Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Removing OP_Return restrictions: Devil's Advocate Position

From: Pieter Wuille <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 17:52:40 +0000

Hi Bob,

On Wednesday, May 21st, 2025 at 1:24 PM, Bob Burnett <[email-masked]> wrote:

> None of my comments insinuate that deals would not be public or that all users and all miners would not have access to this service. The product/service I am working on would be public and anyone could participate.

By publicly-enforced I literally mean deals enforced by the public, i.e., the Bitcoin network, where anyone is free to participate without needing to ask anyone for permission (e.g., I could imagine some hypothetical mechanism to buy futures of block space directly, as part of Bitcoin's network rules). This is in contrast with what I think you're referring to, a business deal, known to the public or not, that is enforced by parties knowing each other, and having legal agreements between them, or at least some means of legal recourse.

The point is that revenue streams for miners that rely on them being identifiable real-world parties hurt permissionless of entry to the mining market, as they'd either need to build up their own contracts with block space users (where a new small-hashrate miner would be in a bad negotiating position), or join a conglomerate of miners that handles these contracts jointly - requiring asking the conglomerate for permission.

> A world in which there is no ability for users to have some level of certainty about access to future blockspace and the cost of that blockspace is not one that, imo, can scale to the levels that I believe we all hope to attain. Blockspace can/should act like any other commodity (think corn or soybeans) in which sellers (miners) mitigate risk and lock in long term revenue streams, and consumers (users) can guarantee their future access and the cost of that access. Blockspace acting as purely a real-time, spot market is not one that I feel is capable of scaling to global levels.

And yes, I understand how demand for such services makes sense, and I do not fault you for pursuing them. But they are a threat, and I think the Bitcoin ecosystem should think hard about how to avoid their emergence.

--

Pieter

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