Chat_170 - Can Anything be Secured in the Digital Age? with Luke de Wolf

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Keeping bitcoin running is the primary concern here. Making sure that bitcoin is available to be used as money by, by everyday people. Any, any actor who wants to come onto bitcoin and send a 1 UTXO from one to another, that's the most important piece for me when thinking about defending bitcoin. Now, the biggest difference, of course, is that this is a decentralized system. There is no central controller, there's no central control room giving out commands and saying, this has to change. You must do this. We are a decentralized group of individuals who are acting on the network. And so the defense of the system is not down to, say, the CEO dictating that everyone has to have their password be 64 characters and change it every three months, which is bad practice, by the way. It's everyone working together to do their part. So that's the biggest difference. [00:01:07] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we have Luke DeWolf on the show today and it is time to dig into the systems security design around bitcoin. And this guy knows a thing or two. So you'll hear from Luke, but he's been working on running and helping to design security policy and software around fundamental infrastructure, oil pipelines, like critical structural systems, the sort of if you do it wrong, lots of people die and something explodes. And he is also, he's just finished a book called Defending Bitcoin and I think he has some insanely valuable insights into bitcoin, how we deal with changes, thinking of bitcoin as infrastructure first, how to protect its function as money. And we even get into a lot of the drama, like fallacies around BIP110 supporters. And then a lot of the major problems and fallacies in the thinking of core or however you want to label the opposition, whatever. But I always just really appreciate somebody who genuinely has their own take and doesn't just fall in line with one camp or their social group. And Luke is absolutely one of those people. And I think it's really because he has enough knowledge and confidence in what he knows that he can't not call out people on both sides who he believes are simply wrong. And so it becomes very difficult or he can't allow himself to dismiss errors in judgment from anyone on any side because he knows enough to have his own opinion about things. And I really find that that's the sweet spot. That's where you learn the most and you get the most valuable conversations is the people who actually have their own take on things. And so those are the people I look forward to dig into on the show. And I love these honest discussions and nuanced takes on these things. So we will get into it in just a second. A quick shout out to the supporters of this show, to the audionauts, and of course to shift crypto and the bitbox for not only making holding your own keys fun, but damn it, making it look good. This, I love this thing. This is the new Bitbox 02 Nova. I keep my little. My little rubber cover on it and then I put it in my crypto cloaks case. Like, look at this thing. It's beautiful. I call this one Jessica. Jessica. Hello. People who. People who know what that reference is are getting a chuckle right now. And I have a discount code. If you aren't sovereign yet, you have got to get. You got to fix that problem. You got to hold your own keys. And there are a few companies and tools that make it easier than just going and getting yourself a bitbox. You using the bitbox wallet, plugging that sucker in right on your phone and holding your own keys safely and off of any Internet connected device. So check them out, discount code and everything in the show notes. And with that, let's get into today's show. This is our chat with Luke Dewolf defending bitcoin. Welcome to the show, man. It is good to have you. Have you been on. Have we done this before? [00:04:38] Speaker A: No, first time. [00:04:39] Speaker B: I mean, I know I've been hung out with you and Knut. Okay, well, first time. Welcome to the show, man. [00:04:43] Speaker A: Thanks a lot, guy. Great, Great to be here. I appreciate it. Yeah, going, going great. Life is crazy. I just, just finished writing depending bitcoin and sent the manuscript to the printer and everything and like literally within the last 48 hours. So. Oh, w touches and all this. So, yeah, feels like. Feels like a little bit of weight off, but still, still some work to do. It's kind of got to get over the finish line. You know what I mean? [00:05:10] Speaker B: Dude, I tell you what. Even people who. I mean, I don't like I said, I haven't read into, got in, gotten into it yet. But even people who write bad books, I have to just like, hat tip because the amount of time that I have spent, like, my intent actually is to. Because like, if I sit down and just like really, really write and just ignore everything else in the world, I can usually like, I can sit down and I can bang out a chapter if I know. Like, if I have the rant right. [00:05:41] Speaker A: Totally. [00:05:42] Speaker B: And I've been working on my book for. I just. I don't even know 2. And it's not even like. It's like crazy long either. It's just getting in the head space and finding the time between all the other things and like, the meticulous process of picking back up where you left off and trying to find the flow again. Dude, congrats. Like, it is something else. It really is. [00:06:15] Speaker A: I. I appreciate that. And you know, it's. It's kind of six months in the making this book. Or. Or I think Knuth has even said something like this before that, that all of his books have always been inside him. So when did you start writing the book? Well, you know, where do you want to start? Forever. But. But no, really, really, this. This book came to be about six months ago. Started six months ago, and I got. I got the core idea, which, I mean, if you. If you don't mind me, just kind of getting into it. [00:06:48] Speaker B: Go right, Go right into it. [00:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah, the show. So. Yeah, thanks, man. The. The. The core idea of this book was to. To merge my cybersecurity background and specifically my industrial control systems cybersecurity background with everything I've been doing in Bitcoin for the last five or so years. And so just to. Just to give anyone who doesn't know me some. Some background and maybe. And honestly, you probably don't even know all of this stuff because. Because I've only just. [00:07:19] Speaker B: I was about to ask, but I figured you might get into it, so. [00:07:22] Speaker A: Totally. Totally. So my, My day job and, and my career, I've been working with industrial control systems my entire career. I studied computer science in school, but I. I got a job working with a pipeline company in, In Calgary, Alberta, and that's where I got my introduction to this stuff. And I've. I've said the. The term twice and I'll explain what it is. So. Industrial control systems are the computing systems and the networks and stuff that run factories, pipelines, electrical grids, basically everything that keeps the world running more. The. The proper definition is more like anything that interacts with the physical world. So, I mean, your, Your computer, to the extent that it interacts with the physical world, it draws electricity and it makes changes in ones and zeros in various places. But that's, that's the extent of it. Factories, the. They're. They're building something. Electrical grids, they're moving electricity, Pipelines are moving oil or water or whatever it is. Physical stuff is, is happening and sometimes that physical stuff gets pretty explode if something goes wrong with the process. Yeah. [00:08:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:33] Speaker A: So, and, and honestly, in the oil [00:08:35] Speaker B: is the worst, is the worst kind. [00:08:37] Speaker A: That's the worst. [00:08:37] Speaker B: The exploding kind. [00:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and, but I mean, that's not, it's not really a joke, right? Because, because I mean there, there have been, there have been disasters where, where, yeah, something has happened to an oil pipeline or something and there's a spill that can, that can explode. There's been, there's been chemical leaks that have killed hundreds of people. Like this, this stuff isn't, isn't a joke, dude. [00:08:59] Speaker B: There's the oil. What's the, what's the thing? I can't even remember what it's called, [00:09:04] Speaker A: but the BP horizon thing. [00:09:06] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like for like 40 years or 50 years or something like that, just burning. Just burning forever. [00:09:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. It's like this, this stuff. If something goes wrong with one of these systems, it's, I mean, the, the worst case scenario is loss of human life and, and permanent disfiguration of the world, so to say. And, and so that's the, the type of world that, that I've been doing my entire career in. I was, I was originally basically operating the systems like, like configuring them and, and making sure that they, they work correctly, fixing them when they, when they break. But, but then I transitioned to doing cybersecurity for, for this, these types of systems about six years ago now. [00:09:49] Speaker B: So what's, what's the craziest lesson and, or kind of like story or experience? Like, like, what's, what's the one thing that was kind of burned into your mind of like how to make sure you do it right? Because I have a couple of those in, in some of my professional careers of, you know, somebody falling off a roof or somebody I knew getting electrocuted, crawling underneath a house and nobody found him for eight hours, you know, like, you know, like, what are those, what are those lessons that, that you hold on to from that? [00:10:24] Speaker A: No, those, those things are. I mean, it's insane. I think anyone who kind of works with the, the physical world like that has, has, has stories, you know, from, from, for my part, like really, really early on, it was drilled into my head that this stuff has to match. Like there would be a guy out in the field. I wasn't the guy out in the field. I was the guy back in the kind of the central system making sure everything was hooked up on that end. But I would be calling a guy who would be way out in the, in the wilderness at some substation and he would have to read out every value back to me and we would have to match and it'd be pretty often that we would have some kind of mismatch, there would be some kind of calibration issue or something. Wasn't, wasn't reading correctly. Something like this. And, and this could be stuff like the, the pressure in a pipeline. Right. If you get that value wrong and, and the, the controller jacks up the pressure in the pipeline, exploding is possible, you know. Right. [00:11:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Your pressure is really low, guys. It's not. I swear to God it's not. Please don't. [00:11:25] Speaker A: Well, and, and I mean, and that's a, that's a real thing. There, There was a, a really famous attack back in, well, 2014ish was, was when it, it was, it was going on. But unknown entities attacked the Iranian nuclear system and they, they sent a. [00:11:44] Speaker B: That's right. It was about the temperature, wasn't it? [00:11:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it was, it was the, the speed of the turbines basically that were enriching their uranium and. Yeah, basically what it, what the, what this bug did as soon as it got into these systems. The worm you call it, because it can kind of find its way around itself. Yeah, so, so the, it spun up these centrifuges too fast, but it showed the operator a good value. Right. So the operator thought everything was fine, but it was, it was operating at like too high a frequency. So it caused these, these centrifuges to fail and destroyed apparently hundreds of nuclear centrifuges and set back the Iranian nuclear program by years. Um, just, just by getting a, just [00:12:31] Speaker B: two weeks, according to the news. [00:12:33] Speaker A: Yeah, totally, totally. So, I mean this stuff is, this stuff is real. And the cybersecurity side of things, I mean. Well, okay, kind of back to sort of like the interesting stories and stuff. I mean, I, I was working with a really small company who, who, who dealt with tiny oil and gas providers like, like companies who might literally only have one gas well and, and that's like their entire livelihood and everything, and they would hook up to our system to, to monitor it and, and things like this. And what I would see there was just crazy stuff like literally people showing up in the middle of the night to try and steal copper, you know what I mean? And I mean this has nothing to do with the control systems or anything, but the monitoring systems would detect that someone's on the property or something like that, and the controller would have to call out and hey, call the police and everything. And so, I mean, you see everything when you're dealing with something out there in the physical world, especially way out there exposed kind of thing. The, the biggest incident that I was involved with was, was I, I caught a ransomware one night when I was. A few years later. And yeah, I just, I got an alert. It was the middle of the night. I was the guy on call, so I had to, had to react to it. I get to the computer in like two minutes or something. It doesn't take long for me to see this is pretty nasty, and click the button that, that says this computer is no longer allowed to access the Internet anymore. And. And that was it. But we, we got it back to the, the lab the next morning and analyzed it. And yeah, turns out the person who had that computer had just been on the wrong website and downloaded the wrong thing and next thing you know. [00:14:14] Speaker B: Furry porn, man. Every time. It's always the furry porn. [00:14:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm. No comment. But yeah, so, I mean, yeah, I've, I've been in some, in some, some real incidents. And yeah, I was the guy getting up in the middle of the night for a couple of years. [00:14:29] Speaker B: I'm actually curious about the, the ransomware situation because