Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What is up guys? Welcome back to the show. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we are back. We are back with the roundtable today to wrap up April. And it largely ended up being all about the drama on bitcoin core and Twitter and social and nostr and everything right now, all about filters and opera turn and what the hell does any of that mean. And in this episode we kind of just jumped up and did this live. So we have kind of initial reactions and there's definitely nuance and we do not really. We just kind of chat about it and we do not steel man the other side at all in this. So this episode you're going to get the this is how we feel about it. Without really solid details on the whole picture of the thing, you might still walk away a little bit confused as to what's going on. So I think I'm going to go ahead and do another episode just to cover this and give both sides a fair shake because it's not as if the arguments for the other side are non existent. They are and there's very strong technical reason to support it. But I think the argument is more of a philosophical one and I want to make sure that we get down to the heart of what the disagreement is and why there's this. This divide. So I'm going to try to do that in next couple of episodes whenever I have the time to really kind of put it all together real quick. This episode is brought to you by the Human Rights foundation and they are amazing. They have a wonderful newsletter, the Financial freedom report I believe 71 should be. I think it just came out actually I haven't checked but I'll have the link to it in the show notes if you want to subscribe. They are the best resource for seeing and staying up on a lot of new bitcoin tech and it bitcoin's use for a tool of freedom around the world and also major developments around the world in human rights and with CBDCs and controls and banking controls and what's going on in the world and then also major news around the world on the issue of human rights. This episode is also brought to you by Synonym. The makers of BitKit. A whole bunch of people tell me that it's really difficult to have to find a good non custodial bitcoin and lightning wallet that just works and that is intuitive. This easy to use. Bitcoin is one of the handful of really good ones that's out there. And probably my favorite thing about it is that you create an id, you create your user and then you can add contacts and you can just pay to your contacts. It's pretty dope. You should check it out. If you haven't link in details to all of that is right down in the show notes. So let's get into it. We have got big bitcoin mechanic, Simple Steve with some great updates on utx, Oracle, my brother Jeff and myself, Guy Swan. And this is Guy's Roundtable.
Welcome back to the show. This is the Roundtable. It's so exciting. We talk about mic problems and audio echoes and saw all sorts of shit. We have got mechanic Steve, Jeff and myself, Guy Swan. I'm the guy who's read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we are wrapping up April this month. Bunch of, Well, a number of interesting things happened, kind of on the political sphere, but there's fresh, new, really stupid.
No, I don't want to preempt too much. There's some new drama and there's some shit going on right now that is throwing a big stink. And Mechanic, I mean, everybody knows your opinion on this, but you, I think you have the best hold on what the idea is or what the problem is. And also arguments on both sides of the aisle. Every time we talked about that, talked about it, I feel like you've been really fair about it, even though people suggest that it's the other way around. But can you give us a rundown of what everybody's been talking about and what's going on with the pull request and kind of what's happened up to this point?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Man, it's really hard to summarize it all. I think it's all. There's an agenda going on to bait and switch Bitcoin from being a monetary network to being something where there's just a bunch of unpaid volunteers that store arbitrary data with no regard to what that data is, whether it's in service of furthering the monetary use case or not. And it's the quintessential shitcoiner mentality of I don't care who runs nodes, I don't care if there are any nodes. As long as we can pretend we're decentralized, everything is fine.
And you know, obviously in crypto land, that's always a larp, right? We know there aren't really nodes over in Cryptoland, we know no one's. No one into ETH or whatever, you know, whatever they're doing on top of ETH or there's NFTs or stable coins or whatever. We know none of them are running Ethereum nodes because it's just not a thing you could realistically do as an everyday user. But it's technically possible, right? In Bitcoin. That was never a larp. It was like if you want to be a bitcoiner, you go to bitcoin.org and you download something called Bitcoin and you double click on it. And now you have an app called Bitcoin, which is just like everything else. Like, if you want to talk to someone on WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal, you download the app and you use it. You don't ask someone else to do it on your behalf. All right, there's obviously client servers and all that stuff, but that's irrelevant. The point is, if you want to talk to someone with a messaging app, you download the messaging app and you use it yourself. Bitcoin was just the same in concept. You want to use permissionless money, you download this software called Bitcoin and you just use it. But now, obviously, that got divorced and now miners don't run it because mining isn't a part of what became Bitcoin core. Instead of just Bitcoin and wallets don't use it, they won't even connect directly to it. Instead you have to go through an Electrum server and everything slowly just became sort of farmed out and divorced from what it was to just use Bitcoin, the app. Like, I want permissionless money, so I go to the app Store and download Bitcoin. So that's basically the concept here and that. But that ties you into the use case for it, right? Like if you're running Telegram because you want to message people and by virtue of running that app, other stuff starts happening. Like there's a bunch of kiddie porn on your phone for no reason because someone figured out how to make Telegram do that on your device. That's a hack. That's an abuse of what it is you're downloading it for. Or maybe it's something noble, like someone's like, I love the Quran. I'm going to upload verses out of the Quran to everyone's phones. Using Telegram again might be great, but it's not why you downloaded the app. And it's. This gets lost in the technicals and all that because people think this is a technical discussion. It's not. It's a philosophical debate about why are people using Bitcoin. What's the actual purpose of this? Start from the human level, like so into the specifics. Now you have this agenda around, which is, let's change things. Let's make it generic file storage. Let's repeatedly push this narrative that, hey, because you can store data related to financial activity in Bitcoin, let's just say it's just a database. And let's just say that people running nodes are just storing redundant copies of a database which can store anything. Now this is a narrative that's being pushed. It's obviously nonsense. Not all databases are the same. And the analogy here is like. Like I tweeted, treating a tricycle and a jumbo jet is the same thing is stupid. You can't put 300 people on a tricycle and get them from New York to Paris because it's not designed for that, even though they are both transport. So just saying Bitcoin is just a database ignores everything about how it was designed to be conducive for one thing. And people hack around that one thing and be like, hey, we can store JPEGs in here and we can store this, that and the other, and none of it's part of the purpose of it, right? So there was. When people started pushing that agenda, it first came in the shape of what could arguably be called, you know, violent pushback. And this was back in OP Return wars, this was actually back in Satoshi's time when they were like, people are trying to store Lady Gaga videos in the chain. How do we stop this? What's the most effective way to do it? That was the position back then.
The next iteration of that was way later, after we started having Witness discount because of Segwit and all that stuff. When people found, after Opera Term was implemented in response and as an olive branch to say, if you assholes are going to keep doing this, at least do it this way, because it's not as harmful. And that was kept strictly limited and the limits were always respected.
Then fast forward way into the future, people found ways to store data in other ways that were harmful. And instead of a proactive approach being taken to do a similar thing as what was done with opereturn, it was just ignored. And the pull request to try and fix this stuff and upgrade the filters was called controversial and we're not going to do that. So it went from active rejection a la Satoshi and early core devs to passive permittance of the thing happening. Now it's turned into active solicitation, which is someone is attacking the network, but we're not going to call it an attack. But someone is trying to store a bunch of unwanted data on all the bitcoin nodes and we are going to adapt the system to make it more conducive to that. So we are actively trying to change what Bitcoin is for. This is not laziness or apathy or oh, it's too controversial. It can't do it anymore. Now it's active. Let's do this. Let's change what Bitcoin is for. Let's redefine it as just a simple redundant cloud storage network where none of the participants doing this stuff are paid. And furthermore, the people pushing for it obviously doing it in service of an agenda because they're so aggressive in how they're moderating the discussion around it. It's being fast tracked. Peter Todd is the one who wrote the pull request to do it. It's identical to something he wrote two years ago which got, you know, rejected back then because it wasn't politically doable at the time. Now it is. So he wrote the exact same pull request and suddenly all the core developers are in favor of it. They keep pointing to the mailing list discussion, which is completely fallacious. The reason you. And it comes down to you, as someone running a bitcoin node gets to say what goes in your mempool. It's not the same as the blockchain. If you manage to mine a block full of garbage, I don't love it. But you also probably spent more than 200 grand per block in proof of work and electricity consumption. There's no faking that, right? So you get, by virtue of being a miner capable of mining a block and jumping through that proof of work requirement, you get to have some say about what goes on in the blockchain I store on my computer. But my mempool has no proof of work requirement. You can spam it to death if you want. There's no proof of work requirements limitation there. So you can connect to my node and fill it up with absolute junk. Unless I take a proactive approach and say, I don't want this, I don't want that, I don't want that. I do want this. Because it looks like someone's actually using bitcoin. This is how your node has always worked. It's your sovereign territory. And what Quora doing is saying, not only are we going to expand the filters that are there, we're also going to stop them from being user configurable now. So you don't get that choice what ends up in your mempool is what we say belongs there. You have no say over this anymore. And further to that, we are going to, we are going to shut down any conversation around that. We're going to ignore all the precedent and we're going to aggressively push for this no matter how tyrannical we look. So that is basically the situation we're in at the moment. It's not necessarily about spam though, that obviously overlaps with that conversation. It's just about do you have sovereignty over what is stored on the computer in your house? Do other people get to just indiscriminately fill up your mempool with junk? Do you get to have any say in that? And what's the directionality? Why are we being more permissive? Why are we responding to attacks from taproot wizards? Why are we allowing these people that are self declared attackers that want to corrupt the ecosystem, why are we moving goalposts to try and accommodate them in service of bluffs? Because they're not actually going to move to this newly relaxed op return because it would be four times more expensive. So the whole thing is just a massive bluff to try and destroy a filter in service of a narrative that says people running nodes must just be unpaid service providers for miners to get them as much data as they can so that miners can make as much money. Which again just flips bitcoin upside down. Miners serve nodes. Nodes do not serve miners. That is the dynamic Bitcoin is predicated on and they're trying to flip that upside down. As a node operator, you have no business doing anything that is outside of your own self interest.
And no one, you're not paid, you're not compensated for it, you're not an employee of the network like miners are. So there we go, we can start digging into it, but that's basically as good as I can do summarizing it.
[00:13:10] Speaker C: So between this and the tail emission that he talked about before, what the fuck is wrong with Peter Todd?
[00:13:17] Speaker B: Well, I don't know. I mean the tail emission thing was too politically unpopular when he starts saying.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Let'S do more consensus issue entirely. So there's just no chance that there's just no chance of that even happening?
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Well, demaraj is possible and it amounts to the same thing. So back when we were still kind of on friendly terms, me and Peter, he told me like, yeah, I'm never going to get above 21 million, but I can get demage or demer. I don't know how you pronounce that word, but that was you know, which is the same concept.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: It's basically, I think it's demur, but.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Demur every utxo, a percentage of it gets minable by miners, so they get to carry on paying themselves from everyone else's. It's tax, basically, it's tax on Bitcoin. But it does the same sneaky loophole that inflation does. Rather than take 10% out of your bank, we make your purchasing power of the money 10% worse. So people don't notice it this way. So, I mean, it's central planning. It's every single thing you came into Bitcoin to get away from. And it's very weird. I don't know what's up with the dude, but I mean, my, my dislike of him was much more to do with, you know, geopolitics than anything to do with bitcoin. But it doesn't surprise me that it all kind of comes from the same mouth. But the fact that the rest of core are on board is now I don't know what to do because that's just messed up.
