Whatever we're quote unquote getting for free is not free at all.
It's in fact very, very costly.
A lot of this stuff is just sort of like satisfying developers without giving users enough benefit.
What is the biggest threat to Bitcoin right now?
If the core devs agree among themselves that something is right,
then the rest of the community can go f*** themselves.
Right now they do kind of have the power to maybe ruin Bitcoin if they really wanted to.
They're given sort of like this godlike respect on them.
Developers need to be a lot more humble.
We all just saw all this horrific stuff in the Epstein files.
That's not to say that there's no Mossad agent contributing to Cora right now.
We don't know.
Anyone that tells you they know exactly how it's going to play out is probably lying.
If you think it's going to be the global reserve currency, then it's completely mispriced.
Yeah, I mean, I see NOSER as kind of like Internet 2.0 almost, right?
Like where you get to do things in a very different way than I think what the Internet has turned into.
It's almost like the truer Internet, if that makes sense.
And, yeah, we're all here for it, so it's great.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, Jimmy, welcome.
I'm glad we've gotten the chance to do this.
You and I have been around each other.
I've introduced you many times at conferences.
We've never had a chance to do a long-form discussion,
so I'm super excited to have you here.
Can I actually ask, because I haven't heard this before,
but when did you actually hear about Bitcoin first?
When did you get into Bitcoin?
So you've been obviously writing about Bitcoin.
You've been hacking away yourself for a long time.
What was actually your first foray into Bitcoin?
Yeah, I think it was almost exactly 15 years ago today.
So this was, if I remember, the actual article is still live on Slashdot.
So you can actually go to the article and when it was published.
It was Internet-only currency Bitcoin has reached dollar parity.
That's the name of the headline that I read on Slashdot in 2011.
I'm pretty sure it was February of 2011.
It might even be February 2nd.
Who knows?
But yeah, 15 years ago was when I first heard of it.
And I was almost immediately drawn in, although my wife told me that it's probably a scam,
which is probably the correct or more rational way of looking at something that's just sort of like Internet only.
But I fell down the rabbit hole and I've been doing things ever since, I guess.
That is pretty wild.
I mean, I only went down the rabbit hole.
I heard about Bitcoin and this was 2014 for the first time.
It was during the Silk Road days.
I had a buddy who was getting some things and he was like, he was asking me, do you know
anything about this?
And I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about, man.
Like, I don't care about these Bitcoins that you need for this, like whatever nerd, you
know, and like went back to whatever fiat things I was doing at the time.
Heard about it again in 2017 when it was like, like right at the tippity top, you know, right
when right when people like me were coming rushing in. But luckily, I was, you know, so
uninformed that I thought you couldn't buy a fraction of Bitcoin. You had to buy a full Bitcoin.
So I can't afford a full Bitcoin right now. Better get a couple of these Litecoin things.
That bad move there. I don't think the price ever I managed to buy like right as Charlie Lee
sold out. I think I must have, you know, right at that just timed it perfectly right at the top
there. But yeah, and then it was COVID, I think, for a lot of people that brought me into it,
where I really had the time or lack of excuses and finally dug into it. And then the rest,
as they say, is history. But yeah, is it a little surreal for you just watching?
Now that we have the president of the United States has talked about it,
Nayib Bukele has been stacking. You've got the kingdom of Bhutan that's been mining.
I mean, is this, did you expect this or is it just a bit kind of like wild to you still?
Yeah.
I mean, I guess at some level I had a suspicion that this could happen, right?
Otherwise you wouldn't get into it, right?
And the thought for me was if this works, then I better be one of the first people and not one of the last people.
because, you know, just the way money works and how technical adoption happens.
And, you know, I thought it had a chance.
But, you know, that's a very different thing than the reality of all of the stuff that you mentioned happening.
And that's been honestly kind of surreal.
Like, what am I doing, right?
Like, I'm a coder, right?
I'm not I like that's what I was doing at the time when I heard about it.
I was working at a startup and stuff.
So for me, like the fact that all of this stuff is happening, that, you know, I get to go to conferences and talk to people about it and I make money somehow doing that is that that part is probably the most surreal because just doesn't feel like anything anyone could have predicted.
it, right? Like, I'm doing a podcast on a platform that's like, you know, not exactly the internet,
but is, but it's not centralized exactly. And it's, you know, it's like, just the number of
things that you have to stack on top to come to this reality is very much completely unpredictable.
So it's, yeah, I like living this way. It really does feel like the frontier. And it's,
it's fun. Yeah. Were you a, were you a quote, you know, classically trained coder or were you
self-taught? I guess I took some classes in high school. So there's that, but I've been,
I've also been coding since I was like nine years old. So there's like part of that too.
But I didn't get any training in college because I was a math major and the one CS class that I was
going to take, I dropped like after three weeks or something. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, since then,
uh, you know, right out of college, my first job was a coding job and I, uh, yeah, it's a, it's like,
uh, you know, I I've been doing it for, I guess, over 40 years or whatever. So it feels like a,
very much a part of me. And, uh, it's not something that I think about as like a formal
training versus informal training. Although I think I've had a decent amount of formal training,
but it's one of those things where I can't really put a demarcation point on, you know,
how much is formal, how much is informal. I've always been kind of a self-learner on a lot of
things anyway. So hard to say. Maybe for the better to have less of the formal training often,
And, you know, sometimes it's not always the best.
It's often just for the credentials themselves.
But so, I mean, the fact that you were a math major also makes a lot of sense, given the context of everything you've done since then.
Well, I'm curious, too, Jimmy.
I mean, oh, go ahead.
No, no, it's true.
And at least in college, I wanted to be a math professor.
And it was really that was like a dream of mine.
But yeah, and in a in a weird way, I've kind of gotten to be a math professor.
I've taught my courses and I taught a course at the University of Texas for a semester on Bitcoin.
And first two chapters of my book, it's all math.
It's here's what a finite field is.
Here's what an elliptic curve is.
And, you know, here's how those things actually make for the signature algorithm that's used in cryptography that ultimately makes Bitcoin possible.
So, yeah, that part's surreal, too, because the fiat path that's required to get into, you know, being like a university level professor and stuff, it's not an easy road.
And I know that that would have like absolutely crushed my soul.
But I got to do what I'm doing now.
And I still get to do a lot of the things that I kind of wanted to do.
And yeah, it's kind of strange in that way, how life works out.
I've got to ask you too, how long have you been wearing the cowboy hat for?
Because it's like, I feel like it's the Jimmy Songz symbol now.
Was this from a young age or was it a later adoption?
No, it's like a Bitcoin thing, right?
So I've been in Bitcoin since 2011.
I started contributing to various open source Bitcoin projects since 2013.
And I don't think anyone knew who I was until 2017.
And for the first six, eight months of like, I guess, my quote unquote public profile when
I was going on YouTube shows and explaining things.
So it was right around the block size wars and stuff.
No hat, right?
But it was October of 2017.
And I was actually kind of getting annoyed that people kept asking, you know, where do you live?
Because I have these cowboy boots that I wear everywhere.
And I love cowboy boots.
And I thought it would be obvious, but it wasn't.
So I was determined to find something more obvious to show that I'm a Texan.
So, yeah, I went with the hat.
Not too many Asian people that wear cowboy hats.
So it ended up being a great branding decision.
And, yeah, I've been wearing it ever since then, I guess.
I love it.
I mean, it is definitely, I think, one of the most iconic brands within Bitcoin.
That's for sure.
It's like you see the silhouette.
I feel like there's various Bitcoin silhouettes.
It's like you see the hat, it's like, I know that's Jimmy's song.
So it's worked well for you, I think.
Oh, definitely.
And, you know, I've come up with narratives around the hat, right?
It's all about going out into the frontier.
And Bitcoin is very much the only frontier, I feel like.
And like at a subtle level, I think this is why so many men are in it and not that many women.
And if you study history and look at like, you know, how frontiers were won, it was almost entirely men.
It was very few women and they would come later after civilization like sprouted in a lot of these places.
But but that's almost always been the case historically.
So in a sense, this this is my tribute to what Bitcoin is and sort of like a reminder to myself that we're we're still early.
Right. Like this is we're still building stuff.
