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There is a massive miscommunication between two factions of Bitcoiners today, and I think it's got really lost in the debate about some specific proposal or some exact change or client, when in reality it's actually a fundamental difference in illogical premise that I think a lot of people are missing. So I want to address one of those today and ask the question, is it censorship of Bitcoin to try to address spam? What is up? This video is brought to you by the bitbox. I have a discount code. Hold your keys, get yourself a nice hardware wallet. You'll find all the details right down in the show notes. But I have to say this before we get started. Understand not a single thing that I am going to discuss in this episode suggests support or not for BIP 110, and this is a huge part of the problem, which I will try to get at in the second half of this. BIP110 is a thing of its own. It is a fork, it is a set of code, it is a set of explicit changes to the consensus code or system of Bitcoin. And yet any conversation at all, or any opinion at all about what should or can be done about spam is now somehow tied to whether or not you support this totally separate thing. And that's a big part of the problem on both sides. Whether, or not, oh, you want to do something about spam, you have to support bip110, or oh, you want to do something about spam, you're clearly against core bip110 is a thing in and of itself. It is not an opinion about spam, it is not an opinion about the nature of Bitcoin. Luckily, I was given a pretty good analogy that I think we can use on the censorship issue from someone that I have occasional conversations with about this in in private and online, who's also pretty good staying on the point. So. So I think it's worthwhile to address this one specifically. Which is funny because I still even though I agree with the analogy, I don't agree with how it's applied and thus still come to a completely different conclusion. So this was in response to Giacomo saying that no place in this discussion does censorship actually make sense. You can read the entire thing. I have a link to it in the show notes if you want to. But the post in question was not publishing. The poet on your own blog is protecting yourself. Of course that's not censorship, but trying to prevent someone else from publishing that poem is. So let's talk about Censorship and the nature of the Protocol Using this article analogy, let's create a hypothetical protocol for writing and publishing articles. Let's assume the benefit of this protocol is, I guess, that if you pay a small fee and publish the article, that the entire ecosystem will host all of these articles and so it'll all stay available forever. The intent is to be an open network for free speech, that anyone can publish their articles, they can speak their mind, they can share their opinion without censorship, and someone is unable to basically say, you're not allowed to publish this, let's call it the blog chain. Now the very purpose of this is to allow anyone to say whatever they want and to not be censored. It's free speech in the form of the written word, right? Well, there are some basic formatting requirements. You have to have a title, you have to sign it with your keys, which is attached to you as the author. There's a timestamp for when and how it gets put into the blog chain. There's a space specifically designated for the article content, et cetera. All of these fields are limited to varying degrees. For example, the title can't be longer than 128 bytes, which is totally reasonable because if it's longer than that, it might as well be the first paragraph. Timestamp has to be in the form of a date with, you know, four for the year, blah blah blah, simple things like that. There's another important limitation is that only 10,000 articles per day get included in the blog chain and the posts goes to whoever pays the highest fee. Now given this hypothetical, our tweet in question makes an excellent point that if one person says that someone else cannot post a poem or let's say something religious or something about a not allowed to talk about it vaccine onto their article space that they are publishing. That would be censorship of a particular opinion or a particular person on the blog chain. I don't think any bitcoiner who isn't completely delusional or just a non authoritarian, in that case you, why are you a bitcoiner? Would disagree with that concept. But imagine suddenly a subset of people realize that this is basically a low cost buy at once store it forever hosting platform where they could publish the binaries for highly specialized AI, fine tuned models. Worse is that they post them encrypted and they're actually selling the encryption key in private so that people can download it from the blockchain. Now, even though it costs them like you know, $500 in fees or something up front, they turn around and are actually making $5,000 off a bunch of people selling these AI models. So they just keep doing this until more than half of the blogchain is actually a bunch of gibberish in a handful of kind of Encyclopedia Britannica sized articles that are published. So instead of 10,000 articles per day being published now, it's only like a few hundred because there's like eight specialized AI models getting published every single day. Now the bloggers on this network start rightfully arguing that their articles shouldn't have to compete with a bunch of people selling AI models out of band and using their computers to host it. Now what can you do about this? And I mean that seriously. Like what is actually possible to do about keeping the blog chain about blogging? Well, if it's for free speech and censorship resistance, then not a lot. You can't really target the content itself. But there are things that you can do. For example, you could limit the size of a single article to 10,000 words. You know, practically 0.1% of articles out there are actually that long. And not only that, it's easy and frankly nice for your readers to just break it up into two parts if you've got it that long. Anyway, many of the article writers are in support of this proposal. Now, does it stop the people from posting their AI models? No, it doesn't. It does make it more annoying though. Instead of sending people to a single post, they now have to direct them to 7540 individual posts that you then order and they're broken up, maybe even across multiple days, trying to get into the blog chain to recreate the model. Now, they may very well still do it, even under those conditions. And maybe that's an argument to just ignore it. But here's the point. That isn't censorship of anyone's opinion. You're not censoring articles. It doesn't affect the ability