← Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell
Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell
Adam Back Part 2: Core vs. Knots - Spam, Censorship and Bitcoin's Future
00:54:25
In Part 2, Bitcoin OG Adam Back breaks down Core vs. Knots, spam mitigation efforts and why any proposed changes to Bitcoin policies must be carefully considered to prevent introducing censorship mechanisms. Follow Adam Back on X ---- Coin...
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- [00:00]
A
Bitcoin is supposed to be final and census resistant and unseasonable payments. If you build in the interests of limiting spam or deleting things from a blockchain, deleting something from the blockchain feels like editing. Deleting or editing, if you set a precedent for that motivated by well intentioned spam mitigation, now you've probably introduced the risk of compelled cooperation to do the same for any number of law enforcement things.
- [00:34]
B
Hey everyone, welcome back. Thanks so much for watching part one of my interview with Adam. Back we had to do a part two. Why? Because so many people have been in my DMs and tagging me about a certain debate that's going on in the bitcoin space. This one about core and knots. I would love to get educated. I know Adam has been in the thick of some of these debates and I, I just want to learn more. I hope this will be to the benefit for everyone to learn in the community what this is all about. So Adam, thank you first of all for taking the time. And can you just tell us what is this debate really about? What is core versus knots?
- [01:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think it's more about the way that the bitcoin network can deal with spam and say not email spam. But I mean, I presume people have realized that there are people putting non transactional things in a bitcoin blockchain which are consuming in the image case a lot of space. So bitmex research put out some quite interesting data. I believe there are around three and a half million images in a bitcoin blockchain. The bulk of them in the last 28 months since the inscription and the phenomena started. And in total about 105 million not non transactional things, things that are not, you know, bitcoin layer two or escrow or direct payments. So things you would normally think about bitcoin because some of them are kind of like color coins. So they're actually representing meme coins, but on bitcoin. So the kind of things that happen on some altcoins were they just post a meme, they run the price up and then it dumps and then they do it again. And some of the offshore exchanges make markets in these. And so historically those tended not to come to bitcoin because bitcoiners generally weren't interested in them. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't attractive to try to do that. Those two types of spam cause different problems. The image spam just wastes space like it displaces, I don't know, 10 to 20 transactions for each image. Interestingly, the images are not actually that large. Working backwards from Bitmex research data, it looks like the average Image is around 10 kilobytes, which is not actually that big in image terms. Right. That suggests that somebody put some effort into cranking up the JPEG compression and things like that and using a low resolution so you can fit an image in that amount of space. So that suggests that the, the, you know, the, the native sort of mechanism for the market to access Bitcoin block space. I, the fact that the fees are market set to use Bitcoin and the fees are related to the size of transaction is actually working. Right. In a sense that they are, you know, the, the behavior has been modified by the cost, let's say. Right. So for the images that seems to be the case. So I thought that was interesting because you know, I already been digging into this in last couple of weeks because there was stuff going on and I thought I maybe could try and understand the technical details and explain it to a wider audience because the, the internals of Bitcoin protocol are a bit esoteric and hard to understand. And I interact with people on, you know, on different ends of. I can understand technology but I also interact with the average people as well. So I thought I could try and help sort of smooth out the gaps in understanding and hear viewpoints about why people wanted different things. And then the problem with the kind of color coin like protocols and there's a bunch of them and they go back years and years. So there's, there's Omni, I think that was the first one if you remember that. It's a way to send stablecoins originally like Tether, I think on Bitcoin. But I think it also got used for other actually, I mean it was the kind of first ICO I think Omni and then it stores data on top of Bitcoin. So it's a bit space inefficient and then there's counterparty different variant. And then more recently you have some, you know, you have RGB which is kind of color coins concepts but Lightning compatible and Taproot Assets which is a competing color coin, Lightning compatible. And then you have these kind of more meme coin protocols, BRC20 and rune and they're probably more. Right. I'm not remotely interested in playing with these kind of scammy pump and dump kind of meme games. But that's, that's what's going on and now the, the effect is that people are particularly in the last 28 months since the inscriptions, of course, these things went for years before. They are creating a lot of transactions. And of course people get rug pulled. You know, they, they end up with a coin that's not really worth the fees and they just abandon it. So, you know, there are millions and millions of never going to be spent utxos, which clogs up the Bitcoin UTXO set. And that matters a bit because if you get a computer, like a small computer or a laptop computer, the thing that is most expensive and harder to upgrade is the ram, right?
