S16 E23: James O'Beirne on Bitcoin Development (CTV, CFSF & Big Blocks)

0:48Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 16, Episode 23. We are live with James O'Beirne, and this episode is sponsored by NoOnes.com, Hodling.ch, SideShift.ai, Citrea, LayerTwo Labs, and Bitcoin.com News. James is a Bitcoin Core developer, or has been a Bitcoin Core developer, or used to be. I'm not even sure what's the proper term for it. If you look at his GitHub, you can see that he's worked on CTV and CSFS, and he had the balls, I'm going to put it this way, he had the balls to go to OP_NEXT this month, it was a couple of weeks ago, and mentioned that Bitcoin needs to scale with bigger blocks, which I think is one of the most courageous moves someone can do in the Bitcoin space, especially as a developer, especially within this cult that says, no, we should never increase the block size, it's perfect. We did that with SegWit, we don't need it, look, the mempool is empty.

1:52Anyway, it's good to have you, James.

1:54James O'BeirneHey, thanks, Vlad. It's great to be here. Yeah, it is kind of funny, you know, people have referred to me as like a former core developer recently, but you know, the reality is that like I've had more lines of code merged in the last six months or so than like many of, you know, I don't know, the people, you know, others would think of as core developers. So I'm still very much involved, certainly in Bitcoin. And I've got two open PRs at the moment that implement CTV and CheckSigFromStack. CFS... CSFS is like the hardest acronym to say for some, everybody struggles with it. But yeah, man, it's great to be here with you, because I've really enjoyed your Twitter stream as of the last few months. I think we're kind of on the same wavelength about certain things. So yeah, it'll be a fun conversation.

2:48Vlad CosteaYeah, I gotta mention that we spent about 20 minutes chit chatting before going live. And I got to apologize to everyone waiting, who thought we were gonna have this at six o'clock my time, it wasn't. But it's really fascinating that we got into Bitcoin for the same reason. And unlike many of our peers, we never forgot why we got into Bitcoin. And do you think this is a problem? Like, should we forget? Should we start going to bankers being like, hey, why don't you pay me to not say why I got into Bitcoin and you can just pump your bags and not worry that Bitcoin is ever going to change?

3:29James O'BeirneYeah, it's it's really ironic to me, man. I mean, I guess, you know, if you'd asked me like four years ago, if I was worried about Bitcoin scaling into something that's actually a challenge to the fiat order or actually provides a realistic working alternative to the monetary system, I probably would have said something like, yeah, I mean, it's a concern, but I'm not, you know, we'll figure it out, something will happen because we've got some time. But just in the last year, seeing the depths of financialization that are going on, you know, whether it's MicroStrategy or Tether or the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, I did not think things would happen as fast as they are.

4:13And people disagree with me about this, but I think that as more and more elements from traditional finance and government get involved in Bitcoin, it's going to be harder to change. And so the problem is that Bitcoin isn't right now in a state where there's any realistic scaling solution aside from basically custodial services, which defeats the purpose of Bitcoin. And so if Bitcoin doesn't change, then then like what have we done? I used to make fun of Ethereum because it was like, oh, Ethereum is basically just like a shitty version of AWS that's more expensive because you have to run a proof of work algorithm.

4:52But, you know, it's all going to be centralized. And so you should just, you know, run your code on AWS. And it's like the same thing is sort of at risk of happening on Bitcoin where we just recreated this less efficient paper market for most people. And so I do worry about Bitcoin not progressing and sort of becoming that by default.

5:19Vlad CosteaYeah, here we go. There's someone in the chat, Casper83. He says new opcodes will not come to BTC. The reasoning will be to not enable MEV, which is miner extracted value.

5:34James O'BeirneYeah, I think you can, you know, that's an ongoing discussion with, say, CAT. But CTV, CheckSigFromStack, those things are pretty well understood by everybody not to have any kind of MEV risk. And I would say in the case of CAT, which I'm definitely in favor of because I think we need that low level escape hatch to do things like, you know, maybe roll ups or whatever, lacking subsequent consensus changes. I think the argument about CAT not doing MEV is best expressed probably by Eric Wall. And I don't know if he's written anything up about this.

6:11But his argument is basically that because of the 10-minute block time, all of the reordering and, you know, miner extractable values basically moved up into these layer 2 sequencers instead of, you know, being handled at the mining layer in Bitcoin. And so you wouldn't actually see a lot of, you know, real issues with CAT. And I'm persuaded by that. But that's an ongoing discussion.

6:40Vlad CosteaYeah, I think the ultimate argument to prove OP_CAT is that it's already available on Bitcoin Cash and Liquid. So if you want to break it, you can already do that on a live net. It's not hypothetical. I think the biggest concern about OP_CAT is about unknown unknowns, like something that can happen in the future nobody's thinking about right now. But if you can imagine any of those attack vectors, you can actually make some money.

7:14James O'BeirneRight. But that cuts both ways, right? Because in some ways we want unknown unknowns because right now there aren't any deployed layer 2s that actually scale Bitcoin properly. You know, some of these may be on the horizon with things like, you know, Citrea is a sponsor of this show, StarkWare. You know, some of these roll-ups that are being actively developed and I guess are going to be deployed sometime soon. You know, maybe these things actually work and trustlessly scale Bitcoin ownership. But of course, all these companies want OP_CAT because it helps them do that more efficiently.

7:56So the point is like this unknown unknown situation cuts both ways. And it would be one thing if we felt really confident about how Bitcoin is actually going to deliver on its mission. But I think until we do have that confidence, like you want to allow for some amount of innovation that nobody's anticipated.

8:18Vlad CosteaWell, the kind of innovation that we got is under attack right now because we got SegWit and we got Taproot. And we have this guy who used to work at Chaincode, just like yourself. And he was thinking, why don't I do NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain? And I let people also add the JPEG. And I used this cool trick that I can do with Taproot to basically have file sizes up to an entire block size. And then people became angry, not all of them, like I was very much in favor of it.

8:53I was like, if you believe that Bitcoin is permissionless and you have freedom of transactions, then just let this happen. Forget about it. Don't try to gatekeep. There's no way for you to filter out this kind of use case. And I think I read one of the best metaphors for it, that the filter people like Luke Dashjr and whatever with their Ocean mining pool, they think they can stop the rain with a tennis racket. Of course, there's water pouring. Of course, there are some drops that get stopped, but eventually they do get to the other side.

9:29So it's horrible. And we got this sort of innovation where people were able to put files on the blockchain at a much lower cost. But what came out of this is that we got the ZK rollups on Bitcoin. And we had people thinking, OK, you can put stupid JPEGs, but what else can you put? So they said maybe ZK verification files, some sort of stuff like SNARKs or whatever. And that can actually work. You can verify against the ZK proof to create layer 2s. I mean, it's more innovation that we got from Core itself.

10:11James O'BeirneAbsolutely, yeah. I've never understood really the objection to the JPEGs on the blockchain. I mean, I know aesthetically people don't like it because it's not payment activity. But in many ways, how is it any different from a group of people that you don't like sending payments back and forth? You know, it's essentially a use of the chain that you may not personally sign off on. But the point is, if they're paying the fees, then they can use the chain because it's a permissionless chain. And in fact, if nobody is paying the fees, as we've seen recently, that's, in my view, a much bigger problem than people paying what is a thousand times S3 storage costs to push some arbitrary data onto the chain.

10:56If we don't have people paying into the miner security budget long term, that's a very troubling situation because at that point, you have guys like Peter Todd suggesting a tail emission, which I think is totally beyond the pale. I think it's absolutely despicable to even talk about something like that because you're then basically talking about undermining the property rights of Bitcoin, the whole parameters of the system that brought everybody in in the first place. And so, if we don't figure out a way to get fees to miners, the security budget takes a big hit.

11:36And people on Twitter, I said this in an interview recently with Pete Rizzo, I was talking about this, and some of the people on Twitter respond, well, it's fine because we have the difficulty adjustment. The difficulty will just go down if a hash rate goes offline. It's like you're not understanding that if the total security budget of Bitcoin goes down, then it makes the system as a whole easier to attack. It makes the system as a whole easier to reorg, do denial of service, and basically impair Bitcoin's place as some kind of monetary backbone.

12:08So yeah, okay, mechanically the difficulty would adjust, but if you're not paying for security, then the system isn't really going to be an effective store of value, and that's a huge problem.

12:20Vlad CosteaPeople celebrate when they see a larger hash rate, but they don't realize it goes both ways. It can be a blackmail, too. These miners can drop out, and then the difficulty goes down, and then they come back, and they can do stuff because they have all of this hash rate, right? They can switch it back on, and I think mining pools like Foundry, which are unitary, meaning that I don't think they have any third parties being part of their pool. It's just devices that they own, and they mine with them as a business.

12:52If they do want to play this game, they can do it. They own like 30-something percent of the hash rate, and if you're going to have a situation where it's not profitable to mine anymore, and you have a bunch of miners dropping out, first of all, it's going to take 2016 blocks until the next difficulty adjustment, and if the blocks are super slow, you're going to cause a situation where maybe it takes one month or two months until we get to the next epoch, and we have the readjustment, and after the readjustment, you already have the ASICs out there, and these miners can deploy the ASICs, and they can game with this, and the fact that it hasn't happened, it doesn't mean that it can't happen in the future.

13:36It's part of the game theory. It's something that they can do.

13:41James O'BeirneYeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I think figuring out where fees are going to come from and some degree of fee smoothing, which CTV provides with congestion control, is an important thing to think about.

13:57Vlad CosteaThere's also Casper83 in the chat. He says that Bitcoin needs the Avalanche pre-consensus to fix MEV. I'm not even sure how that works, but are you aware?

14:10James O'BeirneYeah, I'm not aware of Avalanche pre-consensus. Again, I think a persuasive argument has to be made that MEV is even a problem for Bitcoin in the first place, given the slow block time, given the block size limits, given script size limits. Bitcoin is a much more constrained environment in terms of scripting and execution than something like Ethereum is, and so I think drawing vague concerns about MEV based on experiences in those other environments probably isn't relevant. So before you even talk about adding some big pre-consensus component to Bitcoin, which I can almost guarantee will never happen, whether we want it or not, make sure you believe the MEV risk is real first.

15:07Vlad CosteaYeah. I was going to ask you mentioned Citrea, the sponsor of the show. I'm not going to plug the ad. I'm just going to ask you what you think about it. Did you look at how their model works? Do you think it's a good idea for Bitcoin?

15:22James O'BeirneI haven't looked in detail at their model. To be honest, I don't really understand the ins and outs of roll-ups. I don't understand the ins and outs of BitVM. I understand sort of what they are as a black box. What I can say about Citrea is I've met two guys from their company, and they've both been wonderful, brilliant guys, who I think are much more ideologically similar to the kind of people I found in Bitcoin like eight years ago than the people who are chiefly involved with, say, core development at the moment.

16:04And so when I met Talip from Citrea recently, and it was just such a refreshing experience because he had a kind of optimism about what these roll-ups can do, what zero knowledge proofs can do for Bitcoin, and he really seemed to get the mission, which is not something that I hear a lot of developers at this point talking about in terms of what Bitcoin's high-level mission is. And so it was great to meet those guys, but I don't really know much about ZKP. It seems promising, but I can't talk too intelligibly about the mechanisms.

16:46I know there's a lot of debate about whether the economics will work out in terms of, okay, does it make sense to pay all these fees to miners for the data availability on Bitcoin? Is there going to be enough volume? How do those fees get distributed over the users? I know with Ark, the amount of liquidity that a provider needs to lock up is to some degree a function of how much payment volume is actually within one of the Ark windows. I don't know what the equivalent is for these ZKP roll-ups, but I think it's really important that people are experimenting with this stuff.

17:29Vlad CosteaAnd based on the interviews that I did with Orkun, who is their CEO and founder, I did understand that they're trying to build a Bitcoin economy. Okay, they come from Ethereum. A lot of these toxic laser eye guys, they look at them and they say they're shitcoiners, but they do want to build an economy around BTC. So, for example, I interviewed one of the application builders on Citrea, and he was mentioning that you can do loans and you can have all of these DeFi use cases, which they're trying to not call DeFi because it's sort of a tainted abbreviation.

18:09I don't know. It's a buzzword that maybe rubs some people the wrong way. But they want to do that at the protocol level as opposed to having institutions and situations such as FTX or Celsius or whatever. So, I think it's really cool that they're trying to allow Bitcoin to do more because I think the laser eye people are very ignorant to the fact that WBTC right now is the largest, or maybe Ethereum is the largest, sidechain because WBTC is orders of magnitude bigger than Lightning, bigger than Liquid, bigger than Rootstock and everything out there.

