Bitcoin Forks, Described by Dorks

This page is a long archive containing hundreds of quotes related to forks, extracted from episodes of the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. They’re all grouped so you can jump, skim, and cite. It serves the role of a hub, not a short essay. Keep it open when you need the clip, the timestamp, and the argument in the guest’s own mouth.

I host the show. Guests do most of the talking. Soft fork authors, hard fork veterans, cash maximalists, Drivechain obsessives, client maintainers, privacy researchers. The archive is messy on purpose because Bitcoin’s fork history is messy too.

Quotes are lightly cleaned for automatic speech recognition errors (Whisper tiny.en and YouTube auto-captions garble names and technical terms). Meaning was not rewritten. For exact wording and tone, use the ”Listen” link on every entry.

Every entry is categorized by season, episode, guest, approximate timestamp, and a source link. Always double check that clip over anyone’s paraphrase, including mine.

Ecash naming (read this once)
eCash XEC = Amaury Séchet / Deadalnix: BCH → ABC → XEC (Avalanche).
Ecash ECX = Paul Sztorc: proposed Bitcoin hard fork shipping BIP300/301 Drivechains (distinct coin / distinct UTXO claim path; not XEC; not Chaumian Fedimint/Cashu ecash).
Chaumian ecash (Fedimint / Cashu) is mint-based and appears here only when fork-adjacent.
Blur those three and every later section lies.

Find a fork

SegWit · Taproot · Bitcoin Cash · BSV · Drivechains · BIP110 · Litecoin · Zcash · OP_CAT · CTV · UASF · SegWit2x

Soft forks
Hard forks
UTXO chain splits
Codebase forks
Other

Soft forks

A soft fork tightens consensus rules. Old nodes can stay online; they may simply fail to understand new transaction types. That is why P2SH, CLTV, CSV, SegWit, and Taproot could activate without splitting the UTXO set. Soft forks still need social consensus, miner signaling or user enforcement, and a deployment path. They are upgrades to one chain, not new coins.

SegWit

SegWit (BIP141 / BIP144) moved signatures into a separate witness field, fixed malleability, and raised effective block capacity without a UTXO split. Guests argue over whether the witness discount was clever engineering or a mandatory size increase in soft-fork clothing. Related: Why Does Bitcoin Have Small Blocks?.

Peter Todd · S11 E11 · ~00:08:48–00:09:12 · Listen (audio)

“At the same time, it’s worth noting that we did increase the block size with SegWit. … we very cleverly did it in a way where that block size increase could only happen once, which was part of the reason why it was acceptable. … there was no way to go do it again. … it was also done in a way that maybe people who don’t agree with it can still participate in the network.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:25:26–01:25:35 · Listen (audio)

“Well, I didn’t like SegWit, but I was okay with it. I thought it was worth accepting SegWit if we got the two megabytes and we could all move forward together.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:26:38–01:26:55 · Listen (audio)

“Yeah, we kind of around about way to get a bit more block size without a hard fork. … there were other ways to solve the malleability that are more in line with the original design of Bitcoin. And those are being used on Bitcoin.”

Nicolas Dorier · S15 E14 · ~00:25:43–00:25:50 · Listen (audio)

“But yeah, I was definitely against SegWit2x. It’s basically what made me start BTCPay.”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:33:49–00:35:52 · Listen (audio)

“SegWit was scary. Taproot was not. … And then in the end, we activate a Taproot using the Speedy Trial scheme. … And of course, nobody tried to stop it. And here we are. Cat is even … even simpler than Taproot. … we’re adding a new opcode in a slot that’s already reserved for new opcodes”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E68 · ~00:48:15–00:48:46 · Listen (audio)

“… we used to do a soft fork every six months, we used to do two a year. Then … in the first like seven to eight year period, we did 16 in the second seven to eight year period, we did two. And one was SegWit to 26 months … and then happened to 40 months. So it’s just been getting slower and slower.”

Amir Taaki · S12 E2 · ~00:31:42–00:32:19 · Listen to episode

“… The technology is not in one direction. It can change any time, but it’s influenced by the ideas that are predominant in the network, the ideas that influence developers, that influence the community of users that decide where to put their wealth. For example, with the SegWit, it showed us that the base of power is with the users in the network. The users have a very big constituency power. And if you convince the users, then you can essentially influence the entire direction of the project.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E5 · ~03:09:57–03:11:15 · Watch on YouTube

“…if I use SegWit transactions, I pay less fees because I get a discount. … that is completely a myth. What instead happened is that the witness is stored in extension block a separate place which is a mandatory hard fork block size increase. It’s not really a hard fork but it’s in the sense of being mandatory as a hard fork. … SegWit is an extremely unusual soft fork. … this one was a mandatory block size increase from 1 to four megabytes. So what they did is they gave it the discount.”

John Carvalho · S15 E23 · ~00:09:39–00:09:53 · Listen to episode

“So when I was my intentions back then were multiple. So one, I wanted to show Luke-Jr because I thought that, you know, he was very innovative and how he handled the whole SegWit thing and being able to do the block size with a soft fork.”

Casey Rodarmor · S13 E3 · ~00:27:35–00:27:50 · Listen to episode

“And I am not a big blocker. I was very much not a big blocker back in the day. And back in 2017, when I was asking people why didn’t we have SegWit yet? And I’m very much not a big blocker now. I do not advocate raising the block size limit. That is for smarter people than me to discuss.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E44 · ~00:29:22–00:29:53 · Listen (audio)

“…you also had the activation of SegWit. So by September of 2017, you had a blockchain with 8 megabyte blocks, which was a copy of Bitcoin. And then you had another blockchain which continued the original chain with 4 megabyte blocks… SegWit did increase the block size even if it was… not explicit… initially the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash was just not that great…”

Taproot / Schnorr / MAST

Taproot (BIP340 Schnorr, BIP341 Taproot, BIP342 Tapscript) shipped under Speedy Trial with far less drama than SegWit. It also quietly enabled cheaper arbitrary data paths that Ordinals later used.

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:33:49–00:35:52 · Listen (audio)

“SegWit was scary. Taproot was not. … And then in the end, we activate a Taproot using the Speedy Trial scheme. … And of course, nobody tried to stop it. And here we are. Cat is even … even simpler than Taproot. … we’re adding a new opcode in a slot that’s already reserved for new opcodes”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:31:20–00:31:56 · Listen (audio)

“cat by itself, because it’s so small, it’s a proposed soft fork. That has a very little almost no technical risk because of so small and self-contained … the last soft fork that we did in Bitcoin was Taproot. … the one before that had been SegWit. And SegWit was a scary soft fork because SegWit introduced a new transaction format.”

Lisa Neigut · S12 E8 · ~00:17:12–00:17:42 · Listen to episode

“… the multi-sig transaction that went out in like mid early October is valid underneath the Taproot rules and it is not valid under like the SegWit rules, right? So like anything before Taproot, that would have been invalid, but it’s a Taproot transaction. It uses the Taproot rules. Anyone who implemented the Taproot rules would process it correctly…”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E16 · ~02:21:35–02:22:04 · Listen (audio)

“most miners like they have no idea what Taproot was at all … the pool would would would call them and ask them or would try to get information like hey should we signal for a Speedy Trial or whatever for Taproot and they would just be like what’s Taproot they have no idea what it is”

Casey Rodarmor · S13 E3 · ~00:17:04–00:17:32 · Listen to episode

“… when talking about SegWit or Taproot … whenever they were lifting limitations that enabled these sorts of things, they were not lifting them because they wanted to allow for any particular stance on storing arbitrary data. They lifted them … for reasons not related to preventing arbitrary data storage.”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:54:38–00:55:21 · Listen (audio)

“we’ll see cat possibly some other like small opcodes like that. Going in almost just to like flex our soft-fork muscle. So like remember how do we do these forks? How do we do deployment? Can we do this without a whole bunch of drama … But then I would expect that after cat, there would be a kind of a real covenant proposal. And whether that’s something like CTV or LNHANCE or whatever, it winds up being or TX hash … Then I do think we would need like another real fork.”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:18:00–00:18:18 · Listen (audio)

“There are a couple around this period, the disabled OP_CAT and the other opcodes. It introduced the opcodes and appeared to introduce the notion of a soft fork versus a hard fork and the ability to upgrade the system without other, without old nodes being kicked off. All of this kind of came together in the summer of 2010.”

Michael Tidwell · S17 E46 · ~02:31:30–02:31:50 · Watch on YouTube

“I would say [Taproot] soft fork was my favorite… I think it's super underutilized… It's enabled so many cool style transactions.”

Ekrem Bal · S17 E47 · ~00:36:36–00:37:10 · Watch on YouTube

“I need to say Taproot because without Taproot all these BitVM things wouldn't be possible.”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:58:08–00:58:54 · Watch on YouTube

“…the Taproot annex, that's a way to like make Bitcoin private. You can publish private Bitcoin transactions in the annex. And that's why I opened the pull request in Bitcoin Core to make it standard. It's just the policy change, consensus remains untouched. And even Peter Todd reviewed… and he ACKed the pull request…”

BIP16 P2SH / CLTV / CSV / older soft forks

Older soft forks still live in every validating node: BIP16 P2SH, BIP65 CLTV, BIP68 CSV. They are the template for how Bitcoin learned to tighten rules without kicking old nodes offline.

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:39:29–00:39:56 · Listen (audio)

“we’ve seen that historically with Bitcoin script where we’ve got a weird old feature of like pay-to-script-hash that are really no longer used at all. But any Bitcoin, script interpreter, or transaction validator, needs to do. P2SH, which is a innovation from 2010. I think it’s only me 2011.”

Casey Rodarmor · S13 E3 · ~00:14:53–00:16:27 · Listen to episode

“So there, so Taproot made it easier, but it was actually always possible. … You could have also done it … with old school P2SH outputs. … Then with SegWit, it would have gotten cheaper … but there were still some standardness rules in place. But at SegWit, that was the time when we got this witness discount. And then in Taproot, those standardness rules, the witness discount was retained, but those standardness rules were lifted. And so that’s what I took advantage of when I designed inscriptions.”

Amaury Séchet · S17 E19 · ~02:02:14–02:04:06 · Watch on YouTube

“…removed pay-to-script-hash… if Satoshi meaning Craig… would have wanted… he would have put it in… evil core developer… probably a huge number of coin were stolen when that happened. … Same for CLTV and CSV…”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E16 · ~01:50:30–01:51:16 · Listen (audio)

“SegWit and tap I’m really SegWit in particular was almost not really it was barely a it wasn’t a soft fork in the same way check lock time verified just took up not to … and so is in ctv and all their things these other things when you repurpose an opcode that I mean that is really that’s very tame because Satoshi put those in there specifically because he knew that there might we might want to add opcodes later”

Murch · S15 E50 · ~00:41:00–00:41:59 · Listen (audio)

“I don’t think that covenants was invented that recently. … more of a 2011, 2010 conversation when it started. And I also don’t really love the term covenant. Really, we are talking about opcodes that can introspect a part of a transaction … So I think calling them transaction introspection makes it more obvious what we’re talking about. … check sequence verify and check lock time verify for example, those are also transaction introspection opcodes”

Eric Voskuil · S16 E10 · ~01:50:05–01:50:21 · Listen to episode

“You can turn off all the forks. You can turn off BIP16, you turn off BIP30… You can turn on a Litecoin fork and run Litecoin… We don’t impose those on you.”

CTV / BIP119 / covenants / LNHANCE

Jeremy Rubin · S17 E22 · ~00:22:02–00:23:24 · Watch on YouTube

“…CTV is kind of inevitable like uh Rusty Russell… ‘I now finally understand CTV. It’s brilliant. But Jeremy made all these mistakes.’ … I’m going to make simplified CTV. So he did it. And it was like completely broken. … here’s a code sample of breaking it. … So then I guess it’s a CTV again. But then now he’s kind of on the Great Script Restoration track… one-year effort… instead of CTV. And then he kind of fizzled out… like 3 years ago… we also could just have had a CTV at that point.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E22 · ~00:51:04–00:52:34 · Watch on YouTube

“…BIP361, which is going to be freezing Satoshi’s coins… Yeah, I’m not supportive of that. … it’s a bunch of conjecture about a bunch of bad things that could happen… I’d rather just like ship something like CTV that we know does something good today.”

John Carvalho · S15 E23 · ~00:44:47–00:44:52 · Listen to episode

“Sharing a UTXO for channel of factories for CTV and lightning covenants This stuff like after having been through lightning. It’s all bullshit man”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E16 · ~01:11:13–01:11:46 · Listen (audio)

“They know that the opposite of a soft fork is a hard fork. But what they don’t know is that a soft fork plus a certain type of anti-soft fork equals zero, it was nothing. … if you claim up, not six for CTV. But then you don’t like it. Instead of loosening it back up to anyone can spend, you just tighten it to nobody can ever spend. And then it just goes away.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:20:42–01:20:49 · Listen (audio)

“…what is consensus. Because people say, well, let’s add CTV to Bitcoin or whatever. Then you get an Adam Back saying, well, there’s no consensus.”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:54:38–00:55:21 · Listen (audio)

“we’ll see cat possibly some other like small opcodes like that. Going in almost just to like flex our soft-fork muscle. So like remember how do we do these forks? How do we do deployment? Can we do this without a whole bunch of drama … But then I would expect that after cat, there would be a kind of a real covenant proposal. And whether that’s something like CTV or LNHANCE or whatever, it winds up being or TX hash … Then I do think we would need like another real fork.”

Murch · S15 E50 · ~00:41:00–00:41:59 · Listen (audio)

“I don’t think that covenants was invented that recently. … more of a 2011, 2010 conversation when it started. And I also don’t really love the term covenant. Really, we are talking about opcodes that can introspect a part of a transaction … So I think calling them transaction introspection makes it more obvious what we’re talking about. … check sequence verify and check lock time verify for example, those are also transaction introspection opcodes”

Andrew Camilleri · S16 E31 · ~00:30:27–00:31:23 · Listen (audio)

“…using OP_CAT only for stocks and whatever else is insane. The amount of … bytes you would use … would be insane. … And collider script, I thought that was a bit of a fun toy. … It’s like what I think they did a test, and it’s going to be like $16 million to execute one covenant. … It felt like a bunch of nerds having fun with research.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S15 E6 · ~00:15:47–00:16:07 · Listen to episode

“with BitVM he can basically do stuff that was enabled by a soft fork with Drivechains and there’s a lot of stuff that can be done without anyone’s permission because BitVM was enabled without anyone’s permission, without a soft fork, it just emerged”

Kevin Loaec · S17 E47 · ~00:57:57–00:58:21 · Watch on YouTube

“…one of the things that I would really like to see in a covenant is that the amounts are not necessarily enforced. So in a typical vault, let's say a CTV vault… you have to know in advance… how much money you're going to deposit in it and if you [mess] up you might burn money… and that is horrible in my opinion.”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:40:57–00:41:24 · Watch on YouTube

“Not yet. I'm still very optimistic. We're going to get… template hash… It's going to be great. We can do all kinds of cool things with covenants…”

OP_CAT / Great Script Restoration / CSFS / APO

OP_CAT was in Satoshi’s original client, disabled in 2010, and proposed again as a tiny soft fork. Great Script Restoration, CSFS, and APO sit nearby as bigger kitchen-sink alternatives.

