Without enthusiastic support from users and miners, it wouldn't work anyway, so it hinges on a little bit more than just maybe what 1.10 does, hence the desire to demonstrate it with its own thing, I think. So maybe we could talk about that a little. So you proposed BIP 1.10 a while ago, right? BIP 300 is a fizzle. BIP 300 is years old. It got the BIP number in maybe 2018, I think. And BIP 1.10 is fairly recent, right? Yeah, well, and we should also point out for the audience that BIP 300 is like a complete redesign of all the incentives in the Bitcoin system, and it's like a massive change, and BIP 1.10 is a tiny, surgical, totally common sense. Well, I don't agree with that. It's just taking an unused opcode and using it to count to 13,000, basically. That's all it does under the hood. And as far as the miners, it asks them to basically accept more money for merge mining, which is something that we've had since Namecoin in 2010, 2011. I am much closer to agreeing with Chris on this, just for the record. But I think we probably shouldn't talk too much about the details of what the forks are, even though I know people want to, because we did sort of just have, you know, you talked, and then you talked, and now we're all... So I think most of the people here are at least somewhat familiar from the talks. But I think the difference is, yeah, you're sort of saying, I'm going to do a hard fork, right? Like, there is no... I think it's actually the polite thing to do under the circumstances. It's sort of like people are not, they're not lapping it up, basically. But it did take, so, six or eight years. So for eight years, could you say just a little of like, okay, so for eight years, were you sort of hoping it would be a soft fork and trying to pitch it? Well, I was very open-minded to like, I actually proposed the idea in form of writing in 2015. So it's super old, and I was just kind of shrugged, like, whatever, maybe we won't need this. Over the last ten years, what's really happened is I've seen how terrible everyone else's, you know, how lightning has not worked, and it seems like actually everyone has no idea what they're doing. So my idea kind of stayed the same, and then all these other ideas collapsed, and I thought, well, actually my idea is actually the best idea. And it's very, very misunderstood. There are basic things about it that are easy to understand that people have trouble grasping. So I kind of just thought everything would be fine. You know, the price of Bitcoin has gone up a huge amount. So overall, there's been a lot of success for Bitcoin. But I think I worry about how do we go up from here, both in terms of adoption and in terms of price. You've got multiple people fighting, chasing the customers away at the front door, where people are saying like, you know, we've got the treasury companies, we've got 110, we've got people saying, oh, we shouldn't, it's not a good thing to use Bitcoin. So we've got all kinds of weird stuff like that. Okay, so in this case, the 300, you have a hard fork, there's a difficulty adjustment, there's all this stuff. It's going to run, and you're going to have a sustained chain. With the BIP-110, there's... Something will happen. Yeah, there's no, at least from my understanding, there's no plan for a hard fork or difficulty adjustment at this time. Is that something people have talked about in BIP-110 at all? I mean, people always say like, well, what happens if the miners ignore it? And it's like, well, they're not going to ignore it. That would be an attack on Bitcoin. It would be an attack on the node network. There are other things we could do. What if they do, and then the response is they won't isn't really a response, right? Right, exactly. I mean, if the entire mining industry is malicious, we have to have some kind of stronger escalation to that. And the only, like, the next move would be a proof-of-work change. Would you call the majority of the people in this room malicious? It's a little tricky when they're in the room with you, right? Yeah, because you only have three votes, really, four, right? Well, I mean, but so I wouldn't... But the people in this room are not running mining pools. I mean, maybe there's a couple of people running mining pools. Yeah, I mean, you know. We have Marathon over there. But yeah, I mean, well... I wouldn't say they're not malicious. It's just sort of, do you acknowledge that you might be in a minority position here? Or are you like, no, of course we're the majority. There's no way we could be a minority. But again, so VIP-148 had a minority position, too. And it still forced the activation of SegWit, and it still forced its own activation. Some people will say, oh, well, VIP-91 made it do that, but, like, it was compliant with VIP-148. And obviously that wouldn't have happened if VIP-148 hadn't happened. So I agree it's hard. You know, it is a hard question. How do you measure consensus? With the SegWit, though, it was sort of a basic... As far as I know, every developer working on Bitcoin Core was like, yes, SegWit. And much more than just developers. You know, in an equivalent conference like this, you would have had essentially everyone saying SegWit's a great thing. Although there were some people, like, I remember in Hong Kong... Right, Core was on the good guy's side in the World Size War, and they're on the bad guy's side this time. So, you know, we have to work with what we've got. I don't think we should do good-bad, but I do remember in Hong Kong, SIPA gave the sort of Mike Kropp talk of how you could do SegWit as a software. Everyone was clapping. I remember sitting next to... I was standing next to Joseph Poon, and he was like, oh, great. I thought Luke came up with... He was like, oh, no, look. Look at Roger Ver over there. There were people who were not happy about that. And I sort of feel like that's when the sort of Bitcoin Cash stuff started. But anyway. But it is a hard thing to measure, but it does seem that, like... I don't want to say objectively, but it's like... If you're going to run BIP110, it seems like you should plan ahead of, like... Okay, what do we do if it is minority hashrate? I mean, basically, yeah. It's like, what do we do if actually the nodes are not in charge of Bitcoin and the miners are actually in charge? It's kind of like, okay, well, what do we do if Bitcoin is dead? You even said that it was wildly popular and had 17%? Yeah, 15% to 