Mr. Cat, a dear, warm, super warm welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show.
Nice to have you here again.
Thank you, Knut.
Yes, you've stirred the pot a bit in the Bitcoin space like the last couple of days
by first showing support for BIP110 and then withdrawing that support.
So that has got a lot of attention from both sides.
And I know that a lot of people are very curious about this conversation and where this will lead and what your rationale was for, first for supporting and then for withdrawing your support.
So we'll look into that.
Where do you want to start this?
Like, where do we want this conversation?
I think, you know, the backstory that we are sitting here on the podcast now is that the two of us had a long talk yesterday on the phone.
And, and we, or at least I realized that, you know, I think, I mean, after that call,
I watched the mechanics latest video and I think his approach, you know, of being humble
and just pretty brutally honest, that really resonated with me.
And I think it's super important.
I'm going to like, just explain because I consider it, uh, I mean, I apologized on X
and there is a reason I apologized on X of course.
And the reason is that I think my support for BIP110 was premature.
It was emotional.
And I should have taken more time to reflect and evaluate and learn more basically.
And the reason this happened was that I have been basically disconnected fully from the
Bitcoin space for a year, the whole of 2025.
After this stupid five years of fighting Craig Wright came to an end, I really kind of had
the strong urge to take some time off, to put it that way.
I had enough of Bitcoin conversations for a while.
I just needed to focus on other things.
And I have been focusing on stuff here in Norway.
I started a podcast in Norway.
basically a public, I'm not a public person, but I didn't like do any efforts to hide my
name or identity here in Norway. The reason for that again is, I mean, I got fully doxxed.
Anyone who wants to find out who I am can easily do it after Craig and CoinGeek made
sure of that. So when I came back after, you know, being out of the Bitcoin bubble for
a year. A lot had happened, as we all know. And the main thing being this decision of Bitcoin
Core to merge Core version 30 with the uncapping of OP return. So when I came back, I was kind
of like mind blown to learn how this happened, like in which way it happened, how arrogantly
CORE did it despite obvious controversy. I had so many red flags popping up. I got emotional
and when I saw BIP-100 learned about BIP-110, it seemed like the type of response to what
I consider total lack of principles from CORE and irresponsibility. So it was like very
knee jerk and like emotional reaction for me to just almost blindly support it.
But I, as I said, I came into this with like, not the most solid understanding of the whole
dynamic. So what I saw as the main flags, red flags from core was, you know, the technical
hand waving, which I got tons of when I started just asking questions about this. I didn't like
like the dismissive attitude.
the whole pleb slop narrative, you know that any pleb that is in Bitcoin for very principled reasons
shall just be hand waved away as a ridiculous spouter of slop. That to me is a red flag in itself.
I saw who supported uncapping up return. I saw the people who cheered that specific change on.
Obviously, the narrative of uncapping up return never made sense to me.
It still doesn't.
They call it harm reduction.
But to standardize a new avenue of spamming and grifting on Bitcoin, I'm just not on board
with it.
And I think it's a dangerous pivot from trying to keep Bitcoin as money and the mission of
separating money and state.
So I jumped into supporting BIP110.
I always did say I was not sure this was the best solution, but I always also said that
I feel something has to be done to counter this seeming uncontrolled slide of principles
that Core is exhibiting, in my opinion.
So I kept repeating this and I kept saying that I supported BIP110, but there were things that
were lingering in my mind as doubts and still is, which is why I withdrew my support.
And I feel like this urgency premise that we have to do something now, it has to be done now
or else it's over. Bitcoin is over. This urgency thing, that's a red flag for me.
I think the whole CSAM thing, I'm actually not sure about that. I think it's crazy that we have
opened up a return to basically paste in CSAM if someone would be crazy enough to do that.
And I do see a difference of CSAM appearing on the Bitcoin blockchain as a result of a
standardized way of doing it instead of through some SegWit taproot hack with the witness discount.
I see a difference there. If nothing else, it's a huge principle difference.
I had and still maybe have a little bit of a problem with edge cases where coins could
theoretically become unspendable. If you have some crazy multi-sig with time locks, for example,
I had and still have some issues with understanding the governance part of the BIP110 side.
For example, I'll be blunt and say it like, is Luke fit to be a leader of basically, you know,
a full on pivot of the governance side of Bitcoin. I respect Luke deeply and I think he lives and
bleeds Bitcoin. I think his intentions are as honorable as they get. But some of his rhetoric,
I think is wild. And it's a little bit hard to see that as being the official voice of Bitcoin
governance in some ways. But I think it's even wilder to have Gloria Shao be the official voice
of Bitcoin governance, just to make that clear. So I think it kind of boils down to a question
or it boils down to different things, but should we like, you can do nothing or I can do something,
but something can be doing harm and also doing nothing right now with dip 110 is not the same as
never doing anything so is this our best shot is is it solid enough good enough for us to use as
the last stand you know the the hill we die on or not because i'm i'm willing to die on a hill
to resist what core is doing. That's for sure. I'm just not sure if BIP-110 is the hill.
But I do feel, you know, people saying, shall we just sit around talking forever?
And that's something I definitely don't want to do. I think that's really bad.
yeah if make sure the hill you choose to die on has a sufficiently uh cozy valley to live in
beneath it yeah would that be a fair so so i would it be a fair um assessment of your position
that uh you are not against uh bip 110 you've just withdrawn your official support so you're
right now in the face of studying the proposal more properly before stating your official position.
Would that be? Yeah. Because I saw some backlash in a couple of forums where they called it flip
flopping and that you are now like, some people see you as an enemy now, whether I tried to calm
that down by saying like, no, that's tribalism. If a guy has doubts, then like, just give him time.
and we'll see what happens.
It was just, you know, back to the,
it was just so retarded to,
in hindsight retarded,
because I was honest
and it wasn't like I was aware
that I was maybe premature in my support.
I think maybe some of it is PTSD
from fighting scammers in Bitcoin a lot
that I kind of jumped the gun a little bit.
But it just felt irresponsible for me to,
you know, I changed the whole HODLonaut avatar with the BIP110 patch and all of that stuff.
That felt suddenly, I had my doubts, but still the principal side of it trumped everything else.
And just a short recap of the Giacomo talk, and I kind of feel bad for even tagging him because
it's so unfair that people are attacking Giacomo like he somehow tried to convert me to leave
BitP110. He never, with one sentence, tried to make me do anything. I mean, he's a friend.
I've known him for a long time. I think he's one of the most honest, solid people in Bitcoin.
I never ever caught him in any type of manipulation or dishonesty.
And that means a lot to me because I've been here for a while now.
So of course, his opinion gave me more doubt when his opinion is that for several reasons
he does not support BIP-110 as of yet.
And it came off, you know, understandably very retarded and weirdly if it was understood
like, yeah, no, the miners don't support it. So then it's impossible. It was more like,
I think of it like, I don't think miners are going to help this happen. I think maybe in the end,
they could be forced to just go along with it. But I don't think it's going to be any type of
slow trickle where we have 5% miner support, we have 10% miner. It's going to be almost like
like a moment where it flips if it flips. And there was like something about being
reality oriented on how uninterested the miners are in this, which it was that even that was kind
of like flawed thinking, but that along with his opinion of the urgency part being overstated.
And I do feel that a little bit having been in the block size wars and listened to Roger
for years when with his amazing children are dying messaging you know we have to like uh we have to
increase the block size for children are dying for fuck's sake but yeah so so there are there are
like in some it just gave me more pause and doubt than i could have and still have this
BIP 110 support on X.
But I feel ashamed of it.
I mean, I think it's stupid.
I think I wasted my credibility.
I don't think that.
You wasted some cred points maybe, but not all of them.
But just to be clear, then, I do take a lot of self-criticism for it.
And now I just want to, you know, make damn sure that I don't do take any hard stance on this until I have really, really deeply evaluated it.
And also, it's not like I think that my, and maybe that was my mistake, that more people than I, I had been away for a long time that more people cared about what I wrote than I was aware, which made my support being, it was harder or it was more impossible to stay in support when I had so much doubt all of a sudden.
Yeah. And I mean, at the end of the day, when the day that people stop having self-criticism
and just cling on to the When tribalism wins then we don have any Bitcoin anymore Getting Bitcoiners to get along is a bit like herding cats but that a good thing
I'm still supporting BIP-110, by the way, officially.
And I think I can sum up the reasons why by paraphrasing the great speech in Team America World Police,
It's a Matt and Trey's puppet movie from 2006 or something, I believe.
I remember it well.
Yeah, so the thing is, I'm going to self-censor here a bit.
See, there are three kinds of people.
Ds, Ps, and A-holes, right?
That's what it is.
