Is Bitcoin for data transmission and storage, or is it for money?
There are so many dimensions to the argument that it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what the crux of the issue is.
There's a massive amount of mistrust on Bitcoin Core development as a whole right now.
It looks corrupt. I don't want to say it is corrupt, but it definitely looks corrupt.
If you make a change and no one is willing to run your software, then you might as well have just not done it because it has zero effect.
I think the nation state adoption is coming.
These things happen very quickly.
It's like literally gradually and then suddenly.
It's simply a matter of time before we see a massive run up and we see a massive nation state FOMO panic.
Everyone has a sense in their head that something is off.
It puts the suddenly very close to now and it could trigger at any time.
Bitcoin price is definitely on the verge of Omega.
Welcome to the show.
First time on the new What Bitcoin Did.
Good to see you, man.
How are you?
I'm hanging in there, Danny.
Good to be on the new show.
My first episode on the new one.
I know, I'm excited.
And this is the most requested topic at the moment by a long way.
Under every single video that I post, the first comment is always, when are you going
to talk about knots?
um i did cover this with mechanic on a show and i had shinobi on the show maybe six months ago now
but the the whole conversation has kind of got worse i think the the level of discourse has got
worse um it's devolved into something that i've been kind of a bit nervous to to kind of get into
um and i tried to set up a debate with a few people from the not side a few people from the
core side, try and have like a very honest, calm conversation about this. But no one wants to talk
to each other anymore. So I'm glad that we can do this, Samson. I think you're a voice of reason
in this. So we're going to get into it. All right, let's do it, Danny. So should we start? I think
it would be good. There's obviously we spend all our time on Bitcoin Twitter. We follow this stuff,
but there'll be a lot of the listeners that maybe don't know exactly what's going on. So
can we start by just adding some context? Can you explain what's happened here over the last
six, 12 months. Well, why don't you take a stab at it and I can tell you if you got it right.
That's a good barometer for, you know, the average person's understanding. Not that you're average,
but you're, you know, you're less in it. I'm slightly below average. So obviously I can't
remember the exact date, but Core came out and said they're going to remove the op return limit.
Then this other faction of Bitcoiners have been very annoyed about that because they're worried
about spam on Bitcoin, what could be put into the Bitcoin blockchain. And I think this kind of
comes down to a sort of a hearts versus minds debate where people ideologically don't want
Bitcoin to become something, even if technically you can already do all that stuff on Bitcoin.
And the reason that Core are implementing these changes is to try and make Bitcoin more efficient
than not necessarily trying to just allow spammers on chain would be my take.
Yeah, I mean, it's a very convoluted thing. And there are so many dimensions to the argument that it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what the crux of the issue is. There's the whole debate about, you know, is it spam? And can we stop spam? Should we stop spam?
There's the debate upon, is Bitcoin money or is it arbitrary data?
And do we want Bitcoin to be just a cryptographic blob, a cryptographic accumulator in Adam
Back's words?
And, or do we want to say it's money?
And then there's the whole facet of, you know, just core versus nots, developers being against
nots and nots against core.
and that goes into another rabbit hole of, you know, what is a bug even.
Because if you go back in time to where it kind of kicked off,
it is really the ordinal's inscription spam, right?
And that was when Luke logged a bug, CV202350428,
basically saying that these new protocols are bypassing data carrier size.
and a lot of core developers just said nope not a bug it's a feature so they kind of changed
documentation to fix the bug and i think that is kind of where in my mind the schism happened
and the fallout now over knots versus core and opera turn is downstream of that moment in time
so it's a big can of worms i would say overall but the net effect is really um maybe it's a battle
over the core repo because core core is kind of uh booted luke now yeah you know like when they
were first proposing the change shop return they kind of were banning people and locking the thread
to prevent people from knacking and then unlocking it to act it and then relocking it. It's just
an incredibly childish thing that they were doing. But, you know, Luke is kind of excommunicated from
the Church of Cornell. And that's probably, you know, a major factor in the ongoing battle. You
know, he's got knots gaining traction, a lot of traction. And I would say Ocean is overall gaining
a lot of hash rate too. So the whole situation is kind of a really bad situation that we got into
that could have been avoided, I believe, if there were more people listening to Luke at that time
and we nipped the spam issue in the bud early on. But, you know, here we are.
I mean, this is such a minefield. Even in everything you said there, there were a few
things that i wanted to pick out and and just quickly because we i want to get into the core
of the debate and i don't want to get into these little minutiae bits but you talked about how core
were banning people from commenting on github and this is something that i spoke again both to
shinobi and mechanic about and um i think mechanics take on it's more interesting because he was on the
side that was getting you know kicked out and not allowed to comment yeah github maybe isn't the
place to have the debates about what bitcoin ideologically should be it should be more the
place you have technical debate. And I think Mechanic even conceded that, that maybe that
is not the correct forum to have those conversations. It's difficult to say. I mean,
where is the forum to discuss what is a bug, right? If you go back to what I pointed out as
the origin of the split, then, you know, where was that place to discuss it? You know, that was,
it was technical forums or GitHub and the mailing list, but that didn't really result in a good
outcome, I think. But, you know, it comes down to the, what is the governance? And we like to say
there's no governance, but there really is governance, right? There are leaders and core,
the maintainers, you know, have a big weight in, you know, what happens, what gets merged,
and their acts and nacks carry more weight, whether they believe it or not,
than, you know, just your ordinary contributor. So it comes down to, I think, governance and
And the question of where these broader topics are hashed out is definitely something that
is not yet answered.
And I don't really have an answer.
Is it on X?
It seems to be.
I don't know, but that seems to be where it is right now.
Before we get into the kind of crux of the issue, should we lay out our biases?
Because I think then everyone who's listening knows what side of this we're coming from.
And so for me personally, I don't think core is without fault.
Don't get me wrong.
The big issue has come from the communication of what they're doing and why they're doing it, I think.
But I wouldn't feel comfortable myself running NOTS.
And we're going to get into the reasons why.
But like really, it just comes down to the fact that it's maintained and run by a single person.
