0:30 Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the CoinGeek weekly live stream. 0:47 I am your host, Mr. Kurt Walker Jr. 0:50 We are rocking live from sunny South Florida, produced entirely in the state of Florida, 0:54 which is why this show never, ever, ever misses a live stream. 0:59 We can't be killed, I don't think. 1:01 But our guest today, as long as you like, subscribe, hit the alert bell, all of that stuff, 1:07 let our digital overlords know that you wish to consume the content, 1:10 our guest today is going to be Paul Sztorc, 1:12 who is one of the longest term people that's been trying to get a BIP pushed in Bitcoin Core. 1:20 So he is sympathetic and empathetic to many of the plights of trying to navigate the BTC ecosystem and the broader Bitcoin ecosystem as well. 1:28 He is quite an interesting guy, always been friendly to talk. 1:31 He's always been happy to hop on a good debate. 1:33 And we kind of coordinated this over the last four or five days to talk about BIP300, 1:39 Drivechains, sidechains in general, and then comparing that to L1 unbounded scaling, essentially the BSV model. 1:47 So I expect to have a little bit of disagreement, but ultimately, you know, 1:51 two guys who don't hate each other and aren't going to need to be super toxic in order to get a point across. 1:56 So it should be a good time. 1:57 Please fill the troll box here with questions, not trolling, 2:01 but we will take good questions as long as they're relevant to the topic. 2:04 And if they push the conversation forward, and by all means, feel free to just chit chat and argue with each other in there. 2:09 If that happens, we'll ignore you and you can have fun the way most of you like to have fun every week anyways. 2:15 So it'll be a good time. 2:16 I would like to thank our sponsors, Otherworldly TCG, 2:22 the game that sends out a prize pack to one person every single week here on the Quinky Quinkly livestream. 2:28 Check out Otherworldly TCG and also RockWallet. 2:32 RockWallet is the perennial, our longest term supporter. 2:37 They give you the option to trade in wallet or have a completely non-custodial self-sovereign access to your BTC, BCH, BSV, 2:48 Ethereum, various stable coins, and money, the newest stable coin on the block, 2:52 the only one that does not require you to use gas. 2:55 So good times, everybody. 2:56 Check out RockWallet and check out Otherworldly TCG. 2:59 I have a feeling this episode is going to go long, 3:01 so everybody, you may want to go for a little bathroom break while we run the RockWallet ad. 3:06 We are going to start quickly here and get right into it. 3:10 And yeah, so that's where we're at. 3:13 Mr. Producer, let's roll the ad. 3:15 We'll be right back. 3:17 We'll be right back. 3:48 Hey, Paul, welcome to the show. 3:56 Oh, hey, thanks for having me. 3:57 For sure. 3:58 Good to have you. 3:59 I've seen you a couple of times say that you don't like to do introductions. 4:03 So yeah, I don't know if I was right about that because, you know, people need to know who the person is. 4:10 But I do think whenever I play a YouTube video, I always skip like way into it because I'm like, 4:15 I don't want to hear all this. 4:16 I just want to hear what the person has to say. 4:18 I do the same. 4:19 I'll decide if they're really an economist at the World Bank or not, you know. 4:24 They say that, but that could just mean anything. 4:27 If we could get the 30-second version of who you are and why you're here, 4:31 I think it would help the people who don't know you. 4:33 But I know about half my audience is going to know you anyways because they've been bickering with you on the Internet. 4:37 I have been involved with Bitcoin for a while. 4:40 I heard about it a long time ago. 4:43 And I've also been involved with this whole sidechain thing for a while. 4:47 I published this Drivechain idea back on Bitcoin Talk like in 2014 and then this post in 2015. 4:55 And so I've been basically a member of the BTC community the whole time. 4:59 And I'm a skeptic of large blocks on L1, but I'm open-minded to large blocks on L2. 5:06 And this makes me – I get it from all sides. 5:10 Peter Todd mistakenly thinks that my project is like an L1 unlimited block size increase. 5:16 So that's kind of funny. 5:17 And then you get people from Bitcoin SV who are like, oh, I don't like it because I don't want to leave L1. 5:22 And it's like, well, if you're on L1 and L2 at the same time, it's like the same thing. 5:26 So, yeah, I'm also the author of these two BIPs, 300 and 301, which enable this L2 blockchain idea called Drivechain. 5:35 And I've been around. 5:37 I think I was speaking at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. 5:41 And I think I've spoken at every single Bitcoin magazine conference. 5:44 I'm just like kind of a humble researcher guy. 5:48 And I have my little blog and I post my little technical commentary. 5:52 For sure. And it's good stuff. 5:54 I've read you on and off over the years. 5:56 The Truthcoin blog is – it's good information. 5:58 I actually – I don't disagree on premise with the idea of sidechains. 6:04 I think sidechains are a useful tool. 6:06 And I don't know why small blockers have a tendency to really, really hate them. 6:11 I think it's sort of a utility compromise they don't want to make. 6:14 So I think it's a little more philosophical for them. 6:16 But ultimately – 6:17 We can talk about that because I do know a lot about the dysfunction of the BTC community. 6:23 But then the question is why pick a community, one community over another. 6:27 Sure. 6:28 So to that, let's actually start with – let's talk a little bit about the BIP process. 6:34 And what does BIP300/301 – what are you actually asking for? 6:38 What is being proposed in those? 6:39 Is it a big change? 6:41 What's being added to make that work? 6:43 The irony is almost all the people who have the loudest – 6:48 I think there's a saying in Polish that the weakest dogs bark the loudest. 6:53 The people who have an opinion really haven't read it. 6:56 If you do read it, you see it's very tame. 6:59 BIP300 is basically just asking for an opcode that is not being used, 7:03 to instead be used to count to 13,000 over and over again. 7:07 But it's very simple gear on L1, but it enables – in my opinion, 7:14 it enables this big ecosystem of other things on L2. 7:18 So if you read the BIP, you see it's not really asking for very much. 7:24 All of these BIPs, all the soft forks that people have considered are, 7:29 in my view, harmless because they're all opt-in and reversible. 7:33 When Satoshi added the opnops, he has a commit where he adds the opnops 7:38 in the first place. 7:40 They're clearly intended to be repurposed later as they were done before. 7:45 Absolutely. 7:46 This is exactly why they were put in so that they're blank and anyone can spend, 7:49 and then you can tighten the rules whenever that opcode is selected. 7:54 And then it was well-known that there are only like 10 or so, 7:58 but if you can take the last one and then put two bytes after that, 8:03 you get 100 more. 8:04 So you have an infinite number really. 8:05 So this whole thing was clearly intended from the beginning, 8:07 and it was used this way at first. 8:10 The BIP process is completely broken down in my view. 8:13 There used to be a real process, but now it is sort of a fake sham process, 8:18 I think. 8:19 It's actually bubbling up again just in the last 24 hours. 8:22 It seems like somebody got their commit access revoked. 8:25 It's got something to do with Jameson Lopp, 8:27 and he's funded to break this thing so he can fix it over here, 8:31 and they're all bickering, and there's a lot of butthurt at court. 8:34 There is a lot of bickering. 8:35 But one fact that I point out a lot, 8:38 and I have a slide that I often use for this, 8:40 is that you can look at the number of hard and soft forks over time, 8:46 specifically the number of soft forks. 8:48 There used to be an average of one every six months, 8:50 even though the rate has declined enormously. 8:53 It has slowed down. 8:54 In 2009, 2010, 2011, there were a lot, like around 10 or so. 9:00 And then even in late 2015, there were three, like in December, 9:04 around the time of scaling two. 9:07 And then we entered a long period where basically since 2016, 9:12 the only two have been SegWit and Taproot. 9:16 And SegWit took 26, I think. 9:19 I can't remember if I'm remembering it exactly right, 9:21 but I think it was 26 months from when it was first proposed 9:24 and then coded and activated, and then Taproot was 40 months. 9:27 January 2018, it was. 9:29 So it's been slowing down more and more, 9:33 and a lot of people believe that there will be a useful soft fork, 9:39 like right around the corner. 9:42 But there is, you know, like you could make the case 9:45 that there will never be another soft fork. 9:47 If you just look at the graph, 9:48 if you just look at like what does it mean that people argue. 9:51 So the BIP process, it includes these soft fork things, 9:54 but it also includes kind of other things. 9:56 Like there's things like BIP39 that are not even implemented in Bitcoin Core, 10:00 even though they're implemented like literally everywhere else. 10:02 Everywhere, yeah. 10:04 But like the Bitcoin Core wallet has kind of like, 10:08 it went through like various weird stages, 10:10 and now there's this other project, BDK, that is, I think, much more popular. 10:15 But that obviously uses BIP39. 10:17 Then you have Samurai, which uses the BIP42 to make Bitcoin transactions, 10:23 but BIP42 has this like Luke Dashjr. stamp on it 10:27 of like unanimously discouraged for implementation. 10:31 It's like not supported officially, but Samurai actually does use it. 10:35 So the whole thing is a bit. 10:38 So what's your take? 10:39 You know, I mean, just describing this, 10:40 like we're already talking about a lot of malaise in Bitcoin Core. 10:43 And I've been an advocate for a long time of opening up things, 10:48 basically eliminating them from consensus, 10:51 moving as many things as possible to like node policy settings, 10:54 and then let it be a general purpose system 10:57 where everybody can compete without like breaking the network. 11:00 And it's sort of the set in stone ethos, 11:02 or other people will call it ossification 11:04 if they want to sound impressive to the rest of Twitter. 11:06 But what is your take on basically opening up parameters 11:11 and setting it in stone, letting it be a competitive system 11:14 where lots of people are competing as opposed to, 11:17 okay, we have to fight about it in the core GitHub, 11:20 you know, private chat in order to make a change. 11:23 Is that possible? 11:24 Or what do you think? 11:26 Yeah, competition is the one true God, so to speak. 11:31 So it fixes everything. 11:34 Competition means that if anyone makes a mistake, 11:36 you're sort of happy about it. 11:38 You think, oh, their mistake, 11:40 I'm going to now open my own restaurant or whatever, 11:42 and I'm going to sell pizza, Asian fusion or whatever, 11:46 you think it's a great neglected topic. 11:49 So yeah, more competition is always good. 11:51 And it is the biggest flaw in Bitcoin Core 11:54 that it's very difficult to compete with. 11:59 People have their other implementations. 12:01 Luke has Bitcoin knots and et cetera, 12:04 and there is the JavaScript node. 12:08 There's kind of like these different things, 12:12 but they have to all be on the same consensus network, 12:16 so they have to process the same blocks, 12:18 so they have to enforce the same rules. 12:20 The Drivechain idea is an attempt to get away from that, 12:22 where you can have a completely different piece of software 12:24 that's basically sort of like an altcoin, 12:26 but it's sending and receiving the BTC. 12:30 So I'm pro competition. 12:32 And I do interpret sort of Bitcoin Core's reluctance 12:38 to enthusiastically back it as a kind of guild, 12:42 cult, insularity thing, where they think, 12:45 we don't know, and there's a corrupt version 12:47 and a virtuous version, 12:50 which would be like the corrupt version 12:52 is they get a lot of prestige and they have this job, 12:54 but there's no oversight and there's no one really 12:56 who can compete with them or even criticize them. 13:00 And then the second interpretation would be like, 13:04 they don't know, what am I going to be responsible for? 13:07 Am I going to be responsible for this endless list of stuff 13:09 if we open this Pandora's box? 13:12 That makes sense. 13:13 And I do think it's a little bit, 13:15 I actually really like the religious analogies 13:17 as it applies to software development in general, 13:20 because I think there is a bit of a mystery 13:22 from the average person as to like, 13:24 man, how do people conjure stuff up in code? 13:26 And if you don't know how to program, 13:28 it's a little bit like a talented author 13:30 can create a character that feels very real. 13:33 But it's just a specific skillset. 13:35 But in software, 13:36 it's got this sort of creator created thing. 13:40 And then there does sort of become 13:41 a religious hierarchy to it, 13:43 which has been my main problem. 13:45 The reason that I think there are forks 13:49 or derivations of Bitcoin in the first place 13:51 is specifically because, well, I don't like you. 13:56 I don't like your ideas. 13:57 I don't like this governance model. 13:58 I don't like the directions. 13:59 It's going, you know, whatever, 14:00 whatever those reasons are. 14:01 And from my experience, 14:03 I see like existing in the BSV spaces. 14:06 I just kind of kept saying no 14:09 to changes that were moving away from Bitcoin. 14:12 And then I really wanted to roll back 14:15 and get back to things that are Bitcoin, 14:19 turning back on various op codes 14:21 or opening up op codes 14:23 and then turning off things like pay to script hash, 14:25 which I think was, I don't know, 14:27 it's one of the first five or six BIPs 14:29 or something anyways, right? 14:30 Where- 14:31 In 2013, I believe. 14:32 It was early. 14:33 And it was one of the first major things 14:36 that had a little bit of debate around it and stuff. 14:38 But do you think there's a way to, 14:44 oh, it's reading my thumbs up here. 14:46 Thank you, AI or whatever. 14:49 If you make a thumbs up, it will do that? 14:51 It did on my end. 14:53 I wasn't even expecting it. 14:54 Oh yeah. 14:55 Super weird. 14:56 It's always watching, you know? 14:57 Yeah. 14:58 So that's comforting. 14:59 The great eye sees all. 15:01 Yeah. 15:02 So that kind of lost my train of thought, but- 15:05 We're talking about 2013 pay to script hash. 15:08 So getting into those kinds of changes, 15:10 like do you think there is a generalist version of Bitcoin? 15:15 And this I think can sort of transition us 15:17 into debating about what is Bitcoin 15:20 and sort of the small block versus big block ethos. 15:22 But do you think there is a version of Bitcoin 15:25 that you could objectively say like, 15:27 okay, this is actually what the system was designed 15:30 to look like. 15:31 And if that's possible, is that a good thing? 15:34 Or is it just, is that its own weird religious decision? 15:37 I think it might be its own weird religious thing. 15:39 No matter what, we want to judge an idea 15:42 based on its content, right? 15:44 Everything else would just be like an ad hominem of the idea. 15:47 So you could say like, hypothetically, 15:52 you could say this idea more matches a sacred document 15:58 in the past or more matches expectations in the past. 16:03 But the important thing is whether or not the idea 16:05 meets the criteria for whatever we want to use it for. 16:08 And in my point of view is that we want to have, 16:12 I personally believe that we want 8 billion people 16:15 to use Bitcoin. 16:16 And I think that every computer system 16:20 has strong network effects. 16:21 But in the cryptocurrency case specifically, 16:24 I think the network effects are maybe as strong 16:26 as they could possibly be. 16:28 Because it's just so humiliating. 16:30 Like even if you have money and you go to like another country, 16:33 you go to Japan or something and you just, 16:35 you try to exchange a certain amount of yen or something, 16:38 but you start to run out of yen. 16:40 And maybe you have $100 bill, American, in your pocket, 16:44 or you have whatever, Mexican currency. 16:46 But you feel, you can begin to feel emotionally like, 16:49 oh, like I don't have any more money. 16:51 Like I'm poor now. 16:53 Like I don't have any yen. 16:54 I need yen. 16:55 So when you, you're not on the same monetary network 17:00 as someone else, it doesn't feel good, you know? 17:05 You could say, oh, you take someone out on a date. 17:07 Oh, I can pay with a Confederate bucks or something, you know? 17:10 Like it's like, it's sort of humiliating. 17:13 And so I think that you always be vulnerable. 17:15 One of them, if one of them gets to 8 billion users and you don't, 17:18 then the rest will go to zero. 17:21 And of course I don't literally mean to zero. 17:23 They always have some like beanie baby novelty collected. 17:26 And that's not literally what I mean, but I mean like, yeah, 17:28 we're talking like $300 trillion market cap versus like something 17:33 that is collectible, a part of internet history or something. 17:36 That's a completely different thing. 17:38 That's zero to me. 17:39 So that's my view is that getting to 8 billion happy users in the long run, 17:46 that is the criterion. 17:48 And that's why that's the criterion because it's the criterion for survival. 17:54 So to that, and I agree. 17:56 I don't think you're wrong. 17:58 My concern is that a big part of this is philosophically based. 18:04 It's a sound money system, or at least it's attempting to mimic one. 18:07 So I've always seen it as, you know, 18:10 the basic properties of gold mixed with your basic properties of, you know, 18:14 what if internet packets could be sent with little pieces of gold? 18:17 If that was possible 30 years ago, I think they would have done it. 18:20 Like, okay, 18:21 I'll just attach a little bit of gold to my internet packets and send my 18:23 email with a little bit of internet money. 18:25 And like these kinds of concepts. 18:27 Amazon.com would have been on top of that, right? 18:29 Exactly. 18:30 If anything. 18:31 Yes. 18:32 And so, you know, I look at that and I say, okay, 18:34 I think it's very clear that Satoshi Nakamoto was a sound money guy. 18:38 I don't think he was as hardline, you know, 18:40 zealous as a lot of people are today or even as zealous as they think he was. 18:44 But I think it was clearly something that was on his mind. 18:46 He clearly understood that these basic premises of sound money. 18:49 And for that reason, 18:51 I've always said that a sound money really shouldn't change. 18:55 It's, you know, 18:56 just like the consensus of science can't decide to change gold. 19:00 You can maybe relabel it and tell everybody else to relabel it and have the 19:03 government say, okay, gold is this thing now. 19:06 But ultimately the thing that we understand as gold now atomically is gold, 19:11 whether we like it or not. 19:12 And I think Bitcoin should be that way because if it changes, 19:17 and I think every one of these bips and, you know, 19:19 even right now, 19:20 the thing that's being debated right now is showing, all right, 19:23 it's not really a sound money. 