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:18:00–00:18:18 · Listen (audio)

“There are a couple around this period, the disabled OP_CAT and the other opcodes. It introduced the opcodes and appeared to introduce the notion of a soft fork versus a hard fork and the ability to upgrade the system without other, without old nodes being kicked off. All of this kind of came together in the summer of 2010.”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:31:20–00:31:56 · Listen (audio)

“cat by itself, because it’s so small, it’s a proposed soft fork. That has a very little almost no technical risk because of so small and self-contained … the last soft fork that we did in Bitcoin was Taproot. … the one before that had been SegWit. And SegWit was a scary soft fork because SegWit introduced a new transaction format.”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:33:49–00:35:52 · Listen (audio)

“SegWit was scary. Taproot was not. … And then in the end, we activate a Taproot using the Speedy Trial scheme. … And of course, nobody tried to stop it. And here we are. Cat is even … even simpler than Taproot. … we’re adding a new opcode in a slot that’s already reserved for new opcodes”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~00:23:22–00:23:52 · Watch on YouTube

“…we can’t even get like a completely optional, opt-in, ignorable, and reversible soft fork, such as OP_CAT… only 13 lines of code. It was in the original Satoshi client… We can’t even get that back in.”

Orkun Kilic · S15 E57 · ~00:20:49–00:21:17 · Listen (audio)

“we don’t depend on any soft fork, which is good to like first bring the use case to Bitcoin and tell everyone … you can borrow Bitcoin without losing your custody. And now if people think that’s a good idea … they can approve a soft fork to make it more trustless like OP_CAT or some other soft fork. But I think first getting live and showing the use case to Bitcoin is important for social consensus.”

Max Hillebrand · S16 E47 · ~01:07:30–01:07:49 · Listen (audio)

“That’s in part why I like Great Script Restoration, because it builds on top of this and really solves it. … And then we have more things to try.”

James O’Beirne · S16 E23 · ~01:15:58–01:16:15 · Listen (audio)

“…Great Script Restoration… is massive… another one of these soft forks like Taproot like SegWit that’s just this giant kitchen sink… We really shouldn’t be doing those anymore…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E4 · ~00:25:11–00:25:30 · Watch on YouTube

“Oh, so basically what Bitcoin Cash already has, right?” / “Yeah, I think yeah, they restore the oldest Satoshi up codes.” / “…stuff like that is in is discussed in Bitcoin as well, like Great Script Restoration that would get us pretty far.”

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:34:31–00:35:17 · Listen (audio)

“If like Bitcoin would allow an OP_STARK or stark verification … you would have, again, a thousand fold increase immediately in the TPS without any change to the block size.”

Ekrem Bal · S17 E47 · ~00:29:49–00:30:10 · Watch on YouTube

“I would rather OP_CAT because with OP_CAT you can do both covenants and also you can verify a STARK proof in a single script. So OP_CAT is the best. CTV is a hacky way to do a sibling commit. It doesn't allow you to verify ZK proofs on Bitcoin.”

Ekrem Bal · S17 E47 · ~00:30:28–00:30:45 · Watch on YouTube

“OP_TEMPLATEHASH… is like CTV but they removed the ability to do sibling commits. So it wouldn't improve the BitVM bridges.”

Ekrem Bal · S17 E47 · ~00:26:07–00:26:53 · Watch on YouTube

“…first Bitcoin needs to have either post-quantum signature scheme or GSR-like scripts so that we can make the whole system both post-quantum and also trustless.”

BIP360 / quantum soft-fork proposals

BIP360 is Hunter Beast’s draft post-quantum soft-fork path: optional migration of UTXOs to classical-or-PQ spend paths. Not yet merged into the main BIPs repo at the time of these interviews. Soft-fork preference vs hard-fork migration is the live fight.

Hunter Beast · S16 E35 · ~00:05:44–00:06:09 · Listen (audio)

“…that’s how you’re certain that all the UTXOs have migrated to the system. And there is no value in the old chain. And therefore if a quantum computer breaks that we have already moved on, but that’s not really how Bitcoin consensus works. So you’re going to want to have a soft fork. But the question is, well, what if the coins don’t move…” (Guest carries soft-fork preference into vulnerability taxonomy.)"

Hunter Beast · S16 E35 · ~00:37:05–00:38:15 · Listen (audio)

“…BIP360 transactions commit to an address that you can, you get to choose whether you spend classically or you spend with the post-quantum signature. … It’s always optional … this is just an opt-in thing. You’ll only use it if you need it…”

Hunter Beast · S16 E35 · ~01:07:34–01:09:01 · Listen (audio)

“…BIP360 hasn’t been merged yet. And so it’s still in draft. … There’s a link to the actual git repo that has my BIP in it. It’s just not in the main Bitcoin BIPs repo yet because hasn’t been merged yet and still a pull request.”

Hunter Beast · S16 E35 · ~01:14:23–01:14:56 · Listen (audio)

“Well, that’s definitely a thought that ETF custodians have been having in their fork choice clause, right? So if we fuck it up too much and the custodians are going to then want to fork the chain because their bags are kind of worthless because of the quantum attack, then that’s something I would like to avoid. … the way to avoid that is to be proactive.”

Hunter Beast · S17 E23 · ~00:13:23–00:13:34 · Watch on YouTube

“…we will be continuing the work on BIP360. We will… also advocate for BIP54 activation which is the great consensus cleanup by Antoine Poinsot…”

Hunter Beast · S17 E23 · ~00:32:51–00:32:59 · Watch on YouTube

“…in BIP360 we explain that there are essentially two… long exposure… vs short exposure…”

Hunter Beast · S17 E23 · ~00:13:44–00:14:03 · Watch on YouTube

“…that’s why I am supportive of BIP110 because… if we are going to adopt… post-quantum cryptography someday ideally we are using transactions that if they are bigger they are monetary transactions not a bunch of JPEGs…”

Moonsettler · S16 E65 · ~05:08:03–05:14:17 · Listen (audio)

“…hard fork is a consensus change that makes previously unspendable coins spendable… If something that has previously wallet and now it’s not wallet… that’s a soft fork… soft fork is superior for any quantum migration… BIP360 is a soft fork… soft forks are mandatory upgrades for miners… hard forks are mandatory for users… there is not a single component that a hard fork makes sense from the technical sense for PQ…”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E46 · ~00:03:20–00:04:00 · Watch on YouTube

“The first one we did was [BIP] 300/301. So you do soft forks without changing any lines of code in Bitcoin… This is the second one… It has four features… four different quantum resistant signature options, two hash, two lattice, and we have [OP_VAULT].”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E46 · ~00:10:00–00:10:46 · Watch on YouTube

“We could have had all that on Bitcoin this whole time but instead we have this belief in Bitcoin's infallibility… join our club of Vlad, myself, and Greg Maxwell. We all think that this idea is a terrible idea, but this idea is the mainstream view.”

BIP110 / BIP444 (soft-fork design)

BIP110 / BIP444 appear here as restrictive soft-fork designs aimed at inscriptions and large non-monetary data. Same proposals also surface as potential UTXO-split politics in BIP110 UTXO.

Lukas Hozda · S17 E17 · ~01:20:12–01:20:31 · Watch on YouTube

“And the miners will follow the most profit… if miners leave from the permissive chain, that makes it more profitable for the miners that did not leave…”

Lukas Hozda · S17 E17 · ~01:22:41–01:23:04 · Watch on YouTube

“…at the very beginning, there is also an advantage for the permissive chain because the blocks that are valid for the restrictive chain are also valid for the permissive chain but not the other way around. So if you’re going by the longest chain then the permissive one has a starting advantage…”

Riccardo Spagni · S17 E8 · ~00:29:05–00:29:14 · Watch on YouTube

“…don’t even get me started on how technically broken BIP110 and a lot of the other ideas are. Let’s just not even go down that road because that’s just that’s a whole level of absurdity.”

Hunter Beast · S17 E23 · ~00:13:44–00:14:03 · Watch on YouTube

“…that’s why I am supportive of BIP110 because… if we are going to adopt… post-quantum cryptography someday ideally we are using transactions that if they are bigger they are monetary transactions not a bunch of JPEGs…”

John Carvalho · S17 E11 · ~01:25:47–01:26:02 · Watch on YouTube

“No, you’re right. It would not be terrible at all. In other words, the best possible outcome for BIP110 is a BIP110 hard fork. That’s the best possible outcome. also for sailor also for everyone else. Just have your own little toy and see if that one is the one that’s valuable.”

John Carvalho · S17 E11 · ~00:46:31–00:47:00 · Watch on YouTube

“Well, you can’t you can’t disagree with Bitcoin Core without ultimately having to double down to trying to remove Bitcoin Core. … the only turner you have is to offer a fork. … I’m willing to make a whole new client for it, and I’m willing to risk forking for it.”

Drivechains BIP300 / BIP301 (soft-fork path)

Paul Sztorc · S12 E10 · ~00:25:42–00:26:14 · Listen to episode

“… if you want new features … Z addresses if you want Turing complete smart contracts … large blocks whatever it is you could get that … if you want a small block layer one ossified code you can get that … The Drivechain is a side chain idea … it lets people just send the coins to different pieces of software so … the software will compete …”

Paul Sztorc · S12 E10 · ~00:32:49–00:33:37 · Listen to episode

“… the only thing that the BIP300 script checks is this one tiny little hash. It collects these hashes and it counts up a little integer up from zero to 13,000 basically. … the overhead is very small. … absolutely no significant increase in the node cost at all.”

Paul Sztorc · S12 E10 · ~00:34:24–00:35:14 · Listen to episode

“… the side chain idea was originally a maximalist idea that just said, hey, whatever anyone comes up with that’s good, we’ll just take because it’s open. … anyone who’s not a side chainer is … really not a Bitcoin maximalist.”

Paul Sztorc · S9 E4 · ~02:02:28–02:02:34 · Listen to episode

“I think BIP300 is the best way actually of adding any technology to Bitcoin.”

Paul Sztorc · S9 E4 · ~02:07:51–02:08:03 · Listen to episode

“…sidechains are pro ossification because you freeze layer one and you don’t need to change it anymore. All the change happens on layer two … which I always thought was the entire point.”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E10 · ~00:35:17–00:35:31 · Listen (audio)

“The irony is of course, once we activate BIP300, this will never happen again because there will be no more … need for any soft fork. And Bitcoin L1 and there will also won’t be any need for any toxicity because people will get whatever they want. So this is like … the final boss”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E10 · ~01:02:06–01:04:11 · Listen (audio)

“The issuer always prefers to launch an altcoin … if we set this big precedent, then there’s no demand for altcoins … as long as Bitcoin has decided that there’s things that won’t do, then there’s always hope for an altcoin to replace Bitcoin. But if we take that hope away, then all the altcoins will just be dead, including Ethereum … it’s not … that on day one, we activate Drivechain, then day two, we activate the ethereum and then everyone moves over.”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E13 · ~01:59:05–02:00:15 · Listen (audio)

“BIP300 is very simple. It’s just kind of 13,000. … the complex stuff is done by the side chain itself. … if anyone … adds BIP300, they will instantly get access to all of that. Because the side chains themselves can work on any BIP300 chain. … if you plug them into like a Litecoin block, that just, you still have a Zcash side chain. You have a EVM side chain, you have scaling, scale to 8 billion people tomorrow … So I would think that some altcoin should try it.”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E68 · ~00:39:53–00:40:45 · Listen (audio)

“… all of them are harmless in the sense that you could lay it every soft fork you could just shut off later. So just do 1% hash rate to turn it on and then just do 1% hash rate to turn it off. … including BIP300. So they should all just be activated. … If it’s something that makes more money for miners, they will do it and you cannot stop them.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E5 · ~01:07:25–01:08:57 · Watch on YouTube

“All the soft fork talk has been bike shedding. … all of the OP_NOP OP_SUCCESS OP_TRUE all of these style of soft fork carry absolutely no risk whatsoever and they are ignorable optin and easily reversible. … That was not a hard fork. That was not a soft fork. That was not a proposal. That was not a BIP, but it accidentally had an inflation bug and it would have hardforked unexpectedly.” (Matt Corallo refactor / inflation-bug aside as baseline risk vs OP_SUCCESS soft forks.)"

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~01:04:04–01:06:29 · Listen (audio)

“Well, Paul Sztorc in kind of a classic troll economist tradition … leans into the incentives … And I don’t buy it. … So but not a fan of Drivechains of the concept for that reason. And I even worry a little bit that if Drivechains got a lot of traction, that could distort the incentive on Bitcoin for miners to produce valid blocks where it may be that they would want to rewrite Bitcoin blocks in order to cause grief on the Drivechain”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E46 · ~00:05:15–00:05:37 · Watch on YouTube

“They just run the second piece of software next to Bitcoin Core. That should cost them basically nothing to do, which is why… when will they do it? Never. In a million billion years, it'll never happen because… they're all spineless. Spineless cowards with no leadership skills.”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:46:49–00:47:07 · Watch on YouTube

“We can finally activate BIP300. There is no reason to not activate BIP300 anymore now that Paul forked off. The only real justifiable reason against BIP300 was that you don't like Paul's Twitter, which is understandable to some degree.”

Zerocoin / Zerocash as proposed Bitcoin soft forks

Zerocoin / Zerocash began as proposed Bitcoin privacy soft forks, then left for Zcash (and Zcoin/Firo). The archive treats that exile as cultural resistance, not a cryptography failure. Related: Bitcoin Privacy Limitations.

Paul Sztorc · S16 E52 · ~01:17:00–01:17:07 · Listen (audio)

“Zerocash. That’s where it started 2014. It’s supposed to be a soft fork on Bitcoin to improve the privacy never happened. Bitcoiners forgot about it.”

Diego Salazar · S16 E32 · ~03:37:31–03:37:43 · Listen (audio)

“…Cause Zerocoin was made for Bitcoin, but it was, it was always kind of like the weakest of them. You know, then the Zerocash paper came out and kind of completely supplanted it.”

Reuben Yap · S16 E5 · ~00:18:24–00:18:34 · Listen (audio)

“… we know that Zerocoin would have been a total disaster if it was implemented in Bitcoin. But now we’ve already moved past that. We’ve got the new technology.”

Riccardo Spagni · S17 E8 · ~01:56:46–01:57:48 · Watch on YouTube

"…if it was just researchers creating a thing that they hoped would become a um a a model for Bitcoin to follow, why did they raise money? … that’s at odds with the claim that um Zcash was meant to be some model for Bitcoin to look at and go, "Okay, cool. We can now implement Zerocash."

