Roundtable_015 - Conspiracies, Culture rot, Replay Attacks and the Future of Bitcoin

Summary

Bitcoin Audible - Roundtable_015

"Conspiracies, Culture Rot, Replay Attacks and the Future of Bitcoin"
Host: Guy Swann
Guests: Mechanic, Steve, Jeff
Date: December 4, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features another lively "Roundtable" on Bitcoin Audible, with Guy Swann joined by Mechanic, Steve, and Jeff. They dive deep into current events, controversies, and the technical, cultural, and political issues shaping Bitcoin. Topics span from recent protocol proposals (notably BIP444), replay attacks and chain splits, the Lava loan platform controversy, mining centralization, state actions on Bitcoin, the fallout over Samurai Wallet prosecutions, and broad philosophical discussions about freedom, culture, and self-governance within Bitcoin and beyond. The roundtable’s open conversation weaves technical explanations with social critiques and real-world anecdotes, all in the show's trademark direct and irreverent tone.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Catching Up, Language Learning & Everyday Tech

• Real-life updates: The co-hosts share personal stories, challenges of immigration, tech travel gadgets, and using AI-powered translation tools.
  • Jeff discusses moving to Brazil and relying on AI language models for real-time translation, reflecting on the accelerating integration of tech in daily life.
  • Notable Quote [06:44] Jeff:
    “It looks like I’ve got backups for my inability to learn another language. Hopefully that'll be okay.”
• On the impact of AI and tech workarounds:
  • Guy comments on the pace at which technology is eliminating previous barriers, joking about "cheating" at language requirements with AI glasses.

2. Bitcoin in the Real World: Adoption, Fees, User Experience

• Bitcoin Fees, Narratives, and Reality [13:03]:
  • There’s a persistent misconception, especially from Bitcoin Cash (BCH) circles and certain exchanges, that fees are prohibitive, whereas, in practice, actual on-chain fees are often much lower.
  • Steve: “Fees have just continued to go down. People continue to spend $100 on Bitcoin once per second. It's one out of every four transactions. It's become just like...I mean, maybe that'll change, but like it's almost the opposite [of BCH’s narrative].” [14:49]
• Square’s Bitcoin Integration [64:28 – 72:48]:
  • Square now allows 4M merchants to accept Bitcoin payments natively.
  • Steve shares his bar owner perspective: The main friction is operational, not technical – slow checkouts can upset customers; training staff is critical. Integrating Bitcoin with tips systems, cash flow, and accounting is more work but not insurmountable.
  • There's general optimism: once employees and merchants are comfortable, Bitcoin tips could even benefit staff if credit card fees are redistributed as bonuses.

3. Bitcoin Protocol Politics & BIP444

• Spam, Soft Fork Proposals, and Policy Battles [15:18 – 38:12]:
  • Mechanic describes the escalation around BIP444—intended as an anti-spam soft fork for Bitcoin. Even the BIP number gets fiercely debated.
  • There’s strong infighting and public ego, but also plenty of developer confusion; much of the debate boils down to conflicting visions of Bitcoin’s future, user choice, and what constitutes censorship.
  • Mechanic on distributed “authoritarianism”:
    “[Dathan] made the statement, Bitcoin is distributed authoritarianism. That's the point. It's the most strictly enforced possible rules by no central ruler you can possibly imagine. That doesn’t mean you don’t ever get to change the rules, but...if you try and do something that breaks the rules in Bitcoin, you’ll never be told no more resolutely.” [22:03]
• Libertarian Ideology & Necessary Rules [32:40ff]:
  • Guy and Mechanic reflect on a recurring tension in Bitcoin: libertarian “no rules” attitudes vs. the actual need for explicit, enforced protocols for markets and networks to function.
  • Guy: "A structure of rules are necessary for a market to exist ... It’s not authoritarian to have an out of bounds." [32:40]
• Node Policy Myths [39:24]:
  • Mechanic debunks the myth that nodes accept all consensus-valid transactions—nodes always filter mempools, which is unavoidable for network security.

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4. Replay Attacks, Chain Splits, and Technical Game Theory

• Replay Attacks in Fork Scenarios [99:37]:
  • Discussion on how, in case of a soft fork like BIP444, transaction replay between chains is a double-edged sword—making chain split states more intolerable and incentivizing resolution, especially as mempools and UTXO sets diverge.
  • Mechanic: "This is intentionally loosened inside a fork client ... so as not to bifurcate itself off the chain." [102:17]
• Activation Thresholds [106:50]:
  • They discuss the soft fork activation process and thresholds—how miner centralization (e.g., F2Pool, Antpool) gives a few actors outsize influence over protocol upgrades, which subverts the decentralized ethos.
  • Guy: "We have five people who are going to decide whether or not a software is going to happen or not." [121:06]

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5. Culture Rot, Deep State, and Conspiracy Dynamics

• Western Political Decay & the “Fourth Turning” [45:13]:
  • The group frames today’s open corruption and government abuses as part of cyclical historic patterns.
  • Guy: "When the culture rot and the corruption of the whole architecture starts to get like, the debt just gets to the point that it's insurmountable...everybody gets way more brazen because now it's a genuine fight for power." [46:02]
• Government Overreach & Surveillance State [56:16]:
  • Experiences and anecdotes about politicians being spied on, the inevitability of the "deep state," systemic corruption, and how power is consolidated by leveraging control and blackmail.
  • Notable Quote [59:47] Guy:
    “‘That's just how it works. That's how it's always worked. … The whole game is the fact that all people are very easily corrupted. And the more power they have, the more someone else is going to make sure you get corrupted, because that's how they control you. So this...that was my job. That was our job.’”

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6. Lava Loans Controversy and Proof of Reserves

• Lava switches from self-custodial DLCs to full custody after $200M raise.
  • The crew agrees this is a red flag: Lava hyped a new Discreet Log Contract-based system, raised funds, but quietly defaulted to a standard custodial model—critical security and trust implications.
  • Steve proposes a new dichotomy for Bitcoin-backed loans:
    • It's either “address viewable” (user can validate on-chain collateral location) or “address not viewable” (as opaque as FTX).
  • The group stresses that, regardless of multisig nuances, user auditability is paramount.

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7. UTXOracle Project

• Steve describes progress on UTX Oracle, a tool leveraging on-chain heuristics for Bitcoin price discovery.
• Guy: "It’s crazy how simple the heuristic is. … Since the beginning, 1 input, 2 output, like, direct transaction, drop all this other, all the other crap and it still just works." [90:11–90:37]

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8. Mining Centralization, Stratum V2, and National Security

• Mining Decentralization Stagnation [121:06–125:51]:
  • Worries about a handful of pools controlling activation and mempool dynamics, while “Stratum V2 adoption” is mostly marketing spin—template decentralization still lacking.
• Bitmain National Security Probe [133:13]:
  • Bitmain’s susceptibility to Chinese government “backdoors” is under US investigation; the roundtable is skeptical of both the risk and the PR motivations.

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9. Samurai Wallet Legal Case

• Samurai developers plead guilty and receive multi-year sentences for ‘unlicensed money transmission’.
  • The prosecution’s case was less about direct criminal activity than general knowledge of criminal use—setting a dangerous precedent.
  • Guy: "It’s like literally that, like, if you, you, you have to just be dumb. That like, well, obviously I make shoes, but criminals can’t wear my shoes." [139:46]

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10. Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On Diminishing Cultural Standards [47:08] – Jeff:
  "Ayn Rand says that, you know, the murderer wins over the pickpocket...competition, the corruption of power scales."
• On Node Policy Myths [40:10] – Mechanic: “People just still don’t understand...Core nodes filter too. Libre relay nodes filter too, because you have to. There’s no proof-of-work component in spamming someone’s mempool with consensus-valid transactions.”
• On Libertarian “No Rules” Rhetoric [32:40] – Guy:
  “It is explicit to the fact that you are playing a game that the rule exists and only within that can you actually have the freedom to, to explore, be creative or actually do things. In the sense of a market, you have to have property rights…”

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Notable Quotes/Snippets with Timestamps

• Guy [14:09]: “That’s Coinbase. You’re not using Bitcoin. Yeah, my shitcoin exchange charges me so much.”
• Mechanic [22:03]: “Bitcoin is distributed authoritarianism. That's the point. It's the most strictly enforced possible rules by no central ruler you can possibly imagine.”
• Guy [32:40]: “The idea of the free market is just no rules and anybody can do whatever they want...Well, the reason a market actually forms is because rules emerge.”
• Steve [90:09]: “Like, that's the highest signal to noise ratio for finding the price and that's...those are the most authentic. Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.”
• Mechanic [121:06]: “We immediately are asking, okay, so what does F2Pool do?...We have five people who are going to decide whether or not a software is going to happen or not...”

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Important Timestamps

• [10:01] – Early discussion: Language learning, BestBuy, and tech translation
• [13:03–15:13] – BTC fees, user experience, and on-chain payments
• [15:18–38:12] – BIP444, policy social friction, “distributed authoritarianism,” on-chain censorship debates
• [45:13–48:51] – Culture rot, fourth turning theory, and the deep state
• [56:16–61:15] – Political surveillance, “compromised” power brokers, and how institutional corruption works
• [64:28–72:48] – Square Bitcoin integration, payment friction, POS system challenges
• [75:13–85:13] – Lava loan controversy, proof-of-reserves, and the need for user-verifiable audits
• [86:09–91:22] – UTXOracle project, price heuristic, and the function of on-chain data
• [99:37–111:03] – Chain splits, replay attacks, activation thresholds, miner centralization dynamics
• [133:13] – Bitmain national security probe
• [136:46–144:25] – Samurai Wallet case, monetary transmission, overreach of prosecution, “petty” enforcement
• [145:10–149:26] – Cold storage anecdote, risks of complacency, and the “ritual” of self-custody

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Flow and Tone

The discussion is informal, blunt, sometimes irreverent, blending rigorous technical analysis with sharp political and cultural critique. The dialogue frequently pivots between granular technical explanation, first-person professional experience, and broader societal analysis—reflecting both the strengths and the ideological flashpoints of Bitcoin’s online culture.

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Conclusion

The episode closes with a call to check and strengthen your own cold storage routine—reminding listeners to “go through your setup” and not be the next headline about lost coins (“if your shit gets snagged by the FBI, don’t let them be able to wipe your bitcoin, dummy”). The group acknowledges the coming “spicy” weeks for Bitcoin politics and protocol discussions, especially as BIP444’s activation saga and the aftermath of the Samurai case play out.

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For listeners intent on Bitcoin’s technical, economic, and social realities, this Roundtable delivers essential context, hard truths, and a few laughs—you’ll come away better equipped for the convulsions of both software and society.

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[Episode Highlights for Quick Reference]

• [15:18–38:12]: BIP444, mempool policy, anti-spam soft fork, “distributed authoritarianism”
• [64:28–72:48]: Square rolls out Bitcoin payments, merchant experiences
• [75:13–85:13]: The Lava controversy, Bitcoin-backed loan user safety
• [86:09–91:22]: UTXOracle and on-chain price discovery
• [99:37–111:03]: Replay attacks, fork scenarios, and miner centralization
• [133:13]: Bitmain probe, mining geopolitics
• [136:46–144:25]: Samurai Wallet case – legal risk, prosecution overreach

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“A structure of rules are necessary for a market to exist ... It’s not authoritarian to have an out of bounds.”
— Guy Swann [32:40]

Transcript

[A]

What is up guys? Welcome back to the show. This is Bitcoin Audible and we have got the Roundtable back at it. We get into some interesting things today. I want to make a note before we get into the show because we actually don't talk about this but I have just been using AI a ton and I've just realized it today. I've been working on a bunch of different shows and all sorts of stuff and I have literally got like multiple things running right now. Um, it's amazing how much I, I need to do another episode on how I've integrated all this stuff or maybe just a video because I keep getting people asking me about it and. But I literally am using it just absolutely constantly and I think I'm gonna get to a place where I can share my Drop click Drop click app which I really really like and it's super freaking useful and hopefully it's something that other people can actually get use out of. But it works really great in my workflow. So anyway, we get into some really fun stuff today. We got Mechanic, we got Steve, we got Jeff back on the show. The Roundtable is back and we talk about bip444, the soft fork. We talk about a bunch of the news items actually we talk a lot about the Samurai stuff. We talk about the pains and benefits of like actually using Bitcoin in the real world and everything that's happened with Square and the release of Bitcoin as a payment mechanism and I'll their merchant terminals. We talk about Lavabit specifically after their quite a bit of controversy and what they're offering and whether or not it's a red flag or not. Got some new updates and some really exciting stuff with utx, Oracle from Steve, some updates from Ocean with Mechanic discussions and rejections and complaints with all the soft fork proposals and what might actually have some potential of actually happening. Replay attacks and chain splits, you name it. We get into a bunch of great stuff today and I hope you are ready for it because it's a good one. Roundtable is always a good one. A quick shout out to Leden IO for Bitcoin backed loans. And not only they're just a great company, I really like their service and just the fact that they survived bear market and they do proof of reserves just put them high in my book so. And good to have them as a sponsor too. They're good to work with. So shout out to them. Don't forget there's a special link for you guys down in the show notes then we've got Chroma also been very happy. In fact, I'm kind of sad because I don't want to. I don't have my contacts in right now, so I can't wear my nightshades. But you got to get your hormones right. I'm going to put these on the second I'm done recording this. Get your circadian rhythm right. And they have really cool products. 10% discount with code Bitcoin, Audible. Then check out Pub key app.

[B]

So.

[A]

So Synonym has built this protocol stack to literally separate all of the platform and servers and processes that you run on the web with the users and the networks. And it's incredible. You just have to go check it out, especially if you're a builder. Link right down in the show notes. And then lastly, the hrf, they have the Financial Freedom Report, which honestly is an irreplaceable resource for keeping up with news around the world and all these other countries and authoritarian regimes and basically seeing the dominoes fall on the casket. Dating, financial tyranny, and then importantly, all the tools and the fights and the stories for how to get around it. And I think those are critical lessons to learn in this day and age and news to stay up on. So they have the Financial Freedom Report. It's a newsletter that you will find right down in the show note. So without further ado, let's get into today's episode. This is roundtable number 15. Conspiracies, culture rot, Replay attacks, and the future of bitcoin.

How are we doing, guys? Welcome. Welcome back to the round table. Who's. Who's done all your Christmas shopping, raise your hand.

[B]

00.

[C]

Do I have to get. I'm not even in the country. Do I have to get people Christmas presents?

[B]

No, you don't. You don't.

[A]

That's not. No. That doesn't get you out of this. You're not getting any.

[C]

Is it.

[D]

Christmas presents are in the marriage contract. Like that was in the contract I signed with my wife. Like that's hers, I think.

[A]

Give my lawyer, she's gonna get all the Christmas presents for the both of us. We'll do the dishes, you know.

[D]

Yeah, those sorts of things.

[A]

Page six, clause three.

[D]

You know.

[A]

So let's catch up. Let's catch up. We actually haven't talked. I don't think anybody has. Well, except Steve.

[B]

We.

[A]

I saw Steve since last time. Um, but Jeff, how. How are things?

[D]

How.

[A]

How's immigration going? I don't know.

[C]

It's all. Sucks it all. It's all super fake and gay. It just. I hate all of it. So.

I don't know. We're.

[A]

We're.

[C]

Hopefully everything is now submitted for Brazil.

And I have a place rented in Brazil, so if we don't get there, like, if they don't approve, I'm going to be out, like two months rent, like one in two different countries or whatever. But.

But yeah, hopefully.

As soon as the. Like right after New Year's, we're going to be somewhere warmer and.

It'S now like a blizzard outside right now.

And I'm going to be happy to be away from that. But I also don't speak Portuguese, so. And there are fewer people in Brazil to speak English, so that's gonna be an adjustment. But I've got. It's great. There are, like, models, like AI models that you can run on your phone that will record and translate pretty much in real time. And like, I mean, they. They translate in text. And so then I have.

I don't know, I have another app that, like, translates my text into Portuguese and, you know, like, so it's. It's pretty. It looks like I've got, you know, backups for my inability to learn another language. Um, and hopefully that'll be okay.

