We'd like to welcome Aaron van Wirdum as the moderator for this panel, please put your hands together
Thanks, Stefan
Is this on looks like it's on
Yeah, I think you guys can just come so we have Adam back the CEO of Blockstream and John Carvalho I
Have to sit there. Why?
Okay, okay very clever
Where's Giacomo there's Joe I'd introduce Giacomo yet, this is Giacomo. He's the new
director of what it was it again Giacomo plan B that
Plan B Network, I mean that work. All right. Also Jameson is on his way. Ah, here's Jameson
Jameson the founder of Casa anything else we should mention there a slayer of Satoshi.
Yeah million different projects and a slayer of Satoshi myths, right? And yes, I'm Aaron van Wirdum
I work for Bitcoin magazine. I also just wrote a book about the origin story the prehistory of Bitcoin
One of the panelists is actually in that book. I won't spoil who it is
All right
Is ossification a curse or a blessing. Okay, let's start. I know this is gonna be a challenge
Just to be clear we have 45 minutes you'll have all the opportunity to elaborate your points later
But I want to start with a challenge. Let's start with the one-word answer just to sort of set the stage here
So ossification curse or blessing is the curse or a blessing Jameson
curse
Blessing
Curse
Blessing
Let's okay one more question. So is Bitcoin right now
Perfect. It's Bitcoin right now. Perfect as it is. Let's let's do it in the other way
It's good enough good enough
Yeah, it's good enough
Good enough, but very far from perfect. Yeah, the two things go together, okay
Definitely not perfect. Nothing will ever be perfect
But there still remains, you know a huge amount of things that can be improved
All right. So let's start with Jack. Well, you said
Blessing right? And you also said Bitcoin isn't perfect. Yeah, so if Bitcoin is not perfect, why is the blessing?
my classification a blessing because the risk in changing Bitcoin to make it more perfect and
The risk that this change goes bad and allows a no style takeover a corruption
I consider it way higher than the risk of not making it perfect and I just have to hack around it in other ways
a good example could be that after the last fixes of the
Screw ups that Satoshi had to do at the end of 2010
Every single life-threatening bug of Bitcoin was introduced and not discovered
There may be something that we will discover that will force us to change Bitcoin
And in that case, I think that we will have to change it without violating the meme of ossification
The fact that we say that because should not change and it's good that is not changing
It doesn't mean that if a life-threatening bug is discovered it will not change
Of course, nobody will stay with a broken Bitcoin just to lose money
But the fact that the default is the status quo
I think is very powerful because the risk of corruption is higher than the risk of known
Evolution in this case a Bitcoin we say that it's it's antifragile
It's true that because antifragile as an ecosystem miners developers of all the
All the let's say stack of software that will change
ossification doesn't mean that the software doesn't change if you think about the
TCP/IP standard the main rules of IP version 4 didn't change since the 80s
But the software managing it and the hardware managing routers changed dramatically
So the Internet has changed completely from the 80s, but the main rules of IP
version 4 basically did not and that kind of ossification is a blessing because
The amount of effort that will be put into corrupting it will be much higher than the my opinion
That the attack surface of the current situation
Are the awkward thing which you have only one mic, but does anyone want to respond to that? I
Think that even though we got two different answers for your question that only had two options
I think we probably all agree on the nuances of it and we just interpreted your question differently
Like I don't think Adam or Giacomo thinks that we should ossify immediately or never change if we need to change and I don't think that myself or
Jameson Lopp are saying we need a lot of change so much as we should all be very
conservative about what we do with Bitcoin and that it's probably good enough as is and as Giacomo kind of mentioned that
We've learned that a lot of the problems are introduced not discovered
And so we have to be extremely conservative with how we approach changing Bitcoin or even adding features to it
Anyone else
Yeah, Jameson, I think wanted to say something as well. Sure
It's a very complicated thing to talk about because a lot of what we're talking about is speculation on unknown unknowns
And so whenever you change software, there is risk of unknown unknowns of things going poorly
When you don't change software there can also be unknown unknowns
And then the question becomes, you know, will we still be able to respond to these things? I
Do think there's an interesting historical context. We have decades of history of internet protocols
We can look at the TCP IP stack and it is not perfect by any means
In fact, you you talk to any of the OG's from the Internet Engineering Task Force
And they will tell you one of their greatest regrets was that encryption was not made a default standard at the very lowest
Layers of the internet. So what happened we had to hack it on at higher layers
There's also plenty of attacks and weaknesses that happen at different levels of the protocol stack like BGP
Your routing attacks happen all the time. It would be better if that was not even possible
but you know the ability to even change things that are that low at the internet protocol stack is pretty much impossible these days
so, you know, I think this is one of those things where we we all want to be conservative. We don't want to break anything at the same time
We don't want to lose the ability for the system to react to changes in the world
and and this is one of the main things that I've come to kind of settle on is that
Protocols ossify we all agree that it's basically like a law of physics at this point
But the world does not ossify and so the question becomes how does a protocol?
