Denial of service attack on Bitcoin consensus

Conservatism, not in a political sense, but in the literal sense, has always been a core part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Satoshi himself was very careful and thorough in his attempts at original design, and the subsequent developers were very careful and thorough in the development process after his departure.

Numerous technologies were originally developed for Bitcoin and eventually tested on other networks with this care. Confidential transactions, one of Monero’s core technologies? Created by Gregory Maxwell for Bitcoin. It was never implemented because of its large inefficiency in terms of data size and because it fundamentally changed the encryption assumptions.

All cryptography used in Bitcoin relies on the discrete logarithm assumption. That is, it is impossible to factor two sufficiently large prime numbers. If this assumption is broken, anyone’s private key can be decrypted from the public key. Confidential transactions and how they work allow someone to secretly inflate the money supply by decrypting someone else’s key, and no one will know because the transaction amount is not publicly visible.

Likewise, the SNARK scheme used by Zcash to provide zero-knowledge proofs for Bitcoin was originally a proposal for Bitcoin, Zerocoin. This too was not implemented in Bitcoin itself due to conservatism and caution. The entire encryption scheme relied on a trusted third party to initialize it, and to keep it secure, users had to trust it to delete the private key material used to initialize the system. This was considered an unacceptable compromise for Bitcoin.

Taproot, which has been around for about three years now, is also an offering that was ultimately created from two separate concepts dating back to early 2012. MAST and Schnorr signature. The idea of ​​MAST is to transform multiple possible spending scripts into a Merkle tree so that only the paths used are revealed on-chain. It took 9 years for these two ideas to go from idea to reality.

Conservatism has always been at the core of how this protocol and network was developed.

Recent Offers

I myself have been very skeptical of all the proposals floating around over the past few years since Taproot’s activation and prefer to be very conservative in what I choose to support. For example, I have been arguing for years how conservative and simple the activation of BIP 119, CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY, is. That is, because of what it does. ~ no make it possible

Mechanically, CTV can’t actually enable anything that isn’t already possible using pre-signed transactions. The only difference between CTV and CTV is that one is enforced by agreement and the other is enforced by trusting the people who pre-signed that transaction.

The main thing I focus on when reviewing proposed changes is: always Unintended or harmful consequences have been identified. My critique of drivechains is a perfect example of this. Drivechain was introduced as a scaling solution with no negative externalities on the rest of the network. I have argued for years, initially essentially alone, that that statement is not true. I explained why I claim that’s not true and what negative consequences it would have on the network if it were to become active.

Most of my interest in other recent covenant proposals essentially boils down to one thing: enabling transformation of the drive chain. DriveChain or similar systems allow anyone to become a block producer, advancing the state of the system. In practice, this means that miners effectively have a monopoly on participating in that process if they choose to run it. If such a system actually gains adoption and enables the ability to give miners a space to extract the value of upfront transactions, as in other systems such as Ethereum, then this becomes an economic incentive for them to exercise a monopoly.

This is a centralizing pressure on mining, and once these systems are enabled, there is no way to limit the functionality that other layers or blockchains enable, so there is no way to limit their functionality to a level that does not cause these problems. What is needed to build such a system is the ability to limit where coins can go in the future (e.g. contracts) and the ability to ensure that data passes from one transaction to another.

This allows anyone (read miners) to facilitate withdrawals, creating public UTXOs that can be completed or “cancelled” if invalid. This, combined with the ability to have a second layer state or user funds balance that can be changed and updated by anyone according to the rules of the system, provides a drivechain like system. If you have a closed permission set that can process withdrawals like a federation, or a closed permission set that can update system state like a federation, then there is no drive chain like system. This does not introduce the type of MEV risks and centralization pressures that I am concerned about. For both pegs and state updates to occur, it must be an open system in which anyone can participate, and by consensus it is effectively open to miners to monopolize.

This was my criterion for whether a proposal was too progressive in terms of enabling it to last more than five years. This is not to say that this is a hard line that should never be crossed, but it is a line that should not be crossed without a reasonable plan for how to deal with and mitigate potential centralizing pressures if they actually arise. .

slow and steady worship

As someone who has been a conservative voice for five years and criticizes the proposal from a very skeptical and paranoid perspective, reasonable skepticism and caution have essentially disappeared. Rational analysis that calls for caution and slow pace no longer exists, except for a few people or groups caught up in a sea of ​​noise.

