Chat_148 - It Doesn’t Pass the Smell Test with Jimmy Song

[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you have this disconnect between core devs that value one thing and the users that value something else, I mean, something's gotta give at some point, right? Either you get developers that are more in line with the users, or the users end up, or a lot of the other users kind of end up leaving and so on. So this is not a trivial concern. And it's a big attack surface. And we've seen it in these communities where a lot of this political stuff enters. And then next thing you know, it gets completely sort of subsumed by that movement, by institutional capture, if you will. And that's not just true in like, open source software. It's true in like every, like, nonprofit organization and so on. This is a big problem. Foreign. [00:01:05] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I'm Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else, you know, and we have got Jimmy Song on the show. I have not got to catch up or hang out with him in quite some time. And we had a really fun time. This is literally, if you're. If you're sick of the opera, turn pro filter anti filter drama. That is basically what this whole episode is about. He's had some really cool Nostra videos about that. Not, not only about that, but he's had some really cool, like, kind of vlog stuff that I. I liked a lot. So I wanted to get him to kind of share his thoughts on that. And also I particularly like Jimmy's take on it because even though we've both come down on the kind of like, filters are perfectly reasonable and it's a net positive to have them side, I don't think while we align with the quote unquote pro filters side in a lot of ways, I think he has a very like, his take on it and he disagrees quite a bit, as I do with some of the things that Luke pushes or that people who think this is the end of the world or, you know, there's a bunch of things where arguments are just bad on both sides. And I wanted to have Jimmy on because I feel like he's good at cutting through the noise and good at challenging the way both people are seeing it. So. And you know, what's a reasonable opinion that just. It's being completely dismissed when it's hard to make an argument that, no, that's a perfectly reasonable way to see it. And Jimmy is just that kind of guy. So I think you guys are gonna like this if you're. If you're sick of the drama. Maybe don't don't dig into it. But if you want the drama or you want a honest take on all of this, I think this is a pretty good episode for that. And I had a freaking fantastic time with this conversation. Real quick, shout out to Leden for bitcoin backed loans and supporting my work. Big fan of that company and the product that they have as some money on a bitcoin standard. It has been invaluable to me to not have to sell my bitcoin to make investments and do some stuff on this house. Saved me a lot of bitcoin. Check them out and I got a link that actually gives you a discount on the interest rate right down in the show notes. Don't forget to check out get Chroma they have red light therapy and it is all about light health and building light for humans and controlling your circadian rhythm and your hormones. This is something that my wife and I started taking seriously about a year ago and it's made a huge difference. Interesting rabbit hole and they are based bitcoiners selling products around this 10% discount with code Bitcoin audible and then PubKey P U B K Y app and the Pub Keyring app. I had a video recently actually talking about this is I genuinely think the username and password problem is like reaching the crux like the end of its phase of realistic use. And the Pub Keyring app is such a perfect example of how you would do signing to log in without having to give over secret information. And I love it and I want you to experience it. So I'll have a link to that video but also PubKey ring the app so you can try it out yourself. And then lastly the HRF they have the Financial Freedom Report which is one of my favorite newsletters. It's. It's the best way in my opinion to get the. You'll never get it on mainstream news news about the fight for freedom all around the world and the status of freedom fighters. And they put on the incredible Oslo Freedom Forum which I'm not 100% sure if I'll be able to go this year but I'm still trying to make it work. That's June 1st to 3rd of 2026. I'll have the links down in the show notes so you can join them. And just a general shout out to the HRF and their amazing work. All right with that let's get into today's chat. This is Bitcoin Authorities and the Left Right Divide with Jimmy Song Jimmy, welcome to the show, man. As always, big fan as you know, read a ton of your stuff, follow you for a really long time and. Good guy. Good guy. I've always. I've always liked you. I've liked you, Jimmy. You're a good guy. And I like your hat. [00:05:36] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. And. And you. You have read a lot of my articles and you actually read a couple of my books too. So. [00:05:42] Speaker B: Yep. [00:05:43] Speaker A: Thank you for that because there's a lot of people that like your voice and. Oh, yeah. And they'd rather listen to that than, you know, my voice or something. So. [00:05:51] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. I actually just like. So in this frantic getting kids to sleep and like, I've been back to back today and I actually just got off a show with Rob Hamilton, who is. It's funny, we really didn't get. We talked about it like, at the very end for just a little bit about the whole core filter debate thing. And he's very much on the, I guess you could say pro core. It's really hard to like, define exactly what the. The quote unquote lines are here side. But he's a pretty general picture of it. He's just like, honestly, anybody can run any code they want. And I don't think he. In our conversations, in the Telegram chat or whatever, he's always been pretty clear that he doesn't really like the censorship argument isn't so much his focus because he does think that I basically was like that. That's a disingenuous argument in my opinion. And pretty much many of the other arguments completely discount or destroy the ide idea that this is censorship. So it's just a really bad one to lean on if we want to have an honest, honest conversation. And. But we didn't get to talk on it much. So we might actually do another show in response to this because we didn't get to hit that topic specifically. But yeah, so I wanted to dig in because I've really loved your. Your videos on Noster and X, and I thought you've had a really clear and completely fair position on this whole thing. And I wanted to give the opportunity for people who either haven't seen them or haven't heard the full picture to kind of get your take. [00:07:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate that. First of all. Yeah, I started making those videos just as like an experiment to see how fast I could learn video editing and so on. So it was a lot of fun, like putting like, subtitles and putting music and trying all kinds of stuff. But it turned out Like, I wanted to do all kinds of different videos, but it just sort of converts to this one thing. And that's all what people wanted to listen to, I guess, or watch from me. But basically my take is I've been trying to think from first principles and okay, what is Opreturn? What is it for? And how does it work? And what is the peer to peer network? What are we trying to do as a community, which is namely decentralizing mining and how does this affect all of that? And I've been analyzing it sort of piece by piece and just calling out a lot of the disingenuous arguments that I've heard. On one side it's, oh, child porn is going to destroy everything and make it completely unusable. On the other side it's stuff like, well, filters don't work at all, blah, blah, blah. [00:08:43] Speaker B: But also their censorship. [00:08:46] Speaker A: Yeah, the censorship, actually, I haven't touched on that at all. But yeah, that's a good one to maybe make another video at some point. But there's a lot of what I would call political rhetorical arguments, right? Arguments that sound good. And it just really grates on me as a developer because we should be sort of past that in Bitcoin when we're talking about these technical things. And the people that are saying, hey, we're the technical experts and you should listen to us, are the ones that are making so many of these very rhetorical, emotional arguments rather than the opposite. And of course, the not side is also making a lot of those rhetorical, emotional arguments as well. But I'm seeing so much of it that I wanted to call a lot of that out. I wanted to express what my positions were. And I don't think I completely agree with either side. And I would hope that most people are in that camp. And if you are thinking from first principles and sort of making up your own mind and verifying and not trusting, that's what you would expect the person to have. What I've noticed though is that largely there's two camps and one side is like Team Maxwell and the other side is like Team Luke or something like that, right? And it's funny because it's kind of like the Beatles splitting up or something, right? Like they used to be like good friends and then now they're in like different groups or whatever. And it's honestly like a little sad because I'm seeing a lot of bad arguing, bad logic, bad ways of thinking about stuff. And. [00:10:33] Speaker B: And these are guys who went to war together, you know? [00:10:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I mean they've been, they've been around forever. I mean and they, they've been doing a lot of this stuff. And so yeah, it's, it's not just sad from like a personal level, but it's like where, where are all the people that are thinking for themselves and like, you know, coming up with their own conclusions instead of just, hey, I'm team this, so I have to believe this or I'm team that and I have to believe that or whatever. I mean, like, what. One of the reasons I made like the I why I don't support Covenants video was I wanted to just expect because I, I thought that was like something that was cutting across both. Right? But like, I guess more lately the Naz people are a little less, you know, pro Covenants or something like that. But I wanted to make that video to make it sort of like an orthogonal issue that doesn't really affect either one and give my perspective on it. But it's been co opted a little bit by maybe a lot of the knots. People are saying, hey, like this is, this is in line with what we want to do. Very conservative implementation or something like that. I have thoughts on all that, but it's just, I'm very disappointed at the lack of original arguments. It seems like there's a whole bunch of people that basically are speaking whatever Luke says and there's a whole bunch of people that are speaking whatever Greg says. And I mean like this appeal to the smartest person on either side or something like that is not very compelling to me. I'd rather have like different logic coming from different perspectives and figure that out and have people judge for themselves instead of I'm team this, I'm team that. [00:12:23] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And the idea that that's one of those things is I like it. It's very much in the nature of just kind of like social media argument that you have so much noise and people coming in with like stupid stuff and like I can't make like a very reasonable argument without somebody being like, well, Luke said this. He's like, why don't. Who. I'm not. Where did Luke come from? Like, why is, why is Luke my position? I, I couldn't. There's so many things I disagree with Luke on and the fact that we just like kind of align on some of the topics or maybe reasoning around this particular thing. I just made a comment. Do you have a response to what I just said or are you just going to be like Luke said, do a hard fork which he didn't. But you know, I don't. That's not even relevant. Like we have a conversation, you know, and I'm just like, jesus, man. [00:13:17] Speaker A: Yeah, A similar thing with gmax, right? I mean even Rob at one point, you know, the guy you mentioned earlier, he was like, I wish all these people that are arguing for knots would go on Reddit and argue with gmax. Like, why are you arguing like Euro position instead of having to appeal to gmax, Right. Like that, that's like a whole thing where people are afraid to argue with gmax. Now I get that part. Right. Like he's very smart, he's earned his reputation and he's definitely done a lot in this space where. And he's been right quite often. So it's, it's very intimidating to disagree with Greg Maxwell. [00:13:59] Speaker