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In this X post, I said, I don't know the consequences of BIP 110. Plenty of people called that incompetent, cowardly, or both. Others praised it as humility. It's neither. It's just true. I don't know the consequences. And here's my claim. Neither do you. The best in Bitcoin Made audible. I am Guy Swan, and this is Bitcoin. Audible. What is up? Buy a bitbox because you love me, but everybody's gonna hate me after this episode anyway. You should get a discount. You, in fact, go ahead and do it now before you hate me. I have a discount code. It's Guy. And you can find the link and details right down in the description of this show. And if you want to get a good hardware wallet and you want to support me because you still love me, it is right down there. It's a great way to help out the show. And I take my sponsorships extremely seriously. And I hope that that is appreciated by everybody, that I go out of my way to make sure that I know and trust and personally know the people involved in basically every project that I have ever told people to use on this show, with the exception of one back in the very first year. And I felt like shit about it for like three weeks and then canceled it. And trust me, this does not make me a lot of money. In fact, it's been losing money for like a year just because I've been investing so much in a bunch of things around this. I don't do this because I'm getting rich doing it. I do this because I love it and I think it's valuable to people. So with that said, all of you are going to hate me. Or at least like 95%. If you support BIP110, you're going to hate me. And if you don't support bip1 0 and you're vehemently against it, you're also going to hate me. So that's why you should pause right now and go get a bitbox. And I just want to say, I haven't canceled anybody's friendship over this issue. I've not canceled anybody's friendship over any issue in Bitcoin, because I think bitcoin is more important than that. But I'll preface this that if you can't get mad and disagree with somebody and actually get into a heated debate without hating them afterward or thinking they're a bad actor, then that's your problem, not mine. So I'll let you make that decision and just do what I've always tried to do on this show is give you my honest take on things. Shout out to Jimmy Song for actually defending himself and and laying out why he thinks there is way too much arrogance on both sides of this thing. And I think he did a great job and I love that everybody on both sides came in and still called him a coward and called him a fence sitter and said you don't technically understand that, and I'm going to address all of it in the end of this. So if you actually want to get a little bit of heated, enjoy this episode. This is going to be a really fun one. If you don't, then fix your panties and go have a conversation with AI for an hour and it tells you how great you are and how everything you think is absolutely right. That will be way more comfortable. But I think this is more fun. So let's get into it. We are getting right into today's read by Jimmy Song and it is titled On Overconfidence by Jimmy song. The BIP110 debate has raged for eight months and both camps keep pressuring me to pick a side. I get it. If BIP110 is existential, which both sides insist it is, then rallying people to pass it or kill it becomes a moral duty. I still refuse. Not because neutrality is the safe spot, the cowardice I'm accused of, but because I have a good reason. This article is that reason. A binary view of this question is corrosive, and the worst of its effects is that it sets the stage for centralization. I am not for or against BIP110, the reason being that I don't know enough about the system to know the consequences of either path. We'll know a little more when the soft fork resolves one way or the other, but currently I have little idea of how anything plays out. In this X post I said I don't know the consequences of BIP110. Plenty of people called that incompetent, cowardly, or both. Others praised it as humility. It's neither. It's just true. I don't know the consequences, and here's my claim. Neither do you. Overconfidence. Arguing on the Internet is annoying for a lot of reasons, but the worst is the certainty. Everyone is dead sure of their position. The reason is simple. People believe the argument that sounds more confident. Over time, this has ratcheted up until total certainty is table stakes for any argument at all. In person, certainty is harder to fake. Body language tone of voice, a pause in the wrong place. All of it leaks the doubt most people actually feel. Online words are easy to compose, and it's easy to sound like you know when you don't. This produces some terrible arguments, and certainty about consequences is the worst of them. If you've studied dynamic systems, you know they're exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions. A tiny change at the start can produce wildly different outcomes. The popular version is the Butterfly effect. A butterfly flaps its wings and six months later the weather turns on the other side of the planet. Science fiction writers use this to show that small acts have big consequences. From a complexity standpoint, that's not the useful part. The useful part is that you can't tell what's going to happen. It's why weather forecasts fall apart past two weeks Weather is a dynamic system, and dynamic systems don't let you see far ahead. So when I say I don't know the consequences of BIP110, I mean it. I don't know. And I don't think anyone can know short of running the experiment. Because bitcoin is a dynamic system too. It has feedback loops, interdependent variables, and behavior that resists modeling. Looking back, take the last solfork taproot. It was