<_Sam-->
It's telling that the same people who claim a UTXO commitment is too "complex" or "changes the security model" championed SegWit. SegWit was a far more convoluted change that involved separating signature data and redefining transaction IDs. And for what? So Blockstream could patent and build second-layer solutions like Liquid.
<_Sam-->
We could have used a simple commitment scheme to improve scalability and light client security for everyone, but instead, the protocol was bent to serve corporate interests. They solved a business problem, not a Bitcoin problem.
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<gmaxwell>
_Sam--: your remarks may not have recieved a reply, since they appear transparently malicious given that Liquid has litterally nothing to do with segwit. And while that kind of remark might decieve people elsewhere, it's a lot less likely to here.
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<_Sam-->
thanks for your reply, and hope life finds you well. With all due respect, Greg, claiming Liquid has "literally nothing to do with SegWit" is historical revisionism.
<_Sam-->
SegWit's primary technical achievement was fixing third-party transaction malleability. Without a fix for malleability, building complex, multi-transaction contracts required for payment channels and federated sidechains like Liquid is unacceptably risky and complex.
<_Sam-->
So while Liquid may not use witness data directly for its transfers, the fundamental enabling technology that made it—and the Lightning Network—viable to build robustly on top of Bitcoin was the malleability fix that SegWit delivered. To deny that connection is just gaslighting.
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<_Sam-->
We could have used a simple commitment scheme to improve scalability and light client security for everyone, but instead, the protocol was bent to serve corporate interests. They solved a business problem, not a Bitcoin problem.
<gmaxwell>
That's simply untrue, and liquid launched without any support for segwit at all. (I believe a recentish revision finally added segwit support). It's lack of relation is absolute and complete.
<_Sam-->
That's a textbook misdirection. The argument isn't whether Liquid uses SegWit addresses. It's that the entire project was made viable by SegWit fixing transaction malleability on the Bitcoin mainnet.
<_Sam-->
instead of doing something more useful.
<_Sam-->
You're deliberately ignoring the foundational prerequisite to focus on a trivial implementation detail. Before SegWit, the malleability bug made the complex, multi-stage contracts required for a secure two-way peg dangerously unreliable. Fixing malleability was the green light for building robust sidechains and L2s.
<gmaxwell>
What 'simple commitment scheme'? I'm not aware of any such proposals now, there certantly weren't any back then or for years after.
<_Sam-->
To claim the relationship is "absolute and complete" zero because you initially used P2SH addresses for the peg-in is like saying a skyscraper has "no relation" to the bedrock it's built on because the lobby is decorated with marble. It's a transparently deceptive argument.
<gmaxwell>
_Sam--: it wasn't any kind of prerequsite at all, it made no use of it. Malleability isn't a problem for liquid.
<gmaxwell>
_Sam--: segwit is an optional signature style one could _NOT USE_ with liquid. It's just unrelated.
<_Sam-->
It's telling that the same people who claim a UTXO commitment is too "complex" or "changes the security model" championed SegWit. SegWit was a far more convoluted change that involved separating signature data and redefining transaction IDs. And for what? So Blockstream could patent and build second-layer solutions like Liquid.
<_Sam-->
<_Sam--> Let me spell it out: SegWit works by making transactions look like **anyone-can-spend** garbage to any non-upgraded node. The entire security of every SegWit coin hinges on the "economic majority" benevolently enforcing rules that old nodes literally cannot see or validate. It was a convoluted hack that broke transaction finality by separating the witness.
<gmaxwell>
You're now just repeating yourself SamGPT. What UTXO commitment scheme are you referring to? What comments by what people?
<_Sam-->
The UTXO commitment, such as a Merkle root, would be part of the block header. It would be just as integral to the block as the transaction Merkle root is today.
<_Sam-->
A new node would first download the chain of block headers, which is extremely small. The heaviest chain of headers is the trust anchor, secured by the immense hash power of the network.
<gmaxwell>
How is transaction finality changed in any way?
<_Sam-->
You then ask any untrusted peer for the UTXO set and for a Merkle proof for a random UTXO.
<_Sam-->
You verify that the provided proof connects that UTXO to the Merkle root that is committed to in the PoW-secured block header.
<_Sam-->
If a malicious node gives you a fake UTXO set, the Merkle proofs they generate for it will not match the valid root in the block header. You would detect the fraud instantly.
<_Sam-->
it's the same thing i told you 10 years ago when we were fighting about big blocks
<gmaxwell>
So you're referring to some imaginary scheme that exists only inside your head and your chatbot's head, which has never been proposed anywhere, and which you imagine people would call too complex? Why not also just keep your deluded and abusive IRC commentary also in the land of your imagination?
<_Sam-->
gmaxwell: you've not proven anything
<_Sam-->
We could have used a simple commitment scheme to improve scalability and light client security for everyone, but instead, the protocol was bent to serve corporate interests. They solved a business problem, not a Bitcoin problem.
<_Sam-->
You were part of it.
<gmaxwell>
What scheme? got a hyperlink?
<_Sam-->
i just told you how it works, read it. we're older and more mature now.