B: Yes. [00:14:00] Speaker A: But have some fucking backbone. Jeez, what the hell? You're going to like just like cower in the corner and like have him speak for you because he's intimidating. I like, it just, it feels like very antithetical to the cypherpunk spirit of like fuck you. We know we're going to, we're going to go and verify things on our own instead of relying on an authority. [00:14:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of appeal to authority and like that does bug me too because it's been how often and how much the culture of bitcoin is built around the fact that people who apparently have no authority have had really good points and could contribute really great things or build meaningful things in the space. Because for so long there wasn't an apparent authority. And now that we've kind of like built some up and there is some sort of a reputation and there are core developers and there's Greg Maxwell and Luke who've like survived through a war and you know, have this history. It's like, oh, we're, we're just back to deferring to a different authority. And I'll say I, I had a conversation, an off show conversation with Lawrence, a core dev that a lot of respect and he, he gave a lot of really good arguments for his position and he even said that he got into bitcoin core development. He kind of joined and got roped in personally because, because of the spam issue. And he was like, oh well, I just wanted to make sure that like nodes were still going to get easier to run and like he had a perfectly honest perspective on this and he still thinks like he's fully on, like he thinks 30 is actually a great client with a lot of improvements that will make that better and that the filter thing is just kind of like a sideline. So I was eager to hear him out and he made a lot of great points. But like, it's been framed as if this is like podcasters versus developers. And it's not even just like, because like, I'm a podcaster, it's like, okay, so somebody's like roping me into this bucket. But the idea that because you know something about code, that means that you have a more important opinion about this, especially when we've already like. One of the core arguments is that the technical reality is actually not the most. Like, so many people have admitted the, that there is clearly like no way to actually fully stop this. But if you look at data, there is a degree of how much it actually shows up based on mempool filters. It's a purely data driven argument. You know, like, yes, it has made a difference in the concept of like, what gets into blocks. But I thought this was great. I recently saw a. Oh, wait, no, I actually put this in the podcast folder. I think I'm going to read something that's real quick because this was. I think it's SAT stacker, if I'm not mistaken. And it, it mirrors a lot of what Nick Zabo has said. And I thought like, it was great that he kind of came out of hiding and has started giving input because you, because anybody who comes in and says like, oh, he's just a podcaster, it's like, man, you shut the up. You know, it's like trying to argue with Greg Maxwell, right? You can't. You have to have a little bit of reverence and humility when having that conversation. I totally just saved this and lost it. [00:17:38] Speaker A: There it is. [00:17:39] Speaker B: Okay, no, SATs scholar, excuse me, says, I just, I just love this framing. And this was like underappreciated, I think. Bitcoin didn't succeed because of code, it succeeded because of design. Satoshi wasn't a great programmer. His C was clunky and criticized, but that never mattered. That the genius was in the incentive structures that keep the system in balance. Miners securing for rewards, users verifying for self interest. Developers constrained by social consensus. The game theory is what makes bitcoin work, not the elegance of the code. What's overlooked is that most changes today are argued by people who can write code. But bitcoin's real oversight has always come from outside of that circle. Economists, philosophers, and everyday users. Satoshi himself belonged more to this other group. He was a systems thinker who used code as a tool, not as the essence of Bitcoin. At its core, Bitcoin is not software. It's a social contract expressed through rules. The code simply enforces the design. I thought that was an incredibly good way to put it and should put anybody who thinks this is a. People who know and people who don't know, two sides, like, who tried to dismiss the conversation because of that, like, should have a little bit of humility and be like, you cannot possibly honestly frame it that way and say that like, nobody, nobody with a brain disagrees with me. When the number of people who have been critical to Bitcoin's history, to pre history, to bitcoin surviving multiple like critical points in, in its battle and in its evolution are disagreeing with you and have very reasonable points. It just, it just super, super unhelpful and dishonest in my opinion. And I'm not, and I'm not even saying that it's like all on one side either. Like, there's the number of times I have to explain to idiots on the, the quote unquote knots side who make ridiculous arguments like spam is going to. This is going to be the end of Bitcoin, which I kind of disagree with Mechanic over this on the show recently. But yeah, there's a lot of hyperbolic nonsense all over the place in this conversation. [00:20:06] Speaker A: And that really bothers me because it's, it's a tactic that's coming from the fiat world, right? From politics where you dismiss someone because of their lack of credentials or something like that. And I hate that just like, as a, as somebody that wants to see the right argument win, I don't care what the credentials you have are and why. Why is an influencer or podcaster less valid just because it comes from them? Right. Yeah, this is like a tactic that really honestly happens a lot more on the left. Happens on the right too. But that really kind of grinds my gears, right? Because in many ways it's trying to dismiss the person and not the argument. And it's a tactic that's not just unhealthy, but it's setting you off for a very conformist sort of way of thinking. Because it's like, okay, well these people agree on this, therefore this is the correct way to think. And that's very prevalent in politics today. And I don't agree with that. Right. And this idea that, oh, all the core devs believe this. Very early on we saw Robin Linus, the Citria CTO Very clearly say, hey guys, this really controversial. Let's not do this. We have other ways of dealing with this than expanding OP Return. Why don't we just roll it back? And then lalu commented on that saying like, okay, yeah, why are you guys shooting yourselves in the foot? This is something that no one really wants, but you're kind of pushing this. I don't really get what you're doing. And those are two of the most technical people that you can find, right? Like to come up with something like Bittheon to manage btcd, to run Lightning Labs and all that. These are very technical people. And to say, okay, you know what, it's just these influencers that are making a big noise. Plus Luke, Luke's technical, but he's crazy. [00:22:18] Speaker B: And he's a bonkers for taking crazy persons. [00:22:21] Speaker A: Which is like, it's not attacking the argument, it's attacking the person. And I really do not think there's a place for that in Bitcoin, right, Like, where you're not attacking the actual argument for what it is. If you want to figure out what the right thing to do is, you examine the merits of the actual case. And very frankly speaking, it just doesn't pass the smell test, right? To most people it's just like, okay, so there's this one group that might do five UTXOs a year and you want to convert that to opreturn, and you could do that by increasing it to 160 bytes, but instead you want to unlimited to 100,000. [00:23:05] Speaker B: What? [00:23:06] Speaker A: It doesn't pass the smell test whatsoever. And it's making a lot of people say, okay, what other agenda must there be for them to push this, this hard with such weak arguments? Because even Adam, right, who's very core at this point, he's like, yeah, 160 makes way more sense. But this is the thing that everyone is just sort of very skeptical about is why are you doing this when no one's really asking for it, right? The only explanation I've heard is so that we don't have to increase it more when some other person wants to use it to get it out of the UTXO set or something like that. It's like, is there any evidence anyone's going to do that? Citria says they only need 160 bytes, so they're eliminated. Who else is doing this? Where's your evidence? Where's your technical justification for going up to 100,000? The only justification I've seen is purely political and administrative. I don't want the Burden of having to increase it each time and having to get into a fight each time. So I want to win forever. And that's like a very like political way of thinking, right? It has no justification. [00:24:25] Speaker B: It's a very power from a, from a context of power decision making. And a lot of people have actually claimed that this is exactly why they do have to push it. Like, it's just been defensive. Is that like, well, this is our solution and we're the technical community and we're just not going to back down because a whole bunch of people got mad about it and you know, the crowd made us think about it. It's like, well, yeah, but people choose to run your software. Like, you can't be butthurt. Then when a whole bunch of people download a different client, like you do kind of have quote unquote customers who depend on you and want to be able to trust you. And if you just say go yourselves when they have a concern, like, I mean, you know, don't be a, don't be surprised that people go use something that you think they shouldn't use. Well, why should they think that your concern is something they should trust when you don't even care what they think and you explicitly say that, you know. [00:25:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it's like the worst because they're like, well, if you don't agree with this, then go run another client and then people start downloading that. But don't run lots, right? It's so insincere. It's like, okay, you just want to trap people into running your software and you're going to scare everybody into running whatever you want them to run, regardless of whatever it is that you're doing. And if you disagree, too bad. It's like totally a power move that, you know, like happens a lot in politics that that sort of thing is like sort of like a daily occurrence. It's like, it doesn't belong in Bitcoin. It's a decentralized system. If you're not listening to your users, then why are you surprised that they're kind of rebelling? And then they go on to other arguments like, oh, running that is useless and you're, you're not helping anything. And at a certain point it's like, oh, you know, running your own node doesn't matter. And if you are running it, then you should only use blocks, only mode. It's like, well, okay, I mean, I'm going to do what I think is right and you funding it is actually making me think that you're actually like scared of losing some power. And I think they honestly have to a large degree because a lot of people don't trust Core anymore. Right. And that's, that's the one currency you have as a, as an open source developer is, is some level of earned trust. But if they think you're going in a different direction, then they're no longer going to download your client and I mean, they're going to go do something else. So it's just very frustrating seeing the level of sort of intransigence. But it's not unlike the government shutdown right now. A lot of Democrats are like bellyaching over like not having health care for illegal immigrants or something like that. And it's like, unless we get this, we're going to keep it shut down. Well, you're kind of shooting yourselves in, you know, in the foot right there. This like kind of you think you're winning, but actually no, you're not. The longer this goes on, the worse it looks for you. So, yeah, I don't know. All that said, it's, it's, you know, there's something that Adam Back said over and over. It's like people are arguing dispassionately because they really care. And that's a healthy sign. I think that's a good thing. But you know, that said, it's. I do not appreciate all these like power moves and like, you know, tactics that are used that are done in the name of technical competence but are really just political moves that are I think to some degree like economically illiterate and so on. [00:28:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And there's something actually that, something that Lawrence talked about too, and I didn't