KNOTS OR CORE, WE ARE ALL BITCOINERS | Michael Tidwell

Summary

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THE Bitcoin Podcast – KNOTS OR CORE, WE ARE ALL BITCOINERS

Guest: Michael Tidwell

Host: Walker America

Date: September 25, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the current debates around Bitcoin node implementations, specifically the tension between the "Knots" and "Core" camps in the Bitcoin technical community. Michael Tidwell joins Walker to discuss misunderstandings around node operation, consensus vs. relay policies, the recurring nature of community churns, and why—fundamentally—all users are still “Bitcoiners” regardless of their software stack.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Knots vs. Core" Debate: Not a Real Schism

• Tidwell opens by challenging the framing of the Core vs. Knots split as a real division in the ecosystem, stating:

  "Your relay policy doesn't make you a different bitcoiner. Your consensus policy mainly does…We have the same consensus rules." (00:00)

• He argues that until there’s a consensus-level block rejection (such as a UASF event), “we’re all on the same team,” regardless of relay policy.

2. Bitcoiners, Disagreement, and Community Churns

• The discussion highlights that strong philosophical differences aren’t unique or new; the Bitcoin space has periodic "churns" where ideas are stress-tested.
• Tidwell speculates this may be a healthy, recurring process:

  "I almost wonder if like every X amount of years there just needs to be a churn where people get radically like dunked into cold water on what bitcoin is." (00:54:14)

3. What Is Bitcoin? Definitions and Edge Cases

• Both host and guest agree the question “What is Bitcoin?” must be revisited often.
• Tidwell’s perspective:

  "Bitcoin can survive ebbs and flows of terrible situations of censorship, centralization and actually come out…as a usable system that can course correct and become more of a freedom money and freedom data ledger." (00:02:27)

• He posits that the chain with the most proof of work, regardless of philosophical differences, is what defines “Bitcoin” for most practical purposes.
• Notably, he explicitly diverges from Greg Maxwell, who thinks it’s the “actual nodes” (consensus) that count, not just PoW.

4. Forks, Game Theory, and Economic Nodes

• Emphasis is placed on the real determinants of chain(s) after contentious events:

  "What really matters is who sells their coins and who doesn't. That is actually what matters." (Walker, 00:47:17)

• Economic nodes—the entities with meaningful transaction volume or holdings that can influence forks—are defined less by technical specifics, more by their impact on market outcomes.

5. Revisiting UASF (User Activated Soft Fork)

• Tidwell clarifies a frequent misconception: no true UASF has yet occurred; past UASFs have only been threatened rather than executed.

  "We have never done a UASF. We have always threatened a UASF." (00:55:20) "The main tangible thing that we did for UASF was we wore hats." (01:00:48)

6. Knots, Relay Policy, and Block Filtering

• Relay policy (e.g., those employed by Knots) is a local, optional setting; unless a node rejects blocks, all users remain in consensus and thus "Bitcoiners."
• The recurring fear-mongering over potential "attacks" on Bitcoin via policy change is reminiscent of earlier, overblown worries.

7. The Current Op_Return/Block Data FUD

• The ongoing controversy centers on allowing or restricting arbitrary data storage in the blockchain.
• Criticisms of Core v30 and debates over “filthy” content on the blockchain are recast as emotionally charged and, in Tidwell's view, technically misplaced.

  "It's becoming where…some...were passionate...But then it gets to this and you're just like, wait, what?" (01:17:54)

• Key technical point: Abusing OP_RETURN actually results in smaller blocks, reinforcing rather than undermining the desires of those most anxious about blockchain bloat.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Unless they're willing to reject the block, we're all on the same team...your relay policy doesn't make you a different bitcoiner." — Michael Tidwell (00:00)
• "I think ultimately the pleb move that is measurable...is voting with your feet, you sell your coins." — Michael Tidwell (00:02:11)
• "Who supports what? And this is how bitcoin works, so we’ll see...No need to be a gambler...let someone else take the beach." — Michael Tidwell on UASF consequences (00:58:53)
• "What really matters is who sells their coins and who doesn't. That is actually what matters." — Walker America (00:47:17)
• "We have never done a UASF. We have always threatened a UASF...We made hats." — Michael Tidwell (01:00:45)
• "This is just becoming insane to me…It just seems like people are out for some sort of, like, relevance." — Michael Tidwell on the extreme narratives being used (01:18:05)
• "Maybe ease off on calling other bitcoiners...complicit in exploiting children on the blockchain because that's just kind of like a man, that's a real government thing to say." — Walker (01:06:20)

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TabConf and Bitcoin Community Experiments

• Tidwell describes the philosophy and unique structure of the Atlanta-based TabConf, which emphasizes transparency, technical depth, and the welcoming of experimentation.

  “Everyone needs minimal competence to be self sovereign. I truly believe that.” (00:14:27)

• Fun elements: rotating audience panels, rapid-fire explainers, and hands-on workshops like building Meshtastic mesh devices for decentralized comms.

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On Misconceptions, Fears & Technical Realities

• There are already technical avenues for inserting larger blobs of data into Bitcoin; restricting OP_RETURN is not a panacea.
• Tidwell and Walker repeatedly caution against emotional, government-style “think of the children” rhetoric to strong-arm technical policy decisions.

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–03:47 – Opening thoughts on camps, consensus, and community churns
• 13:13–17:22 – Rethinking Bitcoin conferences and the ethos of TabConf
• 37:42–45:17 – Defining “What is Bitcoin?” and different visions for game theory
• 54:25–60:48 – Breaking down UASF myths and the difference between threats and executions
• 65:28–70:10 – Reflection on community churns, personality-driven debates, and underlying agreement
• 77:54–82:10 – Criticism of strawman, emotionally-charged arguments around node filtering and content risks
• 102:39–105:48 – Deep discussion on the necessity (or lack thereof) for the op_return change and how policy-shy FAQs are received

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Summary & Final Thoughts

This episode is a high-signal, nuanced tour through the heart of the current community debate—not merely about software policy, but about how disputes are handled, what truly defines consensus in Bitcoin, and the inevitability of recurring cycles of ideological "mind-melts." Tidwell and Walker both urge listeners to keep perspective: as long as we share the same consensus rules and underlying ideals, differences in node implementation or policy preference don't make us adversaries, but strengthen Bitcoin’s antifragility.

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Find More

• Michael "Tidwell" / mike21: On Nostr, Twitter, and at tabconf.com
• Walker America / THE Bitcoin Podcast: Primal, Substack, Fountain, and bitcoinpodcast.net
• TabConf: For technologists, plebs, and anyone seeking hands-on Bitcoin learning, transparency, and a dose of karaoke.

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Selected further reading

• Comprehensive OP_RETURN Q&A on Stacker News
• [Genesis Block by Aaron van Wirdum]

“Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. Thank you for spending your scarce time listening to THE Bitcoin Podcast.” — Walker America (01:11:33)

Transcript

[A]

I have a lot of respect for the passion and the philosophy and the ideas behind a lot of people that subscribe to the Knots camp. Right. But I think the problem is they think they're in a camp. Right? I just said they're in a camp. But really the way I see it is unless they're willing to reject the block, we're all on the same team and they actually, you know, we're actually just all bitcoiners, whether they think there's, you know, this core Knots debate or not. Your relay policy doesn't make you a different bitcoiner, right? Your consensus policy mainly does. So you can have all the philosophy you want that makes you a bitcoiner. Guess what? You're not going to have the same philosophy, philosophy as me. That's okay. We have the same consensus rules. Your relay policy doesn't make you in a different camp than me. Even though we're sort of dividing it out that way and it's been pretty contentious. I almost wonder if like every X amount of years there just needs to be a churn where people get radically like dunked into cold water on what bitcoin is and like their perception of bitcoin like just needs to be like completely obliterated and their mind just needs to melt. And if this is just one of those events, if you really push people to explain what bitcoin is and what they want to use it for and ideals behind it and philosophy, I think what people will find is many people are out on little islands of thought that are sort of independent. Like we all, we are all on the main channel but we sort of diverge slightly on subtle things here and there. And a lot of us have unique perspectives on what bitcoin is and what makes bitcoin endangered to, you know, being destroyed or what is a boogeyman of bitcoin or stuff like this, my opinion is pretty radical, I would say. I'm of the opinion where bitcoin can survive ebbs and flows of terrible situations of censorship, censorship, centralization and actually come on the out of it and on the other side of it still as a usable system that can course correct and become more of a freedom money and freedom data ledger. So I, I think it's sort of this really fascinating technology that can actually be co opted and be corrupted and recover because of the proof of work essentially and because of the people incentivized to be good stewards of the, of the network. So I'm even of the opinion where if something really bizarre happens and There only becomes one mining pool. That bitcoin could survive that pretty easily. Even though that would be like a doomsday situation for a lot of people if mining was completely central. I actually, because I truly believe in the game theory this strongly, I think that it would even get to the point where that miner would be incentivized to be a good steward. Because the ultimate thing that people can do is vote with their feet and vote with their nodes via this crazy idea of a uasf, which I don't think is a good idea, but it is a nuclear option for absolutely terrible situations. And. And I think ultimately the pleb move that is measurable, not just running a node, which in my opinion is a unknown variable of impact, the measurable impact that is deterministic however small or however big is voting with your feet, you sell your coins. I would love if we could talk about what is bitcoin? Because I think that's like a dumb question that needs to be revisited every few years. Because I think we're getting to that point now where people are starting their feathers ruffled. And I think it really comes from a place where you got to bitcoin without fully understanding what bitcoin was. And now that something is happening that sort of disenchants you from like your idea of what bitcoin was. You're like, oh, bitcoin's broken. Or we need to like fix bitcoin. It's like, well, if you thought bitcoin was this in the first place, then you wouldn't actually be upset right now. So I guess we need to like, talk about, like, what is bitcoin?

[B]

Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. The value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. And if you're listening to this right now, remember you are still early. If you're not already, go ahead and subscribe to this show wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. If you want to follow me in the show on nostr and X, just head to the Show Notes to grab the links. If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast and want to support it by becoming a paid subscriber, you can download the Fountain app, search for the bitcoin podcast and subscribe. By paying with bitcoin via lightning or fiat via card. You'll get access to ad free episodes and early releases of select content. Plus you'll help support this show. Head to the show Notes for product discount links. Go to walkeramerica.substack.com to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk. We're just calling this one Michael Tidwell Bitcoin Knobs. Is it pronounced Tidwell or Titwell?

[A]

Well, depends. It's. It's kind of. Yeah, it's user choice. It's configurable. It's a knob that.

[B]

Maximum configurability on that, would you say?

[A]

I would say. I've heard everything from Tittywell. Titwell. Tidewell is a good one. I've heard that one.

[B]

Tidewell. Okay, I'm going to go with Titwell because this is Titcoin podcast, so you will from now on be Titwell on this show. I don't make the rules. Uh, we are live. Zap stream is working. This is wonderful. All right, now I'm just gonna go.

[A]

Nostr stuff works, man. I get so. I say, I get so pumped when Nostr stuff works.

[B]

And like, when it works well, yeah, like, it. It. It's amazing. Um, and. And one of the things it feels like to me, it's like it. It always reminds me, and I've said this before, just, but it's like reminds me of sending bitcoin transactions on chain, like the first few times. And let's be honest, even like the. The last few times, basically every time you get that little. Those butterflies in your stomach, you're like, oh, is it going to work? And then it does work, like every time. And then.

[A]

But.

