TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #5: John Newbery

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

Join Marty as he sits down with Bitcoin Core contributor, John Newbery to dig into some of the technical details of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core's process, keeping the long-term in mind, and what the average Joe can do to make Bitcoin better.

What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent. We're back in the studios here at Barstool Sports, sitting down with a very special guest today, as always. It's a man who works for Chaincode Labs here in New York City and is contributing to bitcoin core um his name is john newberry john welcome to the podcast thank you very much it's good to be here thank you for joining us um yeah so for all you freaks out there i brought john and he's got a very interesting perspective in my mind i think you hopped in the scene in my mind early august when you came out with that bitcoin tech talk article about core's process and what it's like joining core's process as an outsider

And I think your perspective, because you, from what I understand, you came in to Bitcoin last year, right? Yeah, that's about right. I was interested in Bitcoin for maybe a year and a half prior to that. And I was getting more and more interested in this strange, bizarre technology and social experiment that we call Bitcoin. And I decided to quit my job and try and make Bitcoin my life and my work. it just so happens that at that time matt corallo was running a a month-long residency program here in new york which i joined and then following that i i joined chenko lab chenko labs as a full-time employee so i've been working on the protocol contributing to bitcoin core for a little over a year now after bit devs meet up a few weeks ago we briefly touched on sort of patience in the

So that's sort of what I want to talk about in this episode and hope my listeners understand is sort of where we are right now with Bitcoin and sort of clear up the air on the argument specifically around scaling fees and keeping the long term in mind. All right. We have an hour. Let's solve all of this. but one article that came out this week was or not article post by rusty russell yeah his three eras of bitcoin um uh paper or post i thought that was actually a perfect precursor to our discussion today because uh so to lay out this to give you the gist of rusty's papers basically three eras of bitcoin were in the middle of the second the first era was from the genesis block to around 2014 and during that period bitcoin i think i think there's some people in the other room watching the bitcoin price charts watching that playing video games um yeah there's always

something going on in this office it's it's never never a dull moment here but um going back to the first era in the first five years that bitcoin was around it was a smaller network in the sense that there weren't as many people using it and during that time period there weren't full blocks so people were able to transact with and the price was lower so people were able to transact using bitcoin and had very small fees negligible where you wouldn't think about it uh buying coffee or or something like that and now we're in the middle of this second era where or the beginning of the second era where more people have come on the network the price has risen as a result and fees have gone up as a result um and a lot of the narratives that are being pushed out there right

now especially by um the bitcoin cash or bcash team um you're saying that the the fee rate is is destroying the value proposition of bitcoin and i would love to get your opinion on that and sort of how you see this scenario right um yeah i haven't read rusty's blog post i saw him tweeting about it and i i had a quick skim it it looked interesting um yes undoubtedly bitcoin needs to be a secure system and we pay for that security by by paying the miners the miners aren't mining blocks and putting work into the network from their own generosity that they're mining because they get paid for it and that revenue for the miners is our security it comes from two places it comes from the block

subsidy and it comes from fees so in the long run fees are going to go down as a proportion of the remaining bitcoin in the world so i expect fees will have to go up to to replace that lost revenue if you want the same level of security and that's what another thing for newcomers coming into the space they get to realize that this block reward subsidy in the first eight years was much larger than it is now right so it's an exponential decay the first four years in the first four years half of all bitcoin were mined in the following four years half of the remaining bitcoin were mined so every four years half of the remaining bitcoin that will ever be mined get mined out so that's a very kind of

aggressive tail off that exponential decay and now we're in year nine of this experiment that we hope will last for decades fully seven-eighths or more of the bitcoin that will ever be mined have gone yeah and that's the whole debate that's going on now is is around fees big bitcoin cash forked off because they think that bigger blocks will lead to lower fees um but would you agree that they're going to run into the same problem of high fees if their network ever attains the same size as the original Bitcoin? I would expect so, yes. And especially seeing as they are on a schedule

which has been accelerated by a few months. They mined out a lot of blocks over the last three months because of their difficulty adjustment algorithm. So they're already a bit further on towards the next halving. And at that point, the subsidy will cut in half and the minor revenue, if they want the miners to retain the same revenue, the difficulty will have to cut in half,

the security of the network will cut in half, all fees will go up to substitute. So, I mean, you can't have it all, there's nothing free. One argument that Bcash supporters often go back to is that Bitcoin was working until a couple of years ago because it was very cheap to use the network. Well, it was very cheap to transact from the user perspective, but someone was paying for that,

and that someone was the entire network in the form of subsidies. And that's fine if the price continues going up forever. It doesn't matter if your share of the pie is getting smaller, if the pie continues to expand, but there's not an infinite amount of money in the world. So Bitcoin price won't continue going up forever, and that subsidy will start to be shown in inflation, people's Bitcoin, the value of their portion of Bitcoin will go down if we continue the subsidy.

So you don't get a free lunch. It has to be paid for somehow. And I think that's what Rusty's article is about. And it's, I mean, it's interesting. It's a very interesting topic for discussion. It's something that maybe a lot of people haven't thought much about or have shied away from. Now, and that's why I really enjoyed Rusty's piece is because he's thinking, he's thinking long term he's thinking ahead and uh these are definitely conversations that we need to start having now because they are going to be problems in the coming years or not problems but debates in the coming years wanted to bring you in today because you know core's process better than anybody i've met at this point um so if you could help explain that process and uh sort of

help our viewers understand why core isn't like a central entity um it was more process oriented yeah um i think it's useful to keep the distinction between what bitcoin is and what bitcoin core is because even even we talk about how code gets merged into the bitcoin core code base there's nothing um there's nothing forcing users to take an update from core and run it right bitcoin is the users running the code that they choose to use and if bitcoin core changed the consensus rules and people didn't want that then they wouldn't run it so it's it's useful to think about core in that context that core can't force any changes but let's talk a little bit about what core is core is a a process it's a software repository on github and anyone is free to open

a pull request against that repository anyone is free to review open pull requests anyone is free to mail the mailing list take part in discussions take part in irc conversations and it's very different from a more centralized software project like linux or python where linux has linus who is the benevolent dictator who directs the direction of linux and he can make executive decisions. That's not really the case in core. We have maintainers who merge code, but they do so much more as functionaries. They don't really have executive discretion over which direction the code base is moving. They simply look at the feedback that PRs have received. They decide whether they've received enough acknowledgments and agreement from other contributors to the

process, and they decide whether it's safe to merge. That's really all they do. They don't have any kind of higher level decision-making power than anyone else in the process and how often does code get pushed from core because we just had version 0.15.1 that's right yeah um i think about every three months we'll have a point release and roughly every six to eight months we'll have a major release but that can change um traditionally it's been we try and on that schedule and then whatever makes it into that whatever features make in in time go into that the next release will be dot 16 we really want segwit addresses to be in before 16 we want segwit wallet to be fully incorporated and fully merged so that might push the release schedule