Even if Luke's brilliant, like I can, he's done amazing things for Bitcoin.
That's still an issue for me.
And like the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is you really don't have to do anything.
Like if you don't like the change that's happening, just don't upgrade.
And so that's probably where I'm at, where like running Core 29 is my most likely path
after this.
I don't know where you stand.
Right.
So I'm kind of in the middle.
I probably lean more towards not, but I also see the value in Core as a whole.
I think there are a lot of problematic individuals in Core and a lot of structural problems with
the organization itself.
and I don't want to get into it, but eventually, Danny, you're going to have someone on and they're
going to air a lot of dirty laundry, you know, dealing from backstabbing, internal politics,
brigading, canceling people. There's a laundry list of stuff and, you know, you'll get it
eventually, I think. It'll come to light. But, you know, there are problems there, but there are good
developers. There are talented developers that know a lot and have worked on it a lot. But at the same
time you have a lot of newer developers that seem to have ulterior motives or have different goals
and are doing things that people can perceive to be conflicted and potentially bad for Bitcoin.
And I agree with your feedback on not. Those are very common resistance points to running it,
that it is mostly Luke. I think there are more contributors and there will be more,
but you know it is a project largely owned by a Luke so I'm kind of in your camp I would say I'm
going to stick with 29 not even 29.1 but 29 and I won't upgrade and this is generally the
recommendation I'm making which is let's not upgrade let's just wait and see and I think
there's an opportunity for a third major Bitcoin client fork or branch whatever you want to call
fork kind of triggers people, but just like another benign clone of Bitcoin Core that is kind
of the middle road, removing some of the more contentious changes that Core did and maintaining
security fixes. Because you can say you don't have to upgrade. And that's often a counterpoint
from the Core side. Like, oh, you don't like what we're doing? Don't upgrade then or run something
else. But then, you know, when people run something else, they go, you're stupid for running that
other thing, right? But you know, you also cannot not upgrade indefinitely. You have to upgrade at
some point, maybe one year, two years. If you're a mining pool or an exchange, I think, you know,
probably in the one year mark because there will be optimizations and bug fixes. So yeah, I think
I'm in the middle ground and there is a middle path through some of this mess.
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Okay. And I think, to be honest, out of this, with more people running NOTS, hopefully more
developer eyes on NOTS, that seems like a good thing. I've got no problem if people want to go
run a different implementation. That's completely their choice. I'm not going to scream at people
and tell them they're being dumb. It's just not what I'm choosing to do. But there's a problem
with that. There's a problem with that, Danny. So I don't know if you noticed, but the core faction
is getting more agitated and it has to do because of the increase in Knot's node runners and their
impact on the network itself. So what you're seeing is the mempool fragmenting because people
are filtering and that has downstream implications on the network. Like compact blocks are affected
and you have the more increased likelihood that mining pools will have private pools
and that has additional impacts too like rbf can be impacted as well because you know you don't see
the all the transactions or you're not able to estimate fees as accurately and that can lead to
some things like lightning pinning attacks too so my feeling is like they realize that there's a
problem now, but their toolkit generally involves yelling at people and saying, you know, just listen
to Core. And that doesn't really work either. So there is a crisis, I believe, in the Core camp.
I see a lot of the comments and a lot of people on Twitter who genuinely believe that Core 30 is
going to destroy Bitcoin. That's something I wholeheartedly disagree with. I want to know
your kind of take on that. I think the whole conversation has got too inflammatory.
Yeah, I would disagree with the Notskamp in that it's going to end things, but I also think it is not a good idea to remove all of these defaults.
Because, you know, if pools upgrade blindly, then they're going to have an impact on the network.
So you'll have larger op returns and you'll encourage other projects to build on this new Bitcoin because there is no deterrent.
There is no disposition from the developers of the main Bitcoin client to resist these external protocols and resist spam.
So I think there needs to be a detriment.
But again, if everyone did upgrade to 30, I don't think it's the end of the world.
But I also see the increasing adoption of knots is causing problems for how the core developers view the network should be.
All right, we've kind of set the table there.
I want to get into kind of the actual details of this.
I think probably the best place to start is with spam,
because that is where this whole conversation came from.
In your mind, what is spam?
What counts as spam on Bitcoin?
Well, spam is non-native data to the Bitcoin network.
So you can say that you don't know what spam is,
but what is a Bitcoin transaction?
If you download the Bitcoin client and you get some Bitcoin, like someone sends you Bitcoin and you send someone else Bitcoin, that is, you know, that's the main use case of the network, sending and receiving Bitcoin.
And that is not sending pictures and other things.
Like there is arbitrary data and that's usually stored in OpReturn, like 83 bytes of data.
And it's been like that for a very long time because you can store a hash of something or a double hash.
Open timestamps uses it.
Various other protocols might embed a little bit of data.
But that's been generally deemed safe and acceptable with general consensus slash agreement.
Consensus seems to be a trigger word these days.
People like to argue, oh, that's not a consensus rule.
But we're not saying it in that meaning.
we're meaning like, do people agree? And people agree, Opratern at 83 bytes is generally accepted
as okay. But when you start moving towards larger blobs of data, I think that's a slippery slope.
And you'll come to see like most of this discussion is really about slippery slopes.
There are slippery slopes everywhere. So this is one of the things that I've not fully,
like when it comes to what is spam So a company like Simple Proof for example they using open timestamps put election data in bitcoin that not a bitcoin transaction but it seems like at
least a decent proportion of the knots crowd are okay with that so what i want to know is why that
is not spam but say someone puts like wikileaks cables on the blockchain that might be spam like
how do you draw the line and where do you draw the line yeah it's a difficult line so i would say
like something small, like 83,
you could convince me 160 bytes.
But, you know, when you go past that,
I think it's obvious that you're trying to store
large blobs of data.
And it could be images or it could be other things.
I think even in ordinals, inscriptions,
things like that are also spam
because they're not sending Bitcoin.
They're using Bitcoin to send something else.
I mean, you can go back and look at color coins,
but same thing.
