Chris, welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Nice to have you back.
Hi, Knut. Great to be back.
Yes, you were here like, what is it now? Like five months ago or something?
Something like that or four maybe? I don't remember exactly.
It's been a few months.
I feel like it was shorter than that, but you know, time flies.
Yeah, I think you were here just a week before Core V30 was released or something like that, or two weeks before or something like that.
The show may have come out just days before.
Okay, yeah. So December, November, October. Yeah, so that was three months?
Three months. So yeah, we usually don't have guests back this soon after they've done a thing, but you wanted to come on to do a sort of rebuttal thing to Merch's episode because we're getting bogged down in this core versus knots. Fantastic.
Yeah, I was hoping to actually have a conversation directly with Merch, which he still refuses to do for reasons I don't really understand.
We're using your podcast as kind of the go between.
Well, I'm humbled that you're both willing to do that.
And hopefully I can be a good mediator and maybe I can offer a third view.
I don't know.
But what has happened since you were on is, yeah, we had Merch on.
We also had, I just recently interviewed CONSA, a long two and a half hour episode.
I haven't released that yet, but that's very good.
It's obviously from the not side, but also very much on the Austrian economics side and the anarcho-capitalist side,
which I've, during our time apart, have figured out that you're not really an anarcho-capitalist.
So we might get into that later on in the episode.
I used to be.
You used to be.
Yes, and I think the thing I want to talk to you about there is maybe Anarcha Pulco and how those LARPers aren't really libertarians.
That's another whole can of worms.
Yeah, that's another whole can of worms.
So I'm just saying that if this can of worms doesn't contain enough worms, we have other cans of worms to open.
But let's go. You made a fantastic document here about certain timestamps from Merch's episode.
So people can go and have a look at that if they want to, so they can hear both sides of this argument.
And yeah, I'm going to try to stay as neutral as I can, but then also offer my opinion.
So I guess I'm not going to be neutral at all.
Okay. Yeah. And maybe let's not publish the doc yet.
I'm going to clean it up if you want to actually publish it.
I will not publish the doc. I don't intend to, and I don't think it's a good idea. But I do think I'm going to read off of it and we can get into, and maybe you will too, and we'll get into that. So the first point is from one minute and 35 seconds into the conversation with Merch. And that says that you agreed with Merch's definition of Bitcoin more than mine. Yes.
Yeah. So basically you said, what is Bitcoin? And Murch said something like it is a it's a network that we can that we can use for Internet money.
And then he said it's the native Internet of the money. Sorry, it's the it's the Internet's native money.
And then you said something like it is a it's a set of rules and a network that makes it makes it more costly to break the rules and to follow the rules or something like that.
I liked Murch's definition a little bit better because he mentioned that Bitcoin is money and your definition did not mention that.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, my go-to answer is Bitcoin is an agreement on a fixed set of rules. And my slightly longer answer is that the reason we agree on this specific set of rules is that these are the only rules that are more expensive to break than to just follow.
or that are most more expensive to break than to just follow, if that makes any sense,
which in turn, in my view, that is the core thing that makes it money
or makes it the best form of money humanity has ever seen.
Right, but so it's kind of muddled.
Your definition is almost like the core devs definition
in that it doesn't actually say in the definition that Bitcoin is money.
And I think that that is partly what's causing all the problems with CoreDev is that they have this notion that, oh, well, Bitcoin, the way that it works, it just naturally becomes the best money because of how it works.
And I don't like I think where the not side is coming from on this is that, you know, maybe it'll get there someday, but we have to make sure that we explicitly define Bitcoin as money so that it can evolve into the best possible money.
It is probably the best money in existence right now, but that doesn't mean that it will always be money.
So I think it's important to specify that.
Okay, I'm going to give an answer to that too.
And I think the difference here is that I come from the Austrian economics literature in terms of what money is.
And money, according to Mises and Rothbard and Hoppe too, is something akin to the thing that turns out to be that society's most prominent medium of exchange, implicitly over time and space.
And I would say that Bitcoin is the best medium of exchange over time and space humanity has ever seen.
So there's a good likelihood that it becomes money or becomes the best money also.
It is already money, but it's not already the dominant type of money on planet Earth.
And that's, I think, is where I draw the distinction.
Hopper defined money as the best insurance against the future available on the market.
And right now, that is probably Bitcoin, but it's still sort of up to the debate.
I would say that it's intended to be money and intended to be a perfect medium of change of a space and time or almost perfect.
So I think we do agree.
It's just a semantics thing.
Well, so I think it's important to point out that Hoppe and Mises and these people who are writing a long time ago were writing about things like gold that are not programmable, right?
That don't evolve over time.
Gold is just gold.
It just it stays exactly how it is, regardless of what, you know, what the culture of gold bugs thinks.
But Bitcoin is not like that.
Bitcoin evolves based on what Bitcoiners think Bitcoin should become.
And so Bitcoin is more of a living system, more of a sort of a macro organism than gold is, because the Bitcoin protocol will can and will evolve, you know, in the direction that Bitcoiners as a whole think that it should evolve in.
And so if we don't consider, you know, Bitcoin being money as an important as an important goal or as something that needs to be actively fought for, then it's possible and maybe even likely that Bitcoin will start to become worse money over time.
And so that's that's I think that sort of encapsulates the knots position.
Yeah. And I by the way, I totally agree with that.
I think Bitcoin should not aim to be anything but money.
yes ever like it's super important crucially and i i completely agree with you that because
bitcoin is bitcoin is is has very fundamentally good you know good features that make it
fundamentally good money um but as you said it's not the most desirable medium of exchange right
now um mostly because of network effects um but also there are user experience problems with with
using bitcoin as a medium of exchange which we can talk about um and that's sort of money yeah
And aggressive monetary monopolists hindering its evolution by enforcing people into behaviors that hinders Bitcoin adoption.
They need to pay their taxes in dollars and so on and so forth.
Yep.
And they have to do a settlement of oil purchases.
You know, if you're a state actor is trying to buy and sell oil, you kind of have to use the dollar for that because the U.S.
points a gun at your head all right next point i think we need to to move on here if we're going to
get anywhere here so 350 in one group thinks that scaling is not part of what's what makes
bitcoin better money yes this is a quote from uh from merch uh i guess yeah this is where merch
was trying to paint the not side as people who don't like scaling um and that's um just it's
just dishonest. The knot side does not dislike scaling. You know, we think that Bitcoin needs
to scale as you and I were both saying just now. I think that it's important that Bitcoin become
a popular medium of exchange because that's how it becomes the best money. And so it is impossible
for Bitcoin to scale to a global user base in the current technological paradigm. Bitcoin needs to
be upgraded in one way or another, or it just simply will not scale to a global user base.
And so the not side, as I see it, sees that as important, but like we need to be careful about scaling and do it properly instead of just kind of like, let's just, you know, open all the floodgates and let all the shitcoin VC money flood in and build whatever it wants.
because if you do that, then you risk corrupting the culture.
And if you corrupt the culture, then Bitcoin may lose its way
and stop trying to be the best money.
And it will start trying to be, you know, whatever fiat VCs want it to be.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
And here it's important to, I think, to point out the two problems that money solves.
And that is removing the need for a mutual coincidence of needs,
like is the case with barter trading.
And the other is economic calculation without money.
people cannot assess the future in the way they can if they have money.
So they can calculate what they need to buy and how much income they need,
how much profit they need, so on and so forth.
And I'd say that any upgrade to Bitcoin that does not help one of those two
is not really an upgrade to Bitcoin, but a shitcoin takeover attempt.
Like Bitcoin should not upgrade if the upgrade does not make it better money.
And I think the Nott side might have a stricter definition of what that actually means.
Yeah, I think that those two points are related to your two definitions of your two types of medium of exchange, right?
Your medium of exchange.
Time and space, yeah.
With space, you know, between people and then with yourself in the future, right?
It's kind of like both of those different functions.
Yes, and you can't have one without the other in a way.
Like money needs to be both.
There's no point in a medium of exchange over time if you cannot send it to other people.
There's no point in a medium of exchange over space sending it to other people if it can't keep its value over time, because then you can't make the economic calculation, which is one of the problems, the very core problems that money is supposed to solve.
Yep.
And I've said this before.
I think I said this on your last podcast, but Bitcoin is innovative and exciting because it solves both problems at the same time.
So it is both a store of value and a medium of exchange.
