Hi everybody, welcome. This is the panel on transaction censorship. My name is Craig Deutsch. I am the editorial project lead at Bitcoin Magazine Pro, and I am joined by Nick Hansen, the CEO of Luxor Technologies. Also joining us is Udi Wertheimer, co-founder of Taproot Wizards. And Paul Sztorc, the founder and CEO of LayerTwo Labs. Thanks all for joining me. So this panel is about transaction censorship, but maybe it should be about wardrobe censorship. I do a little joking. So let's go ahead and just start about how blocks are constructed. Right now Stratum V1 is the main mining protocol for communication between miners and pools. Nick, as our resident mining expert, can you just talk about how blocks are constructed and some current limitations for individual miners who rely on the pools to build those blocks? So blocks are constructed by analyzing the mempool. So every node out in the world has a view of all the transactions that are pending. Basically the way it works is all the transactions that have the highest fee are filtered up to the top, and then we take that portion and create something called a block template. That block template will be the proposal that will submit to the network once the proof of work has been demonstrated. And then once that block has been solved, it's added to the chain. The rest of the nodes, you know, all of the nodes that I'm sure a lot of you are running, will actually get that block, validate that it's accurate, and then the mempool state will change. And then we just do that forever. So there was some criticism when Stratum V1 was implemented because it removed the get block template, which allowed miners to construct their own blocks. How does Stratum V2 solve this, or does it solve this? Can you talk a little bit more about how Stratum V2 changes the way that blocks are constructed? Okay, so Stratum V1, basically all of that stuff that we do to construct the block template, we send that out to the miners over a protocol called Stratum V1. They have no input into what goes into that block. Stratum V2 implements something called job negotiation, where basically up front the miners and the pool agree what the transactions will be within that block. And if there is a transaction that isn't in the block at that time, the miner can propose it through a protocol called job negotiation. Stratum V2 implements a lot of interesting things that I do think Stratum V2 is a meaningful and important improvement. But when people talk about Stratum V2, really the only thing that they're talking about is job negotiation, because that does introduce a way to reduce the censorability of the network and introduce transactions to the mempool that wouldn't have otherwise been there. Because for whatever reason, maybe the mining pool is censoring those transactions, either for regulatory reasons or otherwise, the miner can propose them and add them to the template. Thanks. So part of the idea for this panel came about in response to the ordinals and inscriptions craze and whether these transactions should be considered spam. From detractors there's been ideas for filtering transactions using node policy. Right now we already have some examples of filters. So one sat per vbyte as a minimum fee is a node policy. It's not a consensus rule. The dust limit is a node policy. And now there's been a recent node patch which is or disrespector. So similarly to the previous examples, it only prevents the relaying of those transactions. Udi, what are your thoughts on these types of filters? Would you consider this a type of censorship? I consider it role playing games that people like to play in their basements with their little Raspberry Pi nodes. I don't see how it relates to actual mining. I've never heard of a miner who's running or mining pool that's running or disrespector or a filtering patch like that. But of course if they want to, they're more than welcome to. But I think they'll find very quickly that it's not very profitable and fairly expensive for miners to try to censor these. So I don't expect that they'll want to. I've never heard of a miner who is interested in doing that. I have heard of a lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts who are not necessarily miners who want to run those on their own computers which is fine but doesn't seem to be really relevant for mining. And I guess the big question for miners is whether miners should be maximizing revenue at all costs. Like should that be their main goal? And if not, then what exactly should they be doing and why? Paul, can you speak to that? The answer is yes. The miners shouldn't revenue maximize, of course. Anything else has the feature that it would be contrary to what the miners want to do. So there's no reason why they would just, should miners just give away free money in the form of not taking the ordinal, the opportunity cost of not taking the ordinal transaction? So that's really what it all boils down to is will miners just give away their own money for free for no reason? And that is the whole transaction censorship question. I had a question about a stratum v2. I was going to ask Nick but now we have the two people with one microphone but we're gonna give it a try anyway I think it will be about, the question is stratum v2, the job negotiation. The whole point is the pool, the mean pool, the reason why everyone loves it is the mean pool censoring and the person, you know, some small miner can like propose, they can like trump the pool by getting the block template they want in anyway or something, they can work on their own thing. And the tiny miner, if the pool and the tiny miner disagree, the tiny client of the pool, they win. It seems to be how it must work or perhaps not. But if that's the case then the pool can of course just mine with 0.01% themselves and they can censor anyways and then they escape all the blame. So that is my question to you. Yeah, thanks for the question. I think there's actually a lot there. So actually in stratum v2 when you do job