17% is the sort of... But that's a minority, right? So what do you mean the miners are in charge? That's the people who are, like, rabidly in favor of it. Maybe not rabidly, but enthusiastically in favor of it. In order to change Bitcoin's consensus rules, we don't need everyone to be enthusiastically in favor of the consensus rules. We just need a vocal minority that's really in favor of it and nobody that's willing to do a URSF. Which is how it works today. What if you're in a position where it is true that the majority of users actually disagree with you? They have to run a URSF or it doesn't matter. But isn't that actually not true because of the mandatory signaling? What? Isn't that actually not true? If they just don't signal, then they will automatically URSF? No, because there's very, very crushingly huge incentives to not do that because that's the legacy chain and it has wipeout risk. It might get wiped out. Look, you believe that, but if we wind up in a month and there's 1% hash power mining the Bitcoin 10 chain and, and I think this is true, the majority of Bitcoin nodes and Bitcoin users are going to say, well, we don't agree with the Bitcoin 10 chain either. I mean, then what do you do? Or another way to put it. Again, the incentives are for the miners to just converge on one chain. The miners need Bitcoin to be one thing. If Bitcoin is two things, the miners can't sell their coins and pay for their electricity. If you're in a minority, that's bad for you because they're going to want to converge to one thing, which would be the non-Bitcoin 10 chain. It doesn't matter though, because if even a minority chain can catch up and win and if there's a non-zero chance that the minority chain will catch up and win, then the miners have a strong incentive to switch to the stricter chain. What if there was a minority of very vocal, zealous people who said, we need KYC in Bitcoin and said, you know, we're only 5% of the nodes, but we need this. Then there would be a URSF. It needs to be... A URSF. What if it's 1%? I'm running a node. I'm running, I don't know, core 31, whatever. I don't even pay attention. If you think that change is going to be harmful for Bitcoin, you have to do a URSF. So any minority, no matter how small, commands my attention to do something about it, or can I just ignore it? Well, any minority that's at least as big as BIP-148 demands your attention because BIP-148 was successful. I know, but didn't we discuss, there was the SegWit2x, there was a table with people's opinions in SegWit and then SegWit had another quality where, other than the 4 megabyte block size increase, if you put that aside so we don't trip over that, but other than that, it basically just was like a Pareto improvement where it just said you can do everything you were doing before, plus you have this new option. So it would be kind of bizarre to go down the road of opposing something like that because you're just saying, oh, we're just giving someone another option for their transaction. So these were things that SegWit had. But you're saying restricting is the difference? Is a meaningful difference versus expanding? When you do the software to add a new opcode, you actually are adding something. You're adding functionality. So like, oh, check lock time verify, like Peter did. It theoretically invalidates, it theoretically shrinks some things, but it actually, since it takes the unused opnop2, I think. It would be a weird progression of like, SegWit was a big change, tons of people liked it, companies built on it. And then Taproot, people were talking today about Arc and all these Taproot things. And it takes forever, right? It's like SegWit 2016 and then Taproot 2021. And then the next one is BIP 110, which is like, well, it's pretty different, right? It doesn't enable as much. Yeah, it's different because it's the first time in a long time that we've done a sort of defensive software that is basically rectifying some unintended consequences from previous soft forks, namely SegWit and Taproot. There have been forks like this in the past, right? There was a soft fork to eliminate the, there was an emergency soft fork to eliminate the inflation bug in 2010. And there was also some hard fork and soft fork stuff around the 2013 accidental hard fork. So let's just skim through this for a second. So in this scenario where you have 1% hash power mining BIP 110, let's just say hypothetically that one day after that, we have one day worth of blocks on, we'll call it the core chain, which has 99% hash power at that point. And then miners, you know, quote, unquote, wake up. Now, hang on a second, hang on, hang on. Why would it ever get that far? Hang on a second. They'd have to be asleep. Hang on a second. Well, they can literally be asleep. I mean, this is not a... They're not sleeping. The miners are talking about it. If you see mining disrupt, they're all talking about it. Hang on, hang on. Just for the sake of argument, let's just say we wind up in that scenario. I would argue very strongly that the moment the core chain comes out ahead, there's very strong reasons for people to say, yeah, we're just going to keep mining this rather than have the PR disaster, which is, you know, 100 blocks get wiped out. That's crazy. But why would you keep mining a chain that might get wiped out? All of your earnings are going to go both ways. I mean, because you disagree with that direction, and then it looks like it doesn't get wiped out, and very quickly it's, well, shit, we're going to wipe this out. Yeah, but how do you trust that all the other miners are moving over because it's safer for them? Well, because you can go call them up and say, look at how they're signaling this one. So you can collude with the miners to go and attack the node network. Look, miners, like, I don't know, miners can go... You can get your centralized mining pool buddies... Well, hang on, hang on, hang on. You're saying miners colluding to attack nodes, but we've already established that it seems like the BIP-110 nodes are in the minority anyway. I mean, it seems like they're in the minority in the technical community. So, I mean, it is reasonable to say they're in the minority. Right, but again, the same situation happened with BIP-148. It was also a minority, and it also succeeded in the minority. But it wasn't a minority. BIP-148, I was in rooms where you could do hands. We didn't bother to do hands