OP_RETURN Debate: Hard Money or Wizard Dick Picks Forever - Ep 018

JD and Bondor dive into Bitcoin's role as a financial game-changer while exploring the contentious op return debate affecting its future.

 

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Hosts:

JD - @CypherpunkCine on 𝕏
Bondor - @gildedpleb on 𝕏

 

 

Sponsors:

Unknown Certainty - The Bitcoin Ad Company
IndeeHub - Reshape the Business of Storytelling - @indeehub on 𝕏

What is Better By Bitcoin?

Bitcoin makes everything better. Join the team and our guests as we unpack how, why, and where we go from here.

Hey friend, listen. I know the world is scary right now. Corruption, war, inflation, demographics,

degeneracy, disease, unrest, hatred, and despair. We didn't come here to tell you how it is.

But that it's going to get way better.

Better, by Bitcoin.

Better, by Bitcoin.

We've got to get that track to play for like four minutes after we start because it's just kind of the best.

It's just kind of the best.

It is. It's great.

Welcome to the show, Better, by Bitcoin.

We are going to be talking about the op return debate.

JD, you've been very involved with the debate.

You're actually listening to the conversations that are happening with the people that are actually directly connected to this.

So you have the inside scoop on this.

So I want to give you as much time as possible.

But it probably is a good, like, just introductorily time to just explain the mechanics of Bitcoin.

How transactions work, how nodes work.

Just lay some foundation and then move into what this debate is about and how it came about.

What's the back story and then go from there.

Yeah. And I'll preface everything with I'm not an engineer.

So actually on any of the things that I get technically wrong, which you probably have more insight into, kind of dive into on that side.

It's like the finer sides of like op return and things like that.

Like I'd actually probably lean on you.

Oh, I don't know the finer sides of op return.

Perfect. But I think the bigger piece and I think we don't need to rehash all the more technical things because that's going to be the

actually like engineers to solve and kind of talk about.

But I think the bigger thing that people should understand before they dive into this is most people who are probably going to watch this or like see this and kind of come into it is you are looking at Bitcoin as a store of value or medium of exchange.

Like, let's start with that as a foundation, because you have a bank account or you have a credit card or you have some type of monetary network.

You use money, currency, U.S. dollars, euros, pounds, shekels, whatever it is you're using are mediums of exchange in stores of value.

Like you put your money into a bank for it to grow normally because they're goading you with interest or rather they're saying, hey, we'll pay you interest or we'll keep this safe for you.

Currently in the digital age, keeping your money safe for you.

All that means and which is why Bitcoin exists is unless you're giving them gold, you are just giving them money's numbers on a spreadsheet.

That's it. That's all you're giving a bank is you are giving a bank numbers on a spreadsheet from one financial institution that they then verify in some way, shape or form, which I can verify from people.

People I know who work at the Fed is Kabuki theater. It's not real, but they're telling one financial institution that, you know, bond or has these shekels in their world that they can give to me in my world.

So from Citibank to Chase or Wells Fargo or what have you, and then they make a transaction or rather they move those from Bank of America to Chase and then they rectify those two things on the back end.

They rectify those spreadsheets.

And those transaction ledgers, that is Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is an open source version of that and essentially essentially literally a version of that ledger that anyone can verify.

And it's creation after the 2008 or like introduction after the 2008 financial crisis was in direct response, we assume, to the constant futzing with the monetary system and specifically inflation that we've been experiencing in this world.

And so what Bitcoin is, is it's a network of nodes, which are those ledgers I was just talking about.

So, you know, currently Bank of America has a node, a ledger, and Chase has a node, a ledger.

And the bottom of those ledgers, nobody knows, like we, nobody knows what M2, that's money supply.

Nobody knows what M2 actually is. All we know is that there is an M2, it's the mythical M2 number.

So there's a, there's an amount of money in the, in the world, but we don't know about it.

We do know because of fractional reserve banking that that M2 number is constantly changing, which is inflation that's passed on to you, anybody who holds U.S. dollars or any dollars, any currency whatsoever.

And that was what Bitcoin was trying to solve with an open, completely transparent pseudonymous ledger that anyone can verify.

That is what Bitcoin was trying to solve is, hey, this inflation, which is an invisible tax, is not cool and we want to end it.

And so we're going to introduce a ledger that everybody can see and everybody can cross verify.

I can cheat off of Bandor's work and he can cheat off of my work because that's the point.

We need to be able to keep each other in check because we both have a monetary incentive of, hey, don't screw me over and I won't screw you over.

And so that nodes have that ledger and then the miners are the ones that actually are responsible for updating that ledger.

So they look at all the transactions that are supposed to, I want to send Bandor money, he wants to send me money.

I want to go from Bank of America to Chase.

The miners are the ones that actually look at the ledger and update it.

And so the miners do a bunch of work.

And basically this is where proof of work comes from.

But they do a bunch of work.

They do a really big mathematical equation to create new blocks, i.e.

new entries into that ledger over here.

And then all of those entries that become valid entries, a valid block has a group of transactions that then says, OK, cool.

You guys want to make these transactions.

So this transaction between Bank of America and Chase, we're going to verify it, say that it actually happened.

And we're going to put that transaction into the next block or entry in this ledger that everybody has access to.

Like that is Bitcoin.

Why it's super important.

Because that's literally how monetary networks work in our current digital age.

We don't have gold backing up our ledger.

So when anybody says like, oh, Bitcoin doesn't really matter because it's just all funny money.

Sure, that's kind of true.

But so is all current money right now.

All money is funny money unless you actually have physical gold.

It's like the gold bugs are not completely wrong.

The difference is if I want to move, you know, 100 billion dollars worth of gold, I need to probably spend 10 million dollars worth of like literal hard crazy logistics.

I got to get trucks.

I got to get ships.

If I'm moving it from France to the United States, I got to get like mercenaries are going to kill anybody who comes in to try to steal my gold.