Kieran Mesquka · S17 E27 · ~01:08:26–01:10:24 · Watch on YouTube

“…if you didn’t have this… cultural resistance… why wouldn’t Zerocoin already be implemented… original paper was… presented as a way to… upgrade Bitcoin… performance… big concern… over a decade of improvement since… we still don’t see… that in Bitcoin… push a lot of… new innovation towards the edges… Citrea… island… periphery to Bitcoin…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S16 E1 · ~00:28:26–00:29:43 · Listen (audio)

“… Zerocoin, which was presented in 2013. … At the time the conversation was that they can activate this on Bitcoin with a soft fork and have these zero knowledge proof transactions on Bitcoin. And then there was some sort of disagreement … So they made Zcash and also Zcoin, which I think right now is called Firo. … I do have some hope with these rollups that ironically are coming from Ethereum, which collaborated with the Zcash guys and they came up with these ZK rollups.”

Peter Todd · TABConf 8 bonus · ~00:01:45–00:03:41 · Watch on YouTube

“…if we actually add it to Bitcoin, you're creating this big pool of funds that's likely to get stolen in a cryptographic break… The idea of privacy isn't bad… This type of cryptography just is too new to trust it with that much money… if Bitcoin dies, we may not get a chance to get another Bitcoin.”

Other soft-fork proposals (OP_STARK, GSR, etc.)

OP_STARK, Swiss Army Knife style packages, and other soft-fork sketches that never made the main activation queue. Useful for seeing how far soft-fork ambition stretches when social consensus is the bottleneck.

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:34:31–00:35:17 · Listen (audio)

“If like Bitcoin would allow an OP_STARK or stark verification … you would have, again, a thousand fold increase immediately in the TPS without any change to the block size.”

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:37:29–00:38:02 · Listen (audio)

“Bitcoin has added an OP_STARK. And additionally, the time to verify a proof is zero. And additionally, the length of the proof is zero. Could you now scale things infinitely? And what is the problem of the data availability? In the end, you have the UTXO set.”

Max Hillebrand · S16 E47 · ~01:07:30–01:07:49 · Listen (audio)

“That’s in part why I like Great Script Restoration, because it builds on top of this and really solves it. … And then we have more things to try.”

James O’Beirne · S16 E23 · ~01:15:58–01:16:15 · Listen (audio)

“…Great Script Restoration… is massive… another one of these soft forks like Taproot like SegWit that’s just this giant kitchen sink… We really shouldn’t be doing those anymore…”

Jeremy Rubin · S17 E22 · ~00:22:02–00:23:24 · Watch on YouTube

“…CTV is kind of inevitable like uh Rusty Russell… ‘I now finally understand CTV. It’s brilliant. But Jeremy made all these mistakes.’ … I’m going to make simplified CTV. So he did it. And it was like completely broken. … here’s a code sample of breaking it. … So then I guess it’s a CTV again. But then now he’s kind of on the Great Script Restoration track… one-year effort… instead of CTV. And then he kind of fizzled out… like 3 years ago… we also could just have had a CTV at that point.”

Liam Eagen · S15 E58 · ~01:27:40–01:28:03 · Listen (audio)

“anything that gets us closer to Snark verification Would make bridges a lot … more secure so whether it’s … big integer multiplication or cat or Great Script Restoration all that would be great”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:39:53–00:40:04 · Watch on YouTube

“The most depressing thing was Peter Todd guessing that the Great Consensus Cleanup will come in like '29… if it takes until '29 and if all we get is Great Consensus Cleanup, well, I'm out.”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:42:26–00:42:54 · Watch on YouTube

“…the thing that is most likely to get Greg Maxwell's [approval] is Simplicity. Because Simplicity is a very deep nerd-sniping rabbit hole”

Hard forks

A hard fork loosens or otherwise changes rules so that old nodes reject new blocks. Everyone who wants to stay on the upgraded chain must update. Some hard forks are planned upgrades. Some are accidents (2010 overflow, 2013 BDB). Some activation fights (UASF against miners) get argued as soft forks in branding and hard forks in effect.

Accidental / emergency hard forks (2010 overflow, 2013 BDB)

Bitcoin has already hard-forked by accident: the 2010 value overflow cleanup and the 2013 Berkeley DB to LevelDB split (BIP50 lore). Those episodes are the baseline for how messy consensus reality is next to whiteboard theory.

Eric Voskuil · S15 E22 · ~00:35:21–00:36:28 · Listen to episode

“And there was a built in kind of hard fork in, in bitcoind that was a consequence of switching to, switching the database implementation had to do with how many specializes could be held concurrently or something. And I think BIP50 was written around … So there’s a bunch of forks that it all happened as a consequence of this oversight that had to do with database locking when they shipped that version of a database. … these, these things happen even with a so called single implementation.”

Eric Voskuil · S15 E22 · ~00:36:45–00:37:06 · Listen to episode

“there’s also the argument that the code is the consensus. Right. bitcoind, whatever bitcoind ships of the consensus, but it can’t be because there were two … in the case of the … database locking issue … at least two concurrent implementations out there. So which one is it?”

David Bailey · S15 E63 · ~01:21:35–01:22:20 · Listen (audio)

“And even when we had that accidental hard fork in 2013, and I was like, it’s fucking over. It’s over. Like, you know, and it’s like actually it’s dynamic. Like people just get on the phone and then they like work it out. And maybe they would never be able to work it out in any other circumstance other than the circumstance where it’s like, okay, if we don’t fucking work this out right now, we’re all dead. … I think it’s people should avoid trying to make … authoritative declarations about what will or will not happen in Bitcoin.”

Giacomo Zucco · S2 E8 · ~00:25:49–00:26:47 · Listen to episode

“…there was … an accidental fork in Bitcoin, an accidental split, because there was a change in the database Berkeley versus … LevelDB.”

Giacomo Zucco · S2 E8 · ~00:27:59–00:28:58 · Listen to episode

“Yeah. We also had a very clear example in Ethereum with Parity and Geth diverging … And … in Bitcoin, when there was LevelDB versus Berkeley DB mess we had developers speaking with miners, asking them to let the invalid chain go in order to remain on the same chain.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E19 · ~01:33:23–01:34:39 · Watch on YouTube

“…2010 August… value overflow incident… Satoshi did a soft fork… October, Satoshi set the block size limit to 1 megabyte with a soft fork. … 2013… Berkeley DB to level DB… involuntary hard fork.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S9 E4 · ~00:50:22–00:50:45 · Listen to episode

“I think that’s what led to the 2013 accidental fork … the one about the database lock limit thing. … So there was an issue with exchanges and there was a hard fork afterwards.”

Soft-vs-hard fork theory and activation (UASF BIP148, Speedy Trial)

Soft vs hard fork is not only rule tightening vs loosening. It is also who must upgrade, who casts the tie break, and whether fighting miners turns a UASF into a hard fork. Key reference: BIP148 UASF.

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:19:19–01:20:12 · Listen (audio)

“No, it was not broken at all. So the thing is, XT and Classic were both attempts to re-consensus so we could all move forward together and guarantee there would be no fork. Like if everyone comes aboard, there would be no fork. … Bitcoin unlimited plan was to create a mechanism that would allow people to start running Bitcoin unlimited and allow larger block, starting to send large blocks today if they come in, but we’ll still fork back to the one megabyte block size Bitcoin, if that chain doesn’t become dominant. So yeah, there was some fork risk, but that was intentional. … there’s always gonna be some fork risk if you don’t have consensus.”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E13 · ~02:45:42–02:47:15 · Listen (audio)

“he’s very wrong about this UASF thing. The UASF, again, if you fight the miners with the UASF, it is a hard fork because you’re breaking the heaviest chain rule. … A miners cast the tie breaking vote for every soft fork. And the soft fork needs only one of the two groups. … the security model Drivechain is not based on UASF at all. It’s based on this economics of minor fees”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E13 · ~02:50:43–02:50:51 · Listen (audio)

“since it breaks the heaviest chain rule if you fight the miners, it’s really a hard fork. So it’s not UASF, it’s just a hard fork which again can be done at any time.”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E13 · ~02:52:04–02:55:37 · Listen (audio)

“The soft fork has had two different definitions … tightening the rules versus loosening and then the other definition is, does everyone need to upgrade or not? … this is the magic of the soft fork because you end up on the longest chain … Just like every UASF is actually a hard fork because breaking the longest chain rule is always a hard fork. The Drivechain is designed to measure the miners’ opinion very accurately, three months in advance.”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:33:49–00:35:52 · Listen (audio)

“SegWit was scary. Taproot was not. … And then in the end, we activate a Taproot using the Speedy Trial scheme. … And of course, nobody tried to stop it. And here we are. Cat is even … even simpler than Taproot. … we’re adding a new opcode in a slot that’s already reserved for new opcodes”

Murch · S15 E50 · ~01:32:40–01:34:42 · Listen (audio)

“I often see the criticism that soft forks can be done by miners by themselves or we let miners decide whether or not a soft fork succeeds. … the miners can help enforce the adoption of the soft fork by signaling readiness … once the rules are active enforcing the rules. And yes, we could do it without the miners but that would lead to more unknowns, more reorgs … a UASF is a lot less attractive from a network transition standpoint”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E16 · ~02:21:35–02:22:04 · Listen (audio)

“most miners like they have no idea what Taproot was at all … the pool would would would call them and ask them or would try to get information like hey should we signal for a Speedy Trial or whatever for Taproot and they would just be like what’s Taproot they have no idea what it is”

Amir Taaki · S12 E2 · ~00:31:42–00:32:19 · Listen to episode

“… The technology is not in one direction. It can change any time, but it’s influenced by the ideas that are predominant in the network, the ideas that influence developers, that influence the community of users that decide where to put their wealth. For example, with the SegWit, it showed us that the base of power is with the users in the network. The users have a very big constituency power. And if you convince the users, then you can essentially influence the entire direction of the project.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E46 · ~00:13:08–00:13:15 · Watch on YouTube

“All the soft forks have no risk and they're all reversible also. So they're often ignorable and reversible and yet we can't do that.”

Vlad Costea (host) and Paul Sztorc · S17 E46 · ~00:14:35–00:15:23 · Watch on YouTube

“If you ask Luke, he's going to say that every soft fork is a longer-time hard fork." Paul: "Well, I think that's ridiculous. There's a big difference between eventually and immediately… That whole eventually part of it is doing a lot of work.”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:41:37–00:41:58 · Watch on YouTube

“…soft forks are all about feelings and opinions… it's not about technology at all, like it's not about facts. You can see that from Taproot. Taproot was a shitload of complexity for very little gain and still a lot of people loved it just because the right people push for it.”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:42:02–00:42:36 · Watch on YouTube

“Paul Sztorc actually said the right way to activate a soft fork is you need the approval of Greg Maxwell, and then you need to implement it and then just post it on the mailing list and then say I don't want to have anything to do with the activation… [that] had a hundred percent hit rate and everything else had a hundred percent miss rate. So we should try that”

Michael Tidwell · S17 E46 · ~02:32:47–02:34:10 · Watch on YouTube

“I like all the hard forks… if people are not happy, they can hard fork. I love that. I don't think that diminishes the value of the original coin… you're allowing people to vote with their feet… Bitcoin works by voting with your feet as the nuclear option…”

SegWit2x / New York Agreement

The New York Agreement tried to pair SegWit with a later 2x block size hard fork. SegWit activated. 2x collapsed. Guests treat that failure as proof that users, not corporate signatories, hold Bitcoin’s fork veto.

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:25:26–01:25:35 · Listen (audio)

“Well, I didn’t like SegWit, but I was okay with it. I thought it was worth accepting SegWit if we got the two megabytes and we could all move forward together.”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~00:08:32–00:08:36 · Listen (audio)

“But then there was this big New York agreement that came up with SegWit2x”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~00:08:59–00:09:10 · Listen (audio)

“So when because a SegWit2x was like, OK, we’re activating SegWit and then a few months later we activate the block size increase. And I was like, this is not going to work. … This is going to be a bait-and-switch, which it ended up being.”

Knut Svanholm · S9 E7 · ~00:05:55–00:06:25 · Listen to episode

“But I wasn’t fully convinced until the after the Bitcoin cash hard fork in 2017. And SegWit2x failed so spectacularly. I realized that the users really were in control and that none, no entity could do anything about Bitcoin beyond that point. And I found that really fascinating. So that was certainly a point that kept me in the space.”

Gigi · S3 E6 · ~01:12:37–01:13:12 · Watch on YouTube

“…I’m not only talking about physical attacks as we’ve seen — one of the biggest attacks in Bitcoin was a certain one with SegWit2x and the push from the industry side to change the consensus mechanism … of Bitcoin in a hard fork way and I think yeah we will have to be very vigilant and we will have to … stick to our guns and make sure that Bitcoin stays true to its essence and Bitcoin stays decentralized and uncorruptible…”

Udi Wertheimer · S2 E2 · ~00:56:08–00:56:45 · Listen (audio)

“Yeah in theory it doesn’t sound like that. SegWit2x wasn’t such a bad idea in itself but it was about dividing the community and setting the precedent and when you increase the block size you have done it and you have a precedent and you can come back next year and say oh it wasn’t enough how about we double it and then it turns into a vicious cycle where the average user will be unable to run a node and it will be only the miners to do it and they take over the network …”

John Carvalho · S1 E2 · ~00:22:20–00:23:46 · Listen to episode

“…when Vitalik and a few programmers decided that they want to have Constantinople and they just say, this is what’s going to happen. And then everybody kind of just goes along with it. Whereas in Bitcoin, you know, we have something like SegWit2x or a controversial change, and it falls flat dies because it’s just too controversial. And there isn’t enough consensus.”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E16 · ~01:44:17–01:44:44 · Listen (audio)

“I thought that in fact, I remember people saying, why no we have because SegWit2x, they wanted the 2x block size increase. But plenty of people said rightly so. They said SegWit already is a 2x block size increase. At least it was based on prevailing patterns of transaction size. The. The order of about 2.3 ish.”

Robin Linus and Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E48 · ~00:34:01–00:34:35 · Watch on YouTube

“…there were lots of proposals, there was [BIP] 101 that was saying let's double the block size every two years, but SegWit2x was eight megabytes… Yes, that was a compromise… No, it was two megabytes and SegWit… it was just a hard fork… it would have just been 1.6 times two, right? Because currently we have four megabytes but we're only using 1.6”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E48 · ~00:34:40–00:34:52 · Watch on YouTube

“…the problem is that there was so much fragmentation… and so many forks that we lost some very good users and businesses, and we didn't lose them to Bitcoin Cash or BSV, we lost them to Ethereum, and then Ethereum lost them to Solana and Tron and whatever”

Robin Linus · S17 E48 · ~00:35:09–00:35:22 · Watch on YouTube

“…all of the stablecoin volume went to other chains… network effects are the complicated problem. I don't even think scaling Bitcoin is the hard problem, I think gaining network effects is the hard problem”

Quantum hard-fork / freeze-Satoshi / BIP361 debates

Quantum migration debates swing between soft-fork opt-in (BIP360 style) and hard-fork forced migration, including proposals that would freeze early Satoshi-era coins. Political fear often outruns the cryptography timeline in these clips.

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E22 · ~00:51:04–00:52:34 · Watch on YouTube

“…BIP361, which is going to be freezing Satoshi’s coins… Yeah, I’m not supportive of that. … it’s a bunch of conjecture about a bunch of bad things that could happen… I’d rather just like ship something like CTV that we know does something good today.”

