What Bitcoin Did - The Fight For Bitcoin’s Future | Samson Mow

Episode Date: September 27, 2025

Samson Mow is the CEO of JAN3 and former CSO at Blockstream. In this episode, we get into the growing rift between Bitcoin Core and Knots, why mistrust in Core development is at an all-time high, and what it means for the future of the network. We discuss the battle over spam and data storage on-chain, whether Bitcoin should ossify or adapt, and how governance really works in Bitcoin. Samson breaks down why the UTXO set could become a systemic risk, how mempool fragmentation is reshaping the network, and why multiple implementations of Bitcoin may be both a blessing and a curse. In this episode: - The origins of the Core vs. Knots debate - Spam, filters, and the slippery slope of arbitrary data on Bitcoin - UTXO bloat, miner incentives, and decentralization risks - How nation-state adoption may trigger the suddenly moment for Bitcoin THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Samson Mow: https://x.com/Excellion

Is Bitcoin for data transmission and storage or is it for money? There are so many dimensions to the argument that it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what the crux of the issue is. There's a massive amount of mistrust on Bitcoin Core development as a whole right now. It looks corrupt. I don't want to say it is corrupt, but it definitely looks corrupt. If you make a change and no one is willing to run your software, then you might as well have just not done it because it has zero effect. I think the nation state adoption is coming. These things happen very quickly. It's like literally gradually and then suddenly.

It's simply a matter of time before we see a massive run up and we see a massive nation state phomo panic. Everyone has a sense in their head that something is off. It puts the suddenly very close to now and it could trigger it any time. Bitcoin price is definitely on the verge of O'Mea. Welcome to the show. First time on the new What Bitcoin did. Good to see you, man. How are you? I'm hanging in there, Danny. Good to be on the new show, my first episode on the new one.

I know. I'm excited. And this is the most requested topic at the moment by a long way. Under every single video that I post, the first comment is always, when are you going to talk about Nots? I did cover this with Mechanic on a show and I had Shinobi on the show, maybe six months ago now. But the whole conversation has kind of got worse, I think. The level of discourse has got worse. It's devolved into something that I've been kind of a bit nervous to kind of get into. And I tried to set up a debate with a few people from the not side and a few people from the core side. I try and have like a very honest, calm conversation about this.

But no one wants to talk to each other anymore. So I'm glad that we can do this, Samson. I think you're a voice of reason in this. So we're going to get into it. All right, let's do it, Danny. So should we start? I think it would be good. There's obviously, we spend all our time on Bitcoin Twitter.

We follow this stuff. But there'll be a lot of the listeners that maybe don't know exactly what's going on. So can we start by just adding some context? Can you explain what's happened here over the last six, 12 months? Well, why don't you take a stab at it? And I can tell you if you got it right. That's a good barometer for, you know, the average person's understanding. Not that you're average, but you're less in it.

I'm slightly below average. So obviously, I can't remember the exact date, but Core came out and said they're going to remove the opereturn limit. Then this other faction of Bitcoiners have been very annoyed about that because they're worried about spam on Bitcoin, what could be put into the Bitcoin blockchain. And I think this kind of comes down to a sort of a hearts versus minds debate where people ideologically don't want Bitcoin to become something, even if technically you can already do all that stuff on Bitcoin. and the reason that core are implementing these changes is to try and make Bitcoin more efficient. They're not necessarily trying to just allow spammers on chain, would be my take. Yeah, I mean, it's a very convoluted thing. And there are so many dimensions to the argument that it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what the crux of the issue is.

There's the whole debate about, you know, is it spam? And can we stop spam? Should we stop spam? There's the debate upon is Bitcoin money or is it arbitrary data? And do we want Bitcoin to be just a cryptographic blob, a cryptographic accumulator in Adam back's words? Or do we want to say it's money? And then there's the whole facet of just core versus knots, developers being against knots and knots against core. and that goes into another rabbit hole of, you know,

what is a bug even. Because if you go back in time to where it kind of kicked off, it is really the Ordinoles inscription spam, right? And that was when Luke had a, Luke logged a bug, CV 2023-5048, basically saying that these new protocols are bypassing data carrier size. And a lot of core developers just said, nope, not a bug, it's a feature.

So they kind of change documentation to fix the bug. And I think that is kind of where, in my mind, the schism happened. And the fallout now over Knott's versus Core and Opper Turn is downstream of that moment in time. So it's a big can of worms, I would say, overall. But the net effect is really, maybe it's a battle over the, core repo. Because Core is kind of booted Luke now. You know, like when they were first proposing the change shop return, they kind of were banning people and locking the thread to prevent people from knacking and then unlocking it to act it and then relocking it. It's just an incredibly

childish thing that they were doing. But, you know, Luke is kind of excommunicated from the Church of Core now. And that's probably a major factor in the ongoing battle. You know, he's got knots gaining traction, a lot of traction, and I would say Ocean is overall gaining a lot of hash rate too. So the whole situation is kind of a really bad situation that we got into that could have been avoided, I believe, if there were more people listening to Luke at that time and we nipped the spam issue in the bud early on.

But here we are. I mean, this is such a minefield. Even in everything you said there, there were a few things that I wanted to pick out. And just quickly, because I want to get into the core of the debate, and I don't want to get into these little minutia bits, but you talked about how Core were banning people from commenting on GitHub. And this is something that I spoke, again, both to Shinobi and Mechanic about.

And I think mechanics take on it's more interesting because he was on the side that was getting, you know, kicked out and not allowed to comment. Yeah. GitHub maybe isn't the place to have the debates about what Bitcoin ideologically should be. It should be more the place you have technical debate. And I think Mechanic even conceded that, that maybe that is not the correct forum to have those conversations. It's difficult to say.

I mean, where is the forum to discuss what is a bug, right? If you go back to what I pointed out as the origin of the split, then, you know, where was that place to discuss it. You know, that was, it was technical forums or GitHub and the mailing list, but that didn't really result in a good outcome, I think. But, you know, it comes down to the, what is the governance? And we like to say there's no governance, but there really is governance, right? There are leaders and core.

