S14 E6: Mike in Space on STAMPs & Attacking Bitcoin

0:00Ad voiceover: You're listening to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, the Bitcoin podcast for OGs and intermediaries. Make sure you subscribe, leave a comment and like this episode. Also, read the new BTCTKVR magazine. This episode is sponsored by Wasabi Wallet, Cryptosteel, ShopinBit and Satodime. Thank you for listening.

1:12Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad, your Bitcoin influencer's influencer, and I am live today on YouTube with Mike in Space. And if you know anything about Bitcoin, you know that Bitcoin Car Talk was the hottest show of 2016. He had some of the coolest guests, he put adversaries together, he made them basically talk to each other, but not directly, but through his show. And he has created the nerdiest name for NFTs. I mean, think about it, you have this Paris Hilton endorsed, Jimmy Fallon promoted name for tokens with JPEGs attached, which is NFTs.

1:48But he came up with this, that's called STAMPs. I mean, what kind of nerd are you Mike?

1:54Mike in Space: The biggest. So yeah, with STAMPs, do you know what the acronym stands for? STAMPs, for? Yeah, it's Secure Tradeable Artifacts Maintained Permanently. It's an acronym.

2:11Of course it is. It's not like you have a stamp collection in your back room. And you're gonna show me how you have stamps from the 1976 Olympics.

2:24Mike in Space: One second, I'm doing a podcast. I'm right in the middle of it.

2:33You need to get in here.

2:37Can you give me one second?

2:39Of course. I mean, we just started. I'm gonna talk about Stamps. I'm going to show the website.

2:44Mike in Space: Yeah, let me just blank out my screen for my camera just because kids are knocking at the door even though I told them not to.

2:52Okay, so let's share the screen. And look at the Stamps website. How do I share the screen from the whiteboard? I guess. No, this is not it.

3:10This is gonna be so much fun. I'm sorry, guys. Everyone watching and listening.

3:23Are you back, Mike?

3:25Mike in Space: Yeah, let me just start up the video.

3:28I was trying to figure out how to show my screen but I failed miserably.

3:33Mike in Space: Yeah, it's funny. I told my wife and kids like 10 times. It's like I got a podcast coming up in an hour. I gotta do what you need to do with computer now. But I'm gonna need this room in an hour to do a podcast and then like two minutes in my wife's knocking at the door. Oh, I forgot something in there. But that's the way it goes. Sorry about that.

3:53That's a very Canadian thing to say. Sorry about that. Anyway, Stamps. Are they bloating the blockchain?

4:04Mike in Space: Absolutely. Absolutely. So no, they're not. It's not the blockchain. They're bloating the UTXO set. Right. They're stored on the blockchain, held by archival nodes, just like Ordinal inscriptions or anything else. But the way we store the data so that it's persistent is within the UTXO set. And this is like, it's a technical detail most people don't really care about. But what it allows us to do is persistently store this data so that it's there forever. It's held by all nodes. So full nodes, pruned nodes, pre-SegWit nodes, post-SegWit nodes, they all get the Stamps, right?

4:47Because they all have to hold a copy of the UTXO set. When you compare that to something like Ordinals is clever because what they did is they stored the data within the witness. And the benefit of doing that is you get quite a discount, like fee discount, right? But the trade-off there is that it's very prunable, right? That data is there as long as people want it to be there. So as soon as it starts to become an inconvenience for node runners, then they're going to start filtering that data.

5:25They're going to discard it. And we've already heard devs, core devs talk about this, Luke has his filter. And so, I mean, I don't really think, some people call it, say that I'm FUDing, but I don't really see it as FUD. I think it's a very realistic possibility that the Ordinal data within the witness could be discarded in the next little while, coming years, as it becomes inconvenient. Now, Stamps are just a lot more difficult to remove because they're within the UTXO set. It's persistent there. You can't get rid of it as easily as you can with the witness data.

6:18Okay, that's a good point. But at the same time, is this really necessary? Because there is no reason for the images to get stored on the blockchain, right?

6:25Mike in Space: No, well, okay, what is necessary? I would say what is necessary is what the person paying the fee decides is necessary. So the thing with Stamp transactions is that we are not benefiting from a witness discount. We are paying the market rate to get into blocks, right? So, I mean, what is necessary? If you're consolidating your UTXOs in your wallet, is that necessary? To you, it is, right? Is that necessary for me that you're doing that? Probably not. So I mean, the idea of what is necessary is really, you know, it's sort of in the eye of the beholder, I consider it necessary that I want to store my art persistently within the UTXO set so that it lives forever on the blockchain.

7:16Okay, but at the same time, there's this debate that there's a right way of using Bitcoin, which follows the original purpose of the network. And then there's a wrong way of using it, which means adding arbitrary data into the blockchain, which is not transactional, it does not serve an economic purpose, it serves more of a collector's purpose, an archival purpose, and maybe a speculative one, as you're expecting that that token that you're generating, or that UTXO is going to be exchanged for more Bitcoin at one point in the future, because it has a significance for someone.

7:51Mike in Space: So I mean, there's a philosophical debate there, what is Bitcoin meant for? And I would argue that Bitcoin has had many identities throughout the years. And the way I'm a use case maximalist, I think the more use cases we can do on Bitcoin, ultimately, the better. I mean, we've got a halving coming up in about a year, and the reward is going to be cut in half. And so unless the price doubles, you might see a reduction in security, unless you make it up with transaction fees, and that can be accomplished through different use cases.

8:33So yeah, HODLing is one, but storing art is another. And I mean, ultimately, it's like, if I'm paying, it's a fee market, if I'm paying to be in a block, I think that's a valid transaction.

8:49Something interesting that you pointed out with Stamps is that this was always possible. People were angry at SegWit and Taproot when Ordinals came around, and they were like, we should not have activated these soft forks, because look, we can have this data that's being gathered into blocks. And this can turn into a state attack, this can turn into a spam by corporations and everyone who hates Bitcoin. And then you came out and said, you know, this was always possible, I can encode this in base 58. And I can broadcast it in transactions, and every node is going to store it.

