Read_858 - On Ossification by Jameson Lopp

[00:00:00] Ossification is complacency. Yes, we all agree that bitcoin is great, but I do not agree that bitcoin has reached its full potential. I think complacency is one of the greatest threats to bitcoin. We must not rest upon our laurels. [00:00:21] The best in Bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin. Audible. [00:00:44] 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. And this is the show where we dive into bitcoin, into the ecosystem, into the history, into the open source software and technology of liberty that is leading us into a much brighter future. I am your professor today, Guy Swan, and we've got a really interesting discussion today. This is something that we've talked about a bit on the roundtable with mechanic and Steve and my brother. And I feel like we've fleshed it out enough for me to have a better idea of the foundation of how I think about this going forward. And this is a really good piece on Jameson Lopp or by Jameson Lopp. Anybody who doesn't know you should know Jameson Lopp at this point. If not, there's a link in the show notes, you should definitely go check him out and not only been in the space for, I don't know, forever, as long as I have he was here, but also just a phenomenal resource, super intelligent, like really useful and valuable perspective. I've always enjoyed his stuff, so definitely check him out. But he has a really great piece on ossification and there is this debate going on. There are these two perspectives which I think kind of is a bit of a false dichotomy between the two perspectives, the more and more that I think about it. But regardless, there is a very clear frame of the discussion. And I think Jameson Lopp does a really good job at laying out the kind of against ossification argument from a principles and big picture perspective. But this is actually going to be kind of a double read because there's a very short take by Aaron von Wertem that I think is also linked in the show notes. If you don't follow Aaron or you don't know his work or you haven't read his book, you're missing out. So go check that out as well. But he has a really, really good point and it actually bolsters a lot or I think it defends or it's good evidence for the framing that we kind of worked out in the previous Guys, roundtable for wrapping up November and how we were kind of talking about in that discussion. I think it really goes along in line with that and kind of gets at the whole false dichotomy that the ossifiers don't want to change the protocol, just kind of blindly. And then the people who say we need to upgrade and these are the upgrades we need to do is that there's actually another player in the game, so to speak. There's another reason why we are at the state or the place that we are in when it comes to bitcoin development. And I think he actually has a really, really great point. And it's. It's literally like four paragraphs. It's a super short piece. So we're going to read it just. [00:03:43] And then kind of use that to frame the whole discussion. And I'll give my take on it, obviously at the end. Real quick, this episode is brought to you by Fold this show. Fold has been supporting this show for a long time, but Fold has also been my number one app for basically living on a bitcoin standard. And there is nothing as awesome as having an app do all of the work for you for stacking is that I use gift cards. I've been getting two and a half percent back on everything that I do on Amazon for Christmas. I've been getting like 5% back on a number of other things. I had to do doordash a couple of times. I think that's like 5% right now. The SATs back on gift cards and then being able to get half a percent almost on everything just by using the debit card, the fact that it does roundups. So I'm constantly just passively stacking that I can do DCA right in it, that I can automatically any ACH that comes in, I can automatically divert some portion of it to bitcoin. Literally. Fold does all of the work for you and then you just go look and suddenly you have this huge stack. Like it just builds up over time. And I do not know of a lower friction way to do that. I have been a massive user of Fold for a really long time and you can get 20,000 sats, which is like 20 bucks, right? For free just by using the link in the description. Check it out if you have not yet. This is prime time for holiday shopping. Do not leave sats on the table while you can still get them for like five digits. All right, with that, let's get into today's read and then another very short read after that. And the guy's take with the article by Jameson Lopp and it's titled On Ossification by Jameson Lopp. [00:05:40] An impassioned argument for why we should continue striving to improve the Bitcoin protocol Ossification in the context of network protocols refers to the slowdown in their evolution and rate of change. It appears to be a law of network physics. Essentially, as a network protocol achieves greater adoption, the mass of the network grows and the effort required to alter the direction of the network by coordinating software updates across the users of the protocol increases substantially. [00:06:20] Eventually, the ability to safely activate any protocol changes is crushed under the massive weight of the network as it becomes impossible to coordinate massive numbers of decentralized actors. [00:06:36] As such, ossification is inevitable for Bitcoin, but as of today we find ourselves debating whether or not we should proactively ossify the protocol. I myself am vehemently against this position and believe that there's far too much room for improvement to give up on base protocol changes at this point in time. I pose to you that Bitcoin can only remain vibrant, relevant and secure in the long run through the willingness to implement sensible, broadly beneficial protocol improvements in a careful, consensus driven manner. Ossification to freeze progress at our current point in time is arrogant, ahistorical, and a rejection of the same visionary foresight that created Bitcoin in the first place. Thoughtful, continual evolution is key to Bitcoin's long term value proposition. [00:07:34] Digital gold is superior to physical gold precisely because it is not inert, by which I mean the properties of physical gold cannot be improved. Thus, financial innovation of gold occurred via centralized IOUs. But the properties of Bitcoin can be improved, enhancing its permissionless usage. [00:07:59] Learning from History bitcoin is only 15 years old and has undergone many consensus changes and upgrades. It's premature to assume this particular point in time is the ideal stopping point. Protocols need to adapt over time to remain viable. [00:08:21] We should learn lessons from other popular network protocols like smtp. If Bitcoin ossifies, developers will build increasingly complex layers on top of it to add desired functionality. Complexity introduces bugs and exploits. [00:08:39] This isn't a knock on complex layers like Bitcoin os, Bitcoin VM or Botanix's spider chain Citria's zero Knowledge rollup. They are doing the best they can working with the toolset that is available to them. While we don't want Bitcoin to be a kitchen sink protocol, adding low level functions to the base layer can make sense if they significantly reduce the complexity of building functionality at higher layers. [00:09:11] Potential paths forward Many desirable features like covenants, vaults and payment pools require base layer upgrades. Building these in a clean way on the protocol itself is far better than hacky overlays. A base layer with more building blocks unlocks a new design space for Bitcoin. [00:09:35] Tweet from Jameson Lopp Bitcoin layer 2 devs won't opcat cat is beneficial to a variety of projects and will accelerate permissionless innovation. We need not change the base protocol. Everything can be done on other layers is an argument only made by those who haven't tried building other layers. [00:09:58] Careful, well tested upgrades that have been thoroughly debated and reached community consensus do not undermine property rights or Bitcoin's core stable money proposition. Upgrades enshrine the will of the users rather than override them. I believe that bitcoin has far greater potential than what we have achieved thus far. I view the Bitcoin blockchain as a cryptographic accumulator for a wide variety of systems that can anchor into it. But we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible by ossifying today when it's so difficult to build permissionless second layers, we are hamstringing developers and significantly limiting experimentation to find the most valuable uses of block space. [00:10:46] People often say we don't need to change bitcoin because we can just scale with other layers. Sure, that would be great if developers were not so limited. We simply don't have all of the primitive building blocks at the base layer needed to easily roll out permissionless second layers. We could for example make bitcoin script great again. [00:11:09] Note that we implemented three different forks to enable three different building blocks in order to create the Lightning network. Without the functionality enabled by these forks, the Lightning protocol would be far clunkier and the game theory