<gmaxwell>
where is this supposed commitment scheme that unspecfied people have rejected?
<_Sam-->
i outlined it on #bitcoin but nobody was smart enough to reply.
<_Sam-->
in more detail.
<gmaxwell>
_Sam--: so it's a scheme you've just suggested now. And your questoin is why a litteral decade ago people did not see into the future and implement your proposal which doesn't fix transaction malleability in favor of something that does?
<_Sam-->
gmaxwell: the point was the entire protocol was bent towards your business interests instead of those of the community.
<_Sam-->
we're older now it's ok to say "youre right"
<_Sam-->
i don't want to be enemies.
<gmaxwell>
As I established above, segwit provided no benefit to Liquid.
<_Sam-->
You're deliberately ignoring the foundational prerequisite to focus on a trivial implementation detail. Before SegWit, the malleability bug made the complex, multi-stage contracts required for a secure two-way peg dangerously unreliable. Fixing malleability was the green light for building robust sidechains and L2s.
<gmaxwell>
perhaps you'd prefer to move your goalpoast now?
<_Sam-->
now i'd like to for you acknowledge that in 2025 you can deliver a trustlessly verifiable utxo set.
<_Sam-->
*no
<gmaxwell>
_Sam--: How is something that wasn't even used at all when Liquid was created in any way "foundational"? it's just unrelated.
<_Sam-->
That's a textbook misdirection. The argument isn't whether Liquid uses SegWit addresses. It's that the entire project was made viable by SegWit fixing transaction malleability on the Bitcoin mainnet.
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<_Sam-->
we're not on opposite teams.
<_Sam-->
my idea isn't to make "bitcoin worse"
<gmaxwell>
Repeating yourself again, SamGPT. I didn't say anything about addresses, I said it didn't use it in any form. It couldn't tell that segwit was active on bitcoin and would have worked identically were it not.
<_Sam-->
it's that you refuse to make it better.
<gmaxwell>
I don't have anything to do with it, dimwit.
<_Sam-->
i mean after verifying 1million blocks that i didn't have to for the nth time, it's like i remember why i wanted it in the first place.
<gmaxwell>
you know you can just start bitcoin core up with a utxo snapshot and it will work, right? as of over a year ago I believe.
<_Sam-->
i have old pruned copies i just keep around
<gmaxwell>
Sure you do.
<_Sam-->
cmon dude, i dont want to fight.
<_Sam-->
let's keep it intellectual this time.
<_Sam-->
are you still doing any robot wars? i lived in vegas practically across the street for a bit there.
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<_Sam-->
gmaxwell: no disrespect for real, there's not many people probably thinking of these things, but think about if you want to:
<_Sam-->
The UTXO commitment is a result that a miner must calculate after applying the valid transactions in their block.
<_Sam-->
Think of it like this:
<_Sam-->
Every full node knows the correct UTXO set at block N-1.
<_Sam-->
When a miner proposes block N, every full node processes the transactions in it, destroying the old UTXOs and creating the new ones.
<_Sam-->
Based on this, every full node independently calculates what the correct UTXO root for block N should be.
<_Sam-->
They then compare their calculated root to the one the miner put in the block header.
<_Sam-->
If the miner tried to "add their own UTXO," their calculated root would not match the root that every honest node calculates. The block would be a blatant violation of the consensus rules and would be rejected instantly.
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<_Sam-->
it's almost the exact thing i remember saying 10 years ago but still don't know why segwit was more important, except to your team.
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<_Sam-->
again with the utmost gracious appreciate for all of the efforts of you and everyone else, please take a holistic view of 2025. You could buy more things a bitcoin in 2015. More people ran nodes in 2015. Less borrowed money was being used buy bitcoin and put it in corporate treasuries. Mining wasn't (probably) quite as badly centralized. Again, i'm just being a devil's advocate here folks, not a jerk, even though i am.
<_Sam-->
*appreciation.
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<_Sam-->
you had your chance it was great for corporate america.
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<_Sam-->
which is the antithesis of what i would have pegged you for, gmaxwell
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<_Sam-->
you were my knowledge is free hero. wisdom is expensive.
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<_Sam-->
how patents you got for your free knowledge?
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<_Sam-->
gmaxwell: i've realized this as always for what it is. Let's stop pretending this is a good-faith technical debate. Your entire argument is a masterclass in deflection, so let's talk about something you can't obscure with technical jargon: your patents.
<_Sam-->
How can you, a co-founder of Blockstream, lecture anyone about the purity of Bitcoin's security model when your name is on patents for sidechain technology? Bitcoin was created to be an open, permissionless system, the antithesis of the rent-seeking, proprietary enclosure that the patent system represents.
<_Sam-->
You position yourself as a steward of the protocol while your company was simultaneously building a patent moat around the ecosystem. This isn't about what's best for Bitcoin; it's about what's best for Blockstream's shareholders. You championed the convoluted SegWit soft-fork because it enabled your business model, while dismissing cleaner, more direct scaling approaches that didn't require your proprietary solutions.