[00:14:40] Speaker C: Well, you've got people in there that think that they're the opposite sex and everything else. So, like, they're all fucking crazy. I don't. Like, people have lost their goddamn minds.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: I don't understand what, like, what gets me about this is, even by a lot of their own argument, the supposed change is inconsequential, but the argument for changing it, like this is such a clearly controversial issue. And the whole idea of a reference client is to be neutral is to not play a hand in forcing what other people are doing and for a monetary network to be secure. And you know, it's funny, like, Peter Todd actually brings up in the, in the debate or whatever in the GitHub talking about RBF. And it's funny that he actually brings up RBF because I, I actually see that as an argument for the opposite side of the aisle. He's saying that RBF because, like, because RBF is, is specific to how Bitcoin actually works. And obviously the reason you wanted RBF as an option for users is because it actually was a meaningful change. It altered the dynamics and the ease at which someone could simply rebroadcast their transaction with a higher fee. But as a global bidding network, it's an auction. That is what's happening in Bitcoin. It makes sense that you should be able to change your bid easily. So that is actually in line with what Bitcoin's purpose is. And if you were saying that it doesn't actually matter because people can get around it anyway and people can just go to the miner or whatever and publish straight to them. Well then why would you need rbf? You, you, you like and I, and I'm as someone who was supportive of rbf, the reason you implemented it is because it made it easier, is because it formalized it. And now I use RBF a lot and it's a really great tool. But what you are doing, the whole idea of removing OP return is to make it easier. That is it to make it easier to put dick butts in the chain. And I don't want them on my node. Like I do not believe that that is a consequential or important. And there's, there's another argument by somebody else who says like, oh well, it's a $10 billion or a hundred billion dollar NFT market. It's like, okay, well so are crypto tokens. So are like the, the, the, the market for casinos is a whole hell of a lot bigger than the market for security systems. But that doesn't mean that you put a casino in your fucking security system. Like, like that's not an argument. It's. You have to have the argument for parties and concerts is bigger than the argu, than the, than the market for judicial like arbitration. But you don't put concerts, you don't let concerts outbid your court cases because then you can't have property rights because everybody's just going into the court to have a party. Like obviously it has a purpose. Obviously there is a philosophical question about what we should be spending time and resources on. And what gets me is that I donate core. Like I give them Bitcoin regularly and I want to have more development, but I want them to actually develop something that matters and not push controversial that everybody is annoyed with and everybody is clearly opposed to. And it's like they're doing it because people are opposed to it. And you stupid little, you don't know what you're doing. So we're going to force it down your throats off. Like stop this issue is like stop with this issue. Leave it alone. If people figure out a way to cram a bunch of bullshit data into, into a transaction and they figure out how to put it in my node, okay, I will try to figure out how to get around that and solve that problem for my node. But do not make it easier for them. And yes, that's exactly what's happening. It's being made easier. Otherwise this wouldn't be a conversation Point. And you wouldn't be pushing for it.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: Yeah, well that's. That is the complete contradiction of it because I'm going to try and explain. This is man.
Preach, man. Because what's happening here is the self contradiction is absolutely infuriating. So attackers have method A of storing data by fake pub keys. Core are saying that's bad. Let's get them to use Opreturn, which is four times more expensive. Let's not try and prevent method A with a filter because filters don't work. So let's get them to use method B which they're not using because there's a filter preventing them. Do you understand the contradiction there?
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Right?
[00:19:27] Speaker B: I keep trying to make it like bite sized, but I can't. Method A equals bad, we can't prevent it with filter. Method B equals good, but they're not using it because filter. So we'll get rid of the filter and then they'll just use it even though it's four times more expensive. That's a bluff. It's just an excuse to kill a filter. The idea that these people are going to move from creating fake pub keys, which you know, requires them storing all this stuff as input data, which gets the witness discount, I. E. A 75% discount. The idea that they'll stop doing that hack and move over to Opreturn to be nice to us. Either way, it's bad. If they're all in cahoots and Core have figured this out with Jameson Laupp and all these guys and they actually do move, that means these guys are working together, which is a nightmare. And if they don't move, it means that it was just a crude bluff and Core looks stupid and they have egg on their face because they're like, well, we just killed a filter or we made Opreturn way more permissive and we forced you to accept those new policy conditions that you now no longer can control on your node. And the attackers didn't even move because it would have been more expensive for them. So we just broke a filter for fun. And it was done in service of a rationalization which didn't work out. So either way, Core end up looking stupid and they ruin a filter or they're working literally with the attackers. So I mean, it's ridiculously. It just sounds like hyperbole every time. But this is, this is the scenario that people worry about when they get into Bitcoin. What happens if Bitcoin Core turned malicious? Don't they control everything? Can't they make us have more than 21 million. You're like, no, don't worry. Because if they ever do that, you can use something else. Now's the time that we go. That actually is true, by the way. We will use other stuff. We don't just carry on and inertia. It just means the whole system keels over. This is crunch time. This is crunch time. And if people do not move off core as a result of this, it's over. It's just a case of it's death by a thousand cuts. No one can pinpoint exactly where everything broke, but in 10 years, it's a ghost town. The blockchain is a joke. No one wants to store it locally. No one wants to out compete all these crappy use cases that can raise money forever because hop, hop, hop, hop. You have a money printer that's ultimately, there's going to be stuff downstream of that that fills up the chain with junk with infinite money, because we're not on a bitcoin standard yet. How did bitcoin turn into this trash heap that no one wants to verify independently? I don't know. But I raised hell about a PR that made OP return slightly bigger years ago, and everyone thought I was being melodramatic. I'm sorry. Like, it's death by a thousand cuts.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: Sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:02] Speaker C: If you change the angle, you change the angle just a few degrees and the future is dramatically different.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: That's it.
[00:22:11] Speaker C: Yeah. And real quick, how hard is it to. Is there a public address somewhere we can donate, start donating the knots?
[00:22:19] Speaker B: There should be. Let me ask.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Yeah, post it in there. Yeah, we'll put it in the. The description. And now I feel like I should have been running. I'll be running.
[00:22:30] Speaker D: You'd rather donate than just run it?
[00:22:32] Speaker C: But I want to donate too.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:34] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Steve, I'm curious. What's. What's your take on this?
[00:22:38] Speaker D: I mean, when we were talking about this, by the way, I. I agree with everything Mechanic's saying for the most part, but I get the feeling that there's some people out there listening, thinking that something just changed and now there's like a consensus change and now there's going to be more spam in the blockchain. I just kind of want to. For those out there listening, we're just talking about mempool policy here. And what's your default like right now? If you wanted to, you can go into Core and you can set the opcode limit higher if you want and accept these bigger transactions. But what Core is talking about is like removing the option completely. So it'd be basically like going into everybody's core node and just putting their mempool policy for their opcode limit to like as big as. Or like something really big, like four megabytes or something.
And then like not giving the option to change that. Is that last part correct? Mechanic. Like they're proposing to not even give you the option to reduce the opcode.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Limit right in the pool. It might be a negotiating tactic to be so outrageous and then back off of one of the more ridiculous things. But yeah, they are saying we're removing the config option. Users will no longer be able to determine what this is. And the agenda with Core for a while has just been mempools need to be homogeneous because we need to establish all these heuristics around what the next block has to look like. So mempool space has always had that kind of thing. This is the next block. And if your block doesn't look like that, it's censorship. And this has been a really stupid idea and it shows a complete misunderstanding of how this works. The blockchain is the definitive thing. There's a mempool and there's the blockchain and the idea that again, there's no proof of work requirement so you can flood people's mempool with absolute crap. And it's.
[00:24:36] Speaker C: There's an infinite number of mempools. Right? Well, there's a same number of mempools as there are nodes. Right?
[00:24:43] Speaker A: Like the idea that we're supposed to homogenize the mempool is a suggestion that there should be no at the edge adaptation or response to anything that's going on in Bitcoin. And that only change, the only changes that should occur at all in how it operates should happen at core. Which doesn't make any sense. Like, that doesn't. Like why there was a, there was an argument that. And maybe, maybe you can explain this talking about how like we need homogenization in the mp, like we need menpal policy to be the same for compact blocks.
And I'm curious what the connection there is exactly.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: And well, the argument there, it does depend somewhat on homogeneity. It's basically the idea that we can make transferring blocks around the network a lot faster, which is obviously good if you're trying to stop centralization of mining pools. But it operates again on the heuristic that if we assume everyone knows about most transactions already that are going to show up in any block, then we can save A lot of time. And if a node receives a block that has five or six transactions in it, it had never heard of it, very quickly requests them from other nodes, and it uses that to verify the rest of the block. But overall, you're saving a lot of time because they don't need to send the block and all of the transactions in it. They send a compact block which doesn't contain all the transaction data. It just contains hashes of it. And then you go, oh, wait, I don't recognize that one and that one. And that's just two things you got to pull. And the assumption is we pretty much all have similar MEM pools, so we can transfer block. It's a very sensible approach and I understand the rationale for it. Luke was against it, and there are reasons it's a bad thing. And sadly, I'm just not. I don't understand it well enough. It's Luke. So if you come down to it, eventually he's going to be right. But at least, at least, at least there is like something there that I'm like, yeah, that's a sensible thing. Compact blocks, we understand what you're trying to do with that.
[00:26:47] Speaker D: It's.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: You're trying to massively speed up block propagation times around the network and you can somewhat leverage the fact that we all have similar mempools. But again, I think Luke's main objection was, well, you shouldn't be assuming that. And it hurts Bitcoin on a deeper level to make those kinds of assumptions.
[00:27:03] Speaker D: Yeah, I see what Luke's saying there. Because Bitcoin has to work. If you get a block and you haven't seen any of these transactions before, you got to be able to digest these things. And yeah, like, if you start assuming that people have similar MEM pools, no, that's not good.
