Core and spam debate - easy explanation

[DaveF]

So because of pepe's claim that there are so many BIP110 nodes I have been checking for and playing with things for last few hours.
Took me down an interesting path.
From another thread about how many 110 nodes there are. And going with the standard "every accusation they make against you is probably what they are doing" theory it pushed me to do more testing.

.....
I can't prove it, but I'm certain that if there is a Cybil attack going on, if there are any spoofed nodes, it's all on the core side.

It's Sybil attack not Cybil

It's actually difficult to *prove* in any way but it's kind of *simple to infer* that it's lukecoin trying for the Sybil attack.

According to https://coin.dance/nodes there are about 18,300 real nodes and 5,300 lukecoin censoring nodes.

I setup 4 nodes to test.

Test1:
If you spin up a few nodes and just let them sit there and sync by just average numbers ~ 20% to 30% of peers should be lukecoin nodes that connect to you.
With my (admittedly limited) sample size of 4 nodes that are bare configs. Just install and run lukecoin peers are under 7%

Test2:
Look at how much data the lukecoin nodes that connect to you are pulling (i.e. them doing an initial sync) for my nodes no lukecoin nodes made it into the top 20 of data pulled for 3 of the nodes. 1 lukecoin node made it into the top 15 of the 4th node. Which you can infer from that is (once again from a limited sample) that they are not for the most part syncing from scratch but rather coming into existence fully ready to go. Not many people spin up nodes that way.

Now without more info I do not know (or care) where my experience is in terms of what others see. I can just see from the 4 test nodes that something seems off.

These are all clearnet. Can't at all speak to tor connections since all the ones I have on tor by default block a lot of other nodes so I can not pull any meaningful data from them about peers.

Edit: If I have time I'll wipe these 4 and do a tor test this week. But, will probably not happen till the week after due to a lack of time.

-Dave

I started poking around and testing things. And with a bit of proxy work you can have 1 "real" node and then just put proxy software on a bunch of other machines and have them talk back to the 1 "real" node and all of a sudden you have things that look like a node to bitnodes and coin.dance but are really just passing data back to 1 machine.
Going to sleep now. But at least I know how they faked so much support. Will try to duplicate it when I have more time. Not sure if what I did in a few hours would be stable long term but for a quick test it worked.

-Dave

[PepeLapiu]

(...)

I found a few people on my side who claim that the price drop is due to controversial and unpopular core 30. Than I also found a few people on the core/spam side who claim the price drop is due to BIP110.
I find them both stupid and baseless because it's likely the price drop is just the normal cyclical thing bitcoin does every 4 years. So I never mention the price because it's a stupid unprovable thing on both sides.

I also found people on my side who claim that the core 30 nodes count is likely Sybil attack nodes. And same on the core/spam side. But they both have absolutely no proof of it. They can both be 100% true or 100% wrong with nothing to back their claims.

So go ahead. Make all the claims you want about Knots being all Sybil attack nodes. I don't care, I won't engage with it anymore until you bring us some proof of it. And also if you can prove that the core 30 nodes are not Sybil attack nodes. You won't find either. It's a waste of my time to engage in such frivolous stoopidity.

What I do know is that one hardware company (Casa I think) has an option to auto update your core node. So we can say for sure that a non-zero number of the core 30 nodes were updated without the user even being aware of it, or even being aware of the controversy.

I can also say that I have not talked to a single person IRL who thinks blowing up a working filter was a good idea. Some of them would find increasing the limit to 150 or 250 bytes would have been arguably acceptable. But nobody thinks blowing it up to 1250x it's legacy size is a good thing.

And there is so much controversy that Tone Vale came back onto the bitcoin scene and made a series of interviews of both sides on YouTube. Several others also did.

But somehow you want to tell us this controversy is all fake and imagined? That Tone Vale, who is a core/spam supporter is manufacturing outrage over nothing at all?

Do you actually believe core calling spam "use cases we have today" and blowing up spam filters is not controversial at all? Seriously? Are you for real?