Like there's like a lot of logistical stuff.

Whereas if I do it in Bitcoin in the same way that the Fed and all these other companies and corporations and sovereigns are doing it, all I have to do is change ledgers on an entry.

And so that's why Bitcoin matters so much is because in the future and in this current world, doing what they're doing now in the Kabuki theater world, if we can make that trusted and trustworthy and a really good, solid way of just doing financial transactions, doing one thing and doing one thing really, really well, we can actually solve a lot of problems.

And the number one problem in which is invisible tax.

So circling up on what's actually going on today with this opportunity and stuff, the biggest issue in Bitcoin is something that if you're just here for the money, you're probably not even paying attention to.

And I wasn't paying attention to it either.

I just happened to be involved because some of the people that I'm working with and just kind of like listening to a bunch of spaces today and kind of getting a greater understanding.

I'm going to butcher everything, but here's the nature of the problem.

And my camera's probably going to freeze because that's how it always happens.

It's already happened a couple of times.

It's fine.

Just roll.

Just roll it.

But the I have like the worst Internet in the world.

But the issue is not the Internet.

It's your connection.

Yeah, it's my somewhere in my hardware stack.

But the issue is this Bitcoin, which in the actual white paper was released and the title of it was Bitcoin, a peer to peer electronic cash system.

Satoshi Nakamoto.

So in the actual definition of what is Bitcoin, an electronic cash system, it was a device or a piece of software that was created to be a monetary medium of exchange.

It was something that was created to facilitate this digital age of commerce.

That's what it was great for.

Over the years, there have been a lot of things that people have looked at, like, oh, hey, I can do this with this.

I can do this with this, which is kind of what you want, right?

If you want something that's going to potentially be hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of value, 300 trillion, if it takes over the entire world, you want people to poke it and prod it and find the holes.

The problem is there's a lot of people who are trying to look at some of these these bugs in these holes.

Like, let's assume Satoshi is one person, right?

International economies are really freaking complicated.

I would not expect, which is why we have Bitcoin core and all these developers.

I would not expect a single person to be able to look at all of the different.

Vulnerabilities and security issues and to be able to fully launch a piece of software that would just solve everything like that's just not realistic.

And having worked in tech before, like that's actually just not how tech works.

Like you, you iterate, you iterate, you iterate.

And so where we are now is we're at a point where there's a lot of people, OGs in Bitcoin on both sides, you know, like the Peter Todd's of the world and then like the Bitcoin mechanic and the Luke Dasher's on the other side.

Who, you know, the Jameson Lops as well, like Peter Todd and Jameson over here and you have mechanic and like Luke over here.

And I don't want to speak for anybody, but the net net is you have a group of people who have a financial incentive to see Bitcoin become more than a financial network.

And then you have a group of people who are just hellbent on this definition that I read, a peer to peer electronic cash system.

I land on this camp where I want my money to be stupid and dumb.

And as Satoshi said, a dull gray rock that is just valuable.

That's all I care about.

I do not care about your wizard dick pics.

I don't want your wizard dick pics.

And so we're in this.

Nobody.

There's not a soul on earth who wants that.

Udi wants that.

Even the people.

Even Udi?

No, he doesn't.

Udi wants that.

He says he wants that.

But deep down inside where his soul lives.

Yeah.

He just wants a lizard dick pics.

He just wants to be on.

Okay.

But I know we're going.

We're going down.

We're going to get banned from at least YouTube on this.

But the net net here is I want Bitcoin to be money and nothing else.

And if it does not explicitly serve that purpose, it should be excluded.

That's my personal take on it.

And I'm brand new, you know, ish to Bitcoin.

You know, I just just got here a couple of years ago.

And that is that is the issue with this current, you know, merge that Bitcoin core is about to push out.

Is there essentially going to remove a constraint or rather they're going to remove the option for a constraint?

So my understanding of what's going on now, this opportune debate, is they're going to remove a toggle.

And actually, I was listening to debate earlier and somebody was like, so you're OK with them removing this toggle?

And people like, oh, I thought they were just going to remove a limit on the size of these opportune, which I think it's from one megabyte to four megabytes.

But they're going to actually remove the toggle.

And you're not even going to have the option as a node runner to either person who controls the ledger.

And for people, again, who don't understand, like all of the nodes need to be in consensus.

And that is the Bitcoin network.

It's like the way the Bitcoin network works is all of these nodes say this is Bitcoin.

This is what you own.

It's all based on this.

And then these miners, I'm going to do different hand signals for that.

But these miners are the ones that add more to it.

So these people are not the ones keeping the ledger.

They're the ones adding to it and subtracting to it.

But these people are the arbiters of like that is a valid transaction that can happen.

That cannot happen.

This all runs on the majority of the Bitcoin nodes right now that are the proper consensus are Bitcoin core because it's one of the easiest things to run.

And then another one that's coming up is Bitcoin knots, which is created by Luke and Luke Dasher.

And my understanding of this entire debate right now is the core folks are going to essentially remove the option for you to have Bitcoin be an explicitly monetary network.

And a lot of people like, oh, it doesn't really matter because, you know, you're just looking at the negative side of things.

But my take is personally like.

You have to look at the negative side of things.

You have to assume.

Someone is going to exploit any opportunity you give them if there is a financial incentive to do so.

And so I'm I'm currently of the mind that, you know, if it is profitable for somebody to scam someone with a wizard dick dick JPEG, they're going to do that.

And if you can make it infinitely cheaper for them to do that and they can cram 50 of these JPEGs into a single block for the same cost of one, they're going to do it because they have a financial incentive to do so.

And so that's the issue that I see begin.

That's like one of the many issues.

But the main issue is they're going to make it easier for people to scam people because they're making a non-monetary aspect of Bitcoin that has been found and is being exploited by inscriptions and ordinals easier to do, which, again, this is all my understanding of it.

But the secondary and the more unfortunate ramification will be the will be.