I had a old friend get hit by ransomware and I tried to help him out, but he just kind of like gave up. He just was like, no, it's lost, blah, blah, blah, you know, which is kind of disappointing because I felt like we probably could have. They actually used Tether, and I was trying to contact like the Tether team or whatever, and they were like, we could, if, if you, you know, keep track of it, if you, if we do this quick, we might be able to freeze the funds. I was like, these guys are centralized, you know, like, let, let them, let them take advantage of that. [00:15:06] Speaker A: Right, Totally. [00:15:07] Speaker B: But anyway, I'm curious how so you actually prevented it from like encrypting the whole computer? [00:15:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that, that, that was, that was it, basically, yeah. Like the, the. [00:15:20] Speaker B: Is that just like, you dumb plug the damn thing or like. [00:15:23] Speaker A: No. [00:15:24] Speaker B: Does it not operate the Internet? [00:15:26] Speaker A: These kinds of big, big organizations and stuff, they, they, they have, they have hardcore antivirus software that you can, you can, you know, command centrally and everything. And so yeah, we, we get the alert that this, this thing is running. They, they're even usually able to prevent them from, from executing if they detect them. And that's what happened here. But it, but it could have, if it had been able to, to spread yeah, if I, if we had not disconnected from the Internet, it could have spread to more computers and maybe got going a little bit further. So. Yeah, but it wasn't able to actually start. Like, these antiviruses are pretty. They're more like intrusion detection systems. Yeah, they're really a little bit more hardcore. [00:16:12] Speaker B: Is that something specifically you worked on? [00:16:15] Speaker A: Yeah, like detect and response systems. That was one of like half a dozen things that if we had gotten an issue overnight, I would have been called for another signed would have been that a company executive. If he had not been allowed to download files onto his thumb drive, he, he probably would have called me and been mad. But. But yeah, so you see a lot when working with big enterprises, but this happened to be the, the, the computer of, of someone who was operating one of their facilities. So it was, it wasn't like a someone at the office. It was someone working at three in the morning on their usual shift and Gotcha, gotcha. Stuff happens. [00:16:54] Speaker B: You know, that's how everything gets in. That's how they're using somebody's personal computer or their phone or something and they walk it into that place. There was. Oh man, I can't remember which one it was. Recently I try to like save a bunch of the big hacks and stuff and just like follow through because it was hilarious. Like some, somebody had their personal computer and like the password to their account on like in like Sony Pictures or something. Like, it's like, you know, some huge like institution was, was something like password 1, 2, 3 or something, something. And, and the thing just sat there like their computer had been infected for like two months and just like waited for them to log in from their home computer with their vpn. Then it was just like, all right, there you go, we're in. And it like took 40 million user like data. It just like, it was just insane. It's just like all because of one person's garbage password on their home computer. [00:17:59] Speaker A: Man. Ugh. [00:18:01] Speaker B: It's a mess. [00:18:02] Speaker A: The, the thing here is that one mistake can, can be so costly. Right? But that's, that's kind of the, the more of the principles of cybersecurity that, that you kind of learn just by seeing what's, what's going on. Defense in depth is basically the term for it is just don't rely on any one specific thing. No single points of failure. Make sure you have layers of your defense. You can think of it like laying pieces of Swiss cheese on each other, right? Like each layer has holes in it. [00:18:32] Speaker B: Just make sure there's not one hole all the way through. [00:18:34] Speaker A: All the way through, exactly. You totally get it. You totally get it. [00:18:37] Speaker B: That's a great analogy. [00:18:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And so, I mean, there's tons of stuff you can do. And I mean, staying ahead of the people who are, who are trying to attack you is basically the idea here. And so, I mean, I've been in that world for, yeah, like, longer than I've been in the bitcoin world. And the industrial control systems, or critical infrastructure is the other term that I use. They're not exactly interchangeable, but much of the infrastructure that we consider critical uses these types of industrial control systems. And there's specific kinds of frameworks that we use to do cybersecurity on industrial control systems. And so applying that to critical infrastructure is, yeah, a fairly easy lift. But stuff like payment systems is also considered critical infrastructure. Right. Like Visa and MasterCard is considered pretty critical in the US for example. Most of the world, honestly. So when that stuff goes down, that's. That's a problem. Right? So, yeah. And so basically, I took my experience in that world and I didn't really know how to take that into Bitcoin. Like, I didn't want to be the guy to be like, okay, I'm here, I'm new to Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I wanted to. Well, I didn't want to. I just learned I've done over 200 episodes of Knut's podcast, either as the co host or the producer, and I mean, hundreds, Hundreds more episodes listened to and conferences attended, conversations had. You know what I mean? So I've tried to, you know, do the, do the work on, on that front. And then, yeah, a few months ago I realized, hey, like, I'm kind of thinking about this whole arbitrary data thing from a. From a really, really specific perspective. And it lines up with. With critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, kind of put it that way. And then the whole idea for the book just. Just fell in my lap. Basically, the. The outline that I sketched back in November basically ended up being the exact book that, that came out. Maybe, like, I moved a chapter here or, or added something there, tweaked something there, but. But the, the entire thing made perfect sense to me. I. I knew exactly what it was as. As soon as the idea hit me. And then I've been writing and editing furiously for about six months, so. And now. Now it's. Now it's ready, now it's out there, so. [00:21:05] Speaker B: Nice. Well, give Me the synopsis. Walk me through the big picture. Yeah. [00:21:09] Speaker A: So Defending Bitcoin is the first bitcoin cybersecurity book, or at least the, the first bitcoin cybersecurity book I'm aware of especially that tackles the, the concept at the, the level of detail that I'm, I'm talking about. So what I mean by the first bitcoin cybersecurity book, I've taken an, an industrial cybersecurity framework and applied it to Bitcoin and then mapped the, the threat landscape facing bitcoin and then ways we can defend against all of those threats. So the way I lay it out, the way I lay it out is I don't assume anyone is super deep technically for defending bitcoin. So I'm trying to make it accessible to basically any bitcoiner. That means introducing quite a few concepts. I've also wanted to make it accessible to people who might be familiar with the cybersecurity side or just the general kind of tech side, but hasn't gotten into bitcoin yet. I wanted to make this kind of my orange pill contribution to them. Maybe this is a way to get in with folks like that. Actually the forward writer is a guy named Miko Hooponen and he's like a best selling cybersecurity author and he does keynotes at the biggest CyberSecurity conferences and TED talks and stuff like this. And I met him through the BTC Hell conference last year in August. He's finished and yeah, he agreed to write the forward. He's not a bitcoin maximalist or anything, but he had experience with bitcoin. Like his thing was actually analyzing these ransomwares like 15, 20 years ago. And he first saw Bitcoin like 2011, something like this when it was used in ransomware. So he has some interesting perspective. So anyway, the whole point of this book is to kind of bridge those two worlds. It's the two sides of my world and so bring that all together. Introduction to kind of the bitcoin, the technical side and bitcoin is money because we got to kind of have table stakes here. These are two chapters that our entire books, it's mastering bitcoin tried to condense into 30 pages or something like that. So I'm high level there for sure. And then same thing. It's like trying to condense bitcoin standard into 30 pages too. But we get a basis of vocabulary. Then a chapter introducing the cybersecurity concepts like things like what is the formal definition of risk? What are threats formally and what's the language that we use in the cybersecurity community. Then I move to how we treat it a little bit differently when talking about industrial control systems, critical infrastructure, things like this. And this gets into the framework that I use throughout the entire rest of the book, which breaks the whole thing down into seven categories, categories of controls and also escalates the security level. So the more motivated your attacker, the higher level of controls you should put in it, it works kind of nicely into the things you should do are broken down into the things you should start here with. For example, you should start by just taking self custody, period. Move your funds into a hardware wallet, something like that. Then to go further, you could add a passphrase, you could do multi sig, you could do collaborative multi sig, something like that stuff that's a little more complicated but, but is not quite, you know, you shouldn't just dive straight into rolling your own multisig setup, something like that. [00:24:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:24:42] Speaker A: And then more advanced stuff like you could distribute that stuff across continents if you really want to make sure that people can't get your funds, something like that. So that's just kind of a, kind of a basic example. But the entire book is, is structured like that. So yeah, basically bringing all this stuff together into the thesis of why I consider Bitcoin to be critical infrastructure and the basics of that is just that Bitcoin is this payment system that has revolutionized money and given people the first chance to break out of the fiat system. I'm preaching to the choir talking to you, [00:25:17] Speaker B: but I make explain more. Tell me about this. [00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah, but the case is basically that Bitcoin is critical infrastructure for the reason that it's critical to society for those who are using it. And I argue that it's critical to society in general. I don't get too preachy with it, but I think it's pretty critical that Bitcoin does the thing that we want it to do. And then also beyond that, the mining angle is pretty interesting because the way that bitcoin is interacting with electrical grids, that's another reason to consider it part of kind of this physical critical infrastructure system. I mean the demand response stuff in Texas and heat reuse up here in Finland is really big. So yeah, it's starting to have physical footprint through the mining connection. And then there's 10 chapters, like 300 pages or so of just cataloging the threats to bitcoin, whether it's your personal Bitcoin or Bitcoin the network, because I'm thinking about it as a system similar to these kind of big critical infrastructure systems. And so I think the lens is going to be different for bitcoiners. It's going to be talking in a slightly different language than maybe you're used to, whether you're coming from a technical side and you're really in the weeds with the technical part of it, or whether you're more of a monetary bitcoiner and you've read Bitcoin standard and all this Austrian economic stuff. This is going to be a little bit of a different set of vocabulary and a different way of thinking about it, looking at it through the lens of risk and seeing what could happen in the worst case scenario, but what you can do to defend against that. And yeah, the whole thing comes together, showing what you can do. There's always something you can do. That's one of the refrains of the book, is that there's, no matter what it is, there's always something you can do to make your situation better. [00:27:11] Speaker B: I would ask two main questions about how you thought about and framed out this thesis, so to speak, is what's the biggest similarity between the infrastructure control systems that you work with and Bitcoin? And then what's the biggest difference for how Bitcoin actually operates and how you have to treat it differently than those systems? [00:27:39] Speaker A: Sure. The largest similarity is that these systems have to stay running. That's the most critical piece that is the same. There's a concept in cybersecurity called the CIA triad. And yes, that's just a coincidence. Stands for confidentiality, integrity, availability. Yeah, so CIA. Yeah. No, not the US government agency that secretly created Bitcoin and has backdoors and shot 256, blah, blah, blah. You know, just had to get that out there. CIA triad. So confidentiality means keeping secrets safe, like keeping your password safe or your, you know, your, your login or your, or your personal details. That could be bad if someone leaked them. Keeping, keeping things that should be kept private, keeping them safe. Integrity is making sure that stuff doesn't get tampered with. So if your information gets tampered with, usually that can be like a pretty bad thing. If your account gets hacked, for example, you start to be one of these people whose telegram account is now secretly run by North Koreans. Fun fact though. These, these North Koreans that are trying to, you know, hack everyone's telegram these days, they really don't like it if you, if you post insults in Korean, insulting Kim Jong Un. So I, that's that's a fun one. If you want to, if you want to have some, some fun with these guys. They, they don't like me anymore. