yeah i mean uh i know this looks like a panel but it's fireside because someone told me they
hate panels so we're gonna call this a fireside and then uh james was added uh just now um
and my intro was gonna be something about like we're not devs we're like the liaisons between
this but now you blew it yeah oh turn your mics on is everybody's bikes on yes okay um but okay this
might be a little bit rote but can you do a little intro on yourself for anybody who's not already
aware hi everybody i'm brian gentry i'm head of business development at lightning labs um lighting
labs for people that are unfamiliar is building you know the premier implementation of the lighting
network lnd and go we're also working on the tapered assets protocol bringing stable coins
um to lightning and you know have been deeply involved in kind of protocol development uh as
well and are always interested in extending the boundaries of what's possible um safely with
bitcoin and lightning jamison lop i'm a co-founder at casa we basically specialize in helping people
self-custody individuals enterprises uh really just lowering the bar for people to get into a top
tier highly vetted and thought out security model i'm jay beddick i'm the vp of research at foundry
where the largest by name pool uh as well as a bitcoin mining technology provider uh and i also support
the bitcoin consensus analysis project which is relevant to today's conversations around you know
just analyzing previous uh hard and soft works that's pretty cool because you guys represent a pretty
broad cross-section of i would say like fairly technically consensus familiar bitcoin stakeholder
organizations and participants what open question what are some of your reflections or things which you
have heard these past two days which pique your curiosity or make you think has your mind changed on
anything or does your outlook on the current software discussion has it changed at all
i'm going to caveat this so thoughts still forming um but i'm generally fairly conservative with uh
my views on altering bitcoin protocol very conscious of it as a minor um you know historically that's been
a little bit dicey um i am openly and avowedly pro stratum v2 but having talked uh to shinobi uh
i think that check template verify check stake from stack is going to do more for decentralizing bitcoin
mining than stratum v2 i think stratum v2 is a necessary step to get to that even more decentralized state
um but now i know what i want to work on when we're done with strategy too so i think that's that's been
pretty cool to see that what do you guys think when you hear him say that very spicy um but i i don't
disagree uh at all um you know not intimately involved in mining um you know i think we see actually a very
similar thing um in the lighting community which you know kevin just talked about um you know kind
of issues with deploying self-custodial uh lightning setups sliding wallets um and one of my favorite
examples uh for this is the mutiny team and like the mini team uh for those that remember they built a
self-custodial wallet on ldk um ben tony and paul are in austin they're my friends um love what they did
really you know support them taking a big crack at it um and they you know excellent engineers i
think did a great job building a wallet but just kind of ran into the economic reality that it's
really really hard to make money and build an economically sustainable self-custodial lightning
wallet business right like that is just i think you know i think of kind of bitcoin consensus rules
is like laws of physics right and like you know at some point you just can't fight gravity that long
right and i think that's something we've seen really difficult um in the space is is building
these kind of retail self-custody tools um with which i would kind of put decentralized you know
self-custodial peer-to-peer mining pools um in that bucket is just really hard with bitcoin the way it is
today um and i do think that you know we kind of need to you know tweak the laws of physics so to speak
to kind of uh open up uh what's economically possible and economically viable to build with bitcoin
well i think we're in a bubble uh i confirmed that we're in a bubble because no one tried to rip my
head off after i suggested even considering thinking about changing the block size in bitcoin
uh now yeah i mean i think there's a lot of like-minded people in this room basically
innovators people who are open-minded to considering changes to bitcoin to try to solve problems basically uh
people in here tend to be humble enough to admit that bitcoin is not perfect and that there are a
number of short medium and long-term potential improvements to the protocol to the network to
the game theory of the ecosystem um and you know we are all stakeholders uh different types of
stakeholders even on this very stage and um as a result i think that there is more consensus forming
that perhaps there were too many proposals uh going on and that we need to consolidate and maybe some
people need to uh make some concessions and and basically you know concentrate what we're trying to
get activated so that we can continue building but um you know i think the the primary thing is that a lot of
us at least in this room are just getting concerned or frustrated that it feels like there's a lot of good
ideas out there but that we're not making the the progress and the advancement that we want
you gave me a layup here jameson which is like so yesterday we had rick schoenberg not rock schoenberg
as i tweeted by accident rick schoenberg uh had a company based custody talked about um he said
uh we would listen to our clients if our clients want to request something like if they court request
to us to advocate for a soft fork or provide a feature we'll do that but we were talking before
this and i asked you know you ryan and jay like when have your clients ever like actively requested that
for you i think in mining this might be pretty you rarely see this if ever what are your thoughts it's
it's few and far between um and i say this as a miner so i'm not insulting our our customers but