The maintainers, you know, have a big weight in, you know, what happens, what gets merge. and their acts and knacks carry more weight, whether they believe it or not, then, you know, just your ordinary contributor. So it comes down to, I think, governance. And the question of where these broader topics are hashed out is definitely something that's not yet answered. And I don't really have an answer. Is it on X? It seems to be, yeah.

I don't know, but that seems to be where it is right now, right? Before we get into the kind of crux of the issue, should we lay out our biases? Because I think then everyone who's listening knows what side of this were coming from. And so for me personally, I don't think core is without fault. Don't get me wrong. I think the big issue has come from the communication of what they're doing and why they're doing it, I think. But I wouldn't feel comfortable myself running knots.

And we're going to get into the reasons why. But really, it just comes down to the fact that it's maintained and run by a single person. Even if Luke's brilliant, he's done amazing things for Bitcoin. that's still an issue for me. And like the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is you really don't have to do anything. Like if you don't like the change that's happening, just don't upgrade. And so that's probably where I'm at where like running Core 29 is my most likely path after this. I don't know where you stand.

Right. So I'm kind of in the middle. I probably lean more towards knots, but I also see the value in core as a whole. I think there are a lot of problematic individuals in Corps and a lot of structural problems with the organization itself. And I don't want to get into it, but eventually, Danny, you're going to have someone on and they're going to air a lot of dirty laundry,

dealing from backstabbing, internal politics, brigading, canceling people. There's a laundry list of stuff. And you'll get it eventually, I think. It'll come to light. But, you know, there are problems there, but there are good developers. There are talented developers

that know a lot and have worked on a lot. But at the same time, you have a lot of newer developers that seem to have ulterior motives or have different goals and are doing things that people can perceive to be conflicted and potentially bad for Bitcoin.

And I agree with your feedback on knots. Those are very common resistance points to running it, that it is mostly Luke. I think there are more contributors, and there will be more. But, you know, it is a project largely owned by a Luke. So I'm kind of in your camp. I would say I'm going to stick with 29, not even 29.1, but 29.

And I won't upgrade. And this is generally the recommendation I'm making, which is let's not upgrade. Let's just wait and see. And I think there's an opportunity for a third major Bitcoin client fork. or branch, whatever you want to call it, fork kind of triggers people, but just like another B9 clone of Bitcoin Core that is kind of the middle road,

removing some of the more contentious changes that Core did and maintaining security fixes. Because you can say you don't have to upgrade, and that's often a counterpoint from the core side. Like, oh, you don't like what we're doing. Don't upgrade then or run something else. But then, you know, when people run something else, they go, you're stupid for running that other thing, right?

But you know, you also cannot not upgrade indefinitely. You have to upgrade at some point. Maybe one year, two years. If you're a mining pool or an exchange, I think, you know, probably in the one year mark because there will be optimizations and bug fixes. So, yeah, I think I'm in the middle ground and there is a middle path through some of this mess. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack Bitcoin at the same time? Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockware, you can.

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I've got no problem if people want to go run a different implementation. That's completely their choice. I'm not going to scream at people and tell them they're being done. It's just not what I'm choosing to do. But there's a problem with that. There's a problem with that, Danny.

So I don't know if you notice, but the core faction is getting more agitated, and it has to do because of the increase in knots node runners and their impact on the network itself. So what you're seeing is the Mempool fragmenting because people are filtering. And that has downstream implications on the network, like compact blocks are affected. And you have the more increased likelihood that mining pool, will have private pools. And that has additional impacts too. Like RBF can be impacted as well

because you don't see all the transactions or you're not able to estimate fees as accurately. And that can lead to some things like lightning pinning attacks too. So my feeling is like they realize that there's a problem now, but their toolkit generally involves yelling at people and saying, you know, just listen to core. And that doesn't really work either. So there is a crisis, I believe, in the core camp.

I see a lot of the comments and a lot of people on Twitter who genuinely believe that Core 30 is going to destroy Bitcoin. That's something I wholeheartedly disagree with. I want to know your kind of take on that. I think the whole conversation has got too inflammatory. Yeah, I would disagree with the Nats camp in that it's going to end things. But I also think it is not a good idea to remove all of these defaults. because, you know, if pools upgrade blindly,

then they're going to have an impact on the network. So you'll have, you know, larger opertons, and you'll encourage other projects to build on this new Bitcoin because there is no deterrent. There is no, you know, disposition from the developers of the main Bitcoin client to resist these external protocols and resist spam. So I think there needs to be a detriment.

But again, if everyone did upgrade to 30, I don't think it's the end of the world. But I also see the increasing adoption of knots is causing problems for how the core developers view the network should be. All right. We've kind of set the table there. I want to get into kind of the actual details of this. I think probably the best place to start is with spam, because that is where this whole conversation came from. In your mind, what is spam? What counts as spam on Bitcoin?

Well, spam is non-native data to the Bitcoin network. So you can say that you don't know what spam is, but, you know, what is a Bitcoin transaction? If you download the Bitcoin client and you get some Bitcoin, like someone sends you Bitcoin and you send someone else Bitcoin, that is, you know, that's the main use case of the network, sending and receiving Bitcoin. And that is not sending pictures and other things. Like there is arbitrary data, and that's usually stored in Op Return, like 83 bytes of data.

And it's been like that for a very long time because you can store a hash of something or a double hash. Open timestamps uses it. Various other protocols might embed a little bit of data. But that's been generally deemed safe, and acceptable with general consensus slash agreement. Consensus seems to be a trigger word these days.

People like to argue, oh, that's not a consensus rule. But we're not saying it in that meaning. We're meaning, like, do people agree? And people agree. Operatoran at 83 bytes is generally accepted as okay. But, you know, when you start moving towards larger blobs of data, I think that's a slippery slope. And you'll come to see, like, most of this discussion

is really about slippery slopes. There are slippery slopes everywhere. So this is one of the things that I've not fully, like when it comes to what is spam. So a company like Simple Proof, for example, they're using open timestamps to put election data in Bitcoin. That's not a Bitcoin transaction. But it seems like at least a decent proportion of the Knots crowd are okay with that.

