Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Segwit and Taproot were massive changes and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in Bitcoin. But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self custody, it may only take a few opcodes much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality changes that are much easier to test and reason about and and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin. The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:00:55] 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 we are reading a piece, a post, actually a Twitter post from James O'Byrne. This is actually from November of last year, but I've had it in the bag for a while to get back to because I think he's got a really, really good point. I don't agree and I'll talk about this in the guy's take afterward. I don't like the idea that the concept of pushing OPCTV or wanting everybody to have self custody, that this is a big blocker argument, because it's literally the perfect opposite of the big blocker argument. It is the exact opposite of the big blocker argument. It's exactly why we had the debate, the war and why we had this split on how we saw bitcoin going forward and the direction of actually accomplishing the same goal that everybody could have the self sovereignty and unilateral exit to their UTXO. Now what James O'Byrne talks about in this, like what this article is, I kind of got a little ahead of myself. This is about, it's titled Bitcoin Core's Loss of Focus and it's about the fact that we've kind of just sat and done nothing about the scaling limitations of the protocol. And we've kind of got distracted with all of this stuff around it and watched it succeed purely as a financial asset. And there's very possible an element of taking the easy path, quote unquote, in that the drama and the difficulty around figuring out what changes to make and about testing those changes is just undesirable. It's not fun. And so without the pressure to do it, it's really easy to just do fun, easy things rather than having massive internal argument about what things that we should, what things we should implement and what direction the, the protocol should go. But I think he brings up just some fantastic points and a really good framing that I disagree with some of it and I'll talk about what those pieces are in the guys take to follow. But I just think this is really important to call attention to regardless and I think this this conversation needs to be renewed, honestly. In fact I'm a little it's a little odd that this isn't really the conversation and the only conversation. And that's kind of James O. Byrne's point in this piece. Now real quick, speaking of self custody, check out the BitKit wallet. If you haven't they have one of the best designs I have ever seen for simple and intuitive Bitcoin and Lightning wallet. I have my ID in the show notes so you can add me as a contact. And if you want to go next level self custody, check out the Jade plus Blockstream just launched. Really cool new wallet that I am super stoked about. Always been a fan of the Jade and I have an affiliate link right down in the show notes so you can check it out. Helps the show a lot and lets them know I sent you. All right, with that, let's go ahead and get into today's article and it's titled Bitcoin Core's Loss of Focus by James O. Byrne the legacy technical leadership in Bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective.
[00:04:22] Almost universally, Core and graybeard devs are not focusing on the fundamental problem in preserving trustless UTXO ownership. Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy, core code architecture, and minor IBD or initial blockchain download performance.
[00:04:46] These things are important in their own right, but they fundamentally don't matter if in times of trouble most users can't take possession of their own coins. Core devs are exceptionally talented people, the brightest engineers, but the priorities of the project are out of whack. The aggregate focus does not reflect the thing that makes Bitcoin a unique trustless custody.