because every developer, other than, like, not every, there were people, and this was sort of the beginnings of Bitcoin Cash because that did come a year or two later. But it ended up being the same people who did Bitcoin Cash. But there were a few people who were like, no, I don't like this. But it was pretty small compared to... Yeah, there's very clear... I mean, if you don't like it, do a URSF. Again, there's a clear strategy for... Do you guys think that BIP-148 is going to harm Bitcoin? Do you guys think that BIP-148 is going to harm Bitcoin? Yes, I do, yeah. Why? Because I think it's bad to have nonsense affect Bitcoin. I don't know, wait, how about we do... These are the arguments that we're dealing with. This is our opposition. How about we start with, like, just a poll. Was Bitcoin Cash beneficial to sort of Bitcoin in the large sense? What do you think? I would actually say... What's the question? I missed the question. Was Bitcoin Cash, you know, being developed, splitting off from Bitcoin, or whatever we call it, beneficial for both sides? Well, can we say compared to what? Compared to not. Compared to they just didn't do it. Compared to just staying and continuing to advocate for... Sure, yeah. I would say that it is beneficial. I mean, it kind of makes sense, right? They wanted bigger blocks, but they rejected SegWit, which actually was bigger blocks, which was, like, just completely indefensible. So I guess what I will say is interesting about Bitcoin 10 is that it is a potential minority hash rate soft fork, which has not been attempted yet, right? Because with Bitcoin Cash, they said, no, it's a soft fork mainly because... It's kind of weird. They took the SegWit SIG hashing stuff and put it into theirs. As the deadline approaches, I don't expect it to still be a minority. Okay, so... But that's, like, what, a couple weeks, right? So that's, like, real soon. Okay, so we'll see. So we won't have to wait long. But again, if there's a whole bunch of people who are really, really for it and nobody is strongly against it, that should activate. And that's actually how Bitcoin works. But isn't everyone strongly against it? And isn't all the... No, nobody is strongly against it. Right now, if people run... Then write a URSF. Right now, if people run a client that does not signal, they just won't signal on August 8th or whatever it is. So isn't that... You will fork off of that? If someone mines blocks on those networks, that will be the fork. So that is the URSF. If that has majority hash rate... That's not a URSF. So a URSF is different because you have to coordinate around how to reject the soft fork. If you don't do that, the legacy chain becomes incoherent because it might just continue disappearing. It might get wiped out a bunch of times. One second, just for the audience. Let me just make sure people realize what the heck you're talking about. You are talking about a user-rejected soft fork where people decide to come up with some way of rejecting it. One of the simplest technical possibilities is simply miners and users, maybe some exchanges, just run the command and validate block on a block in the Bit.10 chain. Simple as that. Just to make sure that even if it somehow comes out ahead... Right, so a few large mining pools decide that the decentralized node network of Bit.10 runners, the 15,000 plebs out there that want to protect Bitcoin's monetary purpose, that they're wrong and those five large mining nodes are actually in control of the network. I hate to say this, but again, this bit about 15,000 agreeing with Bit.10, that sounds like minority to me. Everything I've seen going to conferences, all this, is they're actually minority users. If you have an enthusiastic minority that wants a change and you have no serious opposition, then the change should happen. There's clearly serious opposition. There isn't any serious opposition. There's no URSF. There is no meaningful attempt to resist this. It feels like Bitcoin Cash was an enthusiastic minority. It just feels a lot like 2017. It just feels a lot like that. What do you mean Bitcoin Cash was an enthusiastic... Oh, they were trying to hard fork Bitcoin. That is a completely different thing. What's the difference? Let me revise. If an enthusiastic minority wants to restrict Bitcoin's rules in a way that nobody actually thinks is going to harm Bitcoin, they should be able to do that. If somebody thinks it's going to harm Bitcoin, they have to URSF. Otherwise, there's no defense. If it's a hard fork, that's a completely different situation. Restricting Bitcoin's rules in a way that people don't think will seriously harm Bitcoin, but without a good reason, I think is a harm to Bitcoin. Especially for this kind of reason, it's a social precedent thing that itself is really ugly. We actually did rock, paper, scissors, and myself, the person next to me, I don't know who would ask the question. What I was going to ask you in the previous talk was, let's say that Bitcoin Core had, in fact, responded to inscriptions by trying to go filter them. Probably what inscriptions would have done is immediately tweaked the way they were publishing data to bypass the filter. Would you expect Bitcoin Core to just keep on... Spammers never did that. But we never went down that path. The reason why inscriptions became a phenomenon is because there was a shelling point that formed around that particular format. But they changed it multiple times for various reasons. There's a whole bunch of different variations. They have to form a new shelling point every time. They did this and made money off of it. There are multiple variants of inscriptions and things like it that was launched repeatedly to go make money off of it. But there was never a serious attempt by Core to actually counter it. But obviously, if Core had... We have historical precedent of Core being hostile to spam in 2014. The spammers were like, this is dumb. Bitcoiners are clearly hostile to us. We're going to go build Ethereum instead. I fundamentally disagree. The block size is a much better argument there. Secondly, Ethereum's pitch was a degree of programmable money that was just never suitable to go put on Bitcoin. Ethereum is a very different pitch. The spammers are trying it again. They're trying to put Ethereum on Bitcoin again. It keeps coming back. I don't know why. Inscriptions don't have programmability. They're just pure assets. They're pure