So what I want to know is why that is not spam, but say someone puts like WikiLeaks cables on the block chain, that might be spam. Like, how do you draw the line and where do you draw the line? Yeah, it's a difficult line. So I would say, like, something small, like 83, you could convince me 160 bytes, but, you know, when you go past that, I think it's obvious that you're just trying to store large blobs of data. And it could be images, there could be other things. I think even in ordinals, inscriptions, things like that are also spam because they're not sending Bitcoin. They're send, they're using Bitcoin to send something else. I mean, you can go back and look at color coins,

but same thing. But I think as long as you're not harming the network, and I think we can generally agree that bloating the UTO, UTXO set is harming the network, then it's okay. So if you're time stamping, you're putting very little data, you're paying fees, that's good. But you can pay fees and bloat the UTXO set or, you know, embed data and images and whatnot. And I think that is spam. but it really comes down to a blend of harm and what exactly is your intent. Okay, so we should probably talk about why Cora are doing this, why they're removing the limit on Opp return, because you can already fill a 4 megabyte block with a single transaction that is not a Bitcoin transaction.

Like, we saw this happen last year, I think it was. I think Luxor maybe with a mining pool, I can't exactly remember, but they included a block that was a single transaction and it was just one image. So I think cause argument for doing this is that it's a less harmful way of putting data in the Bitcoin blockchain rather than using the witness data or something else. Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult topic. So you can remove the limit. And I think the rationale there is that this is something that can be done already.

Therefore, you know, the filters don't work. and if you remove the filter, then I believe you're encouraging more of it, especially because there has typically historically been resistance to this type of behavior. And, you know, when Luke was more influential in core and less, you know, ostracized. ...pushed off to the side, ostracized, then I think we would have seen a different scenario play out. But, yeah, I would say that stuff is spam. and all of the other protocols that are kind of leveraging Bitcoin

in an affinity scam type of way. Like, you know, this is on Bitcoin. No, it's not on Bitcoin. It's a separate thing that points to Bitcoin and points to, you know, arbitrary data stuck on Bitcoin. But so this kind of comes down to the monetary maximalist argument. That's the way that someone like Rizzo would frame it. And this is where I said to mechanic, like ideologically, I agree.

Like, I want Bitcoin to be money. I agree that pictures on Bitcoin is absolutely not what it was intended for, and I don't like to see it. My issue is whether there is like a reality to that that this is something we can't stop. And like filters, do they even work? Like if we can just get around them, why not have something that is the least harmful way of doing them as the sort of common way of doing them? Right. So, I mean, filters do work. I mean, they've worked for a long time.

It's just recently what we see is people are bypassing the filters, right? Do you have a Lieber Relay? And, you know, that's, it's kind of meant to show the Natsky's your filters don't work. But it's not necessarily a good thing because you're kind of showing that all of these standardness features are bypassable. And they are all there for a reason to maintain Bitcoin as money, not as arbitrary data. and to also keep the Bitcoin network usable for the purpose of money, like transacting between you and I.

So it's kind of bad in a way, and you can view it as an attack. I think the core side likes to say private memples are bad and harmful, but, you know, bypassing the filters is also a bad thing because they are there for a reason. I'll give you another example. You can't say filters don't work. There's another filter called dust relay fee, which was implemented to prevent spam on a network

like from Satoshi Dice back in the day. That is still there, and that is what's holding back the network from being inundated by spam. But, you know, someone could for shits and giggles, you know, start relaying spam and then convince some miner somewhere to start mining the spam. And then guess what? The filter doesn't work because you weakened it.

So it's not like something to be, proud of that, yeah, you can bypass the filter. It's more of a politeness. It's more of a standard. It's more of a way to operate that's not in consensus, at least not yet. And it should be respected in general because it is better for the network. Another example I'd give is traffic. If you go to the third world, you know, you see congestion in the intersections because everyone's trying to get to where they're going a bit faster. They're cutting people off, running lights, running signs. And in Western countries, generally, that's not the case

because people generally follow the rules. But that doesn't mean you can run a red light. Mechanically, you can run a red light. You can cut someone off. But if everyone does that, then guess what? It degenerates into this messy blob of traffic. So I guess that's my point. Like, there was another example.

I think Stephen Levera posted it. It was Mac Corello saying, you know, Peter Todd and this other guy are smart cows that show the other cows how to bypass the filters, you know, like you can open the gate. So, you know, it's always been the case. You could always bypass these things, right? But I don't think we would agree that we should bypass dust relay fee and start seeing a massive amount of dust clog up the network. But here we are. So in your analogy, could you ask you? argue that fees are the filter and the reason that in the West we don't run red lights and speed

and is because you'll get fined and you'll get points on your license. That's one part of it, I think, but generally, like, you know, there's that shopping cart example. Like the shopping cart is the ultimate test of civilization. Do you put it back or do you just leave it there? There's no punishment, right? But generally, people put it back or they try to aggregate them in one spot. But that's a good example.

You have to follow some, you know, level of good behavior if you want what's good for the network. And I think another example would be something like immigration. So, you know, I can also, you're from the UK, right? So I can also show you you can bypass legal immigration by taking a rubber boat across the English channel and, you know, just landing there and you have all these benefits and you bypass the whole system. But is that necessarily a good thing? Because if you look at immigration or illegal immigration as a parallel to spam on the network, eventually there is so much illegal immigration that you have systemic societal problems. And further down the road, maybe the illegal migrant population eclipses that of the local population.

So where do you draw the line? because, you know, you don't want to torpedo the boat's coming in, but you have to try to enforce those rules or else eventually, you know, the migrant population becomes the new population, and you can say the same for spam. Eventually, the network is just all dust and spam, and you and I can no longer transact. That's, you know, hyperbole,

but you get the general directional tracking of where this is going, right? It's a slippery slope. So do you disagree with the idea that fees are the filter then? In the sense that, like, obviously, blocks are pretty empty at the moment anyway. But if enough monetary transactions come online, they will just price out the rest of this stuff anyway. Well, fees are a filter, but it's not the only filter, right? So you can have perverse external incentives, whereby you have some external protocol to Bitcoin that can pay for the fees and can spam the network, right?

