ready to go the bitcoin plus plus oxford debate series day number two
um sorry to do brief opening remarks again but i promise no more american history lessons
i just thought it was interesting hearing people's comments on uh the first version of these that we
did yesterday and just how different it is from the debates we've we typically have in bitcoin
whether those are online or even just like the panel style um and the trade-offs between the two
different approaches and obviously there's a difference in what the participants have to do
there's a lot more work uh that you have to do when you are going to be participating in a debate like
this because it's you know much longer form and you have to kind of think about the narrative arc of the
the whole uh uh argument that you're presenting so uh obviously you know very grateful to the to the
participants uh but it also asks a lot more of the audience members uh you kind of have to do a lot
more work to track the arguments to understand what's going on because it's not as kind of like
quick back and forth addressing single points one at a time uh you have to follow along as well so i i
like to think of that as an advantage of this format uh it forces us as an audience member uh to to to
think a little bit work a little bit harder than we otherwise would have but i think that that just makes
us all uh better participants in this ecosystem so uh so thank you all for also participating so for
today's debates uh the motion is ossification is a greater threat to bitcoin than new upgrades
so ossification is a greater threat to bitcoin than new upgrades
okay and in the affirmative we have jameson lopp bitcoin educator and developer co-founder and chief
security officer of casa his writings and talks cover diverse topics ranging from personal security
to privacy to quantum and then in the negative lisa nigat got that right yeah uh founding engineer
of base 58 the engineering school built on the bitcoin standard long time blog streamer lightning spec
contributor and jet setting conference organizer of bitcoin plus plus
so the structure is going to be basically the same as what we had yesterday but obviously we only have
one debater on each side so there'll be a little bit more time uh for the opening statements uh or for
each each section because we won't be going as much back and forth so opening statements will be eight
eight minutes each rebuttals six minutes each we'll do directed q a q a again um where i'll probably do
some to kick things off and try and and poke at some of the topics a little bit and then we'll let
for uh time for some audience and then closing statements at six minutes each
and now again this is a competition there will be a winner at the end and the way that we pick the
winner is based off of the side that pulled more votes to their side by the end so the goal is to
actually change minds not get the most number of votes so the audience will vote before and after the
debate uh the greater percentage change between the first and the second votes determines the debate winner
this is being live streamed and we are opening this up also to online votes but we're keeping
them separate the winner is determined based off of the in-person votes uh but we'll be able to see
the votes that are going on online afterwards as well so uh before i show that link one more time
the motion is ossification is a greater threat to bitcoin than new upgrades
okay and you can cut the stream and i'm going to show the
so load it up and let the voting begin we'll give a couple minutes
before we start off
oh and as we did yesterday there's also the bingo cards uh we did end up having a winner
although nobody we did not have a winner so uh the goal is is blackout
no blackout this time so just a straight line
normal bingo first person to get normal bingo wins you can yell it out but uh don't yell out anything
else uh we're going to try and and you know give as much time to the debaters uh uninterrupted as possible
uh yes ossification is a greater threat pro ossification you can tell from the conservative
yes yes if you're if you're in being in favor of the motion is being anti-ossification
that makes sense
yes jameson is a dirty progressive
i i'm trying to i am an objective moderator here so despite the the the suit i i don't you know i'm
trying to try not take one side or the other um all right any difficulty voting are we good to to close it
okay everyone good all right so to start off in the affirmative we will have mr jameson lop
check check very good all right thank you i am here to argue that ossification is a greater threat to
bitcoin than protocol upgrades i believe that bitcoin can only remain vibrant relevant and
sufficiently decentralized in the long run through the willingness to implement sensible and broadly
beneficial protocol improvements in a careful consensus driven manner ossification to freeze the
progress at our current point in time is arrogant ahistorical and a rejection of the same visionary
foresight that created bitcoin in the first place thoughtful continual evolution is key to bitcoin's
long-term value proposition i pose to you that digital gold is superior to physical gold precisely
because it is not an inert object bitcoin today is 16 years old it has undergone many consensus changes
and upgrades it's premature to assume that this particular point in time is the ideal stopping
point ossification proponents should be able to explain why now specifically is the right time to stop
improving bitcoin why not three years ago five years ago ten years ago i pose to you that protocols need to
to adapt over time in order to remain viable just because bitcoin is functioning well today does not
guarantee that it will function well a decade from today it's quite arrogant to believe that we can foresee
every potential future problem and every potential future improvement from our current perspective today
and in fact we should learn lessons from other popular network protocols like smtp the email protocol if
bitcoin ossifies then we should expect that developers will build increasingly complex convoluted and risky
layers on top of it in order to meet the demand for missing functionality today you can survey the landscape
of layer 2 technologies that are being developed things such as spider chain collider vm and even bit vm which
is one of the causes of the recent op return controversy while we don't want to make bitcoin a kitchen sink
protocol adding low level functionality to the base layer can make sense if it significantly reduces the
complexity of building functionality at higher layers many desirable features such as covenants vaults
and payment pools require base layer upgrades building these in a clean way on the base protocol itself
i argue is far superior to hacky overlays that may be tried to work in by developers that are trying to