not as sound. [00:11:28] There are other soft forks we could do such as sigh hash anyprev out that would supercharge lightning and allow channel factories giving Lightning network orders of magnitude more efficiency. There are forks we could do that would enhance privacy like cross input signature aggregation. There are forks we could do like OP CTV that would increase the security of self custody like covenants and vaults. We can see many potential futures, yet it's becoming more and more difficult to step toward them on sovereignty and self custody. [00:12:03] Scaling is another long term issue. Greg Maxwell said this in 2015 if the system is too costly, people will be forced to trust third parties rather than independently enforcing the system's rules. If the Bitcoin blockchain's resource usage relative to the available technology is too great. Bitcoin loses its competitive advantages compared to legacy systems because validation will be too costly, pricing out many users, forcing trust back into the system if capacity is too low and our methods of transacting too inefficient, access to the chain for dispute resolution will be too costly. Again pushing trust back into the system. [00:12:51] The decentralization of verification that won the block size debate is only one part of the story. Decentralization of economic actors is also important to the long term success of Bitcoin. Remember that it is not the will of the nodes that determine the future of Bitcoin, but the will of the economic majority of nodes. Economic actors in Bitcoin include miners, holders and transactors, including corporations and custodians. [00:13:24] Point being, if the number of economically relevant nodes is reduced due to centralization and most Bitcoin users are priced out of self custody, we should expect that the governance of the protocol will become more centralized and fragile. [00:13:42] With Bitcoin as it is today, maybe 100 million entities worldwide can access the fundamental properties of Bitcoin. In a world population of 8 billion. This situation would result not in a new decentralized money that changes the landscape of value and scarcity, but merely a new elite who over time would follow the age old path of elite groups throughout history of initially creating prosperity before ending in bread and circuses. [00:14:13] For the first time in history, Bitcoin has the potential to do more than merely shift power from one elite to another, but only if we continue to work toward maximum decentralization by improving the protocol and making Bitcoin's fundamental properties accessible to more people around the world. [00:14:35] Note well that the we can do everything we want on other layers argument tends to gloss over the fact that no layer on top of Bitcoin can ever offer the same security model as the base layer. Whenever you build a layer on top of Bitcoin, it necessitates creating a whole new set of game theory and trade offs for the self custody users of that layer. [00:15:01] Ossification Steelman ossifiers posit that Bitcoin has already achieved its core functionality as sound money and a store of value. Further changes, even if well intentioned, introduce unnecessary risks that could undermine the very properties that make Bitcoin valuable. By ossifying the protocol, we ensure that Bitcoin remains a trustworthy, decentralized and immutable monetary system for the long term. [00:15:32] 1. Preserving trust in Bitcoin's Fundamental Properties Bitcoin's primary value proposition is its fixed supply and immutability. Any changes to the protocol, even soft forks risk eroding confidence in these core properties. Some have claimed that the ability to change the protocol reduces confidence in the inflation schedule no matter how well intentioned. [00:15:59] 2. Reducing developer control and centralization risks Allowing continued changes to Bitcoin gives developers outsized influence over the protocol. This creates a centralization risk as a small group of individuals could potentially alter Bitcoin's properties. [00:16:18] 3. Protecting against unintended consequences Even well intentioned and thoroughly tested changes can have unforeseen effects on the network. As the value and importance of Bitcoin grow, the potential impact of these unintended consequences becomes increasingly severe. [00:16:37] 4. Increasing difficulty of changes with growth as Bitcoin adoption increases and more economic value is built on top of it, any changes become riskier and more disruptive. Ossifiers argue that there should be a point where the protocol stabilizes similar to other fundamental protocols like TCP or PowerSocket standards. [00:17:01] 5. Maintaining Bitcoin's function as sound money the primary goal of Bitcoin is to serve as a new monetary system free from debasement. Ossification ensures that this core function is preserved without risking its fundamental properties for potential improvements that may not be essential to its primary purpose. [00:17:26] Common Ossifier arguments Ossifiers argue that Bitcoin is working incredibly well as is and that the protocol rules should be extremely resistant to change in order to preserve its core value proposition of becoming an unchanging, uninflatable, apolitical form of money. Even well intentioned changes carry large risks that could jeopardize Bitcoin's long term success and stability. [00:17:55] 1. Don't fix what isn't broken Bitcoin is already succeeding with the current protocol having grown from $0 to 1.4 trillion in market cap in just 15 years, there's no need to risk this success by making hasty or unnecessary changes. [00:18:13] 2. Stability is king Bitcoin's core value proposition is its stability and predictability. The protocol rules shouldn't keep changing on a whim. Frequent tinkering undermines confidence in Bitcoin's unchanging nature. [00:18:32] 3. Measure twice, cut once Changing the Bitcoin protocol is an extremely serious undertaking akin to altering the constitution or laws designed to last for centuries. Any changes must be made slowly, carefully, conservatively and only after considering all of the long term implications. [00:18:57] 4. The higher the stakes, the steadier the hand, the bigger and more successful Bitcoin becomes, the more important it is to be conservative about any protocol changes. With over a trillion dollars of value at stake and nation states buying in, we can't afford to make mistakes or take unnecessary risks now. [00:19:21] 5. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. [00:19:27] Even well intentioned protocol changes can have unexpected negative impacts that are hard to predict, such as harming the economics for miners, developers and holders. The downside risks likely outweigh any theoretical benefits. [00:19:44] 6. Keep it simple stupid. Not every new feature or improvement needs to happen at the base protocol layer. Many things can be implemented at higher layers like layer two or layer three without jeopardizing Bitcoin's core security model and stability. [00:20:02] 7. Unchanging money in an ever changing world, constant improvements and protocol changes go against Bitcoin's promise of being a stable, apolitical money and settlement network. Ossification is a feature that prevents Bitcoin from being captured by special interests or mutating unpredictably. [00:20:26] 8. Bitcoin should only be money. The use of block space for non monetary purposes like tokens or NFTs only support fads and pump and dump scams that push out legitimate users from leveraging Bitcoin as money. [00:20:44] My responses to ossification arguments Preserving trust in Bitcoin's fundamental properties Trust in Bitcoin's properties and resistance to implementing bad ideas comes down to the governance process for protocol changes, not from making changes impossible. Bitcoin is crypto anarchy and is a system in which the default is apathy, which is a strong veto. Either you believe that Bitcoin's governance has served us well to this point, or you think we've just been lucky and the whole thing could fail at any time, reducing developer control and centralization risks. Similar to the above, either you believe that the game theory around protocol changes is sound, or we've just been lucky thus far. Bitcoin developers can't force anyone to run code with which they disagree. [00:21:41] Also, the internal process for development is extremely challenging. Most proposed rule and code changes never make it through the gauntlet too long. Didn't read from my research four years ago, after iterating all rejected pull requests from Bitcoin core, we find that there were 9,011,209 total rejected added lines of code, 6,279,435 total rejected deleted lines of code that is 15,290,644 rejected lines of code changed versus 3,651,046 accepted. Which means that as of the time of writing, only 19% of proposed changed lines of code have been accepted into Bitcoin core, protecting against unintended consequences. [00:22:43] The fear of unknown unknowns and unintended consequences is, in my view, a non argument. Why? Because every decision has unknown unknowns. Making changes to the protocol has unknown unknowns. Not making changes also has unknown unknowns. There are always unquantifiable unknown unknowns. Thus the argument effectively cancels itself out. Vigilance is key. Therein lies Bitcoin's anti fragility