Jack Dorsey's frindly takeover against bitcoin

[alani123]

Jack Dorsey has become extravagantly rich from his run with Twitter.
This is a well known fact as Jack himself tends to publicize about his funding grants to various organizations.

In the last few years, his organization initially founded to support bitcoin core development monetarily, spiral.xyz, has become the most major source of funding for bitcoin developers and related events.

The majority of the developers pushing updates for bitcoin core are now directly funded by Jack Dorsey through Spiral.

More recently, some of these Dorsey funded developers openly declared they'll now be running bitcoin development as a lobby. Founding an invite-only bitcoin core developer group by the name of coredev.tech. They even have the nerve to openly announce that invitations are only extended to ideologically aligned developers.

Here's where it gets nasty though:

The upcoming bitcoin core update, so called "Core 30", has already merged some changes that directly benefit Jack Dorsey's corporations.
For one, Square already entered big in the mining game in 2021 by investing 5 million USD:
https://decrypt.co/72930/square-teams-with-blockstream-for-solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-farm

Jack Dorsey has also invested in chip manufacturing and claims to want to fundamentally change bitcoin:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/jack-dorseys-block-inc-reveals-potential-upgrade-on-industry-standard-bitcoin-mining-rigs/

Well, what better way to instate your own will on an open source project than to directly place your favorite people on top of it?

Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure. But sadly, this can't be monetized. But if the only viable way to transact BTC becomes through permissioned layer 2s like the ones Dorsey is trying to promote, they would have successfully managed to monetize bitcoin for just existing.

Jack was hopeful of also dominating chip manufacturing and even tried to cozy up with the Trump administration touting "American made chips". Thankfully the Trump admin hasn't bought into this fraud (yet).

What could be done from now to prevent this?
If you're a miner ask your pool if they're going to support Core 30. If there's no response, switch to a pool that clearly won't support this craziness.
If you run a node, you can symbolically run bitcoin Knots as an alternative. Mining is what makes a difference so keep in mind that node running is just symbolic. 

[hd49728]

Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure.

People can develop new technologies, upgrades, layer 2, 3, whatever new for improving Bitcoin protocol and creating new experience for Bitcoin users as well as companies accept bitcoin.

With me, if it's feasible to use bitcoin on-chain, I would like to move my bitcoin on-chain as transactions done on chain are more secure than offchain. Bitcoin blockchain is a strongest, most secure blockchain in cryptocurrency so why I have to migrate from on-chain to off-chain while it's feasible with me to pay on chain transaction fee.

[Ucy]

He isn't the only wealthy person to attempt what you think he's trying to attempt. He is not tougher than the one who currently owns Twitter, and who is more careful crossing redlines.

It's waste of money working outside of what is allowed for Bitcoin. There will  definitely be no success unless it's within the Bitcoin principles. The centralized powers can only do what they are allowed to do especially with regards to bitcoins in their custody, and as long as no attempt to touch or hijack the Bitcoin system

Bitcoin is special.

[AVE5]

Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure.

People can develop new technologies, upgrades, layer 2, 3, whatever new for improving Bitcoin protocol and creating new experience for Bitcoin users as well as companies accept bitcoin.

With me, if it's feasible to use bitcoin on-chain, I would like to move my bitcoin on-chain as transactions done on chain are more secure than offchain. Bitcoin blockchain is a strongest, most secure blockchain in cryptocurrency so why I have to migrate from on-chain to off-chain while it's feasible with me to pay on chain transaction fee.

Let's just say they both have their pros and cons but the utmost concern should be on the interest of initializing transactions without intermediary enforcement.
Agreeing to the Jacks concept might be a good development on the side of privatizing transactions which records are taken offline before deciding to translate it to the blockchain since miners wouldn't have the obligations to handle verification on their own. But looking at the odds, it's going to take some set of additional processes to verify transactions and same time reduces user safety and time consumption while the decentlization of bitcoin core will be hijacked indirectly.
I don't also think considering the lower cost transaction fees on the off-chain technology is worth attractive than communities security if prioritizing the essence of adopting bitcoin it decentlization potential.

[BattleDog]

Jack Dorsey has become extravagantly rich from his run with Twitter.
This is a well known fact as Jack himself tends to publicize about his funding grants to various organizations.

In the last few years, his organization initially founded to support bitcoin core development monetarily, spiral.xyz, has become the most major source of funding for bitcoin developers and related events.

