This is a special archive recording of Paul Sztorc appearing on What to Expect When Expecting Forks, hosted and recorded by the MARA Foundation on July 30th, 2026. This was not an eCash X Space, but eCash, $ECX, was one of the main topics. Follow the MARA Foundation on X at MARAFoundation underscore. Now, here's the conversation. Hi, guys. Diego, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Hi. Yay. Okay. Okay, good. I'm glad that we were able to figure out how to turn off the music. Yay. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so we've got, we're just getting everyone on stage, guys. Bear with us for a moment. I see Matt's on stage, Paul's on stage, Vlad's on stage. I think Rob, Portland, and Peter, do we see, are they here or are they not here? They are here, but we need to get them on stage, right? If you're still a listener, if you can accept my invite, that'd be great. Very cool. Portland, are you on stage or no? Rob, Portland? Let's try to get Rob and Portland up here. Cool. Rob is ready. Yay. All right. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I can't tell who's up because I don't think this thing refreshes super consistently. Hi, guys. Thank you so much for being here. I am really excited about this space. I feel like this has been kind of a long time coming, this space. And, yeah, we've got a very big month, the month of August, coming up with two special forks, one soft and one hard. Let's talk about it. So, yeah, I think we'll probably start talking with, we'll probably start chatting about BIP-110. We've got some folks up here who are very expert in that subject matter on both sides. We're going to try and keep this as neutral and balanced as possible. Thank you in advance to Matt Hill, who will be repping the BIP-110 sympathizing side of things. So very grateful to you for bringing the balance to the panel. And then, yeah, we're going to also be talking about eCash, which is a hard fork initiated by Paul Sztorc, who's on stage. And that will be, I think, set to be coming up just a couple of short weeks after the potential BIP-110 soft fork. So, yeah, got a lot to chat about today. Really quickly, I'll just introduce myself for folks who are new. My name is Isabel Fox in Duke. I lead the MARA Foundation. MARA Foundation is sort of leading Bitcoin strategic initiatives for MARA, the Bitcoin miner, including Bitcoin R& D, Bitcoin education. Lots of fun stuff that we're working on here at the MARA Foundation. So feel free to give us a follow if you're interested in kind of consuming educational content like this, especially on the technical side and mining side of things. And, yeah, I'm just, like, thrilled with everyone here. Paul Sztorc, I've already kind of semi-introduced, author of Drivechains, BIP300, BIP301, and also the mastermind behind the hard fork that will be coming up in a few weeks. eCash, which we'll get into. Leo, I am very excited to have you here as well, repping the spammers, as they may say, which I say is a term of endearment at this point. I think we should reclaim that term, Leo. And, yeah, I'm excited to kind of get your point of view on this. Rob and Portland, so happy to have you here. Hopefully be the voices of reason on the technical side of things. Repping Anchor Watch, one of the coolest companies in all of Bitcoin, in my opinion. And, yeah, I'm really also thrilled to have Chris and Vlad here who have been really covering these, both of these forks, I think, pretty well. You guys make amazing Bitcoin content, and I'm very glad to have you hopefully help me kind of wrangle this crew a little bit. And, yeah, see, I see Stu down there. That was, I was going to say, maybe we'll have to bring up Stu at some point as well. He also makes amazing content on these topics. So, yeah, I think I have introduced just about everyone. And, yeah, I'm just really excited to dive in. So, without further ado, I would love to just set the container. Again, for anyone, I think most of the folks listening may already kind of be slightly familiar with the BIP-110 TLDR. What is this thing? Why is this thing? But, yeah, I think it would be probably useful just to get a little bit of an introduction. I'm hoping maybe Matt will be the person who can kind of get us started with just giving like just straight up a little overview. What is BIP-110 and why? And then I, you know, anyone else on stage can feel free to jump in and maybe offer, you know, a counter argument. But, yeah, Matt, would you be would you be willing to do that? Would you be willing to give a little introduction to kind of BIP 110 and the intention behind it and kind of why this is being put forward? I can try. I'm definitely not the best person in the world to kind of describe the gritty details and rationale and motivation behind BIP-110. I'm definitely in the loop enough to try to speak on behalf of that camp. I personally would like to see the fork succeed, but I definitely am not the most outwardly spoken proponent of that BIP. I tend to focus on Bitcoin governance. I like to talk about how Bitcoin works and its political nature a lot. I'm also very outwardly spoken in favor of spam mitigation through policy and network rate limiting. But BIP-110 itself, I have been less focused on and less of an expert on. But I will do my best. Fair enough. BIP-110, insofar as, again, I understand all the details, broadly speaking, is an effort to reassert Bitcoin and the network's willingness to fight spam. I believe that is the overarching motivation is to reassert hostility towards spam and the network's willingness to continue fighting against it. I believe that proponents of BIP-110, again, myself included, believe that if BIP-110 fails, the will to fight spam will go with it. That it will essentially be a permanent surrender to the idea that spam cannot be fought on Bitcoin and therefore no attempt to fight it should be made. And so I think a lot of people supporting this soft fork are not willing to make that concession at this time. And they view BIP-110 as a necessary event in order to reassert that will. BIP-110 itself does not stop spam. I don't think anybody makes that claim. But it does reassert the community's will to fight spam. So I think that's the best I can give. Matt, would you mind giving, and I know this is, I mean, maybe you disagree that this is a subjective term, but would you mind giving your definition of spam? Like, what is spam? Yeah, fun. So, you know, I think spam can be defined as you know it when you see it. It's something that you don't want. So, for example, when it comes to email, everyone can agree what spam is. And it's any emails that you receive that are of no interest to you that you do not want and sort of are a nuisance. They are annoying to you. They are distracting to you. And in a worst case scenario, they're actually causing harm to your system, right? Like, for example, the denial of service attack of just information could be classified as spam. That's on the extreme end of, you know, you would no longer call that spam. You would call that an attack. But spam is sort of the lesser manifestation of a denial of service attack. It's just stuff you don't want being thrown at you, even though you don't want it. So it's subjective in the sense of, you know, what I don't want being thrown at me is not what somebody else might want. One person's spam is another person's gold. That's fine. But I think in aggregate, most people would agree on what spam is. That doesn't mean somebody else can say it's not spam. They're welcome to do that. But most people would agree. And therefore, that is sort of how it gets the badge of spam. If a super majority of people agree that it is. Leo, I'm wondering if you would mind kind of offering your counter just because it's probably like the most opposite, like I would imagine, of Matt's. Like, you're probably like on the as, you know, somebody who's was very deep in the Ordinal's ecosystem. I would say you're probably have like the most far reaching outer end of this debate. And so I would love for you to maybe chime in on comment on whatever you think the counter might be here. And then, yeah, and then we'll open it up to the rest of the group. But I would I would love to get Leo's take first just to kind of set the polls. I mean, look, I don't really disagree with anything Matt just said. Like, if somebody wants to define something as spam, that's their opinion. They can do that. Obviously, to fork the Bitcoin network and make it the canonical Bitcoin network, you need to convince a lot of people to agree with you, which I think it's really it's really hard to do that. I think you're going to find out that this 110 is definitely not going to succeed. And, you know, I think that's just the obvious outcome here. But I think it's an interesting conversation to have. I'm happy to get into the details with Matt if he wants to. I actually think it's interesting that Matt's on this stage. I hadn't heard of Matt personally. I knew Start9, didn't didn't know the founders read a post the other day that Matt had worked on a protocol called Worker a few years back in 2019, where he developed an OP_RETURN based inscription protocol for basically essentially building like a Twitter clone on top of Bitcoin, using Bitcoin to store the tweets and the social graph and that sort of thing where you would like make a post and then it would make 189, you know, transactions. Each 80 byte OP_RETURN transaction, essentially storing tweets and whatever information you want to put on Bitcoin. I didn't know that. Just respect to Matt. I think that's super cool. I think it's kind of unfortunate to hear that maybe Matt's, you know, not still interested in doing experiments like that on Bitcoin anymore. But I just thought that was kind of neat. I hadn't really heard of anybody doing that before. And I had actually thought of that like years ago when Ordinal started. Like, wow, that would be pretty cool. To my knowledge, nobody's actually built that other than Matt that I just found out about. So I just wanted to kind of maybe pose Matt a question here. Like, why did you stop working on that? Like, what were your learnings? What was it that caused this sort of change of heart where maybe you're against that sort of activity on Bitcoin now? Well, I appreciate the compliment. And the reason I posted that was, you know, it wasn't to make a point, wasn't to brag. It was just to provide some context in hopes, I guess, that people would understand that I'm not coming at this blindly. Right. Like, I've been in the space for a while and I built data protocols on top of Bitcoin. And now we actually, you know, did most of the borking, so to speak. A borker is a dog that barks a lot. That's why we called it borker as opposed to Twitter, right? Just a bird that chirps. So and it aligned with Dogecoin as well, which is where we did most of our testing. It's where people were actually engaging. And the reason that we did it on Dogecoin, for obvious reasons, is that one, it was extremely cheap fees. Like every transaction on Doge back in 2019 was one Doge, which at that time was, I think, you know, a fifth of a penny. So it was really, really cheap to do, even for, you know, long form posts. Block times were also one minute. And, you know, we didn't rely on mempool visibility for borks to show up in your feed. We actually relied on it being mined first. And so the one minute blocks were really, really useful there as well. Dogecoin also, you know, comparatively has a reasonable amount of protection. The hash rate is fairly high since it's merged mined with Litecoin. So for all of those reasons, we were like, yeah, this sort of makes sense to, like, have the main, you know, network and interactions taking place on Dogecoin. But it was chain agnostic. Any UTXO based blockchain that supported OP_RETURN could accommodate it, which means in the web UI that we built, we never actually got to this because we moved on, you know, and are very focused on Start9 first. But you would be able to choose your chain. So when you went to put together a post or a bork, as we call them, you would say, I want to post this on Bitcoin, Litecoin or Dogecoin. You basically have your kind of gold, silver and bronze selection. And the idea was, well, if you're willing to pay Bitcoin fees, then this this message is really important. And so it carries more weight. So in people's feeds, right, we were we were indexing. We actually built a bespoke indexer for Dogecoin that we called Super Doge. That was basically an Electrum server for Dogecoin. But there was nothing like it out there and we couldn't use Electrum off the shelf. So we had to build our own indexer. But the idea is that the Borker server that you ran, which was an open source piece of software, would connect to indexers for each chain. And you would run those nodes yourself on your own server and basically have this self-sovereign feed coming from multiple blockchains where you could see all of the posts that people had made on the various chains. And you could filter for I only want to see posts that are on Bitcoin because those are the most valuable, the most important. Or I want to see everything or you could rank them differently, etc. And an algorithm that's also self-hosted could determine what you see and when you see it. You could follow people. You could block people. You could flag posts as inappropriate and run an indexer that would filter those out locally for like child protection and stuff. I think we really thought this through. We built Twitter, a multi-chain Twitter that used Operaturn for all of this. And because of the 83 byte limit, we're very familiar with how this limit affected us because we had to design around it. We had to crack a message up into 180 transactions like I posted about is Francisco de Ancona's money is the root of all good speech. I put that entire speech on Bitcoin, but it took 183 transactions. But the Borker protocol did it automatically. I just pasted the speech in, hit enter and 183 transactions spanning, I don't know, like five or six blocks, each linking to the prior one. It's just a linked list is on Bitcoin. And I posted the link to that transaction. The question is, why are you on the 110 side? Well, so I don't know. I learned a lot over the last seven years. I feel like I've, you know, a lot has happened in my life and in my business. And sure. But, you know, the idea that someone like Peter Todd can't just come up with some other linked list, which, of course, would take him 15 minutes. Yeah. So. I have come to recognize, so we worked around the 83 byte limit, but it was work. It was far more costly to do it that way than it would have otherwise been. But even that could have been filtered out. Right. Basically, for any method of embedding data, there can emerge a method of of stopping. And it's an endless cat and mouse game. Every way of stopping it, the way of getting around it. And, of course, at that point, you would a reasonable person would look at the cost benefit on both sides of like, how long does it take to coordinate the 110 soft fork? Well, you're not even going to get, by the way, because it's