Hello, everybody.

My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.

This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin.

It's my mission to interview as many people as I can around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean for them and for their families and for their future.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Thank you so much for listening.

Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten Podcast.

Something a little different on this show because it's technical.

I've generally shied away from doing the technical interviews because it's just not my bag.

I've not got too much knowledge around that topic but that's slipping into the trap is it not?

That's slipping into the trap of it's too technical bro just trust us which is part of the argument that has been happening in the knots versus core debate that has been heating up over the last couple of years so big respect to my guest today luke de wolf because he had sat on the sidelines for a little while lurking away until something sparked within this argument that pushed him to put his head above the parapet and the reasons being because now the argument has kind of crossed a line of expertise that he he has he has a career in a fiat career in cyber security and something clicked for him during the debate and he wanted to come on and share that so thank you very much Luke for stepping up into the debate and for asking me to to come on the show and share it I hope that between us we can get a lot of people who are too afraid to enter the debate because they are not known as technical people in the space to get a little deeper understanding as to what's going on and a little bit more clarity about it as well.

And I have a lot of empathy with the people who are just joining us nine months into your Bitcoin journey, perhaps even less, and you're seeing all of this noise go around.

It's very unsettling, of course, but all debates in Bitcoin are important to one extent or another.

This is a feature, not a bug, and we have to be vigilant.

We have to stay vigilant at all times and think critically, and dare I say it, conspiratorially.

And yeah, always be checking.

Always be checking what's going on.

So enjoy this one with Luke.

And again, thanks Luke for coming on and everything you're doing with your own efforts to educating people about Bitcoin.

Before we get into the show, please make sure you're stacking your sats.

The easiest way to do that across Europe is with Relay.

R-E-L-A-I dot C-H forward slash Bitten.

You can start stacking today, download the app, they are fully now, fully, fully regulated.

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You should not have any problems stacking with Relay up to 1,000 Swiss or equivalent per day straight into your self-custody.

own your bitcoin i cannot be clearer about that if you do not own your bitcoin if they are on an exchange bitbox is the place you need to head to it's bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten and that will get you a five percent discount on the bitbox o2 or the bitbox nova which are bitcoin only hardware wallets if you want to start accepting or demanding bitcoin for your goods and services get over to paywithflash.com.

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paywithflash.com Have you met other Bitcoiners in real life?

This is almost a bigger sin as not self-custodying your Bitcoin.

In fact, if you were to meet a Bitcoiner in real life, you would most likely self-custody your bitcoin the week after because they are going to tell you to do the same uh so get out there and go and meet your nearest bitcoiner best place to do that simple club orange that is a new name a rebrand from orange pill app much simpler now club orange get over to club orange link in the show notes find your nearest bitcoiners find your nearest events get to your local conferences we were just at bitfest in manchester that was such a great grassroots conference in britain again the uk bitcoiners are really stepping forward so it's great to hang out with a bunch of bitcoiners over there and all of the guests from other countries as well thank you for those that made the effort to come across i chatted there with mick from Geyser.

He found the Geyser Fund two or three years ago.

They've funded so many different Bitcoin projects.

He gave a talk there, a keynote about the new feature that Geyser are going to be launching.

It's going to be all or nothing campaigns.

Launch your biggest ideas on Bitcoin with confidence.

All or nothing campaigns are coming soon.

Get over to geyser.fund to find out more.

Meanwhile, enjoy this rip with Luke DeWolf.

Luke, from the Bitcoin Infinity Show, and organizer of BTC Hell, or co-organizer, or one of the leads, you would never claim to organize and be anything more than just a cog in the machine of the team that put that together, which was an amazing event.

Well done.

Congrats to you all.

Welcome to the show, mate.

Welcome back.

thanks a lot Daniel I appreciate the kind words great to be here with you again feels like Helsinki was a long time ago but it really was only a few months and yes as you say I am only one of the the team that put it all together but we're all extremely proud of it working on next year and so more more news should start to trickle out on the on the socials when we have some things to announce but we do have dates and we do have a venue so it will be happening at least that's the that's what it looks like right now amazing all right we'll show the dates then what when's it going to be september 26th to 27th or 25th to 26th i should really i should really get my handle on that it's the friday saturday of of that particular week next year so a little later in the calendar maybe a little easier for people to uh to make it it's not in the middle of vacation time anymore so yeah same venue no uh we couldn't get the same venue and so we're going with another one but it's it's great uh similar vibes a little bit bigger as well so we're gonna try and go a little bigger too so that's the that's the aim bring the noise mate i love it uh yeah really uh well hopefully um we'll be along again uh to help you guys out and support and uh enjoy the uh the few days with the uh the euro plebs and uh and special guests that that flew in from from afar it's always great to see you know people from the u.s canada australia south africa further afield wherever they've come from new zealand even um we had willy woo in riga right uh that's uh special yeah exactly we really should have tried to get him along to helsinki since he was already in the neighborhood but uh yeah now we have a bit more of a of a presence though people know what we're about the the mining angle is definitely still a big a big part of things here in fact we're going to have at least one day of mining specific content.

We're going to call it the European Mining Summit is the current branding.

So similar to Prague's Industry Day, if you're familiar with that, but focused on mining and energy, basically.

So that'll be a day on top of the two days of regular conference.

So really will be a three-day conference this time around.

Excellent.

Right.

Well, we're going to get on here and start talking about what's been going on in the last i mean it's really heated up i would say in the last nine months i mean it's been going on ever since you know what the fuck happened in february 2023 but you got it if anybody if anybody wants to hit pause right now and go back and listen to the episode i did with mechanic and giacomo it is literally titled what the fuck happened in february 2023 and it would take you back to like where all this started um but we want to talk about now i've not done a show yet about the not score debate uh i think we've moved on from debate um it's it's really getting a little bit crazy but i think to for those listeners that tune in each week and haven't heard us talk about it and might still be on the fence as to what it even is uh perhaps they've not even paid attention to it and uh maybe it's over their heads heads down stacking be at mining perfect like you might even just want to stay there and uh but if you do want to get into the weeds and find out what's going on i think um this is a good way to do it uh so shank lauren's not here because she would have set this up very nicely because she would have simply said luke what is knots what is not okay that's a that's a very good start and so i do want to preface all of this that i'm not officially affiliated with Luke Dash Jr.

Mechanic.

You need three initials to distinguish me from Luke Dash Jr., by the way.

That's starting to get quite annoying.

I'm getting confused for Luke Dasher or Dash Jr.

all the time now, which is quite funny.

But I'm not affiliated with them in any way So take everything I saying with a little bit of a grain of salt but I have done my homework And so hopefully everything I say is at least mostly correct Okay What is Nots Nots is an alternative Bitcoin client implementation If you run Bitcoin Nots, you're running a Bitcoin node the same way as you would be if you were running Bitcoin Core.

It's just got a few changes that, yeah, specifically Luke Dash.

I'll call him Luke Dash Jr.

generally.

Let's try and keep consistency here.

I won't go between Dasher and Dash Jr.

that Luke has been curating, which fits more of his view of what Bitcoin is, which specifically is Bitcoin as money.

And specifically, it's generally been removing features from core that he has viewed as straying away from Bitcoin as a medium for monetary exchange and more into arbitrary data, programmatic money.

The real difference in this entire debate, if you want to call it that, as you say, would be between sound money and programmable money to really, really simplify it.

So to answer the question directly, Notts is an alternate Bitcoin client implementation that you can run that has a slightly different feature set to core, different policy defaults.

Everything is configurable in Notts as well.

So you can actually run a Bitcoin Notts node and have basically all the settings be the same as a Bitcoin core node.

They're fully compatible with each other.

It's an alternate client implementation for Bitcoin.

Excellent.

And just to keep it even a little bit, I want to keep it as basic as possible so I don't lose anybody along the way here.

There could be some listeners that we forget.

We just assume too much as Bitcoiners.

And I learned this actually from some feedback I received in Riga after emceeing the morning where a lady approached me and she was down the rabbit hole, had been, but bought her partner for the first time.

and she said, you guys are using some acronyms and you're saying things like Paper Bitcoin Summer and I've brought my partner here and he wants to learn and this is all going over their heads.

You've just really got to assume the basic level of understanding and know that new people are joining the network every day.

That's the real number go up.

It doesn't matter on the dollar terms, but more and more people join the Bitcoin network every single day.

So that means there are noobs every single day that are coming into the space.

And so people might hear Bitcoin Core and think that's like the team.

That's Team Bitcoin.

That's Bitcoin Inc.

Now, I know this is as basic as it gets, but do you want to just explain to people the decentralized nature of Bitcoin?

And there is no Bitcoin Core HQ where 50 staff members turn up to work every day.

Do you just want to give an overview of that?

And then we'll get into a little bit more technical stuff.

Well, I hate to immediately derail the scenario you're putting together, but I would say there is a Bitcoin Inc.

with a Bitcoin headquarters that 50 people go into the office every day.

And that's unfortunate.

it.

The decentralized nature that Bitcoin is supposed to have, absolutely, is that it's an open source project.

And so if you don't know what an open source project is, this is simply a bit of code that lives on the internet that anyone can contribute to.

Now, that doesn't mean anarchy.

That means there's always some level of control.

And the way of controlling that is that there are people who have the permission to actually say this goes in or this does not go in.

These are the maintainers of an open source project.

Bitcoin Core has five of them.

