What Bitcoin Did - Bitcoin Core v30 Explained: Spam, Filters & the Knots Debate | Antoine Poinsot

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Antoine Poinsot is a Bitcoin Core contributor and researcher at Chaincode Labs. In this episode, we dive deep into the growing divide between Bitcoin Core and Knots, why mistrust in Core development has reached new levels, and what the v30 policy changes really mean for the future of Bitcoin. Antoine explains the history behind the OP_RETURN controversy, how “spam” and arbitrary data affect the UTXO set, and why multiple implementations like Knots may be both a strength and a serious risk to the network. We also cover Core’s security-disclosure process, how decisions are actually made inside the project, and whether Bitcoin should ossify or continue to evolve. In this episode: - The Core vs Knots debate - Spam, inscriptions, and the limits of filtering policy - UTXO bloat, miner incentives, and decentralisation risks - Why unreviewed Knots code could become a systemic threat - How Core handles policy vs consensus changes THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Antoine Poinsot: https://x.com/darosior

Bitcoin core developers are not happy with spam. People are spending the life improving Bitcoin as money. Bitcoin Core is not going to prevent people that want to make transactions are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars. If you're trying to get in the way, they're just going to worry around you. That's how Bitcoin works in the first place, that can avoid censorship in the first place. Then it's going to be hindering actual censorship

and payments that we actually do not want to go down this path. Our whole job is assume everybody's car up. Make sure it doesn't impact the software and eventually the Bitcoin users. A weakness of Bitcoin, you are going to store the people's data. That's how Bitcoin works. This is a risk of running a Bitcoin node. The recent changes have no bearing on this risk. There is risk to action. There is risk to inaction.

It's just you can have 99% of filters in your network. It's just going to make your network irrelevant. It's not going to end well if we try to bring politics to be concurred. You just recreated the same institutions as before. Antoine. Good to see you, man. How you doing? Good.

Good to be on the show. I'm excited for this one. It's become probably the most controversial thing in Bitcoin since the block size wars. Maybe. Maybe. But I know you have a lot of views that you want to get out there. You've been frustrated. I mean, I've been frustrated with the way that this conversation has gone on on Twitter.

I think it's become just a tribal mess at this point. Yeah. But we should start, the first time you've been on the show, do you want to just introduce yourself, tell everyone who you are what you do? Yeah, I started working in the industry, probably 25, so probably, yeah, seven years ago. So I started by finding a development company and a retail shot in my, hometown in France. So we would sell Bitcoin for cash, buy a cash for Bitcoin, would also take credit cards payments, but we were pretty proud of before all the new AML package got in. We

tried to go through the greatest length possible that was still legal for a registered business to do. Interesting experiences from doing this. Unfortunately, it didn't quite pay the bills. So we also did developments on the side. Unfortunately, I had to do some shitcoin development as well, some Ethereum smart contract stuff, some other blockchain consulting, essentially people paying you to tell them, no, you don't need a blockchain for this. And then at the same time, I started working in open source Bitcoin.

I started making a few poor requests to Bitcoin Core, which was kind of lame. And then I moved on to lightning development. So we'd contribute to core lightning for a while. Lightning specifications following up there. Then in 2020, I co-founded Wizard Sardine with Kevin Loweck, the founder of breaking Bitcoin and building on Bitcoin conferences. So together, we raise money to build revolt,

Bitcoin vault implementation that we, so we, like, there has been a lot of discussions around volts and how we can do them, but it's always very hand-wavy. It's, so we essentially, yeah, we raised capital, people took risk on actually bringing this to market without requiring any Bitcoin soft work. So our plan was we don't want to put ourselves in a position of we need a software, we need software for our company and we wanted to explore how far we can get without a soft work. We could go pretty far in testing some of the aspects of volts that would be anyways there even if we had covenants. Some others of course would be better with

covenants. So would this be using miniscript and things like that? Yeah. So that's that's another thing where I pivoted in my open source journey there as the as the time as I was working on on Revolts, I started contributing quite a bit to Miniscrettes. Eventually, yeah, working on it, integrating it into Bitcoin Core, porting it to Taproot and co-authoring the manuscript BIP. So the Reavolt thing, we built it, we built the specifications, built the implementation, tried to go to companies to start using it in place of what they had. and let's say the market was less interested in volts than we were hopping. And we were used bits of the Revolved software, so the manuscript part,

to make a software that was less convoluted than a whole vault to make Leanna. So Leanna is a wallet for inheritance and enhanced security purposes that is still active, that is seeing more and more users. And I would say is pretty close to what Anchor watchy also. sponsor are doing as well. So I had no idea that you actually started the honor. That's very cool. I obviously know of it, but I didn't know you've done that.

So when did you start? So now you contribute on core full time. Nowadays, yes. But at the time, say, I was working on coal lightning in like, let's say, 2018, 2019. In 2020, I started pivoting from coal lightning to working more and more in Miniscuit, which was just my new interest. I say, and eventually my disinterest, oh yeah, there was transaction pinning as well.

That's a lot. So in Reveld is using pre-sign transactions as well, like layer two's like lightning. So at the time, there was a lot of discussions around transaction pinning. So I would take part in this discussions, and that's also drew me to Bitcoin Core development. So it's participating in these discussions and then into the manuscript discussions and implemented the Bynscript and Bitcoin Core. So at this point, I was already doing a bunch of core stuff on the side while working on Reveld and on Leanna.

And I started doing more and more with also new responsibilities. I started with other colleagues, the initiative for the security disclosures of the project, worked on fuzzling stuff. And at this point, it was clear that my interest was more into working more in Bitcoin Core than the thing I have done so far. So after four years of with Aldine, I joined ChainCode who gave me the opportunity of just come and do this stuff full-time. So how long have you been with ChainCode full-time now? One year. One year. Okay, nice. And what do you actually concentrate on at Core?

Because obviously there's multiple roles, people have different passion projects, things they want to work on. I'm doing a few things. I quite left the discussions around Penning, There is talented people working in it already. There's Gloria. There's Greg Sanders. And I wrapped up my manuscript project. It's in Bitcoin Core. It was converted to Taproot.

And now I took up the great consensus cleanup soft work. So it's not quite a work into Core. It's more core adjacent. It's more like a Bitcoin-wide work that happens to have to be into Bitcoin Core at the end of the day, but it's not something that needs to be from Bitcoin Core. And so there would be the main thing I'm associated with as well as the security disclosures and a bit of security research. So the great consensus cleanup, is that the idea of making it a little bit more modular, getting rid of some of the sort of bugs in Bitcoin

core, that kind of thing? Yes. So there would be a bunch of, let's say, vulnerabilities and other weaknesses in the Bitcoin consensus rules. For instance, there is one in the proof of work. Proof work algorithm itself has a bug. This bug can enable attacks from miners. Nothing from what is being fixed in the great consensus cleanup is existential to Bitcoin today. It's just a matter of you want to lower the risk

of our decentralized money system could face actual critical bugs in the future. It's like low risk, high impact sort of things. So you don't want to rush any fixes or any changes, but you do want on the long term to take the opportunities when there is not a lot going on to actually roll out the fixes. It's just like a long-term thinking kind of view. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage.

