Conservatism has always been a core part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, in a literal rather than a political sense. Satoshi Nakamoto himself was very careful and thorough in his initial design attempts, and developers also tried to be very careful and thorough in their development processes after he left.
Many technologies originally developed for Bitcoin were eventually tested on other networks out of this caution. Are confidential transactions one of the core elements of Monero’s underlying technology? It was created for Bitcoin by Gregory Maxwell. It was not implemented due to inefficiencies in terms of data size and because it fundamentally changed the cryptographic assumptions.
All cryptography used in Bitcoin relies on the discrete logarithm assumption that factoring two sufficiently large prime numbers is impossible. If this assumption does not hold, then everyone’s private key can be cracked through the public key. Confidential transactions and how they work would allow someone to increase the money supply secretly, rather than just cracking someone else’s key, and no one would be able to know because it obscures the amount of the transaction from public view.
Similarly, the SNARK scheme used in Zcash to provide zero-knowledge proofs for Bitcoin was originally a proposal for Bitcoin Zerocoin. Out of conservatism and caution, this has also never been implemented on Bitcoin itself. The entire encryption scheme relies on a trusted third party to initialize it, and to remain secure requires users to trust them to delete the private key material used to initialize the system. This is considered an unacceptable trade-off for Bitcoin.
Even Taproot, which has been active for about three years, is a proposal that ultimately consists of two separate concepts dating back to 2012: MAST and Schnorr signatures. The idea of MAST is to take multiple possible spending scripts and convert them into a Merkle tree, so that only the paths used are shown on the chain. It took 9 years for these two ideas to go from idea to actual implementation.
Conservatism has always been at the core of the protocol and the way the network is developed.
recent proposals
I myself have been highly skeptical of any proposals put forward over the past few years since Taproot launched, preferring to be very conservative in what I choose to support. For example, for many years I have advocated the launch of BIP 119, CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY, precisely because it is very conservative and simple.That is because of its role no Enable.
Mechanically speaking, CTV cannot actually achieve anything that cannot be achieved using pre-signed transactions. The only difference between it and CTV is that one is enforced through consensus and the other is pre-signed through trust. People come to enforce it.
My main concern when considering the proposed changes is always Always identifying unintended or harmful consequences. My criticism of the drive chain is a perfect example. Drivechain is promoted as a scaling solution with no negative externalities to the rest of the network. I have argued for years, initially largely alone, that this statement is actually incorrect. I have described why I assert that this is untrue and what negative consequences it would have on the network if activated.
Most of my concerns about other recent Covenant proposals essentially boil down to one thing: implementing some changes in the drive chain. Drivechain or similar systems allow anyone to become a block producer and drive the state of the system forward. In practice, this means that miners effectively have a monopoly on participating in the process if they choose to carry it out. If such a system actually gains adoption and enables features that provide miners with a space to extract value fronting transactions, as is the case on other systems like Ethereum, then this is a financial incentive for them to exercise monopoly power.
This is the centralizing pressure of mining, and once such a system is enabled, there is no way to limit the functionality enabled by these other layers or blockchains, so they cannot be limited to a level of functionality that does not introduce these issues. In order to set up such a system, what you need is the ability to restrict the future flow of coins, known as contracts, and the ability to ensure that data is transferred from one transaction to another.
This allows you to create an open UTXO that anyone (i.e. a miner) can commit to facilitate withdrawals, and can be allowed to complete or be “cancelled” if invalidated. This combined with the ability for anyone to change and update the second layer status or user fund balance according to the system rules gives you a driven chain-like system. If you have a closed permissioned group of people who can process withdrawals (like a consortium), or a closed permissioned group of people who can update the state of the system (again like a consortium), then you don’t have a system like a drive chain. It doesn’t introduce the type of MEV risk and centralization pressure that I’m worried about, because for that to happen, both the peg and the status update would have to be an open system that anyone can participate in, and open to the de facto monopoly of miners through consensus.
For five years, this has been my measure of whether a proposal is too liberal. This is not to say that this is a hard line that should never be crossed, but rather that it should not be crossed without a sound plan for dealing with and mitigating potential centralizing pressures if they ever materialize. .
The worship of slow and steady
As someone who has been a conservative voice for five years, criticizing the proposal from a highly skeptical and paranoid perspective, rational skepticism and caution are essentially dead. Calling for caution and a slower pace is no longer rational analysis except for a small group or group of people drowning in a sea of noise.