[B]

I think learning languages is one of those things you can put off for long enough for tech to solve the problem. It's going to be centralized as heck, but Interesting.

[C]

No, I'm. I'm locally running this. It's like really.

[A]

It.

[C]

And it's really not bad. Like, the. My phone can handle it, so it's.

[A]

I'll tell you, I had to get. So my, My. My travel HDMI cable that I always have so that I can hook stuff up and display things on my computer, on the living room. TV's busted not too long ago, and I didn't have a replacement. And we were trying to show Rad some crashing cars because all he wants to do is watch a YouTube video that his Uncle Jeffrey showed him of cars being driven off a cliff.

And crashing and being destroyed. He thinks it's the coolest thing in the world. And so I had to go get an HDMI cable. And sure enough, in this small town, there is a Best Buy. And so I went to Best Buy for the first time in a very long time. And I tell you, it felt a little desperate in that place. It was still great. It was still cool. There was stuff everywhere. But I swear to God, there were as many people working there on the floor as there were customers in the floor or customers in the store. And it's like, one of those things, like, when you go to ACE Hardware, which ACE Hardware just feels like, oh, they just, like, are overly trying to be helpful. This one was like, a little bit like, can I help you? Don't you want to buy something? And so I got asked that, like, five different times. I was like, I just want to. HDMI cable, man. But I did find. So I played with gadgets because that's what you do in Best Buy. And there were some meta AI glasses, and they had, like, translation stuff built in. It has to pair with a phone, which kind of is like, is this really. Is this really a huge benefit? Aside from the fact that you can translate text so you can, like, hold something up to it and you'd be like, translate this into blah, blah, blah, and your phone will read it back to you. But yeah, no, that's. That's definitely. That's. That's one. One major step of Moore's Law to. To, like, solved life. I feel like we're. We're. We're dumb. Close to that. You can cheat on the test. You'll have your AI glasses. And when they. When they, like, require you to take the test that you know how to speak Persian, you just. Just cheat. You just.

[B]

Tech.

[A]

Tech solves that problem.

[C]

Well, I don't have to take a. Like, I don't have to speak Persian or. Or Farsi. I have just Portuguese. That's. And Portuguese would be like. They're more likely to have models that will translate Portuguese in real time than.

[B]

They are to have Persian.

[C]

Say.

[A]

Yeah, Portuguese is a. I mean, Spanish is specifically. They're. They're pretty close, right? I mean, they're.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't know.

[C]

It's. It's not. It. It's not too bad. Like, I've started learning a little bit and languages. Like, Spanish was never my favorite subject in school, but knowing the Spanish that I know is helping with Portuguese for sure. So.

I didn't realize, like, there's a lot of stuff that I can just guess at. And it. Because it's similar to other Spanish, I.

[A]

Was like, okay, yeah, I understand.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

If it's just the robots doing it, like, how are you going to do the social hierarchy where you show that you're more cultured than somebody else by speaking other languages? Like, how's.

[A]

That's just a. That's. That's a system prompt. That's what you do. You do that in the. You do that in the AI. Can you add as much jargon as possible so that everyone knows that? I'M smart.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right. All right, good.

Steve, how you been, man? What's new?

[D]

Oh, you know, a lot of guys have this, like, dream of like, owning a bar one day and I'm doing it. And don't get me wrong, it is great. I am living the dream in some ways. But here's what'll happen. Your best friend will start coming and your best friend will get in a fight with your best bartender.

[C]

Oh.

[D]

And it's. There's just no fricking solution. And it's just tough. Cause you got to make a call, you know, can it be served or not? You know, so it's like emotionally stressful because, you know, one of my best friends and my best bartender, and I don't know who's right, who's wrong.

I gotta make a call on whether he can be served or not.

[A]

And it's like, it's tough.

What's wrong with your best friend? I've never been in a fight with a bartender at all. Not once in my life.

[D]

Yeah, when you start going through shit in life and then you get drunk at a bar and, you know, take it out on somebody, I don't know.

[A]

But that's when you got to sit down with your best friend. He's like, dude, you're being a dick.

[D]

I did.

[A]

Dude.

[D]

So I sit down with him. Probably shouldn't talk about this. I sit down with him and then like two days later, he'll text me and he'll be like, hey, I've been thinking back in our conversation.

[A]

God just talked about this anyway.

[D]

But other than that, dude, bitcoin wise, I've become a little distance from the spam conversations haven't been followed that too closely. But UTX Oracle work is like, awesome. I'm still kicking an ass with that. I think I got a lot of new stuff I'm going to roll out into this year, beginning of next year.

[B]

I saw it on Start os, but it didn't work when I fired it up. That's probably Start os, not you.

[A]

What happened?

[B]

I don't know. It just didn't like. I'm going to stall it again.

UTX Oracle.

[A]

I've been watching it. It gives me. It gives me good vibes. When I'm working on the podcast, I literally bring up the UTXO Pro or whatever. Just like watch the, watch the big transactions come in the mempool. And I'm like, man, this is. This is a crazy network. It still just blows my mind. Just look at it. It's cool.

[D]

As I Mean, I know, I know the spam stuff is a lot. I'm not like disregarding that. But still, the majority of transactions, not byte wise, but people wise, transaction wise, are still financial transactions. And the financial transactions are just a beautiful distribution and they're so consistent and they're so.

People are using Bitcoin as kind of a unit of account in a way because the average transaction sizes keep getting smaller, just like you'd expect if bitcoin was buying them more and more. And you're, you're seeing like human behavior thinking of what bitcoin can get them like really playing out. Like, it's, it's beautiful to watch.

[C]

Well, according to the btc, like the, the BCH people that are still in my Facebook, like follows or whatever, Bitcoin is broken. It doesn't work. Fees, dude. The, the posts that I see about fees being $55, like, what? And I'm just like, I'm like, you mean five cents, dude, what planet are you living on? And.

I just, I don't know, it's astonishing how, like, how bad. Of course, I don't know what's Coinbase charging people to pull bitcoin off of exchange? Like still charging people 20 bucks or something? Like, it might be, but it's that.

[A]

So that's Coinbase. You're not using bitcoin? Yeah, my shitcoin exchange charges me so much.

[D]

I mean, it's the narrative that I was just personally so wrong about what bitcoin would be in 2017, 2018. I think a lot of us were. We thought bitcoin would just move to this settlement layer. Right? I mean, we were even being like, bitcoin will eventually just be international settlements between large institutions and stuff like this. And that has just not happened at all. Fees have just continued to go down. People continue to spend $100 on Bitcoin once per second. It's one out of every four transactions.

[A]

It's.

[D]

It's become just like.

I don't know, I mean, maybe that'll change, but like it's almost the opposite. Like the, the, the BCH people's narrative. It's like that, that's. Yeah, it's like you're, you're. You're even arguing the wrong narrative. Like there's a problem here, but it's not that one.

But yeah, things been going great.

[A]

Sweet mechanic. How's it going, Brian?

[B]

It's going good. Um, I'm kind of curious watching what's coming out of the. The proactive knots side that's coming up with, you know, spam solutions now rather than we. We spent kind of two years raising awareness, I guess, and, you know, talking about issues but not really doing so much. And then it shifted into, you know, all right, now we need something to do. Core 30 is here. What are we going to do about it? And it's. I'm kind of watching and learning, like, 444 came out and that was, like, immediately controversial. Even the number was like, people were dying on the hill on both sides. If it can't have that number or it has to have that number, like, just even the number.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So the opinionatedness of some of this shit is incredible.

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's interesting to watch, like, and a lot of. There's a lot of ego and a lot of, like, people yelling at each other and stuff. And, like, I haven't proposed anything. Right. But everyone sort of holds me responsible for a lot of it, which, you know, is fair to some degree. But I didn't write either of these bips, and I don't, you know, I don't agree with what's necessarily in them.

[A]

Wait, was there another bip? I haven't even. I didn't even see.

[B]

There's people talking about stuff. I kind of wish we were doing this next week because I think there's going to be some, like, very big deal stuff come out over the next week or so. Um, and that's going to be a fun one to discuss. And that's kind of all I can really think about at the moment. Um, I've also been thinking about just how to get knots in a place where, you know, people can't.

People that are, like, genuine about it, but are like, look, Core has, you know, these hundred people looking at it. It's been around forever. Like, we might not like the direction they're going in with it, but it's still, you know, it's established and has a lot of inertia. As opposed to Knots, which has been something that Luke has had to deal with and do most of himself forever. And I'm trying to think about how I would button that up and make it. Make it bureaucratically acceptable, if that makes sense. Like, if you know what I mean by that. Just like, oh, yeah, of course, we've got this thing, that thing. And like, even if they're all security theater, you've got to jump through the hoops, right? So I'm just kind of thinking about how to do that. Basically just button up, not make it more legit. So to Speak, because not everyone's going to assess it from, like, look, man, you're just trusting Microsoft. It's on GitHub. Who cares about any, like, security practices beyond that? Like, not everyone's going to look at it that way.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Like, so I have to, you know, I have to figure out what it is. And I'm a. I'm a noob when it comes to GitHub, so trying to get that together. I've been reaching out and getting advice from people like, you know, neutral people that don't have a dog in the fight.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

But they're just like, oh, yeah, when I went on the GitHub, I couldn't figure out there was some merge and I couldn't figure out where the code came from in the first place. You know, things like that, that just make people go, like, I don't know how to review this. GitHub's confusing anyway. And the fact that it's a fork of Core makes it more confusing still. So I'm just trying to find out a way to, to make all that not just, like, technically transparent, but actually trivial to review the diff between what happens on Core and when it gets merged into Knots, because obviously the hashes aren't going to match because actual code has to change in the process. But just trying to make it so that, like, all right, here's the new version of Knots. Here's everything that came in from Core. Here's what changed. Like, just make it really, you know, reviewable and upgrade it in that sense. So that's what I've been occupied with primarily over the last few weeks, as well as just sort of winding down for the year, as you know, and trying to get into hibernation Christmas mode.

[A]

Personally, I still think that's one of the best, like, routes, like, in my mind is that Knots should be seen as the. The client with options, you know, the one that let. Puts the user in control of what they want to do on their node. And like, I think in doing that, you can also have the most useful node because, you know, a lot of things are being like. Like, I. I even get kind of the idea of, like, having a reference client thing that's, like, in the background, but, like, I don't think we should get away from that, like, kind of full package of, like, this is a node, you know, like, this does all the things. This has datum, this has a wallet.

[D]

I don't need a wallet. Just take the wallet out of there. Nobody uses it.

[B]

Stuff does. Stuff does, like, joint Join market sits on top of, you know, a bitcoin node. And the wallet is in the node, it's not in, it's not in join market, right? So like, there are still things that use that and they still use like Berkeley db, right? They're like really old. So if you compile like a modern version of bitcoin core and not where it's like, oh, just forget about Berkeley DB and join market won't work. So like, you need that legacy stuff, man. If they, if they dump the wallet entirely from core, it's kind of right in theory to move towards modularity, which is what they kind of want to do, right? Like there's been people pushing for filters to be like a thing that isn't, you know, part of, part of core releases at all. So it's like, if for what you want to do with your mempool, that's now a separate thing. You can change on the fly rather than, like, be a part of every release cycle with all this drama around it. I thought that was a great idea, but then that was Aiden, right, that proposed it and then Greg Maxwell said it was distributed authoritarianism. And recently someone told me, like, I.

[A]

Don'T understand how that's not like the best, the best trade off. Because especially considering the fact that like, if, if the overwhelming majority of node runners think that this is a good mempool policy to have, then like, okay, then, then that's, that's what we want. That's what the stewards of the network are trying to do, is they're trying to actually be strict about the nature of what goes into the chain, which is exactly what bitcoin does with everything that it does. And it's so crazy because it's like a distributed authoritarianism. It's like, okay, so the lack of choice decided by like a few.

[B]

Well, I think like Dathan. I was talking to Dathan, who's the Author of the bit 444 and he made the statement, bitcoin is distributed authoritarianism. That's the point. It's the most strictly enforced possible rules by no central ruler you can possibly imagine. That doesn't mean you don't ever get to change the rules, but.

It'S not anything but that. If you try and do something that breaks the rules in Bitcoin, you'll never be told no more resolutely within the bitcoin ecosystem than you would be in any other system. That's where 21 million comes from. That's why it's genuinely reliable and it's such an ideological mistake to paint that and characterize that as a bad thing. The fact that you can have a game where no one can rug you and change the rules every time you start doing well at it, which is what happens with fiat, right? They just move goalposts all the time. That's, that's freedom, right? That's the freedom to print $2 trillion or however many trillion dollars during COVID That's freedom. And it's authoritarian to say, no, you're not allowed. I find distributed authoritarianism is the world I want to live in. It's the world where everyone gets to set the rules and no one can break them, but they're as fair as they could be. I don't does that. That kind of blew my mind when he, when he framed it that way.

[C]

Well, technically, like those words, that's just.

[A]

A complete contradiction in terms. I was about to say it's, it's, it's all about the, it's all about the, the association of the words themselves. Because authoritarianism is when we, when we, like if you actually just want to look at the definition, we're talking about like a top down, centralized, top down set of rules. And like a. Distributed authoritarianism is literally an oxymoron. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a wet, dry blanket. You know, it just like they don't, they don't exist in the same universes. And I, I get what you're saying and just the idea that like, I think you're using the term authoritarianism or authoritarian in the context of like.

We.

[C]

Want strict, a strict rule set, we want a strict protocol.

[A]

Like, it's just, there's, there's no exception. Like, it's, it's a one, it's a singular structure of rules that you can agree to or not play. And in that sense, like within the Bitcoin system, you don't just come in and just change and do whatever you want want. Like, the system tells you what is available as options. Like, like the structure of the network itself says you can either do this or you aren't playing the game with anybody. And the nodes are basically the ultimate arbiters as to what is accepted on the network. And then whether or not they're. And then you have this, you know, kind of.

Consensus anchor on the fact that we're all working off of, off the time chain. So, so it lends itself to being brutally difficult. Even if everybody wants to change it, still changing it is a remarkable pain in the ass. So I don't know the. I think the whole nature of that discussion or saying that, like there's any. I just. The idea that any of this is censorship is just so silly. I mean. And I really wanted to get Callie on because I wanted to hear his take on this. We still haven't been able to reschedule, but he called it an exploit when they put a JPEG in the cashew map. And it's like, well, okay, so, like, what is it about a decentralized system that makes it not an exploit? And what about a centralized system makes it an exploit? And I've had this conversation with a few people, and I think one of them blocked me. I was just trying to ask a goddamn question, people.

[C]

Um.

[A]

God, pull your panties up. But.

He said, well, it's a decentralized system. It's much harder. You can't just, like, change stuff. It's like, well, that doesn't. That's like. That's like. If you could make a. If you could make a whole bunch of cashew tokens out of thin air by exploiting it in the system, or you did it in Bitcoin, like, it's still an exploit.

[B]

You just.

[A]

You're just saying that it's, like, harder to change over here.

[B]

Have we covered this? Did this happen within the last month? Like, we should give the context for what happened.

[A]

Maybe. Maybe we did talk about this last time.

[C]

I think we did talk about it last time, but, yeah.

[D]

Did we? Was it that long ago?

[A]

I don't know. Shit. I don't know, man.

[C]

I've heard somebody talk about it.

[A]

So time doesn't make any sense over here.

[B]

I think there were two things. It wasn't just one. I mean, so Callie did two things, right? The first was he claimed that.

[A]

You.

[B]

Know, this is.

All data is equal. That was the first claim, right? Cypherpunks treat all data as equal.

[A]

Did Callie actually say that? I didn't know if that was.

[B]

Yeah, he came up with a statement and was like, these tyrants are trying to control how other people use stuff and trying to introspect data or afraid of some ones and zeros, but not other ones and zeros. And he said, as a quote, cypherpunks treat all data as equal. And this was, like, a really celebrated post he made. And, you know, so obviously we were hitting him with that. When cashew mint started being used, you know, someone made nut scriptions, which is like, you know, deliberately just to.

I mean, it was really funny, right?