collectible assets. Don't give them any ideas. It's a different problem. I haven't heard that. It seems like we all agree that if you don't end up with 51% hash rate, then that would be basically a loss for 1.10. You seem to be saying, they will come around. We don't have them now, but they'll come around. Is that right? It would be much more of a loss for the miners. Again, if there's a chain split, the miners need the chain to resolve to one chain. Bitcoin has to be one thing. If they can't sell their Bitcoin in order to pay for their energy... But if it splits and becomes two things, they can still sell their Bitcoin. We could sell Bitcoin Cash. If there's Bitcoin 1.10... There's chaos. There is no replay. There actually is now. By default, there isn't. Replay protection, I guess, in this scenario, if there is a split, would be on the core V30 side to put a big op return in every transaction because that won't get replayed on the Bitcoin 1.10 chain. Core 30 will follow the stricter chain. That's why a software core, because all of the old core nodes are just going to follow the Bitcoin 1.10 chain. But I'm saying, if it has majority hash rate. I'm saying, if there is a minority hash rate... That's what I was trying to say. There's very, very strong incentives for that. I'm just saying, though, everything hinges on that, though, right? Your entire argument hinges on that. It sort of becomes like a self-fulfilling proxy. You have a little bit of hash rate, so there's a little bit of... Why not have a signaling that requires 90% like all the other soft forks have? What's that? Like Taproot, right? I don't remember. 95%, 90%, whatever it is. Those were minor vetoable forks. Sure. But yours is also minor vetoable, right? Isn't that what you just said a moment ago? Well, it's not, though, because it activates regardless of whether there is a percentage hash rate or not. With minority. From the people running the software, yeah. But again, it looks like Bitcoin 1.10 is in the minority there in terms of people agreeing with it. But even if there were a difference and it was the majority hash rate that poses the majority for nodes... It's the same way that mandatory signaling in BIP-148 became the majority. It was 100% signaling after August 1st. Yeah, and the majority liked SegWit. They thought it was a great idea. No, the majority did not like SegWit and thought it was a great idea. That's just rewriting history. SegWit was really contentious. There was a whole hard fork of people that didn't like Bitcoin. When you say we're going to activate without majority mining support, of course they're saying we will activate with a minority hash rate. That's what those things mean. You're saying we hope we don't. Obviously, you're hoping that it is the majority hash rate. But you're saying, look, it's in the code. If we have minority hash rate, we still enforce this rule. You explicitly are saying we will still enforce this rule with minority hash rate. Right. The BIP-110 chain is Bitcoin. It's going to be the same as the SegWit chain because it has the same mechanism. In order to avoid activating BIP-110, whoever is against it is going to have to fork off and be the new Bitcoin. Let's just say hypothetically that SegWit had in fact ended up activating from the perspective of people running SegWit nodes with minority hash rate. That is really the scenario I think we're trying to go get at here. Say that again? There is a scenario where SegWit could have activated with minority hash rate but majority node support. But Core would not have followed that. SegWit had like 20 or 30% leading up to the UAS app. Core would not have. Core would not have followed that. There was a UAS app for Junior. Yeah, that's up. But yeah, I never ran any software that would have gone on. But okay, wait. So I want to talk about replay protection real quick. So in this case, you're saying, look, this is Bitcoin. There will be no fork. There will be no split. So of course you don't need ‑‑ so there's no replay. Although two op returns, that's a good idea because that's smaller. In the BIP-300, there's a fork and there is sort of replay protection. You can opt into it, but by default, there is not. So by default, if you're indifferent, then I say, then you haven't picked a side, which is fine, but your transaction will be on both chains. You may lose out on the e‑cache part if maybe that doesn't matter to people if they're indifferent. But if you wish, you can make a special transaction that splits them permanently and then there are other ways of splitting. Paul, what is the simplest possible transaction that would achieve that? We changed it so the end lock time, if you do one less than the 500‑year one or something, it's like maybe 1,000 years or something, I'm not sure. But that one will be mysteriously valid on e‑cache immediately. So that will just cut the rule and return true for that one. And so that is the way ‑‑ that is the easiest way. We have an arbitrary backdoor. So you've got to make a transaction on the e‑cache side that won't be replayed on the Bitcoin side. Yeah, you could sign it and then ‑‑ Okay, so you can't really make a Bitcoin one that won't be replayed on ‑‑ I'm sure it must be theoretically possible, but I wouldn't say that would be the way to go. And so you would anticipate then there's going to be trading between these different things. Absolutely, of course, yes. But it's still SHOT2. SHOT256D, yes. I have a question for you guys. So if BIP110, if and when BIP110 gets 100% signaling and it looks like it's definitely going to succeed, will you hard fork like the B‑cachers to reject BIP110? No, it's temporary, right? So it's all good. Right? I don't understand. Totally common sense and harmless. If it actually got 100%, that would be an interesting discussion. If, however, it gets, say, 50%, then this is a curious thing. And if it gets, say, 5% ‑‑ But why would it do that? Hang on, hang on. So if it gets less, then maybe there's some discussion. But I suspect if it gets 100, yeah, it would say, yeah, yeah, you guys won. I mean, I personally would not change any of my transactions, because I don't make inscriptions or operators. But the tree depth, that's kind of like, ooh, I don't want that. Okay, but you can have it once BIP110 expires. If that happens, I would be a lot less interested in working on Bitcoin further, because what this would go tell me is that the Bitcoin community