The majority of the developers pushing updates for bitcoin core are now directly funded by Jack Dorsey through Spiral.

More recently, some of these Dorsey funded developers openly declared they'll now be running bitcoin development as a lobby. Founding an invite-only bitcoin core developer group by the name of coredev.tech. They even have the nerve to openly announce that invitations are only extended to ideologically aligned developers.

Here's where it gets nasty though:

The upcoming bitcoin core update, so called "Core 30", has already merged some changes that directly benefit Jack Dorsey's corporations.
For one, Square already entered big in the mining game in 2021 by investing 5 million USD:
https://decrypt.co/72930/square-teams-with-blockstream-for-solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-farm

Jack Dorsey has also invested in chip manufacturing and claims to want to fundamentally change bitcoin:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/jack-dorseys-block-inc-reveals-potential-upgrade-on-industry-standard-bitcoin-mining-rigs/

Well, what better way to instate your own will on an open source project than to directly place your favorite people on top of it?

Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure. But sadly, this can't be monetized. But if the only viable way to transact BTC becomes through permissioned layer 2s like the ones Dorsey is trying to promote, they would have successfully managed to monetize bitcoin for just existing.

Jack was hopeful of also dominating chip manufacturing and even tried to cozy up with the Trump administration touting "American made chips". Thankfully the Trump admin hasn't bought into this fraud (yet).

What could be done from now to prevent this?
If you're a miner ask your pool if they're going to support Core 30. If there's no response, switch to a pool that clearly won't support this craziness.
If you run a node, you can symbolically run bitcoin Knots as an alternative. Mining is what makes a difference so keep in mind that node running is just symbolic. 

Funding is not governance. Bitcoin Core changes land only after public review, test coverage, and multiple ACKs from independent reviewers. Maintainers cannot merge consensus changes unilaterally, and miners cannot change your node's rules. If a proposal would alter consensus, it is visible months in advance and dies without broad agreement.

Private workshops are not where rules change. People meet in small groups to discuss ideas all the time; the code, tests, and review happen in the open. If someone claims Core 30 has changes that benefit a company, name the PR numbers and we can read them line by line.

Off-chain is optional. Lightning and other L2s are opt-in. They do not replace base layer settlement and cannot force permissioned payments onto anyone who does not choose them. If a company builds on L2, great; if it is permissioned, users will route around it. Chips and mining do not grant protocol control. Cheap hash can affect short-term censorship attempts, but economic nodes still decide validity. Invalid blocks get orphaned no matter who mined them.

Nodes are not symbolic. Running your own validating node is exactly how you refuse unwanted rules and policies. If you prefer Knots or another build, run it. Verify releases, use assumeutxo only if you understand it, and keep your own mempool and policy settings.

Incentive alignment matters. Anyone funding dev work for PR wins today risks losing far more if they degrade Bitcoin's credibility. The market tends to punish short-sighted attempts at capture.

I have watched a bunch of corporate fads try to steer Bitcoin since 2013. The ones that mattered were the ones that wrote good, boring code and earned review. Everything else bounced off the social firewall of users who verify. Keep your keys and your node, and Bitcoin stays user-governed.

[DubemIfedigbo001]

If this is his aim to centralize Bitcoin mining and change the POW structure to something else, then it wouldn't be possible since in the end he only owns some few nodes while other miners scattered all over the world would continue mining Bitcoin honestly. He wouldn't be able to convince every other miner to join him, That is the beauty of decentralization. 

Even if he bribes some dev to try a hard fork and create a possibility of mining Bitcoin off chain, then they would only end up creating a new token which would still prove worthless in the near future.

The truth is that he cannot change Bitcoin, he may only end up building another later 2 solution if at all which people can still choose to use or not.

Bitcoin is fine as it is and on-chain transactions is the best and most secure way of using Bitcoin. I wouldn't settle for a less secure, customized  off-chain activity.

[alani123]

Jack Dorsey has become extravagantly rich from his run with Twitter.
This is a well known fact as Jack himself tends to publicize about his funding grants to various organizations.

In the last few years, his organization initially founded to support bitcoin core development monetarily, spiral.xyz, has become the most major source of funding for bitcoin developers and related events.

The majority of the developers pushing updates for bitcoin core are now directly funded by Jack Dorsey through Spiral.

