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- [00:00]
Bitcoin Mechanic
This is an iHeart podcast guaranteed Human
- [00:05]
Jake Croquet
Ice Cube's Big Three season is heating up. The most competitive basketball league on earth is on CBS this Sunday. Coach Stephen Jackson and the DMV trilogy face off against two time MVP Michael Beasley and the defending champion Miami 305
- [00:17]
Bitcoin Mechanic
in a must win game for both teams.
- [00:19]
Jake Croquet
Then the battle for Texas as Greg Monroe, coach Nancy Lieberman and the Dallas power take on Jonathan Simmons and the Houston Rig hands the game played the way you love. Watch live Sunday on CBS at 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific and catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart.
- [00:35]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Today's episode is brought to you by ChatGPT for Business.
- [00:38]
Jake Croquet
As a listener of this podcast, you're
- [00:40]
Bitcoin Mechanic
looking for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions and access to work and codecs. In ChatGPT, this means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business, business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more.
- [01:13]
Jake Croquet
The first ever X Games League championship
- [01:15]
Bitcoin Mechanic
is going down live and New Orleans has the call.
- [01:19]
Jake Croquet
Three days of elite action sports. A season's worth of competition coming down to one final weekend. Watch July 24 through 26 on ABC,
- [01:28]
Bitcoin Mechanic
ESPN and ESPN2, or stream on the ESPN app, X Games, YouTube, Kick, Roku sports channel and Amazon.
- [01:37]
Jake Croquet
The championship starts July 24. Don't miss the moment it becomes history.
- [01:42]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts I I can't stop scratching my downtown. Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24. 7 Healthcare just got less painful. We are censorship resistant. We are pseudonymous. We are decentralized. You can't just say those things. You have to actually prove it.
- [02:19]
Jake Croquet
How are we sure that really convinced influential people couldn't do something like this again, but in a negative direction.
- [02:24]
Bitcoin Mechanic
But in the context of policy being maliciously made worse, you have no other option but a soft fork.
- [02:30]
Jake Croquet
Could you explain the difference between consensus and relay policy? Some people seem to get hung up on this part of the conversation.
- [02:37]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Spam on Bitcoin? Why we can never stop it. For me, that's like we can't have freedom because that would require eternal vigilance.
- [02:43]
Jake Croquet
But like, in what world does it end in a chain split? And in what world does it end in? Nothing happens.
- [02:48]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It's not my intention to advocate for a soft fork that would harm bitcoin. I would damage my own investment. There's no advantage to me.
- [02:55]
Jake Croquet
Is there any, like, middle path you see from here?
- [02:57]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I don't see it. I'm open to it. If someone comes along with an olive branch, I will totally consider it.
- [03:05]
Jake Croquet
Welcome back to Market Disruptors. My name is Jake Croquet, and today I'm joined by Bitcoin mechanic. Welcome to the show, man.
- [03:13]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Thanks for having me, Jake.
- [03:15]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, thanks for coming on. I know you're busy right now, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I have like, five days ago, Saylor retweeted my conversation with Samson and we ended up sort of unintentionally spending like half that conversation talking about bit 110. And I just, ever since that happened, I've been like, obsessively diving into this conversation out of like, primarily just being horrified of like, leading people down the wrong path sort of thing, you know, and so. And then I've been trying to understand it. I've heard really compelling arguments for both sides. I talked to Matt Crowder a lot and kind of. I think I understand where you guys are coming from pretty well. To start, I was kind of playing a more pro bip 110 role in that conversation, and now I want to sort of do the opposite of that with you. So lay out some of the counter arguments and give you an opportunity to. To go through them. It'd be cool to start off. There was the end of this conversation you had with, with Rob, and I think just speaks to like, this spirit you bring to this conversation. Kind of like what you're. What you're aiming at and the ethics behind your approach to what you're doing. And so let me share this real quick.
- [04:30]
Bitcoin Mechanic
What can we learn from you besides bitcoin? Like, is there many people go to like family, go to instruments, go to sports, go to like, like many different things. Not, not just like, from you personally, but also something that the knowledge that you hold.
- [04:44]
Jake Croquet
I don't know.
- [04:46]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Thank you. So other things about me, I'm a Christian and I believe that the goal is to be incredibly disciplined and to not deceive ourselves. All deception is self deception. And I would advise people to be very honest with themselves and make sure they're not engaging in Self delusion because that is a cascading spiral of misery that ends in a very dark place. And we live in a world that has perfected the psychological techniques needed to try and make people fall for these traps. So advertising and narratives coming from corrupt government institutions and things like that, they are all over the place and they are incredibly pervasive. And you are obligated for your own health and safety and for the health and safety of people around you that you love and care about. Do not be deceived. Make sure that you assess things being told to you and narratives being thrown at you and the things you are being told to think about and have strong opinions on. Make sure that you can pick up on the fact that they might be inauthentic and some sort of game and trick that's being played on you. Be very vigilant. There is a war for your mind and make sure that what that your thoughts are your own. That is my. That's my life advice, if that. That gives you anything helpful to end the show.
- [06:22]
Jake Croquet
With which I just think bringing that perspective to these conversations is. Is really important. And you know, constantly being on defense against self deception, for me, I found that difficult because there's people that I care about that I know personally that I like on both sides of this. It's like, man, I really like this guy and I really like this guy and I see him like throwing stones at each other and. And it's been, you know, my personal feelings about people can influence my positions on. On bitcoin policy and I'm trying to defend against that. I don't know. Yeah, just the self deception from the many things that come in and understanding like there's people warring for your mind and warring for your opinion on important things like this and just maintaining sanity and level headedness in that. I'm trying to do that for myself. So I want to take that approach to how we go into this bip110 conversation. But the first thing I wanted to do was see if you could tell me a summary of your story so far in bitcoin for those who don't know what some of the key turning points are and maybe lessons you've learned along the way and things of that nature.
- [07:34]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. So I got into bitcoin around the Occupy Wall street movement in 2011. It was the real solution rather than the complaining and never doing anything thing, which I guess would define my whole history in it. Because even right now with the bip110 stuff, there are people that agreed with A lot of the context for it, the complaint around Bitcoin, Core and how bad it's become. But the minute we proposed a real solution, all were like, no, you can't do that with no real alternative presented. Right. So that's the stuff you already cited with Jimmy and Samson. That's what that is. In my estimation. They will agree and say CORE is terrible, dirty laundry, etc. But they're not prepared to support anything real, especially if that thing gets a shelling point, which. Well, we can get more into that later. So anyway, the rest of my.
- [08:34]
Jake Croquet
That was off air, I think, I'm pretty sure. But we were just talking about Jimmy and Samson's proposed neutrality and they were upset with core for a number of reasons, but have some issues with pieces of bip110 it sounds like. So yeah, for context there.
- [08:49]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So the rest of my history, yeah, it's learning. It's basically just been learning and getting deeper into it. Learning about Austrian economics, learning how decentralized networks work, learning how monetary systems can bootstrap, and learning specifically about Bitcoin as my entire basis for what a money can and should be. Because it's a complicated technology that is its own payment network and it's a payment network with its own native currency and the two things self reinforced. And that gives all these people a very mistaken understanding of it because people like Saylor don't understand that it's a medium of exchange and it's already money in that sense. They just see it as a way to preserve value and spending and purchasing power. And there are others, like the people in the prior war, who I was against the so called big blockers back in 2016, 2017, who just above all else needed it to be a very, very functional and cheap, accessible payment network with no regard for the decentralization that would maintain it as an actual valuable currency. Because that's something that gets eroded very quickly. And all in all, everything I came to love about Bitcoin was its was that the qualities it had couldn't be easily eroded because the people that protected it were hard to find and there were too many of them. It became a widely adopted protocol. That's what decentralization is, and it's why I use language as a metaphor. It's really hard to change how English works, though it does change over time. And that's simply. That's not because of any quality about the English language, apart from some things you can kind of cherry pick and point out. The only real resilience, the protocol English Language has is that there's a billion people that speak it. And that means it's, it's going to self reinforce, everyone's going to learn it because of how useful it is to learn because of how many other people speak it. And if you want to change the definitions of any word, you have to deal with the fact that there's a billion people that disagree with what your new definition is. And if you were to centralize it, let's say, let's take the crypto approach, let's improve English, let's make it do way more things, let's add another hundred million words to it, let's make it impossible for a three year old to learn. If you were to do something like that on paper, you might make a better language, but you won't have decentralization. You won't have anyone actually speaking it. It will exist in a textbook on a shelf somewhere and it can be changed arbitrarily because of that fact, whoever it is that writes that book. So what makes bitcoin great and what gives it all the qualities people celebrate about it is just due to one thing. Decentralization. And I mean specifically decentralization at the node level. There are other areas like mining and development and things like that, where you have pockets of centralization on and off ramps, like exchanges. They're huge as well, and they're very centralized. But bitcoin has basically survived and done very well because of the one part of its community which is the node runners. They are the ones that stand up and maintain the integrity of the whole system. So anything that comes along that threatens to centralize that, like having big blocks or a blockchain filled up with trash from parasitic use cases, trying to turn Bitcoin into an arbitrary data layer, those threaten bitcoin at the very heart of it being so those that sets off red flags for me in fire alarms. The minute anything comes along that pushes bitcoin towards centralization at the node level, I think I do not care about any of the arguments for this endeavor. It needs to stop. So when we were blowing out data carrier size, I'm saying that can only cause centralization. That is not a helpful thing to do.
- [12:48]
Jake Croquet
And the trade offs of Opreturn is what you mean there, right? From.
- [12:52]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, well, data carrier size controls the default size of what opreturn is. And I'll get into that in a bit. But yeah, it's immediately a red flag went off. This is not my node isn't there to store giant op returns. And you can Tell me that they're better than UTXO bloat coming from them doing fake pub keys instead. But that's a. That you're missing the forest for the trees. We can't go in that direction. The blockchain is a history of financial activity. No one wants the kind of issues that come with storing random anonymously uploaded media on their computers in their house. Like that threatens. Like you can still have Bitcoin, Bitcoin and treat it like that kind of platform if you want. But we know what happens with that. It just ends up being run in data centers by captured industry players. And they are not going to defend Bitcoin's qualities because they, they have to do everything by the book. Node runners don't do anything by the book. They just download and install open source software and double click on it and then it does what they want it to do. And those are the only people that can be trusted here.
- [14:01]
Jake Croquet
Maybe. I was going to get to this later, but could you explain to me the difference between consensus and relay policy? Because that's like where some people seem to get hung up on this part of the conversation where they're like, okay, you're going to. You want people to one click download their Bitcoin software and you can have customizations for their relay policy at 83 bytes or 100,000 bytes. And I might misuse some terminology here, so feel free to correct me when I do. But yeah, maybe you could explain that difference. Then we can dig into some of the arguments behind that.
- [14:34]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Sure. So there's like two square boxes. Visualize it that way. There's the outer box within which everything within that is technically allowed. So if you're spending some bitcoins and you sign it with the correct private key that falls within side the outer box. Right. It's a valid transaction. It can be mined into a block and nodes will accept. Can't be bigger than one megabyte. It can't. Other examples of consensus rules. A miner can't mine a block that pays themselves more than whatever we're at in the current halving cycles.
- [15:17]
Jake Croquet
Right.
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Bitcoin Mechanic
If you try and mine a block that's more than 3.125 bitcoin in substance, in sustenance. Sorry, what's the word I'm looking for there in subsidy? Sorry, still early in the morning. Then it will be rejected by the network at the consensus level. There's no getting around consensus rules. But there's a rule set within a rule set which is referred to as policy. And it's a perforated line rather than a solid line you can cross over it. And these are called non standard transactions. We've always had one implementation basically that everyone ran that's been bitcoin core for since almost the beginning. Right. It didn't become core immediately, there was no core, it was just called bitcoin when Satoshi was around. It became bitcoin core a few years after that. And that always had these things called default policies. And this gives rise to this notion of standard transactions. So the understanding was right. If we ever want to change a consensus rule, it's really annoying. We basically, if we want to open something up, we have to do a hard fork. If we want to make blocks bigger or if we want to increase the supply cap or something like that, we have to hard fork bitcoin. And those are unbelievably disruptive and need an overwhelming number of people to agree to it for it to be a success. Like the big block. Yeah, those sorts of. They had a lot of people, right? Bitcoin cash had a lot of people. They had Bitmain, they had a lot of companies on their side. They still didn't succeed with it because of how difficult hard forks are to do, even when you have a lot of people that want to do it.
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Jake Croquet
And that's a really interesting thing I think for people to understand is they had the support of Bitmain, which is they do the vast majority of production of Bitcoin miners, ASIC chips.
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Bitcoin Mechanic
They're around 80% of all ASICs, 70 to 80% of all mining hardware is bitmain.
- [17:06]
Jake Croquet
Yeah. So you can have plebs be able to outweigh the opinions of many big industry players. And we've seen it happen before. I'm sure it will happen again at some point in time. So I just think that's an important thing for people to understand. But yeah, keep going.
- [17:22]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It is. So that's what happens when you try and change a consensus rule and make it more permissive, like you need a hard fork for it. And that goes to tell you something around what I already said in the first question, which is even if you have Bitmain and a significant amount of the community saying we want to break a rule and go for a hard fork, they still fail because bitcoin's ultimate enforcers are the nodes. And the nodes were not on their side, at least not anything like enough of them. And Bitmain yielded. And now Bitmain sells hardware to people that mine bitcoin rather than bcash. Right.
- [17:58]
Jake Croquet
If you hold bitcoin I want you
- [17:59]
Bitcoin Mechanic
to think about something just for a second.
- [18:00]
Jake Croquet
Not how you store it, but who
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Bitcoin Mechanic
gets it when you're gone.
- [18:03]
Jake Croquet
Most self custody bitcoiners have never tested
- [18:06]
Bitcoin Mechanic
if their family could access it if they were gone. Knowing where the keys are isn't the same as knowing how to use them. That's a technical side.
- [18:13]
Jake Croquet
But what they most often miss is the legal side. So even if your family found the keys and they knew how to use
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Bitcoin Mechanic
them, there's no legal structure telling them the bitcoin is theirs or how it's supposed to pass to them. You see, bitcoin that isn't properly retitled and documented could end up in probate.
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Jake Croquet
So it's not one problem, it's two. Yes, can your family physically access it? But is there a legal free framework that says it's theirs?
- [18:35]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So if you want to find out,
- [18:36]
Jake Croquet
take a short two minute quiz and get your inheritance ready. To score, just go to unchained.com markmoss again that's unchained.com markmoss and it's definitely worth two minutes to find out that it's actually handled or not. Is it right to say that the final enforcers. Because I feel like for as I've been digging I kind of. That was. I think there's a lot of truth to that. But it also seems like there's this node runners sort of have a check and balance on what the miner is doing. Have a check and balance on what people are calling the economic nodes.
- [19:05]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Not really. I don't see it.
- [19:07]
Jake Croquet
Okay, tell me a little more about that.
- [19:08]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, some people see it that way. There's probably some validity to it. I don't see it like a political system where you have like the Senate and the legislature and the executive and the House.
- [19:17]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, right.
- [19:18]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I don't see it like that. And in Britain you have like the House of Lords and the House of Commons. I see those as a bureaucrat's idea of how to stop a system from being corruptible. Bitcoin I don't see like that. I see it as hierarchical and I see it as an inverted hierarchy because it's basically you take a pyramid and you flip it on its head so that the point is at the bottom and the nodes are at the top and the nodes are. All they do is present this incredibly crushing weight that pushes down on everything else. So miners are below nodes. There are fewer of them. They are always asking permission and getting paid on the premise that they do exactly what they are being told. So it's called proof of work. And the question is, who are you proving you have done work to? You're not proving that to yourself. You already know how much electricity you consumed trying to mine a block. You're trying to say to the network, hey, I must have burned this much electricity because I just grinded out this nonce that gives us a block, which, you know, statistically speaking must have cost me at least at this energy price, $150,000 worth of electricity. To guess maybe I got lucky. But on average over this two week period, you can tell that in aggregate we've all spent about that much mining 2016 blocks. Bit of a mouthful, but at the end of the day, they really are employees. They are getting paid to do a specific job. And we don't ask their permission to do halvings. We don't ask their permission to do things like Segwit and Taproot. We're not asking their permission to do bit 1:10. And that's just what I've learned. To finish off the answer I didn't give in the question 1. All I've learned in bitcoin is that it's decentralized, it's decentralized, it's enforcement of rules by this group of node runners and they control everything. What if Bitcoin core do something terrible to Bitcoin? Well, they don't control Bitcoin. No one has to run their client and we're seeing that play out. This was a case study that I'd wanted to see forever because you know this man, you've orange pilled someone and they've asked you about the code base. Aren't the developers that write the software in control of the whole system? And the answer is always no, because it's open source and we can run other stuff. And that to me was the final unanswered question in this whole thing. I've done this list before, but I'll run through it real quick. What happens if the biggest exchange in the space collapses and gets hacked? Well, it turns out we can survive it. What happens if a couple of developers go rogue like Craig Wright, Sorry, like Gavin Andreessen and Mike Hearn? We can survive that too. We will eject them.
- [22:01]
Jake Croquet
They went, they were bcash that's going rogue, right? Like, didn't they go the bcash route?