<_Sam-->
So, please, spare me the disingenuous lectures. The community's distrust isn't "malicious"; it's a perfectly rational response to the corporate capture of an open-source project that you helped orchestrate.
<_aj_>
_Sam--: take it to reddit, no one here is paying you any attention
<_Sam-->
_aj_: nobody can reddit can explain why merkle root of the utxo set in the block wouldn't work
<_Sam-->
*on reddit
<_Sam-->
only gmaxwell thinks he can
<_aj_>
gmaxwell is active on reddit
<_Sam-->
he was active on irc we were having a lively convo.
<_Sam-->
but it turned into a disingenious exchange. like always.
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<_Sam-->
_aj_: tell gmaxwell if aaron swartz were alive gmaxwelll would be banned from reddit for being a patently a troll.
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<shiza>
instagibbs: wut
<instagibbs>
wall of rage by _Sam--
<shiza>
meh
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<_Sam-->
BlueMatt: you've been around a long time mr corallo. Perhaps you can do a better job than gmaxwell at teaching me why using UTXO commitment such as a merkle root in the block header would not work, and why segwit was more important?
<_Sam-->
having worked on unecessary sidechains since their inception, you should be well versed.
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<BlueMatt[m]>
someone wanna ban this moron?
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_Sam-- was kicked from #bitcoin-core-dev by ChanServ [Banned: annoying...]
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<gmaxwell>
instagibbs: you're not wrong, all of a sudden last week I started getting threatening messages, and now also rando account stalking me around the internet with offtopic attacks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45064111
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<instagibbs>
hah, yeah same flavor
<kinlo>
sam isn't new, he never left. But best to not feed the trolls...
<antimony>
you created your own harassment, because you're a tool who thinks they're smart by posting a torrent to piratebay.
<gmaxwell>
kinlo: didn't reconize the name, and inquired with others before responding.
<phantomcircuit>
also seems to be a group of people not just the one lunatic
<phantomcircuit>
they're definitely posting some sorta ai responses too since some of the errors are just weird
<BlueMatt[m]>
AI reducing the cost of harassment. fun.
<antimony>
If you feel harassed by a person arguing fervently about a correct technical working, then you are in the wrong field.
<phantomcircuit>
antimony, you're wrong and responding with chatgpt garbage, please self ban thank you
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<antimony>
phantomcircuit: please don't forget Sam wrote the first bitcoin pump bot that sent the price from 1 to 10 dollars. it made a lot of people money.
<antimony>
he also invented "dust" on the blockchain.
<antimony>
over a php bet.
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<antimony>
he's created stratum mining pools, and innovated an auto switching transparent port forwarding solution to route miner traffic where i wanted it.
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<phantomcircuit>
antimony, and im a unicorn fart
<phantomcircuit>
woooo woooooo
<antimony>
phantomcircuit: he's been around a long time, knows everyone, and is a geek. there's no reason to think he's out to be malicious. he's probably just smarter and ruder than you.
<phantomcircuit>
antimony, now im a cow
<phantomcircuit>
MOOOOOO
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<antimony>
Encounter: The Martians float into a room, spot a telephone, and begin to approach it warily, chanting "Yip, yip, yip, yip". Imitation: They listen to the ring and try to mimic it using various animal noises, such as "brrrring" and "MOOOOOO".".
<antimony>
Escape: When the phone's receiver is lifted, a garbled human voice shouts at them. The terrified Martians quickly consult their "book of things on Earth," decide it's a "nope, nope, nope," and disappear.
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<kinlo>
sigh
<kinlo>
antimony is _Sam-- ban evading, he used the account before
<l0rinc>
allow me to change this exciting discussion to get back on the translation issue we talked about in yesterday's meeting
<l0rinc>
I have checked the problem against the actual Core translations on Transifex and I managed to reproduce the massive invalidations using a clone of Core's Transifex repo created by achow101
<l0rinc>
the problem wasn't in Transifex but rather how we assign stable ids to existing translations (since the English texts are used as keys, changing that confused the id assigning agent)
<l0rinc>
I pushed a fix for this in general which reassigns the old IDs so now if we change a single entry, all other translations are kept (including translations for major releases which currently seem to invalidate roughly 90% of the entries), see https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/33270#issuecomment-3238407406
<phantomcircuit>
l0rinc, iono man everybody should hear me moo i swear it sounds like a real cow :)
<gmaxwell>
phantomcircuit: the cows never moo back for me.
<gmaxwell>
achow101: would it be possible to do some machine assignment once based on using the strings, and then just keep them?
<achow101>
maybe
<l0rinc>
for old ones, yes, but new ones would probably need to be assigned manually - but the current solution already seems to solve the problem, it's not as ugly as it sounds
<gmaxwell>
yeah assignment is kind of a problem with many patches in flight at once.
<gmaxwell>
basically that would need to be 'add initially without an ID and then after merge make additional commits adding sequential ids'
<achow101>
we could definitely add them automatically for the strings that end up in src/qt/bitcoinstrings.cpp, which should be every string that is not in qt
<achow101>
but for all of the qt strings, I think that's a bit more involved
<achow101>
could probably do something with a macro though