What Bitcoin Did - Is BIP444 An Attack on Bitcoin? | Rob Hamilton

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Rob Hamilton is the co-founder and CEO of Anchor Watch, a Bitcoin custody and insurance provider. In this episode, Rob breaks down BIP-444, the proposed soft fork aimed at stopping spam. He explains why it represents the most contentious governance moment since the block-size wars, what the proposal actually changes, how it could trigger chain splits and reorgs, and why he believes the effort has almost no chance of success. We discuss the economics, incentives, and psychology behind the new fork movement, why filters failed, how miners really behave under fee pressure, and why futures markets can ultimately determine whether a fork has any economic weight. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Rob Hamilton: https://x.com/Rob1Ham

To even introduce a moral caveat to the argument is now moving of, like, the boundaries and how Bitcoin has worked up to this point. And I think you're regressing and seeding ground to people who would want to attack the network. Bitcoin's not a democracy. Bitcoin is anarchy. It is rules, not rulers. You're running a node because you're validating transactions. Everything after that, the influence in what your node has very quickly compresses to almost

nothing. You are attacking the network. You're threatening to orphan minors. You're threatening to reorg the chain. You are threatening to change the rules which everyone had previously agreed upon. Rob Hamilton III, the Giggler. How are you doing? Doing great.

How are you? I'm good. The quote unquote Bitcoin Civil War is heating up again. We've got a thought proposal. Podcasters are being blamed, which I'm very angry about. As the bugle boys will tell you, this is the most honorable job. you can have in Bitcoin. It's a priest-like calling.

To become a podcaster, truly, it's like being a monk. Yeah. We're keeping Bitcoin afloat. People just don't realize it yet. That's right. All of proof of work actually, podcasters are the underlying substrate of proof of work.

How have we got dragged into this fork wars? Well, let's maybe catch up for those at home who don't have the full background and content. there has been, I would say, over the past two and a half years, a growing frustration among users of Bitcoin who are not fans of the Bitcoin being used for non-monetary data. This is inscriptions and ordnals and all of that stuff that gets tied into Bitcoin.

And as a refresher, the way Bitcoin works is that if a transaction is valid by the rules of consensus, even if your personal node doesn't see it before, it will accept that transaction in a block, right? A very simple example is, I technically can make a Bitcoin transaction that doesn't pay any fees to the miner. right? I could just have no fee. If a miner would have put that into a block, it would get accepted and confirmed by the rest of the network, even though you never would have seen it before, because by default, nodes will not relay.

They will filter it up. They have no incentive to include it. They have no incentive to include it, exactly. And so that is kind of the baseline of just how inclusion of transactions work in Bitcoin. Now, I would say myself and others, have very regularly painted out that if you wanted to stop this behavior of pictures on Bitcoin, you are going to require a consensus change in some way.

Because as long as these are consensus valid, miners are optimizing for revenue, and they're going to include these things in a block. It looks like a pseudonymous user, Dathan Ome, has come forward with a soft, fork proposal, which goes to do that. Now, before I even jump off into that, there was a post on the mailing list, a Bitcoin developer named Portland Hoddle,

put forward and said, hey, I have an idea, let's reduce the outputs of all transactions to 520 bytes. And this would basically be a very clever way of reducing operturn at the consensus level. Because an operturn where you're posting data is actually part of the output of the transaction, So if you make all outputs must be 520 bytes or smaller, you're effectively curbing off-return. Luke Dasher proposed in reply to this, his own idea of a consensus change

that would include more things than just the op-return stuff. Dathan Ome has come forward saying that since that BIP, that proposed on the mailing list didn't have any pushback, that there was enough consensus to start writing up a BIP. At the bottom of this proposal, though, it does say credits to Luke, Luke Jr. for the original drafted advice of what this larger consensus change, which has now been proposed. Well, I just, I think it's worth looking back a little bit. So this whole debate that's happened for the last 18 months, maybe even two years at this point. It's been a long time.

All came down to whether filters actually work, I think. If filters worked, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. So is this, the fact that they're now trying to do a consensus change, Is that almost an admission on that side that filters don't work the way they at least want them to? Well, I'm going to give the charitable steelman interpretation of their side. They believe specifically the most recent release of Bitcoin Core, version 30, changed, and to be clear, I am specifying a championing and a steel manning of their argument, not my personal belief, is that with the updates that were made in version 30,

the default node client will no longer filter operturns smaller, sorry, larger than 100 kilobytes. The previous limit in the default software was 83 bytes. They would say, proponents of doing a consensus change would be that this kind of makes the default reference implementation malicious from their perspective, and that now you must do a consensus change to stop this. The deeper point that I would pull the thread on,

to your point about filters working or not, filters, from my perspective, don't work if there is economic demand for those transactions. A really great example of this was larger operands were being included in blocks prior to their even being version 30. Miners would set custom configuration flags and build their own node software

to be more permissive and open, and would allow these transactions to get through. You also have projects like Peter Todd's Libre Relay that were relaying these transactions and preferentially peering to get to miners. And then the actual best example out in the free market of the Bitcoin Blockspace market, you can view it that way that every 10 minutes

there's four megabytes of block space available in the market and people who pay the fees bid them. The mempool of unconfirmed transactions, the pending ones, was so empty that miners realized that they could actually start making more revenue on margin if they lowered their minimum fee rate from one sap per V byte to 0.1 sap per V byte. So even though 99 plus percent of nodes were running a filter that did not allow these transactions that were paying too little of a fee in,

they still got included into blocks. So the moment there's economic demand there, and the miners are trying to profit maximize, the filter argument starts to fall apart. From my perspective. With, yeah, no, that makes sense. And so if you need like a proliferation of potentially even over 99% of nodes doing this for filters to actually work, like, nots did quite well. It got to, I don't know, 20% of all nodes.

20, 22, something like that. And there's probably some funny business in there. I don't even know how you account for that. But like it did sort of surprisingly well. It definitely caught me off guard. How has core 30 gone since that launch? Because obviously that is kind of the crux of this whole issue. So Core 30, as of right now, is the number one client deployed on the network.

It's kind of, it's all over 10% now. Mana not has been keeping a close eye and track on it, with the number two implementation actually being Core version 28. Mm-hmm. Now-hmm. Can you give some context to that? Like normally when Core release and update, they're obviously nowhere near as contentious as this one. How quickly do people actually upgrade? Oftentimes, people aren't rushing to upgrade.

Just realistically, like, the way Bitcoin Core version releases work is every six months, because Bitcoin is a never-ending project. It's not like they're trying to hit quarterly earnings or trying to do something. So they set a rough heuristic that every six months, we're just going to take everything that's been merged in the past six months and tag that into a release. Most of the time, unless there's a brand-new feature you're looking for, you're not rushing to update right away.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it's backwards compatible and that you can run an older version of the Node software. The Bitcoin Core team, though, will actually do patches, like a minor release. So instead of, like, version 28, it'll be 28.1. They'll do minor releases backdating. So if they make a security fix in version 30, they'll go back to version 29 and 28 and also patch those up as well. So the kind of standard, you can do it from like an end-of-life support

or, like, the three most recent versions, whatever's the most recent, and the two previous ones are the ones that get patched. So now there's a version 28.3, which has all of the security patches from version 30, right? Typically, it doesn't go this fast. I think in particular, this release has gotten so much attention. People that wanted to signal support for Core may have upgraded sooner, just like people were upgrading to run the latest version of Knott's to signal that support.