route around the current limitations and a base layer that has more building blocks ultimately unlocks a
new design space for bitcoin as an ecosystem careful well-tested upgrades that have been thoroughly
debated and have reached community consensus do not undermine the property rights or bitcoin's core
stable money proposition rather these upgrades can enshrine the will of the users instead of overriding
them because users are not forced to take advantage of new functionality if they find it uninteresting
and i believe that bitcoin has far greater potential than what we have achieved thus far
i view the bitcoin blockchain as a cryptographic accumulator for a wide variety of systems many of which have
not even been envisioned yet that will be able to anchor into it this is another what fancy way of saying
multi-layered architecture much like the architecture of the internet itself and where we are today we have
barely scratched the surface of what is possible by ossifying today when it's very difficult to build
permissionless second layers we are hamstringing our developers and we are significantly limiting the
experimentation to find the most valuable uses of this very scarce common good that we call block space
people often say we don't need to change bitcoin because we can just scale with other layers
and that would be great if it were true but we don't have all of the primitive building blocks at the base
layer needed to make it easy for our developers to fulfill the vision that we see being propagated as a
narrative around social media now historically it's worth noting we implemented three different consensus soft
forks to enable three different building blocks at the base layer just in order to create the lightning
network without the functionality that was enabled by those forks the lightning network protocol would
be far clunkier and the game theory not nearly as sound and in the days before those forks activated
those early lightning developers were building their software under the assumption that they would have
that functionality available because none of them really wanted to build the hobbled version of the
network and there are a multitude of other soft forks that we could implement things like sig hash any
priv out that have the potential to supercharge the lightning network and allow things like channel
factories potentially giving us an order of magnitude more efficiency and scalability there are forks that we
could do to enhance things like privacy with cross input signature aggregation there are forks that we
could do to create new functionality like covenants that could increase the security of our users who take
self-custody via functionality known as vaults things that enable reactive security something that is not at all
possible today with the current protocol limitations that reactive security would allow you to recover from
catastrophic security failures and of course scaling is an ever-present long-term issue and open question
i really like this quote from greg maxwell 10 years ago greg said if the system is too costly people
will be forced to trust third parties rather than independently enforcing the system's rules and if
bitcoin blockchain resource usage relative to the available technology is too great then bitcoin loses its
competitive advantages compared to legacy systems because validation will be too costly once again
forcing trust back into the system if capacity is too low and our methods of transacting are too
inefficient then access to the chain for dispute resolution will be too costly once again forcing
trust back into the system i think that scaling sovereignty by taking advantage of technological progress
is basically a freebie it's an improvement granted to us by the aggregate results of all human civilization
and ingenuity and to throw that gift out the window is tantamount to shooting ourselves in the foot
the decentralization of verification this was an inherent part of the block size war debate and that's only one
part of the story decentralization of economic actors i argue is at least as important to the long-term success of
bitcoin and i think that we should remember it's not the will of the absolute number of nodes that determines
consensus in the future of bitcoin but rather of the economic majority of nodes and these economic actors
include everyone from individuals to miners and transactors custodians and custodians uh corporations
with bitcoin as it is today a maximum of depending upon your assumptions maybe a hundred million people or
other entities around the world can access the fundamental properties of bitcoin with the world
population around 8 billion i expect this situation will result not in a new utopistic decentralized
money that changes the landscape of value but rather creates a new elite who over time may very well
follow the age-old path of elite groups throughout history of initially creating prosperity before ultimately
ending in bread and circuses for the first time in history bitcoin has the potential to do more
than merely shift power from one elite to another but only if we continue to work towards maximum
decentralization by improving the protocol and making bitcoin's fundamental properties accessible to more
people around the world
beautiful all right and now uh to to argue the the negative
we have lisa nugget oh uh hello everyone uh jameson makes some really great points but um i think
when we're talking about ossification um threats to bitcoin are worthy things to talk about the network
depends on our ability as developers technically gifted humans who truly understand the nature of what
we're dealing with to keep the system running and in working order threats to bitcoin come in many forms
as an engineer and technologist i tend to focus most on the technical side of bitcoin features and adoption but
there are social sides to features and changes that deserve consideration as well we are told that we
must change bitcoin because if we do not it will fail no one knows what will cause bitcoin to fail we must not
give in to the fear to fear in the face of obvious and continued success and adoption to be hasty about
making changes that are good enough instead of ones that aim to simplify and cut through to the heart of
increasing bitcoin's ability to be decentralized a peer-to-peer value exchange
keeping bitcoin working and running with minimal attack surface is as minimal attack
surface as possible is a worthy goal bitcoin is valuable because it can be held by individuals
bitcoin is valuable because as a monetary network it continues to work you can send a transaction
it lands in a miners pool and miners continue today to produce blocks occasionally a problem is found with
the bitcoin protocol satoshi famously deactivated a large swath of opcodes early in the project he was