like probably nothing will happen on August 9th or whatever. But but, you know, it's taking months and months of planning versus then it just takes whoever wants to get around it. Just like, you know, well, that's a very small amount of effort. So I was very involved in the policy debates of 2025. OK, and and this was the essence of that debate is, OK, well, you're going to you're going to filter some type of transaction. And you need to get everyone on the network. Right. Like 90 percent of the nodes on the network to agree with your filter to adopt this filter for to have any effect whatsoever. I shouldn't say that it'll have some effect around maybe 80 percent. It's still kind of a quite imperfect figure, but above 90 and it starts to become quite effective. So, one, you're going to be chasing this thing forever. Cat and mouse. And two, even if you do get the 90 percent adoption, people can still build preferential relay networks and sideload to miners. And this was the essence of the debate. And where I came down on that debate was, yeah, it's cat and mouse forever. Preferential relay networks will emerge and can also be mitigated through spoofed nodes, things like garbage man. So there are basically, you know, offsetting tool sets, but there's no way to win. You just sort of this is a very small point, but I think it's worth clarifying. It's not a matter of really percent. It's not a matter of 80 percent or 90 percent. It's like one adversary can can get around the wall. That's what MARA did with Slipstream, right? Essentially, the miners. It's not a matter of percent. It's just the attacker can do as they like. You know, the strong do as they like in the weak, suffer what they must. Yeah. So there's there's two ways to get around. I got to go point out just regarding the preferential relay networks. While lever relay isn't that great at dealing with spoofing. We do have technology coming down that essentially deals with that perfectly to the point where spoofing is just not a thing anymore. Matt, your Borker protocol actually would have been more efficient and less harmful to the network if you weren't forced to use OP RETURN at 83 bytes. If you had your OP RETURN already lifted to consensus, you would have just been able to do one transaction with less overhead. Because of the filter, we had to do it differently. We had to put in more effort and more cost. Now, we did it anyway. Well, I shouldn't say that. We did this on Dogecoin because Bitcoin was going to be too expensive. Now, that could have been the case even if OP RETURN was open, just because fees in general are higher on Bitcoin. But it was not nothing. It was something. It was an obstacle we had to work around. But if there was sufficient demand for your service on Bitcoin, it could have been just ported straight to Bitcoin regardless. The demand creates the spam at the end of the day. It's what keeps it around. Sure. Yeah. I mean, someone can come up with something and if nobody cares or wants it, it just fizzles away, which is what we've seen a lot of the time. And ultimately, it was the case with Borker. There were some people that really, really liked this and thought it was just the coolest thing ever. We had quite a few people interacting. I'm sure at some point in the future, somebody might scan the Dogecoin blockchain and find our markers and recreate the social commentary that happened. Probably not because nobody cares. But that was where we moved on. It just wasn't interesting. We're doing it at Start9. I think it's really, really interesting and we love it and we think it's important. What we were doing with Borker was like a science experiment. We were just kicking rocks. It was fine. Okay, so I got a follow-up question to this. You weren't able to quite concisely define spam. You said you know it when you see it. So, because of the way that BIP-110, which is a consensus change that potentially may cause a fork, defines these eight rules of consensus to essentially eliminate spam, what do you think about the fact in the future other types of spam being defined? Because we don't have a clear definition of these bytes are spam or these aren't. Some of the views I could take, I guess, would be that potentially banks are large buyers of block space. What about in the future? Are those people that compete for that block space, then are they spam? What if an actor uses inefficient transactions at scale? What about whales just buying up block space for the sake of buying up block space through monetary transactions? It sounds like at the end of the day, whatever is spam to somebody is really an attempt to reduce competition of the free market and the mempool. All right, well, let me do something here because I don't want to monopolize this. I know this is a conversation about forks in particular, and I feel like we're sliding into the policy debate again. So let me do two things in one. Quickly sum up why I think policy is the correct place to be combating spam, however you define it, and not consensus, right? And then we can actually talk about consensus. Maybe I assume that's what Isabel wants to do. On the policy side, I don't think anyone on that side of the debate believes that spam can be perpetually and effectively fought using soft forks. They're slow, they're contentious, they're risky. It's not the right tool in the toolbox for something that can move so fast, like different ways of embedding data of which there are infinite and arbitrary. So you need an equally agile tool, right? So if somebody comes up with some new protocol of embedding data, at first, you don't care. You don't care that it exists. You don't need to react at all, right? Because it doesn't matter. It's not a nuisance. There's nobody using it. And as it starts to grow, maybe you start to take notice. And you're like, hey, there's this thing and it's kind of becoming a nuisance. And there's this niche market that is like really hitting it. Or maybe it's literally an attack, right? Like maybe somebody well funded is just trying to spam the network in order to flood it and raise fees, whatever. At some point, you okay, we should we should react to this. And it's not a fork, right? It's either an update to the node software, like the newest version of core or not has this filter built in. Or there is a method of sideloading filters, which is what we proposed, right? Like our proposal to the Bitcoin mailing list in 2025 was something that we called user defines dynamic filters, which would have removed policy from Bitcoin altogether would have removed the policy code policy dot CPP from Bitcoin forever and replaced it basically with a function call where it's just like, you know, a transaction comes in. And your node says, is this thing standard, and it sends it off to a sidecar, it sends it off to like a different engine. And you can load whatever scripts you want into that engine, they could be, you know, JavaScript scripts, or Lua scripts, it doesn't really matter just the scripting engine. And if all the scripts pass with, you know, zero, then it comes back and it's like, yep, this is standard accepted into the mempool relay. And if any of them fail, it drops it. And so we thought this was really, really clever, because it would have allowed Bitcoin Core as an organization to wipe their hands of policy forever, and just outsource it to this community driven community adopted second layer to network of spam filters. And just sort of like antivirus filters exist for your computer, right? Sure, Windows and Mac might ship some. Yeah, but he's also missing the point, like, imagine those filters just filtered everything. And then Peter Todd builds Libre one Libre relay. And the miners connect to it, because Sorry, guys, can we dog? Yeah, you're right. You're right. Oh, man, I really backslid there. Yeah. So policy behind it didn't work. Okay. Like, we couldn't agree. A huge chunk of the community decided, all right, we really want to do filtering and policy. And so we're going to soft fork to eliminate the current, current, you know, methods of embedding data that are being abused. Knowing that there are others that will emerge. However, the success of the soft fork will one eliminate those methods, potentially causing some harm to the capital that has been invested in them as a punishment, so to speak. And secondly, we'll reassert the community's will to fight spam in policy, that is the hope of BIP-110 is that if BIP-110 succeeds, what it does is it doesn't portend future soft forks to fight spam, it brings policy back into the debate. That's the point. theoretically activates. But yeah, Chris, go ahead. is like a guardrail against a transaction relay, where the underlying like risk is a resource exhaustion. So like the protection of your node is the objective of policy. It's not deciding whether a economically like valid use case of block space is legitimate. And like historically, in addition to that, like the direction has always been to remove or to relax those very policy guardrails. So that's the software is like, I don't know, from Parliament, like multi sick, like went from non standard to standard. went from zero to 80. And not went down to 40. Again, but then now we removed it. So various script constructions became reliable. And today, like any, like, resource consumption problem appears. And then the goal is not to fix it by like a policy filter, but by just writing better software, which we've seen with core version 3031 32. Like there have been tremendous amounts of efforts put into making even low compute hardware like Raspi still re index and yeah, be able to participate and sink to the chain tip, even though we are like 17 years in. So like these, these additional restrictions that the policy has brought, we're never to to to mitigate or make spam more expensive. It's always just resource economics. Like we have a dust filter we have. What is it low as like these are like just for like transactional ability or like other things, but they're never to decide, you know, what kind of valid use case do I personally deem as worthy of block space? Like, I think Portland said, like, the definition of spam is any transaction other than mine. I want to be in the block. I don't care about your transaction. And yeah, really, a policy will never go back to being a spam mitigation because it never was. So like, it's always about disproportionate CPU and memory cost. And like, we, we surprisingly, like, if all the spam went into up return, it would be the most resource efficient way to to like deal with this data for like a Raspberry Pi. So it is about dust protection. It's not about spam. And if you can't even agree on spam, like, how would be ever, you know, gets Peter thoughts to stop spamming our notes. So it doesn't make any sense to have this discussion in policy. Adding on to this before we move on to like consensus, like consensus is way too slow to act on that. So like the only way in moving forward, if you don't want people to waste their Bitcoin on like data embedding, make it expensive for them. Because, you know, tragedy of the commons, if nobody uses it, people will put graffiti, whatever on the Taj Mahal. But if there's enough people there, and if you bring all your friends, we have a lot of visitors and nobody can put graffiti on the Taj Mahal. So instead of playing a cat and mouse game, which you can never win. Yeah, the only winning move is not to play, just get more people into this building. And we don't have to soft fork every six months. One thing I want to quickly point out is most of the policy rules in Bitcoin Core are really about making sure people don't prematurely use upgrade hooks. That is things like weird transaction version numbers, you know, op nops, op successes, etc. And one way you can think about that is the goal there is so that if you have a Bitcoin Core node and you're mining with it, after a soft fork, you should still be producing valid blocks, provided that other people are producing valid blocks. And this commercial demand, if you will, for violating those upgrade hooks is low. I was on the topics of like forks and consensus versus policy. Policy does not present any risk of forking. Consensus does. And consensus essentially is when like BIP-110 or whatever, it's essentially participants on networks saying I need these rules to be enforced, versus it's okay if mempool essentially accepts, but the blocks will contain that information will be considered valid. That's actually a really great segue. I want to hear a little bit more. I want to understand the technical risks or have like explainers for the audience of the technical risks of this particular soft fork. But before we do that, Leo, yeah, jump in. Yeah, not to drag us into the weeds on the Vorker stuff too much more. But basically, I still don't understand the motivation for why you've sort of had this change of heart, Matt. And I would love if you wanted to take one more stab at maybe explaining and I'm almost just giving you an opportunity here because I think there's this default assumption. And I'm not the one saying this, but I've heard people say it, that this is sort of a sales strategy for your company. Right. And I've seen a lot of KOLs on X basically spread a pervasive lie to the Bitcoin Knots and BIP-110 community over the past couple of years, that if you have a certain amount of nodes running relay filter policy stuff that are blocking these, you know, spam transactions, quote unquote, from being relayed around the Bitcoin network. There's some magical number, you know, 80 percent, 90 percent, 95 percent, where all of a sudden you guys have this glorious victory and there's no longer spam. And I think a couple individuals on here already pointed out that through preferential pairing, through dark pools, there's many ways that even, you know, one person, a dozen running a dozen nodes of preferential pairing, running a single inscription website that you can connect your wallet to and pay them to inscribe something for you gets around, you know, literally a billion Start9 nodes running this sort of policy stuff. Right. So I just don't understand why. I don't understand why so many people have come to me telling me that I'm screwed because they're about to take over the network with their nodes and like the amount of misinformation and miseducation that these people have is it's very shocking to me how uninformed they are. And I just wanted to hear from you, you know, that default assumption is that you are part of this kind of lie because it's very profitable for your company. And I wanted to hear from yourself, you know, if you think that characterization by a lot of people is correct or if you wanted to defend yourself. Oh, God, that's so loaded. I want to be very cautious right now and respectful of the topic of this. I am happy to answer that. I'm not dodging at all. I just it's nuanced. And, and there's some history, right? And there's going to be objections. And it's just going to it's going to sort of drag us back into the why I think policy filters adopted at scale result in effective rate limiting of of certain types of transactions in an emergent