Maybe I don't need to self-censor.
Like dicks, pusses?
Dicks, pusses, and assholes, yes.
There are three kinds of people, dicks, pusses, and assholes.
I think we're far enough into the YouTube video to not get, like, immediately banned there.
Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through.
But then you got your assholes, and all the assholes wants to do is shit all over everything.
So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while because pussies get fucked by dicks.
But dicks also fuck assholes.
And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you get?
you get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit and here comes the paraphrasing we the plebs
are the dicks we are the reckless arrogant stupid dicks we are reckless arrogant stupid dicks
and the developers are pussies and the spammers are assholes pussies don't like dicks because
pussies get fucked by dicks uh meaning us plebs but dicks also fuck assholes meaning the spammers
assholes just want to shit over everything pussies may think they can deal with assholes in their way
but the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick with some balls the problem with dicks is
that they sometimes they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate and it takes a pussy
to show them that but sometimes pussies get so full of shit that they become assholes themselves
because pussies are only an inch away from an asshole oh my god uh it's brilliant actually
There's so much wisdom. I don't know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don't let us fuck these assholes, we're going to have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit. And I think that's the essence of this entire debate.
we may be stupid and this may all be plebslop but i do plebslop for a living and i'm not gonna
stop doing that i think fucking the assholes is is more important here than pleasing the pussies
so that's why i'm taking the official stance i'm wholeheartedly behind you know what you said there
so if that analogy was the whole thing we would be you know supporting uh both of us would be
supporting it wholeheartedly. Yeah. So a bit of history here, I think, is appropriate to get this
going. We need to lay out first where we're coming from. We've been friends for a very long time.
Behind you, I think you have a picture of our first true collaboration, which is the second
edition of the Citadel 21 magazine. Correct. Yeah. Which you're reviving, by the way. We can
get into that later or you might be reviving it uh we're both on that cover it's made by uh
cypherpunk now a great bitcoin artist yeah martin fisher yeah uh and he made but 21 of those i know
guillacomo has one behind him when he does the interviews and and so does katie the russian who
is also on there so so so does mr huddle i think if he didn't refuse uh to receive it because all
of the people who are on that poster got one of them.
Yeah, and it's beautiful. And yeah, right now, I don't have it here in Spain. It's still
back in Sweden, but it's a beautiful, beautiful poster. And I aim to put it up behind me someday.
Shout out to Martin Fisher. I have more of his art on my walls, and I think he's one of the best
artists in Bitcoin history.
Absolutely. When is that from, by the way, that issue?
Probably 22.
22. So it's not that old. I mean, we go back earlier than that. I know that.
It could be 21 as well.
Yeah, because I remember in Riga 2019, there were cutouts of the Hodlunoth helmet and posters saying, where's Mr. Cat? And everyone was looking for you and couldn't find you.
Yeah, that was so cool of the Honey Badger guys to support me like that.
Yeah, and that was your first claim to fame had nothing to do with the katana expert, Dr. Craig Wright, but it was actually the lightning torch. So after the block size wars, when the lightning was...
It was May 2020, Knut, so it was earlier than I said.
Yeah, this is way back. But before that, you started the lightning torch, which was basically showing the world that the lightning network actually worked by increasing by one sat and sending a torch in form of...
Yeah, it was like 10,000 sats increase per jump.
All right. And you did that twice. I think I was in the second one, but not in the first one.
Yeah, we tried to do a replay in the year after in 2020. It went really well until some guy misunderstood completely and just sent it. I think he sent it to Jack without even asking Jack if he wanted it and it just stranded there.
Yeah, funny experiment, though. And before that, if we do a TLDR on the block-sized wars, because everyone has a different memory of it, and I'd like to pick your brain on what you remember. I know that the book, The Block-sized Wars, I don't think that gives a – it tries to be neutral, but I don't think the wars were neutral. I think it was an attempt at a hostile takeover rather than just two sides arguing for different arguments.
I think there were vested interests in increasing the block size in order to centralize Bitcoin and take it over.
And I think the immune response was against exactly that.
I think we can confirm that suspicion or this claim just by remembering what Roger did a little later.
He teamed up with Craig Wright.
I think you don't need to know much more about Roger's character and intentions than that.
No, and he also controlled Bitcoin.com, which listed Bitcoin Cash as the real Bitcoin.
And I don't know if Roger actually invented Bitcoin Cash.
I think he sort of, there were probably other people involved.
But one thing to know here is that the first attempt at increasing the block size was Gavin and Mike Hearn with Bitcoin XT, right?
So they wanted...
Was XT before Classic or were they like parallel? I don't even remember.
I think XT was the first one.
And so what happened was Satoshi pulled out and gave the keys to the repository to Gavin,
effectively making Gavin sort of the official spokesperson for Bitcoin.
And I suspect that Gavin kind of liked that.
And also he got advisory roles in all the surrounding companies and stuff.
And he may or may not have had the...
Like I'm speculating here and I don't want to be too conspiracy and bash people too much.
But having said that, there clearly was an incentive for him to be on that side.
if not for anything else, then to just increase his own influence of the project.
And he also, I mean, he fell for the whole Craig Wright thing.
Craig Wright bamboozled Gavin later, and Gavin said that this is Satoshi.
That's also part of the story.
Yeah, he didn't only fool for it.
He allowed Craig to parade him around as the crown witness of his Satoshiness.
I sat in the court in 2022 in Oslo listening to Craig's lawyers again and again read Gavin's old words about how Craig was Satoshi.
And Gavin just sat and looked at it and didn't come forward at all.
No, and have we heard anything from Gavin since?
Has there been any official statement?
Has he apologized or something?
I don't remember.
I don't think so.
So that's interesting.
So what happened basically was that there was a cabal of some of the most profitable companies in Bitcoin at the time.
Some of the bigger exchanges, some of the biggest miners came together.
And what was it called? BitPay, the payment processor, which Jeff Garcik was an advisor to, by the way.
And so the big blockers basically came together in a meeting in New York where they decided that, okay, we'll implement this SegWit soft fork that everyone wants, but we'll also at the same time hard fork or a couple of months after we'll hard fork and increase the block size to two megabytes, the base block size.
Yeah, this was called SegWit2x, right?
Yes. And then the soft fork happened smoothly because everyone was signaling that they were for it. And then this is a very much a TLDR. There is like BIP 91 and 141 and 148, like a bunch of stuff happening that we don't need to go into that much detail.
But what basically happened was that the users said no to the hard fork, which was then canceled because the miners were afraid of splitting the chain.
So they canceled the 2x part of the thing because people were signaling against it.
And around the time, there's also then the Bitcoin Cash hard fork happens, right?
They decide that at a certain block height, they're going to split the chain into two, effectively making the 21 million, 42 million.
So like a crossover between a Christmas present and a train crash.
And then a future market forms where you can sort of stake your bets on which of the chains are going to win.
And I think this futures market is a big deal in what's actually going to happen in scenarios like this.
But now you're talking about the 2X chain or the SegWit chain, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Because the Bcash chain, since it's hard forked, that ran its course.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this is pretty, yeah, I'm mixing things up here.
But of course, the futures market is for will there be a 2X chain or not?
And there's clearly a signal that there wouldn't be one.
And this played a big role in why the miners capitulated, I think.
And a lot of that had to do with this user-activated software.
Also to be remembered, Yihan Wu and Bitmain had something called ASIC Boost,
which is, it's not proven that they actually ever used it,
but it was a way for their miners to mine more efficiently than competing miners.
It was like a small bug in the hashing algorithm or in SHA-256, I think, that you could hash
like 10% faster or something with this implementation.
And SegWit would prevent that.
So it would prevent the head start that Bitmain had.
That made Bitmain dig in pretty hard against it.
Yeah.
So, and what we have now is a similar situation, but the big difference is that this time around,
core is not on the same side as the intolerant minority of plebs.
Because we had an intolerant minority of plebs.
That's what triggered the block size wars.
That thing too, like that prevented that hard fork from happening.
So right now we're in the stages of having a,
there's a proposed soft fork.
We don't know if it will lead to a hard fork,
but that's one of the concerns is that it might lead to a hard fork
and nobody sort of wants that.
Yeah, I think the dynamics are rather different, even though, I mean, I agree with what you say,
but back then it was like, I mean, from my perspective, it was like everyone pretty much
in Bitcoin or the huge majority viewed the big block thing as an attack on the status quo.
And now it's kind of like turned around a little bit because I'm probably entrenched by the fact
that core has always been on the side of and seen as good actors and, you know, solid Bitcoiners.