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and it's the only Bitcoin-only exchange in the US with proof of reserves. There really is no better place to buy Bitcoin, so to open an account today, head over to River.com forward slash WBD and earn up to $100 in Bitcoin when you buy. That's river.com forward slash WBD. Okay, cool. So you said something there that is probably a good pivot into the main thing we want to talk about today, which is the Bitcoin core versus not whole debate that's kicked off. But you call Bitcoin money. Obviously Bitcoin is money. But this has been a key part of the debate, I think, is that there are people on the other side of the argument to you that are worried that people working at Bitcoin Core

see Bitcoin as something else, that having JPEGs on Bitcoin is somehow like a wanted thing from the core side. No, it's absolutely not wanted. Bitcoin Core developers are not happy with spam, or they do not somehow not see Bitcoin as money. It's just like, what would we do this otherwise? People are spending the life improving Bitcoin as money,

as making it more robust, more censorship resistance, more usable by people that are less technical as well, usable in an actually robust way. So no, we're not in it for the JPEX. We're in it for the censorship resistance money. Okay. And so I wonder if it's worth just framing this discussion. Explain where all this started roughly a year ago.

this must have been the start of 2025. I think this all really kicked off. What is the change that Core are implementing with Core 30? And I know there's multiple changes. Let's focus first on the OPP return. And why are you doing it? Okay. Maybe some disclaimer before.

I think there is a perspective of Bitcoin Core as being one... A company. Yeah, maybe almost a company or even more organized than it actually is. Or people being having the core devourable. badge and now you're part of the organization. There's no nothing of such. It's just people showing up and then you show up repeatedly and you're kind of part of the regular contributors, but there's no ceremony of new contributors or stuff. And because that's the case and nobody chooses who is going to be working on core or who is not going to be working on core, we all have,

We come from different background and we have different opinions. So I can give my perspective, especially as I propose to change, but that's only going to be my perspective, not Bitcoin Corris. Okay. Good disclaimer. Yeah, just a quick disclaimer. So the controversy really started two years ago, I think, with the inscription stuff. And there was very low activity on the Bitcoin network. Not a lot of people interested in making financial transactions and the network fees were very low.

That some scammers decided to store NFTs and other random bullshit on chain. And people were mad at it for good reasons, probably, but had the bad, I would say, the wrong knee-jerk reaction. There were Bitcoin Core needs to do something. It's always kind of the intervention fallacy of, oh, the government needs to step in. It's just like, oh, Bitcoin Core needs to step in. And you're like, yeah, but Bitcoin Core is not the government of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core does not control Bitcoin. So Bitcoin Core can try to introduce new rules on your local mempool.

But it's all that is going to do on your local memple, it's not going to change what people globally want to be used. using Bitcoin for. And maybe due to lack of communications and maybe sometimes getting caught up on arguments and well all humans, I have made snarky comments in the past that are not the best perspective for someone working on such an important project or it's just like started fueling resentments between the between two sides that we're speaking basically past each other. And this died down for a bit with, on the one hand, people that were convinced that a lot of the past rules that we had, such as the up return limits, such as completely obsolete now, because people can just store four times as much data for four times cheaper rates, let's say the fee per bite that you're going to pay with inscriptions is four times less than its up return. Because it's going in the witness.

biggest gains with this data. And from one side, people were like, we now have some relay policy roles that are obsolete and are just going to cause more troubles than they are preventing anything from happening. And on the other extreme, there were people saying, yeah, now we should actually implement the limits that we have for up return on the inscriptions

and to prevent them from happening. But the reality is just that there was so high demand for these transactions that it's not going to happen. It's not Bitcoin Core is not going to prevent people that want to make transactions are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue to miners. It's just not happening. Because they're going to find a way of doing it, whether that's going out of band directly to miners to put these transactions in. They're not breaking any consensus rule, so there's no way you stop it. Exactly.

Nobody is breaking consensus rules. and if you're trying to get in the way, they're just going to row it around you. That's how Bitcoin works in the first place, that how we can avoid censorship in the first place. Not to call preventing scams from happening on chain being censorship itself, but that's the same mechanism that we use

for censorship of actual payments. So they can just reuse this mechanism. If we try to prevent this mechanism, then it's going to be hindering actual censorship resistant payments that we actually do not want to go down this path. So really, the perspective of a lot of people were, there's no, nothing we can really do. And we need to let Bitcoin grow, get more adoption and JPEX are going to be outb.

Because at the end of the day, the spam is not a mortal threat to Bitcoin as money. Okay, so a few things I want to get into there. Let's go, let's start with the ways that people are using Bitcoin to put what we can call spam on chain. So at the moment, they are using either the witness data, Op return, or fake PubKee's. Yeah, very little usage of Up Return overall. Okay, but with this change, the limit is being removed from Op Return. So there is potential that people can put larger amounts of data in that. And the benefit of that from the spammer's perspective is that you don't have to break the data up.

Is that correct? I don't think they see any advantage to it from the spammer's perspective. Okay, explain why? Because then they have the same mechanism that is four times cheaper and allows for four times more data. So they're going to continue just to put it in the witness because it's cheaper. So then why are you doing this then? Oh, because it was on the one hand, it was pointless. And on the other hand, it was creating malincentives on the network.

So the whole thing was back in 2023, some people from the camp of saying that, oh, now all this paternalistic rules on a at the policy level are completely obsolete. We have people that, first, are able to store data and that we cannot prevent. And two, we have people that are actually getting organized to circumvent and write around anybody that's trying to impose more restrictive policy. So those people said Bitcoin Core should remove the operator limit because down the road some normal use cases are going to be prevented by this limit. And it's not to say that, well, on the one hand, the limit prevents nothing.

and on the other hand, you say that it prevents something. But the key difference is that the relay policy limit does not prevent what ends up on chain, whereas it does prevent what gets routed on the main P.O2PL network. And some people want the properties of the main PO2PL network, for instance, for timely transactions confirmation. And those use cases are very legitimate money, financial transactions, such as lightnings needs this point. They don't need the operator, but they need the property of being able to send a transaction to the POTU PN network.

