Hey, hey, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix. I'm your host, Cedric Youngelman.
This episode is brought to you by MicroSeed, the Bitcoin self-custody maximalist.
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seed phrase in metal. In this episode, I chat with Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer and educator
that has been a driving force in Bitcoin for over a decade. Jimmy's contributed to Bitcoin Core.
He's authored five books on Bitcoin, served as an expert witness and invested in numerous Bitcoin
companies, and he's not afraid to call out the system for its moral failings. Today, we dive deep
into the current debates surrounding Bitcoin node implementations, particularly Notts versus Core.
We also get into the political undercurrents around Bitcoin core development, funding models,
decentralization theater, and the question on everyone's mind, is Bitcoin under attack from
within. If you're curious about who runs Bitcoin, why no diversity matters, and what's really at
stake in the Relay Wars, this rips for you. If you want to get in touch with me, it's Cedric
at thebitcoinmatrix.com. And now, let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with Bitcoin professor Jimmy Song.
What is real? How do you define real? You can't jump into cash.
Cash is trash.
What do you do?
You get out.
Jimmy Song is a Bitcoin developer, educator, and entrepreneur.
His mission is to bring sound money to the world.
Jimmy has authored five books about Bitcoin.
Let's just say Jimmy Song is well-versed in Bitcoin.
Jimmy knows the protocol, technical details,
economics behind it, the industry, and the people.
Jimmy has served as an expert witness in various contexts
and has taught and advocated for Bitcoin for the last 11 years.
Jimmy is also an open source programmer,
having worked on many different Bitcoin-related projects, including Bitcoin Core.
Jimmy Song is an entrepreneur, having worked at many different startups.
He's currently an investor and advisor to many different Bitcoin companies.
Jimmy is also a Christian, and a lot of his work is explaining the immorality of the current monetary system.
Jimmy is also advocating or advancing the cause of Bitcoin through political lobbying efforts.
Jimmy Song, welcome back to the Bitcoin Matrix for the fourth time.
How are you?
I'm doing well. I'm doing well. That's a pretty long intro, man. I figured you would shrink it a little bit, but that was like two minutes of like, oh, okay. Yeah, I guess I do do that stuff.
You have done all that stuff. And I think it's kind of pertinent to the conversation that I'm hoping we can get into here, specifically about Nots vs. Core, but really about Bitcoin, where Bitcoin has come from, where it is, and not so much where it's going.
But let's maybe talk about reference clients and nodes.
Like, does it matter what kind of node you run?
Well, it depends what you mean by matter.
It matters for what, right?
So, of course, like, they're different clients.
So, of course, there are differences.
And, you know, what you run matters if you care about those differences or not.
I mean, generally what people run the Node software for is the determining factor for why you would run one software or the other.
So, for example, Knots has some really nice knobs.
If you're a miner and you want to sort of tweak your block templates and things like that, there's like a nice UI for that and stuff like that.
So it makes more sense maybe to run NOTS if you're going to be mining and creating your block templates and, you know, mining, you know, using Datum and doing stuff like that.
If, on the other hand, you want the latest security patches and things like that and make sure it's not going to go offline because you're using it as the backend for some lightning routing node or something like that, then maybe LND or Bitcoin Core is better.
It really depends because there are a lot of differences.
But honestly, between Notts and Core, they're probably the two most similar in terms of the code base and things like that.
They're both based off of Core, right?
Notts is a branch of Core.
Luke maintains it.
He's been a Core contributor for a very long time.
You know, he just disagrees, I think, with the peer-to-peer relay part of it, which is honestly what a lot of the more recent, the recent controversy has been about.
It's about relay policy.
There are sort of like rational things for a node runner to consider, you know, like bandwidth and so on that you're going to be using, whether you want to participate in the relaying of certain kinds of transactions and so on, you know, versus doing it and not.
And certain rules or defaults have been changed.
So those things are maybe relayed by default in Core V30 that weren't in Core V29.
There's been some backporting of like sub-Satoshi per VByte transactions and so on.
So there's a lot of reasons along the relay stuff.
But mostly I think what people run nodes for is so that they can verify their own transactions,
you know not have to rely on a block explorer or something like that and not have to trust somebody
right that that's sort of a core ethos of bitcoin and that's essentially what it's there for yeah i
think that's really important to kind of define what is the core purpose and just kind of verify
your own transactions and then there's all these probably other things you could do around that
and have trade-offs and sort of things like that i don't know maybe it's akin to kind of like
driving different cars like a Toyota or a Honda. You know, you
still have to drive the car, the car still serves the same
purpose, but they do a little bit different things, but a lot of
the same things. What is relay policy? What is relay policy,
maybe verse consensus?
So consensus is what is allowed to go into a block. So you can
have like a four megabyte inscription that's in a witness
field in one transaction that is perfectly legal within Bitcoin as a consensus rule.
But it is not something that is relayed by policy.
And the reason for that difference or policy is a different layer, in other words.
So consensus is what goes into a block.
Policy is what your node is willing to relay.
So you'll hear about different transactions like a 4-megabyte inscription transaction, for example, but you're not necessarily going to relay it.
And part of that is for very reasonable purposes, like you don't want to be spamming the connections that you have with 4-megabyte transactions.
transactions, right? If you get a lot of them, especially if there's like RBF or something,
then it's entirely possible that you're kind of DDoSing your peers, in which case they'll ban you
and things like that. You want to stay connected to the network. So there are reasons like that.
There are other reasons like up until more recently, you had transactions creating outputs
that were less than 546 satoshis for pay to pub key hash.
And they come up with these like sort of limits
because it's not economic to spend them, right?
So if you have a 546 satoshi output for pay to pub key hash,
the amount of money that you'd have to spend
in order to include that into a transaction
is probably more than 546 satoshis.
So it really doesn't make sense to create outputs like that.
So to minimize sort of abuse of the UTXO set, you know, there's a rule like that.
There's also up until recently, there was a rule about, you know, how much fee you have to pay for a transaction to relay.
You know, it's perfectly legal, for example, to have a zero fee transaction that goes into a block.
right like a miner is hoping to make money but they don't have to right you can you can't have
zero fee uh transactions but those don't get relayed because they you know they're they're
you can kind of create them infinitely right like especially with rbf and stuff like that you can
create as many of those as you want and it's not going to hurt you any especially if it's coming
back to your own address and that's another way in which you can ddos other nodes uh is and you
You know, it seemed one sat per satoshi was for one satoshi per vbyte was the limit for a very long time because it was very cheap, considered very cheap.
And it's only over the summer that we got sub satoshi per vbyte transactions, which are even cheaper.
And in a sense, they don't really make a lot of economic sense to include.
In fact, like Mara pool actually decided, OK, we're not going to go all the way down to 0.1 sat per V byte.
We're only going to go to 0.5 because it doesn't we've done the math and it doesn't make sense given the stale block risk and things like that.
So, you know, consensus is what can go into a block, what's legal to go into a block.
You know, policy is what every node has with respect to what they're willing to relay.