There is a fat, lazy right to have everything spoon-fed to you. But the moment the spoon approaches your mouth, you get slapped. “How dare you try to feed me!” Before the current covenant controversy, the last time there was real controversy surrounding a proposal was the block-scale war. At that time, people were really engaged with relevant issues and trying to learn and explore in an open way. That’s right. There were crazy people who didn’t engage in honest debate and crazy people who were dogmatic.

It wasn’t the majority of people at the time. When challenged, most of the big blockers will not just scream assertively, they will run the numbers. They engaged in discussions about where the reasonable line lies in terms of block size, and what externalities or costs this would present to users. On our winning side, it was precisely these discussions and logical arguments that brought many people to join us.

I supported Bitcoin XT, the first block size increase proposal. Logical inquiry and discussion changed my mind. I considered What Can Really Go Wrong?, and looked into just how bad the consequences could be. I spent time trying to better understand things I didn’t understand at the time. That doesn’t happen anymore.

People kneel down and throw out the “unknown” as an argument against proposed changes. This is not a valid or intellectually honest response to anything. There are unknown unknowns in everything. There is an unknown in doing nothing, an unknown in making one conservative change, and an unknown in doing everything at once. That is the whole essence of logical categories of things. You don’t know what you don’t know.

This is an outrageous, difficult-to-engage argument that can be dragged out infinitely and never satisfied. This is not a genuine attempt to engage in a conversation, but rather a denial of service attack on the conversation.

There are known and unknown aspects or consequences of change that we know about but are not sure how they will unfold. This is a reasonable way to consider things when discussing changes. You can identify and discuss some aspects or possibilities where the outcome is uncertain. I think this is not only a reasonable inquiry, but also an absolutely important and necessary inquiry in discussing changes in Bitcoin.

I’m just going into the “unknown unknown”! In order to come up with a balanced view of things, any response to every suggestion, every discussion of the pros, and every analysis of the cons is not a rational response. It is not in good faith. The inherent nature of the unknown unknown makes it impossible to solve. in any direction. Both changing Bitcoin and not changing it present the same risk of unknown unknowns, which are inherent in its very nature.

There is an alarming lack of self-awareness on an intellectual level about this, and public debates abound with people having emotional outbursts about acting under that lack of self-awareness.

denial of service attack

It’s not enough to be privately curious and disengaged when faced with new information, and especially when it comes to proposals for Bitcoin, it’s much worse to bring that lack of curiosity into public discourse. The constant chants of “unknown unknowns” and “defaults don’t change” and all the other ossified mantras that go much further than that are not conversation. Denial of service.

Participating only in the setting that it is impossible to meet the criteria and then interrupting and consistently repeating other discussions or conversations that seek to explain or expand everyone’s understanding of the trade-offs or features is not engaging in good faith. This is not an attempt to assess whether a change is safe, it is not an attempt to gauge the likelihood of unintended consequences or the level of risk, it is an attempt to impulsively stop all changes just for the sake of making them.

That’s not reasonable. That’s honestly insane.

This is like having a veto on everything. That’s right. The right to veto is important in a consensus system. However, it is not the veto that prevents the conversation, it is the actions of the actual transactional economic entities that decide whether to run some software or not. This denial of service to the conversation is not a noble or just campaign to save Bitcoin, but an active attack on economic actors and their ability to gain a better understanding to make informed decisions about whether to veto.

It is a malicious and bad faith.

Personally, I think it was motivated by fear. The fear is that, given the ability to provide information, the economic majority will make different choices than the individuals participating in these conversations. I can’t see any other benevolent explanation other than just outright stupidity.

The environment in which these conversations occur is no longer well-intentioned, not because of the people actually proposing change, but because those with their heads in the sand continually launch denial-of-service attacks against the conversation itself. People who refuse to actually admit what they don’t know. that everyone knows unknown If you are honest with yourself. Something I don’t understand, or something I don’t quite understand. But some people are so worried about the unknown that they refuse to fill in the gaps in what they know about the unknown.

They actually refuse to learn more about something they don’t understand very well. It would be one thing if it was just an individual’s quiet choice, but it’s another thing entirely if those people actively intervene in the wider conversation and try to mislead or dissuade others from doing so themselves.

In some ways it’s somewhat ironic. This goes hand in hand with ordinal numbers and people claiming they need to “filter spam”. Perhaps it should be so. This is not the case with blockchain. This wouldn’t be possible if the incentives in the system weren’t fundamentally broken, but it is possible in the conversation surrounding that blockchain.

This is no longer a good faith conversation and it’s not because jpeg people are doing memes about cats, the “other side” is essentially a denial of service attacking everyone else and preventing us from even having a conversation about whether or not we like cats. Because it doesn’t (or the dog) at all.