More recently, some of these Dorsey funded developers openly declared they'll now be running bitcoin development as a lobby. Founding an invite-only bitcoin core developer group by the name of coredev.tech. They even have the nerve to openly announce that invitations are only extended to ideologically aligned developers.

Here's where it gets nasty though:

The upcoming bitcoin core update, so called "Core 30", has already merged some changes that directly benefit Jack Dorsey's corporations.
For one, Square already entered big in the mining game in 2021 by investing 5 million USD:
https://decrypt.co/72930/square-teams-with-blockstream-for-solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-farm

Jack Dorsey has also invested in chip manufacturing and claims to want to fundamentally change bitcoin:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/jack-dorseys-block-inc-reveals-potential-upgrade-on-industry-standard-bitcoin-mining-rigs/

Well, what better way to instate your own will on an open source project than to directly place your favorite people on top of it?

Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure. But sadly, this can't be monetized. But if the only viable way to transact BTC becomes through permissioned layer 2s like the ones Dorsey is trying to promote, they would have successfully managed to monetize bitcoin for just existing.

Jack was hopeful of also dominating chip manufacturing and even tried to cozy up with the Trump administration touting "American made chips". Thankfully the Trump admin hasn't bought into this fraud (yet).

What could be done from now to prevent this?
If you're a miner ask your pool if they're going to support Core 30. If there's no response, switch to a pool that clearly won't support this craziness.
If you run a node, you can symbolically run bitcoin Knots as an alternative. Mining is what makes a difference so keep in mind that node running is just symbolic. 

Funding is not governance. Bitcoin Core changes land only after public review, test coverage, and multiple ACKs from independent reviewers. Maintainers cannot merge consensus changes unilaterally, and miners cannot change your node's rules. If a proposal would alter consensus, it is visible months in advance and dies without broad agreement.

Did you see this public review process being able to protect bitcoin?
The changes were merged and are about to go live. Every miner will probably run core 30 without hesitation.

Now these core devs supporting these changes even started a lobby to develop and make suggestions behind closed doors.

Soon there will be 0 ability by the public to have any say.

What part of bitcoin's development process seems to be public anymore? It's just open source. Not a public process at all. Tell me if I'm wrong.

[gmaxwell]

If the bitcoin community falls for threads like this then bitcoin deserves to die.

What is this hysteria about? Because release 30 changes the relaxes the default limit on the size of op_returns. Why does it do this? Because multiple major miners *already* removed the limit, and non-mining nodes enforcing a policy limit that miners don't enforce creates centralization pressure by encouraging direct-to-miner submission (which makes large miners more profitable) and by increasing orphaning rates for smaller miners, and because the alternative to op_return is fake pubkey stuffing which harmfully bloats the utxo set.

Will relaxing this limit increase spam?

Almost certainly not:
* As was demonstrated, anyone who wanted an oversize opreturn can easily get one mined already and could before this was ever proposed.  Whatever spam is possible post this change is possible now.
* Anyone who wants to spam can already put their spam in witness data and pay lower fees, without using opreturn.  If they did move their spam to opreturns it would *reduce* the amount of spam data in the block chain, because opreturns use more of the blocks' limited weight.
* Anyone who wants to spam without using witnesses today and would otherwise be limited by a limit on op_return sizes can do so using 'fake pubkeys', some do. This directly bloats the utxo set. Opreturn was created in the first place to encourage fake pubkey spam to change to a form that doesn't bloat the utxo set.  Will the current fake pubkey spammers use it?  Maybe. Maybe not. If they do it'll be a major benefit.

The irony is that this tempest in a teapot was entirely or almost entirely created by the employees and investors in the Ocean mining pool, they're the primary parties arguing about it, they're the almost exclusive source of the disingenuous and dishonest arguments supporting it... and guess what:  *They* are the ones funded by Jack Dorsey.  (To be clear I don't have any reason to think Jack Dorsey is behind this nonsense in any way, but the conspiracy theory presented here is so absurd that it's actually backwards with respect to the facts.)

How will this benefit square?  I can't see any was possible that it could (beyond the abstract "bitcoin is better money for everyone" sense).  OP's thread seems to tie it to mining but mining are not and cannot be bound by *policy* limits.  And miners, not including square AFAIK, are *already* mining without this limit and have been doing so for a long time, certainly long before this discussion.  Why did they disable this particular limit?  Because fucking luke-jr and his out of control trolling trying to advocate for reducing the blocksize created a false belief that Bitcoin core was in favor of censoring transactions at the cost of diminishing mining income, so multiple miners went and stripped out most of the policy restrictions.   And in any case it wasn't anyone with square that proposed this or has even taken a significant role in arguing for it.

