The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Knots vs Core Debate w/ MrRGnome | The CBP

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIESThis week I will sit down with MrRGnome, the moderator of the Bitcoin channel on Discord. MrRGnome will lay the wood on the debate between Core vs Knots, the psychosis of Lukedashjr, and how we profit on and protect ourselves during a hostile fork attempt.____Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetworkThis show is sponsored by: easyDNS - https://easydns.com EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. With DomainSure and EasyMail, you'll sleep soundly knowing your domain, email and information are private and protected. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for 25% off fees FOR LIFE, and start stacking today.256Heat -⁠ https://256heat.com/ ⁠ GET PAID TO HEAT YOUR HOUSE with 256 Heat. Whether you're heating your home, garage, office or rental, use a 256Heat unit and get paid MORE BITCOIN than it costs to run the unit. Book a call with a hashrate heating consultant today.

And one of the things that can't be attacked is your self-custody Bitcoin. And one of the things that can be attacked is the ETF. Can't be exposed to that. That's my view. It's not a good idea. And by the way, that'll hit MSTR too. It'll probably hit other stuff as well. Friends and Enemies, welcome back, Canadian Bitcoiners podcast.

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boost them with some stats bitcoin is the scarcity asset i mean it's just a fact geopolitical national down to the local cloud friends and enemies welcome to yet another edition of the canadian bitcoiners podcast i'm lend the legend doing this one solo for now i'm going to be bringing in my honored guest just a moment. But before I bring them in, just got to rhyme up a few things. Well, we had an interesting day with the rate cuts, both in Canada and the U.S. And, well, what happened with Bitcoin? We'll be talking about that a little more in depth on Monday.

And we also have the Canadian budget coming up on Tuesday next week. That will be another topic of discussion for Monday show. But got a few things. I've got to just check off my list of things to do. List of sponsors. Number one, we have Easy DNS. So if you're looking to set up a website, you already have one or you want to set one up, these are the people you want to talk to.

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Hey, Alan. Here, buddy. I am here. How are you doing? I am loving it. I'm living it. It's a dream. It's a nightmare.

I don't know what the heck it is. But it's both, you know, it is both dream and nightmare. I've reached a kind of existential. point where having talked to Luke extensively, like, I don't know if you, you know, and for those unfamiliar with me, I've been in the Knott's camp for a little while now. I have some problems with core governance. I don't really like, I don't really like the way that the lot true situation went down. I really don't like the way that the current security disclosures work. I mean, just the last week we had security disclosures, and it's like the beginning of the timeline

reads 2021. It's like, yeah, you may be disclosed it immediately after patching it, but like, Like, when we could mitigate a problem with just a configuration change, just tell me about it, you know? Don't make me wait four years being vulnerable. Anyways, so I've got my problems with core. I've been traditionally with knots for the last little while. And that has, I guess, changed for me in the last week. I would just like to share with you, you know, my thoughts on BIP 444, as well as how, I guess, I've kind of felt that despite supporting knots, despite donating to Luke, for example, in the past,

you know, I feel like I'm a little alienated from that community right now. I don't support BIP 444, and as a result, I just am not welcome in the Nauts community anymore. Before you go any further, maybe you could explain what the heck is BIP 444 for people who are unaware. So BIP 444 is an attempt to, oh, my goodness. You're getting a lot of, you're a busy dude. We have to bear with this. Sorry about that. You're no worries, brother.

So BIP 444, what it's doing is it is, I'm going to try and present this from the perspective of people I disagree with, the Nott's camp, the people proposing this. So this BIP was proposed by an anonymous person that just popped on the scene. It is Luke Jr's brainchild. It proposes to combat C-SAM that's like child abuse material. on chain by reorging it, should it occur. So this is a proposal to, in maybe the worst case, reorg CSAM if it occurs on chain in larger offer turns, as well as generally attempt to disincentivize arbitrary data on chain is, I think, the goal, as well as, I guess, achieve some degree of legal compliance or safety.

If you read the motivation sections of Bit444, a lot of it focuses on fear of Bitcoin becoming illegal or fear of moral and legal culpability for offensive material on change. So that's kind of where it's coming from. And it's kind of, you can maybe see where the roots of that took their beginning in the operan debate. Like there is a significant portion of this BIP that is about fighting spam, right? In spirit, at least. And so that's basically what that argument has now morphed into is into this BIP, this proposal to both fight child pornography on chain as well as uh spam and shit coins generally i don't support it for a number of reasons um primarily i don't think that it is actually going to be effective

in any way at fighting spam on chain uh i i don't appreciate that it's going to make some coins unspendable some of the things that they're doing to fight spam for example reducing the depth of tap root script trees. So tap leafs are like parts of taproot scripts that you execute to spend your coins. And one of the great things about taproot is you only actually have to include the execution path, just the leafs you're executed. And so like we have structures where you can have huge, huge, basically infinitely large scripts and constructs because we don't need to put most of it on chain, right?

And in order to prevent that data space from being abused, this BIP, and to my knowledge, there is nothing abusing that data space, but to potentially prevent that data space from being abused, this BIP puts a limit on the depth of those scripts, and that would actually make some current UTXOs unspendable. So some of the provisions in this are so restrictive that they actually prevent the spend. of existing UTXOs. They confiscate coins, at least temporarily, in a way that I find very problematic. So that's one big problem with that. I have a huge problem with the fact that it deploys by reorg. So Luke Jr. has said that this thing could deploy as soon as tonight if the wrong block gets in the blockchain. He thinks that if, you know, abusive child sexual material ends up on chain today, that we're going to reorg that block. and everything that comes after it.

