Google Mailing list reply to Greg Maxwell

[PepeLapiu]

So there is a BIP currently being discussed called "The Cat". This BIP proposes to drop spam UTXOs with dust limit from the UTXO set. This would basically help with the UTXO bloat by removing a large amount of spam UTXOs from the UTXO set, over 40% of the UTXO set size in fact.

Furthermore, The Cat would constitute an attack on spam by making spam un-spendable and unprofitable as a one time thing.

You can read the BIP here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2048

And you can read the Google Group discussion here: https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/Q6ulQb13okg

I support this BIP. It would make it less profitable for spammers. We are often told that we can't do anything about spam because they have an economic incentive to attack the network, but the BIP addresses this economic incentive. And it would greatly reduce spam in the future by signalling to spammers, we are willing to rug them, and might be willing to rug them again in the future.

What I find very interesting here is Greg Maxwell's responses on the mailing list.

The proposed gain is some negligible one time reduction in utxo disk space.

The BIP would drop over 40% of the current UTXO set, all spam with dust amounts under 1000 sats. I hardly find this negligible. And it would further incentivize spammers to go elsewhere in the future, further preserving the UTXO set from bloat.

You motivated it by claiming this is a 'memory usage' reduction, but it's not-- it's just full node storage in particular as the txouts in question are normally sized and largely quiescent already-- so the savings is pretty insignificant.

So are we now pretending that UTXO bloat is not a problem? Or is UTXO bloat only a problem when in service to spammers by blowing up the op_return limit filter?

Were such a proposal seriously advanced it would likely cause a new flood of transactions both to move to evade it directly and as a result of NFT indexer changes to just "wormhole" the tokens to new outputs after the fact (and a new marketing opportunity for the NFT gifters).

Yes Greg, spammers attempting to evade The Cat would be inconvenienced and incur additional costs. Though they likely would not be very successful as a new snapshot would force them to move again and again, further making their operation more costly, less convenient, and less profitable. Why are you so worried about costs and profits to the spammers, Greg?

And how can you possibly see making spam more expensive, less profitable, and less convenient as a marketing opportunity for spam grifters?

And moreover the proposal would intentionally and knowingly confiscate millions of dollars in funds.  

This would only be a problem for you if you are a spammer with dust UTXOs full of spammy dick pics. And it would not confiscate anything, it would merely prevent spammers from profit by making hey dust limit spam un-spendable. Or are you trying to protect the spam business or what?

This is outright theft, and I believe it makes the idea a total non-starter.

It would not be theft, it would only prevent them from selling or transferring some of that spam to anyone else, therefore attacking the profit incentive of spam. You still will own your dick pic jpegs, you just won't be able to transfer them to anyone else. Preventing spammers from profiting on bitcoin appears like a great idea to me, no?

It's fine that you or I agree that NFT crap isn't appropriate to bitcoin but those harmed aren't beholden to your or my *opinion* and will absolutely seek redress through any and all means for the damage caused to them.

So you don't want to cause any problems for spammers by fear of retaliation? Why are you such a victim, Greg? I'm sorry, but if your goal is to cater to spammers and be as nice as possible to them, and avoid retaliation, you don't belong in the bitcoin community, which has always required an adversarial mindset. Please do grow a set.

Furthermore, Greg claiming spammers would lose millions of dust UTXOs and that it might cause a massive flood of transactions, that is in itself an admission that spam is a real and serious problem. Aren't you the least bit concerned that they have so many dust UTXOs? Doesn't that come across as a problem to you, Greg? Are you in favor of waiting an other few years until they have billions worth of spam?  

You defended Core 30 blowing up the op-return limit, you viciously attacked anyone who would even attempt to fight spam, you oppose Knots heavy spam filters, you oppose BIP444 (aka BIP110), and you oppose The Cat. How much do you have invested in spam, Greg?

What spam deterrent, if any, would you support, Greg?

[ABCbits]

You can read the BIP here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2048

And you can read the Google Group discussion here: https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/Q6ulQb13okg

It's also discussed on different forum thread, Another BIP on garbage.

The proposed gain is some negligible one time reduction in utxo disk space.

The BIP would drop over 40% of the current UTXO set, all spam with dust amounts under 1000 sats. I hardly find this negligible. And it would further incentivize spammers to go elsewhere in the future, further preserving the UTXO set from bloat.

It's negligible if you compare current UTXO size (about 11.3GB[1]) with current blockchain size (above 700GB). But it's significant when we consider RAM usage (especially during IBD), especially if you don't use storage with fast random I/O to compensate low RAM capacity.

[1] https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set

[NotATether]

Is this in any way related to the OP_CAT opcode proposed a year or 2 ago by any chance?

