The fork will fail, and by failing, it will reduce the credibility of what was my camp.
The political spectrum of the noses moved so far on the left
that now I remain a dangerous right-wing pro-core spammer.
Bitcoin is tolerant of crazy weirdos as long as they provide something useful for Bitcoin.
People have wrote me in private and called me to tell me not to be friends with Luke.
And my answer was f***ing.
People are now telling me that if I want to be a good person, I should not be a friend with Peter Todd.
And f*** you as well.
And they have some ideas about Bitcoin that I find not only wrong, but like super wrong.
Bitcoin will not die for spam either.
Not because spam is not a problem.
I think spam is a serious problem in Bitcoin.
Why?
Cut off your d***.
I don't care, dress like a woman.
The point is that Bitcoin had it good.
It was the most work-resistant open-source project ever.
That said, you specifically listed your favorite and least favorite BIPs.
You put BIP 110 in your least favorites.
I will explain and double down.
Giacomo, Zucco, pizza, pasta, cappuccino in the afternoon.
How are you doing, my friend?
I'm fine, thank you.
tired. It's, it's, it's been almost two years of nonstop activity with this Plan B craziness.
And I'm starting to, I'm starting to feel it because I'm not as young as I was when I created
BHB Milan in 2014. So now I feel it. But I'm happy. Results are great. As always with Italians,
what we miss is a clear structure, but not results. That's, that's something that is pushing me for
forward. Can you talk a little bit actually just about what you guys are doing at Plan B just for
those who may not be familiar, haven't seen the stuff you guys have put out, haven't been to one
of the Plan B forums or anything like that. There's a lot of stuff underneath your umbrella. Can you
maybe just give folks an overview of it for those who don't know? Absolutely. Also the umbrella itself
is not super, is a large one because there is a Plan B price model and Plan B passport. So it's a
It's a very popular sentence and phrase in Bitcoin.
So in 2022, I was not here.
Right now, I'm in beautiful Lugano.
Well, this part is not so beautiful, but the city is beautiful.
And I was not here.
And the company Tether, like stable coin plus a lot of Bitcoin activity,
I already knew them because they were funding with Bitfinex RGB research and BDK research and OpenTest Times research and ProofMarchical research.
So I knew them as funders and basically patrons of a lot of Bitcoin research and development that I was involved.
And they basically, they were in Lugano because they physically were in Lugano.
and they joined the city of Lugano with a memorandum of understanding, an MOU,
called Plan B with five main topics.
One, the creation of a network of merchants to adopt Bitcoin as a payment
and USDT because it was stator, plus a stable coin,
a Swiss francs stable coin of the city of Lugano,
which basically is Swiss francs credit for a cashback mechanism.
So that was the first pillar.
Second pillar was to create a summer school teaching Bitcoin to young people from all around the world, getting them to Lugano to teach them Bitcoin technicals and business aspects.
And that was the second.
The third pillar was to acquire an historical building in Lugano and turn it into a Bitcoin hub of startups and research and development and education and everything.
So like a Bitcoin campus in the heart of Lugano.
The other one was to create a VC fund, basically some money to be put on top of this activity.
And the last one was to create a conference, a world-famous conference.
So the city of Lugano and Tether started to do stuff.
In 2022, they did the first Plan B summer school.
I was not there, not invited, not even as a teacher.
it started, it went, and then they did in October of the same year, they did the first
Plan B Forum, which was a conference about Bitcoin.
I was invited as a speaker.
It was very good.
I found it very interesting because it was not hyper-technical, but there was some technical
part.
It was not hyper-financial, but there were shitcoiners already.
It was not Bitcoin only, but not because there were shitcoins.
There was one actually back then, but now we removed it.
But because there was a lot of freedom tech, which is adhesion to Bitcoin, like peer-to-peer
communication, encrypted communication, drones, all this kind of plan B tech.
So tech, which is focused on resiliency, decentralization, individuals.
So the conference started.
Then they involved another company, Fulgur Ventures, which I also worked with because
they invested in most of the lighting ecosystem in order to do the hub and to do the plan B
VC fund. And then they started to do actual payment in the city. So they created the payment system.
And the payment system actually is now comprised of more than 400 merchants that will accept Bitcoin
for a lot of things like food, medicines, hotels. I bought my car in Bitcoin. So a lot of different
things. Negronis. Yeah, exactly. Negronis and Spritz and many other things. So I was
invited as a speaker in October 2022, that I was invited as a teacher in June 2023 for
the summer school. And then they asked me, Fulgur and Teter asked me to take over some
of the functions. Specifically, they gave the entire school program to me. So we created
this Plan B Network, Plan B Academy, we started to do free courses, business school, tech
school and all these other activities.
We started a lot of university programs with the Polytechnic of Turin.
We started a Bitcoin master in a master school, executive master school in Turin.
We did one in Taipei and TUT.
I'm going there to teach.
I'm a professional now in Taipei for next month.
So that was crazy.
And then after that, they put me in charge to some degree of the populating the
ecosystem of the PlanB hub, which is where I'm now.
So bringing in startups now here we have Arc Labs, one of the two creators of the new Arc protocol. Arcade is here. We have the Swiss part of Ocean. We have the Swiss part with the main lighting developer of Ocean, which is resident here.
We have Debify incorporated here, which is like something by Mascaidum of Odl and Baltic Only Badger.
We have Bitvolt, which is a security startup for multisig and stuff like that.
We have the other liquid like LKWD, which is a huge lightning operator, which one of the biggest lightning nodes.
We have Blockstream and the Blockstream Research Institute, which is incorporated here.
and other few startups of the Fulgur and Tether world.
So this is also happening.
And then the year 2025 was basically my entering this ecosystem.
And 2024 was my entering gradually.
2025 was the explosion.
So what we did was create a community which went from five people at the first
Satoshi Spritz to 400 people during the last Plan B week.
We created a Plan B week where we had basically more than 6,000 people turnover
during the entire week of October, of which more than 3,000 were attendees
of the Plan B Forum of Lugano.
The Plan B Forum itself was extended from Lugano only to Lugano and San Salvador.
And maybe next year it will be Lugano, San Salvador and an Asian city.
That's a possibility, but still not confirmed.
And so that's growing and expanding.
The Plan B VC fund is operative, is investing in a few things.
Most notably, the Plan B VC fund and the Plan B Foundation for Nonprofit Projects was what
I used to start to basically to bootstrap the cypher tank idea, which is coming from
an idea of Mir and other people here in the local group.
And you know what it is because you have been dragged into it with a lot of preparation,
basically people.
So if you don't know what we're talking about, go to CypherTank, Cypher like Cypherpunk,
that's the Poon.
And Tank like Shark Tank, it's a shark tank for Bitcoin.
I think for us the Poon is even funnier because we say tank and punk in the same way.
for real, I don't know, Cypher Tank or Cypher Tank, depending on how you want to put it.
And you go on cyphertank.org, you find all the episodes and you find a great MC,
Jonathan Mott, of course, but there is also Walker.
And I have to say, when you look at that, you will see that the great work that the MCs,
They both actually, jokes aside, they were both great and they were both acting of absolutely zero preparation.
So what I told them was I put them in a room and I told them there will be something happening.
Just go with the flow.
And most of the things you will see is basically them being super professional with zero information and basically owning it and creating an incredible result.
So the Cypher Tank was supposed to be a way to fund a few for-profit startups with the Plan B VC fund and a few non-profit projects with the Plan B Foundation.
We did $850k total for six projects, three for-profit, three non-profit to know which one you have to watch it.
and so it was a success so much so that when we finished the main point was to have an event in
Lugano around the Plumby Forum during this Plumby Week. By the way the Plumby Week is this idea to
create this event around the event so the forum is the forum and it's great but it's limited in
the capacity even and so what we do is to create this week with a lot of activities around from
going to the shooting range, a lot of Bitcoin shooting stuff. It was called Shoot to the
Moon. And then there was a kidnapping training by Elena and her Glock team. There was institutional
stuff about like capital markets with a block stream. There was an official technical launch
of the live of arcade layer two.
There was workshops to build seed designers from scratch and Jade from scratch.
So a lot of stuff from the super technical, super nerd to the financial, a lot of incredible
things.
So Cypher Tank was supposed to be one of those, something we did for that week.
But then the material was so freaking good that we decided to invest a little bit of
money into making the production good quality, basically.
And the result is, I mean, as an Italian and as a Bitcoiner, I'm not used to be
involved in professional stuff.
Usually I'm always only involved in half-ass stuff.
And in this case, it was freaking good.