back a little bit um but in general we release roughly on a six to eight month schedule for a major release happy you brought up segwit um so that is so for those of you who are newer to bitcoin and uh don't know we just had a huge scaling debate that's been going on for two years and one of the backwards compatible solutions that was pushed through by user activated soft work it's debatable some people will say the new york agreement forced it but but I don't believe that, and Segwit. And Segwit is, again, it's a soft fork, which is different than a hard fork,

and it is completely backwards compatible and opt-in. And can you help us understand how this helps the fee situation? Right, so Segwit, first and foremost, was a bug fix. Since the beginning of Bitcoin, there's been a bug called transaction malleability. In Bitcoin, when you create a transaction, it's this blob of data with inputs and outputs and there's also a signature and the way we refer to that transaction is through the transaction id which is a hash of the entire

transaction including the signature now you can have many different valid signatures for the same transaction so you could have transaction a or sorry a transaction with signature a and then the same transaction with signature b they're both valid but because that signature is included in the identifier they have a different id so segwit fixes that by taking the signature outside of the the transaction id so that's great that's that's a really important bug fix it allows lots of new functionality and features but as well as that segwit gave us some other benefits it gives us this block size increase without being non-backwards compatible so we can we can can increase the block size a bit and nodes on the network that haven't

upgraded Segwit they don't mind they they're fine with that and upgraded nodes are also happy so that's good because it's opt-in if you don't want to use a new feature you don't need to you don't need to use it you don't need to change Segwit also gave us a couple of other great features it fixed a quadratic hashing bug which meant a malicious miner could create a block that takes a long time to validate that's that's not made worse by segwit it would be made worse by a naive base block size increase and finally it allows us to do versioning for scripts so we could introduce new features into

the scripting language or an entirely new scripting language a lot more easily with segwit I'm happy you brought up the other option that was on the table which is just a pure block size increase. Why do you think that would be... It's not advantageous at this point. A lot of people think it's not advantageous to do just a pure block size increase. Why is that?

I actually think a block size increase, a base block size increase, is probably... We probably want it at some point. Let me rephrase. An arbitrary just doubling of the block size does not seem advantageous. it depends on how you do it so we need the base block size to be bigger

eventually by some level it's very difficult to work out exactly what the right number is I don't think there really is an exact right number and we'll continue to have different views on what that is and some people want bigger blocks some people are happy as it is some people even want smaller blocks so I think eventually we'll need a block size increase but it needs to be done right it needs to be done in a consensus driven way it needs to be done in a safe considered way it needs to take time to bring everyone with it so convince everyone that this is a good idea it needs time to allow engineers to change their systems it needs time to allow

people to review and test the code so yes we'll need a base size increase i'd like to see more proposals i'd like to see people working on that but it's not something that can be dictated by one person or a small group of people we just we just found that out the hard way in the last four months is we had a group of people try to dictate uh sort of arbitrarily and they met in a hotel room i believe there was a dozen of them and they said hey we're going to double the block size and lo and behold their code didn't work and this is something else you you've written about or you didn't write about it you don't want to write about it because you found a bunch of bugs in the SegWit2x code that you didn't even want to share.

Why is that? Sorry, I can't take credit. Other people found these bugs. I tweeted about a couple of them. I pointed one out to Jeff Garzig, who is the author of the BTC1 repository code base. That's the code base that implements SegWit2x. Really just asking him a question,

why is your code doing this? Why is it using this uninitialized variable? and I wasn't expecting him to do anything with that except maybe answer the question but he immediately pushed out a patch untested, unreviewed and told people to run the code and I thought that was not very professional

and I warned people not to run that code but there are other bugs in BTC1 I don't think it's I mean it's kind of we're flogging a dead horse here the process was completely broken um and the code was also completely broken and so that's something we're finding out as bitcoin ages as we as this technology gets older um is it is very hard to to add functionalities

to to to mess with the protocol at the protocol level like and that's something i've been stressing to a bunch of people like a lot of people in this office have been like what all coin should i buy what all kind what like what's hot right now like what should i buy i'm like i don't i think people are looking at the all coin markets and the token markets like they would the stock market and companies and they don't realize what they're really dealing with is protocols that are similar to what the internet is built on yeah and how are and how hard it is to to successfully uh code scalable protocols and that's i think there's a lot of a noise in the space right now And I think people have to realize that you need very, very skilled individuals to sort of work with these protocols.

Perhaps. I happen to think that the people who are working on Bitcoin are some of the most intelligent people I've ever met. And I'm very excited about proposals that are happening in Bitcoin. I also really appreciate the philosophy that a lot of Bitcoiners have about Bitcoin as a culture, and that culture is one of security and conservatism and not moving fast and breaking things. So other coins take a different philosophy, and that's fine. It's great for people to experiment. I wouldn't begrudge Ethereum for doing what they're doing. It's great for them to try new things.

But I don't value that as much as I value Bitcoin. um personally for my own you know my own ideological reasons i i like bitcoin i think it's safer i think the processes are better and that's why i spend my time working on bitcoin and that's why i hodl bitcoin is because again this is money we're talking about people like security should come first and again i get a lot of shit for this but i'm an ethereum bear solely because they don't put security first they put they have the move fast break things mentality and again with protocols and money i i i think that's an unwise sort of mentality to have but it's heavily debated there's i'm gonna have a couple of eth bulls in here in a couple weeks

to tell me why i'm wrong i'm excited for that but again and that's interesting that you said like the bitcoin community is like-minded like in that sense um which is what we're finding out with these new blockchains they're sort of breaking up into communities uh yep bitcoin cash ethereum uh and bitcoin being sort of the most steadfastly conservative and putting security overall and so on-chain versus off-chain so a lot of people will argue that there's a lot more activity off-chain and on-chain like in otc markets and stuff like that so what do you i don't i don't think anybody could put a number on it but like how how big do you think the off-chain market is like i don't know you know like like you say it's difficult to put a number on and i'm certainly not

an expert i'm not a market guy i don't know i really don't know what's going on and it's not something i follow closely so that the the great thing about bitcoin and i think the vision for bitcoin or my vision for bitcoin i mean i can't speak for anyone else but the way i would like to see bitcoin move is to be the underlying most secure anchor of trust and value and then you can build things on top of that you can build trustless lightning channels or payment channels or side chains or banks or coinbase or whatever you want to build on top of it as long as you're building it on top of this secure level and that's that's what i want to be building and that's the way i view it like that's i was actually i got i met somebody for coffee earlier today they're building

a data platform for for crypto hedge funds that they can use to sort of value like hundreds of altcoins and in my view again going back to protocols i think if there's going to be more than one there's only going to be a few and you're going to build on top of these protocols uh i think having um trying to do everything on the on at the protocol level just logistically doesn't make sense in my mind and um do you see a scenario where you could do everything on at the protocol level like bcash is trying to do i don't think it's scalable i don't think what bitcoin cash are doing is sustainable and scalable um i also don't think what ethereum is doing is is scalable but i didn't think bitcoin was scalable i didn't think bitcoin

was scalable until i started seeing things like payment channels um so the the idea that someone in australia buys a cup of coffee at their coffee shop and on my computer i validate that transaction does not make sense to me at all because lots of people are buying coffee all over the world and i don't want my computer spinning cpu to validate all of those transactions um that kind of model will lead to very few nodes running, I think. So what was the question again? So you don't think you're going to be able to do everything at the protocol? No, I don't think so.