So I would say it's happened way faster than normal, but I don't have the hard data in front of me for how long that usually takes. This episode is brought to you by AnchorWatch. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage. And this is where Anchorage comes in. With Anchorage, your Bitcoin is insured with your own A plus rated Lloyds of London insurance policy, and all Bitcoin is held in their time-locked multi-sig vaults. So you have the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin is insured while not giving up custody.

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this is now being proposed. Is it BIP 4-4-4? Is that correct? It's not technically correct. Okay. So, to explain this, Luke is the original maintainer of the Bith repo, the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repo. He was assigned that, I believe, by Gregory Maxwell back in 2010 or 2011. Amir Taki, for the initial BIP. Someone had to maintain it. Luke took that job.

A little over a year ago, a couple other maintainers were at. because Luke was so busy, he's only one person. They wanted to have more support structure to be able to assign bits and do things. There was an internal message among the BIP maintainers saying, should this be BIP 444? And they have an internal process where they say, okay, I want to sit and listen, and like, if anyone has objections,

let us know, and if there's an objection, we won't give it the number. Luke saw this internal discussion and assigned BIP 4444 kind of jumping the process. So it's not officially signed. it. 444 is a really catchy way just to surmise what's going on, though. So memetically, it's already been assigned that. But just to, I know some of the other BIP maintainers are frustrated that it was prematurely assigned a number, especially when Luke is so closely tied to this. There's a rule that you really can't self-assign a BIP number. And Luke is the original draft of this BIP, so it's kind of

in the gray area of self-assigning a BIP, even if he's not the literal offer. But even, like, I understand understand what you're saying there, but really, who cares about the number? That's not the important signal here. What they're claiming is, this is like an emergency soft fork that needs to happen quite quickly. What do they actually want to include in that? Yeah, so this... Or actually, probably a better way of framing that is what do they want to take out? So what they want to take out. Let me just read it through here. The first one is operturns that are less than 83 bytes. 83 bytes or less, right? So making the pre- previous before version 30 relay policy making that consensus enforced,

if 83 bytes being the maximum. Pushing data, I'm going to speak not in the literal technical terms, but just talk about the spirit of it. Basically, any sort of pushing of payloads that are larger than 256 bytes, which is how you push data onto the stack, unless you're using an old legacy multi-sig. This is basically what they're trying to take out is how inscriptions people put a lot of data on-chain.

They put it 520 bytes at a time. They have decided, Dathan and Luke and whoever helped write this BIP has decided that 256 bytes is not valid. That's the size of a key, right? So they're saying basically you can push keys in the stack. You can't push whatever random other stuff you want on the stack. They are also making invalid unspecified taproot, like script versions and tap leaf versions.

So, Big Segwit introduced these upgrade hooks and mechanisms to upgrade scripts. And we turned on Taproot, we turned on Segwit V1 is a taproot address. They want to disable all of the ones that are undefined as well as all of the taproot tap leaves. They want to disable the taproot annex, which is a place where you can park data. intentionally was thought to be able to be part of just over time wanting to be able to have data to commit for, you can use it for lightning symmetry, you can use it for lightning protocol stuff. No one's using it today, though. So that's marked invalid.

All of the op success op codes, which are basically how you do upgrades in TapScript. So if this were to activate, we could not upgrade Bitcoin for the next year. We couldn't add any new op codes. And also removing op-if and op-not-if from TapRoot. so you can't actually use any sort of if-then conditions within a tap leaf. The logic behind this is that if you're using an

if branch, you could just make a new tap leaf that has the full condition over there. This is how taproot works where you can have one address that has many, many, many ways you can spend from it. Their rationale is if you're using a different spending condition, you don't need to use op-if or not if, you can just use a different tap leaf. So that is

the general summary, the ultimate target for that one, and stopping the inscription envelope for how all of the ordinal inscriptions were being done. Okay. I want to get into some of what that actually means technically, but before we do that, I think the important thing to address here is that they're claiming that this is a temporary soft fork. Correct. This will run for 12 months and then everything reverts to how Bitcoin works the day, as far as I understand it. Yes. If, I mean, we're going to get into whether you think this fork will even happen or not, but if the fork happened, how much, like, we're

Like, what odds would you ascribe to the fact that this is temporary, not a permanent thing? Oh, 100% it would be temporary because the idea would be this activation client would self turn off the rules in a year. Now, what would happen is six months from now, there would be another, let's assume this activates six months from now, there's going to be another question of, do we extend this? But the default behavior will be deactivating. So I think being as charitable as possible taking them at their literal word and how the code works, it would. by default, if nothing else happens, turn off in a year. Okay, fair. And then let's get into what this actually kind of stops in Bitcoin.

So clearly what they've done is they've gone through every single place where you can put arbitrary data on chain and remove that ability. But what implications does that have on how Bitcoin actually works today? Well, a couple of things. There are users who are using Bitcoin today that fall into this, some of these categories that get invalidated. One of the prominent examples is Leana Wallet. This is, they, I'm wearing them my miniscript shirt today.

They use miniscript with Taproot. And with Taproot, you can, some of the versions of how they actually use the different tap leaves actually uses Opif and not if. Because actually you can save on fees and have a smaller transaction if you use an Opif or not if. It actually is a way you you can save money without going into the mechanics of the taproot control block and all that.

There are cases where you actually have a smaller transaction and less data on-chain if you use an OPIF. And that would be, now this is a contentious term. Some would say confiscatory, technically, since it's only for a year, you're just freezing customers' funds for a year. You're not confiscating them. There are people who also use... Personally, I don't see a huge distinction between those two. things. Like the thing that Bitcoin does is enshrined property rights. And if you're arbitrary, well, if you're purposefully freezing someone's funds for 12 months, that is a complete line for me.

Like that's unacceptable. And so that would agree. That's if people are using taproot today in this particular way. Certain taproot could, yeah, not everything in taproot. Just certain ways people are using it this way right now, correct? Yeah. And so if anyone who is doing that, if this fork happens, those funds are frozen for a minimum of 12 months. Yeah. I mean, it's hard. This is where it gets a little bit tricky, because I understand this is a soft fork.

Like, it's backwards compatible in the sense that, like, old nodes will still be able to run. But have we ever had a soft fork before where funds can be frozen if you're using Bitcoin in a particular way? So two, there's one example. I guess let me answer that question and go back a step. So to answer that question, I think the only corollary I've been able to think of is back in

2010, Satoshi changed, he had a commit called MISC changes. And in there, he actually disabled a bunch of op codes. The thing is, no one was using them. This is your op-cat, your opsub string, like, multiplication division. He had all of these other op codes that he disabled, but no one had ever used them before. When you say no one, do you literally mean no one? No one. Okay.

no one had ever used any of them. Because this is in 2010, right? There was not as much developer mind share and good tooling to do different things in Bitcoin. So no one had ever used any of these. And that's probably the closest. We disabled a bunch of things, but no one was using them.

And it was a fraction of a fraction of the market cap of what it was today. But with things like Segwit and Taproot, there was never a potential for that freeze a user funds. So this would be like really discarding that first one, which was very early days, this would be the first time that had ever happened. And that kind of calls into question.

Like I understand it's a soft fork, but that doesn't feel like a soft fork to me. That isn't fully backwards compatible in that sense. So let me, so two things. Before we go deeper about what a soft fork is, there is a clause. Dathan had updated getting feedback from people that there is basically an exemption for if a UTXO was made before this activates, you can spend the money out of that one time. So in theory, I could have my money frozen.