And it's very hard to pin this transaction, to circumvent its propagation and circumvent its eventual confirmation. And we had some BID VM people that were starting to, because they were willing to have this property of propagation on the network, and they didn't even want to use it. They just wanted to have the threat of being able to use it. It's like the penalty transaction in Lightning. Wait, so I think you need to explain that to me a bit more deeply. So this obviously, Citri were at the heart of this whole debate because they wanted to use the Upturn and they didn't have enough data in there to be able. They didn't want to use the Upritern.

I want them to use the Upriter. You want them to use it because it's a less harmful way of putting that data on chain? Yes, so essentially the Ctree has been at the core of the issue and maybe I should have been, some people told me from the filter side actually that I should have been less transparent, which I disagree. I disagree too. But it's just the sea trail, from first principle, the operatin limit was obsolete for the past three years. We just never got around to removing it because it would make people mad and we didn't have

any evidence of it actually creating mal incentive. I just happened to run into this guy at the Boston conference, the MIT Expo, and then the up next conference in DC who explained to me his design on BitVM and explained to me that he needs to have some sort of penalty transactions as you have in Lightning that needs to be confirmed fast and this transaction needs to have some data attached to them because it's some sort of zero knowledge proof as like what we've said for the past two years is actually becoming true in front of my eyes and so I was like but then you cannot do this and the Ralea network today. It was like, oh, yeah, we're just using fake outputs then. I was like, that's terrible. You should explain why that's terrible, because I'm not as technical as you. I'm sure a lot of the listeners aren't as technical as you. Okay, so in other scenarios, using fake pop keys in outputs is going to grow the UTIXA set and it's going to make it harder for everybody to run a node. It's going to be harder to get mining and be

competitive in the mining market. So usually I want to put restrictions on how much you can grow the UTXO set. And using fake pop keys or in outputs that cannot be pruned and cannot be detected as unspendable. In the UTXO set, unspendable transaction output set, you only keep output that are unspent. Did I say unspendable transaction? I meant to say unspent transaction output set.

You only keep the outputs that are unspent. If you have transaction output that are provably non-spendable, nobody will ever be able to spend them, then the Bitcoin core software just discards them and you don't have to keep them in your ATX set. So that's the original reason for why Oprerton was introduced in the first place back in 2014 because people were starting to use bear multistics and other schemes to store data anyways and just wanted them to use a less harmful way of storing the data. It's not quite the case with C3A or any of the BED VM stuff or any new thing that could come up in the future. It's just in this case, they were not going to create a lot of spam in the UTIXOSET. It was just an instance of the policy actually being harmful and pushing them to do more harmful stuff. It's just evidence of the first principal theory that was here for the past two years. So I just came back from the event and sent an email to a main list saying, well,

We had this limit that was obsolete for the past two years. Now there is evidence that is actually creating malincentive. All these people that were asking for us to remove the limit and we didn't do it despite probably knowing it was a good idea to remove it. We're right. And now we have evidence that they were right. So let's just do the right thing. So this will stop UTXO blow on Bitcoin.

No. Okay. This is not going to stop UTXO blow. This is just removing something that was, it's, I kind of, yeah, I'm kind of the opinion of it's really not a big deal. A lot of people are taking this position of like, either way, it's not a big deal. I'm not on the core camp or I'm not on the filter camp because it's not going to make a big different side of the ways.

The spammers will continue to use the inscriptions. It's four times more data, four times cheaper. The people that want to spam the UTXO set can always do it. We just provide some people take the analogy of garbage can. I promise myself I wouldn't use analogies. Here I am. And we have that, but we cannot coerce them into using actually the garbage can. So, yeah, it's not going to have big change.

It's just that in the way that you want to design a relay policy, You certainly do not want to create malincentives. You want to create the best possible incentive and then people act as they want. The previous version just did not even allow people to do the right thing. At least now, we allow people to do the right thing. So when you're talking about the malincentive here,

are you talking about sort of private memples? Not in this instance. In this instance, it's just that an absolute policy restriction was pushing people that wanted to use the PRRLA network towards spamming the huge XO set instead. And I want to underline, they were not going to spam the UGXA set by a huge amount. But it's still, that's why some people misunderstand the point as being,

oh, they are going to spam the UGXA set, we need to do something. It's not we need to do something and we are in a reaction. It's just that from first principle, to design the relay policy right. And we should have done it two years ago. We didn't do the right thing two years ago. No, it's the second best time to do the right thing. Okay.

So I think it would be worth going through some of the key arguments from the not side and get your take on them. So I think one of the big issues that people have is the idea of not being able to control these settings on their own node. So you're going to, core are going to remove the ability to configure this yourself. No. Is that not set as deprecated though?

Not anymore. Not anymore. Okay. So we set it as deprecated initially. But in the face of, in my opinion for wrong reasons, of people wanting to use this setting, we just said, all right, we mark it as deprecated. But what does it mean even? Are we really going to get rid of this setting in the near future? It's like, are we going to get rid of it in the next version?

Naturally, people are using it. In one year, in two year, maybe people have it in the Bitcoin.com and the default of sticky. And on the other hand, what does it get us to get rid of it? It's just like marginally less codes to maintain, which I'm all four. I wish we could get rid of the code. I'm just doing with now the new circumstances are there's no way that we are going to get rid of this option in the near future. Therefore, it was technically incorrect to see. say that it was deprecated. It was not, it was just going to linger as deprecated for five versions or six versions or whatnot. We had one of these settings actually. The RPC user and RPC password have been deprecated for 10 years. And because so many people used them, we just undeprecated them after 10 years and just gave up. Okay. So, but do you not think that it is, or it should be up to the person running the node to set these settings? Yeah, at the end of the day, people have the agency of running whatever software they want. They have ultimate control on what transactions they are going to relay or not or not have a mempool at all. But it's, I guess

it's just an argument how do you want to design the best Bitcoin software possible? Certainly, it's not going to be having every tweak possible on every post-relay policy setting. I can tell you, there is hundreds of them, hundreds of configurations you could have. At the end of the day, you're using Bitcoin Core because you think that the Bitcoin Core developers, outside of the consensus rules, are making good decisions about what is good for end users, what is good for big relay nodes and big economical nodes, and what is good for miners to be able to join the mining market. So that's why they're deferring the decision to Bitcoin developers that are expert on,

this tiny topic. And they always have the choice to go elsewhere and use another software, I use that a previous version, or use one version with a tiny bit of cut changed, and we cannot maintain a setting for everything. It's just insane, it's bad software development. So my take is that we shouldn't have this setting in the first place. They make no sense. But since we have it now, we need to deal with it. And people want to use it, so we will leave the, the, the, the, sitting. And like you say, people can go and run whatever software they want. And we've seen that happen. Like, knots has grown massively over the last year. I think by some accounts, they're 20 plus percent of nodes. I know those numbers are... Correct numbers. I get that because people can just

