TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - btc++ Austin 2025 Live Desk Day 2

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Archive of the live desk at btc++ Austin 2025

We are live, Bitcoin Plus, Plus, Mempool edition, day two. Survived day one. Marks, I have to give you a great deal of thanks for taking over my spot at the end of the day yesterday. No problem. Yeah, it was, you threw me right in the deep end of the Mempool. You're like, here's the microphone. By the way, Jameson Lopp is going to be your first interview.

And it's like, all right, let's go. Logan made sure he got a tiki. Yeah, he closes out properly. I was like flailing. I'm like, what do I do now? So he grabbed the mic. He didn't even say anything. He just grabbed it from me.

So we're here at day two. Bitcoin++, people are starting to stream into the building. A great action-packed day of content here. I believe they're going to be streaming the mainstream made in stage via Bitcoin Magazine. Yeah, it's live over there right now. Very important. We just crossed $100,000 again.

We're at $101,000 now. back at six figures should have that up on the screen yeah life life price action yeah i think people people care about i think people tuned into the last hour of the live stream yesterday and said you know what i need to buy bitcoin that guy marks is running such a great show for sure yeah no it is i i was reflecting on it so i had to leave this desk yesterday to go back over to bitcoin park austin to moderate the final panel of the texas energy and mining summit and wrote a newsletter this morning reflecting on the week that was here or that is here in austin texas we have the texas energy and mining summit incredible event held uh by bitcoin park rod and crew got a

really high signal group of people together in the energy and mining sector to talk about what's happening at the intersection of those two industries obviously we have this highly technical conference bitcoin plus plus talking about mempool a lot of uh how should i describe bit uh animated discussion about op return what's happening with that but i think it's actually pretty civil it's been really cool to see people get together in person and have these discussions face to face i think it's much more productive that way yeah definitely i read your tweet you kind of summarized that in a tweet last night and i thought it was you know very appropriate and something that's cool about like this conference here is yes we're seeing all the

op return stuff and i think because we're kind of on the microphone and we're interviewing people But when you poke your head into the actual sessions, they're just still pushing forward on everything else, right? It's not just about this opera turn debate. There's plenty of work to be done, and there's plenty of exciting things happening within the Bitcoin space. Yeah. And at the same time, we have strategies, conference with corporations happening in Orlando. It's just funny, the juxtaposition of these three events. You have the energy and mining, which I don't want to be denigrating here,

but somewhat viewed as like the Neanderthals in the space, just like give me a computer, I plug it in, I make Bitcoin, and the energy guys are like, you can turn my excess energy into money. Okay, let's meet up. Like they're having discussions, highly technical here, and then highly corporate financialized down in Orlando with strategy. And I think it's just incredible to see that Bitcoin has gotten to such a level where you can have three separate conferences like this happening simultaneously. And it would be remiss of me not to mention the Lightning Conference happening in Italy right now.

Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, there's one happening in Tuscany, I believe. Nice. Yeah, well, I learned something from the mining summit. I went for the first day. And I learned that you don't call the ASIC machine, you don't call it an ASIC. it's very triggering to some mining companies it's actually like a miner it's a machine it's a machine the asic is the chip yeah and they're gonna have like hundreds of asic chips inside of

it so i'm still probably gonna just call it an asic but you know the uh popular nomenclature has taken hold i think people really call them asics yes yeah exactly dozens of asics on an individual mining board a hashing board but yeah so um those three big conferences happen you have mining happening you have this programming one developer conference and then you have the financial one those kind of represent like some of the three big key components of bitcoin space in general right the ecosystem um is there anybody not represented in there i guess you said lightning maybe layer two stuff but that's happening in italy it's happening in italy so it's kind of like everything happening all at once i think that's really really fascinating it is yeah and

obviously number go up draws attention the psychological level of a hundred thousand has been passed again yep speaking of past we have two u.s states now you've got new hampshire and arizona arizona i heard arizona bill was like a little wishy-washy was it okay it's not like we're gonna go buy bitcoin it's like if we seize bitcoin we'll hold it similar to the executive order similar to it's not the strategic reserve but it's the um what's the other one they have the united stockpile the stockpile so it's more of a stockpile thing yeah that's what it sounds I believe I saw one other. It might have been Oregon passed something today as well

in regards to Bitcoin legislation. You got the price up? So I'm just going to stand here and point. Logan is producing on the go here. We need a Bitcoin rollercoaster guy. So we've got a pretty packed schedule today. Yeah, read through what we've got going on. Because last night, if you didn't catch it,

last night was the debate. the debate was really good um and uh i feel like yesterday on the stream we kind of chatted more about one side of that debate but today it sounds like you got some people who are going to talk the other side of the debate we have both sides of the base super test net was very adamant against oh was he okay i missed removing the limit and making sure the spam doesn't get in but we're starting it off with um bitcoin mechanic and chris guida to talk about what's happening with return and their perspective on it and we've got hunter beast and isabel coming on we'll probably talk about how we can make bitcoin quantum resistant i'm seeing gloria's out walk by

we need to get her on at some point today gloria whenever you're ready to come on at some point today just come get us greg with or without with or without yeah um okay no pressure no pressure You can have that on the microphone. You can just, like, talk. Stream it. Then we've got Jeff from Spiral and Nifty joining us. Probably talk about Lightning, I imagine. And then Nifty is doing a debate tonight with Lott.

We'll talk about ossification of Bitcoin. I think Nifty may be pro-ossification. Last time she was on TFTC, we talked about ossification. Okay. Are we getting there? I don't know. Then we'll have Jeremy Rubin and Matt Corallo on together. Okay.

two long-time developers matt made it clear last night he hasn't contributed to core in quite a bit but they've both contributed to bitcoin for for many years now so i'm sure we'll talk about opc tv and what matt's working on yeah at spiral in ldk uh then we'll have ikram from citria oh a company that uh that has gotten a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks due to this op return discussion inadvertently i don't think they were trying to get all this attention Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and then we'll have Scott 9000 from the BidX open source mining project.

Great. Project I'm very passionate about, project that I use. I have a few BidXs now. Yeah. It's a great product. You read to them every night when you tuck them in? I do. I look at them.

I try to manifest 17 seconds of concentrated energy towards the ASIC chip on the BID-X, which is exposed, to try to manifest a solo block mine. Yeah. We had, I think his name is Hunter from Solo Satoshi on yesterday after you left to chat about what they're doing with BID-Xs. So I think it's great having another person on to chat more about it. Yeah. And then, last but not least, this is typically what happens with me at these conferences.

Peter and I have ended Baltic Honey Badger on a panel together, I think three or four times now at this point, and we're going to end the day with Peter Todd on the stream. And it's not a hard schedule. Some people had to drop out yesterday. Some people didn't show, but high likelihood there will be other individuals on the stream as well. Yeah, probably.

Anybody who comes by and wants to hop on, if we've got an open spot, come join us. Yeah. Yeah. funny observation that i remember from nashville so when trump came to nashville obviously it was a really big deal right and uh i don't i don't have a political party affiliation but it's like hey this this guy's in town i'm gonna go watch him speak at the conference and uh you bring up matt corallo and i thought it was really funny matt gave an excellent talk right but it was super technical right and we all got on the door for trump and then they hung up they hung on to

us for an hour basically uh before trump came on and matt carolla gets up there and we have like every kind of financial guy that wants to come here trump speak that couldn't care less about bitcoin code and technicalities and he's speaking to this audience that like maybe three percent of the people understood what he was saying i just found that really funny yeah i think that's another underlying sort of theme of the discussion the last two weeks is how much should an individual bitcoin user be expected to understand about the protocol level, do you think? Yeah.

I hate saying this because going through COVID, we have this problem, but like you have to find the credible people that you trust are making informed decisions, right? But then you always have to check your sources and make sure that they continue to be credible because I don't think it's feasible for every single Bitcoin user

to understand everything at this low level. Like Opraturn, for example, I don't think it's feasible that every single person should know what that means or what it is but have enough uh have enough ability to look at data being put out there from different credible people so you can make an informed decision that is it is tough like i have no idea how tcp ip https works right but i use it every day i trust it it works for me i get that job done but i think really interesting conversation particularly at this point of

bitcoin's life very early on 16 years in it seems like a lifetime for many of us who have been around yeah but it really is early when you say that uh-huh and but i think it's also important to note that if you want to learn about all this low level all the low level details of how bitcoin works at the protocol level there's plenty of information out there in meetups i think for me personally if anybody out there is watching and interested to get involved to learn more highly recommend finding the the closest bit devs meet up to you and trying to go to that once a month you're not going to know everything when you first show up it's all going to sound completely foreign to you during the first couple of meetups but slowly but surely over time via a process of

informational osmosis you will begin to know enough to be dangerous that's that's how i think i'm able to be on this live desk today i started going to bit devs in new york in 2015 i had no idea what people were talking about this is right when the conversation for segwit was popping up and just started going kept going for years and over time know enough to be dangerous to ask particular questions about what's happening at the protocol level yeah and when you hear a term enough times it starts to sink in a little bit and then you can focus on the next term that you have to learn yeah definitely and we uh so yeah definitely go find a bit devs near you i think that's great advice. Another thing is yesterday on the stream, we had Bob McElrath. I don't know

his last name. McElrath. What? McElrath. McElrath. Okay. So Bob and I chatted and we started talking about his Bitcoin braids. He started at New York BitDevs. Did he really? Yeah. Okay. Well, shoot. All right. He was one of the original OGs. I think they did like white paper meetups to start. Okay. And then Jay and a group of others took it over. But I think Bob was part of the original New York Bitdead's crew. Okay. Well, so the first half we talked about Braidspool, but then the second half turned into an AI discussion. And he's doing something really interesting where he is taking all of this Bitcoin content and creating a RAG vector database. So rather than retraining an entire AI, spending all that cost to create a new model, he's just going to have like a

supplement in a RAG that you can attach to a model. And he wants to be able to use that in Bitcoin development. So when you go in to write code and stuff, it'll know all about the Bitcoin libraries. But I think not just for Bitcoin development, that's really useful for anybody like a pleb that wants to understand, all right, what's going on with this OpReturn stuff? You would be able to plug into his RAG and be like, explain the knock-on effects

of changing the OpReturn to this or that or anything. And I think that really helps enable a lot of us to make our own informed decisions. Haven't been to enough AI meetups yet, obviously. What is a RAG? Okay, a RAG. Yes. There are lots of RAGs in the world.

A RAG is like an AI database that stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. I'll have to look it up. But it's effectively, it's like a local database where you can put files. So you can upload a bunch of files into it, and then it transforms it into a format that an AI can understand easily. It is a vector database. I guess we probably have somewhat of a technical audience here. It's a vector database, and so it'll put, like, the word cat

and then a picture of a cat. and it knows that those are similar so it puts them next to each other inside the database so that way when it's going to look up something and it lands on you know car car it'll be like oh this is actually like next to cat and these things and then it got a picture of a cat so it starts to group things together based on their relationships and similarities i might be like butchering this explanation but that's that's my general understanding and so you can basically plug a rag into a model so you can take something from open source like llama from meta or you can plug it into any other any other model that you want to and you can augment it with your own data

without spending thousands of dollars training a new thing so a rag dedicated to bitcoin information could be an incredible educational source for people just looking to learn very quickly yeah you stick all of the mailing list in there you stick all of the different libraries out there open source code that are out there lightning arc like any layer two you can stick in there too and you can have this giant bitcoin brain you know we talk a lot about how no single developer understands bitcoin in its entirely entirety this can help you get there right it can understand it and then help you out will the ais be coding bitcoin core in the future that's that's a big question i have yeah in the next i mean i'd say in the next few years they're going to be helping

people code bitcoin core but it could yeah it could and maybe the debates in the future will be like eight bitcoin ai bots up there arguing with each other and we're all sitting back watching yeah fascinating time to be alive bitcoin back over 100k yes a lot going on what else do we have in the news here Logan's letting me know you updated the title okay at the day two this is good this is good you're currently watching me try to fight with Apple getting our Maple AI app submitted to the app store so let's talk about this you you described this on rabbit hole recap last week but

apple lost a case epic games won a big case yep about in-app payments apple for the longest time has been taking a 30 cut on economic activity within apps on their app store and a judge recently said you have to let app developers enable their customers to pay outside of the app right so that you don't take that or just to offer alternative payment methods like bitcoin Yeah. I thought it was solved. Why are they not? Yeah.

So, yeah, the judge made that ruling in 2021. And then four years later, finally said, you guys still haven't complied. Start complying right now, effective immediately. So they updated their guidelines and they added some things. By the way, they only made it for the United States. So if you want to run your app in other countries around the world, you still have to go through Apple's in-app purchase payment rails. so it still is a shitty situation in that regard but in the united states you can use a different

payment so you could use stripe or bitcoin something like that however they added a they still have another thing in there that says you also must use apple's in-app purchase payment rails so you still have to use theirs even if you plan on burying it in the app and not actually like showing it to users they still want you to implement so that's what we're going back and forth are now trying to hammer that out and i'm trying to convince them that us implementing an extra payment rail is extra work extra complexity it introduces the possibility for vulnerabilities and bugs right because the more complex you make your system uh the more chance for bugs you have so i'm trying to convince them that we don't need to include that yeah i just want to note it that

we have a renaissance man on the stream he's doing a live stream while building out a company at the same time it's incredible yeah yeah see one thing i did want to mention i wrote about this in the newsletter this morning if you're not subscribed to the newsletter go to tftc.io subscribe in the top right hand section uh sending out the bitcoin brief every morning yesterday super test net and i were joined by dusty damon who's been at the forefront of splicing he was giving us an update on where splicing is who's working on it and uh essentially where adoption is of splicing which I think it's very important for channel rebalancing on the Lightning Network. But he also – do you want to join us, sir, for a little bit or no?

Yeah. All right, we've got Justin Moon walking by. You've got ten minutes. We're right here. We've got to bribe the elite developers with nicotine apparently. What are we talking about? I was talking about splicing, but Dusty Damon had an interesting idea for a protocol for coin-join coordination where you would essentially listen to the Lightning Gossip Network,

look for individuals that are looking to rebalance channels, and then basically put inputs into transactions with them to obfuscate common input heuristics. so a coin join lightning rebalancer yeah thing i mean i think stuff like that's bound to happen because it'll be cheaper that's exactly the point like i mean that's the i think the end game of coin joins is that not as a privacy tool like people won't choose them for privacy they'll choose them for cost like you know unchained bitcoin is probably just going to be massive coin joins like imagine if you were running like you know whatever the u.s treasury is going to be or the federal reserve what you know whatever the however how you balance of trade between countries

on like a national level in like 50 years like when that's if that's if if that level of stuff is ever happening on bitcoin you know it's they're they're you know you're gonna have to uh you're gonna want to batch stuff a lot because it's gonna get expensive right and and that's gonna be and then you you'll you'll basically you'll be forced into the privacy i'm sure many of these entities probably won't even want the privacy but like they'll just accept it because Because it'll be cheaper. They'll have an obligation to shareholders, a fiduciary duty, if you will. An obligation to taxpayers.

Imagine that. This is something I've only dreamed of. I don't think I can imagine it, actually. Wow. In real life. Yeah. You're running a new meetup here in Austin. Oh, no.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm an AI guy now. You were AI skeptic for quite a bit. What changed your mind? um i mean i i think i'm still an ai skeptic a little bit i'm so i'm kind of a luddite like i don't want agi to happen to be honest uh but uh and i definitely don't want to uh it to be intermeeting you know like like mark zuckerberg's idea of like you know these are the things like

everyone only has four friends now they used to have 13 so we're gonna we're gonna get that number to zero and we're gonna give you a bunch of imaginary do you think mark zuckerberg may have contributed to the fact that people only have three friends yeah yeah i know i mean it's it's and he's gonna he's he's gonna contribute to getting that number to zero right like i think this these sorts of things are not uh you know but that's and i don't need to pick on him but like that's kind of i don't know i think the the some of the many of the impacts of technology aren't so great and uh but yeah like i i got interested in ai because it was uh it became useful to me. So I went to Gigi's

Sovereign Engineering thing just because I was kind of wanting to do some coding again but I hadn't really found an excuse for it so I was like, okay, if I'm locked on a little island that only serves cod and I have to, you know, I have to do something

with my time, I'll start doing some programming. So it's funny, the first week I went with Paul Miller and the first week he showed off Cursor, the editor this like vibe coding editor that's very popular now um and uh you know the idea of vibe coding is you you explain in english what you want it to do and then you watch it do it and uh and you don't actually have to type out the code yourself and so uh he showed us that

and it's very basic and everyone's like wow that's amazing and like every week we got better and by the end of it like uh pablo was making like uh you know a decentralized repository of snippets for NostraCode to be able to look up how to build an app in the most advanced way. So that was sort of the theme of the software engineering where it's just 15, 20 people get together and it's kind of an idea factory. They don't really talk about it much,

but I think they're going to start to talk about it more. It's a really cool experience. If anybody's interested in stuff like that, you should check it out. But yeah, so it became really useful. So I hadn't really wanted to do any programming and then I didn't have to. I could write code without programming.

It was great. I could make software without programming, without coding, by kind of project managing it. And, yeah, so that became very fun, and it got me back into programming. I was probably a few times more productive than I used to be. So that's what got me interested in it, just because it showed its value to me in my personal life, more so than, like, any of the ChatGP tier image generation actually did. And I could see the rate of improvement. You know, it's improving very quickly, which is exciting.

So, yeah, we, I mean, it was actually, the reason we started doing this meetup in Austin is because Anthony, Mark's co-founder at OpenSecret, was, he was always talking about, like, joking around about starting an AI meetup, mostly to piss off Ben Carman, like, he's kind of trolling Ben. The final Luddite. Yeah, he said it a few times, and I'm like, okay, put your money where your mouth is. We're doing one tomorrow, or you need to shut up, basically, you know? And then we did it tomorrow, you know, it was about a month ago. And it was a good turnout. We did it tomorrow, like, 20 people showed up. We did, like, a BitDev-style discussion format, and it was fun.

And then after that, I was like, dang, that was fun. Let's do one next week. And so we did it. And the second week, we did, like, one where it was, like, kind of a show-and-tell for people's vibe coding setup. So I showed Cursor. Tony showed his setup. You showed your setup, right?

So it's like, how does a non-technical person who has a lot of, like, product ideas get into it? And you showed some really cool stuff. And then Sahil showed it from the designer's perspective, and that was fun. Last week, we did something where we made a coding agent. like so from scratch we made we made a program you could run you could say hey write a fizzbuzz program fizzbuzz is a famous interview question where it's like you count up from zero to a hundred

and you print the word fizz if the number is divisible by three five or print buzz if it's divisible by five and you print fizzbuzz if it's divisible by both so the tricky thing coding it is only really that you have to know how to do divisibility and then you have to check one hand It's very simple, but we were able to say like hey write fizzbuzz and it actually wrote it on a file and we could run It it was really cool You know like so I mean that's one of the amazing things is like something like that Even the two years ago three years ago sounded like absolute magic and now you can do it in a meetup Like in the course of meetup we can we're just following a tutorial we found and then last night

We did one where we built an MCP server so like You know in the prepper like one thing that I've been interested in is like is when you're developing software software, the worst part is QA, testing if it works. So I made a little MCP server that could run a browser, click around a browser, and when I implement a feature, I'm like, okay, test it.

It would open a browser and start clicking around and test that it works, which is crazy. I made that in like 30 minutes using other people's tools and stuff. But yeah, so AI is kind of interesting. It really is going to, I mean, that's kind of why I got

into the meetups and I taught a Bitcoin programming class for like a year, a long time ago. I mean, it's funny, every time I come to these conferences, somebody will walk up to me and say, do you remember me? And I'm like, yeah, kind of. I'm like, yeah, I took your class in 2018. I'm like, oh, that's right, you know.

So, yeah, that happened at the little pool party last night that happened in here. That was just to try to make programmers more productive, right? Like, help people produce better software. And that's kind of the same interest in AI is you can see how it could supercharge that a little bit,

make it more productive. Yeah. And Marks, I know we've talked about this quite a bit, but I think to get both your opinions on founders, building companies, utilizing these tools, are they going to be left behind if they don't start implementing them? If they don't start implementing them, like the founders need to start using them? Yeah. I mean, it's either that or hiring more people. So raise more money to hire people or you use the tools to get yourself as far as you can before you hire someone. It's like you talk about QA, right? We don't have a QA person.

It would be great to, but we can get by for now. Eventually, as we get bigger and we grow, we'll want someone focused on QA who actually understands the discipline of QA more, but we'll give them AI, and they will have their own team of AI people. And so we'll just have one really solid QA person doing all of that. And I think you'll find that in lots of regards. You'll have a marketing person that has their AI marketing team, but I think you still want to have a senior seasoned person at the top for now.

i think of it like you know safety and has this point he's made where like you know there you don't really have a choice to adopt bitcoin like if we're right right you don't really have a choice if you if you say no i'm not going to adopt bitcoin all you're doing is uh impoverishing yourself relative to the people who hold harder money than you right so it's not actually it's not actually a choice there's like like gunpowder right he's like you didn't really have a choice to not you know if you're a military if you decided not to adopt gunpowder you were just you know gonna get steamrolled and i don't know if that's exactly true with a i'm still kind of a little bit of skeptic but it's starting to feel that way um where yeah i mean and you're seeing

it change like i was talking to i was messing around with like an interesting open source project recently and i had a problem in the maintainer just like said hop on a call with me and i was so i as we were talking he's the guy's super sophisticated i was talking i had like a dumb question and he's like and i'm like yeah i just vibe coded this he's like yeah that's why i'm against it i'm like dude i don't even know the programming language this is written in is go i don't know how to write a hello world go program and i'm like pushing your framework to the limits here even though i don't know the language like this is unreal you know so you just proved him wrong no i mean like your your perspective is just wrong it's like this is something i wouldn't even

have considered even entertaining the idea but the the thing i wanted to do the best the only thing that could really do it well was in golang i don't know golang but i i can kind of interpret the thing the agent gives me so yeah i ended up with like this really cool project and uh and so i just don't think that that guy quite understood he's like yeah it produces bugs but it's like i wouldn't have even had a program in the first place last year so it's yeah you can see people's uh attitudes changing towards it really quickly uh and it is like if you're like a seasoned programmer it's it's really hard to like like uh change how you do it right like with with coding the the big thing you have to do is just give it all the context give it all the relevant files and

and uh and it's just like over it took me like a month to adapt to this new paradigm right um and so it is i think like more senior people have more uh uh resistance to it but yeah i mean And there are some very foundational projects in Bitcoin that are being vibe-coded right now. What? I don't want to say because somebody just mentioned it in passing, so I'm not going to say which one. But some of the big ones are like the lead people are vibe-coding them now. At the protocol level or like products? I'm not going to say which one I heard, but it was like a laugh.

It made me laugh. The philosophical question is, though, it doesn't matter, right? If they're still, like, looking at the output and if we can check the output and check how it's functioning. Yeah, it's better and worse, right? Because, like, usually there's sort of two stages in software development. One, when you produce the code, and then two, when you review it, right? So you write some code, and then you put it up for review, and then other people review it. And now it's, you know, so those sort of exercise different parts of your brain.

So you might kind of catch bugs in different ways there. And now it's like sort of, it's like two stages of review. you ask it to generate stuff and the programmer reviews it and then the next stage is you put it up for a pr and then other people will review that so i mean maybe but we have two ais right now that do our code review also yeah we've used that in this process and then we still do the final review at the end of yeah i mean so i think it's way better i mean sailor was on stage yesterday saying the yeah that was kind of alarming what did he say i didn't miss that They used AI to come up with the financial engineering

for their strike and strife preferred stock offerings. Okay. Yeah. That doesn't surprise me at all. Makes sense. Yeah. Then also, I mean, thank you for starting the meetup and thank you for doing it every week now.

Yeah. Because that's another thing, like the pace of change in AI with these tools is so rapid. Yeah. But, like, we did the demo, and you were very gracious with how you described my setup and my demo. It worked. No, it was good. It was a prototype.

I mean, this is one of the things that's exciting about it is that there's, you know, traditionally the people who have ideas and the people who kind of, one of the hardest parts of software is, like, there will be people who have, like, a good idea, and they don't know how to, like, who understand a domain or have, like, business expertise, for example, right? Like, understand something that could be economically, you know, that could produce economic value in the world, right? Like, a surplus of economic value, right? Like, the people who have those ideas are extremely valuable, right? That's where all the good stuff in our economy, you know, an entrepreneur who has, like, a detailed understanding of the world

and has this insight of, like, this is cheaper to produce than the benefit some people will get out of it. That's the whole where wealth comes from, right? But, like, oftentimes people like that have a very hard time explaining this, what their idea is, in a way that a developer can implement because they're just very different worldviews. Like, at the first startup I did, we had a great CEO who had this kind of insight, but he really struggled to explain, to transfer the idea over to the developers. And so a thing that is really powerful about these vibe coding things is instead of kind of explaining it to a designer and then getting mock-ups and then, like, low-fidelity mock-ups and then get high-fidelity mock-ups that you still can't click on, that still aren't interactive, and then get, like, a programmer to, you know, it's like four or five steps to actually get something working. so the idea guy can vibe code a working prototype

that wouldn't work for real but is like, this is what I want the experience to be, right? And it doesn't really work in the sense of a senior engineer would say it works but the senior engineer can see that and is like, okay, I can make that real. So it's

it has I mean, this is maybe one of the best it has a lot of potential to just really improve the handover from an idea to an implementation yeah and that's exciting so I took what I learned from that meetup where we're showing our vibe coding stack and Sahil his recommendation for super whisper that actually really accelerated yeah my interaction with yeah with o3 and other models with maple yeah I mean I had a similar one with Anthony showed this

thing called prompt repo prompt and so it's this cool thing where you it's a desktop app where you can like click a button to import a folder of like code right and so so oftentimes like this example I was telling you earlier this thing that was in this go Lang a language I don't know the is a brand new project so none of the LLMs had it in their training set like they didn't know how this project works they would guess and be wrong and so they weren't able to do what I said but then I use this repo prompt thing which would allow me to download the code base and I would just go and click through the folders and

files I thought were relevant to the question I was asking so like I'm like I want to use this part of the code to accomplish this and then and this would basically take all the files that I said were relevant it would concatenate them together and then stick my prompt at the end of what I wanted the LM to do with it and now it would be able to do what I wanted because it saw the relevant context it saw the functions that were relevant and it could kind of put them together and so that was something that Tony showed that I kind of hacked together my own ways of doing this but like that was kind of a an unlock for me so that's kind of a

yeah like these sorts of uh you know getting people together and that was the same thing that we saw in this sovereign engineering right like at the beginning there was one guy paul who had a little bit of experience with cursor and by the end like we were really pushing the envelope globally of what anyone had done with these like what pablo was doing uploading little snippets to noster like trying to turn noster into like a decentralized repository of example code snippets So, like, by the end, he could say, like, at the beginning, it's like if you ask one of these LLMs, like, build a Nostra client that does X. It would have no idea. It would screw it up.