generally they're more focused on the low level operational considerations of staying above water
mining economics are always bad um even fees are high um and a lot of times um you know more recently
we've we've had people ask some questions about things like opcat um you know bit 300 301
you know how does that impact me do can we do this i think we can get more revenue and then you know
they'll go down the rabbit holes and form their opinions but i mean looking at taproot activation
so i was at foundry for for that um you know when i was much more uh earnest still paranoid but you
know they are excited to talk to clients about it um and found that i guess apathy is the right word
technically i don't think folks were like you know dismissive but they didn't fully gronk it and they
weren't particularly interested they wanted to keep mining they wanted to have better stale share rates
you know make sure that their accountants understood what the mining side of uh of stuff was
um and you know going through the taproot upgrade certainly less contentious and some of the stuff
we're talking about now and absolutely less contentious contentious than another block size
change um you know i think that was a different time um and i think now we'll probably see more
interest but again i think at least from the mining stakeholder perspective there's really you know
they got to focus on staying alive before they can look at the luxuries of okay how could we improve
this and yeah you actually uh you said a trigger word for me apathy i believe that apathy is in fact
the greatest long-term threat to bitcoin and so you know the fact that we are all here is a good sign
um but you know due to the way that this system is set up it's very easy for people just to sit back
and say oh somebody else will take care of that problem but at the end of the day somebody else has
to come together and try to do something and so you know this this is the let's try to do something
crowd rather than let's just wait and uh hope that everything works out i really liked to answer your
question um i really like reardon codes framing earlier of talking about you know opcodes in terms
of new capabilities they introduce not like and the reason why i start with that is have i ever had a
customer or a lightning developer ever come up to me and be like can you please give me ctv channels like
no um have i had you know lightning developers and users come up to me and you know uh complain about
how uh restrictive the developer and user experience is with self-custodial lightning like yes absolutely
and i want to extend that beyond just lightning because i wrote a blog post for bitcoin magazine
last fall um talking about um assessing the last mile solutions for lightning so raise your hand if
you know what the last mile problem is it's actually pretty good um so for those that don't the last mile
problem is like a well understood economical problem where you know if you're laying like roads or fiber or
any sort of transportation network um you know if you're laying fiber in the middle of a city every
mile of fiber can support 100 000 people and like the economics work out pretty well if they're all
subscribing paying your subscription fee the last mile of fiber that you're laying out in the boonies um
in you know the rural areas you know you may serve one or two customers and so them paying for
that last mile of fiber is you know uh doesn't make nearly as as much sense economically as as the dense
areas so i think we have the same you know i think the last mile of the lightning channel for a self
custodial user is the same economic problem where it's just like not economically advantageous um to
serve that one user with that much capital and that much restrictiveness and so i think things like arc
things like bitvm enabled side chains um you know all of these kind of new ideas uh for you know things
like channel factories um all of these kind of new ideas that could be enabled by um you know a new
software things like cat vm um are are ways to serve that demand from users for a battle and from
developers for a battle kind of self-custodial bitcoin experience that connects to the lighting network
so so much of the conversation that last op next this op next every time i hear the devs talk on twitter
spaces every time i see devs talking in on github and whatever everyone kind of agrees right now like
we just want to figure out what the proposals are we want to debate the proposals and then let
the community the stakeholders kind of magically figure out how to activate because like i actually
kind of really enjoy all the devs here saying i'm not really gonna try to push for activation there's a lot of
gravestones and frustrating fraught endeavors there but like does that mean that it's
like whose job is it i know this is dumb and rhetorical but it's i implied in that is that it's
someone kind of like us or in our in our position to bridge the gap into the more active stakeholder
yeah i mean i think you do have to take the perspective of you can just do things even
though you can't just force things upon anyone someone has to just try to do things um if you
look at the sort of arc of soft forks over the past few years what i have noticed and taken away from it is that
the the debates have become like more and more uh precisely nuanced around the tiniest and tiniest minute
details where the taproot uh debate was mostly not actually about taproot it was about how do we activate
taproot and i think this is because there's so much ptsd still from the scaling wars um and potentially ptsd from
developers uh being threatened legally and otherwise that um we had a core developer and maintainer panel at mit
last weekend and my main takeaway from that is like you know no one especially in a maintainer position
but probably really anyone in a protocol developer position wants there to even be the slightest chance
that anyone in the world thinks that they have any sort of power to you know push any button and merge
