Chat_151 - Bitcoin Technically, Ideologically, and Actually with Murch

[00:00:00] Speaker A: So just to be clear, I think that all of the people that I know that are working on Bitcoin core and other bitcoin projects are only interested in the monetary use case. But I think that many of them take a more long term view in how that might be happening. If we're trying to get towards this being not just the money for anyone, but the money for everyone. [00:00:42] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to the show. This is Bitcoin Audible and I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. This show was brought to you by Leden IO which does Bitcoin backed loans. This is a great way, especially if the price is down or you're in a bad spot and you don't want to sell, you can actually take out a loan. It's kind of like a mortgage against your bitcoin without having to sell it. They're a really good company, very focused and I have a link with a little bit of discount and all the details right down in the show notes. We are also brought to you by Synonym and the Pub key stack. Would you ever wish that you had a domain name that nobody could take away from you that was just yours and you could always be reached there? They have built PKDNs built on top of the network that made BitTorrent work. And if you haven't entertained or thought about how you could use these tools, they have an incredible stack and a lot of really cool things. You can go to PubKey app to kind of get a sense of what you might be able to build with this. Then also we have Chroma. These guys do light health light made for humans. And specifically I'm a big fan of their nightshades. Well, of course I use their light as my, my main light in here as well. But their nightshade glasses, which I put on about seven or eight at night to make sure that my circadian rhythm is not being messed up while I'm looking at screens all the time. There's a 10% discount with code, Bitcoin Audible and then lastly the HRF and the incredible work that they do fighting for freedom around the world. And they have the Financial Freedom Report, an excellent newslet as well as they run the Oslo Freedom Forum which will be June 1st 3rd of this coming year. Tickets, details, links, all the good stuff right down in the description. All right, we have got Merch domus on the show today, which we had never done a show together. I'm trying to still make sense and Build some sort of a bridge between. Because everybody that I talk to about this in person and in private and in public. Well, many, except for a handful of people who I think are just trying to antagonize everyone they disagree with on both sides at this point. But everybody seems to have the same goal in mind. They all think this is the right decision for the Bitcoin protocol and the Bitcoin network to make a better bitcoin. So I want to continue having this conversation and trying to build bridges and make sense of why everybody thinks the way they think. And I had a really good conversation. Just an awesome show with Merch. Answered a lot of really good questions and I tried not to push back a whole lot. There's a lot of really difficult perspectives and things that I think are really important caveats or red flags as to why trust has been lost or where exactly it has been lost and what the real issue is as opposed to the one that we're all kind of clinging to and this, that or the other situation. And he did a really good job of answering a lot of those and also would love to hear feedback on which you think were properly answered or glazed over or dismissed or ignored. It's hard, you know, when you're in the middle of a conversation to realize that we brought up three points and only answered two. And I'm sure we'll have a conversation again. So with that, let's just go ahead and get into today's show. We will delay no longer. Cause I think you guys are really going to like this one. And so this will be chat 151, I believe. And it is bitcoin, technically, ideologically, and actually with Merch Adamas. Merch, welcome to the show. Merch Dahmes. How you been, man? [00:04:20] Speaker A: I've been doing well, thank you. I had a chance to have a little vacation and. [00:04:26] Speaker B: Oh, you had a vacation. [00:04:27] Speaker A: That was good. Yeah, tell me about that. Or two weeks ago by now already. So I'm originally from Germany, so living in California, I don't get to go there very often. And we had core dev in Frankfurt in Germany. So the bitcoin core contributors got together for a few days and then I decided to attach another week of vacation to see my family. [00:04:52] Speaker B: Heck yeah. [00:04:52] Speaker A: Yeah, Just let the. Well not be on my computer too much for a week or so, you know. [00:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, the social media, like hiatus. I've done really, really good about like my, my screen time and I. The. The difference was absolutely. In social media, like, I'm not like off of social media. Like, I still think it's, like, incredibly useful. And, you know, if you're very targeted about it, it can be an incredibly valuable tool. But it uses me way more than I use it. [00:05:26] Speaker A: You know, I, You. You don't know how much I feel that I, I had hidden my, My Twitter account in January, right. And I was off Twitter basically for seven months. I was so productive. It was, it was great. Uh, so Twitter accounts get deleted if you remove them and then not log in for 30 days. Right. So I had just been logging in every three weeks or so briefly for a minute, and then del. Deleted it again. Then in August, we. We had our 10,000th pull request merged in bitcoin core. So I thought, oh, I could tweet about that. So when I brought back my account and tweeted about that, took a look around and I'm like, this, this debate is really going sideways on Twitter. Maybe there's. There need to be more people actually trying to, to talk about it. Yeah, I, I must admit it's cost me in other areas of my, My work focus a lot. [00:06:26] Speaker B: Yeah, of course it does. Of course it does. You know, social media is a really funny thing because there is. There is at least one area, I guess, or like one domain where there are more conversations happening. There's more openness and visibility into how people think and disagree. But the conversation also devolves very quickly. It's interesting because it's like some sort of like, filter. But if you, if you. Everybody, everybody I talk to on both sides of the aisle that basically form the, the foundation of their opinions based on what the, the. The quoted Nazis said or the quoted core people said are just to be Fairness. Yeah, Communists. There you go. [00:07:17] Speaker A: As demeanor. [00:07:18] Speaker B: The Nazis and the Communists, isn't it? They've lost sight of the real discussion. And it's so easy also to get trapped into that, especially when like, like, I identify. I identify. But you know what I mean? Like, I, I tend to agree with the, the, the people who are hashtag running knots on a lot of the issues around this conversation. And so when somebody says, oh, Nazis are all stupid, and they all believe this, like, you get this, this personal. It's like I have to defend this. And you have to realize that, like, you're separating, you're putting yourself in the group, which is exactly what the other person is attempting to do to degrade the argument. And then there's this immediate emotional reaction to basically dig your heels in to accelerate the devolution of the actual conversation because you're like, don't. You just fucking insulted me. You know, and so like, it just, it just goes haywire so quickly because it's. So you're all talking. Everybody ends up talking past the issue and they talk to kind of the social divide rather than, rather than the actual conversation. And trying to rein that back in the number of times that I'm just, I mentioned just one thing or some caveat or. I don't think that the censorship argument is very good on the, the quote unquote anti filter side. The communist side is like, I'll, I'll point that out because I'm, I'm literally like, my goal, aside from any attachment in the conversation is I, let's figure out what the signal is because like there's, there's absolutely stuff to unpack on all sides of this discussion. It wouldn't have been going on for 12 years otherwise, you know. [00:09:04] Speaker A: Right. [00:09:05] Speaker B: And. But then I, I'm. Then it's like, well, Luke said. And it's like, where does, where, where's. Where is Luke? What? I don't, I didn't say. I don't. Luke says a lot of that I'm not going to defend. You know, I don't, I don't. Luke is a whole other person in a whole other world from the little thing that we just brought up in this conversation. [00:09:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:26] Speaker B: And like, so I, I have this back and forth of how valuable it is for continuous conversation because like I, we probably wouldn't be having this show if it's not for social. You know what I mean? Like, and I think this is healthy. [00:09:40] Speaker A: Yeah. That's been the biggest damage, to be honest. I still maintain that like Jimmy and I agreed there is no economic incentive to use big up returns right in Ton Ray's shows a while back. And so it's basically two sides of a coin. If nobody's going to use it, we should not enable it or we are not worried about enabling it. But either way, if nobody's going to use it, it's probably a pretty marginal issue. But the whole social blow up around it and the way we've let ourselves be divided over this, I think basically the people on these sides are natural allies. They're the people that are writing software, not just bitcoin core, but also apps or businesses services that are just trying to build cool stuff on bitcoin. And the people that naturally had been amplifying and explaining and analyzing that with the podcasts and the meetups and the conferences and just blogging. About it and talking to their other Bitcoiner buddies about it. We used to always be hand in hand, hey, we're doing cool shit. You guys are helping us refine it by talking about it. And now we're at each other's throats and pointing fingers that that is the actual damage, in my opinion. [00:11:28] Speaker B: Yeah. This is why I think so much of the people who are actually having like a real conversation about this is. It's far less a. Because so many of the major technical issues I think there is agreement on, I think it's about. It's very much about a cultural and social shift. And then the fact that there was such a breakdown in trust, because this felt like very pushed at the beginning. And at least the original. The original conversation on GitHub and stuff was extremely dismissive against a very controversial issue. When the overwhelming majority of people had not been a part of conversations that have been going on for six months about this or longer. And they were just entering into this conversation and then they felt like, and this is totally disregarding who all and how many people were involved in this, but they just felt like they were being told to shut up because this is going to happen. And that was where it broke. And a huge portion of people were just never coming back from. From that. They felt like trust was abused and then that's where it degraded. And the conversation is largely. Or the disagreement is a cultural one of should we. Should we be actively disincentivizing spam or an exploit to turn to make a transaction masquerade as a jpeg, or should we just be ignoring it and not worrying about it or not thinking about it? Any changes that have happened in the past, did they make it worse or better? It doesn't matter. It's all a wash in the end. And this should be a pure, like, I guess, technical purity conversation. I guess maybe is the. The way to think about it. But the divide and the argument feels very cultural. Like, it feels very like, this is the path. We're choosing a path here. And I do think that matters. Even aside from a technicality of one. One piece of it or not. Just, just in the context of like, like a development creep of, you know, letting one thing slide, letting one thing slide over and over and over again until you're like, like, I mean, the witness. The growth of the witness data is like Taproot removed the witness limit. And it's like, okay, well, you know, maybe that's not such a big deal. We have all these possibilities as to what might be used in this. But then boom, we have like this enormous blowout of spam and we don't really have any use case for all of the extra witness data, at least not yet. Probably there will be, but there isn't, except for JPEGs and BRC20. So I think that's where a lot of the divide is, is like, is this like we taken a cultural path or a decision about how to think about this problem? And that's why everybody's desperately trying to latch onto some technical piece that says this is, this is definitely the concrete reason rather than my subjective reason why it should go to filters or why we should ignore filters when as you said at the beginning of this is that probably all in all, this is kind of a very small piece of the whole puzzle. Like, like whether or not we do opera turn this way or oper turn this way isn't going to make that big of a technical difference. But everybody wants that, that, that objective thing that says, no, this is definitely why this is so, so important when it's a cultural thing that makes it so important on either side of the equation. [00:15:02] Speaker A: Yet every time I say most people are just angry about inscriptions, they're like. [00:15:08] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no. [00:15:11] Speaker A: I mean, yes, I absolutely disagree. I think there's a big difference in how people react to, let's call it spam. The I think neither of the two major groups or directions like spam. One thing, I think one side hates