Jameson Lopp

Greg Maxwell's take:
There isn't anything unusual or bad going on *with* Bitcoin Core.
In my opinion there does appear to be a dishonest and inauthentic social media campaign *against* Bitcon Core. There have been a dozen threads on reddit on the matter, which is pretty sad because it's mostly a nothing burger... I've wasted tens of hours writing responses only to find that generally the opponents just vanish.
Back in 2014 the average block size was only around 160 kilobytes, as a result there was no real pressure to drive up transaction fees and it was extremely cheap to stuff whatever garbage data you wanted in Bitcoin's chain. Some people were storing data by paying to fake addresses which were really just data instead of an address. This is maximally bad because it bloats up the UTXO database with unprunable data, directly increasing the minimum cost to run a node.
To address this core devs introduced a 'data carrier' output type also called an OP_RETURN. This is a kind of output which provably can't be spent so it doesn't have to go into the utxo database and can be pruned. Additionally, they limited the size of the data to 40 bytes in order to encourage applications which can just store a hash instead of the data to do that. Later this limit was increased to 80 bytes.
The world has changed a lot since 2014: Fees are now not just meaningful but significant, no one is dumping data in Bitcoin because it's *cheap*. People dumping data in have almost entirely moved to dumping data in the witness portion of transactions. Major miners no longer enforce this limit, because it turns out they like money (and have denied requests to limit themselves), and if you are willing to directly connect to one its easy to get them mined. There are some users who are still creating 'fake outputs' but have said they would change to opreturn if not for the limit (particularly some payment channel thing). Finally, use of hashes for commitments is now well understood and there are over 2 commitments per second flowing into open-timestamps which can aggregate an unlimited number of commitments into a single transaction.
The limit also causes some harm to all users of Bitcoin, particularly since multiple significant miners ignore it. When you don't already know a transaction (because it never reached you or you discarded it) it takes *much* longer to relay a block to you (at least 3x the delay if you knew everything but potentially much more depending on how much data you are missing), this harms small miners at the expense of big miners increasing a centralization pressure on mining (because when miners aren't on the same chaintip, one one bigger miners are on will tend to win). It also contributes to mining centralization by encouraging direct transaction submission since no one will bother submitting to a 1% miner, allowing the bigger miners to make more money. An inaccurate mempool also harms users ability to accurately estimate what transactions are pending for the next block so that they can optimally bid against them.
So it was proposed that the limit be removed. There are two proposals, one that just removes the limit completely, which is the first and simpler proposal. Then there is another proposal which makes the default unlimited but retains the ability to adjust it. At this time neither of the proposals have been merged, descriptions of this as having been done are just untruthful.
Arguments against it don't seem to hold up.
The first category of opposition is basically just accusing Bitcoin Core devs of being in favor of shitcoins or monkey jpegs, having talked to many I am confident that few or even none of them like that stuff (no one I've talked to was in favor of it). But no matter how much they don't like that stuff, that doesn't change that this proposal should have no significant effect on it-- it's unrelated. That stuff doesn't use opreturn today and would cost more in transaction fees if it did.
The next category of opposition is just general opposition to 'spam'-- again this proposal is largely unrelated because spammers won't use this, and to whatever extent they do it'll be good news (either moving from utxo bloating fake outputs or increasing their costs). It's an incidious argument because most contributors to Bitcoin core believe there isn't much meaningfully more that can be done about spam: Miners have bypassed the filters that were there, fees have excluded all price sensitive spam. Bitcoin was designed to be censorship resistant and depends on censorship resistance to work-- and a fact of free speech is that it means it allows both speech you like and speech you oppose. Arguments are made that blocking this traffic isn't morally equivalent to censorship. Perhaps! but it's still substantially *technically* equivalent. But, again, this is all a distraction in that the proposed change shouldn't meaningfully facilitate any new spam.
Ultimately the subject is deep in the minutia. It won't make a difference to your usage of Bitcoin. The only really concerning thing I see in the subject is the degree that people have successfully weaponized misinformation to direct a lot of entirely undeserved abuse at contributors to Bitcoin Core. ... who had only just started discussing a proposal when they were waylaid by a flood of disproportionate comments and falsehoods.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/s/elIDdPaQhL

2025-05-10 10:48:32

Three teenagers are accused of kidnapping a man who had hosted a cryptocurrency event in Las Vegas. They drove him out to the desert and forced him to transfer $4 million in cryptocurrency and NFTs at gunpoint.
https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/florida-teens-kidnap-las-vegas-man-drive-him-to-arizona-desert-steal-4m-in-cryptocurrency-police/

2025-05-09 20:38:34

https://image.nostr.build/1d07204abe445f802d9ca398066a4aa0a34febd0b4e370a2e275d6b972dd30d8.jpg

2025-05-07 03:17:36

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Consensus changes are a lot trickier.
I'd rather us find a dynamic block size solution.

