Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Not rehash the same thing. I think we'll have our own things to cover. And I think you want to respond to some things specifically that a mechanic said.
But if you're cool, we could just go ahead and jump right into it. Sure. All right.
Well, dude, welcome to the show.
Welcome to Bitcoin Audible. Good to have you here, man.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Yeah, good to be here.
Thank you for lending me the microphone as well.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: I appreciate it. For sure. For sure.
Yeah. I mean, as much as I a very strong opinion about this topic, obviously, but I also have no problem.
My opinion isn't based on.
I'm not trying to win my side for the sake of my side. I think that my stance is important to bitcoin and obviously I think both of our goals here are for bitcoin to be the best that bitcoin can be. Right. You know, and the. So much of the discourse is just such garbage because everybody's incessant on claiming that because they are certain their opinion or their tactic or their. Their reasoning is the best for bitcoin under their context, that the other side has to be evil, that the other side has to be taking money from shitcoiners, which maybe, maybe somebody is. And you know, the reverse side, that they're just idiots who have no idea and they're just trying to destroy bitcoin or they want censorship. And maybe there are some idiots on that side that actually think that or want that. But I think the bulk of the discussion is people who want good things for bitcoin and think that this is the right decision and people who want good things for bitcoin and think it is the wrong decision. And if we're all just pointing at the moron who wants to censor bitcoin or doesn't want. Who wants to decide who gets to use bitcoin and how and the moron who literally thinks that jpegs on the blockchain are the best thing that have ever happened, then we're. I don't think we're ever going to get anywhere. So I, I appreciate, I guess, reaching out and happy to get into a steel man of the argument because I've been wrong on plenty of topics before and I don't mind. I'm. In fact, it would be happy, I'd be happy to know or to be convinced that this would be the right decision and I don't have to fight about it or talk about it anymore.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Same here. Despite what some people may say. I'm happy to take arguments from anybody. I don't have any prejudged and I'm happy to be proven wrong.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:02:45] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: Well, why is my name. My name is Riverside at Bitcoin audible. No, my name is Guys one. I'm going to, I'm going to fix this real quick. Okay?
But yeah, so maybe, maybe we'll just cover, you know, conflict of interest because people keep bringing this up and I think this is kind of a. It's one of the things that I consider kind of a weak argument or just not. Not the strongest footing to be on. It's not, it's not irrelevant. It's not irrelevant at all. And I don't mean to say that but you know, small minds talk about people, big minds or strong minds talk about ideas. Right?
But do you take any money from Citria or jpeggers or ordinals or anything? Do, do you have a con? Do you feel that you have a conflict of interest? And where do you think it would be if you had one or not?
[00:03:41] Speaker B: I do not. I do not take any money from jpeggers. I can disclose my financial incentives.
People are interested. I co founded with Alt Saudi in which is a bitcoin security company and we worked on Revolt and on Liana. The company still exists. I left the company and I still have shares.
They're very much not interested in jpegs and I work at chaincode Labs where I get a salary from the chaincode Labs company. But it's really me working on my stuff and them compensating me. It's not really hiring me to tell me on what. What to work on.
So that's my. Where my.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: I'm curious, I don't know much about your background. Like I kind of see you come up in all these discussions and you know, you clearly do a lot of work and code and all this stuff. But just in a general sense, what's your background? What led you to bitcoin? Like why, why are you interested in this? Like why are you here putting up with this fight?
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Well, I'm putting up with the fight because I believe that bitcoin's fate is ultimately in its user's hands.
And I'm not even convinced that Mechanic is ill intentioned or whatnot. But I think he spread a lot of misinformation that was accepted way too quickly by bitcoin users. And I believe that if we ever face real attackers the level of critical thinking would not withhold for long.
And I also wanted to defend the bitcoin core side because bitcoin core got a Lot of personal attacks and accusations and oftentimes I think a lot of my colleagues, let's say co contributors on the project or maybe less comfortable coming up and addressing those because they find them ridiculous. So kind of, yeah, don't like people getting bullied for no reason.
Also about my background, I guess I started really diving into. Obviously I heard, but bitcoin early on discarded it as being whatever criminal money then went in back in 2016.
So I was already in it, I was already a nerd. I was already playing with computers. I was still fairly young.
I'm 25 years old today.
So yeah, I started hearing more about it, started looking into it, looking into shitcoins, because it was already 2016, 2017. So if you, if you arrive during this cycle, you're really into, oh, bitcoin is old technology, it's like ancient. And the new thing is it's better. So I started looking to them and looking to them from a technical perspective, building shit, like building on some, some shitcoin stuff, some Ethereum smart contracts, whatnot. Then I started playing with bitcoin and I was like, ah, that's ancient stuff. But maybe it's relevant for me to have the background as like, everything became very hard to do with bitcoin. You have to download a node and then you need to query like, needs to do fucking ibd. Where is my API? Where can I just send bullshit through the API that other people control.
Actually, nobody controls bitcoin. Why, what happens? And it just, just got me into it through throughout 2017, I would think.
Then I.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: So it was the difficulty of working with bitcoin that got you interested?
[00:07:36] Speaker B: It got me interested, yeah. I was like, why? But why? But why? And then keeping asking why. I just stumbled upon more and more information, but why it was this hard. And then obviously it led me into the more ideological stuff, which I very much aligned with. And the combination of both led me to just never stick my head out of it in the past eight years.
So I found it.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Oh my God, it's been eight years. 2017, dude. Wow. Why does it seem like that was like last year?
Yeah. Anyway.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: And yeah, so briefly I started working locally, started trying to fund a company with other colleagues in, in France.
It was hard to make money with bitcoin at this time. We did some consulting of like, anybody wanted their potato blockchain for whatnot. So we got basically got paid for saying to everybody that they don't need a blockchain for that, but still couldn't quite make revenues with It.
So we. It led us to start selling bitcoin for cash and buying cash for bitcoin.
I felt like I really enjoyed doing it. It was really not a money making business and spend way too much time for way too much. Not enough revenues. It's called bitcoin Leon and it was acquired last year by Bull Bitcoin.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Oh that's.
Oh cool.
[00:09:14] Speaker B: So that was my. My first company and managing bunch of cash in bitcoin. Obviously you start pretty. Getting pretty worry and when someone.
Yeah, and someone. And that's not uncommon in France. And someone approached me to build a prototype for bitcoin vaults.
It was Kevin Loike, the founder of the breaking Bitcoin building on bitcoin conferences.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: And this guy was like, ah. I got this idea from Brian Bishop's design. I modified the design.
Can you build me a prototype? Because I'm not a developer. I was like sure. And I was. I was. It was great. I was paid to do actual bitcoin development.
I started doing this.
Oh yeah, maybe something I forgot to mention at the time I was working on my cash bitcoin thing. I was contributing to core lightning. It was 2018, 2019.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: I worked. I worked a bench on lightning at this time and.
And then eventually Kevin and I would found without sardine.
So to. To build Revolt, which is a vault protocol for bitcoin, a vault architecture using only what's available today, the tools in bitcoin. Because who knows what new tools will there ever be if there is any in the future. So we wanted to do the best we could with existing tooling.
There was not as much demand for vault as we wanted. So we pivoted to Liana, which is a wallet for inheritance. The wallet still exists. The team is still actively developing it. I think it's becoming quite good now.
And I left the company.
So then it was four years of results or the in. So during those four years I slided more from Lightning towards between core developments and eventually I got hired by Chain Code Labs. Poached from without starting basically to work full time on bitcoin open source. That's. That's what I wanted to do so.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Well, hell yeah. That's a journey. That's a journey. Congrats.
Congratulations. Now you get to deal with this drama about off return.
Yeah, this has been. It's funny too because like this has been one of the most contentious issues since the whole time. You know, like way back in. Was it 2013 when the. The debate like really kicked off.
Like you could Argue that this is like one of the first wars, quote unquote in, in bitcoin. Or, you know, it's, it's, it's. It's always been a thing. It's just always been a thing.
So. And that was always that, that was what got me when, when I first saw it, I was like, oh man, this is going to blow up. This is going to be like, everybody's going to be pissed about this. This is going to steamroll for weeks.
But.
So you opened this. I'm not even sure if it was while we were recording or if it was before it. But you said that specifically bitcoin mechanic has, which, I mean, obviously he's not here to answer, but I mean he'll be back on the show. He's in the roundtable and he's good friend and guest, so he'll get to answer. Uh, but what do you consider, like, what's the, what's the quote unquote, misinformation? As you see, that is the thing that you felt you needed to address. And how do you address it? Like what is, what is your claim and argument for it being incorrect?
