What Bitcoin Did - The OP_RETURN War: Who Controls Bitcoin w/ Bitcoin Mechanic

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Bitcoin Mechanic is the Chief Boiling Officer at OCEAN. In this episode, we dive deep into the battle over OP_RETURN and Bitcoin node policy. Mechanic explains why arbitrary data like inscriptions and JPEGs represent an attack vector, how Core developers have responded, and why he believes filters are essential to protecting Bitcoin’s monetary use case. We also cover the risks of miner centralisation, the tension between Bitcoin’s ideological roots and its current developer politics, and what’s really at stake in the “OP_RETURN war.” Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Mechanic: https://x.com/GrassFedBitcoin 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/

Over the last two years and all of the things I've learned have just made me just so appalled with the way things have been presented. And so many people that I looked up to with respect and trust have just betrayed it and undermined it by coming up with these nonsense narratives that are now all coming to a head. Because if you spend years telling people this can't do that, but by the way, we need to get rid of it because it's doing what we say it can't do. that someone needs to eat humble pie over that and no one is doing it, they're just gaslighting. I'm sorry, the whole thing contradicts itself very, very trivially. It's easy to see that there is no intellectual honesty here.

It's all in service of saying, let's have some fun, let's move over all the scam coiners onto the Bitcoin chain, and the motives for them, the more you think about them, the darker and darker it gets. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by our lead sponsor and Massive Legends, Iron. the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network.

They also provide cutting edge computing resources for AI all backed by renewable energy. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit iron.com to learn more, which is iri-r-en.com. I'm a big believer in not saying anything before the red light is on, because otherwise I've got nothing left to say when the show comes. well fair enough then we'll let's start mechanic good to see you man hello good to see you mate it's uh you found yourself right in the middle of this controversy um it's been like it's been pretty

interesting to see this happen like i don't know where i sit on it properly the thing that i do know is that ideologically i agree with you in the sense of pictures on bitcoin is not what bitcoin's for i think that is spam um what i struggle with is like the reality of the situation and whether this sort of downstream consequences of filters is actually a negative for Bitcoin. Just to kind of lay out my framing. But why don't we start with just getting into the last couple weeks, why you found yourself at the heart of this debate and what's actually happened? Well, because it started two years ago, really, didn't it?

Two years ago, there was a sudden change of heart. And all these things that happened in the past where obviously we just focused on nodes, nodes aren't going to relay stuff that isn't anything to do a Bitcoin. That was just a given, right? And when people came along and started saying, all right, well, I want to do counterparty, or I want to do Satoshi Dyes, or I want to do JPEGs on Bitcoin or anything like that, it was always just like, okay, that's an attack, how do we stop it?

And it was never a controversial topic, and it was never an ideological topic. It was just basic network computer science stuff. 101, like, you know, I have a, you know, I have a YouTube. Tube app, how do I stop people using it for something that isn't streaming videos or something like that or any sort of network protocol? Bitcoin's for people doing transactions, it's not for other stuff. And there's conversations all the way back to Satoshi about that, right? And Gavin Andres and saying, like, how are we going to stop people from putting Lady Gaga videos

on the chain? It was never, ever presented as an ideological faux par that's like, wait a minute, some people might want to do that. And who are you to say that's not what Bitcoin's for? That was always gaslighting. And that never even was a thing until 2023. And obviously the people that brought that in and made that part of the discussion

were the people doing the spamming. So, I mean, no surprise is there for why their motivation is to try and enter all that. And the funny thing is you start out by saying ideologically, I agree with you. But there's very little ideology in this. It's all just practical. Can you stop it or not?

The ideological arguments are coming from the pro-spam side because they more predominantly want to present what they're doing as being not philosophically different from what transaction or financial people are doing on Bitcoin because it's all just storing data in what is fundamentally just a database. So that's the sort of, that's the absurdly obtuse ideological position, really. And it is annoying to get called the ideologues and the idiots, you know, on my side of the argument, when we're saying, we know we don't have a perfect solution, obviously, but we got some practical solutions that always worked until 2023. So I don't accept being an ideologue in this at all. I think we're

just saying, look, man, there's always going to be spam and we're always going to have to take some reasonable measures against it. Otherwise, the network's just going to suck. And that's not an ideolog's perspective at all. That is, all right, how do we make something that just basically can do the job good enough? When you say that you have a practical solution to this, like, arbitrary data has been put in Bitcoin basically forever. And you say in 2023 something changed. Obviously, what you're talking about is taproot there and like inscriptions and ordinals and all that stuff. So what changed two years ago then? So yeah, just the first thing you said, arbitrary data has always been put in Bitcoin for sure, but it's never been optimized for that. So the vast majority of what you see in Bitcoin

is people just doing regular normal transactions, right? And slightly different things like massive consolidations or coin joins and things like that, they're all transactions too. And that is what makes up the majority of what's in the blockchain. The reason for that's very simple, because that was the way we optimized the things that the nodes would do. So yeah, it's a database, but does it have movies in it? Absolutely not, because it's not that kind of database and it's not written to be conducive to that kind of behavior.

So all it is is a continuation of that. And ultimately, what changed, well, what changed two years ago, is that when taproot was done, all of the normal limitations that allowed, you know, that prevented certain types of activity, there was a bug that allowed people to get around those limits and people, you know, like Casey Rodhamore figured out, oh, I can get around these limits. Sure, nodes won't let me have more than 80 bytes of op return. But if I sneak this stuff in, it's witness data, I can exploit the fact that that can be as long as I want, really. And it's 75%

cheaper too. Awesome. So they get to use that instead and basically trick nodes into into treating something as a transaction that it isn't. This is the essence of hacking, right? You're using computer software in a way that it wasn't designed to be used in order to get an unintended result out of it. And as amazing as that might be and as impressive and skillful as you might need to be to figure that out, it's still in essence something that if you are doing that, you go, I'm using this system in a way it doesn't want me to use it. that's why you have to mask it all up and split the data in between loads of push, you know, pushes and, you know, that's something that just basically tells you, I shouldn't be doing

what I'm doing here or whoever it was that designed the system didn't intend for me to be doing this like this. So that's basically what changed, but the method isn't really all that important. It's the fact that the, what it is in Bitcoin that makes us. that informs development and who we are as a community, which people obviously are going to hate me talking like that using that language. But regardless of that, suddenly everything was different, right? It became an ideological discussion, should we stop this? And people just started coming out saying, these are valid transactions. And this is just gaslighting to an unbelievable degree,

because no one is ever going to tell you that in any context on any other protocol. No one is going to tell you, you have to treat all the spam email in your email account as being all valid emails and you're supposed to read them and not just treat them all as garbage and junk. No one would do that in any other context. You're using email for a reason, and that reason is not to get scammed and to read stuff that is sent to you by people trying to steal from you. And the reason I run a Bitcoin node is not to facilitate someone that wants to store a JPEG on the blockchain. I don't run a node to do that. I run a node because I want to use money.

I don't want to use money without needing a trusted third party. And people hijack that and try to leverage the fact that I'm going to do that by storing stuff that I don't want. And that's, there can be no ideology more fundamental and more congruent with how Bitcoin is typically see stuff than someone saying, there is no incentive for me to relay. this stuff. You have to come up with one. And those have been incredibly embarrassing. And here's where I start to get incredibly annoyed because there are two sides to this debate. And on one side, you have a bunch of people like me who are admittedly not super technical and their understanding, but they are

very, very committed to Bitcoin. They've been around a long time. But they're going to make mistakes. And I've made mistakes in my technical understanding and my presentation of all this stuff. On the other side, you have Bitcoin Core, who are ruthlessly telling companies. complete and utter bullshit and we expect better from them. And I'm not impressed at all. The implications of core coming out there and saying there are these extremely negative ramifications for people that might filter out spam from their nodes that are complete nonsense. They're only true if you zoom in on them.

I'm going to go into all these arguments in a bit. But there is no incentive fundamentally for you as someone running a node to assist a scammer store JPEGs or any data related to their scams in the. the chain by relaying it for free to a miner and raising the costs of your own transactions because you're all competing for the same amount of block space. That was never a thing. And I saw Antoine in the mailing list that sparked this whole thing up say, there are reasons for spam filters. I forget the three he listed, but he's fundamentally just upside down on the whole issue. I don't have to relay anything. And that should be a principle that all Bitcoiners respect. I'm not

obligated to do stuff for you for free. And most Bitcoiners will invoke free market arguments and all that stuff until the cows come home. And I agree. I'm not obligated to relay anything. But let's be honest, it's a monetary network. We all run nodes. It's going to be pretty useless if none of us relay each other's financial transactions, isn't it? So I'm pretty much incentivized to do that, even though it does, my transactions are going to get crowded out by your transactions.

