TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #671: What's Really in Bitcoin Core Version 30 with Instagibbs

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Marty sits down with Instagibbs to discuss the Bitcoin Core version 30 release, covering technical improvements like checkpoint removal and orphanage updates, the controversial OP_RETURN debate, privacy challenges in Lightning, and the future roadmap for Bitcoin development amid regulatory pressures. Instagibbs on Twitter: https://x.com/theinstagibbs 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 Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.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 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. It's going to be spicy, Greg. We meet here on the eve of Bitcoin's death, October 9th, 2025. Bitcoin Core version 30. Yeah. Drops tomorrow. Somber. Very somber. Very somber. In all seriousness, though, I think a lot of discussion as we were just talking.

Before we hit record has revolved around, obviously, this op return debate, whether or not the limit should be lifted or not, and the potential consequences of doing that. Maybe we'll touch on that, but I think there hasn't been enough discussion on everything else that's included in Bitcoin Core version 30. so i wanted to sit down with you and talk about what bitcoin core has been working on with this particular version and i think before we do that for the layman out there maybe we just do like a high level um a high level refresher of what bitcoin core is what in what is entailed in um basically releasing um new versions particularly significant versions like version 30 and then we can jump into the nitty-gritty of of what's included sure you want me to take the lead on this yes sir all right so basically there's a

big concourse software is the reference client so to speak where it has majority kind of mind share and running share of the bitcoin protocol itself um it includes a bunch of different parts peer-to-peer layer stuff consensus stuff um a wallet which people still use uh a bunch of other like a bunch of other tools and pieces in there um a major release is done every six months so on a six-month cadence there's a what's called a feature freeze which is hey stop adding new things um we're going to continue just doing bug fixes until this time there's a branch off which means okay now we have a new fork in the history that will turn into releases that will release binaries based off of this and then eventually a release right with a series of release candidates

which is happening right now and then eventually a final release um in addition to this you also have kind of using this forked history that if there's future bugs found, if and when there are future bugs found and issues, the fixes can be applied directly on these forked off histories and do minor releases. So someday I will very highly likely have a 30.1 for various reasons. And this is how that's done. That's done on a per need basis. So right now, if I understand correctly there's uh 20 and 29 minor releases being cut right now for various reasons bug fixes and improvements so this can happen throughout this life cycle and then eventually at some point these major releases or these major branches get marked as end of life so saying basically we won't

support this anymore we won't do any effort to like update maintenance to this make and make binaries or anything like that and then it kind of gets stale and so that's kind of the life cycle yeah yeah and taking an even further step back just on the concept of implementations right you have bitcoin or consensus and then implementations like core not the bitcoin ptcd they sort of have their own implementations that build software that is within consensus but does things a little differently, correct? Yeah, so some are complete re-implementation.

So BTCD is a good example. That's been around a long time. It has, it's programmed in Go, the Golang, and it has a complete re-implementation of the consensus software. So when you get a string of bytes in the form of a blockchain,

it needs to come out to the same exact answer as Bitcoin D or any other implementation. That raises, the re-implementation raises There's the chance that there is mismatches, but those can hopefully be ironed out and debugged and fixed over time.

But there's definitely like always, it's a very demanding problem, making sure they're in lockstep of consensus. And even between Bitcoin versions, there's been historical problems with that, where implementation details like how the database is stored causes forks in the future, right? with unforeseen events it's been a long time since it's happened but it's always possible with updates or or not updating too yeah and where would you say we are um in terms of the path of bitcoin core because like going back i remember my first bit devs in new york in 2015 um russianovsky basically presented on segwit and obviously we had segwit getting implemented but

i think um one thing over the year over the last 12 years has been made clear to me is that satoshi when he launched bitcoin it was a bit of a spaghetti code base and there's been a lot of work to sort of separate things within that code base particularly or not particularly but one thing being like the wallet and the gui um and it feels like the last decade of bitcoin core development specifically has been trying to get the implementation to a point where things are separated appropriately more modular and you can begin to do um things that that make it more complex make it easier to build more complex applications on top of the bitcoin protocol layer yeah there's definitely that's one of the major things happening is historically

splitting out these functionalities getting them into their own containers that can be tested separately um so focusing on like the charlatan he's been working on he's been continuing carrying this torch on the liquid coin kernel so being able to separate the consensus parts out of the codebase completely exposed as an API so people can reuse this either in an alternative implementation or just for tooling. It's not exactly, you know, a lot of this work is not glamorous in that there's cost benefits to be weighed. The cost is here is that when you're refactoring these very critical parts of the codebase, mostly consensus, not wallet. I mean, wallet support in its own way, but for the consensus parts, making sure

that when you're changing this code to make it modular, you're not also changing the behavior, which is very difficult. So as you said, Satoshi started with main.cpp, one big file that has wallet, consensus, peer-to-peer. It just says everything just jumbled in it. And it's been a long process of carefully teasing these pieces out, which is continuing today. One big project is the inter-process communication interface so there's this project basically split up to different binaries so you can have your bitcoin node communicate with your bitcoin wall over interface different binaries or in the

future you could have the peer-to-peer parts handled handled only by a separate binary or different ideas like that but this is like future roadmap stuff yeah well let's take on current roadmap stuff like beyond op return which is obviously the most talked about feature in core version 30 i'm looking at my notes now it looks like there's going to be removal of checkpoint support and depreciation of checkpoints uh changes to data carrier size behavior and deprecation plan support for multiple op return outputs per transaction p2p relay mempool adjustments rate limiting and denial of services protections refactoring internal cleanup infrastructure so there's much beyond yeah up return up return as well

yeah let's start on checkpoints because i think that right has been uh not very controversial but i think people have very uh depending on who you talk to um very uh specific views on checkpoints for the good or the bad is removing them good or bad yeah so checkpoints historically are an anti-denial service mechanism. So back in the day, if you spun up a node and you didn't have these checkpoints, like let's say a few versions back, maybe 10 versions back,

a peer could connect to you and then hand you a bunch of data that they cheaply made using, maybe they have like one ASIC, right? The one minor, and they make a long block header chain, a very weak difficulty, and they intercept you right when you're getting connected to the network.