I mean, there's trade offs to it.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: Is what I'm saying, because my understanding of it was what you just explained, but that all that it means is that if someone has stricter policies, then they have more, basically more transactions to request from other nodes, but they still don't have to request the whole block. They just request via the hash. Right? So like, they're saying that the difference would be it's like, oh, well, if I don't have 20 transactions that are in this next block, when I get the compact block filter that, well, then I'm having to request 20 transactions from nodes around me. Whereas if we had a homogenized mempool, maybe I only request one. It's like, okay, I'm still going from 4,000 transactions to 20. And the risk of homogenization or the not even the risk of homogenization. I don't even care whether you care about homogenization. I care about what I can configure on my node and what I can configure about my mempool. If I want to have to download 20 JPEG transactions when I get a compact block filter, that's my choice. If I want to have a homogenized mempool, well then I just take all my filters off like, or I don't add them. Like this is something that could be easily configured to somebody who is worried about those quarter of a second delays or you know, 10 millisecond delays between getting a compact block and being able to, you know, mine on the next one. And this is all like kind of beside the point too when a whole bunch of people are mining on like they need to be mining on ocean first to even give a shit about it because they need to run their own node and nobody's running their own node. Everybody's just using a bunch of mining pools. Like nobody even looks, nobody even checks the bl. They use the block hash. Your compact block only matters if you, if people are actually running nodes. And if you're going to get a whole bunch of people sticking dick butts into the blockchain, you're going to get less people running nodes like and that's like I do want more people running nodes and it's just ah, like this just seems so crazy. It seems like such a thing where they're purposefully trying to push something this controversial. And the whole idea is neutrality. The whole idea is like Bitcoin is money. Let's make it work for that. Let's make sure that there is not, there's not noise that it is as clean and possible to do that as like I want people working on how to bring more payments to Bitcoin on. I want to actually have the debate about ctv, which maybe that's controversial, but that's exactly why we wouldn't just shove it in like we would debate for years over whether or not we want CTV or if that's the position. Steve and Mechanic, I know you guys are against ctv, but that is at least a conversation that might move the needle on something that matters. You know, like I just, why are we wasting resources? Why is there another episode about this when this should not be a thing and it clearly, clearly does not actually have the effect like just like you say they're still just going to use signature data. Nobody's going to use the op return.
You're just removing an option from my node or well, you're just making me download. Not I just. God bless man.
[00:30:40] Speaker C: Not 300 kilobyte limits.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: You can configure that.
[00:30:45] Speaker D: What's the state of acceptance?
When I checked that repository or whatever, it looked like a lot of people did the not acknowledged neck thing. Like is that a kind of vote? Like is it look like it's going to be accepted or.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Well, so here's how that works. So for anyone. I mean it's kind of. This is convention outside of just bitcoin core. But ACT just means like positive acknowledgment concept. ACT means like I like the idea. This is not. Maybe it doesn't get implemented well though I'll check out the code. NAC is a negative acknowledgement and that means I don't want this and you're going to. Similarly, you can have concept nack which is. I just don't like this whole idea.
So yeah, there's a lot of knacks. But Shaws who I did do a panel with at BTC Prague last year did say he at least gave threw me a bone and said I do agree it is spam, you know, to. In response to John Carvalho's whole assertion that spam cannot exist the minute someone pays money to create it. So like, you know, so I at least thought okay, what's something. But he no in that pull request though, he's sitting there saying, look, unless you're a bitcoin core maintainer and you have commits inside this repo, you're not. You should be banned from commenting on this. And in that respect.
So in that respect, Marcellus, unhosted Marcellus, basically my favorite bitcoiner ever. I love this guy.
He said, oh, by the way, this is all being done to placate an attack being carried out by this company which is affiliate with Jameson Lop. And it'd probably be good to disclose that conflict of interest because he's here in the pull request saying we need to do this. And he comes in with this whole magnanimous. I think it's time to accept that bitcoin people want to use it for things other than just money. And I think it's time for us to all accept that. Yeah. Okay. So this pull request which is all being done in response to your attack let's by your company, maybe we should declare that conflict of interest. So Marcellus got banned for that. And then I wrote, I think that is a relevant piece of information to.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: That's a relevant piece of information. I love Jameson Lapp. I love Jameson Lott. But that's 100% irrelevant piece of information. And that's not even an attacking people.
The excuse was that like it's. We're talking about people, not the idea. Well, no, no, like that. It is talking about a conflict of interest. Like you submit conflicts of interest when you have a judicial hearing because it matters into who's. Why people are holding their opinions. And it's not. And it's not attack on people. It's an attack on the fact that there is clear bias. Like you have to have some sort of playing field as to why people are having this conversation that they're having. That is not.
I love Jameson in a hundred other ways, but that's 100% like BS in my opinion.
[00:33:39] Speaker C: And the idea that if you pay for spam, it's not spam. How many pieces of mail have a stamp on it? They're all spam.
What world is that true in? Does it make any sense?
[00:33:52] Speaker B: It's ridiculous. Bitcoin is the cheapest form of spam that's ever existed. You can pay 20 cents to get your transaction in a blockchain and it will be stored on 95,000 nodes for the rest of freaking time for free. You want to tell me that there's a financial like mismatch with spam? In other context, you're getting it upside down. There's nothing cheaper than spamming or more effective than spamming the blockchain. You want to feel like this is.
[00:34:17] Speaker C: Bitcoin'S biggest weakness because, I mean, and how I wrote something about this in like 2013 or something is when I finally like grasped like some of the. Well, maybe, I don't know, maybe it was later. Maybe it was during the block size war. I don't know. When I finally grasp, fully grasp the like, the problem is that you've got a giant tragedy of the commons problem. What's the, the. The gambling satoshi dice like, if you treat it like it was and, and Roger Vers, you know, all of his electronic company transactions or whatever, he was mad because there was not space in the block for all of his retail transactions. But if you treat the whole thing like it has to scale your personal business, then you're offloading all the costs of scaling to the network and now everybody will just support bigger and bigger blocks because all the people that wanted to run a node are squeezed out so all the opposition is squeezed out, and then the only people that can run nodes are people that have interest in expanding their control over the network and expanding the block capacity at the expense of all the other node runners. So you literally have Google and Visa and only like these major companies running nodes and then they control everything. Like it. It will become.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: They just become the source of truth.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Like, yeah, it's just a centralized payment network. We've got a million of them. Who cares? This is why we told big blockers to stuff it. Who cares? And at least Roger had the courtesy to say, if we risk turning Bitcoin into PayPal 2.0, I think it's a worthwhile risk to keep transaction fees cheap. At least he was candid about that.
Nowadays it's not that. It's. Let's just store as many pictures of frogs on other people's drives. And another point I keep making is if something doesn't work out with the incentives for miners and miners start turning off, we have a mechanism for that. It's the difficulty adjustment. It gets easier to mine if. It's obviously too hard to justify enough people mining to maintain the current difficulty. If you make life difficult for node runners, I'm sorry, there's no compensation there. They just stop running nodes.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: And there can't be like. That's the thing is that there can't be like. The whole idea, like, you can only run a node for you, which is exactly why I should be the one that makes the configuration decisions. And like, you cannot run a node for the network. You defending you is good for the network. And that's the exact same way that you carrying a gun is. Is quote, unquote defending. It's good for society. But you are still only defending you and those immediately around you in the case that you actually use it, you know, and it just.
Oh, like the, that, that disconnect. Just this whole issue just drives me crazy. I cannot believe that we're still spending time on this. Like, it's clear, especially when they have gone out of their way to use the most malicious thing that they can. Like, that's what gets me is that you're conceding an issue to people who have demanded this, who have basically made a joke of being good stewards of the Bitcoin system. Like, like, it's the basest. It's the most basic of, like, I am doing absolutely nothing. I'm not even thinking about the ethical or the, the consequential like philosophical concerns here. I'm going out of My way to be contrarian and to be as big of a problem as I can to, to not. Like it's our responsibility to be good stewards and to understand and to build up like we are the only.
We're the only defense for this thing.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:14] Speaker A: It is a piece of software and to treat it so like just ignorantly, like, like just arbitrarily as if. As if none of this actually matters. It's like, yes, it does. You are being complacent. You are being incredibly complacent. Like vigilance is the cost of. Of liberty. Like eternal vigilance is the only way that this thing keeps working. And if we just complacency our way into. Just put whatever bullshit on the chain that you want. The only reason this works is because everything's ser. Like is as filtered as a system can be filtered. That is how Bitcoin works because it is an open digital network. If it's not filtered, it dies like immediately. And I just, I just can't get the whole idea that we're just gonna. We're just gonna kind of like slowly, like frog boiling, just like give up and like stop thinking about it. And there's no. This could never break and there's no consequences to any of this. There's no, there's no trade off. Just stick whatever you want in this thing and let's not think about it.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: It's all valid transactions, man.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: It's all valid transactions. It's. Since like this. The whole censorship drives me crazy. It's like, do you have no idea if you're making the argument that this is censorship? You have no fundamental concept for how and why bitcoin works the way it does.
[00:39:45] Speaker C: That was such a stupid.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: Like, I have a hard time even like talking to people who keep pushing that nonsense because there is no way in hell this could possibly be construed as censorship. Bitcoin does everything it can to make sure that there is only one type of thing that goes into the network. Did you know that I can't add a transaction without hashing it? That's not censorship. Because a whole bunch of people don't want to put hashes in there. It's not censorship. It is censorship. If I say Mechanic, I don't like you. You can't use Bitcoin. And therefore I'm going to figure out how to make sure that just Mechanic can actually make use of the chain. I'm going to prevent him from connecting to the network. I'm preventing. I'm going to prevent him from getting into blocks. I'm going to make this address for no particular reason other than the fact that mechanic owns it. I'm going to make sure that this doesn't get into a block. That is censorship. But the idea that bugs are not supposed to be allowed, that exploits to how something is being used should not be censored, is exactly the same thing as, like, well, I mean, look at the horrible censorship we did. Remember that guy who created like a billion bitcoin out of Nowhere back in 2010?
[00:41:01] Speaker B: It was.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: I can't believe we censored that guy. It was a valid transaction and he paid a fee. He paid a fee for that. I can't believe that you would censor people that tried to spend your bitcoin without a proper signature. You. I cannot believe you're a communist. You're a communist. They paid the fee and they just. They wrote whatever they wanted in there.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: This is so infuriating that I can't.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: So dumb.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: I can't credit this with, like, genuine, Like, I still get people hitting me up in Twitter like, oh, those are valid transactions. Or isn't Ocean censored not an argument? Like, this is. I cannot. You cannot still be making this argument on a serious basis. It's. Look, it's. It's trying to reframe abuse of other people as a right that they have to just put up with. Otherwise, they're infringing on your freedom somehow. It's complete. It's in classic Newspeak tile style, is trying to flip it upside down. And this was my beef with Samurai back when they ended up needing too much opreturn for Ocean's default template. They're like, we'd reserve the right to store 45 bytes of oper data in the chain. I'm like, you reserve the right to store data for free on other people's computers? That's not a right. That's not a right. That is something that you need other people's permission.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: I'm reserving your. I'm reserving this particular space on your hard drive because it is my right.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: It's just so backwards.
[00:42:25] Speaker C: Flipping the moral argument upside down to attack your political opponents is literally the, like, the modus operandi like that. That's just the way politics works now. I mean, because, you know, if. If you want to leave your home and not get a vaccine and, you know, not wear a mask, you're killing grandma.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: Like, like, you know, like, it just feels disingenuous. It just seems so disingenuous.
