What Bitcoin Did - OP_RETURN, Filters & Bitcoin’s Identity Crisis w/ Shinobi

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

Shinobi is the Technical Editor at Bitcoin Magazine. In this episode, we get into the latest "OP_RETURN war," exploring whether the debate is a cultural clash or a technical discussion about Bitcoin��s future. We discuss the origins of the OP_RETURN limit, how users are bypassing it, and the arguments for and against changing data limits. Shinobi lays out his view that filters designed to block certain transactions could increase mining centralisation and degrade network security. We also get into the questions about non-monetary uses of Bitcoin and the ongoing tensions between scaling, freedom, and preserving Bitcoin's values. FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Shinobi: https://x.com/brian_trollz THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ CASA: https://casa.io/

Bitcoin is just fun. The last wave of NFTs and tokens on Bitcoin didn't kill it. These ones won't. And the next one won't. Stop regurgitating moral arguments just because they sound good. You don't get to tell people what Bitcoin's culture is. We're getting into the point of then they fight you. Where the governments come in and try to tell us, oh no, we can't do that because that's against the rules. If we continue meandering and dealing with nonsense instead of figuring out how to actually scale this protocol in a self-custodial way, it's over. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by our lead sponsor

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Visit iron.com to learn more, which is iranen.com. Shinobi, great to see you, man. How you doing? I'm doing all right. What's up, Danny? We've got another war in Bitcoin happening. It's all very exciting.

Maxis aren't supposed to exist this long without it. So this is, like, it's got really heated again. So the last couple of weeks, obviously there's people calling this a war saying Bitcoin Cora trying to destroy Bitcoin. There's lots going on. I want to go through everything with you. I know that you have a very different take to some of the people that are being very vocal on the other side, like the mechanics and people like that. But I think probably the best place to start is to try and lay out a ton of context so everyone knows exactly what's going on. Can you kind of start from the start? Give us a kind of overview of what's actually happened. over the last couple of weeks. All right. So Citria, one of the companies building a roll-up on Bitcoin using BitBM as the peg mechanism between the main chain and the roll-up recently released a white paper for their bridge or their peg between the two systems, Clementine.

And I haven't had a chance to get around and actually fully read the system yet. here the white paper on the system. But some core developers were reading through this and realized, for those who don't understand how BitVM works, try to keep this as high level as possible, when you deposit money into a BitVM contract, you are essentially entering a challenge response game. So if you want to take money out as the operator of the roll-up,

Your job is essentially front users your own money when they want to leave the roll-up, and then periodically you can go to the BitBM contract and take the money out to make yourself hold. So when you go to do that, you start this challenge response process. And it's a very complicated zero-knowledge-based scheme, but the gist of it is the operator can assert that he is owed this much money out of the BitBM system because he's fronted that much to users who wanted to leave. And anybody out there who's been observing the system who has proof that that claim is not true can respond to that with a challenge.

And if the operator cannot respond properly with proof to that challenge that they did, in fact, do everything properly, regardless of what the challenger is saying, then they lose access to money. They can never pull money out of that BIPPM contract again. So in order to do this, you have to write some small bit of arbitrary information on the blockchain so that the challenge response process can take that information and incorporate it. Well, I believe what they need is like 140 bytes or so of space,

but Op return has the 80 byte limit. So what they're doing to get around that is putting the 80 bytes in Op return, and then the rest of the information into taproot outputs that just encode the rest of the information instead of a valid address. So those outputs will never be spendable. And so whenever this challenge response process has to play out on chain, every time you're creating these unspendable, outputs that nodes are going to have to store in the UTXO set and keep track of for the rest of time now in order to validate blocks.

So they opened a pull request, not Citria, in order to raise the operturn limit, like just get rid of the limit. Who put that pull request in? I think it was Peter Todd, but I have honestly not actually read the, the original post in the PR because of how fast the responses to everything have kept growing. Yeah. But the gist of the matter is, like, these filters aren't doing anything. Like if a user really wants to bypass them, they just go to Marathon with Slipstream or another minor and just give it to them directly. And part of what's going on here is, like, that filter is useless.

to stop a transaction from getting into a block. All it's doing is disrupting it, relaying around the network. So it's disrupting other users' ability to see it until it gets into a block. That has a lot of negative issues with fee estimation, not knowing what you're bidding against, that has some negative consequences for layer twos, like in the case with Citria. They need that transaction to broadcast and be widely visible. And in order to do that, they're now creating these junk unspendable outputs because the operatern limit is preventing it from freely relaying, not getting into a block, but other users

being able to see that and respond to it in the challenge response process. And so that's pretty much the start of what happened here. Okay, so it's probably worth, again, just for context, to explain what opereturn actually does and the other ways of embedding data in Bitcoin. So like in the witness or these unspendable outputs. And the unspendable outputs is the one that I understand the least. So maybe you can go through those and just explain what each of them are and how they work. Well, Op Return is the best way to do this. It's literally just a op code that you profess before putting arbitrary information on the stack and it just kind of goes like information is here you can ignore.