And they essentially are the people who eventually say that you get to put a change in or you don't get to put a change in.

And so for a lot of reasons, and I want to be careful here, I don't want to derail what we're talking about or make any accusations to specific people because I don't think that's helpful here.

But for a lot of reasons, those who are maintainers of Bitcoin Core get a lot of attention.

And it's a hard job.

There have been maintainers who have decided to come off of that job because of the pressure.

There were legal threats specifically by the only person who is not Satoshi Craig, right?

That was legally threatening Bitcoin Core.

And by extension, effectively, the only people who really could have been at legal risk or at most legal risk would have been the maintainers.

Okay.

That's a little bit long-winded.

An open source project is a piece of code on the internet that anyone can theoretically can contribute to.

Bitcoin Core, the software, is an open source project.

Absolutely.

Bitcoin knots is a fork of Bitcoin core, a fork in this case, because this is going to be confusing when we also are talking about that there are forks of Bitcoin as well, different, different chains.

Bitcoin cash is a fork off of Bitcoin.

BSV is a fork of Bitcoin cash.

Okay.

A software fork is that someone sees one of these open source projects and decides to take that entire code base, make a new project and start to do their own thing with it separately.

So Bitcoin Noughts is that essentially.

And since Bitcoin Core is still open, Bitcoin Noughts tends to implement all the same changes that Bitcoin Core does.

I can come back to in a moment why that's good and bad.

But basically, the whole thing is that Bitcoin Core has hundreds.

I really should know the exact number, but quite many contributing developers who are on this full time, they are funded by grants by a bunch of different organizations.

And quite many of them actually do work out of the same offices.

I believe it's mostly in San Francisco and New York.

They come together and the work is organized, in my view, quite a lot like a corporate software shop, essentially, that there are people who are in charge of specific areas.

And the direction of development is directed by, yeah, essentially a central management for lack of a better term.

So Bitcoin Core is Bitcoin Inc.

in my view, and to use the term that you did, it's the organization that is developing the reference implementation for a Bitcoin node.

And again, I just want to be careful as far as keeping the terminology basic.

You need to run something in order to be running a Bitcoin node.

and Bitcoin Core is the reference implementation.

When we say that, it's meaning like this is the default one.

If you wanted to install Bitcoin, this is the default one that comes in all of your, say, node in a box softwares these days.

It's the Kleenex, it's the brand name implementation.

And Notts, at this point, is the only really highly adopted alternative to this.

There are other implementations such as Libre Relay, which has a different purpose, but Nots is the major one.

And it does have most of the same code base as Core, which means it gets all of the security improvements and minor feature changes that don't really do much to the way Bitcoin actually functions in terms of money.

It just simply does not merge certain things or implements some alternatives where keeping the priority of Bitcoin as money would be violated by actions that have been undertaken by Bitcoin Core.

So that would be how I would explain that.

And now let's clear up a little gray line between, and again, like nuance, just nuance between the language, but in practical terms, it's huge.

The difference between a developer, core developer and a core maintainer.

Great.

Sure.

Okay.

The core developer, or I think contributor is really the term that they tend to use, is anyone can really go and contribute something to the Bitcoin core code.

You do what's called a pull request, and that can either be accepted or rejected into the next release of the software.

Anyone can do that.

There are regular contributors who are basically in this process quite a lot.

And I think the weight is generally given to them when deciding to make changes, but you could have someone out of the blue do something interesting and they will accept it.

Our friend Fractal Encrypt made some, I believe, documentation changes.

He noticed some, I forget if it was typo or something that was unclear.

He made a pull request and the change got accepted because it wasn't controversial and it worked.

And he showed that you can, in fact, go and contribute to this project, which is fantastic.

It is fantastic.

Now, the maintainers are the ones who ultimately hold the keys to the project, which means they ultimately are the ones who make the decisions about what actually makes it into the final release.

There are five of them, which is good.

This means that the centralization risk at least is down to five.

It's not down to one.

But yeah, basically, they're the ones who call the shots with the project, ultimately.

And now I would say that there's quite a bit of that, the decisions they make and the ultimate technical, their decisions to implement something or not.

I think there's quite a lot of other bureaucracy there.

And so it's not necessarily that these five people are unilaterally making decisions, but they are the ones who ultimately had to hit the button.

So the maintainers are the ones who have the permission to hit the button to say, yes, this goes into the next release of Bitcoin Core or not.

Does that clear that up for you?

Yeah I hope so I hope people are up to speed now So I think probably the last thing you might want to touch on is GitHub and how that works And this basically being the message board for proposing changes, updates, pull requests, noticing bugs, reporting.

Yeah, if you just want to get people up to speed on that.

Sure.

And I'll stay super high level here.

It's really just the place where the code for Bitcoin Core lives.

The code for Nots also lives there.

And the code for everything that we're basically talking about, it all lives on GitHub.

And it is an open message board whenever someone decides to go and open the pull request as the nomenclature is.

You open a pull request, which is you say, I want to make this change to the code.

And then people are free to go and comment on it.

The sort of ownership level people in the project have permissions to do things like closing down a conversation or saying you can't make certain comments or banning users, things like that.

So in terms of it being a place where open discussion is able to happen about Bitcoin, it still is essentially moderated by the team of individuals who is at the project level.

So the developers, contributors, and maintainers, they run the GitHub.

That's what it means.

There are other places for communication about Bitcoin.

I'm sort of anticipating a question along these lines.

The mailing list, the Bitcoin mailing list is an important place where ideas get bounced around before they start to make it into this pull request phase or parallel to it.

there's been quite a lot of discussion.

It's a Google group now, I do believe, and it's open, the official Bitcoin mailing list.

And there are other places, of course, where conversations happen.

X is a big one, of course.

And there are plenty of these telegram and signal groups these days.

I've been reminded recently that back in the day of the block size wars, it was Slack and IRC.

There's an IRC channel also for internet relay chat for Bitcoin development.

And I believe plenty of, a lot of channels for different subjects.

So there are many places where discussions can happen that are quite open.

And GitHub is one of them.

And whenever an actual change is going to be made to the code, it's made there.

And the decision to, the bar is quite high for something to be actually added or changed on the Bitcoin code.

Basically, the maintainers have to be convinced that this is going to be something that's in their view, beneficial to to the code base.

So yeah, it's a place where the development itself actually happens and gets discussed in line of the changes happening, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Interesting that they have the ability to close down a conversation or yeah, it's almost as if filters work, Luke.

Ah, interesting.

More on that soon, I think.

More on that.

So, Luke Dash Jr., you mentioned that name earlier.

People may be scratching their heads, might not have heard that name before.

So, let's just do a quick update as to his career, for want of a better words, in relation to Bitcoin.

Sure.

Well, Luke is one of the longest standing Bitcoin core developers.

And to the extent that he's no longer working directly on core, he is a Bitcoin developer for an extremely long time.

I couldn't tell you the list of absolutely everything that he's done for Bitcoin, but it's very, very, very many things.

For example, he's the person who was able to figure out that Segwit could be done as a soft fork.

And that was extremely important in the resolution of the block size wars.

He ran a mining pool called...

Uh-oh.

Not Elysium.

sounds something like that.

I can look it up if it's relevant, but he ran a mining pool by a different name that eventually turned into Ocean just a couple of years ago.

Here it was resurrected.

And so actually the blocks that were first found by Ocean had the name of the previous pool, I think, because a setting hadn't been toggled or there was references to the old pool there somewhere.

The decentralized mining was something that was important to him back in the day.

Largely, he's a polarizing figure in the community, more for his personal, I'll say, opinions and lifestyle choices.

During COVID, he was very much avoiding catching whatever was going around.

He's Catholic and has a ton of kids and is extremely strict in his moral code.

I don't know.

I'm not a spokesperson for him exactly, but that's definitely the highest level things to know, I would say, for him.

But he's been a Bitcoin developer for an extremely long time and has had an outsized influence in what's actually happened in Bitcoin and major changes to Bitcoin have either been implemented by him or thought of by him, the Segwit one being one of the most prominent.

But he also created Bitcoin knots.

And this is a reference to the knots on the whips that the biblical Jesus used to whip the money changers because they were desecrating the house of God with the act of money changing.

That I do believe is the correct reason for why that is called Bitcoin Noughts.

And so you can extrapolate that somewhat, that Bitcoin Noughts is supposed to be this thing to whip out the bad parts of, say, arbitrary data storage out of Bitcoin.

And that's kind of been the tact that Noughts has taken.

since February 2023, there's been a major uptick in usage of Noughts.

Prior to that, it did kind of been considered this quirky, weird fork that hardly anyone implemented.

But after the advent of a lot more arbitrary data being put onto the chain, users were looking for an outlet to be able to signal, hey, I don't want this stuff.

I run Noughts on my personal home node.

My mempool is quite clean.

I use quite tight settings myself, even I think stricter than the Noughts defaults.

And yeah, I do not want to participate in the relaying of transactions that are for the purpose of embedding arbitrary data onto Bitcoin.

And that is very easy to track, find these transactions in the mempool.

You can tell what they are.

You can tell what they look like.

And ultimately, a miner chooses to mine these transactions or not.

and now Ocean.

So Ocean started a couple of years ago here as essentially out of the blue, a pool that had mining templates based off of knots as defaults to filter out different types of arbitrary data.

We can start using the word spam if you like, maybe being too diplomatic.