[00:42:48] Speaker C: Well, if you're pushing the cost of, of, of managing your own fear onto other people, you're flipping the moral argument upside down. This is just how everything is now. So I don't know that I can't decide whether people have just completely broken in the head or if this is actually some sort of concerted effort to destroy bitcoin or.
I just don't know anymore.
It feels like the whole world's broken.
[00:43:17] Speaker D: The whole world's not broken.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: Course.
[00:43:23] Speaker C: I mean, course, just, I'm talking about just politically in general, the nature of the way people.
I think bitcoin and all of our decentralized networks and all of that make me very hopeful for the future.
But the normie world right now just feels broken and this just feels like an extension of that. Normies are infecting, you know, part of bitcoin.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: Oh, it totally is. Like this is, this gets into culture and politics, but like what goes internally, what goes on at bitcoin core is, you know, you want to work at one of the relevant sort of institutions around it, like chaincode. It's, you know, if you're working in this office, you need to be vaccinated and just everything you expect from just normie despicable, non cypherpunk culture, it's, it's completely infested with it. It started in, in 2019. Matt Corallo had a massive push to get more women in bitcoin development. And all these absolute bullshit. Like, it's just, it's bollocks. I have no problem with good female developers, but I just. It's a shit priority.
[00:44:33] Speaker C: DEI programs just like, like made up DEI programs for bitcoin. It doesn't make any sense.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: Yeah, but now who's in charge of Mempel? It's Gloria. Where was Gloria? You know, headhunted from. Someone ran into her at a shitcoin conference. She had bitcoin and what's his name fell in love with her. And then he was like, all right, this is obviously a conflict of interest and he, he wrote himself out the script and that's why she is where she is there is obviously she's not in, she's not completely incompetent. She obviously knows how to write software. But the context and the agenda is so clear. When we came up with Fix the filter, it was. This is controversial and people are arguing. So we're closing the pull request when they come out with this breaking.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: This is way, way controversial. Well, we're not going to do anything about that.
[00:45:20] Speaker B: No, no, we're going to do it despite the controversy and we're going to ban anyone that has a problem with it. I'm sorry, that's just that it betrays an agenda and it's in service of shitcoiners, surprise, surprise, that want to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum. That's all there is to it.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: And here's the thing that bugs me to no end is that you have.
One thing that we have with Bitcoin is we have a hardened hyper focused foundation that is insanely secure and can actually stay that way. And the idea that we would dilute it, that we would specifically attempt to change it to better a use case that has not kept 10 million shitcoins alive and has not. Like why are we catering to something that we have 10 million versions of?
We don't have. We have. There's, there's an endless sea of blockchains for them to store their data on to put their frogs or their dick butts or what their monkeys, whatever the hell it is that they're putting on there. Let them do that. Like, okay, they have chosen to do projects to build systems that allow people to do that. If there's $110 billion market for that or whatever it was. I don't. Maybe I'm wrong on the number, but if there's a. Supposedly a multi billion dollar market for that, well then it should keep something alive over there. Ethereum should stay working just beautifully based off of just sticking a bunch of NFTs on the thing. But that doesn't mean anything about what Bitcoin should do. Again, back to the analogy in the context of like a mempool.
The consistent argument that, that it's not effective or that people use other ways to get around actually broadcasting on the network. It's like, well no, nobody using Bitcoin for the. Right. For actual Bitcoin reasons is trying to get around the network. They're just broadcasting to the network. And how many people are actually using Mara's slipstream?
Like almost nobody.
Like such a tiny p. This. Such a tiny set of people are actually using it. And the idea that I'm supposed to lose my optionality in saying whether or not I want it. It's like saying that like the, the I use an analogy in a, I don't know, comment somewhere that it's like saying that your fence doesn't do anything around your yard. It doesn't really do anything. Anybody can just come and jump over your fence at any point.
[00:47:58] Speaker C: Right?
[00:47:59] Speaker A: Therefore you should not have the option. We're going to take away your option. Not only we're going to take away your fence that you put up, but we're going to take away your option to say whether or not you can build a fence. Because we really need everyone to not have fences because that means that we can all just run around in everybody's yard. And it's like, that's not an argument against a fence. The whole idea is that the barrier, of course you can jump over it, but you have to jump over it.
You have to jump over it.
[00:48:26] Speaker B: But it's more than that. It's people making fallacious responses. And I posted the 4chan text yesterday that describes it better than anything else. If you tell someone that Asians are statistically shorter than another race and they respond with any variation of I know a tall Japanese guy, you're dealing with someone that doesn't understand. That is a great abstract concept. That's exactly what's happening this every single time it happens. So 99.9% of op returns are within the current standardness policy. And every time you point out that filters work, they go, but here's one time someone got outside of it. So the filters do nothing.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: There are times.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: And what's annoying here is you're not dealing with a low IQ idiot that can't understand concepts like, you know, statistical averages. You're dealing with someone that's very clever that knows they're making a bullshit argument. And it's very annoying because I'm like, I know you are clever enough not to think that's a valid argument. The filter doesn't work because someone got around it once. The safety belt doesn't work because someone got in a car accident once and died even though they were wearing a safety belt. So they do nothing. Like, it's, it's a complete joke of an argument. And every single time I write anything on this, someone will do it. I. Someone put one of my tweets in an op return which was longer than 83 bytes, and they're like, look how stupid you are. There's an OP return longer than. I'm like, yeah, great. What an amazing Gotcha. You found a 6 foot 5 guy from Japan. Therefore it means amazing, well done. Like, they're never supposed to be a watertight solution. Someone can climb over your fence and go in your garden shed and steal your lawnmower. I'm still going to have a fence. Like, it's just. Are you serious with this argument? And when I. You. We were all at Lugano when, when me And Luke debated Pete Rizzo and Pete Todd.
Pete, just one or two of the. Pete's just kept saying, look man, the audience don't understand this stuff. They're too dumb to get this. And they are. That is a, that is a mask off moment where they're saying people aren't just, they're just not capable of understanding this. And they are literally cynically working on that premise that people cannot understand it. Mechanic thinks there should be filters. Here's an example of a filter not doing what it is he wants them to do, therefore he's an idiot. And he's just riding on the fact that no one is going to dig into it and go, but wait a minute, why are there millions of op returns smaller than 83 bytes and 7 this year that are bigger than 83 bytes? What could be the possible reason for that?
You know, like he knows people aren't going to claw through the blockchain and do that kind of analysis. So he just gets to make these stupid obtuse statements like if a miner filters out this stuff, they will go bankrupt. If you have a filter, someone will go around the filter. So they're pointless. It's just playing, it's so cynically just playing off the fact that people are stupid and not going to do any proper analysis. It is politics. So I hate everyone going, oh, this is too technical for me to understand. It's not. This is pure politics.
[00:51:37] Speaker C: Well, and the fact that the fact that they're smart enough to know better suggests that there's some other reason that they're doing it. And I don't think that's ridiculous to say at all. Like, I think that is like 99.9% of the cases that is what happens in the world is somebody makes some argument that, you know, they know it's ridiculous. They have some sort of hidden agenda that they are trying to push. And I don't know whether it's money for them or they're threatened or they're captured in some fucking way, but there's something else going on. And, and I, I have a hard time believing that's not the case.
[00:52:14] Speaker A: I think the big thing is that this makes CORE look embarrassing.
And that's what I, that's what I don't understand about this is like why, like continuing to spend time and resources on this by their own arguments that it does not even make consequential differences is it only is going to make people distrust core. Like this problem only gets worse. I think this is, I think the, the pushback against them now is worse than it was like it used to be.
And like in. In the. The whole idea that like the users aren't smart enough and that they're not going to get this and therefore we have to shove something down their throats.
This was the whole thing that caused like. Like you could cause a much bigger problem by continuing to push this for no reason.
[00:53:09] Speaker D: All right, I got a new theory, guys. Lighten it up a little bit, all right? Yeah, I just. Maybe CORE is tired of being the reference client.
[00:53:21] Speaker A: I got sabotaging themselves.
[00:53:23] Speaker D: Did you see a little of these things in some of the replies? That was like, hey, and you know, people, we're not the only reference client anymore. People have knots and people have other ones. And I was like, wait, what's that? No, that's a meetup organizer who's been organizing the meetup for like 10 years. And you know, he loves it, but he just doesn't want to be the organizer anymore. It just. Cousin wants to be a participant now, guys. And Cor's just kind of like quietly trying to give up the reference client thing and they're just trying to be like a specialty client now. How about that?
[00:53:56] Speaker A: A specialty.
[00:53:57] Speaker C: I'm okay with that.
[00:53:58] Speaker A: Specialty JPEG client.
[00:54:01] Speaker D: Doesn't it seem like, though?
[00:54:03] Speaker C: Let's make sure that happens there.
[00:54:05] Speaker D: Doesn't it seem like that with those statements, like, hey, there's knots out there. Or it's either that or it's like.
[00:54:11] Speaker B: You mean like Gavin Andreessen, Like Satoshi is Craig Wright and all this stuff, like, just write me out of this script. Like, how do I. How do I. Like, I have been co opted by the CIA. I'm not allowed to say that.
Is it that?
[00:54:25] Speaker D: Oh my God, I don't know. It's either that or CORE is a little bit more offended by the growing popularity of knots than they should be. Kind of like some like elephant in the room that, you know, some mouse walks in and people like the mouse and then all of a sudden the elephants just gets really jealous for like no reason or something. You know, like something like that.
[00:54:49] Speaker A: I like the self sabotage on purpose theory.
[00:54:51] Speaker B: It ain't that. Because they're trying to obfuscate what they're doing and shoehorn it in, which tells me it's malicious. It's not. It's a nice theory, but they just.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: Want to change and they don't care and they don't respect what the users and node runners want. And this is. That's what this is showing.
[00:55:07] Speaker D: It's probably just follow the money.
[00:55:09] Speaker B: It is. Follow the money. It's. Look, man, Taproot Wizards raised $30 million. Where is that going?
Like your node, your umbrell pleb node runner is not, you know, taking various employees of chaincode Lab out for a steak dinner. You know, it's not, that's not happening, right? It's the, the correct dicks need to get sucked and like, it's, that's just what happens, people.
It's. It's going to come down to that. Like, everyone knows it's really difficult monetizing what you do when you're, you know, working on open source software. It's difficult. It's a perennial problem and people have been around for years and you know, it's, it's going to come down to that and it's an inflammatory thing to say and it cuts very negative aspersions on people that I want to have a lot of gratitude to because plenty of these developers have done plenty of good things inside Bitcoin and they've worked hard and I appreciate them.