And right now it's kind of different. It's like, it's easy for the pro V30 people to portray the
big 110 people as, you know, attacking the status quo, so to say, or like doing one thing to do
reckless things And I think that a that an interesting debate on its own like because I seen quite a few people while I supported BIP110 trying to like put me like oh you basically a BSV now or like which
is insane to me. So which one of these sides can credibly claim that the other side reminds
most of the big blockers back then? Yeah, and that's a super interesting discussion
because the first change,
the controversial change
that people were opposed to
was the op return policy increase,
which is not a consensus change,
but still a change to a policy
that most of the,
or at least 20% of the plebs
didn't agree to.
I mean, it's a standardization, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so it is signaling
that these things are okay now.
Go and do them here.
Which is a very, very, it's subtle,
but it is a change from the attitude in Bitcoin
back in 2017, I think.
Yes, I agree.
So, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting any stance here,
but I think the argument from Core is that this,
In the end, this results in something less harmful than if we kept things the way they were.
And on the other side, you have, we don't care if it's less harmful or not.
We want to fight these things completely, and we don't want them here.
We want to kick them out, while the core side is saying that it's futile,
and spam can always be crammed in in other different ways.
And therein lies the core of the conflict, pardon the pun.
Yeah. And the more like, that's the one thing that the more I reflect on it and think about it,
and the more I hear the rationale or the attempted rationale, it just makes less and less sense to
me. And just like the first principle of, oh, it's possible to abuse the Bitcoin blockchain
with this Segwit taproot hack and the witness discount to cram bullshit in there in very
complex ways that you basically need third party applications to be able to view them.
Let's just uncap up return and make it possible. Let's open a huge new door and standardize that.
The signal and the philosophical impact of that from the reference implementation is unacceptable
to me. Yeah, so the question then becomes, what shall we do about it and when? And the proposal
is BIP110. Yeah, and I love the concept of limiting up return as a consensus rule.
Yeah, so yeah, I love that too, like because all of a sudden it's consensus and you don't have this,
You're forcing the network to make a decision, basically.
So maybe we should go through the points of the fork, or maybe a bit of other preamble here.
I think another thing here, and why the BIP is controversial, is that some fringe use cases that has to do with, what's it called,
Tapscript and some time lock functions, Miniscript.
Yeah, some really, really advanced features of Bitcoin.
Like you have this, I met a lot of developer types in Bitcoin that have this vision of
if we can make it more complex and if we can allow it to be more programmable,
we get all these nice features.
And my approach has always been before deciding your opinion on anything in this,
ask yourself, does this make Bitcoin better money? And to be better money is very simple.
You have the six or seven properties of money, and you have money solves two problems. It's the
mutual coincidence of need problem, which allows money to be better than barter.
And then there's economic calculation. It allows you to do economic calculation,
And the more fixed the supply, the more predictable the schedule, the more predictable and stable everything is, the better it functions at that, basically, which is why you shouldn't fuck with it.
So fucking with it, there's always a cost to fucking with the rules because it may fuck up an incentive here or there, thereby making it less good as money because it's now less predictable.
And it doesn't matter if you have a smart contract feature in which you can time lock one out of seven signing participants.
That is always inferior to me.
To me, that's always inferior to just, I hate the word ossifying, but to just leave Bitcoin alone and don't fiddle around with it.
There's a fuck around and find out part to doing so.
I always loved the term ossify, but it's probably because I'm a ridiculously stupid plebslopspouter.
I don't think Bitcoin can ossify because at the end of the day is people voluntarily choosing software.
But the concept being, you know, that fuck all this innovation.
We have already now something that is completely disruptive to a lot of the worst shit going on in the world because of the money system.
Why should we risk it?
And I just want to put something in there that I thought about when you talked now, like the arguments.
One thing that triggers me and that is a red flag for me is bad faith arguments and arguments that are, you know, basically false or exaggerated or designed to create FUD.
and I want to throw in one argument that I've seen
and that's been picked up by a lot of people.
It's basically that BIP-110 breaks multisig
and suddenly you have, I mean, so many Bitcoiners
secure their coins with different multisig solutions,
usually two out of three.
And when you saw this suspicion or argument
that BIP-110 is a threat to your cold storage
if you run a regular multisig,
That's a very bad faith argument to me because it doesn't.
Similarly to the argument on the other side, on the pro BIP110 side, that someone is claiming that Bitcoin is 100% dead if we don't do something now.
It's urgent and it has to happen now.
but that doesn't i mean i'm just throwing this out there because i think that's two examples of
things that i personally don't uh find any truth in were you pro taproot
yeah but it was based uh on uh trusting other people yeah same here based on and i think that
was one of the really cool things about mechanics last video that he kind of owned up to having been
to that he took self-criticism for some of the mechanics and stuff that happened in the block
size war and i think honestly also looking back is really important that we have to be honest about
things yeah the way i see we we won one battle so we prove that bitcoin can be like this a
decentralized enough to withstand attacks. We didn't prove that it would always be,
and we didn't prove that that was always going to be the case. We just proved that we had the
ability to resist a hostile takeover. And Taproot, I was for it too, because I've been convinced by
some technical arguments about coin joins and basically making transactions more private and
more anonymous because of the like same lengthness of but in hindsight i think it came with side
effects that were definitely not worth it and i'm with jimmy song's stance on this as that in
hindsight we probably should have been a bit more self-critical and and that adds credibility
and weight to the ossification argument or call it not ossification but like the resistance to
big changes or the resistance to this innovation narrative.
Because when that is actually the case, when Bitcoin is actually resistant to change,
sufficiently resistant to change, theoretically, at least, that means that Bitcoin can only change
for the better, which is like the opposite of a democracy. But it means that if we have such
overwhelming consensus that we will change it, then everyone thought it was a good idea,
Meaning that it was, we can define what good is by that metric alone.
Yeah.
After we won the blocks I swore, I was, I think I could go back and find tons of tweets about this from Hudlinot that, you know, let's not risk this again, guys.
Let's like, let's, let's stay sober now and not do crazy shit anymore.
Now we have what we have, what we need.
Let's not get crazy.
And the analogy would be if I lived with my family in some almost paradise place, I almost said island, but I think you can't use the word island positively anymore.
At least not when you have children on it.
Anyways, if I had a nice setup with my life and with the things that really mattered to
me, no way in hell would I start risking that for like small potential increments of even
more happiness, you know?
Yeah, no, no, no.
When the alternative outcome can be that a dragon comes flying in and burns down my
family and everything.
That's just like very simple logic to me.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, and I think that that kind of brings us into this because it's a weird situation.
It's like I have this position that I don't want Bitcoin to change.
And then I'm seeing core pushing change in a direction I hate.
And then there is no solution to just sit still and continue to let that happen because
that's like slow motion dragon flying into torch everything I love.
But also, I don't want to risk releasing another dragon that flies way faster and the resistance leading to even faster destruction.
So it's a very difficult situation right now, I think.
Yeah, I totally agree.
It's hard to know what the proper stance is.
And our reputations are on the line.
After this has played out, regardless of which side that wins, our tweets are going to haunt us.
That's always the case.
I don't care about outcome.
I mean, I care about if my intention was honest and I can't do anything more than contributing my most honest words and actions.
And if they were wrong, so be it, you know.
Here's another interesting conversation I had with Jimmy Song about being principled versus being utilitarian.
And I think the way I see it, the lower your time preference, the more utilitarian your principles become.
So being principled is utilitarian, but only if you have an extremely low time preference.
If you can extrapolate your time preference into forever, then a principled approach to everything is the correct one.
whereas utilitarianism uh uh like making your decisions not because the you believe in them
from first principles but because of an outcome you find more or less likely exactly is is is sort
of a high time preference thing and and here's to me where this becomes so fucking tricky in bitcoin
because the the utility of signaling pro this fork and everything is that it might
scare off spammers. And it's seemingly so because now fees are low and there isn't as much spam as
there was because I think that some of these people are getting cold feet. And that's the
same thing with also developers who want to do really advanced features in wallets. I mean,
the more fringe you become in Bitcoin and the more fringe things you do, the more your coins
are at risk. And that was always the case. If you decide to make a transaction that you know that a
part of the community does not approve of, or we don't like that transaction, we are tolerating it,
but we don't approve of it, like an NFT on Bitcoin, for instance, of a stupid dick pic or whatever,
monkey JPEG, then that is a riskier transaction. But because at some point, there's the risk that
that feature will be soft forked away or by some consensus rule change, those coins are at risk.
And I think what BIP110 does and what this proposed cat thing that is probably not going anywhere,
but just the threat of that thing happening and doing this whack-a-mole thing,
I think that scared off some spammers.
Some of them are signaling that we don't care what you do, we're always going to find new ways,
but I don't really buy that.
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It's a decentralized threat against centralization.
And grifters, they always would want more centralization.
