All right, yeah, Pete Rizzo, editor of Bitcoin Magazine,
editor at large of the Kraken Cryptocurrency Exchange
and Bitcoin historian on X now, if you follow me.
Welcome to the ossification debate.
Does Bitcoin need to change?
Of course, we've got Mr. Jameson Lopp up here
who just gave a fantastic overview of ossification
and Muneeb Ali, CEO of Trust Machines.
All right, show of hands, we just heard a little bit
about ossification, who in this audience believes
that ossifying Bitcoin should be a goal?
Show of hands, we should want to ossify Bitcoin
and prevent changes to it, show of hands.
- Don't be afraid. - Wiggle around.
- Johnny! - We got one lone hand there.
Okay, who thinks that ossifying the Bitcoin protocol
is a concern?
Show of hands.
- I think we should define ossification.
- Okay, well, that's a great, thank you.
Thank you from the audience.
Okay, so we're gonna define ossification,
maybe state the positions on the panel.
So I guess without further ado, what is ossification?
Are you for it or against it and why?
Let's go with Jameson.
- Yeah, I mean, ossification basically means
no longer changing the protocol.
I think it really comes from like almost calcification
of bones, if you will.
You know, the idea that in order for the network
to continue working and people to be able to rely upon it,
then it needs to remain stable rather than in flux.
- Maybe I'm making an assumption,
but it sounds like from your presentation,
you are against ossification.
- Yeah, I think that Bitcoin at a protocol level
should be conservative, but as I said,
there are risks if you can't respond
to changes in the environment.
- Well, we'll dig into all the nitty gritty
on why the pro-ossification movement
might have something to say.
Manib, are you for ossification?
What does it mean to you and why?
- Yeah, I think the way I think about this
is that being for or against ossification
really depends on the definition
of ossification you're using.
In my mind, when people talk about ossification,
I look at it as a trend.
That is Bitcoin trending towards becoming more stable
and hard to change over time?
- 'Cause you did say in your presentation,
I mean, durability is a feature that we want from--
- Yeah, exactly, or is it becoming more experimental?
I definitely don't want Bitcoin L1
to become more experimental over time.
I want it to become more durable over time,
and I would say trend towards ossification.
And I think the second part of it is
the ossification debate really forces interesting discussions
that if you want to trend towards ossification,
I'm not saying that, hey, we could do this today
or tomorrow or maybe even five years from now
or 10 years from now, then it forces a discussion
that what sort of properties do you want from the L1?
And so that most things can happen on the L2.
And I think that's a very interesting debate to have.
- I wanna see if those hands are working.
We had a minimal show of hands earlier.
So talking a little bit about participation
and network consensus, how many people here run a node?
You have a computer or device that stores
the Bitcoin blockchain at home?
Come on, everybody, we should see a full room here.
All right, a few.
How many people have actually participated
in Bitcoin consensus?
You've run software with a proposed change.
You've signaled for software with a proposed change.
Show of hands.
You participated in Bitcoin governance.
We got one in the back.
All right.
So pretty minimal participation here,
which I think highlights some of the issues.
So barreling into that question,
I think we've seen a lot of innovation
on Bitcoin this year, right?
We've seen the ordinals protocols bring
something I think that is technically better
than an NFC to network.
We've seen BRC20s.
We've seen BitVM.
All of this is happening without lower level changes
to the protocol.
Why are we upset with the status quo
if the status quo is giving us so much to work with?
Jameson.
- Well, I mean, some people would actually say
that the tap root and tap script changes
of a couple of years ago created this unintended consequence
of inscriptions and related ordinals technology.
So as I said, there are always unknown unknowns
and you can't necessarily know what the entire breadth
of functionality and how it will be used
if you're just creating primitives
that people can build on top of.
I think you could argue that people could do
an inscription without tap root.
It just made it easier.
But as we keep going forward,
we need to look at the ecosystem
as total scope from developers
of how limited are people in what they can do.
Do we want developers to have a wider variety
of things they can do or are we gonna say,
okay, Bitcoin is only money and you can only store it
and transfer it, you can't do more complex type
of scripting functionality.
So I think there's conflicting perspectives
and perhaps it's because I'm technical and I'm a developer
and I've always seen Bitcoin as a programmable database
with all of these other interesting properties.
Whereas a lot of people may say,
oh, it's only digital gold and you should just keep it
in cold storage unless you really need it.
- So it sounds like you're saying that ossification,
this attitude that we have is actually,
it was our unwillingness to ossify Bitcoin
that created this explosion of interest and new protocols.
Maneeb, your take?
- I think it's great that there is Ardnals now,
BitVM and these projects are great,
but I would say that they're happening in spite
of the quite hostile conditions for developers
that currently exist.
Because I think Jameson had a great chart, right?