19:25 It's actually a political money. 19:27 And it's a sort of fiat of an oligarchy. 19:30 That oligarchy might be a pretty broad group of people, 19:33 but it's still a group of people that intend to change it to be something. 19:37 And in that sense, 19:38 it is a fiat currency of that oligarchy. 19:42 And I think that's a major part. 19:44 I think that's a deep fundamental problem. 19:46 And I'm curious for your feedback on that. 19:48 Well, 19:50 it's a very interesting line of thought. 19:52 And we went, 19:53 we went like we skipped, 19:54 it's like throwing a stone. 19:56 We skipped from like gold atoms to like oligarchy. 20:00 And that was, 20:01 but I think that there is an enormous tension between the, 20:05 the gold metaphor. 20:08 Satoshi used the gold metaphor. 20:09 And I think he also, 20:10 he seemed to be like a property rights, 20:12 libertarian type person, 20:14 at least at the time. 20:16 And he was saying stuff like it's very attractive to the libertarian 20:19 community, 20:20 if we can explain it that way. 20:21 So there is the, 20:23 the gold bug people. 20:25 It's of course, 20:26 it's quite ironic that a lot of the gold bug people and the Austrian 20:28 economists at first hated Bitcoin for a very long time. 20:31 And many still do. 20:32 And Peter Schiff is still like, 20:34 it's slow. 20:35 It's going to come around. 20:36 He didn't change. 20:37 So, 20:39 but there's enormous tension between the gold metaphor and the fact that 20:43 Bitcoin is a piece of software and the software angle is, 20:48 it's just part of Bitcoin's nature. 20:51 And I do think this is a world's collide moment. 20:53 Like it's almost like its own category, 20:56 sui generis or something where you have all these people who say, 21:00 I want to actually, 21:01 if this thing is already intangible, 21:03 it's already like, 21:04 it doesn't physically exist. 21:05 So if I can't have some certainty that I really own something, 21:09 then what do I really have? 21:10 I really have nothing. 21:11 This is the anti ossification people say, 21:13 I was the anti hard fork people also say like, 21:15 this is going to change all the time. 21:17 And I don't know what I'm getting into on day one. 21:20 It's kind of also the small blocker people, 21:22 because they say, 21:23 I don't know how long I'm running a node now, 21:25 but the node costs can increase forever. 21:28 So, 21:29 but there's tension on that side. 21:31 And then the reality of software development is there are bugs. 21:34 There are CVS that are fixed securely. 21:36 There is like stuff like heart bleed, 21:39 where something that a tiny component, 21:42 like when you build a house from scratch, 21:44 you're not building the two by fours and the screws from scratch. 21:47 You know what I mean? 21:48 No one builds anything from scratch. 21:50 It's like not possible. 21:51 Even if you're a farmer, 21:52 you get the fertilizer, 21:53 you get the seeds from someone or something. 21:55 So we don't live in a world. 21:57 Thankfully, 21:58 we live in a very wealthy world where you can get screws, 22:01 you know, 22:02 from Home Depot when you build a house from scratch, 22:04 you're not building the screws like that's absurd. 22:06 So heart bleed is like, 22:08 there's a component of cryptography that like a lot of people were using 22:13 that was flawed. 22:14 So, 22:16 and there's of course the endless march of science. 22:18 There is the, 22:19 you know, 22:20 new operating systems come out like the whole world is changing. 22:23 Like there was a time when people only had a desktop. 22:27 It was a time when people only had a mainframe computer, 22:29 a terminal that went to the mainframe. 22:31 Then people had desktop computer. 22:33 Now people have a phone, 22:35 more likely to have a phone than a computer. 22:38 So all this, 22:39 this dynamic world of technology is changing a lot. 22:43 Software world changed a lot. 22:44 Bitcoin was originally on SourceForge back in the day. 22:47 SourceForge was the big thing. 22:49 Now it's on GitHub. 22:51 So, 22:52 and that was before Microsoft bought GitHub, 22:55 then Microsoft bought GitHub and people thought we'll have to move somewhere 22:57 else. 22:58 But then it ended up being okay to stay at GitHub. 23:00 So the fact that Bitcoin is a piece of software in entails all this, 23:05 this, 23:07 this, 23:08 this oligarchy of people who have to fix the CVS secretly and then lie about 23:13 they must lie about what they're doing. 23:15 And they say, 23:16 this is a fix to improve matrix multiplication. 23:18 And then it's like smuggled in there is like, 23:20 Oh, 23:21 here's the thing that we fix. 23:22 Sometimes the fix actually breaks things. 23:25 Matt Corral is doing a trivial refactor to save like six millionths of a 23:31 second or something. 23:32 And that could have caused an inflation bug in any version that ran that 23:37 software, 23:38 although not the previous version. 23:39 So that's part of the benefit of the soft fork is you can stay on your old 23:42 version versus the hard fork where you're pressured onto a new version. 23:46 So you're completely right to point out that there's enormous tension between 23:49 these two ideas and people try to balance it the best that they can. 23:57 And I think that we don't, 23:59 I think bib 300 is actually the best, 24:01 the best balance would be the put this one thing in that lets you have more 24:04 competing L2s because then you have more creativity among people who can 24:08 compete and the L2s could even fail or they could just be not popular and 24:12 no one could use them. 24:13 And that would be okay. 24:15 Whereas, but, but, you know, it, 24:18 it's very difficult to say objectively where the perfect line is. 24:22 And I don't think BTC does a perfect job, 24:26 but that is very different from saying that that inherently dooms the project. 24:30 The, the, 24:31 the bigger issue with leaving BTC is that you live by the fork, 24:35 die by the fork. 24:36 So if you leave BTC, 24:37 you leave the number one coin for something else, 24:39 then maybe those people leave for something else. 24:41 This is exactly what happened with Bitcoin SV where Bitcoin cash split off. 24:44 And then Bitcoin SV split off Bitcoin cash. 24:46 And then you had even Bitcoin ABC, 24:48 which split off of BCH. 24:49 And then, 24:50 so it's a, 24:51 it fractures the, 24:52 the coalition. 24:54 And that is a very difficult, 24:56 as I mentioned with the network effects before. 24:58 So for, 24:59 for what it's worth, 25:00 I think if. 25:00 Bitcoin core and small blockers in general were reasonable people, I think accepting BIP300 would be a wise thing because it does actually solve the utility problem in, in a lot of ways, but, but it, but it also, I have a little more time to think at 10 years, 10 years, and I kind of like would tinker with it from time to time, as you may know, I got a little more serious about it two years ago, I started this company to push for it and to make it better because it is true, like, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, 25:27 like, it was only an idea. And until you have test software out, it's kind of like a hard for people to go for. 25:34 Of course, I didn't stop people from going for SegWit and the lightning network back when it was just an idea. 25:37 I can see how that worked out. 25:38 That's one of the things that I made my tiny little list about things that BSV community is correct about, but actually the list is really long. 25:44 It may be for too long, but number three was about like lightning network doesn't work. 25:49 And people are kind of pretending that it does. 25:51 Well, let's, so, so let's actually let, let, let's go over that. 25:55 Because I think like, there are things about Bitcoin core that I think are okay. 25:59 And, and it's a funny thing because like you mentioned, like CVEs, like handling zero day exploits and things like that, like what else would you do? 26:07 All your options are very bad. 26:09 Like your options are try, never change it and hope for the best. 26:12 And then you're killed by heart bleed and then, or, you know, build up a secret cast of people that have PGP, 26:19 send them encrypted message and have them fix it. 26:21 And then lie to everyone about why, oh, you should really upgrade to this because it has better font. 26:26 And then, well, for what it's worth, I think that's Satoshi had the alert key and that kind of thing. 26:31 I think Satoshi actually envisioned, like, I'm going to, I'm going to do a push message to the real node operators. 26:36 As you know, there were a couple of cases in 2009, 2010, where the network minted like 92 billion coins accidentally and whatever, like release an emergency version. 26:46 Yeah, 2013 with the Berkeley DB, like split the network. 26:52 It was essentially a hard fork and then a rollback, I guess, to fix it. 26:56 But they had to roll back first. 26:59 And then the database lock limit had implicitly become something like a consensus limit without anyone realizing. 27:05 And then they removed that with arguably a hard fork, removing the block size. 27:09 It's funny that that rhymes with block size limit. 27:11 So that the jokes write themselves, but only a few people are going to get that joke. 27:16 In July 2015, there was the people didn't really upgrade. 27:20 They thought they had upgraded, but they really didn't. 27:22 And a bunch of invalid blocks were mined. 27:24 Yeah, because everybody always checks their software. 27:27 That's what they'll tell you. 27:29 Part of it is that it's very opaque, right? 27:31 So a layperson, it's extremely specialized. 27:35 So even if you're a very good computer scientist and you're a great software engineer, you don't know like what other people are doing on their software project. 27:41 So it's very different from like a plumber or something putting in. 27:44 Even that is sort of specialized where you'd say, well, I don't know, did they do it wrong? 27:47 Or did I tell them to do the wrong thing? 27:50 Or did the software or did the code? 27:51 Right, just knowing the code for a region is relevant too. 27:54 Like I grew up in Chicago and now I live in South Florida. 27:56 And like I've done building projects in both places. 27:58 And it's like, oh, it's very different building on sand than it is building on clay. 28:03 And so there's a bunch of stuff like that that you just you have to know by doing. 28:07 So, yeah. 28:08 So it's very hard for a layperson under any circumstance to contradict a specialist. 28:14 And then with software, it's just very opaque. 28:18 You don't know if people want to do this and that. 28:20 And it's hard to say, like this was also happening today with the OpReturn. 28:25 Peter Todd wants to remove it. 28:26 I think that that's correct. 28:28 But then other people are saying this. 28:30 People are in there hyperbolically saying on GitHub, this will kill the whole Bitcoin project and turn it into an altcoin. 28:36 People have the same. 28:37 Sure. 28:37 They have the same. 28:38 It's kind of like the reducto ad Hitlerium or whatever, where you just end up, 28:42 every argument online ends up with someone being accused of being Hitler. 28:45 It's kind of like, ultimately, yes, they're going to make it an altcoin. 28:48 I've heard that. 28:49 If only I had a nickel for every time I heard that. 28:51 Yeah. 28:51 Well, and the fact of the matter is, is there is some truth to it. 28:54 Like there are core principles of Bitcoin. 28:57 So one of the things that you've said is, you know, Bitcoin is software. 28:59 And that always makes me wince because I look at Bitcoin and I say, well, 29:03 Bitcoin really is an idea about rule enforcement. 29:07 And it's implemented in software, which is. 29:10 Yeah, it's an issue, though. 29:12 It's like how good luck with the rules if they're not implemented anywhere. 29:15 Well, correct. 29:15 There's my thumb again. 29:16 I got to turn that off. 29:19 But, you know, I mean, when I did it, I have no idea. 29:22 It might even be a local thing on my with my camera or something. 29:26 But anyways, so, you know, my concern, like looking at Bitcoin and thinking of it purely 29:31 as as software is if it's just software, then then there is no fundamental thing that makes 29:38 it Bitcoin. 29:39 And then now you're having a political conversation. 29:41 Like, well, the supply is an abstract idea. 29:46 Well, and what is that abstract idea? 29:48 Is it the enforcement of, you know, just the number of coins? 29:51 Or is it, you know, script validation? 29:53 Do the opcodes matter? 29:54 Like those are those are some pretty big opening conversations to fight for, you know, 10 years 29:59 in your circumstance. 30:00 I mean, of course, like at the zoomed in level, the details are very specific and they do 30:05 matter. 30:06 Like if that really if the software will really reject an opcode, if, you know, like up to 30:11 check was nothing first and then it was check locked and verify, I think. 30:15 So if you really break that rule. 30:19 You're a new miner block, it really will be rejected by the software. 30:23 So that is the chicken and egg problem, I suppose, of like the principles versus the 30:27 software. 30:28 Yeah, I that's a very good question. 30:31 It's like what is at the essence of Bitcoin? 30:33 And again, I think we have no choice but to make it like whatever helps the project survive 30:41 and thrive. 30:42 But I suppose someone could make an argument that says we should just be this fixed. 30:50 Photograph of something and but I think like you're just we're just going to it will just 30:55 end up being replaced. 30:56 You know, there's there are many things in technology that went by the wayside, you know, 31:00 the second Dreamcast or something. 31:02 Sure, you know, where it's like, oh, it existed. 31:05 And it's not like it's fake. 31:06 It's real. 31:07 But in a way, it is. 31:10 So so that always again, it undermines, though, this ethos that Bitcoin is sound money, because 31:15 I think most of your your advocates, I mean, like if I were to have Giacomo Zucco on and 31:20 say, is Bitcoin sound money? 31:22 Like, I mean, he'd probably talk about that for four hours. 31:25 I mean, this is part of what they don't understand is that the software, if the software 31:30 crashes or if the software is CVE, yeah, and you can spend anyone's coins, including ones 31:35 that are not yours, then it's how sound is that money? 31:38 And then if you can create ninety two billion coins, how sound is that? 31:41 And if you can crash all the nodes or if there's just no no one wants to mine a block or if 31:48 the security budget falls so low that anyone can mine ten trillion blocks, you know, for 31:54 four hundred dollars. 31:55 Yeah. 31:56 Then what's the point of proof of work in that case? 31:58 It's not accomplishing anything. 32:00 So sure. 32:02 So a deeper a deeper question, then surely they don't even can't even get what they want. 32:06 Well, right. 32:07 And that's the thing I would argue. 32:09 BTC specifically as an implementation is definitely not sound money because of the things that 32:13 you've described. 32:15 But can't so can it be or should it be like, would it be good if we could make it a sound 32:21 money? 32:23 Can it be ossified such that it can grow? 32:25 It can be this thing that creates abundance and eight billion people use it without it 32:30 being fundamentally political and requiring a BIP process and a BIP editor and, you know, 32:36 Luke Junior banning people or whatever else. 32:39 Is that possible? 32:41 It's an interesting question. 32:42 I think since Bitcoin inherently affects a whole group of people, in other words, everyone 32:47 who's going to run the nodes and or anyone who's going to be a user and or anyone who's 32:52 going to be a miner, but whatever the point is, you're either you're kind of in the community 32:55 of people who use the yen, you know, that is like people who use Visa. 32:59 It's a group of people. 33:00 So whenever you have a group of people who are all similarly affected by one thing that 33:05 seems to be inherently political. 33:06 And that would be the case for Bitcoin SV or BTC or Litecoin or whatever. 33:13 It's just because of the way the design is peer to peer. 33:17 So it's like. 33:20 They put out one version of the full node and then everyone runs. 33:25 I wrote a piece of writing last month in March called Precedence Ossification, which is kind 33:31 of about how to do that, about like what you can do is if you you bet everything on 33:36 the soft fork and you say no matter what, if an older node disagrees with a newer node, 33:41 the old node will win. 33:43 And then you can kind of have your cake and eat it, too, a little bit where you can say 33:47 we can keep putting out new versions. 33:50 The new versions can have bug fixes and they can tighten the rules on the UTXO set changes. 33:57 And but we can't force anyone to upgrade. 34:01 And in that case, you have kind of derived the kind of property right where you say the old 34:07 node is supported sort of forever. 34:11 I mean, of course, in practice, will that work? 34:13 I don't know. 34:13 But it's an interesting idea. 34:15 And, you know, all the rights that we've created, the property rights, people like to say like 34:20 they come from God or they come from common law or something that I mean, maybe. 34:25 But I don't I think we kind of created them ex nihilo. 34:28 Right. 34:29 Like we're just human beings got together and they said, you know what, if we if people are 34:33 allowed to just steal everything, no one's going to make anything worth. 34:36 Sure. 34:37 So we need a rule against stealing. 34:39 And so I think this is kind of like that where you can just say we're going to try to make the 34:43 property rights part. 34:46 We're going to try. 34:46 But I don't know. 34:47 Many people disagree with what, as you know, there are some crazy there are crazy ossification 34:52 people who think the binary file should never change. 34:56 So this is very hard in the context of open source. 35:00 Yeah. 35:00 First of all, good luck. 35:01 Even if everyone even if that like ninety nine percent of people agreed with it. 35:05 Still, those people on GitHub, you know, devs are just going to dev. 35:08 So they're just going to keep putting out. 35:09 Bitcoin Core is going to keep putting out a new version every six months, like whether 35:13 you like it or not. 35:14 So but also that idea is untenable for all the reasons we mentioned. 35:19 What about eventually when there's 10,000 operating systems from now, then none of this 35:25 the software won't even run on. 35:26 Yeah, it still only runs on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. 35:30 Yeah. 35:31 So let me propose another idea to you because you've mentioned soft forks a few times. 35:36 I have often likened soft forks to malware. 35:40 And I'm a big believer in the soft fork. 35:43 I heart soft fork. 35:45 So maybe we can debate this part. 35:47 Yeah. 35:47 So let's and it's actually based on something that I read from Mike Hearn many years ago. 35:51 And in that what you're doing is the upgrade path. 35:55 In the comment section, arguing with him about it. 35:57 And that I'm not really in there. 