TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #388: OP_VAULT and Bitcoin Governance with James O'Beirne

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with James O'Beirne to discuss the OP_VAULT proposal, the way Bitcoin Core is governed, and some bearish vibes. Follow James on Twitter 6:23 - Opening riff 9:45 - OP_VAULT 12:18 - Origins of covenants 16:02 - Further iterations and designing the best vault 21:18 - Explaining vaults 25:36 - UTXO batching 27:32 - Use cases 32:29 - Ideal UX 37:03 - Feedback on the opcode 42:22 - Zooming out on implications 43:47 - Back to mailing list feedback 45:48 - When is the BIP coming? 48:09 - Bitcoin core governance 55:55 - Bitcoin ossification 59:32 - How should governance change? 1:06:43 - New blood in Core project 1:10:04 - Bearish vibes 1:16:51 - Is there room for project managers? 1:20:13 - Supporting new developers 1:29:53 - Bearish again 1:32:17 - Back to OP_VAULT 1:37:30 - Plugs and closing riff Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

so for your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc sat down with a fellow beefy bitcoin boy james o'byrne first time on the pod in quite a bit sat down to talk about his new proposal op vault which would bring a vault structure to bitcoin very interesting very much needed would help give people peace of mind as they secure their bitcoin give them a fail safe if anybody tries to attack their stash very interesting conversation we also wade into the state of bitcoin governance which james is a bit bearish on i think it's a very important episode for you freaks to listen to to get a perspective of a core developer i don't say he's burned out but

is a bit dismayed at the state of the Bitcoin software project. I think you guys are going to enjoy it. Before we get into the ad reads, we have to read the top four boost from RIP387, building lightning network infrastructure with Graham Krizik from Voltage. First shout out at letter 6173, 7,777 sats. Solid content, excited for what the next decade will bring for Bitcoin. Thank you, letter 6173.

at blockchain boog 1000 sats when core lightning question mark when clear net node question mark aimed at the voltage team at slim shady 101 sats smallest palindrome you're wrong slim shady 11 is the smallest palindrome at frank america 100 sats voltage thank you guys for contributing you guys are liking these rips and you want to give value back if you're getting value out of them you can do so by downloading a podcasting 2.0 compatible app fountain breeze podverse the number of apps is growing by the day we really appreciate you guys supporting we appreciate our sponsors supporting as well this report was brought to you by our good friends at river do you want to use a bitcoin exchange a bitcoin company as your exchange or would you

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um yes it's a third-party exchange but they do encourage you to take custody of your bitcoin so you can acquire on river and they encourage you to send to your cold storage that you control river.com slash tftc this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at unshamed capital they're right down the hall for me they're not here today mlk day on chain team seems to have off we don't stop here in the comments we don't stop here at tftc i don't want to denigrate unshamed as i'm reading their ad read i'm just poking fun but unshamed is here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model this is a really driven home with their vault product which is a two is free multi-sig vault in which you hold two keys

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They're here to help you and to get you as comfortable as possible and make it as easy as possible. so go to unchained.com slash concierge use the code tftc for fifty dollars off the concierge service think about taking control of your bitcoin eliminating single points of failure river's telling you to take control of your bitcoin good way to do it bye river send out a chain vault it's a beautiful thing enjoy this rip with james ober and freaks you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to

devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. The beefy Bitcoin boys are back. Oh, man, it's real. It's real. You thought we were gone. We were never gone.

We were never gone. Although, you know, my gym attendance has been pretty, pretty poor. I think I, um, I only qualify as a beefy Bitcoin boy kind of in a, you know, in an emeritus sense, but, um, I'll probably get back into that. We had to be eating steak and eggs at Jimmy's diner in Brooklyn, rest in peace. That's the last time we hung out in New York, right? Yeah. I remember that.

I, we, we, we both felt like we had gotten duped by some of the zero hedge pandemic news. um but we you know turned out that that wasn't the case and and all that stuff was right on yeah this was in what february 2020 almost three years ago a lot has changed since then a lot has changed live in a whole new world yeah it certainly feels like it yeah i mean we were we just freaks we just talked for like 20 minutes about the state of the world it is chaotic we are in uncharted territory i mean one of the biggest differences is that you now have a producer that's kind of blowing my mind yeah logan's over there he was trying to ninja launch on us i said no logan

need some off the record catch-up time here i think sometimes like the best conversations happen after the interview actually ends you know and you you're kind of like relieved and you're able to actually kind of speak your mind a little bit more freely do you ever think about just secretly recording those and then giving the interviewee the option you're like hey we we accidentally left the the the record on do you want to like actually release this thing i think it was pretty like you remember when we were talking with uh the epsilon theory guy then we had that great yeah ben hun we had like that great hour-long conversation afterwards we were kind of pulling him up on on uh some of the stuff that he had said yeah no i wonder what the ethics of that

are well you give them the option yeah right you give them the option yeah maybe i should do that but logan keep that in the back of your mind look into the legality of doing that that's uh it's never been my strong suit looking in the am i a journalist i don't know what are the ethics of journalism i never took a course but oh you mean you don't have a license you're practicing journalism without a license well i don't live in canada so i don't have to do that right now uh yeah yeah that's true okay i don't know if that ever went through it but yeah there was a a law on the table in canada where if you wanted to to publish a blog you had to sign up with the government put yourself on a list as a as a journalist oh man

it's crazy clown world we need bitcoin we need people like you working on bitcoin that's what we're here to talk about today i'm sure we'll wade and meander back into the macro landscape and what's going on because it is chaotic but we're here to talk about op vault a proposal not an official bip yet but a how would you describe it it's a proposal for a new type of vault structure yeah i mean it really started out for me as an exploration um i've worked in a few different uh commercial bitcoin contexts at this point where you know you're talking about either custodying or shuttling around a lot of Bitcoin and so vaults kind of came on my radar a few years ago as being something really worthwhile towards those ends and

I started to kind of wade into the to the covenants conversation and basically came up with this thought experiment for what you know what the perfect vault would look like and so I wanted to write up a paper that just kind of summarized what I was thinking about and what I had found. And, um, as I was doing that, I kind of found that this op vault thing was becoming more and more tangible. And so at a certain point I said, okay, I just got to write up an implementation of this thing in core and see what it looks like and see what it feels like, uh, and release that and, and, you know, kind of see what people make of it. And, And, you know, as I went through that process, I got more and more excited about it, really,

because it was like, oh, this is pretty simple. This solves a lot of problems. It doesn't introduce a lot of overhead. And I think if you're going to do something, you should have the code for it. If you're going to propose something, you should have the code for it. I mean, that's what Satoshi did, right? And I think there have been a lot of proposals in the last two years, two, three years, that are just like, yeah, what if we did this crazy thing?

