TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #620: A New Lens On The OP_RETURN Debate with James O'Beirne

Episode Date: May 17, 2025

Marty sits down with James O'Beirne to discuss the OP_RETURN controversy. James O'Beirne on Twitter: https://x.com/jamesob 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Multi axis issue 5:07 - Core governance 9:36 - Derailing productive discussions 17:01 - Fold & Coinkite 18:32 - CTV 29:14 - Unchained 29:43 - Magnitude of change 41:35 - Covenant proposals 50:06 - CTV benefits 57:46 - Institutional ownership 1:05:16 - Moving forward STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, 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. Combination of physically tired and mentally tired.

It's all so tiresome, James. I was looking at that picture today and I was actually going to tweet it absent any caption just because it's a really good. Yeah, it's a really good epitome of a lot of stuff. But I'm with you, man. I'm tired. It's Friday. Was that just some random Japanese guy? i think it's it's i actually think it's from a documentary about i don't know if it's africa but

oh yes yes it's there's a little bit of a kind of like racy connotation there um yeah yeah it's been long it was interesting for me we had texas energy mining summit here in austin beginning of the week sort of blended with bitcoin plus plus i was over at bitcoin plus plus wednesday and yesterday doing the live desk and obviously topic of conversation is op return this policy decision this policy change that that core wants to make and many people are uh angry about and it's just again it's also tiresome i spoke with people on both sides over the two days and i think i came away more confused than that i entered entered the week like what is the optimal path and somebody's worked on bitcoin core who worked on bitcoin core

for for many years i've seen you tweeting about it seems like and i won't put words in your mouth i'll let you say like what is your perspective on this whole policy debate around op of return yeah so in general i think i have a somewhat different take than um 99 of the people in in discussion which is basically that this is a really stupid discussion um everybody has mempool derangement syndrome like at every layer um and uh what what frustrates me a little bit about the conversation not not to not to uh get like um grumpy right off the bat but it's just it's it's such a small issue in the in the grand scheme of challenges that are being presented to bitcoin that like spending all this drama on it um is is really a silly use of time and uh kind of emotion

but i can break it down for you i mean i think i think like largely the argument is happening on a few layers um the change itself technically i'm totally in favor of it it makes sense you know basically the rationale is like well you know um people want to include exogenous data into the chain um you can't really stop them from doing that um and so let's basically minimize the damage by saying hey you know we're going to make it easier for people to actually make use of op return as a data carrier which lets us avoid bloat in the utxo set which is like one of the precious resources we have to take care of for the node um so that's all good and the and the other thing too is that as we've seen with the ordinal stuff is um you know data is going to wait and make its

way into the chain and actually it hurts the whole network when um there are transactions that most nodes haven't seen yet but they come through a block basically that slows down block propagation time and so the whole idea is if you bring policy closer to the actual consensus rules closer to the actual transactions that are going to come through and be mined then you're going to have better network performance you're going to have lower latency when it comes to actually broadcasting a new block around so that's like the the sort of technical layer of the discussion it's it's really a minute non-controversial change if you kind of have fluency with the the technical end of the mempool but i think there's this this higher layer of the conversation which is sort

of a re-adjudication of spam in bitcoin and it's you know i think a lot of the the old animal spirits and sentiments are emerging about like well we don't like spam and i think for a lot of people who kind of get lost in the technical details it's very easy to latch on to the sentiment of i don't like spam um and so uh so that makes the sort of ocean knots camp maybe more appealing uh so that's yeah that's i guess a summary if you want to jump in anything in particular we can that's what i was saying i came out more confused than i went in so last week on rhr i agree you want policy to be aligned with consensus like whether we like it or not these transactions are getting into blocks they're non-standard but they are valid within consensus

rules and policy just isn't aligning with that and like you said this is disrupting the p2p layer and potentially the fee estimation process that many nodes use many applications use and it makes sense to me to align policy with consensus these things are happening and if you can make it so bitcoin full nodes are operating as efficiently and optimally as possible by changing this it makes sense to me i think my one like pushback was like makes sense to me however i think how it was communicated to people and the whole mess with the pr i think it's i think it's it was it's it's just a tactical error like even if this change gets in the the real benefit of is not material you know nobody was really clamoring for it um this stuff always you know

gets the hackles up of everybody who cares at all about you know spam and bitcoin so it was a real tactical error and i think that's that's one place where i mean it's kind of i had a little bit of schadenfreude seeing it because i'm fairly critical of core as a project along you know a variety of axes at this point and it was just kind of a demonstration of the the disconnection and kind of ineptitude of um publicity management kind of on on their end um and so like there's part of me that enjoys seeing that because i i'm kind of convinced that that group has a lot less efficacy than they have credibility and so to see that kind of catch up was was interesting at the uh let's dive into that like what you said multiple axes you have a problem i think

we've throughout the years like we've been discussing the issues that bitcoin like yourself particularly as a bitcoin core developer for many years trying to get things through not only in the context of the way core works from a governance structure but just the way bitcoin works as a distributed open source protocol like trying to get changes in and i will say like having heard the perspective of core developers like gloria antoine insta gibbs uh throughout the week like i do have some empathy in the sense that it seems like there's many balls in the air and it's just like they want to focus on code and getting the stuff out and the repositories become very political because of the people outside of it who are affected by the changes and have opinions

and i can see the argument that they may have opinions but they may also not really understand the technical details of how all the stuff is interoperate interoperating with each other and then i had conversations with like bitcoin mechanic and luke dasher as well and i think they do make good arguments in the sense of like we have spam filters in email and we know it's not 100 effective but it is effective to a degree and if we sort of cater to um these non-monetary use cases of bitcoin to put arbitrary data in the blockchain by making it easier via increasing the op return limit you're sort of going down the slippery path of signaling that we're okay with this and frankly like as a user as somebody's been in bitcoin for

a while like the whole inscriptions ordinals thing uh i don't think it's found product market fit i would rather be and that then you get to the subjective nature is like what is a a monetary use case of bitcoin and i've long been in the beginning of the inscriptions ordinal discussion like i was vehemently like public and publicly um voicing my disdain for that usage of bitcoin but over time it became clear if you just ignore them it doesn't really a product market fit it goes away and so you have like all these factors playing into how do you actually solve this problem yeah the irony is like i don't think anybody in this conversation likes likes jpegs on bitcoin you know certainly none of the core developers that i know do um i'm i i don't like

that use but i'm also sympathetic in terms of it being a provider of mining revenue and that's kind of sorely needed um but uh but all that said you know the the whole mechanic ocean bit about well email has spam filters you got to be really really careful when you're drawing technical analogies to bitcoin people do this all the time um you know like even going back to the vhs betamax analogy of bitcoin and um ethereum it's like you know you just can't um you can't draw an analogy And the reason that that email analogy doesn't work is that, like, you know, your email inbox doesn't have to be reconciled with the global set of emails in order for you to get better email performance in the same way that, you know, if your nodes or a miner's nodes mempool is out of sync with the incoming blocks, like that's going to meaningfully hurt performance. So there are some caveats to that to that analogy and most analogies that get drawn with Bitcoin. But do you want to go ahead and return to the the core stuff and have me give my spiel there?