And the double spending opportunities that it presents are so dangerous to me. I just, I, to me, this. 100%. You're right. I mean, double spending is an absolute, like, I just want to know how can they go about this in terms of doing the reorg. What mechanism is included in this BIP that gives somebody or minors the ability to do this? So there are two activation methods in this BIP.

One is through a user-activated soft fork a year out, assuming that no child abuse material appears on chain. The second way to activate this BIP is the reorg that I've just described. Basically, this BIP suggests that as soon as objectionable material is found on chain, it will be reorged, and the mechanic of doing so is simply minors. Miners apparently will be bat-signaled by somebody who identifies this, I don't know if that's Luke. I don't know.

It's not specified in the BIP, but minors are the suggested route by which we will reorg the chain. I think it's a little funny because a lot of the narrative around this chain and certainly the narrative when you talk to Luke is that this will be a soft fork. There'll be no problems

in trying to execute this strategy. But the reality is, is this motivations for this BIP section basically lists Core V30 exclusively. They're like, the data carrier change settings enabled child porn on chain and all this other stuff and it's an existential threat to bitcoin like luke junior believes bitcoin is literally dead if this bib isn't adopted uh that you know we've got to do extreme

things we've got to reorg the chain spontaneously and without any preparation or support and everybody's just going to be on board with this because we're reacting to an emergency uh is kind of how they're presenting it but the reality is is there is no emergency it's a manufactured emergency like we've had this kind of horrible objectional material on chain for over a decade. There's no practical difference between whether that objectionable material is contiguous in its bytes,

like say in one single op return or if it's in multiple opertons in 83 byte snippets. You know, all data that we interact with on our computers is cut up, whether it's in packets going over the network, whether it's on disk, whether it's in RAM.

And even from there, like, we encrypt it. We have V2 relay. We encrypt our transport. portation. We encrypt on disk. We exhore our blocks directory. So if the concern that's motivating this BIP is we don't want to be held legally liable for having this plain text data, like you don't need to enforce everyone else to encode the data the way you want or to shape their data the way you want to shape it. If you don't want to validate something, don't validate it. If you want to prune something, prune it. You don't need to make a BIP that

forks and does all these dangerous things like enabling double spends and re-esens and reorgs and an instantaneous UASF with an organization and locks up other people's existing coins, you can just personally choose what data you want, what you want to prune, what you don't. You can use things like zero sync style proofs for data. Like we could create an Oracle for CSAM material if we really wanted to and be like, okay, well, you don't have to download these blocks, but you can prove that they're valid and in the chain using a zero sync style proof. There's all kinds of solutions, almost all of them,

on the client side. None of them involve a fork. And we're talking about an existing, like, as far as I'm aware, maybe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but is there some horrible ongoing attack of child porn on the chain? Is there some horrible ongoing attack? Like, what's the emergency here? It seems entirely manufactured. The only people that are talking about this emergency are Luke Jr. and the people financially associated with him. That's mechanic. That's the ocean lawyer. And you'll notice no other lawyer in the United States or anywhere else, even if we were to accept the flawed premise that what's legal should matter to Bitcoin consensus, we see no other legal

experts agreeing with this position. This is all just coming straight from Luke Jr. and his financial relations. So like, I don't know. This is, this is the next four course as far as I see it. And because Luke's going to die on this hill, he says, no way, no how. Am I ever having part in a network that enables child abuse, despite the fact that for over 10 years now, there have been multiple child abuse images in Bitcoin. As far as I'm aware, there's two or three, and they're very old, and that's all I've heard about him. I don't know where he's getting this idea that we're about to get attacked, that running a Bitcoin node's about to be made illegal. To me, this is just fearmongering. This is, so I'm seeing a lot of danger in the ecosystem

system right now and I wanted to come on your show and just, I guess, vent a little and get the word out that this may be dangerous. So up until this BIP 444, a lot of people were on board with knots. A lot of people were accepting knots. A lot of people were even accepting Luke and his behavior. He is a little bit strange. He has an interesting past. I mean, he's lost of Bitcoin. He was apparently not storing it correctly. I think his PGP, he was stolen or something. It was just for somebody that's a developer that's in this field, I find it to be very interesting to say to least. But his reputation may have been slightly damaged or greatly damaged

since this BIP-4-4-4 came about. Is there anything he could do, you think, to fix what has been done to help him cleanse and people could start trusting him a little bit more and start running knots? Is there anything that he could do? I don't think that we should trust anybody I don't think that it's about Luke I think that if you want to run knots you should run knots based on the code

that it is it stands alone you know the art and the artist are separate I don't agree with these personal attacks against Luke I don't agree with these personal attacks against Lop and Peter Todd I may disagree with all three of these people about any number of things but like we're talking Bitcoin

and we're talking forks and we're talking node and config choices I think everybody should have sovereignty in Bitcoin to choose the code they run, to configure the code they run. Like I'm saying, if you want to prune objectionable data to you, I think you should. There should be better tooling to enable people to configure and manage their node and express their needs exactly as they want. That's the right way to handle some of these moral concerns, as well as running a node is resource intensive. It's a lot of work. You can engage in some pretty significant trust tradeoffs that don't involve a lot of trust like zero sync style sinks

like pruning um there's a lot of room here to to solve or address these problems without a fork and i think that it's in question whether these are even problems in the first place so this idea of like emergency fork is just wild to me i'm just amazed at the fact that they're using this legality as a way to help push this and to help usher it along on a quicker pace and it should is yeah there is nothing yet there's nothing that's pending that's going to knock people's nodes out there's no cops knocking on our doors yet but at least it's not happening right now so it just it's funny that they're using this they're hanging their their hat on this particular point the legality of this all it just doesn't make any sense