And it just feeds you these headers. These headers, based on the current architecture at the time, are just written to disk. And so these are 80 bytes each. And so if you do enough, you're essentially just writing 80 bytes of data over and over and over to disk. And this is called a header disk fill attack. So these checkpoints are basically saying, OK, up until this point, we're not going to accept any forks in the blockchain history. It must get to this point. and then it continues doing validation after that this this point that they picked is basically like

you know it's oh it would take 10 of the network's mining power yada yada long time to make a header chain this long therefore um it makes the attack that much harder that was like the original motivation because it was a real attack and correct me if i'm wrong but wasn't there aren't the way the checkpoints are sort of like verified or um decide upon that you have like a number of developers to basically just sign like this is the right checkpoint this is the right yeah add a new check exactly add a new checkpoint all you need to do well let's see for check i haven't thought about this in a while but you want to make sure that it reorg will not happen beyond that point so it has to be very deep right it's it's qualitatively different than another

feature called assume valid so this one you have to say we will never fork this one out and so it's kind of labor intensive to like philosophically argue that is 300,000 blocks correct 400,000 things like that it's because you really are saying like i will not diverge from this history but yes ostensibly you get you know get into a github uh pull request somebody says i'm updating it to this height so 500 000 or something like that this is the hash and everyone sits there and makes sure that yeah there's been 500 000 blocks on top of it since then and this hash matches that would be a verification yeah and how's that what's what's being replaced there's a headers precinct or something yeah exactly so there's this long this idea this is years and

years of an idea where you could say okay what if we have a when we're first when we're freshly syncing with the network you just have a broad idea of like how many how how much proof of work you should be expecting so you connect to the network and say i'm expecting you know this many exa i can't even say the hashes or whatever right and then you get this you get fed this header chain but instead of committing to disk you just walk the whole chain the whole way until you hit that minimum proof of work requirement that you've internally internalized. Once you hit it, you say, okay, that looks good. I've gotten all this way, and I've only stored one header at a time in memory.

Now that I've gotten this way, I'm going to do it backwards again. You just sync it twice. So you sync the headers once to verify that your disk is not going to be filled, and then you sync again to actually write to disk. And this, along with a bunch of extra testing work, allows you to remove checkpoints entirely from the code base. Does that have any IBD trade-offs in terms of time? Yeah, I think with the current implementation, if you have a floppy internet connection, which I had once when I was testing, I was testing by flapping the internet connection.

During the precinct, before you've finished the first pass, if it gets interrupted, like your peer drops for whatever reason, it has to restart. So that shouldn't happen. I haven't seen that since I was testing it. But that's one constraint there. So you need to be able to download the header chain once. As soon as that's done, it goes like historical. And there are ways of improving this, but I think it's one of those engineering complexity trade-off things,

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broadly speaking how profound would you say that this major version releases in terms of improvement of the node software itself from an efficiency standpoint so are you talking about initial block download or just this ibd you can even talk like peer-to-peer level um uh obviously or transactions going to be um matriculated through the the peer-to-peer network faster sure so on the the checkpoints front front that doesn't improve efficiency at all that's just a philosophical change to make it clear that the core devs are not in charge of what your chain is. But from a performance perspective, there's been a bunch of work done by Lawrence who has focused on,

especially on the lower end of hardware for initial block download. I haven't paid it very close attention to that, but I know it's happening. The other kind of transaction robustness, right? for the peer-to-peer network, there's been a bunch of work both on, there's this thing called the transaction orphanage and also package relay. So I'll start with the orphanage part, where if you turn your node on for the first time and your mempool is empty, people will start telling you about transactions, which have dependencies in the mempool itself, but you don't have them. So, for example, you get a second generation transaction that depends on a first.

Right now, prior to .30, 30.0, this process is a little flaky and can be interrupted by direct peers who are either malicious or malfunctioning. So 30.0 has a significant improvement to that. It was spearheaded by Gloria, Peter, and others to make this robust to single peers being malicious. or even end peers being malicious. So as long as you have one honest peer, you can make this kind of transaction catch up in the mempool. Is this for like child pays for parent and RBF only or? No, not only.

So this, it was aimed at it. So it was aimed at the kind of one parent, one child package relay project, which was deployed in full on I think 28.0. but the existing implementation had this weakness where if a single peer connects to you they can throw garbage at you and basically empty out this this cache right so basically it's the way of connecting the dots in your mempool basically get disrupted by a single peer and the new implementation of what's called the orphanage finding your parent this is robust even if you

have n minus one connections being attackers so basically the one honest peer can take up a slot and make honest cpfps and like package relay attempts like at least one at a time so i'm trying to visualize that yeah so you have a let's say out of the out of the box eight peers seven of them are malicious internet is just so they're they're feeding you orphan garbage so stuff they don't intend to ever fix right say stuff really it's just stuff that doesn't cost them anything they're just handing you data to look at and hold but basically instead of one big global bucket which it was before there's like a global bucket so one peer could just go in and switch out the buckets contents you have n buckets and these n buckets can be shared

it uses some optimistic pathing like optimistic assumptions about using the whole space by one peer but under kind of these loads where either things are very busy or the peers being malicious then we protect at least uh we have a protections slots for each peer essentially to make sure that economically valid transactions are propagated yeah i'm trying to think how would uh how does the node software determine that the one peer providing you good data is actually the right data so it's not scoring or anything like that uh it's just saying i think the i remember right it's saying a maximum transaction package can be like this big like 101 kilovirtual bytes it says i'll protect that much per peer so whether or not the peer is malicious or not

doesn't affect this number it's just something you allocate for that peer so it doesn't it doesn't take like historical note of who's given you useful things it just allocates that yeah that makes a lot of sense it's funny because uh many people i mean as bitcoin we're hitting we hit all-time highs earlier this week we're at 2.5 trillion dollar market cap and most of the world it's focused on bitcoin just use it as this and a digital capital good, which it certainly is, but I think getting into the nitty-gritty of policies like this, or not even policies, but sort of optimizations like this,

really reminds me, at least in the Bitcoin protocol, is extremely complex. And a lot of people are putting hundreds of millions, billions of dollars even into this asset are completely unaware of the sort of optimizations that you guys are working on and these kind of things don't require coordination with other groups so there's no new like peer-to-peer messages no no new format here so this is just piggybacking off things which have existed for many years which helps helps with velocity for moving forward with things,

but also limits what it can possibly do. Larger changes might require more changes like from a higher level, but then that requires more coordination with other projects. Yeah, like BTCD as an example. And on that note, like how is that coordination improving

or deprecating over time? Is it getting harder to coordinate or? Well, like I said, i think most things are happening within within the colored lines so in the lines for coloring which it just improves velocity but yeah like there are no commonly used from scratch implementations of bitcoin today um that are not bitcoin core right so you have bitcoin knots which is a fork Bitcoin Core, but it has per version, it has all the same features pretty much with extra things added on. So that doesn't take coordination. But for example, BTCD is a few versions behind

and things like, as far as I know, they don't implement the way of sharing transactions in the network using witness transaction ID, so WTX ID gossip. So this can impact decisions that bitcoin core makes internally how we try to save bandwidth for our peers we have to be cognizant of what other nodes on the network what are they doing and that can affect things internally as well well i mean sticking on btcd there was an example that a couple years ago now at this point when barack did that 999 of 1000 multi-sig yeah that knocked uh that knocked btcd off the network and some lightning nodes for a period of time. Yeah, so...