it with a passion. Maybe a point where, where reason is not always on the table. [00:15:41] Speaker B: I fully admit to being to, to, to leaning in that camp and yeah, but hanging out over there. [00:15:50] Speaker A: Neither likes spam, neither works on propagating spam or enabling spam, but one side hates it with a glowing passion, the other side thinks it's a nuisance, an inevitable nuisance. And now as you say, the question is, do we want to put all this effort into it, into fighting it, or do we not want to put that effort because we could put it towards something else? And so if you're hating it with a glowing passion of a thousand suns, yes, you're gonna put all that effort in it and try everything you can. And it probably sounds very confrontational when someone explains to you why those things are not gonna be likely to be effective. And I think that's where 90% of the emotion stems from. And the funny thing is, as far as I can tell, yes, there might be a little more up return use with a policy that's more lenient, but any bytes that go into up return are probably bytes that don't go towards inscriptions. Those are the main competitors. I think there's payments are pretty small, they have more economic density per weight. In my opinion they will price out this spam. If you look at the prices for this stuff they're down 30x from the top. Just like every other spam wave in the last 15 years. It has a type cycle and then it just maybe some people use it for, for this or that technical reason later or they have a really, really high value art collection that they put in and you wouldn't have never been able to stop that in the first place. But over overall the trend is this goes to zero and then people stop doing it because it's expensive. [00:17:57] Speaker B: One of my thoughts at the very beginning was that like there was a double edged sword is that like I, I felt this like if you, if you go back to kind of the history of this like in 2014, 2013 era and when this really blew up and there was this very clear was much more I guess cultural consensus in the development community about like being aggressively like no, we're just, we're just not going to put up with this. And this pushed the entire culture. The, the basically the people who wanted to. I'm going to nft, I'm going to make my own coin. I'm going to do all this just kind of like just little spammy shit on the chain went and was like well we'll make crypto. And I think and my personally I saw that as a win. It was like okay, please, please go away and put all of that shit onto whatever stupid thing you want to make. That's fantastic. This is wonderful. Make your own coin, whatever it is. I'll tell people that I still think it's. But that's good that you're going over there and the. And so like going back to this like I think it was effective then and yes I agree in a sense. And so the question now is, you know like how, how much does that cultural stance or that, that signal and that's whether that's whether or not. Again, it was technically possible to get around it. It certainly was. But it's like you know, somebody who's building something or making an investment or whatever, like you don't go, it doesn't matter if it's technically legal in one jurisdiction and technically illegal in another jurisdiction. You're just going to go to the one that feels friendly. And that's where all the people that are there want to hang out. They want to Hang out with their friends and their buddies. There's a very social dynamic of like I want to feel invited, I want to feel like I'm a part of this. Bitcoin is ours, right? Like we are building this, we are making this, we are running this, we are protecting this. And so now there is this divide that. Because the, that consensus seems to have broken down pretty solidly and not just on this issue. I think just slowly over time with the fact that it's gotten bigger and more diverse. I mean you, you could just as easily say there's a huge division between a lot of tradfi investments. Like BlackRock doesn't give a shit about this opinion or this, this issue. And they don't, certainly don't really care about censorship resistant money unless it hurts their bottom line. Like they just want to, they just want to sell bitcoin to people because people keep buying it from them and paying a fee. So like there's, there is that question of like is that, is that attempt or is that that signal to prevent or push those people out even possible? Or do you just divide the community within bitcoin as opposed to keep them out of bitcoin? Especially with kind of the way crypto's gone, I feel like it's, it keeps doing this, oh, we've got a second season but not really and it's like oh, third season. No, no, it's, it's even worse. You know, it's like kind of that only strong survive thing. They're all going to slowly come back to bitcoin because they don't want to give up and throw up their hands and just be done with everything that they've built. But a lot of those tokens or shitcoins or whatever are, are going the way of the dodo, so to speak. [00:21:27] Speaker A: I mean, I think a. Obviously times are very different than 11 years ago. Blocks weren't full back then. If we, if developers hadn't pushed back that hard then probably a lot of the block space, almost uncontested would have gone towards putting this sort of data in. And today I just ran the numbers a couple days ago. Over 91% of the block space is full. Right. So just a little more demand will push the blocks to properly full. And then I got my coffee, my. [00:22:08] Speaker B: Wife fixed it good. [00:22:13] Speaker A: So blocks are full. Mining pools are much more sophisticated which means that they have more staff, they have the bandwidth to do stuff like Mara Slipstream or some out of band APIs that you can submit transactions to. So the mempool policy where people just sure, maybe change it locally on their own node before. And if only three, five people did that, it didn't matter. It's more systematically undermined now. And so on the one hand, basically our tools to push back on these things are not the same as we used to have them. And on the other hand, the danger of this is also not as it had been. If we had full blocks of 1 megabyte in 2013, 2014, where blocks were maybe a quarter full at the time, that would have been a very different story than coming off of two years of full blocks. And now blocks are like over 90% full right now. Yes, Taproot did drop the limit on script sizes in leaves. That was a very explicit design decision of Taproot. It's in the bip. You can look at bip340, it's right there. So the idea there is we changed the behavior of how we commit to transactions. You might have heard of quadratic hashing problems in legacy script. These don't. These have been resolved in SEGWIT and Taproot. And therefore the concerns that people had about big scripts in the past don't apply equally to tab script. [00:24:11] Speaker B: Did that actually change fund, like in a major way with tab script? Because I thought it was Segwit that did the quadratic. [00:24:17] Speaker A: Segwit fixed quadratic hashing for. Okay, so segwit changed how. [00:24:24] Speaker B: For anybody who doesn't know what that is, it's just basically scaling is like, how much worse if the script is bigger, how much more CPU does it take? Is it like, does. Does it get twice as big and get four times as hard, or does it get twice as big and get half as hard for every new byte? Like it's just a. It's just a scaling thing. But anyway, sorry, yes, no, that. [00:24:45] Speaker A: That's pretty apt. Yeah. So now it scales roughly linearly for every new input you get, which is. [00:24:52] Speaker B: Exactly one more input, more of work. [00:24:54] Speaker A: Before that it was for two more inputs. The work goes four times up. Basically the implied, maybe not fully understood, but implied and explicit change with SEGWIT was that blocks could be up to 4 megabytes. And with Taproot, the explicit thing was witness data could, could be pretty large and we might want to be able to do that. For example, if quantum computers ever substantiate and we want to have very big signatures because we need them for quantum, we might be very happy that we can have big tab scripts, you know, or. Well, yeah, so anyway, I Think today, um, we are in a position where almost all the block space is demanded all the time. And at that point, the competition, the block space market itself, regulates that. People who have an urgent need or do something that they consider very, very valuable, they can get in and outbid the others and they buy the block space. And if you look at the statistics lately, yes, there's still a chunk of block space going to inscriptions and runes, but they pay a much lower fee rate in average. So essentially they've become the buyers of last resort. They'll put stuff in the leftover block space. So if you don't want that stuff in there, just use it for better things. Maybe it's finally time to do a little UTXO management in your wallet. If you're. If you're, for example, buying every day and receiving a UTXO every day, it has never been cheaper to clean that up a little bit. Make bigger. Yeah, consolidate. Right? [00:26:56] Speaker B: Or I'm so spoiled. Fees have been so low for so long, I don't even think about it anymore. And I still use lightning, but I use lightning just because it's fast, you know, like, just because, like, yeah, the other day. [00:27:10] Speaker A: So I participated in the tabcon of trivia and my team won this year for the first time. We got a prize and I split it up and two people wanted to be paid on Lightning. Two people On Chain. On Chain was cheaper. On Chain was cheaper than dying. [00:27:30] Speaker B: Oh, if it's a lot. So it totally is. It totally is that. [00:27:33] Speaker A: It was like, yes, 70 bucks or so per person, but wow. [00:27:39] Speaker B: Okay. [00:27:41] Speaker A: Of course, I. I mean, I. I was using Phoenix, so the LS takes a fee, but it ended up being significantly cheaper on Chain for. For the transaction, which was funny. [00:27:55] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's. I actually really love the dynamic that. Not to kind of get off on this, but I really love the way the, like, lightning as a unicast layer, the. The beauty of how it, like, adjusts the economic. Because the base layer is purely like, how many bytes do you have in your transaction? And that's the cost. Whereas lightning is purely a. How much bandwidth are you taking? So it actually realigns the payment incidents incentives properly according to the value of the payment rather than how much data is being stamped, you know, confirmed on chain, which I always thought was like, a really cool element of the dynamic because it would ne. It would basically always push towards lightning to be used for cheap stuff and on chain to be used for more expensive stuff on. On a long enough timeline. On a long Enough timeline. [00:28:48] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. They, they naturally have this equip equilibrium where the expensive stuff becomes more. The relative cost of the expensive stuff is cheaper on chain. The relative cost of lightning is cheaper for cheap stuff. So small payments on lightning and that's also what the technology facilitates. Better, smaller payments, larger payments are just harder to route. Large payments are not a problem on chains at all. Right. Yeah, no, it fits very nicely together. Yeah. So so much for. We're not gonna talk too much about the shelter today. We jumped right in. [00:29:29] Speaker B: Well, I thought we would go. I thought we would dump into it like at the end, but I think it's. I think it's fun. I, I've. I was going back through some other stuff, so it was like fresh in mind again because I was trying to keep in mind what, what I should ask you. That's sort of fresh and what ought to be like, what needs to be repeated to some degree. Um, so yeah, I mean it's on. [00:29:50] Speaker A: Everyone'S mind right now. [00:29:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and on that I, I do have a couple of collected questions. Some of them are super pointed and you're probably. All you'll have to do is say yes or no. Probably. But actually, you know, before we jump into it, I just want to know because I, I know vaguely because I know I've heard this before, but just why and when did you get into Bitcoin? [00:30:14] Speaker A: All right, I read a slash dot article, I think it might have been 2011. And I thought, haha, nerd money. [00:30:23] Speaker B: That's another one you're talking about. [00:30:26] Speaker A: There were like three in a year. And I think I caught either the second and third or the first two. And then the second time it swam from a stream of consciousness. I was like, okay, this is this again. Maybe I'll take a look. Now it might have been the article that it reached $1 parity or whatever. So I read the white paper and I had been the treasurer of a student group the year before. I had done annual billing with six big folders of stuff. We had several international conferences organized, international exchange for students and so on, all volunteer work, but €100,000 in billing. And so I was studying computer science, but had sort of thought a little bit about money and international payments. Like we had some guests and they went back to Ukraine and then they sent me, they needed money for the bus ticket. I had given them some money and they sent it via Western Union. I later found out they must have paid something like 20% in fees on top to send me 50 bucks. So coming off of that, that just sounded super interesting. And after I read the white paper, I quickly discovered Bitcoin Stack Exchange and started reading there. Bitcointalk was sort of on the getting super loud and noisy end of things because it had just grown too much where it didn't work that well in a forum anymore with a linear thread. And it was like someone asked a question, five pages later, there's the answer. [00:32:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember those days. [00:32:19] Speaker A: Yeah, I found Bitcoin talk at that point already too unreadable. But I found Stack Exchange pretty quickly. So I just started reading all these questions and answers mostly by experts and really plugged in people and that's how I learned about Bitcoin. And yeah, was pretty. [00:32:42] Speaker B: Stack Exchange is still just an unbelievable resource. [00:32:46] Speaker A: Well, thank you. [00:32:47] Speaker B: That is like. Yeah, you're it. Yes, exactly. [00:32:52] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I've been a moderator since 2014. 