And somebody was telling me, I think it's like 200 additional gigabytes a year.

You could get to a point where the network, which I think has been growing at a couple of gigs a year, could now be growing at 200 gigabytes a year, which over the course of time, you know, sure, space is going to get cheaper.

I understand that.

But the issue is not ever about the.

Like singular size of the block chain, it's the access to the technology.

So, sure, there's a lot of people will be able to afford, you know.

More and more data space to be able to store more and more of Bitcoin's block chain.

Right.

But the issue is at what point.

You know, it's kind of like a floodgate argument.

And where I go with this is it's like, you know.

Wherever you're pointed, you're going to get.

And so this points towards Bitcoin being not solely a monetary network anymore.

And that is the slippery slope, in my opinion, I think that, you know, I would argue and I would posit that that's what mechanic and a lot of these other guys are saying is, you know, if you're starting to point yourself into not being solely a monetary network.

You are then going to become a shit coin.

You're going to become an old coin because you're just pointing yourself that way.

It's like, you know, you look at a long enough time horizon.

It's like right now it just looks like this, which looks like that.

But 10 years from now, you're all the way over here.

And that's not where you started.

And so that's, I think, the bigger issue here is the the focus needing to be wholly on Bitcoin, the peer to peer electronic cash system exclusively or something else.

That's the debate.

Right on.

Thanks for the massive intro.

So one of the things that comes to mind, like listening to that, is that.

I don't know if you can hear the garbage truck behind me.

Oh, man.

Well, there's also like just just there's a ton there to unpack.

One of the things that's coming to mind, though, is in the block or like block size wars, I fought as an infantryman in the block size wars.

I did not otherwise have any participation, but like I ran a node and I participated in that way.

The block size wars, there was a lot like the BSV camp basically was saying this is what Satoshi said.

This is what Satoshi.

Like this is what this was his vision.

They would they would quote the white paper as evidence for their their side of the debate.

They would like memorize things that Satoshi said about it.

So every time I hear something like, no, no, no, this is what Satoshi said.

I'm like, OK, but that's ultimately that's an appeal to authority on the topic.

And the authority on the topic isn't necessarily Satoshi.

You can actually think there's a whole list of things where the code base disagrees with what the white paper said, what Satoshi said.

And so there's like this huge I think merch put it together.

It's incredible.

Sorry, if it wasn't merch.

But it's like, well, Satoshi got an incredible amount of things right.

But, you know, he also missed the boat on a handful of things going back to one of your original points,

which is like you can't have this kind of software written and managed by one person.

There's just no way you have to have multiple eyes on it.

A security model would would assume that it's open source software and has a lot of eyes on it.

And therefore you get higher security because more people are able to see the vulnerabilities that you might have overlooked or failed to consider

or not had an expertise that allows you to even understand there's a there's a vulnerability there in the first place.

Which, by the way, I'm just going to say on that point, that is the bigger part of the debate right now is Bitcoin mechanic.

And some of the guys from Ocean were were blocked from making comments on the GitHub on the Bitcoin core.

That's the problem about this.

That's the bigger side of this debate, too, is they're going to push an update that is being actively that has active dissenters on it.

And they're basically just saying, yeah, fuck you. We don't care. We're going to do it anyways.

It's that sort of thing. Like they're not allowing the debate to actually happen.

Yeah, there's I mean, there's so many layers to it, too.

So like with Bitcoin core and it's hard to unpack all the layers in sequence or even at all.

But like with Bitcoin core, there's a release schedule for Bitcoin core.

I don't even know which one we're on right now. I think I'm running like 19.

I'd probably take the car like the Carvalho, John Carvalho stance and be like, no, I'm just never going to update.

And like you just so you can just never update because it's not none of these changes are breaking.

So there's like a level of like. If you just never 28.1 right now, by the way.

Yeah, I'm like not even in the 20s, I don't think. Maybe I'm a 21. I forget.

But all of these things are like there's there's these layers to it.

Like, oh, if you want to have all of the like all of the regular like the new stuff.

Sure. Then you're going to have to update. But if you don't care, if you just want the money, you want Bitcoin as hard money.

Well, you don't have to upgrade. This is like, OK, cool.

But then you're going to still have to you're still going to have to run a node that has the right amount of storage space to be able to run.

OK. And hey, maybe you maybe you will run out of storage space.

Let's see. I just had. Yeah, I can tell you all my node info.

So over my shoulder right here, this is my node. It's a highly available Bitcoin node.

It has how many volumes on here? One. Two. Three.

Should have. Shift four copies of the block chain on there.

Four copies of the block chain. That's Raspberry Pis, five Raspberry Pis and two NUCs.

The size of the block chain, if you're stripping it down but not pruning it, it's about seven hundred and fifty gigabytes right now on this.

But this is this is managed through container system. So it's it has snapshots and other things.

So there's a little bit of padding on that. But those are hard drives that are two gigabyte hard drives.

And you can see, obviously, like there's a there is a timeline between when you purchase the hard drive and when it runs out of space because you're running out of space on Bitcoin.

OK, so you got to every day the Bitcoin block chain gets longer and bigger and you got to be able to manage all of that space.

OK. Well, with a two gigabyte hard drive at two hundred gigabytes added every year, two gigabyte hard drives and like one point three terabytes or something,

or no, yeah, one point three or one point seven terabytes. So then you get into all these other usable space.

You get into the economics of it. OK, well, it's at seven hundred fifty right now.

That means I get like if if we don't adopt this thing, that means the hard drives I have will last for another.

Three years, right, so OK, so three years, then you look like, well, what are the costs of going to what's the cost going to be for replacing those hard drives?

At three years, you can try and apply like McCullough's law and like the pricing of all this stuff and like, OK, two hundred gigabytes like you can.

And I've been tracking for the last couple of years and I'd say that like. Three years, yeah, I probably like.

We're talking about incremental like is does the is this percent outweigh this percent and go to it's like it's going to be incremental.