And so they actually have one template that's very strict, one template that is a nots default that allows some bits of spam, but less harmful stuff.

And then they also offer a core compliant template or something that's quite matching to core.

And so they give their users a choice.

And this is the only pool that does this at this point, that gives the users a choice of what they actually want to mine.

And then a little while later, they implemented datum, D-A-T-U-M, which is something you can run on your Bitcoin node, which creates the block templates that you can mine off of for you.

And so you can basically say that you can create your own block templates based on all of your own rules.

And if you do end up finding a block with your miners, you will have made the template that that block creates.

So yeah, it's a great effort towards decentralization of mining, which I think is the ultimate way out of all of these issues is just simply having more miners constructing their own blocks.

So right now, I would say Luke Dash Jr.

is pretty much known at the moment for knots and for ocean slash datum.

Ocean being the company in the mining pool and datum being the protocol.

Any mining pool could implement datum.

And stratum v2 is essentially an equivalent mining protocol that would allow miners to mine their own templates.

and there is theoretically a mining pool coming up maybe more than one that going to do stratum v2 So decentralized mining is something that is slowly moving along But for now, we have Ocean, and Ocean has about 2% of the hash rate type, something like that, somewhere between 1% and 2%.

And so Ocean finds a couple of blocks a day at the moment.

But that's something, that's a start.

So that's Luke Dash Jr.

in maybe a few too many words.

I would just add, throughout the years that he's been contributing to Core, he's had up and down relationships with certain other developers, maintainers.

And also, I believe he started working on Notts years and years ago.

this isn't a thing that's just been spun up out and i want to make this clear because a lot of people i think just well you can't just spin up a whole new thing and you know like within a week just because you don't you think it's spam and i think it's you know somebody's right uh i think there's a lot like do you know when he he first you know like started talking about knots releasing knots created it i want to say like it could even be like 10 years ago oh yeah i was gonna say i thought it was 2013 2014 yeah right okay then that i think is something has been missed by a lot of people this isn't a fly by night spin up right okay fuck you guys here's my new thing like this has been decade over a decade and uh to my knowledge and again see we're walking into the trap or what's that's been set that feels like um a little bit disingenuous which has been happening the whole time throughout this is you and i are going to sit here and put our hands up and say look we're not technically sound uh enough to to talk about this at any depth right so we should just believe the tech bros like that's the trap right there and i found that to be the most disingenuous part of this whole thing it's like you know you have no authority at all to be even memeing you know i've i've been shot down by a couple of these guys for for just putting out memes no text just a meme and then getting character assassinated it's like wow like fuck you guys this is this is wild um okay so if i don't understand it technically can i not ask questions about it uh where's where's the education rather than the you know the shaming no absolutely uh plebslop is the term going around i believe uh and and yeah i i mean i have to say i've been disappointed with with some people who have been sharing that term seemingly unironically because it really is, it feels quite elitist to me to be kind of gatekeeping and saying that you, first of all, I've heard more than once on Onyx on this that if you're not a contributor to Bitcoin Core, you shouldn't be saying anything about what Bitcoin Core is doing.

And I mean, like we were talking about earlier a little bit, like the bar is super high to get into being a core contributor.

The change that Fractal did was a small documentation change, not to overly minimize that he did a contribution and that was great, but to be a regular contributor and actually make changes to Bitcoin, the bar for that is quite high.

And there's only some hundred or so individuals who are currently doing that.

And there's an attitude right now that basically core gets to dictate what happens to Bitcoin and that the masses, the users must go along with that.

And well, NOTS is one alternative to that and one way that users are exercising their right as sovereign individuals in a decentralized ecosystem to say, no, I do not agree with what you're doing.

And it was pointed out to me that in the block size wars, Bitcoin Core essentially was the winner, right?

It was Bitcoin Core versus big blockers that eventually became Bitcoin Cash.

And Bitcoin Core and the development team there and everything going along with that stood their ground and made the necessary changes and ultimately even made a compromise with Segwit, right, that won the block size wars, so-called.

But the pattern I'm noticing basically is that core is the new power base that effectively the users are deciding to say, hey, we're not necessarily going to take this any longer.

And we might be going down a road where there could be a potential fork, a soft fork, but it could turn into a full chain split art fork scenario.

I don't want to mix terms up, but chain split, I think, is better.

There could be a chain split out of this, and the battle would be between, essentially, is Bitcoin Core, the organization and the developers and maintainers of Bitcoin Core, are they in charge of Bitcoin or are the users in charge of Bitcoin?

And just to bring it back to the block size wars analogy, what I've been hearing a little bit is that the impression is so much that it wasn't exactly the users of Bitcoin versus the miners back then.

It was sort of Bitcoin core versus the miners.

Bitcoin core plus the users to be generous.

But now we might be in a scenario where the user base has a chance to exercise its rights in the community and say, hey, our voice matters as well.

Right.

I think we've got everybody up to speed.

Now let's talk about Bitcoin improvement proposals.

or bips because bip 444 was dropped uh time of recording like three and a half weeks ago four yeah yeah something like that about a month let's say about a month ago and uh yeah that's that's caused a stir obviously uh dropped by uh an anon a pseudonymous uh account so immediately started kind of the witch hunt as to who that was uh led of course by on the other side of this debate um some questionable behavior around that because you know like uh pseudonymity is what we're here for right absolutely i mean uh i made a choice to unmask so did you um but to those who who choose to uh not release their entire identity or not or not keep their entire identity i think it's it's only a mark of respect and and even to those who have had their identities revealed.

I won't say anyone, but I continue to use their name unless they start to use their name themselves in other contexts and all this.

And I mean, there's been speculation about who this Dathan Om may or may not be.

The only one that I will address is that people think he's Luke Dash Jr.

I am strongly of the opinion that he is not.

Luke Dash Jr., mostly because I've seen the two of them talking in the same threads at the same time, sometimes with quite different opinions.

So I do believe that Dathon is not Luke.

But yeah, Luke would have to be an extremely good actor and very good at compartmentalizing parts of his personality in order to achieve Machiavellian goals, Machiavellian goals in order to make this work.

So this is what's really interesting that this debate had been raging for a long, long time, as we said at the beginning.

And then, boom, out of nowhere, there's a new actor, there's a new voice, and there's a new bit.

And this person could have been lurking.

It could have been someone from either side.

It could be someone from CORE that suddenly had a change of heart and has come across and put this proposal.

It could be someone just trying to stir up and divide even more.

It could be anything.

But the fact of the matter is, it's out there.

And this caught your attention.

And why?

Absolutely, sure.

So, yeah, thanks for the very open-ended segue here because I'm going to take us on a bit of a tangent.

I'll just preface this a little bit with that if you've seen anything that I've been doing with Knut, Knut Spahnelm, on the Bitcoin Infinity Show or more recently the Bitcoin Infinity Academy.

I've been a staunch monetary maximalist, so to say, since this whole furore erupted in February 2023.

I don't know that necessarily monetary maximalism was in the milieu before that, but definitely I'm here in Bitcoin for Bitcoin as money and for Bitcoin to...

upend the fiat system and to get us out of the dystopia that we currently find ourselves hurtling towards.

And I find any attempts to make Bitcoin less useful as money to be actively working against those goals.

And so monetary maximalism to me is simply let's defend and preserve Bitcoin as a form of money, store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, and reject ways of transacting on Bitcoin, Bitcoin the network, Bitcoin the technology that are not strictly monetary.

Now, we can get into some definitions here and gray areas, tons of gray areas.

Is it a monetary transaction to open a lightning channel?

I would say yes, because it's something that is enabling this medium of exchange mechanism.

It's monetary by all respects, essentially.

A peg out transaction onto the liquid network, I would say, is also the same because you're simply moving, not even really moving, You're sending your Bitcoin to another network, and then you can do some things over there, and at a later date, you can come back into Bitcoin.

So far, so good.

And there are talks of other layer two protocols that need to anchor themselves onto Bitcoin somehow that are a little shitcoin looking, things that are resembling of Ethereum style DeFi.

And those are for sure a bit of a gray area to me.

But what's not a gray area is the embedding of arbitrary data through mechanisms that are absolutely exploits, in my view.

This will be primarily things like images, but it can also be long strings of text.

And it's also a couple of protocols for creating tokens directly on Bitcoin and making transactions with these tokens using primarily Operator or inscriptions.

So I should probably do a really, really high level overview of what the main types of spam effectively are.

the first thing that was discovered back in February 2023 was, and I call it discovered because these things were all there.

These bugs were all there.

The Ordinals Protocol, I guess discovered is the wrong word.

The Ordinals Protocol is a mechanism for giving an individual number to every Satoshi, which for various reasons I find silly.

go listen to Knut on that topic a little bit more, I would say.

But it's a protocol for basically differentiating UTXOs from each other.

And so you can essentially have a UTXO that under this ordinal protocol is theoretically more valuable than some other UTXO.

That's the most charitable way I can describe that.

But the technical thing, so ordinals themselves are silly, but it's a third party program.

It's a layer on top of Bitcoin, even existing outside of Bitcoin.

They're just simply analyzing the blockchain for their own purposes.

Okay, fine.

Go be silly somewhere else.

That's fine.

I don't care.

But the thing at the same time that they found was by using a bit of Bitcoin code, Bitcoin script, called if you would send an op false code and an op if code.

I'm really trying not to be way low level here.

But you could do that in a Bitcoin transaction.