if they have a lawyer they were given the wrong advice here right like like who are they talking to. That does seem to be the case. I mean, they're talking to Ocean Lawyer. You can look at him up on Twitter. He seems to be a primarily antagonistic troll. Maybe his views are framed by the fact that he's a trial lawyer

and he just wants somebody to fight. I really don't know. All I know is that the only people that are sourcing this, like the sources of this misinformation, this fear-mongering about child abuse material, all originate around Luke and that's like it's mechanic he's the one that started saying and he was saying stuff like you know oh just like BSV we're going to have all of our nodes are going to automatically get

shut down by AWS and things because they're automatically scanning for abusive material and obviously that's not true because as I mentioned we use things like v2 encrypted transport and we use things like we XOR the blocks directory on disk so there's no like a scan wouldn't see these things in the first place. But a lot of fearmong, that's where it's originated. And then people like crater and simply Bitcoin, they picked it up. And suddenly Bitcoin University and simply Bitcoin are really beaten the drum. And like, I think that those guys are doing, I think they're doing their best. I think they're acting in good faith. But I think that they have been really taken on a ride here and are taking the rest of their audiences on a ride as a result in terms of

like the core hate bandwagon. I hate core as much if not more than that. Like, I I hated them first. Don't tell me about hating porn shit coins. Like just, but from just a technical perspective, what we're talking about here in terms of fighting spam, it's so dangerous for so many reasons. Even if we had the perfect BIP,

even if there was no reorg potential in a given BIP, which again, not really even possible, even if, you know, I agreed with all of these things and we weren't confiscating people's coins with some of these details, I still wouldn't support this BIP

because there's no, emergency to react to, and by chasing spam, I get the impulse to fight shitcoiners. I totally do, as well as abusive people. I want to lead that charge. I hate how much we're abused, but this is not the way to do it. We're not actually going to stop them from using Bitcoin abusively. What we're going to do is we're going to push them to obfuscate their abuse so we can't even observe it, and we can't mitigate the harm that they're doing to things like the UTXO set. The truth is, is by chasing these guys down and trying to, like, limit their ability to do what they're already doing. It's not going to prevent them from doing it anyway. It's just going to make the ways that they do it more harmful to us.

If we actually wanted to, let's say that the premise of this fork was true and there's an emergency and we need to actually stop these spammers in some way or cause them some kind of harm to deter them from abusing Bitcoin in this way, what we do is we shrink the block size and we adopt covenants like CTV. We adopt covenants to encourage them to take this data off chain. We shrink the block size to increase the costs of spamming the chain. That's what we would do. And this BIP does neither of those things. And yeah, so I can't agree with the direction that the Nott's camp are going. As soon as Nott's merges code reflecting this BIP and judging by Luke's belief that Bitcoin is dead if this is not done, I imagine they will. then I guess I got to stop running knots and run something like BTCD or maybe Bitcoin.

Or at least you can run knots right up to the point where this comes into effect. Of course. Yeah, like just like you can run core version 29 point. Absolutely. So that's, I guess, my plan going forward. That end, I'm going to, if I'm being honest, if this danger of a fork is going to exist and not and the knots camp, several of the people in it are insistent they're going to do this no matter what. I just want to dive into it.

Like, it's Fork Wars time, baby. Let's get paid. Let's make these guys do a hard fork. If they want a censorship coin, let's give them a censorship coin. They'll get some small amount of support. We'll call it 10%. We'll call it 20%. I'll get paid 20% on my Bitcoin holdings,

just like I did during the B-cash fork. I'm making money. The people defending the protocol with me are making money, dumping the scam coin on day one. We're dropping some hostile actors that are in the space, actively harming people, boom. Like this, even if this goes the worst case scenario, this is a win.

At no point in Bitcoin's history has there been more engagement in education than there wasn't a block size wars. If this takes the worst turn, there are positives to it. See, I wasn't there in 2017 when there was the fork. I started buying Bitcoin

November of December of 2017. So I want to just go back in time here. Say you, I just want to know the mechanism. Say you have Bitcoin and obviously it's stored offline. You don't have that on an exchange. It's in secure location. The keys have never been exposed to the internet. And a fork takes place.

How do you get access to the four coins? How was it done back then? So the procedure you want to follow when selling a Bitcoin fork, especially one that is actively occurring and doesn't have replay protection. or is a suspectly going to reorg. What you do is you start by downloading the node client for what you consider the shit coin software. So you begin with your shit coins.

Or no, I'm so sorry. That's not you, you begin with your coins. You move your coins. Before you even touch any shit coin software, you move your coins. You want to secure your coins in a new wallet because you don't know what kind of virus you might be downloading in this shit coin software. you don't know what kind of replay attacks might be occurring against any transactions you make in this shit coin software or your bitcoin software so you want to secure the the bitcoin first whatever you think is

bitcoin you want to secure it first move it to an entirely new wallet air gap that thing don't touch it and then from that point you download the shitcoin software the shit coin node uh download shitcoin wallet you find yourself the shadiest part of the internet you can find it's it's gonna be some horrible shit coin exchange that you've never heard of and you're convinced you're going to lose your money the moment you send it in this is where you're looking for you find this place they're going to have something like uh shit coin futures or like block one shit coin you can deposit and sell it so you go to this site you do all the pre registration or wherever you need maybe like a day two before the fork enough time that you can get everything sorted fork day comes you want to do this on

fork day because the value that you're going to get for the coins that you sell is going to plummet dramatically. That moment where there is the most uncertainty is when you were going to get paid the most for defending the protocol. So you take your shit coins, the fork happens. Immediately you send them to an exchange, immediately you dump them. You have no risk from your original Bitcoin. They're sitting, you're not transacting them. You're not touching them because there's a reorg that could be happening. You want to avoid transacting during this fork period except for with

your shit coins because you don't care about them as much and if they get stolen, who the fuck cares? So once you dump, like I said, in the B-cash scenario, for example, you were getting maybe like 20% of the value of your Bitcoin on that first day

for the first couple of hours. And then within a day, it was down to maybe 10%. And a couple days after we're down to like 3%. So the sooner you move in terms of selling the shit coin, the more you're going to get for it. And that's how we get paid for defending the protocol. You define Bitcoin. And if you have the ability to verify and identify what the valuable properties are in Bitcoin, things like being permissionless, things like being censorship resistant, things like being decentralized.