increasing difficulty of changes with growth. [00:23:22] I don't think this is actually an argument with which either side disagrees. As the network grows and becomes more valuable, it has been and will continue to become more difficult to change, maintaining Bitcoin's function as sound money. [00:23:38] The world in which Bitcoin operates will never ossify. [00:23:43] The world will keep throwing new problems at Bitcoin if it can't adapt to solve them. We should expect hacky and likely centralized solutions to be bolted on. That's what led to the downfall of smtp. Point being, Bitcoin's properties are not guaranteed to be preserved by ossification. [00:24:08] Don't fix what isn't broken. [00:24:12] No one is pushing for hasty changes, nor can anyone make a serious argument that Bitcoin will break without a given feature. But what we can say is that the nature of how Bitcoin is used will change. It has already changed significantly over the past 15 years. [00:24:33] Stability is king. [00:24:36] Bitcoin's rules have not been changed on a whim ever since Satoshi left the project. Satoshi made unilateral changes without consulting others. I have noticed some influential people casting aspersions upon Bitcoin developers as tinkerers, which could not be further from the truth. We can observe that the rate of change to Bitcoin has massively slowed over the years due to the overwhelming caution of developers. [00:25:04] Measure twice, cut once. [00:25:07] Indeed, slow and steady improvements that have been well vetted are all that innovators are asking for. [00:25:16] The higher the stakes, the steadier the hand. [00:25:20] We should absolutely strive to avoid mistakes. We should also have confidence that mistakes are not irrecoverable. There have been plenty of vulnerabilities introduced into Bitcoin Core, for example, that have been patched without incident. And even when the Bitcoin network has suffered from consensus failures, it has recovered within a matter of hours due to the network participants who remain vigilant. This is the fundamental nature of Bitcoin's antifragility. [00:25:49] Bitcoin does not exist within a vacuum. It is in a sense, a living organism. No form of life can thrive via stagnation. [00:26:00] The road to hell is paved with good intentions. [00:26:05] I find this to be another argument that cancels itself out. The bitcoin ecosystem is incredibly complex and consists of innumerable moving parts and actors. As parts of the system other than the protocol itself continue to change over time, we should be prepared to deal with unforeseen consequences of those changes. [00:26:27] Keep it simple, stupid. I think this is another point on which both sides generally agree. The changes that should be considered most important for the base layer are those that will have an outsized effect at enabling innovation of other permissionless layers that can then experiment to their heart's content without worrying about the base layer. [00:26:50] Unchanging money in an ever changing world this seems to be another issue of not believing in the game theory behind Bitcoin's governance. I'm of the opinion that if you don't believe in the checks and balances inherent to the system, you don't really believe in Bitcoin. [00:27:07] Tweet by Jameson Lopp Public permissionless consensus systems let you use them without trusting any one individual. However, you must trust everyone in aggregate. [00:27:21] As I'll note later, ossification itself also has the potential of enabling Bitcoin to be captured by special interest groups. The answer is not paralysis. The answer is vigilance and the ability to adapt to new stresses and adversaries. [00:27:40] Bitcoin should only be Money the debate over what use cases of Bitcoin should be considered spam has raged as long as I can remember. I don't find it particularly interesting because the debate boils down to people arguing about subjective value. While we can empirically observe that non financial uses of block space have objective value to people, they are willing to pay for the privilege. At a technical level, Bitcoin is a store of data. A blockchain is basically an append only log with several other interesting properties. As such, people have used Bitcoin for non financial uses for over a decade. As I wrote eight years ago, it's the trustworthiness of this data's performance and inability to be overwritten that entices people to use it for non financial purposes. [00:28:35] We don't know what the long term market for block space will look like, that is which uses of block space will be found to offer the greatest utility and value. This question becomes more important with each having I believe that more functionality and more layers that run experiments means it's more likely for us to find the highest possible value use cases of block space. Perhaps, for example, that might be to power zero knowledge rollups. We just don't know. So I think we should enable innovators to keep exploring the potential design space. [00:29:12] What do all of these arguments boil down to, in my opinion? [00:29:18] Tweet from Jameson Lobb Ossifiers vs Innovators A Calvin and Hobbes comic Mom says Bitcoin could be worse. Calvin and Calvin says Bitcoin could be a lot better too Frequently Asked Questions what if all of these non bug fix protocol change ideas are nice but not necessary? Is it just the bitcoin tech geeks running away with their ivory tower technical interests that aren't strictly necessary for Bitcoin to someday be global money? [00:29:53] I don't see it as necessary versus nice. I see it as a question of pathfinding of exploring the design space of Bitcoin and maximizing the value of the system. To be clear, we could ossify Bitcoin right now and it would continue operating fine for a long time until we hit a critical issue like quantum computing or the timestamp overflow point. But the nature of Bitcoin itself will evolve in a different fashion due to development limitations. [00:30:25] Where is your stopping point for changes? When is Bitcoin good enough? [00:30:31] We should continue improving Bitcoin until we can't. We've already seen Bitcoin improvement proposals drop off a cliff since 2017, averaging fewer than one per month since then. And many proposals don't even come with activation guidance because developers don't want to run that gauntlet. We're losing talent from protocol development as a result, which further exacerbates the slowdown. [00:30:57] Should protocol changes be bug fixes and maintenance only? No new features? [00:31:03] That's certainly one option, and perhaps that's the path that ends up being followed. But I don't think we should settle for the status quo. [00:31:14] Paint us the likely scenario where the bitcoin ecosystem would okay to support and push through a soft fork or hard fork change any critical issues that put the continued operation of the system at risk. However, the very nature of ossification may make emergency fixes in the distant future very problematic. 1. Imagine that we have gone decades without any changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. As such, perhaps the current cohort of Bitcoin protocol developers have never actually gone through making a change to consensus. This does not bode well for us in such a situation. [00:31:52] 2. Consider that there are some looming issues that we don't know precisely when they will become critical. The nature of OSSIFICATION means we'll keep delaying addressing them potentially until it's too late. I suggest watching my recent presentation on quantum computing for a concrete example of this situation. [00:32:14] In closing, we should strive to make changes to Bitcoin that will strengthen it and allow for more permissionless systems to be anchored to it. I think we all agree that Bitcoin should not become a kitchen sink protocol like EVM based networks. But as it stands today, the developers who wish to innovate find it incredibly difficult to do so without creating incredibly complex encumbering logic. Ossification is complacency yes, we all agree that Bitcoin is great, but I do not agree that Bitcoin has reached its full potential. I think complacency is one of the greatest threats to Bitcoin. We must not rest upon our laurels. [00:33:01] Technology is deflationary by nature. Bitcoin's consensus rules should prioritize safety and keeping the system decentralized in as many aspects as possible. This includes not only node operators but users of block space, because after all, if someone is priced out of using block space, they most assuredly are not going to run a full node. I also believe we should enhance the ability for developers to build permissionless second layers so that we can continue to explore the potential use cases of block space as a cryptographic accumulator and thus have more opportunities to find paths towards sustainable demand and thus for block space that pays for the thermodynamic security of Bitcoin in perpetuity. [00:33:53] Are we going to allow the future of Bitcoin to be driven by optimism or by pessimism? [00:33:59] Innovators are driven by optimism and hope for future successes. Ossifiers are driven by pessimism and fear of failure. As I see it, one's stance boils down to either believing Bitcoin is antifragile or believing it's fragile. [00:34:17] To be clear, caution is of