any code and and and really have any effect upon consensus and so whenever we talk about consensus changes
we get into this standoff situation where no one wants to be the one who is actually seen as doing
anything even if a lot of us like people in this room want to collectively take some sort of action
it's a it's a really weird situation and unfortunately i think that it means that some of us need to just
get up there and be willing to take the abuse yeah i i i totally agree with that and i remember in 2021
in you know the the first ctv saga um which is very frustrating uh i will say that the feedback
was very has been very consistent um from like the developer community where they're like look
yeah taproot kind of sailed through without there being a bunch of pocs and a bunch of code written
leveraging it and a bunch of wallets but like the bar is higher now um and we need kind of more more
proof and uh more demonstrable demand especially if you don't have you know like a peter will uh uh you
you know championing um you know a specific software uh you know proposal um and i think
one thing that has been fantastic to see just this weekend um is you know jeremy and his initial
presentation kind of showing all of the different people who have built poc code with ctv and check
stick from stack all the people who posted on twitter you know in favor of it i think rob like probably the
biggest news this week was robin linus and the bid vm community coming out and saying like oh yeah okay
ctv and check stick from stack is way to go i'm convinced um and i think you know the um the repo that
harsha put together um as well kind of the awesome ctv check stick from stack repo that just kind of puts all
in one place all of the different implementations the vaults the payment pools the yada yada all the different
things um that people have built with this tooling is really kind of building up to a critical mass
where you can go and kind of demonstrate to core developers like look this is what people want
right like this has been vested vetted this has been tested this you know provides 10x improvements to
things that people want to do um and i think we're we're a lot closer now than we have been um in a while
just because people are actually building stuff um and i do think that that's kind of the bar for this
this next soft fork well first of all it's kind of silly because there is no authority who can set
the bar what is this bar well it is this is a very ephemeral hand wavy thing but uh i also caution that
some of the stuff that i've been hearing about well we need to see that there's more market demand
that's kind of backwards like this is not the way that technology evolves like there was not
market demand from the world for you know the internet uh and i mean you could find a million
examples of that um i think when it comes especially like to consensus protocol changes the primary motivation
should be you know can we add more functionality that can be used by someone it shouldn't matter how many
people want it what should matter is can we add the functionality without harming people and without
disrupting the game theory and the stability of the system
and to go back to the original question too like i either rather a point made by rob earlier i think
yesterday you know the market cap of bitcoin is not materially well 30 is relatively material but it's
not like massively different than taproot but the user base is so much broader and when you're forming
consensus like that's the part that you have to worry about so there's a lot more very loud people um
you know with opinions and and viewpoints on the way to do things or the risks that things pose and i
think it's really hard and to your point there is no central authority to appeal to to say no this is
the way we're going to do it and that's that's like the job of the community and it's it's you know
decentralized stuff is very hard for that reason you can't have someone push things through and i think
historically we did see a lot more championing of of um uh these causes but to you know jameson's point
like there's a lot more risk involved in that now as bitcoin has grown and and you know whether it's it's
physical or legal uh violence that that people are worried about like that's that's a very serious thing
um and it's hard to ask that of of so of folks and i think one of the other factors too is you know
bitcoin is a less technical project now and i don't mean that in the sense of like obviously the work that
you know we're all doing is very technical but there's so many more non-technical users and to
to convince those stakeholders is more difficult and then you know historically the champions of changes
were technical like core developers you know they knew their stuff they knew who their audience was
but you know you're now asking someone whose skill set is may only be restricted and i'm not trying to
speak too broadly here but like you know to the development to now okay now you're gonna be a politician and
now you're gonna have to form support from you know multiple different communities who some might
hate you some you know and that that's a really hard task and i don't yeah i don't have an answer
but i just think that's something that i've observed for for the these debates and just to build on what
jameson was saying um you know about how we should introduce something if it adds meaningful new
capabilities without causing any undue harm um you know that's definitely how my mind thinks as well
from like kind of a offensive let's go build more things um perspective but i think another perspective
that's equally as valuable is from kind of a defensive kind of risk mitigation perspective which
is is there a way that we can reduce some existential risks that exist to bitcoin um and i think kind of
like the the two kind of removing um tail risk from the bitcoin protocol um and kind of the two that
that pop into my mind um when i think about terrorists to bitcoin is you know it's not super urgent but at
some point we do need to have a functioning fee market um you know i am very anti adjusting the