Man you are a special kind of stupid.

I get by on my looks.

Well according to the network map there are 2 nodes in El Salvador

GTFOH
Your source is liying to you. You are an absolute retard if you believe that.
There ate some miners in El Salvador. I run two nodes. One at my office and one at my home. And I'm pretty fucking sure the Bitcoin office runs a node too. Already we blow over your ridiculous #2 figure

Worse, they limit the tree depth to _7_, which makes that literally impossible to represent in bip110-coin.

You are the coretard who made this monstrocity. 99% of Taproot outputs are spam dust UTXOs.
Sorry, but not sorry. Your precious tool is fucking up the network. You can't play with those toys anymore. We'll make sure of it.

As far as I'm concerned, I would revert the entire network to pre-taproot.
Speedy trial my ass! Fucking useless spamware. That's all Taproot is.

[ABCbits]

What is the cost of having two branches? Of course 32 bytes, because we need to go one branch deeper in the TapScript. What is the cost of OP_IF, OP_ELSE, OP_0, and OP_ENDIF? Of course 4 bytes. Which means, that instead of using OP_IF, and pushing four bytes, we go one branch deeper, and use 32 bytes. Congratulations, BIP-110 forced us to push more bytes on-chain, than we otherwise would! Good job, keep going!

You are being obtuse. In the six months that the BIP110 there has been tons of spam/core defenders who tell us about those mythical monetary users of op_if in Taproot. But not a single person has come out and said "I'm using it, I need it, I don't want that feature gone."
So, in essence, other than spammers, nobody uses op_if in Taproot.

Lightning Network's HTLC rely on OP_IF[1]. PLTC (replacement of HTLC) is far from ready, so more LN wallet/client will use HTLC together with Taproot address. And in case it's not obvious, IF, ELSE and ENDIF are fundamental for programming/script.

[1] https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/multihop-payments/hash-time-lock-contract-htlc

99% of Taproot outputs are spammy dust UTXOs.

Do you have data to proof it or you assume based on ridiculous amount of Ordinal on Bitcoin blockchain?

[ertil]

And in case it's not obvious, IF, ELSE and ENDIF are fundamental for programming/script.

I think they should just disable the whole Script entirely. Then, they can start from a single public key, and nothing else. And then, they can start expanding it, case-by-case, when Luke will implement each use case individually. Only then users will know for sure, if they can use a given Script or not. Because otherwise, it is a guessing game, and you never know: today it is OP_IF, and tomorrow, it can be OP_DROP, or yet another thing, if they will figure out, that it can be also used for spamming.

Lightning Network's HTLC rely on OP_IF

Well, maybe they consider Lightning Network to be a spam as well? Who knows. Maybe they want to see all LN traffic to be pushed on-chain instead, and have hundreds of transactions, instead of two: one to open the channel, and one to close it.

As far as I'm concerned, I would revert the entire network to pre-taproot.

This is funny, because before Taproot, Luke's client forced it to activate. What happened in the meanwhile, that now you want to revert a change, which Luke wanted to push faster than planned?

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/there-are-now-two-taproot-activation-clients-heres-why

Bitcoin Core 0.21.0-based Taproot Client 0.1, for the remainder of this article simply referred to as “Bitcoin Taproot,” is the LOT=true client. Bitcoin Taproot is a software fork of Bitcoin Core 0.21.0, the last major Bitcoin Core release, but with BIP 8 LOT=true activation code added for Taproot. The project is maintained by the pseudonymous community members Bitcoin Mechanic and Shinobi, with Bitcoin Core developer and Bitcoin Knots lead maintainer Luke Dashjr as the project’s most notable and most experienced contributor.

Also, if you read what Luke said about Taproot, before it was activated, then you may be surprised. He wanted to deploy it ASAP, so why now you want to revert it?

I run two nodes. One at my office and one at my home.

If you don't accept incoming connections, then your node won't be visible on bitnodes. There are only nodes, which are directly reachable.