And essentially, whatever goes under this op if would be ignored by the Bitcoin script.

and you can put whatever you want there up to a limit.

There is a limit actually, but you can keep repeating this structure over and over and over again in the same transaction and essentially fill it with an image.

And the only limit to that protocol is actually the 4 megabyte block size or the 4 megabyte effective block size.

So there have been like 4 megabyte at 3.96 megabyte.

I think that's the theoretical limit blocks that are literally just one of these inscriptions.

So just terminology for a long time in the early 23s, we were calling all of this stuff ordinals.

What was really correct was that the ordinals is this kind of third party protocol living on top of this.

Inscriptions is the thing that is being put onto the blockchain via this mechanism.

Op, false, op, if.

Op, false, op, if is my shorthand for that.

Now, there's another category here that basically uses fake public keys on Bitcoin to embed data.

The most prominent user of this at the moment is Bitcoin Stamps.

And basically, this is a protocol that effectively just said, hey, we can create a multi-sig.

We can make a multi-sig transaction where everything in this massive multi-sig is really just random data.

And the random data that you get there actually is like an image, corresponds to an image or some text or something like this, but usually it's an image.

And the thing is, every single one of these public keys has to be stored in the UTXO set, as in all of the Bitcoin nodes have to continue to keep these stored somewhere.

Because if they ever were to be spent, you have to validate that this was actually valid.

So you can't get rid of them.

That would break Bitcoin's consensus.

So to differentiate what these are, the inscriptions creates only one new UTXO, but embeds a bunch of data with it at a discount, at a four times discount that was introduced by SegWit.

Then this Stamps uses bare multisig, or there's a new one that isn't using this bare multisig, but regardless, They're using public keys to embed data there.

And this creates a bunch of new UTXOs.

It's more expensive than these inscriptions.

And from my perspective, I can't even really be charitable to this.

This was designed to be as destructive to Bitcoin as absolutely possible, with the rationale being that it's the most permanent possible because you can't get rid of it.

You can theoretically prune or ignore the data from these inscriptions, but you can't ignore what's on these stamps.

And finally, the other place where you can easily at this point put arbitrary data into Bitcoin is Opratern.

And this is the thing where all of this controversy has really heated up in regards.

So for the longest time, the oppratern was a compromise.

And this theoretically happened back in 2014.

Oppratern is literally a statement that says in the scripting language, go back to the beginning of the program.

And it existed for a theoretical reason.

It exists in other programming languages, basically.

But what it meant was that if you put something after the operaturn, the program would ignore what was afterwards, is basically the mechanism.

But you can put the data there.

And when other protocols started to use these fake public keys, basically, Opratern was identified as a compromise that you can put your data in this Opratern instead of in the public keys and bloating the UTXO set.

So the limit for this was traditionally 40 bytes, which is 42 for real, but 40 in terms of the actual data that you can put in.

Later on, this was raised to 80 or 83 bytes by Core.

Knott's kept it the same at the original 40.

And so there was a whole controversy with Samurai Whirlpool for a little while that was claiming that Knott's had basically intentionally not allowed these Whirlpool, Samurai Whirlpool transactions.

But they're getting the causality wrong.

core had opened up up to 80 bytes, which the Whirlpool used, and Notts just simply didn't follow that.

So the causality is off there, I would say.

But what really kicked off the controversy here was that core removed the policy default to 80 bytes for this operaturn.

And when operaturn was implemented, the actual theoretical limit for operaturn was the block size.

You can put up to the block size in this op return.

And so now we're back there.

And since it's not this witness data, it's not a four megabyte limit, it's a one megabyte limit.

Great.

But anyway you can put a one megabyte large file into an op return and that it The controversy really kicked off for I would say many in the knots camp and I this is where I'm going to want to be clear about my role in all of this I consider myself very very very lightly supportive of the BIP overall a hundred percent aligned in terms of the monetary maximalism of it.

I do have some criticisms of the Bit444 that we can get into, but we haven't even talked about what it is yet.

So cart before the horse a little bit.

The group that kicked off this Bip and Luke and all this basically are concerned about kitty porn making it onto the blockchain in a in a egregiously easy to access manner now i think this is a bit overblown that's that's what i'll say is that is that this specific fear that has has kicked this all off is a bit overblown there have been some conversations about the the legal implications of allowing or um yeah explicitly allowing this stuff if it if it made it onto the chain like if this makes it onto your node what's going to happen.

The unfortunate newsflash is that there are apparently child abuse images already on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Don't go looking for it, of course.

But through inscriptions, I believe, or some other type of...

By the way, there are tons of arcane ways of embedding data.

It really is possible to embed data in tons of different ways.

This is called stenography in the parlance.

So you can get really creative with how you embed data in this or that.

And so it's not like it's easy to simply say we turn off this or that feature and we suddenly stop spam.

In fact, I'll be the first to admit, you can't stop spam.

I do believe it is possible to have some sensible limits on it though.

And that's basically what this entire BIP444 is about, is setting some limits on what is possible here.

It's intended to be temporary in order to make a more reasoned, more permanent fix after a year, gives a year's development time.

And the reason for the temporariness and the urgentness is cited as the child abuse material that could make it onto Bitcoin.

One last on that, just the data itself in the operaturn is not really raw, plain text data.

It's not like this information is actually able to, like you could extract the code from the block and immediately it's there as a file you could simply open.

There are some things you have to do to make it like a proper file.

Well, the argument really is that it's the easiest it ever would be to do this, basically.

You can dump an image that's one megabyte large onto Bitcoin and with very little effort, turn it into something you could open up with your image viewer.

So these are the concerns.

and from my part, I do think the legal or the, not to minimize it, that child abuse material is awful and I don't want it on Bitcoin.

Definitely, I do not want that.

But I do think that the original justification for this is a little bit overblown.

I personally just don't like the spam.

So I'll pause there.

Damn, all right.

Before we move on to the BIP, you mentioned a few things here, which people might be kind of wondering, like, well, how the hell does that even happen?

And I think we'll talk about fake public keys.

And I mean, well, just basically, how does someone create a fake public key that they literally just take a public key created by their hardware wallet and then change three or four of the figures.

And now they've got a fake public key, which they can relay a transaction onto the Bitcoin blockchain, which then means it can never be spent.

Like this is the thing that you were, that unspendable transaction.

Because it is a fake public key, like it looks like a public key as soon as it hits and it's going to get relayed, but no one can then access it.

So it's on the blockchain forevermore.

And this causes bloat, right?

The UTXO set has just, I mean, it's mooned since February 2023 when you look at it.

And again, the way I understand it, like all of this bloat and nonsense that's entered onto the blockchain.

Well, I've run a node and my two terabyte hard disk SSD thing is now telling me, right, we're 95% full.

You now need a four terabyte.

And I'm like, wow, you know, that crept up.

So this is a real concern because now it's making it longer for people to make the initial Bitcoin download, blockchain download.

It's making it more expensive for people, which is completely antithetical to Bitcoin and, you know, the technology and Moore's law and all of this kind of stuff.

Like it should be, we should be getting equipment now that is cheaper and faster.

And we should have the IBD down in, you know, obviously it depends on your Wi-Fi speed and whatever, but in a few days.

But for some people, it is taking weeks.

Yeah, the entire root of the problem here, and I mean, I will say that there's a couple of effects, but let's tackle this one, is the increase in storage.

So the consistently full four megabyte blocks is what is essentially creating the storage requirement, the actual size of the blockchain.

Now that's growing linearly.

We can say that.

The best part about this is at least there is a cap on the amount that the blockchain can grow in terms of storage.

And yeah, realistically, Moore's Law should handle this fairly soon here.

But storage and memory prices are quite high.

The UTXO bloat that everyone is concerned about is that it really is hard, computationally hard to run a Bitcoin node harder, harder and harder and harder.

if they have to keep this UTXO set and keep accessing it, basically, is the problem.

So the biggest issue is that the IBD, the initial block download, the reason that's starting to take much, much longer is not so much because of the storage.

It's because these blocks to actually compute the blockchain, it takes longer if you can't store the entire UTXO set in memory.

And so 16 gigabytes of RAM is no longer really sufficient.

It will bottom 8 gigabytes is completely out of the question.

I believe it's effectively impossible.

Now, you pretty much need 32 gigabytes of RAM on your node in order for the blockchain to be computed properly.

you can choose to prune your node if you would like, meaning removing old UTXOs that have been spent and you no longer need to keep them in.

But you can only do that after you've gotten to the end, after you've done the whole download.

You can prune afterwards, basically.

So yeah, the whole thing is it's making it more expensive to run a node, meaning that theoretically, the node numbers are going to trend downward over time, meaning less decentralization in Bitcoin.

And then there's even a question of whether the only nodes that actually matter are the so-called economic nodes, not the ones that enforce policy and relay transactions and all this.

I don't disagree with that view 100%.

I disagree with that view like 90%.

There is something too that the most important nodes are the ones that are actually accepting Bitcoin payments or sending Bitcoin payments, but accepting Bitcoin payments, especially to be able to validate that the Bitcoin that you're getting is actually real Bitcoin.

That's important.

And you can make decisions as an economic node as well, if you like.

I definitely use my node to make transactions.

I don't make a lot of transactions.

I'm not a merchant, but I definitely use my node to make transactions.

So I consider myself an economic node, but some people consider only the nodes for the big merchants and the big service providers to be the ones that really matter in the ecosystem, which is, again, is just antithetical to this decentralized network that any sovereign individual can join.