I get one transaction to pull it out. It's technically complicated because if, let's say, if I have 10 Bitcoin at one of these addresses and I send one Bitcoin to you, I send nine Bitcoin back to myself and change, which means that nine Bitcoin, which usually has the same spending rules, would just get frozen for the year.

right? So that's one piece to call out. But you can get around that by just sending it to yourself in a different... Yeah, you would do a full send to a new wallet, right? And then you can get around that. Now, for what a soft fork is, this is a soft fork. It is a restriction of the rules. Typically, the way softworks have thought of in Bitcoin is that you take an op code, let's say, like we added time locks. Peter Todd got time locks added in 2014. What we did to turn that on is we took an op code that previously all it did was automatically pass.

So it was the most permissive thing ever. We said, instead of just pass no matter what, let's encode rules that enforce time lock logic, right? So you're taking this infinite possibility and you're constraining it. That's a way of doing a soft work. All of this is technically a software because you're saying, hey, this thing that allows you to do things,

now can't do anything. So you're kind of like shutting it off. So it's technically a soft fork. I think to your point, though, we usually associate the reason why we prefer soft forks over hard forks is the maintaining of user rights and not breaking user space. Like that's a term that's a classic from just open source development is not breaking user space. You want to specifically make sure that you're not doing anything when you change the software that takes existing users property rights and infringes upon them. And there's probably no software project. software project in history more important in that sense than Bitcoin. So where are we at with this?

Because like obviously, not's got a decent amount of people. Really hard to know how many Bitcoiners were actually sort of supportive knots. But if you just go from like node count as an example, roughly 20%. Obviously not all those people will be on board with the soft fork. So let's say it gets like 15% of traction, 10, 15% attraction. Like what happens then? So, the fork would activate at a certain block height. I am taking the proposal as it's written right now. Dathan has already talked about changing when it activates and other details,

which I think is just ill-advised. If you're saying, hey, I'm putting out some code, you'd be expecting, like, you have to now coordinate it. His proposal currently is February 1st, a block height that's roughly February 1st, right? Because block time is never exactly over 10 minutes. But if you... So, February 1st, roughly,

is when this would activate. And what would happen is that you would now have certain nodes on the network when a miner finds a block. The question is, that block that comes in, is it following BIP-44-4-4-4 rules? Right? Is it following the rules of the new client?

If so, nothing's changed. Where you would have something called a chain split is that, let's say, the miners have not upgraded, and a new block gets produced, you would have a chain split because the 444 nodes would reject that block saying it's invalid because it violates one of these rules.

And because it violates one of these rules, you would be in a position where some nodes on the network would accept the block and some would not. And at that point, it becomes a question for the miners, what block chain tip, the most recent block, are they going to build on? miners can only build on one blockchain at a time.

They can't dual mine two different ones. So you would then have a conundrum of what would happen. And there's a bunch of game through we can go through there, but that would be the decision point. As a new block would get found, if this activation client launched, the code has been released. Funny enough, like Bitcoin technical lore, the code was pushed to the UASF organization,

which is where in 2017, Shallin Fry put out the UASF client. So this same exact repo that hasn't been touched in eight years had just gotten an update with this new code. I would speculate that someone who previously was involved with the UASF

efforts, which Luke is known to have been involved in those, would have given up access to the org to let Dathan push that code. I don't know, but that would be a reasonable straight-line suspicion because Luke was a very big proponent in putting forward the UASF client. Yeah, I mean, we obviously, we can't know, but that seems like an easy conclusion to draw.

So if that happened and obviously a proportion of the hash rate would likely go to this new version. Like you would imagine some of the ocean miners would probably move over. Obviously, this is kind of, is, oh, do we get to the point where this is just like longest chain tip winds? Or what happens if, say, 30 blocks get added to Bitcoin as we know it today, and then 30 bucks later, another one is found on Bitcoin 444 version? So that's an important distinction, right? To make the math easy, let's just say it's at, I'm just going to say block height 100. Right? So if we're going back, like, it's at block height 100 just to make the numbers easier to say.

At block height 100, this activates. And let's say we get to block 130 with these new rules. Block 131, even if it is Bip444 compliant, the Bip 444 knows you're going to reject it because blocks 100 through 130 are invalid. So what you would actually have is two separate chains being built. Yeah. And the question then becomes,

where is the hash rate and the mining pool is actually working on? The only public statement we've gotten from any mining pool is F2 pool, which is 12% of the network, has said they're not going to run. this. Right. The game theory, though, would be, and this is for me to charitably steal man the proponents of the UASF, this UASF's proponents to champion it, like, steal man it, is that even if

initially the UASF chain does not have enough hash rate, there is a game theoretic outcome where, because their rules are tighter and let's say like 10 blocks goes by, what you're going to have happen is that if the other miners went over to the UASF chain, they would basically roll back the entire non-USF blockchain. Because what would happen is you, let's say those 30 blocks get found, and then all the miners push over to the other side, and they start mining and catching up, and that becomes the longest chain tip, the 30 blocks that were mined violating the USF rules disappear.

because all the nodes reject them and they're no longer invalid. This is what's called a reorg, a reorganization. Typically, it's never really talked about outside of like a 51% attack. Like, you could have 51% of the hash rate, make your own blockchain over here and then publish it all, and then you would wipe out all of the transactions that happen on the other chain. The game theory, though, is if you're running a UASF client, is that you're doing a tightening of the rules,

which means that all blocks that you would find are also valid on the non-UASF nodes and that's where you can get this reorg dynamic to happen. It's really a question of how a tax rate would be going over there, and I haven't seen any mining pool or large-scale miner come out in support of this yet. So if that did happen, though, would we be in for very large reorgs? Yeah. So then the question, it would be a very large reorg.

Let's take that 30-block example, right? That would be a five-hour, roughly five-hour re-org. If it's one block every 10 minutes, six blocks an hour, 30-blog. blocks is five hours, six times five-thirty. That would be a five-hour rollback of the on-chain history. Now, what can be done, as I counter to this, is what's called a URSF, user-rejected soft fork. You effectively, what you could do is just pick a block after the UASF activates, find a

block and say, we're checkpointing so that for this, to be on my blockchain, you add block height 101, you have to have this block hash. And this block hash violates the 444 rules. So you effectively then, if a URSF were to happen, that would permanently split the network. But to even put forward a URSF, you'd have to actually see a threat or a real credible demand for the UASF to begin with and a reason to want to reject it. And I haven't, to be transparent, I haven't seen the support yet from anyone. So as it stands right now, do you just think this will never happen? As of today, with the information I have, I don't see that.

is happening. That's my personal opinion. I have tried gauging interest. And so the last time a UASF that wasn't, a contentious UASF was proposed, was back in 2017. This was called Segwit 2X. It was basically a compromise with you Segwit and doubling the block size, right? It was a couple of things. And with Segwit 2X, when you had happened was there was a lot of speculation on if this was going to happen or not. And then BitFinex listed a futures market for what the price of this UASF token would be worth. It ultimately fizzled out. There was like what people would do, just to be clear, is if you had one Bitcoin on BitFinex, you'd have one Bitcoin, and you'd also get this future, and you'd be able to sell that

future and buy more Bitcoin. Right. And that was a strong signal because the miners are not going to want to mine on a blockchain where the token is worth less than the other chain. If you have a split and you have to figure out which is Bitcoin, the miners are more likely to build on the one that's going to make them more money. And if everyone's selling a UASF fork, they're not going to, even whatever reasons, they're not going to want to mine for 10 cents on the dollar.

