Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

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Wow. That is a take my breath away level of untruthfulness.

> in in support of "BRC-20" tokens, which is Bitcoin's feature reduced version of Ethereum's ERC-20 token

It appears that BRC-20 is primarily affiliated with Calvin Ayre, the person backing "Bitcoin SV" and the conman pretending to be the creator of Bitcoin -- the three main entities connected to it are all funded by Ayre and they've been bragging pretty loudly about their disruption of Bitcoin ( https://nitter.it/B2029org/status/1655611301412982784 ). I've heard speculation that the attacks are either a marketing pitch for "Bitcoin SV" (e.g. create congestion on Bitcoin then pivot to the unauditable centralized BSV blockchain, which always has room cause it's easy to scale centralized systems) or an effort to get Bitcoin community members to propose protocol changes to block the flood in order to substantiate the allegations in either of the Ayre-affiliated 6 billion dollar or hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars lawsuits.

I'm not aware of any previous active Bitcoin developer that had anything to do with BRC-20 tokens, if you know of any I'm sure the bitcoin community would be very interested in learning of it.

> changes recently that allow much larger transactions,

Unless you are referring to increasing the capacity of blocks back in 2017, no change to the consensus rules that allowed larger transactions has happened. You can easily verify this for yourself by starting up an older copy of Bitcoin and observe that it accepts everything fine.

In any case, this "BRC-20" crap is mostly only embedding 89 bytes of data ( https://twitter.com/jratcliff/status/1655669410206457865#m )-- it doesn't need any larger transactions. It happens to stuff it into the most recent transaction type, but there is no reason that it couldn't put 89 bytes of data into pretty much any other kind of transaction.

I think the false claim that BRC-20 was made possible by recent changes is mixture of confusion and an intentional deceptive cooperation cracking move, intended to direct even more harassment at project contributors but it's just not true.

Nothing I said was untruthful.

The Taproot upgrade made the witness data discount from Segwit available to be used by inscriptions. This is what led to the explosion in BRC-20 transactions that are clogging up the mempool. According to this research, it's all coming from a single entity.

> Nothing I said was untruthful.

Not so, the very first sentence of your post was a flagrant untruth.

> Bitcoin's developers made changes recently that allow much larger transactions, with blocks up to 4MB in size on the Bitcoin blockchain in support of "BRC-20" tokens,

Okay, go ahead link to this "recent change" in support of "BRC-20" tokens. -- gonna be pretty hard in light of the fact that BRC-20 activity appears to be primarily (perhaps exclusively) by parties connected to the multiple billion dollars in lawsuits against bitcoin developers, and the fact that old versions of bitcoin are just as happy with the same transactions and the limits on transaction size are the same at least since 2017 or earlier.

> what led to the explosion in BRC-20 transactions

The BRC-20 transactions are just embedding 89 bytes of data (see link). They're a spam attack of a sort which has always been possible and is nearly impossible to block, I'm not aware of any basis under which you can argue anything "led to" it other than an attacker being willing to spend millions of dollars a day to DOS attack the the network.

Segwit expanded the blocksize by allowing extra space for digital signatures at a discounted price. Taproot allowed BRC-20 to take advantage of this discounted data, which immediately led to the backlog. Whether that was the intent of the developers or not is not the point of my comment. The statement is factual.

You are arguing about intent and who is to blame for the backlog. My comment has nothing to do with this other than pointing out that the OP shows it is coming from a single entity.

If you assume “good intentions”, BRC-20 is stupid and makes no sense. It’s a reduced feature set ERC-20 token with far less throughput capacity that causes harm to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

I agree this could be an adversary with an incentive to take market share away, it could be someone speculating that a token on Bitcoin could be an opportunity for profit, or likely both.

Yes, in 2017 bitcoin block limit was replaced with a larger weight limit, but "discounted price" is nonsense: fees aren't priced by the protocol. Each block has a limit of 4 million, each transaction uses some amount of the limit and offers some fee. Income maximizing behavior by miners is to fill the block up with as much fees as they can fit within the limit which (if you ignore transaction dependencies and end packing) is accomplished by dividing fees by capacity usage and sorting. Taproot didn't change anything with respect to that, which you can easily verify for yourself by grabbing a copy of Bitcoin from (say) 2019 and observing that it accepts the same transactions. I'm quite confused as to why anyone is bringing up taproot other than that it was the most recent consensus change, but it didn't and couldn't have added any means to add more data because it strictly reduced the set of blocks considered valid (and didn't use the segwit technique of adding a new field to transactions to escape the prior limits). I could offer some cynical guesses, but I doubt they'd advance the discussion.

I'd happily agree these things are not particularly relevant, but you brought them up and stated them falsely.

The rest of your posts continues with the false claims "These same developers block attempts to increase the block size in Bitcoin" -- yet your own post admits blocks can now be 4MB, it was increased. Of course, absolutely zero evidence for your 'block attempts to increase' when your own post contradicts it! lol

> You are arguing about intent

Quite the opposite: "Unless you are referring to increasing the capacity of blocks back in 2017, no change to the consensus rules that allowed larger transactions has happened. You can easily verify this for yourself by starting up an older copy of Bitcoin and observe that it accepts everything fine."

The offense at 'in support of "BRC-20" tokens' isn't even a question of intent, it's a casual impossibility. Bitcoin's capacity increase was in 2017. Taproot (which isn't relevant, but lets ignore that) was designed in 2019-- these things couldn't have been done in support of BRC-20 which is a few months old. Nor would they have needed to, since the BRC-20 data is 89 bytes, people had no problem embedding files tens of kilobytes in size secretly in transactions many years ago.

> I agree this could be an adversary with an incentive to take market share away

I don't see how that's actually disputable. We already know who's funding it, it's funded by Calvin Ayre as the people engaging in it have openly disclosed. ...Unless you want to dispute that Ayre is an adversary! :D Exactly why is a total guessing game, I doubt there is only a single reason.

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