Bitcoin mining industry mostly uninterested in spam controversy
While many Bitcoin users have been engaged in a social media flamewar over the use of individual node-level “spam” filters for most of the year, those involved in the bitcoin (BTC) mining industry have mostly stayed in their lanes, unbothered and flourishing.
The Bitcoin block size war involved a number of miners who were very willing to share their opinions on the correct way to scale the network going forward. However, that was a different time.
Even with the first Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) now written for a potential soft fork related to the “spam” controversy, most individual miners and mining pools are more worried about their own business operations and focused on their specialized roles in the wider ecosystem.
In the past, coordination with miners had been an integral part of the soft fork process, as the miners were intended to update first to make sure everything went smoothly.
While this aspect of the soft fork updating process was politicized during the activation process for Segregated Witness (SegWit), Taproot was activated rather quickly without much input from miners at all.
The general lack of input from miners and mining pools on the “spam” controversy up to this point may be surprising to some, but the tendency of these entities to stay out of these sorts of technical debates is definitely not a new phenomenon.
Read more: Bitcoin dev wants to ban 3,000 Knots nodes amid OP_RETURN clash
Things aren’t as heated as the block size war
Some Bitcoin users are still surprised by the lack of miner input, especially given that during the block size war, certain miners and community members were so determined to increase the block size limit that they openly considered attacking the minority hashrate chain to enforce their preferred ruleset in the event of a chain split.
Of course, it should be noted that the disagreement over the block size limit was much more economically equal than the current debate around spam filters.
In terms of outright support for a soft fork among miners or economic nodes, it’s basically just the Ocean mining pool, and even this support has mostly been in the form of social media posts and rhetoric rather than running any code.
Of course, it’s also worth noting that some miners may have had alternative incentives at play during the block size debate in the form of the ASICBoost controversy.
Whichever way you look at it, there was clearly much more at stake during that time.
Whether you’re talking about Bitcoin Core contributors or the lawyers Protos surveyed nearly a month ago, it’s also clear there is no desire for a soft fork on either of those fronts — at least in terms of the “spam” and its associated controversies more generally.
Read more: Bitcoin Core v30 could cause ‘catastrophic’ node shutdown, critics warn
Miners have become less active in technical Bitcoin discussions
These days, there tends to be a wall between the mining, development, and other sectors of the greater Bitcoin network, almost as if they operate in completely different industries.
This was a view shared by Blockspace Media’s Colin Harper and Charlie Spears in an episode of Bitcoin Season 2 that was recorded at the North American Blockchain Summit in Texas earlier this month.
According to the duo, 30% of the network hashrate was at the event, and no one had been discussing the recent release of Bitcoin Core v30, which included a policy change that is at the heart of the “spam” controversy.
“Bitcoin has become incredibly siloed, and it’s very hard to be a subject matter expert in all of these different siloes,” said Harper. “And miners are mostly worried about making money.”
Spears added that most BTC miners would probably not know what version of Bitcoin Core their mining pool runs.
“They’re not thinking about it,” said Harper.
To this point, many miners and mining pools who Protos reached out to for this article appeared uninterested in commenting on the controversies around “spam” and “illegal content” on Bitcoin.
Some respondents indicated they weren’t the right entity to comment on potential soft forks related to spam, while others stated that they simply did not want to get involved with the drama.
Earlier this month, LayerTwo Labs CEO Paul Sztorc also claimed that Foundry, which operates the largest BTC mining pool on the network, plans to never have any opinion about anything going forward due to a previous controversy related to Ordinals Inscriptions.
“I think miners have mostly cared about one thing: the Bitcoin price,” said Sztorc when reached by Protos for comment.
“Secondly, they have learned that if they get involved, people will be upset.”
Read more: Critics claim ‘buggy’ Bitcoin Lightning Network is slowly dying
Some miners do have something to say
Of course, not all miners or mining pools have remained silent. Chun Wang, who co-founded one of the largest mining pools in F2Pool, posted on X, “BIP-444 is a bad idea. Not going to soft fork anything. Temporary or not. Feel sad that some devs moving further and further in the wrong direction.”
