Excerpt
There’s been a lot of noise around OP_RETURN and data on the Bitcoin blockchain. I didn’t follow all the drama, but I listened to the people I trust: Developers who’ve been in this space for years. Here’s what I learned, why it matters, and why I choose to stick with Bitcoin Core instead of Knots.
Transcript
There was a lot of drama in recent weeks. I didn’t follow all the drama. What I did was I listened to two podcasts from people that I trust they know. They have a deep technical understanding of Bitcoin. And so if you really want to go deep into that, the one is Bitcoin Explained podcast with Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost. Sjors is a Bitcoin core developer for many years. And Aaron is the guy who wrote the Genesis book. Aaron is also in the space. He’s a Bitcoin journalist since the very early days. And the second one is a new podcast, which is called Presidio Bitcoin with Steve Lee. And two other guys, Max, I’ve lost the name now. And like two episodes ago, they were also discussing the OP-RETURN topic on their podcast. And I found both to be very informative. So for me, the basic answers or what I think about it is, if I were to run a node today, which I don’t as I’m traveling so much, but I want to again, I would run Bitcoin Core and all the discussions as much as I feel or want Bitcoin to be money. I don’t need the whole data stuff on Bitcoin. Why? Because I believe that the more complex software gets, the more prone it is that there are bugs in it. And we don’t need bugs in Bitcoin. We really don’t need them. And that’s also the reason why I feel with Bitcoin Core, where we have like 40 people, I think, which are contributing to the code at the moment, where there’s a governance, where you have maintainers, you have people who work out other bugs. You have a lot of very, very competent people who are discussing and working on these topics for years. And I think they are very clever. And also the reason why there are so many discussions. And that’s the reason why development in Bitcoin is slow. But I’m actually happy about that because the value that’s stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, if something happens now or anytime in the future, it would be horrible for every one of us and for the future of Bitcoin in general. And so I feel that these people who are maintaining Bitcoin Core, they know what they are talking about. And it’s also from these podcasts that I learned why actually the removal of the awkward turn limit wouldn’t change anything. It doesn’t change anything because the people who want to use data on the blockchain, they have been using fake public keys and they can use the witness data to embed that or to peg it in a way to the Bitcoin blockchain. And then the awkward turn limit is basically only a mempool policy limit. That means it’s not a consensus rule. There are different sets of rules, the mempool rules and the consensus rules. So the mempool rules mean with the awkward turn, this transaction wouldn’t be relayed to the other nodes. But what the people who are wanting to embed the data in the blockchain are doing now and what they will be able to do in the future as well, with or without the awkward turn limit is they can put the data in a transaction and go directly to a miner without propagating the transaction into the mempools. And the miners will include it because they pay a very high fee for that. Miners are not interested in Bitcoin politics. Miners are interested in making money. And most of them will always go for the profit over Bitcoin philosophy or what it should be. So that means that the removal of this awkward turn limit wouldn’t change a thing because people right now already go the way directly to the miners. And that’s a bad thing. Why? Because it centralizes mining, because only the bigger miners can afford to offer this service of speeding up transactions or mining your special transaction. Smaller miners are not able to offer that service. Then if transactions are being mined without being in the mempools, then the fee estimation isn’t working anymore. So the fee estimation works because it knows how many transactions with how many fees, how high fees are they bidding are in the mempools. But if they are not in the mempools, then the estimation isn’t correct anymore. And also the sending of blocks in between nodes is faster if the same transactions are in all the mempools. Then the block propagation is faster. So the time until blocks can be found gets longer when non-standard transactions have to be validated. That’s, you see, that’s where it gets technically so deep that I don’t understand it anymore, I have to say. And that’s why I say, but that things listen to the podcast with Sjors Provoost, because he explains that. But for me, that’s the reason why I would not install Bitcoin nodes. And there’s another reason, actually. As far as I understood, it’s not 40 people who are discussing the risks, the tradeoffs, the possibilities or whatever of new changes like in Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Nodes is basically run by Luk Deschiers. He’s one developer. And to be honest, I feel it’s not enough, you know, there should be more people looking for possible bugs, asking questions to find out, is it really a good change? What’s going into the software? And also, I mean, I would not trust it because I mean, look, I remember very vividly a couple of years ago, he sent out the tweet saying he has lost all his Bitcoin keys. Because what did he do? He didn’t use standard security procedures that everyone is teaching people use a seed phrase, use maybe multi-sig, use SHAMIR secret, whatever to store your seed. No, what he did, he built his own hot wallet and stored his Bitcoin keys there. And then he was hacked or he lost it. And to be honest, I can’t trust a software from a guy who has made this mistake only one, two or three years ago, you know. And so other people then said to me, Hey, but why I mean Bitcoin Core also started at the beginning with maybe one or two people maintaining it. Yes, that’s true. But that was at the time where no one was interested in Bitcoin and only a handful or maybe a hundred people were using Bitcoin at that time. And there were bugs too in the early days. So it’s not a, how shall I say, I think if I’m weighing the reasons and the reasoning behind the op-return drama, I have to stick to Bitcoin Core. I know these people, not a lot of them, a handful of them. I’m discussing things with them. I am asking them questions. And their reasoning is always very logical to me and not at all driven by ideology or wokeness or all these kinds of stupid stuff that are thrown at these people who are working so much to secure, yeah, our money and our freedom. And so I hope I explained that well enough. So in basically, I don’t want data on the blockchain. It makes Bitcoin software more complex. And I don’t actually want that. There are other platforms for that. There are enough other platforms where you can do that. And maybe it’s like with Ethereum or hopefully the data people will go somewhere else and build their own platform. But of course, they want to use Bitcoin too, because they know it’s the most secure network, which also shows us that Bitcoin is actually the best of all.