way, right? No single party gets to like decide what is spam and what should be rate limited. But if through an emergent process of everyone making individual decisions on the edges, if there emerges consensus, right, a super majority of people, I shouldn't have used the word consensus, there emerges a super majority of nodes like 90% plus why that actually is a highly effective tool to rate limit the spam on Bitcoin. It's just not the topic of this. So I just I just explained to you that it literally has zero impact. You guys haven't stopped a single inscription from going on chain. There's 126 million of these files on Bitcoin. So are you basically just saying you agree that there's a magical number of these nodes? And that's that is your belief. I assume you don't actually believe that. But it sounds like maybe you're saying that you do. I would love to just hear like maybe specifically on that point. What do you think actually happens when 90% of the Bitcoin network is Start9 knots nodes? Like what do you what do you think happens? Do you think we can't inscribe anymore? Do you think anything changes? Because I'm telling you, like, it's simply a fact that it doesn't. It would have the effect that you would not be able to use the primary peer to peer network to get those transactions to miners. I've done the math on this. Go ahead. Yeah, I've done the math on this. The number the percent of nodes before you start having issues on your first like set of peers, 125 or sorry, I use 10 in my example is 94% of nodes need to be running a relay policy. That does not mean you can literally just disconnect your node and restart it to get a new set of peers. The ultimate filter for policy exists at the level of mining. Miners control what go into the blocks. If the miners ignore the policy, it doesn't matter how many peers run a filter. The miners, if a transaction can get to them, it will and it will get mined. And also as a note, as a note, there were basically super nodes peering with 10, 000 peers ran really loose policy. Sorry. Can you explain? No, no, no. I want to just like, like, have full clarity on this 94% number. So this math means that 94% of nodes need to be running filters in order exactly for what in order for individuals to not be able to use public mempool in order to get inscription transactions through consistently. Let's pretend we're filtering. Let's pretend we're filtering inscriptions today. Okay. At 0% filter on the broader network. My method is will the first attempt to send raw transaction. That means I have this transaction. I want to send it to the network at 0% filters. There's 100% success rate. It's going to get to a minor because of the fact that it will propagate at 50%. That number is still 100% almost. And then only once you get up to 94%, do you actually start hitting 75% was my measurement of a success rate. So you lose 25% of the time you're going to fail. That's a 94%. And so with that stated, yeah, that was my metric. And I did this at pleb fine. So I think also, so this is like an important point is like is one. One thing I just want to be clear what you know what the scenario we're talking about is when someone isn't even trying to get their transaction correct. That's when you know they're not doing anything interesting. Like when they're actually trying the number is essentially 99. 999% Yeah, that is absolutely correct. And a note here is I used a default 10 connections outbound on this note. I didn't even do the hey my ports open I get inbound as well. So I thought of it from the worst case perspective from trying to get a transaction out to the network and the number is still insanely high in terms of the number of nodes that need to be running this to even make it have any effect on somebody trying to broadcast a transaction at all. Unless you have a number higher than that nobody even noticed that it existed. Really, and in practice, I mean the way the way people use things like inscriptions usually they just do it through third party websites anyway, the third party website can go and do whatever they need to go make this stuff work. mempool. space right there appeared very, very well, you can literally just use their broadcast transaction, and you will very likely bypass filters, even at that rate, or that that percentage. Rob, do you want to jump in? I would love to, since we're like 45 minutes in, I don't want to try and moderate the panel, but we have a soft fork happening in nine days, and the consensus stuff is way more interesting at this point to talk about where we're at. Okay, so Rob, do you want to maybe take a crack at just actually like sort of explaining like, okay, what's going to happen on August 9th? What can people expect? And for me personally, I'm just like, okay, like, what are the risks to users? Like, what do users on the mining side and the node runner side, and just general users of Bitcoin kind of need to understand or what should they be concerned about in terms of risks associated with what is going to go down on August 9th? Yeah, and we do have two forks that we're talking about, because Paul is here too, right? And so there's a clear difference up front between a hard fork and a soft fork. Paul has a set block height, and at that time, there'll be a new set of rules being applied, whereas the BIP 110 one is a soft fork, which is, you could best say, an attempt to try and bring everyone along with them, whereas Paul is explicitly changing rules in a way that would just cause an immediate break off, and you have to run Paul's software specifically to make that happen, right? So just to lay out there, for August 9th, this is depending on where you are in the world, because it's either the evening of August 8th or the morning of August 9th, there is going to be the end of a difficulty adjustment period, and with that is going to a set block height in which new rules, there's a divergence between consensus of what nodes will accept. The default nodes don't do anything, the BIP-110 user-activated soft fork nodes are now looking for blocks to be produced with a certain version bit. This is what's called mandatory signaling. With mandatory signaling, there are no consensus rules being enforced yet, it's just a requirement that the miners, when they produce blocks, must have a particular version bit in their block header flipped on, saying that they're aware of this thing happening, and it's something that they're signaling for interest in being able to build upon. The initial thought is that, one, at that moment in time, if you want to be very risk-averse, as a user of the Bitcoin network, you would hold off on transacting on Bitcoin for a time until you see an emerging consensus of blocks being built on one chain or the other. Once we hit that block height, the more blocks that get built on a given chain, the higher confidence you could have at that point. As of today, we have one and a half, two percent of hash rate that are signaling already today for BIP-110, the remaining 98% are not. The first time after this mandatory signaling period starts, there is a block which does not signal, there will be a split in consensus, a chain split between the BIP-110 nodes and the non-BIP-110 nodes. From a risk-averse perspective, if you're transacting on Bitcoin, maybe you wait a couple hours. If you are a miner, you should be aware that this is happening to monitor both sides of the chain, and understand what's happening, and understand that if you mine on the wrong chain as a miner, your work may get thrown out, and that goes for both sides of the chain. If you build on top of the mandatory signaling, and the rest of the network does not care, you will have put the energy to make that block for no economic upside, because that chain will be different, and vice versa as well. There's one small caveat that's often made within the game theory of these, is that the BIP-110 nodes are a subset of the consensus rules that the other nodes follow, and what that means is, hypothetically, you could have a situation where the BIP-110 chain can wipe out the work of the other miners. I would, as a closing comment, say, at the current levels of hash rate, that does not seem likely. BIP 148, which is the SegWit soft fork, the last user-activated soft fork that, you know, had something like this happening, we had 70% of miners flipping the BIP showing signaling. Today, it is 1% to 2%. While it's often pointed to as a comparison, it's not really the same in terms of network adoption. Just for clarity, Rob, does this mean, I mean, if you're a miner, and you're just completely financially motivated, and you really don't care, you just don't want to lose money, right? Is the recommendation to just be mining on whatever chain just has the most hash rate, essentially, at any given point in time, and that's really all you can do, and if something goes wrong, that's, you know, you did the best you could? I think there's a very, very big caveat there, which is that many people believe that the BIP-110 chain is going to be propped up by rented hash power. And in that circumstance, even if you're a miner who just wants to, you know, go with the flow, if you will, you've got to think a little more long term than like the next X blocks, because it may be the case that this rented hash power is active for like a day or two, then just all goes offline when they run out of money. And under that circumstance, you may still think through, you know, a week or two ahead and say, well, I'm still going to mine on core rules rather than, like, preemptively switch, if you will. Now, that's complicated by the fact that this is soft fork. So, you know, it may be the case that, like, say there's 25% hash power on BIP-110 chain, and some people would argue, no, no, you should go switch. Whereas under this circumstance, you know, you probably should, even, you know, especially taking into account rented hash power. But it's, you know, it's a complex thing. And I think the good thing is more likely than not, they're going to be under 10%. And this will be a pretty clear decision. But let's say it is 10%. The recommendation for people just doing transactions remains very true. Because even just by luck, you know, the moment BIP-110 mandatory activation enables, it's quite possible for you to just get that sort of one in 100 chance that's, or sorry, like one in 100 chance that you get, say, two, you know, two block reorg, which is much more likely than it usually is. So basically, yeah, wait for more confirmations around that exact moment. Yeah. And one last thing, there actually may be a hidden third fork, which may appear this month, because Luke and Mechanic have already signaled in the event that the Bitcoin network refuses to follow them, they will hard fork to do a proof of work change. So they are very coy on talking about the details of that. But there could be even a third fork, which means that this month, we'll have one soft fork and two hard forks. What was what is the point of the third fork? Like, what is it? It's because so once you have the chain split, and you have one side, basically, the BIP-110 side does not get adopted. The belief is at that point that they need to change the proof of work algorithm to fire the miners because they have shown to be malicious because they disagree with Luke. And because they disagree with Luke, they are no longer allowed to be part of the Bitcoin network. And to change the proof of work algorithm is a hard fork. And Luke has precedent for this. He wrote code changes to change the proof of work algo a decade ago. You can go on GitHub and you can see the commit. So it's something he may very well have in his pocket waiting to kind of drop. They've said that to discuss the hard fork is to increase the likelihood that the hard fork would happen, which is why the BIP-110 proponents do not engage around the mechanisms of them doing a hard fork. Well, the reason why they would need a hard fork is because if they don't obtain the hash rate, that their chain will continue to produce blocks at a very, very slow pace until they have to hard fork because you can't just soft fork in an easier difficulty or a proof of work change. You have to literally go in and then say, hey, update your nodes because we're going to change this so that we can get the chain reset so we can produce blocks at a decent rate. That's why the chain's insecure then, right? If you have 1% of the hash rate, the rest of the network could 51% attack you trivially at a moment's notice. So you need to change the proof of work algorithm to keep your security. And can I can I also bring up the fact of like, okay, like why would transacting potentially be dangerous in this very small chance of a like, basically your chain gets wiped out and that there are two reasons for that. One is replay. So because there is no replay protection, any money that you move on one chain, if you're 110 or the standard chain, it's going to move on the other side as long as that UTXO still exists. And the other side of this is if you take a payment on one side and that chain gets wiped out, that transaction probably is on the other side, but it is not a guarantee. So that's kind of why you wait for it to settle and you determine the winner of this, which I believe will be very quick and concise before you basically accept transactions or even if you you spend on one chain, just like understand it's moving on both sides potentially. And just for clarity, if the reason that they execute a hard fork is because they didn't have enough miner support to get a soft fork over the line, doesn't that, you know, mean that this hard fork risk is going to be pretty negligible by definition in terms of just like how it could potentially harm Bitcoin users? Like it sounds like at that point, they're just sort of by definition would be creating like some minority shit coin, essentially, excuse my language. Yes. Yeah. This would be the exact same this would be the exact same scenario as Paul Sztorc's hard fork, where the only concern there is maybe you want to do replay protection. And now one thing we should have a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing one thing that actually comes to mind, I don't know if anyone's pointed out is another approach that they may go use to go and potentially get their get their chain back moving fast enough in a reasonable amount of time might actually be some kind of time warp attack on their own chain. I haven't actually thought through the details. You can't do it. Portland and I thought through this already. You can't do it. Oh, you did? Yeah. Well, they're already going to be achieving the maximal difficulty adjustment because they have such a low hash rate that the time warp attack doesn't really make much sense anyways. They still have to get through the first and second and third difficulty periods. Yeah. Perfect. There's your answer. Yeah. The problem is that basically to do the time warp attack to get your minus 75 if you wanted to go this route, you would still need to produce 2016 blocks. If you're producing a block a day, that's three years before your chain is able to get to your first minus 75 percent, which if you take three years to get that far anyways and you get to your first difficulty adjustment, even if you were honest about your timestamps, you would still get your minus 75 percent. That's not a concern. And yeah, and it will be the key value will be the one hundred block maturity period also, because in this case, it's normally just one day, but it's so slow. In this case, it would be so long that people will despair of ever collecting. They have to pay one hundred percent of the cost. I just want to clear. So I worry just a quick thing with 100 blocks. So I do have to point out that they could go and apply a financial solution to this by having people go mine to their accounts and pay them out. So, you know, that's not that's not a guarantee that that it's true, but it's kind of just shifting the risk. And that does help letting you do like specialization of labor. But basically, it's just pushing the risk on to whoever's willing to assume it. So I think it's still an interesting thing that I think a lot of people would overlook that the miners don't get paid at all until there's one hundred people behind you in line basically to get paid. And so but I just want to boil it down. Most people listening, I think we can boil it down to like there's basically only two scenarios possible. And then the first one is more likely is that this the one ten soft fork just fails completely and it doesn't it fails to get, for example, even one hundred blocks and basically nothing happens. And it's very, very embarrassing for one ten. And it is just like a bloodbath crushing defeat. I suppose we have to acknowledge that the second possibility, I mean, basically hinges on whether or not a large percent of hashrate joins one ten or does not. And they try to draw comparisons to SegWit, which is a whole different thing we could discuss that I think this is nothing like SegWit. But really, it does hinge on, you know, because even SegWit had something like 20 something percent. It was 70 percent called the last two weeks before activation. It was 71 percent of blocks had the bit flipped. 