Like that's parsed. That doesn't go into the UTXO set because op return, it's not possible to ever spend UTXOs created with that. The UTXO set doesn't have to care about it. People can get their information recorded on the blockchain and not create this perpetual burden on users. The unspendable outputs, that's the worst way, or worst way. you have in any output you creates,

that's not a weird fancy script, just a public key and address that you send your money to. That is a random piece of data. Like it can be anything in theory. And in practice, you can put anything in that field of the transaction. The only thing that matters in terms of being a real private, public key pair is your ability to spend it after you create that UTXO. but you can put anything in there.

And so you can record arbitrary information that way, but every time that's done, there's now a UTXO that can't be spent in practice, but you can never prove it can't be spent. And the UTXO set has to track that for all time now, just to be able to ensure that they're properly validating blocks. Now, the witness, that's essentially creating a,

script that when it's eventually revealed and spent, just has a branch of the script because you can have multiple branches in a script, like use public key A or check a signature against that, or use public key B. And as long as there's a signature from one of those two, it'll pass. You just have one of those branches be an opt-f false branch. So essentially, this will always fail if it's ever actually, the executed branch, but it's still going to be there in the transaction. It's still going to be part of what's on the stack, and you can just put arbitrary information there. Now that doesn't inherently create unspendable UTXOs, but it does let you stuff a lot more

data into that space than it's possible with an unspendable UTXO or op return because it's in the witness field. Like, not literally what happened on a technical level under the hood, but we essentially raised the block size, but only for witness data with segregated witness. So there's just more room for more arbitrary data there. Now, those are the, I guess, three major ways that you can embed arbitrary data in the blockchain, but that's by no means the only ways.

Okay. There are a lot of other ways that you can do things that could be anything from just a different way to put information in the witness to bypass filters or restrictions that people add to things that are even dumber or more damaging than unspendable outputs. Okay. And then so the filters are like a big part of this argument. Like the filters that we have right now, what do they actually stop people doing in Bitcoin? Well, there's a couple of them. And I think, like, the real nuance is not that filters don't do anything. It's they don't do anything when somebody is willing to actually pay money to do that thing. When there is real economic demand of people willing to pay for something, it is rational for minors to take the money and let them do that thing. But filters can't. do a few different things. The ones under contention right now are essentially just stopping transactions that some people would like to discourage, but at the end of the day, are not really

doing anything harmful to the network. Their only negative impact is that they take up block space that somebody else wanted. And the reality of Bitcoin as a system is there's always going to be somebody paying for blocks face that somebody else wanted. That's how the system works. The second, I guess, class of things would be preserving upgrade hooks. So like we have the op nops and legacy script, which, you know, you can kind of redefine those in a backwards compatible way. And that's what was done with Segwit. That's what was done with both lock time op codes. These are just things that will always dispendable regardless until we add restrictions and go, no, you have to follow these rules now.

And there's a similar thing in Taproot. Those filters are just to ensure that people aren't using those undefined up codes and essentially creating problems when we go to upgrade the protocol later with, say, like, we need to use one of these, but now somebody made use of it in a transaction or in securing their coins, we have a problem here. If we use this an added definition or a restriction to create new functionality, now that person's money is unspendable because they won't be able to meet these new conditions. So that's just making sure that we can actually continue upgrading the protocol on future

without things becoming a nightmare, a huge problem of, well, do we burn an idiot's money? because they were being an idiot and they should have known better, or do we lose the ability to use this upgrade function because someone was an idiot? And then the last thing is one more, like real denial of service vectors, like transactions that are incredibly expensive to verify, that could actually crash your node

or just eat up your computer's resources for an extended time verifying it. And those are restricted just to actually protect like people's nodes from things that would degrade their performance or even crash them worst case. This episode is brought to you by Anchor Watch. The thing that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin called storage. This is where Anchor Watch comes in. With Anchor Watch, you're protected by their time-locked multi-sig vault and with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of London backed insurance policy. You get to hold your keys, Anchor Watch holds the risk. Whether you're worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters or your own mistakes,

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slash WBD. I also want to give a quick shout out to the Human Rights Foundation's Financial Freedom Report. This is their weekly newsletter that drops every Thursday and it covers how authoritarian regimes use money as a tool for control and how people are pushing back against that

using privacy tools and of course Bitcoin. It's an amazing newsletter, it's pure signal, and you can subscribe for at Financial Freedom Report.org. So I don't know when this would have been, maybe like two years ago. I remember Luxor mining a block that was essentially just one huge transaction,

like a one four megabyte transaction or something. Would that be an example of someone trying to send a transaction going out of band and bypassing the filters and just creating one huge transaction that filled a block? Mm-hmm. Yep. Okay. And then so if at the moment the op return limit is 80 bytes, if that's removed, does that mean that people

can do a similar transaction without having to go out of band. Yeah, that's what that would allow. You could just directly put it into your own mempool and have it propagate across the network. So is that really like the crux of this issue then? Is that sending these like quote unquote spam transactions is going to be much easier to do? Well, it's trivial to do nowadays. You just literally open a web page and there is the slipstream API. You just drop it in there.