And yeah, I mean, that's part of the controversy is should the policy for every node be the same or not?
Because, you know, it sort of determines what kind of goes into blocks.
So, you know, do we want that to reflect what goes into blocks or not?
And, you know, that obviously has a lot to do with spam.
Do we want certain kinds of transactions to go in or not?
And even if we could prevent certain kinds of transactions, won't they morph to something else and so on?
So there's a bunch of issues around policy, largely because the peer-to-peer network ends up becoming the way for most transactions to get into the blockchain.
So despite the fact that the consensus allows a bigger range of transactions to get in, most transactions that get in are very much within this standardness restriction.
So you do see non-standard transactions get into blocks once in a while, but those are a tiny minority.
Vast majority are standard.
What are the benefits or optimizations or efficiencies that come from maybe a more homogenous relay policy amongst nodes?
And I don't know if that leads to – would that be a more homogenous mempool?
And what would be the benefits of maybe all the nodes kind of – let's say pretend there's a very – there's only 100 transactions that want to get in at a given point in time.
and all nodes are going to really work with the same 50 or 60
if the policy is really similar across all of them.
What would be the benefit of that?
Well, the main benefit would be that you'd have faster block propagation.
So there's something called compact block relay,
which was, I think, introduced in, I want to say, like 2016 or something like that.
But every time a miner finds a block,
It can be anywhere from a few hundred bytes to like four megabytes, I guess.
But if it's fairly large, pushing that to the entire network can take a little bit of time.
And if it takes like 10 seconds for it to percolate through the network,
then that's 10 seconds that somebody else can find the same block that would compete with it,
in which case you have what's called stale block risk.
So if you're having to compete with some other block and then it gets built on that other block, then you kind of lose your reward.
So miners are naturally incentivized to get their blocks out there fast.
And this is this this is something that we've tried to solve for because a lot of miners were mining, for example, empty blocks sometimes because it has no it percolates through the network very quickly and so on.
But, you know, we came up with this thing called compact block relay, which instead of sending the entire block at once, you send sort of like, you know, here's how the block is constructed.
And it's already transactions that you've heard of. So you can sort of use your CPU a little bit to reconstruct the block.
And then you can you can check that instead of using this very valuable bandwidth and latency that that comes along with it.
And then you can do the same thing. And it turns out that it's significantly faster, right? Instead of 10 plus seconds, it takes a couple seconds, something like that. And that ends up being reasonably good for preventing stale blocks.
So instead of getting like one stale block a day, you get like maybe one stale block every two weeks and stuff like that.
So it ends up being very useful from a network perspective, like the blocks being transmitted quicker means that, you know, there's more finality and and things like that, which which we all like, because, you know, if it's in one block and not the other, then, you know, you have to wait until one wins and all this other stuff.
So it ends up being useful at a network level, at a global level to have, I guess, similar mempools for everybody and sort of the ability to not transmit as much and still get the block.
So that would be the main benefit.
I guess maybe in layman terms at a really high level, it's something like because I've already relayed these transactions when the block is solved, they can send me less information because it's already kind of in my cache or something like that.
Yeah, it's in your mempool, right?
And you need to take them out of your mempool because it's part of the block anyway.
So it ends up being a lot more efficient.
So it becomes a better feedback loop kind of.
Yeah or better I mean you reduce latency essentially because you like you said transmitting less information And it multiplies very fast right Because it goes from the miner who mined it to all its connected nodes and then all its connected nodes
and all its connected nodes.
If each of those takes longer,
then you get sort of like a cascading delay.
But if all of those are faster,
then you get sort of like a multiplier effect
in how quickly it percolates.
There's probably all sorts of maybe second
and third order benefits around prediction markets or futures or just being able to sort of,
you know, if there's this many transactions that are in the mempool, and we all have a similar mempool,
you can probabilistically say the next mind block would be these transactions over those because they have more fees.
And, you know, yeah, so you get it. If everyone had the same mempool, then, yeah, you would be able to probably estimate fees a little bit better.
for any transactions that you want to make.
And you'd be able to get better transaction finality
because blocks propagate a little faster
and there's less stale blocks.
So you don't have to wait as many blocks and so on.
So there's a few things like that,
which at a network level, at a macro level are beneficial.
Right.
But at the individual level, it's decentralized
and it's like, I'm going to do what I want to do over here.
Yeah. So, I mean, the problem with like a centralized or like a uniform mempool is that it like once you kind of have that, then it becomes like, OK, well, then what if like miners start mining something else?
Right. Like or mining or not mining certain things like an OFAC sanctions list or something like that.
And it has to be balanced with the fact that you don't want to encourage censorship on the part of miners or things like that.
And you want that decentralization.
Part of the problem we have right now is that we have only like five or six pools that create templates on behalf of all their hashers that are like 90% of the hash rate.
which means that they essentially control what goes into blocks for the most part.
And that sucks, right?
It does open up a lot of vectors of attack and vulnerabilities
with respect to transactions that some people might not like and so on.
So there are various considerations,
But you generally are not going to get like a singular mempool, largely because these are individuals running it, right?
If I don't want certain transactions on my node or if I'm not willing to relay it or if there aren't people relaying it to me, then I'm not going to have that in my mempool.
And that means that when the compact block comes in, I'm going to have to ask for this transaction I don't know about.
and that might cause a little bit more of a delay and add a little more stale block risk and so on.
So those are all things that miners have to take into account when they're creating their block
because even like a six-second delay in your block propagating
means that there's about like a 1% chance of a stale block, right?
Which it's 600 seconds per block on average, 10 minutes, right?
Six seconds is 1% of 600 seconds.
So a six second delay means that there's a 1% chance that somebody else finds a block in that time that the block is propagating, at which point you'd be in competition and your block might not go through.
And it only takes like a very small risk of losing the block reward that you got for it to not be worth it.
This is the calculation that Mara Pool made with subset per V by transactions.
And if you go all the way down to 0.1 sat per V-byte, that ends up not being very much, right?
If you filled an entire block of those, the amount of Satoshis you get in fees is 100,000 sats, right?
And right now, the current block reward is 3.125, which is 312,500,000 sats.
so it's like less than 0.1 percent of the bulk reward so it doesn't make sense to mine though
because especially if a large part of the network doesn't know about it because there's a stale
block risk even if you're connected to the other 90 there's like a 10 chance of one percent right
or a 0.1 chance that there might be a stale block and even if you win like 70 of those or
something like that. You can do the math and figure out, okay, the expected loss of including
this is this much and the expected gain is this much. And it turns out that the expected loss is
greater than the expected gain. So they decided not to do it and they raised the threshold to 0.5
SAT per V-byte. So these are the things that you have to take into account. And that's what a lot
of this is about because you um you know there there's like a global good but there's like a
local good as well because like uh there there's a there's an article i think floppy put out about
like running his node and he left it on for 10 hours while keeping a log of all the bandwidth
that was getting used by the peers that he had and most of them were not uh core v29.1 or core v30
He had one of each of those, and he just measured the amount of bandwidth that was used by each of those nodes, right?