worried that their inclusion and activation in the project would provide opportunity for a bad actor
to attempt to take the network down we as developers and node runners most important task is to keep bitcoin
running preferably in a decentralized way and excessively such that anyone who wants to run a node is able
to do so we must continue to fix problems as discovered in the protocol we should aim to improve the user
experience of using bitcoin but we should not be hasty when doing them as making the wrong changes is more
dangerous than making the right changes slowly we are not currently under attack or threat the network is not
regularly falling over it is more likely the changes we make will destabilize the system than increase
and continued stability ossification isn't about refusing a future it's a commitment to the core values
that makes bitcoin one of the strongest monies in the world it's saying yes to building a strong
foundation for decentralization and peer-to-peer monetary exchange anytime you change a working system you risk
breaking something the obvious breaks are in the code or creating a vulnerability that allows for bitcoin
as a network to be knocked over or for funds to be taken without permission but there are other
there are other breaks that you could make in the social contract and those are ones that we should
avoid it is our duty as developers and engineers to maintain the system in working order this means
running nodes for ourselves making decisions about what is valid in the protocol and what is invalid
and working as bitcoiners technical and non-technical alike to run nodes and miners to provide redundancy
and support to the propagation and storage of blocked data making changes to this working system is no
small feat it should not be taken lightly it should not be embarked upon without a clear understanding of
the goals that we are attempting there are risks associated with updating a moving system one that has been
adopted one that has become infrastructure ossification is not an adherence to defaults it is a commitment to
the users of the system and their understanding of how the system does and should work it is making the
system more predictable and easier to maintain a reason about no one who wants bitcoin to succeed would
have the courage or the short-sightedness to stand up and defend their assertion that ossification means
we don't patch problems so what does ossification really mean if bug fixes aren't upgrades what
are the real debate here i think is what classifies as a new upgrade versus what is a change that will
refine or simplify an existing process trying to change bitcoin is dangerous and difficult especially
when the proposed changes require reimagining of the use cases and contract underlying bitcoin we should
rightfully be cautious and suspicious of projects that aim to reimagine the uses of bitcoin in their own
image or in the image of a system that was designed to work for their own profit imagine buying a car
and then later that later receives an upgrade and becomes a boat do you live near the water how useful
is it to you that your car can now travel through water flying cars exist but you don't buy them because
it's much better to buy a very nice expensive car that can travel across the land quickly and a separate very
nice plane that allows you to travel in style distinct systems that are well adapted to the use case are
far more valuable than a vehicle which attempts to accommodate every desire for movement in conversations
i've had it's become obvious to me that i'm often being asked for a feature or proposal that the person
pitching me has a vested financial interested in the success of that proposal being adopted there's
rarely an interest in what is good for decentralization of exchange or making it easier for
into individuals to hold their coins a simpler system if you want more features and users to pump
your own bags it's not about freedom it's about your own greed even vitalik admits that bitcoin did it
right with our simplicity some with simplicity wait simplicity comes from a clarity of focus
for bitcoin the focus is on transacting peer-to-peer it's about sending and receiving value anything else is a
distraction many people hold bitcoin it's the most widely distributed cryptic currency and one of the
most distributed currencies in terms of geographic location of its holders bitcoin aimed to be decentralized
and it has succeeded at becoming decentralized upgrades to bitcoin threaten the understanding that
these hodlers have about the nature of the asset that they own as currently written the bitcoin protocol is a contract
that specifies what is valid and invalid and every node on the network agrees to uphold and maintain
those rules of validity as we talk both amongst ourselves as a well in the wider community about
the changes we like to make to what is valid and invalid in bitcoin we put the harmony of the network
at risk by asking nodes to not only the considers that the changes we like to make but actively update their
software such they're now enforcing new rules anarchy thrives in such situation but commerce is only possible
between true peers so changing a system that is well understood into something that is less understood
is undesirable as an educator having the system change frequently means that i have to work harder
to update my materials more frequently to people understand what that change means for them so
communication is a precursor to consensus communication must be reenacted every time a new person joins the
network every change and feature requires a re-communication to every interested and invested party
features and changes are therefore incredibly expensive on a human cost side and failure to
communicate effectively leads to disenchantment with a project a lack of trust and a failure of us to
live up to our commitment to be an open source ecosystem that is understandable by newcomers oh my god
so if we want changes you can make them you can fork bitcoin you can run your own chain we've seen tons of
projects in the early days of cryptocurrency that tried to add more features to blockchain technology
they've mostly failed or become shitcoin casinos the economic value of a network comes from the people
who use that technology and bitcoin works because it promises the ability to transact peer-to-peer with
no central authority why must we as bitcoiners be constantly pitched to accommodate new features and
uses i expect new visions of bitcoin will exist and will continue to receive patches and proposals to
change how bitcoin code works we should consider them carefully um the future has already been
instructed it exists in our ability to contract real transact real eternal value without third parties
thank you very much all right now we're going to go into the rebuttal phase there'll be three minutes i think