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Well, I don't have a record of all of mechanics misinformation or it would be larger than JPEGs on the blockchain.
I think that.
Yeah, yeah, no, I know. I, I have no interest in fighting the guy. I have no interest in speculating about his motivations.
I think I am more concerned about the accusations toward Cordev than the have having many things wrong. On the technical side of things, you can be wrong.
Getting so many things wrong and going to yell it on every single broadcast and every time that you have the opportunity is probably ill advised, but fine. But then going and attacking actual core devs on their personal stuff is bad. I think I listened to the episode that you did with him. I think it was the roundtable.
I only had the time to listen to the first 20 minutes just before the show now and I took some notes.
Core devs are pushing an agenda which consists of turning bitcoin into a shitcoin.
What?
And core devs have been working and maintaining bitcoin for the past 15 years.
Bitcoin has had 100% uptime for the past hundred for the past decade. Basically.
You can't just put accusation without anything to back it up. Like you just say stuff and you should be laughed at to make wild accusation without backing them up. I think Dennis said, well, I would.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: Say let me actually push back on what I think his framing is Because I mean, he and I have had this conversation on and off the camera or the microphone is like, I think his argument, and I think a lot of the, the concern from people who believe that spam should be treated like spam, and this is importantly, even in the face of not being able to completely get rid of it, I think there's this constant, like, technical reality being brought up, which is 100% true, that you cannot stop it completely. And I, if there are people of the people on social or whatever who say you can stop it completely, they're wrong. They, they don't, they clearly don't know what they're talking about.
But I think it's more about the, There is a social layer to this. There is a are you welcome here or not?
Element. And thus the guys take that. I did. I'm not sure if you saw that. I tried to be a lot more fair because this was, the roundtable was like literally within an hour of this happening. He had just gotten banned from GitHub. So he is basically just.
We ended up just being able. And we already had this scheduled, so this was just a total coincidence, but we just ended up getting on camera and then giving our first reaction to exactly, you know, our thinking on this.
And so that's where his, his rant came from, is he just got banned from the GitHub discussion. And I mean, I think that's a, a reasonable thing to see is like, I don't, I don't think his GitHub arguments were super unfair.
And I do believe that the banning was probably the wrong route in the context because I think it blew it up way bigger than it needed to be.
But all that aside, I think that was his reaction. But the, the framing from the, the people opposed to this side is that so now we're not treating this as a problem.
Now we're treating this as like, you know, in the context of the analogy of, you know, sure, you can't really stop people from pooping in the park, but what do you do? How do you treat people who poop in the park? You know, this is a public resource that we are all maintaining together.
And there is clearly a way to be a good steward of this system.
And then there is a clearly a way to be destructive or be harmful in some way to this system. To the point that, like, that's one of the re reasons we, this oper thing is even being considered right, is, well, people are making poisonous UTXOs that just stay in perpetuity and can't do anything and have to be held in memory or, you know, that is a bigger memory hog for nodes into the future.
So in the context of, oh, they're turning it into a shitcoin, I think it's literally just that it's just an exaggeration of the framing from people on that side of the aisle that see this as a let me appease the people who were shitting in the park or let me, let me make accommodations for, you know, let's, let's put a place in the park where people can poop. And it's like, well, no, we should treat them as if they are pooping in the park and we should just try. We should be doing whatever we can. Even if it's a, an endless battle, it's safe. Iting brought this up, actually is. Even if it's a never ending battle, there may be a significant number of people who are just always willing to try to make it a little bit more expensive to poop in the park than have a picnic.
So that's, that's my thinking and I agree that it sounds a little bit over the top.
But there's also this element, you know, when we're talking about like whether or not somebody was insulted or called a, or you know, somebody was personally attacked is.
That's just kind of how all of this goes.
And you know, if I had to remove everyone from the discussion who was doing that, there would not be much of a discussion. You know, like, I respect Shinobi on a lot of different things, but he's unbelievably rude and just angry and vicious and personal with his attacks most of the time. John Carvalho, same way, respect the hell out of his opinion on a lot of topics, but he's a complete ass sometimes, you know, Like, I have a lot of people who I respect a lot who are kind of shitheads when it comes to personal attacks or trying to be diplomatic about the conversation. So I'll just say that I think there's an element of we just kind of have to get over the personal attacks, especially with bitcoin core because there's going to be so much like passion.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: I get over the personal attacks. I did get a lot. Yeah, I did get a lot. I, I get over it. I'm just saying that in the same way that as a community, we've been totally toxic to shitcoiners for and people promoting shitcoins because they are harming people that are less informed and they're actively steering people toward something more harmful. We should treat the same people that are treating people that are less informed away from something that is beneficial to them.
And so I do think that it is harmful to, to a lot of the community and I think it's harmful to bitcoin and that's why I'm reacting to it.
I don't think it's, I think it's also a euphemism to just say that is over the top mechanics. Like I've got a screenshot here. Bitcoin core actively sabotaging Bitcoin from passivity in the phase of attack to active participation in the destruction of bitcoin. It's like, how does anyone take this guy seriously? It's like, hey, this like random guy shows up and he says to newbies, hey guys, don't stop listening to these guys that have been maintaining bitcoin for decades. Stop me and just download my executable and write it with your bitcoin. No worries, that's going to be fine.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: No, no, I'll say there's definitely an error in.
I mean I would personally agree that like that's well over the top. Like I don't, I don't think this is the end game for bitcoin either way.
In fact, mostly it's a nothing burger. My, my problem, and this is the one that I brought up at the end of the guys take, was that I think the big problem is that on the social layer when it comes to VCs in crypto, I fear this will be seen as an invitation and that they'll be like, oh, bitcoin is friendly to us now. We don't have to do this obnoxious and difficult way to do this. And while at the exact same time, which I'm sure we'll get into this again in a second, is because there's no monetary incentive for them to use Opreturn because of the discount being given to the witness is that I don't think we'll have anybody who's using inscriptions or stamps or anything now switch to Opreturn.
But I think we very could get a new group of crypto people coming to be like, now we can use Opreturn.
Let me show you this cool thing I can now do on Bitcoin and VCs. Please fund me for my new project. I think it brings more funding and more focus on using Bitcoin in a way that we specifically don't want to use bitcoin.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: I'm, I'm interested in digging into this argument if you'd like, because I, I don't really find it compelling because.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: People.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Can use inscriptions today and they do use them. Well, they stopped using them until we revived them with. By blowing this out of proportion.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: Why would they seem to profit off the drama? Right?
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Like, yeah, exactly. It's like if on the one hand, if on the one hand you believe that marginally. Marginally raising the costs to unwanted usage of the chain is going to succeed in discouraging them, which fair. We can discuss it. I disagree, but we can discuss it. On the other hand, you cannot say that, oh well, making it four times cheap, four time more expensive is going to incentivize them to do more of it. It's like they are not compatible arguments.
So the up return is not an invitation. It's not a signal to VCs or crypto or shitcoiners because shitcoiners can already use the witness data today for four times less.
So I don't see how it's at all relevant to the discussion around up return.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: My thinking is that it's not that it's a financial incentive to do this, like monetary, like, oh, well now it's cheaper because obviously it isn't. And that's also why I don't think, like, I wonder if this has any effect either direction, because again, if somebody is going to be using it, they're going to want to use inscriptions because it's cheaper, even though it's collectively more expensive from the context of maintaining like being a steward to the blockchain itself to the time chain.
So but to me it does send a, a purely social signal of am I going to be fought if I try to do that? Because right Now I think VCs or like crypto people who are trying to build on top of bitcoin, they feel like, or I, at least I want them to feel like. And UDI probably would be the, the better judge of this because he's actually kind of in the community who are jpegging.
But and his, his post was really interesting on it is that he said that there is this sense that it is more difficult, they have to go out of their way and that it is unwelcome on Bitcoin. And those aren't. That's not like quote unquote, but it was kind of the way he described that in his thread.
And I fear this would be a social signal, obviously not a monetary incentive in the sense that like OPER is cheaper because like you said, it's not.
But this would be a social signal that Bitcoin is no longer going to be trying to get rid of this.
That basically we're throwing our hands up and you're like, whatever, just stick your JPEGs, stick whatever you want in this thing. Like we're just going to ignore you and we don't care anymore. Just do whatever you want. Poop wherever you want in the park.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: Again, we can have the discussion about filtering inscriptions, but it has nothing to do with up return. We are not intentional to store JPEGs in the UP return because they already do so in the witness.
So I don't think it's related to the up return at all. I don't think that.