spin up 10 in the bedroom or whatever. Do you have actually any idea what the sort of number of actual economic nodes are running knots? I don't have an idea, but I don't want to minimize it either. I talked with a lot of people that were concerned about the situation, a lot of people that were maybe not quite on board with Luke, who is the character of his hound, to say the least, but just wanted to switch implementation in practice to Bitcoin Core. I think it's due to a misunderstanding, but I understand it, and it's real. I think we shouldn't view it as like,

these people are not real, or, oh, it's all butts on Twitter. It's not all bus. There are real people that were. For sure. And you see that, like, we were at Pubkey last night and it was a, it was a conversation about this. And there's people in the room who are clearly on the knot side. Like, this is a real growing set of users who are choosing to move away from Core. Is that an issue in any way? Like, Core has always been the reference implementation. It's kind of like, it's been the sort of source of truth, as it were. If Nott or any other implementation grows to a larger degree, does that ever be? become an issue for the network? Nuts itself has a much lower risk of being consensus inconsistent with Bitcoin core. So I'd much rather see people run nuts than at scale than alternative implementations from scratch. Because it's just a fork of core with however many changes. Which is the other issue. So of course, it's great.

That's the key poverty of Bitcoin is you choose the software, you want to run. around and it's good that people can change. I'm just trying to warn user that there is massive changes that have been applied to not, not reviewed by anybody by a single man who is interesting views. So I think this is a really important thing to get into because Luke has clearly done some amazing things for Bitcoin. And you don't have to agree with all of his personal takes on the world, which I certainly don't, to accept that he has been very good for Bitcoin. and yeah um but i have been sort of shouted out in the comments for saying this on a number of shows where i'd say this is run by one developer and people like know there's lots of developers

moving to nats and i'm sure in the past year there have been developers move over and start looking at the code but at the same time luke has the ability just to push code without much review or any review is that correct that's correct okay and is that is that happening yes so maybe it be worth you explaining why that is a risk this is this is the main reason. Like, I've really, I've said on other shows that I'm going to stick with version 29. And that's the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that you just can do that. It's backwards compatible. You don't have to upgrade. I just kind of want to see what happens here. But I've also said I would not feel comfortable telling anyone to run knots for this exact

reason. So maybe it's worth you explaining why this is such an issue. Sure. But maybe just to touch on the 29, Bitcoin Core maintains three releases at the same time exactly for this reason for people that do not want to upgrade too quickly people that maybe want to take some time and reconsider before upgrading so we're going to we call them branches you've got the code that is added one after the other like a blockchain essentially and then you've got a version that forks from this blockchain the development version continues and then that becomes this branch eventually becomes a release and we maintain

this past three releases so correct Apparently, we have 27, 28, and 29. And as we are going to release 30, we are going to continue maintaining 29 and 28. So we're going to release patch for some bug fixes. Unfortunately, we cannot release all of them. But it's a good idea. Well, it's never a good idea to just rush to upgrading.

Because anything. Anything. Yeah, it depends on what type of software. But if it's like if it's your fucking Tesla that has a critical vulnerability, You're not going to inspect the code, just upgrade. You're trusting them in the first place. For Bitcoin, there's more of a balance. You want to make sure the developers didn't change the definition of Bitcoin before you upgrade,

but you also want to upgrade before bug fixes, like security bug fixes are made public. So I would say it's this window of three releases. Make sure to upgrade to the latest batch releases and make sure to upgrade before Because after the three window, like for instance, now that we arrive to CERT, we are going to disclose the vulnerabilities to 27. Then you can make your own judgment about how much you're impacted by the security vulnerabilities, but by default, it's a good idea to upgrade from it. So, yeah. That's good context because I'm lazy. And so probably six months ago, I was like, I don't even know which version of core I'm running and I had a look and it was 27.

So if people are running 27, they need to be moving to 28 or 29, but they don't have to move to 30, and that's a key point. Yes. All right. So then let's talk about the issues with a single developer running knots. Well, the issues are like for any other software, except here we're talking about a very important piece of software. I'm talking about all the security vulnerabilities that we disclose in Bitcoin Core because there is a lot. And there is a lot of developers, a lot of very qualitative developers. having eyes on the code base, reviewing the code base.

There is massive testing going on of various parts of Bitcoin Core. And still, almost every release, we fixed security bucks that were disclosed. And it happens with it's like 20 people day to day working on the project and 40 people on the broader group having eyes on the code base, plus all the people that reviewed the code before grading. It still happens. And no matter how qualified you are, what is going to really change the risk of minimizing the risk of bugs

is the number of people. People come from different perspective, from having thought about the code this way or having thought about the protocol this way. So they are going to look at the code in a different manner and have possibly find bugs. That's the very famous quote from Linus Tovold's, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

And, well, Nazis on the other extreme, which is they're using Bitcoin Core as a basis, which is very good, but then they have like 1,500 additional changes unreviewed on top of it. And these changes are not only tiny changes to, PC comments or the GUI, even a lot of them are, but not all of them. Some of them touch the validation code. And you start being like the peer-tweer code and you start being, has anybody had any

eyes on it? No. And then you start looking at the test and then because it's such a massive undertaking to be a rebasing on top of Bitcoin core and maintaining everything. Some of the tests get disabled. So it's also not tested as much. It's an unreviewed, untested, straight to the U.S. user. That's just a gasstache fee waiting to happen. For something as important as the Bitcoin

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Maybe we should talk again, one of the talking points coming out of the knot side is that Luke has somehow been sort of ostracized from the conversation in the core team. Maybe it's worth giving the kind of history of Luke working with core, how that's evolved and what the situation is right now. Well, I think it's unchanged, really. I think the accusation of ostracization are unfounded. That's not true. I think it's really one of the things about the decision.

process of how Bikinkwoer makes changes. Whether your code is coming from a pseudonym, from someone well-known, or from someone with ideologies that you strongly disagree with, such as me with Luke, for instance, uh, we look at the code and if the code is good, the code is included. If the code is bad, the code is refused. And that's what happens with Luke. Luke has never been a major contributor in terms of volume. He's always been fairly sporadic. He was running his business.

He was running LJU's pool at the very beginning. He was doing some stuff. And he's contributed a bunch, but it was also sometimes some very far-fetched projects that did not attract a lot of intentions from other developers. And if you can attract attention of other developers, other developers, your thing is going to go now. Because in Bitcoin Core, we have standards of review. No review, no code merged.

But a lot of his code was merged because he was reviewed and it was good and it still happens today. Just the other month, as Luke was insulting me on Twitter, he made a poor request that made sense. So I just watched the code and I was like, Code is good. I acted. The progress was merged and it's actually being shipped in 30, I think. Okay. So maybe I'm trying to think of the best place to go from here. Maybe it's worth talking about how policy change is handled within core as opposed to sort of consensus changes. Because this

is a really important distinction and something that on, I've seen misconstrued on Twitter. So like policy change does obviously obviously does not require broad consensus from Bitcoiners. This is something that's decided by the core team and core maintainers. Is that correct? Yeah, it's like any other thing in the software, like what database are you going to use for your wallet. It's a local change. It's a local change which has implications network-wide.