six minutes each that's right three who's per person yesterday great six minutes for rebuttal uh and
then we'll go to the q a q a session all right yeah so the steel man argument for ossification posits
that bitcoin has already achieved its core functionality as sound money and store of value and further changes
even if well-intentioned introduce unnecessary risk and those risks could undermine the very properties
that make bitcoin valuable by ossifying the protocol we ensure that bitcoin remains a trustworthy
and immutable system for the long term right it's true every change includes risk the fear of unknown
unknowns however in my view is not a logical argument and why is this it's because every decision has
unknown unknowns and by that i mean making changes to the protocol has unknown unknowns not making changes to
the protocol also has unknown unknowns the argument effectively cancels itself out from my view i believe
that the way that you come to a solution to this predicament is through understanding that vigilance
is key and the anti-fragility of the protocol only is ensured through the continued vigilance of people who are
watching the network people who are maintaining the code and people who are incentivized to keep this
system running and as we know there's a few trillion dollars on the line so i think the incentives are
there it's also true that complexity creates risk this is why i believe that changes to bitcoin's base layer
should be performed with the goal of reducing complexity and higher layers of software by providing
more powerful primitives that are safer for developers to use and easier for them to reason about rather
than having to go off and create a bunch of convoluted game theory that is risky in its own right
another issue that i have with ossification advocates is that the world in which bitcoin operates will
never ossify itself the world will continue throwing new problems at bitcoin and if bitcoin cannot adapt to
solve them then we should expect hacky and most likely centralized solutions to be bolted on top
and we can learn lessons from what has happened to other network protocols bitcoin is actually affected
by the ossification of other network protocols for example the vast majority of bitcoin nodes that
people like you may be running at home are not reachable by other nodes on the network they're not
accepting inbound connections this is a result of network address translation on routers which is
necessary due to the total ip address space limitation of ipv4 as a result we have 7 000 reachable ipv4 nodes
even though there's closer to 60 000 ipv4 nodes out there so this is sub-optimal for the topology of the
bitcoin network tcp similar type of thing this is a basic level transport layer used for almost everything you
use on the internet tcp was designed to be optimized for liability to make sure that data gets where
it's supposed to go but there's so much hardware out there that has hard-coded interpretations of tcp
there's no way for us to effectively improve it to make it faster so people who want faster tcp have to
actually build on other protocols like udp smtp email this is a similar story it was designed for the reliable
delivery of messages under the assumption that everyone would want to receive messages and that
was great back in the 1970s and 80s where only a few thousand people used the internet but in the 90s we
started having millions of people adopt this protocol and join the internet and a few naughty people joined
and these naughty people figured hey why should i send spam through snail mail when it cost me
many cents to do so for each recipient and with smtp it's orders of magnitude cheaper so what happened
the world changed and smtp could not adapt to that change there were new adversaries that had not been
thought about by the developers and because smtp effectively ossified in the 90s when we needed things
like better security encryption anti-spam mechanisms engineers only had a few options and they decided
to bolt on some centralized reputation systems and authentication systems based on dns which is
centralized in and of itself and anti-spam is these days mostly based on reputation and
you've basically got a handful of trusted third parties out there who are telling us who to whitelist and
blacklist all these solutions got slapped on the top of the protocol and as of today it's basically
impossible for an individual person to use smtp themselves it doesn't require a stretch of the
imagination to see how bitcoin could follow down this path we see centralization occurring everywhere from
minor centralization to custody centralization etfs and corporate treasuries are not helping out with
those things and we don't know what the long-term market is going to look like for bitcoin and block space
what of these uses are going to be the most valuable to people this question i think becomes more and
more important after each having and i think that having more functionality and more layers that people
are able to run their experiments on means it's more likely for us to find the highest possible
value use cases of block space this is important of course in order to ensure the long-term thermodynamic
security for the network and i think that we just don't know what those possible value use cases could
be and it seems pretty arrogant for any individual to assume that they know as of today what is better
than what the free market of the future will be so from my perspective it's best that we enable innovators
to continue exploring the potential design space for bitcoin
so thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
all right uh jameson while a dirty progressive makes some valid points um i think the first is that we agree
about decentralization um where we disagree is on where the arrogance and changes lie
um it is true while it is true that changes have been made to bitcoin by some fearless technologists who
dreamed of a better future one that we now all currently live on and build upon
i believe that it is true arrogance to think that you can take a change and apply it to bitcoin um and hope
to improve upon the vision of that satoshi himself had um the bitcoin that we use today is not the bitcoin
that satoshi originally envisioned and um while it's not possible for us to move backwards in the past
soft works are one way anyways um it is arrogant to think that we should continue moving in a direction
that takes us farther from his true vision um that being said um uh sorry um
uh we've already achieved much with bitcoin as it is bitcoin is the most adopted cryptocurrency
currently in existence back when we were making more changes to bitcoin the number of stakeholders and
hodlers was a more technical developer audience in general now it is widely held by institutions by
grandmothers by um shitcoin traders looking to make a quick buck um if we change bitcoin um it is our