and miners are fucking crazy and are willing to go and do things that are a bad idea. No, but if Bitcoin Core just does its job and filters spam, then none of this has to happen. Well, look, we fundamentally disagree on how technically feasible that is. He said it in his talk. He said it in his talk that you said it, that there's no way to stop the spam. No, you can't stop spam. They constantly equivocate on this basic point that is at the heart of the matter. They say, oh, sure, we can't do it. We are completely powerless to stop spam. I didn't say completely powerless. You're just making that up. It's like saying, can you stop people from breaking into your house? Well, of course not. But are you just going to get rid of your door and your fence? In practice, I have stopped people. No one has broken into my house. Okay, but you just get rid of your door and your fence because somebody got in one time? Well, if they didn't work at all, this is the heart of the matter. You keep dancing around. You want to have it both ways. You want to say, yeah, sure, it's just a serialized set of bytes. It's interpreted as an image later by whatever reads those bytes. These are fundamental. This is like a knife to the heart of your argument and kills it instantly. It's a bullet to the head of your argument. And then you say, well, sure, that's true, but we can do it. And I wrote down some of these comments. Not that it should be like a quote-off or whatever. But basically saying it's not possible to stop spam. More hidden, better. Hostility is the deterrent. Then some other guy, that guy over there, he said, like, hey, is it code or is it hostility? And then you get more equivocation on that. You just constantly go back and forth on what this is really about. It's code as hostility. Filters, it's like your immune system, right? You can't prevent all pathogens forever, but you can put up a defense against them. So is relay policy enough hostility? What if Core said, you know, version 33, we revert back to 80-byte max data carrier, would that remove the impetus for VIC-110? Or is it like, no, we're on this track? They'd also have to filter inscriptions. They'd also have to filter inscriptions. Okay. And that... But, like, why is this happening now? Because inscriptions sort of are dead. I mean, they're not dead, but, like, 2023, it was like, whoa, inscriptions. But there's still a kind of could-be-argued-that-they-are-an-officially-supported-way-of-storing-large-files-on-Bitcoin. And that's the problem. People did it, and then... Well, they're still doing it. Well, can I ask you this? I actually don't know how common they are now. I think runes are more popular or whatever. Isn't a transaction a file? Is what? Is a transaction a file? Is a Bitcoin transaction a file? I mean, technically, no. The blocks are... There's block files. There's .dat files. Technically, no. You can say, you know, in Electrum, you can go to... You can export it to a file. As file, yeah. So you just say, then, it's the exporting that changes the set of bytes into a file. I mean, you could interpret arbitrary data as a file, and that's what they're doing, right? They're saying, you know, this is a format, and if you just read it as a common file type... I don't know. ...then it is a file. Wait, wait. We're speaking a different language here. It's impossible. This is a very interesting question. Let's just say, hypothetically, Core went and added all the filtering rules that you want, and so on and so forth. What would happen if a tiny minority continued to run LibreRelay, and basically it just ended up being, like, all of the stuff you don't like went through LibreRelay, and blocks were still full of it? I mean, there's more technical defenses that we can keep escalating. Wait, wait, wait. Remember. Like, in terms of mempool pause, right? Yeah, what would those... Like, would you say, no, we have to do a consensus change? What I'm saying is, at that point, especially... Well, you're saying after bit.10 activates, or... No, no, no. If Core puts in filters... No, no. I'm saying, in the scenario where we say, let's just say Core had implemented all of these filters on... Mempool filters. All the mempool filters. Yeah. Now, in a scenario like that, where, let's just say, hypothetically, 90% of nodes are running Core, they filter all this stuff, but the small minority running LibreRelay go and mean that blocks are still full of this stuff, what would you say? Yeah, so the miners that are working with LibreRelay are malicious, and they're attacking the network. They're doing something that the nodes consider to be antisocial. So do you want to fork them off? Okay. Like, would you say, in that scenario, that we should do some kind of consensus change to force off the miners that are doing that? Like, do you just get back to consensus change? It depends on how much damage is possible, right? So, the thing about intentional... Let's say 25% of blocks are this. What? Let's say 25% of blocks are by miners who... I mean, the biggest factor is the toxic data factor, right? Like, does Bitcoin look like it intentionally stores large files or not? Well... That is the vector. Here, like, 90% of nodes don't, you know, quote, unquote, don't allow this, et cetera, et cetera. Like, do you just allow this situation to go on indefinitely? It depends on how much damage is being caused. I would say, like, the UTXO set went from 4 gigabytes to 12 gigabytes pretty fast. And if it had kept going to 50 gigabytes or 100 gigabytes... Well, I mean, that's not related to putting data in transactions, though. What? In fact, the operaturns, those don't bloat the UTXO set. So it's actually helping the nodes. See, this is the sort of technical argument that you get from core people, where they look at the... They say a statement. Oh, the operaturn causes less bloat than... So we're actually helping with UTXO set bloat. It's like, no, but you're removing all of the context from that. The context is that being friendly to spam is what causes spam, and spam is what causes UTXO set bloat. If we're hostile to spam, there will be... But spam, according to you, does not cause UTXO bloat. Yes, it does. No, it does not, because... BRC20 is spam, and that was the main cause of UTXO set bloat. You defined it as operaturn as spam. After you said... In your talk, you said it's not possible to define spam. But then you said it's really clear that some