The whole thing is just fucking stupid.  Yes, shitcoin nft garbage sucks-- I'm not aware of any significant Bitcoin core contributors who think otherwise!  But so long as idiots and money launderers want to dump money into them they will exist and *cannot* be stopped.  Efforts to do so can only fuckup bitcoin by creating censorship promoting consensus inconsistencies, and developing censorware to ineffectually block transactions.  While sure, I can buy the argument that it's morally not censorship because it's not effective, or potentially the argument it's not morally censorship because the traffic is intentionally abusive... but the mechanisms are exactly the same, even if it's not morally censorship it's technically censorship.  And like any other weapon it can be pointed both ways.  Arguing that it's okay to make censorship technology because it will only be deployed in moral ways is the same bad reliance on human judgement that exists in predecessor systems that motivated the creation of Bitcoin in the first place.

The bitcoin community should be working on *anti-censorship*, not trying to development censorware --- not for the least because the whole concept and design of bitcoin was constructed to make censorship impossible.   This is the same fucking fight that happens against free expression, free speech, free financial interaction in every case:  Someone cries out that third parties ought to have a say over YOUR actions because they think what you're doing is BAD.  Or as Satoshi said: "could always be overridden by the admin based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors", attacks that Satoshi said Bitcoin was intended to make "physically impossible".

The public falls for it because the people crying BAD are often right: humans do bad stuff at times and would be censors are savvy enough to cherry pick examples to support their case.  The argument for free expression isn't that BAD doesn't happen it's that the cure is inevitably worse than the disease, that if you allow people (singularly or collectively) to regulate the interactions of third parties that you will inevitably shut out critical good activity.  This is particularly true because bad activity is very rare compared to good activity, so even a tiny false positive rate destroys the benefits.  It's also true because humans have a pretty bad track record of being accurate in what they think is BAD.  If people got a veto over it Bitcoin itself never would have existed, but fortunately when Bitcoin was created the internet globally followed very freedom friendly cultural norms.  Most people initially thought bitcoin was stupid and or bad. Many people still do.  Good thing for all of us that they don't get a say in the matter, beyond their own choice to not use it.

Bitcoin already has mechanisms to deal with abusive transactions: a limit on block weight and the transaction fees that result from it.  It is judgement free and content neutral.  It doesn't always result in the choices you'd (or I'd make) make, just like the first amendment allows for deplorable, hateful speech.  If you want filtered, censored money-- there are hundreds of other choices.  Bitcoin was created to be money maximally free of human judgement, for better (usually!) or worse.   If you're not happy with the fact that the chain can grow by 500 mbytes a day then where the fuck were you during the 2017 blocksize debate stuff?  Probably fucking slinging your poo at bitcoin developers for not supporting increasing it more or increasing it sooner.

And if I think a policy limit like this is bad then why did I ever support it in the first place?  Because there is a big difference between a limit against traffic that no one is currently creating and one where they are creating it, and because it was at a time when blocks were about 100kb in size, not even close to full, transactions were effectively free, and so there was no other mechanism at play.  Policy is an unstable equilibrium, it works so long as fee paying demand doesn't exist at all... and it collapses completely once it does, and immediately turns harmful.  Presently 99.99999% of the potentially abusive use are already effectively stopped via non-negligible transaction fees, there is no risk of Bitcoin being treated as "EC2 but free" it's like a zillion times more expensive.   To the extent there is spam at all, it's a thin layer of very particular uses that don't mind fees or even actively prefer them (e.g. because they create scarcity for their seinorage).  But their special motivations also make them highly resistant to being blocked, probably much more so than ordinary payments.  The same unstable equilibrium showed up for other policy, such as fullrbf. Most contributors to core preferred to not do it, once enough miners did it anyways that preference was moot and the behavior inconsistent with miners just caused harm.  It doesn't apply to consensus rules-- as those are the rules that govern miner conduct--, but there is no proposal (and it seems unlikely that there could be one) to block any kind of 'spam' with consensus rules.

Ungodly amounts of time and patience have been wasted discussing this already.  My experience is that the filter proponents just disengage and drop the discussion, only to start a new thread like this full of falsehoods, trying to just burn everyone out until their false statements get accepted by people who don't know better because they go unopposed.  All voices have had their say, but surprise surprise when they make arguments based on unambiguous falsehoods they don't tend to get a lot of weight in the minds of people who are not brainwashed.  

