← TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:07]
Craig Wright
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitco. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.
- [00:36]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Gonna be spicy. Craig. We meet here on the, on the eve of Bitcoin's death. October 9, 2025. Bitcoin Core version 30. Yep, drops tomorrow.
- [00:49]
Craig Wright
Somber. Very somber.
- [00:51]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Very somber. In all seriousness though, I think a lot of discussion as we were just talking before we hit record has revolved around obviously this opreturn debate, whether or not the limit should be lifted or not, and the potential consequences of doing that. Maybe we'll touch on that, but I think there hasn't been enough discussion on everything else that's included in Bitcoin Core Version 30. So wanted to sit down with you and talk about what Bitcoin Core has been working on with this particular version. And I think before we do that for the layman out there, maybe we just do like a high level, a high level refresher of what Bitcoin Core is, what is entailed in basically releasing new versions, particularly significant versions like version 30, and then we can jump into the nitty gritty of what's included.
- [02:01]
Craig Wright
Sure. You want me to take the lead on this?
- [02:03]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yes, sir.
- [02:04]
Craig Wright
All right, so basically there's a Bitcoin core software is the reference client, so to speak, where has majority kind of mind share and running share of the Bitcoin protocol itself. It includes a bunch of different parts, peer to peer layer stuff, consensus stuff, a wallet which people still use, a bunch of other, like a bunch of other tools and pieces in there. A major release is done every six months. So on a six month cadence there's what's called a feature freeze, which is, hey, stop adding new things. We're going to continue just doing bug fixes until this time there's a branch off, which means, okay, now we have a new fork in the history that will turn into releases that will release binaries based off of this and then eventually a release, right, with series of release candidates which is happening right now, and then eventually final release. In addition to this, you also have kind of using this forked history that if there's future bugs found. If and if and when there are future bugs found and issues, the fixes could be applied directly on these forked off histories and do minor releases. So someday I will very highly likely have a 30.1 for various reasons. And this is how that's done, that's done on a per need basis. So right now, if I Understand correctly, there's 20 and 29 minor releases being cut right now for various reasons, bug fixes and improvements. So this can happen throughout this lifecycle and then eventually at some point these major releases or these major branches get marked as end of life. So saying basically we won't support this anymore, we won't do any effort to like update maintenance to this and make binaries or anything like that. And then it kind of gets stale. And so that's kind of the life cycle.
- [04:04]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. And take an even further step back just on the concept of implementations. Right. You have Bitcoin sort of consensus and then implementations like Core Knots, libitcoin, ptcd, they sort of have their own implementations that build software that is within consensus, but does things a little differently.
- [04:27]
Craig Wright
Correct. Yeah. So some are complete implementations. So BTCD is a good example. It's been around a long time. It has, it's programmed in Go Golang and it has a complete reimplementation of the consensus software. So when you get a string of bytes in the form of a blockchain, it needs to come out to the same exact answer as Bitcoin D or any other implementation. The RE implementation raises the chance that there is mismatches, but those can hopefully be ironed out and debugged and fixed over time. But there's definitely, like always, it's a very demanding problem, making sure they're in lockstep of consensus. And even between Bitcoin versions there's been historical problems with that, where implementation details like how the database is stored causes forks in the future. Right. With unforeseen events. It's been a long time since it's happened, but it's always possible with updates or not updating too.
- [05:35]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. And where would you say we are in terms of the path of Bitcoin Core? Because going back, I remember my first bit devs in New York in 2015. Ross Yanovsky basically presented on Segwit and obviously we had SEGWIT getting implemented. But I think one thing over the year, over the last 12 years has been made clear to me is that Satoshi, when he launched Bitcoin was a bit of a spaghetti code base and there's been a lot of work to sort of separate things within that code base particularly, or not particularly, but one thing being like the Wallet and the gui. And it feels like the last decade of Bitcoin core development specifically has been trying to get the implementation to a point where things are separated appropriately, more modular, and you can begin to do things that make it more complex, make it easier to build more complex applications on top of the Bitcoin protocol layer.
- [06:43]
Craig Wright
Yeah, that's one of the major things happening is historically splitting out these functionalities, getting them into their own containers that can be tested separately. So focusing on like the charlatan he's been working on, he's been continuing carrying this torch on the Liquid Coin kernel. So being able to separate the consensus parts out of the code base completely exposes an API. So people can use reuse this either in an alternative implementation or just for tooling. It's not exactly, you know, a lot of this work is not glamorous in that there's cost benefits to be weighed. The cost is here is that when you're refactoring these very critical parts of the code base, mostly consensus, not Wallet. I mean Wallet's important in its own way, but the consensus parts, making sure that you're. When you're changing this code to make it modular, you're not also changing the behavior, which is very difficult. So as you said, Satoshi started with main cpp, one big file that has wallet consensus peer to peer, just as everything just jumbled in it. And it's been a long process of carefully teasing these pieces out, which is continuing today. One big project is the Inter Process Communication interface. So there's this project basically split up to different binaries, so you can have your Bitcoin node communicate with your Bitcoin Wallet over interface, different binaries. Or in the future you could have the peer to peer parts handled only by a separate binary or different ideas like that. But this is like future roadmap stuff.
- [08:24]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, well, sticking on current roadmap stuff like beyond Opreturn, which is obviously the most talked about feature in Core Version 30. I'm looking at my notes now. It looks like there's going to be removal of checkpoint support and depreciation of checkpoints, changes to data, carrier size, behavior and deprecation plan support for multiple op return outputs per transaction, P2P relay, mempool adjustments, rate limiting and denial services protections, refactoring, internal cleanup infrastructure. So there's much beyond up return as well. Yeah, let's start on checkpoints. Because I think that has been not very controversial, but I think people have very, depending on who you talk to, very specific views on checkpoints are the good or the bad? Is removing them good or bad?
- [09:20]
Craig Wright
Yeah. So checkpoints historically are anti denial service mechanism. So back in the day, if you spun up a node and you didn't have these checkpoints, like let's say a few versions back, maybe 10 versions back, a peer could connect to you and then hand you a bunch of data that they cheaply made using. Maybe they have like one asic right, of one miner and they make a long block header chain, a very weak difficulty and they intercept you right when you're getting connected to the network and just feeds you these headers. These headers based on the current architecture at the time, are just written to disk. And so these are 80 bytes each. And so if you do enough, you're essentially just writing 80 bytes of data over and over and over to disk. And this is called a header disk fill attack. These checkpoints are basically saying, okay, up until this point we're not going to accept any forks in the blockchain history. It must get to this point and then it continues doing validation after that. This point that they picked is basically like it's, oh, it would take 10% of the network's mining power, yada, yada, long time to make a header chain this long. Therefore it makes the attack that much harder. That was like the original motivation because it was a real attack and correct.
- [10:47]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there aren't the way the checkpoints are sort of like verified or decided upon. You have a number of developers basically just sign like, this is the right checkpoint, this is the right data.
- [11:00]
Craig Wright
Yeah, add a new check. Exactly. Add a new checkpoint. All you need to do. Well, let's see, I haven't thought about this in a while, but you want to make sure that reorg will not happen beyond that point. So it has to be very deep. Right. It's qualitatively different than another feature called Assume Valid. So this one, you have to say, we will never fork this one out. And so it's kind of labor intensive to like philosophically argue that is 300,000 blocks, correct, 400,000 things like that. It's because you really are saying like, I will not diverge from this history. But yes, ostensibly you get, you know, get into GitHub pull request, somebody says, I'm updating it to this height, so 500,000 or something like that. This is the hash and Everyone sits there and make sure that, yeah, there's been 500,000 blocks on top of it since then. And this hash matches. That would be a verification.