Right? So I've been trying to suss out. It's also just an expression of economic demand. You may hear the term economic nodes. It doesn't matter that you have 10,000 nodes spun up on AWS, is how much throughput and how much like validation is that node processing? So like the nodes at Coinbase, way more important because those nodes are validating millions of Bitcoin in the UTXO set from everything they custody and have on their exchange.

That is inherently more important than someone who just spun up a node on AWS and doesn't have any funds tied to it, right? And the expression of a futures market is the ability for economic actors to say, what do they value more? Miners can still choose to mine on whatever chain they want, but it gives them price information because the proposal of a user-activated software brings market uncertainty.

You don't know which side's going to win. You don't know what's going to happen. Are people going to sell early because they're not sure? It provides a lot of instability just to uncertainty of Bitcoin as a network architecture. And that's usually what Bitcoin's pride it on is like, TikTok, next block, every 10-minute's going to happen. And only in these kind of

consensus fights, do you have this uncertainty? And the futures market is a way to try and price that uncertainty. It also gives an option for, if you are a believer in this user-activated soft fork, the only way today that you can buy UASF Bitcoin is with the futures market, because it doesn't exist on chain yet. So if you buy Bitcoin today, you are buying economic support for both chains. Because remember, in that block height 100 activation, let's say in Block 99, you have 10 Bitcoin, and there's a chain split, you get 10 Bitcoin on each side of the, of the, of the, chain split. So if you buy Bitcoin, you're giving economic expression to the entire network, but if you want to explicitly signal, hey, I really want to support this UASF effort, the only

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then grab the whale pass and the whale night party even include surfing so you know I'm going to be there. Tickets are on sale now. Use code WBD to get 10% off at checkout on all pass types. The website is Mina.b.tc. And use code WBD for 10% off. Yeah, so I was quite new to Bitcoin in 2017. I got in 2016, but I was pretty light touch and I was just following along sort of the tail end of the block size walls. And it wasn't really until BitFenex launched that futures market and you could actually see where real demand was, that I felt any kind of confidence in which way this was going to fall. And I find it funny that I've obviously seen you on Twitter

trying to build these futures markets and trying to go people into betting you. People are calling it like Fiat Games, but I think people either forget or don't understand that this was a really important dynamic in 2017. I think it's a thing that people in Bitcoin do where the term Fiat, I get in sometimes with insurance.

Insurance is Fiat. It's like, well, insurance predates Fiat's Fiat by thousands of years. Sorry, like, this predates Fiat currency is a concept. You can't just call things you don't like or don't understand to be Fiat. That's not how the etymology of words even mean anything, right? The futures market, too, I think this is a really important point. I'll hammer it home again is that the only way today you can economically express interest to want to signal to minors that this is the chain that has more value.

before the fork happens is a futures market. If you buy Bitcoin today, you are economically supporting both sides of the chain. If you want to actually short the non-UASF chain and economically signal and support the UASF chain is a futures market. And miners at the end of the day are profit maximizing. That's just baked into being selfish and maximizing.

That's just how Bitcoin works. And if you're going to actually want to try meaningfully sway your voice and consensus, that's an important thing. Because otherwise what you're going to have happen is like when Bitcoin Cash forked off, which is unrelated to the futures market. But UASF was going to activate,

and so Bitcoin Cash forked off. People just took their Bitcoin cash chain, sold it, and bought more Bitcoin. So like, avoiding the futures market doesn't solve the problem. If the chain split happened, like people will freely economically transact in their own self-inship whether you like it or not. You want the futures market to exist

because you want to avoid a messy breakup and a chain split in a divorce if it could be clearly economically signal ahead of time. UASFs are a market uncertainty event. Futures markets bring price certainty to that, right? It's not gambling. It's interesting, too, because as I've

as I said here, I have very high conviction that it's not going to happen. So for me, I don't do it much as gambling. I view it as a certainty. And I've been very publicly transparent for, there are a lot, and this is the other thing, too, with a market signal,

a lot of people will posture on Twitter, especially in the world and day now of, like, large language models and, like, the asymmetry of people can kind of, like, with a couple lines of code, make a really big social imprint. The LLM tokens can't actually participate in the futures market because you need Bitcoin, right?

So actually having Bitcoin is how you actually express this. I built in on-chain futures market, which we don't think. into, but it uses taproot and it uses op, not if, and you have different time lock. So you can, without a custodian, trustlessly verify and express an on-chance future market, and I totally open-sourced it. So anyone can go run off and have fun building on it. And the reason that works is because if Bitcoin, as we know right now, is to continue

to exist, then those coins get frozen. That's correct. So the way the on-chain contract works is that to simplify it, there's two. two main spending paths. You have a spending path which violates the rules of BIP 444, and that expires, let's say, in May. And then you have a path that follows the rules of BIP 444 that, and I'm sorry, I know it's not officially called that, but it's just very catchy memetically to call it that. See, if the UASF, the side that the UASF is not enforced, and that expires in May, and then the side that enforces the UASF expires in June. Now, if you think the UASF, it's, you think the UASF,

if client's going to work, you don't care that I can spend the money sooner a month before you because those will be consensus invalid because I have an opt, not if in there. So it's a way you can actually on-chain, trustlessly, finalize and settle, knowing that you can actually express your interest. And you also can imply odds, right? So my initial proposal was, I'll put up one Bitcoin, someone else puts up one Bitcoin, and then you have a 50-50 odds. I could put up two Bitcoin and you put up one Bitcoin, which then means you only need to be right 33% of the time, right, mathematically for it to explain. Express. No one has taken me up on it yet. There's been a lot of, well, that's gambling. And to that I say, I'm very highly confident, and I want to be able to sell the UASF coins today. I would love to lock in a cell today. I don't want to have to wait to get on an exchange and move UTIXOs around then and deal with all the uncertainty of block production. I just want to sell them today. And so I'm trying to pull the demand forward, which I think a lot of the people who are on the side of the UASS.

aren't a fan of, because this is an important piece. If you promote, you want to do a UASF, and you put all this effort and put it on the developer mailing list and not a BIP, and you're trying to get minors to activate, and trying to do update, if the effort fails, you haven't lost any Bitcoin. You get to kind of, like, asymmetrically attack the networks, like the resources, the time and resources of people

to try and coordinate a hostile, contentious user-activated software. But then if it all fails and no one mines on it, and like just everything just stops and you you come back with your tail between your legs back onto the main chain, you haven't lost any Bitcoin. So it's something that anyone, so the futures market is actually putting an economic cost saying, oh, you really believe this is going to happen? Let's do it. So the proposer of the BIP, Dayton Ome, has agreed in spirit, but not formal details on doing this with me. I haven't found anyone else, though. And I think that's a very weak economic signal, if no one else, because I'm willing to. And inbound, people have, I haven't asked for it. People have come

to me saying, hey, I have 30 Bitcoin, 50 Bitcoin, 100 Bitcoin I'm willing to put into this bet. So I now have an order book of people that want to sell the UASF fork chain, and I can't get any market liquidity on the other side of the bet, which actually shows you that, like, at least with Bitcoin Cash, you were able to sell it for like 0.25, 0.2, 0.1. I don't even think you're going to be able to sell it for 0.001. Like, there's just no economic demand on the other side looking for this chain at all. So you're just basically trying to get people to put their money where their mouth is and bet on the future of Bitcoin. But like you've had, so Dathan said he'll do it in principle.

Have you had anyone else or is it literally just him? Because I know you called out mechanic and Luke as well, I think. Yeah, and then they blocked me on Twitter. Okay. Interesting. So if this doesn't go through as a soft fork, what do you think they're going to do? Do you think they will hard fork or do you think they'll just come back, tails between the legs and try something else? It's an interesting question.