Fortunately, on this issue Bitcoin's design is such that even a small portion of the network refusing to give into censorship will undermine it completely.  Unfortunately the dishonest attacks used to further this hopeless campaign can do a lot to convince people of reason that it's not worth the trouble, creating a vacuum for malicious parties.
 

[gmaxwell]

Not merging this with my last post because it wasn't a double post-- rather the poster deleted their reply.

What's the interest in siding with the spam instead of trying to address it, especially if miners were bypassing intended transaction policy for profit?

Who is siding with spam?   Intended policy by whom? The very people who advocated for this particular limit initially  -- e.g. myself! -- support removing it now.  I was harassed for years over the op_return limit and even subjected to threats. Where the heck were you then?   Certainly not out saying it was a good thing and that I'm not a terrible person for supporting it.

Aside, when I say spam here I'm just adopting the language of this discussion. I don't actually think it's a good description.  Spam is a message sent to you that you didn't ask for and almost certainly don't want by a second party who hopes to profit from it and who paid essentially nothing to send it causing you to waste a lot of resources reading it. You win against the spammer if you don't have to read the message even if your computer processed it or other people read it.

This normal definition spam doesn't exist in Bitcoin except perhaps for dusting which almost no one cares much about, and isn't the subject of these discussions.  The stuff that people are calling spam in Bitcoin is where two consenting parties transact with each other entirely consensually, and they pay a third party miner handsomely, with bitcoin, to process it.  This irritates some Bitcoin users[1] because it consumes network capacity (like any other txn) and does so for the benefit of some activity the user deems to be not sufficiently Bitcoin related. To defeat it it isn't enough that the user personally don't see it (they wouldn't have anyways), but rather they must assure no one sees it/processes it because Bitcoin is a consensus system so as soon as one miner accepts a valid transaction all participants must accept it.

[1] including myself! the distinction is that I don't think being irritated by means it would be right to try to stop it or that I have the ability to stop it.

This doesn't address pressure on small miners and centralization, it just makes it worse. The dangers down the line from such changes are significant.

In what way does removing this limit harm small miners or encourage centralization?  What are the specific 'down the line' dangers you're referring to? Surely they can be enumerated if they're significant.

It's easy to enumerate the opposite:

With the limit in place, miners that bypass the limit will earn more income than others. They get the transactions via direct submission.  There is little reason for someone to direct submit to small miners, since the large ones do the job and the small ones may well be (and hopefully are!) anonymous.   Lots of software authors already somewhat prefer direct submission because submitting to an API fits better with JS-jockie programming practices than submitting to a P2P network,  if the latter is also more reliable at getting their tx mined then convincing them to do otherwise is a losing battle.   In any event the consequence of direct submission is that the biggest few miners make more income, an because mining is highly competitive by design this ultimately tents to push smaller miners into operating at a loss.

Similarly,  when txn that will get mined don't get relayed in the public p2p network then miners that learn of blocks via the network (e.g. especially small and/or anonymous ones) then they propagate slowly.  Slow propagation causes mining to be more race like and less lottery like.  In a lottery you win proportional to your tickets (hashrate).  In a race the fastest always or almost always wins.  If blocks always transferred instantly then mining would work as it is ideally imagined like a perfectly fair lottery.  Slowdowns increase stales for everyone but cause smaller miners to experience more stale blocks than larger miners, and as difficult adjusts larger miners make proportionally more than smaller miners. Another centralization pressure.

I don't think these points can be denied though it's not unreasonable to debate their significance.  However, on the other side what is the downside to weigh them against?   The limit is already functionally not enforced. The spammers already have alternatives that are better for them and/or worse for the resources needed to run the network.  An argument that "spam is bad" doesn't advance the discussion about "is removing the opreturn limit bad?" when removing the limit won't increase the spam.

[alani123]

The issue here is that largely many of these OP codes that enabled the exploits to cheaply add garbage data on-chain in combination with unintended SegWit functionality are not necessary for bitcoin transactions.

Although some might deem them necessary for layer-2 expansion and "Taproot" features later down the line. This is a whole other set of politics but I think it's safe to argue that any layer 2 presented so far is not bitcoin.

Yes, miners are fully profiting from this situation. But if it's something harming bitcoin, why make the limits even looser?

