Roundtable_012 - Lightning UX, Miniscript Magic, and the Mempool Mess

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What is up, guys? Welcome back to the show. This is bitcoin audible and I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we've got the roundtable back in action today. Myself, Bitcoin mechanic, Simple Steve or Steve uses words. I think he's simple Steve now. And then my brother Jeff, we are getting together and talking about a whole bunch of stuff that has happened. Some things that have happened in mining. Of course we end up going into the drama of the whole filters and everything. And actually mechanic went and I went back and forth because I still disagree with him actually on one very specific thing about the severity and the existentialism. And then also we kind of covered a few really just kind of two arguments that I think the ones that get to me because I think they're the worst arguments from the opposing camp and I think there are really good arguments from the opposing camp. I don't really caveat it very well until later on in the conversation because and I don't want it to seem like I'm being unfair because again, like I'm not trying. I don't have any interest in losing friends or having a beef with other bitcoiners over this issue. But the number of people who are taking this to that level is a little bit. It's just frustrating. But you know, that's just kind of how bitcoiners roll. Every. Even. Even the fights about the tiniest little things, seemingly insignificant decisions, end up being super vicious because of how much everyone cares about bitcoin. I think that's what it's an indication of. But there is a lot going on and a lot to cover and I try to actually hit like a bunch of different bullet points and go through a bunch of different things. And then we just kind of generally talk about anything in the set of news items that we cover so that we can actually get through all of it and really only need to cover kind of dig into the things that we are actually interested in. So get ready. This is going to be a fun episode. I hope you guys enjoy it. Don't forget a shout out to Leden for bitcoin backed loans. If you don't want to sell your bitcoin and you don't want to pay capital gains, you can actually loan securely against your bitcoin. Check them out at LEDN IO and I've actually got a little special link that will get you a little bit of a discount, which is really nice. And if you are ever choosing a company to do this with. Go for boring, go for simple, go for what works, go for open books every month, go for proof of reserves. You want boring? The more they're offering, the more features, probably the more likely you want to stay away. Also check out synonym and the incredible stack of technologies that they are building for a new decentralized web. And to kind of see it in action, you can go to pub key P U B K Y dot app. I am up there and I also have my pub key so that you can follow me or shoot me a message or something. And then there is Git Chroma making light for humans. I have really been enjoying my Skylight mini because it's actually battery powered so I can kind of take it around with me, which is kind of funny because it's not actually within reach right now because I have been using it elsewhere, but it lets me swap between full amber light or full daylight. It wasn't the one that I was expecting to get the most use out of, but I've actually liked it a whole lot. And you get a 10% discount with code. Bitcoin, audible. And then last, the HRF, their Oslo Freedom Forum, the center for the conversation and to share the stories and the tools for freedom around the world as well as their financial freedom report, which you've all obviously heard me talk about. And I find a one of the most irreplaceable resources for knowing what's going on around financial freedom, inflation, CBDCs, repression and then the tools to. To counter all of those things all around the world. You'll find links, discounts, all of that down right in the show notes. And so with that, let's get into today's episode. This is roundtable number 12, lightning UX miniscript magic and the Mempool Mess with Guy's Roundtable. All right, let's go. What is. What roundtable is this? Are we on 12? Is this 12? Is this like our year end one? Or did we hit a year last night? Because that's pretty dope. [00:04:28] Speaker B: We missed been a year last time. It had been a year, but it was. [00:04:31] Speaker A: We missed them. Hell yeah. The round table. We are back. Lots of fun stuff to cover. In fact, you know, because Steve, Steve talked a lot about like the pains of the Lightning Network. One of my first ones actually in this list is about the pains of the Lightning Network. So we'll probably get a good little rant from Steve and I'm over it. I'm good now. [00:04:54] Speaker C: I'm fine. [00:04:57] Speaker A: Just a general. How's Everybody doing what's up, guys? Steve, how you doing? You looking sharp. [00:05:02] Speaker C: Thanks, man. You know, celebrity now, so I got to change my hairstyle every once in a while. [00:05:07] Speaker A: Also gotta get that LinkedIn picture. [00:05:10] Speaker C: I got the best night's sleep I got in like a year last night because I slept in, like, a tent in the middle of the woods. So, like, all my circadian natural rhythms, I'm all, like, synced up with the crickets and everything. Like, my. My brain. My brain's hormones used to be synchronized with the blockchain, like, difficulty adjustment and stuff. And I've, like. I've resynced to nature, so I'm good to go, man. [00:05:37] Speaker D: Well done on that. Congrats on that. [00:05:42] Speaker A: Mechanic updates. What do we got, man? [00:05:45] Speaker D: Yeah, you know, I'm good. There's, like, joy and pain going on in. And harmony, you know, the way life does. So I'm, like, miserable in the trenches fighting the spam war because, you know, in my opinion, bitcoin core has gone rogue and they're ripping out tools that no people clearly want because why would you. This appears to be broken game theory. If the concerns they're levying at us about mining centralization and block propagation and stuff like that are true, and we need nodes to altruistically relay as much junk as miners feel like putting in the chain in order for bitcoin to work right, then we have a problem because clearly a lot of bitcoiners don't want to relay this crap, and they're not going to. We're up to 18% now that are saying screw this. Wow, 18. [00:06:34] Speaker A: Now that's dope. Yeah, I didn't realize. [00:06:37] Speaker D: Yeah, it is. [00:06:38] Speaker A: And that's a. That's a steady climb. [00:06:41] Speaker D: It's a lot. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Awesome. [00:06:42] Speaker D: And it continues to increase because core are just not the old guard. Like, it's not like Sipper and Greg have commented on this stuff, but they're not in the role they used to be in. Vladimir and Jonah Schnelli have both retired, and they were the two old guard that were keeping things on track. It's not. It's younger developers that are, you know, less able to see the wider context of this whole thing and kind of walked into it later, and they just don't have the same vision. And that's just clearly true. And there's a lot of group think and a lot of politics and a lot of pressure. So people get scared and they stay within their little cliques rather than just be balls out in public with it. So there's all that context for it. But really, if they're asserting that bitcoin ain't working right, then unless nodes become altruistic, take one for the team and just become, you know, generic relays of arbitrary data, that's not. There's no future with that. And even if they're right, I just. I'm like, well, then bitcoin isn't going to work long term. So anyway, how am I doing? There's that. That's what I'm mired in. But my other half has been working on Bitcoin Valley. Bitcoin Comox Valley. And that's been great. We've just been onboarding merchants in my little town and everyone takes bitcoin. So I can go around this town and just buy food or buy, you know, get stuff printed from the office supply store or, you know, there's a tree surgeon that takes it. There's a couple of naturopaths that take it. There's like at least two massage therapists like that take it. So this is great. And that's like what the joy in bitcoin is. [00:08:20] Speaker A: What are they used to accept? [00:08:21] Speaker D: So it depends, like when I do it, because there's a whole bunch of us bitcoiners in this town when I do it, I usually onboard people to moon and the fly in the ointment with that is if they accept lightning, then it costs way more than the point of lightning exists to counter. [00:08:41] Speaker A: Obfuscate. Counter. Yeah. [00:08:45] Speaker D: But we're working on a white label of coinos. COINOS IO is this cool thing a guy made that just. It's like the most unscalable but beautifully practical way to onboard someone in bitcoin possible. It's just like. It's like two buttons. You go on COINOS IO not sponsored, by the way. I just like this product. It's not what. It's one of the few ways ocean miners can get paid out over lightning as well. Because it supports bolt 12. It's super custom. [00:09:12] Speaker A: I love coin OS. [00:09:14] Speaker D: Yeah, me too. [00:09:14] Speaker A: They do. They do a fantastic job. [00:09:16] Speaker D: Yeah. For me, I'm just like, if you're going to not run a freaking highly available cluster of nodes on Proxmon with a failover to a virtual private server and all that stuff. Then the other extreme, I'm like, just use coinos. I hate everything in the middle. I'm just do it completely right. Run 15 bitcoin nodes all at different versions of knots and core or whatever. And then I need you to do that or I need you to just run coinostas. Like, just complete opposite. I don't want any halfway house. No electrum. Like, no. Like, I just want you to do it properly or not at all. So it's been great fun onboarding people, and it's been miserable fighting, you know, core devs. I'll get more into, like, some of the. The arguments and the drama and stuff as we go on, because that's all I can really think about at the moment. It's an existential problem for Bitcoin right now, what's going on? So, you know, I can't think about much else. And I'll. I'll end my intro there. [00:10:16] Speaker A: Jeff, what's up, man? [00:10:18] Speaker B: Hey. I'm doing. I'm doing good. Lots of immigration. [00:10:26] Speaker A: And. [00:10:29] Speaker B: It looks like we are going to Brazil, and. [00:10:36] Speaker A: That. [00:10:37] Speaker B: Is, like, a whole weird thing because you have to, like, know when you're gonna go and where you're gonna stay and, like, have your flight scheduled and everything before you get approval to go. And it takes, you know, like, weeks or months to get approval to go. So it's just like a weird, you know, like, oh, I gotta just throw a whole bunch of money at a whole bunch of people and, you know, hope that this is gonna work. And. And then on top of that, I'm still, you know, trying to. I mean, like, I don't know. I got to get a FBI background check. Hopefully that's, you know, we'll see how that goes. [00:11:15] Speaker A: You're screwed. [00:11:15] Speaker B: And. [00:11:19] Speaker A: You see what this guy's Twitter page looks like. Jesus Christ. [00:11:23] Speaker B: My Twitter page? I mean, it's not. It's been inactive for. For a few years, so maybe. Maybe that one is not as much of a problem. [00:11:30] Speaker A: Maybe he came to his senses. Yeah, maybe they're gonna contact your FBI guy that just spies on you all the time. He's gonna be like, nah, man. Yeah, nah, nah. [00:11:42] Speaker B: But, yeah, I mean, you know, it looks like we might be getting out of this Canadian closet before the winter gets too crazy, so. So that's good. This is something anyway. [00:11:56] Speaker A: Something. Well, first off, Pear Drive is going really well. I keep thinking we're, like, two days away, but then we, like, run into something that kind of forces us to make. Like, we just recently made weeks. [00:12:07] Speaker B: It's always two weeks. Tm. [00:12:09] Speaker A: Yeah, we kind of made a big change. It wasn't. It wasn't like, a big change, but it was. It was enough of a change that it was a. It was a little bit of a step back, but it allowed us literally to take Two steps forward to the point that um, I mean like I said before the show is that I've just been, I've just been using it to download stuff like crazy. We don't have any of the, the storage bloat or the, the kind of duplicate of like making hyperdrives for everything. It just, it's just really, really seamless. And I also see like a very, very short path finally to a lot of other things like turning what is currently filed downloads. Like I just want this whole file what percent. You know, I got download progress and verification, all that stuff. But give me just these blocks at just this piece of the video so that I can scrub through it and stream the video off of a computer and give me like the next 10 megabytes from dot block height or block length or whatever this. So I, I think the, I think a couple of very recent decisions and changes we've made are going to make the next, next version much easier to start adding some features on. And I think we're, we, we just uploaded to NPM today. It's private, but I'm going to be able to do just NPM install now. So we have paradrive core, like even if it's not like totally working exactly how I want. I think like we're, we're like dumb close to open sourcing now. I don't know. I'm not even giving a date now. I'm done. I'm done with that. [00:13:49] Speaker B: Two weeks. [00:13:50] Speaker A: Two weeks tm. [00:13:51] Speaker D: I'm done with ever believing any EST moments in software development ever. [00:13:56] Speaker A: No, it's, it's all, it's all a scam. So there's that. The other thing though is that Pear Drive has taken a lot more of my direct attention. And then also I think the website is going to. And I made a decision in the last like three or four days. [00:14:13] Speaker B: I'm. [00:14:14] Speaker A: I'm dropping audiobooks. [00:14:16] Speaker D: Is Pear Drive like a way for people to collaboratively, you know, like an icloud substitute kind of thing? [00:14:22] Speaker A: It's, it's. Yeah, it's icloud without Apple. [00:14:26] Speaker D: Does it have an option for not encrypting the stuff I upload there? [00:14:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, like, like making it public. [00:14:35] Speaker D: Like the issue I have with cloud storage always is when I'm trying to make backups, they're already encrypted and I just want them plain text stored on Gmail. I don't want Google to encrypt my stuff for me. It's not like I would trust that anyway. And it slows it down like 90% of the speed is gone because it has to encrypt it as it uploads it, which takes forever. And encrypting stuff over and over again can ultimately just lead to stuff you can never actually recover. That's not like super well known, but if you encrypt a thing with one algo, then another algo, you can often just get in a place where you can't get the original file back. So like it's, it's a bad idea. Obviously. I'm not going to upload like plain text backups of my most important data to frigging, you know, Microsoft OneDrive or some horrific abomination like that. [00:15:23] Speaker A: Like, well, it's encrypted during delivery kind of in the same way that like ssl, that's fine is encrypted, but just because you're, you're doing it over the network. But other than that, no, it's just, it's just the file on one computer and then delivered on another computer. I do intend to have a. There'll be like the normal pair drive and then there'll be like the secure drive that will be about sending sensitive information and we'll have a lot of fail safes and kind of like, are you sure you're adding new peers to this? Do you realize, you know, kind of thing just to treat it far more sensitively. But no, we want, we want open networks like, like, so you can have like kind of a public broadcast and then like the file is just on your one device and you just want it on the other device, you know, um, and that, that's really, that's really the goal. Um, but I am also pulling back away from audiobooks and I haven't told a couple people that I'm doing this yet. Um, which is sad because I, I've been, I've been, I've loved audiobooks and I really love what I get out of them. But they, I've also just come to realize that they are far and away the largest cost in time and resources on my side. Lowest return and the lowest return, without a doubt. And they've taken away from like, I can't do any of the videos, any of the writing and any of the story stuff that I've been slowly getting into. I'm just realizing I'll never be able to really pay attention to those things if I'm always, if I've always got three audiobooks on my back. So I will be shutting that down for the foreseeable. Future and probably turning down a few projects that I showed interest in, which is going to be sad news for people, but I think it's the right thing to do. I. I'm just. My time is. My time is spent and I gotta. I gotta get some of it back. And that's the place where it makes sense, I think so. [00:17:22] Speaker C: That sucks, man. I really like the. The voices that you did. [00:17:27] Speaker A: I appreciate that. I. I really wanted to get into fiction. I really like. Lynn was giving me and her dude the book so far is like really interesting. I'm. I'm kind of into it, but she has her new sci fi and she gave me first. First run on it and I even did like half of the. I don't know, I'm not even sure exactly how much, but I recorded part of the first chapter. And I love like doing the voices and like the voice acting like. I love like really getting into it. But that degree of audiobook is actually more detailed. Makes it even more. More difficult. It just. There's more editing involved. It's just way more. And when I realized I was going to turn down Lynn Alden's next book, I was like, that means I'm turning them all down, you know? So that was that. But I. I'm not going to take it off the table indefinitely just because, I don't know, I just. If I have the time and I'm not doing anything else. I still love to do an audio book, but it's not going to be a formal part of what I'm doing for a while. I think at least for good reasons. It's because I've got a crap ton of other stuff to work on. All right, let's hit the news. Let's hit the news. It sucks that Steve's over this because he's going to be. He's going to. [00:18:46] Speaker D: I'm kidding, man. [00:18:47] Speaker A: I'm going to make him not over this. [00:18:49] Speaker C: I'm like the biggest fan of lightning ever now. [00:18:52] Speaker A: Man. [00:18:54] Speaker C: Had a change of heart. [00:18:56] Speaker A: Okay, so let's hit some business news. So reli or relay the R, E, L A I. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. [00:19:06] Speaker D: Real AI Relay. [00:19:08] Speaker A: I. No, it's. I think it's relay. I think it's just supposed to be relay, but I could be wrong, but they discontinued Lightning Network because of a low user adoption and technical issues. They did a Twitter post. Apparently 5% of their active users tried lightning. And like, literally half of them had some sort of a technical problem. [00:19:31] Speaker D: Oh, man, that's so disappointing. [00:19:33] Speaker A: But part of it was poor integration quality. Some are saying, I think it's probably, you know, all the things that we've talked about is this invoice wasn't supported, this standard wasn't, you know, like if you don't kind of like mechanic what you're saying, if you don't go full in and just go all the way to the end, which is still going to have problems is it's, it just, you're not gonna have a good time. But they did add Taproot support. Then Bitbit launches self custodial tipping on X powered by Spark. So I saw this and I still don't understand how it is. I, I, I couldn't figure out, I didn't go deep enough to figure out how to like get it, but it apparently works. You can do it now and you can tip people's usernames. [00:20:25] Speaker B: And self custodial. [00:20:27] Speaker A: I don't, I, I don't, I don't, I'm telling you, I don't get it. I don't get it yet. And I'm questionable on some of the claims that they have because of that. But according to the article and some of the things that were posted, this is what it is. It's self custodial tipping on X. It's powered by Spark. So Spark is the, it's basically like an LSP and a. Then they have like a SDK. It's a little bit like breeze in that way you can tip to people's usernames and there's a, it says 21 day wallet creation window. So I think maybe the tip goes back or it expires or something like that. Like it's like held in a thing. Again, questionable on claims here, but at least it's really interesting that you know, you can tip on a traditional social media. Then PayPal enabled US merchants to accept Bitcoin and 100 plus cryptocurrencies via PayPal's online payments platform for transactions. So fees are 1% basically for the first year and 1.5% in year two. And it's converted to PayPal, stablecoin, PayPal, USD P YUSD, then to USD and then finally sent to the merchant. So that is what it is gross pretty much. Of course PayPal as a freaking stable coin now middleman. But any, anything on that? We've got, we've got three more in this category but any thoughts on any of those? Steve, I'm curious. [00:22:10] Speaker C: I'm, I'm super excited that yeah. For Square to integrate Lightning Checkout with their point of sale system. I like that because it gives kind of a default or kind of a. What do you call it? Like, everyone kind of agrees. [00:22:30] Speaker B: Selling point. [00:22:31] Speaker C: Yeah. There's just so many formats and different wallets default to different formats. Like when I was buying food from a food truck at the Honey Badger conference, I could pay those invoices with Aqua or Phoenix, but I could not pay those invoices with Cash app because just whatever. Like the. And it wasn't a lightning channel issue. It was a. It's a wallet, you know, QR format code or whatever. Lightning address format. So it's like, like we can have all of these special ones, but like there has to be one that works and that one has to be the default one. [00:23:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:12] Speaker B: If something, Somebody as big as. If somebody as big as square, like just starts using lightning, then everybody's going to be like, okay, well, we have to at least work with square, otherwise, you know. [00:23:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:24] Speaker B: So that, that will. That's not a bad thing. [00:23:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, and I'm just looking at things from retail, point of sale, checkout environment. Like, I know lightning works really well for like sending it over the Internet to your friend and, and stuff like that. Like, I. I know lightning works great for that stuff, especially if you're running your own node. [00:23:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:23:46] Speaker D: All about running your own node. Did we do the START OS clearnet stuff yet, like in the last show, or have I just been doing that in our group chat? [00:23:57] Speaker A: We've been doing that in our group chat. What's the status of that? [00:23:59] Speaker D: It's still in alpha. It's been like seven weeks since a new release of Alpha. Like, they're ridiculous with the timeline. Like they, they have like, just made me give up on any sort of software release timeline ever. It's just. But I mean, it's. It's really. [00:24:15] Speaker A: That's exactly how I feel about Pear Drive. I was ready in January. I was like, this is happening. This is happening. It's. It's September. It's. The August is over. It's September. Basically it will be in two days. [00:24:27] Speaker D: When we were going to release Datum. You know, Ocean's ability for miners to solo mine but just use a third party reward coordinator. It was. That was like August last year. And I was like, I'm going to package this up for Start os. And they're like, package it up for the new version that's coming out in like a couple of days. A couple of days, dude. They said September. And I was like, I don't believe you. I'm going to package it up for the old version even though it's going to be clunky because it doesn't have like IP port stuff. That was a year ago and it's still, it's not even in beta, it's in alpha. But it's that good that it's going to be a game changer when it comes anyway. They're like the best at software and the worst company I've ever met for like timeline prediction. [00:25:10] Speaker A: But dude, Start, that is, that is one thing I will caveat is Start nine makes incredible stuff. Like I love my node, everything that I use on it works like I've been amazed and the fact that they release it to work and it's actually like I feel like it's secure and it's been tested and you know, they did their due diligence. But you were right, it's going to be a year and a half after they tell you it will be available. [00:25:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean where's the router? Is it. Did we paid. [00:25:44] Speaker A: I paid for a router. I already bought a router. I don't know where it is. [00:25:47] Speaker D: Yeah, I bought a Ubiquiti router in the, in the meantime and I'm enjoying that. I don't know about the Startos router. I think that's a 2026 story. They're like, they're not, they're not doing probably. [00:26:00] Speaker A: I don't care, I'll just, I'll wait for it regardless. [00:26:02] Speaker D: Here's how I want it, here's how it shakes out. So there are two methods for clearnet on Start OS and they're. I've only used one of them so far and that's the port forwarding method. Basically you go and buy a domain. Then if your Start OS machine is on your home Internet, you have to get dynamic DNS because your IP address is going to keep changing which means you can't use it as a server. Dynamic DNS basically is a service where that gives you a domain name with and with the ability to keep having its IP updated by your router at home, which says hey, our IP just changed and it tells the DDNS server what that new IP is. Then you buy another domain and that can be like guy swan.com or whatever you want it to be. And you, you set up a records and cname records for that to point to the DDNS domain. That's all you have to do. Then you go into the Start OS machine. Well, you go on your Home network. You forward port 443 to your start OS box and any like bespoke port for like 8333 for Bitcoin for example, or like 4 whatever for lightning. And then you just go to those services and you go to the clearnet section and you just add a domain. So if you want your Lightning available over Clearnet you would just use a subdomain and you would add like lnd.guyswan.com with the port appended and then it just shows you a QR code for it. You take Zeus Wallet or whatever, scan it and it just connects to it from anywhere over the public Internet at that point. Like it works like a literal service you'd use from a, from a like third party big data platform. It works that well. So like I open Zeus now and it's like you know, less than two seconds, pow, right there. Pay a payment less than one second. There's no like tour or trying to tunnel into my home network with a VPN and stuff like being weird. No, I'm just using clearnet now. That's amazing. And it's great. Like I have my own search engine hosted and all that. And it just works on my laptop from anywhere on any network. Like a real self hosted dream, right? Without having to use tailscale or any of that. Then they have this other method which is the router in a sky method. It's really, really complicated but they've obfuscated all the complication with one script. So you just go in and you, you have to buy a VPS for this. So like Amazon web server or you know, Azure or DigitalOcean or something like that. You set up SSH for it. Then you tell the Start OS box what the SSH credentials are and you run a script and it turns that into a router in the sky. So then you don't need to forward ports or set up dynamic DNS or anything like that. You just have it sitting there in a VPS and then all of your services are connected to that and instead of pointing to your home Internet, you point to the VPS IP address which will have a static IP as well. That's why you don't, you know, you will have to pay like $2 a month for that or something. But it just works, right? And then that, then you're not revealing your home IP address. Whenever you're connecting like over hotel, WI fi or whatever, you're connecting just to like an Azure or Microsoft ip and you use that to tunnel through to everything in your home network without anyone knowing anything. So it's probably the better method, but that one isn't quite working right yet. There's still a bug in the script, but I've been doing all this manually for years. And the way they've obfuscated everything and make it just. [00:29:30] Speaker A: That's what I was about to ask. How's the flow? Because, like, that's something that, like, if I, if I explained that to anybody, like, I could go through that whole process, but I don't really want to go through that whole process. You know, I've. It's just because I have namecheap and I've updated records and I have some domains sitting around I could probably use. But how does this work from the perspective of if I gave someone a start nine and they didn't have all of this stuff, what does the flow look like in their. Their ui? [00:30:02] Speaker D: I think it's like the, the UI is the end bit. Like when you're in the start OS ui, then you've done everything else because you have to go and buy a domain that's nothing to do with them. You have to set up dynamic DNS, which has nothing to do with them, and you have to forward a port in your router, which has nothing to do with them. Once you've done those three steps, you go to the start OS UI and you're like, hey, I want Lightning to be accessible over clearnet. You just click on interfaces, click Add clearnet domain and then make it what you want. So you just give it the right subdomain, lnd light whatever.com and then it will just work. But that was. That's the payoff at the end where you get to just add clearnet domains in the Star UI and it's literally just one button and typing in a thing. Oh, you also have to install the cert in. In whatever device you're connecting from. I should point that out too. [00:30:50] Speaker B: Theoretically, since they're offering a router, this could become very easy to do though. [00:30:55] Speaker D: Yeah, that will make life a lot easier with a. With their own integrated router. They'll obviously make that play nice with all this. But that's. We know that's not going to be for like, I reckon the route is not going to be here until 2027, to be honest. [00:31:08] Speaker A: Two years. Yeah, two years. [00:31:10] Speaker D: They need a bigger team. They need a bigger team or they need to do another raise. But tying it back into the other topic, like, so many people are buying start OS machines because they want to run Knots like they, they are continually sold out every month they're running out of servers because so many people are buying Start OS machines and running knots. And all those people doing that are running listening nodes at least over Tor, which means they look great on the stats. And that's why we've been growing so fast. Like because a lot of the core nodes out there are non listening nodes because they're just running crudely on a desktop machine. But all the Start OS and umbrella machines and all that, they all listen over Tor. And we had some attacks. Right. We should go into the attack on not home users from pull. [00:31:54] Speaker A: Oh man, I forgot about that. And that's not even in my list. We should maybe get into that real quick. Jeff, were anything to add on the few things we covered? [00:32:04] Speaker B: I don't even know what we covered. [00:32:05] Speaker D: We're talking about Lightning ux. [00:32:07] Speaker A: Yeah, Lightning ux basically. [00:32:10] Speaker B: No, I mean I don't know. My, my interactions with Lightning have been very limited lately. Aqua. I like the improvements in the wallets that I use but I'm you know, I don't have much to add there. [00:32:23] Speaker A: Oh actually on that this isn't actually anything to do with Lightning but I am super stoked and I got this like an hour ago was the new update for Nunchuck. Dude, I am so excited. So Nunchuck. Nunchuck has been my go to for a long time now. Yeah, my favorite wallet. I have tons of different multi sig setups and stuff and I've always dreamed about the, the different sort of like time lock and like hierarchical multisig and all of this stuff. They have full support for miniscript. They just released it. I, I have it like right now. I haven't done anything with it. I haven't started a wallet but now I can totally do a. And they have like some built in templates that you can just select but if I wanted to I could do a 2 of 3 multisig with a 3 month time lock for any other of this set of keys with like a five of seven and then two of three. The two of three can override it within that three month period. So I can build my own little like mini script And I don't know exactly how the UX is of like selecting the different pieces and the dependencies or the little tree that you're going to make, you know. But I am so stoked because I've been waiting for this to kind of be convenient visual tool to utilize and Rob Hamilton with. Is it, is it Anchor Watch? [00:33:55] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:33:55] Speaker A: It is anchor watch. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. He is the one who. At the. At the meetup, actually sometime last year, he showed me the tools and stuff that they were building with it, and that got me really jazzed because he was like, nobody's. Nobody's really utilizing miniscript and, you know, this is the sort of thing that we need to build. And he got me really jazzed about that. And I've just been waiting for it to start popping up in places. And Nunchuck, my favorite, my main wallet now has it built into their mobile and desktop, and I am so stoked to start playing with it. [00:34:25] Speaker D: Man. I tried to use it years ago and it didn't work, but it had a bunch of features I was really excited about. So are we talking about, like, same on chain footprint as regular single sig? You know that? [00:34:43] Speaker A: I don't know. But. But Nunchuck has had Taproot for a while, so I would imagine they're doing miniscript in Taproot. Like. [00:34:51] Speaker D: No, but they had a hack. They had a hack that made it not quite work the way you want it to work. Right? [00:34:58] Speaker A: Really? [00:34:58] Speaker D: Yeah. So it was smaller on chain footprint than multisig usually is, but it wasn't like, fully. [00:35:04] Speaker A: Fully one sig. [00:35:05] Speaker D: Yeah. Like, that's the point of Taproot, right? Is it supposed to obfuscate, like, all of the. The stuff behind scripting? Yeah. [00:35:13] Speaker C: Like, do you know if they have any plans to remove Taproot from Nunchuck? Nunchuck? [00:35:18] Speaker D: Is that what you're looking for? Next update? [00:35:21] Speaker A: Waiting for them to remove it. [00:35:22] Speaker D: Legacy addresses only. [00:35:24] Speaker A: Like, are you worried about Quantum? Are you worried about Quantum, Steve? [00:35:27] Speaker C: No, I just, like, when I make my plots and I just remove all P2TR taproot transactions out of my address, it's just like, you can see that there is no P2TR transaction for more than a dollar. It's just 99% spam. [00:35:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:47] Speaker C: Like, why. Why are we doing this? [00:35:50] Speaker D: Well, the theory is that spam is a quicker to update to new tech than people that want to actually build serious products, which is. That is true. [00:35:59] Speaker A: Fair enough. But, like, they'll be quicker to CTV than any serious porn will adopt a new protocol before anything else, you know? Yeah, spam. [00:36:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. [00:36:10] Speaker A: That's how it works. [00:36:10] Speaker D: So that's really depressing, though, because, you know, it's all the inscription spam is just like, it nuked the UTXO set or like, whatever the. [00:36:20] Speaker A: No, it's like, what's. What's the multiple. It's like 3x really huge. [00:36:25] Speaker D: It's like we went from 4 gigabyte to 12 gigabyte UTXOs. [00:36:28] Speaker A: Freaking crazy, man. [00:36:30] Speaker D: Yeah, it's horrible. And the whole point of the witness discount was to incentivize shrinking it, which is just makes us look like such fools that we can't anticipate we can come up with these technical rationalizations for making changes to Bitcoin. And when they don't work, we're like, yeah, well, technically we were still right. I'm like, who cares? Look at it. It's three times. [00:36:51] Speaker A: Practically we weren't. [00:36:54] Speaker D: Yeah, practically we weren't. But technically what you said is true. This is constantly the nature of my arguments of Bitcoin core. I'm like, yeah, guys, you're