block size thank you for your presentation earlier um but like you know i do think that there are uh
additional capabilities we can add to bitcoin script that would meaningfully you know increase
block space demand the more that you can do with it um the more that we it would be demanded so i think
that's kind of like you know one risk that that covenant software would definitely help mitigate
and two the other one that's always in the back of my mind is you know there's a lot a lot a lot of
coins that are being hoovered up by custodians um you know with etfs coinbase custody big exchanges etc
um 6102 is you know a risk vector that could absolutely happen you know uh in in the um event
of a malicious government or malicious governments around the world and so building kind of safer tools
to provide the same custodial experience with vaults but in self-custody and pulling some of those coins
at custodians i think also is something that you know is in our power and we have the agency to mitigate
that risk yeah i mean 6102 attacks should always be talked about though i think that there are other
cases that are more likely that aren't as extreme and let's look at our current government they're getting
very interested in bitcoin and yes it's i would say overall a better environment than the previous
administration but let's not forget that some of one of the scariest phrases in the world is i'm from
the government and i'm here to help and if the government is getting really interested in bitcoin
especially if it gets more interested in holding and acquiring more bitcoin then you should take this
to the logical conclusion that government may very well be more interested in the governance
and evolution of the protocol and where are all the bitcoin again how does bitcoin governance work
something something economic nodes something something we're worried about the wrong layer twos
is it is it is a more scarier tweak on i'm from the government and i'm here to help
i'm here for the government and i'm here to pump your bags right yeah and so i mean i think i've had
a post that was something to the effect of like you have to understand that uh the number go up narrative
is concerning because number can go up while some of the most valuable and precious properties of bitcoin go
down and that is a very scary proposition just from thinking through the game
of theory and how that incentivizes people i i would hate to see a future where everyone
is cheering that we're all getting richer while we're basically being shackled by our golden handcuffs
do you think activating
a soft work would be a step in a direction which reduces that scenario or that path
even temporarily i mean there's no silver bullets right this is a multi-faceted problem but i do
think in enhancing capabilities on chain to you know self-custody i think is something that's just so
critical and like it's you know i'm sure everybody here has tried to get a normie friend or relative
you know onboarded it's a pain and it usually ends up in you know cash app or or coinbase god forbid you
know and no offense to rick i think coinbase has done a lot for the space um you know but the that
that experience is difficult and you know there are good self-custodial wallets but there's you know
people make mistakes and you know things like miniscript are improving and miniscript is today but
augmenting that with some of these other capabilities i think could be quite helpful um to empower people to
you know to take the custody of this asset because again i do think that there's a real risk of
you know the economic large economic actors can throw weight around and whether or not they mean well
they have an obligation both you know fiduciarily and to you know their regulators to perform in a certain
function and so like that that's a risk that like you know we can't control at the protocol level but like if we can
build tools and exit doors to help with that i think that's that's important um and i mean you know from
mining perspective again i say this as someone representing you know one of the largest pools but
payment pools and like these tools to remove additional centralization risk out of the mining
stack i think is hugely important because you can do that without negatively impacting the economics of
the the folks who are mining too like those are some powerful tools that i think you know we didn't we
didn't consider early on and now it's starting to uh become a little clearer
yeah so it is a very complicated problem um
one other thing that concerns me is that whenever we're talking about protocol level improvements
i keep coming back to this issue and it relates to my block size talk and the fact that you know
there seems to be lower demand for block space than we've seen in a long time and and what that really
means is there's lower demand for using bitcoin in a self-custodial permissionless fashion um you know
even as the price has gone up i think that's mostly because it's been easier for people to onboard
through various trusted third parties and if that is the trend that continues and then we're talking
about like what is governance how do we convince the market that it needs these things the market doesn't
care what the protocol can do if they never interface directly with the protocol if everyone is using
trusted third party custodians there is no need for them to have improvements at the protocol layer and then
who are the people you're convincing you're convincing the handful of custodians and they probably don't
care that much either especially if they're costing a million different assets and they don't want to
have to do like bitcoin specific things yep i would only add i think two things to that um one is that you
know i think a great quality of the bitcoin community is being so passionate about like education and culture
um i unfortunately i don't think that education and culture scale nearly as well as economic incentives
right like if all of a sudden it is um cheaper it is a better user experience um and you have you know
some additional incentive for self-custodying your coins like more people will do that rather than being