9:23And you just proved that this was possible, but maybe there was not a market for it. Or why was it that you launched it after the Ordinal inscriptions came around?

9:32Mike in Space: Well, no, I definitely give Ordinals credit for getting that ball rolling. And they kind of proved the use case, I think, without the success of Ordinals, I don't know if Stamps would have taken off because you kind of needed Ordinals first. And the novel thing with Ordinals was that they used the witness discount, and that's why it took off, I think. It's that they were able to do it in a very affordable way by storing data that way. But then it just kind of revealed the trade-offs there that, yeah, it's less expensive to create an Ordinal inscription, but the data doesn't persist as well as it does within Stamps.

10:10So, I mean, sorry, getting back to the question. What were you... you asked?

10:18Why was it necessary for Ordinal inscriptions to be first for you to come up with this? I mean, this was always possible, right?

10:24Mike in Space: Yeah, no, it was always possible. And just so the audience knows, STAMPs is built on Counterparty. Counterparty is a protocol that's been around since 2014. And yeah, this has been, I don't know if it was possible from the very beginning, because we're using bare multisig. And I think that was introduced a little later on. But definitely, something like STAMPs could have been done like, eight, nine years ago. And in fact, there were early attempts, things similar to the way we're storing data within the bare multisig did occur on Counterparty.

10:59Why did it take, why did it take Ordinals? I mean, I think it was a confluence of things. You first had that, you know, you had NFTs take off on Ethereum in 2021. And I think the promise there was that, or at least the perception from a lot of collectors was that the data was on chain, right? A lot of people just didn't realize that these are pointers. And then you had something that, like Ordinals came out where it kind of, it kind of was like, that thing, you know, collectors thought they were getting all along.

11:37It's like, no, here, finally, you're getting the art on chain, right? So that was very, you know, you know, the audience was very receptive to that, because it was new and novel, and it kind of delivered on the original promise. And so yeah, no, I definitely, I don't really see Ordinals as a competitor. I think it was a great stepping stone for Stamps. And we're just doing things a little differently. It's like, there are definitely trade offs. Like, for example, with Stamps are about four times more expensive to encode than Ordinals, right?

12:12So that's a trade off right there. So you have to decide as an artist or as a collector, how important this immutability, this permanence is to you, right? Maybe it's not important at all. Maybe you're just like, you know, a flipper and, you know, you don't really care about the art or anything, or the persistence of data, you could care less, then that's fine. Go encode your data on Ordinals or on Ethereum. But if you're an artist that, you know, you know, the art means something to you, and you want it to be around for your kids, your grandkids, you know, you might want to look at Stamps.

12:46Okay, so just for the record, it seems like the video on YouTube is broken, as I enabled the whiteboard. Okay, and it's the prevalent image. So I'm gonna try to play an ad right now to see if that one takes over the screen. And then we're gonna be back. So sorry for the early ad. I mean, it's kind of convenient that I get to play after 10 minutes. But let me see if I can fix the video.

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14:04Okay, so there are a lot of people who virtue signal on Twitter that they're trying to onboard people in El Salvador and Africa, and they were not able to allow them to have cheap remittances and cheap fees because of Ordinals and because of Stamps. How do you react to that?

14:24Mike in Space: I mean, wasn't it just like a couple years ago where Greg Maxwell was popping the champagne and Adam Back was saying the ideal fee market is like $100 fees per transaction? This is sort of the success metric we've been talking about for years. The whole idea is that you need fee pressure, right? Because the fee market or fees replace the block subsidy as it cuts in half every four years. So I mean, what do you want? I mean, this is what we've been working towards, right? Now, I think what it really is about people just don't like the art use case, right?

15:02If it was like, I don't know, anything else, you know, if it was like MicroStrategy, putting their entire payroll on the blockchain, people would be fine with it. So I mean, I think it's just, I don't think it's a fair criticism. And what about Lightning? Isn't the whole point of, like, the El Salvadorians, they're supposed to be using Lightning instead because you're not supposed to be using L1 because that's the settlement layer?

15:31Yeah, but ATMs use whatever they want to use. So some people, for some of them, it's easier to go after the ones using Bitcoin in ways that they don't like, as opposed to going after businesses over which they most likely have no power.

15:46Mike in Space: Now, what about Wasabi? You showed the ad a moment ago, and I think that's a great product. But I mean, can't you, couldn't you lob the same criticisms at Wasabi? Like you're doing a lot of transactions there that might be deemed unnecessary.

16:04No, it's batching. And it's doing a very good job compressing data. So from this point of view, if you want to consolidate your UTXOs, it's a lot more efficient to do it with Wasabi as opposed to do it yourself in a large batching transaction. It does some magic there with SegWit and stuff. I mean, I'm not qualified to explain it properly. But the way in which it works, it actually consumes less block space. It's super scalable. It's kind of impressive. I can imagine a future where the Bitcoin blocks consist of mostly coinjoins of large sizes, just like Monero, except that you don't have hidden amounts.

16:44[00:16:45] Mike in Space: I mean, at the end of the day, the way I see it is, if you're paying the fee, the market rate fee, then that's valid. The miners are mining these things, right?

17:01I can submit whatever I want to the mempool. At the end of the day, it's the miners putting them into blocks, because they have the highest fee. That's really what it's about. So get mad at the miners. Tell them, don't mine these Stamps.

17:21Yeah, that's another question that I had for you, because you can do this. You can do a soft fork. You can do a hard fork. You can remove entirely this situation that you can call an attack vector. But you cannot stop another type of encoding emerging and inserting arbitrary data into the blockchain. So it's like a whack-a-mole. What do you call that game?

17:44Mike in Space: Yeah, no, exactly. But I mean, the fact that everyone is so adversarial towards Ordinals and Stamps just seems silly to me, because I think it's solving the fee market problem. Bitcoin doesn't work at one sat per vbyte long term. The fee pressure has to go up. We need use cases. Or you need the price to double every four years. And maybe that'll happen. We'll see.

