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Roundtable_014 - Soft Forks and Censorship
02:05:52
Grab your drink and pull up a chair - it’s another Bitcoin Roundtable with Simple Steve, Bitcoin Mechanic, and my brother Jeff Swann. This time we’re diving into the chaos around soft forks, censorship, and the latest round of Bitcoin drama. We get into the weeds (and the memes) of BIP 444, Taproot fallout, node wars, and whether limiting data on-chain is smart security or overzealous gatekeeping. Between technical tangents, Halloween costumes, and a few “did that really happen?” moments, we bounce between philosophy and practicality... all while trying to figure out who exactly broke Bitcoin this time. Check out our awesome sponsors! Ledn: Need fiat but don’t want to sell your Bitcoin? Ledn offers secure, Bitcoin-backed loans with no credit checks, flexible repayment, and fast turnaround—often within 24 hours. With $10B+ in loans across 100+ countries and transparent Proof of Reserves, Ledn is a trusted option for unlocking liquidity without giving up your Bitcoin. (Link: https:/...
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- [00:01]
A
What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has written more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we have got. The round table is back today and we get into. It's been a month. It's been a month for bitcoin, especially with all the drama and inevitably all of that came up. So we're talking about the filter conversation, contiguous versus non contiguous data bit 444, which I don't, I don't know how I got the, the number. There was something, we kind of talked about that but I didn't actually get clarity on it. And the fact that there's a user activated soft fork. Now about this issue, what does that mean? What's the likelihood of any of this? What's the pros and cons of it? We really get into a ton of different stuff because this was kind of left field for me and I'm not quite so on the board with it. But we'll get into it. We kind of debate a little bit in the show. It's a fun one though if you, especially if you have no idea what's going on with the softwork. I think, I think we lay out a pretty good what it is, why it is, who. Well, the fact we don't know who it is that actually proposed it and then relative arguments for support and against. But a bunch of other things to cover. My brother has got a really interesting and also depressing story about how bad censorship has become in Canada and we'll just jump right into it in just a second. A shout out to Leden Ledn IO for supporting the show and for bitcoin backed loans. This is a great way to actually get fiat out of your bitcoin without selling your bitcoin so that you can still hold it long term. And especially if you're making like an investment or like in my case, I was improving something on my house and I just know the house is not, it's not an investment, it's a liability. But I just don't want to sell all of that bitcoin. I want to hold it for a longer period of time. It's just a great way to easy get a loan that has none of the fiat mountain of paperwork and credit checks and all of that garbage. It is quick, super quick turnaround. They do proof of reserves, lots of great things about the company and they're simple and boring, which is good. So check them out. I have a link actually right down in the show notes it has A little bit of a discount I think on the interest rate and it lets them know that I sent you. The show is also brought to you by pubkey P u B k Y dot app. This is basically a test case. It's just kind of showing what you can do with this really clever protocol stack that CNN has built to basically re decentralize the web. What if you could have a domain name that couldn't be shut down? What if you could always be found by your public key no matter where you are or where you wanted to direct people to? What if you always knew what information came from who? And this, the content and your social environment and your network were all separate from the actual platform. That is the dream of pub key. And they've got some really, really interesting tools, especially if you're a builder. I highly recommend it. The link will be right down in the show notes. This show is also brought to you by Chroma, that is Gitchroma Co. They have a really cool set of products around red light therapy but also just about controlling your circadian rhythm. There's a whole rabbit hole down this and I highly encourage you to go on a little bit of an exploration because I think it's really worthwhile. And they have some really cool products around it. 10% discount with code bitcoin audible and that is right down in the show notes. And lastly, a shout out to the hrf. They've actually got a really great article we're going to be reading probably in an episode or two. So stay tuned for that about the quantum threat to bitcoin and also check out their newsletter, the Financial Freedom Report. One of the best resources that I know of for keeping up with financial oppression and then the tools to defeat it from all around the world. Link and details will be right down in the show notes to all that great stuff. And with that let's go ahead and get into today's episode. We have got Steve Mechanic, my brother and myself. The whole crew is here. This is guys Roundtable all about soft forks and censorship. How's everybody been? Let's. Let's go ahead and kick this off. What do you got, Jeff? How you been dude? I didn't talk to you in a while.
- [04:39]
B
I'm doing good. My dentist got shut down by the police. So he was. He became famous here in Canada for opposing the vaccine stuff and so he's very outspoken against Covid vaccines and everything. And that was how Ban of Shay found him and so she was really happy with that. And he's Been. He's a really cool dude. I paid him not that long ago for a cleaning in Bitcoin and. And now we were on the way to an appointment for her, a follow up appointment, and they like the secretary there texted us and was like, don't come now. And we got there, they were like, we didn't get the text until like we were basically there. We got there, there were cops outside and they have like been back multiple days to make sure that they're not doing anything, doing anything and serving customers. And I think they've like padlocked the.
- [05:52]
C
Door now.
- [05:54]
B
So I have no idea when we're going to be able to finish, finish up her dental appointments. She's got implants that still need crowns, but, but I mean, there's not anything.
- [06:10]
A
It's for your safety, Jeff. I know it's for your safety.
- [06:13]
B
No, literally the, the, the things that they have charged him with make absolutely no sense. So it's Dr. Benoit if anybody wants to like, look it up. I can't, I have to. Can't remember exactly how to spell that, but.
- [06:28]
A
Canada, man.
- [06:30]
B
Dude, it's insane.
- [06:31]
A
Get the hell out of that place.
- [06:32]
B
If I look at my Facebook feed on her account, like more than half the I post is just not there. It's like it like says, this can't be showed in this country. This can't be showed in this country. So, like the censorship here is out of control. Um, but the.
- [06:51]
A
You wouldn't know it because at this moment you will not be able to watch this episode in Canada. It will get caught by the, the AI and this will not be visible on YouTube.
- [07:01]
C
Right, that's, that's disconcerting. I mean, I must be in a bubble here because I'm in Canada. I've been here for eight years. Nothing ever happens. It seems like. Right, yeah, it does seem. I was going to say, where are you?
- [07:16]
A
Yeah, right.
- [07:18]
C
And bc, like, BC is pretty like lefty, but at the same time it's also very hippie. So nothing ever seems to happen here. Like people sort of leave you alone somehow.
- [07:28]
B
Yeah, well, so his, the things that they're charging him with, like they're trying. They tried to frame it as though he was pushing more expensive options as the only, like the only option in order to line his own pockets. But he has been more recently been screening customers better because I think this was just like one unhappy customer that started a lot of this problem. Like we specifically came to him because he doesn't use metal, doesn't do anything metal related he specializes in removing mercury or like mercury amalgams or whatever. And, and he doesn't like the. All the products he like recommends are like fluoride free tooth powders and stuff. They're not, you know, none of the like traditional toothpastes and that kind of thing.
- [08:25]
A
How dare he. I cannot believe the gall.
- [08:30]
B
Even the painkiller he recommends is like a, like a natural like painkiller. So like the, if you read the thing that like the sort of the rap sheet or whatever, it like sounds like they're insult. He's like he, he attacks industry like accepted industry standards as though they're, you know, unsafe or something. And, and it's like, yeah, that sounds like a butt hurt like reason to go after somebody. Like it just doesn't, you know.
- [09:01]
C
Just sounds like Joe Rogan and when they went after him for taking Ivermectin. Yeah.
- [09:06]
B
Horse. Horse Dewormer.
- [09:08]
C
Yeah. They put, they put this like the cnn like released his Instagram video but refilted it so his like gray and.
- [09:16]
A
Like, like he was dying.
- [09:18]
C
Like I just loved that might have been just a thing they do generally is like process the videos they show. But like even if it's a coincidence, the same making him look sicker than he really was. I don't know, I find it's just so transparently.
- [09:35]
B
It's clown world.
- [09:37]
C
It is, yeah.
- [09:38]
B
Clown world.
- [09:38]
A
I don't know.
- [09:39]
C
I've been paying a lot less attention to it since the trucker protest in Canada. I was like, oh man, when it comes down to it, they, they do buckle. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go get carted out of my house and my like, you know all the community and stuff we have here, like we're building a bitcoin community where we live in B.C. and it's been going great. We've had loads of people over. Like we're in the middle of nowhere. But people have come and spoken at our meet up and stuff. So it's been great. So I'm not, I'm not just gonna get cut it out of here by like psychopathic lefties. Like they don't. I'm not doing it. Yeah, I need somewhere else to go. That was like, yeah, we have to move here. This is the promised land. But like after El Salvador like wasn't enough to get me to move there. I doubt any place is going to be able to be like that. So good that I really just can't resist it.
- [10:30]
A
Especially if you're in a local area that doesn't get that doesn't get hit as much with that because where. City, city and kind of like state level, you know, using the US Analogy was the province level or whatever makes a lot bigger difference than people. Everybody's always focused on, like, what's the government doing? Like, what's the nation state doing? It's like, yeah, but which province you're in makes a huge freaking difference too, because there's a. And dangers to the general culture of your area because you can literally have a law enacted that just like everybody in your area is like, this is stupid. And they just don't enforce it. You know, like, there are different areas where it's perfectly illegal to smoke weed or whatever, but there are places where you can go and people are just buying and selling it and it's just kind of like, whatever. And then there are places where it's kind of legal, but they crack down hard on anything that's not very regulatorily like, like, like perfect from a regulatory sense of like, I'm following all the rules. So it's amazing. Like, you're in a. You're in a world of people, and what other people think around you matters way, way more.
- [11:42]
C
Let me ask you one of these, like, bro. Bro debate questions. Would you rather live in a country that has ridiculous laws that don't get enforced or a country that has actually reasonable laws that stringently get enforced?
- [11:59]
B
That's a hard question because it depends on how reasonable are the laws.
- [12:05]
C
Yeah, well, the laws just line up with what moral people do in the first place, basically. So you can't murder people. You can't, you know, you can't shit in the park. You can't walk around naked or whatever. Like just sensible stuff that you wouldn't do if you were a decent person anyway.
- [12:21]
B
I would probably rather live there. The problem is, is that how. That how things move forward. That's the problem with the US Is that the US as the US has become more corrupt, as the legal system has come more Become more corrupt, there's still so many people that trust the government that. Whereas like in Mexico you can go and bribe government officials and nobody trusts any of the government officials. And. And so it's like, easier to actually get around things. Whereas in the US People will be like, die hard in support of some crazy irrational because they think the government's good. And, you know, maybe some of that is changing now, but it's still crazy. Like, if you want to modify your house, you know, do something, and you're in a city, you're going to have to pay like 10 different engineers to approve 10 different things. And it's not going to make any. None of it's going to make any sense. Like, they're going to require you to do things that are. And you can't use, you know, three colors of paint because this area is, you know, an architectural preservation area or some stupid thing.
- [13:36]
A
I would probably say the better legal environment that was strictly enforced just because there are. There's a lot of ambiguity in that question when it comes to what the people around me think. Or like, let's say it was culturally like my optimal scenario where everybody just ignored the law in exactly the way that I would want them to ignore the law. I might actually lean that in towards like the people around me scenario. Like if we had like a bitcoin citadel and everybody was, you know, anarchist, like hardcore bitcoiner or whatever, and. But the laws of the state were really crappy, but everybody in the bitcoiner citadel just didn't care and it wasn't enforced. I might choose that over a more strict but seemingly legally fair alternative. But there's a reason, as a bro question is gray all around that question. But I would say I probably lean towards the people more often than not. Just because all of it's usually a mess.
- [14:47]
C
Yeah, I think so. I don't think you can really beat anything more than just knowing the people around and them being good people. That's probably my preference because the law can turn tyrannical in any case. Like, even in like a backwater third world dictatorship, if nothing is enforced and you don't care about it, like, you know, they can ch. Things can change very rapidly, is the point. Like, I think with Bukele and El Salvador, that's always the concern, right? Because he's sort of benevolent king at the moment, and if he ever decided he didn't like you, it's just over. Whereas, like, you feel like if in America, Trump decided he didn't like you, you'd be like, who cares? And you could write, make some TikTok insulting him and nothing would happen to you. Right?