I could see both possibly happening. Luke, for a long time, has championed the idea of a hard fork to change the proof of work algorithm to remove the centralization of mining. Fire the miners. He hasn't expressed fire the miners, right? This has been a long-held, I would say, heterodox, sorry, unorthodox opinion that Luke's had compared to other developers, but that's something he's been always thought would be kind of like the real nuclear button.

would require a hard fork, though. The problem, you would have to basically fire the miners, because otherwise if you're using the same chain, you're just another Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin S-D where you're using the same hashy algorithm, and very trivially, people can just re-organ attack the network. And that's not a great place to be. So is it possible?

Yeah, I don't know what they're going to do, though. It's interesting, because I've also heard rumors. I don't know if these are true before. I just want to caveat that, though. there's like the ocean legal team are going around to where the mine is trying to kind of legally warn them against supporting the current Bitcoin chain. Yeah, so those are rumors I have heard as well. I'm actually pulling it up here.

On the mailing list, I'm pulling it up right here. So on the mailing list, if you give me a second, I think the acu- someone had made a a comment to that effect that that someone was used like someone at ocean or people associated with ocean were actually talking to mining pools I have never sat in on any of those conversations so it's I don't work at a mining pool so it's just speculation on my part too

but that is my understanding of it that there's been a pressure. And to be clear, the pressure hasn't been for the UASF. The pressure up to this point, from my understanding, was just not running core version 30. So I don't know if that's changed anything with this proposal, but it's something I would say is relevant to keep in mind. Yeah, not a good look, I don't think.

I mean, who knows if that's true, but if it is certainly not a good look. Sorry, I have the exact quote now. Greg Maxwell on the mailing list said, another issue which you have not mentioned is that prior to you making this proposal, Dathan, I received minutes from a meeting which noted that ocean mining was the true author of this proposal and would be presenting it under a false identity in order to conceal their involvement. So that is what Greg said, and Dathan's response was,

you've fallen victim to some false rumors. Though I'm in direct communication with some ocean employees and the BIP was a originally drafted by one of them. I am not affiliated with Ocean in any way. So take that for what it is. Okay. And I also know that mechanic has come out and outright denied that and said that this isn't anything to do with Ocean.

So, I mean, I don't want to get too far into the speculation because we just don't know. There's something that Mechanic said on one of his videos that I found strange and I want to see if I'm misunderstanding this. but he was talking about the transactions that can be included and have been included in because of V-30 now. And one of the examples he used was like some AI-generated porn video of a Bitcoin dev being put on chain. And I think Marathon with a pool that mined that block, well, they included that transaction. And he said that if this was still going through slipstream, they would have refused. that as a transaction. Again, who knows if that's actually true, but that's a claim that he made.

But that seems very counter to everything he's trying to do with datum and ocean. The idea of being policing how miners organize their block templates. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. If the entire, the, from my understanding, with ocean and decentralizing Bitcoin mining and the actual template generation, right? for those that aren't familiar, the way Bitcoin mining pool works is you usually have one node at the mining pool that organizes

the block, and then they send the block headers to all the miners. You don't need the full block on your AISC. The AIC actually doesn't even look at the full block. It just looks at the header of the block, which has all of the commitments to all of the information that's relevant for doing the actual mining, hashing operation. The mission

with Datum and Ocean would be the problem is that you have one node that organizes like, let me just take like, Mara's like 5% of the hash rate. So 5% of the hash rate has one node doing all of the work for it. Mara's probably a little different

because they have their own mining pool and they own all of their own infrastructure. You and I cannot go sign up to use Mara's pool. It's all their own internal stuff. So maybe like a foundry that's at 25% roughly of the network would be a better example where you have a bunch of people that are mining or Antpool, which is like 17%.

So you've like Antpool, you have a bunch of people go and organize transactions, but like all of the mining at Antpool, there's like one antpool node that's actually organizing the block templates. And the idea would be if you're making block, if you're trying to decentralize it, you wouldn't want to be emphasizing and celebrating choke points of kind of the block space market, kind of contradictory to the whole mission. I'd generally agree with that, but I'm quite sure if mechanic was on the pod, he would have his own colored ad on that.

I mean, if you want to come on the pod again, mechanic, you can do. I want to know, can we get a little bit of Think Boy for a minute? Why do you think this sort of culture war has both come to Bitcoin in such a meaningful way over the last couple of years and then seems to just be accelerating at this point? I think there is a mix of earnest concern that, and earnest is from their perspective, like I would say Luke earnestly has consistently held this. perspective and position in Bitcoin for a long time. And you have a lot of people cargo culting following him, not fully understanding second, third order ramifications and things. Myself and many other people disagree with Luke.

I think a lot of people were aimed to Bitcoin after the Block Size Wars. So they've been reading about it, almost like hearing like oral history passed down by a fire of like, this is what we did to take the Bitcoin network. We ran the nodes and we ran the client. And the Bitcoin Bugle actually put out a funny article which was Bitcoin

Plus Plus Gettysburg. So Gettysburg, I know you're not from America, but Gettysburg is a I know a civil war. Yeah, so doing like Civil War reenactments of like battles. And I think that's what happening is we're kind of having like, we're doing a live action role playing of like the block size war. We're going to like everyone's just trying

like rally together and reenact it, like a muscle memory thing, but it's mostly people who were not here in 2017. So I think there's a bit of like a social status game. I've also seen, I'm rebelling against the system. Bitcoiners are naturally disagreeable and rebellious to begin with. That is being focused internally around the governance of how Bitcoin works. And they were already discontent with how Bitcoin was working. And then version 30 gave them an opportunity to make this not about how Bitcoin technically works, but about a governance issue. So those meanings at core are doing things that are destroying Bitcoin as money, and we need to take back the network.

So I think it's a lot of that. And it's also just like social cloud bait engagement, too. You post this stuff. You get a lot of like eyeballs, a lot of attention. It's kind of just like, you know, the price is flat, it's trending down a little bit. This is just something to keep everyone occupied. Like, genuinely, like, I don't view it as a lot of,

a big credible threat. I haven't seen a single mining pool come forward with it. I haven't seen a single business come forward saying they're running the USF client. Like, this is not like, yes, you write code and you've released the code for a USF, but you have to actually have the miners and the economic actors of the network agree with it. Otherwise, you and I, Danny, could write a USF tomorrow. That doesn't mean it means anything, right? And I just haven't seen the commensurate demand to actually facilitate a successful UAASF. Maybe it's worth getting into what is actually needed on their side to do this, because we've not really talked about that. Like, obviously, the Luke and mechanics of the world running this isn't enough.

What do they actually need? They need hash rate and they need economic actors to enforce this. For example, if Coinbase's node, just to be blunt, if Coinbase's node isn't running this, they're going to accept whatever block has the most hash rate and work. Now, if Coinbase hypothetically came forward and said, we want to support this effort, all of a sudden now you have 2 million plus Bitcoin that are saying, we will not accept the other fork, which is a meaningful thing.

You would want businesses to come forward and say that they want to support this effort for the economic demand that they're signaling for. You're going to want a reasonable set of nodes across the network that are also running this to make sure the transactions propagate. That is an important part of this. And you need hash rate. Because the miners are the ones that are actually

spending the capital to advance the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. And if no one's going to build on your fork, you're going to fork and then you're going to stagnate because instead of having 100% of the hash rate blocks every 10 minutes, you get 1%, which means that it'll take you six hours to find a block instead of 10 minutes. Right. So you would want this to all happen without there be. This is actually a really important point too. You want this alignment and agreement prior to the activation, which is why you would want signaling. You can signal. You can signal. with your node. You can sit, miners could signal that they're going to support this. And the reason why you want that is, let's say this happens for 40, 50, 60 blocks.