I'm also going to have to pay a fee on that basis. But that's about the end of it. I'm definitely not obligated to relay JPEGs around the network. So we've had to invent a bunch of backwards rationalizations for what. filters might harm you if you run them, right? So once you get past the whole nonsense of, oh, it's censorship if you don't voluntarily and for free relay stuff. Like, you know, if I come up to you and say,

you've got to go and tell him something and you're like, no, I'm busy. That's not censorship. You're not obligated to relay messages on my behalf, right? Like, this is just fundamental. Like, anyone should be like, yeah, fair enough. So if someone is expecting that, they're already misunderstanding how the obligations work here, right? You're going to mine a block because you make money doing it or because you need

to get your transaction in the chain. You're not obligated to include anyone's transactions. That's why transaction fees exist in the first place, right? You're not obligated. Miners are not slaves. People that run nodes are not slaves. But when you run a node and people have this expectation that you must by default relay everything, even if you don't want to, that's a misunderstanding of the entire dynamic and hierarchy how Bitcoin works. So I'll stop there. Hopefully I'll I'll come back into some more, you know, I hope to cover everything, but it's a huge and confusing topic. It is. There's a lot in that. And I, so I definitely want to start probably with the spam. But just quickly before we do that, you said that in 2023, the Tap Peru upgrade, there was a bug in it. Was that actually a bug? Or was that just people using it in a way that the developers didn't foresee? Hard to define a difference there, really, but this betrays some of the more nefarious activity, really, because, yes, it was a bug, and there's a CVE officially assigned to it.

This was never part of the taproot discussion that we would remove all limits for arbitrary data insertion and give it unfair access to the witness discount as well, right? Because inscriptions get 75% off after a certain threshold. that tapers off and that goes into the whole motivation for the op return thing and we'll get into that. But yeah, the fact that it did that was not the intended purpose of taproot. And a file was rewritten, one of the read-me files was rewritten to accommodate the fact that this behavior was now possible. And this was the meme in the anti-spam side that we were making fun of them for this because we're saying you can't fix a bug by rewriting documentation to reflect the new behavior. That's not what fixing a bug is.

And the meme was the doctor shows you an x-ray with a broken rib saying, don't worry, we photoshopped it. And now it's not broken anymore. Like this was the equivalent of what they did. And it was the way it was done was also like, it's kind of hard not to see bad faith there because the pull request that went into, that got merged into Bitcoin Core was nothing to do with any of this stuff. So it just kind of went through without anyone noticing.

There was no controversy around it. And it normalized this new behavior, which was reasonably considered to be a bug. rather than something that was just an intended consequence of taproot. In fact, taproot's supposed to get rid of a lot of arbitrary data because you can store it all in stuff that never gets published to chain. That's why it's so good. That's why in a cooperative channel closure in Lightning, if it's a taproot channel, it's great because it uses less data

because all of the other states in which you could have closed the channel never need to get published to the chain. That's what's so good about taproot. It was supposed to reduce bloat on nodes and mean that people could do more with the same amount of data as before. That was the point of taproot. So the idea that it would just become this new method for people to store as much data as they wanted on chain for a discount without any of the existing limitations that nodes place

on them, that's, that was, no, I'm not accepting it. It was never part of taproot. And it got backwards rationalized in as being an intended thing and normalized in something that's really hard to look at as being, you know, not malicious. That was just not okay that that happened, that they rewrote it. documentation to say that this was intended when it was definitely a bug. Okay, fair. So right, let's get into the spam side of this.

I want your definition of what spam is when it comes to Bitcoin. Do you see it as like any arbitrary data in Bitcoin is spam? And I guess the reason I ask is when you think about the things that people are inscribing, like a picture of a cat or whatever, dick butts, definite spam, people have also used it to put things like WikiLeaks cables in there. I think it's still probably not the intended consequence, like the intended use case of Bitcoin, but it seems less spammy to me, at least. And then you can even go further being like, if we're going to have stable coins, tether on lightning using taproot assets, that requires some more

data in that transaction as well. Like, where do you draw the line of what is spam and what's valid? Yeah, well, at least you're conceding that it is up to me to draw the line, which was a big part of what this debate was about, because we weren't even being allowed that anymore. And that was 50% of the reason we were so angry. But, I mean, that changed today. So we can get into the development that happened today. Spam is in the eye of the receiver. Obviously, from the perspective of the sender, there is no such thing as spam.

Everyone that broadcast something to the network wants it in the chain, or they're just trying to flood nodes and crash them or something like that. But no person that sends spam is ever going to say, yeah, this is spam, you don't want it. Obviously, they're not going to do that. Their entire life is trying to trick spam filters

and trick people that are receiving the stuff into thinking it's something it is. You're trying to trick Gmail into thinking this thing belongs in someone's inbox, but they're never going to voluntarily declare it to be spam. It's something that I don't want. And generally, there's a collective idea about what's undesirable. I think that the reasonable place to draw the line was enough data to store a hash, and that's what 40 bytes of Opp return allows, which is what the default is in knots.

That got doubled to 80 in core. But fundamentally, I don't think anyone is going to go to war about someone storing a hash. inside Bitcoin's blockchain. Nick Zaboh said it. He said, stop trying to store your data in Bitcoin's blockchain, store it somewhere else and hash all of it together to prove a certain state of it periodically and then that exists. That's what you can use the smaller amounts of op return for. No one ever really complained about that and no one's going to war over it. That's what open timestamps was doing. No one's gone to war about open time stamps because it's not egregious. You have to draw the line somewhere. You're asking me where that is. I think it's reasonable that 40 bytes

was always fine because it's enough to run a side chain and you can do an infinite amount of things on a side chain. You don't need to do it all inside Bitcoin itself. And the fact that spam is keeps saying we want more and we want more and we want more because it already got doubled from 40 bytes to 80 bytes, which was already too much of a concession. Now they need for this, for the stuff Citri is pushing. They want 150 bytes and Cora only too happy to give it to them because they'll say it doesn't matter. After 150 bytes, they can just use the inscriptions hack. So all of that to me is invalid. They can all redesign their products to just use 40 bytes of data because that's enough for a hash. And then they can do everything else they need to do and just anchor what they're

doing inside Bitcoin. I'm all right with that. That to me feels like a reasonable compromise because I know that if we set it to zero bytes, then they start doing other horrible things and then we become even more pragmatic. We don't want them to use fake pub keys because they're really harmful. They bloat the UTXO set. And I'll get into why the people that are saying they're concerned about that don't really give a crap, but they're pretending they do in service of busting open the op return limits, but again, that's just another disingenuous argument that shouldn't be coming from court. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for Bitcoiners and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River, you can set up zero-fee recurring buys, making stacking sats effortless.

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Financial Freedom Report.org. Well, let's get into that then, because when I spoke to Shinobi on the show, that was one of his points is that, like, OPP return is probably the least harmful place for this to go. So instead of, like, having these filters in place, they can then bypass those filters and go out of abandon and get these transactions confirmed anyway, better to just let them do it in O'Preturn. So why don't you think that's true?

Well, there's a contradiction in that perspective. I'm not sure that's exactly what Shinobi would say, because it's so obviously contradictory. If the filter, if they can, maybe not. I don't want to quote Shobie. But here is the rub. If they can so easily bypass the filter, core don't need to do anything. They can't bypass the filter. But are they not doing it though because it's like a less harmful way of doing it? Sure. But yeah, but the question is, do the filters prevent them from doing the less harmful thing? That's also a bit cheaper, by the way. Like, that is the first question we have to ask here, because if yes, then the last two years has been complete bullshit. That's the problem. Wait, can you explain that to me? They're using, the intention for Citria is to use fake pub keys. And fake pub keys are the most harmful form of spam.

So they want them to use Op return because Opt return stuff isn't conceivably a spendable output. So my node doesn't need to care about it or dedicate as much resources to a fake pub key, right? So they want them to switch to Opt return. Okay, Opt return is less harmful. Why can't they just use Opt return now? the spam filters are preventing them from doing it. If that's true, then why aren't we preventing other types of activity with spam filters, given that we now can finally admit, after the last

two years of lying about filters doing nothing, that they actually are extremely effective. They don't stop everything. They don't stop everything, but they stop most of it. And again, why is Bitcoin mostly monetary activity? Because there's a bunch of filters that prevent other stuff. Almost everything is not below the dust limit, because that's enforced by a spam filter. And why aren't Citria, why are they going to use public fake pub keys instead of Op return? Because it's a pain in the butt for them to use Opreturn because everyone's filtering stuff above 80 bytes. So we can't just jump to the next point without conceding that the last two years has been pure gaslighting. There is a filter out there that stops inscriptions that works perfectly fine that's in knots.