So considering that we are now discussing a possible, like even bigger and
stronger and longer and uncut as they say in South Park the movie second edition it was a it was a
really great uh it is true that you guys prepared us not at all in terms of Joe and I but the the
pitches that were there were fantastic some hilariously not so fantastic but that adds to
the drama of course but it was I liked the concept a lot and I think it's one of those things that
hopefully just because of the, you know, it's, it's, yeah, it was focused around, around Bitcoin
and everything, but it's still kind of this startup vibe. It has that shark tank vibe,
but with Bitcoiners, I hope, and I think that it has reached outside of the echo chamber a little
bit. Cause I know that was one of the goals as well was try to make some content. That's not
just going to sit in this small niche of Bitcoiners, but can actually appeal to a wider range of
people with whether it be, you know, just some interesting tech, some, a little bit of a unplanned
comedy whatever it might be so i i love the concept and for anyone who hasn't gone to either
the lugano or the uh el salvador plan b forum it really is a great a great time uh carl and i were
at the first ever one in lugano we're just blown away by the city of lugano also it's like you
didn't even know what this city was until we went there and then we were like how what what is this
magical place it's just it's it's breathtaking the negronis never stopped flowing it's like this uh
This magical, magical city.
But highly recommend people check it out.
Extremely high signal as well.
Really good programming.
And yeah, you know, always one of the other things that I like about the programming for both El Salvador and the Lugano Forum is there's always a few spicy debates.
There's always, they always throw in some very like kind of contentious debates on whatever the topic of the kind of topic du jour happens to be, right?
I have to give a tip about that because actually in Madeira, so the origin of that is actually John Carvalho.
So we were in Madeira and John was being a little bit negative.
Sometimes he is.
And he was like, ah, always the same.
Incredible but true.
He was negative.
And he said, these panels, people always agree on everything.
They're just circle jerks.
So let's do a real debate like they do in debate class, like with two podiums, with stuff like that.
and he was discussing with Madeira organizers.
And then I just, I mean, it's open source.
So I went to give the Plan B Forum organizers
and John has an idea and give, loved it.
And then we organized it straight away for Lugano
and we kept the format.
And I think it's been very entertaining
and also useful to understand things
because during debate you have to put,
so panels, they tend to be like a little bit,
a little bit circle jerky.
While in debates, you can actually make your statements
And they are useful not just to change the minds of the opponents, but also to educate the public in a dialectic way.
So I'm also a fan of those.
I am too.
I think they do a good job of that.
And hopefully, you know, the goal is like, okay, maybe you at least changed a couple people's minds.
Or even if you didn't change any minds with your arguing of your side, maybe you at least made people think a little bit more deeply about something.
whatever side of an issue you happen to be on, it's good to see Bitcoiners up there representing
all ends of that spectrum and debating it and trying to, you know, work that out in public.
That's, I think, a valuable thing that Bitcoiners do. And there's been a lot of
working things out in public recently. I recently found out that you are now a spammer and it had
nothing to do with Zuxbox. You're a shitcoin spammer and it actually didn't have anything
to do with zux bucks which is really the surprising part of this do you should we get into that a
little bit should we get because right now jacqueline i think the we were just talking
off camera the last time i had you on the show was actually it was a little while ago it was when the
the ordinals inscription stuff was just just popping off uh we were having a discussion about
that i think it was pretty clear to everyone they're like hey you know you were very strongly
the opinion like look this is this is spam this is garbage this is junk yeah it's probably going to
get priced out as well but we should call it what it is it's it's spam you still hold that same
opinion um but apparently now you are persona non grata in some circles maybe a good place to start
is okay uh maybe we'll start at uh do we start with do we start with knots core do we start with
bip 110 where's the most logical place to start for this because honestly i i i don't even know
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Now, let me start from our last debate.
So what I was doing back then was to be super active.
And I think I can, everybody can check.
I was going to have a podcast by being super active in the debate with a few positions.
One position was spam is spam.
All this pseudo philosophical nonsense, what is spam anyway?
Spam is well defined, is communication in bulk, which is not welcomed or desired by the receiver in digital format.
So that's very clear.
And that was spam.
And there is no, I tried to debunk the idea, if he pays a fee, it's not spam.
That's nonsense.
And we explain why.
Bitcoin cannot have spam.
Filtering spam is censorship.
And I started to do this everywhere I went to Prague to actually I proposed to Las Vegas a speech called Ordinance are Retarded being rejected So I brought it to Prague to BTC Prague
and I have been welcome. It was a great speech.
Thank you. Thank you. I liked it. Then I went to Las Vegas with Unconfiscatable,
and I gave a speech, what is this censorship, trying to debate the definition of censorship
versus filtering. And then I went to your podcast, many other podcasts, of course, the Bitcoin
podcast, and also some other Bitcoin podcasts in order to debate this. And I was super active.
I think I've been even to some degree boring in how much committed I was to the specific debate.
Then there was a second debate, which is now that there is spam well-defined and filtering is not
censorship, how much practical it is to fight it with what kind of tool.
And I was very, very clear that I find fighting it with filters not a problem, something that
we can do.
It does make little sense from a point of view of network gatekeeping because of the
way networks work.
But it does make sense if you're a miner, because at least your blocks are not including
spam.
You may give up a little bit of money because of that, but not even that much.
It can make sense even just to give a signal.
I don't want to broadcast spam.
Even, I mean, what happens?
People were saying, yeah, but then you mess up your fee estimation.
And I did check.
I did run a library relay, which is Peter Todd's library that will rely any kind of shit.
And then there is, I did, I am still running notes and I was comparing fee estimation is
relatively cool.
I did also compare, there is some change, of course.
I did compare also basically propagation times and stuff like that.
I owned some ASICs, so I was checking my miners and I did realize that it was not a problem
to filter, not very effective, not a problem either.
So I fought against the narrative that, oh, if you are filtering, you are censoring or
you are destroying the network or this is an urgency.
I was very active during the Bitcoin Core version 30 release, the pre-release debate,
into being absolutely against what was happening, both in the merit, because the change was
unnecessary, it was controversial, it was treated as non-controversial, it was triggering a lot of
unnecessary animosity, and the process to go there was super sloppy, and it was a signal of a bad
health of the core process, in my opinion, because there were PRs open, then all the negative comment
hidden, then the PR was closed, then open just for the friends of the developers to push some hack
and then close the game. And a lot of shenanigans and people that I knew, they were in the same
office physically debating and gatekeeping the debate. So I was very vocally against that.
And then the other part of the element was that people were trolling us.
People on the other side, including my friends, core developers, they were trolling us.
Like, just fork off.
If it's like mempool filters, they don't work.
If you really want to stop spam, just make it consensus.
And I was very adamant, no, this is a provocation, but it doesn't make sense.
Consensus is serious things with a high cost for changing it
with a lot of opportunity cost
because we have more serious things to do with consensus.
And consensus is static.
You have a few chances to change it.
We are not Ethereum or Monero or Tron.
We don't change the rules every month.
We commit the rules and rules are a serious thing
and we don't change it.
And mempool filters are local things that we can update
even automatically may not be a good idea, but we can.
They are not as important.
So for me, fighting spam, if anything, is a mempool thing.
Consensus is not.
And everybody on my side was agreeing with me.
Yes, stop trolling.
We are not forking off.
Ha ha, you wish.
We are keep filters on.
But then something happened.
And that something was mostly the movement of a few letters around from spam to XAM.
C-A-S-A-M.
And I started to really disagree with my own side.
Back then it was basically a couple of people on my side.
But most of the people seemed to agree with me that that was a weird problem to discuss.
Mostly because if you talk spam, it's well defined.
But even if you just reduce slightly the rate, that's already spam filtering.
Spam filtering doesn't mean eliminating spam.
That's impossible.
Spam filtering is even just mitigating, even just socially signaling against or creating some social ostracism for the spammers.
It's already good enough.
We're not going to eradicate it.
But with that argument, one single criminal image, let alone there is all this libertarian debate to be had about the fact that a crime is the same thing as the image of a crime.
And so if I put there the Hiroshima bombing image, I'm culpable of Hiroshima.
But then, of course, if we talk about specific child pornography, that's something that perverts will use in order to be somehow connected with that kind of horrible crime.
So there's also this moral debate.
And then there is a debate of practical tools to avoid it.
So unlike spam, if you mitigate the rate of this kind of legal attack surface from 200 every hour to 100 every hour, you are literally doing nothing.
So I consider this an unfixable problem.
Some people try to straw man this position as you are denying there is a legal risk.
