Hey Arthur, I disagree — Part 1
Earlier today I asked:
In what ways does BSV not conform to the white-paper?
Being that this was on twitter, your answers are limited in text.
That shouldn’t serve as a crutch for answers to be limited in thought.
You write very well. You are thoughtful in your essay construction, and clearly write a lot. I don’t.
Since it’s early on a Saturday morning, and I’m already annoyed at write a blog response to a friggin’ tweet… I will not be editing this brain dump anytime soon.
For anyone who missed the OG thread. Here is his response for posterity:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mylegacykit/status/1426537122828361731?s=21
Now that you’ve seen the impetus.
1. Arbitrary data in the blockchain.
I’m assuming that you mean there is no mention in the white-paper of the chains fundamental utility to store anything more than UTXO data.
Said another way:
Any data that is not required to validate a spend of satoshis, (and ONLY a spend of satoshis) is arbitrary & therefore deserves no deference from the network, the miners, and the nodes.
The conclusion must also be:
If all other data is arbitrary or erroneous, placing such an emphasis on Files, Smart Contracts, & other data structures is outside the bounds described in the white-paper.
I could only find 1 mention of data in the white-paper, in Section 3 about Timestamp Server.
Satoshi describes the timestamp sever as being responsible to create a hash of the data that exists. They are very careful not to call the data inside the blocks being hashed ‘transactions’.
They call it:
a hash of a block of items to be timestamped
This statement is not limiting in any way, what-so-ever to the type of data that can be included in the hash. Moreover, throughout the paper, Satoshi is careful to call transactions ‘transactions’ instead of calling them ‘data’.
It’s my personal opinion that Satoshi recognized the memo line was also hashed and had no bearing on the validity of a transaction.
Immutable, Chapter 7 ?
Block headers are just headers, they don’t grow exponentially the same way blocks can. They’re small no matter what size the block is.
Abstract Section 8 goes on to describe how to validate the the state of the network for simple payments (UTXOs and ONLY UTXOs) without any irrelevant block data.
With the Merkle Tree for the blocks in which the UTXO’s were last spent, the branch of the tree in which the transaction lives, and the headers of all the blocks you can validate the existence & authenticity of your (or anyone’s) “coins”.
The same process can be used to prove that arbitrary data was included in a particular block at the time the hash of block items were to be timestamped.
Transactions that don’t maintain Unspent Outputs (a.k.a. spent coins) can be expected to be pruned from the system as described in section 7.
If you want to be able to access your data on-chain, you “gotta throw a sat on it”.
Otherwise it’s like having a receipt with a coupon on it, but throwing the receipt in the trash. The coupon is your responsibility to hold, if you want to use it one day.
So again I ask in what way does BSV not conform to, as you put it: “Immutable, Chapter 7?”
No wait. Nakamoto Consensus
I don’t even know how to respond to this. I’m reading it as saying:
BSV does not conform to Nakamoto Consensus… but I’m having a trouble believing you’d make that claim.
Clarification would be great.
ANY NEEDED RULES —
Up-gradable Core Design v. Locked Protocol
The last line of Satoshi’s conclusion is incomplete with out the preceding line for context. The complete concept is read as:
They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
IMO a rule and a protocol are fairly similar except for the tiny distinction:
Rules must be followed but, can be broken without breaking a system.
A rule can be updated or changed.A Protocol must be followed otherwise the actions break the protocol.
Any breaking changes would constitute a differing version (x.y.z) of the protocol.
What is it specifically that leads you to believe Satoshi is commenting on the ability to change the how a transaction’s validity is calculated, and not as is the context here: The rules & incentives to participate in MINING?
Surely if they meant ANY rules in the protocol, Satoshi is then suggesting that an inflationary update to the protocol should be adopted by the same standard. As such, when the inflationary coin (supported by the miners that want more awards) reaches a block height with more proof of work, all other network participants MUST adopt the inflationary coin as the ‘honest chain’.
While UASF is a great response, it’s limited in the fact that it only happened once. Plus, that particular controversy had no perverse incentive to miners on the other side of an argument.
And most importantly….
UASF didn’t prevent the change to the network.
The witness was successfully segregated, and the result is BTC transactions are no longer legally valid as e-signed contracts.
Did UASF really work? Or was it more like….