It would use, if it was able to do something, it would use the wrong versions, and it just wouldn't work. And by the end, you could say this, and it would use his NDK library and use it correctly, use the newest version, and it would do things exactly like he was doing them in OLAS, which is like his sort of reference implementation of NDK. And, yeah, so it's really exciting when you get people. It's really productive when you get people together in a room and have them show off what they're doing because generally programmers don't do that. No, I mean, I took that very rough prototype, took some advice from you, Tony, and Sahil,

and then went and reiterated sort of the spec in O3 and then dumped that spec into Replit and through a couple hours of iterating in Replit, had a working extension that I've since passed over to a dev who actually knows how things work, and he's like, I'm going to button it up. But now it's much more, it's like, I mean, you know that meme where it's like how to draw a horse

or like how to draw an owl, right? And the first is like the outline of the horse in like one with a line. And then it's like, okay, so start, draw the outline of the horse, and then step two is draw the rest of the horse, right? And like that's the problem in software engineering. it's like the draw the rest of the horse you get this like impossible thing for the developers like

well i have no fucking idea what this what this guy wants i'm just going to make a bunch of guesses but if you hand over like a working chrome extension that kind of works and but now you just have to extend it now it's like it's like a coloring book where it's okay just i'm just going to color inside the lines but like it's the the draw the rest of the horse becomes a lot easier yeah so let me ask you a question yesterday i chatted with bob knickeroth and he's doing a project and i know you've been working on rags and like looking at how to build rags and that kind of stuff um he wants to build the summer build a rag of bitcoin knowledge so he wants to take the whole mailing list all of the repos out there anything you can find and dump them in

rather than retrain and model from scratch he wants to just plug a rag into it and then give that to a person working on any bitcoin project uh just curious to get your thoughts with what you know about rags like how effective do you think that'll be would that be a useful tool to have yeah so what a rag does is it uh it takes a chunk of text usually it's text and then it uh it uh it's sort of like like think of like a three-dimensional space right with the x y z coordinates like in high school math right uh it sort of take it it it will for any given sentence it will uh it will break it down into a point in space and say like the semantic meaning of this sentence is this point in space, right? And so it can do that for more than three

dimensions, right? It can do it with like a thousand dimensions, right? And somehow it's able to basically extract the meaning of a sentence and represent it as a list of numbers, like usually between zero and one, I think, right? And it's really good. So the first RAG thing I did, I had like a thing, I actually totally vibe-coded this, I didn't write any of the code myself. And so it would take a folder of any kind of file and, you know, run it through, it's called a tokenizer that would, you know, create this list of numbers for any given file

or part of a file. And then, so one of the things I did was I put in, I downloaded a set of 10,000 pictures of animals, right, and I ran it through this thing. And so it's also able to use images, not just text. And so at the end, I was able to run it through this RAG system, and then I searched for the word superhero and it was able to give me the two pictures of cats dressed up in in one was a superman costume and another was a batman costume which is just crazy

like and I did this I didn't even write any code it I vibe coded it purely and so so like that's kind of the idea is like you could go through all the things from the mailing list all the pdfs all the bips all the code and you'd have to figure out you know maybe you you take one paragraph at a time, or one page at a time, or you could do some combination of these, and you represent each one of those chunks of information as some point in space, and then when a guy is like, hey, how do I implement some mining pool with these ideas, or what's relevant with this idea? It takes that question you ask, puts it in space, and finds all the things that are close

to it, and sends it back to you, and then all that can be put into a prompt to an LLM Now it has a bunch of context, and it can sort of summarize it for you. So I think there's a lot of possibility there. It's definitely cheaper than training a whole model. It seems like in the first generation of people, like I remember Fetski was trying to do something like this. He was trying to train a model. And it's just kind of expensive, and then by the time you're done,

now there's new frontier models that are better than the one you based yours on, and it just doesn't really, you're always playing a game of catch-up, whereas the RAG seems like a little bit more of a, it's a little bit, it's more of a grug brain approach. like it's it's not so it's not so it it's it's easier to have a good outcome i think yeah uh so yeah i think that's a really good a really good idea and especially if you're just trying to like you know kind of understand like you're at a conference and someone asks you know mentions a an idea and you haven't heard of it like you could get really good explanation of

that idea from this sort of thing versus like google or any even chat gpt you know so i think that's a pretty good idea yeah yeah and maybe there's a dual approach where you do have training happening also so the foundation model gets that knowledge but then you're always updating it with the latest stuff in a rag yeah i know i think i i don't understand how training works yet uh so that's that's one of the things i wanna i wanna see like i mean so i've done a decent amount of training in my in my time so you tag all this data you annotate it right so you would come in and say all right this bitcoin project is this and maybe this is the importance that it has and you start you come with some kind of format where you like categorize and do all that and then you

you run the gpus you do the training and you get these these different epochs along the way and you say okay this epoch was good let's let's test that out and you run all your tests to guess it and you're like no this needs to keep going yeah so you let it keep baking and it just loops and loops and keeps doing it's like it's guessing basically right it's it's doing predictions and you're saying yes your predictions are correct keep going down this path on the training i mean a cool thing is if you just had like this open data set right if like if someone's starting to put together all the relevant stuff in some sort of an open way that i could download it and try my own experiment i think that would be valuable too right especially if you you had some kind of annotations of the

meaning of stuff it's like you know one guy tries a training run and it might not work but the all the data is there and they might have added more and then the next guy can try it like i think that's i mean one of the things i want to would like to see is like some yeah like you know like what what could gpus do for the kind of freedom tech ecosystem right like none of us know how to really use gpus a few of us in previous jobs like yourself had access to this but generally nobody knows what a gpu can do for you right and so like i think it'd be cool if we had like a freedom cluster right where it's just just like some way if you had some kind of idea where it's like i want to try a little training run here right and at the beginning it probably wouldn't have much

uh output it wouldn't wouldn't probably be super useful but at least us as a kind of community could like learn how we could leverage this new technology because we're all like none of us really know how it works and know how to use it but if we had some sort of a facility like that like that you could say like hey i have this idea here's the training set here's my little python code a couple hundred like 200 lines can i rent it for a day and just run an experiment right yeah That's something I would like to see happen, and I think maybe really interesting things could come of that. Yeah, and could we try the hash pool approach where you have eCash tokens attached to GPU compute, right? And so now we can actually buy some GPU compute, or I can get paid for sharing my GPU.

Yeah, one little interesting experiment I did in Madeira was just like, So, like, one thing, I mean, in a perfect world, I would go and spend $200,000 on GPUs and put them in my closet and have a private LLM, but I don't have $200,000 to slightly up my privacy so ChatGPD doesn't see my stupid questions, right? So it's just, like, totally, maybe if it was, like, $500, I'd do it. I'd definitely do it for $500, maybe $1,000. But what if you could, you know, maybe buy a Mac Mini, a really nice one for like $10,000, and you can run some of the better DeepSeeker, Olamo models yourself? Well, I'm only utilizing it probably 1% of the time. What if I could sell my compute to other people as we go?

So that's what I sort of started making one. This is what Chris from Open Agents is building, right? I don't know exactly. I don't know if he's doing that side of it. I'm not sure he's doing distributed compute resources. I think maybe the early iteration. it might have been now he's focused on like vibe coding tools that give you like a full coding stack but like like uh so i mean the idea was like what if i could uh you know what if

different people who are running like olama or something locally could basically like register to a central order book of how to of you know you list your compute and like your price per token or whatever the metric is, and just allow people to buy, you know, you know, a request comes in here, I want to do this, and then, you know, it sort of assigns, okay, use those three, and, you know, you could kind of run a model, or, like, there's different ways you could do it, right? You could actually rent out your GPU literally, which is a little scary, because you're, like, running out someone else's code on your thing, or you could just, like, say, here, I have

an Ollama API running here, you can send queries to it, right? And I think it's, like, something like that could be really interesting. I stopped doing it because it's, like, this would be pretty scary for, like, vibe coding in particular because you really have to trust the model, right, like, that's running because it's going to be sending commands to run on your computer. So you kind of don't want, at least for vibe coding, it'd be kind of scary to outsource that to just random people. Yeah, unless we all had secure GPUs, right? What if we all had secure Enclave GPUs?

If we could afford an H100 with a secure thing, now I can run encrypted AI on my local thing, and I'm not liable for what they're doing. It'd be interesting if somebody was building a company around that idea. Right? But we're a centralized force. What you're describing is at home, we could each have some kind of secure GPU at home.

That would be really cool. Well, I mean, I think this gets to the broader question of centralized monolithic AI versus open source models. What do you two believe the state of that competition is right now? Centralized models? Yeah, I mean, so I think open source is definitely important. I think we need to have a proliferation of just multiple models out there that people can choose from. So let's not just have one that dominates everybody.

Let's have a bunch to choose from. Whether they're closed or not, like even Lama saying that they're open source, we don't know the data that they're actually putting in there, so that's not open. We just know some of the stuff they're doing. And that topic is, like, open source is really not the right word, right? Like, if you try to make an analogy between... I think it's a competitive landscape. Well, like, so if you think of, like, models, the AI stuff,

and you compare it to, like, the Bitcoin world, right? Like, open source for a model would be, like, here is the code we ran to train it. Here is the data we trained it on. These are the computers we used, right? And that is all available so that you could totally replicate the training experiment as a third party. And I think

DeepSeat got the closest to that with R1 where they described a lot of it. They didn't share their data. But then another lab who has their own data, I think Mistral tried this, they could try to replicate the training run. That's the closest we've got to open source. Open model

weights, that's where the output of training is these model weights that go into the model. To me, that's more like you know software that you can run on premises right so for example like you can't run github software on your own servers as a company right if you're a company that's that's concerned about privacy you don't want Microsoft to see your source code right you can't actually use github you can't run github

in your your company's data centers but you can run git lab right so like like git lab is also open source actually like the code is there but imagine if GitLab only released their binaries meaning like the actual program that you could run right like that's kind of if all that was available was the GitLab like program that you could run but not the source code so you could run it on your your company's servers and you'd have the privacy benefit you don't actually know what's happening in the code that's kind of like what what open model weights is right it's like you can run it yourself but you actually don't

know where it came from you know you don't you don't see the code in GitLab analogy in in like for like deep seek you don't know how they trained it so I think I mean it would be really cool if you had like open if everything in training was open but then you know it's it gets to the point it's like well why would anybody fund I mean that's kind of the big question AI is like why yeah what is the what what what moat will these people who are getting like 50 billion dollar checks to do training runs like what is there I don't think anybody really knows what their mode is gonna be if I had to guess it's gonna be

like 90s it's going to be probably close to like the 90s technology boom where like actually very few modes were there in that first generation yeah yeah it's also exciting it is like the fact we've been implementing ai processes a little bit more about open models though so like we'll call them open and closed right like i mean what like these open ones can do is unbelievable like if you just step back like they're unbelievably good you know and they would have been like cutting edge for the closed ones like a year and a year ago right like a year and a half ago maybe so it's like it's still unbelievable what they can do it's just the the closed ones are a little ahead so that's the problem it's like from an end user point of view it's like oftentimes they'll say

like you know the the close they'll end up using the closed ones because they're they are better but you know so there's just a little bit of a lead right and so if if things sort of tail off at some point, then maybe that lead would get a little less. But if it continues to just go exponential, the closed ones will remain a little ahead, and then for individuals it's a little harder to choose them. Well, and your analogy to on-prem I think is very appropriate. So when we went to Lama,

I went to Meta's headquarters last week to chat with them. Something that they pitched is that even these open source models, you can run them locally, and the cost is a lot cheaper than using ChatGPT because ChatGPT is always updating their model. And so like they retire the model that you fall in love with. You build your whole business process around this model and then they're just like gone

or here's a new version of the same number and it behaves differently. So they're showing that maybe these open source models are like slightly behind in their power, but you can build a whole process around it and really drop your costs down. So you can ditch ChatGPT, cut 90% of your costs out and run something local.

And for a lot of like actual business processes, you don't probably need the best one, right? Like, let's say you're running a conference and you want to open up applications for your conference, and you just need to kind of check if the attendees are kind of, like, should you open a seat for them, right? Like, you probably don't need the O3 thinking model or Quad 3.7 thinking, like, the most expensive ones. Like, a year and a half ago was probably a good enough model for that. And so you can, like, for these, you can apply LLMs for, like, one little business process, and you don't need the cutting edge for that. Like, maybe you do if you're doing, like, a deep research prompt to try to figure out what you should build your next product on. But, like, a lot of actual business processes I don't think need that much intelligence.

And you want them to be set in stone, too. You want it reproducible. So once you get the model working, you want it to stay the same. And then bring in a new model and test it first before you introduce it. Yeah, and you don't want to get rug pulled. Like, that's the, yeah, like, a lot of this stuff OpenAI does. It's like if you build a process around it, like, like, actually, the first thing I learned rag one was this guy, like Simon Willison, I think his name is, he's like a really interesting blogger. And so he built like this rag system that was all using chat GPT APIs. And then six months later, they deprecated the whole thing, and he had to redo it. Right. So you do get rugged by open AI a lot if you try to build like a business process around it, because they are always they only they would just want to be on the frontier, right? So it's just not really worth it for them to run the legacy stuff. AI is so hot right now.

This is a Bitcoin conference. This is. We've gotten way off our schedule already. Yeah, well. We missed our first interview. Mechanic DMed me. He said he's running a little late. He's on his way over now.

So we'll get him on. So thank you for helping us kill time here. Okay. Yeah, definitely. What are your thoughts on the current state of Bitcoin? I trust the plan. Give us your hot take on Operture and debate. I trust the what debate?

The opera turn debate. What is this? I've been at the lake house recently. Tell me more. I've been fishing. I'm going to fish for an honest answer. What is happening? He got me on record yesterday, and I've got a bunch of haters now.

So, yeah, go ahead. Get on record. Let's hear it. No, I mean, I think opinions are overrated. So I just don't have an opinion on this. Okay. You don't need to have an opinion on everything. and there's a lot of smart people on both sides

and I think they can sort it out I don't have I believe it's specialization and I'm not gonna I'm choosing not to engage in this one I think I have

some perspective on the process of it though, I was mentioning this to you one thing I think the whole thing if you imagine this debate happened only over long form writing of 500 words or more where things had to be mailed as they used to do with a man of letters back in the day, I think the debate would have gone a lot better.

But in an echo chamber of Twitter, it gets... Anytime you get people together, that's what's good about this conference. If you get people together and have them debate, it's probably going to be much more productive than... We're getting stickers tossed at us right now. Ninja stars are coming our way. Are these stickers or are these some sort of NFC device? Some shitty NFC device?

Based on his hat, can we trust him or not? NBK have a new shitty product out here? Hey. But the process, what about the process? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that would have been, you know, more long-form writing is probably better to have these debates versus talking past each other on Twitter. Like, I don't think Twitter is a good, it just embroils things further.

And, yeah, and I also think that, you know, it seems like Bitcoin Core could maybe improve at PR, right? It's like if you had a PR professional. Public relations, not pull requests. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a pull request specialist. We need a PR PR. Yeah, yeah, like if you had like a communications professional look at this, they would probably have some small suggestions for how Bitcoin Core could. Because, I mean, they're just like a, you know, they have like probably one of the hardest groups of people to please.

You know, all these, like, conspiracy theorists, you know, like, you know, it's like a hard, it's kind of a losing position for Bitcoin Core to be in, in the sense that, like, you know, they just have a very hard group of people to please and very kind of, you know, easy to upset, you know, and that's one of the good, that's, you know, it needs to stay that way. If it's not like that, it's game over, right? So I think that's something that maybe, you know, just trying to improve the kind of communications. But it's hard, you know, like, Bitcoin Core's not even an organization in any sense, legacy sense, right? It's just a couple individuals who are kind of chipping in, right? People talk about them as if they have weekly meetings

and they all have, like, an office they go to together. I mean, they might. And there's, like, a CEO that's like, and a CEO that says, here's what you're doing. There could be an IRC room that's trying to jam JPEGs down our throat. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just asking questions.

Back in the day. This is what Marty does. Hey, I'm just asking questions. I'm just asking questions. Hey, that's my job, sir. Hey, I'm just asking questions here. I'm just asking questions. Well, hey, you were talking about writing letters to solve these things.

They also did duels with guns back then. Yeah. You insulted me. Let's go out and back and have a duel. Yeah. Do you want to bring those back, too? No. No, no, no.

No. yeah what the hell yeah we're above uh we're one on one this conversation right here pumped the price nifty bump whenever yeah yeah the um beyond bitcoin core though what are your thoughts on nation-state adoption what's happening in orlando with strategies conference does the attention that bitcoin's getting from people who previously disliked bitcoin or never paid attention to it i mean i find it all very disorienting like i didn't think any of the stuff would be happening until bitcoin's price was like a million dollars so it's like it's it gets so much attention now uh that i'm surprised that more people aren't buying it you know like

yeah i mean it's it's weird if you have you know like i think a couple years ago we all thought that once you got institutional adoption you'd get like a 10x price action immediately but uh And, yeah, it's funny. It doesn't seem like the institutions actually moved the needle so far on the actual supply and demand of, you know, the $21 million, you know. Is there paper Bitcoin out there? It could be. Yeah, it could be. I don't know.

There's no way to really know. Like, that's why, yeah, I think it's a lot more valuable if you can get normal people to, I mean, we've kind of said, like, you can get a lot of institutional interest. I mean, at the same time, it's not that much institutional interest. there's like a couple companies right like block doesn't even own a lot of it you know they're not even really buying it a lot like even the big companies that really believe aren't purely putting their treasury in it right uh so so maybe i don't know like do you think we have institutional adoption i mean block is doing the dca approach so they said this percentage of our profits are going to go into bitcoin every quarter yeah i mean i think objectively institutions some have

adopted bitcoin but yeah i mean but it's like is it the institutions themselves like a lot of the stuff that we've had over the last few years is like micro strategy and uh like etfs i mean they're more they're they're not really these institutions buying it for their own right you're for their own sake like as a treasury asset or as like a you know cross-border payment thing it's it's it's more like they're building investment products that individuals will buy but the individuals are still kind of asleep you know i mean like what percent of the bitcoin is in the etfs now like two to three percent or something like it's definitely had some effect like it's pretty big i think there's more i thought sometime there like i saw that the etf surpassed microstrategy and

microstrategy is like two percent now isn't it so it's like you know they have a couple percent but it's not i just don't think yeah i think uh i think we're still probably waiting for individuals to get interested again and individuals a lot more finically right they ignore it until they buy more than they should yeah that's why i mean i think just as important if not more important it's individuals who are bitcoiners who run businesses developing that that routine of sweeping cash flows in the bitcoin yeah building their own personal balance sheets i mean i think that's been a cool thing about the light and we're talking about price at the bitcoin developer conference we're talking about ai and we're talking about the bitcoin price but uh like i

I think it would be cool if we – I mean, to some extent, it seems like we've gotten into an era more where, like, the price kind of creeps up, but it doesn't really pump anymore. Like, it hasn't pumped really like it used to for a long time. And, like, even up to 70K or whenever it first went there, like, it only had a few days where it was like, wow, that's like a, you know, a big candle. But I think that would be kind of cool. It would be good if it was less speculative, you know, mania and more just like people finding value in it in a small way, integrating it into their business and, you know, using it more practically. And it's just like a slow adoption trickle. I think that's a much more healthy place to be in. Yeah, sounds like a super cycle.

I think you just described a super cycle. Yeah, but I mean, it's not. I don't know. Or the end of cycles. It's not. Yeah, I mean, it's. Not hyper-Bitcoinization. Yeah, it's not hyper-Bitcoinization.

It's just like a slow march of actual utility, not speculation, right? Well, yeah. And something you talk about with the ETF, something that I don't think we have insight to, is all of the organizations that are buying through the ETFs, right? So they've made this instrument available. So you have these 401K managers and these health plan managers and these insurance people who they all have to manage the purse. and maybe they're just doing that through the ETFs

and we get less insight into that. So institutions could be going that route rather than buying directly and putting it on their balance sheet. And I think we're still seeing the early stages of that. Could be. We shall see. But bringing this back to Bitcoin development,

what are some projects you're excited about right now or products that don't exist that you think should exist? Boy. Marks. I believe he asked that question to you. I don't know. I don't know, I don't really, I'm kind of just, I guess how I approach Bitcoin is I get really into something for a little while, for a couple years, and then I sort of, you know, observe for a while. So I'm, you know, I was with Fetty for a couple of years, you know, and when we started that, this eCash thing was just like an idea, a research project.

and now it's out there in the world and there's you know there's like a mining presentation maybe happening right now about how to you know pay out mining rewards in ecash and like it's it's something that's you know it's it's definitely there's a whole ecosystem around it right and so that's i mean i'm still excited about that because ecash is like you know it's it's out there in the ecosystem but like you think of the amount of bitcoin that's in ecash meant for the amount of payments that are being settled is still around here right so i would say i'm still excited about that one just you know getting more usage um but other than that i've just i've i haven't really been paying attention to be honest like i'm just kind of uh um yeah i'm kind of on a

hiatus and i'll find something in the future i think just chilling at the lake yeah just showing at the lake house uh the um nobody who is on our schedule has shown up on time so no they're not they hung out at the pool last night too long maybe there was a big pool party last night I had to go to a t-ball practice so I had to dip out right after the debate yeah

yeah the hash pools concept is really fascinating because we have this massive problem in the bitcoin mining pool layer of the stack right now where these FPPS pools are essentially

they've attained an economy of scale that creates this sort of black hole of centralization pressure due to the payout schemes and i think something like e-hash um being distributed to miners pointing to a hash pool could alleviate that because you're really solving the variance issue of getting liquidity for your payouts if you can send shares to a hash pool get e-hash tokens that you can then sell for bitcoin to somebody wants to speculate on that pool's luck over a certain period of time. It's a really unique solution to that problem. I mean, the other e-cash thing I think that's really cool is seeing it with Zeus.

Like, I think Zeus' implementation of it's really neat, right? And I think Evan was a big skeptic of e-cash for a while. He would kind of give me a hard time in the past. But I think he had, like, a really neat implementation where he's got this great self-custodial wallet, but it's hard to get people in the front door. And so he kind of took a bit of a cue from Mutiny, which kind of pioneered this, where it's like,

you know, you use eCache up to, I think they use for in Zeus, up to like 100,000 sats or something, right? And then he had like a cool thing where like your eCache balance is kind of like a... A loading bar? Yeah, it's like a loading bar, right? And it gets red as you get close to 100K, and it's like, it's getting hot, it's getting hot, like you might get rugged, it's time to move it over to a lightning channel. And I think that's a really neat way to approach it.

So I'm excited to see how that one evolves. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and then the angle of eCash, too, that I think is great is we haven't touched on this, but it's the privacy part of eCash that I think is really important. So Bitcoin has some privacy stuff but also not, and eCash really adds a way to make yourself more private. And, like, projects like Harbor where they could manually or automatically manage mints for you and, like, move your coins in and out of mints. I think those are things to be looking at

and maybe using and helping to push forward so that we can bring better privacy to everybody as we scale Bitcoin. I think it's very important. And I think the beauty... Another thing about eCash, too, is it gets a lot of... particularly cashew mints and even fatty mints to a certain degree.

Like, there is a custody trade-off. You're, in short, you're basically trusting that the mint won't rug you or print more tokens than they say they hold and i think that's very important to recognize but i think what many people overlook is the permissionless nature of these mints anybody can spin them up and therefore the ability for a competitive landscape of mints offering certain services arises and they are economically incentivized yeah not to act nefariously yeah and then they use lightning or other l2s as like a glue between all of them too right so it's not that it's ecash or lightning they all they all work together

i think that's important too yeah no that's another aspect i think of where bitcoin stands today this is very underappreciated i think we're reaching a maturation phase of these networks becoming truly interoperable where you're seeing it implemented it implemented whether it's ecash with Lightning Gateways or ARK. I'm not sure if you guys caught what ARK was doing. ARK has the problem with liveliness that is necessary. If you don't claim your Bitcoin in the ASP after a certain period of time, you may lose it. And so they solved that with eCash and Noster where we'll send eCash tokens to your DMs on Noster using your NPUB. And even if you miss the round, you can claim those after afterwards okay so that's i mean that's that's one of the really cool uh i mean

like that olas client uh it's like an instagram clone on nostre i mean i think i think that what they have it now is they use these these uh it's this thing where they store cashew tokens on relays and you're able to you're able to basically have a wallet the minute you start you know because you have an n-pub or an nsec right which is a private key so you're able to drive a uh like a e-cash private key from that and so like as soon as you load the wallet up you're able to have a bitcoin wallet a work as soon as you load the client you're able to have like a working bitcoin wallet and it will store the notes on relays so like you can go into another client you already have and those things are still there so you also have a shared wallet between apps which

is something that is pretty hard to do in general, right? I mean, it's kind of annoying how you can't really take your balance with you between apps. And it's like storing e-cash tokens on relays, which has some problems. Like, you wouldn't want to do this with your life savings. But it's pretty neat how you can have this, like, seamless interoperable experience out of the box. The last time I talked to Nifty on TFTC, she was a bit skeptical of storing e-cash tokens. Yeah, I mean, there's some problems with it. Hold the mic to your face, please.

It's like there's, this is the jankiest ass, my heaviest mic I've ever experienced in my life. It's a two-hand mic. Has one joints in? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so it's a good thing. It's a good onboarding experience, and onboarding experiences are generally not very good in Bitcoin.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a trade-off. Yeah, it's a good trade-off. It's different. And this is building that user experience of understanding, hey, this is somewhat of a hot wallet with custody trade-offs. Use it as a daily spending wallet. If it gets over a certain point, sweep it to a more self-custodial. Yeah, if you become a Bitcoin or do something, you know, you can upgrade.