But I think what we should value, what I value in the blockchain, is a very, very secure ledger, something that you can't rewind, something that you can trust. And that is expensive, right? You're paying for that security. And the challenge for us now is to find a way to use that very precious block space in a much more efficient and effective way. So that might be batching transactions, it might be using Segwit,

it might be aggregating transactions together when you're doing bump fee, just aggregate transactions and bump at the same time. It might be using Lightning Channels, it might be using sidechains. It might be maybe keeping your Bitcoin in a Bitcoin bank and then only occasionally having to use the actual blockchain. So lots of different approaches. I think that's how we build a scalable technology. A lot of people are getting lost in the sauce of the blockchain buzzwords.

Like I went to, I wrote about it on Monday, I went to this ontology launch event they're trying to create. All the buzzwords are there. IoT, AI, governance on the blockchain, IP on the blockchain. It was all there. And the event, it was like, it was like a surreal, I feel like I was like Hunter S. Thompson at like the Vegas Democratic National Convention when he wrote about that. Like, it was just like a bunch of people who had no idea what they were talking about.

Like, I sat down with one, starting, this one guy starting a crypto hedge fund, and I asked him one basic question, and it was, all right, so you're investing in all these tokens, how are you securing them? Like, and that was it. That was the question. And he babbled on for like five minutes. And the gist of it is, not really sure, but people are working on those solutions. And to me, speaking with that man, he was basically just a rich guy with a bunch of money who was hopping on the latest craze.

And I feel like there's a lot of that going on right now. And again, that's why I started this podcast. I'm trying to cut through all the noise in the space and get to the signal. And what I would put forward is that there are a lot of people that will say they understand the blockchain and they're going to build products on it. But at the end of the day, they really don't understand what they're working with. And I think very few people, I mean, this is an alien technology. We're still figuring out how it works. I think we're still discovering new things every day.

And that's why you and I agree with the core processes. Let's think long term. Let's be a little patient here. this is something ideally it'll be around for centuries we're the first guardians of of this protocol and uh let's take care of it and make it like you have to have the the seven nations mentality we're thinking seven generations ahead and not and not uh not thinking about buying coffee tomorrow yeah well seven generations is a long time i think I think Bitcoin core developers, Bitcoin protocol developers that I've met do think long term, maybe in terms of decades, years or decades, and many businesses think in terms of quarters.

And those different worldviews, they conflict in some ways. Your priorities change if you're thinking on different timescales. So that's an astute observation. um and and i think a lot of people just throw economic reality out the door so you have all these people that want bitcoin to be a medium of exchange out of the box but any money that has ever become money has had to go through this continuum where it establishes itself as a collectible then a store of value and then it moves on to a medium of exchange when it's saturated the market enough and then it becomes a union of account and that's like in my opinion like to

think less than a decade into this into bitcoin to to expect it to go through that continuum become a medium of exchange is just asinine like it doesn't make sense to me it's coming from an economic background and i think again it goes back to patience i think there's a lot of impatient people out there that are they're trying to force their views on onto bitcoin and that's what i actually another part of the conversation i had earlier today was i think people are misguided thinking they're going to wield blockchains to what we want. And what we're going to find is that Bitcoin is going to change our nature and how we react.

Yeah, that's getting a bit cosmic. We get cosmic here. I agree. I'm not an economic historian, but that intuitively makes sense to me that we start as a store of value and we move on to a medium exchange. I got into Bitcoin really because I was interested in payments and payment channels fascinate with me and i i really want machine to machine payments and i

really want micro transactions but i want them done right i want them done based on top of sound money and based on top of a medium of exchange which is secure and holds its value i think if you don't have that underlying security and soundness then what you build on top is is a house of cards i think what bitcoin cash is doing promising free or almost free transactions on the blockchain is payments done wrong and i want to do payments right i want to start with the sound money and maybe on top of that we can build a payment system i find that the idea fascinating i find the idea of very cheap transactions almost free transactions where you can stream value right you could have a payment channel where you're streaming

micro sense i find the concept of that world fascinating um there's an economist ronan coast who talked a lot about transaction costs um he called the marketing costs and he talked about the theory of the firm about what size firms grow to based on how much it costs to go to market to acquire services and if you if you shrink the transaction cost down to very low i think it changes the world in in many ways that we can't even imagine right now so i i'm i find that really fascinating i'd love to see that world but it's not free i mean it's not it's you gotta you gotta create that technology and i think that takes a lot of engineering a lot of thought and we're nine years into this experiment where we have this kind of digital native money for the first time

it takes time this is the best kind of money we've ever invented as a species and that doesn't happen very often maybe a handful of times in the history of our species it's going to take a few years to to all come together yeah that's that has been the thing we get very you said that got very cosmic earlier we get very cosmic here and we put it in the concept of of where we are in our part of history again i brought this book up many times on the podcast but the sovereign individual and talk about inflection points basically every 500 years 500 year super cycles that are predicated on inflection points brought by technology, the printing press, and the internet,

and basically have the internet. And would you say the internet and Bitcoin could be coupled together as sort of two very, very huge innovations, one after the other, that might be? Maybe, maybe. I'm not a historian, but I think that makes sense. The internet has made information freely shareable and available to many people in the world

that it wasn't available to before in ways that it wasn't available before and bitcoin could potentially make transfer of value and storage of value available to many people who didn't have that before and in ways that we didn't have before so yeah maybe they are part of the same kind of grand idea an analogy that might be useful here is the shipping container the shipping container has allowed globalization to happen which is the most useful ideology in the history of mankind probably in terms of the benefits it's brought to people around the world i would say and it has changed the world in ways that couldn't have been predicted before the shipping container was invented and and became widespread and i think a digital native money that can be used