right, but you're not putting it in the appropriate context. I get why spam filters like incentivize centralization of mining and all that stuff, but it doesn't matter. Stratum is why mining is centralized. It's got nothing to do with spam filters. But technically you're right. And then they just leave on that like they leave the conversation like having gone, yep, I said something and I was technically correct. And I'm like, but it does. [00:37:25] Speaker B: Being technically correct is the best time. [00:37:28] Speaker A: Correct. [00:37:28] Speaker D: Is that Futurama? Is that what that's from? [00:37:32] Speaker A: I can't remember, dude. Bitmex actually has two things on their blog which I find interesting because one of them is a showing that filters don't work because they, they got together and figured out a way like using just the idea of information theory, which they rightfully point out that the idea that information theory disproves filters. It. It's not that you can't like say that information theory is, is a, is a, is a broad spectrum of what we think about how we think about information theory, think about information itself. So they rightfully kind of like caveat the. The notion or the claim. But they say that, you know, basically you can't, you can't stop it because they were able to actually hide a JPEG in private keys, right? And what they did was they created a like, kind of like a 15 signature or 15 key system where 14 keys to 14 addresses actually have the, if you, if you release your K value, your, your secret or whatnot, that anybody can actually pull the image from that set of UTXOs. And. But still, because it's locked with there's a 15th, you still have the private key where you're the only one who can move it on chain. But all I can think when I read the article is that like how much, how convoluted of a system. Like, like it's to create the most impractical possible way to accomplish this and to do so in something that's so information inefficient that nobody would ever even do it. Like they, they had to use like this look, tiny little JPEG that was like only black and white because they're just doing like basically zeros and ones and it's like, nobody's ever going to use this. It's like one of those things where somebody's like, I finally have the perfect bit VM architecture thing that does all of this stuff and it's got unilateral exit and it's this crazy construction where you have to have nodes that watch and you have to have service providers and you have to have like, it's, you know, it's like a ten piece convoluted puzzle. And I'm like, yeah, you know, it sounds great when you talk about what you supposedly get out of it, but if it takes a hundred different things to set it up, like, no, nobody's, nobody's ever going to use that, that's not a, that's not a tool that's ever going to become a product. It's just theory, you know, it's just fun, a fun developer experiment. [00:40:03] Speaker B: And, and you've created something that costs 15 times as much. So you've literally created your own filter to filter out what you're. [00:40:12] Speaker A: Yeah, they put it literally in the UTXO set, which is the most expensive way, which is literally all filters are even trying to do anyway is to balance out the cost. And those UTXOs are actually still spendable because you still have the private key to them. So you can, you can prune them later if they actually get spent from. So, so it's, it's kind of like, kind of suggestion. And it's one of those things too. Like this is the argument that comes up over and over again that like really bugs me is not realizing that we're just, the whole point is to just balance the costs because right now they're getting a discount and they just shouldn't get a discount. And none of this relies on, it's back to the same thing of like, well, you can still get spammed through the filters. Nobody ever said you can't get spam through the filters. Why is this always the argument? Why did they just come up with a different way to say spam can still get through the filters. Of course it can. That's not the point, of course. Spam, in my opinion, I still get spam. Does that mean that you shouldn't have any filter at all? Just because some spam leaks through and it's. [00:41:26] Speaker D: Yeah, it's a contradiction as well, because they keep saying at the same time that it's a slippery slope to censorship. And I'm saying the reason that you can still evade spam filters is why they aren't a tool for censorship. That's why I'm all right with them in the first place. And this has been a constant gripe of mine. You can't be concerned about censorship, but also concerned that they sometimes don't work because the two things complement one another. It's, yes, a sheep can end up on the wrong side of the fence sometimes, but you still need the fence generally, and it still has an effect that you. Just because a sheep escaped one time doesn't mean you get rid of the fence. And that's a pretty solid analogy here. It's not that obtuse. Like, it's a pretty good. [00:42:05] Speaker A: And it's just about effectiveness. It's got nothing to do with, like, your fence is centralized or email and Gmail is centralized. That's totally irrelevant to the point of the analogy. You know, like, it's like. It's like trying to make an analogy about, like, pressure in a can or something is like, well, your can is going to be red instead of blue. It's like, well, the color. Color is irrelevant. We're talking about the effectiveness of the filter and whether or not you get red. Rid of it. Because it's not 100% effective. Yeah. Which obviously any filter isn't. But the thing about the censorship argument is that it's completely confuses the point of why censorship is a problem and where censorship comes from. Like, if you have a hundred thousand miners in a decentralized way, all deciding individually what they want to include or not, and them all coming to a general consensus that they don't want to include this type of thing. That's not censorship. That's got nothing to do with censorship. It's got nothing to do with any of the problems that make censorship a problem. The reason censorship is a problem is when Twitter decides to censor something, and even when all of the users choose not to censor it, it still gets censored. But if every single Twitter user decides they want to block people who are posting porn or dick pics on Twitter, that's not censorship. Censorship. That's the community deciding what they value in their social environment. And it's not a risk of censorship because if you're saying that like, oh, they're going to like, think about it from the context of knots. It's like, oh, we're just putting in filters and now, now we can just censorship terrorists or whatever. So you're saying that when thousands and thousands of people are running their own nodes and deciding. Exactly. Individually, manually what they want to. To not have in their M poles that somehow there's going to be this mechanism for one dude to decide that this terrorist address doesn't get put into the blockchain and every one of these tens of thousands of people are all going to just decide, yeah, sure, we'll do that too. Because this one person says it's about central control. Not everybody makes a decision and ends up coming to the same conclusion. [00:44:08] Speaker D: Like, exactly, man. [00:44:09] Speaker A: Jesus. [00:44:10] Speaker D: Yeah, you're so right about it. Yeah. [00:44:13] Speaker A: This. [00:44:13] Speaker B: The whole libertine reversal thing too, though. I mean, like, or Israeli reversal. Like, there's a whole bunch of like, like political discourse that like, it's exactly what they do. Is that like, like, if you don't just love the fact that I can go, you know, have an orgy and smoke weed and do whatever I want, then you're, you're evil and trying to like, you know, attack me or whatever. It's like, ah, dude, do whatever you want. It's, I don't believe in that healthy for you. [00:44:41] Speaker D: It's, if you don't help me do the thing I want to do, you're obstructing me from doing the thing I want to do. [00:44:46] Speaker A: You. [00:44:46] Speaker D: You're obligated to help me. It's where, and this is the annoying thing about it, I don't have to relay your shit. And I'm getting increasingly furious with people that are trying to shoehorn in a rationalization for me doing that. If you want to send a picture of child porn or whatever it is from you to a bitcoin miner, I have no obligation to assist in that and I'm not going to. And if that somehow breaks the game theory of bitcoin, because miners are putting stuff in blocks that aren't getting relayed and therefore blocks are more slow to propagate around the network. And once centralized miner offering a service to add that stuff out of band is growing at a rate that outpaces everyone else because they got this additional revenue source. Something's broken with bitcoin there and we need a real solution. It's not ripping out spam filters and telling everyone. You just got to relay it and can't have a problem with it because guess what? We don't want to do it. There's enough of us that aren't going to do it that if that's a problem, we need a real solution. And why is it that you're telling 85,000 node users you can't filter spam anymore? For the good of the network, we need to remove filters just so you have no way of doing it anymore. Why can't you turn around to the five or six miners in the world and say yeah, you guys can't put this in the chain anymore. That seems like way more practical approach, especially as they're not going to lose much money doing it. In fact, it's not going to make any difference because it's just, well, whatever. However much revenue and money in mining there is accounted for with whatever the network difficulty is, miners don't make more money when there's more income into mining, it just. The difficulty just goes up. So it makes no difference. [00:46:22] Speaker B: There's no official definition of or. I've never seen this as an official definition of greed that makes any sense. I think the official definition is a desire for more. But a desire for more can't always be a bad thing. We have this negative connotation of the word ridiculous. But my definition is the desire for more at the expense of someone else with no regard for the cost or who has to bear it. And in that sense that is literally like what these. If these miners are trying to add something out of band so they can make money at the expense of the rest of the network, it's literally the greediest fucking thing you could do at. You know, like it's. It's exactly the sort of thing we're trying to fight. You know, we don't want someone printing money at the expense of everyone else. We don't want people doing these like tragedy the commons bullshit things to the network at the expense of everybody else. [00:47:14] Speaker A: What was funny about this though is that I was reading another article on Bitmex which granted there's a lot of people who work at Bitmex and they've write a lot of fantastic stuff that was like literally taking the exact opposite argument. It's talking about the oper turn wars of 2014 and how that it wasn't that they found a perfect technical solution, it was about the fact, the thing that was technically implemented that that did actually have an effect on a method that was currently being used. And then the culture signaled that we are going to keep doing this, that we're going to keep trying to get in your way and being a hindrance to you. And thus all of the daps and colored coins and all of the stuff that worked perfectly fine on Bitcoin and easily could be built on Bitcoin all went to Ethereum because they just felt unwanted on Bitcoin. They didn't have anybody to sell it to. Nobody cared. And everybody was actively saying, you are not welcome, please do not come here. Here's a small fence that we are going to put up that says your stuff is not going to be here because you're, you're being a bad steward of our network. And that properly made them go away because it makes investments unreliable. It means you're going to have un unwanted and ongoing maintenance cost to, to keep keep your information theory up where you now you have to stick it into private keys and now you have to make your little protocol backwards compatible to the old way that you did it in signatures. So the way now that you're doing it in private keys and like random UTXOs and everybody's gonna have to update their wallet or they can't see their new NFT and everybody's just gonna be like, this sucks, this is stupid. I'm just gonna leave. And it's not because it filters everything. It's not because it's censorship. It's just because, no, this is a poor use of the chain. It's bloating the system and, and, and, and a simple, ineffective, not 100% effective filter will prevent them from, from, will align the cost. It will add a marginal cost to what they are doing and the way they are using the chain. And that is a sufficient thing to, to completely disincentivize the behavior. [00:49:30] Speaker D: I completely agree. It's a cascading benefit where all of the wins come as second and third order benefits that people refuse to, you know, go to that level with. It's kind of like the benefit the analogy here that are like, is that if you got like a bar on a beach somewhere and like there's typically like rowdy behavior and people showing up half naked and like, it's just, you know, loud and annoying and all that stuff. And there's another restaurant very nearby that doesn't want to have any of that kind of stuff because it's a fancy restaurant, all they need to do is say something like, you have to wear shoes. You can't show up here in flip flops like it doesn't. And that's all they have to do. Just based on that rule, they can have a classy restaurant. Everyone in there is like, properly dressed. Everyone. Like, it makes sense to have like, it's not order at the bar. You know, we have table service and all that stuff. Like, you can do all of that based on just having a little indication of the fact that this is a different kind of place. Right. Do you know what I mean? [00:50:29] Speaker A: It's. [00:50:29] Speaker D: And it's so effective. You don't need to. You don't need to do it at consensus level, which the equivalent would be having a massive long list of terms and conditions. You need to agree to. To eat here. You don't need to do any of that. You just indicate, sorry, this is a different kind of place. You need to wear shoes and you can't. You need to have a top on and you need to be wearing shoes. You can't show up here in flip flops and basically glorified underwear like a bathing suit. You can't do that. That's all we say. And then that completely changes the nature of the entire thing. And that's you and people saying, hey, just fork. Just do it. At the consensus level, I'm like, no, because it's not possible to stop the kind of rowdy, drunken, like, beach brawl behavior that goes on at that other bar with writing a list of terms and conditions to get people to eat here. It's not, it's never going to work if that guy shows up and wants to act like that. It doesn't matter what we write on a piece of paper. We just need to have some crude way of saying, sorry, you're wearing the wrong shoes, like that. And that just separates it without us having to go into detail and do everything else. Right. It's just live in the real world. That's what they do. [00:51:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:37] Speaker C: The, the only thing I had to do at my bar to get rid of like rowdy college students was just not sell fireball shots. [00:51:46] Speaker D: Right. Simple as that. Right? [00:51:48] Speaker C: Like, people ask if we have fireball shots almost every weekend and we say no and they get mad and leave. And I love it. [00:51:57] Speaker D: Right. And this. And I have the perfect quote. Yesterday someone dug up a Vitalik buterin quote from 2017 where he said in response to someone, opern did end up getting censored. There's that word down to 40 bytes. So I think it's fair to say that this willingness to compromise protocol, immutability, he means neutrality to achieve a desired outcome in a Particular application sound familiar? Made ETH on BTC even then a non starter. So he's saying, you filtered the stuff I wanted to do that made ETH on Bitcoin a non starter. So they had to go and just make Ethereum, right? Where was Peter Todd back then to say, hey, you could have just got around the filter, just go direct to a miner. That conversation. That approach was not acceptable back then and therefore it made people trying to do what Vitalik was trying to do have to go and consider other options. They didn't want to launch Ethereum on Bitcoin because it would have constantly been annoying to do it. Like, you know the guy, is he really going to persist and say, all right, I'm not going to wear flip flops, I'll go and get my smart shoes and. But still be wearing a bathing suit and no shirt? Like, he's not going to do that. He's just going to go to the other bar where they're just going to say, yeah, come in, help yourself to one of these plastic chairs and you order at the bar. And we only serve absolute junk. Like that's what the shitcoiners always do. So you don't need to work particularly hard to disincentivize them. They're going to follow the path of least resistance. And adding a spam filter makes it a lot of resistance. Whoa, whoa. Sorry. An Ocean block just got mined and it was a datum user that calls themselves Nice hash. That's very. That's quite an interesting development. I did not expect that. Wow. Hold on, let me just go and see who that is. Because ocean is like. We jumped up 5x ash yesterday, which was like a 50% growth. It broke something on the pool and like, you know, there was some overflow on the stats. It the pool carried on working but the website broke and a bunch of weird things happened. [00:54:01] Speaker A: The thing that gets me about the spam stuff is that like I, I 100% there are good especially technical and economic arguments for a pro get rid of filters. Like, like for, for getting rid of filters. Like, I am not saying that there is absolutely no argument that is of interest or worth talking about. I definitely lean the opposite way with like. And everybody, everybody knows this. I've done whole episodes about it. But the thing that gets me is the constant, the incessant regurgitating and circle jerk this like this going around back to back of these, the two arguments that they lean on more than anything else that are their worst arguments. There are their least reliable and most Ridiculous in my opinion. The whole idea that, that because filters