So I don't want this to come across as like, they're all just, you know, it's not Operation Mockingbird. They're not all CIA plants designed to subvert bitcoin from the inside. But the effect is the same now. It is. This is complete undermining of sovereignty of people running nodes. It's turning them into unpaid, involuntary public servants of a network that's supposed to run on incentives that actually are sustainable. So it just breaks everything. And it's one of many cuts. And I don't know how to press the point any further than saying in 10 years when it's a ghost town and the blockchain is complete garbage and no one wants to store a local copy of it and everyone's priced out of using it as money permissionlessly anyway because it's being used as arbitrary file storage. I'm sorry. Like the, the public common ground where families would come and have a barbecue and everyone kind of looked after. The place is being used by like truckers to park them semi, like, I'm sorry, it's not conducive to that anymore. It sucks. No one's interested in maintaining it and it's, it's over. So this is, this is the, the moment. It's not, it's not a boiling frog. This should just be, this should be, you know, dropping the frog into the boiling water. That's what this moment should be. And it should be. Everyone goes, something's wrong.
[00:57:17] Speaker D: Yeah, this is great for you. I mean we were looking for a trigger to get everybody over to knots. Right? Like did you pay Peter Todd to do this? Is that what's going on?
[00:57:28] Speaker B: Well, I don't if I thought it would work. It would have, but I don't think it is.
[00:57:33] Speaker A: You know, I'll tell you, this is actually a great opportunity.
[00:57:37] Speaker D: Well, let me just say this. It did inspire me to make sure that my UTX Oracle would work on knots. So it, it pushed me a little bit.
[00:57:45] Speaker A: And yeah, I mean yeah, I've. I've just been whatever about it for most of the time because it didn't seem like. But I mean I'm mining on Ocean now. Now, now I'll be installing knots, which I did sometime like a really long time ago.
But this show is brought to you by the Human Rights foundation which does not give a shit about the use case of putting JPEGs into the blockchain. They care about how bitcoin is used for money and liberty around the world. Who would have thought that that is the way we should use bitcoin and that's its purpose?
[00:58:21] Speaker B: But yeah, well, yeah, Alex Gladstein mines on Ocean as well and he absolute. Yeah he proud they are they Alex, the Human Rights foundation mines Bitcoin. I don't know how much hash rate they have but they are proudly mining on Ocean. I don't know if they're using datum yet but. Oh, that's another point we haven't touched on yet. The entire mission of Ocean to decentralize block template construction is complete waste of time if Core are going to keep pushing for homogenous mempool policy because every single miner is going to be making identical blocks. It's and in Ocean's case even the split is identical. So the Coinbase transaction is the same. Literally all that happens is identical blocks all with different minor names on them, which completely undermines and defeats the whole point of decentralizing these things. So it's very demotivating for Core to be pulling in the opposite direction. What we really want is unpredictable blocks. That's strong bitcoin if you don't know what the heck the next block's going to contain. And that's the future that is transaction fee land subsidy made every block look like you knew exactly what it was going to contain. Oh, it's been 10 minutes, there it is, 50 bitcoins. Oh, it's been another 10 minutes, there it is. Another 50 bitcoins. That was what it was like for years and years and years. In 50 years. That's not what you expect. The subsidy is not supposed to be anything like what impacts the contents of a block. It's going to be weird things. It's going to be people mining to get their own transactions in the chain. It's going to be very different to the kind of things you see now. And that's supposed to be unpredictable. And the more unpredictable it is, the more decentralized Bitcoin is. And the entire direction Core is pulling us in is homogeneous, homogeneous, homogeneous. We want everything to be the same and predictable. We want to develop these stupid heuristics that say it's censorship if the exact policies that we dictate must be followed are not followed. And Peter Todd, labeling all that as censorship is ridiculous because it leaves you no adjective for when the government goes to Foundry and says you can't include a bunch of transactions conducted by this person or this entity. That's actual censorship. And you have, and you've ruined the word in true Orwellian style, you've completely butchered it of what it's actually there for. Nothing Ocean did with censorship. It was all in service of making miners in control of what goes in the blockchain again, which they haven't been, which is the antithesis of censorship. That's the only way you have credible censorship resistance. And instead everyone's just gotten used to. Let's just leverage the various centralized elements of the ecosystem. If maripool is making blocks that are OFAC compliant, we don't decentralize stuff. We just yell at maripool until they stop. And then when they would beat them into submission, which we successfully did, Yay. Isn't Bitcoin good? Isn't it censorship resistant? No, it's not. You just yelled at someone until they did what they want. And you leveraged the fact that they had all this power and all this centralization. Exactly the same with Core. Wouldn't it be great if the core reference client did this instead of that? Everyone says, just make your own client. We did. That's what Knots is. Run that if you want, but pretending that we don't have 98% of people in the bitcoin network using the same default implementation Bitcoin Core is a waste of time. It's totally centralized, everyone is using it and they're trying to make it so that users can't configure stuff. Which means that basically what ends up in block, what ends up in bitcoin blocks, is all downstream of what Bitcoin core do on GitHub which everyone is just going to mindlessly use and can no longer configure. So it's just what goes in bitcoin blocks. Whatever bitcoin core says goes in bitcoin blocks what goes in your mempool. Whatever Peter Todd says goes in your mempool.
It's not that it can't work that way that's broken.
[01:02:07] Speaker A: The big thing to me is that the homogeneity of trying to get everybody's mempool the same thing through client, through forcing client configuration only means that we're going to have less edge cases in, in the real world, like use of the network, which makes it way less robust. If we're constantly trying to optimize and design everything for it all to be the same, well then the second somebody actually does come out malicious and try to like make things like really different or force changes or use some sort of way to use attack blocks or something that caused some sort of a problem or a delay, well, it's only going to be that big, that much more of a problem or a delay because you've designed everything around being perfectly the same. Like, you want as much diversity as possible and you want people to expect diversity so that you can actually build it robustly around the expectation that diversity may be used as an attack vector, that somebody may be able to actually change mempool policy or change their configuration or inject things that you don't want into the mempool, and that we actually have a variety of how, how things are treated so that it does not have the exact same effect to every single node on the network. Like, like that is. That seems completely antithetical to the idea of why you want robustness and variation. That's a, that's a bite the bullet sort of problem is you want to enable alternate and widespread differences in configuration so that the system works extremely well in the face of that variation.
That seems the definition of it being robust and decentralized, because you're not at no point is exactly what's going into any of these things being dictated by a place that's just defaulting to a whole bunch of machines.
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[01:04:55] Speaker B: It's a bunch of high order thinking. So it's really hard to come out with this stuff without having to do it long form like this. It's really hard to come up with zingers and one liners on Twitter that I can't really do much more than saying it's your mempool. Why are CORE not allowing you choice about what goes into it? That should resonate with most bitcoiners as being a violation of their own sovereignty. And I can get people amped up with that, but the implications are so deep and it's really difficult.
[01:05:23] Speaker D: I had a one liner on Twitter that I thought was pretty good. It wasn't, wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good. It was run the ball. It was like.
So in sports, a lot of times you get in a situation when you're down by a lot at the end of the game and so you increase like the complexity and the riskiness of your plays in order to increase the chances of both positive and huge and gains and big losses. But when you're winning by a lot, you know, you run the ball, you don't make these passes. You, you don't swing for the fences, you don't kick the ball into the other side of the field every time you get it. Like, you maintain possession of the ball. Like you. It's a different mentality when you're winning than when you're losing. And CORE acts like it's losing. Like all of this new stuff, it.
[01:06:12] Speaker A: Acts like folding on a hand that they don't need to fold on. It's like, why are you capitulating to this?
[01:06:17] Speaker D: Run the ball, man. Maintain possession of the ball. Like, we don't need to do these crazy aggressive changes right now. We're freaking winning. We are destroying the opponent right now. We're up 100 touchdowns the first quarter.
[01:06:35] Speaker C: I still think the problem comes down to like just a cultural divide. Like, I think that like the cultural divide is infected everything.
[01:06:43] Speaker A: I think there's a huge, huge element to that. And that was always like a big part of the problem because the Social sphere is a layer, is a critical layer of defense that there is a philosophy to Bitcoin and there is a reason for Bitcoin to exist because code is law. But what informs the code is what people value the use of Bitcoin for. Like, like what does it, what, what do we need to build? And like, that's the big question. What do we need to build? And what do we need a system like this to work for? We do not need places to store JPEGs. Like that is not a need. If you want to prove that a JPEG existed, stick a hash in something like, you can timestamp all that you want to timestamp. We don't, we don't, we certainly don't need something that does everything. But we need Bitcoin to work as sound money and we need it to be reliable in securing and storing on as many places on as many machines as possible so that there is no singular source of truth, as many versions of the Bitcoin cons of the product of Bitcoin consensus as we possibly can. I'm actually super disappointed about the fact that we don't have a much more people running nodes. And the last thing I want is things to be changed so that people are less inclined or less caring about running nodes. And it just, it just seems totally at, at odds with what the one thing that we actually need Bitcoin to do and it's capitulating to something that not only doesn't matter like in the, in the grand scheme thing as, as in the grand scheme is like a use case, not only is it so inconsequential and stupid to boot, but it doesn't move the needle on anything. It doesn't move the needle on anything that is of consequence.
[01:08:43] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I agree with you Jeff, that it's a lot about culture, but that's still related because I, I personally think a lot of the anxiety and short sightedness and flakiness of culture right now is actually downstream of fiat, you know, so it's like, yeah, it is culture and, but the only way we're going to fix culture is if we get a sound money. There ain't no other way to fix culture.
[01:09:05] Speaker C: I don't, you know, it's interesting and I, I don't know like how far off topic we want to go, but like it's interesting because I've thought that exact same thing. Like, and, and there definitely is a massive correlation between, you know, like the, the decadence of Rome and the Fall, you know, the the collapse of their monetary regime and everything like that. And like, you know, the situation we're in now, like, so it looks like there's a lot of that. But what's, what makes me kind of question some of that and maybe wonder how much propaganda preceding that. Like, so my fiance being from Iran, they have a very, like.
I don't know, I say this, I think her family culture is particularly healthy. So maybe some of what, you know, she's telling me is not, is not.
[01:10:00] Speaker A: It's local.
[01:10:01] Speaker C: She talks about the fact that in Tefron there's like tons of plastic surgery and tons of all these other things that are going on that are like, sound very fiat. So maybe, maybe it's the same thing. It's just they started from a different, you know, like, cultural foundation. And so the degradation has happened in a, maybe a shorter time span and has had different effects.
But it sounds like, you know, they're much more close knit and like, and, and I don't know, some of it may also be a result of like the, the policies that, you know, don't allow women to have the same rights as everybody else. Makes the family like, have to be more close knit and protect each other from the government though, you know, I don't know, but it's just interesting like how, you know, some of what she describes. It doesn't sound like the same patterns have played out like here, like families are not close at all anymore. Like, families are all spread out and, and kind of broken up by the culture divide and by the, the fiat.