- [06:20]
B
Yeah.
- [06:21]
A
You have a lot more disk space than ram, but you need RAM because hundreds and hundreds of times faster than disk and the UTXO set cache. So some kind of condensed subset of the UTXO you really need to put in memory or your node will become extremely slow and wear out the disk. Right. So this is kind of a little bit more than a nuisance. It's clogging up, causing people maybe to have to upgrade their hardware. It's, you know, it's sort of stressing the software and things like that. But, you know, it is technically economic activity. There's just speculating on things carrying on top of Bitcoin. And of course it's a little, the image spam, I would say, is the people that like it as a, I don't know, aesthetic thing or a collectible or something. Right. But personally, I think it's, you know, ridiculously inefficient and they can store the image somewhere else and put a hash of it in the chain. So that's my viewpoint. So I think it's much less controversial to say the, the images are spam and shouldn't belong on the time chain. But the, the transaction things is, it's, it's a spectrum. So of course there's a lot of meme coins. They are economic, but they're not really bitcoin centric. Right. They're transferring tiny, tiny amount of Bitcoin to represent some tokens. Right. But then there are, you know, some of these other protocols have real things in them like tether and shares and things like that. Right. So there's a, there's a full spectrum of things in those. Some of them have. Yeah. And then, so let's come back to kind of survey of what's going on and what the impact is. And then, you know, people have different views. Some people will be more aggressive. They, they want to stop or spam, right. Of any kind. And others are thinking that, well, you know, there, there, you shouldn't get too judgmental in terms of, you know, if somebody's transferring a tether, maybe you don't want to block that. Right. That's been going on for many, many years, over a decade. Right. In some of those protocols. And it's, it's also available in some of the new protocols like I think RGB and Taproot assets have probably tether or planning to. Right. And it's not just tether. I mean there will be, you know, companies that have issued shares with a, with a technology company helping them shares or bonds or what have you using some of these carriers. So it's a bit of a gray area. You know, if you, if you declare them all spam and you want to stop them now, you're making a judgment about what's legitimate, right. So I think that gets a little slippery. But in either case the side effect is just clogging up the nodes.
- [09:06]
B
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- [11:32]
A
Yeah, I mean firstly on the points about software safety, some people were critical about Micro Saylor's comments but for myself I've been involved with computer systems architectures of peer to peer systems. I implemented two peer to peer systems. One was a censorship resistant distributed web, another one was. So that was a kind of open source thing in the 90s. And then more recently before Blobstream actually I was working in a startup whereas the implementer and architect of peer to peer layer to transport kind of business collaboration. So think about it like Dropbox or something where you can drop files and exchange messages but it's using the infrastructure of the participants as peer to peer. Right. So if you've. And I also used to run an anonymous remailer which is a way to send anonymous email and anonymous messages to Usenet discussion forums. And actually running that and getting spammed was how I came to invent hashcache because people were trying to abuse it.
- [12:45]
B
We talked about that in our first interview. Adam. So if anyone wants to check out the conversation about hashcache, I highly recommend it.