So it's very important. I wouldn't say it's also only up to the Bitcoin core developers. I think it's up to, the larger group of Bitcoin developers. For instance, a lot of the, like everything is part of relay policy. If you're going to have a new message on the protocol, you need other implementation to be to interconnect.

You need people that are speaking the P-O-to-pea protocol that are not necessarily nodes to be able to be compatible. So it's going to happen on the mailing list. It's going to happen in the BIP repository, more so than on Bitcoin Core. core, of course, it's a lot of Bitcoin core people in these discussions, because that's the most active implementation, it's the reference implementation. But it's not Bitcoin core specific.

Okay. And so this is another place where some criticism has come at core in that when this change was first proposed, there were people trying to have the conversation on GitHub, who ended up getting blocked from the GitHub or having their accounts. Yeah. How do you think Core handled that correctly? Or is that just not the place to have that discussion? You know, I want to say no, but it's also, I always try to, from being in the position of receiving a lot of criticism from people that it's easy to criticize.

It's very hard. So I'm not a fan of the moderation guidelines personally, but I don't want to be criticizing it because I don't know what is better. It's just like, are you going to let trolls come and derail thread in your workplace? Probably not. You don't want that. Are you going to have moderation guidelines? Well, guidelines can be weaponized.

Are you going to have no guidelines? But then it's more arbitrary control from the maintainers. I think that would be the solution I favor, but there is good arguments on all sides. So I think Core could have Andolid it differently, but I don't know what could have been done better. I think a few people, it's also, all the intervention was very mild. It was dramatized on Twitter and everything. I've got banned from Bitcoin.

Some people were muted for 24 hours. Not the end of the world. So when I spoke to Mechanic on the podcast nearly six months ago now, I'm quite sure he said, okay, that's fair. Maybe it's not the place to have the conversation. I could be misremembering that, but I think he did. All right. So then let's get on to the next big one,

so I had Samsung Mile on the podcast recently. I know you listened to that one. And one of the things that he said, which I found a little surprising, was that he thought Core has essentially become corrupted in some way and that there were going to be kind of whistleblowers that would come out and tell the story. Do you want to,

I don't even exactly know how to, phrase the question to you, but do you want to respond to that as an idea? As an idea, it's just wrong framing. It's always the things of, if someone comes to you with an accusation and they always frame it with a way where you say yes or you say no, you're incriminating yourself either way. It's like, have you stopped beating your wife? You say, yes. You imply that you actually did it.

You say, no, you are continuing to do it. So no, core is not corrupt in the sense that I think corruption for core would be that we do not put the best interest of the Bitcoin users first, that the way the decision process relies more on politics or you have the right view, the right ideology, therefore we're going to merge your code. that's what I would call corruption, and there's nothing of such happening in Bitcoin Core. Now, I cannot quite reassure you of everyone is a saint in Bitcoin Core. I don't know everybody personally. They work in Core. After all, we are all pretty paranoid around.

I don't know what the other guy that is opening the SPOR request, his real motives is. That's our job, our whole job, is assume everybody is corrupt. make sure it doesn't impact the software and eventually the Bitcoin users. So no core is not corrupt, but I will continue acting as if it was. Okay. I think you touch on something there that's another important point for you to address, is that there's also accusations that, and this kind of comes back to the corruption side, that there's something ideologically wrong in core,

that Core want Bitcoin to be this Ethereum-like thing and it's becoming woke. Is it like a common thing that you see on Twitter? Yeah, it's exactly the same framing as before. It's like, oh, if you stopped tainting your hair blue. Yeah, no, it's not true. It's not true. People overreacted to a few changes in the past from people that were stopped. For instance, the block list, a low list thing of people that were like, just stop shouting

at me. I'm just going to make the change. And people on the. people on the other side of the spectrum being like, oh, no, you bend the knee. And it's like, it doesn't matter. It's just Bitcoin core developers are doing a lot of things and taking a lot of heat from making right choices all the time.

This is inconsequential. And from this and from a lack of communication from a lot of Bitcoin coal contributors with the wider Bitcoin error community, I think you've got this. People coming from their perspective and they have this perspective. And now, because there's not much communication between the two, they're going to have reinforcement bias. They're going to have new information come.

And it's a confirmation of what you thought, right? You're going to see an event as, oh, it's another proof that Bitcoin Core is work. It's another proof that Bitcoin Core is corrupt. Whereas if you start from the facts and try to try to prove, or derive a conclusion from the fact, there is no way you can reach a conclusion of Bitcoin Coe being war. If we understand work ideology

being collective identity primes over the individual and everything that goes with it, Bitcoin Core is the perfect polar opposite and people that are interested in Bitcoin and spending the life working on Bitcoin are the polar opposite of this ideology. And interestingly, it's an answer, ideology that I see being pushed more, not by all people or filter people, but I see there

is some recuperation being done by some influential people from the people being angry at Bitcoin Core, the smell, blood in the water, and they're trying to do recuperation, which I think it's pretty damaging. And I will be honest, I think Samson Moe is doing this, trying to infiltrate politics into Bitcoin Core. So it's just like, you've got Bitcoin Core. that is extremely neutral, changes be omade, no matter your ideology, and sometimes it's hard.

Luke's ideology is terrible in my opinion. But if Luke is making good poor requests, his progress will be merged and I will review it. And this is the standard of Bitcoin Core. And people make the accusation of something neutral, oh, it's politicized to actually bring their own politics on top of it. And I think it's not going to end well

if we try to bring politics to Bikon Corp. So when you, say the other side is showing some of these like ideas of wokeism is that like essentially cancel culture is what you're seeing uh yeah cancel culture is part of it but it doesn't end there right workism is going to justify violence against individuals not because of their actions but because of the actions of other people it's collective responsibility essentially so other people that share your identity did this to me therefore you are going to suffer And I think it's terribly wrong, obviously,

but you really see it, and not from the other side. I don't want to characterize everybody that is discounted with Bitcoin Core at the moment has pushing this narrative, but it's definitely one narrative that I see being evolving as the narrative evolves. It's getting more and more into this. And actually, Bitcoin Core is not a piece of software that we choose to use and we form the Bitcoin network.

Actually, Bitcoin Core is in control of Bitcoin Core. It's kind of the B-cash arguments, right? And the maintainers of Bitcoin Core are delphor of kind of the Philsover Kings of the Bitcoin network. If it was the case, Bitcoin has no interest whatsoever.