[C]

And it was you said he actually laughed, right? Like he was actually kind of like, he's like, okay, you got me, or whatever.

[B]

No, because he was furious about it. Oh, really? Yeah, he doxxed.

What'S his name, the guy that found it. Floppy disk, right? Yeah, he doxed him. Trashed him for like really, like brutally. Like, this guy's disgusting, like, you know, pathetic loser. Like, really went on one of those like Trump style rants, you know, against him and obviously doxed his name.

[A]

I think, Jeff, you're referring to his initial post about it where he was.

[B]

Commenting, he was giggling, while the irony.

[A]

Of the fact that he's aggressively talking about like, you know, can't stop spam or whatever and shouldn't filter the spam. And now he's filtering the nutscriptions on Cashew. Nutscriptions is such a great word.

[B]

He was furious about it. But then also, I mean, he doxed. So he doxed Praveen there. So I was like, all right, well, I guess cypherpunks dox people as well. That's the thing. Thing now and then, and then, you know, he came up with some wishy washy excuse about that, saying, you know, his name was already known. And I'm like, look, man, no one has perfect opsec. He's clearly trying to hide it and break the link between the two. And you, you can't be lecturing people on what it is to be a cypherpunk and deliberately like screwing with people. Doxing you, sorry, trying to dox them. But then it happened again, right? So he doxxed Dathan, who really is trying to remain anonymous because he's making an anti spam bip and a lot of people will lose a lot of money if their NFTs crash to zero. So Dayton was very carefully a nim the entire time and Cali doxed him as well. So I'm just like, at what point does your cypherpunk credibility finally evaporate here? Because I'm a bit tired of the, the Cali worship, to be quite honest with you. Um, but.

Other than that, I think.

[A]

The original comment, like, in question, the idea that like, all ones and zeros are equal makes no sense in the context of this conversation or the system.

[C]

No, it makes no sense in, in.

[A]

The context of you literally would be unable to define an exploit or a bug in any sense. Like so many, so many of these, like, conversations around this. They'll, they'll constantly give some sort of a platitude or something like that that the second you apply it to an actual bug, it falls apart because like, they, they're directly contradictory. Like, what's the, the transaction in 20 was 11 or something. 28, 2010. I think that created a billion extra Bitcoin because with the over overflow bug, that was valid. It paid a transaction fee. It got in. There was nothing wrong with it. Why are those ones and zeros different from all the other ones and zeros? Why is this, why is this a bug? Why is this an exploit? Like, it all comes back. Like, you can't, you, you can't. Like, like we can jerk off all day about, like, I got a cool motto, but like, at the end of the day, this is a system that actually has to be designed to do something. And you can't just, you can't just hand wave all this shit away. Like, how do you define what a bug or an exploit is? That's the whole fucking conversation. That's the whole conversation. And if your platitude dismisses the capacity for a bug to even exist, then it's immediately not even in the realm of discussion. Like, it's not even. It could not be less intellectually relevant to anything. It's just chest beating.

[B]

I wrote a satirical tweet saying I made a perfect monetary protocol application. Here it is, printf, hello world. And that's it. You're not allowed to change it because that would be authoritarian and you're not allowed to. The free market will just make it work. This was like just these sort of tropes that people throw out there without any regard for what's realistic. Like, they just like lean on these lazy ideologies and just go, everything's fine. And you've got a lot of that with libertarian ideology in the bitcoin space too. It's like you're scamming people. It's like, look, man, this is the free market people, grownups making voluntary decisions a lot. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's just window dressing. You're just scamming people. You're telling. I've read your marketing material. It's all. You're trying to give people a wrong impression. You're trying to mislead people. And you just start yelling about libertarianism and freedom whenever anyone points it out.

I don't get how people can get away with that. The aspect of libertarianism that interests me is the self governance of it. And if people refuse to do that, then they just invite rulers and, you know, corrupt entities to govern them for them, because everything collapses otherwise.

[A]

I'll tell you what I think it is, is that it's a failure to recognize that a structure of rules are necessary for a market to exist. Like that's where I think is the libertarian, and I'll say this because, like, this is how I used to think about it, is that the, the idea of the free market is just no rules and anybody can do whatever they want. Well, the reason a market actually forms is because rules emerge. Like rules of behavior emerge. It's so much just like rules of the road is that you. Or it's just rules of a game is that you can't actually play a game without rules. Like, it's not authoritarian to have an out of bounds. It's not authoritarian to have a one. A first downline, it is explicit to the fact that you are playing a game that the rule exists and only within that can you actually have the freedom to, to explore, be creative or actually do things. In the sense of a market, you have to have property rights, you have to have strict ideas of like formal concepts of what a trade is, of what a voluntary trade is and what one person who owns something is transferred to another person. Like all of the structure of those rules must exist for a free market to actually exist. And if you don't, everything that you do has the tragedy of the commons problem. Everything you do has these massive collective issues where you can't scale anything. It is explicitly in those rules. It's like being able to just be like, well, I can say whatever I want and the rules can mean whatever I want them to mean. It's like, well, no, it's a network. If the words don't mean the same in your head as they do in mine, we aren't communicating. Free market is the exact same way. We don't have rules as to what the ownership and trade is, what money is. Then we don't have a network. And we don't. There's literally just no society. If it's, if it's freedom to just have any word that we ever say mean anything at all. They just change it every single time. The first sentence comes out of my mouth isn't the same as the second sentence, then it's just incomprehensible nonsense. It's just nothing but screaming noise. And the same is true for a market.

[B]

I agree. I think it's. We said it before.

Freedom in any sense as it relates to humans requires some sort of boundaries. And people can't reconcile that. They act like if there's a boundary, how can There be freedom because you can't ever realistically have anything that looks like freedom without some sort of container to put it in and some sort of scope for what it is people are allowed to do. And if you, if you say, well, let's make it scopeless, let's just have infinite freedom in all directions, then I'm like, well then, then no one can do anything because people come to you speaking gobbledygook, using protocols you don't understand. Like, it can even be unwritten stuff like, I can't, everyone here in this market speaks English and you walked in here speaking a language no one else speaks and you, you are unable to conduct a trade as a result of that. There was an expectation on you to speak the same language as everyone else. It wasn't even stated formally. But is that an imposition on your freedom?

[A]

Distributed authoritarianism.

[B]

But they will turn it around on you and be like, right, everyone has to learn all languages now and support all that, otherwise they're not welcome in this market. And otherwise you're imposing on other people's freedom. And then you're saying, well, no, because now you're placing a requirement, a requirement on me to support a protocol at my own expense that wasn't necessary before. So this is, this is when freedom becomes abused as a concept. I don't know if I'm making the.

[A]

Point well, but.

Basically I think you could sum it up very easily, is that if there is freedom in every single scope and at every single layer, then you can't have liberty. Like, you can't, like, like if you just, if it's just a.

Whatever goes in any way and you always have to accept it, there's no, there's genuine, no personal preference and there's no like protocol or standard standardization choice on the part of any individual. You'll never have any networks, you'll never, you'll never have any, you'll never have any standard that survives for any length of time. And you literally can't actually have a free society with liberty in the sense that liberty is any, in any meaningful context whatsoever.

[C]

Well, the rules of the road are a good example, right? Because you can't have people competing to decide whether it's going to be, you're going to drive on the right hand side of the road or the left hand side. Then you have people driving at each other, right? Like, you can't have people competing whether green means go and red means, you know, like, or red means go. Like, you can't, you can't change you can't have half the people doing one thing and half the people doing another thing.

And so, I don't know, you were saying that like they flip things around. It. It just brought into my head like exactly. Like the whole Covid thing, right, Was like, well, you're a threat to, to my health if you go out. Like, if you're unvaccinated or you don't wear a mask, you shouldn't be able to go. It's like no asshole. Like, if you go out into public, you're running. There's a certain amount of risk with being around other people. Like, if you want to wear a bunny suit, you can do that. Otherwise you stay home and you bear the cost of your own damn fear. Like, I don't like if, if you want to change something, it's you who should bear the cost of trying to change it. Like, so, so it's with a protocol like Bitcoin, nobody, none of the people that want to run filters are demanding anybody else do anything. It's just saying, I'm going to run this filter on my goddamn node. Like, you know, and these people are freaking out about it. You know, they want to take away the ability to do that. You should be able to relay whatever kind of transaction you want or not relay whatever kind of transaction you want. And you know, we the protocol, like once something gets into a block, then you don't have much of a choice. But if you want to, you know, if you want to keep the whole history in chain. So, okay, fine, but until then, it's a voluntary action.

[B]

Another point I'll make is.

There are still so many people out there that think core nodes just relay and accept everything that's consensus valid into their mempools and not nodes. Don't they cherry pick? This is just not how nodes work. And people just still don't understand this. Core nodes filter too. Libre relay nodes filter too, because you have to. There's no proof of work component in spamming someone's mempool with consensus valid transactions. If someone makes a billion transactions that spend zero in transaction fees, you'll reject all of it because otherwise they'll just fill up your node with absolute garbage that would never make it into the chain anyway because no one would mind that. And this is just how nodes have to work. You can't be spammed with blocks. So the consensus rules can be really loose because miners can't just find block after block after block. There's all that proof of work requirement, but consensus valid transactions with no proof of work element, they can just be spun up by the billion and thrown and thrown and thrown and thrown at you. And every single node has to have some reasonable way of saying, well, I'm not going to just accept everything, so I need to place some sort of standards on what there are. And everyone does that. But the ideological component of this whole debate doesn't understand that. They still think that Core is treating everything as equal. All transactions that are consensus valid, I will accept and relay. And I'm like, you're not doing that because it's literally impossible. And once you get past that ideological blocker, it becomes a question of, well, all right, policies are just how a node works, so what should they be? And the minute you're in that section, it's like, well, why should they include 100 kilobyte operators?

[A]

You cannot just accept any and everything that is within the consensus rules as a node and, and have a node that is even slightly secure or sustainable.

[B]

It's just part of how nodes have got to work on the network. Yeah, but people don't get this. They're still out there saying, I run Core, therefore I relay everything. And I'm like, you don't know how your node works and you haven't thought for five minutes about how you would design such a thing.

[C]

But there are people that are smart enough to know that, that are saying otherwise, which makes, still makes me think there's like some sort of monetary, there's some sort of invested. They're invested in something that is. There's some sort of other component driving them. I can't, like, I mean, it's like.

[A]

I don't know, it just feels like normal heel. Digging, digging.

[B]

To me, oh, there was a big old post where this, this guy that wants to merge opcat was like, we have to merge opcat because of quantum computers. So like, just.

I know we're always laughing at quantum computers, but this guy, he initially was trying to do something else, right? He was trying to get OPCAP for some other reason that didn't work out. Now he's trying to say we need it because of quantum computers. And I just remember, well, if someone's talking about quantum computers, they're probably trying to scam you, like always.

[C]

Well, we were going to bomb Venezuela because of, you know, drug, drug cartels. And now we're going to do it because of China and Russia, quantum computers, Iran or something like that. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

[A]

Say quantum did it Did.

[C]

Did y' all see. Okay, did I see this right? That J.P. morgan. What's the guy? The Epstein's banker diamond? Yeah. He was like attacking microstrategy and saying that it should be delisted and something as some sort of bitcoin fund. And then a day later he shows that he's offering some sort of bitcoin bond.

Like Jamie Dimon has got some sort of bitcoin bond now JP Morgan.

[B]

They're very incoherent, aren't they?

[C]

It's very like. It's almost like he's acting like he's the sort of person that would be Epstein's banker. I don't, you know, it's weird or just.

[B]

I mean, if you run a bank and it's successful, Epstein's going to be one of your clients. I'm not trying to devil's advocate too strong. But like, if I run a big bank and this like the world's most connected and protected man ever wants to make an account with me, I assume I have to say yes or watch various family members get murdered and have their organs trafficked. Like, I don't really know what the solution is for that. Like, man, people are uncovering more and more stuff about. I've gone down a few conspiracy theory rabbit holes this, this last month or so and it, it just horrifies me the stuff that's out there. I think my, my general take is that the AI based surveillance state is now a given. And they're like, all right, we'll get rid of all the old control mechanisms. So we'll just let everyone hear about all that stuff, you know, like, not just MK Ultra, but like Monarch and all the like Psyop, like controlled celebrities and all that, like all this stuff just come out like, you know, and people are like, wait a minute, Israel have been doing what? And it's like all. And it's like, yeah, we don't really care if people find out about that anymore. We're just going to be brazen with it. The whole Candace Owens assassination plot, the Charlie Kirk assassination, like, they just, it just feels sloppy now. They're just like, yeah, we don't really care if you can see exactly what it is we're doing anymore. Like.

[A]

Well, this is kind of fourth turning vibes at the same time, like. Because like what happens is that they keep it essentially the powers that be. This is a historical trend that you can kind of map out is during the, during the second and third generation, second and third turnings is you have this Face where, like, because things are running relatively smoothly and we're. You're in, you're in the up track of this process.

Is that it's easy. It's about like, just like, looking like everything's fine. And the cost of basically undermining or corrupting the system and.

The, the cultural cost and the rotation doesn't. Isn't great enough that it actually hinders the opera, the overall operation. So it's basically hidden under the surface. But when the culture rot and the corruption of the, the whole architecture starts to get like, the debt just gets to the point that it's insurmountable. Well, then everybody gets way more brazen because now it's a genuine fight for power. Like, because there are so many different actors in it that they literally just have to say, like, I'm going to be a shittier. I'm going to be a worse person than you, and so I'm going to win this. And so everybody just gets, it becomes less and less about what the public thinks in the context of like, oh, do they, do they know that we did bad things or whatever? And it's more about, like, how much evil can we get away with? And the public will just dismiss out of just the sheer need to be blind, you know, to just like, stick your head in the sand. How much can we get away with? And what's the risk to your personal life if you stand up against that?

[C]

Well, Ayn Rand says that, you know, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. So. Yeah, so you, you just have this, this like, competition, the corruption of power.

[A]

Just scales, right? Like, like scales to the, the hierarchy. Dominance. The dominance hierarchy. Is that the, the one who's willing to have the biggest stick and use it most viciously will be the one that wins until the, until there's no structure to maintain power over anymore.

[B]

Yeah, which still baffles me because, like, supposing Ron Paul libertarianism, like, became the dominant ideology in America and our political system reduced itself to the size where we felt like we were embracing the libertarian ideals. What do you do then about.

Some giant foreign superpower like China walking in and saying, this is ours now and we don't care about your principles. Ayn Rand did support the right of the state or the obligation of there being a state just to prevent things like that. If I understand correctly, and I've never managed to figure that out, I, I.

[A]

Think that's specifically why cultural defenses are so critical, because you only maintain that with an insanely strong and exclusive culture is that basically you're not allowed in unless you, unless you support, you know, Ron Paul libertarianism. Essentially it's just the exact same thing as like you put a fence around your yard and you just don't let anybody in unless you like and trust that person.

[B]

And that's an extension of self defense.

[A]

It's just an extension of self defense. It's basic property rights. And that's one of those things that libertarians don't get is that, oh, we'll just open and anybody can come in. It's like, well, no, if you don't have the cultural values and the concept of property rights, you will just let everyone in until you have nothing. Until, until you're literally just overrun with an anti libertarian mental framing or cultural values and then you'll lose it all. Because you, you literally just said that freedom is the fact that no culture is any different, but we want to have a whole culture of liberty. Like you can't, like those, those, those can't exist in the same world. Like the culture of liberty, Liberty is actually only maintained by a culture of liberty. So, so if you just think that anybody can come in and cultural cultures and ideologies or whatever, or are just like, you know, whatever, just, just pick one out of a box. You can have whichever ideology you want. No, that's not how society works. It's. That comes first and then society actually is sustainable or not.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, that was Hoppe's, you know, conclusion was that you had to, you had to get rid of the communists, right?

I don't know. I still go back and forth. I can't because like the situation we're in right now is so bad. And the only, like, how do you have a decentralized way to manage who comes into the country? Like, it seems like most of the problem would be solved if the government just couldn't steal from everybody to fund bringing people in. Because a huge portion of the problem is that like Somalis and all these crazy, you know, like, like people that wouldn't be able to afford the plane ticket here are coming here anyway. Now I don't know how much like could some other country pay to import a bunch of people into a free area, like as an attack? I guess you could do that. Like Florida flew like people to Martha's Vineyard. Right? Like.