And this is what makes it exciting.
It's currently a better store of value than the dollar, but it is not a better medium of exchange than the dollar.
And I think this is a problem.
Yes. And come to think of it, these two problems that money solve are actually, the solution is actually medium of exchange over space and medium of exchange over time.
The solution to the coincidence of needs is the medium of exchange over space aspect.
the solution to the economic calculation is medium exchange over time.
So it makes perfect sense.
So I think...
Yeah, I like how you formulate that.
That's brilliant.
Thank you.
And I think this is, I think on the core side, that view may be more muddled.
I suspect that we have, this is also taking sides,
and I don't really like that when I'm doing an interview,
But I suspect that there are more people who view money in that Austrian way on the Nott side.
I suspect so.
But, I mean, I'm willing to give people benefit of the doubt.
Let's just go on and see how we can comment on this point.
Yeah, just to kind of summarize what I think for this conversation, what the difference, the important difference between Quor and Nott is that I think there's a lot of libertarians and even anarchists on both sides.
and even us Austrian supporters on both sides.
But I think that Core takes the view
that Bitcoin is already ideal money
and we just need to kind of tinker with it
and then, you know, everything will be fine.
Whereas Knott's takes a more conservative approach
and they think, you know, we should improve it, right?
But in the correct direction
and make sure that if we're making changes to Bitcoin,
we're making the correct changes to Bitcoin.
Absolutely.
I think this is very close to the difference between what I call a LARP-bertarian and a real libertarian.
If you think the free market, in a truly free market, you can do whatever the fuck you want and you can scam people.
That is not the Austrian definition of a free market.
A breach of contract is a breach of contract.
Scamming and spamming and implicitly spamming is not okay on a free market It is a crime If you advertising a product and you selling something else than you advertising you committing a contract crime of some kind a fraud at best
I think. You're infringing someone's property rights at the very end. Exactly. Exactly. So
that's what all crime is an infringement of property rights, according to Rothbardian
ethics. So I think this is at the core, pun intended, of what we're missing here,
because I think many people on the many sides of many issues think that they have a libertarian
view when they don't really understand what a free market is. It does not give you permission
to do whatever the fuck you want. That's not the point. All right.
I like that formulation. And I just want to add to that. I think a lot of crypto people are,
as you call them, larbertarians, where they want freedom, but they don't want any responsibility.
So that's how I would summarize that.
And I think fantastic.
But I think it's infecting.
There's always been sort of a contingent of the Bitcoin community that's been LARPitarians.
And I think that that is now the majority of Bitcoin core.
I'm sorry to say.
Well, yeah, I might not have that a dark view about them, but I'd say like and I usually don't like to name names.
But when people are obvious scammers, such as Eric Voorhees, for instance, I think that he's in the LARPitarian camp because he created an exchange that legitimized all the shit coins and compared them as equals to Bitcoin.
And you could exchange back and forth when the whole idea is him taking your sets in the fees between the like it.
To me, that's obvious.
If you're a shitcoin exchange, you make money off of people believing that there's any value in these things.
And therefore you can charge fees when people want to trade their precious sats for other shit.
So at best, it's ingenuous.
What's the word?
Disingenuous.
Insincere.
Yeah.
Yeah, Eric Voorhees and I go back a long way.
And there are many Bitcoiners like him from the early days.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, as you say, I would consider them LARPitarians.
Would I consider Eric Voorhees a scammer?
Probably not.
But I think he just, he enables scammers.
And I think he doesn't realize that he's doing it.
Yeah, yeah, I can give him the benefit.
I shouldn't be too harsh on the guy either.
But as I said, I don't like picking on people, but I think at least he's definitely enabling scammers by providing that service.
And I think that this is the problem that's infecting Bitcoin Core at the moment is there's all these scammers that are trying to invade Bitcoin.
And the core devs are going, well, you know, the free market likes these scams.
And so, you know, who are we to say what the free market should do?
That's not the free market, though.
So that's the point I really want to hammer in.
And I want to add that, you know, libertarians love the free market.
But what they don't realize is that when you have a money printer that prints the reserve asset, you don't have a free market.
And this is actually my pinned tweet.
Capitalism without money is not capitalism.
100%.
There's all of this, you know, economic demand for all these scams.
And I'm like, yeah, there's a money printer that's stealing money from poor people and just shoveling it into the dumbest shit imaginable.
Of course, people like scamming in that environment. Scamming is is one of the best, most lucrative strategies.
Of course. Yeah. As Bitcoiners, we should fight that.
Absolutely. Absolutely. A new sort of ethic into into being.
Absolutely. A more a more. It's actually an older ethic.
It's actually, I think, a more or more natural or more human ethic, which is that you should you should build things of lasting value and you should provide real value to the world.
And the monetary system should reward that. And the problem with the fiat monetary system is it's the opposite of that. It rewards people for doing bad things and punishes people for doing good things.
absolutely i would call it natural law i mean this is the point one of the underlying points
of the entire praxeology book i wrote is is that we've never had true capitalism because we don't
have sound money not not even on a gold standard we have absolutely finite money supply and you
sort of need that to get to experience the true beauty of the free market where everyone wins
always that has never been tried all right but bitcoin fixes this that is what bitcoin does
Bitcoin absolutely fixes this.
So, yes, where are we?
We're never going to get all the way through this Google Doc, by the way.
I mean, if we're going to do it at this speed, it would take us like 10 hours to get all the way through.
No, but I kind of like it.
And you're welcome to continue any day because I absolutely love this.
Or do you want to do it any other way?
Do you want to speed run through it or do you want to go back and forth?
I have a couple of things that I wanted to highlight.
So one of the things is Merch specifically called me out by name.
um at where is it 54 or something 40. Holy shit this is long. I know yeah you you didn't scroll
all the way to the bottom yet it's a long. Yeah that's why we're never gonna get to the end of
this thing but yeah so I wanted to specifically call that out um it would not call that out but
I wanted to specifically respond to that because he you know misrepresented my position on that
and then yeah I think we should talk about so we're talking about sort of the the the
fundamental philosophy of Bitcoin, which I think we just touched on. And then there's, you know,
things that are effective against spam and why core is making the problem worse rather than
better. And then there's maybe addressing how core has made the problem even worse by not engaging
with the node runners and the NOS supporters
in an honest way.
Yeah.
The large bird's eye viewpoints that I'd like to hit
and then we can...
Okay, you want me to recite the entire quote here
from Merch and where he misrepresents you
or how do we want to do this?
Yeah, you don't have to do that.
I can just say...
So, yeah, so he says Chris Guida
has been making that argument a lot.
OK, so he was talking, you asked him, isn't it more expensive to run a node on a Raspberry Pi or isn't it impossible to run a node on a Raspberry Pi?
And he said, oh, no, that's that's wrong.
That's that's.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And then he said, Chris Guida is making that argument a lot.
And then he explained what he why he thought that my argument was wrong.
And then I thought it was interesting that he then explained why Bitcoin Core has, number one, has received a lot of reports of Raspberry Pis being slow to sync.
And Bitcoin Core is specifically focusing on fixing Raspberry Pis, which he said that Lawrence is working on.
So there's a whole lot of detail in all of that.
But I guess just to summarize how he misrepresented my position, he said, so Chris Guida has been making that argument a lot.
It is my impression that he was taking the point at which assume valid, the assume valid block was for an older version of Bitcoin Core at which it starts doing full script validation.
So basically he said Chris Guida did a sink at some point.
So what he thinks that my position is, is, OK, Chris Guida did a sink at some point.
And then he noticed that at some point in the sinking process, it slowed down a lot.
And that's the assume valid point.
And so Chris Guida, being the incompetent, you know, buffoon that he is, assumed that this was the effect of the spam and not the effect of assume valid.
And so I just want to point out that this is this is this is the kind of this is the shit I'm talking about.
Like they just assume that when there's criticisms of how Bitcoin Core works, that the people bringing up the criticisms are incompetent and doing something dumb instead of just listening to the criticism and maybe engaging with the user.
and being like, okay, well, that was your experience.
But a lot of other users have had different experiences from you.
So maybe let's try to figure out
whether there's some kernel of truth in what you're saying
or whether you're just being a troll.
So they're treating me like a troll, right?
But this is improper
because I worked for Start9 for years
and leading up to the spam attacks
and before the spam attack.