And you're like, all right, well, that sounds cool, but, you know, how many opcodes do you need to introduce for that? Like, what are those opcodes? What do they look like? What's the implementation look like? So I got tired of stuff like that and wanted to just write up some code. Yeah, I like that you said. That's exactly what Satoshi did. Let's write the code. See what happens. See how people receive it.

but i think for the context of this conversation let's just talk about the history of vaults and covenants because they're somewhat connected somewhat disconnected two different types of ideas um so did this history start with the funnily enough uh professor emin gunsires uh covenants paper that he wrote with a couple others back in like 2015 or 2016 yeah so it kind of did but we can even go back further than that if if you'd like which is um greg maxwell's famous bitcoin talk post yes and um he i think the term he uses is like condo coins um i think the title the post is something like an amusingly horrible idea um and yeah so he basically introduces this idea of covenants which is like you know and with bitcoin right now if you want to spend some coins

there's an there's a locking script that's like encumbering the coins and you just have to present basically so that's like a little computer program basically it's a little bitcoin script program So you present another program that you feed into that program and then you unlock the coins. You can do whatever you want with them. The idea that Greg introduced in this post was like, what if instead of, you know, just that one unlocking script, you could unlock the coins based on other things like the structure of the transaction that you're going to be spending them into. And so, you know, he was like, oh, you can do all kinds of horrible stuff with this. You know, Luke, Luke Jr. amusingly in the original post, he's like, you know, Luke Jr. could have some coins where all the outputs have to be perfectly round numbers in the tonal number system. You know, you could do smash coin where in order to spend the coins, you have to present a proof that you attack some other chain. So they're mostly just like making fun of this idea. Um, and I think there was a lot of concern. I mean, it was kind of a, you know, early in Bitcoin,

like people were talking a lot about stuff and, and in many ways, like we kind of didn't know what we were doing. Um, but this post, I think fomented a lot of negative opinion on covenants because it's basically these guys saying like, Hey, this is a really horrible idea because the government can come along and you know put constraints on your coins that are you know infinite and recursive and you can't you know you won't be able to escape these condo coins um when in actuality like that could happen today with multi-sig like coinbase could come along and say uh you know you can't withdraw your coins unless it's to this multi-sig arrangement where the treasury department holds, you know, one of the keys. So, so that, that concern didn't actually

end up being legitimate, but, um, like you said, I think it was 2015 or so. Um, yeah, the infamous Eamon Gunsir, uh, and two other guys, um, published this paper and it's kind of an interesting paper because it, um, kind of formalizes the idea of Bitcoin covenants. And I think it introduced the idea of vaults which is you know one application of covenants but then it's a weird paper because like the second half of the paper is like yeah we could also use these covenants things to do bitcoin ng which was like their you know almost their um you know earlier version of bitcoin cash where you you know you're you're like you get way more throughput because instead of doing proof of work you're like electing leaders or something like that and

They just mint blocks. But anyway, yeah, so they kind of came up with this idea of vaults in that paper. Yeah. And then from there, we've had a few developers that I'm aware of try to play with that proposal to create vaults or covenant structures on top of that. You had Oleg Andreev, I believe, in 2016. But then I think more tangibly, Brian Bishop created a vault structure.

And then obviously Jeremy Rubin with OpCTV, Vaults are a big part of that covenant proposal. And so I think what you've done with OpVault really, correct me if I'm wrong, builds on the shortcomings of Brian and Jeremy's implementation and tries to find like a happy medium with a different set of trade-offs. Is that a correct characterization? Yeah, absolutely. um my goal in setting out to design this thing again you know it was it was it was a thought experiment initially it was like okay i really of the covenant use cases i mean there are some really important ones like coin pools we can talk about that later but um vaults is the one that i really care about because i'm really focused on how to do bitcoin custody safer um more safely

And so I was like, I'm just going to set out to design something that in an uncompromising way provides the best vault tool. Because I had experimented with, I had looked at using Opsey TV and I'd written up some code that actually used Opsey TV to do vaults. And that was certainly an improvement over Brian Bishop's stuff. I mean, Brian, you know, Brian, I mean, in many ways, like was groundbreaking on this because he he provided the first real working implementation of vaults. But he was just kind of hamstrung by the limitations of Bitcoin in the sense that if you wanted to do vaults, you had to do these. You basically have to generate a temporary key or an ephemeral key, as I call it in the paper, and send some Bitcoin to transactions controlled by this key, generate a few different possible transactions, and then throw away the key. um and then you have to keep track of the transactions that you generate uh because they like they basically turn bitcoin into cash like a bearer asset like you're if you

lose those transactions you've lost the bitcoin because you don't have the key anymore at least theoretically um so you both have to make sure you like actually deleted the key because otherwise you know if someone kept a copy of the key they can then spend the coins even though you think you're actually in this vault structure. So you have to make sure you deleted the key. But then even if you've done that, you have to make sure that you hang on to the pre-signed transactions kind of until you want to unvault. And if you lose them, the Bitcoin's gone. So as an individual, that's really a pain. You know, certainly if you're going to operationalize that as a some kind of commercial entity dealing with Bitcoin, that's a real pain. And it's really

hard to kind of prove to yourself and to auditors that you're actually deleting that key um so you know like brian's work was really groundbreaking and it was a great proof of concept but i think there were just like a lot of practical difficulties with doing it um then when jeremy came along with opsy tv um and it's worth noting for the purpose of vaults like you can kind of do the same thing with any prev out APO because they're both sort of general covenant mechanisms but op ctv comes along and what it really does is instead of having to come up with this ephemeral key that you're generating and then signing and then hoping you delete properly the enforcement of that is kind of moved on chain and so you can rely on the consensus engine to say

okay yeah you're locking up these coins and you can only spend them in one of you know 27 ways um because with ctv what you're doing is like you're pre-generating the graph of transactions that are allowed for those coins and then um you're kind of committing to that so uh so ctv definitely introduced some improvements on the design but the problem is like you're still you still have to pre-generate everything and you still have to say okay the coins are able to go here or here or here in you know these amounts uh with these fee rates um to these keys you know um and and that just kind of like locks you in uh in many ways yeah particularly on the fee rates side of things right because if you preset those fees we

you don't move coins from that vault until some point way in the future where the fee market's completely different. There's a possibility that those transactions just sit in a mempool for a long period of time. Yeah, it's a big risk. So maybe to step back just to make sure everybody knows what a vault is. The basic idea, like if you really boil it all down, like in the abstract, what you're doing with vaults is you take some coins and you say, okay, I want to lock these coins up in such a way that there's like one recovery path. So I've gone and generated some, you know, some super cold keys. And at any point, I can sweep these coins into that recovery path,

because I'm pretty sure that that's like safe. Or at the very least, that's like, from an infrastructure standpoint, completely different than everything else that I'm doing. otherwise if these coins move at all there's got to be this delay period during which I can contest the spend of those coins you know by sweeping them to the recovery path so if I'm using these things and I set my delay period to a day and I you know making yet another bad decision and I want to go send my coins to an exchange so I can sell them I start the withdrawal process to that you know, to that exchange. And then, um, I have to wait a day and then eventually the,

you know, the coins to the exchange become spendable. If somebody hacks my stuff and they start, you know, trying to spend the coins, I have a whole day or whatever period I set to intervene and sweep those coins into the recovery path. Um, so in the, in the abstract, that's how it would work but the reason I kind of clarify that is because when you're predetermining all the different paths that the coins can go you have to use you have to basically say like in ctb if you're going to do a vault you basically have to say okay when I start the withdrawal process for these coins they are going to go to this one address that's going to serve as kind of like an intermediate wallet like a hot wallet that I then eventually decide like where they're

ultimately going to go because presumably like when I'm creating the vault I don't know where I'm going to spend the coins to but if I'm creating the vault with a pre-generated graph of transactions I have to like decide where everything is going to go so I have to have this kind of awkward intermediate hot wallet that's hard-coded but you know one of the big things that op vault does is you don't have to decide where that withdrawal destination is until you start the withdrawal process and so that allows you to completely skip like this warm or hot wallet phase that you would otherwise have to do which is a big win yeah and the way this plays out in the implementation you have two different types of signatures correct so they can

unlock right so you specify number one you specify like what the recovery path is because that you absolutely want to fix that's that's the place you can always spend to if anything goes wrong so you know that and that might be a taproot address or a script that has like you know a number of conditions you can imagine like it's like okay i can either at the recovery path i can either spend immediately with my super super cold keys or i can wait a year and then spend with some you know maybe this cold card that sits in my closet or whatever um but then so you specify the recovery path and then you specify the unvaulted and that's that's what you use to sign to basically authorize uh the start of the withdrawal process

and so the trade-offs to really dig into how this differs from brian and jeremy's implementations um it's better it's an improvement on brian's implementation because you don't have to burn the keys you don't have that risk of losing your pre-signed transactions and not having a key um to sign those uh and then on jeremy's uh gives you a bit of flexibility and determining what happens when you actually go to spend the keys in terms of being able to set fees, and set an address, correct? Exactly, exactly, exactly. And then if we want to go a step further,

one of the big things we haven't kind of touched on yet is this idea of batching. So when managing a vault, batching becomes really, really important because let's say that you're doing DCA on an exchange and every day you want to make a buy and then withdrawal to your vault, right? So you're creating a UTXO a day.