So, so like that story killed me.

[B]

That was like Calla with the, the spam in the, in, in Cashew Mint. Because it was straight ideological about face. It was like, in this house we believe all lives, like all People are equal. And like, you know. You know, and then it immediately turned into no trespassing. And, like, we will call the police if you show up in our driveway. Like, it was just perfect. Like, they had to completely. Because no one pushing those kinds of, like, those kinds of values ever has to deal with the fallout from it, ever.

[C]

Like, it is definitely the case. The overwhelming majority of the problem is the government actually using US Tax dollars to import and support people. And I mean, to the point that, like, I had someone ask me to invest in a hotel that was going to have utilities subsidized and a large percentage of the rooms rented by the government because they were going to. They were going to keep, you know, people there. So. So, like, this was like a big. This was a thing that was happening in a lot of places. And, you know, particularly in Charlotte, North Carolina, which there's been a lot of, you know, like, discussion about, and in places where they want to pack, you know, they want to redraw voting districts and stuff like that. But, yeah, I don't know. Like, I feel like ICE is a horrible, horrible failure. Like, they're arresting people that are actually decent, hardworking people because the incentives, like, it's obvious how bad the incentives are. Right? Okay. We're going to create a police force that doesn't have to respect any of the normal arrest protocols, and we're just going to give them a quota for people they have to get rid of. And, well, they don't want to go into, like, gang territories and, like, arrest gang members. They want to do the thing that's easiest for them and safest for them. So they go to Home Depot and. And, you know, arrest the guy that's got a job and a kid and, you know, drives a Volvo or. Or whatever. Like, they don't want to arrest the people that are actually the problem.

[A]

They don't want to risk their lives. They want easier rests.

[C]

Right. And so it seems like the only. I mean, this is. This is why cops don't do anything about riots. Cops don't go into the worst. Like, this is why, like, places like Chicago and Detroit have parts of town that are completely run by gangs is because the cops don't want to go there. Like, they don't want a battle. And so. So this is, like, just straight up obvious human nature. Right? It makes sense that we got here because the only thing you can't cut government spending politically, the only thing that's easy to do politically is to create another government program and spend more. So they spent they created another police force and it did all the wrong things.

[A]

But.

[C]

But the only real solution was to cut the spending that was funding the immigration in the first place and supporting the immigrants when they're here. So, you know, I don't know that you can go backwards.

[A]

I was about to say it's like a. You can't stop this train. Like you, like, I don't, I don't know how you do it until it's broken.

[B]

I think. Yeah. Removing benefits.

[A]

And Javier Millier is probably the best example in recent times or vocabulary or something like that. Able to cut significant amounts of government expenditure. Like, like they did, like one of the biggest things was, you know, they fired enormous amount of people in their central bank. They fired a ton of just general government employees and they removed a staggering amount of subsidies and restrictions on housing. And then the price of housing fell by like 70% over the period of like two or three years or something. But their currency was collapsing. Like their currency was basically in hyperinflation.

[C]

Right. If dollarization wasn't part of what he was already doing or like if he didn't have outside support is what I'm saying.

[A]

That's, that's a good point.

[C]

I think that the, the deep state or whatever, you know, whatever you want to call it, Israel, like CIA, whatever.

[A]

I think that the idea of the deep state is just the recognition that the state lies about their motives. Like the political face lies about his motives, which is, which is so like horribly, like childishly, like 5 year olds should understand this logic that the pol. The political face of the government is just the PR on top of a literal organization. Organized Mafia. Yeah, that's. That's all it is. It's just how do we sell this shit to the people so that we can have more power and more control and more money? Um, so the deep state, I think is axiomatically necessary. Like, like, of course it exists because the political face is just pr. Yeah.

[C]

What's the politician's name that in South Carolina that, that McConnell. Mitch McConnell.

[B]

Is that.

[C]

Is that what it is? Was it McConnell?

[A]

I don't know what's. What Everybody talking about, they said something.

[C]

He, he's the one that like, he's been. Trump's been siding with him for over Massey and everybody else.

[A]

He.

[C]

He was like, he got, he was mad because he was being spied on.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

Oh yeah. Mr. Spy on All Americans is mad because he got his cell phone records confiscated. Oh my God. I retweeted that. I was so happy.

[B]

I Hate these people so much, dude.

[C]

But see, this is the perfect example of, I mean, again, whatever you want to call it, the deep state is. It makes perfect sense that if you grant some bureaucrat the ability to spy on Americans, the first people they're going to spy on is politicians, because those are the people that are the power brokers. I mean, to whatever degree politicians have power, those are the people you want to control. So the politicians, the other bureaucrats, the people that you want power over, are going to be the people that are spied on. And this was what he was even, this is even in like, Neil Stevenson's, one of his books or something, is that the people that work for the government are like the most brainwashed and the most spied on and the most, like, they're like the most controlled people. And they don't, like, they have no idea, like, what life is outside of their, like, spied on and controlled world.

Because those are the only people. Like, the rest of the people don't really matter. They don't have any political power at all. And so if the goal is to manipulate, you know, people who have power, then you spy on, you know, those people for sure.

[B]

If you go anywhere in politics, it's because someone had something on you and let you be there. And they are keeping you on a very short leash. And that's, that's just the truth of it. There's no, there's no way. I first had that theory in 2011. Every. It was really crudely put. Every single person in government office is a pedophile. And that's the, that's the reason they're put there. They're put there compromised from the beginning so that they can never be allowed outside of a certain box of acceptable behavior. So they can argue left and right about absolute nonsense, but they'll never, they'll be bipartisan on anything of actual substance.

[A]

So, like, I can't remember who it was, um, but I saw it again, right, recently, and the videos from like, maybe 20 years ago or something, like late 90s, early 2000s or something. But it's a guy who I think used to work in the CIA.

And he was talking about, like, listen, like, how this works is not, is not even that complicated. You know, like, just think about it.

[B]

You're.

[A]

You're a young politician, you have a nice family.

You'Re married and whatever, and you just get in. You get a couple of. You get in an office in your local area, and then you work your way up. And now you're kind of in an important position, your legislature. You're, you know, maybe. Maybe you get to the center of the House of Representatives, and then suddenly you're invited places. You. You have a little bit of influence, and then you're invited overseas to a big conference or important thing that you're very excited about. You know, you're. You're important. You know, you're part of the club now. And when you go there, everybody's drinking and having a great time, and this very attractive young woman comes up to you, and y' all spend an hour or so together, and then she invites you up to you, up to the room, and you have. And you think, oh, I'm in a totally different country. Nobody's going to know about this.

[D]

I'm.

[A]

I'm drunk. My inhibitions are lower. And then two or three weeks later, it comes up that now it's time to vote on something. And somebody comes up. He's like, I heard that there was. That you were with this. This young woman in. In Burma or whatever, at a conference or whatever. I. I would just really hate it if. If that got out and ruined your marriage. He goes, oh, oh, God, no, no, no, it's not. It wasn't like that at all. It was like, listen, you know, people. People interpret these things very, very poorly, and, you know, it just doesn't look good. And I would just hate to see your career be cut short or your. Your marriage and your. Your family be destroyed for this, but I would really, really love it if you had. If we had your vote. He says, and he's like, that's. That's. That's just how it works. That's just how it works. That's how it's always worked. And if they can get better leverage, they'll get better leverage. But the whole game is the fact that all people are very easily corrupted. And the more power they have, the more someone else is going to make sure you get corrupted, because that's how they control you. So this is. This. That was my job. That was our job.

[C]

And they'll give you money if you go their way.

[A]

So.

[C]

So you'll get a stick.

[A]

You'll get a stick in one direction and you'll get a reward in the other. Life will be very. Life will be very easy as long as you give us the vote.

[B]

So it's why you never want to go anywhere near any of this stuff, because you're just going to get bullied or you're going to end up JFK'd.

[C]

Yeah, well, and you Never want to.

[A]

Get called bullied, JFK'd, or just speaking the truth by yourself and Nobody listening for 30 years. Hat tip, Ron Paul.

[D]

Yep.

[C]

You never want to get caught blowing Bill Clinton on camera.

[B]

Yeah, that was hilarious, eh? And just like, it should have all died forever. And the minute they said the Epstein files aren't real, it's a Democrat hoax, everyone should have been like, I'm. I'm done. I am absolutely a billion percent done. I never, ever, ever allow myself to ever get excited. Like, how many people did you know that were stoked that Trump won just now?

[C]

I mean, I was like, right?

[B]

And do you not, like, do you not have to. Do you have a sticker on your fridge? The fell for it again award? Like, do you have this? Or.

[C]

I deserve it.

[A]

I mean, like, I really like such a big sticker.

[C]

Like, I truly. Like, the last time I voted was Rob, when Ron Paul was running. And I, I intended for that to be the last time I would ever vote and legit.

[A]

Like, I feel that pain.

[C]

Harris was so bad that I just thought, okay, no, this sounds different. And here's RFK and all these other people and, you know, maybe, you know, and, you know, Ross Albert got out of jail, so I guess, you know, he's. He just tweeted or, or posted that this is his first Thanksgiving, you know, free, and however, any years, you know, over a decade. So I'm.

[A]

I don't hate that.

[C]

But otherwise, like, it just feel like, God, how stupid could I have been? And. And now watching people, like, I hope nobody's really getting excited over Trump's, like, dangling the idea that, oh, I'm going to get rid of your income tax. No, he's not. Shut the fuck up. Like, this is not even. It's not even sort of gonna happen. He's just trying to cover up for something else bad he's about to do, which is. What was it? There was. I actually saw something. He was going to.

[A]

Probably send Israel or Ukraine a bunch of money or bombs or something.

[C]

Nah, there was a crab. I can't remember what it is now. Hold on. I think.

[B]

I don't know.

[C]

It doesn't matter.

[B]

Fed.

[A]

Well, let's hit some. Let's hit some news items because we've actually. We've actually covered bitcoins. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Bitcoin. Bitcoin. I mean, this is all bitcoin relevant because bitcoin is why. Bitcoin is why we're here. Is it f. F the system?

But.

So I'm curious. I Don't know what y' all know about Lava, but I've briefly looked into them because they were apparently all the rage about like a DLC system, but so Bitcoin backed loans software company Lava shifts from DLC self custody to a custodial cold storage after $200 million raise. So following the backlash, the CEO admitted that shifting their strategy, their security model away from DLCs, fundamental changes apparently not communicated to the users. But Lava can unilaterally move the collateral, implying either private keys were not private or the Oracle could publish false data.

And let me go ahead and hit the last two because there's only, there's only actually a couple here. Then just square launches bitcoin payments for 4 million US merchants, which I have been. I've had a hard time every. Nobody wants to go to their dashboard and set it up. I keep going to like cafes and stuff and like, I don't want to like, get out of the. I don't want to get out and like take like 30 minutes to be like, listen guys, here, let's, let's actually do this. And especially if they're busy. But I keep telling people and they're like, oh really? Really? I'm like, yeah, you just turn it on in your dashboard. There's no fees.

[B]

Well, Steve, did you, did you start doing this at your bar?

[D]

Yeah, yeah, I, I got it. But the, the point he just made, especially if they're busy, is the critical point that applies not to just setting it up, but to doing every transaction. I mean, you guys have all been in Chipotle when you have somebody that's like really pissing you off.

[A]

And I like to pay with a.

[D]

Check, asking questions and shit. Like the entire line just gets furious at your bar. And like, it's like, it's not about. I mean, am I going to take bitcoin and piss off 10 customers to do that? Like, no, you know, it's, it's about the speed of checkout.

[A]

I will say I bought two drinks at the bar and aside from the fact that I think the first time the, the bartender was, she was like, wait a second, how do you do this again? So like one.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Took a, it took a second, but then I got her to do again, like just literally like 10 minutes later or whatever. And it was, it was really fast. I mean, I used Phoenix and, and it worked.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

So I did it twice. And it wasn't, it wasn't a problem then.

[D]

Overall it's been pretty good, like with just expected hiccups. You Know, like, I make my bartenders check me out in bitcoin every night to train the hell out of them.

[A]

That's good.

[D]

So every night I go to my bar and I buy a beer for myself and I send bitcoin to myself and I make them check out with bitcoin. But it's, it's a lot of work. I mean, it's a lot of practice. It's a lot of getting good at it. You know, this isn't your normal set up. You've got extra stuff going on. How do you incorporate the tips on the bitcoin checkout back into the tips of your main system? How do you get all of that integrated with your, your accounting? Like there's extra steps. It's, it's harder. It's, it's.

[A]

Have they figured out more work? Do they have like an easy thing for tips? Because I hadn't seen that.

[D]

So right now the, our setup system is I can charge things in my existing point of sale system to a house account. So I just made a house account called bitcoin. And then they ring everything up in the house account. Then they get the bitcoin checkout and then they put the tips back in. The tips are automatically in the bitcoin transaction. Right. Like that can't be a separate transaction, which kind of sucks because that makes it a lot harder for the tips to go directly to the employees.

It would be nice if Cash app or any system somehow made two traded prisms. Yeah, something like that. Prisms or something like that.

[A]

Well, I was about to say if they had, if they made it so that the, the, like the bartender themselves could, could do it like it, they could make it prisms, but they don't even technically need prisms because they could just forward it. They could just be like, this is obviously the invoice for the thing and then this is the extra amount and it could just be purely custodial because square is custodial on the bitcoin side. When, when you're being received, they just need to allow an allocation to go to somebody else.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, so like if we were fully square, we're not fully square because square does not have the best point of sale system for a bar. They're, they're made for a coffee shop, they're not made for a bar. They don't have all of the tab pre authorization drink modifications, like, you know, a million different options for receipts and stuff like that. They're just, you know, they're. I'm trying to think you know, they're like.

You know, I'm trying to think of an example of like a product where there's like a simple product and then there's like a super complicated. It's kind of like this.

[A]

Kind of like it's a, it's flea market. It's the flea market point of sale. Right. You know, exactly.

[D]

It's, it's not for high end bars. That or speed is everything and just modification customization. It's like a, a bitcoin mining pool. Like running a bitcoin node out of the box. No, they're going to create their custom bitcoin node with all these modifications like specifically for their environment. If they're very serious about it.

[C]

Like that's, that's how movie iMovie vs Final Cut.

[B]

Right? Where is your bar?

[A]

Well, not Final Cut anymore. I guess it'd be like after it's.

[C]

In Raleigh or whatever.

[B]

In.

[A]

Where Da Vinci Raleigh.

[D]

I don't know what that is, but anyway. But it's, it's pretty good. And square and square is getting better at the bar environment.

And like if you are fully with square already that, that makes things a lot easier in some ways because you can do.

All of the tips and everything are just automatically recorded. You don't have to transfer it from one system to another. So yeah, if you're using square already like I, it's. I think it's a no brainer for.

For businesses. I mean you've got to train your employees and you know, you're probably not going to want to do it. When you have 10 people in line and you've got a employee checking out somebody for the first time, you're like, you don't want to do it then. But like other than that.

[A]

Yeah.

I'll see if the coffee shop that I went to today and then the day before Thanksgiving, I keep telling them and they're like oh, well the first, the first girl just looked like confused. She was like oh, okay. And. But the girl I spoke to today actually seemed like, like when I said bitcoin she was aware that bitcoin was a thing and had had that like indication. They're like, oh okay, this is like a thing that we can do now. That, that, that's cool. You know, I'll talk to the owner or whatever about it. It probably won't be available tomorrow, but I'm going to try again.

[D]

Yeah, I mean I have one bartender that is like on. She's not like a bitcoiner but she's like just very Suspicious of the government. And so I'm just like, look, you know, like, non government.

[A]

We're doing this. You're halfway there.

[D]

I mean, you can find some way to get your BART or your employees excited about it in some way other than just like, I just made your life twice as hard and you're not getting any more money for it. Like, you got to find some way to like, make your employees happy about it.