And I've directly firsthand experienced
the syncing process on a Raspberry Pi many, many times. And I have the primary, one of the primary
goals of Start9 was to help as many people as possible sync the Bitcoin network as cheaply and
as quickly and as easily as possible to run a lightning node. That was sort of their original
goal. And so it's really just kind of bewildering and very concerning that he thinks that I'm some
kind of just, you know, some kind of incompetent guy with no experience. You know, I'm probably the
person that they should be talking to the most because I'm the most technical person who has
experience syncing lots and lots of Raspberry Pis and helping people sync Raspberry Pis.
So that's just, it's just crazy to me that he would assume that I misinterpreted the effect of
of assume valid for the spam.
It's just...
Okay, so what's the truth about the cost of syncing on a Raspberry Pi?
Is it much worse since February 2023 or not?
Absolutely.
Yes, it is.
So, and as I said, I have firsthand experience syncing many, many Raspberry Pis starting in
2020, which is when I started working for Start9.
All throughout 2021, 2022, you could sync a Raspberry Pi in a few days, maybe a couple
of weeks at most is how long it would take. There's a lot, a lot of moving parts with the
initial sync. So it's like your mileage may vary. But in general, before the spam attacks up until
2022, you could sync a Raspberry Pi in, you know, five to, you know, 14 or 15 days. And then once
the spam attacks started hitting, it slowed down dramatically. And so, and the crazy thing about
this is that Bitcoin Core, the core devs know that UTXO set bloat is bad because they know
it slurs down the initial sync. And they know that if your computer is slow enough, it can make your
computer fall out of sync with the rest of the network because you can have a block that takes
a really long time to validate. And so they know that a large UTXO set is a problem. And we know
that they know because their entire rationale for removing the opportune limit in PR32406
was UTXO set bloat.
They were like, oh my God, Citria is going to add 64 bytes
of unspendable UTXO set bloat.
And this is a huge problem.
This is a problem that's huge enough
that we have to cause basically a civil war in Bitcoin
to fix this problem.
So we know that they know that UTXO set bloat is a problem.
And if they would just be honest with us and say,
yeah, of course, UTXO set bloat is the reason
why Raspberry Pi syncing slowed down dramatically during the spam attacks.
If they said that, then I would trust them that they're engaging with the problem honestly.
Not a single core dev has said, yeah, it's probably true that the UTXO set bloat caused
by the BRC20 spam attack, which I'll remind your listeners, multiplied the UTXO set from
four gigabytes to 12 gigabytes.
It added 200% of the current UTXO set in 2022. By 2024, it was 8 gigabytes more than that. That's a huge amount of UTXO set bloat from this spam attack.
And so they're just complaining about UTXO set bloat when it suits their purposes, i.e. when they want to remove the opportune limit.
But then they ignore UTXO set bloat when they actually need to take a serious look at Bitcoin D's architecture.
And maybe take a serious look and be like, yeah, it's hard to sync a Bitcoin node cheaply and conveniently.
And so as Merck said later, oh, yeah, we are working on this.
Lawrence is working on speeding up the sync on the Raspberry Pi.
So he's both acknowledging it and he's both saying, yeah, it's a problem because he has to say that because that's the, but I'm repeating myself now.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah, but it's Schrodinger's UTXO set load, just like they did with Schrodinger's UTXO set load.
And I've heard Mechanic make this argument, too, about the UTXO set load and how they're going back and forth on it.
So why do you think that is? What makes them do that? It sounds suspiciously a lot like corruption to me, but is that what you're saying?
So I will be charitable and I will assume that they are doing it because of laziness.
So all of their actions can be assumed by laziness.
So basically, you know, if so, so fixing IBD is a very, very, very difficult problem.
I mean, there's an insanely large amount of moving parts to try to make IBD quicker, especially on a device like the Raspberry Pi, which is...
Initial block download, right?
Yes, the initial block download.
Yeah, for listeners who are not familiar with the abbreviations.
Okay, yeah.
So there's a razor there somewhere.
You're familiar with Occam's razor.
Like maybe this is Chris Guida's razor.
Never a tribute to Malice.
Yeah, it's Guida.
Guida, sorry.
Maybe this is Chris Guida razor never attribute to malice that which can be explained by laziness Laziness Exactly All right Oh well that good So what I saying is so if you look at their rationale for removing the opportune limit it was basically laziness
They were like, we don't want to have to deal with this every time.
So we're just going to get rid of it and maybe somebody else will deal with it.
That was basically their rationale.
And the same thing with IBD.
They were basically like, well, you know, whenever somebody complains about slow IBD, we're just going to ignore them.
Right.
If you just ignore all of the criticism, then you make less work for yourself.
So I think that's actually the proper explanation for this.
Yeah.
That's interesting, to say the least.
Where do we go next?
All right.
Censorship resistance is an important property of Bitcoin, but it's not the most important property because there are a lot of systems that are censorship resistant.
Yeah.
Only one censorship resistant money.
Yeah. So this is this is something that Murch said. I think he talked to you and then he talked to Luke DeWolf about, which is censorship resistance is a core feature of Bitcoin.
Yeah, I've heard many people say that that's think that that's the absolute most important property.
Yeah, so it is a very important property. It's kind of like what you were saying earlier with store of value and medium of exchange being important properties.
They're both important properties. We have to have both of them. Right. So censorship resistance is one is like that. Right. It's it's something that without which Bitcoin would not work. OK, Bitcoin has to be censorship resistant. However, that is not sufficient for Bitcoin to succeed. Bitcoin needs to be censorship resistant money.
If it stops being money, but it's censorship resistant, then it doesn't have any advantages over shit coins like Litecoin and BCH and Monero.
And even worse than that, it doesn't have any.
There's lots of censorship resistant data storage tech like BitTorrent and IPFS and Nostr.
Those are censorship resistant data storage systems.
And, you know, we already have those, right?
We don't need another censorship resistant data storage platform.
Bitcoin is censorship resistant money.
That's what makes it interesting.
Yeah, and I think people have the wrong definition of the word censorship
because censorship implies that you were coerced or threatened to not say something
or to not send some information.
And there is no such thing going on in people filtering stuff.
There's no such thing going on if people find a consensus around the cat, for instance.
That's not censorship.
It's not confiscation.
It's just people agreeing that this is OK and this is not OK.
This is not censorship because there are no guns involved.
And I think people get that backwards.
Yeah.
So, yeah, censorship resistance is a big topic.
I think that Merch and most of the core devs have a rather extreme view on this.
And this goes back to the Schrodinger's Filter thing.
Like they both think that, you know, running knots is censorship or like they both say that filters work and filters don't work.
Right. So they'll say, oh, filters don't work unless, you know, 90 percent or more of the network is filtering.
But then they'll say, oh, but filtering is censorship.
Yeah. And so it's kind of like, OK, well, you have to pick one or the other.
If it's easy to get a transaction confirmed that 10% of the network is relaying and 90% of the network is filtering, then censorship on Bitcoin is really, really, really hard, which is my position, right?
Like, even if 100% of the network is filtering transactions, Bitcoin is still censorship resistant because you can just send your transaction directly to a miner.
I think it's deeper, though, because I think this is back to the LARP-itarians versus the libertarians, because filtering is not censorship at all.
And stopping someone from sending a transaction because it's not really a monetary transaction, I wouldn't define that as censorship at all.
Like super far from it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So the Bitcoin transaction relay network is basically just, it's kind of like a bunch of people in a room playing telephone.
You know, somebody is whispering things in your ear and then you're whispering things to all of your friends based on what they said.
Right. And so what a filter is, is that sometimes when you hear somebody whisper a message, you think I'm not going to whisper that.
That's all a filter is. It's just, you know, I am not going to enable this particular piece of information to propagate widely throughout the network.
You know, the buck stops from me. Right. Obviously, on a distributed network, that's difficult.
But, you know, as you were saying, it's important to still send that signal like these transactions are abusive and these transactions are.
are not abusive right these transactions are data storage and these transactions are money
so i run a node so that i can enable bitcoin to be better money and so i am enthusiastic about
relaying payment transactions to my peers but i am not enthusiastic about relaying data
transactions to my peers because those make bitcoin worse money satoshi set this precedent
satoshi set the precedent of and you know this is a whole conversation about uh why the the
the opportunity conflict happened.
But basically the core position is,
you know, well, there shouldn't be filters, right?