71. But for SegWit, but I was talking about even during the contentious SegWit2x period, it was like, oh, yeah, and even the people between 30 and 40 during that period, I suppose we can now since if people want to talk about this, we can go down the list right now about the long list of differences between SegWit and one ten there, of which there are two that are very, very big, very significant. The first is even the miners who didn't like SegWit openly admitted that it had nothing to do with SegWit at all. They liked SegWit and they thought it was a good idea. They were just kind of like holding it hostage, so to speak. So you can't hold something hostage unless you think it's valuable. You know what I mean? You don't hold like a bag of trash hostage. They liked everyone. It was totally and one million percent agreed throughout the whole. And this kind of bleeds into my second reason, which is that SegWit was to support lightning. There had been like a multi-year process involving the scaling Bitcoin conferences. SegWit had been discussed. Everyone like knew about it at the time. It was constantly discussed on social media. Even normal people kind of knew about it. And and so this this idea that it's related that, you know, what they have done, Luke and and Chris and these other people, they have extrapolated the situation where not me, the other Chris, Chris G. They have extrapolated the situation where it's like one tiny minority of nodes can just do a a transaction. And another thing is that we could just keep going down this road, but there's a long list of reasons. I'll stop after this third one. But really, SegWit was not about shrinking the quantity of transactions and neither is what I'm going for with BIP300 and with eCash hard fork is also part of expanding the quantity of transactions. And also that was kind of what SegWit was trying to do as well. Even if you ignored the block size increase and just forgot about it for a second so that it's not distracting. The idea of SegWit was that you take, you know, there would be new types of L1 transaction possible. So the whole thing was expanding the network, expanding the use cases, whereas 1. 10 is shrinking things. It does a whole lot else besides, but that's some things I want to mention. But I wanted to really get that point in there, but we can shrink it to two scenarios. One is just basically fails long before it would have even activated in the mandatory signaling period, which is August 8th, 9th. And then the second possibility is that for whatever reason, the miners feel bullied or they just decide to just for fun experiment. You know, whatever, they just decide to do 1. 10. We don't have to rethink about what exactly happened, but I suppose it's possible that they get some kind of large hash rate majority and then everyone else falls in line and jumps on to that. And in that case, I don't think it would really be because of the spam. I think it would just be because they didn't want to. It would say a bunch of other weird things we'd have to investigate and figure out. But those are really the only two possibilities as far as I see it. And of course, the first is very, very likely because as people have pointed out, that even now when the signaling is cheap, the signal doesn't cost anything at all. It's still only at 1%. And even the 1% could be fake because you could just signal, but then not when push comes to shove, not be willing to do it. So those are some things I wanted to clarify. I mean, the phrase signaling is cheap is a little tricky here, though, because one of their strategies could be to have agreements to rent a ton of hash power and start signaling in a large quantity, or maybe combine this with some sort of attack on the current Bitcoin Core group of miners to try to get their hash rate to go down for whatever reason. Yeah, it's all cheap talk because anyone could rent the hash rate for any reason, or they could say, our plan is to lull them into a false sense of security by not signaling until the last minute in order to build momentum. And so that's why the whole field of game theory has this cheap talk idea about like, there's nothing like harming you if you signal, you know, if you signal for 1. 10 and then back out, or vice versa. So it's kind of like, what does it really mean? This is all like a bizarre reinterpretation of BIP9. And so it's interesting that Peter and I know how this all came to be. I don't think it's worth boring everyone else with it. But originally, the signaling was like as a courtesy, and originally is 95%. But it's not really that important for anyone listening. So it doesn't matter. One funny note, renting hash rate after the mandatory signaling split happens, you can rent hash for the non 1. 10 side and in the random chance that rollback happens that the 1. 10 proponents say, then you get your money back anyway. Peter, I'm curious if you can just quickly explain also this like poison block attack risk. I'm like hearing rumblings about a potential poison block attack against core perspectively, although I guess it could go either way. But how would that work? And like, how concerned should we be about something like that? And what would that mean? I think Portland's the one to talk about this. No, Peter can go. That's fine. Yeah, I'll give my shot at it. So it is true in Portland's and certainly put a lot of thought into this. But essentially, we're using the term poison block here for a block that is trying to go and take advantage of sort of quadratic slowdowns related to signature hashing. And that's one of the things the Great Consensus Cleanup wants to go and fix. And this basically happens because signature hashing inversion, you know, the very first version of Bitcoin just wasn't designed very well. So you can make the validation time kind of blow up from quadratically. Now, concretely, what this means is, you can make a block that just takes a very long time to validate. And there may be with I mean, first of all, the there are there have been a bit not not people who said that they would do, you know, some kind of attack like this would happen. No clear details or anything. But there's been rumblings of it. And maybe one way this could play out is maybe they use this against core by mining blocks that are not BIP-110 compliant, that try to disrupt mining on the core chain, you can't do it. Well, I don't think it's that simple. Like, They can potentially use some hash power to try to mine blocks like that, and the outcome of this may not be directly trying to make money off of this. It may be a PR attack. It may be something where they're trying to go and just disrupt things to try to convince hashers, ultimately placing their hash power to go switch. I agree with you saying that, yeah, this isn't necessarily a profit-making attack, but there are potentially ways you can go spin this PR-wise. Now, the good thing about this is you do get warning because to set up these kinds of attacks, you've got to go create blocks with transactions with old-school script pubkeys in them that contain basically a lot of checks. You get warning that this is happening, but it is something that they could go do just before and try to go play the PR game and say, hey, our stuff goes as quick as this. Look at how the core chain fails to go stop spam. I was going to state that they would need basically about 150 blocks worth of setup transactions to get a decent payload out to cause a DOS block, essentially, to be put out to the network. Those blocks would contain fully transactions that would be seen on mempool. space, non-standard transactions, op check sig, a bunch of data, op check sig. Essentially, that's why I think it's impossible at this point to really pull off because even if they use MARA's hash rate starting today, I don't think they could get enough setup transactions into the chain. They're buying all of MARA's blocks through Slipstream, and that's not even allowed through Slipstream, but let's just entertain it. I don't think by August 8th or 9th they could pull off a DOS block. Even if they had, they couldn't get enough setup transactions into the chain. And then as a side note, you could also do the same thing to Nott's nodes to a degree because BIP-110 doesn't actually stop DOS blocks completely. There's also the script sig way. If you do a pay2script hash transaction, you can create a less powerful DOS block. But yeah, I just don't see at this point the ability for an attacker to set up a true DOS block to kind of like, hey, our Nott's nodes are protected from this with BIP-110, and the core nodes aren't, so I'm going to lob this thing at them. You're right, reputational damage could occur because if a pool like MARA starts mining these transactions, these setup transactions, people will get very upset. Like, why are you doing this? But the actual ability to execute on that will be incredibly low. I agree with you there, and I think this overlaps with them renting hash power in degrees that we didn't expect. Hypothetically, if they go and convince Foundry, maybe, but the time window is certainly running out, so you do get warned. Yeah, and the fact is, miner centralization as well right now is kind of like becoming a guardian of the network too. Like I've said this for a couple of years, these publicly traded companies or whatnot, they don't want to be mining these blocks. MARA will not mine these setup transactions for that reason, right? It would be reputational damage to the company. Foundry doesn't want to be caught mining these blocks. F2Pool probably doesn't want to be caught mining these blocks. Are there any other kind of risks or set of preventions or precautions that either miners or node runners should be aware of and executing on before August 9th? So one thing we haven't gone and brought up is legal attack. And it may be that the Knots guys come up with some kind of legal attack against, especially publicly traded miners in the U. S. I mean, maybe it's something as simple as just filing lawsuits. Maybe it's something as convoluted as putting data in the core chain and trying to go and wind up with some legal theft. It's hard to say. Now, the one good thing is the fact there is a mandatory signaling period where these rules aren't enforced could potentially mean that you could disrupt this to a degree by mining blocks on the Knots side that mine the transactions they're claiming are bad or so on. But like I say, it's a legal attack, and that's kind of it's a harder thing to go predict. Paul, I'm wondering if now's a good time for us to maybe kind of chat a little bit more about eCash specifically and kind of what people can expect when eCash goes live. I mean, like, how would you TLDR that for people? Creative destruction and chaos. Well, you know, the irony is I planned out and announced this months in advance what 1. 