If you look at ordinal, that's one. And it's kind of like an ICO, but with pictures. They're selling these PFPs or whatever wizard images and cat images. And then they have a war chest, and they don't care. They can print more stuff. Or more adversarially, you could have a company that launches an ICO raises a few billion dollars. And, you know, fees are already low, and they can create a new protocol called proof of empty blocks. I talked about this on the pod with Cedric.

And now they're going to pay miners to mine empty blocks because that is how. how they designed their mechanism to generate coins on their chain. Right? So there's a lot of things that you have to kind of think that it is an attack and mitigate it. You can say fees are the filter, but it's not always a filter. And the other angle to this is we are weakening the fees as a filter mechanism because we increased the block size during the block size war. So you have less fee pressure.

And in 29.1, you lowered the minimum. fees to 0.1 sats per V-byte at a time in which fees are already historically low and declining for miners. And you can argue, well, the miners could set it higher, but, you know, that's not necessarily how it always goes. A lot of pools will run defaults, and some of them may be more interested in short-term economics and getting, you know, $100 more in fees versus the long-term economic outlook. And, you know, that can be self-sabotaging, because now you just, lowered fees by a factor of 10-ish. And it's going to be hard to build that up even back to one sat per V-byte, much less higher at a time where you have more L2 traffic than ever before

with lightning, liquid, and you have ETFs that take even more transactions off-chain. So there's a lot of nuance and dimensionality to all of this. I actually think the miners taking transactions that under one sap of ebyte is a really interesting and useful comparison here, because you were talking about the dust limit before. And I think this has only really happened over the last few months, but miners have been including transactions that are under a sap of ebyte. And they've done that while probably, I'm guessing here, but 99 plus percent of nodes would not have that as policy.

So is that not another example of filtering not necessarily working? Well, filters only work if we generally agree that these should be the filter. If you are bypassed and Libra relay can bypass that and some miners mining it, others might figure out, okay, well, why don't we get that too? And maybe they didn't do the economic analysis and see, well, it's only like 100 bucks. Or even if I'm mining ordinales, it's like marginally nothing. But overall, these kind of behaviors are detrimental to the network as a whole. So it's kind of like bringing down and making it harder for miners if there was a downturn in price that they would be able to survive, right, because they're getting less money. But it's also when you

normalize it through the Bitcoin Core client, that's even worse because you have some people showing that, okay, this can be done. And Core has said, you know, we generally try to align to network usage and, you know, what people are actually doing. So you show this can happen and then core drops the limit. And you can say the same for dust, right? Like, you know, start mining dust. and start relaying dust, and then Core will adjust it in 30.1 and remove that limit. Because I've said that in the past. All of these things are guardrails, and we should be removing these guardrails. Do you know why the miners are actually including these?

Because I can't quite figure that out in the sense that if someone's willing to pay, you know, 0.1 sap of ebyte or whatever for a transaction, and miners just say no, are they not eventually just going to pay one sap of ebyte? I don't understand their economic incentive to do it. I don't know either. Maybe they're not looking at it closely enough. Maybe they're not doing analysis. Maybe they're just following what others are doing,

and they're seeing, oh, it's a little bit more revenue, and they're hoping it becomes more revenue. But, you know, when you have a sizable drop like that, it's difficult to build back up the pressure. And it's even worse if it becomes a default, I believe. Okay, so I'm sounding very, like, anti-nots here. And I'm not. It's just I'm trying to steal man this to get to kind of the bottom of it.

But if what we saw the sub once out of Vibai transactions going through 99% of nodes or whatever it was, not running that as policy, what kind of proliferation does not have to get to actually make these filters impactful? I've seen some people do a calculation, even if they're 80%, it doesn't matter. But I think this is beside the point. The point is you can always bypass a lot of these standardness rules, all of them. They can all be bypassed. So it's just a question of can we get some alignment to put some of them back into place and, you know, bring some sanity back. And I think it goes back to fixing the data carrier bypass bug. And I don't know.

It's difficult, I think, at this point, to reconcile because everyone's really entrenched in their position. Okay. So why do you think Core have done this? I don't know. like their argument is that you can do it anyway so we should not get in the way right and their thinking i believe is that at least they've said it they want um they don't want private mempool so they want um to kind of unify policy across the network and they hope i'm kind of steel manning for steel manning for them but they hope that um the people spamming will stop using

UTXOs and go to Opper turn because now they've removed some of these defaults. And it also reduces the risk that you need to go to a minor directly to broadcast the transaction because the network as a whole will accept these larger operturns. Do you think there's kind of a disconnect between Bitcoiners and Bitcoin Core at this point? And is that the widest that disconnects ever been? I would say so. I mean, there's a massive amount of mistrust on Bitcoin Core development as a whole right now. And I can definitely see that perspective.

If you look at what's going on, they're kind of antagonistic to users. And you see this in a lot of their communication. It's almost like they look down on users. And actually, you can find quotes in posts on X if you want to look for those. But there's also the fact that it looks corrupt. I don't want to say it is corrupt, but it definitely looks corrupt because they're rewriting documentation to avoid fixing bugs. And there are people that have interest in these spammy projects like ordinals and tap and whatnot. And they're all over and they're in the mailing list discussing stuff and very friendly with the core developers and maintainers.

So I can definitely see why there's this massive mistrust of core development. And then there's the resistance to undoing their changes and not changing these defaults. So it kind of all together adds up and people kind of feel like, you know, they're being gaslit. Communications on X compound that. But the refusal to not undo something and their refusal to. you know, slow down or pause, is all reasonable for the average person to assume that, you know, there's some ulterior motive going on. I think probably the reason that they're reluctant to go back on what they've said they're going to do is because they think technically it's the

correct solution. But again, is that them just missing some of the ideological arguments against what they're doing? Well, I mean, here's the thing. Like, I was just chatting with, with Adam back before I came on. And I told them my position is not to upgrade. And this is what I will recommend to people. And he's saying, you should just upgrade. I can just go to 30. And you can always change the defaults back.