[00:05:11] Given the current limits of Bitcoin, even upper middle class Americans will not be able to self custody, let alone the rest of the world if Bitcoin doesn't figure out how to ensure that most users have a trustless way of owning and sometimes moving coins, it will become basically indistinguishable from a gold ETF a row in some OFAC compliant database, another financial widget that is subject to the regulatory dictates of government. In fact, if Bitcoin does not scale UTXO ownership, Gold will have the advantage that at least small amounts of it can be self custodied and traded peer to peer. The same won't be able to be said for bitcoin in a world where on chain fees are in the thousands of dollars and there is not a workable trustless layer. 2. Most coins will be stuck with custodians. Forget payments. I'm talking about savings. I I'm talking about less than checking account volume. One to two transactions per month. If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdraw to self custody once a month and maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you. Given Bitcoin's current limitations, only 18 million users can do that. A little over 5% of Americans right now. The chain capacity is able to meet demand for self custody. Because we are in a time of relative peace, most don't feel at risk keeping their bitcoin with a custodian. That can change very rapidly. As bitcoin grows in value and challenges fiat currency, governments will increasingly want to control it. They won't ban it, which is now obvious, but almost certainly they will impose OFAC like restrictions and possible wealth taxes. When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdraw their coins into self custody, but they may not be able to. Unfortunately, this risk does not seem to be top of mind in the current core culture. One instance of a tone deaf core response to this kind of problem relates to ctv. As Jeremy Rubin has been pointing out for years, CTV would be the most efficient way to guarantee that people can withdraw coins from institutions in times of chain panic and congestion, allowing exit to happen during crises without fully unrolling transactions. I wrote about this at length in 2023 and why it seems there is no more efficient way to do this. A link to delvingbitcoin.org the article will be in the Show Notes and yet technical figureheads like the Blue Mat and merchandomas downplay the value of ctv, claiming that it has no compelling uses. CTV is one of the primitive building blocks that we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions, not to mention its use in applications like vaults. Some core devs might argue, well, okay, maybe we need that functionality, but CTV isn't the right way to do it. We need to think harder. The problem is that time is running out as nation states begin to enter the technical ecosystem. Soft forks that promote scaling and self custody will be more difficult to deploy. Powerful actors will not want Bitcoin to change. They're perfectly happy letting regulated custodians act as the layer two as the market cap grows, the stakes of change go up and it will be much harder to get economically relevant actors to run new consensus. Because core devs aren't paying close attention to the Covenants conversation, they may not realize that CTV is upgradable, simple and well tested. It's good enough. This gap in understanding partially reveals that those devs prefer to work on more smaller self contained puzzle problems that are more tractable. Maybe this is understandable given the fraught core development process and historical drama of soft forks, but neither of those are an excuse for abandoning the core challenge of realizing Bitcoin.
[00:09:23] Segwit and Taproot were massive changes and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin. But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self custody, it may only take a few opcodes much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality changes that are much easier to test and reason about and and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin. As I continue campaigning for a renewed focus on scaling coin ownership, some may compare me to the big blockers of the 2017 scaling wars. The big blockers camp wanted to raise the block size for the sake of housing the world's peer to peer payments. They resisted the use of lightning and other second layer solutions. The reality is that they have been partially vindicated. Lightning has not solved our problems and given the on chain footprint that existing channel constructions require, it categorically cannot. Lightning certainly helps reduce on chain payment volume once someone has opened a channel, but to do that for most people will require a layer one innovation. I don't share the big blockers objectives. I don't think that trying to fit the world's peer to peer payments on the base chain is a reasonable target. But the ability to resist near complete capture of UTXO custody by third party financial institutions that is intertwined with the core purpose of Bitcoin. In Satoshi's white paper, the first sentence claims a purely peer to peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
[00:11:12] If most users become unable to even take possession of their own coins a few times a year, we have failed on the objective. I am not writing this out of any sense of antagonism. Yes, I am frustrated that after numerous attempts core devs are not engaging more productively with the few people trying to translate scaling strategies to the base layer. But I'm hoping that by Calling attention to this issue, we can get some of these great minds to refocus on Bitcoin's critical mission and to realize that ossification will come sooner than we thought. The existing and well funded power structures want stasis. The recent show of rapid institutional affinity should make you suspicious that Bitcoin in its current form isn't a threat to the fiat order. The lack of ivory tower attendance in the recent OP Next and the broader covenants discourse demonstrates that like many of America's elite institutions, there has been mission drift in Bitcoin's technical elite. I hope this changes the risk of merging many of the opcodes proposed during the last few years is limited. Opcat, OPCTV L enhance, probably op, ccv, some others. They're all fine if sufficiently tested. Great additions to Bitcoin, we can pretty easily mitigate what risk there is with comprehensive testing and analysis provided the focus is there. The upside is almost infinite. A reasonable attempt to continue the preservation of Bitcoin's unique function. Trustless self custody that is practically available to most.
