S15 E33: David Bailey on Bitcoin Maximalism & Ordinals

David Bailey used to be my boss. For a while, I also used to hate him. So it felt only fair that the first thing we did in Season 15 Episode 33 was dig up the old beef, and the second thing we did was inscribe a JPEG of his face onto the Bitcoin blockchain, live, while he begged me to stop. "Vlad, what are you doing? Are you committing a moral sin right now?" he asked. Yes, David. Yes, I was.

David is the CEO of BTC Inc, the company behind Bitcoin Magazine and The Bitcoin Conference, and he also runs a Bitcoin venture arm, UTXO Management. In April 2024, a few days after the fourth halving, he was one of the most cancelled men on Bitcoin Twitter. Bitcoin Magazine had leaned into Ordinals and Runes, some well known speakers had announced they would never set foot at his events again, and the word "maximalist" was being tugged in two very different directions.

That made him the perfect guest for an episode about what Bitcoin maximalism actually means. We covered the two flavors of maxi, rare sats and consenting adults, OP_CAT versus CTV, why fees are supposed to be high, BitVM, Tether, Liquid, the cult of Satoshi, how a conference grows from 2,000 to 26,000 people, and whether bitcoiners are still libertarians. Grab a coffee. Maybe two.

Hated Him Before It Was Cool

David took my old grudge with more grace than I expected. "Like always, you're just ahead of the trend," he said. "You hated me before it was cool." He vaguely remembered that it had something to do with hardware wallet content, but he did not know the origin story, so I gave it to him straight.

"I felt misused and underpaid and overworked," I told him. I was a freelancer working full time, picking up the articles nobody else wanted to write. Eventually I forked off and built my own thing, and that taught me two lessons: I had developed my own opinions about what Bitcoin is, and people cared about my work even when it did not carry the logo of the largest publication in the space.

David's answer was half apology, half company slogan. "Overworked and underpaid is probably like the theme of our company across the board," he admitted, adding that they are "probably more overworked and more underpaid than ever before." He also complimented the work I did after leaving and joked that I had misunderstood my own show's name ("we talk about taking over Bitcoin on podcast, right?"). For the record, it is about Bitcoin taking over. Full circle, as he put it.

Two Kinds of Maximalism

I asked David to define Bitcoin maximalism, and he split it in two. The old school version, which he still subscribes to, holds that "anything that's done in crypto that's valuable will get rebuilt on top of Bitcoin," and that Bitcoin "will consume all value in the world." The new school version, which he dates to the years after The Bitcoin Standard, says Bitcoin is digital gold, will only ever be digital gold, and nothing else built on blockchains matters.

I pushed further. To me, only the first one deserves the name. The second is just conservatism, a way to preserve what you already have while treating Bitcoin like a chemical element instead of software that competes. David was surprised anyone took that framing literally.

He always assumed it was a story bitcoiners told politicians and regulators "to kind of get them off our back and not worry about Bitcoin," and admitted, "I didn't know that people actually believed that literally." He had watched Ethereum and other layer ones grow from zero users to tens of millions while being told every year they would go to zero, and his conclusion is that Bitcoin should cannibalize whatever got real traction out there.

I reminded him that when Vitalik Buterin popularized the term, it was in response to a Reddit comment arguing that an improved Counterparty would make Ethereum and every other altcoin pointless. David traced how the community got peeled off along the way: some solid bitcoiners left to build permissionless apps on Ethereum, and the Austrian free market crowd left for Bitcoin Cash during the fork wars. He called himself a small blocker during the Blocksize Wars, and the lesson he took from it was simple: you cannot hard fork Bitcoin. Somewhere along the line, "how do we build these things without hard forking" turned into "we're never going to build these things," and his verdict was blunt: "I never signed on to that train."

His thesis rests on the network effect of money. "All economic activity at the end of the day is going to want to use the best money, and Bitcoin is the best money," he said. Maybe other chains become layer twos once trustless bridging exists, maybe they get rearchitected, but as long as Bitcoin does not hand popular use cases to competitors, "we will eventually eat them."

Committing a Moral Sin, Live on Air

Then I did the thing that got me cancelled once again. With a simple web app built by a friend, I picked a 33 kilobyte JPEG, refused to compress it, fetched a Taproot address straight from my Bitcoin Core full node, and paid for the inscription over Lightning with Phoenix wallet. The fee was around $500. I dedicated the payment to my friend Giacomo Zucco, who would certainly not approve. "Scandalous. Permissionless money. You love to see it," David narrated.