Is Coinbase going to roll back their chain, six, seven hours, and all those withdrawals? Because they're not going to be able to... Absolutely not. Right. Right. We've had chain splits before. Back in 2013, there was a bug where the Bitcoin network was down for like 30, 40 blocks. And we were able to reunify the chain. but like Bitcoin's a lot bigger now.

And so like is, I think it's very unlikely. Bitcoin wouldn't die, to be clear, if this happened, right? If you're holding Bitcoin, you're holding it for like 10 years, like deep cold storage, this action isn't impact to it all. Like, even if there is an org, it doesn't bother you at all. Just the funds that are moving during this reorganization. So they need hash rate. They need economic support.

And they need that now. Because they're proposing to activate in like 83 days. that is incredibly fast, that's very, very aggressive, usually at least a year is given to trying to organize these things, let alone they're not final with the code yet. The actual final activation client code isn't totally done. So they're not minors and businesses and the DevOps teams at these companies aren't going to be like, oh, here's the code.

Let me just load it up into my cloud infrastructure real quick and get running, right? They're going to want to look at what code are you actually changing, which is a problem too. because this UASF client is based on top of a Knott's build, which means you can't cleanly patch on this feature into Bitcoin Core, which is where all of the real economic demand is running. So that's an additional engineering version. And one of the big criticisms of NOTS being that the code isn't reviewed properly,

so essentially you have to go through and review every single line of code. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they need support and they need it now. They need hash rate support. They need a futures market. They need people who are actually willing to put Bitcoin up on the other side of the bet to signal that they want to buy the UASF coin and sell the non-UASF coin. And they need all three of those for this to be successful at this point.

Because otherwise, if they miss any of those, the chains are either going to stagnate or the chain's going to go and people are just going to market dump it. And then the miners are going to switch back over to the other chain because it's not going to be worth it to them anymore to mine it. Right? Because they only get three Bitcoin per block for mining it in the block subsidy. and if everyone's, like it activates, and everyone on the UASF chain is moving coins around just to sell them to crash the price, the miners aren't going to buy in there anymore

because the three Bitcoin is going to be worth 0.03 Bitcoin or whatever, right? So they need all of these things to actually, they need a futures market, they need mining support, and they need economic no business support. Just on this sort of, this is an impossible question to answer,

but as a directional answer, How many of the people who have been very vocally supportive of knots do you think are also going to be behind this soft fork? Because I've definitely seen some that have been very big knots proponents say they're not in support of the soft fork. Yes. I think that a lot of people who were supportive of knots because they disagreed with the software governance of Bitcoin Core

are not in favor of a UASF. So it's already, you're starting from a, because no one who is, people who are not running knots, are fine with things as is, because that's the client they're running. They're fine running the default client of Bitcoin Core.

The people who would run knots, that would be your contingent that would be willing to fork over this, and that I think is going to fracture. There's no way to directly tell or no at this point. Once there is a final UASF client, you will be able to run that

and signal to the network. I'm not just a Knotts node. I'm a UASF node. But again, And I think a lot of people who, for whatever reason, have their own disagreements of how Bitcoin development is going, are not going to be okay with the UASF. So that's to be seen on where that lands. I find it really interesting. The thing that is most interesting about this is kind of the psychology of the people that have been stirred up by all this drama. Do you think it comes down to people thinking they're more important to Bitcoin than they are?

Like, obviously, running a node matters, but it matters to you far more than anyone else. Running a node only matters for you. It's a selfish endeavor to run a node. The node, you run a node presumably because you are sending and receiving Bitcoin. That could be once a year. It could be once every five years. It could be once every five minutes. You're running a node because you're validating transactions.

You are validating that the blocker. that are being found and the transactions that are in those blocks are following the rules of consensus. Everything after that, the influence in what your note has very quickly compresses to almost nothing. And if it wasn't that way, it would be almost like a proof of stake of proof of AWS, who can spin up the most nodes on the network to do voting. Like, Bitcoin's not a democracy. Bitcoin is anarchy. It is rules, not rulers.

And the rules are consensus. which is why, I think, at least, to your point on that people believe in they're more important, I think they would just misunderstand the role their node has. It is a supreme guardian of the rules of the network. Beyond that, it can't influence much outside of it. By design, to be censorship-resistant money, you necessarily, because if I could run stuff on my node or a bunch of my buddy's nodes and actually put serious pressure on how the network gets organized, then I'd be able to censor transactions, right?

So it's just kind of like the asymmetry of Bitcoin as a decentralized permissionless network that you have these properties. So I think maybe it's a little bit of education and enablement for people to understand what their nodes actually for. I will say that the UASF effort is at least consistent. A UASF is how a node can boss the rest of the network at the consensus level. So in that sense, it's ideologically consistent, and it is necessary but not sufficient to actually change Bitcoin.

I want to bring up a tweet I saw. I've actually pulled this up on the show I did with Marty and Hoddle and Eric Kaysen, but this is from BitPain. And I think this really summed up kind of one of my big concerns about this whole thing. Okay, this is the part that I think is the most relevant. It's once you grant the state that you can take efforts to mitigate illicit material, they'll start demanding it, including for monetary transactions they don't like. And if you've accepted that you have a community-wide moral imperative to censor, you don't

have a leg to stand on. It's all over. And to me, that's the big concern here. If this kind of like C-SPAN narrative, CSAM narrative gets any real traction, then how long until some government agency starts saying we have to censor these transactions? Right. I agree. I agree with that base premise is that if you start providing this moral layer in which how bytes are encoded into Bitcoin blockchain of being acceptable or not acceptable,

it's a very slippery slope that doesn't require much leaps and imagination to do that. Now, to steal man from my understanding the other side of the argument is that this is not about you, we are not gating the moral use of Bitcoin as money for monetary transactions. we are morally gaining non-monetary use cases. And they would argue that they're drawing a line at monetary versus non-monetary, that we will moralize and push out all the non-monetary stuff, but everything that is monetary will be held. I would still put forward that you have now moved Chesterton's feds

and made moral any part of the argument. To even introduce a moral caveat to the argument is now moving of, like, the boundaries and how Bitcoin has worked up to this point. And I think you're regressing and seeding ground to people who would want to attack the network. Yeah, and I don't even think the money, sort of non-money transactions don't even matter in this. It's that you're proving that you can do something. Yeah. I think Mr. Hoddle had a really good tweet where he said the most bullish thing is a failed UASF attempt to show how censorship-resistant Bitcoin is.

But even if like some of the most predominant like developers who are also happen to be CEOs of binding pool protocols, Right, like could be seen, you know, having this big, like, effort to be able to push the scale and having them fail would be pretty bullish for the censorship resistant kind of resiliency of Bitcoin as a protocol that can't be cajoled and pressured using these, like, legal framings and moral framings. It's interesting because probably for over a year now, the not side of this argument have been claiming that Core and you and Shinobi and all these people have been like attacks on Bitcoin. Well, Shinobi is Bitcoin Core, but yes. He's Bitcoin core and he's Adam back. But of course. They've been claiming that you're like an attack on Bitcoin. Do you think this poses the risk of actually being an attack on Bitcoin?