Like what's coming in and so on.
The Core V29.1 and Core V30 had, over a course of 10 hours, the bandwidth that he used to download from those ended up being about 200 megabytes each.
For everything else, it was like six megabytes, which tells you that's a significantly more bandwidth that it's using.
And in addition, if you're a core V29.1 or core V30 node, then you're pushing those to all your peers.
So the upload bandwidth would be equivalent because you'd hear about 200 megabytes of transactions and you would also upload 200 megabytes of transactions to each of your peers.
A typical node has 10 peers, and you only hear it from one.
So for every megabyte you get from that one, you end up doing nine megabytes of upload and so on.
So it ends up being actually quite rational for people to have a more restrictive mempool policy just from the bandwidth that's getting used.
And that's not even counting all of the CPU that's used for validation and RAM that's used for validation and space that's used for the mempool and so on.
So there's, you know, rational reasons for an individual to limit that.
And, you know, like you can go all the way to blocks only mode.
But if you want to hear about transactions and so on, then it might make sense to keep that on.
So there's a lot of different considerations.
there. Yeah. So thinking through all this, then what is op return? Op return is an op code. It's
part of Bitcoin script. There's a lot of different op codes and they do all kinds of different things,
right? Like so op check sig checks like the signature, op dupe duplicates like the last
stack element. It's like just building blocks for the programming language that's part of
Bitcoin. Bitcoin's smart contract language has a bunch of different opcodes and opreturn is one
of them. Now, opreturn is a little bit of a strange one because it's kind of like if you've
ever programmed, it's like the command exit or something like that. It just sort of like terminates
immediately and nothing after op return does anything right because it's kind of like putting
an exit in the middle of your program it's like okay exit program nothing after the exit program
is going to execute right uh so it's it's a little bit of a strange uh op code um and the
bitcoin developers decided to use that as like a way to say okay if you want to put you know uh sort
of like non-financial data into a transaction. Use this opcode and we're only going to and
previously they said we're only going to allow one op return output per transaction but you could
put some data there and at first it was limited to 40 bytes later it was increased to 80 bytes
but basically this is a field designated for the purpose of putting data about the transaction
that's not necessarily financial into a transaction.
And there are a whole bunch of uses for it,
but it definitely gets used.
And it's only recently that it was brought up
that maybe we should increase it again,
and that's where we got this whole controversy.
So it's one particular code amongst many codes,
But you're saying that there are lots of uses for it, intended uses.
So it's a programming code, right?
It's kind of like exit program or whatever.
And it's meant to be, it's sort of there.
So and the Bitcoin devs decided, hey, this is like the ideal code to put stuff after it that doesn't actually matter or get executed in any way.
So that's that's where they they said, here's here's now a spot for you within each transaction to put some arbitrary data.
And that was originally created with 40 bytes.
It's now, you know, up until Core v30, it was 80 bytes.
And now it's by default 100,000 for anyone running Query 30.
So in some ways, it's like a file cabinet or like a dumpster.
And you can kind of put stuff there.
And that might be a really cringe way of saying it.
But is there, by adding more room to put things in there,
is there anywhere in the vector that you get more functionality?
I've heard things around like BitVM or, you know, is there something more you get by getting more out of this particular app code and how much you can use of it?
Besides just putting data there.
Yeah.
And there's some controversy about that because the original limit of 40 bytes was there because you have the ability to hash something.
So if you have data that you want to sort of like stamp, right, timestamp or something like that, that was one of the original use cases that people thought of.
You can have an arbitrarily long document, right?
You can have a three gigabyte document and you can hash it to 32 bytes.
And if you don't know what that is, this is actually like a part of how Bitcoin works.
It's a cryptographically secure hash is something where you can take any number of bytes and it will give you a 32 byte string, which is if you do the math on eight bits equals one byte, it's 256 bits.
So you get sort of like a unique or almost unique 256-bit tag or fingerprint for something.
And just to give you an idea, 2 to the 256 is an enormous number.
You're like just not going to encounter it twice, right?
The same number twice because it's so huge.
It's to give you an idea, like it's around 10 to the 77th power or something like that.
And that's the number of atoms in the solar system is like 10 to the 58th or something.
And the number of atoms in the Milky Way is like 10 to the 69th.
So it's like you need like a billion galaxies to get like the number of atoms as this number.
So we haven't seen any set where two different inputs get you the same output.
It's that difficult to find.
So for all intents and purposes, whenever you get an output of a cryptographically secure hash function, it's going to be unique.
and that means that if you want to timestamp something you just store the hash of how whatever
it is rather than the entire thing you don't you don't put three gigabytes on chain you put a hash
of it on chain and then if later someone says can you show me that it existed you show them the file
as it was at that point and then you make them hash it and see if it's on the blockchain and now
now you've proved it so that that's how it's it can be used unfortunately like that's like a lot of
systems i guess don't want to use it that way and in fact this is what kind of brought it up
is citria was the one that asked for something bigger because they have some particular emergency
situation where they need 144 bytes and not 80. and for whatever reason they can't give like a
hash of something they have to have all 144 bytes available to everyone almost instantly
and the way they're doing that per their design is by using a bitcoin transaction to transmit it to
everybody through the mempool it's like a standard transaction so everyone hears about it and that
that was the way that they were going to solve it now i i personally think this is kind of an
abuse of the system to be using the Bitcoin mempool as a way to alert everybody of an emergency
situation within the Citria VM ecosystem. But the way that they were going to do it was put 80 bytes
into op return and create two fake pub keys, which would bloat the UTXO set with something
that would never be spendable and you know it might get mined and so on so it ends up being
like uh uh you know like worse of two outcomes kind of like you you either let citria do this
in which case you're uh every once in a while you're going to get a slight widening of the utxo
set that can get pruned or you going to uh you know expand the op return now the controversial part of this is that besides Citria we don know of anybody that was going to use it for anything else
But they increased it not from 80 to, say, 160, which is past 144.
They decided to go all the way to 100,000.
In fact, like the first pull request, I think it was by Peter Todd,
would have just eliminated the feature altogether and said any amount in op return is fine.
And then they change that to a deprecated feature, which defaults to 100,000.
And then they change that again to take out the deprecation.
So that's been the sort of saga so far.
And yeah, that's what's been happening.
No, I appreciate that.
So in no way, though, this is pay like a game engine.
If you go to 100 kilobytes, then we're going to be able to, the character can walk.
and if we go to 1,000, the character can jump,
and if we go to 100,000, the character can do flips,
and we have more functionality.
It's just sort of more of the same, just more fillage of data.
That's right.
I'm not sure it's not used for it, but it's just more data that can go in that thing
and then run into this op return code that just basically exits stage left here
with all your data.
Okay, so let's talk about censorship then.