2025-05-05 22:24:59

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You're assuming the operator is paying attention, which is a stretch. I'm not aware of any automated CPFP for that case.
It is an edge case, but the point is to illustrate a reason why one would, in fact, want things they don't like in their mempool. The same could happen with any transaction you want to make, resulting in a worse user experience when transactions don't get confirmed.

2025-05-05 22:18:44

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I've never put an image on the blockchain.
I've never even created an OP_RETURN.
Never saw a need.

2025-05-05 15:05:13

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No sir, this is a post about Lightning game theory, which should take into account how others are using Bitcoin.

2025-05-05 14:32:56

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In foresight, it was obvious.

2025-05-05 14:21:55

"Keep your spam out of my mempool!"
Are you running a lightning node? What if a channel counterparty tries to defraud you by publishing an old channel state? In that case you need accurate fee estimation.
Your justice transaction will have to beat the dickbutts in miners' mempools. In order to beat dickbutts, your full node needs to know about dickbutts and what they're bidding. If you're ignorant of dickbutts you'll get fucked by dickbutts.

2025-05-04 14:47:52

Wanted to pull the trigger and buy a 49" ultra widescreen monitor for under $1,000 but thankfully I checked the capability of my laptop graphics card first and realized it can't push that many pixels 🫠

2025-05-04 00:24:40

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Sure, as long as you don't actually need data availability guarantees.

2025-05-03 23:53:13

gmax always eschewed twitter due to character limits but nostr has none...
#nevent1q…nrms

2025-05-03 18:20:54

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For sure, I only eat jerky I make myself now. So much more delicious too.

2025-05-03 18:19:52

🎵No time for nuanced discussion🎵
🎵Must protect Bitcoin from destruction🎵
#nevent1q…3fct

2025-05-03 15:54:34

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Yeah but what about a WHEELBARROW OF DEGREES

2025-05-02 21:36:37

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Because it's a discrepancy between relay policy and consensus.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5539943.msg65335891#msg65335891

2025-05-02 13:27:42

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Yeah part of the problem is that there's currently negligible demand for block space.

2025-05-02 13:15:10

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Meh. What is non-monetary data? I mean from an information theory perspective.
Sure, some data blobs that can be decoded into TXT or JPEG are obvious.
But if you see a blob of data and have no clue how to interpret it, how can you claim that it's non-monetary? It could be an anchor for a monetary second layer.

2025-05-02 13:07:14

If you think about it, it's rather amusing that we've been arguing for over a decade about how to censor the usage of a censorship resistant network.

2025-05-02 00:56:54

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Congrats! You deserve it.

2025-05-02 00:48:05

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This is probably the best take I've heard all week.

2025-05-01 20:52:22

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A moderator most likely!

2025-05-01 18:33:59

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Do you have an actual argument?
I only mined grin for a few hours at launch so I could play around with it.

2025-05-01 18:03:07

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You have the freedom to run other clients like Knots.

2025-05-01 17:57:18

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You sound confused. I'm not a Bitcoin Core moderator.

2025-05-01 17:55:29

Excellent long-form post by Antoine.
https://antoinep.com/posts/relay_policy_drama/

2025-04-29 22:48:33

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This is the note I published yesterday to you regarding moderation: #nevent1q…ufld

2025-04-29 12:27:17

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I'm not.
No one has been able to demonstrate that arbitrary data in OP_RETURNs is more harmful than arbitrary data in witnesses.

2025-04-29 01:40:40

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A conflict of interest implies that changing the OP_RETURN policy would somehow make my Citea investment worth more.
I'd love for someone to explain how that would happen. Citrea's bridge will function regardless of how they anchor the data in the blockchain.