But I think as long as you're not harming the network,
and I think we can generally agree that bloating the UTXO set is harming the network,
then it's okay. So if you're timestamping, you're putting very little data, you're paying fees,
that's good. But you can pay fees and bloat the UTXO set or embed data and images and whatnot.
And I think that is spam, but it really comes down to a blend of harm and what exactly is your intent.
okay so we should probably talk about why core are doing this why they're moving the limit on
op return because you can already fill a four megabyte block with a single transaction that
is not a bitcoin transaction like we saw this happen last year i think it was i think luxor
maybe with a mining pool i can't exactly remember but they included a block there was a single
transaction and it was just one image so i think core's argument for doing this is that it's a less
harmful way of putting data in the Bitcoin blockchain rather than using the witness
data or something else? Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult topic. So you can remove the limit.
And I think the rationale there is that this is something that can be done already. Therefore,
you know, the filters don't work. And if you remove the filter, then I believe you're encouraging
more of it, especially because there has typically historically been resistance to this type of
behavior. And, you know, when Luke was more influential in core and less, you know,
ostracized off to the side, ostracized, then I think we would have seen a different scenario play
out. But yeah, I would say that stuff is spam and all of the other protocols that are kind of
leveraging Bitcoin in an affinity scam type of way. Like, you know, this is on Bitcoin. No,
it's not on Bitcoin. It's a separate thing that points to Bitcoin and points to,
you know, arbitrary data stuck on Bitcoin. But so this kind of comes down to the
monetary maximalist argument. That's the way that someone like Rizzo would frame it. And
this is where I said to Mechanic, like, ideologically, I agree. Like, I want Bitcoin
to be money. Like, I agree that pictures on Bitcoin is absolutely not what it was intended
for and I don't like to see it. My issue is whether there is like a reality to that, that
this is something we can't stop. And like filters, do they even work? Like if we can just get around
them, why not have something that is the least harmful way of doing them as the sort of common
way of doing them? Right. So, I mean, filters do work. I mean, they've worked for a long time.
It's just recently what we see is people are bypassing the filters, right? Do you have a
Libra Relay. And, you know, that's, it's kind of meant to show the Nodz guys, your filters don't
work. But it's not necessarily a good thing, because you're kind of showing that all of these
standardness features are bypassable. And they are all there for a reason to maintain Bitcoin as money,
not as arbitrary data, and to also keep the Bitcoin network usable for the purpose of money,
like transacting between you and I.
So it's kind of bad in a way
and you can view it as an attack.
I think the core side likes to say
private mempools are bad and harmful
but, you know, bypassing the filters
is also a bad thing
because they are there for a reason.
I'll give you another example.
Like you can't say filters don't work.
There's another filter called Dust Relay Fee
which was implemented to prevent spam on a network
like from Satoshi Dice back in the day.
that is still there and that is what's holding back the network from being inundated by spam
but you know someone could for kicks for shits and giggles you know start relaying spam and then
convince some miner somewhere to start mining the spam and then guess what the filter doesn't work
because you weakened it so it's not like something to be proud of that yeah you can bypass the filter
It's more of a politeness. It's more of a standard. It's more of a way to operate that's not in consensus, at least not yet. And it should be respected in general because it is better for the network.
Another example I'd like to give is traffic.
If you go to the third world, you know, you see congestion in the intersections because everyone's trying to get to where they're going a bit faster.
They're cutting people off, running lights, running signs.
And in Western countries, generally that's not the case because people generally follow the rules.
But that doesn't mean you can't run a red light.
Mechanically, you can run a red light.
You can cut someone off.
But if everyone does that, then guess what?
it degenerates into this messy blob of traffic.
So I guess that's my point.
Like there was another example.
I think Steven Rivera posted it.
It was Matt Corallo saying, you know, Peter Todd and this other guy are smart cows that
show the other cows how to bypass the filters.
You know, like they can, you can open the gate.
So, you know, it's always been the case.
You could always bypass these things, right?
But I don't think we would agree that we should bypass dust relay fee and start seeing a massive amount of dust clog up the network.
But here we are.
So in your analogy, could you argue that fees are the filter?
And the reason that in the West we don't run red lights and speed is because you'll get fined and you'll get points on your license?
That's one part of it, I think.
But generally, there's that shopping cart example.
Like the shopping cart is the ultimate test of civilization.
Do you put it back or do you just leave it there?
There's no punishment, right?
But generally people put it back or they try to aggregate them in one spot, right?
But that's a good example.
You have to follow some, you know, level of good behavior if you want what's good for the network.
And I think another example would be something like immigration.
So, you know, I can also, you're from the UK, right?
Mm-hmm.
So I can also show you, you can bypass legal immigration by taking a rubber boat across the English Channel and, you know, just landing there and you have all these benefits and you bypass the whole system.
But is that necessarily a good thing?
Because if you look at immigration or illegal immigration as a parallel to spam on the network, eventually there is so much illegal immigration that you have systemic societal problems.
and further down the road,
maybe the illegal migrant population
eclipses that of the local population.
So where do you draw the line?
Because, you know, you don't want to torpedo the boats coming in,
but you have to try to enforce those rules
or else eventually, you know,
the migrant population becomes the new population.
And you could say the same for spam.
Eventually, the network is just all dust and spam
and you and I can no longer transact.
That's, you know, hyperbole,
but you get the general directional tracking
of where this is going, right?
It's a slippery slope.
So do you disagree with the idea
that fees are the filter then?
In the sense that like,
obviously blocks are pretty empty at the moment anyway,
but if enough monetary transactions come online,
they will just price out the rest of this stuff anyway.
Well, fees are a filter,
but it's not the only filter, right?
So you can have perverse external incentives whereby you have some external protocol to Bitcoin that can pay for the fees and can spam the network, right?
If you look at Ordinal, that's one.
It's kind of like an ICO, but with pictures, you know, they're selling these PFPs or whatever, wizard images and cat images.