You know, the relay, everything that gets reliably,
everything that gets reliably mined
should be relayed by the relay network.
And the precedent that Satoshi set
is completely counter to that.
Satoshi set the precedent of,
we're going to have very loose consensus rules
so that we can always do softworks to upgrade the rules.
And when you do softworks, you're restricting the rules.
So you're taking this very like unrestricted rule set
And then you're sort of incrementally restricting it over time to make Bitcoin better money.
But the filters are the opposite, right?
The filters, you want filters to be as restrictive as possible to only allow the monetary uses and not the data uses.
And again, Satoshi set this precedent.
And we've been doing that, you know, since the beginning, except for the last few years when Core has suddenly done a 180 on that.
I think that you might slightly be misrepresenting that position.
I think what March tried to get, the point March tried to get across was that it's more or less futile, not necessarily that they should be relayed.
It's just that the filtering is kind of futile and that especially that the op-return policy is futile because these things get mined anyway.
So their position is that it's harmful to have filters that are filtering things that are popular.
For fee estimation and stuff like that, right?
Yes, both for fee estimation, but mostly for mining centralization.
So they say, OK, well, if you filter things that are popularly being mined, then you do a few things, right?
You mess up fee estimation, which is wrong.
You don't actually mess up fee estimation that much.
Might it be a little bit different from the rest of the network?
Sure.
But that's not relevant for reasons we can get into.
They say that it causes mining centralization for two reasons.
One, because it makes block propagation slower.
So basically that favors large miners because large miners can sort of do this accidental selfish mining attack where they, what is it?
Yeah, anyway, when you make block propagation slower, I forget what the argument is exactly, but this is why it would be good to talk to a guy.
I think there's a bunch of software that doesn't like that, that will not function as well.
yeah it's basically okay if you if you if you're a well-connected miner and you're a well-funded
miner right you're a large miner you can you can uh you can have better infrastructure and you can
make sure that your blocks propagate more quickly and then if some of the network doesn't receive
your blocks well that's actually an advantage for you because then you can just start mining on top
of that block that you already mined and then the rest of the network might be a disadvantage to you
because you have a higher hash rate and you can do what's called a selfish mining attack but the
But the counter to that, that the not side makes, is that, well, you're harming yourself if the rest of the network doesn't see your block because a block that's filled with spam is going to get filtered, you know, is going to propagate more slowly because of block reconstruction.
We can get into that.
And so you have a higher risk of your block being orphaned.
And actually, if you go back to the docs when compact blocks were added in 2016, you'll see that the Bitcoin Core official release in the release notes said, hey, miners, you should update to the official defaults of Bitcoin Core, because if you don't, your blocks are going to take longer to propagate and that will raise your risk.
and then the the last way that it that it that they say it causes mining centralization is that
it it pushes people to use out of band um out of band transaction submission and because larger
miners are more likely to have direct apis and those direct apis are more likely to be seen
you know by you know there's a power law right if you have a large miner that has a large amount
of hash rate people are going to submit their transactions privately to that miner more than
they're going to submit their transactions privately to smaller miners because those
have less chance of getting confirmed. But there's a way around that, too, which we can also go into.
What's the counter argument to that?
The counter argument to that is you can easily build a protocol that allows users to submit to
a pool of mining pools and that basically has whatever attributes the user likes.
so instead of instead of a instead of a public relay network where everybody sees the transaction
you have a a private relay network that nevertheless includes a lot of large miners
and small miners so that would be completely feasible to build okay uh but but but still
you have to build it so so there's a there's a slight hurdle of course yeah but what i'm saying
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Yeah, this reminds me of why I initially really liked the CAT proposal, because it so clearly points out that Bitcoin, it is more risky to try to embed data on Bitcoin than to not do it.
And that's the way it's supposed to be, because you expose yourself to the risk of the network being pissed enough to basically, well, quote unquote, censor your transaction at some point in the future.
And it pointed out that that is possible as long as we agree on it.
Whether we will or not is another question.
But just the fact that it was never proof of work solely that shielded your transactions and made it safe.
It was first and foremost the consensus of the network.
And I love that.
It's always people.
Right.
Yeah. And I love that you brought that up because the kind of the moment where the your interview with Murch became sort of less interesting is when Murch was like, yeah, I agree with you, but there's nothing we can do about it.
So the cat points to the to what the solution is. The solution is to break the shit coiners protocols. That's the solution. And that's how we've always done it.
If you go back to, you know, 2013, 2014, whenever the opera turn wars against the counterparty people and the Omni people and all that.
Basically, the Bitcoin core devs were like, OK, you can build that, but we're going to add filters and consensus rules that break your shit.
So so the scammers who were trying to launch these these, you know, spammy, scammy protocols on top of Bitcoin were like, oh, well, we're going to lose all our money if Bitcoin devs are at war with us, you know, and they're constantly escalating until we leave.
And so let's just preemptively leave and go to some other blockchain, which is what they did. And then they left us alone for a decade.
so uh if we give the core the benefit of the doubt there and say that the the argument i think
from merch and others is that yeah but it's futile because they can just route around it and they can
just do it again and blah blah blah and my counter to that is that yeah but at least that there's a
cost attached next time and i think the cat very much points out that you you are putting yourself
at risk by adding spam.
Like it's it's real.
The risk is real.
Right.
You know, and people are right to point out that that
that is kind of confiscation.
But at the same time, as Greg Maxwell pointed out, you know,
Bitcoin is distributed authoritarianism.
And if the entire network comes to a consensus to confiscate your coins well then your coins get confiscated I mean yeah like you know we like to think that we like to think that Bitcoin is like this magic thing that will never do anything hostile against any of its users
But if its users are doing things that are hostile to it, it needs to be able to protect itself.
And so if if 99 percent of the Bitcoin community comes to the agreement that we should change the rules, then we're going to change the rules.
I mean, Bitcoin is a consensus system.
Yeah, this was always true. And this was like, this is the deeper layer that people misunderstand. And when that works, by the way, then Bitcoin can only be better. Because we sort of define better. If we all agree, then it is better. Like, that's why we all agree. Like, so it can only evolve for the better. And when that light bulb moment happened for me, it was like, holy shit, this is like super evolution.
it brings you know large human organizations back in line with human values and this is what and
this is what libertarianism tries to do but i think misses the point a little bit and i think
yeah okay i i think there that you have the wrong the wrong uh impression of what i could read
between the lines of that shit long thread about that where we had a back and forth with all sorts
of people uh was that i think you have the wrong view because i think you think the people at the
narco were libertarians basically but it's not the the rothbardian ethical stuff stuff i mean there
were it wasn't just those people i mean you like again you're kind of you're kind of doing what
nirsch was doing with with my complaint about ibd you're all right oh well chris didn't do it right
you know he didn't okay let's address the let's address the actual point then where do you think
libertarianism is wrong about these points what do you think we get wrong i think it it
underestimates the importance of enforcing the rules.
So basically it considers,
it assumes that all humans have human values
and that there are no humans that are psychopaths.
And so if you have, there are, you know,
there's a natural feature of evolution,
which is that some humans that have otherwise human DNA
become predators and parasites to other humans.
and these are called psychopaths.
And when you have these people,
you have to treat them differently
from other types of humans
because they see you as another type,
as a different type of organism.
And so with my example of, you know,
if you have an anthill in your backyard
and you decide to destroy the anthill,
you know, the ants might think,
oh no, you're infringing my property rights,
but it doesn't matter because your shoe.
Yeah, but I think-
And so that's what psychopaths do, right?
psychopaths say, well, I have more guns. And so it doesn't matter. Your rights don't matter.
And so when you're dealing with those people, you have to treat you, you can't, you can't treat them.
You have to put them in jail or do something with them, right? Or enforce the rules against those
people. Yeah. But I don't think this is the, I don't at all think this is something libertarians
miss or anarcho-capitalists miss. I think anarcho-capitalists is the only group that
is actually honest about what happens because we have these psychopaths because these psychopaths
end up as state leaders always like and they they wage wars which is just basically mass murder
it's fucking awful uh so so we we are the only ones daring to imagine a system where this can't
even be possible where we recognize each other's rights to defend ourselves to the fullest right
Well, I don't know if you want to go through this whole can of worms, but I mean, yeah, I've done many, many years of deep reflection about all these questions, and I've hung out with a lot of people who call themselves anarcho-capitalists, and I've hung out with even leaders of the anarcho-capitalist movement, people who are widely influential in the libertarian movement.