Respond to major changes in the world and the environment around it if something becomes a crisis
Very good. We Adam want some opening remarks as well
When I first got like actively involved in Bitcoin in 2013
I went and tried to read everything I could find and talk on IRC to the developers to understand questions
it's ambiguous, but one of the things I did is I went and read all of Satoshi Nakamoto's posts from
Bitcoin talk forum before he stopped writing there and one of the very early ones was
short writing about ossification and it's when you when you look at in the context, it's amazing how early that was
I think it was like 2009 2010. It basically says he rushed the
Scripting system for Bitcoin before releasing it. So are you referring to the set in stone? Yes that one
yeah, exactly. So so he wanted it to be set in stone so it wouldn't need to change and
So at least as the intent but it went badly wrong quite quickly because a number of the rushed opcodes turn
That's have very bad bugs and people fixed fix the issue by disabling a number of them
And so, you know immediately Bitcoin lost the expressiveness for that objective to be met
Which is that everything you might want to do could be done on top and probably the script language is
Simpler and more restrictive and not quite enough to do everything we want to do. For example, you know
There were opcodes to support lightning
Historically and nowadays discussion of opcodes to help a symmetric LN symmetry like a more efficient version of lightning
so I think you know another type of ossification is there are some sort of core properties of Bitcoin and
Luke Dasher did a good presentation of this one of the Bitcoin Latin America main conferences just explaining the change process and
I mean, there's no governance process, right?
But that there are some things which are inviolable, right?
So you can have sort of opt-in soft forks if they don't hurt other people they don't you know adversely affect security
they're opt-in and backwards compatible, but most other things are
Unintentionally ossified and you know, if you try to change them, I mean some things become hard forks
Which obviously much more difficult but even soft for things that it indirectly violate this core principles
You know, you'd have a kind of another community block size war type of argument, right? So I think it is
You know quite immutable, but then the question is, you know, how do we get to a stage where Satoshi's original objective?
To make it more layered so that you could build everything you need on top without needing more things
That we don't know how to do yet, right? And that's what so that's why people are working on op codes to fill in gaps
Shall I go to my follow-up question or did you want to add something Jack?
Just a very quick objection to Jameson's
Which is that I think that the changes to Bitcoin and what the changes to Bitcoin could do
Is actually an unknown unknown while what can happen to Bitcoin if we don't change?
I think it may be closer to a known unknown
I mean
we don't know how much when if but the amount of the possibility possible range of attacks on the current design. I think has been
Explored very much going from mining incentive failures to network censorship
I don't think there is a lot of unknown unknown into not changing
Of course, that's maybe pretentious because I mean the universe could change in very different ways including a solar flare that we destroy electronics
But even that has been discussed how we can talk so I would say that there is not symmetric like you're right
But it's not symmetric the what can happen. We change is literally unbounded. What can happen with not changing?
It can be bad, but I think we have some paranoid perception of it
We can also talk about known unknowns or even known knowns right and I think this is where the nuance gets really complicated and
Adam spoke about inviolable properties and
I've written up like trying to you know, get an idea of what are the inviolable properties?
