TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #95: Gleb Naumenko

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Gleb Naumenko to discuss: - Gleb's experience helping to build an exchange - Bitcoin usage in Ukraine - Gleb's work on Erlay - The Erebus attack - Movies Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce you to this week's episode with Leb Nelmenko, who's currently a resident at Chaincode Labs, doing incredible things. We had a great conversation talking about his experience building an exchange, helping to build an exchange in the Ukraine, what he's working on on Erlay to help bring down bandwidth restraints on Bitcoin, as well as his thoughts on the Erebus attack and bringing bitcoin to to a bigger academic audience uh incredible conversation i think you guys are going to enjoy it before we jump into it got to give a shout out to the cash app you already know all about them they're helping to stack sats they're helping to save money

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use the code stacking sats that's one word stacking sats you're going to get five dollars and five dollars going to go to alice lacrosse uh charity helping boys and girls in chicago learn leadership skills to the sport of lacrosse against stacking sats if you haven't downloaded cash app already go to your local app store and do that i don't know what you guys are waiting for get that five dollars stacking sats and enjoy this conversation with glenn uh an extremely intelligent human being working to make bitcoin more robust and more secure what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here in the studio on a tuesday night on another night with a another member of the chain code labs crew

uh very excited about this uh interview tonight and this man is working on some very uh incredible software incredible improvements to the bitcoin protocol particularly with uh bandwidth bandwidth efficiency and many other things uh excited to dive into his history and how he got to where he is today i'd like to introduce you freaks to gleb nomenko gleb welcome to the podcast hey guys yeah let's talk about bitcoin thanks for uh thanks for coming by man you got an interesting story so i think uh i think we should just jump into it you say you're from the ukraine you were saying you uh you first got into bitcoin you you started an exchange uh while living in the ukraine well we had a company which we've done all the things i i joined it when there was just

five people and we were building an x a local exchange a local wallet we did some like not really bitcoin like more wider financial stuff but yeah that was fun it was not that not that early it was 2015 but it was still like yeah not not that common so we had fun what's the uh the bitcoin community in ukraine like is it uh is it pretty popular over there or uh well it depends it depends on the bitcoin rate i guess because one meetup we had in my hometown which my hometown is kharkiv it's like 1.5 million people we had i think about 700 people at once holy crap yes but that that was when bitcoin was 20 or what you know 20 000 and yeah so yeah so it unfortunately it depends on that so people lose interest when bitcoin goes down but generally i think

there is genuine interest because bitcoin enables people to i don't know to accept payments from abroad for example so yeah is that particularly useful in the ukraine a lot of people do freelance and that's a way to make it easier uh i i know several people who do that for example my mom is getting paid in bitcoin she helps to translate software for american company to russian and ukrainian so banks using banks to pay her would take like several days it would charge more than bitcoin in fees and the bank on receiving side would require to explain where the payment is coming from and that's really hard because you have to translate it into ukrainian to show that so i just helped my mom to set up the bitcoin wallet and ask the company to pay her

and yeah so there are several examples like that and i think those things just drive bitcoin in countries like ukraine yeah and so um you said you uh you ended up interning at blockstream how did you how did you get there uh yeah so in 2017 after starting doing masters at UBC in Vancouver Canada I was doing some I told my supervisor that I'm interested in Bitcoin and one of my supervisors and she was like

I was invited to this Bitcoin conference at Stanford but I don't want to go do you want to go instead of me and then I was happy to get a free trip and to talk to famous people from Bitcoin community because I was

involved but I was not actively working at that time and that's where I met guys from Blockstream and from Chaincode and Blockstream at this at that point just invited me to do an internship in summer and then yeah I went to Blockstream with a couple ideas and we and that's essentially was the beginning of early. What what were you studying in your master's program? That was master's in computer science we were focusing on distributed systems and security so bitcoin was like a natural thing to work on there so is there something about um like the transaction relay part of bitcoin that really drew you to it and why you focused on early or um well i went to that conference and then

i was excited to contribute to bitcoin research wise and then i just started looking at the protocol and I found that there is a lot of inefficiency in transaction relay and somehow nobody looked at it much since early days there was minor improvement and later I found out that Greg Maxwell had this high-level idea which later merged into early so you wrote early with Brian Bishop Greg Maxwell Peter and a few others right so i love brian he's awesome but he was not involved in early yeah so this was greg peter and two of my supervisors from oh yes yes brian brian um he he shared the the early paper and the the bitcoin mailing list and i shared that on twitter

that's what i'm thinking about yeah yes sorry for that for that uh slip up there um but yeah so early it seems like a pretty cool proposal that would do drastic things for for bandwidth efficiency like i'm looking at the chart right now right now like bitcoin flood network uh like depending on how many peers you're connected to you're gonna have a bandwidth per month in gigabytes and if you're connected to 32 this is the simulations you guys did connected to 32 peers you're going to consume 17.3 gigs in a Bitcoin flood transaction model, and then early that gets dropped to minus one gigabyte.

How is that possible? Minus what? 0.94? Yeah. 0.94 gigabyte literally. Yeah. Less than one. So this is particularly important.

and it's probably not a big deal in the US where bandwidth is unlimited, even though you guys probably don't know, but most of the providers have a cap on bandwidth, even in States, but you just don't know about it because you never reach it. But a lot of providers still have a 500 gig cap in the US. And in Asia and Africa and other countries,

it's much worse. You can look up plans on internet in Africa and basically they suppose that a household plan has a cap of 30 gig. So imagine you're now spending half of that just to relay transactions and you cannot watch movies because of Bitcoin. And yeah, so that's why I think there is value.