- [11:56]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. And how's that? What's being replaced? There's a headers, pre sync or something like that.
- [12:03]
Craig Wright
Exactly. So there's this long. This is years and years of an idea where you could say, okay, what if we have a. When we're freshly syncing with the network, you just have a broad idea of how much proof of work you should be expecting. So you connect to the network and say, I'm expecting this many ex. I can't even say the hashes or whatever. And then you get fed this header chain, but instead of committing to disk, you just walk the whole chain the whole way until you hit that minimum proof of work requirement that you've internally internalized. Once you hit it, you say, okay, that looks good. I've gotten all this way and I've only stored one header at a time in memory. Now that I've gotten this way, I'm going to do it backwards again. You just sync it twice. So you sync the headers once to verify that your disk is not going to be filled and then you sync again to actually write to disk. And this along with a bunch of extra testing work allows you to remove checkpoints entirely from the code base.
- [13:06]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Does that have any IBD trade offs in terms of time?
- [13:12]
Craig Wright
Yeah, I think with the current implementation, if you have a flappy Internet connection, which I had once when I was testing, I was testing by flapping the Internet connection during the pre sync before you finished the first pass. If it gets interrupted like your peer drops for whatever reason, it has to restart. So that shouldn't happen. I haven't seen that since I was testing it, but that's one constraint there. So you need to be able to download the header chain once. As soon as that's done, you do it. It goes like historical. And there are ways of improving this, but I think it's one of those engineering complexity trade off things which doesn't seem worth it.
- [13:52]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [14:35]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
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- [14:36]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [15:36]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
And so I guess again, stepping back, broadly speaking, how profound would you say that this major version release is in terms of improvement of the node software itself from an efficiency standpoint, are you.
- [15:52]
Craig Wright
Talking about initial block download or just this ibd?
- [15:56]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
You can even talk like peer to peer level or transactions going to be matriculated through the peer to peer network faster?
- [16:11]
Craig Wright
Sure. So on the checkpoints front that doesn't improve efficiency at all. That's just a philosophical change to make it clear that the core devs are not in charge of what your chain is. But from a performance perspective, there's been a bunch of work done by Lawrence who has focused on especially on the lower end of hardware for initial block download. I haven't paid very close attention to that, but I know it's happening. The other kind of transaction robustness for the peer to peer network, there's been a bunch of work both on. There's this thing called the transaction orphanage and also package relay. So I'll start with the orphanage part where if you turn your node on for the first time and your mempool is empty, people will start telling you about transactions which have dependencies in the mempool itself, but you don't have them. So for example, you get a second generation transaction that depends on a first. Right now, prior to 30.0, this process is a little flaky and can be interrupted by direct peers who are either malicious or malfunctioning. So 30.0 has a significant improvement to that was spearheaded by Gloria, Peter and others to make this robust to single peers being malicious or even end peers being malicious. So as long as you have one honest peer, you can make this kind of transaction catch up.
- [17:48]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
In the mempool, is this for child pays for parent and RBF only or.
- [17:55]
Craig Wright
No, not only. So this it is. It was aimed at it. So it was aimed at the kind of one parent, one child package relay project, which was deployed in full on I think 28.0. But the existing implementation had this weakness where if a single peer connects to you, they can throw garbage at you and basically empty out this cache. Right. So basically it's the way of connecting the dots in your mempool, basically get disrupted by a single peer and the new implementation of what's called the orphanage finding your parent. This is robust even if you have N minus 1 connections being attackers. So basically the one honest peer can take up a slot and make honest CPFPs and package relay attempts like at least one at a time.
- [18:48]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
So yeah, I'm trying to visualize that. Yeah, you have a, let's say out of the box, eight peers, seven of them are malicious and your node is just so they're.
- [19:01]
Craig Wright
They're feeding you orphan garbage. So stuff they don't intend to ever fix. Right? So really it's just stuff that doesn't cost them anything. They're just handing you data to look at and hold. But basically instead of one big global bucket, which it was before, there's like a global bucket, so one peer could just go in and switch out the bucket's contents. You have N buckets and these N buckets can be shared. It uses some optimistic pathing like optimistic assumptions about using the whole space by one peer. But under kind of these loads where either things are very busy or the peers being malicious, then we protect, at least we have a protection slots for each peer essentially to make sure that economically valid transactions are propagated.
- [19:46]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, I'm trying to think how would, how does the node software determine that the one peer providing you good data is actually the right data?
- [19:57]
Craig Wright
So it's not scoring or anything like that, it's just saying, I think the, if I remember right, it's saying a maximum transaction package can be like this big, like 101 kilo virtual bytes. It says I'll protect that much per peer. So whether or not the peer is malicious or not doesn't affect this number. It's just something you allocate for that peer. So it doesn't take historical note of who's given you useful things, it just allocates that.
- [20:28]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's funny because many people, I mean as Bitcoin we hit all time highs earlier this week, we're at a $2.5 trillion market cap and most of the world it's focused on Bitcoin just views it as this digital capital good, which it certainly is. But I think getting into the nitty gritty of policies like this, or not even policies, but sort of optimizations like this really reminds me at least that the Bitcoin protocol is extremely complex and a lot of people are putting hundreds of millions, billions of dollars even into this asset or completely unaware of the sort of optimizations that you guys are working on.
- [21:21]
Craig Wright
And these kind of things don't require coordination with other groups. So there's no new peer to peer messages, no new format. So this is just piggybacking up things which have existed for many years, which helps with velocity for moving forward with things, but also limits what it can possibly do. Larger changes might require more changes from a higher level, but then that requires more coordination with other projects like btcd as an example.
- [21:55]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
On that note, how is that coordination improving or deprecating over time? Is it getting harder coordinate or.
- [22:03]
Craig Wright
Well, like I said, I think most things are happening within the colored lines and the lines for coloring, which it just improves velocity. But yeah, there are no commonly used from scratch implementations of Bitcoin today that are not Bitcoin core. Right. So you have bitcoin knots, which is a fork of Bitcoin core, but it has per version that has all the same features pretty much with extra things added on. So that doesn't take coordination. But for example BTCD is a few versions behind on things like as far as I know, they don't implement the way of sharing transactions in the network using witness transaction id so wtix ID gossip. So this can impact decisions that Bitcoin core makes internally, how we try to save bandwidth for our peers. We have to be cognizant of what other nodes on the network, what are they doing and that can affect things internally as well.
- [23:12]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Well, I mean sticking on btcd, there was an example that a couple of years ago now at this point when Barack did that 999 of 1000 multisig. Yeah, that knocked. That knocked BTCD off the network and some lightning nodes for a period of time. Yeah, that was an eight tapper, right?
- [23:35]
Craig Wright
Yeah. And there's been other ones with so some fuzzing work. I can't remember who did the fuzzing, but the slight difference in how the script interpreter executed a certain thing called find and delete, it's a very obscure function in the old script code base. Like this is like Bitcoin satoshi era scripting that we don't use anymore in Segwit or Taproot. But like these minor differences can result in possible forking opportunities. And if I remember right, that was even with transactions that were standard. So someone who's malicious could have forked up B2CD but didn't. So that was good. It's hard, very hard.