Like when you look at the number of developers,
pretty stable, not growing that much,
but also not disappearing.
I would call these as like diehard Bitcoin believers
and we're working with like very low level primitives
and doing extremely hard work, right?
Like they deserve credit for actually being able to do that.
But it is not a very developer-friendly ecosystem right now.
So if you introduce, and this can only happen on L2s,
you introduce like more high level languages,
easier developer environments.
This is some of the work that we do with Clarity VM
or with Rootstock, you have EVM compatibility.
And I think these things appeal
to a much broader set of developers.
And I think that can be really good for the Bitcoin economy.
If all of those developers start using BTC
as an asset on an L2,
I think that could be really good for Bitcoin.
So we shouldn't look at like, hey, look, BitVM happened.
That means that developers can do this.
It just means a very, very tiny portion of developers--
- That's my next question, right?
We've seen BitVM this week.
I'm not sure if people are familiar with the proposal.
Could bring smart contract functionality to Bitcoin,
or I might be more apt to say,
it discovered that it was already there.
So you could make the argument that maybe 10 years ago
we could have made it easier for smart contracts to happen.
And then we would have never discovered
that this was possible, right?
It really is when Robin Linus put out this proposal,
he discovered something that generations of people
who launched other cryptocurrencies didn't discover,
does not ossification encourage that?
And then if you block that pathway,
what will you lose, Jameson?
- Yeah, I mean, on one hand,
there's kind of the time preference argument of,
it may be a sort of non-falsifiable statement.
Some people will say,
oh, you can do anything you want on Bitcoin
if you try hard enough.
The flip side of that is,
who is gonna try hard enough, right?
If it's really, really, really hard,
it may only be--
- I mean, we have seen people this year,
they did, Casey Rodemore tried hard enough,
Robin Linus tried hard enough.
- Yeah, so then the question is,
what would the world have been like
if it wasn't that difficult?
It's very hard to say--
- Don't we know-- - We're speculating.
- That the cryptocurrency ecosystem is that world?
No, Manish? - Yeah.
No, I think, again, the BitMEM thing,
I wrote some analysis about it as well.
I think there are many things
to be extremely excited about for BitMEM.
Like, for example, personally,
the thing that I'm most excited about is
that it can actually lower the trust assumptions
for moving BTC between L1 and L2.
I think that's huge.
But I would wanna make it very, very clear
that these are not what you call full smart contracts
or full VM, right?
This is something different.
It's more similar to DLCs
and having basically advanced capability
to prove something between multiple parties
versus the type of contracts
that people are used to on Ethereum or Solana.
- But we don't know whether people will build on that
and achieve even more.
- We sort of, like, we know that, you know,
if there are two ends of the spectrum,
they're starting on this end of the spectrum.
And we are talking about people
who are already operating on this end of the spectrum.
So these are very different things.
And I wanna be careful about it
because people confuse,
they confuse Taproot with smart contracts.
This was just a year ago, right?
There were headlines that smart contracts
are coming to Bitcoin.
No, these are not.
- It was the same scripting language as ever.
It was just constructed differently.
- Exactly.
I don't want to make the same mistake with BitVM again,
right, like, that's why I was pretty vocal about it
that, hey, these are not what most developers
would consider full smart contracts.
- Well, let's dive into the activation process.
I think when most Bitcoiners say they're pro-authentication,
really what they're saying is,
our activation process is a mess.
Partly that's by design.
You have the UASFs, the MASFs, URSFs,
some of this hasn't been tested, some of it has.
So I guess the question I would have to the panel
is essentially, if you're against ossification,
are you pro some sort of regular, recurring,
or standardized upgrade process?
Yes or no, Jameson.
- I think it's not feasible to ask for that.
You know, unlike many other cryptocurrencies
that have foundations and set standards and processes,
Bitcoin is too diverse and too spread out to do that.
You know, even the group of developers
who may be working on a given proposal,
or a different generation of developers than those before,
it's kind of funny, like, you can look and point and say,
oh, there's this Bitcoin improvement proposal process,
but there is no one who can actually enforce
the Bitcoin improvement proposal process.
- Right, because the network needs to upgrade and activate.
Muneeb, you're--
- Yeah, so I think the situation with Bitcoin
is actually very interesting, right?
The situation is that Jameson is absolutely right,
that there is no really well-defined
Bitcoin improvement process.
It doesn't exist, really.
Like, if you try to define it,
like, people would be like, oh, they're missing holes, right?
Like, some other network--
- Some people would argue that we shouldn't.
It's actually a security vulnerability and--
- Yeah, who defines the process?
- But then, here's the interesting part.
There's clearly something, because Bitcoin does upgrade.
We did get SegWit, we did get Taproot.