That's a tricky word.
in one way i see it as maybe core saying hey um or i shouldn't say core but people who are like
let's go to 100 000 you know let's sort of mirror uh policy more towards consensus
let people throw anything they want in there and let the economic sort of like
sort of uh or the market based uh around transactions figure out what's included and
what's not so we all could be on the same page and we can move on with our lives and if this one
company comes and they want 80 more you know bites well another one wants another 80 let's
just get rid of this now and we're all the same and there's a quote unquote no censorship and uh
it's all within consensus and we'll let the market figure out and then the other side seems a little
bit like uh you know let's let's eliminate sort of uh bloat and what might be considered spam we
don't we don't spend our time defining every word but that almost feels like a little bit more like
censorship in a way. But I think, you know, every node runner should be able to do what they want.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with it. And I think it makes a lot of sense from
a network perspective. Yeah. And, you know, I have the right to what's on my note. And I think
Bitcoin core devs are actually pretty upfront about this fact when they created the letter
explaining why they chose to make it 100,000 and not some other number.
It was that, well, you don't have to run our code, right?
You can stay with an older version of Bitcoin Core or run something else.
That's entirely up to you.
So we can't really force anything.
And that's kind of critical, right?
Every node runner is sovereign.
And if they don't want to relay something, you can't make them.
And like I said before with the stats that were showing up, once you have certain kinds of transactions, it can take up more bandwidth.
So it's not necessarily rational for a node runner to convey those things, especially if they don't think it'll get mined.
So we know, for example, that a 0.1 Satoshi per V byte transaction is not going to get mined by Amara.
So it ends up just sort of like floating around and not really doing anything.
It's not really like there's no rational reason.
If it weren't getting mined, then there's no reason to keep it in your mempool.
Right. Like so unless you're a miner and you want to mine that or something, then then it doesn't make sense.
So it's a little bit of a weird situation where if you relay it, then if enough nodes want to relay it, then there's a good chance that a miner will find out about it.
But then it's up to the miner to mine it or not. And that's fairly difficult to predict, given that, yeah, I mean, like, I think this one mistake that I think a lot of core devs make, the simplifying assumption there is they'll just mine whatever is most profitable for them.
But like profit only measured in the number of Satoshi per V-byte that the transaction does.
And they're not thinking of all the other sort of costs or liabilities or benefits that they might get from mining certain transactions or the detractions that they might have in other ones.
And that's a simplifying assumption that ends up kind of biting you back because a lot of the transactions that are quote unquote rational actually don't get mined by a lot of miners.
And, you know, some of them are running older software where like other considerations like Coinage end up becoming more like mixed in with the fee rate.
So it's, you know, I don't necessarily think those are good assumptions to make that, you know, miners are just going to go with whatever is the most profitable, especially if some of that is like considered spam.
If other transactions that, you know, are more financial, if they're not getting through like what the long term effects on Bitcoin might be and so on.
So, you know, those are those are considerations that I don't think we necessarily have clarity on.
And I suspect that every miner is different in that regard.
Yeah, for sure. You mentioned Bitcoin Core wrote a letter or I should say Bitcoin Core devs.
What do you make of how Bitcoin Core is sort of works or represents itself?
I think it's a little weird that people can say I am writing on behalf of Bitcoin Core or there's
just some aspects of this that you know as an open source decentralized some people are hired
to work on Core some people like yourself have contributed to Core does that mean why aren't you
on that letter why aren't you noted it not signing the letter right who gets to say who's on the you
know what I mean? Yeah, I'm a little it's that to me, what do you make of this?
Yeah, so this, this change going in, I think broke a lot of different precedents. Usually it
required general consensus and not too much feed pushback. There was significant pushback. In fact,
you can look at the PR and see hundreds and hundreds of comments saying, hey, like, why are
you doing this? Don't do this. And so on. There were a lot of what you call knacks or not acknowledging
or something like that versus acts and so on. But they went through with it. And this was this was a
significant break from precedent because generally Bitcoin debts have not merged in something that
had significant pushback from the community. So they felt the need to write this document as a way
to justify what had happened because they were clearly setting something of a new precedent
and they wanted to explain, hey, we think this is right and therefore we're going to do it.
You don't have to run our code. So, you know, like in that way, we're not forcing anything.
But, you know, like this, we feel that this is right. So that's, I think, where that letter came
from and it was mostly from people that have been contributing uh you know like more often or
i mean it certainly looks like some sort of inner circle within uh within bitcoin core i like you
said like i'm i've contributed to core but i wasn't even asked whether or not i wanted to sign
this letter right uh and there's a lot of people on uh that aren't on that list uh that i know
have contributed significantly in the past uh that that aren't on it so it's a it's a
um i think it it raised a few eyebrows to say the least uh like what what's going on is this
like a new precedent so there there's there's definitely um some trepidation about like what
this means and whether like we need to consider something else. And I think quite frankly, a lot
of people have switched the knots because of this sort of break in precedent. And that's,
I think, entirely fair. Like they're trying to vote with their feet and they express their dismay.
Yeah. I mean, like I said, there are benefits to like not running Core V30. You know, you're
you're using less bandwidth and as a result less cpu less ram and especially if you have like a
constrained system that you're running your node on um all of that matters right and uh for your
node performance and you want to be able to query it when you want and so on so uh it might like just
be a practical decision to run knots but i suspect that the vast majority of the people that have
switched the knots it was uh sort of like a protest against this kind of thinking so that's
with running knots there'll be a little back to the car thing is it a little bit more like
core is the corolla and it's just dependable it gets the latest fixes everyone knows what it is
everyone gets in a corolla like i'm used to this and it's like here's the ferrari or the lamborghini
and uh you have to kind of you have to know a little bit more about what you're doing with it
and maybe uh you know get a little bit more specialized maintenance or knowledge you know
I mean, there's personal responsibility in both, but it seems like one's a little bit more grad school to undergrad, you know.
Yeah, I mean, it might be.
I don't know if I can come up with the cars that best fit the analogy.
Where people are just saying to themselves, I just want to, you know, it's like the whole 80%, you know, go with the 80-20 rule.
80% of people are running core.
80% of the reviews are on core.
Less people are reviewing knots.
It's less on the team.
I'm just trying to say there's trade-offs here.
There are definitely pros and cons and benefits.
But back to sort of core, I mean, it's just, to me, it's quite audacious to say we speak or I gather these people and we speak for core.
What's best interest in for Bitcoin, the network, you know, and, you know, whether you if you're contributing to core, like, does that mean you're working on UI issues?
and somehow that means you should have a voice on OpReturn.
You know, just because you're working on core
doesn't mean you're working on the part of core that relates to, you know,
and I don't know who should have the right to hire people or, you know,
I really feel it's in my mind, it's like there's just people plugging away
in their free time even or, you know, maybe they don't work.
They're lucky, but then I have this thing.
I'm going to put it up on this board and everyone's going to vote
and the world's going to say yes or no because it's decentralized.
And that's my contribution.
Here it is.
Or, you know, someone might have donated for me to work on this little thing.
But again, it's got to go through the approval process just like anything else.
And when you're done, you're done.
Like you're not like Bitcoin Core for life.
