Simpler is better ... so removing complexity from the bitcoin codebase is a huge mistake?  ?


(added hyperlink)

Hi Og, I made an agreement with another forum poster that you would give me all your assets.  Of course, your participation was expressly and explicitly excluded from our negotiation, but none the less you have obligations and aren't living up to them right now. Pay up!  I'll let you keep a cardboard box to sleep in, and if you're nice a swamp cooler. I'm sure you wouldn't want to fail to live up to your obligations. 

That risk sucks but it exists today and isn't changed by alterations to opreturn filtering on nodes.

You can mitigate the risk by setting "prune=1" in your bitcoin.conf.  This won't actually prune any blocks, but will behave to the outside world as if you have-- so it won't serve any historic blocks more than about two days old.  You can also make sure your block files are new enough that they're encrypted so that scanning tools won't flag anything in them.

It's important to keep some perspective:  No one has ever gotten in trouble with this and it's only one of many fringe theoretical risks.  Life just has risks--  someone could relay a north korean transaction through your node and authorities could potentially try blaming you for it or just come to seize your node to try to get logs to determine the transaction's origin.  Also very not likely.  You could be sued for patent infringement by Craig Wright's co-scammer business partners as they've repeatedly claimed Bitcoin violates their patents the fact that they're full of shit doesn't mean that they couldn't cause you bankrupting levels of legal expenses.

But if you don't run your own node maybe you're the last straw that otherwise would have helped hold back a bad consensus change.

Basically if you're going to commit yourself to worrying then there is no end to it.   The best you can do is be aware of more significant risks, mitigate what you can affordably mitigate and deal with problems as they arise.  Only the dead are invulnerable to risk.


It's not that there is no plan, it's that it's a fundamental issue that appears to be largely unsolvable.  It also isn't unique to bitcoin-- anyone who publishes anything could accidentally transmit illegal data that someone snuck in, even if they were engaging in editorial oversight.