It's like, oh, we could do anything with quantum because we have like all these multiverses that we're doing calculations in or something.
That's exactly what quantum is not.
On X, in my little echo chamber, at least, people were pretty pissed.
Should a million Satoshi coins hit the market and you find all sorts of private buyers, immediately it would do something like that.
Talk to me a little bit about how Production Ready is seeking to at least be a part of the solution.
Because up until then, from 2011 to 2013, that was the narrative around Bitcoin was it's darknet money.
But that day, that site went down.
People still held it and bought more.
Today on the show, I have Jimmy Song.
We go into a lot of the most hot topics, the most important things that people are discussing today.
We talk about knots versus core, other implementations, BIP-110, BIP-360, and quantum resistance.
And of course, everyone's favorite lately, BIP-361, the potential for freezing Satoshi's coins,
and all of Jimmy's thoughts and takes on all these topics.
And then he's got a great controversial take at the end that I personally like a lot.
I think you'll enjoy this episode.
Hey, everyone.
Like I said in the intro, I have Jimmy Song here with me.
Jimmy, welcome to the Bitcoin Way podcast.
Well, thanks for having me.
I'm excited to talk about all of these things.
So let's start with just your overall view for context on how you think Bitcoin development
should work.
Like, how would it work in a perfect world?
What level of consensus should be reached amongst clubs, node runners, however you define
various groups and stakeholders?
And then we'll jump in and go from there.
Yeah, I mean, I think the ideal is something in the spirit of open source and decentralization. I think that's essentially what we want as a community, because we want Bitcoin to stay decentralized. It's very easy to centralize around something. And, you know, we've seen it with minor centralization, where a handful of pools now control a lot of the hash rate and things like that.
And having that be under control of more people is obviously better because then that's going to make it so that no one really can influence what goes into blocks or does things in a way that the rest of the network might think is kind of bad.
Or even if they do, then other people are there to kind of balance it out and so on.
And we have that in almost every other part of Bitcoin.
You know, no one, there's no central banker or anything like that.
So people more or less do what they want.
There's no censorship around it and you can spend it however way you like.
You don't have to get permission from anybody.
And that's ideal.
That's what makes Bitcoin sound money.
And that's what makes it so powerful.
Development, though, has traditionally been basically like a single entity kind of thing.
And that, I think, has introduced some potential weaknesses.
And in my ideal world, that weakness wouldn't be there.
That wouldn't be an attack surface.
The burden on each developer wouldn't be so high.
Right now, if you screw up as a core dev and, you know, introduce some sort of consensus bug, even against the other versions of core or something like that, it's all on you.
Right. And it can't be easy to sort of coding that way where, you know, any mistake that you make might mean potentially like the ruination of Bitcoin in some significant way, at least far as that software version is concerned.
I think ideally, I would like to see a lot of different implementations with a lot of support where they have different goals.
They're going for different audiences and meeting the different needs of the various types of people that are on the network.
So a merchant has very different needs than a miner, and they have very different needs than an exchange, and that has very different needs than a lightning router.
And, you know, those obviously are different than PLEPS as well.
So you got a lot of different constituencies that want different things.
And ideally, you have multiple implementations that are fairly close from a coding perspective so that they stay in consensus, but have different features around the consensus code that cater to what each group wants.
And, you know, the consensus is reached by those groups and users have a choice and can voice their pleasure or displeasure with any particular implementation by running it or not running it.
And that's, I think, the closest thing that I can think of, right, at least short of some sort of AI based, very customized like software in the far future or something like that, that that sort of meets the goals that we want, which is no single point of failure, a lot of resilience and, you know, people kind of being able to express what they want to the network without being forced into a particular area.
implementation or set of features or anything like that.
In your ideal world, would it be there really is no reference implementation, so to speak,
that people sort of default into and you've got three, four or five, I don't know how many you
think, but just competing implementations that all have 10 or 20 percent market share, so to speak,
because then it would be more fluid for you to say, OK, Luke and the knots camp have no are no
longer meeting the needs that I feel like I have. I'm going to move to what, you know,
older core version or the core's newer version or to what production ready's done like is that sort
of how you would envision it yeah um the the only uh caveat to that would be they would all be um
you know well maintained well tested they wouldn't be experimental or trying to do different things
consensus wise i think we need to be very very careful in making sure that we're not changing
things accidentally or anything like that, which is why I think it needs to be sort of
like a descendant of the Satoshi client to meet that.
I mean, unless one of these other efforts to completely standardize the consensus code
in a very, very rigorous way happens and is agreed to, short of that, I think it needs
to have that as the core of each implementation.
The consensus code is, I mean, if you mess with that, I think it's kind of a non-starter for most people because you're not going to be in consensus with the rest of the network.
So from a bootstrapping standpoint, you kind of need that.
But past that, yeah, I would like to see more implementations that take up a small percentage.
And I think it would like kind of like how mining pools are right now, where one might have 25%, one might have 10%, and a bunch of little ones might have 5% or whatever.
I think that's fine.