for cheap payments will do similarly it will create new businesses and create new um modes of organizing our societies in ways that we can't imagine but again we're getting we're kind of getting lost in the lost in the sauce yeah getting lost in this pina from oregon that's very nice um so what are you what are you currently working now in chinko from what i understand you're working on the testing suite for poor yeah that's that's what i've done that's what i spend a lot my time on and continue to spend my time on i yeah i have more experience in python as a as a language and the test framework is written in python so that was something i could immediately get my teeth sunk into it's something that needed a bit of love so when i started at chain code in

january that's what i i started looking at um i think it's it's in better shape than it is now i think testing is very important having good coverage and testing edge cases is obviously very important so i hope that the work i'm doing is is useful um in the last couple of months i spent a lot of time on this residency program we had i think about 80 people would apply for the program i interviewed 20 of them so it's taken a lot of time to put that together that's what i've been spending my time on in the last couple of months and putting that together in time for january all spent will take up a lot more of my time i think um i'd like to spend more time working on the wallet, I think that needs love.

Obviously, love to work more in the peer-to-peer layer and consensus layer. There's always review to be done. So, yeah, there's plenty to keep me busy. What do you think could be better with the wallet other than being SIGWIT native? I think a really useful project would be to separate the wallet in terms of codependencies and in terms of the process,

the wallet process being separate from the server process. That's something that Russ Yanovsky is working on. I'd love to see that happen. I'd love to see hardware wallet integration so you can use your Trezor or your Ledger with a Bitcoin core node. There's lots of little things, but I think that separation,

if we can get a well-defined interface between the wallet and the server and separate them out fully, then that allows accelerated work to happen on the wallet separate of the server. So that's really, I think, my focus once I start working on the wallet would be to help Russ do that. One thing I'd like to see is, and what we talked about at the last BitDevs,

or what you always talk about at BitDevs, is better fee estimation. So, I mean, again, one of the big knocks that Bcash will throw at Bitcoin is high fees, but what a lot of people don't realize is that people are spending an unnecessarily high amount on fees. again this whole system is opt-in and you have to be proactive when using it absolutely yeah so if you could just explain and help people understand how they could lower their their fees just by being proactive yeah so like you say fees are optional they're opt-in when you send a transaction on the bitcoin network you set the fee the fee doesn't happen to you you're not a

passive agent in this system you're the one who sets the fees and you can choose to set them where you think is appropriate so the fee what the fee market in bitcoin works in it's quite an open transparent market there's a mempool your transaction goes into the mempool and every 10 minutes or so a miner will discover a block and they will usually take out the top megabyte in terms of fees they'll take out the best paying fees so you're you're basically bidding against everyone else for a space in the block. Now, blocks come in fast and slow. That's just a part of the random process of discovering blocks. So sometimes we'll see a lot of blocks come in very quickly, and that mempool will be drained. Sometimes we'll see blocks come in slowly,

and that mempool will fill up. That's expected. That's part of the system. And you need to set your fee appropriate to what your need is. If you really need your transaction to be confirmed very quickly you set a high fee if you're comfortable with your transaction being confirmed in the next 6 12 24 hours two days a week whatever you can set it lower depending on on what you see happening in the network so we need i think we need better algorithms i mean that's one step but i think we also just need a better understanding that that is that's possible right a lot of people just send a transaction and accept the fee as as if that's something that you have to pay that's not the case you need to understand what your need is and set that fee

appropriately i want to put you on the spot here but what are your opinions of the exchanges right now like coinbase bitpay bitpay's not an exchange but a processor blockchain.info they haven't updated the segwit yet and they've been complaining about fees sort of why we got into the whole segwit 2x do you think there needs to be more a more of a louder vocal outcry towards the exchanges to allow users to pick their own fees. Because in Coinbase, it's pretty egregious how much they're charging people to send money. Yeah, yeah.

And you see CEOs of certain Bitcoin companies saying that the average fee right now is $20 or whatever it is. I mean, first of all, that's... It's not lying because maybe the mean fee in the previous block was $20. But it's not exactly being truthful. It's using statistics to push your own narrative.

And it's particularly disappointing when you see CEOs of Bitcoin companies doing things like that. I think users need to be educated, or we should try and educate users, and help them understand that when they use a service that is setting high fees, that service is wasting their money. That's money out of your pocket that is going to fees unnecessarily. So I think that the best way forward is to put resources out there to show how you can transact without paying high fees. And I've been tweeting about this, and since I've been tweeting about it,

I think four or five different people individually have come to me and said, hey, I'm working on a project that will help users understand what fees are in this way. It might be better tooling, it might be a website with information, it might be graphs of what's going on in the mempool right now. So I think there's a real need there, and I think there's people working on to address that need this whole debacle we went over through the summer and into the fall with the segway 2x it's like how how can anybody take these businesses seriously anymore after after they basically created a problem themselves and they if we were to follow through with the

solution that they brought forth after creating their own problem uh it would have brought the bitcoin network to a halt um i don't think there's been enough backlash against against people that were leading us to slaughter uh if you will it would have been i mean that would have been catastrophic if everybody was running btc1 it could have been i mean it could have been it there would certainly have been a lot of confusion and i think certain people would have lost money maybe at that block height it would have stored for an hour or two as people figured out what was going on um i mean bitcoin's been very robust over eight or nine years there have been a few hiccups along the way but nothing nothing quite like what ptc1 would have done i think where it

would have just been an egregious shooting ourselves in the foot um i haven't seen much contrition from people who are pushing that very hard and saying that it was following the best practices. Barry Silbert was on CNBC this morning pumping Ethereum Classic and Zcash. I don't want to make it personal against you. We'll cut that out. I'm from Philly. I'm not afraid to call

bullshit out when it's there. And this whole summer was bullshit in my mind. But, again, this is an open source project. Everybody's entitled to their own opinion. But enough reminiscing on what was. What are you most excited for moving forward?

i'm excited about um i'm excited about mast i think that's that's a really cool and interesting technology localized abstract syntax trees i'm excited about schnor signatures and signature aggregation these i think these are two really cool technologies that will help us with scaling and also help unlock new features and functionality and allow people to do really cool things off chain like do really cool smart contracts and aggregate signatures together and have all of that that smart contract contract down to a single signature on the chain i think that's really really interesting um lightning network i think is is really interesting i'd love to see people start using payment channels and lightning network i really want to see people put money on the line

and try out use cases and maybe lose a bit of money because things are broken or you know like Just really experiment and see how we can use this technology. Those are all really exciting things for me. Yeah, Schnorr signatures in particular, that always fascinates me because a lot of people say Satoshi would have used Schnorr signatures originally if there wasn't a patent on the technology. Currently we use something called ECDSA, which is Elliptic Curve Digital Signing Algorithm.

