Federico Rivi on Nostr: BIP 110 wants to block spam on Bitcoin. Too bad the spam has already disappeared on ...

BIP 110 wants to block spam on Bitcoin. Too bad the spam has already disappeared on its own.

The blockchain is half-empty. Fees at multi-year lows. Bitcoin Mechanic, a developer at Ocean and the main supporter of the proposal, himself defines the network a "ghost town." Then he asks to modify the consensus rules on an emergency basis.

The proposal would activate with 55% of the miners, or via UASF with no miners at all, with 6-7% of the reachable nodes signaling it. For comparison: SegWit required 95% signaling. Taproot 90%.

Mechanic insists on the expiration: twelve months, then everything goes back to how it was before. But the text of the proposal admits that after activation we will in any case return to the traditional filters, because the consensus rules are not the right tool to fight spam. He himself acknowledges this in the What Bitcoin Did interview of May 26.

What remains when the soft-fork expires? The precedent. The memory that, faced with a situation perceived as an emergency by a niche, it is legitimate to modify the consensus rules to prevent a minority from doing things we do not like.

The game theory that Mechanic uses as the activation engine is the "whoever blinks first loses" one: the miners who do not apply the new rules work for free, so they adapt. It is a correct line of reasoning. But it demonstrates that a determined minority can modify Bitcoin's rules by leveraging the economic rationality of the miners, not the broad consensus. Anyone, tomorrow, can use the same playbook. To block the inscriptions, but also to freeze UTXOs that have ended up under OFAC sanctions, or to extend the emission schedule beyond the 21 million.

On the technical front: in February a developer published a complete image inside Bitcoin with a single transaction, circumventing all the filters that BIP 110 would like to write at the consensus level. Mechanic himself admits that after twelve months the inscribers will find other routes.

You pay the price of the precedent in full. The problem you wanted to solve remains intact.
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