Like it's going to it's going to be ballpark. Right. It's not going to be like blow it out of the water, but that's in three years.

Right. And then what if McCullough's law kind of like tapers off because we're now at the limits of storage and like all this other stuff?

Right. And like it's a huge there's so many layers to it now. OK.

That's that layer. That's that layer. There's and then there's other stuff like.

The spam filters itself and just jump in when when like just cut me off and jump in when you have insight on this, because you're going to know more about the stuff and because you're just super close with it.

I'm not like I'm like I haven't been able to pay attention to any of this stuff. I just see it popping up on Twitter.

So the spam filters themselves are. Essentially irrelevant, like if you look at what Jameson Lopp posted, it's like you can just you can just post like with everybody has this like ultra tight and filters, but you can still get around it because of the way that the opportune works with with Taproot, which was a known vulnerability when Taproot was merged and there just wasn't enough like community chutzpah about merging Taproot.

Unless I'm off on that. But the consequences that were like, well.

You basically if you want to be a node runner, you have to plan for these eventualities.

OK, so if you lose eventualities like you want to be a node runner, you want to participate in the fundamental like first principles.

No, no, no. I am a sovereign. I am a senator in this like running a node as it participates with all the other nodes in the network.

Well, that means that I'm going to have to keep up with whatever those costs are. And it seems to me like those costs are going to be incremental.

Maybe at some point those costs like outpace.

Right. Even if it's two percent more. Well, two percent over 30 years is going to be considerably more unaffordably more.

Right. But if it's two percent less, well, it doesn't matter because two percent less is going to be considerably less.

Like anybody, you can have a phone on your thing on your phone.

It doesn't matter. But do we know what those percentages are going to be?

Yeah, I think the bigger. So here's the all that makes sense.

No, that's correct. My personal thought on what the bigger point of contention is, is you have super high capex.

We're getting out of the pleb era and we're getting into an era now where there are people with really big checkbooks that are going and are acquiring a lot more Bitcoin.

All of them are financially incentivized to have their personal financial interests.

You know. Come through on the blockchain and using the blockchain because Bitcoin is the only block, the only real use for a blockchain.

Yeah. And so if, you know, if your financial incentive is to turn the blockchain into the database, then you will do so.

And you get to this place where we'll say, for instance, let's take Mara Pool.

Right. Let me just look on mempool.space right now and see what the largest like, you know, the two largest pools right now still are.

Foundry and pool, you know, an ant main, essentially.

And so say you're foundry or pool and you guys now have realized that the largest financial incentive you have.

And by the way, the last as I'm talking right now, foundry and pool have found the last three, four, five.

Six, seven of 10 blocks. Right.

So if you get to this place where the financial incentive for you as foundry and pool is to literally just store wizard dick pics and and just censor everybody in a roundabout, sly roundabout way.

You know, the same way Bitcoin has kind of become Bitcoin and kind of like trying to take over those financial institutions.

You then can slowly over time edge people out in multiple ways.

You have the hash power way of doing it. So whatever template your node is looking at.

Right. So there's like a couple different layers to it. But, you know, you remember, go back to that analogy here is the way you add a new block to the ledger is you look at the ledger and then your ledger, your node has a mempool on it.

There is no the mempool, but you have your own mempool.

So it looks at your mempool, which has all the broadcast transactions and then determines which ones you want to put in your block.

And so then if you mind the block, you have created the block that has then been consensus agreed upon as the next thing to be added to the ledger.

But you're looking at a world where you could essentially edge people out in a couple ways.

You have the hash power to, you know, right there. They have roughly 70 percent of the blocks in the last, you know, last 10 blocks.

So you could theoretically make it almost impossible to use the block chain in some way, shape or form, because it's more important for you to advertise about the Super Bowl or to advertise about your given political candidate winning.

Right. Like I'm just kind of like trying to walk these through into different things.

It's like, OK, so we have 30 percent of it. So we think you should just blow the entire block chain with thousands of blocks that say Donald Trump is Hitler.

And then no real commerce will happen, which makes Bitcoin a non viable financial platform.

And so, like, in my mind, that is actually a more existential threat than thinking about all these other things, because, you know, yes, Jameson is not wrong that spam filters, you know, are imperfect.

I'm not going to say that they don't work. They absolutely do work. If you, you know, the Portland Hoddle made a comment of like, well, you can take a dollar bill and you can write on a dollar bill and you're storing you're storing something nefarious or something separate on that dollar bill.

I can write a message of like, you know, Bitcoin is real money and put that on the dollar bill. And then that makes the storage space going to quit the face of the dollar bill, storing something that it wasn't originally intended to do.

And it's like, yeah, you're not wrong. However, that's not the intended use. Like I can rape your dollar bill and put something nefarious on it, but it's still not the intended use.

And so you need to actually. Yeah, there's actually a really interesting thing about about the intended use when it comes to like just hashing and hash algorithms themselves, because and I think this is in like one of the precursors to one of like they were talking about this and you'd like maybe be money.

Why I talked about this could be totally wrong there again. Got to check my facts. But he's basically saying you need to have some kind of thing that serves no other purpose except to be hard to fake. Right. Oh, just what's that thing?

What's that thing? Oh, it's just random number generator like and that's where we get where I would suppose assume that that's where we'd get something like the knots, which is literally just a random number that miners have to produce.

And you run them on the random number is attached. You attach it to your block. You hash the block. If the hash has the correct amount of proof of work, you're good to go. If it doesn't, you go back and you put another different random number in the knots and you go again.

OK, so what? So it's like, oh, that's a huge waste. Right. And so. Initially, you think like, oh, it's a huge waste, we should we should instead of choosing random numbers, we should be looking at how do we find prime numbers or whatever, but then then you're kind of missing the point.

I'm like, well, no, no, it needs to be a specific thing that would be a waste, because if you can just find prime numbers and you're going to optimize some other solution to find prime numbers and then somebody is going to have an advantage when it comes to creating new blocks.