But the problem with that is, that miner is the one collecting all the money for these transactions. Like all the other miners who aren't running services like that don't have access to this extra money they could be making. That's a potentially centralizing thing. Like if the volume of demand for block space to do these things continues increasing, more people are willing to pay money, then only these few miners doing. this are going to make money off of that and all the other miners aren't. That's more money to invest in equipment to become a bigger share of the network cash rate. Like, that's a bad thing. And the entire reason that pressure exists is because miners have to go out of their way to proactively build these systems to accept transactions that want to pay them money. Smaller miners aren't going to

have their resources or time to do that. Bigger ones will. And these are just things that feed back into itself and are centralizing for mining. Whereas if you stop pretending that these filters will prevent these transactions from getting into a block and you let them actually propagate across the network, even very small miners now have access to this potential revenue that only big centralized miners and pools had before. Like it's a harm reduction strategy. Like this is possible. You can't stop it from being possible unless you actually try to fork the protocol to make these invalid at a consensus level. And pretending that you can has no effect except creating this negative centralizing pressure. So let's get rid of that.

Like it's not accomplishing anything and it's actively having a negative effect by pretending it does. So the last thing before we get into like the meat of this, just for a bit more context, is this isn't the first time there's been a debate about op return. So in 24, 14, which was before I got into Bitcoin, so I don't know much about this. There was a debate about, was that increasing the size of the up return then? I forget the details of what a limit was, if there was a limit. But the debate essentially came down to Vitalik Buterin, claiming that he had had discussions with core developers about using Op return to build something like Ethereum.

as a meta protocol on top of Bitcoin, and that the filters were in response to that. No developer I've ever talked to has, you know, validated that. Like, Vitalik did make comments along those lines, like publicly in other places, but there's, to my knowledge, nobody ever validated his assertion that he'd talked privately with core developers over. But it was that you had things like Satoshi dice and on-chain gambling service that just spammed data to actually decide bets on-chain.

Counter-party was roughly around that time, but you just had a lot of discussion about stuffing data on-chain for these other types of meta-protocals. And so the entire discussion, essentially, I want to remind everybody, was happening in the context. of before the block size wars came to a peak. Like, this was no longer, this was not a time where it was a foregone conclusion. Block size increases are off the table. Like Adam back, Peter Woollah, like very respected core developers openly talked about block size increases. He even had Bitcoin improvement proposals for them open at the time.

And so the discussion was how to leave enough. room for these types of meta protocols to have space to do these types of things, but not just open the floodgates and make it trivial to store massive files on China. So everybody kind of settled with the filters there and all these meta protocols, you know, just did their thing. But the point I want to end there with is kind of nobody at the time wanted to just actually at scale build something. thing and store just stupid amounts of information on chain. Like, you had some silly things like eternity wall was like open timestamps or in actually,

no, it was more like operturn Bob that Ben Carmen runs nowadays. It's just timestamp things on chain. But then Peter Todd built open timestamps. You can get the timestamp guarantee without that. Like there's there was always this kind of trend of those types of things just being rational and efficient and the meta protocols is there. own class of things just doing their thing. So I think that kind of gets onto the point, which is probably, at least for mechanic as an example, is probably the thing that is the crux

of this whole debate. It's like, what is Bitcoin? Like, should we be prioritizing Bitcoin as just a monetary network? And I think he feels like we're now being gaslit into thinking Bitcoin is a database where you should store people's data on your node at like at no cost, essentially. So, like, maybe as a question to you, what is Bitcoin? It is a database. I mean, that's what it literally is in terms of function. And I don't really understand why that triggers people so much to hear that. You know, it's really kind of silly. I can't even come up with an analogy or a metaphor for how silly it is because it's like calling a chair a chair and then somebody gets mad at you and starts arguing that's not a chair. That's not what that's for. But we use this database as money. And you know, the notion of using a blockchain for other things is not new. Like Satoshi himself before he disappears. even discussed the concept of BitDNS, an early predecessor to what became Namecoin.

And there were these conversations of what is a blockchain for? Like, we could do these things on Bitcoin. And Satoshi's kind of response to that was to invent merge mining, where miners could mine multiple blockchains at the same time, as long as there was a master blockchain. and the secondary ones kind of built their rules to assume their piggybacking on the master blockchain. And he was kind of like, you need to separate concerns, like a blockchain for this, a blockchain for that.