If you're using one of these, what I call pre-generated vault techniques, then for each UTXO you withdraw, you have like a separate vault and a separate vault process. So if you need to sweep all of those UTXOs, if something happens, you lose your keys, whatever, and you need to sweep all those UTXOs, You suddenly have like a huge number of transactions that you have to broadcast and a huge number of subsequent outputs that you're creating.

If instead you're able to take what I call compatible vaults, vaults that have, say, the same recovery path, you can then batch all those UTXOs together into one recovery output or one unvault output. um and so you know for an individual it makes the process a lot simpler less risky more efficient if you're talking about a big commercial enterprise that's that's custodying a lot of bitcoin um then you know having batching or not having batching might you know make a massive difference because if if you're managing you know just imagine you know tens of thousands hundreds thousands utxos then you've got to be able to to operate on that set of utxos as efficiently as you can especially if you're talking about responding to an attacker in a timely way yeah so let's dive more into that to give the less technical freaks who may be listening more context about

like the particular use cases for an individual and a commercial entity like what what would like for an individual is just is this just more secure cold storage where they can have more confidence that they can put their utxos in this type of structure and get a bit more peace of mind because if for some reason or another somebody gets access to their private keys they they have a way to make sure that that they keep their bitcoin and that attacker does not get it at the end of the day and then on the commercial side let's just treat the possibility for for better business management via UTXO management? Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a perfect way of stating it.

As a user, I mean, I don't think proposals that are not interesting for users are interesting for me. I didn't want to make something that wasn't extremely practical for someone to actually use. And so this is something that I think is really, really usable and is as valuable to individuals, I think, as it is businesses. Because what it gives you is basically like a way of costlessly introducing like a final fallback for the individual. So like I said, even if it's something as simple as like your recovery path is just a different manufacturer hardware wallet or something that you have. You can introduce that into your setup and not add to the operational complexity of whatever you're doing day to day with your Bitcoin, whether that's consolidating

coins or sending to exchanges or sending to other people. You still keep that flow very potentially seamless you know whatever you're doing today but but by using a vault you're introducing kind of like this final fallback um that that you you didn't have access to before and it really really really makes it more difficult for an attacker to get to get to your coins um obviously the cost of doing this is that you introduce a delay period um you know for your coins but i mean if this delay period is like something modest like you know 10 20 blocks like that still gives you as a as as the holder a huge opportunity to potentially intervene if some attacker gets a hold of your keys um at really not that much cost to you i don't think um and then

oh go ahead no you go you finish i was just gonna say and then as as a business um I mean you you know I think every business I've ever kind of interacted with you know if there was this feature in bitcoin this ability to kind of slow things down marginally you know like I said like a 10 block window if you have a sophisticated infrastructure and if you have you know software developers like you know a 10 block window is um is an eternity in terms of being able to actually intervene and prevent your coins from being stolen. So, I mean, it's my true belief if something like this were in Bitcoin, like the notion of a commercial hack happening would be very, very rare

because if not, you know, kind of never because what's necessary when you're using Evolve is to run, you know, what you could think of as a watchtower, which is just something sitting there kind of watching the mempool to see if any of your vaulted coins are moving. And if that move is unexpected, you get an alert and the opportunity to intervene. And so if you're like a company, this is a very trivial piece of infrastructure to set up. And if you're an individual, not only is it easy to run if you want to run it yourself,

but I think you could do this in a way that a third party would be able to do this for you in kind of a private way. um if we were to use something like you know compact block filters or bloom filters where you give some third party like some information that you know provides say false positives for spends and then they just alert you and then you decide whether um you know things have actually moved but anyway that's that's kind of getting in the weeds but my point is like i think like I would use this for sure and I think this has tremendous value for for people at the individual and at the kind of like massive scale too then in ideal world where this gets adopted and people

start building on it might be a weird question but like what does the ideal ui look look like if an individual or commercial business we're going to be setting up these vaults what type of information would they be plugging into an app obviously at the send coin somewhere um so you set up the vault i imagine there's an address associated with that vault so that's where you're sending bitcoin to initiate it and then obviously there's other pieces of information that you'll have to fill out what would that look like so i think what you could do um and that's actually another benefit of the op vault approach relative to the other ones is once you initiate a vault configuration, you can reuse it. You can just send to that same address or it's pretty

trivial to... You're sending it to the same script basically, but the parameters that you would put in are number one, what does the recovery path look like? And presumably if you were creating one of these vaults in a certain wallet, you would kind of want to come up with that recovery path with a different way you know because you don't want the same wallet kind of like generating a recovery because if it's you know if there's a problem with the software or if it's back to order something um so you come up with a different um a recovery path to feed into it and then you'd specify a spend delay and that is specified in the same way that we do like check sequence verify or any of the other relative time locks so it's like you know how many how many

blocks do you want to go by? Or how much wall time do you want to go by before you're, you know, during this withdrawal period? And then you would specify the withdrawal keys. And so that gives you all the information you need to actually send coins into the vault. So you get, you just get an address out and you can send, you know, coins into the vault. You can, And if you gave like an XPUB for the recovery path, you could generate new vault addresses that kind of correspond to the same vault, if you know what I mean, to reuse. And then when you actually wanted to spend the vault, you go to your wallet and you say, okay, I want to spend, you know, this amount to these outputs.

And then I think it'd be pretty transparent from there. um you you know you just wait for that kind of delay period to to lapse um and then your coins would be spent okay you'd be able to pick fees at the time that you're unvaulting that's right yes so this so the proposal actually like it can't be like if everybody decided tomorrow this was awesome and they wanted to do it we we couldn't activate it yet because it relies on um package relay and ephemeral anchors or something like that and i don't know how deep in the weeds you want to get there but basically they they they allow the dynamic fee adjustment to work with this this pattern and they have not been merged into core yet

Yeah, they have not been merged in. But I think of all the outstanding stuff in Bitcoin that could kind of come down the pike, package relay is far and away, I think, the most likely thing. It's pretty much going to happen. It's just kind of a matter of how quickly. because like basically every contracting protocol on top of Bitcoin has this problem where you're kind of like locking yourself into some arrangement ahead of time. And you've got to have a way of adjusting fee rates kind of after the fact. And it turns out, you know, Lightning has a lot of issues with this. So package relay is definitely going to be a thing. It looks like this ephemeral anchors design is going to be a thing as well it's kind of being lumped into some to some degree do they require any that doesn't sound like they require any consensus changes would they need soft forks or no luckily not it's just a just a policy thing yeah and then

would op vault would that necessitate a soft work because it's a new yes yeah yeah it's two new op codes and um so that would be a soft fork okay man i mean i we were talking about it before we hit record but it seems like there's been a lot of valuable feedback on the mailing list to your original post what's that been like and then i also saw ben carman posted something to the mailing list last week about vaults being a way to to improve dlcs as well yeah so the feedback so far has been pretty good. I think, you know, I've gotten some good suggestions from Greg Sanders and AJ Towns that I've already incorporated into the code. So that's up there and tested. And what's been cool is nobody's come along and said like, hey, oh no, this

is a huge issue or this is a deal breaker. And a lot of people are excited about it. I mean, I'm, I'm interested to, to get some feedback, uh, from the industrial side a little bit to see, you know, how, like, I don't know, maybe the guys at river or something would, you know, would like to have something like this, but, um, so far it's been pretty positive. Um, and yeah, like you said, one of the funnier aspects of getting feedback on this has been And like a number of people have been like, oh, you can use this to kind of simulate OpsieTV. And I'm like, yeah, you could. I just think it's funny that, you know, like a lot of people are very excited.