like harangued by their friend to like take your coins off coinbase take your friends take your coins off of
um cash app um so i do think that you know the only way that we can adjust those really is with
the soft work with kind of those incentives and introducing new tools um and so i think that you
know i'm i'm i'm certainly very bullish on that and the other thing is you know uh to jameson's point i
gave a presentation a couple years ago and i talked about like i think the big value add of bitcoin like
what i really hope it can become for the world is to give everybody and anybody the freedom to save
um you know without being debased the freedom to spend and the freedom to earn um that's like the
real hope you can only do that if you really you can really only do that if you hold your own keys and
run your own note right that's really the only way you can do it if you're trusting some third party
like you're free to do those things at their behest but they can you know always shut you down
um and so i do think that that's you know it's really important to get that done and expand expand
those freedoms and those capabilities you know sooner rather than later each of you guys kind
of represents i would say almost a different pillar of the like various kind of stakeholder universe
um are there barriers in your particular vertical um that you see that could be reduced to a
participant say a pool or a self-custody provider or a lightning development company are there barriers
that could be reduced um that you see that would let you be a little more forward in activation discussion
the spicy question but i you know i don't hear other people ask these things well i think from an
education perspective folks are actually understanding how this has been done historically
right there is no single path to activation and it's kind of a crapshoot every time but one thing that
we've been seeing is a lot of discussion on bip-8 and bip-9 activation and like people saying
oh the pools are gonna block it you know they're gonna they won't let it it's all up to this
it's not up to us we're that is the last port of call like you have to have an activation client or
you have to have worked it into core or some other you know mainstream distribution i mean core um
but it it needs to be there for us to signal right like bip-8 is not us voting and saying we want this
or that it is minor signaling that we recognize this change is coming we recognize this transaction
type will be somewhere in our mempool and yes we will include it in our next block you or we won't
get knocked out it's it's as simple as that and i think there's been a lot of confusion and i think
also this kind of goes back to to the scaling wars too of like what that even means and i do think in
with taproot activation we saw a little bit more of a healthy and balanced debate on like activation
methods and approach you know optimistic versus um you know versus not and and i think that's been
an improvement but i still think there's a lot of confusion and almost this sort of
default answer in people's minds that oh well miners are going to vote on this and like that's
that and it's just like take that from your mind please if you take nothing else away from this conference
you're saying you don't like the way that pools are it's not a responsibility that i think
we should have i again it i think pools do need to signal to the market that hey yeah we recognize this
change is coming you know you're not going to get booted from this block because of what you're
transacting on but there's a a conception that like the pools are determining the course of of bitcoin
development i i i and i think that's incorrect um the biggest barrier for us is um protocol developers
getting their shit together on what proposal they want to activate um right like and i i say that a
a little bit tongue-in-cheek but um you know seriously you know as a company and in you know
not speaking for the whole lightning network but being familiar with how lightning companies think
right like um a lot of we are downstream of the capabilities available in the bitcoin protocol
right so like when taproot was like obviously everybody at lightning labs was
very interested in following the taproot um you know discussion and activation and everything
and when um you know but we weren't actually actively developing taproot uh into vtcd and lnd
because it was kind of like well it might not happen and we don't want to waste effort
doing this stuff we have other priorities blah blah blah blah but like literally the second the taproot
um locked in and activation was assured like we started building with it immediately right like lnd i think had
on-chain taproot wallet support you know within like a couple months after activation like i think it was
the next release right that was like a huge priority and something that we you know moved on immediately
and then built the taproot assets protocol based on that did taproot channels like we are you know
we're fully on board with everything and i think the same thing is kind of true with you know a covenant
software like we are watching very closely you know lalo's been talking about it tweeting about it
giving presentations about kind of the stuff that he would like to do with it we can't really do anything
until it's like okay this is coming right but once it's locked in and it's like you know this is this
is actually happening you know we're going to push the boundaries as far as we possibly can and we'd be
really really excited yeah shoot so we have the bits i'll repeat this
yeah i mean i these so pr is open for review what's happening
yeah
oh i totally get it
i'm still going to look at it but um
yeah and i and i i apologize if what i was saying
okay i didn't i didn't mean to come off as being like we're waiting okay
okay okay okay um but to the extent that you guys do not need to watch on board um like mike
and that says um oliver he's great oh yeah huge fan
But if these guys can... these things need to be viewed. We still have a set of hurdles to be owned.