negotiation there will be multiple templates being delivered to each different miner. So, you know, the pool will deliver what it calls the default or de facto template which is delivered to every miner and then if you go through the job negotiation process, the miner that proposed that, that will not go to the rest of the, that will not go, most likely will not go to the rest of the miners. It will be that miner working on it. If they happen to hit the block then their transaction is included. The reason that I don't really think job negotiation is going to improve censorship at all and the reason being is that the censorship comes from a regulatory, most likely will come from a like a regulatory overstep, meaning you're in an environment, you know, you're in a country that wants you to sanction, let's just say OFAC transactions, you know, there's a whole list of addresses that are sanctioned by OFAC. If you send Bitcoin to them you're breaking US sanctions, which is a very bad thing to do. And so there's a proposal or there's been some thought around should we, you know, should mining pools censor those transactions if they see them in the US. Let's just say that they do. Most likely in the job negotiation protocol what's going to end up happening, even if the miner proposes one of these illicit transactions, we'll call them, most likely the pool will just reject it and say actually we're not going to accept that transaction anyway. And so what strategy two then introduces a very easy fall over so you can fail over to another pool, propose that transaction that way. But then in that way it becomes a little more overt that a mining pool is censoring. Right now it's not really possible to tell if a mining pool is censoring transactions because it's not overt. It could just be my node's not, that pool's node is not very well connected, that hasn't propagated yet. But most likely job negotiation, the portion of strategy two called job negotiation, is not really going to improve censorship at all because of the protocol effectively giving the pool the right to say no to those transactions. The pool always has the trump card, I would think. I mean that must be how it works. But then you have an intriguing situation where if anyone, if you have a full node and you have had a transaction in your own mempool that would have met the cutoff for inclusion as far as the fees. If you've had it for more than like 20 minutes say, you must know that it has reached every pool and that they have passed on it and in that way stratum v2 doesn't seem to be an improvement. See what people are, you know, everyone, what people love about stratum, like as you and I agree that stratum v2 brings a lot of useful things, but the people who talk about it on Twitter they just really think it's about the mean pool is censoring and we get to do something about that. But it doesn't really improve that situation I think. Maybe you agree. So I guess since we're on this thread, yesterday mempool.space announced an accelerator and right now when you go to broadcast a transaction you look at fee estimation, you might check mempool.space or another block explorer to see the current fee rate to get into the next block. So how does this type of accelerator, which already exists with other mining pools, how does this type of accelerator impact fee estimation as well as like potential transaction censorship or does it? This is a very important just topic overall because it's kind of a canary in the coal mine as far as if people aren't getting what they want out of all the existing tech stack of Bitcoin like the mempool for example, they will just build some other thing that gives them what they want and that is why the whole idea of transaction censorship is very simple which is as to the miners will revenue maximize because that's their bread and butter and anything that tries to stop them. That needs to have a very, this is often, I think this is modeled because it's like SegWit2x and other things where the value of Bitcoin is maybe threatened by the protocol becoming less useful but the difference when it comes to this transaction censorship question is that the miners have the final say on what makes it into, what was seen by the network by a certain amount of time. So that is the whole game of mining and they have the final say on that and so they can always say that they just didn't get a message and censor it if they wish and they can also include anything, they can include a Bitcoin transaction so this is where we get into maybe stamps instead of ordinals but because of something called Alan Turing's universality of computation you can just reinterpret any data as something else so it's like if you have a JPEG file and you just, you're like on Windows and you change it to like a .txt file and then you open it in notepad, people will always be able to just transform anything they want, any kind of data, image, whatever into Bitcoin transactions and then just broadcast them on Bitcoin. So everyone who is trying to say that there is something other than a Bitcoin transaction in a Bitcoin block and anyone who is trying to stop the miners from profit maximizing or revenue maximizing, they're just asking miners to give away money for free and that's basically the whole story as I see it. I feel very unsportsmanlike holding the one microphone so I'm going to give it back. We can switch chairs and then it'll be easy for you too. Totally. You know on that point of should miners you know censor ordinal transactions or JPEG transactions or whatever, we talked about this before, I don't even think about it in the context of should or shouldn't. I think they cannot censor them because if they do, it hurts their profitability and eventually just they would be competitive. So mining pools cannot censor it or they're gonna lose in the competition to the miners who don't. So it's not even, there isn't really a choice. Mining pools have to include those things. Yeah exactly so I was on a Twitter space talking about