lucash.dev on Nostr: You could use Bitcoin OP_RETURN to store censorship resistant, global broadcast ...

You could use Bitcoin OP_RETURN to store censorship resistant, global broadcast messages.

It has *many* disadvantages, and I don’t recommend doing that for most use cases. But the fact that you can is proof by construction that it is possible to have a censorship-resistant global broadcast network, that is completely trustless, and fair — in the sense that everyone has a shot at broadcasting a message proportional to resources spent.

In fact if you remove individual transactions and treat each block as a message, it is quite perfectly fair and very hard to censor — as long as there’s a honest majority of hash rate.

“But it doesn’t scale!l” yes it doesn’t scale very well — but even at one message every ten minutes, a PoW chain of messages would already offer a lot of value.

But the main problem of scale here is that a PoW chain or “blockchain” was designed to offer a number of guarantees that are really expensive but essential for financial use cases.

Namely: strict immutable ordering, retaining records for indeterminate amounts of time, not having any liveness assumptions.

Those aren’t needed for broadcast communication in general.

It is my belief that other data structures are possible that preserve important properties of “blockchains” while being cheaper and obtaining higher bandwidth by giving up guarantees that aren’t relevant.

In the near future I will publish one, after working a bit more on a PoC . I want to be sure it works first.