No, I'm saying the legal risk is there, has always been there, and it will always be there, and there is no meaningful way to reduce this.
Then people started to say that the difference was because of contiguity of the data.
So if you send the transaction with this kind of criminal image, which is contiguous versus not, and I started to, there are many reasons I considered this nonsense.
And then this escalated to basically, if you don't do something with that, you are a pedophile.
And that's, I mean, that's, that's how to become a little bit nasty.
And that was going around a lot.
And then finally, people started from this, unlike spam, this was considered an existential
emergency.
Like if this is not fixed, we, everybody will shut down the node because otherwise everybody
is a pedophile or something like that.
And so it became, okay, now we fork off.
And at this point, I was keeping my,
so, you know, there is this meme, which is funny.
Maybe we can find it later and you can put it into production.
So Elon Musk also shared it.
And it's basically something like in 2006,
there is this guy who is a little bit left-leaning
and then there is a left and the right wing of the political spectrum.
The guy stays there.
He doesn't move.
He's still left-leaning.
but the left, radical left, is running away to move the overton window so much
that after a while he finds himself to be labeled far right.
And he's still there.
So that happened to me.
Basically, I was a Nazi.
I was against spam, against core behavior as a process.
I was fully in that camp.
And I'm repeating the same thing I was telling to you basically three years ago.
I'm saying the same things.
But now the political spectrum of the noses moved so far on the left that now I remain a dangerous right wing pro core spammer.
And that's funny to see.
There's also another meme, the one in which they push you.
So basically there are red versus blue and the blue are pushing you and then you fall on the right with the red.
And the blue is telling you, why are you siding with the enemy now?
Well, I mean, fuck you.
I'm still saying the same thing I'm saying since three years.
Maybe I'm wrong, but you cannot pretend.
Oh, yeah, this is the first one.
Thank you.
This is the first.
So that's me.
Sadly, in this one, nodes are left.
I think that if you actually try to map it, you should flip it because I think nodes tend to be more right wing overall.
And some core developers can be a little bit woke left side.
But if you flip it, I was there, like center to right.
Yeah, I mean, I don't like spam.
I'm very vocal about spam.
I don't like core.
I'm there.
I'm still there.
The problem is that the center moved to my left so much that I'm now a pro-spam core V30 shield.
By the way, I never installed Bitcoin versus 30.
I'm still very critical about that.
And I'm still very critical about spam and legitimization of spam and ordinals.
I still think they are retarded. And yeah, so that's, there's that.
I appreciate that overview. And, you know, this is, this has all been just somewhat absurd to me
because some of the initial, like, I get the, the desire to want to reduce spam as much as possible.
Like, I have personally never published arbitrary data on the blockchain, not even a single Bible
verse. You know, who would do such a thing? Not even a single Bible verse for me. But it appears
that now we've gotten to this point where, like you said, it doesn't matter that you have kept
your same principles the entire time, have stayed steadfast in your messaging the entire time.
You are somehow viewed as now a bad actor simply because you are not agreeing with every new leap
that is made ideologically. And this is sort of like a, this feels like an identity politics game
is what it feels like.
It feels like that.
It's the same thing.
It's like, you know, Ukraine flag in bio, you know, BIP-110 in bio.
Like, it's all the signaling.
Now, you're a different story.
You're always, you know, putting whatever insult was thrown at you recently in your bio.
I like that usually.
But it's just been a little strange for me.
Yeah, because, wait, wait, what's your current moniker that you have in your…
I think some VIP 110 guy told me I'm an ideological destroyer of Bitcoin.
So I think now I'm an ideological.
Ideological destroyer sounds kind of good by itself, actually.
It sounds like a cool, like heavy metal band.
Yeah, and just before I was a distributed authoritarian,
which was the moniker that Gregory Maxwell was labeling
on everybody supporting Star9 Labs' great work for Bitcoin nodes.
So they were distributed authoritarian for filtering spam.
Which is just a statement that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but we'll leave that aside.
I have also, again, to clarify, I've never told anyone to run Core v30.
I've publicly stated many times I don't run it.
I won't be running it because I don't know.
I've got to check what version I'm running on my node down in my basement.
But several versions behind because Bitcoin node software is backwards compatible.
That's the whole point.
You don't need to update with every new version.
You really shouldn't either.
you know maybe wait a few years like wait see how things play out you'll be okay and so never always
told people like look you don't have to update your nodes don't do it but simply because i think
that fees ultimately uh you know monetary use cases price out non-monetary use cases spam
and i haven't actively uh told people to run knots i've actually i have said run knots run
core run whatever you want i don't care what you do it's none of my business and i don't have time
to care about what you do. I don't run Core V30. I don't spam the blockchain with any arbitrary data.
I don't do any of that. But because I'm not fully on the current ideological bandwagon,
that makes me a bad actor and somehow compromised. Apparently, people are receiving VC money too,
which I didn't know. I wish some of that, if there's any VC money flowing around, please
send some my way. I wasn't aware of this. But for you, it's an even more extreme case,
I think, because you have been very actively crusading more than almost anyone against the
retardation of the JPEGs on Bitcoin. And so I'm curious to, you know, to get into kind of
BIP 110 specifically, and the like, we can maybe go back to some of the CSAM arguments and stuff,
too. But honestly, those arguments, they're just they're so they're so mid curve that it kind of
hurts to talk about them. Like it's literally the government meme, how would you like this
wrapped counterterrorism or protect the children like it's that you're just doing that meme but
with regard to bit 110 specifically so i mean luke has said he has literally said if bitcoin will
fail if we don't do this soft fork are you in agreement with that i'm not but to be to be
accurate about that i i think i can say i know luke personally yeah no i know you do you've worked
with him yeah yeah i and i appreciate him a lot and i consider him a friend and a great mind
and look as a look vocabulary.
And what I used to say is that his brain is a cathedral
with a gothic one, which a lot of particular details,
they are very consistent internally,
but they tend to use the words in different ways.
So for him, Bitcoin failing or Bitcoin dying
is not what trivially we would assign
to that kind of terminology.
For him, if some conditions are not met,
Bitcoin is dead.
and usually there is internal consistency in Luke,
which is not perfect.
Nobody's perfect, not even him.
And nobody's perfectly consistent.
I think I can find inconsistency in what he says
and what I say and I try to correct it.
So he's not perfect, but he's more consistent than most.
But he uses terms in a way
which is very, very different from other people.
So the way Luke says it,
I think I'm almost sure he believes it
and I'm almost sure that he may even be right
in some of his definitions.
It's just that his definition tends to be very, very different
from the common sense.
Now, what I was not expecting, actually, I was ridiculing the idea
when some of my ideological opponents in the core field,
they were in the core camp.
They were telling me, but now people will ride up in Luke's idea
that the sky is falling and we have to do something,
we have to fork, otherwise Bitcoin is dead.
I was minimizing and ridiculing that because I was saying, no, wait, Luke thinks that,
but he's using Luke's speech and Luke thinks, and I know what it is,
I know what he means, is not what you think, and people will never follow him
because Luke was always the super useful maverick.
And I tend to, I'm friend with Luke, and that has been, people have wrote me in private
and called me to tell me not to be friend with Luke.
And my answer was, fuck you.
and now I'm also friend with Peter Todd
and people are now calling me and writing me
and publicly telling me that if I want to be a good person
I should not be a friend with Peter Todd
and fuck you as well
and the main point is that I see them as very symmetric in my opinion
they are different in many cases
but I find their contribution to Bitcoin super important
I'm personally friend with both of them
they taught me most of the things I know about Bitcoin
both of them
and they have some ideas about Bitcoin that I find not only wrong,
but like super wrong.
I'm super strongly opposed to like Peter saying mess with the supply schedule.
No, crazy, unacceptable, go away.
Like that's the door.
Luke says change users are in charge.
If the majority of users, which is not very well defined outside of his mind,
does want to change any rules, just change any rules.
And I'm like, no, no, ossification.
I don't want that.
I want the rules to be stable and predictable for the next century.
So I disagree vehemently with them.
Not only in Bitcoin things, but also in some off topic of Bitcoin things.
Like Luke thinks that probably should have, maybe I'm misrepresenting him, but I'm just
exaggerating to make a point.
That penalty for masturbation.
I disagree.
I clearly disagree.
Or kill old Russian babies, otherwise they become terrorists.
That's Peter.
I freaking disagree.
And they are both extreme.
They're both brilliant people, but brilliant people can say crazy things because especially
if you don't have skin in the game, especially if you are, I mean, there are many reasons.