[vapourminer]

Is this in any way related to the OP_CAT opcode proposed a year or 2 ago by any chance?

no

The-Cat

It is a bad name, because it can be easily confused with existing OP_CAT proposal: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0347.mediawiki

[kTimesG]

If I decide to split one UTXO into 50.000 smaller UTXOs, for which I have the keys, or if someone sends 1 satoshi to me, that's my property, and my problem to deal with.

If a node can't deal with managing a UTXO DB that's larger than 1 GB, or 50 GB, or 2 TB in size (which is basically just a few cents of storage cost, not affecting UTXO lookup efficiency), that's the node's problem, not my problem, or Bitcoin's problem. This issue would resolve itself naturally (fewer nodes, with all the chain effects up to the BTC price), not by confiscating my property. So the incentive of me not doing stupid things in the future solves by itself.

In other words, the BTC network should be fully usable even if each and every satoshi in existence sits in its own separate UTXO. Technically, this is already possible (even though it would take massive amounts of hardware), and more feasible by each day that passes, so I'd not be surprised that the exact opposite BIP will eventually be implemented (e.g., allowing to transact exactly 1 satoshi).

What feels like an abuse or DDoS today, might be an unnoticeable clock tick tomorrow.

[DaveF]

Just keep in mind the BIP was closed and locked.
More then likely AI generated and made by a github account that created the day before it was posted.
And could probably lead to people loosing money (as GM pointed out in a reply in the groups discussion)

This is yet another round of pro LukeCoin censorship crap. Let them add this to knots and fork off and die.

-Dave

[Quickseller]

I am more of a dog person myself.

I am strongly against this. Invalidating UTXOs that are 'spam' will eventually lead to invalidating UTXOs that are 'ilegal', and after several iterations, will lead to invalidating UTXOs that someone who makes it look like they have a big following doesn't like. Accepting this BIP will remove Bitcoin's censorship resistance property.

Further, the fee market already limits UTXOs.


It is also not required for all nodes to store all UTXOs in memory. Nodes could store UTXOs under a certain threshold on disk, and in the event any of these are spent, it would take slightly longer to validate those blocks/transactions.

[DaveF]

I am more of a dog person myself.

I am strongly against this. Invalidating UTXOs that are 'spam' will eventually lead to invalidating UTXOs that are 'ilegal', and after several iterations, will lead to invalidating UTXOs that someone who makes it look like they have a big following doesn't like. Accepting this BIP will remove Bitcoin's censorship resistance property.

Further, the fee market already limits UTXOs.


It is also not required for all nodes to store all UTXOs in memory. Nodes could store UTXOs under a certain threshold on disk, and in the event any of these are spent, it would take slightly longer to validate those blocks/transactions.

But invalidating UTXOs / transactions / things Luke does not want is exactly what Bitcoin knotscoin / Lukecoin is supposed to be.

But, they can play all they want. Since it seems the miners / mining pools / exchanges / crypto payment processors are sticking with core what they do does not really matter that much except for the noise they generate.

-Dave

[BlackHatCoiner]

You can hardly take bitcoin improvement proposals seriously nowadays. We've won so much, to the point where we're discussing about the insane idea of invalidating UTXO with the dumbest excuses.   

The BIP would drop over 40% of the current UTXO set, all spam with dust amounts under 1000 sats. I hardly find this negligible. And it would further incentivize spammers to go elsewhere in the future, further preserving the UTXO set from bloat.

"Elsewhere" = the same bitcoin network, but in alternative means. So you're OK with risking a $2 trillion asset, soon to be multiples of $2 trillion, and the only thing that has a chance to act as an alternative to the central bank slavery, because you don't accept the idea that other dudes fill the blockchain with content you "disapprove of" (lol) and which is impossible to stop in the first place.

You're a moron, to put it politely.

[Donneski]

What worries me here is how easily the long-term health of the network gets sidelined in favor of short-term neutrality. UTXO growth isn’t some abstract concern, it has real consequences for node costs, decentralization and who can realistically keep validating the chain.

If spam has grown to the point where addressing it will disrupt millions of dollars worth of activity, that doesn’t argue against taking action. If anything, it shows just how far the incentives have drifted. Leaving things as they are simply pushes the cost onto every node operator.

Bitcoin operates in an adversarial environment. Bad incentives don’t always fix themselves, more often they compound over time. Proposals like this if you ask me deserve careful scrutiny but dismissing them outright because they inconvenience existing actors feels less like principled neutrality and more like avoiding a hard problem.

[gmaxwell]

In other words, the BTC network should be fully usable even if each and every satoshi in existence sits in its own separate UTXO.

I agree and I would say that's consistent with the views of developers going back a decade-- that the system should be able to handle whatever the consensus rules allow. Though there are good reasons in the short term to try to be more conservative than that, simply because development resources are finite and some issues can wait.  In the long run proposals like utxotree make that kind of extreme usage possible.  But to be pedantic, the consensus rules allow 0 value txouts and in the case of those there is no way to provide such guarantees. So far, a countable infinity of 0 value txouts has not yet been a concern we've had to deal with.