Should we try to run through what we consider what is against BIP110?
or what gives us pause and what gives us the desire to die on the hill?
Yes, I have the website up here, bip110.org,
and we can just go through the entire thing
and see how much of it we understand to begin with.
I'm up for that, but I was thinking more like not only the actual changes,
but like the whole, the broader situation of it and how we interpret it.
what is the reason that you are on the hill?
And what, if any, reasons do you see as against it?
Well, the dicks, pussies and assholes position,
that's my stance, that's the hill I'm dying on.
But I think Mechanic is right in saying that
this doesn't require that much, much more than 10%
for miners to just go on mining on this chain
because they have basically nothing to lose from doing so.
Miners are not making that much from putting spam on the chain
as people think.
But then, like, I think, you know, just to look at the percent
is kind of, I mean, there are, we have to be honest and say that
there are difference between nodes.
You have, like, super connected, crazy big economic nodes
and you have a pleb number 1438 that runs a node at home.
And they are different.
And I think definitely we will need some of these economic nodes to support it
or we will need, BIP-110 will need.
Slightly different opinion there.
I think right now the node count signaling for BIP-110 is around 7.5%,
Which is very close to 10, which is the paraphrasing here, what I think is mechanics opinion is that that's around how much we need, because then we'll just have to fold. Because we don't know whether these nodes signaling, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think I got this right, that there is no way to actually know whether a node signaling for this is an actual heavyweight economic node or not.
you can only see that it's signaling for it or not so there's no way so you don't know how much
how much the significance that node has when when push comes to shove in september and and so so
right now we have basically no miners signaling for this yet then again they have up until september
to start signaling for it.
And if there's a 55% threshold of miners before that,
then the soft fork will just happen.
And if there's not consensus,
all of the users that are willing to die on this hill
will just reject any block
that doesn't follow the tighter rules.
So the incentive for the miner,
and sure, go comment and stuff, brush your teeth first,
But tell me why I'm an idiot and stuff and why HODL or NOT is an idiot in the comments, of course.
But the theory is that there is no reason for them to not follow that chain because the rules are tighter.
So every block that is compliant with BIP-110 is also compliant with the loser rules.
You understand where I'm going with this?
And for the miner, there is a risk of mining the blocks with the bigger op returns and stuff, because that has a risk of being rejected by the network.
So why would they take that risk when there's not that much reward in it?
And for that to happen, the estimate is that we need around 10% support.
Somewhat by that.
I mean, the thing is, even with the block size wars, there are so many interpretations of what actually happened.
And it's very hard in a decentralized system to have any kind of objective view of what was actually going on.
So I think it's very hard to assess the probability of this and that happening.
And I know a lot of big names in Bitcoin have very different opinions on it.
I don't agree with Tone V's triangle thingy.
I think that's misguided.
I stopped listening to Tone Waze a long time ago
I don't
because to me
he is noise in my opinion
I did
one of his
Knotts vs. Core series
him and Jimmy
interviewed me in San Salvador
and now they've done the last one
I think
or Tone did one with Vortex
after he did one with just Jimmy
but the one with Jimmy is very interesting
I'd recommend that one, even though, yeah, they are time-consuming to listen to these things.
But yeah, as I said, it's hard to get a neutral position.
What I don't like sometimes in the knots camp is this tribalism or this, if you're not for us, you're against us kind of attitude.
I don't think that helps.
I think that's sort of, I understand where they're coming from.
And a lot of them are passionate and fighting for Bitcoin's soul.
We are too.
It's just that, like, I think there's a point to diplomacy, for sure.
Yeah, well, I fully understand it.
And I think it comes from, you know, it comes from a place where you really want to defend something.
and I got my fair share of shit last 24 hours or so, 48 hours.
But I mean, I'm taking it on the chin
because I kind of think I deserved it a little bit
and for the flip-flopping and like my lack of wisdom
in jumping to something.
But I do understand it and I do understand the disappointment
when you think this is, it is a really, really important fight.
But if you think someone like, or if you even suspect that someone has, and that's kind
of the problem here that it's making the jump to thinking someone is compromised happens
a little bit too fast for some people, I think, which is unfortunate, but it's also understandable,
especially in the world we live in today with all the fucking crazy shit that is coming
out, you know?
Do you want me to just quickly go through my...
Just one more point on the diplomacy thing before I forget it, ADD brain.
But that is this, I think you can draw a line between two extremes, like the extreme cypherpunk ethos Bitcoiner.
And on the opposite side of there, you have David Bailey, a Bitcoiner who thinks adoption is everything.
And it doesn't matter who the fuck you steamroll over in the way to adoption.
I mean, I think if David Bailey could earn money on the adoption going down, he would be against.
Yeah, yeah.
So maybe, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
He's a bad example.
But say someone who just wants Bitcoin to be adopted by as many people as possible, by all means necessary.
I think that extreme adoption thing is counterproductive because if someone tries shitcoins for one cycle, it will take them another decade before they can figure out the difference between Bitcoin and shitcoins.
And therefore, like these confusing conferences and articles written about that, they are just they're not adding to real adoption.
I mean, paper Bitcoin is not Bitcoin.
Like more ETFs adopting Bitcoin is not really more adoption of Bitcoin.
it's more adoption of paper Bitcoin.
Maybe it's even an adoption.
Yeah, but at the same time,
if you have too far on the other side of the extreme
that it's just this fringe,
hate everyone else in society type of super cypherpunk ethos person,
then you get no adoption and we can play around.
And that doesn't work either
if we're going to take on the central banks at some point.
so i think there's a balance to be struck there um yeah and it's very hard to know where where the
appropriate stances and where where you yeah for sure so so we can only do our best in you know
trying to navigate this and and uh i mean that's what i've been doing i just made the mistake
of being premature. It turned out I didn't think I was premature, but now I'm gonna like
make damn sure that I don't take any firm side unless or until I am sure of it. Because
as I tried to get across, it's not like I look at BIP-110 as anything resembling, you
know, bad fate or attack or I applaud it. And I applaud, you know, anyone who wants to fight for
Bitcoin. You were just in support prematurely in full support of it. All right. Correct. So yeah,
let's go through it. Yeah. And it's not a long list or anything like that. And maybe it's not
even exhaustive for what I'm thinking, but it's what I just jotted down before we got on this call.
And if I first do the pro BIP110 things, on top, I just wrote principles in big letters,
because that's like the real big deal for me. Because I really believe that if you start
compromising on principles with technical hand-waving and huge word salads and saying
everyone who doesn't understand this is a non-technical idiot, that's like a surefire
way that Bitcoin is going to be Ethereum and worse down the road.
So that is like 100% something that made me want to support BIP110.
Bitcoin is money and spam is not money.
I love the thought of rugging these spammers.
I'm so fucking tired of all these lying grifters who misrepresent things and try to basically
harm Bitcoin to personally enrich themselves. The fact that's throughout, like the flags around the
whole Citria launch and the timing and all of that, you know, how many red flags? It's so bad.
Yeah. And all the worst people are pro this thing. Yeah. And you know, who runs Bitcoin?
Obviously, if Bitcoin is run by ivory tower developers and miners, then Bitcoin is already
walking dead thing. Node runners have to count here. That's for sure. I've seen bad faith arguments
from the anti-Bip 110 side that alone makes me sympathetic to the Bip 110 side.
for example this this like funding around loss of funds which is a non non-factor as far as i now
know for basically everyone if you're not like some mad professor that made an insane multi-sig
custom multi-sig setup with time locks and god knows what else so basically only if you
Luke Dasher, you're at risk.
Maybe Luke Dasher is taking an even bigger one for the team by risking his funds here.
Yeah.
Technical hand-waving, like just observing the woke-ification of core.
And I'm saying it out loud, the woke-ification of core.
Like what the fuck is when woke politics and DEI enters the height, the pinnacle of Bitcoin development.
What the fuck?
Yeah.
This is the dick's pussies and assholes argument all over again.
And then the against BIP-110, I don't like this premise that this has to happen now or never and Bitcoin is dead the moment, for example, a CSAM picture lands on the blockchain.
I don't think it's that clear cut at all.
It's disgusting and fucked up, but it's not that clear cut.
Yeah, I agree with that.
The reason, some justification for that position is that I do not believe judges to be rational people when it comes to technicalities in computer thingies.
Exactly. So they could already find some premise.
Then they're not going to care if Bitcoin officially supports this or not.
And like, I don't buy that specific argument.
No, it's just a disgusting thing to support it and standardize it.
Yeah, yeah. I don't think arbitrary data has a place in Bitcoin. I don't know if I want
op return to exist at all, because I don't know why you would need to put other data into Bitcoin
at all. I think Pierre Ocard was pro that position too, just remove the entire thing.