18:48And if people figure out a way to enable these guys who want to do DeFi, but not on Ethereum, but on a Bitcoin layer, I think that's going to be huge.

19:01James O'BeirneYeah, I agree. Bitcoin exists to disintermediate. And I think that a lot of people in the space have forgotten that because it seems like increasing numbers of people are okay with custodians being the de facto layer 2 scaling method, even if that's not Coinbase or BlackRock, but even in the case of a custodial sidechain where you've got a federation or a Cashu mint. I mean, those things are better, obviously, than conventionally regulated financial institutions, but they're still missing the point of Bitcoin, which is to provide basically a peer-to-peer value transmission mechanism that isn't contingent on intermediaries.

19:46And so if someone like Citrea, StarkWare, these other roll-ups, can essentially encode these kinds of financial mechanisms that people use, you know, in traditional finance with with Bitcoin in a trustless way. That's what we're all here to do. And so I think people working on those projects in that part of the space are somewhat ignored or underserved. I mean, I wasn't, you know, until I met with Talip, you know, a few weeks ago, I wasn't even really aware that so much of this was going on.

20:26And I think another interesting dimension of that is that these companies have a lot of money behind them to deliver on these projects. And so if in the next year we have a few of these come online and they're committing a bunch of data to the chain, you might see chain usage in Bitcoin go way up in pretty short order because, you know, these BitVM scripts are not small or, you know, whatever the bridging layer is between the roll-ups and Bitcoin.

20:59Vlad CosteaYeah, you also mentioned StarkWare and I do recall, I think it was Murch who was complaining on Twitter that he's been spammed by people because StarkWare did something with their token like an airdrop to contributors in Bitcoin Core. They had that as a stipulation. And of course most of the Bitcoin Core contributors, out of virtue or whatever, because they wanted to signal to the others that they're BTC only, they never claimed the airdrop. So you had a bunch of people pressuring these guys to basically let them collect the airdrop, trying to make deals with them saying, well, if you collect the airdrop I'm gonna pay you this and I get to keep the rest of the tokens and whatever.

21:41And I saw some hatred for StarkWare, not maybe because they hate ZK-STARKs, which I'm not sure how many people actually looked into that, but because they had this marketing effort to get people to be bag holders of their token. And in regards to Citrea, I did notice over the last couple of days that there was this censorship scandal on the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository and the filter people, I mean the Ocean mining pool people, they are claiming that there's a conflict of interest because there is one core developer who's involved in the conversation who is in favor of Citrea, and that's why they think that there's not gonna be a fix for the filters, which once again is impossible.

22:34As long as someone spins up a node that does not filter anything, it's pointless and the miners can choose to pick up the transaction because of course they want to make money. You can't fix some technical problems with politics.

22:51James O'BeirneTotally, it astounds me that someone as experienced and invested really in Bitcoin as like Luke Jr. just chronically misunderstands the role of mempool standardness and policy. The strongest argument you can make that the policy in Bitcoin Core prevents the so-called spam is that it provides a slight impediment to just relaying it by default through the network. But if you're somebody like Citrea, StarkWare, whatever, any of these companies and you have, if you want to create a four megabyte transaction, you're gonna do it. You're gonna pair with miners or you're gonna use Slipstream or mempool accelerator or whatever.

23:41It's really not any real impediment at all. And so it is kind of baffling to see that. In terms of all of the controversy in the Core repo on that particular PR, I think the guy in question with an interest in Citrea is Jameson Lopp. And I mean, he certainly pays attention to the repo, but he's certainly not moderating that process. Maybe he's weighing in on that pull request. And this whole conversation to me is just very silly because you and I both know that this standard in this question is kind of beside the point.

24:20I think the thing that we should be focusing on as people who care about Bitcoin delivering on its original mission is what consensus change is gonna come down the line, hopefully in the next little while here, that's gonna actually enable more of this sort of trustless ownership of Bitcoin, trustless financial innovation on top of Bitcoin, using it as kind of the native denominator. And that's, you know, in some ways I'm skeptical of all the controversy around this mempool stuff because it feels like a distraction from the bigger questions about where is the protocol going.

24:55Vlad CosteaYeah, to me it's crazy because I agree that Luke is a genius in some ways, but at the same time the way in which he uses words is different from how other people use words. So if you truly want to understand him, you have to ask him to define every word and really grasp the meaning of what he's saying. But I also think that he had that meltdown when he lost like 200 Bitcoin and he had an entire roster of conference participants from Atlanta. And by the way, that was not TabConf. I met Michael Tidwell last year and he told me please never tell anyone that it was TabConf because it really wasn't, it was another side event. Anyway, the point is that Luke Dashjr lost his mind and he lost all that Bitcoin and then he started Ocean mining, right? And it seems like he found his new mission. Ever since that happened, he's been rabid and he's been unreasonable in ways that he hasn't been before. And these people point out to a conflict of interest because of some affiliation with Citrea and they see that as being, I don't know, harmful or evil or I'm not sure exactly what their description would be.

26:17But they don't mention that these people associated with Ocean, they also have their own interest, you know, and if they follow the same company line of thought and they don't think critically and they don't accept to be reasonable and they even try to make claims about the nature of Bitcoin which are wrong. I mean, that's also a conflict of interest, but it's just that these guys wear the badge of veterans who have been around fighting and blah blah blah. And the other guys are just trying to build stuff.

26:52James O'BeirneYeah, yeah, I 100% agree. I mean, I think as soon as you start getting into ad hominem, you know, reasoning, unless there's something really blatant, it just cuts both ways so often. And so, you know, it's easy in this situation I think to look at the fundamentals and basically just say, hey, yeah, this is really just trying to stop a rainstorm with a tennis racket. And you know, it seems like a pretty open and shut case to me. But, you know, again, I mean Luke's in a great position in the sense that he's got Knots and, you know, he can do whatever policy he wants while still implementing the same consensus rules as core or any other implementation and hey, they've got their own mining pool.

27:37So, you know, great. They can go nuts. I think let a thousand flowers bloom in that sense.

27:44Vlad CosteaBut I get the impression that Ocean mining is not really profitable. Like I've seen claims which are ridiculous that miners using Ocean are making more money. How? Like you're saying no to fees. You're not collecting some fees that other miners are collecting. And then they say, well, maybe that we have lower commissions or whatever they take as a pool and it's the participants who take most of the reward. But it's still ridiculous to me. It makes no sense. I think it all comes down to the mental gymnastics of, well, the transactions that other mining pools are collecting are not real Bitcoin transactions.

28:24They're spam. And of course you get no spam on Ocean and therefore you have more economic transactions with us and therefore you have a larger revenue, which is a very dumb way of explaining to people. But I get the impression from them that they're just like Blockstream and their purpose is not to build something necessarily, but to change the narrative about what Bitcoin is and keep the community in a perpetual state of infighting. Because I think Blockstream has their own share of blame for that because they collected a lot of money.

29:02They built some products. None of them was actually successful. I don't even think their mining operation is very profitable. They sold hardware wallets. I wonder how well they did with that one. Their sidechain is unpopular. I'm not sure if they have more than a couple of transactions per block. Their implementation of Lightning is still a minority one. It never became the standard, even though I can argue it was useful for someone to work on that. But Blockstream is not a profitable company, yet it raises so much money from investors.

29:39And I wonder sometimes, do these investors really want these products to succeed or are they financing Blockstream because it has this political power over Bitcoin? And sometimes I think Ocean is trying to do the same.

29:53James O'BeirneThat's interesting. I mean, just as a general note, I find it really ironic that in Bitcoin, almost every commercial enterprise in Bitcoin, if you're not like a successful exchange or a small hardware wallet, is kind of the product of fiat money. It's like we're all living off the backs of cheap VC money injected into businesses that are far from profitable so far. And that's just like kind of a fatal irony to me about the space. But yeah, I think maybe this is a separate topic than what you wanted to go for.

30:30But yeah, I think Blockstream is a very interesting case here because upon reexamining the last decade of Bitcoin development and reading the Hijacking Bitcoin book and kind of reconsidering the block size wars, which I was there firsthand for and was a pretty outspoken small blocker, you really can't get around the fact that Blockstream kind of existentially was predicated on this idea of small blocks being the only way to go forward and a congested, constrained system giving way to usage of side chains and federated side chains. And I don't think anybody at Blockstream, at least to my direct knowledge, set out to start Blockstream with the intent of sort of crippling Bitcoin in this sense or constraining it.

31:29But I think anybody who came to be involved with Blockstream and employed by Blockstream is no longer impartial in certain ways about the way that Bitcoin scales because indeed the thing that they're participating in is contingent on this idea that Bitcoin is going to be constrained on the base layer in certain ways. And so I definitely think some of those dynamics can be at work very subtly. In the case of Ocean, I just think the Blockstream arguments were very persuasive when they were being made. And they were well marketed.

32:08They were credibly marketed. And there were a lot of smart people there. There are a lot of smart people at Ocean as well. I just don't know what Ocean is really trying to do in the way that I guess they want to reduce the block size. They want to eliminate spam or whatever. But they don't seem to be nearly as convincing about those objectives if they are objectives as Blockstream was. It really just seems to me like Luke has very specific and you can say principled ideas about what Bitcoin is for, what Bitcoin is, what Bitcoin should be.

32:45And Ocean is his way of expressing that. And that's great. I know that they're well-backed. I know that they've got, I think, a pretty good-sized war chest. So yeah, maybe they are making money. Maybe they're not. But I guess it's conceivable they could run at a deficit for a while just to serve a sort of ideological purpose in a way that perhaps Blockstream is, although, of course, Blockstream is sitting on a bunch of Bitcoin. But this, yeah, it is a very weird. I think anybody who's professionally involved in Bitcoin, you can make an argument that they have interest one way or another kind of on the basis of what the company they're funded by is wanting to do.

33:31And that is always worth paying attention to. And that is a very relevant thing. It's not always fully explanatory. So, you know, yeah, you have to incorporate that. But you also can't let that dominate some of the technical fundamentals.

33:48Vlad CosteaYeah, I agree. But at the same time, you have these factions which are getting VC funded and what they produce is mostly noise and fud about new stuff coming to Bitcoin. I mean, Blockstream has produced SegWit. We can argue about that. And they also produce Taproot. Maybe SegWit was not 100% the production of Blockstream, but Taproot was. It was Greg Maxwell, Andrew Poelstra and Pieter Wuille when he was still working there. And it was them who advertised it and pushed it. And the conversation was not specifically about Taproot.

34:26It was about Schnorr signatures coming to Bitcoin. They were talking about the expired patents, the fact that Satoshi used this library, which is sort of obsolete and not the most efficient way to do stuff. And they advocated for Schnorr. And then we got Taproot, which is not even full Schnorr signatures. We were supposed to also get cross input signature aggregation after this. And it seems like we forgot about that. But at the same time, we got the Taproot upgrade and what came from it, like some multisigs that very few users actually want.

35:04And that seems to be the full extent of it.

35:08James O'BeirneYeah, that's another irony is that, you know, in talking about soft forks going forward, it feels like there is an incredibly high burden to prove use and demand for a set of changes that are all in aggregate much smaller, both in line of code size and conceptual size than like SegWit and Taproot were. Whereas, yeah, I think because you had this sort of existing trust hierarchy, power hierarchy in developer community, it was very easy to kind of like leverage that existing hierarchy to get these changes through.

35:49I think SegWit and Taproot are good changes. I like them. I'm glad that they're in Bitcoin. But the reality is that they are massive changes. They weren't very well scrutinized. I mean, they were well scrutinized. But obviously, there were some surprises there, as evidenced by the ordinals stuff.

36:09And really, they got in because there were a few guys who everybody sort of reasonably believed in to come up with good changes for Bitcoin. But yeah, the situation now, though, is that changes which are much smaller, much more well scoped, more modest to evaluate are being subjected to this evaluation that's much harder than Taproot. And in some ways, of course, that should be the case. But I'd say it's just totally out of proportion to how SegWit and Taproot were kind of evaluated, especially when you consider how much smaller these proposals are than those things.

36:59And so I think it's kind of a sad state to see Bitcoin in, that it feels like we can't progress on these very achievable goals that many, many end uses of Bitcoin script are asking for.

37:18Vlad CosteaYou stopped talking just when I was about to sneeze. I hope I don't sneeze right now. But I wanted to ask you, what do you think about BIP 300 drivechains, like philosophically and technically? Did you like it? Do you have any objections?