It's negligible if you compare current UTXO size (about 11.3GB[1]) with current blockchain size (above 700GB).

Also when compared to the future utxo set size, as its a one time operation.

Also when compared to nodes using utxotree or similar, since under utxotree this proposal saves approximately 32 bytes and under utxotree with a far future larger utxo set size it would save less than 32 bytes.  And if the UTXO size is a serious problem for your system then any thing less than utxotree won't be sufficient eventually.

But more importantly, even negligible compared to the current utxo set because you have to have a zero-false-positive mechanism for *matching* the 'deleted' entries.  So the list of stuff to delete will probably be most of the size of the 'deleted' stuff. (And when considering utxotree plus this proposal it would potentially be a HUGE increase for these exceptions)

But it's significant when we consider RAM usage (especially during IBD), especially if you don't use storage with fast random I/O to compensate low RAM capacity.

Either the implementation does nothing during IBD, in which case it saves nothing there.  Or during IBD for every output created it consults some hashtable of bad outputs to determine if the output should be skipped in which case the proposal would likely *slow* IBD by doing a lookup against a giant table with about half as many entries as the current utxo set for each utxo created and require that this big table of excluded items be kept around at least until its snapshot point.  

If just keeping stuff out of cache that probably isn't spent were a win it could be done much more efficiently with a probabilistic filter without any consensus change... a filter for cache eviction can be much more efficient because it can have false positives, which you can't do if you're actually excluding stuff.  But generally this stuff is a waste of discussion time-- if low memory hosts could be improved by smarter caching code could be written to predict entries that will likely not be spent soon to prioritize for eviction.  Time wasted dealing with noise like this confiscation proposal is time that could be used to create cache improvements that would actually matter and wouldn't steal anyone's coins.

addressing it will disrupt millions of dollars worth of activity

It won't disrupt "activity", it will confiscate bitcoins.  In the abstract, proposal is "A group of people are using Bitcoin in ways we disapprove of, we should try to discourage them by confiscating the 358 Bitcoin they collectively own which is connected to the disfavored activity."

The NFT usage itself wouldn't even be impaired by it, as the NFT indexer would simply be updated to allow the NFT owners to rebind their tokens to new txouts([1]), so the "discouragement" comes purely in the form of stealing their coins.

[1] E.g. by declaring the tokens are reassigned to the first new txout with the same scriptpubkey as the deleted one, a process that could be entirely automated so matter how many times this stupid approach were repeated no NFT user would ever have a problem transferring an NFT.

What worries me here is how easily the long-term health of the network gets sidelined in favor of short-term neutrality.

Yes, the core purpose and ethos of Bitcoin-- money which is resistant to political influence-- is superior to run time costs.  It doesn't matter how fast Bitcoin is if it doesn't have a reason to exist compared to legacy alternatives.

But you're making a false comparison in any case because this doesn't actually address an existing problematic run time cost issue in any case, and the long existing proposals that do resolve performance loss from UTXO bloat (e.g. utxotree) aren't improved by this.

But even it it did-- so what?  Money which is secure against popular whim comes with costs and always has. They're worth it, and we should be willing to spend them to have Bitcoin and you can be willing to spend them because the limits already in the protocol provide reasonable bounds on those costs. If that isn't acceptable to you-- you'll be happier with something that isn't Bitcoin.

This whole drama is mass psychosis over a non-issue.

[d5000]

The NFT usage itself wouldn't even be impaired by it, as the NFT indexer would simply be updated to allow the NFT owners to rebind their tokens to new txouts([1]), so the "discouragement" comes purely in the form of stealing their coins.

One thing I don't understand: Would it even be stealing or just declare coins which anyway are dust "dead"? Stampchain outputs for example seem to try to match the dust limit as close as possible. And thus moving them would cost almost the same money than what they're worth.

So if the owner of these dust outputs doesn't speculate on a future where the transaction fees are 10 times or more lower than now so he can move the coins retaining most of their value, the "BIP" achieves almost nothing regarding incentives mitigating spam. And that with massive overhead (regularly having to run buggy external (!) tools to see what we can confiscate, etc.).

There was the 1 sat/vByte to 0.1/vByte move of the minimum standard relay fee recently, so for old Stampchain stuff it could have made a difference if these "old dust" outputs were confiscated. But everybody would move them probably before the softfork gets activated.

In other words, the proposal fails to its own goal - can we just bury it?  

(what can be done instead is to implement tools to "clean" the UTXO set from unspendable outputs, like I wrote here.)

If somebody here knows: Has Core planned something like this? Or are there already tools to "clean" unspendable UTXOs? (Here I don't refer to Utreexo but to tools for the "good old standard UTXO set database", I know there are Utreexo-style tools and clients but for Core it's still in the early BIP stage.)