So then I countered back and said, well, then why not just not have those changes if people can change them back? We're kind of in this cyclical argument. He's saying they don't matter. And you can change them back. And I'm saying, well, you can just not change them if they don't matter. right? So this is this, we're stuck in this cycle here. So there's no really good end to it because

at the end of the day, you can bypass filters. They are not absolute. So it's, it's more of a attitude of what Bitcoiners have. Is Bitcoin for data transmission and storage, or is it for money? And this is where the divide is. You know, there are additional angles on slippery slopeness here. Because the discussion around filtering out the spam leads people to think, well, if you can filter that, you set a precedent. And governments can also tell you to filter other things, too, down the road, potentially. But I don't think that's necessarily true because a lot of these spammy things, they're embedding data in envelopes.

And they sort of self-identify themselves by these envelopes. So you can tell, like, okay, this is a BRC, this is an inscription. and yeah, it's spam, so filter. But that's not the path that we've chosen, and Nott's is doing that, but KOR seems to be trying to implement more things to make it more easy for them to spam because they think that is the deterrent

to spamming UTXOs. But if they're trying to deter people from running private mempools, their argument for that would be because that increases minor centralization, so we should do anything that sort of prevents that, is that correct? Well, mining centralization is a common talking point that's always brought up, right?

Like, we're doing this because we want to mitigate mining centralization. So you don't, but so then why don't you think that mining centralization is an issue in that sense? Well, I do think mining centralization is an issue, but I think it's just being used to justify actions that they've decided to take. But they don't need to take those actions. They can roll it back. But I think the prevailing argument from the core side is they think we cannot be forced to undo something that the community wants, right?

Like, for them, that's a slippery slope. If there is backlash and they change something, it means they're not following through on the most absolute technically correct solution. But I think they're missing a point here, which is delivered security. And again, this is something Adam has brought up. But if you make a change and no one uses it, then did you actually deliver any security to the network or improvement or anything? And I think the answer there is no. If you make a change and no one is willing to run your software, then you might as well have just not done it because it has zero effect or negative effects in this case because now you have a lot of mempool fragmentation. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the idea of a critical error with my Bitcoin cold storage.

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So why aren't you running knots? Well, I don't think I should have to run knots because I've been running core for a long time. So I think I should be able to stick on an older version of core, and I'll run a third one if there is a third one that is more reasonable and conservative. But do you think that Nott's is a safe node implementation to be running, or do you think the risk of the single maintainer is too high? Well, I don't necessarily think the single maintainer is an issue. The issue is more that there's a large difference in code, like 25,000 some odd lines of code between core and knots.

And this is because Luke is cherry picking things to merge. It's not a rebase. I think you might have some things that could be merged for security reasons that may have been missed. I don't know. I haven't looked at it closely enough. But for me, that would be a reason why I would choose not to use knots. But I don't think it's because it's just one maintainer because, you know, Luke is

very, Luke is a very skilled engineer. He knows the code base in and out. He was the one that figured. out the Segwit could be done as a soft fork when nobody else in all of Bitcoin core thought it could be done. They all thought it was a hard fork. So he knows the ins and outs of the code base, like the back of his hand. And I think, you know, I could trust his judgment on, you know, developing Bitcoin software because he's been here since the earliest days. So I agree with that. Like Luke is clearly brilliant. He's done some great things for Bitcoin.

But I still think there's an issue with a single person having eyes on the code before anything's Because with Bitcoin core, there's five or six lead maintainers and then, I don't know, 50 or 60 devs that look at this thing consistently. Surely that is a way more robust system than one where Luke can just merge code whenever he wants to. Even if he's brilliant, like surely you need more eyes on the code. Yeah, definitely. More eyes is better. So, you know, I think that's a valid point. People should want more review of knots.

And I think they will get there. I mean, there are people putting together, I think, a new organization to fund Korda, Naut's development, so that will help with that. I mean, it's really a question of funding, right? Like, Luke is doing it himself without any funding. So that can all be fixed. But I think overall, it's healthier that we have multiple implementations, especially multiple robust implementations, because then there's no risk of core just ramming something through that people don't like. because it is the reference implementation right now, and people do blindly follow it.

So there is a risk that something could go through that is detrimental to the network. And there was CV-17144, which was the inflation bug, and that went through with all the review of all the different developers and all the big names that you would expect, they all waived it right through. So there is a risk there, too,

even in core itself, that, you know, people will miss things. So the risk is really the echo chamber, and I think that is another systemic issue in core, which is they kind of give each other a free pass, and they have their in-group and the out-group, and the in-group can kind of wave things through. And that's also a risk, just as big of a risk as just one maintainer or a few maintainers is for knots. The thing that I can't quite get my head around with the multiple implementations idea,

though, is that are we not diluting developer mindshare with that? So there's probably only, I don't know what the number is, 100 people in the world that are capable of actually working on something like KOR or Knotts or whatever it might be. If we have multiple implementations, do we not just remove eyes from KOR, take them over to Nots and then to whatever the third implementation is? And instead of having one really robust reference client, you have three that are all slightly less robust. Well, it depends. I think if you have one client that's rebasing off the latest core version, then it's far less risky than just cherry picking changes and merging, which is the knots method. But I don't necessarily think that's an issue. Like, what we need is more testing

than development. So the question is, Danny, why do we want so many developers developing so many features? You know, there's a clip of Sailor on the old What Bitcoin did pod that's going viral right now where Sailor is saying, you know, we don't want to change things. Like, you don't want more and more complexity, you don't want more rules. You generally want to be very conservative for Bitcoin because it was a $1.3 trillion asset. Now it's $2.0 something trillion dollars, right? So it's getting more and more valuable. I think we need to become more and more conservative. Like do we even want multiple releases of Bitcoin core a year, or do we want one a year or one every two years? I don't know, but I'm okay with like a one to two year release cycle cadence,

barring any urgent bug fixes for critical vulnerabilities, because there don't need to be that many features added to Bitcoin at this time. I don't disagree with that at all, but there's still going to be bugs in Bitcoin. There's also there's things that we know are going to need changing at some point. Like there's the timestamp issue. So like this can't ossify yet. There are things that we absolutely have to change at some point. But do you think...