That was enabled by Tablet, right? Yeah, and there's been other ones with... So some fuzzing work. I can't remember who did the fuzzing, but a slight difference in how the script interpreter executed a certain thing called find and delete. It's a very obscure function in the old script code base. This is like Bitcoin Satoshi-era scripting that we don't use anymore in SegWit or Taproot.

But these minor differences can result in possible forking opportunities. And if I remember right, that was even with transactions that were standard. So someone who's malicious could have forked off BTCD, but didn't. So that was good. It's hard, very hard. yeah i mean since you mentioned scripting is there anything in version 30 that um involves scripting no so the last i don't think script the the script interpreter is one big kind of scary area that's your hesitancy to touch unless you really need to um and during normal releases

there's almost no reason to touch it i would say the only thing that might touch is the the clean kernel with interface stuff but i think not even then um the last time i touched it was a couple releases ago so the pay to anchor update that's a very minor change that doesn't even doesn't even change the definition of what's happening it's just like minor uh basically saying this is not an upgrade path anymore let we use it so i would say in general we don't touch scripting unless there's a consensus change we're trying to affect um in my research i thought i read something about ephemeral anchors

with so 30 is that okay no so that would be so go through the history so the ephemeral anchors is kind of two concepts right there's the pay to anchor part which is the script that was 20.28.0 and then ephemeral dust was the other part and that was in 29.0. So those have been out for about one, two release cycles. Obviously this package relay buff that we're deploying in 38.0 is going to help, but those key parts were already deployed.

In place, all right, that's right. Yeah, and ephemeral dust doesn't affect scripting whatsoever. It's just a rule that basically says you're allowed to have one dust output if you spend it. It's pretty simple. What are you most excited about in version 30? Yeah, a lot of the stuff is kind of just like not letting the network fall apart kind of stuff.

I think a lot of the, if I'm not exactly answering the question, but I think a lot of the work has been done at the security level. um some excellent work with the the brink fuzzing team so like nicholas and marco uh de leon not marco falke uh they've and team have been doing great work with the fuzzing infrastructure so i feel like the assurances we have are much higher than prior years including just going back a couple versions um i i can go more into that if you'd like well i'd like you to out anymore like not letting the network fall apart what what uh that's part of it right i can get into this yeah so historically one problem with bitcoin releases is that it's hard to test everything end to end in a robust fashion where you have you know you have a bunch of layers here

you have a networking stack where you where you're taking in random tcp ip data you're talking to peers you're receiving data from peers you're processing data in like paths that depend on a bunch of context so it's hard to enumerate all the possible paths and it's hard to do this in a test that's in a robust way but basically um nicholas and a few others have been working on a buzz harness which is like putting random intelligent but random data and inputting it directly into the binary and seeing if that if the um behavior follows the what we assume we assume to happen so basic ones is we assume that any message that a peer can send us won't make us crash that's kind of obvious but trace making it uh try to trace all the different code paths to make sure

it doesn't crash is like a non-trivial thing the other thing you can do is do kind of this we call invariance checks which are things like any message that this one peer so let's say peer a peer a sends us a peer-to-peer message it should never cause us to disconnect peer b so an attacker shouldn't be able to connect to me and make me disconnect with the honest peer and so you can essentially set up a harness like that do a few hundred iterations per second of different message patterns including block headers transaction announcements pings pongs whatever basically spewing stuff valid or not at the node and making sure that this connection this connection with peer B stays online.

And so there's been a number of historical catches with this, and I think it'll be very nice to have going forward, especially with peer-to-peer changes or policy changes too. Is that specifically to stop something like an Eclipse attack? Yeah, so that example, the invariance check of don't make me disconnect with my honest peer would be yes. Like I want to hear about all blocks that are honest or even transactions, too.

So one interesting with this orphanage update or how we're holding on to these orphan transactions, there's a fuzz harness that is essentially this, you know, if the honest peer is staying within their limits, then another peer should never be able to evict the honest peer's things, right? And you could basically have the same exact thing. Spuse a bunch of data at it and make sure

that nothing is ever evicted from this honest peer. and so the level of assurance you get uh gets much higher i think i can go on all day about this but you know well let's stay a little more because there's a bunch of there's definitely with the price going up a bunch of people are new to bitcoin but let's dig into this concept of an eclipse attack so try to prevent this and make sure when you have a bitcoin node you have slots open that peers connect to so that you can receive and pass on transactions and other other data but But the concept of an Eclipse attack is if you have malicious peers that take up all of the slots interacting with your node, they can begin feeding you bad data and basically ensure that you're not in consensus with the longest chain. Bitcoin relies on the one honest peer assumption.

So as long as one peer that you've reached out to or has reached you is honest, then you can stay caught up on the best chain of blocks, the heaviest chain of blocks. and an eclipse attack is a way of trying it's an attacker using kind of arbitrary network means trying to trick you into not keeping on to a good person or letting them go or not letting them in at all and so one way of doing that would be like send a message that causes you to disconnect a good person right so and exactly why is it important to protect against these attacks like how would well what would what is the intent of yeah somebody so there's an eclipse attack so there's two two reasons why you wouldn't want why an attacker would well two major reasons why an attacker would want to stop you uh your attacker is another miner and you're a miner

so you're mining blocks and they want to partition you from the network get you alone so you think you're doing good work and making the longest chain but in reality you're falling behind the rest of the network so you know if you're if you're 30 of the network if you can partition off one percent pools off the network suddenly your 30 becomes 35 40 over time right and this benefits you greatly because larger miners tend to fare better because they're just getting ahead the other would be if you're not a miner it would be something like you run a lightning node or a node that has a watchtower of any sort so you have like pre-signed vault transactions and you want to watch when things are happening right if a theft is occurring

lightning it's the same idea uh a lightning party counter party is trying to defraud you going with an old state on chain you want to hear about the newest blocks as fast as possible and the fastest way to do that well if you're being if it's being stopped entirely then you just never hear about it and your money goes out the window so yeah enlightening specifically with the um what's it called htlcs well the htlcs but if you get eclipse attacked and you don't know that your channel counterparty has the specific transaction with your channel partner is not commitment transaction yeah yeah so they could have gone to chain with an old version long ago and you just never heard about it you're sitting there waiting you're saying that's weird i'm not getting blocks but