And when one of the forks challenges any of those things, like permissionless, like censorship resistance. You generally have a good idea of what fork you should be on to be calling it Bitcoin. And you just use that ability to say, okay, well, this is the version of Bitcoin I'm defending. It's going to be the censorship resistant one. And this is my Bitcoin and I'm going to sell the other one. And that's basically how I've ended up in this position where even though I have been a strong not supporter and educator, they really don't like me very much right now. You've been in their Discord. You've been chatting with the folks over there.

You've been explaining you. I was a moderator in their discord a week ago. What happened? I told Luke that I wasn't going to support a fork with a reorg activation method or I told them what I just told you. I told them that I wouldn't support this fork. What are the folks over there say when you bring this idea, this viewpoint? You're coming in with something which the people running knots is against what you're, What you're saying, but maybe the people that are in that environment, they may agree with you.

So I'm curious to hear what they brought this is splitting the knots camp. There's a lot of knots people that are, you know, looking at this bit and be like, no, I'm out. Not happening. But when I bring these concerns to the knots camp, at least when I could before I was banned, they say things like, well, Luke says literally a quote from Luke is me, Bitcoin is dead anyways if we don't. So it's like even the BIP itself, it's somewhat humorous to see how self-acknowledging it is of how dangerous this proposal is. They're like, well, it's like a little fact is part of the BIP. And it's one of the questions is like, well, isn't reorging spontaneously dangerous?

How is this going to work? It's like, yeah, it's super dangerous. But like, what else can we do? We have to do something. It's life or death for Bitcoin. And talking to some of the people there, they're like, well, if we lose, then Bitcoin. is dead anyway, so it doesn't matter. There's a very almost Mike Hearnness to the situation. I suppose you probably don't remember Mike Hearn. Mike Hearn was a Googler that left Bitcoin

after making Bitcoin XT and campaigning for bigger blocks. And he was kind of one of the instigators of the block size wars in many ways. And Luke, I kind of see following the Mike Hearn path. He believes Bitcoin is dead. He honestly does believe that if Core V30 is allowed to exist. He said specifically Bitcoin is dead if anybody continues to use core. I don't see how it's possible that a BIP which is primarily motivated in its motivation section by Core V30 and the choices core is made. I don't see how this code is ever going to be adopted by core. It seems implausible that Core is ever going to adopt BIP 444 since they are the primary motivation and they could, the choice is basically like revert data carrier V30 changes, which are allegedly

the impetus for this BIP or implement this BIP. They would obviously choose to revert the data carrier changes, but I don't think they're going to do either of those things. They have no motivation to it. This is great from a core perspective. They get to cut off the gangrenous limb as they perceive it. They want this forth. And that's really unfortunate because a lot of the good work that I think that has been done over the last year in getting people, away from core and acknowledging some of these governance issues core has and the misinformation coming out of that camp is in my opinion being sabotaged by Luke and and his moral absolutism uh and what do they say in regards to these arguments they say that well there's a

substantial difference between 60 or 83 bites of child porn and 84 they say that by cutting it up conceptually, specifically at the operturn level, they think that it gives them an obfuscation they can hide five. It's performative art for an attack they think will happen, but there is no evidence that has happened yet in terms of like a legal attack, like they'll ban Bitcoin. And they want to be able to say, no, you can't,

you can't ban it for child porn because I had no idea it was child porn because it was cut up. It was cut up into different pieces, ignoring the fact that it's, as I said, cut up. throughout its lifetime in being processed and you know obviously if you want to send somebody if all it took was you processing on your hardware or software objectionable content like why wouldn't i just be spamming objectionable content at your ports all the time like you've processed it you're going to jail so they have an absolutist position that you can't really reason

them out of. They believe that they are less morally liable if the data is cut up at off returns. And 100% on that. The question I would always have is I always want to find out why something is happening. What's the motive? What's what is pushing them into this? So with respect to this came out of left field. It just, from my perspective, it did. And Luke has always been on the side of, I don't like this stuff on my. I know it. I want to have it flushed out for my mempool. But now you're going to this almost extra level of taking care of business. And it potentially, as you mentioned, cause a fork.

But the question I want to know is, has anybody looked at what's causing this? Is there an outside entity or maybe an inside entity somewhere that is trying to push this narrative amongst this Nott's camp? I'm wondering if it's who, like, who would it be? It is observably fact. that this entire narrative, as you said, it spontaneously occurred. We can pinpoint when it spontaneously occurred. It spontaneously occurred through Mechanic, who is Ocean's spokesperson, through Ocean's lawyer, and Luke Jr., as well as Ocean itself and its social media

relationships. And from there, a crater at Bitcoin University picked it up from Mechanic and simply Bitcoin picked it up. mechanic and crater as well. That is the scope of where this narrative has originated. Now, many people have since glommed onto the narrative. I mean, a lot of people are, I think, very rightfully passionate about abuse and want to stop abuse. I don't think that's a very controversial thing. But that emotionally charged argument has attracted people where it originated from is very easy to pinpoint.