Like the percentages don't necessarily have to be equal and there's nothing magical about the number five or anything like that.
just a lot of choices for the users that they can make rationally based on the values that they have
and things that they find worthy and allow them to choose.
So what would your assessment then, I know you've talked about this at length, probably critiques,
but maybe there are some things that you felt like were done well with Core30 that maybe perhaps
aligned with some of what you like to see. And then obviously changes, I think, that you've
probably been critical of and what could they have done differently in your view?
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with what they've done per se. It's just that when you
are the reference implementation and run 90% of the network, the rules are a little different than
in sort of the ideal case scenario that I laid out to you. If this implementation was only like
20% of the network or even 40% of the network and they decided to go this way,
then users clearly have an alternative and say they can go do something else or choose something that is more in alignment with their values.
And that would be OK, right?
Like that's sort of a developer being more opinionated about something and implementations being more opinionated.
That's fine in sort of like a multi-implementation world.
I think where it was a little strange was that they did this in what was, at least at that time, a mono implementation world where the core 30 had to be at least like somewhat decentralized in its development.
If it was one of many, then it would have been fine because you still stay decentralized more or less through federation of different implementations.
But if it's the only one and you ignore the feedback of essentially a significant number of users, then that's where it gets to be kind of a problem.
And that was essentially what happened with the op return change was that there were a significant number of people that did not like the change, but they went through with it anyway.
And again, it's fine if you're like some non-majority percentage of the network, because then the users can vote with their feet, so to speak.
But if they have no choice in the matter, then it's kind of going to blow up in your face.
And it kind of did. It definitely made it so that a lot of people went over to the closest alternative that they had, which was not.
And that was their way of voting with their feet. Now, that's not to say that knots is perfect or whatever. And it's not even to say that these users agreed with everything in knots. It was largely like a protest saying, I don't like this change. And I have no other way to really express that I don't like this change.
Usually consumers, when you're in the market and you want to buy something and you don't like a particular product, they just kind of stop buying it.
That's how you protest.
That wasn't really the case here because there weren't really too many alternatives other than not.
And this is where user feedback into the development cycle is a little lacking.
And that's what this episode, I think, showed to everybody was that, well, how are users supposed to give feedback to the developers on what they want?
Because the minute they did, they said, well, we're overriding this because all the devs within Quora agree that this is a good change.
Therefore, we're going to do it.
And, you know, when they went into the GitHub issues and started commenting, they were like, oh, you guys are brigading.
You're not allowed to do that.
Well, then where else is a user supposed to give feedback on a change that they're not happy about?
How else are they supposed to express that?
And this was kind of the problem that this particular episode revealed was that, okay, well, if the developers are in charge of this implementation, then you need more implementations.
If the users are in charge of the or have at least some voice or say into the implementation, then, yeah, you can at least make the case that the mono implementation is decentralized in that way and that it's taking user feedback into account and so on.
But if it doesn't, then more implementations, I think, are needed. So that's, I think, where the problem of the process around how you decide something, whether it includes user feedback or not, was kind of revealed there.
And I don't think it really did include user feedback.
It was only user feedback of the people that agreed with them.
And if you didn't agree, it was kind of told to you, hey, then don't run this.
But then people went over to Knott's and they started saying, well, then, you know, you
shouldn't run that either because it's bad in this way, in which case people feel kind
of like they're taken hostage, right?
Well, you're giving me the truth.
You're saying go somewhere else if you don't like this change, but not over there.
That feels like you're being forced into a particular direction and people generally do not respond very well to that.
So I think the ship has sailed on a mono implementation sort of world.
And I think the last year has more or less proved that.
And this is why I think there should be more implementations.
And, you know, it needs to be well maintained.
It needs to be well funded.
It needs to have lots of developers.
And that's what we're building at Production Ready.
Yeah.
So I want to get to that in just a minute.
So one question I had for Chris Guida a few weeks ago, I had him on the podcast.
And we were talking about something resembling consensus on these changes.
And admittedly, it can be a challenge.
On X, in my little echo chamber, at least, it seemed like people were pretty pissed.
Yes, you had both sides and everything.
But there was a very broad perspective being a spouse that we don't want this huge migration to Knott's.
I personally run Knott's as the protest you described.
However, I try very hard not to be tribalistic in the things that I do and say, well, I'm a Knott's guy.
I follow Luke and whatever he says.
To what extent should core developers take these conversations to a place like Twitter and maybe Twitter specifically?
But are there other channels that they shouldn't in mediums they should be engaging besides just these chats amongst developers?
Yeah see that I think part of the problem is that in a mono implementation world this needs to happen somewhere right Some dialogue needs to happen somewhere to get the input from the actual community that you purporting to represent But it not happening When it does happen it tends to get very heated and nothing really gets resolved People dig in their heels And next thing you know you have this thing merged in against the protests of a lot of people I don think that the right model I think you need alternative implementations and
you need people voting with their feet instead of yelling at each other. Because in a sense,
software development projects kind of go like this, right? You need some direction. You need
to be opinionated sometimes.
You can't be everything to everybody,
which is essentially what a mono implementation
ends up becoming is you have to be
like a good mining software thing for miners.