2025-04-29 01:36:34

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How is my investment in Citrea going to go up if the pull request is merged? I'd love to know that, because I've yet to hear anyone explain it.
Citrea's bridge will function regardless of what the OP_RETURN policy is. The only issue at play is which methods of data anchoring we wish to incentivize.
I have no input upon Bitcoin Core moderation.

2025-04-29 00:38:51

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Rule #2: "Comments will be about ideas, not people."
https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/blob/main/MODERATION-GUIDELINES.md

2025-04-29 00:37:47

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Your final paragraph sheds light on the misunderstanding. I'm not claiming anyone is slandering me nor am I silencing anyone; my investments are publicly disclosed at https://lopp.vc
The moderation on Bitcoin Core pull requests is their WRITTEN POLICY, not mine.
Rule #2: "Comments will be about ideas, not people." https://github.com/bitcoin-core/meta/blob/main/MODERATION-GUIDELINES.md

2025-04-28 23:36:18

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You new here?
Cries of censorship on Bitcoin Core pull requests seem to happen every few years at minimum.

2025-04-28 23:35:13

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Because we have clients who pay us to help them self custody tokens issued on that network. Stablecoins are by far the biggest driver of demand. Is that a simple enough explanation?

2025-04-28 23:00:34

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The simple version is that it's pretty similar to the RBF debate. And look how that turned out.

2025-04-28 19:25:39

Tip of the hat to @nprofile…8czy for ensuring Bitcoin isn't boring this week.

2025-04-26 17:47:58

https://image.nostr.build/9518be8504164da4d4330d2e76d9f4c00c385bad2efddeb744810f48e029ae1b.jpg

2025-04-26 15:22:02

10 / 10 trolling, no notes.
https://media-hosting.imagekit.io/76fa4537bcfc45dd/iw9_m8hbX03nWt7q.mp4?Expires=1840288586&Key-Pair-Id=K2ZIVPTIP2VGHC&Signature=gTcld1ry~55LEUh6TndcjQU0VoXdyfQ6xpiXgwpoEMwGKyuWEZ7EgkBogAInbGzJlHb0ZHT~KyuASFgiVWa002Gt4AKZF~XsnZxEl5JviocSLXUFThUYli-QpibDJz4nD1dTGn6hZw~xXQKoHhYxbRghyACsOoXo~B1MkoC17DVwXXxaj0FCCxW9Diye~52hKAu37OqQz24stAa5HGUj8tcDXs~e~NwT85TqY7GzSQA905CMhz-i~ULx35yWjLYYfMwcbvNznt4MghbUSSl8ltmaKlL2TA1BTdJ7x5ATL2XYTEgq9lyYMzLJRMWq5FuhiTnVEgGh8AGLIS7qJxwjqw__

2025-04-25 16:04:41

When your censorship scheme is just a regex.
https://image.nostr.build/689d18c396a4e01cafcfb283d899e451c3bd6ca4f87444db40027c98a8e13dc1.jpg

2025-04-24 23:55:30

Worms WMD is on sale for $3 on Switch 😊
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/worms-w-m-d-switch/

2025-04-23 16:35:11

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As long as I can play snake on it...

2025-04-23 13:27:14

Sometimes I figure it's fine to fly economy class for a short flight because I don't need the leg room. Then I'm reminded that business class is insurance against a morbidly obese passenger spilling out of their seat into my personal space. 😑

2025-04-23 13:26:46

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Sauna!

2025-04-23 12:50:39

I need a phone that can operate at 200F for 30 minutes without overheating.

2025-04-23 11:36:18

Just did an 8 rep set of leg press at 500 pounds so I got that going for me.

2025-04-23 11:35:13

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Yeah I get emails and DMs with this level of insanity on a regular basis. Never a full blown BIP, though...

2025-04-23 10:41:43

Somebody just submitted an insane BIP pull request to my fork of Bitcoin Core 🤪
https://github.com/jlopp/statoshi/issues/63

2025-04-21 13:46:09

An untapped market. https://image.nostr.build/d3d8750e0c691aba77d009d89967dbf9289d51a07940179d9b2931e5234da5c1.jpg

2025-04-21 13:22:45

Today is a good day to watch Conclave.