[B]

And then you verify it with your Bitcoin knobs node, of course, just to make sure that you know it's real. And then you. Then you know it's real. Okay, we're going to. We're going to fucking do this live. I will. And by that, I mean we already are live. You know what I did also, I made. Initially, I was like, shit, I'm going to be late for this. Like, you know, it was like a few minutes after 2. How did I know you were going to be an hour late? But it's okay. But I made a nice little song that I was like, oh, this will be great. I'll tell Tidwell the reason that I'm late, which is true, is because I was making a custom AI song for him. So we'll just play it real quick. Driving you to drink it.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Why do you fix it when it's perfectly broken? Michael Tidwell, your heart's in that token. Why the endless debates, the late night. Okay, we can stop now. AI didn't do the best job of writing a song. I was like, make it a song about how this guy, Michael Tidwell hates bitcoin. I asked Grok to do it. It did. Okay. I just. It, like, it lacks a little bit of soul, you know, like, it's just kind of generic, so. I'm sorry you had to hear that, but that was why I was initially going to be late. Just so you know.

[A]

Hey, I just want to make sure you didn't look bad. That's why I had a, you know, plus one. Your. Your lateness by one hour.

[B]

It was. It was so thoughtful of you. It was so thoughtful.

[A]

I'm here for, you know, I'm here for the people.

[B]

You know, I wasn't going to drink today, Tidwell, but now it's like seeing you. I'm just like, God, I need a drink to get through this thing. It's going to be tough. I was watching, you know, you. I think you're most known for being a podcaster. Is that fair to say? Is that not fair?

[A]

I mean, I don't think anyone even knows I have a podcast, though.

[B]

I think I thought that was kind of your claim to fame. That's. You became a bitcoin influencer through podcasting.

[A]

So Maybe, like, in 2017, that's what I was best known for. In 2016, I started a meetup called Tab Tab. And the Tab meetup grew. I mean, the first meetup we had was, like, March of 2016. And before that, we're sort of doing, like, kind of, like, informal meetups. But we went, like, you know, on meetup.com in early 2016, and first one was, like, free beer and pizza, and I had, like, 25 people show up, and I pretty much was a, you know, poor, poor pleb that just really wanted to evangelize bitcoin and tell people about this really cool tech. And, you know, I really was, like, worried because this was from, like, the lulz of Mount Gox, you know, having an attack. And then we had price action down in the $160 range. And then you had my current, you know, crash out. I mean, you had a bunch of weird things happening that I was like, man, I kind of feel like I want to do something to, like, make sure people know this is a good technology. And I don't want it to just like, be stagnant. I want to see if I can do something a little bit to, you know, let people know about this and know this is like a great time to, you know, get in. This is actually like a incredible opportunity because I was like imagining like bitcoin not being like a hundred grand or a million dollars in 2016 was like, this is great. We can, we can, you know, scoundrel together some nickels from the. And quarters from the couch cushions. Because I had like no money back then. But yeah, started the meetup. It grew. Got a lot of people, like, enthusiastic that wanted to help me, like, do it. We. We eventually had the meetup grow to be kind of crazy. Like, we're talking like 700 plus people RSVP for like a monthly meetup. And I was running like weekend workshops that were teaching people how to make bitcoin transaction scripts. I was pretty much doing like full time education, like, with my full time job. Like, and we would get to the point where we would fly speakers in, we had sponsors, all this kind of stuff. And we're like, well, why don't we just do like a conference? So we started the conference in 2018. And so in Atlanta, it kind of got weird because, like, at the time when I was like dating or whatever, we'd be like in a grocery store, out in public. And so I'd be like, hey, Michael too. And then the girl would be like, tudor? Are you like, famous? I'd be like, no, you know, like, you know, this is what it is.

[B]

I'm a bitcoin podcaster.

[A]

It's fine. Yeah, yeah, it's like. Well, I do have a bitcoin podcast. We ran during this time. We started a podcast. My friend and I, also named Mike, started a podcast called Block Time, which we still run now in like sort of a light hearted way. I. Or I still continue it in a lighthearted way. I just had an episode launch with Rob Hamilton, so.

[B]

Block time to stay hydrated, friends.

[A]

Exactly. So the podcast.

[B]

Sorry, Continue. Continue. Yeah, Miller Light sponsors this show, just so you know.

[A]

Dude, that. That's sick. That's awesome.

[B]

No, I wish they did. That'd be cool, though. If you see this Miller Light people, I'll take a pallet of beer in exchange for a. A sponsorship slot. Just so you know.

[A]

So one thing I realized about podcasting and this was during the block war kind of. I mean, now it's being called the block size wars or whatever. I mean, at the time it was just called Bitcoin but during the, during all that, we had special access to employees at BitPay, right. Because we're in Atlanta and we got to get some interesting insights on jihyunwu and what's going on and all this stuff. And what I realized at the time is. And Also I think BitPay got a little upset that we sort of aired some of the stuff about their customers and stuff like this, and they weren't really happy about that. And it pretty much came down to do I want to try to be like this bitcoin journalist where, like, it's not really clear if I can make any sort of like this is. This might actually like wreck my opportunities to get into like the bitcoin space as like a career. Do I want like to do this like journalist block, you know, or block time podcast thing or do I want to actually like have like a real job that can make like, I can like live off of. So. So it was like, really weird because we were like trending number one on Reddit and you know, trying to do like a good podcast, break news and all this. But what I learned is unless you're willing to go all in on like journalism, half assing journalism is, is like, it's just gonna make you sad because you're going to end up censoring yourself unless you're willing to go full in on it. So. And you're not actually going to be able to cover stuff and say what you really want to say. So I decided now when I'm doing block time, it's obviously light hearted and it's not like I'm not trying to like break news or anything. It's just like opinion pieces or whatever. But it's. I learned that podcasting and doing it correctly is incredibly hard. So started doing the content.

[B]

Thank you for recognizing that.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Big fan, right? So. So what I realize is, okay, I really like this education stuff, so I want to do this on the side. And that's when, you know, tab started tab conference. Because, you know, the meetup was just getting ridiculously large. And also we were like, we need like, maybe this is like an opportunity for us to have like invite international people and have like a really big gathering. And we've been doing the conference since 2018 and we're essentially the conference's goal is. I've been really upset historically with conference quality and the mission and goals of conference and like what you actually achieve. Because the last thing I want to do is go to a bitcoin conference. And have someone go up on stage, tell me that the price is going to go up or that bitcoin is a good idea or that we. Or some sort of emotional sort of like thing to like get me motivated. Because it's more like, okay, we. I think bitcoin's a good idea. I actually think it's better to be a little skeptical of it and like to, to grind it to be, you know, even sharper. I don't want someone to, you know, I don't think we should have another conference. I think we're missing a conference like Scaling Bitcoin where we could actually talk about tech and try to push bitcoin in a meaningful way. And that's essentially where Tab comes from and that's where we are now and really focused on bitcoin. Now originally we were trying to bring people back into the fold. So we're originally trying to be like, hey, bitcoin cash people. Come back and learn. Understand Bitcoin is like, you're on the wrong side of this fork. And in 2019, we sort of abandoned that. We tried that for one year and then 2019 we pretty much started drifting to completely like a bitcoin thing. I think we had like one Monero talk in 2019 and then pretty much after that it's like pretty much just been all bitcoin just because bitcoin, there's so much going on that you can't even cover all the cool things going on with it now and all the adjacent stuff like Noster and Web of Trust ideas and all this kind of stuff. So that's where we're at now. Trying to run the best high quality conference possible with bitcoin and bitcoin adjacent ideas and really just focused on the tech and not accepting the excuse that you are not technical enough to attend a technical conference. Because everyone needs minimal competence to be self sovereign. And we really, I truly believe that. So that is me in five minutes or however long I took.

[B]

It would have been less if I hadn't interrupted you so rudely. So I apologize for that. No, and I do want to point out like TabConf, which Carl and I have wanted to go back to it where you guys were, invited us to come and emcee it. Was that 2022, I think. Does that feel right? Fall of 2022, I think so, yeah.

[A]

Like, I think 2022, 2023. I think I revited you last year maybe, or I can't remember. But yeah, y' all are, y' all are absolutely awesome. That was great.

[B]

We, we, we had such an awesome time there. I mean, but it is a great conference to go to for non technical people as well. And the best part about that is like, if you want to feel like a retard, like you go and you try to participate in one of those hyper technical discussions because it will put you right back in your place and you remember like, oh shit, these guys are like, they really know what they're talking about. Like this was before I even had a podcast too. So like, I'm sure I'd feel even more. But it's nice, it's nice to be reminded. And it's a safe space for people who are non technical as well, which is nice. And there's karaoke usually, which is like, boom. I don't sing, but the wife does. So you know.

[A]

Yeah, I think Lucas is coming again this year. He usually. So one thing that's cool is tab comp is like I just buy the venue space and then I give it away to people to run their own events. So BitDevs usually gets event the space is open. So you know, it's like your imagination is your only like limitation within reason. And usually people spin up karaoke, chess tournaments, poker, whatever. Like it's, you know, a little mini satellite within the venue. Like happens pretty organically. And I don't. I like the idea that things are organized on GitHub. Everything's transparent. You can't buy your way on stage. I think like, you know, I'm just trying to think like, what would it look like for me to attend the best conference? Like, and that's sort of where I'm coming from. So.

[B]

I love that you guys did that. I remember one thing that stuck out to me was like you guys did like a review of everything, like where all the money went at the end of the conference, like on stage, like in front of everyone. Right. I'm remembering that correctly, right?

[A]

Yeah, we, we call it a transparency report. So we don't give away like all the financials and we may give more or less depending on what's going on. But that year we did like a full like financial, like here's, here's all of our financials. I think things might get weird in the future if we end up having paid staff. We currently don't. So it's like not a big deal. But if we, we might just have like a general, like this is how much we spent for like help kind of bucket in the future if we ever have paid staff, which I'm Getting to the point now where I have kids, right. I have multiple kids, I have this full time job is killing me. Like I'm working like like crazy and like having full time help I think in the future is going to be like probably a real thing I want to need to consider. So. Yeah. But I don't know. We'll see.

[B]

It's honestly awesome you made it this far. Like without that. That's like, that's a pretty. Because it, it's not like a little like for anyone that hasn't made. It's not like a little like Podunk conference. Like it's like it's a full frickin conference and it's also just incredibly high signal. Like they're like the conversations happening there like are really important and it is a lot of like you know, highly technical people like battling it out and people like me sitting on the sideline holding a microphone and you know, getting ready to hand it to the next person. But like it's cool.

[A]

Yeah. So something that you missed that's really cool that we've been doing that we did last year. So if you don't mind, I'll show some, some cool stuff that we're.

[B]

Go for it man.