Hunter Beast · S17 E23 · ~00:30:02–00:30:27 · Watch on YouTube

“…in BIP361 they do have a timeline but I worry… activate one soft fork and then that then activates a couple other phases… takes like five years. Five years might be too long.”

Hunter Beast · S17 E23 · ~00:44:35–00:46:00 · Watch on YouTube

“…before we talk about increasing the block size or the witness discount, we should try everything else… BitZip which is a STARK proof that miners would aggregate with every block… 80 transactions per second… post-quantum… no way to spam… doesn’t expand the burden of node runners. … we haven’t done enough… before we go into something so drastic as a hard fork.”

Amaury Séchet · S17 E19 · ~00:17:42–00:18:29 · Watch on YouTube

“…we went from like not even that is possible. Like this stuff is like sacred code… to well, we’re going to freeze Satoshi’s coin… Which I find to be… a staggering change… 10 years ago… People would like laugh at your face… but now apparently it is and that scared me much more than… quantum computer at this point.”

Shai Wyborski · S16 E45 · ~06:06:30–06:07:01 · Listen (audio)

“So I was saying that if you do it with a soft fork while it doesn’t break consensus and it’s not contentious in any way people can agree that it’s useful. There can be people left behind … which are vulnerable and they become loot for quantum computers. … but a hard fork even though it’s politically unpopular in Bitcoin can lead to a much more efficient transition”

Moonsettler · S16 E65 · ~05:08:03–05:14:17 · Listen (audio)

“…hard fork is a consensus change that makes previously unspendable coins spendable… If something that has previously wallet and now it’s not wallet… that’s a soft fork… soft fork is superior for any quantum migration… BIP360 is a soft fork… soft forks are mandatory upgrades for miners… hard forks are mandatory for users… there is not a single component that a hard fork makes sense from the technical sense for PQ…”

Murch · S15 E50 · ~01:03:59–01:05:53 · Listen (audio)

“I think it rather expected that eventually the block space will be increased. … if we decide that we need quantum safe signatures and they are significantly larger, we might choose to increase the block space … It would certainly mean a hard fork or another SegWit-like extension block construction, which has been described by some as sort of a forced soft fork … I wouldn’t rule out that we eventually have a block size increase, but how exactly that would happen … probably only discover in a couple decades”

Other hard-fork upgrade talk (blocksize, NIPoPoW, etc.)

Blocksize as an explicit hard fork, NIPoPoW talk, and other upgrade paths that refuse the soft-fork costume. Most of the heat is about activation method, not the byte count alone.

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:18:28–01:18:45 · Listen (audio)

“I think the hatred came for the activation method. And some core developers were not happy with the idea of a hard fork because they were afraid that some users will not migrate to the new network. And they will just support the old one.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~00:07:23–00:08:21 · Listen (audio)

“…when we had much smaller usage on Bitcoin back in 2011, 2012, the miners would set a soft block size limit. So this was like, … not consensus… So they just wouldn’t produce blocks over bigger than higher kilobytes. … the miners increased it to, let’s say, 250 kilobytes, then 500 kilobytes. … then we hit this one megabyte limit … it was no longer permission with miners … They were required this to coordinated change. And in my opinion, that’s what totally changed the system because we were every time we hit the limit … we would increase it. And now we’re stuck at this this one megabyte limit.”

Paul Sztorc · S15 E16 · ~02:27:10–02:27:29 · Listen (audio)

“the hard fork is a serious business it’s saying we’re breaking we’re bending a rule we’re going to break a rule and they they should have explained this is what we’re going to change the block size to this formula like permanently”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E5 · ~00:20:37–00:21:44 · Watch on YouTube

“…why did Bitcoin Cash uh, not succeed? … The the idea of just hard forking once to the 8 megabyte block. It’s kind of like what was so special about the number eight, right? Either just remove the cap or don’t and then if you do eight, won’t you have to do 32 again? … the hard fork was why everyone was suffering… so now we’re just going to just hard fork all the time. … keeping the name uh I think added a lot of stigma… The idea of large block L1, I’m not an advocate of that. I think we scale in layers. … small block L1 large block L2…”

Peter Todd · S11 E11 · ~00:08:48–00:09:12 · Listen (audio)

“At the same time, it’s worth noting that we did increase the block size with SegWit. … we very cleverly did it in a way where that block size increase could only happen once, which was part of the reason why it was acceptable. … there was no way to go do it again. … it was also done in a way that maybe people who don’t agree with it can still participate in the network.”

UTXO chain splits

A UTXO chain split copies Bitcoin’s coin ownership at a height and continues under new rules as a separate network. Holders typically receive coins on both sides. Replay protection, branding, and market valuation decide which chain people treat as Bitcoin. BCH, BSV, XEC, and proposed ECX / BIP110 splits all live in this bucket. Same ancestry. Different policies.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash split from Bitcoin in August 2017 (UAHF) to raise the block size on a shared UTXO lineage. This is the template UTXO split: same coins, two chains, replay risk, and a permanent branding war. Client lineage context: BIP101. Long form: S17 E19 Amaury. Whale / Flipstarter autopsy: S17 E44 Marc De Mesel.

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~00:09:41–00:09:54 · Listen (audio)

“The extension block did not get any traction because SegWit2x kind of like, you know, vacuumed all the support it had. So I was like, OK, the only solution now is to have a minority fork of Bitcoin. And this is how I started working on BCH.”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~00:10:04–00:10:47 · Listen (audio)

“Bitcoin ABC has been created for that purpose. … Like the original proposed was to implement the extension block. But then, you know, when it didn’t work … started implementing the BCH fork. And this is what, you know, this is a Bitcoin ABC happened.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~00:44:00–00:44:54 · Listen (audio)

“And then they started censoring people. Like, essentially you’re not allowed to talk about raising the block size. … if you’re talking about raising the block size, well, that’s, that’s even worse than big a scammer. … all these influential big blockers got banned. … they didn’t realize that they were kind of in an echo chamber that point because … all the people with good big block arguments had been purged.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~00:45:57–00:46:46 · Listen (audio)

“…plot transactions versus time on a lot of scale transactions and increasing exponentially until they hit the block size. … The blocks will get full, people spike to like $100. … people just stop using Bitcoin to go to Litecoin or they go to BCH. So they go to Ethereum or they go to a sell ad or something else. … that just shows how demand is built over to other cryptocurrencies. And that’s a loss for Bitcoin. … we’re just diffusing this over multiple coins instead of focusing on Bitcoin.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S16 E30 · ~01:14:34–01:14:51 · Listen (audio)

“…We have had Bitcoin, according to BIP101, I think the first one was XT and then classic and then unlimited. And then all of them sort of converged into Bitcoin cash.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:18:28–01:18:45 · Listen (audio)

“I think the hatred came for the activation method. And some core developers were not happy with the idea of a hard fork because they were afraid that some users will not migrate to the new network. And they will just support the old one.”

Roger Ver · S15 E26 · ~00:58:32–00:59:12 · Listen (audio)

“So I think there was a big split between BCH and BSV with Craig Wright because a lot of people were fooled by Craig Wright. … In regards to Amaury Séchet and eCash, I don’t think anybody pays any attention to that. … I think it’s kind of a non player at this point. … that fork of a fork was going to go to a dollar?”

Amaury Séchet · S17 E19 · ~00:20:25–00:21:06 · Watch on YouTube

“…you could write the modified client that allow the Mt. Gox coin to be sent… It’s not difficult code to write, but then you will have to have everybody to run that modified version… Seems to me an impossible sell…”

Knut Svanholm · S9 E7 · ~00:05:55–00:06:25 · Listen to episode

“But I wasn’t fully convinced until the after the Bitcoin cash hard fork in 2017. And SegWit2x failed so spectacularly. I realized that the users really were in control and that none, no entity could do anything about Bitcoin beyond that point. And I found that really fascinating. So that was certainly a point that kept me in the space.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E5 · ~00:20:37–00:21:44 · Watch on YouTube

“…why did Bitcoin Cash uh, not succeed? … The the idea of just hard forking once to the 8 megabyte block. It’s kind of like what was so special about the number eight, right? Either just remove the cap or don’t and then if you do eight, won’t you have to do 32 again? … the hard fork was why everyone was suffering… so now we’re just going to just hard fork all the time. … keeping the name uh I think added a lot of stigma… The idea of large block L1, I’m not an advocate of that. I think we scale in layers. … small block L1 large block L2…”

Aaron Day · S15 E32 · ~00:26:04–00:26:36 · Listen (audio)

“I think the BTC people now have gone from peer to peer cash to its digital gold and that this digital gold is going to back sent is going to be the backing for central bank digital currencies. BCH has remained consistent with the idea of this is peer to peer cash that people use for daily transactions. And BSV has has adopted this approach that there’s only going to be one chain. Our chain is so technically superior that everybody is going to have to use it and all CBDCs are going to run on top of BSV.”

Marc De Mesel · S17 E44 · ~00:06:06–00:06:23 · Listen (audio)

“…Bitcoin was around $3,000… And so BCH was around $300 even in the futures market. I thought that was a steal… nine years later… the… price of Bitcoin cash is still the same, $300, whereas BTC went from 3,000 to 80,000.”

Marc De Mesel · S17 E44 · ~00:24:05–00:24:21 · Listen (audio)

“…one of the explanations is that the different splits… caused the community to become too fragmented. It always lost some key people in every split… costly in… having a successful project.”

Marc De Mesel · S17 E44 · ~00:24:33–00:26:23 · Listen (audio)

“…contentions should be resolved via basically miners voting with their hash power… when the vote is decided actually people do stay together and they don't fork off or split off… forking off or splitting off can be done as a last resort but it should not be done over… smaller differences… that didn't really happen… they rather split off than… accept their loss… Of course I did the same with Bitcoin Cash… there was no point of sticking together with Bitcoin BTC when the decision is that they are not going to scale the blockchain and transaction fees will be expensive… the only way left is to split off and fork off. … later then with Bitcoin Cash it happened the same… the first one was Bitcoin Satoshi vision…”

Marc De Mesel · S17 E44 · ~00:35:52–00:36:09 · Listen (audio)

“…the way Roger Ver has titled his book it really was… a hijacking of the project like a sabotage is the right word… I do believe that… we were lied… The expectations for Bitcoin was…”

Bitcoin SV (BSV)

Bitcoin SV split from BCH in November 2018. Same UTXO ancestry, different culture: protocol restoration claims, Craig Wright politics, and a big-block experiment taken further than BCH.

Roger Ver · S15 E26 · ~00:47:07–00:48:13 · Listen (audio)

“At one point, Craig Wright had convinced me that he was Satoshi … maybe 2016 or something like that. … Craig Wright right there in front of my own eyes did not know that Bitcoin addresses have a checksum. … there was zero doubt in my mind at that point that he could be Satoshi because Satoshi absolutely would have known that Bitcoin addresses have a checksum.”

Roger Ver · S15 E26 · ~00:58:32–00:59:12 · Listen (audio)

“So I think there was a big split between BCH and BSV with Craig Wright because a lot of people were fooled by Craig Wright. … In regards to Amaury Séchet and eCash, I don’t think anybody pays any attention to that. … I think it’s kind of a non player at this point. … that fork of a fork was going to go to a dollar?”

Aaron Day · S15 E32 · ~00:26:04–00:26:36 · Listen (audio)

“I think the BTC people now have gone from peer to peer cash to its digital gold and that this digital gold is going to back sent is going to be the backing for central bank digital currencies. BCH has remained consistent with the idea of this is peer to peer cash that people use for daily transactions. And BSV has has adopted this approach that there’s only going to be one chain. Our chain is so technically superior that everybody is going to have to use it and all CBDCs are going to run on top of BSV.”

Vinny Lingham · S17 E35 · ~01:01:11–01:01:18 · Watch on YouTube

“…we didn’t know at the time in 2017 that we’d have a fork with Bitcoin Cash and then Bitcoin SV as well. So, there’s like three forks of Bitcoin effectively…”

Aaron Day · S15 E32 · ~00:32:08–00:32:39 · Listen (audio)

“if you read the Malmi emails that came out of the cope of versus Craig Wright trial between Malmi and Satoshi, it means it’s very clear that there was originally not supposed to be a block size in Bitcoin at all. There was no, no block size limit. … from very early on Satoshi said this was intended to compete with Visa and Mastercard on chain.”

Kurt Wuckert Jr. · S17 E39 · ~00:17:34–00:17:47 · Watch on YouTube

“…a lot of people deserve a lot of credit for… having those ideas… before they became… our narrative but you can read Dantis three four five years before somebody like Craig Wright talking about concepts that we now think of as like the metaanet…”

Kurt Wuckert Jr. / Vlad Costea · S17 E39 · ~01:11:13–01:11:47 · Watch on YouTube

“…the BSV people want to do the big block experiment all the way and that’s… the thing that I care about. So that’s the direction I’m gonna go. … we started from the same Genesis block. … decided in 2017 to split and then there was another split in 2018. And who won from all of this? Tether.”

Arthur van Pelt · S5 E10 · ~01:03:58–01:04:33 · Listen to episode

“…to push BSV for as long as possible and milk this fat cow while they still can. And I can see people from the BSV community denouncing Craig Wright, which was unlikely like a year ago. But now they’re saying, now we don’t need Craig Wright, we’re not convinced that he is Satoshi. We think that he’s a bad actor in the community and we’re going to carry on with developments. Yeah, software without his influence…”

Arthur van Pelt · S5 E10 · ~01:05:58–01:06:49 · Listen to episode

“What we see is a little bit of a split or a drift away from Craig being Satoshi. … We see several kind of important community members leaving BSV, questioning Craig Wright being Satoshi. And the remaining hardcore followers of BSV and supporters of Craig Wright, they say, yeah, it does not really matter if he’s … So they keep the story alive…”

Kurt Wuckert Jr. · S17 E39 · ~01:09:06–01:09:58 · Watch on YouTube

“…the mining on the BSV side… pulled their hash power from BTC… to give a huge chunk of hash rate to BSV for like 10 days before the split to signal… the SV node version of Bitcoin Cash. And nobody did that on the BCH side until like an hour before the split. … Roger… pulled his customers hash power off of BTC and put it on the Bitcoin ABC version… to… eclipse the the SV hash power… And then they had this rolling uh checkpoints to make sure that a reorg actually couldn’t happen even if there was more hash power on one side.”