And then they have a war chest and they don't care.
they can print more stuff. Or more adversarially, you could have a company that launches an ICO,
raises a few billion dollars, and fees are already low, and they can create a new protocol called
Proof of Empty Blocks. I talked about this on the pod with Cedric, and now they're going to pay
miners to mine empty blocks because that is how they designed their mechanism to generate coins
on their chain. So there's a lot of things that you have to kind of think that it is an attack
and mitigate it. You can say fees are the filter, but it's not always a filter. And the other angle
to this is we are weakening the fees as a filter mechanism because we increased the block size
during the block size war. So you have less fee pressure. And in 29.1, you lowered the minimum
fees to 0.1 sats per vbyte at a time in which fees are already historically low and declining
for miners. And you can argue, well, the miners could set it higher, but, you know, that's not
necessarily how it always goes. A lot of pools will run defaults and some of them may be more
interested in short-term economics and getting, you know, $100 more in fees versus the long-term
economic outlook. And, you know, that can be self-sabotaging because now you just lowered
fees by a factor of 10-ish. And it's going to be hard to build that up even back to one sat
per V byte, much less higher at a time where you have more L2 traffic than ever before with
Lightning, Liquid, and you have ETFs that take even more transactions off chain. So there's a lot
of nuance and dimensionality to all of this. I actually think the miners taking transactions
under one sat per V byte is a really interesting and useful comparison here because you were
talking about the dust limit before and I think this has only really happened over the last few
months but miners have been including transactions that are under a sap of e-byte and they've done
that while probably I'm guessing here but 99 plus percent of nodes would not have that as policy
so is that not another example of filtering not necessarily working well filters only work if we
generally agree that these should be the filters right if you are bypassed and Libre Relay can
bypass that and some miners mining it others might figure out okay well why don't we get that
too and maybe they didn't do the economic analysis and see well it's only like 100 bucks or even if
i'm mining ordinals it's like marginally nothing but overall these kind of behaviors are detrimental
to the network as a whole so it's kind of like bringing down and making it harder for miners
if there was a downturn in price that they would be able to survive right because they're getting
less money. But it's also when you normalize it through the Bitcoin Core client, that's even worse
because you have some people showing that, okay, this can be done. And Core has said, you know,
we generally try to align to network usage and, you know, what people are actually doing. So you
show this can happen and then Core drops the limit. And you could say the same for dust, right? Like,
you know start mining dust and start relaying dust and then core will adjust it in 30.1 and
you know remove that limit because i've said that in the past like all of these things are
guardrails and we should be removing these guardrails do you know why the miners are actually
including these because i can't quite figure that out in the sense that if someone's willing to pay
you know 0.1 sap of ebuy or whatever for a transaction and miners just say no are they
not eventually just going to pay one SAP of eBuy. I don't understand their economic incentive to do
it. I don't know either. Maybe they're not looking at it closely enough. Maybe they're not doing
analysis. Maybe they're just following what others are doing and they're seeing, oh, it's a little
bit more revenue and they're hoping it becomes more revenue. But when you have a sizable drop
like that, it's difficult to build back up the pressure. And it's even worse if it becomes a
default, I believe. Okay. So I'm sounding very like anti-knots here and I'm not. It's just,
I'm trying to steel man this to get to the kind of the bottom of it.
But if what we saw the sub-one-sap-v-by transactions going through 99% of nodes
or whatever it was not running that as policy,
what kind of proliferation does nodes have to get to
to actually make these filters impactful?
I've seen some people do a calculation,
even if they're at 80%, it doesn't matter.
But I think this is beside the point.
The point is you can always bypass a lot of these standardness rules.
All of them, they can all be bypassed.
So it's just a question of, can we get some alignment
to put some of them back into place
and, you know, bring some sanity back?
And I think it goes back to fixing the data carrier bypass bug.
And I don't know, it's difficult, I think, at this point to reconcile
because everyone's really entrenched in their position.
Okay, so why do you think Core have done this?
I don't know. Like their argument is that you can do it anyway, so we should not get in the way. Right. And they're thinking, I believe, is that at least they've said it. They want they don't want private mempools. So they want to kind of unify policy across the network.
and they hope i'm kind of steel manning for steel manning for them but they hope that
the people spamming will stop using utxos and go to opertern because now they've removed some
of these defaults and it also reduces the risk that you need to go to a miner directly
to broadcast the transaction because the network as a whole will accept these larger operterns
Do you think there's kind of a disconnect between Bitcoiners and Bitcoin Core at this point? And is that the widest that disconnect's ever been?
I would say so. I mean, there's a massive amount of mistrust on Bitcoin Core development as a whole right now. And I can definitely see that perspective. If you look at what's going on, they're kind of antagonistic to users. And you see this in a lot of their communication.
it's almost like they look down on users and actually you can find quotes and in posts on x
if you want to look for those but there's also the fact that it looks corrupt i don't want to
say is corrupt but it definitely looks corrupt because they're rewriting documentation to avoid
fixing bugs and there are people that have interest in these spammy projects like ordinals
and Tapper and whatnot.
And they're all over
and they're in the mailing list
discussing stuff
and very friendly
with the core developers
and maintainers.
So I can definitely see
why there's this massive mistrust
of core development.
And then there's the resistance
to undoing their changes
and not changing these defaults.
So it kind of altogether adds up
and people kind of feel like,
you know, they're being gaslit. Communications on X compound that, but the refusal to not undo
something and their refusal to, you know, slow down or pause is all reasonable for the average
person to assume that, you know, there's some ulterior motive going on. I think probably the
reason that they're reluctant to go back on what they've said they're going to do is because they
think technically it's the correct solution. But again, is that them just missing some of
the ideological arguments against what they're doing? Well, I mean, here's the thing. Like,
I was just chatting with Adam back before I came on and I told him my position is not to upgrade.
And this is what I will recommend to people. And he's saying, you should just upgrade. Like,
just go to 30 and you can always change the defaults back.
So then I countered back and said,
well, then why not just not have those changes
if people can change them back you know We kind of in this cyclical argument He saying they don matter and you can change them back And I saying well you can just not change them if they don matter Right So this is this that we stuck in this cycle here
So there's no really good end to it because at the end of the day, you can bypass filters.
