Yes, this is still happening.
Clearly Bitcoiners have way too much free time on their hands because this whole Bitcoin op_return debate as escalated to 11 and floods the entire Bitcoin timeline on X. As you can see from the link above this has been going on since early May when I first reported on it, in response to the Bitcoin Core node repository telling the world they were going to remove the op_return limit and allow anyone to bundle non-financial data into their operations without having to jump through all the hoops that exist which allow things like Ordinals and Inscriptions to function (regardless of the policy).
CSAM: a term I haven't heard until now.
Stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material... a watered down way of saying child-porn (presumably so you can say it online without reach getting throttled). Why the hell are we talking about kiddie porn? Because time is a flat circle and history repeats itself.
- TERRORISM!
- PEDOPHILES!
- DRUG DEALERS!
The holy triumvirate of propaganda
This entire child porn debate on the blockchain is as old as the blockchain itself. It's hysterical pathos-based argumentation meant to purposefully make people irrational and emotional about a technical issue. In the old days it was the central banks and the main stream media tendrils that tried to make this argument that Bitcoin was only good for crime. As Bitcoin became more mainstream people stopped buying into the bullshit and I haven't seen that argument been made for quite some time... but now of course the Knotzis are propagating this nonsense as it pertains to Bitcoin Core.
~~~ embed:1964423064378363982 twitter metadata:bWF4a2Vpc2VyfHxodHRwczovL3R3aXR0ZXIuY29tL21heGtlaXNlci9zdGF0dXMvMTk2NDQyMzA2NDM3ODM2Mzk4Mnw= ~~~
The idea being that if we allow 100 KB op_returns then bad actors (probably not even pedophiles just people that want to attack BTC) will start putting child porn directly into the op_return... of course the op_return only contains hexadecimal data so a custom third party program needs to be used in order to interpret an arbitrary file in the op_return. At that point it doesn't matter if this file is in one place or split up into multiple scattered bricks of data, as the custom program will know how to process it either way.
It's painfully obvious that this entire child porn nonsense is just another irrational, but also effective, means of tricking people into supporting Knots under the premise of fear and ignorance and "protecting the children". It's highly effective when employed against right-wing voters and a lot of people at the center of the Bitcoin cult are right-wing voters.
This issue has been a thing for over a decade, and it's already happened on other blockchains like BSV. Is the establishment attacking BSV due to child porn? No. Its an absurd attack vector that lost it's bite many years ago, and yet the Knotzis are trying to resurrect it one last time with their "ends justify the means" campaign.
Wow nice comments guys way to show you're on the level!
Meanwhile if you actually look at how these people act on social media they pretend to care about child porn and then swoon over children posting titty pics online. How... "ironic".
~~~ embed:1964121867796828357 twitter metadata:ZGhydXZwYXR0ZWx8fGh0dHBzOi8vdHdpdHRlci5jb20vZGhydXZwYXR0ZWwvc3RhdHVzLzE5NjQxMjE4Njc3OTY4MjgzNTd8 ~~~
~~~ embed:1964097227334275347 twitter metadata:QlRDX2Jyb298fGh0dHBzOi8vdHdpdHRlci5jb20vQlRDX2Jyb28vc3RhdHVzLzE5NjQwOTcyMjczMzQyNzUzNDd8 ~~~
Okay hypocrites!
Hey maybe if you want to pretend like you care about child porn on the blockchain you wouldn't be announcing to the world that you're jacking off to children posting thirst traps about running Knots... you absolute walnuts. Seriously though. Gross.
And don't get me wrong!
I think the existence of Bitcoin Knots is a great thing. If something this trivial and stupid can create such a traumatic divide in the community it very much implies that Bitcoin is solid as hell and can't be hard-forked into some bastardization created by central banks and Blackrock. As a reminder this entire debate is currently a soft-fork issue and both Core and Knots are in full compliance with Bitcoin consensus. Having a choice between Core and Knots is a good thing. It's a decentralization event, which is always painful in the short term and healthy in the long term (just like the Steem hostile takeover). Knowing that Core doesn't have a monopoly on the code (as has always been a huge worry for years now) is a huge relief.