36:00 I don't know. 36:01 That's funny. 36:01 Delete the comments or something happens to something. 36:04 You know, I don't I don't think Mike would delete you. 36:07 So if it's there. 36:08 But so let me propose the idea as I understand it, as I'll do my best not to straw man, Mike. 36:15 But the way that he says it is that when you create a new client that contains a soft fork rule, 36:21 you're essentially you're creating a rule that the legacy node before it cannot validate. 36:26 And so it doesn't know about it. 36:29 It sees null. 36:31 So it's essentially forced to follow consensus and trust that the new node is doing something 36:37 that is valid when actually in reality, it's technically invalid relative to the rules of 36:43 the old node. 36:43 And so it is now going along with a rule set that if it knew about it would reject it. 36:49 And so for that reason, he proposed and I tend to agree that it follows the definition 36:55 of malware. 36:56 What do you think? 36:57 Well, I kind of think you could flip that around and look at it upside down. 37:01 So I kind of understand what you're saying. 37:03 But there's like a different legal principle of like a volunteer can't claim injury or 37:09 something where it's like if you opt in. 37:13 This is exactly what you're saying is not happening. 37:14 But it's like if someone says, oh, I choose to run across the street when, you know, and 37:21 I get hit by a car or something, that's a bad example, because that's the right away. 37:25 So I don't know what I was thinking with that. 37:26 But the point is, okay, here's one example that's actually good, where if you go to court 37:32 and you say, you want to represent yourself. 37:36 And the judge will say, I really don't think you should do that. 37:39 That's a terrible idea. 37:41 And but then they'll say that you have to formally agree that you can't claim a mistrial 37:47 on that basis later. 37:49 So you have to say, listen, I'm I know I'm signing up for this. 37:51 So the point is, it's a thing that you have. 37:57 You have voluntarily resigned. 38:01 So the point I'm trying to make is there's the opt not to take the case of OpNop2, which 38:05 pre-soft fork was anyone can spend. 38:10 So if the script interpreter sees OpNop2, it will just say that this is fine. 38:17 And it will not throw an error just because it sees OpNop2. 38:21 After the soft fork, it says if there's OpNop2, then the script interpreter will say it's 38:28 fine unless such and such happens. 38:31 And then it will throw an error. 38:33 Mark, the transaction is invalid. 38:35 And then since the transaction is invalid, the whole block that it's in is invalid. 38:41 So that's post after the soft fork. 38:45 And so the idea is kind of like you were saying when you ran the version that said anyone 38:51 could spend OpNop2, you were kind of saying I don't you were kind of voluntarily saying, 38:55 oh, I don't care about OpNop2. 38:56 But you kind of have just a moment ago, you kind of have looked at it the other way where 39:00 you said, well, if you want to use OpNop2, you have to come and tell me first. 39:04 And then I have to have to sign something and say, I agree. 39:07 Let's for the sake of the discussion, OpNop2 was no operation, I think is what NOP is, 39:14 if I recall. 39:14 So it's essentially an empty op code, as I understand it. 39:17 And then either I can't remember if it was NOP or NOP2 got repurposed in the CLTV upgrade? 39:24 Yes, I believe it was. 39:25 I believe it was late 2015. 39:28 And I believe it was OpNop2. 39:29 And I believe it's CheckLockTimeVerify. 39:31 OK. 39:32 So if it got repurposed for CheckLockTimeVerify, at what point would something using OpNop2 39:41 been and anyone can spend? 39:42 Would it have been not before that? 39:43 Before, before. 39:45 So yeah, before you could use it and it would just like not, it would not achieve anything. 39:49 It would just because what you're trying to do is limit the spend case. 39:53 What CheckLockTimeVerify is, it's kind of like postdating a check. 39:56 This was all to help Lightning. 39:57 So there's so many, there was many, many soft forks. 40:00 Yeah, to get to L2. 40:03 And even Taproot, they're all to help support Lightning. 40:06 So it is an irony that Lightning gets all the support, and then these other things, 40:12 the Covenants and BIP300, they get zero support. 40:17 We got to protect the sacred cow of Lightning. 40:20 But if CheckLockTimeVerify is like, it's kind of like this transaction cannot be included 40:26 in a block until this block height, which is in the future. 40:31 So you could use OpNop2, you could try to do that and put OpNop2 and then put like a 40:38 number there and say, but it wouldn't actually enforce anything. 40:41 You could include the transaction earlier. 40:44 Right. 40:45 So in that sense, it would be, and because you wouldn't just spend it to, you wouldn't 40:50 just say, I'm sending this money to something that is only locked. 40:54 The money has to be locked to like a certain script. 40:57 And the script is like a little program made of the opcodes. 41:00 And so if you just put like, I'm not even sure what would happen if you just put like 41:04 OpNop2 and then like the money there and there was just nothing else there. 41:08 I don't know. 41:09 Like maybe it would just be just frozen there. 41:12 Yeah, it might just be an error. 41:15 But what would happen with that? 41:17 But, or maybe, but the point is that before the soft fork, you could use it in any way 41:30 you want and it would not lock anything. 41:33 After that, it successfully locks before the post dated amount you cannot include. 41:40 And then after that, you can include the transaction. 41:43 So I don't know, depending on how you, the whole thing considered at once would be if 41:48 it. 41:51 It's interesting. 41:52 Well, and, but again, it's, so we're, we're talking in theory. 41:55 I think we're also displaying something here about this. 41:59 I don't even know what would happen. 42:00 What would happen if we did X? 42:02 Because it's only had OpNop2 on it. 42:04 I don't know. 42:04 I'm sure you could fire up the software and see what would happen. 42:08 Yeah, somebody, somebody will test it, I'm sure. 42:10 But the, but what's being displayed here is that because like the reference client is 42:16 not, it's not actually a spec, right? 42:19 I think a lot of people treat Bitcoin Core as if it is like the spec, like this is Bitcoin. 42:24 And it's not, it's an implementation suggestion for BTC version of Bitcoin. 42:30 And ultimately, whether or not that's adopted, there's two ways to treat it. 42:34 There's the political, like, well, it's got the most proof of work and whatever, but that 42:38 would be a rules-based, like, you know, you, you, you start referencing things like here's, 42:42 here's what my Bible tells me to think based on white paper, Satoshi and how I feel. 42:49 And then you have the other variation where you could say, but is there a way to come 42:53 up with an objective definition for, is this a Bitcoin thing? 42:57 Like, is, is Bitcoin still Bitcoin if Opnop2 is sort of undermined, frankly, to, to create 43:05 this check lock time verify in order to further undermine Bitcoin with lightning network at 43:10 some point in the future. 43:11 And like, it seems like a snowball problem, like where, where you're like, okay, we're 43:16 now, now we're, now we're creating like a bigger and bigger problem that, you know, 43:21 down the road, which I think is clearly the case now. 43:24 But this is why I'm, I'm a big fan of that set in stone, like general purpose rules, 43:29 lock them down, but make it scalable from where you lock it down, essentially like nodes 43:34 compete, et cetera. 43:38 But as I sort of mentioned before, the Opnops were put in as blank and they were supposed 43:43 to be used later for something, you know, that the future people decided that they wanted. 43:50 So the claiming of Opnop2 via SoftFork, I think that was what was intended, you know, 43:58 the whole time. 43:59 And of course there are many, there are many opcodes in the whole set and Satoshi, you 44:07 know, put a ton in, some he took out later, some he kind of rushed, panicked or, you know, 44:13 I don't know that he panicked, but there was a case where one of them let you spend anyone's 44:17 money. 44:17 And then shortly after that, he disabled like a whole set of them. 44:20 So it sort of seemed like he thought, well, maybe I only want to have a few of these, 44:24 but then he put in this thing that let you add them back basically. 44:28 And so I think that the Opnop2, I don't really see that as undermining anything, right? 44:35 Because your old node is still going to look at Opnop2 and, and carefully consider, look, 44:40 it's going to still go back to the book and look up what does this mean? 44:43 And what it's going to find in its old book is this means whatever they put here, don't 44:48 complain, just, just ignore it and say that it's fine. 44:52 It'd be like, if you, it'd be like, if you worked at a bank and then they had the date 44:56 on the check, they started at, you had checks with no date and then they added the date 45:00 later, but at your branch, it just says, just ignore that. 45:04 That's something that is on the newer checks and you don't have to look at that. 45:08 So that, but the, here's the thing is you are working at a bank before that didn't even 45:13 have the date field on the check. 45:15 So in what sense was something undermined? 45:17 It's not just a bunch of graffiti. 45:19 It's a bunch of graffiti on the check that is meaningless to you, but it does mean something 45:23 to the newer people. 45:24 So it's, it's an articulation of this principle of liberalism that we should, a lot of different 45:30 people want different things. 45:32 And as long as I can swing my fist wherever I want, as long as it doesn't contact your 45:36 face or something like that, you know, the old idea of that, of like, we need to maximize 45:41 the freedom, except when the freedom starts to contradict each other. 45:45 And then we have to come up with something. 45:46 But this is pretty nice because the up-and-up too, the old people still have exactly what 45:50 they had before. 45:51 Yeah. 45:52 And the new people absolutely want it. 45:53 But are we, are we fixing the money? 45:55 I mean, that's really, for me, I, you know, I got into Bitcoin 12 years ago, 13 years 46:00 ago, something now. 46:02 And the big reason for that is I wanted to fix the money. 46:04 I wanted people to stop tinkering with the damn money so that we could get payments worked 46:09 out, savings worked out, financial vehicles worked out in a way that was open and public 46:14 and that I could trust that in five years or 50 years or 500 years, that my smart contract 46:19 that did my thing is still going to be validated on the network and, and all of that. 46:24 It's like, right. 46:25 And that's still my goal. 46:27 But I feel like with this tinkering and, and this, you know, like who knows what Bitcoin 46:32 Core is even going to look like in 18 months. 46:34 Now, like you said, maybe it's another 80 months until there's another BIP that gets 46:38 pushed out. 46:39 But, but in a hundred years, like, is, is that even possible? 46:43 Or are we still going there? 46:44 Or is that something that we should quit on as a, as a goal or a value? 46:48 Well, the question of whether or not something will still be here in 500 years and also is 46:53 similarly as to whether or not it can compete with the banks, which is also, that's how 46:56 I was interested in Bitcoin. 46:58 Yeah. 46:59 Bitcoin versus the banks. 47:01 That was like what I, that was popular around when I was learning about it. 47:05 So I thought that this is going to be great. 47:10 Those questions are all related to like, you know, what your explanation is of how it will 47:15 succeed. 47:15 So if people think, oh, I want this, the small blockers and the L, I consider myself L1 47:21 small blocker. 47:23 So we say if, if you keep adding stuff to L1, the full node costs, the cost of validating 47:29 every block and every transaction and checking them all for double spends, this cost will 47:36 keep growing forever. 47:37 And it also, when you start up a new node, you have to process the historical blocks 47:41 and you have to send them to people who ask for them. 47:43 Otherwise, no one will know what is in the blockchain and whether or not it, let alone 47:47 whether or not it contains invalid transactions or double spends. 47:50 So this cost will go up and up and up. 47:52 And who knows if in 500 years, maybe it'll be too high. 47:54 And the network just will reach this state where it has to halt. 47:58 Should, should everyone run their own node? 48:01 I don't believe with, in Luke, Luke Dashjr. and I disagree on this. 48:06 He has this view that if, if you use, he has a, I don't, I've tried to figure out his view 48:11 and I think he's a very smart guy. 48:13 He's a very interesting guy. 48:15 He's also crazy, but everyone in Bitcoin is crazy. 48:18 Yeah. 48:18 Everyone in Bitcoin SV is crazy. 48:20 Everyone's crazy. 48:20 He's pretty far out on the fringe though. 48:22 Luke is not the normal kind of crazy. 48:24 Definitely, you know, you can make like a greatest hit tweets of his that would, would 48:31 boggle the mind. 48:32 And I don't need some of them. 48:33 I can't even say like, cause they're so bizarre, but yeah, but he's an interesting guy. 48:39 But Luke's view is something like, if you don't, he's, I, you ask him to put a number 48:44 on it. 48:45 Like he says something like 80% of people using Bitcoin must run a full node. 48:50 I don't know where this number comes from. 48:53 But he seems to really think like you need to have a super majority of full nodes and 48:56 only a few people can free ride off the nodes with SPV. 49:03 This is where I disagree with him. 49:04 And the, I agree with the Bitcoin SV community on how cool SPV is. 49:11 I think SPV is very cool. 49:13 And I don't think there's any issue at all with like 99 plus percent of the people. 49:20 Uh, like you could have a few full nodes, whatever, like one 10th of a percent. 49:25 And then you have 8 billion people running SPV. 49:28 I think that's fine. 49:29 The ratio doesn't make any difference to me really. 49:32 The health, it's the health of the host versus the SPV are kind of like parasites a little 49:37 bit free rider, free riding parasites. 49:40 But I think it's the fact that it works is so amazing. 49:43 And it only costs 4.4 megabytes per year. 49:45 And it's, it's unbelievable no matter what the blocks contain. 49:49 And, um, so you, the, I'm still upset. 49:52 I, where I agree with the small blockers is you have to kind of be obsessed with the health 49:56 of the full nodes, because if you are, if someone has to. 49:59 responsibility for this problem, or it will just, so this is where I disagree 50:02 with Bitcoin SPV, but yeah, Luke thinks that everyone has to run their own node. 50:06 And he thinks that if the percentage drops below 80%, then that means 50:10 then, then Bitcoin has failed. 50:11 So he's got his own, everyone has their own like thing where 50:14 they think Bitcoin has failed. 50:16 And it doesn't make any sense because let's say you have the same number of 50:21 Bitcoin users today. 50:22 Let's say everyone runs a full node today. 50:25 And then, uh, you know, every, everyone in the country of India turns on a new 50:33 SPV node or something. 50:34 This is purely additive. 50:36 We had what we had before plus something, you know? 50:39 Yeah. 50:39 It shouldn't matter. 50:39 But now, according to Luke, now Bitcoin has failed because of that. 50:42 Like what the heck is he talking about? 50:43 And of course, when people, um, when people are running full nodes, they're 50:48 And of course, when people, um, when people first join the network, um, 50:56 if they're very unlikely, you know, Hey, do you want to give us 750 gigabytes 51:00 worth of space? 51:01 Like that's the first thing they're asked, right? 51:04 And well, you know, like they don't want to figure out like what the heck is going 51:09 on. 51:09 They own zero Bitcoin at this point, possibly. 51:12 And they just go to bitcoin.org and they, they don't. 51:14 And it says, we need, we need you to leave your computer on all the time. 51:17 And we did 750 gigabytes. 51:18 It's going to be, it's going to be a few weeks. 51:20 Yeah. 51:20 So they're going to think like, um, yeah, the sync time is so, but people have to 51:27 warm up to the idea is my point. 51:29 So I don't, I don't understand why we wouldn't ramp people up by saying, and in 51:33 fact, de facto, it happens anyway, whether or not Luke wants it or not, because what 51:38 happens is people show up on Coinbase, they buy BTC on a website. 51:43 They don't even have an SBB node. 51:46 It's on, it's on Coinbase. 51:47 And so that's their first, that's the real ramp up that we actually have. 51:51 And then you have all these people who clearly don't, I mean, I, I doubt, I very 51:55 much doubt Michael Saylor runs his own full node. 51:57 Oh, no way. 51:59 No, he's, he probably has a Coinbase custody account. 52:02 Do you actually know like what he would do if the full node told him like that the 52:04 coins aren't really there? 52:05 Like it doesn't really, um, so he doesn't really, he's not really plugged into that 52:09 part of the system at all. 52:11 So what does Luke have to say about that? 52:13 I don't know. 52:14 But, you know, I, you know, I think Luke is an interesting guy, but I don't agree 52:17 with him on that. 52:17 And I agree with the BitcoinSV people, SBB is perfectly fine, especially you want to 52:22 co-vary what you do based on the context. 52:25 So again, if you don't own any Bitcoin and this is your first day, it's a very 52:29 different situation than theoretically you're a Ross Albright or something, you 52:33 know, it's to take an example, but you're running an anonymous service and the 52:36 money is, you need to check and see if people actually send you Bitcoin or not. 52:40 Cause of course they would lie to you if they could get, you know, free addictive 52:43 drugs out of it. 52:44 They would. 52:45 So, so let's unpack this a little bit. 52:47 Cause I think there's a, there's an antagonism in your position. 52:51 Like if you agree that SPV is good, but you're, you're concerned about the health 52:56 of full nodes, I guess, I guess I would like you to define what you mean by the 52:59 health of a full node. 53:00 Like why, why not have five gigabyte blocks? 53:03 Like why would that matter if it's a commercial entity that is providing proof 53:07 of work and giving Merkle proofs and all this stuff that their blocks are valid. 53:10 Why should it matter how big the blockchain is relative to you saying that a full 53:15 node should be healthy? 53:17 Well, this is exactly it. 53:18 And this is the, so the open question, but my logic is this, which is that if I'm, 53:24 whether you're the parasites or the host, the host, the health of the host is very 53:29 important to the, so if you know, if you're a host, then you care about your own 53:32 health. 