things must be okay you know maybe miners are slow right and then on the other side they actually have taken your money and run yeah and that takes it's two weeks for that or two weeks depends yeah so with lightning specifically that's up to the node operator uh and channel partner so you can say i i feel comfortable waiting with you running off with my money after half a day or one day that's really up to you um and that's the reactive security model basically it's for better security you should turn that dial way up so talking again about that lnd exploit crashing like that's one example why you might want a longer delay because not only are you worried about eclipse attacks you're worried about bugs and packages and your internet you know

getting cut off and there's all sorts of reasons that you'd want to have these time locks be longer since you mentioned it bugs what um because it pertains to bugs and v30 what uh any being patched uh surely so if you go to bitcoincore.org i'm pulling up right now There's the, let's see, I put my foot in my mouth here. I find it releases security by development security advisories. This is the place to track all the publicly known vulnerabilities. And so example, the latest one was a remote crash due to address spam. And there it'll give you all the details of who, you know, what severity it's ranked.

So low, medium, high, which is basically a rough ranking of how easy it is to do and how bad does it result in. So the worst would be something like chain split, right? Forking off people and making double spending happen. Second least bad would be like, I can send a message and it gets sent to everyone else and everyone crashes, right? that kind of and you can keep going down the list to this takes a bunch of setup it might cost some money and if i know a minor that kind of thing and that's kind of like the strata there but if it's a and then also the the the um severity also informs how long it takes to be told about it because if it's something if it's a chain split if it's if it's unknown it's kind of hard

to do they might not tell you about it till a few releases after the fact example like it could be like only after the last vulnerable version is out of end of life so we told you to update these last three years you didn't here's here's the vulnerability versus something that's low which is like hey here's a new version and here's the vulnerability so if there is a i believe a if there's a low vulnerability for 30 that's past 10 30 at all you should hear about within in a couple of weeks. I believe that's how it works. I'd have to, I'd have to look at the process again, but it was a big, it was a big job to get that process lined up, to make sure that people are hearing about these things and understanding that the system still has flaws

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six figure price floors and why long-term hodlers remain firmly in control download now you'll also get access to the online event featuring james check bitcoin has crossed the rubicon get the report at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc being about like updating the latest version i think that's been a big part of the conversation is this campaign to not update to b30 which is anybody can run any version they want to as long as it's what um what would you say to the people out there telling people not to download i would say i would say if you don't run your node with money it doesn't matter what you do i mean you might be missing out on a new rpc or something or like looking at your mempool or

something, but it's not too interesting. Staying up to date matters when you use money at stake and your security of your node at stake. So money, if you're a business, you should be updating within when possible, especially minor versions. So 28.something will be released, .3. I would recommend you upgrade to that if you can't update to 29.1 or 29.2 or 30.0. Best case scenario, update the latest and greatest because some fixes can't even be some fixes are harder to do as a backport so all the way to old versions basically it's like this big change to like you know there'll be some big change to this script engine or something like that they're not going to mess with that for old versions unless unless the bug is easy to hit and becomes public or something

like that i'm not saying this is the case but that's just kind of the thought process here so i'd recommend stay off of end of life you know so if you're on 27 get 28 at least 28 that whatever the last release was and then try out the new versions too um if you need to integrate it like like btc pay server and all those need to keep trying these new versions to make sure that if there's any api breaks they get caught early and can get fixed or worked over an appropriate speed yeah and what benefits would a project like btc base ever have upgrading to v30 beyond what we've already discussed with appearing i mean it's less it's a less a thing of benefits per se but i mean there's obviously the performance benefits that you get so faster ibd and whatnot

but also just access to the latest tooling fixes it's more about making sure that things aren't broken because uh as an example um bitcoin core for a long time had maintained a series of patches for this thing called bdb which is a database format that the wallet used to use but this format is extremely not maintained uh basically the original project maintainers quit a long time ago or don't don't do the patches necessarily necessary so bitcoin core had to do that that support is officially gone for 30.0 so there's a tool in there to migrate your wallet from to the new version but if you're like running a larger software stack like b2z pay server there's probably more involvement on making sure that your users go from the old

old format to the new format properly and what is uh what is the new format did a bunch of developers simply just write a new database no it's just that sqlite i think uh yeah just like a standard format that works for the sizes we care about so that's it's funny thing because like sqlite that's become extremely popular in recent years i've talked to justin moon a lot about the powers of sqlite but that's yeah it's extremely with bitcoin being released in 2009 and the tools that were at satoshi yeah and and every every time the project gets to get rid of a dependency like bdb the better off we are because these like open ssl used to be a thing that we had to have in consensus

that was removed a long time ago. There's all these different little projects that we basically re-implemented just the parts we need and then the rest is removed or we swap them out for really standard components. So the last time we spoke about

the op return was when we saw each other in person in June, May or June? May, I think. May, BTC++ us where uh very uh very interesting get-together of bitcoin developers in austin texas and um i guess just to cover that whole debate about return how would you frame it um from your perspective so i think that that was kind of where i stopped paying attention because i went in person and was able to finally get out kind of like well what's their like

what what do they think the solution really is we all agree there's some level of problem some people think it's catastrophic some people think it's spammy and noisy but we don't love the jpegs but what do we do about it and bitcoin core kind of people have been saying well it's really hard to disentangle what's spam mechanically and automatically without without causing great centralization force and peer-to-peer problems in general right we hurt we're trying to save the moneyness by punishing jpegs but then we end up hurting the moneyness the fundamental moneyness of bitcoin whereas i asked like hey what is your ultimate vision for bitcoin core if we went down your path and essentially it ended up being this argument of

we'll have kind of a scripting language or possibly like you know this this this list of bad scripts that we have to pass around to other nodes and people are automatically updating their configuration scripts to like filter these and as you can see like this kind of method is inherently centralizing and i basically came away with i don't think this is it this bridge is gappable um there's been some efforts in the knots community to do this where you essentially have a web of trust of filters and it just breaks the inherent moneyness of bitcoin and i don't know what else there's to say about that i mean you can ask more questions of course no i mean i think i fall in the camp of i hate the jpegs i think they're annoying i don't like

that they're bloating utxo set or it was not even jpeg it's just like the arbitrary yeah ordinals arbitrary fills up the utxo set yeah yeah well i guess let's jump into that like the core argument for changing up return and um increasing the limit you're taking the limit cap off altogether um basically comes down to the fact that people that are injecting arbitrary data into transactions are doing it in a non-optimal way that's bloating the UTXO set, correct? Yeah, almost everyone does what's called an inscription, which means in SegWit or Taproot, you can put the JPEG essentially in the input side and you get the witness discount for it. So you pay four times less. OpReturn is an older way of doing it, which costs four times as much.