So the interesting reality right now
is I do think that Bitcoin right now
implicitly relies on a bunch of trusted individuals,
or parties, and once proposals are coming
from those more trusted parties,
the reaction that the, it's almost like circles, right?
Like, if the proposals are coming from the inner circle,
like, the outer circles respond better to them.
They're not that hostile to those proposals.
- But that inner circle is simply a meritocracy
of people who--
- It's reputation.
- It's reputation, right?
But, so that's how it's actually working.
And if a proposal, so what ends up happening is--
- So what is wrong with the current process, then?
- I think what's wrong with the current process
is that if you're not part of that group,
you cannot really propose good ideas.
- But can't anyone just earn themselves
into that group through work?
- I do think that the order, like, it's a timing thing,
right, like, if you were a Bitcoin developer in 2013,
2014, 2015, you have a lot more respect
than someone who's trying to become a Bitcoin developer
in 2022 or 2023.
- It's a very challenging road, because as we said,
even within the Bitcoin improvement proposal process,
there is no best practice, much less anything written down
of how you go about garnering support.
I would say the best way to describe it is
the cypherpunk ethos of rough consensus.
Yeah, it's cryptoanarchy, rough consensus and running code.
But in order to run the code, you have to get through
the gauntlet of developers who believe that the code
is worthwhile to actually merge into the implementation.
- I wanna go back to the one hand of the person
who participated in consensus, thank you again.
So when you're looking at that and you're saying
that we don't have a standardized process,
we can't have a standardized process,
how do we end up with anything other than what we have,
which is essentially needing a bespoke activation method
every time we'd like to make an upgrade,
and then needing that consensus to be very difficult?
Jameson?
- I mean, I don't have a better proposal.
I think this is just, you know, the way that it would be.
- Well, then where does the angst come from
with the people who seem like they want to change
how Bitcoin is working?
- Yeah, so this is a very complex problem to talk about
because there are many different attributes of Bitcoin
that are essentially sacrosanct,
these inviolable properties of the network.
And if you propose something that has even the smallest
chance of weakening those properties,
you're gonna see massive pushback.
But I think on the flip side, and perhaps what we don't
talk about as much are some of the less well-defined
properties of like, everybody talks about self-custody,
running your own node, but how does that fit
into scalability? - Multi-state was enabled
by an upgrade even, yeah.
- Yeah, but if we continue on the current path,
and the protocol doesn't change to enable more scalability,
how does Bitcoin onboard a billion users?
How do we even have a billion UTXOs
that people can self-custody?
There's, I think, a lot of unanswered questions there.
- Maneeb, same question to you.
This bespoke process we have now,
where does the angst come from if this is the only option?
- I think the process right now is actually,
I don't have anything glaring
that I would wanna fix with it.
I think it's actually a pretty decent way,
an open, transparent way as well.
It's not like people are going in secret back doors
and making any decisions.
It's a very public sort of a thing,
and it has community support.
I think where my worry comes from is that I'm in the camp
that Bitcoin basically needs a few very critical changes
to the L1, mostly in the camp of supporting better L2s.
Either it's like ARP Stark Verify, ARP Snark Verify,
or something different, like where you can verify
an entire thing like a Wasm computation.
But if you get that, then I would start caring a lot less
about how is Bitcoin upgrading,
because you have basically implanted the biggest change
that you need, which is much better support for L2s.
And then most of the experimentation is happening
on L2s after that.
- We're talking a little bit about the bespokeness
of the upgrade process.
I wanna talk about the participants.
We've seen, as you mentioned, several upgrades
over the years.
Who should participate in the consensus?
Are there groups that should not?
Maybe for-profit companies, certain types of entities.
How would you look at the participants
in consensus upgrades in Bitcoin?
- Well, I think everyone who has the capability
should participate.
- But if we saw a company come out and advocate
for a consensus change, you would argue
that that would be a very negative thing for?
- No, it depends on what the change is.
But here's, this is why it's so complicated,
is because there's such a diverse group of participants,
and we all have different things that we value and interest.
So, much like Munib, I think some of the highest priority
improvements should be around permissionless innovation,
just allowing for more experimentation to happen
so that we don't have to go through this rigmarole
every couple of years.
I'm a security professional, so I would also like to see
the security improvements that I talked about.
I'm also a cyberpunk, so I would like to see
more privacy improvements.
That's a particularly gnarly problem
because really strong privacy tends to harm the auditability
which is another one of those inviolable properties
of the system.
- Munib, how do you think about the participants
in the consensus process?
- I think it should be open to as many people as possible.
So, Bitcoin defaults to if there is very high level
of consensus and support, only then a change will happen.
So, even small parties who can be very vocal,
who can be very vocally against something,
can actually stop something from happening.
So, as Bitcoin keeps growing, you can see the trend line.