- [24:18]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I mean, since you mentioned scripting, is there Anything in version 30 that involves scripting?
- [24:28]
Craig Wright
No. So the last I don't think the script interpreter is one big kind of scary area that you're hesitant to touch unless you really need to. And during normal releases there's almost no reason to touch it. I would say the only thing that might touch is liquid kernel with interface stuff, but I think not even then. The last time I touched it was a couple of releases ago. So the pay to anchor update, that's a very minor change. That doesn't even, doesn't even change the definition of what's happening. It's just like minor, basically saying this is not an upgrade path anymore, let we use it. So I would say in general we don't touch scripting unless there's a consensus change we're trying to affect.
- [25:19]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
My research, I thought I read something about ephemeral anchors with 30.
- [25:26]
Craig Wright
Okay, no, so that would be. So go through the history. So ephemeral anchors is kind of two concepts, right? There's the pay to anchor part, which is the script that was 28.0 and then ephemeral Dust was the other part and that was in 29.0. So those have been out for about one, two release cycles. Obviously this package relay buff that we're deploying in 38 is going to help, but those key parts were already deployed. All right, that's what I'm an Ephemeral Dust doesn't affect scripting whatsoever. It's just. It's just a rule that basically says you're allowed to have one Dust output if you spend it. It's pretty simple.
- [26:15]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
What are you most excited about in version 30?
- [26:22]
Craig Wright
Yeah, a lot of this stuff is kind of just like not letting the network fall apart kind of stuff. I think a lot of the, if I'm not exactly answering the question, but I think a lot of the work has been done at the security level. Some excellent work with the Brink Fuzzing team. So like Nicholas and Marco De Leon, not Marco Falcon and team have been doing great work with the Fuzzing infrastructure. So I feel like the assurances we have are much higher than prior years, including just going back a couple versions. I can go more into that if you'd like.
- [27:02]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Well, I'd like you to go into more like not letting the network fall apart.
- [27:07]
Craig Wright
That's part of it, right? I can get into this.
- [27:10]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah.
- [27:11]
Craig Wright
So historically one problem with Bitcoin releases is that it's hard to test everything end to end in a robust fashion where you have a bunch of layers. Here you have a networking stack where you're taking in random TCP IP data, you're talking to peers, you're receiving data from peers, you're processing data and like paths that depend on a bunch of context. So it's hard to enumerate all the possible paths and it's hard to do this in a test that's in a robust way. But basically Nicholas and a few others have been working on a buzz harness which is like putting random, intelligent, but random data and inputting it directly into the binary and seeing if that if the behavior follows what we assume assume to happen. So basic ones is we assume that any message that a peer consent is won't make us crash. That's kind of obvious. But making it try to trace all the different code paths to make sure it doesn't crash is like a non trivial thing. The other thing you can do is do kind of this we call invariance checks, which are things like any message that this one peers, let's say peer A, peer A sends us a peer to Peer message, it should never cause us disconnect peer B. So an attacker shouldn't be able to connect to me and make me disconnect with the honest peer. And so you can essentially set up a harness like that, do a few hundred iterations per second of different message patterns, including block headers, transaction announcements, pings, pongs, whatever, basically spewing stuff, valid or not, at the node and making sure that this connection with peer B stays online. And so there's been a number of historical kind of catches with this, and I think it'll be very nice to have going forward, especially with peer to peer changes or policy changes too.
- [29:11]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Is that specifically to stop something like an eclipse attack?
- [29:15]
Craig Wright
Yeah. So that example, the invariance check of don't make me disconnect with my honest peer would be yes. Like I want to hear about all blocks that are honest or even transactions too. So one interesting, with this orphanage update or how we're holding on to these orphan transactions, there's a fuzz harness that is essentially this, you know, if the honest peer is staying within their limits, then another peer should never be able to evict the honest peers things. Right? And you could basically have the same exact thing, spews a bunch of data at it, and make sure that nothing is ever evicted from this honest peer. And so the level of assurance you get gets much higher. I think I can go on all day about this, but, you know, because.
- [30:02]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
There'S a bunch of. There's definitely. With the price going up, a bunch of people are new to Bitcoin, but let's dig into this concept of an Eclipse attack. So try to prevent this to make sure you have a Bitcoin node, you have slots open that peers connect to so that you can receive and pass on transactions and other data. But the concept of an eclipse attack is if you have malicious peers that take up all of the slots interacting with your node, they can begin feeding you bad data and basically ensure that you're not in consensus with the longest chain.
- [30:37]
Craig Wright
Bitcoin relies on the one honest peer assumption. So as long as one peer that you've reached out to or has reached you is honest, then you can stay caught up on the best chain of blocks, the heaviest chain of blocks. And an eclipse attack is a way of trying. It's an attacker using kind of arbitrary network means trying to trick you into not keeping on to a good person or letting them go or not letting them in at all. And so one way of doing that would be like send a message that Causes you to disconnect a good person. Right. So.
- [31:09]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Exactly why is it important to protect against these attacks? Like how would. Well, what, what would, what is the intent of. Yeah, somebody making an Eclipse attack.
- [31:22]
Craig Wright
So there's two, two reasons why you wouldn't want. Why an attacker would. Well, two major reasons why an attacker would want to stop you. Your attacker is another miner. And you're a miner, so you're mining blocks and they want to partition you from the network, get you alone. So you think you're doing good work and making the longest chain, but in reality you're falling behind the rest of the network. So if you're 30% of the network, if you can partition off 1% pools off the network, suddenly your 30% becomes 35%, 40% over time. Right. And this benefits you greatly because larger miners tend to fare better because they're just getting ahead. The other would be, if you're not a miner, it would be something like you run a lightning node or a node that has a watchtower of any sort. So you have like pre signed vault transactions and you want to watch when things are happening. Right. If a theft is occurring, lightning is the same idea. A lightning party counterparty is trying to defraud you. Going with an old state on chain, you want to hear about the newest blocks as fast as possible. And the fastest way to do that. Well, if you're being. If it's being stopped entirely, then you just never hear about it and your money goes out the window.
- [32:38]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
So yeah, lightning, specifically with the. What's it called?
- [32:44]
Craig Wright
HTLCs.
- [32:46]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Well, the HTLCs. But if you get Eclipse attacked and you don't know that your channel counterparty has the specific transaction with your channel.
- [32:54]
Craig Wright
Partner is not commitment transaction. Yeah, yeah. So they could have gone to chain with an old version long ago and you just never heard about it. You're sitting there waiting, you're saying, that's weird, I'm not getting blocks. But things must be okay. You know, maybe miners are slow. Right. And then on the other side, they actually have taken your money and run. Yeah.
- [33:16]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
And that takes. It's two weeks for that or two weeks.
- [33:20]
Craig Wright
Depends.
- [33:21]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah.
- [33:22]
Craig Wright
So with lightning specifically, that's up to the node operator and channel partner. So you can say, I feel comfortable waiting with you running off of my money after half a day or one day, that's really up to you. And that's the reactive security model. Basically, it's for better security. You should turn that dial way up. So talking again about that lnd exploit crashing like that's one example why you might want a longer delay. Because not only are you worried about Eclipse attacks, but you're worried about bugs and packages and your Internet, you know, getting cut off. And there's all sorts of reasons that you'd want to have these time locks be longer.