But yeah, the spam is making it more costly to run a node, and that's not good.

Full stop.

The other effect it has is that when you get these massive frenzies, like you can go through and you can see these massive mempool spikes that happened starting around this February 2023.

These just make Bitcoin much less usable, user-friendly.

It was quite expensive to send the Bitcoin transaction back in that period of time.

it was expensive to open or close a Lightning channel.

So basically, if you had a Lightning channel open, great.

But if you didn't, if you didn't have your funds in Lightning, you are stuck.

You could either choose to send your funds on-chain for huge fees or somehow get into a Lightning wallet by some other mechanism.

But yeah it clogged up the network It priced out the entire developing world This is like anyone who had just a little bit of money could not use Bitcoin unless they were already onboarded It stopped the onboarding and adoption of people in the developing world while this was going on.

And to me, this makes Bitcoin drastically worse as money.

It means that on the whim of one of these fads, you can just get a massive fee spike.

And what ended up happening as well is that services that would make Bitcoin transactions at what they thought were actually crazy overpays, but would make sure that what they're doing gets into blocks, that stuff would not get handled.

So what we had were, I believe it was Binance consolidations sitting in the mempool for like a really, really, really long time that were at like 30 sats per V byte or something.

And they were these massive transactions, like these huge blobby transactions, if you see them on the mempool.

But they were entirely monetary, just to use that term.

Like it was literally a whole ton of UTXOs being merged into one, right?

The definition of a monetary transaction, even if it is a bit of an edge case, a rarer one, a consolidation is absolutely allowed.

Absolutely.

And so what ended up happening was all of these consolidations that they would do all the time were sitting there stuck and basically creating a fee floor that's way above what we would usually experience.

And so this is all just to say that I don't think high fees are bad for Bitcoin.

I do not.

That's a be cash or talking point.

The thing was, it was all so artificial and so sudden.

We've had fee spikes in times of massive adoption to Bitcoin, which is great.

It's great to see.

And these fee spikes are probably something to do with why things start to depress after a little while, because it becomes more expensive to transact and this and that.

But the thing is, it's because of demand.

It's because of demand for Bitcoin, and that's a good thing.

Now, an argument can be made that these massive fee spikes actually helped with certain areas of Bitcoin.

For example, the major exchanges made changes to how they do these consolidations, as far as I understand.

And the Lightning ecosystem had to make a lot of changes in order to become more resilient.

And one thing that cropped up at the time was Bolt's swaps to Liquid.

And this became essentially the edge around basically going fully on-chain is that prices on Liquid were much cheaper.

And so Liquid adoption actually increased by quite a bit.

So instead of swapping out to on-chain, you would swap out onto Liquid.

You could do this or that there and then swap back into your own channels if you wanted to.

So a lot of innovation happened.

I'm not saying that that was a bad thing that the innovation happened, but the way it happened was absolutely a case where Bitcoin became much worse as money.

And this is not comparable at all to gold's non-monetary use cases, because basically, you don't have to deal with the consequence of someone else's jewelry in your own wallet.

Like the jewelry of all of the people in the world are sitting on the Bitcoin blockchain and competing for transaction space.

And so just by the nature of the network, it's degrading the usefulness of Bitcoin as money.

And even if we're not in a period of huge demand now, who's to know when the next one is going to happen?

So that's always been the argument for me is that when these massive frenzies for ordinals or inscriptions or whatever you call them heat up, that that just makes Bitcoin worse at what it's supposed to be.

And I worry for the effects on adoption for short term gain for a very small group of people.

All right, let's do the BIP.

The BIP.

The BIP.

Okay.

four four four four four four so before you get into that i think it's probably we should note that bips are bips have been open for years right this isn't a thing that just comes and goes and uh you don't get a straight no you don't get straight yes they can be looked at reviewed you people can throw in an opinion uh this is what you've been doing um some of them go back five or six years, might still be open, might still be debated.

So I just want people to understand how this kind of works.

So this is the new one.

This is dropped by the anonymous person.

And you have now engaged with the conversation.

But because this overlaps directly with what you do in Fiatland, And this is where you can really lean in with your technical expertise and your experience.

So I'm really looking forward to hearing about that and how this overlaps with this BIP.

Perfect.

I'll cover what is the BIP before I get into kind of my take on the situation and why I support it, at least to the extent that I do.

Okay, the BIP, and I really want to say that it's not being granted an official BIP number, apparently.

And so everyone who's using this 444 might get rugged eventually.

I prefer it to this reduced data temporary soft fork.

It's a mouthful and RDTS, if you squint your eyes, it looks like other words.

so I don't like it.

RDTS might be the more proper term here, but 444 is what I like to use and I'm going to continue to use it.

Basically, it's a set of technical proposals to make a consensus change to Bitcoin to disallow certain types of transactions.

And here we should be clear again about a couple of things.

Consensus is what makes a valid Bitcoin transaction.

So if your Bitcoin transaction that you send out and broadcast and propose to everyone is against consensus, literally everyone is going to say, hey, this isn't the Bitcoin transaction.

Get out of here.

policy is is a different thing uh node policy is users can set their own parameters for what they will or will not choose to relay and ultimately what they will decide to to mine so you can have a a stricter policy than consensus but you can't have a looser policy than consensus basically so consensus is the ultimate limit and policy, you can make settings changes to that underneath.

I hope that's clear enough.

And a soft fork is basically a restriction in these consensus rules, ultimately, like it's fully backwards compatible with the rest of the chain, because it's restricting, technically, the things that can be put onto Bitcoin.

So it means that you could do fewer things on Bitcoin, but they were all valid before.

A hard fork is whenever you open up new functionality that basically, if you decide to reject that, you would be rejecting a new valid set of consensus rules on another chain.

And so effectively, you lose the backing of the the network is what happens.

And then you get left with a coin split is what happens.

So this is how Bitcoin Cash was implemented, sorry, emerged, was that it ended up being a hard fork off.

Now, what's being proposed here is a soft fork.

So what this means is that a smaller subset of what was valid will be valid in the future for those who signal to accept this soft fork.

I'm not going to get into deeply the technical details here for the BIP, unless you want me to, but the high level is that, first of all, the top-level marquee change is that op return is being set at 83 bytes on a consensus level.

So there used to be no limit on how big op return could be, so the block size was the effective limit.

In the BIP, 83 bytes.

So the previous policy default would now be set as the consensus level.

You cannot go above it.

A bunch of other changes are also included to things to limit other mechanisms for pushing scripts, basically.

Pushing scripts, pushing other types of data.

It theoretically addresses these stamps to a certain extent.

It addresses the inscriptions.

Basically, the way it addresses the inscriptions is it gets rid of op if entirely.

So I was saying op false op if is the kind of the signature for inscriptions.

Well, it says op if is no longer valid.

If your transaction includes op if, you're no longer valid.

It gets rid of what's called the taproot annex, which would be another place to just put data that really hasn't seen any use.

So it's just disabling that.

So basically disabling a whole bunch of methods for spam to get on to Bitcoin.

I'll actually pause here.

Do you have anything specific to kind of direct this a little further as far as the actual what this is?

No, I think this is a nice buildup.

So get as technical and as geeky as you want.

So, you know, let's get people up to speed as to what's going on.

Okay.

So now maybe I give kind of my little thesis here as far as why I think something like this is justified And then we can kind of talk a little bit about the merits of the BIP itself and my positions on that But here bringing it back to kind of Fiat Land and my background.

So I'm an industrial control systems cybersecurity professional by trade.

That's a lot of words to say, basically, I do cybersecurity for the things that control factories, electrical grids, oil and gas pipelines, ships, basically anything that where something happens in the real world is controlled by these industrial control systems.

And you have to do a lot of things differently than you would in essentially the traditional IT world with computers and phones and this and that.

Companies and individuals are usually very concerned about their own personal or company data, one, it getting out, but also that it not being tampered with and all this, like all of these things of hacking, cases of hacking, an individual getting hacked.

This is almost universally someone gets their password stolen, basically.

So this is a case of their data being leaked.

And then someone can go and do all sorts of nefarious things with that, with the logins to your email or your bank account or something like this.

That's what individuals and companies are usually concerned about.

What industrial control systems are concerned about is that the thing has got to keep running and it's got to keep running safely.

So another term for these industrial control systems is critical infrastructure.

Now, this is a bit of a more of a precise definition that is essentially set by mostly governments or governing bodies for electricity or whatever you call it, not whatever you call it, etc.

But critical infrastructure are basically those things that are considered essential to the safe and smooth operation of society.

And so the vast majority of things that fall under industrial control systems also are considered critical infrastructure.

This is again, electrical grids.

This is traffic control systems, communications, energy.

So anything related to energy, electricity, oil and gas, and transmission generation, all of this stuff is considered critical infrastructure, water, water systems, transport, the list goes on and on and on.

This stuff is considered critical infrastructure.

The internet is considered critical infrastructure because of the dependence of everyone on the internet in order to communicate.

We're communicating over the internet.

So something I'd never heard anyone say before is Bitcoin is critical infrastructure.

And as soon as that thought came to my mind over the course of just going back and forth with people on this, it's just light bulb.

Bitcoin fits the definition of critical infrastructure absolutely, because it's this base monetary layer for what we can build an entirely new society on.

It's not critical in the sense of that some government is deciding it's critical.

It's critical because I'm deciding it's critical.