It originated from Luke and his financially related parties. And that's actually saying that was what got me banned from the, from the Nazi. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, there you go. Because I portray it like it is,

it's fear mongering. It's dangerous, dangerous fear mongering. There is no actual legal threat that anybody has put, like the legal communities in America, Canada, Australia, Europe, the UK, hey, they haven't come together and said, oh, you know what we're going to do is we're proposing all this legislation where we're going to ban Bitcoin nodes because they're abusive. There is no rash of police breaking down people's doors and seizing the hard drives for running nodes like this just isn't happening, isn't projected to happen.

And in many places, including in America, there are actually protections for running a note, like explicit protections. And this has been the case. Like, we've had this CSAM material on chain for over a decade. So, like, why now? Why so spontaneously? I don't know, but where is it coming from? It's coming from Luke Jr. In terms of the likelihood of this becoming a reality in any client, you mentioned

is probably hell is going to freeze over before Core adopts this, but not. Probably there's a percentage likelihood that they could adopt it. But if you had to say like, yeah, it's more likely it's going to happen or more likely it's not going to happen, do you think cooler heads will prevail and Nott's will say now, we're not going to go ahead with this? Or do you think based on what you see, Nott's will adopt this and it will be essentially something people can run. What do you think about that? They insist to me publicly that they will run this no matter what, regardless of its support, regardless of the minority that they exist in.

This is life or death for them. Thus, it doesn't matter how extreme the measures that they have to take are. I hope, I partially hope that that's a bargaining tactic on a game theoretical position because the reality. Because the reality is, is anybody who follows such a fork with such a minority as Luke would insist you still fork with isn't running Bitcoin and is not secure and is in the very dangerous position. So anybody who he attracts, I think, is possibly hurting themselves quite a bit. I hope that this is a negotiating tactic to convince Core to revert the data carrier settings. Because that's the only way this makes sense to me. There's no way, as I said, the hell's going to freeze over, as you said, before Core.

adopts this BIP. Core is still the majority of nodes on the network. How are they going to possibly pull off a user-activated soft fork with an extreme minority of nodes on the network? And like, were they going to get miners? Like, as far as I'm aware, the only miners running knots are ocean. And not even all of ocean, because a lot of ocean is using datum. And so outside of ocean's control.

so I don't know how they're possibly going to activate these things So how does that reorg work then If you're talking about the longest chain That's the one we adopt And there's only so few miners That would be running a version of knots Then wouldn't by default

The longest chain be the not knots chain And Rigor would never really take place Yes exactly So this is It's very disingenuous When Luke and this anonymous BIP authors Say you know this is going to be a soft fork The reality is it's a soft fork that can be activated via reorg, which doesn't sound very soft at all.

It may be a subset of the rules. But the entire reason of soft fork is valuable is it doesn't cause a fork. That's the soft part about it. If the entire design causes the fork, we've kind of lost any benefit that there ever was to calling it a soft fork. The way that I see it is Luke has positioned himself such that someone else has to now come along and say, this is stupid we're not going to do it we're going to actually hard fork away from any blocks that you make even if you have a majority he wants someone else to be the hard fork back guy he's trying to i think he he is setting himself up to find a villain who he can paint as being pro child abuse

enabling and shit coin enabling and they're going to be the hard forkers he's the soft forker that's saving bitcoin that's the narrative i think that's lining up in his head for how this is going to go when Core doesn't adopt this BIP he's going to have no choice but to go anyway and he's going to assert that the miners are with him because I mean how do you even measure support for a fork

Sybil nodes for UASF like I mean there you can't you can't measure support for a UASF and even a mass for a minor activated software they can lie about what they're signaling like the potential for abuse and this is huge so I don't know like he

if CORE doesn't go in, he's going to go in anyway. There's no way around this soft fork becoming hard forky. It may be a subset of the rules, but it's going to cause forks. It's going to cause chain splits. It's going to cause reorgs. It's going to cause problems. And I'm here for it and I'm getting paid. That's the plan.

There's going to be a lot of disingenuine arguments moving forward. It reminds me of in politics when there is a bill introduced. And I'm going to just throw it a name, like the bill against beating your spouse. and included in that bill would be some funding to some organization that maybe not everybody agrees with. So if you don't vote against it, you're like, oh, then you are for beating your spouse.

But in reality, there's more to it than just the name of the bill. There's stuff within that's buried in that bill that has actual substance that you may not agree with. That's why you voted against it. So when people are not going to run this version of not, should it ever become a reality, people will say, oh, you're for this type of CSAM. But in reality, there's more to it than meets the eye.

I think they're going to hear a lot of disingenuine arguments and putting fingers. I'm already hearing those arguments. Like, I'm already seeing a lot of people being dismissed in that exact way, getting complaints from my peers that they're going on a lot. Like I said, this is fractured the knots camp. A lot of us were using knots. Still are in many cases, but we've been very put off by this. And we won't be running any fork-related code.

I think there's going to be a. split in knots i think it's happening and yeah and you're just going to have like knots bitcoin version the you know the one we have right now and new knots which and that's that's it it just seems like that's just the reality of all this and i don't know if there's a way to stop this it's just unfortunately they patent themselves into a corner and yeah even john is saying that knots lost because of this oh i agree and i'm very disappointed by that because Because like I said, I've donated to this cause and I've done a lot of work because I felt that by having an implementation like knots that focused on user configurability and user sovereignty, we could really challenge the methodologies that CORE is applied to doing things like forks. Like we should UASFR forks.

We shouldn't delegate that responsibility to minors where we can avoid it. Things like a better security policy. Even just, you know, user configurability matters a lot. your note is your way to express yourself. So there are a lot of great things that I liked about knots. And I'm not going back to core if I'm being brutally honest with you.

