We received some push back for Stacks 1.0 as well! And for similar reasons i.e., you don't want to put a lot of additional data into the Bitcoin blockchain (makes it much harder to scale Bitcoin that way).

This was the primary reason why for Stacks 2.0, a hard design requirement was to make absolutely no changes to Bitcoin and to not put additional data in Bitcoin.

With Stacks thousands of STX transactions result in a single hash on Bitcoin (technically on the order of active miners on Bitcoin), so Stacks transactions automatically settle on Bitcoin every block.

So stacks is a separate network with its own consensus layer where a random miner from the bitcoin main chain is selected to write the next block, have i got that right?

What happens when they write something the rest of the stacks network disagrees with?

Bitcoin miners have no role here. Anyone can sign up to be a Stack-miner by bringing in their own BTC into this network. That amount (in BTC) is distributed to those who have staked their Stack-tokens. A pRNG process (based on VDF or VRF) selects one of these miners at random to create the next block

Source: https://blog.blockstack.org/realizing-web-3-proof-of-transfe...

Edit: typo

Notably, Vitalik was run out on a rail by small blockers (mostly LukeJr) when he was trying to work on smart contracts on BTC back in the day. This is the entire reason he launched Ethereum, and took with him everyone else interested in working on smart contracts.

Smart contracts are neat. Bitcoin is neat. Smart contracts on Bitcoin could have been a thing, but now it's too late. There is almost zero intersection between BTC maximalists and people who think smart contracts on BTC are a good idea.

These are of course multiple well-publicized but zero-fact assertions used as propaganda to trick people into ethereum and other altcoin bags.

It's hard to believe people are still repeating these verifiable lies.

The narratives are designed to be earwormy, and everyone wants to live in a spy novel filled with scary conspiracies, so when they hear it, it slips in the backdoor cognitive holes, and they do only minimal "verification" if any at all, and accept it, and then repeat it. It's also very easy to blame an all-powerful adversary for all your woes—did you lose money trading?

Oh, that was gmax's fault.

Did you get scammed?

Oh, that was blockstream's fault. If they'd just did X, then the scam wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Did your friend tell you something secretive that "only he knows" and it's "not public knowledge"?

Well obviously the core devs are behind it.

The absurdity is great when the altcoiners are staring at Bitcoin's behemoth economy with jealous eyes amplifying the narratives they sometimes even know are totally false.

More insidious of course are the lies that are false but simple, where the factually verifiable truth is directly contrary but complex, like the foolish lie about gmax stealing credit, or Vitalik asserting that he was planning Ethereum until the core devs blocked him.

It's easy for outsiders to be infected via their usual lines and information feeds. And, of course, Bitcoin has no marketing department, so obviously defence thereof is a long, painstaking process of careful dismantling and debunking over a long period of time.

Thankfully, the actually helpful, intelligent, and ultra-competent people that are the safest to align with are people on whom these kinds of lies are basically completely ineffectual, so we tend to win, in that respect, just by default.

> .. now it's too late.

Perhaps it is too late for replicating existing use cases. However, the general idea of running EVM-like smart contracts secured by Bitcoin PoW (e.g. merge mined sidechains) is still quite attractive

Counterparty eventually adopted the EVM, and yet could not get traction for multiple reasons:

1. Network effects already on Ethereum

2. Bitcoin block time too slow and block size too low

3. Counterparty uses Bitcoin as a data layer, but Bitcoin itself cannot recognize Counterparty transactions, so Bitcoin consensus does not secure Counterparty transactions.

Only if you enjoy all of the negatives of EVM-like smart contracts including chain splits, gas problems, subtle bugs that could drive exchanges to insolvency, mass theft, broken multisig, the list goes on...

I don't enjoy the negatives. We'll move to better alternatives as they become available. Until then.. it's just like democracy or free markets.. no demonstrably superior alternatives yet

First off I recognize and appreciate your username :-)

As such, you should know more than anyone how heated the OP_RETURN drama got, and how ANYONE using the BTC chain for anything other than moving money from point A to point B is a complete non-started and will be unanimously opposed by the core development team.

:-) Yeah. There's some baggage there, but I was still surprised nobody wanted this username.