Maybe I also say some crazy things on some topics and that's the beauty of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, unlike corporate world, unlike the companies I used to work with before, Bitcoin
is tolerant of crazy weirdos as long as they provide something useful for Bitcoin.
These two guys are both part of the history of Bitcoin in a strong way.
So now, to get back to your question, I don't think Bitcoin will die because of criminal
illegal images encoded in it.
I think that if it was going to die for that, then we have to make peace with the fact that
it's dead.
But I don't think it will die for that.
But if I don't think there's any solution, I honestly wonder if there is one.
And I honestly answer to myself, no, I don't think so.
And I don't think that Bitcoin will die only because of contiguous
up-return standard default child porn,
because that would be a retarded way to die.
And we can do something for that, but it's irrelevant,
and it will be irrelevant.
And people misunderstand me because it's not irrelevant in the sense
that the judge will tell you, oh, look, even if it's contiguous, you're free to go.
Now, it's the other way around.
If the governments will ever try to attack Bitcoin by using this angle, which is possible,
because as you said, terrorism, children, that's all with the package.
So if Bitcoin will be attacked with the child abuse angle by encoding something super bad
and horrid in the transactions somewhere, somehow,
I think the judge will not just not let you go because it's continuous.
He will not let you go if it's not continuous either,
and if it's not standard either.
There is no reason the attack should be mitigated by these nonsense arguments.
And so Bitcoin will not die for that.
Bitcoin will not die for spam either, not because spam is not a problem.
I think spam is a serious problem in Bitcoin.
Why?
Because Bitcoin is global consensus.
That means that every full node must download and verify every transaction on chain from
any other full node.
Now, the way you cannot solve this, this is an intrinsic issue with the design of Bitcoin,
you can mitigate it.
How?
Well, with two things.
One, a rate limit.
So you limit the rate.
so you cannot have infinite blocks or frequent blocks
because you have proof of work adjustment,
difficult adjustment to limit the time rate
and you have the block size to limit the size.
And so you have a rate limit.
And not only you have a rate limit,
rate limits are a spam mitigation always,
but they are bad because they mitigate the spam,
but they also mitigate the legit use case
because they're limiting everything.
In Bitcoin, you have a rate limit
with an unfair advantage to legit use.
What is the unfair advantage?
The legit use, we know now, can go off-chain,
can leave off-chain, can aggregate transaction off-chain.
ARCs, Lightning Channels, Lightning Network in its entirety,
even fiduciary means, like cashmins.
So real use of Bitcoin can move off-chain.
And I would argue that real legit use of Bitcoin
should go off-chain as much as possible.
Why?
Because the blockchain is slow, expensive, censorship-prone, spam-prone, and weak on privacy.
While the off is cheap fast censorship more you could have Lightning may even work if they cut the internet out of your country
We did some experiment with that.
Of course, you have security flows because you cannot close channels.
So if your channel peer has internet and you don't, that's bad.
But if we are both off, we cannot change the channel, but we can still transact.
So miners can prevent transaction from entering blocks if they have 51%, but they cannot prevent
lighting transaction from happening.
So lighting is even more censorship resistant.
Lighting can be more private than on chain.
We are not as private as we could be with lighting, but there is a limited potential
to make lighting more private because it's off chain.
So you don't have the original scene, which is every node must the load every transaction.
And of course, off-chain is spam resistant, unlike on-chain, because on-chain, if you
spam, you force some, some people say it's not spam because you pay, but it is spam for
this reason.
You pay once, one inclusion, and then you force every single full node to read on date
your spam forever.
This is unlike email spam.
In email, you send an email of spam and then you have to send another.
nothing, but you have to send another. In Bitcoin, you spam once, paying a fixed cost, and then you
have as a recipient, every node forever, which is very bad. So my point is that the mitigation of
spam is moving as much as economics we can to the second layers and to off-chain, which is not just
better for spam. It's better for spam, privacy, efficiency, speed, censorship, resistance,
and everything else.
Now, it's ironic that now,
for the way the subculture works
and political movement works,
they tend to create,
so political movements,
they tend to create a package of ideas.
If you are part of us for this issue,
you also have to marry this other issue
because that's the geometry of our package
and you just have to accept it
or you are the enemy.
This kind of attitude created a weird situation
in which the camp of BIP 110 right now, very well defined, tends to be against layer twos
because it sees layer twos as spam.
It's the opposite.
It's the answer to spam.
Reduce some.
Rate limiting is a good thing.
So much so that I agree with Luke Dasher, we should reduce the block size.
And I really think we should.
and I'm able to argue forever that we should.
That's one thing we can do, reducing the block size to limit the rate
and then move everything that we can off-chain where spam is less of a problem.
That creates an unfair advantage because off-chain transactions,
they can pull their fees to go on-chain together.
So basically, if we are in an arc, me, you and another thousand people,
we can basically pull fees together to do one single ARK round.
So let's say one transaction on chain costs $1,000.
1,000 ARK users can pull resources to pay $1 each.
If you want to spam on chain, you have to pay the full block space.
We cannot just pull together.
Yeah, we can pull together, but then we're just sharing one single retarded JPEG and we cannot do 1,000 retarded JPEG.
It's very hard to pull economic activity off-chain because the point of on-chain spam is to use the space.
While monetary users, legit users, they can reduce the block space they use in order to go off-chain.
So it's ironic that the very things that can mitigate spam are now considered bad or taboo.
Like people in that side are becoming increasingly suspicious of lighting itself or ARX or even BitVM.
BitVM is a culprit because it's something that may need some on-chain space for some settlement and proofs.
But the idea of BitVM is moving Sats off-chain.
So the idea of BitVM is in exchange for some block space to close it or to prevent fraud,
you are removing from the blockchain a lot of activity.
And monetary transactions, I don't like the frame.
That was probably one of my first disagreements with the movement.
I don't like to frame spam as opposed to monetary transactions.
On Bitcoin layer one, monetary transactions are spam.
Almost all of them in the sense that I don't want your transaction to be on my node, but
I have to have it for the way Bitcoin works.
And when Bitmain did spam attack the network, so Bitmain did a spam attack.
The spam attack was not JPEGs.
It was monetary transaction, fake ones.
So they were not paying anybody, but it was fully monetary from the outside.
The difference with retarding us is that retarding our descriptions are even are they are overt spam.
So it's like we're not even hiding it.
This is spam and we want you to know and we like for you to know this is spam.
While Bitmain spam was hidden as monetary transaction, but it was still spam.
So sorry, I'm ranting for too long.
My main point is my answer is no, I don't think Bitcoin will die if BAP will fail.
no no you talk well you know this is always a safe space for rants well okay there's there's
a number of points i want to follow up on there so let me let me try to try to try to frame them
together here i guess first question would be uh maybe a more direct one than i've got some more
let's say like theoretical or philosophical whatever you like to call them but do you think
that generally does the fact that bip 110 is now on the table and seems to have been adopted by the
folks operating in this knots camp and i don't like putting people into camps but that seems to
be the best way to describe them right now so i'm not saying this as a pejorative guys i'm just
i'm using it as a way to label thing yeah i'm not trying to put not trying to put you in a camp
don't like don't worry i'm not making a list i think that's what they're doing actually but uh
does the emergence of bip 110 broadly just signal that the knots filtering didn't actually work at
the relay level. It didn't work at that level, so it had to move to the consensus level. Because
even Mechanic himself said he thinks consensus is the wrong place to fight spam. Yes, it does.
But that signals an inconsistency anyway, because what we were saying back then is we know. So I
was saying, and everybody was clapping in my side, was I know this is not good. I know that there's
asymmetry and that the intolerant minority of liberal relay can overcompensate even a
majority of nodes.
I know that it's easier on a peer-to-peer network to propagate than to gatekeep.
I know that filtering is difficult and I know that if Core doesn't support a default for
the network, the effect will be very low.
The effect will be signaling like a clear message, a social message, which is not very
influential of an open network because anonymous people don't care about social messaging,
but it can be influential in the mid space.
For example, I don't want retarding us in conferences.
So if you are, I cannot stop hackers and spammers and phishing attackers from operating on the
internet, but at least I cannot invite them to stage celebrating them with lies like you
are innovating.
So we can at least gatekeep the social part, reject them from technical Bitcoin conference,
physical meetups, at least that can be done.
So filtering can give a social message and filtering can give some slight friction on
top.
That was our argument.
So it's not novelty.
You cannot say, oh, but now it's not working.
Well, we knew, we always responded.
It doesn't matter.
still signaling and we are increasing the friction a little bit because, yeah, because
we don't want to legitimize this.
That was always the point.