- [22:06]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Or am I misremembering Mike Hearn? Rage quit before bcash became a thing. Gavin Andreessen, he supported the parallel big block clients like Bitcoin, XT and Bitcoin Classic. I don't know if he ever went in on bitcoin cash. I forget and I should know that I'll probably remember after this and go, oh yeah, of course. He just kind of, I mean he endorsed Craig Wright as being satoshi and that didn't work out. So I mean, yeah, that's further to the list. Someone came around pretending to be satoshi and a lot of people believed him, but he went off on his own and started the Craig culture and that has not gone very well either. And what happens if there's a hard fork trying to degrade bitcoin and make it more centralized by misguided, well meaning people that we've survived all of these things? We survived FTX blowing up, we survived an onslaught of cryptocurrencies pretending to be bitcoin but better. We've survived bear markets where you've lost 80, 90% of the value of bitcoin. All of these are things that make people go, what if this happened? And we've said, well we have a theoretical solution for those scenarios, but better than that we have a case study of having survived each of those things. That's amazing. Bitcoin really has come out and said we are resilient, we are hardcore and we will survive no matter how much you throw at us. What if the biggest country in the world that containing of what if the most amount of bitcoin mining in the world happens in one country and that country makes it illegal? We can survive that too. In fact they can make it illegal multiple times and we'll just shrug it off like nothing happened. Bitcoin has really survived everything. So that final question. What if everyone's running one implementation of the protocol, namely bitcoin core? What if those guys get co opted and they start not even co opted? What if they just lose the courage to maintain the network in a courageous way, pushing it in the direction it always needs to go to actively willing it to success? What if they just become cowardly and stop fighting back against the people trying to degrade it? What if they do that? Well, then we route around them. That's always been the theory. It's open source, someone can fork it, make a different version of it, that's better. That's what happened with knots. A lot of people adopted knots. You're looking at somewhere between 20 and 25% of the network with around 18% of them having updated to the Bitcoin 10 version of it. That's really good proof to me that ultimately over the next few years people can allocate a lot of capital to Bitcoin because they trust it, they can see that it's gone. It's managed to route around failures with an incredible amount of agility and care, I would say. So that's, that's really quite incredible that it's doing what it's doing right now. I see. I've never been more optimistic about Bitcoin's future based on the success of Bitcoin 10 because it's, it's the, the waxing of decentralization again. Thousands of people were like, I need to run a node because complaining on social media is in either direction about spam or measures against spam isn't manifesting any way and that the protocol can recognize. Whereas when I run a node that's real, if I'm enforcing a new consensus rule to get back to what you're trying to get me to delineate here, if I can, if I enforce a rule, a new consensus rule, then miners are now aware of the fact that if they mine a block that doesn't respect it, they might not get paid. And the more people there are like me, the more that becomes a relevant factor in their decision making. So we know miners don't make decisions around consensus rules. Their job is to figure out what they are and make sure they stay within them so that they do actually get paid. And then just to finish off that other point, the perforated line within the thick line that just. Policy rules are standardness stuff. I really should make that clear because it was your second question. There are. Everyone was using one Bitcoin client, it had a bunch of standardness policies which gave rise to this concept of standard transactions and non standard transactions. You would see very few non standard transactions. Default settings in Bitcoin Core would make it so that anything that was considered undesirable wouldn't step outside the line of standardness and you wouldn't relay it. And because everyone runs those relay policies which can always be changed by the user, but everyone uses the default settings. That meant in practice you very rarely saw non standard transactions enter the chain. And these were spam filters. And this was done this way specifically because changing consensus rules, especially loosening them, is very difficult. But changing spam filters is easy. You don't need a civil war to change spam filters. And that being the case, you can have quite loose permissive consensus rules like 1 megabyte operators, which have always been possible, but you can make sure that they stay within reason at 83 bytes only by having A standardness policy which says, all right, well if you want to go outside of 83 bytes, you're going to have to talk to a miner individually and submit it to them and then they're going to analyze it and say what is this non standard transaction you're trying to put in the chain that people are going to come after us for? If it contains something horrible, is it easier to identify?
- [27:39]
Jake Croquet
Maybe like are they more likely to identify non standard transactions with much less people relaying them, decreasing the probability they make it on the chain?
- [27:47]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, you're necessarily doxxed and, and the content is necessarily moderated is the point. Like if I. If like a coin join transaction, it really can be. If you're doing a monetary standard transaction, if there's a standard transaction you're making, it's getting in a block, someone's going to mine it. If you're doing a giant op return when everyone is filtering it out, that's not getting in a block because when you broadcast it, it doesn't go anywhere and it doesn't make it to a miner. If you want it to go to a miner, then you need to go via a private API and then the miner is going to ask you what is this? And who are you? And then you're going to have to tell them. And if it's something that would sabotage the Bitcoin network by being some illegal JPEG or something like that that no one will want on their hard drive, you're not going to want to tell them who you are and why you're putting it in the chain. It's just not going to work.
- [28:34]
Jake Croquet
Does that give miners more or less power?
- [28:38]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Gives them more power. It gives them more power to do something we definitely don't want them to be doing. So there was an argument, get rid of all the standardness policies, relay everything so that no miner has the power to include stuff that other miners aren't even aware of. That was an argument on the core side, it's. It's not a concern for reasons I can get into, but that was one of their. They said they want to level the playing field. Spam filters mean that a giant miner can offer an out of band service for non standard transactions. And if we get rid of the standardness policies, the spam filters, then all miners have access to this stuff. The reason it didn't work like that. Sorry, go ahead.
- [29:18]
Jake Croquet
I'm just curious before we leave the perforated line piece of this, like how effective is that level of. Maybe a good way to Frame it is like, so when we take away those filters, if that's the right frame, like how effective are those at separating out standard transactions, non standard transactions that will make it onto the consensus layer.
- [29:41]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It depends on how ubiquitously they're adopted. So before they became controversial, they were extremely effective. Right. So 99%, more than 99% of op returns were 83 bytes or smaller. Even though the consensus rules allowed you to go all the way up to a megabyte, no one would go outside the perforated line, typically because a, it was an attack on the network as defined by the standardness policies in Core. And that would mean if you wanted to make some kind of, some kind of scam coin on Bitcoin protocol that needed to do something that all the nodes would treat as spam and you had to organize the whole thing with a miner that would give you, I don't know, supposing it was MARA and they had 8% of the network or 6% of the network or something,
- [30:36]
Jake Croquet
you
- [30:37]
Bitcoin Mechanic
would have to have. Your whole ability to use Bitcoin would be contingent on your relationship with that one miner. That's gonna make things very expensive and inefficient for you because you only have access to 6% of the available block space, not 100% of it. So immediately then you're pushed into. If you're trying to design a real protocol here, not just upload a few jpegs, you're pushed into a scenario where you're like, well, how do we work within the standardness policies? Because we want access to all of the block space. It would make things cheaper and faster for us. We don't want to wait six hours for MARA to find a block, we wanna wait 10 minutes. So what you do is you work with the network rather than against it. So it's just one of those things you can put. There's a one way street with a one way sign on it. You can drive down it in the wrong direction if you want, but no one does because it's just a hassle and it might even be the most efficient way to get where you need to go, but you're still not going to do it, even though it's technically possible. So it was very effective, it was very useful. And we wanted to upgrade the filters in 2023 because the inscriptions hack started. People found a bug in Taproot where they realized they could upload masses of data without being subjected to any of the standardness policies that existed before. And this was the beginning of Spam War 2, which is now concluding with the the activation of BIP110, which is the final chapter in this whole long civil war in Bitcoin's history.
- [32:10]
Jake Croquet
Hmm hmm.
- [32:14]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So, yeah, I'll say they're very effective. But if they're routed around, you can either acquiesce by removing the spam filter or, I don't know, you can end up with all of the drama that's happened over the last two years. Nodes don't typically want to relay non standard stuff and they want good definitions around what constitutes standard because there's just no incentive for a node runner to relay arbitrary data around the Bitcoin network. There have been some kind of rationalizations for it, like you can make it more of a level playing field for miners. Or the, you know, the ideological argument that if you attempt to reject arbitrary data out of your mempool, you're a censorer, which I wholeheartedly disagree with. That's, that's not appropriate at all. That's like saying free speech means you have to relay everything I say. If I speak, you've got to go and tell everyone what I said, otherwise it's censorship. That's called compelled speech. That's not reasonable at all. I do not need to relay anyone's transactions, but I definitely will relay monetary transactions because that makes Bitcoin work better and I'm incentivized to do that. I will not relay JPEGs around the network because that makes Bitcoin worse as money, it makes it less efficient, it makes every monetary user have to pay more than they otherwise would because they're competing with other use cases. So those are my motivations for it and the effectiveness of them. I don't know. It's a delicate balance.
- [33:46]
Jake Croquet
The most compelling, maybe one of the Most compelling anti bip110 arguments that I've heard so far is if you almost like, if you don't invite. What was the way to put it? Like they were saying that opereturn is like the most easily prunable of the ways to spam the network. And so if you don't allow it, I don't know if invite's probably too strong of a word, but basically they're saying you can allow people to put it here and by doing that it's easily prunable. And they're not going to go to the UTXO set or the inscriptions, spam attacks that are more damaging. So that, so it's not like they're saying, yeah, we think spam's good. And we want spam on the blockchain and we want blockchain bloat. They're saying this is the least damaging location for it. And so until we find. Well, I'm sort of reading into this. But until we find better ways to defend spam, defend against the spam in the more damaging locations. It'd be better to leave it here because it's easier to get rid of it there. What do you think of that?
- [34:58]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So there's two reasons here that this is. It sounds right on the surface. One, it's the give drug addicts clean needles argument. Right? We're not in favor of drug overdoses or people getting infections from stuff like that. We're not in favor of the downtown part of your city being completely uninhabitable. But it's objectively just better in a black and white sense that they use a clean needle and not a dirty needle. Right. You're ignoring the context. The downtown needs to be fixed. It's a trash pile. And acquiescing to it, continuing that way and saying there's nothing you can do about it. And here's how we can make little silver linings of it. That doesn't work. Ultimately it leads to the whole thing becoming worse. You need to make sure arbitrary data in Bitcoin is kept to a minimum. Second, you're ignoring the stative motives of the people doing this. You can store data on other people's computer. Redundant data availability is a thing you can do. There are protocols that allow for it. BitTorrent exists. The only and stated reason people are using Bitcoin to store their data is because they want to harm Bitcoin. They want to trick people into storing data they don't want who are trying to use Bitcoin as a monetary network. That being the case, they only want to do it in the most harmful ways. So giving them a trash can to use instead of throwing their litter on the floor as is the repeated analogy ignores who these people are and what their attention, their intention is. They want to do damage and they've said that many, many times. They want to create as many problems as possible. Part of the reason for that is because it gets them more attention.
- [36:37]
Jake Croquet
I certainly believe that there's people like that. But on the other hand, I'd certainly believe that there's people who are like, maybe just crypto bros that are like, let me get my JPEG on the chain or I want to try this new thing on Bitcoin or whatever.
- [36:50]
Bitcoin Mechanic
For sure there are Two people I know of, there was Mike in Space and there's a podcast with another guy who I forget. Both of them are saying their intention is to do harm. Mike in Space specifically says we want to bloat the UTXO set because it's more harmful. And there's a very good reason they do this. It's not because they're, it's not because they are that malicious. It's because they need to market these scams. And if they can say something inflammatory and annoying that will cause people to become outraged, it gives them more engagement, it gives them more clicks and audience. So that helps bootstrap the whole thing. Because these are scams. At the end of the day, NFTs in general are scams. So getting attention for these things and bootstrapping them to the point where they can become, you know, self sustaining attacks on bitcoin, it requires a lot of effort because ultimately it's quite hard to get enough people to really get a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme actually going. It's quite difficult to do that. You need quite a lot of people to fall for it. So if you can get a massive amount of attention by annoying people that are trying to defend Bitcoin's decentralization, that helps you. So they, unfortunately, the perverse incentive does exist there. So all that is why coming out with ideas like Opreturn because it's a bit less harmful and expecting them to use it is very naive. It's technically true, but it's completely missing the point of the kinds of people we are up against here and what the courageous approach is, which is we need to filter all this stuff out by default. We can't have these people headlining the conference that, the main conference that exist like every year, the biggest bitcoin conference in the world is treating this kind of usage of bitcoin as valid, appropriate, it needs to be considered socially contagious. And people say, oh well that's, that's not a technical solution. I'm like, sure, but it is a valid one because we got rid of Vitalik, we got rid of Ethereum by filtering out what he would do. What Vitalik wanted to do on bitcoin was within the thick black line. It just was, it was outside of the perforated line. And that wasn't good enough for him. He said, you guys don't really want me to do this here. I feel, I feel declined. I feel like you're telling me to get out of here. I don't feel welcome. And we said Correct. You're not welcome. Go away. And he did. And I can't believe that that isn't, again, an effective case study for us to draw from. If Ethereum had been built on top of Bitcoin, we would have been part of that whole thing. We would have been party to the whole disaster of it. Instead, it was gone. It was his own cluster F that happened. You know, independently of Bitcoin, there's a little bit of contamination from the fallout because it is all crypto. But Bitcoin, not crypto, we're not able to say that when people start doing this stuff on top of Bitcoin directly. So issuing it at the social level with not watertight, technical, technical approaches that make it more difficult. All of these are very valid things to do. They do take courage and they do take nuanced understanding. Knowing that none of them are perfect, but neglecting to do them all with these very crude, these very crude appeals to, well, doing anything about it would be sent. Would be censorship. And also, you know, it would compromise Bitcoin's neutrality, as Michael Saylor has been saying. Or further, it's strictly better if someone made a big op return instead of a fake pub key. So therefore it's better. You can view each of these as true, but you're ignoring any kind of context that makes Bitcoin a real thing, with real adversaries trying to make it worse, with concerns around centralization that have to be met if the project has a real future. If it's not that it's all just paper, it's all crypto. Again, like cryptocurrency, it's decentralized, not meaningfully. Right. Everyone knows that you can change most of the cryptocurrencies out there pretty much arbitrarily if you hold a gun to the head of the right guy, because they are all just centralized. Bitcoin can't end up like that. It has to actually be decentralized in a practical sense, which means you can't just make these, these appeals to adages like we are censorship resistant, we are pseudonymous, we are decentralized. You can't just say those things. You have to actually prove it in practice. You have to do complicated things like have civil wars and fights and power struggles and things like that. And they need to be very messy. And that's the only way, you know, we're genuinely decentralized.
- [41:29]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, yeah. I think that the key piece of what you said there, that really stood out to me too, is the, I think something that it Feels to me, so far from digging into this, I feel like a lot of the devs miss the human element of a lot of this stuff. And a lot of the people in this space don't understand the technical development code, whatever side of those things too. And so getting these two parties to cooperate is difficult because the devs are like, yeah, there's things that they don't understand, the psychology or whatever, other pieces around that too. And so, yeah, yeah, I've definitely noticed that. I want to pull up this. There's one piece of this thing here I want to get into with you, Staphon. So I posted this thing and I was basically saying, like, hey, I have this. It's a little bit embarrassing to me, honestly, because it's fairly low resolution. But like eight hours later I was like, okay, I understand this way better. But I opened up this conversation, I said, hey, here's what I understand right now. This is the way this looks to me. And then a bunch of people gave me opposing thoughts and all of this stuff underneath. And it was super helpful even just to be like, for me, one of the primary takeaways was like, I had an oversimplified understanding of very important variables in this equation. And so when I understand those variables a little bit better, it made me be a little bit more like, oh, okay, like, I see how some of this makes a lot of sense in terms of like propositions of BIP110. And then it also made me think, I feel like I could see theoretical ways where this could go wrong if I'm understanding some of these variables or where parts of this could be positive, clearly, and parts of this could be net negative, maybe. And so this piece of it here. So there's this flywheel that Stefan Leverish shared. And the point that stands out to me that I'd love for you to talk about is this. Spammers only pay 0.5% more to spam the network. And so, like, while it is factually correct that BIP 110 would increase the cost to spammers, it would also be minimal enough that risking a chain split over it seems like not net positive or something like that. So I don't know if you want to start at the beginning of this, but yeah, I'm curious.
- [43:45]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I mean, I see his follow up tweet where he says, and I know how they can. Like, they're all, they're slippery, by the way. If pressed, they will say it's not about spam. Right? So what Stefan has done here is he's made a strawman, debunked it, and anticipated the fact that we're going to point out that it's a strawman by actually trying to address the real issue. It's not an anti spam bit.
- [44:09]
Jake Croquet
And Lyn was saying something similar with like the Mott and Bailey debate analogy. I read through that thread.
- [44:15]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, they do that, but it's. I mean, let's be. I'll be kind to them. They are being uncharitable in their interpretation of it. The BIP is very well aware that it doesn't stop all spam. And I acknowledge this in a very, very objective set of yes, no questions I posted. The first one was, is bip110 an anti spam bit? No. Is the reason many people support it, the fact that it has an effect at reducing spam? Yes. So there's nothing that can be done about that. I know that people support Bitpoint 10 because they hate the spammers and they want to rug the spammers, but everyone that supports it knows there are other ways around it. So you can reconcile that however you like. The actual motivation of the BIP is we got rid of the perforated line. We've said that all the stuff that was that, that could technically have occurred outside of the perforated line, but within the solid line is now fair game for anyone to build whatever meta protocols they want on top of Bitcoin. And they will never be rugged. They are now welcome here, the next Ethereum and Vitalik. Buterin. No, you're not shunned. You are now part of Bitcoin. You are a bitcoiner. And your desires will backslide into development decisions, into wallet design, all that stuff. You are now a part of the community. We are saying, no, you're not. That perforated line that you guys got rid of, we are now making it a solid black line within the other solid black line. We are making a consensus rule that says OP returns are not okay. They never were. We were fine preventing them with a gentleman's agreement, but you've now deliberately removed that. So we are saying, okay, no more gentlemen's agreement. Now it's a fixed.
- [46:00]
Jake Croquet
It's moving the relay policy to the consensus consensus level. Okay, so you're saying that's locked in. Oh, okay, yes, okay. So that I'm wrapping my head around that piece specifically now. So you're moving it there then. Miners who want to be compliant have to follow those rules at the consensus level and that's a way for okay, so this is an. Is this an experiment in a way where we're seeing can we force consensus level rules or, sorry, policy level rules to the consensus level by having a. I don't know, by committing to a soft fork.
- [46:39]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. In essence, the point I wasn't able to kind of finish with the first question with the difference is the reason we want policy is because it's a pain. Changing consensus rules and policy works pretty well anyway. So we can put guardrails on things that we leave really loose that serve no function to Bitcoin just because maybe in 50 years we figure out, hey, big op returns were actually kind of useful for something like we want to leave consensus rules pretty loose because they're so hard to change. But if you intentionally get rid of policy stuff, that was doing a very good job. This is Chesterton's fence, right? A new guy shouldn't show up and say, this fence isn't doing anything, let's get rid of it. Because what it might be doing might not be immediately obvious to you. So what data carrier size was doing by limiting OP returns by standardness policy, not a consensus, might not be obvious to you immediately, but we think it's a very bad idea to knock down that fence. So, I mean, I'm interested in getting more into what Stefan is going on about there because, I mean, like, we haven't engaged much and I haven't really seen much of what he said. There's a lot of mutual blocking at this point. He's.
- [47:56]
Jake Croquet
I wish everybody would keep talking, but.
- [47:58]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, yeah, me too.
- [48:00]
Jake Croquet
It's hard. It's hard.