I mean, a UASF is an attack on the network by design. Like, and attack because it's challenging the existing consensus rules, right? Like now to be charitable for the other side, they would frame this as we are applying a hot fix to the network. This is like an emergency patch, which is why they say that usually you have a year plus for a UASF. We're doing this in 90 days or less because this is actually an emergency hot fix. This is not an upgrade, right? This is like a emergency security patch. You are attacking the network. That's what you're doing. You're saying, I am, you're threatening to orphan miners. You're threatening to reorg the chain. You are threatening to change the rules

which everyone had previously agreed upon. You could say, I am doing it for good, or I must do this now because the actual attacker is core in version 30, but from a consensus level, it is an attack. Now, we've done it well before. Like, technically you did it with Taproot and with Seguin. We made changes to the net.

Like, we said, hey, we're going to make some changes and do some new things. Those things were non-controversial. They also were non-controversial because everyone who disagreed forked off with Bitcoin cash. So a chain split in like a UAS, like this is almost kind of like a divorce, like it starts socially and like in people that were around in 2016 as the block size wars were heating up would have kind of described as like escalating kind of like social tension in general. And then ultimately

it ends in a divorce and you have a chain split. And then the people who are on that don't fork off, they have better consensus on like activating Segwit, right? Bitcoin cash forked off before Segwit activated because they didn't want to do that. So ultimately at a governing level, this is how disagreements within the anarchy system, which is Bitcoin, get resolved. People self-select, run different software of their own choosing, and opt out of rules or rule changes. So it is an attack. Like, doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying that if you're changing the rules of Bitcoin, you are doing an attack on the network. And, you know, depending on what side you fall on, maybe it's justified and maybe it's not.

We need the, are we the baddies meme here? If you had to kind of predict what happens next time, what do you think will happen? You don't think this soft walk will happen. So what do you think will happen to the vocal support of that? And I'm really talking about kind of the mechanics and the loops of the world. Do you think we'll see rage quits? Do you think they'll come back to Bitcoin and like change the messaging? Or do you think even if this doesn't happen, they'll try something else?

If I had to guess I believe they are going to fork off because I believe they put a lot of time and effort and reputation on this framing It is And do you need hard fork that? Maybe well we'll start off with the UASF They may after the UASF say

Okay we also need a hard fork because we need to change The mining algorithm or the difficulty adjustment or any other odd number of things I know for sure they're going to do the UASF, though. I take them at their word and believe them that they're going to do this. Now, from there, I would welcome them back. I would love, maybe a controversial opinion, I'd love for the Bitcoin cash people to come back over and just have one big happy family again.

Right? Like, there's so much we agree upon. I would rather us be together. But at the end of the day, you can't force or control, who people associate with, and that's their own decision. Now, for the larger future, like, them as people, I don't pretend to understand how ocean business or governance

or any of those things work. Like, I don't, like, they could attempt and sail and just everything keeps on going back to where it was before. It could happen. I don't know, right? That's much more of a question for them, because they would be able to to finally say how they're going to act. And if we got the UASF, do you think there'll be a URSF?

Do you think there'll be a rejection of that? With the reorgs being the, I guess, prime issue there? Well, so here's the thing, is that you would be able to pretty quickly understand, is that even a threat? Because after like five blocks, 10 blocks, you're not going to have to worry about anything. because you'll see where the hash rate is. You'll see where the hash rate is. And you can run a node on each chain so you can see,

I'm at block height 100 and you're at block height 105, right? And you can just sit on the node and see what block are they at. And I think as an actual heuristic, like with the actual like this is over, this is my personal theory. But after 100 blocks, this is an important thing about how Bitcoin works. When a miner finds a block, they have to wait 100 blocks before they can take that coin-based output and spend it. Yeah. And once you get to a point-to-up box,

point that miners are now able to withdraw funds that they've mined on this chain, they're not going to reorg themselves out of money. So after like 18 hours, if there's not a serious split in hash rate, I don't see it as a likely to have a rollback. And then at that point, you don't need to do a URSF because it's fine.

Exchanges could just pause, like pause withdrawals for X blocks. That's a great way in exchange can protect itself. They can say, hey, for the next X-blocks, we're going to hold off on withdrawals because there's network uncertainty. So, like, that's a way of doing it. If you're transacting in Bitcoin and they're moving forward with this, don't do a large Bitcoin transaction until the dust gets settled. Or just wait for more confirmations.

Instead of, like, six, which is like an hour, maybe wait a day. Right? And then I think pretty quickly the dust would settle after that. But I think it would be way premature to do a URSF when no one's, in the futures market. No one believes in the futures market that this coin's going to be worth anything, the UAASF coin. None of the miners have single support for it. None of the business have single support for it. I can't even find one Bitcoin of liquidity on the other side who wants to bet on the UASF coin. And I have at least 100 that wants to bet against it. I think it's way too premature to do a URSF or even think about it. You might have pissed someone off enough today to get that one

Bitcoin of liquidity. I will happily take, you name you, you give me the coins. I will very happily, I can feel probably just on my inbound interest, hundreds of Bitcoin, and if it actually gets serious, there could be more. It's going to be interesting. It's such a mess, man. I'm looking through the BIP right now. There's been

a lot of discussion on the mailing list as well as the repo of people kind of talking through about this. Version 30 being now the largest note implementation. I'm looking at Clark Moody's dashboard at 10.76

6%, it's hard to say where this support's really going to come from. I don't know. Like, I'm thinking to the game theory. I talked about chain splits, talked about features contracts, talked about mining, game theory,

and reorgs. I think it's been a good high-level summary of all of the latest pieces, but it's moving fast, too, which is also just a, as of this afternoon, Dave and Ome was saying that he was going to maybe change the activation height, which

it's really tough because once you start changing it, people take you less seriously because you'll just like move the deadline again. And so I think it's not like that's a signal of weakness. So they're trying to figure out what they're going to do next. I would guess they're going to move that backwards, not forwards. Yeah. All right. It's a I've also, I'm not allowed to, there's a telegram room where they talk about the fork in the opportunities, I have been banned from talking about prediction markets in there

and talking about futures markets because I've been trying to find someone. So if they are trying to stifle the economic demand to express pro-BIP-44-pro-UASF Bitcoin, I think they understand that there is an economic demand there. So, like, I think that it kind of like steals it. The money talks at the end of the day. You can do long debate threads and you can do long kind of like esoteric hypothetical what-ifs, a futures market is actually the market finding mechanism for resolving this and the fact that they're trying to choke the liquidity

so no one can express pro-444 UASF sentiments it's not looking good for them. I saw you did start a prediction market as well. Was that on predicts? Yes, I did. I did start a prediction market. I just tried to look at it, but it says the website's like temporarily down. They are.

So it's a funny note. I had never used the website. everyone was refusing to reply to me. So I went and made my own prediction market on Predix, P-R-E-D-Y-X. I have no affiliation with them. It is entirely custodial. Just to be clear, entirely custodial. I went and set up a prediction market on the likelihood of this UASF activating

and being the most chain, like the most built chain. And the percent is currently at 2 percent. Oh, down. When I checked a few days ago, was it like, seven or something. Well, then I go in there and I put hundreds of dollars and bid it down. So I currently have put up 2.5 million sats to win 2.8 million sats. So those are the odds, like implying the size of the odds here. And so I go in there every day and I just bid it back down because I'm pretty convinced it's no. So if you annualize it, I'm getting like a

30% yield on that Bitcoin as long as the custodian doesn't rug me. So I feel pretty confident. And I haven't found, well, it's just making a bet. I'm just, I have high confidence in it. So, Predixite was fun, though. I'd never use that before. And so then I made a prediction market on, will Luke or Mechanic acknowledge a prediction or futures market to be legitimate that is in motion?