And that was created as kind of a kludge because Schnorr's signature, the right way of doing things, was patented. So ECDSA came in later and it was made a standard and everyone knew how to use that. So in 2008, when Satoshi presumably was creating Bitcoin, that was kind of the de facto standard. Schnorr became patent free in 2008, I think. So it could have gone into Bitcoin, but people didn't have experience using it. There weren't libraries out there. It would have been kind of cutting-edge technology. So Schnorr is just signatures done right.

But with Schnorr, you have this nice property where the signature of the sum of the keys equals the sum of the signatures of the keys. So you can aggregate. That's obvious, right? Easy. Can we explain that in layman's terms, please? Okay.

so imagine i have a private key and you have a private key and i sign something and you sign something you could add up those signatures after we both sign them and that would be equivalent to us adding our keys and signing the same thing right so that that allows us to do things like multi-sig which contract down to a single signature um it's a it's a little bit tricky because there are attacks where you use one key to cancel out the other key. But there are solutions for that. There's an algorithm called Blair-Nevin.

And we might get that in Bitcoin maybe in 2018 or people will start to work on it in Bitcoin in 2018. So Schnorr on its own is just, it's kind of equivalent to ECDSA but better, but simpler and how it should be done from the start. But then because of this property, we can add additional functionality on top. and would that be implemented via SoftFork?

It could be. It could be done via SoftFork. It would be maybe a new opcode in a scripting language. It would be maybe a new scripting version in Segwit, but Segwit allows us to add features like this via SoftFork. Awesome. But let me just say, there's not a plan. There's not a roadmap.

It's not like I can tell you in... It's what you personally want to see. I personally want to see it. I know that other people working on Core would love to see it. I know other people working on different Bitcoin projects in the wider Bitcoin community would love to see it. So I think we'll get there eventually. I think Segwit was very difficult for the community,

so maybe people don't have the appetite for another consensus change very soon. But I would love to see that. Yeah, that's one thing we found that was a hard lesson to learn this year. So what Eric Lombroso talks about a lot is the bit process that was used to push SegWit forward. Was it BIP9?

BIP9, yes. BIP9. If they were to go back, they wouldn't have used BIP9. Is that correct, or am I explaining that correctly? Yeah, so you're touching on something quite important there. BIP9, otherwise known as version bits, is a deployment. So a BIP is just someone or some group of people saying, we propose that bitcoin can be changed in this way and it might be something that isn't on the

consensus layer it might be like oh we we have this new address format which we think people will find useful and should be a standard um people are free to use it or not but it's not consensus so we don't need everyone to together adopt it um but if we want a consensus change we need a way to deploy it and we need a way for everyone to come to some kind of agreement when it's going to be deployed. BIP9 or version bits was a way to deploy future soft forks so it's first of your first of all used for i think check sequence verify that was the first consensus change that was deployed using BIP9 and then segwit was the second and BIP9 is a way of coordinating the network to all agree to upgrade at the same time or to all agree to change the

the rules in some way at the same time. BIP9 splits the blockchain into 2016 block periods, just like retargeting. So a BIP9 period is contiguous. It's the same 2016 blocks as a retarget window. And within those 2016 blocks, miners will signal that they are ready to adopt to the new rules. And once 95% of blocks within a 2016 block period are signaling that they're ready to adopt the new rules, it gets locked in and then one 2016 block period later, those rules are adopted by the network. So it's really a coordination mechanism more than anything else. And people misinterpreted it as a voting mechanism. BIP9 was never intended to be a way to say we're going to let the miners choose whether or not we adopt a new rule it was

more a way of saying okay this rule has kind of general consensus and we will adopt it when 95 percent of miners are signaled and therefore everyone knows that at this date on this block the new rules come into effect so it was it's misinterpreted um it's open to gaming by miners and we i think we saw that on litecoin where the signaling rate went way up and down and the price followed it or um and the price followed it you can cut that bit out and the price followed it so uh bit nine was a technical solution and i think people view that it's being politicized and it's being used as leverage for miners to exert more influence than they should have.

Yeah, and this gets into the whole debate of who controls the network. Is it, I mean, miners or nodes or some would argue developers. And let's dig into that. So do you have a definition of a user? uh someone who has bitcoin or transact with transacts with bitcoin it's kind of it's fuzzy right are you a user if you don't run a node i think you do not have a voice unless you run a

node well you you don't make your voice heard if you're not running a node right anyone who is interacting with the bitcoin markets who's buying or selling bitcoin they could be considered users but they don't get to set their rules they don't get to set the rules of or the definition of what their money is because they can't they have to trust someone else to tell them what bitcoin is so there's there's a graduation there between a full node you're trust you're trusting no one you're validating everything and you're applying your rules your chosen rules to the definition of bitcoin through to people who are interacting with bitcoin on a more casual kind of basis and

that's what a lot of people have been trying to argue uh bcash will do this as well is that miners run the network like you're not a full node unless you're mining and that's something that i want to caution everybody not to not to feed into because this just really does come down to like to be a self-sovereign like you said you run your own you run your own node and you dictate what rules you can basically dictate what you believe bitcoin is and that's what this is a peer-to-peer network yeah that's built on uh it's built on individuals and as an individual you get to decide hey this is what my money is and to do that you have to run a node and the consensus of all the nodes every 10 minutes is what bitcoin is um so that's one thing and i'll admit i hate

to admit this i don't run my own full node i'm waiting i'm getting a bit seeds node soon but it and again it's it then let's be let's be frank it is an arduous task to set up your own full node so for we envision this being currency of the future ideally everybody's going to interact with it in some way so again i know you don't want to get too like cosmic and thinking forward but how do we get to a point where um every everybody's able to run their their own full node? Is this a UX problem or is it a logistics hardware problem? It's an ongoing effort to keep the cost of running a full node down, keep the, and when I say cost, I mean the hardware, CPU cost, the actual, how much

computing power you need to run a full node, that's got to be kept down. But also the effort But to do so, we've got to make it easy for people to run nodes. We've got to put the documentation out there, put the education out there, so people know how to run nodes and know why it's important that they run their own full nodes. It's a continuing project, and a lot of people work very hard and continue to work hard. And hopefully that will continue. It's more about whether people care and whether people are interested in being part of this system and having control and having sovereignty over their own money.