And the argument is that if you need some sort of payload to be in the output, like let's say a cryptographic proof, it's called a Grof-16 zero-knowledge proof, that's too big. It's bigger than 80 bytes, but it needs to be somewhere in the transaction. So what people were theorizing about doing, and actually had software to do, is stuff it in UTXOs that look like public keys. And so nodes have to store this forever just in case someone tries to spend that output. So if there's already these myriad of ways of embedding data, more or less harmful, basically we hand them the least harmful method and say, here, use this one. I also have personal opinions on kind of how opinionated we should be about what the best wallet software is. So I worry that if people set their own, you know, hyper specific arguments like knots, like arguments and knobs, that it really causes mistakes and ends up kneecapping the moneyness of Bitcoin in other ways. So I'll give you one example. For the Knox 29 release, which is the latest release they have, the new version of Lightning Channels would not be able to propagate on their nodes if you use the default settings.

And so I think that's a great example of either lack of communication on their part of what they're trying to filter or just ignorance, right, of what they're doing is causing the moneyness of Bitcoin to be heard for the sake of saving Bitcoin, so to speak, supposedly. I can go more into that if you want. Yeah, like how would it mess up the Lightning Channels? So the new style Lightning Channels, as well as the ARC, Spark, there's probably a few others, they're all using this pattern of the truck transactions, so version 3 transactions. Not only is it the version 3 being valid to relay, but it allows them to be zero fee if paid for by a child. So specifically in NOTS 29, the current release, those are invalid. it does not allow those to propagate so your commitment transaction will simply be dropped

by your local node even if that was fixed then they also ban ephemeral dust so remember this ephemeral dust is the rule where you're allowed to have a single dust output in transaction as long as it's cleaned up immediately after in a package and they disallow the function where this dust could be like one satoshi two satoshi all the way up to the dust limit so taproot the smallest output is allowed normally is 330 satoshis so 1 through 329 would be considered invalid and simply dropped even if it's spent and again the motivation here is to stop jpegs because ordinal theory, whatnot. But in reality, this is just like this feature is being used

in the new Lightning channels. Like that space of the feature is intended to be used. And so this is essentially going to kneecap anyone using the software and trying to do self-custodial payments using Lightning. Wow. And when you say v3 transactions, is that like version 3 of BEC32? or no no no uh it's it's the transaction version number so there's a version field the version field 3 on 28.0 and and newer is it's considered standard for relay

but it also enables things like uh 0p transactions for technical reasons that i won't get into here but that's kind of like the gist of it yeah no like i you told me before we had record that you really haven't been paying attention since bt plus btc plus plus but i think i came away from that week because i was um highly uh i don't want to say triggered but i was like a little emotional like what is going on here i don't want to i was a little i was a little demotivated i thought i thought there was a chance that we would bridge some some of this gap and come to an understanding where there's some solution but i just after that i didn't think so and i think it was it was born

out to be true i just i don't you know i don't see it months later no you know get a lot of and it's funny i've been a lot of people hopping in my benches on x and on youtube and other places saying why aren't you talking about this like i don't want to breathe air into it and i can't i think i walked away from btc plus plus with the conclusion in my mind like these things are consensus valid like there's nothing you can do to stop valid transactions from getting in um if you want to change it you're going to have the harder conversation of soft work to angel return or something like that and if you're not focused on that then um i don't i think it's uh you're looking for a pyrrhic victory there and then i mean i guess

to be critical of bitcoin core the project and i think we talked about this in may in person too like i think just and it's just a massive communications pr failure that um i think And that's why many people have gotten so triggered and remain triggered is the perception is that Bitcoin core is changing policy rules arbitrarily without without talking to the broader Bitcoin user base. Yeah, it's a little disappointing. And I find it a little baffling that the response to that is to switch to a distribution that changes policy on a whim of one guy and completely ignorant to like, no. I mean, I guess I'm being pointed here, but mentioning these like they did not know they're breaking people's expectations of the network. And as far as I know, they haven't changed course. So. Who's defending the money is the Bitcoin.

i don't see how it would be them well what do you think happens tomorrow do you think bitcoin dies tomorrow when 30 is released i'm firmly on nothing ever happens team uh i think it's not a black swan event no matter what um it's like a very very minor thing so i'm happy if people just update to relatively minor uh relatively recent releases um just for the health of the network for security reasons and also just the vp transactions thermal dust all those things getting out there it's good to see these getting uh traction in real life yeah the uh i said this on a rabbit hole recap i forget it was two or three weeks ago but i proclaimed stated um during that episode like we're gonna look back a year from now

we'll be laughing that i think this is what i think is going to happen he knows what's going to happen but um i am also firmly in the nothing ever happens camp and yeah i think we'll look back and be like ah remember we were fighting about that yeah i think i think it's important to try to take some lessons from it uh whatever those lessons are and then i mean some of the lessons are negative right but basically doing what you can to keep your brand as far as like a infrastructure project which doesn't lose people's money i think making that really your focus rather than trying to cater to every user at once which is impossible but also just trying to communicate that it's okay if people were on their own node software that differs right it

really is up to people like the person right self-sovereignty and i think people keep forgetting this fact that running the node 99.9 of the time is for you right it's for your sovereignty your security your privacy it's you're not generally helping the network doing this this almost all the time it's just for you and that's where the focus should be yeah i think there is a broad misconception about the power of an individual full node and its influence on the rest of the network um you know rehashing these conversations that happened during the block wars except of an economic node and i think you can definitely socially signal by running a certain version of a certain certain implementation but um yeah the policy ends up being kind of like the mirror

inverse of that right so the block size wars with the intolerant minority or intolerant minority where basically it's like uh if a small fraction of economically motivated users will reject things consensus then it kind of there's brinksmanship involved that might enable soft work but with policy it's the inverse where a small small percent of people who are tolerant of a certain transaction format lets them through in practice, even if 90% of the network doesn't. And I think there's a bunch of metaphors here, like technical allegories pretty much or parallels.