The image, revealed later in the stream, was a picture of David himself with his name on top. It landed in block 840,697 as inscription 70326676, and I put it up for sale at 2 BTC during the live stream or 3.125 BTC afterward, which is exactly one post-halving block reward. When the chat asked why it was "only" 3.125, I pointed out that a week earlier it would have been 6.25. What a discount.

There was a point under the trolling. Non-monetary data has been on Bitcoin since Satoshi wrote "Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks" into the Genesis block, and WikiLeaks files were embedded back when the price was low. Hal Finney once mused about cypherpunk trading cards, which is more or less what Casey Rodarmor's Ordinals ended up delivering (the docs are here if you want the mechanics).

I also brought up Justin Wales' argument that using Bitcoin for political speech could pull it under the First Amendment. And if you try to filter inscriptions, people simply switch to methods like fake multisig outputs that do even more damage to the UTXO set. It is a game of whack-a-mole where every mole comes back bigger, a point Lukas Hozda later explained in depth when he told me why mempool filters can't work.

David's answer was refreshingly humble. "No one really has any idea what they're talking about," he said, and "almost everyone, literally everyone that I can think of, has been wrong about Bitcoin in one form or another." He called a lot of current inscriptions "very very dumb," but noted that when someone buys one, "that is a monetary transaction." He even agreed that many tokens are unregistered securities and shrugged, because securities are useful: "If one day I can issue equity as a rune, that would be useful."

His other line was my favorite of the segment: "I think you can't really say you're punk rock unless you have some sort of group out there trying to actively cancel you."

Rare Sats, Casinos & Consenting Adults

What annoys David most about the critics is "the lack of autonomy they give to the buyers." He owns a variety of rare sats and has no illusions about them: "I get that they're a complete hallucination. I understand exactly how they work. Yet I'm still buying them." He told me Bitcoin Magazine and UTXO take heat for running an OTC desk where buyers and sellers trade low inscription number Ordinals, and those buyers are mostly Bitcoin OGs who understand perfectly well what they are getting.

His analogy was a Las Vegas casino. The anti-Ordinals crowd, he suggested, should go stand outside one with signs warning people they will lose money, "because I bet you every single person would still walk into the casino." I warned him that a casino metaphor might not be the luckiest choice for someone accused of running a shitcoin casino, and then I reminded everyone that we had colored coins, Counterparty, and the Omni Layer long before Ordinals. Omni gave the world USDT, which, the last time I tried to pay with Lightning in Argentina, was the only thing the merchant wanted (on Tron, please). David played along: "USDT has no value and no one will ever use it."

He got serious about the people leading the charge against him, Giacomo and Luke Dashjr among them. "I do respect them, I do respect things that they've done for Bitcoin," he said, "but I don't respect how they want to control how people can use Bitcoin." The part he finds most obnoxious about owning a media platform is that "everyone wants to control how you use that platform." I suggested it was his own fault for letting contributors believe they ran the magazine. "You're welcome, Luke," he replied, then claimed that without Bitcoin Magazine "there would be no Luke," before admitting, "I'm just trolling."

OP_CAT, CTV & the Politics of Soft Forks

David thinks the next soft fork fights might borrow the Ordinals playbook: create a meme coin or an inscription so people can rally behind an activation. "It's like issuing shares in an idea," he said, "except there's no dividends." He was surprised by how much traction OP_CAT (BIP 347) had gained so quickly.

I gave some background. Andrew Poelstra told me in S15 E17 that OP_CAT enables more use cases and that CTV is too limited, though Jeremy Rubin designed those limits on purpose so nobody could accuse him of breaking Bitcoin. Robin Linus likes OP_CAT too. And yet some plebs reject it because Udi Wertheimer likes it, which is the social filter system at work. David had been through the same thing: "the same reaction happened when I said I like CTV." He then joked that he had now become a hardcore ossification guy, "forever never change the code."

His actual position is more nuanced. He does not want to bless specific proposals because "there's so much technical nuance around each one." He is "a fan of BIP 119," finds OP_CAT interesting, and likes BIP 300 because drivechains would let people "put up or shut up" and tinker without fighting over the base layer. What he wants is a community that does not stagnate.

The more taboo question he raised was what Bitcoin culture looks like after a contested soft fork. If CTV activates, he argued, "Jeremy Rubin is like one of the most influential developers in Bitcoin," and whatever he works on next will get instant attention. I told him I had seen an ugly campaign against Jeremy and that, from where I sit, some of the strongest resistance seems to come from people around Blockstream.