Just remove it, yeah.
It was put there in the first place.
It's kind of like the big increase because it was like, okay, you want to at least do it here.
It's always been at least do it here because it's less harmful.
Yeah, you want to scam a little bit?
Okay, you can scam a little bit here.
Yeah, but no.
No.
I mean.
Yeah, to continue then.
Yeah, sure.
Also, yeah.
So I think the spam urgency is in the same boat.
I did sync up a node, a bit 110 node like five days ago, and it took less than 30 hours on a
five-year-old laptop. It had an SSD, that's crucial here, and it had 16 gigabytes of RAM.
But as of now, the spam topic, it's not like in one or two or three years, spam has ruined Bitcoin,
in my opinion. It hasn't ruined initial block download in three years or four years. Down the
road, like in 20 years, maybe, I don't know. Okay. Yeah. If I may, I have a difference of
opinion here because it's the foreverness of it. If we have to store it forever, like then it's
crucial that we fight it off as much as we can. Yeah, but if Bitcoin is going to live for 500
years what difference is it like uh life or death if we stop it the year uh 14 15 16 or 17
i i think there is because i think there are second order effects that are very hard to see here
if i i think there is an urgency in the sense that if we don't show uh at the early stages that no you
cannot fucking take this over no we are we are going to be resilient we're going to be resistant
then you're sending a signal that will lead to worse things it's a slippery slope argument
and i think bitcoin has shown that in the past and that we're it's not continuing to show that
kind of resilience yeah to me yeah makes sense uh somewhat i i also i mean i think the longer
you tolerate something, the harder it is to turn it around also because every day of tolerance
brings strength to the status quo, so to say. Yes. And it also brings more vested interests
in these things like Citria, for instance, that shouldn't exist. But still, I oppose the narrative
that this is now or never. It could be in hindsight that this was the time because this has already
gathered momentum. And that matters. How easy would it be to even come where we are now in
opposition to the directional core? Probably really hard. Okay. I think this is where you
and I differ a bit because I think that that initial momentum, this may be the only opportunity
we get. But that's what I said, Knut. So then we don't differ. Then you misunderstood me.
Okay. Okay. Sorry. But yeah. So what's the counter argument? Like I thought you were
making a counter argument this is against this is like my argument for for the bit.
No it is actually against it because I am saying that I'm just steel manning my own argument or like
devil's advocating it like maybe this is the chance you know but I'm still saying that the
absolute conviction that it's now or never is not something we know. It could be.
There's a Ben Affleck Batman quote here. So like if there's a slightest chance that
the Superman may destroy humanity, then we have to take it as an absolute certainty.
Like this. Yeah, that would make sense if there was no chance of doing harm
with the action you chose to pursue. Yeah, fair enough. But yeah, so that's that.
And then the fact that there is a theoretical chance and probably a real reality that some
coins would be unspendable under BIP110.
Some UTXOs would just be locked.
And that is an argument that has been fielded to me very passionately by people against
And I can't just completely dismiss that argument because they made the setup that was valid
within the Bitcoin rules when they did it.
And a change that would permanently make those funds lost is problematic.
It's setting a very dangerous precedent.
I can agree to that.
However, I think that as I mentioned before, I think there's a fuck around and find out
scale here.
If you just use Bitcoin as intended, as money, then your coins are at no risk.
They're only at risk if you try to fiddle around with these BitVM things.
Maybe I'm pulling this out of my ass.
But if you're using advanced shit, the more fringe things you're doing with Bitcoin, the more your coins are at risk.
That was always true.
To me, that was always true.
But my argument would be that you cannot own a Bitcoin.
Like if you go deep into this, the only reason that I can act as if I owned my Bitcoin is that A, I find it improbable that someone else has access to the same private key.
and B, that I find it improbable that the protocol rules will change to such an extent that my coins will be at risk of not being accessible to me anymore.
And if those two are true, which I think they are, then the more complicated shit you were trying to do with it, the more at risk your coins were.
That was always true to me.
Yeah, but as a fund owner, as a Bitcoin hodler, you are not necessarily the one who has engineered this way of storing your Bitcoins.
That can have been done by some expert that presented a whole other narrative to you as the owner of the Bitcoin, that this is possible.
This is the rules of Bitcoin.
This is a really good way to store your Bitcoin.
But the responsibility is still yours.
That's the beauty of the system, that you are responsible.
And if you have the I'm with stupid t-shirt on instead of the I'm responsible t-shirt on, you are fucking around and you will eventually find out.
That's my argument.
I think it's fair.
And I'm just trying to give the points that has given me pause.
Because if a person came to me saying that this is my setup, and as you see, they are stored with a time lock and 600 key multisig, and I'm losing everything if this activates.
I mean, it's hard for me to just say, yeah, well, you stupid fuck, you shouldn't have done that.
Because I do understand some of the argument on the other side too.
That's all.
So there's that.
Well, I would say that if, just to do a final rebuttal here, is that if BIP1.10 does that, it will not go through because it's too stupid.
Then people will resist it.
Bitcoin already has an internal mechanism to prevent that from happening because it won't get the support it needs if that was the case.
I think there's a circular argument there somewhere.
And I'm basing that on that I don't really own my Bitcoin.
I act as if I do.
But can we agree that that would be the first time in Bitcoin history that some person lost
Bitcoin after having stored them within consensus rules at the time?
I don't think that's actually correct because I think the inflation bug can be framed as
that.
or something back in the past where the rules were changed.
Like, I'm not, like, here also, I should do my homework more,
but I think that some of the Satoshi Dice stuff,
like, that prevented a, maybe not a certain way of storing Bitcoin,
but it definitely prevented a quote-unquote use case
So you can fuck up someone's business model that works on Bitcoin right now because of what the consensus rules are by tightening the rules.
My point is that that was always the case.
And it doesn't really matter if that involves freezing, you know, sub-thousand set UTXOs or not.
Or fucking up some NFT salesman's business model.
The point of this whole fork is to make it costlier to abuse the network.
Which I agree with.
So there's like, if you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs kind of argument.
Yeah.
And you have to keep in mind that I just ran through a whole list of ProBip 110 angles as well.
So this is, you know, to try to explain what is still giving me some pause to go and wanting to pick up my sword and shield and die on the hill.
Okay.
Yeah.
And the last thing I think, which is something I basically need to understand better is the
whole governance aspect of it.
And that includes code quality.
There was a bug recently, which is, I mean, Core V30 had a bug, right?
So it's not like that.
Quite a serious one.
Yeah.
Which is both, you know, argument for and against because it shows that you can still have a bug in very broadly reviewed code.
And you can have a bug in code that is not reviewed that much.
So it's like the code quality aspect and the whole aspect of what happens after the year is over.
Because this change is temporary, right? For a year.
Yeah, and that year is not set in stone either.
It can be revoked at any point.
Like that's the fail safe.
By the network, I guess, by the consensus.
Like, again, I should have done my homework better, but it's not like a forever thing.
No, it's just that if we open the door to like just a myriad of just one consensus fight after the other,
and all of them will obviously be controversial and have infighting.
And it's like, I would probably, I mean, I'm opening, I'm very open to just me not having
understood the wisdom of this temporary thing, which I hope to learn more about.
But yeah, it just doesn't vibe with my wish to kind of like, because this is a very exhausting
and damaging fight for Bitcoin.
So if we're just like kicking the can one year and we will have the same fight in one
year, I think that's not good.
But I don't think that's the point of the various ability.
Like the whole point of the fork is like,
it's like hitting the developers on the nose
and telling them that guys, you are not in charge.
We are like, do as we say,
or we will have to do things like this.
Which is super cool.
But what still, what will we do after the year?
How will we form the consensus going forward from there?
and who will be the leaders and the people writing this code basically?
Will it be Luke and Mechanic and Dayton?
Well, I don't think that's how it works.
I don't think you're a Bitcoin core developer
if you're not aware of how the system may change in ways that you don't approve of.
That was always true.
I don't think core maintainers are going to quit Bitcoin
because there's a soft fork that they don't particularly like that is being implemented.
I don think that the reason why you And I think Jimmy Song made this point on on tone show as well quite eloquently like like that that not how developers work like you don devote your life to a project like this
if you don't like agree to uh the nature of the project and the nature of the project is that this
was always the case the users could always go against the developers that's that's not new
they were aware of that all the time
and if they weren't aware
of that, should they really have been there in the first
place? Gloria
Schauss certainly didn't seem to be
aware of it. No, but she shouldn't
have been there in the first place. I don't think so.