- [48:01]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It is what it is, unfortunately. Like the. I don't know, I'm not. I can't exactly claim to be someone that just left it all open and welcomed all the attacks. They bother me. They bother me on both sides, I'm sure. I mean, I'm sure the other side is bothered by the attacks coming from mine. I get it.
- [48:21]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, I'm sure.
- [48:22]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Anyway, but he says, look, they are slippery, by the way. It's not slippery. I'm explaining to you why we have to be pedantic about it. It's not an anti spam bit. It says the ways of arbitrary data that were made explicitly available with Bitcoin Core 30 by Moving Standardness policies to ridiculous increments. So you went from 83 bytes to 100,000 bytes with OPreturn after not touching it for 11 years. That was a crazy thing to do. And we're saying we are rejecting that change with a temporary consensus rule that says no, you actually can't go outside of that line. It's very easy to understand.
- [49:03]
Jake Croquet
Could you reject that change?
- [49:04]
Bitcoin Mechanic
At the policy level you can, but not in this context. So because you can do a minority soft fork and change the rules of Bitcoin, we've done that before with BitPun48 in 2017, you can't do a minority protest against the dominant Bitcoin client having a default policy that welcomes in large amounts of arbitrary data. Because of the way filters work. If a new client showed up, that was like Libra Relay is a tiny client that had more permissive spam filtration policies, right? There was no need to do a soft fork to prevent any of the things it would relay. But Bitcoin Core, what is it? It's the dominant, it's the reference implementation. If they have a permissive spam filtration set of policies, by default they are saying this is how Bitcoin is to be used. And if they do that outright, unless everyone drops the client immediately and starts running something else, that becomes essentially a botnet attacking the network. You now have everyone that runs Core, which is a lot of people that will just do so by default are automatically relaying around malicious content on the network because they have no checks and balances, they have no terms and conditions sitting on their node's mempool figuring out whether stuff is okay or not. So they're essentially flying around harmful stuff on the Bitcoin network willfully, and they're going to do it to a massive degree because of how much market share Bitcoin Core has. So the only plausible mechanism for fighting back against it is a soft fork that makes it impossible at the consensus level. That's the only mechanism available to us. It's not a viable long term method for spam mitigation in Bitcoin because that is all policy stuff which needs to start again. But in the context of policy being maliciously made worse by a client, everyone runs. You have no option as a bitcoiner that cares about the network, about maintaining decentralization and issuing non monetary uses. You have no other option but a soft fork, because a soft fork will actually work at undoing the damage of that, whereas a minority client having decent standardness policies is not going to be enough to push back against that. Spam filters work in a context where people are generally running clients which generally issue arbitrary data that works. Even with something like Libre Relay trying to blast through it all, that's not going to be that effective. But Spam filters against a dominant client deliberately forcing people by virtue of terrible defaults to relay as much arbitrary data as possible. So that's not something you can fight at the policy level with a minority client. So that's, that shouldn't be too nuanced. That is a very, that is the rationale for why we're doing what we're doing.
- [52:03]
Jake Croquet
Which I guess the only piece of that that stands out where I maybe like raised my eyebrows or something in that to me is it seems like there is an assumption that everyone else who's on the other side is not everyone else is on the other side. I don't know. Like, I feel like there was a baked in assumption that these are like all malicious actors where I feel like some people are saying, I mean, maybe, maybe we should go to this. Where's my mouse? There it is. Walk through some of this. This is also from Stefan Lavera. He replied.
- [52:34]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, and again, it's always the same straw man, we can't stop spam. I know everyone on the content site knows we can't stop it, but why lead with that? It's called reduced data. It's not called, it's not called, you know.
- [52:48]
Jake Croquet
Well, and I think too, I think it is like you could. The side of like, okay, so if we're going to have a 0.5% increase in defense, again, and I'm not saying that I understand this to be the case exactly, but if we were going to have like a 0.5 increase in percent increase in deterrence of spam, then is that something worth risking a chain split over? Or should we, you know, or should we like be more careful about such things and only, you know, like, like maybe this isn't a big enough emergency to do like a one year planned out chain split or something like that.
- [53:27]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I think the maths of it is very misleading. Right. It's, it's myopic, unfortunately. And not to use sailors. I'm not gonna sit here and start getting all offended at you, like. But yeah, it's not about that. As I said, it's about can a giant company raise $10 million to come up with a new spam coin protocol on top of Bitcoin in a context where we just made the method they would have used impossible at the consensus level, they're going to have a hard
- [53:53]
Jake Croquet
time even if we prove that we could rug those things. Right. I mean, I think that's a compelling case for the proof. One side is like, you see, people build businesses on something and if we can pull that function that if it's. If we're. If it's clear that something is spam and you can pull that functionality out from under them, you discourage attempts, like you said with Vitalik, or maybe people are doing ordinal stuff or whatever.
- [54:14]
Bitcoin Mechanic
To me, it's like this, right?
- [54:16]
Jake Croquet
But maybe there's dangers in that precedent also.
- [54:18]
Bitcoin Mechanic
You know, there are dangers in it, but we can. Let's talk trade offs in a bit, right? Because there is a trade off to all this, what I support, and I'm happy to acknowledge it and come up with a viable mitigation plan if it ever gets used against us. But here's the point I'm trying to make with spam filters. Bitpoint 10 is not spam filters, but it does say we need to return to spam filtration, because that's the only way to get rid of it. Not get rid of it completely, but to keep it to a minimum. The way I see it is like this. Supposing you got like a town, people like to post this meme, right? A gate in the middle of a field. And they say you can just walk around the gate, right? And there's usually like a, you know, a dead patch of grass where you can see everyone has just walked around the gate. So they're saying the gate is useless, you can just walk around it. Here's the point. If that gate exists and there's like a tourist company that has, you know, 20 people that go on an excursion every day that walk somewhere around that field, they are never going to do that little walk around there because they're a sizable business, they have a relationship with the local authority. And the local authority says you're not supposed to walk through that field. So some guy walking his dog, yeah, he's just going to walk around the gate. I get it. But some guy walking his dog through my field isn't creating problems for me. Company after company of tourists going on excursions walking through my field is going to create problems. They're going to create soil erosion, they're going to destroy the whole field. So we need to. Even if it's not a watertight mechanism against them, once they hit that scale, it's not possible for them to violate it. They need a robust way that they can operate their business with these tourists, that they're not going to keep getting letters from the council saying, you can't do this. There are countless examples of stuff like this. Copyright violation, right? I can play, you know, a Katy Perry song. I can Play it on my guitar and sing it. I don't need to send money or royalties to Universal Music or whatever. I don't need to do that. But if you're a radio station, why do they pay royalties to songwriters? Because they can't get away with not doing it. Because everyone knows who they are, they're too big, they stick out too much. So this is why. Spam filters, you can say, oh, if you put that filter in so that they. Or even a consensus rule that prevents them from using OP if in taproot, they can just do it another way. I'm like, yeah, the guy walking his dog can. He can just find a route around it. But the big companies that want to use bitcoin in that particular way, and this is where I push back against Lyn Aldern and against Stefan Lavara's focusing on the mathematical implications. Slightly increased cost of using a different envelope that isn't filtered.
- [56:57]
Jake Croquet
Doesn't regard the human side.
- [56:59]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, the human side of it. What giant company is going to say, yeah, we're a serious million dollar excursion hiking company that comes out here into this beautiful part of the wilderness in British Columbia and there's one part of the tour we take everyone on where we walk around this gate that says, do not walk this way. Right? They're never going to do that because it's not serious. They're just going to get in trouble and create problems for themselves if they do that. So you'll sit there with the tourist company going, this is dumb. Why don't we just walk directly across the field instead of walking around this mile long detour, you know? Well, it's because that's the way we have to actually operate if we want to be a proper business. So if you want to build a new scam coin protocol and you want to use zero knowledge roll ups and you want to have fraud proofs and all of the mechanisms with which you've designed to do it on Bitcoin and suddenly are unavailable to you. It's not a simple case of saying, all right, well we'll just find another way to do it because every one of your investors is going to say to you, can you please do this properly? The bitcoin network has told you you're not supposed to use it for that purpose. Can we use a network that's actually welcoming for this stuff? Otherwise we are going to get in trouble. We might invite lawsuits. We are not an unserious bunch of NFT scamming teenagers trying to have a bit of fun. We are investing millions of dollars into this product. Can you guys be a bit more professional about it? I think that's, it's very easy to see that. And we're not worried about the little guys. Like every farmer knows a little. One guy walking his dog might walk through his field once or twice. It's not the end of the world. But he's not going to tolerate a busload of Chinese people showing up with cameras like messing up their land. Right. And if that ever happens, he's going to contact the company and create problems for them. This is like you say, it's a human aspect to it that they are just ignoring completely and saying, well, it only cost them 0.5% more. I'm like, I'm sorry, you're missing this
- [58:55]
Jake Croquet
whole element to it because it's establishing like, it's establishing purpose. Like, what is this for? Right. If you're saying this thing is for arbitrary data storage, maybe intent does matter. Even if it represents itself as the same ones and zeros on the blockchain. The question I was thinking of when you were talking through that is because that makes sense to me. And then the next question I ask is, what percent of spam do you think would be stopped by. And I know you can't tell for sure, right? But what would you hypothesize in terms of percentage of spam would be stopped by this sort of gate in the field?
- [59:38]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Most of it.
- [59:39]
Jake Croquet
Most of it, yeah. Because over 50% for sure.
- [59:44]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It's hard to know because you're. Again, it's the survivorship bias problem. How many people weren't born last year because condoms exist? It's really hard to answer a question like that because the only empirical evidence you have is the baby.
- [59:58]
Jake Croquet
Everybody who was born.
- [59:59]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. So all of the institutionalized spam, I mean, if I wanted to lowball it, I could say every single nft, JPEG scam, whatever it is that exists on all other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Solana and Cardano, every one of those things isn't happening on bitcoin. And if that works out to 99% of all the spam in the crypto space being on those networks where they actually want it, then I can claim a victory based on that. And I would consider that a low ball because they really don't have much incentive to use Bitcoin for this stuff. Those like Tether does. Tether's a serious enough company. Right. They don't feel the need to do everything on bitcoin. They they use, they use Ethereum, they use other rails all the time. They use liquid like which is. Okay, that is on Bitcoin but not directly. So I would say this maybe is
- [60:51]
Jake Croquet
a better question then is like how much did it increase in 2023 when we had the taproot inscriptions problem? I know we've had a fall off of that that's just been sort of natural. If people being like ordinals are stupid, I don't want them. So there's been like a natural market driver of that fall off. But yeah, what sort of numbers do you know in terms of what sort of increases do we see back then? How much has it fallen off? How much would you expect in proportion to that sort of thing?
- [61:21]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It's been, I would say it's cyclical. So every spam coin happens and then it dies and then another one comes up. I do say death taxes and shitcoins like they, they really are forever and there will always be another sucker with, with more money. Ordinals do, do seem to have died as far as I know. But that's neither here nor there really. They were never like. It does get characterized that way by AI sometimes. BIP110 is the anti ordinals BIP right. It's not. We're not fighting the ghost in that sense. It's been gone for a while. It's companies like Citria that's the problem because they're much more serious than the ordinal scammers. They're trying to really build robust products on top of Bitcoin. As far as I can tell, Citrio died, but it raised.
- [62:11]
Jake Croquet
I don't really know.
- [62:13]
Bitcoin Mechanic
They're trying to just build Ethereum on top of Bitcoin natively. Like that's a stated goal of the project. So they want Turing completeness, they want smart contracts, they want fancy stuff that's like, like zero knowledge roll ups and proofs that are mathematically awe inspiringly complex and wonderful with regards to anyone with the intellectual curiosity. But they are all just ultimately in service of the same scams that Ethereum is in service of. They don't offer anything to anyone. But they are for the intellectually curious, they are amazing just like Ethereum is amazing for the intellectually curious. So those kinds of projects are the ones that because of their complexity and the tiny number of people with the kind of skills in mathematics and computer science required to build them, they cost millions of dollars to do. And that being the case, raising the money for them does require confidence that the underlying network you're using isn't going to tell you to F off. And that was my suspicion with the changes in Core 30 was that not only did they require not being told to F off, they required red carpet treatment. And that was what a lot of people felt was the case with Bitcoin core increasing data carrier size and citing the inscriptions exploit as something that justified it. That was a very specific thing that was done, whether intentionally or by accident, at welcoming in an Ethereum layer being built on top of Bitcoin by saying the way you're planning on using Bitcoin that these people are talking about filtering out. We are going to enshrine as permanently available to you and we are going to cite that in the rationale we use for opening another filter as well, which we hope you will use because it's opereturn instead of the fake pub keys you're using for your fraud proofs. And we will tell people simply that it's better that we opened it because fake pub keys bloat the UTXO set and operand doesn't. So the fact that we've opened this, we invite you to use the network in a non harmful way, but all this is in service of accommodating you. Citria didn't change to using opreturn from using fake pub keys. So that olive branch they were offered became nothing more than a gesture from the developers within Bitcoin that they would not be frustrated in any way and that they were entirely welcome. And my suspicion the whole time was that if they weren't treated like that, they would have left and gone to another ecosystem. And I think again, that's the human aspect of it that I think Core are aware.
- [64:53]
Jake Croquet
That seems to be where a lot of this is missed. I feel like a lot of the knots guys, I don't know I'm going to overgeneralize with this statement. I'm sure people get mad, but it seems to me I kind of like a lot of the Naz guys. I feel like they have an increased understanding of like the human element and the like. Okay, we need to think about what people are going to be thinking when they're running a node and how people, you know, we want more people running nodes. It's better if we have more and more copies of the ledger everywhere, more people relaying. And so, you know, you want to be caring about like the intent of the code so that people have like a more defensible standpoint or whatever or those sorts of things. And I Don't know, I feel like I sort of, I was very partial to the Pro bip110 takes for. I feel like a lot of the same reasons that I was partial to just bitcoin as a whole. And I feel like there is this element of okay, well this is more like the, you have like the miners and you have kind of like quote unquote big bitcoin, right? You have like the bitcoin conference and you have sailor and you have, you know, these guys who a lot of us as plebs, as bitcoiners are like just temperamentally, very disagreeable and anti establishment, you know. And so as this establishment raises, I feel my instinct to want to be like, you know, just take whatever the other side of that is. Especially with some of when you see some of the nasty rhetoric that's come up or very dismissive language of node runners from core developers where they're like, we don't like, I don't like your average bitcoiner or I don't, you know, these people, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sort of stuff that sucks.
- [66:33]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It turns it into politics. Like I really, I hate this stuff because politics is inherently just bullshit and but it's completely unavoidable too. And people call me a hypocrite for this all day because I brought up some of the personal elements of this that in theory should be completely irrelevant like the personal lives of core developers and the, and the, you know, the in groups and the cliques and stuff like that. And there's a lot of left right politics as well. Right Knots guys are all conservatives and Christians and right wing redneck carnivores as you know, Gloria says called us. And they're all like San Francisco New York based, blue head, you know, nose piercing and just like COVID vaccine, all that. There is that obvious cultural line between the two things but.
- [67:24]
Jake Croquet
And there's dangers with both of those temperaments.
- [67:27]
Bitcoin Mechanic
They'll use those heuristics, a lot of people to make judgments on it, right? They'll be like a San Francisco based bunch of 20 year old developers that are all using Marxist language. They're going to use that, right? That's not a technical analysis of whether BIP110 is.
- [67:41]
Jake Croquet
It's just off the vibes. It's just like I got certain vibes from this crowd and you have allegations of whatever. I don't even want to levy any allegations. But there's people who have shown up in shady areas and then you have people who are like, oh, you Used to work with this guy, so you must be a bad guy. Or like, I hate how there's that, like there's this guilty by association thing. Or you think the same thing about this spam filter as somebody else and now like, you're a pedo and it's like, wait, wait, wait, hold on, let's slow down. You know, like, the court of public
- [68:09]
Bitcoin Mechanic
opinion is brutal and it's inaccurate and lynch mobs and all that stuff, I get it. But look, if you want to go all the way out. No one had a problem with anyone in bitcoin core. There was no, we didn't. We weren't people that were going to hang out together on a ranch or in a, you know, grabbing an IPA in a San Francisco bar for $45. Like, sure, we're not, we're not going to get on great. But there was never any animosity. Like, there was just no knowledge of it really. And why did the animosity come around? Well, because you closed the pull request we created to start filtering inscriptions and you opened up data carrier size against massive community opposition. Like, there's no politics in any of that. That's literally just, we don't like what you're doing to bitcoin. And then people start going, why are they doing that? How come they're ignoring the community? Then all the politics starts and all the vitriol and the tribalism and all that stuff. But I don't think people need to lay that at our feet. And that's what Samson keeps doing. They keep saying we are divisive and we have created all these problems and we should apologize. Both sides of my mind, self defense. This is all self defense.
- [69:16]
Jake Croquet
I have such a hard network on conversations. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I have such a hard time when I know two people who I think are well intentioned who want to separate money from state, they want to keep bitcoin decentralized and secure. And whether it's variances in understanding, variances in intentions, or even in lists of priorities, hierarchical ranking of priorities. Like to see it devolve to these personal attacks when it's like, I actually think it's bad for both sides. I think it's bad for the not side because now people are taking their, their technical arguments less seriously because of all the vitriol and all of the personal attacks. And then it's bad for the core side, you know, and we're saying like, it's self defense. Who punched first? I think there's like, that's all Complicated too.
- [70:06]
Bitcoin Mechanic
And who started it is, you know, that is the grown up version of. We call it libertarianism when we're adults. But it's basically just he started it, so he started. I'm just punching back.
- [70:17]
Jake Croquet
Yeah. And I think to be able to like, take some personal punches and be like, okay, I'm gonna like not engage and I'm gonna like continue the technical conversation and that sort of stuff is, is admirable. You know, like to see this even like chivalry, like gentlemanly conflict, even if we are gonna fight, you know, even, you know, that sort of thing, for there to be like some boundaries and it's. We're going to have respect for each other while we're trying to knock each other out or whatever, you know, like some, some balance of that, you know.
- [70:46]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I do think people have to just see through the noise. If you care about bitcoin and it's an important thing to you. I'm not as nasty and as tribal as it has become. Get over it. It's a decentralized network trying to figure out how to move forward. You owe it to yourself. It behooves you to dig through all of the noise and find the signal. I'm sorry that you don't get to care about reinventing money and undermining central banking and doing the mission, realizing the mission of bitcoin and making it successful and say, yeah, but people were being assholes on Twitter, so I gave up. I'm sorry. You just have to dig through it all. Find the signal within the noise. I really don't contribute to the terrible vibes, you know, gratuitously. I've had fun every now and again.