Yeah. Yeah. So it's worth doing some throw clearing, you know, Antoine Gloria and all the sort of core contributors that are public at this point. You know, they're all smart people. I think they're all ostensibly like sort of well intended. um and obviously the development organizational problem in bitcoin is a really hard one it's one i wrote about um a few months ago in that in that post the consensus conundrum and you know i think people forget that bitcoin is as much like an experiment in technical human organization um as it is like a you know as a sort of pure technology um and i think the under acknowledged reality is that we had a much more hierarchical organization up until maybe 2018 2019 well maybe 2020 2021 when all the csw stuff started kicking off um but really you know we had essentially a

small council of people who could make things happen within bitcoin core and and therefore bitcoin and then that trans transitioned into this like sort of uh more free form you know supposedly meritocratic, you know, leaderless structure. And since then, nothing really material has happened. That's not my beef. You know, my beef with the project after having been a participant for maybe 10 years coming up this year is that the things that are being focused on are kind of tangential or ancillary concerns. um you know pretty honestly anything concerning the mempool is somewhat of a secondary concern

it's very easy to make an argument about mining decentralization and you know the importance of having a relay network that isn't censored um i think there are a number of problems with the argument that that's like the biggest challenge facing bitcoin right now um you know anybody who's the inside of a mining operation knows or should know that um the the forces that are encouraging centralization in that function are not like mempool things they're like logistical things like running a good mining operation is very very hard you know keeping good luck which you know luck is the score miners look at um which is essentially how efficient is my mining operation You know, how well am I turning dollars into Bitcoin or energy into Bitcoin?

And that's a really, really, really hard job. And so when you've got a model like full paper share that lets, you know, hashers offload luck onto other operations and they just get to put in some hash rate and get out some Bitcoin fairly reliably. You know, that's like a that's a centralizing factor. And so this emphasis that the mempool is somehow this like central factor controlling minor centralization is totally not the case as far as I can see. And there are much bigger fish to fry when it comes to making Bitcoin into the best substrate for peer to peer value transfer that we can. And, you know, I mean, as you know, I've been working on the Covenant stuff for a while. Jeremy's been working on the Covenant stuff for a while. And on the part of the core project as a whole, there's just very little interest or uptake in some of these major protocol issues that, you know, will actually help us remain decentralized.

yeah and that's been a a common remark to this opera turn drama over the last couple weeks is like it seemed like we were getting to a better spot in terms of the conversation around covenant proposals and then out of nowhere this comes up and causes a kerfuffle and it has a lot of people worry that like just this small policy change creating all this controversy what does that do for the conversation around covenants whether it's ctv i believe you're interested in a check contract verify as well i like them all everything on the table man is is a pretty well thought out proposal you know ctv even cat i i'm i'm kind of holding off on on pushing cat because i know there are some higher level concerns there about um you know mev which i i don't think are

well-founded but that's kind of another battle to fight so coming out of op next there was a huge amount of momentum around ctv and checksig from stack because if if you you i know you weren't there but um almost every presentation whether it was about layer twos vaults arc bitvm you know every one of them was like yeah having ctv would be sort of a game changer for us um we'd love to have it. And so it seemed pretty clear there was good consensus coming out of that. You know, even among some of the active core developers that were there, I think it made an impression on them, like, oh, wow, OK, you know, we didn't really realize, like, to what extent there was demand for this thing. So there is good momentum for that. But that's kind of the irony of all

this is that many of the proposals that have been on the table you know are are simple safe well fleshed out people are just so accustomed to these giant changes like taproot and segwit which you know like i think the scale of those kinds of changes to consensus is probably over just because there were such major complicated multi-faceted you know engine lifts that like i don't i don't think that's appropriate for bitcoin in many ways anymore those kinds of changes. And I don't think, you know, anybody really wants those. It's these more narrowly scoped, you know, opcode additions that I think would really move the needle and are much more easy to reason about. Listen, Freaks, I know you're tired of me talking about Fold, but I'm

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beating the drum and it's had its ups and downs in terms of the the um the sort of engagement on the conversation around ctv didn't like to your point does seem like this year particularly with the advent of ARC, with Miniscript applications getting out there, and just basically the maturation of the second layer protocols is getting to a point where it's like, hey, we have product market fit here. Obviously ARC, maybe not, but Lightning and other aspects definitely have product market fit, and

let's start looking ahead to how we can actually make it so this is as efficient and scalable as possible yeah 100 that that uh image of uh jeremy naked in a cardboard box is seared into my brain from those early uh pleb five meetings um but no i you know i it's um it's it's a tremendously well-studied op code i i tried to avoid it when i was developing op ball um because of the drama at the time the controversy i said okay this thing is like so that the the uh the branding of this thing is so hot right now i i have to try and you know work around that and i wound up just poorly reinventing it and so the my collaborators at the time aj and instagibs were like you should just adopt you know make ctv a

prerequisite for the protocol um and that's something that i think everybody who who goes through this process kind of comes to is that ctv is just this like elemental tool that just keeps being rediscovered and so you know it's it's definitely time for it i think well for shows grown since we've left talking there's a lot of new bitcoiners here let's uh let's put for like what is ctv what would it enable and you brought up the magnitude of the changes that segwit and taproot were compare it what is the magnitude comparison of ctv to those two yeah so um you You know, when you spend a Bitcoin right now, basically what you're doing is providing a signature that proves that you can unlock essentially that Bitcoin for spending. And then it can go really anywhere.