to speak freely on the blog chain about any topic or a religion or a poem of any sort. It doesn't censor anything about any topic from any person. It targets an abuse of the network for something it explicitly isn't designed for. Nobody with a poem is unable to publish their poem. In fact, nobody with a specialized model is still even stopped from posting it. They simply have to pay at least a little bit more for the 7540 headers, titles, timestamps, signatures and all that stuff, when before they only had to pay for one of them. Will this be effective? We don't really know. But does it actually affect Anyone posting legitimate articles or the censorship resistance of the blog chain itself? No, it does not. Now what if a group of people started loudly claiming that this was censorship? In what way exactly? When Twitter was censoring posts from criticizing the Pfizer vaccine back in 2021, when I got shadow banned from Twitter actually, and just kind of walk away from it from a few months because I just, everything just went dark. Nobody saw any of my stuff anymore. Was the thing that bothered me that tweets were only allowed to be 280 characters? Was that the censorship? Did anybody complain about that as being a form of not being allowed to speak your mind on Twitter? Or was it shadow banning certain people? Was it algorithmically demoting certain topics or kicking people off, literally banning people from the platform because they said something that was dangerous? If the protocol maintainers of the blogchain are considering ways to raise the cost of non article data dumps, in what way are they censoring anyone's ability to write an article about any topic that they want to talk about? Now, often the response resorts to, well, you can't design an algorithm to know what is or isn't spam. Well, of course not, but you wouldn't need to do that to just come up with some simple and kind of naive ways to disincentivize non article use over the blog chain. And to use an analogy to explain our analogy, it's kind of like saying that if you have a really big doggy door, there's a lot of people who could fit through the door. But still, almost everyone is going to use the human sized door. You don't need an algorithm to figure out what animal is coming up to the house to figure out a way to build it where the dog is more likely to use the doggy door and the human is more likely to use the human. You might also say that, oh well, a human could still fit right through that doggie door and they might do it. And they can fit right through the window right next to it and they might do that too. Sure. But is it unreasonable to think that making the doggy door the size of a dog means that fewer of your neighbors might crawl through it? Now maybe you respond with well, there's nothing that can be done, or maybe those actions will actually make the situation worse. Well, congratulations, we, we have now landed on something that's actually worth discussing. The effectiveness of the various proposals or options. This is actually another example of the Mott and Bailey style argumentation that Lyn Alden actually brought up. Correctly criticizing the bip1 tenors, which I thought was really good. So I'll read part of her argument and then explain why this is the same thing from the other side. I'm sure you're aware of the Mott and Bailey fallacy for those who are not, I'll explain it here. It's a debating style where you assert an aggressive position, then fall back to a somewhat more defensible position when the aggressive one isn't working, and purposely conflate the two, or switch back and forth when convenient. Many leaders of this movement, and by association their followers, have been saying that bitcoin is under major attack by spam, that it is vulnerable to illegal images, that bitcoin will fail without this fork, that nodes will become unwieldy, or that the fork is absolutely going to happen. That in aggregate is the aggressive position. The Bailey I'm going to skip a lot of this just to get to the main point when I say, well, no, it doesn't do that. I don't consider this an emergency, and even if it was an emergency, I wouldn't view this as anywhere near being a solution for the emergency. But I'm open to discussions on spam management for the longer run. Then people respond by saying look at the bip. It's so mild, it admits how limited it is for spam, it's not really about spam, etc. That's the semi defensible position to fall back on the Mott. This is a great framing for one of my complaints of how I see a lot of bip100 tenors argue. But the claim of censorship is the Mott and Bailey fallacy of the opposing side. First they claim censorship, that it is some literal authoritarianism to suggest you should limit the size of an article posted in the blog chain, which is designed for publishing articles, to the size of of a typical article. And the claim of censorship isn't even about suggesting that the proposal is wrong or it's going about it in the wrong way, but that the very idea of discussing that we might limit the AI models and optimize for articles is somehow morally reprehensible. You disgust me. Then when called out on specifics, they revert to the actual arguments that hold some merit, while people will just post 7,000 individual articles instead of just one big one and that will actually make the problem worse and there's no way to objectively discern the difference. It will have a trade off, we'll lose some important functionality, etc. Those are all legitimate Debates about what to do in this situation, or the fact that it doesn't seem like an emergency, the fees aren't skyrocketing, it's just kind of filling up the rest of the empty space. Also a fantastic point that I think we should actually stick to to end the debate. That's the defensible position, the mot. So going back to the blogchain example, so one group is saying that the blogchain is actually just an open, decentralized, arbitrary data protocol because there's not really any such thing as an article and spam doesn't really exist and it's all subjective anyway, while the other is claiming that, well, we don't need another open data protocol, we have like 20 of those, they all work perfectly fine. What we built and what we wanted was an open protocol for publishing articles. And it rightly feels like gaslighting to claim that articles don't exist. So when the opposition starts resorting to the fact that it's censorship, that it's literally a form of fascism to even have the discussion, don't be surprised if the loonies on the other side who've invested their entire lives and savings into an open blogging network feel so gaslit that they just throw their hands up and decide that, well, they must be getting paid by the people publishing it AI models. I can