[B]

You could make it so that, like, the fact that the, the credit card fee isn't there anymore. You can just like, sum up all the money you saved. Like, so all the bitcoin purchases, say you sold ten grand worth of stuff in the last week via bitcoin. You could be like, well, I would have lost 90 bucks from transaction fees, like with the credit card. So that's all just extra tips split amongst everyone in the bar. You could do that and then they might feel some sort of. That's pretty dope.

[A]

Yeah, that's not a bad idea.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, I. And also not for my bar, because in my bar, I send them home with cash every day from their credit card tips. That's just a system that has a bunch of pros and cons. Some bars send their employees paychecks, you know, to their direct deposit to their bank account. That is if their government isn't watching their bank account and taking money out for whatever reason. But.

So some bars do that. And then some bars just convert the credit card tips and report it, and they have to pay taxes on it, but they go home with cash at the end of the night. Those bars, basically, the employer is paying the credit card fee for them. So I'm paying the credit card fee for their, their tips right now. But if you're not doing that, if you're sending your employees tips via direct deposit to their checking account, then, yeah, you can be like, hey, look, you know, if you get your tips on bitcoin, you don't have to pay that fee maybe, or something like that. But yeah, no, that's a good idea. Just splitting what's saved via credit card fees to the employees. Yeah, it's a good idea.

[B]

I like it.

[A]

You don't actually have to sell your bitcoin to access its value. You can actually borrow against it very easily without selling it. But when you do this, you need to be careful. You need to do this with a company that is trusted, one that has survived a bear market, and one that will literally show you that they have the coins, that they have proof of reserves or some mechanism where you can look at your balance and know that it is safe. This is why I've been a huge fan and a customer of Leaden for a few years now. So one of the bitcoin backed loans that I got a few years ago to finish renovations and the basement and studio in my house, I would have paid three times as much back bitcoin had I just sold it as it now takes me to just pay off the loan. And that's if I sell the bitcoin to pay it off, which I think I'm going to be able to get equity out of the house and pay off the loan and get all of my bitcoin back. This especially makes sense if you're making an investment, if you're doing something that is going to pay you income in the future, or if you're investing in bitcoin mining, it's a whole lot easier to beat the interest rate if you loan against the bitcoin and keep the bitcoin. Leden also makes this like crazy easy. Like if you went to do this right now, you could probably get the money by tomorrow. They do proof of reserves twice a year and I check. It's a very easy process. And you don't have to do monthly payments if you don't want to. You can just accrue the interest and pay off in chunks whenever it makes sense. And best of all, they just recently got rid of all the noise. They had some other features. They had Ethereum loans. They're like, nope, chop it. They had a yield product. Nope, chop it. They had loans where you could get a lower interest rate and they didn't have it on their books. They lent it out. Nope, chop that. Now it's just custodied, fully backed bitcoin loans doesn't work for every single situation or every person. But there are some times where this is an incredibly valuable tool to have. Don't overextend. Remember bitcoin is volatile and read the details. But if you need access to your bitcoin's value and you just don't want to sell, Leden is a brilliant and simple tool for doing exactly that. And I've been a happy customer for a couple of years now. You can check out the links right down in the show notes. It's L E D N Ledden IO.

Now question, did y' all know anything about this Lava thing? Because I did hear about briefly kind of in passing like previously that there was going to be some new system with DLCs and I saw a bunch of people bitching about it on Twitter and the, I believe it was the CEO or somebody who worked for him was coming in and being like, listen, we just ran into too many problems with DLCs and we couldn't get it to work. And that one, I don't, I didn't quite. There was never a full explanation unless I mean I didn't dig like hard into it, but that just seems a little like huh to me.

[B]

Did I hear you? I've never heard of this, but did I hear you write in your explanation that they switched from self custody to them having the private keys?

[A]

Basically like so they were trying to do dlc. This is a bitcoin backed loan company. So it's like let in or unchained or you know, whatever. And they were trying to come up with a new system that like, rather than custodial or multisig, they were going to do a DLC system which was some self custodial setup that you could do. And maybe, maybe it's got to do with like how you can actually execute it because you can like kind of hide other paths and stuff in a bitcoin transaction where like somebody else wouldn't be able to see it and maybe that's part of it. Is that like, okay, well how do we make it so that users. I'm making something up right now. I don't really know what the supposed problem they ran into was, but they were supposed to have something that was like super secure and essentially self custodial in some context, but still have a provable kind of reserved bitcoin backed loan system and they offer 5% interest at least right now, but they don't do, they never did the DLC thing. They raised $200 million with a bunch of excitement about their new system and stuff and they ended up just kind of dropping it for.

For. They just hold the collateral, which you know, a bunch of companies do. And, and they're offering what sounds like an impossible interest rate like, like I kind of feel like as actual fiat interest rates get down that might be possible at some point, but I don't know where the hell they're getting the liquidity to manage 5% bitcoin backed loans. And I'm, I'm not about to trust a company that hasn't been around the block and is saying I've got a new setup and I've got a really great deal. So just really questionable on, on my, on the front for me. Um, especially if there's, if the whole DLC thing got Dropped altogether. But I don't know, just a, just a questionable situation in my opinion.

[D]

I didn't hear about that. But I think there's something we need to do like as a community to change.

Classifications of Bitcoin backed loans. There should just be two categories. Address viewable, address not viewable. Because there's all of these gray area new creative solutions that are some kind of hybrid, some kind of blend between like what Unchained has traditionally done and like, you know, the worst, whatever, the worst, scammiest, take your bitcoin, don't tell you where it is thing ftx.

Some, you know, some people would be like, yeah, your bitcoin is fully stored in custody with, on, with whatever with, you know, institutional grade multi sig. We're not touching it. But they won't show you the address. There's no difference between that and some, and some company that says like you're not going to, you know, we're not going to do whatever we want with your bitcoin. There's no difference in those two things. You as the customer can either see the address where the thing is stored and actually unchained is great that they let you hold one one of one key of a two or three multi. That's great. But that doesn't really matter either. You know, it's just like because I can't do anything with my one key to my thing.

[B]

Well, you can stop them, right? But they have two of three themselves.

[D]

There's a third party escrow person.

[B]

Isn't that just them though?

[D]

It's probably just them. That's why I'm saying it doesn't, that doesn't matter. But what does matter is that because I can download that configuration file for the multisig, I can view the address that the bitcoin is stored at. That's all that matters. There's just two categories of bitcoin backed loans. Address viewable, address not viewable. None of the other shit matters.

[B]

Well, why doesn't you have in a private key matter?

[D]

Because I can't, I can't do anything without, I can't move it with a private key anyway. I mean it's, it's kind of nice.

[A]

It's really just kind of a shortcut to address viewable though. It's like, it's like how do you, how do you make an explicit address viewable without, without a multi sig that the user is part of?

[D]

Like send me the multisig configuration file, I need the multisig configuration file. That's All I need, I, I need to be able to see what keys are here and what is the address that the coins are being stored at and I can monitor that every day. That's, that's the only difference in loans. You either have that or you don't. So I think. But, but the, the companies themselves are going to not going to make this classification. Like we, we have to start classifying lens that way.

[A]

I think where on that category because, because like I don't know how you would do the classification without actually. Excuse me, the address viewable without having it explicitly tied to somebody's key and like a multisig. Whereas something like proof of reserves is an attestation to an on chain balance but it's usually an aggregated balance. So it's, it's like okay, here's a, here's a, an address with 237 coins in it and then there's a hash in it and then you have a Merkle leaf inside of that hash that you go paste and then, and then it's explicit that like inside of that there's, there's, there's your one Bitcoin.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Like, like your one Bitcoin per year loan is in this 237 Bitcoin address or whatever.

[D]

Yeah, I guess I glossed over it. So when you do a bitcoin back loan you the individual.

Are putting an on chain transaction to the multi sig that holds your bitcoin. Right.

[A]

So it's a direct to things. So there's not like the obfuscation for, for an, for an address viewable thing.

[D]

Yeah. So okay, I guess there is a slight difference in there. Like no, a company doing that can't make one multisig for everybody's coins. They have to make a different multisig for every customer.

[A]

Yes.

[D]

That'd be crazy if they did that.

[B]

I mean I've been trying to dig into the. Does anyone want to give me like an overall overarching summary of the state of the art taproot multisig?

[A]

In what way? What do you mean? An overview.

[B]

Like everyone's got all these halfway solutions that are kind of there that are like almost good but no one's like there there yet. If I.

[A]

And for a bitcoin backed loan I don't know how it gets better than like a simple multi cert, like two keys, an arbiter, the company that you're working with and you with a 203. I don't really know how you get a whole lot better like, like that's kind of like that's like the gold standard and, or the bitcoin standard and then everything else is just like variations or gray areas. Like probably the, the absolute top of the line for a direct custodial would be, would just be proof of reserves so that you, you know that your bitcoin aren't being rehypothecated, but that's still in a trusted setup because you don't have a key. And I separate that from.

Custodial versus a multi sig.

But other than that I don't know of anything that's like quote unquote better than just a simple, simple two or three multi zig.

[C]

So real quick with the lava thing you were, you were saying that they didn't have any sort of DLC being implemented and they had just been raising money. They were like moving in that direction.

[A]

They had been trying to do that this entire time and raised money, I believe on basically that promise. And then where they already ended up not being able to pull it off. I, I, as I understand it, you know, to give them the benefit of the doubt is that the reason they didn't is because they could not make it secure is there was always some sort of edge case where somebody could lose their coins or somebody could back out of the loan, you know, unilaterally. Like there was just some degree of control that they couldn't have which limited their security, which means that they couldn't guarantee the loans to the lender versus the borrower. That, that's, that's, that, that is my rough understanding.

[C]

So it was not the case that they had already done a bunch of DLCs and then just moved all the money when they supposedly couldn't.

[A]

They were trying to make the DLC system work in testing and they could never get it to pan out with the, the, the guarantees. That in theory it kind of sounded like oh yeah, we could definitely do it with DLCs and have it secure and trust the lender could be secured and the borrower could be secured and you know, essentially something better, something supposedly better with an independent source of truth that solved or made it one step better than the two of three multi sick. And apparently that just never happened.

[D]

Or just for the price aspect, like just the DLC is just there for like when you're actually liquidated. That's the only thing the DLC would.

[A]

Yes, the DLC is there for Uber. Who does the lender or the borrower get this money? Like who's the attestation as to, to the, the reality of how this unfolded. Who's get, how does this get margin called? Basically.

[C]

What does DLC stand for?

[B]

Discrete log contract.

[A]

Okay, yeah.

[B]

I have now given you all of my knowledge on that topic.

[A]

It's kind of like, like we trust Jeff to speak the truth and mechanic and I have a multi sig that says if the price goes down to 80,000, guy gets it. If the price goes up to a hundred thousand, mechanic gets it. And then Jeff is the, that the price is 82,000, the price is 85,000.

[C]

That sounds. So I'm the Oracle and yeah, okay, I get it.

[A]

But the thing is, is that you have, you don't have to have any clue. We can, we can lock our contract to the price based on what you say it is, but you don't even know that our contract exists.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So like the, just the simple fact that you have broadcast it out to the world means that our contract can depend on your statement in that way. But you're not an arbiter.

[D]

UTX Oracle solves this problem, but only if everyone agrees to run the same UTX Oracle code. So it's kind of like in your contract you're also like running UTX Oracle together. And so and you're, you prove that you're all running the exact same code and then you'll all get the exact same price.

[B]

Yeah, you could make it deterministic. Right.

Does UTX Oracle use mempools or does it just use the blockchain?

[D]

So there's kind of two different products. So UTX Oracle Chain. UTX Oracle Block is sort of a different project than UTX Oracle Mempool, utex Oracle Chain. It's like I fully open sourced everything. Everybody gets the exact same price. Like there's no discrepancy. It's all consensus. Like it's, it's like perfect in a way. UTX Oracle Mempool is messy. I haven't, it's beta, I haven't open sourced everything and everyone has a different mempool. So like UTX Oracle Mempool is going to have slightly different prices. I mean they're kind of be, they're going to be pretty much the same and it's going to be kind of interesting.

What the difference is. But it's, it's not a consensus price and so it's, those two products are kind of two different ones. Like I'm probably going to make an API for UTX Oracle Mempool. I'm not going to make an API for UTX Oracle Chain. Because that's the whole point. But because everybody's Mempool is different, I'm probably going to make an API just for utx, Oracle, Mempool, just so you can see what's in my Mempool, I guess.

Does that answer what you're asking for?

[B]

Sure, yeah. And I think, I don't know, I would be curious like what Mempool policies would give you the most reliable.

[A]

I know, right?

[D]

Well, I know that for sure because I've been doing this for five years now. So the thing that gives you the most accurate prices is the following set of filters. Limit the number of inputs to five inputs or less. Make the number of outputs exactly two. Like you'd think that's overly restrictive. It's not. One output is not going to be a price point. More than one out, more than two outputs is not going to be a price point because these aren't payments, these aren't simple payments with change addresses. And that's what you want. So limit inputs, outputs. Exactly. To no witness data above 500 bytes, no opera turns, no tx IDs that are RBF and no tx IDs that have been spent in the last six blocks. So these are for people making one transaction per day peer to peer. Like that is the highest signal to noise ratio for finding the price and that's.

[B]

Those are the most authentic. Bitcoin is a medium of exchange.

[D]

Exactly right, exactly. It's, it's almost like I'm, it's almost like I'm combining the, the movement for Bitcoin payments, you know, directly peer to peer with the Oracle. It's kind of beautiful how these two things are combining. I'm finding like the ideal transactions for the Oracle are like the ideal intended transactions of Bitcoin like to begin with. And it doesn't even have to be around USD because as I'm finding like I can pretty much tell you the value of Bitcoin purchasing power USD price kind of just based on the median amount of, of what people say Bitcoin sent.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Amazing.

[A]

It's crazy how simple the heuristic is. It's like, you know all the stuff we talk about of like, oh, there's going to be all these crazy transactions, there's going to be all these different types. It's like, well, yes, since the beginning, 1 input, 2 output, like, like direct transaction, drop all this other, all the other crap and it still just works. It's the same, it's been the same. It still just is. Yeah, it's kind of nuts.

[D]

That's awesome. I'm super excited about. I got so much, like, energy to work on it right now. It's great. I don't want to think about my bar right now.

[C]

Like, man.

[B]

I installed it on a Start OS and it's. It needs a configuration. It says UTX Oracle has been automatically configured with recommended defaults. Make whatever changes you want, then click Save. And then there's something called Argument. Then year, year, year, month, month, day, day. It just wants me to input that and I don't know why. Why does it not.

[D]

Okay. Can you hit enter without any arguments?

[B]

I pressed save and I'm. Now I'm starting it. That. That just feels like a bug in the package. Like the fact that it's called Argument instead of what, like, naming what it is it actually wants you to do. Feels like. Amazing.

[D]

Is. Yeah.

[B]

Do you know who packaged this?

[D]

Yeah, well, I. I just met the guy on Twitter as. Just something he did as like a hackathon. Like, quick job. Like, he didn't spend a ton of time on it, but I was super grateful that he did it. That argument that you were talking about is like, you can get the price chart for whatever day you want since 2020. So if you don't want just like the current price, you can just run it in historical mode and get whatever price chart whatever day you want.

[B]

The UI failed.

[D]

Okay.

[B]

UTX Oracle exit code File not found so this is.

[D]

What file does it want?

[A]

Time to ask Claude.

[B]

No, I love podcasts that are just tech support. Like, two guys trying to. My favorite.

[D]

One day I'll work on the Star 9 version myself. It's just. It's a lot to do.

[B]

I can help you out with that too.

[A]

Let's hit. We actually don't have a remarkable amount of news items, but.

[B]

Well, let's. We can talk about 444 a bit as well, how that sort of changed. That's some interesting.

[A]

I want to hit some government stuff real quick because it's just kind of funny how back and forth it is. So the check. National bank purchases digital assets for the first time. They have a $1 million asset test portfolio then. And this includes Bitcoin, USD stablecoin and a tokenized deposit, which I didn't understand. I think they're, like, making their own thing then. So Czech national bank is like, all right, let's. Let's entertain this Bitcoin thing. Spain proposes a 47% bitcoin tax and new seizure rules. Spain is like, f your Bitcoin. We're going to tax the hell out of it. We're going to take it from you.