Once again, this is one of those things where it can be very hard for anyone to say
These are the inviolable properties because you know, there is no authority to dictate that but you know
We know, for example, what the current scaling on chain scaling properties of Bitcoin are and we know?
At least I would say we probably agree that we believe that self custody is very important, you know, not your keys not your coins and
Some of these inviolable properties are actually in conflict with each other
You know how it's not currently possible to get 8 billion people into self custody in Bitcoin
It's this is one of those things and you know, maybe this is a pie-in-the-sky
unicorn decision or wish for Bitcoin, but right now we don't have a way, you know to get to a world where we have mainstream adoption
Where we aren't trading off some of these properties, you know, basically
99% of the world would have to have Bitcoin IOUs if we went mainstream right now with like the current technology stack
And of course people are working on solutions to that with different trade-offs
Yeah, so that's an argument in line of Bitcoin it's actually far from perfect right John do you want to comment on that?
Okay, so or Adam maybe
Let you get your question, but I think you know
one of the big debates is you know as enthusiasts about Bitcoin and we want everybody who could be interested to be able to benefit from
the properties but and a block size war was basically in a rush to do that
Some people became happy to degrade what bitcoins providing so we could provide
Very very weak almost meaningless assurances to everybody or strong assurances to the limit of the technology and the market shows
You know in terms of the investors and which folks they supported right that Bitcoin remained Bitcoin and that was well
we're gonna provide a strong surety and try to improve that scalability and access later and
Not degrade it to lowest common denominator
Yeah, I do have one comment which is
We may not know how to get a billion people on Bitcoin quickly
But we do know how to do it within the known knowns and what we have today. It's just basically
As Jameson was saying it's a little bit in conflict with some of what we want
Which is basically we could scale Bitcoin on chain
Like we could just make the blocks as big as as necessary when necessary and this kind of thing increasing the cost of running a node
But if we do it gradually, you know in tandem with Bitcoin adoption, it might work just fine to do that and
Instead in the meantime while we you know deal with that limitation
We make things like lightning and expert other experiments to see if we can offload some of that onboarding
I think that the kind of consensus that ossified on the social layer about block size
For example after the wars may be a parody of the nuanced argument
There is there is no argument that the block should never be larger or maybe some
Exhibit some kind of flexibility like in many rows and free proposal of elastic blocks Adam himself is a big blocker
Like it was like 8 8 16. He made the proposal to increase significantly the point was that
changes of this Scale should never happen in a rush like sky's falling because that we have to change
Otherwise people are children are dying. We should basically have a clear
view of the trade-offs and in this case the trade-off is spending versus verification for example if we had
Zero zero sync is doing a great job about zero knowledge proof synchronization if that kind of stuff became
super trusted super mainstream super that you could sink with the compact proof a full node or
Proof of that for that in Africa on a cell phone with under Tor well at that point the discussion will change
Maybe it will be too late to change it anyway, because at this point a suffocation would make will prevent the discussion
But it's still possible and the second thing about for example eight billion users having a private keys
Sharing some UTXO would be UTXO sharing light network is a very poor UTXO sharing just two people sharing a UTXO
But there are there are clear ways to improve that into multi-party UTXO sharing well
What clear like yes?
Lighting symmetry is very clear even if we trade off the point is is that that even needed?
We don't even have the the push to that
We don't even have the pressure to go there because nobody cares
People are still happy with custodianship because we custody because they are not being seriously attacked yet
Yes, sometimes the the exchange will run with the money like FTX
sometimes you may have some censorship like in Canada or North Korea or other countries like that, but
Most of the time if you just open a wallet or Satoshi nobody's coming to censor you for the money
Nobody's coming to steal from you
So there is no incentive yet
But incentive will come and our best friends into evolving that direction will be our adversaries that will actually make clear
Again, why we do need?
Self-sovereignty, so I'm very optimistic about that problem
So in general, it sounds that the main argument against changing Bitcoin you mentioned the unknowns unknowns
Is this actually a failure of the peer review process? Is that and it can that be improved?