It's a it's a frontier town, if you if you will.
And there's a lot of needs all over the place.
And yeah, it's a fun place to be.
But, you know, there's also some danger and things like that.
I want to dig into that a little bit, actually, because I think a lot of people, especially
just because the Overton window has shifted so just vastly.
And now, I mean, you've got whether it was the Bitcoin ETFs and, you know, that whole
saga, right?
If it's the president of the United States, you know, saying he's the best crypto president or, you know, whatever, Bitcoin subtext, mostly crypto, though.
We know he likes the shit coins, but that's a different story.
Like, I think a lot of people who are maybe thinking about getting into Bitcoin now, thinking about starting to save a little bit in Bitcoin or still thinking about it as investing in Bitcoin, however they want to think about it.
they feel that they're too late because Bitcoin is kind of a household name now, but yet
the actual percentage of adoption is still super, super low. Like I would agree with you
that we are still on the frontier, but I mean, do you think, is that just people
maybe mistaking knowledge of something or awareness of something for adoption of it?
You know what I mean? The fact that there is such a kind of like such a common theme of,
oh, you're too late to Bitcoin and that's why you need to chase this shit coin or whatever else.
Yeah. And that speaks to sort of like the mentality a lot of people have. They want to get in on something early. Right. And for them, it's it's a it's a game. It's a it's get in before other people.
So at a certain level, when people say, oh, I'm too late, they're thinking in terms of like a Ponzi scheme or something like that.
Right. They inherently think it's a scam.
And that's why they think, OK, if I get in too late, then it's going to drop and I'm never really going to make any money or whatnot.
For the people that actually understand it, that's not how they view it.
So they don't think of it necessarily as like getting early per se, but as you know, as an investment vehicle that where you're trying to figure out what what is the correct valuation model for something like this.
And if you are an investor in anything and you buy something, you do it because you think it's mispriced in some way or that the rest of the market doesn't have all of the information.
So, for example, if you're buying bonds or gold or whatever, you think, OK, what is the correct valuation model for this?
For something like bonds or stocks with dividends, there's a fairly straightforward model where you go, OK, here's how much I can make through this.
Here's the coupon that it pays. Here's how much it can give me on a per year basis and so on.
But with Bitcoin, it's a little trickier.
And for people that don't have the right or have a mental model of what it could be or what we, you know, the rest of us that are in Bitcoin have as an idea of where it's going.
Well, then, you know, if you think it's going to be the global reserve currency, then it's completely mispriced compared to the current price.
I mean, it's like nowhere close. It's like two or three orders of magnitude off from where it should be. So if you think it's mispriced, then it's not about getting like you're still very early compared to where it's going to be. So that makes sense.
But if you don't have the right valuation model of it and think of it as sort of this pump and dump scheme, which, to be frank, that's what all almost every shitcoin is.
So like this, this conflation of those two things makes it so that they think, OK, well, I need to get in early because at some point it's going to peak or it's going to peak relative to other things.
And I just want to be a part of this wave.
And for them, it's much more about getting in, getting out, like more of a gambling vehicle almost or popularity contest or something like that, rather than here is something that is actually useful to the world.
And it is mispriced because of this.
And that analysis doesn't come naturally to most people, unfortunately, because we live in a fiat system.
Like the almost every investment, I would say since the establishment of of the Federal Reserve has had this kind of quality where it's it's much more about like get it on the way up before everybody else figures it out and then like sell at the top, something like that.
And, you know, even like during the roaring 20s and stuff leading up to the Great Depression, this was the mentality.
It's OK, if I buy this and this will go up and blah, blah, blah.
And that that's unfortunately how people think of investments or putting your money somewhere rather than, OK, here here is an asset that is mispriced.
And therefore, I need to, you know, if I if I own this and I'm correct, then I'm going to make a lot of money.
They they're not really thinking that way.
It's just, hey, like which which things are going up.
It's like Robin Hood or you've seen those like invest talk videos or whatever, right, where people are like, oh, my gosh, you just you just look for the things that are going up and then you invest in that or whatever.
It becomes very much a trading game.
And and that's, you know, not really that different than gambling.
and they just want to gamble on the number that's going to come up or something
rather than here's a mispriced asset and the rest of us in the Bitcoin space,
hopefully most of us in the Bitcoin space, have figured out.
And that's why we hold.
That's why we continue with it.
Well, it reminds me, I mean, I don't know if you've seen this,
but on like Robinhood and all of the shitcoin casino apps,
they've now basically, I view this kind of like not so subtle shift that they're doing,
basically away from actually the shit coins and toward just prediction markets.
Like they're actually just going full on.
And like, they're not even pretending that it's an investment, you know, an investment
anymore.
It's just like, Hey, you want to bet on what the weather's going to be tomorrow.
And really it's all just a vehicle for more sports betting, especially in states where
that's not currently legal.
But it's like, I mean, is this, Jimmy, is this just like late stage fiat vibes?
Is that what this is?
Or like, or is this just, Hey, the technology has allowed us to do this now.
So people are taking advantage of it.
Wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin?
Ledden makes that possible.
The global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending, Ledden has issued over $10 billion in loans since 2018
and has a perfect record of protecting client assets.
Why is a Ledden loan different?
Well, with custodied loans, collateral is not lent out to generate interest.
No credit checks, no monthly payments.
Apply in minutes and repay whenever you want, with zero penalties.
And proof of reserves reports verified by a top accounting firm are published every six months.
Ledin gives Bitcoin holders a secure, transparent way to unlock liquidity without selling.
Learn more at ledin.io slash walker.
That's L-E-D-N dot I-O forward slash walker.
If you're hodling Bitcoin personally or for a business, here's the uncomfortable truth.
you probably don't have insurance. Most policies exclude Bitcoin, and the ones that don't,
they only pay you back in fiat. What's the point of that if you need to claim a loss when number
go up? That's not insurance, that's liquidation. Now there's another option, BDIC. They're building
an insurance marketplace on the Bitcoin standard. One Bitcoin lost equals one Bitcoin paid.
They've integrated with Liana Business for enterprise self-custody with personal wallet coverage options coming later this year.
If you care about protecting your Bitcoin as Bitcoin, sign up for the waitlist at bdic.io slash walker.
That's bdic.io slash walker.
Insurance on the Bitcoin standard.
Blockstream Jade Plus delivers robust security with fully open-source hardware and software.
Its unique genuine check feature ensures your device is authentic, giving you ultimate peace of mind.
With versatile connectivity options including Bluetooth, USB-C, built-in camera, and SD card, Jade Plus offers unparalleled flexibility in managing your Bitcoin.
Whether you prefer wireless convenience or air-gapped security, Jade has you covered.
Its innovative design features a durable metal case, a bright 1.9-inch color screen,
and intuitive navigation buttons that make managing your Bitcoin straightforward and enjoyable.
Jade Plus also supports secure air transactions via QR code signing using the Jade Link storage device keeping your Bitcoin safe without compromising convenience Visit store and use my coupon code WALKER for an exclusive 10 discount on your Blockstream Jade Plus
Protect your Bitcoin. Sleep better. Stack harder.
Yeah, I mean, if you study some of these hyperinflating economies, this is a very common thing.
Like Weimar, Germany, one of the things that was happening was people were getting really rich on like stock market speculation and things like that.
And it was it's a I think it's a common thing when the money is bad that in a weird way, you're constantly seeking to make money without actually working.
Right. Like getting a quote unquote for free, being lazy or whatever.
And that that seems to be how fiat societies go.
And I would argue that, you know, stuff like investment banking is essentially that it's a bunch of people that aren't, you know, as concerned with providing value as kind of getting rich.
And you can do that if you have access to the money printer.
And, you know, that's essentially what loans are, is more access to the money printer and especially investment banks and such.
They get enormous quantities of money, especially through dark pools and things like that.
So all of that is to say that it is a late stage or it's just kind of a fiat phenomenon.
And the more we see of it is, I guess, more of it trickling down to retail.
Um, and, um, yeah, I, I, I can't see it sort of stopping.
Um, I like it's, uh, it's unfortunate, but, uh, what used to hold a lot of that back were,
um, moral concerns, moral, um, prohibitions.