And this was actually the last comment he made on the block size. When telling people talking about BitDNS that these should be separate systems, Bitcoin users might want to restrict the size, of the blockchain so that it's easy to verify. And it's, that's what it comes down to is the block size, fees, like those are the only filter that work. If there is access demand for block space, it's going to get more expensive. And these massive transactions doing things like stuffing JPEGs on chain are going to be the first thing that stops paying. Like my tiny transaction that's actually moving Bitcoin, and that's all it's doing, is going to be absurdly cheaper than a two-megabyte

JPEG, because that block space is valuable. And it's that that's the only comprehensive way that you can really address this issue, is this needs to sort itself out in the market. Like, Bitcoin is a database. I think I would agree with that. But do you think it's fair to say that by removing, the operturn limit that we're incentivizing people to put more pictures on bitcoin rather than incentivizing the monetary transactions no they can already do that right now with inscriptions

and the witness data and it's actually cheaper to do it there like operturn doesn't change that at all like we're we're discussing literally a bitcoin layer two needing a small amount of extra space to not have to create unspendable outputs. That is what started this off. This has nothing to do with inscriptions or NFTs or anything like that. It is looking at an actual layer two, regardless of what you think about that type of layer two architecture, whether it's a good idea long term, is trying to function as a layer two. And going to the point of removing the limit entirely rather than just bumping it a little bit is kind of twofold. Like, it's a feudal limit.

It can be trivially bypassed at this point. There are multiple miners who run these dark memples and will accept anything. It's, it's, you're pretending. But it's also just the reality of look at how absurd everything has gotten over people who want to pretend here. like bumping the limit, okay, then what happens when some other layer two needs a little bit more space? Is it going to be the same nonsense and politicking over again? Like, just be done with it.

This filter accomplishes nothing to stop these things from winding up in a block if somebody wants to pay for that. Like, just get rid of it and be done with and move on to things that actually matter. But would the other option there not be to put more filters in to stop people, being able to bypass this one filter? Or is there always going to be a way around it? There is always a way around it. I just go straight to the miner. You cannot stop me. If I want to mine a consensus valid transaction and I'm willing to pay money for it, I'm just going to go to a miner. A hundred percent of the network could have your filter policy. I will just go to a minor. I don't care. I am a person motivated enough to be willing to pay money to do this. You can't

stop me at the relay policy level. So what I'm trying to understand is like, by the way, I've invited Mechanic on the show. So far, it doesn't seem like he's super keen to do it. But I really respect Mechanic. I think he's great. He's been on the show before. So I'm trying to understand like his perspective here. And is there a way that you can almost like steal man his argument? Or do you just completely butt heads on this and you can't see his side of this? I really can't. Like the most charitable kind of steel man I can put together is this is just like to feel better about something. I don't know.

Like it rationally at a purely logical level accomplishes nothing to stop these transactions from getting in a block if someone will pay for it. And it comes with very negative things. It creates mining centralization pressure. If these types of policies are widely deployed on the network, people have to go to those centralized relays. That starts undermining security for things like Lightning Network, which need to be able to see things quickly when they're broadcast to the network, that need to be able to see everything bidding because they have to bid against it to get confirmed quickly.

That's the security model of Lightning. And it has all of these negative compounding effects, but it does nothing to prevent a motivated actor from getting their non-standard transaction confirmed. Nothing. So help me understand that. That's a risk because it stops those transactions going into a Mempool. Instead, they're just going out of band directly to a minor. So everyone else can't see what's happening in the Mempool. Yeah.

Like you see, you don't see any of this until the block gets confirmed. Okay. But it's like, you know what I mean? Like, let's say I need to get confirmed now, right now. All I can do without an accurate view of the mempool is look at the last block and what was the high paying fee ban there. What happens if a bunch of transactions just dumped into the mempool right after that block? Fees went up like five sats of eBite. I don't see that just by looking at the last block.

I have to see the contents of the mempool now. Like, what's propagating now? And if the network is just filtering numerous things that are paying real fees, like in some cases, maybe paying exorbitantly high fees, and I can't see any of this, I don't actually have an accurate idea of what fee I need to pay to get confirmed now. And that can degrade my security model. So there's people on the other side of this argument are very concerned that this is like a cultural shift in Bitcoin and it's moving away from Bitcoin being money and basically becoming like a shit coin network. You're shaking your head there, but is that because you don't agree or because you think I've got the framing of that wrong?

It's because I don't agree and I think it's absurd because like that's what that's saying is that refusing. to stick your head in the ground and ignore reality is giving up on Bitcoin as money. That makes no sense. And just historically, like most of these people have zero contextual clue at all. Like these meta-protocals, like token protocols, they were invented on Bitcoin. Omni, Mastercoin, counterparty, XCP, NFTs. There is one silly thing on name coin. I can't remember.

But the real first NFT that went anywhere was Rare Pepe's on Bitcoin. These are not these external things that are just attaching to Bitcoin out of nowhere because shit coins are dying. These are all things that were originally created on Bitcoin and went to other systems, went to altcoins because. it was cheaper. It was easier over there. They could do more arbitrary things. These things are returning to where they came from. They have always been here. These are always things that have been done and existed on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just fine. The last wave of NFTs and tokens on Bitcoin

didn't kill it. These ones won't, and the next one won't. That is just melodramatic nonsense, like ignoring the reality of history. of things like BitVM as like roll-ups on Bitcoin, things like Botanics using Spider-Chain, all this stuff that's coming to Bitcoin that does look a lot like shitcoins. Like Botanics, for example, is basically Ethereum on Bitcoin. Do you see that as a good thing? Because that's something that I struggle with to see. I kind of see it as an inevitable thing.