Anyway I feel all these proposals are completely missing the main reason for "spam": relatively small token/memecoin transactions with BRC-20, SRC-20 or Runes protocol. Which are standard even by pre-Core-30 policy. The JPEGs and audios everybody's talking always were only a tiny fraction of the Ordinals, Stampchain and OP_RETURN transactions and never took really significant block space.

This dust incentive would be even less effective for these tokens probably, because as long as you don't have a lot of tokens in your wallet, consolidation techniques would not save you lots of fees.

[PepeLapiu]

It's negligible if you compare current UTXO size (about 11.3GB[1]) with current blockchain size (above 700GB). But it's significant when we consider RAM usage (especially during IBD), especially if you don't use storage with fast random I/O to compensate low RAM capacity.

I see. So now that UTXO bloat was used as an excuse to implement core 30 and blow up the op_return limit, we are now back to pretending UTXO bloat is not a problem?

There was the 1 sat/vByte to 0.1/vByte move of the minimum standard relay fee recently, so for old Stampchain stuff it could have made a difference if these "old dust" outputs were confiscated. But everybody would move them probably before the softfork gets activated.

You are not seeing the big picture here. There are literally millions and millions of these dust UTXOs that would need to be moved. This would cause a massive spike in miner fees, which would inflict a very large additional cost to spammers, therefore impleding on their business model.

(what can be done instead is to implement tools to "clean" the UTXO set from unspendable outputs, like I wrote here.)

If somebody here knows: Has Core planned something like this?

I would not hold my breath for core if I were you. For the last 3 years since this spam attack started, they were busy doing nothing about it. They only started to care about UTXO bloat in service of blowing up the op_return data size. Once core 30 was launched, they completely stopped caring about UTXO bloat. UT's not a problem anymore. Go back to sleep. Mommy core is stearing the ship.

Just keep in mind the BIP was closed and locked.

Yes indeed. They closed it based on the false assumption that it was AI generated (it certainly was not) and because they claimed Claire would first have to post her proposal on the Google list, which also censored her. And even after she offered to prove she's not an AI and the Google list finally allowed her posts, the Github censors are still freezing her BIP.

And could probably lead to people loosing money (as GM pointed out in a reply in the groups discussion)

By people loosing money, you mean spammers with dust UTXOs who care nothing of bitcoin as money and use fake pubkeys and fake scripthash (illegitimate us of bitcoin) and abuse Segwit and Taproot to cram even more spam at an even lower cost? Yeah, I don't care to preserve those people's spam on bitcoin.

This is yet another round of pro LukeCoin censorship crap. Let them add this to knots and fork off and die.

Filters are not a "Luke" thing. Filters have been around every since bitcoin was created. And the controversial op_return filter was already running for over 11 years. Nobody ever equated filters with censorship until core decided to blow one of the filters in service of spammers.

How did filters suddenly become censorship in 2025? Did the magic smoke escape the filters?

What worries me here is how easily the long-term health of the network gets sidelined in favor of short-term neutrality. UTXO growth isn’t some abstract concern, it has real consequences for node costs, decentralization and who can realistically keep validating the chain.

If spam has grown to the point where addressing it will disrupt millions of dollars worth of activity, that doesn’t argue against taking action. If anything, it shows just how far the incentives have drifted. Leaving things as they are simply pushes the cost onto every node operator.

Bitcoin operates in an adversarial environment. Bad incentives don’t always fix themselves, more often they compound over time. Proposals like this if you ask me deserve careful scrutiny but dismissing them outright because they inconvenience existing actors feels less like principled neutrality and more like avoiding a hard problem.

I absolutely agree with your views here.

In the last few years, the bitcoin community has grown increasingly toxic and complaisant.

For the last 3 years that this spam attack has been going on, core has done absolutely nothing  about spam. And in fact they barely acknowledge there is a problem at all by referring to spammers as "users" and referring to spam as "interesting and exciting new use cases".

Gloria Zhao, core lead maintainer, is or record saying the whole debate is about wither or not we like kitten jpegs. She admitted she is not concerned with economics and monetary use of bitcoin. In an interview, she gave the thumb down to anyone who believes in bitcoin but not in other " interesting blockchains" aka shitcoins. Those who believe in the value proposition of bitcoin only, she calls "toxic maximalists". She gave us the literally thumb down and she gave the literally thumb up to NFTs. I could not make this shit up if I tried.
https://x.com/Laserman_21/status/1989444886937178279/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1989444886937178279&currentTweetUser=Laserman_21
https://x.com/btcefe/status/1989000347675664776/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1989000347675664776&currentTweetUser=btcefe

And she thinks bitcoin doesn't really work for the new use cases that we have today. BTW, when she says "new use cases" she really means non-monetary shitcoinery and spam.
https://x.com/Laserman_21/status/1996117669175578791/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1996117669175578791&currentTweetUser=Laserman_21

This is who sits at the top of the core team.