Uh, but those have more or less been knocked down the last 20 years or so.
So, uh, yeah, they're like, no one really cares if there's more betting really.
uh and the you know they they call the other people that are sort of opposed to it at a society
level kind of like prudes or you know you're not for freedom or whatever um yeah and i i don't see
a way out of it it it just seems like something that people will continue to do and um you know
maybe at some point people are a little less um or a little more immune to some of these um
uh these things that that make it so that it's just so addictive so i i don't know um i mean we
we've kind of seen this with smartphones uh where you know it was like i i still remember when like
angry birds first came out for like ios right like everyone was playing it for hours at a time
and then at a certain point people realized okay this is this a little too much and people
stop maybe playing those mobile games.
I mean, obviously, there are still people
that are very addicted to mobile games and so on.
But for the most part,
a lot of people sort of developed an immunity
and similar thing with social media and so on.
And it's, you know,
people come up with tactics against it
where the betting market seemed like pretty ripe
for that kind of exploitation.
and the more wider it is, the quicker we'll get immunity to it,
but there's a lot of suffering in between.
So yeah, that's where it seems like.
Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems like, again, I think your analysis
that people are just looking for any way to try and get ahead,
and I think a lot of it stems from just the nihilism of realizing that it,
especially for younger folks, that it is basically impossible.
If you are on this hamster wheel, it is essentially impossible to try and make up any ground or to try and to perceive yourself as getting ahead in any way, especially when you compare yourself to prior generations.
And I think that's that's part of it there. And I mean, that's like that's the reason that we all evangelize for Bitcoin. Right.
I mean, one of the key reasons is like, look, this is a way for you to actually have a meaningful store of value that gains purchasing power over time.
Like gold's done a great job of maintaining purchasing power over time.
Like a fine suit is still worth like an ounce of gold, you know, 100 years ago and still basically today.
It's maintained purchasing power, but it kind of treads water a little bit.
And I think that's where Bitcoin comes in.
And it's like, hey, guys, look, it's not a get rich quick scheme, but you will grow purchasing power over the long term.
But that leads me to something I wanted to ask you about, too, which is just around the store of value in comparison to medium of exchange.
I don't even want to call it a debate because I don't think it is.
I think that's just a it's a spectrum of monetary adoption.
But but where are you at with this?
Because there's I don't I'm going to try to stop myself from putting people in camps because I don't like to do that.
And I think it's ineffective.
But like just for the sake of of discussion, you've got Michael Saylor who's basically said, like, never, never sell your Bitcoin or presumably that means spend your Bitcoin, too.
I'm not exactly sure on the nuance there.
But, you know, it's a pristine asset.
It's pristine collateral.
You've got sort of Jack Dorsey, who I think would agree with the thing that Bitcoin's a great store of value.
But also he said very publicly, like Bitcoin needs to be used as a medium of exchange if it's going to truly achieve, like if it's going to reach its zenith of where it can be.
Where are you at with this as someone who's seen it for so many years now?
Yeah, and this has been an argument almost from the beginning.
And a large part of the block size wars, this was the narrative on like the BCH side saying, oh, it needs to be a transactional currency.
It's a P2P cash, blah, blah, blah. But for me, the way to think about it is thinking about like sort of like how money comes into play.
And if you read a lot of Nick Szabo's essays from Times of Yore, like he talks about gold and all of these things.
How does money actually evolve? And that's a really good question to think about, because obviously Bitcoin is fairly new.
Right. It's it's what, like 17 years old now. And and we haven't we need to think about like, how does it actually evolve?
And his contention. And if you read his essays, this this comes through very clearly is that there's a lot of work put into the money, whatever it is, right?
whether it's wampums or gold or, you know, trinkets or whatever, all of those things, almost every money in any society required a significant amount of work to produce.
And there are people that use it for something or store it.
It's like a good keepsake or whatever it is.
And because of that, because of the effort required, it becomes like a scarce asset.
And that in turn makes it like something that stores value well.
And because of that, people start using it to trade and using it to use it as like a medium of exchange and so on.
And that's kind of the way that Bitcoin has evolved as well.
Right. Like and and we've seen it.
Store value is definitely the first function.
And if you want just like a transactional currency, the dollar is way, way better.
Way more merchants take it.
Way more people are willing to take it for goods and services and so on.
So it's not about beating it on that score.
Most of the dollar rails that exist are pretty digital anyway.
It's not really about that.
So it's not really about convenience. Obviously, I can go down to the store and pay with like credit cards and things like that so much easier than doing it with Bitcoin, even even for vendors that take Bitcoin.
Right. It's like more cumbersome because you have to scan a QR code and open your wallet. Sometimes it doesn't work, blah, blah, blah.
So it's not really about that at the beginning. I think it has to start with as a store of value.
And not surprisingly, there aren't that many good stores of value in the fiat economy.
And this is why it's been so popular to a large degree.
I mean, you have a lot of options when you want to pay for something.
But if you want to store value, there's really not that many things.
I mean, people have homes, people have stocks, maybe gold.
That's about it.
Like there's there's really not I guess you can like collect art or something like that.
And, you know, like have Lego sets or baseball cards or whatever.
Right. Like all of that, like you can.
But those things aren't very liquid and it's very difficult to sell.
And there's like a lot lots of transaction fees.
There's just so many reasons why most other things are pretty bad for store value.
So when you have Bitcoin be a store of value, the next evolution is that people will want it a lot.
And if you try to shortcut that process, at least in my observation, it hasn't worked.
We used to have in 2015, I think Dell started taking Bitcoin and they stopped after after like a year because it was like too much maintenance and not that many people were paying for it.
I think overstock.com also used to take it. Expedia used to take it.
I mean, these aren't small names. They were big e-commerce sites.
And most of them just stopped it because it wasn't worth it for them.
And that speaks to how method of payment parts come in to a currency.
It has to be something that the merchant really, really wants. And if you observe somewhere like Venezuela, if you go to the black market, they do not want bolivars.
Right. They want they want dollars because, you know, they would much prefer dollars.
In fact, oftentimes they'll give you a discount if you pay in dollars rather than bolivars.
And this is true in a lot of other countries that are suffering through a lot of inflation.
They would rather get your dollars. And the reason is because that's that's their store of value.
Right. That that's what they would rather store value in than than the local currency.
So if you can do that, when it gets more like that, where merchants are demanding Bitcoin rather than something else, that's when it really starts rolling.
And there are precious few people that actually have businesses that are Bitcoin based.
There aren't enough people that are saying, you know what, I really want Bitcoin.
I will give you a discount if you pay in Bitcoin because I want it.
I want that so much.
And it's not worth it for me to take the dollars, convert it, suffer some slippage and transaction fees to go get Bitcoin and then do that because I'm going to store it in Bitcoin anyway.
That's when the method of payment really starts rolling.
Now, I personally have done that with like my classes and stuff like that.
There are other other entrepreneurs in the Bitcoin space that have done that.
But if you're just sort of like a normal business and just sort of added as like as, OK, this will this will get like the Bitcoin Maxis into my store or something like that.
That's not really going to work. It's it's it's going to be OK.
Maybe maybe you get like a surge of interest for like a month.
But like over the long term, that's that's not how it works.
This is why I'm excited for, you know, somebody like Steak and Shake or Tahini's in Canada and so on.
Those are actual Bitcoin maximalists at the helm, right?
They want Bitcoin.
They're like, how do I get my hands on more Bitcoin?
Well, I can use it.
You know, I can get people to pay for it and I'm going to be converting it anyway.
This makes it cheaper for me and so on.
And this is my treasury asset. And how do I get more treasury? Well, take payment in it. Right. Like that. It's it's an extension of store of value. It's it's a way of adding to your store of value much easier by taking it as a payment.
So I think that's that's how currency, how money involved evolves.
And I think a lot of the effort to try to shortcut that is premature.
Right. A lot of times and we've seen it like again, like from 2015, that's like 11 years ago.
We had giant e-commerce platforms taking Bitcoin and it didn't happen.
didn't happen right it was in fact it almost all of them i guarantee like are not interested in
trying it again because it's not interesting uh it's it it's it cost them money probably in like
engineering resources and stuff and like they didn't keep the bitcoin they sold it right away
blah blah blah so like it like but you know had you had bitcoin maximalists in those positions
and you did take it and you kept it in Bitcoin,
I mean, your balance sheet would be much, much higher.