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So, so confidentiality and integrity is kind of what most people think of when they, when they think of, of cybersecurity. Like your, you're protecting data and you're keeping that data from being altered, things like this. But making sure that systems stay running is, is just as important. Like if you, if you, if your bank is still secure, no one's gotten into your account but you can't access it, that's, that's pretty bad. Like, you know, especially if it goes on for, for a long time and then say if, if, if a pipeline goes down to ransomware, you may, you may actually know about this. Like this Columbia Pipelines, a few years ago, they got hit by, they got hit by a ransomware. And I think it was, it was a little more like Northeast that got really affected, but there were some states that were out of gas for a couple of days because of this real stuff. And availability is the key point here is that making sure that these systems stay running is the priority in the industrial controls sector. And confidentiality and integrity can kind of take a back seat. It's not really considered a problem if, if the pressure of your pipeline, for example, is, is someone knows that like that that detail doesn't matter a whole ton. [00:30:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not really much of a privacy issue. Exactly Difference between your public key and your private key. If somebody has your public key, it's like that's not good. But you still have your Bitcoin. [00:30:25] Speaker A: Totally. Totally. Well, and I mean that's the thing too is that Bitcoin is a totally public ledger, right? Like everything on the blockchain is, is public and yet like it's a lot of data is hashed. Right. And that's how we, we keep some of that confidentiality. But the entire thing is out in the open now. Now if information gets tampered with though, and then I mean that, that can be bad. Like if someone's sending a bad pressure value to pipeline, as, as we said earlier, exploding is possible. So yeah, it's, it's availability is the, is the key point. That's the, the primary attribute. And keeping Bitcoin running is the primary concern here. Making sure that Bitcoin is available to be used as money by, by everyday people. Any, any actor who wants to come onto Bitcoin and, and send a 1 UTXO from one to another. That's the most important piece for me when thinking about defending Bitcoin. And the biggest difference, of course, is that this is a decentralized system. There is no central controller, there's no central control room giving out commands and saying, this has to change. You must do this. We are a decentralized group of individuals who are acting on the network. And so the defense of the system is not down to, say, the CEO dictating that everyone has to have their password be 64 characters and change it every three months, which is bad practice, by the way. It's. It's everyone working together to do their part. So that's the biggest difference. [00:31:50] Speaker B: Gotcha. I'm curious, in, in, in that context, does, does, does that, in your opinion, create. I mean, I feel like necessarily, if you kind of objectively look at it, the question is that it creates more benefit. But does it? How do you think about the benefits and the drawbacks of that decentralization in keeping the system secure, you know, like, especially in the ability to respond to things. [00:32:20] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, the, the drawback is, is clear. I can't do whatever I want. Man, that's, that's terrible. No, that, that, but that's, that's a benefit too. Of course. Response is kind of, kind of the, the real issue here. I mean, if we want to get into a specific example, which, which I do cover in the book, the arbitrary data thing from the last few. [00:32:40] Speaker B: Yeah, let's go ahead and I was about to say let's go ahead and like, tackle that from that perspective because I really think, like, I'm, it's funny, I, I, I don't have a strong position on bip 110. I'm generally anti. And it's usually not for the reasons most people are, certainly not for the reasons like people who are kind of like core defenders. I don't know who you call the. It's so hard to like, put people in tribes, but whatever, let's call them core munis and Nazis. The, it's not for almost any of the reasons that core munists say. And my support of it isn't totally the reason. Some of them are aligned with the Nazis, but I'm generally against it. But I'm more really kind of just dismayed with the low quality of arguments on all sides like that Everybody is latching on to, like, the worst things. And the thing that just gets me is that, like, I think there's a good argument in defense of the communist position, but none of it has anything to do with censorship. And I cannot, you cannot have two seconds worth of a conversation without somebody being like, bitcoin has to be neutral, and you can't be. You have to be censorship resistant. And that means people can put dick butts on the chain. It's like those have nothing to do with each other, man. And I cannot believe the, the stubbornness, like, the belligerent. Like, I refused to think about the quality of my argument. And I, I just, I just like the tribalism of, of the argumentation. It's not even, I don't even care if you're like. Tribalism of the social layer is perfectly understandable, but the tribalism of the argumentation drives me crazy because it's like you guys are both spewing bullshit at each other and then you're just pointing out whether the other person's wrong. It's like, because you're all arguing nonsense. You're all, you all have bad arguments. But anyway, so I want to hear your position and what your arguments are from the context of a, A bigger security profile of, of the network and the system itself. [00:35:02] Speaker A: Sure. Perfect. Well, hey, so, I mean, I completely agree with you on the censorship thing. Honestly, I, I have this argument too often on, on X. I've. I, I really, I kind of swore off X a little bit to. Yeah, just, just to get this darn thing over the, over the line. Now I, I should be clear that I used to be fully in support of BIP110 specifically, but I have withdrawn that support officially and I get into. [00:35:30] Speaker B: I want to know why. [00:35:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I'll, I'll get into the reasons why. But let's, let's, let's do framework first. Yeah, because. And, and I do it in the same order in defending Bitcoin. I've got, I've got chapter 11 is, is arbitrary data. The arbitrary data issue and kind of explaining what that is. And then chapter 12 is, is about governance risks and kind of all of the issues with the governance structure that, that have kind of contributed or that the arbitrary data issue is really kind of just a. It's a framing device sort of for the governance stuff, if I'm honest. Like, I don't consider the arbitrary data issue massively important. I do have a position. I am strongly against arbitrary data on Bitcoin, but the cracks in Bitcoin's governance, I think, are a little bit more concerning. But that also includes the consequences of a chain split. So that's the framing that I've been thinking about. This entire thing and what causally leads into one another. So, so here, here's, here's kind of my, my position here. So the, the census, the censorship side, just, just to get that out of the way, my, my position on this is that the only way to have censorship on Bitcoin is if we, the network collectively agree that certain addresses are no longer allowed to transact. Like for example, freezing Satoshi's coins as a, as a means of getting around the quantum issue. I, I completely believe that would be, that would be censorship, right? Or at least that would be against the kind of censorship resistant ethos. Right? I mean, you can, you can make an argument that, that avoiding the treasure hunt for Satoshi's coins is kind of worth it. But you know what, what if the guy has been in prison for 30 years and is just about to get out? You know what I mean? Like, it's a hard, it's a hard issue, you know, but, but I, I don't, I don't think their argument that it's, it's censorship to say that we want to put in these new rules that restrict the amount of data that can go into a transaction. I don't think that's censorship at all. And similarly, like, I'll take this even further. I don't think if a miner chooses not to include certain transactions into, into a block, you can't stop them. If someone, if someone is. It chooses not to relay transactions on their node, you can't stop them. That's not censorship either. That's discrimination. That's a different concept. You can certainly argue if it's good or bad to be discriminatory. Now I, I think everyone is discriminatory in kind of every minute of, of their lives, just in the, the choices [00:37:58] Speaker B: they make certain ways. [00:37:59] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. You're. You're choosing to. [00:38:01] Speaker B: Discrimination is just filters. Yes. You can argue that a filter is bad or a filter is good, but you don't. Life doesn't. Nothing works without filters. Like, that's, that's an absurdity. Like, I imagine if I just got the flood of everything on Twitter right in front of me. Like, no, it only works because there's like 8,000 filters that happen before it even gets to me. So. [00:38:22] Speaker A: Yeah, anyway, exactly. And so the thing there is, even if a miner is being OFAC compliant and refusing to mine ofac violating transactions, that's not censorship on the individual level that we might have a problem if that extends out to the vast majority of miners. And of course, that's why we, the community has really pushed back to, to minors being OFAC compliant. But, but it doesn't mean that they are censoring. They are, they are choosing what to do with their property. And, and I, I think it's, I think it's really, it's impossible and in fact morally indefensible to say that they can't do what they want with their property. [00:39:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And I would also say that the, it, it's a complete distraction from what the real problem is there because the problem isn't that someone's decid their block. The problem is that we have a giant centralized entity deciding what goes into everybody else's blocks because we don't have miners anymore. We have hashers who are lending their hash to a giant centralized entity. And it's like, well, obviously actually using Stratum V2 for what we, for the meaning, for the reason that it's supposed to be useful to us or datum and Ocean is the fix. Is the fix. It's not yelling at them. It's, it's disassociating your, your hash power from their block template. Run your own freaking node. Um, but like, it's, it's like such a, it's, you can put whatever you want in your block template, but stop giving your blocks to some. Stop letting somebody else do it for you. [00:40:00] Speaker A: Totally. No, that's chapter, that's chapter nine of defending Bitcoin. I love it. It's like every time. [00:40:07] Speaker B: That's chapter nine. [00:40:08] Speaker A: Not. [00:40:08] Speaker B: Oh, that's chapter six. Yeah. Okay. [00:40:10] Speaker A: Yeah. I, I, I, I, I nodes in the miners chapters for kind of continuity purposes. And so sometimes I mix up those two chapters. But yeah, I, this has been in my head for six months straight. So yeah, I've got it right in the front there. No, but, but, and I mean, you're exactly right. Like, like foundry having over 30% of the hash rate measurably, like, that's, that's a problem. You, you can start to do some of the attacks that are possible if you have that much hash rate like a couple of months ago now they, there's, there's evidence that Foundry held back a solved block until they got another one. And, and that let them actually orphan a new block that was found by, by another miner. Right. And so, and so that's a reorg. That's a reorg because they, they suddenly then come out with the, a new chain that has a longer proof of work and everyone moves to that one. And now suddenly this miner that thought they want, they want a block they did win a block, but they. But they wanted on a stale chain and they didn't know. So. So Foundry was only able to do that because they just had so much hash rate. Right. [00:41:17] Speaker B: And that specifically is the selfish mining attack, right? [00:41:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. [00:41:24] Speaker B: Making sure I had the term. The term for that. Right. Because it's. It's explicitly like, it's not a normal orphan because it had nothing to do with normal propagation, like separation in the. In the network. Because a normal orphan. Orphan block happens when two different miners find and broadcast a block at the exact same time and only part of the network gets each one and then they race to figure out who's going to be built on top of next. This was never broadcast. This was explicitly kept hidden, kept away from the network so that they could reorg someone else and. And basically. Basically have a head start by being private. And. And the only reason they did that is because they have. It literally doesn't work if they don't have. [00:42:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:11] Speaker B: Overwhelming majority of the largest portion of the hash power. [00:42:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know why they. They did it. And there's a lot of reasons to think that that's not really good for them. Maybe they were just trying to do it just to see if they could, but. [00:42:23] Speaker B: Well, I'll say mechanic actually has the best. Like, mechanic was actually super fair when. When we brought this up on the [00:42:30] Speaker A: show, because I don't. [00:42:30] Speaker B: I want to say it wasn't. It doesn't mean it's an attack or that it was on purpose. He believed that with all the problems and like, nuances of, like, keeping a pool up and running and communicating with everybody, he thinks it's just a blip in the communication. Like it was totally by accident and something just got hung up somewhere. And so their internal systems recognized that they were building on the new block without actually ever successfully broadcasting it. And they just didn't know. [00:42:59] Speaker A: So. [00:42:59] Speaker B: And I think that's the Occam's razor, you know? So, like, no. Hate