[A]

So. So every year is an experiment and we were like, hey, you want to experiment with something? Take it to tab comp before you take it somewhere else. You know that you know, whatever is like more I guess is professional or something. Like this is more like a like experiment here. Like have fun with us. Let's, let's do stuff. So we did a rotating panel where someone sits a premise for like 15 minutes and then we have people from the audience queue up to then be on the panel, make their point, discuss, debate, whatever, ask questions and then rotate off. And we probably had like 20 people rotate in and off of this panel within like an a 90 minute period. It was really fun. So it's like if you have a really like important thing to say and the panel's not talking about it, you get in line, we kick someone off the panel and then you go up, make your point, next person rotates, etc. And this is, this is, this has been really, really a good idea. So that's one thing. And obviously I'm moderating. So if you are like going up there and you're not really making a good point or whatever, I like kind of be like, all right, it's time for you to get off now. But the other thing is the rapid explainer game show and this is another way where it's like, we don't want to just have talks and panels that are going to, like, snooze people to sleep. The idea is to involve more people when. When possible. And the. The game show explainer is someone goes up and explains a very complicated subject almost comedically fast within five or six minutes. And they have three panelists that are trying to just consume as much as possible. And then we have judges that then make it a game show and then start quizzing you, like contestant A, what is a silent payment? You know, kind of like stuff like that. And the funny part is. Is Andrew Polstra, if you don't know who he is, one of the most technical competent bitcoiners in the space, was up on stage and got asked, like, a zero knowledge proof question or something. I forget. And totally bombed. And it was funny because it's like, this guy, he didn't know it. We all can take a breath and be like, okay, if he didn't freaking understand it quick. We now know maybe people in bitcoin are just terrible at explaining things. So this game show was to prove, like, you think you can explain, you know, like, you think you can dance? Is to show you, like, we're terrible at explaining things. And if the most competent people in the space can't understand your elevator pitch in five, six minutes, then maybe you need to think about how to explain this in a better way. And the funny part is the judges have to be also as competent as the speaker that goes through it. But that was so much fun because you get to rotate three new people and a speaker and judges on every session, and you get to do four of those per hour. And that was. That was a lot of fun because it's almost like you can get lunch and there just watch the shit show unfold in front of you of, like, people stumbling around these questions, and everyone's laughing. And. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. And then finally. Cause now I'm going long. Another really cool thing that we're focusing on is freedom comms. So freedom communication. You're making me want to get a drink now. I might get a beer.

[B]

I want to get one. Yeah, Yeah. I saw your face, and I was like, I need a beer.

[A]

So. So the freedom communication part, which bitcoin veterans are really into as well, and I've learned about recently because. Oh, my gosh, I'm blanking. Anyways, I'm blanking on the bitcoiner's name, but introduced me to Meshtastic. And Meshtastic is An open protocol where you can not. Gary. Um, but Gary's. He's actually coming to tab comp. And he, you know, might be involved a little bit with this, but we. I'm killing myself not remembering this person's name. I want to remember it right after this podcast. But anyways, we. We decided to spend like, I think like about 20 or 15 or 20 grand on meshtastic hardware. We bought soldering kits, we bought a bunch of wires, bunch of, bunch of plastic cases. And you know, and the idea is we had a whole area where like, I think we ended up making like over a hundred devices or like 200 devices. And like everyone had like a little mesh tastic antenna and they're like book bag. And like people were like not even needing like WI Fi or the Internet to like talk to each other at the conference. Like, that was really fun. And then it's like, okay, that was the first year. Okay, how do we take that experiment further this year? It's like, well, maybe now we try to pass bitcoin messages, like partially signed transactions, you know, over Meshtastic. And then what, what does this like do when you have like a really robust network? Well, you have like a really privacy focused like entry point into the Internet before it gets broadcasted through a node, which is really, really cool because if you're able to broadcast your transaction through a meshtastic device in Atlanta, and it goes all the way up to Nashville, Tennessee to Bitcoin park, right? And they broadcast it through their node, it's like linking Internet IP hops and stuff might be easy for ISPs and working together, but tracking that through Meshtastic is a whole new can of worms. And I think that's really, really fun, especially if you also include encryption with that, we're talking some really, really cool stuff right now. So these are like projects that we want to keep continuing and experimenting with throughout the years. And so that's why I say like Bitcoin and Bitcoin adjacent. Because some of these things like NOSTR and meshtastic don't necessarily apply to Bitcoin directly, but I think it's really cool as like a tertiary, secondary sort of enhancement to making the money better. So with that being said, I want to grab a beer. I'll be right back.

[B]

Do it. Do it. And while Duval is grabbing a beer, just wanted to say hello to everybody in the NOSTR only live stream. If you are not watching this on NOSTR right now live, that means you are watching it later on a centralized platform. So you could have been watching this live, but this show only live streams on Nostr. So to those who are here, thank you for being here. I'll even forgive QW and probably Derek. I'm not sure for rude comments, but who can say? But yeah, if you haven't checked out Nostr, you definitely should. There are a bunch of different clients you can use. It doesn't matter. You just need to generate a public private key pair and keep that private key pair safe and sound somewhere and then you are off and running, my friend. So watch this show live next time on nostr. Only Nostr does pay me to say this just so you guys know. Even though it's an open protocol, they actually, they pay me. So this is sponsored by nostr. Just so everybody knows. And by sponsored by Nostr, I mean people are sending me zaps right now in bitcoin, which is fantastic. So thank you guys. I appreciate the zaps, each and every one. What kind of beer do we think Tidwell will have when he comes back? Oh, thank you forest, for the 5000 SAT ZAP. That is. Cheers. Much appreciated. I've got to say I've noticed since more clients turned on in app live streaming capabilities, the number of zaps I receive during these live streams has increased quite drastically. So I think people are probably watching maybe from maybe on Zap stream directly right now. Maybe on Primal, maybe on Fountain. I think they like stealthily just released Nostr live streaming there. Amethyst has it. I know probably some other clients. So yeah, wherever you're watching, welcome. And if you're not watching on Noster live, fuck you. I'm just kidding, guys. That's a joke. Welcome back to. What beer did you go with? What you got there? Oh, that's nice. All right, now we're having. Now it's a party.

[A]

So sweet. Sweet Sweetwater is, is a Georgia Atlanta brand. So trying to support local.

[B]

You know, I'm from Wisconsin, so that's why I have to drink Miller Lite and because they're going to sponsor this show someday. But not today, but someday the cool, refreshing taste of a fine Pilsner beer will be filling. Filling my pockets with more cool, refreshing fine pilsner beers. I can. I hope so anyway.

[A]

But you know. You know about this brand, right? You know about this brand, Sweetwater. You've heard of it? Maybe?

[B]

I've heard of it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if I've.

[A]

Had it actually.

[B]

But I do know it.

[A]

Is there a follow up there? Well, it's, it's. It's the most popular, I think external. I think it's the most popular beer that's come from Georgia.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Like, by far, I think that this is like the, the currently the most popular beer from Georgia is Sweetwater 420. So I, I wasn't sure if how, how wide it spread, if it's an international deluxe, like luxury beer in Japan at this point, you know, I'm not.

[B]

Sure, you know, you know what I find funny about like Japan and America and like how the trade works. It's like, like kind of like very basic brands here in the USA or like luxury brands in Japan. That goes with like beers also, like whiskeys. Right? They're like luxury brands over there. They're super expensive. And the same with like Japanese whiskeys and Japanese beers. Like over there, it's like, yeah, like you can, you know, get a bottle of Japanese fine Japanese whiskey, like very cheap, but you bring it over to America and it's like that thing is high end, high class and like there is just a racket going on. This is like some sort of booze cartel happening. And like, who's paying the price? It's like it's us, the little guys. They're screwing us over with their beer cartel and their whiskey cartel. I digress. But yeah, these are things I ponder sometimes. Who's profiting off that massive spread? I guess distributors.

[A]

I don't know, you could also say maybe a little bit with cars, except American cars going elsewhere besides maybe Tesla, but I don't think anyone's really excited about a Ford Focus and anywhere. Well, maybe they are, I don't know. But I think foreign brands. Let's just have the hypothetical that American brands are, you know, same quality. You know, for argument's sake, I think there'd be a little bit of like, oh, you have a Beamer Mercedes or whatever, you know, and I don't know, maybe it's like everything.

[B]

Yeah, well, on the car side, like, what people want, like, especially in Europe, is like classic American muscle. But the problem is that like, most of those cars are basically like, you can't drive them because they're not, they're not eco friendly enough. Like, you literally like, like the engines are too big. They, you know, they use. And it's like, God, that's. I feel bad for Europe sometimes. Like, it's just like, come on, you know, they deserve to taste more freedom.

[A]

You know, that's what they deserve to taste. Freedom, period.

[B]

Amen. It's. Yeah, it's Looking a little dark over there, but I have faith.

[A]

I mean, I mean, what I'm seeing from what I'm seeing from my highly curated Twitter feed. Apparently you're not allowed to post memes in London or the uk, which sounds a little crazy. I don't know how true that is, but that is kind of crazy.

[B]

Legitimately true. And like, you can actually, you can get in trouble for retweeting an offensive that is. Sorry, offensive.

[A]

Quote, quote, retweeting or just retweeting? That's the real question.

[B]

Just retweeting, I'm pretty sure.

[A]

Oh. Because retweeting, you just need to make sure in your profile, RTs don't equal endorsement. You know that you're like, that works, right?

[B]

That counts. It is messed up, though.

[A]

It's like bringing awareness to the problem, you know?

[B]

Well, I wonder how many people that's going to push to understand the importance of, you know, anonymity and pseudonymity online. And like, that. That is a really powerful and good thing. Like, there's this weird thing where I feel like social media kind of like, like the Facebook effect, where basically it ushered in this era of everybody puts basically, you know, it's like name, date of birth, like all my favorite hobbies, the street I grew up on, like putting basically all their most personal information, like, right in their Facebook bio. More back in the day. Like, I don't know if anyone in our generation is like, really even using Facebook in a meaningful way these days. It's like it's all boomers, all boomers getting catfished by AI basically. But like, that was actually kind of just like such a fucked up thing that we did to people. And just to normalize that, to really normalize, like here, you just put all of your info out there and also post your location, like wherever you are all the time. And granted, like, that perhaps has led to a negligible amount of physical harm that ends up being done to people. But like, when something like that is normalized, it does create a vector, like an attack vector for anyone who does want to do any harm. Like you can, especially with boomers. I'm like, you guys are. If I don't know if people come for the boomers, like, we'll know exactly where to find them. It's. And that's a little bit dark and concerning. So I'm glad that things like Noster exist where you don't have to have anything, literally anything at all, tied to your identity. I think that's a beautiful thing. Hello, friends. You May notice that there are no sponsors for this episode and that is because this is a pure value for value episode. So if you find this episode valuable, consider giving value back. You can do that by becoming a paid subscriber on Fountain. You can send me a zap on Nostr, a boost on Fountain, or if you don't feel like doing any of those, one thing you can do that is totally free is is just to share this show with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet so that it reaches more people. If you are listening on a podcasting app like Apple Podcast, you can also give this a five star rating so more people find the show. You can subscribe on YouTube, Rumble or wherever else you're watching. But again, I always recommend that Bitcoiners check out Fountain. You can also go check out the big print audiobook which I narrated. You also of course do not have to do any of those things. Bitcoin does not care. But I sure do appreciate all of your support support. So thank you.

[A]

It's going to get even scarier when you know, Carla calls you and it's her voice, but it's not her, you know. Oh yeah, like that's going to get bad. It's going to be be bad when your child calls you and it's not your child. It's going to be bad when grandma gets a call from me and it's not me. Right. You know, equivalent, like it's. I think it's only going to get worse and that. Not to show my bags. Not to show my bags. But that's why I think web of trust and maybe something with HSMs are part of the solution. And when I say web of trust, I brought this up just really briefly earlier. Like for instance, if we do a key signing or we validate each other, whatever, our nostril, pub keys, whatever, and you're getting comms from this Nostra pubkey that, you know, seems legit. But you have, you know, Walker's, you know, first level sort of, you know, connection say, hey, by the way, that's not Walker Walker anymore. Like I can have some sort of idea. Like, okay, well Walker's already said like these five or six people like are his close friends or whatever. Like these people are validating, you know, whatever. Or you have like backup accounts that validate that, you know, like the idea is like you meet people in person, you verify who you're talking to. You build that out slowly over time. Social media posts, videos, pictures, whatever, all can piggyback off this rotating pub keys On Noster can piggyback off this partially signed bitcoin transaction conditions with Frost and other things can piggyback off this as some of the conditional of long tail time lock conditions. I mean, I think it's part of the solution because I'd tell you it's becoming commodity. It's get. It's bec. It's getting in the hands. Like that song that you played earlier, like 20 years ago, like making that from AI would have been like, ah, whatever. Like that's. That was a real person, right? Like now it's like, okay, yeah, that was probably just like some like you paid like three bucks for like some tool to like generate it or like even like less. Right.