Kurt Wuckert Jr. · S17 E39 · ~01:33:58–01:35:10 · Watch on YouTube

“…everybody likes to focus on the block size… but… more significant is… a lot of op codes in Bitcoin that got turned off in 2010 and were never turned back on again. And… all but two have been turned back on in BSV. And then… the script limits… have been… eliminated… If you want to… push a a two gigabyte script in a single transaction… the node will process it if it’s a valid script. … you can open a channel that works quite a bit like a lightning network channel except that it lives in…”

Arthur van Pelt · S5 E10 · ~00:29:49–00:31:07 · Listen to episode

“Again, the big block discussion was still not on the table at that moment. … And only the big block discussion where he, when it was in the scaling debate, which was much later, and we’re talking 2017, you already saw that … great writers Craig Wright puked out by the Bitcoin community already back then because nobody believed him in 2015 and 16. So he only could connect with people that supported him from 2015 onwards, which was in this case Roger Ver. … So he connected with the BCH community. Yeah, those were the big blockers and that is where Craig Wright also became a big blocker.”

eCash XEC (Amaury Séchet / Deadalnix)

eCash (XEC) is Amaury Séchet / Deadalnix’s chain: BCH to Bitcoin ABC to XEC with Avalanche consensus work. Not Paul Sztorc’s Ecash. Not Chaumian mint ecash. Episode: S17 E19.

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~00:54:28–00:56:09 · Listen (audio)

“They want it big block on the main chain of Bitcoin and this is what they’ve been working on for several years. And what they did fail and so they come back to BCH … There was no set for like you know about the game … ready to be deployed on BCH … this is why it went from. About 12% of BTC to one person you know and this is why we ended up leaving … So eventually this is what led to the creation of eCash.”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~01:20:29–01:21:05 · Listen (audio)

“Now it wasn’t the, it was in the roadmap for BCH pretty early on, even like before the BSV fork. … But when avalanche came out, we were like, okay, like this does the same thing as what we wanted to do, but, but nicer. So we’re going to use that.”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~00:59:11–00:59:26 · Listen (audio)

“Also I think Drivechain is very interesting and and can’t know like big block it’s been beating in the bad light but it’s something people should look into. I think right now is the only proposal that can onboard everyone in the world in an uncustodial way.”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~01:02:11–01:02:43 · Listen (audio)

“But the idea of Drivechain is that you can have like different Drivechain, effectively, right, that are also kind of like blockchain, but with different rules. And you can move your Bitcoin from the main Bitcoin blockchain to a Drivechain and do stuff in there and then send them back on the main chain. And the reverse-back problem is, oh, do you send the coin back from the Drivechain to the main chain?”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~02:27:55–02:27:58 · Listen (audio)

“Aside from eCash. I probably would have to join Paul’s story and work on Drivechain.”

Amaury Séchet · S17 E19 · ~00:17:42–00:18:29 · Watch on YouTube

“…we went from like not even that is possible. Like this stuff is like sacred code… to well, we’re going to freeze Satoshi’s coin… Which I find to be… a staggering change… 10 years ago… People would like laugh at your face… but now apparently it is and that scared me much more than… quantum computer at this point.”

Amaury Séchet · S17 E19 · ~02:02:14–02:04:06 · Watch on YouTube

“…removed pay-to-script-hash… if Satoshi meaning Craig… would have wanted… he would have put it in… evil core developer… probably a huge number of coin were stolen when that happened. … Same for CLTV and CSV…”

Roger Ver · S15 E26 · ~00:58:32–00:59:12 · Listen (audio)

“So I think there was a big split between BCH and BSV with Craig Wright because a lot of people were fooled by Craig Wright. … In regards to Amaury Séchet and eCash, I don’t think anybody pays any attention to that. … I think it’s kind of a non player at this point. … that fork of a fork was going to go to a dollar?”

Marc De Mesel · S17 E44 · ~00:10:14–00:11:45 · Listen (audio)

“…I really did not agree with what Amaury was planning for Bitcoin Cash. … he planned to introduce a… They call it a dev tax but I don't think that's really nice… It's actually a business model as has Dash introduced as one of the first where a piece of the minted coins goes to the development team… and Zcash also has such a system and I think it is a smart system… the idea that Amaury came up with was… not a bad one to do the same for Bitcoin cash… but… the way it was implemented was a little bit too dictatorial.”

Marc De Mesel · S17 E44 · ~00:20:19–00:22:05 · Listen (audio)

“…I believe Amaury split off then started this project under another name… the same happened I think eCash he call this new project eCash it's a fork from Bitcoin cash… probably another coin that will die. And of course that happened also with the other forks… from Bitcoin Cash we have… the BSV community… that project is really also dying… after Amaury left… Flipstarter… like Kickstarter… non-custodial…”

Ecash ECX (Paul Sztorc)

Ecash (ECX) is Paul Sztorc’s proposed Bitcoin hard fork that ships BIP300/301 Drivechains without waiting for a Core soft fork. Distinct coin claim path from XEC. Episode: S17 E21.

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~00:41:36–00:42:34 · Watch on YouTube

“…the hard fork is actually a pretty good idea overall. … with the hard fork every Bitcoiner who owns like 0.003 Bitcoin, now they’re in this new thing. … hard fork is actually a stronger competitor. … Bitcoin Cash… briefly made it to the number two spot.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~00:43:29–00:43:52 · Watch on YouTube

“…anyone who owns Bitcoin and has self-custody… should just be pro hard fork cuz you just get tons and tons of free coins… zero effort, zero risk, zero cost.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~00:49:55–00:51:09 · Watch on YouTube

“…we already have a version where there is no… reassignment of Satoshi’s coins and that’s the BIP300 idea on on BTC. … the hard fork is a a less desirable… path. … If you if you do a pure hard fork… it’s very difficult to get any like investment in the project…”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~01:02:51–01:03:13 · Watch on YouTube

“…is BIP300 a good idea? If it is a good idea, then… I was the one who was scammed… But if you think the idea is bad, then you have nothing to worry about from the fork…”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~01:40:06–01:40:31 · Watch on YouTube

“…the L1 client will basically just be Bitcoin Core with small block size and one weird transaction that alters Satos… and… changing the difficulty to its minimum value. That’s just to create the hard fork…”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~01:52:16–01:52:56 · Watch on YouTube

“…what the Drivechain idea does that no that no one else has done before, it it actually does decentralized development. … if you dissent… you kind of have to hard fork… start an altcoin… this is the first project to decentralize development…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E21 · ~01:59:29–02:02:25 · Watch on YouTube

“…I do believe that eCash is more interesting than Bitcoin Cash. … Bitcoin Cash has more of a network effect… If it pushes Bitcoin to improve… I don’t think people should necessarily sell BTC for eCash.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E37 · ~00:02:00–00:02:22 · Watch on YouTube

“…the L1 is the same as Bitcoin core, so that’s been ready. And the BIP3000 301 enforcer, all that stuff’s ready. So… we were going to launch everything in August, but for a wide variety of reasons… it’s like the summer and people aren’t paying enough attention… the cold card hack and this LLM security stuff. Everyone was distracted with 110. … we… wanted to… let people practice a few times before the real… super launch…” Host: “…the roll out of the hard fork is going to happen in three phases with an alpha… this month… a beta next month and then on October 31st, Halloween night, Bitcoin’s 18th birthday, there’s the mainet launch.”

Paul · S17 E37 · ~00:04:25–00:04:59 · Watch on YouTube

“…you do need… the Bitcoin private key… but you don’t necessarily need to type that into our software. You can split it off by broadcasting a certain type of transaction. … fast facts… repository on GitHub… how to mine how to split off the coins and how to do the replay protection the right way. By default there’s no rep play protection but if you do a certain thing you split the coins off permanently.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E21 · ~01:05:33–01:05:53 · Watch on YouTube

“…after BIP300, Bitcoin can ossify safely. … the altcoin to end all altcoins.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E44 · ~00:18:39–00:18:53 · Listen (audio)

“…Layer Two Labs which is building another hard fork of Bitcoin which is going to be called also ecash but this is ECX not XEC and it has Drivechains which is an idea for two-way peg side chains…”

Michael Tidwell · S17 E46 · ~02:05:45–02:06:14 · Watch on YouTube

“I would say this is the least dramatized hard fork. This is the most kosher, calm hard fork in recent memory… I've only seen the hard forks that have deep emotional involvement.”

Janusz · S17 E46 · ~01:14:05–01:14:30 · Watch on YouTube

“I maybe not agree with everything with Paul's fork strategy, but I think there should be some more encouragement to try things like this… he's tried for a long time to activate drivechains on Bitcoin and this seems like a natural step to hard fork.”

BIP110 / Blake2b Luke coin (Knots camp)

BIP110 season talk treats a restrictive client / policy camp as a possible live fork: Knots, Blake2b branding jokes, and the claim that the best outcome might be an honest split. Cross-ref soft-fork framing in BIP110 soft.

John Carvalho · S17 E11 · ~01:25:47–01:26:02 · Watch on YouTube

“No, you’re right. It would not be terrible at all. In other words, the best possible outcome for BIP110 is a BIP110 hard fork. That’s the best possible outcome. also for sailor also for everyone else. Just have your own little toy and see if that one is the one that’s valuable.”

John Carvalho · S17 E11 · ~00:27:07–00:27:25 · Watch on YouTube

“This is like hard fork fantasy kind of um I don’t think you can actually do that kind of thing. … You can duplicate ownership like you mentioned, but it doesn’t mean people will value the new thing, you know, just like what happened with Bcash…”

John Carvalho · S17 E11 · ~00:46:31–00:47:00 · Watch on YouTube

“Well, you can’t you can’t disagree with Bitcoin Core without ultimately having to double down to trying to remove Bitcoin Core. … the only turner you have is to offer a fork. … I’m willing to make a whole new client for it, and I’m willing to risk forking for it.”

Lukas Hozda · S17 E17 · ~01:20:12–01:20:31 · Watch on YouTube

“And the miners will follow the most profit… if miners leave from the permissive chain, that makes it more profitable for the miners that did not leave…”

Lukas Hozda · S17 E17 · ~01:22:41–01:23:04 · Watch on YouTube

“…at the very beginning, there is also an advantage for the permissive chain because the blocks that are valid for the restrictive chain are also valid for the permissive chain but not the other way around. So if you’re going by the longest chain then the permissive one has a starting advantage…”

Riccardo Spagni · S17 E8 · ~00:29:05–00:29:14 · Watch on YouTube

“…don’t even get me started on how technically broken BIP110 and a lot of the other ideas are. Let’s just not even go down that road because that’s just that’s a whole level of absurdity.”

Hunter Beast · S17 E23 · ~00:13:44–00:14:03 · Watch on YouTube

“…that’s why I am supportive of BIP110 because… if we are going to adopt… post-quantum cryptography someday ideally we are using transactions that if they are bigger they are monetary transactions not a bunch of JPEGs…”

Super Testnet · S16 E56 · ~00:59:49–01:01:11 · Listen (audio)

“So if it before four four gets adopted into Bitcoin knots, I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere anyway. … roughly around 20% of brickway node runners … switch over to dots. And I don’t think most of them are on board with this before for proposal. So if it gets on into knots, I think maybe 10% of them will adopt the new Bit44 for compatible version of knots.

And then 10% of the network of the total network will be using Bit44 for. And 90% will not. … among the remaining 90% … something like 25% of them are going to be so opposed … download incompatible software. apex. Like some people call it user rejected software. Download something that”

Alex Waltz · S17 E31 · ~02:18:18–02:18:41 · Watch on YouTube

“…let’s talk about the forks that are coming. It seems like the knots people are really not happy that there are dicks on the blockchain. And then you have the builders who are fed up with the politics of Bitcoin core and they want to experiment with stuff on another chain which copies the same UTXO set.”

Vinny Lingham · S17 E35 · ~00:10:22–00:10:43 · Watch on YouTube

“…watching the community kind of fight against each other right now with BIP110 versus Cole. And and actually I I I kind of sympathize with the BIP110 guys cuz I kind of agree like if you took the direction 2017 to keep small blocks, you can’t then now go and say, well, we need to enable all this other, you know, ordinals and stuff on on on Bitcoin…”

Bob Summerwill · S17 E42 · ~00:29:08–00:31:05 · Watch on YouTube

“…the other proposal was… a hard fork. … that hard fork… didn’t rewind anything… it wasn’t that kind of like go back to an earlier block… instead it was what was called an irregular state transition. It’s quite a… good euphemism. But what that did was… changed the smart contracts that were deployed at particular addresses. … the DAO and the child Dow… all… got turned into refund contracts… just call this contract and it will send your… ether back… So… not undoing, but… that stuff is not going to continue…” Host: “…the narrative… is that there was a roll back of the blockchain… return to the previous state before the DAO hack…” / Bob: “…that is”

Other UTXO / chain splits (Bitcoin Gold, Private, etc.)

Bitcoin Gold, Diamond, Private, and other UTXO-set stunts, including Wassim Alsindi’s merge-fork case study of Bitcoin Private. Mostly negative design lessons.

Wassim Alsindi · S2 E1 · ~00:39:03–00:39:28 · Listen (audio)

“… the original creator of Zclassic came back and said, hey, we’re going to do this thing where we combine Zclassic and Bitcoin, the UTXO sets of both ledgers. And we’re going to call it Bitcoin private. So this is the first time to my knowledge that this operation, which you could call a merge fork, fork merge or whatever you want to call it. This kind of synthesis of these UTXO sets was conducted.”

Wassim Alsindi · S2 E1 · ~00:41:45–00:42:30 · Listen (audio)

“So by analogy with this kind of stellar notion, I was calling Bitcoin private a white dwarf chain. So this thing is kind of, it’s wrecked. It’s dead. Nobody’s going to use this thing. It’s too easy to attack it. … They filled the ledger with Bitcoin UTXOs, to kind of use the Bitcoin name, maybe for a bit of marketing. … Indeed, the … coin did a hundred X in about a month or six weeks from the announcement of the fork merge until the actual operation …”

Wassim Alsindi · S2 E1 · ~00:49:46–00:49:58 · Listen (audio)

“But no I wouldn’t say that there’s any good design lessons in Bitcoin private. Quite the opposite it’s kind of like a menu of what not to do if you want to not have your network collapse and fall apart.”

Wassim Alsindi · S2 E1 · ~00:45:15–00:46:34 · Listen (audio)

“… something very odd goes on around the time of the fork merge as they insert all of these UTXOs into the … new network … Coin Metrics went a step or two further and they were looking at the UTXOs themselves and that’s where they saw this gigantic pre-mine … This is hidden inflation that was put into the shielded pool of approximately two million coins at the time of the … fork merge. So even though Bitcoin private was already extremely wrecked … it got a whole lot worse.”

Dan Hannum · S3 E3 · ~00:37:05–00:37:55 · Watch on YouTube

“…I think there’s what like five or six different Bitcoin forks between Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Cash and so on … the harm … causes your … traditional investor … to be a little bit confused … friends that didn’t really understand what Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash was … same thing with … Ethereum Classic … sometimes forks can be a little bit difficult for … a retail investor…”

Codebase forks

A codebase fork copies Bitcoin’s software (or a descendant) and launches a new genesis or new economic policy without claiming Bitcoin’s live UTXO set as the same asset. Litecoin, Namecoin, Dogecoin, Dash, Decred, and Zcash are the main examples here. They inherit code and ideas. They do not inherit your BTC balance.

Litecoin (incl. MWEB)

Litecoin is an early codebase fork (scrypt, faster blocks) that later shipped SegWit and MWEB. Charlie Lee treats it as a softer lab for features Bitcoin may never take.