are. Aren't 100% effective at the mempool level, that that means that you should completely get rid of them when nobody has said to the contrary. Not a single person. In fact, every single argument I have ever heard from somebody, Pro Filters caveats it in practically the first or second thing that they say. I know this is not 100% effective. That's not the point. And yet I. Another article comes out of Pro Filters and I read it because I want to know if somebody has something interesting or new to say. And it's like, look, I found a new way to get around it. It's not going to be 100% effective. It's like, nobody is arguing that. Nobody is arguing that. [00:55:37] Speaker D: Can I add to that? Because I've been arguing with Adam back a lot lately and that's been like, just, you know, he's a hero. He's an absolute hero. This man doesn't just invent bitcoin, he invents it by accident. Right? [00:55:47] Speaker C: I love that he's pretending to care about this issue. [00:55:49] Speaker A: Now I know, like, he doesn't actually care. [00:55:52] Speaker C: He's just pretending to care. [00:55:53] Speaker A: He doesn't think it's existential. [00:55:55] Speaker C: He spent 30 minutes thinking about this issue. [00:55:58] Speaker D: Thank you for acknowledging that. Because, like, I, I don't know if you saw this. It was like in a late night back and forth and I dunked on Adam in a way I never expected to do in my life because obviously he's a hero. And I said, like, you keep judging spam filters as a tool for censorship and then going, hey, like guy just said, we got around it in this esoteric way. Information theory for the win. The Internet treats censorship as damage and roots around it. You're never going to be able to do this stuff. And it keeps it. If you want to make bitcoin optimized for a particular use case, which is money, you need soft disincentives for other use cases. If they're hard disincentives, then that turns into censorship. So you need something in the middle. You can't be completely permissive with everything because then the chain is just going to be tragedy of the commons and fall into disrepair and be garbage. And if you have hard disincentives, like, you know, constantly forking to try and stop spam, then that sets a negative precedent and you're probably going to end up with censorship being viable. So spam filters are great because all they do is annoy spammers without being A vehicle with which you could actually censor anything. So. And I said to Adam, and I genuinely can't believe I had the goal to say it, I said, if you could judge a tool by its effectiveness at the job it's trying to do, rather than judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you would have invented Bitcoin instead of hashcash, because you invented hashcash. And then Satoshi realized what this is amazing at doing is solving the double spend problem. That is a completely different thing. And you didn't realize what the tool was actually for. And that's amazing because now you're looking at spam filters and saying these are terrible at censoring things. And I'm saying that's because that's not what they do. They rate limit spam and they make it a bit annoying without ever posing a censorship risk. Please understand that you're judging a tool by its ability to do the wrong job and therefore writing it off. And I never got a response from that. And he's gone back and forth and back and forth with me loads, but whenever I hammer on this point, he just never gets back to me. And it's really annoying because I know he's wrong on this and he should know he's wrong and there should be a good counter to that. If that's not true and there just isn't one. Spam filters, all they do is just optimize bitcoin for monetary activity. And nodes have every incentive to do that. [00:58:22] Speaker A: The other thing is that, like the censorship going back to the like, why censorship is a problem. If Twitter is the one that makes all the decisions for all of the users, then that's a huge problem for censorship because they're just going to. Even though those users actively want to reach a person who says something negative about the COVID vaccine, or a person who is anti lockdowns or wants to criticize the government for whatever reason. If Twitter decides that those two people cannot communicate, cannot have an exchange of information, that is a problem. That is censorship. Because someone external to the conversation and external to the mode of sending information is the one controlling who can speak and what they can say. This is not what is happening. When you're talking about a bunch of people running nodes and individually. Individually deciding for themselves what information they want to receive and who they want to speak to and that they are the ones who have control. There is no central party that is able to censor anything. There is absolutely. I'm. And it's not even a. It's not a slippery slope. It's zero. It's zero. There is zero chance at all that this means that this subset of 20,000 users who are running their own node and deciding what they want to put as filters for their mempool will ever, ever censor one address from one person. Because they aren't the right. Because the government says they're not allowed to. This is, this is not even like a. It could turn into censorship. There's absolutely no way whatsoever that that is ever going to happen because it's, it's counter to the entire ethos of why they want the filters. And it's a decision made individually by tens of thousands of people to make this for themselves in their mempool. It has absolutely nothing to do with censorship. It has absolutely nothing to do with the reason censorship is a problem. It's not central control. It's decentralized decision making to optimize a certain type of information to get through easily. That is all it is. And in addition to that is that if you actually believe that that is censorship, then Bitcoin has always been censored. It has always been censored. Like you're using a censored protocol, period. If you actually think that that is censorship, then what are you doing here? This is not a censorship resistant protocol. This is not a protocol where, where anybody, where information theory actually, actually works or prevails because we have had the OP return filter in the whole time. Is that censorship? Is that a slippery slope to censorship? Vitalik, can WikiLeaks. Can WikiLeaks not. Oh, Jesus Christ. Can WikiLeaks not get their transaction through? Because somebody who's implementing OP return filters might decide, well, maybe we shouldn't let WikiLeaks addresses in. And we're all going to collectively decide all at once that we're also going to add that to our filters. [01:01:29] Speaker B: Honestly though, what, what the fuck do we care what Vitalik thinks? He created a, a new Federal Reserve shitcoin. Like, I mean, he centralized it and stole the mining reward for himself and, and like his other 10 buddies or. [01:01:43] Speaker D: Whatever, and he wanted to do it on bitcoin and we made it a bit annoying for him, therefore we censored him. It's censorship. This is the level of UN analysis that people are throwing at this stuff and it's just pathetic. [01:01:56] Speaker A: And again, there are good arguments, but these are the ones we go around on over and over and over again. And as someone who wants the good arguments to actually be able to be sorted out, these are the worst. Like, and literally, in my opinion, they're the worst. [01:02:14] Speaker D: Yeah, they. And it becomes like a power thing at this point because it's like, well, we're going to make deliberately bad arguments and just lie. Like, Calla is the one who's just like, giving me actual. Like, I don't know what the word is, but, like, I'm getting triggered, I guess, is the word. Because he'll go out there and be like, knots only has one developer. And I'm like, no, it doesn't. There are literally other developers on Knots. Like, that's just. There's big, shiny, there's Ataraxia. Like, these guys are submitting pull requests. They're getting merged into the code. And then you go, okay, well, it's still Luke that has to do the merging. And I'm like, so what? Core only has five people that can merge code. That doesn't. That's not magically decentralized. 5 doesn't mean it's decentralized. While one doesn't. Like, you know, it's. This is a nonsense argument and you're only saying it so that people are like, ooh, not only has one dev, I'm scared of running it now. It's just. It's designed to. To shape the opinions of people who aren't paying that much attention. That's what politics is. You just say something that makes the whole other side look like a bad idea, who aren't prepared to really think about. About it, and you let that disinformation just spread. Right. You know, it's very annoying. [01:03:20] Speaker A: I will throw a bone too, because, like, this is how. This is how social goes, right? Is you. You drop the good arguments and the nuanced arguments and you go find the dunk and you repeat the dunk over and over and over again, even though the dunk is kind of a really garbage argument, especially when you start looking at the nuance or you actually respond to the legitimate argument being made. Both. And this is. This is on both sides. The number of idiots who I have read who are pro filters, like, it's a hundred thousand percent out there. And there are dunks that make no freaking sense that get repeated and blow up. That's the nature of social. That's the nature of this whole stupid thing. Especially when you have a heated argument about stuff. But the serious people that are leaning heavily like that just bring those out and refuse to have a conversation about things. The real arguments. That's what drives me crazy. I love C in every other way. I Follow everything he builds. I love the ecash stuff and the. The E. Nuts, you know, whatever. But when. When I hear those. That same stuff come out again and I'm like, who are you arguing with? Nobody said this. Nobody said this. This isn't the argument. It's just. It. It just. They set up straw men and knock them down over and over and over again. And it's just like, where. Please explain. Like, take the whole piece and explain where anybody made that argument. Exactly. Are we actually going to have a conversation? Because we are all bitcoiners. Like, I a hundred percent believe everybody's trying to do the best thing for bitcoin, but are you actually going to have a conversation? Like, are. Are you willing to sit down and have an honest conversation about it for bitcoin, or are you just. Is. Is Twitter dunks the most you're willing to invest in it? You know, I don't know. [01:05:09] Speaker D: No, I agree. And I. I do genuinely think that all the people that are most hostile between. Well, that there's the most hostility between me and them, like Shinobi and like Portland and all these people that are, like, aggressively, you know, throwing shade and insulting me personally and all that stuff. I do believe that if and when this whole thing is resolved and there's another massive issue that will probably be on the same side, and I'm trying deliberately not to, like, I don't know, scorch the skies over it, because I've been on their side in previous fights. I know Shinobi is a really intelligent guy, and he's definitely going to outclass me when it comes to understanding a lot of the technical elements of bitcoin. I just think some people are him and many other people are just straight up wrong on this issue. And sadly, a lot of it just seems to be. Look like Mandrake at least has the balls to come out and say it. I don't understand it. But Greg Maxwell said X, so I now think X, like, at least he just comes out and says that. I'm like, all right, you're trusting the science. Okay, I get it. Like, but here's Greg Maxwell saying the opposite 10 years ago, back when the community was a bit different. Like, so, you know, he doesn't want to get into it. I don't want to drag him into it. Mandrick's a good guy. Everyone likes Mandrick. He's like the David Attenborough of bitcoin. Like, you can't dislike this guy is just, you know, it's a rule. It's like Bob Marley. Like you have to like Bob Marley. Like you're just not allowed like anyone, like metal heads, opera heads, whatever. We like Bob Marley. It's just a rule. [01:06:37] Speaker A: And I also will say too is that I don't share your degree, Mechanic. Your degree. This is a perfect example, actually is like 98% of the time. I would agree with all of those other people as well. And I do think this is a really important issue. But I also don't think it's existential and at least in the way that I think that you talk about it, I, I'm, I'm almost more aligned with Adam back in that sense, even though he seems to lean the opposite direction in how he's arguing. I definitely lean obviously pro filters, but I don't think it's existential either way. I don't think pro filters are censorship, as I've made very clear. I think exactly everything that's happened in the last year. The fact that knots are 18% of the nodes, I mean, I think this is like one of those things. There is a culture, there is a buildup of how the infrastructure and how things are thought about. And I think this is kind of the evolution and the evolution of the social layer which inevitably the filters are going to be in because it, because it is a soft barrier. It's not a consensus thing, it never will be. And is because of that, it's going to be a messy evolution. It's going to, it's going to behave a lot like politics really, which is messy, shitty, sucks. Nobody likes it, but it does end up mostly coming out in the wash, so to speak. [01:08:08] Speaker D: I disagree strongly and I'll like, I understand on the surface and I think you have. [01:08:15] Speaker A: I still think fees, I still think fees are the. Is it. Fees are just going to get high. But anyway, keep going. [01:08:22] Speaker D: No, I think ultimately there's a problem here and the difference. The block size war was fought at the consensus level, which means you have closure and resolution at some point. Ultimately you have like a massive rift between people that are going to die, you know, on the Hill of Bcash or even Craig Wrightheads and all those people. But they are necessarily in their own own world now with their own chain. You don't have that here. So you have. Now you genuinely have the bitcoin libtards and the bitcoin Nazis. They keep calling us Nazis or Nazis, which sounds the same in American accent. [01:08:57] Speaker A: Nazis. [01:08:58] Speaker D: Yeah, like. And you have like the bitcoin lefty libtard like rust programming enthusiasts like they're over there and that's never really going to go away. You can't get closure on it because we're not fighting at the consensus level, we're fighting at the mempool level and that we can coexist for a while. But at some point there's going to be a separation there. At some point knots is not going to be something you can sustain as a fork of core. Core don't really like knots, people doing it. And knots people are going to get different enough in their request that the thing becomes its own standalone software. And then you have Luke Transit, like just thinking about all the practicalities of this, how sustainable is this Rift before it becomes a full on division that isn't represented in bitcoin as a consensus discrepancy or eventually even leads to that. Because if they start going down one of the soft fork routes, like not CTV but Instagibbs variants of it, that's a bit like CTV but has the annex in which Jeremy Rubin didn't like and that makes it more spam prone. So obviously Luke hates it. If they push that and all of the monetary maxis are like, we don't want this. Leave Bitcoin alone or at least fix the issue with Taproot and Segwit before we move on, then you're going to have URSF in response to the way they activate it in core and that's going to lead to an actual fork in the road. You have now this cultural division that's significant enough that it's going to mean two different directions when we're at choke points and choke points and unknown unknowns are going to head, you know, so the spam filters, if it was just about whether we have more big op returns in the blockchain or whether we don't by virtue of us not running core. That is a non issue for Bitcoin for the most part. I agree. But what it's emblematic of and the fact that we now have this massive division and these two different directions, once the shit hits the fan, then that's going to manifest in some serious disruption. You can even also have things like there's a bug in knots because not as many people are looking at that code as others, but you have so many people running it now that that causes severe disruption and you know, or you have something where there's a bunch of people that are furious with core, some defectors, but they don't like knots either, so they go and make a third thing and the die has been cast now. And things are now going to progress in a, you know, we, we've had this whole luxury of centralized. Everyone just runs bitcoin core. Everyone does what they say and they've been good actors and good stewards of the protocol and now we don't really feel like we have that anymore. Even if you disagree with my assertion that we don't have that anymore or that that should have manifested, we now have a massive chunk of bitcoiners that are never going to run bitcoin core again. And that's different. I don't know what that looks like because they're running on the same network. They're not about to fork off at the consensus level, throw a bunch of money at regular bitcoiners and fail to usurp the network or hijack bitcoin as Roger Ver ironically tried to do. So I don't know where we end up, but there's loads of implications and loads of mess coming. It definitely happens with soft forks. I think that's going to be like, okay, where do you stand? You can't just be an angry knots guy yelling at the core users, but nothing actually changing. And we all have the same blockchain. Something's going to come like there's going to be a fork in the road and you're going to have to choose left or right. [01:12:29] Speaker A: And here's the reason why I'm, I, I, I completely get what you understand and what you're kind of the, the map that you're, you're laying out there. But I think that would have kind of been the outcome earlier on in bitcoin's life. I think now if we get to that point where there's some sort of a soft fork and it, there is some apparent like literal, like fundamental divide going on, is that the soft fork just doesn't happen because the economic incentives to not hurt the overall network. And there's too many