I think that you're. Well, this argument is entirely subjective in the end. So it's very hard to find an agreement on a subjective argument.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: But sure, it's both of us trying to predict the future of what people will do with this thing.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: They already do it for four times cheaper.
We don't send a signal for the operator and the operator is completely unrelated to jpegs and they don't care in the end. And if, like the counter subjective argument is if they even cared about our feeling, they would care more. But it's more scarce.
Like someone did a one megabyte up return fucking JPEGs the other day just to show that they were able to do it today with or without Core changing its limits.
And it's like it's just fueling the meme to try to do something about it, showing that you're powerless, that the emperor has no clothes. And if anything it would fuel their meme and make them stay alive longer.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: I think the drama absolutely does that. But. And I thought a lot about this because. And this is one of the reasons why I think a lot of people say this is not a technical discussion.
And then basically people on the other side, I'll say it's only a technical discussion is I think a lot of this is actually a discussion of economics. And that's why there's so much difference of opinion or so vicious of a difference of opinion about a lot of this stuff.
Because without a doubt the drama increases the value. You know, like, like you said, like somebody being able to stick one megabyte opera turn into the chain is a ha ha ha, look what I can do. And it is specifically because people are paying attention to whether or not you can do that right now that makes that viable. But I don't think at the exact same time, I think that is more of a playoff to drama just kind of like, you know, if I make a tweet about opera turn right now if somebody does that, somebody's sharing something about opereturn right now, it'll get tons of posts. But if you did this two months ago or you do it in three months, nobody's going to care. Right? Is that like there's just more activity and interest around the topic.
And I think the economic discussion, because I thought about this a lot and this is a, and this is, this is where I think the right discussion is, is that this is an economic discussion. Is are we creating a, a cobra problem or are we creating a issue like a, like oh my God, like the ivory trade in Africa is. There were a number of governments who actually have gone went like super hard on poachers and trying to get ivory out of the market. And what they did is they found this, this stash from a bunch of poachers of like an ungodly amount of ivory husks.
And the idiots proceeded to set it on fire as like a statement.
And what they actually did was increase the price of ivory like 4x in the market.
And because it suddenly got the flow suddenly just stopped.
And what they needed to do is they needed to flood the market with ivory and they needed to invest in people making artificial ivory. Like that's what they needed to do in that was indistinguishable, kind of like lab grown diamonds. Like that's how you kill the market. Yeah. And they did the exact opposite. Right.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: It would be a good analogy to filters if they worked to. That's what they would be trying to do and having the unintended consequences of fueling it further. But thankfully they don't work and they don't feel anything.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Well, here's, here's my reason why I think. Excuse me. Here's my reason why I think that doesn't quite apply to this situation is because the JPEG and stuff itself is not actually scarce.
It's in the context of the drama that there is some additional value.
So we're not actually making the.
And you know, just like you said, there's no, there's no way to stop it anyway. Like in like a hard and fast way, all you can do is just kind of disincentivize it. Like if 99% of nodes right now were filtering, we're trying to filter out or did a base filtering for inscription, they would have to do extra work.
They would have to pay temporally maybe a little bit. Yes, temporally there would have to be some sort of Adjustment and there would be a cat and mouse. Like, it's just, it's just like hash cash. Like my, my question to you would be, does hash cash stop spam?
Like the, the need to do a tiny proof of work on an email. It doesn't stop spam. Right. You can't like make spam go away, but you can disincentivize it and there may even be some element of like, oh my spam is better because I do a proof of work. There could be some drama element where somebody still wants to do a lot of spam to prove that proof of work doesn't stop this.
But over a long enough timeline, it's simply going to be more disincentivized because the cost to benefit ratio has altered, has been altered just a little bit.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's not, it's not a, it's not a good analogy. Email is really. Well, it was said multiple times. It's really not a good analogy. But if I want to continue it nonetheless.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: But why don't you tell me why it's not a good analogy first? Because the analogy comes up a lot.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: Yeah, because we are.
The issue is that spam on the bitcoin blockchain, the analogy with spam protection for emails is that you are not going to consider an incoming email as valid unless it has a proof of work attached, whereas with Bitcoin you do.
So it's just actually not the same.
I think what would happen when you say if 99% of the nodes on the network it would create more cost for the jpeggers.
Where I can agree with you is that if there is like almost no economic demand for using the chain with encryptions, probably they would just go away.
But if there is enough. And that's actually an argument that I gave in my write up as well. There is a point to be made that if Bitcoin core's standardness rules were at the very beginning preventing inscriptions from happening, maybe it would have never taken off. And if it had never taken off because it creates its own demand by virtue of being just a meme, maybe it would never have been an issue.
Or not yet, maybe it would have been in the future.
But yeah, anyways, we are here with a use case that has significant economic demand and saying that 99% of the nodes, if they filtered, is treating the current peer to peer relay network as static. It's not static.
If 99% of the nodes are going to not relay your transactions, people are going to use a different peer to peer network to reach the miners.
So sure, it's going to have a marginal fixed cost to spinning a few nodes on an alternative peer to peel network, but once it's done, you can just relay it for free. Well, for the same cost as any other transactions, let's say for no additional cost.
So the real thing is that it's being turned on its head that if Bitcoin Core worked against the Bitcoin spammers, it would prevent spammers from spamming Bitcoin.
No, if Bitcoin Core works against Bitcoin spammers, it's going to get Bitcoin core obsolete. People are just going to use something else.
[00:35:35] Speaker A: Well, here's my question then, because what I get the sense of, and seem to see a lot outside of the people who are explicitly attacking Bitcoin, who are explicitly saying I can come up with a more expensive and more like bad steward way of using this, you know, like with bear multisig or something. Yeah, Put those people aside, is that most of the people who want to publish JPEGs, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but they're doing it because they don't want to run a node. They're trying to get free hosting on the network.
And I think there's a slight disconnect in the economics there because there's the economics of people who want to have something on chain, then there's the economics of people who want to have something on chain, like want to store it and to show it off without having to do it themselves.
Because there's a tragedy of the commons problem, then there's a market problem and one of them is paying for the space and one of them is storing the space but not getting paid for it, like on the node. So this is actually why I think, I actually think this. There's an element to this that explains why the node network doing the filtering is actually the economically aligned way to do it. Because the only way that jpeggers then actually solve it by having like a separate mempool or whatever is if they run nodes.
So we would actually know whether or not they want to free ride on this or if they want to run a node that stores their JPEGs because they'll spin up nodes that remove the filters and you know, have their own like separate mempool. And then I think it just comes out in the wash in the long run.
But if they actually just want to free ride and they just want to pay to have their JPEG stored on other people's nodes forever and they don't run nodes themselves. Well, then the filters might actually do some incremental, like mar. Add some marginal cost.
That just makes it a little bit like that's specifically a claim that. Or a notion that they are too lazy to do it and the easier it is for them to do it in both the software sense that, you know, like the, they have to build the tools themselves or they have to build their. They have to run their own little node network, whatever it is.
I actually, I don't think it means that people switch away from core because I think all the people who want to run bitcoin nodes aren't the ones trying to store JPEGs. The people trying to store JPEGs are the ones that don't want to have to run this. And they want other people. They want, like, look, I got this thing on the blockchain and other people are storing this for me.
But again, that's an assumption about what people are thinking and doing in this context. And I don't know if you see something different or you have evidence to the contrary.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Cool. So your argument is that. Well, actually it would get them to run nodes, which is in itself a cost because it's a cost to just be running a bitcoin node and they would not be willing to run the nodes because they're lazy.
Is that a fair assessment? That's the main point here, is that if the Bitcoin core relay network filters out the inscriptions, the inscription people would have to run Bitcoin, I don't know, Libra relay.
And actually doing so is not for free.
It takes five hours to sync the blockchain and then you need to connect to other nodes and they would not actually bear this cost to broadcast their inscriptions.
I think it's.
Sorry, go ahead. If I mischaracterize.
[00:39:27] Speaker A: Not necessarily that they wouldn't bear the cost to broadcast their inscriptions, but that I think that most people who want to do inscriptions or whatever just think they're going to make a little money on the inscription and don't actually care about like, they, they do just want the easy thing. They're, they're, they're chasing easy money. They all want to mint a thing and then sell it for money.
And I, I don't think there, if it appears as if there is, there are barriers to that and they don't want to.
They're not getting, you know, free hosting to. To from bitcoin nodes that it actually shrinks the market for the people who are willing to actually go around the open network to do it.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: I understand your argument. Again, there is not one open network. There can be as many as we want. There is just one today because.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: They have to start one up.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: Yeah, they would have to start one up or someone would have to do it for them. Which is the main argument behind the economic demand here.