It's not like, you know, you don't get a pension.
It's not like Congress.
Yeah, and it's been a strange open source project because you're right, like vast majority of open source projects, it's just people donating their time or maybe like they're once in a while on the bigger projects like the Linux kernel or Firefox or something like that.
You get like a company sponsoring a dev and they still kind of work on whatever.
Bitcoin Core has been a little bit different in that like it used to be like that.
But, you know, more recently there have been, you know, there's been a lot more wealth in Bitcoin.
So companies and organizations and even private donors have donated to particular devs saying, OK, go work on something within Core.
you've done good work and we want to continue to support you.
So that model is a little bit different than other open source projects.
And that like, you know, typically what a Bitcoin core dev does is they go out and look for grants
if they're not already, I guess, if they need the money, I guess.
And they'll, you know, often get it from multiple organizations.
They might get some money from Chaincode, some money from OpenSat, some money from Spiral, some money from BitMEX, you know, whoever it is.
And they get that so that they're living reasonably while working on the core software.
And that's very strange because there's no real, like, directive on, like, what they should work on.
They are for most of them.
I mean, some of them, like if you get like an HRF grant saying work on this privacy tool or something like that, that's one thing.
But a lot of the core devs there, they just get funded to go do whatever they want.
And, you know, those might not necessarily be the things that are the most urgent or the most impactful for users.
It's something that the developer is interested in.
And this is something that Adam Bax pointed out.
Maybe, you know, grants have to be a little more directional rather than just sort of open ended, which is what most of them are.
So. So, yeah, it's a it's a it's a bit strange.
And it grew out of like sort of the explosive growth that Bitcoin has had the last, you know, eight to 10 years.
So it's, yeah, I'm not saying it's good or bad, but that's the way it is because of where Bitcoin is.
I mean, I kind of feel like this model is broken.
I mean, I kind of feel like regardless of the pros and cons that are coming out, it's like we kind of have to change things up and like kind of smash core.
Why do you say that?
What do you mean like smash core?
Well, I just I think that like I think we need more competition around reference clients.
and um i i just think the way that this has been sort of mitigated is extremely political in ways
that are not aligned with the bitcoin ethos it seems like yeah i'm not saying that like there's
not gonna be politics and sort of debating these things right the idea of uh people hired to because
you mentioned you know well developers need money i'm like whoa whoa i don't want people working on
core who need money like that just sounds alarming so they're they're doing this for the money that's
Most of them, to be honest.
Right.
In a short term, that means – and going down the road.
And I don't think you have to have a lot of skin in the game to be a Bitcoiner.
I don think to understand what self can do for you and your freedom and your future and your sovereignty There just a few sats But I think to work on core if you need the money I feel like wow you could be lord
you could be incentivized.
And then that could only be maybe what's relatively not a lot of money.
Like maybe they give them a job for a year, right, which is to a large organization, not a lot of money.
But then in their mind, if they do well during their service, that's money for life or employment for life.
It's a resume builder, right?
And so they're incentivized in just different ways than sort of contributing altruistically.
Yeah, and this is –
You can live on altruism, maybe not, but it kind of needs to or has in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
And you're spending your time altruistically in a way like in the conversation, right?
Because you have skinned the game, but it's also maybe intellectually stimulating and all these different reasons.
But that's contributing.
I think it's like, go write the code that does XYZ is not necessarily the huge contribution.
Coming up with XYZ is, conceptually, philosophically, that could be even more important.
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Well, so, yeah, I mean, you're right.
But like here's sort of like how it all plays out.
And I've seen this happen over the last 15 years.
is that as Bitcoin price goes up, the ones that have Bitcoin at some point have enough to retire.
And it's like, well, versus somebody that's a little younger, maybe more hungrier,
that they're more incentivized to work.
So guess what happens?
It goes more towards the people that are hungrier and younger and aren't set up for life with Bitcoin or whatever.
And this has been sort of like a continuous churn for 15 years.
So like the core devs that are, for example, signed that letter, very different group than say eight years ago, right?
Like when SegWit happened and it's very different group.
A lot of different names have either stepped back or gone to do something else or whatever.
And that's continuing to happen, right?
I'm hearing there are developers that are ready to step back because, you know, it's the part of the cycle where it's like, you know what, I'm kind of tired of this.
You know, I'd rather not deal with this.
Let me go relax for a while or something.
So there's definitely like aspects.
There's an arc to the journey.
But I think in some way, you know, you kind of on that scale, maybe you grow out of being involved.
You disappear, whatever.
But then I think maybe on a legacy basis or even a value basis or just maybe the debate, you see someone like Nick Szabo come back.
Mm hmm. You know, to come in, you know, and he has he has.
But like, yeah, he and he is interested, but like it doesn't necessarily mean you go back to coding. Right.
Like there's there. And I don't want to fall to credentialism.
It's just because, you know, who he is doesn't mean we have to weigh it more.
But it's notable that someone came back.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Yeah.
And people do that.
But obviously, like, if you leave for a while and come back, you don't necessarily have the influence that you used to have.
Right.
And you're not going to get people to review the code that you wrote necessarily or even listen to the review that you wrote.
So it's like any place, you know, like, you know, it's about relationships and those relationships change as the people change.
So that's definitely happened with Core.
And there are different people in there now than, say, five, six years ago.
So and that's not surprising.
Like a lot of projects are like that.
very few projects have like the same developers for, you know, a long period of time. You always
have people coming in and out. You know, it's, you know, that also means that like the culture
of it is going to change. And, you know, there's going to be different directions that maybe people
are going to sort of push it towards and stuff. And I think that's kind of what we're running up
against is you have a um yeah you you you have different things kind of going on and um
yeah it's uh it's maybe a little more concentrated around uh chain code labs and spiral and local
host than maybe it was in the past um you know back in 2017 it was accused that like you know
blockstream had all the developers or whatever um of course even back then like chain code had a
decent number of developers, core developers there as well. So it's, you know, like the culture
of the developers changes and the relationships change. And, you know, I think that's normal,
but whether that means that, you know, the client has the same priorities, you know, that's
probably the big question is, is it still aligned with Bitcoin and what users want and, you know,
what and stuff like that. And that's the question I think everyone is kind of asking is,
is, does this group actually want what I want for Bitcoin? And I guess for some, some of them,
they're saying, no, I'm going to go switch to something else because they don't seem to.