different ways. Going back to, you know, Steve and I, all of us actually have talked about this multiple times in the group about how there's no end to kind of the innovation of like what we can do to make this thing work better or implement new technical tools or means. I'm reading a paper on Glock which is actually like really fascinating. It's a white paper that's putting in a much, a much cleaner and more efficient construction of kind of an arbitrary code execution that allows you to have more advanced like scripting stuff. It's really at least an interesting idea. But the point is, is it's something that was, this was never going to be possible and we can't, we can't figure this out. And they've got a way to do it. And now we figured out how to do signature aggregation with SEC B256K1. Also something I'm not sure if. Will everybody do this? Well, now we can do it. And in that same sense is we're going to have things like utrixo. The bigger the UTXO set becomes as a problem to run a node, the more pressure and attention of people who care about it like us will be on fixing that problem or mitigating that problem. And we'll just figure out there will be a technical solution to the fact that the UTXO set is just freaking huge. And in fact we're probably going to have to deal with a huge UTXO set at some point anyway because we want there to be billions of UTXOs. Um, so again, I don't, I don't think it's existential just because the economic shelling point is so powerful that if there was a split in bitcoin right now, it would be so damaging, like, so damaging to what bitcoin is, to what the promise is. And to have that happen over spam when there's going to be some other way to deal with spam or to deal with a UTXO bloat. We still have the block size limit. We. I think it's just a forever argument. I just think it's going to be something that we're always fighting about and we're always trying to come up with our solution versus their solution. But I don't, I do not think it leads to a split. I do not think it eventually goes to where you're saying if you had. [01:15:14] Speaker B: The core dev, let's say all the core devs are like on board. Let's put this, you know, more this thing in there that's going to remove filters and make spam easier to do and whatever it satisfies a bunch of shitcoiners or whatever. My guess is there is a huge portion of the people who are even running core who also wouldn't like that and would just not upgrade to the next version. And you would have probably the number of people running knots would also grow. And so I could see how it just would be, it would just make the soft forks going forward like it would make their efforts to change things not successful. But I mean, it doesn't mean that it won't. It could be that they essentially fork themselves off. You know, you have some small group of people running core that create problems for themselves. [01:16:07] Speaker A: I mean, I think they'd be too nervous to force it. Like, like, I think that's part of the problem too. [01:16:14] Speaker D: They usually are, let's be honest. [01:16:16] Speaker A: A lot of, A lot of the core devs admit. I mean, I've, I've had there again, there are people who have perfectly good arguments and are pretty reasonable about it, and they even say we don't like spam, like the number. I think Peter Todd is the only one that ever raises his hands when he says, who likes spam on the blockchain? Who likes JPEGs and Dick Butts in bitcoin script? [01:16:36] Speaker D: He definitely likes dick butts. Sorry. Aubergine emoji. Sorry. You call that eggplant, right? [01:16:43] Speaker A: No, but it is legitimately a disagreement in strategy over a recognized problem from both sides. And I think it's about the degree of problem that both sides think it is and what to do about it. And I really kind of think that the core perspective is that it really feels like we kind of have to bend the knee because these miners are too big and we can't. We have to make bitcoin efficient and aligned with what miners are doing rather than kind of standing up and being like, well, we can actually be the ones to exert force on them because they're clearly doing something that is at odds with. It's just at odds with good stewardship of the network. And, and, and because of that, I, I think that's all the indication necessary. That group is not going to push a soft fork or push something that risks a hard fork. If it's that contentious, they'll push through a, you know, remove the filter in the next core version. But I think the number of people who are going to run core 29 or, you know, 28 point whatever, is just going to keep dwindling. We got 18% now going over to Knots. And I also have a ton of people who I know aren't going to knots who said, well, I'm just not upgrading from 27. [01:18:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I, that's what I think. I mean, I, I gotta run here in a second, but I'll just throw in my perspective there that that's what I keep thinking about is like, I, I sent out a Twitter post that got just like crazy likes where I was just like describing the average person. And, and if you guys are talking about economic nodes and they're definitely going to upgrade, and that's one thing But I think we're going to see a huge number of people that just stick on 27, 28, 29 for a long period of time. Because you know this. I think people are realizing that upgrading, you're not doing anything to protect the security of your private keys. When you upgrade, the security of your private keys is done at your hardware level. What are you doing when you're upgrading? I mean, like, you're, you're making maybe something work a little better, a tiny bit, maybe increase DDoS PER. Like the, the things you're doing when you're upgrading to the average person are just really nothing when you think about it. [01:19:10] Speaker D: There are, there are security vulnerabilities and stuff though, in older versions, when you. [01:19:15] Speaker C: Say that, you worry people and you shouldn't do that because when you say that there's security vulnerabilities, the thing they think is, oh, my hardware wallet might be less secure. And that is like, totally wrong. Like, when you say security vulnerabilities, it's. [01:19:29] Speaker A: Like edge cage stuff about node connections. And yeah, it's like, I mean, I. [01:19:35] Speaker C: Haven'T upgraded my Apple Mac OS or like, I don't upgrade shit like that. I never have any problems with anything like that. Like, and it's even less when it's talking about my hardware wallet. I mean, there's no chance any upgrade of anything is going to affect my hardware wallet. And so it's like, why am I upgrading? Just to join a club? Like, just to like signal my tribalism? Like, what's the point? I mean, this would be different if there's like a serious software consideration. And I don't know, I could be wrong. I just think we're going to see a lot of people joining knots, a lot of other people sticking to their guns and, you know, doing 30. And I think we're going to see like 90 of people just sticking on 28 because they don't really want to join a tribe, I think. [01:20:20] Speaker D: So. I mean, they did backport a bunch of the stuff that's in 30 into the really into 29 now. So, I mean, it's not like even if you stay on 29 because you don't like 30, you're still going to be, I think by default relaying sub 1 SAP per V byte. [01:20:35] Speaker C: So really interesting. But that's only if you hit update on 29, right? [01:20:40] Speaker D: Yes. If you download 29.1.2, I think it is. Don't quote me on that, but they're definitely backporting some stuff that they're not backporting the op return change. The more nuclear one. They didn't go that far. But you also used the term economic node and I got triggered. [01:20:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:20:57] Speaker D: What. [01:20:57] Speaker C: What do you guys think about that? [01:20:58] Speaker A: I mean, is this. [01:21:00] Speaker D: I think. I think it's a meme. I don't under. Like in a conversation about default relay policy, my node is as relevant to the world as. Who's the biggest bitcoin exchange in the whole world? Is it? Coinbase? My node is as relevant as their node. And if my node's listening and their node isn't, it's more relevant even if my node does literally nothing except sit on a Raspberry PI and dumbly relay transactions around like, it's. So I don't. And it's also a false. It's a. It's a, you know, a black. A thing of scale presented as a black and white thing. It's like trying to turn temperature into. Into just hot and cold Boolean values. It's like. No, it's a number. Like I. I use my node for. Because I run LND on top of it. Am I now economic or not? Like, it's. It's how much you use it. Right. Like, Coinbase's node is obviously way more relevant to ST than my lightning node, but they're still both being used and like. And it. I think the. It was a meme from the fork wars because if you're saying 60% of people are running Bitcoin, XT or, you know, whatever the latest Gavin Andreessen client is that is telling the world they want bcash or big blocks, it doesn't. People said the retort was it doesn't matter because none of those nodes are significant or represent significant economic activity, which is. [01:22:18] Speaker A: You know, I think it was a bad way. It was a. It was a really bad framing for trying to make sense or separating out the difference between somebody spinning up 3000 nodes on AWS versus users who are actually running nodes. Yeah, like, I like that. It's like, how do we distinguish it? And it's like, well, it's like, well, these others are economic nodes. And that's just like somebody running a bunch of crap on aws. And. And so it became this kind of like black or white thing for something that isn't black and white. And we're literally just trying to find, like, literally this guy's just running a bunch of freaking fake nodes on aws. Like, obviously that's not going to make any difference. So I think that's really the point. [01:22:57] Speaker D: It's just not a black and white thing. That's all. [01:23:00] Speaker A: That's what I mean. Yeah, yeah. [01:23:01] Speaker D: And if we're talking about relay policy, you know, every node matters. [01:23:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:23:05] Speaker C: Oh, no. Sorry, I just gotta head out. I'll let you guys continue. I'm heading back into the woods. [01:23:10] Speaker A: Oh, enjoy it. Yeah, have fun. Enjoy your circadian, your circadian balance and. [01:23:16] Speaker C: Fix all this stuff by the time I get back. [01:23:18] Speaker A: All right, we got it. We got it. I will never talk about this argument again. Even though every roundtable just is the whole conversation about spam. [01:23:27] Speaker C: All right, see you guys. [01:23:30] Speaker A: You don't actually have to sell your bitcoin to access its value. You can actually borrow against it very easily without selling it. But when you do this, you need to be careful. You need to do this with a company that is trusted, one that has survived a bear market and one that will literally show you that they have the coins, that they have proof of reserves or some mechanism where you can look at your balance and know that it is safe. This is why I've been a huge fan and a customer of LEDN for a few years now. 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It's LED in LEDen IO so anchor watch, this one's really cool because I think this is going to be like a big deal and insurance is something that specifically Lloyds has like we're starting to get into the, the kind of capital management or the, the capital markets side of bitcoin and I think we're really multi sig is where it's going to be. Bitcoin backed loans, insurance, just, just collateral. This, anything to do with collateral is going to be freaking huge. And I think bitcoin is going to explode into that market in the next like five, 10 years. It's just gonna, it's just gonna be a flood. But Anchor Watch has launched kidnap and ransom insurance policies. So they're doing a multi sig setup with like a ongoing fee and they're doing the lords Lloyds of London is doing the insurance policy and they have set up their system so that they believe that it is secure enough that they can get insurance with Lloyds of London and they believe that basically you can prove that the setup is secure enough that you don't have to worry about kidnapping, being kidnapped and having ransoms and thus you can have insurance for being that covers kidnapping, extortion, detention, ransom reimbursement, 27, 247 crisis response, like this sort of sort of stuff like hostage negotiators and like that's just like that's a huge deal because I know there's, I at least know like in the back of my mind this is like an issue. Like I think that's why I've recently gone a little bit ham on. Like I really need to get my gun game in order. Like I need to be practiced, I need to be ready, I need to have it with me all the time. And I've always just been kind of like so, so about that. In the last like year or two, I've completely changed my perspective on it. But I think that's a big deal that. Because that's a first and I think that's an important direction to move because that is a big problem when you're talking about digital freaking cash. Then Michael Saylor's they've shifted strategies equity issuance, allowing share issuance below 2.5 times net asset value. So basically they said we were not going to dilute shares this much to get more bitcoin. And now they are going to dilute shares this much to get more bitcoin. Oh, is funny if you got something. [01:28:22] Speaker B: And that kind of what Mechanic said was going to happen. [01:28:25] Speaker A: If you got Fiat on one side and you got bitcoin on the other, Fiat's just going to keep getting more fiat so that you could stack bitcoin. Doesn't matter. They're just going to delete. And then kindly MD and Nakamoto merged to create public Bitcoin Treasury. Oh, just another Bitcoin Treasury. Another Bitcoin treasury that says they're going to acquire 1 million bitcoin. I think we're up to like 22 people who say they're going to acquire 1 million bitcoin. So I think we're going to have a problem there. [01:28:48] Speaker B: That's good. It's a good problem to have. [01:28:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Before I hit government and regulatory anything on that, the ransom insurance, Michael Saylor's fiat dilution of shares or knock them out, somebody else going to is going to require 1 million bitcoin. We'll see how. We'll see how that. Well, that goes for all of them. Anything. Anything. Nope. [01:29:15] Speaker B: I mean, I guess it's bullish. [01:29:17] Speaker D: I can't like with the treasury stuff, man. I just. The point of bitcoin is self custody, not owning it through proxies. Like I get what you're talking about with Anchor Watch and trying to like, you know, make it so that you're secure in, in doing so. But that's a different thing. [01:29:33] Speaker A: Well, they're part of a multi sig. So it's and. And. Or it's like multi jurisdictional, multi. Multi institution type stuff. [01:29:43] Speaker B: Well, from a, from a company standpoint like that, they actually may be very useful to companies too. To if you can. If they can help people, help companies secure like set up multi sigs that secure you can have insurance against some sort of bitcoin loss as a company that could be significant. [01:30:05] Speaker A: No, and I'll actually push back on the whole because Mechanic that Is literally my first thought or my first feeling on the whole bitcoin treasury stuff, companies as well is like you're supposed to just own bitcoin. And so my first thing is like eye roll. But I will actually push back because like when I, when I think about this at length, like the whole Bitcoin treasury company thing, it's not about competing with people who are sovereignly holding their keys. It's about accessing capital that is stuck somewhere because there's literally tens, tens of trillions of dollars that stuck in retirement accounts that stuck just picking who in The S&P 500 they want to invest in. That's stuck in some sort of instrument that can't be withdrawn and put directly into Bitcoin. And it's stuck there for 20 years, it's stuck there for 50 years. And the whole bitcoin treasury and like integrating it with finance is about unlocking that capital because there's capital in dozens, literally hundreds of different pools that all have their own restrictions, that have their own environments, that have their own time periods in which they can make decisions about what to invest in. And all of those things are eventually going to be able to get exposure to Bitcoin somehow. But it means that for everything stuck in the stock market, it's going to need corporate treasuries, it's going to need, it's going to need bitcoin treasury companies or an etf. And the things stuck in this vehicle are going to need a bitcoin mortgage backed security or something. You know what I mean? Like it just, they, they need an instrument for every environment. Sure. [01:31:47] Speaker B: They're all still very likely to get raped in some way because that's the same way that's like, that's literally what happens to mutual funds, right? Is they, they put, they push all these people into mutual funds and then all of these institutions know where the mutual fund is going next and so they can front run all of them. You know, like they're just raping the, the people that are stuck in these that don't manage their money. So there's going to be some aspect of that like the fact that they have created a, some sort of, they've created these like rent seeking abilities by putting rules in place that prevent people from moving their money where they want it to means that that's going to happen. But it means that our entire financial system which is now backed by nothing, may end up able to hold on to bitcoin and backstop all of the fiat loss. Like all of the Insane, you know, crumbling of the fiat system in. In the process, which may make for a smoother transition from, you know, one phase to the next. And so, I don't know. I mean, I don't know how else. Like. Like, there's part of me that would like to see, you know, the entire US Government and everything just fall apart, because I think it's just an evil organization. But at the same time, that's not the, you know, be careful what you wish for sort of situation where, like. Like, the fallout from that would be so horrible that, you know, I also want my kids to just be able to live in the world, and I don't know what, you know, a dystopian, you know, entire western world is. You know, I mean, like, I