to Foundry, but the problem is still just. Foundry has so much hash power that you could accidentally reorg the freaking network if you're. If your system doesn't work. 100%. [00:43:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, Foundry isn't. Isn't being this massive bad actor by. By any means. At least they appear not to be, but it is. It is not good that they have so much of the hash rate. Right. And. [00:43:24] Speaker B: Yeah. It's not good that they could have done it on purpose. [00:43:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And Ghash IO is the original. The Original story here from, from. Yeah, I'm not going to get the, the year right off the top of my head, but they had, they had 51%. This was back when they, they basically. [00:43:39] Speaker B: It's like 2013, wasn't it? [00:43:41] Speaker A: Yeah, 2013 sounds right. Yeah. And, and, and, and that one is. Well, basically they did have 51% and, and they started cloud mining. That was, that was pretty much what they did. Now it wasn't this, there's been this whole in between thing where there's been this scammy cloud mining where you theoretically just sign up to hash rate, but you have no idea. And now we've got this hash rate rental thing which is actually provable. You can prove the shares that you're renting. And so that's different. But we kind of went from this first era where you could just sign up and get hash rate. Right. And they got 51% of the network. But they. Miners migrated away, actual miners or hashers, if you want to call them that. [00:44:24] Speaker B: And they migrated away shockingly quickly, actually. Were you there? Were you? No, I was 2013. [00:44:29] Speaker A: No. [00:44:29] Speaker B: Okay. But I remember the, the huge fuss about everything. And it was kind of wild, like, like everybody was like, oh my God, like, this is kind of like make or break. And, and they went for, I mean, they literally went out of business almost like in, in like six months. They were almost insubstantial on the network. They had plummeted so much. Like people just left in droves. It was, it was really kind of wild because Ghash was like trying. So like they just succeeded, you know, from their perspective. Like they had just done really good at what they had set up. And everybody's like, attacking them. They're like, we're, we're not going to attack the network, I swear to God. We're just, we're just here trying to help Bitcoin. And then people just, it was, it was still just. It doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter if you're a good guy or not. Like, this is just the huge problem. And so many miners just left in droves. [00:45:20] Speaker A: No, and, and I mean, you, you, you can't have, have 51% controlled by a single entity. And I mean, I mean, the, the thing is you can add two or three entities and you get to, you get to 50, 60%. Right? So that's not good either. [00:45:35] Speaker B: In their defense, they explicitly like stopped signups and like froze like logins and stuff like that. So they were like, o, can't they. They recognize the problem themselves totally. Ghash was not a bad actor at all. They were literally just what do we do when, when we're just doing really good and we're doing too good for the sake of the network? [00:45:56] Speaker A: No, exactly. No, I, I, I and I explain all this and like maybe just a quick aside is that since I'm not assuming like a base level of, of knowledge, I am trying to be quite explanatory of topics. Every one of these kind of threat chapters goes a little deeper into like some, some area. So the mining chapters gets into all these conc. Node chapter gets into different different bits about nodes, things like that. So yeah, every little bit is just me. This is me writing the, the bitcoin book that you know, I, I would want to, to have placed in my hands as like a, a fresh cyber person and then get to know about everything there. So but we, we took a, we took a little bit of a tangent there with the, with the mining thing, but kind of pulling back to the arbitrary data side of it. So my angle about this the entire time has been, has been different from yeah, we, we shouldn't have crypto on bitcoin. Shouldn't. But yeah, there's lots of ways to do crypto ish things on bitcoin that aren't harmful to the network in the same way you can pump your coins out to liquid and just go trade tokens there if you want to, for example. But all you've done is one on chain transaction. That's not crazy. Lightning is capable of all of this stuff. You know, we shouldn't have, we shouldn't have specific pieces of data on, on the chain. I definitely don't want CSAM coming onto the chain. That would be not cool. But I mean I don't want, I don't want to talk out of my ass on this or anything but, but there, there was a study that, that found evidence of it at least not nice material, pornographic material. Right. So, so bitcoin has this stuff there right now. You just. [00:47:43] Speaker B: I was about to say I found a somebody somebody. I almost did a shitcoin insider episode on it before. I was just kind of like sunsetting a lot of that. But somebody linked me to, there's like a NFT website or whatever and it's nothing but like poorly drawn porn and there's like, there's like just a thousand of them of like, it's like, it's like bad. It wasn't even like, like AI generated anime. It was literally like kind of like pixelated like porn, you know, but it just like. And people are buying like a hundred bucks some stupid NFT of. I don't even, I don't even know. Like it just like. [00:48:23] Speaker A: No. [00:48:23] Speaker B: Did you literally just like. [00:48:24] Speaker A: It's silly. [00:48:25] Speaker B: I. I just. That was exactly my thought is like what are you even getting out of this? Not selling, obviously. Selling. [00:48:34] Speaker A: You're. [00:48:34] Speaker B: You're able to take an image of something and super pixelate it so that it's not even, it's damn near not legible and then you're getting a hundred dollars for it. So like I get it from the, the scammer side or from the, the seller side. It's hard to not call it a scam, but agreed. Who, who bought, who buys that? Like who buys that? I just don't understand it. Is it just all wash? [00:49:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I suspect that. [00:49:06] Speaker B: Is it somebody buying their own stuff to make people believe that there is value, hoping to then sell a few because it went up, you know, like are they wandering? [00:49:17] Speaker A: I don't know. Yeah. [00:49:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Like that's, that's the thing. Is, is it just like I can, I can give the appearance of green candles and a bunch of morons will come chase those green candles because they don't even care what they're, they don't care what any of this stuff is anyway, you know, but anyway, it's like cryptokitties, right? You know, like that one was somebody, somebody bought like one of the biggest cryptokitties for like $10 million or something. Like bonkers. Just absolutely bonkers. And then they, it was worth like a hundred bucks two years later. [00:49:48] Speaker A: Totally ridiculous. Yeah yeah. No, I, I mean like that, that was the thing is that bitcoin kind of didn't have this stuff. At least not like to a huge degree. Some, some of these protocols have actually been around for like, like a fairly long time that have tried to do like NFTs or whatever it is, but the opposition like way back in the day wasn't really about the, the, the content. It was about the mechanism, right? Like there, there were protocols that were, were basically putting data in, into fake public keys and that was how they were doing their, their encoding. And that was seen pretty quickly as like this isn't a good thing. It's not good to have to have public keys in the UTXO set that are literally never going to be able to get out there, right? Like provably unspendable, but we can't do anything about it, you know. So operator was the compromise and 80 bytes of opera turn was the legitimate use of arbitrary data on, on Bitcoin. Like if you can't stop data embedding, which I admit 100%, you can't stop data embedding steganography, just embedding data into, into otherwise like other protocols that, that exists and it's possible but you can say okay, we, the network are going to relay transactions that include opera turns up to 80 bytes and if you put more than that, we're not going to relay your transactions. That was a filter that worked. It was possible. Large Opera terms made it into blocks every once in a while, but it wasn't a thing. That filter worked. People built their protocols under 80 bytes and generally were good citizens of the network and not griefing it effectively. And the thing here when we talk about arbitrary data, the, the concept that I'm looking at is the availability of the network as a monetary system. I do come back to that, that Bitcoin is money and Bitcoin, Bitcoin's purpose is money. Peer to peer electronic cash. Go back to the white paper, that's why all of us are here. [00:52:00] Speaker B: Or I mean don't talk to a b. Casher. [00:52:04] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, and, and that, and that's [00:52:07] Speaker B: the thing, you know, I am shocked that totally aside. Sorry to interrupt but I'm just shocked the number of people specifically on the, the communist side of this whole current debacle. It will not actually argue. Well actually kind of like argue against that that like because from a purely technical standpoint it's like all you're doing is stamping data into the chain that has nothing to do. Like that's, that's like saying that a car is a box because it's got four sides, you know, like it just doesn't. Like that has nothing to do with anything. You know, like you're, you're, you're arguing away from the position, you're arguing away from the problem entirely and ignoring everything meaningful around it for the sake of some like technical win which is just so childish and stupid. Like obviously the purpose of the system is money and if you do not focus everything around it to make it censorship resistant and secure money, it won't work like that. You can't possibly make it work and have all of your decisions around are we stamping data into the chain successfully or not? Because as soon as you lose that focus, you, you all decision. All the questions about like how to make a decision or what to think about the trade offs completely change and, and you can't just, you can't, you can't completely change the mental framing and think that doesn't mean that your decisions won't be the same, you know, or that your decisions would be the same, because they clearly wouldn't. Anyway, sorry, just an aside. It just, it just blows my mind that people argue that. [00:53:52] Speaker A: No, you're hitting exactly a lot of things that, that I think about here. And one of the features of Bitcoin that I think is very worth optimizing for. We have limited blocks, right? A limited block size and we have scarcity in block issuance block every 10 minutes on average, adjusted by the difficulty adjustment every two weeks, right? So the whole thing there is, we have scarcity of those two things. Therefore there's a limited number of transactions that can go into a block, both in a single block and over a time period, right? So the size of transactions is important. The size of a transaction optimizing to this is one of the original changes was optimizing the size of the public key and doing a double hash so that it can be as small a hash as possible to make the transaction size as compact as it can be, right? Fit as many as you can. So this was something that technical, people in Bitcoin were aware of that we can't have transactions be gigantic. At least that can't be the default setting. But for reasons that I don't really understand, the transaction limits have basically been set pretty high. And you can have standard transactions that are 100 kilobytes essentially if they're not using this witness discount. And then we can have a 4 megabyte blockchain, right, which we have had a 4 megabyte block or like 3.96 or whatever it is the largest possible. And that's where the arbitrary data thing really comes in. It's two sides really. But I'm coming at it from this perspective first, that if we have a lot of data in transactions that increases the size of individual transactions and doesn't really relate to any of the operations actually happening on chain like UTXO moves from one address to another or three keys signed that out of these five that were acquired, something like this, we can even go into covenants or whatever it is. This many inputs, this many outputs, this is all stuff that is doing things on Bitcoin as money operations. And they're not using data outside of the system, right? They're all using parts of the programmable system of Bitcoin and they're not putting arbitrary things on it to make their protocol work. Now you have things like open timestamps that literally only exists to put an OPER turn and that's a hash of something that proves that that thing existed at that moment in time. And I mean, I don't love open timestamps. I think there are interesting uses for it, but I don't think that needs to be on Bitcoin. But it's also respecting the transaction size, right? It's respecting this 80 bytes or less of arbitrary data and it's putting it in the right spot, which is provably prunable. We can just get rid of that data and it doesn't create a new utxo. [00:56:57] Speaker B: Yeah, and importantly, I was about to say importantly, it doesn't bloat anything. It's proper use of the chain to enable exactly what everyone is talking about without actually causing a problem or having some sort of a cost or bloat or UTXO unspendable utxo. It's not an exploit, it's just using like everything in Bitcoin is just a hash of a thing. You know, it's just the hash of the transaction, the hash of the script. And you know, all of, all of this stuff, it's like, well, this is just a hash of something external and it's, it's, it's a perfectly like good steward way to actually do the exact same thing. And it just, it doesn't, I don't, I don't understand the, the need to do it any. Anyway, I'll let you keep going. [00:57:48] Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, I'm like, I'm glad you said exploit. Like the, the whole thing is. And, and I argue