10 is going to like kind of do like scrambling at the last minute, which is very bizarre, because I was kind of like, well, hey, there's we have it's very simple. There's many ways in which it's very similar, which is ironic to me, because I think that, you know, it's also like they have just some of the worst ideas in the whole world. And I think I have really good we have really good ideas over there. But basically, I have also put out a soft fork, which is BIP300/301, which is the enforcer that anyone could run at any time. And we could activate it with hash rate support. And it's kind of like it's there and we're just giving it away for free. So you could take it if you want. And then I'm like, you know, no one no one is right now. And of course, you know, it's hard not to take that personally. But, you know, we have a cat and we have all these other things that haven't gotten through either. Basically, nothing is almost nothing has gotten through. If 110 activates, it would be very embarrassing that that's the so. So the point is, I also have like a soft fork and a hard fork. So it's kind of like I have my soft fork, which is the BIP300/301 activator. And you could just take it if you want it. But I'm kind of like, well, kind of no one is taking it. So now I'm doing the basically what Luke would call the, you know, the proof of work. I'm not changing the proof of work, but I'm lowering the difficulty, which is more very, very similar. And so that's basically all we do is we lower the difficult. So it's very funny that what I'm doing will be very similar to what Luke will scramble to do on like August 10th. And I'm going to mine is going to be around August 23rd again because of time zones and because of block, you know, block times. We don't actually know the exact moment. So I'm not sure, you know, and of course, when I did this, I was just thinking I want to announce it before the Las Vegas conference. And I just saw four months. It's probably enough time to like get it onto people's calendar and stuff. So it's very bizarre for me to watch the 110 people. They're just kind of like complete Yolo, this soft fork that's almost certainly going to fail. And then they're going to scramble. And then, you know, I have to, you know, from personal experience, I know that there's an awful lot of details. The name, the domain name, like the GitHub or how do people how can you let people know how they can find? A lot of people are going to ask these questions like, how do you derive addresses, blah, blah, blah. So there's like kind of a lot of questions you have to answer just to launch the hard fork. And so I'm kind of curious as to what the 110 people are, you know, what they are. Are they, you know, are they planning to I agreed with what someone said before about I think for them to discuss the hard fork. They think it makes it it's defeatist and it makes it seem like that they're not confident in the soft fork. Personally, I don't think so at all. I think it's, you know, imagine a military general is like trying to like invade a country or something. You know, you would not want them to just be like you'd want them to be confident, but you wouldn't want them. I would have more confidence in 110 soft fork if they had actually like laid out like some kind of document with like, this is what we're going to this is what we're going to do. We're thinking about all these issues. So it is intriguing that I'm more surprised than you are more surprised than anyone. There's a lot in common. I'm kind of like further along in the I'm like my soft fork has pre failed, so to speak. Notice I made a lot less noise about it because I think it'll be just crushingly humiliating for 110 people on August 10. Paul, I think I would just say that, like, I think the way you're going about it is the more direct, honest way of going about like, hey, here's my intentions. I wanted this is how I'm going to go about it. I'm going to like put this all up front. There are no tricks here. To be clear, that is mechanics position that to discuss it is to admit defeat. And I think it is also an attempt of what you're doing with a hard fork. You're saying, hey, Bitcoin's going to continue building on its chain over here and I'm going to do my own thing, whereas they are trying to take the mantle of we are the real Bitcoin, just like the B cashers. Right. And I just haven't found anyone on the 110 side who wants to talk about the mechanics of the hard fork in detail. It's to me at this point come off as a unified party line and it's difficult to do a proof of work change like you have to pick an algorithm and then you're going to have winners and losers of people who know on the inner circle. If you kind of drop it like you to do it as a fair distributed kind of like we're going to try and reset this. I'm assuming they're going to try and do one with ASICs because if you use one that doesn't use ASICs, all of these AI data centers are going to be able to 51 percent attack trivially because they have these H200s and H300s with CUDA. Those are like FPGA ASICs that are going to out dwarf anything. So you could just like rent a data center for a couple hours and 51 percent attack the new network. So like it's a rough spot to be in. And I think because they're trying to manufacture this idea that they are the real Bitcoin, they have to go about it this way and make it look like an emergency. Remember, BIP-110 is an emergency. That's why it's a temporary soft fork. I'm very glad. I know we have four hands up, but I think you hit on two things that would really clarify for lots of people, but maybe Isabel wants to. Well, I want Matt to jump in if he has a comment on this. I'm curious to get his take. Yeah, I mean, there's there's been a lot and I just wanted to weigh in on some of it real quick. I think on this whole panel, I'm probably the only person on the wanting to see BIP-110 succeed side. So I think it'd be good to balance it a little here. So earlier, Paul said a couple of things that I want to comment on, especially since, like he said, there are some some corollaries here between what he's doing and what BIP-110 is doing. Obviously, there's huge differences, too, in methodology and the reason behind it. So but one is that there's been multiple references to sort of Luke soft forking the network. I want to make it very clear to frame this properly, that there are many thousands of people in the world like real people who are ideologically aligned with Bitcoin and who are politically kind of libertarian and anarchist and who want to separate money from state like good people. There are many, many thousands, which is actually a meaningful portion of the Bitcoin community and network who are very, very aggressively and passionately fighting for this fork. So if you say that, like Luke is forking the network is is is wrong to the point of being dishonest and malicious. Right. It is a lot of people trying to fork the network right now, like a lot. OK, so I think that's important to keep in mind. Number two, Paul had said something that caught my ear, which was, well, there's this other scenario that could happen. And let's say, you know, for some reason, all the miners start signaling before the mandatory signaling period and it snowballs. And then everyone sort of has to go along with this because of the fork dynamics and game theory behind it. And that, for some reason, was very just hand waved away. And there actually is an extremely good and powerful reason why that could happen. And it is because each large miner or collection of small miners. Right. So we'll call it some meaningful amount of hash. Has the ability right now between now and mandatory signaling or even right at mandatory signaling, but probably before has the ability. To avoid everything that we have been talking about on this entire space, all of the risks, all of the confusion, all of the chaos, everything. Every large miner, a collection of medium miners or small miners has the ability right now to pull out of their pocket a avoid the whole thing card. But you're imposing your will on them that at that point, you're basically saying you must you must do this. Otherwise, I am not talking about the morality of it. I'm not talking about the motivation behind it. I'm not talking about whether people like it or not. I am saying a simple fact that every miner on the planet right now has the ability to pull out of their card, has the ability to pull out of their pocket the avoid the whole thing card. Let's just be very clear what we're saying when we say every miner. We're saying a group of miners with at least 50 percent hash power. Not 50. This snowballs way before 50 because the risk of wipeout rises with each percent. It is just not that clear. It really isn't. I mean, if this was sitting at 25, the way this could play out could easily be the other way. Plus, I mean, there are things that miners can go do to go and make this wipeout risk go away. I mean, they can go and react to this and do another soft work. But hold on. Hold on. I want to be clear here. There is no. There's no good reason. So Paul was saying earlier, like for some reason. Right. What is the reason on the other side? Why wouldn't a miner pull this out of their pocket? What is the harm to them? So let's say you're a huge miner or you're a couple of small miners and you pull this card out right now. It's risk free, as we've all stated, because you pull it out now and you can retract it before mandatory signaling. So there's this sort of risk free reconnaissance or hedge that you can take right now as a miner and be like, OK, I'm going to show this thing. I'm going to signal. Let me finish. I'm going to signal. Right. Just to see what happens, because ultimately, if I signal and a few other people signal, the whole risk vanishes. The network just moves on like it like it always is really symmetric. You understand. It's totally symmetric. So there's there's a there's a Queen song, Hammer to Fall. And there's this lyric that says, what the hell are we fighting for? Just surrender and it won't hurt at all. And that's the joke of the lyric is that people fight because, yeah, of course, if some one side surrenders, the fight's over. But, you know, it doesn't mean so. You're assuming the miners have some kind of opposition to this card. Anyone could say Peter could say the miners can just pull out this card that says we will avoid all this by just ignoring one time and not signaling. And then they also avoid the whole thing. Well, but I want to be clear. There's a very good reason for miners to oppose this, which is that it's bad to set precedents that we should do. And the technical change is the Bitcoin consensus without good reasons. And it is perfectly reasonable to go and take that viewpoint. And it's also like you're letting the terrorists win, you're shrinking the transaction fee revenue. So there's a lot of a lot of you. I think there's a lot in a way. Right. Imposing your own belief of what is good for Bitcoin onto the miners. It's not that there are opinion lists. It's not that there aren't people at mining companies that have opinions about BIP-110 or not. Right. It's that doesn't it doesn't the indifferent person win? It's really interesting. Totally symmetric. Continue this. Right. I've triggered something. You know what you understand what I'm saying? I'm trying to I'm trying to create a vision here, a picture of something. And when I'm done, I think it's really useful to kind of debate it. Right. But there's emotions all of a sudden. I'm just trying to paint a game theoretical picture for a moment. OK. If there are people at mining companies that have opinions about BIP-110, et cetera, that's fine. And I'm not saying that they won't act on those opinions, that those opinions will not sort of infiltrate the decision of the company. But fundamentally, miners are rational economic actors. Their goal is to make money. Right. Their goal is to spend energy in order to mine blocks in order to get Bitcoin rewards. It's not that simple because they have an enormous amount of money tied up in ASICs and they have to go think about longer term than just tomorrow. Yeah, I think you'd have a better point if mining didn't have ASICs in what you say. Hypothetically, we're in a world where it was all, you know, the AI people just mining on the side and their only cost was electricity. But miners do have to think many weeks, many years even down the road. And under that type of circumstance, you certainly don't want to set precedence to turn on bad technical changes. Well, hold on. So you're making the claim right now that you're speaking sort of on behalf of the largest miners in the world, that they think that if BIP-110 activates, it dooms Bitcoin and ruins their future. I'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for them to take that position. I have a question slash like mild point of view, but like maybe this is just a question I'm not really sure. But I think, you know, if the argument if the if the challenge with filtering, you know, for instance, even at the policy level is that you'd have to kind of like update the filters every six months to combat like the newest way of getting arbitrary data in. I would imagine the incentive for the miners to say no to this would be. And again, this is just me spitballing here. I'm not speaking on behalf of anyone, of course, would be. Well, we don't want to have to be dealing with the soft fork thing every six months, every time consensus needs to upgrade to figure out how to block the next wave of spam. Right. I mean, like I could see why that would be a very reasonable, like a rational reason not simply to fold to BIP-110 or any other similar soft fork exclusively for the purpose of, you know, avoiding, you know, having potential contention the day of. So here's let me fast forward a little, because I'm trying to get somewhere and I understand that, you know, there's. I welcome honestly, because we already know, I think, where you're trying to go. And that's that's the interruption. The emotion is boredom. Where I'm going with this. OK, and this should apply to you. You should appreciate this. There are a few sort of tenants in, you know, freedom circles and in Bitcoin. OK, we say that often everyone does, which regardless of which side you're on, which is, you know, you can just do things. It's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. The question isn't who is going to let me. It's who's going to stop me. I would argue that these these phrases embody the essence of progress. It's how things happen in the world and in Bitcoin. Right. People just they have an idea. They do it and they try to get support behind it. OK. And the process of soft forks over the years. has largely been, and again, there's not a whole lot of precedent here, has largely been what you do, which is you come up with an idea. And then you go try to convince everyone, the technical community and everything, that it is what we should do. And what you're hoping to get out of this is a sort of social consensus. You're hoping to get a, you know, some magical number in your head or from some certain people, right? Maybe it's core developers, maybe it's miners, whatever, you're just trying to get some adequate collection of people in sufficient volume to support your idea before you're like, okay, we're going to move forward with it. We kind of, we have consensus. That is asking permission. That is not begging forgiveness. That is asking permission. And my point is that nothing will ever happen if that is how Bitcoin governance works, because we're never, Bitcoin is too big, too important, and too broad at this point to ever get any kind of majority, right? Consensus is not democracy, to get any kind of majority buy- in on anything except maybe some kind of zero-day vulnerability where the threat is so obvious that even mis-and disinformation online can't dissuade a meaningful amount of people from it. Paul, I'm curious what you think about that, because I feel like you've said similar things. I think we should just ignore all of that, because isn't it all obvious? And I would rather go back to what Rob was talking about. It was way more interesting in every way, but we could continue to dwell on-see, he was saying that we can't get consensus on a soft fork anymore, and I agree. We can. I mean, this is, again, part of the similarities between 1. 10 and myself, which is that we both think that Bitcoin Core is mostly lazy, they have bad priorities, they're corrupt, they're pretentious, they're not great, and so we need more competition. So I agree with that. I mean, I think it's a terrible-what 1. 10 is doing, because 1. 10 has chosen a losing issue, they've chosen a bad side of a bad issue, and they have terrible strategy and terrible execution, and so it will probably be an embarrassing failure, and it will probably make everyone think, oh, core is infallible after all, and that will be a huge setback for the critics of core, and everyone will just think, yeah, we should just do whatever Gloria Zhao or name whatever fake villain you like. We should just do whatever Vladimir says forever, and they should rule us as a king. That's what 1. 10 is going to actually achieve on August 10th, I think. I hope that we get some momentum out of the-which was-this was a nice thing about 1. 