2013 maybe. Yeah, no, I, I've. I've had an account since 2013 or so and anyway, like it, it's. I've put a lot of effort into trying to curate. [00:33:07] Speaker B: I'm 90% sure that all of AI technical expertise on, on Bitcoin is all trained from Stack Exchange. It is, it is pure Stack Exchange answers. It's like all merch. [00:33:25] Speaker A: A lot of other people also have written about. I've written about 2,000, I think. No. And Peter and Ava have written similar amounts. And then there's a bunch of other people that on and off have written a lot of answers. But also mailing list and GitHub and some forums and so on. There are some real treasures out there. [00:33:51] Speaker B: Yeah. For. For the sake of people who. [00:33:59] Speaker A: For. [00:33:59] Speaker B: The sake of the pro filters lowest common denominator arguments. Do you like NFTs and JPEGs? [00:34:11] Speaker A: I have never owned an NFT or JPEG on chain or anything. Are you not care. [00:34:18] Speaker B: Are you invested in ejpex? [00:34:21] Speaker A: No, no. I neither own nor find it interesting nor have invested ever in fact. [00:34:30] Speaker B: Okay, now I'm actually curious about this one because I've had a conversation with people like this one. Sounds like a gotcha question, but I actually think this one's an interesting question. Is it just the. Do you think is Bitcoin money or is it a data like verification network? Like is it a data storage network? [00:34:54] Speaker A: So I think that it's both and I'll try to explain. Bitcoin transactions are not just encoding a payment, they're using a programming language called script to express the spending conditions. So basically, yes, even the most Simple Bitcoin scripts that are only used for payments are data in the sense that they're interpreted by a script interpreter and so forth. So it is a data structure. It's an append only multi author data structure. And we collect pieces of data in there where the data is transaction information that tells us which pieces of Bitcoin are being spent and which ones are being created for the most part. And everything else around how that works is up for negotiation. Like with legacy transactions, let's say paid to public key hash and paid to witness public key hash. They're almost the same script, but they work under the hood, different in where the information is stored, how it appears in the data structure, how exactly the signatures commit to the transactions and so forth. But to the end user they're equivalent. Different address format. Okay, whatever. It's less expensive. Sure. Great. Yeah. So if people are saying is it a data structure in the sense can I store a lot of data there? No, you can't really store a lot of data there. It's limited to four megabytes every 10 minutes. That data is highly replicated, it'll be there forever. Which has interesting properties for some people, but it's also really, really scarce. Yes, it's not limited, absolutely like the amount of coins, but it's limited in its linear growth. The block space is limited in every point of time. Even if it's like there's never more block space available than those four megabytes in the next 10 minutes. Right. And if you don't use it, it's gone. You can't store it in a battery or anything. Right. So I don't know, I maybe I sidestepped your question. Do you want to double down? [00:37:42] Speaker B: You know, I'd say a lot of the divide on that and why I think it's an interesting question is then a lot of the divide on that particularly is whether or not you answer it ideologically or like in the context of a purpose or you answer it technically because I got a hundred, I could a thousand percent make a long Steelman argument for yes or no, that it is a hundred percent just a data storage network or it is a hundred percent a bitcoin or excuse me, a monetary system. But I would say from the context of like what's its purpose is that everything around its data storage and verification is for the purpose of creating money. And anything in that space that hinders or crowds out or gets in the way of its purpose as money is, is a bad user, is a bad structure of that system. Of data storage on that network because its purpose is money. But technically, yes, you could absolutely make an argument that it's just, it is purely a data storage network. Because I mean, if you just, if you just want to technically say, I mean if you look at the blockchain, it's just a bunch of bits, right? Like it's, it's literally just data on my computer and a bunch of rules about how that data should organize itself. [00:39:04] Speaker A: So just to be clear, I think that all of the people that I know that are working on Bitcoin, Core and other Bitcoin projects are only interested in the monetary use case, but I think that many of them take a more long term view in how that might be happening. If we're trying to get towards this being not just the money for anyone, but the money for everyone. And frankly, with something like 15 transactions per second, I'm not sure we're going to be able to onboard 8 billion people. And there will probably be some interesting inventions that we will want to have. Currently the experimental interesting things seem to be ARC state chains. Other things people are discussing that are not as mature. That will be the next stepping stones. Just like lightning was a wild idea in 2015 and people were very excited about how it might scale payments instead of users. Maybe ARC is now super easy to onboard for your first payment because you don't first have to open a channel, but you can get a battle lens in an ARC immediately, right? Of course everything has trade offs and if we're just going to say yeah, we can do the basic use case of spending a UTXO and sending it directly to a new UTXO that someone else receives. Sure, that works for us. That works for the number of people that are using Bitcoin right now, more or less. If we all want to use it right now at the same time, it doesn't work particularly well. Block space is too scarce. But for example, UTXO sharing schemes are going to make that way more efficient and obviously people that use the blockchain more efficiently are going to crowd out less efficient users. Less efficient users include, for example, people using copious amounts of data for dumb shit like JPEGs. They're going to get crowded out because the economic density of that is zilch, right? Not zilch. I mean some of these are apparently valuable or something and people are going to collect them because people collect everything. People collect Beanie babies, they collect a snot of baseballs, if that were a thing, you know, I mean people just collect stuff and Actually probably some people are very excited about bitcoin and being able to collect something on bitcoin is the epitome of their interests combined. Yeah, well, so how we got there, how did we get to the collectors? [00:42:23] Speaker B: Yeah, we just started with the bitcoin money. Is bitcoin money your data or a data storage network? And purpose versus technical? [00:42:30] Speaker A: I do not know of anyone contributing to bitcoin core that is interested in anything else than just using bitcoin as money. But that doesn't mean that it can only be used for money. Right? And now there's two ways to react to that information. One is but I only want it to be used for money and then try to make it so. And the other one is, well, how are they doing that and what can we do about it? And is it worth the effort of fighting this? How much harm is it? How much effort would it take to fight it? So I hope I'm not presenting this to uncharitably, but even if we all want this to be money, just being upset about it without a plan is a lot of energy towards, not necessarily a solution. It absolutely does help at making these use cases feel less welcome to tell them that they're not welcome, sure. But that doesn't change the technical reality under the hood. And we got this huge influx of people that are like, well we tried NFTs everywhere else in crypto as you had previously said, and most of these other crypto networks eventually just didn't have that buy in or tapered off or block space wasn't scarce enough. So anyone can just copy these things endlessly and they basically drowned in a sea of them. So they come to bitcoin because it is so expensive to do it here and because they know bitcoin is going to be around forever. And then to be honest, I think some people probably get an extra kick out of how, how much it upsets some people to do it here. Right? [00:44:36] Speaker B: Oh, that was part of the double edged sword that I, that I, I didn't get to the other side of that conversation was that like at the beginning is that you had that like they are unwelcome element which I think history indicated that that was a successful way to deter or at least disincentivize the behavior and the culture creep. Whereas the, there was this, this kind of like toxic incentive where the more important or the, the bigger deal that we made it on social media, the more it was like you're gonna get lots of tweets and angry, engaging. It's like rage baiting on social. If you can show them that you got your, your dick pic into the end of the chain. Because everybody's talking about it, right? [00:45:28] Speaker A: Everybody sees it, it's free marketing. [00:45:30] Speaker B: Yeah, everybody, everybody like sticks down in their camps too because somebody's like look, he just posted a dick pic on the chain. Like this is why we should do something about this. The other side is like he just posted a dick pic on the chain. We can't do about this, like quit making a big deal out of it. So it's, it's, it's really funny how. [00:45:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean for example, the same thing with Citria. They didn't really ask for it. I know this is an often misunderstood factoid but basically, I think you might have talked to Antoine about this before but basically Antoine discovered there is this incentive incompatibility. They want to do the right thing but because of the policy limit they just decided to write data to payment outputs. And he used that as an example to show how enforcing the upper turn limit had downsides at this point because it pushed people to put data into payment outputs rather than into non UTXO set outputs. And he only used this as an example. They didn't ask for an increase. Their solution works for them. That just makes them a standard transaction and the standard transaction will be in the next block and they have their problem solved. Right. So that was the motivation for the up return increase was the mal incentive. People are trying to do the right thing and it pushes them towards something that is worse for the network. And now everybody says Citria must have paid us. And everybody talks about Citria so much. I didn't know anything about this project at all. I still know little. But everybody knows Citria now, right? It's exactly this effect because it got this football. [00:47:29] Speaker B: Free marketing. [00:47:30] Speaker A: Yeah, free marketing. And that's the double edged sword, right? [00:47:40] Speaker B: You know one thing and I, I just had Chris Guido on the show which was a really fun conversation. I'm not sure if you saw it but one of the things, he actually is supportive of ctv, which I am too. I, I've thought like when you, when you mentioned the idea of like shared UTXOs is that I always thought lightning, Lightning never solved the problem until you have a UTXO sharing system as well. Because lightning like in fact you actually said it perfectly right when you brought it up just all the way talking about like 2015 is that lightning scales payments, not users. And so that one user can basically take up one user space on the network but make many, many payments. Right, but you still have to scale users. You still have to scale the number of UTXOs that can be compressed online or on the chain. [00:48:31] Speaker A: I mean, strictly speaking, it is a UTXO sharing scheme, right? It's a two of two multiple. [00:48:37] Speaker B: Oh no, it totally is. It totally is. It totally is. But I mean it in the, in the sense of a scalable one. Right. Like channel factories were a great idea, but they didn't scale because of the level of interactivity and complexity and. [00:48:50] Speaker A: Well, and we still don't have a way of doing ln symmetry channels, so. [00:48:55] Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah, that too. That too, of course. [00:48:57] Speaker A: Okay. But CTV and UJXO sharing. [00:49:01] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. So back at ctv, so Chris is supportive of ctv, whereas I find a lot of the people that I tend to culturally or kind of like ideologically agree on the sense of like how we should treat or how we should think about spam on the chain are also very aggressive on the, like, we shouldn't make changes because it's just going to make spam worse. And, and I'm like, well, you know, we should think about changes based on like, how they alter the cost of data. Like, like, like. Because, you know, if you think about it, like, and I'm not even saying that the witness discount is a bad thing because the witness discount makes sense. It always