It seems like the Bitcoin maxis are very anti-core 30 and they're very pro-knots.
 What is it that they're not understanding that you do understand?
 If you believe that, you know, getting to 50% of the network or whatever is going to
 stop that data from propagating, you're just fooling yourself.
 And so what I've been telling people for a while now is like, if we want to stop the
 spam, you need to get people to use Bitcoin more in the way that you want them to use
 it.
 It doesn't actually really become a legal issue or liability unless you're building
 additional functionality that is extracting that data and transforming it into a JPEG that
 could then be interpreted by a human as that illegal content.
 What problem does taking the op return from 80 to, was it 80 bytes to 100 kilobytes?
 I think you said, what problem does that solve?
 Jameson, it's good to see you again.
 Long time no see.
 Yeah.
 I think last time we spoke was in person in Nashville, Miami, Nashville.
 I think it was Nashville.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 It's been a while.
 A lot has happened since the last we spoke, especially around this whole Bitcoin knots versus
 core debate, debacle.
 I don't know what it is.
 We've spoken with a couple of people on the show about it.
 I was just telling you offline, it seems like from a distance that the community, wherever
 you circumscribe that is siding with knots and then, you know, people are on both sides
 are accusing the other side of being infiltrated, hijacked, compromised, et cetera.
 I don't really have a strong opinion on all of this.
 I feel like everyone should just run a node and let the market sort it out.
 But I'm hoping that you can maybe tease out some of the nuance.
 And I know you said you've been talking about this for a while.
 You might not be too happy to talk about it again.
 But for the benefit of my lovely audience, if you could please just sort of unpack what
 in the world is going on from your perspective with all of this.
 Yeah.
 Well, Robert, I would actually say that you are emblematic of the community.
 I would say that the vast majority of the community does not care about this debate and they are
 being quiet about it and they think that it's just not worth their time to be interested in
 or devoted to the minutia of what is becoming a lot more controversial.
 But yes, you're effectively right.
 You know, run your node or don't.
 Most people don't even run a node.
 And continue about your business.
 Actually, I think Mandrake had a great tweet a few days ago where he was basically like,
 you guys don't need to worry about this debate.
 Let the nerds fight it out.
 And the best thing that you can do is nothing.
 And your Bitcoin will remain as it is.
 And it was a similar type of thing with the scaling debates, for example,
 which I would say were far more contentious and had far more people interested in the
 controversy.
 And of course, that was creating a fork, which then had actual financial consequences to people
 who wanted to choose one side or the other.
 But once again, if you don't choose a side, then even in the case of a fork, which I don't
 think is going to happen here, you have both sides.
 So you're effectively neutral and safe.
 But yeah, where is this all come from?
 It's really interesting from a historical perspective because the debate goes back a decade, probably
 longer than a decade.
 And the debate is effectively, it's a few things.
 One of it is what is spam?
 You know, what is the activity that we don't want to see happening on the Bitcoin network?
 Another aspect of this debate is should non-monetary use of Bitcoin be allowed, condoned, what have
 you, and so those two things kind of intertwine to get some people to start thinking about, okay, what can
 we do to try to stop what we consider to be bad uses of Bitcoin?
 And so I think on one side, you end up having a very interested and caring set of people who
 have, you know, morals and philosophical ideals of things of, you know, they perceive that Bitcoin
 should be a certain way and they want to do what they can to push Bitcoin more in that
 direction.
 They don't like the direction that Bitcoin has been going.
 And then on the other side, you have more of the technical, could even call them the autistic
 folks who are like really deep in the weeds of the protocol and the network who actually
 mostly agree with the philosophical and moral points that the other side make in the sense
 that like we think that JPEGs on Bitcoin are stupid.
 However, they look at what, you know, what is the actual capability of Bitcoin?
 What is the game theory?
 How does the network actually work at a protocol level?
 And what activity are we seeing on the network?
 And is it worth our time trying to stop that because, you know, we are talking about a censorship
 resistant network.
 It is designed to be very difficult to stop people from doing things that you disagree with
 as long as they are following the rules of the protocol.
 And that's where things get really gnarly.
 Like what is, what are the rules of the protocol and what is consensus?
 What is policy?
 What, what is filtering?
 That's where things start to get really complicated.
 Yeah.
 So I guess we need to actually go into the nitty gritty about some of this, but you brought
 up a few of the points.
 Like what is spam?
 You know, who, who arbitrates?
 What is spam versus what is not spam?
 Um, I also, you said non-monetary use cases.
 I don't know if those are so clearly defined as well.
 Um, could you go into some of this nuance and then are there bright lines or is this just kind
 of a social consensus debate thing?
 Yes.
 I think that that's one of the reasons why this is so contentious, especially when you're
 talking about trying to stop quote unquote spam or, or quote unquote non-monetary use of
 block space, uh, because, well, there are counter examples.
 Um, you know, there are, are protocols that are effectively allowing the creation of second
 layer networks where there is arguably monetary activity and these protocols may then put arbitrary
 data into the chain, uh, to anchor into it, uh, for various reasons.
 So it's like, okay, is that monetary?
 Is that not monetary?
 Uh, you know, there's also some people who seem to be more on the side of, well, as long
 as you're only doing a tiny amount and you're doing it highly efficiently.
 So another counter example, uh, is open timestamps, which is a project that's been around for
 nearly a decade now and open timestamps, I think makes two or three on chain transactions per day.
 And it scales up almost infinitely, uh, where you can effectively, um, timestamp and hash and, and
 create a proof of existence of any arbitrary data, any document, whatever you want.
 And, and, and ultimately this is using like the magic of Merkle trees and cryptography to, to ultimately
 only put one hash into the blockchain itself from which you can then cryptographically provably show
 that, you know, you had a document or a file that was in existence at some period of time.
 And you can use that for all types of things.
 It's been used for things like voting attestation, for example.
 Um, and, and, and some people say, you know, that's fine because that's only using a few
 transactions per day and it scales really well.
 And then on the extreme opposite end, there's of course, oh, I'm going to put a whole JPEG
 in, in, into the blockchain and fill up an entire block.
 And, and, and, you know, that's the extreme end where I think almost everyone can say, yes,
 this is a non-financial non-monetary transaction.
 And it's just using up a lot of block space.
 Um, should that be allowed or not?
 Um, I think that one, one way that you could look at this is I actually find some similarities
 to, I think there was a judge nearly a hundred years ago in the United States who was essentially
 tasked with deciding whether or not something was pornographic.
 And the judge essentially said, well, I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it.
 And so I think there's an element of that going on here.
 And, and, and as such, it is a very gray area and, and gray areas do not work well when you're
 talking about codifying rules that a machine is supposed to enforce.
 And that's what Bitcoin is.
 It's a system of rules.
 And, you know, we have consensus rules and then we have network relay policy rules,
 which is what a lot of this debate is about.
 But either way, you have to have a way to very precisely quantify, describe, and in a deterministic
 way that machines can come to agreement on say, okay, this is allowed, or this is not allowed.
 And so that's when you start going down this rabbit hole of how do we filter out everything
 we don't like, uh, it gets really gnarly.
 And you'll find that many protocol developers essentially use the term, you know, this is going
 to be a whack-a-mole game that is never going to end because making changes to the protocol is a very
 arduous process.
 It takes a long time, um, you know, development and like release cycles for Bitcoin core is like
 at six months, you'll have a new release.
 But then when you think about your adversaries, if you want to consider the spammers, the
 people who are doing new things on the blockchain that some may disagree with, they don't have those
 constraints.
 They can roll out a new protocol or a new meta protocol that like sits on top of Bitcoin
 in a few hours or a day.
 And so there's a very, uh, asymmetric disadvantage on the side of what you might consider the defenders
 of Bitcoin purity, uh, to try to continue, uh, whacking away at preventing things that they don't like.