CTV is an example of something that, you know, is often referred to as a covenant. And basically, all that means is that you're opening up the aspects of the transaction that are looked at to determine whether a spend can happen beyond just, you know, say the providing of a signature. um so what this allows you to do specifically in the case of ctv is you can make a statement when you own a coin you can basically say you know this coin can only be spent um so long as the transaction that it's being spent into uh looks like such and such um and And so this allows you to encode basically these like big graphs of transactions that you can commit a coin to that are finite because CTV isn't what's called like a recursive or a general covenant. But it basically allows you to, you know, sort of pre-sign, you know, a transaction to be spent through some flow without actually having to do pre-sign transactions, which have all kinds of problems. And so it turns out that this is really useful for a bunch of different things, including, you know, the thing that I know the most about is probably vaults.

But this is, you know, almost every layer two application has to structure these conditions where people in the layer two have to be able to get their coins out of the layer two. And so that winds up being a use for CTV, where you're basically locking up the coin to be trustlessly redeemed in a certain way. it's useful for miners because they can compress um payouts in the coinbase um using something called congestion control which is nice we actually have a hackathon team right out here from the bitcoin plus plus hackathon that's going on today they came over here to work on it they're implementing ctv on testnet and doing this exact thing like mining mining pool payouts from the coinbase using ctv oh that's really cool yeah that's great it's it's a it's a great application And then there's the more general congestion control case, which I actually think is going to be really, really big in the future.

It's going to be a really important use of CTV because what it allows you to do is come up with a very concise on-chain commitment that allows redemption across, you know, hundreds, thousands of people later on at some point when the fee market is lower. And the reason that I think this is very important and this is like a broader discussion is that I think bank runs in Bitcoin are going to be a thing, whether it's some kind of a correlated layer to failure or whether it's institutional failure and people want to move coin around. They want to take possession of coin in short order. We're going to see these very spiky events in the same way that, you know, bank runs happen in traditional finance in the same way that, you know, FDX goes down and all of a sudden everybody wants to take custody. And so I think congestion control is kind of an underhyped aspect of CTV that could be really important. Yeah. and so with this in mind let's just focus on ctv what are your hopes that actually it's merged and let's put let's put let's put uh let's put the bitcoin dictator hat on like how would you go

about actually uh garnering consensus and then actually setting up a a um soft fork mechanism to get it pushed through? Yeah. So right now there are pull requests open against core for both CTV and Checksig from Stack, which activate it on reg test only. And so that means that we can get test coverage of it as we're running these automated tests that we have. And so those could be merged with really no risk.

The thing is that CTV has been reviewed, like you said, for seven years now. And the code really hasn't materially changed. I've, you know, changed a little bit of the window dressing on Jeremy's original patch. But the reality is that I think Lincoln Labs, no, not Lincoln Labs. I'm forgetting their name now, but somebody has had a five BTC bounty on finding a material bug in CTV, and that hasn't been claimed yet. that's a lot of money at this point it's half a million dollars so um so ctv really is in a good place i think it's it's it's seen the level of technical review um the situation that we now find ourselves in reveals this you know some of my other criticism of core which is that they occupy a place in the power structure of Bitcoin in that core is the de facto implementation

that every business, every miner runs, because, you know, no business or miner really wants to take the operational risk of running something else. It's just, you know, it may actually come to that at some point. But but for the time being, you know, if you're a serious commercial enterprise you're running bitcoin core because you know if there was some kind of a consensus failure and you were running some other piece of software you'd look like an idiot so um de facto right now bitcoin core has a kind of monopoly over like this protocol discussion and because these are so deeply such deeply technical issues most of the ecosystem knowingly or not um seeds um their assessment to the core developers basically it's very easy to say well

if so and so doesn't you know if so and so hasn't acted then it's obviously not ready for bitcoin yet and i think that sets us up for a very precarious i mean it's the situation that we found ourselves in for the last four or five years uh which is that because um covenants and protocol changes of this nature are a bit harder to think about. They require actual experience building applications. They require actual usage of script, which frankly, the sort of Bitcoin core class of developer oftentimes hasn't experimented with. I know from personal experience

this used to be me before I started writing scripts, before I started working for custodians. They just want to sort of focus on these pure software problems and these you know like closed form you know oh let's figure out a new optimal way to restructure the mempool so that we can you know sort of hit some metric um that's a much easier space to occupy mentally than like oh what's what's actually gonna like let's think about these big scaling problems what's actually going to kind of move the protocol forward so the the uncomfortable position that we find ourselves in now in terms of activation for CTV is like, the code's basically ready. The change has been picked over for years.

There's a ton of demand for it. But because you haven't had many core developers in a position where they can say, yeah, this is, you know, I understand this. I've looked at the code. It kind of jams the works up. Now, luckily, like I said, there were some core developers at Opnext. And I do think that I should say, besides me, I'm still technically a core developer, even though I'm kind of on the outs socially. But there were some core developers that up next. And I think it's just becoming harder and harder to deny that it's time for this change. It's time to see a meaningful movement towards the software, which, again, is just a tightening of the rules. It's not anything crazy.

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just an opcode lines of code is um it it is mostly uh it's it's kind of the first metric that anybody looks at and it's a you have to look at it um you know the actual interpreter change I think right now the CTVPR has 3,000 lines. The 90% of those are test changes. It's all these test vectors that have been added. I think the actual interpreter changes are maybe 200 or 300 lines. They're fairly minimal. Whereas Tapper and Segwit, you know, you're talking about thousands of lines of consensus critical code changed, excluding tests.

Um, and the other, the other, I mean, the, the better way to size this up, um, is Segwit and Tappert both changed these very core aspects. They changed the model for how script execution works in Bitcoin. You know, it's, it's like a completely different, um, system in some ways for how, how script gets executed. Um, and with that, you know, there were resource changes, obviously segwit added the discount um you know taproot introduced some some resource uh constraint changes as well um you know these are these are like system level changes uh with all of the proposals that are on the table now whether it's cat ctv you know check check contract verify they're adding individual op codes within the existing framework um and you know i don't want

want to downplay the importance of vetting those and making sure that they're actually you know safe changes to make because there can theoretically be uh you know you could think of it as contagion if let's say you introduce an op code that introduces some denial of service vector that can be exploited like obviously they need to be gauged for security but they aren't these kind of like reimagining of the physics of how script in bitcoin works and um and so so consequently they're much easier to to look at i think and assess yeah and i think that putting the perspective of the non-technical bitcoin users sort of paying attention to what's happening to the protocol i think many believe that segwit and taproot sort of enabled the combination