I think that's probably the most important thing to... We can't say that people should care, right? Maybe it's fine if someone doesn't care about this stuff, but I think at least making people aware that this is something that they maybe should be considering, that's something that we should be making really strong efforts to do. Well, I would even argue that the fact that people do care is what gives the network its value i think so yeah yeah it's like so and that's what the big

blockers want they want they don't like if you so let's go to the logistics of raising the block size what you do when you raise the block size is you basically increase the amount of data that's able to be stored on the blockchain which makes it so you need to use more specialized hardware that can handle that data which cuts out a group of users as it gets more expensive to buy the hardware that you can run a full node on which centralizes the system to a certain point. Yes, and it also centralizes mining.

The larger the blocks are, the longer it takes to propagate them and the more advantageous that is for centralized or the more centralization pressure that puts on mining. So that's an important consideration. So yeah, one of the things that we, I think, should aim to do as a community is keep that cost of running a node down to its minimum as far as is possible. Yeah, I don't think everybody's going to be able to afford a $20,000 node. no and and if if bitcoin becomes a centralized or a federated system then the whole experiment is worthless i think pointless um you might as well throw out all of that expensive mining

that's just wasteful and slow and just go back to using paypal i mean that's a fine system you can have apis to that why bother with all of this stupid consensus stuff exactly and that's that's where i think again i think that the theme of tonight is getting lost in the sauce that's where a lot of people get lost in the sauce is we want a paypal caliber network right now it's like again trade-offs we talk about trade-offs security for scalability versus sovereignty and this is one of the trade-offs you're gonna have a slow sort of lumbering network but everybody's able to participate and that's what people have to realize out there is is this is all about censorship-resistant self-sovereignty,

like being able to make transactions without anybody censoring them. And the more centralized the network becomes via bigger blocks and mining centralization, the less censorship-resistant it becomes, theoretically. I mean, I haven't seen this play out. Right. Decentralization is not the goal. Well, it's a tool that we use to get to censorship resistance. So it's important that we have decentralization because without that censorship resistance,

and like I say, there's no point. Why are we all wasting our time on this thing when we could go and work in fintech and work on APIs in a centralized system? I think you're right that we need to talk about security and scalability and sovereignty and be grown up about it and talk about trade-offs because there are trade-offs.

We have this scale and we can pick a number somewhere in the middle of it and that won't please everyone but we should at least have an honest conversation about what we're doing. We can't just say, oh, if you use this blockchain, it will be free and fast and quick

because these bad guys have censored it. It's fine to have a different opinion about what's important but let's be honest about it and and have that honest discussion and this segues us into another huge topic which is governance how do we how do we come to um an agreement on on that happy medium of of trade-offs what in your definition what does blockchain governance look like um i think blockchain governance we do have a governance system and it's people choosing to use the node that they choose

and choosing to run the code that they choose and choosing to follow the rules that they choose. That's what governance is in Bitcoin. How we come to make changes to that is a really difficult question. And we're nine years into this experiment. We don't know. We don't really know, right?

We're all learning as we go along. This is a brand new system that we've never seen a brand-new form of organization, organizing economy and people we've never seen before, and we're all kind of figuring it out. Yeah, and that's... Again, I don't want to harp on it too much, but I think there's so much goddamn hubris in this space

where people are like, hey, I figured this out. This is the way we should do it. And I don't want to point fingers at Ethereum, but I think their whole focus on governance is misguided because I've said this before and it's right in line with what you just said

is governance is an emergent property of these systems. It just emerges out of what node runners decide they believe at a certain point in time. And governance happens every 10 minutes in Bitcoin. On average.

On average. On other blockchains, faster, longer, depending on what chain you're on. But it's an emergent property and I think a lot of people can't see that and they're trying to apply governance as a top-down structure where it's like, all right, this is how we're going to decide everything.

And I would argue that that's just going back, that's a reversion to the system we're trying to get away from. Yeah, I mean, it's a system that people are used to. And I think many people who come into Bitcoin, myself included, when you first come into it, you see all these problems and you think, oh, it would be just easy to change this thing and tweak this thing and then Bitcoin would be so much better. I think you need to have a more Zen-like approach to Bitcoin, right?

I saw a, I'm not sure if it was a tweet or just a message from Pierre Rousseau saying something like, I wouldn't try to change Bitcoin. It's hard enough to change oneself, right? And I thought that was very wise from Pierre. It is hard to change oneself, and it's extremely hard to change Bitcoin. And it takes a while to learn that, right? It takes a while to figure out that Bitcoin isn't like a company. It's not like a government.

It's not like anything else we've ever seen before. And it's difficult to change, and maybe that's a good thing. You're proving my cosmic point. We are going to yield to Bitcoin. It's not going to yield to us. Maybe. That's my philosophy at this point. is Santiago Siri has been on this podcast before.

He posted a tweet. It's basically a 2000 space odyssey, the picture of the monkeys staring at the black slab in the beginning of the movie. That's what Bitcoin is. We are apes to a certain extent, and this thing was just dropped down in front of us, and we're trying to figure out how it works.

And we're going to yield to it as it grows, and we grow along with it. Check. um there's some good stuff we talked about fees talked about fees about ethereum a bit process background patience we hit everything i wanted to talk about but i don't want this conversation to die i've got you in this room for for a little bit we still got some wine left okay um it's very nice what are you interested outside of bitcoin oh um no i i spend my time working on bitcoin and thinking about bitcoin

and i spend a bit of time climbing i like climbing at my local climbing gym and getting outdoors when i can and that's about it i've kind of optimized my life down to two two activities that was a trick question because anybody that gets into bitcoin can't stop thinking about it and it's all you think about and so you talk about and so you're right about it's it's all consuming but yes it is all consuming and it's an obsession i'm gonna i'm gonna turn you to the cosmic side of bitcoin too it is it is a it is a global phenomenon it is like it is an event horizon that is drawing people in like if you want to um i don't i don't want to get all metaphysical but it's it's people get drawn to it yes they do

and meeting someone who is passionate about bitcoin is you know you feel like you've met a kindred spirit shit we're we're getting through this wine we got another bottle don't worry you can each polish off a whole bottle okay um but no and that's that's one thing let's touch on that so why do you think people getting so enthralled with this like it's do you think there's just like such a thirst for something new for something different system-wise like well i can only speak for myself and i got interested in bitcoin really three years ago two and a half three years ago and it's captured my attention and held my attention like nothing in my life has ever captured and held onto my attention i can't think of anything

where i've been as interested in something and two three years later i've been as or more interested in it and it's just kept holding that attention and every week or every month new horizons open up and it seems like more possibilities present themselves i think it's like that for a lot of people i mean i can't speak for anyone else but people seem to have this obsession and get consumed by bitcoin and you can really tell maybe maybe that's true in other fields as well and it's just i happen to like bitcoin so that's what i feel passionate about But I've never come across anything like it. The next thing I want to get into is funding sort of these teams

that build these open source protocols. It's definitely an area that needs help right now. It's something that people are figuring out. Chaincode, the company you work for, is one of those companies that is funding FOSS, and it's something that's very needed. And what do you think, how can we do better in helping open source developers succeed?