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 Alright, so lots of ways to go. I'll just go back to 2017 block wars, maybe to like try to draw some
 parallels with that if there are any. That was the only, you know, real contentious situation I'd been
 through in Bitcoin. And that was that did result in a fork. You said you didn't think this would result
 in a fork. Again, assuming the audience doesn't have such in depth technical knowledge about what
 these terms mean, even fork, hard fork versus soft fork, etc. Like what can we just try to do like a layman's
 discussion of like, what is the, what is at issue? Sounds like the opera turn is kind of the center
 piece of what's at issue here. So what is that? And then why do you think this does not end up in
 a fork? And if you could also sort of describe what the consequences of that are or what a fork is,
 that would be helpful too. Yeah. So opera turn is a feature of the Bitcoin protocol that was added
 a bit over a decade ago, really at the beginning of this debate. And it was because people were starting
 to build meta protocols on top of Bitcoin. They were inserting data into the blockchain. And some
 people said, Hey, this isn't great. Like these people are, they're creating a lot of UTXOs that will
 probably never get spent. You know, they're, they're increasing the resource usage and, and basically the
 size of the database that the Bitcoin node has to maintain indefinitely. And how about we create a
 function in the protocol that incentivizes them to store their data in a way that doesn't put as much
 burden on the node operators. And so opera turn was basically a way where if you're building on top of
 Bitcoin, you can put a little bit of data into the blockchain without creating an unspent transaction
 output, which is just a piece of data that will have to stay there forever because a node needs to
 know if someone's going to spend their money in the future. But if you do opera turn, it basically says,
 this is not money. I am not, I'm not holding, I don't have a placeholder for a piece of an entry into
 this ledger that I may want to spend in the future. I never want to touch this again. It's just putting
 the data here, you can ignore it. So that was considered to be just an incentive to get people
 to be nicer. You know, this is a lot of what the Bitcoin protocol developers think about is, you know,
 they can't really control Bitcoin. They can't control how people use Bitcoin, but they can try to fiddle with
 incentives to make the people who are playing the game of Bitcoin not cause as much harm to the network
 from a variety of different perspectives. So where are we today? Basically, at the beginning of the year,
 I think it was back in April or so, we had a developer who suggested a change to Bitcoin Core,
 which was essentially to remove the restriction on which transactions will be relayed across the network,
 specifically when it is an opera turn type of transaction that has an opera turn output.
 And so I believe that the latest default is 80 bytes. So you can have an opera turn with up to 80 bytes,
 maybe 83 bytes of data. And as long as you do that, you're conforming within the standard transaction
 rules and the average node on the network will happily validate your transaction and pass it along to the
 rest of the nodes that it's connected to. And eventually, presumably, it will get mined.
 Now, the reason why the developer chose to suggest increasing this limit and actually removing the
 limit so that the new limit is essentially the consensus limit, which has always been in place,
 which is 100 kilobytes, which is a lot larger than 80 bytes. The reason why they wanted to do this was that
 they discovered that there are edge case situations where people are building on top of Bitcoin and they
 want to put that arbitrary data into the blockchain, but they also want it to be relayed across the network
 very quickly so that everyone else who's participating in that protocol will see it rather than have to
 wait for the block to get mined and then the transaction data to get relayed across the network in the block.
 And so this was a very unique edge case that created a lot of controversy, however, because it was a
 company called Citraya, which is building a second layer zero knowledge rollup. It's like using BitVM
 technology to do this. And that's where the conspiracy theory started, essentially saying, oh, this is a
 terrible precedent because the Bitcoin developers are changing Bitcoin to accommodate a venture backed
 for profit company, which, by the way, full disclosure, I have a small investment in. And so I got roped into
 all of this as well, because I was in favor of that change. And people were assuming that I was in favor of
 the change because it would somehow improve my investments in Citraya. To be clear, Citraya didn't
 need the change. They had already figured out a workaround so that they didn't need larger op returns.
 And Citraya didn't ask for the change because they had already figured out a workaround. It was actually
 the Bitcoin protocol developer, after talking to Citraya and learning out about this workaround, who basically had a
 horrified reaction of, oh, my God, why are you using Bitcoin in that way? Oh, it's because you can't use
 it in the way that we consider to be nicer and less spammy and less polluting to the UTXO set. And so
 that's when the Bitcoin core developer made that suggestion, because they figure if Citraya is doing this,
 there probably will be other people doing it in the future. What can we do to try to tweak the incentives to
 prevent that from happening? And so, you know, that has really started off a whole storm of conspiracies
 around why this was happening. There have been very lengthy technical publications explaining why it's
 happening. And I think a lot of people have found that to be sufficient, but a lot of people have found
 it to be insufficient and they want to fight back against that to the extent that they can. Now,
 as we said, I don't think that a fork is going to happen from this because nobody on either side is
 suggesting changing consensus rules. And this is, once again, we're getting really deep into the weeds,
 where even if people know, like, what is a consensus rule? How does Bitcoin operate? You may not know what
 a policy rule is, what a standardness rule is. And these are what are colloquially now being called
 filters. And essentially, this is a more restrictive set of rules that every node also enforces,
 but it only enforces it on unconfirmed transactions. So when someone creates a transaction, they send it to
 some nodes, those nodes, if they agree to it, will validate it and then relay it to the rest of the
 nodes. If a node has a more restrictive policy rule, where it says, no, I, even though this is a valid
 transaction, I don't like it, I'm not going to relay it, then it just drops it on the floor. And so now
 we're getting into this area of game theory where people are trying to figure out, okay, if we get
 enough nodes refusing to relay this stuff, can we stop the spam? And there's a few issues at play here.
 One of the issues is, you know, how does data propagate across the Bitcoin network and the Bitcoin
 network is essentially a dense mesh network. It's a peer to peer network, peers connect to each other,
 willy nilly, you'll have anywhere from like 10 to 130 or so peers for any node that you run. And,
 and if you think about the dynamics of how this transaction really really happens, if, if you're connected to 10
 nodes, then you only need one of those nodes to send a transaction to you for you to learn about it.
 So if you're thinking about like, how does filtering or you could call it censorship, whatever work on the
 network, like if you want it to be effective, if you want to actually stop transactions, you don't like
 from propagating, you're going to need more than 90% of the network to refuse to really, you're probably
 going to want like 95, 98, you know, as close to 100% of the network is going to need to refuse to
 reload, relay those transactions in order to like actually stop them from propagating across the entire
 mesh network. And even beyond that, it almost becomes entirely irrelevant. Because one of the things that has
 changed over the past few years, is that we now have a lot of mining pools that have centralized APIs,
 where you can literally just go to a website, and you can put your transaction, hex data into that and
 click a button, and it goes directly to the miner. And so it completely bypasses all of the rules of the
 network and what people are enforcing there. And that's actually one of the reasons, additionally,
 why the protocol developers were concerned about how this has changed over the past few years,
 is because if we find ourselves in a situation where there's a significant amount of activity,
 whether or not you considered it to be economically viable or not, but if there's enough people who want
 to purchase block space for something, and they're doing it with valid transactions, and they realize
 they can't just broadcast it over the network, their incentive now is to just go to these mining pools
 directly. And that is that's bad for the business of smaller miners who aren't operating these direct
 out-of-band transaction confirmation mechanisms. So this is another argument that you should prefer the
 relay rules of the network to be as close as possible to the consensus rules, because you want nodes to have
 the best possible view of what the next block is expected to be. One of those reasons would be you want
 to have the best fee estimation. You don't want there to be some dark pool of transactions that are going to crowd up
 the next block and make your fee estimation incorrect. That'll result in a worse user experience for you or for
 whoever is using your node for fee estimation. And then there's other like really, really edge case minutiae around
 like how do blocks propagate around the network. And like we've seen over the course of this year, we've actually seen
 block propagation times greatly increase. And the reason for that
 is because there's more and more data that is not getting relayed around to a lot of nodes.
 And so when the block comes in, it doesn't have it's missing a lot of those transactions.
 And it then has to go out to other nodes and ask them for that data. And that
 it creates suboptimal performance, because like a lot of effort went into something called compact block
 relay around seven, eight years ago, that greatly improves the relay performance around the network.
 And so that has degraded. And it's degraded for multiple reasons. But we've also seen, you know,
 even aside from like all the spam, JPEG, ordinals, token stuff, we had this other phenomenon,
 which is pretty fascinating happened this summer. And that was the sub one Satoshi per virtual byte
 transaction fees. Essentially, there was such low demand for block space,
 that some people figured out, hey, why am I paying this one Satoshi per virtual byte fee,
 which is essentially the like default fee floor, when I could pay less, and it's still consensus valid.
 And so a bunch of people started crafting transactions that paid 10% of that it was paying
 point one Satoshi per virtual byte. But some of them realized, hey, maybe we need to route around the
 network, we need to once again, go to directly to miners. Others realized, there are nodes out there,
 like Libra relay, that have more permissive policies, and they will relay these regardless.