And I'm like, look, if we want to do OpsieTV, like we should just think about doing OpsieTV because I've spent a lot of time looking at that change. It's very simple. uh the risk is uh non-existent as far as i'm concerned i sat down and tried to break it i was like it would be fun to you know find some like hashing attack or something um and um i really i put that code through the paces now i mean i'm not i'm not like a galaxy brain in the way that you know some of the other devs are but um i think it's a safe change um but yeah i mean people people have been, you know, ironically enough, like excited about this idea of using op vault as a kind of CTV proxy. And I guess there's, um, there's a big efficiency improvement

for DLCs, uh, that you can add if you have something like CTV or like op vault. it seems like after reading your proposal even though you mentioned op ctv seems like a minimal change but it seems like the design parameters of vault are even a bit more constrained which would yeah yeah it's like it's it's more purpose built for you know for the vault use case and so i think as a result like it really just like knocks that out of the park whereas with ctv i think there are a variety of cool things you can do but i think like none of those things is this zero to one where you're just like oh wow this completely unlocks this new and amazing use case you know it's stuff like, oh, you can, you know, make the DLC contracts more efficient or, oh, you can do

this like, uh, offline, uh, channel opening where, you know, you walk into a Starbucks and they don't have to have a signing key, uh, live for you to be able to like open a light and channel and push payment, you know, to them trustlessly. So it's like, there's, I'm very supportive of ctv i think there's there's there's some really cool stuff but it's um i just think like op vaults very very tangible in terms of uh it's like okay yeah this i mean it it really allows you to do stuff with vaults that you just you know there's there's nothing else that kind of gets you this this tool yeah no i mean after reading the paper and perusing the mailing list and trying to follow along the best i can because it gets really in the weeds of the technical details

of the op code and stuff like that it does seem like it would be a massive added benefit particularly for an individual who would like more secure cold storage like would be i would love to send coins to cold storage set like hey let's have a hundred block delay um set up a watch only address and if i get a ding like hey your coins are set to move and i didn't initiate that transactions like all right i gotta go um recover to my recovery path um that would be a massive addition to the peace of mind on top of cold storage that i'm sure i know for a fact that many bitcoiners have it's like yeah i'm pretty confident my cold storage set up but there's always that lingering fear in the back of your mind like ah something's gonna gonna go wrong

somebody's gonna get my private keys and begin spending my coins and um it would be great to have a fail safe like this? Yeah, I think so. And I mean, to get like a little cosmic, you know, I think a lot of us, a lot of us have big dreams for Bitcoin. And if you start to think about something like central banks adopting it as a reserve asset, or, you know, like Feddy getting deployed in a massive way and um you know like there are gonna be custodians that are gonna are gonna want to see a period for bitcoin where like hacks just don't happen and there's like a kind of nuclear design for doing custody in such a way that like you just know it's not gonna get stolen and i think right now like we we just don't have that um there's a

lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of, it's very nerve wracking. And like you're saying, like you're, even if your coins are super cold, you know, some nights you're like sitting there like, oh, I hope, you know, I hope something didn't happen that, you know, I didn't kind of anticipate or like I'm unaware of. And so I think having something like this is just a huge, it really could be a piece in you know a design for custody for both individuals and you know major institutions where it's like you just you're not worried because you know this thing works yeah what's the specific feedback been just tightening up some aspects of the op code um thinking differently about the design of the vaults particularly

yeah yeah so one of the like the first piece of feedback i got from greg sanders insta gibbs um was in my initial draft um so there are two new op codes there's op vault which is like where you send the coins into when you want to vault them and then there's op unvault which is kind of like what i call the trigger transaction where you're triggering a withdrawal so they have to go into this like intermediate op unvault thing while the spend delay is elapsing um originally that op unvault had to be in bare script um because otherwise the script interpreter would have a hard time you know wouldn't be able to see that you're spending the op vault output into a compatible op unvault output um but greg sanders proposed a way um to ensure that we can

spend that op vault input into any kind of output so that up on vault can be in like a taproot or a um you know witness version zero script hash uh so it was kind of an implementation improvement um but it does help out the the efficiency and maybe debatably the the privacy of the whole thing by letting us, like, keep the entire lifecycle of the vault within Taproot or within, you know, Segwit script hash. Hell, yeah. Yeah, so that was... Oh, go ahead.

No, you go ahead. I was just going to say, yeah, that was a great improvement. It added, like, a little bit of complexity to the implementation, but I think it's well worth it because, yeah, it's just a good thing to have. Yeah. And then, so what's, you got the proposal out there. How long are you going to be taking in feedback before you officially write up a BIP? I was actually going to work on the BIP this week because I think even if you have a BIP out there, you know, there is a review, a review period for the BIP. um and i i think this this thing is pretty close to baked just because again like the

the use is so focused it's not like a lot of the proposals that have been pitched over the past few years have been extremely open-ended and like oh this is gonna support you know 101 different use cases and we really have to sit there and like you know turn up the clock speed on our brains to make sure this is going to be like the right platform for the future of smart contracting on bitcoin this is more just like hey look we want to we want to knock vaults out of the park um and me and you know a few other people put in a few years of thought on on this and um so i'll be surprised if the the feature set or the interface really changes all that much. I tend to think it's going to be a few things like what

Sanders pointed out or what AJ pointed out, but I'm not expecting it to change that much. And frankly, I'm not expecting that I'll devote a ton of time to this, to be honest with you. I think I'm just going to make sure the code is in good shape, make sure the BIP is precise and readable and captures everything and then put it out there and just kind of let it marinate. Um, because I'm not interested in, you know, pushing the soft fork. I mean, I, I'd love to have this, but like corralling the community is a whole different thing. And, you know, in my opinion, like a good idea just kind of sells itself. So if, if the code's sitting there and people are wanting to use it then um you know hopefully uh i'll have other people kind of like doing sales

pitches yeah and this wades into another thing we we said we should probably touch on which is governance around bitcoin core particularly around coming to consensus around soft forks which obviously op vault wouldn't necessitate yeah i think it's a good time to jump into this the state of Bitcoin governance. I know you've been a bit burnout in recent years and a bit dismayed at the state of governance and conversations and the ability to actually get things reviewed and then ultimately merged. And obviously with Taproot, we did speedy trial for that soft fork. And there's been a lot of negative feedback on that particular path towards that particular soft fork and that raises the question like how do you do these soft forks

going forward um is there going to be a new sort of um lock-in mechanism uh every time you do a soft fork is that the best way to do it yeah i mean you know and i think maybe the like hopefully we've moved past fretting about the you know the particular activation mechanism because that's just like that's so beside the point um in some ways i i really think like that whole controversy during the taproot activation was it you know honestly the the people pushing that controversy were like not some of the cooler heads in the project and i think it almost felt to me like oh we need to manufacture some kind of fight so that it looks like there was i don't think this actually what they were thinking i think the the participants were all genuine but it just struck

me as like this like straw man fight of like oh you know are we gonna do you know bip nine or not uh you know a lot equals true it just it it felt really superficial relative to the the meat and potatoes which is like what is what is taproot what does it do um but setting that stuff aside I mean, I think Bitcoin's in kind of this weird desert right now where the guy who really, I mean, in many ways, you know, led Segwit and Taproot, like the major, major changes to Bitcoin has kind of, you know, like for great reasons, stepped back a little bit and said, you know, like I'm kind of done making consensus changes for now. And, you know, his exact reason for doing that, I don't know, but I can speculate that maybe he detected it's not healthy to have one person or a limited set of people be responsible for proposing the big changes to Bitcoin because that creates an implicit dependence, like an implicit expectation on the part of the community that it's like, oh, what does Peter say? Like, you know, what are the stone tablets that Peter brought down off the mountain? You know, like, and I just think Bitcoin is right now in the middle of a sort of awkward, like teenage period where it's like, okay, maybe, okay, what do we, what do we do without a sort of implicit benevolent dictator? How do we make decisions?