David answered that he has "nothing but respect" for Adam Back, Andrew Poelstra, and others there, but that "character assassination is a tool to maintain control," and that it loses power the more people it targets. His phrase was perfect: "whack-a-mole of dissenters." And his challenge to the critics: "Y'all were wrong about Jeremy. Why haven't you reflected for a second that maybe you're wrong about the next thing?" (Jeremy later came on the show himself to talk about CTV and building in an adversarial environment.)

He also had a prank of his own. He had etched a rune at launch called "fix the filters" and wanted to airdrop it to the payout addresses of miners on Ocean, the pool most associated with inscription filtering, with a snapshot far enough in the future to give people time to join. "We got to unlock the power of irony," he said.

A High Fee System by Design

Behind the jokes, David's most serious point was about fees. People act as if the airdrop prank mocks those paying high fees, but "the person who's willing to pay the most in fees is going to have their transactions clear," and "the system is designed to be a high fee system." The real question, in his view, is how to make Bitcoin self-sovereign for people who cannot afford those fees, and "instead it's like, how do we shame people into not using Bitcoin for certain types of transactions." He suspects the conversation only moves forward when fees get so high that solving it becomes a necessity.

I asked whether degenerate stuff belongs on a chain with 15 second blocks instead. He defended permanence: "I don't know if anyone's going to remember this podcast in 500 years, but I do know that that ordinal will be around in 500 years." He would rather pay fees "to a hardworking miner somewhere in the world" than to "an Ethereum co-founder who is just an oligarch staking their ETH," and he wants to starve rival chains of fee income.

He also told me he enjoyed my interview with Roger Ver, because the Bitcoin Cash and BSV civil wars are over and those users should come home. "When you win a war, you have to let the people in the country that loses reassimilate into the society as a whole."

I went a step further and probably earned another cancellation. If Bitcoin does not scale in a way that lets anyone hold their own keys affordably, without custodians or ETFs, then the earlier you got in, the better your experience, and that starts to look like a pyramid. Maybe Bitcoin with 8 MB blocks would be just as decentralized, I said. David agreed: "I think you're probably right that Bitcoin with 8 megabyte blocks is just as decentralized." But he still thinks scaling on layer one is not viable, and that hard forks only make sense in "a true moment of urgent crisis, like encryption is broken."

What changed since the early days, he said, is that the ideological vision got watered down. "If 95% of the world can't afford to use Bitcoin because the fees are astronomical and they have to use some sort of custodial solution, then all the users of the system are not equal." If Bitcoin ends up "commoditized by Wall Street and sold in a wrapper" with individuals never going on chain, "we've kind of failed." His hope is that popular support for a soft fork pushing toward individual self-sovereignty would prove the community still holds those values.

Lightning Torches, BitVM & Forty Bets

On scaling proposals, David reminded me that Bitcoin 2019 was the first conference to integrate Lightning across the board, with tickets payable in bitcoin and arcade and pinball machines that accepted Lightning payments. We reminisced about the Lightning torch (I was still syncing my node when the first one ended, so I joined the second). "How sick was the Lightning torch," he said, noting that today someone would probably shame you for it.

The venture side has bet big: "We've invested a ton of money into Lightning companies, a ton, like more than honestly I'm comfortable with." He admitted that private conversations with key developers about the network's problems are "not entirely confidence inspiring," which is why he wants many Lightning competitors. "Development in Bitcoin needs to be as ruthless and as hardcore as mining is in Bitcoin," he said, calling mining the most ruthless open competitive industry on the planet.

I told him I consider BitVM, which Robin Linus explained on my show, the most interesting discovery in Bitcoin in years, and mentioned that Rootstock had just sent me a press release about BitVMX, built by Sergio Demian Lerner to make the RSK peg trust minimized. David's numbers backed up the hype: his fund made almost 40 venture investments in the past year, and "at least half of them are working on or experimenting with BitVM." He was amused that the monetary maximalists cheered BitVM ("hurrah BitVM") even though it opens Bitcoin to far more than financial transactions.

That developer migration is also how he got into Ordinals early. Pete Rizzo and Mark Goodwin at Bitcoin Magazine told him about them, and the number of OGs and crypto developers returning to Bitcoin was "a huge signal." Teams that were building on Cosmos or Ethereum came back to focus exclusively on Bitcoin, and he is bullish on that "even if the ideas themselves don't work out in their current form."