- [34:07]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Since you mentioned it. Bugs. What. As it pertains to bugs. And V30 would any beam patched.
- [34:18]
Craig Wright
Surely. So if you go to bitcoincore.org I'm pulling up right now. There's the. Let's see. Put my foot in my mouth here. Not find it releases security advice, development, security advisories. This is the place to track all the publicly known vulnerabilities. Example, the latest one was a remote crash due to address spam. And there it'll give you all the details of what severity it's ranked. So low, medium high, which is basically a rough ranking of how easy is it to do and how bad does it result in. So the worst would be something like chain split, right? Forking off people and making double spending happen. Second least bad would be like I can send a message and it gets sent to everyone else and everyone crashes. Right? That kind of. And you can keep going down the list too. This takes a bunch of setup. It might cost some money and if I know a miner, that kind of thing. And that's kind of like the strata there. But if it's a. And then also the. The severity also informs how long it takes to be told about it. Because if it's something, if it's a chain split, if it's unknown, it's kind of hard to do. They might not tell you about it until a few releases after the fact. Example, like if it could be like only after the last vulnerable version is out of end of life. So we told you to update these last three years. You didn't. Here's the vulnerability versus something that's low, which is like, hey, here's a new version and here's the vulnerability. So if there is a. I believe a. If there's a low vulnerability for 30, that's patched in 30.0, you should hear about within a couple weeks. I believe that's how it works. I'd have to look at the process again, but it was a big job to get that process lined up to make sure that people are hearing about these things and understanding that the system still has flaws and needs to be continuously fixed.
- [36:27]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [36:58]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
At the house too.
- [36:59]
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- [37:52]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
TFTC being like updating the latest version. I think that's been a big part of the conversation is this campaign to not update to V30, which is anybody can run any version they want to.
- [38:05]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
As long as it's.
- [38:06]
Craig Wright
Exactly.
- [38:09]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
What would you say to the people out there telling people not to download the method?
- [38:15]
Craig Wright
I would say if you don't run your node with money, it doesn't matter what you do. I mean you might be missing out on a new RPC or something for like looking at your mempool or something, but it's not too interesting. Staying up to date matters when you there's money at stake and your security of your node at stake. So money, if you're a business, you should be updating within when possible, especially minor versions. So 28 something will be released as a dot 3 I would recommend you upgrade to that if you can't update to 29.1 or 29.2 or 30.0, best case scenario you update the latest and greatest because some fixes can't even be Some fixes are harder to do as a backport. So all the way to old versions basically it's like this big change to there'll be some big change to this script engine or something like that. They're not going to mess with that for old versions unless the bug is easy to hit and becomes public or something like that. I'm not saying this is the case, but that's just kind of the thought process here. I'd recommend stay off of end of life if you're on 27, get 28 at least 28, whatever the last release was and then try out the new versions too if you need to integrate it like BTCPay server. And all those need to keep trying these new versions to make sure that if there's any API breaks they get caught early and can get fixed or worked over an appropriate speed.
- [39:56]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, and what benefits would a project like BTCPays ever have upgrading to V30 beyond what we've already discussed with appearing?
- [40:09]
Craig Wright
I mean it's a less thing of benefits per se, but I mean there's obviously the performance benefits that you get so faster IBD and whatnot, but also just access to the latest tooling fixes. It's more about making sure that things aren't broken. Because as an example, Bitcoin Core for a long time had maintained a series of patches for this thing called bdb, which is a database format that the Wallet used to use. But this format is extremely not maintained. Basically the original project maintainers quit a long time ago or don't do the patches necessary. So Bitcoin Core had to do that. That support is officially gone for 30.0. So there's a tool in there to migrate your Wallet to the new version. But if you're running a larger software stack like BTCPay Server, there's probably more involvement on making sure that your users go from the old format to the new format properly.
- [41:15]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
And what is the new format? Did a bunch of developers simply just write new database?
- [41:21]
Craig Wright
No, it's just SQLite, I think. Yeah, just like a standard format that works for the sizes we care about.
- [41:32]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
It's a funny thing because like SQLite, that's become extremely popular in recent years I've talked to Justin Moon a lot about the powers of SQLite but it's another dealing with Bitcoin being released in 2009 and the tools that were at Satoshi.
- [41:49]
Craig Wright
Yeah. And every time the project gets to get rid of a dependency like bdb, the better off we are because these like open SSL used to be a thing that we had to have in consensus that was removed a long time ago. There's all these different little projects that are basically re implemented just the parts we need and then the rest is removed or we use or we swapped them up for really standard components. Yeah.
- [42:19]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
So the last time we spoke about the op return was when we saw each other in person in June. May or June.
- [42:25]
Craig Wright
May, I think.
- [42:27]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
May BTC where Very, very interesting get together of bitcoin developers in Austin, Texas. I guess just to cover that whole debate of opreturn. How would you frame it from your perspective?
- [42:45]
Craig Wright
So I think that was kind of where I stopped paying attention because I went in person and was able to finally get out kind of like, well, what's their like, what do they think the solution really is? We all agree there's some level of problem. Some people think it's catastrophic, some people think it's spammy and noisy. But we don't love the JPEGs, but what do we do about it? And Bitcoin core kind of people have been saying, well, it's really hard to disentangle what spam mechanically and automatically without, without causing great centralization force and peer to peer problems in general. We're trying to save the moneyness by punishing JPEGs, but then we end up hurting the moneyness, the fundamental moneyness of Bitcoin. Whereas I asked like, hey, what is your ultimate vision for Bitcoin core? If we went down your path and essentially it ended up being this argument of we'll have kind of a scripting language or possibly like, you know, this, this, this list of bad scripts that we have to pass around to other nodes and people are automatically updating their configuration scripts to like filter these. And as you can see like this kind of method is inherently centralizing and I basically came away with I don't think this is, this bridge is gappable. There's been some efforts in the Knots community to do this where you essentially have a web of trust of filters and it just breaks the inherent moneyness of Bitcoin and I don't know what else there's to say about that. You can ask more questions, of course.
- [44:28]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
No, I mean I think I fall in the camp of I hate the jpegs. I think they're annoying. I don't like that they're bloating UTXO set or it was not even jpeg.
- [44:40]
Craig Wright
It's just like the arbitrary ordinals.
- [44:42]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, ordinals.
- [44:43]
Craig Wright
Arbitrary ordinals fills up the UTXO set. Yeah.
- [44:48]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Well, I guess let's jump into that. The core argument for changing up return and increasing the limit, taking the limit cap off altogether basically comes down to the fact that people that are injecting arbitrary data into transactions are doing it in a non optimal way. That's bloating the UTXO set, correct?