You mean the time warp attack, right? No, I may have, it may not be called the time stamp book. Isn't there a problem with like, um, at some, is it like the 20, the fact that it's 24 bits or something like that? Let me find out. I don't know. There's a time warp attack that's, uh, being worked on, right? But I mean, there's a problem here too, which is the current state of things is making

it very difficult for, getting consensus to upgrade the network, especially with core the way it is now. Like, as you said, trust in Bitcoin Core is at an all-time low. Will they be able to push a soft fork through to fix something? So I just had a quick look. There's a timestamp bug that will break Bitcoin in Core in 2038 because it was written in 32-bit integer rather than 64. Okay, right, right, that one.

So there are things that we know are going to come up. that will require developers working on Bitcoin Core to make some changes. So, like, how much ossification do you want to see? Like, in terms of things like Covenants and these more out there, potential upgrades to Bitcoin, are you just, like, wiping the board? You don't want to see that come to Bitcoin. I'm open to it, but not right now. I mean, there's no need for it.

Like, people pushing for Covenants, you can do that on Liquid right now. Yes, you don't like Liquid. Probably you want it on the main chain, but prove out the use case and get some adoption. have people using it for some wallet somewhere for some reason. But you can't just say we need this. And I don't think we're at a stage in Bitcoin's lifecycle where that should be the case where someone comes to the table and says, I need something and let's change something. Like that's just completely unreasonable for an asset that is the size of Bitcoin.

And, you know, I agree that we do need bug fixes. Like there are things that we can fix. but like that bug is in 2038. We have time, right? There's no urgency. We can spend more time analyzing the current state of Bitcoin, looking for more bugs, fixing issues, and fixing these longer-term bugs that can wait for a decade.

Is it fair to use Liquid as a comparison there? I like Liquid. I think there's going to be useful. I think there's obviously very real use cases for it, but it is a custodial model. It's not the same as these things coming to Bitcoin. Well, I don't like the word custodian for anything like eCash, because custodian is a legal term.

It's like you have a legal responsibility to someone because you're taking care of something for them. It is a definition. I would call things like liquid eCash, fetamints and the like, you know, cypherpunk asset pools or caps. And, you know, you're just pooling unpooling together and there are different security models around these things. But it's not a

custodian. So you want liquid because you want the benefits of the liquid chain. You can't expect to have your Bitcoin and have the liquid BTC at the same time, right? Doesn't work that way. So you have to make a trade-off and take one over the other. But you can always swap back and there's utility there. But my point is if you wanted to build something with Covenants, there's simplicity now activated on liquid, go and build a commercial project on liquid that is in demand and people want it, right? Like, Aqua is a good use case. We're seeing a massive amount of Aqua usage, transaction volumes, because people want to

use liquid and being able to use liquid as a base for lightning payments or aggregating smaller lightning payments to swap to Bitcoin main chain and consolidate their UTXO. So the onus is on the people asking for the thing to prove that there is a real use case for it. And it's not just theoretical that they themselves want. Because if you look at Taproot, like we rush to activate Taproot. It was a major emergency because we want to have signature aggregation. Where's the signature aggregation? I don't know.

I don't see it. Do you? No. Do you think Taproot was a mistake? Not necessarily, but rushing it through maybe. I mean, we could have packaged up a soft work proposal that did a lot of different things and activated all at the same time, right? There is no rush here. I think the monetary maximus are trying to build a Bitcoin for the next thousand years.

And if you work back from that timeline, you don't need a release every few months, you know? A release every couple of years is good enough. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. So where do you think we go from here then? Because when this debate all started up, I thought this was going to be something that was a talking point on Twitter for a few weeks and then would die down. And if anything, it's ramped up, like the vitro from both sides has got to insane levels. Call 30 is going to be out in, I don't know, three or four weeks. What do you think will happen?

Well, I don't think a lot of people will run it. I think there is sort of a shelling point here. There is a faction that won't run it. they'll stick with 29, and there's a faction that will run knots. And I really don't see a lot of people keen to run 30 unless they're just a devoted core supporter and they want to signal that they're loyal to core and they support the devs,

or they're running it to spite the knots people because they don't like them. So that's generally the lay of the land. If you look at the entire landscape, it is very fragmented, then there are these camps that have their entrenched beliefs. But to answer your question about where we go from here, I'm really not sure.

It definitely feels like everyone has their side, and that's it right now. So I posted a sort of bait posts on X about the UTXO size, growing from 11, 11 gigabytes now to 128 in like 10, 10, 10, 10-ish years, and then maybe to 1 terabyte. And if you look at the responses to that, everyone kind of missed the mark. Everyone was like, they missed the mark on a number of levels because there's a lot of nuance to

this. Can I tell what I thought, and you can tell me where I missed the mark? Go, go, go, go for it. Because when I saw that, like, the few things I thought is, it's 11 gigabytes right now. You can still run a node with a machine with 4 gigabytes of RAM. So, like, why I didn't necessarily know why it was an issue. One, because, like, storage capacity is going to get cheaper and easier. And, like, you don't need to keep the entire UTXO set in RAM.

Like, I didn't know why it was an issue. Yeah. So I was trying to kind of do what Adam was doing. So Adam posted a tweet saying he's running Bitcoin 30. And, you know, that triggered everyone in the usual way that you would expect them to be triggered. But he left out the word core because what he was implying. was he'll run a Bitcoin 30, not necessarily Core 30. So it could be Knott's 30, a Nob's 30, another implementation based off of 30.

But it goes to show, like, on his thread, you get the people that are in their camp pushing their view. So the core camp was like, hey, hey, Adam is on our side, you know, suckers. And then, you know, the Knott's guys are angry. Like, how dare you run, you know, Bitcoin Core 30, right? But for my post, I was trying to get to the point of if you care about real decentralization and if you care about miners, small miners, which is the argument that Core is giving for their changes, then you definitely want to constrain the UTXO set size. So you can, so a lot of people first got wrong.