I then read a fake ad from Paul Sztorc, and David gave a shout out to Layer Two Labs, clarifying, before anyone asked, that he is not an investor. "Paul is one of the coolest people in Bitcoin," he said, someone who "has not forgotten the mission" and "refuses to stop." I praised Paul for trying to unite bitcoiners across tribes, as he does with drivechains, while suggesting he lean more on fantasy than politics, since SegWit and Taproot were marketed without spelling out everything they made possible. David agreed: when people complain nobody told them inscriptions would be possible after Taproot, "you weren't told a lot about Taproot."

Tether, Liquid & the Software Nobody Downloaded

I asked why one company seems to get a free pass while funding Ethereum layer twos and making Tron relevant. David separated Bitfinex from Tether. He was one of Bitfinex's earliest users and respects that, unlike exchanges that rug their users, Bitfinex "kind of always figured a way out of their problems," including the BFX debt token after its big hack, "another example of a token that actually worked."

Tether is another story. In his view it has become the backbone of "the crypto shitcoin complex," the top on-ramp to offshore margin trading, and "probably the most valuable shitcoin that exists," while its money shows up across core Bitcoin infrastructure and it remains strangely "immune to criticism." I asked whether we had just become Tether truthers and admitted there was no tinfoil hat within reach. We agreed on the observable part: they hold a mountain of US Treasuries and somehow survived every depeg scare that killed Terra and Binance USD.

Liquid got a warmer reception than I expected. "I'm pro Liquid," David said. Blockstream predicted a fee market and built a product for it, so "this product should be booming right now." Bitcoin Magazine's first NFT experiment was actually issued on Liquid. I countered that it has a big marketing budget, plenty of love in maxi circles, and empty blocks, and that even the institutions it courts prefer permissionless Ethereum. His explanation: "the core value proposition of being permissionless for most people is the ability to route around laws and regulations."

Then came his sharpest observation: "the Maxis often love software and solutions that they've never used." He proposed, half seriously, that we create a fake app with a Twitter account that posts maxi talking points, and predicted that within a year or two people would recommend it. I added that, after years in media, I can confirm people pretend to read articles they only skimmed, and that I see ZK rollups get undeserved hate simply for coming from Ethereum. David pointed out the irony that he had seen Giacomo call ZK rollups something like the Holy Grail.

Satoshi Was Just a Guy

The Satoshi emails released during the Craig Wright trial were a revelation for David. People revere Satoshi "as a time traveler or an alien," but the emails made it clear that "Satoshi was just a guy," apparently one person "making decisions in a practical fashion in order to get the system to work," which is why he thinks Satoshi might give ideas like ZK rollups a second look today.

I agreed. In his exchanges with Martti Malmi, Satoshi sounded insecure about pitching electronic cash to the P2P Foundation. The first client shipped with a half-built poker game and a peer-to-peer marketplace, and it took Silk Road for a real use case to emerge. David connected the dots: "I think it's a pretty hard case to make that meme coins on Bitcoin are more scandalous or more immoral than buying and selling drugs online with Bitcoin." Bitcoin, in his words, gets adopted by "the people that are most estranged from the system," for whatever they find useful, from escaping political terror to "making a funny meme coin and airdropping it to a bunch of miners."

From 2,000 to 26,000: Building the Biggest Stage

Why keep running conferences when you already had the biggest names and the biggest crowds? David took me back to the blog post BTC Inc wrote when it announced the first Bitcoin conference, titled "Make Bitcoin Fun Again." The idea was that everything people were excited about on other chains could be done on Bitcoin, and the event would be a platform for "the nerdiest, neatest, funniest ideas." In four years, he said, "we scaled that conference from 2,000 people to 26,000 people."

The next step was every major market: Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and more. He told me there had never been a Bitcoin-only conference of thousands of people in Asia. He confessed, "every time a conference happens I like lose at least a year of my life," and he took a swipe at competitors trying to build "the purest Bitcoin conference possible" by filtering out voices. His philosophy is the opposite: "bad ideas are also learning experiences." The company's mission, he said, is hyperbitcoinization, and they will keep going "until every single person on the planet has 100% of all their money on top of the Bitcoin value chain."

I noted that his events always carry a libertarian flavor, with Ross Ulbricht and Julian Assange in the spotlight, and asked how he would replace the high priests boycotting Nashville over Ordinals. He was calm about it. "We get boycotted every year," he said, and some 2,000 people apply to speak each year anyway. Despite groups harassing speakers and attendees, he said his refund data since 2019 shows a single refund request: "One. All the drama, all the hating, one ticket refund request." He insisted "there are no burned bridges with us" and said he hoped Giacomo "will one day reconsider his view and speak at the conference," even offering to let him give his Ordinals speech there.