[00:12:56] All right, now I know this is something that we've covered from a lot of different angles and in a lot of different ways. And I'm a little bit wishy washy about how I feel about it because I'm a proponent of CTV in the sense that. And this, I'll tell you, this is the thing that gets me more than any other about this argument and the debate. Like, I understand the reservations, I understand the thinking that we should be cautious and we should be incredibly slow about how we go about things and about what upgrades we do move forward with. And we understand and we are dealing with or we have seen the consequences of not realizing how this can be used for spam. And there was some degree of like, oh, we kind of know that obviously something will be done with this. And none of these things have been existential, none of these things have been terrible and some of them were even really easy to mitigate. But I do understand the overabundance of caution. But this section right here is the thing that gets me and that I have a really hard time in thinking that we already haven't been cautious enough with something that's been around and has been tested like CTV for as long, as long as it has been. And it's this quote. Segwit and Taproot were massive changes and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin but to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self custody, it may only take a few opcodes much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality changes that are much easier to test and reason about. And don't reinvent the engine of Bitcoin.
[00:15:00] This is the thing that gets me Opcodes are extremely limited in their functionality and what they can do and how they change or alter the security profile of Bitcoin. And specifically there's very, very little way to logic about a consequence of an opcode that has any scope outside of just someone using it poorly and making a mistake and losing coins, which like, that's kind of where the fallout of a lot of these things even exists. Now that's not entirely true, but the scope of the risk is so much smaller than essentially the two giant saw forks that we've done recently that honestly did not even get as much pushback as CTV has gotten. Segwit. Segwit is different. Segwit got. Segwit was in the middle of the block size war. It got a vicious, unmitigated just holy war about whether or not it should be done and literally about the course of the future and direction of the entire project and how to think about who the developers are and how this is even going to evolve moving forward, etc. Etc. Segwit is in a world of its own because of where it was, where and how it was implemented and everything that was going on with the direction of the project. With Taproot, even with the drama that it got, Taproot was a big change. Like Taproot changes the signatures themselves. And there's a lot of great things we can do with Taproot, but the potential risks of Taproot are way higher, much more significant and much broader then something as simple as a CTV opcode which just locks it to the hash of the next UTXO in the line which is pre signed. It's just making a pre signed transaction in the script as opposed to directly exchanging pre signed transactions. I want people to kind of understand how kind of logically simple the concept is of the CTV opcode is that when we are signing and updating lightning channels, we are just exchanging a pre signed transaction. I'm signing a transaction and giving it to you and you're signing a transaction and giving it to me. And this is what's happening within our channel and the updates to the channel are enabling those pre signed transactions to basically be the universal or the unilateral exit from our little Multisig CTV is basically just an opcode to formalize that so that it doesn't have to be exchanged. Every single layer two that we have in some form or fashion is working with pre signed transactions being exchanged and handed around. This just lowers the amount of interoperability and communication necessary to make this secure. And specifically the direct and at the same time communication that needs to happen where like I could add my CTV utx and this is again, this is something that you have to sign for yourself. Nobody can force this onto you. I don't know why or how that FUD got pushed onto this. But no, there is no, this does not mean there is any blacklisting going on. Nobody can encumber your coins or your addresses with some sort of restriction that you don't want. That's just not how opcodes work, period. So it's important to recognize that the risk of these is pretty low on the totem in comparison to changes we've already done in Bitcoin, like by a pretty significant margin. Now I do also just want to see like what do people build with this? I do want a solution, but there's also part of me that's like some of these primitives are so simple to intuit about what those risks might be. And then of course something like CTV has been around long enough and has kind of been argued and invested or investigated enough that I also think the level of opposition against it is not really warranted. And when you put it this way, when you this quote says to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self custody, it may only take a few opcodes much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality. That's really kind of the kicker is that we don't need any more massive changes to Bitcoin anymore. We literally just need a handful, maybe even less, maybe