you know the big wizard and other ordinal stuff and the very angry Bitcoin guy got on stage and asked me well why aren't you running or disrespect or you should turn that on you're attacking Bitcoin why would you turn that on? I said well I'm the only CEO of a mining pool that's here talking to you about this stuff. All the other ones are stoked that this is happening because they're making a ton of money and a ton of revenue for their miners. You're asking me for to effectively reduce the revenue of the customers that I have which are the miners. My job is to steward their hash rate and produce the most value for that hash rate as I can and by turning on or disrespect or I would be effectively you know doing a disservice to my miners and you know effectively my customers and that's gonna put me out of business because none of the other pools are going to do that either. So there is really like you know like Udi said you're effectively asking the mining pool to reduce their potential revenue and it's just not going to happen because that is I mean that's the way the consensus is built is to maximize revenue and to maximize profit from the network. So I'm gonna ask you a follow-up question on that. When Luxor mined the first taproot wizard, the very large one that got all of the Bitcoin maximalists up in arms part of what some of them at least were upset about was the fact that the fee was set at zero sat speed byte so it was an out-of-band transact payment. So I guess one of my in going back to the like the mempool.space example with the accelerator are those payments like made out of band is this a way that mining pools could be taking additional revenue without potentially having to disclose that publicly on the time chain and for people to for their miners to be receiving the fees from that? I think it's very straightforward that this is an example another example of what I mentioned before of the existing system doesn't work so if you have if people are paying out of band then miners want that miners control they have a certain amount of block space that they want to sell someone wants to buy it we had this public mempool but if it's not going to facilitate that transaction then they will just do the out-of-band payment so yeah I think if the you know if the laser a maxis want to have efficient transparent reporting of how transactions flow and you know fees and so on the mempool will have to become more useful right now you know there's a lot of people who want to you know for whatever reason they want to inscribe four megabyte transactions there's a bunch of them they cannot do that with the mempool so all of that you know that information will not be available in the mempool before it's mined after it's mined you're not gonna know for sure if the fee that you see is the fee was actually paid if you think that those are things that are valuable then the mempool is gonna need to you know be improved to accommodate for this because people are gonna keep doing that because they want to we can't stop them up the protocol allows for it so the question is are we gonna let are gonna have the mempool serve those people as well or we're gonna say that that they shouldn't be part of that mempool for whatever technical reason which is which is also okay but that would mean that they would have to bypass it because they're still gonna do it yeah transaction accelerators have been around for a long time but they were mostly for like a transaction you put you accidentally put one sap per V by and you know you need to get it through so you can go through and pay the pool out of band this has been around for a long time by BTC has it on their front page a lot of mining pools have done this throughout history now the problem is if it becomes prolific if that becomes the way that fees are paid to mining pools that starts to look kind of like an attack on Bitcoin the other pools so I don't know if people don't know the most pools now are paper share meaning you pay the expected value of every share that's submitted to the pool regardless of whether you find blocks or not it you know maybe 94 to 96 percent of all hash rate in the world flows to PPS based pools that PPS calculation includes transaction fees so if there's a mining pool that's taking a bunch of out-of-band transactions they're effectively reducing the PPS rate for the rest of the network and the rest of the pools which then will drive all of the hat all of the hash rate to the one pool that's doing all the transaction acceleration and so like with what men pool is do it men pool space is doing they're going to effectively make it way more centralized or they're going to put apply a centralizing force to the hash rate that exists today because they're going to make all the other pools less profitable now Luxor hasn't subscribed to the transaction acceleration program that men pool space has I believe they announced it was foundry I'm not sure but that's just going to continue to accelerate the decentralization of hash rate if that is the case if that becomes a very prolific way of doing you know transaction propagation and transaction fee payments so let's talk about the centralization of mining because it becomes more easy for transactions to be censored if miners are centralized and yes but what does it mean that what is the definition of minor centralization it's a good question it's a good question we right now we have three pools that have a significant share of hash rate and I don't know what the percentage of that is offhand but it's a it's a lot but does that is that because that's just a certain grouping you know there's just like maybe they have it's like just just because someone runs a pool like he just gave you a perfect example of someone who controls a pool they run they own a pool but they have very limited control over that because they have a they will lose clients immediately to a rival pool if they if the pool doesn't you know so what we want is it to be as cheap and easy as possible for someone