utmost importance. Nowhere will you find me claiming that Bitcoin must implement Feature X or it will fail. Bitcoin's success is, in my opinion, one of the factors that is actually making it more difficult to improve. [00:34:36] What's really going to bake your noodle later on is when you realize that Bitcoin's exchange rate can continue to moon even while its unique properties are slowly eroded. We should not allow newfound wealth to lure us into complacency. [00:34:51] But if we allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear, we will be sacrificing potential paths forward and vastly limiting the exploration of Bitcoin's design space, which I believe naturally results in limiting its adoption, use cases and strengthening of value attributes. The torments of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. Napoleon Bonaparte A word of warning as I see conflict on the horizon. Consider the incentives around why one would want to improve the bitcoin protocol. The only reason you'd care about doing so is if you are a direct user of the protocol. In other words, protocol improvements are only interesting to those who self custody. If you are a trusted third party to store your funds, you don't care how they make use of the protocol. [00:35:48] The folks who are focused on tradfi adoption of bitcoin don't care about improving the protocol and scaling the network because they don't care about self custody. The next battle for the future of bitcoin is brewing. [00:36:03] Perhaps bitcoin has already ossified and all of the above was written for naught. We won't know for sure until we have the benefit of significant hindsight. The world is never going to stop evolving and we have to ask ourselves if we want bitcoin to evolve along with it or for it to get left behind. [00:36:24] Let us proceed together apace onward if you haven't used fold yet, you suck. If you haven't gotten 20,000 free SATs for using my link in the signup in the description of this episode, well, you suck. If you don't use the fold card and get roundups and buy bitcoin every time you buy something, you suck. If you did do that stuff and you did get 20,000 sats for free and you did use my signup link and you did get me 10,000 sats free also and you do use the full card to stack all the time and you do DCA to stack even harder and you do auto convert to stack even harder than that and you do use roundup to stack even harder harder. Well then that's pretty cool and maybe we can be friends. And if you live in a country where fold is not available, I'm very sorry for you. But you should maybe get a fake idea on the dark web, use a VPN and still use fold. This is not legal advice, or at least not very good legal advice. Fold stack harder. Check out the link in the show Notes all right, so Lob has a and I've watched a lot of his talks about this issue and I kind of go back and forth on it, but I think I have landed because I'm still, you know, when I talk about it with Steve and Bitcoin mechanic, they always come down heavy on the kind of ossification or extreme just like naturally against the argument and thinking just that the notion of making those changes should not be encouraged that essentially the culture should be don't change unless there's a very, very good reason to. And there's definitely something to that as like the base of the argument. But I think when when you actually give Lopp his due on how he actually explains his argument is that he's not actually against that he completely agrees in the level of vigilance and care and in fact is arguing that we should be more careful than we have been in. [00:38:26] But I really do think that so much of this conversation boils down to PTSD from 2017 is just the degree to which everyone dug their heels in about how and why and for what reason the Bitcoin protocol should change. And then seeing the consequences and the examples of all the protocols that did change and what a disaster it has been for them in so many different ways or how poor the direction of a lot of those things have gone. I mean if there's a example of one that could not be a more a more cautionary tale would be Ethereum to have gone to this twisted, complex, ridiculous proof of stake system that does not have any like that is basically just run by the initial distribution of coins to all the quote unquote VCs and the insiders that were just the closed sale of ethereum where basically 75% of all tokens were distributed. And now proof of stake is a literal permissioned protocol where you're not even allowed. It's not even an open staking. They've just created a group of people who control staking and it's about your investment in the protocol. And then of course they added in checkpoints on top of being permissioned because they can't just let anybody's keys come in. So the current stakers have to vote to allow new stakers and then it's become completely centralized and basically like a couple of different custodians. Like prime example of WTF of just to avoid anything at pot in anything possible that appears to be going down that path. And I think a lot of it too is the association with some of the people I think mechanic made this argument on the roundtable is that if I think he used the term assholes or maybe this was Steve. I don't know. Like mechanics usually usually tries to be pretty fair even though he's very aggressive about the the no spam argument. But I can't remember exactly who it was, but it was something about, you know, if only assholes are advocating for some change, that there's a re. Oh no, it was Giacomo, it was, it was. He was talking about something that Giacomo said is that, well then you should not make the change purely because we should not go in the path that rewards people that we know only want to do explicit harm or are specifically being the worst stewards of the network possible in either in order to incentivize their direction. Like anybody who argues, not by technical arguments, not by being vigilant and proving their use case, but by literally attacking, by literally openly and saying that they are attacking, by making it hard for other people to use it, by being less efficient and worse on the underlying attributes. Like literally by their own argument, explicitly trolling people, being assholes and being the poorest stewards possible of the network as it is. There's a very strong argument there that whatever they are asking for, like you just don't do it at least, or certainly you do not do it their way. You do not entertain them at all. Like if there are five people arguing that you should clean up the water supply through various methods and that there are attack vectors or there are issues or whatnot, and there's one guy who is literally peeing and defecating in the water that we are drinking and using to wash our clothes, that is the person you don't listen to, that is the person you evict from the conversation of being good steward. Like if the conversation is about being good stewards and having a reliable and secure chain and network going forward, they are the opposite of useful in that conversation. There is something to that argument, without a doubt. And I think there is also an element of all the roll ups and all the Starks and all of that stuff. That stuff is so heavily associated with shitcoins. I think that. [00:43:03] I'll tell you the reason why I think it's tainted in everybody's mind is because it's tainted in my mind. I can't separate it in my default association from some stupid token or fart coin or ethereum or whatever it is. Now I know there is something underlying that is interesting from a cryptographic perspective and verification or validity proofs, as opposed to fraud proofs are a really strong potential tool. However, there is one very specific thing that I think is being ignored here is that I've still never heard of a roll up or a bit VM thing that is running or some sort of a network that's running that isn't centralized And I don't mean it in the sense that like there's not like, you know, better incentives or better implications of the ability of self custody and the ability of people to prove that they are in fact the owner of some subset of a balance inside of this roll up or inside of this network. But specifically that there is a central operator which means that it's not really all that different from ARK or Statechains. And I think there's a very important piece of the puzzle that we don't have a solution. [00:44:30] There's nothing concrete to latch onto that actually solves a huge problem. There are a number of primitives that could be really useful Covenants and CTV in particular. But every time I have a conversation with someone about it, like when we had Burak on the show again, one of the things that he specifically said is that CTV doesn't help a ton without Ellen, Hans or any prev out or no, it's check sig from stack that makes it really useful, especially in regards to ark and I hear this a lot as well, is that CTV might be a very useful primitive and might be capable of simplifying a lot of things, but that by itself everybody still needs something else. Which I think causes a lot of friction in the conversation is that still nobody knows exactly what the thing is that we need to build for. Which I think lends itself to the argument that if we want to make a