in the works for years and plenty of very smart people implemented it and predicted how it would get used. Tweet from Anthony Towns Big short term win is for self custody. I think you get an if I lose my wallet I can recover my funds via X alternative for free. Not sure if exchanges will see benefits in the short term though. I think Bitfinex announced they'll support on day one. One predicted use was social recovery, which is using taproot to back up your coins with help from your friends. The people making that prediction knew Taproot inside and out. They were wrong. Five years on I am not aware of a single consumer wallet doing social recovery with taproot. What actually happened? Nobody saw coming. Inscriptions, Ordinals, BRC. 20 people used taproot to stuff junk into the blockchain. There were also more positive developments like bitvm and ark. These are second order consequences and no one predicted them before taproot shipped. If we look back at segwit, no one predicted the deluge of solforks that would emerge in late 2017 and early 2018. Nor did anyone predict that BCH would emerge or be adopted by Bitmain or that Craig Wright would join them and then split from them and then decide to sue Bitcoin core devs Leading to the resignation of the lead maintainer. Epistemic humility. I'm not fence sitting, I'm telling the truth. We don't understand the full consequences of what we're doing, so we should move carefully and slowly. I'm wary of softworks in general for exactly this reason, because the second and third order consequences are things we keep failing to predict. A hallmark of centralized systems is that they pretend to know what can't be known, namely every consequence of a policy. It's the hubris that drives legislators to pass law after law. Certain they're doing good because their intentions are good, even when the results are bad. Hayek called it the pretense of knowledge. And it's the conceit that makes centralization possible. If people really grasped dynamic systems and how hard second and third order effects are to predict, they'd want fewer laws, not more. That's exactly what's happening here. And people understand other people's pretense of knowledge well enough when it suits them. BIP110 advocates demanded it from core devs over the elimination of the opreturn standardness rules which was then walked back to a change default. Now the same demand runs the other way. Regarding BIP110, each side claims it knows the consequences and the other side doesn't. The truth is that nobody knows them, least of all the second and third order effects. People also paper over their ignorance by appealing to intentions. We want small miners to get as much fees as the big miners get. We want CSAM off the blockchain. Fine intentions both, but intentions don't make good law. Austrian economists have known this for a century. And you don't have to look past socialism's many failed runs to see why the decentralized way. If we shouldn't make large changes, what's the alternative? A decentralized one instead of one policy for everyone. We decide one person at a time. Centralization means surrendering your self sovereignty and letting some other entity decide for you. Usually with a single rule for all. That road leads to surveillance, restriction, confiscation and worse. More laws don't make a better society. Decentralized law has a far better track record. English common law is the classic example. Nobody legislated it. It changed one case at a time. Consensus emerged and norms shifted, but slowly. That's why I favor a policy based approach over a consensus based one. Consensus changes carry all. The second in order risk I've been describing policy is each node deciding for itself. BIP110 so is Jimmy against BIP110 against Solphworks in general, my stance is that Bitcoin is money, and that money is best when it changes very little, which is why I'm an ossificationist. Related to that is my position on softworks, which is that it's fine for bug fixes and security improvements that includes removing opcodes almost nobody uses. I'm for simplification and for shrinking Bitcoin's attack surface. Does BIP110 qualify? I can't tell. Read it one way and it shrinks the attack surface. Less arbitrary data, smaller blocks, cheaper nodes, more of them. Read it the other way and it's a policy preference smuggled into a hurried consensus. Change something even the proponents half concede with their own FAQ and admits that spam is best fault with filters, not forks. Both readings are honest. I can't decide between them, and saying so isn't a dodge. It's the truth. Here's the part I want to be careful about, because it's the whole point of this essay. I'm not for BIP110. I'm also not for stopping it. Those sound like the same refusal, but they're not. To be against activation, I'd have to know the chain is better off without it, and I don't. To be for activation, I'd have to know it's better off with it, and I don't know that either. The boosters are sure it saves Bitcoin the loudest. Opponents are just as sure it wrecks it with their warnings of chain splits and frozen coins. Both are predictions about a dynamic system, which is to say both are guesses wearing the costume of fact. I won't join either side, because joining means claiming a certainty that I've spent this whole essay on arguing. Nobody has. What I will do is defend the attempt. There's a camp that sees unrestricted data on chain as existential, a slow poison that prices out node operators and turns the world's money into the world's hard drive. I don't share their certainty, but a UASF is exactly the tool a decentralized system hands to people who feel that way. Users asserting that they, not miners, are the final authority over the rules, and telling them they aren't allowed to try would be the centralizing move, the one