arrogance that threatens the social contract and expectations that these users have of the assets
that they are holding um how what what responsibility and arrogance do we have to maintain the system as it is
as it is working and continuing to process transactions um and not uh uh sorry um and not
uh go diverge from the vision that um people who currently and understanding that people who currently
hold bitcoin um understand for it to be working it is true that we have changed in the past to accommodate new
layers these new layers now exist um and these layers are already being built if we do nothing with bitcoin
today we make no further changes bitvm will continue to be developed bitvm will continue to be pushed out
and there are new projects that are currently being in development such as collider vm which is another
way of doing covenants both of these projects can exist and do exist and don't require bitcoin to change in
order to be developed and shipped which i believe proves that there is a clear path for exploration without forcing any new
proposals or changes onto the existing holders of bitcoin jameson says that if bitcoin does not change
it will become irrelevant and it will be um subsumed by another system um it's true that old systems that
lose their but old systems that truly lose their relevance are not changed they are replaced
um a good example is a horse and buggy well there are many people that um have moved on from the horse and
buggy horses that are no longer a thing that people use um we now drive cars or walk or use bicycles even
that was a new invention um there you can continue to use horses and buggies um without moving on to um
uh sorry to the new technology so rather than um think that we can change bitcoin i would expect if a
new and better money is created and shipped that we as smart individuals who value sound money would
simply move to the new system and bitcoin would be abandoned but that system doesn't exist there have
been many contenders to attempt to replace or update or improve upon the features that bitcoin currently
has and i think uh current historical price information will tell you that largely they have been a failure
in comparison to where bitcoin is today bitcoin is a simple system it continues to transmit value from one
peer to the next um and it's across a wide swath of individuals not just developers who have the power
to change their nodes um we have a contract not only with ourselves and our ability to exchange bitcoin
peer to peer but also with the hodlers who don't have the technical ability to interact with their node and
maybe understand the changes that we're proposing to keep their money as sound as our own
if we're missing building blocks what blocks are we missing um okay thank you
all right thank you very much i will be kicking off the q a section now i will ask a couple questions
of each of the debaters and then we'll let the audience participate as well
um all right so i wanted to start by asking jameson a question um kind of a parter so you mentioned at
one point in your rebuttal that um the idea of making changes would be to reduce complexity
at higher levels and that is a good for the network uh but couldn't you argue that this is what ethereum
does and did and isn't that one of the ways in which it went astray as vitalik recently himself
admitted in terms of the complexity that they added to the base layer um and you know do you see any
risk of that in bitcoin in making bitcoin changes and then the second part of the question is uh it's
great in theory to talk about making changes but is there a limiting principle to that at what point
is a change bad or good yeah i mean i think the the layer two thing is interesting to to think about
especially i mean i'm not as deep into this as probably a lot of my haters may believe uh with
ethereum and its ecosystem but um i think that one of the problems of the layer two ecosystem of ethereum
is how fractured it has become and that like if if you're using something on one layer two uh of ethereum
you can't really easily get to another layer two and from what i've been seeing the way that the layer
twos have been evolving within bitcoin is that there is a concerted effort for the layer twos to be
lightning compatible so we basically already have these trustless bridges between the layer twos
so i could envision that creating a an ecosystem of layer twos that rather than fracturing are actually
still sufficiently compatible with each other that people can hop around without going through like
trusted third party bridges which is another major problem on a lot of the the evm setups um so you
know this is a very complex thing to to talk about especially at a vague high level you know what is good
what is bad that is part of the consensus process and it's not up to me to judge what is creating too much
complexity uh what is creating uh enough new functionality and utility uh versus you know
the amount of risk that may be inherent to it and so that's why especially for consensus changes we end up
having multi-year processes often and of course right now we're in uncharted territory it has never
been this long of a time before when we uh did not have you know some sort of consensus soft fork uh
activation that was actually really on the table even you could actually argue that right now we're
too fractured amongst many different proposals and we don't have uh you know sufficient uh drive and
velocity behind one of them and that's perhaps one of the problems that people are at least the developers
are almost uh too motivated and going in different directions in order for us to find rough consensus
for something great thanks um all right lisa i will ask you a question now feel free to take your time to
respond to any of what jameson said as well but uh my question for you is is is somewhat related as well so
uh this idea so you made the observation in in uh what you were saying that we have these ways now
that new functionality can can be released can be experimented with can be can be built upon you also
mentioned uh that you know is the duty of the maintainers and developers to uh to to protect decentralization
now what about the idea that some of these workarounds to to do these things without uh an upgrade to the
protocol actually harm uh decentralization or are inefficient or harmful to the overall health of the
network sorry could you repeat the last part sorry um so the idea that um that some of the workarounds
that people are coming up with like the bitvm having to you know publish these things off off mempools so
these workarounds that exist and maybe there's going to be other ones that are going to be developed as
well yes we can build them in other ways without requiring soft forks but if those workarounds are