change we should focus on just making Lightning a lot better. Because Lightning is a very successful smart contract self custody payment network built on top of Bitcoin. If something can make lightning significantly improved and significantly less complex and thus able to not need persistent and you know, ever growing backups of every previous state of transaction and you can get lightning symmetry, these sorts of things and also simplify the exchange and updating where maybe there's even a way that you could push a payment over Lightning. I think those sorts of improvements that should be where the discussion is specifically because there's something concrete to point to that makes it better. And while Jameson James makes a really good point in this one, that Lightning would not have worked without three very specific improvements. But here's the thing, is that those three very specific improvements were arguable. Like it was easy to argue for them because we wanted the Lightning Network, we saw the potential and the Lightning network has worked, it's been hugely successful. The only people who think it isn't is are the shitcoiners who don't use it, but anyone who's actually experienced nostr and actually built and used lightning and sees how like I use lightning everywhere, like all over the place. In the bitcoin ecosystem, lightning is almost as ubiquitous as on chain. Like they are one and the same. And we talked about on this show for a long time and for years about how they would basically become interchangeable at some point point. And now I just don't think about. There are very, very few wallets. It's basically only multisig wallets where I go and I'm not thinking about or interacting with lightning as the dominant layer, as the main part, as the main point of contact in something in Bitcoin and where the overwhelming majority of services seem to have accepted or seem to be accepting and or have integrated lightning now. So my question is, how can we make lightning 50% better with CTV or with a covenants? And also, just for anybody who hasn't heard the many, many conversations we've had about covenants and my trip down the journey through all of the FUD around it and understanding it and its nuances on this show, which we had like 10 episodes over the course of like six months, just over and over, we went back to CTV because I would learn something else about it or I would find out that some misunderstanding that I had about it was in fact a misunderstanding. But I just want to boil down the idea of the implications of CTV and why I think it's the safest upgrade path for something that is not. That has bare minimal risk. Obviously soft forks have risk, period. Doesn't matter what you're doing, there is a risk. But we have had many soft forks. And I also like Lopp's argument in particular, which we'll come back to a couple of different ones from this piece, but one of them that the idea of not doing a soft work, even for something very minor every once in a while, is in itself a risk. Because we will have to do soft forks and we will have to do hard forks at some point in the future. And having a group of developers who have no idea and no fundamental precedent or no knowledge and experience about doing that could in itself be an unknown. Unknown could be a risk in the future. So anyway, that's an interesting tidbit that I hadn't really considered in the whole batch of things around this long and really obnoxious argument. But the idea of CTV as a security implementation, security implication is how does it change the security profile of a user who interacts with Bitcoin? [00:49:23] This is the thing, is that in everything that I understand about it and in My thinking, CTV does not change the security profile of interacting with Bitcoin at all. Anybody? For people who understand there are no recursive covenants in ctv, and I mean no arbitrary permanent recursive covenants where you can just arbitrarily say it can't be sent to these addresses, all you can do is stipulate exactly what addresses and balances it goes to and you have to pre sign, pre create hashes for that. It is exactly the same type of implication as a time lock or a multisig. So if you have heard the argument against it about, oh, governments or exchanges will impose some recursive covenant and you won't be able to send it somewhere or there will be white lists or black lists, understand, they cannot do that in any different way than they can force multisig or time locks on your coins. If you create an address, it is from, it is within that creation of the address in which those stipulations, the things that will unlock those coins or unlock anything at that address are created. Which means that if you give an address to an exchange or service or anybody, and you didn't put ctv, some sort of a lock on it, they can't put it on it for you, they cannot force it onto you. And if they can say, or if they're going to say that you, I can't send it to this address because we have to be able to put a CTV lock on it, well, then that's not different from any other sort of stipulation. It's not different. They could, they could say the exact same thing, that we have to be part of a multisig, that we're not going to send it to anything except an address that we created in which we hold one of the keys or in which you have a time lock of two years. And as such, CTV does not change that security problem or the implications of that at all. It's the same as to whether or not you are the only one who can put locks on your addresses, period. This is simply a new way, a new type of primitive that's very simple that has essentially the same security profile of what kind of lock it is. You can lock to amounts in the sense that, like this address can only be unlocked by this key and this address has a specific balance or this utxo, you have time locks. I can only unlock it at a specific time. And you have relative and also absolute time locks. So you have two different kinds of those. And then CTV would add an explicit place in which you can send it to which specifically helps with lightning, because lightning is about ensuring that if we exit we can take this information and send it to or we can take the balances and we know exactly where they're going to go so we don't have to be there. And I think there is some, there's absolutely some improvement with that primitive because it's such a core primitive to exactly how like you just have a couple of different ways to lock up coins and this just adds it has to go somewhere specific, which I think is what is most likely to enable a means of an off chain updating mechanism in which you can go offline and not have to worry about the risk of being offline that someone still can't steal those funds from you because you didn't go and enforce it. You had a CTV lock that did not have a UTXO like an on chain footprint. But if anybody else spent from that while you are temporarily gone, those coins still have to go to you. That type of lock I think is very, very valuable and you are the only one who can pre create the address and the transaction details to which you lock it to. This is why I generally support ctv. I think it's a useful upgrade with very little risk and also the greatest potential to be to be very beneficial to a lot of the things that we already are doing to make them better. But I think the conversation should be around how do we make lightning better, how do we make the tools that we have better or make a tool that's worth upgrading for. [00:54:01] This is where I want to pause and read Aaron Von Wertem's take on this and why I think this is a really useful piece of the puzzle and understanding why this is such a difficult debate or controversial debate right now. And this came out just a few days ago on Bitcoin Magazine and it is titled the lack of soft forks is due to a lack of interest, not a lack of process by Aaron Von Wertem As I explained in a take two weeks ago, I think the threat or promise, depending on your perspective of protocol ossification, is somewhat exaggerated, at least at this point in time. Yes, the rate of Salforks has slowed down significantly over the years, the last one having been taproot in 2021. But it seems this has more to do with a lack of interest in the potential upgrades that have been proposed since then, rather than it being due to the lack of a good process for deploying protocol upgrades. Although that is not exactly a solved problem either. Bitcoin core developers are generally funded on a no strings attached basis or outright volunteers, meaning they're not required to work on any specific part of the code base. As such, their time and energy will be dedicated to whatever they find most interesting or important to work on. So far, that hasn't really been any of the softwork proposals. The various Covenant style opcodes aren't unequivocally perceived to offer the type of groundbreaking use cases that deserve prioritization. And while drive chains sound great in theory, their major downside is still that miners can ultimately steal coins from them. [00:55:51] But even if Bitcoin core developers aren't interested, that doesn't mean it's impossible to upgrade Bitcoin. For better or worse, anyone with the right skill set, admittedly not a very low bar, can always deploy a soft fork through an