It seems like that's what essentially the problem is done, right? You can't find potential problems with whatever upgrade anyone proposes
Well a few things so one like there's a difference between speculative and prescriptive
Change and a lot of the chain a lot of the culture in Bitcoin core and Bitcoin right now is for speculative change
It's saying if we add this we may be able to do this and we may get more
Bitcoin fees or more users, etc, but it's not coming from demand. So it's not prescriptive
It's just which a prescriptive example might be oh the blocks have been full for nine months and fees have risen to five hundred dollars a transaction
And we have a lot of people that want to use Bitcoin and the price is starting to go down like then you might say
Okay, well, let's make the blocks bigger, you know, let's finally talk have that conversation again. So as far as
Prescriptive versus speculative. Well, we're mostly took most of this is speculative and when you have scaling that is unrealized
Basically, you speculate you take a risk the cost of that scaling is bared by the existing user base
and so you have to fulfill that scale in order to have justified that speculation and
we don't always do that and when you're speculating you're basically in an oppressive position because
you're coming down from this trusted process where you have, you know protocol engineers that make proposals and reach a
Intra consensus between them but then beyond that everything is like trickle-down
Trust where it's like, oh, I know a core dev and I agree with him and he says this is cool
So I'm gonna like do some superficial or even deep
Attempt to understand it and then I'm gonna promote it to people and we're all gonna help activate it
But the truth is you can't come anywhere near close to unanimous, you know
Active willing agreement for any kind of activation or any kind of change
So it's always oppressive in some way because you're leaning on the ignorance of the people that don't know the true repercussions of the change
Yeah, I mean I think the in a way it's a lot easier to have change which is
you know, not not understood by absolutely everybody and
When the changes opt-in, right?
so it where it doesn't really cost other people anything other than you know, the risk of the change itself and upgrading some software and
most, you know, I think all of the recent changes are
Soft forks like taproot is a good example, right? Just make some more compact signature
You know add some ability to do some
Sort of more efficient complicated scripts that you only review reveal if you use them things like that
I would say the I'm about ossification. I'm more concerned about long-term things where
You know for people who've been in Bitcoin for five years or some period you've seen it evolve where you know
There are bigger entities getting involved, you know ETFs
big financial companies, you know, even the beginnings of
sovereign wealth funds and countries buying a Bitcoin Treasury public market companies buying a Bitcoin Treasury and
You know if you'd ask people if they'd expected any of that five years ago
They would have said well maybe in 30 years or something so like Bitcoin we didn't notice because we're in the moment
But you know, the trajectory is scarily fast
and so what I'm thinking is that you know, if that continues another five years in a similar kind of thing and
You know, there were g7 countries with Bitcoin on their balance sheet or something
Now you have like if there's any kind of change process
And they get into another
You know Bitcoin Genesis block like situation, you know
They're having a financially hard time and they want to increase the number of bitcoins drastically for an emergency reason or something
you you know at that point it's better if Bitcoin is digital gold and there's no change process and
We're trying to like disable soft walks or something, right?
I mean because the problem with a change process is that people who are good at bureaucracy
Come and try to take it over and overwhelm it and that there's a history of that in the ITF as well
so there's a blog post written by Alex Bergeron, I think it's called the Tao of Bitcoin or something like that and it's
It's all about the history of how a lot a lot of big companies tried to take over the ITF and ultimately lost and I
Think bitcoins closest analogy to that was a block size war, but we don't want to repeat of the block size war
You know with World Bank and like international financial organizations and government monetary policy committee
So I think the race is on to like ossify it for real
Yeah, well, let me ask a question about this then so
what you've been describing right now is what you would like Bitcoin to be or what you think would be a good idea for Bitcoin
And some people also speak of ossification as sort of an inevitability
I've been personally kind of reconsidering that stance myself and seeing it more as an incentive system
So the most obvious example of that would be miners can if they have a majority soft fork protocol
It depends a little bit on what you consider a soft fork, but they can at least you know
They can they can suffer practically speaking at least
I'll let you respond in a second
Similarly Shaolin fry was you know, maybe one guy and he made a UASF now
We're we've also been talking about URSFs and then you can potentially have a change play at the market can decide
Figure it out and no one could have stopped Shaolin fry from doing that. So isn't
ossification maybe just not actually true in the end
Individuals or miners can just do whatever they want. No one can stop them
So is is that maybe the future for Bitcoin?