And we want people who use Bitcoin as a payment system to be available to run nodes at home. because running a node is the most secure way to use bitcoins for several reasons. Also running more nodes contributes to the security of the network in general. So that's why this is cool. And the second cool part about Erle is that it allows to increase the connectivity for free. Currently your node makes eight connections to nodes in in the network but it is better to create more so for example if you connect to 16 instead of 8 today your bandwidth will go two times up and with early it remains the cost remains the same

due to the mini sketch library and how we use it yes so that's let's jump into that like how do you guys create these these efficiencies um because they're pretty drastic like it's crazy how big of a reduction in bandwidth usage that is. Yeah, totally. So we use this idea called set reconciliation to efficiently exchange information about transactions. Instead of announcing transactions right away to all my peers, I will relay them to a small subset of peers

and with the rest of the peers, I'll just efficiently find out what they're missing from me and what I'm missing from them through using mathematical aspects. Process of elimination on this? Well, so I'll compute a sketch, a compressed representation of my transactions, which I was going to send to you,

and I'll request a sketch from you, and based on those two really compressed things, I can very efficiently find what's the difference. So, that would allow to save a lot of bandwidth, which used to be redundant before. So, redundancy is a good, generally good property in distributed systems because it allows security. It allows not relying on one peer in the network, for example. But it comes with a cost. It comes with bandwidth cost.

And with early, we preserve the same redundancy, but just make it more efficient due to the mini-sketch library, which we built. So how does Minisketch, your particular library, make it more efficient? This is stuff from an area called information theory in computer science. Information theory discusses how to deliver some data with the least overhead, so as efficiently as possible. And that's, we're using polynomials, and yeah, let's not talk about math. Yeah, you don't have to get too deep into it, but essentially there's math behind this library that's able to condense the information. Yes, but the cool trick here is that if the difference in our sets is, let's say, two elements,

and so there are two transactions I'm missing from you, then no matter how big is the set, we can find this difference just by sending just to the amount of data which is equal to these two elements, which is, it's very hard to do better than that. It's almost not possible. Yeah.

So we're approaching this theoretical bound of, Like, it's, like, almost optimal at this point. No, it's crazy how heady the math behind the cryptography gets when you dig deep into this stuff. Oh, yeah, totally. It's technically not even cryptography. Yeah, so it was even cooler when you're finding another way to apply math.

Because, yeah, that's what I find cool about research. You get to do unexpected things to achieve the goal. And the goal is quite practical, right? we are solving the bandwidth issues and to slightly improve the security of the network. Yeah, and so the only trade-off with Relay is the latency of transaction Relay goes up a couple seconds, 2.6 seconds, I believe, right?

Yeah, so it goes up from 2 seconds to 4 seconds or something like that. Depends on the configuration. And it's, so, yeah, so it's very important to clarify this. this is absolutely no big deal because effectively transaction relay latency which has nothing almost nothing to do with the block relay has only two implications first when submitting a transaction to your friend you will see it at his phone with two seconds delay which is like I don't think it's

important it's like it used to take two but now it will take at most four and And second application, it affects, so there is this property of the Bitcoin network called orphan rate. Orphan rate is the amount of blocks which don't become the part of the chain, valid blocks. So sometimes miners mine a valid block, but because of the concurrent valid block, only one of them will become the part of the chain. And transaction relay, the increase in latency might affect that, but in early, even though the latency goes up, it's even better for orphan rate. So orphan rate goes down due to the specific details of the protocol

you can look up in the paper if you're interested in more details. Yeah, no, it's great. So it's a worthwhile trade-off at the end of the day. Totally. I think if the only negative implication is extra two seconds for user experience while block confirmation time is 10 minutes, it should not be a big deal at all while the benefit is huge. Yeah, two seconds of waiting so that the majority of the world can successfully run a full node is probably worth it. Yes, and two seconds is really the worst case. It's usually faster.

yeah um and so right now it's only a paper you guys have a a bip in the work works is that uh true and like so how how do you imagine this getting implemented in the protocol and uh what would be including in a bip if you when it is proposed yeah so i'm we're writing a bip bip is almost done at this point i would say we decided to make bip really focused on network messages so just explaining who sends what the format of messages what to include there and all the protocol level specifics like how often to reconcile is is not going to be there it's going to be in the paper and alternative implementations for example might change the parameters we just have recommendations for that

But yeah, so it turned out to be fairly straightforward and I think understandable, probably as simple as BIP on compact blocks written by Matt Corrala. And yeah, I think we'll get it reviewed and make an implementations really soon. Is there a software hard fork? Or obviously not a hard fork, a soft fork? No, nothing really required. It will be fully compatible with existing software because for old nodes, you'll just use the existing protocol

and you'll still get a good benefit. Probably not full bandwidth savings until everybody updates, but the benefit is still substantial. And it is also compatible with Dandelion. the peer-to-peer proposal on improving the anonymity of transactions so yeah so we might it's nice that protocol naturally plays well with other things and is backward compatible somebody try to get that a package deal or just uh uh highlight that it would be compatible with dandelion um well it would be cool if we include both of things at the same time but

then the line development is I think it's a bit harder because Bitcoin we take care about details so for example we cannot just abandon working with

orphan transactions where you try not orphan where you try to relay and confirm transactions chained at the same time so Dandelion Dandelion has challenges there

but what would be the benefits of Dandelion if that were to be implemented what are the perceived benefits? So if we implement Dandelion it will be much harder to spy on the network so right now I imagine

spyware companies run Bitcoin nodes to monitor the traffic and find who sends which transactions and link transactions to IP addresses. So Dunderland is a big deal in mitigating those guys and making it much more expensive for them to spy. How does it do that? So the assumption spies do is that,

well, the simplest assumption, if they connect to everybody in the network, the first node to announce a transaction to them will be the source of the transaction, Because that's, yeah, that's, if you think, the first node having the transaction is probably the origin. That's the assumption they make. So Dandelion creates, instead of flooding the transaction right away,

it first sends a transaction just through one link in the network containing, on average, 10 nodes, so that it's really obscured and a spy would not distinguish the origin of the transaction. Sort of like a coin join for transactions sending out. You can think of it that way. Yeah. Yeah.

That's, yeah. It seems like it's necessary, right? And that's actually what you were talking about when we were walking up here, what you were working on earlier today of trying to figure out a problem with a bunch of nodes running in cloud servers, which could be easily traceable or easily identifiable.