to start a new pool new competing pool that stops the pools from misbehaving the same reason why we want miners to revenue maximize in contrast to an older dispute such as SegWit2x we want the software developers to write software code that maximizes the value of Bitcoin it's a very it's a parallel situation but I think it's the lesson of the SegWit2x era was that miners should like be very tame and just do whatever they're told or something like that there's still this cult lingering cultural baggage from SegWit2x that has carries through to the present day but the miners must at revenue maximizing we wanted it to be as cheap and easy as possible for someone to start a new pool I think sometimes people use a definition of minor centralization that goes something along the lines of if one minor becomes more profitable for any reason and puts another minor out of business then that is mining centralization which I think that that definition cannot possibly be useful because that is like just happening all the time every two weeks every time the difficulty resets it fires the bottom half of the mining performers so so I guess I guess my question stems from like a concern around that being so an accelerator being so successful that so much of the hash rate goes to one particular minor or a couple particular miners because then it opens up the network for potentially more censorship I think we should bet everything on the censorship question but isn't it interesting that the idea that if you revenue maximize you're going to include as many transactions as possible and if you can only include so many you'll put the ones that pay the higher fee first to me that seems to be the definition of not censoring so the the fact that someone would block a transaction for some kind of a political reason or that we give these other people influence over like someone in a bureaucrat in a different country influence over the Bitcoin protocol that would be like one kind of censorship but then also the or disrespectors you know we're doing a similar thing if you just say that or disrespectors are all from a different country and they're all lawmakers or something like that so the question of it's really all just about the revenue maximization of the miners which is why I think it's well I mean don't you think that like what do you think of like is it mining centralization when very many people join a few pools if all the other pools are irrational and if in particular if they censor what if all the other pools censor and there's only three that don't and everyone joins those three that's is that mining centralization I mean it can become mining centralization if them if it's an overwhelming majority but I think like it goes back to like is that are they acting in their own best interests and does that also act in the best interest of Bitcoin I mean one of the fascinating things about Bitcoin is it is economically you're economically incentivized to act in the best interest of the network at large so I want to I do want to go back to the the mempool and how that is specifically not able right now to function with like four megabyte blocks and things like that and can you just explain why that's the case because for people who might not understand right so so the way transaction propagation works by default in addition to you know validity rules that just check that a transaction is valid there's also what you know is called in the technical terms is a standardness rules and that's basically policy rules and they basically affect how transactions are allowed to be propagated through mempools of the Bitcoin network node Bitcoin no network into eventually a mining pool and that peer-to-peer network does not allow for propagation of transactions that are above 400 kilobytes so again it's not because the transaction is invalid it is valid but the peer-to-peer network will not propagate it unless it gets into a block so that just means that if you do want to get a four megabyte transaction into the network like we did and like you know a bunch of others have done after us then you have to do it you basically have to contact the mining pool directly to do that and that kind of reduces the efficiency of the mempool yes it's just magic ignore it it's not it just it kind of it kind of makes the mempool a little less sufficient because it means that it doesn't serve everyone needs some you know some users of the Bitcoin network cannot use it and it doesn't fully reflect what the actual you know state of transactions that are waiting into inclusion into a block so it's it's inaccurate and it is also creating you know eventually I think for mining pools the the equilibrium they would probably want to strive for is that everyone gets an equal opportunity to mine those juicy forming about transactions and not just you know the the the pools that get those sent directly to them right so those kind of things clearly can hurt you know decentralization of mining but it's really up to mining pools to you know they could they could all connect in and decide to receive four megabytes transactions they could start their own alternative mempool there's a lot of things they could do I think that as Ornels become more popular as inscriptions become more popular and I fully believe that they will you know I it's funny I've heard a bunch of people saying on panels that oh this is a fad I've been hearing for three months that it's a fad I've been hearing for three months that it's a fad and the fad seems to keep growing I really think they're here to stay and I think that mining pools are gonna have to start thinking about this more seriously because again this isn't just I feel like right now people in the mining space that I've talked to seem to think of it as like just a juicy booster to their revenue which it is but also it kind of requires involvement because mining pools that will not optimize for this will end up being uncompetitive compared to the ones that do yeah the so the mempool policies there's