Impressive adoption rate.
Knots went from <1% of the nodes in the network and is now quickly approaching 20%. Of course this will start to taper off in a big way should that number get much higher... and also Knots basically needs almost 100% adoption for the filters to actually work... so Knots will never actually work and filters are dumb... but whatever. Miners will mine the blocks with the biggest reward, and if those include "spam" then so-be-it. These are the financial incentives of Bitcoin and they can not be swayed by emotional rhetoric.
Watched it so you didn't have to.
I must have been bored because I watched this entire video of the main guy spearheading the Knots debate. The main takeaway here was a decent analogy:
If you saw a fence on the side of the road that didn't look like it served any purpose, would you just remove the fence because it seemed like it was pointless at first glance?
In this case the "fence" is the op_return limit of 80 bytes. The argument is that even if a cow is on the wrong side of the fence you don't get rid of the fence just because it doesn't work 100% of the time. I think it's a pretty good analogy but it's not enough to change my mind. But also my opinion is largely irrelevant. Such is the nature of true decentralization. Let the network consensus decide. I'm quite certain this entire issue is pointless because Bitcoin itself never had a limit on the op_return and never will unless it hard-forks (all of which have been painfully unsuccessful).
https://mempool.space/
Much ado about nothing?
The funniest part of all this slop regarding "spam" on the blockchain is that the Bitcoin blockchain is completely empty right now. The mempool is blank and we have all these toddlers arguing online about how they are running Knots and refuse to put "spam" in their mempool. Is the spam in the room with us right now guys? I mean obviously in the future perhaps the argument will have more weight but right now as it stands it's all pretty laughable.
Conclusion
I can't believe how much mental bandwidth is being allocated to a debate that has little to no merit in the grand scheme of things. Bitcoin is not going to hard-fork over this, and if it does the Knotzis are going to lose all their money and I'll get an airdrop of a coin that I'll be sure to dump instantly for more real Bitcoin (just like with Bitcoin Cash and BSV). The longest chain wins. Always.
Personally, I think knots vs. core is nothing but a massive circle jerk and distraction from the fact that Bitcoin is now a regulatory captured, banker co-opted, globohomo NFT, which is now irrelevant as a tool for financial freedom and censorship resistance. It's all so stupid.
I'd be thinking the same thing but the people who are adding this fuel to this fire are not the ones that captured it. The OG community is the one making all this noise. I also believe that the idea that Bitcoin is "captured" is premature at this point. TradFi adopting Bitcoin is not capturing Bitcoin. The institutions interacting with Bitcoin being captured doesn't make Bitcoin captured. Bitcoin is only truly captured if they hardfork it or successfully start blocking transactions.
If the establishment can capture any crypto simply by adopting it then what the hell are we even doing? It wouldn't even be possible to win.
Its not that they adopted, it's that 85-90% of bitcoin users are kyc'd and identified and now under surveillance by governments, tax authorities, chainalysis and blockchain analytics firms, and bitcoin can be censored, have their bitcoin seized, or accounts frozen. They now totally control it. People say stuff like "they can't stop me from using my bitcoin", ok, true, but they can arrest your for noncompliance with whatever rules they role oput, and extract wealth from you for using bitcoin. This defeats the entire purpose.
Correct we are not at the end game yet.
The infrastructure to exit the current grid does not exist.
We have to build it.
Bitcoin was never going to solve that by itself even in the ideal scenario.
That bit about Knots needing almost full adoption for filters to actually do anything hits the core of it. Incentives beat vibes, and miners chase fees no matter what label people slap on data. Kinda funny that everyone is arguing about spam while the mempool is snoozing. If fees run hot again, do you see this op_return panic fading on its own, or will the filter crowd double down?
Along the same lines, I have said for a while now that if you look at the timeline the whole Clinton pizza parlor porn thing was a huge misdirect from the handling of Covid and the BLM protests. Clearly this is a case of if something works you might as well go with it.
They do, when you just hodl, you have to fill up your time somehow.
you need a third party program to read a binary stored jpeg, how is this different?
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