As someone who has been following the BIP-110 situation fairly closely for the past couple of months, Ive learned much more about the technical underlying functions within Bitcoin than I used to know.
The BIP-110 debate and their proponents have brought up many of their grievances with the current state of Bitcoin, and many of them I agree are issues. However, when looking outside of the echo chamber, many people don’t seem to be worried about these issues as much, if at all.
So I wanted to ask questions to some of you who happen to know more about the technicals of bitcoin, why some of these issues aren’t as bad as BIP-110 made them out to be, or if these are valid issues, what are some actual changes we should be working towards to fix them.
Question 1:
BIP-110‘s main issue is the acceptance of spam on the blockchain and in blockspace. The problem with allowing this is that it will gradually increase the costs for regular people to operate their own full nodes. If allowed to continue, this would lead to an existential threat to Bitcoin where only large, centralized, institutions can operate nodes, and thereby verify transactions and run the actual code of Bitcoin.
Is this a real threat in the future? And what should regular people do to ensure they can now and in the future, afford to start up and operate their own nodes to avoid node centralization?
Question 1.1:
Core increasing OP-RETURN size large enough to contain high definition pictures exposes Bitcoin node operators not only to accelerated blockchain bloat risks explained above, but also to legal risks if morally or politically insensitive material is added to the blockchain.
What should regular node operators do to reduce or eliminate this legal risk to their nodes?
Question 2:
Attempts to debate OP-RETURN changes by those against increasing OP-Return were ignored, censored, and the changes were pushed through anyways by a maintainer who according to Jeff Booth, never held any Bitcoin of her own, showing that maintainers are not economically incentivized to act in the best interests of Bitcoin, and disagreements with policy changes will be ignored.
What can regular people do to oppose future Core changes if in theory they introduce an even more contentious change, such as tail emissions on Bitcoin supply?
Question 3:
The failure of BIP-110 shows that block template design (not necessarily hash rate) is centralized enough that the game theory of UASFs does not work anymore in coercing miners to accept changes suggested by node operators. Apparently this never even worked for Segwit either.
What can regular node operators do to force changes with Bitcoin policy which miners may not support?
(My only idea is that we need to invest more into hash rate markets such as the Braiins marketplace and decentralized mining pools like Ocean +DATUM enough that hashing power starts leaving the more centralized mining pools and block template design power in is more evenly spread across different pools/nodes.)
Someone who knows a little more about this than I do and could answer these for me would be a great help. Because as I see it, these are valid concerns the BIP-110 has brought forth but there are no other attempts to address these problems than BIP-110. Even as ineffective as it would’ve been, it was at least an actual attempt to do something to fix these problems and according to game theory, should’ve been adopted by miners. They fact it wasn’t makes me wonder what can we act do to address the issues they expressed.
submitted by /u/Pseudoname3
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