Core devs may not agree with what some users do with the system (current specs/features).. but as the Ethereum miners showed with increase in block size, core devs' philosophical objections may not matter in the end

Yup. Creator of Counterparty here. It's funny to think that if the Core devs hadn't be so incredibly resistant to people using the Bitcoin blockchain in unexpected ways, Ethereum wouldn't exist in its current form.

See https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/929804867568373760

Vitalik's claim is a lie. No "OP_RETURN wars" happened. It's a complete fabrication.

See https://twitter.com/notgrubles/status/1187470076833697794

I strongly disagree with the way that Ethereum was launched and the way that it was run---indeed Ethereum was a competitor of Counterparty's, with a polar opposite approach and ethos---but Greg Maxwell is the one that's rewriting history there.

I remember the hostility by certain Core devs to OP_RETURN being used for "ulterior" purposes. I remember the push to reduce the size of OP_RETURN to 40 bytes to sabotage smart contracts.

source: https://www.coindesk.com/developers-battle-bitcoin-block-cha...

Your Coindesk source is wrong, the limit was never lowered.

Here is the commit where it was raised from 40 to 80: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/5286/commits/a930658...

If you believe if was ever lowered, show me the commit.

The Coindesk articles contains the phrase "OP_RETURN was originally meant to store 80 bytes of extra data in a bitcoin transaction". How do they know what it was originally meant to do? If it meant to do it, why wasn't it in the source?

The first comment in the pull request is: "The maximum size for OP_RETURN outputs used to be 80 bytes, then got changed to 40 bytes to be on the safe side. We have now been running with 40 bytes for about 9 months, and nothing catastrophic happened to the Blockchain, so I am proposing to increase it back to 80 bytes."

The commit that is referenced by this comment is "script: reduce OP_RETURN standard relay bytes to 40" https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/8175c790eb

There you can see that it was originally 80 bytes.

What do you mean by "originally"? It looks like it was introduced as 80 bytes here, so it had only been 80 bytes for a year or so: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2738

I recognize the commit where the limit was lowered, though I don't believe it was actually released before being raised again.

Lol are you honestly linking your own twitter as a source

Didn't you see the username? It's clearly not him =P

Sad to ear all that kind of stories, Governance is a real issue of bitcoin, and it is only gone get worst. I am OK with it, you just have to assume nothing will ever change with bitcoin.... ...as long as there is another place for changes happen. If you want change stuff you need governance, take a look at decred.

I don't think there'll be any issue since it's a separate chain and just submitting checkpoints to bitcoin so they can pretend they're a sidechain for marketing hype.

I came here to say that. Here's a super informative thread laying out those events from the perspective of one of the Decred developers.

https://old.reddit.com/r/decred/comments/6wxueo/your_best_pi...

TLDR: Smart contracts on BTC were intentionally strangled because it would necessitate bigger blocks.

At the same time, BTC core devs were gearing up to start their sad push in creating artificial scarcity on a perfectly functional blockchain by reneging on the agreement they made to increase the block size.

They traded their ideals to get rich and all that momentum was lost. Instead of peer to peer cash, we're all left with a thousand useless ponzi schemes and a handful of promising coins that can't work together to actually achieve Satoshi's goal.

At the moment the Bitcoin blockchain size is some 310 gb while the bitcoin cash blockchain, with its larger blocks, is some 180 gb. I just looked it up.

(I think I looked it up the last time I saw this argument too.)

(I also can't easily find it for BSV, the search turned up too many articles about how they're increasing their block size to 2 GB.)

I dont follow. What does the size of either of those blockchains have to do with the discussion?

What point are you making?

At the time there was the argument that larger blocks were bad because they would increase the size of the chain and prevent casual users from storing the whole chain and verifying it themselves.

I think the chain was already too big for casual users at that point!

Oh right. Yeah thats absolutely true.

I always thought the argument that full nodes should be inexpensive to operate made a lot of sense. But keeping blocks small would obviously lead (and clearly did) to transaction costs high enough to price out most people that actually want to use it.

Wait for the lightning network is an insulting reason to kill the p2p cash use case, which in my opinion is the only thing that makes the "store of value" use case work.