53:33 Sure. 53:34 And if you're the parasite, you don't want to pick that parasite is such a mean 53:39 word, but you know, it's kind of the point I'm just trying to get at that. 53:42 I don't, I don't love it, but I get, I get what you're saying. 53:45 The SPV, I just want to explain it for other people who think I'm being mean, 53:48 which is a SPV node doesn't have any data. 53:50 So if you put stuff, if two SPV nodes meet and they ask each other for block, the 53:55 contents of block 700, then neither of them, they're both going to leave 53:58 disappointed because no one had, they don't have, both don't have. 54:01 So, um, only if you're using SPV, you have to free ride off of someone else's 54:07 full node. 54:09 And, um, so you want to make sure that the host, if you're a parasite, you want 54:14 to make sure you pick a healthy, if you have a choice between healthy hosts 54:17 versus a host that's dying, you want to pick the healthy host. 54:20 So that's why I think it doesn't, it's almost SPV is almost irrelevant to the 54:24 question of, of what's going to survive in the long run. 54:28 And SPV is the opium. 54:31 It's the Novocaine that dulls the pain of the block size increase, because 54:37 you don't feel it because you're free riding. 54:40 And then that way it is a deception. 54:43 But I do think if Bitcoin succeeds, 8 billion people will be using SPV. 54:46 But I think that we have to care about the, so maybe the more concretely answer 54:52 the question is that you have less of a guarantee of what you're getting into. 54:59 You're thinking, because the bigger the blocks are, the higher the cost is of 55:06 processing all the blocks, because it's not free. 55:08 You have to, you have to get every block. 55:11 This is in the white paper. 55:12 You've got to store the blocks. 55:14 You have to check every transaction, see if it's invalid or a double spend. 55:18 In a way, the only way you can check it as if it's a double spend is to know 55:23 what all the previous spends are, because if it conflicts with one of 55:27 them, then it's a double spend. 55:29 Yeah. 55:29 So this is where I, one thing where I completely agree with the Bitcoin SPV 55:36 people, I should, I really should stress this, which is that in BTC world, it has 55:41 become kind of a boogeyman of like, if we increase the block size, the network 55:47 is certain to reach a death state or something. 55:51 And then we'll, and then we'll all regret our hubris and how we 55:55 mock the gods by whatever. 55:58 You know, so a more sane thing to do in BTC would be if we had test versions 56:07 with different block sizes, and you could see, you'd have like numbers, you 56:10 know, like a normal person would have like tested out and say, and I think 56:14 you guys are doing this, there used to be, I think, I don't know, Andrew Stone 56:17 or someone in Bitcoin Cash had some version that had like the largest blocks 56:21 possible to stress test the software. 56:24 And you guys have something, I don't know. 56:25 I saw a Terra node. 56:26 I don't know. 56:27 Yeah. 56:27 So Terra node, the, the idea is terabyte size blocks, but one of the, one of the 56:32 big things in BSV just for context is that instead of it being a consensus 56:37 rule, it's policy rule and, and I run a BSV pool and for us, like we're 56:42 willing to accept 10 gigabyte blocks and we're willing to build four gigabyte 56:46 blocks, but that's just a policy setting for us. 56:48 I could make it, we'll mine 10 gigabyte blocks and we'll accept a hundred 56:51 gigabyte blocks, like it doesn't really, it's not going to kick me off the 56:55 network by having a policy setting change. 56:57 And I think that's a generally good thing for that to be a competitive 57:00 part of the network rather than a hard capped protocol decision. 57:05 In general, it is preferable to like let, you know, different 57:12 strokes for different folks. 57:13 So that, that in general, that's good. 57:15 But in this case, the, you allow a block today and it's going to affect not 57:20 only the people today, but everyone in the future will be on the hook for 57:24 that block. 57:25 So it is, the people mining today might not even be the same people who mine 57:30 in the future. 57:31 Yeah. 57:31 So in that way, it's not as good because you think, well, we'll allow this 57:39 giant problem into the community today. 57:43 And then, and then, and then a year from now, we'll be out of here. 57:46 And then 10 years from now, people will be like, oh, grumbling about it. 57:49 Perhaps. 57:49 So it kind of reminds me, I mean, it reminds me of the people that are 57:52 saying like, wow, we need to get rid of 80% of the global population for the 57:57 sake of a climate or something. 57:58 It's like, well, isn't the purpose of the purpose of the climate is to make 58:02 people, isn't it? 58:03 Like, you know, well, and, and same. 58:07 I'm trying to win some points with the audience. 58:09 That'd be good. 58:11 And I think that's the same thing about Bitcoin. 58:13 As you're saying, like, well, I'm, I'm pro Bitcoin. 58:15 I want as many people as possible to use Bitcoin. 58:17 And I, I really think that all of our ideas extrapolated out there, they do 58:24 require big block Bitcoin. 58:26 At some point. 58:27 There's another thing on my list about, I think Bitcoin, I made my tiny little list 58:31 of things that BSV people are right about, I think, which is, but one of them is that 58:36 like, we have to have in mind 8 billion people using it. 58:40 Like, so someone is going to process whatever you want to call it. 58:44 Like, someone will process these blocks somehow. 58:47 And I'm in favor of like chopping it up at this weird L2, like pyramid shape. 58:53 But the, but the point is, it's like, you know, we have these other networks, Visa, 59:02 Venmo, whatever, they can do it without, without bursting into flames. 59:05 So they have, they have some, like, it's not like it's not possible. 59:12 The question is just like, what, what exactly are we comfortable with? 59:15 And if we, if we reach a world where everyone is using Bitcoin, then yes, there were, there 59:20 are, I tried to estimate it with some napkin math, but it's like, there's 9 trillion 59:23 transactions a year, basically. 59:25 I tried to like, it's a complete guess, but I, I tried to figure it out, honestly. 59:29 And so that is, so that's just how many happen. 59:34 So if you want that to happen, then those, that data is going to be somewhere. 59:38 And even the, I feel like the lightning people kind of wanted to imagine a world where they 59:43 would all happen there and then L1 would not be used as frequently or something, whatever. 59:48 So I think everyone kind of sort of buys that, but they don't, to your point, they don't 59:53 really like, they don't seriously buy it enough. 59:56 They don't sit down and say, they don't start with 9 trillion transactions a year and say, 1:00:02 okay, where are we going to put them? 1:00:03 How do we engineer that? 1:00:04 They just kind of think, you know, they're kind of going through, some of them are 1:00:08 going through the motions of, you know, just Bitcoin Core has been this way for a long 1:00:11 time. 1:00:11 And they just think, well, you know, you know, we'll, we'll see, we'll, we'll make a bit. 1:00:17 We're getting, we're getting rich. 1:00:19 So don't rock the boat too hard. 1:00:20 I think that's part of it also. 1:00:21 I mean, it's hard to, I have, I've criticized Bitcoin Core a lot, but, and then I always 1:00:26 have to say, well, it's hard to argue with the results though, because it's been the 1:00:28 greatest performing asset in the history of capitalism. 1:00:31 And it's like, you know, it changed the world and it's made a lot of people angry, but those 1:00:36 people couldn't do anything about it. 1:00:37 So that, I mean, it's hard to get better than that. 1:00:40 So I'd argue with the results. 1:00:42 That's also why it's very difficult. 1:00:43 I mean, you guys are kind of, I kind of, my heart goes out to you a little bit, like anyone 1:00:48 who competes with Bitcoin at all is like, of course, in the trenches. 1:00:53 You're ice skating uphill, for sure. 1:00:55 You've got to be on coin market cap, looking at the number one, you know, it's kind of 1:01:00 like demoralizing like day after day. 1:01:03 So it's funny because, I mean, I look at that and say like, yeah, would it be better if 1:01:09 we were richer? 1:01:10 And, you know, the answer is like, well, sure, if the good, if I think we're the good guys, 1:01:14 it'd be better if we had, you know, a thousand times more money than we do. 1:01:17 But the, when I think about some of these issues that you brought up, like, yeah, you 1:01:22 know, a 10 gigabyte block, like who's going to validate my hundred gigabyte block in a 1:01:25 hundred years, right? 1:01:26 Like that, I think commercially, if you really think about it, I think it's actually a really 1:01:32 trivial thing to do for, you know, and everybody will bring up Moore's law. 1:01:35 That's your classic big blocker. 1:01:36 Like, what about Moore's law? 1:01:37 There's my magic thumb. 1:01:39 And then, but then the other thing, yeah, have you heard of Moore's law? 1:01:44 But the other thing is that aside from Moore's law, I think it's very easy to, you know, 1:01:49 maybe you do it once a year, maybe you do it once a decade. 1:01:52 Maybe this is something that gets done where you just do like a cryptographic chain commitment 1:01:56 and say, look, everyone unanimously agrees that the UTXO set and everybody's holdings 1:02:01 and all this stuff is valid to X. 1:02:03 Here's the hash and nobody has to sync prior to this hash any longer in order to say that 1:02:09 we're just moving forward. 1:02:10 And I think similar things have been proposed by probably Bitcoin Unlimited and other people 1:02:14 because it is a basic problem. 1:02:16 Like, well, yeah, I don't know. 1:02:17 Can I sync a billion terabyte into a thing? 1:02:20 And the answer is probably no, but you could do a chain commitment at some interval of 1:02:25 time and say everything was valid to this hash and we're moving forward from here. 1:02:29 And then that's essentially a solved problem, isn't it? 1:02:33 Well, I think that that idea is a good idea. 1:02:35 And partly it is done in Bitcoin Core where there is, there's something called the Assume 1:02:40 UTXO and there's also Assume Valid where it checks a lot of stuff, but checking the signature, 1:02:45 which is the most computationally expensive, it doesn't do for like many, many years until 1:02:50 only recently. 1:02:51 And so that is a good idea. 1:02:54 And it's also, it would inherently happen with my Drivechain idea also, because the 1:02:59 way Drivechain works is basically if there's a six month reorg, it is toast anyway. 1:03:05 So you can kind of just say, well, if we put a UTXO commitment in the L2s, then you don't 1:03:12 really need to sync the, because not for a different reason. 1:03:15 This is because the L2 is slightly, slightly worse, slightly insecure, but it's kind of 1:03:20 like it has this additional vulnerability of being vulnerable to six month reorgs. 1:03:24 But because of that, because it's already completely toast if that happens, well, then 1:03:28 now you might as well just only sync the last six and a half months because you're like, 1:03:35 we're dead no matter what, if that's going. 1:03:37 So I agree completely with what you've said. 1:03:40 And I do think that it's sort of more an empirical question. 1:03:46 And I was trying to say before about the boogeyman, it has become like kind of like a sacred 1:03:50 versus profane, like purity versus contamination, emotional decision. 1:03:55 And it doesn't have numbers behind it, which is what it would, in a sane world, you would 1:04:00 just say, well, how much is too much? 1:04:04 And this and that, how much bandwidth would one, because one issue is the full nodes, 1:04:10 perhaps they, you want to hide the physical location of the full node. 1:04:15 You know, some people might. 1:04:17 So the question is, well, doesn't that become much harder with all the bandwidth that is 1:04:21 needed? 1:04:22 Yes. 1:04:23 But the question is, how much harder? 1:04:25 And, you know, what other software could we build that would maybe change? 1:04:27 We had like some VPN tunneling thing. 1:04:30 Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. 1:04:31 I don't know. 1:04:31 Maybe. 1:04:32 And then it's another part of the question is if internet speeds improve, if Starlink 1:04:38 improves and if whatever, then maybe it becomes less and less of an issue. 1:04:42 So there should really be some kind of numerical thing behind it. 1:04:46 But I do, the small blockers have this sort of principle. 1:04:50 And again, I'm L1 small blocker. 1:04:53 I agree with the principle that we have to, someone has to take responsibility for sort 1:04:58 of keeping this cost down because we don't, we just kind of don't know. 1:05:02 The cost is already kind of slowly increasing over time and technological and economic growth 1:05:07 is bringing the cost down in a relative sense. 1:05:09 But there's like more and more bytes. 1:05:12 There's a thousand blocks a week. 1:05:14 So even at one megabyte, and now it's four megabytes, but even at one megabyte, a thousand 1:05:19 a week would make it one gigabyte a week of block data. 1:05:23 And then the UTXO said, and then who knows what has to be stored. 1:05:26 But it's sort of an empirical question because you're like, well, you know, is it really 1:05:32 so bad if the blocks are five gigabytes or one terabyte or some other amount? 1:05:39 And the answer is we don't really know. 1:05:42 And I think that the BTC is successful, not really because of picking the most perfect 1:05:49 and serene block size limit. 1:05:51 But I think it is mostly just inertia of not having hard forked and the community just 1:05:58 sticking together and people wanting to have a coordinated team and like a unified opposition 1:06:08 to fiat. 1:06:11 I think those are the main things that have driven its success. 1:06:14 But of course, from my point of view, many of the advantages of the large block world 1:06:19 are still available to BTC. 1:06:20 You know, of course, if we did this BIP300 thing, then you could have an L2 that has 1:06:26 an unlimited block size, or you could really have what I would prefer is to have a group 1:06:31 of 12 to 14 that have like maybe like a 25 megabyte block size that is scheduled to grow 1:06:40 geometrically to like one gigabyte over five years. 1:06:43 And this would like kind of process all the world's transactions. 1:06:48 And there would be BTC transaction without any need for it. 1:06:50 So the reason why altcoins are lower on coin market cap than BTC is I don't think is because 1:06:59 their ideas are wrong. 1:07:01 I think that is not necessarily evidence of that at all, because even if the idea is really 1:07:08 good, everyone will steal it. 1:07:10 You know, if the idea is great, everyone will steal it. 1:07:12 So it's like you can't get any credit for your good ideas. 1:07:14 It's like who knows why, what's going on on coin market cap. 1:07:18 But I think it's either you flip in Bitcoin and you hit 8 billion users and you get to 1:07:22 300 trillion or you don't. 1:07:24 And so I think when I look at coin market cap, I just see a percentage, the likelihood 1:07:29 of getting to 300 trillion. 1:07:32 And so I don't, but I think it's a very good point. 1:07:38 Like there should, people should actually just test it out with the different block 1:07:43 sizes and see what happens. 1:07:45 They should not, I think it has become a purity thing. 1:07:48 That's always been my contention too, is that, you know, I think people like to claim that 1:07:53 I'm some kind of like toxic big blocker or whatever. 1:07:55 And I'm always like, I can't imagine how I would have made somebody feel that I was 1:07:59 toxic in this conversation. 1:08:01 But the response that I give people is that even if BSV ends up being some kind of failure, 1:08:07 like if the network is orphaned at some point in the future and everybody just has to pack 1:08:11 up and go home, that ultimately it was a good faith project in the attempt to figure out 1:08:16 the limits of Bitcoin, right? 1:08:18 That we didn't add anything to it. 1:08:19 We didn't say, okay, it's Bitcoin plus X. 1:08:22 It's literally just, all right, let's strip it down to like, what is Bitcoin? 1:08:27 And then let each of those little aspects of it be competitive. 1:08:30 Like you mentioned signature validation. 1:08:33 Signature validation has been the most difficult thing for us to scale in SVNode. 1:08:37 And it's been the most difficult thing in the development of TerraNode. 1:08:40 Now, TerraNode, you're probably not aware unless you've done your research on it. 1:08:44 And I wouldn't expect you to, but it's essentially a microservices node. 1:08:50 So you take everything that a node does, you break it into its own module, and then 1:08:54 each individual thing, so block building, various peer-to-peer protocols, and all these 1:08:59 other things can be scaled individually and scaled horizontally, essentially using more 1:09:03 hardware. 1:09:04 And what we've found is that by and large, it shakes out to something between three and 1:09:09 four orders of magnitude more efficient than SVNode, which is already itself capable of 1:09:13 probably 15,000 honest transactions per second. 1:09:17 And so we're targeting and have seen it in distributed consensus, the testnet stuff, 1:09:23 including geographic distribution, all this stuff, we can do about a million transactions 1:09:27 a second of pay-to-public-key hash transactions sent around that network. 1:09:33 And so we're pretty pumped about it. 1:09:35 The most difficult thing was definitely signature validation. 1:09:39 But once you solve those things and you modularize them, and then you allow people to compete, 1:09:45 much the way that people compete in hashing is sort of a separate venture in Bitcoin. 1:09:49 Imagine people competing to be like, hey, I just want to be the best provider of signature 1:09:55 validation service to the network, that that can be a specialized service in the system. 1:10:00 So anyways, my idea or my notion is that I like to think of us as teaching Bitcoiners 1:10:08 how to break Bitcoin into more and more competitive pieces, how to think more like a capitalist, 1:10:13 think more like a business person in the competition of the system. 1:10:16 And that ultimately, if we fail systemically, like if BSV, the network, the ticker, the coins, 1:10:22 whatever, if that thing is a failure, but there are broad lessons learned that apply 1:10:27 ultimately to a tool that brings Bitcoin to 8 billion people and allows it to be robust 1:10:32 and useful and all those things. 1:10:33 And I know a lot of my BSV people are going to be like, oh my God, this is terrible to 1:10:36 say, but I'd say that's a victory because the idea for me is I want to live in a world 1:10:42 where there is a sound money system that everybody can use and that it's easy to use and that 1:10:46 it gives people the freedoms that I think Bitcoin is capable of. 1:10:49 And so that's my basic value system coming into this. 1:10:53 And I don't know if there's a question in there, but I'm curious for your feedback. 