actually an alternative implementation called Libitcoin by Eric Bosco they remove that entirely because they think that any any transaction that is that is valid and meets the consensus rules should be allowed to be propagated the reason that we don't propagate those now by default is because their DOS vectors DDoS vectors basically if you're spamming four megabyte transactions to everybody you know it takes a lot to propagate and validate those same with zero fee you know it's a very easy way for you to spam the network with zero fee transactions that's why those don't get propagated it is it those would be considered you know DOS vectors and that's why they remove those is it time for me to invoke MEV do we want to talk about MEV okay so MEV on Bitcoin that's you know MEV so from ETH they did they basically there's this huge business called flashbots that they actually integrated into ETH to help combat minor extractable value basically the idea is like in DeFi stuff you can add or remove liquidity let a trade occur absorb the ARB opportunity and then add liquidity back there's a bunch of different attacks and I don't know attack is the right term a bunch of different techniques that you can do generally it's up to the mining pools to do this because they're the ones that actually get to order the transactions now for BRC 20 and all these inscriptions coming mining pools are going to be incentivized to place those transactions in a particular order that could be considered a type of censorship I'm not sure if it's censorship in the classic sense of like binary but you are effectively modifying the consensus without outside of the standard rules of the fee you know the fee rate so that's a very interesting potential vector for for mining pools to become vastly more dynamic than they are today where generally a mining pool is plus or minus a few bips within all the other mining pools are deficiency and things like that but if MEV becomes a real thing that's a very meaningful like hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue have been generated by MEV and ETH and if that comes to Bitcoin the mining pool game is going to change very significantly so you know I think it was around when I think might have been before SegWit was introduced and adopt widely adopted there were consistently high fees and it seemed like it was coming from a mining pool who was just putting extra fees to drive up the fee market would you consider that like a form of MEV? I would I would say no I wouldn't say that's MEV. MEV is generally more transaction ordering I think with MEV it's kind of like you're doing something other than including the transaction so there's like there's some other thing going on and you the sum of all that equals more money for the miners I think it kind of cuts into a little bit about how easy it is to run a mining pool whereas how difficult is it to like check the transactions to make sure they're valid and then order them or something like that and then whereas with Ethereum they are doing many more steps and this I think makes I think the reason why it makes people uncomfortable sometimes is that it does cut into what I was saying about how it's you would want it to be very easy to run a mining pool and even to audit a mining pool to make sure that it's doing what we want it to do whereas with MEV it does seem to be it seems that there's like a victim with MEV you know there's like traders are trading and some they would have gotten a better deal but instead the miners get a better deal so it's a suddenly a very adversarial relationship between a miner and the end user but I do think that you know miners will revenue maximize which is the bottom line as always. It creates a very I think it makes mining into a very different type of business because either it might not be the miners themselves it might not even be the mining pools themselves that have to do this because maybe they outsource it but at some point someone has to be very intimately familiar with the way that users are using their network what their motivations are what are they trying to achieve and the miner kind of tries to extract value from that which has not been really happening in Bitcoin in the last few years maybe for the first time again sort of at some very specific points in the last three months and again yeah it's specifically about it usually comes down to ordering transactions right because it's not really about letting a transaction in or not letting it in you will eventually probably let it in happily but when there's like this added semantic to the point in time that the transaction appears relative to others then because miners are the ones that decide that then they might find that there's a you know that there's a way to extract value from that and just you know like as an idea as an example right if there's been this little race that ordinals people have been doing to get into the first you know 10,000 inscriptions for example right now if you because they have this number and some people had this added you know they value having a low number of an inscription so if you're a mining pool and you see 20,000 you know inscriptions coming in and you need to pick the first 10,000 then of course you know that might be very valuable for the for the people are creating those transactions it is nothing to it's very different from what usual Bitcoin transactions are where people do not necessarily care about urgency and or you take a little bribe on the side to get in the first 10,000 yeah listen I pay you a little extra yeah I'm gonna be there yeah so that the issue I mean I don't know if it's an issue but this this happens maybe happens when people ascribe meaning and semantics to the order of transactions and not just the existence of them yeah certainly I mean if you saw this burst of 10,000 transactions let's say we're minting a PRC 20 which what are you referencing here maybe the mining pool just swaps out 5,000 of those for their own because they know like wow there's