Which has nothing to do with her gender
or skin color. It has to do with her
having these fucking
anti-pleb
opinions. Yeah, even
implying that gender
or skin color or anything
is a factor, is
bad faith yes and and all of those dey narratives are a side effect of the state owning money
production that might be hard for people to see but politicians have too much power because of
money printing and therefore we get crazy fucking clown world things like dey yeah uh and if we if
we didn't have that we'd have a functioning meritocracy when no one gave a fuck about your
sexual preference or if you were a devout
Catholic or if you were
whatever and you were
it was completely based on
merit and that's what
every single Bitcoiner
I know wants
Bitcoin to be a meritocracy
and nothing else. Exactly.
Yeah.
I agree and I think
maybe I shall repeat because I'm
not sure if I've said it out loud
in this talk. I've said it
to exhaustion on X that
In my opinion, CORE carries the whole responsibility for the situation we are in right now.
They caused this response by extremely arrogant, irresponsible, and reckless behavior in uncapping
up return in the face of huge controversy.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
And that's like another thing when I see them rejecting that, like they can't even accept that fact, then what the fuck?
This is why I want a response to this.
I want to support something that confronts it.
And yeah, as we've been through, it's just that, you know, I feel like I was premature.
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So what's the best counter argument to Bit110?
and what's your strongest reason for pulling out your support?
Like, what is the crux of it?
Is it just, hang on a minute, I'll need to do my homework?
Yeah, I think it's the sum of doubts that, you know,
some of them were already there all the way.
As I posted about while supporting it,
like I am not sure if BIP-110 is the best solution,
But I still supported it because I was so sure that core direction needs to be opposed.
And then, you know, after talking to him, once again, Giacomo did not reach out to talk to me.
I reached out to talk to him.
He did not try to convince me.
It's just that I respect his opinion a lot.
And it gave me more doubt after talking to him.
I'm honest about that, you know.
Of course, you shouldn't trust anyone blindly, but reality is that me and you and a lot of other people also use the social compass in navigating.
And we do outsource some, or at least listen to the people who have proven themselves worthy to listen to.
And suddenly I found myself, it's not like, I mean, Giacomo, he shares all of my anger at core, basically. But he does not think BIP-110 is a responsible solution.
so how much of that do you think is just like giacomo might be a bad example here so so like
let's not make this personal but for for influencers in general uh or people who make a living out of
being a voice in the bitcoin space i would say that there is an incentive of of to to stay on
the sidelines and not not invest too much in a fight that you're not sure if you're going to win
because you don't know what the result will be on the other side of that fight.
So I think there's a reputational damage to be had for,
and I think there's influences like people who speak at conferences,
people like me.
And to me, that was sort of more of a reason to actually signal
that I am willing to die on this hill because the only thing that got me here
in the first place was this principled approach to stuff.
And as soon as I start compromising that, I become no better than anyone else.
No, no.
Not saying that I am better than anyone else, but I'm just saying that, yeah, I have my doubts about the actual fork as well.
But I feel so strongly about fighting for Bitcoin's core principles.
And to me, there's this Venn diagram of knowledge about computer networks and economic literacy.
and ideally you want the Bitcoiners to be in the middle of that Venn diagram.
And I feel that Core has lost the part of the economic literacy way too much.
I think maybe some of the people trying to keep the monetary thing,
they don't have the technical understanding required.
I might be in that camp, sure.
But at least I'm trying to push the economic literacy bubble
to be bigger and more important for the discussion. Make of that what you will.
Yeah. One thing I've observed also, which I think is, I mean, I think you're very correct that
a lot of people are scared to pick a side here. And I don't think they become less scared when they
see the level of backlash that comes whenever you choose a side.
And I've managed the amazing feat of being hated by both sides in some ways right now,
which is kind of funny, but I can assure it, it wasn't out of anything but, you know, Bitcoin
and trying to do the right thing.
I've seen one thing.
I think at least I've seen it.
I'm not going to be bombastic about it, but it really seems like that, that there is a
cohort of people who resist and try to, you know, shut down this BIP110 thing because
it's making noise, it's making drama, it's hurting the price.
And that to me is like, that's not a good reason to be against BIP110.
If you think if the only reason you're against it is because it can hurt, like drama can
hurt the price short term.
No, and that's like, this has been one of my key points since the whole core versus
not debate started.
And that is that everyone should be happy that this conflict is happening because it
means that Bitcoiners care.
If we were just going along with anything like bad, bad, bad, then that would be much
more dangerous.
It is going to be chaotic.
It's going to be super fucking scary.
and Bitcoin is going to be at the brink of death from certain point of views,
that's part of the system.
That's what we signed up for.
It's why it's different.
It's why it's special to me.
Because there is no guiding light.
There is no leader that can tell you what the correct position to have here is.
Which is why I'm so frustrated when I see tribalism form
and this whole, if you're not with us, you're against us attitude.
Because I don't think that helps either.
And, of course, this might be self-contradictory then with talking about the pros of being on the sidelines and not taking a side and that's cowardice.
But as with all things, there's a balance to be struck.
Absolutely. Yeah, this is a difficult topic.
I'm going to spend a lot of time talking and reading and, you know, trying to address my, like, what is giving me, what is, like, unclear to me.
And, yeah, I'm not going to make any rash decision for sure.
Again, and if I ever, you know, were to support BIP110 again, which, I mean, I'm going to be honest.
I think you need to be able to change your mind in the face of new information and new understanding.
And once again, this just underlines the stupidity in me to be premature in supporting it.
And I tried to explain it was because I was away for a long time.
I came in under-informed and emotional.
And I regret it.
it would be so much better if i was still on the sidelines you know and just like
kept learning and then i could like take a position but i'm gonna i'm not done with this
discussion that's like my so so we don't really know your position yet honestly it shouldn't
really matter to be honest you know you should make up your own mind it's like the life of brian
we're all different yeah so it's not like i think that my opinion should matter uh a lot to anyone
but probably the reality is that some people value my opinion too and they they they want my opinion
and that's that's why i was it was super important for me to be honest that shit i i think i was i i
I don't have this conviction right now.
I have to withdraw my support right now,
even if it was stupid as fuck and made me look like an idiot.
So let's try a thing here.
If I go to the website and just read off of it
and see what our ideas are about these specific points, is that okay?
Yeah, I think it has to be the last point on this call, though,
because I'm going to have a date with my girlfriend.
Okay. Yeah, I wouldn't want to fuck that up. So how it works. Simple restrictions that preserve
all monetary use cases while limiting data abuse. So output size limits. New outputs are limited to
34 bytes, except op return, which allows up to 83 bytes. The output size limits, that is to make
it more expensive to put JPEGs and stuff on chain, I guess, because you have to split them up into
the smaller part leading to bigger fees having to be paid
because more V bytes per transaction of these things, right?
Is that how you interpret it?
Yeah, I mean, I also interpret it like, you know,
putting the OPOP return limitation into consensus
and strangling it at 83 bytes instead of 100 kilobytes.
Yeah, that's also, yeah.
So I think in knots, it's defaulted as the default is like 42 bytes and not 83.
But that's the mempool policy.
I mean, you can just do that afterwards too, I guess, whatever that.
So data push limits, data pushes and witness elements are limited to 256 bytes maximum.
Op push data payloads and witness stack elements exceeding 256 bytes are invalid,
except BIP 16 redeem script.
So I guess this is another attempt at strangling whatever comes in there as spam.
Yeah I think already because I be perfectly honest and say that I don know anything about OP push data payloads and witness stack elements
So that tells me that it would probably be smart to have like a layman's explanation on all of these points on this site.
Yeah, I think so too.
Absolutely.
But I'm just going to assume that all of these limits are to make spamming more expensive by limiting the amount of data per transaction.
I think that's the retard understanding of it that actually works.
witness
version restrictions
only well defined
witness versions
v0 and taproot can be spent
during the deployment
now yeah
I'm confused do you understand any of this
does this have
anything to do with
with like segwit
discount I don't know
probably not
so I think
I have no idea
Yeah, this is Hodlunot and Knut naked here admitting how much plebslop retard we actually are.
Yes.
I think so.
Yeah, here is where some of these wallet developers and stuff could be irritated at this because some of their functionalities would not work anymore, right?
But that is motivated by the bigger incentive to just fuck with Citria and the likes of it.
yeah but but but i think the broad the broad understanding i have is that you know none of
these restrictions uh fuck with any like popular normal use case wallets uh at all and that's very
important to keep in mind it but it does it does fuck with the ability of mental gymnastic grifters
to to buy different methods use bitcoin for non-monitor transactions yeah if i'm gonna
Devil's advocate against this, that would be that it might disincentivize developers from working on new interesting features that could actually have monetary use case.
But I don't think that's a very strong argument.
Anyway, taproot restrictions.