really like in our conversation. I wanted to just kind of give him his like let me lay out how I think about it because we had a very short time period to actually go through it and we could have easily just gone back and forth on one little thing for 40 minutes. But one of the things was he mentioned, which I can understand this from both perspectives too, is saying that the thing is, is we don't know how valuable OPER turn is going to be in the future. Like we may need a contingency for quantum where we need a big block of data and opportune may actually be critically useful for that. We may, like, we have no idea. It's like Sytri is a great example, is like, oh well, we need more than 180 bytes. We might need 160 or more in order to do this new construction. Which could be, which could potentially be very useful and a very interesting system to build on top of. And so if we're raising it to 160, well, what's. What if the next thing comes and it's 200, are we going to do all of this crap all over again? You know, so it's like, well, how about we just remove the oper turn limit and now we have a transaction size limit and then we can talk about, you know, whether that is a proper limit or like we just remove the mempool filters and. But there was an element of a piece of that where he said, we don't know what it's going to be used for. That is exact same argument for why we should be concerned about just haphazardly changing it is like there's this idea that because we know that technically you can get around it, that means that we have a, a full assessment of exactly what the consequences are and what everybody's going to do, because this is the technical reality, as if we can predict what people are going to do, because we know what you can do if you can break out a terminal and write your own script, you know, like, as if that has anything to do with the social layer and, or the economic incentive layer. And nobody knows, nobody knows what the consequences are going to be. And they are pushing this so hard, I think, again, in a very defensive way of just like, well, I'm not going to back down because it looks like you guys won if I do and nobody has a clue. Maybe it's completely fine, maybe nothing happens at all. But there is very good reason to be concerned that something bad might come of it. You know, like 2014 was actually. The spam wars in 2014 were actually a pretty good case for why there's a lot of social push for people to put shit on other chains instead of bitcoin because of simple small technical barriers like locks on a door or fences around a yard that make it uninhabitable and make them seem unwelcome. So they're not willing to make the investment for, you know, whatever malicious attack or spam project that they have. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to say you don't know, you don't know. Nobody has any idea what the future holds. We are making a change that might have a meaningful effect, and it's not something that we can probably roll back. The cat might just kind of be out of the bag if we change this. And what's the benefit? Like, look at the consequences of Taproot and Segwit. There's a shit ton of unintended consequences. This whole spam debate coming back up is literally one of them. And you know, did you, you said you knew then, but did you know you didn't. You clearly didn't fucking know. So I don't know. [00:32:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you make a really good point there. It's that from the core side, the assumptions are that whatever expansion of Opreturn, it's only going to be used for good, right? Like Citria is going to use it instead of UTXOs, that's going to be good. Other people that might otherwise put JPEGs into stamps and bare multisig outputs or something like that will instead use Opreturn so that it's prunable that everyone that's going to use Opreturn is going to use it responsibly like a good citizen, right? Like putting a little garbage can outside that everyone's going to put their trash into instead of the actual thing that we've seen in Bitcoin, which is that people do bad stuff with a lot of the fields that they have, that a lot of them don't have good intentions. And those are the exact things that we're worried about that, okay, what if they just start spamming, right? What if this was just something that they're going to now use as an easy way to have a standard transaction that can go in and don't have to worry too much about, or that has very fast Rails because it's standard on the P2P network and so on. They're not really thinking adversarially, which is surprising given this is bitcoin, right? And this, we're supposedly a bunch of cipher punks. Like they're not thinking adversarially at all. Instead it's. Everyone's going to do the. It reminds me of like freaking socialism or something, right? Oh, like don't, don't worry about the incentives. Everyone's going to do the right thing, right? If we, if we pass a law that says you have to, you know, kill 20 mosquitoes before you go to sleep, well, we'll be rid of mosquitoes in no time, right? Like, yeah, and it's kind of like that. And not thinking about second, third order effects of what's going to happen is it's very, I don't know, very collectivist, leftist, very like the argumentation that I've noticed coming from that side has largely been like appealing to sort of leftist sensibilities. And this Is one of them is, oh, everyone's going to use it properly. And you know, no one, no one's going to use the garbage can for, I don't know, putting in something gross. You know, it's, it's, you know, they're just going to be using it properly and everyone's going, we're all going to be singing Kumbaya or whatever. It's just unrealistic. [00:34:55] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I agree and I'm curious your thoughts and we don't have to go into this deeply if, if you, if you don't want but on this increasing left right divide in a political sense and the supposed concern or the ridiculousness of even bringing this up that the, the, the kind of dynamic has fallen on is that some people are like, well you know, there's, I think there's a perfectly reasonable argument to say that actually I'm going to be doing a read and, or a guy's take on this. But Nick's OS could not be a more perfect example of an open source project that was destroyed by exclusively left politics. Taking over the environment to taking over the moderation group that started literally kicking people out, calling them Nazis and right wing extremists and then controlling the direction of the project who were not even elected. They were, they had nothing to do with the governance process. They were an external group that set themselves up and essentially took power. And the project has gone in a crazy direction and it has been a huge like the, the degree of which there is a radical left that just believes that they can just infiltrate anything and kick people out who have the wrong political opinions, not technical opinions. And, and the degree to which this has happened in the last five to six years, I think you're being a complete gaslighting sack of shit if you say that that's zero concern. Like I just like look at the world today. You have to literally stick your head 10ft down into sand and like dig like so, so like crazy blinders to think that that shouldn't at least be open for discussion, that that could be a concern. Yes, there are perfectly reasonable people on the left, I know many of them. But that does not mean that there is not completely negate a huge and extremely problematic trend. And so I think it's completely fair to bring it up. And the people who say it's like, oh now we're just, now we're woke and this is a ridiculous, like that's some gaslighting shit right there, in my opinion is like, no, open your damn eyes. Did you Even were you alive in 2020 or were you born in 2022? So I don't know, I'm curious your thoughts on it and how much you want to stake a claim on this one. [00:37:24] Speaker A: No, you're absolutely correct. It's not just Nixos. There's like Golang and the Rust community and all this stuff. There are so many of them have been honestly captured by leftist sentiments. And we know for example, that a lot of bitcoiners are for example, lean libertarian right, like more and more towards freedom and self sovereignty and so on. So if you have this disconnect between core devs that value one thing and the users that value something else, I mean, something's gotta give at some point, right? Either you get developers that are more in line with the users or the users end up, or a lot of the other users kind of end up leaving and so on. So this is not a trivial concern and it's a big attack surface and we've seen it in these communities where, you know, a lot, a lot of this political stuff enters and then next thing you know it gets, it gets completely sort of subsumed by that movement, by institutional capture, if you will. And that's not just true in like open source software, it's true in like every like nonprofit organization and so on. This is a big problem. And to suggest that somehow, oh, developers are all above it and that we're, you know, none of us would ever, you know, think about doing anything that is in our political interest and like sacrifice something technical. It's like we look at this pull request and we're like, okay, are you sure? Because this does not pass the smell test from a technical perspective. And that's been the objection the entire time. And it looks kind of very economically right, like it's okay. There's clearly, clearly transactions that are paying three times more right now to get op returns that are larger than 80 bytes that are waiting five or six times longer to get confirmed. And they're like, yeah, so they still get in. I'm like, well the fact that they're paying more. Right. Fees and waiting longer costing in money. [00:39:36] Speaker B: That'S the whole point. 100% total absolute success with the goal here is to make them take longer and cost a little bit more. That is it. [00:39:47] Speaker A: And they're like, well then, you know, they can still do it. Yeah, but I mean, even with like larger fees, they all agree, you know, eventually feasible, like once fees are high enough that spam will go away. It's like, okay, if we can increase it for them now, then that would prevent more of it. Right. And they just do not subscribe to that argument at all. And I wrote a couple of tweets and noster posts about this, like, analyzing exactly how much more it costs and going through all the greater than 80 byte op returns and what percentage of the network it was. And I came to the Conclusion it's like 99.9% effective and it costs three and a half times more, takes six times longer to get into a block. I'd say that's a pretty good deterrent that prevents a lot of people from getting a lot of that stuff in. Instead, it's gaslighting about, well, no, filters don't work. They can still get it in. Yeah, they can get it in, but how many other people didn't put it in because it cost too much? It's just like a basic economic fact that they seem to be completely denying, saying, well, it's not perfect, so therefore it doesn't work. And it's such a disingenuous argument, and I really hate that. Anyway, I was ranting about that, but really what you were asking about was sort of like this leftist takeover. And I, I think that that really is a problem. And the argument that we're above it, that being like getting offended at the fact that, that people are even asking the question is very, is itself a. [00:41:34] Speaker B: Leftist argument kind of again, like, well, you're kind of reinforcing what I thought, you know. [00:41:40] Speaker A: Right, right. It's, it's the, it's a Dr. Fauci say, oh, I would never do things because of politics because I, I, I, I am completely for the science. You should trust the science. Right. Like, it's, it's very, I mean, it's, it's the exact same. And, and this is why a lot of bitcoiners are like, very skeptical. Because we've seen this movie before, right? Yeah, we've seen all of these tactics before where, where, where we're being told, okay, you know, what you're seeing with your eyes and what you're experiencing and what your logic leads to. They're all wrong. Right. Because the experts say, the technical experts here are saying that this is the way it is and you should accept it or you're crazy and you should never come near bitcoin again or something like that. And it's maddening to me that they don't see themselves doing this or recognize how much this affects the users, because we've all been through this and many of us are very much against this sort of like authority following sort of expert trusting kind of thing. I mean it's what Bitcoin is against. But they don't seem to recognize it, they don't seem to acknowledge it. They