They are not absolute.
So it's more of a attitude of what Bitcoiners have.
is bitcoin for data transmission and storage or is it for money and this is where the divide is
you know there are additional angles on slippery slopeness here because the discussion around
filtering out the um the spam leads people to think well if you can filter that you set a
precedent and governments can also tell you to filter other things too down the road potentially
But I don't think that's necessarily true because a lot of these spammy things, they're embedding data in envelopes and they sort of self-identify themselves by these envelopes.
So you can tell like, okay, this is a BRC, this is an inscription and yeah, it's spam.
So filter.
But that's not the path that we've chosen.
and knots is doing that but core seems to be trying to implement more things to make it
more easy for them to spam because they think that is the deterrent to you know spamming utxos
but if if they're trying to deter people from running private mempools their argument for that
would be because that increases minor centralization so we should do anything that
sort of prevents that. Is that correct? Well, mining centralization is a common talking point
that's always brought up, right? Like we're doing this because we want to mitigate mining
centralization. So you don't, but so then why don't you think that mining centralization is an
issue in that sense? Well, I do think mining centralization is an issue, but I think it's
just being used to justify actions that they've decided to take, but they don't need to take those
actions. They can roll it back. But I think the prevailing argument from the core side is they
think we cannot be forced to undo something that the community wants, right? Like for them, that's
a slippery slope. If there is backlash and they change something, it means they're not following
through on the most absolute technically correct solution. But I think they're missing a point here,
which is delivered security. And again, this is something Adam has brought up. If you
make a change and no one uses it, then did you actually deliver any security to the network or
improvement or anything? And I think the answer there is no. If you make a change and no one is
willing to run your software, then you might as well have just not done it because it has zero
effect or negative effects in this case, because now you have a lot of mempool fragmentation.
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pro not sorry pro core in any way here. So why aren't you running Noughts? Well, I don't think
I should have to run Noughts because I've been running Core for a long time. So I think I should
be able to stick on an older version of Core. And, you know, I'll run a third one if there is a third
one that is more reasonable and conservative. But do you think that Notts is a safe node
implementation to be running? Or do you think the risk of the single maintainer is too high?
Well, I don't necessarily think the single maintainer is an issue. The issue is more that
there's a large difference in code, like 25,000 some odd lines of code between core and Notts.
And this is because Luke is cherry picking things to merge.
It's not a rebase.
I think you might have some things that could be merged for security reasons that may have
been missed.
I don't know.
I haven't looked at it closely enough, but for me, that would be a reason why I would
choose not to use knots.
But I don't think it's because it's just one maintainer because, you know, Luke is very,
Luke is a very skilled engineer.
He knows the code base in and out.
He was the one that figured out that Segwit could be done as a soft fork when nobody else in all of Bitcoin Core thought it could be done.
They all thought it was a hard fork.
So he knows the ins and outs of the code base like the back of his hand.
And I think I could trust his judgment on developing Bitcoin software because he's been here since the earliest days.
So I agree with that.
Like Luke is clearly brilliant.
He's done some great things for Bitcoin.
But I still think there's an issue with a single person having eyes on the code before anything's merged.
Because with Bitcoin Core, there's five or six lead maintainers and then, I don't know, 50 or 60 devs that look at this thing consistently.
Surely that is a way more robust system than one where Luke can just merge code whenever he wants to.
Even if he's brilliant, surely you need more eyes on the code.
Yeah, definitely. More eyes is better.
So I think that's a valid point.
People should want more review of Noughts.
And I think they will get there.
I mean, there are people putting together, I think, a new organization to fund Noughts
development.
So that will help with that.
I mean, it's really a question of funding, right?
Like Luke is doing it himself without any funding.
So that can all be fixed.
But I think overall, it's healthier that we have multiple implementations, especially
multiple robust implementations because then there's no risk of core just ramming something
through that people don't like because it is the reference implementation right now and people do
blindly follow it so there is a risk that something could go through that is detrimental to the
network and you know there was cv you know 17144 which was the inflation bug and that went through
with all the review of all the different developers
and all the big names that you would expect,
they all waved it right through.
So there is a risk there too,
even in core itself that, you know,
people will miss things.
So the risk is really the echo chamber.
And I think that is another systemic issue in core,
which is they kind of give each other a free pass
and they have their in-group and the out-group
and the in-group can kind of wave things through.
And that's also a risk,
just as big of a risk as just one maintainer or a few maintainers is for knots.
The thing that I can't quite get my head around with the multiple implementations idea, though,
is that are we not diluting developer mindshare with that? So there's probably only,
I don't know what the number is, 100 people in the world that are capable of actually working
on something like Core or Knots or whatever it might be. If we have multiple implementations,
Do we not just remove eyes from core, take them over to knots and then to whatever the third
implementation is? And instead of having one really robust reference client, you have three
that are all slightly less robust. Well, it depends. I think if you have one client that's
rebasing off the latest core version, then it's far less risky than just cherry picking changes
and merging, which is the knots method. But I don't necessarily think that's an issue. Like what
we need is more testing than development. So the question is, Danny, why do we want so many
developers developing so many features? You know, there's a clip of Sailor on the old What Bitcoin
Did pod that's going viral right now, where Sailor is saying, you know, we don't want to
change things. Like you don't want more and more complexity. You don't want more rules.
You know, you generally want to be very conservative for Bitcoin because, you know,
It was a $1.3 trillion asset.
Now it's $2.0 something trillion, right?
So it's getting more and more valuable.
I think we need to become more and more conservative.
Like, do we even want multiple releases of Bitcoin Core a year?
Or do we want one a year or one every two years?
I don't know, but I'm okay with like a one to two year release cycle cadence,
barring any urgent bug fixes for critical vulnerabilities
because there don't need to be that many features added to Bitcoin at this time.
I don't disagree with that at all, but there's still going to be bugs in Bitcoin.
There's also, there's things that we know are going to need changing at some point,
like there's the timestamp issue.
So like this can't ossify yet.