So, yeah. So earlier I was talking about the, so sometimes I switch from research to really hands-on writing code for Bitcoin. that's what's going on now I decided to take a little break from early and I'm acting on the paper was published a week ago or so it's slightly different it's focused on an eclipse attack where so right now the diversity of providers for Bitcoin nodes is sort of low. I just measured that a quarter of nodes, of

public nodes, are running under just four or three ASN providers. It's Amazon, DigitalOcean, and some third entity. And because of that, if we corrupt just those three entities like for example government makes a deal with them then the network is in danger and the changes I'm we're planning to make is to diversify the connections so that there are we make less connections to Amazon notes for example did you say one of the the top three providers is unknown some third entity I just looked it up and it didn't I don't know what is that it's some some german association i thought it was like a dark pool you don't know like his

maybe i don't really know but yeah um and so you're trying to prevent eclipse attacks an eclipse attack is when uh when another node feeds you yeah so so an eclipse attack is uh if all of your connections so are compromised for example if all of your connections are amazon nodes then it's just it just requires corrupting amazon to attack you to feed you the fake blockchain or double spend you so send you transactions and pretend that they paid you but they would spend them on the real chain yeah and so you're trying to make it so nodes that are spun up within each provider are not connected to too many other nodes within that provider so they not not really to the same we're just we will make it so that

you connect to amazon at most once yes out of your eight connections and the digital ocean at most once that that's why in that case it would require corrupting eight providers essentially yeah so diversify the risk make sure yeah no that's uh no it's great it's like things like that that people don't think about and yeah totally we gotta we gotta i'm glad that there is more and more research and peer-to-peer layer on bitcoin there was a really cool paper on uh inferring the topology of zcash network so zcash network is it turned out to be just 300 of nodes the block relay there is very slow because they don't have compact blocks and because of that inferring the topology and finding out who connects to who is very easy and and once you do

that it's much easier to split the network it's much easier to find the origin of the transaction so whatever zero knowledge stuff you're doing doesn't really matter because everybody can find which ip is transaction sent from i haven't heard anything about this there's only there's only been 300 nodes running zcash um according to that research yeah well there are maybe uh more nodes behind firewalls but i'm i don't think so yeah yeah probably not likely if there's like so in bitcoin there are 10 000 public nodes and in zcash it turns out to be 300 that's pretty crazy and uh and then and then luke dash jr's uh estimate why is that like 60 000 non-listening nodes or something like that yes yes that's true and what is so and can we uh go over like what

non-listening node is and why that's not uh not uh counted in like the the 10 000 nodes that we'll see on like coin dance or something like that yeah so non-listening nodes are running if you if you start a node at home you usually have a router which protect you protects you from outside world so it allows only traffic to go outside of your home but not inside uh in simple words yeah that's why those nodes are not reachable you cannot find them they only can find you essentially yeah are they yeah no it's uh there are different trade-offs so for example for miners or for exchanges we still don't really know what is better i'm actually very curious about your strategies of miners and exchanges so if you're doing that and you have

some insights, please reach out to us because there are different trade-offs. For example, public node is better connected, so it's harder to analyze its traffic. But at the same time,

since it is possible to connect to it if an attacker really targets a node and knows that that's an exchange, it can look after it. It's not super clear. Yeah, it can attack it and hone in on it

and try to figure out a way to get through the cracks and what would the benefits of being a non-listening node for exchanges be? Nobody can connect to you so it's much harder, for example, to shut your node down

because right now there are botnets which just, you can hire them for, I don't know, one dollar an hour and effectively just kill the node on the network so ideally perhaps every exchange runs couple private nodes and couple public nodes to to obscure traffic to make it harder to kill a node so yeah what was uh what was your strategy when you guys were were building the the uh exchange in ukraine uh we just we just took basic

like it security strategies which I shouldn't probably talk about okay yes that's like this yeah how security but yeah so I think more research here is important to to to get this best practices of running a node for an exchange for example that's why we got things like Bitcoin off tech out there early in the way oh yeah totally that's very valuable yeah that's the I think That's what I actually had that up to. Let me see if I can pull it up here real quickly. I don't know if I have it right in front of me.

I don't. Optech came out with that cool cross graph of showing wallets and exchanges. It was like BEC32 and Segwit ready and stuff like that. It's a good matrix to go check out to know which exchanges are on top of things and which aren't. it's interesting to see which uh providers are are on top of their stuff um but it's something like it really showed like in 2017 these exchanges not being ready infrastructurally like hindered the network network right like like december 2017 all the exchanges going down people basically couldn't get access to the exchanges let alone buy and sell bitcoin or

move it to their own wallets and where the fees go up and it was a great case study and uh maybe the industry quote-unquote of people building on top of bitcoin was not prepared to be as efficient as possible with this network i'm not sure it went down for those reasons maybe it went down because they wanted to make more money yeah i really don't know i have no idea why those guys are not implementing segwit addresses or all those things it's like it's not that much effort it's yeah it's just beyond my understanding my my thesis is for some of them at least like maybe they don't know that they need to know and like maybe they just are stumbled into their success to a certain extent another thing is yeah they i don't understand how those huge

businesses on top of bitcoin don't contribute to to the ecosystem except just running their exchange yeah i haven't you got to give a shout out to uh square and cash app today they're just oh yeah totally are you sad to lose matt corrala from the chain code offices so i honestly think that matt is one of the best people to start building a bitcoin focused team like you basically cannot find anyone else with that experience and open-mindedness and i don't know friendliness uh so uh yeah so that's really cool and even though we will we're not gonna lose matt because it's like bitcoin bitcoin is right international and whatever worldwide uh he will be always available i'm sure but but having one more team which is focused on bitcoin is really cool and i

think matt and steve will build a really cool project yeah shout out to matt matt is one of the most uh tenured guest on tales from the crypt he's been back a few times and we will speak to him again about his transition to uh square crypto but i completely agree like if you're gonna have somebody come anchor it's he me somebody who's been writing code for bitcoin since he was uh in college and been to block stream been to chain code that's the interesting about him now he's going to square crypto like he seems like he's just like hopping from place to place spreading his wings a little further and then and then spreading the bitcoin love to a new company yeah i think everybody understand that there is no contention contention there