um and that's their right uh but you know that that seems to be what's happening yeah i mean it
feels like you you know you asked me like why do we have to like smash core well it's like
i feel like we're solving problems the way you know i would solve them in my house but now we're
solving for the town or it's like you know like uh we're playing pickup basketball and uh now we're
playing the nba championships and like the the reference it's just gotta be a different model
because like we're still playing with people who are like it's my ball i'm going home
and so in that regard like but you know maybe on a positive note do you think that i think this is
a great thing for bitcoin in a lot of ways um i mean i think it's gonna be a very difficult thing
i think it's gonna probably and i might be off here but i think it's gonna get a little bit worse
a little bit muddier just uh you know confusing until it gets much more clear and i don't know how
cloudy it's going to get if it's going to be a civil war or something. I have a feeling that
this is leading to a soft or hard fork. But is this also sort of increasing node adoption or
node running awareness? I hope so. I mean, the reasons for running a node, again, are mostly
selfish, right? You want to verify and not trust and, you know, have access to stuff and not lose
privacy um you know those are all very good reasons to run a node a lot of people don't
seem to care too much about those things so they rely on mempool.space or blockstream.info or
whatever and you know um their privacy has gone to those places then so be it but i mean i think
there are there are um the corners that do care about this sort of thing and um you know as you
said the the vibes are such that like they're clearly very opposing camps and they're fairly
angry at each other so like does that mean like some sort of chain fork or something like that i
don't know um but what i see is that there's a lot of people that are passionate on both sides and
you know something that i've been talking to adam about he thinks that's a good thing because that
means that they really care if you're if you didn't care you know you wouldn't be arguing so
passionately um and that's uh that's in general a good thing uh now it does mean that you know
people can be really nasty to each other and stuff and there's been no shortage of that in this debate
um but but you know that that can be um i think ultimately that uh that passion can be
channeled towards or i mean it just kind of shows how much conviction that a lot of bitcoiners have
about Bitcoin itself and how much they think it's like a solution for a lot of really nasty
social problems. So ultimately, you know, I think it'll be good for Bitcoin. I'm optimistic that,
you know, this will put us in a place where people are a lot more cognizant of like changes
going forward and things like that. Certainly a lot of people learned about mempool policy
and relay policy a lot more as a result of this whole thing, which is good.
You're leveling up your technical knowledge, not necessarily because you're so curious,
but because this controversy kind of demands it.
I'm for that.
I think a more informed populace is always a good thing, especially for stuff like this.
And people are a little bit more skeptical of core and aren't blindly following them.
So that's good, too. I think ultimately that means that they're verifying a little bit more of the stuff that's happening rather than sort of trusting, which, again, levels up their game and, you know, makes the network a little more self-sovereign and decentralized.
So, you know, does this lead to some sort of fight?
I mean, I think we've been fighting a lot already.
And I think people are fighting, at least at the node level, by, you know, running the clients that they're running.
We'll see whether that leads to anything more.
But, you know, so far, it seems like it's been relatively a healthy thing for Bitcoin rather than, oh, it's good.
It's the end of Bitcoin, as we know.
or something like that.
Yeah, I think long-term is probably healthy,
but I just remember when I came and found Bitcoin in 2017,
maybe it wasn't the first time I heard about it,
but it was really the first time I got interested,
sort of following.
I mean, that was during the block size wars,
and it was extremely confusing.
It did not sound like something you would put,
you know, your life savings in.
It sounded like more like something you would speculate on,
and now it was like,
do you have to speculate on both these things?
Because I think one of the great things about Bitcoin
is, you know, personal responsibility,
and I think it reignites a lot of people if they were interested in learning and stopped or they weren't
to start just doing more on their own.
Less outsourcing of intellectual maybe things or pursuits or even just chores around the house, whatever it might be.
But I think there's certain slices where you're like, well, you know, I'll learn about fiat
and I'll learn about the Federal Reserve, but maybe I'll outsource SHA-256 and figure it out for myself if it's unbreakable.
And maybe the source code, I think, for a lot of people, or even just the client, the reference client, was something they were like, hey, I just need to run it.
I don't need to review the code myself or understand the differences in some of these computer science or network issues.
But going back to sort of core, you know, Blockstream has a lot of goodwill, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, in the Bitcoin community.
but they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of VC money, right?
And so you think like, oh, maybe they're only paying a developer X, Y, Z in salary,
but they could literally be hiring, you know,
they could put lots of millions behind the project that developer is running, you know,
or hire 1099s, you know, to help code or whatever it might be.
But I'm saying that there's more to sort of the funneling of money, I think,
or sort of resource allocation than just how much a developer makes
or what the size of the grant was.
And then if you look at chain code,
I think they're sort of like not well-known in the Bitcoin community,
I would think.
They're not.
I'm an avid learner, and I very, you know,
maybe I heard of them before, but you just don't connect dots,
but like I didn't know them.
And they have several, like developers on their payroll.
And I think it's just, I don't know, what do you make of,
to me is very strange.
And the people who run ChainCode,
I don't know them very well.
They come from the trading,
the institutional trading space.
From the background,
it looks like they were heavily involved
in global markets
and sort of like designing policy
and regulation around trading.
And they seem to be very successful
at a young age.
And then they just pivot to Bitcoin
and keep a very low profile.
You're right.
Their bios make them sound like they're noobs on their website.
Like, you know, I'm forgetting their names.
I'm not going to pull it up.
But like, you know, this person started Hudson River Trading and was very instrumental in high speed trading and arbitrage and designing global structure around financial markets and policy.
And then in 2014, they just turned their attention to the nascent cryptocurrency industry.
And they're just excited to learn.
And then they go hire several Bitcoin core devs and keep a low profile.
And they, I get your skepticism.
It's just like, okay, some very rich people suddenly start getting interested in Bitcoin.
Sure, I get that.
What the heck happened?
We could trade it.
But they're all of a sudden very interested in the design of the protocol.
They're just donating.
I mean, it's not even a for, it doesn't seem like it's a for profit.
I mean, maybe, but they have a lot of not-for-profit sort of staff for a not-for-profit project.
Maybe they make money like this.
I don't know how they make a lot of money.
I don't know what they do.
Quite frankly, I don't think they do.
I've never seen them at conferences or anything involved in the community, any of it.
Yeah, I'll just put it this way because I do know at least a decent amount about Chaincode.
It's the kind of people that want to keep a low profile.
profile so if you do have a lot of money right you want to keep a low profile but you want to
sort of benefit something this is about how you would go about doing it right like is put yourself
in the background like not make it obvious at all like what you're doing or how you're doing it
because you don't want people to come after you for whatever reason so i i think you you you know
some details that are public and yeah just no just yeah minutes of looking at
the situation so I but to me it's not even about the particulars it's just that that
Because this could be happening offline, not this, not that anything's happening, but structures in terms of people can hire Bitcoiners, not tell you and me, not tell the world, right?
Not that you and me matter, but like they don't have to announce it.
They can work on things.
People can work on things on their own.
It's very interesting to me, but that it just makes me, you know, you see companies like Telegram, what they've gone through to sort of figure out how to be a company and not have the state kind of hammer them on certain things.
You know, it's just interesting. And that's why I'm very concerned about sort of, you know, not for profit or for profit money in Bitcoin steered towards core and the way the project.