actually harmful to the decentralization or the overall health of the network um yeah i think that's
a good point um i think that we have yet to see one of these projects become that point of harm to the
network um i think the idea is that bitcoin since you're not making changes to the base layer of bitcoin
bitcoin can continue to operate and exist as it is with miners making blocks and users sending
transactions to each other i think if anything the risk of bringing more complexity into the base layer
instead of keeping it on these other layers is that if it gets to the point where those systems
are too complex to exist it's why don't they go make their own project independent of bitcoin what about
those projects like bitvm or collider vm necessarily needs to involve bitcoin at all as a system to
transact bitcoin from peer to peer and if their existence on the network is making it such that
bitcoin itself is untenable then it seems like bitcoin may have failed um so i i i think if you get to the
point there it's like what changes can we even at the protocol make to protect bitcoin if we're not at
the point where it's protected already there have been a lot of protocols in the past that have um
attempted to harm the network or introduce more meta protocols etc data into the blockchain
my understanding is we haven't really made many changes for example um for like how inscriptions
work for example um and bitcoin continues to exist people continue to transact the biggest impact has
been the cost at which it is to transact on the network um but overall i think that um bitcoin has a solid
foundation and um if there are any problems to the network so i want to i guess i'm saying like
things that could the bitcoin changing to prevent itself and to keep the network healthy is something
that we should expect to see um things that we introduce to add new features to bitcoin i think are
really where the threat comes in to destabilizing the network all right um it's kind of all related
but so this this question jameson um this is a bit i don't know i guess hypothetical but so
you kind of alluded to this we haven't made a change this is the longest period of time that we haven't
seen any sort of soft fork we haven't made a change so one could argue that maybe
we are already at ossification and that we're seeing now that this uh but even just policy
changes are hard to get through which don't even need consensus um this opera term proposal
was made two years ago it got closed down we're trying it again and the the the community ecosystem
just kind of blows up around it so um i guess part of the question is is ossification inevitable
anyway once the ecosystem gets to a certain size um if is there a time when it's therefore okay to
be ossified and so we're just trying to get in the right changes before we get to that point like we
did with some of the lightning changes and if if ossification is a danger then that means it's a bad
thing if we're already ossified does that mean you know you could say that bitcoin has already lost if
we're already ossified that big that the game is is lost and um if it doesn't mean that bitcoin's lost
and we might be ossified then isn't it better just to play it safe yeah so um we only have
30 to 40 years of experience of history watching network protocols and observing them and trying to
understand you know what what what are what are the the actual physics of these things in network
protocols uh something that humans really just started designing recently and um it seems to me
that ossification is inevitable for any network protocol that gains sufficient adoption it's almost
like a physics problem uh the coordination of the actors amongst the network grows uh impossibly more
difficult because the network kind of gets crushed under its own weight so yes it's inevitable um
i don't think there's any optimal point at which any network protocol you would want to ossify because
there's always room for improvement and but it's a question of you know how many improvements can you
get in before that happens because once you reach the point of no return that's when you have to start
bolting on other hacky systems that can have unintended consequences centralization and
um i don't think i want to be clear that i don't think that bitcoin is going to like die or fail or
cease to exist as a result of ossification but rather that the nature of bitcoin and how it is used and
perhaps the game theory because of a change in the cohorts of the participants result in uh just bitcoin
changing and perhaps not being as sovereign for individuals all right this is the last question
i have before we hand it off to the audience um lisa at one point in uh your opening statement you talked
about um you know that the the benefits of ossification uh can be a benefit to users just because of the extra
costs that it otherwise would impose for um for them to be upgrading their nodes to to support these new
features uh so first off isn't that the that's the advantage of the soft forks that you can keep on
running your your your node and don't have to worry if you don't care about the new feature you don't
have to upgrade uh but the flip side is now that we have this much better um reporting system for
vulnerabilities we are learning about all of the dangers of continuing to run older versions of the
software and so that really you do want to keep on upgrading your node anyway um so that that is that
really a cost then that we should be worried about imposing on users if they should be upgrading anyway to
to keep their funds and their nodes safe that's a great question so um i believe it is should we
we're already expecting users to upgrade their nodes in order to patch known vulnerabilities that could
knock their nodes down out of the network um which if enacted at scale would cause the entire network
to go down basically um i think that there's an interesting kind of um similarity here to how ethereum
would force its network to upgrade when they realized that they wanted to do the merge um which i like
to say is a great uh marketing term for making the biggest hard fork your network has ever seen you
call it a merge instead of a fork um the way that they introduced this is they started something called
the difficulty bomb which basically made it such that miners had to update to the next layer the next
version basically it was a holding a gun to the miner's head and saying you must update before
this block otherwise you will not be able to mine anymore on ethereum so they basically built a suicide
switch into the upgrades um i think that that sort of forced upgrades on users so tying feature updates to
vulnerability patches for example is a great way to um really md uh what do you call cause the developers
the arrogance of the developers and their desires to be pushed out across the network um and that gives