this whole essay warns against. And it would mean pretending I know their stand is wrong. I don't. They have every right to make it, and they're going to make it no matter what I say. The signaling is live. The Software ships, the block heights are set. My declaring for or against changes none of it. So the real choice in front of me was never activate or don't. It's fight the attempt, bless the attempt, or watch it. I choose to watch because however this resolves, we learn something valuable we currently don't know. That's the one thing I'm actually sure of. If bip110 stalls at single digit signaling and dies, we learn how a hostile user activated soft fork fails and what it takes to kill one. If it activates, we learn what it takes for a software with significant opposition to succeed. Either resolution clears a patch of the fog. The honest position the pressure to declare for or against assumes one side can see the end of this from the beginning. Neither can the boosters are guessing and the doomsayers are guessing. And dressing a guess in confidence doesn't turn it into knowledge. That's the conceit that builds central planners, the pretense that the consequences of a policy can be known in advance when the whole lesson of Dyna dynamic systems is that they can't. So my honest position is the one I started with. I don't know the consequences of activating bip110. I don't know the consequences of blocking it, and neither do you. I'm not for it and I'm not against it. The only thing I'll commit to is the process. The people who think the stakes are existential have the right to make their case to the network. They're going to make it regardless and watching how it plays out is how we learn. We'll know what BIP 110 does to Bitcoin when it plays out one way or the other. Until then, anyone who tells you they already know is selling the same false certainty that builds every system Bitcoin was made to escape. You should buy a bitbox for your own sake so that you can hold your own keys. Do it easily. And bitboxes are just cool. They're one of my favorite hardware wallets, have been for a very very long time and particularly I like their entire stack to go from like start to finish. Use their software, their the ability to just plug it right into a phone. It's just a really awesome tool. It's a great hardware wallet and in addition you should also support the show because I do a lot of work and it helps me out and I only promote. I take my advertising very seriously on this. I refuse to work with anybody that I does not have a product that I literally know and Love that I specifically trust. And it's a great way to help out the show. You've got a discount code and all you got to do is remember to put mine in when you go get your hardware wallet. Check it out. Links and details right in the show notes. This was fantastic, man. And it is hilarious. The, the God, the determinism that this has been responded to on both sides. The usual suspects and the not usual suspects. But I want to address some of them because this whole. This literally drives me crazy. Because people think that because they have a technical reason or that there's a technical reality about one tool or one piece of this and because they understand that technical reality that they understand the social consequences. All of these consequences are social. And I'm going to start with Adam back, who I massively respect and consider him a friend, but I'm going to shit on him a little bit here. He said fence sitters gonna fence sit. The stuff about Taproot is nonsense, coincidental. Spam as easily sent is easily sent, I think is what it's supposed to say with segwit or P2SH. Tech people know better. Segwit had widespread consensus that crazily. The crazily broken filter bip does not accordingly it will fail. Simple man. This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. The stuff about Taproot is nonsense. It's coincidental. Spam was easily sent with Segwit or P2SH. You don't. Nobody knows that. It literally didn't happen until Taproot and explicitly until we blew out. The script size, the script witness limit, it was 10 kilobytes. That was the most you could put in a transaction. The claim is not that you could not put steganography, steganography or put data into the chain. The claim is that the way and ability and the cost of doing so absolutely changed. And thus the social outcome and the trade off of people actually paying to do that did in fact change. You can't say that you change the incentives, you change the price and the cost and the mode of interaction and that that did not change the outcome. Especially when the. The empirical evidence is to the contrary. They weren't using Segwit or P2SH to do it. They did when Taproot did it. It may be coincidental. He might be right, but the arrogance is hilarious because Jimmy Song is literally talking about the fact of exactly what we don't know. We don't know the price changed, the rules and the policy changed. It does not mean that you couldn't have figured out how to stick crap in it. It's that people weren't until it got easier and cheaper. Like, holy crap, did anybody read this thing and actually think about it? Then Luke jumps in. The outcome is not even a factor here. Do you support forcing bitcoiners to distribute CSAM Core 30 or not? BIP110. You're not gonna stop it, Luke. You're not gonna. You. Oh, God bless. There are a few comment sections where, like the top post do such a perfect job of ex showing how right the post is in my opinion. Now, I will agree with one part of Adam Back's post. It says segwit had widespread consensus and crazily broken and the crazy broken broken filter BIP does not. Accordingly, it will fail simple. And actually, I disagree with that. I do not think it is at all obvious that it will fail just because it does not have