- [15:36]
A
Yeah. No, that's 100 true, actually. Actually on that mechanic, what's. What's been going on on your side of things? I know we have a lot of things on the. The filter debate has made news again lately.
- [15:54]
C
Well, yeah, I mean, we did. We went ocean, went to Lugano in Switzerland, the tether conference. And that was like a lot of bitcoiners were at that. It was nice, really nice experience being There we had this panel that I really didn't want to do with Peter Todd and Lamerson and what's his name, Stefan Lavara, moderating. Right. So I felt like it was just this pointless at this point. And you know, we opened it up and Luke just said, you guys are both bad actors. And you know, this is like, Luke just has a way of saying stuff. And I don't know if people caught it, caught the whole thing, but it went really well. I didn't expect the kind of.
- [16:43]
A
I saw a bunch of clips, I saw, I saw all the most angry, anger inducing clips from both sides of the argument many, many times.
- [16:53]
C
But the one, the one that I, I've only seen one clip from it, which is the one my other half posted. And it was of me just sort of doing a two minute rant and then the audience clapping for like 20 or 30 seconds or something while Peter Todd tries to speak and they just kind of won't let him talk. Right. And it was very edifying moment.
- [17:13]
A
Yeah.
- [17:13]
C
Because it's like, because sometimes like whenever we have these debates, the main thing is like, even with this recent bip, that is a soft fork that this guy Dathan Ohm proposed.
- [17:24]
A
Who is that? Does anybody know who that is?
- [17:27]
C
If I told you, I'd have to kill you. No, I, I don't know. I don't. I'm. I'm in contact with whoever it is, but I like, it's not me, it's not Luke. But regardless, the suggestion is from, from Greg who responded to. It was just like, this is Ocean. Why are Ocean doing this? And it's not like, and I maintain that like the nodes are real and that there's a lot of pushback against what Core have done. And then in Lugano, I don't know how many there were in that room. It was probably like 800 people or something. And it was like the entire room was like, we agree, like Bitcoin being used for arbitrary data stuff at an increasing rate is just going to make life harder for nodes for no benefit. That was basically my assertion. And it was like, okay, hundreds of people are here, I don't know 90% of them, and they all agree. So it's not just knots and Ocean. It really isn't. There's genuine, it's genuinely, at this point, I think a minority of sort of, what do we call it? Dev slop. That's the. They keep calling us plebslop and we keep calling them Dev slop. That's the new meme. So they have a tiny little group of people that think they're right about everything and they're very condescending and they're very dislikable. But bitcoiners and general maxis, there's lots of them and they do agree with us. So that's been my. I didn't really realize that because I never know. Maybe someone is spinning up fake knots, nodes. I don't know. It feels real to me and I know it's real because of all the DMS I get. But that, that moment in Switzerland definitely cemented it for me. I'm like, look, the data boys are not popular. What they are doing to bitcoin is not something that a lot of bitcoiners are on board with.
- [19:16]
D
I was just wondering like, yeah, the plebs and the devs, it's pretty clear where they stand and everyone assumes that the miners are going to be on the side of the devs and big data, but I'm not quite sure that's true. Like, what's your sense of like Foundry and Mara, have they said much about this?
- [19:33]
C
So I don't know exactly. To, to my mind it seems like they're not really paying attention, which is kind of surprising and does reveal how much like, of echo chamber stuff and silo effect is real. So it doesn't. Like, I know Antpool aren't paying attention at all. Like Luke and Mark sat down with Antool in China and they were like, so are you guys into crypto? And you know, and I'm like, so this is Luke. But like they straight up just had no idea who Luke was or like they'd never heard of knots. Like, they're very, very out of the picture. Right? So that's ant pool. And it, it really sucks because without Foundry, Bitmain is the entire hardware side of mining and the entire pool side of mining. So like the fact that they basically don't know anything, they're like an AI company now and the fact that they like know so little about bitcoin and care so little about it is it. It hurts me. Like you, you are the entire mining thing and no one and you don't even know anything about it.
- [20:39]
B
Wasn't that sort of the case during like the whole Segwit debate too though? That was why Roger Ver and the other people went and like salt them out and thought that they. If we can just convince these. Because they weren't paying attention. You're like, if we can just convince these people to support us.
- [20:55]
C
Well, that was different. That was Jihan Wu and he really, really.
- [20:59]
B
He was paying ATT.
- [21:00]
C
He really wanted BCash to succeed and he meant it. Like, I disagree with him profusely, but I know he was sincere and he meant it. He wasn't trying to con people. He thought BCASH was the future. And apparently all of his lobbying done over in the Asian part of the bitcoin world fell on deaf ears. He was like, we have to have big blocks, otherwise we're going to suffer this, that and the other. And, and all of them just didn't care, it seems. So that part of the history isn't really. I don't know if a few people have told me that hasn't been super corroborated, but I believe it because, man, did they die on that hill. Bitmain lost billions of dollars on that, on that play on bcash.
- [21:44]
A
Yeah, I want to get into. Before I share my kind of like knee jerk reaction to the whole thing about Solfork, I actually want to get into, it's bip 444. Right.
- [21:58]
C
Well, even that has been a source of a lot of drama. It's tentatively given that number, but.
- [22:04]
A
Okay.
- [22:04]
C
Behind closed doors that did cause some issues. I think someone jumped the gun giving it that number. And like, I think this.
- [22:13]
A
You mean like making it a BIP or something? Specifically?
- [22:15]
C
No, not making it a bit. Assigning it a number.
- [22:18]
A
Okay. What's the, what's the significance?
- [22:22]
C
I think something. There's been some sort of bureaucratic snarl up that has made like some people want to strangle each other. I. I don't know exactly. Like bips.
- [22:32]
A
Sure. I mean, isn't that everything about everything that has happened recently?
- [22:38]
C
Yeah, it's, it's a procedural thing. Like I'm, I'm learning about it. Like apparently the correct thing is you post the idea on the mailing list and people have philosophical discussions there and technical, if you want, then you do the BIP or you do the PR and then only technical discussion is allowed. Unless you're Greg Maxwell. Then you make a bunch of personal attacks against Ocean. And it's fine that that seems to be the process that I didn't know, but there you go. So.
- [23:05]
B
Yeah, I was going to say, how many of the people that have been promoting this are invested in Citria?
- [23:12]
C
Well, the BIP is against that. Right. So none of them.
- [23:16]
A
No, no.
- [23:17]
B
I mean promoting the. Like Greg Maxwell. We know LOP is.
- [23:21]
C
Right.
- [23:21]
B
Is. Is Maxwell invested in Citria or.
- [23:25]
C
I have no idea. I don't think so. I Didn't see his name on the. On the stat sheet that's been floating around. I did see a bunch of other people, like, out of David Bailey and Eric Voorhees, and I think Stefan Lavara was on there. I. I don't remember. But, yeah, it's not a good list. It's a list of people that. But I don't know. Adam Back is like, either. He's trying to, like, just, you know, I. I think he's sincere, to be honest. Adam, I think. But he also.
- [23:55]
A
He sounds pretty sincere, and I think he's also generally, like. I've seen his arguments actually go a little bit back and forth. Like, he doesn't. He doesn't seem to suggest outright that there's no credence to the debate at all, you know, and that's what most people are doing. Like, I see more posts about, like, literally less about the actual arguments and more that our side has nuance and the other side is just emotional. And it's like. It's like you're. You're literally just jerking off on social. You know, like, you're not even. You're not even having the discussion. You're just saying, my part of the discussion is great, and everything that disagrees with me is terrible. And it's like. But, like, you can find the slop wherever the fuck you want to if you just look for it. I still see people today give me this stupid bullshit of it's a valid transaction and it pays the fees. This is a free market, and there's nothing you can do about it. And it's like, dude, in, like, under 20 words, I can make that argument utter nonsense. Every bug that ever has happened and ever will happen in Bitcoin is a valid transaction that has paid the fees. You are outside of the scope of where the entire discussion is occurring. Like, you're saying that bugs can't possibly be bugs because they're valid. They will always be valid. That's what a fucking bug is. An unintended consequence of a valid thing that gets put into the protocol or the chain or whatever. That conversation is stupid. Just like the whole censorship argument. It's not censorship. Or Bitcoin has literally been censored. And I. I hear them over and over and over again. And then in absence of actually having discussions and actually having the debate, and I mean, again, this. You can find it everywhere. Everywhere. All the dumb shit rises to the top. And. But, like, so many people are just beating their chests that we're the only ones with a Good argument.
- [25:52]
C
Thanks for pointing that out. They are very frustrating arguments to come up with. But actually, the stuff Greg keeps coming up with is more annoying because he's so significant, because he's so respected. And it tends to just be personal attacks against Ocean. So Ocean didn't write the bip. Luke's involvement in it is stated. Right. So he wrote a thing on the mailing list that piggybacked off something Portland HODL did.
- [26:17]
A
Luke does not help himself. Luke does not help himself in any of this.
- [26:22]
C
Well, he's not electronic.
- [26:24]
A
Yeah. Quotable and clippable person on planet Earth.
- [26:28]
C
Yeah. He's not trying to help himself to be fair. And this is the thing, Luke. I saw Simon Dixon, who seems to agree with me generally. He was like, oh, so people want to fork, do they? Go, read the 2017 history. You'll realize what happens to people that try and fork bitcoin. I'm like, all right. But they were all airdrop hard forks. Right. The one fork that did work out was the 2017 UASF for segue activation, and that was Luke. So, like, when I look at that, I'm like, well, I agree. Forks never work out. But there was this one time. Actually, no, there was. There was more than that because Luke also dealt with the crap back in 2013 as well. So some of that was hard for P2SH.
- [27:19]
A
You talking about that one?
- [27:20]
C
I can't remember exactly. I get muddled about. I. I watched that happen in real time on my bitcoin node.
- [27:28]
B
That was the 20. The 2013. It was. What's the guy that rage quit?
- [27:35]
C
You mean Mike Hearn?
- [27:36]
B
Yeah. Wasn't it Mike Hearn's change that caused the fork in 2013?
- [27:42]
C
I don't remember. I think so. That sounds right.
- [27:45]
B
It was actually like a chain split, and we watched and took like, 12 hours or six hours or something to, like, go back to.
- [27:54]
A
No, yeah, it was. It was like. It was like. It's 12 to like, 16 hours or something. And I think it was like, 23 blocks or something because, like, blocks went. Came in, like, super slow. It's on the bitcoin holiday calendar or whatever that I published. And I think MBK has a version of it, too. I think it's on there.
- [28:12]
C
And what happened with the inflation bug? Like, was that hard for. To fix or.
- [28:19]
B
Yeah, but that was very early, right? That was like.
- [28:22]
A
Yeah, yeah. But no, there's been. No, There has been no, like, persistent hard fork in. In the network.
- [28:30]
C
No, I think there was, like, the quarter. I think there was Back one of those was a hard fork back then.
- [28:36]
B
I believe so there was like the early inflation bug was literally satoshi, like hard forking to that one.
- [28:44]
A
Happened in late 2010, right? Some.
- [28:49]
B
I think that sounds right.
- [28:51]
C
I don't.
- [28:52]
A
I don't remember. I don't remember. I'd have to look it up. I ain't got.
- [28:56]
C
Off top of this is regardless, like, context for what we're talking about because we. We've this like, the way we've handled this conversation here assumes people are like paying quite a lot of attention. And I'm going to assume that not everyone is because this is like, it's already pretty niche. So I'm just saying it's a niche.
- [29:16]
A
On top of the niche.