Between removing functionality that's exploitable or even just doing nothing, some developers decided to completely throw the baby out with the bath water.
Who does this benefit?
It's not hard to expect that layer 2s will be marketed as the miracle solution to the upcoming on-chain bloat that will be created after Core 30.


The incentives to do something like this are huge.

If something like this happens, Jack Dorsey would have executed the cheapest takeover attack on bitcoin. No 51% attack, no politics or lawfare, no quantum computers, just cozying up to project developers with sweet salaries.

This type of marketing is already deployed by certain commercial layer 2 solutions against bitcoin p2p transactions.
Yes, my post is a conspiracy theory. But a future where p2p transactions become economically unwise is not unlikely. I would argue that this already happened to ETH and a few dozen people became incredibly wealthy from the sidechain/layer 2 craze.

Connecting the dots on who funds these changes with what they might entail is not so crazy when you deduct that it has already happened once in crypto.


The difference with ETH and BTC is that one has a BDFL.
But look at how many bitcoin devs are now funded by Dorsey. You may also start to think that bitcoin is also about to get one.

And as of the blocksize debate... I find Luke's take that blocks should be smaller is entirely unreasonable. I would argue that many of the aforementioned problems are largely a result of how hastily SegWit was implemented to solve the so called "blocksize wars".

Maybe if things hadn't gone down this way we would have had a less conflicting and more decentralized solution to scaling by now. But since this is what we have to deal with, of course I'm going to be against making things even worse.

And I'm gonna be honest, I don't like this shruggish approach @gmaxwell. I don't think I'm a nostalgic but I believe bitcoin used to be supported by more people that were passionate about decentralization and chain immutability rather than coming off with a "I don't like what's going on but won't do nothing about it" attitude. Many bitcoin devs outright quit past the so called "blocksize wars" and it looks like bitcoin development has kept feeling the consequences of this particular loss of human capital ever since.

If we can't have people program something really immutable, better off without it. Satoshi removed nearly all OP codes in 2010 because of security and we're here in 2025 saying that since miners ignore limits we're just gonna let it pass and/or even make it easier for them. Have we not learned a single thing?

[BitGoba]

Bitcoin is money and a monetary protocol based on social consensus.

Bitcoin is open-source, which means no one has a monopoly over the software. Anyone can download, modify, and use the software as they see fit, as long as they follow the consensus rules. If someone changes the consensus rules, it becomes a fork and is no longer the Bitcoin In the end, users decide which software to use. They choose the version of the software they want to run

As far as Jack Dorsey is concerned, from what I’ve followed, I think he is not a bad actor and is a positive figure for Bitcoin. His investments and initiatives, such as Spiral, aim to support the development of Bitcoin and the expansion of its ecosystem.

[BitGoba]

The changes were merged and are about to go live. Every miner will probably run core 30 without hesitation.

Miners don’t run a full Bitcoin node and don’t need Bitcoin software at all. They just connect to a mining pool A node is necessary for users because it allows them to verify that they actually own their Bitcoins, verify transactions, and participate in the decentralization of the network.

[slaman29]

Dang its been a while since I caught up with something like this, but to be honest I am not so sure I understand everything. If it was really so bad why was there not enough objection to it? Or rather there was but consensus eventually happened right? We have a dev who explained why and to me it seems legit.

I don't support trash on chain but doesn't mean it should not be possible

[gmaxwell]

The difference with ETH and BTC is that one has a BDFL.

You mean a primary beneficiary of a multibillion dollar premine?  And what's the relevance? Ethereum effectively created the NFT boom, helpful for the preminers to offload their coins without immediately collapsing the market and to let them launder the income they got from wave after wave of defi ponzi scheme.  I don't see what the lesson is-- you seem to be mildly shilling for ethereum as better but it has much more of this crap, and if you don't agree with its creators who have enforced it you don't get a call because even if you fork their software they'll just attack you with their premine as they did prior forks, even before getting to the fact that post switch POS the premining grants them substantial direct control of the consensus.

The issue here is that largely many of these OP codes that enabled the exploits to cheaply add garbage data on-chain in combination with unintended SegWit functionality are not necessary for bitcoin transactions.

When it comes to miners the only thing that has been enabled is having larger blocks.  Taproot,segwit, whatever, none of those details matter.  Miners can put more spam data in blocks because the community overwhelmingly demanded that more data be allowed.  Though for some of the spam activity it's not clear that bigger blocks are a gain-- the limited capacity is what makes issuance scarce and that's why the NFT people argue it's valuable.