This is use case that has millions of dollars worth behind it.
So I'm sure someone will be willing to do it for them if they don't want to. It's just I think that economic incentives are good motivation, like a very strong predictor of human behavior.
And I think that basically if there is some, some money on the table, someone is going to stand up and take the money that is on the table.
And Bitcoin core cannot just ignore the economic reality of Bitcoin trying to blind us from inscriptions, blinding the current open network from inscriptions. It's just going to blind people using Bitcoin core from these inscriptions and from the actual economic reality. Like that's just the reality. Reality is going to get back to us if we try to ignore it. So sure, we could try to change Bitcoin to change the economic incentives so that then they have less economic incentive. But you don't have economic incentive at the relay network. It's like, it's like the kind of the legal framework sets the economic incentives and the legal framework is set by the consensus trolls.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: I got a question for you.
So first off, what's your, what's your general opinion? Are you kind of ambiguous to it or do you actually see it as a negative?
Like I, I specifically refer to it as being a bad steward of the network. Right.
Is, do you see it as a negative for people to post JPEGs and you know this sort of stuff on chain or is it purely like a. Well, when they have unspendable UTXOs there's a cost here. And so like that is a purely from the network perspective that has a cost.
But the JPEGs in general, what's your take on that?
Non monetary use Cases of Bitcoin may be the better way to put it.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: I think. I don't like it because it's usually related to scams.
I don't like scams, therefore I don't like JPEGs too much. But they don't worry as much. Like for instance there were these schemes to store wallet descriptors on chain. I think it's completely a bad idea, but it's also something that I care less about because it's not directly related to A scam.
I think I'm concerned about the weird incentives it could create surrounding meta protocols. Like if most of the economic activity is related to other protocols than using Bitcoin to make payments, it can skew the incentives of the network.
Unfortunately, meta protocols are not like related to arbitrary storage on chain as was demonstrated by ordinals. They just take some actual Bitcoin regular UTXOs and assign a different meaning to it. Nothing you can do as long as people want to take part in the collective hallucination, it can happen.
So that's where I'm most worried. I'm annoyed at scam, I'm worried about miner extracted value and I'm frustrated that nobody actually wants to use bitcoin.
It would not be a discussion if the average next block fear rate was 200 sats per V byte for the past years or two. Because the large arbitrary data that they are storing on chain is like large data. Therefore the fear rate would severely impact.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: Them much more than someone 5sats per V byte to 20sats per V byte would obliterate.
Yeah, so much of that market. Yeah, no, I'm. I'm actually less concerned. A lot of people talk about this is that like, oh, people aren't using Bitcoin and I'm, I'm significantly less concerned for what's going on chain. Like obviously if this trend continued indefinitely it would be a concern, but I really don't think it is because I just don't think we have branched the market. I think everybody still thinks about this in the context of retail and how many people are going and using this with merchants and peer to peer in person transactions and that sort of thing.
And I get that. But also in my endless exploration of monetary history, I just don't see that coming first. I see that as a reaction after you get this point where everyone sees. And I don't think we're super far away from maybe this era, maybe this chapter, maybe the next cycle.
But we're getting very close to the point where everyone sees Bitcoin as something desirable, something to simply hold and to save in. And I think that shift actually has to occur first before it makes sense for a merchant to go, well, obviously I would just accept this because I also just want it like, just in another context I would like to hold Bitcoin.
And in the context I'm going to do a video about this. It's so I'm. We don't have to like get into it. This is kind of a side sideline here, but I also think that retail is not the final boss. Retail is what gets solved after we fix the final boss. And the final boss is international exchange and Fedwire, it's the bank of International Settlements and stuff because the amount of value that is settled in those and where the imbalances and economic problems that are created, like the systemic problems are created are in markets that move like hundreds and literally even thousands. I think the international exchange market is like $2.1 quadrillion per year settled. And Bitcoin is still at 3 trillion. Like it's not even, it doesn't even show up on the map.
And I actually think that's where bitcoin is going because it's about being able to make like you need to be making large payments, you need to be moving a billion dollars for a $200 fee to be like, oh yeah, duh.
And I, I do think that's where I think it's going to branch. I think we're going to have a horrible transition period where it's just going to be horrible. Like, like really, really painful when we break into that. But that's the institutional, state level, corporate level introduction. Like once they get into bitcoin in earnest and they are trading with each other in Bitcoin, that's when all of us are going to be like, God damn it. Everything that I do in bitcoin now is a pain in the ass.
And at that point, I think JPEGs will, they'll probably be even more rare because if somebody does it, they'll have to spend literally $200,000, $300,000 to get one on the damn chain. But I do basically think it goes away at that point if it continues to be seen and adopted as a reliable high integrity monetary system, which I think it will, I'm really not that worried about it.
But aside the point, aside the point, what else do you see on the opposing side is maybe either a distraction or what other major point do you feel needs to be addressed about the context of this op return change? Specifically.
[00:48:49] Speaker B: About this operator change, Specifically, Maybe the.
Well, I posted on Twitter two days ago, one of the mechanics redundant points with our core is contradicting itself because they have been saying that the filters to network for the past two years because of inscriptions and now they want to change the size of operators, which means the filters work.
Well, first of all, I don't like the framing of filters should be just standardness rules.
Or maybe we could call them Bitcoin core rules besides Bitcoin's rules But.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: The.
[00:49:41] Speaker B: Point that I was trying to make with Hopreturn is that it's about existing standard transactions.
So people are going to make these transactions no matter what. And even with not you are going to relay them.
So it's just about making existing transactions just less harmful.
And mechanic's point was confusing. Well, merging two concepts of the filters are not effective but yet we need to change them because they are effective for these guys.
The thing is that they are not effective to prevent things from going on chain because what regulates what goes unchanged is Bitcoin's consensus rules. They're effective to prevent things from getting relayed through the unconfirmed transactions built network because this network is defined by Bitcoin calls 10 Dallas rules. It's just two different things that are defined by different things. And the use case here of the bitvm bridges, there's ctria, but Citria is just, just an instance. They're just the first the bit VM bridges.
They want this transaction to be related through the Bitcoin core peer to peer network because that's the timeliest, the best way to get timely confirmation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. English is hard.
That's the, that's the best way.
That's the best way to get timely confirmation and it's the best way to prevent other people from messing with your confirmation of your transaction.
But it's not properties that are valued really by jpeggers. What jpeggers want is forever unchained storage so they can wait two more hours for the JPEG to go on chain by only accessing 10% of the hash rate. They don't really care. They also don't really care about censorship resistance.
They can just rely on a third party API. But the bit VM bridges are really as most bitcoin scalability constructions.
They have these transactions that need to go on chain in case of fraud. It's like just a fraud resolution mechanism.
[00:52:20] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just a challenge transaction.
[00:52:22] Speaker B: Yeah, the challenge. And if your counterparty can prevent you from getting this transaction confirmed, they can steal your money.
And therefore that's why they wanted to use the Bitcoin core relay network.
And they don't want to rely on a third party. If they wanted to spam the chain, they could rely on a third party.
They don't.
[00:52:45] Speaker A: Okay, I would say probably the nuance to that is at least, I think would be. Or at least let's address the context of spam. Filters don't work.
But we're trying to remove the filters because they work Is that it's about disincentivizing. And I think there's an element to like, it does disincentivize, it does make it harder and you have to go around some additional route because.
[00:53:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but it's marginal. It's, it's so marginal.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: Of course it's marginal. Of course it's marginal, without a doubt. And then that's, you know, we can't, that's the whole thing of like, we can't stop it completely. But the question is, is a marginal cost to this worth it?
And does trying to maintain that marginal cost for this potential use case, not, not Citria or bitvm, but for just putting crap in the block, like non, non monetary stuff in the blockchain, is it worth fighting and trying to maintain that marginal cost through the different methodologies that they attempt to the point that if, if they are largely ignored and responded to with just a. How do we add a marginal cost to this? How do we add a marginal cost to this? Do they just stop and give up? And I, I genuinely kind of think it's going to peter out on its own. I think it kind of has.
And except for recently it became the fun thing to do to troll people again because, like, you know, like we've said, the drama has added its value back.
But if you look at like the fees and what they paid and like how much space they. They're bidding for in the chain, is that back in. What was it when ordinals and inscriptions launched? There was a huge. I mean, it was just like crazy. And then basically now it only shows up when the blocks are empty.
That's it. And it's like, oh, we have free space. Let me mint some crap.
And I think in the context of. That's one of the things that worries me about this is that the.
Having these options opened up rather than how do we add a marginal. Like the, the two perspectives, the two, two paths of how do we add a marginal cost. How do we just like make this.