10, was that core was uncriticizable for years, and then finally we had some criticism of core, which I thought was overdue. But otherwise, I don't think it's that interesting. I'd rather talk about this whole idea of the real Bitcoin, and this idea of why change the proof of work versus not. That's what Rob started us on. Then we got sucked back into the vortex of 1. 10. We can't stop talking about it, which is perfectly fine. If that's what you want to talk about, we can. I just-I personally think the audience will get way more out of it. I want to get back to a second, though, to a technical point about this idea that you can just signal with no cost. Actual miners do invest a lot of money into their software setups, and there's a lot of risk associated with changing them. At the moment, Bitcoin Core is offering that if you just keep doing what you're doing, more likely than not, the network's going to just keep doing what it does, and you're not going to have to change anything. Whereas, if you signal for BIP 1. 10, you are setting in motion a thing where suddenly in less than two weeks, you now potentially need to update your software. There's a very strong reason not to go do that. Really quickly, I want to- I think Peter is right, actually. I would accept that as a correction. I would actually say that the fact- if you do signal and you appear on a Wicked Smart Bitcoin's site, that does mean that at least you were willing to actually go in and change the software from whatever it was doing. Actually, that probably means that signaling is slightly more reliable, which is even worse news for 1. 10, if you think about it, because the number is so low. The reliable signal is low. Think about another BIP, BIP 54. We have 34% of miners signaling for that with their Coinbases. The miners will signal when there's an incentive for them to signal. BIP 54 is not some surprise activation like, hey, we're all going to change our Coinbase and lock times and our in-sequence value. It's like a slow grind to find consensus, which that's why I believe it's possible to find consensus in Bitcoin today. I'm just noting, miners are willing to change their software. They are from OrangeSurf, who I know has done a ton of interesting research on this, but Chris, go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to ask while Matt is here, and we talked about proof-of-work chains, as the CEO of Start9 and a big, big proponent of implementation diversity, my curiosity would be, are you also happily going to support and distribute a node implementation in StartOS that changes the proof-of- work, or does your sense of diversity acquire boundaries there? And will you also support an implementation of Paul's eCash? Yeah, this is an easy answer, finally. So StartOS and the marketplace ecosystem are designed that we can't, no matter how hard we tried, no matter what we did, prevent anyone from distributing anything, including blatant malware, to other people who willfully download it. Obviously, we won't list anything like that on our hosted registry, and we have two. One is the community registry, and one is the Start9 registry. Community registry get cursory vetting. We look at them, we don't vouch for them, but we do put them through the ringer, just like Apple or Google would before something goes on their store. And then we warn users like, hey, we have not, we don't totally vouch for this, we don't necessarily recommend it, but they can still download it with minimal effort from one of our default registries, we call it the community registry. The Start9 registry has a much higher bar. It means that we vouch for, maintain, recommend, and understand so that we can provide support for all of the services in that registry. What determines whether something goes on the community registry or the Start9 registry is quality of the service, which is highly subjective, basically, whether I think it's good enough to be on our Start9 registry and that we're willing to put our brand behind it. And two, that it is in demand, that people want it. So the answer is, if people want to run a Bitcoin implementation that implements a proof of work change, or to run Paul's fork, and they are technically sound, then we would host them on the Start9 registry. If people don't really care that much, or we think they're really, really stupid and don't want to attach our brand in any way to it, it would go on the community registry. So it's very subjective. Do you have like a limit in terms of like, is there a threshold, like for example, Ethereum or Solana on a Start9 platform and the primary registry? Or is like, what's, where's the point where like, hey, our boundaries, we can't do this. The primary registry, and I wrote a blog post about this at one point is, it checks all the boxes, right? It's like, we think that this is quality software, we recommend that you run it, or at least we don't recommend that you don't run it, right? It's like, we're not saying you should stay away from it. We're not embarrassed by it. Like, it's not something that we're gonna, you know, take a lot of flack for. It's very delicate. And it mostly comes down to just kind of me deciding whether this fits with the company's brand and mission. For example, like Bitcoin Cash is on the community registry, right? As in it passed the technical spec, it's not malware, somebody's going to install it, and it's not going to blow up their server. But it's also not something that we, you know, are personally willing to kind of, you know, put alongside Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots, which are much more legitimate. I just want to say I'm so impressed with the way that Portland is very seriously asking those questions, as if it matters at all to anything. What kind of nodes Matt approves or doesn't approve on his node, like the poorest, most broke people in Bitcoin are running Start9 nodes. It absolutely doesn't matter what you guys do list or do not list and which repository, yes or no, like who the fuck cares, guys? It's like, that's the most irrelevant question I've ever heard. In Portland, I'm so impressed that you are asking it with a straight face as if it has any meaning whatsoever, and if it matters to anything. Well done. 25% of the Bitcoin network is running on Start9 servers. You can run 900% if you want, it doesn't matter, like there's nothing less relevant than your user base. I cannot imagine anything that's less relevant to Bitcoin than your user base. Okay, so you're here to troll and start fights, not to have a meaningful discussion. It's not a troll, it's not a troll. Everyone here knows it's true, like everyone is pretending as if like this is a serious conversation. Everyone on stage and everyone in the audience knows that it's absolutely immaterial what your user base has in the community repository or the official repository. Nothing is less important than that question. Okay, all right, okay. Do you have any idea what we do? I don't think you understand what we do. No, I understand very well. Do you prefer a Bitcoin node? Yeah, Matt, do you want to respond? Yeah. I mean-You don't have to. Not really. You don't have to. No, I mean, he's here for, he's obviously here to disrupt conversations and if I was moderating this-I'm saying what everybody here thinks. There's not a single person who doesn't agree with me right now. Not a single person other than Matt, and Matt agrees with me too, he just can't say it. Okay, we're gonna-I disagree with Leo Mattis. All right, there is an issue here where, so the term that's often used is an economic node for the obvious reason that, you know, anyone can go spin up nodes on, say, AWS or something, and it certainly is an interesting question what BIP-110 support actually looks like in terms of economic nodes, that is, nodes associated with very large amounts of coin purchasing. Because ultimately, when you look at the feedback loop of mining, what ultimately matters is, are people willing to buy miners' coins? And with that, things like Michael Saylor, for instance, coming out saying he's against BIP-110 is quite relevant. But for Michael Saylor, when he runs a node, is it in the community repository or in the official repository? That matters a lot for the weight of Michael Saylor's decisions. Well, ultimately, when Michael Saylor quote-unquote runs a node, of course, what he's actually doing is telling an employee of his to go call up Coinbase and verify what nodes they're running. But, you know, the economic decision is still the same there. I honestly, jokes aside, I'm not even sure how that terminology of economic node came to be. I mean, I know the history and the legacy of it, but, like, it's not really, like, the word inside of the term economic node, the word node is not playing any part. You can just say, like, economic actor. Whether or not the economic actor is running a node is completely irrelevant. To have his voice heard, that's, like, absurd. The node does not play a part in the economic node. I think it does, though, actually, because you could say if one person is going to be receiving all of the incoming transactions for the next two weeks, they would look at their node to see if they're actually being paid. If they want, they can manually do it with a pen and paper. Like, it doesn't matter if they run a node or not. That's completely orthogonal. Well, I mean, in the example of Michael Saylor, the important thing is, like anyone, ultimately, for him and his purpose, ultimately, somewhere out there, there's a node running. Now, this may not be quite as controlled as if I personally happen to run a node on my laptop, but there's always issues around control there. I mean, one example is maybe my laptop's actually compromised, and what I think is my node isn't quite so much my node. But the important thing is that the intent is there. Michael Saylor intends to go run a node that ignores Bitcoin 10, and ultimately, that filters out to some node that's actually sitting somewhere, probably in the data center. Just for the purpose of education, and I think we'll wrap up this but I do think it's a fair one, just the conversation about economic nodes and sort of the power differentials between nodes, right, because there is maybe this misunderstanding, right, that the absolute number of nodes on the network running a soft fork, you know, kind of, quote, unquote, matters, maybe more than it does, when perhaps it's actually kind of the transaction volume that's running between those nodes that's more meaningful in terms of putting pressure on miners to change. I don't know if anyone wants to kind of add to that or just sort of, again, give like a TLDR explainer on that. Just one last thing, and I don't mean to be offensive to anyone, but I do think when people say economic nodes, the node is orthogonal, and that's kind of like, we could have also said like economic wives, like there are holders of Bitcoin, and some of them have wives, and maybe some of the wives have an opinion about Bitcoin forks. So we could like do a survey of economic wives in the network and see like, hey, for some wives support BIP-110, and some wives don't. But like the truth is, it's not about the nodes, and it's not about the wives, and it's not about anything, it's about the economic actors, and what they actually want and what they actually support. Yeah, some of them have nodes, some of them have wives, some of them have like horses. We can talk about the economic horses and if they want BIP-110 or not, but like it doesn't matter. The point is, there's an economic actor that holds Bitcoin, maybe buys more Bitcoin, maybe doesn't. And it's really a question about who's buying or accumulating Bitcoin and not really who already holds it, because for example, out of the BIP-110 people, they might own like 0. 0002 BTC, but they're not planning to transact with them, they're not planning to buy more. So their opinion doesn't really matter that much. So the whole conversation about economic nodes, it's just like, it's not the nodes, man. The nodes don't matter, they don't really play a part in this at all. Well, anyway, economic nodes is a term that gets used in the discussions of this stuff. Obviously, it's a shorthand for a very complex concept, but it's reasonable to use that shorthand and that's just kind of standard in this industry. Really quickly. Yeah, you can have an economic node without any Bitcoin. And as long as you route many transactions, that is an economic node. It's just about the impact that that node would have if it goes down. And I think Michael Saylor met us, even though he doesn't have a wife. Have we asked him what Saylor thinks of eCash? He's not telling us about it. I'm pretty sure that Michael Saylor would not be a fan of eCash, which I think is probably evidence that eCash will do really well in the long run. Because, I mean, when has Michael Saylor actually been right about anything? The fact that he is against 110, I think that has put more fear into me that we may be on the wrong side of history than anything else in this whole saga. So, I mean, it's just the eCash idea and BIP300 in general, it completely obliterates his... Michael Saylor has this idea that he wants to be able to explain Bitcoin to his congressperson in 30 seconds or something. And I'm opening it to an infinitely expanding canvas of L2s and I'm throwing open this developer paradise or playground or whatever you want to call it. And I have this idea of infinite growth. So I'm rejecting all this idea of stasis and overconfidence and complacency. And then again, he is representing this view that Bitcoin has already won. We don't need to lift a finger. We don't need to change anything in Bitcoin. We don't need to do anything in Bitcoin. In fact, everything we do might be a mistake. So I think he would be against it. But I'm not worried about that because he's also been describing Bitcoin as Manhattan real estate, space rocket fuel, digital credit, digital whatever. So he's just got a new explanation every week. And I don't think anything... You can go down the line of everything Michael Saylor has attempted, including the treasury companies. And I don't know. But all this stuff was shuttered and it was ultimately not successful. So I'm not sure what he's done that actually has ever succeeded. Did you consider adding digital credit to eCash? Yeah, I'll get right on that. We're going to close the loop on Michael Saylor. I really would like to hear from OrangeSurf because he's done some really excellent research on this. And then I want to bring up Ryan Dowell, who currently doesn't have space on the stage. So OrangeSurf, go ahead. So the first thing I was going to say is earlier on, Matt claimed that he was underrepresented. But I think actually, when you look at the 2% signaling, he's pretty reasonably represented in this group. In terms of signaling, I mean, basically the mandatory signaling to hit that now, you're going to have to have like over 81% of the remaining blocks signaling. So that's just the BIP-110 specification. So, I mean, it's not really compatible with Bitcoin 10. So I think they should probably try and fix that. And then