They think it's just on disk. Oh, hard drive space is getting cheaper and what are you talking about? But I was referring to RAM. And I was referring to people that want to mine, because if you want to mine, you have to load the entire UTXO set in RAM. So that it's fast access. Yes. If you're a miner, whether you're a small mining operation with a couple S-9s or you're a Bitax user, then you should be running Bitcoin Core with all UTXOs in RAM so that you're competitive.

And this has been an argument about mempool policy and why it's bad to have divergent mempool policy because you're slowing yourself down. But it's the same thing. You want to have the entire UTXO set in RAM if you're a minor, regardless of your size. And if it's in RAM, it's not 11 gigs. It's 50-something gigs because 11 is compressed.

So if you have that linear-ish growth of UTXO size, you know, in a decade, it's not 120, gigs, it's, you know, five times that. And in, you know, 20, 40 something, it'll be, you know, five terabytes at the max. Not, that's the worst case scenario, but you get my point. If you care about mining and you care about decentralization, you should realize these things, but everyone just said, okay, you're wrong, you missed it, and, you know, it doesn't matter. But it does matter. And if you care, then you should have come to that conclusion and added one plus one plus one and figure it out, oh, it's three. And it does actually matter because the UTXO set is huge now.

And it's going to be a problem for anyone trying to run their own node. And if you want decentralization, they should be running their own node, not just running, you know, running with a pool and relying on a pool's templates and node. So help me understand this. Does putting all of this information on operator not reduce UTXO bloat because people aren't using unspendable UTXOs? It could, but I mean, it's cheaper to do UTXOs versus Opper turn, right? And I think people have kind of homed in on that, and this is why they're resisting core, because it doesn't make sense. Like, you're trying to encourage people with thoughts and prayers to use Opertern instead of UTXO.

And again, this is probably where some mistrust is brood because, you know, why would they think that? That makes zero sense at all. So why is it cheaper to do it in UTIXOs? Because of the distance. account. Okay. Because of the second time, I don't, yeah, but at the same time, I don't think you want necessarily to encourage more people shoving stuff in the opertern too, because it's true that you can prune

operon, but then you're running a pruned node. You can't just prune only the opereturn. And if everyone is running a prune node, then there is no more full node to boot up the network and help other people, you know, spin up new nodes in the future. So if we put Samson Mao in charge of core, you're the dictator of core today, what would you do? I don't know. I would roll back some of the more contentious things. And I don't think there's much we can do to undo the damage that's been done. But I would say, let's be very conservative and very cautious on what happens in the future. But if you were to ask me, like, you know,

how do we fix this whole divide? I don't think you'll like the answer. Like, you have to be able to bring Luke back into the fold. I think Bitcoin Core has to remove a lot of people that are maintainers and have been driving the project. And I don't think that will happen either because there's economic incentives to be a maintainer. You get paid more, right? And you get prestige from it. So the only way that someone would step down is because of honor. Like, yes, we messed up. We caused a massive cluster fuck, and I'm stepping down because of that. And I'll continue to work on Bitcoin, but I won't be in that position anymore. And I don't see that happening either. And I don't see them welcoming Luke back either. And I don't see them willing to roll back the changes. But if you

wanted to, you know, repair the divide, that's how I would see it happening. That some people in CORE step down and there's kind of a house cleaning there. So I was only around for the very end of the fork wars, the block size wars in 2017. Obviously that culminated then, but it'd been going on for a long time beforehand. Do you think that this does risk escalating into something similar and we do end up with a fork because of it? I don't think so. I mean, like I said, I don't believe core releasing 30 is going to be the end of the world. I think we can unify some of the policy. We can talk to miners and mining pools. Like I used to running mining. pool. You can talk to people that run mining pools and show them that it's better to align with

what the network wants, which is seemingly filtering of spam. You know, there might be some holdouts and some people, some pools might want to keep mining and relaying spam, but in general, I think it's possible that a lot of them would understand it is better for the network not to do that. And yeah, I think you can kind of bring about some change to the network. I think, I think think the problem with a lot of core developers is you work with the tools you're given. If you're a lawmaker, you know, you're just going to write laws and write more laws. You're not going to remove them. If you're a developer, you're going to keep focusing on the code. It's probably not in your tool set to go out there and engage and educate and talk to miners and mining pools about

what is bad. So I think this is why the default reaction was, let's just adjust the filters and standards to what is happening instead of trying to go out and affect change. I think one of the dynamics has missed a little bit too much in this conversation is the fact that not all nodes are created equally. The economic nodes are the thing that matter on the network. And obviously, for a long time, basically forever, they've all been running Bitcoin core. Do you think any of those will be moving across the knots? Because it's really easy for me to spin up 10 knots nodes in my bedroom and then it looks like. there's massive growth on the network.

And obviously there is some real organic growth. But do you think any of the big businesses running big economic nodes will move across the NARs? Hard to say, but I mean, Ocean, I would say a lot of the hash rate there is using knots. And I don't think you can really deny that they are a sizable portion of the network now. And that is good. It's good to have mining decentralization. So everyone that was paying lip service to mining decentralization, on the the core side, I really don't see them congratulating Ocean in any way. So you can see that a lot of

this is, a lot of this divide is really personal. They just don't like Luke for various reasons, and they will never like Luke, and they will never like Ocean. So, you know, it's a difficult predicament right now. It seems to be personal attacks and attacks on individuals are more prevalent than actually thinking things through and thinking things through from a level-headed place of calm. And you see that. Like the first reaction to a lot of posts is maintaining my side. And that is not a way for us to move forward. So do you think this really is about Luke as a person? Because he obviously has some pretty wild views. Lop just did a big post where he went through a ton of things that Luke said in the past that are very out there. Is that what is at the core of this issue in your

opinion? I don't know. It's interpersonal, I would think. It's a lot of these people in Bitcoin core that don't like Luke. Ultimately, we do need to get along, and I think eventually we will get along. You know, we have more in common with each other, irregardless of all the differences in vitriol being spewed than we would think, and we are all Bitcoiners. So, you know, maybe in a couple of years it'll all calm down and, you know, everyone will get along better, and, you know, we can move forward. But for now, I think it's important to keep in mind that, know, everyone is, everyone wants the best for Bitcoin. They just have different views on what is best for

Bitcoin. And yes, maybe some people are doing some things for the lulls, but that is short term. It's not going to last forever. Yeah. Rough consensus is messy. Um, all right, Samson, you are obviously fronting up Jan 3. How's everything going? How's the nation state adoption going? Pretty good. We just got back from Paraguay and we made some good. there. We met a lot of the right people that could potentially make a Bitcoin bond happen in Paraguay. And we likely will go back again if discussions progress. And I assume they've, all of these countries have been looking at what Trump has been saying in the US and him leaning into Bitcoin. Has that made a real impact in your conversations with these other countries?