of this to enable this inscriptions ordinals craze and there's i think there's arguments for and against that but i think they there's a bit of ptsd in the sense of all right if we do another soft fork are there some negative externalities in terms of stuff like that being enabled by these op codes and i think many are sort of just erring on the side of let's not do anything because i don't want something like that to happen after something like op ctv gets merged in yeah yeah 100 and i understand that concern um it's it's it's one of those things it's just difficult to alleviate unless you kind of have a technical grounding in this or you trust somebody who has a technical grounding in this and can tell you the nice thing about ctv in

particular is that um and this is really getting into the weeds here but all of the verification that ctv does based on sha-256 hashing and sha-2 hashing is a thousand times faster than ecdsa checks i've got benchmarks that show this um so you you still have to be careful obviously but um you know the uh dos ability of something that's just hashing is a lot you know kind of less open-ended that's something that's doing uh signature checks and then for for For checks from stack, it's literally the same operation as like a signature check, you know, that you would do. It's just allowing an arbitrary message in there. And so, yeah, all this stuff has to be looked at.

And it's a it's a perfectly worthwhile concern. But, you know, the argument that I that I don't hear enough, you know, I watched the ossification debate, some of it last night with Lisa and Lopp. I don't know if you caught that. I missed it. I had to jump. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think, you know, the recent beat that I've been on a little bit is trying to emphasize the risk of not doing anything to help scale Bitcoin. Because, you know, right now, if you run the numbers, just over, I think, two and a half percent of Americans would be able to, on a monthly basis, buy Bitcoin on exchange, withdraw it to self-custody, and then maybe make a spend, you know, to pay their mortgage or whatever. that's a really really low number if you're talking about actual usage of bitcoin actual ownership of utxos and so if we don't figure out a and by the way lightning doesn't help with this because you have to own a utxo to you know participate in lightning and you have to have the threat of actually hitting the main chain to close your channel if your counterparty tries to

cheat you so you know i think a lot of people myself included for a long time kind of have this feeling in the back of their mind that like either we've got the scaling solutions that are gonna kind of let bitcoin remain this decentralized trustless value layer or you know some genius is going to come along and figure out a way to preserve that given the the existing system um and after years of thinking about this i just don't think that that's true right now and i think the risk of us stopping um especially given the increased you know scrutiny that things like the strategic bitcoin reserve introduce um you know i think there's a there's a shot clock basically on getting to um a truly um trustless decentralized value storage technology and i think we really

have to be thinking about that i agree and the panel yesterday the core developers peter uh gloria antoine and greg i think it became clear to me there there is like ptsd within core too i mean peter specifically was like i don't want anything to do with yeah soft fork activation yeah staying out of it and i think that we need to somehow get over the ptsd there i don't know if it was craig wright driven or just the backlash of inscriptions ordinals emerging after taproot and segwit but i think i think enough time has passed it's like all right if we believe that we want ctv covenants to scale bitcoin for individual self-custody purposes if you think that's worthwhile which i certainly do we sort of have to just like shake off the ptsd and start

having genuine conversations about this maybe i this this show has drifted more towards the macroeconomic and sort of uh sociological aspects of bitcoin we try to keep it technical as often as possible but i'll admit we've we've gotten away from it maybe it's on the part of the greater bitcoin community to make some noise about this too that gets in the question all right once you shake off the ptsd like what is the activation route if you think it's worthwhile it's well it's understanding it's understandable man because like the the technical weeds just get deeper and deeper and this stuff just gets it's harder and harder to reason about and and i think with all the exciting geopolitical stuff

that's going on you know number go up big time um that that's a lot more fun and interesting in some cases to talk about than these hard questions of like okay well how do we actually make this thing deliver on value storage um so i don't i don't follow you at all for for not really like focusing on because god i mean if if i wasn't a software engineer like my eyes would glaze over somebody was describing ctv to me because it's such a an indirect like bizarre you know you're like well but how the hell does that yeah that's not useful at all you know it just it doesn't viscerally make any sense um and it doesn't really have the block stream marketing you know machine behind it which you know for segway and taproot i think did a very good job of getting people

riled up and saying oh privacy privacy privacy and efficiency of snore signatures and you know things like that um since then there hasn't really been that kind of like um you know you could call it marketing you could call it consent manufacturing which i think is inevitable when when things are this technical but yeah man we we have to shake off the stasis and we have to figure out what a workable um arrangement is going forward i mean i think at some point bitcoin has to stop changing um i i am for ossification at a certain point and i think it'll be inevitable um i just think that the external forces of ossification are coming more quickly than i would have thought and the downsides of ossification are greater than i would have

thought in the current state yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah so hopefully i mean i was really blackpilled for two years, maybe coming out of this. But the last few months, I think we have seen momentum around some of these proposals. And we've seen a lot of non-core developers in the ecosystem who are frankly just as smart, you know, and capable as the core developers. I really don't think the core devs deserve this kind of high status, this glazing. Like it's really kind of distasteful to me because like they're all well paid we're all well paid you know um for the most part and there's plenty of money out there for core devs um but these you know people in the ecosystem working on actual applications are like what the hell's going on

man like we've been hearing about ctv for years and you know we can see firsthand it'd be it'd be really useful for for these like you know very bitcoin values aligned projects we're working on You know, I mean, like one of one of my favorite advocates has been vocal for some of this stuff is Rob Hamilton. You know, Rob is doing one of the most interesting things, you know, for the sort of traditional Bitcoin use case that you can think of, which is, you know, in essence, he's trying to de-risk custody. You know, he's offering an insurance product that insulates people from loss. and you know i think he's really activated in the last year because he's like i mean you know i'd love to make use of this stuff and it all seems safe um so i do think there's kind of a growing awareness that um we do need to keep moving forward um how it happens

remains to be seen yeah rob's right outside here actually asked him a couple questions I was like, well, what should we ask James right before I hopped in here? The, no, I completely, and I'm optimistic too. It did seem like for the longest time, the Covenant discussion, I think it got, I think the way the Taproot Wizards guys with the OpCat specifically sort of marketed it and came very aggressive with that particular Covenant proposal, really just people like step back.