That's a really good insight. I never thought of it that way. The inverse consensus-first policy. Intolerant minority can affect consensus more than they could policy. uh a an intolerant a tolerant minority can make more things relay uh they can't make less things relay an intolerant minority can affect consensus like shrinking consensus is the heart is the uh easier part while expanding policy is the easier part on the policy side of things it's easy to expand it's hard to restrict it is kind of like

the mirror universe here. It's hard to hard fork. It's easier to soft fork. In Relay, it's easier to expand, harder to restrict. So moving forward, when Doomsday comes and goes tomorrow, we move on. I think the dust will settle. A lot of questions around ossification, what changes are needed in Bitcoin. Like, obviously, Bitcoin Core isn't going to stop working on Bitcoin after version 30 is released tomorrow.

And the same can be said for any other developer working on any other implementation. But in your mind, what are some of the top priorities that people need to be focusing on beyond what gets released tomorrow? Well, I mean, doubling down on security infrastructure, but I already talked about that. Um, so aside from making sure that this multi-trillion dollar asset doesn't fall over in the next few years, um, there is a continuing conversation on what people call covenants or scripting softworks. I think that'll continue. Um, Rusty Russell has submitted a somewhat serious, like more concrete proposal for his

kind of rewrite of Bitcoin script where, um, taking Bitcoin script and turning it up to 11 um but there's like a number of different ways that script updates can be done like for uh what what you're trying to accomplish and how you do and that informs how you do it so he has one way uh russell o'connor has like simplicity if you've if you've read up about that and then aj also has his own bullish kind of list-based programming language and i think beyond the near term we need a bigger discussion about if we want to do if we want to continue iterating on scripting in bitcoin what's the best way to do it that's a big engineering question as well as you know theoretical and engineering yeah i'd pull sure on a couple months ago to talk about

simplicity launching on liquid mainnet um and we talked about the potential of it getting implemented at the protocol level and it seems like simplicity i mean obviously blockstream's working on it i think the paper dropped about 12 years ago maybe even a long time ago um and it's been talked about since then finally got a live on mainnet on liquid um to basically show showcase what what could be done there but it seems like i mean simplicity has always sort of appealed to me but i think the common pushback is like how are you going to get this into well yeah common pushback is oh it's very complicated it's a lot of lines of code but if you look at any other proposal it make they're making severe trade-offs too and i think

the community will have to have an honest discussion that doesn't involve brinksmanship of like you shouldn't be arguing necessarily that bitcoin isn't worth the work i would say like this um because there are facets of simplicity or simplicity like solutions that really appeal to me as well um that aren't maintained with the great script restoration or bullish and so i think this discussion has to be made more near term uh antoine and i have been working on a kind of smaller proposal which is template hash checks from stack and internal p i think have you had Antoine on for that no okay but a few months back um basically it's a it's a slight revision and reframing of another proposal where it's like ctv as well as check stick from stack and we

basically we became intrigued with this kind of pairing and did a ground up rethink of how we would do it post taproot era and that was our proposal essentially it's a ctv like widget That's TapScript only. CheckStick from Stack, which is BIT348, and internal key, which is BIT349, as is. What would you say to the ossifiers who are worried about the unforeseen consequences of messing with something like BitcoinScript?

Because I would argue, too, that there was unforeseen consequences with the combination of SegWit, Taproot, with the ordinals manifestation um i guess how do you how do you have conversations around that in really war game through the potential for stuff like that yeah i mean that's an interesting question because the things i felt that were deficient in taproot are probably not the same ones like from an unforeseen perspective so when i look at lessons learned from I mean, there's probably a bunch from Segwit, but let's say from Taproot, since it's more recent, we learned things like, hey, maybe we should have more tooling in place before we actually talk about activation.

Because in Taproot, the way keys are published on the network, there are these 32-byte keys, what we call X-only keys. And this ended up, it may or may not be the right decision in the end, but we didn't have a fuller discussion from the tooling side of things. How do you make cryptographic protocols with a slightly different public key format? And it ended up complicating certain protocols. I think it ended up OK, but the lessons I took away are essentially, hey, tooling needs to be much more defined before these kind of larger changes are done. And we're taking that to heart. So part of our efforts is not only saying, hey, these capabilities, these opcodes and capabilities enable some cool use cases. Hey, look at these blog posts we made.

But much further than that, we want to have the tooling ready to go, applications deployed in like SIGNET and maybe custom testnets before we even talk about things like activation. and we're far from that uh even from a mindshare perspective we're far away but from a quality assurance perspective we're also far away so that's kind of like the lesson i took away i guess from from taproot yeah so like if it activated tomorrow ideally we'd be able to have wallets that just spin up and use things the next day right or you know practically the next day with taproot and ended up being like this activated in 2019 or whatever and then like oh it took four more years for music to to be formalized and another two years to be standardized and psbt support is taking years and ideally this ideally more of this would have been done

prior to activation yeah and it's insane problem we have as a bitcoiners as species as we're becoming more dependent to a degree on this and this monetary protocol it's approaching two and a half trillion dollars in value not only that i mean you mentioned earlier we have all these different second layer solutions whether it's lightning liquid um arc spark dirt shawmy and mints in the uh in the bag as well um silent not silent payments um what's a spark use uh state chains state chains state chains sound payments too right all these you have this whole tech stack that's all kind of interlinked in certain ways and well the velocity is just kind of slow because there's a lot more layers to it

even if i snap my fingers and we got some magical software it'd still take years for adoption yeah this is out of left field but just because it's a big topic of conversation uh i think when it comes like fuzz testing is ai help at all with this is there any uh any vibe coding that helps i was i was briefly considering today could you get reasonable vibe coded fuzz harnesses so making but with fuzz testing you really want to make sure like you need a lot of subject matter expertise to define it otherwise it does like basically really random and if it's really random data then it doesn't really make any meaningful progress it's trying random numbers essentially with no understanding of what it's doing but the way you can write the

harness with intelligence so maybe there's like maybe there is you know i wouldn't rule it out i think ai for writing testing is probably one of the best avenues to go forward with in this space i'm not sure how much people have been doing it i was just going to ask is anybody working on that probably what um what would you obviously there's been a lot of controversy and shit slinging going on over the last eight months what would you say is the uh the mental state of your average developer right now i mean it depends um obviously this kind of drama makes maintainers more risk averse in some ways right so risk averse could mean they're going to ignore issues longer or they're just going to make snap decisions and just say like this is the way

it is um outside of that i think people are ready to get back to work uh working on interesting things so like one project that i think will become more important as time goes on possibly is uh aj is working on this thing called template sharing which is and we basically want these future relay discussions to be less political and so one way of doing that is solving some parts of it technically that you kind of allow you're more likely to allow people to have different mental policies as long as it doesn't affect convergence of the network in blockchain terms so we don't want to slow down block propagation on the network to make mining fair so if there are like technical ways of mitigating this even when people disagree on mental policies that would be a big win and so