18:25I mean, to give credit to Ordinals and to Stamps, the fees did go up this bear market. And for the past year, we did see miners receiving a fee reward, which is larger than the block reward. So in some cases, they got more than 6.25 Bitcoin from fees in one block, which is something that we expect to see and we expect to have in the future. And of course, we need high fees. And that's a very unpopular debate to have. It's just that some people feel entitled to tell you how you can use Bitcoin and how you cannot, what they want to store and what they don't.

19:02Mike in Space: Is it really a debate though? Is it really a debate? It needs high fees. This is how the system was designed. I don't even consider that a debate.

19:13People who say we need low fees, it's like, no, that's not how the system is designed. The block subsidy cuts in half every four years. The fees need to make up that difference. It's not a debate.

19:24Well, there are people who argue that Bitcoin is over secured, meaning that there is too much hashrate and some miners need to go down and turn off their machines because they're not efficient and find the cheapest and most sustainable and blah, blah type of energy. And also buy the cheapest gear and buy gear that has higher efficiency and all of this talk about making mining more efficient, but also more industrialized, which means that you as a home miner stand no chance against those who have better electricity deals and also can afford to buy the latest gear that you don't have access to.

20:05So it's pretty delicate.

20:12I don't like that look on your face.

20:14Mike in Space: It's just, I think it's just a difference. I don't know. It's like a few years ago, everyone was rah rah rah, you know, hashrate, whenever it hits an all-time high peak, it's like, yeah, we're the most secure network. Yay. And it's like, now it's like, oh, now we're over secured. It's like, let's bring that bring it down. It's like, seriously, we're over secured. We want we want it to come down, rather than fees to go up. It just, I don't know, seems a little cognitive dissonance there.

20:47Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It's a very ugly debate to be had for the simple reason that we have been teaching people that Bitcoin is decentralized and is permissionless and is for enemies. But when someone who uses Bitcoin in a way we don't like, we come out and say, yeah, you're not supposed to use Bitcoin like that. And it's difficult. It's not a nice kind of debate to be having. There was this guy, Ordisrespector, who was always bragging about how he is filtering Ordinal inscriptions from his node.

21:23Yeah. And I think it was Luke Dashjr who created the code for that. And to me, it seemed discriminatory. I mean, it's maybe, you know, there's this slippery slope fallacy that says that once you open up the gates for something, you're gonna end up doing more. I mean, I see no reason for these people to also start realizing that they don't like transactions from dark markets, or they don't like transactions coming from this exchange. They're going to also filter that out. And it's up to them because Bitcoin is by design, a system which allows censorship.

22:00You can, if you open your full node files, you're gonna see that there's a banlist.json file that you can find there. And you're gonna figure out, okay, Bitcoin has always enabled this type of censorship. If you don't want to be a peer or interact with someone else, then you can totally block the right IP address, or you can block certain types of addresses. And having a full node means exactly to be entirely sovereign and store whatever you want and follow the rules that you want, as long as you stick to the basic consensus rules.

22:34But at the same time, do we really want that type of system? Or do we want it to be inclusive? And we want everyone around the world to be able to participate?

22:45Mike in Space: Yeah, I mean, whatever you do with your home node, it's like, yeah, of course, that's up to you want to put on an Ordisrespector and filter out whatever, you don't like Roger Ver's transactions, filter that out, do whatever you want. I mean, but yeah, at the consensus layer, it's like, these are valid, you know, these are valid Bitcoin transactions, they're paying the network fees. They're supporting the network. It's, and here's the thing, it's like, a lot of people say, you know, what, it's a stupid use case that will get priced out.

23:18Great. So but it's like, once those use cases materialize, and they price out the stupid art, that's great, then you have a replacement, but you don't you don't kill the existing use cases. Before that happens, you let the, you know, the real use cases price out the stupid use cases, rather than killing the stupid use cases prematurely. And then you have nothing. That's the way I kind of see it. It's like, if Stamps and Ordinals are stupid, they'll get priced out. So you don't have to worry about it.

23:57Well, yeah. And to some extent, you can see that the market is not as hot as it was maybe five months ago. There was this FOMO and this enthusiasm for this new type of writing data into the blockchain. And people started paying a lot of money and paying a lot of fees to inscribe their art, or send their messages or create time capsules for themselves or whatever they wanted to do. And they were willing to pay higher fees. But right now, I think the market slowed down for the reason that there were some...

24:29Mike in Space: Well, it goes up and down. I mean, the death of Ordinals has been called several times, every time the mempool drops, like, five sats per vbyte, it's like, whoa, Ordinals are dead. And then it ramps back up again, right now we are in a valley, and maybe we'll stay there for a while. But it's gonna go up again. It's just these are cycles. It's it is what it is. So I would it just like everyone likes to proclaim the death of Bitcoin, you know, every time the price drops, it's a say it's just funny to see those same, you know, the maxis then say over the death of Ordinals, but they've said it like five, six times, like every month, they're saying it every time it dips a little bit, and then it just roars back to life.

25:11But Mike, why do you refer to the others who criticize you as maxis? Because you're also maximalist, as you're building on Bitcoin?

25:20Mike in Space: Yeah, I mean, okay, so we probably need better terms, because honestly, they're not maxis. If they're, if they're like, you know, we don't need high fees. And we don't we don't need a fee market, then I don't know if they are maxis. Because they clearly don't know how the system works. So yes, I am a Bitcoin maxi. I'm the maxi of maxis. And, you know, I can't explain what they're talking about.

25:50Okay, before I ask you the next question, let me add another ad, the video still doesn't work. But when I play an external video, it seems to display that one. It's very strange. I don't know, I just suck at using Jitsi or it's buggy.

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26:52Okay, I think this is a good moment to take a look at Bitcoin Stamps. There's this website stampchain.io which you, I guess, created I'm not sure if you are the only creator but you certainly worked on it.