made sense, like logically that you only have to deal with it once, right? You only have to verify it and then you're good, you can throw it away, you can do whatever you want with it. It's not critically important ongoing to have that data sitting around. And so it made sense that the witness would get a discount and it served multiple purposes when we did segue so, but at the exact same time is that it meant that, oh, here's this nice fancy place for arbitrary data that we can stick in, especially at the taproot, remove the restriction on size that, oh, we can just stick as much as we want when now we get a discount for it. So rather than an even marketplace for data or, or even a disincentive on using the data that way, we had this almost like an invitation. It's like, look, you can, you can use this way cheaper than everybody else can use, use this on a per bike basis. And, but CTV obviously has nothing to do with that. [00:50:41] Speaker A: Right? [00:50:41] Speaker B: And I don't understand how we, like, we need a simple UTXO sharing scheme and it's not even that we can't even do a lot of like, ARC Kind of proves that connectors are really, really clever way to kind of get CTV functionality with the VTXO system without actually needing ctv. But it's way more interactive, it's way more people need to be there, more things need to exchange hands and the less interactivity, the safer it is, the better it's going to scale. [00:51:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:51:14] Speaker B: So I've always felt like we needed something that just had a very small footprint. Not I mean data wise, but I mean footprint is like an attack vector. It was very clear about the limitations. You couldn't do it recursively but that you needed something like ctv. And me and Chris like totally agreed on that and it was just like. But everybody we agree with on like how to think about spam and like is it an exploit or is it just a nuisance or whatnot? There's an uphill battle over there because I think they mostly just make the ideological stance and they just kind of like, like whatever that's just gonna, that's gonna have horrible consequences too. And it's like. It's just frustrating. But yeah. [00:51:58] Speaker A: I still don't have a super strong opinion on CTV or not ctv. I think we will need more Covenant constructions and there are several that are looking very interesting and have been developed pretty thoroughly. Basically I'm hoping that the people that make Covenant research their focus rally behind something and sell it to the community. I think I saw the template hash proposal recently which is basically like CTV but addresses some of the criticisms people had open with ctv. Like why introduce it into a legacy script does also changes whether it commits to the annex or not. And there's another. The. The hash construction is slightly different. Right. [00:52:57] Speaker B: But and I guess in general like when I, when I say ctv I. I really just mean Covenants in general. And the, the reason I refer to CTV is just because I think it's the longest running of like if, if we found it had some sort of a problem we probably would have figured that out by now because it's been controversial like twice. [00:53:15] Speaker A: Right. [00:53:16] Speaker B: But just in general a way for people to have. For there to be one UTXO with one Bitcoin in it and for 10 people to reliably and non interactively I don't have to be there or like, like they can provably. I own 0.1. Each one of those people owns 0.1 Bitcoin in that and that they, they just know that they can take that to chain and that is theirs. And if they want to do an alternative path or they want to do something else with it. And they don't want to redeem that. They can stay in that UTXO and they can work with them, but in the absence of interaction, in the absence of anybody being there, they have full ownership of that point one and all they have to do is take it a chain that that is a critical primitive to actually scaling users on Bitcoin. [00:54:02] Speaker A: Right, right. Because it would be such a much more efficient use of block space. A lot more of the interactions would be accounted for virtually in the cash and people would be able to prove and go on chain to execute what has been agreed. But as long as there's no disagreement, nobody ever has to. And I think essentially this is the same idea that led to lightning and that would make LN symmetry so powerful is with LNPenfTD, the existing channel construction you get this asymmetry and it's just difficult to scale that up to multiple people. I think you could probably make it for three people. But then there's for example, the question how do you know who to punish when someone sends an old version? Right. And with LN symmetry, the nice thing is every party gets the symmetric commitment transaction, so having multiple parties does not have this exponential blow up of all the different cases. And yeah, so I continue to be pretty excited about something coming along that enables LN symmetry. Ellen Hans, would CTV sort of would, I think CAT apparently would maybe, I don't know, I don't remember, but like, yeah, yeah, I think that could be an interesting primitive. Obviously CTV for example, or TX hash or template hash or whatever would make ARCs much more powerful, less interactive. It would probably make people build creative cool stuff that makes it much more efficient to use block space. So yeah, to step one more point back, I think that there's a lot of people that have actually not necessarily super overlapping opinions on everything else that are all upset about spam. And in a way, I think the reduced data temporary soft fork is currently not very likely to succeed in my opinion because the confiscatory surface is a big no no and OP return policy limit is too high. So let's make these seven incisions into consensus code and cut out all sorts of other stuff without any motivation in the text or very little motivations for the specific rules that are being introduced. I think that currently doesn't seem very convincing, but it is very healthy for this debate in the sense that being against something is cheap and easy and only words, but actually being for something and pushing that it gets adopted lets people actually they need to Be for something. They need to agree that this is something they want. And maybe I'm in the wrong echo chamber for a full picture, but my perception is that this has very much cut down the people that want it because being for something is a very different commitment than being against something. [00:57:39] Speaker B: Being against something. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a. It's a whole hell of a lot easy to get. Get people on account. Like CTV or Covenants would probably be a great example, is that that'd be the easiest way to divide the. The Knots community, most likely. But it's interesting because like, let's say, and I guess you, you already said that you're not really sure about like which Covenants or whatever, but do you actually think about the fact that taking a hard stance on this, not. Not you personally, but like Core, as pushing this change, will actually affect whether or not we could get a soft work down the road? Because it's caused a potentially deep divide in the. The actual conversation or the community, the consensus around like the path for Bitcoin going forward that we don't get something like Covenants that we probably really need because OP Return, which in the grand scheme is such a small, largely insignificant piece of the puzzle, but is a major part of the cultural divide that. That actually prevents from ever getting the threshold or the agreement that this is the group or this is the client that we ought to submit or accept or trust a soft fork for. Do you think about that? [00:59:04] Speaker A: I would say that the upper turn discussion has definitely reduced social capital in general across all of us. I would perceive Bitcoin Core to have certainly lost trust from the people that felt that they hadn't been heard or that their concerns had been dismissed. And I can't tell you how often people have told me, oh, I'll never run core again, or whatever. So in that sense, yeah, it's probably made it harder for soft forks to get adopted. On the other hand, I feel a little conflicted about that because for the most part, all of the Bitcoin core people and also all the opponents of Bitcoin core want to be very clear that Bitcoin core is not Bitcoin. And I think it is very useful to divide Bitcoin core development from Bitcoin protocol development in the sense that it's abstractly not the same thing. The overlap is when a protocol change is proposed to the point where it gets a reference implementation, it might be put into Bitcoin Core or it might be put into a different client. But this is the overlap where the development community actually implements a protocol change in some node implementation. Obviously there's a huge overlap in the people that contribute to Bitcoin core and the people that are interested in protocol development, but it's not the same conversation. So from that standpoint, if there is finally sort of the people that are really invested in Covenant Research come to the agreement we want to do this, I think it would sort of be a mailing list conversation or a community conversation, and then where it gets implemented and how it gets implemented would be a Bitcoin core development question, if they want to put it in Bitcoin core. And of course, it would help if a activation client is in the most widely deployed node software. But it's sort of a little bit. Two separate conversations and gotcha. It's overlapping and the border is not always super clear in the sand. But. [01:01:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. You know, that's also why I think, you know, in the past there's been like, Taproot was such a messy, soft fork, in my opinion, is that it's because not, not. Not from a technical sense, but from a who's going to pull the trigger sense, is that it was just this huge mess of like, nobody wanted the liability of saying that, like, oh, we're going to do this. And then everybody feeling like, oh, we have to. So everybody was kind of like waiting for someone else to take up the mantle and we did this, this funny dance for I don't even know how long. I can't even remember. [01:02:27] Speaker A: It was actually not that long. [01:02:29] Speaker B: I think it felt long. Is that. Am I just. Am I just imagining this or. [01:02:33] Speaker A: No, no, no. [01:02:34] Speaker B: Is it just Bitcoin time? [01:02:37] Speaker A: I think it felt long because it. There was this, this fight over it. But really, I would say someone had volunteered to facilitate an activation conversation and they very quickly announced, oh, the community has decided we will use this activation method. And I think the people that actually worked on Taproot themselves didn't think that that was the right way to go at all. But other people latched on. Oh, it's been decided by the community because the person that volunteered to facilitate the conversation said so. And then there was this perceived huge back and forth on how we activated. Do we still trust miners or not? And should we have lot true or lot false? And meanwhile, at some point, a few developers sat down and said, okay, let's do the speedy trial here, and implemented it, rolled it out, it worked perfectly. And then we removed the speedy trial code again, because it's only used for the activation, it Was like in one or two versions and it was over. So from under the water surface, it was like, no, we're not doing that, we're doing this. And we did this and it worked. And there was this whole huge blowup on the broader community conversation that just was a huge waste of time. [01:04:16] Speaker B: I want to get back to something that we talked about that we, we wanted to cover, because I do think it's important, especially with the. As far as one of the big divides in this conversation is Core as an institution and monetary influences, who, who pays who? And like, what is, what is this group? Because it largely gets personified as a single person. Because, yeah, I heard that because of Dunbar's number. Right? So Dunbar's number is alive and real. And so everything that gets a label becomes one person in most people's heads. And so give me the breakdown that you wanted to cover, the framing that you wanted to give. When somebody says core thinks this, or Core did this, or Citria funded Core, et cetera, like, like, what's your answer to that perspective? [01:05:14] Speaker A: Right. So Bitcoin Core in that sense is not a formal organization. There is no membership, there's no membership fees, there's no Bitcoin Core leadership and owners of the organization. And it's especially not a single person with a single opinion. Bitcoin Core is a centralized project in the sense that we use a Bitcoin repository to. [01:05:43] Speaker B: Oh, man, we're clipping that one. We're clipping that one so hard now. [01:05:47] Speaker A: You ruined it now. [01:05:49] Speaker B: Keep going, keep going. [01:05:51] Speaker A: Okay. We use a single GitHub repository to coordinate our effort. We have something over 30,000 issues and pull requests in there, some of which have hundreds of comments. There's just a ton of information in that repository and it is the shelling point for how people organize themselves. We log on to our workspace, we look at the conversations people are having about pull requests, about issues, and we review code that we get from GitHub. We leave our comments in DEPOL requests to guide the pull request author towards improving their suggestions, their proposals to an acceptable state. We sign off there when we think something is ready to be merged. So in that sense, the central thing of Bitcoin Core is where it is being developed and how it is being released. We all just