developers i think oversized power um for for the users of the network great thanks very much um all
right we got time for maybe about 10 minutes of questions hey i guess this is uh thanks to both of
you uh great arguments on both sides um yeah i guess this is a question for for jameson um why um
if we ossify and so this is a free market right if we ossify um and that starts to hurt bitcoin
which wins value presumably because it's it's doing something that like it's doing something that
it that's that makes things harder right um wouldn't wouldn't bitcoin just fork uh to a newer version
and the market would say oh this this newer version is better because it leads to um better features
which will lead to a network that has a higher market cap um so wouldn't we just have a fork war and
whichever one um whichever one happens to be more valuable is the one that wins because we live in a free market
market optimistically uh but once again i think it's a historical um a i don't think that
bitcoin ossifying and perhaps you could argue like becoming weaker or more brittle in certain
attributes of the network necessarily means that the value of the network goes down i think it is entirely
plausible that the value of bitcoin continues to go up even as very important attributes of the network
are eroded let's once again you know look at smtp look at any of these network protocols that from a
number of different perspectives have become worse over the decades uh 20 30 years ago you could run your own
email server you could reliably get your messages to where you wanted them to go do that today you're
going to get black hold blacklisted even if you try to follow the rules if you don't have a sufficient
team of people to help you with reputation management you are effectively going to be on your own network of
one when it comes to email so email what most people would say is one of the most highly adopted network
protocols like we all use email right well actually no we don't we use trusted third parties 95%
of email is captured by about 10 gatekeepers and so yeah from one perspective email is a massive success
from the sovereignty perspective email is an abject failure yeah it sounds like uh luke has
taken satoshi's vision for bitcoin and arrogantly added a new um feature to it which would be um disable
allowing your node to continue running after three years um uh you know um i don't know what satoshi would
say about that but i don't think he would be particularly happy um and that it seems to enforce um
the doubt the the that was not bingo um um enforce the um the uh what do you call it um enforce something
users basically to continually um reassert their uh what do you call it participation via updates um
uh yeah so that's that's that's what i think about that hey i have a question for jameson um something if
you talked about a bit as the specific risks that can happen from bad changes can you speak to the
specific danger of ossification and why that's a dangerous thing well like i said there are
unknown unknowns both for making changes and not making changes so i think that uh you can't predict
all of the potential future threats uh that we may need to guard against you also cannot predict all
of the future potential advancements and improvements that may become possible for us to take advantage
of so i i don't think that we want to shoot ourselves in the foot by ossifying and then 20 30 years from
now something really cool comes along but oh wait there's no more developers around who even know how to do
consensus changes or have shepherd consensus changes through the entire process so that could be
particularly uh unfortunate if we're just not able to maximize what bitcoin can do and you know take
advantage of these other things uh you know we know that there are things coming along there's like you
know time stamp overflow stuff maybe quantum stuff uh scalability stuff and all of these things uh they have the
potential to either directly cause harm to bitcoin or to somewhat indirectly harm it by preventing us from
growing and giving as much functionality and and as i keep saying as much sovereignty to as many people
throughout the world hey um over here uh yeah so you you cite other networks as something that we can learn
from from but i had thought that one of the main problems with those open public good systems
is that the economic incentives to you know send get to send your messages for free everywhere meant that
you know in this yada yada yada um proof of work was invented to solve that right so isn't it kind of
important to like more important even to get the economics and the you know the money use case really down
path and then build networks on top of that it seems rather than looking at the networks as something to
emulate in terms of the mistakes that they made well yeah i mean anything that has potential economic
impact uh you know for example block size changes you know anything that can
even anything that can improve the ability of what people can do with their bitcoin can have
second order and unintended side effects right uh you know adding some new functionality if that becomes
extremely popular and it's unanticipated then just due to the fact that bitcoin is a shared common resource
that can unintentionally push other people out of the system from an economic point of view some of these
things are intractable problems and i believe once again as i've said several times as new cohorts continue
to come in especially as wealthier cohorts and institutions and enterprises come in it's entirely
possible for them to start using bitcoin and essentially price out all of the plebs so this is very it's an
ongoing challenge and uh the short version is that yes uh i think you do have to be very careful about the
economic aspects of it and this is why i think the the scalability question ultimately needs to be
what are we really trying to target who are we really trying to get sovereignty to because
there is no layer two system that can provide the same security model to anyone as layer one bitcoin
all right uh there was a couple to james do you want to respond to anything before we
go to uh closing statements um yeah i just wanted to respond quickly to one point jameson
make about how um it's complex to talk about what the requirements might be for these secondary systems
or what building blocks they would need um and maybe just reiterate that simplicity comes from
a simplicity of purpose which is being able to transact peer-to-peer in a decentralized manner as
satoshi set out in his white paper all right thank you everyone we will now move on to the closing
statements starting with jameson
all right so uh what's the takeaway from all of this uh i believe that ossification is tantamount to
complacency yes we all agree bitcoin is great but i do not agree that bitcoin has reached its pinnacle