2025-04-20 11:54:50

https://i.ibb.co/PZt4V3MJ/rickscience.png

2025-04-19 19:44:52

https://image.nostr.build/14664116dd12bffc7b410687f84aef835a772033bb4f456a318b038f7ede9395.jpg

2025-04-19 10:11:54

$5,000,000 😬
#nevent1q…pjuv

2025-04-18 23:09:56

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Coinbase "contentcoins"

2025-04-18 23:03:14

Just when it feels like the degens are finally exhausted, someone comes up with even more ridiculous shit.

2025-04-17 14:36:34

At OP_NEXT last weekend I presented the concept of Goldiblocks, which is a novel perspective upon the issue of Bitcoin's block size. I explain why all previous block size proposals were flawed and outline the more nuanced concerns that should be considered.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cPPKok5luk4&list=PLDoWOGC_LqgMVew7-eKPCUX9TuRF6xy7s&index=17&pp=iAQB

2025-04-17 14:34:38

Bring back virtual reality conferences!
#nevent1q…z8dl

2025-04-15 10:46:44

Blackstone's Ratio: it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
#nevent1q…xhea

2025-04-13 13:03:49

Walking around Microstrategy HQ during OP_NEXT
https://image.nostr.build/beee0b55e9983efa4844e0abcd12b166d5dae15a1492c6232472c76e973c9e2d.jpg

2025-04-12 17:09:32

Wen Fort Knox audit?

2025-04-09 18:15:27

I'm getting tired of all this "winning."

2025-04-08 10:57:02

Nature is healing.
Fartcoin has flipped BSV.
https://image.nostr.build/7ffcbc2061f2f7feadf8430abf49861886db2f1a7e1b93406b1fee10161dcc16.jpg

2025-04-07 22:21:47

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I'm not necessarily worried about AGI, but I'm certainly worried about runaway exponential change to which humans may not be able to adapt quickly enough for us to survive.

2025-04-07 19:29:16

Absolutely horrifying and yet entirely believable AIpocalypse porn: https://ai-2027.com/

2025-04-06 19:13:22

https://image.nostr.build/bf70f22a5a182b2813a6f305dd85a3e6500ca6f91b6eed554d19c20e7f6a94ce.jpg

2025-04-06 15:37:52

The good times were when the government didn't care at all about Bitcoin.
The bad times were when agencies wanted to crack down on crypto companies.
But it's entirely possible that government "support" ends up being worse.
There are few scarier phrases than "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

2025-04-06 14:11:23

My latest research that I presented yesterday at the MIT Bitcoin Expo, delves into a relatively new type of attack we're seeing on the blockchain.
https://blog.lopp.net/bitcoin-address-poisoning-attacks/

2025-04-05 18:13:33

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I'm not against free tampons, but condoms would be more useful.

2025-04-05 18:12:21

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It's not a joke, I'm not that creative.

2025-04-05 17:26:51

Thought it was pretty cool that the men's restrooms at MIT have machines to dispense free condoms.
Then I looked closer and realized they're dispensing tampons.

2025-04-05 15:07:21

An open question in my mind: if Bitcoin reaches mass adoption and the overwhelming majority of participants are statist cucks using regulatory compliant services, can the ecosystem retain censorship resistance?
https://image.nostr.build/6f7e5c8c8fba1762d080145c53edfd6970b8b142de54398b044f1a2abc625241.jpg

2025-04-05 02:43:52

I like to think I'm well traveled but I must admit, the folks across the hall at my hotel in Cambridge just made me do a double take.
https://image.nostr.build/1c26e4142c0d5388df95c9627f69d5804c4c893173e864d77d0c372e8fe0076f.jpg

2025-04-04 19:09:16

Congratulations @nprofile…rm9g!
https://image.nostr.build/c6fa8c9a7c0d0f39e1bf885283f88d1eff2bedaf0c85ee3f4ca6689ceaef96a6.jpg

2025-04-04 12:28:35

Well at least someone is doing well from memecoins 🙃
https://image.nostr.build/49acb3e8a64f48fd16e51ad4d2166cd98ffde5a8413dd0535df3a969dc6ceb76.jpg

2025-04-03 20:17:27

https://image.nostr.build/19465d816830ce68e015d6486666c31734d2210b0ebcf52907649a02c46cb2e5.jpg

2025-04-03 01:43:46

Trashed my HPs years ago and only own these now.
#nevent1q…raew

2025-04-01 20:33:59

AI is certainly going to displace some jobs, but from where we stand right now it's only going to impact lower skilled jobs for the forseeable future.
Whenever I try to use AI to help me write code or do research, it's really good at doing basic stuff that has likely been done by many humans in the past. But whenever I try to do something novel, I run into a brick wall.
This seems sensible to me, as once you veer outside the scope of an AI's set of training data, it won't be able to "predict" what the answer to a query should be.