- [45:12]
Craig Wright
Yeah, almost everyone does what's called an inscription, which means in Segwit or Taproot you can put the JPEG essentially in the input side and you get the witness discount for it, so you pay four times less. OPReturn is an older way of doing it which costs four times as much. And the, the argument is that if you need it to be in the, if you need some sort of payload to be in the output, like let's say a cryptographic proof, it's called a Groth 16. Zero knowledge proof. That's too big for. It's bigger than 80 bytes, but it needs to be somewhere in the transaction. So what, what people would were theorizing about doing and actually had software to do is stuff it in UTXOs that look like public keys and so nodes have to store this forever just in case someone tries to spend that output. So if there's already these myriad of ways of embedding data more or less harmful, basically we hand them the least harmful method and say here, use this one. I also have personal opinions on kind of how opinionated we should be about what the best wallet software is. So I worry that if people set their own hyper specific arguments like knots like arguments and knobs, that it really causes mistakes and ends up kneecapping the moneyness of Bitcoin in other ways. So I'll give you one example for the Knots 29 release, which is the latest release they have, the new version of Lightning Channels would not be able to propagate on their nodes if you use the default settings. And so I think that's a great example of either lack of communication on their part of what they're trying to filter, or just ignorance of what they're doing is causing the moneyness of Bitcoin to be heard for the sake of saving Bitcoin, so to speak. Supposedly I can Go more into that if you want.
- [47:14]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. How would it mess up the lightning channels?
- [47:18]
Craig Wright
So the new style lightning channels as well as the Ark Spark, there's probably a few others. They're all using this pattern of the truck transactions. So version three transactions, not only is it the version three being valid to relay, but it allows them to be zero fee if paid for by a child. So specifically in knots 29 the current release, those are invalid, it does not allow those to propagate. So your commitment transaction will simply be dropped by your local node. Even if that was fixed, then they also ban ephemeral dust. So remember this Ephemeral dust is the rule where you're allowed to have a single dust output in transaction as long as it's cleaned up immediately after in a package and they disallow the function where this dust could be like 1 satoshi, 2 satoshi all the way up to the dust limit. So taproot, the smallest output is allowed normally is 330 satoshis. So 1 through 329 would be considered invalid and simply dropped even if it's spent. And again, the motivation here is to stop JPEGs because ordinal theory, whatnot. But in reality this is just like this feature is being used in the new Lightning channels. Like that, that space of the feature is intended to be used. And so this is essentially going to kneecap anyone using the software and trying to do self custodial payments using Lightning.
- [48:55]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
When you say V3 transactions, is that like version three of Beck 32 or.
- [49:02]
Craig Wright
No, no, no, it's the transaction version number. So there's a version field. The version field 3 on 28.0 and newer is considered standard for relay, but it also enables things like zero fee transactions for technical reasons that I won't get into here. But that's kind of like the gist of it. Yeah.
- [49:29]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
No, you told me before we hit record that you really haven't been paying attention since BT plus ptc. But I think I came away from that week because I was highly, I don't want to say triggered, but I was like a little emotional, like what is going on here? I don't want to.
- [49:51]
Craig Wright
I was a little demotivated. I thought. I thought there was a chance that we would bridge some, some of this gap and come to an understanding where there's some solution. But I just. After that I didn't think so. And I think it was, it was born out to be true. I just, I don't, you know, I don't see it Months later.
- [50:08]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
No, you know, get a lot of. And it's funny, I've been a lot of people hopping in my benches on x and on YouTube and other places saying, why aren't you talking about this? Like, I don't want to breathe air into it and I can't. I think I walked away from BTC with the conclusion in my mind like these things are consensus valid. Like there's nothing you can do to stop valid transactions from getting in. If you want to change it, you're going to have the harder conversation of a soft fork to change up return or something like that. And if you're not focused on that, then I think you're looking for a pyrrhic victory there. And then I guess to be critical of Bitcoin Core, the project. I think we talked about this. It may in person too. Like I think just. And it's just a massive communications PR failure that I think that's why many people have gotten so triggered and remain triggered is the perception is that Bitcoin Core is changing policy rules arbitrarily without talking to the broader bitcoin user base.
- [51:29]
Craig Wright
Yeah, it's a little disappointing and I find it a little baffling that the response to that is to switch to a distribution that changes policy on a whim of one guy and completely ignorant to like no, I mean I guess I'm being pointed here, but mentioning these like they did not know that they're breaking people's expectations of the network and as far as I know they haven't changed course. So who's defending the money? As a Bitcoin, I don't see how it would be them.
- [52:02]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Well, what do you think happens tomorrow? Do you think bitcoin dies tomorrow when version 30 is released?
- [52:07]
Craig Wright
I'm firmly on nothing ever happens team. I think it's not a black swan event. No matter what. It's a very minor thing. So I'm happy if people just update to relatively minor, relatively recent releases just for the health of the network, for security reasons and also just the weekly transactions, thermal dust, all those things getting out there. It's good to see these getting traction in real life.
- [52:39]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, I said this on a rabbit hole recap. I forgot it was two or three weeks ago, but I proclaimed stated during that episode like we're going to look back a year from now, we're going to be laughing that I think this is what I think is going to happen. Who knows what's going to happen. But I am also firmly in the nothing ever happens cap. And I think we'll look back and be like, ah, remember we were fighting about that?
- [53:08]
Craig Wright
Yeah. I think it's important to try to take some lessons from it, whatever those lessons are. And then, I mean some of the lessons are negative. Right. But basically doing what you can to keep your brand as far as like a infrastructure project which doesn't lose people's money. I think making that really your focus, rather than trying to cater to every user at once, which is impossible, but also just trying to communicate that it's okay if people run their own node software. That differs. Right. It really is up to the person. Right. Self sovereignty. And I think people keep forgetting this fact that running the node 99.9% of the time is for you. Right. It's for your sovereignty, your security, your privacy. You're not generally helping the network doing this almost all the time. It's just for you. And that's where the focus should be. Yeah.
- [54:10]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I think there is a broad misconception about the power of an individual full node and its influence on the rest of the network. Kind of rehashing these conversations that happened during the Black wars, the concept of an economic node. And you can definitely socially signal by running a certain version of a certain implementation.
- [54:32]
Craig Wright
But yeah, policy ends up being kind of like the mirror inverse of that. Right. So the block size wars with the intolerant minority or intolerant minority, where basically it's like if a small fraction of economically motivated users will reject things consensus, then it kind of there's brinksmanship involved that might enable soft work. But with policy it's the inverse, where a small percent of people who are tolerant of a certain transaction format lets them through in practice, even if 90% of the network doesn't. And I think there's a bunch of metaphors here, like technical allegories pretty much. Or parallels.
- [55:17]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
That's a really good insight. I never thought of it that way. The inverse consensus versus policy. Intolerant minority can affect consensus more than they could policy.
- [55:33]
Craig Wright
A tolerant minority can make more things relay, they can't make less things relay. An intolerant minority can affect consensus. Like shrinking consensus is the heart is the easier part, while expanding policy is the easier part. On the policy side of things, it's easy to expand, it's hard to restrict. It is kind of like the mirror universe here. It's hard to hard fork, it's easier to soft fork in relay, it's easier to expand, harder to restrict.
- [56:07]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
So moving forward, when doomsday comes and goes tomorrow, we move on I think the dust will settle a lot of questions around ossification. What changes are needed in Bitcoin? Obviously Bitcoin Core isn't going to stop working on Bitcoin after version 30 is released tomorrow. And the same can be said for any other developer working on any other implementation. But in your mind, what are some of the top priorities that people need to be focusing on beyond what gets released tomorrow?