[01:11:03] Speaker D: By fiat.
[01:11:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:11:04] Speaker D: Fiat makes both parents have to work.
[01:11:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:11:07] Speaker D: Of course, family can't be closed if both parents have to work by a house.
[01:11:11] Speaker A: Right.
[01:11:11] Speaker C: And, and then, you know, kids are like, schools are daycare and the propaganda machine has your kids from 5 years old or whatever. So. Yeah.
[01:11:20] Speaker D: Yep.
[01:11:21] Speaker A: You want to talk about a couple of good news items?
[01:11:24] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:11:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:11:26] Speaker D: This is weird because I've had such a great, positive bitcoin experience for the past two weeks. And then that news recently is just like, man, I can't, can't classify our whole month away from each other.
[01:11:37] Speaker A: You lose some, you win some. It's just some, just some drama and that. And honestly, I'm not, I think, bitcoin mechanic. I think you're probably more like, this is a disaster or just a disaster. This is a bigger cost than I kind of think it is in the long run. But it's certainly a bad trend in the wrong direction.
It's enough to make me be like, I really should have been running knots.
But I also still think that the NFT market, I think the sensitive dependence.
[01:12:16] Speaker C: On initial conditions is a major factor in all of this. And, and if we lose sight of that, that's a, that's a serious problem.
[01:12:25] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean the bigger game theory that monetary transactions have to out compete data storage transactions in order for the whole thing to work anyway, like that bigger game theory is still in play and I think that's still going to be true. And if, if that comes through in a major way, this kind of stuff won't matter as much. So there is, there is on a bigger perspective a way that it's like probably going to all work out. That's not to say it's a good idea, but I, I think I worry about this stuff a little bit less than maybe mechanic and some other people do.
[01:12:54] Speaker A: You know, it would be great if bitcoin core was working on things to actually aggregate payments together and split up the, the ownership of UTXOs instead of making it easier to stick JPEGs in the chain since that is actually a long term potential concern or philosophical debate about what we should actually stick in the chain. But no, I guess we're just paid spend my bitcoin on this stupid crap. Just, it just really just.
[01:13:24] Speaker B: But this is the thing with boiled frogs, man. It's not, it's not, it's not just pointless melodrama because you have to draw a line somewhere. No one like I used the analogy earlier on the spaces about mass immigration. Like you end, if you want to end up with like London and Paris and you know, Berlin or whatever European capital. Be like, yeah, the most common name here is Muhammad or something. It's like you've literally just replaced the culture entirely. And you, you might not want to do that, but there's never a line where you're like, yeah, I don't want a single person that isn't white and born here like to be. That's. There's no point. You draw the line. It's just at some point you're like, wait, how did this happen? Why is the menu written in Arabic in the McDonald's inside Paris? Like, why is that? When did that happen? And it's just at some point I maintained that if the rot sets in and bitcoin sucks in five or ten years and people go, what happened? You have to point to some watershed moment and go that happened. And to me there is no better example than this because it's one of the many cuts that will happen. But it's just directionality. Yeah, that's all. That's all.
[01:14:36] Speaker A: It's just representative, like.
[01:14:39] Speaker B: It's just, what are the priorities? What is the agenda that is unmasking itself to do things like this?
[01:14:44] Speaker A: That's the thing. What are the priorities?
That's the word I was looking for earlier. What the hell are your priorities?
[01:14:50] Speaker B: It's nodes. Does this make life easier for node runners? Does it help us with this perennial struggle of if you're a bitcoiner, you need to run the software bitcoin, Is this making that more annoying to do or is it helping us? We're being told it helps because these spammers are supposed to voluntarily move from creating fake pub keys and bloating the UTXO set over to Opreturn, which was always supposed to be a friendlier way for spammers to interact with Bitcoin, but we know they're not actually going to do that. And the deeper implication is that if these spammers and core are working together to give them the use cases they want, and there's all sorts of, you know, horse trading going on there, then obviously that has massive implications. And why are they devoting time and energy to accommodating scammers? Why is that a thing? We got other things we need to do in Bitcoin. All of that just means, look at it, look at the direction that we're going in, you know, where it ends up. And you can always just say, oh, well, it's not that much of a big deal to each and every slight degradation of what this thing is. So you just end up with, yeah, no one really runs nodes anymore and you just end up in that landscape where you're decentralized in name only. You're just another crypto. Because nodes aren't really a priority. There are a bunch of ethereum nodes, but it's not really decentralized, is it? Same with all the other cryptos. That's how you go down that path.
[01:16:10] Speaker D: But if you didn't run a node, how would you even know the price of bitcoin?
[01:16:13] Speaker B: Good point. There is no other way I'm aware of.
How did you, like, bootstrap that? Is it like, does it, does it have like an initial price that it had like 15 years ago and you just always move it? Related on that?
[01:16:30] Speaker D: I had to do that originally. Like five years I was doing that. And then a couple years ago I figured out how I could do it without any bootstrapping at all, just based on the, you know, it's not just that people send round numbers of dollars. It's like the proportion between people sending around $100 and people sending around $1,000 is very.
[01:16:52] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:16:53] Speaker D: So, you know, you have about a hundred times less people sending a thousand dollars than people sending a hundred dollars. And all of those proportions, you know, 5 compared to 20, 20 compared to 50, 50 compared to 100. So I, I use all of these relationships that I can. And it's like a glove. It's just like, it just locks in. It's just like, bam.
So I don't even have to give it a price at all. I just.
[01:17:21] Speaker A: That is the algorithm for anybody who doesn't know we're talking about utx, Oracle. And it's the way, it's a way that you can. It's 144 blocks average. Right. So it's like a daily thing. Yeah, yeah. You can literally pull, pull the bitcoin dollar price, the fiat price out of your node without anybody else. And specifically, if somebody else is running that same one, they can pull the exact same, like sovereignly, they can pull the exact same data out of their node and get the exact same price of bitcoin, which is a super, super underappreciated. Like, that's so cool. And I think people just don't, don't appreciate how unbelievably cool that is. Yeah.
[01:18:08] Speaker D: And it, it runs on knots. I mean, I haven't run it yet, but all I'm doing is one, I'm asking bitcoin CLI for the longest chain of blocks. And I'm pretty sure that command is the exact same on knots. Just kind of like get block number, get block hash, get previous block, get block hash. Just that. And then after I get the block hashes for all the blocks I need, I went binary, man. I went like straight reading ones and zeros out of the BLK files out of the blocks database instead of asking for core or knots to like get the block and decode it for me.
So like, I map like the section of the blocks database that I need for the BLK files and I'm just reading straight binary. I'm not even using any libraries, man. Like, there's no PIP install. Like, you run utxo, Oracle, no PIP installs.
God, I hate. I'm pretty sure it's going to work fine on knots.
[01:19:13] Speaker A: Hell yeah.
[01:19:14] Speaker D: But I might need guys to test it.
[01:19:17] Speaker A: I'll, I'll test it and I'll, I'll get. That'll be a great little project with knots. When I Get mine set up. Okay, but I want to say something just because, like, y'all might not know this if y'all hadn't been on socials, but it looks all right. Apparently it's a rumor. The prosecutors are thinking of dropping the case against Samurai.
[01:19:36] Speaker B: Oh, cool.
[01:19:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Hell yeah. And I think this is after like a year and a half now, I think, like, how long has that been going on?
[01:19:48] Speaker C: What's the reason? Does anybody make offers an explanation?
[01:19:52] Speaker A: I think it's just because they don't think they're going to win. Then they don't really have much of a basis because they were never custodians. And, you know, Trump, it could very well be related to the executive order because Trump got rid of the crypto broker rule by executive order, which was the thing that basically implied that if you were writing software that someone else was using to custody Bitcoin, that you were the custodian, that the developer was basically on the hook. And it's exactly what. Because the crypto broker rule, as soon as that got in, that's when Phoenix was like, we're out. That's when Wild. She was like, we're out. Like, everybody, like LSPs started running, you know, fleeing the coupe.
And so that got overturned just with an executive order. And I think. I mean, I. I suspect at least that was probably a decent part of the case. You know, they needed some sort of legal precedent to say Samurai is guilty. And they're, you know, they're running a mixer in their fiduciary. Like, they're controlling other people's coins and all of this stuff so that they have the obligation or the responsibilities of, like, a financial company.
And. And then I also think the defense of, like, their marketing is specific. For marketing, you know, they publish publicly. When Russian oligarchs got banned from the banking system or whatever. They were like, we invite all Russian oligarchs to use Samurai Wallet. But I think there's a. There's a. I think they had a really strong case, too. I mean, somebody who's no jack about legal, that the whole point was to be edgy. And they posted on Twitter, you know what I mean? Like, it's. They're clearly making a statement to get that that's clearly an engagement thing to prove. Like, this is. This is how cool my tool is, is that, you know, it can't be stopped.
[01:21:51] Speaker B: So I'm pretty sure we've covered that on this pod before, probably a while back. There are other, like, better privacy tools made by people that never ended up getting in any sort of trouble. So it seems like the motivation for the authorities was to come after people using aggressive marketing rather than based on the actual nature of the product. Because there's no reason you wouldn't go after Adam Gibson from Join Market. Right. Like Samurai, being the disingenuous clowns that they are, would characterize that as. Oh well that's because they're all, you know, the CIA made Join Market and Wasabi were the only real one when in reality they had the worst implementation there was. So I don't think it was about the product. There was, I know Rodolfo had that theory, you know, it was a honeypot the whole time. And the minute they decided to release it and make it self hostable, it was no longer useful. So that was the moment that they pulled the plug on the whole operation. The timing of that does fit really well. I don't like spreading conspiracy theories like that, except in Samurai's case because that's exactly what they would do to everyone else. So fuck them if you want to live like that. Obviously I hope they get off and I hope they don't get the precedent set by them getting in trouble for running coin joins and all that stuff is ridiculous. And I hope they get off. But the context here, I'm not just going to be mindlessly sympathetic either. And it's not just because of them bashing Ocean and all that stuff. Genuinely they are bad actors. They've been providing a broken service for ages and they've yelled down and destroyed the reputation of anyone that ever tried to bring it up. And that's not okay. So that can't get lost just because they've been mistreated by the US authorities. Exactly the same with Roger Vere. This guy is a scammer. He's done endless attack after attack and he's tried so long and hard but unsuccessfully to undermine and damage Bitcoin. But I still obviously don't want him to be in trouble with the, the, the U.S. government trying to chase after him for this exit tax money. That is completely unjustified. So I'll defend him, but only in that. Only to that degree. And the summary, very narrow. Yeah, Samurai is exactly the same. These guys have been absolute assholes. They've been a blight on the ecosystem forever. And like there's an Ocean donation address for people to mine to that we don't charge fees for. Barely anyone minds to it. I don't think it's even up to a hundred bucks yet. But the Will. And the intention is there to work with them on this injustice and get them out for that. But please do not forgive and forget guys. These guys have been an absolute pain in the ass.