Are We Still Libertarians?

My final big question was whether Bitcoin is still a libertarian movement or one recaptured by the state, trading self-custody for number go up. "We're still a libertarian organization," David said, adding that most of the bitcoin in the world is held by libertarians. "If we just wanted to create compliance technology, we didn't need to create Bitcoin to do that. It already existed." His sign-off on the topic: "Freedom Maxis for life."

We closed with the block size. I asked why we could not double it every halving, quoted John Carvalho's framing of the two extremes (giant blocks only Amazon can validate versus a node on a Raspberry Pi for a chain you cannot afford to use), and mentioned that Litecoin was experimenting with Mimblewimble extension blocks, a topic I dug into with Charlie Lee in S15 E34.

David admitted he knew nothing about Litecoin's approach, but called the idea that one megabyte is a sacred balance "an absurd position." Would anyone argue that cutting the block size by 90% makes Bitcoin ten times more secure? Bitcoin facilitating 20 million transactions a year instead of 200 million would be "very harmful," and the target "should evolve over time as technology evolves." His line in the sand: "where I draw the line personally is on hard forks."

A Shared Cancel Culture Experience

I told David he sounded far more reasonable in conversation than people assume from his tweets, and that I did not think anyone in these fights genuinely wants to destroy Bitcoin, not even the people filtering inscriptions. He agreed: "I have yet to meet someone that I thought, this person wants to see Bitcoin destroyed." He thanked me "for getting me cancelled" and said he was excited to have a commemorative ordinal "for this shared cancel experience."

We made one last pledge with the inscription money: if it sold for 3.125 BTC, one bitcoin would go to David, one to me (for matching Toyota Supras, naturally), and 1.125 to Ross Ulbricht's legal defense. I argued that even if you think Ross belongs in prison, a decade behind bars is far more than many people with much worse crimes have served. David said "there are a lot of people working behind the scenes" and that there was "a very good chance it happens in this next presidency." He was right: Ross walked free with a presidential pardon in January 2025, and the Free Ross campaign is still online.

David came back to the show twice after this, for S15 E63 on Bitcoin and Trump and later for S16 E63 on NAKAMOTO, BTC Media and the bull market. But this is the episode where my old boss and I got cancelled together, and the JPEG is still sitting on your node. You're welcome.

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Time stamps:

00:00:00 - Intro: David Bailey, Bitcoin Magazine & the old beef 00:04:03 - Bitcoin Maximalism 00:11:57 - Inscribing Ordinal 70326676 on Bitcoin 00:22:06 - Criticism and Autonomy in Transactions 00:25:42 - RGB Protocol and Colored Coins 00:26:02 - Bitcoin maximalism and control 00:28:12 - OP_CAT and use cases 00:29:35 - CTV vs. OP_CAT 00:35:32 - Bitcoin fees and self-sovereignty 00:42:39 - Scaling and vision alignment 00:47:55 - Favorite L2 proposals and Lightning Network 00:51:41 - Bitcoin Development and Layer Twos 00:52:35 - BitVM and Rootstock 00:54:21 - BitVM's Impact and Developer Interest 00:57:25 - Layer Two Labs and Bitcoin Unity 01:00:38 - Controversy and Character Assassination 01:07:36 - Tether and Bitfinex 01:12:36 - Liquid and Sidechain Adoption 01:15:20 - Permissionless Transactions and Trust Minimization 01:16:48 - Maximalist Support for Software They Didn't Test 01:21:29 - The Cult of Satoshi 01:22:49 - Use Cases for Bitcoin 01:23:57 - The Evolution of Bitcoin Conferences 01:25:13 - Building a Global Bitcoin Community 01:26:23 - Importance of Diverse Ideas 01:27:41 - Hyperbitcoinization Mission 01:28:19 - Political Dimensions of Conferences 01:29:24 - Navigating Speaker Boycotts 01:30:10 - Community Engagement and Perspectives 01:31:12 - Maintaining Values in Bitcoin 01:36:20 - Nature of Bitcoin's Value 01:38:22 - Block Size Debate 01:39:58 - Future of Bitcoin Scaling 01:41:20 - Understanding Perspectives 01:42:12 - Shared Cancel Culture Experience 01:43:08 - Advocating for Ross Ulbricht 01:44:06 - Closing Remarks