[B]

Anyways, that probably cost me a couple of cents. I mean, I don't know, I've got like an unlimited membership plan just so I can generate plenty of, you know, 90s angst rock songs.

[A]

Right. But I think it's becoming more commodity. I don't think, you know, I think any sort of idea of like watermarks or whatever aren't going to be necessarily super effective, but I think, you know, you're going to. You're just making a market for private mempools of AI, you know, equivalent, you know, if. If everything requires a watermark. And I think it would be nice to have a more freedom centric sort of approach to verifying what the hell you're looking at. Makes sense and is from essentially, okay, is it like two strings down? Is it three levels down? Like, is it four levels away from me? Like, in terms of like, do I have anyone? Like everyone's like nine, you know, connections away from like Kevin Bacon, but like, am I. Do I have any sort of idea of, you know, how trustworthy this is in terms of some like, you know, ELO score? Um, so I think it's important we're going to be doing this. It doesn't stand for shit as far as I understand. It's just the measurement of chess. Like, you know, when you're playing chess and you have like a rating.

[B]

Oh, you got to say this for, for non, like expert autist chess players. Like, I'm just like a normal chess player. So, you know, excuse me while I'm really outing myself as a big dumb idiot, aren't I? Jeez.

[A]

Well, I mean, I don't know what ELO stands for. Maybe it does stand for something, but I don't think it stands for anything but. Okay, but what I'm trying to say is like, I don't want to Use the word credit score or credit rating because I think that gets into like a weird space and I just want something where it's. It's just like, can I understand, you know, what I'm looking at with some sort of guarantees as things become more commodity in terms of, you know, fake videos, pictures, transactions, phone calls, etc. And I really like the idea of, you know, piggybacking off nostr ideas like with pub keys. I like the idea of building that out and making that useful for other things outside of nostr as well. So these are all things I want to experiment with with tab comp. So that's me pushing my bags again, where it's like, I'm looking for people hungry that want to like start this project with me that's recurring, that has an annual sort of like in person meeting essentially. And tabcom can help find funding. TABCOM can help find people interested and can help be this thing to help motivated people stay engaged on various projects that are important for the conference and bitcoin and people who care about this stuff. Anyways, all right, I'm done pumping my bags. I'm ready to talk about random news or whatever. So.

[B]

No, I mean, honestly, I love it and people should check out. I wish we could go this year. We're not going to be in the country at that time, but we will be there in spirit pumping your bags for you. But, yeah, so there's. I don't know. What do you want to talk about? I purposely prepared very little for this. I was like, I'm not preparing for Tidwell. I'm just going to go in there and raw dog it. So I guess maybe a good place to start is, Is it true that you hate bitcoin and want it to die?

[A]

Yes, but, but, yes, but, but let me explain.

[B]

Came at you hot there?

[A]

Yeah. So here's the thing, which we can take it there if you want, but I would love if we could talk about what is bitcoin? Because I think that's like a dumb question that needs to be revisited every few years. Because I think we're getting to that point now where people are sorting their feathers ruffled. And I think it really comes from a place where you got into bitcoin without fully understanding what bitcoin was. And now that something is happening that sort of disenchants you from your idea of what bitcoin was. You're like, oh, bitcoin's broken, or we need to fix bitcoin. It's like, well, if you thought Bitcoin was this in the first place and you wouldn't actually be upset right now. So I guess we need to talk about what is bitcoin and maybe you can start.

[B]

So Tidwell, tell me what is bitcoin?

[A]

Perfect. You're perfect. You just throw it right back at me. So I am, I'm sort of of the principles of bitcoin uncensored originally where. Where a lot of my original sort of ideas of what bitcoin really is comes from that this is where. And then I will go a little bit more nuance where I pretty much am maybe on. On my own, you know, out to the edge of. Of thinking. I do want to caveat this with saying that if you really push people to explain what bitcoin is and what they want to use it for and ideals behind it and philosophy, I think what people will find is many people are out on little islands of thought that are sort of independent. Like we all, we are all on the main channel, but we sort of diverge slightly on subtle things here and there. And a lot of us have unique perspectives on what bitcoin is and what makes bitcoin endangered to being destroyed or what is a boogeyman of bitcoin or stuff like this. My opinion is pretty radical. I would say. I'm of the opinion where bitcoin can survive ebbs and flows of terrible situations of censorship centralization and actually come out of it and on the other side of it still as a usable system that can course correct and become more of a freedom money and freedom data ledger. So I think it's sort of this really fascinating technology that can actually be co opted and be corrupted and recover because of the proof of work essentially and because of the people incentivized to be good stewards of the network. So I'm even of the opinion where if something really bizarre happens and there only becomes one mining pool that bitcoin could survive that pretty easily. Even though that would be like a doomsday situation for a lot of people if mining was completely centralized. I actually, because I truly believe in the game theory this strongly, I think that it would even get to the point where that miner would be incentivized to be a good steward. Because the ultimate thing that people can do is vote with their feet and vote with their nodes via this crazy idea of a usf, which I don't think is a good idea, but it is a nuclear option for absolutely terrible situations. And I think ultimately the pleb move that is measurable, not just Running a node which in my opinion is a unknown variable of impact, the measurable impact that is deterministic however small or however big is voting with your feet, you sell your coins. So because of these sort of primitive ideas that I truly believe in and I think are very strong and keep everyone accountable, I think bitcoin is a very robust system and actually why I'm involved in it and actually spent my first 8 months of Bitcoin being a antagonist and actually thinking bitcoin was a terrible idea. Trying to prove that it was a bad idea, unfortunately cost me a fortune during that time trying to prove it was a bad idea. But in the process of doing so, I was able to address all my concerns with it. So this is. So I've. I feel like I've already went down all the paths of dystopian sort of scenarios and I've actually been okay with all of them, whether people think that's fortunate or unfortunate. I think this is, you know, my own thing. Now. This is also where if we want to get into like some nuance, Craig Maxwell and I actually disagree on a few things. And the most interesting thing, and I point to Greg Maxwell because I consider him to be one of the most competent bitcoin developers and that I respect. So I think it's important to be like, where do I actually diverge with? We'll say typical core thinking or typical bitcoin technical thinking, right? At least to some facet of it. And it gets to the point where, okay, if bitcoin Cash hypothetically got more proof of work than bitcoin, my opinion is that actually becomes bitcoin. And the reason for that is because if I go into a coma for 20 years and I wake up, I can very easily look at one metric to know what's going on, which is which chain has the most proof of work, cumulative proof of work. And if I see that the current chain with the most proof of work going on, the most miners that support it, the most energy being pumped into it is this thing, then that is, you know, people are calling it Bitcoin, even if it completely disagrees with prior consensus rules or relay rules or whatever the hell, or even, maybe even like some, some various principles of Bitcoin that I don't agree with, that is still whatever the community size is, Bitcoin. And that's how we sort of have this super dry source of truth for what bitcoin is. Now, whether or not bitcoin is interesting, I think is to be determined, but I think it's very interesting to be able to understand that this is the chain with the most proof of work that people are calling Bitcoin. So therefore it's very easy for me to understand what Bitcoin is without being Sybil detect with various implementations and amounts of nodes and stuff like this. So that is sort of my, my. And by the way, that's where Greg and I split. Greg is actually of the opinion it's not what, you know, most proof of work says, it's what, you know, the actual notes, you know, say. But anyways, that's. This is my opinion, what Bitcoin is and how I feel about it. Your turn.

[B]

I do want to ask for one clarification then. Is it fair to say that the way that you would determine Bitcoin then is on a. Like, you're looking at the economic rationale. You're looking to say, like, this is what has. Because ultimately that's what it comes down to when it comes to most miners. That's most power going into it, most energy going into it. That is all. Like, those are all economic forces at the end of the day, when you boil them down. Right?

[A]

Yeah. And funny enough, you can almost say that abstractly given efficient markets, that all you have to do is see which coin has the most market cap. And if you really want to be a layman about it. So which coin has the most market cap? You know, granted that you're incentivizing proof of work to be pumped into it. You know, granted those two things, you know, it's not like bizarre where miners are purposely mining at a loss or something. Like, granted, miners are doing what's in their best interest. Like the coin with the most money has the most people that voted with their feet, has the most people that are supporting it, has the most businesses behind it, has the most plebs buying it, like, whatever, like cumulative. Maybe one of those things is wrong. But like in. In culmination, you can almost just look at the market cap to understand this thing, which then really pisses people off because they're like, that's not what Bitcoin is. Because it's so much more complicated that. But I like to say, like, well, is it. You know, because if you can abstract these things out to what they actually result in, then, and that result is very easy and easy to understand, then maybe we're wasting our time talking about what Bitcoin is and let's just start building shit. So boom.

[B]

Boom. I like that. Boom goes the dynamite. I think that it's a Very fair point, because it's easy to get distracted. And what I've realized with these recent, rather contentious debates that I've seen. And full disclosure, I am not a highly technical person. I have studied bitcoin quite a lot. I do have some basic technical chops, but nothing on your level or certainly not on the level of anyone who is actually developing on bitcoin, very obviously.

[A]

So.

[B]

But one of the things that seems to be really clear to me is that people don't understand what would actually happen in a fork scenario and how that what really matters is who sells their coins and who doesn't. That is actually what matters, that people don't seem to understand the concept of economic nodes and what that means. And I get that that's confusing for people, but it does all come down ultimately to economic energy and where that is being pushed. And there is a reason that bitcoin cash is worth. I don't know, what is it worth now? Like a couple hundred bucks? Like, something like that? I haven't looked in a while. It's worth next to nothing. It's worth orders of magnitude less than bitcoin, real bitcoin, because people sold. When it forked, they sold their bitcoin cash and they bought more bitcoin with it. And that's what happened. And I feel that there's a bit of a disconnect there. And for me to answer the question, just so I don't seem that I'm skirting it, I think bitcoin is money and a network and a ledger. And you can define. Like, ledger can be defined how you want. If you want to define a letter as like, a ledger, is a distributed ledger. It's a distributed database. Whatever you want to say, but that's what it is to me. It's a multifaceted thing. I. I think that though ultimately you have a good characterization of it, because what you're saying is, yeah, you can call it whatever names you want, but ultimately what bitcoin is, is whatever has the most economic energy behind it. You don't even have to worry about giving it a name, like naming the beast. It's just like it is what it is, I guess it's like, what is a woman? Like someone who identifies as a woman. So it's like, what is bitcoin? It's like, oh, whatever chain identifies as bitcoin with the most and that also has the most economic energy.

[A]

Fair. That. That part's important. Yeah, it's like, what is bitcoin? Well, I would. I would like to caveat that, yeah, that Bitcoin's name may change. So I'm, I am talking about. I mean, this, this does get into the gray space where it's going to seem like I'm backpedaling. But this is with the assumption that things, things don't get weird where you have a chain that's still using SHA2v6 and then a new chain that's using, like, SHA512 or, you know, SHA3 or something. This is, this is a situation I want to. I want to sort of box this in where you are looking at the chain with the most SHA2V6 proof of work. So obviously that comes with. I mean, this is like a completely new sort of conversation if you want to take it outside that. But I'm boxing myself in to that. Right, yeah, if that makes sense.