the cost for a mining pool really signaling Bitcoin 10 is that miners are going to move away from the pool because they want to mine Bitcoin. And they're going to look embarrassed and foolish if it fails, which obviously it's going to fail. So, I mean, the fact that we're not really seeing any BIP-110 supporters with significant influence developing any widely used product services or tools is basically like quite high signal. And yeah, that's my contribution. Thank you for that contribution. Okay. I am going to bring up Reindell, because I feel like he had something to say. And now we're going to bring him up, one of my favorite speakers on this subject. If anyone else has comments that they want to make, this has been riveting, you guys. I'm curious, Paul, actually, if you want to just kind of maybe share a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision for eCash. Like, where do you see this going? I mean, is it, what's the reason to do this? I mean, to everyone else's point, you're not trying to be the next Bitcoin. You're not claiming like this is the real Bitcoin. You're kind of just going and doing your own thing. Like, why? Like, what are you, what are you trying to create? And what's your end goal here? Well, I do think there's only room for one cryptocurrency in the long run. So the question is, how long is the long run? And I don't know, but probably it's like 10 years in this case, because the strong network effects. So I do think that in the end, there will only be one currency that survives. I was more interested in like the gravitational pull because Rob brought up this idea of the real Bitcoin, and he brought up the psychology of the 110ers. And it's about how it's really important to them to win over the whole community. And they purport to represent this conception of the public good of Bitcoin or something. It doesn't occur to them to just create a new thing as a demo or even a competitor. And I think I just wanted to point out that that is very, very, very, that's a very mesmerizing and tempting thing that has caught a lot of people. It's like the siren music, you know, from the Odyssey. And you can see, you can go back to Roger Ver and all these people. So a lot of people have been caught in this whole the real Bitcoin thing. And I do think it's unusual for me to, but even I had like registered some domains in the past, I was like, I'm gonna do my own thing. And I'm going to call whatever Bitcoin extended or something like that. So it's very tempting. And I think people really invest a lot of their identity in being a Bitcoiner. And I think that that deranges people. And it's not, it's not good for you or anyone else. It's not necessarily good for Bitcoin. Maybe it is because it creates this big cult. But I think it's very smart of us to shine some light on this phenomenon. If we can just be armchair psychologists, and say that, yeah, it's very tempting to want to be like, oh, I am the savior of Bitcoin, or I represent Bitcoin or blah, blah, blah, I think that is very, very, very common. And a lot of people have suffered enormously by giving into that temptation. And I think the 110 people will be the latest in a long line of people who have suffered similarly. So that was a determination of mine was eventually, at first, I was kind of like, not sure. But at some point, I was like, okay, I just have to pick something as a completely different name, completely different brand, you know, different colors, ideally different, whatever. It's hard to make it all different. But I was thinking like, it has to be a different thing than Bitcoin. So that it's clear that, you know, I'm just giving this making this new thing, giving everyone a bunch of free coins. And I think that that's much more sane. And I hope that I can kind of maybe set a tiny example, maybe, where new people who think they have the most important idea in Bitcoin, just copy that, and they just give us all free coins with a different name. And then it's easier to talk about these things. I think one thing that's quite funny is that people when they talk about the inevitable hard fork, they end up using these phrases where they say, Oh, you have to buy Bitcoin over here, and then you have to buy 110 coins. So that's the thing is, if you don't pick the name, then the name is going to be picked for you by by the people in, you know, in an x space somewhere, they're just going to start calling it 110 coin, because you and then you Yeah, I think that is a funny name, or because that's a very, very witty name, but I don't know how many other people will get that. joke. And so and then, but it's funny that there's, I mean, Paul, hard forking Bitcoin into a shitcoin that nobody cares about is not novel. Many people have done it before you. And yet, how do you know how many people will care about it? Before launch? It's not fair to because people are still going to care about it, when Luke does it for the proof of work change. So like people get to care about the things they care about. And we can't really tell them like, yeah, it won't be interesting or new. It won't be Bitcoin anymore. But like, that is the survival mode. Luke and mechanic have both staked out that they are willing to go down burning with the ships. And I think to Paul's point, it's a healthy way to just sort disagreements and move on. See, I think if they were smart about it, they would actually be trying to hype up the proof of work change now. Because they could say like, hey, you know, 15 years ago, you could mine Bitcoin on your home computer. You haven't been able to do that in a long time, we're going to change your proof of work algorithm that you can you can make bitcoins on your computer again. And that could be like a fun new thing that people would actually be excited about. Yeah, no, if if the BIP 110 soft fork fails, and there is a move to proof of work change and hard fork, and there is incentives to, you know, mine, and it's for the plebs, etc. It's going to be like a meaningful network, there will actually be users, it's not going to be Bitcoin, right? Or, I mean, it depends. But, but, like what Paul's doing, like, there's no, it's, it's sort of, you know, it's just dead, like, nobody cares. It's just a hard fork into a shitcoin. I do want to just call out, I just pinned the tweet. 18 months ago, I told Luke, he was gonna have to change, fire the miners and change the proof of work to fix this. And his response to me was liar. And here we are two weeks out. It looks like that's about what's about to happen here. I mean, if you want to play, but yeah, yeah, Rob, if you want to play that game, I wrote a shell script three years ago, that rejected blocks that had inscriptions in them. And Luke said that it was malware and blocked me. So like, you know, lots of prior art for for people foreshadowing Luke, and then him telling them that they're liars. I think a great deal, you can go to, for example, LayerTwo Labs. com slash friends. And you can see all the people who have endorsed the 300, at least. And this includes people like Adam back. Robin Linus, these are like a lot of people, and they seem to think that it is actually the best L2 out of everything available. So there are quite a few people who are interested. And I think, you know, I'm in a completely different realm than 110. 110 wants to shrink some transactions that they call spam, but which are actually very easy for the network to process and store. And I'm trying to expand it so that 8 billion people can use Bitcoin. I'm trying to add Zcash level privacy, I'm trying to add like, the ability to endlessly add new L2s if the existing set of L2s is insufficient. With the CUSF activator, the L1 is the same as Bitcoin Core, it's exactly the same as Bitcoin Core. So anything you like about Bitcoin Core, you can keep on L1. And then we can also do with the CUSF activator, we can do quantum, we can do all this stuff without changing any lines of code. In Bitcoin Core, so I think I'm in like a completely different realm of solving like, like all of the biggest problems in the entire cryptography, crypto coin cryptocurrency industry. Like we have like kind of already solved are on the way to solving. And it's like, that is way more important than this fake spam crusade that's going to just crash and burn and by hitting a rocket on August 9, it's like completely different realm of conversation. In fairness, to you, but not to all the thousands of people fighting online about it. Like clearly, many, many, many people care. So one of the things that's interesting, Well, I just want to say, in fairness, Paul, like, you may have that viewpoint, but your viewpoint that Drivechain solve these things is not widely shared. And in that regard, it's not unlike, say, the BIP-110 issue. But my point is, you have to go as soon as my coworking space mats, but it's closed. So good luck guys. Peter, thank you. It is certainly admit that it is, you know, controversial, but we have many supporters. So I think that that alone means that it's kind of an open question. But you don't feel the same way about BIP-110. Like BIP-110 has orders of magnitude more supporters than Drivechains. I've only actually met like three or four people in person who support one 10. So maybe it's a representative. Yeah, that's yours. That's yours. I've met thousands of real people. Theoretically, I can't imagine a reason why someone would support one 10, because it doesn't actually stop the spam. And stopping the spam is not actually a good idea. Because of course, You keep fixating on your own opinion and projecting it onto the world. What I'm saying is that thousands of real people passionately disagree with that. Thousands of real people are less interesting than a hundred people who are not broke. You keep forgetting that you are not broke. It's just less interesting. It's a little bit interesting, but it's not very interesting. People's right to spam. They're not broke. They bought a Stardust for thousands of dollars. They're clearly not broke. But they're also complaining that like having to buy a new hard drive every 10 years is too expensive. So like, I don't know. But I'm looking at the BIP-110 company directory that got passed around. And like, if you scroll through the directory of companies who have claimed that they're going to support BIP-110, it's like, you know, Start9, Bitcoin University, and then a bunch of people who like, you know, sell one t-shirt. And some of the, if you click through the links for like the proof that they actually support it, some of it is very spotty. And it's like not at all clear that, you know, these people actually support 110 or not. So I think part of the reason why miners are ignoring this and are safe to ignore it is because all of the actual economic actors on the network are ignoring it. Like miners at the end of the day have to sell their coins to somebody. So getting back to the whole like economic node thing, a thought experiment is imagine there was a chain split for like a hard fork. And on one side of the chain split, there's a million nodes running on EC2 that never buy Bitcoin. And on the other side of the chain split is one guy who has infinite bid and will buy all of the Bitcoin. Like, where are the miners going to mine? They're going to mine where they can sell their Bitcoin. So like if there's no exchanges or merchants or big buyers or anything supporting 110, then like why is there going to be economics on that side? Because I think it's really important to recognize that like this is not a hard fork. There is no choice that the miners have to make. They're not choosing between the BIP-110 people and the core people. What they're choosing between is everyone and the core people. They have the option to keep the entire network. I disagree with this. You keep saying that it's important to distinguish, but it's not important to distinguish. Actually, it's not important to talk about this at all. Nothing, nothing is going to change whether or not we talk about this. Nothing is going to, the outcome is going to be identifiable. Why are you here that all you do is, all everyone does is talk about this? Why are you here if you don't want to talk about it? Because it's fun and there's nothing else to talk about. I'm having fun. So it's fun, it's interesting. It's like, you're stating all the reasons why miners would want to keep this contingency. Miners will, okay, will when, Ben? At some point, you're going to need to say miners did not. What is the date when you're going to say that this is going to pass? At some point, which might be August 8th, there will come a day when it is clear that mining is centralized enough and corrupt enough to willfully carve off 15% of its economy when it doesn't talk to it. Did you rehearse this before you came here? This is so, this is such bullshit. There is no way you believe what you say right now. There's no way you believe this. How do you keep a straight face saying this? I just want to go back to a different point that I think is more interesting, which is this idea of 110 versus BIP300 or eCash, whatever you want to call it, which is that I think a lot of people, when they learn more about each of the two options, they will actually like eCash more and they will like 110 less. Matt brought up this point about, oh, well, maybe people don't care as much. But when I talk to people personally, they usually say, well, I don't really know a lot about BIP300. If I talk to them a little bit about it, they seem to like it more. If I talk to people who dislike it, either it's clear that they have gravely misunderstood it, or at least that's my opinion, and they don't actually understand it, or when you talk to them about it, they sort of like it more. Whereas, I think with 110, there's a lot of... I think we can all tell that from the caliber of the discussion, if these people actually studied it for 10 years, they would not be saying the things that they're saying. And in fact, the 110 people have very frequently shifted their story. Remember, the original story was that Core V30 will be coming out in three months, and it has a change that will destroy Bitcoin or something. That was the original story. Then they learned more about it, and they were like, well, we have to change our story to some other thing. Like, it might hypothetically cause some future... It's really important that you stop applying the reasons behind it and your own opinion. I'm trying to state a simple fact. It's not going to change the outcome. It's not important if he stops at that. You gotta let me talk. The outcome is going to stay the same. You gotta let me talk. Ryan Dell... Wait, wait, wait. Hand is up, and I'm going to try to bring some decorum to this space. Ryan Dell, would you feel free to chime in? Yeah, I mean, so to Paul's point just a second ago, like the reason for BIP-110 to exist, which used to be 444, has gone through a bunch of big arcs and changes over the last like six or nine months, right? It used to be there's going to be this change in Bitcoin V30 that's going to brick all of the nodes running on cloud infrastructure. So this is going to be... The reason why it's a one-year change is because we need to hit an emergency panic button, and then that'll bias the time to go and do it correctly. And then like V30 came and went, and the network didn't explode. So then it became about like rug the spammers. But like the spammers already rugged themselves because markets do that. And then after that, it became all about like we have to fire core, and we have to like increase the decentralization of the network, which, you know, moving to an implementation with a single maintainer, who's also the chairman of the one mining pool that's mining these blocks, that increasing decentralization somehow is like still lost on me. So like the story keeps changing. And to Matt's point about signaling for 1. 