And it was never implemented because a controversy, which is easy to manufacture and the excuse for us, you know, kicked off of GitHub and all that stuff. There's more to the story there and we should probably come back to that. But B, because filters don't work, all right? If filters don't work, then you really do not need, fundamentally what Citri are saying they need and what Core are saying they'll give them is we'll give you the P2P network. We'll relay your stuff around, these giant operatons you want to use, will help you because it's in our interest to do it and you won't do it if we don't help you.

I thought you didn't need our help. I thought that you could just go out of band and get these transactions in the chain anyway. Is there some reason that that presents you with a greater difficulty? Is that more expensive? Is it less efficient? Because if it is, then filters are worth something.

They're not worthless. And that was the entire premise of doing nothing and not fixing the filters, was that they just don't do anything. They don't do anything if you just, if you're prepared to be a complete, again, ideologue. and say, well, it doesn't stop, you can't pull every single weed out of your garden, so don't even try. That's the argument.

You can't stop every bad thing from happening. So don't eat, you might as well participate in everything falling apart. It's, it's the Nirvana fallacy. If you can't make something a little bit better, because not everything will be good, you don't need, there's no point even trying. So back to what your, your characterization of Shinobi's argument, which is, is operative better than fake pub keys? Definitely. But again, why do you need us, why do you need our help making them into operatans instead of fake pub keys, which are cheaper for Citria, by the way? Why do you need our help? It's because we're filtering the operetons and because filters work. And that admission is, that should be an indictment of the sincerity and the general level of honesty and intellectual integrity that has characterized the last two years of debate, which we held as being complete nonsense. And obviously, when I came on the show before,

when it was you and Peter McCormack, I didn't have anything like the understanding I have now. And it was still a relatively compelling case I could make for our side. But over the last two years and all of the things I've learned have just made me just so appalled with the way things have been presented. And so many people that I looked up to with respect and trust have just betrayed it and undermined it by coming up with these nonsense narratives that are now all coming to a head. Because if you spend years telling people, this can't do that, but by the way, we need to get rid of it because it's doing what we say it can't do,

that someone needs to eat humble pie over that. And no one is doing it. They're just gaslighting. So, but yeah. Is this where, like, you and the other side of the argument are kind of talking past each other to some degree because, like, you're saying that filters do work. Obviously the other side is saying filters don't work. And I think the point you're making is that filters work in terms of stopping more than

80 bytes of data going into Op return. And I think their side of the argument would be that might be true, but it doesn't stop people from creating these transactions, which are still valid by the consensus rules. So like even if it's stopping it going into Op Return, it's not stopping the transaction from actually happening. Yeah, because there are other ways in which they can do it. But again, the minute you've made the concession that filters are preventing a certain type of activity, that justifies another approach.

And because this is spam filtration, right? It's not just we do nothing. We didn't do anything for a couple of years, but it's a moving target. So either we're going to start filtering what it is there trying to do, or we're going to try and roll over to it and say, could you at least use a less harmful method? And the problem with the latter approach is you're saying to scammers and migrants from the land of Ethereum, we will adapt the Bitcoin ecosystem as fits for you. Because, yeah, on the one hand, we're saying it's better for Bitcoin because it doesn't

bloat the UTXO set. But on the other hand, we're saying we will adjust stuff to make it more appropriate for you to be here because it's also cheaper for them what we're doing. The fake pub key outs are more expensive for them. And also, this again is something where I'm going to have to call BS because the amount of UTXO bloat that is caused by Citrius product, it's a failover. It's a fail case like a force closure of a lightning channel. It's not expected to happen very often or a justice transaction even. In ideal operation, that very, very rarely happens. The amount of UTXO bloat we're talking from Citrius product is about a kilobyte a year.

We watched the UTXO set as a result of the inaction of people saying filters don't work for the last two years, go from four gigabytes to 12 gigabytes. Okay, so we added eight gigabytes of UTXO bloat. We went from 70 million transactions, 70 million UTXOs to 200 million, and there's been a bit of consolidation since then. we're like down 170 million. Nothing. We didn't hear any conversations about it at all, and it's a nightmare.

We wrote off a whole class of hardware that you can't sync nodes on anymore because of how bad that was. Now we're talking about adding a kilobite a year, and we need to nuke the operative filters for that. That tells me that you're on a technical point, they're correct, but they're relying on the fact that no one can put it in the appropriate context because it's too advanced at that point. So I can tell a bunch of people, we can make these spamers, usually. op return instead of bloat the UTX O set and that's better. You're right. But if you don't ask

any more questions, they're right. I'll give you than that, right? But if we put it in any kind of context, but there's serious problems going on with the UTXO set, are we going to do anything about that? No, we can't. And why can't we? Because filters don't work. Then why are you killing the Ottartern filter if they don't work? I'm sorry, the whole thing contradicts itself very, very trivially. It's easy to see that there is no intellectual honesty here. It's all in service of saying, let's have some fun, let's move over all the scam coiners onto the Bitcoin chain, and the motives for them, the more you think about them, the darker and darker it gets.

Does removing the filter on Op Return reduced the UTXO set blow from inscriptions if they have another way of doing it, or does that not impact it? No, they'll never switch over. And that's part of the, this is the double edge short of that argument. They're saying if we, there's no point increasing the Op return. size filter, just a little bit, we might as well just blow it all the way up to 100,000 bytes. Because after about 150 bytes, inscriptions start getting the benefit of the witness discount. So no one's storing JPEGs. Well, typically everyone that wants to store JPEGs is going

to use the inscriptions hack rather than L-Preturn. So that's why there's no point even having an op-return limit once we get past 150 bytes because it's four times more expensive because it's not input data anymore. It's output data. So that makes it cheaper. And their contention is no one's going to do that. That's not entirely true. There are reasons that you might want to put some nasty pictures in an opereton instead of using the inscriptions hack,

because then it's just there in one big chunk rather than separated, which makes it is really good for trolling if you do that. Because then if you've got a full node on your laptop and it gets scanned at the airport or you've got antivirus software and they want to put nasty stuff in an opereturn, that's going to be a bigger problem for you. At the moment, if you put that inside inscriptions, It doesn't matter because it's all broken up into chunks

and you have to decipher that in order to get the actual JPEC. Putting a JPEG in an op return, it's just there, right? It's in one big, I guess, serialized format. So there's potential for trolling there. There's some mitigation that Core have done, but that's not in, I don't know, that was done sort of last summer, I think, and that's not fully implemented yet,

but put an asterisk next to all this because I'm not quite clear on the details yet. But that's sort of a tangent anyway. But basically their point is, who cares about the op return limit? Once we go twice the size we are now, everyone's just going to use inscriptions anyway. And I'm saying the inscriptions are trivial to filter. What I want you to do is to use the inscriptions filter that's in knots, put that in core and then tell Citrio we're not giving you any more op return data.

Design your product better. Just make it use the 40 bytes of Op return. That's enough for you to run your whole side chain anyway. The product is just badly designed. but Luke and Jason, the people I work with, have no incentive to go and help Citria design their product in a better way. We're not interested in doing that.

But the idea of pressing nodes to change their relay policies to help them out just so their own transactions can get more expensive competing for this stuff, it's just completely nonsensical. So, does that make sense? It does make sense, yeah. And I think that you mentioned working with Luke,

obviously you're working at Ocean. And this is one of the things that I've been I guess most confused about on your side is that, and I'd like your perspective on it, because like if you assume that this, that having the filters increases minor centralization because instead of just like having this transaction going into a mempool, it goes into these like dark pools and it goes into slip into slipstream or ever to Marathon. So these transactions still happen. They're just not happening in yours or my mempool. How do you kind of justify that when everything you're working on is decentralizing mining? Right. I agree. I agree.

If you look at it just on the surface, having dark memples, having filters widespread on the network, does just increase minor centralization. Every one of their arguments is true if you don't put it in any kind of relevant context. Does it make fee estimation worse? Yes. Does it slow block propagation down disproportionately hurting smaller miners? Yes. Does it increase minor centralization because of products like slipstream that Mara can make? Yeah.