And it's critical because every user of the network is deciding it's critical.

I think anyone who becomes to a certain level a Bitcoiner, the functioning of Bitcoin is critical for many parts of their life, at the very least to a similar degree as the internet itself.

So my follow-on to this, because I don't think that's a massive, that's not a massive insight that Bitcoin is critical infrastructure, but the critical infrastructure as a term, as how the implications for how this must be defended and how you go about defending it, That's what I'm talking about.

Well, governments would consider the banking industry to be critical infrastructure, right?

Absolutely.

Payment systems, Visa, MasterCard, Swift, all of this stuff.

Yes, the same thing, same reason.

Yes.

So where this leads and where this ties into kind of my perspective here is that, so to To credentialize myself a little bit, I hold the CISSP certification, which is one of the most commonly requested management cybersecurity certifications out there.

I also hold one called the GICSP.

This is the equivalent for industrial control systems by a different organization.

I'm not trying to pump myself up here.

This is all visible on my LinkedIn, by the way.

Feel free to go check that out.

It's all visible.

This is to say that I know my stuff.

I'm credentialized.

That's not everything there is to it, but those were difficult examinations.

I will also say a little bit about that in order to get these things, you kind of have to have a mile wide of knowledge, but that's an inch deep.

So my job, the roles that I've had over my career are largely about knowing what how long has that been luke and it's about about 10 years at this point in the in the combined industrial control system cyber security so i i don't i don't mean to say that i'm like an expert in in any of this stuff but i know my stuff that's that's that's where i'm at i i kind of consider myself uh i'm not a junior anymore i'm i'm a journeyman that's that's how i would uh describe myself i know what i know and i know a fair bit about what i don't know So that's which I think is important.

And my job has been to know a lot about what to do and then digging into how to do it later.

But I don't need to hold that stuff in my brain all the time.

So that's just a little bit of contextualization for this stuff.

and in terms of how you go about defending this critical infrastructure stuff a whole lot of this is about putting in layers of defenses and this this actually this actually is true for for the rest of cyber security generally but the the key principle here is that you cannot ever stop someone who has unlimited resources and unlimited motivation to get into your system You can't.

That's a government, that's a really, really motivated competitor, industrial espionage sort of thing.

But you can make it as difficult as possible for them to do the nasty things that they want.

And so the main framework that I've used in my career is something called ISA, IEC.

And I really wish I had the acronyms to spell out, by the way.

Industrial Society of Automation is one of the ones that goes into this one, ISA IEC 62443.

And they couldn't have picked a better number.

I say that number like 20 times a day.

But there's ISO 27001 is a really common IT cybersecurity certification.

And at least that one kind of has thousands in it.

But yeah, 62443, whatever.

This framework basically sets the controls.

Cybersecurity is about implementing controls to defend against threats.

I can go even more specific into things like what is risk and what is a vulnerability, but that's a little boring.

I'll save that for my book.

Yeah, something like that.

Working on it, working on it.

the main thing is you put in controls to defend against threats.

And in these frameworks, this industrial cybersecurity framework, the threat levels are basically ranked in terms of how capable and how motivated they are.

So the very basic level of controls is actually against accidents.

Like literally someone unsuspecting gets into a system that they're not supposed to be in, And they just cause havoc that they weren't supposed to.

That's the level.

It's very, very, very low level stuff.

And it's super basic things like, do you have a password?

In many of these factory settings or industrial control systems settings, the computers there that run everything, many of them literally don't have passwords.

And many of them are literally running 20 year old operating systems and have been running for 20 years.

So it's crazy out there.

If you get into one of these systems, you can actually do a lot of damage, which is why I have a job.

So the really basic level of stuff, I actually analogize this basically to the policy filters.

It's stuff to prevent the really, really easy stuff.

If someone is stopped by basically just a password, they're not very motivated.

There's malware viruses and all this.

just floating around on the internet looking for stuff to break into.

And if you don't have any password, if you don't have any antivirus and you're connected to the internet, you can just some random little bug that hunts for private keys could get onto your system and just do whatever it wants if you don't have any protections at all.

And so that's the really basic level.

And so that's level one.

Level two is basically when threat actors start to get a little more motivated and these are a little bit more targeted.

I consider these to be kind of the filter level stuff.

But then you get into more and more expensive things, things that are a lot harder to implement, things such as literally not being able to communicate in and out of your industrial environment.

So in other words, totally locking off the internet almost completely.

this stuff gets more and more expensive and it gets more and more difficult to overcome to the point where essentially militaries and governments consider these things to be worth spending the money on basically.

Hardly anyone in the corporate world would go so far as to any of that.

But the point I'm trying to get at is that the layers of protections get more and more advanced based on the level of threat that you're anticipating receiving.

Now, I basically say all of that, and now I'm prefacing all of this with Bitcoin is not a company.

Despite what we said back with that core might be compromised and blah, blah, blah, run like a company.

Bitcoin is a decentralized network.

Cybersecurity, defense, whatever it is, has to be undertaken differently to what a corporation or a government or an individual can do.

I, as an individual, can choose to lock my phone with whatever settings I want to keep myself secure, my own personal data.

A corporation can similarly say, hey, we're going to do this and that to make ourselves more cyber secure.

And maybe they have to spend a lot of money and it takes some time, but they get the thing done.

A government's same thing.

But with Bitcoin, it's entirely different.

It's a decentralized system, users can choose to run their own nodes, and they can choose to have their own levels of policy.

And ultimately, the final backstop is the consensus rules themselves.

You can't do something that is against the consensus rules of Bitcoin.

That at least is the place where we butt up against it.

But the insight that I'll say comes from kind of my area is that is that well over 90% of attempted cybersecurity incidents are stopped by the really, really basic stuff, like just literally having a password.

It goes to 95%, 97%, 98% when you start to add in more complicated things like multi-factor authentication or network segmentation or things like this or having an antivirus, right?

But the thing is, there are so many of these cybersecurity incidents that go undetected, unreported, right?

Because they're simply stopped by one of these layers of filters, right?

So the thing is, what level of, say, spammer is being stopped by the policy filters that already exist?

Well, we got some evidence for this.

When the policy was dropped, there were a couple of companies, and I'm not going to shut them out, who said, yay, we can finally start to do the thing that we've wanted to do on Bitcoin so much easier now that this policy limit is gone, right?

And the thing is the limits that are essentially set by consensus that say, hey, you can do this type of transaction, but not that type of transaction.

If we were to restrict that with something like this bit 444, it's not a given that these attack vectors are automatically going to move to something else.

It makes it more difficult, more costly.

They have to do something in order to change their tactics.

And basically, at the end of the day, every organization and individual in the world has to play this cat and mouse game against threat actors, people who want to steal your data or steal your stuff, whatever it is.

And my argument is that Bitcoin also has to play that game to a certain extent.

We have to do it differently.

We have to come to consensus with each other.

Individuals can set their own policy limits for themselves.

Users can choose to put their hash rate towards mining templates that have the transactions they want, whatever.

But I consider spam on Bitcoin to be an attack.

I do.

It's not the biggest attack there is, but it is one.

And when it really disrupts the usability of Bitcoin, then it's an actual serious one.

It's degrading the availability of the network.

And that was the thing.

The availability of the system to be used properly is the key point in critical infrastructure systems.

If you can't use your network, then you're done.

You might have heard in the news that Russia has DDoSed this or that website or service.

Here in Finland, we had a DDoS of the transportation network.

So everyone got free train rides for the rest of the day, just as the way of solving that.

But you take away the ability to use something and the system is no longer worth it.

So that's the angle I'm coming from.

And it is, just to be clear about something.

It's an anti-ossification message, begrudgingly.

I wish we could.

But I do believe that Bitcoin, the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin users need to come together every once in a while to defend against some kind of threat or attack.

That's going to include quantum.

I don't even really want to get into that because that's a whole other thing.

There are bugs that will need to be fixed before a certain date, before Bitcoin will stop working.

We can't ossify completely and it's a call to vigilance and it's a call to be be flexible and open to respond to these threats vigilance that's the key word uh i used i used to just hashtag stay vigilant like uh you know because you know if if not you then who who else is watching there's only the you know few is a meme for a reason and uh there's only few of us here like i said earlier more and more of us are joining the network every day but still very few of us um in the grand scheme of things have found this thing and uh are building our our futures on it and like you said so let's let's take a typical scenario like um it could be transport it could be oil and gas it could be some oil and gas right in critical infrastructure obviously and what's your what's your threat vector there well like you say you could just have some like kid in the basement just randomly accidentally gets involved in some kind of online hackathon and finds his way into some oil and gas company system and just creates havoc because they I mean very unlikely that they would be that lax because they'd have someone like you that has looked at the threat vectors and a threat vectors could be environmentalist activists turning up in rubber dinghies to blow up a pipe or something to, you know, make a statement and then claim they did it two days later in order to raise awareness.

That's a classic.

So now you've got to like put your mind to Bitcoin now, as all of us should do.

think critically what are the attack vectors how high does it go it goes to the very fucking top we're talking state we are talking like you said unlimited money with any means possible and the desire the incentive to bring this thing down doesn't get any more critical than that i don't think i have i was that hyperbolic in any way no i don't think it was and i think understanding what we're up against is important and understanding exactly how bitcoin can be attacked is is also important uh just to be clear about something i don't think spam or arbitrary data is the is the most most critical one.