You just recreated the same institutions as before. So this is obviously nonsense. This is dangerous because then it can be used to justify coercions against developers because you start

by assigning collective identities, we are the users. They are the developers, obviously mutually exclusive. The developers cannot be users of Bitcoin now. And they are responsible. And we need to have power to create a power structure. They attack the power structure and they say, there is the power. We need to have some control of the power. They need to represent us.

It's just like, what does this hand? Do they want Bitcoin to be a democracy? It's just, I don't know. So I think it's nonsense. I think we need to stick to Bitcoin core working on rough consensus, objective technical facts, and leave the ideology and the social work outside of the decision for the software. All right. Let's talk about one of the most controversial bits. In, I don't know, the last few months, this conversation around illegal or just inappropriate content being put on Bitcoin,

and particularly the illegal stuff, being a risk vector for Bitcoin. because if you're running a node, this stuff is on your node, you are then subject to like the laws. So that has always been an issue with Bitcoin, an issue. A weakness of Bitcoin, you are going to store it of people's data. That's how Bitcoin works. This is a risk of running a Bitcoin node. The recent changes have no bearing on this risk. Can I just push back on that?

that in a slight way. You say it has no bearing, but it does mean the entire images, rather than broken up images can be found Bitcoin. Yeah, encoding of data is not going to change the legality of the data. It's just if you've got child porn in MP4 or in MOV, it's still child born. So when you say it's chunked or it's contiguous, it's just encoding at the end of the day. First and then second, you can also. just have contiguous data, even if it's chunked, using some smart encoding.

Some clever guy on the mailing list proved it, that it's what Adam Beck brought up yesterday the night. Some guy put a penguin image in an inscription, and you can see if you try to just use it, it's contiguous. It's just going to have tiny red dot in the middle, that you don't even see. So this contiguous thing does not make any sensible. And I think it's kind of concerning because there is no way, there's maybe ways, but it would surely damage Bitcoin's utility to address Bitcoin nodes storing potentially illegal data. And it's not something that developers can really fix. It's not something that developers are going to make worse.

But we are going to make it worse by trying to create a narrative around this. And it comes exactly at the right time. It's like the shift in C-S narrative was, I took a step back. I was like, we have seen all these attacks on developers. People sometimes don't realize what are our primary concerns as developers. If you ask anyone in the room here at Chinkert, probably one of the main counselors I don't want to end in jail. They have been after developers

working on privacy stuff. Privacy stuff is enabled at the core by Bitcoin. And even if the new administration is maybe more favorable to Bitcoin stuff, they're going to be more favorable to the economy

boosts, maybe to the digital gold narrative, but they're not going to be favorable to anti-KOC. The KOC, they're not going to be favorable to it. They've proven that. Like the These cases, while brought up in the previous administration, like the samurai devs of being charged under the Trump administration.

And that's very, very concerned. And so I was like, is this shifting narrative trying to get us to incriminate ourselves? Is it, well, are they trying to, because at the same time, they were like, debate me, debate me, debate me, do they want me to go on a podcast and say on the mic that it's what we do or something? But at the end of the day, I think people are not evil, unless you have strong evidence that they are. But you shouldn't just assume that they are evil. I think it's just a lack of perspective. Again, from the, from this two, we're going in parallel. And with very little communication,

we can open source developers and the wider group of bitcoinsers. And I think they don't realize how important to us and scary to us. I think some of them are. Some of them are. Some of them try to call for legal attacks on developers. Some, these people are just evil. They didn't know that we have been attacked in the past by fucking clowns. What is it going to be if we are attacked by actual real people?

So is this really a problem without a solution and just one of the consequences of cypherpunk software? Yeah, the storage of data that is illegal. Fortunately, it's not like the law is completely retarded on the subject either. It seems not legal advice, but it seems that the law around illegal material is whether you are trying to view it, where you're trying to download it for the purpose of viewing it, which is not in the case of Bitcoin, it's just spammers. Obviously, like spam transactions trying to carve out some ways of inserting data into transactions.

So it's pretty obvious. It's not the purpose of our software. So I think there would be a very strong case for a net runner to protect himself in court. But it's not a given. It's like if you're very, very concerned about this stuff. It's your only answer really just you can't run a node then. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Let's talk more deeply about Phil. I mean, start with a broad question, do they work? Do they work for what? To stop spam transactions? They don't work to stop spam transaction entirely. They don't work to stop spam transactions to any realistic extent. They can't work to prevent bootstrapping use cases.

For instance, you could make a case that if inscriptions were non-standard to start with, maybe this use case would have never been bootstrapped. And if it was never bestrapped, then there would have been no incentive for miners to change the policy. And there would have been no high-praned and so many fees paying the miners. So you could make these arguments. But once there is, once miners have chosen to put some transaction in their block and people are willing to pay them for doing so,

you need to change consensus rules or deal with it. Do you think this does end in a fork and there is, no, you don't think so? Again, the spam is not an existential threat to Bitcoin. I think there is a lot of dramatization of the topic. But once we get to speak about actual consequential actions such as a fork, it gives a very strong incentive to people. to actually look for objective information to be more rational. Whereas now, people have the strong incentive to be rational.

They can just yell on Twitter. It's a new vibe, so you can grow your Twitter accounts by just taking dig at core devs. And you actually incentivize to go with the narrative. But once you have to change the consensus rules on your note, Back to rationalization, rational decisions, and I think in this case, you're going to think, all right, the spam is not going to make it any more expensive

to run a node. The spam is not going to change much for me, except insofar as in the long run, it outbids financial transactions. Which I can't see happening. If you think, yeah, so either you can't see happening. And if it happens, if in two decades, financial transactions do not count out bid fucking JPEGs, then what's Bitcoin done? Yes, exactly.

100%. I agree with that for sure. Okay. So the analogy that is used all the time from the not side is this idea of a lock on your house. Just one more analogy. Another analogy, but let's go with it. So the argument is a lock on your house doesn't stop a dedicated. but it does put off people from actually trying to get into your house.

Do you think that analogy works for filters? No. No, it does not. Filters is also kind of newspeak. It's just local relay policy rules. So you can stop relaying things for older people, but it's not going to prevent them from having them in blocks and you're going to keep accepting the blocks. Really, the lock on your door is closer to consensual

if we want to have the analogy. But analogies are terrible when we want to actually understand a subject. Because we're talking about specifics here. It's because analogies are useful when you try to communicate to a large audience and you just assume the audience is going to give you like 1% of the brain time, think about the analogy and be like, oh, yeah, it makes sense, and you're going to win them over.