[01:24:32] Speaker A: The whole XPub thing was like, yeah.
[01:24:36] Speaker B: If you bring up that, like, you know, the Chomian blinding where you reveal the XPub to the coordinator is a complete and utter joke. That's you're undoing the whole process and turning it into trust me, bro. And wouldn't it be a terrible thing if your server with all that information with it got confiscated by the authorities? Oh, look, that's exactly what happened the minute you changed the product to be something people could self host again. I don't think they were spooks. They would accuse anyone else of being spooks in that scenario. So live by the sword, die by the sword.
[01:25:11] Speaker C: Even just from the most superficial analysis of the whole thing, if you assume that our lawmakers and enforcers and whatever know so little about bitcoin that the only people they're going to go after are the people that allowed us to make in the most noise. And that was samurai. So. So, like, it's just, it's just the good point.
[01:25:35] Speaker A: They're looking for examples. Yeah.
[01:25:37] Speaker B: Like there were a million dark web markets, right, that they go after Ross Ulbricht because that's the one everyone knows, right? And he's the one with the vindictive punishment. So, yeah, that's a good point.
[01:25:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Ross Ulbrich is actually a great example because like they put like the operators of Silk Road 2 got like two years or something ridiculous like that. Like, it was like nothing. Like it was, it was clear distinction between we are politically motivated and we want to scare people and we want to just destroy this one particular person's life with cruel and unusual punishment just to have an effect on the culture around this, just to. To push people out of building these sorts of tools rather than any sense of justice or even caring about legal fairness or anything.
So.
[01:26:28] Speaker C: Well, with all the craziness of Trump's first hundred days in office, we can still be thankful that Ross is out of prison. Choke point 2.0 was stopped. You know, like there's Bitcoin is like, the US government is not entirely hostile to bitcoin right now. So nobody has to leave the country. So all that's, you know, not terrible.
[01:26:51] Speaker D: Things are still good. Things are still good in the bigger picture, things are still really good.
[01:26:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know about that.
[01:26:59] Speaker A: Does anybody have an opinion?
[01:27:01] Speaker B: I don't know, like, sorry, I just got like the worst message ever. The guy told me not to share. So now I.
I can't even say what I just saw. It just like, came as a gut punch. This is.
[01:27:13] Speaker C: Was it. Was it like a legal policy problem?
[01:27:17] Speaker B: No, it's just. It's. It's just politics.
[01:27:19] Speaker D: Like, yeah, he's banned from core for life. Yeah, it's like you're. You're never allowed to.
[01:27:26] Speaker A: You have a conflict of interest.
There are no other conflicts of interest anywhere in this situation. But because you have Ocean and you are visible about your opinion, you're very public about it, you have a conflict of interest. Therefore, goodbye.
Does anyone have a take on tariffs and how this affects or relates to bitcoin?
[01:27:49] Speaker C: I mean, didn't we do that? I think tariffs are good for bitcoin, no matter. Everything's good for bitcoin. But if businesses can pay people under the table and do things outside of the system, I mean, tariffs incentivize that.
I want to see more black, gray market adoption of bitcoin anyway.
But. But the more like, I think there's a balance because you don't want, like, again, like, if. Choke point 2.0 and some of these things, if. If there's too much hostility all at once, then it makes life very difficult and people like, I might have to leave the country.
[01:28:30] Speaker A: Right.
[01:28:30] Speaker C: Like, we might have to, you know, find somewhere else to live. But if you have this slow, constant pressure of other things that are making life more difficult, then that. I think that incentivizes the adoption of bitcoin and the use of bitcoin to get around the things that are making life more difficult.
And we need lots of slow, constant pressure.
[01:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the idea of character building. Father says you're out of the door. Ten days in the wilderness, survive.
It's that not the molly coddling, bubble boy approach. Like, protect this thing and have favorable treatment and elect politicians that say nice things about bitcoin. It's just not what we need, is it?
[01:29:21] Speaker A: Well, listen, this on a positive note. What do you guys have? Mechanic, let's start with you.
What has happened in the last month that's gotten you, like, hopeful and. Or just that you're. You've been excited about. Is there. Is there any new buzz?
[01:29:42] Speaker B: Um, well, we had Tether say they were going to start mining with Ocean. Had they done that before our last rip here? Or is that like. I don't know.
[01:29:51] Speaker C: I don't know if I've heard.
[01:29:52] Speaker A: I don't remember it, but it vaguely I think I. I feel like maybe we talked about it in a different conversation.
[01:29:58] Speaker B: We. We've spoken about.
[01:29:59] Speaker A: I know, it's awesome.
[01:30:00] Speaker B: We've spoken about Tether a lot, but I don't think with regard to them mining on Ocean and they specifically said it's about datum and the fact that we can make our own templates. And this is congruent with the.
[01:30:10] Speaker A: Oh, you like to configure your own node and what you want in your mempool.
Oh, man. I heard there's some people who don't like that. You want to do that.
[01:30:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Imagine if Tether. The what, like the 7th Rich Tether Company in the world get to decide what goes in their blocks instead of Peter Todd. This is an outrage. This is an outrage, guys.
[01:30:34] Speaker A: Oh, man. Why are you making me defend dollar Stable coins? Oh, my God.
[01:30:38] Speaker B: I don't know. Because they are like, there's a lot of companies in bitcoin and if they all design blocks how they want, that's great.
And if you pay transaction fees, they might even include your transaction too.
[01:30:50] Speaker D: That.
[01:30:51] Speaker B: That's wild west cypherpunk, bitcoin land. I want. It's not. My transaction will get in because, you know, it's permitted by whatever core.
[01:31:01] Speaker A: Core policy says that it will probably get in.
[01:31:04] Speaker B: Oh, gosh. Well, anyway, yeah, that was a big deal. They. They announced that there's. I mean, it helps move the needle because a lot of miners are like, really not very technical. So when they see a big endorsement like Ocean's still less than 1% and they're just like, this is scary. It's not Stratum V2. I don't get it. Someone else will get it and explain it to me. Like, that's kind of how people operate. Right. So when Tether were like, we're going to use this thing. It works. And we came out with our. We found 100 datum blocks now. So this is huge. Right. Because it's not a GitHub solution that never manifests in anything. Like the proof of works there. The blocks exist in the blockchain. Miners can use a pool, which they're always going to want to do, and they can make their own blocks in that context. So that was the dream forever. We've realized it. It's being aggressively undermined by the fact that miners aren't going to be able to meaningfully do anything. But.
Or at least that's the trend. But it's still a win. It's a big win that's being endorsed by you Know, a massive actor that's going to do months of research and due diligence.
And you know, that endorsement helps us with other miners because they're like, okay, tether are saying you're legit. All right, I'll check it out. Like I'll expend, I'll do the mental exertion to actually figure out the implications of doing this.
[01:32:26] Speaker A: Guy Swan said you were legit. I don't understand why that's not enough.
[01:32:30] Speaker B: Well, you're not tether. It seems you need to start printing your own money, bro, before people will really take you seriously.
[01:32:36] Speaker A: Am I just a rando podcaster? Damn it. Is that what happened?
[01:32:41] Speaker B: Steve, you're supposed to listen to 40 hours of podcasts a week, not create them.
All right.
[01:32:52] Speaker D: Well obviously I'm just going to talk about UTX Oracle because I've just been in like, obviously I've been, I've been coding for like eight hours a day for the past like three weeks and it's just been great. Man. I love when I get in these autistic modes. But I've been realizing there's a lot of things about UTX Oracle that are very similar to bitcoin in nature. One, you know how bitcoin uses the self incentivized greediness of miners in order to make like a decentralized product. So UTX Oracle is using the unit bias of individuals and also using the fact that they're using the dollar as their unit of account. It's kind of using those two like whatever. It's just like a property of human nature in order to make a decentralized product. So I think that's super cool.
And also I've been thinking about, you know, how bitcoin is different for everybody on the chain tip. Like everyone has different mempools and everyone gets slightly different orphan blocks, but as you, as you get out six blocks, you know, the more and more, the more firm it is. That is, I've realized that's the same thing with UTX Oracle. So like the price of UTX Oracle in the mempool is, is very kind of maybe different for different people. But if you go to a daily average, and especially if you go to a weekly average, that thing is like a consensus price. Like that's, that's going to be record written in the record book. Like there's absolutely, that's immutable data right there. So I'm just getting more and more pumped about how much UTX Oracle mimics a lot of the philosophical properties of Bitcoin.
So, yeah, I've had my head in the sand for the past month. I'm not looking at other news, man. I'm just building right now.
[01:34:57] Speaker C: And when UTX Oracle breaks, it'll be when bitcoin wins. So. So when. When the dollar. That's right, exactly.
[01:35:04] Speaker A: That'll be the. That'll be a beautiful moment.
[01:35:06] Speaker D: I want it to happen, but you guys aren't seeing the trends, man. If you look over the past eight years, the dollar imprint on bitcoin has gotten stronger and stronger every month.
[01:35:17] Speaker C: Yeah, it'll definitely still.
[01:35:18] Speaker A: It'll be 20, 30 years. It'll be a long time.
[01:35:20] Speaker D: Yeah, it'll be a long time. Yeah.
[01:35:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Jeff, what about you, man?
[01:35:25] Speaker C: I don't know, man. I hadn't been paying attention to anything either. I've been.
[01:35:28] Speaker A: Well, what have you been doing in life?
[01:35:30] Speaker C: Cutting trees and reshaping. Reshaping the yard. And I rented a tractor for a week and dug out a bunch of roots and finished. Finished shaping. Like, my yard actually looks like a yard now. There's no grass. I just planted grass. So hopefully in a week there'll be some.
And then. And right now I've got both the tracks fell off of my excavator, so I've got. I was trying, like, the Chinese excavators don't turn well. And. And I was carrying. I'm carrying a bunch of limbs back and forth and I had to, like, turn a corner and I did not. I was getting lazy and was turning it sharper than I should have. And. And then I thought, well, like, one track came off a little bit and I was like, oh, it's not any worse than it has been before. So I thought I could like, back up and get it back on track. And I managed to knock the other one off in the process of trying to do that.
So I've got it lifted up. And it was harder to put on this time than I remember them. It's been a while since I've knocked them off and it's harder to put on this time than I remember. So I took off. In my annoyance, I took off. There's like an alignment wheel on top that I can take off and it kind of makes more space. And then. And then I took off the wheel at the bottom so that I can hopefully 3D model the wheel itself and see if I can find a replacement. Either modify them with, like, plates on either side or find a replacement that is.
It's got like one, basically one rib in the middle. The track rides on and if it had three ribs it would be much less likely to come off. And if you look at a lot of like Takauchi and a lot of the other like excavators, that's what they have. And so I'm hoping that I can find a replacement wheel that's not too expensive and get some of those.