broad widespread consensus. But I do think it is far more likely to fail than not. But I would never say accordingly, it will fail simple. With the confidence that the tweet has, which is exactly what Jimmy points out, is that it's very easy to be insanely confident in text when I don't think anybody. If nobody would even be talking about that. Adam Back would not jump in here and go off with fence sitters gonna fence sit if there was absolutely no concern whatsoever. Jamison Lapp wouldn't jump in. Luke would not jump in if they were certain. If they were certain, they wouldn't even respond because they wouldn't care. They would simply know that their outcome was was going to be their outcome. It's exactly why nobody talks about bcash anymore, because nobody's worried about it. Nobody thinks it's gonna win. That is the action of somebody who is not concerned. The reason everybody's bitching about this is because nobody knows. Everybody's insecure about it. And so they have to come in and say their piece. And one way or the other being more likely isn't relevant. Nobody knows. And one side being right will not mean that they know, because one side's eventually going to be right one way or the other. But I'll give you a perfect example of something that just happened that proved it. Nobody knows what the fuck they're talking about. It's real easy. The OP return, the change in OP return. The Nazis screamed it was going to be flooded with spam and tons of people were going to use it. And the other side literally said over and over and over again, is that this is going to be better. They should use it and it will actually, they will actually move stuff over to it. It's like a trash can. And some people, maybe even a lot of people will put their, their trash in the trash can. I talked about both and the potential for both on the show in many different conversations and at many different stages, but I wasn't sure. The only thing that it really looked like to me was that it might allow more spam. But I wasn't even certain that anybody was ever going to use it either way because there wasn't much incentive to nobody, nobody's going to inscriptions aren't going to change their code. There's a real limitation in having to retool. There's a social cost to building a completely different thing. Use something a different way and then to totally change like all your other inscriptions are kind of useless if now you're going to switch it over to op return. So nobody's going to do that. So I had no reason to think that anybody was ever going to switch it over. And it's more expensive. So why would you switch it over? You didn't change the incentive, you didn't change the cost structure of anything. They're not going to use it. But in the same way blowing out opereturn, the operator limit wasn't going to. Nobody was going to use it because the spam systems are already in place. They use inscriptions and they're cheaper to use inscriptions. So what happened? Basically nothing. Both sides were wrong. All right, so then Jameson Locke comes in, says we cannot know. Unknown unknowns, quote unquote is a meaningless statement that doesn't help the decision making process. Why? Because there are always unknown unknowns for both doing something and for doing nothing. Yeah, except that everybody's claiming what the social outcome and how people are going to use this and what the consequences for the chain use are going to be. Those are necessarily unknowns. And the thing that gets me is the people who arrogantly think because they know some technical piece of it or they have some technical understanding that they can predict what people will do, those are not the same thing. They're not even slightly the same thing. They're totally different categories of conversation and thought, hell, I can't even imagine a track record that is worse than developers trying to predict how users will use software. They don't even realize that they live in totally separate universes. Like developers understand how the thing works inside, so they don't even know. This is exactly why you have this conversation of like, oh, People can just use steganography and people can just use, they can use fake pub keys and all this stuff. And so obviously there will just be endless. There will be this huge inscription market no matter how, whatever mechanism we have, because people can always stick in arbitrary data, but that does not align with any of the economic reality or the social costs or the barriers to actually doing it. I think there was an example of Peter Todd doing during all of this, showing that like, he could do some like, really complicated thing with a terminal and he could like force a bunch of arbitrary data into a transaction no matter what, even, even like valid within the filters. But it was funny because I think that was actually the example in which he actually used slipstream to get around it, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know, I could be wrong in the details and I might be mixing up two different episodes or examples of this actually happening. But I remember reading the post of one of the situations like this and, and looking at like all of the different commands and like the setup, like the lengthy thing that was explained of how they actually did this thing. And all I could think is that this is a perfect example of one of those, like, GitHub tools. There's like, this, this problem is solved and now you have a tool that like solves this problem and it's so great and it's really easy to use. And then they give you like six pages of like how to install it and get NPM and, and then, you know, your package manager and then, and then install it and then run this like special thing to get permissions and all this stuff and all I can think every time when I do this and I can do all