Like, the more and more people get involved,
it's like there will be more people who would be against
whatever you're proposing.
And if Bitcoin keeps going in that direction,
that's why I think we have a sweet window of opportunity
maybe in the next five to seven years or something
where we should get enough of these changes in
that are forward-looking, that that enables future
permission-less stuff.
Like, for example, I don't see privacy happening
in terms of fully encrypted transactions happening on L1,
but we should absolutely have L2s that have that.
And people who want to use that feature,
move their BTC to an L2, they have their privacy there,
and then they can come back for auditability
at the base layer.
- Running a bit low on time here,
so I want to move to the next question.
How do we know that we won't destroy or harm Bitcoin?
Of course, this is the allegation about some of the things
that Taproot enabled with ordinals.
We see the UTXO size increasing,
we see the blockchain size increasing,
people are concerned about that
having a centralization effect.
How do we know that we won't harm Bitcoin
if we don't ossify?
- Yeah, I mean, we can't know.
As I said-- - Not very comforting.
- Well, as I said, one of my biggest worries is
we ossify and we don't have the scalability
and permissionless innovation,
and actually, I worry that Bitcoin does go mainstream
without these changes,
because the only way that I see that happening
is by basically a billion people
ending up with their money
in the hands of a dozen centralized gatekeepers.
It's very similar to the email problem.
- You think if we ossified today,
that's more likely to happen?
- Yes, so there are many things to worry about,
but it's an interesting process of discovery.
For example, we had check template verify
that Jeremy Rubin worked on for years
and was pretty soundly rejected,
but now it's coming back around.
- But he's also proposing a change
to the activation process
as well as a specific technical change to Bitcoin,
so a little bit different there, would you agree?
- Yeah, so he gave up on that,
but now it's interesting because actually with OpVault,
we're seeing people looking at OpVault
in the context of check template verify
and saying, oh, these two things are actually
mutually compatible and can help make each other stronger.
- So you're saying the initial negative reaction
was positive?
- It's, yeah, it just goes to show how difficult it is
to foresee how these things will interact with each other.
This is a continual process of discovery.
Now, I'm optimistic because this is a system
that is widely distributed,
and many of us are paying attention to what is happening,
so if something does break and there is general agreement
that we have strayed off in the wrong direction,
it's still possible to course correct.
- Muneeb, how do we know we won't harm
or destroy Bitcoin through this process?
- I think Bitcoin is already sort of like,
the culture is to be extra careful.
Like, if it's a spectrum, we are already
leaning towards that, and I think the market forces
would pull you more in that direction anyway
as Bitcoin becomes more and more adopted.
Like, you know, if BlackRock is using it,
or other people, like, people would want stability
more and more, so I would say that right now,
this year, seeing the revival of interest in developers,
and Bitcoin certainly became relevant
in the rest of the industry, where the developers were,
right, so this year would be probably the worst time
to signal that, hey, we are gonna ossify Bitcoin.
And a lot of developers are getting interested,
they're feeling that, hey, Bitcoin is open to change,
new things are happening, so I think this year
would probably be the worst time to signal
that, hey, we are actually not gonna change.
- Well, that brings me to my last question.
Isn't ossification an inevitability,
and then how do you know when that line is,
or where it is, Jameson?
- Yeah, I mean, we won't really know in hindsight.
You know, I think we're seeing that the time period
between making changes to the protocol is growing,
and so, you know, perhaps if we've gone for a decade,
then most people will agree that there's no more changes
that are likely gonna happen, but once again, I worry,
we get to a point where 50 years from now,
we do need to make a change in response to something,
and there are literally no developers alive
who have gone through that process.
- Muneeb, question is when, will we know we've done it?
- I think you know when, basically,
there are no more improvement proposals
needed from the layer, right?
Like, look at TCP/IP.
Like, it's like, I think some work happens there,
but in decades, like, TCP/IP has not changed.
Why, and I'm gonna really sound like a broken record,
because they enabled other layers on top, right?
Other layers on top were able to give the new features
so that TCP/IP never had to change.
So I think ossification, I don't think it's like
something you can proactively drive towards.
It's something you reach because people are no longer
demanding features from that base layer anymore,
and I think that can never happen without
very thriving economy of, like, L2s and L3s and L4s on top.
- We got a little bit of time left.
Just wanna run that show of hands again,
get people up and ready.
How many people now, after hearing everything you've heard,
think that ossification is a concern?
Show of hands here.
Okay, how many people believe that ossification is a goal?
We should keep Bitcoin the way it is?
Or one guy, thanks, all right.
And how many people learned something about ossification,
or learned about the Bitcoin process?
Okay, there we go.
Maybe that's the best we can hope for.
Thanks, guys. - Mission accomplished.
- Appreciate it. - Thank you.
- Thank you so much. - Thank you.