37:36James O'BeirneYeah. Well, so my BIP 300 story is that I listened to Paul speak a few times, I want to say maybe, I don't know, six years ago. And I always love hearing Paul speak. I love speaking to Paul. He's a very special guy, and I'm glad he's in Bitcoin because he provides a great perspective. Somebody once described Paul, I think Nick Carter described Paul as the Steely Dan of Bitcoin. And I totally agree with that characterization. Steely Dan is one of my favorite bands of all time. So I was persuaded by things that Paul said at a high level, and I wanted to evaluate drivechains.

38:17And for me, I'm not kind of a immediately conceptual thinker. I'm someone who needs to dig into the code to really get my arms around an idea and how it works. And so I went and read the BIPs, and then I looked at the patches that were proposed to actually implement the drivechain BIPs. And they were just so big and so sprawling that I couldn't really, I couldn't see that proposal moving forward for that reason. And I also kind of couldn't understand some of the second order economics stuff around how drivechains would work.

38:56So I would say I'm drivechains agnostic. I like the high level features of what Paul, I think, is trying to do.

39:04Vlad CosteaYeah, right now, I think they are building much more concrete implementations that you can find. It's on layertwolabs.com/download. And they also have a community on Telegram where people talk. And that's how I got Vitalik Buterin for the next episode, actually. I was reading the conversation there, and Vitalik was tuning in to add some insights. And I was like, hey, Vitalik, want podcast? And he DM'd me, and I had to double check that. It's not some sort of impersonator, but it was him. My point being right now is that for many years, Paul has been speaking about drivechains.

39:44And now you can actually try the software. So it's not just hypothetical that Bitcoin can do this, and you can have this type of sidechain. You can actually test that. I think it's on the signet. And you can mine blocks with your clients. You have a Bitcoin one, a Zcash one, an Ethereum one, a Namecoin one. I think also a prediction market one, which I think for the longest time has been Paul's little concept. And it's sort of a shame that Ethereum took that with Polymarket. Right now, Polymarket is so big.

40:18And I wish Paul got to do this. But anyway, I wanted to let the listeners know that they can try that. If you want to test it, James, you're invited to. Now, let's talk about the fact that you sound like a big blocker. What's wrong with you, man? Like, haven't you had your steak today? Haven't you had your, didn't you sun your balls or something?

40:45James O'BeirneSo for full disclosure, like I am one of those, you know, like, classic Bitcoin maxi, you know, I love I'm not I'm not a I don't do carnivore. But I very much like slot into that gym bro archetype that's associated with the Bitcoin maxis. And I never you know, back if you had asked me in 2017 2018, you know, I never would have thought like, I would be a big blocker or anything resembling that. But I think the important thing there was that I was taking a bunch of inherited wisdom for granted.

41:20I you know, you had guys like, you know, Greg Maxwell kind of parading around saying, you know, oh, big blocks will create this catastrophic miner centralization. And, you know, you won't be able to run a node and being able to, you know, anybody being able to verify Bitcoin is the most important feature of the system. And there are elements of truth to all of that. But some some of the arguments for four-megabyte blocks are just outdated and dumb and wrong and untrue. And so the talk that I gave at OP_NEXT recently was basically me quantitatively investigating, you know, the claims around if blocks got bigger, you know, would you see miner centralization?

42:06Would it be materially harder for, you know, people who want to run nodes and do full validation to actually do those things? And a lot of the conclusions that I came to suggested that we could raise we could probably 10x, 100x blocks and see no material increase in centralization because of existing technologies. We have like, oh, nice cat because of technologies like compact blocks, AssumeUTXO, you know, and proposed technologies like weak blocks and Utreexo, which are pretty well understood at this point. But the whole impetus for me to think about this was looking at the current state of Bitcoin scaling and saying like lightning is not going to get us there because lightning requires everybody to have at least a UTXO.

43:02Which is totally not workable, you know, Bitcoin monthly can only support something like 5% of Americans from having a UTXO and moving it around, let alone the rest of the world. So, you know, lightning really doesn't get us there. Maybe things like Ark and ZKP rollups help. But look, at the end of the day, my concern is making Bitcoin into something that is an actually viable alternative financial system where you can't be inflated, you can't be censored. And that's my chief objective. My chief objective is not to preserve some kind of aesthetic engineering design choice that, you know, graybeards came up with whatever 13 years ago.

43:48I think it's worth heeding those things. But at the end of the day, I think, you know, if you're if you're really serious about Bitcoin, you're here for those fundamental reasons. And so I looked, I started to evaluate bigger blocks as a way to ensure that Bitcoin could actually deliver on some of its original promises. And I was surprised at, you know, the degree to maybe it can.

44:10Vlad CosteaWell, I know that you're not a BCasher because you did not refer to Greg Maxwell as One Meg Greg. That's what they used to call him back in 2018 or something. But it's so reasonable, man. Like, why is it so contentious? You can do block size increases with soft forks, with extension blocks. It doesn't have to be a hard fork, which seems to be this boogeyman that everyone is afraid of. Because for some reason we're going to get they think we're going to get divided and have like a community split around any attempt to increase the capacity.

44:49But once again, we have to not think in extremes. I think that's the best solution because it sounds so reasonable. Yes, we should keep the block size small. Yeah. But how small is small?

45:04James O'BeirneYeah. Like the idea that we just happened upon the perfect equilibrium of the right size right now makes absolutely no sense. And look, you know, I think the best objection to what I'm saying, you know, about like, hey, we could have a bigger block size, maybe that would do us a lot of good. The best objection right now is that, hey, look, man, people don't even care about self custody in the first place. Like, you know, we've got these empty blocks for the last few months. And the real problem is that nobody nobody even cares about kind of using Bitcoin in a real way.

45:39And that's absolutely true. That's totally true. But the point that I come back with is that that could change overnight. If there's some kind of regulatory shock, you know, if there's like not even an executive order 6102, but something softer, more subtle, like, you know, all of the regulated exchanges in G7 countries are required to run some kind of fork that implements like monetary policy tools. If something like that comes around, then all of a sudden you're going to see this huge demand shock for block space and we're not going to have any kind of an answer for it.

46:12And that's basically de facto game over, you know, the system's captured. And so, yeah, right now people may not care about self custody, but, you know, my job as an engineer, any software engineer working on Bitcoin, our job is to sort of foresee where the bottlenecks are going to be and try and come up with at least graphs of solutions for this stuff. And, you know, you're talking about kind of the aversion to like the forking, you know, the particular activation mechanism. The steel man, I guess, against doing hard forks is yes, of course, you don't want to have to force people to upgrade the software because that's kind of this dangerous precedent where if you have to upgrade the software to hold your Bitcoin, then you're putting the user in a position where maybe they don't agree with all the changes.

47:01Maybe they don't want to upgrade the software. So that is bad. But like you say, there are designs where you can do things that are not quite hard forks, not quite soft forks. Obviously, that's not altogether a comfortable situation either because, you know, with say extension blocks, it's like the old nodes, you know, may not be validating certain things like you'd have to get into specifics. But, you know, if they're not seeing the new transactions come through, you know, in the higher capacity region of the block, then, you know, maybe they're not like able to validate the supply or something like that.

47:40Those are specifics that could and should be worked out for a given proposal. But yeah, your point is a good one that like it doesn't necessarily take a hard fork to do this kind of a thing. So, yeah, I think it's worth looking at.

47:55Vlad CosteaAnd I think something that is super underrated and that Litecoin has done is the Mimblewimble extension block, which adds some privacy and also some scalability. Mimblewimble is a protocol that prunes old blocks, so it doesn't take a lot of storage. It's super scalable. The nodes that are willing to participate in this, they're not having to add a lot of capacity because, once again, it goes back to Blockstream. They came up with confidential transactions. To their credit, Adam Back and Greg Maxwell, they built this. But I think a lot of Maxis, they stopped researching and learning about how stuff works.

48:37And they just remember from like 12 years ago or whenever we had confidential transactions that privacy is necessarily very big in size and unscalable by definition. They added that to Liquid because they don't care. It's just a bunch of centralized operators that are running the federation. But if you look at it, there's been Mimblewimble, which was co-developed by a Blockstream researcher and engineer, which is Andrew Poelstra. I'm not sure if he was the creator, but he was one of the guys who picked it up and made it actually functional.

49:15And it used to be a big deal up until I think there was an exploit in basically being able to store all the transactions in spite of the pruning, which takes away some of that privacy. But even in that case, if you're going to extend the capacity of Bitcoin, you can do it like this and the nodes are not going to have to become data centers. Because that was always the argument that Bitcoin nodes will end up becoming data centers if the block size is too big.

49:49Right now, I think the blockchain is about 500-something gigabytes in size. How much is a 500-gigabyte hard drive? It's not too much. And you can prune the transactions; that's also something we don't talk about too much. Like, you're still fully validating because you're syncing from Genesis, but you're dropping the old blocks.

50:14James O'BeirneExactly. And that's, I mean, here's the thing, is that the blockchain grows indefinitely for all of time. And so at some point, basically everybody's gonna start pruning. Basically, everybody's gonna start using AssumeUTXO or something like it to sync. And so it's, for all that stuff, it's just a matter of time now. I mean, there will always be archival nodes where, you know, people have the full and complete history and they turn off assumevalid, which, by the way, is default, that skips most of the signature checks in the chain when you're doing the initial block download. There will always be people, and there should always be people, who do that. But the reality is that, like, most people don't give anywhere near a shit about running a node at all. The few that do can afford halfway decent hardware for the most part.

51:03I think within, you know, a very tight tolerance. And even those people, 20 years from now, they're all going to be running pruned nodes that use some kind of abbreviated syncing, because we just can't, for all of time, you know, do this linear process. I mean, you know, maybe we have some kind of a magical, you know, hardware revolution that makes that conceivable, but it's probably just not in the cards. And so again, you know, when I really looked at the block size quantitatively and made some measurements, which are all detailed in the OP_NEXT talk,

51:40it was really clear to me that four megabytes is like a very, very, very constrained, conservative, you know, it's... and it's like, yeah, it's just not... I don't think it's doing us any favors really at all. Your point about, you know, Mimblewimble and extension blocks is interesting. I think privacy stuff is crucial to think about, but I think the one objection I would raise there is that in systems like Monero, you know, where you have ring signatures and really good privacy, and, you know, even with, say, confidential transactions where you're hiding the amounts, some of the auditability, you know, of the chain is not necessarily sacrificed, but maybe obfuscated. And so, you know, in Monero, like, if they have had an inflation bug in the past, nobody can really prove it.

52:35You can't show it. And for me, you know, privacy is a very important part of Bitcoin, but the most important thing about Bitcoin is preventing inflation and preventing censorship. And so I think privacy is kind of a secondary consideration there. And so I can see, you know, hey, if we come up with some magic way to get some kind of Mimblewimble-like functionality into Bitcoin in a palatable way, I'm all for it. But I can also see the objection that the thing that we really want to make sure sticks around is the auditability, the assurance that, hey, the supply is what it is.

53:14Vlad CosteaYeah, but at the same time, you can verify how many coins are coming in and out of the extension block. So it's not like you're adding that on top of the base layer.

53:24James O'BeirneThat's... yeah, that may be true. Yeah.

53:27Vlad CosteaYou can also add zk-SNARKs, I think, on extension blocks. I don't think anyone has done that, but it was so much fun to laugh at Zcash like three or four years ago. They had some incidents, but to their credit, they went back to the drawing board and they came back with Halo 2, they came back with Orchard, and a lot of cool stuff happening. And I don't think they get the credit that they deserve for it. And we forget that basically Zcash is a team of developers that wanted to improve Bitcoin with a paper that was called Zerocash back in 2013, and it was too experimental for Bitcoin at the time.

54:04Maybe it was the wise decision to not soft fork it into Bitcoin around 2013, but my point is that they've pushed this technology very far. They don't require a trusted setup anymore. The transaction sizes are pretty much the same size as a one-input, two-output SegWit transaction within an anonymity pool. They're making some very great breakthroughs, but it seems like Bitcoin doesn't care too much about this, but the Ethereum camp seems to be more interested and they're using it, and it seems like Ethereum is more into privacy these days.

54:42James O'BeirneYeah, man, I think these other chains deserve so much credit for pioneering this stuff, experimenting with it in a real environment, developing it. And it's very easy as a Bitcoiner to just shit on these other projects, and the level of, like, cowardice and entitlement there in doing that is unreal, because these guys probably aren't gonna get the credit of, you know, making a change, say, directly to Bitcoin, but they are sowing the prerequisite seeds to evaluating all this stuff and figuring out what works and what doesn't, and, you know, what can make it into Bitcoin. And so in many ways, like, a lot of those things going on right now are much more important than, like, the kind of Core development that's happening around, you know, the mempool and aspects of the system that are sort of secondary in nature. And these guys won't get any credit. In fact, like, they'll probably be shit on by a lot of the Bitcoin community. And so it's simultaneously a shame to see, but very kind of, you know... Now, I don't know.