So it has to be something single purpose. Now, to your point, I mean, I'd have to sit down and really think through how much of that applies as you as you go up the stack. Right. Because in the extreme, in the absurd case, you can say, oh, well, we know that Antpool mined this block.

That means there's irrelevant information on the block chain.

We know that ocean minus like that means there's irrelevant information on blockchain like, oh, they have like each miner gets a little like a little space where they can write whatever message they want or whatever.

Well, we should get rid of that, too. Well, actually, we should probably get rid of whatever kind of vanity addresses that you can make, which you've got to get rid of those.

And it's like, well, it's like getting rid of an event like that's literally how the Bitcoin network works.

You can store information if you wanted to. You could store information in vanity addresses and then have some kind of lookup table that looks up the vanity addresses and you spend you spend bitcoins like that's a perfectly good use of Bitcoin.

So you really get into these these weird arguments. And it's not to say that any of these guys are wrong or that any of these guys are right either. It's just to say, like, this is complicated and it gets it just gets more more convoluted the more you look at it.

Yeah, I would I would argue, though, you have to have a binary decision decision making framework because somebody must be right and somebody must be wrong.

Like, I actually I actually do think you need to make a call on this. And the reason I say that is it's like.

You know, morality is not.

Fluid.

Ruth is a binary, and so somebody has to be right, somebody has to be wrong on this.

And I do believe that.

From my perspective, the long term viability of Bitcoin is only.

Safe as a strictly monetary network, because I think we have SQL and different types of database software that's really good at storing content.

But there has never been a really solid financial storage mechanism that's cross-border, that settles almost instantaneously, roughly in 10 minutes, that has a very low threshold entry.

If you want to participate in the network, be it mining with bid X or be it, you know, actually protecting the network with a node from actually running your own ledger to be able to verify your transactions like that has never existed before.

And so my personal take, and I'd be curious your take on it, but my personal take is anything that is antithetical to that, anything that adds any additional barrier to entry for somebody to be able to participate on that network is wrong and should be should be should be removed.

I do firmly believe that.

So I think I think that's valid.

I think that there are definitely some truths that supersede like time, right?

Like it's for all times and all places.

It's wrong or it's right.

However, many, many, many truths do not.

And there's a there's some real wisdom in trying to figure out which is which.

Do I need to decide today or like, hey, is this person evil?

Well, I don't know.

They've said some weird things.

It's been it's been a goofy town, goofy, weird, like hanging out with them has been goofy.

But like, are they evil, though?

Do I need to cut them out of my life?

Like, OK, well, that's pretty.

You know, that's a little bit more gray area.

Oh, well, now they've done something that's clearly evil.

Right. OK, well, then.

That makes that makes that decision much more easy.

But until that point, well, it's like, well.

Maybe it's not prudent to hang out with them, but certainly like.

Would it be prudent to just like cut ties, let's say their family member, right?

Like even more complicated.

Right. So there's there's definitely layers there.

Now, one thing for me personally, that's absolutely true, which is like.

Do not like the Lord hates a unjust way.

Therefore, the thing that matters for me in Bitcoin is whether or not you get any kind of monetary inflation.

Right. So what are the odds that you get monetary inflation?

Well, it's pretty slim.

Because of the way that the network networks work and also stuff.

And like you can even look at like safety and talks about this, too, where it's like, well, even if we have only central banks running Bitcoin and there's 800 central banks, you like you're you're essentially kind of you're still in a.

It's not necessarily federated, it's still peer to peer, but the the peers are banks and the Bitcoin network itself is just too expensive.

To run for your average everyday user and therefore, you know, hey, we still have.

We still have Bitcoin, we still get access to the base monetary layer if you can afford to, but by and large, it's all just the central banks playing games against each other and they have to play the Bitcoin rules against each other as central banks.

Now, this is like decades, if not centuries into the future.

Right. But that's a viable opportunity or viable framework for humanity to exist in where the inflation is still zero, verifiably still zero.

Now. That like, OK, do I personally want to want to push in that direction?

No, I love like I love running a node like many nodes.

Great. Fantastic.

OK, so what makes sense for me and how do I participate and how do I, you know, like look at this holistically and with wisdom and with an understanding about both sides and see who's right and what's wrong, see who's right, who's wrong and what the actual technology is and does and how it functions and all that stuff.

And yeah, so there's that.

So we're we're at our switch point of like the doom and gloom.

So like how.

Like, how does this get better?

How, you know, how does this get better?

So one thing.

One thing that comes to mind in terms of how it gets better.

Is I guess you'd probably have to look at this, look at the proportions on this, because obviously Bitcoin users have gone up significantly over the last five, 10 years, obviously.

But what about node counts now?

I remember checking node counts years ago, like back in the block wars, 2017, and node counts were something like 10 to 12000 of reachable nodes.

Now, I know Luke Dasher has done all sorts of work about trying to find and quantitize unreachable nodes and nodes in the Tor network.

The numbers are not like exact by any stretch of the imagination, but you can look at reachable nodes at something like 10, 12000 in 2017.

Today, I just checked it, I think yesterday, it's like 25,000.

Yeah, 2021.

Currently, 21,000.

Oh, yes.

My bad.

Not today.

That's impressive.

That's to say that the amount of people who are interested in running nodes has not accelerated, but increased, right?

That matters because, well, 20,000 nodes is considerably harder to shut down or co-opt than 10,000 nodes.

So the amount, the node count over time has increased.

Now, has it increased with usage?

Maybe not.

Maybe it's, you know, only increasing in tech minded people who want to run nodes, who are bought into the ideology and all this other stuff.

Whereas there's a whole set of people who are just trading dick pics that don't care about node running.

They should run nodes.

Now, when those people run nodes, they'll quickly realize the errors of their ways because it'd be expensive to run a node.

And they'll be like, those incentives will come into play.

So that's your first point.