I'll continue to run old versions of things. I maintain some of my own little minor forks with my own little patches in them. But I'm not running a fork. You can't pay me to fork. You can pay me to defend a fork. You can't pay me to fork. Has anybody talked about those unspendable UTXOs

that would be a result of all this? a little bit. So there are some examples in the GitHub discussion around this that highlight specific UTXOs that will become unspendable if the top root tree depth enforcements are imposed. Yep. And what sort of response would you, if somebody comes to me and says,

moving forward, a portion of your Bitcoin, because if I was somebody that used a UTXO now is going to be unspendable, I'll be pissed. The BIP author challenges the validity of those use cases. But it's a technical issue that you could prove it to be factual. Yeah. I mean,

I can only guess the mind of an anonymous person whose only contribution so far has been this BIP and appeared out of nowhere and went out and exists seemingly as an avatar for Luke Jr. But that's what I was going to get at. Is that what is that the consensus or that's what people are believing that this maybe him? No, I don't believe that. They're far too polite.

I don't believe Luke Jr. has the patience to compose the responses that this person is. No, I think that they're just another adjacent person in the knots camp. It seems like this is just coming at an interesting time

because Bitcoin seems to have had some stability for a number of years. I know we've had order knows not too long ago and shit like that but there was no real threat like this that i've seen at least since i've started using bitcoin and the last few years definitely not so it's just interesting that this came up all of a sudden and i'm always wondering maybe this was done externally maybe something like there was maybe an external actor out there that got in somebody's ear or is funding their shit and trying to get this just to

That was me. I accidentally funded this shit. Sorry. No, I'll donate it about 0.17 Bitcoin to Luke about it. I don't want to know how much. So what's your what's your course of action moving forward then? It's just simply not to upgrade and just Yeah, so node-wise I'm not upgrading. Socially, I'm on the warpath. I am really excited, really, really excited for these new fork wars.

Yeah, there's going to be a lot of chaos. But if you have the ability to verify and know what's valuable about Bitcoin to you, fork wars are easy. Fork wars are really easy and they pay you and it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of stupid people. And like I said, everybody gets an education in a fork war. Everybody. It's fantastic seeing how the community matures during a fork war to the point that 10 years later,

you'll still be talking about it and reveling in the lessons you learned from. That's going to be us 10 years from now, Len, talking about this fork. And that's good for the community. It's good for the user base, generally speaking. It's good for Bitcoin. And I think that we're at a point in time where if you want to morally censor the content that's going into Bitcoin, then I think that we've reached a parting of ways. We reached it over a decade ago.

But if you've only just realized now that's... It's okay. Bitcoin isn't for everybody. Not everybody needs permissionless money. As I'm processing all this information, the one thing that I just dawned upon is those Bitcoin related ETS. I know they're not Bitcoin, but the perspectives from, you know, we're going to go right now. This is actually one of my bigger concerns.

So the ETFs themselves, they have terms of service that say they get to arbitrarily decide what isn't is not Bitcoin. And we've been long highlighting that this is an enormous. risk, especially in the event of something like a fork. If there's a fork and there is, for example, a chain that is censoring Bitcoin under the auspices of stopping child pornography, that is something that may attract a business or a government. This could invite a government attack to put their fingers into Bitcoin and start trying to censor transactions and content. So if this goes forward, it's entirely possible that these ETFs are going to

choose even a minority chain even even something that isn't being supported by a majority of nodes or the economic activity of nodes they might select because that is what is in keeping with their legal and moral and corporate practices fighting this like if they buy the narrative that you know they're actually fighting child poll which they aren't but if they buy that narrative they could easily get on board with it or even just use it as an excuse you know governments would would love, I think, an excuse to say, oh, we're going to decide what goes into Bitcoin blocks. What a great idea. Let's do that. And if we don't like it, we'll just have them reorg it later. So this is a huge opening in terms of like it could be abused by these ETFs and or our governments that regulate these ETFs.

And for the users of these ETFs, they're along for the ride. They have no voice whatsoever in what coin they get. in fact they're definitely not going to get two i can pretty much guarantee you that they're not going to get both of them so this money that i'm talking about the 20% that you could have potentially earned in the last block size wars on your bitcoin you aren't going to get because you aren't willing to hold your coins and defend yourself so get out of the ETFs buy bitcoin instead of paper put it in your own wallet and hunker down because the block size wars were nothing we're getting into a new four course and get an education right now the hard way or the easy way you get to pick you know what i'm linking of this too and you touched upon it this

almost gives validity to what core has been doing they've essentially won this round this particular part of the fight then it does it give them more fuel to the fire to even push the their agenda a little further maybe the opera turn could be even larger oh i hate it but it absolutely does yeah and there's nothing that really because they would the majority of bitcoiners right now run core and if you exclude knots in this then it's just even a larger slice of the pie that they have they essentially they could run the show and then that would be such a mistake on their part i think that the right lesson for core contributors and maintainers and sympathizers to take from this is that there is so much dissatisfaction with them that an extreme

minority is willing to do this stupid shit. If they do anything to cause more dissatisfaction, they are just going to feed that minority. They don't want it to become a majority. They need to take a step back, quit doing things that remove sovereignty and agency from their users, and start respecting that node runners define the protocol, change their governance model to include node runner voices. That's what they need to do. That's the most productive thing they can do to ease these tensions to make sure that it is a minority of people that are following Luke into this hellscape. It's the only way they're going to maintain their relevancy quite frankly, because as is,

yeah, maybe this is a little hiccup in the road and going to drive people back to core a little bit, but I'm not done this fight. I am going to keep fight in core. This is just a little stall. This is Luke has unfortunately forced the focus to be on his child porn fork. We can't focus on. core and running nodes that aren't core anymore we need to be on fighting dangerous reorging double spend enabling forks that's what the focus needs to be on