But that's kind of one of the interesting things of Nostra is that you can, you know, you see people join and they introduce themselves and people send them money. and it is kind of a magical first experience right where you can you can show up say hi and payments are flowing your way they're very small but it's still like wow that's kind of neat right that doesn't happen anywhere else yeah it's awesome justin thank you for uh thanks for coming on like impromptu impromptu we did 45 minutes there you crushed really any uh any words of wisdom to anybody listening to the live stream before you leave yeah if anybody has an h100 they would like to mail to the lake house just get in touch with me

send that to the lake house I'll put it to good use what's your primal I think it's Justin Moon you can find me on primal Justin Moon and I'll give you the address of the lake house it's a P.O. box in Austin

but I swear There's a lake here. I promise I'll drive it to the lake. Yeah, yeah. Someday, you know. My word is my bond. Well, do we have people coming on next? Yeah, Rob's going to come on next.

But more importantly, when's the next AI meetup here in Austin? Next week sometime. Every Wednesday, I think. Have you and Anthony decided on a topic? It's going to be a Socratic seminar. So just go over the stuff that's happened in the last month. And then the week after that is the agent-to-agent protocol, which is something Google introduced that I don't understand at all.

That's the way to have agents kind of collaborate. So we'll dive into that and build some little prototype with it. All right. Sweet. Okay. All right. Thanks, Martin. Thank you.

Go to Bitcoin Park Austin meetup page if you want to attend any of those meetups if you're in Austin while they're going on. My arm's sore. You need to get a CrossFit. It's called lifting weights, man. All right. I'll do my little shill right now, too, since we're shilling stuff. So I started doing Freedom Tech Weekend. you and I were chatting about it briefly, but every Friday at 1530 UTC, people can hop on

YouTube or right here on X. I also got Nostra streaming working. So my job last week was to get streaming to Zap.stream. So I've got that going now. But it's one tool. I play with it for a half hour, show you a Freedom Tech tool that you can play with this weekend when you have extra time. Awesome. So trying to help people decouple their lives from these closed systems where their data is trapped. Let's go. I'll get my show in tftc.io. Go sign up for the daily newsletter. We also just launched a hat. Logan, get it up, tftcmerch.io. Why are you not giving a hat to all your guests?

The hats, they just got delivered. They are on sale now, though. That's the beauty of these conferences. There's so many smart people here. For me, non-technical, like I said earlier, know enough to be dangerous, but can't produce a line of code without asking an LLM. And the caliber of talent and intellect in this conference right now is humbling. Yeah.

I honestly think you could close your eyes and just point at the next person that walks by and have them sit down and have a really fruitful conversation for a half hour. Yeah. That was very fruitful. I hope anybody listening to the live stream enjoyed that AI talk. I know this is a Bitcoin conference, but I do truly believe that anybody building in Bitcoin needs to be playing with these tools, learning how they work and implementing them into their workflow because it really accelerates what you're trying to do. Don't sleep on AI.

You heard it here. Justin said it's the new gunpowder. So don't let your friends get guns while you're still playing with knives. He's getting quote-tweeted. We're getting quote-tweeted on the stream about that comment. Nice. Do you have, like, people working behind the scenes clipping this stuff and posting it?

We do. Logan, you're not clipping on the go, are you? Logan's not clipping. Somebody's clipping. Somebody's clipping. We've got a whole team. I mean, we're like a full-run business here at TF2C now. Yeah.

I keep getting alerts from my alarm that the next guest is supposed to be on, and we still haven't had any. Nobody showed up. No one showed up. We've got Insta Gibbs, Antoine Passant, and Rob Hamilton have a conversation right now. We'll just go put a mic in the middle of that. Yeah, yeah. Let's just talk on the stream.

Should we do some? I don't think at a Bitcoin conference, I think that's frowned upon. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, you just said who's having a conversation. that's probably not okay oh yeah that's my thoughts then that's my bad yeah i got actually i was using wrong names purposely to uh oh there you go my bad yeah my bad

yeah uh oh yeah this is uh it's a cool thing live streams live desk yeah marathons i never do shows like this this is a a new format for me yeah yeah it's tough uh you know you have these people who do these live streams like tone vase right well they'll hop on during some big bitcoin event and they'll do it on online and he's just bringing guests on and off he'll he'll do it for like 12 hours where he's just on the camera talking it's exhausting it is it is a skill it's a muscle that you have to develop um what do we got on the schedule right now right now we should have it is 12 p.m central on the dot so it looks like we're coming up to lunch here soon so there should be people

yeah next up is supposed to be jeff and nifty i saw jeff walk by earlier yeah yeah but really at this point we can pick anybody that we want to bring them on so lunch is being served downstairs okay okay well we can check the price while we're at it that's the only thing that's moving Still at 101. Still at 101. Yeah. Holding strong.

Will we hit all-time highs before the end of the conference tomorrow? Oof. Oh, yeah. The price is right there. I don't see it on the live stream. Oh, it's really small. Okay, there it is. Yeah, yeah.

Don't make fun of Logan like that. He's right in front of us. Right there. Yeah. But, yeah, we can check the M-Star. MSTAR is at $420. Let's go. Microstrategy, $420.

You call it MSTAR. That's the… I've never heard that. MSTR, right? MSTR, yeah. Yeah, that's how I say it in my mind is MSTAR. MSTAR? Yeah.

It sounds like a 90s tech company. MSTAR, you know, coming to the future. I mean, Microstrategy. Microstrategy. It's a very 90s tech company. Oh, for sure, for sure. If we're being honest. Yep.

And then CEP, which will turn into $21. They're at $37.70, up 18% today. This is non-investment advice. this is a bitcoin conference we don't talk about we don't talk about it we don't talk about securities okay yeah that's right we're filling time right now uh and then fold is that four fold is also at 420 but four dollars and 20 cents so those are some of the ones i'm watching right now nice but it's not investment advice not investment advice this is uh just an observation just an observation state of the markets we had jerome powell if we want to talk

mark as it came out wednesday afternoon i think he may have another he had the fomc meeting yesterday made some remarks i believe he's saying we don't want to lower rates okay angering donald trump a bit more um but yeah i think again leaning on this topic though of this conference tems strategy conference sort of i don't want to say competing forces but this push and pull of bitcoin as the sovereign neutral reserve asset that is outside the purview of the states and hyper regulated entities coming in and buying bitcoin and that's something that super test net uh voice yesterday is that he hopes that we can keep get back to the cypherpunk ethos of bitcoin of separating money in state which i think it clearly is still separated but yeah bringing

the cypherpunk back to Bitcoin. Rob is getting ready. Rob is getting prepared. Just come barge in here whenever you're ready. Sure. Are you guys, are you guys going to hop on?

Yeah. Okay, come on in. We'll put the microphones down. I'll get out of the way. Just warning you guys We have 3 million live viewers right now There's going to be white smoke coming out of the building We're going to figure out what's happening

With OpReturn I think hold it up here like this how you two gentlemen doing doing good doing well yeah it's been a chaotic week for for you particularly I imagine yeah so what is your let's hear the story from your perspective on all this op return conversation that's been going on So, I went to the MIT Bitcoin Expo one month ago. I met one of the founders of Citria, who blew my head, basically, blew my mind, because I started asking him questions to gain knowledge about how application developers were using the tooling at their disposal at the practical level and he started telling me, oh yeah,

well we use very large transactions, multiple hundreds of kilobytes, but that's not standard. How do you even broadcast them? I was like, oh no, we just use Slipstream. Oh shit. And then it just kept on going. And it's like, oh, yeah, but we also have this transaction, and we have 1,000 dust outputs. And I was like, what? And do you even spend them?

Oh, yeah, no, they're just zero-set outputs. I use the connector. And I was like, what? And then, oh, we also have this second-stage transaction where we were limited by the up-return limits. Therefore, we just use unspendable taproot outputs to store data. I was like, what? So just the first two ones are pretty important and the most important ones because like somebody actively building on private bridges to miners is bad. It's pretty, pretty bad.

Somebody actively storing thousands of dust outputs in the Chexos set is pretty, pretty bad. Then you have the second stage transaction using unspannable type rate outputs instead of up returns, which is bad, but also not that bad. But it was also the easiest to fix. So I just emailed the mailing list back in the train to New York. hey, we should just raise the operating limits because it's not binding anyways. People are using the witness data instead, which is cheaper. It's not constraining anybody, but it incentivizes these guys to do more harmful stuff, so we should just remove it. I think, Mr. Gibbs, do you have anything to add to this? Yeah, to be clear, I think they did spend a decent amount, maybe due to your conversation,

because i didn't i met him uh later on but many of the transactions are actually standard uh the ones that have have like uh ticking time uh ticking clock on them pretty much the those end up being standard because they want to rely on the public network because that'll get you the fastest confirmation but then there's these things like these huge fraud proofs using uh groth 16 these zero knowledge proofs or these thousands of connector outputs which they use for security of their system, like there's only so much papering over you can do. You can basically make it rare to happen where this transaction should never be played. But if it does happen, then it has all these negative externalities.

And if I understand correctly, Citria is trying to bring to market a 3M virtual machine and a zero knowledge proof roll up? So the core of it, yeah, there's two parts, right? There's the bridge. So how does money go in and out of the system? So versus a traditional kind of a federated side chain system like Liquid where it's N of M signers, you essentially have a one of N assumption. So as long as one of the operators are honest, money goes in, money comes out, everyone's made whole. Then once you're in the system itself, that's where like the side chain is, right, and where the roll up is more specifically.

And Citria is working on the EVM compatible, but you could, in principle, have multiple roll-ups inside, including privacy-based ones or other systems, depending on what you want. Which is, to give rough numbers, basically a 10x scaling solution for making Bitcoin payments. Right. One example would be using Jonas, Nick, and whoever else worked on this, shielded CSV system where you have Zcash-level privacy, and each transaction has to be, there's a chunk of data that has to be published on the main chain for security called data availability, and this would be 64 witness units.

They put it, it'd be only in witness data, and it's 64 bytes per. And with that, you get, so that's a pretty good scaling. It's smaller than even normal transactions, which is pretty cool. So, yeah, this is the C3I use case is to scale Bitcoin to make more payment with your money, to be clear. And not that I'm particularly interested in what they do. I was just blown away by the lack of connection we had between how they use the protocol and the towing that we offer. and I wanted to bridge the gap between how to do it and also to reply to some things online.

I don't want to accommodate them. I just want to ask them nicely to do less harm in how they store data. But at the end of the day, you really can't enforce that, right? Right. So the best we can do is, like in this case, this very specific case, We can do things like give comparable goods where the price is the same and then with a pretty please on top. Ideally, we'd make it even cheaper, right? Make the right thing even cheaper.

But those are some fundamental scaling issues we've had since the dawn of Bitcoin, I think. Yeah, this is a question that popped up into my mind that I wasn't able to ask during the first debate last night. It was like, how do you guys approach? Because let's imagine OpReturn limit gets, excuse me, eliminated. And then a product like Citria and others like it, they don't find product market fit. Do you think there's an argument to be made that maybe they should find PMF first and then you do this? I don't really care about Citria in particular. The specific use case where they would be using OpReturn is in a second stage transaction

that should never happen on chain and in practice will never happen on chain because it's a challenge transaction where the person challenging is putting a bid, a significant bid, and the amount that the person that is being challenged put there as a bond is so high that they are never going to try to cheat.

But it just sends a signal to protocol developers that, hey, application developers are working around your protocol and we better fix it before all the next protocols come around and start designing on top of it and on top of these workarounds, these harmful workarounds, and then probably they won't be playing as nice as C3IS. Like the C3IS guy I talked to, he's here today. Probably he's going to be on later.

Probably a bunch of other application developers are not going to care that much at all about the harm they inflict on us and they're just going to be using unspendable outputs and once they build it we won't be able to convince them to build it back on top of a larger up return so it's more for the next ones in preparation and i'd argue that if we're seeing material damage in the network for it depends on what we're talking about but for this one specifically if we're seeing material damage it's already too late uh it should have been done before the question really is you know to me when i when i think about this is do we want to know maybe the number's wrong

right it shouldn't be 80 should be 144 but that's like a it's a very opinionated app based response versus saying what is this rule really for has it outlived its usefulness and are we doing material harm making app decisions at this protocol layer yeah yeah one way you can see it is that And an intervention was made in limiting the number of our preterians, which create distorted incentive for people to use more harmful ways of storing the data. And I'm arguing that we should remove the intervention that created distorted incentives instead of trying to do more intervention on top of each other to fix the previous intervention. Yeah. Are there any lessons, like, is this enabled because of the combination of SegWit

and Taproot to begin with? No, no, no. Like data publication was always a possible, especially in a standard sense, since at least P2SH, obviously the arc of history of relay and Bitcoin protocol is obviously bent towards more relaxed and expressive. Right. So, um, I mean, you can just look at, I have to read the taproot vips every single time to refresh my memory. But you can just see how the resource limitations are relaxed more and more, such that app developers really don't have to worry about it. You don't have these situations where, oops, I did one too many, you know, I did a non-aggressive, like a non-adversarial multi-sig.

Now I can't spend my coins, right? This has actually happened in the past. And we're trying to avoid that going forward. Yeah. So has this week at this conference been productive for conversations outside of the Internet on this topic? Not as much as I wished. I feel like I understand more of the arguments than I did before because in person ends up being a little more informative

and you can have more back and forth, really getting to the core of the issue. i i do think that at this point i can confidently say these are two separate visions for well there's n separate visions right but my vision versus someone else and like the knots camp our visions are just different um and irreconcilable i think in some core sense um the way a project has to be managed is very different how they're proposing uh they're proposing like dynamic filters I've heard basically kind of web of trust load a config kind of thing now maybe this is just the one person

talking I was talking to but this is like an opportunity I think to encourage people to really put you know what's the knots vision for filtering because you can't just say this is a bad thing let's stop it that may be true and I might even agree with you on that but like how you stop

something is the more important engineering discussion and I just don't think it's possible yeah i think in a decentralized way at least no that's i mean i've been saying this the last week it makes sense to me considering what's happening with these projects going out of band to mining pools and that messing up the p2p layer in terms of bandwidth and cpu usage which and i don't think dgens care about the decentralization of the network no which is like fascinating they'll do whatever they want which is like do they not recognize that if they want to

accomplish their goals and bring a product to market as an app developer like it sort of depends on Bitcoin being sufficiently robust and decentralized at the protocol layer short-term vision versus long-term vision yeah just very short-termist but unfortunately there is such demand demands demands behind it that is there really though is it is it well most of the block space demand demand in the past years were for inscriptions no demand for block space agreed but is there demand for the end products that they're bringing to market i think speculation is the innovation yeah it's very people love to gamble i mean that's i kind of got into the space because i realized that it

enables casinos i'm like that's that's market fit right there i'm not a gambler and i don't work on that stuff but i don't know like the idea that you can't stop it is what got me in the space yeah i can't get around that no and that was i think yet last night when peter todd brought up open timestamps and the fact that they're hashing data using op return like that is subjective use of block space it's a non-monetary use case it's one like what seeing what simple proof is doing with open timestamps is really encouraging and lightning is publishing data through the witness for htl supreme ages yeah so even lightning is using that that publication yeah like it's resolving you know other people resolving their htlcs which enables you to resolve

them it's not a payment right but if you're making these moral judgments what's a payment what's not what should be filtered what's not becomes very unclear to me where this line ends too yeah there if we want to filter some things like if we want to marginally increase the cost of some people to make some transactions, there is a lot of people that I dislike way more than degens buying fucking inscriptions, right? There is like financing of terrorism or whatever. If we are going to filter, might as well filter dues first, but I don't think it's a road we want to take. And then, in terms of how many people have been on this

desk and conversations outside of this the last couple days, it's a communication issue particularly from bitcoin core like a public relations issue what would you say to that yeah that's very true because uh bitcoin core is not somebody with an agency and uniform thinking there is plenty of people that just have their own vision and come and contribute and i guess my email to the mailing list on the train back to new york from mit is kind of an example of this obviously there is some culture which could lead to maybe some groupthink but not even that much so it's very hard to communicate effectively when you lack organization so but we can bring some more organizational

structure to the beacon core project but it also comes with trade-offs more organizations less decentralization kind of which I in the past argued in favor of because to make the project more efficient but yeah there's trade-offs the fact as a matter of fact right now we are very very disorganized therefore we have poor communication but we also are very unable to pull any kind of conspiracy or whatever yeah no i mean this has been an ongoing discussion about the open source contributors to core specifically for years a lot of burnout it's like hard to get things through and it is this herculean task for the individuals working maybe what was that sisyphean yes good

good correction yeah always pushing the rock up the hill the world up the hill and uh It's unique to Bitcoin, too, as an open source project, in a sense, where you have many people who are highly engaged in what's happening because their monetary value is attached to it as well. It's unique in the sense that, at the end of the day, we are coordinating around the consensus roles, and we need to all have the same consensus roles. So, yes, it's unique in this way.

unlike other open source projects where you could just run whatever software you want. You might dislike that people take a different path because then your preferred in-it system, whatever is going to be underdeveloped compared to the new in-it system. But in Bitcoin, we need to all agree. And it's kind of an amazing thing

that all of us, all Bitcoin users, already are coordinated on a fixed set of roles. If we wanted to come together today and actually draft a set of rules to all agree together, which has never happened. So, yeah, it's unique to Bitcoin in this case. But what we're discussing is not even the consensus rules in the first place. Do you guys have any worries about this creating some knock-on negative externalities, this op return discussion specifically? I mean, there are definitely ways of handling it that could exacerbate the issue. but I'm pretty optimistic that calmer heads will prevail there's no rush for

any of these things I haven't heard any apocalyptic kind of discussion from core contributors that it's like the end of the project if one thing happens or another it's more like there's better and worse and you can have to deal with that as we go all while keeping in view that communication needs to be better yeah absolutely agree something I've been trying to pursue in the past weeks is to communicate better but it's hard outside of this hopefully this is just a temporary kerfuffle in the world of bitcoin what are you guys interested in right now working on specifically making bitcoin stronger i've been involved in the

security advisories for bitcoin so putting together a disclosure policy having proper disclosures of bugs, proper crediting to security researchers, hopefully in an attempt to formalize the process better and potentially incentivize people to research more security bugs in Bitcoin and once they find them to route them through us because we have a defined process you're going to get credit eventually. But please don't go another route because we need some embargo periods to fix it silently, get people upgraded. Because, yeah, it goes without saying that security bugs in Bitcoin can be pretty harmful.

That's another thing, talking about on-ramping to being able to contribute to Bitcoin Core, another conversation I've had many times throughout the years. And Bob McElrath yesterday was explaining he wants to build a RAG system to make it easier to search data pertinent to the Bitcoin project, put information about the mailing list, pull requests, lightning, Bitcoin, different parts of the repository, sort of help onboard. People want to learn about Bitcoin, how it works faster. It's called BitcoinUpTech.org. Yeah, that's go subscribe to BitcoinUpTech. BitcoinSearch, that's what I use. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, BitcoinSearch. Which indexes that as well. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's hilarious. It's almost poetic that this conference is happening the same week that MicroStrategy is having their Bitcoin for corporations, and you have people plunging hundreds of millions, billions of dollars into this asset. And I'd be pretty confident saying they're probably completely ignorant to the conversations that are happening here, which are extremely important. What about you? against what are you uh well the past couple years or two three years i'd been working on

mempool policy stuff because i'd worked on ellen symmetry as a project under blocks chain with rusty russell and i became very dissatisfied with the the api of the mempool so to speak as an app developer and so that gave me a side quest along with a number of excellent people which i'm sure you talk to or are going to talk to, so there's Peter, Willa, Suhas, Gloria, others, I mean there's plenty others, but that would be like the core group I'd say, and we got through a lot of these kind of basic package relay things that are backwards compatible with today's network protocol, it's unsticking kind of a lot of L2 protocols, which is like Lightning today, they're going to adopt a lot of this, as well as set things up for

future and then currently I'm helping just on the review side of things for cluster mempool Peter gave a presentation on that but I was here can you explain high-level cluster mempools so the current mempool probably doesn't work the way you think it does I think a lot of people think cluster mempool is already merged in the sense of they think that once you get a transaction over this peer-to-peer network they just know where they know how good it is for a miner or batters for a node from an economics perspective this is basically not true there's a set of heuristics that were built over time to deal with things like mempool is getting too big

because a long time ago about 10 years ago if your mempool just it just keeps growing right and so you know to literally crash and this would happen to mine a few times back in the day so there's limiting in place but then it says okay if there's limiting how do we choose you know what's best to mine and a bunch of heuristics were put in place that are incorrect they were heuristics right they mostly work but actually don't work correctly and so cluster mempool is an attempt to make sure that the mempool is ordered at all times we know what a miner would want we know what a miner wouldn't want and allow that to be exposed to the node operation to better efficiently better more efficiently gossip what will actually be mined and also provide a path for

wallet developers to actually effectuate transactions that make sense right in a kind of a meaningful way i can go more into that if you want but this help with like block template development in the sense that you may be able to get uh the highest potential fees So, yes, the mempool is ordered such that at the top of the mempool, you have the thing, you can basically have an ordering where you know that the first thing you'd mine is the last thing you'd evict if the mempool was getting too big, and vice versa, right? So you don't have weird conditions where you're handing things to a miner

that they actually don't want because their mempool is oversized. This could literally happen today, and that goes away. that so this would be massive for basically peer-to-peer efficiency yeah peer-to-peer efficiency and for building on top so we've been talking just today a few of us about generalizing package relay further which was a tough maybe impossible task to do well because if you don't know how good a transaction is you definitely don't know how good a transaction packages for for the miner and we did this in a very limited setting in 28.0 and 28.9 this one parent one child that's very constrained right how can we do it for general chains of transactions

and the answer is the cluster node pool and so once we do more when we want to do more general package relay we have to do deep analysis of like is somebody trying to censor a real package It's somewhere hidden in this bigger package. How much energy are we going to spend trying to validate that this package is a good package? There's all these design decisions which basically weren't answerable prior to cluster mempool and now are. So that's why it's my number one project to get pushed through. This affects not only the P2P layer for miners, but second layers too if you're trying to. Yeah, a bunch of pins actually go away.

There's a bunch of rules for replacements, for entering the mempool. These will just go away. If you make a better fee rate package, you will get in. And that is kind of like the, well, there's one asterisk to that, which I'm sure people will work on, but like 99% of the pins you actually see in real life end up going away. And then also just app developers on top can do things like, given this package, what's my effective fee rate?

Like, would the miner actually want this? Like, today you can't do that, and you should be able to pretty easily tomorrow. It's very important. Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me. And thank you for the work that you're doing. Thanks for having us. This has been awesome. It's useful.

Yeah. Full communication. Yeah. It really is. We should do it. The Pope's American. Pope's American. We got a Pope announcement.

Finally, the plan is, it's not Trump. I was like, finally, it's happening. The book of Matthew. See you guys later. Thank you. Thank you so much. We should do longer TFTC episodes too, not just the live stream. Yeah, definitely.

I'd like to advertise my work on the consensus cleanup, which is much more important than fucking out returns. I would be interested. We're going to talk consensus cleanup later with Antoine at some point. Am I breaking? No, come on in. No breaks. No breaks.

We got a new pope. Bitcoin's over 100,000. You can't stop. the new Pope Logan what are your thoughts on the Pope any thoughts he's there the first American Pope in history

Cardinal Robert Cravost will go by Pope Leo the 14th is the Pope the Antichrist Rob rob good to see you sir good to see you as always how uh what is your perspective on the week that has been in austin texas i love this like double stacked conference vibe because i was over at

bitcoin park austin campus um you know for the texas energy and mining summit now over here at bitcoin plus plus you have this really cool cross section and what i really love to appreciate always in bitcoin is that the the culture has a lot of breadth and depth in that you go to the mining summit and you just have guys that are working on rigs they're you know they're behind the meter you know just running natural gas lines and flaring things and dealing with like the hard gritty nature of just all of the machinery and then you come over here and you talk to like the software side right you have like this dueling um like not dueling in the sense that they're in conflict but you just have like the people that could be very invested in bitcoin could just be

very very different two very different lanes yeah and then you have this new emerging third class now of the suit coiners right they're down in orlando yeah right so you have all of these different people that all come to bitcoin and they all see it as different things and we all kind of unite and rally around it it's very cool just seeing like the the diaspora of all of the culture and how bitcoin touches people in different ways bitcoin touches people it does consensually because it's permission it's all consensual yeah what do you think of the debates last night did you stay for the second one at a bounce um i stayed i think it was good i think It's interesting with the Oxford-style debate of the structure has pros and cons, in my opinion.

I think in the pro side, people get a chance to fully expound upon thoughts. And I think a lot of the stuff in the context and the nuance of it all, you need more than just the pithy 280 characters on Twitter to really get a point. On the downside, if someone makes a point, and let's say a mechanic makes a point, Shinobi wants to respond. And Shinobi has to wait 15 minutes to make a response, right? And because of that, it's almost like a duty to whoever's consuming the debate has to be really attentive and following the discussion correctly. You can't glaze through it like it's any other kind of content because you have to kind of have this holistic context of this debate.