How do we decide that we're going to set out on this, like, fairly complicated process of doing a consensus change without the kind of previous hierarchy that we had, you know? And it's a really important thing to figure out because if we don't figure it out, and mind you, like, almost every other major open source project, you know, if you want to look at Python with Guido van Rosum or Linux with Linus Torvalds or, you know, I mean, Ethereum, like, just the normal mode of operation is kind of like, yeah, you have some guy at the top who's like, like arbitrating at the very least. And like, you know, and, and Bitcoin doesn't and probably shouldn't have that. But it's like, well, there's never really been anything that's kind of operated this way. Like maybe you can look at the internet kind of like the IETF, but so, so I think we're in, we're in a really tough.

And for many people frustrating period where it's like, okay, we, we're proposing these things but like how do we actually know when good enough is good enough and how do we know when you know the social consensus has has been met um and i i don't have answers for that yeah that's a very very hard problem to solve um so yeah you were mentioning peter willis has taken a step back um gloria's owl has um she's become a maintainer correct she's got some some merge keys now so there's change there and um i know vladimir vladimir step back yeah yeah vladimir step back and um so yeah it is this weird i like bitcoin cores and a bit of a desert wandering through trying to figure out like how the hell do we move forward

right so that's like so i just got done like complaining about the social ass i mean i'm sorry the consensus aspect but if you think about the implementation aspect which is bitcoin core per se versus like bitcoin the protocol right um that's in a similar state where it's it's a really really frustrating project to work on. And honestly, like everybody who works on it is extremely talented. They're, you know, a lot of those people are like good friends of mine, but I just feel that like the leadership there does not have a very high EQ on net and like the kind of softer aspects of the project are like, it's, it is, it is the least fun project i've ever worked on in my life by probably an order of magnitude um and it's a real

i mean sometimes i get i get very down um working on it just because it's it's it's it's really tough and for um you know for a new contributor i mean i just i i can't imagine i mean i i have a lot of like i i go back and forth about like how much to say about this stuff because i you know some of it's just me bitching and then uh you know like how productive is it right i've got a bloomberg headline bitcoin developers as the protocol cannot be upgraded that's right that's right journos yeah yeah here's here's your fodder i mean no it's like these are these are fantastic struggles to be having like you have you have to have these struggles if you're going to make something that's genuinely leaderless but i do

wonder i mean i i do wonder what the final incarnation of that looks like like is it you know multiple competing projects is it like segmented projects that you know where you have like the consensus engines just really narrow and nobody ever really touches it and you have stuff on the edges i i don't know yeah i mean obviously you have the cohort of bick winners that are screaming for ossification and actually like um i can't think of a better word than stalemate that exists in terms of actually being able to make changes um well they may really get what they want um because like and i look i am in the past i've been an ossification guy i mean i like i i want immutable sound money like as much as anybody else but um a buddy of mine i guess i

i won't name him because i don't know if you'd want me to put his name out there but um really really talented guy um uh gave me a stat a few months back and it's really stuck with me and um i'll bungle the exact stat but the nature of it will come across right like so if you wanted to open a lightning channel for three billion people like all you want to do is just open a lightning channel you're not talking about closing or or anything else and you're not going to do anything else with the bitcoin chain right for the next uh however long until you get you get this this these openings done it would take you something on the order of three years of chain space to do that, you know? And it's like, yeah, like I'm open to the idea

that Bitcoin might, um, you know, Bitcoin might essentially be like a, uh, a plumbing asset where we have kind of, we go back to free banking and maybe Feddy creates this kind of like free banking environment. Um, but look, man, Bitcoin is not the same asset if there isn't always the threat of an account holder going on chain right like you always need the ability to withdraw to chain and take custody of your coins right or else or else we wind up in the gold problem where it's all just sitting in a bitcoin warehouse and you know there's a paper bitcoin market like you need a system for this thing to work in the way that i think we want it to work i i think you need a system where you can take possession of your coins if you want to i would agree

and so yeah i mean that's something that's i mean it's been talked about a lot but people don't it's like one of those unspoken agreements like don't bring it up but yeah like if as the protocol stands right now it's literally impossible for not even everyone on the planet to have a UTXO but for a material amount of people to actually own a UTXO that's right that's right um yeah I think somebody told me recently is the number like 40 million detected on chain entities I think per some kind of you know glass node metric it's like it's not it's not very much and you know like so look I don't I don't want to make crazy changes to bitcoin uh if anybody goes near the supply schedule, you know, I'll freak out. But I mean, like, Bitcoin's gotta,

we've got to scale to some, to some degree. And we've got to figure out how to do that in a way that, you know, preserves the ability to audit the supply and to transact as an individual. But it's got to be done. And like, we're pretty far from that point. So, you know, the people who want to ossify ossify ossify i just i don't think they understand the limitations right now yeah and now you said you don't want to be the one proposing solutions for these consensus or these social consensus agreements to get these changes in but if you did have a magic wand like what what is your inclination maybe you don't know exactly or have an exact idea of what needs to be done in terms of creating a governance structure

but where does your gut lead you toward so you mean in terms of like specific proposals or like changes to process or process specifically because it seems like that's that's a very big sort of um it's part of the that part of changing bitcoin is is slowed down quite a bit yeah i mean most is the most questions in the air it's the 64 000 question seriously because like so you have one answer which is like put somebody in charge like everybody knows that's not the right answer um like we can't go that route um you know i think like you can make the argument it's early yet, you know, uh, it's, it's, it's only been, you know, a little time since Tappert activated.

Um, we have, we have more time to sort this out, um, which maybe is true, but, uh, I have worries about the way the supply schedule interfaces in terms of timing with, you know, with other things. Um, One thing that's encouraging to see is like right now, Antoine Riard has put together this Covenant's working group and he's, you know, holding regular meetings and he's got this repository that has, it's trying to document like all the Covenant use cases so that at least, you know, he can put some formalization around that process and create like a specific venue to have that conversation. So I think, you know, things like that are good. And maybe you'll see more things like that evolve. The thing with consensus, it's not like someone, you know, can, it's not like the answer is like, oh, just make another code base and do the alternative. And, you know, people will adopt it. uh, I think it's a really, it's a softer process than that because you're, it's not just like, Oh, Hey, run this, this other software. Cause you have to reason about the way the deployment

is going to happen in the way that like, um, all the legacy clients are going to interface. And so it's really, I think it's gotta be this process of, of people kind of coming together and maybe there's gotta be a sort of overwhelming, like, yeah, we want to do this kind of from the, the the community at large but that's it's it's tough um because like you know you don't want i mean i i'm not a big fan of like democracy and um a lot of people in bitcoin you know industrial users have their own set of incentives and so it's just it's i don't have a great answer for you man i wish uh i truly wish that i did that's what the freaks came here for they're gonna be disappointed i'm kidding that's the thing nobody has this answer and that's going back to like 2017

