I generally agree with your analysis, but I consider myself in camp 1. The reason I come to a different conslusion than you WRT what is next, is because there are two assumptions hidden in your analysis:
That everybody in camp 1 sees BIP-110 failing as proof that Bitcoin has failed (or at least that it is not recoverable). This particular assumption is the main one I do not agree with. I think there is still plenty of battleground left to fight on.
That creating a new coin (yes, even if it is “the true Bitcoin”) will be strong enough to compete in the broader “crypto” space and become the king. I think there are other coins in this space that are not scams and are honestly fighting for similar goals (like Monero) which (even if their technology isn’t quite as good as Bitcoin’s) have first mover advantage and network effects of their own that will be very difficult for a new startup network to beat. Thus, even if assumption 1 is true and the original Bitcoin ultimately collapses, there is no guarantee that those who remained on the legacy coin to fight after BIP-110 will adopt this new coin and not another one that is better established.
I personally don’t see there being any battleground left to fight on if BIP110 fails but that is a personal opinion. I believe that if BIP110 fails, it will have failed because it came too late and Bitcoin was already too far gone. This means that it will continue to devolve, welcome bad actors and just get harder to bring back to what it’s supposed to be. Same as what happens with societies throughout history.
The monero take is interesting. I never thought of camp 1 bitcoiners jumping ship to a different coin such as monero but it’s possible. I haven’t done enough research on monero to know the pros and cons so I won’t say much about that.
Monero was just an example (I haven’t dug very deeply into it myself either). I just meant that there are coins (albeit very few) which are not scams, which were created in good faith, and which have built strong followings and network effects of their own.
My main considerations are that at 72 I dont have another 10 years for a BIP 110 derived hard fork to play out. We already have a very difficult time in on and off ramping for FIAT as it is. How many outlets will a new coin be able to use given that it wont be called bitcoin anymore? Also the grass roots efforts that I and many others put in to onboard new Bitcoiners will all have been wasted as many of those will just not come back. If BIP 110 fails we all have to consider pragmatically which is the best path forward. Also a new coin will be building on a very small hash compared with the legacy chain and therefore block discovery will require a very low difficulty adjustment to facilitate mining and that begs the question how many miners will support a new hard fork not called bitcoin?
There are coins that exist on exchanges and with miner support that have FAR LESS support than a BIP110 chain would have from the get go so while I understand what you’re saying, I don’t think the BIP110 chain would be starting from scratch or even close to the bottom compared to other existing coins. In other words, getting exchanges to list it and hardware to support mining it shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking about what Matt Krater said in his last video. He quoted something along the lines of [bip110ers leaving the Bitcoin network is exactly what the enemy wants]. I think that makes sense to me. Assuming everything we believe about corruption and capture within Bitcoin is true, we can still fight from within. We can be a major thorn in the side of the corrupt. I watched an interview with the owner of Sazmining and he was talking about trying convince bitcoiners that mining bitcoin is the best way to acquire BTC instead of from exchanges. Im assuming most, if not all of bip110ers DCA Bitcoin, or at least used to. What if our next push is on the mining front? Instead of DCAing Bitcoin from exchanges we DCA by decentralized mining?
Please poke holes in my thoughts.
also can we do a bip110 summit or something. In person or over Zoom? Is that crazy?
That doesn’t sound crazy to me. There’s an immense amount of sweat poured into the current project. I still think continuing the fight by offering alternative implementations and, as you mentioned, trying to take a bite out of the existing mining pool centralization is still a viable tact.
The only way I can contemplate any hard fork effort would be if the current network changed the consensus rules in a way that disabled anti-spam and/or decentralization efforts through the alternate implementations.
Yes, if Core-tards made changes to consensus rules making that nonsense mandatory, I would reconsider a hard fork. In the meantime I think creating implementations that essentially allow us avoid storing spam on local nodes while still allowing full archival of data at the transaction level that complies with local node policy might be a viable compromise. Let nodes that want to engage in garbage collection do just that while the rest of us store what is related to bitcoin as money.
bitcoin core will be smart enough not to make it too obvious that they are open to spam 100%. They know people are watching. It will be covert, obfuscated and subtle. I’m excited for the upcoming proof of work change coming from the bip110 people. I’ll put my weight behind it but wont sell my bitcoin, not straight away anyway.
I’m thinking that Core have already doomed themselves to failure. A state-run CSAM attack to poison blocks and make it illegal to run a node, is practically a certainty at this point. This will absolutely sink Core into irrelevance (having played their role, the state will have no problem discarding them). We need to be ready with an answer in the form of a new type of node which completely side-steps that attack vector.
This here is a nice video that explains the concept of zero knowledge proofs at different levels of technical detail. The idea would be to use this concept to build up information that could be used to prove a transaction valid without needing to reveal it (thus allowing true validation of the blockchain without needing to hold all of the pieces). I’ll probably borrow from the logic in “the cat” soft fork for identifying known patterns of spam, and those become the transactions which are not collected or transmitted by the new type of node, and verified through zero knowledge proof only.
Based on my understanding of what is in the draft, I think it will. The database will certainly contain all spendable utxo info, so the hooks for this should remain the same.
Monetary Node is a good start, but it still has to download the content initially from a normal full node to verify before hashing and deleting it (which in the scenario I am imagining, a government will track and use as evidence to prosecute node runners for downloading illegal content). My goal is a bit more ambitious (impossible? hopefully not) where the node never needs to access the contend to be able to verify it’s existence.
These would work as full nodes for wallets, lightning nodes, and indexers, you just couldn’t use it to send or receive transactions that contain inscriptions or large OP_RETURNs .