- [12:53]
A
Yeah, so I think that, you know, people are probably losing track of the, you know, the operational risks of running peer to peer software. So you know, the running a remailer or running a Tor exit node, you are, you know, it doesn't exist if there are volunteers running it. Right. And yet it's something that governments, law enforcement often don't like and would wish would Stop. And of course anything that's on the Internet and providing anonymity or self sovereignty is going to get abused because any Internet protocol can get abused. And frankly if somebody's going to do something problematic like try to hack something, they will probably try to cover the tracks by using Tor or proxies. Right? So while you are by intent providing, you know, self sovereignty and privacy for individuals just for their liberty or human rights activists and things like that, it's also going to get abused by people doing bad things. It's quite clear that intelligence agencies also use Tor and, and you know, some, some of it's even funded by one of the US agencies or co funded. So you can see that there is a mix of people in there and a lot of establishment dislike of what's going on. And so if you operate one, there are people that basically had to get the, they're running it in their basement or something, a remailer or a Tor exit node, something aggressive was sent through it. And the next thing the law enforcement turns up by the house and they have a multi year legal battle on their hand where the EFF is funding their legal defense fund basically. Right. So some of the precedents are bail, how law interacts with peer to peer file sharing systems and peer to peer browsing and now peer to peer money are precedents that were built up over years and the precedents are usually set by some test case where some poor Renner person, the establishment, tries to make a negative example of them and that will generally set bad precedents. So then you know, human rights and Internet rights organizations like Privacy International, EFF try to lobby, file amicus briefs and you know, try to avoid the precedents being set that are really bad. Right. You know, bad for liberty. And so you know, you've got this whole factor behind it. Something more recent that people are probably more going to be aware of is the Apple vs FBI recent case where FBI was trying to compel Apple to decrypt something. And Apple's point was they didn't have the technical means to do so.
- [15:51]
B
I covered that when I was a reporter. There was a San Bernardino shooting if you guys recall. And the question was can and should the FBI be able to get into the shooter's phone? Is there a back door that Apple has? And it's like a very important conversation to have because you can set a precedent that's very, very dangerous.
- [16:09]
A
Right. I mean it is interesting. As you know, of course, many decades ago now a lot of life and communications and social interaction moved from the physical world where you have a natural form of privacy or you're paying with cash, so you have that form of privacy to the online world and there's nothing, you know, the fact that we would tend to lose those rights in an electronic environment is an accident. You know, the social norms and the regulations and the rights and the charters of the countries say that you still have the rights and yet the technology architecture is by accident stripping you of those rights. And then of course law enforcement are pragmatic. You know, they're living in a world where their job is to investigate crime so they will wear away at and try to attack rights in the digital space. And even if it's legally defined, protected right under a chart or of a country or something. So there's been this multi decade fight on that. And so the Apple case is quite good example for Bitcoin, which is the area I was most worried about where things are going with this anti spam. And the precedent there that you mentioned is if a company or an individual has access to something, so they have built a mechanism into their product or to the service that enables them to access it and they've demonstrated that they've done it for other reasons, for debugging, for their convenience, because a friend of theirs asked them, then if law enforcement turns up and they say give us it for this other reason and it may be something you don't agree with, it may be in another country you can get compelled. If you refuse, you go to jail basically, something like that. That was exactly the crux of the Apple case. And and so that's also a precedent if you're designing pit to pit systems or implementing them. And I've implemented two, as I mentioned, you've got to be aware of these things and not build that infrastructure for well meaning purposes and not think to your point about the second or third order effect that you're building the second order effect, which is now you're going to get compelled to do things which will undermine key properties of the system. And say the obvious translation put out to Bitcoin is Bitcoin is supposed to be final and census resistant and unseasonable payments. If you build in the interest of limiting spam or deleting things from a blockchain, deleting something from the blockchain feels like editing, deleting or editing if you set a precedent for that motivated by well intentioned spam mitigation. Now you've probably introduced the risk of compelled disclosure, sorry of compelled cooperation, to do the same for Any number of law enforcement things. And law enforcement things vary between some serious crime, like the example you said with the FBI where everybody agrees that society agrees that it's important that the FBI catch the culprit and so on. But