understand why they might feel that way. Bitcoin is an open, decentralized monetary network. It is a protocol for money. The only purpose at all for any of the data in the network. Literally the only reason we keep the time chain in the first place. Otherwise it would be way better to just throw the thing away and is for validating, securing and defining the ownership and exchange of Bitcoin balances. It's an accounting system. It's the only reason we need everybody to know exactly the same state of its history. When we look at blocks coming in that are more than half full of JPEG images, it is perfectly reasonable to ask the question of whether we've done something that may or may not have made this easier to do and what could could be done to either disincentivize it or better optimize it for, you know, money. Nobody came here wanting an open, permissionless data network. BitTorrent does that way better than Bitcoin and it does it with no limit to bandwidth. We came here to protect and build an open, decentralized, censorship resistant money in all conversations. Considering the trade offs, or whether we can potentially limit the amount of JPEG data going into the chain and equalizing its costs against normal activity is exactly in line with keeping an open censorship resistant money. Now check yourself for just a second. If you came away from this thinking that I'm defending bip110 or that I must be a bip110 supporter, just notice for a second how quickly we lose the plot, because that's not what this video is about. I haven't said a single thing about BIP 110. It's about attempting to route around what I think is a bad faith argument the Mott and Baileys on both sides of this, which this video addresses. One from the opposed to bip110 side. Unfortunately we seem to have landed in this space where tons of people on one side call any discussion at all of limiting or addressing spam a form of literal authoritarian censorship, while most of the other side just screams they're all pedophiles. Now the real debate may still be intractable, but it ought to be about whether anything can be done and about what the relative effectiveness of those things might be. But if the opposed just calls it censorship every time, the other side's just gonna stick with pedophiles because it rightly feels like gaslighting. To say that to limit the size of a public key to the size of a public key is censoring people who want to use Bitcoin even if it has no effect whatsoever on spam. That seems crazy to me, and I want to applaud Lynn Alden in her post one more time because she said, quote, she doesn't consider this an emergency, but she's open to discussions about spam management in the long run. Notice she didn't say I believe it is censorship to discuss the idea of limiting or disincentivizing spam. This, I think, is the premise difference that is causing bip1 tenors to go full Hail Mary over this conversation and why they say it is both existential at the same time as admitting that bip110 doesn't stop spam. They think the fight is over whether or not the culture of development on bitcoin actually cares about keeping this a monetary protocol. Or are we just going to be gaslighting people into thinking that all the data on the chain is completely equal and that to even say that there's such thing as spam or arbitrary data and that maybe there is something to do about it is just a totally unknowable thing and to suggest that we might do something about it is totally authoritarianism. From my discussions with them. They think they're actually saving the idea that Bitcoin is a monetary protocol at all in the same way that the blog chain seeks to allow people to post articles in free speech, and that maybe we ought to disincentivize people dumping the entire thing with an AI model. Now if your first reaction to that is well, it would not be effective anyway, that's great, that's a meaningful conversation to have, but it is simply not censorship to attempt to do so. No, we cannot algorithmically know exactly what the difference is or exactly what is or isn't arbitrary by simply looking at it. But yes, we can and have done things to minimize it. Luckily a great many of those things that minimize it are still a part of Bitcoin. If you do actually think it's censorship to allow all of the monetary use and attempt to limit or make more expensive than non monetary use, then I don't know how to agree with you. I don't know how to to square that circle because I'd find myself in a really silly spot and I would not have any logical basis, any foundation to stand on anymore to defend the idea that a Sig Ops limit isn't censorship of things that take a long time to compute. Or why the old 10 kilobyte witness limit wasn't a form of censorship when we had it in this in SEGWIT transactions. Or why the current transaction size limit of what is it, 100 kilobytes isn't also a form of censorship of 1 megabyte transactions. Or why the tx id the transaction hash only being 32 bytes isn't censorship of people who want to stick 64 bytes in there. But saying that we should limit the size of 34 byte signatures to 34 bytes is censorship because somebody's using it for something else. Since all of that list clearly is not censorship, I want to be able to hold on to my logical foundation that allows me to make that argument, and then we can use that foundation or that common ground to argue what does or does not help us moving forward to keeping Bitcoin an open, decentralized, censorship resistant money. And yes, it's a real thing, and yes, you can define it. Anyway, I just don't think that any of this has anything to do with censorship, and it's frustrating as hell to have that thrown into every single thread in every discussion from otherwise very sensible people. Let me know what you think. Don't forget to grab yourself a bitbox. Don't forget my discount. If you do, don't leave free sats on the table and support the show. I much appreciate it. And you know, leave your comments. Let me know if you disagree with me, if you if you think I support bip110 because of this. In fact, my next video, if I actually get it out in time, was to break down BIP110 and all the different changes. Why it isn't some big scary thing that destroys all of this bitcoin functionality, but also why I don't at all support it. And so if you want to stick around for that one, subscribe, subscribe. And anybody who watches this and does like this content and has not subscribed, please do so. It's a very free and easy way. As a button right there. You could do it right like two seconds, you could already be done with it. Do it for me and leave me a comment. Let me know if I'm an idiot or you disagree or why and maybe I'll respond to yours. I appreciate it. Until next time. That's my two SATs.