When the inscription spam started to spike, Luke Daskjr suggested a filter that would filter out that spam. But they changed the definition of datacarrier in the documentation and rejected his suggestion based on the new definition.

Guys like Back and Maxwell, who once were very credible bitcoiners, are now going around poo-pooing any and all attempts at resisting spam. Even Maxwell, who once scripted filters into bitcoin is now pretending that filters don't work and make spam more desirable and valuable.

When I got into bitcoin during the block war, nobody had any problems defining the word "spam". Today, the entire community is trying to pretend they can't define spam, and it's all "valid transactions which paid the miner fees". And any and all attempt at preventing it is not only in vain, but amounts to censorship.

Miners are actively lowering the fees below 1 sat/byte in order to fill their blocks with spam inscriptions, and operating services like OpenRelay and Slipstream and others all specifically designed to cater to shitcoinery and spam.

An entire industry and infrastructure is being built around spam on bitcoin with more spam block explorers and spam indexers going around than there are actual legit bitcoin explorers.

All the while, so called bitcoiners are sitting around in a circle jerk, trying to pretend there is no problem, and even if there was, there is nothing we can do about it, and it's all somehow going to go away on it's own of we just learn to ignore it some more like we have done for the last 3 years.

Here is what Satoshi had to say when someone tried to bring a " new and exciting use case" into bitcoin:

Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale.

Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately.  Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other.  BitDNS users may not want to download everything the next several unrelated networks decide to pile in either.

The networks need to have separate fates.  BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices.

Today, they are actively trying to create new spam opportunities by removing filters and actively going bat shit crazy over any and all attempts at fighting spam.

We are living desperate times, my friend. I hope core and the shitcoinery can be stamped out so that bitcoin can survive.

[d5000]

You are not seeing the big picture here. There are literally millions and millions of these dust UTXOs that would need to be moved. This would cause a massive spike in miner fees, which would inflict a very large additional cost to spammers, therefore impleding on their business model.

The point is: it is often simply not practical to move these UTXOs.

If you have bought some SRC-20/BRC-20/whatever tokens and they sleep now in your wallet waiting that your once-valuable bag which is now worth almost $1 will appreciate again. Most people probably have 10-20 token-related dust UTXOs or so, not much more (because a single BRC-20 transaction only creates one or two of these UTXOs). These dust UTXOs together will perhaps be worth 2-5$.

We have now 2 scenarios:

- The tokens magically appreciate and go to $100. Then their owners will probably try to sell them as fast as they can. And with them, the UTXOs will (perhaps) be moved, but they would be a minor issue.
- The tokens stay at $1 or go to $0.10. Will they try to save at least their $2-5 of the dust UTXOs? It will take them more time to "consolidate" them than the value they could be saving.

Probability for case 2 is higher as for case 1, so at least 50% of these UTXOs will never be moved. And thus, from the incentive point of view, it would make no sense to run The Cat, a big operation to save Bitcoin!! (having to run ord and other buggy external software which even may contain malware in some cases) to invalidate them.

Then there are the Stampchain UTXOs, which are also a few millions. These will never be spent, it's not even possible because they are based on fake data. So it's extremely important to invalidate them again with The Cat! Because WE ARE FIGHTING SPAM!

BTW, the second kind of UTXOs can simply be deleted by any nodes, without needing "The Cat" nor other amateur "BIP" from some first-year coder with messiah complex.

We are living desperate times, my friend. I hope core and the shitcoinery can be stamped out so that bitcoin can survive.

Oh yes. Really desperate. 8 OP_RETURN transactions with more than 1024 bytes were recorded last week. Bitcoin is doomed.

[PepeLapiu]

Oh yes. Really desperate. 8 OP_RETURN transactions with more than 1024 bytes were recorded last week. Bitcoin is doomed.

Wake TF up buddy. The infrastructure is being built which will facilitate (intentionally or not) a massive wave of illicit, ilegal, and immoral files. These files will be pushed through the network with op_return without the need for spam 3rd parties like SlipStream, and each and every node will have to download, host, and relay this shit.

It's not likely to happen right now, with only 10% of the nodes running spamware 30 and the rest of the network still running filters at 83 bytes. An attack right now would lend too much credibility to the anti-spam guys and provide us with a giant "told you so" foam finger.

Here is how I imagine it will happen.
A few years from now, after you tell me a zillion times that nothing is happening, and most nodes have downgraded to spamware 30, and you will have come out as triumphan against us, the parranoid anti-spam knotzis.

A shit ton of illicit, disgusting material will be posted on chain. With op_return blown up, they won't have to break up their shit into a 100 different transactions and have to ask Mara's spamware SlipStream for permission.