How do we just deal with the fact that this is here? Like, those are two different perspectives and paths that we can kind of take. And my worry of going down the. Okay, how do we just deal with. How do we just like, let them do whatever and how do we figure out. Let them, Let them do it in the most harmless way is reinforcing or potentially reinvigorating the. We can do these things on bitcoin. Now. I know we've already kind of addressed that. Because you think. No, because opportunity is more expensive and they would just rather use inscriptions.
But there's also. The other side of that is the.
That's also why I don't think opening up the opera term really changes much.
And especially with Citria, you know, what's the. What's the. What's the bridge? What's the threshold for? It's cheaper with oper turn and then it's more expensive or then it's cheaper than bullshit.
[00:56:18] Speaker B: That's there. There was a. There was a chart that was going on Twitter where it's. It's cheaper to use inscriptions versus up return, but it's conveniently missing bare multisec that they can already do. So it's not opening a new way that is cheaper for standard transactions. So the threshold is.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: I'm not even sure I saw this chart.
But yeah, no, you're fine.
Is there a threshold? So, Citria, would it actually be cheaper for them to do this with Operturn, the challenge transaction, or would it be cheaper with inscriptions? Do you know?
[00:57:02] Speaker B: No, it would be cheaper with encryptions, but they have to use transaction outputs. Oh, well, wait, they need to store 144 bytes, so I think they're right at the threshold.
[00:57:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:57:15] Speaker B: But it.
They need the transaction. They need the data in the transaction output for technical reason, it cannot be in the witness.
So they are ready to bear the cost because they're not trying to put crap on the blockchain because they're trying to do a fucking layer.
[00:57:30] Speaker A: Yeah, their context is a little bit different.
They're trying to have some way to prove the state of a thing that is off chain.
So another question actually, and this is kind of a tangent, but I really wanted to get your thoughts on this, was is there a way to show or demonstrate inscriptions as like. Because it's like you can look at a chain, like, you can look at it and say like, oh, this is an inscription.
Is there a way to reliably see or prove that this is unspendable so that it can be dropped? Like, can it not be treated kind of like a proof of burn address, you know?
[00:58:15] Speaker B: Well, it's not. It's not in an output. It's an in, it's in an input. So.
[00:58:22] Speaker A: Oh.
Oh, I guess it is. That makes sense.
[00:58:26] Speaker B: So one thing you can do technically could be. Well, I hope I won't be confusing people into thinking it's a good idea.
One thing you could do is that once it's just a witness, and the witness data is only useful to verify the validity of the spam transaction. And once you have validated, you do not need to store it anymore. So you could just prune all the witness data from your disk. If you are concerned about your disk, but you're not concerned about your disk, generally, you're more concerned about the active state that you need to maintain to validate new blocks, because it's going to increase your cost of validation. Like your on chain storage is not increasing your cost of validation and it's bounded by Bitcoin's consensus anyways. But so you are concerned about what goes into the chain state into the UTXO set. Inscriptions do not go into the change state.
[00:59:26] Speaker A: Okay.
Okay.
[00:59:31] Speaker B: So technically also. Yeah, that's another thing I, I noted in the podcast you did with Mechanic. It was like it makes it harder to run nodes. It's not true. Yeah, that one, it makes me. It makes it strictly less expensive to validate.
[00:59:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't, I don't. And I generally don't agree with that either in either direction that one of them makes it better. Like, like obviously if Everybody was using OperTurn, it would be better on the nodes instead of inscriptions. But in the context of this change, I don't think that makes much of a difference because as, as you said again, there's no monetary incentive to use like, let's say Citria challenge transactions are the only thing that do it. I think it was even Linus and then one of the devs from Citria. I think I saved it in one of the things like this. This would be something that would almost never happen anyway. You know, like you're literally counting on your, your fingers how many inputs or UTXOs that you would have to worry about on that in that context. And we're talking about 50 million, 100 million excess UTXOs. Right.
So I lost my train of thought.
Yeah, I had something that I was gonna go back to. Had something I wanted to ask you about.
What had you just brought up about. Oh, oh, oh, oh, sorry. Yeah, no, make it harder to run a node and then in the reverse is that it also just doesn't make it harder because like theoretically, like the idea of bloat and extra UTXOs that don't need. I mean, you know, you have 51 million extra UTXOs. Yes, that makes it harder to run a node, but in the context of this opreturn issue, I don't think opreturn affects it either direction.
[01:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the thing. Right. Even during the podcast together we flipped back between Filtering inscriptions, filtering the OP return and really the opreturn is just a nothing burger. As you said.
The real meat of the discussion which I think is important to address is do we want to filter inscriptions?
Yeah, I don't think we won't. But it's at least a more interesting topic that increasing the side of the upper turn is not going to change anything if only for the five outputs per year that bit VM bridges are going to have in the challenge transactions. That is not going to end up in forever and spendable outputs instead.
[01:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah, and I really think that's where the disagreement is.
That's certainly where the passionate two sides of this aisle are is.
And people on either side may disagree with me, but I think it's the idea of that division and I think this is what Bitcoin mechanic gets at too is that this is a change in the culture, this is a change in how do we treat this. We have the path of how do we continue to add marginal cost to this to non monetary use cases versus how do we just make sure that non monetary costs do the least damage possible.
And maybe there's a, maybe there's an argument for both, like is that we go both directions at the same time. We try to make it as non damaging as possible. And you know, do we use the node network as a way to try to disincentivize or add some sort of a marginal cost but we end up back in the situation where like if it's not basically all nodes then it doesn't do much of anything. You know, if like 5% of the network is filtering or running knots, that means nothing in the, in the grand scheme of things.
[01:03:20] Speaker B: Sure, but it's not really, it doesn't have to do with the number of nodes. I think the number of nodes is not very relevant. I think what's relevant is the economic incentive to go around.
Do you have any incentive to form a new peer to peer network? Do you have any incentive to use the private API of the miner instead?
Where I can see standardness rules having a use is to prevent such things from bootstrapping.
So for things that do not exist yet, preventing them from standardness can maybe avoid the economic demand being bootstrapped.
There might be a case behind this argument. I'm sympathetic to it.
But if such demand is bootstrapped by other means, Bitcoin core will have to adapt to Bitcoin. It's just Bitcoin core cannot change Bitcoin.
Well the consensus rules can. But Bitcoin core policy Cannot change Bitcoin.
[01:04:30] Speaker A: I've got a question. Actually, this actually brings me to a different topic. I read a really good piece by Unhosted Marcellus, really trying to get at the heart of where the difference comes from. Because one of the issues, the big issue actually is miner centralization is the fact that mining pools are creating block templates for all of the hash power. And people who are quote unquote, miners are not miners. They're not running nodes. They are hashing for a mining pool.
And this actually is exactly what allows somebody like Mara to sell Slipstream, to sell this service is because they are using other people's hash power in order to get a large enough portion of the network in order to sell a meaningful service.
Which means that the centralization of mining pools, this is what's great in my opinion, about Ocean and why I think whatever you think about Mechanic aside, I think it's one of the most important projects happening around bitcoin right now. Because the long term decentralization, even undermining Mara's ability to do this, is do we have miners building their own block templates?
[01:05:46] Speaker B: Because I.
That's interesting because if mining was entirely decentralized, it would not be an issue. We didn't even talk about policy anymore because people would just include whatever bullshit they want in their blocks and nobody would cry about it.
If mining was decentralized, you would have all the JPEGs in the world. As long as you do not outprice them with financial transactions. It's just say the JPEGs are not due to mining centralization.
[01:06:15] Speaker A: Not necessarily backward.
[01:06:17] Speaker B: It's backward.
[01:06:19] Speaker A: I actually, in the context of out of band, like, I think it would be. It would be the economic network that would decide like, yes, there will be miners that are just there for buying the fee. But I think there is also an element of being a good steward and protecting your investment.
Because.
[01:06:40] Speaker B: I. Go ahead.
[01:06:41] Speaker A: My, my case for this is that a lot of people have said for a long time that if bitcoin enabled all of these other things or invited crypto back and let them make shitcoins and stuff, that bitcoin would be. Let's say the whole crypto market is like $800 billion or something and Bitcoin is 2 trillion.
Well, if we embraced all of that stuff, well then bitcoin would be $2.8 trillion and there would be no crypto.
And I think that's a completely wrong framing. I think that's a misunderstanding of where each of those things get its value.
I Actually think that if we embraced and tried to invite all of the crypto crap back to Bitcoin, Bitcoin would look more like a $1 trillion market.