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:02:49–00:04:36 · Listen to episode

“So the goal I had was to add more fungibility to … Litecoin. So fungibility is one of the properties of some money that is missing from Bitcoin and Litecoin. … The reason why I went with MimbleWimble. So initially I looked at confidential transactions. … confidential transaction … brought 90% of fungibility. … But the problem with confidential transaction is it does not scale. Because transaction size is like 20 times the size of a normal Bitcoin … transaction. … What MimbleWimble did was it has confidential transaction, but also makes things more scalable. So using like cut through technology where inputs and outputs can be pruned / thrown away when they’re spent.”

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:05:06–00:06:09 · Listen to episode

“I mean, you have Grin and Beam were both using MimbleWimble for many years now. … So, MWEB or what I’m calling on Litecoin is called MWEB which stands for MimbleWimble extension block where we’re implementing it using extension blocks. It’s a good trade-off … between like scalability and fungibility.”

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:06:55–00:07:59 · Listen to episode

“So extension block was proposed by Johnson Lau a while ago. It wasn’t related to scaling when he proposed it was for adding a feature to Bitcoin … via extension blocks. And then it was … to address Bitcoin scaling where you can just basically use extension blocks to add more block space via soft fork without doing hard fork. But that proposal, I thought that was pretty silly … just for scaling … And SegWit was a much better proposal. So in the end SegWit won, and it was implemented … or activated on Litecoin and then Bitcoin…”

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:10:33–00:11:23 · Listen to episode

“Yeah, … I describe extension blocks as very similarly side chains. So it’s kind of like a side chains that’s attached to the main chain. And … the rules are enforced by the same set of miners. So with side chains, for example, Liquid, the rules on the side chain is enforced by a federation. … With extension blocks, … miners are enforcing the peg-ins and peg-outs and all the rules on the extension block.”

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:34:52–00:35:55 · Listen to episode

“Yes. So it was done as a soft fork. So … it was miner activated. So right now … every miner actually has upgraded … and is mining … MWEB blocks. So every block right now has an MWEB block attached to it. … if over 50% of miners decided to not mine … MWEB blocks, … that would be a hard fork. … It’s no different than if 50% miners said to mine 22 million bitcoins instead of 21 million.” *(Soft-fork miner activation (00:34:52)–(00:35:15); >50% refuse ⇒ hard-fork analogy (00:35:26)–(00:35:55).)"

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:37:04–00:38:52 · Listen to episode

“Yeah, that’s why it’s going to be much harder battle on Bitcoin than it is on Litecoin. And in that sense, it’s good to test it out on Litecoin … whether it’s something that … we can add to Bitcoin in the future. … So for Litecoin, we’re just experimenting … adding fungibility and privacy … as an opt-in feature to layer one…”

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:54:32–00:54:53 · Listen to episode

“I’m not, I don’t expect Bitcoin to implement MWEB because it’s just a big change. It’s Bitcoin is a lot more conservative, and I think that’s good. So we’ll see what happens in the future, but at least it’s working on Litecoin and people can play around with it and see how … that works.”

Charlie Lee · S15 E34 · ~00:13:56–00:14:39 · Listen (audio)

“So the way it works is MWeb is added to Litecoin as with a soft fork. And the idea is that there is a new parallel blockchain extension block that is attached to the main chain. So every Litecoin block now has an extension block that has all the MWeb transactions. And then you can move coins between the two. … it has a bit of privacy, a bit of better fungibility. And if you want to sell your coins … you can always peg out back to a main chain address”

Charlie Lee · S15 E34 · ~00:44:11–00:45:06 · Listen (audio)

“all along I knew that active in SegWit on Litecoin would help Bitcoin and that was one of the motivations behind doing it … once Litecoin SegWit activated on Litecoin … it just became too much for them to keep segret back from Bitcoin and soon after Bitcoin activated segret also.”

Charlie Lee · S15 E34 · ~00:41:18–00:41:34 · Listen (audio)

“other than mweb we haven’t really changed anything from from the initial kind of fork from bitcoin so it’s been mostly just … getting updates from from bitcoin changes so mweb is one of the major … change from bitcoin”

Charlie Lee · S15 E34 · ~00:43:21–00:43:53 · Listen (audio)

“I put a million dollars bounty on a Litecoin SegWit address and basically say come get it … and no one was able to … that really helped kind of turn the tides in terms of public support”

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:33:45–00:34:26 · Listen to episode

“Interesting thing with Litecoin specifically is that Litecoin has merged mine with … Dogecoin. And … Dogecoin has basically infinite inflation. … So … miners mining both Litecoin and Dogecoin would continue to have the Dogecoin kind of inflation. So that … helps secure Litecoin, even though Litecoin has a fixed number of coins, 84 million.”

Marc De Mesel · S17 E44 · ~00:49:28–00:49:47 · Listen (audio)

“…started already investing in altcoins in… 2012… litecoin… peercoin these were the first altcoins and from the start there was hatred towards these projects by bitcoiners and I thought that did not make… sense…”

Namecoin (incl. Satoshi merge-mining)

Namecoin pioneered merge mining with Bitcoin under Satoshi-era ideas. It remains the historical root for BIP301-style blind merge mining talk.

Paul Sztorc · S9 E4 · ~01:28:05–01:29:18 · Listen to episode

“…I came up with something called blind merge mining that I broke off into a separate BIP301 … slightly tuned up version of vanilla merge mining which was invented by Satoshi in 2010 … nothing stops the side chain from being mined in any way you don’t actually have to use merge mining at all … I would imagine people would lazily fork that and make the side chain of their choice … since Drivechain is now the term for BIP301…” *(Note: elsewhere Drivechain ≈ BIP300+301; here he loosely equates “Drivechain” with BMM/BIP301.)"

Paul Sztorc · S9 E4 · ~01:33:24–01:34:00 · Listen to episode

“…That’s kind of why part of why I split out the BIPs into two, because they are actually quite separate. You could blind merge mine something that is an alt coin, like name coin. … And you also, you could create a side chain with BIP300 … that does not use merge mining at all. And uses proof of stake…”

Karl Kreder · S17 E18 · ~00:19:15–00:20:35 · Watch on YouTube

“…merge mining isn’t new. … merge mining with Bitcoin and, say, Namecoin, a lot of Bitcoin miners will just … go to a pool. The pool will also … mine Namecoin and automatically sell it so that people can get more Bitcoin. So, if you’re kind of the minority chain, merge mining still doesn’t necessarily help… So, what we said is in SOAP, the miners will only get Quai. And the second token that they merge mine will come back to the network. The network will then sell that token and buy Quai at market to burn. … it forces the value to flow through Quai by consensus. … all the other chains are subsidizing our security.”

Karl Kreder · S17 E18 · ~00:18:04–00:18:58 · Watch on YouTube

“…one thing that we added to Quai network in December … is something called SOAP, our subsidy open market acquisition protocol. … what it effectively does is it allows us to merge mine with other proof-of-work blockchains. So, right now, it’s set up to be able to merge mine with Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ravencoin. … it’s also set up to merge mine with Bitcoin itself. We just haven’t … activated … because we don’t yet have enough SHA hash rate…”

Charles Chong & Spencer Yang · S16 E28 · ~00:48:34–00:49:10 · Listen (audio)

“…blind mergers mining … champion by one of the show sponsors, Layer 2 Labs … enable miners to create merge mind site chains. So they will be able to provide, for example, Ethereum and Zcash and name coin and whatever features on individual site chains. And at the same time, the miners also collect transaction fees…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E47 · ~01:24:02–01:24:48 · Watch on YouTube

“…the first altcoin was actually Namecoin… Satoshi Nakamoto… told the developers that they should merge mine it with Bitcoin… The issue with Namecoin, I think, was squatters.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E48 · ~01:17:20–01:17:59 · Watch on YouTube

“…you split into two worlds: the ICANN-style names… and something like google.bit or whatever, and you respect all the property rights of the original set… you basically front-load, you hard-fork the UTXO set of the ICANN database and then you add in new stuff”

Dogecoin

Dogecoin is a Litecoin-derived codebase fork with uncapped inflation and later Litecoin merge mining. Useful as a security-budget analogy in Drivechain debates.

Charlie Lee · S11 E5 · ~00:33:45–00:34:26 · Listen to episode

“Interesting thing with Litecoin specifically is that Litecoin has merged mine with … Dogecoin. And … Dogecoin has basically infinite inflation. … So … miners mining both Litecoin and Dogecoin would continue to have the Dogecoin kind of inflation. So that … helps secure Litecoin, even though Litecoin has a fixed number of coins, 84 million.”

Vlad Costea (host) / Paul Sztorc · S14 E10 · ~02:31:18–02:31:38 · Listen (audio)

“Litecoin has kind of secured it’s security budget … because it’s merge mine with Dodgecoin Dogecoin … mine nurse make more money from Dodgecoin than from Litecoin.” / “That’s a useful example for people who ask about what if one side chain becomes dominant.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S16 E52 · ~01:40:19–01:41:22 · Listen (audio)

“It’s also why we refer to stuff that’s not Bitcoin as altcoins. Because most of them are just code-based copies of Bitcoin with some added stuff like master nodes or proof of stake or whatever … Like you still have Litecoin, which has been around since 2011. You still have Dogecoin, which has been around since like 2013. You still have Monero, which has been around since 2014. You still have Zcash, which has been around since 2016. … You still have Dash. … And it seems like indirectly they’re scaling Bitcoin.”

Karl Kreder · S17 E18 · ~00:18:04–00:18:58 · Watch on YouTube

“…one thing that we added to Quai network in December … is something called SOAP, our subsidy open market acquisition protocol. … what it effectively does is it allows us to merge mine with other proof-of-work blockchains. So, right now, it’s set up to be able to merge mine with Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ravencoin. … it’s also set up to merge mine with Bitcoin itself. We just haven’t … activated … because we don’t yet have enough SHA hash rate…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E7 · ~00:36:37–00:36:43 · Watch on YouTube

“…that’s the reason why Litecoin didn’t pump this bull market because the miners are incentivized to hold Dogecoin and sell Litecoin.”

Dash

Dash began as a Litecoin fork (Xcoin / Darkcoin), later rebased toward Bitcoin, and added masternodes plus an Evolution side chain. Codebase inheritance without a Bitcoin UTXO claim.

Joël Valenzuela · S17 E33 · ~00:47:23–00:47:30 · Watch on YouTube

“…in the very early days Dash was originally forked from Litecoin, but then it was rebased off of Bitcoin later because Litecoin was abandoned.”

Joël Valenzuela · S17 E33 · ~01:02:21–01:02:34 · Watch on YouTube

“…Dash was forked from Litecoin and Dash had the same thing however… a lot of people piled on that for years including Charlie Lee…”

Joël Valenzuela · S17 E33 · ~01:56:44–01:57:10 · Watch on YouTube

“…evolution is a… data network and enshrined side chain. So there’s two Dash blockchains now… the main proof of work… that’s based on Bitcoin. And there’s the other chain… entirely proof of stake because it’s run by the master nodes only…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E33 · ~01:13:14–01:13:25 · Watch on YouTube

“…it wasn’t always called Dash. It was Xcoin and then it was darkcoin and then it became Dash which is like an abbreviation of digital cash.”

Joël Valenzuela · S17 E33 · ~01:50:48–01:50:54 · Watch on YouTube

“…Dash is sort of a from a codebase and inheritance thing sort of a Bitcoin Cosmos Zcash today.”

Joël Valenzuela · S17 E33 · ~02:09:48–02:10:28 · Watch on YouTube

“…not possible with Dash because… you have the turn styling system where you have an orchard pool. There’s only so much that’s in the orchard pool that can come out… ever since 2024 when the evolution chain was launched… Dash is bridged from the core chain to the evolution chain so there’s an asset lock…”

Decred

Decred forked Bitcoin’s codebase into a PoW/PoS hybrid with on-chain governance and a treasury. Guests treat it as a governance experiment footnote more than a money rival.

Christian Keroles · S3 E10 · ~00:35:06–00:35:39 · Listen to episode

“Gosh, don’t get me started on Decred. I think Decred has very good intentions, but it’s experimental … never advise anyone to invest in it … interesting experiment … a good footnote … in the history of Bitcoin as it proved something in regards to how it’s governed. But it will crash and burn just like all the others.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S16 E43 · ~01:16:34–01:16:46 · Listen (audio)

“You also have Decred, which is an old project. It started from one guy deciding that he doesn’t want to work on Bitcoin anymore. And he started deploying his ideas on the network that’s called Decred.”

Vikrant Sharma · S16 E43 · ~01:17:17–01:17:31 · Listen (audio)

“I know there’s definitely some overlap between the Monero community and the Decred community. … It was feedback from users … So we did it.”

Chris DeRose · S2 Bonus · ~01:13:41–01:14:58 · Watch on YouTube

“…you’re gonna end up at Dash having manifested that ideal … I have a complicated relationship with Dash I don’t own any Dash don’t promote Dash but … they’ve achieved … because they haven’t embraced the immaculate form as their notion of the ideal they instead said … our ideal would be vendor uptake … maybe in 50 years or less … the model of development … Bitcoin has undertaken can no longer really support itself … it no longer gets updated … and the community … says … we have to have a tax and then … that’s what Dash did frankly and that’s what like Decred does … it’s at least conceivable that that would be better … that’s a market decision…”

Jake Yocom-Piatt · S15 E55 · ~00:21:52–00:26:07 · Listen (audio)

“proof of work … was a great idea out of the blocks for Bitcoin. But then it very rapidly degenerates into who can get as close to the silicon … So what we did is we changed that and we hybridized it with proof of stake. … instead of it being one CPU, one vote, it is one CPU, one vote when you’re mining. But when it comes to decisions for the project, it’s one coin, one vote. … that sort of fixes what I viewed as the major governance problem with … Bitcoin. … another major problem with Bitcoin is, okay, who’s going to pay for it? … venture capital will fund it for a while. And then … maybe black rock will fund it … And then the third piece … p”

Alan Szepieniec · S16 E61 · ~01:55:08–01:57:01 · Listen (audio)

“…most of the development on a live testnet was done on Litecoin. So a lot of the wallets, like Pnex and I think also Jack Mallor’s wallet was tested on Litecoin. … it’s a shame that Litecoin did not maintain their lightning network implementation. And as far as I know, the only altcoin out there that is actively maintaining lightning network is decred.”

Val Venis · S16 E46 · ~02:23:06–02:23:57 · Listen (audio)

“sometimes you’re at some sort of event and someone wants to send you, let’s say dash. … I don’t think dash is in cake wallet as of yet. … They have decred. I sort of confused them.”

Zcash

Zcash is a Bitcoin codebase fork that shipped the Zerocash privacy paper as its own chain (Sprout, Sapling, Orchard). The archive keeps asking whether it was a failed Bitcoin soft fork or a successful laboratory. Related: Bitcoin Privacy Limitations.