like there was the social aspect of you guys are degenerate scammers and we don't want to associate any update with you but i think cooler heads have prevailed and again going back to ctv i think ctv is has been discussed for the longest has been tested the longest and it would make sense to me that that may be the one we should focus on for focusing on covenants but then you have the discussion of like if you do one how many do you do more at the same time if you're going to do a soft work so check sig from stack uh any prev out it's been talked about um so it's like you have to like there's many layers to this discussion like we're going to do one should we do more if we're going to do more how many do we do yeah i actually think you know you have to look back in

time um at the soft forks that preceded lightning which were check lock time verify check sequence verify uh obviously psych wit um you know those first two just rolled out without much fanfare and they were much closer to the kinds of changes that we're talking about now in that they were just basically adding op codes there was a little bit of you know transaction logic in there but um I would really like to see us kind of get back to that. I don't think it's really a good thing to be doing in terms of this giant bundling, you know, because that kind of risks like this omnibus type situation, which are fair criticisms of Segwit and Taproot. And that's partially why the you know, I actually I think the changes in both of those were completely reasonable, aside from some minor nits on taproot. But, you know, I don't want to see us get into this position where we're, you know, lumping a bunch of changes together. I think the actual deployment of soft forks nowadays would be a lot smoother than they were back then,

because things just generally seem to be less contentious but but also i'm you know i think again a lot is made of like the severity of chain splits and i i just think there's a ton of fud when it comes to the actual deployment of these things that um i i think the the negative consequences of like whatever you know honestly seeing a five block reorg would probably be good for the ecosystem that would probably be a good thing uh long term to stress test some of these these systems so i i think you know we can we can roll that soft forks that seems like a pretty easy problem um we should be cautious about like bundling them all together and just i just want to make one note on the the taproot wizards guys you know i think they deserve um let me just say

this you know i i know um those guys very well i have for a long time um i think in the fullness of time um it will be clear that they really do care about bitcoin and everything that they do is is to the end of trying to make bitcoin succeed um you know mostly on the terms that i think are widely shared the values that are widely shared i think that you know those guys are just kind of avant-garde type artist guys and they like being you know controversial and confrontational um so they have their own style and i think you know there's there's something to appreciate about that even if aesthetically like look we all hate spam and garbage um for the most part i mean i i don't know maybe yeah maybe they do like jpegs but i think they're

they're kind of in it for the the right reasons more or less they're not just trying to spam the chain with jpegs yeah i mean like like well that's what i'm curious like ben carman now that spiral i'm saying why'd you leave we asked them last week he said they stopped working on opcat like uh why'd they stop working on opcat um which is interesting but we don't have to belabor that point the it's i i think there's a lot going on there and i think they haven't lost interest you know the so so look while we're here let me just give my big selling point for opcat because i hate i still hate opcat i hated it when it came out i was very critical i interviewed up cat's my baby like he's yes like he loves it and and i and i get his rationale and i agree

with it i totally agree with it because here's the thing so opcat you know my old bit from years ago was that basically opcat is like building a computer out of black and white pebbles like yeah you can do it it's horrible um but it lets you do pretty much you know anything you need to do. And I think as we look at how the technical, how uncertain the technical waters are for Bitcoin in terms of our ability to actually make changes, having Opcat is really important as this hyper inefficient escape hatch to do things like, you know, zero knowledge proofs. I think people forget that in the early days, Satoshi, Greg Maxwell, a lot of the early guys were like, you know, look, ultimately, we want to move a lot of the stuff towards zero knowledge proofs because it's

a really cool tech. It's just not mature enough to put on the base layer. But like this might be our best shot at privacy, freedom, all this stuff. So so the thing that's appealing to me about Cat is that it gives us this little escape hatch to experiment with things like zero knowledge proof roll ups that are completely values aligned with Bitcoin and may actually wind up being, you know some of the techniques that like bail us out from a freedom standpoint um but it's inefficient enough that it's not a major change to bitcoin um and to do anything on there requires like a lot of money spent as revenue towards miners so the other big problem you know as you know as as almost everybody knows is that the subsidy is dwindling right now it's

little over three Bitcoin, you know, as soon as it's going to be one and a half, you know, after that fractional, um, and that, you know, if the, if the net security spend behind Bitcoin is, uh, very low in 10 years, like that's, that's not a good outcome for the system because it's all predicated on, you know, uh, there being a ton of security spend, you know, a ton of thermodynamic, security behind the system, protecting it. And so I like Opcat because it's basically a way of doing, you know, almost anything, but having that inefficiency subsidizing miners. I know there's a whole MEV discussion there. I have been convinced, I was very skeptical about that for a long time. I've been convinced that's not actually a concern because if you look at the

way that mev works the 10 minute block time basically makes like layer one um defy shit kind of intractable and and unappealing and so what winds up happening i guess is that a lot of the mev gets moved up into these like layer two sequencers and then that's where a lot of the messing around happens uh and and so i actually think because of things like you know script limits because of the 10 minute block time all these you know kind of vague pieces of doubt about cat and it's it's you know risks i think are not as well founded as as i had thought but you know to the broader discussion i i think setting that aside you know to evaluate on a longer you know time scale makes sense whereas changes like ctv checks it from stack like these

are just like open and shut you know very basic very well understood scrutinized um you know i spent a bunch of time trying to break cdb at a certain point jeremy had made some caching change that was a um a result of some benchmarking that i had done and it turned out my benchmarking was wrong and ctu was fine you know to begin with so a lot of people have been trying to break those and can cats cats a little bit of a different discussion the let's paint the picture i mean you've described what it would enable but like how more confident in bitcoin would you be if let's just focus on ctv check sig from stack if they got soft forked into into bitcoin i think it would do really nice things for some layer twos um you know arc specifically it reduces

the need for interactivity i think in arc you can then non-interactively receive value which is big obviously for vaults you know vaults are kind of a separate question from scaling in fact vaults are are kind of like opposite of scaling because they require more chain use but if the chain is a ghost town and we're not getting any fees then vaults are actually great because they're gonna they're gonna juice mires with some fees so ctv does get you a fairly primitive form of vaulting um that i can say would probably be used at the industrial level um still maybe not ready for like home user personal user type vaults we're still not at that level of ergonomics with just ctv but the important thing to note is that ctv is basically

required for any kind of good vaulting um you know again when i was coming up without vault it just wound up being kind of a prerequisite unintentionally so you know those things are really good um i think congestion control is is big my big big worry about bitcoin is that we're going to have some kind of phase change event where either it's a regulatory discontinuity where the government comes in and says hey if you're a regulated miner uh exchange you know You've got a soft fork in monetary policy tools where this is going to go into effect at such and such date. And, you know, with with the knowledge that Bitcoin, given its current capacity, can't possibly facilitate all the withdrawals. So I think having something like CTV and having, you know, exchange level support for congestion control where it's like, hey, you're in exchange.