i think that complacency is one of the greatest threats to bitcoin we must not rest upon our laurels
technology is deflationary by nature and bitcoin's consensus rules should prioritize safety and keeping
the the system decentralized in as many aspects as possible this includes not only node operators but also
users of block space because after all if someone is priced out of using block space they are most
assuredly not going to run a full node i think this quote from napoleon does a pretty good job describing
the analysis paralysis that can lead to ossification the torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be
avoided this in effect is the innovators dilemma that is to say we have been so successful we have gained so
much adoption that now we start to be afraid that if we continue innovating we might take a risk
and we might go backwards due to harming the network on the other hand do we stop innovating do we remain
content with what we have today because by stalling innovation we might ultimately lose dominance if some
other entity comes along that doesn't have anything to lose and innovates past us eventually taking market share
from us as i see it you're either optimistic that bitcoin's game theory is sound and the network
is anti-fragile or you're pessimistic that bitcoin's governance is brittle and the network
is fragile one of the most dangerous narratives that i believe keeps coming around in the context of this entire issue
is number go up similar to what i responded to chris earlier i think it's entirely feasible that number
continues going up even as the various attributes of bitcoin become eroded due to centralizing forces
if we don't remain vigilant and continue to fight against them as they arise proponents of number go up
we'll keep pointing at the exchange rate and claiming everything is fine we're all getting rich don't rock
the boat but this once again is complacency i think that we should remain focused on the issue of
individual sovereignty the question should be how do we maximize the number of people who are able to use
bitcoin without trusted third parties in a permissionless manner without disrupting the game theory and
economic forces that have kept the system sound up until this point what do i think we should do about that
obviously support permissionless innovation on other layers encourage more participation in the bitcoin
improvement proposal process preserve the philosophy of careful thoughtful and cautious soft forks
and perhaps more funding for a variety variety of even crazier research and development projects to continue
to explore what's even possible with this magnificent thing that we call bitcoin
those who wish to continue striving to improve bitcoin should ignore the ossification extremists
ultimately this is a permissionless space and no one can stop you from contributing to bitcoin
the world is not going to stop evolving and we have to ask ourselves do we want bitcoin to evolve along
with it do we want to it to adapt it so that it continued to thwart new and unforeseen threats do we want
to take advantage of technological advances or do we want to risk bitcoin losing sight of its original vision
as peer-to-peer electronic cash
ossification is not a threat the real threat is attempting to accommodate the world into a protocol
meant for peer-to-peer exchange a loss of core purpose and core values would destroy bitcoin it is not the
responsibility of the protocol to accommodate every use case for decentralized exchange
new proposals for how to change the protocol and what to add to it will never
end much like the amish encouraged their use to go and experience the world outside of their own value
systems we as bitcoiners should encourage young engineers and newcomers to try their hand building on systems
outside of the simplicity of bitcoin they can build and learn and lose money and make mistakes in ecosystems
that have different purposes like being a world computer or a privacy coin they can add their work
and their value to those projects and see what impacts their ideas have on the world elsewhere the amish
update themselves on a much slower arc than any other society they allow their children to dabble in
shitcoinery as youth but they do not bring it home so so two main bitcoin developers dabble in
shitcoinery and meta protocols but they must not bring this into the simplicity of satoshi's vision
much like vitalik has recently realized i think that they will find that they have missed the simplicity
of what bitcoin's singular focus offers that is not to say we mustn't consider updating bitcoin to be more
robust changes have and continue to be made to bitcoin but ones that ensure its ability to survive and
the simplicity of its use we have a commitment to the users of bitcoin to make changes that are well
communicated and they continue to represent the core values that they have come to expect of the protocol
complexity is ugly the only way to ensure simplicity is through taste and competency ossification is not
death it is a continuation of tradition it is amish it is survival and simplicity in a world of temptation
towards complication bitcoin continues to work and bitcoin continuing to work and be adopted is good bitcoin
changing out from under the feet of existing hodlers is bad we might should aim for more adoption and
more use of the existing protocol there is much work left to be done sound money has no competition
there we go in person voting okay so motion ossification is a greater threat to bitcoin than
new upgrades so to reiterate in human readable terms i guess the affirmative side believes that
ossification the resistance to change and the ability to adapt inability to adapt both the greater
long-term threat to bitcoin was jameson's side than the risks associated with new upgrades at least aside the
con side the opposing side believes that new upgrades with their potential for unintended consequences
centralization pressures and increased attack surfaces are greater threat to bitcoin than ossification
so pre-debate we had 18 votes for seven votes against six votes uh undecided 58 so the majority was on four
post-debate uh we had 15 votes for 58 stayed the same against was 38 and undecided was four percent so four stayed
steady against um uh gained the most and undecided went down so against wins
and uh against wins
and uh
the devs decided close the prs close all the prs
close all the prs are you are you leaving the online
can you see the results and just tell us
online voting oh nobody participated
they left by the end too
they're not the two people all right well thank you everybody for participating in the first ever
bitcoin plus plus uh oxford series debates uh we hope to have many more uh if if our benevolent
and dictator of the conferences that keeps them coming uh but yeah thank you everyone
Thank you.