- [56:48]
Craig Wright
Well, I mean doubling down on security infrastructure, but I already talked about that. So aside from making sure that this multi trillion dollar asset doesn't fall over in the next few years, there is a continuing conversation on what people call covenants or scripting softworks. I think that'll continue. Rusty Russell has submitted a somewhat serious like more concrete proposal for his kind of rewrite a bitcoin script where taking bitcoin script and turning it up to 11. But there's a number of different ways that script updates can be done for what you're trying to accomplish and how you do and that informs how you do it. So he has one way Russell o' Connor has simplicity, if you've read up about that. And then AJ also has his own bullish kind of Lisp based programming language. And I think beyond the near term we need a bigger discussion about if we want to continue iterating on scripting in Bitcoin. What's the best way to do it? That's a big engineering question as well as theoretical and engineering.
- [58:04]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I'd pull Shiron a couple months ago to talk about simplicity launching on Liquid mainnet and we talked about the potential of it getting implemented at the protocol level. It seems like simplicity. I mean obviously Blockstream's been working on it. I think the paper dropped what about 12 years ago, maybe even long time ago and it's been talked about since then. Finally got it live on mainnet on Liquid to basically showcase what could be done there. But it seems like, I mean simplicity has always sort of appealed to me but I think the common pushback is like how are you going to get this into.
- [58:44]
Craig Wright
Well yeah, common pushback is oh, it's very complicated, it's a lot of lines of code. But if you look at any other proposal they're making severe trade offs too. And I think the community will have to have an honest discussion that doesn't involve brinksmanship of like you shouldn't be arguing necessarily that Bitcoin isn't worth the work. I would say like this because there are facets of simplicity or simplicity like solutions that really appeal to me as well, that aren't maintained with the great script restoration or bullish. And so I think this discussion has to be made more near term. Antoine and I have been working on a kind of smaller proposal which is template hash, checks it from stack and internal key I think. Have you had Antoine on for that?
- [59:34]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
No.
- [59:35]
Craig Wright
Okay. But a few months back, basically it's a slight revision and reframing of another proposal where it's like CTV as well as checksig from stack and we basically we became intrigued with this kind of pairing and did a ground up rethink of how we would do it post Taproot era. And that was our proposal. Essentially it's a CTV like widget that's TapScript only. Checkstick from stack which is bit 348 and internal key which is bit 349 as is.
- [60:11]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
What would you say to the ossifiers who are worried about the unforeseen consequences of messing with something like Bitcoin script? Because I would argue too there was unforeseen consequences with the combination of Segwit Taproot with the ordinals manifestation, I guess. How do you have conversations around that in really war Game through potential for stuff like that?
- [60:43]
Craig Wright
Yeah, I mean that's an interesting question because the things I felt that were deficient in Taproot are probably not the same ones. From an unforeseen perspective. When I look at lessons learned from there's probably a bunch from Segwit, but let's say from Taproot since it's more recent, we learn things like hey, maybe we should have more tooling in place before we actually talk about activation. Because in Taproot the way keys are published on the network, There are these 32 byte keys, what we call X only keys. And this ended up. It may or may not be the right decision in the end, but we didn't have a fuller discussion. From the tooling side of things, how do you make cryptographic protocols with a slightly different public key format? And it ended up compliment complicating certain protocols. I think it ended up okay. But the lessons I took away are essentially, hey, tooling needs to be like much more defined before these larger changes are done. We're taking that to heart. Part of our efforts is not only saying, hey, these capabilities, these opcodes and capabilities enable some cool use cases. Hey, look at these blog posts we made. But much further than that, we want to have the tooling ready to go applications deployed in signet and and maybe customs test nets before we even talk about things like activation. And we're far from that. Even from a mindshare perspective, we're far away. But from a quality assurance perspective, we're also far away. So that's kind of like the lesson I took away, I guess from Taproot.
- [62:29]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah.
- [62:31]
Craig Wright
So if it activated tomorrow, ideally we'd be able to have wallets that just spin up and use things the next day. Right. Or, you know, practically the next day. And with Taproot it ended up being like this, activated in 2019 or whatever. And then like, oh, it took four more years for Musig 2 to be formalized and another two years to be standardized. And PSBT support is taking years. And ideally this, ideally more of this would have been done prior to activation.
- [63:04]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. And it's insane problem we have as bitcoiners, as species, as we're becoming more dependent to a degree on this monetary protocol. It's approaching two and a half trillion dollars in value. Not only that, I mean you mentioned it earlier, we have all these different second layer solutions, whether it's Lightning, Liquid Arc, Spark, Shami and Mint in the bag as well. Not silent payments. What does Spark use?
- [63:41]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
State chains, State chains, state chains.
- [63:43]
Craig Wright
Silent payments too. Right. This whole tech stack that's all kind of interlinked in certain ways and the velocity is just kind of slow because there's a lot more layers to it. Even if I snap my fingers and we got some magical software, it would still take years for adoption.
- [64:00]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, this is out of left field, but just because it's a big topic of conversation thinking when it comes to fuzz testing, does AI help at all with this? Is there any, any vibe coding that helps?
- [64:14]
Craig Wright
I was, I was briefly considering today could you get reasonable vibe coded buzz harnesses, so making. But with fuzz testing you really want to make sure like you need a lot of subject matter expertise to define it. Otherwise it does like basically really random. And if it's really random data, then it doesn't really make any meaningful progress. It's trying random numbers essentially with no understanding what it's doing. But the way you can write the harness with intelligence. So maybe there's like, maybe there is, you know, I wouldn't rule it out. I think AI for writing testing is probably one of the best avenues to go forward with in this space. I'm not sure how much people have been doing it.
- [64:56]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I was just going to ask, is anybody working on that?
- [64:59]
Craig Wright
Probably.
- [65:01]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
What would you. Obviously there's been a lot of controversy and shit slinging going on over the Last eight months. What would you say is the mental state of your average developer right now?
- [65:15]
Craig Wright
I mean, it depends on. Obviously this kind of drama makes maintainers more risk averse in some ways. Right. So risk averse could mean they're going to ignore issues longer or they're just going to make snap decisions and just say like, this is the way it is. Outside of that, I think people are ready to get back to work working on the same things. So, like one project that I think will become more important as time goes on possibly is AJ is working on this thing called template sharing, which is. And we basically want these future relay discussions to be less political. And so one way of doing that is solving some parts of it technically that you kind of allow. You're more likely to allow people to have different mempool policies as long as it doesn't affect convergence of the network in blockchain terms. So we don't want to slow down block propagation on the network to make mining fair. So if there are like technical ways of mitigating this, even when people disagree on mental policies, that would be a big win. And so I think arguing less about what an. What a default number should be in a config file, I think going this way is more fruitful.
- [66:39]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. What would you contend is the biggest risk to Bitcoin right now?
- [66:47]
Craig Wright
That's a great question. Biggest risk. I think it's the legal one for users and developers still. It's a stablecoin people, I would say are political force in America, but still not quite there for Bitcoin. Right. We still don't have legal, like explicit legal protections in congressional writing promising that they won't jail us for writing code that helps people move money. Right. Privacy is going to be a big bear to tackle. I think privacy is essentially illegal on the Internet and they're going to want to keep it that way. Even if people figure out how to do coin joins en masse and keep off chain the legal. I mean, just yesterday I was talking about Spark, this Spark service, how it's their policy to, on an indexer, publish every single transaction for every single account. So if you have someone's Spark address or you get a single bolt 11 invoice from them, a Spark user, you can look up their entire transaction history, including balance. And my guess is they have their stated reasons, but my guess is they're worried about pushback from the federal government, whether that's invasive data requests or, you know, regulatory crackdown on their service for being, you know, not for money transmission. I mean they'll try to claim it. Right. So the government could still try to claim that they're money transmitters, even though they claim they're not. And this could be instigated by a service offering practical privacy. So I think that those are some of the finer tightropes they're walking, these wallet services.