is no conspiracy it's just how bitcoin works right it's like nobody competes on contributing to bitcoin core it's we're all working together yeah but it's such a it's such a weird thing for the for a lot of uh like incoming companies profit-driven companies in particular to come to grips with and then put their guard down and and cooperate with each other like the perfect example is like the consortium of private uh like distributed ledger technology consortium like r3 and all that stuff yeah i think bitcoin is very different yeah it came to be that like jp morgan and deutsche bank and all those banks didn't want to work together and couldn't cooperate at the end of the day and that's the beauty of bitcoin like it is open source and if everybody's benefiting

from it and that's like i think we were saying earlier like it makes sense that like you would contribute to this because it's gonna make your underlying investment in the token Bitcoin more valuable yeah yeah I think we're getting much better there there is MIT digital currency initiative block stream chain code now there is square crypto bit max supported fanquake great mm-hmm I hope there are more companies like yeah I think that max is like supporting devs through MIT or Or something like that. Yeah, whatever.

But anyway, I'm saying that we're getting better at finding core development. I hope we'll get even better because we're still, I think, lacking more review, more contributions. I hope we'll have more researchers from academia interested. And yeah, I'm doing my best to achieve that. Well, that's a good segue into what you're doing in November

and you're presenting at the ACM conference on computer and communication security and you were tweeting that you're very excited to get to that conference in particular to try to maybe convert some of those security researchers to think about Bitcoin. Oh yeah, totally. So this is like top three security conferences in the world.

So it's just like the basically best people who invented RSA and ECDSA and all those fancy names we're using now in Bitcoin. And I think we already know some folks. Like, for example, Tor developers are always around with the Bitcoin community and we see them from time to time. But I think Bitcoin is still lacking a bit of legitimacy

from the point of peer review. for example yeah I think I think our like block streams work on on signatures it is I think it is super it would be super interesting for that community but it just it's it's not known enough and talking at the conferences is helps to reach out to the to the well-experienced like top security minds hey you think me this this crowd would be very interested in bitcoin because it's such a fascinating like new technology what what are most of these researchers working on at the moment and what are they focused on like creating new cryptography curves and stuff like that or um well signature there was just there

was just another conference going on a couple days ago it's using x security and i was looking at the papers and there is uh really similar stuff so i haven't got i haven't got a couple ideas from there there is a there was a paper about how some researchers decided to measure how easy it to to attack a tor network to to hire botnets to spam tor nodes and essentially put the network down and i just became curious okay so can we apply that to bitcoin how much would it be to attack the public infrastructure in bitcoin because it's essentially very similar um yeah so that's perhaps i will start looking at it once i finish my current tiny tiny thing about diversifying the providers so that's a good example of what researchers are looking at

And now the coexistence of Bitcoin and Tor is pretty fascinating, right? Because especially Bitcoin relying on Tor, especially for people running nodes in particular countries and trying to run lightning nodes and stuff like that. So a lot of people have been trying to encourage Bitcoiners to run Tor nodes as well to help support that network. Because we may, as the Bitcoin network, rely on that pretty heavily in the future. Is that a correct assumption? Oh, it's a bit more complicated because Tor is not always as good as we think it is. But generally, yes, I think Tor is definitely, it's not worse than regular and it is often better. That's why there is certainly value in running under Tor.

yeah um do you think it's necessary though in the long run to to evade like state uh co-option uh to to be able to run this stuff through tor uh it's good to have it around it's good to have support because even if we will decide that okay so tor is probably not that good if people want to use tor we should i think we should let them do it that's why having this infrastructure available is is important for Bitcoin yeah and do you have you seen the the interest into Bitcoin research grow at all do you think it's been growing sadly not fast enough do you think it just needs to grow faster because we need to scale this network out faster or

Well, I look at it as a, you know, it's like a free market. If people are interested, they will contribute. So we probably should, there is in mid-October, there is a research summit at MIT where a couple of academics or perhaps several dozens will get together and figure out where Bitcoin research is going to. So if you're doing research and interested contributing to Bitcoin, come and talk to us. We have ideas for you to contribute, like just interesting areas which were not really worked on before. For example, well, like research on peer-to-peer stuff was when Torrent was invented in 90s. And then once we solved most of the problems with Torrent, it all went down because nobody really cared anymore.

And then Bitcoin is the new application, and there is a lot of room to contribute to measure, I don't know, proof of work, efficiency, and how well it works. For example, the selfish mining attack. It's really cool to show that even if you don't own half of the mining hash power, you still can attack the network. So those things, economic aspects, future, what's going to happen when we're out of subsidy and now miners receive only fees. Peer-to-peer, cryptography, there is a lot of room. We're trying to bring more attention,

and it goes. We're doing it, I think, quite well. It's crazy because there's so many facets that make Bitcoin work. It's an incentive system, so it's economic, and, like, trying to figure out can it last without an emissions tail is a question that a lot of people are still positing and uncertain of. I come from, like, that's where I come from is, like, the economics background. I'm confident that a fee market will develop

just simply because the demand for a peer-to-peer distributed censorship-resistant transactions will be there in the future, especially when you take into consideration the way the world's going. but it's it's not entirely clear for me now because what do you mean by develop if oh if bitcoin is still one megabyte blocks and we are out of subsidy then how much transactions would cost like 100 or something to to have the same reward or will the reward goes down i i don't know i think that's like a very interesting well that's what yeah that's something that we're gonna have to figure out and see how the limitations of this network really

uh what they allow us to do and i'm sort of partial towards how finney's vision of bitcoin banks and think of the protocol layer as a huge settlement layer that enables even a little less trustless but more trustless than uh the incumbent system that we're that we grew up with um and that that sort of makes sense to me but um again who knows like that's that's the way i see it and i can see it developing that way and that makes sense to me at least yeah i think lightning is a big hope i'm a big fan i'm not super like knowledgeable about it i still i'm trying to learn but yeah i i hope it helps us to to to figure out the few market too that's like that's how crazy is because i've talked to people on this podcast in the past and like who are very

