Fake Pubkeys, Real Lessons: Historical Analysis from Counterparty
Aaron Recompile published an analysis of Counterparty’s “fake-pubkey grinding,” using it as a historical case. The piece highlights how early data-embedding techniques exposed the boundary between what Bitcoin permits at consensus and what the network chooses to relay, framing a debate still relevant for today’s L2 and BitVM discussions.
medium.com/@aaron.recompile
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Why Counterparty’s Fake-Pubkey Grinding Reveals the Real Boundary Between Bitcoin Consensus and Policy
Bitcoin is not a state machine.
It is a verifiable sequence of events.
'Event Machine Letters - Protocol Thoughts on Bitcoin's Architecture' begins here.
· Consensus guarantees possibility.
· Policy guarantees sanity.
Most debates around Bitcoin protocol behavior (including recent ones) come from mixing these two layers together. Counterparty provides a perfect historical case study for why this distinction matters.