don't seem to even be self aware enough to realize just how much damage they're doing to their own reputation as a result. [00:43:07] Speaker B: Yeah, there's another kind of like contradiction that gets me too is the degree to which there are like Greg Maxwell has made this argument. I mean so many people on the other side have like hinged on this argument, which I think is a completely fair position. Like I think there's a good point about this is that the mempool is designed. It's hard to say designed, but the mempool is there basically to mimic what is going to get into blocks, right? Is that it's supposed to pass around all the transactions that are likely to end up in blocks. And there is a, there's a notion that, which is funny because this was the, literally the original argument that came up when this whole thing started over a decade ago was that well no, like you should, you should actually be able to filter. There is a policy that makes it reasonable to use the network to limit things that we would not want bit that would be a bad steward of the Bitcoin network but that it's to mimic what is going to get mined so that we don't have external or private memol or things like Slipstream where you're paying miners directly. Because this leads to you know, potential problems and centralization and all of this stuff. And it's like, and there's so much of this like minor centralization. Minor centralization. Minor centralization is this, this is a huge problem and is if this whole filter debate like letting go of this is somehow going to have a huge effect on minor centralization. And there seems to be very little evidence that seems in any real picture that this is actually going to move the needle to any great degree like at all. And if you mention Stratum V2 or Datum, it's crickets. It's like that could not be like two orders of magnitude more important for mining decentralization than what the fuck is happening in the mempool. And like you're, we're literally talking about whether or not the mining pool is dictating what goes into everybody's blocks who are hashing versus those people doing it for themselves. And there's like, like two people diligently who actually care and are working on Stratum V2 and it's been like a eight year project and it feels like, like almost nobody is actually using it. And at least Ocean is using Datum and they have concretely like provably looking at actual addresses in the coinbase, done more to actually decentralized mining than anybody else. And they're supposedly the filtered censorship guys, you know, and I just, God, I don't know this, that one just drives me crazy. Is it like, okay, you care about mining decentralization? What did you add about stratum in V30? If that's your concern, shouldn't that make a top priority? [00:46:09] Speaker A: I don't know, it just seems crazy to me to suggest that, that that's the reason. Because what we know right now is that F2 Pool and Maripool are the ones that are mining greater than 80 bytes transactions. They have 16% of the network. So if you allow those into your mempool, they're going to be right 1/6 of the time or they're going to be accurate 1/6 of the time, 5/6 of the time, it's going to be inaccurate. So why, why are you saying that? That's actually like it doesn't argue what you think. Right. But if you make it standard now, everyone minds it, in which case you've sort of made it a self fulfilling prophecy by saying, okay, well now all these other miners will mine. We'll see if they actually do end up mining some of these. I don't know what the miners are going to do, but thing that it assumes is miner centralization and that that will continue forever. Which is I think very defeatist number one. But second, it's, it's completely undermining what you said, right? The decentralized miners, their mempool is going to be very similar to your mempool because they're on the P2P network and for you to be like, okay, well we're going to add some stuff to it because some miners are mining it is just going to make it so that everyone mines this spam instead of just some of them and having them, you know, have you know, stale block risk and everything else. So it's, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you make something standard, yeah, it's going to be in everyone's mempool and more miners are going to mine it because in many ways it's a signal to the miners, hey, this is a legitimate thing to be mining and that and you don't have to worry as much about stale block risk and so, so on. So it's a self fulfilling prophecy, right? Yeah. It's going to be more accurate because you've made it standard. The whole thing about standardness is what's supposed to go into the block. So it's a completely disingenuous argument. [00:48:21] Speaker B: If you literally push against it, it will work in our favor and if you let it go, it'll work in your favor. Your decision is exactly what pushes it one way or the other. [00:48:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good way to put it, but. But again, it's, it's. It just doesn't smell past the smell test. This is, this is why we've been arguing for five months. If the technical thing, if it just was a matter of explaining the technical thing and. Oh, okay, I didn't get it before, now I get it. Then a lot more people would be agreeing. [00:48:52] Speaker B: Yeah. There'd be a lot of flow to one side. Yeah, yeah. There'd be a lot of. A lot more settlement. Yeah. [00:48:59] Speaker A: In fact, I think it's only because of people like Greg Maxwell that the core side has as many people as they do, because I think the argument is much more on the opposite. But people are so afraid of going against core consensus or core opinion. It's kind of like vaccines or whatever. Right. Like the. I think the people that are anti vaxxer have a lot more point than the people that are pro vax. They've certainly thought a lot more about it and they've read more primary sources. But because the cathedral is there, because the powers that be are there, and because the quote unquote expertise is there, a lot of people are very afraid to challenge it. And it's really only because of that power structure that exists that so many people are on that side. [00:49:50] Speaker B: A lot of inertia. [00:49:52] Speaker A: And it's a testament to the merits of the. The opposite position being like against core v30 that so many people are saying this doesn't pass the smell test. And the fact that so many people are trying to verify and not trust that we have this, I don't know, I feel like it's a test of like, what is reality or something. [00:50:17] Speaker B: Right. [00:50:17] Speaker A: Like, it's like the whole transgender thing or something. It's like, are you, are you willing to submit to an authority that tells you that this is the way it is? I'm glad a lot of bitcoiners are saying, no, I'm not. But there's a surprising number of them that are saying, yes, okay, yeah, we'll do what you say. [00:50:39] Speaker B: I try to Be very nice about it. I don't want to lose. This is a stupid. I think this is a stupid thing to lose friends over or like to break associations. Like, I'm not going to be like, I'm never going to talk to Shinobi again because he's a, you know, and he, he's anti filter or whatever. [00:50:58] Speaker A: No, I mean, yes, I, I get that. But I mean, you, you, you can cut people off for being. I think that's truly fair. [00:51:06] Speaker B: Sure. But I, I also. There's a lot of that I, I value for their contrarian takes and, and I like digging into it for that reason. But just personally, I, I try in my life to do this without burning too many bridges, because I think keeping those bridges open is how you actually get through to people. But when somebody tells me it can't be this way or you're. I'm not gonna do it this way, man, it really makes me want to do it that way. Like, I am like supernaturally disagreeable in that sense, but I try to do it diplomatically, but. Oh, shit, like, even before I was like, okay, maybe, maybe, yeah, I should run knots or I should change my config in like a, you know, 28 or something version. When they're. When the, the hard, like, don't run knots started coming. I'm like, man, I'm gonna run knots. Like, I could just like, oh, it gets me when I don't like being told that I can't do something, especially when it seems perfectly. [00:52:12] Speaker A: That's another one, right? [00:52:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that. [00:52:15] Speaker A: That's another one. It's. It's like, don't run nuts. [00:52:17] Speaker B: Why? [00:52:17] Speaker A: Because there's one developer. Okay. Why? What's going to happen? I can always, like, switch back if, if something goes wrong and it's. And you get into this, like, sort of like very strong fud. To get you to behave a certain way. Right. And that's what propaganda is ultimately. It's a method to get you to behave the way that the propagandists want. And I do not appreciate that. I don't want to be manipulated into doing something that I haven't figured out on my own. And it's. And that's a very leftist motivating thing that I feel like I'm being subject to with a lot of what's coming out of the core side is, hey, you. You have to do things this way. And if you do something else, you're being stupid, you're endangering your coin somehow. You're doing something that's completely useless or whatever. It's like that I'm kind of like you in that regard. Once people start trying to manipulate me into a particular direction, I'm going to dig my heels in and I'm going to be like, no, you're not. Like over my dead body. Like it's, I, I, I have sovereignty over myself. And if you're, if you're trying to get me to do something against my own will, not going to happen. Sorry. [00:53:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:53:39] Speaker A: And I think a lot of other bitcoiners are like that. [00:53:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, without a doubt. And I'm, I'm curious your take on kind of ossification. I've been thinking about this for a long time because the social layer is a really interesting dynamic to bitcoin because of that interplay between so many various forces and incentives in, in a, in a, in a human environment, which is always messy, and the, the loss of core's reputation. I think that like, I think this is a very meaningful hit. I mean, for sure this, this has had more difference in I think legitimate client switching. On top of the fact that there may be a way to point that like some few percentage or whatever is, is somebody running them in AWS or something or hosting them somewhere. And that's a reason to think somebody, I don't know, I don't know anybody who would give a shit on the not side to pay to have like a bunch of fake nodes spun up. And obviously anybody can do that. Like, somebody on the opposite side could easily just spin up 200 of them and be like, look, knots are doing this. And I wouldn't put it past anybody on either side. I think there's plenty of people acting like on both sides of the conversation, so. But regardless, I, I think it's pretty clear that there is genuine loss of trust in what has been the reference client for a really long time. And it makes me think that, you know, to have a soft fork, you have to have some coherent center, some consensus on what is valuable, who is trustworthy and what code to run. And it makes me think of like, have we kind of reached a point of almost premature ossification that like, like if CORE ever wanted to have another soft fork, they really just shot themselves in the foot. Not, they didn't shoot themselves in the foot, they shot themselves in the balls on ever getting that out because now their uphill battle just got twice as steep and twice as long because they spent all of their cap years, a decade or more of reputational capital wasted on this issue, on this issue of all issues, and on a removal of the Opera turn limit. Like, you want to do it to do a consensus cleanup and opcode restoration and covenants and CSFs, you want to do all this cool shit and you, you literally probably blew it on op return. On op return of all things. And it looks like a really difficult process to try to get any sort of a soft fork. Like, it looks a lot more dismal than it has in the past. [00:56:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. The only part I would disagree with is the premature part. I think that's great. I think ossification is amazing. The video I made about Taproot, like, asking whether or not it was a good software, I think has some merit to it, because the use case that the vast majority of people that are using Bitcoin for is savings, right? Like store value. And why did we do Taproot? Again, this is the thing that we should be asking about. These softworks is like a good postmortem of, okay, did it work? Did it do