like um very engaged in building on lightning and even they're like we need more researchers like we need we need help to figure out like channel routing like this is like a lot of routing issues on that network in particular you need like routing experts from telecoms industry to come in and help with like the routing of the lightning network in particular i think they're doing fine i think yeah oh yeah up to this point too but like that's the thing there's like there's so much potential and there's so much people want to deal with it it's like ah yeah totally and the call the call to arms if you will that's why it is like i know we're talking about like the need for researchers but i think slowly but surely like luckily chain code and block stream

were there to pave the way in mit and now square crypto is huge i think because you have like a huge publicly traded company here in the states being like all right we're putting our our muscle behind bitcoin this is something we're socially signaling that this is something we think is going to be around if you're not investing in it you're an idiot and that'll just scare other companies into doing the same i want to be surprised if ameritrade comes out actually that's who was because i thought it was weird that bitmex would support mit since they're based out of i think it was ameritrade that was supporting mit devs yeah so i i don't know the the background yeah i just know but i just think naturally like social pressures will start to come in for these

larger corporations that are interacting with bitcoin or or plan to interact with bitcoin and it makes sense right if you're if you're gonna hatch your your business plan on to bitcoin in any any way shape or form like uh to to contribute to the the bolstering of that system and making more robust and more valuable at the end of the day just makes complete sense for yeah i think even at least one exchange one of big exchanges uh dedicated one developer even not to contribute but just to review code and act big commits that that would be already a big deal just to hang on on bitcoinax.com all day um bitcoinax.com given to us by pierre rochard if you're ever looking to see what uh what is popular uh in the bitcoin repository and what's currently being being

talked about and reviewed that's where you should go and but so the whole concept like code review and bitcoin in particular seems daunting for for a lot of people like i know uh a lot of people may seem um uh apprehensive to to put put their opinion out there because again this is uh uh critical code that like the future of uh financial privacy may depend on and a lot of like what would you recommend to people uh who may be a little bit apprehensive and how should they approach uh reviewing this stuff and interacting with so i think i think the best way is to get somebody to get to know somebody in person go to one of the conferences at meetup Because guys from Blockstream go to San Francisco Bitcoin meetup, whatever, core development or what this is called.

We have bit devs at Chaincode. And in Boston, there is now Bitcoin meetup where MIT guys are involved. Or we always have conferences around the world, like scaling Bitcoin, advancing whatever, advancing Bitcoin and all those. so just come and say hi to bitcoin core developers and once you understand how friendly are those people and welcoming and always willing to share their knowledge uh i think you'll you'll feel better and you'll feel more confident so that's what happened to me before going to scale in 2017 i thought that bitcoin community is sort of toxic because i don't know honestly i was i was reading peter todd's twitter and it felt like it's like scary i shouldn't go there but then like

it changed a lot in person and i think everybody's super friendly at this point no yeah it's what you'll come to find um everybody's a little bit more vitriolic on twitter than they are in real life and the rumors of of bitcoiners being evil right wingers looking to take over the world is uh is very far from the truth it's a bunch of from my experience just a bunch of people are excited by a quasi-alien technology that they feel could change the world and they feel driven to work on it like do you feel driven to work on bitcoin in particular um can you like do you feel like like a responsibility to work on bitcoin as opposed to other things like you go work on other distributed systems like maybe like tour

something like that what about bitcoin well it's it's yeah it's it's nice to feel that you're doing something something good but i think genuine interest drives me more like this area which has a lot of room to contribute and unsolved problems and yeah so it's hard to tell me which aspect is is larger yeah but you see like uh again uh open frontier in front of you you can roll up your sleeves and get like a bunch of cool stuff done yeah and it's much better when once you actually realize that it is used by people and it's enabled something better than we have today it's like people can send transactions abroad with within minutes and yeah yeah this is super cool um no thank you for deciding to work on bitcoin you've proposed some pretty dope shit so i'm glad

that there are now companies and entities which can support our work it was very different in the early days I think so now yeah I encourage more people to join us in our contributions join us

I've been interviewing the residents of the summer program at Chaincode over the last couple weeks and seeing how invigorated they have been just to be able to meet for the last six weeks whatever it's been um and because i remember the first night they came it was bit devs like two months ago

and we got they were all out to drinks after the bit devs meet up and you could see like the the jovialness of of of uh them just meeting for the first time and like seemed a little nervous about what was to come and speaking with them like four to five months in it's like it seems like the you guys are chain codes running a very uh very good program and these people seem invigorated and they're seem like they they've actually accomplished stuff in the last five weeks and it's because they've been able to bounce ideas off each other and and build off each other which just being able to create that environment is like you said we need more of that yes totally i think those guys will be the future

part of our future of building bitcoin yeah um now it's uh it feels like again another thing i think is like the decade mark is huge too like people see that bitcoin has been around for 10 years and that just being saying that like one decade just in people's mind as humans like round numbers like ah 10 years that's a that's a long time like maybe this thing isn't going away it's it's hard for me to justify that because honestly i think even if bitcoin was one year for me it would still be huge it would be like us by just what it does and um yeah i don't know it's like it's just beautiful the whole proof of work thing the the way that it actually works and people are running nodes and signing transactions with all those different ways today somebody uses

hardware wallets somebody uses mobile android things and i don't know well that was cool about what uh peter about what sippa dropped today with miniscript like that's going to enable like wallet developers to create way more complex transaction schemes which therefore make it a bit harder to get out your Bitcoin yeah yeah make it much easier yeah I think I think there is big value there because wallets I think wallets should do better it's integrating all the features we have mm-hmm yeah yeah but but it's been hard right because interacting with Bitcoin scripts isn't easy yes totally so this is very valuable having having many

So how would you describe Miniscript from your point of view? Miniscript is a much easier way to express the way you want to contract a transaction. So for example, if you have some complicated multisig where one of the signatures should work all together with time lock. So for example, I can use this key but only in five years, and before Miniscript, a developer would have to mess around with Bitcoin script, which is very low-level, stack-based language, and it's very easy to mess up, and yeah, and now it's much simpler. They developed an expressive language which compiles to Bitcoin script.