You have to be a good exchange software thing for exchanges
and you have to be a good merchant software thing
for merchants and you have to be a good lightning base
for lightning runners and all this other stuff.
And it's kind of doing all of them,
but not anything particularly well.
And that's kind of the situation that you end up in when one piece of software serves all of them. This is why I think it should be more implementations and users shouldn't have to yell. They just, you know, run what they want to run and have more choices along those lines. And if they don't like it, maybe they go and create another implementation, right?
Like that's, I think, the right model to get the right thing.
And if they, you know, mess with this consensus code or whatever, then that's kind of the danger.
And this is where you have to be very careful about preserving the core of, no pun intended, core of the software that you need.
But, you know, like resolving it through X or GitHub issues or, you know, email list discussions or whatever, those don't work that well.
And there's always going to be a hierarchy.
And they're all subject to some sort of civil attack where you can just like brigade things.
And that's kind of the problem, right?
You don't know how many of these people are real, how many of them are not.
And this is, I kind of sympathize with Core on that regard.
Well, like if we just leave this GitHub issue open and let everybody comment, then it's just
going to be a flood of comments.
And how are we going to get anything done?
I kind of get that.
But at the same time, you need to listen to those people.
But how do you listen to those people? And the one model that we have of that working is the free market, where each entrepreneur just sort of guesses and puts out a product that they think that the public might want. And then the public chooses, right? They choose.
And I think that's the only real way to resolve it rather than, oh, you know, we should have a civilized debate with a moderator and, you know, five minutes speaking spot and two minutes over and an unbiased audience and whatever.
Like, that's not going to work.
That's not going to actually reflect the will of the community.
And I think this is where we need to be more realistic about how conversations like this have to go, because you're not going to come to oftentimes you're just not going to come to a consensus on any of that stuff.
Now, personally, I think the default should be whatever the status quo is.
And that should be it in the face of opposition, even of like 20% of the network.
But this is where you have different implementations, try different things, and have them represent different constituencies.
And that's, I think, the way to do it and not sort of arguing on Twitter.
Yeah, I hear you on that.
So talk to me a little bit about how production ready is seeking to at least be a part of the solution.
And just to be clear, I want to maybe give a background on what it is.
My understanding is, and correct me if the framing is wrong, is production ready isn't an implementation per se, but maybe like more like an incubator for developing another or maybe multiple implementations even perhaps.
Is that approximately right?
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
We're a 501c3, much like a lot of the other organizations that fund core developers, for example, like I think Brink and Chaincode.
I don't know if Chaincode is a 501c3, but the idea is that you're the organization that funds the implementation and not the implementation itself.
Now, we're focused on a particular type of implementation that we think the market wants, that a lot of plebs want. Specifically, we want one that is conservative, that is preserving the sound money properties of Bitcoin, rather than any of the other stuff.
So we have an opinion.
And if it were kind of a mono implementation, that's not something that you can sort of credibly do, right?
Because if you're a mono implementation, then you have to sort of take in a lot of the opinions of the entire community and not a specific slice of it that you represent.
So we're aiming to be the sound money, more preserving the properties of money and security and the things that make Bitcoin Bitcoin, essentially, as we believe it to be.
And that be the basis of the implementation.
Now, that generally means that we want to reject anything that doesn't have consensus.
Right. We want to be like the conservative one, the one that the implementation that businesses, for example, are comfortable running because it's it's not doing anything controversial.
It's not, you know, like doing anything until it has consensus.
So the 80 byte op return is like a clear one that has a lot of conflict and doesn't have consensus.
So we'll just keep it at whatever the default was, which is 80 bytes.
And similarly, BIP-110 doesn't have consensus yet either, right?
Like if it did have consensus, yeah, then you implement it.
But if it doesn't, then you just go with what the default is, which is no BIP-10 or BIP-110.
So that's essentially the type of implementation that we want to make.
But I think more importantly, there needs to be more implementations for user choice, like I explained before.
And the current dynamics are of essentially two implementations.
And you can kind of see it online, see it everywhere.
And a lot of the vitriol that's thrown by one side to the other is very indicative of that.
You get like a very big polarization of the user base where only the people that are extremely on one side or the other are the voices that are heard.
I believe that most people are in the middle, but they don't really have a place to go at the moment.
They're like, I don't want any of this drama.
I just want something in the middle.
I think, you know, American politics is very similar, right, where a lot of people are either on the left or the right.
People in the middle don't get any voice.
Right. And they're kind of forced to choose.
And, you know, people say this all the time, like, I have to choose between the lesser of two evils or something.
And that's kind of the social dynamic that happens when you have sort of a bipolar power dynamic. I explained this in my article, The Third Way. When you have a third implementation, things change drastically. Because in a bipolar power dynamic, what ends up happening is that you define yourself by what you're against less than what you are for.
And you see this in politics right now. Democrats are mostly the party of not Trump. And Trumpists or the people on the right are the party of non-woke. You define yourself as being against something rather than for something.
Once you have three or more, what happens is that you start having to tell people what you are actually for. And being against something, yeah, that's part of your belief system, but it's not actually that in alignment with your values necessarily.