First point of hope is like, no, there's way more, way more nodes that are being run today that were run even five years ago.

And there's a lot of people who are buying into the idea that, you know, it's going to be expensive to run a node.

That's your first point.

First point of hope is like, no, there's way more, way more nodes that are being run today that were run even five years ago.

And the expectation is that as Bitcoin grows, that will continue to grow.

I have no intention for the rest of my life, whatever the cost of shutting down my nodes.

End of story, right?

So whatever the spam thing is, it doesn't matter.

And I imagine there's a thousand other people just like me who are like, don't want the spam.

Of course not.

But, bro, we're going to run the nodes with the spam.

We have to run the nodes with the spam.

So that's the first point.

The second point, in terms of bringing some hope to this, is...

Totally just spaced on it.

Spaced on it.

Man, right on the tip of my tongue.

What do you think about it again? Jump back in.

I think it's a valid point of, you know, I'm just looking at bitnodes.io.

I got it.

And we're up 230% in the last eight years.

So, yeah, I think that's valid.

You know, more people are engaged and interested in doing the work to run a node because it's not arbitrary, right?

You could buy an Umbral or you could buy a Start9 and basically plug it in.

Like, essentially be running a node.

Or even like the Apollo, which I have one of those.

Like, if you buy a future bit, you can be running a node tomorrow.

But, yeah, it's still work required.

But, yeah, what was your other piece?

So, yeah, and to be clear, if you are listening to this podcast and you are not running a node,

like, and you're participating in Bitcoin, you're on the fence or whatever,

that should be your first priority.

Stop buying Bitcoin and go run a node.

Like, for real.

You're not participating, really, until you've run a node.

You're just a nothing.

Start9, you know, Start9.com or the other one is Umbral.

Yeah, here's our affiliate links.

We don't have affiliate links yet.

I think you can make one, actually, for these ones.

But Umbral.com, also Umbral is U-M-B-R-E-L.com.

Yeah, but Start9 is probably the place you want to start.

They're hardcore and they're super legit.

Yeah, they're OGs.

You know, I will say Umbral's website is very Apple-y.

It looks great.

Like, they did a really good job with their redesign.

And no offense to the Umbral guys, like, not to shit on Umbral OS,

but, like, I have an Umbral right now and I've been trying to reach it for the entirety of this call

and it will not pop up.

So, like, just do with that as you will.

If you're technically minded, I put together a guide to build this node, this bad boy behind me.

It's called the, check it out on GitHub, which is at, let's see,

I think it's gildedplebe.github.io slash hab dash guide.

So, check that out.

If you're technically minded and know Kubernetes, like, that's the way to go.

But, yeah, so, second point, the solution to this issue,

and this may actually, like, I would love if this becomes the rallying cry for basically everybody in the space.

One, let them, like, remove the spam filters, who cares?

Two, reduce the block size with a soft fork and say fuck them.

Reducing the block size is another one I think that actually, you know,

I do think that's the most interesting solution.

And, again, you want to explain that because you were here, it sounds like,

or the block size wars and I was not, but the, I want you to, can you do two pieces?

Kind of give an overview, but then also explain why that's actually valuable in a good way.

So, the Bitcoin had a one megabyte block size,

and I'm going to get the intricate details wrong, so bear with me.

Go read about it yourself.

Here's the high level.

Bitcoin had a one megabyte block size since inception.

Not really true, but there's all sorts of weirdness about that,

but Satoshi put a one megabyte block size maximum on there to just as a last-ditch effort,

let's say, to remove spam and keep the block size from bloat while it's still in its infancy.

Okay.

So, as Bitcoin moves and develops and gets more interest and the blocks are full

and people are trying to send transactions and the transaction fees are going up,

we enter into the 2016, 17, 18 block size wars where there's basically two factions.

One says, remove the block size limit.

Bitcoin is mature now.

We can have unlimited blocks or double the size of the blocks or four times the size of the blocks

or do whatever, like we just do all sorts of interesting things on the blockchain now.

Let's just do it, whatever.

Hey, it's all safe.

This is led by Roger Ver, by the way, and a lot of other Bitcoin Cash BSV guys.

Yeah, a lot of people who didn't really get it.

And then there's the other side of the camp, which basically says, which is the camp I was in.

I run USAF, user-activated software, USF, I don't know.

BIP 148.

And we basically said, no, we're all dead.

Like the whole ecosystem is dead if anybody can just write any amount of information to any block

with unlimited block size or a block size that was in disproportion to where we were in the space

and the technology that allowed us to participate and function correctly and appropriately.

Now, who is it?

Was it Luke who figured out?

Yeah, Luke is the one who figured out how to make SegWik work.

Yeah, who made SegWik.

So there was a suboptimal way that transactions were put into blocks.

And this is a bastardization, but bear with me again.

And what he decided or what he figured out is that you could reorganize the transaction

so that the witness was separated from other data.

And if you did that, then you were able to save some space.

And you were able to get some other cool things, like you were able to activate the lightning network

and you were able to activate a handful of other interesting technological things

that are probably too far in the weeds for this call.

So the user-activated software guys, myself included, were like, look, here's the reality of it.

A block full of transactions costs $50 in 2017 dollars.

So like $100 today or $200.

I don't know.

Who could possibly know?

What's M2?

Just take M2 and divide it.

Oh, God.

Okay, so we basically said there's a real issue here.

The transactions, you have to spend so much money for this.

You can go look back at the mempool history.

It's crazy.

Way worse than it was in the last couple of years.

And basically said the real problems.

Two, there's a real solution with SegWit.

But three, we should also increase the block size just for the sake of the volume.

Like we can't just sit here on this.

So that was kind of the community rallied around that.

A lot of the core developers, including some of the people whose names have been mentioned in this call,

were like, oh, my God, this is crazy.

We do not condone the user-activated software.

This is completely imprudent.

But we just did it anyway.

We're just like, fuck it.

The node runners are the people who run the Bitcoin network.