- [71:34]
Jake Croquet
No, you've been exceptional at it. Actually. I've been in some spaces where people are like, where it's like, can we let this guy talk? People ask you a question, you'll like get half a second of like an explanation out and then just cut you off. And then the next guy yells over. The next day, it's like, dude, I've been here for 10 minutes and I've been like sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to hear his answer to this question. And people are just like, you know, being unreasonable.
- [71:55]
Bitcoin Mechanic
There's nothing unreasonable about our position. At the end of the day, we know you can find your way around spam filters. We know that. And we know the minute there's a bit point 10 block, someone's going to fill it with spam that isn't affected by bit point 10. We know that stuff. There aren't really a lot of technical dunks. It's just a rejection of the changes in Core 30. And it works. It will be very effective at what it claims it wants to do. It's just a case of whether it actually gets over the finish line or not. And that's anyone's guess at this point. And I will say that I've been presenting this thing as unknown since it started. I'm very confident that it will succeed, and I've explained why. I'm confident because we had a minority soft fork in 2017 with fewer people supporting it. What they were pushing for was ultimately supported by more people than support bit 10 in the shape of Segwit itself. So those factors make it difficult to compare apples and oranges. But we had around 15,000 nodes now running bip110. That number doesn't seem to be going down. It seems to be. It was dismissed. And this is what I mean, right back to the first thing you played. Do not deceive yourself. Be not deceived. I've asked myself constantly, are the numbers of people running bip110 for fake. Are there a bunch of people on my side running nodes that don't represent any real economic activity within Bitcoin? Are they just spinning them up as a joke? But I was able to corroborate, and anyone really can, by going to Umbrella, by going to start nine. These are the companies that make the boxes that people use to run nodes if they're a pleb, if they don't run, you know, Linux in a VPS somewhere or a Proxim cluster in their house, they're just like a normal bitcoiner that isn't super technical. They want to buy a box that they can plug in one click, install Bitcoin on. Thousands of those people have done that and they've told us all over the place on social media. And I don't care if you're in an echo chamber. You can't block a guy you've never heard of or never met who has 50 followers saying, I'm running bit 10 on my umbrella. Like, how do you not come across that message even if you're on the other side? If you're talking about bitpoint10 being stupid all day, like Stefan Levara and Adam Back and Shinob and Mr. Hodl and Wicked, it's in their algo. They are aware of bit 110 and the algo is going to give them content to that effect on either side. How are they not going to come across these random individuals that no one knows who are doing some three minute monologue, walking around with their shirt off saying I decided to run bit one zero. They're going to see it. I know who's against bitpoint 10. I've seen their arguments, I've interacted with them on a protocol level. No one is running URSF nodes, which are how you actually reject this thing. And they get very upset when I point this out. They're saying, no, we can just ignore it. I'm saying we can get into this more if you want, but there isn't the kind of opposition that anyone can really take seriously if they're trying to make decisions as an exchange or a mining pool. But be not deceived. I'm looking around at the network and I'm saying this thing appears to have the support of around 18% of every single node runner there is on the network at least. And I'm saying that based on these numbers on these websites, and those are corroborated by the sales statistics from Start nine and Umbrell and their personal experience is helping customers out in support who have been asking as humans, genuine humans, how do I run knots? How do I run bip110? What happens if there's a chain split, blah blah blah. They have corroborated all this stuff. Start 9 disclaimer. I used to work there. They represent 25% of all the bitcoin nodes on the network. They've been going for years. They run Bitpoint 10 as a company, right? They've sold millions of dollars worth of servers, Sybil attacks, fake nodes, the kinds of things. And this is where I'm asking who is deceiving themselves? Adam Beck and Callie and a few others came out with this asmap analysis saying the knots nodes are lying. They're less than 2% of the network. There's only 200 of them or something. They said we thought, how could you possibly believe that? I personally know more people that run bip110 than do that. Who is deceiving themselves in this? So I look at the start 9 numbers, I speak to them and they're like, yeah, we sold 500 servers this month. And before all the BitPoint 10 and not stuff blew up, they would sell, you know, maybe a dozen, a couple of dozen servers a month. So their sales shot up. They had back in April 2025 when the change to data carrier size was proposed by Core knots went from less than 1% to above 10% in a month. Around the end of April to around the end of May. And this was unprecedented. And you even saw the number of knots nodes on the network fall in proportion to that. So this was people, this was firstly lots of people that already existed, that already ran nodes switching to knots. And that's just yelling at you. You can say we're running fake knots nodes. You can't say we were running fake core nodes too, that we switched to knots just to create a fake appearance of adoption. And during that window of transition from core to knots, where 10% of the network switched over, another 5,6000 people all put on order a mini PC that they could install Umbrell or Start OS on. And it's there. The download stats from their marketplaces are there. You can see the downloads on GitHub, you can see the sales stats. If you're an investor in Umbrella or Start nine, which loads of people are, you can look at the, the sales statistics and go, wow, Something happened in April 2025. Thousands of people came out and started running nodes and they all did it overwhelmingly to support this rejection of what Bitcoin core was doing. So I don't believe I'm deceiving myself and this is what the source of my confidence is, because I don't think any of those people are going to switch. I don't see any of them next month going, oh well, we tried, it didn't work. So I'm going to switch to Core 31. I don't see that. But I do see the industry saying what does bit110 do? How much risk is there? How much are we going to blow stuff up if we don't start enforcing the rules of bitpoint 10 ourself and adhering to it in our blocks. I don't see any of them not going with the safer option at this point, which is let's mine bit one zero. Any big mining pool that does that basically results in the rest of the network coming along with them pretty quick, which puts them in a way too powerful a position. But because there's no ursf, every single person out there that says they don't like bit 10 but is running a node that will accept bit 110 blocks is deferring all their decision making to a few miners, like every single core supporter out there anti bip110 person is running a node that will accept bit 110 blocks from a mining pool because they don't actually oppose it at the protocol level. And you need to so we can get into that In a bit, because I really. One of the main concerns has been from Greg and others like that, that minority soft forks represent a threat to Bitcoin because people being able to change it without overwhelming consensus means they can degrade it by the same process. And I'm saying, well, if ever there was a genuinely bad UASF like bitpoint10, but with negative intentions, I wouldn't just be talking about how it sucked on Twitter and lying about its motives. I would actually oppose it at the protocol level. And I would be able to achieve a shelling point for that because I would be able to point out matter of factly what's bad about it and launch a credible resistance that could be large enough to actually thwart it. But no one's done that with Bitpoint 10. They're just mocking it on Twitter and misrepresenting its goals, which isn't effective because there's no manifestation of that at the protocol level. A mining pool can say, adam back hates this fork, but at the end of the day, I don't want 15,000 nodes to throw my block in the garbage. And it's not going to be more accepted because of a tweet, but it is going to be more accepted if I flip this version bit. So I'll stop there because I'm saying way too much. I know you want to break it down into chunks.
- [80:20]
Jake Croquet
It's all right. Yeah. And there's a lot of. A few more things that I definitely want to get to, so I might try to expedite some of that. But there was something you said that I do want to dig in on. Is UASF user accepted soft fork? How do we define whether or not it's been accepted? Right. Like at 18% adoption rate in nodes, you know, which, you know, there's the caveats of, okay, you could have Sybil attacks. It doesn't. I know a lot of people who have made the switch. I made the switch. I was running knots. You said, I don't know. A lot of people have gone back. I've considered it more recently as I've, you know, as I. It's not. It's not as black and white as I feel like almost anyone I've talked to about it seems to make it out to be, even though I, like, given all that I know all that I don't know. And as I dug more into it, all I did was uncover more that I didn't know. I mean, I definitely learned things. Right. But then it was like, oh, wow, okay, so this thing and this Little variable here that I wasn't even considering is infinitely more complex than I'd initially. I put like spam into a single bucket and it's like, okay, wait, so we have this spam, this spam, this spam, and then you can defend it and risks, whatever. Right. But yeah, so what's the threshold for. So I just. To your point, I've definitely seen. I don't think that these are like a spin up of a bunch of civil nodes. I spun up an OTS node. I know a lot of people have adopted and are like serious bitcoiners have been here for a long time and they think that this is the best path forward. Right. But what makes it accepted? What's the threshold to be like, okay, this is now an accepted soft fork?
- [81:57]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Well, that's anyone's guess. I think people are really. I don't have a better heuristic, really. That's the point. There are. Consensus is the name of the game, right? That's what everyone likes. And I found that people are incredi. I should hold myself to a higher standard than other people. But I'm in a context where people will use consensus to just mean I support this fork and everyone that doesn't support it is lying. That's what people tend to do. So when we're engaging in revisionist history about 2016 and 2017, we just say, Segwit had consensus. Segwit definitely didn't have consensus. I represented it as having consensus in the past and people are calling me out on that today. And I can hold my hands up and say, yeah, I was wrong. People are wrong about stuff and people engage in wishful thinking. But the truth is, if Segwit had consensus, there wouldn't have been the block size war. People would have agreed to activate it regardless. People opposed Segwit because they wanted big blocks. And the reason Bitcoin Cash exists is because there were a sizable amount of bitcoiners, prominent ones that were heavily against SEGWIT being activated. They didn't activate Segwit on bitcoin cash. And you don't get to dismiss those people and pretend you have consensus because you want the warm fuzzy feelings of never having made any enemies or argued with anyone. It was a war. You fought on one side of it and you won that war. You don't get to erase its history because it makes you uncomfortable. And you want to hold that standard over the head of people you disagree with in the future.
- [83:40]
Jake Croquet
Why do you think you were wrong? About Segwit, you said I was wrong about. You were just wrong about it having consensus or.
- [83:46]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, Segwit didn't have consensus. A lot of people liked it and there was a lot of. It definitely had a lot of support. But if it had straight up consensus it would have activated without any drama. And it wasn't just Bitmain blocking the activation of it. It wasn't just a mistake made in the activation logic that put too much power in the hands of miners. It's further than that. It had genuine pushback. I considered all the pushback ill founded and wrong, so I was happy to dismiss those people. But that doesn't mean I get to say it had consensus. Taproot was closer to consensus.
- [84:24]
Jake Croquet
Right, but you still think that it was. Keep going. Excuse me.
- [84:27]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So yeah, Taproot was closer to consensus. Very few people had strong opinions about it one way or the other and most of the people that were into it said it was great. Literally. I only know of one person ever that said Taproot sucks because the addresses are quantum vulnerable. They're public keys. That was it. And people went well. Bitcoiners still aren't treating quantum computers as a real threat in any material way anyway. They still upload their X pubs onto software while it's connected to the Internet, which in the world of quantum computing is the same as putting your private keys on your laptop. So this we are not treating quantum computing as a real threat to Bitcoin anyway. I digress. Bit 110 does not have consensus. It has support from the people I would trust with having Bitcoin's interests at heart. I think the people that are opposed to it typically have conflicts of interest. So David Bailey and the Bitcoin magazine empire, they are direct investors in things like inscriptions. They are investors in inscriptions in companies like the Taproot wizards. All these people want to use Bitcoin as a data layer. BIP 110 is a deliberate rejection of that. It's not watertight, but it will have a chilling effect on the kinds of things they want to do. The financial motive there is obvious and it's a very obvious conflict of interest. Other people like podcasters and influential personalities within Bitcoin, people that are very into stablecoins, all of those guys have their own designs and intentions with bitcoins too, or sponsorships from people that do. Those people have their own conflicts of interest as well. They are. They do not want to get disinvited from conferences. The biggest conference is the Bitcoin magazine Conference. So again, very easy to see what the conflicts of interests are. I don't think any talking head or podcaster is someone that you can consider free of conflicts of interest. Anyone with sponsorships, from hardware wallet manufacturers to companies like Blockstream to. I mean, they don't want to upset their sponsors is the point there. I'm saying these people, they are influential. They are obviously very widely followed by people like, you know, like the people you brought up in this video. But they have careers in the bitcoin industry, so they're worried about how what they say blows back on them. If Stefan Lavara was to say I support bitpoint10, he's not going to be the compare on the various panels that you see at Bitcoin 2027. He's going to get rejected from that. And that represents an employment opportunity for him. The man has a family. He's. He doesn't want to create, you know, economic hardship on for the people in his family. This is very understandable. You can he. He might get very offended by this and say he really is doing all this on principle. But you know, we're looking at what's in front of our face here.
- [87:32]
Jake Croquet
I think there are a lot of, A lot of anti bip110 guys doing this stuff on principle. That's been. One thing that I've had a tough time with more of the. The Pro Bip 110 conversation is that I feel like there's. And had a tough time slash was guilty of it myself. You know, there was like two weeks ago whenever I'd hear when someone was like anti bip110, I was like, is this guy a spook? Is he. Who's. Which. Which three letter agency is he in bed with, you know, or like. And you know, it's, it's. I try to recognize those things in myself. Cause it's easy to get swept up in. I mean I wasn't on this train, but you look at something like Covid and you see how many people get swept up in that. Like that, I don't know, that mob mentality sort of thing.
- [88:14]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Right.
- [88:14]
Jake Croquet
And it's so compelling. It's so easy to get swept up and especially with someone I think especially for bitcoiners with people who. They have this. They have the capacity to stand their ground, you know, and go against the grain and go against the mob and so. And even enjoy it to some degree. Like I kind of like it. You know, it's kind of fun. And so I try to like watch that Spirit rise in myself, you know, and be like, okay, is this. Cause there's utility to that. There's so much utility to that. It's part of why we're all here. Yet you have to be careful of it at the same time.
- [88:42]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, we're very tribal. Like, I don't think people should decry it or celebrate tribalism. It just is what humans are and is there for a perfectly good reason. And again, I'm not gonna. I don't like that kind of New Agey atheist, I'm beyond the tribe kind of vibe. Like, I'm not. I get swept up in red team and blue team, even in US Politics, which I shouldn't. I know it's dumb, but I still do. Like, so.
- [89:07]
Jake Croquet
But I wonder, as a Christian, if you think, like. Because I think my view as a Christian is, like, my tribe is humanity, right? Like. Like, we're. We're all sons and daughters of the one true God. It's, you know, not to go too far off the rails on the finance podcast, right? But it's like. But that's. That's my perspective. And so I wonder, you know, obviously there is the reality of this earth that we live in if, like, people are coming, if they're at the walls, want to come in and kill you and take everything you own, you know, Like, I don't think the right response is be like, well, let's go. These are our brothers and sisters. Let's go pray for them and get stabbed or whatever, right? But I think that. That there's a balance there.
- [89:47]
Bitcoin Mechanic
That's the point, in my opinion. This was the crux of sailors 110 reasons against Bitpoint 10. The final section of it was, we are all on the same team. We are all bitcoiners, and we should all be fighting the same battle. And this, to me, is the same deception of misuse of Christian principles against Christians, because Christians are turning love thy enemy into pretend no one is your enemy, which is not the same thing.
- [90:15]
Jake Croquet
Well, nobody is your enemy, I don't think. I think that, like, other people. Well, maybe other people, like, conceptualize themselves as your enemy, right? But to me, it's like, we wrestle not with flesh and blood. It's like, none of you are my enemy. I'm wrestling with, like, the spiritual things here. And if you're captured by these spiritual entities, like, it doesn't mean that I won't shoot you if you try to kill me. I don't want to throw crazy things on the Internet, but if you come into My house, watch out.
- [90:38]
Bitcoin Mechanic
But it means you will defend yourself. You'll be prepared to defend yourself if necessary. That's all because the pacifism that it's like the meek shall inherit the earth. It's trying to push a pacifist kind of narrative that isn't the intention of the wisdom. And bitcoin is.
- [90:58]
Jake Croquet
I won't dig into that actually keep going.
- [91:00]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Fair enough.
- [91:01]
Jake Croquet
So I think it's a misinterpretation of the meek will inherit the earth. But we can do Agree. Okay. Yeah, sure.
- [91:07]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. That's my point is that people have taken that to mean. Yeah. You can't ever have an opinion or a spine on anything. You just have to go along with everything. It's a bully. Bullying tactic to silence people that try and.
- [91:20]
Jake Croquet
But I think the humble. The humble will find them will be more likely to find themselves on the correct path. When you're like, okay, like, you know, yeah, certainly.
- [91:28]
Bitcoin Mechanic
And that has been. I've been watching the other side constantly say this fork is dead. It's dead on arrival. These guys losers are going to fork themselves off. And I've constantly hubris thinking that sounds like hubris. And there is not the same on my side. There are a lot of people saying, I don't care if we get forked off. I'm happy to die on the hill, but I think we'll win. Right. That to me has been an essential perspective to maintain because if we ever get arrogant on our side, we deserve to lose. So I don't want to bring about that kind of. I don't want to get taught how to be humble. I don't want to be humbled again. I want to be humble already because those lessons hurt way too much. So I think I'll further say it like bitcoin is definitely under attack. That's logical given the nature of what it's trying to do. It's going to have subversive actors within it trying to undermine its mission. Even if that's just a redirect focus from it being a freedom monetary platform to a number go up stonk. Right. So invest in my treasury company instead of buying the proper thing. Right. That's a very good attack because people have green dollar signs in their eyes and they want to get rich. And that's what the crypto scam has always been. It's always been, I like bitcoin, buy my crypto. That's always been the scam forever. And whenever the crypto guys would face any kind of issues because of how centralized they are or because of how corrupt they are, they would always run to bitcoin for comfort and say, we're all in this together. Crypto is one big happy family. Why don't we fight the government that's coming after us? And bitcoiners would always say, this is nonsense. We have nothing. You are just affinity scamming. You're trying to make people think you are the next bitcoin. You attack us all day long because you want the money that would go into bitcoin otherwise. And the minute you get in trouble, you try and hide behind us because we're the biggest thing in the whole space. So this is what I see, that same mentality at the end of sailor's 110 reasons. It's we are all in this together. We need to fight and focus on bigger battles. And I'm saying, no, I don't agree with that. I think we are under attack from people trying to corrupt bitcoin and we can't pretend that the people engaging in the attack aren't in order to get along and have a nice happy family because that would be again, self delusion. Bitcoin is under attack from within. I feel like most of the people engaging in the attack aren't even aware of that. They're just doing what they've got to do on a day to day level. Zoomed in on what it is they need to get done without paying too much attention to the wider implications.