Yeah. And it's not just chain code. There's Brink and Post and Spiral.
there there's um and there's there's a bunch of other um you know like organizations i think um
i think uh more recently what was it like jack dorsey's grant for african and indian developers
you know they're doing something i mean it's it's not a small number of uh organizations but you know
this is the thing you you really don't know where the money is coming from who who they're funding
or whatever this is why we have to verify not trust right like you know you you don't know how
many like there there's a whole bunch of anonymous contributors to bitcoin core right and they they
hide behind sort of like pseudonyms as is their right like satoshi did and and so on uh but you
have no idea what their what their motivations are you zero right they could be like a member of the
NSA or whatever, right? Like you, you don't know, uh, which is why like, you know, the,
the price of, uh, you know, decentralization is eternal vigilance. It's, it's looking at things,
you know, from a strictly merit perspective and saying, okay, this, this, this makes sense. This
doesn't. And in a sense, like this whole controversy, I think for me is, uh, is showing,
okay, like there's a lot of people that think there's something, you know, sketchy about this particular pull request.
Why are they going up to 100,000 and not 80, right?
Or not 144 or 160 or 256 or some much smaller number.
And why did they make it like multiple op returns now?
And why did they, you know, change things down to 0.1 sat per vbyte?
A lot of these things just don't seem to make that much sense for a lot of people.
And, you know, therefore they keep asking the questions and they keep getting sort of, you know, told that they're not technical enough to understand, that it's nuanced, that, you know, there are lots of reasons that are, you know, sort of gigabrain.
But, you know, you need to understand all this other stuff first or whatever.
And they're kind of saying, OK, well, explain it because I want to verify for myself.
And if you're saying trust me, bro, that's not going to fly.
And I think that's kind of the right attitude, right, for any of this stuff to prevent essentially what you are implying, which is undue influence by people that, you know, like are just sort of funding different things.
You know, it is to go verify and not trust.
And that's kind of that immune response, I think, in the Bitcoin community that's flared up as a result of this.
And that's a very good thing.
Now, what we do about it going forward, what happens, that's still kind of an open question.
And whether this ends up being like a point of attack for something that we haven't thought of yet, that's entirely possible too.
So, you know, but but the fact that a lot of people have sniffed out something is, I think, commendable and a good thing.
But yeah, that's my take on it.
Do you think that as it stands now, if V30 gets sort of widely adopted or built on or sort of continued in that maintains 80 percent or something of this nature, is it an existential threat to Bitcoin?
Maybe in ways we can't even think of right now, is there a non-zero chance that it's sort of an existential threat?
I'd say it's non-zero for almost anything because we don't know what we don't know.
And that's the problem.
We can't imagine all of the things.
Like before Taproot, we had no idea something like BitVM was possible, right?
Like zero knowledge proof that you violated a smart contract, something like that.
We had no idea ARK was possible, that you could have virtual transaction outputs within like a Taproot script tree and stuff like that.
These were not arguments for Taproot, right?
Like we had no idea that this was going to happen.
And this was not even in the imagination of the people that were pushing for it.
I think in a similar way, we really don't know what the consequences of this op return change are.
So who knows?
Maybe somebody comes up with a completely different protocol or something that runs on top of Bitcoin based on the large op return output.
It's entirely possible.
And maybe that becomes popular.
I don't know.
Maybe it creates like all kinds of new altcoins or something.
Does that mean that Bitcoin will end as we know it as a result of this? I mean, I don't think so. I think Bitcoin will be fine. And if those things get abusive, like there's still the block size limit. So, you know, nodes can still continue running and stuff like that. And it's still valid for financial transactions, which I think will ultimately price out all this other stuff.
So money is the primary use case and in that case that will dominate everything else whatever happens on those other things But that said we like to prevent those non use cases as much as we can
because ultimately Bitcoin is money.
And the more it gets used for that, I think the faster we have Bitcoin becoming the sound money
that we all want to see it become.
let's say that a opportunist kosher fine,
whatever you want to call it.
And I'm not saying it's perfect solution for whatever they're trying to
solve,
but let's say it mitigates the issue of moderates it.
Everyone acts in good faith in it.
Whoever does in the,
you know,
it just kind of helps a little bit nudges it along,
whatever.
So let's say that's that timeline.
That's the timeline we're on.
Is it somehow a non-zero chance that if the not side,
and that's a loose thing,
not that you're on the not side or there is just one side or you know just sides but like
that if we roll back the hundred thousand and we kind of go more filters is that somehow
in an unintended way non-zero chance of like an existential threat to bitcoin some like i'm
trying to look around corners like i like loop mechanic i kind of i i like and support i'm a
small investor in ocean i think my the my the centralization of money is a problem uh i i think
what I kind of like the not side more, but let's just say, is
there something we're not seeing where like, we go down that
road? And it's that, you know, that's an attack or some sort of
threat we don't understand yet, or an obvious answer the
impossible to know. But do you think like, is there is there
something there? Maybe?
I mean, I think the thing that people are talking about is some
sort of contentious soft work, in which case, like, all bets are
off on like exactly how that plays out uh but but yeah like that's uh that's i think one possibility
um but yeah i mean i i i don't put too much stock in that because i i don't think i what a lot of
people are expecting like and i've seen this a lot on twitter is oh i'm gonna get like uh you know
an extra 10 dividend on my bitcoin because i'm gonna sell the fork that that's uh that's um that
the majority is not on or whatever and i'm like that's that's totally not the way it's going to
happen because that's the last war everyone learned from the last war that like if you if you hard
fork then you're you're kind of lost uh so there's like an incentive to not hard fork but then if you
soft fork then what what's that going to look like and how how are you going to prevent wipeout risk
and things like that.
So there's a lot of games that are going to get played,
and I suspect some of it maybe even planned out in advance,
and then after you do the analysis, it's like,
oh, okay, yeah, then we should definitely not do that.
There's going to be a lot of that on both sides if it comes to that.
All that's to say, I wouldn't worry too much
about what you can't control on this thing.
But just kind of watch.
The nice thing is whenever we have big conflicts like this,
we tend to get a bump up in price as it resolves.
So I suspect that's going to happen here.
Do you think somehow it's maybe like a social vector attack
where it's on one level,
hey, look, look at the clowns over here.
They can't even manage this thing.
They can't even get along.
satoshi's gone they have no leader you know we we come for the rules no rulers but some people are
like look at the rulers over there they you know and all the infighting and and maybe the attack is
to sort of uh show us all we we can't figure this out and when something real comes along that we do
have to come together and figure out we don't have the method or the faith or just the process
to figure out like, you know, maybe this forces us into ossifying ways we don't want to.
Or, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I personally don't think that that would be too much of a problem.
If the thread is very clear and present and obvious,
then I don't think the community will have a hard time coming together on something like that.
Because we're all Bitcoiners.
We want our Bitcoin to continue to be worth something.
But, you know, you know, smaller or lesser than existential threats are where you get sort of the conflict.
And that's kind of where we are.
How has this debate been, you know, or is it more of a left or right debate?
Yeah, I mean, the thing I think I've noticed and a lot of other people have noticed is that the sort of tactics used by core seem very familiar to most of us.
Because they were kind of used during COVID, right?
The trust the experts kind of vibe that we get from you're not a developer, right?