don't know. You could. You could argue we're getting a little dystopian with COVID stuff and everything that's happened in the last two years anyway, but. But how dark things get is maybe relevant to. Maybe bitcoin will force incentives in a better direction. And I don't know. [01:33:45] Speaker D: Yeah, I don't celebrate the. I'm not an accelerationist, because that's always a. It's tempting to. [01:33:55] Speaker A: Depends on the day. [01:33:56] Speaker B: Yeah, me too. [01:33:59] Speaker A: But 90% of the time, I am not an accelerationist, but every once in a while, I'll read a news item, and I'll be like, just burn it all down. [01:34:06] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, sure. Like, the planet is run by deranged pedophiles that are, like, getting worse and rubbing it in our face now. Like, no, there's no Epstein files. It was a hoax. Like, just seriously, God. Okay, fine, but no, but still, like, if you burn it down, why are. [01:34:25] Speaker A: We still talking about Epstein? Such an idiot. Why would we even do this anymore? Well, yeah, let's talk about tariffs. [01:34:31] Speaker D: I'm not. Yeah, I'm not an accelerationist. I think, like, everything that, like, things decay over time. Like, it's like saying, oh, like this. This guacamole, like, turned, like, into that horrible dark gray color it does. And then going, I'll just make it like, it's only gonna. It's only gonna get worse. Like, there's nothing you can do that you're never going to get back to. The nice, bright green guacamole. It's only going to turn into more. [01:34:57] Speaker B: Lemon juice on it. [01:34:58] Speaker A: It can't unscramble scrambled eggs. [01:35:00] Speaker D: Yeah, you can't. [01:35:01] Speaker A: Oh, you just got to get a new avocado, man. Actually, y' all let me know when any we'll close it down when the next one of you guys have to get out. And there's one thing that I really want to talk about before we close it out. So it'll be our last issue, but let me hit some government and regulatory stuff really quick. So Google introduces developer identity verification for Android apps distributed outside the Play Store. So they must verify their identity Through Developer Console. September 2026 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. Then worldwide in 2027. Google Play Store policy initially required FinCEN registration, state banking license or mica Mica. I don't know how you say that license for non custodial wallets before backtracking and clarifying that non custodial wallets are not meant to be in the scope of the Play Store policy. So this was something that was the rage. Did an article about that and actually the other one that I pulled from the rage was about the Ethereum core developer in the Argentinian, I think who was actually arrested in Turkey. And this was not because they built privacy software. This was not because they, they're running a mixing service. They wrote a privacy research paper about privacy in certain like Ethereum tools or protocols. Like I can't, I haven't actually read the paper. I just saved it somewhere to look into it. [01:36:39] Speaker B: Must be a good paper. [01:36:40] Speaker A: Literally, probably is literally arrested in Turkey saying that he helped people to misuse Ethereum and that this was a crime. Granted it's Turkey, but you know, a lot of people are saying like this is, the west is. The west is falling. And part of me is like well yeah, things are, things are getting bad, but it's Turkey. [01:37:08] Speaker D: So. [01:37:09] Speaker A: But still that's, that's, that's ridiculous. That's a crazy stretch. And even then Turkey is a little bit surprising. So BIS proposes grading permissionless wallets for AML risk based on fund sources. So the BIS is getting into blockchain wallets for AML anti money laundering. So this is crazy. So we, we all know the Kingdom of Bhutan has a bunch of Bitcoin because they've been mining it and they did so quietly for a long time and now it's like 50% of their GDP. Well, United United Arab Emirates, it's been, it came out they're holding $700 million in mind. Bitcoin, not seizure derived like they didn't, they didn't seize it from people, they mined it. Arkham. Arkham. This was from Twitter. Post identified a government wallet holding 6,300 bitcoin mined via Citadel Mining. So sixth largest by country. Philippines considers a bitcoin reserve, 10,000 bitcoin and central bank's strategic reserve. Algeria bans basically all the things about cryptocurrencies. Sad to be Algerian. And. Oh, yeah, and El Salvador now has unlimited reelection. So that's. That's our. That's our government and regulation stack, Jeff. [01:38:36] Speaker B: Well, I mean, plus one for the stability of El Salvador, I guess. I don't know. I mean, like, that's. I mean, you could argue, you know, that. That there was really, like, if he didn't make it so that he could be, you know, indefinite, real indefinitely reelected, everything he's done could be undone. And I. I mean, not that I'm, you know, pro authoritarian or government in any way, but my guess is that El Salvador will be better off than the alternative. It's certainly better off than it was prior to him. So I don't know. You know, what, Whatever. Like, I'm kind of to the point where with politics, it's so. It's so ridiculous. I mean, like. Like Hong Kong, right? [01:39:27] Speaker A: So broken that, like, what do you even do with it? [01:39:30] Speaker B: Well, well, prior to. Prior to the previous, like these recent Chinese kind of like, you know, retakeover of Hong Kong or whatever, Hong Kong was not politically free. Like, you didn't have. You couldn't vote for anything, you know, but they were economically free, right? And this is kind of the same thing in Singapore, right? It's like they're not really politically free. You have no political say in anything, but you have lots of economic freedom. These. These produce very good societies. Like, you know, sort of similar thing happening in UAE and other places, you know, like. So it seems like that's more desirable than what we have right now. I mean, I don't know, like, what we're devolving into some sort of insanity. So. [01:40:16] Speaker A: And it's so. [01:40:16] Speaker B: Dude, it's so weird. I, like, I don't. So the only corporate social media I'm still on is Facebook. [01:40:23] Speaker D: Right? [01:40:24] Speaker B: Like, I'm. Everything else is just Keat or Noster. [01:40:26] Speaker A: And I don't know why, but. [01:40:28] Speaker B: Yeah, well, marketplace is the primary thing. And then there are a couple of groups that are like 3D printing groups or something that are great. But my other. Like, I have like, Myers Briggs groups and things that I joined a long time ago. And like, those things have become just these weird. Like, it's almost like a sick thing. Like, I want to stay in it just to see what continues to happen. But I'm. I'm kind of deleting them now because they've become this dominated by political bots. They're saying the weirdest stuff and they argue with each other, calling other people bots. Like, it's pretty clear. Like, it's not, it's possible that it's people. [01:41:07] Speaker A: You're a bot. No, you're a bot. [01:41:09] Speaker B: Yeah, no, like, but I'm sure the, the people that are doing this are like, it's the future. [01:41:15] Speaker D: Just bots arguing with each other, accusing each other of being bots. Is that the future? [01:41:19] Speaker B: I really think so. I really think so. [01:41:21] Speaker A: And the future is now. [01:41:24] Speaker B: It's the weirdest. Like, like the, the propaganda they're spreading is like, there's like this weird anti Israel propaganda that's happening at the same time that they are promoting all of the socialist policies. Like, it's like they're weaponizing the, the trend against Israel and they're saying, look, Israel's stealing all of this money from the US So that they can have free health care and they can have, you know, all these things. Why don't we just have these things in the US and stop giving it to Israel? And I'm like, dude, this like, like this is exactly the sort of, like this is the trap, you know, like, is that they want you dependent on everything. So, yeah, I don't know. It's very weird. We're in very short order. Web of Trust is going to be like, I mean, if it's not already that way. Like, the Dead Internet theory is, I think is a very permanently relevant thing. [01:42:24] Speaker D: Yeah, it sucks. I saw a tweet yesterday. Someone said, my son just used ChatGPT to do his homework. The assignment looked AI generated and someone is probably going to use AI to grade it. What are we doing here? And this is, I mean, and the sort of giga brain theory on that is we're learning a new skill set, which is how to prompt AI for stuff and actually get the kind of results we want. But that's a moving target too, because these things are constantly tweaked in accordance with whatever some woke agenda is or. And eventually, like when it, when AI becomes recursive, like at the moment, it just, it gets. Most of the training is done on Reddit, right? Which is, you know, ridiculous. And that's why they have all these NPC opinions all the time. We invented, we reinvented the npc. It's just like it started out as algorithmically generated correct opinions via conditioning all these intellectuals into thinking these Malthusian things. Then you have Redditors just mindlessly absorb it and parrot Those opinions. Then you have AI absorb all that and turn it into completely reasonable sounding, just nonsense. And I don't know, it just becomes the amount of recursion here of just of stuff devoid from any intuitive spark that has some sort of ability to think outside the box just becomes like impossible to find. Like, it's almost like I need there to be grammatical errors in stuff before I'll believe it's something a human genuinely thinks. And then I'm like, oh no. But now they're going to start copying that. Like you can get grok to be like, bruh, what the is even this? Like, you can get it to, to talk like that. So you're like, no, like my one heuristic for knowing if I'm dealing with an actual mind rather than, you know, an artificial thing. So I don't know, burn it all down. I'm back to being an accelerationist. [01:44:17] Speaker A: Give it another 30 minutes, right? No, dude, I feel that so much. It is interesting though, because I've actually been learning a lot with AI and it's just because I don't, I guess really it all comes back to culture. It all comes back to culture and like what the perspective of the user is because I don't want it to write stuff for me. Like, I don't understand. Like, I mean, granted, if I had somebody like telling me to do, you know, like, if I was back in school, I probably would get to do, to do my homework because I just don't like, if it's something that I found no value in and I didn't want to do. That's what I use it for. It's a bullshit generator, right? And so much of school was just busy work. And this is the busy work. This is the ultimate like problem solver of busy work is like, okay, well let's just, let's just stick all this in. However, the things that I'm actually interested in, in learning about, it's a fantastic tool for doing so. The number of. I've solved like four or five little problems with PEAR Drive myself and now I actually am so much better at troubleshooting because I know how and where to go in to, to use our little like, API that, that we built for, for logging or whatnot. And I've got it so that like, I, I list like, okay, well I want the log to tell me which file I'm using and where it's calling from. And so I put that in the logs and I can chase stuff down and I can make sense out of the Code I, if you, if you did that, if you asked me to do that like a year ago, I'd have nothing. I'd have nothing. I wouldn't be able to. Troubleshooting would, I would suck at it. But it's just because I, the way I use AI, I don't get it to write me a whole like 800 lines of code to do this thing. I mean granted sometimes I do, but usually what I will do is I will give it code, I'll say which piece does this? And then I'll get it to explain how each piece is working to do what thing and then I'll be the one that comes up with the idea like I want to figure out how to solve it because I know AI is just going to do some generic thing and I'm like well could we do this just within this one piece to make it work better and, or to fix something or get it to ask some other file and then it will help me do that. And like I, I've just. The structure of the code makes more sense to me. I've learned more about. I'm way better at troubleshooting it now than I ever was before. And troubleshooting has always kind of been my thing, troubleshooting tech stuff and feeling like I've kind of gained this ability to troubleshoot code now and that I could actually do something useful without Claude, you know, without Chat GPT because I kind of know the structure. I know how to open it up in VS code and which file to go looking for when something's called. It's like okay, this, this function is this and this is where I'm probably going to go to find it. I don't know. I feel like, I feel like it's been a huge, it's been a great teacher. It's been a great teacher. But it's entirely in how I'm using it that I think it's you that it has actually been applied that way because I've been using it to try to, try to answer questions rather than get it to do stuff for me. You know, like that's a totally different approach is what does this do is different from make a thing that does this. I don't know. That's, that's been my, my take on AI and I, I loved it for, for what I've been able to get out of it. [01:47:52] Speaker D: Yeah dude, if it wasn't useful it wouldn't be growing the way it is. It's just the double edged sword of tech making us all Lazy and complacent and that degrading things on a more, you know, subtle level whilst improving things for high achieving people, you know, so I use AI to do some pretty amazing stuff and so does, you know, people at Ocean and so do a lot of developers because it just saves time. Like we can write. I can get amazing things happening with computers very quickly because AI can just throw it together. I'm just like, you know, write me a script that pulls from this AI and does that and updates this file and rotate it once every 24 hours on Pacific Standard Time, you know, at midnight and all this. And it will just cough up a script and I'm like, all right, make it work. Make it run this every, you know, make this run every 24 hours on this version of Mac OS and it coughs up another script. Like I'm just. And put this in that file and make it do it. And this is just saving so much time. [01:48:47] Speaker B: Like it's, it's translation. [01:48:50] Speaker D: I'm. [01:48:51] Speaker B: My ability to communicate with people that I would. [01:48:55] Speaker A: Your family now. [01:48:56] Speaker B: I mean, my entire family. [01:48:58] Speaker A: Yes. [01:48:58] Speaker B: My ability to communicate with my entire family is, is basically dependent on AI and it does a really good job. It does a better job than Banner Shay could do. If it does something weird, she can tell me, which is, I've figured out how to hack. You know, if I make fairly simple sentences, it creates very beautiful Persian. You know, as long as I don't make my senses sentences complicated, it full of idioms I can say. Yeah, yeah, well, not even that. [01:49:29] Speaker A: It. [01:49:29] Speaker B: Actually, those things are not as bad as you would think. It's more just like if I make a run on sentence or I make a sentence that's just too complicated, maybe technically correct, but just, you know, it's too much strung together. It's, it's much, it does much better if, if I just break everything up into smaller sentences, which is probably a better writing practice anyway. [01:49:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [01:49:55] Speaker B: And so no, it's, it's. It's amazing how well it works. And I'm doing the same thing with, you know, Portuguese right now, talking with somebody that I'm trying to rent a place from. And, and thankfully my lawyer's very good at English. [01:50:11] Speaker D: But. [01:50:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. I need, I need to build something that will hopefully allow me to do some sort of Portuguese, like right on my translation, like right on my phone without the need for a. At least. I don't know, we'll see how, how hard that is. [01:50:28] Speaker A: But yeah, all right. I want to go ahead and get to the one that I really want to talk about just because all of us are interested in mining. Bitcoin mining is like a really big deal. And the. I read the article and this was so jack and block. I've been talking about getting into mining for a long time and there was a buzz about a mining project for a long time and rig. Their project has now been unveiled and it looks awesome. So they have completely redesigned the entire thinking around how to model. Like, your infrastructure is now separate from your asic. So your power block, your encasing, your fans, your, your inverter. Like all of the stuff is now separate from the chips. [01:51:27] Speaker D: Modular. [01:51:28] Speaker A: And you have boards that you can swap out and swap back in and in seconds you're running on the new asics. And like so they've, they've literally, they finally made it into infrastructure that can be where you can set up your entire enterprise and you can isolate one board and replace something without shutting anything down. Like without you like, it's just like swap out to go. Just like in any sort of big data center thing, you heart swap a hard drive, right. You got to hot swap miners, you got to hot swap ASIC boards. And it makes upgrading, it makes maintenance, it makes repairs. All of it's modular. All of it's modular. So you can do any individual piece and your infrastructure is infrastructure. [01:52:18] Speaker B: You don't have to buy machines, you don't have to buy machines that have all of that stuff built in. [01:52:23] Speaker A: Means that each cost is cut down so much because now you're. Yeah. [01:52:29] Speaker D: You don't need to buy a new power supply because a chip died. Yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah. It's ridiculously inefficient. The current model they made the, they made the current hardware market look like a bunch of kids. They, they that they've gone. They've leapfrogged it that much by being like this is how real data center data centers operate and miners. [01:52:47] Speaker A: This is how serious people play. Yeah, that's exactly right. [01:52:50] Speaker D: They, they've done