All of the, and what was the other thing we were talking about? Is UTXO set bloat? Is it preferable to put it as up returns instead of UTXO set? Yep. All of these arguments they're making are true, but they don't matter the minute you put them in context. And that's why I'm so annoyed here, because I don't know what the argumentation technique is of using true things to mislead people, but that's what's happening. These are all true, but they're completely negligible.

So I'll go through them all in a list. The first one they've talked about is fee estimation being messed up by having a different memel to everyone else. Nothing about Bitcoin requires us all to have the same or similar memples. That's not how it works. What we agree on is the blockchain. We don't have to agree on what's in memples. Fee estimating wallets. Wallets that estimate fees do not do so exclusively by what's in their memple because it doesn't work.

There are wallets that do it that way, but not Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Core doesn't estimate fees based on what's in its mempool because it knows that that is not how you make good fee estimation. The way it does it is it looks at what's gone through its mempool, it looks at what ends up in the blockchain, and it develops a bunch of heuristics about how long that means it's going to take roughly to get into the block based on historical evidence. And if you filter, interestingly,

if there's one minor on the network that has a semi-decent chance of finding a block within the next couple of days that filters the same as you, your fee estimation gets better, not worse. And that element is just neglected. But here's the point. Bitcoin Core's fee estimation is not broken by filtration. Other wallets are broken by filtration,

but Bitcoin Core are saying you can't fee estimate on those heuristics anyway. It's broken. So that extra bit of information there makes the argument. Do you see what I mean? If you zoom in, yes, filtering breaks your fee estimation. But they never give you the rest of the argument, which is if you use a stupid approach, approach to fee estimation, which we would never do because it's broken.

So they always leave out that context, and that to me just screams dishonesty. So you have fee estimation, you have block propagation, which goes into the whole mining centralization aspect of this. Is it a disadvantage in the current environment for us to filter and create this whole class of transactions we call non-standard that Mara can then create a product called slipstream to solicit, that they can then dump on the chain? Right. Yes.

current scenario, yes, you're creating an extra source of revenue for a miner that is large enough to be able to do that. The problem is that that is an artifact of mining being basically centralized at the moment, like insanely centralized. And I made a tweet earlier today comparing us to what we should be, you know, back in the days of Satoshi. Before pooled mining became a thing, when each miner was their own entity running their own node, constructing their own templates, in that environment, if nodes are large, and you put a bunch of non-standard transactions in your block, you suffer as the minor, not the rest of the network. Right now, why is that? Because your block takes longer for the network to process

than a competing block that decided to stay within the parameters of what nodes consider acceptable. So if you mine a consensus invalid block, you're dead, that block is never going to get accepted. If you mine a block containing a bunch of non-standard transactions, doing stuff that the nodes are telling you, we don't like this, would you mind not doing it? mind not doing it, and another miner finds a block that doesn't do that at the same time, they win

because their block gets validated faster than everyone else's. This has been flipped on its head because of the amount of centralization we have, if we're trying to go up against Foundry, who are obviously the biggest mining entity on the planet, not that they do all their own hashing, but they're the ones making the templates and making the relevant decisions here. If we're all filtering and we're a bunch of smaller miners trying to compete with Foundry on an open market, Foundry can fill up their block with non-standard transactions, broadcast it to the network. The network goes, what's this? We don't recognize any of these transactions, and they have to, because of the way compact blocks works, they have to request all these unfamiliar transactions.

That slows down their verification, and the nodes and the other miners lose, because it takes them longer to get in the race against Foundry, who's already building on top of their own block. So you have a giant miner abusing their position. But guess what? They can do that regardless. If they want to attack the network, work like that. It's got nothing to do with whether we filter or not. The fact is, they can do a 51% attack at that point. Sure, they're only 30%, and that means it won't be a perpetual success, but they're big enough to undermine the entire system if they want. So we're relying on their goodwill and their good nature to not attack us at that point. So it's got nothing to do and no relevance

if we filter or not. And there's also the other point, because it depends on what scale the filtration is happening. If I run some spam filters and I'm more aggressively against Op Return or something like that than the rest of the network, then it makes no difference to anything because I'm going to see that transaction go around the network before it gets in a block. I'm going to cash it, and this is another topic that's never brought up, that means when a miner finds a block that includes that transaction I didn't like and I didn't want to relay, when I get the block and I have to reconstruct it because it's a compact block, I'm I'm still familiar with all the transactions in that block,

because I cached the stuff I filtered, so I don't need to waste any time reaching out to other nodes saying, hey, I don't recognize this transaction. Can you tell me? Because I need to verify this block. That's never pointed out. So at what scale are the filters effective? How do the trade-offs manifest as the filters become more widespread

or more narrowly adopted? What is the context with how centralized mining is and isn't? All of the things in this argument, the concerns that are being presented to us about mining centralization, if we optimize for nodes being in charge of the network and having a very strict set of mempool filters that means they rigorously only want to allow certain activity, with decentralized mining, miners are punished if they start putting crap in the chain. With centralized mining, miners become the boss of everything and it's up to us to try and anticipate what they want by relaxing

all the filters and just trying to be as effective as a free relay as possible. But that's on our back, and we're in a position in that circumstance where the miners are in complete control of Bitcoin anyway. So we might as well give up at that point. The current state with mining is not sustainable. You can't have over 51% of the network being two fully KYC'd entities, and one of those realistically being at least 40% when you consider all of the smaller pools that they are secretly in control of.

So what CORE are doing, and this is the saddest part of it, is they're saying, we're really sorry, but mining is so centralized right now that they can bully us by putting non-standard transactions in the chain and making it even harder for small miners who are going to take longer to verify their stuff. And I'm saying, if we're in that position and we start optimizing for that and trying to say, well, at least we'll make it not as bad as it might be if we filtered more. I'm sorry, we can't accept that position anyway. It's over. This is why Ocean exists and this is why Datum has to exist. Miners need to start making templates and miners, we need there to be more than 10 nodes or, you know, more, because we need there to be more than 10 entities on the

planet making decisions about what goes in the blockchain. And with Ocean, you've got 1,400 people. More than half of them are using datum. That's 700 odd people, 750, 800 people that are all making their own blocks using their own nodes. In that scenario, the nodes become dominant again, and then it flips back in the right dynamic again. It's just like the block size wars. where we put the miners in charge of whether we get Segwit or not, and everything starts collapsing. And then we say, all right, miners, it's time to get back in your lane. You need to activate this thing because you're not the boss of the network.

The nodes are. And then that flipped, and then happy land again. And it's exactly the same here, because miners are punished for putting consensus invalid stuff in blocks by having their block rejected. Miners are also nowhere near to the same degree, punished for disrespecting the nodes by ignoring all their spam filters. And if they construct a block full of complete garbage,

it takes longer for the network to verify. And that's their problem. And that is why an entity like Mara would charge more for a project like SlipStream. And to that end, it would be way better for companies like Citria if they didn't have to use Mara for everything, if they had the help of all of us. And we have no incentive to give them that help.

And they're trying to tell us we do by saying your fee estimation will suck if you don't, which it won't. Or that blocks will propagate slowly if you don't, which it won't. So do you understand all these points I'm making? Like, all of the backwards rationalization for nodes needing to bend over for miners are only valid in a scenario where miners can destroy the network unilaterally anyway. So I'm not interested in discussing it. It comes back to, like, you said, like, ideologically, I agree with you. And I will start there.

I admit that. I don't want to relay spam around the network. I find that ideologically objectionable, and it would be nice if there was a way to map that ideology onto reality. And it maps perfectly. It's just people are pretending it doesn't. and they're inventing reasons for why we need to bend over for this stuff. But when you say that it maps perfectly onto reality, like what actually has to happen?

Is it really you need like 90 plus percent of nodes filtering and doing this? Because like we saw with full RBF that even with like less than 10% of nodes running it, like those transactions would still find their way into blocks. So like how many people do you need running these nodes, like basically running knots? Is it 90 plus percent? Yeah. So again, it depends. All of the thresholds are interesting to discuss,

and there's no hard numbers, right? So the more people filter, the less likely the transaction is to get into the chain, and the more likely a miner is to say, I'm not going to do this. So back in 2016, let me just ask a question on that. Why is it more likely the miners says I'm not going to do it at that point?

If we're decentralized, the miner is incentivized to respect what's generally filtered. So in 2016, when compact blocks became a thing, inside that pool request in Bitcoin Core, it said, minors are advised to, to update to these latest standard mempool filter policies in order to decrease the chance of their blocks getting orphaned. That was the attitude of Bitcoin Core back then, right?