Taproot annexes large control blocks and certain opcodes are temporarily restricted.
Yeah, I don't think anyone uses Taproot for whatever it was, for its intended uses anyway, or a very limited usage of that.
So it's being used way more for crap.
So I don't think that's a big concern.
Would it be fair to say that the main result or the main innovation downstream of Taproot being merged was ordinals?
is this conspiracy theory territory where where we think that it was actually pushed through
because of that it was actually not intended as that by me but i certainly see that it could be
interpreted like that yeah and and some malicious forces may have pushed it through because they
wanted to do this shit it's uh at least we have to agree that probably we should take lessons should
we learned after the whole taproot implementation how casually and like non-investigatively that
was done and like how that broad consensus formed was it just because all the people we got used to
trusting were for it i think that plus a fatigue from the block size war so so people were not
willing to do the work and and actually reading up on what this thing actually did and as far as i
I remember it was also sold almost like an extension of Segwit.
And Segwit was like, you know, it became seen as, I mean, basically the fruits of winning the block size war in some way because Jihan resisted it so hard and stuff.
And Taproot was like always like the last piece we needed to make it so much more powerful.
Yeah.
At least that's how I interpreted it.
Yeah, that's how I remember it being marketed as well, whilst that might not have been entirely
true then.
Maybe.
I mean, at least it seems to me like Taproot was a huge positive for people who want the
JPEGs on Bitcoin.
Yeah, unfortunately.
I sometimes wonder where Bitcoin would have been today if Lightning Network was not a
thing.
Sure, SegWit was important for other things than just Lightning, especially the malleability thing, transaction malleability bug.
So what would have happened if we didn't have a Lightning network, but if Bitcoin had just ossified and continued on?
Would we have had the spam?
Would we have had similar attacks?
We can never know because we live in the branch of the multiverse that we happen to live in.
and that's just true for everyone alive.
We cannot ever know what the...
It's Bastia's broken window,
or Bastia's seen and the unseen.
We cannot know what the other timeline would have looked like
because we're not in that timeline, we're in the one we're in.
Yeah.
No, it's this sliding door, sort of closing doors,
thought like what would happen if you managed to get on that subway
instead of the doors closing in front of you
and what would have happened if the Germans won World War II and all that shit.
We will never know.
Yeah, and if Jamie Oliver actually learned how to cook at some point.
We can never know.
Let's not get into the wildest mental gymnastics.
Yeah.
Anyway, so the common questions here,
maybe we should round this out by commenting on this stuff too.
So why is this proposal temporary?
The one-year deployment allows the community to evaluate the impact.
that's very fair, I think.
That's what allows you to have a bit of time
before you make your stance on this.
Like, they're giving Hodlunot time to do his homework here.
And me, by the way.
So, while developers work on a longer-term solution,
so it sort of implies that something else
will have to follow a longer-term solution.
with. And I think that's referring to
actually fixing the bugs.
What Luke and Mechanic calls bugs
anyway, or what Luke calls bugs.
I think they are bugs.
Or exploits. Exploits, I think
is a better word. Ordinals
and inscriptions and all of these are
exploits.
Can I just, devils, advocate
that? All right.
It's like, it's
worded as of
just a positive. It allows
the community and, you know, as the
The community is, as we are seeing right now, extremely polarized.
Yeah.
It allows the community to evaluate the impact.
No, no, no, no, no.
So that, to me, sounds like we're going to have an ongoing, very hostile debate going on what is this actually doing, you know?
And we will have one side who says, look here, it destroyed Bitcoin as we know it.
And the other side will know, fuck you.
it saved Bitcoin.
And this is like the thing
that I haven't fleshed out in my mind enough,
just like how will this year
and what happens after,
how will it look in practice?
Is it any chance of Bitcoin emerging from this
as one solid thing
that still retains the trust of the world?
I don't know.
Well, I'm optimistic about that.
Yeah.
I think it wouldn't be the case if Bitcoin hadn't had this fight.
Like, either everyone agrees to this and then the consensus rules are temporarily tightened.
Or we have a hard fork.
Or it's dead in the water.
Who knows?
Well, I guess we'll see.
There's some sort of Pascal's wager to it, too.
because the more you believe it will happen,
the higher the likelihood that it actually will.
Yeah.
So that's to take into account too.
The other sentence here is,
I can agree that this language here is kind of,
it's presenting this fork as something
that allows the community to evaluate the impact.
Like it's very self-promoting in the language chosen here.
Yeah, I could rewrite it and probably be similarly close to the truth, like something like allows the community to infight and put each other on the stake and kill each other for a year.
Developers work on a longer term solution.
Yeah, some restrictions would severely constrain future upgrades if permanent, but are acceptable for a limited time to address the immediate crisis.
Yeah, here I can actually be where one of my biggest concerns with BIP-110 is the same as like passports were a temporary measure at one point in time.
And now they're standard all over the world.
So you need a paper to be allowed to go abroad.
That was not always the case.
And this is my biggest concern.
I think that sometimes temporary things are not as temporary as we think.
It's like when you fix something with gaff tape and instead of properly fixing it, you
tend to not give a fuck about it afterwards and the temporary solution becomes the permanent
solution.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll add something that would be pro Bipon or like that would make me less concerned
about that.
And that's that severely constraining future upgrades like that just sounds good to me.
I don't want to upgrade all that.
Like, what is Bitcoin?
Is it something that we shall always like upgrade?
I understand maintain and fix bugs and shit, but I don't want Bitcoin to be this innovation
place.
So there is a point where enough is enough, right?
That we don't need to.
Maintaining is one thing and fighting off future threats.
That's one thing, but that's not upgrading necessarily.
So if upgrading is, you know, quantum resistance, if that is even needed, I don't know.
Is that just FUD as well?
But that would be valid.
It's both FUD and not FUD at the same time.
Roner Schrodinger's FUD.
Yes.
Limiting taproot control blocks could complicate advanced smart contracts like BitVM.
I don't think this is a trade-off at all.
I think that's a feature, not a bug.
I don't want programmable money because to me, programmable money means programmable people.
I don't want fucking scripts like that.
I know that Satoshi was for having the script thing in there so that in the future,
Bitcoin could accommodate smart contracts and stuff.
But I don't necessarily like that.
I want Bitcoin to be as simple as possible.
Yeah, I agree.
Upgrade hooks are temporarily unavailable for other soft forks.
Some wallet software using op-if and tap leaves may need updates.
However, these are acceptable short-term trade-offs for immediate benefits.
Yeah, might piss off some developers on some projects
and might even fuck with their business models somehow.
Yeah, however, I think this is definitely in the fuck around and find out category.
Is there any risk of funds being frozen or lost?
In theory, yes, but this proposal goes to great pains to avoid affecting those use cases.
Funds are completely unaffected if they don't use Taproot, use Taproot in standard ways,
or can be spent via KeyPath or other expected tap leaves.
Additionally, UTXO created before activations are permanently exempt from the new rules.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah.
So it doesn't freeze anything, except if you create that thing now before the whole thing.
Yeah, I would be interested to find out if there are no exceptions to that statement
that basically funds UTXOs cannot be frozen, because I've heard different stories spelled
out, and yeah, that should be clarified.
It says UTXOs created before activation are permanently exempt from the new rules.
To me, I interpret that as you being able to move those coins after the rules are implemented.
Yeah, a separate two-week grace period between lock-in and activation also provides great general preparation time.
Yeah.
won't spammers just spread
their data over multiple fields
while it's impossible to fully prevent
steganography limiting data sizes ensures abuses and non and obfuscated requiring users to divide files into chunks of 256 bytes raises the costs in fees and effort sending a clear message
that data storage is unwelcome i think this is the biggest why i'm pro this thing because
i i do want to send that message and i do want it to become more expensive for them to
do that
I mean, even if my house, you know, theoretically can be broken into by very sophisticated thieves using advanced tooling and equipment, I still prefer that situation to opening my door wide open with a sign and like marketing that thieves can enter here.
it's a huge difference to me and obviously to me making it more difficult and and need
more complexity yeah costly everything to spam the blockchain or grift on the blockchain
we should do that yeah uh why limit script pipe keys to 34 bytes script pipe keys must be stored
indefinitely in quick access memory by all nodes. Modern usage is all 34 bytes or smaller,
as actual spending conditions are in the witness. Large script pubkeys enable data abuse and
malicious poison blocks that take a long time to validate. Yeah, I don't have anything to add to
that, I think. Is there a slippery slope toward banning use cases? No, these rules enshrine
long-standing principles of Bitcoin, this software does not restrict monetary activity,
only non-monetary data storage. The temporary nature reinforces a targeted intervention,
not a new direction. Yeah, I like that point. Even if it said, yes, it is a slippery slope
toward banning use cases, I would be pro it because I don't want use cases. I want there
to be one single use case. Yes. Yes. Yes. I don't want smart contracts.
like it's just a fact i want monetary transactions on bitcoin yeah uh and even even a thing like
time locks which i think are super cool i know that if i was to put my bitcoins in a time locked
in time to time lock them for x number of blocks then they are more at risk than if i could
interact with them during that period of course because i cannot predict the future that is a
fuck around use case even though it's a cool use case it's still a fuck around use case all right
does this solve spam completely no of course it doesn't and no one ever claimed it did by the way
this is the that's what yeah bad argument yeah which is which is also like something i don't like
with the rhetoric for from this v30 core camp that oh look we could uh we could put the whole
BIP-110 PDF in the blockchain under BIP-110 rules.