So we cannot say, oh, surprise, this is not working anymore.
And there is another thing which is deeper, I think, is that I've seen the emergency of
this kind of problem, psychological problem.
So this situation should have a name, but I don't think it has a name.
So there is a problem.
You propose a solution, which is proportionate to the problem.
The solution is hard.
So you fail to implement it because life is like that.
Sometimes you fail to implement the solution.
Since you fail, you find the next solution, which is even harder, which is assuming even
more things, which basically includes all the assumption of the first plus more.
And now you think that this one will actually win.
And if you just say you won't, you are a defeatist.
And like you say, no, let's just go back to reason.
No, because that didn't work.
Actually, let me say, let me try to be super unpopular here
because I will take the classical anarcho-capitalist
anti-border stance,
which is very unpopular with everybody,
right wing especially.
And currently even among libertarians,
I'm a huge minority.
So my point will be with regard with immigration.
And I know now I'm losing any sympathies.
I don't care.
Fuck you.
So I say what I think.
So immigration is a problem because you have people coming in countries seeking for welfare parasitism and you have different cultures that can also destroy some of the cultural beauty that was there because cultural shock is always a thing.
And then you don't, in many Western countries, you don't have the right to discriminate.
So you're forced to do integration even if you don't want.
And then some of these cultures are more violent and you don't have rights to self-defense because cops will take guns away from you.
And so you have to suffer and you cannot defend yourself.
So all these things.
And then you have DEI policies.
So some of these people will be hired instead of you.
Not because they're better, but just because they are different colors or whatever.
So this is bad.
So what is my solution?
Well, I know it's hard.
But my solution is remove welfare.
Liberalize self-defense completely.
Liberalize exclusion.
Even when it's stupid and racist, it should be still free in my property.
I don't want Italians in my property because Italians, I don't like them.
That should be free.
So that's my solution.
Yeah, that's hard.
That's utopian.
You're never...
I know it's hard.
I never said it was easy to implement libertarianism.
Probably I'm going to fail, but that's the right proportional solution.
But then you have Trump and then you have another solution which just must deport everybody.
Man, this is just as difficult, just a little bit more,
because you have the problem of all the low-pay workers to now deport.
You have the problem of enforcement, which is crazy.
You need to implement this kind of crazy surveillance,
state surveillance with Palantir looking at faces so you can deport people.
Then you have ICE people shooting people if they protest.
It's crazy. It's even worse.
It's just as difficult as the first, just as unrealistic,
but now is even ideologically inconsistent with freedom.
So if I say, when I debate immigration, I say that,
and Americans especially, they say, yeah, but I am suffering
because my block now is full of whatever, like Mexican, Pakistan,
they are, I don't know, they are shooting, raping, whatever.
So I'm suffering and you are proposing me to do nothing
because what you're proposing is unrealistic.
I know, but what I'm saying is that even the alternative you are proposing now, you are just falling for that because it seems newer.
So the psychological trick is the first solution didn't work.
So I was libertarian, but libertarian has let me down.
So now I'm going full status.
Why?
Because it's newer and I don't feel like repeating something that's failed.
I feel like doing something that is different.
So this is like the opposite of the Einstein quote.
So doing the same things over and over again, expecting new results is the definition of
stupidity.
But that's, sorry, Einstein, but that's stupid.
Actually, sometimes doing something over and over again, if the alternative is even harder
and even less realistic and also ideologically inconsistent, it's exactly the only thing
you can do.
Either nothing or you try again, maybe with different styles, with different scale.
Maybe you try to scale down.
Maybe you move and you migrate and you try with different demographics.
Maybe you try with c-steading or crypto-anarchism online or you try with Bitcoin, you try with 3D printed guns to shoot to the cops.
Do whatever you don't shoot to the cops unless serious 3D printed guns.
But what I'm saying is sometimes there is this fallacy in which the ideologically consistent method failed.
So now I will move to an ideologically inconsistent method, which will also fail and is obviously
will also going to fail because it's assuming even higher constraints than the previous.
But the fact that you are compromising on ideology makes you feel like you're finally
becoming pragmatic.
But so let's move back to Bitcoin.
having the majority of the network filtering spam was possible but hard having core keeping a sane
default was definitely possible not even that hard we we just need the core not to behave like
they did it failed now making alternative to bitcoin core as a default we can i think we will
i think i will have to do it because i think is needed and beneficial to bitcoin but that any of
this, any of these alternatives becoming the new de facto majority so much so that the
same default on these new things. So let's say we fork core version 29 and we make a
new implementation and I think I will help something like that with cheering and funding.
But then we do that. We will maybe we also become a competitor to core and not, but we
we will never get to 90% relay, share.
So we're still to some degree failing.
Now, let's change consensus.
Wait, to change consensus effectively,
you need the same thing.
So you need people to maintain your note.
If we don't have core developers for my shitty alternative,
let's imagine with a shitty alternative
that also changes consensus.
If Luke and two peoples are the only maintainers of notes,
which I don't think is that bad,
but it's a fact, BIP-1 and 10 will still be low on developers, will still be low on minors.
Yeah, you can fantasize that there is some kind of weird game theory that will magically give you everything,
but it's just like saying, yeah, I mean, libertarianism failed, but with Trump King,
finally everything will be solved and magically this time around central planning will work
and total power to police taste will not create any problem.
I mean, yeah, this is not being pragmatic.
This is just giving up a consistent over-optimism to some inconsistent hyper-over-optimism.
So you're trying to do something even harder, which will still fail, but now you're also
compromising on principle.
In the case of Bitcoin, the principle is not libertarianism, but is fixed rules and not
playing around with the rules, being conservative with rule changing and that kind of stuff.
Somebody just commented in the ZapBot stream, Giacomo rants are the best, and they attached
some sats to that message.
So thank you for that, Zapper out there.
Now you're financially compromised.
That's like VC funding.
I've been compromised.
This, it's clearly, it's actually a Citria VC sock puppet account, I think.
And that was, I didn't even know it, but they just compromised me.
Okay.
So once again, we have a number of things to unpack here, Giacomo.
I guess maybe the first thing here is I think that a lot of the,
there's a lot of anger out there that I'm seeing from
and like really vehemence from this BIP 110 camp crowd, whatever.
And I think a lot of that is due to expectation setting.
You know, happiness is expectations minus reality, right?
Well, if more of them would have understood what you said right there
and that was always your position that, look, we can't get rid of spam.
We can mitigate it, though.
We can mitigate it, and we should mitigate it.
We can't get rid of all of it.
We're never going to get rid of all of it.
We won't even necessarily get rid of most of it.
We can get rid of some of it.
We can make it less palatable to engage in this, both in the meat space and in cyberspace.
I think that a lot of people had the idea that, no, if we just get enough, if I just run knots a little bit harder, then we'll get rid of spam.
And when that obviously, you know, reality had different ideas because that's like that was not a it wasn't a realistic position for for anyone to take.
But some people did because they were talked into this or, you know, I don't know why.
But then it was OK, well, we need to do something else.
And the reason for the failure, it's not us.
It's not our unrealistic expectations.
It's that everyone else who disagrees with us is a bad actor and who's been compromised.
and they're Epstein and they're Mossad and they're, you know, they're, they're clearly,
they're all shit coiners and they're spammers. It doesn't matter if they don't shit coin,
doesn't matter if they don't spam, you know, it doesn't matter if what, it's just like they're
anyone who disagrees with me and my increasingly extreme opinions, which keep not working,
must be a bad actor. And this, I think is just where things like completely, any semblance of
dialogue seems to have just completely broken down. And I'm, I'm curious too. I mean, do you
just let's let's ask this very very blatantly do you think core v30 was an attack on bitcoin
huh uh so let me try to frame it this way i think that um i think that the the culture wars
and the woke movement that are the last association of the culture work uh wars is real
The woke movement is so real that it's changing people's lives.
It got people fired.
It was super virulent in 2000, around a few years ago.
It basically destroyed Star Wars, Disney, Indiana Jones.
So it's pretty real in entertainment.
Video games are completely destroyed.
And even more seriously, outside of entertainment,
entire communities and politics are destroyed by that.
So that's a very real thing.
And I think that the Wook movement is disproportionately represented in software and especially open source software.
And so you see something crazy.
If you are interested in open source software, you have seen Linus Torvald and, I mean,
Jay Applebaum before and everything in Rust and Tor and SQLite situation.
So something really crazy in open source software.
Now, I think Bitcoin has been blessed to be not really that involved into that in the sense that actual.