a bunch of interest in value here that's it I would say that's MEV and potentially a censorship vector MEV is very centralizing that's a big problem you we talked about you know we're talking about mining centralization we can get into this you know we can get into the semantics or the minutia of what centralization is in my opinion it's one entity producing more blocks than the other that's kind of the way I would define it and in MEV is very centralizing the reason being is that it's highly it's highly technical and very difficult to do that's why flashbots was built flashbots was built to basically make it easy for everybody to do MEV but before that there was a huge centralizing force towards pools that were doing MEV because they were massively more profitable like to the tune of 20% when we negotiate fees with miners you're talking about like single bits you know the difference between 1.01 and 1.05 percent fee if you're talking about adding 20% more volume revenue that's you know 2,000 bips that is an incredible amount of revenue that could be added to pools which will certainly perturb the end and in cause centralization towards a pool that's able to do MEV effectively and I'll just add that when in this discussion about MEV there's kind of three groups that I see that are kind of playing that game there's end users there's application developers and then there's mining pools for end-users MEVs obviously end-users would prefer that MEV doesn't exist because MEV basically means that miners extract value that could otherwise have gone to the end-user so end-users would prefer MEV not to exist but there's not anything they can do immediately other than trying to pick applications that do not have excessive MEV so and that brings us to application developers they can try to design their applications and their you know protocols and you know BRC 20 for example is very MEV heavy but I wouldn't be surprised if BRC 20 will be you know over time adapted or replaced by protocol that is not as MEV heavy so application developers can help solve it in that way mining pools however will probably have to be on top of the MEV game you know from now on forever because even though I would expect application developers and users to push to a MEV light world there are always going to be these you know these temporary period of times like we have had in the last month where you see fees going up very high because basically of these MEV phenomenon phenomena so mining pools will have to be ready for it it is gonna happen even if it's not gonna stay you know gonna happen all the time it will happen sometimes and this is what we've seen in aetherium too it's not like you know flash bots is making buckets of money necessarily right now but if you look at a year ago when new protocols popped up on aetherium like every week and there's been like this entire defy conundrum and NFT and and and whatever then during those periods of heat MEV revenue goes up a lot so I think pools will have to kind of adapt to it this is all very healthy thing though I think that you think like because well for those of you don't know something weird happened at once at scaling three where a miner left scaling three early to signal for a bit kind of limited with nine percent of their hash rate and this was led to a kind of blockade of bit nine activation of SegWit and then it started this whole like miners versus developers like access or something but really the miners are just when the miners revenue maximize they are just trying to make it so that you know the customer is actually whoever's paying out there this money you're trying to maximize like the end users use of the the protocol they want the miners want the price of Bitcoin to be as high as possible miners want the transaction fees to be as high as possible so this has always been a kind of very healthy and very rational feedback loop that we sort of like we kind of like took a break from for like five years and now it's like returned so I don't know like that's just kind of like you know what do you think is like the next what's the next for what's where's organo's going to go we're going to go like how high are the feet see because the thing is the fees are very low that's part of the reason why ordinals could break in is it didn't really cost that much to actually fill up the block which in a way implies that the people were not people were not actually taking making use of the blocks right you know I would say the reason that inscription got popular and we're seen as so appealing to such a you know broad audience was because block space was underpriced for for a while artificially it's very cheap and then you know we see the fee rates fees per block like total US dollar fees per block that will go up sometimes like during these bubble periods but on the whole it then returns to a very very low rate only with the ordinals has it been anything above that right it may it may return back to its lower rate again or I may not but it's kind of interesting that the one time the fees have stayed slightly high has been because we've done a kind of kind of like non orthodontic non laser I type of yep do you think many pools will clear again it's a great question I would say yes I think I think the default answer needs to be yes but we're very far away from that there's like two days worth of transactions over 20 sats so and they keep coming by the day so the reason so early on inscriptions were driving fee volume a bit I mean blocks were all full but people were like oh wait why is it still only five sats per V bite that's only a little bit high the reason is because art inscriptions those type of inscriptions are what we would consider to be low time preference they don't really care when it gets in just as long as it does what drove the big volume last week like I don't know if you saw but like course I printed 64 Bitcoin in a day that's insane they usually do like 30 something the reason that there was so much fee volume during that time is