They are trying to raise the top tax rate on bitcoin gains to higher than all the other things and then classify all digital assets as feasible.

Then Texas makes a historic $10 million bitcoin treasury purchase. So they've become the first US state to actually acquire Bitcoin directly for its Treasury. They pumped $10 million worth via BlackRock's IBIT ETF.

[C]

So close now.

[A]

So damn it. Now they did say yes, we made the purchase via the etf, but the intention is to move to self custody. This is just the first step. So that's, that's something. They made the recognition that like we didn't really buy bitcoin yet.

[B]

Wouldn't that mean that they'd have to sell it and buy it again properly? Like, you can't withdraw from an etf, can you?

[A]

Yeah, well, no, I think the like for like actually works now. I think legally you. There's like a.

I can't. I don't. I don't know exactly how it works but, but I was pretty sure I read that not too long ago. The. There's some sort of ability to redeem or something at an institutional level that you can trade in like, like paper bitcoin for actual bitcoin and it doesn't register somehow as a sale and a purchase. But I could be wrong and it might be specific to one very isolated thing.

But.

Yeah, so. And obviously this just follows the fact that Texas is formalizing Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset.

[B]

There's so much bitcoin activity. Half of the conferences I go to are in Texas, man.

[A]

Yeah, dude, Texas is all in.

[B]

Yeah, it's pretty dope.

[A]

Pretty dope.

If anybody has any comments on that. Otherwise I'm. I'm happy to dig more into 444 because I still. My picture of it is still a bit vague.

[D]

Can. I'll let mechanic explain four for four but can you. The thing I'm interested in is this detail about some mini script weird edge cases that would become invalid on the soft fork. I don't understand why that's a big deal because like all transactions that have spam are going to become invalid on the temporary software. Can you, in your like explanation can you mention that? Because that, that seems like the biggest hangout for a lot of people on this software.

[B]

I don't understand miniscript well enough unfortunately. I'm still like trying to make head or tail of it myself in a lot of ways. So. I don't know. Like, I do know that initially, like, the. The drama around OP if was bothering people a lot. And I was like, I was trying to dig into that a bit. I'm still not really there. But it does seem like the entire point of Taproot is so that instead of using OP if you make different leaves for stuff. And then it's the. That's the whole efficiency gain of it, is that you only reveal one of the leafs. So instead of revealing a whole function or something that has if this, else this, else this, else this, and having to write all that on chain, you just reveal one of the paths. That was the whole point of Taproot. So Luke's assertion that people using OP if are retarded if they're using it in taproot. So we're just disabling that because that's what the inscriptions guys use. Yeah, they can use other stuff, but let's kill OP if. And obviously people are using it. But he just keeps yelling that you just stop designing your stuff in such a stupid way, like, stop using OP if. So that was like one thing to comment on that I didn't really get. But maybe other people didn't do or have some pushback again.

But other than that, I think when it comes to things, miniscript specifically, I'm just way too out of my debt.

[D]

I think it's the same thing. It's the same OP if thing, same thing category.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I think other than that, like, he pushed it, he's now doing it as an MASF with a much longer.

[D]

Timeframe.

[B]

Which is fun.

But, like, that was sort of something I can't believe I agreed with. But I did end up agreeing with it because it just means miners can activate it sooner if you still have a lock in on timeout. And he's extended the timeout. So it's this Sword of Damocles concept. Like, if the network ever gets too annoyed with spam, they can turn around to the miners and say, why aren't you activating this softwalk that's been around for a while? And the pressure can grow from there. And anyone that's saying, well, we don't want to, they have to then offer their rationale for why they don't want to. And you get into the Bitmain against segwit territory. Like, why are you guys actually against this? We don't think you have a good reason. And then the pressure can build and build on that premise. So that's kind of where things have ended up with it. I think a lot like the whole proactive approach is now the main thing. There's no reactive approach left. That's sort of a read between the rule, read between the lines kind of thing now. Right? Because if someone uploads CSAM into the blockchain and everyone collectively decides, all right, we need to just get that out of there. Then you have 4, 4, 4 reworked in the reactive case where a couple of big miners just say, all right, we're starting from three blocks ago, we're just going to mine from then and just not include this thing in the blockchain that seems to have been like sort of decided is. Is a, is a thing we don't need to talk about anymore because it's so controversial, but something that might suddenly become not controversial and just what everyone wants to do. But it's only being worked on at the moment in the proactive sense. So it's definitely not Luke working on it. Dathan is definitely not Luke because Luke doesn't approve of it in its current form.

And then, yeah, that's, that's pretty much it with it. I think he's going to release an activation client in the first couple of weeks of December and then we'll, I guess we'll just see what happens with it after that.

[D]

What about like replay attacks? Or it's weird to call them attacks, but like.

So if, if we're in the situation where we have a, a soft fork and we kind of have like two different. We have a chain split, we have these kind of. The legacy thing and the soft fork chain kind of go in, in action. Does a regular user of Bitcoin need to decide which chain they want to broadcast their transaction on? Or like, is it kind of going to be assumed that if you broadcast it on either chain, somebody's going to replay it on the other chain? I mean, is replay kind of like a good thing in a way?

[B]

It means that the state is less tolerable, generally speaking.

Right. So.

That should mean it resolves faster. Assuming that the fork chain is the minority, the nodes on that chain aren't. They're going to have very lapse banning policies. This is intentional because otherwise you'd end up with two different sets of nodes not talking to each other at all. Because they'd all ban each other. Right? Like core would ban nots and knots would ban Core because they keep doing stuff that's like speaking two different languages, even though the chains, you know, are acceptable in both cases on the core side, if that makes sense. But the intentionally, in scenarios like this, the, the, the fork nodes are made more tolerant. So even though the core nodes keep broadcasting some silly chain to the, to the, from the perspective of the, of the fork nodes, they don't ban any of the nodes that do that. So they still hear about all the transactions and they still include them and broadcast them on their side and vice versa. All from the core nodes perspective, assuming core goes, you know, rejects the fork or, but not with the ursf but just doesn't go along with the new rule, the core nodes will receive all the transactions from the fork nodes and the fork nodes will receive all the transactions from the core nodes and the ones that are valid on both chains will end up in both blockchains. And.

[D]

Okay, that's, that's a very different behavior though, because I typically in node software, if you realize that you're not on the same block number as another node and.

Node to send you a block that you consider invalid, and they do that multiple times, the node typically stops listening to that other node as a peer. So like that, I'm pretty sure that logic is in all existing nodes.

[B]

Are you saying the node would stop if you keep getting blocks that you keep rejecting? You would stop listening to the node sending it to you?

[D]

Yeah, because you're just you as a node, you're constantly.

[B]

Yeah, that's intentionally loosened inside a fork client. Like a UASF client intentionally loosens that so as not to bifurcate itself off the chain and the network that's ignoring the new rule.

[D]

Okay, so then it, then what it has to do then is it has to stop sending its blocks to core nodes that it is connected to, otherwise nodes are going to reject it. They're going to stop.

[B]

They might not even be requesting it. Right. Because if they're already three blocks ahead by their own count and you have some competing block from three ago that just looks like you're just, you just fell behind for whatever reason, which is a normal condition because you're not sending them an invalid block. Right. You're the one with the more stringent rule set. So the fork client says, hey, I can, I've got a new block from three blocks ago from your perspective. And then they said you've fallen behind. There's been a, a reorg since then. That one got orphaned, I guess.

[D]

Yeah. And also you're probably going to want to stop sending like the, the fork client is probably going to want to stop sending transactions to the, the core clients too, because event like at first it'll be fine. The UTXO sets are going to be the same and all things are going to be the same, but eventually you're probably going to get into a place where the UTXO sets are significantly different and a coin that's spendable here is not spendable there. And then like, if you start sending that node, like, invalid transactions, it. It'll probably start stop listening to you too. I don't know. I mean, I, I'm out of my depth here, but I'm.

[B]

Me too. I mean, Luke has worked on this stuff before and UASF was designed with all this stuff in mind. Like Bitpoint 148 was deliberately designed to not fork itself off the unconfirmed transaction pools. Like diverging massively would probably result in nodes being hostile to each other as well. And I don't know how that's accommodated for either. Okay, but again, everything is all valid. Everything the UASF chain is doing is valid. All they're doing differently is just rejecting some newer blocks, but that is going to result in them receiving a divergent set of unconfirmed transactions too. I don't know the implications of that, but. And I don't know if you can. Tolerance is all on one side because maybe you, at that point, the core intolerance of you broadcasting already spent transactions. No, it wouldn't matter. Actually, it wouldn't. Because again, there, there, it's just a very common scenario anyway that a whole bunch of nodes you're connected to are sending you a block. You already have a different version of like, same height, but a different version that happens like once a day, right? Where two pools find a block at the same time. And like a bunch of nodes on the network say, hey, I have this block for you. And they tell that to a node that says, I already have a block. And it doesn't look like that. And that doesn't result in mass banning. There's already just tolerance of that built in. And there's also going to be a difference in transaction inclusion there as well. So unfortunately, this is the kind of stuff that nodes can either tolerate, which makes them, makes the, the whole mechanism by which you do a UASF that wasn't particularly popular, quite viable. Or if you harden nodes to this, it's kind of like the Portland Hodl attack where he was trying to like waste bandwidth of a, you know, Comcast users that have like bandwidth caps and stuff, like by repeatedly Ibding over and over and over again. And people were like, well, good, we can harden nodes and make them less susceptible to this. Attack. But there isn't really a way to do it. Nodes kind of have to just be like, oh, you keep. You've requested IBD from me 19 times. All right, I guess we'll go for a 20th. Like, if you start banning pairs that do that stuff, it makes the network so much more hostile that it would end up just being really annoying for people. Genuine IBD users. Like, I think no one can figure out a good way to stop griefing like that.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, there is some of that already built in though, I think. I mean, your, your node's always looking for other nodes and always, like letting go of nodes that aren't useful to it. I'm pretty sure.

[B]

Yeah, there's. I'm always getting that message like.

[A]

You.

[B]

Know, one of the peers is stalling ibd, dropping it and finding another one. I'm forever doing ibd. So.

[A]

What'S the, what's the activation threshold of whatever the.

[B]

I don't know. I think he was thinking of dropping it to 55%, which is, which is not that crazy. But, you know, the point is if you set it to 95%, then Wang Chun personally will just say no, and then it won't happen, which is ridiculous. Like, why should one guy be able to say that? Like, we had this scenario with, with a Bitmain before saying no. Now it would just be Wang Chun saying no because he's a. All day. There's ones and zeros. Believe.

[A]

Or who's Wang Chun?

Which one does he run or what's he. F2 pool. Okay.

I knew, I knew the name, but I didn't know where from.

[D]

Interesting times, man. Interesting software times. I feel like in a way we've entered into a different game theory world with this kind of.

This softwork thing. But, like, we're thinking about things.

[A]

This, in my opinion, is still very different from the. The previous user activated software. And I don't know. Yeah, I don't have a stronghold on how any of this would play out in my mind.

[D]

We didn't talk about this stuff during the block wars. Like, this is, this is new territory.

[B]

The, the main difference is we're not activating a bunch of sleeping logic in core, which was segwit, that like, we could just like force core nodes to consider. Segwit acting like the rules aren't dormant inside core. They literally don't exist. So you're doing something far more alien to the majority of the network. You're activating a rule they'd never heard of. Whereas in UASF Time. Sure, we were a tiny minority of intolerant people, but we were activating stuff. That core was looking to be activated because SEGWIT was in there. It was just in its unactivated state. So there definitely was some more signaling of intent, like everyone's running unactivated SegWit. They clearly want Segwit and it's just a couple of miners that aren't letting us do it. But I mean, it wasn't that clear cut, right? Because all of the BCachers were against Segwit directionally. They were like this. This represents a change of approach, even though it's not a stupid thing to do regardless, you know, fixing transaction malleability, it's being done instead of making blocks bigger, even though it did make blocks bigger. Like it's being done instead of that, and we don't want to go that way. So it became a political football and symbolic of, of a bad direction from the big blocker perspective. So there were plenty of notes that said we hate this, but they had, they did fork themselves off. So I don't know. Same team really behind this UASF though. I mean, Luke didn't support UASF initially and then he suddenly was like, I do support it now. And I think that can be the case with 444 as well, because he's against the way it is written now. But I think in some circumstances there's one where he just says, well, this is the best option we have and we now no longer have a choice. Like big op returns are causing a problem. I mean, let's, let's change consensus to not allow them anymore. Like they were basically blocked with a filter before, but we had to get rid of the filter because of, you know, political angles and things like that. But either way, no one wants 100 kilobyte or 1 megabyte opera terms for that matter. No one. There's no reason for 1 megabyte opera terms to be consensus valid. And they are. So if you can block em with a filter to 99% effect, that's worked pretty well, but that's gone now. So it, the only real path left is blocking it at consensus. And then it just becomes about, all right, well, what about the taproot holes? Do we want to fix them at the same time? And that's why it becomes this whole temporary soft fork thing, because it disables all other soft forks for a year because all the upgrade hooks are dead as well. So if we want to add anything else during the 444 time we won't be able to. But it's not like anyone is itching to add a soft fork fork in the next 15 months. Right. So that would like allow us three months until February. Right. Until 444 would theoretically activate. But I mean that's already been pushed out to like September now. So there would be a year where you couldn't activate a soft fork for.

[C]

For this to activate. Doesn't do we have to have like a majority of knots nodes to avoid a chain split.

[B]

Well, 444 isn't knots. This will be its own activation client. Just like UASF wasn't core, it was its own thing. So I don't know if this is going to end up in knots. I don't think it's definitely not going to start that way. It's built on top of knots and it has all the like normal filters you'd expect with knots. But it's not a release from the knots team. Right. This is Dathan who's made a fork of knots and has made a UASF client that allows for minor signaling. And I should. I also want to point out that all the activation stuff for soft forks in Bitcoin core is all broken. None of it worked and Dathan has iterated on it and made it all work again. So if any fork happens, whether it's Antispam or a Covenant or anything like that, they're going to end up cherry picking from all the stuff that Dathan has done for this because bip9 broke. Bip8 has been completely just destroyed and someone had to go in and make all this work again. And you know, it's. It's all just kind of dead code at this point that's been revitalized and it's modified bip9 which is what Taproot ended up using. But I it fell into disrepair and had to be repaired again. So this, if there's any fork going to happen at all, this whole conversation needed to happen because.

Some things like you start down a path that doesn't ultimately work out, but things that happened on that path had to have happened for another path to be unlocked, if that makes sense. So I'm pretty sure some fork is going to happen whether it's 444 or not.

And if and when it happens, this whole conversation around 444 needed to have happened in order for that to have gone where it got like. The conversation has progressed rapidly.

And he's doing a lot of work though. I think the conversation's kind of quietened down a little bit while he works on the activation client. But pretty soon, I'm expecting, I think probably around the second week of December, there'll be an activation client for 444. And then I guess we'll see if there's massive resistance to it or it just dies in obscurity or people like it, or there's some sort of black swan event where people are like, wow, we really need this. And it came at just the right time. Or there's a URSF client that comes in, you know, to resist it formally. Who knows what's going to happen.

[C]

So this is like a whole separate node implementation that has to be run. Or is the activation client something anybody can adopt? What's the.

[B]

Yeah, anyone can run it. It's not like ground up again. It is just a full walk of knots. But yeah, it's. It's just not going to be an official Knots release.

[C]

So migrating from Core to this version is not going to be like super difficult or.

[B]

No, it would just be a different node. I mean, the whole point is someone will have to package it for Umbrella and start nine for most people. Just run it. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

So, okay. But it is like, I mean, you would, I guess you could import your history or something if you wanted to, but it is like spinning up a whole new network.