55:50Maybe you can make the argument that enough of these kinds of projects, like, have kind of gotten rich by, you know, pumping their own bags in some way, that maybe it all offsets in the end. But the point is that I'm really glad that projects like Zcash, you know, and Ethereum and Litecoin, Mimblewimble, all these things exist, and they're trying new strategies to get at the big objective, which is to just challenge, you know, this extractive, exploitative fiat system with a workable alternative.

56:24So it's great they're doing that.

56:27Vlad CosteaYeah. And back to the topic of bigger blocks: we like to not read the Lightning white paper, which mentions, I think, 133-megabyte blocks or something. We like to say, yeah, Lightning fixes this, it gives you sender privacy, it also scales very well, and it leaves no on-chain footprint. It's so cool. Look, I just installed Wallet of Satoshi, or if you're fancy, Phoenix wallet or Blixt or whatever. But at the same time, we forget that it doesn't really scale, and we need people to use this in a sovereign way. And it gets very depressing once you realize that people will just point out right now that the mempool is empty and be so ignorant saying,

57:15yeah, the fact that they're not using it right now just proves that there's not enough demand for it. But they overlook what's happening on Solana or what's happening on Tron right now. You pay like three, four dollars for a transaction of USDT on Tron. It's insane. It's really insane that you pay that much money to move Tether across the Tron network. And speaking of that, I gotta plug another sponsor. Let me make a transition. If someone wants to pay in stablecoins on Tron or whatever, you can use SideShift to just paste your Bitcoin address. They're gonna send their stablecoins to the address that belongs to SideShift, and then you're going to get BTC into your account. There is no mandatory registration that's required, and I think the fees are pretty low and the liquidity is good. So check out SideShift.ai. You can use it for this, or you can buy shitcoins if you're into that. I don't recommend it, but you can do it. It's a free market, it's a free world. Use your freedom with responsibility. But my main point here was that we say on one hand that there's not enough demand for this and Bitcoin should not scale, and we were so right, you know, we were so right to not increase the block size, because look, nobody's using it. But on the other hand, we overlook the fact that there's so much activity on Ethereum, Solana, Litecoin. Litecoin on BitPay is the most used payment coin, which is insane.

58:47It's called BitPay. It was Bitcoin-only until 2017 or something, and now Litecoin is number one on BitPay. And once again, we live in this ivory tower and we say we're maximalists, we're so great, we're pure, we don't use shitcoins. But we don't see how the rest of the world does. And a lot of the stuff that could happen on Bitcoin and did start on Bitcoin is being co-opted somewhere else, and it's getting network effects. It's not like it's a fad and it's gonna go away after the bull market ends.

59:20James O'BeirneYeah, that's the funny thing about re-examining the block size war with the benefit of hindsight, is that in many ways we really did scare away a lot of these uses. I remember specifically, like, OpenBazaar, you know, it was this peer-to-peer marketplace, and they were really active in the block size war, basically saying, hey, this is gonna, you know, this is gonna kind of remove our use case. And, you know, in Hijacking Bitcoin there are a number of interesting artifacts, like a blog post from the Steam guys basically saying, like, hey, it wasn't because of block size, but, like, unpredictability of fees kind of is basically preventing us from accepting Bitcoin. And, you know, the Bitcoin payments discussion is kind of a separate thing.

1:00:03But at the same time, I can't help but wonder, and this is a totally academic question, but I can't help but wonder: if the payments stuff in Bitcoin had taken off more, would you have more de facto self-custody? You know, if people actually were making payments in Bitcoin, you know, would that mean that they're just, like, that ownership by default is more decentralized? And I do think there's sort of an argument for that. But on the other hand, yeah, it's, you know, payment scale is totally massive, and I'm really at the moment just concerned with ensuring that we have even store-of-value scale that's resistant to attack from, you know, governments and corporations. And I think we're not even there yet. So we don't even have kind of the technical assurance that we'll be able to weather some kind of regulatory attack on the consensus rules themselves. So I'm concerned with getting there. But yeah, so I mean, it is a really fascinating thing to kind of, like, walk back through. And we may have, like, Bitcoin kind of may have already been dealt, like, a fatal blow, in the sense that we haven't seen it yet, but, like, maybe it's already captured. Maybe the kind of anti-fiat potential energy of Bitcoin is already exhausted, and we're just kind of coasting on momentum, and pretty soon it's gonna essentially be governed by, you know, these large institutions like Saylor and BlackRock and those entities. And, like, right now we're all just kind of, like, being smug and saying, oh, yeah, we won, when in reality, like, we totally didn't. But I guess my optimism there is that Bitcoin as an experiment is still seeding us with the technological know-how, you know, the tools, the experimentation, to eventually do something that will truly provide an alternative.

1:02:08And so, you know, I hope it's Bitcoin. I still hope we still have some gas left in the tank and we can actually put up a fight and make this thing workable, but I have no illusions that it may not be. And, you know, Bitcoin may well be just traveling kind of the same path that gold did at this point, in terms of being locked away in warehouses and rehypothecated. So that is a shame. Just, you know, getting back to your note on the Lightning paper,

1:02:37I don't deserve, you know, credit entirely for kind of resurfacing this conversation about block size, because Tadge Dryja, the, you know, one of the authors of the original Lightning paper, gave a talk, I want to say, eight months ago at the previous OP_NEXT, subtly talking about the need to re-evaluate block size. And so I think he's been, you know, kind of putting out vibes on this topic, and of course Tadge is, like, you know, widely respected, and well he should be.

1:03:16And so I kind of, you know, I was prompted somewhat by him, I was prompted somewhat by Hijacking Bitcoin, prompted somewhat by just seeing the sorry state of the scaling conversation, you know, to take a look at block size again.

1:03:34Vlad CosteaAt the same time, it seems like this concept of increasing the block size is contentious. But there are a couple of situations where we do agree that we do need to hard fork Bitcoin, right? We agree that there needs to be some sort of resistance against the quantic... quantum computing. I was thinking in Romanian, sorry. And also, there needs to be some hard fork to fix that timestamp issue, which is going to become a big deal in like 40 years or something. So please answer this.

1:04:16I got to kick out the cat because he's interrupting too much. I apologize to everyone watching this that I'm going to be absent for like a minute, but I do have to do this for the sake of the interview.

1:04:28James O'BeirneOf course, yeah. So yeah, I mean there are some hard forks that need to happen. My view is basically that these kinds of clinical hard forks that are very rote mechanical changes like a time stamp fix, you know, and an obvious threat if quantum becomes viable. I have a lot of skepticism about quantum. I think it's probably bullshit just because of the physical processes necessary to scale up, you know, physical qubits. I think we're good at doing things in software. We're not very good at doing things in the physical world anymore, which is a shame.

1:05:14So I'm not so worried about quantum, but if there is a kind of obvious threat along those lines, I think it will be much easier to galvanize support for some kind of a fork that fixes things like those. You know, my bigger concern is that there are certain forks that we need to do to ensure the, you know, the properties of the system in the way that I've been talking about, you know, add some scripting functionality that lets us get to these trustless scaling mechanisms. And I think the appetite for those broadly is going to go down over time just because the ownership is going to shift so much towards BlackRock, you know, big institutions.

1:06:01And the problem is that the more coin that institutions like those control, did you miss all that Vlad or are you, I can recap for you if you missed some of that.

1:06:13Vlad CosteaLike a very short summary. I don't want people to get bored listening to the same stuff.

1:06:18James O'BeirneYeah, yeah, yeah. No, I wouldn't do that to your viewership. Long and short of it is I think mechanical changes like a timestamp fix, you know, addressing obvious attacks, you're not going to hit so much resistance to a hard fork because it's just obvious something needs to happen. I said I'm very skeptical about the viability of quantum computing, although I'm by no means an expert. And the thing that I worry more about is that the window for interesting soft forks is closing, you know, soft forks that might actually get us great functionality for Bitcoin, you know, not only in terms of scaling, but vaults are really important I think for decentralizing Bitcoin ownership.

1:06:58And I think the clock might be running out on, you know, the palatability for that broadly, not because people don't want those things, but because ownership of coin is concentrating in the hands of regulated entities. And there's going to be resistance from them, I think, to those because in some cases, scaling Bitcoin on-chain is directly contrary to their business interests in the same way that it is say for Blockstream. You know, BlackRock wants people to own IBIT. They don't want people necessarily to own on-chain Bitcoin.

1:07:32That doesn't do anything for them. So if there's a proposed soft fork that's like, hey, you know, we're going to do CTV, which makes it easier to do a BitVM type roll-up or Ark, you know, I think it would be very easy for institutions like that to say, no, no, no, what are you doing? Like, you know, we're not going to support this. This is too risky. You know, Bitcoin needs to stay the way that it is. We've got this giant, you know, momentum built behind what Bitcoin is.

1:08:01And furthermore, in, say, the case of BlackRock, you know, in their filings, they basically say, hey, we get to choose which side of the fork gets dumped. You know, the owners of IBIT have no claim on both sides of the fork. And so this creates a situation where if you have a construction like that that's holding a lot of Bitcoin, they get to essentially decide like which way the ticker goes for BTC. And, you know, that's that's a tremendous amount of control over what Bitcoin winds up being.

1:08:32And so I just worry that the clock is running down in terms of soft forks that actually enable Bitcoin to become the thing that we want it to be.

1:08:43Vlad CosteaYeah. So I have to ask you, because over the last few years, we have seen so many proposals and the term covenant has become sort of the priority for these soft forks. And I think it all started with CTV. It was Jeremy who was pushing this very hard. He was going to every conference talking about Sapio, his smart contract computing platform. He had a bunch of people like that. There was that guy, Keagan, who left Start9 to join the work on CTV. And then I guess the momentum was lost on covenants and that there was no consensus whether or not this is necessary.

1:09:28But what happened next is that when the conversation started about one year and a half ago, we had too many proposals. Like, it was very hard to choose anything. At one point, I think this was sort of Blockstream's way of remaining relevant in the conversation and also have a conspiracy theory about this regarding Blockstream. I think the reason why we don't have CTV yet is that they did not make it because they made Taproot and they had their contribution to SegWit. They do have to retain some of that power over development, and it's sort of lost if they acknowledge that this guy Jeremy was so right with his design. But my point was that we had too many proposals for covenants at one point. It seemed like every week someone else was coming out with another way to do CTV, but add something else on top. And now we're back to CTV and CSFS. And I was going to ask you, how did we revert to this and why do you think this is the best sort of choice as opposed to what Blockstream was proposing with the Great Script Restoration?

1:10:43James O'BeirneYeah, so great question. I am partly, obviously, responsible for some of the churn, I guess, with my OP_VAULT proposal. But I think that experience explains the answer to your question, which is, you know, Jeremy did CTV. He was five, six years ahead of his time, if not more. We'll find out, I suppose. But, you know, he went and shopped around CTV and said, hey, there are all these cool uses. You know, he came up with these crazy diagrams. He wrote a bunch of stuff. Jeremy is like, he's like, do you know Back to the Future?

1:11:24The, you know, Christopher Lloyd, like the crazy doctor who invents the time travel machine. You know, he looks like totally crazy, but he's actually, you know, pivotal. Like, he creates the story. He's a genius. Jeremy's kind of like that. I call him crazy Uncle Jeremy sometimes. But, you know, when I was first presented with CTV, I was like, I don't understand this at all. I don't get these uses. I don't get the construction. But that was largely because, like, I wasn't a real user of Bitcoin script yet.

1:11:53And, you know, in going working in industry, you know, working on a bunch of custodial systems, you know, I discovered the use of vaults. And then I started to say, like, okay, well, how could I use, you know, CTV to create this vault structure? And meanwhile, all this controversy was going on with CTV. Jeremy, you know, basically released the activation client. And, you know, there was just tremendous drama in the community. I think a lot of it totally unmerited. Jeremy, I think, is like probably the best force for Bitcoin that we've had in the last decade, to be honest with you.

1:12:32But setting that aside, so I looked at, you know, I said, okay, well, I really care about doing this vaults thing. And so I want that to happen. So I'm going to prepare this proposal, OP_VAULT. It just does vaults, doesn't get mired in this covenants conversation. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't get it doesn't have CTV. And so it will avoid all the controversy there, which was kind of a cowardly move on my part. But at the same time, you know, I really cared about vaults.