what we wanted? And if you look at 90% of the UTXOs that are using paid to taproot, they're spam, they're BRC 20s, they're inscriptions, they're stupid things. And I mean, we should be asking, okay, if that's what happened with this, where the intentions were to add privacy, to make composability easier, and all this other stuff, and none of it has come to pass, right, Other than maybe Taproot channels and lightning, Basically no one is using the Taproot mass script tree, which was a big part of the design. You can have backup single sig with seven different ways of doing it. You could have degrading multisig and all that. And it turns out the UX to make all that is completely impractical. It's just going to confuse users. They don't actually want any of these features that the developers had in mind. The arguments that they gave when they were saying, okay, well, let's do Taproot, because even though it is nine bytes longer for the utxo, you know, we get all of these benefits because, you know, people can back it up or whatever. Well, you know, your, your intentions didn't come through, right. And I mean, that's not to say it won't ever, but shouldn't you have a little more humility about predicting the. [00:58:41] Speaker B: Future when this is your most recent, like, major track record? [00:58:46] Speaker A: Yeah, and it's kind of been bad, right? Like, well, all this stuff didn't come to pass none of the features that I was expecting to become a part of Bitcoin network have come to pass. And I've taught this stuff, I've played with this stuff. I've made my own degrading multisig wallet using Taproot and all that stuff. And it's like, well, either you do something very generic like 3 of 5, and then it degrades to a universal and blah blah, blah. And even then it's not easy to communicate to the user what the hell they're doing. We should be a lot more careful about that. And frankly, I don't think we have enough foresight or knowledge to be able to execute a soft fork without significant unknown consequences. And I don't think it's worth the risk because we have everything that we kind of need on the first layer, right? Like we have complete, absolute scarcity. We have limits so that spam can't grow unbounded. We have the ability to run things reasonably efficiently. I really don't think additional things are necessarily going to benefit users. And this is what I said about Covenants as a potential software. What are the users getting out of it? They come up with, all of the developers like stuff like that because they have more primitives to use and they're like, cool. Yeah, okay. Well, I read this tweet by Ben Carmen a while ago. He was saying, you know what sucks about Bitcoin is that there's nothing to do. And he's kind of right. You're doing bug fixes and just making sure things run smoothly and maybe making things a little more efficient. But it's kind of boring for people like him that want to go and make new virtual machines and cool rocket ships or whatever. And I kind of feel for them, but. But we're like a two and a half trillion dollar network right now. How can you be so brazen about risking all of that for a potential software that might ruin the usability of the things that people actually use it for? And for that reason, I really would like to have Bitcoin development much more focused on supporting the current use cases. Right, because that's by far the biggest thing. And reducing the attack surface, making it more efficient, fixing bugs, stuff like that. But largely I'd rather get. There's soft work that's being proposed right now. The great script restoration, it would add new opcodes and stuff like that. I want the opposite. I want to disable like, like 70 opcodes that no one uses for anything except maybe some like obscure mini script thing or whatever. I don't want those things on the network. That's like a maintenance burden going forward. That's like stuff that like, that rarely ever gets tested, right? Because it's just so rarely used. It's. I would rather get rid of a lot of stuff. [01:02:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like, look at what it's used. 99.5% of the time it's like, okay, what's in that? 0.5% and can we get rid of it? [01:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I would rather do that. Right. Like, in fact, like, I would go so far as to say, like, I want an ossification such that. Let's just get rid of all of these other functionality that the developers get like wet dreams about or whatever and stick with what the users are using it for and just make that really, really good. [01:02:48] Speaker B: Right? [01:02:48] Speaker A: Like improve the ux, make it very obvious, right. We have this entire virtual machine of script interpreter and stuff like that. That's very burdensome and it actually prevents a lot of new clients, new node software from coming in because like making sure that that acts exactly in the same way that the C version does is extremely difficult because there are all sorts of minor ways in which it can change and stuff like that. I say get rid of as much of that as possible. We should be shrinking the functionality of Bitcoin to the core of what's actually useful, what people are using it for, rather than expanding it and hoping, okay, well maybe if we do this, we could capture the NFT market or stupid like that. I don't care about the NFT market. I could care less about the defi market. Right, do that. You have plenty of other layers. You have liquid, you have ark, you have state chains, you have lightning. You could do all kinds of shit there. I don't really care, right? Like you could, you can try it or whatever and if it works then go do it there. But the base layer, this is what people are using it for. I think we should be prioritizing that. And I get why developers want more toys, but I think at this point it's like, no more Christmas toys, guys. You have enough already. [01:04:21] Speaker B: You have so many Legos. Just build shit. [01:04:25] Speaker A: Yeah, let's start taking toys away, right? I think we're at that level and not let's give them more new toys. We should be shrinking the attack surface as much as possible. This is a two and a half trillion dollar network. [01:04:39] Speaker B: You know, having to sell Bitcoin hurts, especially when you are certain it is going to be worth more in the future. But you can actually get access to the Fiat without selling it by using a Bitcoin backed loan. 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This could be a huge benefit to your Bitcoin stack and give you optionality in accessing Fiat without it being that selling Bitcoin is your only option. I've been a very happy customer. Check them out. The link and details are in the description kind of at the beginning of this when we were talking about Taproot. So I want to give because I asked Rob the same question just literally an hour ago or two hours ago and Because I was asking like, why, why does he think that Taproot has basically lived up to none of its promises and nobody has used it because what they're doing with Anchor Watch and what they're trying to do with music and Frost Snap and those guys and what they're taking advantage of are actually finally taking advantage of Taproot in some really interesting ways. Because I've. I've been like, yes, Taproot has been a net negative for a while, but it also is. It's still kind of early when we're talking about like the timeline of all of this and that I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, because usually very dumb uses are kind of the first use case for everything. You know, Bitcoin is a revolutionary global sound money. And the first thing people did with it was buy mushrooms and weed, you know. So in the same kind of vein, I asked him about Taproot and he said the reason he thinks is because the developers built like the technical, like the core protocol, but then none of the bridge tools for people to build with it. It's like people build applications, they don't. [01:08:21] Speaker A: Aren't. [01:08:22] Speaker B: Don't want to touch cryptography stuff. They don't want to know, like how to pass. There's still no standard way in like music on how to use a PSBT to pass around and like sign transactions together. Like, none of that shit is built and nobody wants to make an investment in a product and then have to hire a bunch of cryptography developers who are all working on bitcoin already anyway and take on all of this liability and risk when like multisig, nobody use fucking multi sig until psbts. Nobody. Because there wasn't a safe way to even collect signatures together. But after that happened, multisig became very available, you know, it suddenly people started integrating it. And so it's like this chicken and egg problem of we don't have any bridge tools. And if you build. Nobody wants to invest in bridge tools because nobody has the adaptation. Like nobody has it a compatibility, but nobody has any compatibility because there's no bridge tools and nobody wants to touch it, you know, like. So I, I think we may actually be crossing a Rubicon here very soon where there are particular tools that are finally coming out and standards that are finally being built. It's just a really slow and grueling process. And Taproot actually gets out of the. It's only used for spam window. But we will see. You know, fingers crossed on that one that Taproot becomes like a tool. The tool that it was always promised as. [01:09:52] Speaker A: I mean, I don't think we should hesitate to take the L here, honestly. [01:09:56] Speaker B: Like, I mean, if we take the L, we take the L. I'm not personally invested in this. [01:10:02] Speaker A: No, no. But there are lots of developers that are. Right. Because they did push for it. And honestly it was the brainchild of Greg Maxwell. Peter Willey actually implemented it. But a lot of it was a lot of developers, at least when I was talking to them during the thing there were kind of hesitant about it. It's like, okay, do we really want this? And. But they didn't want to be sort of like the squeaky wheel or whatever. So they just sort of like held back their objections. And like, the more I think about it, why. Why it would have been a lot better if they actually did object. [01:10:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Be the tenth man. [01:10:46] Speaker A: Yeah, Maybe could have spurred some of the people that, that wanted Taproot to create some of these tools ahead of time so that it gets used in the right way or whatever. But that said, I'm skeptical even of that, that there will be good use cases. I mean, it's possible ARC becomes like this huge thing or whatever and maybe bit VM becomes a huge thing. And those two are particularly enabled by Taproot. But I don't really see evidence of it. [01:11:21] Speaker B: Right, yeah, that's a tall order to basically predict what's going to be the next big thing and be like, that's why we'll use it. It's like, eh, well, nobody knows that. [01:11:33] Speaker A: Right, Exactly. And to a large degree it's like, where's the user demand that you're going to fill? Right. This is a classic sort of startup problem of okay, where's the product market fit here? Because I don't see a market for these things. We came up with, okay, yeah, you could do backups and blah, blah, blah. Is there a big demand for backups? Because we already have seed phrases. Right. We know how to go and secure a piece of paper with 12 or 24 words on it. And that took like 10 years of training, people. [01:12:08] Speaker B: Right. [01:12:08] Speaker A: Okay. We're really going to have a separate process to set up a 3 of 5 multisig so your friends can recover your, your wallet that your dumbass erased or something. I feel like developers didn't really even think about those things and that's a large part of why Taproot hasn't succeeded. And even ARC and bitvm, those were not arguments for Taproot. [01:12:33] Speaker B: At all. [01:12:35] Speaker A: They came up with that, honestly, quite brilliantly, both of those projects, as a result of, okay, well, we have all this space because you can go down 120 levels on the mastery. We could actually put a whole program in there and you can disprove that a smart contract was not executed properly in a very efficient way and blah, blah, blah. And with arc, it's like, oh, users can share these Taproot outputs, basically, and they could be like virtual transaction. These were not at all like what. Even the benefits of Taproot might actually be sort of like accidents, right? Not. Not what the developers intended. So I think we need a lot more humility about. About softworks in general, because you're giving toys. And it's kind of the same assumption that we were talking about at the beginning with Opreturn. The developer assumption right now is everything's going to be used for good and