I enjoyed it, though. I think it was a good conversation. um i am doubtful that people meaningfully change their position in any real way um i mean i think it's the conversations that were good just to get different perspectives because i asked a question during the first one the panel and i was asking about you know the second third order effects of this if this pr were to get merged and there were to be changes to bitcoin like what is the countermanding response right and hearing luke in his own words say previously that like miners that are included in this stuff are attacking the network you you know we were

talking about filtering two years ago the inscriptions haven't been filtered and luke responded that they have been filtered and i think that goes into like luke's interpretation and his perspective um that's more edifying to get how people are thinking to be able to map mental models and to have a better understanding of the other side yeah I think ultimately I don't think opinions were changed or swayed but I think

talking is good we are all here talking about this stuff because we care about Bitcoin and even though we see things differently you know being able to exchange ideas and talk about it is kind of that Socratic method is what helps everyone I've been asking everybody I don't want to belabor the point but your general

thoughts on the up return limit yeah my very high level thought is closer having consensus mirror relay policy within reason um the opera turn stuff uh it's really unfortunate in that i think a lot of the cultural outrage is a streisand effect that brings more attention to it um i agree there there's definitely a lot of just doing it out of spite to troll people. We've seen that with the opera turn bot this week. Yeah, right, and it's something that

I understand why people are passionate, and I listen to it and hear these discussions, and I sit here and talk in person. I mean, I was talking to Mechanic for 15 minutes before he even knew who I was because my name tag was flipped backwards by accident because it's two-sided, and then he was like, ah, you're Rob. I was like, yeah, we can all have these conversations. like twitter first off is not a real place my twitter's on screen oh um yeah so uh i uh like having the conversations with him i twitter's not a real place first off i think people um things get heated online when you're behind a screen i think being able to have conversations in person helps um ultimately my opinion i think comes from a general sense of from the

health of the network having transparent mempools not having dark mempools being informed on the fee rate market helps with lightning as a layer two let alone any other layer two i think one part that gets missed though is this idea of like for monetary transactions and i think technically strictly speaking a roll-up can be used as a monetary tool it's a different set of security and trust trade-offs and i think often roll-ups get bundled in because people issue tokens around them and it has other abstracted computational like programming use cases that are more associated with ethereum but the idea of a roll-up i can send someone money instantly and like peg them into like a roll-up without utx so you can do that um i mean you can also do that stuff with arc and

you can do that stuff with like fediments and stuff but i think like it is a monetary use case so i view it in the sense of it's hard to really start policing until there's a full codified thing that we have consensus on not mempool policy it's going to constantly just be whack-a-mole people Citri doesn't need any change to any of this stuff to have it work. Yeah, I don't know. I think there just needs to be more discussion around this stuff and kind of like what happens next. Yeah, that was the interesting part of the first debate last night.

Is like a monetary use case of Bitcoin's objectives that differ between each individual. It was funny having Peter Todd up there who runs Open Time Stamps, which arguably is no monetary use case at all, but I see value in that project specifically. I see what projects like Simple Proof are doing with it. I think that is extremely valuable for the world. And I've been grappling with this for two weeks now,

but I think there is objective consensus rules that enable certain things, and there's subjective sort of views on what people are doing within the rule set. Absolutely. Yeah, and that's why I think ultimately the natural second, third-order step of this is having a consensus conversation. i don't think we can rely on miners being altruistic in the sense of thinking some sort of greater good that exists beyond their own you know either publicly especially if they're publicly traded they have fiduciary dues to make money and the abstract argument of we need to make

sure that for the long-term endurance of bitcoin we have this like non-consensus lens and how we view these things is i mean i think it's wrong i could be glib and call it like it's a new version of esg like you have to ethically you have to source ethical transactions in your blocks and i think that if you want to actually in the brinksmanship of bitcoin consensus move things like in 2017 and like the block size wars that was a consensus threat right we were going to force things and invalidate and fork off the network and until you're at that level of brinksmanship you're not able to convincingly dissuade miners from changing their behavior and then the extension of that to be transparent i think it's somewhat of a perpetual whack-a-mole

game because there is so much data that exists that needs to exist in bitcoin whether it's the transaction id whether it's the signatures the public keys the end lock time the end sequence number these things have to be part of every bitcoin transaction you uh they will find new ways to just put data in elsewhere and so i think you have to really really think about what does it look like and i don't want to go back to a world of script templates originally bitcoin had a whitelist where only certain formatted transcription uh transaction types could be allowed in the network and i think short of going back to that and even then you'd still have stuff you really start kind of breaking down like the permissionless nature of the network

if i make a new miniscript template i don't have to go to the core repo and say please allow my new kind of transaction to be included right like it's not a good way even from a financial use case things like removing the segwit discount um i think impairs a lot of people just that want to use bitcoin as money i use witness data for signatures and scenario that you're laying out to it seems like it introduces it's a potential to become much more political that way explicitly so yeah it would definitely be political if you went back to a white list because you have to go lobby a board of people to do that and then you have like a high council of people who say can your bitcoin transaction be included or not um the white list though wouldn't be consensus

It would probably be policy, but then you just go back to, I can just, you know, go to the slipstream API and get my transaction included. Yeah, it's, there's not a clean answer because both sides have very strict different value sets. The pro-op return, increasing the limit size, or more of Bitcoin as a technical distributed system and understanding how decentralized systems should work and kind of for the health of the technical elements of the network. and the other side has a non-code based heuristic and ultimately bitcoin as code you have to encode the rules that you want to do in code for them to be enforced and that's when it gets um subjective and that's what makes it difficult yeah fun times yeah we're all here because we're all fighting because we all care about that's actually a little exciting like there hasn't been like a open sort of contentious debate in around bitcoin protocol in a while yeah i think if you

I view this as an extension of the inscription ordinal conversation so this has really been the main driving point it just kind of went dull for a year it's good to see people care and they want to debate and talk about this stuff I think the

I think we need to get these kind of smaller stake things out of the way as Bitcoin continues to grow because Bitcoin continues to succeed there will be more sophisticated attacks that are much more impactful to the health of the network that we need to make sure that us people who care about bitcoin are on a united front

right it'd be really unfortunate if we start fractioning off into a place where um that makes it easier to divide and conquer down the line thank you for joining us my pleasure we've pulled you in yeah we've got nifty jeff going on next mvp oh let's talk about berlin berlin awesome very nice let's go thanks everyone thank you rob rob hamilton everybody from anchor watch If you need to insure your Bitcoin held in cold storage, hit up Rob at Anchor Watch. Lisa. What's going on? What's up?

This is Jeff. Jeff. Nice to meet you. Have we met before? I think we have, yeah. In passing, at least. Yeah. Lisa, I'm sorry I missed you yesterday.

I had to jump back to Bitcoin Park, Austin. But this has been an incredible event. Is it true what the people are saying? Did you manufacture all this op return discussion? Yeah, I'm going to be honest. It's like, I feel like it's like, you know, people accuse Trump of being good at 4G tests. And it's one of those, like, I wish I was that good at 4G tests.

Like, yeah, I wish I could manufacture controversies ahead of every event. That would be great. Maybe, like, you, I don't know. I think it's interesting because, like, I've been planning this conference for over a year now, right? Um, you know, we talked about it end of last year after last Bitcoin plus plus here in Austin, we start planning what we're going to do the next year. I mean, obviously I have a bunch of conferences going on, but, um, yeah, I don't know.

No, I mean, it is a great, but I think the thing is, it's like, I didn't realize most people didn't realize that this was happening. All these interesting conversations were happening at the mem poll. Right. So that's why I did the conferences. Cause I was like, this is really interesting, controversial stuff. Like there's a lot to talk about here and it feels like everyone found that out right before the event started, which is like, yeah, that's great for me.

Thank you for putting this on. I mean, just sitting here the last two days and the caliber of people that are at this conference and having these very important discussions is extremely impressive, somewhat humbling and sort of intimidating for me to sit here and talk with all these low level protocol developers. Oh, yeah. But thanks for coming out to chat with them, because I feel like it,

you know, one of the point one of the things I like to have it happen at these events is people get to learn from all these people that are doing cool stuff and make it feel maybe less far away, right? Like less hard to understand because you get to hear them talk about it in person. So let's talk about Berlin. Jeff, what's going on in Berlin these days?

Still a lot, I would say. I mean, it's been, I think it was one of the cities or places that picked up Bitcoin on a larger scale, like one of the first in the world. and i would say it's still going pretty strong i mean this we had two bitcoin plus plus conferences in the last year in the year before yeah so the story with me and jeff is i wanted to do a european conference two years ago right three years ago yeah i think we talked about it in miami in miami

it was the last miami conference i think oh yeah of course yeah i was telling jeff about how i was planning on expanding the bitcoin plus plus universe because we had done austin in mexico city and i was looking to move to europe and then she said i'm planning to go to paris i was like what's in paris like it seemed like a fun time i don't know um so i tell him this and then like i think two minutes later maybe it was even an hour or two let's go talk at lunch so like in miami i got pulled over in like the the speakers area jeff pulls me over and he's like okay i want to pitch you on doing it in berlin and this is why um and so we did the first ever bitcoin plus plus in berlin two and a half years ago now right yeah

and it was a nix it was nix and it worked and if you can run a conference on nix you can run a conference on everything or anything a niche of nix which is yeah it's like a very niche conference um in terms of like bitcoiners it's like a very small group of people but we we did it we got like 150 people there um probably one of the bigger nix conferences okay yeah it was mostly bitcoiners um we just it was like a good um like event in the run-up of like we had we had many good events and over the years probably most most namely the lightning conference in 2019 which is huge which was great and so i feel like btc plus plus is a good continuation of that tradition we're doing our best yeah we're actually gonna yeah go ahead i was gonna say correct me if

if I'm wrong, but last year's Bitcoin++ in Berlin had the iconic images of developers sitting on elevated surfaces giving presentations. Right, yeah. Layered developers. Because we were doing eCash was last year, right?

We did the first ever Bitcoin++ eCash conference with Kelly and a bunch of Fetty people, so Cashew and Kelly there, yeah. There was also something that felt right at the right time at the right place because the whole privacy aspect and like privacy improvements on e-cash.

There's a strong community, I would say, in Germany and in Europe that's prone to privacy. And you have a bunch of developers that are rooted in that general area. Let's say Europe. I don't want to dox anybody. So it was a good place. And also last year, it felt like a good time where everything was kind of ripe enough to have a whole conference on it. So I guess that was also first, right?

It was the first major e-cash conference. And the timing seems perfect. I mean, the proliferation of Cashew and Fetiment over the last year has been insane. Like, we were talking about hash pools with VMPRC and Average Gary yesterday. They're implementing Cashew to fix the mining pool layer of Bitcoin.

It's one of the areas I'm most excited in Bitcoin right now is eCash. Yeah, and rightfully so. So what's the topic this year? I think we're calling it Lightning++. But it's a Bitcoin++, right? So it's Lightning again? Again as we did

at the Lightning conference six years ago? Jesus. So it's time to bring back a Lightning-themed conference. In Berlin, yeah. Everything that's accumulated over the years, eCache, especially Cashew, is closely related to Lightning. So that's also

a topic that's going to be touched. Do we have any... Did you book anything yet? or we're going to be back at the same venue um as far as speakers are i know the whole ldk team is going to do their off-site there so we'll have them coming working on getting blockstream developers to come um i think one of them had a sailing trip they had to check it didn't overlap that kind of thing um so i'm still working on getting talent books as you can imagine i've got

a lot of that stuff happening with like between this conference and the other stuff but um yeah it should be good kelly will be there again talking about um e-cash stuff so i mean i think it's going to be focused on lightning but i'm really hoping we can also get maybe some arc developers there ecash stuff and have it be focused on how lightning is also enabling all these other layer twos to excuse me build cool ecosystems because like ecash and light and ecash and arc which are other protocols not lightning different kind of models of how to send money around and liquidity that kind of thing but most of them use lightning as their common layer of how people transact with them so you have an arc wallet but you'll pay a lightning

invoice or when you want someone to send you money i haven't really used it yet but i think you can give them a lightning invoice and it'll land in your wallet as e-cash so i think there's this really nice synergy going on where lightning is kind of becoming this um nice connective layer between all the different people and how you hold your bitcoin kind of at the end it can be slightly different so i like to think like ecash and like this arc stuff is really kind of solving the last mile problem that lightning has um i think this conference would be a good place to kind of maybe showcase how lightning is able to um uh i don't know make other kinds of flare twos possible to some extent and still in a super decentralized way which is cool that's something i

said a couple times over the last two days that it feels like it's very underappreciated the maturation of the interoperability of all these of all these networks and what can actually be built and i would not be surprised i mean just going back to cashew specifically like the pace of development on that protocol over the last year has been mind-blowing partly enabled by the ability to have these lightning gateways to make the mints interoperable yeah and i'm happy that they're finally starting to to do real world implementations of the multi-pay multi-notch I read about that earlier this week. And that relies on Lightning, right?

That uses an aspect of the Lightning protocol to work. So let's explain multi-nup payments to people. Yeah, so the idea is with eCash, you're really giving your stats to a mint, and they give you eCashes, like almost tokens that represent the Bitcoin, but that is held by a mint, right? So someone else. So you don't really want all your stats to be on mint. You kind of want to separate it out, right?

One, so no mint has all your stats. If they disappear, they go away. Um, so it's kind of like this, like distributed, you can distribute your sats at grants, many different e-cash wallets, right? So many different e-cash mints. You could have a wallet with a bunch of sats in it, but let's see, you want to pay a single lightning invoice. Lightning is set up so that you can ask each of those mints to pay a portion of

the invoice for you and have it when it reaches the end, the end, it'll only go through if every single mint sends the sats that they're supposed to, so it adds up to the total and that uses something that we added to lightning years ago at this point called multi-path payments which lets you take a lightning payment and split it such that whenever it gets to the destination it comes from like a bunch of different places it's really cool to see the ecash or cashew in particular using reusing that thing that we added to lightning and making it so that they can spread out your stats across many different places i think it's great for privacy right because all the funds aren't coming from any one person and ecash is kind of this hidden

layer that helps coordinate all these different people paying um to a single source if that makes sense yeah and this multi-nut payment design is a forcing function for a competitive landscape of mints where they're more incentivized to act uh in the best interest of their users instead of being a malicious actor yeah and i think one of the cool things about having that level of interoperability i mean this is like you know open protocols are great because and like especially open protocols that let you know people build this other layer of ecash on top of it right and then it doesn't matter what lightning implementation those like four different mints are running they can all manage to still pay your lightning invoice equally right so you

can get this nice diversity of clients and mint software and but they're all running the same protocols right like all the mints are running the cashew protocol all the lightning nodes are you're running the lightning protocol and you can get this really cool like um cross usage that just works together pretty nicely um because they all built to a common specification so shout out to open protocols i don't know um and just you know it's cool to really see i think that distribution happening and decentralization right because this is like real decentralized payments network right like um and i think you know it does leave this opportunity for competition so let's say you've got a bunch of mints maybe they charge different fees to make lightning payments and so then they're

incompetent so that big for like you as the user um you get kind of the best experience i would think right you get to use all your money it doesn't matter where it is you can just use it as one balance um you get the opportunity to uh have that decentralization of funds so there's like a little bit of like you know having your money spread across a bunch of banks so if one goes down whatever uh it's not a total loss right um and then you have in theory these banks you know if they became big enough competing for your business um because they want you to be i'm assuming charge some little transaction fee to do the the exchange between ecash to lightning i expect that to to be how i would expect people to use it um so there's just kind of a i think

it's a cool yeah i think it's a really cool thing to grow and i want to see more of these things develop because I do think they're good for like the whole ecosystem Jeff do you have any thoughts on this intersection I'm a ever since BTC++ last year which

was BTC++ going nuts right yeah I think like the multi nut payments is the lowest hanging fruit that does most for usability and I'm happy it's finally being worked on again there was a little break and

I guess different focuses and now it's getting some traction again so I think I hope we can see some like actually working wallets and products in October yeah and it's interesting to watch all these disparate projects working on their own scaling solutions obviously Citria

part of the conversation this week with OpReturn and what they're trying to do with ZK rollups and creating an EVM to unlock all these financial use cases of Bitcoin on a second layer curious to get your thoughts about the competing sort of views on how to scale bitcoin particularly these two models these zk roll-ups versus a multi-second layer protocol that's

interoperable creating sort of modular use cases yeah i feel like i have to be like shout out to we're doing a conference in istanbul right before berlin where we're going to be talking about zk and scaling stuff because i think that's like a whole different i guess i do kind of see that as a whole different topic um when i hear people say scaling bitcoin i feel like i feel like a lot of people mean slightly different things by that and maybe that's and maybe they would say that they disagree which i'm totally open to that conversation but i feel like the the mint stuff and ecash things is really focused on payments like how do i take my bitcoin and give it to someone else and how do we do more of that with for lower cost right um and how do we do it more

privately more decentralized like all those things um i think like more privately and more decentralized is really where like ecash and lightning are focused um on how do i get bitcoin to someone else in these ways and faster a lot like they really improve the speed compared to on-chain the zk stuff i think they start going in more of a slightly different direction where it's like how do i do more complicated programming on bitcoin more complicated programs more complicated contracts of like who's involved in like it's not a payment so much as it is like a logic of who gets the money at the end of the day kind of thing it's not just i want to send value from point a to point b it's like i want the value to get there only in these three conditions or

whatever um and so scaling that kind of like programmability on bitcoin just strikes me as like a slightly different um use case and you end up with slightly different tools that you want slightly different designs of what you're proposing because what you're attempting to accomplish is slightly different than i just want to get bitcoin from point a to point b period do you think there's room for all these solutions that's a good question i think people are building all the solutions um is the market man there for something like i mean i think i think we still have that conversation in the general like bitcoin space if is it a good moe what is the m is medium medium yeah yeah yeah um a good people talk about the medium of exchange

stuff which is like the you know that's getting it from point a to point b so a lot of people i think still talk about like well is bitcoin even worth doing from point a point b why don't you just hold it right um and this is almost i think a third category of is like is bitcoin worth doing complicated programming contracts with um i i think it's one of those things where like i understand for me i'm very much like i think being able to send people bitcoin is really important and so that's why like i like focusing on lightning and working on those product protocols personally I think that all the people doing more programmability stuff, I think they've seen use cases and uses that they think people will pay to use,

and they're working on proving that out, I think, to some extent. Yeah, I think it's the fork in the road of the visions of two forms of DeFi. Do we want decentralized finance, or are we definancializing the world with better money? And I think the two solutions that we're talking about now are going down those two different paths. How can we just recognize that Bitcoin is de-financializing the economy? We don't need to go speculate and create a new hyper-financialized system. We just need better money. And how can we build tools to make it easier for people to receive and send that money?

And the other, DeFi, decentralized finance, is saying, no, this hyper-financialized economy is good. We need to recreate what's already been built in this Bitcoin world. Yeah, I think so. Maybe the ZK. I joke about it every year, but I think maybe it's kind of true that the reason I hold conferences is to find out what's going on there and better understand it to create conversations people can have in public. So hopefully we'll be having some really great conversations about what's going on in Lightning and Medium Exchange World in Berlin in October. So tickets are available. Check it out.

We're very excited about it. Um, but, uh, you know, I think the CK conference in Istanbul will be a good opportunity for me to really get a better understanding and everyone I hope that comes and people that are building there, like they'll get to showcase what they're building, why they're building it, what they think Bitcoin, why Bitcoin needs it, you know, and for the, I see it as an opportunity for them to really make their case, you know, on a stage about like, as technologists and people that are building solutions and care about Bitcoin, like this is what we're doing and this

is why we're doing it. And so, yeah, I'm looking forward to that, both those conversations, yeah. Yeah, I think they can probably complement each other. So having the one in Istanbul first, we see what you can bring to Berlin out of that conversation. Yeah, exactly. Well, outside of Bitcoin++ Berlin, if anybody's traveling through town,

interested in getting involved in Bitcoin events, where should we send them? There's a meetup page called Bitcoin Lab Berlin, and this doesn't really mean anything other than that's the name of the meetup but pretty much everything going on in town is on there. We have a Socratic Bitdefs that's been going on for six years now. So every every month there's a Bitdefs and we have several monthly meetups. So one of them is actually and if I mean unless somebody proves the opposite but it's the

longest running Bitcoin meetup in the world. It's been running since... I think Tampa Bay may have some... It's since summer 2011. They claim 2014, so if it's 2011, it's longer running. I think like New Hampshire might be up there, but I don't think the meetup doesn't exist anymore, or at least the one that like was running since... I think that was like Porkfest, Tangential. Yeah, maybe something like that. So that's still going strong. That was happening at room 77 for the longest time and then we moved locations

and now have another great place also that like a restaurant that runs their own node and accepts Bitcoin payments and like it's a community kind of hotspot for and and then there's like different small events

depending on the time but it's always a good hub especially during summer like from Easter to October it's a good time. So BTC++ October, the weather's probably going to be nice and then it only gets shitty in November so it's still a good time to come and

check it out and there's always people there that are up for like chat or so yeah, especially since a bunch of people are also traveling through town the whole time so you usually meet somebody. So come on over, say hi if you're in town.

What week is it in October? It's going to be the second, third and fourth. So first week of October I think it's right after Oktoberfest if you're planning a trip to Germany. Oh, yeah. I think, yeah. Is it the last weekend or is it over the weekend before? I think, I don't know, but I think it's just right. I think Oktoberfest happens like just right before it and then our conference.

Because Oktoberfest is usually over by October. Yeah. You're asking for a very low energy first day at the conference if you're telling people to go to Oktoberfest. Okay, yeah. I'm kidding. Go enjoy it. Lisa, Jeff. Lisa, thank you for throwing this conference, for having us.

Jeff, looking forward to Berlin. I will not be able to make it, unfortunately. My wife is pregnant, and the child is due around then. Well, all the best to you, then. Thank you. Thank you. But I will be watching the live stream. Yeah, let's go.

Sounds good. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Cody. Thank you, guys. Thanks. I think we have Matt Corallo. I think we have Matt Corallo coming on.

Matt Corallo, one of the most tenured TFTC guests, I think he's been on six or seven times now at this point. One of the first guests ever. We crushed a six pack of IPAs back in 2017 talking about Bitcoin. I don't think I've ever told you this, but I think you were the one who helped me learn the most about Bitcoin is being at BitDevs in New York for many years between 2015 and 2017. You can't blame me for that. You've got to blame

our wonderful host of, former host of BitDevs New York now, Jay. Former? Oh yeah, he moved to the Bay Area. Oh yes, I did hear this. He's now running local host research. There's like a whole new Bitcoin development and research lab in the Bay Area that he's running now.

Shout out to Jay. Incredible person, ran an incredible meetup. New York BitDevs. Guy knows how to run a community. Yeah, he does. He really does. New York Pitt Test has a special place in my heart. Yeah. We've been belaboring the opera turn talk. If you want to get, like, 30 seconds in on it,

I don't think we need to cover it anymore. I doubt there's anything new I can say on it. I think there's not much new that anyone has said on it in 10 years. Yeah, I think we've gotten the perspective of raise the limit pretty much nailed down today. I think we'll have Mechanic on later to keep the filters. yeah it's just it's been it's been going for for years yeah but let's talk about join us i don't know hey hey good we haven't started yet i mean we kind of started sorry i

actually missed yesterday i was like scheduled for you guys and then i was talking to bob and time just it's all time flies we we have a schedule yeah for the schedule interviews This year, but it's not being followed well, but we're doing a good job of just pulling people out of the hallway and into the live stream. But I was going to ask you, where is LDK? What's the latest there?

Yeah, we think it's going to be a big year for LDK and for non-custodial lending in general. We're very optimistic about splicing and also mostly zero fee commitment transactions. So being able to use the truck feature in the new Bitcoin Core release, the last release I believe it came out in for Lightning is going to be

a pretty big UX unlock and so taking advantage of that and then some other work that we haven't announced yet that we're pretty excited about. So we hired Ben the car man last week or so. He joined our team so we're really excited for what we're going to ship this year.

Are you worried that he's too focused on OpReturn bot right now? Eh, you know the drama will subside a little bit You know, he's been known to get shoot off the street many times. But I know you're not used to hearing me say I'm excited about something. But I know for once I am. I mean, I'm not going to ask you what your probability of Bitcoin success is.

That's the ultimate question. But no, speaking of splicing, I had Dusty Damon on yesterday talking about it, and I think it's a really underappreciated concept or just tool in Bitcoin right now that if implemented widely would be incredibly beneficial to the network. Yeah, I mean, it is fairly useful. You know, it's a big deal for non-custodial Lightning. For a custodial Lightning node, it's helpful,

but you can also just open another channel. If you're a big routing node or whatever, you can just open another channel. Splicing allows you to route slightly larger payments, but there's not a lot of those in Lightning to begin with. But for a non-custodial Lightning node... How would you define a slightly larger payment? Well, it depends on which part of the network you're looking at.

You know, the really large routing nodes, you know, you're talking about like a one Bitcoin payment, right? Like a really large, for Lightning, really large payment. Whereas for a non-custodial node, splicing makes a fairly large difference, right? So this is why you saw like Phoenix adopted very early. And it really addresses a lot of important UX challenges that we've had with Lightning for a long time.

junglee any thoughts on this particularly i mean whatever work you guys are doing on lightning a lot of the stuff is so complicated that if you're not living and breathing it day in day out it becomes even hard to follow but whatever's been done i mean we all need lightning to just work especially the non-custodial one you know so whatever's been happening is kudos i mean seriously it's very hard you read up you you understand you okay this is cool you go away for month, come back, what was that going on there? I'm just honest there, you know? Yeah, no, it is. There's a lot of depth to

Lightning. That's definitely true. And it's a huge amount of resources like on the LDK team but also you look at Phoenix, Core Lightning, L&D, the amount of man hours that have gone into building these things is huge and continues

to be huge. You know, as we add more and more features it just becomes totally impractical for anyone to build a new Lightning implementation that supports all this stuff. I mean, a recurring theme of the discussion the last two days, particularly when Lightning comes up, is its role as this somewhat connective tissue of many different second-layer solutions like eCash are coming to market. Curious to get your thoughts on that. we were talking about multi-nup payments right before you came on and this idea of maybe onboarding a user to a custodial e-cash mint

to build up a balance that makes sense to create a lightning channel with and using the lightning gateways that exist in these e-cash protocols to facilitate that. Yeah, I mean, it definitely means this is a problem that we've seen, especially outside of Bitcoin, actually, in the crypto world. you look at like ethereum payments ux ethereum transfer it's trash it's really really bad because they have this fragmented marketplace it's like okay i want to pay in usdc and i have usdc on this second layer roll up but i want to the merchant only takes the payment on this second

layer roll up so now i have to do this thing in my wallet that i don't understand and like yada yada it's it's really awful um and lightning is actually addressing that in a big way for bitcoin is like we can have a common language for here's how you make a payment and all the wallets can support that. And, you know, it'd be nice if all wallets supported Lightning and not just on-chain,

but like we can have a fairly common single thing in spite of whatever technology you're using underneath, we can have one, just this is how you pay and all the wallets support that and payments just go through and you don't have to think about it as a user. And it's a huge UX win. I mean, I really can't,

you really can't overstate how important that is for the Bitcoin transfer user experience. Yeah, tying this into like Bitcoin mining and the centralization issues that exist at the pool layer now. We talked to the hash pool guys yesterday, and I think this implementation of e-cash and the ability to, as a miner, get e-hash tokens as you're sending shares to the pool

and then immediately sell them for Bitcoin to somebody who wants to take the luck risk using the Lightning Network. So I actually had some follow-up questions, and it's very related to what you were asking as well, right? Because remember in P2Pool, we want to do the swap and stuff. But then the issue is, I think it's only C-Lightning that still supports LTC as well, right? If you want to. And LND took it out, right?