There are things that we absolutely have to change at some point.
But do you think the time warp attack, right?
No, it may not be called a time stamp bug.
Isn't there a problem with like,
is it like the fact that it's 24 bits or something like that?
Let me find out.
I don't know.
There's a time warp attack that's being worked on.
Right. But I mean, there's a problem here too,
which is the current state of things is making it very difficult
for getting consensus to upgrade the network, especially with core
the way it is now.
Like, as you said, trust in Bitcoin Core is at an all time low.
Will they be able to push a soft fork through to fix something?
So I just had a quick look.
There's a timestamp bug that will break Bitcoin Core in 2038
because it was written in 32-bit integer rather than 64.
Okay, right, right, that one.
So there are things that we know are going to come up
that will require developers working on Bitcoin Core to make some changes.
Yes.
But so like, how much ossification do you want to see?
Like in terms of things like covenants
and these more out there
and potential upgrades to Bitcoin,
are you just like wiping the board?
You don't want to see that come to Bitcoin?
I'm open to it, but not right now.
I mean, there's no need for it.
Like people pushing for covenants,
you can do that on Liquid right now.
You know, yes, you don't like Liquid.
Probably you want it on the main chain,
but prove out the use case and get some adoption.
like have people using it for some wallet somewhere for some reason but you can't just
say we need this and i don't think we're at a stage in bitcoin's life cycle where that should
be the case where someone comes to the table and say says i need something and let's change
something like that's just completely unreasonable for an asset that is the size of bitcoin and
you know i agree that we do need bug fixes like there are things that we can fix but
like that bug is in 2038 we have time right where there's no urgency we can spend more time analyzing
the current state of bitcoin looking for more bugs fixing issues and fixing these longer term bugs
that you know can wait for a decade um is it fair to use liquid as a comparison there like i i like
liquid i think it's going to be useful i think there's obviously very real use cases for it but
it is a custodial model. It's not the same as these things coming to Bitcoin.
Well, I don't like the word custodian for anything like eCash because custodian is a legal term. It's
like you have a legal responsibility to someone because you're taking care of something for them.
It is a definition. I would call things like liquid, eCash, affetiments, and the like,
you know, cypherpunk asset pools or caps. And, you know, you're just pooling and unpooling
together. And there are different security models around these things, but it's not a custodian. So
you want liquid because you want the benefits of the liquid chain. You can't expect to have
your Bitcoin and have the liquid BTC at the same time, right? It doesn't work that way.
So you have to make a trade-off and take one over the other, but you can always swap back.
and there's utility there.
But my point is,
if you wanted to build something with Covenants,
there's simplicity now activated on Liquid.
Go and build a commercial project on Liquid
that is in demand and people want it, right?
Like Aqua is a good use case.
We're seeing a massive amount of Aqua usage,
transaction volumes,
because people want to use Liquid
and being able to use Liquid as a base
for Lightning payments
or aggregating smaller Lightning payments
to swap to Bitcoin main chain.
consolidate their UTXO. So the onus is on the people asking for the thing to prove that there
is a real use case for it. And it's not just theoretical that they themselves want. Because
if you look at Taproot, like we rushed to activate Taproot. It was a major emergency
because we want to have signature aggregation. Where's the signature aggregation? I don't know.
I don't see it. Do you? No. And do you think Taproot was a mistake?
not necessarily but rushing it through maybe i mean we could have packaged up a software proposal
that did a lot of different things and activated all at the same time right there is no rush here
i think the monetary maximists are trying to build a bitcoin for the next thousand years
and if you work back from that timeline you don't need a release every few months
you know a release every couple years is good enough yeah i don't disagree with that so where
do you think we go from here then because when this debate all started up i thought this was
going to be something that was a talking point on twitter for a few weeks and then would die down
and if anything it's ramped up like the vitro from both sides has got to insane levels um
call 30 is going to be out in i don't know three or four weeks what do you think will happen
well i don't think a lot of people will run it i think there is sort of a shelling point here
um there is a faction that won't run it they'll stick with 29 and there's a faction that will run
not and i really don't see a lot of people keen to run 30 unless they're just a devoted core
supporter and they want to signal that they're loyal to core and they support the devs or they're
running it to spite the knots people because they don't like them. So that's generally the lay of
the land. Like if you look at the entire landscape, it is very fragmented. Then there are these camps
that have their entrenched beliefs. But to answer your question about where we go from here,
I'm really not sure. It definitely feels like everyone has their side and that's it right now.
So I posted a sort of bait post on X about the UTXO size growing from 11 gigabytes now to 128 in like 10-ish years, and then maybe to one terabyte.
And if you look at the responses to that, everyone kind of missed the mark.
Everyone was like, they missed the mark on a number of levels because there's a lot of nuance to this.
Can I tell you what I thought and you can tell me where I missed the mark.
Yeah, go, go, go for it.
Because when I saw that, like, the few things I thought is, it's 11 gigabytes right now,
you can still run a node with a machine with 4 gigabytes of RAM So like I didn necessarily know why it was an issue One because like storage capacity is going to get cheaper and easier And like I don
you don't need to keep the entire UTXO set in RAM. Like I didn't know why it was an issue.
Yeah. So I was trying to kind of try to do what Adam was doing. So Adam posted a tweet
saying he's running Bitcoin 30. And you know, that triggered everyone in the usual way that
you would expect them to be triggered. But he left out the word core because what he was implying
was he'll run a Bitcoin 30, not necessarily core 30. So it could be a knots 30, a knobs 30,
another implementation based off of 30. But it goes to show like on his thread, you get the
people that are in their camp pushing their view. So the core camp was like, hey, Adam is on our
side you know suckers and then you know the the knots guys are angry like how dare you run you
know bitcoin core 30 right but for my post i was trying to get to the the the point of you if you
care about real decentralization and if you care about uh miners small miners which is the argument
that core is giving for their changes then you definitely want to constrain the utxo set size so
So a lot of people first got wrong.
They think it's just on disk.
Oh, hard drive space is getting cheaper.
What are you talking about?