of those things and I do those things pretty like constantly. But I feel like I'm in this funny middle place where I read this and I think this developer has no idea that nobody's going to use their crap. Like, you didn't solve the problem. You didn't solve the problem until there's a tap. And your interaction, you, your, your actual system, your, your software flows directly toward or directly with the intent of the user. And this developer has no idea because they don't understand. They don't. They. It's like they have blinders on the fact that people aren't going to open up a terminal window. The only people you have are crazy autists or people who build their own stuff anyway or are constantly tweaking things. And because of that you're never gonna have a broadly popular tool. In fact, probably One of the biggest things that's actually changed that in recent, in like the recent year or two is that you can actually have AI install these things for you, which is an interesting element to all of this, but totally different topic and side tangent. But all of this, like you have to pick a direction and you have to be confident and say declarative one way or the other that definitely this is going to be worse for spam or definitely this is going to kind of fix spam or this is going to be a good decision when literally when all we are talking about is the social outcomes of how users will use something when Taproot could not be the more perfect example, despite Adam Back's flippant hand waving like there were no. Like everybody just knew what the hell Taproot was going to be used for and everybody was right because they had some technical understanding of it. We don't have nobody, nobody's using it to do efficient multi sig. Almost nobody's using it for privacy. Almost nobody's using it for a joint like key recovery and like complex multi layered, multi multi path scripts. None of that shit is happening. Nobody's using Taproot except spammers. We're five years in. I'm even still hopeful and confident that we will actually get like cross input signature aggregation or something and Taproot will actually become the thing that it is. But hell, I'm not even confident on Quantum. Quantum might be here before we even get to that point and people actually use it for what it's used for. Why? Because users just want to use the stuff that works and the stuff that's already built and they don't want to retool or create new wallets or do anything. And the idea that that's not a factor in the spam. How the hell we're five root, five years into Taproot, nobody's even switched their multisig. If you forced inscribers to literally retool to make their stuff work or their ordinals work again, they literally might just give up. They might be five years before anybody even cares or thinks about spam. Again, you don't know. You just don't know. We're asking, we're making declarations about what users will do. Technical understanding does not fix that. A guess about child pornography on the chain does not, does not lead to any moral superiority, does not tell you what users are going to do. And I'll tell you, everybody who said the sky is falling from the BIP 110 changes. The changes seem insanely mundane to me, like they're extremely minimal and they don't seem to affect anything that's actually being used. Yet again, nobody, almost nobody is using OP if inside of taproot except for spammers except for inscriptions. Nobody is using giant witness data except for inscriptions. And importantly the people who are the very few people who are using it not for inscriptions won't even be affected. And anybody who's using OP if inside of TapScript for multisig is actually doing it wrong. This should be using different leafs. It's better for privacy and is cheaper. They're probably only using OP if so that they don't have to retool miniscript to actually do it the right way. But I'm supposed to think the sky is falling because we won't have oplif and OP if inside a taproot when it's not even needed. And if you hate me because I have this opinion about it or I actually came to my own conclusion and this is how I think about it and I shared it and it doesn't mean that I absolutely support bip110 or I absolutely reject it. I'm a fence sitter and that makes you not like me. That's your problem because you're too petty. I don't dislike Jameson Lopp or Luke or Adam back because they disagree with me, but I'm gonna call them out on their shit because I do disagree with them. I'm telling you how I think think I can actually get this intense about something and be friends with somebody still if they can't, then they shouldn't be friends with me. I still tried to extend an olive branch to Roger Ver in multiple different situations over the years where we were actually in the same place and conversed a little bit. I mean it was a lost cause, but I gave it a shot at least. And you know what? On that topic, I'll also point out something about Adam Back's comment is that tech people know better. Widespread consensus is the crazy broken filter. BIP does not. Accordingly, it will fail simple. That actually does not denote whether or not you should support it. Even if I was concerned that small blocks were not going to be the proper outcome or were not going to be the actual outcome of the block size war, I still think small blocks are the better decision. They're the better long term path. They are a better assurance of Bitcoin's security and robustness and maintaining consensus in a decentralized way for the long term and I think so. Scaling is actually a red herring. You can't scale consensus to every single interaction. It's the nature of the trade off of the problem. And to fix it or to actually get around it I think actually requires a technology as. As foundational and as breakthrough as Bitcoin was in the context