during this time people like or entities like Citra may want to take advantage fun some particular ways of having core divert in the future and then you know they could fund it perhaps to try to twist the arms of core developers and and put something else that's in in there to really shift the dynamic of like operatives or whatever like it's it seems like it's it's a opportunity for them to really change things the way they want it to be because because the focus is is diverted right at the particular moment it is an opportunity for every actor every bad actor on every side of this debate yeah that's concerning very And it's also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I find it really heinous, very morally objectionable and heinous that Lucan Mechanic and Crater and Nico have been pushing this narrative in a way that is almost definitely self-fulfilling. There hasn't been CSAM on Bitcoin in a decade. It's two or three images as far as I'm aware. they have created a context and situation where it is almost inevitable more will be put on chain even if only to trigger Luke's fork yeah right

and who wouldn't want to do that make some double spends in the same block this is so easy if he's going to fork as soon as you put content he doesn't like in the chain package up that content on chain make a whole bunch of very big transactions to the exchange you hate the most

he'll fork you'll double spend against the exchange you'll sell the fork coins you get to double dip you get paid twice speaking from experience or theoretical i don't want to go there just in case did maybe some legality i've never had to do a double spend against one of these terrible exchanges but it certainly has happened frequently and did in the old foreboards for things like bit gold for example is one they always was getting double spent against the exchanges that accepted time. And that's the other part of this is there's almost a precipitation of more forks that inevitably happens when the fork gores get serious enough. Once we get to the point where it's clear that core isn't going to adopt any BIP related to this, and Luke is going to do it no matter

what, I think we're going to see a whole bunch of forks pop up just like we did last time. And it's just going to rain. There's going to maybe be one main significant one, but there's going to just be a whole little rain of little dotted cash grabs and all kinds of things. And the diligent Bitcoiners, is going to sweep them all up and make a tidy little sum. Don't forget to declare it on your taxes. You know what I'm interesting, interested to see is if in the next little while there's going to be a migration of hash rate away from ocean just because of this. I haven't looked at this.

They've got like 2%. But still it's 2%. If that drops, say, 30% of that 2%. It's something that's measurable. And I'm wondering if this is something we're going to see in the next little while. Well, FT pool, F2 pool, they came out against Bip 444. They're about 10% of the hash rate. So already, you know, some miners are making their positions clear.

So the fantasy, Luke has in his head of this being like a smooth sailing soft fork, it's delusional. It's never going to happen. Well, if I was running a company that does nodes like it's a, sorry, a pool, I wouldn't want to adopt. If I'm trying to maximize my profits adopting this, obviously it's not going to do it. It's just I would want stuff as much,

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I like the stuff as much garbage into any block as possible just to maximize the amount of fees I could ring out of it if I was a pool runner. And they do. Yeah, they do. And I can understand that. I mean, they're there for their business.

They're not charity. Some that are standing up. for a particular point, but they're few and far between. The majority of these are actual businesses, and they want to ensure that they're able to keep the lights on for tomorrow. At the same time, that argument is actually one of the same in the Nautz camp. They think that, you know,

being businesses, being legally obliged to stop things like abuse, they're going to want to rush to this fork attempt and support it. I don't think they will, and even if they do, I don't particularly care because businesses do not define Bitcoin. I do.

And my Bitcoin is censorship resistance. I love that. Did we exhaust this topic in totality? Is there anything else did I miss that you just want to rail on with respect to this whole Bip 444 stuff? Oh, I think we covered at all. I could talk about it like forever. Like I'm expecting to be talking about this issue nonstop for the next year.

I am in full Fork Wars mode. If no minor backs Bip 4444, can the fork even activate? Yeah. So one of the activation methodologies is, user activation by block height. So there will come a block height if this BIP is adopted where they will start rejecting blocks that have, for example, 84 bytes of operturn data or a tap root, tap leaf depth greater than I think it's 128 or something.

Yeah. So they don't, will it be secure without any miners? No, but they don't need miners to activate it. And if they activate with outminers, they're going to have a very interesting time. I guess Johnny Miner would even run it maybe would be some clients of Ocean, maybe. I honestly have no idea what the support of it's going to shake out. I hope, and this is maybe being a little bit malicious, but I hope that the support is enough that I get paid.

I hope if they're going to put me through the rigmarole of defending against this attack on Bitcoin, I hope that they're successful enough that I get paid. That's looking at it through the lens of a glass half full. I like that because you're going to come out ahead. Not only is it a learning opportunity for everybody, but it's an opportunity to add to your stack. I'm going to come up so ahead. Dude, if I can get another 10% on my stack,

who wouldn't say that arguing on the internet for a couple of hours is worth 10% of this stock? my partner comes to me the other day is like you've been typing angrily a lot the last 48 hours like do you want to it's noticeable talk about what's what's going on and I'm like oh I'm you know I'm preparing for a potential Bitcoin fork and if it happens I intend to get paid for it so you are going to get paid for for arguing on the internet I'm like yeah yeah I do yeah If we're going to be taken for this right, it might as well maximize ticket as much on the weekend.

I wasn't there the last time around, so it'd be good to get it. It's a good time. And I missed out by just a few months. Again, November, December is when I first got in. And so, like, it was just right after all that. But, Noam, I appreciate you coming on to talk. We've been at this for 50 minutes or so. Time always flies when we start this.

We, like, we can talk about other things. Like, I mean, we talk about the rates, just change. We talk about government of Canada, budget. I know you mentioned to that. Well, we have one more question from John. Would the government want to back Luke's fork to either take control or just sell discord? I think that it could. That is a big fear of mine.