1:10:57 You know, what what do you think of these ideas conceptually? 1:11:02 I think it's well, OK, so I remember that I remember Elon Musk saying the same thing 1:11:07 about Tesla, not, you know, we don't, you know, obviously he's very polarizing a figure 1:11:11 and there's many good and bad aspects. 1:11:14 But he said something like he started Tesla just to accelerate the adoption of electric 1:11:20 cars. 1:11:20 Sure. 1:11:21 And he thought that everyone and he like kind of open source. 1:11:24 I don't know exactly the details, but he basically tried to like give away the blueprints, 1:11:29 even like at some point. 1:11:30 And and then I think it's a very interesting part of the story. 1:11:35 I don't know. 1:11:36 You can you can tell like maybe I don't know if this is all lies or if this is clever, 1:11:39 sociopathic manipulation or earnest genius. 1:11:42 And I have no idea. 1:11:43 But it's kind of interesting that he had these pure motives, or at least he said he did. 1:11:48 And then Tesla became like the number one. 1:11:50 Turned him into the richest man in the world. 1:11:53 Yeah, I wouldn't like I wouldn't knock that necessarily because you can see that on paper 1:12:02 it does look like the altcoin. 1:12:04 You would think and this is what I always thought is that any altcoin will invent something 1:12:11 useful. 1:12:11 It'll be open source and then everyone will say, OK, this is a great idea and we'll just 1:12:15 add it to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is open source. 1:12:17 That was what everyone thought. 1:12:18 Like that was my assumption for sure. 1:12:20 Yeah. 1:12:20 And so but now you see the issue is not like the problem is that people can't agree on 1:12:27 if something's a good idea or not. 1:12:28 You even have stuff like, you know, scaling that doesn't increase the L1 block size or 1:12:34 privacy features, Zcash, Monero or whatever. 1:12:39 People get painted into these weird corners where, you know, Michael Saylor was asked 1:12:42 by Peter McCormick about. 1:12:46 He's saying like there is no second best. 1:12:47 Bitcoin is perfect. 1:12:48 ETC is perfect the way it is. 1:12:51 And then he gets asked a very simple question like, oh, what about people who who do want 1:12:57 more privacy in their transaction? 1:12:59 Bitcoin, the transaction is public on the blockchain and you send during the receiver 1:13:04 and the amount or you can kind of go back and forth. 1:13:07 And if you pay someone from a large UTXO, they know that you own the whole UTXO. 1:13:11 Like what about people who are someone who's an activist or kind of, you know, Edward Snowden 1:13:16 or whatever? 1:13:17 And then Michael Saylor was forced to say, oh, well, you know, if you want more privacy, 1:13:21 maybe you need a Monero. 1:13:22 And then they clipped that maybe you need a Monero part. 1:13:24 And they made like a little video about it, which is they should. 1:13:27 It's exactly what they should do, Monero people. 1:13:30 But the point is. 1:13:34 People disagree on if something's a feature or a bug. 1:13:37 So that's the that's the weird part about it is. 1:13:41 This is what I was apparently very wrong about or I didn't expect, which is that you would 1:13:46 think it objectively, it's obvious which things are better ideas. 1:13:50 But the block size limit is a perfect example, too, where some people say it kind of depends 1:13:55 a little bit on who you are. 1:13:56 Like if you live in a country that has fast Internet. 1:13:59 You don't care as much about. 1:14:01 Yeah, it seems trivial, right? 1:14:02 Like, why not 10 megabytes BTC? 1:14:04 So and if you're very, very poor and you make a lot of transactions. 1:14:08 So like it was obvious to me why BitPay back in the day, why BitPay? 1:14:12 They were large blockers because when the blocks get full, people are trying to pay 1:14:17 stuff, buy things with Bitcoin. 1:14:19 Then they someone told me that their their customer service, when the blocks fill up, 1:14:26 they get 40 times for zero, 40 times as many customer service calls. 1:14:30 And of course, it would try to pay and then it's not working. 1:14:33 And then it seems broken. 1:14:34 Yeah, so you could see how people disagree over what a feature is. 1:14:40 What really blows my mind is I think there are in my opinion, there are many the whole 1:14:44 suite of soft forks. 1:14:46 But even you and I disagree about just that just a moment ago, but that all the soft forks 1:14:51 proposed in BTC, to me, they're all opt in reversible. 1:14:57 They have no risk. 1:14:58 They don't do anything because they just take an opt in something that wasn't used. And then only the people who choose to voluntarily upgrade use it for something different. And this may result in more happy users, more transaction fees paid to miners, a Bitcoin that maybe is less vulnerable to like, you have OpVault or something, or better multisig, something where it's harder for people to come into your house, and, you know, you're not going to be able to do anything. 1:15:25 Hold a gun to your head and say, give me all your Bitcoin, because of OpVault. So we have all these amazing features that have no cost. And you soft fork to add OpNop, but then you can always later say, I'm going to soft fork and we're going to ban OpNop2 from ever being used in any block after this point. And then that just deletes whatever you did before. So even if something bad happened, so in my view, all these soft forks should just be merged, you know, like there's no controversy, in my 1:15:55 opinion, about them at all. And yet, in the Bitcoin community, BTC community, there's so much controversy that not a single one has really made any noticeably noticeable progress. And then, you know, basically half an hour ago, you were saying that the soft forks undermine the old nodes and other things like that. So that's, I think that's an interesting piece of the puzzle, which is that 1:16:17 it's, it's political. I think that's my point is it's just like the, you know, it's like Tesla will win, you know, Tesla will win in analogy, you know, so maybe it won't be so bad. And I think the people who have some kind of purity of motive, at least they have something that they are measuring their results against. So at least they have some kind of criteria, for sure. 1:16:36 But it really is, it reminds me of the, you know, the people who wear a mask, because it shows that they're a good person. And that means all these political things, or your red hat, or your Ukraine flag on your social media profile pic, you know, it's like, all these things are like, okay, here's this thing that I'm standing for. And right now, it's all the people with the no cat, because everybody doesn't want to bring back up cat for for BTC, 1:17:00 one of the silliest ones of all, because it was active in Bitcoin. And right. So we know it's not dangerous. It's sort of like, it's very short. And it's just putting two stack elements next to each other. And right. Yeah, it's just crazy. I don't know. This part of it with up cat is because of these, some of these other people, Udi and whatever, they made like a big marketing show about it. And but you know, it's easy to say it's because of that. The real reason is that none of these, none of the softworks have made 1:17:30 it further. Right? In the process, the process doesn't exist. And I do think it is kind of a superstition, like how to get the soft fork. No one really knows. There's no there's no evidence to suggest that it's because of the taproot wizards, JPEG, like bonanza, that OP_CAT has been harmed or helped by that. I think it's just all of these ideas are good. All of them are good enough to be merged. 1:18:00 They're all harmless and reversible. They should all be merged. And it's just what has really happened is because of what happened with SegWit in 2017. Yeah. There has been this political anxiety over the soft fork. And you know who it was, it's the guy that we're not supposed to talk about, because I was listening to some of your old episodes. And it's because the the G man, yeah, he was the one who did taproot in the taproot email. So if he sends an email, then it's fine. But 1:18:29 correct. But then otherwise, it's dead, do a so, you know, whatever, right? Like, so, so I bring all that up, because, you know, you're saying, Oh, maybe we'll do all this work to make BSV scale, and we'll prove it to the world. And then we'll get that we'll have nothing to show for it. Yeah, because it'll just be copied by everyone, maybe. And but I think that's the right reason to do something. And I don't know, like, I, it's, I think it's, it's possible, because if if BTC goes down, it will just be 1:18:59 because all the tools are laid out. And I, in fact, I wrote about this in the precedence ossification post. And at the end, I wrote about the the Easter Island heads, I borrowed it from a book, I quoted a book that that they wrote about it, but I applied it to Bitcoin. So I don't know if you're aware of this, but, you know, it's Easter Island heads on that one island. And there are all these statues that are all the same in there. And actually, the statue has like a huge torso that's like, very, the statues are 1:19:26 well aware, the Rapa Nui, the whole thing. I'm super into it. Yeah. 1:19:30 And so what, it's hard to, there's a prevailing theory is that half of these half of these statues 1:19:40 are like, on route to their intended destination. So the archaeologists think that they ramped up. 1:19:47 Because this civilization used to have, there used to be many more people on the island, and they had 1:19:52 much like division of labor and like many people, and then the population crashed. And only a few 1:19:57 people survived. And it's thought that the society went into horrible decline. And they ratcheted up 1:20:06 the statue production, as they were all dying. And in fact, they made more and more statues. And 1:20:13 it's hard, who knows, you know, because of the way this type of thing is done. But the prevailing 1:20:20 theory is that the civilization started experiencing problems. And they thought, 1:20:26 what we need to do is make more statues to appease the gods, you know, because the forests aren't 1:20:31 growing, the plants, the food isn't growing. So they start cutting down the food, and it causes 1:20:35 ecological disaster. And they make more and more and more, they double down on the statues. 1:20:40 So, whereas if maybe they just done nothing, or fewer statues, or no statues, they would have 1:20:46 survived. But instead, that, you know, like, a huge percent, I don't know the exact percentage, 1:20:51 but like more than 90% of them all died. Giant decline. And so that's, but that's what you're, 1:20:57 that's what you're betting on. If you, if you own BSV, you're betting that it's Easter Island 1:21:03 statue world in BTC, where it will just, we'll just keep making these statues, or this will keep 1:21:10 doing the irrelevant thing. The thing that is so stupid, you know, which is like, and this, 1:21:17 basically, Michael Saylor is on the, he's the, he's the captain of the team to make BSV a success. 1:21:22 Right. Well, in a weird way. There you go. Easter Island head, like. Yeah, no, for real. 1:21:31 It's not, it's not the worst bet in the world. It's, it's, actually, I think that really defines 1:21:35 it really well, as I think the economics of BTC are so bad, especially as you extrapolate them out 1:21:42 over, you know, incoming halvenings and all, you know, just the math that goes into it implies that 1:21:48 there's a security budget problem. There's, you know, various big problems that aren't being 1:21:52 addressed because of the rhetoric. And I think at some point, if Bitcoin was ever a good idea, 1:21:59 then something like BSV stands to take that mantle because it's like, well, we really just tried to 1:22:04 be the most Bitcoin, Bitcoin. And while everybody else was trying to engineer some other outcome, 1:22:09 we continued to try to scale this idea to be, to be a good thing for as many people as possible. 1:22:15 And so, you know, and that's something I would own forever. Like, again, people tell me all the 1:22:20 time that, oh, Kurt, you're just, you're going to wear this like an albatross for the rest of 1:22:23 your career. And I'm like, I'm super proud of everything that we've done. And, you know, 1:22:29 like I don't care. I'm happy to say like, yeah, I boldly stood against most people's ideas to 1:22:37 fight for what I thought was good. I mean, I hate to bring up Craig because, but I think that's part 1:22:41 of it is that, you know, he's like suing people and it's very popular. And so then people think 1:22:45 like, why, you know, I do think, I think that's, you know, that's a part of the. It's the social 1:22:51 part, which again is, it's tangential. I treat it mostly as separate, but it's also fair. Like 1:22:56 if your culture, if your culture has some kind of thing about it that is problematic, it's like 1:23:01 the same thing talking about Donald Trump. You can be like, yeah, the department of government 1:23:06 efficiency is a really good idea, but I also don't like, you know, whatever, right? I don't like 1:23:10 tariffs or I don't like some other political thing, you know? And so, you know, you're 1:23:14 unfortunately bundled up into groups like that. But I think, so we've been going about an hour 1:23:20 and a half and it's funny because I think the thing that has stood out is we agree a lot more 1:23:25 than I assumed we would. The key thing is the cost of the full node is unbounded with the 1:23:32 unlimited block size. So if you could just show that even if it's really, really, really, really 1:23:37 big, it won't actually cost that much and we'll still be able to download the blocks and stuff. 1:23:41 So I think that would be like the maximizing the chances of success. And of course, you know, 1:23:47 obviously you want to amplify the most ridiculous people in BTC world, and then it will become, 1:23:53 you know, but who knows the, because I do see like BTC is just like one, 1:24:02 it's just like one BIP300 away from all the altcoin technology being as an optional L2 of 1:24:07 BTC. And then it's like, what would stop it then? Because it can scale to 8 billion people and have 1:24:12 Zcash privacy. And, but notice that what objective progress has BIP300 really made 1:24:21 like over the last 10 years? It's very hard to say. I mean, I have made all the software 1:24:24 and I've answered people's questions, but it's kind of like they have, it's this thing is sitting 1:24:29 right in front of them and then they're not going for that. Instead, they want to double down. This 1:24:33 is the Easter Island thing. They're doubling down on covenants, which is basically lightning 2.0. 1:24:38 They say we want, well, we want to be able to open more lightning channels. So now we've realized 1:24:43 that opening lightning channels is too hard and there's not enough space. So we want to like open 1:24:48 them in like a weird tree that can time out sometimes. And so now, and that's the big thing. 1:24:54 And of course, more conferences are needed and more papers. More podcast subscriptions. That's 1:25:01 what we need. So, you know, it's funny. And to answer your question about nodes, I can see Alex 1:25:06 Favell, one of our frequent listeners responding and saying like, yeah, cost is a concern, but it 1:25:13 doesn't address ROI. Like if you're making revenue based on that cost, like if you have a 1:25:18 terabyte size block, terabyte size block has a lot of fees in it. It allows me to then, you know, 1:25:23 hey, here's my archival node. I've got it backed up in 12 places. Like it can be your seed node and 1:25:29 you know, whatever. There's a lot of things, but then, so I see that as a solved problem 1:25:35 because if it's bigger, if the blocks are that big, they are full of money and we have a lot of 1:25:41 money to either engineer a solution or just economically say, you know what, if it costs me 1:25:46 10 million bucks to sink another node, fine. It is a projection how much revenue will come in, 1:25:53 what the costs will be. If someone wants to sink a node, they will not necessarily get, 1:25:59 so the only one who gets the revenue is the one who mines the block. And then even the miners, 1:26:05 even if we live in a world where only miners are nodes, which I know is the preferred BSV 1:26:10 phrase today. It's the basic premise. So like in the future, those miners will have to download 1:26:16 the historical blocks in order to know how to mine. So it's a cost that they'll have to pay 1:26:21 all those past blocks they're not getting the revenue for. So it's still a projection as to 1:26:26 like whether or not a line, one line on a graph crosses another line. And the fact, I think what, 1:26:33 I do think it's like a programmer thing also, where programmers like stuff to be like very 1:26:37 tightly, like artistically spelled out, but when it's unlimited, it's kind of like, well, 1:26:42 then what happens if it hits infinity? Then see, that's when it does become like kind of like a 1:26:46 boogeyman. But that is kind of still the heart of the matter though, which is that the costs will 1:26:51 go up and up and up. The cost is paid to people who do not necessarily receive the revenue. 1:26:55 Is that people who have to sink the node later. So you can say certain this time window and 1:27:03 checkpoints. And that's where I think it's a good thing, because when you actually have the 1:27:07 working piece of software and you say, here's our demo software, or here's our actual real life 1:27:12 demonstration demo either way, you say here is what it cost us in 2025. And here we're pushing 1:27:21 the envelope every day. So this is what we think we could do like two months from now, we'll change 1:27:26 the software, we'll parallelize everything or we can get it to run. Can you imagine if you like an 1:27:31 NVIDIA thing that like verify signatures or something? I don't think that's, but you have 1:27:37 no idea. For what it's worth, I think that's part of the solution. A specialized chip that 1:27:43 does like an ASIC for signature validation. And then it turns out that that's less expensive than 1:27:49 people thought. And you can now, thanks to the hardware world, you can do 10,000x what you 1:27:54 thought. The difference between the graphics, the CPU's graphics and the GPU's graphics is like 1:27:59 I don't know, but it's really, really high. It's a big jump. Yeah. Yeah. So in that case, 1:28:06 it would all become more concrete. I think part of the unlimited thing would make people just kind 1:28:11 of shrug and say, well, then I don't know what to think about it. And so then I don't know what 1:28:16 my conclusion is. It sounds fanciful. Yeah. And I get that. I think it's very interesting the way, 1:28:21 you know, there was like BTC and then there was Bitcoin Cash, BCH, BTC. And it was kind of like, 1:28:28 Bitcoin Cash is the large block version. And then Bitcoin BTC is a small block version. 