I don't know if I see it as a good thing. I think that's depending on how you define good. Are these awesome things guaranteed to be useful for all Bitcoin? users, no. Are these things demonstrating that mine share and liquidity are starting to gravitate back towards Bitcoin? Yes. Are there some ideas in these projects that might actually be valuable to build on and look at in the long term? Like, yes. Like spider chains is essentially ignore the fact that the network is going to be EVM based. But spider chains itself, like how money is locked into the system, how the consensus of that system is being done, is like a very novel hybrid

of a federation done in a very different way compared to just a normal, the majority signs, that's it. And proof of stake as a second layer, where that might actually be liable as a way to build a system because it's attached to proof of work as a base, instead of just trying to pretend proof of stake can be the base layer consensus system of something. And like, frankly, like, who the hell is anybody to tell them that they can't try these things? Like, who are you? Who am I to go, no. Like, you can't try this, this system on Bitcoin and see if it actually works, if it can actually provide value to Bitcoin. Like, who the fuck is anyone in the space to tell anyone they can't do that? Yeah, that gets down to being almost like the social

police of what's a good enough transaction to be in Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. And I don't think that, like you say, no one's in the position to be that person. And that kind of gets back to the spam side of this argument. Like the people on the other side of this to you are calling all of these transactions spam. Like, what do you think spam is?

Do you think spam exists in Bitcoin? Spam is a completely subjective arbitrary term. Like, it's ultimately. what somebody doesn't want. Well, if it doesn't concern your Bitcoin, Bitcoin that somebody is sending to you, and they pay the fee, it's none of your business.

That's how the free market works. There is block space. Miners provide that block space when they find a block, and people can pay for it. That is the mind-blowing thing to me that I just don't comprehend because it's the antithesis of everything these people claim to stand for and believe in.

Freedom, self-sovereignty, but here they are lecturing what people can do with their own property. Like, it's, I tweeted something before we started recording. I guess the new thing to do is, what's his name on him? Matthew something.

You did that stupid movie, like, what is a woman or whatever, looking at transgender. I know who you mean. I forget his name, but I don't know what you mean. The new meme is, I guess, a clip from that movie. And what is a Bitcoin transaction? Whatever identifies as a Bitcoin transaction. Like, it's these people have inverted reality in their head. A Bitcoin transaction is any digital message built around an unspent coin in Bitcoin.

that meets the spending conditions that input defined and follows the consensus rules of Bitcoin. It is any digital message that fits that criteria. This is not feelings, this is not some postmodern subjectivism. That is an empirical objective fact. And these people are inverting things in their head. And I think why they don't see that, is because the types of traditional arguments they're trying to draw a comparison to here are essentially like,

I am not something, but I can be that something because I feel like that. Like I can be something that does not reflect reality because feelings. And what they're doing is they are inverting that. They are going this thing, which is this thing, which is this thing, thing in objective reality, a Bitcoin transaction, can't be that thing because of subjective feelings and just like postmodernist subjectivist nonsense. And they just, you see what I mean? Like they're the ones who are going la la la la and ignoring an objective empirical framework and then just shoving their own subjective feelings in the place of that and going, this is an objective framework when it's not. And it's just a really strange thing to observe happening. This episode is brought to you by CASA, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution. I've been using CASA

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If you want to find out more, visit Ledger.com and secure your Bitcoin today. That's L-E-D-G-E-R.com. I do think that they've kind of captured the mindshare of quite a lot of Bitcoiners, though. Like, Nott's went from being this thing that, I don't know, like six people ran. And the data shows that, like, a lot of people have moved over to Nod. knots in the last couple of weeks. Like, I think it's up to something, is it just under 5% of all nodes are now running knots? And that originally was like less than 1%. It was like less than 0.5%, I think.

So do you think that shows that a lot of Bitcoiners do believe that Bitcoin should just be money and are kind of throwing away this database side of the argument? Well, at least people who run public facing nodes, but that says nothing about the overall economic weight of those nodes. Like, okay, 5% of the network, that could in the reality of things be like 200 Bitcoin. That's meaningless in terms of consensus. But from a social aspect, like, yes, I do see a very large amount of people in this community, at least active people on places like Twitter, online communities that are.

and it's really kind of disturbing. It is, it's almost like, because at this point, like there just is no rational arguments. There is, there is like philosophically, there's no rational argument on a technical level. There's no rational argument.

Like, just their side of this debate is devoid of rationality. And yet they are using, inflaming rhetorical tricks, like comparing this situation, I don't know why they think this is a coherent analogy, to like immigration in Europe, like Muslim immigration, and going, this is, this can't be allowed because these aren't compatible and just drawing these ridiculous, absurd analogies to right-wing takes on, you know, foreign immigration. And actively demonizing and attack, developers who, hey, guess what? We need them. Bitcoin's a software project. Software needs developers. It doesn't just write itself.