1:12:59I really wanted those. And so that seemed like kind of the most politically wise way to do things. So I tried that. But what actually happened throughout the course of development of OP_VAULT is that CTV was actually a necessary component for that proposal. I didn't know it at the time, but I basically reinvented it poorly. And the guys that I was working with at the time, AJ and Greg Sanders, were like, dude, this is just CTV. Just make this proposal dependent on CTV. And so I think what happened to me there is what has happened to almost everybody who's paid attention to this, where they they're initially presented with CTV.

1:13:39They're kind of like, huh, that's I don't quite understand that. But here I'm going to like go generalize it and create my own proposal, my own version of it that's, you know, cleaner or whatever. And they eventually find out that whatever additional functionality that they've added to CTV, like in the case of TXHASH, it doesn't really have a known use. And it's just a lot of dead weight that's getting tacked on. Like TXHASH as a proposal is like 10x more complicated. It's 10x riskier to do than CTV.

1:14:11And we don't really know kind of what the added benefit is. Like maybe there is some stuff. We haven't really fleshed anything out. And so I think that just kind of happened to everybody. But what's been encouraging to see in the last six months or so is that there is finally wide acknowledgement that, Jeremy, like, CTV is just this elemental primitive for encoding these pre-signed transactions into consensus. And we need that for a whole bunch of stuff. We need that for Layer 2. We need that for vaults.

1:14:38We need that for congestion control, for non-interactive lightning setup. Pick any of the 25 uses. It's this primitive that keeps coming up in Bitcoin script development. So even some guys at Blockstream have acknowledged this. Poelstra, who I'm a huge fan of. Sanket, also a totally brilliant guy. They've done a lot of work on Liquid. And they say, yeah, we obviously use CTV to replace these time-locked pre-signed constructions that guard the federation. So I think really this has been like an onboarding experience for everybody to seriously think about the future of Bitcoin script.

1:15:20And they eventually realize when they mature enough that, yeah, man, I mean, CTV is just this thing that keeps popping up. In terms of the Great Script Restoration, like many things that are proposed for Bitcoin script, I am conceptually in favor of, totally unopposed. But the devil's in the details. It's path dependent. It's how is it deployed. How do we get there? And I think the reality that I see is, look, if great script restoration were in Bitcoin tomorrow, and it was bug-free, fantastic. Great. Boon for Bitcoin.

1:15:58The problem with that proposal is that it's massive. It has like 30 different bike sheds that people are going to latch onto and debate over for forever, probably. It's another one of these soft forks like Taproot, like SegWit, that's just this giant kitchen sink package. And we really shouldn't be doing those anymore, to be honest. I think Bitcoin is too mature. It's too far along. We shouldn't do anything. Well, I guess I won't say that. What I'll say is that it's much harder to evaluate and it's much harder to actually get done.

1:16:31And furthermore, the guy pitching it, Rusty Russell, basically said, ah, I don't have time to work on this. I'll find a trainee to get this done. So consequently, I just don't see GSR getting done. I think there's hope for other proposals. I think OP_CAT has a really strong argument behind it. Although I'd say if push came to shove, I think probably that will happen in a different activation cycle than CTV and CheckSigFromStack might, just because I think there's such widespread acknowledgment that CTV is well understood.

1:17:06It's closed form. The change is very simple. There isn't this kind of like higher level concern about MEV, which, again, I think might be overblown for OP_CAT. But at the same time, it's a consensus system. So you've got to bring everybody along with it. You have to basically flesh out, kind of as a community, hey, this risk isn't real. And that might take a lot longer to do for OP_CAT, certainly, than it would for CTV. And so I think CTV, CheckSigFromStack are ready now. You know, the PRs are there now.

1:17:38We haven't come up with any kind of activation timeline or proposal, but hopefully we can get the code into core without activation. And then from there, you know, it'll just be a question of when do we do this thing? How do we do this thing? And then hopefully we can start talking about, you know, these other proposals.

1:17:58Vlad CosteaWhat's funny to me is that about a year ago, I interviewed Andrew Poelstra and he made the exact same argument, but in reverse, meaning that he said OP_CAT is better understood. It's been around for a long time. It was rewritten using Tapscript by Ethan and the other guy who are pretty well reputed among the cryptographers who are working on Bitcoin. And CTV is lesser understood. And maybe it's going to be part of some other soft fork activation cycle, maybe in 2032 or something. And I was mind blown at the time that this guy basically presents a schedule for upgrading Bitcoin.

1:18:38And the year later, it's so funny to see that CTV is back and a lot of people agree that it's the best way to go forward.

1:18:50James O'BeirneYeah. Look, I'm totally sympathetic to what Andrew is saying. I mean, well, I agree with him from a technical perspective. I think Andrew's not on Twitter. And so he doesn't see the discourse about the concern over MEV. And so he might be somewhat insulated from that part of the community that is an influential segment of Bitcoin that maybe at some point was concerned about this. Maybe they're not anymore. So he's, I think, to some degree insulated from that drama. But, I mean, I haven't publicized this, but, you know, a few months ago, I had a working patch set for CAT plus CTV plus CheckSigFromStack, because for me, that was like the best way to go.

1:19:34You know, they were all very well scrutinized, very minimal, at least from a code standpoint, changes that I think could be deployed together. So that's actually my preferred way forward. But it just seemed like they're, you know, among people involved. I know guys like Rearden Code, you know, who were very active participants in the covenants conversation. It just seemed like there was enough uncertainty there that, you know, that overcoming that would be more difficult. And I think the name of the game for me right now is like getting what we can, just kind of making whatever forward progress we can.

1:20:13And, you know, so CTV is just so kind of closed form that it seems like that's likely. But no, I think, you know, Poelstra's absolutely got a point, too.

1:20:25Vlad CosteaI want to ask you more details about CTV and what it does, what it enables and why you think it's so well understood at this point. But let me plug a couple more sponsors in the meantime. So news.bitcoin.com is the place where you can go and read news. What's funny about it is that not so long ago, it was this Bitcoin Cash friendly website that was telling you that you should use BCH instead of BTC to save on fees. And they're also trying to cover the big blocker side of history.

1:20:55Now they went along with the voice of the market right now. Bitcoin.com is BTC only. Well, not BTC only, but BTC centric. And I think news.bitcoin.com, and I'm the one who reached out to them for this partnership, has pretty good news coverage. Like you can go there and read news about India and China and maybe Iran or Russia and parts of the world that usually don't make it in the Western news cycle. And I like to think of Bitcoin as something which is global and something which affects the rest of the world as well as the U.S.

1:21:37And sometimes I feel like Bitcoin Magazine is way too focused on the U.S. and what's happening there. So give it a chance. I mean, I also found some articles about gold, which is not something you'll find on Bitcoin Magazine. And I don't have any beef with Bitcoin Magazine. It's just that they're following their own incentives. And I feel like the journalism on Bitcoin.com is underrated. So check it out. And there's also NoOnes.com, which is the business of Ray Youssef. He used to be known for Paxful.

1:22:10Now, he's very vocal about onboarding the global south and getting them off the U.S. dollar. I'm not sure he's a big fan of stablecoins, but you can use them on NoOnes. What he's trying to do is to get people to use non-custodial free market money. And he seems to be in favor of Bitcoin, Monero, Litecoin and a bunch of others. And what you can actually do on NoOnes is that you can trade gift cards. So if someone sends you a gift card and you don't want it, you can sell it to some citizen of the global south who will most likely flip it for more money.

1:22:46And there's this system where everyone gets their own cut or as Ray Youssef says, everybody eats and gets a seat at the table. And also, they have a debit card for spending coins if you're into that and the peer to peer marketplace as well as a spot exchange. So they have a lot of stuff going on. Go to NoOnes.com and check it out. And last but not least, Hodling.ch, which is a business from Switzerland, which specializes in self-custody. So if you're part of a company that is trying to acquire Bitcoin or you're an individual who owns a lot of BTC and has no idea how to secure it, then these guys will advise you on how to set up your multisig or whether or not you need one in the first place.

1:23:33What kind of hardware wallets you should be using. I think they're very much in favor of the Specter DIY as well as some others, because they're against the idea of having only one that controls everything. So just check them out. It's Hodling.ch and they also have a coin recovery program. If you lost your part of your seed phrase and you don't know how to recover it, then they might be able to brute force it for a fee. Now, let's talk about CTV, James. Tell me more about the features that it enables and why you think it's so well understood.

1:24:17And fewer attack vectors are present in it.

1:24:22James O'BeirneYeah, so what CTV basically allows you to do is commit to a future graph of transactions. So you can say basically, hey, this coin can be spent only in these limited number of ways that can potentially span multiple future transactions. And that turns out to be a really, really useful property, because, for example, in the case of vaults, you want a way of saying, hey, I'd like to spend my coin to this address, but I'm going to have to wait for whatever, some configurable delay, 10 blocks.

1:25:07But you need a way of saying this coin for sure can only be spent in the following ways. And so it's very simple functionality, but it allows you to do a whole lot. And you can go to utxos.org, which is Jeremy's website, to see an enumeration of some of the use cases. But guys at Citrea, StarkWare, they say that they have uses for CTV, the Ark guys found a way to reduce one round of interactivity, which is very important for enabling offline receives using this.

1:25:48It just turns out that committing to a graph of presigned transactions pops up over and over again. From an implementation standpoint, what makes this very simple to evaluate is that this is all a hash-based operation. And so really what you're doing when you execute CTV is you're saying, hey, when you spend this coin, the hash of the spending transaction has to match the CTV hash. And what's nice about that is that hashing is a very fast operation. It's faster than elliptic curve operations by an order of a thousand or something pretty wild like that.

1:26:32So the opportunity for a denial of service attack is limited. And the CTV hash itself is very well understood because it really mirrors the existing sighash mechanism in Bitcoin, which is basically how you decide what message an elliptic curve private key is going to sign to prove how to spend for a coin. So it's all pretty familiar from an implementation standpoint, and that makes it simple.

1:27:01Vlad CosteaOK, but I think Greg Maxwell made this argument that Bitcoin should not enable soft forks that are not universal and only a subset of users are going to be using this, which is ironic because that's basically what Taproot does. It just lets a bunch of users do slightly better multisigs. But for the average pleb who's just holding coins on a Trezor or something and spends their time posting pictures of their steaks and saying that every attempt to change Bitcoin is an attack, what's the compelling argument? Why do they need this?

1:27:40James O'BeirneYeah, I think setting aside the more general version of the argument that you just made, which is like, well, if that's the case, then why did we do multisig script instructions? Not everybody uses multisig. You can emulate multisig offline by splitting up a single key using Shamir secret sharing. So clearly we don't need a multisig opcode in Bitcoin. I think it's just silly that every single user of Bitcoin needs to make use of a proposed feature. But people should really care about CTV from my standpoint for the following reasons.

1:28:18Even if you set aside CTV being an ingredient in whatever magical scaling solution that we come up with, like Ark or ZKP roll ups, I think vaults are a very not well understood means of scaling ownership in Bitcoin, because if you have a vault construction, which CTV is pretty much required for, that allows someone to set up a scheme that's very normie friendly, but also very secure. And what I mean by that is you can imagine a vault scheme where the key that you use most of the time to trigger a vault is like just on your cell phone.

1:28:59But the fallback path, if someone steals that key on your phone and they try and steal your coins and that theft attempt is detected, you can fall back to like, say, an institutional custodial account or multisig of your friends or something along those lines. And so the whole point is there that that person who's right now using a Trezor to take possession of their coins, like Trezor is not exactly normie friendly. You have to, first of all, go out and buy a Trezor and then you have to set it up and back the seed words up and all that.

1:29:33But having the availability of an on-chain vault construction, which requires CTV, might allow you to get to a place where you get hardware wallet level security from simply having a cell phone and either having some friends or a custodial account. Or, yeah, if you want to go and make an offline wallet and have that be the fallback path as well. But my whole point here is that if we have vaults, I think that eventually we can get to wallets that make robust self-custody very easy for normal people.

1:30:10Vlad CosteaI think covenants are this approach where we say, okay, if Bitcoin doesn't scale to allow everyone to onboard layer twos with individual transactions, we can basically batch all of their transactions into one huge transaction, onboard everyone on this layer two. But the issue is unilateral exit, because if you join with a bunch of people in the same bus, you have to leave with them in the same bus. So I was going to ask you if there's any mitigation for this issue of unilateral exit from layer twos, or you're just going to have to swap the coins using some third party service?