So like it has to be part of that strategy for it.
When you're talking about medium of exchange
or method of payment,
it has to be part of that,
has to be that the merchant is storing value in it, right?
It's part of that flow.
And really it's about the merchant's store of value.
It has to be that before it can really take off as that.
And there are circular economies in the world that where this is the case, where you have enough people on Bitcoin Beach that are orange pilled that want Bitcoin, that see it for what it is, where it works because you have enough people that see it for what it is and want to store value in it.
And this is just like a convenient way to to make all of that work anyway.
That's when it really takes off. But, you know, it's it's going to take some time.
It requires lots of entrepreneurs that are really into Bitcoin, that really are convinced this is where I should store my value.
And, you know, this is why I say store value has to come first, because if the merchant doesn't value it as a store value, then it's more a burden.
Right. It's like, oh, I'm I'm taking some foreign currency.
Like, say I'm in the US. Should I start accepting euro?
I mean, I guess I could. But that's that's like very painful.
Right. Like you have to go change it every time.
That's kind of what you're asking a business to do.
If you're saying, hey, go go take Bitcoin, you'll get more business or whatever.
That it's it's not not that compelling.
There are a few places, very touristy places where they'll take Alipay and WeChat payments from the Chinese tourists or something.
But that's the extent of it.
The real driver comes in when the merchant is using it as a store of value.
I would agree with that analysis, though.
Perhaps the couple of interesting caveats I would add to that, not even necessarily caveats, just additions,
would be I think that what we're seeing with both like Square enabling their merchants to turn the
feature on, not even necessarily to need to accept the Bitcoin, but to be able to use those rails and
get away from the two to 3% credit card fees. That's something that's really interesting because
now they just see, oh, wait, there's a way for me. If you're a low margin business, especially
either a restaurant, grocery store, whatever it might be, some that's like pretty tight margins,
a two to 3% makes a huge difference to you. So that's, and Spark is doing something similar where
it's like, or light spark with spark, you know, they're using Bitcoin as the rails to move the
money, the merchant. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to still keep it in Bitcoin. Maybe I'm not orange
pill yet. You know, using it as my personal store of value, but that's, I think another
kind of interesting development that obviously wouldn't have been possible in 2015. Like that,
it just, the technology wasn't there yet. Right. But now we're at this point where you do see
multiple modes of potential adoption of Bitcoin. But I would agree with you in terms of like,
if you want a merchant to really accept Bitcoin and want to keep it, well, they need to understand
that it's a great store of value. Stake and Shake, I've been to Stake and Shake. I'll say
this. Shout out to Stake and Shake. I've been there multiple times, probably at least five,
six times since they have deployed Bitcoin payments. I've paid in Bitcoin every single time.
And the experience has been really, really smooth. And they're doing everything in tallow now. So
shout out to them. That is a great example. Makes you want to go there, right? So with respect to
credit card payments. I am a little bit skeptical about that being the sort of like killer use case.
I agree. You do save two or three percent as a merchant. But there are other rails that are
much cheaper, right? Like there are other rails. There's already competition along those lines. So
this is there's a there's a really good article on bits about money, about credit card fees and
and how they made more or less kind of got like a monopoly through their network and stuff.
But one of the reasons why it's almost free to send using Venmo as opposed to a credit card.
What's going on, right?
Like credit card payments, they charge 3%.
Why is Venmo like free?
What's going on?
Well, it turns out that if you're using certain other rails,
And in this case, this is essentially going through the central bank to the other bank.
It's like a direct bank to bank transfer or whatever.
It's like a fraction of a cent per transaction.
It's like orders of magnitude cheaper.
And this is what stuff like Zelle and other platforms are built on is other rails that are cheaper.
Even at the grocery store.
And you'll notice this if you ever use a debit card.
they'll try to route you through the debit network rather than the credit card network right they'll
they'll ask for your pin as soon as you scan it if they detect that this this debit card and you
can sort of like decline it and it'll it'll process it as a credit card transaction but this is one of
the subtle ways in which they're they're trying to make more money by um because the debit card
path is like one and a half percent, whereas the credit card path is like three percent.
And so that margin, I think, goes away, right?
Like it's not long for this world, but it's not necessarily Bitcoin that will take over
that because there are other rails that already exist that are significantly cheaper.
And in many ways, they're more convenient for people.
I mean, I don't I don't know about you, but more people have Venmo than Bitcoin wallets.
Right. Despite all of that. Right.
And and like this, this is how people transact when you have dinner or whatever.
It's like, OK, you owe me this. Like, can you can you just Venmo me that or whatever?
And it's it's kind of gotten to that.
So like while I do understand the the the case with credit cards and that it does save two or three percent.
And I totally agree on the economics of that or whatever.
Bitcoin isn't the only game in town.
But with store value, it is the only game in town.
And I really think that that's ultimately going to have to be the driver if you want to see a lot of medium exchange method of payment use cases on that score.
We are 100% in agreement on that regard.
And so that also kind of leads me to something else which is the idea okay like I Bitcoin is money right Like I use Bitcoin as money in multiple ways right Both as a store of value I use it as a medium of
exchange. I use it also, you know, like whenever I can, I try to use Bitcoin to spend and then I
replace it like immediately with a few extra sats on top, you know, to make sure I wasn't missing
out on something. But I also try to think in it from a unit of account perspective, which is like
a difficult shift to make, right? But once you make that shift, you start to look at sats being
on sale. When you see these dips like right now where people are freaking out and you realize
you're still denominated, you know, you're using the wrong denominator here. You're still using
fiat as your denominator. But in order for Bitcoin to stay decentralized and secure and to
continue to, like, I think Bitcoin is winning. For Bitcoin to continue winning, there are some
different thoughts on what the path forward needs to be. There's kind of the idea of,
we need to ossify Bitcoin now. There's the idea that Bitcoin's ossifying whether you like it or
not. This is not a choice that you make. It's a natural progression. And there's the idea that
we need to avoid ossification at all costs. What's your perspective on that? How do you think about
that from the perspective of Bitcoin as a store of value, which obviously you just clarified,
is, in your opinion, the most important function of it to achieve medium of exchange?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm an ossificationist. I've said this in multiple venues, and I really think that
money is better when it stays constant, when it doesn't change very much. This is the problem
with central banks and the Federal Reserve and many other institutions with respect to money,
is that they change the rules around too much.
And it's very hard to predict.
The function of money is that,
at least on the sort of value front
or medium of exchange over time,
is that you can plan for the future, right?
But if the rules keep changing
or the denominator keeps changing or whatever,
then you can't plan as well.
And that's the thing that people want to be able to do with money.
If you have too much stuff changing, then it makes it very difficult to plan out into the future.
And, you know, I mean, just to give an example in terms of Bitcoin, you know, 2026 2012 or whatever, you had one type of address.
It's it's paid to pubkey hash. It starts with a one. And that was it. That was the only type of address.
Then you had a software, pay to script hash, and these were addresses that start with three that came in 2013.
SegWit happened in 2017 and you had native SegWit addresses, which all start with BC1Q, right?
2021 came and you had a different type of Bitcoin, like BEC32 address, and these all start with BC1P.
So like each time it sort of changed things around, which meant that if you had storage in 2013, I mean 2012 or so, it would still work.
But like a lot of the tools just kept changing around it.
Now, that's not to say that it's bad, right?
Like you still want that.
And, you know, the paper wallets people were making in 2012 still work.
but a lot of the uh a lot of the software a lot of that stuff it's it's not really meant for 30 50
years which is what store value stuff should have right so when you're when you're thinking about
like a hardware wallet from uh from 20 uh i think the first ones were like 2015 2016 somewhere around
there um like those have had like 30 uh firmware updates and stuff that's it that's not keeping it
for 50 years, right? Like you're, you're constantly having to change things and then,
oh, there's this soft work. So we have to make sure we support it and whatever. And we're not
going to be able to detect, uh, certain payments into these if we, if we, if we're not looking for
it and so on, it, it, it's a, um, so it's not good at that level at sort of like the money level.