The capture of the reference implementation, I think, is also more sinister.

I have been being called out on X for this as far as that I'm maybe making accusations about this that are unfounded, that the running of Bitcoin Core is transparent, the funding is transparent.

and that is true.

I do acknowledge that all of this stuff is being done out in the open except the thing is it is run essentially like a central organization and it's not like there's anything inherently wrong with that.

It's just that the ethos is a little off there and then there's one specific Bitcoin maintainer who it's been going the rounds on Twitter that she doesn't really like Bitcoin maximalists and is a little pro NFTs and all this and was quite junior in her career when she was made a Bitcoin maintainer.

And basically all I ask about that is how did this happen?

How did this end up being what was considered the right move here?

Who's making the decisions and how are these decisions getting made?

That's the part that seems quite opaque to me.

I'm happy to have conversations about this.

And I do hope I'm wrong to the extent that those who are working on Bitcoin Core are actually Bitcoin ethos aligned.

But their actions and what they done to me indicates that they more concerned about increasing the utility of Bitcoin There a whole thing where you give all of these developers a whole pile of money and say go work on Bitcoin Core.

And I don't think all they're doing is bug fixes and security patches.

And I do admit here also that they are actually defending against security threats on their own.

there's a cybersecurity angle to Bitcoin Core.

You should upgrade to the latest versions of the Bitcoin Core software, except if you consider the changes they've made to be essentially a downgrade.

Some people are even calling it malware.

I think NOTS is great because it's merging in security changes that Bitcoin Core provides.

There was recently apparently a bug that was disclosed that didn't get fixed in the latest core release that Luke went and changed in knots, right?

So you should run your latest node implementation because there are actually cybersecurity vulnerabilities in older releases.

But the thing is, as the reference implementation, core is the one that basically gets to decide when to change course and when to change policies and and why.

And they have been trying to get their kind of message out to the plebs.

But the message to the plebs has been a lot of, well, hey, we're right.

So you should agree with that.

And not a lot of listening to reasons why you might not think that they're right.

And just to attempt to steel man this a little bit, the reason for the policy change to op return that they made, taking away the limit was basically that there is the ability for transactions using larger opertern to get into blocks by side channels, Libre Relay, going directly to miners.

And this is starting to become more and more common.

There is also a set of actors that are basically using these fake pub keys and could be using opertern instead if the policy limit were relaxed.

And so So their answer was to just completely remove all limits and say that, well, because consensus rules, again, the strictest rules that we've got, says that you can have up to one megabyte op return.

Well, by policy, we should allow the relay of up to one megabyte op return and everything will be more transparent.

Everything will be easier.

And so that's a valid technical argument.

And if you're only looking at this from the perspective of looking at the transactions that are bouncing around people's mempools and eventually making it into blocks, I can understand why that realization is there.

But the point that I come back to is that filters absolutely do work.

Filters work.

We just don't see all the stuff that's filtered out.

And that's true in the cybersecurity world.

You have to do all these studies to see how many things are actually filtered out.

If there's someone who's working in the security operations center for some company, they can tell you how many attempts to get into their system there actually are versus how many start to become a problem.

Filters and controls, they work.

And so taking the filter away, it definitely means that more of these arbitrary data transactions are able to get onto the chain more easily.

And then who's to say how much demand is going to be there for that?

Now, again, I come back to you that the Steelman point for this is that by not allowing OpReturn, not allowing putting data into the OpReturn, you increase the amount of public keys that are being used for data encoding.

So there's a bunch of these new layer twos that use some kind of proof or another that has to be a certain transaction size.

And when they run out of operaturn space, they've simply been using additional public keys to fill out their encoding space.

And so that creates that UTXO bloat.

And if they're going to do it anyway, well, maybe the idea is give them the bigger trash can, so to say.

But I think going all the way to one megabyte is just absolutely like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, basically.

If there was some valid reason to raise the opportune limit to, say, 256 bytes, 160 bytes or 256 bytes is being tossed around by quite many people as a solution here.

Yeah, that would have, I think, gone over with drastically less controversy.

Or at least the controversy would have said, well, hey, you're in the pocket of this or that company, blah, blah, blah.

but maybe CORE would have actually had a chance to like communicate why they're doing it that they were just trying to to reduce bloat of the UTXO set so um the the issue to me really is that CORE went and made these changes unilaterally the this change was incredibly controversial had more NACs the the the terminology here is AC for agree acknowledge and no NAC no acknowledge for do not agree.

So it had tons of NACs, but they were ignored.

More NACs than NACs, and they were ignored by the team because they were mostly coming from non-regular contributors.

So these are people who have a GitHub account who decided to come on and say, well, we disagree with this.

And I believe Mechanic, Bitcoin Mechanic was banned from the Bitcoin Core GitHub for this.

I think Luke has been locked out for a long time, apparently, from being able to contribute over there.

So yeah, basically Core ignored opposition.

And what they say to that is, well, should every change be democratic?

Should every change be at the whim of the user base?

And there's a valued argument there that they should be able to do what they want in terms of making a software implementation, but it's the users who get to say, well, hey, I agree with this change or not.

And since Bitcoin Core comes as a package, you kind of have to agree with everything or discard it entirely.

And so the thing...

To be clear there as well, with the NACs and the ACTS, the terminology that's used there on GitHub, anybody could create a github account and if you ignore if you agree with um with with the you know op return set to one megabyte you can go and act if you disagree you can go and that and if i remember rightly um that like you said the nacks were far outweighing the axe uh and then the the kind of rationalization was that i was just you guys spinning up a load of anonymous accounts on GitHub and just throwing the nags up there to try and muddy the water and throw us off course.

And it's like, wow, like, you know, maybe they, maybe, maybe not.

But the point being, like, you can't prove it.

And there could be 1000 people out there, like, just general Bitcoin plebs that are following this, and decided, you know what, I'm going to create the GitHub account.

I'm going to use a pseudonymous name.

I'm going to put that in.

And this could be where the BIP44 has come from, BIP444 has come from, or the RTSD, whatever, RTDS.

I can't remember what you said now.

So it's a fascinating, it's been a real weird one.

And I have empathy with a lot of people that are new here, might have been in Bitcoin nine to 18 months and trying to figure all of this out and all of this language has been thrown at them.

It's hard to build conviction when this is happening, but it is important.

It's going to be a very important milestone for Bitcoin and wherever we go now, it's going to be very, very interesting.

So how are you kind of weighing in on this latest bit?

What are your views?

What have you added to it?

well my bottom line is i directionally support it i do think there are some things that need to be improved and i i will say that they are taking criticism uh the the doth on om was was banned from from x fairly early on it's it said that there was a lot of reports from the kind of bitcoin core crowd and and a mass reporting campaign from their side to to silence the account and get them off twitter uh but then but then everyone complained that they have no one to nowhere to to register their feedback to and somehow he got the account back or made a new account something like this and another another point here people should be very aware of like this this datum om could be a male could be a female could be a group of people it could be five or six people sitting there looking at this stuff using that one alias to we we have no idea the mystery no we have no idea and and and so so now he he back on twitter i'm just going to use he by default but but whatever um dathon is back on on x and there's also a telegram channel that that is is fairly easy to to find i'm told uh uh where where he's he's there and responding to questions and things um so so so the thing is um he's there he's responding to feedback the initial draft and the motivation for for the bip was most of it was about kind of the legal risk due to to child abuse material and that's been taken out and i believe rightfully because it's really, I think it's a bad hill to die on basically to say that this is the only reason why we're doing this and why it's an emergency and everything.

There's an updated motivation that I agree with strongly because it's effectively a monetary maximalist manifesto and it's very short, but it's very, very good, the motivation.

I think it's hard to argue with it.

Giacomo posted some very good measured critiques of the motivation just in terms of the practical implications but anyway I think Giacomo has been a very good voice here by the way Tone Vase and Jimmy Song have been doing a series covering this in much more depth and so I would recommend checking that out they've had Giacomo on I think twice Knut's been on they've had merch from kind of the more core side I think they're on episode 6 or 7 or something like this And so they're really trying to cover this issue very well.

And there are technical bits of this that have faced some valid criticism, one of which is that removing op if is very, very drastic and breaks many things.

So to that, I mostly am that I want that to be out of the BIP, mostly because there's apparently been cases where coins couldn't be spent anymore if they disable this op-if, coin confiscation, or freezing funds, if you want to say that.

No one's actually physically taking the private keys or anything like that.

I say physically, but I think you know what I mean.

but freezing funds, they couldn't be spent.

Now, there's two answers to this.

One is that this is temporary and after a year they would be able to spend it also that they can hear about it and move their coins to an address that wouldn't be affected.

I think that's pretty weak.

I don't like that at all.

I don't like coin confiscation concerns but there's a flip side argument that if you're going to be making a soft fork, anyone could go and send coins, send Bitcoin to some address that violates the soft fork in the future and say, hey, look, there's a reason to not use this anymore.

And so there's got to be a line where you eventually say, hey, people are adults and responsible for their actions and we have to eventually make some kind of change and we can't let any coin confiscation at all get us in the way of it if it looks like it's obvious sabotage or whatever.

But regardless, it's a precedent that I don't want set.

Apparently, they're going to go back to the drawing board on that specific point and make it so that, yeah, it's more narrowly defined and it breaks fewer things.

There have been also some criticism about limitation to the number of tap leaves.

I really do not want to get into that as far as right now, the technicals of that.