If I'm going to put my Bitcoin in you, I want to I want to be able to see that you can actually compress, you know, an arbitrary number of withdrawals into this one 32 byte hash and put it on a chain. I think that's really important. And that would make me feel a lot better about that kind of exit case. You know, and then then even I haven't really looked into applying that same sort of congestion control exit into. well, actually, no, I should say ARC already uses that pattern. That's basically how a unilateral exit works in ARC is that, you know, you spend this one output and then the users of the ARC have to unroll that output. I think what's interesting about that is that and with all these layer twos, and that's why I sort of think about the block size, which is a whole other discussion we can get into if you want. But, you know, Greg Sanders did a really good talk at

next about the economics of some of these layer two systems because to really have a trustless layer two system you've always got to be able to unilaterally withdraw your coins to the base chain right otherwise you're just stuck in somebody else's system in the arc case you know unrolling this tree there are a few layers in the tree that means that you know you as a user of the arc potentially have to see a number of transactions broadcast and committed on chain to actually get your value out and so you know how much does that cost what's the weight of those transactions you know what's the fee regime look like those are really interesting questions um that you know are not well spelled out they're not they're not well modeled by these vc-backed companies that

are making this arc system like what i worry about here is and i'm not i really don't mean to pick on lightning too much lightning's a great technology smart people working on it so on so forth. The amount of venture capital and hype relative to our expectations for Lightning, you know, seven years ago, I think it's non-controversial to say that hasn't been met. You know, like we all kind of, I think, thought in the back of our minds back in, you know, 2018, 2019, Lightning is going to be the thing that scales Bitcoin and we're all going to be using Lightning wallets. Some of us are, but it really hasn't delivered on that for a lot of these kind of thorny well you've got a managed directional liquidity you know you've got a

og when the fee market spikes all the channels close um you know which exacerbates the situation there are all these like second order things you got to think about with the layer twos and until we've got a working layer two that is meaningfully scaling bitcoin i i think we kind of have to be cautious about assuming that's that's coming down the pike yeah i think i mean i use lightning every day i think i would say it probably has not reached the expectations that we thought like everybody's gonna be using it i was talking to corallo yesterday he's confident that the back half of the year we'll see self-custodial lightning will we'll take a a step we'll make a step function improvement no for what reason i don't know he

made an announcement of announcement on on the live desk i'm tired of these things man we need We need social norms against announcement of announcements. I pushed back. I was like, you're making an announcement of announcement on the show. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it, man. But I don't know if this was ever the intent out of the gate, but I think Lightning is finding this really nice product-market fit as this connective tissue between these second-layer solutions,

whether it's e-cash, mints, ARK. 100%. I think there's a lot of value there. Institutions, exchanges. is you know but i i completely agree i think it's invaluable for that i just think we all kind of thought it would be this it would be the thing that onboarded more normal people to bitcoin and facilitated me and were kind of payment activity but well you know part of the problem is there isn't demand for payments from bitcoin yeah and like that's i guess that gets to

which is below that which is like how many people are actually adopting bitcoin i know and that's that's that's sort of the problem at the root of all this you know um the best objection that you can give to a lot of the stuff that i've been talking about recently is like people just don't care people just don't care about self-custodial bitcoin um at this point actually using bitcoin at this point so my argument is as an engineer you know think about think about building a bridge right say say you live between two cities you know one city's on the mainland the other city's on the island right and right now like there's only a little bit of traffic in between these cities so you're an engineer you want to build a bridge

right um you know one option is to build the bridge for the amount of capacity that's you know going across right now as an engineer it's very appealing and and maybe even your duty to project forward and say hey in 10 years 20 years like what how many cars are we expecting to go over this bridge you know if there's a disaster on one side of the bridge in fact like if there's a disaster that we all kind of see coming and and there's a credible argument that there's going to be a huge spike in traffic well you know we should be designing we should be designing the bridge to kind of withstand that um that load so anyway just as an engineer i can't help but forward project no and i think it's important to do that and uh i i think it's become clear that

individual adoption of bitcoin even as a savings vehicle before payments vehicle is not happening as quick i mean daniel craywitz wrote hyper bitcoinization in what 2013. like i think we all like when i first got in i was like fomo it's happening we need to get in everybody's going to get this and i just i think throughout time we're all learning that this asymmetric information that's held by bitcoiners understanding how it works compared to the incumbent monetary system is not moving throughout uh throughout the world as quickly as we expected but i think it also affords us an incredible opportunity to build these bridges before the hordes are forced to use bitcoin in the future yeah hey question for you just as an

aside um how worried are you about the process of bitcoin becoming like sort of a stock ticker like the etf ownership you know the concentration in custodians like how much does that kind of keep up at night or do you think there's going to be a sort of you know uh business application level solve for that it doesn't keep me up at night because i hold my bitcoin in cold storage and i fall back to the bitcoins for enemies if people want to put it in the etf wrapper or micro strategy wants to hold it at coinbase they can do that doesn't affect me as long as i have the ability to self-sovereignly use bitcoin in a p2p matter and custody myself yeah it's good and i mean i do think number go up by any means is good for like better liquidity profiles good for

anybody using bitcoin um but and i just i do like this is the conversations i have with normies in my life i shouldn't call them normies people in my life that are not into bitcoin like they they just view it as a toxic and a stock ticker and right i know i think we're just at this very early stage of bitcoin where people haven't even questioned money to begin with they're starting to post-covid um but yeah i'm actually interested to see if something if we have like a black swan adoption event from the machines that really highlights that bitcoin as a medium of exchange actually works and is viable well here's what freaks me out a little bit just kind of thinking through the high high degree of institutional ownership now is like if we did see a contentious

say the g7 countries you know say say bitcoin whatever 5x is 10x is from here the g7 countries get together and they're like okay great wow we're gonna rebase our monetary system on on this this thing maybe partially or whatever um but we just need our monetary policy tools back a little bit a little we just need a little bit of a tail emission or whatever what freaks me out is if you've got you know sailor owning half a million coins or whatever and you know blackrock owning however many um it's the situation where like that concentrated ownership can act very decisively in a situation where um a fork happens they dump the other side of it and then profit-seeking miners just have to flip you know what i mean yeah i kind of worry about that well in the case