And no, a AI algorithm that hallucinates and spits out incoherent, incorrect content, like half of the time you prompt it for anything, is not an answer to that. Over just incoherent nonsense. Like, they're actively, like, riling people up to harass developers, actively painting these developers personal lives and personal attitudes as reasons why they should be demonized and treated as enemies. And it's just fucked up. It's sick and fucked up. And I say that as, like I said when we first started,

I am a huge opinionated loudmouth. I have opinions on lots of things. I have gotten into, I don't know how many arguments and shit shows with their developers in this space who won't talk to me anyone. How things are being handled right now is something that is wildly inappropriate to me. And I'm a giant fucking prick. I mean, I agree with that. Is it almost like they're saying, I want Bitcoin to be this way? At the moment, it's not this way.

And you're like, okay, cool, that's just not Bitcoin. You know, I should maybe change my display name on Twitter for all times' sakes. But Bitcoin isn't about you. Bitcoin isn't about me. I don't get to decide what Bitcoin is. That's not my decision. That's not something within my power to define. Everybody who participates and uses Bitcoin cumulatively defines it.

It's not about you. But you don't get to say that. The thing that I haven't really enjoyed about that side of the argument as well is that they're framing this as like a war, the end of Bitcoin. Like if this goes through like Bitcoin's over, I think the CTO of Oceans said he'd sell all his Bitcoin if this happens. Like I feel like they are amplifying this message to a degree that it just doesn't need to go there. Yeah. But at the meantime, they're incredibly quiet about the math. massive Hoover vacuum of Bitcoin ETFs, sucking up all the coins, the complete lack of serious action by the Trump administration, who's supposedly our friend, on critical issues like privacy, the persecution of open source developers going on, the wild lack of scalability that we have right now, that is a huge problem when we're getting into the point of then they fight you.

the governments come in and try to tell us, oh, no, we can't do that because that's against the rules. You're in big boy world. Now you have to follow the rules. While we're on the cusp of that, they're crying about JPEGs. They are trying to twist and rile people up into actively demonizing and harassing the people who maintain this protocol that has made all of us, all the money that we've made, that gives all of us the utility and value that we have. This, this is a good thing. This, is just, this is insane, Danny. Like, this whole situation is insane. I definitely want to get onto your thoughts on like the Trump admin and stuff. But let's finish this point first. Because Cora found themselves like at the middle of this controversy. They have been like

muting and blocking accounts from commenting on the poor request on GitHub. We were talking about this just before we started recording because like I have been on GitHub like twice. I don't go on But do you think they have handled this badly in any way? No. I think this was handled completely appropriately. A discussion in a poll request is for reviewing and commenting on the code in the poll request for the conceptual design. It's not for debating whether Bitcoin is money or people are spammers or not. or whether somebody is invested in a layer two company that doesn't actually need the

poll requesting question to work, it would just make it less damaging to the rest of the network if we had it. And just it's no, I think they acted completely appropriately. Like if people come into these places, these discussion threads, and just start derailing them, disrupting them, insulting people, try to get on a soapbox and turn it into a debate over what is Bitcoin man? No, ban them. That's not what that place is for. Like, there are a million other places you can talk to developers. You can tell them your opinion on things. Like, that's not what the place where they actually write and review code is for, period.

Okay. But what about the idea that, like, I actually don't know the full details on this. So maybe you can explain this. But if this goes through, um, I, I think Cora are looking to remove the ability for the node runners to actually configure this setting in their node. I don't know exactly the state of that. Will you explain that and then we can talk about whether that's a good or a bad thing? Well, that's what the state of this poll request is. Although there is another one, I believe InstaGibs opened, that would remove the limits by setting the default to the box size, but keep the configure option and would also allow multiple oper-turn outputs, I believe. But the reason to remove it is it does nothing.

Like, this is the same dynamic as the full replace-by-fee scenario, where policy was changed so that you could replace by-fia transaction, even if you didn't mark the flag that was supposed to be, you can only replace by fee if you mark this flag. And all that needs is 10% of the network to adopt this. And then they will broadcast all of those transaction amongst themselves. They will get to miners and they will get mined. And it doesn't matter that 90% of the network didn't turn that on.

Like it's working. The transactions are getting to the network, getting to the miners, getting confirmed. And 90% of the network filtering that isn't. stopping it. So there's no reason to leave that option. All it does is throw off the mempool that you have available for P-estimation for things like lightning nodes or other layer twos. It slows down your block validation time because the way that blocks are propagated around the network now, they don't actually send the whole block. You should have all or most of the transactions already just relaying around your mempools.

And what miners and nodes do is just have the header and a little sketch, I guess is a term for it, of what's in the block, and you get that. And then fill in all the transactions yourself, and if you're missing a couple, you get those, and then you validate the block. Well, when everybody is filtering all these things that wind up in a block, and you're just slowing down the block propagating, like, you're slowing down your node validate it. That's all you're doing. Like, that's the only thing having that option

if you left it and set it on accomplishes. It does nothing, so just get rid of it. Yeah, I see what you're saying. But maybe there's an argument that, like, at least throw a bone to the people that don't like this and allow them to configure their own node themselves. Well, you can go run nuts. But, like, you know, my attitude about it is, like, off shit, go run nuts.