And that's why people say I'm choosing the lesser of two evils, because nothing really aligns with them.
But they're forced to choose, you know, like either one candidate or the other based on sort of like a very polarized and power dynamic where you're voting less for something and more against something else.
But with three or more, you start getting that dynamic where you have to define what you're actually for.
What do you want? Right.
What are you trying to solve for?
What are you optimizing for?
What values do you have that I can either support or not support?
And I think that's a much healthier place for the entire ecosystem to be instead of telling people I'm against this or I'm against this.
Or, you know, I'm not going to run knots because, you know, I think Luke is crazy.
I'm not going to run CORE because I think they're a bunch of DEI people or something like that.
I mean, they might be legit reasons.
I don't know.
But to me, they're not really technical reasons, right?
They're not the best reasons.
You want good technical reasons to run a node.
And I think that's where you want to place the chooser is saying, OK, well, that is a node that reflects my values and my understanding of Bitcoin and what I want in an implementation instead of that's not.
Therefore, I am going to go with this one. And, you know, ideally, you have more than three.
So you have more choices to do that. But the minimum to achieve this is three.
And unfortunately, there have been a lot of different attempts at different implementations. And this has been going on for a very long time. LibBitcoin, I think, was, I don't know, created in 2012 or 2013 or something like that.
It's a very old project, and it's another implementation of Bitcoin written in C++, I think originally by Amir Taki, now maintained by Eric Bosco.
But they've been working on it for that long.
But you look at the nodes on the network that are actually running LibBitcoin, it's not that many.
It's like a handful.
And the reason is because they don't want to take the risk, right?
What if it has a bug?
What if it has a consensus bug?
You might fork off and you might lose out on a bunch of money.
What if it goes down?
What if there's a DOS vector?
What if it accepts a block that it's not supposed to, that the rest of the network rejects, right?
Like there are all kinds of risks associated with running a lot of this stuff.
And that's like the oldest one.
There's so many more newer ones, right?
BTCD was like 2014 or 2015.
Bitcoin was like 2016.
there's a bunch of other ones that I can't even remember
that are written in Haskell or Rust or whatever.
There are new ones being created by core devs right now
that are kind of sick of core,
but they want to make an alternate implementation.
And they're saying, we're going to do it from scratch.
We're going to write it in straight C or Rust or whatever.
And I think those, I get the sentiment around it.
They want to give users choice.
And I applaud their intention,
But I don't think it's going to work because none of the other stuff has worked.
Right. And it's been over 10 years.
And like LitBitcoin actually was created fairly early in Bitcoin's history, yet still no one runs it.
And it doesn't have that hardening.
It's not software that people feel confident running.
Whereas having a descendant of the Satoshi client, of the reference client, I think is better because you're not asking people to run sort of like experimental software, essentially, with their money.
Instead, you're asking them, OK, well, it's just a few modifications that you're going to agree with that that we want you to run.
And this is going to make things easier and better for you in these ways.
And you make the argument to them that way. And I think that that's the way to go.
And I think that's that's where it needs to be. And that's what we've been arguing as a nonprofit org that, you know, new implementations need to be.
And this is why people run NOTS and not Bitcoin or BTCD, right?
Like that's because, you know, most of the code is actually similar to Bitcoin Core and you're not going to go out of consensus with them.
And it has a lot of those that hardening and patches and so on.
And we think that's what needs to happen.
So, yeah, that's where we are.
And hopefully where more implementations come in.
Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense.
So you've got this issue of there are other implementations and people have tried with good intention and it's just never gotten any traction.
And I do not say this condescendingly.
I think this is an important thing.
Is the solution to that firepower, marketing, more capital to fund in order to give people the awareness, the confidence that they need to actually make the shift from core or from knots into whatever implementation is that you all develop?
For our implementation, I think a lot of it is just time. And this is the thing about a lot of software is you need some hardening time. And the reason why LibBitcoin, BTCD, Bitcoin and many others have not gained traction, I think is because they can't solve this chicken or egg problem.
You need adoption to get hardening, but you're not going to get hardening until you get adoption.
So you're always trying to get adoption and you're not able to do that because there's not enough hardening.
People don't trust it. It won't be worthy of trust until it's got a lot of adoption and it's gone through many cycles of bug fixing and things like that.
With our implementation, I think we solved that by becoming a descendant of the Bitcoin reference implementation.
the original Satoshi client. But there is still this aspect of, you know,
having a really good development team, having a history. And the history is the most important
thing because you can't replace Father Time, right? Like if the reason why people run Core
right now is because it's been running for 17 years and it's been hardened against every kind
of attack and it had to suffer many different kinds of bugs and things like that that have been corrected essentially And that very valuable And it has sort of this history And it been releasing on a six
cadence for a very long time. It's been battle-tested, people mine with it, it works. And
that's kind of where you want to be as an implementation as well, is you want that history,
But it takes time. So it's not just a matter of a six month marketing blitz. That's not going to work. What's going to work is a five to 10 year horizon where you've been pushing something for however long. Maybe there's a bug that's in one and not the other.
and you show through your software development process
and through time proving that it's actually hardened and stable and usable
that this is something worth running.