If the node runners decide to change the way that block templating happens,

all the miners are going to have to follow suit or they're going to lose all the investments on their infrastructure.

Or if the node runners wanted to decide that, well, we're going to kick all the miners off the network anyway,

they can just do that, too.

So that's a tremendous detriment to themselves,

because part of the miners' value is that they provide security for the network so that it can't reverse transactions.

So, again, it's all tradeoffs all the way down.

But at the end of the day, the node operators are the ones who have control over the network.

One of the things that was incredible during and after the node wars

was that the people in the Bitcoin cache who wanted unlimited or larger blocks,

they would point to, look at all the node runners who are signaling for Bitcoin cache.

And they'd pull up the graphs.

You can verify it yourself.

It's like, wow, there's tons of network, tons of Bitcoin node runners that are signaling for Bitcoin cache.

And shortly thereafter, it was revealed that most of those nodes were just EC2 instances or whatever it was, AWS nodes.

So they were like one person spinning up hundreds, if not thousands of nodes in support for Bitcoin cache

as a foil for everybody out there who would think that they could get by by relying on argument ad populum, which you cannot.

You have to think about the stuff from first principles for yourself and run your own node according to your own stuff.

Now, that's. Oh, what was your original question?

That kind of takes us through the history of the block war and kind of block size wars and why that was important.

But you had another question that was follow up for that, which was what?

How does reducing the block size make it better?

So. Now, today, we've been we had full blocks for, I think, years on end, maybe there was a connection to pull up.

And full box is to say. The mempool is not clearing, so I have a transaction, I put it, I send the transaction.

And. If I don't have a high enough fee rate on there, it just never gets confirmed, it just sits in the mempool for potentially forever.

And my miners are not mining spam that, too. Yeah. So then.

Yeah, so the mempool was cleared for most of twenty, twenty two, continually and emptied and got cleared.

Go back further. But that was the last time the mempool was cleared until recently, the last couple of months.

So why does reducing the block size matter?

Well, it basically makes transactions more expensive and when transactions are more expensive,

you cannot afford to put spam on the blockchain and nobody's like the mempool may not clear that point.

But the transactions that declare are much more expensive and therefore are monetary transactions that actually are participating in the network in the way that the network is meant to be participated in,

as opposed to just throwing whatever random JPEGs on the blockchain that you think were funny.

It's which is not a part of how it's supposed to be run.

So reducing the block size would make the economy of of the.

The economics, rather of the spam, much more difficult, which is great.

Hey, if you guys want to if you guys want to spam, go ahead and spam or reducing the block size.

Consequently. You're going to it's going to be expensive to spam, which is the way it should be.

It should be expensive to spam. If you want to spam, go for it.

You're free, you know, free as a bird. Have fun.

But it's going to cost you because it's retarded behavior.

Now. What what are the what are some other downsides of that?

Well, I mean, actually, I think Luke put together a really interesting. Analysis, a perspective on it that basically said basically made a really strong argument that a one megabyte block size was too big.

Just straight straight up, which is, again, one fourth the size we have now.

Yeah, I think he wants 200 KB blocks.

Oh, yeah. I think his original thing was 300.

I remember the 300, but 200 now. Great. Perfect.

Yeah, it's something like that. 200 or 200 or 300.

I mean, personally, I think that seems aggressive and maybe like that doesn't that's not going to just fly very well in the community.

But if you reduce the block size by 10 percent or 20 percent is like as like, cool.

No, no. These have consequences. If you want this, then you're going to get that.

Sorry. And it's it's there's actually like researching this recently as well.

And I'd have to neither here nor there, I guess. But researching the idea that.

Node operators are the ones who control the network and node operators control the network.

Well, there will probably become points and it's just like running any organization.

Right. If you're running if you're on a film set and you're you're shooting a film and you have to manage all these people.

And like somebody doesn't like you or some some other random thing is going on where this this person's fighting with that person.

So they're not doing their job right or whatever the random B.S. drama is. Right.

Well, at some point, that's going to and this is the same thing with like running an office.

It's the same thing. Just human psychology or conducting an orchestra.

I want to get away with my little like whatever side project.

And the authority has to step in and say, like slap the person and say, no, that's not going to work.

Like you, you either get to choose to stop that behavior or you get fired.

Right. If it's an office setting, not that you would slap somebody in office, but metaphorically now.

In terms of Bitcoin, the people who are in control are the node operators.

Now, there's twenty five minimum twenty five thousand reachable nodes.

So that means that these node operators, like if there's a situation where they have to crack the whip, they're going to have to crack the whip.

Right. And in my opinion.

That that should be. Used sparingly, but used right.

Like that's that was one of the whole reasons of or one of the whole images is behind the user activated software was that you have to crack the whip or else people will forget that they work for you.

People will forget their place in the pecking order. And when you do that.

Oh, wait a second. I don't want to lose one hundred million dollars that I spent on this infrastructure.

So I'm just going to back off. Right. Cool. I think that's another positive thing that's going to come from this opportune debate is.

It's going to be really hard for someone who has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure and logistics and all this stuff put together to actually be running a mining operation to ignore the nodes.

Conversation like it's going to be really, really hard after this to, you know, I'm I'm through this conversation.

I don't particularly enjoy the fact that they're probably going to merge this thing.

But I feel that actually is going to force people to.

Look, much more people will be running Bitcoin, not saying, look, everybody's going to be running Bitcoin.

And then we'll then what happens next? Well, oh, well, we have two competing.

Highly venerated implementations of Bitcoin.

And I mean, one of the things that I did with with this node when I first made it was that I didn't want to be relying on core at all.

So I built the entire infrastructure around multi implementation nodes.

Now that has its own issues and you have to kind of be careful with that.

But if if we're talking about highly skilled engineers.

All working on one project because you get the brain trust.

Right. But then people who are intellectually not just engineers, but intellectually aware of the game theory and the economics and all the other big picture stuff all start going to some other node.