this, that that basically Inscriptions found a way to get around the system. They used OP false opif. Like the structure is you put an OP false code in the script followed by an OP if. I don't know why they have to do it exactly like this, but somehow, yeah, it's the OP if you need an OP if and a closing statement to that if. And then you put whatever you want in the middle. But the point is they create a branch in the Bitcoin script that's never going to execute. So Bitcoin script never looks at what's underneath that to check if the transaction is still valid. And the loophole they found is that they can just go push data, push data, push data as many times as they want within that envelope and get as much arbitrary data on the system as they want. You can go up to the 4 megabyte block size limit through specifically using TapScript also, because there are limitations in other output types, but not in tascript. Tapscript went in without a limit on the total amount of data you can, you can push. And that was, that was raised as a bug by Luke Dasher and so was the op, false op if things separately, but both have been rejected by Core. So my, my point of view on this is it's totally an exploit. It looks, it looks exactly like a common attack pattern. It's called SQL Injection, which is basically that someone tries to put. Yeah, yeah, someone tries to put SQL, the structured query language, which underlies a lot of web databases, into like a form on the Internet and tries to do funny things. There are web comics about this and all this, and it's not, it's not an exact analogy. They're, they're, they're. It's a bug. They're. They're making use of a bug. But I think off false off OPIF is a bug. Right? So it's not a perfect analogy. [00:59:48] Speaker B: It's using the same, the same type of, like, it's. Conceptually it's using the same type of attack. Right? Is. [00:59:54] Speaker A: Is. [00:59:54] Speaker B: It's, it's using the input field to, to change what's behind rather than actually use it for the purpose of the input field. [01:00:04] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's, that's, that's entirely right. So, so that, that's the analogy I go with there. And I mean, I mean, more, more directly, it's, it's like just a payload of data that's, that's somewhere it shouldn't be, but technically that's what it is. But I, I think the SQL Injection attack is, is actually like a, like a really good analogy. And then the whole thing with it too, is that the reason that this wasn't closed off exactly. Like, I guess I don't want to open up the bitpoint10 thing or anything just yet, but their mechanism is to just say, get rid of the use of OPIF in TapScript. I really just wonder if there isn't some other way to just check that. Hey, if someone has put stuff in a thing that can never execute, just, just throw that away. Like say that that's not allowed. You know what I mean? Like, I, I don't know. I'm sure there's good technical reasons. [01:00:57] Speaker B: I was about to say, I think from. Because I've looked into that path, like, you kind of have to have like a proof because it's a little bit like a burn Address. Sure. That you can assume that something is a burn address, but you actually don't know if somebody doesn't have that private key or not. [01:01:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:14] Speaker B: Because they could have just generated an insanely unlikely address. Like you could have essentially won the lottery with, you know, this is my burn address. 165, blah blah blah. And that, that was just total by happenstance. But in the context of like I don't understand why we don't just like recognize even with op false op if like that like just have a script witness limit and like why that is so like we have, there is not a single person who has come up with a good use case for giant scripts that everybody kind of said like, oh, we'll have taproot scripts that are just like massive and there's all these leafs and all this stuff. It's like nothing that complicated is ever actually going to work very well in practice anyway. And like simple is going to actually be reliable and secure. And like what's the. Just put in a limit. Just put in a limit. And like I don't even care if somebody like in puts in a bunch of data and they have to put in 2030 UTXOs. It just gets rid of the discount. [01:02:18] Speaker A: Totally. Well, you know, and like I, I, I was at BTC, sorry, I should Bitcoin+ in Vienna. Their, their Austrian edition just, just over well last week. And I, I mean I, I haven't been at a dev conference before. It was a really good experience and I, I mean I, I've been having conversations about this online for a while, but it was nice to get to have some of these conversations in person. And, and honestly it's the real difference in perspective here between what I would say monetary maximalists or bitcoiners who maybe come from the Austrian economics tradition and are really only thinking about this as bitcoin as optimal money. The difference between that side and kind of the developer community, it's so interesting they want to have this space to explore and figure out what bitcoin is. I had one developer basically say, yeah, we just need the freedom to be able to find out what bitcoin actually is and give people the flexibility to do interesting things and break stuff and do things that we've never figured out before. And then later at the closing panel on the first day I was there with Knut and we also had Matt Corallo and Chris from Sidor there and sorry, I'm forgetting our fifth panelist, but the whole thing was that the whole panel agreed that the vast majority of users just want to be able to receive Bitcoin into self custody to store their wealth and be able to trade it for goods and services. All of these crazy things are just appealing to a tiny, tiny niche of people. And so therefore we have to open up Bitcoin to this massive explorer space to let the development community just so [01:04:09] Speaker B: they can move fast and break things like. [01:04:12] Speaker A: No, exactly. And so really there is a difference between this kind of natural conservatism of wanting Bitcoin to be simple and secure and well, basically do its thing really well. And then a lot of the development community wants Bitcoin to have this flexibility, to be able to put in upgrades and new features and things like that without so much friction. And to that I say we should have friction like Taproot might have gone in. Well, okay, let me not hedge this. Taproot in my view went, went in without some due scrutiny and tapscript has introduced a couple of bugs that have had profound effects on the network. 99% of Taproot UTXOs are dust. It's arbitrary data. Right. That's a, that's a bad result. Right. If we're just talking about the result of the change objectively. [01:05:04] Speaker B: Objectively I just don't understand like how that's like how can you not look at Taproot and say, okay, like well this is not what we intended, this is not what was expected like that you didn't come up with any use case for money, like to make it better money, you know. [01:05:22] Speaker A: Okay, I mean I'll devil's advocate that one, like there are privacy improvements to Taproot and there are ways of using it. [01:05:31] Speaker B: Use, yes, yeah, 100%. 100%, I agree. But nobody is using it for that. [01:05:37] Speaker A: That's right, that's right. And then you have to do a cost benefit analysis. I don't really call it that in defending Bitcoin. But, but every, every security control comes with a trade off. Right. And the cost is, is it worth that 99 plus percent of dust just to get that privacy improvement? Could we have stepped back? We the community, we the network have, have had some more due diligence and put in a system that wasn't going to have that result. I think, I think it's entirely possible, I mean the Schnorr signatures could have gone in on their own without tab script. Right. And had that privacy improving layer. Now I mean there's, there's issues with Schnorr signatures as, as defined right now the quantum angle is basically Basically the thing that, that Taproot addresses are, are not as quantum resistant in themselves exactly as, as, as Segwit is. And that's, that's a step back, that's a trade off. Now Quantum is an entirely other thing. But, but the thing is we didn't need Tap Script, which is the thing that is it didn't need to go in at the same time. There isn't like a defined reason why those two things had to go in together. Right. And so, so, and I mean, okay, I'm sure, I'm sure there's, there's people who can, who can tell me the rationale for that. But, but still, TapScript is the thing that has the issue and Schnorr signatures doesn't really, isn't really part of the problem there. So we can just, as you say, be objective and look at what was the result of it and was it worth it. And in my view, currently no. Taproot appears to not have been worth it. And, and I would, I would actually fully support just saying, hey, soft fork now Taproot no longer works. Your addresses will still work. Have some kind of block height limiter on that like you send. Yeah, but no more making new addresses. Something like that. Yeah. So I would support that just to get some time to solve the issue and maybe it would be more elegant than, than what VIP 110 is doing. [01:07:44] Speaker B: But, and what's funny, what's funny on that same thing is that I don't hear anybody talking about that one. They're talking about like freezing coins with, with the quantum, the quantum issue is that like, okay, well, you have to freeze all Taproot. Like you have to like, if your plan doesn't include removing Taproot, then your plan is not complete because Taproot is exactly what you're talking about. And if, if in one, if in one way it's been used for, and I was a huge supporter of Taproot mostly for the concept of Schnorr, because Schnorr was attached to it. Yep. And, and for just the efficiency in like the, the script and like how, how the signatures and the, the different like script paths were built. I thought that was really, really interesting. Super interesting. It does, it does open up a lot of like, functionality. But this, this idea of just like using it to blow out the witness size and then not looking at what the consequence of that is just pretending that like, oh well, this huge thing that has nothing to do with anything was never intended, is clearly an explo. And has literally bloated like more than half of the use of the chain is just this garbage. And we're just not gonna, we're just gonna pretend like, oh well, we did it. So we just have to live with it. And that is the one thing, that is the one argument for BIP110 that really resonates with me. And Steve brings it up on this, the round table all the time. Is it like, if we make a mistake, do we have the ability to fix it? Like, are we even going to recognize it if somebody else is profiting off that mistake? Does that just mean we have to like, we're just stuck with it forever? [01:09:42] Speaker A: That's 100%. My, my argument and angle with this is that we need to be able to do that and that's a security feature. The network needs to be able to react if, if we do make a mistake. And, and, and I mean, I've been asked like, what, what would be an example of that mistake? Well, okay, I mean the, the inflation bug happened, right? Like, and I mean the network was pretty fast to solve that. You know. But the thing is, it's not really about hypotheticals. It's just like if the outcome is bad, there's some exploit and it's consensus level and we have to fix it or else Bitcoin as we know it isn't going to work anymore. Do we have that ability to do that or do we just have to live with the conditions? And I argue no. Definitely, I argue no. And I mean you might be thinking that this is all sounding like I should be a bip 110 supporter and I'm supportive of the content. I absolutely am. The real crux of bit 110. Well, okay, first, we skipped over a whole other thing with this by the way, and I'll be fast. The fee spike over arbitrary data back in 2023, 2024. I mean that was insane. Like hundreds of sats per V by to get into a block. 50, $50 to get into a block. Something like this. Like who's paying that? And I mean, I mean the, the thing is in the long run, do we see eventually a world where that is actually the fee market? I mean that would be, that would be amazing. Right? And, and yeah, I, I, I love that. I, I love that idea that, that we're just going to have so much adoption that fees are going to be kind of high and we're going to have to deal with it and have second layers and all. Great. If it's organic Monetary adoption. I'm all for it. All for it completely. But the thing was this was all just frenzies over NFT crazes. And it's the availability of the system. Right. Bitcoin became less available to use as an average user. You either had to compete with these NFT frenzies or you had to just wait. And you had to wait months. Especially if you're wanting to move a smaller amount or whatever it is. Right? Like if you just didn't want to pay the fee. The argument that monetary transactions are going to outcompete arbitrary data. I mean that's always been super wrong to me. Why is it okay for the standard use of the system to have to out compete something that is. That is working with a totally different set of rules. They have a totally different incentive structure. Their incentive. [01:12:24] Speaker B: Totally different economics. 