And that's the only real way to gain credibility
in the software development space is by doing that
and not by, hey, go run this and putting ads out on DraftKings app or something.
Right. Like that's that's not how you do do software development.
And that's you shouldn't expect people to trust you just because you have an ad somewhere.
You should expect people to trust you because you're trustworthy.
And and that means having good development, the developers, good development process, having really good testing frameworks, you know, continuous integration, documentation, you know, test harnesses and all that stuff.
All the good development processes that software developers know, good code review, all of those things should be a part of the organization or of the implementation.
And once you have that and have had that for a long time, that's when you really start getting traction.
And I can't tell you right now, I would be a little scared, honestly, if day one we had like 30% of all nodes.
Right. Like the day we release a new client, we instantly get 30 percent.
I would be a little scared because honestly, you want people to be a little more skeptical of new implementations.
And you don't want everyone to be first doctors.
You want you want it to sort of grow slowly as it gets a reputation for being rock solid and, you know, good to run and doesn't have all these bugs or whatever.
And then as that reputation grows, you get more and more of the user base.
And ideally, you get multiple of these where there's a bunch of implementations that do similar things.
And that ultimately ends up becoming part of the ecosystem that users have a real legitimate choice to make.
Do you have like an ETA yet on when a production ready funded implementation could be out or in beta or how's that looking?
Yeah, we don't have a timeline per se, but my hope is that by the end of the year, we would have something.
Yeah, I just have no concept of how long these things take.
But and I know like the bulk of the code base is sort of already there.
But then I guess determining what are those adjustments, modifications is probably.
And you want to add value to, right?
Like you don't want to be just like something that that's like a protest vote.
Right. You don't you don't want to be the Joe Jorgensen.
Right. Like you want to be actually something that people can get behind and say, yeah, that's what we want.
That that is something that I've been looking for in the market.
And those are my values or whatever.
That's what you want people to have rather than, hey, like this is only useful to make core pissed off or whatever.
It's I'm running this because this is actually valuable to me.
And I want to do this because it's in alignment with my values and what I find valuable about Bitcoin.
That's that's where we want to be, not just like kind of a protest vote.
I think that's good. So real quick, you mentioned BIP-110.
Maybe give like a real high level overview. What is it?
And then your personal opinion and then how that might apply in what you're working on.
Yeah, so BIP-110 is like a set of seven changes that are essentially there to reduce spam.
And it's done at a consensus level instead of at the relay policy level, which the op return change was at.
And this was based on, I think it was Portland HODL's post on the mailing list about, let's fix it at the right level.
It shouldn't be done at the policy level.
It should be done at the consensus level.
That was his argument. And I guess Dave and Ohm took that and found seven different ways in which
spammer spam, and he wanted these to be a soft work, a temporary soft work to prevent those
accepted into consensus for one year. I guess that's like 52,500 blocks or something. So that's
the idea behind it. It's to quote unquote, rug the spammers and make them not feel welcome.
but at the same time, like revert everything afterwards so that if it's a temporary software
and it manages to kick out a bunch of spammers, then afterwards, you know, like there's no real
harm other than like a year of not being able to create those or something like that.
Now, personally, I get the idea behind it, but not comfortable with it until it has consensus.
Like the idea of changing the protocol to make it unfriendly to spammers, I get, I get.
And but I think like for me, the bar is higher before you accept changes like that.
But, you know, at the same time, I'm still kind of curious, like what what happens with a software like this, where what's the game theory around the canon intolerant minority make something happen?
Because this is very important for the future of Bitcoin, whether or not an intolerant minority can do something like that and what the mitigations might be and so on.
So there's a bunch of things like that, which I'm curious about. But as far as production ready is concerned, I think it's more or less until it gets consensus, I think it stays out of the client. And if it has consensus, then fine. Like that's easy enough to go and add into it.
But without it, then I don't like being a conservative implementation.
It would be against the values that we're espousing.
Let's talk a little bit about quantum.
I'm sure everyone else is somewhat tired of the quantum conversation.
However, it's an important one because it's brought up so much, whether you think it's a problem or not.
To what extent do you believe quantum is a realistic threat to Bitcoin?
And is there some time horizon that you say yes versus no that is meaningful in this context?
I don't think it's a real threat.
And I say this because they still haven't factored the number six without cheating, right?
Like that's the most basic thing that you could be doing with a quantum computer that's actually useful for cryptography is factoring the number six using Shor's algorithm.
And Shor's algorithm is a very, it's a quantum only algorithm that works by doing certain things and doing a Fourier transform and seeing the wavelength and waiting for a particular thing to show up and then observing that and then being able to factor a number based on that.
It hasn't done it for the number six without cheating. They did it for 15 with some cheating. They haven't been able to do it for any other number.
And at least in my reading of all the literature that I've looked through, and very few people that talk about quantum, by the way, actually read the actual papers that it's based on, or at least the physics that's required to make it work.
And I find that very curious, right?
Like the people that are shouting from the rooftops or saying something about qubits and error rate and whatever.