It was minors that needed to get in line, not nodes that needed to start nuking their own filters and becoming involuntary relays for all this stuff. So just be aware of that change of mentality from nine years ago. So, but yeah, how many filters? I don't really care because there's no good answer to that. That's what I'm going to say, because if I just filter alone, I told you what happens with that.

All that happens is I see a bunch of stuff that I'm not going to relay, but I cash it all. When a block shows up that contains a bunch of that stuff I filtered, doesn't matter. I can reconstruct the block because I cached it all in the first place. I just didn't want to participate. I didn't relay it because I don't approve of this activity. OK, if two people start doing that, at some point,

when you have around 20 or 30% of the network, it starts to become a chance that you won't actually cash this stuff. and you just never see it because enough of the network's not doing it. Then the miners start having incentives to pay attention to that and saying, all right, we're not going to include this stuff in our block. And remember, 99% of miners' income is subsidy. 1% extra is all of the transaction fees they might get. Then 1% of that 1% is if they want to start cramming in giant op returns

instead of genuine financial transactions. It's pretty low incentive for miners to want to include this stuff anyway. It's made out to be like a massive deal. Mara made $1.7 million. I'm not sure ever or in the last quarter for slipstream. That's not a lot, given the expense and pain in the earth and hassle it has to be. And to be honest, I think Mara are just going to abandon it soon because it's not worth it. At the end of the day, why are you fighting the network?

Why are you going around them and soliciting stuff that they're telling you they don't want in the chain? Yeah, you can do it. You can create non-standard transactions and put them in the chain and you can get a bit more money doing it. But it's not enough to justify itself typically. The minute that stuff starts happening at a wide enough scale, it's a race to the bottom anyway. If Foundry makes a slipstream style product as well, then they both just keep lowering and lowering and lowering until, you know. The only real advantage they have with those kinds of product is if they're big enough to be able to say, hey, we'll get it in the chain in the next couple of hours. And if you can make that kind of guarantee, then again, you're big enough to attack the whole network and a way more fundamental level.

You can 51% attack. So who cares is the point. How big do the filters have to be? How widespread? The point is they don't hurt you if you're the only one doing it. And if you're not the only one doing it, the bigger you get, the better it gets for you. For the most part, there is maybe a crossover point around 15 or 20 percent. And I'm sorry for the amount of conjecture I'm using here, but this is all just estimates. Around 15 or 20 percent, I'll say, is the point where you might actually just not see something that is still very likely to end up in a block. And that is going to slow down block propagation a bit. Fair enough. But if you're ocean and you're running a back end where we've got to construct templates, we run everything. We need to know about every single transaction.

And we're going to cash everything we possibly can because we're a mining entity. But around 70% of filtration, I think, is a crossover point where it's like this stuff is just not getting in the chain. I do think a miners are incentivized to pay attention to what nodes are signaling, right? But people always jump to the end and they beg question whenever they do this. They say, if your filter doesn't work, you might as well just

turn it off and relay this stuff. And I fundamentally reject that. There is harmless to me running a filter that, you know, stops me from relaying stuff I don't want. And that's an important part of the argument, right? Just because it ended up in the chain, even though I filtered it, doesn't mean I stopped filtering. And I've been told that so many times, you might as well just bend over. And I'm like, why? Why? It's, again, the fee estimate, the block propagation, all of these are non-arguments. So no, I'm going to filter. And I always have, by the way.

And people keep comparing us to Roger Veer and all these other people that are upset with Core. And I'm like, that's a really annoying one, right? Because we're asking Core not to break a filter. Can you just leave it? That doesn't make us the nut jobs that want to start, you know, they want to turn an 80-byte limit into an 100,000-byte limit, right?

I'm not the madman here saying, can you just, I'm saying, can you leave this alone, please? Obviously, I want my inscriptions filter, and they're not going to do that, or maybe they will, but I'm just telling to leave operetern alone. And the immediate crisis that we apparently faced that motivated all this, which is Citria saying, we need their fake pub keys to be opereterns. It's just, I don't care. It's a killer by a year. That is not a horror story justified in nuke in these limits. It's just overblown.

Yeah. I mean, I definitely don't think you're Roger Ver. For one, this is not anything to do with consensus. But just to play devil's advocate on the slipstream thing very briefly is that I also saw they made like 1.7 million in net profit. I also am not sure if that's just this year or if that's ever. But is there not an argument that with more filters, their revenue from that goes up? And so like these two things could work in tandem kind of. Yeah, but if it ever becomes lucrative enough, the problem is that if who are they competing with?

If it actually becomes worth it for other mining entities, then they'll start doing that too. And then it's immediate race to the bottom. And at the end of the day, the more it costs, the more the people using these non-standard transactions, the more incentive they have to just fit within the rules of Bitcoin as it stands. Why do I want to pay Mara millions of dollars a year to include my non-standard transactions when I could just make something that the Bitcoin nodes don't hate? Why don't I just use 40 bytes of op return? and then I get Mara's what, 15% of the network?

What if I have access to 100% of the network for cheaper? I want to create that incentive, right? I don't want to do the opposite, which has become a free relay service. I don't need to, I'm not the one that needs to acquiesce and placate here. They are. Make Citria design a product that says, all right, we're not going to work against the nodes

and pay a fortune extra to do it. That's just ridiculous. Why would, why? This episode is brought to you by CASA, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution. I've been using CASA since 2019 and I can't recommend them enough. CASA have options for all Bitcoiners from a 2 of 3 multi-sig to a 3 of 5 and a private client option for absolute best in class security. CASA also do inheritance which are very recently set up and it really couldn't be easier.

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managing your Bitcoin has never been more convenient. Whether you're a long-time holder or new to the world of Bitcoin, Ledger makes it simple to keep your assets protected. If you want to find out more, visit ledger.com and secure your Bitcoin today. That's L-E-D-G-E-R.com. On the Knott side of things, like it is interesting to see, like, clearly a lot of Bitcoiners align with you on this. The number of people running knots has gone from, I don't know what it was,

less than 1% probably to like over 7% I think at this point. I'm going to ask you a question that you're going to hate because I know you're both friends with Luke and work with Luke. But is there not a risk of people using this? implementation that's maintained by one person essentially? I mean, it's non-zero. There's definitely less eyes and knots than there are on other things. But 99% of the code base more is all core, right?

It's not a bottom-up implementation. So if everyone was running over to BTCD, then I'd be like, yeah, this is a serious systemic risk, right? If we had 10% of the network, we're at like 8.5%. if we had 8 and a half percent of the network ditch core and move to BTCD, I'd be like, yeah, all it takes is for BRUC to make one weird taproot transaction, and then that 8% of the network goes offline. That's what he did with before, right, when he did that 998 out of 999 multi-sig, and then he

took down LND. So, yeah, but BTCD is a complete ground-up re-implementation of the protocol. Nance isn't. It's just core. That's all it is, with a bunch of XRND. to tweaks. And it's time, it's, it's been around for a long time. Hundreds of thousands of blocks on the network were mined by miners that constructed their templates using core, using knots, not core, because you couldn't do this stuff back then with Bitcoin Core. It wasn't

set up for it. Luke put it all into knots. And that's, that's a forgotten part of history at this point. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to gaslight you. I'm not going to say it's zero risk, but at the same time it's just, I've been running it for years. I'm pretty confident with it. And also, it's all trade-offs, right? Using core isn't all, you know, sunshine and rainbows. Not at the moment when we have so much bad representation and bad faith arguments coming out of that side of it. And it just seems to me like a bunch of whining and dining has happened from some horrible scam coin VCs, and they're trying to make Bitcoin more conducive to that kind of activity. And if that's what is seducing the core devs and is the explanation for why they're

doing and saying all these insincere things about why we need to bend over for them, then I would rather take the risk with knots because I don't really think it's that big of a deal, but I'm not going to tell you it's nothing. It is basically just Luke. And at some point, someone needs to step up and say, all right, we have a non-negligible chunk of the Bitcoin network using knots now out of basic concern for Bitcoin, I'm going to review the code on this thing. I'm not just going to play politics and hope it dies or there's some horrible bug in it.