10 being a riskless option, it's not a riskless option because like 1. 10 is this, you know, solution looking for a problem. It doesn't actually fix any of the things that it purports to fix. And making technical changes to Bitcoin consensus rules for no good reason, but just because like, there's a bunch of people yelling about it on Twitter and yelling about it on GitHub comments is not a good reason to change Bitcoin. And I think if you have millions of dollars invested in ASICs, or if you have a business behind Bitcoin, you don't want to support people changing consensus rules because of Twitter politics, like that would actually destroy Bitcoin. And so it's not, you know, a free option. Like on the one hand, if you signal for BIP 1. 10, you are setting a horrible precedent that this is not, you know, the strongest money ever. This is money that is subject to the whims of Twitter mobs. On the other hand, if you don't signal 1. 10, then you have an opportunity to force like the most annoying and most hostile group of Twitter users to fork themselves off the network, which is like a phenomenal opportunity. So it's miners are incredibly well incentivized to not signal for 1. 10, especially because as I pointed out earlier, there aren't any real like major businesses that are saying that they're going to buy 1. 10 coins. Right now, I'd even make it just one step bigger. It's not just businesses not running it. The people who are running 1. 10 themselves are not economically signaling. Eight months ago, I built a trustless on-chain fork futures contract where the Bitcoin blockchain is the oracle. In a narrow domain, guys, we solved the oracle problem. Since we're betting on Bitcoin consensus and we're understanding what do we think is going to happen, there is this belief that one, I built that contract, fully open sourced it. No one wanted to take me up on it. No one wanted to take me up on it at reduced odds. This is provably auditable. You could dump it into Chad TPT or Grok or Kimmy or whatever. And this is the thing is when a chain split happens, miners are only able to mine one block at a time. They cannot mine both blockchains. And because of that, you need to not look at the count of nodes, but how much is going to be put on the line. Say what you will about Roger Ver and Jihan, they put up hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin because they believed in a different vision for what Bitcoin should be. And in a chain split, we're capitalizing and economically supporting their side of the chain. It's not just that there's no businesses and there's no exchangers and there's scant little mining pools outside of ones that are being rented. It is the fact that every user who is saying that they are going to do this and they will drag the whole network kicking and screaming along with them. None of them want to put a Bitcoin with this belief of, oh, I don't want to participate in markets. I'm gambling. First off, I don't believe buying Bitcoin is a gamble, right? It is not gambling. When you buy Bitcoin, you are betting on yourself in the future and the prosperity of the network. And if you think buying Bitcoin is gambling, maybe that's for you then. But like it's investing. That's incredibly important. And also, by not participating in the market, you are providing a market signal. There's one little prediction market that has about four Bitcoin in volume on it right now. And that is largely because the pro 110 side of the argument does not want to economically engage. They have a belief that if they run software and they yell at people online, they're going to be able to persuade and move the entire network. And to Reindell's point, that would be a really weak, bad thing for the Bitcoin network if people can socially peacock and run software but not engage in economics. And they would be able to influence the network. That would be the end of Bitcoin, the experiment of Bitcoin being decentralized money. Portland, go for it. I don't think I can follow up after Rob. I just had a point about signaling and why miners wouldn't flip the bit just out of safety, essentially, to mine on both chains. You would be the person that I would want to have respond to that. OK. Yeah, basically, the reason why specifically signaling is communication of intent. So it's like, am I ready to enforce this rule or not? Essentially, if you have a bunch of miners that don't intend to enforce the rules come the enforcement date, you walk into essentially a fog of war. The miners, if they all flip the bit, but we don't know who's signaling, they then have to communicate amongst themselves outside of the chain to go, OK, I will be not running the rules anyways. I was just kind of like trying to be nice here and ensure like I got my Coinbase rewards. And so that could cause a lot of confusion. And at the end of the day, like if they don't coordinate well enough internally instead of externally through signaling, you end up with a scenario potentially where essentially like some miners might be running the enforcing client and some might not be. And you end up with like a 30-70 split of hash rate because of that. And then they would all have to kind of scramble to figure out their situation. So I don't believe it's truly costless just to flip this bit. You're essentially obfuscating your true intent to signal if you just signal because you want to mine these blocks on both chains without any actual plan to run the enforcement mechanism. Thoughts? We're kind of about to be wrapping up on time. This was riveting, you guys. So this is a good opportunity if people have final thoughts. Well, this was fun. This was fun. Leo, what's up? Yeah, I mean, look, I still haven't gotten an answer from Matt on why the guy who created Borker is pandering to like this spam haters now. And I think it's a great opportunity. We've got some people here listening who I think genuinely would be curious to hear your counterargument to the prevailing narrative that you're trying to sell overpriced raspberry pies to people. And you saw a great opportunity to do that. And that is what most people believe. And I'm not saying I believe it, Matt. But that is the belief. And I'm just curious if you have any sort of answer to that. Because the first two times I asked it, you failed to answer the question. So yeah, Borker guy, really cool thing you built. All of a sudden, you're not a huge fan of people inscribing arbitrary data into Bitcoin. What happened? I'm going to read. It's really interesting because Leonidas is the guy who made the Start9 nodes useful. Like, there's no point to start nine nodes. The only good thing they do is they're storing valuables in a decentralized way. And Leonidas created that use case for him. And instead of like thanking him, he's like making this whole story about miners being centralized and whatnot. I mean, we're literally helping you build your company. We're attempting to keep this as respectful as possible. This is an official organizational Twitter space. But Matt, I will... Isabel, I also have a question. And sorry for interrupting. And I'm trying to keep this professional and organizational and whatever. What's up? What's your favorite Drivechain? My favorite Drivechain? I want to hear people... So Matt is not going to answer your question. It's like we've been on here two hours. It's the only interesting question we've talked about. And Matt's just not going to answer it. I might rephrase it because I actually... I mean, I think we all know the answer. I mean, I think that like you are kind of trolling. OK, well, I think Matt doesn't know the answer. I personally think I would rephrase that question, which is just like, we haven't really done just like the basic education of explaining like, why are these transactions with arbitrary data? Like, why do you now consider them harmful when maybe you previously historically didn't? I mean, I think that that's like a fair question to ask. But I think we can ignore the whole, you know, are you trying to sell nodes part of the question? No, I think he's asking the question in good faith. I mean, Udi's clearly on the attack. But I think Leonidas is asking the question in good faith. He wants to understand why the change, right, over the years. And the answer is not complicated, right? People change their minds over the years. Back in 2019, when I was really learning Bitcoin development, right, not just from the economic and political side, which is what attracted me to it, but when I actually wanted to start, you know, understanding technically how it worked, this was a really interesting project to work on to help educate me, right? Like reading Mastering Bitcoin like four times over and then getting into the code and, you know, building something like Borker was an educational experience. I thought it was neat and cool. But ultimately, it was just a science experiment that nobody cared about and wasn't actually interesting. I know you think it was, but ultimately, I viewed it as like, you know, just some child's tinkering thing and moved on. And over the years between 2019 and now, I believe that I have come to understand Bitcoin dynamics and governance and its nature better than I did. And I believe that spam can absolutely effectively be mitigated through policy and network rate limiting. And I also am even more interested in soft fork dynamics now that I've really kind of dug into it. And I think that one way or another, an extremely valuable lesson is about to be learned in the next week and a half. And I think we all can agree that it's an exciting moment where one way or another, somebody is going to get punched in the face and learn a hard lesson. I think that's fine. Right. I want to hear from Reindell, but Matt, really quickly, what is your projection? I mean, we haven't heard from you on like, I mean, it seems like everyone seems to think this is just going to like DOA and like not a big deal, nothing burger. Like what is your projection as to like what's going to happen? What do you speculate is going to happen on August 9th? It's hard to put percentages on, but I think that there is a meaningful non-zero chance that between now and the mandatory signaling period, you will see a rapid and then overwhelming rise of signaling and hash supporting Bitcoin 10. I think that there is a meaningful chance that that happens, but I am curious to see, right? I'm very, very curious to see how this plays out. Yeah. Reindell, you want to jump in? Yeah. Two things that Matt said that I think are really important that I just want to like massively plus one. The latter one, which is, you know, in whatever, nine days, 10 days, something, a whole bunch of people are going to learn something, which I think is great. I think everybody's going to learn something. And like, that's just always good. And then the other thing that he said, he said, you know, he picked up this project as a way to learn development of Bitcoin. I, you know, the first time that I really understood how Taproot worked was actually contributing to Ord. Because Ord was like a very approachable code base, and it was an interesting thing to work on that required actually, you know, building tap trees and like actually like building those transactions. And it kind of gave me a reason. So I would just say for anybody out there listening, finding novel ways to shove data into Bitcoin transactions is actually a very good constructive way to learn Bitcoin development. And I think we've seen over the last three years, you know, there's more developers in the world who know how to work on Bitcoin because of things like Ordinals than before. You know, for a really long time, if you wanted to like build software on Bitcoin, you could build a wallet or a block explorer, and that's it. There wasn't really thing else much to build. And, you know, like, it's been great to get more developers working on Bitcoin, thinking on Bitcoin, doing Bitcoin things. So I strongly co-sign what Matt was saying about sticking arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions is a great way to learn about Bitcoin, and I encourage more people to do it. I have to seriously-I'd like to respond to that. I want to respond to that real quick once you're done as well. Okay, Matt, you go ahead, and then I'll say my point and I'll wrap up. Yes, one, thank you. And two, I agree. And I'll take it even further, which is the more barriers that we put up in policy and consensus to prevent arbitrary data in Bitcoin actually pushes that envelope further, right, forcing people to get increasingly creative about how to embed data. Because if it becomes standardized, it gets boring, right? Like if one emerges and nobody fights it, and there's nothing to learn, and it's all just AI copy pasting from patterns and templates, then you're not going to learn Bitcoin development. You're not going to learn how it works. So you guys should be, you know, fighting tooth and nail for policy and consensus to block all this stuff so that people can come up with increasingly creative ways to do it. Fair point, yeah. If anybody wants to see, I put up in the nest the thing that I was referencing with Bitcoin Purifier. It's a project that's on GitHub. It's only about 80 lines of shell. I put it out on Christmas day in 2023. My family was super mad at me because instead of hanging out with my, you know, children on Christmas morning, I was writing code to help the org disrespector crowd. That's how much I love them. And so I put up Bitcoin Purifier. You know, some people in the 110 crowd didn't like it and said that it was malware, but it was actually really the proto 110. So I feel like 110 is actually kind of, you know, the intellectual nephew of my own work, and I'm thrilled to see it flourishing. Love that, love that. I don't know about intellectual, but it's a nephew. Full circle moment, Reindell. Thank you for bringing that home for us. This was really fun. You know, I feel like we kept it like somewhat professional in this very professional, highly organized space. Thank you guys so much for joining. And yeah, I am going to close down now, but you guys are awesome. And this was really fun. So thank you so much for joining me and talk to you soon. And special shout out to Matt for holding it down for his crew. You did not have an easy job today, and I think you actually did incredibly well. So thank you, Matt. All right. Bye, guys. Thanks. Knots Army.