 So I just have to know which nodes to connect to. And I can still relay it across enough of the network.
 And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of this is game theory, or at least from my perspective, it's game theory.
 And some of the aspects of the game have changed a bit over the years. And I think that's what's made
 a lot of people upset because they want to harken back to the old days. I think that there are strong
 arguments that filters did work. They did work in the old days, when people didn't have, you know,
 economic incentives to try to figure out how to bypass them. And so that's another reason why people are
 very upset. And this is a contentious thing, everyone's trying to argue about whether or not
 filters actually work or not. And I think it's possible that both are true. It works in some situations.
 But ultimately, if someone really cares enough, they will find a way to make use of the censorship
 resistant properties of this network. Interesting. Well, I guess the immediate silver
 lining that jumps out to me is all of this debate and circumventing and all of the adaptations going
 on inside of this network seem like a feature, not a bug of the whole thing, right? It's like the
 fact that there's so many people sort of finding a way, right, to solve their individual paths of
 self-interest. And somehow that is getting sorted out inside of Bitcoin. I think there's something to
 be optimistic there about rather than just this is the whole point of decentralization, right?
 That not one party can come in and just unilaterally say, this is how we're going to do it,
 that actual participants in the network get to decide democratically what will be.
 Yeah, that's going to trigger me. Not in a fiat democracy way.
 Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing. Bitcoin is anarchy. And I think that another thing that gets
 people upset here is that they live in a supposed democracy and that they then try to map their democratic
 ideals onto how Bitcoin itself should function. And so we've seen that in a few different perspectives.
 First of all, the beginning of this whole hubbub back in April or so was with regard to the actual
 discussion that happened on the Bitcoin core GitHub repository. And a lot of people were upset because
 because there were more people that were enacting the change than acting the change, which basically
 means there were more people coming in and dissenting and saying, you should not make this change
 than there were people saying, oh, this is a good change. We should do this. And so first of all,
 Bitcoin core is not a democracy. It's a meritocracy. And the opinions of every GitHub user that comes in
 is not going to be a simple 51% vote on whether or not something passes. Rather, the opinions are going
 to get weighted based on the reputation of who is saying them and based upon the logic and the arguments
 that they are making in there. So if you have a hundred generally anonymous or like zero reputation
 GitHub handles that suddenly appear and have never contributed to the Bitcoin core repository before,
 and they're all just like knack, knack, knack, this is dumb, knack, those opinions are going to get
 discounted. And beyond Bitcoin core itself, you know, the way that the network operates, if we're
 talking about nodes, I think everyone's familiar with the way that like 51% majority of hash rate works.
 So like in general, Bitcoin is considered to be thermodynamically secure as long as 51% of the
 network hash rate is honest and is not trying to double spend their own money and whatnot. But there's
 nothing like that when it comes to the nodes that aren't mining. Nodes are just validators. They are
 receiving transactions, they are receiving blocks and your choice as a sovereign node operator is what do you
 accept and what do you reject. And so now when we have a lot of people that are saying I'm going to run
 knots nodes because I'm going to reject all of these unconfirmed transactions that I don't like,
 that is completely within your right to do so. But if you believe that, you know, getting to 50% of the
 network or whatever is going to stop that data from propagating, or it's going to prevent those spammy
 transactions from getting into blocks, you're just fooling yourself. And so I have no problem with people
 running whatever node software they want to, I just want them not to be delusional and be doing it for
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 I see. So we're back to this issue of where the wet code meets the dry code, right? That everyone has
 certain opinions or value judgments about what is spam and what their node should allow in versus not
 allow in. What should be filtered out. And all of that does, I mean, as I understand this, correct me
 where I'm wrong though, that the consensus of those nodes does form the backbone of Bitcoin, right? Like
 they're choosing which... At the consensus layer, but not so much at the policy layer.
 Yeah. Okay. So maybe you could tease that out for me then because that's what I was thinking about when
 I invoked the term democratic, which again, not fiat democratic popularity contest, just that you have
 to have a social consensus, right? That all these disparate opinions need to get compressed into some
 social layer. I was under the impression that's occurring at the node level, but it sounds like there's
 there's a distinction to be made between the policy level and the consensus rule level. So maybe you can
 tease that out a little bit more. Yeah. So, so ultimately the consensus rules
 for op return and the consensus rules for everything are not changing. Like no one is proposing changing
 the consensus rule for what is considered to be a valid transaction that is using this op return function.
 Which would catalyze a fork if they'd work. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so, you know, all of the,
 all of the changes or the filtering that people who are running knots nodes, or even people who are
 running Bitcoin core nodes with different custom settings for their operator, for their data carrier size
 configuration, you know, they, they are just making local changes that only affect that relay aspect.
 Um, as soon as a block comes in that has transactions that were not relayed, but are still consensus
 valid, the node is still accepting it, validating it and storing it. And so that's like another reason
 why I find a lot of this to be rather performative because then, you know, the people who are running
 these nodes, yeah, sure. You're, you're effectively delaying how long you're storing this data that you
 need to test for 10 minutes or a few hours or whatever. But ultimately your node is downloading
 it and storing it. Uh, now you could tell your node to prune it out. Um, that's another option,
 but you still need to download, validate, and store it for some period of time in order to remain in
 consensus with the rest of the network. And from a game theory point of view, I think the only effective way
 that you can actually stop spam is at the consensus layer. And so if I was a, a highly, uh, puritanical
 Bitcoiner who said, I must not ever see, you know, JPEG spam in Bitcoin, your only real effective option
 is to reject not only the transaction when it's unconfirmed, but to reject the block when it comes
 in with the confirmed transaction that you consider to be spammy that you don't want. I think that anything
 else is more like a protest than it is actually effectuating any change in the network. And so,
 you know, if anyone says, okay, I'm running knots as a protest because I hate what his core is doing,
 then I think that's completely valid. Just don't delude yourself that the dynamics of the network are going
 to change because I don't think you're going to get the requisite, like 95 plus percent of people to,
 uh, to buy into your protest.
 Okay. So going back to the block size wars, one of the issue there, not the issue, but a major issue
 was that the decentralization of Bitcoin was threatened. At least that was the strong view of
 the small blockers who ultimately won out, right? That to increase the block size would increase the
 cost effectively of running a node, which would reduce the, uh, dispersion of nodes, which would
 reduce the decentralization of Bitcoin, which would compromise its core value proposition.
 Yeah.
 Is any of the decentralization of Bitcoin under threat in any of this core versus knots situation?
 Uh, so I think you could make arguments both ways. Uh, if you were, if you were going to argue that it
 does put it more at threat, then I think what you would argue is, well, you would really argue more the
 inscription side of things that, um, uh, taproot is being abused and that, you know, people are putting
 megabytes and megabytes of data, uh, into a taproot witness to, you know, store JPEGs or whatever. And
 then, you know, that as a result, that is using more disk space on, uh, the, the part of node operators.
 Um, I could then argue the opposite in the sense that actually from, from a validation
 performance perspective, any of these, uh, data stuffing related things, whether or not it's, uh,
 an inscription and a taproot witness, whether or not it's, uh, an op return, those are actually easier
 for nodes to validate compared to a similar amount of what you might consider like regular transaction
 data. And the reason for that is that really, um, at least the most CPU intensive aspects of running
 a node and validating transactions are validating the cryptographic signatures. And so when you're just
 stuffing a bunch of data in there, it's not validating any signatures. The node's actually
 just completely skipping over it as quickly as possible. Um, another reason why you might argue that this
 isn't meaningfully putting decentralization at risk is because the block size is not changing. Um, and,
 and in a similar vein, uh, operaturn, uh, operaturn is actually not the most efficient way to store data
 in Bitcoin. Um, there's a, there's a good chart out there, but I think effectively if you're trying to
 store more than around 143 bytes of data and into the Bitcoin blockchain, it, it starts to become more,
 uh, financially cheap in terms of transaction fees to put that into, uh, a taproot inscription
 because of something called the witness discount or essentially data that is, uh, is put into, uh,
 witnesses, which are essentially like the signatures signature data space of Bitcoin gets this, uh,
 it's like a three, four X discount compared to really all other transaction data. Um, operaturn
 does not have any discount. So, you know, if you, if you want to put, if you want to create this maximum
 size, uh, 100 kilobyte operaturn, that is consensus valid and possible. Um, you could for the same fee
 store 400 kilobytes of data in the tap roots, uh, witness. So it's, you know, it's possible,
 but once again, what, what really matters, I think is incentives because the incentives are what drives
 the game theory. Interesting. I had not heard about the witness thing. That's interesting. That's sort
 of obviates a lot of the argument against the operaturn. I, I suppose if there's a, I mean, I don't,
 I don't think that we're going to start seeing significant portions of the Bitcoin blocks be used
 in operaturn as a result of this, because just the incentive is not there. Um, and so the, the obvious
 counterpoint here is okay, then why are you blowing out from, you know, 80 bytes to a hundred kilobytes?