[B]

No, no, it, it absolutely does.

[A]

I mean, don't talk yourself to that. Then it gets. We start getting like, you know, it starts getting. It becomes a more complicated answer. I'll just put it that way.

[B]

Well, you know, can I, can I ask you, like, in what scenario? Like, let's step, step outside that box for a site, then we can return to the box. But in what scenario do. Does that outside the box situation present itself? Like, how do we get there?

[A]

So, going back to the coma idea, I wake up 20 years in a coma. There's this project that's still using the same ledger as my old. Because right before I went to the coma, I was running version 30 of Bitcoin, which was malware that actually took down half the Internet. And actually something fell on my head from the cataclysm. And that's actually why I was in the coma in the first place. And I wake up, we're on version, like, I don't know, not much progress has been made. Like, half the world's population has died at this point. So we're probably at version like 32 in 20 years. Like, you know, so 20 years, this is going to be 2046. We're in version 32 of Bitcoin and there's a SHA2V6, you know, chain with the most work. However, there is now something that everyone is telling me is bitcoin that's using SHA3. And now I have a weird decision to make because it's okay, like, well, how do I know how much energy is being put into this versus this? Because they're different hashing algorithms. How do I know what ASICS advancements, you know, how do I know? Like, how Much energy is being put into this versus that. When everyone's using the same hashing algorithm, you sort of level set where you sort of have this abstraction of knowing how ener, you know, knowing this general idea of energy. Roughly speaking, I mean, obviously there's caveats to all this stuff, but you know, granted on energy price and, and cost and stuff like this, but you sort of have general ideas. If it's a different hashing algorithm, you sort of almost can't easily compare these things. At least not unless you're really technical, which at, at the point of this sort of technicality, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know anything. I would have to like rely on experts or you know, at that point, you know, 40 years from, or 20 years from now, maybe Chat GPT can just tell me he'll actually give me good answers. But we're, we're, we're talking about a situation where like some crazy stuff happens and there's like a new mining algorithm and you don't really, you weren't there to like understand the situation when it happened kind of thing. So.

[B]

Okay, fair enough.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So getting back inside of our box, I don't know how much you want to get into the debate du jour. You let me know because I can take this in a bunch of other directions too. So like you let me know what you're feeling. Man.

[A]

Dude, let's, let's go, let's go hard. Let's do it.

[B]

All right. Okay. So I feel like there's just a lot of people acting really all over the place, probably myself included. I'm not going to exclude myself from the retardation. I'm right there with everyone else. But it feels like a lot of talking, people talking past each other, a lot of people making strawman arguments. And I'm not talking about one side or another specifically here. I'm just talking about generally. Right. And man, it also just seems like a lot of people misrepresenting what is under their control and what is not. And I'm just kind of curious where you're sitting right now on all of this because I published an episode with Jameson Lopp today and boy, the comments on YouTube are fascinating. Really, really fascinating. And I'm realizing I'm like, even at my non technical level, I'm like, you said something that's just really obviously not true or not the case or just the biggest straw man I've ever seen that actually has no meaningful impact. And so I don't know, is this actually a big deal? Does this actually lead? Like, we're not talking. First of all, we're not talking about a consensus change right now, like a protocol change. We should probably clear that up right off the bat that that's where we're at. But what is the state of things right now? Is this. You've been around a lot longer than I have. Is this even, like a bad debate right now? Or is this just kind of like bitcoiners being bored with sideways price action and needing something to bitch to each other about?

[A]

I want to send you a tweet I made that sort of sums up the situation. I just send this to you. Is that cool?

[B]

Yeah, man. You can share too, if you want.

[A]

I'm just going to send this. I'm just going to send this to you right here on Twitter. But this is sort of my take and I can read it unless you want to put it up there. But if.

[B]

Oh, that's right up there too.

[A]

I actually, actually sent you the wrong tweet. Well, this one. This one actually maybe does the trick too. But that's not the. It's not the tweet I wanted to send you, actually.

[B]

This. This is awkward. Get it together, man.

[A]

I know, I know, I know. Here we go. I was. I was quote tweeting Rindell when. When I. When I made this.

[B]

There's so much quote tweeting going on these days in the bitcoin space.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

It's just like.

[A]

There we go. It was a quote.

[B]

It's a quote tweet of palooza Here, I'll pull it up on the old share screen here.

[A]

So Rindell says, sounds like you need to reject blocks with arbitrary data. I quote tweet saying, until this. This is the biggest nothing burger in the history of nothing burgers. I believe the logical next step are get knots nodes to a super majority and UASF reject blocks. Not sure if that part. Not if that's part of their official public roadmap. So in other words, this is going to have absolutely no impact until this happens. Now, a lot of people are going to disagree with me, especially people on the not side of things. But this is also a superpower. Right? But I want to caveat it. An economic node versus a non economic node. The difference is almost night and day. So if you have a lot of economic nodes, uasf, you have major disruption and the people are having their voices heard through these economic nodes. You. You start having weird things happen with. With uasf. Okay. By the way, if anyone says that UASF has ever happened. They're wrong. This is where Giacomo and I split ways, right? This is where me and Aaron von. Von Weirdom split ways. Although I do love his book the Genesis block. Make sure to check it out. It is the best piece of literature in the space. But this is where Aaron and Giacomo and those types and me, we split. We have never done a uasf. We have always threatened a uasf. We have actually never pulled the trigger on it. Now we have run node implementations that would have UASF under certain conditions, sure, but it never triggered. It's not uasf. UASF is going to be the PLEBS nuclear bomb. And I don't know what that looks like. I think that is like the last experiment in Bitcoin that we've never done. So we've done forks. When bitcoin cash happened, that was like the big, like, okay, what happens? Do people sell their side? Does game theory work? What happens? This is the last thing that I can think of that we haven't done yet. That is like the experiment of bitcoin. We've tested all the game theory of bitcoin, more or less. More or less. I mean, there are some things you can arguably say that we haven't tested out yet, but the UASF stuff, we haven't tested. So, yes, I think bitcoin will be fine. At the end of the day, it doesn't actually matter. Don't sell your coins, just see what happens. Wait for the dust to settle, whatever. Don't try to be a hero and make an extra 100% if it means you're going to actually lose 100%. Just whatever. No need to be a gambler. But eventually you can make that decision and it's less controversial in your opinion, or whatever, like, let someone else take the beach, you know, but. But like this, we. We haven't seen what a UASF looks like. Now, what would happen to a UASF that is also minority economic? Like, I think they just essentially fork themselves off the network. But we just. We've never done this before, right? Now, if you do eventually start rejecting blocks in uasf, like, it's going to depend. Like, what does Coinbase do? What does Kraken do? What does financial institutions do? What do whales do? What happens, right? Who supports what? And this is how bitcoin works, so we'll see. Now, luckily, historically, whenever there has been some sort of contention, there hasn't been a uasf. There's been people who have forked themselves off with a new port, with a new, you know, repo with a new. You know, like this is like, like, you know, new. A complete. Like the networks weren't trying to like fuck each other, you know, the networks were disparate. Right. The only thing that you really looked at was like, okay, bitcoin cash versus bitcoin price, you know, you got to see. But there were like different networks, different nodes, et cetera. Like obviously coming from the same sort of parent source of truth. So you got a split of the UTXOs, but the split was more or less clean. More or less like compared to a UASF would be.

[B]

So that's like a little confusing, I think, for a lot of people, because isn't the general assumption or the general conclusion that like, yes, we did have a user activated soft fork?

[A]

Oh, yeah, it's totally like people like Giacomo and Aaron von Weirdom will say that. Yeah. So this is why it's so confusing, because we definitely did not. We threatened a uasf, but we actually never went through with it. We held Barry Silbert and we held the New York agreement accountable for their misdeeds and corruption and malice, so we didn't have to do it. And Barry Silbert was like, oh, shit, y' all are crazy. I'm not going to do this. Let's back up a step, you know, so, like, we didn't do the uasf, right? We made the hats. We made the hats for the uasf. That's the main tangible thing that we did for UASF is we wore hats. Right.

[B]

Cool hats.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, that's how bitcoin politics actually works. You have to make a hat. Make sure to check out shop.satoshisettlers.com to buy your hat of your idea for your preference.

[B]

We got to talk about satoshi settlers also at some point in this because I just logged in there and I have questions. But we'll talk about that later. I have questions. Okay, so can we maybe also just like, since we're in the interest of asking some very seemingly basic questions, but ones that apparently need to be asked, can you just explain what is an economic node for people that may be still confused by that concept and why that matters? Because I think there's a huge misunderstanding on this.

[A]

Yeah. And I hope I don't mischaracterize an economic node, because this is actually where. These are things I never really even cared about because I'm more of a proof of work sort of maximalist. But if we needed to get into definitions, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to do a Good job. Now I will tell you what I think they are. It's just pretty much anyone that is doing anything meaningful where they have a service, they have an exchange, they have a wallet, they have like some sort of like maybe like a custodial, anything that's like their node actually makes a difference on user experience and like accepting payments. You can almost. In my opinion this is. Granted someone's going to say like, that's not an economic node or whatever. My sort of layman's opinion is how much financial volume are you processing with that node? Sort of helping you facilitate those receives or payments or whatever, or user experiences for people. So that's how I kind of, you know, define the economic node to myself. So if you're running a node that is just kind of sitting in your house, that is, you know, a node that you know, isn't backed up to like a BTC pay server, where you have like a web shop, you know, where you're selling hats, then it's not an economic node. Right, that's, that's sort of how I'm defining it personally. Yeah, I don't know actually what the definition is.

[B]

Yeah, well, the other characterization that I would put in there because I think part of it is about like actual volume passing through that node, obviously. The other part is just like, honestly like bag size to a certain extent because like, and that's at a, like a less technical level just because it's like again, if there is a fork. So like you're going to sell one chain and buy the other eventually, right? Like you're, you're going to move and, or maybe and you're right, like if that does happen, you should wait like, but like that's another kind of thing that I would put on top. The economic node definition is just like it matters if you have, like, just because you have a lot of coins doesn't mean you control Bitcoin. But it does matter in the, like, you can't control Bitcoin. But in the case of a fork where you decide to keep your economic energy and where you decide to sell it, that does make a difference. That does move the needle in terms of that market cap metric. And that's a thing people miss. I also have this. I kind of wonder when I see things getting contentious, I'm like, are a bunch of OGs just kind of itching for a fork because they wouldn't mind a chance to sell a bunch of forked coins? Again, is this just a big gambit to try and make things contentious? Enough get a fork and then be able to dump a bunch of forked coins and buy more actual bitcoin. I don't know. Maybe I'm too conspiratorial. I don't know.

[A]

So I made a tweet a while back when this first all start got started and I was sort of joking because at that point it was just pretty much Mechanic yelling out to the Void before he got this huge rally behind him. Honestly, like I have to give it to him. He's. He's great at getting people aware of a situation that he is concerned about. Like he is for sure. He is so good at that. Honestly, if this was going to kill bitcoin, you would want people like Mechanic doing stuff like this. This is great. And arguably speaking it's good that we're freaking out over something, in my opinion that's not very harmful. So we're kind of making sure people know that they have this power in case CORE does sort of misbehave and we actually need to fire core. I actually think this is good that people know that they have some sort of idea of what does it look like to hold developers accountable now. I'm glad we're testing it without it need to be done, but I hope this doesn't delegitimize it later on when we actually do need it, if and when. So sorry, the original question, the. Jesus, I'm like losing my mind. The original question.