- [94:01]
Jake Croquet
All right, so let's see if we could try to approach some of this. And like, I don't know, we went through a lot of great rabbit holes. I'm having fun but like, I try and see if I can like speed run some of this explanation for people at home to understand. Okay, so what is the, what are some of the rebuttals to things that you're saying here? What are some of the rebuttals to things that Samson was saying to me last week that, you know, a lot of people saw that and I was like, I wasn't deep enough in the Pro Bip110 side of the thing to be able to mount very compelling, like antithetical, like, you know, and half. You'll see, I'll play some of it for you. But I was like, I think mechanic said this thing that I like don't really understand. And you know, like, this is Stefan's. So this is what he sent me in terms of like, okay, here's like the antithesis to some of the points that I was Sharing. And I was like, okay, this is informative. I didn't know a lot about it. A lot about some of this stuff at least. So this says the anatomy of a transaction. This is where data can live in a transaction. We have the. And then he sort of grades them by like how disruptive they are to the network, which, you know, who are the metrics or what are the metrics of that exactly? I'm not sure just in terms of total data that comes onto the network when you have. It can be more damaging in different places because there's the UTXO set has to use often stored in ram. It has to be readily available versus things that are longer term file storage. So the only harm they do are in terms of downloading the whole transaction, the whole blockchain, the time it takes to download it, and the sort of hardware you need to be able to store it. So there's the UTXO set Spam Witness Data spam and Opreturn spam. And he grades these by saying that UTXO set spam is the most damaging. And that has to do with. Because it's because of the way that it's stored, essentially. Witness inscriptions are moderate. And this is the level that. Is this the level that Taproot is on? Yes. Okay. Yeah. And then Opreturn is provably unspendable data that nodes immediately know they never need to track it as a spendable coin. So it's easily prunable. So what do you think of this first section?
- [96:12]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, I think it's. Again, I will not disagree with you. If there's going to be a bunch of homeless junkies in the middle of your downtown, is it better for them to use clean needles or not? No one would deny clean needles are better, but it misses the whole point of what your downtown is actually supposed to be for, which is not. It should be a place you can go to without getting in issues. Right. We made the point already. It's correct, but it's missing context.
- [96:40]
Jake Croquet
Okay. Because then my response where I was like, okay, this makes sense to me. I'm understanding what you're saying here. I think Nick Szabo shared this tweet that I re shared here and I was like, okay, so would it not be better to fight spam at every level, regardless of how damaging? Like, is that what you think it is? You think we should be fighting it at that at the opera turn at every level rather than saying these are more damaging so we should welcome it here? That's nuanced. Man, that's hard for me to be like, oh, there's clearly something that seems like the right call here. Because part of me thinks, yeah, fight it everywhere. Like, why? Like,
- [97:19]
Bitcoin Mechanic
bitcoin is amazing. If you want to store data on other people's computers, it really is amazing. It sucks for the people who you're doing that to because they can't really delete it even if it's in opereturn. They still basically need to keep it around if they want to run wallet software like it's. The opereturn is the least harmful per a bunch of metrics. But I don't know where you are on nutrition science and all that, but, like, everyone's on statins because they want to make their LDL lower on a piece of paper and then they have heart issues from the statins, making the whole thing pointless Again, it's myopic. Focusing on a number like it is. Every fake pub key that is an opera turn instead is technically better, but you always have to ignore the context. And for me, the title of his piece, Spam on Bitcoin, why We Can Never Stop it, for me, that's characterized that as saying we can't have freedom because that would require eternal vigilance. It's flipping an adage upside down in a way to uninspire people, and it serves as a call to inaction. You're going to fight spam on bitcoin forever. And when we give up, then it will suck and it will be centralized. That's it. I'm not saying we can win. I'm saying I have no choice but to fight it. So it's a misframing of the whole thing. I know we can never stop spam on bitcoin, but I know we've managed to keep.
- [98:37]
Jake Croquet
And we'll never be forever free. It will be this eternal struggle, which I found that compelling, where I was like, okay, I think that you should be able to spin up a bitcoin node, fall into a coma for 10 years, wake up and be like, my node's fine, everything's fine. And I was like, why would we optimize for something other than that? And then this is the most compelling case against that is not like, let's add a bunch of additional functionality to bitcoin. We want to have this thing or that thing or whatever people think their proposal to make bitcoin better is. But. But the side that says but you need to understand Bitcoin will be under attack. Things that provide freedom and allow people to portal out of tyrannical structures will be attacked by the tyrants, by those who hold the power currently. And so, sure, if you want it to be like that, that'd be great, but that's not the world we live in. And we need to continue to defend it and stay vigilant, and people need to continue. Cause I was kind of, like, annoyed when this came up. I was like, ugh, I don't even want to dig into it. I wish I didn't have to, you know?
- [99:44]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, you want to. Just. Everyone wants to. You want to fix it and leave it, but you can't. Bitcoin requires maintenance.
- [99:51]
Jake Croquet
The.
- [99:51]
Bitcoin Mechanic
The, you know, the tree of liberty watered with the blood of tyrants.
- [99:54]
Jake Croquet
Like, it's.
- [99:54]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It's. It's how it works.
- [99:56]
Jake Croquet
America turned into this.
- [99:57]
Bitcoin Mechanic
People got complacent. America was great. It sucks. Now people have to continually say, no, this is what the Constitution says this is. You have to fight for these things, otherwise you lose them. It's. It's just a rule of how things work. There's no. The Constitution was not so good that you could just say, america's perfect. See you later. Because it will turn to trash unless you defend it. Same as bitcoin. It's. Satoshi was amazing. He got everything almost perfect, but it still can turn to complete trash. And we have, again, we have the case study, we have all the cryptocurrencies that didn't do it right. And bitcoin will just suffer the same fate as all those guys if it doesn't maintain some kind of focus on being a monetary network that eschews other use cases. The use case, the, you know, the. The appeal of these platform maximalist people that wrap up what they're saying in censorship, resistance, and free market. These appeals to free market freedoms and things like that. They're just parasites that never understood the. The dichotomy or the interrelationship, rather, between responsibility and freedom. They just want freedom. They don't have any regard for responsibility. No, you have to steward bitcoin into being. Maintaining a decentralized ethos, and it needs to be manifestly always gaining decentralization. It must always be reasserting that as a priority. If it doesn't, it will just become centralized, and then it doesn't matter what it is you want to do with it. You'll always need someone else's permission. That's the end of it for me.
- [101:38]
Jake Croquet
And that seems like a balancing game to me. It's not exactly like, we need to do this thing. We need to do that thing. But it's like, okay, you need to optimize for. This is a game. We're playing an economic game together. We've set clear rules, 21 million, this is how it operates, blah, blah, blah. Right. So there's clear boundaries and clear rules and those need to be enforced. But, but in a way, sort of like a yin yang side of this where it's like we need something. Bitcoin is something that is allowing freedom in an area of tyrannical order. Right. So it's like an antidote in some ways. But then even within Bitcoin we need to enforce the like. These are the strict boundaries, these are the strict rules, even though those are enforced by not a centralized entity, but this distributed group. And that's part of why it provides this freedom. Yeah, I think that's important.
- [102:26]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I put that before, I completely agree and I've tried to juxtapose that before. It takes a certain degree of maturity to understand that freedom and boundaries complement one another in any real sense. You cannot have any kind of realistic free association, free market freedom, money. You can't have any of those things in a context where you don't respect the kind of boundaries that you need to define things properly. You know, you can't take freedom to the point where there's nothing anymore. The laws of physics aren't even respected. It doesn't work. You have to, you have to say, all right, you know, our country has become corrupt. We're going to break away and make our own country. If you do that with a group of people, you're going to have structures and conventions that you must adhere to to make that project work. And if people deviate from them, that's going to create problems and chaos that make it impractical. So it's only children that can't understand that. If you want freedom that comes with discipline and discipline is self imposed limitations on your own behavior. Like, you have to accept that as a as and you have to be able to reconcile the two things and know what tyranny is versus what's constructive limitations. Like all the soft forks. Bitcoin is freedom as a result of, of rules, which if you can't handle the contradiction of that, it's because you're being, I guess, philosophically naive. Bitcoin is very, very hardcore rules. And people complain about those rules and call it authoritarian. And I'm saying, well, the freedom that comes with Bitcoin is only as a consequence of the rules it enforces on the people that use it. If those rules were not to be enforced, Bitcoin would be just the same as fiat. It would be an ever changing mess where constantly, whatever happened, it just siphoned away your purchasing power. Someone somewhere would figure out how to rob from you. So, yeah, I can tell that. I think that people. This is not that complicated, right? I'm no mastermind, philosopher or economic theoretician or anything. I'm just. These things are. Again, it's just a misuse of a principle. Bitcoin is about freedom. Bitpoint 10 is rules, therefore it's anti Bitcoin. Right? And I'm saying, well, 21 million is a rule as well, and you benefit greatly from that rule and you would suffer massively if we eroded that rule. Do you not agree?
- [104:52]
Jake Croquet
And that enforcement you're saying, and I think that this is important, is those enforcement. It's sort of like the nodes are steering the ship and the miners are rowing the boat kind of is the analogy that seems to map for me. I wonder if that sounds right to you. But it's like, like you're enforcing those rules at the node level and then the miners power everything. So, like, if you had no miners, your nodes would be useless, right? It's like, okay, you have these rules, but like, nothing's running, so your, your ship is moving. It's like, okay, I'm, I, I have my rudders steered there, but if nobody's rowing, then it doesn't matter, you know, so there's that element of it. But it, but yeah, that seems to be right to me.
- [105:31]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I guess it is. I immediately get a picture of slaves rowing like a Roman galleon or something, which I don't want to, I don't want to dismiss the miners as slaves. They do get paid and it is all voluntary. But not that that was even what you implied. But the point is, yeah, they don't decide the direction of the boat, they just give it the power. And I think that's a nice analogy for how it works.
- [105:55]
Jake Croquet
But maybe we do have to cooperate with them because it's like we are like hiring them, you know, Like, I get the analogy you put forward of the picture, but it's like it's more like we're being like, hey, I have this bounty for whoever wants to rail me across the ocean, you know, and.
- [106:08]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Well, I do agree.
- [106:09]
Jake Croquet
I have the bounty. It's actually not right. Yeah, I don't know.
- [106:11]
Bitcoin Mechanic
No, I agree. But we are not at war with miners at all. We were in 2017 to some extent, because bitmain represented such a massive amount of the mining ecosystem, but no one in the mining space has come out and said, I hate Bitpoint 10. I'm against it. All that's happened so far that we know of is Wang Chun six months ago, who it runs F2 Pool, said, I hate Bitpoint 10. Fair enough, he did. No one else has commented on it until last week, when it looks like this is still unconfirmed, by the way, but it looks to be true. Foundry asked their miners, do you guys want us to flip the bit for bit 110? If 51% of you say yes, then we'll flip the bit. That's not war, that's just the guys rowing saying, we don't know which way we're supposed to row right now. So we've asked, do you want to give us the answer? And also importantly, they're saying, it's not our decision. And they've passed the buck onto the hashes that are connected to their pool. That, to me, demonstrates a very, very surprisingly accurate understanding of their position and their role in the network. People have come at the BIP1 tenors and said, none of the miners are signaling for BIP110, therefore it won't happen. And my response is always, it's not their decision whether it happens or not. So Foundry coming out and saying, we don't have an opinion on this. It's not our place to have an opinion. We're asking our miners is quite edifying because that completely confirms my understanding of network hierarchy. I should caveat that it somewhat confirms it because it's not their hash's decision either. But they have at least said it's not theirs. And I agree with them that it's not theirs. What now is appropriate is for the hashes on Foundry to say, well, it's not our decision either. Why don't we look at what the network is indicating? Let's look at the nodes. Let's ascertain whether they're real or not. There's too many of them for us to ignore and there's too much risk. So we will defer to the network and flip the bit to version. You know, flip version bit 4 and start signaling for bit 110. And foundry will say, okay, you listen to the network now we're listening to you. Then Foundry, flip the bit and at that point, it's over. Every single other pool has to signal too. Because of the basic asymmetry of soft fork activation, it would make it a silly thing for other pools to pretend they can ignore at that point. And they've already stopped pretending they can ignore it even at 0% or 1% signaling now that foundry with their 25, 30% have acknowledged it and demonstrated a willingness to flip the bit. If they are pushed to do so by their miners, who should be pushed to do so by the network, that should begin the cascade. And at that point no one has any complaining left to do. There was never a credible opposition, there was never any pushback or a counter fork proposed that ever got off the ground. Because again, there's nothing really to give you any rationale for doing so. It should just be a technical matter of implementation at this point. You've got got 19 days left. It should just be the case that over the next 10 or 11 days the pools say, we've done our analysis. We don't think we can afford to not flip the bit. It's not our decision anyway. We are being pushed into doing this and then we just go on with our lives and bitcoin gets better and then we fight the next battle whenever it comes.
- [109:34]
Jake Croquet
I think I don't need to get through every point on this, but this is a summary of this, of Stefan's kind of rebuttals to some of these. I think we probably won't get to this too, but this is just something Matt sent me, Matt Crowder, when we were talking last week about like you want to go through, do a bip110 code walkthrough. So these are, you know, this is a good place if you want like the. The anti. Some of the anti takes, you can find them here. If you want some of the pro takes, you can find them here. This walks through exactly what. You know what, let's actually just go over the summary at the end of this. I'd love to hear. There's seven things. This is the seven rules, one enforcement flag. I wonder if you could walk me through these step by step and give me like that or one by one and just give me why? Yeah, what it's doing and why it's doing it.
- [110:23]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Here's what it does. Rule number one, it limits new output scripts. New script pub keys above 34 bytes are invalid except opreturn outputs which will be 83 bytes. Right. So a script pub key is just an output. No outputs can be bigger than 34 bytes. Right. So this limits a lot of the, you know, fake pub key stuff. They can still exist, they will just be smaller. That one should be pretty self explanatory. It reduces large data pushes or Push data payloads and witness witness argument items are capped at 256 bytes with a narrow P2SH redeem script exception. And that one's. I don't know exactly how to explain that. My understanding of it is, I don't know, is too poor for that. I'll come back to it at the end if it's not sort of covered in combination with other things, if that's all right.
- [111:19]
Jake Croquet
Okay, one question about the first one is like, what does that stop exactly?
- [111:26]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Well, fake pub keys can be a lot bigger than 34 bytes, if I understand correctly. And yeah, I think that just makes
- [111:35]
Jake Croquet
it so that fake on limits in sections of the code, essentially.
- [111:42]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Well, not the code. This is literally outputs. Yeah, outputs are literally bitcoin addresses. Right. And they can. A fake pub key is something that looks like an address that you paid, but it isn't actually a bitcoin address. So you have that famous one one bitcoin eater address. Don't send. You can create a transaction that sends bitcoin to that they'll never be spendable because it's not a real pub key. It doesn't have a private key that allows you to spend from that address. So that's a fake out stuff there. Yeah, this is the. This is the juxtaposition with op return because opreturn says I'm not a real output. Whereas a fake pub key, your computer thinks it is a real output, so
- [112:24]
Jake Croquet
it has got to keep track of it because there's bitcoin there.
- [112:27]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Okay, so rule one is preventing fake pub keys being above a certain size. I believe Rule 3 spend only defined witness versions. Yeah, you can store arbitrary data inside various witness versions if you like. That's not possible because we have a whole bunch of witness versions you can put in when you're constructing a transaction that tells your node what type of witness version the transaction is. And what BIP1.0 does is it says, well, there are only a couple of those known. You've got Taproot and all the other kinds that we've left placeholders for are now all invalid right at the moment. Inside Bitcoin core they're all treated as non standard. So there is a spam filter there that. That prevents transactions being relayed that use undefined witness versions. But BIP110 will make it so again that that becomes consensus invalid rather than just non standard. So that one, I don't think there's a lot.
- [113:28]
Jake Croquet
It goes from saying that's a non standard transaction where people are discouraged from Relaying it. And it's more difficult to get into the block to saying you can't. This cannot. This will not get onto the blockchain.
- [113:40]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Exactly. Again, yeah, just a thing that's already.
- [113:45]
Jake Croquet
Are there any risks of that that you can see clearly?
- [113:48]
Bitcoin Mechanic
No, nothing exists that uses those Witness versions. Right. You only have a couple of Witness types that are defined within people using Segwit or Taproot. There's only a couple of. It's something like eight zeros, and if the last zero is a one, that means it's a SegWit transaction. And if the second to last zero is a one, then that means it's a Taproot transaction. This is. I'm probably like grossly simplifying it here. But the point, you're going to have
- [114:16]
Jake Croquet
to get that for me.
- [114:17]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So I appreciate it if you were to make that like that field of eight zeros, be like, you know, 1:1, 1:1:1 or something like that. That's an unknown use of Witness. So what nodes do by now is if they see a transaction that does that, they treat it as non standard and they don't relay it because there's an unknown use of segwit that's like. It's a placeholder. Like if we come up with a bunch of new upgrades to Bitcoin, they will use the new version, they will use the new defined Witness versions, they will become defined in the process, and then those transactions will indicate what kind of Witness version they are using inside the transaction itself. Like if. Do you Sparrow Wallet or anything like that? Have you. Have you ever seen like a RAW transaction? Right. So at the beginning of it, it looks like 020000. That's how it looks. So I'm just going to pull up my Sparrow now and literally look at it. No, because I'll totally dox myself if I do that. Wait, let me just look at a transaction ID View transaction. Yeah, so at the beginning of it you've just got Sparrow's. Great. Cause if you make a transaction, it shows you the details at the bottom and it starts with if it's Segwit, it's going to start with 020-0000 and that's telling you what kind of transaction it is. And it doesn't become invalid. You're not making a fake transaction without a private key that you know about simply because you're using an undefined version bit or sorry, version of the witness. You're not using a defined Witness version within the transaction. I have exhausted my knowledge on what the actual function of that is, because you can still generate valid transactions that use undefined witness versions. So I don't know what function this actually plays. Adding this to a transaction, if you use the wrong one, then I don't know if that would make the transaction invalid or not. But this is something that I'm going to get. I'm going to spread too much misinformation about if I keep opining on it. So I'm going to have to humbly say I don't know enough about it to elaborate beyond that. So reject Taproot annexes. Yep. That's just a way you could conceivably add data to Bitcoin that is disabled by Bitpoint 10. This is decried by the people that want to add ln symmetry, which is rather a frivolous concern because there are other ways to add LN symmetry and we've been trying to add LN symmetry for five years. One more year of not being able to add it by your preferred method is not the end of the world. Cap Taproot control blocks. So that does a lot. Taproot. Do you understand what Merklized script trees do? Do you know much about merkleization?