And let’s talk.
That, I agree. Capital demobilization... I think it's the strong good actors from the object moving in spiral. AJC—they've organized.
Yep. I remember I participated in one of them. It was great.
Yeah. No, I totally get your point.
Okay, yeah. I mean, I totally get that. I think, you know—trust me—within the LND ecosystem, we understand more than anything else how scarce resources like review time and review hours on PRs are.
Yep. We'll suggest that I ask someone close to Core. Who would you suggest look at it?
Well, so there's multiple problems, right? One problem is: no one is obligated to do anything. So, if none of the protocol developers are interested...
This is one of the more common things: one of the worst reviews you can get on something you propose is, “That’s just not interesting to me.”
Yeah. I don’t even want to look.
Right. So there's no guarantee that anyone will even find it interesting. Beyond that, I’d say—related to the chilling effects—I think one of the problems is we're not cypherpunk enough anymore.
We need more anonymous developers. I think that at least protocol developers should be lawsuit-proof. They should be wrench-proof.
Yeah, see, this is the problem. The developers are paying their taxes and doxing themselves.
Exactly. So I think that's another interesting, potentially long-term game-theoretical problem to deal with. I don't fault anyone for caring about their own safety.
If you're going to contribute to the ecosystem—just look at one guy trying to protect his privacy. Kudos to him. I was doxed a long time ago and kind of wrench-attacked.
I had to decide after that happened, after a physical attack:
Am I going to disappear? Because that's the safest thing to do.
Or am I going to spend a ton of resources to improve my privacy and security and continue contributing with my name and face?
These are real-life choices. And I don't fault anyone for hesitating or not wanting to become a target because they stuck their head out.
Another thing I'll say, to John’s point about allocating review hours: A year ago, there were—credibly—I wrote at the time—seven different proposals being discussed.
So it’s kind of like: Does it make sense to spend scarce review time on all of them? Should I wait a little bit and see if the field narrows down?
I think that field has meaningfully narrowed. Now it could make sense to actually take a plunge.
Another thing that would convince core developers to spend some of their scarce time reviewing PRs is seeing application developer interest. Seeing actual demand.
Because what you want to say is:
“I reviewed this PR. I helped progress the software. We got it locked in.”
You don’t want to say:
“I spent two days reviewing this PR, rebased a bunch of stuff, and nobody cared.”
That sucks. Nobody wants to do that.
So I do think there’s a critical mass effect. You want to see people building on these things. Other people reviewing it.
And then, over time, a sort of shelling point emerges. Like:
“These are the proposals we’re doing. These are the ones everyone’s signed off on.”
And then the business community can say:
“Oh, okay, looks like the protocol devs want this. Let’s wrap our minds around it and prepare for activation.”
No, it’s okay. I was talking to some proponents of Tapscript, and I said:
“It seems like people in the community are waiting for you guys to position yourselves and signal support.”
They told me, “That would be a very bad idea. Don’t wait for us.”
The other criticism of what you said is: is there industry demand? I'm 100% on board with what you're saying.
Will tells me—yeah, actually, it was timely. It's Chatham House Rules so I can't say who—but you merged the PR for CTV. There was a conversation at that BitDevs. DAZ was who merged it, and who was in the comments.
So, just to kind of jump on your point there, John: who is going to be taken seriously in the eyes of the people that seem to have the hard power to move forward with a potential soft fork? Because based on some of these conversations, like James, for example—not to give your pedigree—but like your former...
There's just a dissonance between who’s allowed to merge things and work on things, and who’s not. I think anyone who's been a long-term established protocol developer can weigh in.