there can be other things, which is that what I've seen participating in this kind of environment where you are operating things with risk of running into the edges of the law and the way it translates from the physical space into the digital space, where you should have a right, but law enforcement's trying to erode it and the precedent's still being set that you have to be careful about those things and avoid creating those precedents. And so I think, I think it should be unambiguous to everybody that it would be extremely bad for Bitcoin's value proposition if people built and set a precedent in the node software, in the miners, that they're able to censor or freeze or edit transactions. It's kind of the opposite of Bitcoin's value proposition. It's permissionless and it's not supposed to prejudice against unpopular minorities. All this kind of thing. Right. It's kind of Internet freedom thing. The other thing I was going to say is that people will an observable effect when governments would try to combat these systems. They disliked the Internet in general originally because it democratized access to journalism, to publishing, to information dispersal. And they had some degree of control over, you know, regulated or large company media companies. Right. So they lost that control. And so when there would be a legal fight, the test case they would always use is something dramatic. The cypherpunks had this phrase, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And it was, you know, all of the bad stuff. Think of the children, think about this crime, think about that, think about the other. And for the average person, it's a way to suspend logic, forget about their rights and they're going to feel, wow, that's shocking, that's terrible. We must help anything we can and not think about the side effects. And then it usually gets left to the civil liberties groups to fight back on that because they're the people that are more thoughtful and get the risks. And then the other point is on the other end of the things, when things do get eroded and they're less fortunate outcomes, like, you know, it's pretty easy for law enforcement to go to an ISP and get logs. You know, what's the phone number of this connection? What's, you know, what's the address, who's the buyer, what's his credit card number, what's his name? Right. And that, you know, that that didn't have to end up that way, but it did. Now the question is, well, what are they using it for? And it's not, you know, it's not all going to be serious crime stuff. Some of it's going to be in the wrong school district. You didn't have a license to be a dog. It just goes down and down and down until, you know, once they have an access, they use it for anything and the safeguards against access get eroded. So, you know, people, I think that's where people come unstuck in their reasoning about what the, you know, reasonable and correct balance to protect, you know, centuries old civil liberties in charters should be online. Okay, so come back to the spam topic.
- [22:42]
B
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- [25:03]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two factors. I mean, the backdrop is just an observation, but you get the fiercest battles between people on the same mission with the same desired outcome. They're not arguing about, they all love bitcoin, they all think bitcoin is the most important thing in their lives, in many cases or for humanity. And they're very concerned about the robustness and future survival of bitcoin. Right. And so if somebody says something that, oh, this could be a risk for bitcoin, they want to get in there and try to prevent it happening. Right. And the problem is that it's complicated. There are second order effects. And a lot of people don't necessarily have the familiarity with this history. Right. Of the, of the architecture, how it interacts with rights and law enforcement approaches. And so when they hear that exact same four horseman argument applied to, you know, you want to stop spam, everybody's okay with that. The technical guys will say, it doesn't really work. It has worse side effects to try to stop it than to just leave it alone or take some more gentle approach. And you can explain that to people and they will say, okay, I get it. I understand why anything you can do, there is going to be a way for somebody to bypass it. Because the fundamental problem is bitcoin's network is designed to be censorship resistant. And it's just technology, right? It can't tell the difference between blocking spam and blocking somebody's transaction. So it turns out to be, by design, hard to stop spam. And so then what are we doing? Do we want censorship, resistance, or do we want spam? So that's kind of part of it. And then of course, for people who are Saying, an example of how blocking one type of spam could make things worse is people complain. There's spam in inscriptions, like in the taproot, right? They're hiding images inside what's designed to be a script, a smart contract for a bitcoin transaction, right? And so the thought process is it goes down a ladder, right? Saying, well, what about if we blocked like disabled taproot? Well, firstly that's a problem because people have money in it. But secondly, even if we did that, would it stop the spam? Well, not really because they just move it to segwit scripts. And he said, oh, what about if we get those? Okay, then they're going to move it to OP returns. What about if we get rid of those? They'll go back to pub keys, fake pub keys, which they were doing probably a decade ago, right? And as you go down that step, it gets more and more high overhead and worse and worse for your node. So while you have