And the reason my argument for that is that it looks like a low integrity garbage project.
It's about perception is what does this thing looks like look like right now? Bitcoin looks like a high integrity no nonsense. I don't want your bullshit or your wing digits and your jpegs monetary network Crypto is the fiat vc. I want a new gadget. Here's my app for whatever stupid crap casino market.
I think those are entirely separate things and if you conflated them all you actually do is undermine Bitcoin's high integrity monetary assurances. Because people see the shitcoins and the casino and all the garbage on top.
Our viciousness towards shitcoiners I think has been a a net positive for a while because they don't feel welcome and so they just went off and made their own chains.
[01:08:26] Speaker B: I think that is. This is giving ourselves way too much credit.
I think Bitcoin is what it is. It's already designed. There is no inviting people because we are not changing anything. It's like Bitcoin is designed. We can try to change Bitcoin to make sure that they don't feel welcome but it is what it is today.
Also I want to get back to the previous discussion about miners and mining incentives. Just.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I wanted to hit that too. Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:58] Speaker B: To drive the point home.
If well, if node implementation were more decentralized policy would not be a thing anymore. If mining was more decentralized, policy would not be anything anymore. The only reason that we have miners actually respecting bitcoin cost and honest rules is Bitcoin because there's just not so many miners at all. And that's why we can rely on distend on this rules to stump to some extent which is very good for some reasons. For instance, it's very good to make soft fork safer. I'm not sure how we are going to do any to do soft forks if any once we do not have standardness rules that are binding anymore.
If like to get the intuition you can just go through the the simple thought experiment of all right, if every single of the 80,000 nodes full nodes out there was a miner like the extreme point.
Well any transaction that they make they wouldn't mine it.
Therefore any other any anyone else on the network would accept the blocks. So the more and sure it would never approach that extreme but the more you tend Toward the extreme of more decentralization of mining, the more you're going to just have to rely on fees to judge. To judge going on. Yeah. What's going on?
[01:10:27] Speaker A: Well then my question is just because I think that's the bigger problem, regardless of what's going into the chain, how do you specifically think about correcting that problem?
And how have you seen with, let's say, other developers that you work with in Bitcoin core, how is that, is that seen as something that that core can fix and contribute to, or is that seen as a different layer? Because in I'll give you my perspective on this and why I think there should be some.
Or it would be wildly beneficial to have some easy way to plug an ASIC into the Bitcoin node that allows people to build their own block templates in a mining pool and is. Because the original node was a miner, but after gpus, FPGA like, you know, everything like moved and then we ended up in Asics, the device and the node separated and now we have Asics and a node. Right? And the core client is the node.
Well, I feel like there should be some like, I would love to be able to have a like horribly simple way to turn on my ASIC and it's pointed at my node and then whatever the mining pool is, ocean in this context is the only one where I can just use my node and datum and build my own block templates. And I am a miner, I am sharing the payout, but I am the one running my node. I am setting my own policy which right now is just whatever, it's just the normal template. I don't even, I don't like or I guess whatever the default is with knots, but I don't even think it's filtering unless I actually tell it to.
But I did update to knots like before all of this actually.
But I see that as like a core function of.
Of core.
And I'm curious how you think about it and. Or how the conversation in the development, the core development community is in regards to the responsibility or the thoughts about that decentralization problem. And are mining pools a part of that conversation?
[01:12:53] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think that mining centralization has been a core concern, no pun intended, forever and is still at the heart of most discussions.
So it's been a discussion even with the old guard of improving block propagation, trying to adapt the standard rules to the Bitcoin economic demand to not incentivize private submission to miners, because private submission to miners increase the cost of entry on the market, if the market is more sticky, there is more opportunity for miners to censor transactions.
And there is many discussions nowadays around, well, and then you have Blue Mat that worked on Stratum V2 and you also had. This is also a recurring topic in the Saffork discussions. So not the Bitcoin core part, but the broader Bitcoin development part is minor extracted value.
And with regard to Bitcoin core itself, for instance, there's been this stratum v2 initiative.
Shor's Provost is leading the initiative of implementing Stratum V2 bridge and the necessary components in Bitcoin core. It's been actively worked on.
Russ from Chaincode is also working with him on this.
It should be ready to be used soon. He's been working in close collaboration with Demand, the new pool. So with Demand Pool, in order to get people onto this new protocol whereby if you want to mine, you can create your own templates as I understand it.
[01:14:56] Speaker A: Sorry, okay, sorry. No, keep going, keep going. You said.
[01:14:59] Speaker B: However, however, I'm not sure how much it's going to help with pull incentives because pooling incentives are financial, they're not technical.
So you, you can create your own templates all you want.
At the end of the day, you're only going to mine on those that the pool is rewarding you for mining. So it's not like the power is still in the mining pool's hands. The protocol is better because we designed the protocol in a certain manner. It's probably going to increase the cost to applying some censorship maybe, but it's going to be marginal because the incentives are really that you're just going to determine on what the pool is paying you at the end of the day.
[01:15:51] Speaker A: Yeah, this is why I think the, you have to compete with a pool, but the technology has to be able to, has to be there to actually plug that in. Because most miners, like a lot of miners that at least I know are kind of like they're the blue collar workers of the bitcoin space. Right. Is they're the guys who had an oil rig or work on their cars kind of thing. They're the mechanics, so to speak, of the Bitcoin space. Less the I'm in a technical, I'm going to run custom software via my terminal and.
[01:16:28] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's why as well, it's financial incentives is what matter here. Because most people starting with farms and mining farms, they don't even want. Like some people went there to them and told them, oh, you have enough hash rate that variance of income is not going to be that much of a concern for you. Why don't you just mine your own blocks? And they're like, it's easier for me to just use the pool. And the pool fees are not worth me investing the team the time into setting the pool software on myself. And you're like, yeah, these guys are not going to be running specific notes with specific templates. Maybe if we do it for them. And that's what Shorz is doing. That's what BlueMad has been pushing for.
But at the end of the day, they are going to have very different concern from Bitcoin Twitter. They're all going to be, I want to pay my bills, I want to pay my employees. I'm going to mine these blocks for these fees.
No matter if I'm welcome on Bitcoin Twitter or not. Right. As long as it's valid by consensus, they are going to take the fees.
[01:17:43] Speaker A: I'm curious what the.
Is it just kind of like a sunk cost in like Stratum V2 has been in works for a really, really long time. I remember like the first piece I read about it like, good God, I don't even know is really early on in the show.
And as I understand it, it's kind of bulky because it wasn't really. Stratum wasn't originally designed for that specifically.
What's the thought around is it mostly just we've been working on this specific one for this length of time and so we want to finish this out in the context like in comparison to using datum, which as I understand or at least if you look at it, it's a much smaller and more. It does one thing protocol is what's the reason for continuing to push with Stratum v2 rather than just using Datum on the specifics?
[01:18:46] Speaker B: You would have to ask Shorz and Blue Matt. I not able to speak too much on the topic because I'm not well informed on the specifics. But the reason for continuing to push on anything is because someone is doing it. Like Shores didn't. Didn't ask anybody's permission to just do it and so he's doing it. Even. Even if you. If you want more details into it. People were not happy about the way he was doing it. So he just picked it up and then people pushed back and he. This way of architecturing the code is going to cost too much to project. They went another approach. So it's really why. Why is it being pushed forward? Because Shores is working on it. And because there is some pools working.
[01:19:34] Speaker A: Just doing it. Yeah, yeah.
[01:19:37] Speaker B: Can just do stuff.
[01:19:38] Speaker A: That's fair. You can just do stuff.
Okay, see, let's see.
Is there actually anything else that you wanted to bring up? I'm. I don't want to like, rush out if there was.
I feel like there was something else that I wanted to hit. But we. We've already gone like an hour and 20 minutes here.
Was there anything else you. You had note to specifically address that you wanted to. That you feel is weak or important in the discourse?
[01:20:14] Speaker B: I've got notes of angry notes of mechanics saying things I wanted to refute, but nothing substantial anymore. I think what I wanted to say was that. I think one takeaway that users should have from this is that the off return per request that is open currently is not going to change much for anybody that is not using a bit VM bridge. And so it should not be the center of the drama. We can have more drama on whether we want inscriptions to filter inscriptions or whatnot, but we should realign the thing out of this pull request, I think.
Yeah, that would be the main takeaway.
[01:21:06] Speaker A: I will say that I generally agree with that. Is that the OP return issue, what it has done, it has. It has brought back the issue of do we filter inscriptions? And the argument is really about, do we filter inscriptions? Are we trying to add a marginal cost to this? And I think people on the against side generally see this as a. We're not going to try to do anything. We're not going to filter anything. We're. We're just throwing our hands up and this is the way it is.