 And I think the simple answer there is like, we can already see how contentious an issue this is.
 And like I said, this debate goes back over a decade and a lot of people are really tired of this debate
 and they want to just get it over with. So, you know, I, I consider there's an argument that it's
 kind of like ripping the bandaid off and just, you know, letting the network go.
 So this was a question that came up with, uh, one of the guests we had on arguing the side of knots
 and his core question of contention was what problem does taking the ceiling from, of a operaturn
 from 80 to a, uh, was it 80 bytes to a hundred kilobytes? I think you said, what problem does that solve?
 Yeah. So, you know, this specifically solves the edge case where someone needs to have visibility
 of that data in an unconfirmed state across the network. And they, they can't wait for the data to
 show up in a block. It's, it's an extreme edge case. And like we said, uh, I think Citra is the only
 example of that, that we have now, but who knows what similar, you know, second layer protocols will
 come along that may have similar needs.
 Got it. Um, what, and what does this, so all right, back to the idea of spam, because
 the purpose of proof of work was as an anti-spam technology, right? The, the idea that
 if you have to pay to play, so to speak, well, that mitigates the ability of a spammer
 to work, right? Like we all get spam email and while that's because the cost of those emails is near
 zero, so they can blast out infinite spam emails all over the internet every day. But if you assign a
 small cost to those same emails, well, all of a sudden that's a very, uh, expensive endeavor for
 a spammer. So is it, is it not adequate for us to define spam as you know, if someone's willing to pay
 for it, you know, as they say, one man's junk is another man's treasure. So if someone's willing
 to pay for it, doesn't that validate it as non-spam?
 Yeah. So that's my perspective. And I think that's a lot of people's perspective,
 but it's not everyone's perspective. It's interesting, uh, to, you know, to talk about email and spam
 because I was an email engineer, uh, for the first decade of my career. And so I've, I've spoken at
 length about, uh, how I observed the email ecosystem, uh, centralizing and, and, and losing a sovereignty
 and censorship resistance over the course of the decade or so that I was participating in it and how
 I'm actually quite fearful that Bitcoin may fall down a similar path.
 And what is spam only an economic thing? So yeah, you can, you can take the perspective of,
 well, spam is in the eye of the beholder. Once again, uh, I know it when I see it, but that doesn't
 work very well when you need a very precise deterministic protocol where everyone is in
 perfect bite for bite consensus with each other. Um, I think that the economic argument is the most
 objective argument and easier for people to agree about, but the problem is that right now nobody is
 using Bitcoin. And so, as I already said earlier, it's been so bad that the fees have dropped by 10x below
 the prior default fee floor. That's how dead the actual demand for Bitcoin block space is right now.
 And so what happens when you have what is essentially, um, a, a communal shared resource
 block space and it's permissionless or anyone who is following the rules of the network can use it
 however they want. And, and it's super cheap. I think this sort of like the trifecta of all of these
 things happening at the same time is how you end up with spam on the network. And so what I've been telling
 people for a while now is like, if we want to stop the spam, you need to get people to use Bitcoin more
 in the way that you want them to use it. Because I do agree that it seems like a large, uh, portion
 of usage of the Bitcoin network lately is for frivolous, stupid things that would not make economic sense to
 do if the fees weren't effectively zero. And so I think we, we could easily step back and take
 this like mile high view of how did we get here? Um, I, I think that a lot of the past year or so
 of trad fi adoption, for example, of Bitcoin, this is, this is, this is making it a lot more convenient and,
 and, and, you know, building a lot more rails for people to get Bitcoin exposure, but like everyone
 who's doing trad fi Bitcoin stuff, they're generating zero demand for block space. And you could probably
 argue that they're actually essentially vampires. They're siphoning off a lot of potential demand
 for block space if those people would have been sovereign Bitcoin users instead. So I feel like,
 um, you know, for me, it's the same battle that I've been fighting for over a decade now of just
 trying to get people to actually use Bitcoin to its full potential to be sovereign, to not have to trust
 third parties. Uh, but it seems like a losing battle because we're fighting against human nature and human
 incentives and the human nature is essentially to choose convenience at the expense of almost
 everything else. And I think that that's, what's been happening here and, you know, bad things
 results. Uh, hopefully it turns around, but I don't know. Interesting. So the, that this could all
 perhaps be looked at as an epiphenomenon of low block, low demand for block space,
 that things are just so cheap. Yeah. I think that exacerbates it. Yeah. Um, you know, we have seen examples in
 like a few years ago where, you know, someone creates a meta protocol and they, they create this
 other game theory around the meta protocol that really like time compresses the amount of time
 where people can like get a token drop or some other stupid thing. And, and that has actually created
 massive spikes in fees and demand for block space. But that's always been like a fad, you know, it'll,
 it'll be like a few hours or a day. It's not a sustainable thing. I think if we want
 a sustainable, um, you know, high demand for block space, we just need more people using
 Bitcoin and a sovereign fit in permissionless fashion. So let's talk about that then. Um,
 because I guess another thing, well, all right, let's just focus on that.
 Other than just transacting in Bitcoin, what are some other things that could
 increase demand for block space in a way that could make this whole issue a moot point?
 Um, I've, you know, I've heard the idea thrown around that if there were consumer applications
 that were putting, creating demand for Bitcoin block space by virtue of their utility, whatever
 they're rendering to their customers, that that could be something that could drive demand for
 block space. Like what other ideas are floating out there that could help alleviate this?
 Yeah. I mean, a, any, any sort of other layer or protocol that is being built on top of it. And
 arguably a lot of the more puritanical folks will say a lot of those are, you know,
 shit coins or non-financial, whatever. But, you know, even if you're creating some, you know,
 crypto casino gambling, second layer protocol, if it drives demand, if it ultimately ends up needing,
 you know, more settlement mechanisms back onto the main chain, then that will drive demand for block
 space. And, and actually I I'm, I'm hopeful that Citra, which I mentioned earlier will do something
 like that because they're the way that they've designed their zero knowledge rollup is that it
 will end up buying like non-trivial amounts of block space to, to publish these proofs and settlements
 into. But we won't really know until it actually rolls out on mainnet with, you know, real value behind
 it and starts to get a real traction. Um, otherwise, you know, doing more things in a sovereign fashion.
 So let's say you want to take a loan out on your Bitcoin. You could send your money to some centralized
 third party, uh, and they hold onto that collateral and they give you fiat. That's, that's a convenient
 way to do it. Or you could use a trust minimized solution where you're entering into like a multi-signature
 arrangement with multiple, uh, different entities where no one can rug each other. And you can see that the
 funds are staying where they are. They're not being co-mingled. They're not being rehypothecated. Uh,
 you know, you can get better security and safety, you know, for your actual loan in a situation like that,
 but there's additional level of technical complexity involved. But by doing that, you're buying more
 block space. So I think that just like doing more stuff permissionlessly in Bitcoin is the way that we
 continue to drive demand. Okay. So the non-monetary and or spam, um, use cases that are driving demand for
 block space, albeit because block space is cheap. Isn't that contributing to, if we just go back to
 incentives, that that is creating more incentives, at least putting upward pressure on the incentives to
 have layer two plus development. I mean, for, for whatever reason, uh, so far, like the, the spam usage of
 Bitcoin, you know, the, the non native, uh, Bitcoin financial usage of the blockchain, uh, at least for
 most of this year, they seem to be sitting right there at the limit. Like, uh, they're, they're not
 creating enough demand to actually create what I would call a robust auction market for block space. And so,
 um, you know, the, if you look at the fee rates on the network, I think it's been very, very rare over
 the past year that we've even gone above like 10 Satoshi per virtual bite is pretty much hung out in
 the, like one to two range all year. And, and, you know, Bitcoin block size is small. It's we're, we're
 talking about fairly small amounts of demand that are actually needed to really kick off, um,
 um, more competition around block space, but it just hasn't been there. And it feels like,
 you know, the people who are buying up block space and doing stupid stuff with it are, are being
 opportunistic and they're only putting in the minimum amounts and they're willing to wait, you know,
 for the next amount of empty block space to show up. If you're listening to this podcast,
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 There's a question. I'm not sure what this means, so you might have to explain it to me.