27:05Mike in Space: First of all, can you see and hear me?

27:07Yes. Okay, great.

27:09Mike in Space: Yeah, so this is stampchain.io. So basically, I came up with the protocol with some help from others. But the protocol is just you know, that's, you know, a document that exists on GitHub, you really need devs to bring that to life. And I'm not a programmer myself. So I enlisted the help of some programmers to turn the white paper into running code. And so yeah, what you're seeing here is Stampchain. It's one of many explorers for Bitcoin Stamps. There's also Stampverse, RareStamp.

27:53There's Stamped Ninja. That's the newest one. And so yeah, basically what you see here is all the Stamps that are getting minted, and they're all numbered. And some of them are SRC-20. That's a fungible token protocol on Stamps. Others are SRC-721. And others are art. So yeah, there's different use cases on Stamps at this point.

28:22Okay. So what is a good use case? Can you describe something that's actually adding value to Bitcoin?

28:31Mike in Space: Well, okay, so what's adding value to Bitcoin? I think the fact that you know, we people are using Bitcoin is an added benefit. We're also, you know, we've brought in many people from other networks. There's a lot of people, you know, that have been onboarded to Stamps from Ethereum, right? So what does that require? That requires that they acquire Bitcoin in order to participate. So I think it's a net positive for Bitcoin.

29:05Is there not a greater purpose to create a market for these and sell them flip them for a higher price during the bull market? Because I guess that's the purpose. And I can see a piece of ass here. I guess.

29:18Mike in Space: Those are the... I think those are called Stamp Ass.

29:24So appropriate. I mean, this is stored in people's nodes, right?

29:30Mike in Space: Yeah, exactly. Yep. If you're running a node, whether it's a pruned node, a full node, pre-SegWit, post-SegWit, it's got all this. So and that's a that's the thing with Ordinal. I just again, I'm just trying to contrast it with Ordinals. Because Ordinal stores data within the witness, that means any pre-SegWit node does not get any of that any of those inscriptions, right? So the you know, the one of the big differences between Ordinals and Stamps is that literally every running node has the Stamps data, while only a subset of nodes hold Ordinals.

30:11Okay. Yeah, I'm just looking at these trying to figure out where they're coming from and what their purpose is, because it seems like some people are trying to create tokens. And what's the point of these tokens? They're kind of like Ethereum tokens, but they have this nice background, like a JPEG. What's next for these tokens? What's going to happen with them?

30:35Mike in Space: So what you're referring to is SRC-20. SRC-20 was modeled after BRC-20 on Ordinals. It's a fungible token standard. So basically, it's a protocol on top of a protocol on top of a protocol on top of a protocol, because you have Bitcoin, Counterparty, Stamps, SRC-20. And what are they used for? Whatever you can think of. So basically, with SRC-20, you could use them in smart contracts, liquidity pools, DeFi, whatever you can think of.

31:15So what kind of DeFi or smart contracts can you do on Bitcoin or on Stamps?

31:24Mike in Space: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, it's like, that's a use case that was built on Stamps that I'm not really that involved with. That's what's happening so far. Stamps is kind of at a point where it's very decentralized, permissionless. Various devs are building different protocols on top. And I'm the first to say I prefer the art Stamps. That was the original use case of Stamps. That's where my heart is. I don't mind other protocols being built on top. I think that's great. But yeah, I mean, other people will play around with SRC-20 and see what they can do with it.

32:03But yeah, I mean, my focus is elsewhere.

32:08Yeah, I get that. I'm looking at some of the Stamps right here. And I realized that, for example, there is this one, which is called, and I don't want to advertise it, but it's just the one on which I stumbled upon. It's called Pepe. And it says that there are 1000 of them, which means that unlike Ethereum or Counterparty, where you can create with one transaction as many tokens as you want, with this one, it seems like you need to do 1,000 separate transactions to be able to mint the entire supply, am I correct?

32:39Mike in Space: No, no, what you're seeing here is, so this is modeled very closely to how BRC-20 works. So the idea is, first you mint a deploy, and within the deploy, you specify the total amount, and you specify the amount, the max amount that can be minted. So say the total amount is 21 million, and then the max amount is 1 million. Then if I wanted to mint, the max I can mint is 1 million. Now, I wouldn't want to mint any less than that, because there's no point to mint less than the max.

33:15But once you've minted it, then you can mint what's called a transfer, and you can transfer any amount of that to someone else.

33:27Okay, so with one transaction, one minting, you can generate 1 million of them. Then you need to do 1 million transactions to send all of them, or can you batch transactions?

33:39Mike in Space: So what you do is, let's see if we can, there's a transfer. Yeah, you're seeing transfers on your screen. So basically, you define it, when you're minting it, you define it as a transfer, and then you specify the amount you want to send within that transfer. So if you have a million, you can send half a million, you can send one, you can send one tenth of one, basically up to eight decimal places, just like Bitcoin.

34:07Okay, I just realized that there are two more pieces of ass here. And it made me wonder, you know, this is the concern trolling that always emerges when you have this type of freedom and people say, what if people put child porn in the blockchain? What can be done about that?

34:24Mike in Space: Well, okay, so there's not a lot that can be done about that, because it's been there since the beginning. One mitigating thing is that Stamps by their very nature are kind of file size constrained. And so everything is kind of geared towards pixel art as a result. And so there isn't, I mean, you can do, I guess you could do a very crude something or other that's inappropriate, but you're not really going to have high fidelity images or video that you could do with other protocols. So I mean, that kind of mitigates the concern a little bit.

35:05But yeah, I mean, it's still a concern. But also, here's the thing with directories can decide what they want to censor. So if something really vile were to be minted, it can be suppressed at the web level right now. It's still on the blockchain. But any of these sort of user facing interfaces, they can be cleansed.

35:28Yeah, but I guess some people running nodes are gonna be angry that they have this.

35:32Mike in Space: Well, I mean, yeah, but honestly, that stuff's been there, I believe, since like 2010, like in one form or another, because data encoded on the blockchain has always been possible. So it's there. It's an unfortunate reality.