It's like, well, what's the actual thing underneath, right?
Like what's a quantum manipulable form of matter that you're talking about?
They can't answer you, right?
Because they don't know.
They have no idea.
They just read the press release from whatever quantum lab director that put out the release,
whose job, by the way, depends on putting out press releases exactly like that,
that to make it seem like it's inevitable so that his job is justified and he can get a raise even.
Yet those people do not know anything about it.
So vast majority of people talking about like quantum as if it's inevitable or is imminent, they're completely ignorant of the reality underneath.
In other words, they're midwits, right?
Like they're the people that think they know way more than they do just because they read a TechCrunch article on it instead of the actual underlying papers.
If you look at the underlying papers, if you look at what the physicists are saying, well, you find out a few different things.
For example, there's not just one type of quantum computer.
There's like seven or eight.
Now, you might say, oh, that means that there are seven or eight times more probability that it'll happen.
Actually, no.
What it means is that none of them work.
That's why they keep trying new ones.
there's like a super cool semiconductor and there's like trapped ion and photon based and
all this other stuff and essentially what they're trying to do is come up with a manipulable form of
quantum states where you can you can manipulate the quantum state in a in a direct way and then
at the end do the observation so that you can do the actual compute stuff and it turns out that
most of them don't work. They decohere very quickly. Almost anything quantum has a very
short lifespan. It's not going to stay in that state for very long. And if you do any observation
whatsoever, and this is the nature of quantum mechanics, if you know anything about it, is
once you make one observation of an entire complex system, everything else becomes fixed around it.
The whole idea of quantum is that they're kind of in superpositional states and you observe the right thing.
But if it leaks, then it doesn't work. So, you know, these things decohere, right?
Like they stop being uncertain and become certain at some point, in which case you've lost all that, you know, supposed compute power that you could have had or whatever.
It's just kind of gone. And you can only manipulate it so many times before it decoheres, which is why they haven't factored the number six without cheating yet, because there's a fixed number of operations that you can do.
Each operation is called the quantum gate, and they actually manipulate the quantum states in some way.
And there's only so many you can do before they decohere.
So you just don't have time.
On a classical computer, you just have a circuit that goes on.
Even if the circuits are relatively big, you just build a really big one, and it solves itself.
with quantum it's you you have a you can't do anything about the decoherence you just have like
a fixed amount of time this and this is an engineering reality that they nobody has solved
this is why they haven't factored the number six so when i hear stuff like it's imminent and this
is going to happen or whatever they're almost all from rent seekers of quantum right there's a lot
of jobs around quantum. If you're in a quantum lab, your job depends on quantum being imminent
or at least plausible. If you're a quantum computing PhD or a professor or anybody in
that field, you're a rent seeker. And you can't admit, it is impossible for you to admit that
this is leading nowhere. Instead, you have physicists that are making all of these critiques
and putting out papers.
And there's a hilarious paper by this one physicist
that talks about how almost every quantum experiment
that they put out in these press releases
is the equivalent of getting a dog to bark three times.
That's all it is.
That's how hard it is.
It's getting a dog to bark three times.
That's essentially what they've done.
That's amazing.
And it's like, okay, that doesn't sound like
it's actually that much effort.
And they've been saying it's 10 years away for 40 years now.
What gives?
And, you know, like you kind of come out on the other end thinking this through from first principles, saying maybe the incentives aren't aligned here for the truth.
It's more for hype than everything else.
And I honestly think that's where it is.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are sort of taken in by that.
Oh, Google said this or whatever.
And it's like, yeah, it's their quantum lab, right?
That said this.
It's them that put out the press release.
If they said we got zero results and we don't think a quantum computer is viable for the next hundred years, do you think they're going to get any more funding?
I don't think so.
Like Google would cut them the next day, right?
Like it's like we're not in it for a hundred years.
What's the point of doing that?
But that's kind of where they are.
And this has been the case with a lot of technology, which has a lot of hype around it.
And, you know, this was like, for example, the hype around cold fusion, right, in the 90s and early 2000s and so on.
A lot of people got into, OK, how can we do fusion or cold fusion?
Right. And they got funding. They got people to give them money.
They had labs and all this other stuff. They still can't do like normal fusion.
Right. Like anywhere. They're not even close.
And any of the scientists that are actually working on that, they're like, yeah, it's not happening in my lifetime.
And 30 years ago, I thought it was 10, 20 years away.
And you get to the reality of it and vast majority of the time it doesn't work.
So like my rule of thumb regarding technology that gets hype is that it's almost never going to come from that direction.
Right. When you get an innovation, it's almost always like almost accidental.
Right. It's like penicillin.
It was mold that they were going to throw away and they noticed that there was like no bacteria growing around it or something like that It almost accidental and serendipitous that such discoveries are made where good things come out And it almost never research scientists that advance it
It's almost always engineers that accidentally discover it or find out, hey, this works.
I don't know why, but we know this works and we're just going to keep doing it.
And that's usually how innovation is done and not through this very weird, obscure or hyped kind of way.
If you don't believe me, go read the story of the Wright brothers.