100% different economics. Yeah. [01:12:28] Speaker A: Their entire system is built around put this data on Bitcoin, affinity scam with Bitcoin, basically that your data is on Bitcoin and then try to sell that to make a profit. That's the entirety of what it is. Whether it's an image, like a JPEG or whatever it is, or if it's one of these token protocols. BRC 20s or runes. Just a quick aside on Runes. By the way. Runes is following the rules, right? Runes is using small operators. I can't see a real thing we can do about Runes that doesn't violate some kind of principle that we don't want to step back from. I'm not here to say that every single arbitrary data protocol is evil and we just need to eradicate it for the sake of Bitcoin being pure. No, like Runes is actually the example of following the rules. It probably only took off because of the other frenzies going on at the same time. But that was actually effectively an attempt to be a good citizen. Now Knots does filter out runes. It sees the signature that Runes uses and just says I'm not relaying that. And I think that's every user's choice. I think it's every miner's choice to include that or not. But it is still a. It's not from the perspective of it's not using an outsized amount of data in the transaction. It's using the right place to put it. It's not creating UTXOs. So I don't have have an issue with it from that perspective. I still think it's stupid and I'm still going to advocate against it, but. Yeah, yeah, but, but yeah, it's way better than BRC 20s, which are like 40% of the UTXO set at this point, right. So it's just, it's just some craziness and that stuff is never going to move. You know, it's never going to move almost in the exact same way that fake pub keys are never going to move. They've moved on people holding these tokens like they've all gone to zero, right. Who's going to move your dust just to get back. Well, it's not even economical, right? Like you get fractions of a substantial, [01:14:30] Speaker B: you can't pay for it, right? [01:14:31] Speaker A: So yeah, they're never going to move. So it's a relatively permanent issue at this point. But okay, so the fee issue, right, like this is the other side. So arbitrary data and arbitrary data protocols competing with monetary transactions, that just doesn't square with me. I don't think that's the solution here. It is making Bitcoin worse as money by forcing everyone who wants to use the system to have to pay more just to get over the threshold of whatever arbitrary data is in vogue at the moment. And therefore I absolutely support solutions to try to limit the amount of arbitrary data at least and to repudiate the support of these types of protocols. That was the thing back in the so called opera turn wars. Other forms of putting arbitrary data on Bitcoin were rejected and there was a gentleman's agreement that hey use operator. And people abided by it. And there was a filter in place, a policy filter, but that set the limit and people didn't go over that limit. And it worked for like 10 years, nine or something. But yeah, then inscriptions comes along and ordinals and all this and here we are. Do I think this is like the sky is falling and it's breaking Bitcoin and it's the worst thing in the world? No, the impact of arbitrary data, even in kind of absolute terms, I don't think this is something that kills Bitcoin. Definitely not. Even if we do have kind of like, like a really long sustained frenzy of arbitrary data again, like, okay, you are still able to get over that threshold. I would think that that's bad. That does make Bitcoin worse as money. The effects would get felt eventually. But we have lightning, we have other layers, we have other tools and we figure something out if it gets, if it gets as like really worst case scenario. So what I'm saying is this is worth careful consideration of maybe changing the protocol to reduce arbitrary data vectors and discourage them But I don't think it's something that requires the massive urgency that's currently needed. I don't think if someone, a bad actor puts CSAM on Bitcoin in an OP return that that's going to instantly make it illegal to run a node everywhere. Yeah, right. Like I, I think that's, that's, that's a little bit, sky is falling so that's, I just want to be measured about it. Yeah. [01:17:08] Speaker B: And yeah, and I don't, I don't, that doesn't make much sense to me either just because of the nature of the network. But it, it also simultaneously it doesn't make, even makes even less sense to me to believe that there's nothing wrong with a one megabyte transaction that has like one utxo, you know, like that just has like one input address, one input address and two output addresses. It's like what do you even like, like you've done something wrong. If somebody needs a megabyte and there's no use case for this at all. And it's not even a spendable, it's not even a usable address or amount of money. You know, like you've, you've clearly like you've just taken 25% of one block of, of the total that can fit into a single block and you have allocated it as something that has nothing to do with Bitcoin's use as money. [01:18:08] Speaker A: Right. And the, the, the thing here is that even in the argument that they paid the fee and, and that's what, that's the cost of getting into the block and there, therefore everything should be fine. And the other nuance here is that prioritizing the interests of miners seems to be a real preoccupation with the development community. Some of them, honestly, they're scared shitless of running out of miners because the block subsidy goes away. That mining is just going to go away if we don't develop solutions that encourage on chain transaction usage. And therefore anything that creates on chain transactions is good for Bitcoin because it's paying the security budget. And again I just think that's sky is falling thinking a little bit that, thinking that we need to come up with new and innovative ways of using Bitcoin and making transactions just so that the miners get paid. Well, the other side of it is bring more people onto Bitcoin, you know, grow bitcoin adoption, try to orange orange pill people and bring them into the network and get them using it organically, [01:19:20] Speaker B: make it better money and they'll use it as money. You know, like it just absolutely, like a focused purpose will have a bigger long term effect. Like it's, it's the definition of short term thinking to me is that like as long as we get a bunch of NFTs, like well what if that, what if that literally sacrifices what people. What, what the dominant use of this would be for in 20 years so that you can, so that you can get a bunch of extra fees while we do have the subsidy. [01:19:51] Speaker A: That's, that's, that's for sure a part of it. Right? That, that. Why do we have to solve this now? Like why, why do we have to solve 20, 40 years down the road immediately? I, I mean it's great to keep making incremental improvements. [01:20:04] Speaker B: Specifically solve it in a non monetary way. Like, like solve it in a monetary economics way. You know, like people are used to paying 1% for the security of their transaction. There's a way to do that. And if you can, if you can. It. It's so hard to explain how obvious it is to me. And, and I just, it seems like such a bad direction. It seems like such a fiat like, like reactionary thinking that we just have to. Whatever the hell we can put in the chain, we can put in. It's like, it's like trying to think that. One of the analogies that I try to use is because there's such a tragedy of the commons problem is that imagine if other people could pay. You had to compete to use your own security system in your house and you had to pay a small fee to keep it running, but other people could literally pay a fee to use it for casino infrastructure that nobody could shut down. Right. Is that they could run an online poker website using your security system. How can you argue that your choice to have it for the securing of your home and your family should have to compete with how many people are playing poker right now and how much it's worth the fees to the casino owner, the online casino owner to use up your secure to make it so that you can't log into your security camera or your security system cannot call the freaking police if something bad happens because there are too many people playing poker right now because there's a tournament going on. [01:21:44] Speaker A: Yeah, basically this was my exact. Where I was going with it was that basically it's just. [01:21:49] Speaker B: I'm so sorry I cut you off and, and just went into it. [01:21:52] Speaker A: Not at all, man. Not at all. No, like the prioritizing the interests of the miners versus the interests of basically the people who just Want to use bitcoin as money. Like, I think that's just the wrong priority. I don't want to think that we can just say, yeah, everything's going to solve itself. No, that's why I've been out here trying to educate people, trying to grow adoption as much as I can. And I absolutely support adding new monetary features to bitcoin covenants, doing things that clean up bugs. There's this consensus cleanup which I have actually heard some criticisms about certain specific things here. But let's make changes to Bitcoin when they're worth it and they're through a good proper vetting process and get consensus from the network before you do something. Right. And like, I think, I think basically just Taproot specifically was. And I mean there's some historical, historical. I mean we're not talking that long ago, but basically like the success of Segwit and the winning. The block size were so such as they're referred to maybe gave Bitcoin core a little bit more, say, goodwill to put Taproot forward. And it just went through and there's nothing. [01:23:15] Speaker B: You make a mistake after. You think you just won't. [01:23:17] Speaker A: Totally, totally. [01:23:18] Speaker B: You become complacent and think that you can't do anything wrong. It's just like every bitcoiner after bitcoin succeeds and it goes up 10x, they think they're an investor and so they open a business or they invest in stocks and you know, they're trying to make their money work and then they all get their asses handed to them and they're like, wait a second. But I thought I was right. You know, we. Taproot should have humbled us, I believe. [01:23:40] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and, and I mean, and this is, this is the thing is that it, it. A lot of it comes down to just the different priorities. Like a lot of the developers I talk to are, yeah, the mining thing is their top priority and also having the flexibility for developers to build things easily. That's a lot of the rationale for keeping a lot of these vectors open. Like they're hooks to be able to do upgrades more easily or they're literally just free spaces to do whatever with because we don't know what we might want to do in the future. [01:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you think Tap. I know, I know you disagree with that perspective and I do too. Like, like mentality wise is I think we should do less with Bitcoin so that, so that it can be worth more for what it's doing. But in, in the similar vein do you believe Taproot was a mistake? [01:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I do, I do. I mean just on a, just on a results basis. I, I do, yeah. And I'm okay. Would I roll it back? I said, I said earlier that I would support like a specific. Just turn off Taproot. I would if that were getting consensus. I don't think that's a bad outcome here. But, but. Well, I mean maybe that's, maybe that's the key word here and the reason that I'm not specifically supporting, explicitly supporting BIP110 even though, even though I support the contents and like I'll really emphasize here, the trade offs demanded by BIP 110 are not onerous in, in my view. They're, they're really not anything massive. They, they, they mean. [01:25:15] Speaker B: I agree. They're like. It's kind of. It seems like a. No, a little nothing burger and it does plug a couple of holes. But anyway, keep, keep going. [01:25:25] Speaker A: No, no, exactly that, that's it. Like, like the, the biggest thing that's pointed to that would break is, is miniscript. But it doesn't actually break break miniscript. [01:25:34] Speaker B: It doesn't break. It just means you can't use OP if for it. But you can still do it. [01:25:37] Speaker A: You can. Well, you can still. There's I believe two specific functions that, that miniscript calls that would use opif. And first of all, I, I mean they're smart people, I'm sure they could refactor this stuff or, or that you don't need. [01:25:52] Speaker B: Just use. They could just refactor miniscript for Taproot to use a different leaf instead of opif. Yes, like that's it. [01:25:58] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep, exactly. So there would be some development work required, but that's okay. [01:26:04] Speaker B: Like, like building new things. Come on. [01:26:08] Speaker A: And I mean, I get it. You don't want to see things that you spent a long time on like being made up, being made obsolete. But in a certain sense it's the same thing as can we, can we react to mistakes? Right. Just because something is valid on Bitcoin now doesn't mean it's, it has to be valid on Bitcoin forever. I maintain that. And so again, it's all about trade offs. So I don't think the Trade offs of BIP110 are too much to bear. I mean the OPIP thing, it could have been done in a way that doesn't just throw that out. Okay, I think that's true. [01:26:47] Speaker B: But again, just put in a script witness size. I just don't understand that's just the naive, the totally naive thing. Just make it 256 bytes again or whatever the, Whatever the heck it was. [01:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah, and. And, you know, I mean, I think, I think the other thing too is that. What about just straight transaction limits lower? Like, like, yeah. Why. Why do we need transactions to be so huge? I mean, I mean, like, coinjoin is. Is great. I think being able to make big coin joins is. Is great. Consolidation is. Is always good. And so, I mean, it's not like we could lower the transaction limit by like a ton. A ton. A ton. But. Yeah, so, so, but if you have [01:27:24] Speaker B: a thousand UTXOs, like if in, if you're going from a thousand to a thousand or something, or 4,000, you know, you're. You're maxing it out, that's totally fine. Like, I don't think the limit. I think the limit should just be in the script. It should just be in the witness. [01:27:42] Speaker A: Sure. [01:27:42] Speaker B: Because the witness should just be about, like, the spending conditions, and nobody has come up with a legitimate use case for 256 kilobytes of witness that isn't just spam. [01:27:54] Speaker A: Totally. You know, Totally. No, no, I mean, and I mean, yeah, that, that would, that would do it, basically. And, and I mean, other things, like getting rid of the witness discount. I, I think that there are smart people that, that think that would be a good idea. Giacomo, for example. But, but like, I, I don't know. It would definitely the, the reason for the witness discount of, of