the kind of sort of emotional gratification that you've fought back against the spam, you're taking a fight at spammers, it's actually you that suffers and it doesn't stop. So where it gets gray is some people will argue, surely the spammers will take the hint and stop if we do enough of it. I'm not sure. So conceptually that sounds logical. The problem is the system is extremely censorship resistant. So you know, if you don't do like soft forks or hard forks to actually remove things that would be bad for bitcoin, bad for users, all kinds of chaos. The things you can do with policy where you change the software or you change the configuration of your node have almost no effect on the spam getting through. And that's because the network censorship resistant. So there are some quite counterintuitive effects that if 90% of nodes are trying to block, let's say op returns over a certain size, they're not actually using images in OP returns because they're four times more expensive. But hypothetically, then it has zero effects on your ability to reload those and to get them mined. So miners are mining them and it's actually worse, you know, 90 trying to block it is no effect. Even 95 has no effect. And that's because the miners are economically incentivized to grab as many transactions as they can, right? So they'll set up, you know, powerful computers with high speed connections and they'll connect to everything to suck the transactions up and get the most profitable ones, right? And then there Were other kind of amplification modifications to Bitcoin to help, I mean, I guess to automate that or to help a minority that wants to get a transaction through, to amplify the censorship resistance. It's called preferential peering. It doesn't mean you block anything, it just means you try to recognize and connect to nodes with the same outlook, the same policy. And so the practical matter is that it doesn't work like it really doesn't work at all. And if you start disabling features, like you get more aggressive and you ask for a software personally, I mean, to start with, that's going to take years and a lot of drama. And secondly, it doesn't even do, even that doesn't work. The first part, what we talk through. So people will hear all of that story and understand it and they'll still come back to you. But I want to do something about spammers. We gotta like at least try, right? And the intuition is when you get spam in your email, you don't shrug, you try, right? The ISPs install some heuristic anti spam. The mail clients add a button to say to teach an AI that hey, this is spam, don't do it so you can block things. So people are trying. And then of course the spammers, it's an arms race, right? So they imitate your friends, they hide the message, they're using codings, all the same stuff that happens in Bitcoin at a high level. And so they have the intuition that maybe it works for email spam. Surely it could work or at least they'd feel happy about at least having tried. But the problem is trying is actually unfortunately itself has two side effects. One is it degrades the peer to peer network because the way that blocks the transactions are sent through the network is that they're trying to make it happen very quickly, right? So they don't just send this two or three megabyte block. You've already received most of the transactions and verified them as they're getting spent. And so you have them in memory in the mempool. And what the node your neighbor will send you is a list of transactions that are in the block and then you'll assemble it yourself out of the pots. And so that is orders of magnitude faster than receiving the whole block. Now unfortunately, if people have lots of different filters on their node, then they've thrown away some stuff or they haven't relayed it to the neighbors. And so that relay performance goes from thousandths of A second to seconds. And then of course the network has got lots of hops. Suddenly everything slows down. So people have been, I think the developers and people watching the network have been looking at that data and see it dramatically drop, basically. Right. And so that is an unfortunate somewhat negative side effect of trying to control spam. But it's not, you know, it's manageable. Right. I think there are some things that developers could implement in the future to modify the network protocol very carefully that might work around it. Or the fact that the network is so censorship resistant means it's fairly robust. So the blocks will still get through even if your node doesn't, because the 5 or 10% that are more infrastructure nodes are well connected and they'll get the block through. So there's kind of workarounds, but you don't really want to design a system where the system only works because of the efforts of a few people and companies. What if they stop and the system stops working? Right, so that's a lot of stuff there, but that's the sort of setup. And then where it gets potentially dangerous, in my opinion is there's a realization here that the only real way to stop spam is to persuade the miners to stop it. The pools, they're the only ones who actually can put transactions in a block. The network is substantiate resistant, so the transactions anyway get through the network. So the only thing that actually works is if the miners would, if you could talk to them and ask them to stop. Now another interesting data point From Johnny Beer's as BitMEX research reports data is that the fees spent, it's like a billion dollar industry, basically the spam. So it's not like it's not a small effect. So the miners have collected I think $800 million of fees. It works out to about, I think $8 per image and less for the 100 million