nobody's going to use it for evil. And that's where we're getting burned here, because people did use Taproot for evil, and people did use it in a way that the developers didn't intend. And you can't just throw up your hands and say, well, we intended it to be good. Hell is paved with good intentions. [01:13:58] Speaker B: It won't happen this time. [01:14:01] Speaker A: Like, intentions don't matter, results do, right? And like, well, intentions do matter, but that doesn't absolve you of the results. And that's just sort of like being retarded economically, like we talked about before. So I'm very sort of disenchanted with softworks in this vein because of the lack of predictability and sort of this endless clamor by Bitcoin by developers for new toys. Honestly, I think it would be better if we started taking some of those toys away, started working on using the toys that we have well, and maybe even ossifying to a degree where you just kind of keep the use case that you have now. And if other people can come up with new use cases, maybe we protect those later, as long as they're popular. But anything beyond that, don't do it right. Just keep it sort of like what Bitcoin is, because the quality of money that's so important is that it doesn't change. This is what's wrong with the Federal Reserve, this is what's wrong with all of this fiat stuff, is that it is constantly changing, not just in supply, but in the ways that you can spend it and how it's used and all the financial instruments that it backs and stuff. Like that that's the problem. And if we. The more steady it is, the better it is. And that's a part that we're kind of running up against with the developer desire for new primitives and functionality versus the economic reality that the best money is going to change the least. [01:16:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the shiny thing syndrome, right? Is that like. And I fall victim to that all the time. I was a huge supporter of Taproot. I thought to be. [01:16:13] Speaker A: So I was. [01:16:14] Speaker B: I was really, really like, it was privacy. Like, I thought we were going to have like a bunch of new privacy tools. And I was really excited about that because that's one area where I feel like Bitcoin is susceptible and particularly weak at the base layer, but almost. I don't know of any privacy tools that leverage Taproot to any degree. Really. None. [01:16:39] Speaker A: I mean, at least you can sort of like have one address that could be both single sig or multisig, and you can't tell. But that's not leveraged at all by anybody really. But like I said before, there are so many second layer solutions that are solving for this. Liquid has confidential transactions. You have submarine swaps. Like, Ecash is private by default. There's so many things that provide the sort of like quote unquote mixing functionality. You could have covenants on Liquid. I mean, they. I think they enabled opcad, among other things. And besides, you can use like simplicity and you could probably build whatever covenant you want first. I don't think there are too many use cases behind what we already have that people are going to come to Bitcoin for. But if there is, go prove it somewhere else first and like show massive user growth, then we can consider it. I feel like that's the path towards softworks and not this. Hey, we're developers and we want new toys, so you should give it to us. [01:17:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. There's an element of like, you know, we're trying to make TCP IP better in like 1999. It's like, well, let's put streaming in it because, like, definitely streaming is going to be like a big thing, but it's like, how do you even know a when streaming is anybody's going to care about it because, like, you've still got 10 years. You might feel like it's about to happen, but you definitely have a decade and some change. And then in addition, why do you think that we definitely need an upgrade to make streaming work? You got 10 years ahead of you that you have no idea what people are going to build. And this is something that Steve brings up on the roundtable a lot, and I really respect his opinion on this, is he just says, like, we just have no idea. We have so many tools at our disposal with Bitcoin. We have no idea what we can actually build right now. And we have not taken any of the time necessary to like, bit. VM is still a relatively new thing and it was a completely unintended. Nobody even considered that that was even in the possibility of like, how you could build stuff or how you could construct things. And it came completely out of left field. We still don't know, like, in 30 years there is. You give 30 years, there's absolutely zero way. There will probably be like five huge things that nobody saw coming that somebody develops and becomes a thing. You know, in some context, we just have a lot of tools and we. We haven't figured out how to use them. You know, we're still just taking the hammer and running around banging things and thinking that, like, oh, well, I need a completely different tool for. To pull nails out. And it's like, well, turn the hammer around, you know, so well. [01:19:20] Speaker A: So, I mean, I get this sort of, like, analogy about tools. The. And the reason why I want to take a lot of those tools away is that what we've been talking about, which is they can be used for good. And the developer assumption is that it's always good, but there's a lot of evil too, and we want to prevent that too. [01:19:41] Speaker B: Like, every time, every time somebody's like, oh, well, we can do defi with this and we can capture. Capture the NFT market as if that's something we want to do. Like, you're gonna lose a lot of people with that one. But there is. There is this weird thing of like, we need to capture other markets and we're kind of missing the point if that's the framing of the whole conversation. Money doesn't need to capture any other markets. Like, yeah, there is no market that even comes in the realm of importance or size or scope as money. Like, money is the market and everything else has a sub market. You don't need to capture submarkets so that the market is better. You know, like, it just. It just like that one, like, drives me crazy. Like, Bitcoin doesn't need to do anything other than be perfectly sound, globally trusted money. Yeah. [01:20:39] Speaker A: And. And that mentality totally comes from VCs and people that want to see growth or whatever. It's like, you need to enter other markets. Why? Because money isn't big enough. Store value isn't big enough. A market, what, $200 trillion isn't big enough for you? [01:20:57] Speaker B: The biggest market of all markets is not a big enough market. [01:21:01] Speaker A: Yeah, we should start selling like trinkets on the blockchain because it's not enough. It drives me nuts because it's totally like a fiat way of thinking where it's growth at all costs. Just do what you're good at, right? Like one function is really all. And this is the product market fit that Bitcoin has found. You don't need more product market fits, right? Like just be good at the one thing that you're good at and let everybody else like go, right? Like if, if somebody wants to do NFTs more power to them. I mean, I think it's a scam, but go, go, go try it somewhere else. You don't need to be polluting the main use case. So I mean, in a way, like I respect Google in that regard, right? Everyone complains about like the products that they stop supporting, but they know what they're good at, right? They know where, where their money is coming from. So if it's not making much money, they just kind of, you know, cut their losses and that's it. And yeah, and that's actually like a smarter way of protecting their main business than in sort of getting distracted by all of this other stuff. Which is, I think the direction that bitcoin has headed for a while now is, at least in development terms is hey, what cool new shit can we build instead of how can we make what we're already doing way more secure, way more easier, way more accessible and way, you know, like those are the things that we should be thinking about instead of hey, I want to make this interesting covenant so this, you know, we could take over the point of sale auction market or something. Yeah. [01:22:52] Speaker B: No, one of the things that gets me is that, you know, the, the reference client, like I would love to hear developers talking about like how do we get twice as many people caring about running nodes and how do we build tools for them to, to want their node to like care about? Like, because one of the biggest things for me that I use more than anything else aside from like Albi on Start nine is like I, because of literally Nostra Wallet Connect is the only reason that Start 9 is my number one used Lightning wallet. So and, but the other, the other big thing is my own personal mempool. Mempool space. Like that was like a huge thing and it's just like I Had two nodes and I still went to a website run by a third party to look up addresses. Like, that's stupid. And I could do it on the terminal, but it's a pain in the ass. Like, I don't. That's not a fun experience. Like, why. And then, and then people complain. It's like, well, there's just not enough people running nodes and people don't want to run nodes. And it's like a lot of work. It's like, well, make it good. Like, make it fun for them. Like, you're designing the software for the node and sure, you're not. You're not at the application layer, but you are at the layer where people who build applications that make it cool are interacting with, like, give them things to interact with easily. Build bridges. Build bridges. Because I would love to see two or three times as many people running nodes for real reasons. Because it's just better to have your own bank and easier to do all of the things that you want to do with Bitcoin if you had a node. And I think, I really think it's kind of like a business who has lost touch with their customers is they. They don't know who they're building for anymore. They're kind of building for. I mean, this is a very general statement. I'm sure there's plenty of people in Core who aren't in this. You know, like, I'm talking about a lot of people here. But it does kind of feel like there's this big disconnect between what's. How it's being used and how the direction that it's going. And I don't think that's an unfair thing to say, but, you know, it is what it is. [01:25:18] Speaker A: No, no, it's totally fair. And this is the maybe divide between users and developers because in a sense, the developers aren't really developing for the users anymore. And that's a distinct feeling I get is they're developing for other developers. And, you know, you're talking about, like, why aren't more people running nodes? Because it's not built for them, right? Yeah, they're just like, the UI sucks. You. You have to, you have to like, you know, write a bunch of commands into the command line and. Or maybe you download the binary and double click it and you have no idea what's going on. There's no user interface that shows you, oh, you've downloaded this much. I guess you. If you're running the Core Wallet or something. Maybe, maybe. [01:26:02] Speaker B: But, like, which they want to Deprecate. Which they want to get rid of. Like. [01:26:06] Speaker A: Well, I mean, maybe they should because it's kind of a very poor user experience, honestly. But there's a very big disconnect between users and developers. Even running your personal Mempool space thing, you not only have to run a node, you have to run an Electrum server on top of that. Why? Because there's no transaction index by default. There's no address index by default. You can't. And then you need to run something on top of that, which is Mempool space, which reads all of the stuff. [01:26:40] Speaker B: The index that you just built. [01:26:42] Speaker A: Yeah. And then it displays it and so on. All of that should be a part of Core, or at least have a UI layer or something. [01:26:53] Speaker B: API layer for pulling the index. Yeah. [01:26:55] Speaker A: Or just like a simple web interface that you can go and look at what it's doing or how far it's synced, or what your Mempool currently looks like and all that. You have to install two other layers of software just to get access to that. That's not a good user experience. And to some degree, I get it, we don't want to have to maintain that or worry about that or whatever, but at least provide some basic APIs. There's a lot of developers that have been asking for some sort of address index forever. And in fact, I think Jonas Schnelli had like, a fork of Bitcoin that had an address index in it, but he stopped maintaining it, I think, by version 0.12 or something. But that's enormously useful if you want to