- [29:17]
C
So, like, bigger picture, Core 30 was a thing that I saw a great. This guy on Twitter today characterized it really well. He said, in effect, Core 30 changed a consensus rule. It didn't technically do that, but because the Opera turn filter was used so widely, them changing it effectively changed something about how bitcoin itself works. Even though technically it was always possible to get around data carrier size, the fact that they changed it from 83 to 100,000 manifestly changes something about bitcoin. And now we're sort of reconciling that. And the. Matt Hill made this assertion to me like four months ago where he's like, if policy stuff doesn't get done in a way that plebs want, then a soft fork will spontaneously start happening. And I really didn't believe him. And now I do believe him because that is what's happening and it's not me. I didn't push for this or write it, but I did say I support in the abstract some sort of soft fork to tighten up consensus. I did say that, but that was before BIP444 showed up, at least in the way Dathan wrote it. So there is now a soft fork on the table and there was a lot of pushback on it. And I realized that Microsoft sucks for yet another reason, because I can't even load the GitHub. I can't load the BIP because there's so many comments on it that the website just won't load.
- [30:46]
A
Oh, holy crap, that's bad.
- [30:48]
C
Yeah, it's. It's insane. Like, and most of it, there's some genuine pushback. So I'll try and go through what I can at least make head or tail of. There are some, like, super exotic use cases for taproot that would be unspendable after this fork activates for a year. And a bunch of those were created right after the pull request. Or, sorry, the BIP was created for obvious reasons, which is so that people can go, you can't do this. You'll confiscate my funds. But Barack Obama, our favorite. Our favorite bitcoiner, came up with ways you can do that with ctv.
- [31:27]
D
Is he a bitcoiner or is he a shitcoin insider?
- [31:31]
A
I don't know.
- [31:35]
C
Yeah, he's a mole. He's a smart guy, though. And he's like, look, if you want, before CTV activates, you can dump a bunch of bitcoins in a utxo that would be messed up by that too, if you really want. Like, at the end of the day, people can sabotage forks by putting coins and encumbering them with conditions that would make them unspendable after the fork activates. Though, obviously no one is out here saying that means we get to activate forks that lock people out of their bitcoins as, like, a fine thing to do. So there's various attitudes about that. With Taproot, you always have the key path available to you. Well, you don't, but typically you do. And what that means is, even if we mess up your script being redeemable, you can still use the key path and spend everything. But there are instances where there's no key path available and they're called no nums, which is nothing up my sleeve, which is where you're organizing something like a multisig with other people, and you need to prove that you can't unilaterally spend the whole thing. So you create the address, literally doesn't have the key path available to it. So you all must agree to the script path. And if you go super deep with it, I think if you go seven layers deep, or if you go over seven layers deep, as Mononaut found a few, you know, spends that did that, then suddenly those become unspendable after the fork activates, and they become spendable again once it expires a year after. So it's not a huge thing. But Dathan already has started making a white list of sorts that says, right, anything like that. Or he's doing basically what he can to make it so that if the fork activates, even people that have encumbered their UTXOs with those kinds of conditions can still spend them. So that was a technical objection that hits very hard because it sounds like confiscation, but it's actually pretty easy to work around. There's the other Objection. Which is, why don't you just do opreturn? That one is still quite debatable. And someone already posted to the mailing list, but not an actual bipn. The. The request that we just limit op, return a consensus and just deal with the CSAM threat, the contiguous CSAM being dumped in an opreturn threat, and, you know, worry about stuff like inscriptions separately and other stuff was all personal. So Greg didn't write any technical objections. He just, like, just said, this is ocean, and they've been legally threatening people and trying to coerce miners and stuff. That's all completely false. And it amazes me that Greg gets away with saying stuff like that because he's, you know, he should act equal to the respect people offer him. He's very, very respected. So it's very annoying when he says false stuff like that. And a predator control f'd the bip and then wrote legal. And there were like 21 instances of the word legal. And a lot of bitcoiners were like, this is unacceptable. Why are you trying to legally threaten people? And of course, that's not what the BIP did. The BIP said, we are being opened up to people, you know, creating legal issues for us. It wasn't saying, we are going to instigate lawfare against you. It was, you know, so that's rather unjust that it got interpreted that way. But nonetheless, I did leave a comment on GitHub saying this bip stands on its own right. Limiting arbitrary data in Bitcoin is good for it. Whether or not you're complying with arbitrary legal restrictions or not is neither here nor there. So you can remove all that. It's just annoying everyone.
- [35:03]
A
I was about to say. I was about to say it opens, especially if that's not the focus. Like, the idea that they're saying. It's like, it is. It is an absurd twist of the actual language to be like, somebody said, like, this could be a legal risk. And then somebody says they're threatening to call the cops, and then they just reference Luke calling the FBI because somebody stole his Bitcoin. But so, like, that's ridiculous. But then at the exact same time is like, like, I agree with the general sentiment that Pledger actually put out in that tweet. And I retweeted it. I was like, because, yeah, the argument for why this is a good decision being, you know, legally compliant or it's legally less risky is a. Is an equally terrible argument because, like, everything about bitcoin is about challenging legal what, what is legal in all of the places in which it is illegal to do simple things like, like pay people without being scrutinized or in a sanctioned country or you know, this, that or the other. So I think that's the. I think that's one of the lowest common denominators of arguments in the pro software. And I think Dathan or whoever, I think it was a terrible choice to. To plot that everywhere. As if, like that's the reasoning behind this. Because that is not what I care about. That is, that is not why this was interesting to me in any way.
- [36:37]
B
Agreed.
- [36:38]
C
Well, I'm hoping that he can revise it. He is revising it and it will get rid of all the references to legal stuff. And you know, because that just. That was unaware, it looked needlessly inflammatory and like it was scary.
- [36:51]
A
It makes Greg Maxwell looks like he's telling the truth too. Like if he's saying that Ocean is going and legally threatening everybody. If that's not true, it doesn't help that here comes this soft.
- [37:03]
C
But I mean death and isn't even Ocean.
- [37:05]
A
No, I know, I know. I'm just saying that's the thing is like, I know you can't do anything about that because that's not, that's not got anything to do with you. But I'm just meaning from the context of him, like if I was arguing with him, it's like, like this was just poorly done in a lot of ways, especially in the, the language.
- [37:23]
D
Yeah, it's kind of adorable in a way that Dathom didn't care to run it through Chad GPT to get some feedback. Like, he clearly just yoloed that.
- [37:34]
A
You gotta grock it, man. You gotta grock it. Like what's, what are the top rage tweets that will come from writing this bill?
- [37:42]
C
Well, no, like I'll add nuance to what Guy said or not. I will push back on something you said because I do actually think bitcoin doesn't. Bitcoin isn't about challenging arbitrary legal, you know, legal constraints. It isn't. To me, it's only about doing that within one.
- [38:02]
A
Within the realm of money.
- [38:04]
C
Exactly.
- [38:04]
A
Within the realm of money. Like it is, it is creating a stateless money.
- [38:10]
C
Yeah, I want, I want permissionless money. I don't want permissionless everything because I just feel it's over the top. So that was my.
- [38:18]
A
You could have permissionless everything, but it's not, it's not going to be in bitcoin.
- [38:23]
C
That's what I mean. I Just mean that's not. Look, my thinking has actually changed on this a bit and I have to be so careful how I say this because it is always going to be something you take out of context.
- [38:33]
A
Clipped so hard. Get ready, get ready.
- [38:38]
C
Here we go. Ready, ready. So some people have messaged me saying, hey, I actually do believe all data is just ones and zeros. Like, some people have taken that position. They're like, whatever's on my hard drive, I shouldn't be able to get in trouble for it. It's just ones and zeros. They've said that to me and I'm like, you know what? I think if we talked about this for the next week, I think you're probably defensible, but. So my argument has changed from saying all data is ones and zeros is not true. Everyone has a collective subjective opinion of certain files and if certain people go to jail for having certain stuff on their computers, no one really is kicking up a fuss about it. But I think there's probably a philosophical truth to the idea that if you just have bad data, that shouldn't be illegal because it's the crime that's illegal. Right. It's not the documenting of it or something like that. But so my. I've just taken it to a more subtle place and I'm just saying, look, that's just not bitcoin's fight. If you want to fight the all day, it's just ones and zeros fight, go do it somewhere else because it's too much for bitcoin to handle. I will deal with the like, you know, the, the sending of money, the.
- [39:49]
A
The transaction completely objective and independent. And there should be no stipulation that this is good money and this is evil mind.
- [39:58]
C
Yeah, I really am up for fungibility and I will defend that forever, but I'm really not up for like, let's fight the all day is ones and zeros argument. I'm just not.
- [40:08]
D
Another argument related to that is if you are up for the fight for all data, the best way to win that is probably to defund the person that's fighting you.
- [40:18]
A
Well, the best way to do it is separation of the battles of the. The last thing you would want is to stick that argument into bitcoin too, because now you're tied to the fate of that argument as to whether or not bitcoin succeeds. And you have a much better moral high ground if you're just saying that money is neutral.
- [40:38]
C
And you know, on top of that you have other file platforms like ipfs. And made safe and stuff like that. And all of those platforms have mechanisms to stop people getting, you know, targeted by law enforcement. Like, Bitcoin's the only one where you have to store everything forever and you can't delete it unless you delete a bunch of other useful stuff, too, like IPFs. You can be like, I don't want that. I do want that. Like, and these are, like, actually catering towards generic file storage, Right? So I'm like. And then you have all the stuff with Tor exit nodes. That's been a good point that has been made by our friend Omar. Once again, like, running a Tor exit node, you can say it should be. It's a perfectly moral thing to do. And I agree and all that, but just, there's a reason we don't do it. Like, you run an umbrella. You could run a Tor exit node on your umbrella if you wanted.
- [41:30]
B
Police are going to show up to.
- [41:31]
C
Your house and they're going to make your life a nightmare. Yeah. Like, and I agree with people's right to do that, and I think it's a moral thing to do. But I just. People got to know what kinds of fight they're dealing with. Like, it's. It's like, I know a guy that drives around without license plates and insurance, right? And he's like, this is my right to do it. And he. He made his own license plate. That's like, I do not need a license. Right? And it's. And he will argue with the cops that pull him over and stuff, but.
- [41:59]
B
He gets pulled over all the time.
- [42:01]
C
But I respect it to the end of the earth. I'm just saying that if anyone I know is going to get a car, I'm going to. I'm not going to be like, yeah. And that's my expectation of you to go through that much inconvenience. I'm going to be like, no, you're going to. You're going to want license and registration. Like, you're going to want to do that stuff if you don't want your life to be a hassle and if you want to take on this battle, know how inconvenient it's going to be for you. So that's all I'm saying. With the Bitcoiners, I'm like, we're about to take on a horrible battle. Can we at least go into it? Like, yeah, all right, we'll do this. And so far, there's two Bitcoiners I know that are like, I will fight the all data is Ones and zeros battle and I, we're anti fragile. We will win it. And I'm like, okay, you know what you're getting yourself into. Fair enough. I respect that. But no one else does. Everyone else is just like, oh, isn't there already porn in the chain? I'm like, actually, not really. So that's where I'm at the moment.
- [42:51]
B
So just for fun, I looked up the. The 2010 fork, and it's the value overflow incident. Yeah, it was August 15, 2010. Transaction exploded a bug that created 184 billion bitcoins out of thin air, far exceeding the intended supply. Miners quickly spotted the block and forked a blockchain by adopting an updated version. And it says that this was a soft fork, it was backward compatible, that tightened consensus.
- [43:21]
C
I mean, this is AI.
- [43:23]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's. It's pulling from like bitcoin wiki and something else. So I'm assuming it's correct.
- [43:29]
A
I was about to say I'm. I'm pretty sure that's. That's correct because I had a debate with somebody and pulled together like a ton of this information. And I'm. I'm pretty damn certain from all the different things that I documented and laid out, I've got it somewhere on my freaking computer. But I can't search it that well that all. All of the major bugs ended up like. Like there was not a hard fork in which the old client was no longer compatible with the one that came after it. It was a rollback that continued from the point of the bug. And it. Basically, they all ended up just orphaning a chain or a part of the chain. And I don't. I do not think there is one that is a legitimate hard fork from the old consensus rules and that. And that goes all the way back to 2009, 2010, unless there's one that nobody talks about from 2009.
- [44:32]
C
Well, Luke has different definitions for this.