Supports what, sorry? Litecoin, right? Oh, Litecoin, yeah. To be able to run a Lightning node that does two chains, for example, right? So if E-Hash comes along, that's a question for the Mints too. they support multiple assets right how can we do that i know i know lightning doesn't want to do that you want to do lightning natively on top of the p2 pool share chain yeah yeah that's a good question yeah i don't know um yeah i mean the litecoin stuff got taken out just because nobody

i mean it doesn't it well it also just doesn't exist like there's no nodes and there's like one node left on the litecoin network so it doesn't matter um but yeah on the on the p2 pool share chain you're right that's a that's an interesting question i mean you don't need it to do these swamps right so i mean i guess maybe you want to explain briefly to people what what we're even talking about so this is all this is all matt's fault i was trying to kind of figure out what i want to do with uh you know with braid pool seeming very complicated to me i was thinking let's build something simpler get something shipped so that we can get people to start contributing and get something out there so i came up with this idea which was like all federations and stuff and matt

caught on to me was like what is this nonsense so i tried to explain it to him but then he said hey listen to this idea instead and matt had been talking about this idea for a while it's just that it took me ages to grok so it's probably best you explain it i'm sure the payout mechanism so i mean this wasn't this was i don't know whose idea this really was because it was really bob trying to explain braid pool to me and me misunderstanding what bob was saying and concluding that he meant this other thing and i like this other thing that i thought bob was trying to explain to me and But the idea was really just, I mean, you have this P2 pool thing, right, which is really a kind of, it's a merged mine chain on top of Bitcoin, but it's really a pool for miners to do payout to split reward, reward split, and you mine shares, and shares are, in fact, blocks in this merged mine blockchain. Blocks and tokens.

and blocks create basically tokens in this merged mine blockchains which are our shares you know which are shares that will get future payouts when the pool mines a block um and what i thought bob's idea was for braid was okay well you you take that design which is great and then you extend it by making the blocks go faster so you use a technology called braids to make the blocks go faster which is also good which addresses some important issues with p2 pool where there was just too high variance and then on top of that you say okay well we have these shares what if we just let people trade these shares like treat them like a currency and you can say okay i want to sell you my share i only have one share in this this blockchain in this pool and it's maybe going to get a payout

its payout is going to be super low it's not worth trying to receive the payout on chain on bitcoin for this so instead i'm going to go to somebody and i'm going to say hey market maker i want to sell you my share and we're going to do an atomic swap on lightning you're going to pay me bitcoin you're going to take some some variance risk so you're going to take some risk i'm probably going to pay you for the service um but there can be an open marketplace for this you know many market player market uh participants market makers can can participate and make this market and compete and this can allow people to to mine on a smaller level on this kind of p2 pool design while still getting paid out in Bitcoin by these market makers.

And this has been a long-running problem that many in the mining space have attempted to solve, not only the, like, Peterpool and Braid specifically, but the idea of, like, hash rate futures or payout futures. I mean, those instruments, at the end of the day, you need some financial engineering wizards to come on board, right? It's a two-sided market problem. Historically, you have, like, Bidded is OTC desk,

where it's very chunky, they're finding one large investor with one miner to sell a block of hash, where in these models, whether it's P2Pool, GradePool, or HashPool, you have this many-to-many opportunity because you can get the granularity of the shares and then trade them on an open market. That's what I like with this mechanism in P2Pool is that there is a market, even if it's not a futures market.

You're just buying shares to get Bitcoin at a discount because the other side is taking a risk. Well, it would technically be a futures market. It could easily be a future delivery of Bitcoin, kind of. Yeah, exactly. But the good thing is it leaves that out of our work at the moment, right? We just do the engineering first. Then someone else can come along and do the financial engineering.

And someone will do, I mean, you know, at some price, someone will always do this, right? Yeah, it's not even like complex financial engineering. It's just literally creating an order book for people to buy. And it's the same thing that all the pools already do with PPS, right? It's just, you're basically offering PPS as a service and you get to decide what fee are you charged and there's an open marketplace now. So you, you disintermediate this, like the pool that you use, who's doing all this other technical work that you have, you know, all this counterparty risk and, and whatever.

So you're picking that. There's like a lot of, uh, centralization pressure around that. Like you just, a lot of economy of scale, you know, you have to build a trusted brand and yada, yada. Whereas now it's like, okay, well I'm just mining on this open network and who offers me the best FPPS rate, right now, I can just go to whoever's offering the best rate on like an instantaneous market basis. So it totally disintermediates that part of the pool, which I think is kind of cool.

Absolutely. There's not one centralized entity controlling this stuff. It's not kind of cool. It's like revolutionary for the dynamics of the mining pool layer. I think it's desperately needed. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go build it.

Let's go build it. Yeah. I've got a bone to pick with you. Yeah. you ninja launched the threat of a pow change on my podcast last year yeah any has your feelings about that evolved at all um i am still very disappointed in the mining ecosystem and like the lack of accepting that this is a major problem for bitcoin but i have seen a lot of movement since that, kind of in the last year and a half

or however long it's been, I have seen a good bit of movement on the pool side and on some miners starting to say, like, this is a problem. We really want to use Stratum V2. We want these kinds of cooler technologies. And I do appreciate that, that, you know, these things move slowly.

Like, I obviously accept that things aren't going to move quickly. Having pools redo a lot of their architecture is not going to move quickly. um and so the fact that there is some movement happening in the background right now that you know hopefully will come to the surface and and uh become a larger part of the mining ecosystem in the future i'm really happy about um but you know obviously if if that doesn't then it's still like i mean this is like a failure of bitcoin right if it doesn't happen so i'm i'm hoping it

does i'm hoping miners adopt i mean hoping p2 pull v2 gets built some miners adopt that some miners adopt stratum v2 you know depending on what their business needs are i think they're complementary technologies i don't think they really compete because they're they're just different pools and different miners are going to have different needs um and we're stealing a lot of the work from stratum reference implementation anyway right right right so we're just using as much components as we can why write code when somebody else has written it right right right it's always fascinating i think timing is extremely important in bitcoin and i think the timing is ripe due to the combination of the technologies that exist lightning's at a certain stage of

maturation uh e-cash is out and we're thought about like the how to tokenize these shares and get them into people's hands like you just need a market that is extremely liquid for the miners that may not be able to meet a threshold of payouts in a timely matter for them yeah yeah No, I mean, it's all, it is very exciting in terms of, I feel like, you know, Bitcoin is always a slow burn on the engineering side, but it does seem like there's a lot that's kind of coming to fruition all at once right now. Again, you know, like you mentioned maturation of lightning, but also a lot of these mining technologies like SRI is getting to a point where it's like, okay, this is real. You can totally use this, you know, pools can totally integrate this. It needs some tweaking here or there, but we'll find bugs as it gets integrated, obviously,

but it works. It's there. It's an option. It's a real option. And then stuff like P2Pool v2 getting off the ground, it does seem like there's a lot of technology coming out. This sort of bull market we've been in, this sideways bull market,

has not been super negative for technology. I'm used to the bull markets being like, nothing ever gets built in the bull markets. You wait until the bear markets, but this time it seems like there's still builders. So by definition, this is not a bull market. Right, right. By definition, this is not actually a bull market.

Although, I mean, we hit 100K today, so I mean, we're... The price is right over your head, Junglee. We're at 101, 369. 101, yeah, there you go. 101, awesome. But I mean, just to add to what Matt is saying, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that has been built that we are now able to use,

which was not true five years ago, like Rust Bitcoin, right? PDK, LDK, all this stuff just exists. It's just some awesome work that has been pushed out over a long grind over the last few years that makes building new stuff, experimenting with it easier.

I think that's awesome. Going back to timing too, I think now more than ever, particularly at the mining pool layer, it's important to get these distributed, more decentralized models out there as nation states start to get in the mining game. I think Bhutan came out.

Everybody's been celebrating them for years and they came out and said, you need an official government license to mine Bitcoin. within their kingdom. Yeah, the Bhutan is very controlled, for sure. Yeah, and obviously the Trump family is starting a mining company. Oh, aren't they now?

Yeah. Oh, boy. American Bitcoin, what's it called? Okay, all right, hey, I mean. Is that news from today? Better, honestly, better that than they issue some coins, some tokens. I prefer they do some mining.

They're going to do it all. Yeah, maybe they'll be a little focused on mining for a minute. They're having fun with their crypto. Yeah, all right. They're having fun with their crypto. Marks and I were actually joking earlier. You opened for Trump in Nashville last year, and it was a very stark dichotomy of speeches slightly that scheduling was a little interesting

i did not ask for that slot they gave me that slot there i did i did ask for a main stage slot i was like i think this is important i want to do it on the main stage and they were gracious enough to to make room for me because that was tough last year but they were like no no no we're gonna put you right before trump okay well i'll give the talk i want to give i don't know that you're gonna you know it's gonna come through with the audience but uh you know that's what That's what the replay is for on YouTube. Yeah, that's fair. That's for the people who actually want to listen to it.

Gentlemen, this has been great. Any final parting thoughts on things people should be focused on or work that you're doing that you could use help with and people should be paying attention to? Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. We need hands-on. I mean, I've got a project plan on my GitHub repo. Please come take a look.

You know, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done. What's your link? What's your name on that? Look for P2Pool V2 on GitHub, and you'll find it. Yeah. don't sleep on non-custodial lightning a lot of people sleeping a lot of people have given up on it don't sleep on it who's doing it coming back phoenix right now phoenix but at the end of the year it's going to be a new project by ben the car man is this an announcement of an announcement

this is an announcement of an announcement yeah yeah i know i was told i wasn't supposed to do that don't get your hopes up people our pr guy was like we can't announce an announcement but Now here I am doing it. But look, Matt's optimistic. Yeah, I'm optimistic for once. There's something there. This is the TFTC news desk. We get you the alpha that you didn't know you need.

An announcement of an announcement. Right, right. Matt Chungley, thank you guys so much. Thanks a lot. Thanks, buddy. Now you've got to talk right into them. And we're back. Bitcoin Plus Plus Day 2.

Mempool Edition. Bitcoin Mechanic. Hello. And this is... Cool, your first name? Jason Hughes. With Jason, yes. I noticed you have a nim on there too

I didn't know if you wanted to roll with that but I caught the first debate last night it was really a debate panel discussion about op returns and everything that's happening you're obviously very on the front lines

of this discussion going on let's hear from your perspective we've had a lot of perspectives from the let's raise the limit part of the argument today Not much on, let's not do that. That's disappointing in itself. Yeah, I mean, it's just rolling out the red carpet, let's be honest,

for people that want to do Ethereum things, namely Ethereum on Bitcoin. And it's got this sort of lame technical excuse that op return is a bit better than creating some UTXO bloat. And this is the edge case of this whole Citria thing. It's very, very unlikely to cause any sort of significant damage if you just leave things as they are. Being wrapped up into this think of the children kind of argument that's completely implausible coming from people

that watched the UTXO set go from 4 gigabyte to 12 gigabyte in two years without any concern. And any attempt to do anything about that was... Core weren't calling it censorship and stuff. Peter Todd was, but he's not Core exactly. Core were just like, look, this is too controversial. We're not going to touch it. And I bought that.

I was like, fair enough. Core can't be merging stuff that's, like, super controversial. And then this one, though, we wanted a new filter, right? We wanted to upgrade a filter. And then what's going on now is they want to get rid of an existing one with this very, very wanting explanation of, oh, it will stop a bit of UTXO bloat, and filters don't really work anyway,

so just let us get rid of them, and please don't complain too much. I mean, solution in search of a problem. Right. And really, it's pretty obvious what's going on and where the motivation for this change comes from. And it just doesn't fit. It violates all the ideology of what's going on here. I don't have to participate in scammers storing stuff on-chain.

I don't have to do it. Or not even scammers, like people with the most wonderful use case for storing arbitrary data on Bitcoin, whatever. If Julian Assange wants to put WikiLeaks stuff on Bitcoin, I'm going to go, can you please not do that? Even if it's the best thing ever. just so you know it's not about the content that just adds insult to injury when it's all nfts and

scams and all that i'm like well this that's kind of a distraction yeah it's it's an insult to injury but it's not the problem it's just bitcoin's money if you keep using it for other stuff then it degrades it and i saw you actually quoted me saying something to that effect yesterday yeah yeah there's been a and it's hard too like as an outside not an outsider i'm a bitcoin user invest in companies in the space and it is tough too because like how do we delineate between what one person may deem to be a not optimal use of block space versus what is allowed with consensus rules i think part of the problem is there there's a difference between what can already be done and exploits that are

are happening like the inscription things like these things are happening and that's through inaction that these things are happening well if we explicitly remove this limit that is an action we are taking to encourage this behavior now i want bitcoin to be bitcoin we shouldn't be encouraging it not to be bitcoin we should be going the opposite direction on that it seems there's one thing to not act it's one thing to not do something like when they didn't merge luke's pr to filter the inscriptions that was inaction you need to have some level of courage and ability to do so to to fight something like that and i understand why it didn't happen but this is the opposite this is just throwing the door open and actively encouraging it which

is going to make matters a thousand times worse anybody that says otherwise just hasn't they can't see the forest for the trees they're looking they're looking right here and not looking down the road 10 feet yeah the context matters and it keeps getting put down into this tiny framing of like well isn't it strictly better if they need 90 bytes of op return isn't that strictly better than them bloating the utxo set yes that's correct but you have to ignore the political context and the ramifications and all that stuff and be so naive to pretend it's just about that one thing yeah that was the one question i didn't get to ask last night after the panel discussion that popped into my mind and i asked it earlier today but interested to get your thoughts on this

like they're like i don't know if i'm going to characterize this right but it seems like by releasing the limit they're maybe making assumptions that some of the projects that would benefit from this are actually going to find product market fit and i think the wave of inscriptions and the jpegs i think it's clear to me at least that it went on like a pretty big hype cycle that died down pretty significantly in terms of like the value of the tokens but a lot of that stuff does i mean that's every scam coin that's been out since you could clone bitcoin i mean pretty much everything has gone up a little bit down i mean it's just like it's it's got some hype behind it and it disappears i mean how many how many alt coins have been made it's since

probably the millions now yeah and how many how many do you know about i guess is the question everybody knows about bitcoin and let's keep it that way and it's just how much um bitcoin is a database they say but it's not just a coincidence that 99.9 percent of the stuff in that database is people doing transactions like monetary transactions that's not a coincidence of like oh people just found that more useful that's a reflection of how it was designed to actually permit that if blocks were five gigabytes in size it would be really different it would be used for other kinds of things people would be trying to make like youtube substitutes and stuff and be pretending it was decentralized, even though you could only really run a node if you were

Googling that kind of network anyway, making it pointless. But that was the Craig Wright BSV thing, right? We don't care about any nodes except mining nodes and piss off if you're not one of them, which was the worst part about all of yesterday for me when I said, despite being where I am in this whole war, I don't want to see a bunch of people move away from Bitcoin core because it's not traditional FOSS. If we have a bunch of different competing implementations, you're just going to see network downtime and that's going to make us lose all our credibility. And the response wasn't, yeah, that's a concern. It was, we don't give a shit because they're not mining nodes, which is exactly what Craig Wright used to say. The nodes

don't matter unless they're mining nodes. Otherwise they're irrelevant and piss off. And that exact same disregard for what you can do with a node that isn't just mining and constructing templates is relevant to how the network gets used and the direction in which things go. So, yeah, I mean, I just find that disgraceful. There's no other word for it. Has the last two days been productive at all

in terms of meeting people in person? It's been productive. Getting a better perspective of the other side of the argument. I think getting one-on-one and face-to-face with certain people on the topic does help get the perspective across in a different way. There's only so much you can do on Twitter. There's only so much you can do in a GitHub pull request post. But when you get somebody face-to-face, you can actually talk to them. And most of the people that I've talked to that either didn't understand or were slightly on the wrong side, they understand it better now.

And even if they then decide not to go in the direction that I would like them to, I would rather them have the information and be able to make that choice. And that's part of this whole debate is kind of taking away that choice. Yeah. And, like, is filtering the optimal solution for getting this out? This is a thought that's been in my mind last week. Like, does something more drastic? I saw Warren Tagome was suggesting on Twitter that you should just basically increase the cost per V-byte of UTXOs below a certain threshold.

Did you see this? I did not, so I don't know if I could speak to it. Warren has always his own, he's his own guy, and he has some interesting ideas. I saw it, but I haven't thought about the implications of it yet. I think filtering is a great solution. It's got historical precedent, right? And the nodes run the network, which is the elegant part of it. if you're using filters to do it rather than you know they operate at the mempool level that is

just the resignation that's going on which is if miners want to do it they get to do it and this is so defeatist and such an inversion of the the the employee owner aspect of bitcoin the nodes are always supposed to be the owners and the boss of the network and that's established with it's not just a consensus yeah safety is described miners as the slaves of the network before i wouldn't call them slaves i'd just call them employees i don't see anything wrong with that they get paid well yeah my favorite analogy for it was winter cools from years ago about them being security guards and the block size walls was them saying we're going to be a security guard for another product and it's up to you to pivot we're saying look we're just going to hire other

security if you do that like this is our thing this is our company and i mean you have that being at the moment i mean there's all sorts of reminiscence like throwbacks to that era of the dynamic just flipping upside down on its head and people being like spammers want to put it in the chain miners want to get paid to do that i'm like yes and now they're trying to force someone to be a middleman to facilitate that against their own interest and i asked repeatedly what what incentive do i have as a node to relay a jpeg from a scammer to a mining pool can someone please explain what that incentive is and there's like 50 terrible reasons they give like your fee estimation is gonna suck they're not real reasons no they're not so at the end of the day i invoke

property rights it's my mempool and you can keep telling me that the spam can end up in the chain anyway no matter what i do it doesn't matter i'm not going to be the guy that's you know putting a safety belt in a car and being like well there's no point because car accidents still happen and people still die so it's pointless i just that argument doesn't work in any other context bad things happen so just give up trying to ever like not be a part of it like there's no incentive for me to be a part of it so the default is if you're real if you want to transmit crap around the network i don't want to be a part of it all it's going to do is make my transaction fees more expensive anyway so why would i participate in this it only hurts me no and you're right and

there's no good answer there there's answers that people are trying to gaslight into reality i mean that that's politics that's kind of how that that side of it goes and we're kidding ourselves if we say this isn't at least partly a political thing but on the technical side i mean you got to think the miners are the gatekeepers of the blockchain not the gatekeepers of the mempool or your mempool they they are there to facilitate getting transactions into blocks for like bitcoin transactions for me to send money from for me to you like that should end up in a block because i should have paid a miner to do that and that is what bitcoin is for if the miners want what they are mining and being paid to do that in the form of the subsidy or in the form of the fee that

i give them if they want that to be worth something then there has to be demand for what they have in form of that subsidy or bitcoin and when bitcoin isn't money anymore what is that value if the if bitcoin all it is is data storage and you no longer have a need for me to send bitcoin for me to you because why we either can't use it or don't want to at this point what what value is bitcoin after that and i think that's again looking a mile down the road instead of 10 inches down the road Yeah, we had Antoine Passant earlier this morning, and he was describing the way he's viewing this, which is like, this is going to happen.

It seems pretty obvious to me as a protocol developer that these app developers do not care about messing up the main chain, and they're going to do it anyway, so let's provide them a way to do it more efficiently. Well, so, I mean, I don't know if you watched Luke and I's quick talk about the policy history stuff this morning, And I guess people that are watching this can rewind and see that at some point. But we kind of described, like, there's reasons that these things exist.

There's a reason that the consensus layer is much less strict than the policy layer, because we trust that miners are going to work in the interest of the network. They are the gatekeepers. That is their job. And if something happens to where we need to react quickly to a problem, the miners are the first line of defense not the first line of let ever let everything happen not the first line of well we have to worry about what the miners want like no the miners are there to facilitate bitcoin and when we talk about policies like filtering spam and things that's their job their job is to make sure that bitcoin is usable as bitcoin not as anything else if

somebody's able to use it for something else within those boundaries without causing a problem i mean that is what it is maybe we can detect it maybe we can't and maybe it doesn't hurt anything maybe it does but this obviously isn't it and swinging the door wide open and firing some of the security guards that are in place just doesn't make any sense there there's one again there's one thing to have in action and things happen and that we that are difficult to deal with it's another to make them happen and we're currently trying to do the latter with what the changes are i've been seeing it like a newfound appreciation for crypto because it was like biblical analogy you have the money changes in the temple we basically made a second awful temple and we're like you guys can

just be there and that was crypto and it kept the bitcoin temple fine right people are going to cringe at this analogy because it's biblical so what's going on in core at the moment is the money changes came into our temple and we and now we walk in one day and they're like cutting a new hole in the side of it to be like yeah this is a new door for the money changes we're like what are you doing that for we don't want these people here we're supposed to be chasing them out and ironically the whole bitcoin knots concept is jesus with the knotted whip right chasing them out so there's a that's a beautiful fact that knots has become like the tool to fight back against this stuff given what it's named after well i always like the uh the biblical analogy

of tower of babel in crypto where you just have like many competing languages where nobody can understand anything. And I think that could maybe apply to this situation too, where you're introducing. I think what's even more interesting with the not side of things is knots isn't there to tell you what to do. The whole point of the configurability of knots is if you want this stuff, you could have already set that and in an even looser way than core is going now, if that's what the users wanted. What is the problem with having a sane default for mining. And if you can convince a miner, okay, well, I mean, that's what happens. People can be bribed. That small proportion of bad actors that let things in that shouldn't be in

that are Bitcoin doesn't change that the majority of miners and nodes and everything are acting in Bitcoin's best interest. We don't want to change that dynamic by making Bitcoin something it's not and inviting Bitcoin to be something that it's not. It's the invitation that's the problem. It's not the technical issue that's the problem bitcoin as a technical project could probably potentially survive an onslaught of arbitrary data it has in the form of the inscriptions this is a little different i won't get into the weeds of that but it could as a technical thing this may may not be as huge of a problem but from the perspective of it like actually causing problems for the rest of the network that's a problem and basically sending the signal like

Hey, all of this stuff that we, that everybody kind of objected to is now welcome. We are, we are welcoming whatever you want to do to Bitcoin and just go ahead. We don't care. That's the wrong message. That's the wrong message. It was fascinating. Even last night on the panel discussion, I think Jameson asked like who wants to see JPEGs on the blockchain and Peter Todd raises his hand. I think it was sarcastically, but it's just like, it's just like nobody wants it.

It's like the weird spot. I did ask him straight up, like, during, I think it was that debate or one of the debates, like, if there were a solution to it, would he adopt it? And he said yes. So, that just baffles me even more that, like, okay, we have an okay solution to this already in place. Like, we do nothing and it's okay. We do this, it definitely gets worse. Like, objectively worse. There's no way to spin this in a way that says this is going to make things better for anybody.

It makes things better for the people who don't really use Bitcoin. That's not Bitcoiners by definition. We're not doing this for Bitcoin. We're not doing this for Bitcoiners. We're doing this for everything else. Why is Bitcoin, why is the reference implementation of Bitcoin focusing on everything but Bitcoin? Yeah, and there's also a problem of minor income.

Miners need to be our, not slaves, but they do need to be our employees. And if your employees are doing side gigs and get money from someone that isn't you, they're less incentivized to do what it is you want. And you're less able to get rid of them because they carry on occupying the same territory by someone else. And this comes in all over the place. There's ultimately just the flaw that miners do actually need to care about Bitcoin. And sometimes that will result in them earning less money than they otherwise might. And everyone's allergic to that being true. But it's for fact, if you have a situation where miners now where they're not allowed in some circumstances to mine, they're not allowed to create their own templates and get unpredictable payouts and stuff.

They have to use FPPS and products like the way Foundry wrap things up because otherwise they have to pay twice the amount of tax. That's how it works in Canada. There's two taxes, a sales tax and something else. If you mine Bitcoin because you're acting as some sort of financial middleman as well and you have to pay tax to being that kind of service provider. Government is basically saying, we'll give you a 15% cut, actually a 50% discount on your tax because it's 15% instead of 30. If you don't actually mine Bitcoin yourself and get someone else to make templates for you. Are you going to sit here and be like, well, they earn more money, so it's fine. And Bitcoin can't ever have any sort of issues if people do stuff like this.

That's not good if they're doing it. That's miners being deputized by the state. And it's not spammers coming along and giving them a side gig in that effect, too. Any ability they have to earn money that isn't doing what Bitcoiners want them to do works against our interest. And if it ever becomes dominant, like maybe four or five halvings from now, when like actually, let's just say worst case scenario, it's all just arbitrary data in the chain and there's barely any subsidy. Miners are being paid by arbitrary data storage seekers who are trying to take advantage of the fact that there's this ghost town network of people who run nodes and actually store this absolute crap

that is just going to completely diminish. And then the whole thing keels over when it's like, well, we don't want the block space because only 10 people store this stuff now. It's just like every shit coin. There's just no network anymore. The question about miners is, let's look at the short-sighted version of this. Let's say tomorrow somebody went to a miner and paid them $100 million to mine a block that breaks Bitcoin. Like, grinds the network to a halt, it's dead for weeks or days because of this, and we need to upgrade everything.

Would everyone consider that a bad thing that the miner did that? Nope. They're economically incentivized to do it, so they did it. I think realistically most Bitcoiners would think that's a problem. But that's the other side of this. Most Bitcoiners thought OFAC compliance was a problem, right? Well, true. The reason Mara would have done OFAC compliance is because their lawyers would have said, look, it might lose us a couple of transactions, but it will save you millions of dollars in legal fees.