I'm sure there are plenty of people looking for bugs in knots so they can try and exploit to try and humiliate the anti-spam side. But at the end of day, someone's got to step up and say, all right, I'm going to, someone's eventually going to have to break ranks with what's going on. The politics is really intense

between the two sides here. Yeah, I mean, regardless of this kind of debate. I think more developers having a look at Knots can only be a good thing for Bitcoin anyway. Like having multiple implementations, even if they're very similar, has to be a good thing. I agree. Should we talk about Core? Maybe it would be worth you giving kind of full context what's happened with Core over the last couple of weeks in case anyone's not fully aware. Yeah, so the pull request and all that stuff. So, I mean, it starts two years ago when we made

some pool requests saying, look, there's all this inscription stuff happening. There's also stamps, which were UTX O bloat, you know, Mike in Space's thing. That was horrible and he, you know, he was saying out loud, I want to do as much harm to Bitcoin as possible with this. It was like, part of it was outrage marketing, the same thing the Taproot Wizards do, they say inflammatory stuff, but it actually manifests as being as harmful as they intend. So anyway, we made two pull requests, disable bare Maltysig by default, because no one's used it for Maltysig pretty much ever, at least not.

There's just so many better ways to do it. The last 10 years, you barely see any of it. And it's horrible because you're storing basically essentially a backup for your multi-sig setup on chain for everyone else to store. Not my problem. I don't need to store a hashed version of your 24 word mnemonic in an operativean, that's up to you to store again, not me. We wanted to turn that off by default.

The pull request got, you know, blown up into a massive full-scale war and then closed by core as being controversial. and we're not merging controversial stuff. Fair enough. The inscriptions filter, exactly the same deal. Here's a filter that will make inscriptions subject to the same filter that defines how large and opt return can be. So if data carrier size is set to 42, that doesn't just mean op return is 42.

It also means inscriptions can only be 42 as well. That was what that pull request did. Same thing happened. Massive fight in the comments. People telling us, oh, you're doing censorship and all this stuff. blows up and Andrew Chow closes it saying, look, this is too controversial, obviously, you know, I think it got locked once saying everyone calmed the hell down, we'll see you in 24 hours, and then they unlock it, blows up again, and then he says, all right, too controversial, we're not merging it.

All right, I could accept that. Even though I felt like it was disingenuous and the people that were against our side and the motivation for the pool request were scammers that were trying to brigade and stop us from, you know, making their life more expensive by forcing them to use stuff like Slipstream, right, which wasn't actually around at the time. But you know what I mean. If you don't have the peer-to-peer network, you've got to go out of band to a minor, and Dark Memples are just more expensive. They want our help.

So I was saying, let's turn this stuff off. And I, but I bought it. I basically said this is annoying, but I understand why Core can't be merge in controversial pull requests. I get it. Two years past, you know, the UTXO set blows up. Inscriptions become commonplace. We're in just a horrible situation. the halving happened and you see these giant complete you know people pay millions of dollars

you know to fill the network up with complete trash you know the whole incentive around that was miners are about to get a 50% pay cut let's bait and switch them because we want miners to be employed by us the taproot wizards not bitcoins you know that's the last thing you want if you're a bitconer right is for your security to be paid for by someone who isn't you because then you're not their boss anymore nightmare. So anyway, that time all passes, and then where do we end up? We end up with, it stops being in action on cause part. Instead, it becomes a proactive measure on their part to facilitate more spam. So it's no longer, look, we're not going to do anything about the spam because it's too controversial. It's we are going to solicit more of it. And the way they did it was

twofold. They said, we're going to increase the limit all the way up to the max standard transaction size, which is 100,000 bytes rather than 80. And we're going to disable your ability to configure that yourself because you have no reason to want to do such a thing. And this is all from people saying that we're being paternalistic, right, by wanting to have Mempool policies. So this caused a massive blow up, right? And we said this is just ridiculous.

And it's just as controversial, right? It got heated, the GitHub comment blew up, the same as everything else. Jameson Lopp was in there. unhosted Marcellus said, look, you're an investor in Citria, and this whole PR is motivated in trying to make Citria's life easier and cheaper. Reasonable conflict of interest to point out, and the response was, look, turns out we have some moderation policies here and you're making personal comments, so you're banned. And then I said, I don't think it's appropriate for people to be banned over that. And then I got banned. And then Twitter went apeshit over it. People were really annoyed. A lot of people were saying, I couldn't care less about Op return, but this process is broken, how dare you ban these people? They're not just random trolls, etc. All that stuff,

I don't really care about getting banned because for me it's just selective enforcement. You know, Maca Raleigh is like, oh, it's great. We're enforcing these moderation policies, which is great. And all that means is they're just creating an echo chamber for themselves, and they've silenced people that disagree with them. But here was the hypocrisy of it. I don't care about any of that other stuff. It's really just the fact that this was just as controversial, and they seemed determined to proceed with it. And the arrogance and the ivory tower crap that came out, like none of you guys know what you're talking about.

You're not devs. You're not C++ experts. What does she say? You don't know what assigned integer is, stuff like that. Just basically the standard trust-the-science kind of mantra, right? You guys are all stupid, we know better, and shut up. And this was unacceptable, right? Because you closed our pool request from two years ago,

saying they were controversial. This is controversial too. So you can't just proceed with it. But today, what's happened with that is they've backed off. Just before we get on to what's happened today, can I ask just a quick question on that? I think the other side of this in defending core would say that the GitHub is a place to talk about the pull request, not necessarily like ideologically what Bitcoin should be. Do you think that's fair?

I think the moderation policy is reasonable, but it has to be consistently. enforced and they never are. So it just becomes, Francis, Puglio killed this. He smashed it because he doesn't agree with mail filters at all, but he understood what happened with the GitHub, right? If you have any sort of community with any sort of set of rules, it just becomes politics, because some people are able to break the rules and other people aren't. That's all there is to it. So back in the day, if controversy happens on a pool request, it's allowed to happen, it blows up, and they say we can't merge this. It's too controversial. Now, a person, Apparently, you know, same set of moderation policies.

I don't know if they're supposed to have changed since then. But it just feels like selective enforcement. That's all. Like, you can never have a, what I said to Gloria initially was, if you're trying to push something this unpopular, there is no moderation policy that is going to make that somehow just not a pain in the ass for you. Like, that's just the reality of it. We care about it.

And, okay, the discussion didn't happen on the mailing list. That is the more appropriate venue for it than GitHub. But I didn't say anything wrong on GitHub. I said, I'm not incentivized as a node to run this stuff. Why are you forcing me to do so? That feels like acquiescence to miners that are attacking the network and completely unnecessary. I don't remember exactly how I put it. Something along those lines.

And I agree with you. Look, GitHub is not, like I said, I'm not super mad that I got banned off GitHub. I don't think it's appropriate for a lot of these discussions anyway. But I just think core devs are not stupid. They know that there's a significant amount of Bitcoiners that are not okay with this. And if that was the rationale for not fixing the filters two years ago, it should be sufficient rationale today for not merging this stuff. And people are coming up with all sorts of reasons.

Like, you don't need consensus to change default policies or remove configurability. And I'm like, well, no, you actually do need to follow the community on this stuff because this is very significant. I know it's not technically consensus, but it matters. And we have a strong opinion on it, and you should just leave it. Like, this isn't the first time. Peter Todd did this pull request two years ago, too, and it got, you know, rejected. And it's been brought back, and his one has now been closed.

But we have a new one where they've kind of backed off a little bit, but not really. And maybe we can get into that. And that new one, that new one is where it's, I think it's the same, basically the same poor request, but allows you to configure your node at the node level. Is that right? It marks configuration as deprecated, which means it will be gone soon, but it won't be part of this particular merge if that happens. So when Core 30 gets released in September, you'll have no limit or not return, but you can configure it back down to where it is now if you want or wherever you want. But it's marked as deprecated.

And historically, stuff that gets marked as deprecated in Core means it's just going to be removed without any sort of ceremony at some future release. and treat it as we don't care about this thing. So they're telling us they're going to get rid of it. So it, but they're telling us we're not doing it yet, but we're going to. So I don't know if that's a relevant detail in this or not. And the thing that we do know from this is that everyone just runs the default. Like I imagine it's less than 10% of people actually go and configure these policies in their node.