- [44:35]
A
Oh. Oh, yeah, Luke. Luke has different. The number of times somebody has mentioned hard fork or soft fork. And they have completely different definitions because they're like they. Hard fork, the GitHub repo. It's like, well, that's not relevant to this discussion about bitcoin, but yeah, no, I.
- [44:51]
C
That.
- [44:51]
A
That. That drives me crazy. Can't even agree on definitions.
- [44:56]
C
Yeah, I mean, even forking people are talking about like knots is a fork of core, but that doesn't mean it's a fork of consensus.
- [45:02]
A
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- [47:20]
D
Can we talk about contiguous data or not? Because I find in my discussions with people that a lot of things come down to this like, you know, we've, we've, with the soft fork here, we've kind of gotten rid of the whole angle of policy and relay matching each other. Like that's kind of gone now. So now we're just like straight at data. And a lot of times it comes down to like whether you think data being contiguous, like all in the same string of ones and zeros rather than broken up and fragmented into fake pub keys or a lot of different data pushes or something like that. Whether you think that's a big deal. I the where my mind goes, I'm interested in you guys opinion, but where mine, mine goes is kind of like a file system. Like if you have a website that says upload a picture and it says these are the formats, then those are just like the formats and you have to upload a file in that format. And that's how I want Bitcoin to be. Like, I want Bitcoin to just have formats of specific file types that it allows, which isn't censorship, it's just the file type that the censorship thing is for.
- [48:37]
C
I agree.
- [48:39]
A
And obviously you can hide any arbitrary data in that format, but you can't read it in that format, right?
- [48:48]
D
Yeah, but I mean a lot of people, I'm like, you know, let's take what's Carvalho? Or there's a couple other prominent people that are just like broken up data and contiguous data are the same thing. What do you guys think about that?
- [49:01]
C
I disagree, but I think it's, I.
- [49:05]
A
Think I would generally disagree. Like I get the philosophy of that argument. I'll let Mechanic go.
- [49:11]
C
But yeah, I think it's overly philosophical. Like we're dealing with practical concerns here. So that's my issue with these people. Like again like all data is probably ones and zeros when it comes down to it. But people are in jail who tried to make that argument and they're not getting let out anytime soon. And I don't want bitcoiners ending up in jail for running a node if it's taken on something they didn't have to do. So like media players aren't going to open like a.txt or a.CSV file and stuff like that. And as someone was about to point out here, that's not censorship. Right. And it's if you can do something steganographic like make a thing that is simultaneously an a jpeg and an mp3. Like there are like artists doing interesting, like technical artists doing things like that kind of interesting. But I think that's what it comes down to is like if Taproot had been specifically for data storage, even though you have to break it up into chunks, and we all agreed on the interpretation of those chunks being reassembleable into media files, that would be basically the same as what's going on with Opreturn. But it wasn't. That's not what Taproot is for. So I think it's a deeper argument than contiguous versus non contiguous. It's why is it non contiguous? Is it because you're hacking something called Taproot that wasn't designed for this? Okay, well that gives us a very plausible amount of separation from what it is you're doing. Opreturn doesn't enjoy any of that. It's contiguous because it's file storage. And when you do file storage, you have no reason to break it up into 540 byte chunks. So I think it's always the second layer of questioning there. It's not contiguous versus non contiguous. It's why are they contiguous versus none? Why are they not contiguous? So opera turn is just straight up file storage and you can store 1 megabyte files according to the consensus rules is probably a very dumb rule that we need to fix with a soft fork. And we didn't have to because the policy was essentially another consensus rule that's now gone. So I don't know. That's my take on it and I'll let Guy chime in.
- [51:17]
A
Yeah, so I just think in the context of like pure philosophy, like you can always say that contiguous and non contiguous, there's no, there's no real difference. Simply because, I mean, simply because data is data and it's, it's our choice on how to interpret it. But you also have like very explicit standards and interpretations. You have a certain set of rules that this is how you interpret an image, this is how you interpret an MP3. And just like you said, you can put steganography and you can put any of those things in that that you want and you can hide something there, but you're explicitly hiding something because if anybody ever takes it as an MP3, to read it as an MP3, it won't see it. That's the whole point of all of it. Which means that its intended format and its intended execution are the same thing. The non contiguous from a point of pure practicality is that which lies outside of the format of its interpretation. It's like, okay, because of course, interpretation is subjective interpretation. The word interpretation suggests subjectivity in the context of what data it's reading. It suggests a perspective and a way to interpret the thing. And so in that sense I don't think you can practically make that argument. Like, like a good example is. Had a good little wicked. Had made some good points in a conversation we were having on X of he was talking about how because you can have non contiguous data and or because you can Taproot. I made an argument that Taproot raised or got rid of all the script size limits and that basically made it easier for people to just put bigger things and spam in Taproot. And he was saying well it was a really good thing that we didn't have this beforehand or that we actually did this with Taproot because otherwise they would have inscribed it into like 30 transactions and we had 30 UTXOs every time they wanted to put a JPEG on chain. And that would have been way worse than after we activated Taproot and Segwit where it's only just one utxo. And. But then like my immediate thinking is that well, you're very likely like the argument to the Exact opposite is 100% as applicable because you're saying it would have happened anyway but then we're recognizing that in practical reality it didn't happen until after we changed that rule. And when it comes to like putting in the arbitrary data is there's a, there's a, there's a social connection. There's a. What did I refer to it as this like, like conceptual distance. I think, I think is the, the, the idea of thinking about it is how far away. Like I think it's very clear that an inscription and, or an inscription spread across 30 transactions versus an Opera turn which is just a block where you can put in a literal JPEG encoded image is these are act. These actually have greater conceptual distance from the thing that are actually being implied. Like if I have to stick my mp3 into a jpeg, I'm never going to pass it around to somebody and have them just be able to be like yeah, yeah, here's a, here's a music file and they're going to get a jpeg and they're like wait, what? Like it's explicitly at odds with all of the interpretation and all of the formatting and all of the systems and how everything is read currently.
- [55:10]
B
And unless you build some sort of client that would read the hidden stuff, but then that becomes not hidden as soon as that client it literally.
- [55:19]
A
Yeah, but I think the point kind of got too deep in the technical weeds.
- [55:25]
B
In the weeds.
- [55:26]
A
But the point is that the reality is a whole lot different from the technicality. Like, there's a lot of things that you can make a technicality argument against. There's a lot of things that we could say that technically it would have been worse without taproot. Thank God we had Taproot. But the actual results, like, you have to look at the actual results. It's just like saying, I got. I think this is. This has been my whole thing. I think the actual results of if we just continue to loosen up, return, and everybody just kind of like throws their hands up and says whatever is, we're just going to end up with a shit ton more spam and it doesn't matter. All the trash can arguments and it doesn't matter. Although they could have done it if you just shoved it into a public key and you could have steganography did over there. Because the results, I think, are just going to speak for themselves. And you can't, you can't just say that the results aren't real because the technicality is just the technicality. The technicality isn't the whole freaking story. There's a whole social layer to this. There's like a thousand layers to this. There's a thousand different perspectives and directions for this is a human, organic system that we're talking about. And you can't just pretend that pure technicality is the only thing that applies. And especially from people who literally are saying that there's no nuance on the other side. It's like, well, you're saying that the technicality of like, I can stick a JPEG into my public key is the exact same thing. It's like, no, there's no nuance. If all you are saying is that this is possible, there's a whole lot of shit that's possible. There's a whole lot of shit that's possible on an OS or in a terminal window. I can do so many things that I don't ever do because it's just a pain in my ass to get done. So what's the reality of those things? How much of this actually exists? If it's hard versus it being easy and it just seems completely obvious and completely following the data, that if you make something easier and it doesn't matter at what layer or what scope, if you just make something easier and more universal, more like standard in its acceptance, you're just going to get a shit ton more of it. You're just going to get a lot more of it. And that's what feels like this is happening is we've got this. Well, technically it's the same thing. It's like, well, technically we're just going to get a lot more of the thing that everybody's saying that they don't want say for like two people on the Pro 30 side. Everybody else is at least trying to say that they don't like spam and they think this is a net negative and that we shouldn't have UTXO bloat. They make the argument that it's a trash can. Nobody's going to use that shit. Nobody's going to use it for a trash can. It's a traction that costs three times more. You know, I don't know.
- [58:12]
B
It's literally like there's some trash in the park. So let's turn the park into a trash dump is like they're just. Let's just convert everything. Let's put dumpsters out.
- [58:21]
C
Yeah. I mean, you've seen xkcd 1475. Technically, food is a drug since it's a substance that alters how your body works. Like it's, it's very.
- [58:33]
A
That's a great.
- [58:34]
B
That's a great one.
- [58:35]
A
That's a great one. Obligatory excuse reference.
- [58:39]
C
My life improved when I realized I could just ignore any sentence that started with technically. I agree. I wholeheartedly endorse your rant just now because it's just a way of saying let's ignore the context. That is all technically really means. Let's ignore the real world implications of what we're doing and how they'll matter.
- [58:59]
D
I think the miners are going to end up being on the side of the soft fork and things are going to get very interesting.
- [59:06]
A
Well, maybe this is a good time.
- [59:07]
C
For me to put my UASF hat on.
- [59:12]
A
No, no, that's the thing is that I want to put my. I think soft fork is. And, and maybe I don't know the details about the soft fork, but I think it's a huge overlay of the hand.
- [59:23]
C
Can we let Steve finish his point though? Why do you think the miners would. And do you.
- [59:27]
A
Could you.
- [59:28]
C
Could you differentiate between miners and pools?
- [59:34]
D
I'll go with pools. And I don't. This isn't like this is just a hunch. This is just a feeling that I have that the mining pools, like the big mining pools. Foundry. Mara. I don't know about ample. Maybe you're right. They're not paying attention. But I just have. I just have a feeling that like, you know, the craziest thing that would happen would be if the mining pools generally were on side of the side fork and then basically all the pleb node runners and all of Wall street and all of the mining pools are for the software and it. And it's like Core goes from being kind of like the main person that everybody respects to like the only person that has no idea what's going on. Like they, and then we're like, what, what are you guys even pushing for anymore? Like, are you literally just doing this for Citria? Like are they your, are they your only customer?
- [60:34]
C
Well, I think there's, I do love the contrast with Vitalik being like, man, they're censoring me so I can't do Ethereum on Bitcoin because of the like the 80 byte limit on op return. I love that Citria is literally Ethereum on Bitcoin and they changed a policy to allow it. Like I just have to like exhibit A, exhibit B. This should have been just. And that's why I got banned off GitHub over this exact point, right? That was what kicked off a lot of the problems was me. Like I said, LOP has a conflict of interest. And then they were like, this is abusive and you know, like you're making personal attacks and all this stuff. And I got banned off there for like a day or something. And then like in the same thing with the BIP just now, Greg is like, this is all ocean and they've been threatening people and, and like conflict of interest and all that stuff. And not only is he not like banned from the GitHub or anything, his comment didn't even get marked as off topic. And then a bunch of the responses to it were all marked as off topic. So I'm like, I can't even defend myself from personal attacks here. And it's just because it's Greg. Like I sound like a crying soy faced bee cacher when I'm like, oh, it's just because Greg said it is really annoying.
- [61:50]
D
I guess. Here's a little bit more like actual rationale for why. What? I think the miners, I don't know if you guys have been following transaction fees lately, but they're a joke. I mean they're, they're, they're less than 1% of the block subsidy, like regularly.
- [62:06]
A
They're like half dollars. I just, I've just been doing one.
- [62:08]
D
They're like 500 blocks, even blocks every day. So if you're, if you're a mining pool operator and you have to weigh the risks, right? It's like, okay, my Reward is to get maybe 1% more revenue. And what are all the risks associated with Big Data? I mean, not just the legal stuff, but you also have, maybe have the malware stuff and plus you have something that we don't even know about. Right. And so it's like, is 1% more profit worth all the potential risk that could come from Big Data? And it's like I could see them just saying no. I mean, I, I don't know. Obviously, I don't know.