just two or three opcodes. And we can get orders of magnitude, we can get many multiples, we can add some zeros to the scaling potential just in kind of more simplistic and naive functionality in how these things can be utilized. And that's not even talking about what potential solutions we could innovate on going forward. And we could do the least risky of the handful that we have available to us. There are some that are just not that complicated and not that high risk that add a pretty significant and important level of functionality that could be incredibly useful. Ctv just in general, using batched lightning channels that you never actually have to open on chain, that alone is such a huge thing that could fundamentally change a Huge amount of the efficiency and the model for something like an LSP to run with a bunch of different users. Because you could open channels off chain inside of a CTV as if it's already open. Because basically there's no way to do anything except for opening that channel. And then you could also have a time decay that allows you to rework or splice out the liquidity and reform your channels later and add liquidity and change balances with a massively minimized or a massively cut down on chain footprint for accomplishing this. And it could do so with really limited interaction. Like not everybody has to be online at the same time. You can basically hand over the, the details or the UTXO that you want to be the enforcement utxo. And then it can basically be combined as things go on with, with multiple participants. And so the LSP can essentially create channels with like thousands of different users without all of those users having to be in some like kind of giant crazy multisig where everybody has to sign and pass around this big massive thing. And it's like some sort of federation. No, it's actually really simple. Just put in an opcode tree, a signature tree with opcodes for everybody's extra, for everybody's channel output and then publish that one. And with something like Taproot and with how we can do signatures and stuff now because of the massive changes that we've done in the past, it can all be done with basically one UTXO and one script that's private on chain, so you can't even see what's going on. You can't see the thousands of channels, you can't see all the UTX UTXOs. It's actually just one thing, it's one balance and one utxo. And yet everybody has a sovereignly held key protected self custody of all of their individual balances and all of their individual channels within just that single utxo. And essentially the risk of the primitive is not unlike using a locking a transaction, locking a UTXO to a key to a particular signature, locking it to a particular timestamp or block height. So essentially a what is locking it and when is it locked? And this just adds a where does it lock to? It's a really simple primitive that we just under that we already kind of understand the risk dynamics of because we know what people can do with, you know, malevolent time locks or malevolent signatures or trying to force you into a multisig and sneak it around you. And honestly just none of Those things.
[00:23:41] Attackers don't use those things because it's not. It doesn't really make much sense to do so. It's easier to just get somebody to type their seed phrase into a telegram chat because the people who are at risk in those ways, it's too complicated of an attack that doesn't even have that great a benefit. Like, yeah, you can make malware software that puts in a different transaction or signatures or tries to trick you, but the people who are going to fall for that or just use some random wallet are also the people who will just punch their seed phrase into an email thread that support sends them, says, your wallet's compromised, send me your seed phrase immediately. There's a reason why multisig and time locks aren't big concerns with stealing coins. Just nobody uses them. And I think CTV would be the same way. But having that added primitive could make a significant difference. And that's just one opcode. And I also actually like the idea of doing opcodes one at a time. I, I know a lot of people are like, with this rushed, oh, we're almost out of time sort of thing. And I'm man, I go back and forth on that one. Like, I do agree in some sense, but that we're adding in a lot of players or stakeholders that are now going to have their own opinion about this and what bitcoin should do, or more importantly, what bitcoin should not do. But I also really don't like the idea of we're running out of time, we got to do this now. And I don't like the idea of doing a bunch of these things at once. I would rather do a kind of like a scheduled out, like, you know, two years out, CTV activates, two years out of that checksig from stack activates. And it just kind of gives us this Runway to test, explore and start building with it. It basically has a deadline that says, okay, yeah, this is likely to occur. And it just puts the ball rolling. I am not really in a rush. I would definitely like the time to test and reason about it. But I think James is kind of right, is that we're not. We're, you know, it's one thing to be like, okay, here are all these proposed changes, but if the focus isn't on the opcodes themselves and how they will help and what can be built with them, and we're just kind of focused on these other 9,000 things that we can do that are just kind of like secondary or tertiary to the problem, well, then years will go by and we won't be closer.