it. It's amazing. The efficiency is where everyone's looking, right. Because no one wants to be Bitmain always have that advantage of being so big that they can be TSMC's biggest customer. Right. So they or whoever it is they use for manufacturing and they can get like the lowest, you know, on paper cost, you know, joules per terahash blocks ahead of their latest generation but behind the next generation Bitmain. So they're not bad, they're like pretty good. And they can be justified and the savings with like not having to one chip dies on an S19 so you gotta take the whole thing out and replace everything and you lose like hours and hours doing it. And you know that I think it's. [01:53:33] Speaker A: Going to win like the long term. I was about to say the long term kills it. Like if they don't go to this model, you know. Yes. The upfront you might be paying the same or similar or maybe even a little bit more for the first run of machines in the first infrastructure. But your cost to upgrade is now cut in half from what what you would do with the other things. So it doesn't even matter that this model isn't necessarily the best model. It's the fact that the next model you're. You. You're going to have a 50 discount even if you're matched. You know. And it's only going to get better and they're going to sell a lot of these. It's 800 terahash per second. ASIC miner is their. Their like main thing. That's amazing modular and it's like three boards inside of it. So like one thing can have a problem. You can swap. You can slide it out and there's still two boards in. Slide the third one back in so you can piecemeal repair. Like you're not the whole thing. It just. It's just the way it should have been done. It's. It's so beautiful. And I was. There's a great article. [01:54:35] Speaker D: Yeah. Like seriously, this is no small deal. Like Ocean was starting to decentralize template construction and make some another important aspect of mining as decentralized as hash rate is. But the elephant in the room was always there's only one fricking manufacturer of all the hardware and it's all closed source and backdoor and we don't trust them and all that stuff. This was like the horrible secret that no bitcoiner really wants to admit is how centralized that part of mining is. And he might have Jack with this whole initiative might have just fixed that. I'm just like wait a minute. We've been crying about mining for 10 years and wait, did it just get fixed? Maybe actually maybe we fixed it. It needs to be adopted and it's one more manufacturer. It's not like everyone can print an ASIC at home but it just makes it so much better than what we've currently had. And have you heard any news about what that. Because it open sources everything too. Right. [01:55:31] Speaker A: That was the thing. [01:55:32] Speaker D: Yeah. It breaks up all of these like Little cartels of big pools that are like, we want you on our pool, which is really just a front for Bitmain. Again, if you use our aftermarket firmware, and we'll give you a discount if you do that. And that means necessarily we've got to close the firmware down and make sure no one knows what it is. And like all that like tomfoolery can just end. It's like, no, I'm just using JAX thing. It's open source, it's more efficient, it's modular. [01:55:57] Speaker A: Here's why, here's why it's going to destroy because now somebody who just has a better idea for a chip or for a more efficient board, like let's say we go to some unified memory type thing, right? There's like just some idea about how to make it better. Doesn't have to make a power supply, doesn't have to make a case, doesn't have to make a fan. They just build a board that slides into JAX infrastructure. Yep. And, and then same same thing in reverse is that you can then use all the boards in, in rig or in Proto or whatever, whichever one you would refer to it as. And you can build your own case and use their boards like you can, you can find a better way to make a better power supply that's a little bit more efficient and swap that out without. Without having to invent better chips. You don't have to have a chip manufacturer to make Asics better. So. And then the fact that the. [01:56:47] Speaker B: You get the best of all worlds. [01:56:49] Speaker A: You get, you get the best of all worlds because you have other people improving your stuff for you. And if three other companies make boards that work into this, Proto's gonna sell the absolute crap out of their infrastructure and their boards because they're gonna know that they can swap out the boards for. Yeah, they can buy rigs next, next Sports, but they can also just buy, you know, the next Butterfly Labs. That's a terrible example because they're. They were a big pile of crap that was a scam. But they could buy from Butterfly Labs if they actually just make a board and maybe they could actually deliver if they didn't have to do all of the other crap, you know. So just to. This is. This is so huge and it's way bigger than I think it was kind of giving credit. It really kind of went under the radar. I just kind of bounced into the article from someone else, like, is like, oh, cool, there's their mining stuff is out and I was just kind of going gaga about it for a couple of days. I like it just been buzzing and. [01:57:44] Speaker D: No, it's, I just think this is huge. [01:57:46] Speaker A: I think it's huge and people are not giving it the credit it deserves. [01:57:49] Speaker D: Yeah, it's, it's great. Modularity is the way to go, man. Like get experts to work on each component one by one. You don't buy a power supply off the world's biggest ASIC manufacturer because it's going to suck. And they do, they just suck. So like, no, I've had enough. It's time to do this whole thing properly. Do they have like, you don't need one ethernet cable for each machine as well. You just like plug in the whole rack and it just like intelligently is a switch at the same time. Do they have. [01:58:15] Speaker A: That's a good question. That one. I don't know. [01:58:17] Speaker D: Well, because that adds up. Like I need, you know, 80,000 ethernet cables just like. And like four of them break every hour. It's like just someone has to go. [01:58:26] Speaker A: And deal with that. [01:58:27] Speaker D: Like just plug in the whole thing. Right. Just like all those little savings are just so intelligent. [01:58:34] Speaker A: Where the hell's the. I'm trying to find the original article because I wanted to. There's got to be a way. I would love that. That would be amazing too. I had not considered that one. [01:58:46] Speaker D: Well, those things add up. [01:58:48] Speaker A: Like so xyz, that's the website. It's amazing how much adds up when you see it done right. You realize just how amateur the entire global market around this has been. And that's really the crazy thing. Like that's the seriously crazy thing. [01:59:06] Speaker B: What's crazy is how big it has gotten and how much money is built on this thing. And it has like, it all works, you know, like it's, it's kind of, it's kind of wild that it is so like amateurish. But we're. I don't know, it, it's, it's very bullish because you know that means like Bitcoin's. Bitcoin's growing up. [01:59:30] Speaker A: Oh, and also it's air cooled and immersion. Same same case, same everything. That's really cool. It, it's, it's basic. It's. It's ready to be either, either or. [01:59:44] Speaker B: Crazy. [01:59:45] Speaker D: Hey, do you want to give me some context here? This is unrelated, you know, Crown Lightning guy? [01:59:51] Speaker A: Crown Lightning? [01:59:52] Speaker D: Yeah, he's. Yeah, he's a Twitter. [01:59:54] Speaker A: Is this a user? [01:59:55] Speaker D: Yeah, he's a Twitter user. Oh, he had a. He said shitcoin insider podcast he did with you. [02:00:02] Speaker A: Oh, J.C. crown. Yay, a crown crown. BTC or Barack Obama. [02:00:08] Speaker D: Yeah, Barack Obama. That's how I know that's the one. [02:00:10] Speaker A: That's the one. Yeah. [02:00:11] Speaker D: Well, he's. You know, he's. I don't know. I'm just sort of randomly throwing him a bone here because, like, he keeps calling Bitcoin magazine and David Bailey scammers, and David Bailey's like, I'm going to expose your shitcoin past with you. And he's saying. And he's just telling me here, like, well, here's my past. I'm laying it out before I get sort of thrown under the bus. I did the shitcoin Insider podcast with Guy Swan to help educate bitcoiners and others about why those were bullshit. Do you want to mention anything there and, like, help the guy out if he's about to have his character assassinated by David bailey? [02:00:45] Speaker A: Well, he's 100%. Um, I mean, we. We talked about it, and I was friends with him back when he was doing a whole bunch of shitcoin stuff, and it was really very interesting, dude. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was. It was really interesting. And he thought he. He recognized them as all shitcoins even back then. [02:01:03] Speaker B: Didn't he kind of infiltrate a bunch of communities? [02:01:05] Speaker A: No, he totally did. He would argue bitcoin maximalist stuff with them while working with them to make NFTs or whatever because they were paying. But he never. It was. It was honestly a weird dynamic. I never. It's one of the reasons why he was always interesting to me, but, like, I never. I never really held it against him. He. He recognized he was 100, honest about everything he was doing and the projects that he was working. I was like, oh, yeah, this is garbage where it's. It's like kitties. It's like digital kitties. Who the. Who wants this crap? But as they're paying $20,000 for it. [02:01:41] Speaker B: So he also sewed a bunch of dissent in some shitcoin forums, like, like, arguing as, like, other people and, like, just starting, like, starting fights inside. Like, starting inviting and a bunch of shit. [02:01:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:01:56] Speaker B: So in shitcoin development. [02:01:57] Speaker A: That's why we did shitcoin Insider together, because he was literally hanging out tons of different communities and projects in shitcoins, and he saw them all as shitcoins, but he was working and talking and doing stuff with all of them. That's why we did shitcoin Insider. I was like, you're my shitcoin insider. I'm not in any of those communities. I'm not. I don't know anything about any of those projects, so let's do a show together. And he's like, all right, cool. And none of that's hidden. He's not revealing anything. Anybody who's listened to Shitcoin Insider knows exactly what it is. That's the premise of the freaking show. So, yeah, I don't know. [02:02:26] Speaker B: He was also at a bunch of the Bitcoin rally. Rally Bitcoin meetup podcasts. Right? That was like. He was in most of those. [02:02:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's where I met him. I don't know. I've known. Yeah, I've known Crown for a long time now. So I'm not. I'm not. I don't even remember where. Where we met him. I assume it's probably the bitcoin. The Raleigh meetup is where I met him. [02:02:47] Speaker B: But those were good shows, man. Those were hilarious. [02:02:51] Speaker A: I really enjoy Shitcoin Insider. [02:02:54] Speaker B: No, I mean, I mean the Raleigh Bitcoin. The Raleigh Bitcoin. [02:02:57] Speaker A: Oh, the Raleigh Bitcoin meetup podcast. Oh, my God. Yes. No, those were fantastic. [02:03:01] Speaker B: They were hilarious. [02:03:02] Speaker A: Those are fantastic. Yeah, that's Steve's original show. This is original podcast. [02:03:08] Speaker B: That's. That is true. Steve is responsible for that. [02:03:12] Speaker D: All of that. [02:03:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it looks like. It looks like there's one Ethernet per thing. You still have to have Ethernet, but it's per. But it's per rig. So it's multiple boards and stuff. And so you're not necessarily doing it per. It seems like. It seems like you're a little bit. You're a little bit better. [02:03:34] Speaker B: But one thing at a time. [02:03:35] Speaker A: Maybe, maybe a 2x, like, maybe like a 50% decline. [02:03:41] Speaker B: They're improving things like three or four steps at a time. [02:03:43] Speaker D: So, yeah, they're gonna. It's right. This. This was just like a weird example anyway. It's not like a deal breaker for me or anything. Like, obviously like singular hash boards rather than having to put three down. Well, one breaks, so you. By virtue of that, two others also don't work and you have to have them all offline. Like, that's the major win here. But yeah, like, I don't know. I think if we can get mining back on track, like the nice hash is now mining on ocean, it looks like. So that's massive because they appear to have 5x a hash, which is just. Yeah, that's like a 50% increase in our pool hash rate. That's a lot. We're one and a half percent of the network now. That's no longer like, you know, an embarrassment like that. It was when we were petering along at like 100 pair hash and stuff. Like we're doing pretty good now. We should be finding two and a half blocks a day on average. So that's, that's pretty good. And everyone that's mining on us seems to be using knots and there's. That's not required. Granted, the scripts I threw together all necessarily use knots because like, I just wouldn't use core at this point. But yeah, they're using knots and they're using the defaults in it and they're even changing the 300 kilobyte block size to be, you know, the full amount. Though the one nice hash just mined was a block with hardly any transactions in it because everyone is now sub 1 Sat per V byte enjoying paying nothing. So yeah, it's ocean's going great. The hardware side looks like it's going great. So all that's left now really is this like struggle with core. And I don't really like. Me and Guy disagree about the severity of and the implications of it. Happy to disagree on that. I do. [02:05:28] Speaker A: I hate you now, pushing your ass off the bridge. [02:05:33] Speaker D: I, I hope you're right. I, I really, really would love to be wrong on this whole spam issue and that it's not emblematic of some deep rot that's going to eat things out from the inside and just. I hope I'm wrong about that. I don't think I am. I think the fact that like, maybe I should mention something. Actually I have had a suspicion that something is deeply wrong in CORE since before the spam war kicked off. And then when the spam war kicked off, I was like, well, obviously that's why there's kind of some context there that is stuff I can't really go into. But I'm just like, this is like, there's some gatekeeping going on here. There's some people doing good work that are just being elbowed out because they're not part of a little clique. It's become very, very political and very unmeritocratic and you know, and there's those kinds of things I was seeing before and, and then, you know, when. But everything coming out of CORE was still basically good. So I was like, all right, but when is this going to rear its ugly head? And then it did. And I was like, all right. So I was ready to go and ready to be like, core, it's finished, I'm done, they're corrupt, it's over. And everyone else is like, well, they're just making up return bigger, like, and maybe there's a reason for that. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Oh, sweet summer child. Like, that's how I kind of felt about it. [02:06:52] Speaker B: The straw that broke the camel's back. [02:06:54] Speaker D: Yeah. And I also feel like there's the sort of theory of it, if we're going to be attacked at that level, like someone's going to go to the default implementation and start putting malicious code in it. They're not going to just be like, right, block size equals a gigabyte now. And like, we're hard for. They're not going to do anything like that. They would do death by a thousand cuts and do little shitty things and ball the frogs. And I'm like, well, then I'm going to be paranoid and looking out for stuff like that. And this ticks that box. So I'm like, here's like, obviously they're not going to do something ridiculously over the top. If there is an agenda in court to subvert Bitcoin, they'd have to do it subtly. But I'm aware that having that paranoid attitude can also just lead to making everyone miserable and unhappy when everyone is actually doing a good job. I know that kind of paranoia does like, you know, you come up with a political movement that's against the establishment and you assume everyone else in it is a fed and no one can do anything in it, then then you sabotage yourself when you might have been wrong the whole time. So I, I understand like all of the contradictions here and I'm trying to reconcile them all and act in a way I think is okay. But yeah, I'm just giving all that context. [02:08:04] Speaker A: One of the reasons why, again, I don't think it's existential or kind of gets to that point when it comes to like, eventually a fork is, is really because one of the things that I've been seeing really since the fork, the original, like block size war, is there were a couple of things that I recognized and like, kind of stuck with me for how I was seeing these, this conversation or these debates evolve. And I started reading a lot about like old protocol wars and old Linux wars and stuff because of how vicious some of the early decisions about those types of things were done. And it just kind of made me realize, or my framing for a really long time since kind of the 2017, 2018 era, was that we were going to get to a point point where we had a permanent impasse on some subset of issue or issues that would just never be settled there would, it would never actually reach an end. Because that's necessarily what I think the decentralization of this means, is that we're going to grow to a point where there is no more social consensus and the only consensus left is the network consensus. But that the economic force, the, the, the power of the network to converge on the same economic reality will basically neuter the effect of that social lack of consensus, so to speak. Is that the cost of the economic burden of the, the economic damage of trying to get across the kind of Rubicon to settle or have some sort of finality of like it's definitely this way or if it's definitely not. I think it only works early in those protocol, in the years of those protocols and, and the whole idea of like whether or not spam filters or no will probably look a lot more like IPv6 or IPv4. It's just gonna, we're, we're gonna implement it in the year 2000 and we got a four year plan and 25 years later we're probably gonna have IPv6 one day. You know, like it just