It's some compliance we can do in advance that might save us money. So they financially incentivized us to work against Bitcoin. We didn't care. We were like, stop doing that. But they're still mining and Bitcoin is still functioning. In this scenario, let's say they mine a block. they get a one-time payment from some bad actor that is the sum of all payments of all bad actors over time and bitcoin dies i feel like that would be a bad thing if that were to happen and most

bitcoiners would would say the same now how is that not a bad thing when that just happens over an extended period of time which is what we're cultivating now because boiled frog syndrome there there's the thing we a lot of people just don't recognize how detrimental this is to bitcoin and it's the same problem we're either they're either getting the money now or they're getting later but they're still bad actors for the for what they're doing i think everybody can agree that if a miner killed bitcoin tomorrow in some way with some unknown issue that they pulled it off as a miner everyone every bitcoiner would think that's a problem and but not everybody realizes that that is the problem we are facing by embracing this change and this arbitrary data

inclusion stuff that's what it does and that's proven to be what it's done everywhere else yeah Yeah, going back to what I said earlier, it doesn't seem like there's really a strong staying product market fit. It's like waves. There's people trying. It seems like there's a diminishing marginal return on the shit coinery on top of Bitcoin. If you want to think of a way like a state actor could just think adversarially here and disrupt the network. It's just like use printed money to just keep doing this. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely ways to cause havoc.

I mean, we've seen some of them over the years. I mean, I've been around a long time in Bitcoin. I mean, I don't know if many people have talked about it already, but I used to run the Elegious Mining Pool with Luke back in, like, 2011. So, I mean, I've been around a while. I've seen a lot of the problems happen and be fixed quickly in the ways that just would not happen today. It's a totally different landscape on the developer side. And the mining side, there's just not – people just don't want to fix things. They want to break things.

That's literally what this does. and i i just don't i don't know how how to get that point across any anymore it's well they just keep gaslighting us and saying it's already broken so let us break it that's what that is the argument i mean well kind of it's it's an argument i don't think it's a very good one to just keep working on the same thing i'd like to get a way to get it across to people no to steel man there's like bring it back to like warren's like that's what like again like the opera turn limit is the focus now, but what I've been trying to think of the last week, is there something beyond that release in the limit that needs to happen to disincentivize this activity

and make it somewhat economically infeasible? Part of the problem is, what's going to end up happening is, let's say this gets merged. Not a lot of people are going to immediately use it, because this is a solution in search of a problem. This is not something that needs to happen, because there's already ways that the people that are cramming arbitrary data in are doing so at a discounted rate that anybody can use right now

because of the inaction of developers now. If we change this, the narrative is going to flip to, see, we did this. It's not that bad. But that's because we never fixed the original problems. And now our action is exaggerating the inaction to push a narrative that this is a good thing, Whereas once that is embraced and sends the signal and that signal gets across to the people and that are bad actors

It's going to be a problem for Bitcoin errs and Bitcoin. I Don't I don't know how else to make that clear and I'm happy to chat with whoever about it. Well on that point like What do you both think is the best course of action or what would you like to see happen moving forward? I would like to see core stop doing what they're trying to do. I would like them to Say that your mempool is part of your sovereign territory and it is what makes you a Bitcoiner and it's fine to have that kind of, we call them first class Bitcoin citizens, right?

Like if you're using a third party node. You can put up a stay off my lawn sign. I don't even want all that. I just want them to apply the same standard they did to Luke's PR. This is too controversial, close it. Yeah, that would be appropriate. That would just be consistent, be consistent in it.

This is obviously a problem. not everybody agrees to it the the community as a whole of users as they learn what this does to the system they reject it pretty pretty readily like everyone that this has been explained to that that i know of it has is probably leaning towards i wouldn't do this and there's different levels of understanding of that and you have to get them to the point where they can make that decision that's not been done there's and it doesn't seem like the people pushing this care if that's done or not because for you forget that like bitcoin is based on the users it's not it's not the miners it's not the exchanges it's not that well the exchanges are kind of users but

it's not like any individual entity that controls this that's great that's why it's bitcoin um we need to stick with what the users want and if the users are divided on this and the controversial thing is well we're not going to do it as is precedent stick with the precedent Why can't we at least do that? I'm not even asking for them to make statements that are saying the mempool is sovereign or anything. Just don't break things further. And they did the PR two years ago, and it got kicked out, right?

Like, come back in two years if you want. There isn't actually a massive, urgent need for it. So appeals to UTXO set bloat, again, is it's like a killer by a year. If stuff keeps going wrong with Citra, and they keep having to go into their failure mode. But here's the thing. if they get it through it will be everyone else that wants to use it too so i mean if it's under

150 bytes op return is a bit cheaper than fake pub key outs and it doesn't get to use the the witness discount to the point where it becomes financially advantageous the jpeg is never going to use op return probably actually you have some reasons on why they actually definitely would that's a whole other talk yeah that's awful that's a whole other talk but um but i mean right now the current people that are stuffing large amounts of data into the chain would have no real incentive to use op return it's four times more expensive beyond about 150 160 bytes so okay thanks developers i'm not going to touch this which again goes back to my point they're going to use that as proof that this isn't harmful in the extreme short term and again like you said boiling frog syndrome

we need to we need to get ahead of this we can see around this corner immediately like it's obvious what this does and it's it's obvious what its intention is why aren't we using that knowledge of being able to see around one of the very few corners in this particular space that we can see around and then being like oh hang on maybe we shouldn't do that i don't know where that where the heads are of some of the people i don't know how to get them there i feel like i have pretty sound arguments that make sense but here we are yeah i want to be cognizant of your time i know I know, I'm looking at it, so I'm going to have to leave in just a moment. Okay.

Yeah, it's so discombobulating almost, because I've had plenty of conversations with many developers throughout the years, but still, I think I learned particularly championing Taproot and Segwit and seeing the unforeseen consequences that getting both those soft forks merged led to. Now I'm just not as comfortable. It seems like a lot of people. How long have you been in Bitcoin, let's say? 12 years now.

Okay, so you've been around a while. Did you keep track of a lot of the policy changes and things back in the day and kind of like how quickly the miners and things reacted to some of these issues that popped up like in, let's call it like 2013, 2014, somewhere in there? Probably a little early for me to be cognizant of that. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, but that was the thing.

Like we had issues with attacks on the network way back in the day. And again, I'm going to kind of reference you back to Luke and I's little panel this morning about a lot of that because we did touch on some of it but um but what happened would be there would be there would be a problem somebody would be using bitcoin in a way that it shouldn't be used it's not bitcoin it's a problem for bitcoiners miners and users would see this we there would immediately be a discussion in one of the dev channels like all right what is this what are we doing about it and something would be done about it like that was immediate like One of the attacks, I think we got like 85% minor adoption in like eight hours to Thorn with policy.

Policy alone, not consensus, not a fork, not anything, just filters that already are in place and work. And that's the point. The reason they want to get rid of this is because the filter works. They're saying the filter doesn't work, so we need this, but we need to get rid of the filter. This is a contradiction of it because what they really want is the assistance of the P2P network. And part of this is Cytria's terrible design where they can't afford to wait a few hours for a block from Mara because Mara has an unlucky streak and it takes them six hours to find a block. They don't get the equivalent of a justice transaction in in time and it breaks their thing.

So they need our help and assistance for it. And all we're doing is saying, you don't have our consent. And Korra's just gaslighting everyone into saying, well, the fact that you don't consent... There's nothing you can do about it anyway. It doesn't matter because they can get around the fact that you don't consent, so just consent. They're telling us expressly that they need our help with this. And I'm saying I'm not going to give it. And then I'm being told, well, your resistance is futile.

Resistance is futile. That is great. It's such a self-contradictory message. Every time I talk about it, I start going crazier and crazier with it. Because you're telling us that you need the help of the P2P network, which is what Bitcoin is, right? I've got to roll in a second. Let me leave with one tidbit. There's better ways to do these things. There's better ways to do pinning things to Bitcoin to where Bitcoin is the security layer and your project is protected by the security layer of Bitcoin.

That's been around for over a decade. It's called merge mining. you can convince if your product is useful you can get miners to merge mine your your chain your product in whatever way that needs to function you don't need to conform that to bitcoin you can get miners if this is able to be brought on board if it's something that's worthwhile you can convince miners to do this because they have an incentive to do so to a keep it off of bitcoin and b gain whatever the benefit of mining your chain is whether that's a token or some swap or whatever And there's an incentive to do that.

It doesn't end up on Bitcoin. People who want to run that also run nodes for that project. And everybody's happy. Why have we forgotten that this is a thing? Yeah. The smaller operator. I've got to go, guys. Yeah.

See you, Jason. Always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us, Jason. Thank you. Have a good one, guys. The smaller operator in knots, the 42 bytes, is enough to run a whole side chain. Exactly. And you can do anything with that.

Do it. You can run all of Ethereum on that as a sidechain in Bitcoin if you want, and not default will allow it. Is this how Rootstock's doing it? What's that? Is that how Rootstock's doing it? I don't know. Are they MergeMine?

I believe they are. I can't remember what Rootstock. I can't remember anything about it. They created like an Ethereum. I think it's MergeMine. It's Ethereum or Bitcoin again, right? Yeah, and no one cares. There's no controversy about that.

It's the fact that they want to like get their tentacles inside Bitcoin and start making all these little, they're making themselves comfortable. and i'm not comfortable with them being here and it's them or us like this is and it's and i've been talking about so much on the cultural level too like it starts at the cultural level and you have like bitcoin magazine conference you have this as a developer conference it's just shit coiners everywhere and like i'm sorry like you if you put up with that it infests everything very quickly that just go to crypto go over there and have fun and i don't want to be associated with any of this stuff.

We worked really hard drawing a line in the sand between Bitcoin and crypto. That was an amazing thing we did. And now we're just bringing all that into Bitcoin. And you're getting told by people like Pete Rizzo

and stuff that this is great because the shit coins will all die and then Bitcoin will be even bigger as a result. And all these people will get scammed and then they'll realize

Bitcoin's great and they'll buy it. No, they won't. They'll get scammed and then they'll leave the whole space. That's actually what happened. We had a conversation earlier

with Nifty about But it seems like there's a fork in the road with two different versions of DeFi and Bitcoin's place in it. DeFi, in one sense, being the definancialization. We have better money, therefore we don't need hyper-financialized DeFi, decentralized financial protocols to do things. And so the DeFi that's de-financializing the economy is something like Lightning, eCash, ARK, basically making it easy to send, receive, hold Bitcoin in a peer-to-peer and more private fashion. And then you have the decentralized finance crew, which is like, no, the hyper-financialized world in which we live in, we need to replicate that on first crypto. But now we can do it on Bitcoin to do it there. and i think it's just like a literal fork in the road of where we're going i tend to believe

we're going towards the definitionalization of the world over defy and over the last three years the whole ordinals inscription things has been extremely frustrating because it does feel like people are pissing in the men pool um and it's uh i don't know it's hard and then again this i think is where the extent of where i feel comfortable commenting on like consensus and policy goes because like both sides are giving good arguments in my mind in terms of how it could disrupt the network on both ends right yeah miners are bitcoiners or the what jason was saying was back when it was kind of the same thing yeah you were a bitcoiner you were a miner so the p2p layer and what ended up in blocks were like of course respectful and congruent with one another

but now it's just miners want stuff so we must tie ourselves in knots to facilitate it to our own detriment without and if we were to refuse to go along with that we wouldn't suffer at all yeah there's no there's zero i've been running knots for years i filter out inscriptions nothing bad has ever happened as a result of that and like the energy around that helped motivate Mara's slipstream, I think. But that's not usable in so many cases. It's a pain in the butt for spammers to have to go out of band and pay miners, you know, to do this stuff. And as I said, they want the help of the P2P layer. And that is being just handed to them by the corruption that has manifested itself inside Bitcoin Core, because they're just they're telling all of the

appropriate lies they need to tell to make it seem like a non-issue whilst trying to pretend it isn't there's no valid controversy about it at all and saying look it just doesn't matter it just doesn't matter and say if it doesn't matter then why do you need to do it because like it again it always it always contradicts itself but there's like five or six self-contradictions that make the whole thing i mean so many people were like when peter todd said this yesterday that should have been the end of the debate because that's not true and you know if there was if there was any technically feasible way to filter out inscriptions there is it's in knots we've been using it for years and it works so that's the end of the debate if you're going to claim these tools

don't exist when they're staring us right in the face and they've worked for 15 years like jason said i guess it's all just politics and and it seems to me like they've really decided to come together and go we are just going to push this narrative and people are going to get too confused to be able to to see through it do you think there's um miscommunication at like going back to like filtering doesn't work you think peter todd says that believes like these transactions are getting included in blocks therefore it doesn't work and you're making the argument well my node's filtering them and propagating transactions and that's working for me is it that's what i'm again listening to all these conversations and trying to take it in like

is there are we agreeing on the same definitions of things yeah well work they always want to go with 100 success rate which is never a thing it's an approximate tool that does a reasonable job really good actually like i said almost everything in the blockchain is financial activity that's because of careful design and filters and that goes south quickly in itself reinforces its own destruction if one or two of those dies because you're attracting people that want to use it for non-monetary usage they become a bigger contingent of the bitcoin as a whole development starts to reflect that use case which attracts more people doing it that way and like it's now just a thing to talk about the monetary use case of bitcoin and the non-monetary use case

of bitcoin like that's just a given there is no non-monetary use case of bitcoin that is of any interest well they might be worthwhile to the people doing it and miners might earn money facilitating it but it doesn't help bitcoin it can only hurt it it was interesting is that like what are your thoughts on like open timestamps i don't have a problem with it really like if you want to get into the philosophy like this is where like the philosophical argument goes too far it's where i think the spectrum of subjective nature comes in because well i mean And as far, I don't know, Peter Todd, I don't know how he plans exactly to proceed with it because there isn't any specific mention of how it gets itself into Bitcoin's blockchain.

I don't know if he plans to do it with op returns forever or with the op false hack forever. But hashes can fit inside that 42 byte limit set by default in knots. And there's never been any sort of civil wars around that stuff. I don't really care about it to the same extent. and this spam is never an ideological discussion despite what lop said yesterday about us being crazy ideologues this is a practical matter there's two if if there's like weird guys putting the odd op return in bitcoin every now and again it doesn't make sense to filter that because it doesn't happen enough for us to bother even looking at it but when you get a goliath come

along just like i have ethereum and i want to dump it on top of bitcoin they have a way they're going going to work they're a slow giant cruise ship that isn't going to be able to maneuver that fast and you're like all right it might make sense to counter this and then then you treat that as a problem and if anyone says well where do you draw the line i don't know you can't draw the line with spam versus financial activity it is it's a subjective thing and no one ever pretended otherwise and spam filters never got rid of 100 of spam in any protocol but we never abandon them because it's just stupid you don't they always go back to the ideological positions of how do define spam is that objectively definable no it isn't and can you ever completely get rid of it

no of course you can't so but these are again that's the we're not the the ideological nut cases here we're just saying look if block space is mostly being used up by junk we need to do something about it that's not ideologically insanity that's just it's not working man like Yeah. No, it's been fascinating anthropologically to observe, particularly how the spammers, scammers, whatever you want to refer to them as, like position it. They're like, I get value out of this. And it's like, do you really? Or are you just looking to extract value from greater fools? And it seems pretty clear to me that that's been the case with ordinals and inscriptions specifically. Yeah. Undeniably. Yeah.

As I said, though, that's just insult to injury. Yeah. so what do you uh what do you foresee happening here i see i see core continuing on with this hubris and this ivory tower attitude that you know if you don't know what assigned integer is or whatever gloria said like just shut up and get out of the the conversation and stop creating a hassle for us and all this i see that carrying on that seems that doesn't the reaction would have to be significantly bigger than it has been the blowback for it to actually cause a change of course but it's it's almost like i think it just comes down to hubris now and power dynamics a lot

actually like people don't want to feel like their hand has been forced and if they back down from it now i think they're even going to make the argument that well that sets a precedent that anyone can make controversy around anything we ever try and do and then we can't do it they set that precedent themselves when they didn't want to turn off their multisig by default or add the Luke's inscription filters they just said oh look it's and then it becomes a case of

selective enforcement of all of the moderation policies and all that like you know obviously I got banned off the github and all that stuff but I'm back now it's not really a big deal but the point is I was kicked off for things that other people did too that they weren't kicked off for and then it

just becomes a reflection of what core want rather than having some neutral moderation policy right so i i said to gloria um the fact that core said okay this is a pain in the butt all this like noise in all of our technical forums for discussing this stuff we have these moderation policies we're going to start enforcing them and matt corallo said like this is great this is going to make our life so much better the the timing of it is too convenient because these kinds controversies have happened before and no one cared to to sort of invoke these policies that can prevent you know that can on the one hand make the discussion tolerable on but on the other hand

just completely silence opposition so i mean how do you i'm not saying there's a solution to that problem they need to be able to work in relative peace to do the job they do and if there are like trolls coming out of the woodwork and yelling at them all the time and making their life horrible I feel for them there's no perfect solution to that but this is this is too convenient I'm sorry like me and a bunch of other people that were on that github thread complaining about what it did we articulated what it was that we thought was wrong and we did a good job of doing so and it wasn't it wasn't as obnoxious as what the spammers did on our pull requests not by a long degree so it just seems like a selective enforcement and that's what you do with these sort of

these Ayn Rand socialist kind of setups that you get you just make everything illegal and then you make exceptions for people that play the right game and you know satisfy you in other ways right so it's you scratch my back I'll scratch yours but if anyone falls out of favor with the in-group there's always a policy you can find to shut them up right you said this he said that you're not allowed to do that okay like I get it but it's it's starting to look like there's a clique inside there that are very comfortable with people trying to do some interesting things on bitcoin that are not to anyone's benefit but them um and that rolling out the red carpet for them knocking a hole in the side of the temple door it's just i don't know i guess i will come back

to just saying it's hubris because they're not really hiding it like this should be a thing where they're saying to citria look we're not going to do this you it might make your life a little bit easier but the the bitcoin community on are pretty divided on this and they don't want to see this happen so your product i'm very sorry to say it's going to have to operate a slightly different way and spend a tiny little bit more money like how is that not the outcome of this it should be but it's probably not going to be well in fairness of uh antoine's positioning of Citria thing specifically earlier, like the way he described it was I went to MIT Bitcoin or blockchain, whatever their conference is. They said they were doing it this way. I said,

oh God, that's going to bloat the chain. Like this would probably be more optimal. So it wasn't necessarily like Citria saying we need this. Could you make this change? That's the way. No. Yeah. It's supposed to be a proactive move on the part of I'm looking for the mailing list post, sorry, where Antoine said there are three reasons filters exist, to do this, this, and this, and it's just not true. So they're trying to rewrite it, but I don't have the list there. I would like to...

The reason he didn't list is because you have control over what is on your computer. That's why they fundamentally exist. Like, it's just there's a footpath through your backyard that people walk through to get from A to B, and they will still be able to do it even if you fence it off. like but it's still my yard right and shinobi's gonna say that's a bad analogy i know bitcoin is not literally a backyard i get it analogies aren't perfect but anyway yeah your previous point that

you said um sorry it slips my mind what what your last point the position it wasn't necessarily citria coming yeah we need this change it was like antoine understanding how they were doing it and saying oh god this well you can would be more optimal if this change existed yeah and I don't know how the thing happened, but things come together in organic ways. And ultimately, the consensus of people within core is that the spam filters are annoying. They treat them as a kind of technical debt. And that's why they're getting rid of the option to configure it, because they're like, any user would be stupid to ever decrease this limit. So we're not even allowing them the option to do it anymore, which is, again, just more hubris.

And Peter Todd in his Libra relay says that this thing that I've made gets rid of the paternalistic mempool policies inside Bitcoin Core. And I find that hilarious because he's saying to you, you're not allowed to control what goes in your mempool. That's not a configuration option available to Bitcoins anymore. And he's calling us paternalistic. I mean, that's ridiculous. Yeah, I think it's the argument against optionality that if you have too many users with too many options configured in different ways,

you're going to create disruptions at the P2P layer. Well, the argument is that it will hurt you if there are transactions ending up in blocks that you never saw in your mempool. Yeah, you have to go validate them after they're mined. Yeah, but that's not the thing they're presenting it to be. Like compact blocks, they don't contain all of the transactions and that's the concern here because if you can't recreate the block

when you receive it at your node because there were unfamiliar transactions in it then it takes maybe 10 milliseconds longer or something but actually that's not even how it works. If I have a spam filter and I filter out a bunch of junk you send me and it ends up in a block it still caches everything. So I still know those transactions exist I just didn't relay them. So I get the compact block I can recreate it just as fast as anyone else I just didn't participate in that shit. So to be fair, that isn't their only argument, but the others are all just as bad.

Fee estimators, the one they always roll out is your fee estimation will suck. But that's not a thing either. Fee estimation that works solely off the premise that there must be a homogenous mempool. You have the same mempool he does. Therefore, we know exactly what the next block will look like. There are fee estimators that attempt to work that way, but they're broken by design. And that's not how Bitcoin Core works. So if you're worried about fee estimation and things that aren't Bitcoin Core that use a broken method, all right, but this is Bitcoin Core we're talking about, and Bitcoin Core doesn't fee estimate that way.

It looks at everything that came through its mempool, and it judges by the past blockchain how long it took for that stuff to get in the blockchain. It doesn't matter how much spam you have in there. And in fact, if you filter, your fee estimation gets better, assuming there's one miner on the network that runs similar filters to you. Otherwise, you end up paying more than necessary, which is a very interesting thing that never gets pointed out. If there's a miner that filters, you need to match their filtration policy because then you're not going to end up accidentally overpaying for stuff that looks like it's filling up the next block,

but not all miners would actually include. There's block space available to you that you don't realize. That's interesting. I never thought about that. And Ocean exists. Yeah, Ocean exists, yeah. It's almost 1%. It's not there yet, but it's growing. yeah god this is

you think it's good that we're having these discussions right now it's fine it's controversial it's not my first war man

it is yeah it's it's not my first bitcoin war anyway yeah how would you

compare this from a gravity perspective to something like segwit and the four cores back then you always look

back at the old ones with rose tinted glasses right that felt so easy because it was a consensus war so they just kept forking and giving us free money at the time it felt stressful but i look back at it now and i'm like man like that was a fun time like it wasn't fun the fact that roger veer owned bitcoin.com and blockchain.com and the bitcoin handle on twitter and rbtc and all that stuff and kept crying about censorship i mean that was really annoying and i spent all day every day fighting him not him but you know i'm not going to call them sock puppets let's say there were real big

blockers and there still are there's bitcoin cash people are out there like and every time i get annoyed with bitcoin core they're like yeah he's going to be a bitcoin cash guy any minute and i'm like the reason like i want it's so funny because the reasons i was against the big blockers is because all i care about is nodes and making them be the most important thing and like cheap transactions can't come at the expense of easy easy you know making it easy to run a node and now it's just spam being at the expense of nodes so i'm like i'm still fighting the same battle it's always nodes first otherwise we're just crypto like this that's all it comes down to for me yeah so it's always the same war yeah who runs this nodes or miners like it's it's got to be

nodes yeah or devs no still nodes yeah it's fascinating because i mean just the many conversations i've had with people on both sides of this argument over the last two days it seems very clear to me everybody has what i would like to believe are good intentions like they think this is the best thing for bitcoin yep and it's just having this having these discussions very important in my mind yeah i i don't think anyone is acting with malicious intentions i do think some people are um well not knowledgeably acting with good intentions without good intentions if that makes sense but path to hell is paved with good intentions someone's actually got to do the right thing here and that i understand that it's confusing and i have i've been talking about it

for the last two years it's only okay it suddenly got really dramatic like 10 or 11 days ago when this pr happened but i still it's still really hard to put this succinctly what's going on but occasionally i'll wake up and be like right it really is just one sentence it's just they want to get rid of a filter that's existed and done a very good job on the premise that it isn't doing anything anyway in order to facilitate a bunch of ethereum use cases on top of bitcoin and they're not really concerned about how much controversy they kick up doing it so that seems to be a reasonable summary of the situation and i don't think i don't know how you can look at that and think that's you know a good turn of events like they can come back to the

drawing board and be like all right guys like you don't like this what shall we do like there needs to be some hubris here that's what it seems like may need to happen is all right let's take another pause on this and i don't want to see five percent of the network switch to knots in a week that's insane yeah like that's people are like i'm not i want to do it because i prefer it but i don't trust it people are saying that knots is trustworthy and i've been running it for years but i've also made the point that the foss mentality of like look guys if you don't like core just run something else that doesn't work in bitcoin the same way it does with everything else like linux because if you run your own modified version of ubuntu it doesn't it's not

a consensus system where everyone else in the debian land or debian forks all needs to agree every 10 minutes that everything is identical that's that's a requirement of bitcoin that if we fail it because some other implementation of bitcoin went down and like 30 of the network just went offline for like an hour we can't be taken seriously as money in that scenario anymore we lose that like that that reputation yeah like you can't you can't be doing that so that means for better or for worse bitcoin core is bitcoin the decisions they make are what it there's no spec right like lightning you have core lightning and you have lnd and you have async and you have different implementations of the protocol and if they break it doesn't really matter that much

it's not a consensus thing it's just you and me with our channel yeah but oh great we got luke we've got luke joining the stream as well man i've been here for ages yeah i keep thinking it's about to wind down we've been going for like 45 minutes now but luke welcome welcome to the live stream thanks you gotta hold the mic you gotta do that i have to admit to say stuff too i learned something last night i always assumed uh i always assumed something different but i didn't realize you were putting the bible verses into the queen base um and you made a distinction between uh You believe there is an objective definition of spam. And when people say, you were putting Bible verses on the Bitcoin,

you said, no, I was actually doing it in the Coinbase, which is allowed by the network. Yeah, it's completely different when it's something that's there by design versus obfuscating the data to make it look like something that isn't there, supposed to be. So, I asked Mechanic this, I'll ask you this. Has the last two days been productive at all in terms of having conversations with people

to try to get somewhere in the middle on this discussion. I guess time will tell. It feels like the conference itself felt like an ambush because it's just so many scammers. But Thames didn't feel that way, by the way. Thames was awesome. But the online world, I woke up to a lot of support today. so you know i feel like the wider echo you can argue it's all echo chambers but

the twitterverse is at least a wider echo chamber than this conference which is probably you know 80 or 90 people or something but with a very strong slant towards let's do fun things on bitcoin you know there are other use cases and we must facilitate them and it's do not resist now there's also ways to do the use cases without harming bitcoin they just choose to do it the most harmful way which tells you they're not really interested in bitcoin itself they're just interested in jamming people really jason was on with us earlier saying merge mine side changes one way to do that in your opinion what are other ways that people could be doing this to i mean merge mining's been around for well over a decade it's a proven technology

The only reason that these scammers are not using merger mining is because they want to force it on people who don't want to opt-in. If they're okay with just people opting in, they could do it in an opt-in way. There's a lot of discussion about subjectivity of the definition of a good use case for Bitcoin. I think that's what you were leaning into last night. It's like, no, there is objective use cases. Yeah, and it's not to say Bitcoin can't do more use cases, but you've got to do it in a way that respects other people that are using Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't have to be limited to a single blockchain.