- [117:13]
Jake Croquet
Not really. I've heard the merkle tree. I've heard the term thrown around before, but I don't. I don't understand.
- [117:20]
Bitcoin Mechanic
The way it worked before Taproot was that you could have like, you know, suppose you. The one everyone likes is the inheritance plan, right? I have a situation where if I like. All right, let's just make a crazy contrived scenario that's not even technically possible. But supposing you're like, I have my whole stash sitting here. I can only spend 10% of it if I want to spend it today or within the next six months. If I want to spend 50% of it, I need to wait longer than six months. So that's a condition you place on it, like a time lock. And if I want to spend. If I want to send it, if I want to send it immediately, then I need three out of the three signers to sign off on it. If I want two out of the three signatures to sign it, because maybe I lost one of the private keys or maybe someone disappeared or, you know, we fell out and now I don't have his signature to sign the multisig, then we have to wait a whole year before we can do it right? These are spending conditions and you can make all of them. You can Enshrine all of them into the. Into the way a UTXO will ultimately be consumed. And pre taproot, this is time locks.
- [118:34]
Jake Croquet
Like is it like time locks multisig, all this stuff is built on top of that. Okay, so those are all need to be very large amounts of data to set up those. Like if this, then this sort of.
- [118:47]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, well, the only point I'm bringing it up is because those spending conditions have to be satisfied. And in segwit land, pre taproot, when you would satisfy the conditions, you would publish the entire logic of whatever the script was to change.
- [119:02]
Jake Croquet
Yes.
- [119:03]
Bitcoin Mechanic
And then people would verify. Yep, everything in this script was adhered to. Taproot broke it up into it merklized it all the different script paths into separate leaves or tap leaves where you wouldn't need to write all of the conditions. So supposing like we need a two of three multisig to send money. That's one of the spending conditions. Supposing we did that. That's all you need to reveal in taproot land. Even if there were another bunch of
- [119:31]
Jake Croquet
the word merkalize because you just lost me. And I'm sure that's probably like most of the audience too, maybe. But can you, can you explain? Yeah, what is that? What does that mean?
- [119:41]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, a merkle tree or merkleized scripts very importantly mean that supposing I can spend. Let's simplify it because I don't explain this stuff often enough to be able to do it smoothly and I'm pretty newbie at it myself. Supposing you've got. I can spend the coins this way or this way or this way. Pre taproot, spending them, any of those three ways meant telling the world all of these ways were possible. And I chose this one. In taproot land, when you go to spend because it's merkleized, you only reveal the one that you actually did spend. I won't use my middle finger for it. You absolutely only reveal the one you did spend and the merkle root of it, which proves that there was some. It doesn't reveal the other conditions. So that's good for privacy and it's good for saving space because you don't need to write all of the ways. I could have spent this nine different ways. I chose way number seven. Instead you just say I'm spending this with this way. That is one way of spending them. And you don't know what the other options were. But the more conditions there are and the later it is in I Guess the stack. That's definitely the wrong word. The bigger the taproot control block gets. So a merkle tree is a binary tree. It has the root, then it has two different things, and each of those has two different things. So you've got four and then it multiplies to eight and then 16.
- [121:02]
Jake Croquet
So when it gets confirmed on one path, you're basically saying you only reveal one of those paths and not every other part of the tree.
- [121:10]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Exactly. Okay, yep. So you reveal the relevant leaf, the merkle root, and the path between the two of them. That's how it works with. But the, the depth of the leaf that you're using. Supposing it only goes to 2 to the 8. Right. So 2 to the power of the 8. That's what bit 10 actually allows. And when, if you were to spend the last one in that whole tree structure, you would have a control block that's 257 bytes, which is the maximum that's allowed by BitPoint 10. As you see in Rule 5, if you were to have a tree that was bigger than that, with more than 128 leaves, that is more than 128 ways you can spend your taproot UTXO. If you use something after the 128th leaf, like the 129th leaf, the control block will be too big and the transaction will become consensus invalid.
- [122:05]
Jake Croquet
And so by saying you can only see one piece of that merkle tree. So I'm assuming people are finding creative ways to embed data in all these other places along it. And so by only making one of those public, you're removing the rest of the merkle tree as a place to embed spam.
- [122:24]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, it's potentially. It's the tree. I don't know how exactly they get the data into the control block. That's beyond my technical understanding.
- [122:33]
Jake Croquet
I probably don't want to tell them how. Tell people how to do it either, but. Okay, so I think I'm trying to just wrap my head around like the intentions, I guess.
- [122:41]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, for sure. Taproot control blocks can be used to add, I think it's four kilobytes of data. So limiting their size means that you can't just generically add arbitrary data in that way anymore because they can only be 257 bytes max. Even if you figure out some way to hack in 4 kilobytes of data using fake, you know, because what's going in these tap leaves isn't necessarily real script code. That's what the Inscriptions hack is they have one tap leaf that just says if 0 equals 1 and then a picture, they just stuff a JPEG after that. It's not script because obviously your computer sees if zero equals one and then ignores everything after that because zero doesn't equal one. So it's not real executable code.
- [123:26]
Jake Croquet
And that's 4,000 kilobytes that would fit in there versus now you're saying four kilobytes or, sorry, four kilobytes, which is 400,000 or 4,000.
- [123:37]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, 4,000 bytes.
- [123:39]
Jake Croquet
Four kilobytes. I'm just trying to get that the
- [123:40]
Bitcoin Mechanic
whole block is only a million bytes, right? Or, well, 4 million if you're going with the weight.
- [123:46]
Jake Croquet
Okay.
- [123:47]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah.
- [123:48]
Jake Croquet
Okay.
- [123:48]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So cool, cool, cool.
- [123:49]
Jake Croquet
Yeah.
- [123:49]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Keep in mind this is a lot of. This gets on the edge of my knowledge too.
- [123:53]
Jake Croquet
Yeah.
- [123:54]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So I'm happy to go on to
- [123:56]
Jake Croquet
it or who is it not on the edge of their knowledge. Is it. Luke is like the primary person who
- [124:01]
Bitcoin Mechanic
could be like, yeah, Luke came up with these parameters for sure. So Luke would he. It was a mailing list discussion that was off the end of Portland Hodl trying to figure out a way to stop poison block attacks, which Bitpoint 10 does stop the poison block attack as well. So that's another motivation for it. That's actually why some people support it. It's a very small minority of bit 110 supporters have that as their reason, but it is there, and that is, funnily enough, how this whole thing came around. So, yeah, the poison block attack is thwarted by miners not being able to make arbitrarily large amounts of stuff that gets disguised as engine code that grinds a node to a halt, where it takes a whole hour to figure out whether a block is valid or not. Preventing that attack is thematically, I guess, very similar to what you're trying to do with BIP110. They overlap a lot, though they're not quite the same thing. So, yeah, it caps the control block size. It disables OP success. So op success is a thing. If that shows up anywhere in a taproot spend, it means that you don't need a private key to have a valid transaction. It's anyone can spend. This is an upgrade hook. It's a way of putting a placeholder opcode somewhere inside Bitcoin script that allows future upgrades that will place a condition there. So this is why you remember when Craig Wright said that SEGWIT transactions are insecure, or SEGWIT addresses are insecure, because Anyone can spend your money if you send it to a Segwit address. Do you remember when he said that?
- [125:48]
Jake Croquet
I don't, but I'm understanding what you're saying.
- [125:52]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, yeah. The point is, like, if your node doesn't enforce the Segwit rules, anyone can spend money sent to a Segwit address because you're not enforcing the script that it requires be adhered to. So.
- [126:06]
Jake Croquet
So on their fork, if you did that, anyone would be able to just. Yeah, gotcha.
- [126:11]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. So the OP success has that role in Taproot. It allows you to. You wouldn't ever use it because if you ever spent something that contained an OP success while it was an unconfirmed transaction, everyone else would try and spend your money at the same time and send it to them. So no one uses OP success. It's literally just there as a placeholder because it will be replaced by another opcode that has actual conditions that you would have to satisfy to be able to spend it. That would require your private key. So that being the case, it's just an upgrade hook. So this is why when people complain and say, we wanted covenants and now we're not going to be able to add covenants because of bit 1 0, because they disabled our upgrade hooks. That's what they're referring to. But there isn't a new opcode that's about to be added to Bitcoin in the next 13 months. That's not a thing. And if it were to be a thing, it would be ctv, which actually isn't affected by that because CTV was written before Taproot. It doesn't use that upgrade hook. So you could do CTV in the next 13 months if by some miracle it became a thing. So that's like Vortex and Reardon and a few others have talked about, have lamented the fact that we can't add a covenant into Bitcoin while bit 110 is active for the next year. As I say, it's a very overblown concern because you can still activate CTV and you will be able to activate any soft fork after September 2027, if you really want to.
- [127:37]
Jake Croquet
There's two questions I had. One is. So you're saying upgrade hooks, you're saying these are places where you sort of leave code in a position to. Where it gives you future optionality. And there's a way to like, permanently close those upgrade hooks, essentially. Permanently close, Is that the right.
- [127:54]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Once you use them for something, there are conditions that didn't exist before, so they stop Being anyone can spend and they are checked for validity when someone would consume whatever replaces OP success if it was to be something like, you know, checksig from stack or some other upgrade, the nodes that enforce that new rule that have upgraded, rather like, you know, some nodes aren't going to upgrade to bit 110, right, which means they'll totally accept blocks that violate these rules you're seeing here. But that just means they're not running a fully validating node anymore. That would be the same like you can run a node, like you can run Bitcoin version 9 if 0.9 if you want. You can not enforce the SEGWIT rules if you want. It means that you're not running a full node, that's all. So if and if people come along and they start trying to steal SEGWIT funds by spending without having the valid private key, they can do it. And your node would accept any blocks that contained it. But it would, it would probably never happen because. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
- [129:02]
Jake Croquet
Would that. Would your node then be like out of consensus or.
- [129:06]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It would, but the reason it wouldn't happen is because, well, you're not enforcing the consensus rules. So people can fork you off the network if they want, but not really because you also accept the SEGWIT valid transactions, the chain that only has SEGWIT valid transactions and that's longer than yours. So in practice, if you don't bother enforcing the rules of Taproot or Segwit with your node, but the rest of the network is, you'll have a short only chain.
- [129:32]
Jake Croquet
You're going to tell the consensus.
- [129:34]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, no one's going to bother making a chain where people are stealing segwit or tap proof funds because it won't ever get longer than the one which everyone's enforcing. But it's kind of one of those things. If everyone had that attitude, then there would be chaos. So it's a good thing that you can assume most people actually are running fully validating nodes. And when people are like, I run an ancient node, it doesn't enforce SEGWIT or Taproot. I'm like, yeah, that's silly. I'm never going to encourage you to do that because at some point that's
- [130:03]
Jake Croquet
nice to have one for some.
- [130:05]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Okay, yeah, just actually enforce the rules if you're going to run a node. I don't see why you wouldn't. And then, yeah, rule seven.
- [130:13]
Jake Croquet
What's a covenant?
- [130:14]
Bitcoin Mechanic
A covenant.
- [130:15]
Jake Croquet
I talked to Samson about it a bit, but I Don't really understand it.
- [130:19]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It's just like soft fork restrictions in bitcoin just create conditions you can impose on your own UTXOs like time locks. And time locks are the ones everyone knows about. Covenants restrict where you can send the money and this is useful for vault style concepts like if someone holds a gun to your head and says I want you to spend that utxo. If you've encumbered the UTXO in a condition that means I can only send it to this address and that address is one you control or one someone else controls, there's a bitcoin will enforce that you cannot be coerced and placed under duress. So that's what ct. The covenants might be a bit more broad than that. Specifically, CTV is the most well known covenant upgrade. And that's specifically what that does. It means you can create a bitcoin address that any funds you send to that address can only be spent to a specified other address. That's all that means. So if someone holds a gun to your head and says I want you to send your bitcoins here instead of there, you'll say bitcoin literally won't let me. If I try and send it there, it's an invalid transaction. It's just like I didn't have the private key. So that's what a covenant is. And again, it's sort of ironically, it frees us up. It makes L2s work a bit better, it makes lightning work a bit better, it makes ARK work a bit better because you create the, the, the service providers and the counterparties can agree to restrictions on their spending conditions that liberate the counterparty from having to be concerned about theft and things like that. So lightning required upgrades, right? It required check sequence verify and check lock time verify. In order for the justice mechanism to work right, we need there to be a way where if you're trying to run off with someone's money in a lightning, if there's a relationship between two counterparties on the lightning network with one channel and someone tries to defraud the other person, they need to be able to. If the person conducting fraud can only do so with a force close that has a covenant restriction on it, that means that they give the other person enough time to be able to redeem the funds that they are attempting to defraud them from. You can't do that without the kinds of restrictions given to us by stuff like check lock time verify and check sequence verify. So that was why those upgrades had to be added before lightning became. Before lightning was truly possible. Otherwise it would be. If your node, if your counterparty went offline, you could close the channel in an old state, steal all the funds in it, and they wouldn't have any, they wouldn't be able to stop you from doing it. But with those, with those opcodes, you can close the channel, try and defraud your counterparty when they go offline, but then you're now in a week long limbo, or however long it's defined as, and then your counterparty has time to show up and say, ah, you tried to close it that way and in doing so you revealed a secret that I know, which allows me to close it more quickly than you. So now I get all the funds in the channel. So that's what I mean. These are the conceptual things people use and these geniuses are coming up with to make bitcoin work better and to prevent theft from, you know, honest actors. It's really interesting. Unfortunately, it's all kind of, It's. I'm not. I do understand it all conceptually, but I don't have. I so rarely get asked about this that I can't explain it in a way that's particularly approachable yet. So apologies for that. I wish I had a more graceful, masterful explanation of this stuff, but it's, it's really cool.
- [134:06]
Jake Croquet
I really appreciate the attempt. Yeah. And it's just, you know, part of a big part of what I'm trying to do here myself and provide for the listeners and everything is just like an honest intellectual exploration, you know, because even whether that's what we're doing here or, you know, I'm thinking of hosting some conversations between people who maybe are on opposing sides, but trying to have this. Yeah, just like an honest, hey, listen, none of us, none of us have all the answers. We're here, like trying to put forward the knowledge that we know and help each other out and, and circumambulate in on the truth over time, you know.
- [134:40]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, I'd happily have a conversation if you want to moderate between me and someone on the other side. I'd really like to speak to some of the core developers. As nasty as it's been. I haven't been particularly, you know, venomous in any of them. I've been very respectful with most of them. I'm blocked by pretty much all of them. I haven't blocked anyone in core at all. So I'm very happy to speak to any of them. Merch Instagibs Antoine Hl Very happy to have conversations with them and I'm clearly genuine about it. If they do have things they think I'm just not understanding about bit 110, it's not my intention to advocate for a soft fork that would harm Bitcoin. I would never live it down and I would damage my own investment. There's no advantage to me. So I'm very happy to listen to these people. If you want to set anything like that up.
- [135:26]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, well, if anyone you just said wants to shoot me a DM on X, we could talk about that. Maybe it's something we do here on Market Disruptors, maybe it's something we do elsewhere. But yeah, okay, let's do this last one. And then I have something I was planning to open up with. We can maybe close with that and then. Yeah, this has been great so far.
- [135:44]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I apologize for my answers on the first couple of rules there. I'm just. They're probably very simple, but, you know, I haven't had enough coffee today. I can't quite figure out how to explain them in a coherent way. And I'm probably just going to be spreading misinformation by mistake number seven. I understand very well. So, OP if again, this goes back to merkalization in taproot. Like, if is how you crudely separate different ways in which you can spend a utxo and it all gets published on chain. If A, then this, if B, then that. If C, then something else. Right. Back in segwit land, you just wrote all that on chain. It took loads of space and you only executed one of those. Taproot doesn't work that way. You just tap leaves and all the conditions are in their own individual leaf and you only reveal the leaf you use. So you don't need to say, if this, then we do this. If something else, then we do this. There's no if in taproot, but it was left in anyway because it's a, you know, an opcode we've had forever. Luke pulled that out saying, op if in taproot, dumb. Just use tap leaves. That's literally what it's there for. And even though you can use it in taproot, it's kind of dumb to do it. In most cases, you're just wasting space because you're putting different conditions in the same leaf and revealing the whole thing on chain, which is bad for privacy and uses more space. If you put the two different conditions that were separated in two different leaves, then you use way less space and you never reveal the other condition. Was it a multisig? Was it someone closing a lightning channel? We don't know because it's Taproot and we're hiding all those other conditions when we close it. That's what made Taproot so great. So OP if getting left in was what ultimately got used as the inscriptions hack. Because as I said before, they would say, if zero equals one and then, you know, a 540 byte chunk of JPEG data, then they would do it again. If 0 equals 1, then the next 540 byte chunk of JPEG data. And that's how they upload an inscription. They just keep adding chunks of stuff that looks like script, but it's always preceded by this. This conditional thing that can never actually be executed. So getting rid of. They do it after an OP false. So that's functionally, if zero equals one, then do this. But the way they do it is OP false, then OP if. So some people said, you should have just disabled OP false OP if because no one could ever conceivably use that for monetary purposes. It's intentionally dead code. But Luke went further and said, OP if in Taproot entirely is just a bug. We're going to get rid of it. And monetary users of Taproot need to just use an updated version of miniscript, which will never generate IF conditions within a Taproot context. Miniscript has been updated to that effect, and lots of people were complaining about that, saying, you know, wallets like Nunchuck still can generate IF conditions in a Taproot context. And if someone did that after bip110 activates, they would generate a Taproot address. And if you were to send money to that taproot address, the coins at it would be unspendable until September 2027. It's a possibility and it's acknowledged as a trade off in the bip, the new version of miniscript. Sorry, guide.
- [139:03]
Jake Croquet
What if it's like. So it's a temporary soft fork, right? So you're saying you wouldn't be able to do this until the end of the temporary soft fork.
- [139:12]
Bitcoin Mechanic
They wouldn't be able to get stuck by anything the soft fork does permanently. That's all.