of fiat money. So just a point to add is that supporting BIP110 or not or supporting the direction or the case for making policy changes to limit inscriptions or to change the cost and incentive structure of inscribing garbage into the chain does not actually hinge on whether or not supporting or making a decision or having a stance on something is going to succeed or not for the exact same reason that sound money. Even if there's no technological way to secure it, no decentralized way to actually make it work is still the proper position in the context of fiat. Everybody knows you cannot totally solve inscriptions or you can't solve data embedding. Arbitrary data embedding with a policy or consensus rules. There is always a way. But you absolutely can change the cost and the incentives. They have been changed before like three or four times to looser and cheaper. And then the spam problem arrived. I believe claiming that changing the cost and incentives around sticking spam into the chain did not it was simply coincidental that suddenly it blew up and became a massive part and half of the entire UTXO set is exactly the arrogance. That you don't know that. You don't know that. Absolutely 100%. Nobody knows that at all. You don't know that it definitely was because of the script limits being blown out from 10 kilobytes to as big as anybody wanted. But to say there's not a simple logical path from the cost and difficulty of doing something something to the presence of the thing actually existing and the empirical evidence that aligns with that and that you can't draw the conclusion because some technical person somewhere can always stegnography some emojis into the train is also something you can't know. That is a declaration about the social and economic outcome of a technicality. Knowing the technicality is not easy. Any sort of crystal ball about what people will actually do with the tool. And considering not one good prediction about what taproot was going to be used for has actually come to fruition on the chain. I think we should be a little bit more humble in claiming because we have some technical knowledge about something, we can predict human behavior. And I'll give you another good example actually because. Because nothing has actually gone. In Bitcoin's history, nothing has actually gone exactly the way anybody has predicted it would. And I'll tell you how we could have lost the block size war and not gotten segwit. And I promise you there's not a soul on earth who could have told you that this definitely wasn't going to happen. We were betting and got lucky on the ignorance of the big blockers in how Bitcoin worked. Because they could have stopped segwit. And if you tell me, oh, we had support for segwit and they weren't belligerent enough, that's bullshit. You don't remember what it was like talking to them. They were going to slit somebody's throat over this issue. They were stopping segwit and they were refusing to give Segwit specifically for the purpose of getting their hard fork. They didn't give a shit about what was good for the network. They wanted their way. Had they understood how nodes worked and had they understood understood how the soft fork, the dynamics of the soft fork, they could have done. A user rejected soft fork of segwit activation and SEGWIT would not have won. The UASF would have failed. If they had forced SEGWIT off the network from the bcashers rather than them actually splitting off into their own fork, they wouldn't have gotten their fork because that requires extremely high and broad consensus. But they could have stopped a soft fork because that only requires enough people for inertia to land on the people who did not update. We got lucky because they didn't understand how nodes worked. In fact, they, they went so belligerent, they were so angry about the idea that nodes could stop them from getting their hard fork that they literally, I think just out of pure belligerence, adopted the policy that nodes don't matter at all and then started preaching that mantra that your node doesn't do anything. And that was their ultimate failure. If they had just accepted and thought about the nuance of what a node does and how they could have actually enforced their power even without minor hash rate, they could have stopped Segwit and nobody would have known. You cannot predict whether or not they were going to do that. We did not know the outcome. It was a gamble. We were playing chicken. And when you play chicken and claim what the outcome is going to be, you're betting on what a person is going to do and you don't know it. And it's not an arbitrary fence sitter, it's not A those are unknown unknowns. It's literally the area in which nobody can know. And if that's the core area that we're fighting over because the technicality is just, just the technicality and everybody's arguing about what the outcome of user actions and choices are going to be, that's what this argument is over. What are users going to do if this policy is in place or this technical reality is in place? With all due respect, Lopp, it's not an unknown unknown. It's the whole thing we're arguing about. What will users do on chain if these are the policy rules or consensus rules versus these? It's not part of the argument, it's the whole argument. And the thing that I'm constantly told about from Nazis is that the government's gonna flood the chain with CSAM for 10 years and that's gonna kill Bitcoin. It's existential. And I'm like, you're telling me what somebody's gonna do. And if we're talking about the government, they explicitly would just use whatever steganography option they have. They could do it just like Adam Back says in segwit or P2SH. If they wanted a concerted attack on Bitcoin and they're okay with spending unlimited funds to do it, they don't need