1:30:52James O'BeirneYeah, it's a really interesting question. And I think that's the hidden gotcha of many layer twos that people haven't yet reckoned with. And it's actually why, again, I go back to block size as being something that we need to be prepared to resort to because, yeah, you might say, oh, I have this great advanced construction for doing layer two transactions on Bitcoin. But oh, shoot, if the service provider or the rollup sequencer or whatever, goes offline, goes out of business, all of a sudden, I need to exit back into Bitcoin.

1:31:21But what does that transaction look like? How big is it? How much interactivity do you need with other people in the same layer two construction? A lot of those details haven't been or at least aren't widely understood by people so far. And so I think that might be a kind of no free lunch hidden gotcha about layer twos that we haven't really reckoned with. That said, one of the uses of CTV that I really like is called congestion control. And the idea of congestion control is because with CTV, you can pre commit to these, you know, an arbitrary graph of transactions.

1:32:01What you can do is you can say if I'm in this interactive construction with, you know, 100 other people or if I'm an exchange trying to allow withdrawal for whatever, you know, 10,000 people. Instead of having to process that withdrawal immediately and pay the fees immediately in the moment at a time when, you know, the fee rate might be sky high because there's some kind of correlated failure event. Instead, what you can say is, hey, I'm going to commit to this one 32-byte CTV hash that ensures that everybody else, you know, is going to get a payout eventually when they claim it.

1:32:39And so that would require, you know, communicating to your to the people withdrawing. Hey, here is the transaction structure that we're using to come up with this hash. And they, of course, validate it on their end and then later on broadcast those like unrolling transactions. But the whole point is that CTV lets you get away from this case where, oh, man, I need to exit. But the conditions for exiting might be very punitive or expensive in the moment. And so I think, you know, it's another instance of why having that tool is really important.

1:33:17Vlad CosteaYeah, I think about this a lot and the people who larp about lightning being the ultimate scaling solution. I find it amazing that not amazing baffling that they're not on board with CTV because this is basically what they want. Right. To be able to get as many people as possible to get their own lightning channels and be able to exit in a moment that's convenient to them, not when their channel gets force closed or whatever. They can return to the base layer under certain conditions. And would you say that this makes Bitcoin more programmable and...

1:33:58James O'BeirneAbsolutely.

1:33:59Vlad CosteaYou can set up smart contracts and stuff?

1:34:02James O'BeirneYeah, yeah, yeah. I think I mean, a good example of this is DLCs, like for certain Discreet Log Contract arrangements, which is basically like a way of doing futures contracts on Bitcoin. You know, the availability of CTV drastically reduces the amount of precomputation that needs to be done. And so the guys at, I think it's Atomic Finance, maybe Matt, you know, in their design, it's like something like five minutes of computation goes down to a second because they can just commit to these presigned transactions using CTV.

1:34:42So I think it does add programmability that, you know, that's the whole point is like it makes the chain more useful. And with more use, you're going to have hopefully more use of blocks, you know, hopefully higher fee rates, hopefully. Ultimately, like what we really want to see in the next few years is is miner revenue going up so that the security of the system stays strong. And to do that, you need more on chain uses for Bitcoin, whereas now everybody just basically goes to a custodial layer two because, you know, the conventional wisdom is you're not supposed to really use layer one for anything.

1:35:19And that's going to create a situation, you know, that where security spend on net for Bitcoin is low, which is very bad.

1:35:28Vlad CosteaI don't think we say this using the right language because Bitcoin right now is secured by inflation. And I think this is a good way to frame it. We are securing Bitcoin using monetary inflation. We larp all day about Bitcoin not being inflationary, but it is inflationary up to the 21 million cap. And once I mean, we don't even need to hit that point. Once the miners are no longer profitable, we're going to run into some existential crises. It's not just one crisis. It's going to be like a series of moments when a lot of people will finally learn how Bitcoin works and they will see that the game theory, just because it hasn't played out in detrimental way to the network, doesn't mean that it can't.

1:36:15And it's all part of how the system was built. So do you believe that if we do get CTV and we do get CSFS, that's going to improve the number of transactions on chain? It's going to bring more people to build on Bitcoin and keep them on Bitcoin as opposed to exploring something like Ethereum or Solana? Because it does seem like after the block size wars, it seems like the community split into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. But in actuality, a lot of these people did not go to Bitcoin Cash.

1:36:51They went to Ethereum and they started building there. And Ethereum has been growing steadily, getting more users, getting more L2s. I think the L2s on Ethereum have more users and more liquidity than the L2s on Bitcoin. And to me, this is concerning because we've lost revenue for the miners. And do you believe that CTV and CSFS will be the ones that bring back the users?

1:37:21James O'BeirneNo, no, absolutely not. Bitcoin, I think, in many ways can't compete with systems like Solana and Ethereum if what you want to do is really sophisticated high volume smart contract type stuff. I just think that's not really in Bitcoin's DNA. I think what CTV and CSFS do, which is very important, is make it easier. They make a whole variety of uses on Bitcoin that are core to Bitcoin's mission of at least being a suitable store of value or workable store value. They're a big stab in the right direction to that end.

1:38:11But I think the people who left Bitcoin during the block size wars five plus years ago, Bitcoin has just become kind of a different system than these others have. And the level of functionality and the speed of throughput, it's just not coming back. Solana is interesting to me in the sense that they are kind of a redesign of Ethereum, but they just sort of threw out any pretension about having regular users kind of run nodes, which is a totally reasonable trade off to make in the Ethereum design space.

1:38:56And I think it was a very wise one for them to make because they basically said, okay, well, you're going to need $20,000 to play as a sort of first class citizen on our chain. The reality is that most of the users of cryptocurrencies don't care about having that ability, really. And so I just think that the kind of functionality and throughput that you can achieve with these systems will not be replicated on Bitcoin. The question is it worth replicating? Is there actually going to be kind of an interesting freedom output from something like Solana, something like Ethereum?

1:39:40Maybe there will be. I'm certainly less close to that possibility than I was a few years ago. But I just think it's kind of a different ballgame. And it really, to me, does feel like, aside from being a very valuable laboratory where things that might make their way to Bitcoin eventually get tested out, I think it just seems to me to be this like... Fairly elaborate sort of casino system. But, you know, look, I'm not in that world. And so for me to kind of just brush aside those projects with that lens is probably overly dismissive.

1:40:21But I just think Bitcoin shouldn't compete on those terms in some sense.

1:40:26Vlad CosteaWell, I do believe that Bitcoin needs the on-chain activity. Yeah, I agree with you. We need to pay the miners somehow. And the biggest gamble in the whole design is that Satoshi was hoping that there's going to be a lot of transactions to pay the miners. We don't really have that. And we need to change the culture to encourage people to use on-chain when it's cheap. I think a lot of the quote-unquote plebs, and I really hate this term, because it sort of puts people in this lower-class position where they're not allowed to have their own opinions.

1:41:05And they should just have uniformity and embrace a sort of mentality where they're just bystanders. They don't matter. But a lot of them got psy-oped into believing that any transaction smaller than 0.01 Bitcoin, and that's one million Bitcoins according to the BIP submitted by John Carvalho, any transaction that is smaller than that should happen on Lightning. And that's what they believe. That's what they do. And I think this takes away from the miner revenue. From my experience, Lightning is not even always the cheapest option.

1:41:46I think I'm responsible using Phoenix Wallet, which takes like 0.5% of your transaction as a fee. I'm responsible for some of the largest Lightning fees. When I bought my car, I used the Lightning network to go on Kraken. And I paid like $50 fees, and this was in December. I could pay much less on the main chain, but I just wanted to play with Lightning. And it's interesting that the ways in which it was advertised doesn't always apply. And a lot of people think it's the solution to all problems.

1:42:28James O'BeirneThe irony about Lightning that you highlighted there is that for small value payments, if you have a small value channel, it's not actually even economical to enforce, to guard against theft of the funds in your channel. Because if your counterparty wants to steal from you, they broadcast a transaction to do so. If the value of your channel is less than the fees that you would pay to actually contest that transaction, then you're not going to want to pay them. So, Lightning doesn't even actually make sense for low value channels, which is not well understood, I think.

1:43:06But to your broader point...

1:43:08Vlad CosteaDon't say this on Nostr, they're going to crucify you.

1:43:11James O'BeirneNo, maybe some of the guys on Nostr who are making the zaps there, maybe they have fat channels that are open with hundreds of dollars or whatever, and it's still worthwhile. But I think the whole point is that the economics of Lightning are not as rosy-eyed as we thought a few years ago. And we're just now grappling with, well, I mean, throughout the past few years, we're grappling with the fact that this isn't a solve-all.

1:43:41It certainly doesn't solve the scaling problem. So, to your point earlier about like, hey, there needs to be activity on Bitcoin for miners to get paid, I totally agree. But I think actually that if you map something like some fraction of the checking account volume that happens into Bitcoin, people doing one or two transactions per month, I actually think that would... And if you were charging, say, I don't know, 50 cents a transaction, you would actually get to a place where you're matching or beating the subsidy now in that case.

1:44:21So, for this talk, I did at OP_NEXT, I did some calculations. And basically, if you want everybody on earth to have one UTXO and move it around once per month, you need something like 765 megabyte blocks. Let's assume that you had 150 megabyte blocks, okay? If everybody in that block is paying 50 cents per payment, that equals the subsidy that you have today of 1.5-ish... Or sorry, that equals a subsidy that will have in some time. So, if you doubled that, right, you get today's subsidy.

1:45:00And in that case, everybody's paying 50 cents a transaction, but they're getting the benefit of this value that can't be confiscated or inflated. And so, I think that even if we don't move to this hyperscaler, we're eating all the payments, we're doing all this sophisticated automated high-frequency trading financial activity, even if it's something as mundane as a lot of people are just doing one to two transactions a month to save, the amount of revenue that you could get from that with a sufficient block size is considerable.

1:45:38Vlad CosteaThis goes back to One Meg Greg and the hypothesis that we're just going to have large fees that people are willing to pay because it's Bitcoin and it's the most secure, it's the first cryptocurrency in every chart, it's the oldest, it has the most users, you have all of these compelling arguments. But it's been proven that there are people around the world who don't care about any of this. And they don't care too much about the security of the transaction as long as it's just good enough for them to get some money across, just to move it without banks or governments or permission from any third party.

1:46:21I think that's big and we seem to just be stuck in this ivory tower mentality. We say, okay, we're Bitcoiners, we're the best, we're number one, everyone's buying our bags, everyone's kissing our asses, we have politicians telling everyone that Bitcoin is great. Seems like we are winning this side of the war, but we're losing our principles and we forget why we got here in the first place. And I guess I started the episode like this. I asked you, how come you didn't get paid? Because a lot of these guys, when I see them and they say, oh, Tether is fine, it's just a Trojan horse, it's just like this little toy that newbies are going to be using.

1:47:08And in fact, they learn how to use a Bitcoin wallet. I don't think they will ever use a Bitcoin wallet.

1:47:12James O'BeirneI don't think so either.

1:47:14Vlad CosteaFor all the effort that we put into adoption and education, it seems like not only that we failed, but we're coping right now. We're saying, yeah, it's fine. Bitcoin was never meant to be used in commerce because it's still in the price discovery phase. Maybe today you spend half a Bitcoin on something and then five years later you realize you could have bought a house with that.

1:47:41James O'BeirneThere is a lot of cope and there's a lot of it's a bad feeling to me when there's a high degree of confidence, smugness, assurance that we're going to win, we're winning. I think we're being bought off. I think it's totally clear to me that we're being bought off. And maybe the financial powers that be take Bitcoin seriously enough that things like the Strategic Reserve happen. But the path is so clear to me that could be traveled for Bitcoin to be completely captured and for us to have basically no recourse other than some kind of a very unpopular hard fork type situation where the people who actually care about freedom fork off into a different system while everybody else is well, OK, whatever.

1:48:28The government is going to do tail emission now, but hey, I still need a good exchange rate for my Bitcoin because I want to build my citadel. I think we're all being bought off. My expectation at the moment is that two positive things will result from Bitcoin. The first is that people with values like ours are going to be more enriched than we were as a class prior to Bitcoin. And number two, that the technological tools to eventually challenge whatever the fiat order is, we're kind of prototyping.

1:48:59And someday, the cat's out of the bag. I do think at some point we'll have something that the original Bitcoin was supposed to be. But I think if we keep going the way that we're going, we're in stasis and we're being bought off. And yeah, most people are going to be using like a Tether wallet or if they own Bitcoin, it's going to be at the benefit of somebody like Coinbase or BlackRock.