35:47Yeah, but it's so much easier to be ignorant and not know about it and think that Bitcoin is clean, and someone who came around this year and stamped something made it dirty.

36:00Mike in Space: Well, here's the thing. The data, it's not like you're running a node. And then you have within the blockchain, there's a folder. And in that folder, there's like JPEG files, right? The way it works, how this data is encoded is it's broken down, like the file is converted to base64. And then it's split into small pieces. And that data is then encoded into multisig outputs. So it's like, is that even a file anymore? You know what I mean? It's not like it's a readily available file. It's basically almost arbitrary data at that point, spread out into different unspent outputs.

36:42So I don't know if it's more of a philosophical argument or a legal argument about does that data exist if you converted and split it up and encoded into a multisig? I don't know.

37:00Yeah, that's a very important distinction to be made, as most people think that you just upload the JPEG to the blockchain, when in reality, it's data that gets encoded in a certain type of encryption. And you need the proper type of decryption to be able to see it. If you look at this type of data, like this ass right here, it's not going to be displayed when you use your full node and you look at what's in the block. It's not going to be displayed on. So let's take the transaction hash transaction.

37:36It's this one. And we take it to mempool.space and we're going to see that it's a transaction just like all the others. You need to know exactly how this was encoded and what kind of cryptography it uses. This paid a lot of fees and it was almost 100 bucks to encode this. I'm going to have more questions about this later.

37:58Mike in Space: So, expand. These are all the outputs where the data is encoded. You want to click show more? Because it's kind of hiding it a little bit right there, like the blue button. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So yeah, all these multisigs are encoding a little piece of that file.

38:18Yeah, so you need the proper way to interpret what this is. Because on a block explorer, this makes no sense. You look at it and you're like, this is very strange. Why would anyone split this amount into all of these small amounts, which are equal and make a multisig out of them? It's very strange. But yeah, this is what it looks like. And this is what your node is actually storing. It's just that the people who want to interpret this image need to use the proper decoding way.

38:53Mike in Space: Right, exactly.

38:55But this is not very block space efficient. Do you think that there are better ways to do this?

39:02Mike in Space: I mean, there's different ways to do it. And they have different trade offs. Going back to Ordinals, they do it in a very different way than Stamps. Trade off there is that the data isn't necessarily persistent over time. So it's really what you're looking to do. This is probably the most resilient method of storing data that we've come across. Because the data is just in outputs, and the nodes need to keep track of those. And again, I return to the fact that, look, that guy paid $100. That fee went to miners.

39:46So I see that as valid.

39:53And if you don't like it, you can out-compete them. You can pay $101 and you can send yours.

40:00So how is this not a conspiracy by the miners to increase the fees in a time when they're less profitable?

40:06Mike in Space: Well, I mean, if it's conspiracy, I... I'm waiting for them to cut me in because I haven't heard from any miner about that. I mean, I'm sure they're happy about it, but I don't see really as a conspiracy. Miners aren't behind it, but they're happy to mine high fees.

40:32What you're seeing here, SRC-20 kind of same way that BRC-20 dominates Ordinals. What we did is we allow users to add these backgrounds just to make them look a little bit more creative because when you contrast it with ordinals.com, it's all just strings of text, right? You can't even find art. So we did this just to make it look a little bit more pleasing to the eye. If you skip ahead in like the... like towards the end, you'll see more art. Like right now, you're kind of seeing very, very little art.

41:08Yeah, yeah. I see that you have this last button that you press and you can see actually the first of Stamps. And I guess these were made by you.

41:17Mike in Space: I was early. I have zero and one and a few others. I got Mario up there, number 16. I got Hello Kitty. But there are other people involved early on as well.

41:30So concerning Mario and Goku and Hello Kitty and all of this stuff that you can see here, Pokemon. Are you concerned about copyright infringement? Do you think that someone can come after you?

41:43Mike in Space: I mean, I think we've seen it already a little bit. I think, was it Yuga Labs, went after one of the punk derivatives on Ethereum. So I mean, what they can do is yeah, they can they can censor it at the at the web level. Like they could say to, you know, a directory, hey, you can't you can show Mario, but it's still it's still stored on the blockchain. There's nothing they can do about that.

42:11Someone even put the animations of the strippers from Duke Nukem 3D. Shake it, baby. And then give the stripper like five bucks. The old Bitcoin logo. I mean, to some extent, I can see the time capsule value of this because this is the Bitcoin culture, as it is, or as it was this year. And some people are gonna look at this maybe in 20 years. And maybe there's gonna be an anthropology or history department in some sort of sore-ass university. And they're going to dig up these artifacts and think about what they meant and try to interpret their meaning.

42:50And you're gonna end up giving university lectures about the stuff that you did for fun. But at the same time, how are they valuable? Why would anyone want to pay for this?

43:05Mike in Space: Why is the Mona Lisa valued at hundreds of millions of dollars? Why? It's art. Value is in the eye of the beholder. It's in the eye of the collector, the market. If you feel that they have no value, I can't argue with that. It's really a personal thing. I value them. I buy Stamps all the time, right? It's I like seeing them in my wallet. I like I like that they exist. Yeah,

43:33but really, who is this for? Because it's very expensive to create Stamps. And it's also expensive to buy them. So it's basically a game for a couple of not a couple, but a bunch of OGs who decide that they just want to trade Bitcoin with each other and send memes. And

43:51Mike in Space: what's and that's a use case. And that's a beautiful use case. And I've been doing I've been involved with Counterparty since about 2016. And that's what we've been doing. I mean, up until like the NFT, you know, bull run in 2021. It's like it was all just like 200 people on Telegram, trading these low value NFTs back and forth, giving them away for free, because it was fun. It was really no profit motive, per se. I'd often make Pepes and whatnot, and just give them away, because it's fun.

44:27And so yeah, this is a community that likes to have fun. And I think that in and of itself is enough. I don't think Stamps is going to necessarily take over the world or, you know, become the number one NFT protocol. But it, you know, for its community, I think it has value.

