I really thought we had seen the bottom in terms of Bitcoiners making irrational and ridiculous arguments against improving Bitcoin while portraying themselves as some kind of righteous underdog fighting against corruption and incompetence from the inside. .
Boy, was I wrong?
So, first a few things need to be explained. With Lightning Channels, you must set your fee rate for unilaterally closing transactions ahead of time. Because the actual UTXO is a multisig, both sides of the channel have to sign the transaction which both parties use to unilaterally close the channel prematurely. The entire safety of lightning is based on their existence. If you ever need to use someone, let’s say your counterparty is uncooperative, you certainly can’t count on them to resign themselves to a higher fee-rate if you need them.
This created problems during the unilateral closure of tariffs. If the fees were high and have decreased since opening the channel, you paid money you did not need. If the fees were low and increased, you cannot guarantee that your channel will take off on time. You can’t do replace-by-fee (RBF) because your counterparty needs to sign, and you can’t use child-pay-for-parent (CPFP) because all your outputs are timelocked, so the cost on them is Nothing done will be valid unless after The first transaction actually confirms and a number of blocks are passed.
Because of this, anchor outputs were created. They were special outputs that existed without timelock for the sole purpose of being able to spend in child transactions to fee-bump Lightning Close transactions. However, these further increased the inefficiency of capital, making it necessary to use a negligible amount of Satoshi to create these outputs.
Enter ephemeral anchors, building on V3 transaction relays and package relays (relaying transactions across the mempool as groups). The idea is to allow an output of value 0 with OP_TRUE to be spent (meaning anyone can spend it). Transactions that have a fee-rate of 0, and involve a short-term anchor, will be relayed to the mempool. as long as A child transaction is a short-term anchor output spender with a reasonable fee-rate.
This allows Lightning Channels to sign unilateral closing transactions without any fees, and anyone who needs to use them can spend short-term anchor outputs to set the fee-rate they need at that time. . This greatly simplifies lightning closing transactions, and removes the capital inefficiencies of existing anchor outputs. An added bonus is that Any Fees may be levied on transactions with a short-term anchor, not just with channel (or other contract) owners.
The short-term anchor never creates a 0 value UTXO in the UTXO set, as it will only be relayed with a transaction that spends it immediately in the same block.
So why is this a problem? or attack? I have no clue, this is an amazing simplification that essentially any second layer protocol, or contract built on Bitcoin in general, that uses pre-signed transactions would greatly benefit from. This does not cause any bloat in the UTXO set, because as the name implies, the outputs used are short-lived. They are not actually built permanently.
The only arguments I’ve seen are “Spam!” or “Core developers are removing the dust limit!” (The restriction on minimum price transaction output should be relayed, and they are not removing it for anything other than short-term anchors, which Sure To be relayed will be immediately spent by the child).
I think we are at the point where we have to seriously consider whether it is time to dismiss criticism or complaints related to technical topics in this area. Or where legitimate criticisms cease to be so, and become illogical and illogical crusades against or in favor of personalities instead of rational criticism. Because this reaction against short-term anchors is unquestionably the latter.
All rational criticism should be welcomed in an open source protocol like Bitcoin, but it is time to stop mocking irrational tribalism without any logical basis as if it equates to legitimate criticism. It is not, it is a complete waste of time and a denial of service attack against the process of improving Bitcoin.
This article is a TakeThe opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