[00:26:21] It'll be three years. I mean since the whole CTV drama, it's been like three years now and I don't feel like we're any closer to implementing ctv. But honestly I think we should be closer because I think we should be thinking about upgrades to expanding UTXO ownership. We've got a lot of great L2 designs and ideas but most of them basically have some complexity limitation that needs a. Or would at least be greatly impacted and greatly benefited by a kind of pre signed transaction opcode thing. Not to mention just the security and the backup. Like talking about the, the whole idea of fallback keys and like the episode that we just did about the Jade blind Oracle and how to use how to segment other devices and other keys and having you know, mini script and cascading keys. Well the idea of introducing vaults and a certain size transaction like, like having it so that certain, only certain things can be done with the bulk of the coins themselves and that this can be pre signed and set up and then the keys can be removed and even if compromised there's still nothing that can be done about it. They still move to a completely different setup. That, that is actually kind of crazy. That's the sort of primitive that could literally like make that Fort Knox type set up and really make like just a crazy self custody situation. And also, and also one thing that I think people really discount is the idea of financial services without any custody at all. Imagine a multisig where your coins still sit in your wallet backed by your keys and there is a CTV lock to a multisig with a legal team or some sort of intermediary that is pre chosen or it's in a multisig with your institution right now. And now you can get a loan or you can get ecash based off of that balance and you still actually have the coins. You don't have to put it in someone else's custody or even in a multisig with them because the CTV lock itself acts as proof that that route is viable without their participation. You could have some really interesting next level non custody service and non custody like reserves and, and credit instruments and ecash instruments and all of these things on top of it. That would be really, really cool and unique because you have this simple primitive to leverage at the base layer, at, at your transaction layer, at your UTXO layer. And not to mention just the idea of congestion transactions is that an exchange could withdraw a million people, hundred million people in a single transaction. It could Open thousands, hundreds of thousands of transactions or lightning channels in a single transaction. And it's the kind of thing that could also lead to, because it would make it so much more viable for people to take self custody. It could also lead to that backlog of Mempool where you can have a wallet that just sits with your CTV and then whenever transaction fees get down to a certain amount, you can just have your wallet automatically sign or push the transaction to get it in your self custody so that it's your UTXO or so that you can open a lightning channel or you can do something else with it and suddenly you have this permanent upward fee pressure. So this just stretched out over time so that even though you can, you know, get, you know, you, you can withdraw or take self custody for 100 million users or 100 million people all around the world in essentially one block, well now you can stretch out the next thing that those people want to do with it for the next year's worth of blocks. And you've basically always got pressure on the security budget of the Bitcoin system while at the same time keeping fees incredibly low because you can always self custody in batches. So it's kind of a benefit in both directions that not only can everybody can massive amounts of people very cheaply get UTXO and self custody ownership of their coins very, very cheaply, but also there is always this permanent backlog where if fees get down to a certain amount, it keeps fee pressure, it keeps pushing fee pressure up because it allows you to build up a backlog of people who want to then move their coins or take it when there is now space available. And again, it takes the core of the Bitcoin system, the base of the bitcoin system and turns it more into like what I've talked about in the mental model of using it as a financial court, a monetary court, where everybody uses it to prove their ownership and everyone has unilateral exit. And then we can create layer two systems where we can still move transactions around and we can still do things, all with the power to exit still being retained during the operation. But only if things actually get, things become a conflict, or only if there is some sort of a problem or attempted censorship or some sort of dispute, does then someone need to take that UTXO on chain? And I think it's perfectly viable and not even that we need to rush it, but that the focus and the attention should be on the opcodes, the low risk opcodes that enable that sort of a future to be the default to be the way that we interact with Bitcoin. And as James says in this piece, it does not take many of them, it does not take a lot of very low like limited functionality opcodes to make a massive difference because of the groundwork we have already laid. And we could potentially, with just a few solid opcodes, make it so the whole world could self custody and that the base interaction of the entire ecosystem always had the choice of exit. And there's actually another piece that I've got in the lineup that is Nicholas Dorier, which I haven't read, I haven't even heard from him in a while. But he has a really interesting piece on watering down the concept of self custody. And