MachuPikacchu on Nostr: Learning out loud here. It’s a line of thinking and not a complete one at that. ...

Learning out loud here. It’s a line of thinking and not a complete one at that.

Does the OP_RETURN debate boil down to: what is your preference for mempool topology? Continuous or discrete?

Preference is the operative word there because the mempool at the moment is discrete with many private mempools holding transactions that are only made public once added to a block.

Should we stop that? We can't do it without a fork and is there a compelling argument for making that backwards incompatible change? While it's not ideal, a competing mining pool can see the lucrative private transactions and if it's worth the effort they can try rewriting that block.

There's no solution to the "out of band payments" problem. That would require "out of band" enforcement for a global network spanning different cities, cultures, jurisdictions, etc.

That means we're likely stuck with a discrete topology whether we like it or not. Then the argument seems to boil down to where on the spectrum of "sieve to plane" (a sieve has many holes while a plane has none) should a mempool be to serve the biggest market?

In my view a free market most likely serves the most people. Let the people doing the proof of work hash it out.