of sailor i mean his whole shtick is there's only ever going to be 21 million right like and so india of the government did you see the black rock promo video where they asterisk that well i think they have to for legal reasons right it is highly unlikely but possible technically but i wouldn't be surprised and yeah it is and it's certainly adversarial capital now yes something we should worry about and i think we just need and i i do think i like what the guys at zap are doing in the sense of just like enabling people to easily accept bitcoin as payment as business and right injects their self-custodial yes options yes yes and i don't know i think it's a it's a it's a learning process i mean this has been said many times throughout the years

um on this show which is like before we had plumbing people had to learn how to wipe their ass and take showers like i think people are just learning how to wipe their ass and take showers when it comes to private public key management something like if something like ctv or vaults down the road and what rob's working on what he's doing miniscripts i mean it's already that's already on the market but if we can enhance use cases like that i mean your whole pitch for op vault let's make exchanges unhackable and if you can apply that to self-custody as well i think the degree to which people will be more comfortable self-custody in bitcoin will increase significantly and really defeats that risk in the long term.

I think one of the most exciting things about Vaults, and I don't think this is widely understood, so I'm glad I'm on here, I'm able to talk about it, is one of the reasons I'm so excited about Vaults, it's not that I've seen custodians and we can make their operations more efficient. It's that I believe Vaults are a tool that would allow you to actually onboard someone with nothing more than a cell phone and maybe

an account and an exchange and be able to get a degree of self-custodial security that's on par or greater than like, you know, setting up a hardware wallet and burying a C phrase in your backyard. Because you can do something where if you set up sort of the time delay for a spend on a vault, you know, and obviously your wallet can have different delays and so forth. But you could have a configuration on your phone where someone can can have a key on their phone. They can be receiving Bitcoin, you know, spending it in different thresholds. And then if that key ever gets compromised and, you know, the phone's watchtower can't check in or, you know, the exchange's watchtower can't check in or whatever, the funds get swept to their exchange account.

Or, you know, perhaps if it's your mom, you know, maybe you configure it in such a way that there's a watchtower on your cell phone and if you see the fun funds move you know your mom's life savings or whatever you call her up no i didn't move those you click a big red button and then it gets swept to your exchange account so even if the attacker whatever got all of your your parents credentials say um you know so there's all kinds of things you can do i mean there's just an infinite number of ways you can nest the scripts um with something like a vault to make a really, really ironclad self-custodial setup that you don't need special hardware for.

You may not even need a seed phrase setup process, you know, in some cases. You might want one, of course. I'm a big fan of seed phrases, but if you're literally just trying to onboard your cousin with a thousand bucks of Bitcoin or something, you know, and he's got an exchange account, you can say, hey, you can hold this yourself,

you know, without the custodian having access to it. But still, you know, if you see some funky behavior get hacked or whatever you know you use leverage the security of the custodian um so to me that's really exciting yeah it is and i'm just thinking about a use case and then got beers with um one of the dads at the boys schools a couple weeks ago we were talking about bitcoin i showed him how to download blue wallet he went through that process and then he texted me this week he's like how do i buy more bitcoin on this blue wallet and i was like you don't buy it there set up an exchange and like even that like even i sent him some exchanges reputable exchanges you can buy

bitcoin through and um even there in the back of my mind i was like do i really want him sending this to blue wallets do i need to have like another conversation about like how to secure the seed phrase and what like the opsec around securing the private keys and if we can make it so you don't even have to have that conversation it'd be incredible absolutely you can even set up like training wheels. You could say, hey, man, OK, right now your vault has a condition where, you know, if I detect some weirdness, I can sweep it to your to your exchange or my exchange or whatever. But we can rotate you out of that trivially like we can remove we can remove that policy. You know, you could do all kinds of things like that. And I think, you know,

exchanges who are Bitcoin aligned, you know, like like River and NYDIG and others, you know, they, of course, have an incentive to offer this kind of wallet, because like you're saying, It's like, you know, if they can integrate the actual purchase of Bitcoin with some kind of self-custodial option, it's a win win for them because they don't have to custody the Bitcoin. They get to make their spread. And then that would, you know, they'd be a natural counterparty to run a watchtower and to be a backup. So it's a really, really cool design. I'm really excited about the prospect of it coming to Bitcoin. And, you know, CTV will get us a lot of the way there. It'll get us, you know, some of the functionality. But to really get the full vision, this check contract verify opcode, which, thank God, is very simple.

And I think, you know, once more people start looking at it, will be an appealing target for future software. Let's talk about that a little bit before we wrap up here. So Salvatore from Ledger is on top of this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he, he and I have been going back and forth for a little while. It's kind of a confusing progression because he started off doing this mat thing and it, it eventually morphed into check contract verify. And he kept, we, we went back and forth for maybe three years because I had done vault

and he was like, no, I think this, I think this check contract verify code is really cool. I think you can do vault stuff. And I'm like, I don't see it. Like, well, how do you do this thing? How do you, you know, how do you combine these vault inputs? How do you do this amount balancing? and he's like okay well i'll make this change i'll make that change and pretty soon the proposals in a way kind of morphed like kind of melded together um and he did a really really good job

of making ccv into um a very general kind of embodiment of um aj towns's tap leaf update verify idea which never really got a formal implementation or proposal but anyway like so So so what what Salvatore has done with CCV is it's basically just a way of saying, hey, I'm going to make an assertion about how the tap tree is changing through spends. And again, if I'm a normal person, my eyes are glazing over at that point. What the hell does that mean? It's pretty hard to explain. But the point is that it's a very fairly simple Bitcoin cryptographic operation to enforce. And it's a very general tool that allows you to make these really ergonomic vaults and to do other things.

So I think that's a super exciting proposal. It's a little bit tough to get your arms around, but luckily the implementation is very simple. The line of code added, pretty minimal. So I'm very bullish on the prospect of that making some progress. I want to beat the drum. How do we dictate our hat on? How do we do this? How do we build consensus?