incentivizing consolidation. Like, that's, that's not a bad thing, but it is, is tinkering with incentives. You know, like, there is, there is this element to like, yeah, let's make this tweak here and see what happens. Like, yeah, I, I don't agree with that being the, the way the system should work. Right. And I mean, there's, there's other things too. Like, could you, could you let the discount apply for, for some amount of transactions, but then make it go away or something like this. But all of these are arcane and yeah, we're, we're talking the same language here. So. But the thing with BIP 110 is basically the method of going in. It's going to go in at this block height or after this signaling period, and we're going to start rejecting blocks that don't follow bip110, no matter what happens. I do definitely think that it's, it's being pushed through without sufficient consensus. And frankly, the chaos that is going to ensue when BIP110 goes in. We have no idea what's going to happen there. Right? Block size wars. I mean, what if bitcoin cash had won, right? What are the bad guys win? The next chain split, right? If you're on the monetary maximalist side and you're all in for BIP 110 and there's a chain split which by the way would have to be forced by the other side, not by bip110, but like if someone is really saying like hey, we're going to split the chain, it has to be the people with the broader rules, not the, not the more constricted rules. So just saying. But if there's a chain split that results in like a new coin and everything, and the one that the market follows, no matter the number of nodes, the percentage of nodes that that's following one side or the other, the, the side that the market picks to be more valuable, that's the one that all the institutions are going to go with. That's the one that the, the mining hash power is going to, going to migrate to. Right? Because that's worth more for their hash power. Right? Like the, the, the entire thing rests on that. It's, it's going to cause chaos. And, and if the monetary maximalists quote unqu because their coin, their chain becomes the one that's worth a lot less and it turns into kind of the new bcash and they all migrate off and leave, where does that leave? The larger Bitcoin, the spam enabling version of Bitcoin. And what does that mean for the future, right? Do we split off into here's monetary bitcoin, but it's way smaller, way less adoption and it's not the one that the institutions are going with. And then we have this other version of bitcoin that has now had a precedent of that that we can ignore. People doing crazy forks. [01:31:14] Speaker B: We need to figure out as much thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just, it, it literally takes the monetary maximalist out of the network. Like they, they isolate themselves for no reason. And I think bitcoin itself will be the worst off because of it. [01:31:30] Speaker A: That is my position in a nutshell and I don't think I'm alone here. Guys like Giacomo again, Jimmy Song, Samson Mo, who've just started up this production ready thing, you know, funding a new implementation, those folks are saying the same thing, like it's just the approach is wrong and that going with a different tactic to solve the problem, which is again, I don't think Arbitrary data alone is the problem. It was that Bitcoin core was pretty much free to make changes and ignore the community. Right. That's the root cause of the problem in my view. And I've had conversations with people in core and within the funding organizations like Brink and I believe they're good people. I believe they want the best for Bitcoin. But Brink and Chain Code fund the majority of the bitcoin core developers. Spiral can come in at the third place. So you have three organizations that have physical offices that bring people in together into a physical office to do bitcoin development work. Like we're not talking about cypherpunks in their basement doing this after hours because they still have a day job. Right. Volunteering their time. We're talking about people being paid a full time salary career to have a career just working on Bitcoin core. Now do I think it's good to fund developers, let them focus on Bitcoin core entirely? On balance, yes. It's good if you're able to dedicate your time to being a bitcoin core developer and that's your contribution to bitcoin. Right. But the moment you have outside funding, it's an incentives issue. If you have funders who have an agenda and say hey, I'd really like it if you focus on this thing that needs fixing in Bitcoin they gave you money, you're going to look into that. And maybe there's others who are a little more independent who are really only focusing on the thing that they find interesting or whatever it is. But, but Bitcoin core is a software project now like, like a, like a corporate software shop. That's what, that's what it looks like to me when they have these offices that just talk to each other and, and everyone comes in and is like having conversations over coffee and everything like this. It's, it doesn't look to me like a, an open source organization. So yeah, arbitrary data is just this, this red herring for the, the deeper governance issue. And I think solving that is the more long term solution and giving control back to users. [01:34:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And to me like staying, staying on the network and just providing alternative software I really think is the best route and specifically like leveraging that software and going all in on build your own block templates and doing it better like just doing it better like I just, I think that is the way forward and bit 110 like to reject something that is valid is different than why segwit1 and this is why I think bip110 has such a bad, like, has, has a, has a very extremely disruptive implementation. And, and one that's more damaging, like the potential of like a 100 block reorg or God forbid, if this goes on for months and it actually starts gaining traction. A, you know, 10,000 block reorg on the chain is an order of magnitude worse than 10 years of spam, you know, for Bitcoin's legitimacy or integrity. For Bitcoin's integrity. And the, the idea of risking that Bitcoin's integrity as a monetary network just because you might have to pay more in fees or your node might be a little bit more difficult to run, I do not think is a sensible trade off. I think that's a reactionary trade off. I think that's, I think that's the exact same thinking that went into push taproot as fast as possible is, is like, let's just get in cool new features as quick as we can. And everybody trusts us. So like, you know, they trust our direction and you know, bit 110, it's like we're monetary maximalists. We're the, we have the pure, we're the pure of heart and we are going to, you know, we're going to make Bitcoin great again. You know, we're going to make like money great again. And because there are so many people, so die hard, myself included, ideologic, ideologically convinced or, or what's the word, you know, kind of like ride or die on that stance. They, they want to raise the stakes, they're trying to raise the stakes, but you're escalating a situation that's not violent. You know, you're escalate, escalating a situation that is not that severe. It's like police coming into argument and then pulling out a gun. You know, like, like now, now there's a chance like sure people were gonna have their feelings hurt and sure everybody was like screaming and like, you know, it wasn't a nice situation, but as soon as you pull out the gun, somebody might die. And that was only because you entered the situation and escalated it that now you have a much more serious problem on your hands. So like the whole idea is de escalate, de escalate and provide an alternative and you get the upper hand of like Cormunists were the ones who forced a change against the community. You know, like you, you have the, you have the upper hand from the, the narrative, I guess from the, from the social side is that they explicitly did something that didn't have consensus and now you're explicitly trying to do something worse that doesn't have consensus. And so what, what right do you have to complain about them, you know? [01:38:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I completely agree with all of that and fantastic framing. It's, it's a really hard situation all around. I mean I think the most likely scenario, and I think even mechanic has, has said this, it's. It's pretty much either bip110 activates early and overwhelmingly. Right, that would be surprising. But if it has over 50% or 55% of the hash rate and like, okay, great, fantastic. I mean, first of all I support the change in terms of the content and I think that outcome would be positive for bitcoin overall if everyone else comes along, maybe ordinals chain breaks off and causes some issues, but I don't really see big industrial miners following along with that. But I really just don't see that as likely. And he said that the other likely outcome is that it just fizzles out. It doesn't achieve early activation, it has some amount of the hash rate now. I mean even just when we're recording this, there's been a flurry of bip110 blocks. Who knows, maybe there's a lot of hash rate coming online. The biggest irony would be of like, like Foundry started signaling for VIP 110. I was just like, oh, okay, then minor centralization is good. No, but yeah, I think in the absence of a big FPPs pool, it's going to be really hard for this to really get traction. I don't think a massive chain split massive reorg scenario is on the table. I don't think it's likely, really unlikely, but the impact would be massive. [01:40:00] Speaker B: I was about to say I find it unlikely because if bit 110 activates with 2% of the network, the idea that it would continue to increase from there seems silly to me. And it's not even about like, oh, I don't support BIP110 because like it's not even like you have to have a good excuse. It's literally just you now are committing to a massive reorg, you know, like if you support it. And even if it went up to 3% for some reason, for some short period, because a bunch of monetary maximalists, you know, or borrowed or rented a bunch of hash rate. Like that's not in the realm of like, like now you have miners that are losing money. Like not even like sort of like, oh, they're unprofitable, like they're just losing money. Economics does not play out in that favor. [01:40:58] Speaker A: Although the hashers would be getting paid, [01:41:01] Speaker B: ironically, the hashers would be getting paid. Sure. [01:41:04] Speaker A: Yep. [01:41:04] Speaker B: But, but how much, how much money can the monetary maximalist lose on something that like what's your, what's your percent chance? Right? You know, like roll the die. [01:41:13] Speaker A: No, I, I, I'm there with you. [01:41:15] Speaker B: And we want monetary maximals to keep their freaking Bitcoin too. Stop. Don't waste it on a useless chain. [01:41:21] Speaker A: Exactly. Like, and basically as soon as There is a BIP 110 non compliant block, that's the split. It's not like, it's not like it keeps getting refreshed every time there's a bip110 compliant block. The bip110 chain is only bip110 stuff. Only bip1 10 and signaling bip110 blocks. Right. It doesn't even matter if all of the transactions inside the block are compliant. If the block isn't signaling for BIP 110, then it's rejected. So yeah, I would like a client [01:41:50] Speaker B: that just removes taproot. Just remove taproot again. And I, you know, like, I just don't even, it's just bad. [01:41:58] Speaker A: Exactly. Like all of it, all of it. I just see basically negative outcomes to it based on the way it has been done. Now. I also very much disagree with the way Core has, has conducted themselves through all this. And I, I don't mean Core as a monolith. I mean the, the decision making apparatus [01:42:20] Speaker B: that I was gonna say the. [01:42:22] Speaker A: Yep. [01:42:22] Speaker B: The people in the front making decisions and how unbelievably dismissive they have been to what their actual customer, their real customers are like, like the user base of their software. Like the, and it's not even dismissive, like disdainful. Yeah, like to, to literally speak to them like they're to be like, you're an idiot. You have no idea what you're talking about. We're going to do it and you can suck it. You know, like, like that was the absolute mentality. [01:42:52] Speaker A: Exactly. So so many people from that side of things have, have had that exact attitude. And, and, and really I, I find it so elitist. Like if, if you, the, the specific. So I asked, I asked this question on X, I don't know, four or five months ago now. Actually, Actually, yeah, it was like near when I started this whole process. I was really trying to dig into the reasons behind all of this stuff happening and what would I need to do to get My voice heard in this rough consensus, because that's the mechanism that they say that they use. It's not about a vote count, like a show of hands, how many people vote yes, how many people vote no. It's that the open source project, this ephemeral open source project, comes to rough consensus. And what does that mean? Well, it means that the voices of those who contribute to the project are listened to and those who aren't are rejected. And so what that means is unless you are a consistent Bitcoin core contributor and constantly in these discussions, you're not going to get listened to even if you understand the code, even if you're a technical person, or maybe if you're an economics oriented person who understands what the change might mean for incentives or something like this, or you're just a user of the network saying, I don't agree with doing this right, the bitcoin core, the organization is going to disregard all that. And so I asked what would it take for me to get into this rough consensus? And I meant it. But both hypothetically and kind of literally, like, I'm a technical person, I study computer science. Like, it's not like I can't read code, you know what I mean? And the answers ranged from what? Like, okay, like basically start reviewing code. Like, start, start contributing, start contributing to these discussions, start putting time into it. I, I went and did this saving Satoshi