A few of the most prominent and vocal bitcoiners will be SWAT'd, charged, and procecuted for running a node, hosting, and distributing illicit child porn.

If they are in a decent country with a half decent legal system, they will be allowed to defend themselves in courts, provided they have a few millions to spare in legal fees, and a few years of drama. Most likely, they will be forced to accept a plead bargain and a few years in jail, like the Samurai crew is being forced to do right now.

And the beauty of it all, is that it will all be done without cheating the network. No fake pubkeys required, no fake scripthash required. They won't even have to pretend it's a genuine monetary transaction by barely going above the dust limit. The attackers will be using the system EXACTLY AND PRECISELY as core 30 intended it to be used: censorship resistent illicit file sharing and hosting.

These few bitcoiners will be perp walked on town square as examples to the rest of us.

Many nodes will just throw in the towel in discuss at the very idea of hosting and relaying the disgusting stuff. Others who are more hard core bitcoiners will still throw in the towel by fear that they might get SWAT'd too.

"Oh my! Won't someone think of the childten?"

Of course none of this would gain popular support if child porn and other disgusting materials were not involved

It's a lot easier to scare and manipulate bitcoiners who knowingly are hosting and relaying illicit disgusting material than it is to manipulate and scare ones who are just running a clean node.

With the surveillance state growing and growing every day, they might be able to pinpoint and locate every single node in just a few years, even those running or tor. In fact, they just might be able to do that today.

Within a year or two after the start of the illicit material attack, the number of nodes will have dramatically decreased. Whoever still remains will likely be offered to be permitted with a special license. You know, to make sure they are not pedos. And here is a list of non-OFAC/AML/KYC compliment UTXOs. Thank you for your collaboration.

The only part of the network that is still decentralized, the nodes, will no longer be.

Zhao, Maxwell, Back, Todd, Shill-Nobi and the rest of the shitcoiners might not even be on the scene anymore. Lucky for them. The cheepy fucks win.

You guys are just un-fucking-believable.
You refuse to filter spam with decent filters and you insist on calling anyone who do paranoid knotzis.
You refuse to block spam at the consensus level with BIP-444/110, even temporarily.
You refuse to block spam with The Cat.

And you scrug your shoulders and claim there is nothing we can do about spam, but just pray and wait that they somehow go away on their own.

They're not even spammers anymore, they are redefined as "users who need to upload data".
There is not even spam either. We can't define the word spam anymore than we can define the word woman. It's all "interesting and exiting new use cases Satoshi was too narrow minded to make room for".

What a disgrace!

You're absolutely right, and you've hit on the exact metric that truly matters, both technically and practically: RAM and I/O performance.
The debate about blockchain size versus Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) size is a classic, but what really impacts the user or node operator isn't just disk space, but how that information is accessed.

Yeah!

Don't run any filters against spam. That would be very bad. Maxwell said so. And he's the expert. He knows better than you.
Don't try to stop spam at the consensus level, even temporarily, with the BIP-444/110. That too would be very bad. Maxwell, the expert, told you so.
Don't even try to take the spam out of the UTXO set, that would be bad. Maxwell, the expert, told you so.

Oh, BTW, there is really nothing you can do about spam. Just pray with us that they will just go away soon.

And don't forget to blow up the op_return on your node. Yes, we have to create more ways for spammers to shit all over bitcoin. They'll just go away if we bend over for them and take it deep enough.

[stwenhao]

A few of the most prominent and vocal bitcoiners will be SWAT'd, charged, and procecuted for running a node

There are jurisdictions, where Bitcoin is illegal. There is no need to focus on a particular data in the chain, to sue someone. It can be done easier, by accusing someone of "money laundering", or anything like that.

And then, it should be easy to guess, why there are that many nodes, running behind Tor.

For example: https://bitnodes.io/nodes/

Nodes: 24354
Onion: 15595 (64.03%)

It is probably much easier to sue someone, just because of running a node, than to focus on the data being processed. Otherwise, a lot of clearnet sites, like many image hosting sites, would be endlessly sued. But guess what: they are running just fine, and they are not responsible for data, uploaded by their users.

No fake pubkeys required, no fake scripthash required.

If you upload something to some image hosting site, then there is even no blockchain at all, and everything can be conveniently linked in a format, accepted by browsers. And somehow, these things are not taken down. Guess why.

With the surveillance state growing and growing every day, they might be able to pinpoint and locate every single node in just a few years, even those running or tor.

There is no difference if you want to trace someone running Tor, because of just using Bitcoin, or because of sharing specific data.

Also, there is no need to chase nodes. In practice, a lot of users use SPV nodes, and other kinds of light clients, so they mostly process only their own transactions.