 Is it a concern that there could be unconfirmed op return CP/CSAM in the mempool?
 Yeah. I don't know what those things are, so maybe you could explain what that is to you.
 Right. So, well, I hope I don't get your channel banned or anything, but we're basically talking
 about child abuse related materials and content. Ah, okay. That's what that stands for. Okay.
 Yeah. Some people have been trying to avoid saying that because they don't want to get
 like banned by any automatic filtering algorithms on the podcasting platforms.
 So the short version is no, I don't think that there is much concern about that. Now,
 there has been illegal content in Bitcoin for over a decade. So there's been everything from there have
 been links to various websites that had that type of material. There has been, for example, some of the
 WikiLeaks documents have been put onto Bitcoin. I'm pretty sure there's some classified material in
 there that would be considered illegal. And so a lot of the really what I consider chicken littles that
 have been going around lately have been crying that, you know, once this op return limit gets increased,
 we're going to see that illegal content happen on Bitcoin. And I'm like, yeah, sure. It's entirely
 possible. But this is not going to cause Bitcoin as a network to stop running. I don't think that as a
 node operator that it puts you in a more precarious legal position. And there have been a number of
 companies in this space who have actually sought to answer this question. And I think a few weeks ago,
 I saw Bob McElrath, who worked on Fidelity's Bitcoin custody infrastructure. He posted a tweet where
 he said, you know, Fidelity obviously was interested in the answer to that question. And after they had
 their legal counsel look into it, the takeaway was that it's not illegal to be receiving and storing
 data that's happening on a public permissionless network, as long as you're not trying to actually
 make that accessible and transformed into the format where it's interpreted as such. So, you know,
 essentially, we're talking about raw bits and bytes, right? And people are, they're basically
 manipulating and looking for loopholes in the Bitcoin rules, saying, okay, where do the Bitcoin rules
 allow me to shove arbitrary data? And there are a lot of places where you can shove arbitrary data into a
 Bitcoin transaction and it's still considered valid. Ava Chow had a several hour Twitch stream, I think
 a week or so ago, where they went through all of the code and said, okay, if I wanted to put data here,
 I could, if I want to put data here, I could. And this was basically an academic exercise in
 understanding if we really wanted to stop all arbitrary data, how much functionality would we have
 to rip out of the Bitcoin protocol? And it would be significant and it would have a negative
 a detrimental impact on a lot of the pure financial functionality, like the security of Bitcoin.
 Like multi-sig itself would probably need to be ripped out. And to actually to put a point on that,
 one of the first ways that anyone ever inscribed data into Bitcoin, it was 2013 or 2014, but Peter Todd
 actually wrote a Python script, which inserted data into P2SH pub keys. And I believe that this script is
 actually the script that was used to embed the Bitcoin white paper into the blockchain back in 2013 or so.
 And that's an interesting novelty, right? So like, if you're a node operator, there's this one cool bash script that you can run that will actually
 actually extract that data and actually transform it into the PDF and you can read the Bitcoin white paper from your own node.
 But like getting back to the point, we're just talking about raw data that's being put into a Bitcoin node and the Bitcoin node doesn't know what it is.
 It has no way of interpreting it as anything else other than raw data that happens to be shoved between different operators within Bitcoin's coding language.
 And so it doesn't actually really become a legal issue or liability unless you're building additional functionality that is
 extracting that data and transforming it into a JPEG or a movie or whatever that could then be interpreted by a human as that illegal content.
 So I think like that's the takeaway. And I have yet to see a single person who is claiming that this, you know, child abuse material stuff will become a legal threat to all node operators.
 I've yet to see a single one of them actually produce a legal opinion from someone who practices law that that is the case.
 And I've been welcoming them to do so because that would be news to all of us.
 Interesting. So that's a speculation then.
 Okay, that's, that's what I would say. Yeah.
 What? Okay. So what is it then that, again, not that this is representative, but online, it seems like the Bitcoin maxis are very anti core 30 and they're very pro knots.
 So like, what is it that they're not understanding that you do understand? Like, why, why do they not share a perspective more like yours?
 Well, first of all, I would say it's a tiny contingent, very loud, but tiny contingent.
 There's been a lot of Tom foolery going on. Like I have reasons to believe that both discourse on social media and actual metrics of nodes and stuff are being manipulated.
 I've, I've actually, I've run into quite a few AI bots in my replies that have been, you know, saying things that then I've been able to essentially perform a Turing test on to show like, this is not a human.
 And so I'm generally skeptical of a lot of people who are claiming, you know, certain sizes of contingents here.
 You know, look, there are humans who believe this, I would put it on the order of maybe a thousand or a few thousand people who are really into that camp.
 Um, a lot of that is from looking at the early metrics.
 Um, so if you look at the early, uh, node metrics from may, June ish.
 You can see that there's like a drop in the number of Bitcoin core nodes and an increase in the number of knots nodes.
 And I think that that feels like it's probably legitimate.
 Like that's probably like the actual protest vote per se.
 Um, but then a lot of the continuation of, uh, increase of knots nodes counts that have happened since then, I think is a lot more suspect.
 And one of the main reasons that I say that is because there's been a massive divergence between knots nodes running over IPv4 and IPv6 versus knots nodes running over Tor.
 And there's a few things that you could take away from that.
 Uh, one of those, which I'm sure like the knots proponents would say, well, these are all the node in a box people that are running their start nines and their umbrellas and whatever.
 And, and those operate over Tor by default to get around the network address traversal issues that happen when you're running a node at home by a router.
 Um, and so, you know, that may be true to some extent.
 Uh, but I would also argue that then a lot of those people are probably not particularly economically relevant if we're talking about like a contentious, uh, fork situation.
 And that what really matters more are a lot of the enterprises, the businesses that have massive volume of Bitcoin coming in and out.
 Like they're going to have a much larger effect if there's any sort of consensus, uh, issue at play.
 And another is just that, uh, Tor is incredibly cheap to manipulate.
 Like, uh, you can't get IPv4 addresses for free.
 Uh, you get one assigned to you if you have like a residential ISP.
 Um, if you're doing stuff in the cloud, you have to pay, uh, for every IP that you're getting, but you don't have to pay for Tor addresses.
 It's just software.
 You spin it up and go.
 So I'm, I'm, I'm generally skeptical about the size.
 Uh, there's no doubt that there's a lot of controversy and that this has been dominating discourse, at least on X, uh, for what, four or five months now.
 But in general, what I expect is going to happen is that, uh, Bitcoin core version 30 is going to come out sometime next month.
 The sky is not going to fall.
 Bitcoin will continue working.
 And then the only question will become do all of the people who said that this was going to kill Bitcoin or have some disastrous consequence.
 Do they, do they seed, uh, to the fact that, that they were incorrect in their assertions and move on to something else?
 Or do they just push the goalposts out further and keep trying to argue about this stuff?
 Even though, uh, their actions are not having any real consequential effect on the network itself.
 Okay, I'm getting a hint of like kind of a Malthusian type thing where a lot of people want to be doom and gloomers to get attention about stuff.
 And maybe there's a, there's a function to that, right?
 Of course, you want to draw people's attention to things that could go catastrophically wrong, even if they're low probability, because, well, a catastrophe is a catastrophe.
 But is, but that doesn't seem like if you are thinking this is going to destroy Bitcoin, then aren't you simultaneously saying that you don't think Bitcoin
 Bitcoin is very robust or anti-fragile, which is very core to its value proposition?
 So how do you, how do, how do we reconcile those two things?
 Now, you know, I've, I've been dealing with that, uh, issue for several years, but in the context of ossification, because I feel like there's a similar, uh, perspective, uh, across a lot of people who are very strong ossification.
 Um, and basically that means the people who want there to never be any more changes to the Bitcoin protocol because they consider it to be too risky to make any changes to the Bitcoin protocol.
 And, and I think that this kind of relies upon, uh, a lack of, uh, belief, if you will, in the entry fragility of Bitcoin, because yes, uh, we want the, the network.
 We want consensus to remain sound and robust.