Um, but more than that, you, you also have this other thing where, um, it's hard to build,
Right. Like when things keep changing. So I've said this before. I when lightning first came in 27, like 2019, 20, 2020. Right.
Like as it was evolving and I was teaching my classes on programming Bitcoin. A lot of people would ask me, OK, Jimmy, when are we going to get a programming lightnings course?
I was like, well, I would do that, but they want to change up this stuff, right?
Like, you know, the payment channels are using two of two multi-sig using ECDSA.
But they're going to get Schnorr signatures in Taproot, and they're going to have something called Taproot channels.
And also these hash time lock contracts, they want to change them to point time lock contracts, so you get privacy all the way through.
I was like, okay, if I like, I'm thinking of it as a teacher, if I teach two of two ECDSA multi-sig for payment channels, and then it all suddenly changes to Schnorr, it's going to be outdated in like a couple years, right?
And it makes it like that. And that's just like my personal thing. But there's a lot of other places where this sort of thing comes into play, where it's like, OK, I want to build. But, you know, they're constantly changing the rules.
it might even make what I'm trying to do easier, but I don't think I'm going to build it right now.
Or I'm not going to go and try to figure out how to do it despite whatever.
There are all kinds of things that are made much easier by covenants, for example.
Or let's pick something specific, OpsiTV.
It makes a whole bunch of things very easy.
So what do those people that are building that are saying,
okay, you know what, there's this OpsiTV thing that might get into Bitcoin at some point.
Should I just build it this way or do I wait for it?
And it becomes this dilemma.
Whereas if you're ossified, then it's a lot easier.
You can say, okay, well, this is how it's going to be and I'm just going to build on it.
And I'm going to make it.
So it takes away a lot of that entrepreneurial energy by thinking, OK, maybe I can get some protocol changes that make what I'm trying to do easier rather than let's just go build.
So like there are those are just two of the reasons why I think ossification is much, much better.
And yeah, I mean, just there. Sorry, I have to close that.
All right. So good. And so so they're like that. I get the arguments from the people that are saying, you know, we need features and things like that.
And honestly, they mostly come from developers, right?
They say that largely because they want to build something and so on.
But you have to ask yourself, is it what the best thing for the users?
Now, they can always make an argument.
Oh, you're going to have this feature and this feature and this feature.
But unless there's like a practical thing that the user actually gets out of it in the end,
I don't think that's a legitimate reason to go do it.
For example, with Taproot, we were told, okay, you're going to have all this privacy.
I still remember AJ Towns on the mailing list saying, okay, here's why we should do Taproot.
You basically have a single SIG spend path.
This is the key path of the Taproot tree.
You have the key path and the script path. And you can have the same wallet that you have now, which for most people is a single key, single signature unlock.
unlock, right? It's not multi-sign. Most people don't use multi-sign. You have a single signature
unlock. And for free, you can have a backup path where if you happen to lose your wallet,
then you can have three of five of your friends sign on your behalf and you can get your Bitcoin
back. Isn't that awesome? You're getting this for free, right? And I was like, that's a great
argument. That's awesome. Yeah, that would be amazing. And there's a lot of people that get
into accidents or are just dumb about something that this this would be awesome for and then tap
root came and then i was like okay where where where are all all of these things all all of these
and paths that are that are that are useful for that haven't seen it haven't seen it right and uh
and it turns out that the reason why we haven't seen it why why we don't have all of these unlock
paths why we don't have degrading multi-sig in like consumer wallets and stuff like that
is because the UX is just batshit insane.
You can't make something that people aren't going to screw up royally in setting it up.
And also it's going to be terrible for your wallet, right?
It's hard enough to get people to write down 12 or 24 words when they set up a wallet.
How hard is it going to be to go and pick five friends,
go get their xpubs and then import them in and then have that descriptor uh you know give that
descriptor back to them and then you know now now you have this backup solution not gonna happen
right like it's just too complicated the ux is just so unbelievably bad that whatever we're
quote unquote, getting for free is not free at all. It's in fact, very, very costly because
the user interactions and things like that, that you have to do to make this, you know,
potential reality into a user benefit is enormous, right? So there are lots of things like that,
that I see within like a lot of these like proposals for, okay, let's do covenants,
Let's do this. Let's do that. You can do this. You can do that.
It's like, well, I don't know if we're going to get any of this stuff. Right.
A lot of it requires not just like the ability, you know, certain primitives at the protocol level, but everything up the stack.
And there are blockers all the way up the stack that might just make it so that the user never gets the benefit.
So while I, as a developer, I like getting more toys, right? I like getting more primitives. I like having more composability, right? Or better ways to do things and, you know, not shooting myself in the foot for certain things.
But I think as a community, we need to demand a little more evidence from the developers.
Because as far as I can tell, this is one of the complaints about Taproot.
90% of the outputs in Taproot are spam.
The other 10% presumably are being used for good measure or whatever.
You can use it for your corporate treasury and have three or five multi-sig and degrading or whatever.
But 90% is being used for spam rather than that.
Shouldn't we ask some questions?
Like, you guys said we could get all this stuff.
I'm not seeing that, right?
I mean, other than maybe Taproot channels, which not every Lightning wallet supports,
I'm not sure there have been that many good things that came out of it.
Right. Like I and, you know, I like what can I say?
Like you need we like it's not that I'm opposed to soft works necessarily.
But the evidence that I've seen makes it seem like a lot.
a lot of this stuff is just sort of like satisfying developers without giving users enough benefit.
Is it so fair to say, I mean, like at the consensus level, basically there needs to be an
overwhelming burden of proof that something would be not only a cool, neat idea, but also desired by
the majority of the community. Yeah. Or the benefits have to be proved out. Right. And this
This was like one of my frustrations was, you know, like people are like, oh, you know, if we had covenants, we do this, this, this and this.
Well, yeah, you have covenants on liquid.
Why don't you go and build a wallet and like make make that happen?
Go, go, go show me something that gets a lot of consumer adoption.
And at that point, we can be like, OK, maybe then it makes sense to go and and make it on Bitcoin because it makes it more secure and stuff.
Not opposed to it. Right.
It would be great if we had time lock vaults and only two paths out and things like that.
You could even do it on Bitcoin right now.
This was one of my arguments.
Okay, are people using covenants?
Because you could kind of do covenants right now and not just time locks or whatever.
If you want only three paths out of a particular UTXO, here's what you can do.
Create three transactions, sign them, throw away the private key.
Those are the three paths out.
You can go put them in a vault or whatever, right?
That's the only way you can get them out.
It goes to this address, this address, or this address, or however way you want to put it.
Perfectly fun.
It'll work.
But to my knowledge, no one has built anything like that, right?
If you're that into covenants and that convinced that this is going to work, then you could...
And honestly, if the protocol were more ossified, I bet you people would try stuff like that and see if it gets consumer adoption.
But this is why programmers aren't always successful, why startups aren't always successful.
You have to go and see if there's a market for it.
And there's something called product market fit for that reason, where a lot of things that you think people want, they don't want.
or you think would be unpopular with people, which are.
There's this disconnect between what's good in theory
and what actually works in practice.
This is the part where I think developers need to be a lot more humble.
Unfortunately in Bitcoin, I think we've given way too much respect
to developers talking about stuff that they don't necessarily know about.
I speak as a developer.
I feel like people think that I know everything about certain things.
Right. And it's like particularly around economics or like, you know, end user experience and things like that.
I think a lot of developers, frankly, suck at both of those things, but they're given sort of like this godlike respect on them, which I don't think they necessarily deserve.
Yeah. So.
So I'm curious then, just given what you've said about kind of strong hesitancy or opposition to consensus level changes and favorability towards a more OSFIT approach, what are your thoughts on the consensus changes in BIP 110?
10. Yeah. So that one, so I, I, I'm, I'm not really sure what that's going to do now. I,
I, in general, like just to be clear on like ossification and what that means, um,
I'm in favor of shrinking the set of stuff, not expanding the set of stuff. So those are two very
different things, right? Like, uh, give it more features and stuff is expansion. Um, as a programmer,
I know that when you shrink the amount of stuff that that you're able to do, it tends to be more stable and and more less buggy and things like that.