But I was referring to RAM.
And I was referring to people that want to mine.
Because if you want to mine,
you have to load the entire UTXO set in RAM.
So that it's fast access.
Yes.
If you're a miner,
whether you're a small mining operation
with a couple S9s
or you're a BidAx user, then you should be, you know, running Bitcoin Core with all UTXOs in RAM
so that you're competitive. And this has been an argument about, you know, mempool policy and why
it's bad to have divergent mempool policy because you're slowing yourself down. But it's the same
thing. You want to have the entire UTXO set in RAM if you're a miner, regardless of your size.
and if it's in RAM it's not 11 gigs it's 50 something gigs because 11 is compressed so if
you have that linear-ish growth of UTXO size you know in a decade it's not 128 gigs it's you know
five times that and in you know 2040 something it'll be you know five terabytes at the max not
that's the worst case scenario but you get my point if you care about mining and you care about
decentralization you should realize these things but everyone just said okay you're wrong you missed
it and you know it doesn't matter but it does matter and if you care then you should have come
to that conclusion and added one plus one plus one and figured out oh it's three and it does
actually matter because the utxo set is huge now and it's it's going to be a problem for anyone
trying to run their own node. And if you want decentralization, they should be running their
own node, not just running, you know, running with a pool and relying on a pool's templates and node.
So help me understand this. Does putting all of this information on Operator not reduce
or not reduce UTXO bloke because people aren't using unspendable UTXOs?
It could, but I mean, it's cheaper to do UTXOs versus Operator, right? And I think people have
kind of homed in on that,
and this is why they're resisting core,
because it doesn't make sense.
Like, you're trying to encourage people
with thoughts and prayers to use Operatorn instead of UTXO.
And again, this is probably where some mistrust is brewed,
because why would they think that?
That makes zero sense at all.
So, why is it cheaper to do it in UTXOs?
Because of the discount.
Okay.
Because of the Segre discount.
Yeah, but at the same time, I don't think you want...
necessarily to encourage more people shoving stuff in the opera turn too. Because it's true
that you can prune opera turn, but then you're running a pruned node. You can't just prune only
the opera turn. And if everyone is running a pruned node, then there is no more full node
to boot up the network and help other people, you know, spin up new nodes in the future.
So if we put Samsung now in charge of core, you're the dictator of core today,
what would you do? I don't know I would roll back some of the more contentious things and
I don't think there's much we can do to undo the damage that's been done but I would say let's be
very conservative and very cautious on what happens in the future but if you were to ask me
like you know how do we fix this whole divide I don't think you'll like the answer like you have
to be able to bring Luke back into the fold. I think Bitcoin Core has to remove a lot of people
that are maintainers and have been driving the project. And I don't think that will happen either
because there's economic incentives to be a maintainer. You get paid more, right? And you
get prestige from it. So the only way that someone would step down is because of honor. Like, yes,
we messed up, we caused a massive clusterfuck, and I'm stepping down because of that. And I'll
continue to work on Bitcoin, but I won't be in that position anymore. And I don't see that
happening either. And I don't see them welcoming Luke back either. And I don't see them willing to
roll back the changes. But if you wanted to repair the divide, that's how I would see it happening,
that some people in core step down and there's kind of a house cleaning there.
so i was only around for the very end of the fork war the block size wars in 2017 obviously that
culminated then but it'd been going on for a long time beforehand do you think that this does risk
escalating into something similar and we do end up with a fork because of it i don't think so i mean
like i said i don't i don't believe core releasing 30 is going to be the end of the world
I think we can unify some of the policy.
We can talk to miners and mining pools.
Like I used to run a mining pool.
You can talk to people that run mining pools
and show them that it's better to align
with what the network wants,
which is seemingly filtering of spam.
There might be some holdouts
and some people, some pools might want
to keep mining and relaying spam.
But in general, I think it's possible
that a lot of them would understand
that it's better for the network not to do that.
and yeah, I think you can kind of bring about some change to the network.
I think the problem with a lot of core developers is
you work with the tools you're given.
If you're a lawmaker, you're just going to write laws and write more laws.
You're not going to remove them.
If you're a developer, you're going to keep focusing on the code.
It's probably not in your tool set to go out there and engage and educate
and talk to miners and mining pools about what is bad.
So I think this is why the default reaction was,
let's just adjust the filters and standards
to what is happening
instead of trying to go out and affect change.
I think one of the dynamics
that's missed a little bit too much in this conversation
is the fact that not all nodes are created equally.
Like the economic nodes are the thing
that matter on the network.
And obviously for a long time, basically forever,
they've all been running Bitcoin Core.
Do you think any of those will be moving across the Nots? Because it's really easy for me to spin
up 10 Nots nodes in my bedroom and then it looks like there's massive growth on the network. And
obviously there is some real organic growth, but do you think any of the big businesses running
big economic nodes will move across the Nots? Hard to say, but I mean, Ocean, I would say a lot
of the hash rate there is using Nots. And I don't think you can really deny that they are a sizable
portion of the network now. And that is good. It's good to have mining decentralization. So
everyone that was paying lip service to mining decentralization on the core side, I really don't
see them congratulating Ocean in any way. So you can see that a lot of this divide is really
personal. They just don't like Luke for various reasons and they will never like Luke and they
will never like Ocean. So it's a difficult predicament right now. It seems to be personal
attacks and attacks on individuals are more prevalent than actually thinking things through
and thinking things through from a level-headed place of calm. And you see that, like the first
reaction to a lot of posts is maintaining my side. And that is not a way for us to move forward.
So do you think this really is about Luke as a person? Because he obviously has some pretty wild
views. Lop just did a big post where he went through a ton of things that Luke said in the
past that are very out there is that what is at the core of this issue in your opinion
i don't know it's it's interpersonal i would think it's a lot of these people in bitcoin
core that don't like luke ultimately we do need to get along and i think eventually we will get
along um you know we have more in common with each other you know irregardless of all the
differences in vitriol being spewed than we would think and we are all bitcoiners so you know maybe
in a couple of years, it'll all calm down and, you know, everyone will get along better and,
you know, we can move forward. But for now, I think it's important to keep in mind that,
you know, everyone is, everyone wants the best for Bitcoin. They just have different views on
what is best for Bitcoin. And yes, maybe some people are doing some things for the lulls, but
that is short term. It's not going to last forever. Yeah. Rough consensus is messy. All right,
Samson, you are obviously fronting up Jan 3.