 Uh, we, we don't want people to fork off if it's not absolutely necessary because there's, uh, you know, some point over which we just can never come to an agreement.
 But, um, you know, even if there is some sort of technical failure within Bitcoin as a protocol, the anti-fragility of Bitcoin comes from the fact that it's ultimately not backed by nodes.
 It's backed by the humans who are backing the nodes, uh, and who are contributing their time, their resources, their skills to Bitcoin in whatever way they can.
 And so if there is some sort of technical failure, you know, what happens, well, it's the same thing that happened in previous technical failures, which we haven't had.
 And I think 12 over 12 years now, but you fall back to the human consensus layer and you figure out what went wrong and you fix it and you go forward.
 And, you know, there's no shortage of examples of that happening on other networks as well as this is just the way that these things operate.
 And, and yes, you, you may have some short period of time where there's a kind of like chaos and people aren't sure what's going on, but as long as there is a sufficient amount of people who are dedicated to ensuring that Bitcoin continues operating, then I think that Bitcoin can't die.
 Yes.
 Well, you know, also the, you know, very highly motivated because these people tend to have a lot of their purchasing power stored in Bitcoin.
 They're obviously very technically proficient, the most technically proficient people in the world, uh, on Bitcoin, obviously working on Bitcoin.
 So there is that I've, I've, I've often shared a similar sentiment that that aspect of Bitcoin is always too heavily discounted, like how adversarial and responsive and talented the ultimate, uh, network participants are.
 And so, yeah, I dunno, then I, I guess that's what gives me conviction and not being such a doom and gloomer is like, I've heard all these different stories and all these different existential crisis.
 I'm like, yeah, it'll be fine.
 Like I just, it just seems like that way to me as, as somewhat of an outsider, right?
 I'm not a technical guy like you, but I do have faith in incentives and faith in open source software projects.
 And, uh, you know, I don't subscribe to market failure.
 So I think markets will in general sort these things out.
 All that being said, one thing that does concern me, like in hearing about this was, and I put my conspiracy theory hat on, I'm like, well, let's see.
 What is Bitcoin?
 It is at least the ultimate threat to the business model of central banking.
 Right.
 It's at least that, um, central banks have been funding the both sides of every war for the past 600 some odd years.
 Yeah.
 Why wouldn't they just be running their same playbook here?
 Are they not just funding both sides of this little controversy to try to, I don't know, stir things up, weaken social consensus, play other games?
 Like, am I, so, um, being, it's actually funny.
 There there's, you know, some of the conspiracy theories that have been floating around are, are around funding and financial incentives and stuff.
 Uh, and so like, I find it personally amusing when people try to attack me to say that I'm pushing for increased op return because it would help my investment in Citria.
 Um, my investment in Citria is a rounding error.
 Uh, my Bitcoin holdings are where, you know, my holdings are like in, in the majority sense, an overwhelming majority sense.
 So like, I wouldn't try to like kill the golden goose by trying to bring, uh, you know, something good to Citria only.
 Um, and, and also like my investments in general are, I treat them as donations because I've, I've been doing some venture investing in Bitcoin since about 2020.
 And when I look at every investment that I've made, I would have been better just holding onto the Bitcoin and that's the way that I treat it.
 Like I, I expected that to happen.
 And, and so I treated every investment as a donation because really what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to give back to Bitcoin.
 Bitcoin has done very well for me and I want to do what I can to try to continue to grow the ecosystem.
 Like, as I said, ossification is something that I've been very worried about.
 I want to do whatever I can to fight against that and continue pushing this ecosystem forward.
 And you do that through capitalism.
 You do that by funding people to do research and development, to try new things and expect that many of them will fail.
 And that's fine because every failure is a lesson that you can learn from go forward and not repeat that mistake and try something different.
 You keep trying until something works.
 So, um, it's also funny because if you try to, if you look into the, the major funding sources for both sides of this debate, Jack Dorsey is on both sides.
 And that's because Jack Dorsey is one of the biggest funders in general, but like, you know,
 he was one of the big investors into ocean, uh, which is, you know, primarily, uh, behind a lot of this, uh, knots, uh, stuff.
 And, uh, he's also, um, you know, major donator to a variety of other organizations that ultimately give grants to like Bitcoin core developers.
 So, um, it's, it's funny to see.
 And, you know, I don't think Jack's malicious.
 He, he wants, I think very similar to what I want is just continue pushing the ecosystem forward.
 And yeah, we expect that there will be contention.
 There will be controversy, but, um, we figure these things out as we go along and, uh, some people will win.
 Some people will fail, but Bitcoin will ultimately succeed.
 So you do think this is purely a market process.
 There's not any weird state intervention.
 I mean, I'm sure there is at the edges, but like, you don't see this as any coordinated
 psyop attack on Bitcoin or anything like that from the state level.
 Uh, I mean, I don't think op return stuff in particular, uh, would make sense to be a state psyop.
 Like if, if I was going to do a state psyop, it's going to be more on the ossification side of things.
 And I actually had a tweet, I think just the other day about this of like, if I really wanted to take
 a very long-term slow burn attack on Bitcoin to prevent it from being the biggest threat to central
 banks and governments as possible, then I would just tell people that Bitcoin is already perfect.
 And that developers tinkering with the protocol are the biggest threat to Bitcoin.
 And that we should, we should basically stop trying to improve Bitcoin and just let it sit
 where it is right now.
 I see.
 Cause that would completely hamstring its anti-fragility that it could not adapt to.
 I mean, yeah, ultimately it, it will, it will hamstring the scalability, um, that I think
 it will result in what has already been happening, which is we've been seeing more and more Bitcoin
 go into trusted third parties, centralized silos and traditional finance is coming in and, you know,
 they, they want to make money off of this stuff and they'll do it however they want.
 They don't care about the fundamental values and principles of Bitcoin.
 They're here to make money.
 And, uh, if that means that they just need to take all the Bitcoin and sit on
 it and financialize other shit around it, then that's what they'll do.
 Hmm.
 That makes sense.
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 Um, okay.
 I want to ask you a question about, uh, you, Casa, et cetera.
 Cause I know you guys get a lot.
 I was around when you guys initially announced support for Ethereum on your platform, you have
 received an unbelievable amount of shit for that, as is to be the case from that very loud minority.
 On Bitcoin Twitter or Bitcoin X.
 Um, you know, Casa is a multi-sig service provider.
 You guys now provide multi-sig for Ethereum.
 What is there a future?
 Or I guess, what is the value proposition future of Ethereum that Bitcoin maxis are missing?
 If, if any.
 Well, I mean, first of all, I think it's important to note exactly what, uh, we support for Ethereum.
 So like we don't do defy stuff.
 Uh, that is not our target market.
 Clientele is like degen trading.
 Uh, we don't do NFTs.
 Um, in general, I mean, what we do is we provide high security for people who have a lot of money at
 stake.
 And so really.
 One of the big reasons that we added Ethereum was, is not for Ethereum itself or for the diverse
 ecosystem of tokens on Ethereum, but it was primarily for stable coins.
 And so that has actually proved out to be quite true.
 Um, you know, over the past few years, since we've added what people call it, Ethereum support,
 but it was really, it was ETH plus Tether and USDC, uh, support, you know, those stable coin
 markets have been going bananas over the past year.
 And, you know, the demand is there.
 Like there are a lot of people who have use cases for, you know, essentially using fiat over
 crypto rails.
 And, you know, if there are people who instead, and I think this does make a lot of sense.
 Like if you're a, if you're a crypto native person and you want to have some dollars for a while,
 personally, I would rather hold on to like a Tether or a USDC, then have to go to some centralized
 exchange, convert it to dollars, wire that to my bank, let it sit in the bank.
 And then, uh, when it's, when my money's in the bank, it's so much harder to actually use it.
 Like if I, if I want to, at least in certain ways, right.
 If I'm, if I want to put a purchase on my debit card, then that's easy.
 But if I want to send it to somebody in Europe or Algeria or whatever, like if I need to do an
 international wire transfer or, or for example, most of the wire transfers I do are for venture
 capital investments.
 They are so annoying to go through, uh, compared to, you know, clicking a few screens on your ledger
 or Trezor or whatever, and sending a stable coin.
 So like, I think there's real use case there.
 And yeah, you can hate the fact that Ethereum exists.
 Um, and you can hate a lot of the stupid stuff that happens on Ethereum.
 And I have no, uh, shortage of criticisms of Ethereum.