So I am in favor of a lot of different things that would be considered soft work.
So if, for example, we eliminated 30 op codes that no one uses, right?
Like they're they're they're used once in a while as somebody testing something.
But vast majority of like op2 dupe, op3 rot and stuff like that, just nobody uses.
And they've been in there since the beginning.
Now, it would be a software to say, OK, anything using this is invalid or something like that would be great.
Why? Because it would take there are code paths in Bitcoin in the software that have to handle all of these things that almost never get tested.
Right. Like it's all kinds of code in there that very gets very little testing that.
And who knows if there are bugs in there and stuff. And this is something that you learn as a software developer.
Unused code paths almost always have more bugs than the highly used code paths because you find them right away.
Right. Like somebody reports it almost right away. So like getting rid of a lot of that stuff, I think I would be all for.
right like uh so for example like if if we got rid of 30 opcodes that no one uses or you know we
we analyze like the top 50 uh smart contracts right here's pay to puppy hash here's uh you know
bare multi-sig here's whatever and we we take all those and and here are the 50 and here are the
opcodes that they use let's just get rid of the other ones right okay i'd be i'd be like okay that
That'll make it more stable, probably reduce bugs and things like that.
That would be great.
So those are two separate things.
So I'm not opposed to all soft forks forever or anything like that,
or like let's just keep the code exactly the same.
I'm thinking more at a conceptual level, like keep things the same and eliminate.
You can cut more as long as you know what the thing that you're trying to do with the software is.
I think the original Satoshi client had a poker thing in there or something like that.
Stuff that you want to cut down the software to its essence as much as possible, at least at a consensus level, at the base layer.
This is what you want to do with software architecture if you can.
The question then is, what is BIP-110?
right what what's it trying to do is it expanding functionality or drawing it in and i'm i'm not
sure it's either of those to be honest it's a it's a somewhere in between um i i would say it's not
it's not like eliminating uh bug paths or something like that uh potential things like that
it's also not like adding a feature like uh taproot or segwit did it's it's it's uh more or less kind
of trying to eliminate spam. It's at like sort of the data layer. It's trying to add something to
that data layer. So, I mean, I don't know if I am for reducing spam if possible. And I think even,
I think everyone in this space would like that. And in fact, like part of, you know,
how BIP 110 came about was the demand from core developers instead of fixing things at the relay
level, fix things at the consensus level. Now, is it a software that actually does what we think it
will, which is take away a lot of that spam and do it in a way that works for the network? Like,
We not accidentally breaking like a bunch of people things that are actually like useful to people I mean in a sense that they kind of doing that right like they they taking away uh certain things that allow you to do inscriptions um ordinals so those users
would kind of get uh set out so you know um yeah so i i i i'm not sure where i am on that right like
i i i've uh like a very limited one like let's keep op return to 160 bytes or something like that
I think I would be on board with but this does this goes like two or three steps above that
I'm trying to eliminate inscriptions and some other things I like there it's yeah I and to be
honest I haven't looked at it closely enough to say okay here here are the exact things that it
eliminate and here are the exact things that it would allow um and you know here are the mitigations
against it if uh if i if i were determined attacker and you know what that probability might be so i
in general the idea of the soft work which is to get rid of a lot of spam i think i would be
in favor of um obviously you know there there are certain risks and stuff and this is where
it kind of gets tricky because like to be in favor of a soft work um you generally want a lot
of people in favor of the soft work as well or at least that's what we think we're we're not really
sure like and this is where a lot of weird game theory comes into play because uh and and i'm a
little sad that we didn't get to test it in 2017 with the user activated soft work is we we don't
actually know what's going to happen and how people will react.
And, you know, in the in the episode that I did with Johnny
Veer, this was one of the things that we were talking about is, OK, what
there is this wipeout risk for the main chain if if, you know, some people are
mining BIP 110, does that mean that you have to protect against that wipeout risk?
Otherwise, like all these transactions can get invalidated.
He's like, well, you know, he's of the opinion that Core wouldn't do an incompatible soft fork, right?
A counter soft fork or whatever?
Yeah, yeah.
And there's lots of things like that which haven't played out.
And anyone that tells you they know exactly how it's going to play out is probably lying because we've never had this situation and we've never played it out before.
Now, there are lots of things in theory, but practice theory tend to not cooperate necessarily because there are factors that you can't take into account oftentimes because the way people like people are very creative.
right like and you can't necessarily predict their behavior so it's a it's a very very strange and
in many ways i think exciting kind of thing because we've never had this before where uh where
more or less an intolerant minority wants something to come come through um and if you
don't know about the details of the software september 1st it uh the the clients that are
running it will reject transactions that do not meet the standards of the soft fork, in which case
there might be a chain fork, but then what happens? It gets very interesting.
And I'm of the opinion that we have to test this at some point. Why not now?
I watched the one you guys did, the pod you guys did in El Salvador.
I thought it was, again, a very good discussion.
I told you this beforehand.
I enjoyed it a lot.
Always glad to see, you know, Tone moderating things.
You know, shout out to Tone if he's listening to this somewhere.
But so what I guess I'd like to understand a little bit, too, is, I mean, to me, okay, I'm looking at this.
I've been called a core sympathizer and a distributor of terrible illicit material and all these different things because I've said for a while that people should run whatever node implementation they want.
If you want to run core, great.
If you want to run nodes, great, run it.
You don't have to update your core node also.
I haven't in some time.
This, again, because they're backwards compatible.
If people don't know that, you should know that.
Now you know it.
And I think that fees are the ultimate filter on these things.
I know you've expressed the same sentiment, too.
I've watched a lot of your, like, the short-form videos that you do, which I think are great, where you're in the armchair, you're breaking things down on the porch.
Love it.
Cowboy hat's there, of course.
And in one of them, I mean, you basically said that you don't think that spam is actually that big of a deal because ultimately it gets priced out by, you know, monetary transactions.
Are you still of that opinion?
And if that's the case, why the urgency to do?
And I'm not saying you have this urgency.
I'm just saying like the general seeming urgency to activate this soft fork now that we're seeing from people.
It seems to me like this is one of those instances where it's like there's being a lot of impetus put on like we need to do something right now.
And Bitcoin is going to die.
If not, I mean, Luke has literally said time and time again, this like if we ossify, Bitcoin is dead.
Ossification is fatal.
If we don't activate BIP 110, Bitcoin is dead.
This language seems like the kind of stuff that's used to get people to make rash decisions.
And I'm curious if you think like if you're of the opinion that Bitcoin like spam on Bitcoin is ultimately priced out by monetary use cases, which I agree with.
Where do you fall as it relates to kind of the urgency that's being pushed here on BIP-110?
Yeah, I mean, the urgency is from the BIP-110 proponents, and that's mostly around child porn and things like that.
And for them, that's sort of like a drop that thing, right?
Like it's once chopped on my computer, I'm not running CoreNode or whatever.
And, you know, I don't see that as a risk or as a high enough risk to go do that.
Again, they feel differently and it's entirely their right to go do this, right?
And this, of course, there's a part that I think a lot of people miss is that it's it's a it's a decentralized network.
They could they could try a software anytime they want.
And and it's and this is why I think we need to know how this is going.
Like, we need some experience as a community knowing how this stuff will play out, because at any time anyone can propose a software.
work. They can run software that's compatible with Bitcoin in every other way. But this,
what happens? Right. And it doesn't have to be, you know, people like Luke. It could be
a government. It could be libertarians. It could be like it could be anybody. And we need to
get some experience on this because we honestly do not have that experience and we don't know how
it's going to go. But, you know, this particular one, you know, the fact that they're feeling that
urgency is not necessarily something I agree with. And as you said, like, my perspective is that,
you know, fees will price out spam. But like, you know, we did another show with Chris Greta. And
one of the things he was saying is, you know, it's entirely possible that people will pay to
keep something forever right um and more money than you would think um and this is because we've
never had a system like bitcoin before where you can keep something on a chain forever right like
that's like in the history of digital stuff we've never had something that was this replicated and
this permanent we like if you if you have like a file from 10 years ago and i'm sure a lot of
people don't practice good digital hygiene. So, you know, they they've lost it or, you know,
kept things that they shouldn't have or whatever. We've never had something where it's going to
last as long as Bitcoin lasts. And we many of us in Bitcoin expect that to last forever, right? Or
for for a very, very long time. And it's it's a guarantee that we've never really had that that's
So that's based on incentives and so on that that are very different.