And that is seen as a negative course of action.
So. But I do, I do generally agree that, like, the opera turn isn't going to make or break anything. It's probably not even going to change the makeup of anything unless.
Unless literally somebody just comes in, like, with all the drama and excitement is like, look, you know, as soon as this gets unlocked, quote unquote, there's probably gonna be this flood of people putting bullshit into OP returns just because, like, look, I can do it now. Hey, yeah.
[01:22:05] Speaker B: Well, these people, if they were that interested in doing it, they could just use Ben Karman's website and pay a few bucks to do it.
[01:22:15] Speaker A: We'll see. We'll see if it ends up like, going through as is.
But I will ask about the idea of deprecating it and whether or not, I think another big part of the issue is this idea that people who run nodes feel like this is about their control.
This is about them running their network. As they see it, they are running Bitcoin.
And I really think the biggest problem for this was in which was pointed out. And also note that this was specifically Peter Todd and that the idea of conflating all of this as bitcoin core is like you just can't do that. In the same way that you can't say filterors say this or believe this because it's just not true that you can't you put everybody into like one big group and then say what they think because you saw one person do a thing.
[01:23:12] Speaker B: Collective responsibility.
[01:23:14] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And but I think one of the big things was this idea that like, well, not only are we going to change the limit, but we're going to remove the configuration option to do it yourself because it feels like this specific targeted thing is like we're going to show the filterers how stupid they are and that like they can't do anything. We're just, we're just going to remove this altogether because the people who want to use this are stupid and they don't know what they're talking about. And someone who is running a node like that's their.
They see that as their decision. And even if I am doing absolutely nothing at all, I feel like there is some element of am I being a good steward to this system? Like I actually care about this from a non economic point of view because I want to like going. I used an analogy before and maybe, maybe you've heard this, but I think it's a worthwhile analogy. Is if we have a court system that is there to settle disputes, to protect property rights and suddenly a whole bunch of people figure out a way to hire the court system to have parties and to host concerts is even if I own a tiny little court somewhere.
And because I. This is specifically about me being a miner, by the way. I want to build my own block templates and I want to at my cost because the block reward is most of the reward anyway. The fees just don't matter. Right now I want to remove JPEGs from my chain or from my block templates. And the single reason is, is because if we are saying that, you know, we'll let, we'll just let people hire this out for parties and concerts.
Well this, the idea of whether or not you even have a court system that protects your rights is dependent on being able to have your court adjudicate your problem.
And if we're hiring it out for concerts, then what's it, what's it even mean that you have a ticket to the concert if you can't adjudicate? If you have to wait in line behind 20 concerts to adjudicate whether or not you got your money's worth from the ticket, it like it's, it's a fundamental. Money and property rights are a fundamentally lower layer of the market.
And for the exact same reason, I don't want a casino software running on my security system.
We don't want concerts and parties clogging out our court system. Now, maybe there's no way I can do that. There's. Maybe there's zero way that I can actually prevent that. But if I'm running a tiny little court in a tiny little town and this is my court, this is my node, this is my block template, well, I would just like to prioritize the people who are actually using this as money and accept their lower fee to just do what I think is the right thing to do with my node and my little court. You're just not allowed to hire. You're not allowed to put a concert in my court.
[01:26:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I understand.
I. Well, there is a lot of. To him back. I understand how it.
The perception issue with removing the configuration option to get back to the. To the very beginning of your point.
[01:26:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, sorry, that was a long rant.
[01:26:30] Speaker B: I.
My take on this is that it was taken as we are going to prevent you from making a mistake that only affects yourself. It was, I think it was perceived as being paternalistic in a way of removing the option.
I don't think that we should be paternalistic in Bitcoin.
I also, I agree don't think we should provide a way like I don't think we should prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot, but I don't think I should be forced to provide them the shotgun.
My take on this is that I do not think the option matters anymore when the default is changed. So once the default is changed, defaults are sticky. So at the global scale on the network, it's not going to change what is related on the local scale. It can change what gets into your mempool on your nodes and there might be.
So I think purely on a purely irrational, no subjective assessment of what transaction is, I think it's purely negative.
Negative because it's going. The usual argument is going to make your FE estimation worse and it's going to make your blood propagation marginally worse.
[01:28:04] Speaker A: And.
[01:28:06] Speaker B: Therefore I don't think we should have an option that is just making the user shoot themselves in the fruit. However, sure, if there is significant demand from users to have this option that is not incentive compatible, let's say, but they want to do it anyways.
It's not an option that cost us that much to to keep around, so we might as well have it. But we also need to point out that it's just one simple option. Like there is no I as a node runner. Well, first of all, you run a node to validate the chain. You run a node, your incentive is to validate that incoming payment. It's to validate that you actually have the money that people you're transacting with are telling you have.
You don't really have.
You only have a marginal incentive in participating in the income from transaction relay network.
But it's also the case that there's basically no other nop, no other options to tweak your mempool policy for the simple reason that we can't make everything configurable. It's going to make a nightmare of the implementation for no reason. And Bitcoin Core generally also assumes rational actors because we cannot cater to every single use case and we try to. Well, I'm already getting one use case right is already a good thing. And we'll try to get the use case of rational miner trying to not be an attacker, trying to be a good steward, but still rational to try to be.
I think it matches reality. Nobody wants to be an asshole, but as long as it doesn't cost them too much.
So that's what Bitcoin Core is trying to do. If you're trying to be actively working against your incentive, we could implement it, but it's not something we do anywhere and it's something that would cost implementation.
So it has to be balanced on a case by case basis.
There are people that are arguing in favor of doing it. On the pull request, for instance, Martin, my colleague here at gencode said whatever, they would not be maximizing their return.
But if people want to keep the option around, I'd rather take this request over the other one that removes it.
So yeah, it's like it's not a consensus. I strongly argued in favor of removing it because I felt like just keeping it was trying to appease people that objected as if they were childs, like just saying, oh no, I believe you're wrong, but I'm just going to do it so you stop yelling.
And it's not the communication I want to have with Bitcoin users.
Like no, if I believe I'm right, I'm Going to state my arguments until you prove me wrong.
But it's not like again, there's no one mind thinking alike on Bitcoin core. There are various contributors. It seems like the consensus is around keeping the option for now.
It's still marked as deprecated, but we'll see what happens.
[01:31:37] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[01:31:38] Speaker B: Like we just.
[01:31:39] Speaker A: I think you actually mentioned in something else that there are things that marked were marked as deprecated that actually never got removed versus things that after one.
[01:31:49] Speaker B: Decade of deprecation of the OPC user and OPC password option.
[01:31:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:31:56] Speaker B: Vladimir, who goes by Marana, remove the deprecation instead of removing the option.
Yeah, but to be fair, sometimes they do get removed. Most of the time they do.
[01:32:11] Speaker A: You know, I'll actually push back because there's a, there's an element of like this, this idea of rational versus irrational is.
I think there is a short term rational and irrational and a long term rational and irrational because there is a.
There are two different economics of what you're maximizing and what you're like, do you, do you maximize the value and the use of the network or do you just maximize your return in the short term?
And one of the interesting things is, which I still can't believe that this, I mean, I think it will probably shift with time because it just takes time for this information to get to the market and actually seems like people are trying to be quiet about it because it's a, it is a significant advantage. But FP miners are getting screwed by FPPs and they don't know it like really screwed. Like to the point of probably upwards of 5, even to 10% without recognizing just how bad it is because you cannot predict exactly how many blocks you're going to have. Like there is a, there is obviously a significant margin of. I'm only going to take this much. But how does that apply to fee spikes? How does that apply? Like you're just never going to be able to predict exactly how much comes in. And some of the percentages that I've seen, the relative returns, it seems significant. It seems a lot more significant than I would have suspected.
Um, and you know, going back to the idea of like a minor being rational in this context is that like, oh, well, you know, you can get more. You can just build your own block templates or whatever. Well, they're going to do the easier thing.
[01:34:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
[01:34:07] Speaker A: You know, there is a cost, but.
[01:34:08] Speaker B: It'S part of rationality. There is a cost to switching from the default option.
[01:34:13] Speaker A: It's a framing of what is rational, what, what, what they are targeting for their rational decision. And I actually think, I don't think it's entirely fair to say that it's irrational to try to filter out spam or not put spam in your blocks. Because in the short term, granted, I'm not trying to make money. I am trying to make Bitcoin back because I use my miner to heat my house.