How's everything going?
How's the nation state adoption going?
Pretty good.
We just got back from Paraguay and we made some good progress there.
We met a lot of the right people that could potentially make a Bitcoin bond happen in Paraguay.
And we likely will go back again if discussions progress.
And I assume all of these countries have been looking at what Trump has been saying in the US and him leaning into Bitcoin.
Has that made a real impact in your conversations with these other countries?
Well, I think they have a vague idea, but we often seem to think in a wrong fashion that
everyone knows everything that we know. And that's not always the case. A lot of people don't even
know that the Bitcoin ETFs are BlackRock's most successful ETF and has generated some 200 million
and profits for them. People don't know that. And the executive orders, they don't know that either.
So it's kind of our job to go and tell them these things. So if you look at what we do from a 30,000
foot view, we're kind of like a personalized podcast about Bitcoin that we go and sit down
with them, talk about everything that's happening in Bitcoin and answer questions. And there's no
question that is too uh too noobish to answer you know back in 2021 when sailor came out and
started doing the strategy stuff everyone was thinking like institutions were going to start
piling in and we saw one or two and then like really it wasn't until the last 12 months where
we've seen real institutional adoption of bitcoin um do you think nation states may be similar in
the sense that it may we may just be like a cycle early and in a few years we'll start seeing a lot
of these nation states actually piling into Bitcoin? Well, there's like two parts to that
question. So this cycle doesn't seem to have played out. We're behind schedule. You know,
we should have had a bull run already, like a massive run up. And, you know, we're down actually
at the time of this recording. So I think this cycle, if you want to call it a cycle, is delayed.
It might push into next year for whatever various reasons there are. But I think the nation state
adoption is coming. We're pushing on a lot of fronts. Other companies and people are pushing
too. There are concrete examples of what Bitcoin can do to benefit a country out there right now.
The moves in the US, I think, have yet to propagate throughout the world. So Trump did
create the SBR, but they haven't started buying yet. And we are talking with other countries to
do the same. There are a few that have said they will create it. And I think it's all coming.
It's really that these things happen very quickly.
It's like literally gradually and then suddenly.
And I think we're on the tail end of gradually and we're at the beginning phases of suddenly.
And if you look at just the U.S. alone, they're pushing forward on a lot of their budget-neutral Bitcoin acquisition and the Bitcoin Act, too.
So I believe it's simply a matter of time before we see a massive run up and we see a massive nation state FOMO panic.
Which nation states are you most bullish on as like a category?
Because obviously El Salvador done incredibly well.
Bhutan done amazing.
The US is starting to make moves.
Countries like the UK where I'm from and Australia where I live, I think are going to be laggards in this.
I can't see them being amongst the first movers.
Like where do you think the real progress will come from?
I think it's likely Latin America.
And I've said that since we started Gen 3, that it's the most ripe area of the world to significantly do something with Bitcoin because you have energy, the energy part of the equation.
You have the general stability, political stability, and you have the need.
So you put all those things together and it just makes it the perfect place.
And I think we just need a few more dominoes to drop.
if Paraguay if things pan out in Paraguay the way we hope I think that's a big domino and
countries in surrounding in the surrounding area would likely come as well I mean I'm excited for
the nation state FOMO that's uh is that when we actually get the the million dollar bitcoin target
that you always talk about we'll see I mean even without nation state adoption we should see it too
simply because of the corporate buys. Every day, there's more and more corporations buying.
And it just blows my mind that we're not running already.
Yeah, it is like, it is a bit strange. This cycle has felt very different. And one of the
best ways I've found to describe it is like my vibes, my vibe check is completely gone.
Like in previous bull markets, you get a sense of what's happening. You get a sense of where
we're going. You can almost feel it when we're about to run. And this time, I've just got no
idea what's happening and I don't I can't put my finger on why that is but my vibes are all off
yeah because every day you see an announcement that strategy bought this many coins meta planet
bought this many coins this new company is buying and the price is going sideways and down so it
makes zero sense you know and I don't really have an answer about why I think it's probably a number
of things. It could be paper Bitcoin. It could be ETFs. It could just be outright fraud like FTX.
Some exchange somewhere selling coins that they don't have and they're buying back when they need
to buy back to meet demands for withdrawals. I don't know. But definitely, I think everyone has
a sense in their head that something is off and there's no way to know for certain until, you know,
something blows up and it's all over the news. But definitely, I would say it puts the suddenly,
you know, very close to now, and it could trigger at any time. And that's kind of like the Omega
thesis. And I think that the current situation of Bitcoin price is definitely, you know,
on the verge of Omega.
You're feeling it. So why do you think there's fraud? Like, what leads you to think that there's
some kind of fraud in the market? Is there always going to be blow ups whenever we have one of these
like bull and bear markets? Because we have had that in the past. Do you think that's likely in
the future? Well, there's always been something, right? Like FTX was the perfect example. We saw
that they were selling Bitcoin that they did not have. And, you know, that's always a possibility.
And I think of all the factors, it has to be some contributing factor that some entity is doing
something weird. I'm here for it. I'll have the popcorn ready. Samson, anything else you want to
talk about before we close this out? This has been great. No, I think we pretty much covered
everything. It's a good conversation. Bitcoin's going to a million dollars. Everything will be
okay with Core30. Run whatever implementation you want. Stop shouting at people. This has been great,
Samson. Thank you very much. Where do you want to send anyone before we do close out?
I'm on X. My handle is
Excelion, E-X-C-E-L-L-I-O-N
and you can find Jan3 on X2
Jan3.com
Perfect. Alright, thank you man
I appreciate that. That was fun
Thanks Danny. Catch you next time
Thank you.