know the history of a particular address. Right. Even if it's not yours, you sometimes want to do some investigation into where this money might be coming from or whatever. Like, why hasn't that been in there? Right. Like, and it. And I've always heard from, like, people like Greg Maxwell, well, it's kind of too complicated to do that, or, you know, like, what would that mean? It's like, well, go figure it out. This is what users want. [01:28:16] Speaker B: You're trying. [01:28:17] Speaker A: Why are you, like, giving technical excuses for not giving users what they want? [01:28:24] Speaker B: You're trying to do a great script restoration as if that's easier. [01:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that. And then there's another one that a lot of people have been asking for. Some sort of, like, UTXO commitment. So you can sync much faster. Right. Just download the last block. Look at the UTXO set commitment. Go download that and then check it against the commitment. Now you have the utxo, you're up and Running without having to do the entire initial blockdown mode. And you could do that, but no, these are things that would make Node running a lot better and those are deep in the weeds. Right? Like the actual things that users would use, like having a web interface or something like those aren't even under consideration and it's just complete tone deafness to what users actually want. And instead it's, you have to conform to what we think you need. And that's been the attitude of core developers for a long time. Maybe this is sort of like the inflection point where it starts going the other way, where if you have competing node implementations that they start going to the needs of the user instead of the needs of the developer or whatever is convenient for the developer. [01:29:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Did you see that Samsung was talking about they're gonna do a client. Do you know anything about that? I had heard about that in conversation or whatever and I haven't dug into it at all or seen anything. [01:29:55] Speaker A: I wouldn't be surprised if there is one. Yeah, and you know, it's especially with this, the knots fud, where it's kind of like, you know, if you don't like it, go run something else and then people run lots, but not knots. Well, then you're kind of asking for a third implementation, aren't you? [01:30:16] Speaker B: Right. [01:30:17] Speaker A: Okay. At that point it's maybe even a fourth or a fifth implementation. I honestly think that would be great for the ecosystem for the reasons of ossification, like I said before, but also because I think you find more bugs and fix more of them if you have more groups looking at it and so so on. So I, I, I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if that happens. I'm actually kind of hoping that it does. [01:30:48] Speaker B: Yeah, it'll be interesting to watch that kind of unfold in the history of this because there are a lot there, there are many different dynamics to this that aren't perfectly mirrored in, you know, an analogous system. Like, but like, it kind of makes me think about like browser dominance or whatever. Is that like for 10 years it's like all Mosaic or Firefox or whatever and then suddenly, boom, there's this huge shift to Chrome and it'll be interesting to look back in like 10 or 15 years as to how this all played out and what the, the node market actually develops into. And you might be right. We might be kind of like crossing a Rubicon into nodes become a different, seen as a different product or a different piece in the stack and it's no longer just you Run the node from the Bitcoin developers. And now it's actually like, you know, choose, choose which software gives you the Bitcoin environment that you want. So it'll be really interesting. It'll be really interesting. [01:31:56] Speaker A: I hope so. I would like to see more user orientation, user alignment from these clients. And I think competition is what makes it better. And honestly, Core just hasn't had that much competition. I mean, you've always had Lib, Bitcoin and BTCD and bcoin and all these other ones and even knots to some degree. But the dominance has meant that it has sort of like monopoly, like market dynamics where you don't innovate all that much. Right. Like, you don't have like. One of the reasons I actually started using BTCD at one point, this was like back in 2016 or something, and started contributing to it at least then was because it had an address index built in. It's like, oh, okay, I don't have to go do that. It's there by default. And it's like, well, that wasn't that hard. Why can't you do it? So I think it's stuff like that that we want to see where the users of the software actually kind of motivate the developers more so than their own sort of dreams of utopian networks or something. [01:33:17] Speaker B: What it ought to be as opposed to what it is to the people who use it. I'm curious, is there anything like, we, we've, we've hit a lot of like the, the main things, but is there anything that you have, and we may have already covered this, but that you feel has been missed? Like, because the one, the one thing that I feel is missed in this whole thing is the whole like, okay, if you care about mining decentralization, why, why have we not been spending two years arguing about Stratum V2 versus the five months we've been arguing about OP return? Like that would at least dictate that amount of energy in comparison? Probably more. But I'm curious, do you have like a thing that you're like, how is everybody missing this part of it? [01:34:06] Speaker A: Yeah, the thing that for me is kind of related to your point, which is that in the future we expect mining decentralization to be more dominant because all of the assumptions on both sides, right, like, oh, we're going to get, you know, child porn or whatever. It, it depends on there being sort of minor centralization. Right? Yeah, the, the entire idea of your mempool reflecting what the miners blind depends on minor centralization. That's what I described as like where the puck is versus where it's going. Because the puck is right now centralized. Right? Yeah. [01:34:45] Speaker B: The puck is not where we want it to be. [01:34:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we're. And, and it's, it's going in the other direction. You're seeing Ocean having more hash rate, you're seeing brains pool having more hash rate. Those run datum and stratum v2 respectively. And that's not a big part of the network yet. It's maybe 3, 4, 5%. I think CK Pool lets you do solo mining, so I think you can make your own templates. I'm not entirely sure. I think that's another percent or something. So it's like 5% of the network and yeah, 95%. [01:35:21] Speaker B: It's more than we've had. [01:35:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And for that 5% of the network, all of this stuff matters. Right. And the arguments that they've been giving is, well, it doesn't matter because the miners are going to mine it anyway through slipstream or whatever. First of all, slipstream is really only mara. But even if you have Libre Relay to all of these centralized miners or whatever, that's not all of it. And 1 out of 20 times at least currently your mempool is not going to reflect whatever it is that they have. It's going to reflect something else. And as that percentage grows, the less and less accurate your mempool is going to be according to this logic from the core side that hey, you know, like you, you want the most accurate mempool whatsoever. Well, no. Well, it's going to be accurate 95% of the time. At 5% of the time it's not. It's going to be 95. 5. But what if it that becomes like 5050 and I don't think that's a, that's a very crazy thing to believe in like five or ten years. [01:36:26] Speaker B: Certainly hope we get there. We should, we should determine that this is our most important goal for it to be 5050, that mining decentralization is that good. [01:36:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And if it's 50 50, then all your assumptions go out the window. Right. All of the Libre relay like preferred peering and you're going to be able to get it to them anyway. Yeah, only half the time if it's 50 50, you have to wait twice as long and whatever filters are on the network, you have to pay probably a little bit more to get into those 50% of blocks instead of having 100% of the blocks that you have access to. So all of that matters economically. And it's just kind of completely missed by both sides, honestly about. Oh well right now it's being stopped because of centralized miners or something like that, because they have a big liability. Well, if we have decentralized mining, then it's going to be a problem regardless. Right. Like it's. I don't really understand what your point is there, but that part really bothers me that no one's really thinking about five, ten years down the line, all of these assumptions that are being made are going to be completely untrue and you're going to have completely different dynamics and game theory and everything else because it's going to be way more decentralized, especially with the hardware from Block coming out. Right. They have new hardware where it's going to be very easy to be modular and all that. [01:38:04] Speaker B: God, I love that. [01:38:05] Speaker A: And that should allow for those chips to be made into consumer level stuff. So instead of Bitax like disassembling ant miners or they're putting them into new ones, they can just manufacture them and maybe it comes low enough for a price where you can make it part of your water heater in your house. Who knows, right? There's so many ways in which we're not planning for the future and just assuming that everything is going to stay static, which is like a classically very Keynesian way of doing economics is okay, we have this situation now and we have to deal with it. Let's just assume that everything's going to in the steady state and then let's add stuff and we'll pretend that whatever we add won't affect everything else. Right. Like it's just like it's such like so many moronic assumptions built on top of each other that are in these arguments like at a very rude level. And it's not acknowledged by anybody that these are economic assumptions and that they're bad economic assumptions on top of that. And this is something that really bothers me, I think more as a, as a student of economics than as a, as a technical person. But that, that's, that's one part that definitely missed by pretty much everybody. [01:39:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. I like the analogy of like, or the framing of like going to where the puck is versus where the puck is going to be and this, and it's a mechanic and I talked about it, is that it, it's this seemingly defense, a defeatist attitude is that because mining is currently centralized, well, we need to fix it. So the mempool accounts for mining centralization rather than Being like minor centralization is like a big problem. Let's fix mining centralization, you know, let's not react to it. Let's be aggressive and be like, okay, what are the most important tools right now and the, the lowest effort and highest return things that we can do to help decentralize Mining has definitely got nothing. Opera Turn doesn't even show up on the list if we just want to like have a hierarchy of what we ought to do to fix that problem. [01:40:33] Speaker A: But it's kind of like, oh, subways aren't safe, so let's just get less people to ride it instead of facing the subway. [01:40:44] Speaker B: Jesus Christ. [01:40:45] Speaker A: But I mean, this is sort of like the, the weirdness of bureaucracy, right? Like, and sort of like the fiat incentives that we have is that certain things are ossified in a bureaucratic manner and there are certain things that you can't do once a bureaucracy sort of like rises up around it. So you can't fix the main problem. And maybe some of that has happened to Core because of its almost monopolistic position and a bitcoin node economy. So yeah, yeah, I mean them losing some of that I think is a very good thing. [01:41:20] Speaker B: Might be healthy. Might be healthy. I want to loop this all the way back around. We're going to go full circle. What are your plans for the videos that you're doing? Are you going to keep up with them and what have you been using to edit them? What's your workflow stack? [01:41:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to do non bitcoin stuff. So I have this whole like script that I've written for like Justin Trudeau's paternity that I would like to get out at some point. [01:41:51] Speaker B: Hell yeah. [01:41:52] Speaker A: Puts all the pieces together. Oh yeah. I wrote an article years ago and I've had some new information since that I want to put back into