I think the more the better, right? I think we're lucky that we have organizations like Chaincode and the DCI, the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, which funds two developers for Bitcoin, two of the most prolific Bitcoin Core contributors. Blockstream has a full-time Bitcoin Core contributor in Peter Wooller. i know that some of the mining companies actually contribute to open source developers and that's a great thing i would love to see more companies in the space contribute either have either having employees who work full-time on open source projects or funding external developers who

work on open source projects and i saw a tweet from brian armstrong at coinbase just last weekend saying that they were going to fund five open source developers. That's fantastic news. That's really great. I'm really excited about seeing that. I'd love to see other large companies in the space follow that lead and contribute to the community that is providing the underlying infrastructure

that their businesses are based on. So let's dig into this a little bit. So how much harder is it to coordinate and build these decentralized systems compared to a centralized system? Like you said, you have a software development background, I suppose, working on centralized products. Yeah. What's the difference between, obviously there's going to be a lot of differences,

but what do you think is like the biggest difference between working on a centralized product versus an open source decentralized product like Bitcoin? Do you mean in terms of the technology or in terms of the culture and organization? Let's hit both if you're willing. Okay. Okay, so I worked in telecoms software, and telecoms is a very centralized industry. There are a lot of incumbents, companies like AT&T and the equivalents in different countries, and they have their own networks, and those networks are physically separated from each other.

And so you can build borders around the edge, and that was one of the products that the company I worked for sold. we sold what's called sbc session board and session session border controllers kind of like firewalls for voice um and you can build your network like that right you can you can control the entire network and you can keep the bad guys out and build a wall between yourself and the bad guys in bitcoin we don't have that wall right everyone is connecting to each other and anyone who connects to you might be a good guy they might be a bad guy they might be lying to you And so DOS protection has to be built in, not as kind of like an add-on feature at the end. It's got to be built in from the center.

It's got to be considered in every aspect of the system. So that's a big difference. In terms of the culture, well, if you're running a company, you have this great luxury of being able to have a plan and have a roadmap and have people who are accountable for that plan and have resources that you can assign to different tasks. In open source, in a decentralized system, everything is voluntary, right? We can't have a roadmap because nobody can be held accountable for delivering something, right?

People might be interested in pushing the project in some direction. They might want to contribute something. But if they don't contribute, well, they're a volunteer. You can't make them. So we can't have a roadmap. We can't dictate which way things go. It's a completely different mindset. Yeah, that's pissing a lot of people off, I think.

Right. I think often you hear the question, what's Core's roadmap? Well. What is Core? Core isn't a company. It's not an organization, and it can't publish a roadmap because people work on what they want to work on, and they're not being paid for it not by core um because core isn't a thing so i i think that's

frustrating for people um people it's a different mindset people aren't used to it and hopefully as this experiment continues as this process continues people will get more used to that understand it better yeah but the one thing that pisses me off is that these people that want core to have a roadmap and want these volunteers to build what they want is when the volunteers turn around and say, uh, I don't, I'm not building that.

And you hear the word toxicity thrown around and I hate, I hate the toxicity. Like talk. It's, it's complete bullshit in my mind. Cause at the end of the day, this comes down to a meritocracy. You're Cody.

There lives up to lives up to the hype. it is either productive and additive to the to the protocol or it is disruptive and people get butthurt when their code or their ideas get get i don't want to say denied but just people shut them down say i don't want to build that and it turns it turns into oh this isn't it this is this upgrade isn't good enough to oh you're toxic like you're not doing this and that's and that's muddying sort of the the debate that's going on right now is it's become like more an emotional thing compared to a technical thing and how do we how do we get away from just pointing and calling each other toxic to having everybody understand that this is a meritocracy

like don't don't get your feelings hurt just because you don't get something passed well getting everyone to understand it's never going to happen when you're talking about any subject to it um yeah i i also get a little bit annoyed by the word toxicity being thrown around there are certainly bad actors all across the space there are people who will threaten violence or say bad things that's undeniable both way like but like jeff guard i don't know if it's true jeff guards are saying he's getting death threats jameson lap got swatted like yeah don't ever do any of that shit like yeah obviously don't ever do any of that shit but i think also important is don't draw attention to that shit it's it's nasty stuff and i think the best way to deal with it is

to focus on the good stuff right focus on what you want to build if you want to build something build it if you see something you don't like build something better um i i don't like the word toxicity being thrown around because i think it it just draws attention to the bad behavior and it's not productive right if something bad happens and that's it even bad behavior though i don't like it's not bad behavior like so that's the thing it's like they're throwing in it's like a propaganda thing where you're throwing like a negative negative connotation a negatively connotative is that how you say negatively connotative word at somebody and it doesn't apply like it's not toxicity it's merit um okay so yeah there's a separation there is bad behavior

but then when toxicity the word toxicity gets used loosely like oh you don't like my you said my idea is bad you're toxic um yeah i don't i don't really have much time for that criticism is not toxicity it's not trolling you know truth is not not trolling bitcoin is is a very um like you say it's a meritocracy but our technical ideas get annealed by this really fierce process of technical review and criticism um and and you should if you want to participate in the technical process you should accept that and you should welcome it you should ask for really strong criticism of your ideas because it makes them stronger and this is we're going to do sports analogy we're here at barstool sports i played lacrosse one of the best lines i ever

heard in life from a from a sports coach was my lacrosse coach in high school and it was a simple concept basically trying to entice everybody on the team from the best player on the team all the the last person on the bench you're only as strong as your weakest link and this is funny we're talking about blockchain links like if you let something that does not like live up to the merit of the system and it's a a weak point like you're only as strong as that weak point like you can have very good functionalities on top of it but that is a weak point so you should not let any weak links into this chain and you have to you have to be able to to take some criticism at times and that's what i feel a lot of people in this space and that's i don't want to get into the

culture of developers but like that's something like a lot of people there's a lot of big egos especially in this space oh suddenly egos yes yeah um and i think it's it's difficult for all of us to separate our work from our ego right we we put our passion and our talent into something and then it gets gets criticized and you've got to be dispassionate about looking at that criticism and saying it's criticism of the work rather than its personal criticism you know i think that's a challenge for all of us right it's not not saying certain people are bad at it i think we all need to internally work on that and we also all need to internally work on when we're Criticizing something, criticize a work rather than the person.