[B]

Well, you kind of. You addressed the economic node question. This is more about like whether or not this is just OGs playing playing games, you know, to try and get some forked coins, which is just me being conspiratorial. We don't even have to address it necessarily.

[A]

I don't even think I even somewhat answered your question. I was going to somehow turn around to answer this question and I didn't even like that train of thought was going to like come here and I like stopped about right there. So I don't think there is. Yeah, I don't think there's like a. Oh, I remember where I was going to take this now. So what. What I was going to say was, so I don't think it's a conspiracy, but I think Bitcoin naturally. And I don't know if this is the case. This is just a prediction. I have very little amount, I have very few data points on this, but I almost wonder if like every X amount of years there just needs to be a churn where people get radically like dunked into cold water on what Bitcoin is. And like their perception of bitcoin, like just needs to be like completely obliterated and their mind just needs to melt. And if this is just one of those events now, I want to make sure it's understood. I think Luke and I've talked to Luke extensively. I've talked to Chris Guida extensively. I talked to people like Matt Hill extensively. I feel like I understand their point of views. I've never had the chance to talk to mechanic, but Luke Dash Jr. Is very consistent when it's just me and him talking about this, really drilling into the specifics. I have a lot of respect for Luke because of his consistency. Long form Luke, there was a joke. Long form Luke is way better than short than liar or, you know, like the short response Luke like long form Luke is good. And I think I love Bitcoin plus plus. But I think like Bitcoin plus plus did. Did no service to help this conversation at all. And Luke wasn't really given an opportunity to. To actually speak his mind on what he actually believes. I think very few people share. This goes back to. We're all sort of on the main channel, Knots Core included, and we all sort of kind of deviate out at the further out you go. Right. There is no normal. Depending on how far out in that channel you go, we're all going to have different opinions. And Luke's opinion is very interesting and I think is very unique. I think there's a lot of cargo cult thinking where people think that they have the same ideas as Luke and they definitely do not. Luke is actually. Me and him actually have a ton of overlap. He's very consistent and addresses a lot of the things that I bring up to them about inconsistencies that make that seem like they're inconsistent on Twitter. But anywho, I, I have a. You know, so I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think this might just be a natural churn. This is a. This is a theory. Like, you know, we had the, you know, obviously with bitcoin Cash and Roger Ver and you know, losing Mike Kern and Greg, you know, we. We had a previous churn and before that we might had another churn with Gavin Andreessen or. Or something. I don't know, maybe that's still part of the Roger Veer churn. But, you know, maybe it's like every eight years we have to, you know, we have to have our minds melted and it's just like, you know, we talk about the havings having happening every Four years maybe. It's like, you know, there's like a mind melt activity every two halvings or something. Um, so, you know, now with that being said, I do want to say I have a lot of respect for the passion and the philosophy and the ideas behind a lot of people that subscribe to the Knots camp. Right. But I think the problem is they think they're in a camp. Right? I just said they're in a camp. But really the way I see it is unless they're willing to reject a block, we're all on the same team and they actually, you know, we're actually just all bitcoiners, whether they think there's, you know, this core Knots debate or not. Your relay policy doesn't make you a different bitcoiner. Right. Your consensus policy mainly does. So you can have all the philosophy you want that makes you a bitcoiner. Guess what? You're not going to have the same philosophy, philosophy as me. That's okay. We have the same consensus rules. Your relay policy doesn't make you in a different camp than me. Even though, you know, we're sort of dividing it out that way and it's been pretty contentious. So. Yeah, I'm just kind of brain dumping on you.

[B]

But yeah, no, I'm glad you said that because I think that's one of the biggest things that I've tried to. Tried to get. Get across is that it's like you're. It's. It's bitcoiners, you know, arguing with bitcoiners right now. And that's good. That's part of this immune response. Right. As you mentioned, kind of this, like this, this churn like this keeps us, keeps us vigilant and on our toes and making sure that when a, a real existential external threat does emerge that we are able to just attack that thing. Right. But people seem to be forgetting that. It's like we're not talking about a consensus change here. We're not talking about a protocol level change. We're talking about like a mempool policy change. And then I've seen this conversation just seemingly. And I stayed out of it for a while just because I was like, this is, you know, nothing productive is happening here. I'm just gonna stay out of it. And then, you know, just more recently, I like decided just to kind of start poking in there with memes. And that was a mistake. I guess people forgot that I'm a bit of a court jester at heart and that I like to laugh. And if you can't laugh. That's. You know, other people are gonna laugh at you. And then those people would say, well, I guess you just want to exploit children on the blockchain. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. First of all, I've heard this one before. I've heard this exact one before.

[A]

Where have I heard this before?

[B]

Oh, that's right, the fucking government. This is literally like the government's playbook. Like, are you kidding me? Second of all, I've literally heard this one from bitcoiners before, myself included. Before I understood how, like, things worked a little bit better back when inscriptions were popping off like this. This exact same thing was talked about at that point, too. People are going to put God only knows what awful thing in the blockchain. It's like some of that probably already exists out there. Heinous. We all, like, nobody wants that. First of all, nobody wants that. Like, unless you are a sick, twisted fuck, you don't want that. And even the sick twisted fucks probably want to keep that shit offline. Like, because, like, why would you post something. I mean, I don't know, but why would you post something like a public, like, public blockchain that just seems. Just seems dumb. You already talked earlier about, like, IP address tracing and stuff. Like, that shit could probably be traced back to you, buddy. And so, like, it just feels like we've moved goal posts constantly in terms of, like, this is what the biggest threat to bitcoin is. And, like, if Core v30 is released, it's going to be flooded with disgusting images, and you want to keep that on your node because the FBI are going to knock at your door and kick it in and you're going to go to jail and everybody's going to hate you and bitcoin will be dead, and it's all your fault. And that's what it. And it feels like we got to that really fast from just, like, where it started, which was, hey, you know what? Kind of don't appreciate, like, this particular core upgrade. And it feels like Core isn't really listening to the. What its users are saying. That's a legitimate, Like, a legitimate grievance, right? Sure, absolutely. But it went really fast from there to, like, if you run bitcoin core, you are a child predator and want bitcoin to die. And that's just not true, first of all. And second of all, you running knots isn't. It's like, yeah, oh, would you. You know, you put a fence up around your house so to stop people from getting in. It won't stop them all, but it'll stop a lot of them. Like, yeah, but. Except that's not really the point, is it? Because all it takes is one. Well, if you take your argument to like, it's just. It's all logical. Sorry for ranting.

[A]

These analogies are so frustrating because it's like, if anyone in the entire world has anyone hop their fence, your fence is useless. And it's like. It's like, which fence? How does this analogy make sense when every fence is somehow parallel? It's like the. The. The joke I tell people in response to this is like. Is like, imagine you have a solicitor at your door, and then you, like, say, who the is this? You slam the door, and then you turn around and he's having, like, dinner with your wife. It's like, that's how you think. Like, this is what's happening. And I'm like, obviously. Then it becomes a joke about them being a cuck. But, you know, I don't want to call people cucks, even as a joke, because it's like, dude, you realize this is so stupid. Like. Like, like. Like. If you want to come up with an analogy, we can come up with analogy, but at least make one that makes sense where it's just like, you know, like, I like. I like Guy Swan a lot, but he. He was like, one of the people that really liked this fence analogy, and I was just like, it's like, doesn't make any sense.

[B]

Yeah, I also like Guy a lot. He's one of my favorite people. This is the beauty of bitcoin, to your point. You don't have to agree with everyone on everything. Exactly.

[A]

Guy Swan and I will probably forever be friends in bitcoin. I highly disagree with them, but also, who cares? You can disagree with people on this. It doesn't need to get weird. It's getting. Last week between now and, like, few days ago, it's getting, like, weird. And I just sent you a. A tweet to your dms, and I think Justine Harper sort of sums this up pretty easily for everyone. And I think it's like a very. Like, this is pretty much the summary of what's going on. I think Justine nailed it, so I'm sharing that tweet with you. I don't know if you want to pull it up, but that is. That's my take. You're muted, by the way. I don't know if you're talking to.

[B]

Me, but I sure was. Sorry. I could hear my little Guy making some noise downstairs. I'm making a lot of noise downstairs. So, yeah, you know that game. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and now I hear my dog going off, man. It's all going crazy.

[A]

The good part is I can't hear anything. Everything sounds really good.

[B]

So thank goodness for these fantastic mics. Okay. Okay, so. Oops, went to the wrong one. I've been on such a. Such a. Where the heck did it go? I lost it. Now I'm going to find it again. I've been on such a kick of bookmarking and saving and screenshotting so many tweets just to later remind people of the links that they went to.

[A]

Do you ever bookmark within Twitter or do you, like, bookmark in the browser? What do you.

[B]

Oh, no, no, I bookmark. I bookmark within Twitter.

[A]

Okay, cool. You have like, custom bookmark labels and stuff.

[B]

Yeah, I mean. And like, most of the time I don't even, like, go back to them. Okay, let's go to here. There you go. Can you see that now?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is that on Justine's.

[A]

Okay, great. This is when this guy who I just learned about this year, Matthew Crater, who apparently runs a university, some education.

[B]

Thing, he has a YouTube channel.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And apparently has onboarded people into bitcoin. So I assume he's done good work to be famous, but.

[B]

Yeah, here, I'll read this direction.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

So basically, Kratter says, for anyone that's listening after the fact, is Bitcoin Core v30 a nation state level attack on bitcoin that forces bitcoin node runners to host and distribute child prawn. Extremely disturbing quote tweeting mechanic saying that, you know, let's see, there's no context in which you would let random Anonymous strangers host 100 kilobyte files in your computer. Da, da, da. Rindell says, sounds like you need to reject blocks with arbitrary data. Crowder says his taproot wizards and enabled some of those CP inscriptions. Founders, board executives, and even employees could face criminal prosecution for that. Justine Harper responds with, you guys are really becoming unhinged in a way I didn't think was possible. Which, yeah, I think that's.

[A]

That's really it. I mean, this is just becoming where it was, where some, like the entirety of Knots folks were like, okay, y' all are passionate. You want your voice to be heard that you think this is attack on Bitcoin. This might say, this might set a precedence that signals to, you know, bad things in the future. And I can sympathize with that. I can get it. Even if there's no technical merit or technical reason for, or there's no technical harm that will happen. You're saying that this is a cultural sort of shift and it sets a bad precedence in it and it's not good for the overall health that is hard to measure going forward into the future, whatever. Like, okay, I can sympathize with that, whatever. But then it gets to this and you're just like, wait, what? Like, first off, this has nothing to do, like, with off return. You're. You're bringing in a completely new idea to sort. Like, is it because that the conversations have dried up and you've run out of ideas? Is it because you're getting desperate for some reason for relevance? And it's like anything that mechanic sort of talks about now, it's like, it kind of trickles down to like four or five people that then sort of amplify it. Like, what in the hell is going on? Like, this is sort of like, insane to me. So, yeah, I think people. And I would hate to. I would hate to like, just be wrong about this because I don't know what's going on, but, like, it just seems like people are out for some sort of, like, relevance. But I don't. I don't want to. I don't want to, like, assume that's the case. I want to assume that everything is genuine and like, they're on the up and up and they actually really, truly believe this. But it's hard for me to like, to think that someone who potentially has thought really deeply about bitcoin would actually use this as a serious talking point. So that's the part where it gets really weird.