For anybody that cares about it, actually, like, probably your listeners care deeply about this topic. I care deeply about this topic. So I think we need to refrain from using analogies in this case, because it's just going to reframe the problem into another problem, and then we can discuss this as other problem, but it's not the one we're talking about in the first place. Yeah, okay. And so, like, I think probably a concrete example of why filters don't, stop these transactions from propagating the network is the sub one sap per vbyte mining fees. So we saw those start happening in the last few months, and I would guess that 99 plus

percent of nodes were not relaying those transactions. So you have to assume that Nott's needs to get to 99 percent of node implementations to actually allow the filters to work. Is that correct? I don't think it is. I think people really think, really think, think of Bitcoin as being one network that is very defined and concentrated. You have the Bitcoin network. If you can reach this percentage of nodes on the network, you're going to prevent people from putting stuff in blocks. It's not the case.

Anybody that wants to put stuff in blocks is just going to use a separate network, for instance. You can just, it's like you can use, for instance, it's very useful to have those experiments about extremes to think about what would happen. What would happen if Bitcoin Core stops relaying transactions that pay less than 10,000 sets, 100,000 cents. Probably people are going to stop just making minimum payment to 10,000 sets, 100,000 sites. Probably people are going to start either stop making this payments and use other methods

or they're just going to use, if there is one available, another network. Bitcoin, obviously, just what is going to do is make the old network irrelevant and you're going to have a new network. And that's what I mean in writing around. It's just you can have 99% of filters in your network. It's just going to make your network irrelevant. So what you're talking about there is people going out of band directly to miners or other period of peer-to-peer network.

It's like the current peer-to-peer network of Bitcoin is an emergent, uh, network of people starting the Bitcoin software, interconnecting with each other. And if the peers are not useful to your nodes, it's like, for instance, we have a lot of spy nodes and we have a lot of peers when you're a Bitcoin node, you make connections in the dark when you just pin up. You don't know, you don't have reputations of notes, and you just have peers that are useless to you. So when they're useless, you just drop them and you start connecting to new peers. And you can just have the same mechanisms when they just don't relay your transaction. You're a Bitcoin user. You want Bitcoin Core does not relay your transaction.

You use Bitcoin version 2 or Bitcoin 3. And it's all going to be compatible because they all use the same consensus rules. It's just going to make the peer-to-peer network irrelevant. Okay. So Core 30 is not going to be a threat to Bitcoin. No, I don't think so. I think Bitcoin Core 30 on the contrary is had brings good improvements for all users. And the changes in Core 30 are. aren't just the mental policy changes. What else is in it? Yeah, thankfully.

That's maybe something to underline as well. I'm here talking about this topic. I've been out there on Twitter because it was initially my proposal, and I care about people not having misconceptions about stuff. So it was like talking with people that are oftentimes pretty aggressive toward us on Twitter trying to correct people.

So I've been very associated with this chance, but it's not the main thing. thing I've done. I didn't even make the change myself. I just made the proposal, defended the proposal on the technical circle, it took a while. Eventually it got pre-requested, then it took a while, and now we'll finally releasing it. But during all this time, I'm doing what I do more, which is work on the security issues that get reported to us, try to find more security bucks myself to report to the group, work on my B-54 for consensus cleanup. I've been helping with the covenant stuff as well. With Greg Sanders, we have a new.

proposal called template hash. That is another way to achieve the function it is offered by CTV that we believe is better and there is currently under discussion whether it's better or it's not. So we do a lot of stuff. That's a very tiny part of what we do. So did you ask what else is in core? Certainly. Okay. So I would need to see the release notes, but I can go through off the top of my head. Or anything that's like particularly interesting to you that's happening. So one thing is the package relay made robust. So what I mean by this is that in previous situation of Bitcoin Core, there was work on package relay, which is making the transaction relay network more usable for lightning. So a second version of lightning commitment transactions, the transactions that build the lightning channels.

Currently, they have a lot of inefficiencies and more probability to force close and more. complexity associated with them because of limitations and the Bitcoin network. And the Bitcoin transaction relay network, not the consensuals. And one proposal to improve this was package relay along with truck, if people have heard of it, TR, you see an ephemeral anchor and ephemeral dust. That's a whole package of what I call the MAMPAL guys, which is a good. Gloria, Greg Sanders, and to a lesser extent, Suez and Peter. These are going to make it possible for Lightning to bring

substantial improvements to Lightning users. And it was shipped at first in 28 and 29 with the first version that was less robust, that couldn't be used in adversarial scenarios, but it was still opportunistically useful for, let's say, you don't have a transaction that needs to be confirmed in a timely manner. It's not security critical, like your wallet,

you can start using these features. However, with V30, it's made actually robust to use in adverse soil situations. So Lightning can start actually using it for their commitment transaction where it's security critical. And do we know, is there a firm date of when the 30 is going to be released? So there is, we try to have firm dates,

but it's always subject to bugs that we find in testing, that we need to backport potential security issues that when we actually make release candidates, more people test and stumble upon that we need to fix before. We're very conservative between shipping, before shipping a binary. It's like this release has been baking for, well, it's been baking for six months of developments,

but one full months of it has been one month and a half actually, no more features, only buck fixes, only testing, only bug fixes, and we make a new release candidate and more bug fixes, and new release candidate, and eventually when we stop having bug fixes, we release a final binary. So the actual release date depends on the duration for which we don't find bucks at the very end. But what we target right now is the 10th of October. So very close. Very close. Finally, it's It's been exhausting. And are you hoping that when this is released, you'll be proven right that this is not

a threat to Bitcoin in any way and this conversation falls by the wayside? Yeah, I hope that a lot of people that were caught up in the fearmongering, realized that it was just fearmongering and hold people that were spreading this fud responsible or not responsible, accountable. It's like, this guy's been spreading bullshit for six months. I will take what he says in the future with a grain of salt. So that's what I hope, but I don't need to be proven right that it's not going to break Bitcoin. It's not going to break Bitcoin. I hope that this conversation does fall by the wayside as well, but I don't see it happening personally. I think even if you are proven right, which I think you will be, I still think this conversation will be happening.

So, but I think anybody, there is a lot of very active people on both sides, a lot of which are not Bitcoin core contributors or Bitcoin nuts contributors whatsoever. Yeah. There are, and these people will still be engaging on Twitter, growing their accounts and you get the dopamine hit. just like you reach to your tribe on Twitter, you troll the other side. So that's continuing to evolve. But I don't think it's going to be reaching anybody reasonable whatsoever after they've been proven wrong. It's like very clearly.