That’s why I mentioned OP_VA and Lightning. Anyone who's been around in the space—the longer, the better. That’s why I mentioned with the BIPs that co-authors can help lend credibility to new BIPs for the same reason.
Okay. I would say counterpoint: that shouldn’t matter at all. I would actually prefer that BIPs be submitted anonymously.
I think rather than asking, “Who are the decision makers?” it should be: “How do we get enough people reviewing it so that it’s overwhelmingly obvious that it's good?”
That probably starts bottom-up. The people with the most clout are also the busiest, have competing priorities, and are the most at risk.
Bitcoin is about solving a coordination problem at the end of the day. I think that extends here. Of course, you want folks with pedigree and reputation writing good code and giving solid criticism. But as Jameson said, there needs to be room for new blood, too—people who will get just as much critical feedback.
Our community isn’t known for being warm and fuzzy. But as we grow, the risks to Bitcoin changes—both economic and OPSEC—grow as well. So we need to be mindful.
We’re under pressure. I don’t think anyone debates whether ossification is inevitable—we only debate whether it’s already happened.
I hope ossification doesn’t happen for a while. This is software—we always need to maintain it. But at some point, it will go into maintenance mode. I hope that’s not soon. There's still work to do.
Right now, though, we’re feeling pressure we hadn’t before—ETFs, big institutional players. I remember posting on forums when I was younger, wondering, “What if the government does this?”
Now it’s like, oh shit... what if they actually do? That changes how it feels to work on this.
From our side—especially in mining—we interact with energy utilities. We feel the pressure. You want to be a good citizen—you don’t want to create noise.
But the code side is grayer. There are active cases against developers. We used to view code as a First Amendment–protected activity. That’s not the case anymore. That’s terrifying—and it will seep into the core protocol, not just the adjacent stuff.
Going back to a question you asked earlier—something I learned this week that stuck with me:
A large part of the chilling effect around this conversation is: whatever soft fork we do, people will oppose it. But then you get the Coinbase Custody guy on stage saying, "Yeah, we’d love more Bitcoin capabilities."
Whatever you think of Udi, the smartest thing he’s ever said was about BlackRock. He said:
"You guys don’t understand. The number one thing Larry Fink wants to do is go on CNBC and say, ‘Buy more of my iBit shares—Bitcoin’s about to have smart contracts.’"
He wants a catalyst. That’s what we underestimate: the potential support from big players.
We shouldn’t fear imaginary ghosts of big entities. To Jameson's point—we need confidence and agency to act.
We might be surprised by how much support there is—and how little resistance actually pops up.
Don't ask, “Who’s going to allow me?” Ask, “Who’s going to stop me?”
Powerful. Very based. Are you going to stop me?
We’ve got experienced voters all up in this room. Somebody just look at it!
What are you actually afraid of? Earlier, a poll showed 94% in this room would be fine if CTV were activated December 1st.
What are we afraid of?
It’s the bubble talking. Pretty much everyone in this room wants innovation to continue. But the fear is: what will others think? What will they do?
Painful splits should be avoided. Now you’ve got the ordinal people. You said “airdrop” in different words.
If you're going to do polls, the real question is:
If someone activates CTV on December 1st—are you willing to put your entire life savings behind that opcode? Because if it’s not enforced, it’s gone.
That’s real skin in the game—not just saying yes on a poll.
We can do Q&A. I see someone back there—thanks.
Funny thing—speaking of echo chambers—I was looking at Charlie's post where he accidentally typed “rock.”
One thing that stood out: Luke-JR—a very notable person in Bitcoin Core—apparently thinks this conference is run by scammers and attackers hijacking Bitcoin.
That’s not some random nobody. He’s involved in the BIP process.
So what’s our strategy to reach people outside this bubble we’re trying to push changes for?
I don’t know. That’s my view. But Jameson—you say this is a bubble—so what if someone just does something? What kind of pushback would we see? Actual technical opposition? Just mean tweets for a couple months?
If you’re pushing a soft fork, Jeremy Rubin probably had the worst experience.
We’re championing CTV. It’s Jeremy season.
Worst-case scenario: you spend years championing an idea. Everyone tells you to fuck off. So you do. Then you come back—and you get to open the conference.
For a great answer to that question, check out Christian Decker’s talk from last year at Bitcoin++ in Austin. He shared lessons from trying to push APO. It was really instructive.