There will just be it will just the it depends on incentives much more than what we want it to be
Well, first of all, the example of the Internet is already like that
The ossification of IP version 4 that Alan was mentioning yet that the post by Alex is very very good
You really see this company's trying to change the Internet and the Internet just not caring which is good. That's ossification
It's also has problems like Jameson said well, I mean, there is no privacy at the base layer
It's there are a lot of problems but Internet is of ossified still every Internet company every ISP could change it there in theory
Just like you say it's just incentive, but those incentives are part of the practical ossification. It's not a theoretical one
Everything can happen if we if we move all the population of the earth in some location and jump
Maybe we can change the rotation of the earth. Yeah, that's theoretically possible, but that's not going to happen
So the point is that practically speaking the Internet protocol version 4 is ossified because it's the same
Shaolin fry could do whatever he wants, but practically speaking if we didn't win the bleph the chicken game with
UASF most likely we will not have segue that was I will not going to run for real and incompatible not and I think there are other people
Like me, so what really one was not wax
So the resistance to the hard fork was an uncontroversial win
While the imposition of segwit was only possible because nobody really had anything against a wit and to miners
So forking that's not entirely true because the point minor can sensor and that's a given
We know that miners can censor on chain
They cannot censor second layers, but they can censor on chain and when the censor they could they could of course
censor conditionally, that means that it can temporarily impose any kind of new rule, which is a soft fork
but only while their will and power and capability goes on they can censor whenever this majority stops. Let me give you an example
We have minor censoring every transaction that is not respecting some rule now
I create a transaction with a very huge fee that breaks that rule and now everybody with child pay for parent
Piles on me and that becomes basically two billion dollars on top of that of that one transaction
Some minor will take the risk that's not happening with a soft fork
Because the miner knows that even if they take that money all the blocks of the economy will invalidate the blocks
So the risk is too high
But if when it's just miners imposing you just need miners defeating and miners are very easy to bribe
Because that's I mean they are prostitutes in a technical way. I mean they just go yeah, but I don't want to become a penalist myself
But doesn't that also apply to for example a u.s
Like if a group of users and forces the same thing that miners are enforcing now the incentives might shift into keeping these rules
Jameson, yeah, I think there's a million different ways. You can sort of slice and dice the proposals John hit on something
I think is a good way of doing of the you know, prescriptive versus
Speculative and if we look at the block size Wars, this was a prescriptive kind of top down
From a bunch of companies because really what they wanted was they didn't want to have to do the work to use
Bitcoin more efficiently they wanted to offload the cost of
Using Bitcoin more efficiently onto the network to make the network basically work less efficiently
That was a very obvious, you know trade-off that you know, the rest of the world said no
We don't want to have to take on all of this, you know extra data and processing
On the other hand, you know we have a bunch of nerds who are kind of feeling around trying to figure out like what are the different directions that the protocol?
Could go in what are the the primitive functions that could be used at a protocol level to do more interesting things and
either on the base layer or on second layers
And so, you know if we look at the history of the protocol changes over the past decade or so
We could say, you know, what would have happened if the protocol had ossified in 2015?
You know, what if we didn't have check lock time verify or segwit or whatever?