decide to do it in that one spot where all the other people are, because it's useful. But beyond that, all the people that contribute, they just show up and do work and keep coming back to do more work. And then at some point we know Each other, and we talk to each other and we know, oh, this person knows a lot about that thing and this person is interested in that other thing. And so when someone opens a pull request that is about that first thing, we ask that first person, hey, can you take a look at this? Because you know a lot about this and you have opinions and you can help them get it, get it done or shoot it down if it's a bad idea, right? And so like it is just sort of how people that want to do a thing find a way to do it more efficiently is they end up meeting in one spot and doing the thing together. So there's something like maybe 40 Bitcoin Core contributors that are part time or full time contributing to the bitcoin core project. And as I said, we just had our 10,000th pull request merged a couple months ago. There has been a lot of time invested into this project. There is people that have been working on this project for 13 years, 15 years, very few, 15 years. But you know, and most of us have been there at least five years. There's always a few new people. Some stick around, some people eventually say, okay, I had enough of this and move on and do other things. Right? And so what it is is just sort of this loose conglomerate of people. Not conglomerate, that's the wrong word. Loose collective. Loose group of people that self organizes and contributes to this thing. And because we need someone to sweep up when something falls over in aisle three, we give a few people permissions to do administrative tasks in the repository. We call them maintainers. They are basically public servants for a project that volunteer some of their time to go towards cleanup. Looking at pull requests, are they ready for merge, they might have a specific section of the code that they are very familiar with and they sort of are made responsible to be the last reviewer there or one of the most present reviewers in that area. And then they organize the releases, which is a lot of effort. They just check, have the translation files been put in? Are all the critical bug fixes backported to the prior major releases? Have the geeks builds been done? Is the code signed? Is it bug free? And then when everything's happened has happened, they package it, they sign it, and they make it available to the public. So while the maintainers are usually picked from people that have been around for a long while, and they tend to be experts in an area of the code base, they have very limited power in the sense that they just merge the things that have already sufficient buy in and review from the rest of the crowd. And if they ever were to use their power to do things that the other bitcoin core contributors don't like, they'd stop being maintainers very quickly. Or in the worst case, they'd have a repository that nobody contributes to because everybody just walks away, copies the code somewhere else and works there. Right? So they have, they have sort of this soft power in the sense that, yes, they're very present and they make our process work a lot more smoothly and they have trust from us in the sense that we can see everything they're doing, we're watching their fingers and they're doing great work and we love them for volunteering their time to facilitating the group process. But if they go rogue, they stop being maintainers. That's how it works. Do they have a lot of power? Are they the solitary deciders for controversial things? I've seen recently, multiple times, that people characterize the merging of the up return pull requests as being the decision of a single person. And it couldn't be further away from the truth because most things in bitcoin core get merged when they have maybe three to five acknowledgments acts. And this pull request had 14 acts. 14 other Bitcoin Core contributors said, sorry, it was 12, 12 and four concept acts. So four people said, conceptually I agree with it, I haven't reviewed it yet. Twelve people said, I have reviewed it and agree with it. So there were 16 people that said, yes, this should be merged probably. And then someone merged it after also going through all the comments and summarizing them and explaining why they decide to merge it. That's not the decision of a single person. That's a group direction and one that has a lot more explicit buy in than almost anything else. So yeah, please, please stop claiming that it was a single person that decided that. At least make us all responsible. [01:13:20] Speaker B: 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. Maybe this is for an emergency, maybe this is for an investment that you think will do really well, but it won't beat bitcoin because it's monetizing. Or this is actually something that you know you'll get back but the timing just isn't right and you don't want to let bitcoin go for that span. This is why LEDN was built. They let you borrow against your bitcoin quickly and easily. And bitcoin is the ultimate collateral. There is no more perfect thing to use securely in this setup and something that you can verify with their proof of reserves that they do. There are no monthly payments if you don't want you pay it off at your pace. There's no penalties for early payment, there's no finder's fee. It is quick and simple to get your funds. I think their turnaround right now is like 12 hours. And I don't know why every bitcoin company doesn't do this. Everybody who's at least holding bitcoin for other people. But they do a proof of reserves so that you can confirm that your balance is there. And something that made me really happy recently is they just cut their Ethereum loans, they cut their yield product, they cut their non custody loans at lower rates. And so they now offer one simple hyper focus thing. Custodied, secure, easy bitcoin backed loans. Use someone with a good track record who's done over $10 billion in loans available in over 100 countries. They do proof of reserves, they and they've made it through the toughest times in the market without having a single problem. There's no credit check, there's no hassle. It's simple. This is why Leden IO exists. Get the value of your Bitcoin without having to sell it. Remember to read up on how the collateral works. They're really good at reaching out and making sure that everything stays balanced. Remember that bitcoin is volatile so do not overextend. But if you know how to use it, 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. I'll bring up a couple of typical pushback things is sure. So one of the things I think I saw this or this conversation comes up a couple times but I think I saw it recently too is that when there are, let's say when there's, when there's knacks and the conversation supposedly goes quote unquote off the rails and then it's basically pushed out of GitHub like there, there is basically a shutdown of what is clearly to some people a controversial change that they feel like the conversation is not allowed to be extended especially for people who weren't in the conversation during that time. Like you know, people who may contribute or they're at arm's length and then they come back when they feel there's something important, which is probably a lot of people in Bitcoin, just in general, like, I know I don't pay very close attention until it seems like there's something important going on. Then I read all the optic and I do it on me like I do. Bet I backtracked six months to figure out what the hell happened. Right. And so is that they felt pushed out of the conversation as soon as, as soon as it appeared there was acts there. Well, there was like movement forward that this was going to occur. Is that disagreement that did crop up at the time that a lot of new people were suddenly paying attention to it basically got dismissed. Now, I'll just ask, just in a general sense as a personal question, is that do you think that the way it unfolded and decisions were made Both on the GitHub, but just like kind of in general at the beginning, would you have done things differently personally? Would you have halted or like given more time to actually let people be heard and not worried about pushing or making this change included with V30? Because there were other things in V30 which we hadn't got to. But they're like other pretty big and kind of important things in my consideration or at least, and I'll. I'll say I'm trusting Lornick on this, is that he. We had a private conversation. He just told me about a couple things. And I was like, oh, wow, that. That's actually interesting. And I didn't. I hadn't even dug into that part of the V30 yet. [01:18:03] Speaker A: I just realized who you mean with Lorenik. You're talking about Lorenz, right? [01:18:09] Speaker B: Probably. [01:18:10] Speaker A: I just l0r I n c r. [01:18:13] Speaker B: N yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's it. [01:18:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Lawrence, basically. Lawrence. [01:18:19] Speaker B: Lawrence. Lawrence. Okay, I'll use Lawrence so that I don't hurt myself. [01:18:23] Speaker A: Okay. So yes, with the benefit of hindsight, which gives me superpowers, I think that the first reaction to this sudden influx of people on that pull request could have been handled a little softer touch. The moderators on GitHub were fairly new. I think it had been less than a year that we did that. And this might have been the first. [01:19:01] Speaker B: Like, controversial event for them to have to deal with. Yeah. [01:19:06] Speaker A: So. Or traditionally the maintainers were the people that had the privileges to sort of moderate excessive comments. And a while back they were like, hey, it really doesn't have to also be on our plate to do this. Maybe some other people could help with that. And we've had some minor things before where people made legal threats or one person made a death threat, and they otherwise weren't contributing that much useful stuff. And then eventually people felt, look, you're too much work for what you're adding, so please go somewhere else, because that's the scarcest resources. We have, like 40 people. And we're building the software where everything has to be reviewed about three to five times by three to five people. And if then there's someone that just keeps making drama and not contributing work, then that's net detriment. Right. So I think there were several things that were unfortunate. The conversation about the upper return limit was maybe 2 years old at the point when it cropped back up on the mailing list. When Antoine pointed out this incentive misalignment, and I think in the mailing list he proposed, hey, Peter Todd, you had a pull request to change this in the past. Do you want to reopen your pull request? Or whatever. And that happened on short notice. The conversation on the mailing list was going on for two or three weeks at that point. Pretty pleasant. People were exchanging arguments, largely agreed, oh, yeah, this is an incentive misalignment. We should probably change this. And then a pull request was open, and it proposed to immediately remove the configuration option, dropped the limit entirely. And someone saw that and made a podcast about it the same day. And then suddenly there were dozens to scores of people commenting on this GitHub pull request. And let's say not all of that was questions. Yeah. So in hindsight, I think we have a better way of handling this sort of stuff now. Things just get hidden as duplicate if they repeat stuff that has been mentioned before or as off topic if it's. If it's like. But this person held hands with Santa recently, so clearly they can't be trusted to not gift away everything. But, like, if it's not technically relevant. [01:22:22] Speaker B: Is that a reference that. I don't know. [01:22:24] Speaker A: No, sorry, I. I was just trying to make a. [01:22:29] Speaker B: Is that a euphemism? Just. Just a euphemism. [01:22:30] Speaker A: I just made it up. [01:22:31] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. [01:22:33] Speaker A: Just like. And people. People were sort of saying by association, this. This person may not have any say in this because they also did something completely unrelated. And that's. That's not a technical review. Right. That's not. Not an argument of whether this technical change is good, especially when it's about a reviewer of the change. Right. We're working in public. Everything is out there. You can read every single comment and. And review people to the mailing list is public. Obviously our in person meetings are not necessarily public, but even from our core dev we've now have notes out and like what we talked about, what people like, the general gist some minutes you can just go and read all of what we do because it's all in public. So if we're looking at what people are saying and we're interested in evaluating whether their arguments are good, it doesn't really particularly matter whether they're friends with someone or it doesn't diminish or improve their arguments. Right. If we're weighing just the argument. So I think the way of just hiding things that don't contribute to what we're doing in the repository, which is reviewing code, is a better way than deleting it and maybe putting people on cooldown for a day because they're attacking a person multiple times in a row. And yeah, I also think that sort of people heard, oh, he got banned. That was of course a big trigger after our bitcoin subreddit had been moderated so heavily in the segwit times. [01:24:34] Speaker B: A lot of PTSD there. [01:24:36] Speaker A: Yeah. What happened was that he was banned for one day because he attacked a person three times in a row and was told to cut it out and then the next day he could post again. Right. It's not like he was completely banned. Right. So in hindsight, yes, the