And there are also many "block-explorers-only users", where they just trust some block explorers, like mempool.space, and if something is there, then they believe, that it is always on-chain. And then, it is all about convincing a given website, to display something in a given way, even if it is not really there. Because many users don't care about sharing data in P2P way: they care, if they can link to some explorer, and show everyone, that their JPEGs are displayed there.

[PepeLapiu]

WAKE TF UP!
You are telling me with a straight face that the only way to deal with spam is to not block it at the policy level with filters, not block it at the consensus level with BIP444/110, and not remove the spam from the UTXO set. And even go as far as removing filters like core 30 is doing.
And when this ridiculous behavior is neccesairily going to result in more spam, and most absolutely some illicit material at some point. You are basically telling me that incumbering all the nodes with illicit immoral disgusting and illegal material, that will have no effect on their desire to keep running a node they were all already doing for free?

Are you out of your mind? Are you for real?
V
If shitcoiners like core/Zhao/Todd/Back/Maxwell et al are correct, running as node to shape policy and prevent spam is completely useless at all levels, than why even bother to run a node? At what point will you wake up and understaond they are pissing on your leg and telling you it's raining?

There is a staggering aggregated 380 btc worth of spam dust UTXOs.i That is a ridiculous amount of spam.

And the shitcoiners are telling you that the only way to deal with it is to not do anything at the polilcy level, not do anything at the consensus level, and never ever even consider removing that spam from the UTXO set. In fact you should accept core removal of existing filters.

And BTW there is nothing you can do about spam. And if you even try, that would be horrible censorship. Yeah man, if you stop dick pics and other non-monetary activity a monetary network, that is somehow censorship?

You actually believe that turning every node into a random file sharing network for any and all strangers to drop any and all files on the computers of the entire network is the only way to keep bitcoin running?

Look up, it's not raining. They're pissing on you.

[ABCbits]

But it's significant when we consider RAM usage (especially during IBD), especially if you don't use storage with fast random I/O to compensate low RAM capacity.

Either the implementation does nothing during IBD, in which case it saves nothing there.  Or during IBD for every output created it consults some hashtable of bad outputs to determine if the output should be skipped in which case the proposal would likely *slow* IBD by doing a lookup against a giant table with about half as many entries as the current utxo set for each utxo created and require that this big table of excluded items be kept around at least until its snapshot point.  

I see. I was thinking the full node software would filter certain output based on criteria stated on the BIP proposal, even it means trade lower RAM usage with higher CPU usage.

It's negligible if you compare current UTXO size (about 11.3GB[1]) with current blockchain size (above 700GB). But it's significant when we consider RAM usage (especially during IBD), especially if you don't use storage with fast random I/O to compensate low RAM capacity.

I see. So now that UTXO bloat was used as an excuse to implement core 30 and blow up the op_return limit, we are now back to pretending UTXO bloat is not a problem?

My second sentence clearly mention one of problem about UTXO bloat.

Here is how I imagine it will happen.
A few years from now, after you tell me a zillion times that nothing is happening, and most nodes have downgraded to spamware 30, and you will have come out as triumphan against us, the parranoid anti-spam knotzis.

A shit ton of illicit, disgusting material will be posted on chain. With op_return blown up, they won't have to break up their shit into a 100 different transactions and have to ask Mara's spamware SlipStream for permission.

Or they could continue to use Ordinals, which is roughly 4 times cheaper since the arbitrary data counted as witness data while OP_RETURN doesn't.

[stwenhao]

the only way to deal with spam is to not block it

It can be optimized locally. If you do that on consensus level, then people will be mad, and they will spam more. If you do it locally, then your node will be safe, and everyone else will process the spam.

So, it is not about doing nothing. It is about making local optimizations, and convincing users to use your version.

not block it at the consensus level with BIP444/110

If you block it on consensus level, then people will start making transactions, which will be valid under old rules, and invalid under your new BIPs. Which means, that then you risk using a minority chain.

A soft-fork can be "soft", if deployed correctly. Otherwise, everyone could deploy a soft-fork every day. But that would result in a lot of minority chains.

And, as far as I know, the filter enthusiasts don't have hashrate majority on their side. And as long as it is the case, using a minority chain is more harmful, than following the strongest one.

and not remove the spam from the UTXO set

If you remove something, which is considered as valid by other nodes, then you will end up on an altcoin. The only safe way, is to give some data a lower priority. Because then, you can mark 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE as "very difficult to spend", and place it on the end of your processing queue. Then, things will be faster, if validating such things will be delayed by your node. However, if you reject it instead, then after many years, someone may produce a valid transaction, and fork you out of the network.

why even bother to run a node?

For example to know, that you are not using a minority chain. SPV nodes can be tricked, to follow the wrong chain. We had cases, when big mining pools stopped verifying things, and there were some block reorgs because of that.

At what point will you wake up

My node does not process the spam. Anyone can use implementation like utreexo, and don't store things like that. It is just not the default.