1:49:24Vlad CosteaWhich sort of defeats the purpose. It's really disappointing that we got here. There's also the camp that says, you know, self custody is an illusion because it was never going to happen. It's too difficult to take care of 12 words or some private key that you write down on a piece of paper. Normies don't know how to handle that. I don't know. It feels like we're coping too hard just because the number goes up. And I think this is the worst part of it all. And maybe that it's true that we're being bought out or we're getting paid to leave or whatever.

1:50:02Everyone seems happy when the price goes up and we forget about all the problems and we just put them under the rug and the amount of problems under the rug just keeps stacking up. But we ignore them. I don't know for how long this is going to happen. I don't know for how long we're just going to enjoy the pumps and nobody's going to be upset. And I've never seen so many software developers who feel frustrated trying to build something and trying to deliver something and make it meaningful, as I see in Bitcoin.

1:50:36Every week I interview at least one developer who's trying to bring something to Bitcoin. Two of my sponsors are trying to bring something to Bitcoin. And it's really frustrating to see that they put so many years of their lives trying to build something. They try to remain pure in the sense that they could just rage quit into some altcoin and say, OK, let's do this on Litecoin or whatever. Let's maximize what Ethereum can do. But they're not. But at the same time, do they have the reputation of remnants or do they get the respect they deserve?

1:51:09Not really. And it hurts just to realize that I think at this point, and you can disagree with me in the chat if you think I'm wrong, but it's more dangerous for Bitcoin to not change and stay this way. And I think the politicians and the regulators caught up with how it works. And Chainalysis is pretty accurate at this point. You can claim that they have their blind spots and they make wrongful assumptions, but most of the times they're right. But I think upgrading Bitcoin and having some bugs or unknown unknowns is less dangerous than leaving Bitcoin the way it is, which means it's going to get eaten up by the system that we used to pretend that we want to replace.

1:51:59James O'BeirneI think you're exactly right. And I'm really glad to hear you voice that because I think it's understated. A lot of the developers working on Bitcoin are these sort of technocratic, fairly myopic people who are like, oh, the worst thing that can happen to Bitcoin is that we have a chain split and there's a 10 block reorg or whatever. That's absolutely not the worst thing that can happen to Bitcoin. A lot of the things that can go wrong during a soft fork, they have solutions and they are much less catastrophic than Bitcoin slowly not changing and just drifting into this state where it's just another stock ticker, which we're dangerously close to.

1:52:45And in fact, that's my base case at this point. I mean, I'm obviously working to try and prevent that, but to be honest, I'm not optimistic that we're going to make it in that department. So, yeah, it's sad to see the level of self-assurance and confidence. And in some ways, maybe it's a kind of inevitable condition of human nature. I don't know. I think I was less religious maybe 10 years ago and Bitcoin was kind of a placeholder for religion for me. It was like, OK, this is the thing that's going to deliver us from all this.

1:53:26But as time went on and I kind of saw these failings, even in a community of people who really seemed ideologically geared and technologically enabled to challenge this stuff, we've kind of lost our way. And so Christianity and kind of a renewed interest there, I've really fallen back on because I'm like, well, Bitcoin is just another human system and we have original sin, we're all flawed. Any human system of sufficient size just ultimately kind of crumbles and people lose their way when presented with sort of material upside.

1:54:02And so I think that that may be in the process of happening to Bitcoin. I hope certainly it's not, but I'm not ruling that eventuality out.

1:54:13Vlad CosteaIt's funny that you mention how you saw Bitcoin as a substitute for religion, because I saw it like a substitute for human politics. I used to think that Bitcoin is meritocratic and you have a system where it doesn't matter who you are, where you're from and all of that nice stuff. You can contribute and you can be a node and you can be a miner and you can make a change. And everyone who's participating in this consensus system is actually well-meaning and wants what's best for the network.

1:54:46And there's nobody evil who will say, oh, you know, this is a good proposal, but I don't want it because I'm an asshole or something. But I see a lot of that. And I used to think that I'm going to run away from human politics and isolate myself in Bitcoin. And then I discovered that it's the exact same human politics, but mainly just managed by nerds who are discussing some technical arguments. But for political reasons. And there's no meritocracy. There is nothing about it that says if you're better, you're going to succeed.

1:55:27Still, if you look at Bitcoin Core developers, like I had a great amount of respect for Wladimir van der Laan for his class of developers. These are the guys I was looking up to when I first started. Now I look at Ava Chow, who says openly that he or she is not going to integrate anything that is controversial. No piece of code that is controversial is going to make it into Bitcoin Core. And what does controversial even mean? Because it only takes like five or six people to express objections and then we're going to stall development.

1:56:06Or as the term for covenants has become, bike shed.

1:56:14James O'BeirneThat's right. Yeah. Yeah. You didn't realize that you were walking into one of the most deeply political environments like in existence right now. And it's the same thing happened to me. I thought that this was this wonderful, meritocratic, you know, hierarchy-less system. But it turns out that actually it's deeply political. And the fact that it has this veneer of not being political, that it should be meritocratic, fools a lot of people. But the unfortunate reality is that a lot of the people working on the Core technology here.

1:56:56You know, in my personal experience, they don't seem to be totally concerned with the ultimate end goal of Bitcoin. They seem more concerned with some of the narrow considerations as a software project, because I think the Core process is bureaucratic enough, is frustrating enough that it selects for a certain kind of person. And yeah, it's really like and this is where I know I was speaking against kind of ad hominem type approaches earlier in the podcast. But, you know, the reality is that I think like I'm very dismayed by the the lack of vision, the lack of consideration about where is all this going, you know, kind of on the part of the Core people to the point where I'm like, well, I've I've kind of known a lot of these people personally and some of them who were highly ideologically motivated before, you know, maybe they're wealthy enough now that they just like kind of don't care what happens.

1:57:56They've made their nut or or maybe they sort of never cared. And it was always just this kind of abstract, interesting problem to to to tinker with. Or, you know, it was a prestigious software project that they could go and put their name on. And I, you know, I don't see a lot of people who are kind of genuinely concerned with like money printer really bad, you know, censorship really bad, fiat order really, really bad. We need an alternative to this. And so it's been increasingly alarming to me to kind of see who's at the helm.

1:58:33Vlad CosteaAt the same time, you sort of dismissed Peter Todd like an hour ago about his proposal to add inflation to Bitcoin, which is I think he published an article that's called Tail Emission is Not Inflation. And he justifies that a small percentage of inflation will basically just compensate for the amounts of coins that were irreversibly lost. So that's his thesis, that we're not going to exceed 21 million Bitcoin in like a few hundred years. But to his credit, I think he presented the most extreme argument. And it's sort of like a threat to all of us in the sense that if we're not fixing the security budget problem and we're not getting enough fees, that's the only solution that makes sense just for the sake of preserving Bitcoin, because we have this wonderful network, we have users, we have transactions that happen every day.

1:59:34Are we just going to dump it because this economic model did not work? Maybe not. Maybe we'll want to continue and change the social contract and say, well, 21 million was just the initial hope. We did not make it. We did not deliver Satoshi's expectations, but we can still continue Bitcoin with these new rules. It's nihilistic. It's very...

2:00:04Cope-like. This is the ultimate cope, saying that nothing in Bitcoin actually worked, not even the economics of it, not the technical side of it. We had to change the plans as we went on, but that's, I guess, the most powerful threat. If we don't get transactions on the base layer, we don't make it work with transaction fees, that's what's coming. Either it gets abandoned and we forget about it and we move on to something else, or else we're going to have to demolish this 21 million meme, which honestly I would prefer as opposed to the other option, to not use Bitcoin anymore.

2:00:48James O'BeirneYeah, it's hard to say. I mean, I think from my perspective, if you dismantle 21 million, you've undermined such a core part of the identity of the system that I think there would be a massive hit to the valuation of the thing, because I think a lot of people who have money in Bitcoin would look at it and say, well, then how do I know... You know, how do I know there isn't more inflation coming? If we've already crossed that threshold, you know, I don't know whether up is up and down is down anymore, but like to your point, look, I mean there is a very consequentialist argument that can be made that, you know, if we get to a certain point, maybe that's like better than whatever the alternative is that we're presented with.

2:01:39I just personally, I'd rather not even think about you know, something like the 21 million supply cap until like we're really in a foxhole, because I think it's in some ways it's even harmful to kind of move that Overton window in that direction in the way that I think Peter Todd maybe was, but you're right that it's a really valuable kind of like end marker for what the ultimate price is if we don't, you know, get ourselves together and start thinking about how to scale this thing.

2:02:16Vlad CosteaYeah, I think about this a lot and there's also I think BIP 42, if I'm not mistaken, which was by Pieter Wuille. It was published on April the 1st, which makes some people think it was a joke, but I think he fixed a bug in the Bitcoin code, which I'm not even sure it was a bug. Maybe it was just human understanding of the 21 million that was wrong, but what it did was basically after the 21 million coins were issued, the issuance system, so the inflation would start over from 50 Bitcoin per block, and Pieter Wuille stopped that from happening and that's how we know that we're never going to have 21 million, more than 21 million coins according to the existing rules.

2:03:03James O'BeirneRight, and we know that Satoshi kind of indicated, you know, that he had intended for a 21 million limit, so it does seem like probably programmer error, but yeah, maybe you can argue if well, yeah, I guess I can't remember what the rollover date would have been, but yeah, maybe that would have been bad or maybe not. I mean, it certainly would have been bad, but maybe it's far enough in the future that it was sort of, you know, academic.

2:03:29Vlad CosteaI was going to ask you this because it seems to be like a point of contention, which separates libertarians from statists in the Bitcoin space, and I don't want to put any label on you. I just want to ask you, what do you think about the case of Roger Ver?

2:03:44James O'BeirneOh man, I mean, I think Roger is obviously being politically persecuted. I'm not privy, of course, to the details of the case. I know in my own dealings with the IRS that they are not a charitable or even efficacious organization, so it's totally believable to me that yeah, he's being politically persecuted for, you know, being someone who's trying to push back on what the fiat system is doing and, you know, maybe remove some some power from them. So I don't, you know, I'm not even sure if I'd consider myself a libertarian anymore.

2:04:26That's absolutely where I come from, but I look at Roger and yeah, I see somebody who seems genuinely concerned with limiting the size and scope of government and especially doing so, you know, by way of cryptocurrency, which is what I got into this for. That's definitely what I'm still in it for, and so yeah, I think it's pretty clear he's being politically persecuted, and I hope that that ceases.

2:04:56Vlad CosteaIt's a very delicate case, and I did see people like Jameson Lopp, for example, pointing out that he pays his taxes fairly and he doesn't think it's fair for someone like Roger to just get away with it, but last week we had Richard Heart, who got away with a Ponzi scheme, and people were commenting, how come this guy got away? And then you have a bunch of builders and developers, even the Samourai people, they're still in jail, and then you have the biggest Ponzi schemer in the space gets a free pass.

2:05:29And I think the reason is that Richard Heart is not threatening to the establishment, and he can actually be useful. I think Donald Trump or the administration or whoever advises him, they're aware that this guy has a following that's mostly right-wing, and they can leverage Richard Heart to get more votes. They can turn him into a talking head for the establishment, and I don't think he's threatening. I think he enjoys being rich and being whatever he wants, and for the people who are hoping that just because Trump gave freedom to Ross Ulbricht, then we're gonna have a new administration that's friendly to everything being built and friendly to privacy.

2:06:19That doesn't seem to be the case.

2:06:22James O'BeirneNo, absolutely not. No, I think Trump's been a big disappointment on a lot of counts for a lot of people, and I certainly feel that way. It's great he freed Ross, but I think any notion that he would be somehow ideologically compelled to help Roger out is definitely not gonna happen. I mean, you see selective enforcement all over the US government. Anybody with an SEC violation pretty much gets a slap on the wrist. JP Morgan rigging the gold market or whatever that case was, some menial fine. Selective enforcement is the way the government operates.

2:07:02Roger's claim is that he knew the government would be scrutinizing him as a big Bitcoin personality, and he tried to do everything right and went through an accountant, etc. That's his claim anyway. I mean, again, we have a court system so you can adjudicate details like this, but I can't imagine that he was dumb enough to try and pull one over on the IRS, but it's possible, but I would suspect it's more political than anything.

2:07:36Vlad CosteaAnd I think Paul Sztorc also made a pretty good case of how small and insignificant Bitcoin was in 2014. We tend to analyze events from 11 years ago with the knowledge and understanding that we have today, but I guess the regulations regarding Bitcoin were not very clear on how to declare your income and what to do exactly and to apply retroactively some principles of today to something that happened 10 years ago. It's pretty crazy.

2:08:11James O'BeirneYeah. Yeah, no, definitely, definitely agree.