[B]

You don't even need to do that. You just leave the directory where it is. Like you have a you in Linux it's always the home folder, slash dot bitcoin. And then in there you have the blockchain, you have the chain state, you have the wallet, you have like the mempool dot. Like you just have a bunch of files in there. All you would do is you stop your Bitcoin core node and you just start the client node instead and tell it the data directory to look at. And it'll be like, oh, okay, I already have a blockchain and I already have this configuration file and it just runs the exactly the same way. So that's how it's, that's how it works for like an upgrade of Core as well.

[C]

Like it's just in the same like, vein of thing. Like if we've got a competition between node implementations or whatever, is it possible that we could just have enough knots adoption with people setting their own filters that all of this becomes kind of moot?

[D]

Or.

[B]

I mean, maybe. I think it depends what you're looking at because I think Citria is already like kind of not able to get going because they need like, they're really weird. They need like everyone to see their rollups in their mempools basically at the same time. And there's 20% of the network that isn't going to see a Citria roll up because they filter inscriptions, which is how the Citria roll ups formatted. So I already think that's kind of prohibitive for them. Like they're, they're really weird because the whole pushback against filters was always, it can get in the chain anyway. But that isn't their concern. They want to make sure it's in everyone's mempool because that's what they need for their project. And if it ends up in the chain afterwards, they actually don't care. They need the mempools, which is a very specific request.

[D]

Why would they need so many? I mean, I understand how they would want.

[A]

And I guess this. I just don't understand how the, the justice transaction or the enforcement transaction in Bitcoin, that's different.

[B]

That's the fail case. That's, that's a different thing that uses a fake pub key, which even knots nodes will accept that. And there's only a couple of them a year in normal circumstances. And that's what the whole conversation was about, making Opera turn bigger so that they could use opera turns instead of fake pokeys. But the rollups are inscriptions and they are way more dangerous. So no one really spoke about that. And I didn't realize it until a friend of mine pointed it out. He was like, if Citria is successful, every block is going to be five giant transactions that are just Citria roll ups. And that's all you'll see in the blockchain. They will use up all of the space. They'll be incredibly big. And the insult, the final insult is that they don't even need them. They just needed them in people's mempool. They never needed them in the actual blockchain, but they just end up there anyway because miners pick them up as regular transactions and mine them. But once they're in there, they serve no purpose to Citria or Bitcoin and they use up all the block space. So this feels like a horrible tragedy of the Commons kind of scenario. And it really didn't enter the discussion until a couple of weeks ago when someone pointed out to me that that's their design. It only happens that way if they're successful. But I'm sure they plan to be successful.

[D]

Somebody said to me, like, last talk has been like kind of making me feel uncomfortable for the last month. Like if these continue to go down, like they are like the incentive for.

Mining pools to just mine empty blocks just gets higher and higher.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And like.

Seriously, like we're, we're lucky. I mean with all the risks that might be associated with putting some, something terrible on chain. You know, a mining pool is like, why am I putting in transactions when I'm only making a dollar a month and I'm, I'm, I'm getting $10 million a month just for the block. Why am I adding risk for a dollar a month? Like why do, why do I, why do I put any transactions in at all?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

But I mean the opposite has been what's happened. They just spontaneously all agreed to lower the price of what they're selling block space for. So clearly, like you'd think that if they stopped doing it and they said, all right, we're doing blocks only we have no mempool anymore. If they did that, then in theory you really need your transaction in the chain. So you start paying really high fees to try and incentivize them to actually put it in the chain. Like you spend a thousand bucks on your, on your transaction. Just so a miner mines it. And in theory that means they open it back up again because it starts to become worth it. So supply and demand should balance things out right now. And I mean, I mean. But the real effect of it would probably just be everyone goes off chain, right. And starts, you know, I gotta start studying minimum.

[D]

I don't, I don't understand, man. I would think they get. The mining pools would kind of get together and just kind of agree to start setting minimum TX fees. Like it. I don't understand that dynamic.

[B]

The weirdest thing ever, like mempool space were like, who's ready for subset per V byte summer? And then they spoke to two mining pools who just unilaterally like we are going to single handedly ruin the price of the block space market and include mine like a day's worth of blocks that contain transaction fees less than 1sat per byte make an extra like 800 bucks doing it. And now everything is like below that line that they just like, they just. I don't understand it. It wasn't a prisoner's dilemma thing because they agreed to do it together for some reason. And I think a lot of the agenda was we need to prove filters don't work. Because even though every node out there is filtering this stuff, it will still end up in blocks. But weirdly F2 pool and via BTC never did it. They never got involved with it. But Antpool and all of their little, you know, front running pools did it. And that was enough to make it look like they're like, miners are getting around this stuff. I'm like, well, it's really just one company that decided to do it. Then Foundry jumped in a couple of weeks later after it all started. But F2 and Via never did. So you still have like 20% of the network there. That's like, I'm not doing this. People can actually pay if they want to get in my blocks. I'm not going to let you fill up like a quarter of my block for like $40. This is ridiculous. So like, I don't know why it happened. None of it makes sense to me. It's all an artifact of centralization that a couple of people can do something stupid and economically irrational and it makes the blockchain look completely different. Like that's, that's an artifact of centralization. If you had decentralized mining, things should be more predictable as a result.

[A]

I was about to say this is literally the thing that gets me about all of this is that we immediately are asking like, okay, so what does F2 Pool do? Okay, what's Bitbank going to do? And even with a miner activated soft fork or anything, that's all we're asking. And somehow the people who say that this operation issue is about mining centralization and the everybody, everybody is kind of just ignoring that fact is that the failure to recognize that this is a problem because of this, because of how centralized everything already is and the idea like none of this is going to make a dent in any of this and none of this is going to change any of this. Like we're completely talking around the issue with all this about like whether or not mempool is. The mempool is perfectly in line with consensus or not. It's like, who, who gives a shit? We have five people who are going to decide whether or not a software is going to happen or not, or whether or not the standardization on like what the fee is and 80% of the blocks that get produced.

For all the talk of all of these things, what's actually being done about that. Like even like and I watched somebody had a made like a little dashboard of. And I want to like double look into this because this would be really cool that Stratum V2 is like 5% adopted. But I'm pretty sure it's Stratum V2 purely in the like, oh, I have an encrypted connection. Like, we have stratum V2 support is 5% adopted.

[B]

We really need a different.

[A]

Not that any nodes are actually building their own block templates or that these.

Pools actually let you build your own block templates, which is the problem. That's the problem. And I don't understand how.

All these people who Wax.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Stratum V2 is like the pool that supports it is brains, which not only doesn't let the miners make their own templates, the pool doesn't either. Bitmain does. So, like, they've moved in the opposite direction from the main goal, which, you know, and. But it's celebrated as a. As a. As a step forward in decentralization.

[A]

Well, it makes no sense because it's like, what's the step forward? Like. Like. Like, is this not like the. The problem is very, very clear and this doesn't. It's not even related to the problem if that's the case, you know.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it's. The Trouble is Stratum v2 and the job declarator element of Stratum v2 should have been two separate projects so that people could, you know.

Treat them as independent things. Like. Stratum V2 is an improvement to Stratum V1. It isn't a redesign of mining and pool dynamics, minor pool dynamics, where the miner gets to choose what gets in blocks and broadcast it directly to the network. That's not a part of the Stratum protocol. It's just like. It's a whole independent piece of software that lets you tell your miners, give your miners work that you create locally based off of what your node generated as a template. Like, that's just you. That can't be an afterthought to encrypting the communication between a pool and a miner. That's not. It's an entire redesign of. And targeting a different thing. It's. I don't know what it is. It's like you're manufacturing a car and you're getting into like, the design of tarmac around a car, like a town. It's like that's a different element of what this is.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Or the other way around, I would put it. It's like, that's not. You're going outside of your boundaries. Like your BMW, you don't make tires like that. Someone else does that. Like, you know.

[A]

Well, actually on.

And this is kind of getting back to the news items, but mining. There was a Moina or Muina or something. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. There's a new open source bitcoin mining software that's supposed to be for AS six and it's Muna or Muino S however the hell you say it. M U G I N A And right now they literally only support the bit axe gamma or whatever. But like that's just like their first like okay, this one's supported and they're gonna like go, go up the stack basically and they have plans for like five more including the S19J.

And then their intent is to basically support everything in a fully custom open source mining software or whatnot. To essentially, you know, help redecentralize mining and let you to connect to any various pool or use as I understand it. Actually I could be totally wrong on how it's implementing a stratum V2 or DAS datum sort of thing.

[B]

I googled it and funnily enough the first result was Mugina mining most commonly refers to the illegal mining of coltan in the Muna section sector of Rwanda's.

[D]

Branding. What great name.

[B]

Yeah. And like the next result is there was a landslide killing two people in this illegal mining operation. Like just they've, they're definitely going the samurai marketing route.

[A]

Yeah, they are.

[B]

I don't know but look, Axos is open source anyway. Those guys are like the most militant. They're the kind of open source people that will like kill you for also being open source, but using a slightly different license than the one. Like I've seen these guys fight. It's vicious, dude. They're all threatening to like law fare against one another just and you know it really false Nazis really annoy me, to be honest. Like I don't, I don't think anyone is obligated to open source anything they write that they're just not. Like it really annoys me that people are like, you wrote some code, you have to share that with me. Otherwise you're like, otherwise. Back to that first discussion we were having today, like they're like, you have to do a thing, otherwise you hate freedom. It's like that's, that's not how this works, man. Like it's my code on my computer. I definitely don't have to share it with you if I don't want to.

[D]

You know, I've open sourced maybe 1,1 millionth of all the code I've written and that's never going to change.

[A]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Claude owns, I'm pretty sure Anthropic owns every bit of code That I own. I've never read the terms and conditions, but. But all the little single purpose apps I've built, I'm pretty sure a hundred percent anthropic has the rights to all of it.

[B]

Hilarious. Well, you should read the terms and conditions that's stumping a lot of people at the moment, like, because big organizations are all adopting AI to do some code stuff for them.

And there was like a discussion about BIP3 on the mailing list as well, where, you know, there was an argument about whether to allow AI submissions or whether not to allow AI submissions or whether to ask people to declare if they've used it or not. And like, there's like strong opinions in either direction on that. I was saying I think the etiquette and open source should just basically become. If you've used AI to write some of your code for you, just be honest about it, like, tell them how much to what scope you used it. Like, you can just. I asked it to write some like skeleton code for me and I took it from there. Or I wrote it all myself. An AI button it up for me. Like, just tell them what you did. And if you, if you com. If you're found lying about it and people like, look, this looks written by AI and you never said that, then people are going to stop reviewing your stuff. And that, that to me is like a pretty good social agreement that I think people would adhere to.

[A]

I was about to say, I think that's more than effective or more than enough.

[B]

I think so.

[A]

Because, you know, I think in some context it'll be like, you know, did you use autocorrect to finish writing this sentence? Or did you, did you, did you write it yourself? You know, and it's like, well, I mean.

Like depending on, like if somebody submits 20,000 lines of code, it's like, okay, well, if this is just a bunch of AI slop, you know, there's going to be bugs galore through this. But if somebody submits 10 lines of code and it works, it like does the thing and you can easily just review that it's sound. And people who have engineering sense, it doesn't really matter whether or not it's written by AI. It matters whether or not the code is sound. You know, So I don't know, but I agree. It just, I think it just kind of becomes a simple thing. It's like, okay, are you submitting a whole bunch of crap that's just going to be full of bugs because you have no idea what you're Doing like, like if I submitted a.

Commit request or some shit, like a submitted code to Bitcoin, it would be nothing but Claude and it would be an utter mess. Well, because of that, people would probably poke holes in it very, very quickly and then they'd be like, yeah, don't, please don't submit anymore because you don't know what you're doing.

[D]

I think it'll work itself out naturally in the way that kind of homemade food is differentiated from fast food. Like AI generated code's always going to be fast food. I mean like, yeah, like that analogy, like a handmade painting or something is always going to be worth more than the massively produced print. And it's always going to be obvious. I mean it, either a human understands every line of the code or they don't. You know, I mean that if you, it's. I don't know, I think it's, I think that's going to work itself out naturally.

But I use AI for like when I write utx, Oracle stuff, I always like write my function by hand and then I just send it to ChatGPT to improve it. And sometimes I take it suggestions, sometimes I don't. I mean, but yeah, I definitely use it in everything I do.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I would, I would find it hard not to use these days. Like, even if you know exactly what you're doing, like it's just a timesaver.

[D]

So such a time saver.

[A]

But you also just need to know exactly. Even if you're just getting it to work, do something for you, you have to know what it's doing. Like I, I can't tell you how many times I've tried to get Claude to troubleshoot something or work through some sort of thing and it just doesn't, it doesn't fully understand the structure, the reasoning behind a bunch of stuff and something that I've even like gone over with Claude before, you know, it doesn't remember everything in context perfectly. And like I, I have to, I mean I, I call it arguing with Claude to produce something thing because half the time I'm telling it to like, please no, don't do that because this is why this is in place. Please memorize that this is in place for this reason, write it into Claude MD so that we don't have to go over this again. But you're misunderstanding what the code is doing. And so like as long as I understand the structure, like if I just give it to, to go, which sometimes I will, sure it will produce a whole bunch of stuff and Then I just kind of have to trust it or. Or whatever. But I find myself basically getting to a point where as soon as it starts breaking, I can't continue forward because I don't know what I've. What's actually occurred up to that point. Like if I don't understand the structure of the things and how they work together, you can't help it. Using it doesn't scale. Using it doesn't scale because I can't guide it. Exactly. So, yeah, I probably got to go.

[D]

Here in a little bit, guys.

[A]

Got you. Gotcha. Um, well, let's hit. I want to talk about Samurai Wallet in just a second, but there's actually some other thing on mining because we mentioned Bitmain a couple times. Did you know that they're actually under a federal probe right now for a national security risk?

[B]

Yeah, I did hear about that.

[A]

Um, so the Senate Intelligence Committee has warned that Bitmain devices could be manipulated by China. And it's the. It's the TikTok China scare and that there's several China.

Several disturbing vulnerabilities and potential remote control. You know, Bitmain denies it and all that stuff, but they're like under investigation for whether or not Bitmain devices should be considered safe for American bitcoin miners.

[C]

So Ant bleed again, this is like Ant bleed. Yeah, ant bleed 2.0, something like that.

[A]

I mean, somebody thinks that there's a risk of it I think is really.

[B]

The thing they are the most. I mean there's no way they're not all backdoored, right?

[A]

That's kind of. I mean they kind of. They were at least once before. So yeah, who knows?

[B]

I don't know, man. I do know that like remote code execution is still a thing than it shouldn't be.

Like a miner.

A 3 kilowatt bitcoin mining machine reaches out of plain text to a pool that can then just respond with, you know, the most trivial stuff that can get the, you know, the control board to start doing generic computation. Like that's the workarounds they implemented for that as far as I know, didn't work.

And I would put it down to sloppiness more than malice. So is that a kind of thing, this government probe could be like this stuff is so bad, the software on it is so appallingly, shockingly badly written that it's a national security risk. Given that there's like a million of these computers running in Texas and places like that. Is that. Is that. Can. Can it be done on that premise? Like this isn't malicious. This is just absolute incompetence and it's gone to the point like it's all plain text.

[D]

Right.

[B]

Anyone in the middle can like start doing.

[A]

We're not doing anything bad. We're just. Please be nice.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I'm wondering if that can be the, the basis for the probe though. This is, this isn't like these are such badly made devices that there are now a genuine security threat. Is that a thing or. I mean, do they imply what. It's what the basis is in the probe?

[A]

They just, they just say it's a national security threat. I think it's just purely to like American infrastructure running on Chinese hardware. It's the.

[B]

Is this part of a bigger. Like, like China's the boogeyman. Like the Republican boogeyman's always kind of in China.

[A]

That's kind of what I feel like. That's, that's what it feels like to me. At least that. That's my base assumption.

[B]

Fair enough. Don't they ban in Huawei phones for a while as well? Like yeah, they, they do occasionally. Just be like, china bad, China bad.

[A]

Don't do this.

[C]

Isn't. Is Jack's company an American company? Like Square is an Or Block is an American company.

[B]

Block. Yeah. Proto's US based.

[C]

I think if they're getting ready to, to release new miners and the US Government's like, no, you have to buy the American miners.

[B]

I think they're using TSMC for the chips.

