Pierre Rochard (co-founder Nakamoto Institute, co-host Noded podcast) and I talk through Bitcoin’s Decentralised Governance. This is the process by which Bitcoin’s rules are decided, implemented, and enforced without having a central authority. Bitcoin’s governance matters because Bitcoin is the first successful, most liquid, and most widely known crypto-currency.
Some topics covered:
- The different parties involved in Bitcoin Governance
- Network Governance, rather than Miner Democracy or Dictatorship
- Bitcoin has no central authority
- Process of Research, Proposal, Implementation, Deployment, Enforcement
- Schelling Points
Pierre’s Links:
- Pierre’s article: Bitcoin Governance
- Pierre’s key note speech: Bitcoin Governance
- Pierre’s twitter: @pierre_rochard
- Nakamoto Institute
- Noded podcast: Noded.org
- Bitcoin Advisory
- David Harding Bitcoin Paper errat
Stephan Livera links:
- Show notes and website
- Follow me on twitter @stephanlivera
- Subscribe to the podcast
- Patreon @stephanlivera
Podcast Transcript:
Stephan Livera:
Hey guys, welcome to Stephan Livera podcast. And my guest today is Pierre. Thanks for coming on Pierre.
Pierre Rochard:
Thanks for having me on again, Stephan.
Stephan Livera:
Excellent. Yeah, Pierre’s one of my repeat guests. He’s one of the best guys to follow in this space. He is just for anyone who doesn’t know him. He is a cofounder of the Nakamoto Institute and also a co-host of Noded podcast, which is basically one of the top podcasts in this space. And he’s also the founder of Bitcoin Advisory. And our theme for today is Bitcoin Governance. So Pierre recently wrote some articles and has done some speeches and podcast appearances in relation to this. So obviously those will be in the show notes page. So I suppose let’s start with Bitcoin governance. Why do we care Pierre?
Pierre Rochard:
So I think that you’ve had some past guests on like Murad and Saifedean that have really laid out the monetary economics of Bitcoin and why they matter and why they are good for the future of humanity. Really. I mean as a civilization maximizing the capital accumulation and wealth that we have. And you know, at the end of the day that is a species is what’s going to allow us to survive and get into space and escape this this rock. But anyway, without getting too cosmic so governance is important. Bitcoin’s governance is important because Bitcoin is important. And Bitcoin did not emerge from the mind of Satoshi as a perfect thing. And I think that that’s widely recognized that there are improvements that can be made to the Bitcoin protocol. And so we have to examine how are those changes to the protocol made what do they affect? And how are they selected for specifically?
Stephan Livera:
Yup. Cool. And then who are the relevant parties to think about?
Pierre Rochard:
I think we could really go in order of their involvement. So you’ve got researchers and they are, in academia or in industry or independent and they’re trying to think of ways to tweak the Bitcoin protocol to address either a problem that they’ve seen or to create a new feature that they’re interested in seeing implemented on the Bitcoin protocol. And then after that you have a process called the a Bitcoin improvement proposals. And so there’s different people involved at that point that are looking at Bitcoin improvement proposals and then merging into the BIP repository where those improvement proposals are kind of canonified. And then you have people who implement these BIPs. They, since Bitcoin generally is, you know, has one reference implementation and we can get into that later, but that the implementers are C++ developers.
Pierre Rochard:
And so that’s another constituency of what’s called Bitcoin core contributors. And there’s overlap over all these groups, right? And then you have people who are run a Bitcoin full node, and that ranges from someone who is running a Bitcoin full node without owning any Bitcoins, which we can talk about why that might be a little useless. But there’s also on the other end of the spectrum large exchanges that are verifying millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins coming in and out using their Bitcoin full node. So then finally we have the miners. The miners generally would be running a full node, but that’s really actually only the mining pools, pool operators that run a full node currently. And the miners themselves are just a running SHA256 squared calculations. So they have a role to play in, in the governance as well. And, and we can debate about the extent of that role.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, great summary of the many moving pieces that are in play in the Bitcoin world. So one concept I’ve seen you talk about, and I think you do really well in explaining this, is you talk about this concept of network governance specifically as not a miner democracy or not a kind of developer governance or benevolent dictator. What do you mean when you say network governance?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah, so I think that explaining network governance kind of a necessitates explaining what it is that we are governing and what’s being governed with Bitcoin’s. Governance is the block and transaction validation rules. And so this is a long set of different rules. Some of them are minutia that aren’t particularly interesting to people. And others have caused Holy Wars within Bitcoin. So you know, I have in mind obviously the block size limit, which is now the block weight limit. And so that particular block validation rule has caused a huge amount of controversy. But there’s a lot of other different validation rules that are much less controversial. And so the definition of Bitcoin really is these rules. Because if you are not following these rules and you are creating an invalid transaction or an invalid block, that invalid transaction and that invalid block will not be propagated, will not be communicated by other nodes that are following the rules.