Taproot is complicated.

Limiting the number of tap leaves to a certain amount theoretically reduces different vectors, but can theoretically break some really advanced wallet functionality.

I think many of these things that would be broken are actually good, valid uses of Bitcoin, such as, hey, you've got a multisig that decays from a 3 of 5 to a 3 of 4 to a two of four to a two of three to a one of three eventually over time.

And it uses this op if statement and it could be used in inheritance, something like that.

That's cool stuff that's interesting and feels fully monetary to me.

And they have to pay their fee to get that whole thing set up and all this.

So I don't want that breaking.

Directionally though, the whole thing is reducing spam vectors, I think is good.

I think it's possible.

The filters don't need to be perfect.

The filters don't need to be like, there's no spam at all anymore.

As I understand it, some of the alternate vectors proposed that are not covered by this BIP would be more expensive.

Like inscriptions would break under the terms of the BIP as they are currently, but they already have another opcode that they would use instead.

But as I understand it, they have to pay more for that to work.

Where I get a little bit into the weeds here, and I find the entire thing tricky, is this going to result in an incentive to put more arbitrary data in fake public keys?

In other words, is there going to be an incentive to do more UTXO bloating or not?

That's very, very tricky.

And I acknowledge that it's not straightforward that we just say, hey, get rid of the spam vectors and we might be eventually left with a UTXO set that's getting even bigger because we disabled some of the methods that are more easy.

I just don't believe that it's worth giving up.

And so where I'm at is I'm supportive of the BIP as long as it can address some of these technical concerns and actually get to something that may pass.

And I believe the conditions that would be that the BIP would actually pass would be a huge signal, a strong signal that the users, the plebs are actually the ones in control in Bitcoin.

That Bitcoin Core gets a massive reality check that their multi-million dollar funding apparatus is not infallible and that maybe listening to their users, the plebs, is worth doing.

I don't want to do anything that's going to break Bitcoin.

I don't want to do anything that's going to confiscate anyone's funds.

But I absolutely think that this BIP, supporting and signaling for this BIP, is one of the concrete tools that a pleb who disagrees with the actions of core can take.

The others at the moment include running knots, run knots, and put up your own filters.

They don't do nothing.

It might seem like they do hardly anything, but my mempool is very, very calming and clean.

So that's good.

Less resource use on my system.

And if you are in control of any hash rate, point it towards ocean and use datum if you can.

There's some technical challenges to set up, but if you're an actual miner, you can definitely implement datum.

Something like 97% of knots blocks are being created, sorry, ocean blocks are being created with datum at the moment.

It's amazing.

It's folks like me who have a heater and it's hard to connect it to my home datum server, so I just give up and use Ocean's basic template, some cypherpunk I am.

But my hash rate is pointed at Ocean at the template that is most constraining to data.

So if my little 21 energy Ofen 2 finds a block, it will not have any monetary, it will only have monetary transactions in it.

That's what I'm doing.

And plebs can actually do something.

And altogether, maybe we can do a lot.

I hear you.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of the criticism thrown towards that stance is, you know, pointing you, oh, you're just an ideologist.

well if if that's what I'm being accused for then I stand guilty because yeah I'm here for the morality the ethical nature of rebuilding society actually discovering what a true civilian life excuse me civilization should be because we've not experienced it in our lifetime you know anyone born after 1971 pure fiat standard you know i'm sick and tired of it and we have this thing it needs vigilance it needs people like yourself to to lean on your skills and everything that you learned over the last 10 years And I hope you inspired other people listening because they have similar skill sets that you know, your voice needs to be heard.

Don't be afraid of stepping into the ring.

It's very noisy on Twitter.

Reach out to me.

Reach out to Luke.

Reach out to, you know, get to your local meetup and have these discussions, right?

Just find out, like, what's going on.

because if we just sit there silent and let all of these changes just take place, like we said, we've visualized the threat vector.

It goes to all three-letter agencies.

It goes to the deepest of states.

It goes to nation states.

It goes to banks, massive hedge funds.

0 yeah it will constantly be under attack and if we do not stay vigilant if we 1123 01:52:32,1000 --> 01:52:41,780 said it before complacency will be the killer and we have to keep thinking critically or even conspiratorially and um having these conversations uh so i appreciate you coming on is is there anything we didn't cover or anything you you want to put a pin in or hand off with before we uh before we close it now.

Yeah, I think got the chance to cover everything important.

If you want to follow along with what's going on here, I think most of the critical conversations are happening on X.

And yeah, I would just say that I'm in this for upending the fiat monetary system.

I'm not here to enable people to make a quick buck off of Bitcoin.

And I want this to be over.

I really do.

Like I want to go back to focusing on other things, focusing on Bitcoin adoption and all this.

I think this entire thing is a distraction.

And I just, I want a resolution of some kind so we can get back to fixing the money and fixing the world.

Well said, sir.

Well, thank you for coming on.

Where can people come and find you and Canute and the show and everything that you're doing?

Let's make sure you get the shills out there.

You got all the books behind you.

thanks Daniel yeah so I'm at Luke DeWolf first name last name on x and you can find all the other details from there basically it's the Bitcoin Infinity show we have everything under the Bitcoin Infinity media brand these days I'm not a part of the show so much anymore the the schedules with with Knut and I and me having a two-year-old really weren't matching up so I'm just the producer there now but we're doing the Bitcoin Infinity Academy once a week and that's still a lot of fun.

And yeah, what's coming up?

I don't know, stay tuned a little bit, but I am working on a book kind of merging these ideas.

So we'll see when that makes it out.

I'm hoping soon.

And I'm itching to get back into having conversations like this.

So yeah, maybe you'll be seeing me on a fresh new pod eventually.

So that's what I've got coming up.

And go to btchell.com for all the information about BTC Hell.

Honestly, I'm just so proud of that conference, and it's a different kind of thing than anything else that I've done here.

It's my adopted home country that I just feel so much affinity for and I've been welcomed into, and this is my way of contributing to adoption in my local area, and it couldn't have been a better success, and we're aiming just for more next year.

So thanks to everyone who came and to everyone who helped support what we're doing there.

And yeah, just thanks to everyone for that.

So check out btchell.com, join the mailing list to get updates and hopefully see you in Helsinki in September next year.

Hopefully that discount code BITTON will still be running for the listeners if they want to get over there.

A hundred percent.

Use code BITTON.

Excellent.

All right, brother.

Well, thanks for coming on, Luke.

and yeah, I look forward to chatting again soon.

Thanks, Daniel.

Appreciate it.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Well, thank you everybody for listening and thank you again, Luke, for coming on and sharing everything that you just shared with us there.

I hope, like I said at the beginning of the show here, that if you had no understanding at all, that you've got some now.

If you had a little understanding, maybe you have a little more.

If you are fully down the rabbit hole and technical and a developer, or at least very least can write code i hope we didn't do an absolutely dreadful job there maybe you switched off just 25 minutes in i don't know but they're definitely you know of course we are very much skewed here towards very few people that truly do understand the depths of the code and everything that goes with that and are able to suggest or even put forward improvement protocol proposals excuse me it's and is this an inherent problem do we need more coders I mean the argument being developers the argument being not the argument being the what's been recognized over the years and I've spoken to some of the guys that run funds for developers what's been recognized over the years is that developers go through like a training like some kind of hackathon camp, whatever they get the funds that they need they get supported from the donations, from various funds out there they get up to speed and they can read the code and they can tinker with the code they can make changes uh obviously they can't because it won't reach the consensus but theoretically they could but then they end up going where the money is and that means working on other blockchains and this is a real problem because if money is being collected as donations and then spent to train developers but then the developers have nowhere to go after that and the carrot gets dangled from xyzblockchain.com for them to go and you know do work over there with a nice wage of course that's where the incentive lies and this is i mean everything is incentives we know that so this is a problem and i do remember having a discussion with this with mike schmidt from Brink Fund, you can go back and find that episode where we go into that.

So, there's lots to be discussed here, obviously.

Always.

And I say this word with a grain of salt.

There is nuance to all of this.

And it's not plain black and white.

1227 01:58:51,1000 --> 01:58:54,020 It's not, you know, just choose one side or the other.

Maybe you have already.

I know where I lean.

I lean in the same way that Luke's been leaning I've preferred to run NottsClient on my node just to stop relaying any of that crap yes, it might still end up on the blockchain but if it's a little bit harder for them then so be it that's pretty much all I can do having this debate is going to I mean it is part of the history books already we'll be looking back at this moment in time, in 10 years time however it ends but I think it will always be known as an important debate to have had whether or not you've been enjoying it it's here so like I said at the beginning I hope this has gone some way as to help you understand a little bit more about what's going on alright finally please again show some love for the show sponsors you've got relay here in europe r-e-l-a-i dot ch forward slash bitten you can download the app today and start stacking sats immediately bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten for your hardware wallet paywithflash.com if you want to start accepting sats club orange if you want to meet your local bitcoiners and get over to geyser.fun to see what projects are over there that you might be able to help get off the ground.

And finally, if for any reason at all you are a little bit worried about your security setup, your physical security setup, you find yourself looking over your shoulder, Glock.me is the place for you to go and check out.

This is something that's going to become bigger, I believe, in 2026 and something you want to keep an eye on if that is a genuine worry for you or your family so go check him out glock.me g l o k dot me that's an unofficial shield for the glock guys thank you so much for listening i will catch on the next shot