things are, but operaturn does not... Just because it's impossible to draw a line between... An objective line between spam and non-spam does not mean that the categories of spam and non-spam don't exist. Would you... Okay, so it sounds like there's mempool policy versus consensus. In a BIP110, let's say BIP110 succeeds, or even if it forks off some way, and there's its own implementation, would the idea be let's make consensus and mempool relay policy as close as possible, or just, you know... No. You want them to be different. Yeah, no, Satoshi clearly designed the consensus rules to be really, really loose so that we don't have to hard fork in new functionality, and he clearly designed policy to be robust to prevent people from doing crazy stuff on the network that harms the network. What if there's a LibreRelay 110? What? This guy might make a LibreRelay 110, right? Well, of course. I'm sure he will. He probably will. He definitely will. So then you have to keep making consensus changes sort of reactively? Well, no. This is exactly why it's different from SegWit. The situation right now is that Bitcoin is not hostile towards spam because Bitcoin Core is not hostile to spam. This is a new situation. Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin were always hostile to spam in the past. Even if Core were, there's a guy with a hat, and it's like 110. Right, but what I'm saying is he's an attacker, right? He's a malicious actor, and we have technical defenses against that. Are we supposed to be doing questions or something? Is that what's happening? Do we want to leave 10 minutes for questions? Okay, sure. Sure, sure. Oh, it says three minutes there. All right. Yeah. I think we did that pretty far. Any questions from the audience? Yeah. Thank you. To the fork authors, what are your plans following up the activation of your respective forks in different contingencies? Wow, that's a wildly abstract wording of that question. But it's funny because, of course, he was just saying a moment ago, like, we don't need any contingency plans because we're always... So, yeah, I think, like, you know, with mine, it's a little bit easier because we deliberately hard fork off to a different thing. We cut the difficulty down. So something will exist. There will be some blocks mined. There may be crazy difficulty adjustments or something. The chain may stall out. There may be people renting. Who knows? But something will happen, and we'll probably learn from the experiment. So even if it isn't successful, we would all gain at least some information. And then, of course, if it could have limited success, it could be cool as a demo. It could have, like, outrageous extra success. It could be more successful than other famous projects. It would be fun. So I think that's, like, the... You know, that's where it goes for me. And then BIP300 is the soft fork. You know, that's... Anyone could use that at any time. And, in fact, I'm pretty sure that Litecoin, they have plans to make use of the enforcer. And so that will probably happen also. What was the question again? Sorry. Basically, what are you going to do in the follow-up after the activation of your fork, in the different realities where things might play out? In the follow-up of the activation? So it expires after a year. And the BIP says that we should plan to activate some other better permanent solution to this. And I can't speak for the BIP authors, but my opinion is that covenants... This would be a good time to do covenants. So that would be a good follow-up, I think. Something that prevents large contiguous data, larger than 256 bytes. And, yeah, covenants is what I would say. But that's just my personal opinion. I can't speak for the actual BIP authors. Another question? Any other? Don't be shy. Thanks so much. This question is to Paul. You're hard-forking to e-cash, which seems to me like you want e-cash to be a lot more expressive, kind of like, you know, programmable, or just express whatever you want with it, right? I'm just kind of curious. Have you considered just building this on something like Bitcoin Cash first, instead of just doing a hard fork? No, because I don't think that would really help. Layer 1 in e-cash is just exactly the same as Bitcoin Core. So the idea is to try to keep as much of what people already like. The thing is, so the Bitcoin Cash, it could be interesting. I mean, nothing's stopping Bitcoin Cash from using the activator. So that's part of the advantage of the Q-SYS, the core and touch software. So you could, but having large, optional large block L2 over a smaller block L1, that is sort of just more efficient than, like, it wouldn't even, you wouldn't even really be. So I haven't really thought about that. But as I mentioned, I'm pretty sure Litecoin will try to use the Q-SYS 30031 activator. So it's certainly possible that Bitcoin Cash could do it as well. And I know that at some point there was some telegram group about Bitcoin Cash drive chain or whatever. So I think nothing's really stopping. To just maybe re-explain this part, all the L2 software that we build, that could be, that works with the 30031 activator and that could kind of work with almost any block chain. So actually it should be possible to just take the entire stack of stuff if anyone likes it. And it would be mostly independent of the L1. So I think that we probably will see some people do that. For, I guess, all four of you, preferably one at a time, how confident are you in your thoughts on the forks and why? So you can go first. Well, I can't believe I'm on a panel where Paul Sztorc, of all people, is a reasonable one. And I guess, yeah, I'm actually pretty confident that Paul Sztorc's drive chain's badly named e-cash thing will, you know, become its own super currency and do whatever and it might die eventually, whatever. As for the BIP 110 thing, I think, at the moment, I think it's more likely than not it gets sufficiently little hash power that it just dies out and doesn't even really become a separate currency. But, you know, I think it's a pretty high chance in the double digits that it does get a minority hash power and then ultimately becomes a separate currency. That may at some point die out, but that'll be a little ugly. And I'd say it has a very low chance, but not zero, that somehow it actually does get majority hash power, which will be very interesting. I could say, yeah, the drive chain, hard