So my choice of what I put in my block templates I think is perfectly rational because my only concern is to make some sats to heat my house and to be a good steward of the chain. So my option to remove JPEGs is I just want someone who is, you know, if a jpeg is paying 5 sats per V byte and somebody who is doing a monetary transaction today is paying 4 sats per V byte, I want to put the 4 sats per V byte in my, in my block.
[01:35:03] Speaker B: I understand, but throwing more hash rate at the network is not going to get rid of jpeg.
[01:35:09] Speaker A: No, yeah, no, no. I was just talking about the rationality of the decision is. I don't think that's an irrational thing for me.
[01:35:17] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a preference, it's a personal preference. But also if you're not maximizing profit in the short run and all your competition is, you won't be in business for long and you won't even see the long run.
So you have to, you have to do both. Right?
[01:35:42] Speaker A: I don't know. It's interesting. And, and that's, that's where I think the most interesting part of this discussion is, is the, is the economics. Is the economics because. And it's far more nuanced.
I don't think it's so clear that one decision is the correct way because it's a far more organic thing than it is just a math problem.
Yeah, exactly.
[01:36:07] Speaker B: Well, I think the main argument against, again, not the operator bullshit, just the inscription part.
The main argument that is fairly consensual among Bitcoin developers that are running that are working in this area is again, miner extracted value. It's just that if you push people towards direct submission to some miners, some miners, some of the fees are not going to be on the table for whomever wins a block. They are going to be only to some existing miners. Therefore, the cost of entry on the mining market is going to increase and a higher cost of entry is going to be yet another centralization force. And we want to do anything we can to not take on more centralization forces.
[01:36:59] Speaker A: Yeah, man, I'll tell you, you know what I'm worried about and I've been worried about it for a long time because I think it will make a much larger difference than anything like JPEGs and slipstream or something.
And I don't see how it's preventable, which, which is also why I think what Ocean is doing and Stratum v2 as well. But Stratum v2 isn't available yet, but datum and building your own block templates and trying desperately to get a pool to be competitive whether it's Ocean or demand po, any other one.
But I also think dividing the network effect of those things is not necessarily a net positive.
But the reason why I think this is so important is because block space futures, I think as this becomes financialized and institutions adopt this, we're going to get large mining pools that are building templates for all of their hashers selling block space futures for a margin in the market.
And you will only be able to, your, your futures will be direct. The value of those futures will be directly related to how likely you are to find blocks. And that is not something that you can fix with mempool policy or like you know, anything. And that's why I think an aggressive, I mean just, just in any general speaking, an aggressive, like how do we redecentralize mining like right now in like the next year or two? Because I kind of think this is the crux of our best opportunity to do that. Like I don't think the opportunity is ever lost and there's no alternative here. So it's like we have to, we just have to assume that we can.
[01:38:42] Speaker B: Fix this problem to work with your blockspace future thing. You know what, there can be significant demand for block space insurance which would be the other side of the future.
That's true because of time sensitive transactions.
We were discussing it with Kevin back in 2020 for Revolt, which is you've got a vault and you want to get a callback transaction because there was an unwarranted spend from your vault. You want your transaction back in your vault and you want your transaction confirmed to get your money back into your vault as soon as possible.
You would pay a lot of money for this and you would pay even more money to have the ability to say no matter what happens, I have 99% confidence that I can get a transaction within 100 blocks.
Therefore you set your time locks to this and you can have some rational risk management.
Same for lightning channels.
So I think black space futures are Definitely likely because there can be providers and there is definitely buyers.
[01:39:58] Speaker A: Yeah, without a doubt.
It'll be interesting. We're going to have a million of these fights coming just because I don't think there will ever be a time where we don't have another centralization risk. I think centralization risks are natural because centralization is such an easy way to solve a problem.
And the idea that the Bitcoin protocol and the bitcoin market won't have frictions.
It's a global auction, of course there will be friction.
So it's going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting and we'll have plenty of discussions and arguments about all sorts of things with this.
I will ask one thing real quick is what's your feelings on ctv? Just because I want to know. Out of curiosity.
[01:40:45] Speaker B: I think it's safe to do.
I'm not convinced yet it's worth doing.
I think a lot of interesting.
I think that there should be a significant threshold to change Bitcoin.
I think we should be able to change Bitcoin because the world around bitcoin is changing and we might have to adapt to some external conditions or if there is significant benefits to a change and managed risks, we should be able to do it. But the presumption should be on not changing Bitcoin. Because the most valuable thing of Bitcoin is to be able to agree and coordinate on a fixed set of consensus rules.
This is the most valuable thing and that's what differentiated from all the shitcoins that can just be changed. And if your money can just be changed, it's not worth much.
So I'm trying to convince myself right now that it's worth doing the CTV +CSFS proposal that has been put on the table recently.
I tried to argue against undeveloping publicly. I'm trying privately to convince myself right now I think that it was over marketed because the real beneficial points of CTV are very technical or bad. There's nothing groundbreaking about ctv. It's just going to make some things that are possible today more attractive or more practical or just realistic.
[01:42:29] Speaker A: Just a formal pre signed transaction.
[01:42:31] Speaker B: Basically it's reduced interactivity. It's having a percent injection without having to do it and that's significantly overlooked. Like interactivity in protocols. It's the root of all evil.
But also if you go on Twitter and say that CTV is going to scale Bitcoin to the next 1 billion people or it's going to give secure self custody to all bitcoiners, you're Not a serious person. And it gives, it gives me more reason to be.
To be worried of the change than just going and arguing in favor of it based on its own merits. So that's.
[01:43:13] Speaker A: I would say that the.
The primitive of granular control of the UTXO of a UTXO that one person, one. One UTXO can be quote unquote sovereignly owned by 10 different people in 10 different amounts in a non interactive way is a very very valuable primitive in direct use.
It's.
It's like. I mean it's not a panacea, you know, it doesn't solve every problem in Bitcoin. But I think you don't need that many primitives to make a ton of various layers and assurances to add assurances to layer two and layer layer three in such a way that even in that you just know that you are the one with the keys and you don't have to be online to check. You know.
And I, I think that is one of the few primitives that is kind of left that I would really just. I just kind of think would be a really fundamental thing that on a long enough timeline and enough like configuring that as a non interactive thing I think is actually hugely valuable.
But alone obviously it doesn't really solve a ton. It's pre signed transactions. We have tons of pre signed transaction tools.
[01:44:38] Speaker B: And also it was I think where the current proposal shines is where.
So did you hear about any provoked and cgash no inputs in the past?
So do straight transactions give you the capacity of rebindable signatures? Yes, they enable L2 or also so called LN symmetry and CTV plus CSFS emulates any prevail. So you can do L2, you can do LN symmetry and you can do a bunch of channel factories.
You can do more improved versions of ARC because CTV alone is not very interesting for arc. It's. It's really any prevalent that is interesting. Yeah, so it seems like a sweet spot.
Checksig from stack. CSFS is itself marginally useful for some stuff.
CTV is useful at a level in protocol design.
CTV plus CSFS gives you some killer application. It might be a sweet spot to make a software but we should not rush it.
[01:45:51] Speaker A: Sure, no rush. No rush. Yeah, there's zero emergency.
[01:45:55] Speaker B: My echo chamber and Twitter is all in on on CTV plus csfs.
[01:46:01] Speaker A: Nice. Nice. Awesome. Well dude, I, I really appreciate you coming on and going a little bit back and forth with me but also just like making the case and I think really more than anything is like, everybody's such a.
And, like, I think it's, like, it's crazy that it's so hard to have, like, an honest conversation, like, a real conversation about it and have it not devolve very, very quickly. So I appreciate you.
[01:46:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:46:33] Speaker A: Putting up. Putting up the other side of the aisle and just, like, coming on and just having a chat about it.
[01:46:37] Speaker B: Same. I appreciate you degreeing with me and having me. And having an honest and fair conversation. I think one really underlying issue of all this drama is the lack of communication between protocol developers and users. Well, end users, not necessarily, but let's say bitcoin enthusiasts. People that really, really care a lot about bitcoin. And I think we should restore this communication channel. So happy to do it another time as well.
[01:47:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome. All right, man. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful rest of your day. And I'll give you details, anything you want to point people to before we close it out.
[01:47:21] Speaker B: I've got a blog.
[01:47:22] Speaker A: You got a blog?
[01:47:23] Speaker B: I got a blog.
[01:47:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:47:28] Speaker B: I'll send you the link on signal.
[01:47:30] Speaker A: All right, cool. It'll be in the show notes.
[01:47:32] Speaker B: Cool. Thank you.
[01:47:34] Speaker A: Thanks, man.