You could have a sidechain, a Mergemind sidechain that is still part of Bitcoin, and then leave it up to people whether or not they want to adopt that. And what do you think the most optimal resolution is from here based off of everything that's gone on the last two weeks? To which problem? The op return one. I mean, I guess Bitcoin Core could try to save face. It obviously won't fix the bugs that they've had for two years either, though. I guess one good thing that's come out of all this is that not usage has grown and there's a little more diversity.

It's not just everyone using Bitcoin Core on the network anymore. the uh i was telling mechanic it seems like having conversations with people on both sides of the argument over the last two days i think we've done eight hours of conversations at this point it's clear to me it seems like everybody on both sides has really good intentions just like how do you solve this particular issue yeah hard to see good intentions in the whole unlimited op return thing what and another thing Would there have to be some sort of bigger change or another type of change as opposed to this up-return limit thing, whether you increase it or decrease it, to actually prevent what many would deem to be spam from getting into the chain?

Yeah, the up-return thing would be just opening the floodgates to more spam than there already is To actually get rid of the spam that's currently posing a problem to Bitcoin, they would have to fix the bugs that they introduced with Taproot. What bugs are those, particularly? When Taproot was added, it added a new way to provide a script, and they didn't apply the existing spam filters to that area. And so that's why the inscriptions are able to use the Taproot area to bypass all the limits. yeah and that's witness data too right so it gets a 75 discount assuming there's a large enough

amount of it so yeah and that's another thing i wonder what are the unforeseen consequences of removing the op return limit or they're unforeseen so you can't know but like what are the unknown unknowns yeah yeah are there and maybe the better way to frame it is like are there unknown unknowns Always. I mean the use case doesn't exist because the filters prevented those use cases from manifesting. Once they exist, once the possibility is there, once the tool exists, the job that requires that tool or the use case that requires that tool will be built. And once it's there, anyone that tells us it was inevitable so we might as well have facilitated it. Again, I just can't find the good intentions there.

like we're breaking down walls saying they're not doing anything and then i mean the known issues are bad enough if we want to talk about the unknown unknowns we there was a lot of studying of segwit and taproot before long before it activated and we thought that we had a good solution to solve various problems and then all we learned years later that there were unknowns there and that's stuff that's been studied by lots of developers over several months this upper turn thing nobody's even considering the unknown unknowns at this point so do you think the best move here is just build on precedent and not do anything just say this is too controversial right now let's come

back to it later maybe that would be at least a bare minimum principle of action um if they don't want to get involved in controversial stuff they shouldn't get involved in controversial stuff it doesn't make sense to say no to the people that are trying to fix the bugs and then say yes to the attackers in exactly the same situation. Both are controversial. The selective enforcement, we spoke about that a bit already. That was what... Basically, that just comes down to do Core want to do it or not?

Yeah. yeah this is we've already talked so much about this i'm trying to think of like what what new to ask luke but i mean bring can we bring us back to ocean like how things been in ocean well it's been great we've grown a lot tether announced they're going to mine with us and they they're enormous and they they went into the details of it and we're like we we think miners need to be using datum because it fits with the principles of you know minor side template creation fits with you know it's congruent with bitcoins decentralized ethos and all that i'm just great it's music to my ears hearing a miner actually say that stuff rather than

have to be like well why why would i make my own templates can't you just do it like it's just you know we're like well we'll give you a 50 fee discount if you do and they're like all right that was a important motivator for it but yeah it's been growing we've out we've been we've we've grown a lot faster than the difficulty has gone up so slowly but surely the network is moving over and we're maybe we announced a SOC compliance that's been a big thing preventing from a lot of preventing a lot of miners from working with us because it's just one of these bureaucratic requirements for publicly traded guys we're not SOC compliant yet but we're basically there we're like the final stages of it and that's gonna that's gonna mean a lot of

people can move over to ocean and um yeah it it should be a harmless bit of regulatory box ticking that was required to make some people some suits happy and comfortable suits need the sock too yeah the suits do need it yeah yeah i don't know if it's strictly the suits need it but like they don't want to have to hire people internally to do whatever audits that would be necessary without box checking maybe it's the same thing you made the point that with us it wasn't really that necessary because we don't take customers if you're a miner bigger than like 40 petahash or something every single block ocean finds you get all of the money you're owed every single time so we never touch your money and then it becomes like well do you need

your isp to be socked to and do you need your like do you need your power company to be socked to like Ocean doesn't really do that much. It just coordinates reward splits, which is all a pool should do. But anyway, we're getting it. And hopefully we'll see another jump up when that happens. I don't know. Maybe we see another couple X hash. Maybe we ramp all the way up to 30 suddenly.

And then we'll be having a great time. We'll be finding 15, 16 blocks a day, which would be incredible. There was a lot of people saying when you guys originally launched Ocean in that due to the option to filter and allowing miners to construct their own block templates that it wouldn't be as profitable. It seems like that's not the case. I believe you guys came out with some data earlier this year.

That's because there's a whole bunch of factors in it. People are cherry-picking the most irrelevant things and ignoring the most significant things. There's eight orders of magnitude difference or something. so like if you use tides which is our payout model versus fpps it's like double digit percent more with ocean or something i don't know how to be like bob's first year he got like 30 percent more on ocean than three of the fpps pulls he was comparing to but some of that is not stuff that you'd expect to always be the case um and it seems like but we're still always like five or six

percent better like in kind of bad scenarios and sometimes like 10 percent better than others that's huge but people were bashing us about spam filtration 99 of the minor income in a block is subsidy then you have one percent extra which is transaction fees and then if you start being selective about those it might make about one percent difference to that one percent so it's it's it i calculated it last time i did the napkin math it was like a guy with an exahash is worst case losing like 20 bucks a day and this is a guy who's spending you know 40k on electricity i don't know how much what's the electricity cost of running an exahash it's a staggering cost it's going to be a five figure amount per day and we're talking about

20 bucks like it's the fact that you'd hyper focus on that and ignore the wider context of how fpps is just draining everything made it all just feel like you know it's in service of an ideology that says spam filtration is censorship and this is obviously never true and it was historically never true and we've you know not been this whole conversation has been under the impression that we treat arbitrary data as a bad thing at least to be fair yesterday the debate everyone did agree that arbitrary data was bad they're just saying there's nothing you can do about it at least we've moved to that point in the discussion than the original one which is either how do you know it's arbitrary data how do you define that and how do you get to say it's bad

but monetary use is good like that there used to be that level of like how do you get to say this is bad at least they're all agreeing it's bad like so when lop said who thinks jpegs and bitcoin is good and no one agreed at least we admit it's bad now yeah but he's just being a troll well back to the point of like fpps pools over at tabs yesterday there was a interesting discussion at the end of the day basically that as the subsidy gets cut in half maybe two or three halvings in the future the forcing function of the economics of how fpps pools work may lead to their ultimate disintegration because it just doesn't make economic sense right at that scale so like which is encouraging to me because it seems like there's

a natural forcing function just in the way Bitcoin is distributed to market that should lead the market back towards PPL and S models or something more granular like a hash pool or something like that. Do you agree with that? Probably.

Not one to try to predict the future too much but I got to bounce. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having all of us. Thanks for coming. Luke. I've got these we're going to continue the mining conversation with bitax luke thank you for joining us sir thank you guys did scott change his name to bitax

is that his actual name yeah hey bitax so he responded he responded all right yeah thank you guys this one diving deep diving deep It's about how are you? We would just we've been live-streaming talk to the live stream right now. I've been live-streaming for two days So we got probably like eight hours of content. We're gonna put this on this the podcast feed Yeah

We've got Scott Scott 9000. Yo, Marty 9000. What's up, man? It's been a long day. Been a good day. Good couple days. Should we take a quick break?

No, we're good. We had a break right before that one, so we're good. You guys were talking for like an hour. I know. How do you do this? Important stuff. You know, you put a bike in front of your face for eight years and you figure out how to do it, you know?

You're a seasoned professional. Yeah, I guess a podcast, as some people would say. Dude. How have you been? What's your thoughts on the week? You're at Thames now, Bitcoin++. How's your week in Austin been? Fantastic.

This is my first ever time to Austin. Really? Yeah. I've never been. This is, like, the first time I've, like, been in Texas proper. I've been to, like, the airport and Houston and Dallas, I guess, and driven across that, like, top part. The panhandle?

Yeah. Yeah. I went to Carhenge. Have you ever seen that? No. In the 60s, this, like, crazy art group called, like, Alien something, They, like, buried all these Cadillacs in the ground, like, standing up like this to form, like, a Stonehenge thing made out of cars. That sounds pretty cool.

I've never made my way north of Dallas. I don't think I've been north of Dallas. Okay. I freaking love these conferences. Like, I absolutely love it. It's so much fun. There's so many cool people to talk to. People are like, well, what's your favorite conference?

It's, like, the one I'm at or the one I just went to. You know, like, they're always so cool. So I'm loving it. But the new Bitcoin Park, Austin, is fantastic. Rod's empire is expanding, and for good reason, because that dude's got something cool going on. Yeah, Thames was great. And I think both conferences, obviously, Texas Energy Mining,

Bitcoin Plus Plus, about mempool mining, very pertinent to what you're doing. And I've had, because I just speak with you now, because I've had a lot of conversations over the last few days about mining. Yeah. But specifically, like hash pools, what VNPRC, I always want to say VPN, VNPRC, an average gallery you're working on. Super cool. To make it so you can send hash rate to a pool, get e-cash tokens in return.

Such a good idea. Well, I think specifically for what you're working on, it's optimal for the use case of somebody running a BIDX. It really is. I think it helps bootstrap small pools, of which I think we need more of. we need a lot more of uh you know we can't we can't have an actual uh you know thousands of pools that won't work they won't get paid out enough but what we can do is spring up you know a thousand new pool types and let the best ones win uh so we need we need these experiments we need um that's one of the things the 256 foundation is working on is sort of a hydropool as a platform

that people can try new payout methods like hash pool stuff like that so we can have this kind of rapid development stuff but yeah hash pool is great for for bidax for heat reuse small miners you know anyone that's um not necessarily in it for like they're not running a mining business you know what i mean so let's jump into for anybody tuning into live stream may be unaware of what bidax is let's introduce it to people okay the open source nature of the project not Not only the hardware, but the firmware, the software, everything. What is the stack looking like these days? The BidX is the first ever open source ASIC Bitcoin miner.

Which is insane because we've had ASIC Bitcoin miners for over a decade. And the BidX is the first one that's ever open source. Open source is obviously important. It's a fundamental part of Bitcoin. One of the main reasons why I think we're all even here talking about this because Satoshi put it in the first sentence of the first ever public post that is open source. So yeah, BidX is a small miner.

It's something you can buy and run in your house, but also sort of maybe more important to the revolution is that it's a reference design. It's open source, the firmware, the hardware, and you can take it and modify it and do something new with it. And people are doing that. We have the Nerd Q-AXE.

A couple guys took and built this. They're putting four chips on there. The BID-AXE only has one chip right now. They're doing four chips, six, eight, ten. We're going big. And in this case, it's really cool because they are respecting the BID-AXE's open source license, which says that if you take the BID-AXE and you modify it, you are obligated to release your changes under the same license,

meaning just you have to open source your derivative project as well. So NerdQX and the crew behind that is like all on board for the open source revolution in Bitcoin mining, which I think is starting to have some legs. Definitely getting some legs. Yeah, I'm happy to see it. This is what I'm here for. I mean, just talk about the growth of the project over the last year. I think the first time you came on,

Rabbit Hole Recap had to be like a year, maybe even longer. Yeah. We were talking about it. it's like holding up some hash boards like this is what i can do now right it's like almost like a cultural phenomenon within bitcoin i i never would have guessed but i'm super stoked and it makes sense because it's a lower barrier to entry for anyone interested in mining and it turns out there's a lot of people who are interested in it um it's it's permissionless it's decentralized like if you don't like me it doesn't matter you can still build them and make them and sell them

you can get involved you can it's it you know you can get them all different places all around the world people are manufacturing and selling these all around the world i just talked to a crew from south korea that they're like manufacturing bid axes and like spreading them there and it's it would be very hard for a small project that was uh proprietary and centrally located for us to get coverage and sales in south korea on the other side of the world so it it has that i think what's happening is that that exponential growth due to like sort of removing the barriers to entry. Yeah.

And I think the timing is perfect because we've had this concept of ASIC commodification in Bitcoin mining for some time, but it does seem like the ASICs are getting to a point where the progression from one generation to the other isn't going to have the same order of magnitude jump forward that it has historically. I think that's absolutely right. mixes and on top of that large scale mining the economics the margins of that application are continuing to get razor more razor thin by the year and these form factors that bidx is really leading the way with really enable people to get modular and get creative with their setups

to the point where you can do some really cool applications heat you at reuse being one of them Right. That's a huge one. Tyler Stevens, the heat punk movement, they're sort of championing heat reuse, which I mean, I'm I'm full. I'm certain that's going to be a majority of the hash rate in the not too distant future. Well, let's let's put this out that Tyler gave it at the Nashville Energy Mining Conference in the beginning of the year. I believe is if you convert two percent of the HVAC, if you convince two percent of people running HVAC systems in their house to incorporate Bitcoin mining for heat reuse, That would double the network hash rate at the time. Yeah, and I think you said it's like two more Zeta hash, right? So we're like almost at one Zeta hash right now.

It would be two more. Yeah, it would triple. Yeah, like just absurd numbers. Obviously, there's a lot of water heaters in the world. Like most houses have one. So it's a big market, and it's not like you just convert that overnight. But it does show the sheer magnitude of possibility here, which I think is limitless.

And 256 Foundation, which I'm also a part of, and the Bidax movement, we're working very closely with the heat punks because, you know, they don't have the hardware yet to make Bitcoin-fired water heaters. Like, it doesn't really exist. I mean, all the, the majority of the hardware on the market right now is meant, it's in that, like, S19 shoebox. It's meant for putting on a shelf and plugging into the grid. And that's not a water heater. So things are going to have to change for this future that I think is going to be a significant part of the network hash rate. Yeah, the form factor is going to be extremely important. Yeah.

Let's talk about how you guys make it so people can create these unique form factors. Okay, so right now, if you want to build your own miner, like your own form factor miner, You would need to get ASIC chips, and you would need to connect it up into a minor system in this new form factor with different power requirements, different control requirements. But the problem, the reason why very few people have started this is that you cannot buy chips. And no one's giving you a data sheet on how to use them.

It's all totally secret. So what I've learned for the BIDX so far is from years at this point of reverse engineering and hacking how it works. We still don't fully know how it works. And especially if you're going to go to market with a product, like a retail product, like a hot water heater, you need to know how this chip works. You're kind of asking for trouble if you don't.

So the current paradigm absolutely limits what you can create with these things, like the new kind of products, the new applications you can go after with these things. So the BidX is kind of taking that first step, And I am fortunate enough to be funded by open source granting agencies. So I don't have to, like, make a marketable product. We're just kind of getting this information out there. But we're starting to see, which is really cool, is other ASIC manufacturers who I think would love to take a bite out of Bitmain's market share. They're starting to want to play ball, right?

In what way? They're talking to me. They're just simply calling me. They don't just totally ignore me. I have gotten sort of preemptive calls from ASIC manufacturers. They're like, hey, let's talk about this. Do you want to make a BidX with our chip? Which is like six months ago, maybe a year ago,

I absolutely never would have guessed that this would happen. But I think it's because what you're saying, like BidX is now a household name. It's a cultural phenomenon. I love my BidX on our bookshelf in the studio. That's so cool. I stare at it. when you have that?

I stare at it for 20 seconds a day and say, you're going to mine a block. I put it in at solo CK pool. Collapsing wave functions. Collapsing wave functions. Just put your intentions right into it. We actually have Andrew Polsher walking by. Maybe we should come ask him

if that's actually possible. Oh, it's possible. We don't need to ask. For sure. We are going to manifest a block from the TFTC bid axe on the bookshelf. Remember the telehash? Yes.

The time before last that we had? That was all of us sitting on stage thinking about this miner. or that it was a node but like thinking about this node and everyone watching the live stream thinking about it and we solved a block against all odds of course that didn't happen the other day but hey you know it's not an exact science that would happen i'd actually be scared of the security of the mining layer if you could just like yeah right we're gonna manifest blocks now yeah right but getting back to a more serious conversation okay the i think what excites me

most about Bidax, early days, cultural phenomena, definitely caught the eyes and the attention of many Bitcoiners out there, people buying them, people thinking about how to design new form factors to implement them. Let's think 5, 10, 15 years down the road. What is the sort of optimal path of the Bidax project and the impact it has on the Bitcoin mining layer in your mind? So for the BidAx project, I would like to see more awesome home miners that can reach a larger target audience. Think like no-coiners, grandma, anyone who's even remotely interested in running a miner at home. You know, more reliable cooling, just like a plug-and-play experience. I think the BidAx is fundamentally a small home miner, just to go after that market and do it right.

But we also have this other sort of goal here, the manifesto, right, is that Bitcoin mining needs to go back to open source. It started off as open source with Satoshi and CPU mining and GPU mining, went closed source with the advent of ASICs. I'm going to bring it back to open source. And that kind of is kick-started by open sourcing the BIDX design. and by providing that open source i hope to get other people fired up that was that was the title of my talk here today was build your own damn pedax and it was to try and you know to uh rope

in some of the smart folks here at this developer conference so like hey you want to work on some hardware want to work on some firmware like let's just do this it's a fun thing to do um so we get more people in on it and that you know the effect that that has i think is is larger than making a rad home miner in the bid axe and because that will benefit large pubco miners i've talked about this before with the 256 foundation but when large pubco miners have access to open source firmware there's crazy cool stuff they can do i think if you talk to a lot of big pubco miners now the people that are doing the operations like no one likes the current situation like bitmain firmware kind of sucks and there's not much you can do about it sucks okay i was trying to be nice yeah

Yeah, it's really bad. I mean, you're kind of locked into it. It's this adversarial relationship where they don't want to let you change any other firmware. Yeah, it doesn't allow for overclocking, underclocking. Like all these guys doing demand response and load following stuff, they're kind of just screwed. Like they have to hack something in there. So once we have a firmware, and we're actively working on this, once we have an open source firmware that people like miners, pubcos, can start building on top of

and building their custom applications to try things out, to implement their secret sauce, they're not going to switch back. They're going to demand open source because their entire business depends on it. Let's contextualize this for anybody listening. What is an example of some secret sauce or an application that can be unlocked via open source firmware?

Heard of Cholla Mining? Yes. West Texas, right? Yes. They run an older fleet of miners, and their sort of use case, their business proposal, as far as I understand it, is that they follow the, I think he says, the load curve really closely. So they're going to turn these things off when the energy price goes too high. And they can do it quickly because they're kind of small. But imagine if you could operationalize that by writing some software to do it, maybe do some predictive stuff like you could really dial into this.

This is things that other industries are doing for sure already. We're kind of in the Stone Age with the miners that we have now that you essentially have to unplug them. And it takes a long time to ramp up and down. And it's this binary. They're either on or off. We know we can ramp Bitcoin miners load profile like fairly linearly across the whole the whole range. we take we take advantage of that that's that's the secret sauce that's what i'm talking about that's the application you know that these miners in their specific regions you know this is how

they've figured out how to make money and they can do it better through custom software yeah this would increase profit margins again in an industry that is i often describe bitcoin mining as the most ruthlessly competitive market in the world and this is this is like that's that competitive edge right you're like oh i got i got some firmware that i wrote we had our in-house team write some firmware that you know looks at the the weather and just like predicts something and and ramps up or down in response like there's no there's like no limit to all these ideas it's gonna be cloudy today sun's not gonna shine solar prices are gonna go up so we should probably turn off yeah let's be a little bit less reactionary and like you know get ahead of these pricing

events yeah what uh where can people get involved with bidx bidx.org is my website uh i've got links to a number of cool things we have a a discord chat called the open source miners united it's got like 8 000 people and it's growing very fast but that's a good place to go and talk with people in the various different aspects of the project we have links to the github repos that we have where you can actually get the source. Don't have to ask me for permission. You can just dive in. If you are so inclined, you can submit pull requests,

like changes, fixes, that kind of stuff. You can fork it and make your own thing. So yeah, bidx.org is the spot. We also have the 256 Foundation, which is kind of just ramping up. And this is a group to help fund developers who are working on open source mining. And it would be remiss of me not to mention how cool one of the fundraising aspects of the 256 Foundation is. You can donate hash rate.

Yes. So you can literally point some of your miners' hash rate to a pool that will send the payouts to the 256 Foundation. Yep. This is fascinating. It's an exciting fundraising opportunity. I mean, you can send us Bitcoin, too, if you want. But, you know, if you've got this hash rate, send some percentage over our way and we'll make good use of it. I mean, it would actually be funny to see if, like, Pubco miners in a particularly profitable year, like around Q3,

they're like, all right, we're going to have a ton of profits. We need to do some tax loss harvesting. Let's point some hash. Yeah. At 256, they've got a taxable write-off on the donations that we're giving. Like, I'm not an accountant. I don't know how that actually works. But it is a 501c3 registered charity.

so think about it pubco is out there yeah looking for interesting tax strategy literally low lift yeah i mean you can also good marketing too like it is good marketing right because we're gonna we're gonna you know solo mine a block or take your hash rate and also there's there's some messaging out there that we're gonna you know destroy the pubco miners no no not at all like what we're working on is like i was saying before i think it's very beneficial to large pubco miners Like, you're going to, I would assume you're going to benefit from this. My favorite sort of analogy here is AWS. Amazon's, like, web hosting business that just, like, prints money.

They're, like, one of the most profitable parts of Amazon. They wrote sort of applications on top of Linux, right? They put their secret sauce, whatever things they think they can sell, whatever services they can sell are just custom applications that they wrote on top of Linux. which is open source software they didn't have to ask for permission they just built on open technologies and it's it's like a cash cow right that that same thing i think could happen for bitcoin miners it literally is the only part of their business that makes them profitable i'm pretty sure like really the online store is just a loss leader for aws it's ridiculous at least i

was at some point the whole internet works like this like back in the day microsoft made a web server and it was proprietary and i i'm guessing it has like 0.0 market share now yeah i'm happy you exist and that's a bit x thanks man project exists thank you for doing my pleasure thank you for joining me here i don't want to take up too much of your time but right on thanks scott appreciate you appreciate you yeah if you have anybody out there who wants to come on send them this way we can we can get marks back up here too okay or we can just keep riffing i'm done to keep riffing all right let's keep riffing it's a nice seat right here it's i'm trying to be cognizant of people's time i know there's a lot of talks people want to get to but i don't

do it i can talk about this all day what is the most exciting thing going on within bidax right now like you mentioned uh nerdax was a cool fork but yeah what's the coolest application you've so my my goal for 2025 is to get off of bitman chips for those who don't know bitx uh we just reuse bitman chips it's not a a willing partnership we we are not an authorized buyer of those chips we unsolder them from ant miners and this is no way to scale it's it's kind of funny i've i've talked with some manufacturers and they go to like you know like in china or whatever like professional circuit board assembly lines and they're like i want to build you know like 10 000 of these and they're like looking at the parts list and like okay cool cool cool what's

this oh what's this like this chip here and they're like oh yeah that one you just got to unsolder it you know from this thing over here and it's like no no no get out of here like no electronics are made like that so this year dropping bitmain uh we're gonna have willing partners um it's going to be we're going to start with the discontinued intel chips those are nice because they are free intel made millions of them they're out there and they're free they're sort of like lower efficiency but i think there's a market for very cheap bit axes that have sort of low efficiency would be nice um we're going to do aridine chips i've been talking with the folks at aridine and we're going to do block chips we've been talking with the team yep oh yeah yeah so

three new bit axes not on uh bitman chips this year i mean i'm already working on it it's really exciting and it's a dream come true for me because i have data sheets for these chips data sheets are like large long manuals for how to use the chips like descriptions of like how to connect it how how to send it work, how to get responses, things like that. Stuff that I've basically only guessed how it works with Bitman chips. It's really cool. So it makes your job considerably easier. It makes our job considerably easier,

and I don't have that sort of uneasy feeling that I don't quite understand how the chip works because we've never seen any documentation for Bitman chips. Is there a distributed marketing team for BidX? I made some BidX propaganda when the… Which was really awesome. I think you're in our distributed marketing team. That stuff is cool.

Yeah, I want to make BidX propaganda with AI. Let's do it. It's very aesthetic. It's very cyberpunk aesthetic, too. Yeah, it is, right? Yeah. It's that sort of post-apocalyptic sort of like we're in this cyberpunk future and we're using the retro works progress administration graphics.

How global is BidX right now? 100% global. Where is the furthest place in the earth that you've heard of BIDX being run? There are several folks running them in China. Really? Yeah, which is apparently not legal. Behind the Great Firewall. Yeah, they're running them there, so that's pretty far away.

I talked with the crew that are building them and running them in South Korea. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone from Russia running them, but they've got to be. They've got to be. We have India, Africa. I went to the African Bitcoin conference in December. We actually took a Starlink on a safari out into the African bush in Kenya. And Eric Hirschman from Gridless brought his Starlink. And we connected it up to the inverter in the Land Cruiser and mined Bitcoin from the middle of nowhere.

out there so but uh yeah there's there's a strong contingent in i think ethiopia uh kenya uh a couple other african countries were were um big into it and starting you know local manufacture that that's really important because sending stuff like this around the world there's always you know tariffs and local register uh restrictions um this is a kind of cool story there was a guy who contacted me he ordered a big order of bid axes he's in turkey he ordered a bunch of bid axes and they got like confiscated by customs it was like somehow they figured out what they were maybe they just googled the like name on the front and like confiscated them and like we're demanding some huge you know tariff tariff import fee yeah and he was like no so now

he's manufacturing them really yep how does one get into manufacturing bid axes i did a little talk today on on you know make your own damn bid axe but the gist of it is it's not that hard it's not that hard it's it's i have all the design files i have everything you need to build a bid axe on listed on uh the website you know you can you can have a a shop manufacture the blank circuit boards for you you can buy all the components there's they're they're like normal components that could be used in anything. You buy those all, solder it on. I have soldered hundreds of boards together in a toaster oven.