So, I mean, just to dismiss me as, oh, he hung out with the anarcho-capitalist people once, and he got the wrong idea.
No, I'm saying that that's the vibe I got from that thread because I read a lot of the responses you were giving were not addressing the actual, you know, Hoppe and argumentation ethics and the non-aggression principle.
You were misrepresenting those by not admitting that punishment is very much a thing in anarcho-capitalism.
but when you actually go and hang out in libertarian or anarcho-capitalist society see
this is the problem with anarcho-capitalists is they don't apply their ideas to reality they just
talk about their ideas and they imagine futures and then they don't actually go and try it and so
what i'm saying is i tried it i hung out with people who were who were freedom-minded and were
who called themselves anarcho-capitalists and we tried to make a society that worked on anarcho-
capitalist principles and it doesn't work. And you know why it doesn't work? Because the psychopaths
come in and they take over and then you have to make a state either out of either the psychopaths
make a state and now you just have, you know, a constitutive war where you have to make a state
to fight off the psychopaths. And then the psychopaths come and take over whatever state
that you made. Okay. I would just not frame that as it not working because it is like the,
There is no working or not working since it's not a political ideology.
It's just a lens to view the world through, which is more honest than every other lens.
What I'm saying is, is it honest if you can't apply it in the real world?
What I'm saying is you need to actually take into account incentives.
You need to take into account the economics of violence.
Okay, okay.
So the way I see it is that two plus two will still equal four, regardless if there's a psychopath on top telling everyone that it equals five.
it still equals four and the same is true for hopian argumentation ethics you cannot argue
against that you control your own body because by doing the argumentation i need to control my body
so thereby i prove that human beings have control over their bodies so it's the same kind of
axiomatic thinking as mathematics it only works as long as the other person buys into your system
If a psychopath says, 2 plus 2 equals 5, or I'm going to shoot you, then they're right.
You're missing my point.
It still doesn't invalidate the non-aggression principle.
It's just someone violating it.
It still doesn't make it less true, because it's still true that we would all be better off if we didn't aggress against one another.
And there's no justification for aggression, no natural justification for it.
That is still true, regardless of if someone violates it or not.
Knut, the history of all of humanity.
Yeah.
There are incentives to violence.
If there were not incentives to violence, then people would not be violent.
But the fact that there's violence everywhere, there are incentives to violence.
We're talking over each other's heads here, because my response to that would be,
yeah, but what's a priori about human history?
Nothing.
Like you can say two plus two equals five
because people have believed that for 10,000 years.
It's still not five.
A priori systems are not useful.
The reason why mathematics is useful,
mathematics does not say anything about underlying reality.
Mathematics is a language that humans can use to describe reality.
And so it's very useful at that.
But there are alternate forms of mathematics
that rely on alternate axioms.
And so, you know, if you just take if you take different axioms, then you have a completely different system. And this is what and this is the problem that I have with praxeology and and Kansa.
You know, they're just like they just declare that, oh, you know, this this is true and we're not going to worry about collecting evidence about whether whether our system is true or not.
And that's precisely the problem. If you build a system on top of axioms that are not viable, then you'll end up with a system that causes more harm than good. And so that's what libertarians and anarcho-capitalists often do. They take these axioms to be true, and they're not.
right they're they're true and these systems work as long as everybody buys into the system
but as soon as you have a psychopath that doesn't buy into the system now you have to deal with that
you have to deal with the incentive yeah but i have the other person to just come in
yeah yeah but okay okay more anarcho-capitalist systems wouldn't we
yeah well absolutely we would see more anarcho-capitalistic
systems if there weren't psychopaths in the world i absolutely 100 agree with that because
the psychopaths are the ones violating the non-aggression principle we should design
systems that take into account okay who's we who's we people trying to build better systems
yeah but so well i think that big winners are trying to build better systems i think that the
reason are here is because we're trying to make a better system than what came before
Yeah, and that's why we're building it on Austrian principles, which is the same branch of science that leads to anarcho-capitalism.
I think we should build a new system on principles that work in reality.
I think we should take into account reality and evidence and history instead of trying to just kind of intuit this utopia that is not actually applicable when you try to put it into the real world.
Yeah, but okay, once again, I'm just defending my personal view here because I don't view it as a system that you transition into and all of a sudden you live in Ancapistan.
I just view it as a lens to view the world through, to acknowledge to yourself what is justifiable behavior and what is not.
And it's super simple because what can be true for all humans at all times?
And the only universal principle is property rights.
It's like, you cannot violate my property.
Like, if we don't get closer to that, we get less civilized.
If we get closer to that, we get more civilized.
Like, it's so basic.
And also, I'd like to hear you try to refute one of the praxeological axioms.
You may pick whichever one you use and just argue against it.
impossible to refute an axiom do you know what an axiom is it's yeah yeah fine to be true so you
can't be like no no no but okay let me say principles instead let's say principles instead
i'm using the word wrong uh so one of the austrian economics principles one of the
praxeological principles can you argue against it like for instance human action is purposeful
behavior. Can you argue against that? Yes, in most cases. Right. So what I'm saying is that,
yes, the principles of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism and Austrian economics are
good principles in theory. But in practice, there are people who are going to ignore that system
and are going to ignore those principles. And if you don't do something about that,
if you don't do something about people who are ignoring your system, then your system is going
to get eaten either from the outside or from the inside. And that's what we always see with
with decentralized systems that tried to provide decentralized collective defense.
But doing something about it that does not violate the non-aggression principle.
Defense is not violation of the non-aggression principle.
In fact, there's a book by Rothbard called The Ethics of Liberty
that allows the victim to do, what's it called?
Reparation and retribution.
So it's basically two eyes for one eye.
That's what the victim is entitled to. So none of this, none of this trying to fight psychopaths, none of that breaks the non-aggression principle at all. Like it's defense. We're allowed to do that. No, aggression is when you initiate violence. It's not when you defend yourself.
I know I'm saying if it works, then show me an example. It doesn't work while you're deliberating about who has what rights. And, you know, you're litigating, you know, oh, who infringed on who first? The psychopaths are are stealing everything. They're just they're just going in and saying you aggressed on me first. And they're just lying. And then everybody has to go. And it's way easier to spread bullshit than to disprove bullshit.
Have you heard that saying?
Like, it's like a bunch of bullshit.
And that just DDoS is everyone's time and attention.
And then while you're trying to deliberate on who did what wrong, they've stolen everything and killed everyone.
Yeah.
And that's what we're living in now.
And it sucks.
Yeah.
So now let me just let me just have you.
Can I just slightly reframe? Because I think you don't get how I view the world. I think we live in Ancapistan, and I think it's unfortunate that we're not defending ourselves properly because we're being attacked all the time.
But that does not change the fact that we cannot not live in Ankapistan.
The only principle that can be justified is the non-aggression principle.
And you can call it theoretical all day long and that it doesn't apply to reality.
Just as I said, it's the same as 2 plus 2 equals 4.
And to apply that to reality...
a noun like two plus two apples equals four apples, then all of a sudden the mathematics
is reality. And the same is true for the praxeological principles.
Right. As long as your interpretation of the rules is the same as other people's
interpretation of the rules.
No, they're true regardless. That's the whole point. No, no, no. They're true regardless.
That's the whole point. They do not rely on other people's opinions. That's the whole
beauty of the system and they do not require empirical evidence in order to use mathematics
you need to be able to interpret what the statements that mathematics says in a way that
other people are going to interpret it if you if you're using the rules of mathematics in a way
that nobody else is using then it's totally useless yeah but two plus two apples is still
going to equal four apples regardless of people's interpretation and language i can think of an
interpretation in which two plus two apples does not equal four apples okay there's rule again so
like you're assuming that other people are interpreting the world in the same way that
you're interpreting the world but that's not always true people people have have all sorts
of different ways of interpreting things no they come to a common understanding of those things
it's not your rule system is not going to apply to reality it's not rules language and if nobody
else speaks your language, then it's a useless language. What I'm assuming is that human action,
deliberate, purposeful action is the bridge between our subjective, what we think about
things and how we see the world and objective reality. It's the bridge between the two.
Property and action, using means to acquire ends, to reach ends, is the bridge. That is the thing
that binds the two realms together.
So therefore, studying that is the most crucial thing
to understanding how people can organize each other and find...