2025-04-01 01:57:00

Chun in space!
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=fram2

2025-03-31 11:51:24

Exodus wallet is removing Lightning support tomorrow.
Not a great data point 😞
https://www.exodus.com/support/en/articles/8598830-lightning-in-exodus

2025-03-30 14:45:35

T minus 35 hours until Wang Chun, founder of F2Pool, becomes the first Bitcoiner to reach escape velocity.
He'll be on the first mission in history that orbits around the poles.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=fram2

2025-03-29 16:53:39

It seems appropriate that NYC has a monument to their sky rats.
https://image.nostr.build/e742c3fefe7bf7b6cdea767b24a74cd88418ebb2083b7e71045c5fd92b302745.jpg

2025-03-29 01:29:03

xAI acquires X
https://image.nostr.build/46562995b0df8b9e09cf6620ab9565e35390c5f1b500c2c631c73027efb578ac.jpg

2025-03-28 19:52:26

Last December a software engineer in Chengdu, China was lured to a hotel with the promise of sex and ended up being robbed by a gang for 6 BTC.
https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-honeytrap-bts-hybe-nft-asia-express/

2025-03-27 21:23:55

Is there an API anywhere that you can query for a specific bitcoin address to receive the maximum balance it has ever held?
I'd rather not have to calculate it by pulling potentially thousands of transactions per address.

2025-03-27 17:31:40

What if "God" is just what people call the computer that runs the simulation we perceive as reality?

2025-03-26 14:07:21

Narrator: they were not clean.
https://image.nostr.build/2b51e8749c40f4d8a6a1166a125dfae6d7e68e62163a16b9e267b65f3c2bbd96.jpg

2025-03-26 13:28:43

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Sounds like he was dumb enough to harass a judge.

2025-03-26 13:15:01

Guess who's back?
Back in jail.
Bitboy's back.
What a fail!
https://image.nostr.build/43ef9d73cb0e011d5f93256a6fe0f28ed7a8708ccd1c15aab2f5855002ec0d65.jpg

2025-03-25 19:50:17

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That's why I tried it out in the first place, after I heard about the bug. My phone is always up to date.

2025-03-25 18:39:29

Spent several weeks running GrapheneOS with the battery optimization setting enabled. This setting is supposed to cap charging at 80% to increase battery longevity.
For whatever reason, enabling this setting really killed my battery life because many times after plugging in to charge overnight, it wouldn't even charge to 80% and I risked having the phone run out of juice before the end of the day.

2025-03-25 13:44:37

This looks promising, my only complaint is it's wired. Might buy my first new headset in 7 years...
https://store.bigscreenvr.com/products/bigscreen-beyond-2

2025-03-24 23:32:12

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I'm not sure they legally can.
I bet in many cases archival of comms is required for transparency.

2025-03-24 23:31:01

Impudence rides sidesaddle with anonymity.

2025-03-24 18:40:14

I use the responses to my anti-authoritarian posts on X to determine how many new firearms I should buy.

2025-03-23 17:25:14

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FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION

2025-03-23 14:34:10

If I ever meet the sales guy who told me their platform would enable me to reach SOC2 compliance in 2 to 3 weeks I'm gonna slap him.

2025-03-22 18:59:35

DOGE posts be like
https://image.nostr.build/2ce69634233ded113517aa9ce969d71343554c7dc2c89294ee9dae8a69194b89.jpg

2025-03-21 16:52:57

Pump Fun has launched 8.7 million tokens over the past year, generating a cumulative revenue of more than $600 million. Only 4 of them have managed to maintain a market capitalization above $100 million.
Their greatest success? Fartcoin.

2025-03-21 11:22:32

Finally fixing the @nprofile…u74w problem!
#nevent1q…rct5

2025-03-20 19:00:30

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Buy a huge jug with hour-of-day markings on it.