taproot and inscriptions. The only thing that actually, I think, actually changes with taproot inscriptions and consensus rules or policy rules is a subtle difference in the price and incentives for spamming the hell out of the chain versus not not really being interested in doing it. That's exactly why I am a fence sitter, if anybody wants to call it that. I don't give a shit anymore. I'm literally so sick of everybody telling me exactly what it's going to be and then playing this like silence is violence bullshit. Like I have to pick a side if I don't think either one of you right are right. I'm not going to pick one of you. It's the most. If you're not a Democrat, you have to be a Republican. Nonsense. So no, I do not think that having taproot means the government can attack us. And if we make the consensus rules that opcodes are OP return is small and there's a script limit again. And taproot doesn't have op if that now the government can't attack us with csam. Yeah, that's not true. They'll figure out a way to stick it in. And importantly, the claim that making a not doing the contiguous and non contiguous. You know, remember that was a whole section of this argument that just kind of blew up for, I don't know, four weeks and then just disappeared again. The idea of contiguous data versus non contiguous data is that, you know, whether or not you're literally printing the JPEG into the data, into the transaction data, versus doing a steganography thing. It is hilarious. This was a perfect example of the. Everybody's arrogant about exactly what the outcome Is and they're 100% sure that it's definitely. Oh, everybody will treat the contiguous data as like an explicit acceptance or approval of doing, of putting whatever horrible data or images they want on chain versus no. People will literally see it no different at all from steganography. And the courts will see it no differently at all than steganography, because technically it's not any different. And one side claims they know because CSAM is bad, and the other side claims they know because they have the technical reality. Both of you are telling me what other people are going to think, so get off your high horse. You don't know. Neither do I. I have no clue. I have no clue whether or not this is going to lead to More spam, whether bip110 actually does anything against it, or if they will actually just retool all their stuff and keep their inscriptions going the same way. Or if they'll just kind of throw in the towel because all of crypto seems to be dying. Or if they're going to throw in the towel anyway because it kind of looks like everybody's throwing in the towel. The crypto, the whole crypto narrative is dying. The inscriptions, even though there are huge amount of the block space, don't really have much of a market anymore. It seems to have petered out. Spam may literally die of its own accord because it's stupid, but it might literally last forever. It might be half of the blocks forever for no reason, because guess what? People are also generally stupid. Bit one of may literally be enough to just kind of cut off a finger at a crucial point, kill the market and nobody ever reinvests because they think it's a stupid thing to worry about, to think and actually build a market on, because kind of the last group of people that did it all kind of got rug pulled. Now they have to support like four different things in their software stack just to see all the previous inscriptions versus the new inscriptions. That sounds like a giant bloated mess, but what the hell do I know? Windows exists. The people who cannot admit that all of this argument is about telling everyone exactly what other people are going to do when everybody has been so blatantly wrong about everything up to this point. And all we have is hindsight. And for all the declarations about what Taproot's going to be used for and the fact that it was safe and that there were no consequence, there were not going to be any negative consequences. And when it's absolutely. You cannot possibly make the claim that previous changes to bitcoin had no effect whatsoever about the existence of spam on chain because technically you could always find some way to squeeze it in. Goes against all of the empirical data. All of it. It might be right, but it doesn't have any evidence. But also claiming that bip110 is gonna stop it and they're not gonna just retool and keep selling trash. You might be right, but there's also not a lot of evidence to support that. And I don't think it's existential either way. And neither one of you are gonna stop government from doing whatever the hell they want to shove crap into the chain because I don't know. Just like Jimmy Song. And thank you for this article, man, because you said it really well. I don't know what people are going to do. I don't know which thing users are going to do in response to which thing that actually occurs. And because I don't think it's existential, I don't have a strong position on what I should do. I've said probably a hundred times that I always thought policy and actually decentralizing bitcoin mining was the best way to deal with this. But I don't know what people are going to do. All I know is that one side's telling me people are going to do this and the other side's telling me that people are definitely going to do this. And I know that both of you don't know shit. And I'm not a Democrat or Republican for the exact same reason. It's where I've sat politically for most of my life. It's where I continue to sit right now on this issue until I feel like I have more confidence. And I'm pretty comfortable here. So buy a bitbox, use my discount code and kiss my ass. Love you guys. Catch you on the next episode. Don't forget to subscribe. Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. Ralph Waldo Emerson.