What I'm saying is if other people have different goals
from the rest of society,
then you're still not going to be able to coordinate with those people.
I know, I know.
I'm failing to do that all the time.
And so are you.
Like, we have a lot of people that we have different opinions with
And people, we hate what they do, but we can't influence it.
Right. So let me extend an olive branch.
I think there is actually a resolution to this conversation because I had this exact argument in my head over many years.
And my resolution is if you read The Sovereign Individual, the book, I think it explains what the resolution is.
The resolution is that in times where so you have this this concept of economics of violence.
And according to the book, you know, it flips every 500 years.
And sometimes offense is more efficient than defense.
And then you get a society that's very, very offensive and very, very violent.
And then you get central banks and you get gunpowder and you get basically invading is cheaper than defending.
And then after 500 years, it flips again.
And then you see a lot of castles, you know, and you see a lot of decentralization of political power and you see a lot of sort of fragmentation of the state.
And so what they say is that Bitcoin is going to bring about this this this flipping.
Right. Yeah.
They don't specifically say, great book, but they don't specifically say Bitcoin, right? Because it's written in 1999.
Right, but they say, yes, exactly. It was amazing that they wrote that in 1997.
Yeah, something like Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah. And I use this analogy all the time. I talk about, you know, a spear and a sword and then eventually a shield and then a bigger sword and then a knight in armor and then a gun and then castle walls.
We flipped back and forth and then atomic bombs.
And now we're all, we've been stuck in this offense,
Mexican standoff between states for a very long time.
And all of a sudden, yeah, I had to talk about this too,
like the similarities between Oppenheimer and Satoshi Nakamoto,
because I think what they both did was find a way to use the power of physics
to change human incentive structures.
It's just that one did it very violently and very aggressively
and the other very defensively.
And I think that that's the beauty. And if that is this flippening that it promises to be like it, that's why I'm so fucking bullish on Bitcoin, because I love this. So I think we're very close here. And I think we have similar views. I think we have semantic differences for some things and mainly.
Yeah. So so this is the problem, right? The problem that I have, and it's the core problem.
The difference that I have with core devs is is this view is, again, after many years of hanging out with anarcho-capitalists, I realized that they didn't actually have a mechanism for implementing their ideas.
Their mechanism was always, oh, we're going to educate people. We're just going to we're just going to get the word out.
And then everybody is just like the scales are going to fall from everyone's eyes and they're going to realize, oh, the government is a big fraud.
You know, Larkin Rose talking about, you know, the what is it?
The most dangerous superstition that somebody has authority over you.
People are just going to realize that authority is a bad thing.
And it's like, no, that's not going to happen.
And the reason why that's not going to happen is because the the incentives of the current
technological regime are forcing everybody to to continue this game that we're playing
this very violent game.
But if and this is why I'm such a big Bitcoiner, if Bitcoin becomes the reserve asset of the
world, now we are no longer going to have a fiat standard, which causes violence. We're going to
have a Bitcoin standard, which causes peace. And then maybe we can have the anarcho-capitalist
utopia, otherwise known as Anakapistan. I think that's beautiful. And it's so close to what I
think. One of my earliest semi-viral tweets was like, being a libertarian without being a
bitcoiner is futile and i still believe that like exactly exactly but i can still be an anarcho
capitalist at heart and have an austrian view of the world but i also understand that for me to have
any more freedoms for myself in my life i need to be a bitcoiner there's no other way like and i've
i've fully accepted that for a decade now and that's i i love it yeah and as you and as you
I completely agree that anarcho-capitalism and the non-aggression principle are good, as you say, lenses through which to view the world.
I think that's useful because then you can find other people who are also viewing the world through that lens.
And you can be very good friends with those people and you can cultivate those relationships and those become those bear fruit.
And we're on the same page. But it's like when we argued in that thread, I think we had like a disagreement about the word fee because I cannot view a tax as a fee because a tax, a fee to me, to me is consensual.
So, again, I think that you and I already agree that we are already living in Anikapistan, right? So if you look at Anikapistan, Anikapistan has private security agencies instead of public security agencies. And that's kind of the only difference.
More than regular police officers, actually. Around the world, there are more security guards than police officers, like private police.
Yes, but that's irrelevant.
No, I think it's very relevant.
Explain why. I'll explain why it's irrelevant.
It's irrelevant because those security guards are operating within monopolies on violence.
So security guards, like a security guard in Texas is answering to the police force of the state.
And that police force is answering to the state police.
Yeah, yeah.
But I meant answering to the national police force.
Absolutely.
At the international level, we have Ancapistan.
At the international level, things are completely anarchic.
So we already live in Ancapistan.
It's just that things are way more centralized than everybody wants.
It's just like the criminal gangs are too big.
That's the only problem, really.
And that's why Trump can go and just pick Maduro out of the country and stuff like that.
Because that's an ANCAP move.
Well, and again, that's what happens.
That's what happens with competing security organizations.
If you have the big dog, which is the U.S., and you have the small dog, which is Venezuela,
the big dog is going to push the small dog around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I totally agree with that. It still doesn't justify it. What I wanted to point out was that the fact that there are more private security guards hints at that there's absolutely market demand for that and that people are willing to pay to be secured against whatever the criminal organization on top cannot take care of.
Right. But so what I'm saying is the difference between Ancapistan and what we have now is is immaterial, except that Ancaps want everything to be more decentralized than they are now.
So like for instance so they say oh we want we want everybody to pay a private security agency to secure their property rights Right So like you have these defense you know you have these dispute resolution organizations and you have these private security agencies
Or cities or even countries, like they could all be consensual.
If I can leave whenever I want and if it has sound money, then I have no problem with that.
Then a country can be any size.
If you own property in Ancapistan, you're still paying property taxes.
The only difference is that it's not a property tax.
No, you're paying fees.
It's a property fee.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So what I'm saying is, if I consent to pay my property tax on my property today, right
now, if I'm already consenting, then I already live in Ancapistan as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah.
And that's good for you if you do consent.
But I'm saying that you couldn't live where you live without paying that.
You have no competing fee of service.
Right.
The tax is not on living here.
The tax is on owning property here.
And that's appropriate in my opinion because the government is protecting my property rights.
Well, I would say it means that you don't want to defend me.
I would say that it proves that it's not your property.
You're living there by permission.
You have the permission to live in that house because they decide what it costs you to live there.
Exactly.
So ANCAPs should not be complaining that they have to pay property taxes.
They should be complaining that, well.
Well, I wouldn't call it owning the house.
Things are too expensive, right?
I think people just think that taxes are too high.
I think everybody would be totally fine paying fees to a security service if the fees were reasonable.
But I think that most people feel that their taxes are higher than the benefits that they're getting.
Absolutely.
but I don't think they can be fair or low if they aren't consensual fees rather than taxes.
But they are consensual.
If I didn't consent to the tax, I would buy property in a different jurisdiction.
So they are completely 100% consensual.
That is not my definition.
If you buy property and you are ignoring the fact that you're going to need to pay property taxes,
you're an arbitrarian, or you're a communist.
You're just trying to get somebody else to provide services to you for free.
No, no, no, no.
So you're misinterpreting what I'm saying because I'm saying that you don't really own the house.
You never bought the house.
You bought a permission to live in it for a certain – and you don't know when they will change the rules.
If they increase the tax, you didn't agree to that.
So what I'm saying is if libertarians just viewed the government as the actual owner of the land, then everybody would be fine with everything.
No, no, no.
At the moment, there's this sort of perception of fraud because you bought the title to the land.
And so you feel like, oh, I'm the owner of the land.
But you're not.
But de facto, in reality, you're not.
The government is the owner of the land.
However, if the government just came out and said that and they were like, we're renting parcels of land for $1,000 a year, but we're not going to pay property taxes, libertarians would be fine with that.
It's the same thing.
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Let's get into the merch conversation again, shall we?
Yeah, we will go out there.
We're going to go in circles here, I'm afraid.
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, where are we going into that then? Is there anywhere else in that that you think is super important to point out?
Yeah, I mean...
Okay, here's one. 1330. Knut thinks UTXO sharing is not important. He's incorrect in this. It's very important, but filtering spam has nothing to do with it. So why is that important?
yes um you said something like uh um what is it yeah utxo sharing merch said scaling bitcoin to
the world is important which i agree with um and i hope that you agree with um absolutely now that
we've both said you know that that uh bitcoin success as a medium of exchange is important to
bitcoin success overall so utxo sharing is how bitcoin scales and merch was correct to point out
that Lightning is a UTXO sharing scheme.