The reality is: most efforts to improve Bitcoin are rejected. Not just protocol-level. Most pull requests to Bitcoin Core get rejected. Most BIPs don’t get implemented.
That’s why we need people willing to try—and fail—and try again.
Otherwise, the dev ecosystem will wither. If developers conclude there’s no point in even trying, they’ll move on.
Great question, thanks. On betting and chain splits:
Obviously no one wants a chain split. But Polymarket just launched a CTV and CAT market a few hours ago. Was it someone here? You don’t have to dox, but...
No clue. But personally, I’m a big fan of both CTV and CAT. I think a lot of us are, but no one wants to push it.
So I think the Polymarket market is a great thing. I’ll be betting.
It’s a non-destructive way of betting on outcomes. What do you all think?
That’s a great question. On the Bcap side, we try to measure consensus. It's really hard.
Yeah, there's some hate toward BIP9, but it’s the best tool we’ve had.
Things like Polymarket and yesterday’s forked.wtf—these are alternative ways to measure consensus. People putting their money where their mouth is helps.
Bitcoin has no voting. No polling of every user. It’s impossible.
But having one more measuring stick is helpful. Some people respond to: “People are betting on this.” Others respond to: “My favorite dev likes it.”
Right now, you have two paths: everyone working on Bitcoin is betting—their time, their reputation—that their efforts will pay off.
Also, on the topic of scammers and attackers: Everyone trying to change Bitcoin is accused of attacking it. Everyone trying to stop change is also accused of attacking it.
Bitcoin is multifaceted. So many perspectives. No global consensus on what Bitcoin is.
Someone asked last weekend: “What is Bitcoin?”
I don’t know. We’re figuring it out. This process of discussion and governance is part of that.
Is Bitcoin digital gold? Peer-to-peer cash? A distributed JPEG database?
It’s complicated. People use it for different things. Narratives conflict. That’s why we argue about how it should—or shouldn’t—change.
But that’s part of the fun.
To the betting market question—you know, that's a big effort in measuring consensus before we actually go and try to activate something.
Measuring how many people are in support is obviously a really tough thing to do with the global online community. There are a bunch of efforts in terms of making that measurement civil-resistant.
One thing that Jay and I were talking about, just as a spitball idea yesterday:
How many of you run a publicly available Lightning node with an alias?
One thing about publicly available Lightning nodes that we discussed was—you have Bitcoin locked up in those channels. That’s provable. You’re a holder; you have actual access to Bitcoin.
So, it would be kind of interesting if, during this cycle, one way of measuring support would just be people with publicly available Lightning nodes adding something to their alias, like:
“Upgrade CTV and CheckSigFromStack.”
Because that is something we could actually measure. Like a BIP10—well, I don’t even know what number it would be, but you get the idea. It’s just a spitball idea.
The hardest question, though, is: how do we know that this mechanism is actually trusted and can’t be spoofed by people we don’t like?
At least with this method, we have tens of thousands of provable holders—active Bitcoiners—running public Lightning nodes.
Proof of node isn’t really a thing yet—you can have proxy fake nodes that just query data—but with Lightning, you have provable UTXOs that have been around for a couple years or something.
Yeah, but I’ll push back and say—once again—I think that’s the wrong question.
It shouldn’t be, “How many people want it?”
It should be, “Is this useful functionality that won’t harm the people who don’t care about it or don’t want it?”
From the protocol-level perspective, the real question is:
Who cares enough to review the code?
And what I’ve been hearing more recently—even long-term—is:
Who’s going to buy in to maintain it at the protocol level?
That’s one of the bigger questions within Bitcoin Core.
If we’re taking on essentially new technical debt that we have to maintain in perpetuity—is this change simple enough for us to be willing to pay that cost?
Or is it complicated enough that nobody will be willing to raise their hand and commit?
Speaking of raising hands—I feel like we’ve talked for almost an hour now.
And this has been a long-ass conference. We had a very aggressive programming schedule.
I feel like we can probably drop it here and go drink beer upstairs... and debate what Bitcoin is—with alcohol!
Yeah, with alcohol. Off camera.
Because we can only say so much on camera. But after a few drinks, we can give what we really think.
Anyway, give it up for these guys—the participants—and yourselves!
Will, I, and Colin (who couldn’t be here) have absolutely loved organizing this conference.
Thank you all for coming.