I really like his thoughts in addition to this because I think they relate really well to how we think about what self custody is and how we can extend this to the greatest number of people, how we can make sure that this system maintains this for everyone who wants to utilize it. And importantly, what does that mean? What is it that we are focusing on and how are we defining what it is that we are trying to achieve for people? And I also don't like the notion that this is a big blocker argument, because it's literally not. It is literally the opposite of the big blocker argument. The big blocker argument was that we're going to fire the devs, we're going to take over the projects, all of these corporations who got together and make it, made an agreement with each other, they represent the entire ecosystem, the miners control it and we're just going to do whatever they say and we're just going to completely just make this thing bigger and bigger and bigger to fit all of the transactions of the world. This is literally the opposite argument. This is the exact opposite argument that we should come up with new functionality and new primitives and new opcodes to make it so that layer 2s can build out robustly and have everyone else in the have everyone in the world be able to have a utxo even if that UTXO is not on chain. They have the ability to enforce and control the ownership of their own coins unilaterally. Unilateral exit for every single user. That is not the big blocker argument. That is literally the opposite. That is exactly what the argument against the big blockers was, that we can do this without making the chain massive. But that means that we actually have to do it. The goal wasn't to have limited blocks and a really limited complex Layer two. It was to have layer twos and layer threes solve all of the problems of the base layer and have the base layer limited and strong enough and robust enough and resilient enough and distributed enough that all of those layer twos can actually enforce the degree of assurance that Bitcoin. Extend the degree of assurances of the Bitcoin system upward into those spheres so that we could have everybody with a UTXO and everybody could do small payments, even just as long as they are in a new network. And that network and those funds can always be cascaded down the ladder back to the base layer if there is a conflict or if someone tries to cheat them or censor them. That was the point. That was the idea of the small blockers. That is why we fought the war. And that's what we won the war over. And honestly, it's sad to me that nobody is focusing on this and that it's just kind of this corner of drama where nobody wants to talk about it because it's the hard thing to talk about and we can't get agreement about it. There's just easier and more exciting things to do. And last time we were talking about this, I think it was with the roundtable.
[00:36:08] And I don't want to bring it up again with a roundtable because I feel like we hit this every single time the roundtable comes around.
[00:36:14] But no pun intended, but at the time I felt like. And part of me still feels like this is that, okay, if there's like a really great construction or idea or the L2 that you can design, then just design it. Just build it on top of liquid or something, because we have a lot of those primitives on liquid and so we can show and see how those things could work. But then when I put on the other hat and, you know, step outside and ask, or, you know, I'm trying to find fault with my own position, there's also part of me that says, well, then I'm asking for you know, to prevent or in requirement of a very simple primitive that is helpful even in and of itself in a lot of different ways. I'm asking for some holy grail solution to be invented before we would even entertain the kind of low risk, simple opcode improvement that could potentially improve all of the things that were already done doing. And part of me realizes that that's a bit of a tall order or a kind of a ridiculous requirement. But then just from a realistic perspective, I think there just needs to be a lot of excitement about it. Like, people need to be amped up about what it is that we are going to get from this. Like, the reason everybody was so excited about Segwit is because of lightning. And Lightning has been awesome. And I don't mean to disparage Lightning and most of the argument about lightning, there was always the argument that, oh well, you know, with a channel opening and closing, like lightning won't scale to the whole world. In the white paper itself it says Lightning can't scale to the whole world. But it was always assumed that we'd have some sort of functionality or additional opcode or some sort of channel factory setup where we could extend the lightning scaling to a new layer so that we could batch and group and, you know, multisig together a bunch of different systems that then extended and created channels that don't necessarily even have to go on chain. So I don't like the idea even or the suggestion that Lightning didn't live up to its promise because Lightning has done, like I said, Probably a 50 or 100x on the number of people that can hold UTXOs and use Bitcoin peer to peer because of the massive amount of payment volume that is taken off chain from directly just using everything on the Bitcoin layer. But it was never going to be an all in one solution. It was never going to be the end all, be all. It always needed additional layers and additional improvements in order to scale the UTXO problem to hundreds of millions or billions of users. And it's not like Lightning was fully fleshed out before we implemented SegWit. Like we had an idea