If you have, do you have a Lightning node
or a Lightning channel?
Yeah, yeah.
So a Lightning channel is a bilateral agreement
where you're sharing a UTXO with your counterparty.
And so Lightning is a very basic UTXO sharing scheme
where you can share this UTXO
as a two of two multi-sig with your counterparty.
And you can have a bunch of these together
and that forms the Lightning node.
Yeah, yeah.
But there's more complex forms of UTXO sharing
like ARK and up from there, right?
infinitely many ways you can share UTXOs with other people. And those are really how we scale
Bitcoin because those are how we make effectively, you know, full reserve, full reserve Bitcoin,
full reserve unilateral exit Bitcoin, not banks exactly, what do they call perfect,
perfect money substitutes? You know, these things that, that, that seamlessly substitute for Bitcoin,
like Lightning and ARK and things like that. I think it's important for Bitcoiners to draw
a distinction between those types of constructions and things like Citria, which are one of N-Trust
model, which are not fully trustless. Because if you start building things that are not fully
trustless and you put a majority of the capital into those systems, then you get exactly what
happened to gold, right? Basically, everybody treats the paper version of the gold as the real
gold. And once you have that, then you have this sort of subversion and you no longer have sound
money so this is super interesting because like some philosophical questions here then
and this is wonderful to be talking to a developer about this because uh if now segwit segwit enabled
a lot of spam let's just say that or the segwit got implemented and the spam happened that's
empirical you know yes so segwit slightly encouraged more spamming um but there there
There have always been ways of cramming data into the Bitcoin block.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's always been ways of doing that.
And the only way to fight that is by filtering it.
So the fact that it's slightly cheaper, yeah, may have affected sort of the optics around inscriptions when they came up.
OK, so let me do an abstract example instead, like a thought experiment.
If now, like, so we're living in the timeline we're living in.
And in this timeline, Segwit was implemented, Taproot was implemented.
The Lightning Network happened before Taproot was implemented.
But Lightning happened there.
Everyone's happy because now Lightning exists.
It's fucking awesome.
We're doing that.
Most of it is custodial, but who cares?
It's still way better than banking, fractional reserve banking, so on and so forth.
But also 2023, spam goes up.
Did you say we're okay with it being custodial?
Because I'm not okay with that.
No, no, no.
But most people are okay with using custodial lightning.
I think Bitcoiners should not be okay with that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, I can agree with that.
So we're living in this world where Bitcoin is fantastic, but we have this spam issue that happened February 2023.
So let's say if I pose an alternative timeline where SegWit was worked on for longer and Taproot 2 and weren't implemented, but were more carefully implemented, and we wouldn't have the Lightning Network, but we wouldn't have the spam.
Would you have preferred that timeline to the one you're living in now?
I don think so Yeah so there is this that a popular view on the not side oh well you know why didn we just take longer to do it And then we would have come up with something better And that maybe true But that ignores the fact that
by implementing it, we were able to collect real world data on whether it would work and how it
would fail. So, you know, at the end of the day, you have to do things. If you never do anything
and you just, uh, you just keep theorizing and you never apply your ideas in the real world,
then you're never going to find out whether there's those ideas actually.
If you never fuck around, you'll never find out.
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Some fucking around. Yes, that's, that's, that's beautiful. Some fucking
around is, is, is necessary. You know, you, you have to kind of experiment with things.
otherwise you're never going to figure out what the real solutions are and you
know so I think that the correct you know the the slow and team slow and steady as
they're calling it on the internet I'm on team slow and steady I'm on I'm not on
team stop right I think there actually are like actual ossification is I don't
find those people to be serious I think no me neither yeah I don't think
can also fight I agree yeah there's always going to be a slightly different
different version of the rules that, you know, in the event of a fork would actually accrue more
value in the free market. So there's always going to be, and that's because reality is always
changing, right? So this is evolution, right? This is why biological forms of life, you know,
are constantly evolving because the environment is constantly changing.
And how could anyone ever prove that it had ossified? It's unprovable. You can't prove a
negative right there's still people people may choose other rules right yeah it's like saying
you know evolution should ossify it's like okay well no and second of all that's impossible like
if you tried if you tried to do that you would end up destroying everything so just just like
let's go slow and steady you know the trodulites the trodulites tried that or the cockroaches
like for a very long time yeah anyway yes there there are yes exactly like bitcoin could be seen
like a cockroach. You know, it's very, very, very durable, you know, very, very hard to kill.
But it's still it's still evolving slowly, you know, or I would like to see it more like humans.
You know, humans have been around for a while, but it's not impossible that we that we're just
going to that we're going to keep evolving. Right. Like it seems. Well, anyway, that's another whole
conversation. But yeah, no, Bitcoin, Bitcoin should not ossify with the current rule set.
If Bitcoin ossifies with the current rule set, it will inevitably be captured. Right. Because it
doesn't work properly as a medium of exchange. And so there's no reason to expect it to perform
better than gold in this respect. It will just get captured exactly the same as gold. So we have to
keep scaling it. We have to make sure that it works as a medium of exchange for the world,
for a global user base. Because if we don't, then there's no reason to expect Bitcoin to be
more valuable than gold. There's no reason to expect people who are looking for a good store
value to buy Bitcoin instead of gold. No, absolutely agree. No disagreement there.
Yeah, we were talking about UTXO sharing. Yeah. So, so, so, so Merch is correct. We, he said, oh, you know, Bitcoin has this flexible scripting language and Satoshi made this flexible scripting language so that we could evolve Bitcoin and have it do more interesting things. And I completely 100% agree with that. But, but Satoshi also made mempool filters. So he, he, he left the consensus rules perfectly flexible and expressive so that people could build whatever they want.
But he also implemented mempool filters so that if people start doing stupid shit, if people start building things that are more destructive than constructive, then we can filter those things out.
So mempool filters are a very, very fundamentally useful thing that Satoshi built in from the beginning into the Bitcoin protocol.
And the core devs in the last few years have suddenly decided that mempool filters are no longer useful.
And that's bewildering and concerning.
Yeah, yeah.
um i agree and i still think it's it's strange there's so much that doesn't make sense to me
out of this i can somewhat buy the argument that it's futile but but it's still the answer i've
never gotten a really good straight answer to is why why was it important to increase the fucking
thing right it wasn't and he even said that it wasn't yeah and so no so why did you do it like
I still don't know why.
He's explained.
Merch himself has gone on social media and many different places and argued with lots of people who are less technical than me.
His communication is only one way, right?
He only tells people things.
He doesn't listen.
And so where was I going with that?
I was answering your question.
Shots fired, I guess.
Okay, here's one.
I was going to steal man their position.
Okay, so their position is that leaving the opperturn filter in is bad for UTXO set bloat and mining centralization.
And so as we've just talked about, it does neither of those things.
And in the case of UTXO set bloat, it probably makes it a lot worse because as we've seen, BRC20, which was a result of not filtering inscriptions, caused 8 gigabytes of UTXO set bloat.
Whereas Citria, the system that sort of prompted them to remove the opperturn limit, was 64 bytes, which is never expected to occur.
So they were mostly like, oh, UTXO set load is a huge problem when it's Citria who needs us to get rid of the off return limit.
But not when Bitcoin node runners who are struggling to sync Raspberry Pi nodes need us to help limit the UTXO set size.
Yeah, and here's a point that says Citria needed 144 bytes, not 100,000.
Exactly, exactly.
So as I said, you know, appeal from laziness, you know, argument from laziness.
You know, they were like, oh, well, we don't want to have to keep having this fight every six months.
So we're just going to completely rip out the filter.
It's something sensible like having a discussion about whether to raise the limit.
Yeah, here's another one.
Knut says that spammer calls spammers users.
I apologize for that.
I don't think they are users.
I think they're abusers.
Yeah, there's a much quote here that could be good to address.
this highlights that the 80 byte op return limit has downsides.
Please explain the downside of 64 bytes that could go,
but are never expected to go into the UTXO set.
Right. So that's what I was just saying right now.