Yeah, and it doesn't need any upgrade or anything. Bitcoin doesn't need any upgrade for it, right? You can just compile Miniscript on top of Bitcoin right now. Yeah, I think it works with Bitcoin today. Yeah, which is really cool, and that's crazy. And again, that's the other thing. So are you happy with where Bitcoin is today from an engineering perspective?

Do you think it's robust enough? Do you think we definitely need things like store-and-tap route to survive in a perpetuity? Are they good-to-haves but not need-to-haves? Things like that. It's very hard for me to justify. I think there is... So at one point, I think Bitcoin is underrepresented

among people. Not enough people are using Bitcoin. we're probably the way we have bitcoin today is good enough to serve more people which is not necessarily the case for lightning because i know lightning developers always no it's too early don't use this yet with bitcoin i think we are a bit ahead it doesn't mean that we should stop attacks on bitcoin are still possible like attacks on the peer-to-peer layer i'm working on is possible but i'm always saying like five years ago attacking a bitcoin peer-to-peer network was ten thousand dollars today it's probably one hundred thousand dollars and we want to get to

the point where this billions of dollars or something so there is always room we're we're doing quite well for now i think yeah no and so where do you see bitcoin progressing in the future and like how do you see it changing humanity like do you do you feel driven to this because because of the like being from the ukraine you think yeah so i think i think bitcoin today is already very well and it is already an important technology it allows it allows people to receive transactions within minutes it's like if if it even if it doesn't become a world payment system i think it's it's like it has a huge value today it's probably undervalued by

most of the people I think because I'm much more excited about Bitcoin even today and I'm not thinking much about the future if I don't know if 1% of people in the world are using Bitcoin that's a huge success we're a bit quite not there yet definitely not there yet

but I'm totally not worried and it honestly serving like entire world is very challenging. It's not exactly clear for me how it will work with proof of work

and the whole energy thing. I know right now all the stuff about Bitcoin consumes energy of Denmark is like fud and it's actually like... It's fun. There was an article

which explained that all that research is created by one person citing himself all the time about how bad is proof of work but I'm not sure what's going to happen if everybody starts using Bitcoin is it actually going to be bad or not

so I just wanted to say that I'm very satisfied with what Bitcoin already accomplished I think I'm one of the believers that proof of work is going to make us one of the most energy efficient civilizations that's ever lived

because I've actually seen it first hand here in the states in particular in oil fields that are flaring natural gas like these natural gas fields they're very dirty to begin with but they have a problem where they can't transport the energy from the the field in the middle of nowhere to the economic hubs where people are actually using the energy so they just have to flare it into the atmosphere which is a lot worse for the environment so i've seen setups and they're like upstream data's got uh i've seen setups similar to what upstream data is doing with their own projects but you go instead of

just leaking that gas in the atmosphere which is way worse you cap it you bring bitcoin miners to the place so you don't have to transport the energy they just use it on site and yeah you have you have millions of oil fields leaking all this stuff into the atmosphere and just wasting it and bitcoin finally provides incentive to go cap and use that and then on top of that like it also incentivizes renewable uh uh energy uh innovation and production right yeah i wish it was true and i think what you explained about renew like the energy in difficult locations is totally true i'm just slightly worried with the fact that uh so right now It costs $100,000 to rewrite a block, for example.

Of course, incentives in Bitcoin are aligned in that way. It's always better for an attacker to mine on the real chain and not attack. So imagine today everybody starts using Bitcoin. uh transactions are probably much have much more value and then people are moving around like millions of dollars per block so the the reward should be as big as people are moving to increase the cost of an attack and that would drive miners spending of more and more energy so probably not renewables might not be enough I think I think there's plenty plenty of on tap or no like that's what I think it's gonna make us

go find all that there and I and again like there is a lot of open there's a a lot of oil fields on the planet and they a lot of them are wasting that earn so like yeah i think it makes sense i think we have a lot of runway before but you're also gonna have people in cities just like plugging in miners to get bitcoin as well but that'll drive up energy prices and you have economics coming to play like if it does if it ever does get to a point where um like too many people are consuming energy for bitcoin they're gonna get priced out eventually i really hope so i'm just i i used to be a very pro free market and pro capitalist but then i realized that it's probably more difficult for me because

imagine a beautiful hike so if there was no regulation at all there will be a starbucks shop at the end of every hike ruining the view and that's why I think I'm a bit afraid of where this uncontrolled mining might lead us and free market

well you also have to think ASIC commodification comes into play too right so the price to produce the ASICs is driven down considerably as well and therefore the price to acquire them you have less capital cost there therefore

or less need to expend as much energy. I don't see how the AC part plays in the whole equation of mining, but yeah, I got to learn more. Not that it would make them consume less energy, but you have like a, yeah. I think it evens out. Yeah, so what's your biggest worry that it does even out? You're right.

what's your biggest worry that this miners get or bitcoin becomes too big of a frenzy no i'm actually more worried that transaction fees will go up and we'll end up having the same financial system as we used to have with custodials and all that so hopefully lightning will work here well to not commit every transaction to the blocks but if there was no lightning will once the bitcoin gets more popular and we run out of subsidy without lightning there will be just exchanges sending transactions to each other and people will just it was a point not even have private keys yeah no i agree i do think like like things like lightning need to succeed and is there any other like second layer protocols that you're looking at or anything

do you have any thoughts on state chains or liquid I think there is a room for those protocols I think I think liquid is a very cool idea

I hope it will be used more and more by the exchanges and their customers it targets. I'm just, I'm not sure we're there yet. Like, Lightning can be used today. Liquid maybe will get, it will get more popular once Bitcoin gets more popular.