These were two bicycle mechanics, engineers that did all kinds of experiments, tried all kinds of different stuff.
Nobody even believed them when they said we could do flight.
And at the same time, there were all these government and industry funded think tanks to come up with ways for people to fly in the air and stuff like that.
They all failed miserably, completely miserably.
And then the Wright brothers come out of a garage in Ohio and say, we're going to fly for 30 minutes in the air in France because nobody in the U.S. believes us.
And they did it, showed everybody.
And as far as anyone could tell, it came out of nowhere, right?
That's how real innovation happens, not this quantum lab says it's 20 years away.
That's not how things happen.
That's a completely wrong model of scientific progress and how things work.
I love that explanation.
And I think that'll put a lot of people who we talk to work with at the Bitcoin Way at
ease because we get a lot of questions about it.
So I think I know where we're headed then with some of these other topics.
I briefly want to touch on. The first one is BIP360. So in spite of everything you said,
is there a justification for quantum resistance in the Bitcoin protocol or is it just literally
who cares? I mean, I suppose it's OK to have something in store in case it's imminent or
something like that. And against all of my and believe me, I could be wrong, right? Like somebody
could come up with something and I might be eating crow tomorrow or whatever. In which case,
I'm happy to do that. If that happens, great. Now, having something ready is fine. Doing it
without any proof that there is anything close, like them factoring the number six without cheating,
that seems kind of ridiculous to me. Activating it or confiscating coins or doing something
for your own good, I am completely against. And I think that way lies madness and centralization
and fiatization of Bitcoin. Yeah. So I had Hunter Beast on the podcast several months back,
and we talked about BIP360. And to be fair, I was barely, if at all, keeping up with what we
were talking about. But I think it is an interesting conversation. And I think I tend
to agree with you that having people thinking about this, working on it makes sense. If for
no other reason than if there are people who are reading the Wall Street Journal or the New York
Times and they think there's this butt around it, if we're armed with something that we can say,
hey, look, this is not a problem we're unfamiliar with. It's not going to happen. But if it does,
we're ready. On its surface, do you have any issues with BIP 360 specifically, besides not
activating it, but just having it on the sidelines? Is there anything you see in the way that it
operates that you're aware of? I want to quibble with you a little bit on that logic of putting the
Wall Street Journal reader at ease because they're too stupid to understand that quantum is this,
like they're unwilling to think from first principles or whatever. I mean, I think everyone
gets in at the price they deserve if they get out of Bitcoin because of quantum fraud, or if they get
into Bitcoin because the supposed quantum FUD is relieved or whatever, I think that's really
rewarding the wrong thing. You want people that understand stuff from a first principles level and
not from authority. That's kind of what we're trying to get away from in Bitcoin is verifying
not trust. And I guarantee you, everyone that is spreading quantum FUD has not verified whatsoever.
Right. Like they they haven't read any of these papers or don't understand the difficulty of the physics and things like that.
And, you know, the few people that have like Scott Aronson was the one I think he's like a quantum cheerleader slash scientist that's been saying, hey, you know, Bitcoin, you should really think about like having some post-quantum signature scheme or whatever.
but even him like you you look at his career he's he's this is his entire career is doing stuff in
quantum i think the byline on his blog is if you understand nothing else from quantum it's not doing
exponential things in linear time that's not what it is right which is how people understand quantum
in the popular imagination for some reason it's like oh we could do anything with quantum because
you know we we we have like all these multiverses that we're doing calculations in or something
And that's exactly what quantum is not. And unfortunately, a lot of people have complete misunderstandings because most people don't understand quantum computing at all. So they kind of make up stuff based on their limited understanding of it. And that's kind of where this discourse is. It's crazy people talking about crazy ideas.
and they don't, or it's not even crazy people.
It's midwits talking about crazy ideas
that they don't understand.
Like if that's what causes people to not buy Bitcoin,
I'm totally okay with that
because that leaves a lot of room for people
that are actually a little more practical
and evidence-based and verify and not trust get into it.
And I'd rather have those people in Bitcoin
rather than the Wall Street Journal bro
that's going to sell in six months
when some other fund comes around.
That's a fair point.
I think where my bias is,
I think about friends and family
who I've desperately tried to get into Bitcoin.
I don't think there's anyone in my life
who's been like, well, hey, what about this FUD?
Like they're not reading the FUD.
They just don't take time to do the verify,
don't trust on what Bitcoin is
and don't understand that there's a whole rabbit hole
you can go down.
But I hear you on that.
So then I know, I think approximately
what your answer is going to be,
but I do want to finish off here with BIP 361.
Why don't you tee us up?
What exactly is it proposing and what's your position on?
That's the one with the quantum freeze, right?
Like that's freezing all pay to put key outputs.
So their big fear, and I think this comes from maybe Keynesian economics or belief that if Satoshi's coins were somehow released, that it would ruin the Bitcoin economy or something like that, is that quantum computers would take all of Satoshi's coins and spread them all over or whatever.
Now, the thing that they're really fearing is that if and these are the Potoshi coins, early mine coins that are all in pay to pub key addresses, which would then be quantum vulnerable, supposedly, and could be spent with without the private key or have the private key relatively quickly computed and then done something about.