Because they refuse to legitimize it a big bet, and I'm a liar. They won't elaborate further. So I made a prediction market on, will they legitimize a prediction market? And then I made a prediction market on, like, will Luke and Mechanic acknowledge a prediction market as legitimate? because they just came. But what are the odds on that one now?

That's at 14%. So there's 14% on that. I did a prediction market on when they would actually release the code, which already resolved. They released it on November 7th. So that already resolved. I made a prediction market. Will Dathan Ome still do the on-chain futures contract bet with me?

Because I'm not sure if he's going to. That's currently priced at 19%. Well, that's free money for him. Well, that's what I said. It's free money for you, buddy. I've been having fun with this idea of trying to constrain prediction markets as like gambling or it's just information finds a signal in a way.

And it's just one of these things that I've been having fun since no one will take me on the trustless non-custodial, auditable one to make my own market elsewhere with different risk tradeoffs. But I just want to price some risk. It's all insurance, baby. I'm just pricing risk. That's a perfect segue

to talk about Anchor Watch, Rob. You're such a pro. How are things going to Anchorage? Doing great. Yeah, everything's going great at Anchor Watch. A couple of people have asked all of these changes and do not impact us at all. We use pay-to-witness script hash, and there's no restriction on what we're doing as it relates to this UASF, so our customers are not impacted. It won't be an issue at all.

But it's been going well, heading into the end of the year, we're looking to be launching some new vault variants and product offerings as well as uninsured custody around years end. So keep an eye out for that. Can you talk about what they look like yet, or is that still under apps? I'm happy to. There'll be versions where customers only have to hold one key, where Additionally, with uninsured, you'll be able to set it up in a way where we co-sign with you. But then it goes to yourself custody. And then a year later, if you lost your key, we can help recover it later.

So there's never... The only way that we could act to move funds without your permission is because the funds haven't... Like, you lost your key and you haven't been able to move funds for a year. Also setting up multi-institutional custody, just kind of finding new ways to be able to meet customers where they're at with their own... preferred custody key model and being able to, you know, meet people where they want, you know, right? At the end of the day, we want to be able to help people secure their Bitcoin, however they see fit, and being kind of a tool to help empower them to do that. You know this BIP, different BIP now, that Jesse Posner and someone else from Bickey has put forward, which is

basically a way of, as far as I understand, you can explain how this actually works, allowing collaborative custody, but where you as the personally collaborating with, can't actually see the Bitcoin transactions they're doing if it's not including your key. Is that something you'll be able to implement? And maybe if I've explained that badly, maybe you should reframing it. No, no, no. So at the highest level, just explaining how most, if not all, collaborative custodians work today, is maybe I give you a key.

You set up a wallet. This would be like an unchained or a CASA or a long list of many others. Or a Bitkey. Or a bit key. Of course, yeah. So the Big Key team, they worked on this. The Bit Key team was a lot of. working the BITKee team. The way it works today is the service provider to be able to help you

transact and maybe load up the app and see the balance, they have to see all of the transaction data. So you give them what's called an output descriptor. This output descriptor is like the full body of all of the metadata for the wallet. The trade-off here, though, is that the service provider can see all of your transactions and knows all of your deposit addresses and knows every time you use a transaction. This new BIP would allow us. to basically do a key exchange. And by default, I can never see your on-chain activity.

But if you need me to sign to help you out, you can then reveal information to me that allows me to use my key to sign your transaction. So it allows for better default privacy. I mean, that seems like a massive upgrade because the big trade-off with any kind of collaborative custody is the privacy one. Like, if this is removing that,

that's probably pretty huge for you. No, I think it's a massive upgrade in thinking about the user experience and kind of the privacy trade-offs when it comes to self-custody, but having someone able to help you in the event you need help. And so your default happy path could be just using your own keys, and the service provider would never be able to understand or divine anything about how you're using Bitcoin.

Not because they're hiding it, it's because they actually don't know. So I think that's a very good, just like, first-principle basis of kind of like improving the custody model, for sure. I think it'll take some time for it to get into the ecosystem. Ideally, we'd want to have hardware wallet supporting this, so you can interoperate with it. You'd want to be able to even use it with Bitcoin Core. Like, you want to get a reasonable proliferation of, like, the wallet and software to adopt this.

But I think in a time, like, in it realistically, two years from now, maybe we'll start seeing it more widely adopted. But definitely keeping an eye on that. Very cool. I'm bullish on that bit. Less so on BIP 444. We're going to get a lot of hate for this, Rob. But I think it's an important conversation.

I'm glad we managed to go and get into it. Any way you want to send anyone apart from Anchorage, before we close out? Yeah, I guess I'm Rob Oneham, R-O-B, the number one, H-A-M on Twitter. I'm Rob at primal.net on Nostr. If you are a big proponent of this UASF, in my PIN tweet, I talk about the importance of futures markets.

I've been tweeting out a lot about the actual on-chain contract. You can start looking at the code and understanding, asking questions, getting audited. I would love to be able to facilitate more market-making. And what's great about it too is it's peer to peer. I'm not just two individuals putting money together into a Bitcoin transaction. And that code is fully open. Anyone can go run off and do this.

You don't need to involve me at all. And I would encourage you if you're interested and you want to kind of, if you have high conviction in this UASF working, hit me up on Twitter. And we can talk about going through the code and getting something set up. Love it, man. We will definitely get some hate from this. It's interesting. Whenever you talk about either core 30, core in general, Bitcoin knots,

like the amount of comments I get is unusual. I think there's probably a lot of bars. My favorite, and since I am a avid follower of the 40 hours per week podcast program that the Bitcoin Bugle does, I'll get YouTube subscription notifications when you come out with a new show. And it's wild that within three minutes of a show being uploaded, you'll get multiple comments. Like people who have obviously not watched it. It's always the first comments that I get come through on a video

are always about knots, pretty much. Right, which makes you question how much of this is organic versus real user interest, which is why the futures market is beautiful, because a bot can't put up Bitcoin in a trustless, non-custodial smart contract. But they can run LLMs all day and just kind of astroturf the ecosystem.

This will be a fun test when you upload this with my name as a keyline hit, and in like your podcast, the amount of random unrelated comments that are going to show up within the first hour of people who definitely didn't watch it. And they don't comment on anything else. And they have no actual user footprint or anything. It'll be very interesting to see. Yeah, the comments are like definitely come in before they could have watched any of the video. But we'll see.

It's all good. It's all fun in games. Everyone missed the part at the very, you got you got to just giggle. You got to giggle. Giggling is free. Giggling is legal. And it's good for the soul. You've got to be doing some giggling.

I'll let you get back to, everyone will have missed this at the very start of the conversation, but you're not lopping on Twitter today. You're actually lopping. Yeah. So Lisa, Nifty Ney is here at Bitcoin Park for there's a Bitcoin Veterans Summit. And she was doing a LARP, the live action roleplay, how the Bitcoin Network works. If you ever get an opportunity to go check one out, I would highly recommend it. It's a lot of fun.

But Danny made me abandon a room full of veterans on veterans, day to go do this podcast. And so they were none too happy about it. And right after I got up this call, I'm going to go run downstairs and host BitDev's. So I'll get a little bit of redemption there. There you go. I'm sorry to all the veterans out there. But this conversation was great, Rob. Thank you, man. And I'm sure we'll speak soon. We were going to do a show totally different on the hero's journey of Bitcoin, but we'll have to park that one and we can do that next time. Absolutely. Sounds like a a plan. Thanks, Danny, for having me. Thanks, mate. Bye.