segwit i mean one can make the argument that segwit got merged into core because we hit these limits and became apparently like all right we need um more efficient block space and so like we hit this this wall of usability in terms of block space and then segwit was there got implemented and maybe the point i'm trying to make is maybe that's what is the driving impetus for these changes you hit a sort of threshold or a limit of what the chain can do people want more things and then they're more incentivized to be like all right let's seriously look at consider these changes and try to develop consensus around them yeah i think you're dead on and like the counterpoint to what i just got done saying is like well all right if there was actually some

existential problem with Bitcoin. Like, I do think we could probably come together. And I do think the existing technical community is practically minded enough that, like, if there was something really rough, we could come up with something and I think get agreement and I think get it deployed. But yeah, it's almost this question of like, what do you do when you're in the middle? What do you do when you're, you know, a lot of people, I mean, Jeremy, my God, I mean, you know, Jeremy's got all these ideas for things you can do with Bitcoin. And he should get a ton of credit for coming up with things you can do with Bitcoin that aren't shit coiny or ill-advised or risky to the kind underlying protocol. And so what do you do when you're in this situation where you see the world

that could be, and you're like, oh, this could be so good. You know, you could use it in this way and this thing could be more efficient, but it's not like a burning need, right? It's not like, oh, tomorrow nobody's going to be able to transact if we don't do this. It's like, how do you deal with that situation? Yeah. Is patience the most important virtue for a bitcoin core developer that's certainly like dumb persistences uh you know like just sitting there and like rebasing your code and you know responding to feedback and um it's i i war you know like from a personal standpoint um before i started working on bitcoin professionally i i was writing so much code and it was like it it feels so good to

to make things and ship them and see them in the world. And in Bitcoin land, you spend, like, if you're doing it right, if you've really figured out something great, you're spending 20% to 30% of your time, like, writing code, maybe if you're lucky. And otherwise, you're waiting, reviewing, responding to feedback. So it's a different mode. And I kind of worry sometimes that I'm atrophying, you know,

like as a dev, because I'm, I'm doing, but then again, like you, you focus on different stuff. You focus on these protocol problems and you come up with like side projects to distract yourself. Like, um, I'm working on this BMON thing and, you know, Bitcoin perf is currently defunct. I'm going to return to that. And, um, so you, you find ways of keeping yourself occupied, but it's a different mode for sure. Yeah. That's fascinating. I do not envy.

that type of workflow it's rough man i really don't like doing it uh i i keep doing it because i really like bitcoin and at this point i'm not the sharpest tool in the shed but uh i've sunk so much time into doing this that it's like who the hell else is going to do this you know well that brings up a good question who the hell else is going to do this and what i mean you mentioned new individuals coming and trying to contribute to core what's the state of new entrance into the core project looking like from your perspective you know i'd say in the last year maybe we've actually had some some really great new people come on board um there is a younger crop you know in the code base that i'm seeing um and that makes me really happy

uh i do worry a little bit i mean i mean still it's not in the numbers that i'd like to see but um i do worry a little bit about what is going to happen to funding if we have a protracted bear market because already i'm talking to devs who are like hey you know i'm not i'm not getting renewed and i know for a fact they're amazing devs and they're doing super valuable work for Bitcoin. And, um, and I am getting the sense that funding is a lot tighter. Um, and I, I tell you what, man, I mean, I, I started doing Bitcoin development on nights and weekends for myself, um, you know, at a time when, when the development regime was probably a little bit easier going. Um, but if chain code hadn't graciously paid me to just sit there and do core stuff all day, um,

I just don't know if I would have had the tenacity or the, you know, the time to stick with it and actually become a proficient core developer because it really just takes like months of kind of sitting there and being useless and getting to know the system before you can, you know, do good review or be helpful. I mean, you know, now some people are different. Some people are absolute geniuses. But even then, like, there's a different acclimation process. Like, no matter what your strengths are, it just takes a few months to kind of get into that world. And I worry if people aren't being paid full time to do it, it's not going to happen. Yeah. Oh, it's fascinating because we, again, going back to review Bitcoin as this imperative protocol project, monetary system, as we transition further into the digital age.

uh and it is at the end of the day a distributed system dependent on on code that people are um either getting paid to write or just writing out of passion um as the system grows larger and more systemic like it's these are very important problems to think about or maybe not necessarily problems but processes mm-hmm yeah definitely yeah it's uh so you bullish or bearish we're just in a little period here where look I I used to think something like Bitcoin was just inevitable and it would be a matter of time I still think that I think I'm less sure of it just because of these massive governance questions I

just don't I don't know how all that shakes out I mean what I do know is like I'm just gonna keep doing it because it's the most important thing I could I i could think of um i mean i have like i don't know i do i do worry i mean i think about the physical world more these days like in my off time i'm like building an off-grid solar system because i want to learn how energy sovereignty works i mean solar's you know like solar's i'm not bullish on solar but per se but i i want to know how to generate my own energy you know which is the way solar should be used yeah yeah yeah yeah like yeah we could have a whole discussion about that i don't think solar scales uh but i think if you're if you're if you want

self-sovereign energy it's like in many cases the most a practical way to to get it you know um but but so am i bullish or bearish right now i i guess like i'm kind of bearish but i'm like this is so critical and important i don't care if it's like if the chances aren't good i just we need to work on it if that makes sense like i see a bunch of problems um although i'm someone who's kind of like a warrior by nature and so you know and a bit of an alarmist um but look you know i remember you and i having a conversation and it was like i just don't know what i would do if bitcoin didn't exist i don't know how i would like get up in the morning because of like things are so screwed up that what you know like this is

one raft we have out of all this and like i feel that way still but in a different way i'm like it it is sort of but i'm less i'm less certain that it's going to work within our lifetimes i guess damn yeah i know i i'm i'm sorry for being so somber freaks no we need uh sometimes everybody needs some cold water splash in their face like be real this is uh yeah i i want to be i'm you know and like it's probably it doesn't matter being like too close into to everything and like being zoomed into how the sausage is made as they say uh but um yeah i don't in my gut i'm just like the world is much less certain to me like Like, let's say that, like, all the political fuckery that's gone on, you know, for the past, oh, I don't know, 50 years, like, eventually does come back to bite us and we hit massive energy scarcity.

and like all of a sudden our immediate concern isn't you know how can i make enough money to afford a nice house to like how can i make sure that my family is warm um you know and and the country the country's focus shifts from like oh aren't all these software companies that we've harvested great to like holy shit we haven't built an oil refinery since 1975 or whatever maybe we need to be doing that maybe we need to be you know like building nuclear plants and i'm not saying any of this is mutually exclusive with bitcoin i'm just saying that like if physical problems in the world get real enough the digital world might take kind of a back seat while we retrench as a civilization and say like holy shit there's some bad energy stuff going on uh there's

some bad stuff going on in the physical world that we've got to address and i don't really have time for the stock market or a new money system anymore um i can certainly see that you know um and it's a little bit of a luddite perspective um and it's not necessarily my base case but it's like maybe that happens yeah no it seems like the governments are fucking things up pretty pretty brilliantly they're right right now whether or not it's on purpose or via pure incompetence is another discussion but objectively it's happening right now it's yeah it's pretty scary especially as somebody with two young children it's like what the hell It's going to happen to you when you grow up.