- [68:46]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, I saw you tweeting your quote, tweeting Wallace Satoshi which has moved to Spark as their backend.
- [68:53]
Craig Wright
Exactly.
- [68:54]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
That's insane. It's like anybody who's technical enough can sort of probe that data.
- [68:59]
Craig Wright
Yeah, it's a little surprising. I'm obviously not happy with it, but I think to be clear for that thread, I'm bringing this up because wallets, like end wallets, like Wallet Satoshi, have to somehow communicate these expectations of non privacy to their users. And I think it's very difficult prior like in previous iterations they were the custodian and so while Satoshi says I'm not going to publish everything on a database, but now they're relying on a backend that does. How do you update the mental framework of how do you get informed consent from your users for that? That's really challenging and I'm not sure what the solution is for that.
- [69:45]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I'm just going to pull this up. Yeah, there isn't real privacy against the Spark operators that everyone should be searchable in a public index. So it's like. Yeah, they're not even.
- [70:00]
Craig Wright
That is their stated. That's what they said. So I feel comfortable saying that's what they said. And then you can like Ben Carmen whipped up a tool for me in about 10 minutes. Probably vibe coded it. There we go. So if you get someone's Wallace Satoshi invoice, it immediately pulls up their account. So I tested it on my own, which I don't use it seriously, but it would show my test transactions to my real Lightning Wallet. So it's like how do you communicate that to a user, especially a new user. How do you communicate that to a user of Venmo which has what you know, they're maybe okay with the service knowing, but not everyone in the world knowing if they can switch a button.
- [70:46]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah, no, that's what I was going to say. It's like, even if the operator knows every transaction doesn't mean you broadcast.
- [70:56]
Craig Wright
I'd be more sympathetic if they just. If they just said, yeah, and we give you a button in the API or whatever to say don't publish and then they just didn't do that, I'd be pretty sympathetic. To that.
- [71:08]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. Now the privacy war is going to be a big one. But I saw Dan Gold from Pay Join Dev kid a couple weeks ago. It seems like they're making good progress when it comes to Pay Join specifically. I think we're going to have to position it as a way to.
- [71:29]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
As.
- [71:29]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
A sort of cost saving technology for exchanges specifically.
- [71:34]
Craig Wright
Yeah, that's. I mean that's the tough thing it seems like to make it palatable regulatory regulation wise we have to say it's something else. It is. Right. Pay Join Coin joins in general can be potential savings. Lightning is a potential fee is a fee savings vehicle that gets you practical certain, certain levels of privacy. Better than on chain an arc Spark. Well all these other systems can also potentially offer those kind of privacy trade offs. Maybe Trojan Horse using the original systems. Right?
- [72:14]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. That's why I don't know what your thoughts are on Chami. Immense. But I love them. I love the Cashew wallets and the Mint wallets that I interact with.
- [72:28]
Craig Wright
Yeah. I think the big challenge is who runs the Mint. Right. They cannot claim they are non custodial by any stretch of the imagination.
- [72:37]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
No.
- [72:38]
Craig Wright
So who runs them? How much of a centralizing force is that? Right. Because it's more efficient if everyone's on the same mint. Maybe there's decentralization back pressure from like. Well we have the lightning network that interconnects everything so maybe the centralization pressure isn't as big. Right. You just have like thousands of operators. I mean I guess we'll see.
- [73:07]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Some people think the AIs are going to run the mints. They're going to recognize it's superior money for the agentic framework and there's going.
- [73:14]
Craig Wright
To be galvans conspiracy theories there.
- [73:19]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. But now we're getting into the philosophical side of things because no matter what part of the stack we're talking about, Spark has to make this privacy trade off because of the government. Maybe other things like Pay Join won't get implemented by exchanges because they're worried about the regulatory and compliance blowback. Obviously Chomi admins can provide not only incredible privacy but since they're separate from Bitcoin and very modular, you can build a literal new banking stack from scratch that gives you all the functionalities you'd want from a banking service with better, more secure tech minus the centralization pressures of the MIN operator. It's like we have the potential to build an incredibly robust secure private financial system which arguably should be what everybody wants. But for some. Or not for some reason but the Government just messes that up.
- [74:21]
Craig Wright
Yeah. Also the user demand just isn't there for censorship. Existing payments, I mean there obviously is some, but in the west as an example, no one seems to care. And what would make them care? Right. What events might transpire that will make them care and will we be ready for them? That's the other one too. Right. We're building, I think like general hodl tech is pretty much solved. I would say like Coinbase seems to be doing okay with eight quadrillion Bitcoin or whatever, but the payment technology still isn't there. And so if Bitcoin payments actually need to take off in a non custodial way in the future, the infrastructure needs to be there. And I think that's kind of what we're looking at, looking at this future.
- [75:12]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Hey, we had a good step in the right direction yesterday with the square announcement. People were waiting for seven years for that. Yeah, no, I think the pressure is going to be digital id and my theory is that they're going to try and thrust something, world coin or something like it on the masses and people are not going to be fond of staring into the orb and then they'll care.
- [75:38]
Craig Wright
Maybe. Yeah.
- [75:43]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I mean now we're getting something like are you optimistic about the potential for the user experience and the products built on top of Bitcoin to get to a point where regardless of people's desire to use peer to peer cache, the experience is simply superior to the incumbent system that just gets adopted because it's better ux.
- [76:09]
Craig Wright
I mean it depends on the layer. It's already better than some things. International wires are trash and will continue to be trash for a long time. But I think you'll. I mean some of the payment UXs are really nice in Bitcoin but a lot of them take steep trade offs in the, the self custody dimension. You know, if you just park your money on. Well actually it's. This is where it still works. Right. Parking your Bitcoin on Coinbase is only useful if you're willing. If you're only interested in trading on Coinbase or using base chain or whatever. But if you want to actually send someone over the lightning network of payment, I think it still works. But there's all this regulatory pressure to not let it succeed. Right. And I think that's where all the friction is. So if you can go ahead.
- [77:00]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I did this last week. We had a 1031 off site with the portfolio companies. We're at this resort and over the course of the three days got to Know some of the people working at the resort, particularly the bar, and last night got to tip him. He's got a Coinbase account. I was like, I'll send it over. Lightning in the UX was just completely abysmal. And I thought, like, I got a confirmation on my end, but it never hit his account. I got a confirmation that the payment was received, but from what I understand, and I didn't realize this till after I left him. Coinbase is asking users that accept Bitcoin over Lightning to sort of ask for personal information at the counterparty.
- [77:42]
Craig Wright
Exactly.
- [77:42]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
And the transaction, it's like, what?