You don't like what this developer team is doing. Use some other teams thing. But like this, this does not work is a scalable thing. If Bitcoin is a project has to stop at every PR request that some person who doesn't actually understand what's going on, gets upset about something and change the entire development plan around that. Like that's insane.

Like if this really triggers you so much, delete core and go run knots. Yeah, that's fair. So you obviously were wanting to come on the show and talk about this. I know it's been really frustrating for you, like the last few weeks of the kind of discourse. What do you kind of want people to leave with from this? What do you want people to understand?

And maybe on top of that as well, where do you think this will actually go? What do you think will happen next? Well, I guess the thing on this topic to end with is like just stop stop regurgitating moral arguments just because they sound good when it comes to technical matters. Like this is a technical system. Like this is actual engineering going on. Like moral arguments and analogies and metaphors, like that's not how you discuss things like that.

Like, did you discuss how the timing on the cylinders in an engine? should be set in metaphors and analogies? No, because I'm pretty sure that the mechanic who did that would just brick your engine. Like, that's not how this works. And it's like, it's okay to not fully understand what's going on. It's okay to have to ask questions and figure shit out. But what makes these situations a giant shit show is where somebody who doesn't really fully understand something starts talking aggressively and assertively like they do. do because they're just repeating some rhetoric they heard from somewhere else instead of actually spending the time to figure out what's going on. And it's like, this whole situation is that on

steroids. It's a technical issue, like, pure and simple. This is a matter of what are users doing in the real world? And how does that intersect with the software that they're using? Like, this software is designed a certain way, to function a certain way, to restrict or not restrict certain things. And what we have here is a situation of there were gentle restrictions for something, and users are getting around that.

So the logical thing, these are not working, remove them. Like, it's that simple. And as far as like this is a cultural issue, you don't get to tell people what Bitcoin's culture is. You are not the culture police.

You don't get to define how people choose to interact with a decentralized system. It defines itself through the characteristics of how people interact with it cumulatively. I don't know what else to say, except I feel like a lot of people I've known for a very long time never actually understood Bitcoin.

Well, you have that meme that's, I don't know if it's your pin tweet, but it's like the one in the car about Bitcoin as being idiots. I'll put that on the video. All right, cool. Well, I hope, well, I hope Mechanic would come on the show and talk about this. I've asked him, I'd like to hear his perspective, but we'll see. But before we close out, you were talking about Trump before, and I do want to talk about that, because I,

I know you're not going to be in Vegas. You refuse to go to another political conference. What do you think of like the state of the Trump admin and Bitcoin? I think that they see votes and money. And that's all I've seen out of them so far. Like they keep, they're just winding back things with executive orders and the executive branch. okay, that's so. Like the Trump administration did a bunch of pro-Bitcoin things and their first administration.

And then Biden just rolled it all back because you just did it through the executive. And that's just snap. The president can flip the switch on and off. And they're very quiet, particularly on things like the samurai wallet case, the tornado cash case, the Bitcoin fog case. all these instances of open source developers being legally prosecuted for doing nothing but writing software. Like I, these people are not our friends. And I really think that a lot of people in this space are in for a rude awakening at the end of all of this. Like the government is not our friend.

And I cannot believe how many people in this space I'm trying to tell people they are. Yeah, no, I agree with that. And it's something I found really hard is like it's one thing to say maybe this like nation state adoption of Bitcoin. We'll see what that actually looks like because so far it's just been words. But like there's one thing to think that's inevitable. And it's an entirely other thing to be sort of cheerleading the state in the way that Bitcoiners have been. And I've been really surprised to see that. Do you think this kind of like politicization and financialization of Bitcoin does pose like an inherent risk?

Yes. I think that's the biggest risk to Bitcoin at this point. And what is the risk there? What's the risk you see? That it becomes captured. Consensus is decided by the economic actors actually using the network. If that winds up just becoming financial institutions, people trivially put under the thumb of government regulation, if we continue meandering and dealing with nonsense like the fifth freakout over my JPEGs instead of figuring out how to actually scale this protocol in a self-custodial way, it's over.

Like, yeah, okay, the number might go up. You might get rich if you have some nice K-Y-C, like paint-free coins that you were able to hold on to over the years. No one will have freedom money. No one will have privacy. No one will have censorship resistance because everybody just sat back on their ass and assumed victory was insured and cried about JPEGs being the existential threat that's going to kill Bitcoin, the guaranteed predestined thing that was going to topple governments and change the entire world. It's a state of complete cognitive dissonance.

I've said this a few times on the show, but one of my favorite quotes was from Thomas from Pubkey. he said, we're all going to be rich and depressed because the project failed. And like, if you looked out at potential future timelines, I could 100% see that being one of them. But what do we actually have to do to avoid that then? Is this about acting quickly now before Bitcoin can be captured? To a degree, yeah. But that's kind of the needle you got a thread. We have to act quick to a degree.

