Quote from: theymos on Today at 06:27:26 PM

people will have much stronger feelings about a contiguous CP image in the chain than a non-contiguous image; a non-contiguous image is a lot easier to ignore.

It makes absolutely no legal difference, it makes no functional difference. You already noted anyone can do it by mining a block, which you can do at a fairly minor cost using nicehash or other similar services, but you don't even have to because as was demonstrated at the start of the discussion major miners (and likely a majority of hashpower even!) were already ignoring that op_return limit in their policy! (and doing so THANKS to motherfucking luke and his outspoken stupidity causing miners to erroneously believe that the existing filtering policy was politically loaded and try to diminish their income!) So it's already there, even before all this discussion. The world hasn't ended.

What bitcoin core does doesn't matter when it comes to policy that keeps valid transactions out of the chain, what miner do matter. In particular, even a small minority of miners not enforcing a policy makes it moot. And this is good because the fact that information is easy to spread and hard to stifle is what is protecting bitcoin from outrageous financial censorship. Bitcoin core not relaying transactions which are readily mined only hurts Bitcoin by promoting centralization both in the form of direct miner submission which increases income for the largest miners, and harming block propagation which improves income for the largest miners.

I think it's doubly ironic to see promoters of bitcoin spinoffs that already have no such limits, and were in fact shitting on bitcoin 7 years ago, claiming that OP_RETURN being limited was some kind of commercial conspiracy to undermine bitcoin -- are out in force claiming that removing the limits (that their own favored chain doesn't have!) is a conspiracy to undermine bitcoin.

Though anyone convinced that it makes a difference is free to write a few-lines patch to change the serialization to make any of the encoding non-contiguous. Of course, no one is doing that because the "concern" is just fake. The only normative parts of data encoding in bitcoin is the order that data going into the hash functions. Otherwise software is completely free to do whatever it wants. In Bitcoin core today all block data stored on disk is encrypted. All data sent to other modern nodes is encrypted... and part of the reason for this is so that there wouldn't be any problems with idiotic scanning software that doesn't know what its looking at.

All where seeing here is just more desperate lying and goalpost shifting by dishonest attackers who are desperate to seize any meaingless fringe. Up thread, the allegation was made that bitcoin core contributors were into shitcoins. I challenged for any substantiation-- and I get just crickets. Now the thread is going on about 'contiguous data' .

Meanwhile the *known* approaches which can reduce risks from illegal data (beyond the encryption stuff that is already done) like starting from a utxo snapshot, running pruned, and so are worked on by the very people being attacked through these lies and ignored or discouraged by supposedly concerned.