Yeah, I don't think many people do. Realistically, like I said on Twitter, I don't think it's, basically we haven't won anything here. We've created a massive drama and Core have made it about process and made it about you're all too stupid and you're all don't, you know, you're actually going to hurt yourself if you request that we leave this thing in. There's been like every stage of grief or whatever it is like bargaining and like anger and all these things. And you know, and now it's just, well, we're going to do it. And that's the end of it. So and also 8% of the network switched over to knots or well, well, 6% because 2% were already running. nods. And rather than treat that as genuine, I've seen a chain code guy saying, you know, it's all just Amazon web server. They're faking it. And I saw both Matt Corallo and Peter Todd last week at the conferences say, we don't give a shit because they're not mining nodes, which is a Craig Wrightism that I never expected to hear from core. That was like mask off moment there. We really just don't care about user sovereignty in this network at all. Like, we're just going to leverage

the fact that it's totally centralized and there's 10 nodes that actually matter. That's just, are you serious, guys? Like, no way. I'm going to go off on a tangent here, but you just, there are experts that don't understand the context in which the thing they're an expert in exists. And this is, there's no more obvious example to me than Peter Todd with wanting to go above the 21 million limit or do demurige or demurage or however you pronounce that word. Like, this is such a failure to understand Bitcoin in a wide.

context. The reason 21 million is not a magic number. The magic is in that it doesn't change. It's not that the goalposts in football are like 12 feet apart or whatever they are. It's just that's what they are. And if you change them, you change the game and you undermine a rug pull everyone that spent their whole life getting good at it. You don't change stuff like that. The reason sports are interesting is because the rules of them don't get arbitrarily changed. So that means we get to play, we get to compete on a, you know, without rug pulling, one another. That's what Bitcoin is. And the idea of like changing to having someone go, well, there's a variable that's wrong here and we're going to start planning the economy

with this central group of bureaucrats that says there needs to actually be some inflation or the idea of introducing inflation back into Bitcoin to fix an economic problem. Is that not everything Bitcoin is trying to get away from? Like in essence, what is Bitcoin? It's getting away from central planning of bureaucrats and people that think they can. So I'm just like, how are you possibly in this position you're in? Like you might be an expert inside, you know, microcosms and parts of Bitcoin, but do you understand what it is as money to our species? Maybe not.

And that's why you need to go and deal with these unpleasant morons on Twitter that, you know, are not, then they didn't, they're not computer scientists. They don't know what they're doing, but, and they're going to, like I said at the beginning, like me, who, you are going to get a lot of technical elements of this inaccurate, right? But that doesn't mean you just ignore us because actually we do understand some of this stuff that might be lost on you, right? You can be an expert C++ developer and expert computer scientist.

That doesn't mean you understand what money is or any of the other things that need to be understood that Satoshi got because Satoshi was a generalist, right? He was a generalist. He understood how to make different things come together in a way that works. Anyway, I had no idea where, yeah. No, I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with that. Like this is like the antithesis of central planning, so we definitely don't want to see that creep back into Bitcoin. Yep.

So what I want to get onto is you framed this as like a war. You've kind of compared it to the block size wars. You're obviously taking this incredibly seriously. What I want to know is like what do you think is truly at stake here? And like why do you think, because this is a policy change, not a consensus change. Like, why do you think this is comparable to the block size? Because it's about who runs a network, whether it's nodes or whether nodes have to try and anticipate what other people do. So the block size war was we need to be able to transact cheaply.

And it doesn't matter how big blocks need to get to facilitate that. Nodes just have to accept that. And if you can't run a node or it becomes ridiculously expensive to run a node, that doesn't matter. We need cheap transactions, right? And now it's more, well, miners need to earn as much money as possible. And that's all that matters here. And if nodes don't want to relay their stuff, then the nodes are going to be the one that suffers

and they need to get on board with this. And the other element of the block size walls are, well, miners don't want to give us Segwit and nodes asserting themselves and winning by saying, actually, it's us that want Segwit, and it's not you that gets to decide that. So basically, I always feel like that's what's forgotten, right? So everyone comes with this framing.

These guys want to get their data in the chain. Miners want to earn money putting it in the chain, so it's going in the chain. That's always the thing. I'm saying, there's a third party involved here. It's the node who has no incentive to facilitate that. Why do I want to take your picture of a cat and give it to foundry to put in the chain? I have no interest in doing that.

And that's where I say they have to come up with all these backwards rationalizations about fee estimation and block propagation on stuff. Because fundamentally, I've always been filtering that chunk until 20203 came along and it stopped working right. I've always been filtering and it never broke anything. Because again, like I say, nothing about Bitcoin relies on us all having the same memple. So initial, what was it you asked initially? Like you're framing this as a war, which personally to me seems like quite extreme when it's a policy change, not a consensus change, I guess.

Here are the implications of it. If you stop prioritizing nodes, fundamentally what happens is you just end up in shitcoin land, because that is always what happens in those, that is the only credible thing we get to say makes us Bitcoin and not crypto. There's no other, there's no other thing you can point to that makes us special. the fact that the resource requirements are low enough and the feature set of the blockchain is minimal enough that we can all basically run a node. If you can download the Bitcoin app on your phone and start using it in a few hours or a few days, I guess we know you can't do that, right, but you can still download Bitcoin on your laptop and you can still sync up to the network. Okay, the blockchain's massive and you're going to nuke your whole internal

drive. But we try to fight that with smaller blocks and that was what the war was about. Because if you can't run a node, then the only people that validate everything are big data companies. And at that point, it's identical to PayPal. It's just PayPal has its own PayPal coin that moves around on a centralized network. Who cares? That is what every single crypto is. It's a waste of time. It's not going to be, it's not going to have any elements of sovereignty with it.

The whole point of Bitcoin is you can use the Bitcoin app and then you interact with it without a third party between you and the network. You use it directly. And it's distributed widely enough that if anyone, tries to block you, you're good. You can still get around it. So this was Luke's point as well. People keep calling spam filtration censorship, but they're the opposite. Bitcoin's censorship resistant because if almost everyone on the network tries to censor you, you can still get in a block. Then the censorship failed. But if you want, if you spam filter, all you need to do is find one block without spam and the filters worked. They are literally opposite. So the more people

filter spam, the better it gets. Whereas you can never quite get all the spam. out. So that's why we're censorship resistant. So yeah, again, going back to your point, I forget it a third time, but it's, that's okay. The other question there, and this is kind of like, I guess, to close out a little bit, is do you actually think call are attacking Bitcoin here? Because that's something I find really hard. I think they're not perfect, but in general, they're doing an incredible job and we're very lucky to have the core team. Yeah, I don't think. I don't think, I think it comes down to intention, right? I think they have good intentions, but, so I don't think it's malicious, but I do think there's

a lot of hubris there, and that's been more than thoroughly demonstrated by just the general condescending attitude they've had towards the people that are against this change. And I think they're wrong. I think they don't understand the damage this will do, and it makes sense to frame it as an attack whether it's done intentionally or not, because, I mean, we're in the ugly world of politics here. They don't feel like they're attacking Bitcoin and they're going to feel really pissed off with someone like me. I did see a change of tone from Gloria from you're all idiots and thou shall not put arbitrary data in the chain. I saw her changing to, you guys just don't appreciate us,

right? That's the first time I've seen an actual change of tone and I get it. Obviously I want to be grateful to the people that work on this stuff. They are all talented. But as I say, I just think hubris has taken hold. I don't think it's malice. Someone wrote a long thing about Peter Todd being the CIA and all that stuff yesterday. I'm not into that narrative, right? I'm sure there are that kind of things going on inside Bitcoin, but again, I just don't think it's that deep. I just think it's a bit of hubris.

It's from a technical perspective, the spam filters don't completely work. So why do we even have these things? It's just technical debt. Get rid of it. They'll just use the inscriptions act anyway, right? I get why you might look at it that flippantly and go, this doesn't matter.

But the context that it gets put in makes it matter. And they're also. just not understand, like there really is this narrative that Bitcoin is just a database, pushed by people like Shinobi. And it isn't just a database because different databases are conducive to different kinds of activity. And I keep saying that. There's a reason you don't fly from Australia to freaking Istanbul on a tricycle, even though it's transport. It's transport. You don't get to be that obtuse, okay? You need a different kind of transport for that. And Bitcoin is not that kind of database. It's not supposed to store, it's not supposed to do the

kinds of things that these scammers are trying to make it do. And core, they're just making a horrible mistake. It's a failure of philosophy, right? And I do hold strictly the principle that there are so many things that can come in and infect a culture and it's cyclical. If you start rearranging furniture to accommodate scammers, even if it's just increasing a filter that you don't think does anything and makes their life a bit cheaper and doesn't bloat the UTXO set or something, they're here now, they're going to start running

some nodes, they're going to inform further development decisions and it's going to go round and round and feed back upon itself to the point where, oh wait, why aren't there any nodes anymore? Well, because no one wanted to store gigabyte after gigabyte of stuff that was nothing to do with money. This was supposed to be money at the end of the day. And then you just end up in one of those tragedy of the common scenarios where, again, that third middleman just got forgotten about. The guys that wanted their spam in the chain, I get it, they want their spam in the chain. The guys that wanted to earn money, putting it in the chain, the miners, I get it, I get the motivation. But where was my incentive to participate in that? That was just assumed and forced upon me.