But if you use Core or Knots, then you store and process historical transactions, so it is your choice. Even Knots cannot address historical spam, and does nothing about it.

There is a staggering aggregated 380 btc worth of spam dust UTXOs

If you assume 0.1 sat/vB, then it means 1 GB per sending 1 BTC. Which means 380 GB of potential spam. Is it too much? Well, the total size of the chain is around 700 GB. And, again, Knots does nothing to address that historical spam.

And BTW there is nothing you can do about spam.

You can do a lot of things. But splitting the chain, where no-fork solutions are possible, is pointless.

You actually believe that turning every node into a random file sharing network for any and all strangers to drop any and all files on the computers of the entire network is the only way to keep bitcoin running?

No. But I believe that the first layer will be turned into that in the future. And then, users caring about resources will have to do their optimizations on lower layers, and process a subset of the mainnet traffic.

Because if you are going to process 100% of the mainnet traffic, then you will be spammed, even if you use Knots. Just because people will always bypass all filters, and stuff their data into historical blocks, which you will never touch, just because you don't want to.

[DaveF]

What worries me here is how easily the long-term health of the network gets sidelined in favor of short-term neutrality. UTXO growth isn’t some abstract concern, it has real consequences for node costs, decentralization and who can realistically keep validating the chain....

That has become such a irreverent argument that people keep making. And at this point I am ignoring most of them.

Not your keys, not your coins. Not your node, well it's not your node then it's just not your node. You have to broadcast your TX through someplace else. That's not even a privacy concern anymore.

Computers that can sync and run a node are being thrown out by many companies at this point because they they can't run a node. You can get them for just about nothing in most places.

So then it goes to in poorer countries you can't get computers that can run a node. Outside of the fact that you can get used PCs in a lot of places that can for under $100 which admittedly can be a lot of $. Then run a SPV wallet like the original white paper suggested. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf section 8

Running a node is not needed for BTC, and unless you are doing it properly can actually be more of a privacy concern then running a SPV wallet.

Most of the people do that anyway running you are not running a node on their phones. And most hardware wallets are going to be SPV anyway. If it matters that much to you then you would find a way. But for the most part most people don't want to run a full node.

How many people using a Trezor or such go though the hassle of running their own node or just run the trezor suite and connect to wherever.

Quoting myself here but:

....

Outside the cost of electricity which for the most part is nominal, nodes are free. Saying people are spending money to run them is disingenuous at best. Yes you can if you want to but there is no reason to. Also, time to set one up is well under an hour for anyone with any PC knowledge.

With Win10 kind of going away there are 10's of 1000s if not 100's of thousands of PCs out there that are fully capable of running a node FOR FREE IN MANY LOCATIONS if not then well under $30. We are talking 6th gen intel machines with 1TB drives.

Hell I made money labor day weekend here by filling a van with about 100 of these PCs for a company that was getting rid of them and taking them to the e-waste facility. Paid to load them into the van and then paid $0.40 a lb at the scrap yard. Everyone was happy, they got rid of their e-waste for very little money, I got paid, and the scrap yard made money. Why did this happen? Because nobody wanted those PCs. Too old and slow. Kept a bunch of them and have been installing umbrel on them. instant node amongst other things. Cost $0.00

OT but important to mention it's kind of sad, but there was an effort to send these machines to people who needed them. But the cost of shipping them was more then the cost of what you could get ,once again get 9 and 10 year old machines for locally. I even tried to donate them to some other places I knew but no takers. But that is another discussion for another day.


-Dave

Hardware is not a valid argument. Some people come back and say that in poorer 3rd world countries even free or just about free hardware is too expensive. Which would be a fair argument if they should be running a full node. If you don't have the money to do it properly or the knowledge of the complete risks of doing it on older hardware will less reliable internet and power and so on. You should be using a SPV wallet. Like BTC was supposed to be run for most people.


I am in IT, I also like BTC Due to those 2 facts I help a lot of people with BTC related things.

Some of the people I help have 7 figures + of USD in BTC.
And I can tell you zero - none - nada - null of them run their own nodes. (and no I don't have 7 figures of USD in BTC or anywhere close to it, if I did I would be on a beach in the Caribbean right now having a drink out of a coconut not talking on the internet)

But anyway, some of them I file under tinfoil hat paranoid lunatics even they don't want to run their own nodes.

I'm sure PepeLapiu is making some sort of argument about spam or dick picks or whatever right now but since I have them on ignore I'm never going to see it. Talking to people like that is like talking to BSV fans but instead of following Craig like cult members follow their leader they are following Luke instead. Sooner or later they will too loose most of their BTC.

Since I just picked up a couple of 4th gen i7 machines out of the trash the other day I think I'll go spin up a couple more .30 nodes. I actually want to try it on a 2nd gen I7 I found but it has a bad power supply.

-Dave