Paul Sztorc · S16 E52 · ~01:17:00–01:17:07 · Listen (audio)

“Zerocash. That’s where it started 2014. It’s supposed to be a soft fork on Bitcoin to improve the privacy never happened. Bitcoiners forgot about it.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E8 · ~01:55:26–01:55:57 · Watch on YouTube

“Zcash is basically the Zerocash paper for Bitcoin on a Bitcoin fork. So if anything, these guys hoped that Bitcoin was going to adopt the technology, which is why they kept it optin so that they could prove that there’s no inflation bug… So the the way that I interpret this is that Zcash has been since the beginning a Bitcoin experiment with the hope that this is going to improve Bitcoin.”

Riccardo Spagni · S17 E8 · ~01:56:46–01:57:48 · Watch on YouTube

"…if it was just researchers creating a thing that they hoped would become a um a a model for Bitcoin to follow, why did they raise money? … that’s at odds with the claim that um Zcash was meant to be some model for Bitcoin to look at and go, "Okay, cool. We can now implement Zerocash."

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:34:31–00:35:17 · Listen (audio)

“If like Bitcoin would allow an OP_STARK or stark verification … you would have, again, a thousand fold increase immediately in the TPS without any change to the block size.”

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:16:20–00:16:30 · Listen (audio)

“most of the proof systems use the for privacy purposes with very short proofs, for instance, on Zcash are snarks that are not starks because they have a trusted setup aspect to them.”

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:21:45–00:22:20 · Listen (audio)

“the first was the Zcash we wrote in academic paper, the Zerocash paper about it’s title Zerocash, something like adding privacy over Bitcoin or privacy over Bitcoin. And what happened was that sadly, we realized that getting this on Bitcoin would involve a lot of politics and social consensus and you know, it wasn’t possible back then and 11 years out, it still is not possible to do a Zcash transaction on Bitcoin.”

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:22:29–00:22:48 · Listen (audio)

“there’s also the aspect of using one of those toxic waste based snorx that is very much not in line with what Bitcoin is about. So I co-founded a company Zcash to create the Zcash cryptocurrency.”

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:25:16–00:25:28 · Listen (audio)

“This is exactly … the ceremony that generates the proving and verification keys for Zcash, which is exactly the kind of stuff that you don’t need anymore with protocols that are transparent with things like starts and also like Halo and Halo 2.”

Eli Ben-Sasson · S15 E36 · ~00:25:59–00:26:13 · Listen (audio)

“for them to do a shielded transaction today on Zcash is still something that is even much harder in terms of UX and UI than it is to use whatever a ledger or a treasure … on Bitcoin.”

Kris · S15 E62 · ~01:01:07–01:01:17 · Listen (audio)

“… the electric coin company, which has been responsible for all of these innovations in zero knowledge proving and maintaining the Zcash-D node implementation that was derived from Bitcoin.”

Kris · S15 E62 · ~00:33:20–00:33:39 · Listen (audio)

“That’s how we went from sprout, which required minutes on the high end machines to do proofs to sapling, which requires seconds on mobile phones. And that’s how we went from … sapling, which still required a trusted setup for ZK Snarts to … Shambos … revelations about how to get rid of the trusted setup and create Halo 2.”

Josh · S15 E62 · ~00:54:16–00:54:35 · Listen (audio)

“… we’ve got Zcash shielded assets that are … at this point almost fully developed for release in network upgrade seven, which is going to be our next network … upgrade next year. Sean Bo is now working on Zcash scalability. And … this is the fellow who came up with … Halo 2.”

Janusz · S17 E46 · ~01:09:31–01:10:05 · Watch on YouTube

“The soft fork was coordinated to pause the Orchard transactions in the Orchard pool and… there were a lot of major wallet providers that weren't aware that that was being done… if you can all coordinate and do things very quickly like that, what's to say that coordinating… to just shut off a pool for whatever reason.”

Ekrem Bal · S17 E47 · ~00:37:01–00:37:15 · Watch on YouTube

“I wish some of that energy with all the developers creating cool stuff was still on Bitcoin.”

Other

Sidechains, merge-mined systems, BitVM bridges, minority-fork lessons from Ethereum Classic, privacy coins in Bitcoin debates, client lineages, and ossification culture. These are fork-adjacent: they change how people exit, experiment, or refuse to change L1.

Liquid / Elements federation sidechain

Liquid / Elements is a federated Bitcoin sidechain (not a UTXO split): peg-in BTC, confidential transactions, issued assets, federation security tradeoffs.

Soft Simon · S11 E1 · ~00:48:21–00:48:55 · Watch on YouTube

“We’re also expanding into the liquid sidechains. So we have a separate website called liquid.network. So if you don’t like liquid, you can just stay on mempool.space. So it’s a separate website where we are supporting upcoming assets like the El Salvador volcano bond asset, for example, which is going to be soon on Liquid. And yeah, there’s a lot of Bitcoin DeFi stuff being built on top of a liquid right now that we are trying to, we are working with these guys trying to help them with the integration there.”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E10 · ~00:56:26–01:00:37 · Listen (audio)

“Liquid … Liquid in our care and RSK both federated. Liquid was not even open source until recently … Anyone from Blockstream could just withdraw all the money … on liquid all the transaction fees go to a wallet controlled by Blockstream … unknown people … can rug the system … whereas with b300 BIP300 … the miners drop add the side chains. The miners do the withdrawals the miners collect the transaction fees … Rsk is their own version of ethereum that is not exactly the same as … the b300 side chain. We have a zact exact copy of the latest ethereum full node … those people won’t switch to rsk ever … BIP300 is like … an ATM but it’s also like a kind of Xerox machine.”

Paul Sztorc · S14 E13 · ~00:52:53–00:56:03 · Listen (audio)

“the federated model is the whole difference between Bitcoin and its failed predecessors. … Liberty Reserve … fixed number of people that you could take down … that is the difference between liquid and Bitcoin … the federated model is terrible. … liquid are like two handwritten books and V300 BIP300 is kind of like the printing press. … there’s no like EVM liquid. … How can I use liquid to make Zcash side chain tomorrow? … I just want to … copy and paste Zcash … open source software and create the Zcash side chain. … What’s the technique for using liquid if I want like a Monero ring signature side chain?”

Andrew Poelstra · S15 E17 · ~00:45:18–00:45:46 · Listen (audio)

“in liquid, when we started writing real covenants using that technique, we quickly realized in conjunction with the 201 offcode limit that existed prior to Taproot … we were using almost our whole offcode budget just on this offcat machinery. And in the end, when we upgraded liquid to use Taproot, we introduced a whole pile of new offcodes that it was just directly introspective transaction.”

Matthew Haywood · S5 E9 · ~00:12:10–00:13:15 · Listen to episode

"Okay. So yeah, liquid side chain to Bitcoin, it’s, I guess, why does it need it? It takes transactions off chain. So in my eyes, anything like name LN? or liquid that can take transactions that don’t really need to be stored in eternity on people’s nodes all around the world, anything’s good. So liquid is primarily targeted, large traders or exchange users to rapidly move Bitcoin that’s been pegged into the liquid network between exchanges. And it does that by, well, all these sort of scaling solutions will do that by making some trade offs. So liquid makes a trade off with its security model compared to Bitcoin. So if you want to take a bit "

Matthew Haywood · S5 E9 · ~00:13:25–00:14:09 · Listen to episode

“…when there was like 15 members of the federation, I say 15 exchanges or financial institutions. It would take two thirds of those to be compromised, or two thirds plus one, so to take an 11 to be compromised or to act maliciously in coordination in order to sort of steal funds. … when you compare it to the model that, you know, traders … normally, which is leaving funds on an exchange … funds are in the hands of just one exchange, which is surely a far greater risk…”

Matthew Haywood · S5 E9 · ~00:14:30–00:14:47 · Listen to episode

“…there’s also things like issued assets confidential transactions, so you get confidential transfers in liquid.”

Rootstock (RSK) merge-mined

Rootstock (RSK) is a merge-mined Bitcoin sidechain aiming at EVM-style contracts. Often compared unfavorably to BIP300 by Drivechain advocates, and treated as under-adopted by others.

Paul Sztorc · S14 E10 · ~00:56:26–01:00:37 · Listen (audio)

“Liquid … Liquid in our care and RSK both federated. Liquid was not even open source until recently … Anyone from Blockstream could just withdraw all the money … on liquid all the transaction fees go to a wallet controlled by Blockstream … unknown people … can rug the system … whereas with b300 BIP300 … the miners drop add the side chains. The miners do the withdrawals the miners collect the transaction fees … Rsk is their own version of ethereum that is not exactly the same as … the b300 side chain. We have a zact exact copy of the latest ethereum full node … those people won’t switch to rsk ever … BIP300 is like … an ATM but it’s also like a kind of Xerox machine.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S12 E2 · ~00:18:51–00:19:05 · Listen to episode

“… the scripting language as well. At some point, there was a bug found in one of the opcodes, not a big deal. … But the immediate reaction by the developers was like, okay, let’s comment out the scripting language. What they did is … they just kind of disabled it using this templating system, the Gavin Andresen put in, which restricted Bitcoin contracts to a specific type of predefined contracts.” Host: “But is it also Ethereum stuff with Counterpartyy? … There’s also Lightning Network. There’s also RSK, which imports smart contracts from Ethereum on the merge-mined side chain.”

Amir Taaki · S12 E2 · ~00:21:08–00:22:21 · Listen to episode

“… other projects. I think Rootstock tried to build on top of the Bitcoin blockchain using OP_RETURN, and developers reacted aggressively … And then also … people like Vitalik, for example, came to the Bitcoin developers. And he was like, oh, … can we remove some of these restrictions so that we can … create … more interesting applications on … Bitcoin. And then everybody was like, no, Bitcoin is … money. … we can’t … allow new things to happen. It will break it, etc. So there wasn’t any space that was opened up for experimentation. And that ended up with a significant community of stakeholders in early Bitcoin community leaving for Ethereum…”

Amir Taaki · S12 E2 · ~00:22:30–00:22:44 · Listen to episode

“… there was this other project before I think Rootstock, which built smart contract functionality on top of Bitcoin, the difference with Ethereum was that they issued their own token. So by issuing their own token, they were able to capitalize the project to fund development.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S13 E2 · ~01:10:50–01:11:36 · Watch on YouTube

“pretty much every altcoin … is basically the Bitcoin experimentation layer … the best of use cases … are going to be added into Bitcoin layers … even rootstock rsk which is a side chain those are not successful yet”

BitVM / ZK rollups / Citrea

BitVM, Citrea, and ZK rollup talk sit next to forks: they try to get Drivechain-like bridges and contracts without a consensus change, then optionally ask for soft forks later.

Robin Linus · S15 E13 · ~00:15:10–00:15:27 · Listen (audio)

“It’s totally like Drivechains. Like I like Drivechains. In general, I’m very interested in this idea of two way packs. And the most mature proposal for two way pack on Bitcoin is Drivechains. And I totally supported like Paul’s work.”

Orkun Kilic · S15 E57 · ~00:20:49–00:21:17 · Listen (audio)

“we don’t depend on any soft fork, which is good to like first bring the use case to Bitcoin and tell everyone … you can borrow Bitcoin without losing your custody. And now if people think that’s a good idea … they can approve a soft fork to make it more trustless like OP_CAT or some other soft fork. But I think first getting live and showing the use case to Bitcoin is important for social consensus.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E5 · ~02:39:22–02:40:01 · Watch on YouTube

“…Robin Lus has said multiple times that … BIP300 is preferable to BitVM, but that you BIP300 doesn’t exist. So, you we have to work with what we have… he has said like that bitm is a very bizarre hack and it involves all these extra steps and is convoluted and it also requires covenants…”

Orkun Kilic · S15 E18 · ~00:10:41–00:11:00 · Listen to episode

“So we started building the roll up, we are expected to roll up in the first place as a summer roll up, which only use Bitcoin for that day to be able to see about settlement and verification papers of chain … Until BitVM. And what’s been discovered, BitVM and potential of it, we started building a ZK proof there fire on the BitVM.”

Filip Baturan · S16 E21 · ~00:02:45–00:03:07 · Listen (audio)

“…I was … working at some other projects, kind of on the ZK rollup space and Ethereum. But then I saw Citrea … came out to the stealth last year. And I was like, okay, this is the solution that we need because all this technology that we were building so far can be applied to Bitcoin as well…”

Alexei Zamyatin · S15 E19 · ~00:10:00–00:10:15 · Listen to episode

“if it were a full ZK roll up, you would not need BitVM. You would basically have a program on Bitcoin in script that would allow spending bitcoins only and only if they actually were unlocked on the roll up.”

David Seroy · S16 E27 · ~00:07:04–00:07:34 · Listen (audio)

“…the Ethereum ecosystem, they exploit these concepts of ZK rollups, which is very, very similar to the idea of side chains, except you don’t have that trusted intermediary … now we can kind of reignite that idea originally spurred by side chains … without a centralized intermediary in between.”

Robin Linus · S15 E13 · ~00:11:18–00:11:29 · Listen (audio)

“Bitvm the main purpose of Bitvm is to have some kind of Trustless or trust minimised bridge into into other systems especially site chains”

Ethereum Classic as minority-fork lesson

Ethereum Classic is the minority chain that refused the DAO bailout. Bitcoin guests use it as a lesson about immutability branding, donation culture, and what a contested hard fork looks like from the losing side.

Giacomo Zucco · S2 E8 · ~00:27:59–00:28:58 · Listen to episode

“Yeah. We also had a very clear example in Ethereum with Parity and Geth diverging … And … in Bitcoin, when there was LevelDB versus Berkeley DB mess we had developers speaking with miners, asking them to let the invalid chain go in order to remain on the same chain.”

Anthony Lusardi · S1 E8 · ~20:48–21:35 · Listen to episode

“it is taking way too long though. I would say to sync the Ethereum base chains. And a lot of that has to do with how high gas usage has been made. And that’s definitely an issue for any Ethereum base chain, including etc. That we need to really think about in the future.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S2 E3 · ~00:01:10–00:01:45 · Listen (audio)

“…an altcoin like Ethereum Classic ended up getting or learning as many lessons from Bitcoin as it was possible. And as you can see today, ETC ended up having the fixed supply just like Bitcoin. … And to some extent, it’s interesting to see how a project which started as something else ended up getting as close as possible as respecting the ideas of immutability and decentralization.”

Igor Artamonov · S2 E3 · ~00:03:10–00:04:04 · Listen (audio)

“…from technology perspective, speaking about blockchain itself… They have a lot of similarities on this level. So more close to Bitcoin vision about usability, decentralization, and so on, rather than the ETH Foundation… And that’s how initial community of ETC was formed. So basically we disagreed with a Foundation decision on bailout… And community just forked / forwarded the original chain at that moment…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S2 E3 · ~00:02:10–00:02:33 · Listen (audio)

“So usually when I speak to ETC people, they say that they are also Bitcoiners. And they like the values of Bitcoin, but ETC is more of an extension, which allows for smart contracts…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S2 E3 · ~00:34:47–00:35:43 · Listen (audio)

“In the case of Bitcoin and maybe in the case of Ethereum Classic, you have this mindset that you have to basically resort to donations. … And we have the precedent of SegWit2x… New York agreement.”