Like, you know, even talking about the left-right thing is, oh, that's so beyond us.
Like, there's no way you can accuse us of being like left or right.
You know, it reminds us of like people like Anthony Fauci just being like, hey, like, you know, I'm above all this.
I'm not partisan at all or whatever.
So there's definitely a lot of sort of tactics that have been used.
And I did point out I think in one of my vlogs chain code is in New York localhost is in San Francisco spiral is Francisco You know I mean is it any wonder that they kind of communicate this way I mean like the arguments that they use are sort of like skewed in a particular political direction where it you know if you if you appealing trying to appeal to sort of more you know middle of the country kind of people
then it would be very different right like it would uh be more about self-sovereignty and you
know check this for yourself and stuff like that instead of you know it has it has very different
um yeah it it feels very different um and that's i think reasonable to uh to say that you know
Maybe the developers that have been pushing for this are maybe more on the left.
The way it's been argued, I think you can very clearly see is more on the left.
And we know for a fact that Luke is more on the right.
So there's definitely a cultural difference there, a political difference there.
And as Rockstar said, a large part of this conflict is actually a lot of personal vendettas against Luke.
There's definitely at least a little bit of truth to that.
So whether that's because of his politics or his personality or whatever, it's all hard to untangle.
But there's definitely some of that which comes off, at least to a third-party observer, as being more political.
Yeah. Maybe it's kind of a tangible politics, but should we, you know, a lot of us, not you and me, but people like we need to scale to 8 billion people.
You know, is that a concern we should have at this point?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
And I say that because like there are certain like when you look at eight billion people, right, there's a significant number of them that are like senile and can't remember things.
There are a significant number of them that are way too young to be entrusted with like a wallet, let alone like a digital wallet with like a passphrase and things or like a seed phrase and things like that.
Like just there are lots of people that are just kind of unqualified and a significant number that are also not very interested in doing that.
A significant number that I don't think will ever get on board.
Right. But even if it becomes a global currency, just out of principle that they will go do something else or use something else.
I think second layers are great.
I think a lot of them can definitely help onboard a lot more people.
Sadly, I think a lot of them will be custodial and people will be OK with that until they get burned, at least.
But, you know, you can't sort of like force people to use Bitcoin in exactly the way that you think they should use them.
That's not how the world works.
and 8 billion people is like we're seeing on chain right now like there's just so much block space
available for other stuff in part because like there's not as many people getting in and using
it that way uh the people getting in are you know buying etfs and you know buying microstrategy or
you know like all these other things and you know I like I don't like that but you can't force them
to go do that or think that they're all going to come over instantly when you know something
happens to them so I mean I don't think we need to worry too much I think that this is where
entrepreneurs will be stepping in to provide solutions that meet the market demand and you
know they'll they'll uh you know maybe maybe some people get rugged but other people will learn like
a harsher lesson or whatever but this isn't something that you need to solve right now i
don't i'm not even sure you need to ever solve because i'm not sure we'll get to a place where
eight million people are self-custodying and using seed phrases in fact like i i would wager
like getting even like half that um is going to be like even if bitcoin is like the world's
store of value and it's like the sound money that everything else is based on i i'm not sure we get
to even like four billion people using it on a daily basis that way uh so i mean like it's
premature scaling, premature optimization for a future that might never arrive. And yeah,
I just don't think it's kind of a useful metric by which to plan.
Yeah, I appreciate the levity. A couple of questions here just to round it out. Was
Taproot a wise decision? I'm going to say that at this point, no, because 90% of the outputs are
spam and there were a lot of things that we missed, I think, about the benefits that haven't been implemented in any wallet.
We could like I remember AJ tweeted a while back before Taproot like oh you can have a single sick wallet and for free you can have three of five of your friends back it up
And I was like, yeah, you can.
And I was super excited, but no one's implemented that.
That's perfectly possible.
Why haven't they implemented that?
Why?
Because there's no good UX for it.
Right. Like how and really you're going to set up a single sig wallet and collect five different X pubs from your friends to input into a like no one's going to go do that.
And this is why no one's made the feature, because it's just kind of unrealistic to to do that.
The UX isn't a good experience. And if you're going to do multisig, you're going to like go do something else.
you're just going to make your own multi-sig instead of, hey, you can back it up with three
or five of your friends. I don't think we really thought through what the user experience would
look like and how that would play out. And that's something that I think we should be a lot more
humble about going forward with Softworks. And one of the things that I've been saying is I
I actually want ossification.
I think it would be better for that rather than, you know,
all these new opcodes and things that people want
because I don't think we really have a good grasp
of all the different ways they can get abused
and sort of made weird or even the benefits really used
because I pointed out in other places that, you know,
you can do some of these functions that, you know,
people are wanting without covenants or something like that but very few people actually make them
right like very very very little software takes advantage of them and they're not ubiquitous by
any means so that tells me like maybe there's no market for it and i think had we had that analysis
pre-tap root i think we would have come to the same conclusion there's there's no real market
for this thing why are we doing it uh and you know i i've heard from some devs that they they
had the same doubts like you know maybe maybe i should uh you know protest on on taproot but i
don't want to be the squeaky wheel and you know so many people want it yeah so i uh i think
we we should be a lot more humble uh about like sort of changes like that uh going forward yeah
I think we need a core shutdown and just keep potential services open.
My final question is, does Bitcoin need to capture markets besides money?
No, absolutely not.
I think money is the only one that matters.
And this is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine because there are people that are going out and saying, oh, you know, Bitcoin hasn't succeeded yet.
You know, like we need to go in, you know, like make it possible for developers to make all this other stuff.
It's like, no, no, we don't.
I think I think money is a pretty, pretty good market.
And if we capture money, then we don't need anything else.
Instead, you know, they get sort of altcoin envy or think that you're going to be able to take certain altcoin markets by pushing that functionality on Bitcoin, which was, you know, which has been sort of a narrative since.
2014 or so about okay well if anything useful comes out of all coins then we can just report
it over to bitcoin uh but the thing is like what what they're doing is one completely scammy and
even if if there's anything legitimate to use you don't want to pollute the monetary use case with
that stuff right like you you can have i guess uh gambling or something on on some other chain but
I don't want to bring it into Bitcoin. I have no interest.
Right. Like like enabling that or promoting that in any way.
I mean, if somebody figures out a way to do it with the current tools that they have, well, all right, fine.
Then you can you can try it. But like I can't stop them.
But I'm not going to like enable something just so we can capture the gambling market or whatever.
The big thing is that it's money and it's very good at it.
And I say we just keep that instead of trying to have other use cases or, you know, jerry rig them into Bitcoin.
It doesn't make sense, especially when you have this other thing that it's much better product market fit for.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jimmy Salon, for coming back.
I'll leave it to you for any parting words and let people know where they can find you and your work.
I mean, just keep verifying, not trusting and level up your game.
You can find me at JimmySong on X and I have a newsletter, JimmySong.substack.com.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jimmy.
Hope to talk to you again.
Thank you.
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