And, you know, I've obviously dedicated my life to Bitcoin because I think it's imperative for them. I want them to live free and be able to... live a life of prosperity and joy and the pursuit of happiness and freedom. But then, yeah, you have this, um, stark reality in the physical world of Mute Space, where, like, literally the infrastructure

that gives us modernity is crumbling right in front of our eyes. that's right yeah maybe being a beefy bitcoin boy won't just be uh you know a a trivial thing no it's gonna be a bunch of scrawny bitcoin boys it's uh unless you have your own farm ah oh that's what i'd love how how nice would it be to have chickens and you know be have a nice little garden growing have your own source of energy have well water uh you know those are those are the things that i want i uh i really don't care to be uh rich i i just really like a security a lot of land and yeah and and obviously the social stuff that's the tricky part man is like how do you yeah there seems to be this like trade-off between getting self-sovereign and

and then like having a social life you know yeah yeah i deal with that all the time coming from like a big family it's like i'd like to live on a farm in a far off place but it's like i'm so far away from my family it's uh interesting times when um you know the uh the bear sentiment on bitcoin is um got me thinking like and i had this thought earlier i wanted to bring up like and I don't know I mean you mentioned like how Linux was run how Python was run other open source projects with this centralized figure sort of arbitrating what does and does not get into those projects and obviously we would both agree probably not a not an option for bitcoin considering it needs to be this leaderless project but at the open source layer of the

project obviously we have a bunch of core developers proposing code discussing it like is there and i can be completely wrong here but this is there room for like project product managers that have experience with like big product releases joining the developer community and sort of trying to think of ways to to do quote-unquote product launches which would be changes to core or something like that you think that type of perspective is necessary or valuable for core yeah i mean i think it's an idea worth exploring and so what's funny is like to an extent it has been explored a little bit like when steve lee first came on the scene um you know i i i think the world of steve he's like i've never seen a harder worker um

Um, and his ambition, I think initially was, he's like, I'm going to come in, get to know the core world and kind of be the core PM. Um, because I, you know, I detect that there are these kind of like process inefficiencies here. um and you know um i i think it's one difficulty there is because bitcoin's such a deeply technical project it's not that he didn't have credibility but it's just like you kind of can't be in that sort of managerial role like people like the the project won't take you seriously just because it's deeply technical and unlike a private company where there's sort of a hierarchy and it's like oh no this is a manager they you know maybe uh they're seeking your counsel but like they tell you what to do at the end of the day like that because that hierarchy isn't there like it's it's a very frustrating experience i think for the pm because it's sort of like okay well

i can't i don't you know i can't really affect anything um or maybe it feels that way but um i've kind of felt like i so i think what you need are are more people who have done development work um but are really trying to kind of facilitate other people's work and come up with a priority list for themselves and you know check in on prs and say oh i think we should all review this or i think you know maybe this is ready for merge or it'd be really great you know if we could focus on project xyz because i think it has these benefits um and so i've thought a little bit about shifting my focus after what was i going to finish i was going to try and finish beam on and then kind of shift my focus to that and and just be more of like a repo mom and like

figure out you know what what we need to do and you know try and like just comment and check in with people and if there's a new contributor really stay on top of their prs and try and be welcoming um i just think it's yeah it's hard to do that if you haven't established like you know technical credibility um in bitcoin yeah so i guess you're saying like the some of the gray beard devs just need to become repo moms let other people write the code and step back and try to not focus on writing new code but try to coordinate everybody else writing code so i think so but the the tricky part there is like when you spend time in the software world you realize like there are to an extent different

archetypes and um one of the archetypes is like oftentimes the smartest software engineers um, in a, in a narrow technical sense will not be, uh, people, people. And I think we've like the Bitcoin, both the Bitcoin core project and process kind of selects for people who aren't people, people. Um, and so sort of the, the existing, you know, and again, like these people are my friends so i can i can bag on them a little bit um like the eq is not high uh and like these people are very thoughtful you know like but it's just they're you know they're they're they're very very very technical people and so um either there isn't isn't the desire or kind of the understanding um to do this i mean i

so, so, um, I won't go into specifics, but like there were a number of new contributors who came along over the past year, did some really awesome work, uh, clearly showed that they had some horsepower and, you know, might be real assets to the project and their, you know, their PRS were kind of like met with crickets. And, um, in, in a few different cases, I was kind of saying like, Hey, these are new people they look talented they've made good changes like why don't we try and do

something with this and um you know it's it's like nobody's fault and everybody's fault you know just but nothing nothing happened um is there sort of like a like a mentality of like hey this is our like a it's like the surfing lineup like you go to somebody's local beach and try hop in the surfing lineup like yeah you can't run a wave like we're gonna ignore you not only more you but like box you out from from catching a wave is there that mentality eating into the project i think you know there like there was a time where i would say yes uh maybe four years ago when you had a lot of people driving by um trying to get their name on you know the perception was oh you're trying to get your name on bitcoin by making this

the superficial refactoring change um and there was like a big you know we like the project swung way in one direction which is like no refactoring you know we can't have these people just coming in churning up the code base so that used to be more a part of it now i i don't think it's so much that i think here's what happens like nobody no bitcoin dev wakes up and they're like that jerk hasn't been around so I'm not gonna you know it's it's more like there's a very limited number of people working on the project and getting code reviewed is a very time intensive process and there's a lot of work that has to be reviewed so people's you know people just aren't they don't they don't have much time and there isn't much net time on the project

And this is kind of like the same with the consensus discussion is like the reason Bitcoin becomes a very deeply technical, deeply political thing to work on. And this is like another controversial thing I've been mulling over is like the development process in Bitcoin is like extremely political. It is more political than any company I've ever worked at, to be honest with you, because at a company it's like, OK, I got this thing. It like solves a problem. You know, let's do it. And again, it's not an apples to apples comparison because the risk at a company is much lower typically. But but in Bitcoin, what happens is like there's a scarcity of people who know the project, who are working on it, you know, who have the capability to assess things at a ground level. Right. And then there's more people who are like kind of technical, but they're really just using the people who understand the ground truth as kind of like heuristics, as like indicators for like what the right thing is. And so that creates this like deeply political situation where you're like, okay, how can I, how can I talk to or influence the 50 people who are upstream kind of of this whole ecosystem?

um and that's what it ends up being and so i think like to to zoom back into the repo it's it's more just like um everybody's busy but also you know welcoming new people kind of isn't really a priority yeah how do you solve that nobody knows repo moms i'll become a repo mom all right buy a minivan put your apron on put my apron on no seriously i mean that's that's that's probably what i'll what i'll end up doing because um i don't know it's like it sounds like a good idea to me yeah you've obviously identified this i wouldn't probably describe it as a shortcoming of this inability to to help these new contributors sort of wade through the process and

who knows maybe you'll be the tip of the spear of a new trend that begins to emerge and is one of these natural progressions that that leads to a trend that at the end of the day maybe we'll look back five years from now the emergence of the repo moms helped create better consensus processes it could be yeah um you know another guy who deserves a ton of credit here is adam jonas he's like you know he's done a ton i mean you know more things that you could rattle off um in in a few minutes but um he kind of i think he like went down the repo mom path a little bit and he was like man this you know um you'd have to ask him like why he he kind of shied away from that but i i just know he kind of like but yeah man i mean i'll give it a shot like if i think

if i think that's like the the best thing that i can do for bitcoin that's what i'll be doing um yeah what would you is there anything idiots like me could do like the devs looking for signaling from from users more or i can just keep doing what you're doing man you're doing i think you're doing exactly what you should be doing for bitcoin which is which is awesome um i'm trying to think i mean i haven't put too much thought into like would it be worth highlighting newer devs or something like that i i don't know if any of that stuff makes sense because it is a really thorny issue. I just think we need to start with being more welcoming,

more accommodative. But look, at the root of all this stuff, I think is the hard fact that if more big businesses are not paying individuals to sit there and work on open source Bitcoin stuff, it's just it's not going to happen because realistically like being being a an active core contributor in your spare time it's just not it just doesn't work to do to do a meaningful contribution like it it's it's it's too it's too time intensive I tried to do it after you know