And I think actually something that they're hoping for because they want that support. Which, I mean, this is how, like. Liberty always dies with thunderous applause, you know, to quote Star Wars, as they will be invited. The government will be invited into attack Bitcoin by some actors in Bitcoin, whether this is the instance in which that happens or it's the future, they will be invited in. I'm going to switch gears quickly because I'm not sure if you've been following the Canadian budget is coming next week. Are you following that at all?

I have been following that. Because you're, without getting too specific, you live within Canada somewhere. Yeah, I love politics. I'm very interested in Canadian politics and commenting on the current federal and provincial situations. Doug Ford certainly stirred the pause. Sure it is. Oh, my goodness.

Apparently, you got approval from the PMO's office, but I'm not sure if that's true or not. It's just something that's floating around. So he looks like that he didn't go rogue. Irobo approval. He's saying that he like Carney had eyes on it. He's saying that he had seen it. Yes. It applies a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

But he had seen it. If I've seen something and I disapprove of it, I would tell the person I hate this fucking thing. You know, that. Of Carney's business. It's the province. I know that Carney wants to be like, oh, you know, the Fed, the buck stops the Fed for international trade negotiations,

but that's very clearly not true as you see every province right now put out like Ebby and VC is just putting out ads right now as well Ford's taking on ads Mo is applauding Ford Daniel Smith in Alberta she's like taking private meetings

in the US with Republican strategists and going to university talks and stuff so like they are all doing their own thing in terms of trade negotiations with the US as much as Carney may not like that. That's what's happening. Yeah, I have a lot of different players

trying to improve their constituents' lives. But you're going to take a little bit of heat here. But like Nome likes to pay taxes. I know that you're an advocate of... I am. Yeah. I like taxes. I don't like this new budget at all.

I'll be honest. I'm not a Carney fan in the least. We haven't seen it yet. We may be getting some snippets of info. We thought his platform, and we know like he is for a lot a lot of the spending the generational spending that he's talking about and I presume is going to be the the primary content spending wise in this budget is military spending and it's about expanding the north and the Arctic and getting presence there it's about updating

equipment and practices and it's it's an investment that I would like to see done very differently. I don't agree with the actual practice. I have no problem with spending money, but I don't really like what he's spending it on or how he's spending it. I would like to see a lot less focus on meeting the NATO new 5% mandate and calling it stimulus. I would like to see a lot less of this real estate stuff, like his dedicated real estate housing organization that he's building to build houses. I would like that instead of to be basically a tool for private finance and private contractors and construction through the investment bank of Canada, I would like to see that Crown Corporation take the lead and do all of it. Like just I would like them to hire

Canadians. I would like them to build houses. I don't want them to fund houses. I want them to fund houses. them to build houses um because i see these you know housing contractors across canada basically lining their pocketbooks they basically run it seems every municipal election in Canada these contractors that's part of how we ended up in this real estate crisis in the first place by my estimation i don't want to put them in the driver's seat and nothing so while i may share some goals with Mark Carney, like modernizing our military, like escaping dependence on U.S. trade. I don't really agree with any of the ways he's doing it. You know what we need to do when you start pitching Bitcoin to some of these trade independence folks. You want to

avoid a world with tariffs. You want to avoid a world with sanctions. Start doing business illegally internationally. Do business in Bitcoin, the way that Russia does, the way that India does, the way that China does. You want to avoid U.S. hedge money. We got a solution for that. You want to back your dollar against abusive marketplaces like the U.S. stock markets.

Back the dollar, back your treasury bonds with Bitcoin. That's how you can compete with this insanity. And we're obviously not going to do that. A neo-liberaliberal through and through, and I resent that to my core. as a filthy communist. And not even his, his strongest opponent,

Poliev, would even consider doing anything you've said. No politician out there that has aspirations, or at least, would potentially win? It's just not going to happen. I'm not aware of anybody who couldn't win that saying this. Nobody is saying these things.

I'm, you know, I don't know every one, every fringe candidate out there. There's got to be a few, but you're right it's too bad you know I wish they spent less

foreign spending and you know if they're going to spend money and it might as well just make it all domestic as much as possible because at least there may be some benefit from that hopefully they spend it right

but that's what I would like because so much foreign investment went out the door and a lot of it was for projects that you know it feels good but in reality

if you're making people suffer at home it's it's not for the greater benefit it's for the detriment of the people here but got to put on your hair mask first right you know before you can put on the people beside you before you can help anybody else you got to yeah help yourself and make sure that you're on stable footing a hundred percent and that doesn't mean we stop helping people it just means that we get our footing yeah charity begins first at home yeah mr aranoma we should end it here but before we do before we do i want to just make sure people can find you. If they want to reach out to you, I know there's a couple of places. You have a nice

website. I want to make sure you pump that. Maybe you just sign things off here. Where can people find you if they want to talk to you? Yeah. So if you want to discuss more of these ideas, whether you're pro-Bip-444, whether you're pro-core, whether you're pro-nots, doesn't really matter. We've got a great community at bitcoin discord.com where we get to have all kinds of open public debates where we don't ban or mute people for suggesting. that perhaps there are financial incentives for their behavior, such as they do in the Bitcoin core repo or in the Knots server, come join us at Bitcoin Discord.com. We've also got great educational resources, which you are going to need in the fork wars

at BTcmaxis.com. Run a node. Learn about these forks. Read Bip 444. Don't take any of the things that I am saying, that Len's saying, as gospel, go make your own opinion. These are my opinions. Go make your own. That's what Bitcoin's about, then express those opinions in code. Love it. Appreciate you coming on,

spending time with us. Thank you so much for having, Alan. It's always a joy talk to you. Anytime, brother. And with that, we'll be back at this again next week, so take care.

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