non image inscriptions and things. And so the miners are in a competitive business now. I mean people will say, well it's not our job to subsidize their business. Fully agreed. But the point is, are they going to be easy to persuade not to do it? Probably not, because they can make money doing that. Right. And it's a whole industry, it's not just the miners. You know, there are VC funded startups selling and promoting these meme coins, the images, the NFTs, and there are people buying them. They're probably going to lose money on average, but there are gamblers who will do that and there are people selling the Block space, the miners, Right. So, and there are exchanges collecting fees on trading it. So to think that we could call some pools and miners and say, can you stop that? It's bad for the Bitcoin network, maybe they would listen. I think the one argument that might work, try to back up the envelope, is if you say, look, it is giving you some short term revenue, but maybe it's subtracting long term revenue because you're making bitcoin less easy to use, some of this stuff is not a serious, becomes a serious asset, sees a bit of brand damage. And how much money are you making anyway? Because while a billion dollars sounds like and is a lot of money, it's not a static system. So if you know the fee revenue that miners are receiving goes up by 10%, what will happen is they'll go by 10% more miners. So the hash rate will go up and therefore they'll get a smaller percentage of the revenue. So ultimately they won't get 10% more revenue, they'll get maybe 1% more revenue or less, maybe a tenth of a percent. Right. So then if it really gets that marginal, somebody needs to do a proper kind of economic modeling because we don't know exactly what the average profit margin is or how quickly the hash rate adapts to profitability changes. But if you could make the case that, look, it's only a tenth of a percent, is that really worth the bad PR and the slowdown in transactions, the reduction in capacity and the brand damage, Maybe there's a case you could make. I think that'd be a very interesting thing for somebody with economic modeling to try to do and then you might stand a chance. But otherwise I'm not sure you can persuade the miners to stop. Because even if you persuaded a couple to do it, the problem is the system is reactive. That makes it, you know, that bids up the price for the ones that are still doing it. So it becomes more that, you know, the more people you persuade to not do it, the more profitable it becomes for me to break ranks and do it anyway. So the, yet again the censorship resistance, which also comes from mining, right, that if somebody doesn't, if one miner doesn't like your transaction, another one will that's working against you because the more you're successful at persuading people not to do it, the more they are incentivized to pay and the more profitable it gets. So it's yet another example where another sort of similar example was the China mining ban some years ago. The hash rate dropped and it became extremely profitable to mine because of it. And so there was an enormous incentive to get it back online. So it's something like that, right? The more you constrain something, the more profitable it gets, the harder it will be to dissuade the remaining people because it will be extremely profitable for them. So you effectively are never going to be able to stop it. As long as there is economic demand and as an industry that can continue making money, it's probably not going to stop. And I think the real concern though, because all this stuff so far is kind of nuisance game theory. People want to try things, it's a free world, they can try what they want. Right. And that's where knots came in. I think there's a difference of opinion going back a few years ago when Inscription started and Luke wanted to sort of expand. There's, there's a, there's a parameter which sets a local nodes, you know, a nodes local limit on, on how big of op return it would receive this again back that was introduced in like 2014 or something. And you know, with inscriptions, which is I guess 2021 onwards, a little bit after that since Taproot, there are multiple other spam things in between. But that's, that's the current, that was the debate because it became widely used. Luke wanted to, you know, change the bitcoin software to use heuristics to look inside these bitcoin scripts they're hiding in and try to discover which are spam by looking. And that can work the first time, but as soon as you do it, they'll just change the program. Right? It's programmable, it's hiding inside code, so you can change the code in an infinite number of ways. It's really a cat and mouse. So I think a lot of developers didn't think that was a good direction because it's a losing cat and mouse. And it's also starting to get into a slippery slope because now you've built a heuristic, you've got a pattern, you've got a rule, you've got something that's trying to leave things. And then you've got back to the Apple FBI case. You're running a node. Somebody could come to you and say, well, here's a list of things that law enforcement doesn't like, or here's a list of things that this politician doesn't like. Can you do it? And if you say no and they've got an illegal standing, you're going to have a problem. Right? So on Nodes, it doesn't matter so much because there are lots of nodes and it's censorship resistant. So they're probably not going to bother, hopefully. But for miners and pools, if you get them running this kind of software that is introducing this doctrine, which could be fatally dangerous. So I've been trying to encourage people to think about these second order effects as