 Um, this is actually not the first time that I've built on it.
 Um, I, I was working on building infrastructure at BitGo back in 2015,
 2016, and we were Bitcoin only when I started there.
 And then over the few years that I was there, we added like Ethereum, Litecoin, uh, Ripple.
 I mean, we just basically started going down the list, the market cap.
 Uh, and that was because our clients, a lot of them were payment processors and exchanges.
 And so the exchanges of course, want to support everything under the sun, because it just means
 more volume to them.
 Uh, you know, they're, they're not going to be particularly like moral or philosophical.
 About what they let other people trade because they're, they're getting the trading fees.
 Um, and so, you know, when I was building Ethereum support at Casa, I've, I've written
 blog posts and given presentations about all of my technical criticisms of Ethereum.
 And a lot of those criticisms actually still exist.
 Um, but the short version is Ethereum is where the stable coin and stuff was.
 It seems like we may be at the very beginning of finally getting stable coins
 on top of Bitcoin, but it's still not there.
 Like nobody's actually doing it in production.
 Um, you know, maybe next year we'll actually see it start to happen, but hard to say.
 It's like, that's been on the horizon for a while now.
 It's like stable coins on Bitcoin.
 Yeah.
 So I, I mean, it is an interesting line, right?
 That I correct me if I'm wrong.
 It seems like you're kind of like, sort of like me, like a free market maximalist type,
 right?
 It's like, well, you guys have demand from clients and you meet the demand as a business
 and that's how you do business.
 But then there's some ethical and I don't really know where it exists.
 You know, it doesn't seem unethical for instance, for Ethereum to exist, right?
 And to be a thing, but there's Bitcoin maxis that act as if it is unethical because maybe
 they misrepresent what they are, you know, the decentralized world computer or, you know,
 whatever the latest goalposts.
 The narratives change, but the narratives have changed for Bitcoin just as many times over
 the years.
 Yeah.
 Well, that's the thing because, and this is where it's complex because in the world of innovation,
 you know, you could call something innovation if it's successful or if it's not successful,
 it's innovation theater.
 Right?
 So I always give the example of like, you know, before Instagram is a thing, there's someone
 pitching just a deck and an idea to somebody with money saying, Hey, we're going to go build
 this whole thing and it's going to change the world and blah, blah, blah.
 Well, that's all innovation theater until it becomes real.
 Right?
 And you've got customers on it and it's generating revenue, et cetera.
 So there is this sort of, that's not deceptive.
 It's, it's, it's, uh, it's almost a fake it till you make it.
 Yeah.
 Fake it till you make it.
 Yeah.
 So there is a little bit of that built into innovation itself.
 Um, and so what, yeah, what, why, what is going on with the big
 Bitcoin maximalist contingent of treating everything that's not Bitcoin as if it is,
 um, evil, you know, I'm not, I'm again, as someone, I don't advocate for Ethereum.
 I don't hold Ethereum.
 I think it's got a ton of issues.
 I think it's going to continue to have a lot of issues.
 I don't think it's decentralized.
 Like I'm not a fan of it in any way, but I don't consider it to be evil.
 So what's going on there?
 Ooh, I mean, I think that this is getting more into sociology and psychology.
 Um, there, I think there's a lot of reasons.
 Some of the top ones, I think, um, you know, we're, we're seeing more people.
 And I, I'm even seeing more technical people who like are kind of retiring from being technical
 people and they're becoming more philosophical, uh, and talking more, more moral stuff, even
 more religious stuff.
 I've seen a lot more religion come into the, like the Bitcoin echo chamber over the past few years.
 And I think that at least part of it is that there will always be some set of Bitcoin users,
 Bitcoin adopters who feel like they want to contribute to Bitcoin.
 And so if they're not a coder, if they're not going to be contributing at a technical level,
 then they may be contributing in the marketplace of ideas.
 And so then depending upon what your particular skills and background are, uh, you, you may
 use your, your platform to espouse certain things.
 And so there, there's many reasons for this.
 Uh, part of it is of course, there's a, um, there's a constant
 both offensive and defensive mechanism when it comes to marketing Bitcoin.
 I think everyone who owns Bitcoin is incentivized to market Bitcoin that can be.
 Good and bad.
 Some people are not good at marketing Bitcoin and may actually turn off a lot of people
 from, uh, looking into the space.
 And so, uh, you know, I think from a defensive perspective, um, a common theme that I see
 is that, uh, in the, the landscape of money or the landscape of finance, ultimately,
 everything is in competition with Bitcoin.
 So, you know, any, any crypto asset, any other public network that has some token to it,
 even if it's not claiming to be money, it is at least somewhat in competition with Bitcoin for
 maybe for, uh, you know, the like liquidity and the, the, the actual value, but, but certainly for
 more mind, share and attention.
 And so there, there are people who want to ensure that as much attention and therefore
 resources, and then, and then hopefully money and investment
 comes into Bitcoin and doesn't go off onto these other things.
 And then, you know, a lot of them are scams.
 A lot of them are casinos.
 So there's also the, the protectionism aspect of, uh, you know, people who start to go down that,
 that alt coin rabbit hole, like there's a lot of danger there.
 Uh, best case scenario, you're effectively investing in penny stocks that are probably,
 you know, unregulated to have no real protections around them.
 Worst case scenario, you're going to get rug pulled.
 So for the average normie, the best thing to do is just buy Bitcoin and ignore the rest of the
 ecosystem.
 Um, but the rest of the ecosystem is not going to stop existing.
 You're not going to stop other people from innovating and from offering things.
 And, and so, uh, there's always going to be, you know, some, some level of, uh, of pushback
 that, uh, people have to, to anything that they consider might be even slightly, um, competing
 with Bitcoin for any reason.
 Money is inherently ideological.
 Maybe that would, that be safe to say that, you know, you people inevitably end up acting
 tribal about these things.
 Yeah.
 And it, um, I think it's interesting just to look, it's an interesting perspective on money
 because money isn't such a new, you know, we often call it a tool or technology, but it's not neutral
 really, right?
 Like it's sort of, as you said, it captures your mind share.
 It becomes your identity.
 You know, and this could be in a lot of different ways, right?
 There's gold bugs, right?
 They identify themselves as supporters of gold.
 Um, you know, oftentimes overly zealous American patriots thinking,
 you know, US dollar, we need the, we have the global reserve currency.
 We're the best kind of goes hand in hand with American exceptionalism.
 And then obviously there's, you know, all the crypto money cults, um, the biggest of which
 is Bitcoin, but it's just sort of an interesting perspective.
 Yeah.
 I mean, it's, it's the, the, there's a cohort of people who are, you know, perpetually
 online and plugged in.
 And, uh, I look, I'm one of those people, so I get it.
 Um, and everybody's got to spend their time doing something.
 Uh, some people end up spending all of their time essentially, uh, you know, wading through
 these intellectual battles, um, you know, and, and whether you're doing that from a, a marketing
 perspective or, uh, whether or not like you truly believe that the, this just is like the pure truth.
 And you are, you are trying to defend and protect other people from scams.
 You know, there's many different reasons why people may be incentivized to, to take these more
 extremist positions rather than a sort of live and let live.
 Yeah.
 I wish more people would just be pragmatic about it in that way.
 It's just like, look, these things are ideological instruments and they do create this sense of
 identity and there's going to be this in group out group.
 And, you know, we're going to call, we're more likely to call the Ethereum people evil or bad or
 shit coin or whatever, but it's, it more, it's more than anything.
 I think holding up a mirror to human psychology or sociology, as you said.
 Yeah.
 Um, and you know, the, the purity tests have only been
 spiraling downward.
 Like it's just been getting more and more absurd, uh, really.
 Like I, I almost.
 Consider it.
 There's like the pre scaling debate and the post scaling debate and pre scaling debate.
 It was like, okay.
 You know, if, if you're propagating, um,
 support and, and investment in any alt coin, you know, any network that is not Bitcoin, then you're a
 shit coiner.
 And so it's pretty, pretty clear cut whether or not you're a shit coiner, but over the past few
 years, um, as people have been building more stuff and building protocols on top of Bitcoin and doing
 things with Bitcoin that people have disagreed with the, the purity tests spiral and get tighter
 tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter.
 And, uh, there've been some really good memes around this.
 Uh, but essentially it's like, oh, oh, you're, you're a Bitcoiner.
 Huh?
 What type of Bitcoiner are you?