I did it against my own better judgment and now the chain's full of junk. No one else wants to do this. It's an unpaid thing. This was the problem, right? If mining gets too difficult and people stop, the difficulty drops. That's Bitcoin adjusts to satisfy miners. If running a node becomes too difficult, there's no such equivalent mechanism. People just stop running nodes. And if there aren't a lot of nodes on the network, we are identical to every other crypto, except they just have more features because they accepted being centralized from the get-go. Bitcoin is trying to actually be decentralized, and it mainly comes from nodes. So if we lose the nodes, if we don't treat them as the priority above all other priorities, if that becomes a thing that we just lose because we're not really considering it, Bitcoin Core is node, right? It's not a piece of stratum software. It's not a scam coin protocol that uses the Bitcoin network. It's just a node implementation. That's their job to look out for the people that run it. Do those people have incentive to relay scams around? Absolutely not. And do we need to get lost in a philosophical quagma about what's really a transaction versus what's really a JPEG? No, that's ridiculous.

We all know what spam is and stop the gaslighting. And so how do you think this will play out now then? So if the next version of core in September is going to roll out with these changes, eventually deprecate potentially. Do you think this is a war that your side may lose? I don't think so. I mean, to be honest, I'm not for fighting a war even if I may lose it regardless. I mean, I don't think that the majority of Bitcoiners are going to run nodes in the future. But if they don't, we're dead. So I'm just going to go down fighting that battle.

I'm going down with the ship on that battle. This makes that a harder battle, which is why I'm so vehemently opposed to it, because it just turns us into crypto. I think ultimately what might happen here is that there's enough, I don't think anyone that switched to knots is going back to core, save some massive blow up with knots. And that's the beginning of severe ossification, because you need to leverage the fact that we're centralized around Bitcoin Core to ever have any hope of activating a soft fork in Bitcoin again that isn't, you know, a game-changing bug found that we have to fix yesterday, right? Save for something like that happening. How are you going to get stuff like CTV and CzechSig from Stack and all these proposals that are a little bit popular?

How are you going to get them in if you have multiple implementations running? I just don't think you'll be able to get the buy-in anymore. It gets too difficult. And to be honest, I think, I don't know if it's macro factors, but whenever we fight like this, the price just absolutely, skyrockets because the fact that no one can really get their way over anyone else is it signifies that Bitcoin is rock hard and I do think it can be undermined more easily than people think but somehow they never attack it quite in the right place so I think it will be

fine I don't think that we're going to I don't think that ultimately it's all gonna I don't think they're just going to get this through and it not have severe consequences that result in basically stagnation in a good way or ossification, I guess you would say again. I think that's basically the result of this. I saw you debating Peter Todd and Shinobi at Bitcoin Plus Plus. Shinobi's argument to you was that forget this, go to the consensus level if you want to have change. Do you think that's a realistic outcome from this? No, it's never been the right tool for the job. That was sort of the immediate troll that,

I mean, Ryan Dell made a soft fork to stop the Taproot Wizard spam. It was called like pure Bitcoin or something way back. And it's a bait because everyone wants us to be Roger Veer and to fork ourselves off the network out of rage and stuff. But we're not actually that emotional. Sure, we've made some, you know, it's gotten heated. But ultimately, we're just asking a carry-on filtering spam like we always had. That's all there is to this. and that's the right tool for the job.

It's an approximate tool. It's not an idealistic thing where we need there to be zero spam. Like I said, I don't care about open time stamps. I don't care if you want to do a side chain and use 40 bytes to anchor yourself into the chain. I don't really care. I just think you have to draw a line somewhere and storing massive JPEGs on the chain

and acting like that's something nodes are completely fine with is just you can't. That's obviously. too far, right? That's all. So no, I'm not about to start forking to try and get rid of this stuff, because forks take forever. They take forever to coordinate, and then the spammers can just anticipate the fork. Okay, you're activating at block height, you know, 950,000. All right, we're just going to change the way our protocol works the minute you fork. You can't do it. It needs to be much more responsive than that and much less precise, right? I don't care if a couple of financial transactions

get caught in spam filters, just change the transaction until it works, right? That's how spam works on other protocols. Every now and again, your email is going in someone's junk folder. And every now and again, some junkers ending up in your inbox. It's the only way to make email usable, and it's just kind of part of how you use it. Bitcoin can work exactly the same way. We don't need to change the SMTP protocol to detect the word Nigerian and say, that's it. This email now violates the rules of this protocol.

It will never go around the network. That's ridiculous. I call it swatting a fly with a nuclear bomb. It's just a ridiculous thing to do. And again, they're turning us into the idea logs that we are not. I don't care if weirdos want to, if some guy wants to make a JPEG, if we started filtering inscriptions, and some guy wants to make a giant JPEG and it's not going around the network, and he uses slipstream to put it in,

it fills an entire Mara block, and it costs him thousands of dollars to do it. If he really wants to do it, go ahead. I only have a problem with it if he's part of a team that raised millions of dollars to spam Bitcoin for months on end and undermine people trying to actually do transactions because that does real damage. That hampered our growth as a medium of exchange, which was growing organically, and we have enough difficulty doing that as it is. So that's a practical matter where I'm like, look, for 2023 and most of 2024, the chain was filled with complete trash for months and months and months on end while everyone is getting into Bitcoin thinking it's gold 2.0. That's not a good situation. And we need to try and rebalance stuff a bit here. No soft forks are not appropriate for that.

You need something much quicker and something that approximately does the job. Yeah, that makes sense. I really appreciate the time. Is there anything we didn't cover that you wish we did? Oh, it's probably a thousand things, man. It's a huge topic. But yeah, I really just want to emphasize we're not big blockers. We're not that.

We're passionate, but I would say we're not that unreasonable. And at the end of the day, we are the underdogs in this fight. We do, like saying with the less technically inclined people is a bit ridiculous because you've got Jason and Luke. And Luke is, I don't care, he's way more senior than anyone else in Bitcoin Core, right? We wouldn't have lightning without him. We wouldn't have Segwit without him. And this is, when he's standing up and saying, look, it's not working the way it's supposed

to be working. I don't want to see a bunch of kids giggling every time he's speaks. I have a lot of respect for that man and a lot of us should. Of course he can be wrong about stuff. He's not infallible. But he's right on this issue and he's initially when Ocean launched and we were going to go really hard against the spam. You know, I wasn't sure about a lot of this stuff that I'm talking about now, but it's been years and I've learned a lot about it. And every time I make technical inaccuracies and, you know, screw up my own understanding of things and correct, I realize.

I'm still basically right about it. I've never heard something that makes me go, yeah, I'm in the wrong on this whole thing, and I need to just shut my mouth, or just start advocating for the other side. So, and there are times where I've said things, an accused core of something which has been wrong and apologized for it publicly.

And I don't think the other side has had that humility. I haven't seen Matt Corallo or Peter Todd, or any of these people say, all right, it's not censorship to filter this stuff, because it isn't. Or say, all right, your fee estimation, it doesn't work that way in Bitcoin core. We need to stop making that argument. Or block propagation, all right, if it slows down, it's to the miners' detriment in any

sort of reasonable scenario. Not smaller miners. It's not going to cause further centralization in mining. All of these things, they need to stop making these arguments because they're not true. They're only true in tiny little irrelevant contexts. They don't actually fit outside of that. And just, yeah, the narrative that filters don't work that has now been abandoned saying filters do work, but they cause these undesirable second order effects. That can't have been a thing.

It's not like Edward Snowden when he said, you know, he pointed out, initially we're all conspiracy theorists when we said they're spying on everything. Now it's, oh, everyone knows that, who cares? Where was the outrage in the middle? It can't be, filters don't work, filters don't work. We need to get rid of a filter because it's working. Excuse me, is there not a, that's a change of narrative here. And I need some intellectual honesty about that, because if they work, then maybe we need to talk about going the other way and filter our inscriptions. I'm really glad we managed to cover the other side of this with you. I've been nagging you for like a week straight, so I appreciate you making the time.

Yeah, sorry, it took so long. It was a busy week last week. No, no, no, no. I know you've been busy. I'm sorry for nagging. But I really appreciate the time. Open invites come on whenever you want. I'll hopefully see you in Vegas.

And yeah. Thanks, man. I'll speak to you soon.