fork, that seems like it'll just happen, right? You can do that. It'll be a lot of fun. I'm pretty confident you can do that. I'm not advocating for doing that, but, you know, it'll happen. Because I think there are some innovations, like the sort of one-way replay, which people probably like, and then taking the old coins. And so you might see research, because back in a few years ago, we had a lot of different hard forks, forking off from Bitcoin with Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Gold, whatever. So, like, hey, maybe people get into that stuff again with new rules. With the BIP110 one, yeah, I don't know. It might be minority. It'll be interesting in the next two weeks, because it might be like, oh, well, actually, we realized that we don't have enough support, so we need to change something or tweak something or push it off. I don't know. We'll see what happens. If it does end up being minority, it sounds like the people running it, if you're a representative of them, don't want to have a minority split side, right? And so that would sort of be, like, not a good outcome for BIP110 people. So hopefully we can avoid that. Yeah, I mean, like, all I know, I mean, I'm very confident, like I said, because of the precedent of BIP148. But, like, if something crazy happens and, you know, the miners collude to not activate BIP110 against the wishes of the nodes, which are the soul of Bitcoin, which is crying out to limit spam, you know, all I know is, like, activating it, if it activates, that's how Bitcoin is supposed to work. And if it doesn't activate, that's not how Bitcoin is supposed to work. And we have much bigger problems if BIP110 doesn't activate, you know. Okay, let me give you, like, a metaphor, because the question was, how confident are you? And the metaphor is this. We're on the Titanic, and we're headed maybe for an iceberg. We don't know, because it could be, like, a parallel universe or something. But I'm, like, grabbing all the dining room tables, and I'm, like, sawing them apart, and, like, trying to make, like, life rafts, like, as quickly as possible. And I hope that we miss the iceberg, and that everything's fine, and that lightning works out really well, and all the other stuff we do works great, and everyone adopts Bitcoin, and everything's fine. And I think that would be wonderful. If we miss the iceberg, that would be great. Now, do I think these life rafts are going necessarily to save us all? Probably not also. So I just think, but, like, what else would you do in this situation? To me, it kind of blows my mind we even spend so much time talking about 1.10. That was low on my list of derangements that I alluded to in my talk. I had this long, long list of problems with Bitcoin. The problem with 1.10 is not just that we have it, but that it's somehow monopolized so much of the conversation for, like, a year and a half. I think that's very bizarre. Because it's really important. People running nodes actually care. With respect to 1.10, currently my expectation is that on August 9th, it will just, like, not have blocks. I agree with Peter. Again, it's funny that we sometimes do agree. Where, like, if it somehow got 100% hash rate, I would just think, like, wow, I guess for some reason I'm not looking at the world. Like, I see something. I'm not seeing something about the world. I would almost then think, though, we're about to hit an even bigger iceberg or some other that we're even more screwed than we were before. So I don't know exactly what I would conclude from that. But those are my thoughts on that, too. Can I do an article analogy, too? I think we're on a nuclear submarine, and, like, we're the best top of the line U.S. nuclear submarine, and no one's going to fucking touch us because we're on such an awesome boat. But with tail emission, you know, I do think we're probably going to run out of reactor fuel in 20 years. And we should think ahead 20 years to, like, how we're going to make that work. These guys, on the other hand, seem really pissed off that someone forgot to go and, like, load all of the frozen pizzas in, and, you know, we're missing that one nice thing. But, you know, we'll survive without frozen pizzas. We'll get some more in, you know, 90 days when we restock. I think the analogy is more like this. The iceberg is this arbitrary data thing that's coming at Bitcoin, and it's basically going to kill any hope of Bitcoin being used as money, like, for the foreseeable future, and maybe forever, because if Bitcoin's culture forgets that Bitcoin is supposed to be money, then at that point it just becomes Ethereum, and nobody cares where it goes. And there's a little button that all the miners have that just zaps the iceberg and makes it go away, and that's flipping the bit to activate Bitcoin. I think the nuclear submarine goes under the iceberg, just to be clear. I mean, why is it so important to you that this – it's so important that it's – like, I'm talking about, like, having 8 billion users and Zcash privacy. It seems like this is, like, a completely different realm of, like, significance to, like, whether or not some people sometimes put large op returns. I just – I'm honestly – I'm honest to God curious. Because – Why is it so – this is your iceberg. Why is it so important? I just told you, if we allow arbitrary data storage as an officially accepted use case, then it outcompetes the monetary use case, and it makes everyone forget that Bitcoin is supposed to be money. And you're actually seeing this with Michael Saylor. He's saying Bitcoin isn't money. He's saying my STRC derivative is going to be digital money, and Bitcoin is digital capital. It's like turning into this thing that isn't money. So you're forking Bitcoin because of Saylor. I know, and it's – because Saylor does say – No. He literally says everything both ways. I almost have, like, a list where he said Bitcoin is money. He has, like, tweets where he says Bitcoin is money. Then he says Bitcoin is capital. Bitcoin is real estate. I don't think he said Bitcoin is money for a while. He used to say it back in the old days, back when he was ingratiating himself to the Bitcoin community. But he's not into ordinals and runes, right, or yet. He wanted to use inscriptions for his, like, digital ID thing. Originally, he had, like, some kind of ordinals company thing. But he just does everything every way. I don't think he has any idea what he's