Now, if they do that and the million or so Potoshi coins go into the market, their big fear is that it'll crash the price.
That's really what they're fearing. Ultimately, that's what they're fearing.
It's not that they're stealing coins from Satoshi because if Satoshi is alive and moves the coins, then whatever.
But there might be an extra million Bitcoins that are in the supply that may get dumped or whatever.
And I think that's kind of the wrong motive here.
and it's based on bad economics, you have no idea what that would do. Their assumption is,
well, there's going to be a million extra supply. That means that the price is going to crash.
First of all, how do you know that the people taking those coins are going to sell immediately?
It's in their interest to get the best price for it as well. How do you know that they're not going
to sell to a private buyer that's been waiting for a large chunk of coins anyway? Why are you
so afraid of that? Should those move and it not cause a crash, I actually think the price would go
up massively because now there's no uncertainty about those coins anymore, right? It's all been
spent. It's all gone to some other people. And even if it crashes after the crash, it might go
up on a huge bull run because, okay, well, there it is. There's no unknown supply of Bitcoin that's
suddenly going to flood the market. And all that we feared actually came to pass and it wasn't that
bad. It's an economic assumption at the end of the day. And I think it's based on sort of like
very simplistic economic thinking. You have no idea what's going to happen. And I'll tell you a
story from 2013, obviously early days or whatever. And this was after March when it crashed from 266
down to like $50. And then it went up and down all summer. And we were just kind of like, what is
going on? Is it ever going to go back up again? And I was in some chats with people and one guy
was saying, well, you know, like it might not come back because, you know, it's kind of like
a darknet currency. And if the government shuts that down, then, you know, it's going to be over.
And lo and behold, like October 1st, 2013, Ross Ulbrich is arrested and the FBI seizes
the Silk Road website. And that day it did a mini crash and then it went up.
Now what happened? That was the day that the darknet money narrative died. Because up until
then, from 2011 to 2013, that was the narrative around Bitcoin was it's darknet money. It is only
used by drug users. It's used by ransomware hackers and people like that. But that day,
that site went down, people still held it and bought more. And it went up. And from October 1st
to I think late November, seven, eight weeks, something like that, went on one of the best
bull runs in Bitcoin history. It went from $100 low that day to $1,100 by the end of it. And that
was the peak of that. And what had happened was that that narrative died and it caused the bull
run. Now, I think if and I this is like speculation on speculation. So and it's kind of I believe it
will be a counterfactual anyway. But should a million Satoshi coins hit the market and you find
all sorts of private buyers, maybe China comes in and privately buys the million Bitcoins,
immediately it would do something like that because it would no longer be just savings for
people, it would immediately become like savings for governments. Or if it doesn't crash that much,
or if there are private buyers or whatever, I really don't think you need to fear that.
And that's essentially what BIP 361 is. It's fearing that these coins get dumped into the
market. Oh, no, my bags are worth less and that sucks or whatever. No, that's not it at all.
I don't think you understand how complex this is.
It's not a simplistic equation of you add a million coins into every exchange and now
everybody's going to lose money.
That's not how it's going to happen.
That's like a very simplistic first order analysis.
There are many, many more orders of analysis.
And there's great reason to believe that it would do the opposite of what you think it
will.
I think that's an interesting thesis.
And for me, it's a non-starter that it's a violation of private property rights.
But the fact that it's based on the FUD that you've just outlined very well in the last few minutes, I think, makes it all the more interesting that people would even take this seriously.
Let's head for home here.
I told you I was going to ask you this.
I don't know if you had came up with anything, but what is an unpopular opinion that you have?
And you get bonus points if you offend some Bitcoiners with it.
Christ is king.
That's a good one.
You're not going to offend me with that, man.
You will offend some, though.
I see these debates every once in a while on X.
All right.
I'll go one further.
Bitcoin is Christian money.
How's that?
Okay.
That will offend even more people.
I think you nailed it, Jimmy.
Jimmy, hey, this has been a blast, man.
I think we really did cover a lot of ground in 60 minutes.
So thank you for your time.
It's been a blast talking with you.
Why don't you tell people where they can follow you, read your stuff.
You get a great newsletter and then learn about more, more about production ready as well.
Yeah.
So my website is jimmysong.org and you can find, you know, you can go subscribe to my
newsletter there and lightning and things like that.
And you can find all my other socials there on X.
I'm Jimmy Song and I have a YouTube show and all that stuff.
Production ready is at productionready.org.
And we're looking for both developers and donations.
If you are interested in either, please use the contact us form there.
I promise I read every single one.
And even if you haven't contributed to core before and,
and you're a developer and you're interested, I have ways to train you up.
And, you know, we're, we're trying different things than perhaps core is.
So yeah. Give us a shout.
Thank you, Jimmy. Really appreciate your time today.
Take care.
And I'd love to have you back if we have any more of these controversies that
we need to run through at some point in the future.
All right. Thank you.
Cheers, man.
And that's a wrap. Again, hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jimmy.
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