44:52Well, but do you ever think about the fact that your fun and the way that you're having fun right now might impact others who try to use Bitcoin in the future, and you're bloating the UTXO set, and you're adding more data to the blockchain. So it's gonna be slower for African citizens to sync up their nodes in 10 years.

45:13Mike in Space: So again, what it comes down to is that, you know, it's a fee market. And whether it's me putting art on the blockchain, or it's Michael Saylor deciding to pay all his employees on L1, it's like the same to the African farmer. It's the same thing. Does he care? Like, oh, well, okay, it's Michael Saylor paying his VPs on Bitcoin. So that's okay. But you know, Mike in Space is putting art and that's not okay. It's like, I'm sorry, you know what, like, yeah, I think people have this idea that Bitcoin is for everyone.

45:56And it's more like Bitcoin is for anyone. And there is like a subtle difference there. It's ultimately it is a fee market. And it's like, yeah, some people are going to be left out. But this is how the system has been designed. And there's no way around it. There's no free lunch. Like, it's like there are other, you know, there's Lightning and there's, you know, other methods of transacting as well. But yeah, no, I don't feel any guilt or anything about, you know, sending out valid Bitcoin transactions and having them mined by miners.

46:35It's completely valid use case in my view.

46:38Yeah, that's what I was about to tell you that you're slightly avoiding the question in the sense that you're explaining that it's technically possible. Yeah. At the same time, you're not tackling the ethical issue of making it harder for other people, harder and more expensive for other people to use Bitcoin.

46:57Mike in Space: But no, I don't think it's an ethical issue because that was always the end game. The end game was $100 fees that, you know, the end game was a robust fee market. Like, this is what, you know, everyone was talking about a few years ago before the fork, right? This is how we want, this is how Bitcoin has to be. It's not even how we want it to be. It's like, we have the halving every four years. This is how the system is designed. We need a fee market.

47:25And the inevitable result of a fee market is yes, the people, some people are going to be left out of that economy. It's just, that's just reality. I'm sorry.

47:39Yeah. So to a degree, given your past and the fact that you're friends with Colin and Vin Armani and all the others, it's kind of hard to not think if you're trolling a bit and you're basically trying to say, okay, Greg Maxwell, you wanted $100 fees. You popped the champagne. Let me give you $100 fees so you can pop the champagne. And I know that he was angry because of this. He's not particularly happy that people use Bitcoin in ways that he does not endorse.

48:10Mike in Space: It's permissionless. So it's really not about what Greg Maxwell has to say. It's not about what anyone has to say. This is what an open protocol looks like. It's necessary in my view to have these use cases until they get priced out by other use cases. So again, it's like, if you feel that, you know, art is a stupid use case, then build a more relevant use case and price us out. I'll be so happy when the art is priced out by these, these, these, these magical use cases that everyone's talking about.

48:53State level actors settling on the blockchain and central banks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Make it happen.

49:01Okay, let me play another ad and then I can ask you something else.

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50:01So basically, what I want to say is that you were one of the people who introduced me to Counterparty and you're not even aware, but you sent me one of my first cards, if not the first ever. It was a Lombrozo that you created and it was not even a named asset. It was one of these numbered assets, and I thought it was pretty cool at the time, but I also appreciated that the data is not added into the blockchain so that the fees are cheap.

50:31You only create that Counterparty token and you trade back and forth with others. I mean, it seemed very nice and now you found a different way to use Counterparty which takes a lot more blockspace and is more expensive and is mostly for rich people who can afford it. How would you describe the difference between what you were doing back in 2016 with Rare Pepes and stuff and what you're doing right now?

51:00Mike in Space: Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is it's like Rare Pepes in particular don't even contain the pointer. Most NFTs on Ethereum and Counterparty, it's a pointer to an asset that lives on a server somewhere. Rare Pepe, I mean, it was at the forefront at the beginning of the NFT movement and they were still trying to figure things out, but yeah, they didn't even contain pointers. It was literally just the token and they decided through consensus that, yeah, this token refers to this JPEG and that's how it was done.

51:45That was the mode of thinking for many years. It was like, well, you can't store this on chain. It'll be too expensive. Then what happened was in 2021, fees on Ethereum went nuts where people were paying hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars to transact to buy monkey JPEGs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and suddenly paying a hundred bucks to store some JPEG on chain doesn't seem that expensive anymore. I think it's all relative. At one point, we're like, well, yeah, I don't want to spend a hundred dollars to store this data, but now it's like, yeah, it's only a hundred dollars.

52:25Yeah. I mean, okay, I'm not going to judge that, but it still seems this very rich boy's club where...

52:34Mike in Space: It is. No, no. Okay. It is. NFTs in general.

52:42The average person does not think like this. Even like the art you buy and you put in your house, you might spend a couple hundred dollars, maybe a thousand dollars for a painting, but you're not spending tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a painting, the average person anyways. But that same person, it's weird because with this internet money, it doesn't feel real. It's like, I'll go to the grocery store and I'm looking at two cans of corn and I'm like, well, here's a store brand.

53:16You're comparing it. It's like the difference of a dollar. It's like, why are you even wasting your time doing that? Meanwhile, I'm buying an NFT and the transaction fee is several dollars and the NFT is hundreds of dollars. It's a weird... The mental mode is different when you're in the real world versus like these fake numbers on screen.

53:38Yeah. So let me give you credit for this because I have been looking at 4,000 Stamps so far since I started scrolling. And compared to Ordinals, you can see fewer porn posts. You can see some asses, you can see some piggies, but at the same time there is nothing offensive. It's just maybe PG-14 or 18+ or whatever, but it seems like the higher price does not attract too much of that trolling activity. Because mostly when people inscribed dicks or whatever, or any sort of porn as Ordinals, they only did it to upset others.