I can credit luke-jr with at least one piece of consistency that he's aggressively for reducing the blocksize limit.  But you, like almost everyone repeating his position disagree with that position even though it makes your position less logically consistent.

Although some might deem them necessary for layer-2 expansion and "Taproot" features later down the line. This is a whole other set of politics but I think it's safe to argue that any layer 2 presented so far is not bitcoin.

Irrelevant because when it comes to miners there isn't any functionally related limit... but do you really mean to suggest lightning isn't bitcoin?   omg 2017 please come take your fools back, we don't want them!

It's not hard to expect that layer 2s will be marketed as the miracle solution to the upcoming on-chain bloat that will be created after Core 30.

I think I argued persuasively why this opreturn change won't increase on chain bloat, it might even decrease it (though I think a decrease isn't really likely).   You haven't explained how I was mistaken but only continued to assert.

If something like this happens, Jack Dorsey would have executed the cheapest takeover attack on bitcoin.

I believe my message adequately addressed this by pointing out that one of Dorsey's companies is the principle opponent to this and that there doesn't appear to be any particular reason his other companies would profit from it.  Again, you seem to have ignored my message?

just cozying up to project developers with sweet salaries.

So I assume you're referring to the employees of Ocean mining?  Because they're the primary Jack Dorsey funded players in this discussion.

I would argue that many of the aforementioned problems are largely a result of how hastily SegWit was implemented to solve the so called "blocksize wars".

How so?  None of this spam stuff has anything to do with opcodes or whatever.  People can do this inscriptions stuff because blocks are big enough to contain them and because they're willing (or even eager) to pay the resulting fees.  Yes they encode them in particular ways right now, but if the situation were different they'd just encode them other ways.  Just like they do in Ethereum or BSV or whatever.  It's one of the reasons that it's arguably much harder to censor the NFT users than ordinary financial transactions:  The NFT stuff doesn't care about the networks rules-- they're not using any of the networks actual functionality or opcodes, they're just stuffing data into transactions that nodes will ignore and their special software will treat as highly valuable dogshit. They have almost complete freedom to structure their data as any kind of valid transaction they want.  But an ordinary user has to create a transaction a very specific way in order to pay another party.  Anyone who cares about using specific opcodes inherently must care about transacting Bitcoin value.

[alani123]

It's not at all absurd to claim that lightning is not bitcoin.

In Oct. 2023 Riad stated publicly that he quits lightning dev saying

Effective now, I'm halting my involvement with the development of the
lightning network and its implementations, including coordinating the
handling of security issues at the protocol level (I informed some senior
lightning devs in that sense before).

Closed the very old issue which was affected to me at this purpose on the
bolt repository:

https://github.com/lightning/bolts/pull/772

I think this new class of replacement cycling attacks puts lightning in a
very perilous position, where only a sustainable fix can happen at the
base-layer, e.g adding a memory-intensive history of all-seen transactions
or some consensus upgrade. Deployed mitigations are worth something in face
of simple attacks, though I don't think they're stopping advanced attackers
as said in the first full disclosure mail.

https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALZpt+G-eLLShrJckLG1UMDQ9tMGzqP1pBsUpEZ+82e9wHZGYw@mail.gmail.com/

Given the aforementioned fundamental design flaws are still a concern, it's reasonable to expect that some company will market a proprietary solution sooner or later. Interestingly Jack's Square is preparing for a bitcoin payment rollout on its machines by 2026. Who's gonna prepare the ground till then if not his salaried devs?

[gmaxwell]

It's not at all absurd to claim that lightning is not bitcoin.

In Oct. 2023 Riad stated publicly that he quits lightning dev saying

https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CALZpt+G-eLLShrJckLG1UMDQ9tMGzqP1pBsUpEZ+82e9wHZGYw@mail.gmail.com/

Given the aforementioned fundamental design flaws are still a concern, it's reasonable to expect that some company will market a proprietary solution sooner or later. Interestingly Jack's Square is preparing for a bitcoin payment rollout on its machines by 2026. Who's gonna prepare the ground till then if not his salaried devs?