So we didn't have a Linus Torvald equivalent because we don't have Linus Torvald, but also because Luke for a very long time was a Sedevacantist Catholic that is saying that abortion is murder and that it should be theocracy, small kingdoms with theocratic.
And it would have been ostracized by any open source project years ago during peak workness but it was pretty much respected in Bitcoin And so Bitcoin had it good It was the most work resistant open source project
ever. That said, since workness in software was a problem, and when you start to see many Bitcoin
core contributors and maintainers becoming transgender, which is not a problem.
I mean, cut off your dick.
I don't care.
Dress like a woman.
The point is that that was strongly associated with an intolerant movement in which if you
don't use the self-appointed pronouns, you get ostracized by software because you don't
bend the knees to some kind of crazy demand of negation of reality.
So the two persons in question never did that.
the two trans among recent big commentators
that never bothered anybody about pronouns.
So they behaved correctly.
But when you see two of them starting to become around there,
and then you see the conservative, super conservative,
or even reactionary,
Sedevacantist, traditional Catholic,
being hosted by the development.
Luke was always tolerated.
even the weird things about Luke were always tolerated in Bitcoin.
Now he's completely out.
He's out of the physical meetups.
He's out of the security disclosure list.
He's out of the BIP repository.
Not yet, but he will be hosted by the BIP repository.
He's out of the mailing list or the translation project.
Every single of those things has an excuse like,
yeah, but Luke, this, this.
But the reality is that he was tolerated before.
He's not now.
Then you see something that people mock me sometimes when I say that,
but because it's not serious and I agree.
But it's a symbol, it's something, it's a sign.
So a few years ago, somebody came to GitHub and said,
blacklist in Bitcoin is racist, so you should change it with blocklist,
which was stupid because the word block is something else in Bitcoin
and blacklist is not racist.
So it was stupid.
But one core developer is to merge that because he said, I don't want drama.
I'm scared.
So he was scared of the woke mob and he just is to merge it.
So that's a sign.
I don't care for that.
We people protested that and they were banned from GitHub for protesting.
That's a sign.
That's a little bit.
Bitcoin still has it good.
The woke problem, but is there.
And then you see Bitcoin Core developers basically grooming two girls with ethnic characteristics to become maintainers.
And you see that it's very urgent.
And maybe the public doesn't see it.
But I saw it.
That two girls that were strongly shitcoin leaning became maintainer because we needed girl maintainers because of diversity quotas.
And we needed ethnic girls maintainers.
The first one, then that failed, then the other went in.
So you see that, that's a work problem.
That doesn't mean that the girl is not good.
That doesn't mean that she's by definition not competent.
The problem with quotas is that they create actually a negative bias against the quota.
Because if now you know that you have to have a girl, you become suspicious of the reason there is a girl.
But then when that specific girl also becomes the flag of the spam relativization movement,
like whatever, NFTs are like whatever.
And when that merges, you start to be concerned about the wokeism.
So that could be considered one potential attack.
And I'm happy that the community is vigilant and reactive, maybe overreactive.
But still, I think that if you, I mean, worst case scenario,
we are just being
hassles with the developer
I mean okay cry harder
Bitcoin must survive even if some
people online are hassles
developers. If the success of Bitcoin depends
on nobody on the internet
being hassles with developers
well good luck Bitcoin, you're basically dead
so I mean I'm sorry
personally I don't think I've never
I have ever been
particularly nasty with people
and if I have I apologize
but
I think it's good that Bitcoiner were resilient to this kind of ideology, potentially creeping in.
Again, I want to stress this.
It was Bitcoin had it good so far.
Maybe so good that the woke virus wave already is fading away already in the rest of the world.
Maybe we also will have the pendulum in which we are back to Nazism.
So we have the opposite problem.
and maybe we just made it out
and wokeism is decreasing in media,
in advertising and jeans advertising
and whatever.
It's getting better.
So maybe we are out,
but that was an element that was not made up.
It was not zero.
It didn't impact Bitcoin seriously,
but it could have.
And I think it was legit to have some kind of vigilance
and reaction about that.
Then there is second.
So there was a woke attack on Bitcoin.
Maybe.
It's a small one.
potential, some signs better to kill it in its infancy.
Then the second point is elitism.
This is not something woke.
It's not something recent.
This is something eternal.
Whenever you have a tool or a subculture either, in both cases, you create a natural elite
of people that care and they can become self-referential.
They can live in a bubble.
They can become gatekeepers.
They can become elitist, a snob.
that freaking happens
that's inevitable
Bitcoin core
so Bitcoin maximalists can become that
we have been accused to be that
maybe whatever cry harder
Bitcoin developers can also become that
and we non-developers
we have to either learn to code
or fund other developers
or cry harder ourselves
that's the way it goes
and I think that happened
is that an attack on Bitcoin?
could be, but I don't even think it's an organized attack.
It's just a natural evolution, this kind of elitism of technical people.
It's just something natural.
Then on top of that, you have another thing,
which is basically the geographical and cultural concentration
of Bitcoin development.
Just like we had ASHRAE concentrating in China and the US,
development concentrated in two physical offices, one in the US, one in the UK.
And most of the maintainers are basically in those offices under a couple of companies.
Is this an attack on Bitcoin?
I think people that created those two companies are generally trying to help Bitcoin by funding
Bitcoin.
I think they are the best intention, but it did create an increase in the monoculture.
The fact that it was UK and US and not Italy or not because I'm proud of Italy, but-
Sounds a little nationalistic of you.
It may seem nationalistic, but I'm Swiss for tax reasons.
But anyway, what I mean is that Italian culture has a lot of problems, a lot of problems.
I'm not really super proud of Italy in many regards, but there are a couple of good things.
One is food, of course.
The other one is that we are pretty impervious to work ideology.
ideology. We are, I mean, we really cannot become politically correct. We are incapable
of political correctness. We are Berlusconi. I mean, we cannot be that. So we are pretty
resistant to political correctness. So UK and US, especially big cities, London, New
York, San Francisco, yeah, that's basically the epicenter of the disease. So you had,
Basically, you had geographical concentration plus technical elitism
reinforcing woke penetration in Bitcoin.
Still to the point that it was not, for me, a serious practical problem,
but it was a symbol of something potentially scary.
Then, on top of this, you have shitcoins.
Shitcoins are an attack on Bitcoin.
Unfortunately, inclusivity and DEI, they did end up attracting shitcoiners and maybe the woke virus is connected with some relativism, like whatever, which can be seen as a legitimization of shitcoins.
So I think there are several issues that are independent, completely independent, but they did converge into something that looks like a coordinated attack.
I don't think it is. To be very clear, I think that I was also, this was probably something that got connected with the CSAM discussion and helped my cancellation from the VIP 110 camp, which I will oppose anyway because I'm against the fork.
Jeffrey Epstein. So I think that Epstein funding Joy Ito in MIT was a super normal thing. I mean, this guy lived off influence spheres. And especially Epstein was specialized in not only massages, but also in new technologies.
He was selectively trying to fund and interfere and get influence in new technologies, many of them.
Bitcoin was an emerging technology that was interesting.
So it's absolutely normal and if not super nice that he told MIT DCI to do Bitcoin stuff.
Ito received money.
Ito used the money.
and the money ended up in the greatest Bitcoin,
the first big Bitcoin startup ever,
which was Blockstream.
And the money entered there.
But then Blockstream was against Stellar
and Ito's money went also into Stellar,
which was a shitcoin.
And so Blockstream people say,
no, this isn't compatible.
So the money went out.
When the money was given,
Ito, so an MIT guy,
which was a good Epson pal,
also invited over Austin Hill,
which was the co-founder of Bloxstream, the business guy.
Austin Hill brought in the poster boy of Bloxstream, Adam Beck,
quoted in the white paper, and Adam went.
Now, I'm not even as nerd as Adam.
I'm almost the business guy sometimes.
But if one, if in any startup I know,
if the business guy tells the tech guy,
come to be the poster boy for the company
in a freaking island, the tech guy will not even remember,
let alone Google, but even remember the name
of the hand-shaking opportunity, a photo of opportunity.
You just freaking go on any kind of helicopter island
and you don't go to examine any, like, federal report
on underage prostitution of four years before.
You don't.
I mean, maybe you do.
So in 2014, I have to say it because it's the honest thing to say.
Sorry if that changes your opinion of me.
But if in 2014, I was trying to do Bitcoin things, I just had quit Accenture the year before,
and I was trying to do Bitcoin startups.
And if somebody told me, come to teach Bitcoin to a billionaire on an island,
the last thing I do is to even write down the name, let alone doing a deep search on the name.
