While many Bitcoin users have been embroiled in social media flame wars over the use of individual node-level “spam” filters for most of this year, those involved in the Bitcoin (BTC) mining industry have largely stayed in their lane and thrived without a care in the world.
Bitcoin’s block size war has involved many miners who are willing to share their opinions on the right way to expand the network going forward. But it was a different time.
Despite the creation of the first Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) in light of the possibility of a soft fork related to the “spam” controversy, most individual miners and mining pools are more concerned about their own business operations and focused on their professional role in the broader ecosystem.
Previously, coordination with miners was an integral part of the soft fork process, as the aim was for miners to update first to ensure everything went smoothly.
This aspect of the soft fork update process became politicized during the Segregated Witness (SegWit) activation process, but Taproot was activated relatively quickly without much input from miners.
Some may be surprised by the general lack of input from miners and mining pools on the “spam” debate so far, but these groups tend to stay away from these types of technical discussions. it’s not a new phenomenon.
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The situation is not 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 wars, some miners and community members were so determined to increase block size limits that they openly considered attacking minority hashrate chains to enforce preferred rulesets upon chain splits.
Of course, it should be noted that the disagreement over block size limits was much more economically equivalent than the current debate over spam filters.
In terms of full support for soft forks between miners or between economic nodes, it is essentially just Ocean Mining Pool, and even this support is primarily in the form of social media posts and rhetoric. instead of running the code.
Of course, it’s also worth noting that some miners may have had other incentives during the block size discussion in the form of the ASICBoost controversy.
Whichever way you look at it, there was clearly more at stake at the time.
Are we talking about Bitcoin Core contributors or lawyers? protea The nearly month-old survey also makes it clear that neither side wants a soft fork, at least when it comes to “spam” and related controversies more generally.
Read more: Bitcoin Core v30 could cause ‘catastrophic’ node shutdowns, critics warn
Miners have become less active in Bitcoin technical discussions
These days, there tends to be a wall between mining, development, and other sectors of the entire Bitcoin network, as if they operate in completely different industries.
This was a view shared by Blockspace Media’s Colin Harper and Charlie Spears during a Bitcoin Season 2 episode recorded at the North American Blockchain Summit in Texas earlier this month.
According to the two, the event was attended by 30% of the network hashrate, and no one discussed the recent release of Bitcoin Core v30, which includes the policy changes at the center of the “spam” controversy.
“Bitcoin is incredibly siled, and it’s very difficult to be a subject matter expert in all these different silos,” Harper said. “and miners are mainly concerned about making money”
Spears added that most BTC miners probably don’t know which version of Bitcoin Core their mining pool is running.
“They don’t think about it,” Harper said.
Up until this point, many miners and mining pools contacted by Protoss for this article seemed uninterested in commenting on the controversy surrounding Bitcoin’s “spam” and “illegal content.”
Some respondents said they were not the right people to comment on a potential spam-related soft fork, while others said they simply didn’t want to get involved in 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 have no say in the future due to previous controversy related to Ordinals Inscriptions.
“Miners care about one thing the most and that is the price of Bitcoin,” Storck said when asked for comment by Protoss.
“Second, they learned that people get upset when they get involved.”
Read more: ‘Buggy’ Bitcoin Lightning Network is slowly disappearing, critics claim
Some miners have something to say
Of course, not all miners and mining pools remain silent. Chun Wang, who co-founded one of the largest mining pools at F2Pool, posted on X, “BIP-444 is a bad idea. I’m not going to soft fork anything, temporary or otherwise. I’m saddened that some developers are moving further and further in the wrong direction.”
BIP 444 is a soft fork proposal that gained some attention over the weekend as a pull request was created to be added to the BIP section of the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository.
Additionally, when asked for comment on this soft fork proposal, Tomas Greif, head of product strategy at Brainins, told Protos:This particular suggestion appears to be very poorly written as suggested.
“There are a number of fallacies that could damage Bitcoin (for example, if implemented, it could make some Bitcoins unusable and essentially block some users’ funds, which is currently not possible and has never happened on the Bitcoin network) and attempts to impose laws and morals within the Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin has no flags and no allies, and attempting to politicize it is extremely dangerous.”
Greif added that he personally is not a fan of people inserting images, text, or other forms of arbitrary data into the blockchain. However, no way has yet been found (and may never be found) to prevent that activity in a free, unstoppable system.
“In my opinion, these proposals are ill-conceived and are not the direction we should be moving in,” Greif said. “If we want to propose improvements to blocking spam on the Bitcoin blockchain, we have to find a way to do it efficiently without infringing on user freedoms or Bitcoin’s anti-censorship features. This BIP clearly fails in that regard, so I strongly oppose it.”
Luxor Technology COO Ethan Vera also responded to Protos’ request for comment:
“In general, we believe that users of Luxor mining pools should use the Bitcoin network for as many purposes as possible, creating a lack of block space and higher transaction fees to continue to strengthen the security of the network.”
Of course, these comments from mining pools are the exception that proves the rule. In terms of explicit rejection of soft fork proposals, Brains and F2Pool together account for about 13% of the network hashrate.
Luxor accounts for another 3% or so of the network hash rate. Both MARA and Spiderpool have already mined blocks with larger OP_RETURN transactions, indicating that they have upgraded to Bitcoin Core v30 or other equivalents.
Collectively, these mining pools account for approximately 31% of the network hashrate. “Ocean” effectively expresses contradictory ideas, accounts for approximately 1%.
It’s also worth mentioning that at the end of the day, the mining pool will do what the individual hashers request, and those hashes will want to mine on-chain with the most valuable block reward (all else being equal) determined by the users.
Is lack of miner interest a risk or a feature?
Stork has long argued that miners need to be more actively involved in the Bitcoin development process.
His own project, Drivechain, is closely related to this issue as it potentially allows miners to earn more revenue from transactions made on layer 2 networks.
As for why miners are hesitant to support various soft fork proposals, such as his proposal related to drivechains, Sztorc told Protos: rival miner. These are the types of things miners care about.
“The truth is that technologies (such as Drivechain) need to compete at the coin level. One coin has that feature and the other doesn’t. But we still live in a world where most coins are scams, and there is no competitive coin environment.”
As Sztorc alluded to in the aforementioned editorial, if fees overtake concession subsidies as the main driver of revenue, miners may start paying more attention to technology development. Currently, fees vary from day to day, but only account for about 1% of the total block reward associated with the mining process.
Asked if miners were too focused on the short term and not thinking about the long-term health of the business, Stork said: “I don’t think miners are too short-term minded. I think they probably have the right mindset.”
For now, miners seem happy with Bitcoin Core handling the node software development process. Therefore, changes from a soft fork will have to go through that GitHub repository, at least for the time being.
There is always the possibility that users will rebel against Bitcoin Core and its development choices and force the hands of miners. However, the current state of the “spam” debate seems far from that threshold.
In other words, the collective silence of miners, at least from their side, is effectively endorsing the technical decisions made by Bitcoin Core.