alternative client, even as a user activated soft fork. Yet despite some rumblings from time to time, no one has done this yet. I suspect this is at least in part because of the proponents of these softworks aren't convinced a UASF would actually be successful. And if a UASF wouldn't be successful, maybe the upgrade is not worth doing in the first place. [00:56:31] This is a really good point. Like I said, it was a really short article, hardly an article. It's a take, as they call it. But going back to CTV as the example, nobody's built an implementation that makes a massive improvement to Lightning with ctv, even though theoretically the primitive of what CTV does could be very useful. And then there's l enhance and these other things about okay, well how could we make lightning better? How could we get lightning symmetry and all of these things? And that is a genuine part of the discussion. It seems a lot of people don't even want a salt fork. Or at least it seems to come up in the conversation a lot, that even of the people who are against saw forks say that it makes no sense to have a soft fork unless we can get lightning symmetry. Which is interesting because these are I find I hear that from people who are against soft forks who basically make the argument for ossification, which indicates or seems to lend itself to the idea that Aaron von Wertem might be right, that it's just that nobody thinks these soft forks are worth it. Nobody really knows the next step forward. Lightning was a pretty clear option for what those paths are. Okay, do we build or do we focus on this from a layered perspective? Or do we expand out the blockchain indefinitely and try to turn this into a global broadcast network that everybody can use? And now nobody can verify that I think was the obvious right path to go the route of everyone can verify. But the problem is we still don't have a technological solution. Going back to my guy's take on the hard truth, no one has invented globally scalable everyone can self custody, decentralized, trustless digital cash. [00:58:24] That invention does not yet exist. Still to this day we have a few of the very critical and core technological innovations, revolutionary ones in fact in Bitcoin and in the lightning network that lead us in that direction. But we still do not have a technology that enables this. And rollups and Starks aren't it. People are just kind of assuming that they're going to be able to do that. That's the same thing with opcat. People are like, well you can do a whole bunch of stuff with it, therefore we're going to be able to solve this problem. But nobody has the solution. They're just assuming if we add in these additional features or these core primitives that could be on their face useful as well. They just could be really nice to have from a development perspective that if we add them then we will figure it out and we'll have the tools that we need in order to build the thing that we want eventually in the future. [00:59:28] But I really think the problem is that we still don't know what that looks like and to basically propose changes without a concrete proposal for what to do with it. You know, with lightning we knew what lightning was. There was a lightning white paper. It was clear that there was a very powerful and payment network and system to be built on top of Bitcoin with it, that we could begin to see what it was going to look like, how it would start to manifest. And so everyone was in agreement and discussing about how it would affect those things and how we could make that layer two possible. Because we wanted a strong layer two. We knew this was going to evolve with layers. It was the only way to keep it decentralized and actually extend its fundamental properties that we want for everyone to have. For everyone to have the potential and the trust minimized or trustless nature of self custody and of digital cash. [01:00:28] But so far, every single proposal I have heard and every system I have heard about an additional layer two, even a channel pool or channel factory or whatever, they are all run by service providers. And I think that is the big problem to solve is how can you have something where anyone can basically come in and out as a service provider and provide and essentially uphold. Like basically anyone can run a node and participate in it. Because otherwise it's just a coin join in the sense that a trust minimized or trustless coin join or atomic swap type thing where a federation just kind of does the job. Also a state chain just kind of does that same job. And if it's just going to have a lot of the same trade offs or downsides as something like a state chain, why would we fundamentally change the protocol for something we can already do? And I think therein lies the problem. If you think, if you're saying that with opcat you can create the holy grail of layer twos or layer threes and you can super simplify this to make this so much easier to make lightning, something that anybody can spin up on mobile without even breaking a sweat. Do it. [01:01:50] Do it. [01:01:52] Build it right now and prove that that works, that the trade off is way, way better than the alternatives we have. If it's only 10% better or if it just makes a big trade off somewhere else, I don't think you're going to get any to get all that excitement behind it. I don't think you're going to get the pressure and the push you need to make it happen. Opcat exists on liquid if you want opcat and it really is the tool that makes all of this cool stuff possible and gives us the future that we want. Build it right now and prove that that's the case. [01:02:29] Break down exactly what it is, what exactly that path is so that we can see what it looks like and we can know where it is that we are going. And then I bet you'll get a whole lot of excitement from it. But if your opcap proposal is only being pushed by a bunch of people who want to literally put jpegs and pictures of their asses on the blockchain and do monkey NFTs and who have gone out of their way to try to figure out how to make it cost as much as possible and store as much data as possible over the long term for the sake of just being a shit, I'm not going to cry that nobody's paying attention to it. It makes perfect sense. They've created the situation for everyone to ignore them anyway. If the ossifiers are toxic and they attack people who want to change the protocol arbitrarily and they just make up stuff to make it so that nobody wants to make the change and they just fud it or don't bother even listening to the argument, and if you're going to make the claim about all of that, that the ossifiers are pains in the asses to deal with. Well then guess what, you just came on and just. If you're just coming in and pouring fire, excuse me, pouring gasoline on that fire, I'm not, I'm not going to feel even slightly bad about the fact that nobody's listening to you. Like if you're complaining about toxicity and you come in and just pour mercury into the drinking water, your complaint is moot. If your goal is to just come in and get your, your jollies to masturbate your ego in front of everyone so that you can stick it to the Maxis, well, you will reap exactly the seeds that you have sown. There's a reason why, even though I have gone back and forth on this conversation and this topic is that I read stuff by like Jeremy Rubin and Jameson Lopp to get kind of the other side, which again, like I said, I've been wishy washy on this. I've gone one way and back the other. But the reason I read them is because they're sensible people who make legitimate arguments and they actually put to it to have a real argument to be open and honest about the debate. Like yeah, yeah, of course there are quote unquote bitcoin maxis who are thoughtless morons who just parade whatever this tribe or whatever they perceive as their side's position is supposed to be. You know, what am I supposed to think on this issue? Of course there are those people. I don't listen to them on the side that I am on either. They're not the people to listen to. But bitcoin mechanic can put down a very solid argument. Jameson Lopp can put down a very solid argument. Aaron Von Wertem always adds a good point. Jeremy Rubin I think has done a great job of defending and advocating for CTV over the years. He might have made a couple of decisions that added some, probably some unnecessary controversy because he just wanted to push it and get the conversation happening. But there's part of it that makes me think the conversation might not have happened unless he did that. So if your ability to have a conversation or debate or talk about these ideas is completely measured or controlled by the worst people, the least useful people to talk to who hold an opposing position, well then don't be surprised if there's no progress. You're essentially begging for there not to be. And I think this whole discussion is actually solved by someone building the thing that is a solution and you can build it on top of liquid. If opcat and covenants are what is needed in order to build the perfect protocol. Well then you can do it on top of liquid, do it on top of liquid, make it work, prove that it is the holy grail of layer twos and I bet you don't have a problem anymore. I bet this issue is very, very different from what