- [62:45]
C
They could go blocks only at some point. I mean, if this, if the revenue is that negligible and the content of blocks is, you know, called into question, they could just stop doing transactions. This is not an endorsement of them doing that, by the way, for anyone that wants to characterize it as such. But you're right. There's been, the transaction fee market's been horrible and Floppy disk guy pointed that out. He was like, you've been telling us that fees are the filter and you just cut the fees by 90%. So.
- [63:18]
D
Oh, you mean they could go, you mean they go empty blocks only.
- [63:22]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [63:22]
D
Just stop collecting transactions. Okay, yeah, that would suck.
- [63:25]
C
Yeah, yeah, that would totally suck. And people would call out the pools for doing it. But I guess some idea logs would be like, well, that's better than picking and choosing. And I can see them making that argument that I would obviously fight it because I would like miners to discriminate against file storage in their blogs.
- [63:43]
D
Oh, dude, we need fees to go up.
- [63:46]
C
Well, fees, fees are like, I don't, I don't think fees are going to be what people think at all. But it's just such a long term problem that I, I refuse to. Like, the only person really worrying about it is Peter Todd and he wants to do all sorts of crazy things to try and remedy that before it's even a manifest issue. So that's breaking the 21 million cap or the soft fork version, which is UTXO taxes.
- [64:11]
D
So dumb. Remember how we, how what we thought about fees in 2019? We're like, well man, if, if fee, if bitcoin goes to $100,000, fees are going to be $100 per thing. Like we were so wrong about what fees were going to be in seven years. And we're trying to predict fee dynamics 100 years from now.
- [64:30]
C
Thank you.
- [64:31]
D
And to make this even worse, I get so mad when people are saying, like, Steve, stop talking about 2106 problem, man, that we're going to figure that out later. Now let's talk about this 2144 problem. It's like what it's like, okay, you're saying it's not worth your time to talk about an issue that is a clear no debate into Bitcoin in 2106. There's no this. We don't know what the environment's going to be. No, it's crystal fucking clear what's going to happen in 2106. Bitcoin is going to just come to a grinding halt. And then there's this questionable what the environment's going to be 34 years later. And you think it's worth your time to talk about that and not about 2106 problem?
- [65:14]
C
Well, I don't know if I agree with that. I don't think it will come to grinding halt.
- [65:17]
D
Because if it doesn't change, it will.
- [65:20]
C
No, because it will just be transacting. People making blocks because they have to.
- [65:25]
D
You can't put a block header more than you can like there's 32 ones.
- [65:29]
C
Oh, you mean the time header. Sorry, I thought you're talking about transaction fees.
- [65:32]
A
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no.
- [65:35]
C
The UNIX time thing that will obviously be fixed.
- [65:39]
D
And it's like why are we talking about it? Why are we talking about 2144?
- [65:43]
A
Go ahead and throw it into bit 444.
- [65:46]
D
But people think 2144 is imminent. Why do we talk about this? That's my point, is that how is that imminent and 2106 is not imminent.
- [65:58]
C
Fair enough. But I think it's viewed with such a non controversial fix that it's like assumed that we will just be able to fix it.
- [66:07]
D
It's going to be controversial as hell because everyone's going to try to push other stuff in there with it.
- [66:12]
C
Well then that's the hard fork wish list, if anyone.
- [66:15]
D
That's why we have to do it before. We have to do it before that wish list starts building.
- [66:20]
C
Everyone is going to want their pet issue to be included. And there is a wish list for the hard fork wish list, like go through it. Everyone has little changes they want to make in a hard fork and they want to use that. But that very quickly could get to a point where everyone collectively goes, I've had enough of this. We are just fixing the UNIX timestamp issue and nothing else. Yeah, that's it. Stop trying to politicize something we all agree has to be fixed.
- [66:43]
A
I think that would be better.
- [66:44]
C
I don't know.
- [66:46]
A
Because as soon as you.
- [66:50]
B
As soon as you include one thing, everybody wants their thing.
- [66:55]
A
You're in subjective land, you know, you're. You're entirely in like, why this change and not this other one?
- [67:02]
C
I think it's when your roommate goes to the store and everyone's like, okay, could you also get some coffee? Do you mind picking up like some cigarettes and stuff. It's like, I'm just. This, this has no logical end. I'm just going to buy the thing I needed. All right. I'm not doing everything else.
- [67:20]
D
I think you had me get you some sparkling water one time mechanic.
- [67:26]
C
That, that did happen. I'm sorry. Like, at least. Yeah, I didn't expect you to change the consensus rules of bitcoin as well, but you did. So.
- [67:36]
A
Okay, so since, you know, honestly, we probably shouldn't even get into there was some decent news, but honestly, maybe I can cover a lot of this in the, in the outro just to get the news items out of the way. But honestly I think there's too much to talk about in just a handful of these topics that we've already covered and one of them is who has. I have a very loose understanding of what the softwork even is and I want to, I want to give the opportunity because I am not Steve and mechanic. As, as I understand it, you guys are think this is something that would go ahead and are generally in support of it. Jeff, I have no idea where you stand, but can we get the details on what the hell the software is? Because anybody who's just been on X hasn't has no clue what it is. And I can vouch because I didn't have any clue what it was until I started digging into it just a little bit. But I still have a very vague idea. What does the actual proposal say?
- [68:41]
C
It limits out like script pub keys, I think to 34 bytes across the board, except op returns which go to 83 bytes. It gets rid of op if entirely and I think if it has op success in something that allowed people to route around a previous limit that won't be allowed anymore. There's like four or five other things it limits, but basically it's going to get rid of every known method of storing data at consensus level temporarily. And people have already made a joke. There's nothing more. It limits it for one year. So at the end of that year all this stuff becomes possible again.
- [69:31]
A
What's the explanation for that?
- [69:34]
C
So it's because the reason we wanted to do this at policy in the first place instead of consensus is because if you limit stuff at consensus and you realize you don't want that stuff to be limited anymore, then you have to hard fork to get the stuff possible again. So the point is to do. If it's a temporary soft fork, we don't need to hard fork. If we discover that op if in taproot is super amazing for something and we really want it and it requires a hard fork to start using it, that would suck. So the point is, let's make this. If for some reason we discover some amazing use cases, then you've only got to wait 12 months maximum until it shows up again. And if by the opposite token, if clearly bitcoin is not struggling at all as a result of limiting all this stuff, let's make it longer so you increase it or you decide within that period, we're going to carry on limiting this stuff for another temporary period or even permanent. But I hate to give Zenda like, he already made the joke. There is nothing more permanent than a temporary soft fork. Which he did say that. And I'm like, well, I am not a government, sir. We are not a government.
- [70:42]
D
But, well, I mean, that obviously is in there. It's not really hidden. Like, if it is desired at the end of the year to keep it, like, you know, Luke's gonna. Everyone's gonna want to keep it. I mean, that's not like, secret that.
- [70:53]
C
I know, but they did. They said two weeks to flatten the curve. And they. They did tell us at the end of those two weeks, we'll have flattened the curve.
- [71:02]
D
So I haven't quite worked through all this, but is another motivation for it being a temporary soft fork is that if it turns out to be contentious and it kind of turns into sort of a hard fork for a year, the soft fork will just die anyway. So it won't become like a coin that competes with bitcoin.
- [71:24]
A
Well, that would be horrifying to have a year of a chain split that tried to remerge.
- [71:31]
D
Well, it will happen. I mean, if half of the community does this soft fork and half of them don't like, it will be a temporary hard fork for a while, right?
- [71:42]
C
Well, you mean a chain split, not a hard fork.
- [71:44]
D
Yeah, sorry. It'll be a temporary chain split. Yeah, but that's what I mean.
- [71:47]
C
Yeah, yeah, no, I know it's what you mean. And this has been a thing that's been like, I've conflated chain splits and hard forks in my head forever. And it's wrong because every soft fork can be a chain split. It's just one. The soft fork gets above 51% and gets more cumulative proof of work than the incumbent. Then it overtakes it and then you suddenly have one chain again.
- [72:07]
D
Then you have one again.
- [72:07]
C
Yeah, yeah. So soft forks can be chain splits. And hard forks, according to Luke's definition, don't have chain splits because they require everyone to go along with it. Otherwise it's an altcoin, like bcash. So these are his definitions that like totally broke my brain. I'm like, wait a minute.
- [72:24]
B
So it's, it's an on purpose chain SP split, then it's an altcoin.
- [72:29]
C
Yeah. So bcash is not a hard fork to him, it's an altcoin. So is BSV and all those like, because he, he, he wants to maintain the when we hard fork to fix the UNIX thing, the time code thing. He wants to say that's a hard fork and it's not an altcoin. It's not an air drop or any of that stuff. A hard fork is when legitimately bitcoiners go, we have to break a rule now to do a thing where, whereas he wants like hard, like attackers giving us UTXO drops and all that stuff. He, he doesn't want to credit that with saying, yeah, that's a hard fork. He says, not, that was, you are not bitcoin. You are not a hard fork of bitcoin. You are something else. And I'm like, all right, that's. Yeah, I, I agree with it. You're a copy.
- [73:09]
D
I sort of agree with Luke's opinion on the hard fork nature of the, the timestamp problem, but not if we do it the way I want to do it, which would have updated and non updated nodes be in sync with each other until 2106. And if we have that early enough, then people's computers will die in 20 years and there won't be any of that old version around. And they're literally, it'll like be an abstract, theoretical hard work hard fork, but there won't be a scene.
- [73:36]
A
It never actually occurs on any device that actually occurs.
- [73:40]
D
So it won't be like a practical hard fork. But that again is only going to happen if we start early. Like if we start late. Like it's going to be like a hard, hard fork. Yeah, like everyone do it right now.
- [73:53]
C
I agree. But back to your question about like, if there's a chain split and it expires, then we end up back. I don't think that's a consideration, frankly.
- [74:01]
D
Because you don't think so. Okay.
- [74:03]
C
If there's a chain Split and we move back. Our chain never suddenly starts accepting blocks again from the new one. Because.
- [74:15]
D
Right you have to have people making your own blocks and you're a separate thing.
- [74:20]
C
We would have to just drop our previous enforcement of the rules is the thing like so we spent a year enforcing these rules on a chain that never grew long enough to actually become the dominant chain. And now we're accepting we're abandoning those rules on a going forward basis. So what that means is now all these new blocks comply with it, but they're not building on top of my chain. So I don't see it as valid. So you would just sit there at.
- [74:44]
D
The end of it now people would still mine it. I mean even if you stop pushing it forward like somebody else will keep. I mean Ethereum classic still going. I mean like it, it'll still go well.
- [74:55]
C
And then you have these other questions of if you get like replay protection or a URSF spontaneously comes along because the incumbent chain might want to protect itself from getting wiped out by us ever getting longer. So that's true. I don't. We might see the first ever URSF and that's going to be very interesting if that happens. I see one hashtag in bio saying ursf.
- [75:19]
D
So even way to make this incredibly complicated problem even more complicated is that you can use the technique of merge mining. You know that there's some altcoins that merge mine with bitcoin so they basically accept a bitcoin block or their own block either one as an advancement of the state. Bitcoin block won't have an advancement of their UTXO set but their own blocks will. I think you could add in merge mining to the soft fork so that you always accepted the old. The non soft fork bitcoin chain blocks as new blocks as new proof of work. Just those block headers don't actually advance your UTXO set, only the people that are actually mining on your soft fork do. And like this would make it even more complicated.
- [76:08]
C
But I don't hate it. I'm wondering why that would even be broken to be honest.
- [76:12]
D
I know. I think it's a good idea. That's what I texted you about. I think it's actually a good idea.
- [76:16]
C
Oh you. I'm sorry for not getting.
- [76:18]
D
Oh yeah, no worries.
- [76:18]
C
No, no, I don't care.
- [76:19]
D
No thanks.
- [76:21]
C
I've just been. You know I took four. I had. I was on four planes three days.
- [76:25]
A
Yeah.