Like obviously the state of Bitcoin and what you could do with the protocol would be very different
Over the past more recent years, you know, we've had some other people
Suggesting protocol changes that are a bit more complicated, but are also speculative whether it's stuff, you know covenants style stuff
object check template verify, I believe which I guess it was not sufficiently convincing to people that like the use cases and the demand were there
Now several years later, we have other people coming in saying, okay
I want to do op vault which is a much more limited type of covenant functionality
Oh, by the way, we have discovered that you know, check template verify is actually quite complementary with this
So it's it is an interesting process of discovery where we're trying to figure out like what are the building blocks that could be useful
but it's very hard to work backwards to have people who are like already living five or ten years in the future like in their
Head and saying okay if we have these things then we'll have this unicorn
Bitcoin that can do everything for everyone and we don't have to you know, have the trade-offs of some of these inviolable properties
In light of the oppressive nature of this though you have to still go back to that everything he's describing
well, you can rationalize it is still speculative and so you're always just trusting the
Developers of covenants op vaults, etc
That this is actually going to be safe and can't be combined with other things like taproot scripting to do
You know unforeseen harm
Also since UASF came up I think it's more interesting for you rather than saying that miners could soft fork to mention like you mentioned the reverse where I think
That UASF it could be argued is kind of one of bitcoins flaws
I think that you could UASF by a minority and
And miners have no clear way of measuring the actual adoption of a UASF
And so they I think futures markets can help with that, but that's not a topic
Well, they can they can help sure but it that's extra Bitcoin right?
It's outside of Bitcoin and so Bitcoin itself can't provide what is necessary
To give any confidence to a minor as to whether to activate or not
So they're inclined to start activating as soon as they feel like they're gonna risk orphans
And so this is a very, you know
Oppressive way by the minority to be able to make a soft fork
So again a reason to be, you know, careful with any ideas of changing Bitcoin
Yeah, I think
In a way one of the things Bitcoin has is because as Giacomo was saying IPv4 the internet is very layered and
It's easy to build different protocols even relatively low-level pros on top of IP and UDP and ICMP and things like that, but
With Bitcoin, it's a bit difficult to transfer the security properties to the layer above and I think it's one of the technical challenges
We face but there are there are a couple of things which are
So in 2013, I think Peter Todd and I had this massive four-hour phone conversation because we were both talking about
thinking about client-side validation types of things and it turns out if it was all in search of if it's possible to modularize Bitcoin and
So the idea is that the sort of base layer of mining producing blocks processing sort of minimal simple transactions and the fees and
that other things could potentially be negotiated between clients if
You just sort of had the blockchain commit to the data that they're exchanging and in that in that model
different subgroups of users could be using different script systems or different versions of script systems and as long as because they have to like
Verify the thing they're receiving and that's up to them, right? So and then they can respend it
so it sort of makes it a bit more lightning like where you can relax the
Sort of need for miners to bitwise verify that otherwise you get consensus fork
So anyway, it's that that line of thing is continuing in RGB like they formalized that and implemented it
So it has some other trade-offs. So it's not not necessarily simple and I think the other thing
Where you see the discussion about the opcodes, right?
So is that it's a kind of language design that situation and whenever you have a language design it gets contentious because
It's sort of aesthetics, right?
You know you're designing a CPU and you want to add some opcodes to accelerate graphics and there are different ways to do it
And so people will be championing different ways and other people were saying well
I want to do that just do it with the irregular CPU instructions. Keep it risk. And so a lot of the
Argument is kind of bike-shedding, right? It's like which opcode should we do?
How many opcodes can we tolerate, you know, every few years the rate of change is annoying like lots of changes creates risk
Even a attitude of encouraging and condoning change too much is risk, right? Because that encourages more change later
Which you know the current users and investors may have less control of once banks are involved of central banks
So I think the idea of simplicity which is a kind of v2 script idea that's been around since
2012 or something in IRC and Blockstream has been working on for a while now is a sort of soft forkable script system
So upgrade Bitcoin script and the characteristics of that are a little bit
Interesting because it's extremely low level and it's just like nine bit level logic operators
And so then there's less debate, right? The question is do you want Bitcoin to be
Extensible or not? You can't really say well, let's have a 10th operator because you don't need it, right? And so
Arguably with that it could be the loss of fork in a manner of speaking because all of the current opcodes can be implemented with
That level of thing now, you do have software upgrades to optimize common things, but they don't change the semantics
So I think that's potentially a longer term route to get to ossification, but it's a big change, right?
One of the great sort of open questions in Bitcoin
I think anyways is how do we upgrade Bitcoin if we want to upgrade Bitcoin?
So in the early days Satoshi was basically the benevolent dictator
then at some point minor activated soft forks were
Discovered we had you ASF's with a taproot. We had speedy trial. What are your thoughts on?