[B]

I hear you. And it's like. Because again, the second you start dismissing stuff, then you're just a courtyard who thinks he's better than everyone else and won't listen to the things that the plebs are saying. And I think that there's a couple of points here. One is that you're right that it's completely missing the point of kind of what the argument is. Right? We're not even talking about the same thing anymore. And I understand completely where people are coming from and why they would get riled up about one feeling as though their voices are somehow not heard when it comes to development that happens. I can understand why that would. Would rile somebody up. I can understand why it would rile somebody up. The thought of people putting disgusting images of children anywhere like that. I think as Anyone who is a dad especially, yeah, that riles you up, makes you sick to your stomach and makes you want to like, you know, makes you really glad that those kind of people get the ever loving shit kicked out of them when they get into prison. Like rightly so. Like you should. They should be. Well, I don't know if I can say this because later it might go up on YouTube, but they should have horrible, horrible, horrible things done to them and they should never walk free again. I think everyone's on that same page. Unless you are one of those sick fucks, right? I don't think that anyone. Okay, not the vast majority of people. The people that are arguing back and forth with each other, neither of them want bitcoin to be full of monkey JPEGs, right? And that's where this all started. It's like started with monkey JPEGs and now it's like you want pictures of children up there and it's like, no, no, I don't think any of us want that. The question is not that none of us want that. The question is whether or not what you're proposing actually works in any meaningful way. And this is how I first waded into this conversation was I made one meme being like, how do filters work? And I was like, that's the neat part. They don't. And people. I didn't realize how pissed off everyone was until everyone came after me and.

[A]

They'Re like, I think I didn't know.

[B]

You were a big dumb retard. Fuck.

[A]

I think I liked that post by the way. I thought that was really funny.

[B]

That's pretty great.

[A]

Yeah, that's really funny.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's a shame. But I mean is the.

[A]

It's a shame. It's a shame that the rational view is the most criticized right now. So anyways. Well, yeah, I mean, what are you going to say?

[B]

What I. Well, I was just curious like just based on your tweet earlier is where this ends up going that like, because not nots doesn't actually do anything unless you have a critical mass. Right. There's no way knots node runners actually have any impact whatsoever in any meaningful way besides keeping that filth off my node, which great, run whatever you want, I don't care. But to characterize people who are running a different software than you as enabling horrible, disgusting exploitation of children is really dishonest and just frankly stupid. Does this ultimately though is the game theory as this plays out just if it continues this way, it ends up somehow leading to some sort of A fork or like an actual consensus change versus this is just a mempool policy, right?

[A]

But this, this, the, the problem is where it's being taken right now by people like Mechanic or Matthew Crater or whoever is like this has been the age old problem of bulletin boards, Internet nostr. This is not a unique problem to Bitcoin. This is not even like if anything, bitcoin is spam resistant because of the fucking fees. It's the most spam resistant per byte data thing that we have in the world right now. Probably like unless you want to get some actually kind of thing. But per byte, Bitcoin is the most expensive and the most like spam resistant. So we already are using like the best technology to prevent bullshit. When bullshit gets through, it's like okay, like that's, that's how, that's like these are the principles of Bitcoin to, to have like, you know, this freedom tech that you can't control. You're going to have bad things go on it. And like when Zephy was running Nostr, I mean dude, we had all types of terrible things just start flooding into our relay and guess what? We deleted them. We removed them, we didn't display them. You know, like what kind of crazy thing would you have to think about to be like, oh, I'm going to run this special piece of software that reads op returns or scans this and then Xors it this way and then displays it with a finder. Like you're, if you're looking for it, you're looking for it. That's on you. Like it's, this isn't something like the, the, the bitcoin software that interfaces with this is super, going to be super dry, that doesn't do anything with images. It's going to be up to you on whether or not you want to consider bytes into images. I think it's, it's ridiculous and there's just so many other things that are going to be cheap and going to be like right there in your face. I mean this is like, like what you said earlier, it's like this is what the, this is like the, the attacking points where, where they, they try to find like the hearts and souls of voters to vote for something like totalitarian. Like this is, you're going for the same playbook that, that also like helped us get like you know, like the Patriot act and stuff. It's like, you know, it's just you're, you're, you're going for. It's like, like the meme is like okay, how are we going to wrap this one? Is it going to be terrorism or protect the children? And it's like, you know, you start pulling at the heartstrings of people. It's easy to get people emotional about this and it's super, I would say manipulative.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, does I agree with that? Is there any long term risk from this, like to play devil's advocate, or long term risk from like a, an actual ability to run a node standpoint? Like does if take this to this worst case scenario, does this allow the chain to be bloated to such a degree that it will be impossible for people in third world countries to ever be able to afford to run a node?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's a great question. I'm really happy when people ask this because, and I don't know if you're asking it rhetorically or genuinely, but regardless, like both, but regardless, like people need to realize if Opreturn is used, you do not get the witness discount. I want to really just take a step back and summarize that this makes the bitcoin blockchain smaller. That might sound unintuitive, but that's ultimately what happens because you prevent the blockchain from bloating and taking advantage of cheaper style transactions if Opreturn gets exploited. The argument mainly has been there is no need for useless filters. Let's remove unnecessary configs if they have no good ideas of defaults. This is how all software works. You want to remove unnecessary toggles because better user experience is giving people meaningful knobs. Not just multiple knobs that, that don't do anything that could potentially even, you know, make your node run less performant. And you know, whether you relay it or not, you're going to have to download it. It's going to go into your bitcoin blockchain. Unless you really want to say like, hey, everyone in the world is going to run this relay policy. Well, if that point, if it's non controversial, you might as well just make it a consensus change, right? Ultimately now, unless now. Luke actually has a good response to this, by the way, which I can share, but it's, you know, when you take these things out, a lot of these things are like misconceptions, right? Like, like, oh, if we have large opera returns, my blockchain will bloat. I want to hold all this bullshit data, blah, blah, blah. Like you're like, technically speaking, if you're like a hodler and you're worried about like, especially for like from like ironically, right? Ironically, Ocean folks like Mechanic and Luke are advertising 300 kilobyte blocks. Right? Which is, which is if you still include witness ideas, it's a 70% reduction in how many transactions can happen in Bitcoin per 10 minutes. That's what Luke and Mechanic are doing. And for reasons that aren't necessarily bad or good or whatever, they're just trying to say like, hey, we need to make sure that this doesn't get out of control in terms of how much data gets processed into bitcoin. Now, ironically, if people abuse OP returns, it actually helps satisfy their lowering of the block size or effective block size will be lower if a lot of large OP returns get into the block. So on a technical basis there is no there there, right? Even, even like when you start seeing like, hey, you want smaller blocks, like shouldn't you want like these OP returns are actually going to make the block smaller. Right? Like anyways.

[B]

Well, I mean, is that. And is that because they are prunable?

[A]

No, like, so they're prunable. Yes. Which is nice because we still have.

[B]

To sink them the first time, right?

[A]

You still want to be able to verify like a block matches all the way up to the hash of the block ultimately. But OP returns don't need to be in your UTXO set, right? The database that is indexed. The thing that people care about in terms of keeping a live cache of index transactions because you don't necessarily want to go through and like care about all the transactions that have already been spent. You care about all the current amounts of bitcoin. And the OP return output is just like, oh, it's an OP return. My node software says to just drop this. So you just drop it out of your UTXO set and you can look it up later. But it's not in like your UTXO set that a lot of people are worried about in terms of like this is typically the stuff that's kept in memory that's going to be highly performant. That helps you, your node verify blocks very quickly when some of those UTXOs get used into the next block. So you want to make sure that your ability to look up these transactions is very quick and you want that in your ram, your memory of your computer. So OP returns don't even go there because they're unspendable. You can't spend an OP return. So you just say, oh, there's an OP return. Okay, bye bye off return. Like not in memory, like, you know, no problem. But there's there's tons of misconceptions like this. Like, there's one. But there's like, even, like, soft, squishy misconceptions, like, not even technical, where someone was saying, like, hey, you know, we had them close their pull request. You know, the Peter Todd pull request, we had them close it, but then while we're sleeping, they opened up a new one by Instagibs. And it's like, dude, the last comment of that pull request was saying, hey, we're opening up a new one to not remove the option that you want to keep. And it's like, now, like, it's like, we're not even removing the configurability, you know, like, we're deprecating it. But when I say we core, I'm not actually part of core or anything, but I almost feel like colloquial. We bitcoin is not removing the option. And that was the change between the pull requests. And people are like, oh, you close the pull request to then just secretly open up a new one. Like, what? And these are people that are like, I'm a technical person. I should be able to be involved in this. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah. You know, one of.

[B]

One of the other things I see get that it's been brought up a ton recently is people bringing up bsv and they're saying, well, this is actually what caused BSV to fail, because BSV got this explicit material put on their blockchain after they opened up the. You know, after they opened up the upper turn limit. And so if we do that, that exact same thing is going to happen to bitcoin, and bitcoin's going to fail just like BSV did. And I feel like that's a weird characterization given that obviously that wasn't the reason that BSV failed. Like, you know, like, what was BSV's block. What was BSV's block size when that happened?

[A]

Bitcoin was only protected from BSV because of that reason. Like, you have these people now that are going to praise whatever illicit material on BSV now because it saved it from taking over bitcoin. How crazy is it to think that?

[B]

Well, can you maybe. Because for some reason this is a huge misconception. Can you explain why, first of all, bsv, one of the whole things about it was it has a different block size, a vastly expanded block size. Was that. Would you say more like, responsible for everything that went down with bsv? Or was it these other. Was it op return that ultimately was the nail in the coffin for bsv.

[A]

So I think it was really. This is going to sound weird, but it was honestly Roger Ver that made BSV delegitimate. I mean Roger Vere still had a lot of respect from a lot of bitcoiners and pretty much everything, everyone in bitcoin cash. The fact that Roger Veers smelled a rat with Craig, you just keep getting shittier. The further forked away from bitcoin you go. And it's just like what killed BSV is really just like how it's kind of like they co opted the bitcoin cash movement took it even further in like a direction that you know, was, was sort of like insane, you know. This is like you're asking like such a funny question like what was the reason BSV failed? It's like apparently I have to. That's such a funny question because it's like there's so many things like involved. Whether it be with Craig Wright or.

[B]

Their giant fucking block or the fact.

[A]

That they said we just mounted like a terabyte block. Like look how great this is. Like, like it's just like, like there's just so many things that like are hilarious with it. That.

[B]

Which is why it's such a dumb argument to bring up in this case. Like again there are better arguments you can make. You know what I mean?

[A]

It's just apples and oranges. It's just so far like it's just so far removed from like a comparable that it's, it's like yes, we can compare it in like certain ways, but outside of like this it's like these things are like just so different, you know, and it's comedically different, especially with the people that were like promoting it. Right. And the, and the people involved with believing like Craig was Satoshi and like having this more or less cult following of people. Like I remember that was also like around the time like I got on Clubhouse and there was like a BSV group. And like it's just. There's so many. I guess it's, it's, it's almost an impossible question. You know, it's like it's like one of those things where it's like what came first? The chicken or the egg? Like what came first? Like how did BSV fail? Was it like, you know, these two things that are like sort of cyclical. It's just fraught with. Yeah, with, with, with. With disappointment and misery and failure.

[B]

Scams.

[A]

Yeah. I mean. But I assume BSP is still running though. I assume it's still Going, it is still exists, but, yeah, I guess it hasn't completely. So 25. It's trading at 25. So if you wanted to trade your bitcoin in for it now, you could become a whale.

[B]

You could, you could.

[A]

You could become a whale.