Well, I think they have a vague idea, but we often seem to think, in a, you know, in a, you know, in a wrong fashion that everyone knows everything that we know. And that's not always the case. A lot of people don't even know that the Bitcoin ETS are BlackRock's most successful ETF and has generated some 200 million in profits for them. People don't know that. And the executive orders, you know, they don't know that either. So it's kind of our job to go and tell them these things.

So if you look at what we do from a 30,000 foot view, we're kind of like a personalized podcast about Bitcoin. that we go and sit down with them, talk about everything that's happening in Bitcoin and answer questions. And there's no question that is too newbish to answer. You know back in 2021 when Saylor came out and started doing the strategy stuff, everyone was thinking like institutions were going to start piling in and we saw one or two and then like really it wasn't until the last 12 months where we've seen real institutional adoption of Bitcoin. Do you think nation states may be similar in the sense that it may, we may just be like a cycle early. And in a few years, we'll start seeing

a lot of these nation states actually piling into Bitcoin. Well, there's like two parts of that question. So this cycle doesn't seem to have played out. We're behind schedule. You know, we should have had a bull run already, like a massive run up. And, you know, we're down actually at the time of this recording. So I think this cycle, if you want to call it a cycle, is delayed. It might push into next year for whatever various reasons there are. But I think the nation state adoption is coming. We're pushing on a lot of fronts. Other companies and people are pushing too. There are concrete examples of what Bitcoin can do to benefit a country out there right now. The moves in the U.S. I think have yet to propagate throughout the world. So Trump did create the SBR, but they haven't

started buying yet. And we are talking with other countries to do the same. There are a few that have said they will create it. And I think it's all coming. It's really that these things happen very quickly. It's like literally gradually gradually and then suddenly. And I think we're on the tail end of gradually and we're at the beginning phases of suddenly. And if you look at just the US alone, they're pushing forward on a lot of their budget neutral Bitcoin acquisition and the Bitcoin Act too. So I believe it's simply a matter of time. before we see a massive run-up and we see a massive nation-state FOMO, you know, panic. Which nation-states are you most bullish on as like a category? Because obviously, El Salvador

done incredibly well, Bhutan done amazing. The U.S. is starting to make moves. Countries like the UK where I'm from and Australia where I live, I think are going to be the laggards in this. I can't see them being amongst the first movers. Like, where do you think the real progress will come from? I think it's likely Latin America. And I've said that since we started Gen 3, that it's the most ripe area of the world to significantly do something with Bitcoin because you have energy, the energy part of the equation, you have the general stability, political stability, and you have the need. So you put all those things together, and it just makes it the perfect place. And I think we just need a few more dominoes to drop. If Paraguay,

if things pan out in Paraguay the way we hope, I think that's a big domino, and countries in the surrounding area would likely come as well. I mean, I'm excited for the nation state FOMO. That's, is that when we actually get the million dollar Bitcoin target that you always talk about? We'll see. I mean, even without nation state adoption, we should see it too, simply because of the corporate buys. Every day there's more and more corporations buying, and it just blows my mind that we're not running already. Yeah, it is like it is a bit strange. This cycle has felt very different.

And one of the best ways that I've found to describe it is like my vibes, my vibe check has completely gone. Like in previous ball markets, you get a sense of what's happening, you get a sense of where we're going, you can almost feel it when we're about to run. And this time I've just got no idea what's happening. And I don't, I can't put my finger on why that is, but my vibes are all off. Yeah, because every day you see an. announcement that strategy bought this many coins, MetaPlanit bought this many coins, this new

company is buying, and the price is going sideways and down. So it makes zero sense, you know, and I don't really have an answer about why. I think it's probably a number of things. It could be paper Bitcoin. It could be ETFs. It could just be outright fraud like FTX. Some exchange, somewhere selling coins that they don't have. And they're buying back when they need to back to meet demands for withdrawals? I don't know. But definitely, I think everyone has a sense in their head that something is off. And there's no way to know for certain until, you know, something blows up and it's all over the news. But definitely, I would say, it puts the suddenly, you know, very close to now, and it could trigger it any time. And that's kind of like the

omega thesis. And I think that the current situation of Bitcoin price, is definitely, you know, on the verge of Omega. Are you feeling it? So why do you think there's fraud? Like, what leads you to think that there's some kind of fraud in the market? Like, is there always going to be blowups whenever we have one of these like bull and bear markets? Because we have had that in the past. Do you think that's likely in the future?

Well, there's always been something, right? Like, FTX was the perfect example. We saw that they were selling Bitcoin that they did not have. and you know that's always a possibility and I think of all the factors it has to be some contributing factor that some entity is doing something weird I'm here for it I'll have the popcorn ready samson anything else you want to talk about before we close us out this has been this has been great no I think we pretty much covered everything it's a good conversation bitcoin's going to a million dollars everything will be okay with call 30 run whatever implementation you want stop

shouting at people. This has been great, Samson. Thank you very much. Where do you want to send anyone before we do close out? I'm on X. My handles Excellion, E-X-C-E-L-I-O-N, and you can find Jan 3 on X2, Jan 3-com. Perfect. All right. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. That was fun. Thanks, Danny. Catch you next time.