You've picked the least topical aside in my message then responded to it by quoting some well known emotional figure saying that lightning has issues which other people disagree with.  Even if we assume it does for the purpose of discussion, but this is in response to an apparent claim that it isn't *bitcoin*,  which is just an utter goalpost move.  Whatever issues it has doesn't seem to prevent it from being used an an absolutely incredible amount of transactions, but even if it weren't that wouldn't prevent it from being Bitcoin.  Pick some random Bitcoin wallet--- for sure it has some issues. It's still bitcoin.

In any case, You've ignored almost the entire content of my messages, all more substantively directed to the subject.  And you've now done so multiple times.

And yet again on Jack-- what developer funded by him is relevant to the discussion except for the employees of Ocean mining who have been the primary parties opposing this change?

Every discussion on this subject goes like this-- a complete evasion on the substantive points: Why is this change bad. Why aren't the specific provided reasons that it isn't bad correct?  Was their something unclear in my prior messages?

[Rustam Meraj]

Bitcoin is money and a monetary protocol based on social consensus.

Bitcoin is open-source, which means no one has a monopoly over the software. Anyone can download, modify, and use the software as they see fit, as long as they follow the consensus rules. If someone changes the consensus rules, it becomes a fork and is no longer the Bitcoin In the end, users decide which software to use. They choose the version of the software they want to run

As far as Jack Dorsey is concerned, from what I’ve followed, I think he is not a bad actor and is a positive figure for Bitcoin. His investments and initiatives, such as Spiral, aim to support the development of Bitcoin and the expansion of its ecosystem.

You are exactly right about it makes Bitcoin special. It is open source protocol meaning anyone can use code and no single person or company is in control. This is important because it prevents monopoly. Network stays decentralized because users get to choose which software they run. When people disagree on rules it can create fork which is separate version of Bitcoin. You are also correct that Jack Dorsey has been very positive figure for Bitcoin with his projects like Spiral working to support network growth and decentralization.

[Jack Dorsey (parody)]

Greetings all,

the solution to scaling bitcoin is already being prepared by us and it's at citrea.xyz.

We're bringing Ethereum style layer2s on bitcoin. I just had to buy some (all?) bitcoin developers so the required on-chain changes are merged faster and without hesitation. We still estimate this endeavor to be profitable up to a modest few dozens of billions or so.

It's gonna be awesome, trust me. The future of finance and all. Trust me.

Thanks for understanding,
Jack

[EluguHcman]

What could be done from now to prevent this?
If you're a miner ask your pool if they're going to support Core 30. If there's no response, switch to a pool that clearly won't support this craziness.
If you run a node, you can symbolically run bitcoin Knots as an alternative. Mining is what makes a difference so keep in mind that node running is just symbolic.  

Keep it this way...Hello World Of People Irrespective Of Your Privacies, "between Centralization and Decentlization which do you appreciate if you prioritize self custody your right and interest?
With all being said of Jack Dorsey are part of the issues Satoshi Nakamoto has sighted and and avoided and made Bitcoin be just in that concepts as stated in the white paper and so on being realistic.

Bitcoin most interest for users is the Decentlization, maybe we can for now say it is its potential to store values because we consider most fear and concern to fight inflation first. However, the assurance of your funds safety is when it is of no authorities control but yourself.

So throw the question as stated to the entire Bitcoin community or enthusiasts because if only developers may have choosed to reinstate the decentralized system of Bitcoin to be governable with Jack Dorsey's ideal if not (speculations), I would say.... Blockchain and its Decentralization won't be so admirable for users as it is from it origin of Satoshi's development concepts that made self custodial a privilege and right for everyone in the cryptography of Bitcoin cores which has brought the stance of massive adoptions of the technology as a means to keep custody of their Privacies.

(If) Paraventurely Jack Dorsey and his teams succeeds this agenda, then is a goodbye to decentlization and an end to Bitcoin because adoption will be dumped by users therefore, Jack Dorsey proposal will be abolished even by the developers because they too values that concept (Satoshi) stated that respects their rights respects privacies. So don't expect them agree to Jack.

[peter0425]

If this is his aim to centralize Bitcoin mining and change the POW structure to something else, then it wouldn't be possible since in the end he only owns some few nodes while other miners scattered all over the world would continue mining Bitcoin honestly. He wouldn't be able to convince every other miner to join him, That is the beauty of decentralization. 

Rich people always think they can change the world or a system of something. They think they can always just walk in and make changes but it takes a lot more than money to do something successfully. As others have said, bitcoin is so special that it’s hard to even take away the community it has been built on.