- [76:26]
C
And like it just. It's been murderous man. But yeah, no, I'm gonna. I'm gonna chat to the guys about that. That's super fun. Maybe we can do it. Yeah, no, I kind of hope it doesn't work because then anyone. If you can do it safely, if you can, like, risk free, safely, UASF stuff all the time, then people are just gonna absolutely obliterate bitcoin to the point where it's like, yeah, you can't do anything anymore. There's a coinbase transaction in a block. That's it. Like, block size is down to a kilobyte. That's it. The block size is now one kilobyte. All of the UTXOs are now blacklisted and you can't use any of the opcodes that exist. Like, I'm pretty sure people would just start forking in ridiculous stuff immediately.
- [77:08]
D
So, I mean, whoever's doing this bit for four or whatever, it's got a lot of people like me and Barack. What? Obama? What's his name?
- [77:20]
C
Barack Obama. Yeah, this whole episode has been about him and he's. I've got 24 unread messages from the saga.
- [77:28]
D
Yeah, me too, actually. But that's like, dude, it's got people like me and him head spinning with all sorts of creative hybrid softwork ideas. And I'm like, man, I don't know if this is good.
- [77:38]
C
No, we kind of want to keep the, the cats in the bag with regard to people being able to arbitrarily tighten consensus rules in bitcoin. But yeah, I hope that answers the question about, about the expiration, because, like, if it doesn't, a few people have been like, if these are good ideas, they should be permanent. And I'm like, all right. But, like, that's going to make for every guy that thinks that there's 99 other people that are like, I will support this if it's temporary because then if something turns out to be awful about it, we get back the bitcoin as we know it today.
- [78:13]
D
Yeah, temporary is a good idea. I like that idea.
- [78:16]
C
I agree. I think it's a very practical thing to do and I have no problem defending it.
- [78:21]
B
So what I originally, like, what made me interested in, like, bit VM was the fact that we might get some sort of actual, like, sidechain bridge or something that was. It basically made it easier to. To create, you know, a provably limited pool of bitcoin that was easier to move, you know, a payment network or something. And I don't know, it makes sense to me to want that sort of thing to be possible. Is this soft Fork in the limits that it's putting in place. Is it likely to prevent that sort of thing or is it? Yeah, yes.
- [79:09]
D
It'll stop the bit VM stuff.
- [79:11]
C
Yeah, yeah. 444 kills bit VM for a year.
- [79:16]
D
And it also kills witness data. It also kills big operation. Like 444 goes for everything. I mean there's some other ones that are like kind of different now, but 444 is kill all that stuff.
- [79:29]
B
So what does that mean for the possibility of some sort of side chain bridge? Does it just mean. No, I mean like is it or is it.
- [79:37]
C
I don't know of any non bit VM mechanism for doing like fully trustless, zero knowledge based bit VM stuff. I don't know of any mechanism to do that.
- [79:46]
D
You'd have to do it with an 80 byte hash. Like that's just like lightning or whatever.
- [79:50]
A
That's.
- [79:51]
D
That's all you get to link in.
- [79:53]
C
Your layer two which should be all right. Right. I don't know why that's such a limitation for them, but I think it's.
- [80:00]
A
Still questionable as to whether or not bit VM holds that solution as well. Granted I don't know exactly the constructions of all that stuff, but a lot of things that I've seen, I mean if you go and buy Ethereum as an example is they end up being really convoluted systems that still end up kind of behaving like arc like or not even ark, they still have an.
- [80:27]
B
Operator sort of wrapped.
- [80:29]
A
It just ends up being a lot fuzzier than oh yeah, everybody has unilateral exit and nobody can stop them. And it ends up like why wouldn't you just use lightning or ARC or something like that? So I'm, I'm still granted, I'm interested. Like I will still absolutely read every proposal and dig into it. But I'm also not totally convinced that VM has all our answers or that there is some perfect bridge between a sidechain that you can't create fake bitcoin and everybody can have unilateral exit if they want without anybody else's permission or involvement or whatever. So I just don't think. Granted, it's really interesting. It's really interesting. I've read a lot about it.
- [81:17]
C
I'm more interested in ARK than I am bit VM stuff for sure. People are using ARK for real and if you can reduce the interactivity of it with CTV and stuff, I'm like, I like it. I'm not going to lie.
- [81:29]
A
I do like it, yeah, ARC gets more interesting the more I dig into it.
- [81:35]
B
Between Lightning and Ark and Ecash, you've got enough things that we should. The scaling problem really is not a problem. I mean right now we don't even have transaction demand for it to be a problem. So doesn't matter.
- [81:51]
D
But yeah, will we ever.
- [81:54]
A
I was about to say, I more and more wonder about the whole transaction fee thing. I'm still, I still tend toward that. It can get away from like it hits a threshold that's likely to hit a threshold and then get away from us.
- [82:12]
B
Run away.
- [82:13]
A
There's, there's no. I, I have very little, I have no practical evidence for that. You know, like I have nothing. Again, again, go back to the argument for the Pro V30 argument. Like I'm definitely holding the technically, I'm holding the technicality argument about fees and where it's going to go. And if you just look at the numbers, none of that shit supports my, you know, intuition about where we're going to be going.
- [82:40]
D
Down in USD piece of content that's bad. Since 2019. Since 2019.
- [82:47]
A
Down in USD is fantastic for me.
- [82:49]
D
Steady down.
- [82:50]
A
Yeah, it's crazy but I gotta, I gotta put my piece on the software because I don't, I, I don't support it. The, the whole like one year thing makes it more interesting at least. Like, I'm like, I'm curious because it's not even like persistent, you know, like, like it's about a temporary thing. But I think it, it reveals two things. But one, the, the big point that I think is that I think it's an overplay of the hand because the reason the user activated soft fork worked is because the status quo was trying to hard fork is that it was the status quo that. I don't know, I don't know what you call it. The, the establishment, the Coinbase and the Bitmain or whatever. Like they were trying to get SegWit2x, Big Bitcoin and the big Bitcoin were trying to get SegWit2x and user activated soft fork. There was no inertia because everybody was trying to change something. Everyone was trying to change something. And the user activated software worked because they said we're going to change the only thing that doesn't kick anybody off, that doesn't cause any sort of a split in this. Therefore all of the inertia will actually push to our favor. What I actually think we've seen when it comes to knots versus core and this whole debate about our zeros and ones arbitrary. And is Bitcoin a, a data network or is it a transaction network? And can you even define the difference between those two things is that the, the everybody's just going to do Core as the reference client and nobody's going to contest it. And they are basically the de facto standard has been undermined. Like we for the first time have two clients or two sets of values on the Bitcoin network. And maybe that inevitably means like, I've argued with a bunch of people and be like, well, that means you're going to solve fork and there's just no way around it. You're going to end up with a fork because you can't have that. But I'm inclined to think that that actually can be maintained and that's eventually where we end up going anyway. Because there's no real. Because we're talking about a layer that's, that's social. We're talking about a layer that's more and more subjective, like Mempo policy. There is no, again, there isn't a consensus rule around it. And I think like, if this soft fork fails, this will get roped in with the whole position, the whole argument against it. And I think it will resubmit Core or it will resubmit the, the, the reference client as not knots or whatever, and that it's likely to make the social argument less relevant. And there's a very big chance that because of the inertia of the current reference client and V30 and everything is the software just doesn't work. And I think it just hurts the argument for good mempool filters and having an alternative client. Then the other thing is that this really reveals the, the consequences or the dangers of the mining centralization, which was the whole point of Datum and Ocean, all of this stuff to begin with. Is it like 55% of the blocks are run in V30 because seven people have upgraded, because seven mining pools have upgraded. Which goes all the way back to the whole point of all of this. And the thing that just blows my mind that nothing in Core seems to put any energy in this. And I'm excusing the handful of people that, thank God, are actually working on this. But how much there's. This is all about mining decentralization. But how much work has been put into Stratum v2? How many of you people really care about the fact that like, that that doesn't bother you that V30 got like. Even if it was not. If it was not, which I would be, you know or opera term filters whatever whatever. And seven people upgraded and suddenly more than half the network has this filter now. Like this has completely changed the standardist rules. That's a problem with mining. That's a problem with mining. There are, we have hashers, nobody is making their own blocks. And that's a problem. That's a huge problem. Support Z30 or not. And I, I think, I think there's going to be a whole lot of people who have no idea what's going on, who are completely outside of this, who are just going to be like, I use the Bitcoin.org client, I'm the one that uses the reference client. And they're just gonna be like, I don't know what this other thing is and so I'm just not gonna download that. And then like somebody's like, you have to choose. And it's like, well I don't, I'm just not gonna, I'm just not gonna, you know. And, and I think that puts the inertia on Core's reference clients and knots or whatever, anybody else who's got some filter, whatever is just some, some weird stupid thing on the sidelines. And I think it's not, I don't think it is. I think a ton of users care about this and I think a user activated soft fork trying to soft work this in, this change in I think is overplaying the hand and I think the slow and steady wins the race of just do, do a better client.
- [88:13]
C
And yeah, I got questions. I really appreciate your take on it because I definitely don't want to be overplaying hands. And again this isn't my bit. What do you say to the way more stripped down idea that's been floated around, which is just limit op return at the consensus level, don't do any of the other stuff.
- [88:42]
A
I don't see it. There's so much like softworks are dangerous. Like soft forks come with a lot of risk and I have been on the fence as to whether or not this is even a soft fork bubble issue. Unless there's massive consensus around going that direction. Maybe I could be convinced otherwise about that.
- [89:08]
B
If you already have massive consensus, like if you had 80% of people adopt knots, you know, then do you need the soft fork at all?
- [89:17]
C
No, you don't because then policy is not stupid anymore. But I mean you still have Libre Relay cutting through it all.
- [89:23]
D
So I don't know, if you don't have the software proposal out there, then we're just going to keep going around in circles about mempool policy versus consensus. We went around in circles over that for months. It's just like, what's the point of doing it in mempool if it, if it can be done in consensus? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's no end to this debate. Like, the soft fork is the only thing that moves us out of that circle.
- [89:49]
C
I don't. I mean, Guy made the counterpoint. I guess I noted down everything you said here because I'm really interested in going back and forth on it, Guy. And you're saying that was one of your points, that this undermines mempool filters by giving up and doing it at the consensus level. And I do agree with that. And that is fundamentally why it's more embarrassing for us. Yeah, well, yeah, because. But that's also one of the reasons why it might be successful, because ultimately a lot of the people haven't been saying spam is good. They've been saying, maybe just in a rhetorical capacity, that spam is bad, but you need to fight it at the consensus level, not the policy level, because we can just root around it. So us saying, all right, we'll do that in theory, naively, that should result in them all saying, well done, we agree with you now. But it's not. They just resort to other things, which is, well, we'll just find other ways to spam that get around your consensus changes. And further than that, there's no such thing as spam and all these other, you know, very annoying arguments.
- [90:53]
A
Yeah.
- [90:55]
C
So, I mean, is there anything else you want to say on that, Guy? Because I've got. There's like five things you said, and I want to ask you about each one of them one by one.
- [91:03]
A
I don't know what's. Let's continue forward because we're. We're limited on time, which sucks, because this would be like the perfect one to go for tingy freaking hours. But maybe let's give us a month. Let's. Let's put a pin in it when we get to the end of this, because we're already. It's already 4:17, okay. And let's everybody dig for the next month and do this again, and I'm sure some new news will happen and let's. Let's make the next round table.
- [91:29]
C
Yeah.
- [91:30]
A
Bitching about self working.
- [91:33]
C
And in a month, things are going to be very different. But I will say the one thing you said there was about the inertia, that was a very interesting point. But I would ask you. There still was Bitcoin core that was still just plodding along and all that was going to happen with that was in a year Segwit just times out and it never activated. That was the default. That was the inertia. You did have segwit2.x and you did have UAS effers, but you still had Bitcoin core and it would just had lock in on timeout. False for Segwit. And they were just saying, yeah, Segwit's just the miners aren't turning it on so it's not going to happen. And then in a year and a half when it times out, we'll just re. We'll just deploy it again and ask them again. That was the entire plan. And we were like no, screw that. Will UASF it and make miners start activating it. So there definitely was some inertia. In my opinion though, I don't think it's like there isn't like a hard forking entity right now that we can like oppose with this. 444 I agree with that context being different.