- [139:17]
Jake Croquet
Okay.
- [139:19]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Because these are hidden conditions, when you generate a taproot address, the spending conditions of it are unknown until you go to spend it. So an inscription has two stages. You generate a taproot address, send a tiny amount of money to it, then there's the reveal where you spend from that taproot address. Surprise. Turns out there's just loads of JPEG data in here pretending to be, you know, spending stuff, because then it moves to the input side on the second transaction. So we can't. I don't even know why I'm bringing that up. Because, like, people can generate taproot addresses all day that have unspendable conditions inside them that we won't find out about until they go to actually spend it. So bip110 just says, don't generate addresses like that, because if you do, when you go to spend them, you won't be able to unless you wait until September 2027 and then it will become available again. But, I mean, this goes into like, absurd territory where the soft fork proponents have to anticipate every way in which a user might generate unusable addresses and try and prevent them as best they can. It's not a thing we can robustly prove. Every time we do a soft fork, we create a new rule in Bitcoin. And every time you do such a thing, it's always possible that a user doing stuff in the way they used to is now no longer able to spend their coins. Like, you can use OP success that way at the moment, you can create OP success if you want, in your conditions and make stuff spendable that would become unspendable if we do another soft fork that uses OP success in a restrictive way, which it almost definitely would, you know. So again, SEGWIT addresses, or. I don't know, segwit made things unspendable that were previously spendable and it wasn't a concern. So bit 110 is making things unspendable that were previously spendable, but it grandfathers everything in. So that's another point.
- [141:14]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, so it's all backwards. Anything that was on the chain before is still going to be exactly as it was. It's rules that are from here moving forward. When it's activated.
- [141:23]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. The entire UTXO set as it will stand, the block prior to Bitpoint 10 activating will be spendable even if it breaks all of these rules.
- [141:34]
Jake Croquet
Yes. Right, right, right. So then, in what. This is maybe my last bip110 question for you. Maybe not. But it reduced. Reduced data. Temporary soft fork. Right. Rdts. So in what world does this end in a chain split? And in what world does this. And how does this. Like could it be something that activates is not rejected from the entire blockchain or from the entire network, and then not accepted, not rejected. I forget what I said. I'M starting to lose my sharpness here as well. But in what world, I guess, does it end in a chain split? And in what world does it end in? Nothing happens. Basically, nothing ever happens.
- [142:18]
Bitcoin Mechanic
The world the ends in the world with. I'm pretty blunt as well myself at the moment. The world in which nothing happens is the one in which everyone goes along with it. With Bitpoint 10, if one pool flips over the next 10 days, then the rest of them will do the same and we can all go on like there wasn't any disruption at all. And I would expect the price to go up a fair amount because I don't think anyone loves the uncertainty. Yes, the world in which there's a chain split requires some people either ignore or URSF against Bitpoint 10. That's a given at this point, that they would have to do that to cause a chain split. The BITP1 10 side has said, if you don't come along with us, there will definitely be a chain split. That's what they've done to that end. The only people that can say, all right, we'll give you your chain split, are people that don't go along with them. I don't know who exactly is the aggressor in that libertarian case study of yes or no. I don't know if that's okay. Bitcoin is coercive. Soft forks are coercive in that regard. It's a very hard thing to reconcile. The chain split would occur if we already know we've set the stage for it. And this is the whole pulling the pin out of the grenade thing and saying, we've done it, there's no turning back now, this thing's going to blow up. It's just a question of how we respond to it next month. Well, 20, 19 days from now, if enough of the mining, if enough of the industry ignores bit 1 10, they will mine a chain that quickly adds quite a few blocks onto it faster than the Bitpoint 10 side. Then you have a chain split because there will be a bit 110 block eventually that all of the bit 110 nodes finally accept. And then you have two versions of Bitcoin. At that point you have a long chain that ignores Bitpoint 10 and a short chain that doesn't. And it's anyone's guess where we go from there. If the bitpoint 10 chain is too short and its proponents are fed up waiting around, you know, a week for two blocks, they would probably do a proof of work change, which is a hard fork and make, you know, end up in a completely a new world where we've resolutely gone two different directions. If they're not waiting a week for two blocks and instead they're getting like 10 or 20 a day, they have like 10, 20% of the network, then they would presumably just wait and watch the other side sweat because that other side would now be waiting for wipeout risk. They could, because if the BIP110 chain ever gets longer, it eats the ignore side. So the ignore side has to then either URSF make sure that they don't accidentally get wiped out by the bip110 guys, or they can capitulate and there's no chain split scenario in the other side because there's no ursf. So if there's. If immediately after the enforcement begins there's a bip 110 respecting block, that will just be how we go forever. There's no chain split after that. Because if someone ignoring mines a block that disrespects Bitpoint 10, it won't get resurrected.
- [145:44]
Jake Croquet
Rejected softwork. I mean, does that, does that just become a user rejected soft fork at that point?
- [145:50]
Bitcoin Mechanic
No, it doesn't. Because a URSF is intentional. It has to explicitly reject bip110 blocks. But no one's doing that. This is the asymmetry of it. This is why, and I would like to touch on this, if there was a hostile soft fork doing what the bitpoint tenors are doing right now, I would say we are actively upon the enforcement height of what you're doing beginning, we are going to deliberately discard your signaling block because we don't want it. So bit 110 blocks signal on version bit 4. What you would do if you wanted to URSF it would be on that first height. Where that was required by the bit one zero nodes is you would require a zero there instead of a one. So the URSF nodes would say, we are requiring you not to signal for bit 10 on the exact block height that the bit 10 nodes are requiring that you do signal for it. So that is how you go in two directions at once without either wiping each other out. You have a fork and you have a counterfork. Right now there is no counterfork. There's just BIP 110 and there's nodes that will accept everything BIP 110 does, assuming it's the longest chain, that's all.
- [146:59]
Jake Croquet
Is this a minority of users enforcing a consensus change?
- [147:05]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Correct.
- [147:06]
Jake Croquet
I'm understanding that properly because that Conceptually, even if everything lined up in this is like, yeah, that's a net gain for Bitcoin. That seems like. That feels to me like a dangerous precedent to set. To say, okay, you could have, it
- [147:22]
Bitcoin Mechanic
is, but we've already done it. That's what bit 148 was. In 2017, there were only 500 of us running Bitcoin.48 nodes, and we made the entire industry go along with it. At the end of the day, they're the only people I trust with Bitcoin's long term health. They can be corrupted and they can be misguided and you can say they're all emotional or whatever, but they are the least corrupt. They are not the industry. They are not weaponized enforcers of state control.
- [147:53]
Jake Croquet
Who's the only node runners doing that? Yeah, okay.
- [147:56]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. The people running BIP110 nodes are not doing so under duress. They're not doing so because they have a lawyer telling them they need to do it. They're just doing it because they think it's better for Bitcoin and there's no way to find out who they are and tell them they got to stop and hold a gun to the head because there's too many of them and they're too anonymous to figure out. And that is Bitcoin's defense layer. It is the immune system and the precedent argument again. I'm telling you, if that represents a Faustian bargain where this becomes a mechanism that gets abused with a horrible soft fork in the future, then I promise I will URSF against it. I won't just say it sucks on Twitter because there's no serious retort. I'm not going to write a blog post about how BIP 110 or whatever this new BIP is, is terrible and it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. I'm actually going to resist it at the protocol level because it's harmful. Like why Stefan Lavara and Jameson Lopp and Adam Back and these people, if bitpoint 10 is a negative change to Bitcoin, they need to, at the protocol level, resist it. And there is no risk to them doing that if they believe it will fail anyway. If you require that the first block after enforcement height does not signal for bit 1 0. If you require that on your node and you're confident that we're going to lose anyway, there is no risk to you doing that. Just run the ursf. The problem is that they do not have anything defensible about it because these Seven rules are not bad rules. They're good things to bring into Bitcoin. And there are edge cases where they could be a bit annoying. And that's why they're. That's why they are temporary. But at the end of the day, the protocol, Bitcoin itself just does not have a way of gauging sentiment from social media. And it cannot be intimidated into going along with popular opinion. It only cares about what's enforced at the protocol level. And 99% of Bitcoiners aren't. They are not doing anything that the protocol can take into account. They can. The protocol can only look at what the nodes are doing and operate from that regard. And if you have 20% of users saying, we enforcing a new rule, the miners have to respect that and you can tell a mining pool, BIP110 sucks. You shouldn't support this thing, you shouldn't flip the bit. And they'll say, yeah, but at the end of the day, that's not going to save my blocks. My blocks are going to get wiped out if I try and ignore it like you're telling me to do. I have to respect it. So, again, that's the asymmetry of it. And to really hammer the point home, if it's considered coercive or improper, an idea doesn't become correct just because everyone supports it. And BIP110 being a minority is, again, not the first time. BIP148, even though it pushed through Segwit, which did have majority support, even if it wasn't consensus, it was definitely a majority. BIP148 itself didn't. And Bitpoint 48 had less users than Bitpoint 10. Has it had a smaller percentage the day before it activated than BIP 110 does now, 20 days before.
- [150:58]
Jake Croquet
And at that point in time, the day before it activated, it activates, all the miners just flipped a bit. That's what happened. Yep.
- [151:08]
Bitcoin Mechanic
And we were going to lose. We were going to lose, lose, lose, lose. And then we won at the last minute. That's exactly what I expect to happen here. But what's annoying is they rewrite it and say, well, it won because you had consensus, everyone flipped the bit. Like, that's not how it went down, man. And that's what they're doing. That's what they'll probably do with BIP 110 as well, is if the miners all flip the bit at the last minute, they'll say, well, yeah, bit 110 succeeded because it had consensus. I'M like, well, it didn't for a long time. And then last minute we bullied the miners into doing it and they did it. I'm not sure that counts as consensus really, but. But write the history books however you want.
- [151:51]
Jake Croquet
That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think this is a good point to say that, like, I don't know, it seems to me that like, a lot of the people digging into this don't have a complete understanding. I mean, nobody has a complete understanding of any of it.
- [152:06]
Bitcoin Mechanic
That's why we gotta stay humble, man.
- [152:10]
Jake Croquet
But it also does seem to me that, that bitcoin is going to be all right, no matter how this shakes out. All right? I mean, bitcoin will continue. Bitcoin will endure. I think. I think that perhaps there. I know that there are core developers that look at some of this stuff and go, well, I don't support Bitpoint 10, but there's good ideas in there. There's stuff that I do want to adopt. I don't like the way that it's been pushed in like a narrative social media sense or some of the activation mechanics or whatever, but they're like, there's stuff in there that I think is good and stuff in there that I think bad. And so I don't know, like I could see. I don't know. Is there, Is there? Before we go to this last thing, I want to close with, with Samson. Is there any, like, middle path you see from here? Is there any way where there is could be this like, re. Connection realignment of some of these things? If we do see a failure, if we.
- [153:04]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I don't see it. I'm open to it. If someone comes along with an olive branch, I'll totally consider it. I don't have any power, though. I'm very aware of. People put me on more of a pedestal than I'm actually on. If I came out tomorrow and said bip 110 sucks, everyone would laugh and dismiss me. I don't think I have anything like the influence that people think I do. So if something came out that was compellingly better, I would be able to convey that to everyone, hopefully and say, all right, guys, I know we all love bitpoint zero, but there's actually something that's better than that and we should probably migrate to that. It would have to be real. It would have to be actually defensible. And so far all I see is it seems to be more like they're spending the time rather than extending olive branches, but finding sort of frivolous concerns about it. Like there's been two bugs in BIP110 over the weekend, neither of which are actually, you know, they're pretty laughable. One of them is a pedantry around a description with P2A that's like the BIP is incongruent with its own rationale or something. And I don't even get it, but it seems ridiculous. And the other one was this concern that bip110 doesn't. If you run Core, post chainsplit and it downloads a bunch of blocks that aren't valid for bit 10 nodes and then you switch to bit 1 0, it won't automatically figure that out, which is like not. It would be great if it could. It's a nice to have. But it doesn't constitute bip110 being like broken or in need of a consensus change at this last minute. So if they were to switch to finding constructive solutions, I'd be very happy to hear it. I really would. I don't have any beef with Core that's going to make me say I will never listen to good ideas again. And if they come out with good stuff, I will celebrate it. Like the privacy stuff that broke in core 31, you know, the ability to broadcast a transaction with a spun up Tor circuit that allowed you not to use your IP address even though you were normally connected over ip. I love stuff like that and I support it. And it sucked that there was a bug in it. I didn't bash them over the bug. I'm happy that they're doing the good work they're doing. I don't feel the need to like be gratuitous and insult them all day. I'm wide open. But for the time being, BitPointen is the only game in town. They are not contributing to anything it does. They are just constantly throwing low effort fud at it. And that makes me, I guess, sad, I will say. Yeah, very sad.
- [155:35]
Jake Croquet
Yeah. I mean, I'm glad to hear that. I feel like maybe I'll spend some time walking around looking for some olive branches among the other party.
- [155:43]
Bitcoin Mechanic
But I. I'm wide open, man. If people want to heal, I'm up for it. Let's go.
- [155:47]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [155:50]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Bitcoin's adversarial, man. Everyone is trying to kill it. Like some people in there are motivated to keep it together. But I maintain that once you have a career in bitcoin, your career is what matters rather than bitcoin. Like that's like a lot of people have Even said the same. You work at Ocean Mechanics, so therefore all this is about Ocean, not about Bitcoin. Right. They're very quickly, very quick to throw that at me. So, you know, if you're a developer, you're trying to get your dev grant, if you're a podcaster, you're trying to make sure you don't get cancelled and you can't get anyone on your show anymore. Right? Like, they're all conflicts of interest. That's why, again, I trust these anonymous node guys because they don't have any conflicts of interest. They just want Bitcoin to work out.
- [156:37]
Jake Croquet
I think I've seen a lot of the debate on this topic is not actually debate about this topic. A lot of the debate on this topic is attacks of the character of the people on the other side. And I am, I don't know, I think, like having productive, deeper in the weeds conversations. It's not, it doesn't sell, you know, this. There's a very high probability this is not going to be the most watched episode we've put out. You know, and that's okay. I think that they're, you know, that, that like the getting deeper into it is, is, you know, that trade off is worth it, it seems to me.
- [157:16]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Agreed. Yeah. I hope it gets some, some, some traction. And I think if you want to get more technical on it, on the seven restrictions, get. I don't know who you could get on Luke, if he would do it. Definitely. I definitely don't have as good of an understanding of at least two of the restrictions as I should. So I'd appreciate anyone that wants to be a stickler about that and be more accurate. I encourage it. Let's. Let's check out Samson then, shall we? What's the update?
- [157:43]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, cool, we'll go. I was planning to open with this, so some of this we've touched on. But if you hear something where you're like, ah, I want to comment on that real quick, just. I'll pause it, we'll go through it. But I think there's some interesting points he brings up here. The segment of this. He started this off with basically saying he thinks BIP110 is doomed to fail just because they make a big fuss. There are some nodes running it. There's like 1% of hash rate signaling that's not consensus. And you, as a 110 supporter would absolutely be against that, right? I would, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And the argument that they're saying is that there's like, there would be reason for Miners to wait to the last minute to signal or something like that. Like, from this game theory perspective, I mean, you can say that, but I don't see that as the case at all. If you look, what do you think of knots? Like, the fact that, you know, I think knots has gone from 0 to 20%.
- [158:38]
Bitcoin Mechanic
You can't just look at node signaling.
- [158:40]
Jake Croquet
That's a easy sybil attack. Right. Anybody can spin up a node. I'm not saying that they're fake. There are definitely real people running knots nodes. I know them. But if you look at some of the. Like, I read my feed, like, I see people, like, they're saying I'm running knots, but I'm switching back to Core because now Knots is saying I have
- [158:57]
Bitcoin Mechanic
to signal for 110.
- [158:59]
Jake Croquet
Right. So now you're being forced to do a change, and I don't believe that's
- [159:06]
Bitcoin Mechanic
how Bitcoin should work.
- [159:07]
Jake Croquet
Is that the right frame, though? Is it the right frame to call it a change? If they're saying we want to go back to what we were doing before. Before. Right. Before Core 29, that was the procedure. So I. Because it seems to me, in my view, that core 30 was the change. And so then I guess it would be a change. That change didn't matter. So if you want to undo that change, just edit your config file. The 110 fork changes a lot of other things, too.
- [159:33]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Like.
- [159:34]
Jake Croquet
Sure, yeah. So any strong? Any strong. I mean, we did the civil attack. We don't have to go into that one. Any strong thoughts on this thus far?
- [159:43]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, so we did the fact that. I like the pushback you gave there, because in the context of Core 30 opening up spam filters and being the dominant implementation, the only rejection of that is a consensus change. And technically, yeah, we're changing consensus rules, while core of 30 changed nothing about consensus rules. But on a meta level, it's very different from that. Right. What we're doing in our intentionality is for Bitcoin to work the way it was working forever. Even though sometimes you got to change things to stay where you are. And you can. I don't think it's worth splitting hairs over that. Everyone knows what I mean by that. So, yeah, I think he's giving politician answers to everything.
- [160:30]
Jake Croquet
Right.
- [160:30]
Bitcoin Mechanic
So he says there's a few nodes run in BIP110. Right. It's not a few nodes.
- [160:34]
Jake Croquet
It's.
- [160:35]
Bitcoin Mechanic
They've spent demonstrably millions of dollars buying start nines and umbrells. It is an unbelievable amount of people that have started running nodes or have switched. It's staggering to me and it really does fill me with confidence for bitcoin's future. It's not an imaginary thing. I don't think there's any need to downplay that. I think anyone on the side against bit 110 should be more honest about it and say this thing has a good chance of success and it's probably going to happen because there's no active opposition to it. That's the truth of the matter. And I don't know what advantage there is talking disparagingly of it at this point, given the level of support it has. You either have to be delusional and think that that's a negligible amount when it isn't, or you have to think a lot of it's fake. And he implies that they're fake and then you say that they're not. And then he says, no, I'm not saying that they're fake. So it's kind of like he's dancing around, trying to make it seem like it doesn't have the kind of grassroots momentum it does without trying to make a claim as to why it would be so. I think it's an attempt to be dismissive of something that you called out that he says, all right, I'm not being dismissive of it. He's trying things that aren't working, I would say. And then he says also very quickly that it doesn't have consensus. Samson sold UASF hats for BIP 148. BIP 148 did not have consensus either. This is the politician's usage of the word consensus. Consensus is the soft fork I agree with. And lack of consensus is the soft fork I don't agree with. That is how people use the word. Now. I wish it wasn't true.