actually talking about. I agree. Guys, we have a last question here. Okay. Well, thank you for the panel. It's very entertaining. That's for sure. So I think all of the people on the panel seem to be in agreement that Bitcoin at the minimum has some small realistic chance of activating and there's some chance of a giant split. So given that, I guess I wanted to ask the opinion of everybody on the panel. How do we think centralized exchanges should react at that point of activation given there is some uncertainty on what will happen and following a losing chain for a centralized exchange could be pretty bad? I mean, I don't think there's going to be any uncertainty leading up to the fork. Like, a few days before the deadline, the miners are all just going to turn it on and everything is going to be fine. Maybe. So bizarre. I mean, like, yeah. And, like, I agonize over every detail of, like, oh, like, what if maybe this would happen? It's like you're piloting the nuclear sub and then someone's like, hey, what if we, like, just, like, we're not, like, looking where we're going. What if we just hit something? No, we're definitely not going to hit anything. It's going to be fine. That's what Core did with ripping out the opportunity. I think it's funny that if you do launch something that may split the chain, you kind of are screwing over the exchanges, which I think is kind of funny because the exchanges, you know, they made so much money and they kind of had the run of the place, you know. And I just honestly, I think, given how much money the exchange make and I think it'd probably be the right thing to try to, if there is a chain split, just split it, like, under the hood, especially because it's like Bitcoin Core is the node and just split it and make it, like, the two things and if the 110 people won't give it a name, call it Bitcoin 110 and then just credit everyone with it. I think that's what they should do. And so will they actually do that? I don't know. And if they don't do that, will it just be total chaos as their, like, transactions are replayed and drained from them? Or is it a bad precedent for them to set and say, any random Yahoo who does a hard fork, now they have to have this build, this infrastructure? I don't know, but I'm saying, in terms of August 2026, I would just say, just, you know, just credit everyone's coins and kind of let them trade because they make more money trading. So that's my actual answer. As to what they will really do, I have no idea. I think it will be really interesting as the days approach because exchanges failing to go put up the press releases saying what they're going to do will be a very strong sign that what I think is the most realistic outcome is going to happen, which is BIP 110 basically just fails. I think that's the least likely outcome. Most likely outcome is the miners are going to be like, wait, so you're telling me there's a bunch of people who really, really want to activate this and they're going to start throwing away our blocks and there's absolutely no reason to oppose it? Let's just turn it on. The legacy chain is going to have a bunch of vulnerabilities that the new chain doesn't have. Let me answer this poor guy's question. So if exchanges do start putting up those press releases, then I agree with Paul there, which is the obvious thing to do is just credit both sides and then start letting people trade. From a technical level, it's a bit of a nuisance because you have to do a few extra steps to make sure you do BIP 110 noncompliant transactions to cleanly separate both sides. But fortunately, putting two up returns in one is enough to do that. It's not terrible, but certainly with cold storage, the nature of cold storage is often the systems that actually handle those coins are really locked down and touching them is something no one ever wants to do. So it might be the case that some of these cold storage systems, it's going to be a pain in the ass to change them to let the coins get split. But we'll see. I think maybe what we maybe all agree on is that since exchanges are trusted third parties and we don't know what they're going to do, it's always better, no matter what the case is, to have your own keys and have your own coins and then whatever happens, you'll have everything. Do people agree with that? I hate to say this, but one catch with this is a lot of wallets are not going to give you a way to cleanly split things. If you had your money on an exchange, you would. But at least you're free to do it if you can figure out how to do it. I don't think it's worth it to even talk about a chain split because the historical precedent is that there won't be a chain split. All of the miners will just figure it out in the days leading up to the deadline. But yeah, withdraw from exchanges. Not your keys, not your coins. Not your keys, not your coins. One super last question. I was just going to say apologies. I'll go for like eight hours, whatever, I don't care. Would you just quickly TLDR why you decided to hard fork specifically and is it because to use Taj's language you just want this to actually happen? We haven't had enough competition. I think things have actually been really boring over the last ten years. And the fact that we're talking about 1.10, I think Peter was clearly right. I was waiting to get rid of the op return limit for a really, really long time. I always thought these standardness limits were misleading, mostly. And I just can't believe that the fact that this is what we're talking about is 1.10 and we're not talking about how to add privacy to Bitcoin or how to do anything cool. We're just talking about all this nonsense. We need to have some other thing to do. And I think that obviously all the alt coins people really don't like and most 99% of them are terrible. We don't really want to give Ethereum any... So I thought this would be a cool thing. Everyone will get coins. If you have people who are very interested in doing something with whatever opcat or whatever, they want to do some kind of near-Bitcoin thing, we have some other flavor. So I just say, well, give us some other thing to do. I think things have been very boring for the last ten years. Of course, saving Bitcoin from existential threats is not the most glamorous or sexy thing. I definitely agree with that, but that doesn't mean it's not important. Okay, thank you to our panelists. A huge applause, please. Thank you.