i think arguing less about what what a default number should be in a config file i think going this way is more fruitful yeah what would you contend is the biggest risk to bitcoin right now that's a great question biggest risk i i mean i think it's the legal one um for users and developers still um it's it's a you know stable coin people i would say are a political force in america but still not quite there for bitcoin right uh we still don't have legal like explicit legal protections in congressional writing promising that they won't jail us for writing code that helps people move money right um privacy is going to be a big bear to tackle i think privacy is essentially illegal on the internet and they're going to want to keep it that way

even if people figure out how to do coin joins in mass and keep off chain the legal i mean just Yesterday, I was talking about Spark, the Spark service, how it's their policy to, on an indexer, publish every single transaction for every single account. So if you have someone's Spark address or you get a single Bolt 11 invoice from them, a Spark user, you can look up their entire transaction history, including balance. And my guess is they have their stated reasons, but my guess is they're worried about pushback from the federal government, whether that's invasive data requests or, you know, regulatory crackdown on their service for being, you know, not for money transmission. I mean, they'll try to claim it, right? So the government could still try to claim that they're money transmitters, even though they claim they're not. And this could be instigated by a service offering practical privacy. So I think that those are some of the finer tightropes that are walking these wallet services.

Yeah, I saw you tweeting, you're quote tweeting Wallace Satoshi, which has moved to Spark. Yeah. As their backend. Exactly. That's insane. it's like anybody who's technical enough can sort of probe that data yeah it's a little surprising um i'm obviously not happy with it but i think to be clear for that thread um i'm bringing this up because wallets like and wallets like wallets satoshi have to somehow communicate these

expectations of non-privacy to their users and i think it's very difficult um prior like in previous iterations there they were the custodian and so whilst hoshi says i'm not going to publish everything on a database but now they're relying on a back end that does how do you update the mental framework of you know how do you get informed consent from your users for that that's really challenging and i'm not sure what the solution is for that yeah i'm just going to pull this up yeah since there isn't real privacy against the spark operators that everyone should be searchable on the public index so it's like yeah they're not even that is their stated that's what they said so i'm i feel comfortable saying that's what they said um and then you can like uh

ben carman whipped up a tool for me in about 10 minutes probably vibe coded it uh there we go so if you get someone's wall satoshi invoice it immediately pulls up their account so i tested it on my own which i don't use it seriously but you know it it would show my test transactions to my real lightning wallet so you know it's like how do you communicate that to a user especially a new user how do you communicate that to the user of venmo which has one you know they're maybe okay with the service knowing but not everyone in the world knowing if they can switch a button um yeah no that's what i was gonna say it's like even if the operator knows every transaction doesn't mean you

broadcast i'd be more sympathetic if they just if they just said yeah and we give you a button in the ati or whatever to say don't publish and then they just didn't do that i'd be pretty sympathetic to that yeah yeah now the privacy war is going to be uh going to be a big one but uh i saw dan gold from payjoin dev kid uh a couple weeks ago it seems like they're making good progress and when it comes to payjoin specifically i think we're gonna have to position it as a way to uh as a sort of cost-saving technology for exchanges specifically Yeah, that's the tough thing. It seems like to make it palatable regulation-wise, we have to say it's something else. It is, right? Coinjoins in general can be potential savings. Lightning is a fee savings vehicle that gets you practical, certain levels of privacy better than on-chain. um an arc spark well all these other systems can also potentially offer those kind of

privacy trade-offs maybe trojan horse using the original systems right yeah that's why like i don't know what your uh thoughts are on chummy events but i'm i love them i love the uh the cashew wallets and the eddy mint wallets i interact with and yeah i think the big challenge is who runs the mint right because they can't they cannot claim they are non-custodial like by any stretch of the imagination no so who runs them yeah how much of a centralizing force is that right because it's more efficient if everyone's on the same mint um maybe there's you know decentralization back pressure from like well we have the lightning network as it that interconnects everything so maybe the centralization pressure isn't as big right you

just have like thousands of operators i mean i guess we'll see some people think the ais are going to run them in and recognize that superior money for the agentic framework and there's going we go i mean conspiracy theories there yeah and now but now we're getting into like the philosophical side of things because like no matter what part of the stack we're talking about like spark has to make this privacy trade-off because of the government um maybe other things like pay join won't get implemented by exchanges because they're worried about the regulatory and compliance blowback uh obviously chubby immense can provide not only incredible privacy but since they're separate from bitcoin and very modular you can build a literal new

banking stack from scratch that gives you all the functionalities you'd want um from a banking service with better more secure tech um minus the centralization pressures of the min operator uh it's like we have the potential to build an incredibly robust secure private financial system which arguably should be what everybody wants um but for some we're not for some reason but the uh the government just messes that up yeah also the user demand just isn't there for censorship resistant payments i mean there obviously is some but in the west as an example no one seems to care and what would make them care right what what events might transpire that will make them care and will we will we be ready for them that's the other one too right we're

building i think like general hodl tech is pretty much solved i would say like coinbase can seems to be doing okay with a quadrillion bitcoin or whatever but you know the the payment technology still isn't there and so if bitcoin payments actually need to take off in a non-custodial way in the future the infrastructure needs to be there and i think that's kind of what we're looking at looking at this future hey we had a good step in the right direction yesterday with the uh square announcement people were waiting for seven years for that yeah no i think i think the pressure is going to be digital id and uh my theory is that they're going to try and thrust something world coin or something like it on the masses and people are not going to be fond of uh

staring into the orb and then they'll care maybe yeah yeah i mean now we're getting something like do you have uh are you optimistic about the potential for the user experience and the products built on top of bitcoin to get to a point where regardless of people's desire to use peer-to-peer cash the experience is simply superior to the incumbent system that just gets adopted because it's better ux i mean it depends on the layer it's already better than some things international wires are trash and will continue to be trash for a long time but i think you'll i mean some of the payment ux's are really nice in Bitcoin, but a lot of them take steep trade-offs in the self-custody dimension.