Yay, so this is pointless.
That's bad faith, in my opinion.
Yeah, the other point I want to make about the smaller,
won't the spammers just spread their data over multiple fields?
This is, I guess the devil's advocate argument there would be that
since there are smaller fields, they will bloat the UTX set more
because there will be more transactions and they will have to spam it up.
The point is, though, that it's costlier.
So I do think that that's a bad argument too, even though it could lead to more bloat, but that sort of requires all the spammers to have more money to spend on this.
And the risk there, I'd say, is a state-level attack where a nation state decides to kill Bitcoin, and they have a money printer.
So they have infinite money for at least short term before the fiat, their printing dies.
So they can just print and print and print and spam the chain or bloat the UTXO set.
however that would require a competent government which is incompatible with
a deep state really smart government so i'm i'm unsure there if retardation or 5d chess is the
biggest threat yeah does this affect the utxo set no bip 110 limits only limits the size of
new outfits going forward. It doesn't touch, invalidate or prune any existing UTXOs. This is
important. You may be thinking of the cat. Yes, the cat is the really controversial proposal.
And we had a lot of fun trolling people with that by saying meow on X, just threatening with a cat,
which is actually going to these ordinals websites and picking out these transactions
of just making them unspendable.
When was that Meow meme and when did Cat launch?
Yeah, I'm sorry you missed it
because you would have been perfect for it
with the helmet on.
That was like a couple of months back, I guess.
It's an idea by a developer called Claire Ostrom,
which is probably some kind of Nym thing.
And it proposed to actually go to all these sites
that promote selling stamps and ordinals and inscriptions
and targeted because all the data is there where where this nft was minted or whatever where this
rares the the address of this rare set and you would just go there and invalidate all of those
which is i love the idea as much as i hate the idea the president that sets and so on and so
forth but i kind of love it just to really really rug the spammers i i love that i love the i love
the finding out part of it, but I don't love the precedence and like basically the principle
of it.
No, and someone would actually have to code the thing first. So I think the cat is probably
in. That's not the topic of today. Definitely not. Does this affect the Lightning Network?
No, is the short answer here.
Yeah.
I'm sure there will be someone in your comments, depending on how many people watch this, but
that will create some type of exotic scenario where it would affect something on the Lightning
Network. But I mean, I trust what is said here that basically the summarized answer is no.
Yeah. Taproot was designed so that, why is op if restricted in Tapscript?
And here's a long explanation, and it's basically to, oh, this is long and complicated.
I have seen controversy around this op-if thing, at least, but my takeaway from what I read is that it's extremely rarely used, if at all, and that there are substitutes for it that can be implemented if BIP-110 were to activate.
Yeah. And as we have said before, BIP 110 is a consensus level change and not a mempool policy change. I think this is where most of the criticism is like that this is and should be a policy level thing, how much you allow or choose to allow or not allow in your mempool.
but I'd say that that is, yes, that was a good position to have up until Core V30,
which fucked that up.
So now that argument does no longer apply, in my view,
because they went against the grain there.
Is this optional for miners?
During the signaling phase, miners can choose whether to signal support.
If 55% signal in a retarget period, the soft fork locks in early.
If not, mandatory signaling kicks in before the deadline.
blocks that don't signal are rejected guaranteeing lock-in once activated the new rules are enforced
at the consensus level any block that violates them is rejected by all enforcing nodes regardless
of the miners preference yeah are people willing to die on this hill or not i guess we'll see um
Yeah. And I hope the debate kind of like continues to illuminate what it really is for me and
for everyone who wants to understand that, you know, the sides of it that are still like
contentious or under understood will be better relayed to laymen or people with less technique,
like plebslop people like us.
And I also hope that, you know, I think,
I like to think that our conversation today is kind of like maybe representative
for the level of technical understanding of a lot of Bitcoiners
and therefore may be useful.
And maybe it's useful to have more conversations like this from,
not necessarily from us, but from people who just like honestly,
Maybe the main target would be people who are worried about what Core is doing, because that's where I'm coming from. I would love to just brush this aside. Why should we even consider this? We have a great developer group in Core that we can trust, and things are great, but I don't feel like that. I really feel like Core needs to be tempered.
yeah i i totally agree and uh the question becomes is this the the way of doing that or
shall we bicker and argue until a better way comes up and this is only already gaining some momentum
so i'm very unsure that we'll get a second chance at this and so the same argument like i think this
was one of giacomo's arguments to you if i'm not mistaken that uh it has such low chances of
succeeding that will have a harder time the next time we try something.
That will burn more social capital for maybe the right reaction.
Yes, but the counter argument to that would be, well, Batman was not the hero Gotham wanted,
but it's the one they got.
Like, this is the thing that is on the table.
There's currently no other thing on the table. So maybe now that this is the thing on the table, then this is the only chance we get. And therefore we should just fucking do it. And then everyone can theorize afterwards.
Yeah, I think doing nothing over a long time period is 100% harmful.
That is harm the way I see it.
But I also think doing something rather drastic in haste has the potential of being harmful too.
it's like therefore the conviction level and like confidence in having understood
the aspects that are important to you know each of us wherever you stand subjectively
is a prerequisite before you die on the hill or before you potentially decide to die on a hill
Because this is important for Bitcoin. This whole conflict is very important for Bitcoin. And I don't think it's very overstated to say that this is maybe not as important as the block size war, but it does feel like a moment in time for Bitcoin where stakes are high and it really matters which side you choose.
yeah so so before we close this out like a final question would be what would it take to convince
you to signal support again for for bip 110 what would that take uh it would take for me to reflect
more on this and to become more uh confident in the in the points i raised against bip 110
10. Basically, the maybe, maybe the biggest thing is, you know, uncertainty about and everything
regarding governance, one year temporary activation, what happens after what like that whole dynamic
is is big for me. And also to have more clarity on potential for loss of funds for any users
Yeah, fair enough. Do you wear flip flops?
I did yesterday or the day before I took them off. I mean, I'll just go back to saying
maybe two things, you know, that I subscribe to just, you know, being open to learning always,
and to be open to, to change my mind.
And it's not like I really,
to the degree to which I changed my mind
was a conviction level.
As I think I've become clear in this conversation,
I am not like one of the people who attack
Bip 110 in any way. I applaud it. I applaud people who want to fight for Bitcoin and who
follow principles. I like to follow principles. I do that always. I try to. But I, yeah, but I'm,
I'm very like, I feel embarrassed for having flip-flopped on my outspoken support. And that
means I will have to be damn sure before I come back in support. Okay. So if we ever see you
support it again then that's final then i'm on the hill that's for sure all right yeah yeah uh
i'll close out with this uh once again here we the plebs are the dicks we're reckless arrogant
stupid dicks and the developers are pussies and the spammers are assholes pussies don't like dicks
because pussies get fucked by dicks but dicks also fuck us fuck assholes
assholes who just want to spam on everything
pussies make think that they can deal with assholes in their way
by increasing up return
but the only thing that can fuck an asshole
is a dick with some balls
yeah
with that
strong words Knut
pick a side or don't
and remember to brush your teeth
and like comment subscribe share this thing call us idiots call us wise old bearded men You not bearded You have a mustache or an attempted one
And I hope to see you again soon, man.
We see each other way to sell them in the flesh.
And we have to find an island somewhere.
We can hang out with our kids.
Maybe we can do Eurasia.
Yeah, who knows?
It's always a pleasure anyway.
and I respect you insane.
The levels of respect I have for you
and the decisions you made in life are insane
and it's always good to talk to you
and bounce these things back and forth.
I'm going to continue my support for BIP110 now
and we'll see what happens in the future.
Yeah, I respect you a lot, Knut.
Thanks for having these conversations with me both
on this podcast and on the phone before.
And thanks for being my friend
and I hope to talk to you soon.
With that, this has been
the Bitcoin Infinity Show.
Cheerio, folks.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thank you.