- [92:32]
B
The thing is, is that Knots people are. It's the easiest thing to argue is that like they're like Naz is trying to like do this top down changes. I'm like, no, it's the easiest thing to argue is like no. Core is removing something that has been there the entire time and making it impossible to do something that's always been possible. Knots is just get. Making sure that you have the ability to use the filter that's been there. And yes, they have a different default but you can set it to whatever you want. Core, you can't anymore. So it's very clear who's changing things in a way that is, you know, if you're soft working you're very clearly changing stuff. Whereas with Knots we're basically just keeping things the same and you know, the options are still yours. All this stuff is users can set their policy.
- [93:29]
A
Yeah, that's, that's, that's what I was trying to say. I didn't realize you were actually making that point. Yeah, but yes, that's, I agree with that. Is that especially from the kind of social layer of this of like what's the, what's the image like what's the narrative that people have in their mind is that it's very easy to explain that something has been changed and there is a significant group of people that don't want that change. And standardness rules are absolutely a change regardless of whether or not it's in consensus. And the practical results are clearly that something has been limited and that something will now be. I mean, the only reason they want to lift it is because they want it to be. Want it to grow, because they want to use it. Right. They want the OP return space. And it's. And it's annoying to use right now or difficult to the point that they can't build a reliable system using it.
- [94:28]
B
Well, I'm just glad that there's like a clear reason why, like, it now makes sense to me because the arguments did not make sense. It seemed, it seemed like we were being gaslit and now it's like, oh, okay, well, this is. It just seems much clearer now that it's, you know, Citria or whatever. But. And maybe it was clearer to somebody the whole time. I don't know. I just. I kept looking for a reason and nothing else made sense.
- [94:57]
D
I probably have a minority opinion in all this and that I think Opera Turn was a bug from the start. Uh, the introduction of the, the Segwit data dump is definitely a bug when it was introduced and it was. These have just been mistakes and bugs that. I don't think Satoshi ever wanted Operturn to be used like this. I think by the time he realized it could be used like this, he was already kind of out the door. I think if Satoshi would have stuck around for a little bit longer, he would have fixed the OPER Turn bug from the beginning. I just think they've been bugs from the beginning. So that's why I'm for the software.
- [95:35]
A
That's fair.
- [95:35]
C
I appreciate that and I tend to agree. I think it's collateral damage of undermining the efficacy of filters. But at the same time, there's an interesting thing Guy pointed out as well with mining centralization. If Foundry or Antpool or something says we support this fork and we're doing it, then it wins. And that just tells you mining is ridiculously centralized. And that was very useful for getting this fork activated. But then, I mean, that would be kind of elegant. If that happens, we get just a massive look. One company just unilaterally changed the rules of Bitcoin. So can we admit that mining is not in a good place, even though that we just used that to do something that helps? That would be nice if that was the catalyst for miners going, that's it, I have to make my own blocks. It probably wouldn't be as simple as that, but it'd be kind of elegant. And then the funny Thing with that is then Core and Greg and all that say we told you it was Ocean's plan all along just to get miners understanding the point of making their own blocks. They had a two year plan to make everyone join Ocean. We had a plan to create an issue and then get centralized miners to fix it and then annoy everyone by having been able to fix it by virtue of how centralized they are to the point where everyone understands why they are trying to decentralize it.
- [97:02]
A
That's some 40 chests.
- [97:04]
C
I can see the conspiracy theory only Trump can convince. That is. Yeah for sure. Definitely. Like you're looking at like the combined intellect of Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. This, this new super couple didn't have shown up. I can't.
- [97:22]
B
Is that, that is the stupidest. I, I can't see anything except that this is some sort of weird publicity.
- [97:28]
C
Stunt by he's gay man. So yes.
- [97:34]
B
It'S an effort to like like weird some weird after. After after effort to revamp his. His publicity or something. Revamp his reputation with Katy Perry.
- [97:50]
C
I just, I don't know. I shouldn't have brought it up. Let's roll through everything else.
- [97:54]
B
Politics is horrible.
- [97:57]
C
I don't know.
- [97:58]
A
Yeah.
- [98:00]
C
What's next boys?
- [98:01]
D
I gotta get going in a second.
- [98:03]
A
I was about to say. I know, I know Steve has to. Has to bounce and so do I, which sucks because I feel like we were just getting into what is a very long conversation. But we, we're going to have to put a pin in it and we'll do this on the next roundtable and I'll, I'll look much more deeply into all the software conversation because like I want to get, you know, because everything that hasn't updated. There's so many, there's so many nuances to soft forks, especially user activated softwork. And I'm inclined to think the. I really like the point that Jeffrey brought up because I think that's, that's the way that I'm seeing it that bugs me about it is that there's a clear pushback against a change that has been, that has been recently made. And not updating means that you don't. You're not going along with that change. And KNOTS is explicitly a quote unquote social opposition to that change. Whether or not it's even consequential. That's not. That doesn't really matter. If there is. There is a group that are running it out of the fact that they're like I, I am saying that I think bitcoin is different than what you are claiming philosophically. And I'm basically putting my node behind what I believe, so to speak.
- [99:23]
B
Stop taking away my tools. I'm going to run the one that keeps the tools.
- [99:27]
A
Exactly, exactly. And as soon as a soft fork, like, I think a more, a more. What's the, what's the term? Configurable client and more user friendly client. And node is actually a, A stronger route in the medium term because as soon as there's a soft fork, it's, oh, we're, we're forcing. Like, I think you lose that, that philosophical inertia in a sense of like, we're the ones trying to preserve Bitcoin as opposed to changing it. And I think there, there are a handful of other things that have just kind of been spread around on Twitter and X or whatever, like the fact that legal is in the, in the thing and you know how many people are actually going to read the BIP to see what it actually means? Like, there's just a ton of controversy around that where I think the inertia lands to the opposing. And so. I don't know. I don't know.
- [100:31]
C
Yeah, I agree with all that. I think the soft fork, the asymmetrical soft fork thing always plays out though. Like if you have a big enough minority, the prisoner's dilemma kicks in for the other side and then they have to hop onto your rules. So I mean, there's also the question of the reactive versus proactive approaches, because there are two things in that fork. One of them says someone mines a 1 megabyte CSAM, you know, op return and we go back to that block height and remind the chain from there. That's the reactive approach. Then there's the proactive approach which says limit OP return at the consensus level before that happens. So one being way more chaotic than the other. And that's. I forgot to even mention that. So. Yeah, and then you also mentioned overplaying the hand in general. And a lot of people, I imagine a lot of people that run knots will be like, no, that's too far for me. I can see that happening too. I don't know. I'm as much of a neutral observer in this as anyone else. Despite obviously being well known for championing knots. I'm kind of just watching and being like, this thing might actually work. Interesting.
- [101:38]
A
Let's see what happens in a month.
- [101:40]
C
I do support it, but. Yeah, I do support it, but I don't think, like, if no one is interested in doing it, then I don't See any point in committing suicide over it. So, and what Jeff said earlier, I think he was alluding to, it's chicken and egg. Like a lot of people have said, I don't support softworks that don't have consensus. I'm like, well, where do you. That's a chicken and egg.
- [102:02]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [102:03]
C
If people really like it and consensus develops and that's what's needed for you to jump on board. Sure. But you're never going to have 100% support right from the get go. Apart from like, you know, the cruder stuff that we're talking about. Hard forking. Yeah.
- [102:17]
A
2106. We can get support for 2106. God, you people suck.
- [102:22]
D
Everyone agrees on it. Let's do it.
- [102:25]
B
I feel like a soft fork now is, is a lot and, and I would rather just see lots of people switching to knots. And then if, if, if there is still some sort of like what you're saying, if, if somebody's going around in some sort of way and actually trying to make knots. Filters not work. Then if you've got 80% of people running knots, then we talk about like, okay, let's soft fork and get rid of, you know, this problem.
- [102:57]
A
I think push for running, running an alternative client and get them creating their own blocks. Like, and I think, I think the create their own blocks thing kind of makes the entire issue moot because a big part of this philosophical argument is that people who are trying to stick JPEGs into the chain do not care to mine and they do not care to run their own node because they're literally trying to freeload. They're literally trying to. And if all of them are actually running their own nodes and mining their own blocks and they want to put their, into the blocks, okay, the system itself is permissionless. If they're not freeloading, if they're actually running, they're trying to be a steward for the network. There's a degree of like, well, who's going to stop them? You know, like, it's a, it's a much different thing. But I don't think they're doing that. Like, I don't, I don't think we're going to get 50% of the network actively going to make sure that we can stick JPEGs into the chain. I think they're just going with core because like that's the reviewed and that's the technically correct, like, you know, they're, they're going by the technicality argument. So I, I think, I think doubling down on that Push. And that this is about building your own templates and getting. Getting rid of that. Seven people can update and change what the standardness rules are to.
- [104:19]
B
To what you just said. If. If we get people running their own nodes and mining their own blocks and somebody builds something in these ZK rollups that actually is economically interesting. And so you have a whole bunch of people wanting to, you know, build the infrastructure to do this. Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah, like, I'm okay with that. I just don't like the bullshit that's been there. And so right now, it doesn't look like that any of this shit has been used useful for anything. And it looks like there's people trying to make money, more money off of putting more bullshit in the chain. So, you know, if you've got good ideas. Awesome. Let's see that, you know.
- [105:00]
D
Yeah, I got to run.
- [105:01]
C
Okay, dude.
- [105:03]
A
All right, we'll catch you all on the next roundtable later, Steve.
- [105:08]
D
All right.
- [105:12]
C
All right, I'm probably going to have to jump in in a second, too, so if there's anything else like, you just specifically want to touch on, let's. Let's run it real quick.
- [105:22]
A
I'll make one little point. Just because I'm holding the opposing argument or the wrong argument for the reality when it comes to the whole transaction fee thing, which Steve brought up, is that I think the Taproot, we're still making changes, expecting something of value to come out of it, and then the results keep being more spam. You know, like, that's really what Taproot was, right? We removed all these script limits, and suddenly we just get a lot of spam and it's like, oh, but people are going to use it for this, this, and this. But we don't have any of that stuff built out, and we're still not using it for this, this, and this. Like, all of their proposals that were going to make Taproot awesome, increasing the.
- [106:11]
B
Things that bitcoin can do is just increasing the attack surface.
- [106:15]
A
That's.
- [106:15]
B
Yes, that's basically all it boils down.
- [106:17]
A
To in the anticipation that somebody's going to be building something really cool. And it just feels like we already had this problem and all we got was more spam. And now we're doing the exact same thing again for Citria or who the hell ever. And it's like, we didn't. We haven't sorted out that we definitely made the right decision last time. In fact, the whole reason this is a debate is because clearly the results last time were just a bunch of bullshit, you know, like. And like, that was the. Of course, technically, there's all these great things that we can do with Taproot. In reality, it's just a bunch of bullshit right now. And I would really like, before we go ahead and make the next change that's going to technically enable all of this great stuff to actually prove that Taproot was really worth it by using it in all the really cool ways that we could use it. Like, I don't know, it just. And the reason I use the analogy or whatever is because like, like what, what changes are we going to make to stop high fees right now? That like, I would support? Because I'm like, oh, we want to fix high fees. It's like. But I've got no, I literally have no evidence that fees are going to be terrible. You know, fees just aren't. They keep going down. But I have this hunch that in the future we're going to need a whole bunch of high fee solutions. But I don't know. I don't know. It gets really messy. It gets super messy when you start talking, when you add a soft fork into this. In my opinion.
- [107:47]
C
I do agree generally that the, you know, part of the way I view bip444 is taproot cleanup. Basically. Like a bunch of stuff happened with Taproot. The was nothing to do with why any of us wanted it and can we address that? And then that, that just felt like a way of. I'm not trying to. This is not like a marketing thing or anything. That's literally just how I feel it. The purpose of it is. That's what it feels like to me.
- [108:18]
A
Well, let's see. In a month.