challenge, which, which Chaincode puts on. It's a, it's like an interactive game thing to not learn about, well, sort of learn about Bitcoin, but also prove that you've got some programming capabilities. Like you can't get through it without, without some, some fairly decent programming knowledge. Yeah, exactly. And, and so like I went and did that and, and, and I, I got admitted into their, their, the next phase of this, which is like this whole boot camp thing. And theoretically at the end of the end of that year, you're a candidate Bitcoin core developer or lightning developer or whatever it is. But the thing is, I don't got time for that, man. Like that, that's, that's, that's the whole thing. Like, like I, I'm already deep into my career. No, like, like I'm, I'm, I'm deep into two careers. Basically. I've got a family. Like if, if you're 20 and in school or fresh out of school or something, and you can dedicate some time and, and your life into this and you're kind of blank slate. Yeah, you can do this. You can go make Being a Bitcoin core contributor, the thing that you do. But that's not the best use of my time. Continuing to put out the podcast I'm working on, working on the conference that I put on, writing this book, spending time with my family, my career in cybersecurity, that is still active by the way, still got a day job, that is the use of my time. And so what it means is that they're discounting everyone except those who can basically dedicate their life to being a Bitcoin core contributor. From the discussion. And how tiny a fraction of the user base of Bitcoin is that? How tiny a fraction of the technical people who are capable of understanding these discussions. [01:46:38] Speaker B: Some of those literally aren't even users, which baffles me. [01:46:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm not going to get into arguing that core people don't have a stack or don't have skin in the game or whatever. They're contributing in some way. But yeah, that's it. Right. And so I do think there's some rot at core and the joint funding organizations contribute to the problem. It's a centralizing factor that funding largely comes from. Essentially funding comes from like about five organizations, but really the maintainers come overwhelmingly from brink and chain code. So end of the day, yeah, that's the bigger problem. And I think aiming for more implementations. I would like to see the node landscape be as decentralized as the mining landscape or More so no one implementation holding 50% of the network. You can make an argument that the different versions are technically different implementations, but you can. Bugs get found in old versions of Core all the time that apply to huge chunks of the network. Right. So yeah. And end of the day it's just. That's the solution to me. Keep advocating against arbitrary data if you care about that. I do care about that. I don't think it's a sky is falling issue. And same with the governance thing. They're doing great work. Core is still doing great work. But I just think that there's a disconnect and the priorities of the development community are different from most of the users of Bitcoin. And prioritizing the interests of miners in the development community at the expense of the user base, the node runners and the holders of Bitcoin, I think that's a mistake and rectifying that by decentralizing the node landscape is the solution to that. And that's not going to happen overnight, unfortunately. [01:48:37] Speaker B: I agree, I agree. The long term, the smart approach is not a reactionary attack, a reactionary Response to what was essentially a reactionary enforcement and a problem kind of caused by a similar thing which in my opinion was short sightedness. It's the long term approach. It's, it's grow ocean grow datum and, and keep calling out where a bunch of people are using Stratum V2 and not building block templates like what's the point of Stratum v2 if you're not doing that? And build an alternative implementation that's geared towards monetary maximalist is geared toward miners that treat the network with respect. And even if like that are there's a good steward of the network of the chain and even if that only ever reaches 5% adoption like that means 1 out of every 21 out, every 20 blocks is, is a monetary block. And like I think that's enough to keep, keep, keep Bitcoin a monetary, a reliable monetary system. You just have to think about your confirmations not in 10 minutes but in two hours. You know, so I don't know. That's, that's my, that's my perspective on it is I, I think that's the right approach and I, I think you win in the long run if you do that because you will have bear markets in, you know, like you will have NFT bear markets, you will have ordinal bear markets and in those moments you will be the sensible person, you know and you may even get more adoption in. And there will be bull markets in those things where people need somebody running a node or building a block template that doesn't have inscriptions in it. You know, like serve the network the way you think it needs to be served. And, and if you actually believe that the economics don't work out that way, then why do you think the economics would work out in a, a forced fork to a minority? You know like I just, like I think you're playing the same like the economics are way worse if you have 2% adoption pip110 and you run out of money way quicker. How many years can we keep this up if we're just supporting a monetary network that defends our money and our use of it? You know, I don't know. That's my little rant on it. [01:51:15] Speaker A: Sort of the silver lining to that is even kind of they think that it's either or the middle case probably doesn't really play out. But let's see. I mean I've loved this chat. Like this has been like a really good healthy. I mean you're, you're knowledgeable about this, you're up on it. I've talked to folks who don't really know what's going on with bip110 and I've mostly talked to people who are on the Pro Bip110 side. But yeah, this was nuanced. And so basically I found my position through writing this book. I came into the conversation, I came into writing this book, staunch monetary, maximalist, bip 110 supporter, even like I had some viral big tweets on the topic and everything, lots of discussion and all this. I still believe in the principles of keep bitcoin as money and all this, but I really can't be the guy who's writing a book about bitcoin cybersecurity and about risk. Right. A chain split is a really low likelihood event. Risk is likelihood times impact, the likelihood of an event happening and the impact of it does. And it's a really low likelihood event, but the impact is massive. And yeah, I just can't advocate for pursuing something like that without the reason being like really, really existential. I just don't think we're at the threshold for that here. I think there are other methods of getting a good outcome out of this thing. Advocate for bitcoin adoption and advocate for these means of decentralizing the network both in terms of mining and in terms of nodes, node implementations. I mean knots is a good, a good reaction, good health reaction. This other implementation from Production Ready Live Bitcoin is a thing. It doesn't relay blocks, but it's a thing. Yeah. So I mean there's lots of options out there and we can do this in a, in a more long term way, but a couple of months we'll, we'll find out what's the, what's the outcome of all this, you know? [01:53:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And we'll see. We'll see. We're getting close. I might have to do another show on it. [01:53:30] Speaker A: Hey, I'd love to, to come on again talk about the outcome. Yeah. [01:53:34] Speaker B: Yeah, man. Dude, thanks for coming on, man. I wish we had. I know we could just probably run down this road for eight hours, but I do have another obligation. So maybe just point people to your stuff. To Bitcoin infinity show to your. When is your book coming out? [01:53:53] Speaker A: You said it's July, June 15th, so right around the corner. [01:53:57] Speaker B: Oh, June 15th. Prague is right around that. But right about to happen, isn't it? [01:54:00] Speaker A: Totally, totally. Yeah. I don't know when you're going to get this out, but if you happen to be lightning fast and this is still Before Prague. Well, first of all, you can come see me there. And that'll be the first time the book is available physically. And then the, the Monday after Prague it'll be, it'll be going live on, on Amazon and the bitcoin infinity store.com if you want to pay with sats and, and if, if right now, right now you can go to defendingbitcoin.com you can sign up to get a free copy of the PDF. I'm not, I'm not even like you can go get it, you can go get it and be an advanced reviewer. That's basically, that's basically my request is just, just read the book and write a review after you're done on Amazon. That's my request. Or social media, whatever it is. And yeah, that's, that's, that's it. I want this information out there. Defending Bitcoin.com also has a bunch of other resources on there already. I've got a, a threat model tool where you can go in and punch in a whole bunch of data about your Bitcoin and then I'm gonna know about it. [01:55:07] Speaker B: I was just noticing this. I haven't, I haven't gone to this, but this is really cool. [01:55:11] Speaker A: Yeah, no thanks. And. Well, yeah, I was just gonna make a joke about collecting. But you can verify, you can verify that I'm not collecting any data. It's, it's just URL slugs like it, it's, it's just local to your browser. So, but, but you can, you can [01:55:25] Speaker B: go through the tool and install malware installed on your computer. [01:55:28] Speaker A: What is this? Oh yeah, yeah, perfect. That's, that's normal. Just, just, just keep going. [01:55:32] Speaker B: All ransomware. Oh, Jesus Christ. [01:55:34] Speaker A: Okay, we're, I'm, I'm secretly North Korean. This has been a long. No, but yeah, the, the. Yeah, I'm just wanting to make, I'm going to put more, more things on defending Bitcoin.com the whole rundown of the threat landscape. And I mean there's, there's stuff that I can't put everything into a 450 page book. I mean that sounds like a lot of pages, but, but there's a limit. So I'm going to keep building on it. I'm going to keep things current and, and turn it into a resource for bitcoin security and, and I mean I'm not the only one out there, but I'm going to just try to make it accessible and, and good information for people. And if you want to support what I'm Doing. Yeah, I appreciate if you pick up the book but I want you to have the information as well. [01:56:17] Speaker B: So you own noster, you're on. [01:56:18] Speaker A: No, absolutely. I. I am primal.net Luke. So I got. I got my. I got my name, my four letter. [01:56:26] Speaker B: You got that handle? [01:56:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I got the handle. [01:56:29] Speaker B: Early adopter. [01:56:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can find me on there. I'm Luke DeWolf on X. [01:56:34] Speaker B: So though wait there. I don't. I don't see your stuff. Of course I hadn't been. I haven't been on trying to stay. [01:56:41] Speaker A: I haven't been on. I haven't been on that often. I. I've been posting. That's probably why in the run up. But. Yeah, yeah, yeah, gotcha. [01:56:48] Speaker B: All right, cool. Well I'll make sure I follow you. I'm probably do. [01:56:51] Speaker A: But just in case. Yeah, cool. Appreciate it. [01:56:54] Speaker B: There you are. Yeah, I follow you. Okay. All right. I'll have links to all that good stuff in the show notes. Pub key, all that great stuff. [01:57:02] Speaker A: Appreciate it, guy. And yeah, hey, love to come on. I. I really. I really enjoyed this. This was. This was actually super awesome. So would be. Would be cool. [01:57:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:57:11] Speaker A: Again something. [01:57:11] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Same dude. [01:57:12] Speaker A: Hope we can see each other in meet space sometime soon too. [01:57:16] Speaker B: Shouldn't be too long. [01:57:17] Speaker A: Come. Come to Helsinki if you want. [01:57:19] Speaker B: I was about to say it might not be this year. That's awesome though. I can't believe I didn't know you guys were throwing a conference. Yeah, but next year I'm on the. On the docket for a European conference at least. So I'll hit you guys up and we'll see if we can't get together maybe. Maybe play some guitar or something, hang out. [01:57:42] Speaker A: Yeah, sounds good. [01:57:42] Speaker B: All right, man. [01:57:43] Speaker A: Take care. Till next time. [01:57:44] Speaker B: All right. [01:57:44] Speaker A: Thanks again for this. [01:57:45] Speaker B: Later, man. [01:57:46] Speaker A: Yep, bye. [01:57:47] Speaker B: At least if I had. It's been like 500 episodes ago. There was like. There was like a whole group and I was just like, well, shit, what the hell. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for the content. All right, Lynn. Appreciate it. This was long overdue. Glad to finally have you on the show. We will do it again. Hopefully. Hopefully it won't be too long. Sure. [01:58:05] Speaker A: Yes. [01:58:05] Speaker B: Thank you. Awesome. Take it easy. I hope you enjoyed that show. Don't forget to get your copy of Defending Bitcoin. Don't forget to get your Bitbox 02 Nova to hold. To hold your own keys and keep them safe. Discount code right down in the show notes. And give Luke a follow shout out to Knut. What's up, man? Haven't talked to you in a long time. I figure you probably get a link to this show and might actually check it out since it's Luke. I hope to catch up with you and Luke here in the next. Hopefully I'll be at a European conference this coming year and we'll get to hang out. Thank you everyone who listens to the show, who supports the show, stay tuned. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and video centered channels because we've got some really cool things in the bag, things waiting to be released that I think you guys will really, really like and I'm really excited about. So stay tuned, lots to come, and I will catch you guys on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. Until then, everybody, thanks so much. And that is my two SATs. Sam.