first reaction was maybe people took a moment to find out how to best react to it. And there was also maybe just a topicality. The broader discussion was happening on the mailing list already or on social media, and there was just a lot of repetition and duplication of the same talking points and a lot of emotional arguments that while valid, not necessarily contribute to review. Right. So. It's hard, right, where we have like two people that help with moderation and suddenly there's a hundred comments on a pull request in the matter of a few hours. And now if you want to review that pull request, generally we read the entire conversation so we are sure we have the context, we haven't missed anything and so forth. This is just a ton of developer time. If all of that is considered to be part of what you have to read before you can review the pull request. And when you treat it that way, essentially that becomes a blocker for any pull request. And if we got into the modus operandi where people just stop leaving review on pull requests that have a lot of comments because it's too much work to read them, it becomes trivial to stop any progress on almost any Pull request just by getting a bunch of people to comment on it. In a way, it was sort of a denial of service on our way of working with our repository. And I think that both the people that disagree with Core have understood better what we use the repository for and how we would like people to interact with the repository at this point. But also we know better how to interact with errant comments. And just to be clear, we invite everybody to come in and start helping review, start helping work, working on the repository and leaving comments that are, that bring up technical arguments. Relevant points are highly welcome. It's just when the 15th person comes in and says, I agree with what he said, that is not actually moving us forward. [01:27:53] Speaker B: Just leave a thumbs up, man. Just leave a thumbs up. [01:27:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I just remembered you also asked about funding. [01:28:01] Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Funding, yeah, sorry, let's go there. [01:28:03] Speaker A: So back in the olden days, Bitcoin Core was completely privately funded before it was Bitcoin Core. Satoshi just wrote it and presumably his free time or who knows. And then other people discovered it and started working on it in their free time. We have reached a much nicer future where a lot of people are interested in Bitcoin and they realize that software projects need maintenance and improvements. And as you said, we're not completely done scaling Bitcoin and the technical reality around our software is changing. So for example, when, when an operating system brings out an update that might remove a dependency of Bitcoin Core and suddenly Bitcoin Core doesn't boot anymore or start happen with the Mac release a couple of releases ago, it just suddenly didn't work on the latest macOS, right? And so software, even if it's perfect in the first moment, it ages by everything around it changing by compilers being updated, by operating Systems, changing by 32 bit systems, getting replaced with 64 bit systems on AMD by not AMD like Raspberry PIs and so on in the recent years, moved from 32 bit to 64 bits basically and so forth. So also on the other side, the way people use Bitcoin changes, right? And that might cause so for example the influx of many, many transactions. April last year we found out that there was a issue with how many transactions we could relay between nodes. And if they, if we got more things added to the queue than we could flush, eventually the nodes would fall behind and slow down pretty significantly and things like that. So we obviously fix mean well, right? So there is just the challenge that we're trying to solve with the Bitcoin software is evolving, all of the hardware around us is evolving and the other software that creates the environment in which the bitcoin software is running is changing. So we need to keep working on this if people want to continue using Bitcoin for the next 100 years. So we are now in this future where a lot of people are using Bitcoin. Quite a few people have been very financially successful by having bitcoin and some of these people are generous with that money and giving back to pay people to work on bitcoin software full time. Bitcoin core isn't centrally organized, there's no hierarchy. But there are a number of different organizations that employ developers and donate their full time employment towards the bitcoin project. So obviously people know about Chaincode Labs, about Brink. There's 2140 in Amsterdam, there's Bichala in India, there is BTRUST in Africa, there's Vintium in Brazil. All of these organizations, they pay some people to work on bitcoin projects. Not just bitcoin core, but bdk, ldk, Core, Lightning, you name it. Like a number of different bitcoin softwares there. And then there's grant organizations like OpenSats, like HRF, Spiral and so forth that fill in different needs by putting out these usually one year grants where they just give money and say here, go do something, work on this. We're not employing you, we're not giving you health care, but maybe you can spend some time working on bitcoin. Right. I actually co founded a new organization in the last year. We started local host research on the west coast. We're in the Bay Area. We also work mostly on bitcoin core. We have five developers in office right now. So all of these organizations, they are organized very differently. I think 2140 and localhost research, we are donation based. ChainCode Labs is privately funded. Brink is also a 501C3, just like localhost. I think Vintium is very heavily funded by a couple donors. So yeah, and then there's Jack spraying money everywhere. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah. For the most part people are just donating to these nonprofits and these nonprofits pay bitcoin developers to work on bitcoin and as far as I know there's surprisingly little money coming from bitcoin companies. In the past, of course, Bitmex Research, Coinbase and Gemini and probably others that I don't have on the top of my head have full grow ventures also have been spending a lot of money on or spending some money towards developers. But compared to the profits they have from running on top of Bitcoin, sometimes I think they could afford a little. [01:34:36] Speaker B: They could pump those numbers up a little bit. Right? Yeah, numbers in this racket. [01:34:41] Speaker A: Coinbase, for example, could probably afford to pay for a few devs. [01:34:46] Speaker B: Dude, Coinbase can't even, if you're listening, can't even work up the courage to say the word bitcoin when they're talking about stuff. He's still butthurt about the block size wars, I think. [01:34:57] Speaker A: I don't want to speculate as to the reasons, but they have definitely been very successful on the back of projects like the Concord. So if they wanted to show some appreciation, Local host research is accepting donations, by the way. Yeah, no, so we've been very lucky. People recognize that the work we're doing is valuable and more people have been putting money towards that. As far as I know, nobody's been paid directly by Citria, except for in a joke where someone was sort of maybe being a little trolly. But yeah, I'm also not aware of any NFT projects or anything funding Bitcoin core developers. So just just to be clear, just. [01:35:52] Speaker B: To be clear, I have a. This is a very general question and it's mostly just because I don't think, I don't think you need to counter the accusations directly. But I am curious about your thoughts on this idea because I've read a lot about like, especially since 2020 era, the idea of the consequences of cultural creep is, I think, very, very prominent and very alarming in a lot of people's minds. And then there's stories and we talked about it briefly with Jimmy Song. We didn't really get into it. I've been wanting to actually do like a very serious investigation just for my own. Like, how does this even, like, happen? Is like the Nixos and the. These things were literally this like slow cultural takeover. And then they start making decisions based on explicitly political choices. Like, and I'll say when it comes to like, accusations is that, you know, when there's dozens of people having thousands of conversations over years, you can find 10 pieces of evidence for literally any narrative you want. And for a lot of people, those 10 pieces of evidence are all they need to know that something has occurred. You know, this is a perfect example is the Flat Earth theory. There is some. If you go down that rabbit hole, there is so much fun stuff to like, like pull on because you can just like there's all these great conspiracies of like, oh, they wanted the North America and, and Europe and stuff to be the biggest thing on the map and all this stuff. Like, there's some really fun threads. I like, I, I have like a lot of entertainment and just going down the rabbit holes of conspiracy theories purely for the observation of like, you know, in, in some sense there's a, there's a world where I could be convinced by this, where this is an interesting thing, you know, but just in the context of like the accusation that like bitcoin core has gone woke. Like, there are absolutely things that have come across, like social media, that, that I completely understand why someone would be alarmed or, or think about. Like, I remember the first time that I heard that accusation or that like things were, were steering in that direction and there, there may be a, oh, we're going to be Nick's OS or Go Go Lang or whatever. Whatever. I may have the wrong one, but the situation where the development itself becomes political and explicitly political left, like political like left authoritarianism, so to speak, is that you're gonna say this and you're not allowed to offend people because it's not a technical argument. You're not allowed to do this or whatever. Was there was this, I think, pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I don't know of any other examples really off the top of my head, but the terms master and slave were changed in conversation with like server, server conversations or server designations because it was offensive and especially in the around 2020 eras. Like, that's a big red flag to a lot of people. And it was a big red flag to me. Granted, I never really pulled on the thread. I don't really know of any other example, but I only use that to bring up like, do you worry about that? Do you think about that as like, like how that could happen in just like a slow long creep. Because as a social system, it's just a very interesting concept to me is that like something can just be slowly diverted away from its purpose in this very, like, at the, the smallest level of like, let's just not make this conversation uncomfortable, but over and over and over again because someone's willing to make it uncomfortable while the other person's just like, well, let's just not worry about it right now. And I was just curious how you think about that or if that's even like presence present in your mind or if you're just completely. If it's just like, we're all just totally technical, having a technical conversation here and so it doesn't come up. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to address or just kind of talk about how your, what your perspective on that whole side of things is. [01:40:18] Speaker A: All right, I have some thoughts. I think mostly we are trying to have a technical conversation so we don't talk about this culture war stuff too much in our work. Next. I think that generally bitcoin appeals to people that in some way have an issue with the general societal rules or like the struggle or they distrust the state in general. And I see that a lot of. [01:41:02] Speaker B: Bitcoin shout out to liberty modes. Just saying. [01:41:08] Speaker A: I see that especially in the US a lot of bitcoiners are very much from the libertarian side of things coming in that way. But I would like to point out that just last year I think Troy Cross and some other people did this interesting investigation of who actually uses bitcoin and just how there is people more on the right side of the political spectrum that feel disenfranchised by the state and have issues with all sorts of institutions. There's people on the left and they're also attracted to bitcoin. For them also, separation of state and money is interesting for completely different ideological reasons. For example, a lot of people that are not fitting in, like gay people for example, have had huge issues with state for decades. And a lot of those more vague left leaning people also like bitcoin for other reasons than the people on the right. But it solves problems for them. They might not be able to get a bank account for some reason and with bitcoin they can just be right. So I felt that there was a bit of an implied suggestion that bitcoin is inherently a right leaning project. And I would like to push back. [01:42:42] Speaker B: On that because it sounded that way. I can see why it sounded that way when I refer to left authoritarianism. There's a lot of people on the left like, like liberal, like almost classical liberal left that I don't think fall in this camp. But the reason I just bring up, quote unquote, left authoritarianism is because I think it was so prominent and it's become so politically dominant in the 2020 era. And. But as, as someone who more identifies with libertarianism, I, I always like the perspective that we're more liberal than the liberals and we're more conservative than the conservatives. Because, you know, one of my favorite slogans or T shirts or whatever for libertarianism is I want gay married people to be able to defend their pot farms with AK47s like, like, like that's, that's my