And they can articulate very well why they're doing that.

Some not node, but implementation. You're going to see a brain drain or at least a bifurcation of of node implementations.

And that's going to be, in my opinion, I think that's going to be healthy.

Now, either one of those implementations is going to be a little bit less secure, perhaps.

But we're talking about one, the most the most secure infrastructure, the most secure software that's ever been written.

Probably, yes.

Debatable because of Kubernetes and the amount of the amount of value that that Kubernetes defends, but debatable.

Especially as the price of Bitcoin increases now.

OK, so you have two versions of extremely secure infrastructure running.

And they have different government structures, governance structures, different goals, and those goals are then at odds with the rest of the ecosystem.

Now, maybe this ends in a chain split.

Chain split.

Well, then you're going to have to decide, you know, with the Bitcoin cash chain split, that's the most Bitcoin I've ever acquired in my life because of that.

Great. I think somebody somebody's going to be right and somebody's going to be wrong.

And that's when, like, Judy, going back to your point, when somebody you have to decide when somebody's right or when somebody's wrong, it's like, no, I actually don't.

The moment you have to decide when they're right or wrong is when there's a chain split, because at that point, I mean, you could keep value on both chains, but come on.

Like, if one of them starts, it's just, bro, you're 100 percent going to lose all that value.

Case in point with Bitcoin cash and like, whoa, the the game theory really just connects at that point.

Right. Like everybody, you either everybody goes or it's game over.

It's just like there is no it's just a game over for you because you just lost half your wealth.

It's just it's unbelievable. So, yeah, I think I think there's a lot of interesting things you said there.

And I think, you know, we're we're coming up on our time break.

But the the positive spin on this from my take is all the things that you said, echoing that.

But it's going to be really, really hard for people to ignore what's going on in Bitcoin.

And I think the value is Bitcoin.

Somebody said it in the space today. The value of Bitcoin is those who are engaged with it, period.

It's the same thing with U.S. dollars. The value of U.S. dollars is those who are engaged with them.

You are engaged with your money because you engage with your money every day.

You know, to be on the Internet right now, to be running this electricity in my house, I'm interacting with the monetary layer of commerce.

And so things like the opportune debate are going to force people to actually pay attention and are going to further secure the network for the next 10.

You know, let's say 10 years, 100 years, because I don't think we're going to get any type of 100 year consensus on this.

But for the next 10 years, in a positive way, it's going to be, I think, a challenge.

As we see, some people have been good supporters of Bitcoin and protection, you know, protecting it might kind of like, I'm done and just kind of like check out.

And I think that's going to be a big challenge with A.I. coming in, too, because we're going to have a lot of people who are really not tech savvy, but think they are because Grok wrote them a really great app that they're going to dive in and maybe screw some stuff up.

And so I think we're at a really interesting moment where...

But I mean, that argument cuts the other way, too, where there's going to be just as incredible people coming in and being like, oh, light bulb moment, I figured it out, I understand this thing.

Like, this is, I'm in, this is it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's always going to be people exiting a space and entering the space.

But I think the the net positive of this opportune debate is at the end of the day, it's going to force people to get engaged.

And I think that's the thing, like the posts today about this from, you know, some folks online are getting hundreds of thousands of views at this point in time or tens of thousands of views.

And it's showing that people actually care because when you start futzing with people's money, they care.

Yep.

They're going to care.

Yep.

And so that's the thing about a soft fork or any type of fork here.

You know, and Portland Hoddle said this.

He's like, oh, people can, you know, just kind of, you can run your own soft fork if you don't want to do this thing.

It's like, that's just disingenuous, because at the end of the day, you know, people are going to be like water unless they actually understand what's going on.

And most people don't.

And so, you know, I think it's going to force people to get more engaged.

But the bigger challenge here is it's like, you know, the people who can afford to be the most engaged are the people who have the most Bitcoin.

And they aren't necessarily the people who have the most to lose.

Because at the end of the day, if there were a soft fork, they would do the same thing you said, like, oh, I'm going to move all my money here.

But then we actually will get to a good debate.

All right.

All right.

Portland, put all your money where your mouth is.

Let's do a soft fork and steal all your Bitcoin and move out of that chain.

Like, yeah.

So it'll flush the system out.

I guess it's not bad.

For anybody who's just out there and doesn't like doesn't know how to feel about this.

Obviously, go read the books on that have been written about the blockchain wars or block size wars.

But also, like, you will, to weather any of the storms in Bitcoin, you will have to think for yourself.

Get to the root issues like identify and and uncover logical arguments and logical fallacies.

And at the end of it, if you play the game right, like you could be sitting on.

An unbelievably fat stack because you made the right choices and you thought through the things the right way and you chose and then, you know.

Split the chain.

If there's a chain split and they split the chain and you get on the right side of history and you're you're good to go like this.

It's an incredible it's an incredible opportunity for those who can muster it and you should muster it or weather it.

Those who can weather it and you should weather it because it's so worth it.

It's incredible.

So yeah, like check in for real, like huge opportunity.

If you can see it, if you can play, play the game right.

And if it's a huge could be could be a huge loss, too.

So it's not.

It's not financial advice.

Yeah, not financial advice, not zero risk.

But at the end of the day, you're 100 percent right, which is everybody gets more engaged.

Everybody has to figure this stuff out.

And that's what's beautiful about it, because then you're you're more inclined to understand why Bitcoin is so much better than the legacy garbage system where you do not get a choice at all.

And you don't have to research it because it doesn't matter what you say or think.

And this system, it does matter what you say and think.

So exercise that exercise your voice.

Get into it.

For real.

Yep.

And get ready for your world to be better on a Bitcoin standard.

That's right.

All right, guys, that'll be it for us.

We'll see you next time.

Peace.

Thanks for tuning in to better by Bitcoin.

Bitcoin makes everything better.

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Not financial advice.

Mathematical certainty.