well as the kind of points that Michael Saylor made about being cautious with software change. It's dangerous to modify. I mean apart from the kind of second order, not even technical factors, right? These kind of esoteric areas of law, interacting with societal norms and expectations, even the changing things in a technical way can have second order effects. You have to be extremely cautious and thorough in review. And I think Bitcoin Developer group, which is people say Bitcoin core, but there isn't really a Bitcoin core. It's like dozen different organizations focused on different areas. Like Brink is focused on security and fuss testing and security review. And you know, other, other like local Host is focusing on like Bitcoin wallet technology, increasing the wallet support in the Bitcoin node. And you know, so you've got like a dozen different orgs with different funding in different countries, working on different specializations and different, different sub projects is pretty uncoordinated, right? And it's mostly engineers. So there's no, you know, product or marketing or communications professionals that have intuition about how to, you know, how to manage a release effectively. Something like Apple would do when they're launching a new product. There's nobody with that kind of skill set. Right. And then, you know, what is core is the release process to scrape together the contributions on all these different independent subparts and make a release out of it. So people will get angry about communication, misstep and say Core did it or they'll get emotional and say we should fire Core. But it barely exists and they're volunteers funded by third parties and Bitcoin needs the maintenance. There's a lot of security work that's going on behind the scenes. We shouldn't want to if we could is what I'm saying. So that's the kind of communication factor of it. Because I talked about the easy sort of reaction that everybody apart from across the spam industry agrees that they don't like the spam. But the issue with this parameter change is the developers were close to it and realized that this parameter is not doing anything anymore. It's just making things worse because of the issues I mentioned. And so they just like kept it but marked it for deprecation and set it to a relaxed level so it doesn't do anything. And a lot of people who run nodes and don't like spam, even though there's no spam to speak of, going through this opreturn use case got upset to say, well wait a minute, I want to control spam, I should be able to modify that parameter, maybe it'll stop spam. And I think that was a far big effect in the, in the thing because it was probably under communicated. Some people were snarky because Twitter is good for that. And when people get, you know, if somebody says something snarky to that person, they're typically going to say something snarky back. And then, you know, there's a lot more users than there are developers, so they get mobbed, right? And most of them aren't even on Twitter anyway. And of course there are people who are understanding these trade offs, who are technical but not core contributors, weighed in and say even more aggressive things and upset people and then they think, oh, that guy was a core contributor. No, he's never written any code, sorry, he was offensive, you know, and said something aggressive like you don't matter or your views don't matter if you're not progress. There's all kinds of crazy stuff being said, right? So people got upset about this. What they interpreted as, you know, a central big company like Apple saying something and you know, just removing a feature that they, that they want to do without consulting them or without asking them if they like it. But there was no intent. It's just because developers were looking at it for a couple of years, they're very close to it, so they know all the details and they thought, oh, it's uncontroversial, it stopped working basically, right? And that's under it. And of course people are upset too because they think spam is a problem for Bitcoin. And coming back to that hot button trick that governments do, right? Think of the children. Of course, when the push by people who really had the inclination that we should try anyway to stop spam, even though there's no clear technical way to do it, when they found a not very receptive response to that, people just respond, that doesn't work. They don't take no for an answer. So they go search for a hot button to press and say, well, what about if the spam is illegal? What about if it's disgusting and hated by everyone? And then they go wild and they use that. They get upset about it and so they're Actually, I said something about this in the discussion after a while, which is thinking back to previous peer to peer systems. This is the first time I've seen the users and enthusiasts for the system use that hot button tactic that governments use to ban those things to attack themselves unintentionally because they want to change. And the change they want has this other risk, the Apple FBI risk. It's complicated not just from a technical point of view, but also from a social communication point of view. It's really, and I think actually it's possible that if you got people in a room, in a mixer and they talked about it for a while, it would evaporate because really it doesn't, you know, whether whatever number you set this parameter to, it basically doesn't matter. You know, if you set it to 100 kilobytes, if you delete, you know, if you get rid of the option, if you set 0 to 160 in 99% of the nodes, it's going to make zero difference to the spam in the network. I can guarantee it. It's just how the network's designed and works. Right. So