If we're gonna have another presumably a soft fork. I don't think our fork is gonna happen anytime soon. What is
What are your thoughts on what would be the way to activate that?
Personally, I'm extremely conservative and so I would I'm hesitant that I would ever really fully endorse another soft fork unless it was
Prescriptive than maybe and in that case like I'm not really an expert and all the activation options, but I would say
something more like how like when we did taproot and segwit like being able to accumulate and somehow measure the whole network and as confidently as possible
So at least we know everybody is ready
Do you mean the nodes do you mean counting nodes? This is the problem?
It's I don't know how to do this in a non-civil way
I'm just saying an ideal would be you would want to know that actually everybody supported the change and that's probably
Yeah, it's probably impossible
Yeah, I also agree basically the main point is that we must not have a predictable governance process
If we don't have it, then we may have changes when needed
But we but any attacker cannot predict the risk of trying to impose a change that is not needed
As example, if you have the game of chess, is it possible that human beings will change the rules?
Yes, I mean they really need it. They will human beings are very flexible, but there is there any
Any kind of governance flow to change the rules of chess?
You can just change the Federation the International Federation, which is a political body
But then people we keep playing chess in the same way
Chip players, we just quit the Federation
So it's good that there is no process to change Bitcoin that can be predicted and measured because if there was
The attacker could actually try to estimate the budget to attack Bitcoin
Let's say one way of possibly upgraded because I think is very possibly interesting and funny is
We discussed it many times side chains, of course blocks is working on that since since the very beginning
But it's very hard to do to way back in a trusted way. So a possible option would be one way peg
So basically you burn Bitcoin and you get this side coin on another system
the interesting thing about this process is that if you're really convinced that you find that you found a great and
Controversial upgrade to Bitcoin that would be a very good test
Just burn a coin and get your side coin if you're right
We will all migrate there eventually and the last man migrating will not lose any money
Because the price of Bitcoin and the second we stay we still is capped
So basically while the new system will draw demand from Bitcoin
It would also draw supply so basically in 100 year the last man which will migrate without any kind of price difference
Unless you are afraid that this side coin will go to zero because nobody uses it. But that's the point. Nobody will use it
It's not really necessary. So I think I mean probably I'm lonely on this, but I think that proof-of-burn could be a nice
Proposal. I mean, do you want a confidential transaction on Bitcoin? Sure do a burn coin
Let's see if people wants it if they do the price would be the same a Bitcoin if they want
Jameson how do we upgrade Bitcoin?
Yeah, I'm not worried about that
I think it's kind of a meta governance thing of like it's not possible for someone to impose a process in the first place and
It should be a big red flag if there is ever an official process
I'll kind of close my time by saying I think there are two types of
Changes to Bitcoin that we should continue pushing forward and exploring
one is things that will improve permissionless innovation aka
changes that will make it so that people can go off and do whatever the hell they want without having to go through this process because
We don't have to worry about them potentially breaking Bitcoin. The other is things that help the Bitcoin base layer act as a
cryptographic accumulator of sorts aka things that allow you to do
Functionality that would be really really difficult or really hacky to try to put together on a second layer
You know, these are basically efficiency and scalability improvements
Adam last words for you how to upgrade Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, I think actually the the fundamental is
The economy the market is actually deciding I mean, it's like gold
You know if you if you mind led the gold bugs won't buy it and that that's the bottom line, right?
so if you change Bitcoin in some way that people don't like or they don't like the way you changed it even if they like the
Future it's gonna refuse to buy it and the miners will stop or go bankrupt and that's basically what's happened in the past
And I think everything else is just convenience around it
So while people looking at UASF as a dramatic thing the earlier folks were just like that economic
Nodes upgraded with a bit of lead time
The miners followed and that was that right if the miners mind something invalid they lose money
That's their problem. And so the the whole idea of even involving miners was just a convenience wait for all the nodes to upgrade
Asked the miners to set a date, but you know, you can just set a date that is in the future and at that point it becomes active
All right, that's our time. Thanks for being here. Thanks to the panelists and enjoy the rest of the conference