1:28:33 They had a very clear brand positioning. Yeah. And then when Bitcoin SV came out, I kind of like, 1:28:39 I kind of shed a tear for BCH, you know, I kind of had like, because now they had, you know, 1:28:44 those people who had to say, like, you know, like, it's like being crushed by like a military 1:28:51 pincer move or something. Well, exactly. So it's kind of like, it's the worst place to be. 1:28:55 They're so crazy. They're small blockers. Oh, but then why not have really, really, 1:29:00 really big blocks? And then they're like, well, sometimes the block size can be too big. 1:29:04 Yeah. And it's kind of like, oh, no, like Goldilocks. 1:29:07 Goldilocks moderate is never a good value proposition. 1:29:12 Well, it's kind of like, yeah, we have picked the perfect 1:29:15 thing based on what, like, is there a formula for that? Oh, yeah. Okay. 1:29:19 Well, and so that's the thing. So let me address some of those points. Like, again, I think when 1:29:24 we talk about network design, engineering, topology, and these kind of things, like, 1:29:29 first of all, you can just download the UTXO set and headers and just mine with that, which is 1:29:34 itself, you know, some infinitesimally small variation of running the full client. 1:29:39 Secondarily, there's SPV, but that's the free riding off the full node. 1:29:42 A bit, but then there's also this notion that, okay, so why are we spinning up a full node? 1:29:47 Like, let's say you're a commercial operation, you're trying to run a stable coin on BSV, 1:29:51 and let's say it's 30 years in the future and it's a million terabyte blockchain. 1:29:56 So, okay. So now what you need is you need the headers, you need the UTXO set, and then you need 1:30:00 an overlay service that just listens for your token, just the things that you care about. 1:30:05 And so you run essentially a light client variation that connects to the, you know, 1:30:11 uses Merkle proofs to prove, okay, here's where the token's valid. Your sidechain essentially 1:30:16 has its own, or your overlay network rather, which is similar to a sidechain, has its own 1:30:21 back to Genesis problem, but you're solving that through your own agency and your own overlay 1:30:25 network. And I think for the purposes of that, you're still like, you're treating the center 1:30:31 of the network, like your big archival mining operation, which is itself like an AWS style 1:30:37 company. And then you're running your company, which is just like any other, you know, 1:30:41 commercial services application. Like it's, maybe you rent cloud compute, maybe you got some 1:30:45 on-prem stuff. Like it's a pretty big operation, but it doesn't need to be Goliath. Like you don't 1:30:51 need to ingest that whole blockchain. And so I still see that as not really a problem because, 1:30:58 you know, somebody like Amazon, let's say Amazon right now decided, okay, maybe we want to start a 1:31:03 BSV node and use it for whatever. Like AWS would not have a problem syncing the blockchain or 1:31:08 whatever. I don't think they'd have a problem doing it in 20 years either. And so I kind of 1:31:13 see that as at the level that somebody would want to be a full mining, full validating archival 1:31:19 node. I think the companies that can, won't actually see that as a limitation. And I don't 1:31:24 think it's necessarily bad if there's only, you know, 12 or 20 or 50 companies on earth that can 1:31:30 run the full archival copy, because as long as they're geographically distributed, the only 1:31:35 thing that we're trying to actually solve for is security. Like, you know, decentralization 1:31:40 is not a goal in and of itself. Decentralization is a leg under security, right? And so for that 1:31:46 reason, I just don't see why an unbounded block size would ever really be a problem 1:31:53 ever. I just don't see it. You've given an example where it's so expensive that only 20 or 30 people 1:32:00 run the full node. But I mean, cost, this is based on a kind of an explanation, you know, 1:32:06 there's like this whole worldview behind it. Like maybe it would be so expensive that zero people 1:32:10 can run, or it could be some other number, you know, it could be any number. So I don't, I think 1:32:16 that is, what you're really saying is we can confidently project that the cost will not be 1:32:23 above a certain, and that also there are these other considerations about can I hide the physical 1:32:29 location of the node, you know, behind Tor and stuff. I don't want to like make it about Tor, 1:32:33 but I do want, I do think people, there's more to cost than just adding up a bunch of stuff, 1:32:39 like on Amazon and shipping to your house. There's like the ongoing cost and there's whatever. So 1:32:44 there's the cost is a multi-dimensional thing. And the cost could be any number. It's not like 1:32:50 it has to stop at 30, you know, like it could be so, it could be 29 or it could be some other 1:32:56 number. So with respect to like only having a subset of the data, you can kind of do this in 1:33:06 reverse with BTC, you know, where you can say the core is we have SPV and then you have the cores, 1:33:12 the one megabyte, now four megabyte core. And then you, if you want anything else, 1:33:18 and this is kind of how BIP300 works, where it's like, you want, you have a whole nother 1:33:22 block somewhere else that could be its own size of whatever you want. And you hash that. And then 1:33:29 you have another Merkle tree, you hash all that. And this just ends up as 32 bytes 1:33:34 in the BTC blockchain. So with those 32 bytes, you have a sort of unlimited size, like overlay, 1:33:43 like in reverse, instead of a subset, it's a super set. So you could do that. And then 1:33:48 this is the question of which bytes are mandatory, but that is why this is the core problem of BSV, 1:33:56 which is that all the bytes are mandatory for the full node, because it's part of the rules 1:34:03 that you have to check every transaction for being invalid or double spend. 1:34:07 This is like part of the software and the white paper. And it's also, if a node requests a block, 1:34:15 if someone says, here's the blockchain, and I need block, you know, 700,002. And if it can't 1:34:21 find the block, then it will just say, well, then I'll just assume it's invalid. And we'll say, 1:34:27 and if you say that you have that block, and you say the hash is this and the header is this, 1:34:31 but then it won't give you the block, then the nodes will ban each other and hate each other. 1:34:37 And so there is a very good reason for that, which is because the whole point of the node 1:34:42 in the first place is that you have something that you know has been cleansed of double spends. 1:34:49 And so that is the heart of the matter, which is that the node is defined as the thing that 1:34:53 downloads all the... This is where the BSV people equivocate on this point. This is very weak, 1:34:59 because they say, in one sense, the block size is unlimited and we can put whatever we want. 1:35:05 And then they say, ah, we're not responsible for that because of SPD. But that's having it 1:35:09 the wrong way around. So here's how I see it. I see it as, you know, if block 700,002 was mined, 1:35:17 we can see who mined it. We have the header. We have the Merkle proof. We have, you know, 1:35:21 the fact that it was done with valid proof of work. I see that as a done deal. Like everything 1:35:26 that should have been done was done at some point, and people have been building from it. 1:35:31 Like, I think that that's the actual signaling mechanism of proof of work. I don't think proof 1:35:35 of work is about, you know, the security budget and it has to be X amount more than the price and 1:35:40 blah, blah, blah. I think that's a little part of it. But I think what it actually is, is it's 1:35:45 essentially your stamp of promise at any given point to say like, you know what? Somebody worked 1:35:51 really hard and put a lot of money into mining that damn block and nobody orphaned them. And 1:35:56 nobody said it should be orphaned. Nobody signaled that it was bad in any way at that point or any 1:36:02 point after it. Like people kept building and building and building on it. And so for all 1:36:05 intents and purposes, I really just think that that doesn't matter. I think it's a null point 1:36:11 that you can pick whatever block is the oldest block that you can grab and just go from there. 1:36:15 Because if that's not the case, I don't see a reason why Satoshi would have used like Merkle 1:36:20 trees at all or proof of work at all if that was not, there's my magic thumb again, if that was 1:36:25 not supposed to be like what that indicated. It just seems very obvious to me. Well, it's in the 1:36:32 code for BTC and Bitcoin SV, last time I checked, that if the block is requested and it can't be 1:36:39 found, it's marked as invalid. Because it's only going to mark the ones as valid that have been 1:36:43 purged of double spends. So you could, it's plausible that someone would design a different 1:36:50 system that is entirely proof of work driven. And it says, we make no, we pass no judgment on 1:37:00 what this block contains. It may contain double spends, it may contain invalid transactions, 1:37:04 it may contain anything, it may contain nothing. But we know that the hash, we know that it contains 1:37:10 some stuff that hashes to this Merkle tree root, even though we don't know what it is, 1:37:17 but something does. So, or someone said that something did at some point. So you could do that. 1:37:23 But part of my argument, though, is that if that's the attitude you're going to take, 1:37:27 you can already do that on BTC. You can just say, here's the part that's mandatory. 1:37:33 And here is the part that no one is checking, which would be like open timestamps. Peter Todd, 1:37:40 a chief hater of my project, BIP300, but he created this open timestamp. And many other 1:37:45 people have done this. This is often people's like first wallet project is to like, put an 1:37:49 OP return in the blockchain or something. So it's a lot of fun. But you put the OP return in for 32 1:37:54 bytes, but you don't put in whatever you were going to put on. So you could put like the Lord 1:37:58 of the Rings video, extended edition file, you hash it to one hash, you put the hash on the 1:38:05 Bitcoin blockchain, or people put their marriage vows, as I'm sure you've seen people do this. 1:38:09 They put something on the BTC blockchain. But they're not putting the actual thing on. 1:38:16 In contrast, like the taproot wizards and the inscribers and the ordinal people, 1:38:22 they really are trying to put stuff on. That's for some reason newer. I don't know why it evolved in 1:38:29 that in this chaotic direction. So it's actually kind of, it's stored in the witness data, 1:38:34 which is pruneable. I don't actually see that as deep Bitcoin data. I see it as a little tangential 1:38:40 because you can just prune it like a lot of other things. 1:38:43 Yeah. Well, thanks to segregated witness, they started to make, as you know, they started 1:38:47 creating this kind of Frankenstein's monster of things where now there's different blocks. 1:38:51 There's now different block headers. And if you talk to an old node, they'll give you a different 1:38:55 block and there's a witness TXID. So there are now multiple Merkle roots actually. And the old 1:39:03 system is kind of run like in parallel. It's like an emulator, like an N64 emulator or something. 1:39:09 Exactly. 1:39:09 So it's kind of strange in that way. 1:39:11 It bolsters my malware point. 1:39:13 It's also, I mean, I think SegWit in particular is a very unusually weird soft fork. For one 1:39:20 thing, it was a mandatory block size increase from one megabyte to four megabytes. So the other 1:39:25 thing though, is it does melt down the current block, like header, the block structure, the C 1:39:32 block and make something else that is like a one-to-one mapping between the two. And then 1:39:39 if you talk to a node, it'll tell you first if it's a SegWit node or not. If it's a SegWit 1:39:43 node, it gives you a different block than the old node gets. And in these ways, it is way, 1:39:51 way, way more invasive than taking the OpNop2 that was always intended to be used for new 1:39:57 op code that someone might want. 1:39:59 And voluntarily saying the script interpreter will fail if it does not follow the CLTV rules, which is like a tiny, tiny, tiny, like very narrowly defined thing that is totally in its one little scope that you could easily reverse by getting rid of the OpNop2. 1:40:13 And I do think SegWit kind of maybe ruined the brand of the soft fork slightly by being so weird. 1:40:22 And that is why now people can't think of it. And I think it also greatly exacerbated the scaling war because this is just my historical recollection of what happened, having attended Scaling 2 in Hong Kong, December 2015. 1:40:38 It was kind of like, oh, can we have a hard fork to increase the block size? Oh, no, we can't because we don't want that. Hard forks are terrible and block size increases are terrible. 1:40:48 And then, you know, Peter Wheel, he gave a talk, and I don't think he intended anything malicious with this talk because he's a perfectly sweet guy and a genius. 1:40:59 But he was like, we can increase the block size with a soft fork. 1:41:06 And I think a lot of this technically blew a small number of people's minds who knew what he was talking about. 1:41:13 But I think other people were like, we were just been told block size, soft, hard fork needed to increase the block over and over again. 1:41:20 We were just told all this stuff, and now we're being told something else. 1:41:23 It kind of seems like, oh, it's OK when you do it. When we want to do it, we can't do it. 1:41:27 I think it created all this confusion. 1:41:29 So the SegWit soft fork, in particular, is one of the most bizarre, possibly. 1:41:35 I mean, it's probably of all of them, all the ones in Bitcoin and maybe of all that anyone has ever heard of. 1:41:40 I don't know. It's just kind of very strange. 1:41:43 It created some permanent scars, for sure. 1:41:45 And I mean, it's still a problem in a lot of ways on all variants, too. 1:41:50 It's the Bitcoin cashers and the BSV people. 1:41:52 It gave us lightning. We needed it for lightning. 1:41:56 I always joke that when it comes to defining who's the real Bitcoin, it's kind of like defining what are the actual objective borders between Poland, Lithuania and Russia. 1:42:07 It's like, well, nobody's ever going to agree that those are a real thing. 1:42:12 I know you're partially Polish. 1:42:14 I agree with that, ironically. 1:42:16 We say we speak English, but no two people really speak exactly the same language. 1:42:21 Sure. 1:42:22 So its definitions are, I think, we wouldn't want to hang our hat too much on the definition because it doesn't help as much as people think. 1:42:34 For sure. 1:42:35 We should instead focus on the problems that we want to solve. 1:42:38 No, I agree completely. 1:42:39 If we start with values and then here's a goal and then let everybody compete to the goal, I think that's a good thing. 1:42:46 Yeah. And to the Terranode point, I would ask the skeptics of that type of thing, how serious are you in your critique of that? 1:42:59 Because the serious thing to do is build something and then test it against the real world using science. 1:43:06 This is like the scientific method or whatever. 1:43:08 So if you're serious, if you say, oh, I think there are moons around Jupiter and then someone says, I don't think so. 1:43:15 But then you have 500 people say yes, 500 people say no. 1:43:18 And only one of them builds a telescope that is capable of locating Jupiter in the sky and looking for moons that might be around it. 1:43:25 Then that person is the serious person and everyone else is fake. 1:43:28 And so to explore it honestly would be to create the software and measure it and get numbers. 1:43:40 And that is that is what the BTC should do that just to figure out, like, what could the block size theoretically be on the off chance that anyone ever wanted or how, you know, how important is or should the block size be smaller? 1:43:50 You know, many people, Luke Junior has he's constructed an argument that is much, much, much better than his other arguments, because at least this one has some kind of logical consistency and I can follow it. 1:44:03 Maybe the problem is mine, I don't know. 1:44:04 But he has an argument for why this should be 350 kilobyte blocks instead of one megabyte. 1:44:10 And, of course, he, as you can tell, he is not happy with the four megabyte increase. 1:44:16 But I don't know. I think I went on a kind of a tangent because you were saying that witness can be pruned or something. 1:44:20 But so but it can't be pruned from the you know, this is like I think that's just kind of a distraction. 1:44:27 But technically, so if everybody pruned that witness data, then your taproot wizards would be gone. 1:44:32 Like that is that is a fact of reality. 1:44:34 It depends kind of on how you would do it, because the witness data is still there. 1:44:41 If you run the SegWit node and you ask for it, it will give you the transactions and all the witnesses and it's in its other and it'll make its other witness transaction ID and all this other stuff. 1:44:51 So even if everybody's purged it from their database, where would it come from? 1:44:54 Well, I think in that that's a separate issue of does can you can everyone prune like what is pruneable in BTC? 1:45:04 So, as I said, if you request the old block data, someone has to give it to you. 1:45:09 Otherwise, the network will fork at that point because all the new nodes will just decide, well, I don't know what what this is. 1:45:18 I think the pruning is in the same category as SPV, where you have decided you have said, OK, I've synced a full node. 1:45:27 I already know because he's saying the part of the white paper is called reclaiming disk space. 1:45:32 So I've already spent my disk space on this. 1:45:35 And I think that's a very good section title for that part, because what he's saying is I have requested this data and I've already gotten it and I validated it. 1:45:48 And so whether I put it on the C drive or the D drive or the E drive or I put it on the F drive and then we unplug the F drive and throw it away. 1:45:55 I like I kind of I, you know, I saw it already. So I know that this and, you know, it's you could always ask when someone is going to spend money to you. 1:46:10 They say, I will spend this output and then you're like, oh, that's more block I deleted. 1:46:15 And you're like, oh, no, but you can always ask them. They have the output. They have the Merkle path probably still. 1:46:21 So they they will they can send you the thing that proves that, oh, even though I saw this block and then I deleted it. 1:46:28 This now the little Merkle Merkle branch is that's more than enough for you to say, OK, there are actually 30 Bitcoin here and he sent me seven now in the future. 1:46:39 So that's why I think that that works. 1:46:43 But it will not nothing will work if everyone has deleted the block 700 as the way the software is set up now. 1:46:49 You could set it up a different way. And in fact, some altcoin got away, wasn't it? 1:46:54 I think like Stellar or something, a ripple, they lost like a bunch of the blocks. 