political ideology or whatnot. [01:43:35] Speaker A: So Right. [01:43:35] Speaker B: I don't mean it in the pure sense or the simplistic sense that it's just bitcoin is right. Because I mean like if you want to say political right, like Republicanism, it's, it's aggressively pro war when you look at the political system. And there's nothing more anti war, I think from a fundamental level than bitcoin because of how the monetary structure works. But so I don't mean to say bitcoin is right and everything anti bitcoin is left. I only point out left authoritarianism because it's kind of the more prominent cultural, I think fascism. Left or right, which they, they both kind of are in the state apparatus. Left and right are both just kind of different forms of let's control people. So anyway, I understand why you want to push on, push back on that and I didn't mean what I wanted. [01:44:24] Speaker A: To mostly push for, not just push back on anything is I think that people of large variety of ideologies and political inclinations are interested in bitcoin. And big surprise, public money is not apolitical. It is highly political to try to separate state and money. [01:44:53] Speaker B: Technically apolitical, but extremely political in every other sense. [01:44:57] Speaker A: Yeah, so apolitical. And it doesn't come from the political institutions. But obviously it is a controversial and highly divisive topic. But it appeals to people from all sorts of political spectrum for a variety of reasons. And so I think maybe there's a little bit of a kernel here in the sense that especially the American podcasters that are interested in bitcoin, that are fairly entrepreneurial, they are probably like self employed and running their podcast business and so on, they might be a little more at odds with open source developers from their more likely ideological background because you can't really work on something, give away the fruit of your work every day. And then I mean it sort of pre filters for people. Right. So a few people have pointed out that mindset wise developers tend to be maybe a little differently inclined than. [01:46:20] Speaker B: The. [01:46:21] Speaker A: Biggest fan base of bitcoin in the US Right. Or one of the biggest. But I see that there is a bit of a culture clash from that. There's of course the culture clash of monetary maximalists saying we only want bitcoin to be used for money and we don't want to give a single inch. And people saying we want bitcoin to be developed for money. And if you have a programming language in your bitcoin system that leaves room, like if we allow ourselves a flexible scripting system that leaves Room for people to insert data and pretending it doesn't just doesn't help. It's maybe a little bit a clash of a system is for what it's designed for or a system is for what it ends up being used for. Right. It's sort of like a system does what it is used for is sort of more of a sober taking a look and assessing point of view where. Well, we didn't expect that the most dominant use of taproot would be inscriptions and we certainly didn't design it with that in mind. But now we're here at that point and pretending they don't exist doesn't really help us assess what we want to do. Right. Or I mean, yeah, I think I'll leave it at that. [01:48:05] Speaker B: Okay, well, let's. We're kind of getting to the end of a time slot. I know I'm gonna have to let help get the kids to sleep in just a minute, but I want to talk about. Actually I feel like we probably have don't have enough time to really get into V30. But let's talk about a couple of things in V30 that I think you covered in or somebody covered. It was in the op tech there was like a really good breakdown but on non op return related things. And if I remember correctly, there's a bug fix for like a poison block scenario or something. I can't remember. I saved a bunch of stuff on it and I never even came back to it. [01:48:55] Speaker A: So we actually introduced another policy in. Yeah, let's talk about policy change in version 30 is. So Antoine Ponsot specifically and other people have been working on the consensus cleanup. And the consensus cleanup tries to fix four protocol bugs that have been known for a very long time. That includes the time warp bug and especially includes the like you can build blocks that take an extremely long time to validate with. Yeah, so I think that's what you're referring to with parse and blocks. But the idea would be that, for example, a miner could create a block that takes extremely long to validate and that gives them a head start on the next block or might even take offline. Some miners that are running with insufficient compute that just can't process that block. So one of the policies that was changed or actually introduced here is that legacy transactions are now limited to 2,500 signature operations. And this should for the most part never be hit unless you're doing something that is obviously malicious. [01:50:18] Speaker B: Explicitly malicious. [01:50:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And this is intended to be the stepping stone for making this a Consensus change with the consensus cleanup soft fork. And it has been long the practice to sort of dissuade things on policy first before they are introduced as consensus rules. And yeah, so this is a preparation for a bip 54 deployment. Bip 54 is a consensus cleanup bip. Also, I, I think it's high time that we fixed these bugs in the protocol. I'm most concerned about from those for about the time warp attack. [01:51:09] Speaker B: How do you fix the time warp attack? Out of curiosity, what's the, what's the solution there? [01:51:15] Speaker A: The time warp bug depends on being able to mislabel blocks as having happened in the past. And specifically you would keep almost all of the block timestamps frozen at the start of your attack time. And then as the wall clock, the clocked the wall time progresses forward, you occasionally make just a single block at the actual time in order to and specifically the last one in a difficulty adjustment. So you get a very long time between the 0th block and the last block in a difficulty adjustment. So the difficulty goes down. Right. Because the difficulty period is perceived to have taken a very long time, difficulty goes down and then all of the other timestamps are kept back at the time of the 0th block, the first attacker block. And therefore you can after using the actual time in the last block in the difficulty period, go jump back to the old time because it depends on the median time, which is calculated from the 11 previous blocks and 10 of those have very old timestamps. So you can make a new timestamp that is also very old. So the fix is you do not allow a step back in time of more than two hours if it's consensus invalid to change the timestamp from one current time to more than two hours back. You can't do this attack anymore and that fixes it. And no, usually however much you've misconfigured your computer, you shouldn't be off by yourself. [01:53:11] Speaker B: You shouldn't have to accidentally do that. Yeah, yeah. [01:53:13] Speaker A: If you do that and you put mining hashtag update your computer man. Because you should notice pretty quickly. Yeah. [01:53:24] Speaker B: Okay. And wait, is that. Is has that actually been implemented as policy in B30 or was is it just the poison block thing, the computing limit? [01:53:35] Speaker A: So we. We limit timestamp to the future. A node will not accept a block that is two hours more than two hours in the future. Yeah, I. I'm not sure. I don't think that we have any restrictions on blocks in the past yet. And I think if it. We can't there, there is no policy for blocks, right. Because blocks only exist in a blockchain. So if you didn't accept them, that would be a consensus change. Right. So there is no way to roll out a policy first to dissuade old blocks. [01:54:06] Speaker B: That's a good point. [01:54:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, shout out to the consensus cleanup. I think it's an important project. It's been very well researched and. [01:54:20] Speaker B: I. [01:54:20] Speaker A: Mean, we've been talking about it for 10 years, so maybe we can activate it sometime in the next five. That would be great. Maybe. Let's talk very briefly on how we do releases in general and then maybe we can do a couple more highlights from version 30. But so given that there is no project managers, no bosses that you report to, there's nobody that tells you you work on this now or you work on that Generally, Bitcoin core contributors work on the things that they think are the most impactful, important or interesting, some mix of those. And what we put out in a release is just the things that are merged in the main branch by feature freeze. And when feature freeze happens, we don't wait for oh, this project is so close or anything. It's just nice feature freeze, no new features, only bug fixes on this branch and the branch gets split off and then it's refined towards the release and the release goes out. Right. And then this big project might be in the next release. We only put out new features in the major branches, major releases like 30. And then there's point releases for bug fixes. So for example, if in version 30 there was a bug fix, it might also be rolled out to 29.2 and 28.3 as a backport. But only bug fixes generally get backported to the other major branches. And bitcoin core, the lifecycle is such that two major branches are maintained in the past, and then we're working on the next major branch. [01:56:18] Speaker B: Gotcha. So, and that's something as much as it's amazing how much you can like actually touch and interact and like use GitHub, and I still don't. There are still some pieces of that whole thing and releases and branches that kind of vex me. And I've never really taken the time to actually figure it out, but. So you're saying that old versions get backported. So are you saying that, like some of the bug fixes, like let's say the computation limit, the 2500 limit, that that could actually be put in other versions that are still being in use prior to v30. [01:56:58] Speaker A: Right. So if, let's say in Bitcoin Core 35, we introduced the soft fork with the consensus cleanup and there's activation code and it gets released, we might backport the activation code also to 3.4.1 and 30.3.2 or whatever the current thing. Obviously we don't have auto updates, so nobody that runs the software would automatically get the change. But if they're on the 34 branch and they know that the 34 branch is compatible with their infrastructure or their Lightning node or whatever else they're running on top of their full node at home or in their business, they might feel more confident to just update to 34.1, which is only that one bug fix change. They only have to check does this break anything or not? And rather than making a jump to a new major version in the first week after it's released, and Maybe there's new RPCs or some parameter changed somewhere, or it behaves slightly differently in some regard, that affects the whole other infrastructure. Right? So backports would only be in a new point release, but people obviously still have to pull in that point release and decide to run it in order to get to. [01:58:29] Speaker B: So that may actually answer a question that I had, but there was one, because one Lawrence introduced me to the idea of the kind of. The bug fixes that were going on in beef 30 and like the path and plans to do a lot of that stuff. I was like, well, that seems like really interesting. But then it also seems like kind of against the, the very positive outcome of that or very positive effects of that to have that attached to something largely as insignificant as the Opera turn that comes with so much controversy and that that would actually lend itself to like, if I. Again, this is, this is hindsight. You know, you said hindsight's 20 20, but in the context of like, when I think about it as an engineering choice, it's like, okay, well let's push out these important, like the computational limit and the, like the, the very important bug cleanup type stuff in its own release and then do a 30.1 with the Opera turn specifically, because the 30.1 may limit. Or if it's all in V30 together, it may actually limit the protection of the network itself because of its attachment to this controversy. You know, it's like earmarking something that nobody really were. A bunch of people don't want, or a bunch of people are, even if it's for no reason at all. They're just mad about it because it sounds bad and they don't even understand what it is. You earmark that on the back of a build. It's like really important that we actually just get done let's stop the war, right? It's like, let's stop the war. And it's like, okay, well let's pay for trans education in Pakistan. At the same time, it's like it was like, no, no, like, please just put that off on the next thing because that's going to be as controversial as hell and let's just stop the war kind of thing. So again, hindsight 20 20, but I'm just curious what your thoughts about that because that does seem like an important and like big thing that I feel like is totally overshadowed. Like most people. It took me a while to find that out and I just had to keep having conversations with people and reading op tech and all that stuff. And most people don't do that shit. Most people are just on Twitter. So like, what's kind of your perspective on that? [02:00:45] Speaker A: Well, again, we just released all the things that are merged at the time of the feature freeze and the upper turn change had a lot of buy in from Bitcoin Core contributors, even if people disagreed with it and argued about it. And then I hope it doesn't sound too mean, but we put out a free piece of software without warranty that people can choose to run. So we're making a recommendation of what we think the best