I just go.
And I'm not the nerd.
I'm the business guy, the one that should be aware of potential compromises
in terms of public relations or optics, let alone Adam freaking back.
He just would go to speak about Bitcoin, wherever.
He still does.
Like, if you call Adam today, Adam, we have to talk Bitcoin,
and you just throw him a random Chinese name, he will just go.
It's Adam back.
and so that was also another uh sorry i'm running again i think i completely okay okay let's go okay
no you you've tied in a lot of threat okay so and actually giacomo i i did specifically ask i didn't
actually ask if core was an attack i asked if core v30 specifically and the uh changing well
bringing the op return limit to just be in line with consensus because that's really what it did
right consensus there is no like there it's a relay policy thing it wasn't a consensus rule that
that be at that level in a word was core v30 specifically an attack in the way that it's being
framed or is this just the natural result of some of the things that you described earlier happening
like culminating do you know what i mean and i'm going to ask you to be brief on this one because
i want to get into another one after this yeah the latter is i think it just is not a coordinated
attack is the final coming together of all these elements.
Technical elities, some level of disrespect to the users due to technical things,
the geographical concentration of people living in a bubble and what is not
controversial to them cannot be controversial to the users, and some
wokeness that made, they created sympathy for shitcoins, scams, and spam like, well,
the wokeness created selection process, which got one shitcoin-friendly developer in a very
influential position.
And in order to defend her, they had to defend a shitcoin-friendly position.
Fair enough.
That was succinct, Giacomo.
See, you Italians can do it.
You know, it's just, it's not in your nature.
But okay, next question.
You posted a tweet that was, I mean, probably sacrilegious and blasphemous,
but you specifically listed your favorite and least favorite BIPs.
You put BIP110 in your least favorites.
Would you like to publicly atone for that,
or would you like to explain your rationale for it, perhaps?
I will explain and double down.
There are many people like on BIP110.
The first I don't like is the fact that he includes an activation method
even without consensus.
That means that it will activate with a relatively low
ASH rate readiness threshold, 55%,
as opposed to the traditional 95%.
That's already something bad, a bad precedent.
And if it doesn't meet that threshold,
it will still activate regardless, which I think is bad.
I think it was bad.
So let's exclude for a moment UASF on Segwit.
I think this was bad when drive chain proponents
said that he wanted to do it.
I spoke against them.
It was bad.
And I don't dislike,
I do dislike some elements of dry shame,
but not so much.
I think it was bad when Jeremy Rubin
trying to do it,
which by the way was a huge absent friend.
He tried to do it with CTV.
I was against that.
And I like CTV, especially now.
I was a little bit skeptical.
Now I'm very sold,
but it was bad.
You don't activate something,
risking a split,
because the fact that rules don't change
are more important for money
than the fact that rules are particularly good.
So an important fact of money and networks in general,
but especially money,
is that you don't change the rule arbitrarily.
And so you do that when there is total full consensus.
If that means that we cannot have arbitrary features anymore,
well, cry harder.
Consistency and reliability of the base layer
is more important than your feature,
including CTV. So it's totally natural for me that BIP 110 is just like that. The activation part,
I dislike it. If you do the same without the activation part, I can be way more tolerant.
But then again, why the activation part is justified? Because everything is presented as
an emergency. Like skies falling. And if we don't do something, Bitcoin is over. This could be true
someday. So I'm not saying that it's impossible that we ever come to some kind of existential
moment in which either you do something or Bitcoin is dead. That can happen. I realize
it can happen. But as a prima facie heuristic, sorry for the pardon me French, as a first
reaction, I'm skeptical. So it's like a commercial thing. You come to my house, buy this or you
die tomorrow and you only have one meal to buy and to decide, wait, wait, wait, red flag.
Red flag.
If you try to push an emergency on me, red flag.
That doesn't mean that I know for a fact the emergency doesn't exist.
I'm saying I'm being skeptical.
And my skepticism was not addressed to my satisfaction by the answer.
What is the emergency exactly?
Spam.
Well, no, actually, it's going down from the retardant era, not up.
Well, it's encoding of illegal images.
Well, you cannot stop one illegal image to be encoded ever.
So it was always a risk.
Let's use Tor for our nodes.
Let's try to lobby in order to protect us.
Let's do something.
But we cannot stop it.
Yeah, but it's continuous.
What does it even mean?
By the way, we can do a continuous transaction.
It will not be continuous in Luke Dashier's terminology,
but it will be in any other person's terminology anyway.
So I see the emergency.
I dislike it.
the emergency is a justification for the activation mechanism
and the emergency was actually the explicit reason
so legal compliance was the explicit reason
mentioned in the first draft of the fork
now it has been removed
okay but still the same full proposal
started with legal compliance as an emergency
that has been removed
I'm sorry I dislike that
it makes it not even CTV was as bad
not even BAP 100 like big block BAPs.
At least they have children are dying emergency.
Roger Ver was like sky is falling, children are dying.
That was bad for me.
Samson was mocking that I think with reason
because when you try emotional manipulation to create an emergency
even if you believe it that's the red flag.
And so there is the children are dying
or are being raped by Epsin or whatever kind of emergency
if we don't do something, so let's do something immediately.
And then you remove that reference from the fork,
but it's still the same fork with the same timeline,
with the same emergency.
That is temporary.
Now, some people claim that temporaries of fork
never exist in Bitcoin, that's false.
But the fact that it's temporary
only match with the fake emergency,
which I consider a fake emergency.
Otherwise, if you think it's a good fork,
just make it permanent.
And then we can R fork if we don't like it.
But why temporary?
So you're trying to please look who consistently thinks that's an emergency.
And I know why I think so, and I disagree.
And you try to please people that understand it's not an emergency,
at least in the sense we will use for the term.
So that's bad.
Then you go into that, and you see that the other thing that I dislike
is that it's a missed opportunity because changing consensus is becoming harder and harder.
I don't even know if it's possible anymore except for existential bugs fixing.
And with existential bugs fixing, I don't mean Luke doesn't like it.
I mean the node stops running.
If the node keeps running and you just have somebody shutting it down because now the image is contiguous,
that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about bug that will kill the network, technically speaking.
So, except for that, maybe we don't have many chances to do a fork anymore.
Maybe not any.
Maybe some few last.
This feels like a temporary emergency led fork, which is not really an emergency.
It's a waste of scarce coordination space for a good fork.
CTV may be a waste as well, because even if it's good, it may not be the best.
So I was against CTV activation, not just because it was unsafe,
but because it was potentially wasting some better opportunity to do a fork,
work, including a spam addressing fork, because for example, within the good, within a good
framework, block size reduction, I think it could be a good
for limiting spam.
Alone, it will never pass.
But maybe with Cheez-A,
in some contexts, it may pass.
Covenants may also reduce spam.
Why?
Because covenants help the UX
and the safety of off-chain transaction.
And if transaction can pull fees off-chain,
they can overcompete and outcompete spam,
which is also a scam, on-chain.
So, you see, it's a waste.
And then there are some sloppy things.
For example, the alleged emergency is op return versus 30, version 30 in core, which is now unbounded in policy as much as in consensus.
Even if, even that, so let me say something.
V30 is very sloppy because they try to unbound it, making it like consensus.
But then that was controversial.
It was.
So they close the PR, then they open another one, which says, well, let's not unbound it.
Let's just put it 100, well, basically, let's just put in a super huge number.
It was at least the first PR was controversial, but it was at least consistent, like remove
and make it like consensus.
The second, which was Easter merge, was equally controversial, but this time around, it doesn't
even make sense.
Like just at this point, just freaking remove the limit.
That limit is a joke.
It's almost, I would consider it almost a provocation.
I don't know if it's intentional, but seems like a power flex, like a gaslighting power
flex.
So I want to remove it.
That's controversial.
I still remove it, but I pretend I don't because I put a super huge number.
Now it's not controversial, it's emerging.
So V30 was bad.
The reaction is also bad because if the emergency is op return, contiguous data, which is sanctioned
by the community because up return has been accepted or whatever.
If that's a problem, then you are saying that inscriptions were not an emergency
because they're not contiguous and not accepted there in this plot.
So why are you fixing inscriptions with the same fork if the emergency is up return?
Just fix up return.
Be consistent with the emergency narrative.
No, we fix up return and, well, let's just pack also some inscription patch.
But no, you say that the emergency was the contiguous CSAM.
So it's confused.
It's all over the place.
It's many inconsistent narrative put together.