Yeah, no. Because Lightning is more available to geeks, it feels like, right? You can just go around. Start building on it. so how like i see that but do you think we're like still extremely early or do you feel like an urgency to build all this stuff because how so how long do you see bitcoin i know you don't like to think about the future this is funny like developers like i had uh fabian uh yar on last

night and he was like i don't like to think about the future either it was like trying to get him to predict stuff he's like i don't know i don't like to talk about that but like if we do envision bitcoin as a system that's around for many centuries if not millennia potentially like We're so early, and how do you temper the amount of urgency with the amount of care that should be taken with reviewing the code as you upgrade the system, right? Or build on top of it, if you will. Can you read?

Yeah, in short, do you think there's an urgency to build out these second layers? and i think so i used to think that we actually built everything enough and now we need to market it more but then lightning developers always approaching me and say no no no we should we should build more first we should uh like promise the security and show that it's actually robust and then and then we can start marketing no but i guess what i'm trying to get at is like do you feel like humanity needs bitcoin now or in the near-term future um bitcoin is used today yeah oh i know i use it but do you feel like the system needs to get to a point where everybody can use it

right now for a reason like do you think are you worried about the traditional economy the traditional financial system or do you just think bitcoin is better and people should just user because of that um i think i think bitcoin is is better yeah yeah i think with i'm not sure humanity is gonna change much so bitcoin today helps people and that's that's good yeah yeah um no but i think bitcoin changes people though that's what i say a lot bitcoin changes your bitcoin is going to change you more than you change bitcoin like uh many people will scream about bigger blocks and stuff like that and whether or not we should add emissions right now but you'll find that bitcoin changes your temperament more than uh your ability to sort of

change change bitcoin as a system yeah we gotta we need more population because to understand that phenomena because so far bitcoin was more very nerdy right yeah it's like it gets more and more mainstream and you gotta look at those people who were not into this anarchy and privacy and now they're getting into it and it's like things you had uh last week samsung announced the s10 is gonna have a bitcoin wallet in it now and just small things like that people get in their samsung phone and be like holy crap there's a bitcoin wallet like should i have bitcoin like should learn about this i think well i think it's it's it's definitely not bad i would never keep my coins on the samsung s10 it's just like for the cycle for the psychology of the users they just

see like oh samsung's got bitcoin on it now um yeah well you know there is this concept of smart money where you don't want every investor to invest in your server but you know you want somebody who understands stuff to invest so I think in the same way we probably it's not necessarily that those people who don't understand shit but

just see an app will be good members of community because if they if they're not if then they buy BSV or some other shit coin then what's the point so I think education first

but if Samsung makes them to go and read about bitcoin that's that's good okay so you think there should be like education pushes with when you roll that's why i liked cash with cash app announced that they're rolling out bitcoin first they had that little book what is bitcoin yeah that's what we try to do here at this podcast is why we're here talking we're trying to educate people about the bitcoin network and so how how would you uh attempt to educate uh somebody who has no knowledge of from scratch what where would you point them to first the white paper uh some other types of writings uh keeping in mind the the the audience that you're that you're speaking to it always

depends on the background um i i prefer to give a couple sentences description by myself i always tell that about 10 years ago people decided that they want to be in control of their money and that if you put your dollars under your mattress and forget about them for a year in a year you lose 20 percent in value in amount of goods you can purchase because of the i don't know inflation yeah yeah so and then people decided that they don't want everybody to be able to track their transactions and to charge them fees and to take part in this super an efficient banking system and then after that we can we can discuss a bit and then i can send them depends if they're technical i can send them to the white paper if they're more like

non-technical i can i don't know andreas antinopoulos or yeah i'm you can always send the tales from the crypto if you uh no it's uh that's a it's a problem i've been thinking about for many years now like it and that's the the main crux of the problem is everybody has a different way uh different avenue through which they come to understand bitcoin and trying to to create one resource that that uh sort of pertains to everybody is not easy at bitcoin right because like a lot of people come to it from like an engineering perspective and i came to it from an economics perspective and i'm trying my best to learn as much about the distributed system as possible um but as you can tell i'm uh i need i have a lot of catching up to do

doing quite well oh thank you sir um no but it's uh it's fun to be a part of though isn't it do you do you like waking up and working on bitcoin i'm like i'm like proud of what i'm doing because i can talk to my friends so i did undergrad in like software engineering and it's always cool to be passionate about it's opposite to just do what you're told to do and not being excited at all so I'm always like I'm grateful that I can do it

I can have fun I can contribute to a better world as I see it I can do this cool research and technical contributions and I I'm like getting to know all the best people who quit

Google and Microsoft and all that just to like we have uh bittorrent first developers in bitcoin we have googlers we have i don't know the best cryptographers would which would make millions of dollars a year working for ibm or something really i i can talk to you in person yeah all right we'll sidebar that one yeah and we're gonna yeah and yeah i think this is i'm i'm very glad that i'm i'm here yeah i'm glad you're here too uh so what do you do outside of bitcoin you were talking earlier we were talking earlier you're a big fan of music thinking about starting it in the podcast but um like what do you what do you do to get your mind off bitcoin um i i watch a lot of movies mostly independent stuff often

european or the sun dance program in in the u.s so basically almost every every night i watch something yeah i have like about a thousand movies on my list i think really yeah well it's yeah it's more than average people but there are much more crazier guys than me do you have a favorite director or or genre within D&D it's it's maybe Lars von Trier it's a he's from Denmark and he does some crazy stuff uh but um yeah it's it's the movies where you gotta think about something think about like sociological things or philosophical things or how humanity works in general and yeah so i'm i like to watch a movie and then spend an hour of just thinking about it what i just saw yeah so are you are you strict like no looking at your phone while

you're watching a movie uh i got a bit worse recently because uh like i got more active on twitter and it's like distracting but i used to be yes i used to be like be careful twitter is addicting oh yeah i have a severe addiction my name is marty and i'm addicted to twitter so now it's like two times over two hours i'm gonna watch i gotta see twitter or something yeah which is still not bad but no movies are a great escape though what uh um and would you ever think about making a movie or um so i have very difficult relationship with art I play guitar but I never produced my own song or anything so I'm I'm very glad that we have people in the world who can make movies or make songs or write books I'm not one of them I always