from that point of view, I would argue that either PI should be happy to flip a coin to say, okay, we're going to set it to 160 heads or 100k tails. And it shouldn't matter to either point of view if people were being calm and rational and you know, sort of backed off from the panic. And you know, I think the other point, which is unfortunate, is that there is illegal content in the chain, apparently. So there's 2018 paper referenced by, I forget which online newspaper that went and looked at it all and found some illegal content, like 3D printed guns, illegal images in most jurisdictions, et cetera. Right. And so they referenced them and this paper is in 2018. So those had to have been before. Right. And there's three and a half million images in there. So that's one factor. And then so the people that are complaining about the sperm are seeing not all of them, but a subset of them are getting worked up that this hot button issue could be a problem for Bitcoin and there's nothing you can do in the software that could prevent it. Anybody could post something illegal in any of these formats. They could have done that in Opreturn, which is the one they're arguing about in 2014. Anytime in the last decade, illegal content could be posted. It probably has been. I don't know what format that 2018 paper was talking about is clearly not taproot inscriptions because it didn't exist until 2021. So maybe it's opereturn, maybe it's segwit, maybe it's hidden pub keys, who knows? But point is, you can't really stop it. And there's another legal doctrine again from hard won previous legal challenges and you know, eff, protecting people, human rights lobbies, fighting against government intrusion, that if you are found to have illegal content on your computer, you are not in trouble for that. If you, you know, if you didn't have any intent, you didn't know it was there, you never opened it. You know, it's, it's, it's the, the risk is if you are seeking it out and looking at the illegal content, right? That's the legal concept. So effectively that means that the complaint that somebody that suddenly OP return increasing, it's not even opera turn, you can send megabyte OP returns today and for the last decade, right? It's legal. I mean, it's valid, right? Network valid. So it's not even new, but just changing the parameter. They're developing this very sort of, I don't know, artificial, let's say, argument that there's something very unique and dangerous about OP returns that have been network valid for a decade, that have been sent in the thousands going back years, that suddenly that is going to be a problem that never existed before. Even though there's data in the chain and even though it's legal doctrine saying that, you know, you as a bitcoin user using a bitcoin wallet are not in any way liable for the spam, it doesn't seem to persuade them because they've got upset about the risk. Right. And the reason they're upset with the risk is because they care about Bitcoin. So everybody cares about Bitcoin. So they all get upset about risk to Bitcoin. So that's it in a nutshell.
- [51:49]
B
Well, you gave us a lot to think about there, Adam. Thank you so much. And to sort of our earlier points, we do really, I think, have to be very careful about evaluating any proposed changes to Bitcoin. We do not want to introduce any ability to censor. I think there was some misunderstandings online when Michael Saylor posted the Do Not Harm video from his interview with Peter, because it said something about knots at the end. That doesn't mean he's endorsing knots.
- [52:15]
A
So that was actually a side story. So it turns out he didn't. It was like a mashup. Right. So a Twitter user took a two year old video from what Bitcoin did where Sailor was talking to Peter McCormack and he condensed it like interesting snippets and he put his own logos, logos and sub, you know, subtitles and a splash screen at the end. And Sailor didn't like talk about knots. It's a couple years before this drama's going on, so he didn't endorse anything. He was just saying general and things that I find I highly support. Which is, yes, you have to be very careful with mission critical systems. And Bitcoin is the most mission critical system in the world at this point. Right. I mean people worry about aircraft control systems, medical equipment, reliability, automotive. But Bitcoin has $2 trillion in it and that's clearly the highest risk point. Saying, yeah, we should be cautious.
- [53:22]
B
Yeah, we should be cautious. Conservative. Someone once gave me the analogy of sometimes developers are like plastic surgeons. You know, some a patient walks in, they're not going to say, hey, you're perfect. I'm not going to work on you. They'll find little things that they want to change. So we have to be very careful. Adam, it's been great to chat with you. Thank you for taking the time. Again. This was a hot button topic. I know a lot of you wanted me to cover it and I did with the greatest of all time. Adam back, thank you so much for joining me.
- [53:50]
A
Thanks very much.
- [53:51]
B
Thank you so much for checking out this episode of Coin Stories. Make sure you're subscribed to the show so you don't miss any new episodes. And if you can turn on those notifications and leave us a positive review, they really help the show grow organically with new listeners. We have a free weekly newsletter. You can sign up@thenewsblock.substack.com this show is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing should constitute as official investment advice and you should always do your own research. I'm always open to feedback and guest suggestions, so please feel free to reach out@infoalkingbitcoin.com I'll see you next time.