after I'd gotten to know the system and you wind up spending an entire weekend rebasing and you're like okay i didn't even make any forward progress like i'm just i'm just keeping up with the joneses here uh and i just blew my entire weekend so um i think at root you know one way to address this problem would be like if you're an exchange and you're making a lot of money off of bitcoin like reallocate that to a full-time core dev because otherwise they're just not going to be in the in the same numbers yeah and does that i mean does that catch-up process just get more arduous as time goes on the protocol changes and there's more variables to be aware of like is this a problem that compounds moving forward

what i hope happens is what carl dong kind of started um which is the lid bitcoin kernel project where like maybe we'll get to a point where the you know bitcoin core as we know it is really just the consensus rules and it's a bit more tightly scoped. I mean, but there are a lot of problems with that too because so much of like Bitcoin development now and questions about what's going to happen to Bitcoin are contingent on mempool policy and like mempools, you know, sort of separate from consensus and, you know, I think having a good wallet implementation that's like canonical is always good so like that's not as straightforward as i as i once thought it was i used to be of the opinion that if oh yeah i just segmented into the consensus stuff and then

everything else and it's like oh it's a little bit a little bit harder to do um than i thought yeah tough conversations need to be had though i'm very happy that you're being this open and, um, just speaking your mind on this stuff. Cause I think it's important because I know, I mean, we've had conversations off air over the last, I know in the last couple of years, particularly, like I said earlier, you've been a bit dismayed at the process and everything that's been going on. Yeah. And, and, you know, number one, the fact that I'm bearish and saying bearish things means you should probably, uh, you know, it's, it's probably a good contra indicator for the bitcoin price is probably going to rocket tomorrow or something but um

so yeah not financial advice but uh um yeah given my track record um number two uh maybe i'm just too close to this stuff and and look like when it comes to any like i still think of bitcoin as far and away being the most credible uh thing that could do what we want to do um and that's why i'm still waking up and you know devoting my best hours to it so i still think it's it's it's the best shot that we've got i just you know sometimes you're uh waiting waiting through the desert right now wondering yeah is there an oasis out there that's right is the manna gonna keep showing up i uh i hope so i do as well let's wrap it up without ob vault stuff more possible like would you be more bullish if you get a bit it gets uh it gets a lot of enthusiasm around it

maybe people are like all right we want this good soft fork and let's say by 2025 we have op vault would that make you more bullish well i it'll make me more bullish if if people really want it and there's you know there are a lot of voices who are like I would love to have this, you know, both kind of individuals and on the commercial side. So, yeah, if it gets a lot of support, and look, I'm not trying to sell it. I just thought it should exist as an idea out there with working code in case that's the direction that, you know, we want to go. So if it gets a lot of support and people are excited and it gets activated, you know, great. I think what I find interesting from a process standpoint about this proposal versus other ones is that, like I was saying, this is a much more general proposal.

It's like much more purpose built. And so to see how it'll be evaluated is interesting to me because there hasn't, you know, this proposal is a lot more like, say, check lock time verify or check sequence verify than it is like SegWit or Taproot in the sense that it gives you this new tool. It's not a complete reimagining of like how scripting in Bitcoin works in the way that a general covenant proposal would be or, you know, a zero knowledge proof, you know, Rube Goldberg machine would be. It's a much more narrow tool. So it'll be interesting to me to see how it's evaluated. I'm looking forward to just kind of like throwing it out there and seeing what happens. yeah so you're saying there's a potential that you throw it out there and people are like yeah this is too specific like why would we sell fork for something so narrowly focused i'll be very

disappointed if that's the if that's the um the outcome um what i'd be more interested to hear is if someone's like this doesn't mean my use case or i wish it did this thing but it doesn't actually do this thing um but again you know after thinking about this stuff for for almost years now um I just think the vaults like like vaults to design for is pretty open and shut in terms of what you want and I think this is this is everything uh I could ever imagine wanting um so I'll be I'll just be curious to see if there are people who investigate it and come up with you know different conclusions and have you gotten feedback from any potential enterprise users of this have you had anybody reach out be like oh we really need this part of my i mean part of what motivated this is

like i'm pretty intimately familiar with certain you know enterprises and just in in kind of watching the design of things it's you know i've kind of been like matching that a little bit against this proposal um but yeah i would i would love to hear from um you know other people who are who have to deal with large amounts of bitcoin um to see if uh you know if this is a this is of use yeah so if any of you enterprise users are out there listening let's give some feedback go read the proposal yeah it's weird at this bear market everybody's focused on price and like the the industry, like some of these enterprise companies that fucked up with Bitcoin, everybody's focused on, how would I put this, like just the market in general.

It feels like there has been a bit of a straying away from focusing on the protocol that actually enables that industry to be built in the first place. so maybe there's there's a need for people to to come back and and focus on the protocol obviously we had segwit and then in the taproot it seems like maybe there's a bit of a burnout after taproot specifically in terms of the mind share of people paying attention to the protocol and that's actually i was really excited when you launched when you released the proposal for outvault i was like oh this is like the most interesting thing in regards to like bitcoin protocol that i've i've read in quite a while like reinvigorated my my drive to to get more

familiar with what's going on day in and day out because honestly i've been focusing on the market structure as well more more heavily than than the protocol stuff over the last year and a half probably i'm glad to hear that man and um yeah i hope i hope it reminds people that there are you know maybe tools that we can actually introduce that that make doing what we all want to do with bitcoin which is custodying you know safer um and and we can actually improve things um in substantive and specific ways so that's great to hear where can we send the freaks to learn more about vaults if there's any developers who may want to review um the code that you've written or give feedback on on the proposal obviously feedback can happen on the

mailing list where you started that thread but in terms of the code base where's that sitting right now? Yeah. So if you're just curious about this stuff, go read the paper. It's at, um, the website's jameso.be slash vaults.pdf. And if you pull that up, you can read the paper. And then within the paper, I linked to the implementation. So that's pretty much got everything you need. Um, and then, yeah, if you, if you want to follow the discussion, check out the mailing list. That's, that's all up there. Yeah. Very short paper, only 12 pages, in the last pages, annotations. Yeah, I wanted to keep it brief

and the margins are big. It's not a bad read, I don't think. No, not at all. It should take you 20 minutes. James, my beefy Bitcoin brother. It's been a pleasure. We can't wait as long as we have both off the record and on the record.

Absolutely. And, uh, we got to counterbalance this episode with me in like a euphoric bowl phase. Yeah. Um, so, uh, yeah, let's, let's, let's do this again soon. Um, I always love coming on, man. I, you know, I love to see TFTC develop into the mammoth that it is now. And I just reminisce often about our sloppy evening in the Barstool Sports office with my younger brother, who no longer likes Ethereum. A lot of pee breaks during that first rep.

That's for sure. But yeah, it's always a pleasure coming on, man. Thanks for having me. the pleasure is always mine thank you for doing what you do and being earnest and honest on this because again every once in a while all the all the the boltards need some

some cold water splash on them like hey the numbers going up or you're thinking about number go up but number go up is dependent on this code base that is making everything work so appreciate you

highlighting some of these pain points and painting the picture of Bitcoin wading through the desert from an engineering project perspective, because I think it's very important that people are aware of that. Totally. I do it because I love Bitcoin and I hope we get there. I'm fine to be in the desert for a while. It's nice out here. And I'm bullish. I'll be the bull of the episode like i said earlier i think there's just this natural way of things in bitcoin where it gets to a point where it's like all right we need to do something and then once it gets to that point people are like all right let's do something i think that'll continue yeah yeah i think you're right yeah all right well you go enjoy your day i know you're going to do some chores i don't want

to hold you from doing that and um we'll catch up offline sounds great brother all right peace and love freaks Thank you.