 Uh, do you, do you use taproot?
 Uh, do you use the op if not, if inscription envelope?
 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
 I like that.
 Oh, you're a shit coiner.
 You know, it's like, uh, and it's just getting more absurd.
 Uh, and so it's like, it's at the point where I, look, I get called a shit coiner all of the
 time and I, I think that's less of a reflection upon me and more of a reflection upon the people
 who feel like that it means anything to call me that anymore.
 It's like the, the term shit coiner has gotten diluted to the point that it's basically meaningless.
 It just means I hate you.
 Uh, and even I, I wrote something a few years ago, a really, really long article, uh, entitled
 a history of Bitcoin maximalism.
 And I went through like the entire existence of Bitcoin and what I consider to be all of the
 major, uh, turning points and key figures that had major effects upon the, the narratives and
 the terminology that was used by Bitcoin maxis.
 And my conclusion is that at this point, even the term Bitcoin maximalist is almost meaningless
 because it is fractured into many different sub sects of maximalism.
 And, and at the extreme end is what I call puritanism.
 Like the, they reject almost everything.
 Um, and, and then now of course, there's a lot of gray area in between with all of the different
 ways people may be using Bitcoin.
 And, and so, I mean, there is a human need, I think to have, you know, single, simple words
 and descriptors for different things.
 Right.
 But the, the, the, the, the people of Bitcoin have become so much more diverse over the past
 decade that I think it's, it's getting pretty silly to try to bucket people into tribes.
 Yeah.
 I, you know, anytime you reduce someone to a label, you're sort of one step away from engaging in
 propaganda of some kind because well, people are much more complex than just a word.
 Um, yet we have to deal with one another through words.
 And so there is this whole need for like data compression simplification, but just don't mistake
 the map for the territory.
 Cause that's when people really get their, uh, panties in a wad, so to speak.
 Um, okay.
 Well, you know, I would say the one thing on the bright side of all of this is that we've
 been talking about like a very tiny niche of the, the social media, Bitcoin echo chamber.
 And I think that if you're in that echo chamber, it's very easy to not understand that this is like
 single percentage, uh, of Bitcoin users and adoptions.
 And that the overwhelming majority of people don't spend any of time on this.
 They don't care about it.
 It doesn't affect their life.
 They're doing their own thing.
 And they're letting the Bitcoin nerds, uh, fight over these minutia.
 And I think that that's completely natural.
 Yes.
 Yeah.
 It's easy.
 This is probably a plus to anything on social media that if you, you know, you're scrolling
 and staying in whatever echo chamber you're in, it's very easy to start to mistake the whole world
 to take that little echo chamber for the world.
 And it's just not the case.
 There's a big wide world out there.
 A lot of stuff going on.
 So, um, poke your head outside every now and then get off the doom scrolling.
 Touch grass.
 And, uh, touch grass.
 There we go.
 Son, um, any sun, your balls.
 That is yes.
 Thank you.
 Bitcoin for teaching me that that's been a game changer.
 Um, any closing words of wisdom?
 And if not, could you please let people know where they can find you on the internet?
 Yeah.
 I mean, major takeaway Bitcoin will be fine.
 Uh, Bitcoin is not going to fail at least not anytime soon.
 I've got my own, uh, existential crises, things that I'm worried about.
 I should add, sorry, if I can, if I can add one more question actually,
 because you mentioned that earlier and I wanted to come back to it and it just slipped my mind.
 I'm glad you brought it up.
 You mentioned that the fear you had, the lingering fear from the, you said the email days you're
 working on email, you saw it kind of go a centralized path, I think is what you said.
 And you had similar fears of Bitcoin, something similar could happen to Bitcoin.
 Could you just elaborate on that a little bit?
 So, uh, compressing an hour long presentation into one soundbite is that over a period of 30
 or 40 years, email went from being a sovereign protocol where lots of people were running email
 servers or call them email nodes and directly using the protocol, uh, to connect to the network
 and, and talk to each other and, and send these messages.
 Uh, and, and over many, many years due to adversarial actors on the network, abusing
 the protocol with spam, which was not, uh, really, um, it was, it was never a part of the original
 protocol design.
 The original protocol design was made under the assumption that everyone will want to receive
 messages that are sent over this protocol.
 So when that got flipped on its head in the nineties, when, uh, email became mainstream and the
 adversarial spammers came along, uh, we then went into a multi-decade period of trying to solve
 spam and how did we solve spam?
 Uh, ultimately it was through a variety of like half a dozen, um, reputation mechanisms.
 Like many different things were tried.
 We tried heuristic filters, Bayesian filters.
 Um, we, we tried, uh, you know, just locking down things at the administrator level,
 like telling them to apply certain software patches and those things were never able to keep up.
 And it's kind of related to what I said, like an hour ago about how there's an,
 there's a mismatch disadvantage between the defenders and the adversarial spammers on Bitcoin.
 It's a similar type of thing with email.
 And so ultimately the thing that we settled on was all of these
 centralized reputation providers who did things like monitor the network and create blacklists,
 create allow lists, require you to register with them, uh, require you to do certain things with
 your, your DNS and, and signing your messages, um, with keys that were tied to your DNS.
 And DNS is just another centralized system, of course.
 So we solved spam by introducing a lot of, um, of costs, but the costs were so high that where we are
 today is that almost everyone has been priced out of actually using email.
 And, and this is mind blowing.
 I think for most people, because you ask the average person, do you use email?
 And they're like, oh yeah.
 Cause, cause you know, there's billions of people that use email every day.
 And what I would argue to you is no, you don't use email.
 You're actually using IOUs with a centralized third party who is then using the email protocol
 at your request, which is extremely analogous to leaving your Bitcoin in a centralized exchange
 and asking them for permission to use your Bitcoin.
 And you can't, okay, you can run the software to run an email server, but you can't do that
 over the longterm without a massive team of people to manage your reputation issues.
 And so even though it is technically still possible to run email, uh, you're going to
 end up getting black hold and black listed likely within a few weeks or months of doing so.
 And so most people that I know, even the really highly technical nerdy folks have stopped running
 email because the cost of maintaining it was too high.
 And, and so I think it's very easy to see how parallels could happen with Bitcoin where,
 you know, the cost of operating as a sovereign Bitcoin user, where you're actually directly
 using the protocol, not using any middlemen, uh, becomes way too high, way too difficult.
 And that's where things like scalability and, and an ossification of preventing us from continuing
 to improve the ability for individuals to be sovereign within their uses of Bitcoin.
 Uh, that's, that's where a lot of my long-term fears are.
 And then of course, there's also the quantum stuff, which is more a, a, uh, intersection
 of ossification with the potential for quantum computing to eventually break the cryptography.
 And so it was like, if we can't respond to that in a timely fashion, we're going to have major issues.
 Yeah.
 That all makes sense.
 Um, I, I guess my hope would be that the difference with Bitcoin is that there's a much stronger incentive
 for these middlemen, well, for people to avoid these middlemen over time, right?
 That you, you know, in terms of avoiding the counterparty risk and whatnot.
 So hopefully you wouldn't, I, if, if you're saying analogously, that's people leaving Bitcoin with
 an ETF or a custodian or something, some centralized custodian would be, you know, using Gmail today
 that hopefully the incentives of holding your own keys, you know, having a risk adjusted, um,
 what is it you're, well, you're just realizing the value proposition of Bitcoin ultimately,
 whereas you're not if you're using a third party custodian.
 And so, you know, quite the same in email, right?
 Where it's a little bit more just convenience driven rather than, uh, purchasing power driven.
 Yeah.
 Hopefully the incentives and the game theory are sufficiently different, uh, that we can
 continue to fight the good fight.
 And look, I'm, um, I'm concerned.
 I'm not, uh, totally black pilled on it, right?
 Like if I was totally black pilled on it, I would stop running Casa.
 I would shut it down.
 I was like, what are we even doing here?
 We're not moving the needle, but, uh, you know, I think that it's, it's a good fight.
 That's still worth fighting.
 Good deal.
 Well, Mr. Lopp, I appreciate you joining me.
 I appreciate the, uh, deep dive on this.
 It's a very contentious topic.
 Um, yes.
 Where can people find you on the internet?
 Uh, find me on X at Lopp, L-O-P-P or, uh, my website, which has thousands and
 thousands of Bitcoin resources is Lopp.net.
 Beautiful.
 Thank you, sir.