like a three or four minute video. You can see it and be like, oh yeah, that guy. [01:42:05] Speaker B: It's the whole picture. [01:42:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, but love it. But I don't like, you know, it requires a little more like getting different assets and stuff like that, like images and stuff. And like I want it to be good. So that's something that, that's the direction I want to go in. Maybe not daily vlog, but maybe like a weekly vlog or something like that. What I'm. What I've been using to edit it is capcut. Capcut. [01:42:38] Speaker B: Cap cut's good. It's a handy tool, man. It's really good. [01:42:42] Speaker A: Especially for multi camera. You just, you just select the Clips and you just go multi camera and it just syncs everything. I'm like, yeah, what the. I don't have to clap. I don't have to do anything. It just figures it out. [01:42:53] Speaker B: And it's like my slate. I've been. I've been waiting so long to make a film where I needed a slate, you know, and I've got, I've got my slate. I've had it for like two decades. Don't even need that shit anymore. You're done? [01:43:03] Speaker A: Yeah. No, no, you just, you just pick the camera angle. You want it whenever you want, and then it just like, all flows right. You could pick the audio track that you like the most, or I mean, if you record it separately, then it can be part of it. It's fantastic for that. The subtitle stuff is fantastic as well. Sound effects, the transition effects and stuff like that. I played with some of them and tried whatever. I think, at least for the videos that I've been doing, I think less is more. What I found is that you don't. Yeah, you don't need too much. People are really there for the content anyway, which, which is something that I've learned is that like, you know, the, the videographer in me wants to get like, fancier cameras and lenses and all that. And then like, the person that's more into hearing and podcasts wants like, really good mics and stuff. But like, honestly, content is the most important than the audio and then finally maybe video. And it's honestly, like, most people think it's the opposite. It's actually the content is the most important and what you choose to put out there and working on that, and that's changed my workflow significantly. So at the beginning, if you watched the evolution of my vlogs, it starts with me just like editing the hell out of it, right? Like, I'll record myself, like five minutes of ranting or something like that and like chop it down to two minutes. Like, like, it. It looks so choppy and crazy. And then I, I realized like, I, I was spending like, like an hour just like on editing it, right? Just trying to say, okay, there's an ah here, there's pause here, blah, blah, blah. And then I, I started like, becoming more intentional with the content instead of just like off the cuff ranting for five minutes and hoping for two minutes of content in there. It's okay. Here are the rough things I want to talk about. And then later it's like, okay, you know, I could just write this out and then I could look into a camera and that's going to be a lot less editing in the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the workflow I've come to is think of write it out, edit it a few times, and then put it onto like a teleprompter kind thing and then record it once, maybe twice. And then, you know, I like put it into Capcut, put the two or three effects that I do, which is mostly like around the title and then. And then you're done. Yeah, yeah. Makes it easy. [01:45:45] Speaker B: Now your evolution is very similar to mine. What do you use? So I've actually been using descript, which is similar to Capcut. And then for more involved videos, I use DaVinci because, like, I'm very native, like nonlinear editor. I've been. I learned on Final Cut and did Adobe Premiere for a long time and after effects, so. But DaVinci has slowly gotten a lot of those, like really nice tools that the AI tools that like capcut has had of just being like, these are your camera angles and just like basically propose an edit of the whole thing. And it's just like, Jesus, the time, the time saved on this is incredible. And I used to, I, I still, still, I will do a lot of editing, but it's usually less on the content and more on just like I'll flub or I, I realized that like, I really don't need this sentence. And this is already six minutes. Let's cut it down to five and get these couple of things. But I will still, I will still go on like a 20 minute or 25 minute rant every once in a while and then have to cut that shit down to five minutes. And that's not a fun task. It's not. [01:47:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. [01:47:05] Speaker B: It's not. [01:47:05] Speaker A: Well, the, the caption thing kind of helps a lot because you can, you can see where you're right repeating things. [01:47:11] Speaker B: Text editing has been a game changer. Being able to see the text and then just be able to like highlight this in like this is what I said. Let me just delete this chunk. [01:47:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:47:24] Speaker B: And then they. It squishes it. That has been. That is the thing. That is the thing that has made more of a difference in editing. [01:47:31] Speaker A: It's more like editing text and less like editing video, which is, Which I really appreciate. [01:47:36] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. [01:47:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [01:47:38] Speaker B: Well, but yeah, I think I have. Yeah. Oh. Oh, my God. We're already like an hour and 50 minutes. Okay. [01:47:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:47:47] Speaker B: I think I have another thing here in like 20 minutes to like finish out My day. Well, dude, let's go ahead and wrap it up then. This, this, this is a good point. We went full circle. Is there anything else that you wanted to share or you know, plug your shit, you know, all that, all that good stuff. But any other final thoughts you want to leave with people on advice and thinking about the drama or life. Life. You've lived a lot of life and you have a lot of kids. [01:48:21] Speaker A: I have. For me the biggest thing is verify, don't trust. Please, please. We need more voices than like Luke clones and Greg clones, okay? Like we need people that are actually thinking for themselves and actually going through and making arguments. Even, even if you get crushed, even if somebody smacks you down with arguments from other people. I think it's good practice because we're gonna need that. Right? Like this is what it means to be self sovereign. It is not blindly following some other person, but actually thinking for yourself. So I think that that's certainly true of this current controversy, but also true in life as well because it's way too easy to go with the flow or that team or joint team red or joint team blue. I like to think that as a libertarian that I'm like not taking either side and trying to figure out what the actual true thing is. Although big L libertarians tend to be sort of groupthink as well. But the whole point being, I want you as a sovereign individual to actually use the brain that you have, even if it's limited. Right, whatever. Just in the knowledge that you think you ought to have. Because it's good for you and it's good for the network and it's good for the community to have more voices, to have people that are actually thinking about things in a rational, reasonable way. And that for me is what stops tyranny in the end is more people that are actually thinking for themselves and saying, you know what, this doesn't smell past the smell test. But that doesn't necessarily mean, okay, you join the, you know, the Astroturf opposition over there, but it's actually like thinking for yourself and making objections that, that you've come up with. So be an original thinker that that would be basically my, my plea, my stuff. I'm on X, I'm on Noster. I'm on a lot of different platforms. You can find them all, I think on x.com Jimmy song my newsletter is jimmysong.substack.com I don't just put technical stuff, even though the newsletter is called Bitcoin Tech Talk. I have a bunch of articles that I find interesting. And they range from what's going on economically to like, gender relations and you know, all kind. Like what. It's. Whatever. Quantum mechanics, whatever. Yeah, yeah, I will. I will post whatever I find interesting. So if you want to read about stuff that I. That's on my mind, that's. That's the newsletter to get to. Yeah, I think that's a. About it for my stuff. I don't know. Maybe. I mean, there's always more. I guess I could promo my book or whatever, but, you know, you guys can find all that. Hell yeah, dude. [01:51:35] Speaker B: No, that's great advice. No, I always love the. It's like a quote probably from Jefferson, who the fuck knows, but that the greatest enemy of tyranny is independent thought. And, like, we should strive to be better than just repeating the opinions to like, give ourselves the time to just be like, all right, I'm gonna. I think I agree with this, but let me see if I can break that opinion. Let me see if I can steel, man. The other. And I like to think I try to be very pointed about, like, don't get caught in that, you know, like, actually have my opinion. And hopefully we can have more and more people who. Who do that very thing. And I thank you because I've always thought of you as being one of those people who, like, if I. If I get a. Get a take from Jimmy, Jimmy's thought about it and he's got his take and because of that, it's valuable. I'm not going to just hear Greg Maxwell or Luke from a different person. [01:52:39] Speaker A: Thankfully. Yeah. [01:52:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, hell yeah, man. Dude, thanks for coming on. [01:52:44] Speaker A: This is a good show, man. Thanks for having me. That was a fun conversation. And yeah, hopefully you get a lot of clips out of it so you can, you know, promote it on all the social channels and all that. [01:52:54] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, get lots of video clips, man. I'm gonna put them in cap. Cut. [01:52:57] Speaker A: I did. I did do a lot of ranting, so hopefully, you know, one of those goes viral. [01:53:02] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, man. All right, guys, I will have a link. Links to all of that good stuff down in the show notes. The description is always going to be the place where you can find all the things that we talk about and anything related to it. And if you find something that's missing or something that we brought up that you would like a link to, do not hesitate to throw me a message, a DM on NOSTR or X. I'm happy to help. And I would love to be able to add it in just so that I want obviously the description and show notes to be the place to find all of the things and easily search through this later. Especially with regards to a lot of the things we're doing on the website which is finally coming along. We've had kind of a placeholder for two years and it's good to actually see progress. So hopefully I have a database, a library, a central location to make it easy to go find things that we've talked about, to search through episodes where we've discuss this or that and get through the history of 1200, 1300, 1400. I don't even know how many episodes and chats and reads and everything now because there's a lot buried that I think people regularly tell me are lost. A lot of pieces by Jimmy Song, a lot of. And you know, like we mentioned in this episode book I've done on so many books and people don't even know that some of them are out there. I don't do a good job of promoting them. So I will have again links to all that good stuff and hopefully bitcoinaudible.com will be a really good and really useful reference for finding and digging through all of the cool ass things we've talked about. So thank you guys for your help on that last shout out to Jimmy Song. Always, always appreciate his conversation and company and that was a really fun episode. That was a really good chat and with that I guess we will wrap it up. I don't think I have anything else to add. Shout out to Leden for Bitcoin backed loans, LEDN IO to pubkey P U B K Y app for building the decentralized web. The tools to redecentralize the web get chroma for LightHealth for Light built for humans and the HRF, the Human Rights foundation for their incredible work, their Financial Freedom Report newsletter and the Oslo Freedom Forum. They do irreplaceable work and it's an honor for that they actually felt like supporting mine. So shout out to all those guys. Great products, great tools, great people. And with that I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible. And until then everybody, that is my two sets.