We have to start scaling this. actually do the things we need in terms of protocol upgrades to give us the room to do that. But we also can't just rush in a panic and do it like snap, snap, because that's how you make mistakes. That's how you make bad decisions that have bad consequences. And that eye of the needle keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller with all the type of stupidity going on right now, that continues downplaying the serious risks we're facing right now

and wasting everybody's time crying about meaningless nonsense. Like somebody made a Bitcoin transaction I don't like. What are we going to do to stop that, Dad? But what are the things we need to help Bitcoin scale? Are you talking about things like CTV or is it bigger than that? Covenants. Like we're going to need more than CTV, but we need efficient, affordable ways to share control of UTIP.

XOs. And like, there is no silver bullet right now. There is no do this and the problem solved. But there are lots of things that can get us a lot further along. And we need to start doing it. What do you think of things like Rusty Russell's Great Script Restoration, which is essentially just turn all the op codes back on, I think. Is that fair? It's a little more complicated. There's also a new scheme called Verops to kind of safely construct. validation costs so that even though we turned everything back on, like, nodes are still affordable to run. Like, people can't do things to, like, explode verification costs.

But that's the gist of it with that caveat. I think long term, it's a great North Star to shoot for, but it's pretty clear momentum petered out behind that last year. Like, we need to start piecemeal. We need to stop looking for the silver bullet. that takes insane amounts of effort everybody has to get on board and buy into. We need to just start with whatever we can start with.

That's safe. It's actually giving us a good bit of functionality for the time spent dealing with the nonsense to get it done. I mean, the ossifier kind of side of Bitcoiners has definitely grown, I think, partially because of Michael Saylor. What kind of likelihood do you think that we get a Bitcoin? Bitcoin upgrade in the next three to five years. At this point, I think it'll be a miracle.

I'm half convinced we're ossified already, and everyone's just ended up now. I could believe that. And then last thing I wanted to talk to you about was like the quantum side of things. How closely have you been following this? A little bit. Do you think that's going to pose a real threat to Bitcoin? It could, but I, they, It's, that's a really screwy situation.

I forgot who put it to me this way. But any actor that could conceivably have a performance enough quantum computer to do something that could harm Bitcoin, like the NSA or MI6, they have every incentive in the world to shut their fucking mouth and never let anybody find out that exists. So no stealing all the Bitcoin because that finding gives it away. And then you have all these huge tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, dumping all this money into research and development. And they have every incentive in the world to wildly over-exaggerate where they're at because, you know, shareholders. And so I think like the whole landscape is kind of just a shit show of like what. is actually an accurate assessment. Like, so like I'll say this. Like if a performant quantum computer comes into the world, we have a big fucking problem to deal with. But there is in my mind nothing

out there that gives certainty to a timetable. Like it could be never. It could be 50 years from now. It could be holy shit. In two years it happened. How that happened so fast? Like I just, I don't see enough information to really gauge that beyond just, I pulled a hunch out of my ass and I'm pretending it's more solid than that. Yeah, the really interesting side of that conversation to me is not necessarily like the timeline for getting quantum computers. I think probably given a long enough time, it's inevitable at some point. It's really what do we do when we get them in terms of all the old coins that are either lost or never going to be touched again? And do we freeze a load of those coins or do we just let them be stolen? And I think that's going to become a bigger conversation

going forward. And like, I firmly am on the side of, I don't think you can freeze someone's coins just because you assume they're not active. But interestingly, I think the economic weight of that argument will be behind freezing those coins. Yeah. I think that's completely unacceptable. It's just a violation of like a bedrock principle of Bitcoin. Like, if you can't provide the witness, like it's not your coin. And, you know, I know quantum computers is a wrench thrown into that, but it's, that doesn't fundamentally change a guarantee Bitcoin needs to be able to make in my mind. I think Hunter Beast and Mike from Marathon both have a proposal hourglass. And that idea is to kind of restrict block space so that only one,

transaction spending coins that are quantum vulnerable can be in a block at a time. So you kind of stretch out like how long it's going to take to steal all these coins. Instead of a frenzy in a day, it's something like eight months or something. But then you also create this dynamic where if you have multiple actors with a quantum computer, they're going to be fee sniping each other. Like, so you're going to have in practice probably most of that money, if not all of it, just wind up going to minor fees. And so that'll be like a nice smooth out reward for minors without us having to freeze things. I've not heard about that.

That makes sense. I think that is probably the best solution I've heard so far how to deal with that. Yeah, I'd agree with that. Shinobi, this has been amazing. Is there anything else you want to talk about before we close out? Can we please stop being stupid? people. Please.

It's a big ask. I'm trying to stop being stupid, but it's hard. Yeah, I appreciate the time, Shinobi. Shame I won't see you in Vegas, but I'm sure I'll catch you soon. We'll bump into each other somewhere. Do you want to send anyone anywhere before we close out?

Well, I guess if you are still trying to make heads or tails of covenants, instead of getting distracted by spam and JPEC, I am almost done with a series of articles explaining all the major covenant proposals that's been being published on Bitcoin magazine. I just pushed the OpCat one Friday. There's two more left. Check contract verify and op tweak verify.

And yeah, hopefully somebody out there might actually want to go learn something to have informed. conversation, I hope, might help. Yeah, go check out the articles. Thank you, Shinobi. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on day.