we think it is right now because we're all arguing about non solutions or we're all arguing about abstractions, right? We're arguing about unknown unknowns both to the positive and the negative. Now there's a couple of things I want to point out or things that I really appreciate from Lopp's perspective. I've always liked his argument or analogy to SMTP in the history there because email int eventually became captured because of the difficulty and inability to maintain an open protocol with smtp because SMTP could not essentially evolve around certain limitations that slowly grew as it scaled. So there is a good argument to be made that there's a future path of Bitcoin where it is incredibly successful but has a lot of drawbacks, has a lot of painful trade off trade offs that get exacerbated, get exaggerated with and as Bitcoin scales in value to the point that it almost appears as if the underlying thing that Bitcoin does is essentially not is essentially evolved out of it, or so unbelievably suppressed and so far down in the stack that it doesn't really come into play for basically anyone using the system. Now it's interesting though that the element that killed SMTP in my opinion, or the major problem was the fact of spam. Spam has always been the problem of the problems of decentralized networks, Usenet brought down by spam, email centralized because of spam. Basically every argument about every protocol upgrade in Bitcoin's history an argument about spam. The beauty of Bitcoin though is that it has its own spam defense mechanism. And even though as much as I agree or I think mechanic, Bitcoin mechanic has very good arguments about the conversation about whether or not like you know, bitcoin is used for money and the fact that is optimum. And I totally believe that from a fundamental perspective as opposed to a what I quote unquote a subjective value perspective. And I don't quite adhere to Lops. I don't like the idea that somebody says oh, it will just be used for its highest value use case because you know, people will pay for block space. I think that has a fundamentally circular problem as well because all bitcoin is, is a set of filters to limit what kind of transactions and what kind of data is allowed. Like it is the most extreme, most hardcore system of regulation as to what data can go into it and what data can be changed and cannot be changed that allows for money to exist inside of it. It creates the most powerful, most secure accounting system on the planet. Literally, that is what Bitcoin is. So the analogy I like to use to try to say why I think that argument is not actually very strong in my thinking is that a legal system is about securing the rights of the individuals is how do you resolve disputes in a peaceful contractual manner where contracts and the rights and property and agreements of the individuals involved are actually enforced as understood and in a simple to comprehend way according to a set of laws like the Constitution, etc. Therefore, it is critical that courts operate efficiently and that they are used for the court system. And it costs money to rent the court, it costs money to sit before a judge to have representation, etc. Now imagine that you could also host parties or concerts inside of these courts and then you made the argument that because the free market was willing to pay more for a party with 200 people or a concert, that it was justified for somebody who is getting screwed by an employer out of thousands of dollars worth of pay, who is literally broke and is waiting for a resolution to this problem has to wait in line between like 30 frat parties and a Twenty One Pilots concert because well, I'm sorry but the free market is willing to pay more to just do whatever the hell they want inside of this courtroom rather than enforce the law. I think there is a perfectly reasonable explanation or perfectly reasonable argument to be made that you should disallow use of the courtroom for frat parties and in fact the use of the courtroom that its ability to enforce the law and be a force for justice, as we would hope any legal system was and any conflict resolution system would be is dependent on the fact that it only does that or that any other extra legal use or any not like outside of legality, but any non judicial or legal use of the courtroom is at least put to an absolute minimum possible and that we do not design it to work really well for concerts. Even though, you know, you want the judge to have a mic so you can hear him really well. Well, we don't also don't want to put in amps and a plug in so that people can plug in a guitar. Like if that's a part of conversation and somebody wants to add guitar amps and plugs for people that we would just not want to add that to the courtroom. So in that same sense, the filters around the use of Bitcoin should be for its use in securing Bitcoin, in verifying Bitcoin, in proving and validating the 21 million and the ability to enforce the custody and the rules of ownership of the system, that it should be thought of and designed of as a place for money. And there is one specific place in which you can hash stuff and lock to it and use it generically as a timestamp server, and that's called the opreturn. And that should be optimized for that. And everything else should be treated as a system of money and transactions and ownership, because that is its most important use case. And if you do not think that is the most important use case, well, then make a timestamp server that does something else and prove it literally. Any other token system that only does that other thing would necessarily be more valuable if that's a more valuable use case. But if you compromise the ability of Bitcoin to do that or to be efficient at doing that, you do not prove that there's a higher value case for that, because the system costs and system benefits are collective, not individual. In other words, it would be the exact same thing as saying that Usenet has a higher value for spam because people are more willing to pay for spam than they are to use it. When there is spam filling up Usenet and everybody was driven away from Usenet because it got overflown or it overflowed with spam, therefore spam is a higher value use case. That's not true. Do not believe that one of those means the other is true, for exactly the same reason that it means that a court system is of less value than concerts because someone would be willing to rent more for the singular event of a concert in a courtroom, as opposed to someone wanting to enforce property rights and be adjudicated in some sort of a situation where they are getting screwed over. So if I wanted to try to make this argument a bit more axiomatic to the concert itself or to the money itself, is that the idea of using Bitcoin to pay for jpegs on top of the Bitcoin network, a derivative of a monetary use case cannot be of higher value than the money itself, because it is only with the money that that use case can be properly priced. In other words, there's a hierarchy of what needs to happen for the other to happen. If you do not have property rights, you cannot properly make money off of a concert, you cannot actually prove ownership. You cannot actually enforce the market in which someone would rent space for a concert and people would buy tickets and people would actually be able to prove that they are the ticket holder and get the honor of going to the concert because they were the ones who paid for it. You need a property rights system in order for that to be the case. And if your concerts then start destroying or making less efficient or more friction full the the system of legal rights enforcement itself, well then eventually you degrade the ability to have a concert at all. Because before a market to make an exchange for entertainment, for an experience to actually be able to take place, you need property rights. And this is the same thing with NFTs and JPEGs. You need a good money before it's worthwhile to timestamp bullshit into the blockchain. And for that market to be properly priced at all and for the fees to make any sense and for its value to actually be comparable to everything else in the economy, you need a secure monetary network and system of ownership. All other use cases to Bitcoin as money are derivative to its success as a money period. Because all markets can only work at scale with good money and they work well to the degree that their money is good. So that's my take on that. I do not agree. I have a. I do not believe that you can just say that. Oh, because you can use Bitcoin for other stuff and it's cool for other stuff, that that means that we don't know how Bitcoin should use and we don't know how we should design for it. No, I think we should and always must. It's a token quote, unquote, backed by nothing. It's a. It's an ethereal token, which means the only value it can have is monetary premium. The value of the bitcoin token is necessarily attached and cannot be removed from the ability of the bitcoin system to secure a monetary structure. So I think that argument is valid about spam and about what bitcoin should be used for and optimized for, etc. From the perspective generally of the ossifiers, I usually hear them make that argument. But it's also not just the ossifiers, it's just the spam filter