Like, that's just a rule for life, right? Yeah, and I'll say this. We all got lost in the sauce this summer. There was a lot of personal attacks both ways. Yeah, yeah. Guilty. No, and that's one thing I've been trying, again, getting into your Bitcoin Zen,

like trying to really work myself back from the emotions of this because it's emotional. it is it's money people get emotional about money and it's like trying to take a step back and bruce lee just flow like water just go with it yeah it's a it's good dharma for all of us right yeah yeah exactly but you have to balance that just go with the flow with stick up for your your beliefs as well too in a in a constructive way definitely yeah i mean it's it's in some ways it's a great thing that people are this passionate about something like i i don't know anything else people are as crazy about because i mean they're passionate about they they really

care they put themselves into it and that's a good thing i got one thing religion oh what can people like me do like i'm i'm not i'm not a developer i'm writing i'm dumb i'm pretty dumb um but obviously i'm enamored with this as well yep uh obviously even evangelist evangelist it's a long word yeah evangelist yeah i told you i'm dumb i've had six concussions my brain doesn't work too good but like what can the average joe like the average listener to this podcast do to move this movement forward i think educate oneself is always good for all of us right wherever you are on your bitcoin journey it is a journey that's a journey um we can all we can all learn more um i i feel very privileged that i'm kind of working at this point

I'm alive at this time to work on Bitcoin. We have a front row seat on something that... When I met that dude for coffee earlier, that's what we were talking about. We were so pumped that we're alive right now. Wow. This is really the wine. This is what makes the show great. It's a little loose.

It opens up. I think just learn more, right? I mean, that's what I try to do every day. I try to learn more about the system, try to learn more about what Bitcoin is. and that's all any of us can do and so how so again like you say we're born in like the craziest era ever and so i was born in the early 90s and i feel like we're moving into like when i was born like i remember downloading aol uh i got the backstreet boys millennium album for christmas

and a free free aol subscription came with it and i downloaded the internet for our family when i was like seven or eight so i got introduced to it it wasn't not late in life but i lived six seven i have memories of living without the internet yep um but now we're moving to this world the internet's almost ubiquitous not everywhere in the world but getting there um how does that change like education going forward like like focusing on do you think everybody should focus on computer science more heavily going forward like should you push your kids towards coding and understanding HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then even C++ and stuff like that?

Do you think we have to have a societal push to sort of change our educational system from an industrial age to an information age? And if so, what does that look like? How are we going to solve the world's problems, John? Wow, okay. So you've moved on to solving Bitcoin's problems. We've done that now?

Yeah. Okay. Pretty much, yeah. So Bitcoin's solved, and nobody be wary. We're going to 100,000 tomorrow. Great. um well i don't have children so i i will not give people advice on how to raise their children um yeah it's important right it's important that people understand and know how to use the internet

just like it's important that people understand and know how to read books and add up numbers and maybe one day it will be important for people to understand what financial sovereignty is and that they have control over their money so yeah the world keeps on moving i like i'm not philosopher i don't know what's happening any more than you do marty so that's true and no but that's one thing we're finding out is i that's another interesting part that you brought up is maybe we're not so worried about it here in america about self-sovereignty but you're seeing in zimbabwe venezuela argentina sure like do you think this movement happens abroad before it happens here maybe um i i think the need there is probably more acute but again i'm not an expert

on any of those places um i think bitcoin is fascinating because it is a store of value and it could enable a medium of exchange and in this country the united states and in western europe and australia um we have both of those things in there all right right they serve most people we have kind of good stores of value we have kind of good mediums exchange but in places like you said Zimbabwe and Venezuela they don't have either of those things I think potentially this technology could really be transformative for those places I'd like that to happen obviously I think we all want that to happen right I think all of us who are interested in Bitcoin really want that to happen I don't know how it's going to happen and I don't think I don't think there's

an easy answer I don't think Craig Wright saying that he's going to target Africa and Asia next year and roger saying he's going to save all the children is truthful i don't i don't think they have sustainable solutions um but we all like we i think i think most people in bitcoin really want that to be the case right we we really want to build a system that can help everyone yeah and and the way it does that is just make by making everything fair so we talked about the truth earlier and that's what bitcoin is that it records the truth every 10 minutes this is what happened on the network or well it the truth inside the network it it records something every 10 minutes and you can't change that thing after the fact the node that is is sinking from the network

they can evaluate whether that statement was true or false um a blockchain doesn't magically make things true no but the the incentives around bitcoin and the ability to validate oneself does make it costly or difficult to lie so what do you i mean obviously we've talked about scaling um we had department of homeland security and the federal reserve come out this week and say make comments on bitcoin uh specifically saying hey we should be paying attention to this yep A lot of people think the next big attack on Bitcoin will be from nation-states or a nation-state. Maybe. What are your thoughts on that?

Are you worried at all about that? Do you think maybe Pandora's box has been open for too long? It would be hard for them to stop this? I think it might be. I think it might be hard to stop it now. I think given much longer, it would be very, very difficult because so many people would be invested financially and ideologically in Bitcoin that it would be very difficult for a nation state to attack it. I think Bitcoin needs to continue to fortify its defenses. It's expected, right?

It's expected that we exist in an adversarial system. And we've seen people try to adversarially hard fork the network several times. And Bitcoin has continued and shaken off those challenges. At some point, I think at some point, a nation state may try to attack Bitcoin. We need to continue to make it more robust. We'll see. I mean, it feels like every time we overcome some attack, it's another end-of-level boss,

and we just go on to the next level and fight the next boss. I don't know what will happen next, but, I mean, it's fun to watch, right? It's fun to be part of. It's incredible what you've been part of, and I'm so happy I fell into this rabbit hole. I fell into it. I literally was writing a paper on monetary policy and stumbled across the white paper. I was like, oh, what's this?

This is interesting, isn't it? Now I'm here talking to you. Yeah. good um john i really appreciate your time tonight um thank you i think you really helped the listeners uh to this podcast with the technical aspect and sort of putting everything in perspective from upgrading the network and the course process uh ending note what should we know about you where can we find you uh anything uh you think our listeners should know right now you can find me on twitter i'm a sporadic tweeter occasionally he's got fire threads

yeah i i tried to hold back a bit it's not good for your mental health i think tweeting too much i'm uh i've got a bad addiction my name's marty bet and i'm addicted to twitter my name is jf newberry and i haven't tweeted for one hour and that's newberry with one r Yes, that's J-F-N-E-W-B-E-R-Y. You can find me on GitHub, jnewberry, without the F. I prefer it without the F, but someone had already taken jnewberry on Twitter.

Yeah, find me there. If you want to chat about Bitcoin, please hit me up. If you want to chat about contributing to Bitcoin Core, even better, hit me up. I really love helping people get into that. Yeah, just reach out to me. Awesome.

and that's all we have for this week freaks peace and love that's it it's hot in here how was that? it was great