[A]

That would be a great, that would be a great bootleggers. Bootleggers and Baptist relationship.

[B]

And then the samurai thing, right? Like they got. He pled guilty and still this is.

[A]

Like, this is what I was, that was exactly what I was going to ask because this is confusing me. So they've pled guilty to running an unlicensed money transmission business. And Rodriguez was sentenced to five years and Hill was sentenced to four.

And $250,000 fine each. But this is what I don't understand. Is it like, were they under the anticipation that this case was just going to be a disaster? Like this was going to go against them? Because I saw, I think it was Hill.

[B]

I think the money, if I understand it was the money that made them say we can't afford to fight this even if we could win all these. We just don't have the lawyer fees. Like they burnt through. They only made like single digit millions I think from the entire samurai thing anyway. And yeah, I think it was, I think they were advised, like, you will just run out of Money very quickly if you don't take a plea deal here. So. And I think the prosecution knew that and were like, well, we can.

[A]

This is how they get their precedent set. And now they can just F everybody forever.

That's so ridiculous. I think it was Hill was in an interview, was in an interview, and he said that the, the supposed claim in regards to like, the criminal activity was that, you know, usually, like, if, if they want to say that you were, you were a money launderer and your conspiracy to launder money is that you spoke directly with someone who was going to launder money. Like, that's why they do the sting operations, right? Is that you go to a peer to peer person who's buying and selling bitcoin, like by the shitload, and you say, yeah, man, I just want to, I just want to buy some bitcoin from you. Totally not a cop, but I want to just buy a bunch of fake IDs on the dark web with this. And it's like, please shut up. Don't. Don't say that to me. Here's your bitcoin. Boom. You're. You laundered money because you heard what the criminal, you spoke directly to the criminal and you know what they're going to use it for. Whereas what he was saying in the interview, it was just a clip. But what he was saying is that it was recognized that they didn't have any knowledge or any specific contact with anybody who was a criminal, who was using their, the using samurai wallet, but they had knowledge that criminals could use it for bad reasons, for criminal reasons. And therefore it was, it was officially like money laundering. It falls under the same punishment. He said, like, can you imagine, like, how insane, like the, the breadth, like the, how broad that it's like literally that, like, if you, you, you have to just be dumb. That like, well, obviously I make shoes, but criminals can't wear my shoes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, like, like, and, but then if you recognize that, like if you make a commercial in which a criminal is running away from a store with shoes and they have stolen something, now you're immediately guilty of aiding and abetting.

[B]

Did. Did they cite the, the social media stuff? Because to me, that always felt like the motivation.

[A]

It's because they were brazen.

[B]

But it, but was that cited or did they like, was that the elephant in the room the whole time? Like, did they say, yeah, you clearly look at this tweet where you're saying Russian oligarchs.

[A]

I'm pretty sure it was explicitly used against them. But I could be wrong. That, that may just be an impression because of the conversations around it. But I'm. I'm 80% certain, I thought I read it, that it was specifically brought up.

[D]

So.

[A]

And I would assume that that's where they would go. Like, like that's what they would go hard with. Um, so I would be surprised if it wasn't, you know, like, directly used.

[B]

I won't go into specifics, but I do know there is another, like, team that's into doing similar things on bitcoin that don't go to America ever. Um, not because they're in trouble there in a way they know about, but because they've been told by legal experts in their jurisdiction, you shouldn't go to America. You are going to have a very hard time if you do.

And I also know someone else that works on a similar thing that travels around pretty much freely. So. And I don't really understand why that is. It has to be like, as you just. It seems you agree that it was literally, you've been embarrassing us on Twitter, so now we're gonna ruin your life.

[A]

Like, I think that's the way it usually happens.

[C]

Right.

[B]

But they're so petty. Hey, like, that's. Do they really need to expect the.

[A]

Government to be any different, though?

[B]

Yeah, actually, yeah. I feel like bureaucracies don't have the capacity for pettiness. That's a, that's an individual thing. I never know how a, a government agency can be petty. I don't get that.

[A]

Well, they're collectively all equally petty. I mean, it's like, I mean, you think about it, they are, they are petty people by design. It's like, it's like saying that like, oh, why would all the journalists just get behind this Covid thing and say that? Like, vaccinated, unvaccinated people can't get a hospital bed. But they did it. They were all equally shitty and petty people.

[C]

Well, there was literally somebody said like, would. You should have heard what he said about us about Roger Ver. And, and so it's just, it's literally always that, like, that's, that's like, you know, the bureaucrat that wants to like, go after his next door neighbor because. Or like, you know, some, some like his friend's business competition. Right? Like, it's always, it's always some sort of like, nonsense things arbitrary.

[A]

You always have to keep in mind too, that all of these systems, like, things only really get done because one person's like, really mad and petty about it and they Push to get it done. You know, like this, the system itself just kind of like punches the numbers, like punches the check boxes and runs the numbers and stuff. And it's, and it's a system and that's when, and that's why you like talk to other people. And those people, even inside of it will just be like, I don't know, this doesn't make any sense, but this is my job, I gotta push the paper. And, and you don't really have, you have to call this person to sort this thing out. But behind it there's, there's a DA who just is pissed that. How dare you say that you're not gonna listen to the rules of New York. You know, like it, like it's, it's literally just a petty person who is, who has too much power, who's just using it to, to get back at someone who they feel. It's just like, you know, if you read something on Twitter, it's like all the people who support, I don't know, knots or all the people who support CORE are stupid. And you're not even a part of this conversation. You read it and you're like, I'm not stupid. And then you just, you just want to go after them. That's that, that's the, that's what it is. It's just that I have power and I'm actually gonna go after you because you said something. It's like, how dare you? How dare you? I'm the one, I'm. You're gonna do what I say.

[C]

Or a career hungry person that just like. Well, I put all of these people.

[A]

I'm looking for an easy win specialist.

[C]

Yeah, I'm the crypto specialist that put all these crypto criminals in jail. And so I can be appointed just a different form of petty.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And it's just I can be appointed to the new crypto crime department or something.

[B]

Yeah, that's someone can make a career for themselves. I mean hungry, young, fed. And then otherwise it's just someone from up top keeps squashing the lower downs. Like these guys need to be in jail. I don't care how you do it, just do it. And then.

[C]

Well, that actually what's the guy that was the, the regulator that ended up working for Coinbase or something like he like made a name for himself and then.

[A]

And then drive a Coinbase.

[C]

Yeah, he like created all the regulations and then went.

[A]

And you know, the guy who was responsible for the New York thing, the like real shitty one.

[D]

Bit license.

[A]

I can't remember his name, but I know the book. Bit license. Yeah, but I. I know exactly you're talking about. Yeah, I remember that.

Well, I want to share one more thing that I just thought was funny. I mean, part of me. Part of me is like, dude, that sucks for that guy. Because it's like, okay, bitcoin's not confiscatable, but also like, I just cannot believe that we're in 2025. Or I guess this was in 2022 when this happened. And you don't have a backup. Like, you don't have. You don't have it.

So Michael prime was.

Got hit by the FBI and they raided, took his computer and stuff. And he said that he reported to only owning between, like, it was like 200 to $1500 worth of Bitcoin. So like thousand bucks or something. And.

The FBI, apparently, as a. As a policy, I've never even. Never even heard of this. But after they check your computer and investigate to try to find all the things they can find, if they can't find anything, or whether they do or not, they wipe the hard drive. They re zero out the hard drive. So you don't ever get anything back from any of your devices. You get a blank, useless piece of plastic when you get it back because they don't want you to be able to see what they did or the software that they used or get any footprint of that. Like, they're just being like, we can do whatever you want, and you're not allowed to see anything that we did. Well, they wiped his hard drive, and apparently he actually had 3443 Bitcoin on it.

[B]

Whoa.

[A]

And so he's trying to sue the FBI for bitcoin that he didn't tell them he had that they destroyed. And the 11th Court or the 11th Circuit said, well, you can't sue for this. And I'm just like, where's your seed phrase, man? You had all of this completely subject like, to 3,000, 3,500 Bitcoin.

[D]

I bet you he had it.

[A]

You don't have a backup.

[D]

No, he's got a backup. He's just trying to get a double that.

[A]

But why would you reveal that you won. You won so hard. They wiped your hard drive. They believed you. Your bullshit. That you only had a thousand dollars worth of bitcoin.

[B]

Yeah, I agree. That feels like a desperation move. Like.

Here'S zero chance the FBI is going to be like, all right, we bought 3500 Bitcoin at any price and gave them to you. Like, no way. I don't see it.

[A]

Sorry.

[C]

Maybe he had. Maybe he had, like, 300 Bitcoin and he lost, and now he's trying to sue the FBI for.

[A]

For 3,000. I don't know.

[C]

That's such a crazy. Like, I don't know. How do you have that much bitcoin and not know enough to.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

To back up your stuff.

[D]

I don't know.

[A]

That's crazy to me. I mean, it's not like it hasn't happened before. People are stupid and they get complacent, and they just have their setup the way they've had it, and.

They'Re like, I mean, how. How long, Jeff, have you and I talked about, like, oh, we need to change this key setup or do this multi zig thing? And then, you know, four months go by, and it's, oh, we need to change this thing. We need to do this multi sig thing.

[B]

I hate it.

[A]

You know, stuff just gets left.

[C]

So maybe his laptop is 15 years old, and that was. That was his hardware wallet.

[B]

I mean.

[A]

I mean, that's what. Right. That's. That's what my friend did. And he was like, I just don't. I didn't cut it on. I can cut it on in 10 years.

[D]

Set up and, like, repracticing your words and, like, doing that. It's like the most cathartic thing in the world. It's like the feeling.

[A]

It's a great ritual you got to work out. It's.

[D]

It's just like you. You get done with that, and you just feel, like, so confident. It's like a. If you're having a bad day or just feeling.

[A]

Take charge of my.

[D]

You use cold storage, man.

[A]

It feels so good.

Truth. Truth. That's. That's the call to action today, man.

[D]

Go through your.

[A]

Go through your setup. Make sure if your shit gets snagged by the FBI, don't let them be able to wipe your bitcoin, dummy. Like, get. Get that catharsis.

[D]

Go through your.

[A]

Go through your setup. Read through your seed phrase. Try to memorize it. Know where all your keys are and all your setup is. It's a good ritual. It's a good ritual.

[D]

All right, guys, I think I got to end on that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

That's the January 3rd practice.

[D]

That's right.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And wait, what's the other thing? We have to. Steve, you're supposed to. You're supposed to end Every show with 2106.

[A]

Yeah, 2106 bug.

[D]

I heard it again today. Isn't it A problem that when the mining reward stops, bitcoin will die. That is 40 years after bitcoin has died. Because bitcoin is dying in 2106 as hard coded into all software knots and core.

[A]

We need to fix this in bit 444. That's how you do it.

[B]

Well, the trouble is it's a hard fork.

[A]

It's a hard fork.

[D]

If we.

[A]

Wait, that's right.

[D]

It's not a hard fork if we start early, it's not a hard fork if we start late, it's a hard fork fork.

[B]

Wait, no, it's a hard fork no matter what.

[D]

Not if there's not a node that is in existence that will hard work.

[A]

Technically a hard fork, but if you have forward compatibility, if you have like forward recognition of it and you don't have a node that's old enough, then there is no fork. It just occurs.

[B]

That's just a successful hard fork.

[A]

That's the thing. That's just a successful hard fork. But that's the thing.

[D]

If we made a patch now and it like new, new versions were patched now, then in order for there to be a hard fork, somebody would have to get a new computer 80 years from now and install software that was written 80 years ago.

[B]

Yeah, you can, you can obscure the fact that it's a hard fork by virtue of it being a complete success, but it's still hard for.

[A]

Correct. Correct.

[C]

Well, it's.

[D]

It's one of those definitions of hard fork.

[A]

It's a hard fork in. In consent, in the theory of the consensus. But it is not a hard fork.

[D]

And it's not a hard fork in practice.

[B]

I'm taking the opposite perspective. Those are the only things that are hard forks. Everything else, like bcash everything else, they are that. Exactly. They are an airdrop and they are a shitcoin. They are not hard forks. Hard forks are when the whole community says we actually have to break a rule and we're all going to do it together. And if that works out, it was a hard fork. If it doesn't, you're a shitcoin. Those are the actual terms for it, as at least I think we need to. We. We cannot cede the linguistic territory of hard forks to Roger Vere and Craig Wright. I refuse to do that.

[D]

Well, it's kind of like. But then you get into like this gets in a murky water because if you were to take that position, I think you'd have to take the position that we all agree now that Bitcoin ends in 2106. Because like if we agree that bitcoin continues past that, then we've already agreed to this what you're calling a hard fork.

[C]

It's sort of. It's just a bug. So it's not really like. Yeah, maybe it's a. I don't know.

[B]

That's weird you say that. I reckon it's going to be the most controversial.

[C]

It is.

[A]

That's why.

[D]

That's why it needs to happen now.

[A]

So it's all ones and zeros are the same, man.

[D]

And it's not like we have to hard fork now. Like we can get ourselves into a situation where updated things and non updated things work together fine for 80 years and eventually, you know what, at 2106 the non updated ones stop. But like there won't be any of those left if we do it now.

[B]

But anyway, I think we should.

[A]

I'm on board. I'm on board. 2106 FIX. Let's do it.

[D]

Let's do it.

[A]

All right.

[B]

All right.

[A]

All right guys.

[D]

See y' all next week.

[A]

Thank you.

[D]

Next month.

[A]

I was about to say we got. We're have a hell of a next month. Not only will, you know, Christmas and everything will have gone by. Let's do this like right at the beginning. Let's try to. Try to hit this on like proof of keys days but proof of keys day or something. But so everybody can actually have a holiday and chill the out. But we're gonna have. We're probably gonna have a new proposal. We're probably gonna have all kinds of drama about it. It's gonna be fun. It's going to be spicy. So. So let's get ready. I bet the. The mechanic derangement syndrome is going to get real good. Real good. Because whatever it is, whatever happens is your fault, mechanic. 100%.

[B]

Oh man. Well, I think naively, I think with what's coming down the line, people are finally going to leave me alone. But I've been. I I already.

[A]

That's naive as shit. You're wrong. You were getting tagged in every single one of them.

[B]

I know, man. Man.

[A]

All right, guys.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Catch you in the next one later.

And with that, we are wrapped. This has been bitcoin audible. Thank you guys for joining me. Don't forget to check out ocean mining and mechanic and everything that he's doing. He's got plenty of lengthy explanations for his take on all of this and he does a decent job of keeping up with the fork stuff that I don't really have time to get into right now. Definitely check out Steve and UTX Oracle and everything that he's been working on. I love his project. He had a great presentation at BTC Durham. Check out my brother people have Noster Impubs and Twitter and stuff for all of our stuff. Don't forget to subscribe to the show obviously Check out our amazing sponsors. We have got Leaden IO for bitcoin backed loans. We've got Synonym and pubkey app. Download the Pub Keyring app and log in. I still can't believe that this is not normal. Like this is not the way it works anyway. Check that out and don't forget to check out Chroma to get your light health in order and to get your circadian rhythm right. And lastly the HRF and their amazing work and the incredible information they put out with the Financial Freedom Report and the Oslo Freedom Forum and also for supporting my work. That's really awesome and they're just a great group with that I guess that will wrap us. I don't think there's anything else to add. My favorite thing recently that I've really gotten into is Claude code right in the terminal, which I probably need to get it into VS code more than anything else. But I don't know something about having it right in the terminal because I have just have a terminal window open and I've just built everything into like automated processes and I can like edit apps while I'm using them and then restart them. All of my applications feel more ephemeral. They feel more like I can mold them and I can build my own little apps and scripts and like I said at the beginning of this, I really want to make a episode or a video kind of breaking this all down, but it changes so much and I have so much of it it's hard to. But anyway, that's my cool thing recently that I've been really into and oh my God and wholesale, wholesale version two. You know, I'll talk about that in the next one. But really cool stuff to share and I hope you guys check those things out. I'll try to have this link down in the show notes with that. I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. My name is Guy Swan and until then everybody, that's my two sats.

SA.