2:08:15Vlad CosteaSo also, this has a slippery slope, right? Because if Roger goes to jail, this sets a precedent for a lot of people, and it also sends a powerful message that if Roger, with all the money and resources that he has, was not able to stay free, then it means that everyone else is screwed. If they don't report their taxes exactly as they're expected, and I don't even know what that means. You always declare what you think you owe, the tax authority says, okay, pay, and then they can come back for you in a few years if they think you owe more.

2:08:51James O'BeirneYeah, yeah, 100%. But this is how you see, I mean, this is how they work, right? It's like, they pick high visibility targets, go after people, and then hope that everybody else falls into line via osmosis. It's like with, people say of Bitcoin, oh, the state never showed up. We thought, and it's like, yes, they did. A few high profile people in LocalBitcoins were prosecuted, and that pretty much put a damper on a lot of the local peer-to-peer traffic that was happening. And so they did show up.

2:09:26They just showed up in a smart way that wasn't obvious, and I think probably something similar is going on with Roger. But again, it's just so contingent on the details. I mean, and it could be something as mundane as the IRS wants a high profile publicity stunt. And so they say, okay, well, there's this Bitcoin guy we can get. So I really don't know.

2:09:50Vlad CosteaI spent so many years going to conferences and meeting people and having drinks with them and having dinners with them. And it's going to be so disappointing 20, 30 years from now when I'm going to be old and I'm going to watch documentaries on Netflix, VR or whatever. And I'm going to see reports about how the CIA was trying to destroy the Bitcoin movement. And I'm going to see reports and stories from agents. And I'm going to be like, wasn't that guy sitting with me at the table claiming that we're going to replace fiat?

2:10:23James O'BeirneDefinitely conceivable, man. If we're playing it right, it's a high stakes game. And to not acknowledge that there would be not explicit state involvement, I think is just Pollyannish. So I think you're probably right about that.

2:10:41Vlad CosteaWhat do you think about never selling your Bitcoin, which is the meme that Saylor derived from the HODL meme? HODL used to mean just hold until you're in profit and never sell at a loss. Right now we're at never sell your Bitcoin, which is also what Trump echoed when he had that meeting with crypto people.

2:11:05James O'BeirneYeah, I think it's a convenient catchphrase for people who want to operate a Bitcoin warehouse where the Bitcoin never leaves and you use it as collateral, you know, as a loan that you get in fiat terms and that helps you pay your expenses. You know, I think if you're rich enough in Bitcoin terms, that is an appealing arrangement where you don't have to, you know, you think Bitcoin is going to go up, you want to buy a house. So you just, you know, whatever loan against a fraction of your Bitcoin as collateral.

2:11:32That's what rich people do with stocks right now. But I think it's like fine, whatever you think of that, you know, fine. But it's a very convenient argument for people who run and support big Bitcoin warehouses and custodians to make. It's not personally the way that I would probably ever operate because I don't like debt personally. But yeah, it's a convenient line of thinking for big institutions, for sure.

2:12:02Vlad CosteaIt was also funny in 2021 with BlockFi, I think. McCormack bought his Aston Martin using referrals from BlockFi and a lot of people were using BlockFi because they were thinking, oh, I don't want to pay tax on my Bitcoin, so I'm just going to get a loan against it. And what they found is that the amount of money that they had to pay, especially when the bear market started and they had to put up collateral to have the same amount of, no, to have an amount of BTC that is equal to the amount of U.S. dollars that they received. I think they actually lost more money doing that.

2:12:38James O'BeirneAbsolutely. Yeah. I mean, I know a few people who had money at BlockFi. Blessedly, I don't think any of them actually like were BlockFi customers at the time of their insolvency. But it was pretty instructive to see that all go down, for sure. Because I remember even thinking at the time, oh, man, you know, OK, this company seems pretty buttoned up from the outside. Maybe this is just going to be a permanent fixture in the Bitcoin financial system. Obviously, that didn't turn out to be the case.

2:13:13And so it's a good thing, I guess, that everybody saw that now and hopefully learned that lesson. You know, a few years ago, rather than now.

2:13:25Vlad CosteaLet me ask you this. I know it's late into the interview, but I still want to hear it from you, because I get the impression that you tend to be optimistic, even if you don't like what's happening around you. You're still hopeful. And let's say that we get CSFS and CTV activated by next year. Where do you see Bitcoin in 10 years if we're going to have these soft forks added?

2:13:53James O'BeirneMy belief is that I hope we get CTV CSFS soon. Maybe we get CAT after that. But my belief is that the forks will slow down. And that's part of why I think CAT is so important is because in many ways I hate CAT. I started off as a CAT critic because it's like the most dumb way to do anything. You know, in the same way, my old line from a few years ago is like, in the same way you can build a computer using black and white pebbles if you have enough of them, like you can do anything with CAT.

2:14:33CAT is very much like that. But it does provide this escape hatch to do things like ZKP layers on top of Bitcoin. So I think if we get that and, you know, the sort of off-chain or on top of chain innovation continues, Bitcoin could be in a good place 10 years from now. I mean, I hope we go on to do things like a block size increase, because I do think that's going to be really important. But I think the technical change at the protocol layer will inevitably slow down at some point.

2:15:10It's just kind of a question of when. Is your question more about like broadly where will Bitcoin be or is it more about the technicals?

2:15:19Vlad CosteaWell, I don't know. I just want to get your prediction in terms of anything. Like you think we're going to live the cypherpunk dream? You think it's all going to be useless anyway because the biggest layer twos are banks?

2:15:36James O'BeirneI think it's going to be a subtle, boring mixture of all of it. So I think that probably so here's like the thing that I'm still the thing that still makes me think Bitcoin has a bunch of like value price appreciation left in it is it remains this kind of memetic Schelling point for people who are concerned with, say, the dollar. You know, like Bitcoin remains memetically a kind of antidote to that. And so I think people will continue to sort of run into Bitcoin, even if it's just essentially a stock ticker, which it both is and it isn't.

2:16:21Like for most people, it's still it is just a stock ticker at this point, because at sufficient volume, they just simply couldn't interact on chain. But for people who hold some decent amount of Bitcoin, if they want to hop jurisdictions, if you're in the US and you want to get out or whatever, you still can make an on-chain transaction. You still can get out of the country and have your money, which is a great thing. And I think even if chain usage remains low-ish, we do definitely have to contend with the security spend problem.

2:16:57But I guess if you set that aside, even if it can't scale, maybe then some ultra savvy, relatively high net worth people can still move around where maybe otherwise they couldn't. So to me, that's a very lame outcome. But I guess it's better than Bitcoin not existing. So it's still something worth having. But no, I mean, my expectation is that that probably Bitcoin isn't going to be a major challenge to the fiat order, but it will at least galvanize an anti-fiat class and sentiment.

2:17:31Vlad CosteaWell, that's a moderately optimistic prediction. Something else I want to ask you before I let you go. When you talk about a block size increase on the podcast, all you get is comments in the chat. But you went on stage at OP_NEXT and you spoke about it. What was the reception like? What did people tell you after your presentation?

2:17:55James O'BeirneThere were some people who enjoyed it. I thought it was kind of rambling, but I do think there are some very valuable observations in there that are both quantitative and qualitative. I didn't get any kind of material objection. Nobody was like, oh, you know, you missed this here or you're off by an order of magnitude there, or this is the real problem. There was no real pushback. So I don't think anybody at this point who's technically grounded is seriously concerned about a block size increase on the order of, I don't know, 10X.

2:18:28I mean, if you are, tell me, tell me where I'm wrong. You know, show an argument. But no, I think nobody's been looking into this stuff for probably over a decade since I know Christian Decker did some paper way back in the day when he was in, you know, the academy about this stuff. And that was before compact blocks existed. You know, we've had a bunch happen since then. So it's really a simple matter of nobody's actually evaluated it. And so I'm curious to see if there is any kind of objection or other people who are convinced this is a good way to go forward.

2:19:06Vlad CosteaI think you should speak with Amaury Séchet, the creator of Bitcoin Cash, because he's done some experimentation and he believes that the block size is just like the speed limit on the road. Like you can lift the speed limit and say you can go up through up to 500 miles per hour. It doesn't mean that the laws of physics will allow you to do it. And he thinks that 32 megabytes is a conservative option. And there's a reason why he chose that for Bitcoin Cash. Right now, he's working on something else that's called XEC, it's eCash.

2:19:43He sort of moved on from Bitcoin designs. But what I'm trying to say is that this man has been obsessed with big blocks for a long time. He actually implemented it and got real-time feedback as he was deploying software. And maybe that there are some lessons to be learned from his work, because we can both agree that BSV is just insane and nihilistic. And maybe that what they're trying is interesting. I've seen an article from 2011 by Dan Kaminsky where he was doing napkin math about what it takes for Bitcoin to scale.

2:20:21And he was saying that even at one terabyte blocks, no, one gigabyte blocks, sorry, not one terabyte, at one gigabyte blocks, people will still be able to validate the chain and keep transactions for up to two weeks. This is what he was saying back in 2011, that people will be pruning their nodes. I think Dan Kaminsky believed that Len Sassaman is Satoshi, which is another conversation to be had in and of itself. But my point is that we have had these discussions for a long time. We have some live networks that are using the implementations. It's just that we somehow developed a religion where you're not allowed to look in other places.

2:21:06James O'BeirneThat's right. And the Bitcoin Cash guys have done a lot of work in this department. I know they have basically an adaptive block size now with a base size of 32 megabytes, which I agree. You know, if Bitcoin's block size was 32 megabytes, I really don't think you'd see any notable decrease in decentralization at all. Because, again, the people running nodes, actually running nodes and keeping them up are essentially hobbyists who have some money to throw at computing hardware. But even if you didn't, I think there are still technical designs that allow you to participate in the chain in a firsthand way.

2:21:48So, yeah, I think there's a lot to learn from Bitcoin Cash as a project. And then that applies equally in the covenants department. They've sort of done their own equivalent of the Great Script Restoration. And they have sort of a CTV equivalent and a CSFS equivalent. And everybody I've talked to recently from that community, I mean, their discourse on Twitter is a little bit aggressive for my liking, but in person, super nice guys. Everybody I've met, you know, they've got their heads on straight, I think. And so I've enjoyed kind of interacting with them, for sure.

2:22:26But, yeah, a lot to learn from people who have been actually doing it with real money for a while. So point well taken.

2:22:35Vlad CosteaYeah, James, what do you work on these days and how can people follow what you're up to?

2:22:41James O'BeirneYeah, so I have been kind of active in the covenants conversation. I do have a day job working on Bitcoin that I won't talk too much about. But obviously, I'm invested in not only getting CTV and CSFS done, but I still care a lot about vaults. I still think vaults are very critical for getting people to actually hold their own Bitcoin at scale. So I continue to work on that to some degree. But if you want to see what I'm up to, it's hard to really recommend my Twitter feed because it's so full of disparate political stuff and media and some Bitcoin stuff.

2:23:26But I'm @jamesob on Twitter if you want to check me out there.

2:23:31Vlad CosteaOK. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you wanted me to ask you?

2:23:38James O'BeirneI think we'd hit everything. But, Vlad, I really enjoyed catching up with you. And like I said, you know, I've enjoyed following you for the last few months. I think, you know, we've got kind of a similar gut feeling about a lot of things. And so keep it up. I think, you know, some of the interviews you've done recently, I really enjoyed the one with Paul Sztorc. I'm going to watch the one with Phil Zimmermann and the one you did with Amir Taaki was fun to scan through.

2:24:02I know it was like seven hours or something, but

2:24:04Vlad CosteaIt's timestamped. So if you want to skip the part where he geeks out about his favorite mathematician and dinosaurs, then you can do that.

2:24:13James O'BeirneBut, yeah, no. So you're I think you're having some really great discussions. And so I just appreciate you having me on.

2:24:20Vlad CosteaWell, I appreciate you're doing the work that you're doing because someone needs to present this point of view that if we're going to scale with layer twos, it doesn't mean that we should not scale the base layer also to let people onboard them in a permissionless and trust minimized way, as opposed to just giving up and saying, yeah, we'll use banks. Amen. Thank you very much, James. And thanks to the sponsors. Once again, SideShift, Citrea, Bitcoin.com News, NoOnes.com, LayerTwo Labs, Hodling.ch. I'll see you in the next one.

2:24:55I think I'm going to be interviewing Vitalik next. Maybe it will get a lot of views and then people will look back to see what other interviews out there. And this is also going to get a lot of views, but we still got like a thousand during this livestream. Thanks to everyone who watched and I'll see you on Friday.