1:46:57 Yeah, like 90,000 blocks or something. 1:47:00 People make fun of that, which they should because it is funny. 1:47:03 But to your point, it's not like their network just like bursts into flames and doesn't work. 1:47:08 You know what I mean? It's like it's sort of still there. 1:47:11 So it does depend on what you prioritize. 1:47:15 I mean, I suppose it's an open question if there is a dispute, like maybe someone says, oh, I actually have. 1:47:21 Ten thousand ripple or something in this block, and then someone says, no, actually, I have those. 1:47:25 I suppose it's kind of an open question if that ever came up and what what exactly that means. 1:47:30 And what does it mean, like to lose those blocks? 1:47:32 And then in that case, if I get money today in a block, like, is that block going to be lost later? 1:47:37 And then what's going to happen? 1:47:38 So I think those those are some funny questions we could ask. 1:47:42 But I kind of to your point, it's not as though that that network suddenly went to zero utility instantly. 1:47:48 I don't know exactly what it means, but it's an interesting example of that happening with the blocks being lost. 1:47:57 For sure. So what do you think? 1:47:59 We're coming up on nearly two hours here. 1:48:02 Do you want to make a broader point? 1:48:05 Is there something in particular you wish we could have discussed or like how we got about 15 minutes until we're at two hours? 1:48:11 So what's the is there anything you like? 1:48:14 Do you think should we should we explore? 1:48:17 Hmm. We did discuss a lot. 1:48:19 Yeah. 1:48:22 We did discuss a lot. 1:48:24 I think I can't think of anything other than, you know, Craig saying he doesn't like BIP300. 1:48:29 But, you know, a lot of people don't like it. 1:48:31 So Peter Town also doesn't like it. 1:48:33 So they should form a club. 1:48:34 I think so. 1:48:36 So here's what I like about it. 1:48:37 Just like I'd love to steel man it for a second here and say, like, I like the idea that you can you can show people that they can bootstrap anything onto Bitcoin or using Bitcoin. 1:48:49 And, you know, however you feel about BTC being the real Bitcoin or whatever. 1:48:53 But the point is, is that Bitcoin is a very powerful general purpose tool. 1:48:58 And then you can use it to create all these other things. 1:49:01 And I think that's probably the biggest and best lesson for something like BIP300. 1:49:06 Now, what I what I don't like about it, what I suspect Craig doesn't like about it is that he doesn't like the fact that, well, it solves the problem of small blocks. 1:49:16 And it it sort of brushes away the fact that I think the small block cultism. 1:49:21 And I think you'd agree with this, that small block cultism undermines so many crucial things about Bitcoin that have just been written off at this point, because there's this presumption that Bitcoin is supposed to be slow and expensive and everybody should run a node. 1:49:36 And I think like to concede anything on that premise is the kind of thing that's going to make Craig lose sleep at night, which is why he will not accept such a proposal. 1:49:44 But but I think I think in BSV, for example, like I don't see any problem with running an exact implementation of BIP300, like a Drivechains concept on BSV. 1:49:58 I think it's a basically good solution. 1:50:00 So yeah, BIP300, it's like the ensemble of L2s has an unlimited block. 1:50:07 You can just keep adding more L2s. 1:50:10 So you have now you have all kinds of block space that you may want. 1:50:15 In a sense, it's not as good because BSV already has the unlimited blocks. 1:50:20 I think you're right that if the plan for BTC is to keep the blocks small and keep all the tech that we have, like keep lightning only, then I think people would get really, really worried if they really thought about what that meant. 1:50:33 And I think a lot to your point, a lot of these people don't have no many. 1:50:38 You can talk to even people who've been into Bitcoin for a long time or even large miners today, and they don't they don't really know what any like how this a lot of these in particular, one interesting thing about miners. 1:50:49 This may conflict with the whole because the BSV is like nodes equal miners or whatever, and miners will take care of the network. 1:50:58 But many BTC miners that I have met over the last few years, which I have gone to like mine disrupt a few times, but a lot of them don't even they're not even Bitcoiners. 1:51:10 They're just like people who can get cheap power or people who can like easily set up. 1:51:16 They're very good at quickly setting up and tearing down like I don't know, like these like storage units that can hold the thing. 1:51:22 They're literally thinking about it kind of like the mining analogy is almost complete or something where someone's going to mine cobalt or something and then sell it. 1:51:29 And they don't even really care about if it's cobalt or silver or whatever. 1:51:34 So that is an interesting thing about the miners. 1:51:39 And you're right. So it's funny. I actually have a like an inside industry report coming out in the next couple of days. 1:51:45 I went to mining disrupt this past year and basically noted that two thirds of the vendors in there are not related to the Bitcoin industry at all. 1:51:53 They were all power arbitrage and carbon credits. 1:51:56 And here's all this all these novel things you can do because you're this big power consumer. 1:52:00 And it is it's problematic. 1:52:03 And so to break that out, it's I think largely people treat hashing as mining like they don't understand the differentiation between like what is mining versus what is hashing. 1:52:14 And I think blind hashing by itself, not connected to a Bitcoin node is not mining. 1:52:20 Right. And so you have to have the hashing and the client in order to be a miner. 1:52:24 And I try to separate them out, but it's hard. A lot of people don't agree with that. 1:52:28 I don't know why they don't, because I agree. 1:52:30 But I think there's you know, it's a specialization of labor thing where the pool is going to set the block. 1:52:35 But a lot of people hate that. So, again, to mention Luke or whatever, Luke thinks this is the end of the world. 1:52:41 And even the Stratum V2 people think that they think it's desirable for the hasher to be able to override what the pool is trying to put in the block. 1:52:54 But of course, like this is kind of strange, because as you and I have just discussed, the hashers, like they don't even know what's going on. 1:53:00 And they of course, they one of the reason why they prefer there's different types of payouts. 1:53:06 And it's very confusing. And if you actually run a pool, you probably know more about it than I do. 1:53:10 But it's like a lot of them prefer just like paper share or the paper share adjusted for the fees because they just want they know how many hashes they can get and they just want money. 1:53:19 So they don't know about like all this stuff about like whatever trending historical patterns of block fees. 1:53:26 They don't like they're just like I will I will hash and you will pay me money and it's a fully specialized thing. 1:53:31 So the whole Stratum V2 quest, they think to decentralize the block mining template. 1:53:38 This is another thing I disagree. And they had the Bitcoin magazine and the mining edition. 1:53:42 And they asked me for the other side so they could put it at the end. 1:53:46 But I wrote about like how many of these ideas make no sense to me at all and that no one wants them. 1:53:52 And like they don't even achieve anything because it's not desirable. 1:53:56 If you join a pool, you're hoping that the pool will maximize the amount of money we all get. 1:54:02 Yeah. So there's no it's not like there's a controversy about should the block contain this or should it contain that? 1:54:09 It's like, no, we want the most money. Like it's there's an objective. 1:54:13 There's an objective thing that so I don't the whole thing is bizarre to me. 1:54:16 But that's another thing that people don't agree. 1:54:18 But anyway, I kind of bring that up because it cuts a little bit against the whole. 1:54:22 The idea in Bitcoin SV that the miners will end up as these people who guard the network in BTC. 1:54:29 They are traveling far away from the. 1:54:32 Sure. 1:54:33 Maybe it'll be different in Bitcoin SV than in BTC but maybe not. 1:54:36 I think I think that's I think that's the product of really SegWit. 1:54:40 But it's that era, too. 1:54:42 I think miners, they were ideological and they did see themselves as the, you know, hey, we're the stewards of the system. 1:54:48 And they really just kind of got beaten out by Core saying, no, we're the stewards and you run the reference client or we're going to sue you. 1:54:55 Which is, you know, some of some of that information has come out in the last couple of years. 1:55:00 I mean, look at Jihong Wu and Hypo Yang. 1:55:03 Those guys were like, no, man, this is our job. 1:55:06 And they really got pushed into the corner by Core. 1:55:09 You are right. 1:55:10 It's an interesting question as to because I think it is something of a chicken and egg with everything cultural. 1:55:15 Everything cultural is like chicken and an egg where you can't really tell like what is this? 1:55:19 Is X causing Y or is it the other way around? 1:55:22 But it's true that like particularly with the SegWit activation, it was like people split into teams and then one team was like conclusively defeated. 1:55:33 And they kind of and in fact, one thing that I say I'm very confident about saying is there's a data point that kind of cut SegWit activated in this contentious way. 1:55:44 The UASF specifically, you know, in spite of the miner. 1:55:48 So that was overt. 1:55:51 And then Taproot, which was the soft fork after that. 1:55:54 And the way I read the cultural situation was that that was the miners sort of accepting defeat and submissively bringing. 1:56:05 So even this one is an example of that. 1:56:09 There won't be any soft forks in the future because the whole reason that Taproot was activated by speedy trial was because of miners feeling guilty. 1:56:15 It's like Germans feeling guilty about World War Two or something. 1:56:18 Actually, the reverse of what people think people someone could argue against someone who look just naively looks at the pattern would say, well, Paul, actually after SegWit Taproot activated. 1:56:30 So soft forks are still still with us and they're still alive and well. 1:56:34 But actually, the Taproot was like a negative shadow inverse of the SegWit catastrophe of trying miners trying to say, oh, we will be we will be nice or we will agree with you more or something or we will we will we will defer to what you want even more than before. 1:56:53 But, yeah, there was, of course, a few of the large blockers tended to be the Chinese miners, which was and all the ASICs were coming from China at one point. 1:57:03 And so they ended up that ended up being part of it. 1:57:05 So you might you might be right about that. 1:57:07 I don't know, though, because think about it. 1:57:09 The economics of it, the specialization of labor are very, very reliable effects. 1:57:16 So I don't know. But think about this. 1:57:18 Also, you can a miner can. 1:57:22 You just as you can use SPV to free ride off of someone else's node, you say you have three large miners and the nodes are expensive. 1:57:31 Well, then one miner can just say, I'm going to be SPV mode and I'm going to use the other miners full node. 1:57:36 And so in this way, you have now separated mining from running a node. 1:57:41 So this is another like core belief of BSV that I kind of just don't believe, because the node is whether or not you check all the transactions and it is independent of whether or not you are doing any mining yourself or collecting any fees. 1:57:55 So it's not really. You could say it would you could say it would tend to vertically integrate, but you could also just say there's absolutely no reason to consider them to be bundled together because. 1:58:06 Well, for my just and I'm speaking as a minor of BSV is that I actually see the data as the store of value. 1:58:14 Like for me, it's what is on that database, because it is data that has been committed by proof of work and lives in distributed consensus that I can then be selling back to the economy. 1:58:24 It's like it's the proof of everything. 1:58:26 It's at scale right now. 1:58:28 It's not right now. It's a lot of like, hey, when you want to buy this, this JPEG will serve it to you. 1:58:32 But but I think in 20 years, if, you know, let's say global banking is on that ledger, I mean, that's really that's the golden goose. 1:58:40 Like, hey, I've got a disk image over here that I will sell you if you if you want to validate every single thing on it. 1:58:47 I will sell you this disk image to do it. 1:58:50 And I really see that as something very valuable, like the complete and total archival set of data of that network, if it's successful, I think could be the most valuable chunk of data ever. 1:59:02 So I absolutely would not be pruning my node and or, you know, or only keeping one copy like we have distributed lots of not like I want all that data because I want to be the guy that has all that data. 1:59:13 If if we're right about the way this plays out. 1:59:17 But you sort of said that it wasn't it was OK if block 700 went missing. 1:59:24 I don't know exactly. Is it the I don't know exactly which side of that. 1:59:29 Theoretically, I'm I'm not going to be the guy that lets it go missing. 1:59:32 I will be the last guy with block seven hundred thousand two. 1:59:36 And someone would pay because they want to know that this is the data that was here by this point in time. 1:59:43 Yeah. I mean, if if they care that much. 1:59:46 I mean, maybe there's maybe there's a trillion dollars in that block. 1:59:48 So they'll pay me one hundred million bucks for it. 1:59:51 Like, cool. Can you maybe explain that a little bit more? 1:59:53 Like, why would I want to pay a hundred million dollars for it? 1:59:57 First of all, if I start up the node software, I could theoretically get it for free. 2:00:01 I would be paying the node costs. 2:00:05 So maybe so maybe maybe it's not being served. 2:00:08 And I think one of these things that people assume is that the ability to download the network from just open public seed nodes for free is a premise that should just exist. 2:00:18 And I think that is always going to suffer from the tragedy of the commons. 2:00:21 You're treating it like it's everyone's river. Right. 2:00:24 And it's it's not like you want data that's on my computer. 2:00:27 And if you really, really want the data that's only on my computer, that has some kind of a cost, either computational or it's or it's a network cost or something. 2:00:35 But I mean, if you want it, if it's crucial, then we negotiate the value for that. 2:00:41 I mean, like maybe it's maybe it's 50 bucks or, you know, or maybe it's some serious chunk of money in order to get that, because you need to validate that your ten thousand bitcoins or whatever are in that block and nobody else has the ability to validate that for you. 2:00:55 So I think that's a I think it's a huge opportunity at scale for a big node operator to be able to help banks or, you know, whoever other archivists like family offices. 2:01:08 Like, hey, I think my dad had a thousand bitcoins 50 years ago. 2:01:11 Can you can you help me drill into it? 2:01:13 Like, yeah, if I have all the data, like, give me the pieces. 2:01:16 We'll rearchitect it. 2:01:18 And if we can prove that it's yours. 2:01:20 Cool. It's yours. 2:01:21 Pay us 50 grand in order to validate the thing and whatever. 2:01:26 So like instead of in BTC right now, the trying to get people to run full nodes, trying to keep the node costs down, the node downloads all the data for free and syncs it so that the person running the node has a copy of the blockchain and can verify that they when they receive money, they will get double spends. 2:01:49 The idea in Bitcoin SV is, in fact, to run a node, you have to pay people for the historical data. 2:01:57 In theory, I think it's one possible solution. 2:02:02 I think there are technical like their software. 2:02:04 There's cryptographic cryptographic solutions to the sync problem. 2:02:08 And then I think there's also just plainly commercial. 2:02:11 Like if we were to run a client, we actually run a proprietary client that we mine on and it does some special things. 2:02:17 We have a tool. 2:02:18 We call it Jungle Bus. 2:02:19 It's essentially a data bus that you can subscribe to and listen to various types of network events. 2:02:25 And so if you cannot afford to run a full node, you can subscribe to our jungle bus, which is similar to a node, but it's just an API service. 2:02:33 And then you can have that subscription feed your light index of whatever it is you want to hear some specific token or you want JPEGs or you just want JPEGs that are part of this NFT collection, whatever. 2:02:43 I don't care. 2:02:45 Pay me some subscription. 2:02:46 Maybe it's 30 bucks a month or maybe it's, you know, do it by the data amount or whatever. 2:02:52 And you get fed that data and you're subscribing to us the same way you'd subscribe to like an ISP. 2:02:58 I pay 100 bucks a month to Comcast to serve me the Internet. 2:03:01 That's my relationship with them. 2:03:02 I kind of see it as the same thing. 2:03:05 Indeed, yes. 2:03:06 So the business model is that this service, this is like an Fiora for Ethereum where, you know, you are paying the node sync cost and then you get money coming in based on API calls. 2:03:18 Yep. 2:03:19 But this still gets back to why it is important how much that costs. 2:03:24 Because that's your costs running the service. 2:03:27 Sure. 2:03:28 But, yeah, I completely agree with that. 2:03:30 And interestingly, that service doesn't have to mine, right? 2:03:33 It could be a different thing. 2:03:34 And all the miners could subscribe also. 2:03:36 So the whole nodes equals miners. 2:03:39 But, yeah, this is the idea of not having your own node. 2:03:45 And so that's all very well, but it still relies on that service is only going to be around if the node costs stay low. 2:03:56 And, of course, the people who will start such a business will tend to be the most optimistic about the business model. 2:04:01 Right. 2:04:02 Sure. 2:04:03 Indeed. 2:04:04 Right. 2:04:05 Yeah. 2:04:06 But I still think to talk about cost without at least projected ROI, I think, is not a fair calculation. 2:04:14 It doesn't have to be an obvious ROI. 2:04:16 You have to project the revenue also. 2:04:17 Right. 2:04:18 Okay. 2:04:19 But let's think about this, though. 2:04:20 How much revenue can actually be charged? 2:04:21 Because if someone syncs the blockchain, they can compete with you. 2:04:25 They have all the data. 2:04:27 In theory. 2:04:28 I mean, they have to serve it well. 2:04:30 Like, it's the same thing. 2:04:31 Like, why use one ISP over another? 2:04:33 It's like, I don't know, throughput or availability or guarantees. 