So I could kind of see his point that it's possible that some other application comes up for data storage like this, where it where people may be willing to pay a lot more for it.
In which case, who knows? Right.
And the other part that sort of like throws a wrench into this analysis that fees will eventually price out everything or whatever,
is that we actually don't know what second layers will be successful.
Because as you've seen with Lightning, if you're able to transact on a second layer, you don't have to use the first layer, layer one.
And there are certain protocols which almost require no on-chain footprint or compress down not just hundreds of transactions like Lightning does.
You're compressing 100 transactions on Lightning to a single one on-chain.
you know they're able to do a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand uh oftentimes
especially with stuff like vtxos and so on is it possible that at some point we get million
10 million 100 million at that point it's like okay maybe maybe the block space actually doesn't
get filled up that much right like if you if you have a a ratio of like a million transactions on
layer two compressing down to a single transaction on layer one i mean and we have seven billion
people that's like seven thousand transactions right equivalent and that's like two blocks
like you can do you can handle a transaction per person per 20 minutes like without a problem if
you have that level of compression now we don't know what what level of compression we're going
to be able to get. And these are, again, all theoretical. And again, practice is very different
than theory. But it is an argument and it's not implausible. I personally don't think that that's
going to be the case either. In which case, it does make it more difficult for a node runner if,
say, blocks are half empty going forward because we have this massive compression that we're able to
to practically realize.
You know, I mean, I could kind of see that.
But again-
So just to clarify,
you're saying if blocks are half empty,
the concern here on the node runner side
would be that those blocks
would then be filled with non-monetary transactions
because they wouldn't be getting priced out.
That it would have non-monetary additions and that,
like, again, like I can see their point,
but like, is it worth doing all this stuff for?
Maybe, maybe not.
I guess all of that accumulates over time and so on.
So there's multiple different ways in which I could be wrong.
I personally think that the monetary transactions will dominate and the fees on those will price out all of the other stuff.
but there are some possibilities where spam can take over the network who knows right um and uh
i'm not going to say with certainty that that that's uh not going to happen because you know
there are paths like i personally don't think that likely but i mean it's it's possible so
um you can't sort of dismiss it out of hand i guess uh and you can't you also can't say this is
also what's definitely going to happen. And, you know, one of the frustrations during this debate
for me has been both sides essentially being completely certain of the future. And I'm like,
there's no way you can say that. There's just too many unknowns, too many ways in which things can
go that you don't expect. And, you know, life is kind of like that, right? Like you think
something's going to play out this way. It totally does not. And it's almost always like
not even something that one side predicted or the other or even something in between, but like
just something completely off in another direction that no one predicted by any measure. So
I suspect that that's how Bitcoin stuff will go. And, you know, like just take things as it is.
As a community, the big thing that we should be thinking about is do soft forks from an intolerant minority, what happens?
And I'm not even sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing if they succeed.
I don't know the magnitude or direction of this change, whether it would be a good thing, whether it would be a bad thing.
like how like to whatever degree governance exists in Bitcoin, like how that affects those things, how it affects developers, how it affects how we think about softworks.
Like all of those things are kind of up for grabs here with this softwork.
And personally, I like it because I want some certainty around that.
Right. I want some knowledge around that.
And in Bitcoin's history, the more knowledge you have about the system, the better it does.
When we thought it was just like a darknet currency in 2013, it was at one price.
But as soon as Ross Ulbrich was arrested, a lot of people I knew were saying, you know what, it's going to go down because there's no use case for it anymore.
People aren't going and getting drugs on the darknet.
Instead, it went on one of the best bull runs that we've ever had in Bitcoin.
100 to 13 or 1100 in like six weeks.
2017, what's going to happen with this SegWit2x and Bitcoin Cash and all this stuff when you have a split community?
Are people going to be confused?
You know, like whatever.
And again, that resolved and we got more information about all of that.
And that, again, had a pretty huge impact on price.
We went from 2,000 to 19,000 in the matter of like three months or something like that.
It's a good thing to understand more about the system.
And we think we might know how this plays out.
And this was one of the things I put out on Noster.
I think it was yesterday.
What do you think will happen?
Because I don't know.
I have no idea what's going to happen.
There's so many variables that I think way too many people are just like way too certain on here's what's going to happen.
Here's what's not. And in fact, on both sides, right?
Like the intolerant minority thinks that this is totally going to work.
We're going to get our software. We're going to, you know, kick out some of the core devs that have been doing things that we don't like or whatever.
a lot of people on the course side think this is going to be a nothing burger
no one's going to run this thing, no one's going to mine with this thing
I really don't think either side really has any clue what they're talking about
there are just so many variables
you get even a small minority of miners mining it
it could snowball because I honestly don't think a lot of miners care
and it's okay well there's wipeout risk on this side there's not on this side i'm just gonna go
with the one that's not that's not just just for that reason even like you don't it's trying to
predict too much what other people are going to do and their incentives are way more complicated
than you give it give them credit for it's not just hey they're going to do uh they're going to
do this because of this reason most people have all kinds of other motivations that you don't know
about. And even if you knew all of them, you don't know how they're weighted and all that. So
yeah, I want to know how this works out. I want to see how this happens. And I think it's very
good for Bitcoin in the end. I appreciate the nuance, Jimmy. I appreciate somebody actually
coming and saying, you know what? I don't think any of us know exactly how this is going to shake
out. And I think we need more of that kind of attitude. And I think it's a great point just
about like the actual consensus mechanism, which is so much more convoluted than I think
most people understand.
Did you read the piece that Lynn Alden and Steve Lee put together?
It was basically that analysis of the different, it's really, really good.
It's an analysis of just like the different mechanisms that go into establishing consensus
in Bitcoin.
It's fascinating.
It's a great analysis of it.
But I think the larger point here is the beauty of Bitcoin is that anybody can kind of do what they want, right?
It's a decentralized system, yeah.
And it's going to be messy.
And I think that you do have a – it's a fair point around like, hey, if we're going to really figure out how this works because we didn't actually get to the end state in the block size wars.
It didn't actually go there.
Let's figure it out sooner rather than later.
I think that that's a sentiment that makes sense.
I know from your conversation with Tone and Jonathan, you know, Tone had some different opinions on it.
I'm, you know, I'm curious to just more broadly, because I have to I go back to where like a lot of this discourse got really, I think, unproductive, which is a shame, because I think ultimately, like if we all the same consensus code, like we're all running Bitcoin, right?
We're all Bitcoiners. Now, if the consensus code is different, well, then, you know, you know, OK, there might be a fork off situation where you're actually running, you know, BSV or BCH or whatever.
But I'm curious, if we go back to the start of this, I think a lot of the frustration was around a lot of people feeling that core was trying to push forward changes in relay policy and mempool policy that they didn't get any say in it.
It didn't matter that these things were talked about on forums and all that.
It was a feeling of dismissiveness from what people are viewing as their Bitcoin core overlords, basically.
And I'm curious, too, because a lot of the language that's been thrown around has been bad actors, compromised, attack on Bitcoin.
Do you think that Bitcoin Core or Core V30 or getting rid of the operaturn limit is a direct attack on Bitcoin or that Core has been compromised or that this is just it's all just bad actors doing this?
Because I struggle with with that kind of really kind of strong language that's just unnecessarily inflammatory personally.
But I'd love your opinion.
Yeah, I don't think they're like that. The thing is, what's that law? All arguments devolve to Hitler or something like that. There's something about being online where people just end up escalating whatever they're saying so that they get attention.
Like my take on it was that they were they they were very dismissive of of the people that had some objections that mostly it was immature young developers.
And I've seen this working as a software developer all the time where you try to push through something because you think it's right.
and you get a lot of pushback from
People that are not technical and you end up dismissing them because they're not technical and you think that those guys don't have a point or whatever.
I've seen that pattern with a lot of young developers and they usually have to fall on their face at least once, right?
Where they think they're right and it turns out that they were wrong.
