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.

[DaveF]

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

There you go assuming that his nodes exist anyplace except his imagination.

The doublethink he displays is truly impressive. "look at all our nodes" followed by "the places that show node counts are wrong"

Point out the behavior of the nodes seems wrong and he does not even counter it. Because, he can't. Not because there may be an explanation for it but because he has no knowledge of how nodes and BTC in general works.



Due to the way he responds when you show him actual proof with programming about what will happen he just calls people names I'm starting to think he has no idea at all of how things work in the BTC world. Not to mention the truly deranged belief that with no miner support and no exchange support anyone would follow that fork.

If any large exchange even made a statement that they may possibly follow the fork then there might be some support for it, same with miners. But at the 3 1/2 month +/- a few days out from it activating and none of them has even mentioned the possibility of support for it. Just a few that said they will not.

Figure we just have to keep pointing out facts and observations and keep him occupied here till he leaves or the fork happens in case some new user might believe him. After that he will hopefully go away. Lets face it at the moment there is no reason for that fork to exist outside of wanting to hurt BTC. I mean that could be it, luke had all his coins stolen and pepe has none so is it just lashing out at the world at this point?

Wondering if they will modify the lukecoin client to have a difficulty adjustment at the fork like BCH did. At that point anyone running a BTC client with just the 110 censoring changes would no longer be following that chain.

-Dave

[PepeLapiu]

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

Imagine you create a specific new kind of hammer. And imagine 99% of those who use this new hammer use it to break knees of random strangers. And we think it's possible that one person could actually be using this hammer to drive nails and build houses.

Obviously, this hammer needs to be taken off the market. We can't confiscate the hammers already sold, but we should stop selling it for sure as the negative uses far outweight to positive uses.

This is the situation we are in with Taproot users. 99% of which are creating spam dust outputs.
Now, you can complain all you want about the possibility that one person is actually using op_if in Taproot properly. But you are only guessing, you have no idea if anyone uses it properly.

And unlike my example of the hammer, we are not trying to completely removeTaproot. We only remove the use of op_if in Taproot. And only after activation time, and only for a year.

So keep bitching about how op_if in Taproot might actually get used properly. But we both know 99% (and possibly 100%) of the op_if in Taproot uses are spam.

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.

No idea what you are talking about here. But what I do know is that LN happened before Taproot. And so LN doesn't require Taproot anything to work properly.

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

Jesus! Just go on Mempool.space, look for any random Taproot tx.
Better yet, show me a block with a lot of Taproot txs's on it from the last 24 hours and I'll break it down for you.

Due to the way he responds when you show him actual proof with programming about what will happen he just calls people names I'm starting to think he has no idea at all of how things work in the BTC world.

I've had discussions with people far more knowledgeable than me as well as with people far less knowledgeable than me in all sorts of areas.
Those more knowledgeable than me know to explain it in simple ways to make you understand their idea.
But many on the core side deliberately make things more complicated than they really are. So that the rest of you who have no idea what they are reading will say "See, he explained it to you and you reject his comprehensive explanation" even often admitting they themselves don't understand it.

All the while I'm supposed to just "trust the experts" without understanding anything. Or just accept that they are the technical ones and I'm not, therefore my point of view is invalid.

In reality, very very few people understand stuff like op_of and other op_codes.

But I know enough to know that nobody how uses op_if in Taproot for monetary transactions has protested BIP110 so far.
Though plenty of you are assuming these people exist, and they will keep on using it after the fork, completely unaware of the fork's existence. All the while pretending the fork is a hard fork, and it it's not temporary at all. So that if anyone keeps using op_if in Taproot after the fork, their funds will be lost forever.

[gmaxwell]

that argument is like saying that bitcoin should confiscate all outputs to addresses that begin with "1di" because 99.9% of existent outputs to that prefix are dust spam from a long gone money laundering site.... and ignoring that this would create a 1/3364 odds of destroying each person's bitcoin for each transaction that pays them.

Because crap like NFTs creates a lot of little payments anything it uses will be 'mostly' NFT crap. But so what?  The value of other things is *independent* of the noise-- your coins don't become less legitimate or valuable because some idiot used a script similar to yours.  NFT crap existed before taproot, and it would continue if taproot were gone-- it's not a product of it.  It's a product of market demand for scarce tokens in order to launder money and fleece idiots.  Changing how they have to use it won't discourage them or slow it at all, if it had any effect it would potentially make it *more* profitable for the responsible parties.

You don't have to agree with people using multisig or see any purpose in it... YOU DON'T GET TO JUST FUCKING ERASE THEIR BITCOINS NO MATTER WHAT EXCUSE YOU SUMMON, but the excuses here are particularly pathetic and pointless.

the only spam relevant to this discussion is pepelapiu's constant flooding the forum with disinformation and delusion about a dead proposal gut bitcoin's functionality. dear god, make it stop.