In a toaster oven? In a toaster oven. Yeah, it's kind of wild. You just turn the toaster oven on? So you get the blank circuit board. It's got nothing on it. You also get a stencil. The shop that makes the circuit board also makes a stencil.

You put the stencil on there. You get solder paste. It's just a paste, and you kind of squeegee it, and the stencil applies the solder paste on the board then you get tweezers you put the parts you just set them on top of this paste you take the whole thing and just put it in the toaster oven it's like a kiln yeah so you there's like a temperature profile you have to follow but it's only two set points you do 140 c for two minutes you do 200 c for 30 seconds it's done yeah like it works really well you see this is so sketchy like there's like breadcrumbs down the bottom of

the thing and you got this in there and like i mean we also use leaded solder so don't use it for food again but yeah yeah the uh i'm really bullish on this trend like at what point do you think the aggregate hash rate of people running bidax machines surpasses if at all um big box miners do we need to get i do not think ever surpassing it i don't think that could happen like i guess it's a thought experiment uh let's say a bit x is one terahash they're actually like 1.2 but say it's one terahash so an exahash is a million terahash so we're like eight something and change network hash rate exahash so we need eight million for one percent of the network hash rate um that's a that's a lot of machines that's a lot a lot of machines but that's all right we

don't need to have a hundred percent to affect the market once you have all these sort of like home miners who don't you know they don't care about the hash price they're not going to unplug for anything it will start to affect the market but then also like i said before that the other goal of the bidx project is to to spawn a million new projects different things and and streamline the production of those what is that lower threshold of aggregate hash rate that you think is necessary to make a material difference or at least to keep the rest of the mining network in check? I don't know.

I don't know. I feel like you could figure that out. I feel like if you get to 1% to 2%, you get to like 1.5% to 3% blocks a day, I think that's enough. People making really important transactions, if you're worried about censorship, being able to wait a day makes sense to me.

It does have a compounding effect too. Like if those people are all lottery mining and you see, you know, three people a day hitting the jackpot, you're going to want to get one. So it sells more and that reduces the time. That's why I bought mine. That's why I have three. I'm staring at all. I have one at home. Really?

Two in the studio. I'm like staring at them like mine, mine, mine. And you got it because that solo block like last summer? Yeah. That's awesome. It could be me. It could be you. Yeah.

I can manifest this. I could collapse some quantum waves. your chances are not good but it is it is important to remember every single block is solved by a single chip just like the one that one hash under the difficulty target you know when the bidx solved a block all the articles are like against great odds you know a bidx solves a block every block is solved against great odds yeah because it's just a chip yeah it might be in a huge you know billion dollar farm but it's still just that one chip that solved the block against all odds yeah it's a beautiful thing it is a beautiful thing yes

we've got uh we've got peter todd peter todd there he is he's a legend i hear you i hear you're like jpegs on the blockchain is this true you can join yeah yeah are we all doing this here we can do it yeah i'm talking about all right Do you want to hang around? Sure. I'm good. I know Peter Todd is my biggest fan.

He's like the number one BIDAC spokesman. Jeremy, who are you again? Peter, I was saying, this is typically how our interactions work. It's the second day, the last day of a conference, the last panel. Baltic Honey Badger, we do unpopular opinions every year that we're there. Now, here, there's no topic for our final discussion on the live desk here. Well, I could give a very unpopular opinion at this table, which is this better be good because I'm missing Matt Crowlow's talk on Meevil.

Oh, shit. Like, this conference is a rare one where I actually want to go see the presentations. Why do you want to see Meevil? Because I want to go fight Meevil. Or maybe I want to move to the dark side and be Meevil. how so is this like mev sniping yeah yeah cool i mean it's actually just there and basically he left on talking about how an ethereum you know if you want to run an ethereum mining pool it's like a tens of million dollars investment to be competitive and part of it is because a big chunk

of the income you make is actually doing arbitrage between centralized exchange and decentralized exchange which is like crazy to think like miners are doing transaction selection to make money on arbitrage and like that has to come into it it's like crazy level financialization well is that entering bitcoin is that what he's discussing well you know i'm missing the i'm missing the talk but uh i've heard him talk about this before and certainly it is a risk to this stuff getting into bitcoin so far it hasn't but you know there are risks here is it a bad thing well do you want to live in a world where to be a bitcoin miner you got to go spend like 20 million bucks hiring people to do transaction selection?

No, we were just talking about being able to buy a $200 device to plug in. Well, I'm going to buy my $200 BidX and then go hire a high-frequency trading firm. Let's do it. It's permissionless, man. You can do what you want. You can just do things.

Yeah, I can just do things, like start a high-frequency trading firm to find a block once in a blue moon on my BidX. Well, when it comes to the MEV, i imagine matt's talking about like the centralization the mining pool layer yeah what is uh what are your thoughts on that particular layer of bitcoin famously i mean obviously how big like ant pool is and foundry and all these accusations other pools are really just getting their templates from there i mean that's clearly bad um it's not clearly a death

sentence yet because so far starting up new pools isn't that hard but to give a good example like ocean is a massive missed opportunity here if ocean actually want to decentralize mining they wouldn't be pissing around with datum they'd go open source their pool code so anyone could start up a new pool i asked luke he said they're working on it well he's said that a lot and i don't think they're making much progress on that also it's code you can just put it on fucking github like there's nothing actually stopping them from doing this yeah you're getting this this you know i'm gonna i'm gonna want to have it fully commented yeah we're working on it that's just an excuse That's what I said, just publish it now

You've got to swallow it with your pride, it's not perfect We've talked to Ocean We've talked to Hashpool We've talked to P2P pool The last two days, out of those three What is most appealing to you? I personally You said Ocean, P2P pool

P2P pool and Hashpool Hashpool So I honestly don't know that much about Hashpool And the current P2 pool I assume you mean P2 pool V2 I honestly don't know that much about them. I did actually just come out of the Braidpool talk not that long ago. I have been following Braidpool for a while, and it looks very exciting.

But obviously there's a lot more code development to be done before it actually works. But I think it has potential. I think for all these solutions, block withholding is a massive problem. It's not clear if it's even fixable. So I don't know what's going to happen there. Do you think that block withholding has been happening with the FPPS pools and why there's been this consolidation? It's hard to know.

I mean, block withholding is inherently an attack that's just hard to go prove. You know, if you're running a totally centralized pool where you do all the block template creation, there are tricks you can use to make people reveal that they've been block withholding in some cases. But a catch with that is you can only do this as centralized pool. Is this like sending them dummy work that you know? Exactly.

But you could always argue, like, oh, we're changing the extra knots or something like that, right? Like, it's hard to know exactly what the wind is flashing. Yeah, but it's not relevant for a centralized pool. It's like they might be to kick them off. That's true. Well, I think whether it's braid pool, P2 pool, hash pools, I think it's obvious. So I've got to point out, early P2 pool, I don't know what P2 pool V2 does. If I remember correctly, if you found a block, you got an extra reward for being the person who found the block,

which does disincentivize block withholding. Because if I, don't quote me on the numbers here, but I think it was something like you get, like, 1% of the block reward. So the block reward for everyone else is, like, say, 99%. And 1% of a block reward is pretty good. It's a strong disincentive to withhold blocks. Now, maybe that's not strong enough if this is, like, a censorship thing where someone's actively trying to go kill off the decentralized pools. But it's better than nothing. Is it correct to say that the crux of the problem is consistent payouts

and the solutions that are being worked on are trying to unlock liquidity for individual miners earlier? I mean, the crux of the problem is, yes, consistent payouts matter. But that's more of like, why do pools exist? The crux of the problem for block withholding is more pools must exist because of this variance issue. So now what do you do about it? And I've got to point out, like, let's say hypothetically Braidpool exists. And let's say hypothetically on the Braidpool level itself

somehow you saw a block withholding. I'm not saying this is possible. I'm just saying let's say hypothetically it was possible. Braidpool itself, there's limits to how much variance it can reduce because variance reduction is kind of a data issue. So even then you would get share withholding attacks on people creating sort of metapools around Braidpool for very low hash power miners,

like the people running BidAxes. Now, of course, like always, if you have a BidAxis on Braidpool, you can mine in sort of lottery mode, where you might get a payout of like $1,000 like once a year on average, but people are still going to want to get paid more regularly than that.

We're thinking about actually adding a withhold blocks checkbox checkbox to the BidX dashboard. Kind of funny. It's easy to do, man. The solution for Braidpool is to create this MergeMine sidechain that produces tokens that you can trade to get liquidity. The problem is there are limits to how

low-valued those tokens can be. You know, Braidpool can push that variance reduction in one direction, but it can't get it to zero, right? Like, you know, good examples. Like, I run a BidX for five minutes i earn the equivalent of like a millionth of a penny or whatever it works out to

be obviously there is no way on earth we can have consensus over me getting paid out that has to work in some kind of hierarchical system you heard about the um the hash pool idea i think every share you get back a hash token yeah yeah which which is a trusted like centralized system sure but we're you know we're distributing that and you could then sell that yep token yeah to people who actually have a chance of solving it it's not unlike um some braid pools ideas where for instance you could go and take your sub payout reward and then sell it someone else with a transaction within the braid pool itself which is interesting too because then you're actually adding another transaction layer to bitcoin yeah and that's that's always i've talked to

to Eric Voskio about this, Bob, about this, how I feel like figuring out the token structure of the MergeMind side pool or side chain is still the problem to solve there. I don't know. I think that part of it seems like a real small problem compared to

all the work you've got to do, like actually implementing a braid pool. Originally, a braid pool is based on a totally different consensus algorithm. That's obviously going to be a ton of work to actually implement. that seems like a lot hash pool

you do have the centralization trade off of the mint being somewhat of a central entity not somewhat it is a central entity yeah it is

you could have diverse sort of competition in much the same way you could have diverse pools that's true but I think the

which gets back to I think my point about ocean it's that the thing that will actually fix this problem the most in practice

is not things like datum it's not things like cache pool it's just at least making sure that the next time a pool goes bad someone can quickly go and get the software to make a new pool and spin it up if ocean only made their github repos public this would solve things much more than anything luke has ever done that's that's huge and it removes the target off their back too yeah to an extent in my understanding it ocean was supposed to be somewhat of a charitable operation by uh was it jack torsey or whatever i mean why

you know if i were him this is what i would have insisted on day zero no you will make your github repo public end of story and this will be the thing you actually run so if anyone else wants to copy you they can and obviously that would mean you'd get a copy of ocean spinning up immediately and maybe all the hash part would go there but it's non-trivial it's non-trivial right it's not like they release their software and all of a sudden there's a competitor that just slays them right there's a lot of extra work well i mean i have a suspicion luke's worry is that this will happen and he doesn't want to lose that control like there's no good like if your goal is really to go and make bitcoin a more decentralized place there is no rationale to

go keeping your source code for your fancy pool that actually works private you always want someone else to have the ability to go spin up a new one oh absolutely and i just ocean just doesn't do that the risk of of someone setting up uh something you know using their code exactly and setting up a better ocean it's not a risk it's a good thing unless you don't actually have the goal of making bitcoin a more decentralized place yeah and i think that's that's a real answer there it's luke is being selfish here so on a scale of spectrum of fully decentralized to where we were in 2015 with g hash like where would you put the centralization of the bitcoin mining pool layer well i so so you gotta remember a big part of decentralization is distribution of hash power

and because hashing is a much more marginal business that's inherently become more decentralized because more people have to go chase smaller opportunities for cheap power now back in the day you made so much money hashing you could just go and buy a warehouse anywhere throw a bunch of equipment there pay market rates for electricity and you'd yeah you'd make money hand over fist that inherently resulted in fairly large mining pools popping up in a bunch of places that had low shipping times so the asic manufacturers and of course the nasik manufacturers themselves building equipment in mining themselves now in a in a world that's stable it would be very unexpected for an asic manufacturer to do this because what's the

chance they simultaneously can make things and have cheap power all right you would expect them to be beaten out by the guys having disused solar panels and, like, stranded hydro in the middle of nowhere. I mean, that's where we're headed, right? It's these razor-thin margins. Well, it's where we are, I would argue. Like, we're much closer to that than we used to be. You go talk to, like, big miners that are scaling up,

a lot of them are not actually making a profit. They're playing financial games by getting debt. Yeah, that's pretty clear. Incorporating micro-strategies, strategies to their... Yeah, whereas the ones that are actually making the profit are doing things like just mining on like flare gas, mining on solar that's stranded, you know, hydro that's stranded, all that stuff. And all of those things are good because they're inherently decentralized. StoneRidge, Ross's annual letter last year, I mean, explicitly alluded to we have this portfolio of stranded gas wells. And we're going to try and create these synergies with our Bitcoin mining expertise.

They just bought Crusoe's mining operations. You can see it heading in that direction. Or even like Bhutan, the story being they apparently had a bunch of hydro that they couldn't get rid of and bought a bunch of Bitcoin miners. And ironically, in some ways, I mean, that's the most centralized thing. It's a government literally mining. But it's not a big government. It's not a big government.

I would also throw out that we do not have any mining hardware that is optimized for flare gas or hydroelectric. It's all like dirty hacks to get that to work. I mean, the Watts miners, I know from experience, work very well in the oil field. those things are tanks i would say they work very well compared to bitmain but they're not optimized for this i talked with uh gridless well what would you do to optimize them what would you change gridless has this problem where they uh they're doing um biogas yeah and they have to uh ramp up and down the miners fairly frequently and that like physically breaks them yeah because the generate because the generator is ramping up and down the generator is ramping up and down they

can't like stall it and so they have to ramp this thing up and down and the the like thermal cycling on it like breaks the heat sinks off and like cracks the chips and i you know funny you say that i mean i was just talking a few months ago to a miner operating in well where where it was at the time was uh covered in snow and uh they at the time power was very expensive but they were still running their hashing operation on a reduced level just to keep it hot enough that they weren't thermal cycling it yeah they don't like to work when they're too cold yep yep so eating a loss Yeah, well, where it was was not a place where snow was common, but that particular day was like negative 15 Celsius,

and they were running heaters, basically. Like, they were using their miners as electric heaters just to make sure that the boxes themselves stayed above a certain temperature range so they weren't thermal cycling them. Because they had their financial model basically saying, well, if you let it thermal cycle past this, this is how many things on average are going to break, this is what the value is.

And they had it all worked out in a spreadsheet. I mean, this is one of these special sauces like I was talking about. If you figure out how to solve that, and you can incorporate that into your miner firmware and or hardware, you can make money. Or you can just figure out how to make miners that don't break so easily. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. We can do this, right? We have a very narrow focus from the current manufacturers, of which there's just really one. Well, it's what, like 95% of chips roughly is one source, basically?

I saw 80%. I've heard a bunch of different claims. It's up there. It's high. Micro-VT in 21 and 22, I do think, took a material bite out of Bitmain's market share, but I think that has since gone back in Bitmain's favor. I've heard the Intel chips that were available briefly were very good for certain types of things because they were just optimized in certain ways.

Other things weren't. Of course, then Intel stopped, so that kind of ruined it. They didn't stop until they made millions of chips, which still exist, by the way. I know people who are still actively working on using them, but there's no... Well, there you go. I know even more people now. But what I've heard is there's no likely way that Intel is going to restart production. Yeah, I believe it. I think Block bought a lot of their IP anyways.

It's fine. And we were just talking about this earlier, but home miners are probably more sensitive to, like, machine price than they are to efficiency. So we'll make a bid X with those. There's actually millions of brand new chips, you know, sitting in, like, anti-static bags in a warehouse somewhere. It's cool. Having you on the list, I did want to talk about Open Timestamps. It's a project. It's been around for a while.

I've been a big fan. We were for a long time. You sit here. I'm going to. You're going to jump? I'm going to jump. It's been around for a very long time. And it seems like...

Well, the current iteration of Open Timestamps, that's been around since 2016. And then Open Timestamps, the projects, I started in 2012. Yeah. And so it's been around for a while. It seemed like I've had Carlos on from Simple Proof. I think the way they're implementing it is incredible. And so I think Open Timestamps has been this thing

that's just been sitting in the brush for over a decade now. And it seems like people are finally figuring out how to optimize it and leverage it. Well, I mean, there's been gradual increase for a very long time. But, I mean, Simple Proof is one example. Just to give an example recently is the group Bellingcat just added it to their archival tools that you use to archive all kinds of things like war crimes data and so on. And, you know, it's just over time more and more people realize this. this actually really funny example this was um remember earlier well you know january 1st of

this year how the irs briefly had their claim that they were going to like apply certain types of capital gains rules to crypto and a lot of people actually timestamped their declarations that they were going to treat their crypto in such and such a way and this became kind of almost a meme it's like yeah do this write up your document get it timestamped before the deadline and i i get some insight into the logs of the calendars I run, and I could go see that likely there was on the order like 50,000 people doing this. That's pretty material.

It's more than I would have expected. Yeah, that was more than I expected. So for anybody who's unaware of Open Timestamps, what it does in the current state of the protocol, how would you pitch it? Well, Open Timestamps proves data existed in the past. Why is that useful?

Because bad guys don't have time machines. That's all it does. And it does this so efficiently it can be offered for free because it uses Merkle trees to scale so like the entire world's data could be time stamped in one Bitcoin transaction

and have minimal effect on block space I mean trivial like you know per day all of the open time stamps calendars out there that actually do time stamping you know they gotta go make like less than a dozen or two transactions per day it's not much I mean

it's this type of thing like I run two of these calendars and they're there for redundancy so you know at least one works um and i fund that those transaction fees purely out of donations and so far you know i've had enough donations keep them running yeah and so like having talked to carlos about this like again building on that example you literally timestamp any digital piece of data that you wanted to well i mean and also i gotta point out like the way it works is i have no idea what people are doing with it right because you know your open timestamps client it hashes things locally then sends me not even actually the

digest it hashes it with a random number so i can't even know what could possibly be that data and also if you're doing a lot of data people will then do aggregation themselves so like let's suppose you need a timestamp a thousand documents at once you're actually in a timestamp the thousand by creating a Merkle tree on your end, then giving me one 32-byte digest that then eventually I get timestamped with everything else. So there's many layers of the scaling. And that's like the root of the tree that you can then reference?

Well, it's like for every document, there will be a path up these trees. And in reality, there's multiple levels of trees for various reasons. Yeah. It's always made sense to me because being able to hash this data. It is a centralized service

because if you want to get your timestamp proof back immediately, of course, you can't wait for a Bitcoin transaction. So what you're actually getting is a promise by these calendars saying in the future, we're going to timestamp this. Of course, if you then wait for it to confirm and record all that data all the way up to Bitcoin block, then you don't have to ever trust me again.

Yeah. No, going back to the point, like, you don't know what's happening. Like, you can selectively reveal. So you think of, like, your board of directors or your company and somebody makes a claim against you about a certain piece of data, and you can be like, well, actually, we're time stamping this the whole time. Now, I do got to point out, this only works if the data was something where you didn't have a reason to fake it at the right time.

And, like, a good example of this is, I mean, let's suppose I come up with a video of you apparently murdering someone with an axe. Very easy these days with AI. Yeah. That video is born evidence. It is clearly you doing something bad at the time. Does the timestamp add value to this? Not really.

Because I could have just faked it and then timestamped it. Now, maybe if this is like a claim of surveillance footage that was automatically collected, maybe that adds some evidence. But maybe I just faked it to begin with. On the other hand, if we're talking about something like a tweet that by itself didn't mean anything at the time, and then later turns out to be valuable, then yeah, a timestamp can mean something.

A good example of this actually is the Hunter Biden emails. So the emails themselves are incriminating. But how do you authenticate the email? Well, there happened to be a digital signature from Google on the email of course the challenge is how do you know the digital signature was actually from google right because that isn't time stamped but what i was able to go show is actually i have a time stamped email from greg maxwell actually with the same um with the digital signature signed by the same pub key and that said it was from gmail and i had that time stamped like 2016

what's the chance like did i even know who hunter biden was in 2016 no none of this was like no one would have ever thought to do this that's very strong evidence that yes google was in fact using that pub key thus back in 2016 they you know that they really did sign this email well prior to any of this becoming publicly known or relevant yeah we have a high degree of confidence yeah it's legit yeah i remember writing about that in the newsletter because again it's like yeah applications like that, or use cases like that. And you've got to be careful, because you've got to be able to show things logically that actually we

added value, but often enough it works. And of course the beauty of timestamping with open timestamps is it's so cheap, why not do it? Like, all you've got to do is run a bit of software, and the software's free. You know, you use a little bit of network bandwidth, and that's it. Like, why aren't you timestamping your data?

Well, I think there's a big thing here in the United States, like Doge, like Elon was talking about, like, having better sort of data management systems. Well, I mean, this is kind of the thesis, I think, of SimpleProof. They think there's going to be big market government-to-government-related entities just to go time-simple data and go prove that, yeah, we didn't at least tamper with it in that way.

And it's so cheap to do. What's the argument against it? Yeah. I mean, we had the first example was Georgia. One of the counties in Georgia verified their election results. And, you know, and I've got to point out, that's pretty weak proof. I mean, maybe they faked it on the beginning, but it's still, why didn't you go at least prove that? You know, what was your argument against it?

And I think going forward, more and more often, that question will be asked. Why didn't you do this? Like, what were you trying to hide? Slowly but surely. Starting in 2012, beginning to catch on even more. It's a pity this didn't happen pre-AI. I mean, one of my big regrets is I timestamped the Internet Archive. like i wrote software that download the metadata got it timestamped and all this

and that was all well and good the internet archive actually reached out to me and i saw them in person in san francisco and talked to a bunch of their high up guys and it was all pro timestamping they thought it was a great idea but one fucker in the room just said no we're not going to do this as bitcoin we can't yeah we cannot legitimize bitcoin really yep and that was enough to stop the whole project what was this great with bitcoin specifically you know bitcoin i know has been environmental i mean who the hell knows it's like i didn't talk to the guy much but you know there's just there's a certain type of person who just thought bitcoin's inherently evil and we just cannot do anything related to it and this problem there's

been problems with the internet archive recently hasn't there well i mean a big one being of course ai got invented and uh now all the stuff you kind of got to wonder whereas had they at least timestamped everything, we would have a couple more years where you could say, yeah, this stuff is legit. And it's an archive. Why wouldn't you do this? Yeah, it seems like a fundamental aspect

of an archive is timestamping when something was made. It's just a sad, missed opportunity. And as far as I know, they still have no timestamps on any of their stuff. Except, of course, the things I was able to timestamp myself. We have many people from Internet Archive

that watched us live stream so if you're out there listening yeah let's re-approach this please um before we wrap it up thoughts on the week here in austin obviously op return a big topic what a stupid topic scoffing like i mean it's it's such a crazy thing too because ordinals were not popular ordinals was this kind of kooky idea that was kind of a coin collector thing no one really cared then they created inscriptions and no one would have cared except luke jr and co made a big deal of it giving them free advertising if they had just said whatever we're in it we don't care i bet we wouldn't be having this discussion but because they made a big deal of it they created this whole false like may not false is the right word but

sort of like hyped up narrative on bitcoins you know social communications and suddenly a bunch of people were able to go sell a bunch of stuff that they wouldn't be able to sell because they didn't have you know they they needed that narrative they needed this is a fight don't give them the fight none of this would happen strice in effect in real time yep yep do you think there's been any productive conversations these last two days in terms of uh i mean technically I could say yeah obviously the Oxford debate we had was technically productive because according to the votes

we changed people's minds in favor of lifting the return limit but you know how productive is this stuff really when you waste all this time of all these people I mean maybe the more productive thing is we made the conference more interesting sold a few more tickets like

it's a stupid discussion and I think this gets back to my criticism of ocean um if they actually cared about decentralization there's a very different way to do it they'd create a good pool they'd release the code they'd tell people how to spin up a new pool if necessary like everything they're doing is just they're going about it the wrong way and it's sad because the technology seems reasonable enough i mean the pool seems to work um i mean i've done a little bit of mining on it myself with you know bidx type equipment but it's just a big lost opportunity why are you getting into these fights when you

don't have to focus on what actually matters maybe let's take this feedback to heart open source to pull you know well i've known luke for a long time ain't gonna happen what do you think about the just like the overall state of bitcoin obviously you got well i think there's a bunch of legit stuff to go talk about with mempools um the mev talk i missed uh my bad that's uh those are real issues and how we deal with them will be an important topic um i think they're tricky issues because they really depend on how how people use bitcoin and i will say and i'll say this very broadly l2 systems in general are a solution to this because they allow you to do transactions that are not related to transactions on chain you alluded to this yesterday on the

panel discussion oh maybe i did i forget but i mean just just point being is that if you can do transactions that are not related transactions on chain this kind of mev stuff goes away because it doesn't matter what miners mine and so what would a solution on the second layer look like something well there's a lot of possibilities um just to give one one of many examples um rgb client-side validated system they're working on adding lightning support so if you can trade lightning right there or sorry if you can trade tokens with lightning with lightning type technology right there you can go start move money around like say usdt token that's just not related to bitcoin blocks and that helps circumvent some of these possible mev sources now i can't say that

This will solve everything. But at least this kind of solution helps. And this is something that Bitcoin has done a lot better than sort of the Ethereum world, precisely because our L2s actually work. Their L2s, eh, it's kind of dubious and not so popular. How would you compare RGB to Tappert Assets? Does Tappert Assets introduce potential for MEV? Well, Tappert Assets is a pretty close copy of RGB.

I mean, so close. I know the RGB guys are very happy about this. um a taproot assets i think makes some weird technical decisions um which seem to be related to potentially like political considerations um but you know by and large they're basically the same thing you know taproot assets um lightning design is essentially the same thing as uh as rgb proposes fascinating it's been a fun two days thank you for ending this with me i know you had to miss the meevil talk sorry about that lisa made the schedule wasn't me hey apparently it's getting video recorded so i guess in theory i could go and watch it later well uh thank you

for taking some time thank you appreciate you see you next conference i'll see you again i'll probably see you in riga we'll talk about some unpopular opinions the uh um that's it for the live stream i'm gassed i'm gassed logan that was a fun day fun two days marks you want to come in and give some closing thoughts with me he's gassed he's gassed we're all gassed here we've been going for six hours now almost five hours can't even tell time thank you guys for joining