[B]

There you go. You too can be a whale. So I think another. Actually, I think a very legitimate question to ask from folks in the not side is, okay, sure, let's say that you're right about some of these other things, but why is it even necessary to make this change in the first place? Why can't we just leave things the way they are right now? Why can't we leave it with the current op return limit? Why does the limit need to be removed at all? Like, I feel like a lot of people don't feel that that case has been made strongly enough to them. And I think that's where a lot of this disconnect comes because they say, like, okay, you're telling me this needs to happen. But like, but, like, why? And then there's feelings like, oh, well, this is, you know, this is Citria or some other, you know, some VC or somebody's, you know, back channeling this, and that's why it's getting done. And that's the only reason. What is, what is your feeling on. Like, is this something that needs to be done? And if so, why?

[A]

Yeah, no, I think this is a way better question than most, unfortunately. This is when people like Francis with bull bitcoin get very, I would say, abrasive. I've always considered Francis to be nice in person, but my gosh, is he abrasive on Twitter?

[B]

There's many such cases with bitcoiners. I like Francis a lot, too.

[A]

So Francis, for instance, and I consider him a very, you know, nice guy when I'm in person with him and honestly, a fun guy when I'm in person with him, but, my gosh, is he a total asshole on Twitter? So this is a good question that was asked and I answered it two days ago. I'm. I'm going to read this off, but I also will also just drop the link here for you because I think it's a great question and I don't think it's a, like, a quick question to answer necessarily. So there's a guy named Merch, and he's a bitcoin core contributor and myself, and we're like, oh, this was like, months ago. We're like, man, there's a lot of people, right, that are getting upset about this. OP return change. Let's take a lot of time and let's do like a faq. Like let's address all of the questions that someone could have. Right. I will also link you that FAQ summary. So that that FAQ summary was 40 questions and we tried to cover everything from like conspiracy theories to technical concern. Right. We tried to do like a lot of in between as well. And one of the questions was sort of like around the point that you just asked like you know, why do we even need this change? Why shouldn't we just like even like raise it like to be just like 160 bytes instead? Like why, why uncapped all this kind of stuff. Essentially the answer is which apparently by the way just disclaimer is not was not acceptable by people in in the KNOTS group like Francis for instance, instead of provide and I'm going to just read the last part of this post from the Stacker News article that I shared with you and also the tweet. Instead of providing mining pools with a financial incentive to accept oversized OP return outputs out of ban and have to and to have to debate. Wait, sorry, out of ban and to have debates to slightly loosen the limit Further, every once in a while it seems easier to get rid of the incentive and debates by dropping it altogether. So in other words, this filter has outlasted its usefulness. It's better to just get rid of it now versus every once in a while having to incrementally increase it for, you know, another sort of debate. Potentially in the future it's better to just when we can safely make relay rules and consensus rules as close as possible within reason and this is one of those situations. If relay and consensus rules were identical, that's actually ideal. We can't do that because of certain technical concerns. This is not a technical concern. I don't want to believe I, I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I don't want to believe that. Originally we were super concerned about non technical concerns with relay policy. We're mainly concerned with people that are going to do like harmful things on the network and our relay sort of relay policy sort of helping with that. So this is one situation where relay policy and consensus can start to become closer in a safe way. And just dropping the, the, the limit in general just helps us get there and because there's already more effective ways this was seen as like a nothing burger because it's like oh there's already. If you really are going to be an this is the last way you would want to do it because if you did, you would have to spend more. It would. And, and honestly, it'd make the block smaller. And like, no one, like, you know, like, if anything, you know, people who want smaller blocks benefit from this. So ironically, if anyone does abuse this, people like Ocean, people like Mechanic and Luke get their ideas of smaller blocks, but not even gonna happen because it's not economically incentivized. So that is sort of the roundabout, you know, sort of a long answer, but that's the answer that I have for you, is there's just no need for it. Better to get rid of the debates and future debates that are gonna be needless in the future. And yeah, getting consensus and relay policy closer together is always gonna be a good thing if it's safe. And this is an example of that. The 40 question Q& A is, you know, I think like, people on the not side of things at this point are just not even going to. Like at first, when we posted that several months ago, people were like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. This was great. At this point, people have dug in their heels so much that if I Show them this 40 question Q& A from Stacker News titled A Comprehensive Opreturn Limits Q and A Resource to Combat Misinformation, they're just going to pretty much ignore and not actually care what core contributors have to say about any of this stuff. So that's.

[B]

I'll link it in the. I'll link it in the show notes for anybody who does care and wants to check it out. I mean, as. And I want to be conscious of your time here, but as just like another general question. And again, I'm purposefully asking kind of broad or basic questions because these are the ones that I've seen posited out there again and again and again and again. But okay, you've got operator. And the main argument right now is that you're going to be able to put big, big chunks of data in that opera turn. Right. Is it possible right now to put bigger chunks of data into a bitcoin block in other ways?

[A]

Well, thank you for asking. Some of these are rhetorical. Yes, you can. Do you know, if you wanted to do a giant inscription that's four times bigger than the NOP return for the same price, you can pretty much do it right now in bitcoin. So right now there's options of putting in arbitrary data for 75% cheaper or 25% of the cost of op return. So the.

[B]

And that's where I'm just kind of like, I don't see how this is a meaningful. Like, how this actually moves the needle when this is already possible. Like, if you want to inscribe malicious things in the Bitcoin blockchain or insert them into the blockchain, I'm not just talking about inscriptions. You can already do that, right? Like, this can already be done. I'm not saying that's a good thing. But this. I don't know if I. I'm just. Maybe I just don't understand it. Maybe I'm too stupid. I just don't really see how running knots fixes this.

[A]

I'll tell you this. If we ask Francis or Chris Guida or someone, we will definitely be told we were too stupid to understand.

[B]

So I probably am. I probably am. I don't know if you are.

[A]

I definitely am, depending on who you ask. So. So the. The interesting weird argument is like, hey, OP return is a cleaner way of putting data in, so therefore the illicit material is more legitimized, which I think is a bizarre take. And someone combated this, you know, in multiple ways. There's been funny ways of people saying this is like, stupid. The. The, like, the trope is if you put a red pixel every like 120, 137 pixels red on a illicit material, does it then not become illicit? Like, there's some ways of saying, like the witness. Putting data in the witness of a transaction is. Is not as, like, clean and it's. And therefore it's not as bad. And then if you. If you. If you have an OP return, it's. Now it's terrible because it's contiguous bites. The arguments are very, very weak in my opinion. But that is sort of the. The argument there on why, you know, I'm not. I'm not going to say that it's justified, but that is an argument I've seen from like, people like Wizkid or someone else or whoever, like, trying to argue this point.

[B]

I mean, I'm for sure I'm. I think I'm fully canceled by the Knox Knotts folks at this point. You know, after having LOP on. And now I'll have had you on. Like, clearly I'm complicit in. In all of this, but I appreciate you coming on. I think the nice thing for people to remember is you can run whatever node implementation you want and nobody can stop you. And you don't have to update your node implementation either. That's the really cool thing about Bitcoin node implementations is they are not automatically pushed to you. You are not forced to update. So you just don't have to do anything actually. And they have to be backwards compatible. And yes, you may be missing out on some security patches, but that's the whole thing. It's all backwards compatible and no one can make you do anything with it and you can run whatever you want. So just fucking do it. And yeah, maybe, maybe. The last thing I would say is maybe ease off on calling other bitcoiners who also think bitcoin is money and use bitcoin as money all the time and have been working on bitcoin for a long time. Maybe hold off on saying that they are complicit in exploiting children on the blockchain because that's just kind of like a man. That's a real government thing to say, you know, that's. I don't know. Anything you want to leave us with? I appreciate you coming on here, man. It was good to just catch up. I'm bummed we're not going to be at tab comp. It was good to. It was good to chat.

[A]

Yeah. Super sad. I'll. I was. I mean, it's not. It's not very fun when we agree on everything. I'm. I hope I was. I don't. I don't have a whole lot to debate with you on, but I hope.

[B]

I asked enough broad questions at least.

[A]

I'll see you on Satoshi Settlers. I'll see you on. See you there.

[B]

I've still. Okay, maybe just really quick. Okay. You launched something called Satoshi Settlers. I just logged in there with Noster. What are we doing with that? What's happening?

[A]

It's a project that hasn't been worked on in over six months. I do plan to work on it after Tab Comp, but right now it is, I think, a very cool idea. It's a bitcoin, like bitcoin through and through as much as possible without it being spam. So there's nothing like on chain that's going to be like, you know, messing. Spamming the chain or anything?

[B]

Not yet, thank God, because that would have caused a problem.

[A]

Yeah, well, we'll do NFTs after. After knots becomes the majority. No, but, but real talk, I think it's a pretty cool idea. Every 10 minutes, a new block. Roughly every 10 minutes, a new block is mined. So every 10 minutes, the map gets a little bit bigger. So it's an ever growing map where the center of the map is the genesis block and it's spiraling Outwards. So the higher block heights are at the edge, the earlier block heights are near the center. And it's just a really cool metaverse that I'm building that's just using the blockchain data to fill in the environment textures. You can use Lightning. I plan to, after tabcom, probably implement ARC Payments. Does Nostrawal connect? You know, I'm just trying to make it where it's really cool. There is a Satoshi Settlers Noster page where every time there's a purchase on the game or a theft. So you can steal people, you can steal what they they've done, but if you steal a piece of land from someone, you have to pay double what they paid and the refund goes to them. They have to put in their Lightning address as a way for me to refund them. So it's a fun little economy. It's a forced sale. So if you. If you have a piece of land, someone can always just spend double to steal it from you and then you get the refund. And it's just a really, like, no stress kind of game. Eventually there will be stress. I am working on some gamified fun things right now. It's mainly just experimenting with Lightning Nostril Connect. All like. Like I said, all the activity in the game gets posted to Nostr. Yeah. So I love it. Every time there's like a cool new bitcoin thing, I'm going to try to put it into the game as like a fun way of experimenting and playing with it. That's sort of the idea going forward.

[B]

Yeah, I'm into it now. I understand a little bit better what's going on. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna have to. Have to dive back in there. Where can folks find you?

[A]

Tabcomf.com is my passion right now. Outside of my work, I would say on Nostr, I'm. Well, I go by Mike21. That's my Twitter handle. And I believe I'm also that on. I have a few Nostr accounts that I'm maintaining. But I think if you search Mike21 on Nostr.

[B]

I think you're [e-mail]. mike21.

[A]

Yeah, Mike21. It's. It's confusing. It's OPSEC. It's 20 spelled out with a one. So, you know, no one will actually understand what you. What I said. Yeah, Exactly. I say Mike 21. They're like, it doesn't work. I'm like, yeah, well, OPSEC. Or you can just search. You can just search Tidwell. Or Titwell. I don't know if that's going to show up. Maybe if you post it, they'll there'll be a link to me.

[B]

Might just have to.

[A]

Yeah, but.

[B]

Well, I appreciate you coming on here. It was good to catch up. Thanks for answering some of my questions, even if they did seem rhetorical, because I think we're on the same side here. Ultimately, we all want bitcoin to succeed and people just have some different ideas of what that means right now. But the great thing is that bitcoin doesn't care. So it's just going to keep on processing blocks every 10 minutes, keep on adjusting the difficulty, keep on having. And yeah, we'll keep on podcasting, doing our part.

[A]

It's been awesome to chat, Walker. Thanks.

[B]

See you, man. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening, and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on [e-mail] Walker and this [e-mail] Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram. Itcoin Podcast Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.comwalkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin Podcast. Until next time, stay free.