gets to the point where it's so big and it's so disjointed and there's no way to have social consensus that it just doesn't move. Like, like, I think that's what ossification is, is when you reach an impasse where there are different directions and disagreements and social circles and ideas of what bitcoin should be and not none of them can then actually have a say over what bitcoin does. And again, it's too economically valuable to keep everybody together than it is to try to split again. [02:10:57] Speaker D: Yeah, I think I'd agree. Like you're, you're going down the, if I understand correctly, you're celebrating the fact that this leads to more likely somewhat ossified state. Is that fair? [02:11:10] Speaker A: Not celebrating. Not celebrating. Just saying that I think this, that's what it means. And I was expecting that it would always get to this point and this may be one of those issues where it just is a, is a permanent impasse. [02:11:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you just, you never know when you're going to hit the, you know, the, the ossification point. But it certainly could be that that's just what's happened is it's gotten so big that we will maybe it could, we could still have consensus, we could still have consensus around some other soft fork. [02:11:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [02:11:41] Speaker B: And then you end up in a situation where maybe the people that Want one thing, try to hold it hostage the same way we had with the same way we had the big blocks. [02:11:51] Speaker A: But also they just think it means self forks are gonna, if we do get a soft work, it'll just take a really, really long time. You know, it'd be like a five year implementation period or something. But I would say this is that I 100% get your thoughts about like the degrading culture and the, the potential risk of all of this if there is an agenda or there is an attempt to cause problems or disagreement or something. But I would be very, very worried about it if this was a government. Like I would be extremely worried that this was leading to a dead end and we're screwed and I don't know how to fix it but. And how long has it been since when we went to what, 1% to 18% knots? Like it's not a government. There's definitely one group in charge. In fact, I think this is done more to damage bitcoin core's reputation and the cohesion around them being able to make decisions than anything else that has happened to bitcoin core as an institution, whatever you want to call it in Bitcoin's history or since Bitcoin core was a GitHub thing. So again I just think we're watching consensus kind of split apart into a lot of different branches. [02:13:10] Speaker B: I do think that like this may be emblematic of like the, a wider cultural problem is that you said it's a bunch of like younger devs and stuff that are in the, in the core group and a lot of, you know, a lot of the older guys left, right, the old guard. And it's just like everywhere I look, I'm sure probably mentioned this sometime before, but everywhere I look there is like just such a total lack of, of ability to think through failure modes of stuff. Like literally this refrigerator, it beeps when you leave it open too long. But not if you leave the door. Only leave the door cracked. Why the hell if the door is completely open, do I need the refrigerator to beep at me and tell me it's open? I can see it's open, but when you can't tell that it's quite open, it'll just stay that way all day and never make a noise. What, what is the like people are putting things in stuff that makes no fucking sense. Like it, you see it on cars. Every car past like 2010, 2014 maybe there's a couple of like year models that were like particularly like where things got particularly bad. But like, the last 10 years, it. Like, there are cars that if the battery dies, it forgets how to roll up the windows. That should never be a thing. I mean, you know, okay, the electric cars are like a whole other problem. [02:14:32] Speaker A: But, like, can't open the door. [02:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah, you have a door handle power. You have a door handle that. I know that the electric car, if it. It should never have a situation where the battery runs down. Like, it's supposed to, like, you know, protect itself or whatever. But the thing is, is it does. Yeah. Like, there's always a situation where one gets wrecked and gets left in a junkyard or, you know, on somebody's lot for a long time, and then you cannot get the freaking doors to open. Like, it's just. It's a nightmare. Like, this is not how you build things intelligently. And I think a lot of that that's infected the software that we use is. It's infected everything. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know how that, you know, bitcoin fixes. I don't know what you do about it. Yeah, yeah. Like, I don't. I don't know. It's definitely a wider cultural problem. I don't know. I don't know what you do about it. [02:15:23] Speaker D: But look, I'll make that comment now because I think it's relevant to what you said and I don't. It's. I don't want to ramp up the fear porn too hard, but I'm going to, like, invoke some scary context anyway. So, like, Barack Obama made a nice comment that he shared with me. He was DMing someone and just like, screenshot the DM because he's like, what do you think of this argument? And he's right. He says, like, you can change the supply schedule in Ethereum and you can change the supply schedule in Bitcoin. It's the same process, technically speaking, but culturally it's acceptable in one culture and it's completely not in the other. Like, if you want to change how many Ethereum there are, you just do it and everyone just goes along with it. If you want to change 21 million in Bitcoin, it's impossible. And if you're just going to talk about what's technically doable and what isn't, you're going to miss the point completely because it's a cultural pushback in the case of Bitcoin that prevents you from doing it. And that might not always be the case. Like, if every. I've said this before. I Think on this on Satoshi Roundtable. If in the future everyone's broke except a bunch of rich bitcoiners, someone is going to ride on that politically and say, you're broke because bitcoin has broke the economy. They, they made fiat fall apart and it's all their fault. And here's a fork to make more bitcoins and only broke people will be given the new ones. Everyone's going to go for that because people are economically illiterate. And, you know, if the will is there culturally, that's the thing people are pushing for, then it happens. And you, you still have Peter Todd saying it would be a good thing if it did too, right? So that's no good. And then I have the, the sort of the. A corollary to that, which is I read that Vitalik Buterin quote right, from ages ago, from 2017, where he's saying eth was not possible on bitcoin because of spam filters. And your spam filters tell us that you will censor people that will use bitcoin in ways you don't like. Right? That was laughed out of the room. And we literally don't have that culture now. We have a culture that if Vitalik came to us now and said, I want to do something called Ethereum on top of bitcoin and your spam filters are getting in my way today, we would literally and have just said, okay, we will remove, we will make data carrier size way bigger so you can do it a bit more conveniently than using fake pub key. That's all we would do. And obviously bit VM exists to kind of facilitate the whole thing, and it didn't back then. The culture has changed. And can you imagine if all of the ICO scams and the NFT scams and all of that stuff, instead of happening on Ethereum and over in the shipcoin world, all of it happened on bitcoin instead. Can you imagine how differently the last 11 years would have gone? Like we got to say bitcoin, not crypto. We had that clear distinction. Suddenly there would be no difference. It would all just be the same thing. Wrapped bitcoin would have been a thing on Bitcoin instead of it being a thing on Ethereum. I just can't imagine bitcoin having any sort of strong ability to remain internally congruent if that kind of rot would be allowed to happen. Like, I never appreciated how much shipcoins keep the stuff. We don't want to see the fiat in another ecosystem. And rather than Bring it under the bitcoin umbrella. I never appreciate that until the bitcoin magazine guys came along and were like no, it's all we can do. NFTs and stable coins and all this stuff on top of bitcoin. Now I'm like, that's, that's ruining the line. It's no longer bitcoin, not crypto, it's bitcoin, this kind of use, but not that kind of. No one's going to understand. [02:19:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no 100%. [02:19:03] Speaker A: There's a lot of that that I get. But here's one of the big things about your first point is that if Ethereum changed the schedule, nobody in the community would push back. If anybody in bitcoin at any level, regardless of how many normie support they have if they try to change the schedule, there's a fork, there's a fork. I'm holding the line, Everybody. And there's 20% of knots or 18% running knots and probably another 30%. I should know 95% of the people who are actually running nodes will fork. [02:19:41] Speaker B: Would hold the line. [02:19:42] Speaker A: They would hold the line. But the point is, but here's the big thing, here's the big thing about the user activated software. An intolerant minority. It's the, the economic dynamic that I talked about even way back then that I thought that I really think is the reality and why bitcoin for the long term remains defensible. It does, it does mean that you have to be, you know, eternally vigilant. That's the cost of liberty. I think Jefferson right is. But that an intolerant minority can hold the line and it does so much economic damage for them to push through that if we're willing to bear the burden of bitcoin falling 50% they're not going to because the whole reason they're trying to change the, the, the you know, 21 million limit because they're chasing, it's because they're chasing short term is because they're trying to get richer. It's, it's only going to work. They only want it if they can get more wealth. If we can hold the line and take that wealth, if we can make it uncertain if we can, if we can. For if we call their bluff, we will win. And I think we only need 10, I think we'll have 80, you know, like when it comes to something like that. So. [02:20:55] Speaker B: Well, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that not only that people would just go along with the change in Ethereum but Nobody has any say except for nobody's running handful of exchanges. That's what I'm saying. The only people that have any say in Ethereum are a handful of exchanges and Vitalik and some heavy buddies. It's literally in the hands of a very small number of people. And so you have to follow in Ethereum. So it's not even. The comparison is just. Just wildly different. But. But even if you're taking like, let's say litecoin or whatever, you know, whatever the other shit coin you want to use, like the. I don't know what's funny is that even the col. Maybe they have colored coins or something now in there. But like, I remember even in Litecoin because it was marketed as like the silver to bitcoin's gold or whatever the litecoin culture was. Was even. Was even more resistant to a lot of the shitcoin spam and stuff that was being added than. Than most of the other. Like. So, yeah, you know, I don't know. I mean, there were people running litecoin. I mean, I ran a litecoin node, you know, like, like sometime early on thing. [02:22:06] Speaker D: I think I actually did that once. [02:22:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I did. [02:22:09] Speaker D: Yeah, it was. Wow. Yeah, it's. Sorry to cut your flow down. I'm just like. I remember it. I probably still have it on my 2012 MacBook Pro. The Litecoin core or whatever it would have been. [02:22:24] Speaker A: Dude, you know what? You know what? Actually the. Something that has just given me like that just makes me love, absolutely freaking love bitcoin and just think how crazy this whole thing is. Is that my friend, a good friend of mine who I did stuff with him and got him into bitcoin. [02:22:43] Speaker B: Like you coerced into buying bitcoin? [02:22:46] Speaker A: Basically. Basically, like I don't even know how many years ago, like, literally like 1512, 1212 and some change years ago. And it was just a little bit, you know, it wasn't like a ton of money, but. But it is now. But he. He had not opened. He was so scared. And I put this. I moved away. So we don't live in the same place. So we barely get to hang out and never get to really do anything bitcoin. But he has treated his laptop like a hardware wallet. He just doesn't. It's not plugged in. It's just. It's just air gapped from everything and he's just never touched it. It is a MacBook Pro from literally 2013. And he just brought this thing out, booted it up. He Says, I haven't opened this in, like, seven years. He booted it up, opened up multibit. This is the first time he connected to the Internet. [02:23:45] Speaker B: It still had battery life, right? [02:23:47] Speaker A: It still had battery life. He said it's the first time he's connected to the Internet since, like, the year that he put bitcoin on it, because it was, like, during a bull market, and he got, like, really nervous about it, and. And he booted it up, and it took, like, a day. And he synced. He synced the chain to. To current. He couldn't send it to a BC1 address because they didn't exist back then. But other than that, everything worked. Everything worked without a hitch. We sent the transaction to. We got him set up with, like, a really good cold car set up, and. And he's just, you know, cold storage, put it all away. But the whole thing just worked. And I was just like, this is, like, going back into the past like this 12, like, 13 years, and this still thing just. Just connects to the nodes, downloads everything, checks all the blocks, checks all the transactions. Boom. Here it is. Here's your bitcoin. Send a transaction. Bitcoin network accepts it. Everything's good. We got it on new keys. And I was like, damn, that's amazing. [02:24:52] Speaker B: Wait, did you get his fork coins? [02:24:56] Speaker A: Well, that's probably there. They're probably not worth, like, crap right now. [02:25:00] Speaker B: Well, you still look. [02:25:01] Speaker A: Great point. That was a great point. [02:25:04] Speaker D: Thank you the bcash, for remembering that I've helped people something. I helped someone dump B cash and BSV in, like, 2019. [02:25:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:25:16] Speaker D: And they. They made a decent amount out of it, man. [02:25:20] Speaker A: What is. What's the price now? 500 bucks. Okay. [02:25:26] Speaker D: For a B. Cash. [02:25:27] Speaker A: For a B. Cash. [02:25:29] Speaker D: Yeah. So if he's got, like, something that's something. It ain't nothing. [02:25:33] Speaker A: It ain't nothing. It certainly ain't nothing. Hell, yeah. Thank you for that. My God. [02:25:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:25:39] Speaker A: This is before the fork. That's amazing. All right. [02:25:45] Speaker D: And the legacy addresses, too. [02:25:47] Speaker A: Legacy addresses start with one. [02:25:49] Speaker D: Makes it easier. It's annoying when the Segway addresses, like. Or if they're nested. Segue. It's annoying. You have to, like, find the. You have to go two layers instead of one. [02:26:03] Speaker A: Well, anything else you guys want to cover? Because I think. I think I got the things that I wanted to hit, and we've been going forever, as we always do. What you guys got? You got any last thoughts? [02:26:15] Speaker D: I got nothing. [02:26:16] Speaker A: Got nothing. You guys got nothing to say? Y' all never talk. [02:26:21] Speaker B: I wish Steve was here to. To make some comment about the Raleigh Bitcoin meetup podcast. It makes me want to go back and listen to some of those episod episodes. And we need. I like, I mean, I'm not even in going to be in the country, but I really want to. I really want to make more Raleigh Bitcoin meetup podcasts. [02:26:37] Speaker A: Dude, that would be great. We should. We should totally go back to that. I'm not even. I'm not against it at all, but I will. For. For to embrace the spirit of Steve, we need to solve the 2104 bugs. [02:26:54] Speaker B: We do. We do. [02:26:55] Speaker D: I plan to not live that long. [02:26:58] Speaker A: Bitcoin is going to die and we have to fix it. This is the most important bug in bitcoin. You're welcome, Steve. [02:27:03] Speaker D: I have a feeling someone is going to figure out how to do it as a soft fork before that manifests. [02:27:10] Speaker A: I bet that as well. I would put a million sats that that is the case. Somebody will figure that out. [02:27:15] Speaker D: And then we never get our hard fork wish list actually activated, which is sad. Yeah. But probably, like, the hard fork's gonna be a nightmare because everyone's gonna want to tack on their own little personal things to make it. [02:27:28] Speaker A: Guys, let's do this too. [02:27:30] Speaker D: Like, we have to hard fork at the moment. Like, even Luke says we have to hard fork, and he's like, famously the guy that figured out how to do Segwit as a soft fork when no one else thought we could. So. Yep, yep. If he says it's a hard fork, then it's probably hard for. [02:27:47] Speaker B: Well, I mean, if we have to have Luke as the. As the. [02:27:54] Speaker C: I don't know, the. [02:27:55] Speaker B: The code, the knots. Dictator. I mean, we've. We've already established that, you know, political dictatorships are more stable. [02:28:02] Speaker D: So, yeah, they're great. Like, we will have our roles. Like, he is the fuhrer. I am the head of propaganda. These. These have all. You know, they've. We've taken into our roles like ducks to water. It's been. It's been beautiful. [02:28:17] Speaker A: Amazing. [02:28:18] Speaker D: Yeah, I'm good. I've got to jump off anyway, so. [02:28:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, guys. All right, I'll see you guys later. Thank you for joining me. Round table 12. We are out. Thank you guys for listening. Don't forget to check out and follow everybody on the show. Show me mechanic Steve and Jeff. There will be links to find him on socials and Noster and all of that stuff down in the show notes. Obviously, our wonder, wonderful sponsors as well. 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