- [77:45]
Craig Wright
Yeah, that's. I think it's, it's incredibly centralizing in that no one will want to do that. But if transactions, the payments. Payments volume isn't high enough that people won't jump that hurdle to go on the other side. Because if money is sitting in an ETF or what, everyone's happy with it. They don't need to ask permission because it's not going anywhere. But if you want to make payments, this is where all this friction shows up. Especially, especially if you're trying to send from a Coinbase or regulated institution. Well, I don't know if we could fix that. Aside from legal changes.
- [78:23]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
It's completely immoral, though. I sent it from my wallet.
- [78:28]
Craig Wright
I'm making it descriptive. Yeah.
- [78:30]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Oh, I know, but just I was thinking about it through, I was like, wait, I sent $15, $20 worth of Bitcoin, whatever it was, to this wallet. Obviously it's centralized. Coinbase is presenting and running the Lightning Node presenting the invoice. They have the Bitcoin sitting somewhere in their account.
- [78:47]
Craig Wright
The guy that sent it to lightspark does, I think.
- [78:49]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
But yeah, yeah, Light, Spark, whatever. It's sitting somewhere in a centralized third party and that guy's never going to get the money. And I send 20 bucks that I'm never going to get back because I don't think this guy's going to be able to find me, to ask me for my home address and all that. And when he does, I'm not going to give it to him. I'll say, spin up another invoice using Zeus or something like that and I'll send you the Bitcoin there. But Coinbase just holds that money now.
- [79:15]
Craig Wright
Yeah. So I think that's where you'll see the riot. If Spark does take off, that's the niche. It'll fit. There's an unfortunate privacy thing, but if you're willing to accept a system that says self custodial and it kind of is trustodial. At least maybe that's enough for users to get onboarded. But is that a world we want to go to versus something more private? This is like big challenge.
- [79:45]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. I mean talking to Matt Corallo earlier this year, he's pretty optimistic that self custodial lightning will see a step function improvement.
- [79:57]
Craig Wright
Better. It's definitely better than before. I think a lot you'll hear like, oh, this new layer two will fix all lightning's, you know, all the issues lightning has. But you look under the hood, it's either making custody trade offs, security trade offs or it's making the same assumptions as like lightning needs improvement. So it's like, oh, it's instant transactions. They said, how do you get instant transactions? Oh, you just trust this person not to sign twice. Like come on, that's zero comp trust. Right. So I think in this industry there's still a bit of that. Even the bitcoin side, it's kind of hiding what models people are buying into. But I'm optimistic too. So I think there's enough there for another 5, 10 years of development and smoothing out the processes.
- [80:51]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. And in the meantime, in parallel to your point, we need to wage the campaign to abolish the Bank Secrecy act, where all this privacy infringing, compliance and regulation comes from.
- [81:07]
Craig Wright
Can we somehow get. Yeah, can we somehow get the BSA as a person to insult Trump or something, trying to think of a way of, you know, instigating constitutional crisis because then maybe the courts will strike it down anyways. It's like, ah, wasn't constitutional anyways.
- [81:23]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
No, it isn't same. We're dealing with the remnants of mistakes made many decades ago. Funnily enough, 1970 I think is when the BSA was implemented.
- [81:36]
Craig Wright
It's interesting to see the thing that was vaguely probably not constitutional at the time accepted because we didn't have computing widely. Now that's flipped and kind of seeing the straws being grasped by the statists who want everything to be reported at all times. It's really stark, I guess.
- [81:58]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Yeah. And admittedly I haven't been following it as closely as it probably should be, but last I heard there was. This doesn't have anything to do with privacy. But to your earlier point about legal ramifications of writing open source software that allows people to use Bitcoin in a peer to peer fashion, there was positive language in the Clarity act, which hasn't been passed yet. I don't know if it's been taken.
- [82:22]
Craig Wright
Out or revised out, but has not yet been taken out. But there's always a worry that until the job's done, it's going to get horse traded for something else. Right. Because again, you have the stablecoin Bros. Stablecoin contingent and you've got the kind of Elizabeth Warren contingent at the moment. And people worried that Elizabeth Warren actually hates bitcoin more than she hates to stable coins. So maybe a trade would happen there. Yeah, we'll see. I'm optimistic long term, but you need to actually battle this out in, in Congress and in the courts.
- [83:02]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Well, I mean I think my, I'm going to call it a pipe dream, but would be incredibly badass is that if they did push and put the regulatory pressure on, if you just got back to the site for punk roots and you just had a bunch of pseudonymous devs pop up and just start launching things without anybody telling who they are.
- [83:21]
Craig Wright
So I have a slightly contrarian point of view on this, I guess. Yeah, I think it's a good idea of something like that. But I see America as a potential base for freedom through freedom of speech and computing. And if I just snap my fingers and America became the place where all non custodial development is blessed legally and protected 100% and there's no question that you're going to be dragged out of your house because your system helped enable someone else to do money laundering. I think that'd be a huge win for the world and I think we can push that way. I don't think that everything bad for me as a developer is good for bitcoin, I guess is my point. I think we can kind of push the other direction, make it easier in countries with law and order, potentially more law and order, and export that goodness worldwide through the Internet.
- [84:20]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Craig, I like that optimistic view. We should lead by example.
- [84:26]
Craig Wright
I still.
- [84:29]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
The tools. The potential is all right. Like we can build an incredibly transparent, robust, resilient, secure, relatively private financial system.
- [84:41]
Craig Wright
The potential is there in general. Freedom of speech has gotten stronger and stronger in the United States. The one caveat is, oh, but you did talk about money and suddenly this is like a legal loophole to throw you in jail forever. So I think just keep maximizing these First Amendment gains as far as we can in the next few years. Right. I think it's possible I did too.
- [85:07]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Let's keep pushing. It's been awesome. This is the first time in a while I've gone deep on bitcoin core stuff. It always reignites the subdued nerd in me and it makes Me miss New York bit devs in the heydays.
- [85:34]
Craig Wright
When.
- [85:34]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
I would nerd out with this stuff for I think I went to probably 80% of the bit devs between 2015 and 2020 and it's easy to forget the intricacies and the complexity involved in actually maintaining and improving the bitcoin protocol. Yeah, most people are completely unaware.
- [86:02]
Craig Wright
Yeah, like with anything else, there's a lot going under the hood. It doesn't directly. It's not a feature for the user, so it's hard to see and show value.
- [86:17]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
No, I'm thinking too like is more institute like do you have faith that the last question you have faith that like as more institutions get in, if banks get in, that they'll have tech departments that will understand the importance of understanding the intricacies of the protocol level.
- [86:33]
Craig Wright
That I don't know, can't. I think it's kind of. We're also in an eternal September kind of situation. I would have expected more industry feedback, direct way, but you don't get that people don't even really complain when things are broken. It is like a. There's a feedback loop problem with development. So I looking forward to find ways to solve that too, especially as things get bigger.
- [87:07]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Think about it, freaks. All right, any final thoughts before we wrap up here?
- [87:11]
Craig Wright
I appreciate you having me on and excited for the future. Still future two days from now.
- [87:21]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Bitcoin dies tomorrow. So enjoy it while it lasts for you because you got a 24 hours.
- [87:28]
Craig Wright
All bitcoin transactions are legal the next 24 hours. See ya. Thanks.
- [87:36]
Host (possibly a Bitcoin journalist or podcaster)
Peace and love, freaks.
- [87:38]
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- [88:28]
Craig Wright
Okay?