Citria built this rollup that uses 64 bytes in the UTXO set,
because they needed 144 bytes of arbitrary data in a single transaction,
which isn't allowed the bitcoin network came to an agreement that 80 bytes was the maximum in 2014
and so they were like okay well we need to put 144 bytes in so we're going to put 80 bytes into
an opera turn and we're going to put 64 bytes into fake pub keys which go into the utxo set
this transaction is never expected to occur it's kind of like the justice transaction
in lightning you know it only happens if stuff is really going sideways right if the coordinator is
is executing things wrongly, you know, and basically trying to steal people's money.
So they're basically saying, oh, my God, 64 bytes, which is never expected to occur,
is worth getting rid of this, like, highly popular, highly respected
op return limit to limit transaction, to limit arbitrary data storage on Bitcoin
and keep Bitcoin as good money.
They're basically saying, you know, like, the whole rationale was bullshit.
And the thing is, I'm kind of the only one who knows why it's bullshit.
And this is why they won't talk to me.
So BAPS, this thing that Citra is pushing, to me, that sounds like complete bullshit.
What's your opinion on BAPS?
Same shit, different toilet.
I mean, it's the same thing that companies have been trying to do.
I mean, so Vitalik famously left Bitcoin, stopped trying to build Ethereum on Bitcoin in 2014.
when he...
He was pushed out, right?
Well, he said he looked at the situation with Oppurtern
and realized that the Bitcoin core devs
were going to be at war with him.
So he left Bitcoin entirely.
This is how we win.
Okay, so he went and built Ethereum.
Then there's a thing called Rootstock or RSK,
which, you know, because the Ethereum protocol was popular,
it used basically JavaScript-like programming.
And so it was very popular for lazy devs
who like JavaScript.
And so they were like, look, we can tinker around
and have all this fun with Ethereum
because it uses this language that's very similar
to JavaScript or very conducive to sort of web style programming.
That's why they call it web.
And so there was this idea early on oh we should just instead of having Ethereum be a separate blockchain we should we should make a copy of Ethereum and bolt it onto Bitcoin So that was Rootstock And so they made a federated sidechain and put the Ethereum virtual machine
in that. And there were a bunch of baps, they didn't call them that, but
just apps that people built on top of Rootstock, all of which were scams.
And Rootstock, nobody cares about Rootstock now because obviously it was a scam.
Maybe not Rootstock itself, but obviously it was misguided.
It was something that did not need to exist and it effectively only existed in order to enrich the people who were sort of building it.
Yeah, yeah. But this is what I'm saying. This is back to the Voorhees example.
Like this is this is pyramids upon pyramids of enabling each other to do like just enabling more and more scams.
Yeah, the game, if you're trying to start a tech startup, the game in fiat world is how do I get as many VCs to ape in to my startup as possible?
Well, in late game fiat world, the best way is to just be fraudulent, is to just market
really well, but not actually have a product that does anything useful.
Right.
So that's that's that's that's the name of the game in crypto world.
You know, in the crypto industry outside of Bitcoin, that's what everyone does.
Right.
And so they did that with rootstock.
And then Citria is the same exact thing.
Citria is literally rootstock, but with a slightly better pegging mechanism that doesn't
rely on a federated multisig.
It relies on a BitVM bridge, which is a one of n trust model instead of a, you know, eight of 15 or whatever.
But it's like there's pretty much no effective difference for the end user.
So there's no reason to expect Citria to be successful where rootstock was not.
So it's a cash grab, right?
It's just people looking around for a way to raise a bunch of VC money for a blockchain startup.
And this is what they landed on because now since Casey Rodemore invented inscriptions, now inscriptions are a thing.
Yeah.
And since Robin Linus invented BitVM, you know, so they were...
Yeah, yeah.
I met him in Prague after we had our conversation, I think.
Like after, yeah, I met a lot of core side people there at the Trezor event.
I guess they would be at that event.
But yeah, let's see where we are here.
Okay, so let's talk about the proposed forks, 110 and the cat.
like what are your opinions on those two because i think both of those were suggested after we had
our last conversation so so let's go in there what's what's your opinion on on on uh bit 110
um yes bit 110 is just a also known as bit 444 is a uh a proposal to sort of um reject data storage
strongly at the consensus level it was originally proposed in order to protect node runners against
um uh like a like a c-sam attack um you know and this is still sort of its its its um
strongest uh rationale in my opinion um but it sort of uh evolved into a yeah basically just a
general rejection of the data storage use case which i think is really really useful i think that
that you know bitcointers should be able to come together and say you know bitcoin is money it's
It's not data storage.
And Bitpoint 10, in my opinion, does this just about as well as anything I can imagine.
So, you know, we've been going in circles over, you know, what's going to be the next consensus change for the last few years.
And it seems like something conservative like this, something that solves some of the problems that were caused by SegWit and Taproot by the prior softworks, is probably the next best candidate for a consensus change.
So I think, yeah, I'm a big supporter of BIP444.
Yeah, you have it in your handle.
Yes.
Yeah.
And the cat is kind of interesting.
It's a lot more complex than BIP444.
And it's a lot more like it kind of changes the social contract of Bitcoin a little bit.
I mean, obviously, you know, as we were saying earlier, if Bitcoiners decide to activate it, you know, then it activates.
you know i mean so so the cat is is is much less mature than before for for bit44 already has
an activation client uh already published so um like i think it makes sense to just support that
and activate that uh since it's a you know it's a much more simple change it's very easy to review
it's it's ready to go you know let's turn it on um whereas with the cat you know it needs to be
developed further into uh into an actual piece of software that people can run and uh it's pretty
doubtful that that would happen soon but what i really like about the cat is that uh i don't know
if you noticed pretty much right after it was proposed spam went down all of the spammers went
away like i know that's why i loved it so much because it's it's regardless of if it's implemented
or not just the risk of something like that being implemented is fucking up their incentives and it's
all about incentives i i love i love it like we're not we're not gonna take it that's that's the
message it sent and it's wonderful right oh by the way my my power just went out so i'm on battery
so i'm not sure how long this is all right yeah yeah we've been going for one and a half hours i
think we should round out i just wanted to i just wanted to reiterate the point that merch says that
there's no way to fight spam and the cat demonstrates why this is wrong because all we
have to do is talk about breaking their protocols and they leave so now merch will say oh well that's
because they were outpriced you know they were they were priced out their their scams became
unprofitable unprofitable and it's like yeah but why did their scams become unprofitable yeah
because we're hostile.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And also, like, the fact that we're talking about it
and doing these things,
maybe someone who was prone to buy one of these scams
had to think twice and refrained from doing that stupid shit.
So, like, that's why I still believe that education
is the most important thing.
And maybe you can't, you probably can't educate everyone in the world
to run a lightning node at home.
Like, it's too complex for most people.
but you can tell everyone why shitcoins are shit.
That's very simple to explain.
Right, yeah.
And if you basically say,
okay, Bitcoin is money
and we're not going to put up with your stupid spamming,
then that kind of refocuses everybody
and gets everybody back on the same page.
Oh, we should be improving Bitcoin is money.
And then it becomes easier to convince people
to run Lightning nodes.
And then it becomes easier and easier to run Lightning nodes.
The more in open source,
the more people that run a program,
the more eyes you have on that program
and the faster it improves.
So that's what we want.
We want lots of people running it, even though it's difficult, it's way easier than it was, and it's getting better.
And the more people that do it, the faster it will go.
So that's what we want.
Yep.
I have, you can see the box over there.
That's the start nine.
It's running over here.
Excellent.
Anyway, is there anything we haven't talked about yet that you wanted to bring up really?
Like, have we missed anything here before your battery runs out?
Yeah.
I mean, there's like, yeah, like I said, there's probably a ton in here.
I think we hit all the main points.
And some bonus points.
I just want to reiterate that I would love to have a direct conversation with Merch or anyone from the core dev side.
This problem wouldn't exist if they just treated our concerns as real concerns and treated us like human beings and actually talk to us and listen to our concerns.
That's a whole different can of worms to open up the not letting you guys even propose stuff on the forums and stuff.
That's a huge problem.
Let's not go there now.
So, I mean, I would absolutely love a conversation between you and Marge.
I would be glued to the screen, pretending I understood what you were talking about.
And I think a lot of my listeners would too.
So, like, subscribe and brush your teeth and comment if you want to see the things.
And Chris, thank you for coming back to the show.
You're welcome back whenever you want to do another rant or back and forth like this.
Follow Chris on X.
I guess that's the best way to follow you, right?
Yep, yeah.
Seaglita6 is my handle.