[01:37:31] Speaker A: Building a family and building a house or building a house to build a family.
That's bullish bitcoiner stuff.
[01:37:38] Speaker C: It is, it is 100% and proof of work.
[01:37:41] Speaker A: You got to do it yourself.
[01:37:42] Speaker C: And I'm 99 sure. I mean I haven't tested it yet but I'm 99 sure that I figured out a way to build a, a wall, a privacy fence out of cast concrete that is going to save me like 40 grand. Put up fences and it's going to save, it's going to save a ton of money and it's actually not going to be that difficult to do. So we'll see if that pans out. But, but I'm pretty excited about it, so.
[01:38:11] Speaker A: Hell yeah. Hell yeah.
So what I've been up to last month I'm, I'm really stoked about. In fact I'll be sending the offer today but we kind of worked out a bunch of the details in the last two days. But I think we're going to be working on our first project or commissioning a first project built on top of paradrive Core and it's still, still not released. We're still not like public or anything.
And maybe that's just because I'm super picky about it and I just hate the idea of sending out something that's got bugs in it or is going to be problems, gonna have problems. But we are, we are getting to the point where because this is like the kind of beauty of what we, what we hope we've done with paradrive Core is just making something this dumb, easy to build on top of and makes peer to peer networking stuff intuitive because you know there's, there's some decent tools out there. Everybody was talking about like telling me to use sync thing and oh God, sync thing man, I, I hadn't tried it in a long time and then went to set it up and I just not realizing that like the experience of the user is this like that is the thing to solve. It's like if you have an interesting technical solution that's cool but if the user cannot use it in the way that that technical solution makes great, like makes it interesting then you didn't really solve the problem for the user. You just solved the technical problem that could make the actual solution viable.
And I could not. I could. I spent like 15 minutes and I just, like, had to set it aside because it was just being. It was just being a pain. I couldn't even. They didn't even have an iOS thing. Apparently there's like a Mobius app or whatever that's like the unofficial sync thing app. But I didn't even figure that out until afterward because, like, there's nothing to show that. That's like, I had to just dig into stuff. Conversations on, like, the Internet to figure that out.
[01:40:28] Speaker C: But in that sense. In that sense, isn't hyperdrive is a. As a solution to your. To your problem? Why don't you.
[01:40:34] Speaker A: Exactly, Exactly. Why don't I just use hyperdrive? Well, I am, but I'm building a way to make that not suck to use.
But, yeah, it's gonna. It's kind of cool because it wasn't actually the.
What we're using it for. It's gonna be a game. It's gonna be a game built like, peer to peer.
And it's just kind of funny because I think we think it's gonna be, like, really, really useful.
[01:40:58] Speaker C: Can we talk about the game?
[01:41:04] Speaker A: No, no, not until. This is going to be a short. This will be a short run, like, to actually get to a product at the end of this because we've done two years of legwork to make this easy to do. So that one will have. That one will be public soon. But I don't want to talk about it before anything has happened on it, you know, but it's just cool. It's cool to get to that point.
And I'm also working on the studio and stuff. I don't know. I've been. I've been super bullish about stuff lately. Things are.
I feel like what I'm building is actually going to be cool. Like, it's actually going to be, like, really awesome and people will use it. So we'll see. Maybe I'm naive, stupid. I've just wasted. I've wasted a bunch of money, but I don't care. I'm going to try it, do something, you know? All right, well, guys, thank you for joining me. Hey, we did pretty good on a live show, right? We didn't screw up too bad. We only talked about, like. And there's no echo. There's no echo. Look at that. We only had mic problems for, like, the first five minutes of the show. And I'm Sure. It was super interesting to everybody who was hanging out on Twitter. And I bet they stayed. I bet they stayed and listened.
[01:42:11] Speaker B: Dude, the Twitter's got like 4,000 people listening right now.
[01:42:16] Speaker C: That's awesome.
[01:42:18] Speaker A: That's true. That's all the thoughts. That's all the. That's all the only fans girls that just retweet my stuff every time. Every time I post something. There's three. There's three only fans girls.
[01:42:31] Speaker B: And the bots are really bad on Twitter lately.
[01:42:36] Speaker D: What just happened? Did utx, Oracle just.
[01:42:39] Speaker A: Just chat? Oh, my God.
[01:42:42] Speaker D: Oh my goodness. How did that happen?
[01:42:45] Speaker A: Are you gonna show me a pretty chart? Show me a pretty chart.
[01:42:47] Speaker D: I gotta show you guys a demo real quick. It'll only a second.
[01:42:50] Speaker A: Okay, do a demo while we're waiting, we'll talk about BitKit and the best on Chain and Lightning Wallet that you cannot publish JPEGs through on the blockchain because that would be a stupid thing to put in BitKit and nobody wants to do that.
But Jeffrey, have you actually used.
Did you start using bitkit yet?
[01:43:12] Speaker C: I haven't used it since some of the. Like, I used it very early on and used it for a while and then. And then I think he re. It was something to do with like when the Lightning support was taken away.
[01:43:25] Speaker A: They left the U.S. see, I just put my VPN on. I just put my VPN on Switzerland. And I didn't even stop. Like, I just. I just kept going with it.
[01:43:32] Speaker C: I didn't know that there was any. There was actually a solution to it. I just.
[01:43:35] Speaker A: Oh yeah, it is not hard at all.
[01:43:38] Speaker C: I was having some sort of. Like, I had some sort of technical issue and it was still just kind of slow to open and. And like, And I was using. I can't remember what I was using in place of it, but I don't know. Now I'm mostly using aqua, so I haven't like, I'm not using. I'm also not using the.
[01:43:56] Speaker A: I use aqua too. I like. I like liquid people on liquid, but I really.
[01:44:00] Speaker C: I like liquid.
[01:44:01] Speaker A: Misty Bree. Misty Breeze is using liquid too. I don't like. I don't hate it. Like, I mean, I. I get that there's a trade off, obviously, but I don't know, it's. It's still. It's underappreciated in my opinion.
[01:44:13] Speaker C: But you know, my use of Bitcoin has been slightly lower in the last, like.
I mean, some of it's because of like, loans and stuff. Like, I've actually had cash I don't normally have.
And so my interactions have been a little bit slower paced, and so that's kind of changed some of it. But I'm getting.
I've gotta, like, I'm gonna re. I'm gonna update my. My start nine and get everything. Get everything, like, revamped really quick here. So.
[01:44:51] Speaker A: Dude, I need to make some changes to my multi sig stuff. Super bad.
[01:44:54] Speaker C: Start running knots.
[01:44:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
I've got so many wallets.
[01:44:58] Speaker B: Friends don't let friends run. Core, man. Bitcoin core. Bitcoin core is the ledger nano of bitcoin implementations.
[01:45:09] Speaker A: Oh, my God. That's kind of accurate a little bit. I'm not even hating on that.
[01:45:16] Speaker B: Dude.
[01:45:17] Speaker A: Ledger, man. That's some.
[01:45:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I think we finally. We finally got. I got everything off of dad's ledger. Yeah, our dad had had a ledger that. We had a little bit of bitcoin on it, and I got everything off of that.
[01:45:31] Speaker A: And we sent our last update to government.
[01:45:36] Speaker C: We didn't start it, but we. We put it in a drawer where it is. It is archived.
[01:45:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I haven't thrown any away, any of my wallets. Even, like, the really bad ones. Like, I have the ballet, like, the. The metal, like, ballet card where they, like, literally make the key and then they stick it on the card and they're like, put bitcoin on this.
Sorry, brother, I ain't doing that. But I've got it as, like, a great example of, like, don't be stupid. Don't be stupid in bitcoin.
All right, Steve, where's our thing? I was trying to give you a moment.
[01:46:15] Speaker D: Yeah, we'll see if this works. I'm trying to join right now, but Riverside's kind of using up a little bit of my processing. But we'll see if it'll let me share my screen.
[01:46:28] Speaker A: What's our demo for?
[01:46:31] Speaker D: Well, because this is like this thing, the beta release of the visualizer. I've noticed that people don't really take this thing seriously until they actually see all the points, until they actually visualize the graph coming from their node, and then once they see that, then it's real.
But, yeah, I don't know if it's not, is it?
[01:47:01] Speaker A: Join us next time on the Round Table.
[01:47:03] Speaker D: Yeah, we might have to do it next time. Yeah.
[01:47:06] Speaker A: All right, so everybody subscribe to Bitcoin Audible and follow guys, Juan on Twitter and Insta Something. All right. All right, guys, thank you so much for the drama. And that. That is. That is a little sad, but it gives us. It Gives us something to do. We'll get on the schedule and I'll catch you guys next next month.
[01:47:26] Speaker D: All right, see y'all next time.
[01:47:27] Speaker A: Peace, guys.
[01:47:28] Speaker C: That was fun.
[01:47:33] Speaker A: All right, that wraps us up. I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. And again, for those who really kind of want the entire play by play as to what's going on with the whole drama, I will try to do my best to pull together. I think I've found some really good threads on both sides of people trying to explain the justification and the reasoning behind the opera turn. And we'll talk about that issue largely outside of talking about the drama, which I think is really about the GitHub being shut down and trying to push this through, even though it is very contentious and people don't understand, which I just think is sowing a lot of distrust and is just not a good look. But regardless, I also want to break down the technical issue so that you at least have some sort of picture in your head. And I'll try to do my best to steel man the other side. And if there still feels like we need to be another episode about this or we talk about it with somebody, let me know if you want me to have somebody on the show or you're interested in, you know, some piece of this to discuss because I'm happy to explore. Don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors, the Human Rights foundation and their Financial Freedom Report. You can sign up their newsletter just down in the show notes and then the Bitkit wallet for a non custodial bitcoin on chain and lightning. And it's just set up as this is my savings and this is my spending account and it just, it just works when you move it between them. It's pretty dope. So check that out. Details are right down in the show notes, links, all the goodies and with that we will wrap it up. Thank you guys so much for listening. Do not forget to share this out. Subscribe so that we got a lot going on and I am happy. I love when people ask me questions because it gives me a focus, it gives me a perspective to tackle some explanation or show from. So if you want to ask me any questions you want to DM me or boost me on, just pay this like a little zap and fountain so that you can post a comment. I try to check that pretty regularly. I try to check my twitter and nostr as well. If you tag me and you're curious about something and you want to hear a show about something, I would love that helps me. That is a huge help for me, as well as great reads and all of that stuff. So always hit me up. I'm around. You can find me eventually. And until then, don't forget to subscribe. Share it with everybody you know in the bitcoin. I'm feeling hella bullish right now, man. I'm feeling like things are moving. The foundation. The foundation is rising. So I got some really fun stuff that I want to talk about. So we got some great episodes coming up. And until then, everybody, I am Guy Swan, and that is my two sets.
