15 November 2024 · Block Height 870379 · Bitcoin Price $88K

Welcome back to the Blockspace Newsletter!

For today’s roundup, a recap of the biggest question marks to come out of our inaugural tech conference, OP_NEXT. Plus, Bitcoin’s big post-election week, Greenidge Generation’s legal triumph, and the FBI’s raid of Polymarket’s founder’s home.

What caught our eye this week

In case you missed it, we held our Bitcoin scaling conference, OP_NEXT, in Boston last weekend featuring Peter Todd, Rusty Russell (Blockstream), Steve Lee (Chaincode), and many others. We’re publishing all the videos from both Presentation & Workshop stages but in the meantime here’s a quick summary of our takeaways:

Activation itself is probably more controversial than specific soft fork proposals

Everyone has something negative to say about previous activations, particularly Segwit and Taproot. Also there was little-to-no agreement during the conference on what future healthy activation would look like. As ReardenCode put it: to have consensus, we need consensus.

Covenants (using OP_CAT and other opcodes) are going to happen whether we softfork or not

The wheels are already in motion to emulate it. Both through Bitcoin PIPEs and the recently published (but absurdly impractical) Collider Script research (Poelstra, Hileman, Viktor & Avih), OP_CAT and some other covenant opcodes are possible today if you have time and money. TL;DR: we can use fancy math and computers to accomplish the same things CAT does without a soft fork.

Are these methods practical? It probably depends. Our takeaway is that CAT may be so desirable to certain groups that the cost and impracticality may not matter.

The role of developers is to propose softforks, but it’s controversial if they advocate for those forks.

“Developers are naturally in the driver’s seat because we have a dominant reference implementation,” Rusty Russell said in one of the panels at the end of the conference

While Bitcoin Core developers may not drive soft forks, they can de facto veto them. Currently, most soft fork discussion continues to be localized mostly to developer-heavy circles with the recent exception of OP_CAT, which has crossed the chasm into widespread retail support due to the Taproot Wizards campaigning.

Opinions diverge on whether developers should take an active role in promoting their ideas. Look no further than Jeremy Rubin and CTV. CTV, while resoundingly popular today, received harsh pushback both on the proposal and arguably moreso on Jeremy himself, as Jeremy emphatically explained in his presentation.

Ethan Hileman, OP_CAT coauthor, said during the conference that his “job is just to come up with proposals and educate on them,” indicating that he thinks it’s best for developers to stay out of soft fork campaigning (and Ethan largely has – most OP_CAT discussion we see are focused on the proposal, not Ethan and Armin Sabouri, the coauthors of the BIP to reactivate the opcode).

News

Bitcoin soars to new high on new “Trump Trade”

Bitcoin skyrocketed earlier this week to a high of $93,477 on Wednesday. Crypto assets overall added another ~$500 billion to the total crypto market cap. Trump has promised crypto advocates favorable regulatory policy and – more importantly – the prospect of favorable fiscal stimulus policy.

NY Supreme Court rules against NY DEC in favor of miner Greenidge

The New York Supreme Court overturned the New York Department of Environmental Conservation’s rejection of Greenidge Generation’s air permit renewal, a huge win for the public bitcoin miner after more than two years of arbitration with the state regulator. In his decision, the presiding judge said the DEC “acted in a manner that was both affected by errors of law and arbitrary and capricious”.

Polymarket Founder’s phone seized by FBI

The FBI seized Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan’s phone and other electronics in a surprise raid in the bleeding hours of the morning on November 13. Authorities had been telegraphing this move for a while, with reports that the FBI had been investigating the company for allowing Americans to bet on the site, which they are not permitted to do by law. Many condemn the raid as politically motivated, including Coplan himself later in the day.

Chart of the week

How long does it take a Bitcoin block to get from one node to the whole network? This phenomenon is called the “propagation delay,” and it is usually a sign of the Bitcoin node network’s level of optimization. Recently, some Bitcoin developer gigabrains such as Murch have been discussing optimizing Bitcoin nodes with a “cluster mempool,” an improvement over existing node mempool logic.

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