Vortex | CTV | LNHANCE

Stripe & Tempo launching their own standard instead of working on and integrating with x402 feels like such a missed opportunity... same as with them launching an L1 instead of an L2. We'll probably see 100 other different standards now pop up just because of Stripe's big ego. Thank you so much Stripe.

It's strange to start the discussion by ignoring all the fork risk like splitting the network and so fourth but here's a few: -Protocol/Ledger neutrality - By moving "Standardness" filters into "Consensus" rules Bitcoin ceases to be a neutral settlement layer and starts looking like a curated platform and this sets a precedent where a 55% majority can decide that your valid transaction is "spam" simply because they dislike the use case -It doesn't actually solve the problem - As Peter Todd demonstrated these filters are easily bypassed as he successfully embedded the entire 6,000-word text of BIP 110 into a single transaction by fragmenting the data across multiple 256-byte PUSHDATA elements and 83-byte OP_RETURNs so this proves the fork doesn't stop data it only increases the transaction fee "tax" for users -Incentivizes Centralizing BlockSpace Market - Capping the public relay at 83 bytes forces high-volume data users to bypass the P2P network and instead pay large mining pools directly via private APIs to include "illegal" non-standard data which creates a private blockspace market that small home-node miners cannot see or profit from -Risk of confiscation / disruption to backwards compatibility - As Gregory Maxwell noted Bitcoin nodes have no "global state" of pre-signed transactions so if a user has a multi-year inheritance plan or a "Vault" emergency exit signed offline that uses a 500-byte script or an OP_IF branch BIP 110 welds that exit shut and since the transaction is now consensus-invalid the funds are effectively confiscated for the duration of the fork -Anti-Scaling (Kills eltoo/ln-symmetry) - BIP 110 explicitly invalidates the Taproot Annex which directly blocks the ln-symmetry upgrade which is the industry's best hope for a Lightning Network that dramatically reduces the need for constant watchtower monitoring and enables simpler multi-party channels -Creates UTXO bloat - BIP 110 incentivizes spammers to hide data inside fake addresses/UTXOs (like multisig-encoded data) and while an OP_RETURN can be ignored by a lean node, a fake UTXO must be tracked by every node forever so BIP 110 intended to "save" nodes but actually creates a more expensive permanent burden on them -Breaks Miniscript & Vaults - Miniscript is the industry standard for writing readable secure smart contracts (used for inheritance, multi-party escrow, timelocked recovery) and relies heavily on OP_IF to branch between conditions so by banning OP_IF in Tapscripts BIP 110 effectively breaks Taproot-based custody setups that represent the direction the entire industry is moving -Lobotomizes BitVM - BitVM is one of very few viable paths to trustless Layer 2 bridges and requires deep "Taproot Trees" (Merkle paths) to verify computation and a 257-byte limit caps the tree depth at roughly 7 levels (128 leaves) when BitVM protocols often require thousands of leaves to function -Loss in fees for miners - If you filter out the highest paying transactions because you don't like their content you are effectively asking miners to take a pay cut which could lower the "hash price" and as block subsidy continues to halve transaction fees become increasingly critical to security -Rushed Timeline / Governance Precedent - BIP 110 activates unconditionally by September 2026 regardless of support with early activation possible at just 55% signaling within a tiny 3-month window and this "emergency" style of governance is a radical departure from Bitcoin's traditional 90%+ consensus model, if rushed "emergency" consensus changes become normalized that governance precedent is permanent even if the technical changes expire

"Spam has been fought with policy historically" - total lie, I'm pretty sure policy has exclusively been relaxed since it was created, never tightened "You are at legal risk unless you try to filter" - false, by treating the content of blocks as anything other than other people's money and attempting to filter, you open yourself up to liability "Filters work, you can tell by the lack of 81B opreturns" - filters add the barest bit of friction and nearly all opreturns are messages that can by shortened by 1 character without losing anything, and the 80B limit was specifically picked because ~all uses known at the time for it for into that size, so of course most non message ones are smaller "Core is doing this for Citrea" - no, Citrea find a legitimate money use for a larger than 80B opreturn and core naturally responded by relaxing the policy "This opens nodes up to abuse" - false, the more data is put into opreturns, the lower the costs of operating a node "Core is doing this to us on purpose" - no, core is merely doing their job by responding to network conditions. People like me, who run libre relay to ensure propagation of consensus valid economically valuable transactions, are forcing core to relax policy. "This is bad for bitcoin" - no, if consensus valid, economically valuable transactions could harm bitcoin, it was a failed system. Fortunately they cannot. There are some real dangers to bitcoin that are addressed in the consensus cleanup, let's focus on that. "This was never 'allowed' before" - opreturn has never had a consensus limit and has been consensus valid since bitcoin was first published. They deliberately mix up consensus and relay policy throughout their entire rhetoric to confuse the less technical. "Core is specifically sanctioning fine storage on bitcoin" - opreturn is intended for money protocols, always has been and always will be. "This turns bitcoin into S3" if S3 was ten thousand times more expensive and got exponentially more expensive the more people use it. People looking for file storage can not and never will use bitcoin for it. It is a novelty, a cultural statement, or similar to publish files in the blocks of the world's best money. I could go on because they literally lie continuously.