because there was high time preference transactions coming into the mempool in the form of BRC 20s basically I need to mint faster than everybody else so I'm gonna set a thousand sats per V bite and it was really important to get those transactions in the top and basically get them included very quickly and that was that is what causes fees to go up the last time we saw a fee spike like that was during 2017 when everybody was trading shit coins around different exchanges and trying to get you know Bitcoin from Cryptopia to Bittrex and whatever so that he could buy Pepe whatever that was really and that was again another type of high time preference activity and that's what you need to see we need consistent high time preference activity on Bitcoin to continue driving fees and continue driving transaction fees up for for mining pools yeah but of course that's kind of a paradox because in the long run people are patient right so it's kind of like you need people to be panicked on a continuous basis I think and I think that's very good but I when I was talking about organo's I kind of just mean this more abstract like I kind of include BRC as ordinals is like ordinals is like the name of the technical 20s built on top of one and also yes so but they're like there are ostensibly not a Bitcoin transaction so like stamps would also be it's part of the ordinals movement the ordinals time I think we if the if the men pool does clear I think that's would spell the doom of the there was always a long you know this idea that over time transaction fees would replace the block subsidy so if the men pool will always eventually clear and that does seem to imply that the fee rates will never rise above a very small amount there always be a time when it's only $1 per transaction for like you know 2,500 transactions or whatever you can fit into a block so but that's using dollars as a unit of account yeah but I think we so it is should be like the the total amount of money paid by users you can use in whatever you like it's like it's the purchasing power of that unit that makes the difference so it's what did the users sacrifice an opportunity cost like how many how many hamburgers do they give up to broadcast a Bitcoin transaction you know but that's the however many hamburgers they give up is how many hamburgers the miners get to eat so it's the same number so that value in terms of its abstract purchasing power that value well you know though users want that to be low and they'll wait they get annoyed when the fees are high but the miners obviously want that value to be high but it is the same value and the blocks when the block subsidy goes away that is the same number but if if we're but if we believe in hyper Bitcoin ization which is a default assumption then Bitcoin will theoretically be worth a lot lot more so if the block subsidy goes away but the fees are still at 22 cents per V by that might actually still be a lot in terms of revenue the fee revenue is in purchasing power so it's independent of the Bitcoin exchange rate it's 100% independent the Bitcoin exchange rate could actually be increasing at an accelerating rate and that would make no difference when the block subsidy is zero in the interim the block subsidy gets halved every 48 four years famously but that would the Bitcoin price cannot actually double at a rate that would make up for that without it being the case that I mean this is like a spot I don't know if this is possible or not but one day like you know 99% of world GDP would just be like the value of Bitcoin I'm not sure you know maybe but I think yeah so that's an interesting question but my guess is that we want we want there to be we want miners to be allies of people who actually want to pay fees because they are the actual users and we want to be as respectful as possible of the actual end-user not necessarily someone on Twitter we want people who pay they really are they are the customer customer is always right with that from the point of view of the of the end-user who's creating their transaction the reason they would agree to pay you know whatever $20 per transaction is not related to how much it is in in SATs or how much what the Bitcoin price is it's just a question of do they get $20 of value out of creating that transaction and the the answer is we don't know and it's very hard to predict what if someone will be able to get $20 of value out of making a transaction tomorrow and it's definitely gonna be difficult to answer that question in you know 10 years into the future right and that's why people now are paying a lot in fees for a BRC20 token because they are they believe they are getting more value exactly these are currently worth so we're running out of time so I just want to do a quick run through of like for final thoughts do you feel like transaction censorship is a reasonable or like valid concern for Bitcoin no not at all all right the miners can and will maximize their revenue because of Alan Turing's computational universality among other reasons so I also say no but we should build something that checks to make sure that every there's no transactions that would have been in a maximized block revenue maximize block that are not that are being passed over so that we cannot be warned of that but it's very easy to be warned of that I think yeah I mean not only should miners optimize their revenue miners cannot not optimize their revenue and that's what makes Bitcoin work I'm not losing any sleep over this I know that it's gonna be fine of I've seen it work for 10 years and it's gonna continue to work thank you Miami for the last three years in this amazing city the whole world shut down but Miami welcomed us with open arms we want to show Bitcoin to the whole world we are taking the conference on the road to set the stage for Bitcoin in a new city Nashville Bitcoin 2024 is coming to Nashville in Tennessee a city that is known as a music and freedom city Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville from July 25th to 27th