people, the people who think the NFTs and JPEGs. We should not design stuff to make that easier. Now there is an interesting caveat going back to the idea of unknown unknowns. And I'll read a quote from Jameson Lopp in this piece that I thought was really good. [01:17:56] The fear of unknown unknowns and unintended consequences is in my view a non argument. Why? Because every decision has unknown unknowns. Making changes to the protocol has unknown unknowns. Not making changes also has unknown unknowns. There are always unquantifiable unknown unknowns. Thus the argument effectively cancels itself out. Vigilance is key. Therein lies Bitcoin's anti fragility. End quote. This I think this is completely valid. I think this is the right perspective on the idea of unknown unknowns. Because here's the thing is, especially if we're talking about spam filters and stuff, there is this conversation or this risk that supposedly if we implement CTV or opcat or whatever it is that oh, the spam's gonna get way way worse and there's gonna be some way that they can introduce spam that we did not know about. Yes, that is 100% true. Except there is also the possibility that we can that spam can be implemented in a way right now that we do not know about. I mean it wasn't until very recently that a number of new very spam happy developments were made in which people found a new way to use up space on the blockchain. Not for monetary purposes or not for monetary data. So going back to the idea that if we do have some sort of a holy grail of layer two or layer three with OPCAT or CTV or CFSs CSFs, check six from stack. If there is some incredible like groundbreaking decentralized like a group of peers can all individually manage it themselves and even offline know that they are secure in their self custody system that is out there and it can be built, well then I think it's worth the risk of spam on the chain specifically because it is that sort of a system which will make someone paying a whole bunch, a whole bunch for spam or nonsense on the chain. Not important. [01:20:10] Going back to the court analogy, if one judge and one jury or whatever can only hear one case at a single time, and thus if 20 concerts are lined up to rent out the courtroom now everybody who wants to be adjudicated has to wait in line behind all of these concerts, well, we've got a really big problem. But if there is a technology that allows that jury and that judge to adjudicate 20 million court cases all at once in a completely decentralized and quote unquote self custodial fashion, which I know ruining the analogy, but if it is able to compress so much of the legal problem or rights enforcement problem into an incredibly small space, then it doesn't really matter if it has to wait in time or wait in line, because it will outpace the cost of a concert. Which means that scaling off chain scaling in layers is actually an important conversation about how to negotiate gate the risk or the cost of spam and to make sure that the spam cost as much as possible. If you can aggregate a million different court cases into a single judge and jury instance, then all of them can pay a dollar. And then the concert that wants to happen inside that courtroom to edge them out of their ability to use the courtroom to enforce their rights, has to have a million dollars. They have to pay a million dollars, which means that they're just going to go to the concert hall and do it there instead. We need to figure out how to make it worthwhile and how to aggregate these networks so that we can easily spend $1,000 on fees for a transaction and enforce the ownership, the non, the self custodial ownership of as many people as possible in a distributed fashion so that jpegs don't get put on the blockchain. Which suggests we need improvements, we need new opcodes and new tools in our bucket in order to figure that out. And if you want that to happen, if we want those tools to be added, you need to prove that it does that, that we can put a million people in that courtroom and that and that anybody can be the judge or the jury and that if the judge disappears, there's another one right there ready and waiting. Any, anybody can run a node, anybody can verify and all parties involved can have their self custody and that the trade offs are not serious and have all of those benefits that we want. But again, nobody's invented it yet. [01:22:54] None of the shitcoins have it. None of the Ethereum VM has solved, solved the problem. Roll ups are the same central and it's, it's a cool technical tool. Like the potential of it is promising, but it still requires a central coordinator, it still requires people to enforce it, which feels a lot like just a. Just arc with a whole bunch of other potential trade offs and a bunch of random tokens for no reason. On Ethereum we can do that. We can basically have those trade offs in a system that doesn't need any soft forks or huge unknown protocol changes or anything like that. What can you build with those things that is fundamentally and orders of magnitude different than what we can build without them? And ark, as cool as it is, has a Lot of trade offs that if we want to make a significant protocol change to the base layer of Bitcoin, I think we need a 2x, a 3x, a 5x improvement. I think the system needs to be significantly better. Like lightning is a 10x to 50x improvement over the scaling potential and payment network potential of Bitcoin. And importantly it added instant payments which we did not have on Bitcoin before and a proof of reserve instant payment, self custodial network. That was a powerful upgrade. That is a huge and incredibly valuable network. We do need another layer on top of it. We do need some sort of base layer primitive to take that to the next step. But I just don't think we have it. And I think that's the problem. As Aaron von Wertem said, there's no enthusiasm, there's no motivation because none of the improvements prove that none of them, we don't need any of them, none of them have proven that they do the thing that we really, really need them to do. It's just kind of a. Wouldn't it be nice to have this because then maybe we can figure it out. I think it's only going to happen if we figure it out first. And I think the way to do that is to build it on liquid. There are new tools on liquid at our disposal that we can use right now to prove the case. A bunch of things that might be really nice to have on top of Bitcoin do it, build it. Then I think the debate changes drastically and the clear vision for the path of Bitcoin moving forward reveals itself. [01:25:26] Now of course that's much easier said than done, but I think that's the way, I think that's the only way it happens. [01:25:32] So anyway, that's my thoughts on that. I actually have like 30 quotes from this and I read like two of them, but I am out of time. I got an appointment here in just a little bit so we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up. I think I hit most of the main ideas that I wanted to get a shout out to Lopp for staying true and staying, I guess, honest or controlled and clear about his argument and how he puts it, especially in the face of all the people that just give him crap or say he's on Ethereum shill now. But I also, you know, shout out to everybody who honestly and strongly makes the argument to the other, to the ossifier side. Like I said, I really value Steve's and bitcoin mechanics opinion on this. [01:26:21] My brother and I Talk about it all the time. This is why I put the roundtable together. I think I really appreciate their input, but I think the solution is, or at least where I have come to at this point in my evolution of thinking about this issue is we have to solve the globally scalable, decentralized, verifiable, self custodial digital cash problem. And we haven't done it yet. So we have more tools and we have a network, a consensus network and a monetary network in order to solve that problem. But we will not get the fundamental primitives that we may or may not need for that unless we figure out what we need. Exactly. [01:26:59] So build it, figure it out. [01:27:02] Somebody else do it because I don't have the time. And with that, with that, a shout out to Jamison Laup. Shout out to Aaron Von Wertem and everybody who listens this show. Shout out to Fold. Thank you guys so much. Share this one out. If you have anybody who you think has a really good take or would have a really good argument against some of the crap I said or argument Jameson Lop's piece, or if you got a great article that takes the other side very viciously, I'd love to hear it. But I think Jameson Lop actually did a pretty good job of Steel Manning. He was pretty honest about the ossifier, the quote unquote ossifier position. So anyway, happy to hear any suggestions. Always love more discussion and more debate and more argument about this. I think it's a really important topic and so that's what I'm here for, to dig through it, try to make sense of it and give you my take. And with that, I will catch you all on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible shout out to the audio Knots. I love you guys and don't forget to subscribe. And until then, everybody take it easy. Guys. [01:28:21] It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. [01:28:32] JRR Tolkien.