and that got people excited about it, but it certainly wasn't built and implemented. So I don't know, I go back and forth. I feel like, I feel like just from a social standpoint, like we need something to get excited about. There needs to be something that has a very convincing argument as to why we need it, that uses CTV or that utilizes CTV or just why it would be better than a subset of alternatives that we have already. And I agree the focus of Core should be about those things, keeping it secure. And I also don't think that the idea of like, you know, making IBD better and all of those things is even like a bad or thing not to focus on. Except that those, those aren't like super time sensitive. They're not, they're not foundational in the sense that like not a lot changes when those get implemented. And if they're implemented two years from now versus this year, it's not really going to do much because it's all client side and it's just kind of like ongoing maintenance. It's like, I don't even dislike those things. I like that those improvements come. And I think, you know, running a node should be a lot easier. And the more we can do to securely bootstrap nodes is really great. But I also think we need more reasons to run nodes. And if we had greater L2 constructions and more concrete ways to secure our self ownership and our custody of our coins, even coins that were held in some sort of service. And that leads me back to, you know, some of the constructions that use E cash on top of it and then quote, unquote, settle and update the CTV on a daily basis or something like that. That could make, can make completely new, quote, unquote custodial models that aren't really custodial or they're only partially custodial with coins that are on the move essentially that are being transacted and could give a level of assurance to the user that is unheard of in the financial world and could do so on a global level where just the model itself knew that you could made it available or made it obvious that you could trust the institution or the service provider or the wallet provider that you were working with. And I think it's just, it would be really, really cool to have that and to see people be able to innovate and start building with those primitives. So anyway, I thought this was a really important thing to hit. Uh, I agree with some of it, I don't totally agree with all of it, but it's, it's a really, really critical discussion because I do think that the concept or the focus should be on how do we get UTXO and unilateral exit self custody for everybody in the world. Um, and not that we have to do that tomorrow morning and not that there's only one way to do that, but that that should be the focus and that if CTV isn't it, well then we should be focused on what the thing is. So maybe this revives the conversation in somebody's mind and could be useful. And we'll also be hitting, like I said, Nicholas Doria's piece on watering down of the idea of self custody and what we mean by it and trying to really make it concrete. The differences and the basically the lines between what we think of as self custody and custodial or service provided etc, etc. So this will definitely be a continued part of the discussion going forward. And it took me a long time to get this get to this one. But I just thought this was a really, really great light write up and really worth calling attention to. So shout out to James for putting this together and posting it. Always, always really thankful for new discussion and attention on this problem because I think, I think it's the problem. You know, like this is the thing that bitcoin is there to solve. Sovereignty for everyone without central banks and without custodians. So with that shout out to Bitkit Wallet, a non custodial or self custodial bitcoin and lightning wallet that you should definitely check out because they have a phenomenal design and I have my ID so you can add me as a contact. And of course if you have not ordered your Jade plus yet from Blockstream, that I have an affiliate link for that down in the show notes as well as well as affiliate links for a number of other services and businesses that I just use regularly and that I really, really love. I'm gonna double shout out crowdhealth right now because I've just had to get a bill paid or get something paid that we've already paid for and we were getting some of the money back and holy crap, the integration with Fold is so amazing. Like it is so dirt simple. Like I literally just connected it to my Fold account and then everything did on the back end and then the money just showed up. Like, talk about hassle free. I do not understand people who have insurance. Medical insurance is a straight scam. Crowd health is where it's at and I have a an affiliate link down in the show notes and that gets me something too. So it's a, it's a way to help me out and solve a very significant problem that probably a lot of y'all have. Because crowd health kill like just destroys our old health insurance. Like I don't have health insurance anymore. So if you haven't checked it out yet, if you haven't explored that, you definitely should. All right, thank you guys for listening. Don't forget to share this out with everybody you love in the world and that you want to be happy and prosperous in a bitcoin future. And then don't share it out to everybody you dislike and that you want to see poor, because this show will take you to the former. And until then, don't forget to subscribe and I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. And until then, everybody take it easy, guys.
[00:45:06] It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt of it. Maurice Switzerland.