[PepeLapiu]

that argument is like saying that bitcoin should confiscate all outputs to addresses that begin with "1di" because 99.9% of existent outputs to that prefix are dust spam from a long gone money laundering site.... and ignoring that this would create a 1/3364 odds of destroying each person's bitcoin for each transaction that pays them.

Strawmaning your opposition? It's not like you've never done this before.

The fact is that all the known cases of op_if in Taproot are spam. You can point to "possible cases" or "theoretical cases" but you can't actually point to anyone who actually have used op_if in Taproot, unless it's spam.

If they exist, the wallets and the users have almost a year of warning before the fork gets activated. And even so, it will only be for a year or so.

You know op_if in Taproot is used overwhelmingly by spammers. You know likely nobody uses it for actual monetary use. Which is why you only talk about theoretical cases, never actual cases.

You don't have to agree with people using multisig or see any purpose in it... YOU DON'T GET TO JUST FUCKING ERASE THEIR BITCOINS NO MATTER WHAT EXCUSE YOU SUMMON, but the excuses here are particularly pathetic and pointless.

Nobody is erasing anyone's bitcoin.
Users and wallets have until August to put their ducks in a row and remove the op_if feature which is used only by spammers.
Should wallets and users ignore the warning and go ahead with the use of op_if in Taproot, they coin will be unspedable, but only until the temporary fork expires a year later.

the only spam relevant to this discussion is pepelapiu's constant flooding the forum with disinformation

Really? Aren't you one of those who's been proclaiming for the last 3 years the fees are the filter?
Because you know full well that ordinals get a 75% discount while monetary users get a 50% discount. In order words, spammers pay half as much as monetary users.
So who exactly are the fees filtering here, MrTruthTellerNeverTalksBullshitPaidBlocksteamMouthPiece?

If I was paying $1 in miner fees for a specific tx before Segwit, I now pay 50¢ with the Segwit discount. But the spammers pay 25¢ for the same size tx as me.

WHO IS GETTING FILTERED BY THE FEES HERE? WHO IS GETTING PROMOTED BY THE FEES HERE?

[ABCbits]

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.

No idea what you are talking about here. But what I do know is that LN happened before Taproot. And so LN doesn't require Taproot anything to work properly.

What does "work properly" mean? LN without Taproot have many disadvantage and issue, such as

1. Worse privacy.

One notable advantage is increased on-chain privacy; Taproot channel opening and closing now resemble regular single-sig Bitcoin transactions on-chain, rendering them virtually indistinguishable from standard transactions.

2. Bigger TX size.

Additionally, the integration of Schnorr signatures with Taproot enhances on-chain efficiency by enabling signature aggregation. This development ensures that on-chain cooperative operations become more space- and cost-efficient.

3. It would break Taproot Assets, NFT/token "protocol" on LN.

Taproot Assets relies on Taproot, bitcoin’s most recent upgrade, for a new tree structure that allows developers to embed arbitrary asset metadata within an existing output. It uses Schnorr signatures for improved simplicity and scalability, and, importantly, works with multi-hop transactions over Lightning.

4. It would break stores/services that already use LN with Taproot address.

For example, https://1ml.com/node/030c3f19d742ca294a55c00376b3b355c3c90d61c6b6b39554dbc7ac19b141c14f shows channel that connected to Bitrefill (probably most popular place to buy gift card/voucher that accept crypptocurrency). If you look at the TX of the channel, many of them have address with prefix bc1p which indicate Taproot address.

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

Jesus! Just go on Mempool.space, look for any random Taproot tx.
Better yet, show me a block with a lot of Taproot txs's on it from the last 24 hours and I'll break it down for you.

Since you decided not to show the proof, i'll just share the data/analysis that i found. https://research.mempool.space/utxo-set-report/ analyze the UTXO on middle 2025.

The table on bottom of webpage says there are 59,262,426 UTXO P2TR/Taproot.

But table on middle of webpage says total inscription UTXO that use P2TR/Taproot is only 37,293,318. It's about 62.9%, so so your claim "99% of Taproot outputs are spammy dust UTXOs." is wrong.

[ertil]

that argument is like saying that bitcoin should confiscate all outputs to addresses that begin with "1di" because 99.9% of existent outputs to that prefix are dust spam from a long gone money laundering site.... and ignoring that this would create a 1/3364 odds of destroying each person's bitcoin for each transaction that pays them.

It happened in the past, and it can happen again: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=816578.0

If he could block "1dice" addresses in 2014, which just used a single public key, and a single signature, then he can do that again. And of course he wouldn't care, that it may block regular users accidentally.