BIP 444 is the soft fork proposal that gained some attention this past weekend, as a pull request was made in an effort to add it to the BIPs section of the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository.
Additionally, when asked to comment on this soft fork proposal, Braiins Chief of Product and Strategy Tomas Greif told Protos, “This specific proposal seems very poorly written [as] proposed.
“There are many fallacies that could damage Bitcoin (for example, if implemented, it could make some Bitcoin unspendable and basically block some users’ funds, something that is currently impossible and has never happened on the Bitcoin network) and tries to impose laws and morality inside the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin has no flag or sides, and trying to politicize it is extremely dangerous.”
Grief added that he’s personally not a fan of people inserting images, text, and other forms of arbitrary data into the blockchain; however, a way of preventing that activity in a free and unstoppable system has yet to be found (and may never be found).
“Proposals like this one, in my opinion, are badly written and not a direction we should move toward,” said Greif. “If we want to propose an improvement to block spam in the Bitcoin blockchain, we must find a way to do it efficiently without violating users’ freedom or Bitcoin’s anti-censorship features. This BIP obviously fails in that regard, so I’m strongly against it.”
Luxor Technology COO Ethan Vera also responded to a request for comment from Protos, stating, “Luxor Mining Pool consults with its hashrate contributors on all signalling, activation and fork discussions.
“Generally, Luxor’s mining pool users are of the belief that the Bitcoin network should be used for as many purposes as possible that create scarcity for block space and higher transaction fees to continue to incentivize the growing security of the network.”
Of course, these comments from mining pools are the exception that prove the rule. In terms of explicit rejections of the soft fork proposal, Braiins and F2Pool combine for roughly 13% of the network hashrate.
Luxor accounts for another 3% or so of the network hashrate. MARA and Spiderpool have both also already mined blocks with larger OP_RETURN transactions, indicating they’ve upgraded to Bitcoin Core v30 or some other equivalent.
Altogether, these mining pools account for around 31% of the network hashrate. Ocean, which effectively represents the opposing view, accounts for around 1%.
It’s also worth mentioning that, at the end of the day, mining pools will do what’s demanded by individual hashers, and those hashers will want to mine on the chain with the most valuable block reward (all else being equal), which is determined by users.
Is lack of miner interest a risk or a feature?
Sztorc has been saying miners need to become more active in the Bitcoin development process for years.
His own project, Drivechain, is closely related to this issue, as it would potentially allow miners to gain much more revenue from transactions made on layer-two networks.
In terms of why miners have been hesitant to support various soft fork proposals, such as his own related to Drivechain, Sztorc told Protos, “Because there is no way for one miner to use it to compete against a rival miner. Those are the types of things that miners care about.
“Truthfully, tech (such as Drivechain) needs to compete at the coin level — one coin has the feature, the other doesn’t. But we still live in a world where most coins are scams, so we don’t have a competitive coin landscape.”
As Sztorc hinted at in his aforementioned op-ed, it’s possible miners will start paying more attention to technical developments once fees overtake the block subsidy as the main contributor to their revenue. Currently, fees still only account for around 1% of the overall block reward associated with the mining process, depending on the day.
When asked if miners may be too focused on the short term and not thinking about the long term health of their operations, Sztorc replied, “I don’t think miners are too short-term minded. I think they probably have about the correct minded-ness.”
For now, miners seem content with Bitcoin Core taking care of the node software development process. So, any soft-forking changes will likely need to make their way through that GitHub repository, at least for the foreseeable future.
There’s always the possibility that users could force miners’ hands by revolting against Bitcoin Core and their development choices; however, the current situation with the “spam” debate doesn’t appear to be anywhere near that threshold.
In other words, miners’ collective silence is effectively an endorsement of the technical decisions made by Bitcoin Core, at least from their end.
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