And this is part of the training of being a developer.
but I'm sure it's true in other careers as well, where your level of conviction about something is based on like your model of the world, right?
That isn't necessarily complete.
And there are things that you don't know.
And, you know, just thinking yourself to be the smartest person in the room just because you're very technical is generally not a great thing.
That's my take on what happened here is that there were a bunch of developers within Core that were convinced that this was the right way to go.
And, you know, they ended up pushing it and then it became sort of like a thing to defend the reference implementation itself, something like that.
And it ended up being sort of like more tribalistic and political than it needed to be.
um and yeah i like there was a reason why adam was saying stuff like that at least at the beginning
of this thing like and he was trying to coach people like loria's out right like you can't
tell people that they're they don't that they can't have any input because they're not technical
this is that that's just like going to piss them off more and there's some um some wisdom in
listening to them even if you disagree and stuff like that like like i could i could see him doing
that because i've been in that position a lot too right like where where you're you're sort of like
the senior developer and you go to the junior developer and you know like i know this person
is frustrating and they don't understand certain things about this this and this but you you you
still have to kind of hear them out and see if they have a point and like sort of like dismissing
them out of hand is just going to get them really pissed off at you.
So and a lot, honestly, a lot of these developers that are in core now are fairly young and many
of them honestly haven't had industry experience.
And it kind of shows, right?
Like this is probably like exhibit A of like how not to do certain things.
So, yeah, that's part of it.
Now, as for the actual technical thing, again, it's I don't think it's that big a deal.
Like I and I've repeated this over and over.
I just think it it's the the bigger sort of concern is.
You know how they make decisions around this stuff and and that that procedural stuff I think is is what worries me way more than the actual hey they changed this from 80 to 100 What the process that got you to 100
And why didn't you do this, this, and this?
Because from my perspective, it seems like there are way better compromises than what they ended up at.
And they've isolated a lot of people.
They've antagonized a lot of people.
It's what you would call foot guns.
They've shot themselves in the foot four or five times.
And it's just like, why are you doing it this way?
And it's a little frustrating as somebody that's been a software developer for a long time.
But that's the extent of my concern.
Not necessarily, hey, these guys are trying to ruin Bitcoin or whatever.
I mean, very well could like I mean, let's face it right now.
They do kind of have the power to maybe ruin Bitcoin if they really wanted to.
And who knows, maybe the process is broken enough that they still might.
But, you know, my take on it is that it was a lot of, shall we say, inexperienced devs.
uh still very smart still very technical just people skills and things like that presenting
things certain certain things like that that that um that weren't optimal and uh and they're sort of
facing the consequences of it it that's also good for it but by the way right like they they they're
learning something and i i've i've seen some evidence that they're taking some of this stuff
to account and you know in the future they probably wouldn't do it this way so that's good yeah and
once again jimmy i appreciate your nuance on this because it is possible to have nuance these days
and you are you are proving it uh word by word can i ask if it's not too personal do you run knots
or an older version of core i i have both um yeah i i run multiple things like i mean that's that's
I have a lot of different reasons to run nodes.
And, you know, I mean, I'm mining on one.
You know, I have one for like a block explorer.
There's a bunch.
So, yeah, I have more than one.
And I definitely run both.
I kind of figured that might be the case.
And again, Jimmy, I appreciate your nuance on this because I think so much of this is sort of devolved into like everybody that doesn't agree with me is a child predator
and is complicit in putting horrific images on the time.
And it's like, no one wants that, right?
Like, nobody wants that.
Like, we all just saw all this horrific stuff in the Epstein files.
And now it's like the conversations devolved further into like,
Core V30 is actually a Mossad attack from Jeffrey Epstein.
And it's like, come on, guys.
Like, it is possible to have some nuance.
Not everybody is a bad actor.
There are certainly bad actors out there.
Like, as we've just found out, most of them happen to run our country.
but that's like that's a different story right yeah I mean that's not to say that there's no
Mossad agent contributing to Cora right now or something like that of course not I would be
shocked if there wasn't yeah I would be shocked if there wasn't yeah but uh but again like people
saying that are just so certain of what what they saying and that that the part that like really gets how do you know right like what what evidence do you have it oh their actions are blah blah
blah well how do you know that that's why they're doing whatever they're doing like to me like the
simplest explanation is that a lot of these people are a little inexperienced maybe maybe they're
like they're guilty of having a little bit of pride and uh digging digging in their heels a
a little bit and, you know, not wanting to lose face or whatever.
But I don't think you need to go to, you know, this is a Mossad, you know, operation to explain
that, right?
Like there's plenty of plenty of room for for explanations that don't involve bringing
in such kind of crazy things.
So, yeah, I want to be conscious of your time, Jimmy, because I know.
I'm going to get you out of here in a couple of minutes.
I did want to ask you before we go, do you think that like, maybe a better question,
what is the biggest threat to Bitcoin right now?
Is it quantum?
Is it delayed ossification?
Is it premature ossification?
Is it just apathy?
What do you think is the biggest threat to Bitcoin?
Definitely not quantum.
I don't think that's for I'm not sure it's ever coming.
So, yeah, definitely not quantum.
Yeah, I think it would be something along governance lines or something like that.
So, like I said, the thing that worried me about how this decision was made was it kind of set a little bit of a precedent.
Right. And I'm not saying this is like permanent rule or anything.
But it was if the core devs agree among themselves that something is right, then the rest of the community can go fuck themselves.
Paraphrased, obviously, but like, you know, as far as the reference implementation is is concerned.
Now, I'm not saying that they'll do this for everything, but but like just the way the dynamics turned out on that.
was a little bit like, huh, like, and then, you know, among other things I found out is that
if you want to be a maintainer, you have to be, the current maintainers have to vote you in and
not anybody else. I'd always thought it was all the other core contributors, like sort of voting
for one or some sort of consensus process like that. But it turns out currently that the current
set of maintainers have a veto over whoever is let in as a maintainer. So little things like that
with governance issues within core worry me a little bit just because it does have something
like currently what like or at least I mean if you include knots as a derivative of core something
like 98%, 99%.
If you don't with knots,
then it's maybe like 80%,
something like that.
So yeah I mean that part some sort of precedent being said and not enough people sort of like rebelling against that would be it
But I mean, we're kind of a contrarian bunch anyway.
So I think there would be, as we're seeing with BIP-110, right?
Like a lot of people are like, oh, these people are bad actors.
I can't believe they're forking off and they're going to ruin Bitcoin.
No, that's good too, right?
Like all of this is actually a very good thing. We want to see what happens because this isn't the first time it's going to happen. Right. If it doesn't happen now, it'll happen later. And the earlier we learn about it, the more information the market has and the better it'll go, I think.
So, yeah, that's where I would say just and it's not something that I would have said like a year ago, but it just seeing how this particular thing played out.
And, you know, frankly, because of some of the turnover in core that I wasn't that aware of, like within the last five years, you know, that that's something that I I don't think it's a giant risk by any measure.
But if I had to pick one, that would be it.
The quantum futters are going to be very disappointed in that one, Jimmy.
I mean, we would have to do another entire episode to go through quantum and how mid with that whole thing is.
But it is. Yeah, it is. It's getting frustrating.
But I'm going to take up on that. We're just going to have to do another episode on this.
I've got I'm going to get you out of here now because I know you've got a hard stop here.
But, Jimmy, I appreciate your nuance.
I appreciate your perspective and all that you've done for Bitcoin over your your long career with the orange coin here.
Where do you want to send folks?
just I guess you can find me on Noster and my newsletter jimmysong.substack.com bitcoin tech
talk I had a free issue out this morning so you can go read about all the recent developments and
some of my random interesting articles that I put in the front that's all free so yeah there you go
well I appreciate you sharing your scarce time Jimmy this was great to do this
would love to do it again all right sounds good man let's do it
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening,
and share it with your friends, family, and strangers on the internet.
Find me on Noster at primal.net slash walker and this podcast at primal.net slash titcoin.
On X, YouTube, and Rumble, just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at Titcoin Podcast.
Head to the show notes to grab sponsor links.
Head to substack.com slash at Walker America to get episodes emailed to you.
And head to Bitcoin Podcast dot net for everything else.
Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.