Reaching a specific prefix is not that unlikely, for example:

My Casascius Coins website issued a payment address starting with"1Fake" and the customer did not know if he got a real or a test address. Suspicious, he redid his order and paid the new (non-1Fake) address he was issued, then wrote to tell me about it.  The 1Fake address was a real address and a genuine coincidence.

Which means, that if someone needs a lot of addresses (for example by running an exchange), then that person can accidentally hit something, which would be rejected as a "spam", and then it could hurt real users, once in a while.

[DaveF]

But table on middle of webpage says total inscription UTXO that use P2TR/Taproot is only 37,293,318. It's about 62.9%, so so your claim "99% of Taproot outputs are spammy dust UTXOs." is wrong.

Don't go confusing him with facts.

4. It would break stores/services that already use LN with Taproot address.

For example, https://1ml.com/node/030c3f19d742ca294a55c00376b3b355c3c90d61c6b6b39554dbc7ac19b141c14f shows channel that connected to Bitrefill (probably most popular place to buy gift card/voucher that accept crypptocurrency). If you look at the TX of the channel, many of them have address with prefix bc1p which indicate Taproot address.

It would also kill WalletOfSatoshi and just about every other LN thing out there that uses it.

....And of course he wouldn't care, that it may block regular users accidentally....

Reaching a specific prefix is not that unlikely, for example:

Luke has no problem stealing peoples hashrate to destroy things he does not agree with. Do you think blocking people really bothers him one way or another.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56675.0

Back then it was not a big deal but now luke is just out and out proposing taking peoples coins and destroying services like bitrefill as @ABCbits pointed out in the post above.


But as a bit of humor, someone pointed out to me that PepeLapiu skunk cartoon character was a stalker who sexually assaulted a female cat since he did not understand the work no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pep%C3%A9_Le_Pew   if you are going to create an internet personality of someone who does not understand that nobody is interested in his fork and does not take no for an answer and does not seem to understated that nobody wants him around then he did pick the perfect name. Lets not forget pepe had to flee Canada to El Salvador to start a BTC business. That as far as anyone can tell does not really exist. Or at least he has never shown proof that there really is on.


-Dave

[Dogedegen]

I was at a Bitcoin conference here in El Salvador. Everyone there hates core.

But you proclaim all of this is all fake? Bots and fake nodes?

Yes, it is not hard to fool a big group of people to believe something false. We've seen this happen to many individuals, many who were even seen as experts like Gavin Anderson who got tricked by the most basic method by Craig Wright. How many people supported Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, both which were shitcoin scams designed to seize control over Bitcoin by those that were founders of such projects? It really had nothing to do with big blocks or scaling, that is a reason that you give the mass so that you can sell your takeover idea. Luke is doing the same now with OP_RETURN and some illegal content that nobody cares about, illegal content which is already everywhere on the internet and on every major blockchain.

Given your user name, it's prettycleatr you don't think all the spam and shitcoinery on bitcoin is really a problem. So it's no surprise that you also think it's all fake.

There is no problem, fees are very low and the transactions that you are against are legitimate Bitcoin transactions. You may not like them, but that does not change the fact that they are valid transactions that confirm to the rules.

I already explained thattakinfg bets won't do shit. Betting on your sports team doesn't increase their chance of winning. I'm putting my funds to work where it will help increase ourchancces of winning. Not wasting my fine and funds on stupid bets.

It is because you just talk big but you won't back it up, the same as most Knots people. A bet that is surely to be won and you believe would be won is not a stupid bet, it is the road to riches. So either you do not have money or you do not believe in the idea as much as you claim that you do.

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.

This represents a small number of nodes and is not so important even if you keep mentioning it. There may be private solutions that also have auto update, there may be scripts that people have that also auto updates their own nodes. That does not discount that they have updated. The time to update is meaningless as a metric as you can't derive the reasons for doing something based off of that, you do not have the information. I sometimes found myself that I have been running an older version of Core here and there for quite some time, not realizing that an update was available for quite long. Sometimes I was even multiple versions behind. It happens.

You don't have to agree with people using multisig or see any purpose in it... YOU DON'T GET TO JUST FUCKING ERASE THEIR BITCOINS NO MATTER WHAT EXCUSE YOU SUMMON, but the excuses here are particularly pathetic and pointless.

This is the main key here and this reminds me of some posts that I have read not long ago from the early days, ideas of blacklisting Bitcoin based on some criteria and stuff like that. These are same ideas just using a different approach and different justifications. It does not matter what word we use, blacklist, seize, erase, they all represent the same thing. If we centralize Bitcoin this way and start doing it for one reason, it is never going to stop. There will always be new reasons, better reasons, better justifications to do it again for something else, and again and again. This is why we must never do it.