54:17They only did it to troll. I don't think it was made by someone who was into porn and really wanted this to be immortalized. It was just someone who really wanted to upset the others and wanted to stir some sort of debate about what's going on with Bitcoin. But I can see that in Stamps you mostly have heads of punks, you have Simpsons references, you have Seinfeld references, you have some Pokemon references. It almost seems like this is some sort of 90s kid's playground where you dump all of your references to cultural phenomena.

54:54And you also have Space Invaders. I'm not sure why anyone would want to buy one of these, but whatever floats your boat.

55:05It's interesting that there are different types of Bitcoin users and there's this official quote-unquote narrative about what Bitcoin is. But there's also this subset of users who are in their Telegram chats and they do stuff. And I wanted to ask you if RGB or Taro or Taproot Assets or whatever they call it these days gets deployed and it works at scale and it has liquidity. Would you consider moving Stamps onto that one?

55:37Mike in Space: No, and I'll tell you why. Because the whole premise of Stamps is the persistence of data and it would basically kill the meme. We've already seen, you take something like Liquid, I think they have their own protocol for NFTs, Liquid. And it's a ghost town. In one way you might say, yeah, this is the best way to do it because it's off chain, but it anchors into the chain. And so this is the best way to store art, and yet no one cares. No one uses it.

56:11It's a ghost town. So really the market kind of decides what it wants. And it's pretty clear that what the market wants is on-chain art. And that was proven by Ordinals and it's proven by Stamps. So these other protocols, they have different priorities. Their priorities are what is the most efficient way to store this, but that's not necessarily the priority of a collector or an artist. So we're focused on giving artists what they want.

56:48Yeah, right now I'm still scrolling through these Stamps and it's interesting to see how many heads you have and how many punks. I don't know why punks.

56:58Mike in Space: Well, there was a Punks 10K. The entire punks was minted on Stamps. So you're going to find at least 10,000 of them. So there were quite a lot. They're called Stamp Punks. It was like a free mint. And that means users minted on their own. And the first one to have the identical base64 becomes the valid one. So it's sort of a race. Like we're all kind of racing to mint these punks. And if mine is minted before yours, then mine is valid. Yours is invalid.

57:34I like this doggo. If I actually had disposable income, I would buy it. I'm pretty sure it's like 1,000 bucks or something, so I'm not going to touch it.

57:46Mike in Space: Well, I'll send you some Stamps after this call.

57:49It's definitely interesting to see what this project is about. And let me ask you this, because when you first sent me that Lombrozo card, and maybe I should show it. It's on XChain.

58:03Mike in Space: Yeah. And this is an example of like, there was no monetary reason to do this Lombrozo. It was just fun. I had the idea in my head. This is my flash bit. Yeah, there you go.

58:15It's on Counterparty and also it's an Ordinal, but it's not a Stamp because I could not figure out compression. And because it's too expensive. But it's here in credits, I think. And I have to go to the very first one. And I was right, you sent me one card of this. And that's the Lombrozo. Yeah. With Peter Todd in the background. So this was the first one that you sent me back at which block height is this? If you go to issuance in this tab. 696. Okay, so this was in August of 2021.

58:53So two years ago, almost. Right. You sent me this one. Also Pepe Nation and Senpai Pepe. Okay.

59:05Mike in Space: I don't know if I sent you those or those were ones that were in the same block that got sent.

59:09Yeah, those were in the same block because I don't have them. But what caught me by surprise at the time, and I remember thinking about this, was the fact that you use hot wallets and you reuse the same address all the time. And it kind of goes against everything that you learn. About properly using Bitcoin.

59:30Mike in Space: 100%. And you have to understand there's a little bit of different ethos within NFTs where you want to be able to kind of showcase what you have. Right. And so there tends to be, you know, this desire to keep everything in a single wallet. But again, it is a hot wallet and it's not a great practice. There are hardware wallets that are, you know, you can now put it on a Trezor or Ledger and it'll work with FreeWallet. And so there are better ways of doing it these days.

1:00:02But also you don't need to necessarily, it's a hot wallet. I mean, I don't put thousands of dollars in Bitcoin on my hot wallet, but I do have probably a lot of assets that I need to move to cold storage. So, yeah, it is a little dangerous, I will admit.

1:00:17Okay, this is funny. Make pruning great again. Yeah, some of these are actually so I don't like the punks, no disrespect for whoever worked on them, but I don't see the point of them. They're kind of dull. But I do like this sort of art, which relates to Bitcoin culture, something that tells you, okay, at this point in history, we had this meme, which was popular, and that was immortalized in the Bitcoin blockchain. Right. So I do like the stuff that specific. I do remember one of the first, one of the

1:00:51earliest Ordinal inscriptions was Greg Maxwell, with tears in his eyes, someone made some sort of pixel art with some guy depicting Greg Maxwell. And that was funny. I mean, I love Greg Maxwell, don't get me wrong, but he seems to have these strong opinions in terms of policing what others are doing. And this seems to be a greater trend, right? With Bitcoiners trying to tell you how this should be used. And I guess this is part of scaling, you know, because if everyone just did whatever they wanted with Bitcoin, it would break a lot of stuff.

1:01:31A lot of the nodes would no longer stay online. And this is another question that I think I have right now for you. What happens if too many Stamps get broadcast at the same time? What's going to happen with the infrastructure?

1:01:46Mike in Space: If they get broadcast at the same time? Well, things get held in the mempool for an amount of time. And basically, miners assemble their blocks based on the value they can kind of put together. So I mean, blocks get mined every 10 minutes, and that clears up the mempool. Sometimes the mempool gets bloated for a few weeks before things get cleared out. But eventually it happens. And so I mean, there's no real concern there. I mean, blocks keep getting mined. And that's how that works. If, you know, if you need to get your transaction in a block, you might have to outcompete whatever's in the mempool.

1:02:36That's just how a fee market works.

1:02:40I do recall at one point someone in the Telegram chat saying that if this breaks Bitcoin, maybe it was never meant to work in the first place.