I'm always like trying to make real life easier because I think the capital is misaligned and uh like we should all work together as a humanity so i'm always like i don't know if i have friends who are art students i'm always like buying drinks for them because because i feel like that's my way to make it the world a bit more even yeah no i love that and you said there's like a an imbalance of capital and so do you think well i i just think that it's it's it's very hard um to measure so for example with movies i always think that producing a movie is a compromise like finding balance between a producer and the director where producer always money driven and director is always art driven so for example if you take some

like marvel movie or recent star wars which is all about making money the director just have no opinion there most of the time and you don't like you don't like marvel coming out with 22 movies in two years yeah that's why i think if capital was a land better than there were more independent dependent directors and more really cool valuable art would be produced so what do you uh look for more in a movie like a good storyline a good script or like the cinematography and good shooting uh good lighting and stuff like that all stuff i think i think a good director usually take care of the details right so so it's either that it's it's usually what in in commercial movies you gotta find something you like you might like music but in in really good stuff it's like

everything plays well together what do you think is uh an example of a perfect movie in your mind um the fountain by darren aronofsky i think it's 2004 or something it has like a perfect storyline it has very good acting and music and play and yeah everything do you re-watch it a lot or i watched it five times i think yeah i usually don't re-watch stuff but this was special yeah it has a special place in my heart what are you gonna watch tonight um i'll see i'm i'm catching up with some east european like post-soviet because i i always ignored it and i recently found out there is like really good shit there which is probably would not be well understood

by Americans today's age why? why not? so one of the things I find very valuable in artists is feeling the time

and feeling the surrounding and environment that's why me being raised there when somebody uses some slang word i always like yes this is like very precise and and movies are i'm always looking at a more wider and difficult concepts and feeling those is like is very important so for example

it's a bit not related there is this uh modern philosopher slovoj zizek from yugoslavia or something and he's quite popular on youtube and people always make memes of him because he speaks in a very funny way but i think he's like without memes he's he understands words so well that i always enjoy watching him and exactly because of that because it feels like he just took what i have in my brain and put it all together like as a system and i was like yes that's what i wanted to say being able to uh illustrate the current condition of a given time yes in a in a way with good analogies and yeah yeah no it's it's not easy you know somebody writes every day that's i mean that's why i want to write something more long form is so i can try

and tap into some some of that zeitgeist the modern times right and i have ideas of writing like a fiction book that's completely non like topical or analytic i always love when people change background i i used to have well i still have a friend in ukraine who used to be a like successful developer and then he just decided that it's not his thing and he quit and he's now earning like 10 times less than he used to but he enjoys what he's doing and i'm very proud of him nobody understands him but me i'm like yes i'm glad that you're doing this and i'm telling everybody that this is an example of how you should live life you should do what you like that's the most important i don't want to um pat myself on the back here but that's that's i uh out of college i worked at a

at a something like akin to a hedge fund a very specific type of hedge fund and i'd worked there for three years and one day i was sitting in my cube i was like i can't take this anymore and i had to quit and um i didn't just show up one day or actually it's a funny story i thought i was gonna quit uh uh on june eric's i shouldn't dox myself here i almost just dox myself i thought i was gonna quit like uh in the middle of june and it was a few weeks before that and it was my birthday nobody said happy birthday to me and i knew i was quitting in a couple weeks to take this design boot camp and it was like you know what it's not worth it the two weeks being here is not worth it and nobody said happy birthday so i went and quit like a like a

little diva um but uh no it's something that i i would actually recommend too like i was i love that job i actually love the people i work with too i mean i didn't love that job but i did not like that job but i love the people i work with and i learned a lot it's hard it's like i love hate relationship like i learned i love how much i learned and the people i work with but did not see my future progressing to that hierarchical ladder and um yeah no i took a big pay cut i think it's strictly better to do what you actually like and you'll just do better perhaps it will take a bit longer to succeed there but yeah so that's why i'm always very supportive of people changing backgrounds quitting school it's all like yeah just just do it you only have

one life we're only on this planet for for a very and it's it goes fast like yes so i'm very happy that at this point i found my thing i'm involved with bitcoin and i don't know where i'm gonna be in in five years but so far it seems fun yeah what would you uh focus on if you weren't working on bitcoin do you think you're asking what would be something else yeah oh i have i have no idea you're so deep in it now you can't even think yeah i'm the same way i don't well i i can probably find a job in software security or something but if i'm sure i'm sure you could but if you think about something completely different then i i don't know i can write about movies

it seems like you've seen enough to write about enough numbers like it's not enough but yeah Yeah, it's true. The content has to be good, right? You can't just watch them. It has to be good content. This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you again for coming through. Is there anything that you're working on

that you want to touch on before we wrap up here or anything else in particular you want to touch on? I would probably encourage just the listeners that if you have an idea how to improve peer-to-peer of Bitcoin, there is no magic in what we're doing. there is like no strict rules if you think that your ideas is actually will make Bitcoin better just come and share and ask us and we can talk and because I

think there is a lot of room so yeah just just reach out guys if you have some something and we're gonna we're gonna help you implement it because peer-to-peer doesn't require any forks usually that's why it's much easier to to implement your ideas yeah yeah um don't be shy don't be uh put put yourself out there especially if you're you're in a in a position or somewhere you're not liking what you're doing and you're and you're thinking about contributing you know stick your neck out there greg maxwell may yell at you but you know what you put yourself out there you tried uh and uh you're gonna learn at the end of the day yes and that's that's all we're all learning together and we're all building

the system system together and it's uh uh i feel like i've met a kindred spirit here like i'm seeing somebody who's gotten to come work on the system and you feel invigorated and you look uh look like you're happy and and pumped to be working on what you're working on and gleb i want to uh thank you for doing what you're doing helping bitcoin because it helps all of us and again i truly believe it's one of the most important technologies in the world right now and anybody working to strengthen that is uh a-okay in my book yeah thank you for having me over we'll keep making bitcoin better yeah maybe we'll do this again sometime too oh yeah um that's all we got this week reeks peace and love