How do we activate? How do we get the conversation out of the stasis phase? Does there need to be olive branches extended between core developers who don't agree with what they're doing? Does there need to be a big, I don't want to say Bretton Woods of Bitcoin, but something like that? Well, you know, Bitcoin is money for enemies. And in keeping with that, I've tried to be a little bit of a heel lately

because i think this like kumbaya bitcoin core situation is really not a good configuration for bitcoin for the reason that if if bitcoin's technical success is contingent on this one organization and this one code base you know like working harmoniously together like they're already a choke point man i mean they like if if they are not already captured like that that is a great target for sabotage because de facto changes go through there so to your question you know my goal here i think is to put pressure on that organization either to catalyze the review of this stuff and take it seriously or set up the kind of social rationale for saying hey we're gonna like we're forking we're gonna do an alternate activation client um because we're

getting to the point here where i think you could get together a very compelling group of people who have public credibility who are building interesting things and basically get them to say hey if this doesn't get real attention within six months if there isn't substantive review discussion about how we get this stuff in you know we're going to start looking at an alternate client because at a certain point the lack of attention becomes kind of indistinguishable from an attack um and so that's i think that's my current path um i think long term the reason i'm leaning into that kind of adversarial mindset is because again it's just not a good situation for bitcoin to be in where everything has to sort of come together at this central point does that

make sense it does it does and again i will go back to what i was saying earlier with empathy because i feel like everybody's so shell-shocked that they don't i think they have soft soft fork fatigue almost where they don't want to the gravity of even approaching the subject of soft forks is such where nobody wants to really stick their head out and do it and so they're focusing on policy and men pool and stuff like that yeah and to be clear i don't i don't think they're attacking bitcoin i mean like there's one part of me in the abstract that says well this is such an important system that it would be naive to think that state actors weren't somehow participating in the process but on the other hand i know all these people personally pretty well and they all

seem well intended to me it's just that we find ourselves in this very uncomfortable un-bitcoin like situation and we got to get out of it like there's got to be a way to get out of it because um otherwise we're there's literally centralization going on and you know one of the things that frustrates me about core a little bit is that out of one side of their mouths they say say oh it's so irresponsible to run a consensus engine that isn't core but then the other side of their mouth is saying oh well you know hey it's not our job to evaluate these controversial things it's like well look man the substance is in the controversy like to make substantial progress here there's going to be controversy if if a if a trivial issue like you know this

mempool filters thing which doesn't actually really mean anything in any sense it's sort of a virtue proxy for people to express their values like the consensus stuff is going to be controversial and so you know simultaneously occupying that part of the power structure and all the attendant funding and you know like but not owning it and not saying okay we do have to reckon with this you know or you know saying hey some of us are going to split off and like do another implementation you know it's just this this position can't kind of continue um uh to the benefit of bitcoin yeah i think but it's a tough one it's a tough one it's like yeah it is weird like you think like chin code brink open stats like funding all these days like

dude but it's always like no strings attached work on what you want to um so i was gonna say like you have to go to alex and sue us and be like guys come on what are we doing here you have to go to you know and i've worked for i mean they they don't they would not um they they would never there's there's never a conversation like that no no that's what i'm trying to make it's like right yeah right right but but at the same time you you you simply can't ignore that there is a social reality to being in that world there are people who decide does this person get funding or not and on what basis you know and that set of people is pretty limited you know there are really three organizations that do maybe four that do a bunch of core development funding um and you

know i'm involved with open sats i think open sites may or may not have an it's been an informal policy in the past but like they haven't liked to fund people working on consensus stuff uh because it's controversial which to me like we're going to need to revise because you know the important stuff in bitcoin the stuff that's going to guarantee bitcoin's success is at the consensus layer at this point so it's got to be grappled with um so it's a messy situation i think everybody involved to my knowledge is has good intent um but we just have to think about how to reframe the system to to continue under more kind of you know under bigger stakes more adversarial environment yeah good problem to have yeah bitcoin is catching on and number certainly going up man

yeah um yeah number certainly going up i i hope on-chain ownership is going up too but it's hard to say you can't measure that right yeah i've said too it's great to catch up we gotta do it more often definitely man yeah i always love coming on and um yeah it's uh it's always good talking about this stuff i hope i'm not well i i guess i should be scaring people a little bit it's not my intent to like muckrake but no i think it's very important like again going back to it does seem clear to me now at this point it was great being at bitcoin plus plus it made me feel like i said i got a bit devs i probably catch bit devs here like every other month in austin not going as often as i did in new york just family stuff and

busy yeah but being at bitcoin plus plus around that group of people it made me feel like i was back in new york like 2015 to 2018 era like bit devs like conversations and really immersing myself in the technical details in a way that i haven't um in some time and i think uh that's another thing that's weird like this position and i'm not on the media side of things it's like i think i have ptsd from segment and tapper too due to the unforeseen sort of consequences of those two marriages and being a big champion of both of them and i've been apprehensive to like get into the conversation about any of these upgrades it's like what do i know i can't audit the code i can't verify it like and that position is almost

more admirable than just jumping in and kind of blindly saying you know yeah let's do x let's do why so i think there's there's a nobility in that um it's just it's yeah it's it's tough there's we've got to start having discussions about this stuff um but i think you're doing you're doing a great job you know tftc was the first bitcoin podcast i ever appeared on so every time i come back it feels like coming home beefy bitcoin boys you know that's right that's right that's right you're gonna have to do a willow burn episode at some point how is will i haven't talked to him in while i i you gotta yeah you gotta dig them up check in i know we'll do it hopefully we do it in person we have all three of us back together the beefy bitcoin boys back together uh that'd

be fun but we have to do it at the uh maybe maybe not at the barstool office but uh maybe we can do it at pubkey dc um oh that'd be cool yeah that'd be very fun get all this playing on i'll be in that neck of the woods uh relatively soon so excited for that yeah i'm as well um i think i like the part i like that you're playing heel too it may i don't think it's uh i don't think you want to be playing heel but i think forcing people to think about these problems from uh different perspectives is important i i have to admit i am a contrarian by nature so indulging in that is is always a little bit fun but yeah look man there's got to be somebody to kind of bridge the worlds and be a credible um counterweight because it's very echo chambery

um it's more echo chambery than it should be i think yeah so so i'll i'll keep doing my job as long as it needs doing hopefully it doesn't we don't need it for too long yeah i can create yeah i agree but we didn't even get to talk about block space so we'll have to do that or block size so we'll do that uh on a future episode we'll do that another time that's that's a big one i gotta i gotta prep for that one definitely definitely definitely all right keep crushing it brother thanks my man thanks for having me peace and love freaks freaks thank you for listening to the show i hope you liked it if you did like it please make sure you subscribe rate review the show it helps us out a lot and also if you like these conversations

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Take care.