2:04:37 Like, whatever. 2:04:39 It's a funny way of flipping the script. 2:04:41 I've got to give it to you. 2:04:42 That is a funny way of saying, you know, Bitcoin Core, everyone's like, well, how can we get more people to run a node? 2:04:46 And then it's like, you can't even run a node unless you pay us. 2:04:51 I mean, I think it should be. 2:04:55 I think so. 2:04:56 I often make. 2:04:57 Analogies, and I tell small blocker like the deepest small blockers that they don't understand that they're communists, but what they're essentially doing is pre planning the level at which people are allowed to compete to say, if we make that if we make that ceiling too high, then people won't be able to compete. And that would fundamentally be bad. But that's sounds like an experiment in the Communist Manifesto to me. It should be taking a fixed parameter is a static thing, which has it's a static thing, but it's a static thing. 2:05:24 Sort of is like a similar to like a price control in a sort of way. 2:05:28 But there's a flip version where the BSV is communist also, because it's all the free rider. 2:05:33 Everyone's free riding. It says we will. We're all in this together. 2:05:36 And no matter who puts what in the block, we will. It's kind of like running a library for it. 2:05:42 I'm not putting something in if they don't pay for it, just like the taxpayer. 2:05:45 Well, I don't know exactly how to modify the analogy, but it's kind of you run a huge library where anyone can send in a book. 2:05:53 And then the library is going to be responsible for storing the book, making copies of it and even mailing it out to people. 2:06:01 It's forever. They got to pay. They got to pay to put it in. 2:06:04 They got to pay to check it out. That's a business model. 2:06:07 It's instead of a library. 2:06:11 So, yeah, it's like where you anyone where it's a private library to support the town and say whatever it is. 2:06:20 You're saying that it will charge for the books, which is funny, essentially. 2:06:24 But I mean, but it's it's the same thing. 2:06:26 The library works because it lives off of big donations and it lives off of taxpayer dollars, plus whatever the cost of your library card is annually. 2:06:33 Like there is a business model there, even if it's they treat it like it's not. 2:06:37 It's it's our community library, but like nobody's working for free. 2:06:40 There's an actual business model there, too. 2:06:43 And that's true. I mean, of course, the library, there is kind of like a vague, as you said, 2:06:46 there's kind of a vague conception that during normal hours, anyone can show up there and read the books on the shelves and quietly and whatever. 2:06:54 Interestingly, library has to have all these rules about like people have to be quiet and stuff. 2:06:58 It's kind of like a block size limit in a way to the comments. 2:07:02 So that's a neat idea. If you can say that it doesn't matter how, you know, the node will be a certain cost, but they'll bring in all this revenue. 2:07:10 But of course, again, the transaction fees are not necessarily the revenue that's brought in. 2:07:15 So I don't know. And what that is sort of like, will you compete with AWS and Dropbox and stuff? 2:07:23 I mean, maybe it depends. 2:07:25 And I don't think it needs to be in something where there's a lot of there potentially a lot of free writing or maybe not, maybe not, because maybe everyone's just saying, I'm going to have this control over what's in the block. 2:07:35 And yeah, well, I think it depends, too. 2:07:37 It's about value. Like, you know, do I want to put every duplicate copy of all the pictures of my phone? 2:07:43 Like, do I want to pay to upload those? 2:07:44 Like, no, it'd be too expensive and it's irrelevant. 2:07:46 But like, maybe I'll put my wedding pictures and like the nicely edited photos of my children being born or, you know, that kind of thing. 2:07:53 Because it's like it's on Bitcoin SV, but you wouldn't put it on AWS or something or Dropbox. 2:07:58 I think it depends. 2:07:59 I mean, like, I think that's a personal value calculation that you make for yourself. 2:08:06 You know, you want it permanent. 2:08:08 If I want to know that it's permanent, maybe I'm willing to pay to put it on, you know, the greatest proof of work network that ever existed. 2:08:14 And I think that's just a personal choice that is, you know, up to people to make themselves. 2:08:19 Yes, of course. 2:08:20 Yes. 2:08:21 The point of putting it on like Dropbox or AWS would be because it has a very established brand and they're very unlikely to lose your stuff. 2:08:31 And then if you were to put it on BSV as it's sort of currently coded now, like what I was saying before about like all the block content is mandatory for everyone and the software will complain if it can't find the data. 2:08:43 So because it's got to check it off for double spends, you'd put it there knowing that it can hang out on everyone's full node forever. 2:08:53 But, of course, you could change it. 2:08:55 You know, like we were talking before about maybe it is only the proof of work timestamp server and the contents of the block can be discarded completely. 2:09:07 I think one issue with that, though, is that the miners are being paid the transaction fees from stuff that happens in earlier blocks. 2:09:16 So if you lost that, then you might eventually run into a mysterious situation where it's not clear if the miners were supposed to get if they say they got this number of fees and maybe that the fees didn't add up. 2:09:29 Because if you need the contents of the block to add up, oh, 10 cents here, five cents here, you add it all up. 2:09:37 I came. This is 7000, which is X number of BSV. 2:09:42 Right. So I don't know. 2:09:43 But this is a projecting a lot of that. 2:09:44 I think the right thing to do is still to measure the node cost, because, of course, any revenue projections will be even flakier than the cost projections. 2:09:55 Right. Because the cost projections. 2:09:58 It's always a projection. 2:09:59 And then it's kind of like, well, I don't usually it's like a pleasant surprise, right? 2:10:06 The new hard drive comes out and it's even cheaper than you thought or something. 2:10:09 It's kind of like the costs. 2:10:10 Costs have been going down as. 2:10:13 Over the last 500 years, everything has gone way down. 2:10:18 Yeah. So you do those. 2:10:21 But then the revenue, I think, is much harder, like to project, because who knows? 2:10:25 And then if this idea works, will there be other copies of the idea? 2:10:31 And so I think the projecting the revenue or even like, will there be crazy cryptography like 15 years from now where you can compress every photo you've ever taken? 2:10:41 And it's like fits on your phone. 2:10:44 And it also fits some some other network that is very good at storing things. 2:10:49 So that all that is really, really hard. 2:10:52 But I agree with you that you would offset, you would tend to offset the benefit of the node against the cost. 2:10:59 And that should be taken into consideration. 2:11:02 My guess is that the most psychological damage would be if the costs were low, though, because that is the big that was the big, I think, hang up. 2:11:12 And this is the big this is my opinion as just what is the big, large blocker, like, like the big downside that a lot of people kind of just couldn't wrap their heads around. 2:11:27 And I think the fact that it was vague makes it worse, you know, sure, because maybe the cost could be this or could be anything. 2:11:33 And people just kind of think, I don't really know. 2:11:34 And I can't. I think that that makes it more fearful in a way, more and more menacing, because the devil, you know, is better than the devil. 2:11:43 You don't, you know, right. 2:11:44 And you just kind of think it does make it the boogeyman where it's kind of like, well, then, yeah, I don't know who knows. 2:11:49 And that's the problem with toxicity is that, you know, it got to the point where, you know, Roger Ver couldn't talk to anyone that ever worked at Blockstream, like to the point where, you know, I have a funny story about that, which is that, well, I don't know how many details. 2:12:03 But someone from as of scaling one in September 2015, people were like, the people who worked at Blockstream were like, oh, Roger is great. 2:12:12 We love Roger. So that was like, you can see in real time it changed from from black into white. 2:12:19 It was like or vice versa or whatever. 2:12:21 But the so that everyone was friends before. 2:12:28 And then because the scaling war, we had all this pointless. 2:12:30 All this has been a big distraction. 2:12:32 I see lightning even as just. 2:12:35 It's almost a victim of the scaling war in a way where the creators, Taz, Draja and Joseph Poon, they had just had this idea, which is a very good idea. 2:12:43 Lightning is a very good idea on a technical merit point of view of like, here's what you can accomplish with these pieces. 2:12:50 And in fact, there were these channels and they used to have to have the channel with someone. 2:12:56 But actually, with Lightning Network, you can route through third parties that you. 2:13:01 So now it's like a six degrees of Kevin Bacon or whatever type of a thing. 2:13:07 And so all that was very cool. 2:13:09 But then, as you know perfectly well. 2:13:13 There was like, oh, we're going to scale with large block side. 2:13:16 And then there was like, how are you going to scale? 2:13:18 And then you were supposed to say it, say it just like it was written on the card, you know, Lightning Network. 2:13:22 And it's like that's just and then as a result, it just became craziness everywhere. 2:13:27 So, yeah, so that's too bad. 2:13:30 And, you know, it probably probably made it more difficult to accomplish anything in the Lightning Network anyway. 2:13:36 So I think it was a bit it was a big setback for everybody. 2:13:38 You know, like people people will say, oh, you know, Bitcoin won and blah, blah, blah. 2:13:42 And I'd look at it and say, you know what, I think we failed to legitimately disrupt anything. 2:13:47 And I think other than the price, there's nothing that you can point to to say, like, wow, we really achieved a great cultural victory. 2:13:54 I've been very disappointed. 2:13:56 But again, when you say that, you sound like I say, too. 2:13:59 And we both we sound so weird when you say it clearly. 2:14:03 There is no denying that Bitcoin has like. 2:14:08 Has like erupted into the world and made and then it's a zeitgeist and it has become this thing that and it's become so valuable and anyone who bought a little bit back when it was new, you have enough money, more than enough money to retire and have. 2:14:26 So it's like it's this. 2:14:29 It's like this, it's just this amazing and yet I have been disappointed because I was hoping for lots of people using it, you know, better privacy technology, better, just like a more rational way of handling the technical disagreements. 2:14:45 One thing that I put out a long time ago is I put out this measuring decentralization, decentralization. 2:14:51 I remember that one of your one of your pieces of the same thing. 2:14:54 Everything is, but people weren't very interested in that. 2:14:57 And now you see why is because the small blockers were also just saying, we're just going to cheer for our side and we don't care about numbers or anything. 2:15:05 So which is always a bad sign. 2:15:07 And so there are other things that, you know, you would have thought we would definitely have had by now. 2:15:13 And it's sad when there's a huge brain drain in BTC because the temptation to do an altcoin or the temptation to just do like a. 2:15:27 Well, a lot of people will do like if you're in academia, a lot of people do like EVM theorem stuff. 2:15:32 But even the temptation to just write like a little paper, it's very impressive, but nothing happens because all that stuff is very, very, very tempting. 2:15:41 And then in BTC, what are you going to do? 2:15:43 How can it be like? 2:15:44 Let's tell we can tell a little story like this about with Jeremy Rubin. 2:15:48 He came up with the CTV idea. 2:15:51 CTV is a great idea and it enormously improves many different things. 2:15:56 It lets you open many like right now, you can't open enough lightning anywhere near enough lightning channels to onboard a significant percentage of anyone, even if the lightning network, you can't join. 2:16:07 It takes 180 years or something if we wanted to get everybody in the Western world. 2:16:11 Yeah, it depends on exactly the assumptions. 2:16:13 But if you want to have all 8 billion people and you had normal assumptions about like one transaction to onboard each person, it would be like 100 years or something. 2:16:21 So, yeah, which is too long, just FYI to anyone who doesn't want, but the. 2:16:29 He has this idea, CTV, which among many things it does is it makes it slightly easier to open more channels. 2:16:36 But that's not the real reason to do it, and I don't think I don't think that lightning channel model is going to succeed. 2:16:42 I do think you can incrementally like improve it for a while, but I don't think that it's worth it anymore. 2:16:47 So, yeah, the point is he has the CTV idea. 2:16:51 It's a perfectly good idea. 2:16:53 I think the code was finished like in 2018 or something. 2:16:57 Yeah, it's pretty old now. 2:16:58 Yeah, very old. 2:17:00 It's kind of the opposite of what I did where I had the idea and then I answered questions about the idea for many years and then only wrote code like recently. 2:17:06 But he has code on older idea. 2:17:10 People have talked about it. 2:17:12 I think it was February 2022 or something like that. 2:17:15 April, one of those. 2:17:16 I don't know, but he puts out his activation client. 2:17:20 You know, this is after like talking with all these people and even he volunteered. 2:17:25 Talk about this hand washes that he volunteered to be like the taproot. 2:17:29 I don't remember what it was called. 2:17:30 There was like a name for this. 2:17:31 It was I remember this a little or something. 2:17:35 Yeah, it's going to go around and try to like get everyone to upgrade their wallets, get all the mining pools. 2:17:41 So he volunteered for the the the present day soft fork, you know, it's kind of like you, you cleaning up the graveyard and putting the flowers and mowing the lawn so that when you're dead, someone will take care of your grave or something. 2:17:57 He's working on the taproot one, doing the unpaid labor. 2:18:02 Then he gets all this work to get all these names for his. 2:18:06 And then and then everyone hated his thing. 2:18:11 And they said he's the worst person ever. 2:18:12 And they said he's attacking Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah. 2:18:15 The long list of things they say for every soft fork. 2:18:17 It's going to turn Bitcoin to an altcoin. 2:18:19 Never the worst. 2:18:20 The end of the world. He quits. 2:18:22 He even though what he did was he put an optional activation client and such a good sport. 2:18:28 He put out a client that would like anti activated. 2:18:32 So you could if you ran nothing, you would just kind of go along with what the network. 2:18:35 But if you with what 51 percent hashrate data, if they act, if they act, you would you would still be existing on your own. 2:18:42 But you could even put out something that would say. 2:18:46 If you activate this, I will reject any blocks from someone who's activated this. 2:18:51 So you kind of very even handedly. 2:18:53 Yeah. You know, like a judge would put it, you can do innocent or guilty. 2:18:57 You know, I'm just so and then everyone hated that. 2:19:00 And he had to quit Bitcoin development and like possibly all development for like a year or two years. 2:19:08 I don't know. And now all this time later, years later, now it's three years later. 2:19:15 Everyone's saying, oh, Covenants are the future. 2:19:18 But Covenants is his thing, his CTV thing. 2:19:21 And even the stuff that is derived from that is just because he intentionally neutered parts of CTV in response to feedback. 2:19:31 So he made it slightly more tame. 2:19:34 And then they come out with other stuff, the stuff that this is like TX hash or whatever, which is like a scooped up. 2:19:39 It's like the but the CTV could have been equal to CSI or any of these innumerable variation. 2:19:46 But the only reason I bring this up is because it's like there is no, there is no cultural consistency. 2:19:55 So it's like he proposed this idea. 2:19:57 It's very tame. Now everyone agrees that it's good. 2:20:00 When will it activate? I don't know. 2:20:02 Never. You know, whatever. 2:20:04 So it's wild. 2:20:06 So we need to wrap up. 2:20:07 Unfortunately, I got a family time coming up here in the next few minutes. 2:20:12 But Paul, it's been fun. 2:20:14 It's really been a pleasure. 2:20:15 I think it's been a valuable talk for for everyone involved. 2:20:18 So thanks for coming. 2:20:20 Thanks for having me. Thank you. 2:20:21 All right. Well, we'll talk soon. 2:20:23 We should stay in touch and maybe do an update again sometime soon. 2:20:26 All right. Great. All right. 2:20:28 Take care. Thanks again. 2:20:32 All right, everybody, so it was Paul Sztorc really turned out differently than I thought it would. 2:20:39 Not that Paul's always been a nice guy, I didn't expect it to be toxic or us yelling at each other. 2:20:44 But I think we actually agreed on a lot more things than I think either of us expected. 2:20:50 So a lot of fun. 2:20:52 I want to say thanks again to our sponsors, Rock Wallet and Otherworldly TCG. 2:20:58 Sorry, my brain's a little fried now. 2:21:00 So if Mr. Producer, we could run the comment of the day. 2:21:03 You got a lot to choose from. 2:21:05 We'll distribute an Otherworldly card. 2:21:07 Let's run the slide. 2:21:15 We got. Hey, he's been big block pilled. 2:21:26 I don't know about that. I think I think we both learned some things. 2:21:29 But so based frogs, please reach out on X to the real CoinGeek account and we will get you your free pack of cards courtesy of Otherworldly TCG. 2:21:38 So thanks again to Otherworldly. 2:21:40 Thanks again to Rock Wallet. 2:21:41 Of course, CoinGeek for keeping me here live on the air to present this stuff to you. 2:21:46 And of course, you, the audience, for tuning in for what I think are the best conversations in Bitcoin. 2:21:52 Without you, we wouldn't have anything to do. 2:21:53 So please like subscribe, hit the alert bell, let our digital overlords know that my content is worth at least a little something to you. 2:22:00 And please set your calendars so you know that we go live every single Tuesday at 2 p.m. 2:22:05 Eastern Standard Time. 2:22:06 If you would like to be a guest in the future, please also reach out to the CoinGeek account to schedule. 2:22:11 If you're an entrepreneur, you got some kind of cool thing launching. 2:22:14 You get dibs to bump your way into our schedule. 2:22:17 So again, thank you so much, everybody. 2:22:19 I'm Kurt Walker Jr. 2:22:20 Reminding you at the very least to be good to each other, but go out and do some good in the world. 2:22:26 And and thanks again. 2:22:27 So we'll see you next week. 2:22:29 Goodbye.