코인톡

A few people are curious about what I'm talking about when I say bitcoin should be "Ossified" and that it is a daemon only, and not a platform, and why I compare it to http the protocol that runs the presentation of web pages on the World Wide Web.

I will use two examples to explain this; the familiar Dropbox, and the less familiar Chiptune App.

Dropbox and other services like it allow users to store very large files; files that are too large to send via email. The popular email clients have the following file attachment limits; Gmail 25MB, Outlook 20-150MB, Yahoo Mail 25MB, iCloud 20MB.

Email attachments have to be sent as plaintext, and so they are Base64 encoded before being sent in an email. Because Base64 encoding inflates attachments by 33%, the real upper limit of a 25MB is a file of 18MB. This upper limit is why Apple's iCloud is used to handle large file attachments and other services use their own cloud-storage, rather than allowing inline attachment of Base64 encoded files.

Dropbox presents its users with a web interface to the storage they offer. That web interface is served by the webserver Nginx, and they used it for a decade.

Nginx is a very light web server, that does one thing only; serve web pages. Nginx is chosen by companies because it has a smaller memory footprint that stays nearly flat, whilst Apache (Apache dominated from the mid-1990s to ~2020; Nginx now leads among high-traffic sites especially) has a footprint that grows per connection, especially with mod_php installed.

Nginx serves static content faster than Apache with lower CPU overhead. That means it performs better on hardware, meaning you don't need to pay for more hardware to get the same results as you would had you chosen Apache to serve your web pages.

Nginx's Concurrency Model uses a few worker processes to handle thousands of connections each, while Apache has a one process per connection method, consuming far more memory than Nginx.

If you are running a website, you choose the server that allows you to do the most with your hardware; this is why Nginx is the webserver of choice for high traffic websites.

Now, imagine if F5 Networks and Igor Sysoev who own Nginx, decided to develop a version of that webserver where the files of other people are stored by your copy of Nginx.

That would mean that completely random people, who you have no contract with, would be able to store pornography, warez and every other imaginable file on Dropboxes infrastructure, using the tool for serving webpages.

I think you can see where this is going, can't you?

The people who want to use Bitcoin as money, the actual bitcoiners, are running the bitcoin daemon to do that very specific job; mediate the synthetic money network. Bitcoin runs efficiently, and can be built upon to create valuable services, in the same way Dropbox does on top of Nginx and other single purpose tools in its suite, some of which they've built for themselves in house.

All of a sudden, a group of disgusting perverts and idiots have come along, and in an audacious conspiracy, changed the bitcoin daemon reference client to force everyone running bitcoin to store their user's criminal pornographic files.

Everyone running bitcoin, for whatever reason, is now compelled to store the files of perverts; files that have absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin storing synthetic financial transaction data showing which database entries are allocated to which private keys.

Obviously, companies like Dropbox would never consent to running a 'Nginx 30 Bitcoin Core Edition", where their copy is leveraged into a pornography fileserver for random files to be stored and retrieved, forever, with no opt out.

And this brings us to where Dropbox stores the files they maintain for their users.

Dropbox, like all properly run businesses, uses one tool for one of each of the functions in their business. They use Nginx for serving webpage interfaces and they store file data on Magic Pocket, its custom-built exabyte-scale in-house storage system, after migrating themselves off of Amazon S3 in 2015–2016.

(N.B. Amazon built S3 to charge people to store large numbers of files. If Bitcoin Pornographers want to store files, they should go to Amazon. They won't do this however, because they have to identify themselves to Amazon, and that means they could get caught for storing pornographic files.)

Nginx have their own super efficient file storage tools to manage the files their customers give them to store, and those files are split into blocks of up to 4 MB, compressed, encrypted (AES-256), and content-addressed by hash. Deduplication happens at the block level, making file storage very efficient for them.

This is the complete opposite of using bitcoin's chain of blocks to distribute files across the machines of many thousands of random people running full nodes in perpetuity.

Not only is it inefficient, it is fundamentally unethical. It is a clear corruption of not only design principles of how to run services at scale, but it is a violation of people's property rights in the guise of "Open Source" and "Consensus".

The correct way to run storage with (not on) Bitcoin is to use the built in signing functions in bitcoin to create the hashes that refer to files stored in private infrastructure; but even that is overkill, because hashes are free to create in the billions using freestanding GPG and other secure hash creating tools. You don't need to use bitcoind for this any more than Dropbox needs it.

Exactly the same can be said of Chiptune (https://t.co/iP5Ng7lmXN) which presents a retro web interface to files stored running a web server daemon, and 309,313 files of chip tunes stored in file storage systems that are entirely separate from the Web Server function.

This is true of every website on the web. Every system architect of big services knows this, and it is telling that the people who run Bitcoin Magazine do not consult with and have never spoken to people who are system architects of large sites, being obviously siloed in their Bitcoin Cult echo chamber.

Given all of this, it should be manifestly clear to you that storing files in bitcoin is a non starter, is anti-pattern, is unethical, is inefficient, and profoundly stupid on its face.

There are only a small number of explanations for the bizarre behaviour you're seeing from the people who are promoting the insanity of storing arbitrary files on bitcoin.

1/ Ignorance and Incompetence
They do not know what they're doing, and are not competent enough to find out why what they're doing and promoting is wrong.

2/Malicious and Malevolent
They know exactly what they are doing, and are either being commanded to do it by the State, or are making a move for a last extractive squeeze of Bitcoin before destroying and collapsing it, by launching a "Token" in a flagrant pump and dump.

3/Dumb and Dumber
They're just dumb. They're carpetbaggers from dieting and fashion, Wall Street, investment and other industries, and just happened to read about bitcoin somewhere. These people "invested" in altcoins, got burned, understood that "bitcoin was it" and then became "Bitcoiners" because that's what's hip.

Whatever the explanation is, it is possible for Bitcoin to survive an attack from these low IQ characters, but it would be much better for bitcoin if attacks from their class were rendered impossible, so that bitcoiners can put that effort into businesses to spread bitcoin across the globe rather than fighting CHUDs.

If it becomes impossible to change bitcoin, then bitcoin becomes like Nginx; a super efficient daemon used to do one thing; cause the Internet of Money to emerge.

That's the background describing, roughly, why file storage on bitcoin is one of the most stupid and evil things imaginable. Anyone who is proposing that bitcoin should be used for storing files is anti-bitcoin, and is actively working to abort the birth of The Internet of Money.

Getsuga Jūjishō.