Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] Proposal to solve the spam war: configurable data blob relay policy

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2025 10:25:43 +0000

On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 06:16:20AM -0700, Greg Sanders wrote:
> > If we need two networks, one for stuff like what Citrea is doing and the 
> other for finance with a technological fence around it, I'm all for it. Has 
> Citrea heard of nostr?
> 
> Citrea, like Lightning, is relying on Bitcoin's proof of publication to 
> ultimately move bitcoin. Moving the data elsewhere would change the L2's 
> security model drastically.

FYI I wrote a fair bit about proof-of-publication started in 2013, over a
decade ago:

https://petertodd.org/2013/disentangling-crypto-coin-mining
https://petertodd.org/2014/setting-the-record-proof-of-publication

Putting data in the Bitcoin chain creates a proof that an overwhelming amount
of hash power has "seen" the data; in practice it's proof that everyone who
could ever want a copy of that data has a copy of it.

Lesser schemes simply can't provide that kind of guarantee. So it should be no
surprise that high-value use-cases like Citrea - or even NFTs - choose to use
Bitcoin as a publication layer.

That said, it would be interesting to see some schemes with lesser security
guarantees get developed. Bitmessage for example tried to develop a message
publication layer for anonymous messaging. But, notably, the last release of
Bitmessage is over 7 years ago, and I've been told that the software basically
doesn't work any more and old messages have all been lost.

Data published to the Bitcoin chain a decade ago can still easily be recovered.
A case in point: https://bitcoinstrings.com/

If someone does want to make a serious attempt at developing a new type of
proof-of-publication system, I'd strongly suggest focusing on the proof aspect:
make sure that your underlying cryptography actually proves that a given bit of
data is widely published. For example, if the system is based on sacrificing
Bitcoin to make data valuable, prove that other, previously published, data was
also published by using some kind of proof-of-posession like a random sampling
of a merkle tree of previously published data to show that all data in the
system had reached the wide audience that it is supposed to.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org

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