You know, if you just park your money on, well, actually, this is where it still works, right? Parking your Bitcoin on Coinbase is only useful if you're willing, if you're only interested in trading on Coinbase or using base chain or whatever. But if you want to actually send someone over the light network of payment, I think it still works, but there's all this regulatory pressure to not let it succeed right and i think that's where all the friction is so if you can hey go ahead i did this last week we had uh we had a 1031 off site with the portfolio companies we're at this resort and over the course of the three days got to know um some of the the people working at the resort particularly the bar and uh last night go to tip him he's got a

coinbase account i was like i'll send it over lightning and the ux was just completely abysmal and i thought like i got a confirmation on my end but it never hit his account i got a confirmation that the payment was received but from what i understand and i didn't realize this till after i left him coinbase is asking users that accept bitcoin over lightning to sort of ask for personal information of the counterparty exactly and yeah the transaction it's like what Yeah, that's I think. It's it's incredibly centralizing in that no one will want to do that, but if transactions, the payments, the payments volume isn't high enough that people won't jump that hurdle to go on the other side, if money is sitting in an ETF or whatever, everyone's happy with it. They don't need to ask permission because it's not going anywhere. But if you want to make payments, this is where all this friction shows up,

especially if you're trying to send from a Coinbase or a regulated institution. I don't know if we can fix that, aside from legal changes. It's completely immoral, though. Like, I sent the Bitcoin, like, I sent it from my mobile wallet. I'm making a descriptive, yeah. Oh, I know. But, like, just, like, I'm thinking about it. I was thinking about it through.

i was like wait i i sent fifteen dollars twenty dollars for the bitcoin whatever it was to this wallet like obviously it's centralized coinbase is presenting and running the lightning node presenting the invoice they have the bitcoin sitting somewhere in their account the guy light spark does i think but yeah yeah light spark whatever it's sitting somewhere in a centralized third party and that guy's never going to get the money and i sent 20 bucks and i'm never going to get back because i don't think this guy's going to be able to find me to ask me for my home address and all that and when he does i'm not going to give it to him i'll say spin up another invoice using using zeus or something like that and i'll send you the

bitcoin there but the coinbase just holds that money though yeah so i think i think that's where you'll see the right like if spark does take off that that's the niche it'll fit uh there's an unfortunate privacy thing but if you if you're willing to accept a system that says it's self self-custodial and it kind of is custodial at least um maybe that's enough for users to get onboarded um but is that a world we want to go to versus something more private this is like big challenge yeah i mean talking to matt corallo earlier this year he's pretty optimistic that uh self-custodial lightning will see a step function improvement better it's definitely better than before um i think a lot of you'll hear like oh

this new layer two will fix all lightning's you know all the issues lightning has but you look under the hood it's either making custody trade-offs security trade-offs or it's or it's making the same assumptions as like lightning needs improvement so that it's like oh it's instant transactions they said how do you get instant transactions oh you just trust this person not to sign twice like come on like you know that's zero comp trust right so i think there's a in this industry there's still a bit of that even the bitcoin side is kind of hiding what models people are buying into but i mean i'm optimistic too so i think there's enough there for another five ten years of development and smoothing of processes yeah and in the meantime

In parallel, to your point, we need to wage the campaign to abolish the Bank Secrecy Act where all this insane privacy infringing compliance and regulation comes from. Can we somehow get the BSA as a person to insult Trump or something? I'm trying to think of a way of instigating constitutional crisis because then maybe the courts will strike it down anyways. It wasn't constitutional anyways. Yeah. No, it isn't saying we're dealing with the remnants of mistakes made many decades ago. Funnily enough, 1970, I think, is when the BSA was implemented. It's interesting to see the thing that was vaguely probably not constitutional at the time accepted because we didn't have computing widely. Now that's flipped and kind of seeing the straws being grasped by the statists who want everything to be reported at all times. It's really stark, I guess.

Yeah. And admittedly, I haven't been following it as closely as it probably should be. but last i heard there was this doesn't have anything to do with privacy but to your earlier point about legal ramifications of writing open source software that allows people to use bitcoin in peer-to-peer fashion there was positive language in the clarity act which hasn't been passed yet i don't know if it's been taken out or revised out but has not has not yet been taken out but there's always a worry that until the job's done it's going to get horse traded for something else right because again you have the stable coin bros stable coin contingent and you've got the

kind of elizabeth warren contingent at the moment and people are worried that elizabeth warren actually hates bitcoin more than they actually hates to stable coins so maybe a trade would happen there yeah we'll see i'm optimistic long term but you need to actually battle this out in in congress and in the courts well i mean i think my uh i would have called a pipe dream but would be incredibly badass is that if they did push and put the regulatory pressure on if you just got back to the site for punk fruits and you just had a bunch of synonymous devs pop up and just start launching things without that's anybody that's tough here they are so i have a slightly contrarian point of view on this i guess yeah i think it's a good idea of something like

that, but I see America as a potential base for freedom through freedom of speech and computing. And if I just snap my fingers and America became the place where all development, all non-custodial development is blessed legally and protected 100%, and there's no question that you're going to be dragged out of your house because your system helped enable someone else to do money laundering, I think that'd be a huge win for the world. And I think we can push that way. I don't think that everything bad for me as a developer is good for Bitcoin, I guess is my point. I think we can kind of push the other direction and make it easier in countries with law and order, potentially more law and order, and export that goodness worldwide through the

internet no greg i like that i like that optimistic view we should lead by example i still have like i said earlier i mean the potential the tools the potential is all right like we can build yeah an incredibly transparent robust resilient secure relatively private financial system the potential is there in general freedom of speech has gotten stronger and stronger than the united states the one caveat is oh but you did talked about money and suddenly this is like a legal loophole to throw you in jail forever so i think like just keep maximizing these first amendment gains as far as we can in the next few years right i think i think it's possible i do too let's keep pushing yep it's been awesome this is the uh

this is the first time in a while i've uh gone deep on bitcoin core stuff and uh it always reignites the uh the sub subdued nerd in me uh and it makes me miss new york bit devs in the in the heydays when uh when i would nerd out with this stuff for you know i mean i think i went to probably 80% of the BitDevs between 2015 and 2020. And it's easy to forget the intricacies and the complexity involved in actually maintaining and improving the Bitcoin protocol. Yeah.

Most people are completely unaware. Yeah, like with anything else, there's a lot going under the hood. it doesn't directly it's not a feature for the user so it's hard to see and show value no I'm thinking too like as more institute like you have faith that

the last question you have faith that like as more institutions get in if banks get in that they'll have tech departments that will understand the importance of understanding the intricacies of the protocol level that I don't know I can't I think it's kind of, we're also in an eternal September kind of situation.

I would have expected more industry feedback in a direct way, but you don't get that. People don't even really complain when things are broken. It is like a, there's a feedback loop problem with development. So I'm looking forward to find ways to solve that too, especially as things get bigger. think about it freaks all right any final thoughts before we wrap up here i appreciate you having me on and uh excited for the future of still the future two days from now or the uh bitcoin dies tomorrow so yeah enjoy a while last freaks you got a piece of 24 hours

yeah all bitcoin transactions are legal the next 24 hours all right see ya thanks Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show.

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