So I really dislike the fork because even if I don't like spam,
and I certainly don't like CSAM,
and I don't like scam, all this iteration of the letters,
and ordinals are spam and also scam,
and, well, inscriptions are spam, ordinals are scam, and sysam is sysam.
It's all bad, but this solution is very bad for several points.
And that was the topic on the cake, which I don't think is super serious,
but it's annoying. It's another ugly thing.
So in order to stop inscriptions, this version of inscriptions,
you cut out op-if in the Tapscript.
Opif is not something necessary, but it is the standard output of some Miniscript policies.
So some wallets, including Nunchuck, may output an Opif.
You don't freaking break it.
You may, I mean, if Opif didn't exist, the Miniscript will not output it,
then Nunchuck will not adopt it.
But now that the case If there not a real reason to break EOS case with consensus change don break it Nobody will lose money because of that realistically
It's not really an emergency.
It's not a problem.
It's not confiscation.
Also because in worst case scenario, it would be freezing because then after one year, the funds would be unconfiscated because it's temporary.
But still, it's, yeah.
So yeah, I really liked this BIP.
The framing of it, the initial like legal compliance framing is just such a statist cuck thing to do, to be honest.
Like that's its own form of wokeism is like statism is its own form of wokeism just under like a different wrapper a little bit.
Where it's the same thing.
It's like we have to pander to this.
Like except instead of pandering to blue haired commies, you're pandering to the totalitarian state, which is like, you know, a different flavor of the same sort of retardation.
but I appreciate the breakdown there and and also like the little bit of the technical side as well
because I think that is important for people I mean what do you think the the realistic chances
are of this thing like I guess what's the what do you think is actually going to to happen when we
get to this and I would also on the temporary side it's like okay it's temporary it's like
there's nothing you know what's that old saying that there's nothing so permanent as a temporary
government decree it's like maybe the same applies here I don't know but what do you think is the
likely outcome of all of this once this, you know, enough nodes start signaling for BIP110?
I think that not enough ASHRAE. I think ASHRAE will not signal in 55% until the very last minute.
Then it may happen. I think that it will just, I think, so let me put this way. I think the
signaling will be so low and any kind of future markets will signal such a low interest for
this post fork coin that signal in mining will stay very, very low.
If there is any chance that this doesn't happen, because for example, I don't know, anything,
a very good campaign, something new, if I'm wrong, I think what will happen is that if
If there is any signaling at all, people will signal it overwhelmingly because it's just
better not to be forked off for a lack of signaling.
If you can just flip a bite, you do it because it costs you nothing and it keeps on the same
side.
So either there is no signaling at all, which I will assign a probability of 60% like we
have one block on ocean.
My friend Bob will do something, maybe it goes to 2%, but we're so low that nobody cares.
The date passes and nothing happens.
Otherwise, if the day approaches of the mandatory signaling and there is, let's say, 30%, 35%,
which I don't think there will be, then it may very well go to 60 or 70 because it costs
nothing.
Then for after the mandatory activation of the signaling, everybody will signal.
Then there will be the mandatory enforcement of the rule in this case.
In the first case, everything failed already.
In this case, there will be the mandatory activation of the rules.
Now, I think most miners will produce BIP 110 compliant blocks for a while.
Why?
Because it doesn't cost you much to do that.
You just give up a little bit of fees from the remaining retardant subscription, which are very few and up return.
So it's a very low cost to mine a compliant block and a very low risk because at least you don't get forked off in case they win.
But then this is the first challenge, create compliant blocks.
But the second challenge is if the best chain include a non blocks which will happen will arrive somebody even just to piss off look or even just because it the government to create the the discord somebody will create a
block not with sysam but not necessarily but just non-compliant and then another block on top and
then another maybe it doesn't happen immediately maybe after a month maybe after but before one year
three blocks will be created which are not compliance or one non-compliant blocks with
two blocks on top which may also be compliant now what the BIP is asking you is not just create a
compliant block but ignore the biggest chain and go with the minority and no rational minor will do
that or one ideologic minor you know one single guy on ocean with an ASIC maybe Bob but I think
Bob will start to say, maybe it's better not, because you don't want your block, your
work to be completely wasted.
So when there will be a moment to actually enforce it, it will fail.
So in the first scenario I mentioned, the hash rate signaling never goes close to 3%
or 4%, which I think is more likely.
And the second scenario, what you have is basically that the main chain goes on like
nothing was there, like ignoring the fall completely.
My node will follow the strongest chain, the best chain.
And then I think what will happen is that some people very committed with this fight,
including Saddle Luke and Mechanic and Crater and a few others,
the leaders of this revolt, they will...
So Luke will probably not ever run a Bitcoin node again.
It will remain on a node doing nothing because it's consistent
and it is not there for profit.
He's not there for money either.
Luke is there for the ideal, and I know him.
And he will probably be cut off of Bitcoin entirely on a technical sense.
And that would be bad for Bitcoin because Luke is an important dissenting voice in Bitcoin.
So Luke is self-cancel, technically.
Maybe other people, like most of the other BIP 110 people, like my friend Knut, my friend
hodl out, I think they will just accept the fact and go back to Bitcoin node.
But then their credibility will be diminished for a while, which is also bad for Bitcoin
because Knut is a freaking good person and a freaking good brain.
And his point, Bitcoin was based on good intentions and it would be reduced in terms of credibility
and commitment.
Both of them, I think both hodl out and Knut, they will just accept the loss and go over
and they say, oh, too bad.
Maybe we'll try again.
But their credibility and their enthusiasm for Bitcoin
will result diminishing,
which I think will be bad for Bitcoin
because they are right on many things,
right to be critics about core,
right to be critics about spam,
and many things they say are right.
So I think the out cut will be bad
because I think the fork will fail.
And by failing,
it will reduce the credibility of what was my camp,
which was fuck spam and fuck core process when it fails for some reasons.
And so, yeah, that's basically my fear.
I cannot change it.
What I can do is voice opposition to that
because at least my credibility and enthusiasm will be unwavering
and I can keep the fight until they recover from the loss.
No one could ever accuse your enthusiasm of wavering, Giacomo.
It's one of the reasons I always appreciate hearing from you.
And I've kept you a little bit long now.
So I want to get you out of here only a little bit late but you Italian so you used to being late I think it fine right yeah they have a cappuccino at 8 p oh oh boy oh my god i gonna have to edit that out that uh that is true blasphemy uh you know uh from from coming from lugano there
uh even though you're not uh not quite in italy you're almost in italy there but uh thank you for
this giacomo this was i'm glad we got a chance i hope that people if you listen to this again we
talked at the very start about debates maybe you change a couple people's minds or at least make
them just think more deeply. It's not that your position that you're holding is necessarily wrong,
but every position could benefit from more nuance. I know I always can try to bring it. And so I
appreciate you coming on here and giving your perspective on this because I think that you have,
again, nobody can doubt your track record in terms of being a crusader against spam for a long time.
Nobody can doubt that. You have the receipts. I've got the receipts. Multiple conferences and
podcasts around the world have the receipts. And so I think people should take what you say
seriously in this regard, because I know that your heart is in the right place. We're both in
agreement that, you know, ordinals are retarded and, you know, spam is retarded. It's just a
question of what's the best way to actually deal with this in a realistic way. And so, yeah, I think
this is, I hope this conversation is helpful for folks out there. I want to thank everybody
who zapped this conversation, 2,349 sats on Noster live streaming this. So thank you guys.
use Bitcoin as money. You can use it as money just by holding it. Yes, that's a store of value,
but Bitcoin is a great medium of exchange too, and you should use it as one. Lightning is not
spam. It's just sending sats in a really good way. So Giacomo, where do you want to send folks?
Where can they find out more about Plan B? CypherTank.org for the show, which they should
definitely go and check out. Where can they go to find out more information about Plan B?
Plan B.network is a vitrina site with a lot of information about the forum, the academy.
so usually it's plan b.something
plan b.academy
there is some free courses
but plan b.network
you use that to go around
to plan b.lugano
local initiatives
cypher tank
and everything else
and you are
you're just at Giacomo Zucco
on X right
for those who want to
follow your rants
and call you a
call you a bad actor
and things like that
please direct all of your
hate mail towards Giacomo
and do whatever
nasty thing you want to do
oh boy
be careful what you wish for man
You got to be careful these days.
Well, Giacomo, this was a pleasure.
Always appreciate it.
I'm going to go have a cappuccino.
It's the afternoon now, so I can finally have a cappuccino.
You enjoy your late night cappuccino.
We'll both be burned at the stake for being blasphemous.
But always good to talk to you, my friend.
Great to see you.
Good company.
See you soon.
Bye.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
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