There is a right to be fat and lazy and demand that everything be spoon fed. However, as soon as the spoon came close to the mouth, it was swatted away. “How dare you try to feed me!” Prior to the current Covenant debate, the last time there was an actual argument over a proposal was the block size war. People actually engaged with the issues involved at the time, people made the effort to learn and inquire in an open way. Yes, there are some lunatics and dogmatic lunatics out there who are unwilling to have an honest discussion.
That wasn’t most people back then. Even a large percentage of big blockers don’t just scream dogmatically when challenged, they run numbers. They will discuss reasonable bounds on block sizes and the externalities or costs this would impose on users. On our side, the winning side, a lot of people are in it precisely because of these types of discussions and logical arguments.
I support the first proposal to increase the block size – Bitcoin XT. Thanks to logical questioning and discussion, I changed my mind.I have considered What might actually go wrong, and then investigate how serious these consequences might be. I took the time to better understand things I didn’t understand at the time. This doesn’t happen anymore.
People subconsciously throw out the “unknown unknown” as a rebuttal to any proposed change. This is not a valid or intellectually honest response to anything. Everything has unknown unknowns. There are unknown unknowns in doing nothing, there are unknown unknowns in making a conservative change, and there are unknown unknowns in doing everything at the same time. That’s the whole nature of logical categories of things, you don’t know what you don’t know.
This is a ridiculous and unacceptable argument that can be pulled out ad infinitum and never be satisfied. This is not an actual conversation attempt, but a denial of service attack against the conversation.
We know some known unknowns, aspects or consequences of change, but we are not sure how they will play out. This is a rational line of inquiry when discussing change. Some aspects or possibilities where the outcome is uncertain can be identified and these can be discussed. This is not only a rational inquiry, but one that I think is absolutely critical and necessary when discussing changes in Bitcoin.
Just going “unknown unknown!” Responding to every suggestion, every discussion of merits, every analysis of shortcomings in order to come up with a balanced view of things is not a rational response. This is not goodwill.Due to the inherent nature of unknown unknowns, this is an impossible problem to solve in either direction. Changing and not changing Bitcoin brings the same unknown risks that are inherent in its nature.
There is a profound lack of self-awareness about this on an intellectual level, and in public discussions large numbers of people exhibit emotionally driven strong reactions to this lack of self-awareness.
denial of service attack
It’s bad enough to engage privately without curiosity when faced with new information, or in the case of Bitcoin-specific proposals, it’s even worse to bring this lack of curiosity into public discourse. This constant chanting of “the unknown unknown” and “the default is not to change”, and all other rigid slogans that go further than this, are not dialogue. This is a denial of service.
Other than engaging in a bar setting where it’s impossible to meet, and disrupting any other discussion or conversation that is trying to clarify or expand everyone’s understanding of trade-offs or features, and then continuing to do so over and over again, that’s not engaging in good faith. This is not an attempt to assess whether change is safe, nor an attempt to gauge the likelihood or level of risk of unintended consequences, this is simply an impulsive attempt to prevent any and all change for the sake of change.
This is unreasonable. Frankly, this is irrational.
It’s like having a veto on anything, and yes, vetoes are important in consensus systems. But disrupting the conversation is not a veto; it is the economic actors in the actual transaction deciding which software to run or not run. This denial of dialogue service is not a noble or righteous crusade to save Bitcoin, but an active attack on those economic actors and their ability to better understand whether to veto something or not to make an informed decision.
This is malicious, this is malicious.
Personally I think it’s out of fear. Worry that given the ability to understand themselves, the economic majority would make different choices than individuals engaging in conversations like this. I can’t really see any charitable explanation for this other than downright stupidity.
The environment in which these conversations take place is no longer benevolent, not because people are actually proposing changes, but because people are always burying their heads in the sand and constantly launching denial-of-service attacks on the conversations themselves. People refuse to truly admit what they don’t know.This is a known unknown If you are honest with yourself. Things you don’t understand, or things you don’t understand. However, some people care so much about the unknown unknowns that they refuse to fill in the gaps of their known unknowns.
They refuse to really learn more about things they don’t know much about. That’s one thing if it’s just one person’s quiet choice, but it’s another thing entirely when these people choose to actively engage in the larger conversation and try to mislead or drive others away from doing it for themselves. It’s the same thing.
In a way, it’s a bit ironic that this is happening at the same time as Ordinal, where people claim we need to “filter spam.” Maybe we should. Not on the blockchain, because that’s impossible without the incentives of the system being fundamentally broken, but in the conversation around that blockchain.
This is no longer a good-natured conversation, not because the jpeg folks are imitating cats, but because the “other side” is essentially attacking everyone else with a denial of service, preventing them from even discussing whether we like cats (or dogs) at all.