- [162:15]
Jake Croquet
I mean, I think perhaps, and perhaps, like, if, you know, I like Samson, I think he's generally making attempts to be, like, intellectually coherent and honest. And perhaps if he. If you're using that, and, you know, I don't know everybody all that deeply, of course, but. But it seems to me that if he's using that line of thought to determine consensus, then if bip110, if everybody flips the bit right before, like they did with 148, then it would say, well, then there it was. They got consensus right there.
- [162:43]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah. And if that happened, he also agreed, as we've gone over already, but he also says it's unlikely that they will flip the bit towards the end. Yeah, I still think it's pretty likely. I don't. I don't know why the miners would want to blow everything up unless there really was a coercive force telling them they can't activate this thing.
- [163:04]
Jake Croquet
It does seem fairly likely. I mean, I. From my. I've heard people explain the other side, but it. It does seem relatively likely. I'd put it more in, like, the 50, 50 range, from what I can. Just from the vibes I'm feeling, and not like, oh, we got 1% of signaling. So there's like. Like, 1% chance or something. I don't know.
- [163:21]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, the 1% signaling is irrelevant. Like, and I really. I came up with this yesterday on the podcast. This is hilarious. We need to make a client that lets miners signal in favor of the next halving, and none of them will run it, and everyone will start saying, is the next halving gonna happen? Like, what if the miners ignore the next halving and we're gonna say, yeah, they're not signaling for it? But that has no bearing on whether or not they actually go along with it. The miners respect halvings, and they have no reason to, apparently.
- [163:52]
Jake Croquet
And the nodes enforce that, right?
- [163:54]
Bitcoin Mechanic
The nodes enforce.
- [163:55]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, Right.
- [163:56]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not telling you that they're stoked about getting a 50% pay cut in two years. None of them are telling you that. But they're going to go along with it. So when we give them the option of early signaling for BIP110, none of them take it at all. Fair enough. But it doesn't tell us anything about whether or not they're actually going to acquiesce to it at the last minute. So. And I really want to drive that home with, like, ask them if they support the next halving. Every single one of them won't give you a response, like, because there's no point. It's not up to them. You're asking people to make decisions who are not decision makers. So they're just going to leave your message on red. That's it. That's what they did with bit 1 10. So putting that logic in there with the 55% activation threshold means everyone looks at it and goes, well, the miners didn't activate it. I'm like, there's only six companies making that decision. They have no input, and I don't want them to have any input. So it really is just about the nodes, and they can be sybil attacked. Samson points that out. They can be fake, they can be sybil attacked. Once I verified that they weren't and that there really are that many people that have gone out and done this, I'm like, well, they can't be ignored. This movement can't be crushed because there aren't any central points of failure for it. Like, me and Luke are like two larger elements within it. Dathan, obviously, if those guys came out and said don't run bip 110, I'm sure that would, you know, drastically reduce his chances of success. But they would have to have a reason that goes along with that too. Right? And they don't. So I still, I, I agree with your assessment. I'm probably more in the. I think I'm around 80% sure that this thing happens than I am 50%. And that's only because choosing 70% is for pussies. So I'm not doing that. I have to go with 80% rather than 60. So. Yeah, but we will see. And if I am wrong, I will have. I will eat as much humble pie as is necessary.
- [165:52]
Jake Croquet
Yeah. Yeah, Right on. There's one question he has at the end of this little section that I think is a good one for us to wrap with here. I largely agree with 110 ideas to limit data. I disagree with the execution and tactics used to push it. I just like that take. I like that take from Samson. You know, it's like, I think it's important and I've seen a few people try to throw bones to be like, okay, listen, I'm not going to do the whole bip110 thing, but I'm not saying you guys are all bad and evilly intentioned. I. There's some of the intentions I agree with, some of the mechanisms I disagree with or that sort of thing, you know, I think is, I'd love to see that, you know, on all sides of the aisle, so to speak.
- [166:39]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, I think it's a mess, but I still view it all as feature rather than bug. Like the mess of it just means, yeah, this came from plebs. Like if it came from, like you remember when Mara flipped, I don't know what they did, but they indicated support for the great consensus cleanup, which is a core approved soft fork. Right. They like this one. They want that to go in. There's zero pleb support. There's no one in the world running a bitcoin node. That's like chomping at the bit to get great consensus cleanup activated on bitcoin. But Mara indicated in some way that they wanted it to happen. And merch came out and was like, this is how you establish consensus. This is the right way to do a soft fork. I'm like, no, it isn't. It's coming for. It's very orderly and it's very clean and it's very professional, but it has no actual real support amongst the community. This is a corporate way of doing things. It's an orderly, industrial, industry friendly way of doing things. It feels better and it feels less chaotic. I understand that, but it's way less organic. I'm actually totally fine with the chaos of BIP110. It's horrible and stressful, but it's real. And I find that just that is what gives me the comfort that bitcoin is still run by people that have limited amounts of control over anyone else. That, to me, is where I draw my comfort from. It is decentralization. Like the world's biggest miner. Who's Mara saying, we're going to activate a soft fork in bitcoin? And core developers saying, that's how you do it. That to me, means they have no respect for decentralization at all. They just want a comfortable, quiet life where things are much more orderly and much more professional. I'm sorry, you can't have that. If you want to have an immune system, you need something that freaks out and acts like a complete nut job. And, you know, you get. You get some sports injury and your leg swells up to the size of a balloon. It's like, yeah, this is dumb. But that's. That's an immune system. That's how it works. Like, try not having cyber hornets. Some would say the cyber Hornets exactly like we are here. We are nuts. Do not mess with us. Even if you think BIP110 is like an overreaction, I'm like, let the cyber Hornets do what the cyber Hornets want to do. All right, don't fight the cyber hornets. What are you gonna. You really gonna fight guys like us? No way. It's dumb. If it's a really bad idea, I'm not gonna be out here championing it. I'll be like, all right, guys, we need to. We need to not do this. It's a cure worse than a disease. Whatever they want to say. I promise you, I have no interest in making bitcoin worse. Right?
- [169:18]
Jake Croquet
Yeah. Yeah. And I believe that. Yeah, I like that. I've seen Samson and Lyn say, whether or not I support your thing, I support your right to run whatever you want to run sort of thing, which I think it's like to me, Samsung was like, I think people should run whatever software they want to run, and things are going to fall where they fall and we'll probably all be fine. I was like, yeah, makes sense.
- [169:44]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I'm more pessimistic about the failure scenarios. If Bitpoint 10 were to fail, that would spell the end for me. I've touched on that on a lot of other podcasts and people accuse me of doomerism over it. So I don't need to rehash that. I'll just tell you that's my opinion of it. I wouldn't have high hopes for Bitcoin if this manifestation of decentralization didn't succeed. I would feel like the immune system was no longer effective and I wouldn't fancy its chances against another attack in the future. 2025 in Lugano, I actually organized a
- [170:20]
Jake Croquet
meeting to see if we could talk things through. And a lot of the players in the space that are fighting with each other now were, were at a table discussing things. And there was
- [170:34]
Bitcoin Mechanic
some tentative agreement that,
- [170:36]
Jake Croquet
you know, things can be hashed out and maybe there can be a way
- [170:41]
Bitcoin Mechanic
to limit data to make everyone happy
- [170:44]
Jake Croquet
because, you know, nobody wants data to be stuffed into bitcoin. I think the camps are really divided on should we do something because it is futile and should we should minimize harm to the network by discouraging. So I think it's a very thin line where the disagreement is actually over. But what about like the David Bailey side of the crew that, that has, you know, what's it called? UTXO Management and you know, like Bitcoin Magazine in 2023? I think they were like, you can buy special sets. These sets are like, you know, special set sort of thing. So it seems, you know, they have, we have a photo attached to this set or we have whatever. So it seems like at least that group would have a financial incentive in being sure there's not a restriction of non monetary data. Well, the thing is you can never stop all data, right?
- [171:37]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Bitcoin is. Oh, man, sorry, I had to decry that. You're asked exactly the right question, right? He says nobody actually wants arbitrary data in Bitcoin. And you say, yeah, there are people that really do. And then he flips to, well, you can never really stop it.
- [171:54]
Jake Croquet
So you can't stop all data. You could discourage it.
- [171:59]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I live on Vancouver island, right? And one of the funny reasons I got out here is because that's where Blockstream's like, thing is on that island. And I knew someone in Blockstream and very long story about psychedelic drugs and all that stuff. That was how I ended up here and met my other half. And now we have our family and all that. Samson is a part of that area. Right. So like I've met all these people in the meeting he was talking about. I was in that meeting. Right. This just seemed like a deflection tactic. It just seemed like we don't really want to do anything about it. What about Opera Turn two? Like all your concerns are valid, all your concerns are valid, but please don't do anything. And Adam back did 95% of the talking in that meeting and it was all in an effort. Just please don't do anything. And Luke sort of sat there like face palming the whole time. Like all of this has been talked about. All of this is pointless. None of you are actually going to do anything. And you know, we did. I don't know. I think I've got a round off the podcast at some point, unfortunately. But yeah, as, as I said it, it's saying nobody actually wants arbitrary data in Bitcoin. But all it's the implication is that the people that are trying to do something about it or the people that are opposed to bit 110 all agree with us in spirit, but they see bitpointen as technically misguided or somehow a cure worse than disease or just procedurally incorrect. Even if it's a good idea, it didn't try to build consensus the right way first. It didn't get buy in from the right players in the dev space and the industry space. Something along those lines. Fine, but where's the other proposal? Where's the other suggestion? What are we supposed to do here? Core blew out a spam filter that had been there forever in a context where we were asking them to fix it. They made it worse. What else do we really have available to us that would authentically not be frustrated? And I've looked at it. Adam back wants Opratan 2, which again is a failure to acknowledge the existence of people that want to add arbitrary data to Bitcoin and their harmful intentions. They're not going to use the less harmful option when their stated goal is to do harm. So these are not serious.
- [174:20]
Jake Croquet
I think you can look at, you can look at the other things these guys are doing. I don't want to call anything out specifically for now just because I don't want to. But you know, you look at the other things they're doing and see and consider how that would impact their opinions on Matters of code and things like that, their businesses, their whatever other stuff. So I guess the last. I'll fast forward here to this end question because I really just, I want to hear what you think in terms of this. Had I was just thinking about this after Samson said it to me for a bit and I'm like, this does seem like legitimate attack vector and then we'll wrap it up. Well, it's nice we got right to the three hour mark. People are going to be like, wow, what a long podcast. Here we go. If you don't agree, you'll fork off. And that is the destiny for 110 because there is no consensus. But you can go on and on. There are all these examples in bitcoin history where some group of people thought this is really important and we need to do this and you just have to step back from the current situation, maybe take a breath and calm your emotions down. Emotions are running high right now. But if you replace the situation with any other situation, you'll see like this is not consensus and this is not going to fly.
- [175:25]
Bitcoin Mechanic
It can't fly.
- [175:26]
Jake Croquet
Otherwise the barrier to attack bitcoin is so low.
- [175:30]
Bitcoin Mechanic
You and I and Mark can, you
- [175:31]
Jake Croquet
know, can launch an attack on bitcoin and disrupt the whole network. That's not bitcoin. It doesn't work.
- [175:36]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Bitcoin will shrug it off.
- [175:38]
Jake Croquet
So that's the main. Yeah, my main thing is like, how do we prevent this? Okay, you get a few really convinced, strong whatever people together to launch this sort of thing. Let's say Bitcoin 10 is totally net positive. It comes in without a hiccup. How are we sure that a few really not really power, but really convinced, influential people couldn't do something like this again, but in a negative direction, even if this one is super positive?
- [176:12]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Very good question. Again, that's the Faustian bargain of it. If this sets a precedent now where people start trying to UASF in bad soft forks into bitcoin, I am not going to do what the other side has done with regard to bit 110. I'm not going to sit here throwing FUD at them, telling them they're technically illiterate or overly emotional or they don't understand how bitcoin works or that their nodes are all a sybil attack. I'm actually going to A, say what I think is wrong with it in a way that can't be easily blasted to pieces for being disingenuous. Like the kind of stuff Stefan posts. B, I'm going to run a URSF and say, I'm not going to accept your blocks and I'm going to make it so that if you do mine any blocks in support of this malicious fork, I will never be dragged along with it. That's how I would do it. And the only reason they're not doing that, which is the actual protocol level approach to rejecting malicious hostile soft forks, is because no one is actually going to run their client if they do, because there's no justification for it. Because no one actually wants the stuff that bit 10 disables. Apart from the bad actors. They can't. You're never going to run.
- [177:17]
Jake Croquet
So that's why they. Yeah, that's why they're lobbying for it kind of thing. Or like lobbying against it, right?
- [177:23]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, they're lobbying against it, but they're saying this is a bad thing for Bitcoin, it shouldn't happen, but we don't need to actively resist it. At the same time, this is a, it's an obvious contradiction. If it was a bad idea that doesn't belong in Bitcoin, they need to actively oppose it, not passively oppose it. I'm sorry, there is no one I'm going to believe and take at face value telling me this sets a negative precedent for Bitcoin. It's harmful and damaging and undermines its long term success. But I don't feel the need to actually oppose it. I run a client that will totally accept what they do. If they get the majority hash rate, Samson's Bitcoin node will accept a BIP110 chain as valid. And whether that chain happens or not is the decision of three mining pools. Doesn't sound like he's actually all that concerned. And this I'm not. This is, I'm not goading people into anything. There is a reason they are not doing a ursf. It's because no one will support it. And they need that support to resolutely reject a soft fork. And the reason they cannot do it is because the soft fork is not worth rejecting. It's not a bad thing to do. So I'm telling you that that is my public promise. We did bit148 and we're doing bitpoint10. They're both minority soft forks that didn't have consensus. If a third thing of that nature comes along which attempts to do the same thing with something I consider harmful to Bitcoin, there will not be a question in my mind. I will say what I disagree with about it publicly and I will run a URSF immediately to thwart it, because that's the only thing you can really do. And anything else is just noise. And I don't understand how people don't understand that.
- [179:02]
Jake Croquet
It's all of the complaints, because it needs to be a big enough proposal that it's a threat in terms of consensus or, like, you know, significant adoption or whatever. And so that's not going to, like, sneak up on you. And, you know, you won't be able to.
- [179:19]
Bitcoin Mechanic
In his experiment, he says, can me, you and Mark do this? Obviously it would be terrible. But you, Samson, and Mark, can't do a UASF. You're not going to instantly have 15,000 plebs go out and spend a thousand bucks each to buy a node to support you. You can't fake that.
- [179:36]
Jake Croquet
Well, but me and before that, we were saying. I mean, yeah, we were sort of saying. He was like, who do you see the people in the front of this being? And I said, you, Matt and Luke, of course. And just to the people I'd heard the most about and not you guys, exactly. But there is a. There is an emergent property of, like, this idea comes out. There are, like, leaders who understand it well enough that have a platform to be able to discuss it more openly and then it. And that's how the adoption takes place, I suppose. And so it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to be like, yeah, what could this look like? Another time around, I suppose. But I've heard your rebuttal to that already, I think.
- [180:17]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Yeah, you can't fake a decentralized movement. And they're equating a couple of hostile takeover actors with a name and some recognition in the industry. A couple of famous guys in bitcoin make a soft fork, and they're equating that with bit 1 10, which has all this organic support. And the latter is unfakable. And there's a constant desire to make it look somewhat not genuine. And he's giving you both perspectives at once. He's saying, on the one hand, you can fake node numbers. And then when you say, well, they're not fake, he's like, oh, I know. I totally know people that run BitPoint 10. I'm like, well, you need to pick a lane on that. Like, either it's real or it's. I mean, it can be real, it could be fake. It could be somewhat fake. All right, fair enough. But no one is going to spend a thousand dollars to spoof a bitcoin node. And there's been, like, the start nine numbers were around 8,000 people bought a server and most of them did so to run nods. And also I saw him one of those. He made the point I really do have to shoot after this. He made the point that not everyone that runs knots wants to run bit 110. Very important distinction. So I made a poll on Twitter last week that said, do you run bitcoin core, bitcoin knots pre bit 10 or bitcoin knots post bit 1 0? Of all the knots runners, it's around 12 or 13% of them that stayed with old nods and don't run bit 1 10. So that's overwhelming support amongst everyone that migrated to knots since 2025, April that they are okay with the soft fork. It's not all of them. And I did. We definitely saw some people in the Knots vibes that when Bitpoint 10 came around, they were like, no, I ain't going for that. There was around 1 in 10 people were like, no, you've gone too far for me. So they're real, they do exist, but they only represent about, you know, 12 or 13%. Anyway, I'm sorry, man, I do have to jump off now.
- [182:16]
Jake Croquet
Thanks, man. I appreciate you taking the time. I think that it gives me like, you know, the contentious conversations are tough, but I think having them is really important. Important. I appreciate you being someone who's, you know, making sacrifices to have those conversations. And yeah, it's, it's. It brings me peace to know that we have people who are, you know, grinding at all hours, looking for the threats on the horizon, making preparations if they've assessed the threats properly so that we have options, you know, to deal with them. And I think it's really important work. I appreciate you trying to, you know, communicate with the plebs and the idiots like me, you know, just trying to wrap my head around everything and yeah, yeah, it means a lot, man. Appreciate you taking the time.
- [183:01]
Bitcoin Mechanic
Anytime, man. I'm happy to. I'm happy to be. Like you said at the beginning, there's the devs, there's the plebs. I'm always trying to try and understand what's going on on both sides and help communication because it's hard and there needs to. It's a technical thing and I'm not going to start waffling again. I better just drop while the moment's good, people.
- [183:22]
Jake Croquet
Put so many links you want below and you can find. We'll link your YouTube channel. Anything else people need. Cool.
- [183:28]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I'll shoot you over the ocean stuff. Any bitpoint 10 info and great.
- [183:33]
Jake Croquet
Yeah, yeah, Ocean seems great for anyone who doesn't know about it. We didn't talk about it. That's all right. But thanks for coming man. Really appreciate it. Thanks man.
- [183:40]
Bitcoin Mechanic
I'll see you later. Bye.
- [183:46]
Jake Croquet
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Bitcoin Mechanic
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Jake Croquet
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Bitcoin Mechanic
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Jake Croquet
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Bitcoin Mechanic
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