1:02:48Mike in Space: Well, and that's a good point. Exactly. We're stress testing it. And honestly, I mean, if this breaks Bitcoin, I think, you know, the experiment has failed. If this is what breaks Bitcoin, not state actors, not, you know, I mean, if JPEGs break Bitcoin, like, I don't know, I think Bitcoin is more resilient than that.

1:03:09I mean, that's a valid point. But at the same time, how does that not imply that you're attacking it?

1:03:19Mike in Space: Hmm. Well, you know what, if you want to say that I'm attacking Bitcoin, I'll wear that. That's fine. Bitcoin needs a villain. I'm happy to be the villain.

1:03:31I do remember when you were a big blocker hanging out with Vin Armani.

1:03:37Mike in Space: I was never a big blocker. Okay, careful with that. Because here's the thing. I made some skits, some funny skits on CoinSpice because they were funny. And that's what I like to do. I was never a big blocker. So I just, you know, those rumors get out there and people are like, oh, yeah, he's a big blocker. And that was never the case.

1:03:59I mean, I do have a question from Hodlonaut on Twitter. And he says, has Mike in Space come out from under Roger Ver's desk these days?

1:04:09Mike in Space: It's so ridiculous. I mean, there's no, what does that even mean? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Whatever. Yeah, I work for Roger Ver. So I'm on the payroll. Yeah. Okay. I would love that. Can I get on his payroll? I'll take it. But no, there's no truth to that.

1:04:35So are you attacking Bitcoin or not? I don't think so.

1:04:40Mike in Space: I don't believe I am. I believe Stamps is a valid use case. Ordinals is a valid use case. And honestly, again, what I come back to is, for all the people who feel that it's a stupid use case, you just need to create better use cases. And it will price these things out. That's what it comes down to.

1:05:02Do you think that this is just a fad that will go away when fees are gonna be really like $100 only for the most basic of transactions? And for this type of minting, you're gonna be more than 1000?

1:05:16Mike in Space: Well, again, but what your statement is premised on is other use cases pricing this use case out, right? You're saying when the fees are $100, whatever. Well, what is going to make the fees that? I mean, it's either the art use case, in which case, that means the art is popular, and so people are paying it. Or it's another use case that's pricing out the art, in which case, why even worry about the art?

1:05:47So yes, if you're saying hypothetically, if another use case prices out the art, will the art disappear? Well, yeah, obviously.

1:05:57I want to show you something because you are a Bitcoin head, you're part of my collection.

1:06:03Mike in Space: I'm honored, by the way. So I have one of those Sato cards, and it has this on it. And it's very cool.

1:06:09Yeah, and I also want to ask you about how you can store these Stamps on Sato cards, like Satodime.

1:06:17Mike in Space: Yeah, so I mean, I haven't looked too closely at it. But I mean, if it has like, if you have a public key there, yeah, you just send it to it and it's stored. Like, it's no big deal whatsoever.

1:06:31Yeah, so there's a dispenser for this one. If anyone watching wants to get it for its 12,000 baby bitcoins, I don't like to call them sats. It's like $3. Look for MINSPACEHEAD and get it. I think I still have some spares and I can do a huge airdrop. But if you want to support the show, you can just buy them from this dispenser. I can put the link in the description if you want. But I think this collection is underrated. And I just wanted you to pump it, to pump my bags.

1:07:01I have Theo Goodman in here. All of them are Ordinal inscriptions. So they're forever. I mean, not forever, as you're concerned for right now.

1:07:11Mike in Space: Right, exactly.

1:07:12They're still, for the moment.

1:07:14Mike in Space: For the moment. Until Luke nukes them all. They're good for now.

1:07:20Do you see that happening?

1:07:23Mike in Space: I mean, all I can go by is like, I look at, you know, the Bitcointalk forums or the dev forums. And I mean, there's serious discussion happening about it. Like, this is not like FUDing or rumoring. They're literally saying these things. And Vlad, I'm seeing a landscaper drive up. And I think he's going to be knocking on my door in a few minutes. So we may have to wrap up here.

1:07:51Yeah, yeah.

1:07:51Mike in Space: Apologies for that.

1:07:53It's fine.

1:07:56So another question. This is card number six. It says that you do Bitcoin Car Talk and Mempool Report shows. Strength, you can make people who hate each other collaborate in absurd yet somewhat funny skits. Weakness, collecting Rare Pepes. Special attack, Bitcoin Genesis block on a three and a quarter inch floppy disk. And you actually sold this.

1:08:21Mike in Space: Yes, it was a lot of fun. And it was kind of a pain in the ass because mailing out physical items is always a pain. And that's why NFTs are superior. You don't have to send anything through the mail. It's instant. And, you know, that's why they're so great. But yeah, for a while we were selling floppy disks and it was it was definitely fun. Yeah, we had the Genesis block encoded right on the floppy.

1:08:44Yeah, your ultimate attack is Bitcoin Car Talk 2.0 and he makes you laugh and feel confused at the same time. Basically, what I wanted to ask you is how would you change this today, given that now you're into Stamps and your role in the project at large has been changed to the point where to some you're a villain. So what would you make this say?

1:09:12Strength, weakness, special attack, ultimate attack.

1:09:15Mike in Space: Let me get back to you on that, because I really have to put some thought into it. Maybe I can create this. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that's and you got to do it on Stamps. But anyways, Vlad, I'm really sorry. I got to cut this short. My wife scheduled a landscaper and he's right outside. So I got to deal with that. But this has been great. Thank you for having me on.

1:09:37Yeah, I'm very happy that you are here. Let me play the last ad, which for some reason I forgot to play. And this is going to wrap up the show. So thank you guys for watching and listening. I'm also going to upload this on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and all the live streaming platforms, not live streaming, just streaming. And yeah, subscribe, like the video and whatever YouTubers say. And I'll see you in the next one.

1:10:02Mike in Space: Thanks, Vlad.

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1:10:59OK, guys, so Mike left. Thank you once again. And I hope you learned something new from this episode. Make sure you subscribe before you leave.