Igor Artamonov · S2 E3 · ~00:37:30–00:38:29 · Listen (audio)

“…about SegWit2x… I know it’s… a political topic. And I’m not really familiar with this… I was… busy with Ethereum Classic… So I look on the side, what’s going to happen with SegWit2x and I didn’t have an opinion. But for me, it shows actually… how community is important in Bitcoin. So community basically decided. So it was kind of, it wasn’t about increasing block size. I think it was about taking control of it with some corporates… or communities to control. So community won…”

Vlad Costea (host) · S2 E3 · ~00:51:56–00:53:23 · Listen (audio)

“…even in the case of Bitcoin, it was the same with Mike Hearn and Jeff Garzik and maybe even Gavin Andresen. … I remember BIP101 issued by Gavin Andresen, which proposed to increase the block size according to Moore’s law and basically double the block size… It took more than two years to adopt SegWit. So they realized… that hard-forks are difficult and ethereum… has learned a few hard lessons about hard-forking too often… the last time ETH had a hard-fork… Constantinople.”

Monero / CryptoNote (when tied to Bitcoin fork narratives)

Monero is CryptoNote lineage (Bytecoin community fork), not a Bitcoin UTXO split. It enters this archive when privacy soft-fork dreams, merge mining, or “just use Monero” answers appear.

Riccardo Spagni · S17 E8 · ~00:38:48–00:40:06 · Watch on YouTube

“…a great example of this is like mint which is a Linux distribution. … So they forked Auntu um and they made that and it’s awesome. … And so if there was like and a great example of this is um in Monero. So in Monero there’s a um reimplementation of Monero and Rust called cup rates. … The cup rate contributors aren’t unified in hatred of Monero’s core C++ implementation.”

Riccardo Spagni · S17 E8 · ~00:50:01–00:50:56 · Watch on YouTube

“if I had a magic wand, I think that the probably three-fold privacy. So something like stealth addresses … something like confidential transactions … and something like um FCMP on Monero or Zcash um ZTC transactions where you don’t know the transaction graph. If if you can do all three of those and combine that with um quantum resistant cryptography, that would make Bitcoin a very real contender for a strong money.”

Andrey Sabelnikov · S17 E3 · ~00:02:34–00:02:44 · Watch on YouTube

“…the way in which I described it in my conversation with Tyler Spalding was that it’s a fork of Monero and you guys got angry at me and you wanted to get the record straight.”

Andrey Sabelnikov · S17 E3 · ~00:03:30–00:03:53 · Watch on YouTube

“…I prefer to call it cryptonote because bitecoin associated with the project which have a very negative association… I’m the one who was in charge of technology so I prefer to call it cryptonote”

Andrey Sabelnikov · S17 E3 · ~00:04:38–00:04:54 · Watch on YouTube

“…Monero is basically a fork of Bitecoin. It’s a community fork of something that had like a 80% premine and people were not happy about it. So, they launched Monero, which doesn’t have a premine, but it has like a turbo mine.”

Vik Sharma · S17 E6 · ~00:58:29–00:59:56 · Watch on YouTube

“…when they were launching Zcash as an altcoin because initially it was the Zerocash software core bitcoin they looked into ways to activate this on the main chain. They did not get along with the core developers. Then they looked into adding this as a side chain and blockstream’s research was not complete in terms of creating side chains for bitcoin.

So at one point they said okay let’s launch this as an altcoin. But then someone from their team pointed out to the fact that Monero already existed and they said why don’t we build this on Monero. … at the time Monero was not as complex as it is today. It was just basically a rewritten version o”

Vik Sharma · S17 E6 · ~01:02:40–01:03:37 · Watch on YouTube

“But why can’t it just be money? Why can’t it just be money and value? Bitcoin. … Let it just be as store of value and a medium of exchange. … if you want to do DeFi … go to Ethereum, go to EVM chains. … if you want privacy, I I mean, I I would think Bitcoin, that’s the only thing I would be in favor of adding to Bitcoin would be would be privacy. like uh option. I know people don’t like Monero guys don’t like option but fine you don’t like option use Monero.”

Vik Sharma · S17 E6 · ~01:04:37–01:04:56 · Watch on YouTube

“…you can either have more transactions. … Or you can have incentivize the miners… Or you can have merged mining with other networks like Bitcoin can secure other networks too if they want. Monero can become like a merged mind coin for Bitcoin.”

Client forks that became chain splits (XT → Classic → Unlimited → BCH)

Bitcoin XT, Classic, and Unlimited were competing clients before BCH. Client forks are not automatically chain splits; they become splits when incompatible consensus rules activate. See BIP101.

Vlad Costea (host) · S16 E30 · ~01:14:34–01:14:51 · Listen (audio)

“…We have had Bitcoin, according to BIP101, I think the first one was XT and then classic and then unlimited. And then all of them sort of converged into Bitcoin cash.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:15:17–01:15:41 · Listen (audio)

“Then we started hitting that one megabyte block size limit, and now this is a consensus change. … the most credible initial solution is given an analysis idea of depth one or one. … He wanted to basically jump to eight megabytes right away, and then I think it was every two years, the block size limit would double. So eight to 16 to 32 to 64…”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:16:30–01:17:00 · Listen (audio)

“So he couldn’t get that into core, they tried to do that with XT, like creating a computing client. The censorship was crazy … on Reddit Bitcoin. So talk to XT was not allowed, people were getting banned. … and the actual was classic, right? And classic … it did increase the block size just to make a bite through something.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:18:28–01:18:45 · Listen (audio)

“I think the hatred came for the activation method. And some core developers were not happy with the idea of a hard fork because they were afraid that some users will not migrate to the new network. And they will just support the old one.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~01:19:19–01:20:12 · Listen (audio)

“No, it was not broken at all. So the thing is, XT and Classic were both attempts to re-consensus so we could all move forward together and guarantee there would be no fork. Like if everyone comes aboard, there would be no fork. … Bitcoin unlimited plan was to create a mechanism that would allow people to start running Bitcoin unlimited and allow larger block, starting to send large blocks today if they come in, but we’ll still fork back to the one megabyte block size Bitcoin, if that chain doesn’t become dominant. So yeah, there was some fork risk, but that was intentional. … there’s always gonna be some fork risk if you don’t have consensus.”

Amaury Séchet · S15 E28 · ~00:10:04–00:10:47 · Listen (audio)

“Bitcoin ABC has been created for that purpose. … Like the original proposed was to implement the extension block. But then, you know, when it didn’t work … started implementing the BCH fork. And this is what, you know, this is a Bitcoin ABC happened.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E5 · ~00:14:40–00:15:08 · Watch on YouTube

“…he did not allow any conversation to happen on our Bitcoin about Bitcoin XT which was supposed to be hard fork because he considered that Bitcoin XT is an altcoin. … they took the same criteria which were being used for hard forks and they applied them for soft forks which are optional…”

Ossification / anti-fork culture / right to fork

Ossification is the political claim that Bitcoin L1 should stop changing. Drivechain advocates say sidechains make that safe. Soft-fork skeptics say the cadence already collapsed. Fork maximalists say exit is the only real voice. Related: On Bitcoin Maximalism….

Paul Sztorc · S9 E4 · ~02:07:51–02:08:03 · Listen to episode

“…sidechains are pro ossification because you freeze layer one and you don’t need to change it anymore. All the change happens on layer two … which I always thought was the entire point.”

Vlad Costea (host) · S17 E21 · ~01:05:33–01:05:53 · Watch on YouTube

“…after BIP300, Bitcoin can ossify safely. … the altcoin to end all altcoins.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~01:52:16–01:52:56 · Watch on YouTube

“…what the Drivechain idea does that no that no one else has done before, it it actually does decentralized development. … if you dissent… you kind of have to hard fork… start an altcoin… this is the first project to decentralize development…”

John Carvalho · S17 E11 · ~01:54:10–01:54:43 · Watch on YouTube

“…you’re only ever going to be able to like express yourself by disagreeing… either by selling your Bitcoin or running different rules than the Bitcoin that you disagree with. And so, you ultimately would have to express your disagreement as a fork as well. … the reason that I think that you see soft forks being treated not that much differently than you might treat a hard fork is a passive acknowledgement of this power.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E5 · ~01:07:25–01:08:57 · Watch on YouTube

“All the soft fork talk has been bike shedding. … all of the OP_NOP OP_SUCCESS OP_TRUE all of these style of soft fork carry absolutely no risk whatsoever and they are ignorable optin and easily reversible. … That was not a hard fork. That was not a soft fork. That was not a proposal. That was not a BIP, but it accidentally had an inflation bug and it would have hardforked unexpectedly.” (Matt Corallo refactor / inflation-bug aside as baseline risk vs OP_SUCCESS soft forks.)"

Paul Sztorc · S15 E68 · ~00:48:15–00:48:46 · Listen (audio)

“… we used to do a soft fork every six months, we used to do two a year. Then … in the first like seven to eight year period, we did 16 in the second seven to eight year period, we did two. And one was SegWit to 26 months … and then happened to 40 months. So it’s just been getting slower and slower.”

Kevin Loaec · S17 E47 · ~02:13:47–02:14:10 · Watch on YouTube

“Bitcoin as a system is alive, right? Bitcoin has to follow what the crowd wants. But the crowd is not a democracy… It's a thing that moves very slowly and adapts.”

Kevin Loaec · S17 E47 · ~02:14:43–02:14:52 · Watch on YouTube

“Forks are not new. It's just that right now it's the trend again to fork Bitcoin instead of doing a [shitcoin]." Vlad: "Every decade…”

Documentary gold (misc.)

Leftover lines that do not fit a single subsection cleanly but still teach fork history: early block size foresight, Craig Wright checksums, merge-fork curiosities, maximalist sidechain claims.

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~00:03:29–00:03:41 · Listen (audio)

“…I think we’re very early in 2010 to the 11 people could see that this block size limit hard-coded in Bitcoin, what is now known as Bitcoin core, would become a problem in the future and would be hard to remove once we hit it.”

Peter Rizun · S16 E30 · ~00:08:33–00:08:55 · Listen (audio)

“…we’re going to do SegWit, we’re going to do second layers, we’re going to always go to crazy, things that was never part of the original design of Bitcoin. … We were succeeding. We were showing how as demand grows, we could increase the block size up up. And then we just stopped doing that for some reason.”

Roger Ver · S15 E26 · ~00:47:07–00:48:13 · Listen (audio)

“At one point, Craig Wright had convinced me that he was Satoshi … maybe 2016 or something like that. … Craig Wright right there in front of my own eyes did not know that Bitcoin addresses have a checksum. … there was zero doubt in my mind at that point that he could be Satoshi because Satoshi absolutely would have known that Bitcoin addresses have a checksum.”

Wassim Alsindi · S2 E1 · ~00:39:03–00:39:28 · Listen (audio)

“… the original creator of Zclassic came back and said, hey, we’re going to do this thing where we combine Zclassic and Bitcoin, the UTXO sets of both ledgers. And we’re going to call it Bitcoin private. So this is the first time to my knowledge that this operation, which you could call a merge fork, fork merge or whatever you want to call it. This kind of synthesis of these UTXO sets was conducted.”

Paul Sztorc · S17 E21 · ~01:52:16–01:52:56 · Watch on YouTube

“…what the Drivechain idea does that no that no one else has done before, it it actually does decentralized development. … if you dissent… you kind of have to hard fork… start an altcoin… this is the first project to decentralize development…”

Paul Sztorc · S12 E10 · ~00:34:24–00:35:14 · Listen to episode

“… the side chain idea was originally a maximalist idea that just said, hey, whatever anyone comes up with that’s good, we’ll just take because it’s open. … anyone who’s not a side chainer is … really not a Bitcoin maximalist.”

Knut Svanholm · S9 E7 · ~00:05:55–00:06:25 · Listen to episode

“But I wasn’t fully convinced until the after the Bitcoin cash hard fork in 2017. And SegWit2x failed so spectacularly. I realized that the users really were in control and that none, no entity could do anything about Bitcoin beyond that point. And I found that really fascinating. So that was certainly a point that kept me in the space.”

How to cite / methodology

Cite a quote as: Guest, Bitcoin Takeover, Season Episode, approximate timestamp, with the Listen URL. Example: Peter Todd, Bitcoin Takeover S11 E11 (~00:08:48–00:09:12).

Source of truth for this anthology: curated quotes from the Bitcoin Takeover archive (Whisper / caption transcripts, lightly corrected against the findings vault). Timestamps are approximate. ASR can still leave residue; the audio is canonical.

Taxonomy used here: soft forks (rule-tightening upgrades), hard forks (rule-loosening or incompatible upgrades, including accidents), UTXO chain splits (shared ancestry coins on divergent networks), codebase forks (software lineage without claiming BTC balances), and other fork-adjacent systems (sidechains, bridges, culture).

Credit: Bitcoin Takeover podcast / Vlad Costea.

Last updated November 2026, through S17 E48 (Robin Linus).

Quotes are the raw material. For the long-form story of each fork, read the essays from BTCTKVR: Forks!: What the Fork?!, All the Hard Forks and Soft Forks, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, eCash (XEC), Bitcoin BLAKE2b, eCash (ECX) and Zcash.

Find a fork

Table of contents

Soft forks

SegWit

Taproot / Schnorr / MAST

BIP16 P2SH / CLTV / CSV / older soft forks

CTV / BIP119 / covenants / LNHANCE

OP_CAT / Great Script Restoration / CSFS / APO

BIP360 / quantum soft-fork proposals

BIP110 / BIP444 (soft-fork design)

Drivechains BIP300 / BIP301 (soft-fork path)

Zerocoin / Zerocash as proposed Bitcoin soft forks

Other soft-fork proposals (OP_STARK, GSR, etc.)

Hard forks

Accidental / emergency hard forks (2010 overflow, 2013 BDB)

Soft-vs-hard fork theory and activation (UASF BIP148, Speedy Trial)

SegWit2x / New York Agreement

Quantum hard-fork / freeze-Satoshi / BIP361 debates

Other hard-fork upgrade talk (blocksize, NIPoPoW, etc.)

UTXO chain splits

Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin SV (BSV)

eCash XEC (Amaury Séchet / Deadalnix)

Ecash ECX (Paul Sztorc)

BIP110 / Blake2b Luke coin (Knots camp)

Other UTXO / chain splits (Bitcoin Gold, Private, etc.)

Codebase forks

Litecoin (incl. MWEB)

Namecoin (incl. Satoshi merge-mining)

Dogecoin

Dash

Decred

Zcash

Other

Liquid / Elements federation sidechain

Rootstock (RSK) merge-mined

BitVM / ZK rollups / Citrea

Ethereum Classic as minority-fork lesson

Monero / CryptoNote (when tied to Bitcoin fork narratives)

Client forks that became chain splits (XT → Classic → Unlimited → BCH)

Ossification / anti-fork culture / right to fork

Documentary gold (misc.)

How to cite / methodology

Related

What the Fork?!

S17 E38: Keagan McClelland on Lightning Metrics, Covenants, Consensus Politics & Verifying Bitcoin

S17 E22: Jeremy Rubin on CTV, Char & Relentless Building in an Adversarial Environment

Comments