Hey Greg -
I certainly share your concerns about governments censoring bitcoin. We should absolutely make sure we don't put bitcoin in a position where governments might start to get ideas.
However, as I tried to argue in my response to Peter, I think being too permissive with relay policy can be just as harmful as being too restrictive. We must guide bitcoin through the Scylla of government censorship and the Charybdis of making bitcoin's monetary function so expensive and inconvenient that bitcoin simply ceases to be money. Avoiding the latter catastrophe does not involve "censorship" at all. It involves rate-limiting spam.
>But when the censorship is backed by threat (even if vague or
unconstitutional) of civil or criminal legal penalties, the avenue to
just bypass may be much less available.
Can you elaborate on why you see this as a threat? Again, I don't see how governments - even colluding worldwide - can compel 100% of the hashrate not to mine transactions. The recent movement towards home mining seems to make this outcome increasingly unlikely. But perhaps I am missing something?
>So for example, in an alternative universe: Bitcoin goes along with
Guida and after having built this massive edifice of transaction
censorship the Bitcoin developers lose their UK lawsuit Craig S Wright
after he successfully bribes a judge, and now have a the UK courts
imposing a worldwide order to freeze any of their bitcoin address under
threat of imprisonment.
Again, can you elaborate on how this attack would work? I don't understand how the UK government, or anyone, could compel a large enough percentage of hashpower not to mine transactions from certain actors for it to matter. If bitcoin cannot stand up to tyrannical governments that try to impose unjust (and in this case, impossible-to-enforce) demands, then what are we even doing here?
>The censorship is deployed via the prebuilt censorship infrastructure
What is this "prebuilt censorship infrastructure" you refer to? Garbageman is just a bitcoin node. No one is compelled to run it. It only makes a difference if a large percentage of the bitcoin network is running it, and this can only happen voluntarily. And again, it is impossible to use for censorship. You are using that term incorrectly.
>and willingness to bypass it is greatly decreased because doing so would
land the bypasser a UK arrest warrant.
How does this even work? Are you saying that any noderunner who *doesn't* run Garbageman could be compelled to do so? I'm just not seeing how this could realistically be enforced.
>Could they still get their transactions through? Probably but at much greater costs and delays, creating a significant harm.
Can you go into more detail as to the harm caused? As Sjors pointed out, people can just resubmit their transactions again and again if they fail to be accepted the first time. And people can run LR nodes to get around government censorship, if that's what's occurring. I completely agree with the notion that LR could come in handy again if anyone actually ever tries to censor bitcoin. In the case of a government attempting to blacklist certain addresses, for example, it is very likely that LR would see a surge in popularity and GM would not be as effective.
The noderunner network is decentralized. We need to trust that noderunners will make the right choices and will run more GM nodes when spam is the most pressing issue, and will run more LR nodes when censorship is top of mind. I think each tool has its place. I just think we are nowhere near LR's place currently, and I think it is a terrible idea not to build its conservative counterpart, because then we will have no recourse once the spam begins in earnest. And make no mistake, governments can attack bitcoin via spam just as well as they can attack it via censorship. The loss of a culture that values bitcoin's monetary function is just as deadly to bitcoin as censorship would be.
>Not building the censorship infrastructure (even though you intend it
for 'good' purposes) and instead building anti-censorship infrastructure
leaves us all with a better world.
I agree that building a "censorship infrastructure" would be a terrible idea. That is not what Garbageman is. And again, I am fine with the existence of LR, as there are (very unlikely) situations in which it could come in useful. I just think at the moment we need fewer LR nodes, not more. Censorship of bitcoin is exceedingly unlikely, whereas spam is the much more pressing threat at the moment.
>A world that, sure, sometimes has higher transaction fees due to waves
of well funded spam--- but that's just the cost of having limited
capacity on the network to preserve the ability to validate and to
provide income for security.
I disagree. We have successfully deterred spammers for almost a decade between 2014 and 2023. If we treat them with the hostility they deserve, then the economic demand for their activity drops precipitously. There is hard historical data supporting this view. Conversely, if we throw open the floodgates and welcome all the spammers in, now we've created economic demand where previously there was very little.
>Even if there was never any spam at all there would sometimes be
elevated transaction fees due to surges in demand. Essentially the
energy behind this anti-spam stuff is just relitigating the blocksize
war, but doing it under the cover(?) of undermining a foundational
property of Bitcoin: that bitcoin was created to escape other people
passing judgement over which existing transactions are okay or not.
This is inaccurate. I am not interested in relitigating the blocksize war. I understand that block space needs to be limited to keep validation costs low and the node network decentralized. I know this better than most, as I've spent a large portion of the last few years setting up new users with bitcoin nodes. In fact, this very property has been undermined by the spam attack that happened during 2023-2024, where the minimum cost of hardware sufficient to fully validate the chain in under a month went from $100 to $250.
I am making a more nuanced point: If low-fee monetary activity is drowned out by high-fee monetary activity, this is acceptable from the bitcoin network's point of view, because bitcoin is money, and this simply reflects that it is working properly. There are no threats to bitcoin's culture if such a thing happens. Everyone simply goes on thinking that bitcoin is money, and people who can't afford to pay high fees just wait till the fees come back down. If, on the other hand, low-fee monetary activity is drowned out by high-fee non-monetary activity, then this undermines bitcoin's entire identity and purpose as money and corrupts its culture into no longer believing that bitcoin is money at all, resulting in a downward spiral ending in bitcoin's death by fading away into irrelevance, just as we've seen with Ethereum.
>The
Bitcoin project has never seen that to be its role.
I certainly hope the bitcoin project sees making sure bitcoin functions as money as its role!
>Prior to Bitcoin your ability to transact "could always be overridden by
the admin based on his judgment call
weighing the principle [...] against other concerns, or at the
behest of his superiors." If someone cares that someone else is using
bitcoin for things they don't like, or that being outbid can delay their
transactions-- then they ought to be using something else. This was
settled long ago.
I completely agree that bitcoin is not interesting if it is not permissionless money. If it is to be merely a permissionless database, then it is no more interesting than Ethereum. So there are two ways in which bitcoin can fail to be permissionless money and thus lose relevance: too much censorship on the one hand, and too much spam on the other.
>That's the problem with all this filtering stuff: It works better, to
the extent it works at all, against sincere usage which lacks the
flexibility of spam (or outright attacks). Sincere usage cares that the
network validates its rules, it has to spend specific coins, specific
values, use specific fields. Collateral usage (a term that I think
better captures most of what people are calling spam)-- where the goal
of the transaction isn't really to move Bitcoins-- can do virtually
*anything* with its transactions, it is far more flexible and so it is
less vulnerable to attempts to filter it.
I don't agree with this view. As long as we detect Ponzi metaprotocols as soon as they are announced, we can counter them without affecting sincere usage. There are even proposals for modular filtering, where the bitcoin node software would not even need a new release in order to counter a new threat; filter developers could simply write new filters as the threats evolve, and the node software could import it dynamically. In all likelihood, once we implement this, the spammers will simply give up and spam other chains instead.
There are certainly risks to implementing something like this, as it could be co-opted to nefarious ends if we are not vigilant. However, as I stated earlier, I think the noderunner network is sufficiently decentralized, and noderunners themselves are smart enough about what software they run, that the risk should be manageable. As long as there is no single point of failure, I don't see much reason to be concerned. Again, everyone chooses the software they run, and no one can be compelled to run something they disagree with. I think we should trust noderunners to make the right decisions.
Kind regards,
--Chris