Okay, Bitcoin 30. What else? Oh, the net travel soul maybe. So historically, Bitcoin Core shipped with a protocol called UPNP, which is used for nodes that are at home, that are listening. You've got your node at home that is listening for connections, but because it's behind your rotor, your rotor acts as a firewall. So it makes it impossible for people outside to connect to your node, and you have to open ports on your node. It's like a lot of, probably a lot

of your listeners are going to be family always open port 8333 on your rotor and direct to your node. So historically, Bitcoin Core shipped with a protocol that was doing this automatically, as long as you were listening on your node. You can choose not to listen on your node. But if you were, you could set this option. Unfortunately, this protocol was fairly insecure in itself. It was using unadvised protocol messages and encoding. was using XML. And it was all implemented in a not very secure manner. And it actually turned to enable to open security vulnerabilities

in Bitcoin Core. This functionality was disabled for years, for almost a decade, after we found that it has this security vulnerabilities. But eventually, because this functionality is so important to have diversity on the network, it's don't want the Bitcoin network to be like Ethereum or 99% of the nozzle in AWS. You want the Bitcoin network to be robust and diverse from people at home because then the way the internet is structured, you're going to do the connections coming going to home networks

are going to be spread from connections going to the big data centers. So it's better for resilience of the network. And people have put some efforts to efforts into rewriting from scratch in a very secure manner in Bitcoin core this functionality. So this was done last year. It was shipped in 29 as opt-in and it's going to be enabled by default in V-30 because of the testing we've done with 29. So that's, I guess it's a good example of improvement of tangible features of things that You see a lot of Bitcoin users being like, yeah, don't touch Bitcoin. It's perfect already. No, it's perfect because of all the disaster that could have happened that were avoided by these people doing this stuff.

Is that one of the things that worries you about this conversation in the sense that a relatively minor policy change? I don't mean to downplay it. Is causing this much controversy that it makes things like ossification. more likely. Yeah, I mean, I would say personally that there is more risk to an advisable consensus changes to Bitcoin than there is risk from ossification. However, I think that ossification is suboptimal today. Because there are known bugs in core.

Yeah. There's known bugs in the Bitcoin Consensus rules, what I'm working on. But there is also very good optimization we could make of feature. like Lightning and yeah, bringing new features at the scripting level to enable more scalability in Bitcoin, more privacy-preserving protocols, and having more flexibility for this layer to protocol designers to find the right trade-off with Bitcoin users. And I think it's also critical to Bitcoin that Bitcoiners be able to use Bitcoin in dragway without having to go through third parties.

Makes total sense. Okay, I tried to put to you most of the big arguments from the not side. Do you think there's anything I missed? Let's think. Because I read a lot of stuff that usually just doesn't make sense to me, so I discard it. Contempts, yes, content from core developers to word node runners, for instance. It's just nonsense.

This is the idea that Corsi themselves is like elite in some way, and they don't have to worry about the people actually running the nodes. Yes, I think it's the specific things I've read a few times on Twitter of your node doesn't matter. As if any Bitcoin core developers that is working full-time on your node has ever said that. Controversial, but is there some truth that a lot of the nodes out there don't matter? Because we know that economic nodes are the only ones that are particularly important. Well, they do matter for enforcing consensus rules. So your note matters to you to...

I think that's the key distinction. It matters to you. Yeah, it matters to you to enforce your consensus rules. And having a lot of individuals enforcing consensus rules themselves on their own without being coordinated brings resilience to being able to make reckless consensus changes to Bitcoin. That's what makes Bitcoin's difference. So I think it's very, very important. nodes are what make Bitcoin different from other shitcoins. I think, yeah, I heard Adam say this, or maybe it was not Adam, maybe it was something, someone else, but that your node matters to you for consensus rules.

Like consensus rules are decided by node runners. What gets into block, the mining policy or relay policy, is decided by miners, by design of Bitcoin. And I think it's a good way to put it. You all note matters, but just you cannot decide what miners are going to put inside their blocks as long as consensus. but yes and okay before we close out anything else that you think we've we've missed in this because I want to make sure that we address all the big issues that are being thrown up from the not side of this debate yeah I feel like we could talk more about what Bitcoin core is doing and the narrative of the Bitcoin is perfect because I think that a lot of the

What the fearmongering was hinging on was that a lot of people have been onboarded in the past three or four years, and they were told repeatedly that Bitcoin was perfect already. And that from this perspective, I can totally understand how they would think that, sure, you have reasons to tweak some knobs on stuff, but why would you even try to do this, developers? Just don't touch anything, and it's not worth the risk. But the reality is that it's really this perspective. I've got a friend of mine that told me, when I hang out with Bitcoins, they're all so overconfident about Bitcoin. And when I hang out with the developers that see all the risk there is and all the things that get fixed at the last minute for the network to continue operating,

they're all underconfidence about the network. The truth is probably in the middle. The network is resilient by itself. Even if you don't upgrade for a few years, it's probably going to be fine. But it's going to be severely suboptimal. Bitcoin is not perfect yet. We still have, I think, at least a few consensus changes to make the, to actually fix the bugs and the consensus rules, enable more use case to make it more possible to use Bitcoin in a censorship-resistant way.

And then there is a lot of maintenance of the PL2PL network that needs to adapt to the real world conditions that Bitcoin operates in. So there is risk to action, there is risk to inaction. And the whole thing we did all day is think about the risk, ponderes the risk, think about the second order consequences, third order consequences, what could happen in any cases. And we try to make the best decision for all Bitcoin users and not trying to make changes to appease some particularly loud,

segment of users. We try to think about all people, people that don't have Twitter that are still relying on Bitcoin for being inflation resistant in their third world country, people that just don't have a voice as well that they can have this loud than movements. Bitcoin, Bitcoiners are a minority of Bitcoin users. I'm convinced. I think Bitcoin users are a much, much, much broader group than Bitcoiners. It's not to say that Bitcoiners do not matter. I think it's extremely important to keep this community of enthusiasm, but Bitcoin because they are doing so much good at large, convincing people, creating businesses and contributing to a pencil software.

And I don't want to minimize it. But we need to keep in mind that when Bitcoin core developers work on the software, they try to think of all Bitcoin users and not only those users that have the luxury of spending time on Twitter and talking about Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, I think your point there about Bitcoin is thinking it's perfect and then developers not. Matt Corallo is a perfect example of that.

Like whenever I use lightning fairly regularly and it like it works great for me. But as soon as you talk to Matt Crowell who's like, this thing's broken, it's terrible. Like this, I mean, last time actually was interesting because the first time I've spoken to him where he's been like, no, we're actually really getting somewhere. But I think that absolutely exists. All right, Antoine, this has been amazing. Yeah. Thank you. I massively appreciate all the work everyone does on core.

I'm sure you're not hearing that enough at the moment. Yeah, I appreciate your work and I appreciate the work that everybody is doing for Bitcoin. Bitcoin Quartz is just one piece of it. Yeah, we're moving this thing forward. Before we close out, is there any way you want to send anyone to find out more about you? I was going to say on my Twitter, but maybe not. I've got my website where I post blog posts there. It's Antoine p.com.

Perfect. Thank you, Antoine. Thanks.