software is that we can release every half year and that is what we put out. And then people have to decide whether they run it or not. And so the two concessions that Bitcoin Core already made on the up return thing was in the first iteration, the configuration option for data carrier was removed completely. Completely. And the second version, it was deprecated, which means it's not recommended for use and might be removed in the future. And then that was one of the three things people were upset about was don't take away our knobs. [02:02:00] Speaker B: I like knobs. I'm a big fan of knobs, man. Give me the knobs. [02:02:04] Speaker A: The second concession was that the deprecation was also removed. And the release that happened actually, like this discussion started in April, the release happened in October, six months later, just. [02:02:21] Speaker B: God, has it been that long to. [02:02:23] Speaker A: Comment on how rushed this was? And it didn't have the deprecation anymore because people said, hey, we want to be sure that we continue to have this knob. So if people feel so strongly about this limit, I think the interesting, there's two separate things here. One is you can just change it Yourself just set data carrier size to 83 and it works almost exactly as before. We also introduced multiple up returns per transaction. So it does change slightly, but the overall data that you can have in the data carrier outputs is limited by the data carrier size configuration option. And if you set it to zero, you just will not propagate anything with upper turn bytes. And you can totally set that setting in 3D. So the thing that then remains is what is the default that is being set and the default of a mempool policy? In one of the implementations of Bitcoin, granted, the most run implementation of Bitcoin node software was increased. Yes, yes, we did that. We talked about that for half a year. So if that's your only reason why you don't run Bitcoin core, even though you can change it on your own computer, I don't know why. A piece of software that had a different default and then rolled out the default change for a mempool policy you can already configure locally. That just doesn't feel sufficient to make an extra release. It takes a lot of time to make a release. We have a separate branch, it gets vetted, translations are made for it. People do geeks builds, there's a website update, it's like actual work. Right. And you can already change it locally. Just change it locally if you want to change it locally. It's just we don't recommend that the default be this low anymore because we feel that there's downsides to the default being lower than what gets mined. And it's already economically less attractive than inscriptions. So presumably it won't get used that much because people are just going to use inscriptions instead. Now there's a whole other conversation and we've already established many people are just generally upset about inscriptions also not being fought tooth and nail. But if we grant that this is a separate question of whether inscriptions should be fought or not, up return in the reality that inscriptions exist and are currently standard, just probably is. Please make fun of me next year if actually upreturn gets used aggressively, aggressively. [02:05:30] Speaker B: Oh, you will hear about it. [02:05:31] Speaker A: I will absolutely hear about it, sir. [02:05:35] Speaker B: You will be tagged so hard. [02:05:38] Speaker A: Yeah, and deservedly, I guess. But also, I mean, if it gets used much, then I think part of it will be we pay extra because it makes you more upset. I will continue to maintain that position. So anyway, yeah, it's just from our perspective, I think a mempo policy. Mempo policy has always been local decision. It's just a different default value. It's trivial to change. Just configure it differently if you want to do it differently. And one of the things that is not listed in the release notes, because it's sort of fmo, is it's actually significantly faster in ibd. [02:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah, Lawrence and I talked about that. He shared a bunch of couple of links with me about that. Like he did like benchmarks and some stuff, but. [02:06:33] Speaker A: Right, yeah, yeah. Not just because we update the assumed valid point. Oh, by the way, this is one of my favorite ones. So there's this observation that Bitcoin core has been much slower to IBD since the inscription stuff started, but it also coincides with an old assumed valid height. So if you run certain version of Bitcoin core and it starts full script validation from the time that the inscription started, you're doing full script validation. And that is what is so slow. It's not the inscriptions, actually. So I haven't fully investigated this, but this seems like the most likely explanation because inscriptions are actually pretty cheap to validate. I don't think that they actually grind IBD to a halt. So when you upgrade to the latest version, the assumed valid point is updated to a few weeks before the release. And by default, if you use Assume Valid, Assume Valid makes the assumption if something is buried several thousand blocks from the best chain tip, presumably it was the valid chain because otherwise it wouldn't be buried several thousand blocks deep. And you still build the UTXO set from scratch. You still look at all the transactions and you do most of the verification, but you don't check the signatures because you assume if the TX ID matches and the WTX ID matches, all the data that was used to validate the transaction is there byte by byte. And it must have been valid because otherwise it wouldn't be buried a few thousand blocks deep. And if you feel that that is too much concession, you can always run it with full script. [02:08:32] Speaker B: Turn it right off. Yeah, yeah. [02:08:34] Speaker A: So anyway, Assume Valid makes it much faster up to the point that we put in, and we put a new point for every release that is a few weeks before the release and then IBD itself, actually, in a Apple for Apple comparison, as you probably described. Was Lawrence on your show or did you. [02:08:53] Speaker B: No, no, we've just had a. We've just had an ongoing thread. I kind of tried to encourage him to, but he just. He prefers the background. [02:09:00] Speaker A: Then let me give a shout out to Lauren's work here. He has been doing a lot of benchmarking and testing and checking how to make IBD Faster for all sorts of different architectures. Very much also for the types of computers that are being used for the Node in a box setups, the Raspberry PI's and so forth. And he has identified a bunch of minor code tweaks that significantly increase the speed of ibd. So for example, he changed how many megabytes of data get written out to the disk at a time. He just doubled that from 16 megabytes to 32 megabytes when we write out the UTXO set. And it's like a, I think a 10% increase in like IBD speed just because you get fewer disk seeks. Yeah. And I might be slightly off on the details here, but little things like this where he just making simple assumptions. [02:10:03] Speaker B: About like resources available too. When you're just talking about like a Raspberry PI's got eight gigs of ram, you know, like so no, yeah, that's. [02:10:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Or like. Yeah, we had a very, very conservative default value for the database cache where we keep the utxos during ibd and he pushed towards increasing that default now because today raspberry PIs have 4 gig or 8 gig of RAM and only allowing half a gig of RAM to be used by Bitcoin Core is maybe a little too conservative now and so forth. So he, he has like probably 7, 8, maybe 10 small improvements and they amount to an overall speed up of over 20% on IBD. And since I think he has. [02:10:55] Speaker B: That's pretty awesome. [02:10:57] Speaker A: This graphic he compared since version 22 and like it's more than twice the speed since version 22. [02:11:07] Speaker B: Wow. [02:11:08] Speaker A: So it's just sort of this digging through the code and running a thousand different IBDs and checking. Does it get faster if I tweak this a little if I do this? Or just very deeply understanding the C and being like, oh, here, this is an odd value. If we increase that by a few bytes, it'll get much faster. This is the sort of work he's been doing and it's been amazing. [02:11:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. Shout out to him. And we're kind of at the end of time here. There are still things. It's amazing how many things I come up with and it's just like we could just keep going and maybe we'll do another show. [02:11:55] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll just have to sit down again. [02:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah. But I would say maybe. What's a good way to cap this off? Actually, actually I'll, I'll cap it off this way first. I'll just. In general Let you get like kind of your final thought and you know, any call to action, follow op tech or local host research, like that sort of thing. But then also, if you had to kind of extend an olive branch to people who came to this conversation going, oh, Jesus Christ, merch pro v30 bastard. You know, like, like with, with that perspective is what, what olive, olive branch would you extend to that. That part of the audience. [02:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you for listening all the way to this point. [02:12:45] Speaker B: They left, they were five minutes in, they were out. None of those people are still here. [02:12:50] Speaker A: Well, they wouldn't be hearing me at this point then. So it's safe to say this. Thank you for listening. I think one of the thing that went awry is that we didn't listen to each other at some point. And maybe just a reminder, you trust us to write good software in so many different ways. Why would you not engage with our arguments and read why we think this is not a big deal, this up return thing. If you trust us for everything else with the software you're running, and even if you're running knots for the most part, it's just most of it is bitcoin core code. So you seem to think that we're doing good work in general. Maybe could you please also read what we have to say about Upreturn and not just watch videos of people on Twitter? Because I think we've made the case for it in so many different ways. So please give us a chance by actually engaging with our arguments. [02:14:01] Speaker B: Cool, cool. All right. And then, yeah, any. Do you have like a link for local host research and that sort of stuff? Or is that out there now or is it. [02:14:11] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. We have a website, it's LCL, like local LCL host.org we do a transparency report. We try to do one every three months so we write about the work we're doing. If you're interested in more transparency, we have these really long, detailed transparency reports. You can basically see what we worked on every month. Each of us, if you're in the Bay Area, we are deeply involved with the San Francisco bit devs. And yeah, come, come out, come to our bit devs if you have some loose change that you urgently want to get rid of. We are a 501C3 in the US and we are completely donation funded. And if, if you think we're doing good work, you can throw some money at us and we'll hire more people to do good work with us. [02:15:13] Speaker B: Sweet. Awesome. Oh, dude, Merch, thanks for coming home. Good conversation. [02:15:18] Speaker A: Thanks for having me. [02:15:19] Speaker B: And we'll see what everybody thinks about it and which parts they clip and all the great new questions we have for when we do it next time. [02:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. And maybe next time we get into the nitty gritty of, well, maybe by. By then version 31. But yeah, okay. Thank you for having me. Thanks for the pleasure. Sounds good. [02:15:42] Speaker B: Mr. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, man. Appreciate it. All right. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I thought there was a lot of really good stuff to unpack there without actually without totally reiterating the same things we reiterated over and over and over again, even though sometimes that it's inevitable and you just kind of have to go over a lot of it many, many times. I really appreciate Merch coming on. I think the only solution to any of this is to have as many conversations as possible with as many people on different sides or opinions of this issue. And I really value his thoughts. I honestly think Merch probably more than anybody has done a really good job of laying out the argument for the V30 side. I guess if you say don't forget to check out his link, let me know any thoughts you have, any pushback, anything you wish I would have said or things that he should have addressed, etc. Like I said, we're this conversation is far from over. So I'm certain there will be more news, more items, more conversations to unpack in the coming weeks and months. So stay tuned. Don't forget to subscribe to Bitcoin Audible. Don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors Leden IO for Bitcoin backed loans Pubkey app that's without the E by the way. P U B K Y app Chroma for red light health and protecting your hormones with blue light on these screens all the time. And then lastly we've got HRF and their amazing financial freedom report and all the work they do around the world for fighting and informing on how to protect human rights. So a shout out to all of them. A shout out to all of you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing this out. Let everybody that you actually love in your life know about Bitcoin Audible and everybody that you despise. Tell them never to listen to this show and I will catch next episode of Bitcoin Audible. And until then everybody, that's my two sets. Sam.