- [108:20]
C
Yeah, a month is an incredibly long time for something. I mean, it's, it's gonna move, move fast. Yeah, like, if it wasn't Luke, I'd be like, yeah, this is dead in the water. But it's Luke. And I'm like, no one else knows how to actually have an idea like this and write it. Like, as far as I know, it's just like, you know, he can implement it, but I mean, there's also a bunch of nuance. Like, there's no bip8 activation or anything that I know of. So I'm like, so now what? How does this thing even activate at this point? Like, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't get it. Like, yeah, anyway, all right, I gotta jump off. Been a pleasure, boys. And yeah, I'll speak to you soon.
- [109:02]
A
Later. All right, so that was a great conversation. I'm still, I don't know what to think. I think the next month will reveal a lot about the software viability, more concrete information about what and why. I'm. See, I'm not in theory against a taproot cleanup, and I kind of want to ask some, like, generally, like, what good has come out? Like, what functionally useful thing is using op false and what's the. Like. I would like a defense of why it's necessary, considering the outcome. The result of it has literally been nothing but spam. So I would like the defense against why this taproot cleanup is not actually a good decision. And that's regardless of whether or not it's a software, because I have my problems with it purely as a soft fork and specifically purely as a contentious one. But I would like to know, like, what is it that we lose by doing that? Because I don't, I don't quite get the argument there. It's, you know, all the conversation about it is just a good stupid. And you're. And there's nobody's going to do a solve for it, which is why we all said it was going to be a fork. It's like, okay, well, why don't you, like, what's the, the policy change? Like, what are the changes here? What do we lose if we have this and what do we gain? Like, I would actually like to have a discussion about that regardless of whether or not any soft work is even going to happen, because that's the issue. The issue isn't the soft work. It's not the whether or not it's relay policy. The question is, did these things gain us something good or is it. Did we just get crap? Did we just get a lot more crap? And are we just going to continue to get more and more crap as time goes on? So anyway, that might be a good thing to kind of bring up in the next roundtable, but because we did a lot of research on and saved a lot of news items, I wanted to go ahead and just hit those as quickly as we could in the outro here, just so you can kind of get an update of the general space. So Light Spark launches Grid, which is an API that lets businesses send, receive and settle fiat stablecoins or Bitcoin across endpoints on a global scale. So from a kind of cursory look over what Grid is, is, it seems like a literal an API to just call a bunch of functions to, like, create wallet to pay out to basically bring all of the Bitcoin integrated technologies and create one API to access any and all of them. And it seems relevant to even do like normal fiat execution like, like there was like a payout to bank and basically do all sorts of business and payment endpoints together in like a single uniform API. So this sounds really, really interesting if it ends up operating in practice that way. And obviously the idea is to simplify all of this for development so that you can integrate all of this stuff into one structure or into one application and don't, you don't have to know what each piece of any of this is actually doing. It's taking care of all of that on the back end for you. So it's a, it's a really good development advancement. I'll have the link to that. It's lightspark.com grid then there's wallet of Satoshi returns to the US now branded as a self custodial tool. I have not actually dug back into how Wallet of Satoshi is working now, but it's just cool that they came back and they supposedly have a self custodial option and what that looks like. Users concerns arise as Spark, The Bitcoin layer 2 solution used by Wallet of Satoshi may expose customer balances and transactions via the Spark Public Explorer and Bulk 11 invoice can reveal customer Spark address. Okay, so they are literally using Spark. So I've heard, I've heard some interesting things about Spark. This might be worth an episode to really dig into because it seems like they're closed, like they're proprietary. Like not everybody can be a Spark service provider so to speak. And that, that, that's a flag, that's a yellow flag for me at least might be a red flag because like if nobody else, if it's all just a proprietary system, how do you know it's self custodial? Like what's the, how do you know anything about the relationship and is it actually, if nobody else can run it, it's not decentralized, like even liquid. Like you can't be part of the liquid federation unless the liquid federation lets you in because it's a multi sig. But you can run your own liquid, like it's all liquid elements and all that stuff. But I don't, I don't know like deep details on that. But that makes me a little like, okay, that's what the Wall of Satoshi self custodial thing is. Which begs the question yet again about what Spark actually is. So this will be something to probably dig into on the show. If you have any questions about it, shoot them to me and I'll try to make sure I put it in my my lineup to explore Trezor launched the Trezor Safe 7, its latest hardware while integrating the Tropic 01 chip. Its sister company Tropic Squares open source element. That's pretty cool. Trezor's always been a pretty good wallet. Can't. Can't really knock them for having good hardware. Wallet, government and regulatory stuff. So We've got the US DOJ seizes 127,000 bitcoin $14 billion largest forfeiture to date from Chin Z, head of Cambodia's Prince holding group. This was an article from the Rage. I'll have the link there. He was charged with fraud and money laundering. He ran forced labor compounds conducting pig butchering, crypto scams. Okay. He remains at large. So they haven't found the guy. Critics warn seized bitcoin well, I guess since this is updated. I can't remember when we added this. Critics warn seized bitcoin may go to government holdings instead since civil forfeiture rarely returns assets the actual 3% return rate in 2022. So civil asset forfeiture is just a way to steal money. More details on the wallet seizure on chain activity can be found here. There was something about like the idea that this was actually brute force and I can't remember what it was, but I didn't say that that might be, I mean might be something to come back to as well. South Korea national tax Service targets cold wallets in a tax crackdown. Fun. Government's getting more involved with how do we steal people's bitcoins. We analyze tax delinquents, delinquents coin transaction history the NTS says and we'll search homes and confiscate hard drives and cold wallets. And South Korea. South Korea. Ethel thought they were free but they're going to basically do analyze the history of the coins on chain and then decide whether or not they need to go break into people's house and steal their hard drives and hardware wallets. So be warned, more than a hundred exahashes per second were added to the hash rate of the bitcoin network since mid September 2025. So if you actually go to the hash rate chart, it bounced all the way up to. I mean the estimate fluctuates a lot but I think it actually got to 1.2 Zeta hash and then came back down to about 1 and 1.1. But there's just been an enormous amount. Like we've already been like 10 to 20% fluctuations above 1 zeta hash after our Holy God. How crazy is the the word zeta hash in any kind of computer science context episode that we did with the roundtable, Tales from the Crypt said this. It took the bitcoin network exactly 11 years to reach the 100x a hash milestone. And we just added 100 exahash in like under a month. The solo miner with six nerd axe Q nerd QX plus plus devices and an Avalon Q mined block 920,440 by themselves. That is dope. Solo miners making bitcoin. Love it. HRF Bitcoin Development Fund supports 20 projects worldwide with a billion satoshis and grants. Dude, the HRF grants are just amazing and they funded so many cool projects. I'll have the link in the show notes so you can actually go check, check out that list. There might actually be something very relevant to you and you'll find a project that you didn't know existed. That's why I end up randomly going down and scrolling through the list. There's always some really cool shit that I'm like, I had no idea this was even there. Nobel Priest Peace Prize awarded to Maria Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader and bitcoin advocate. Okay, that's pretty cool. Oh, that's in the Financial Freedom Report 94. We might actually get to that on the show. Machado has supported Bitcoin as a tool of financial resistance amid the regime's escalating financial repression. Awesome. Now we've got new launches. So Arcade launches on mainnet in public beta with SDKs in Typescript. That's Ark by the way. And we're going to have another episode about ARK very very soon in Typescript. Golang, Rust, Arcade Wallet and Fullmine. A demon for payment hubs to optimize Lightning network channel liquidity. Awesome. Arcade is a programmable execution layer for Bitcoin. It enables fast self custodial financial applications on Bitcoin including lending, smart wallet and trading without changing the protocol or requiring trusted intermediaries. And we've got Bull Wallet. So Bull Bitcoin now is an open source mobile wallet built on BDK is which is now available on iOS and Android. Haven't checked it out, but love Bull Bitcoin. They're always building cool shit again. Link you will be able to find it. Breeze launches timetobuild.dev, a global developer challenge and international hackathon to embed Bitcoin Payments into open source software with a $25,000 prize pool. That is dope. And breeze makes really cool tools. Actually I'm really considering using them for paradrive. We'll see what happens there. We're not to the payments zone at all yet. Phoenix Wallet One of my favorite wallets brings Taproot channels and support for multiple wallets. That's cool. Happy to actually see Taproot being used for anything other than spam. Sparrow Wallet always great. Add silent payments, address sending&bit 353 human readable Bitcoin payment instructions plus various other features. Sparrow Wallet One of the best things about Sparrow Wallet is that it's a really good for like I have a separate business wallet and Sparrow Wallet is one of the easiest that we know of that you can just throw in like a watch only. And it's great because you just throw in the public key or whatever and my bookkeeper just has a copy of my, my business wallet and so he just kind of keeps track of everything and if he wants to ask me about something I can just be like oh yeah, this transaction was this thing or whatnot. But otherwise he basically can just keep up with everything and I can just give him visual access to just one wallet and 30 wallets or whatever. Like I can separate everything out based on my use case or associate like like which business or, or my personal or they're specific for some goal or savings thing, you know whatever it is and you just have like such good piecemeal access and I we use Sparrow a lot for a number of different things like that and they're really good export as well and you can just like label stuff. So it, it makes it great for him to just pull out like a CSV file Decentralized peer to peer marketplace bisque Everybody knows Bisque announces bisqueasy for Android allowing peer to peer bitcoin trading over Tor from Android mobile devices and one I we didn't actually put in here Robosats I'm getting into using that because the last Bitcoin Basics I was going to do a Bitcoin basics on privacy and there were a handful of tools that I never got to use and I wanted to use one of those was to really dig into and have basically a flow and my good a solid assessment of Robosats for buying bitcoin and or selling bitcoin privately. So I'm finally actually getting to that. So we'll actually have another Bitcoin Basics episode pretty soon because I've got a lot of Cool little things to add for that now after a year of diddling with privacy stuff, you know what I'm going to not. We don't even need to cover $5 wrench attacks. A bunch of people got beaten and kidnapped and robbed over Bitcoin and crypto. Be careful with your privacy. Be careful with your keys and carry a gun and learn to sheet. Learn to use it. Protocol Update Bitcoin Core v30, everybody knows about that. There are actually some significant improvements that have nothing to do with OP Return. And I'm going to actually, I think I'm going to get merged merchant Dumas on the show to talk about that because he and Antoine, I was having a conversation with them and they want to really kind of go over all the other things in V30 that were upgraded that completely got overshadowed by the whole operator and filter issue. Which is exactly why I think if you were trying to do such a contentious issue like that and you're trying to like force it down, ram it down everybody's throats when tons of people don't like it, is you don't do any other important updates at the same time. Because you may very well get like a third of the network to just say, I'm not going to use that. And if they're important updates, well, then you should value the improvement. The, the important things in Bitcoin over the contentious thing, whatever. But I think it's really important to actually go over like what are Those things in V30 have nothing to do with upper term filters that are actually very desirable, make running a node easier, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll do an episode on that. And Bitcoin Core publicly disclosed four new low vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin security advisories. I did not actually go through it, but I have the link for you if you want to dig into and I will probably here in the next few days. The proposal reduced data temporary software authored by Dathom. Yeah, okay, that was, that was the thing. That was the one with the one action item that we actually covered in the round table. And it only took us like an hour.
- [124:15]
C
So.
- [124:16]
A
And we're not even close to done. So we'll be covering that in the next roundtable. That covers pretty much all of the items that we had for what happened in the past month. And this next month is going to be quite exciting. So stick around. Don't forget to check out the roundtable. We will have roundtable 15 at the end of November. The end of this year is going to be really interesting. And yeah, don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors, Leden Synonym and Pub Key, the HRF and their Financial Freedom Report. And then get Chroma for your lighthelp. And seriously, I got a second shout out for the nightshade glasses. Those are like, those. Those are a pretty big deal. I. I've really, really appreciated those. So check those out. And links, details and discounts all in the show notes, as well as a link to all of these news items if you want to dig into anything in particular. And with that, we have wrapped it up. I and my guy Swan. This is Bitcoin Audible and I will catch you on the next episode. And until then, everybody take it easy. Guys.