Pierre Rochard:
And so you immediately kind of get sidelined by the network and you’re no longer part of the Bitcoin network if you’re not following those rules. Now I think that the issue with that explanation, so that’s, network governance, which is basically that if you do not follow the rules of the nodes on the network, then you will get excluded from the network and you’re removed. But the controversy is which network, which set of validation rules do we call Bitcoin and we saw last year and we’re continuing to see it with Bitcoin cash, where you have the BCH people who say, well, our set of validation rules is Bitcoin. And that is their point of view. And then you have the BTC people who say, well, no, it’s our set of validation rules. And thus our network that is Bitcoin.
Pierre Rochard:
And last year we had the SegWit well, they called it SegWit2X, but it’s really just the 2X part, right? The, the two X people led by Jeff Garcia who were saying that now our set of validation rules is Bitcoin. And so it’s kind of a, it’s an interesting issue where there’s no central authority that says, this set of validation rules is deemed to be Bitcoin and everyone has to follow that. And if anyone disagrees, they’re wrong. And if they insist, then you know, we’ll throw them in jail or something. So there’s no trademark. There’s no and in fact, there’s, it’s very challenging to kind of think of a legal precedent unless we kind of take a step back and think about it at a social level and not just a technological level.
Pierre Rochard:
And I think that at a social level what Bitcoin is, which set of validation rules Bitcoin is kind of the same question of what, what technical properties of a computer make a computer, a laptop versus a desktop. And there’s no, there’s no formal definition it, right? And everyone can disagree. You know, you could say, well an iPad is a laptop. Or you could say that, Hey the new iMac is a laptop because it’s so compact and self-contained. So everyone can have these kinds of debates over semantics. And at the end of the day, it’s kind of when you’re actually engaging in commerce with someone else and you’re actually exchanging value. You’re part of, you know, catallaxy in Austrian terms what is it that you and your trading partner are agreeing on?
Pierre Rochard:
And so if you sell a brick on eBay and you call it a laptop and the person you’re breaking that, the counterparty’s expectations, they were expecting a laptop and you mailed them a brick. Now if you can just go in front of a judge and say, well, look, your honor I call bricks laptops and it’s not really my problem that this other person doesn’t share that same definition as I do. Because that’s just my definition of what a laptop is. It’s a cement brick. And so obviously a judge would say, well, let’s look at like, what would a reasonable person, consider a laptop to be? And that’s kind of the legal standard of like, what would a reasonable person think. And that’s grounded in a social reality of what’s called like inter subjective reality, which is that we have all these words to talk about things.
Pierre Rochard:
And we have to have some kind of bridge between those two. And otherwise, I mean, society completely falls apart if we don’t have this right. If we completely lose the ability to communicate meaning with each other, then not only is commerce impossible, but even just any kind of social interaction, it quickly devolves into being impossible. So let’s bring it back to Bitcoin, right? So if you were to sell BCH to someone and you say, Oh, you know, I’m selling you Bitcoin then it’s kind of a question of how many other people agree with you that you sold that person Bitcoin before it becomes a preponderance and it becomes, what the reasonable person would expect. And that’s deliberately, I think, I mean, it’s not deliberately unanswerable, but it’s inherently unanswerable and that’s a good thing.
Pierre Rochard:
Otherwise, Bitcoin would be centralized, right? If there was one person who said, Hey, this is Bitcoin and this is not, then Bitcoin would be completely centralized and they could change the definition at a whim. So it’s good that Bitcoin is an emergent social consensus among people. But it’s disorienting for folks who want to make changes to the validation rules of Bitcoin but ultimately are stifled by the difficulty of changing so many people, people’s minds about what Bitcoin is and shifting what I think is called a Schelling point. And we can talk about it kind of what a Schelling point is, if you’d like.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, those are fantastic points that I really liked the point you’re making that it’s really an, it’s there’s parallels there with like Austrian economics and praxeology and this idea of inter subjective perception of value and what really what is the social consensus around that. So yeah, maybe it’d be a good idea to then go now into the process of governance. And then as we go through that, then we can talk about how that will help you know, at what point people start to move that Schelling point. So maybe we’ll start with that process of governance. So in your article you talk about research. So do you want to Add line a little bit around that?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah. So there’s a variety of people and I actually think that there’s not enough people doing research on the Bitcoin protocol. But basically the idea is that you would use your tacit and explicit knowledge about both Bitcoin, its properties. And your vision for where you think it should go and have all of that coalesce into your ability to do research and run experiments, run simulations, and see, what kind of changes do I want to make to the Bitcoin protocol? So I think that there’s not enough people doing that part of it might just be like a, it’s a public good. It’s there’s not enough provided. Yeah. But I actually, I mean, it’s not that big of a problem from an economic point of view that there’s not a lot of research going on because you kind of do want the protocol to remain very stable and, and not changing willy nilly. One of the questions is, well, what if people are researching the wrong things or not researching enough? And I think that those are fair criticisms of Bitcoin’s governance at the research stage. Especially because like, if it’s self-directed researchers who are not employed by industry or by large HODLers, like they’re just going to research what they’re inherently intrinsically interested in. And that might not necessarily align with what users are expecting to have researched.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Fair points. Okay. And then, so the next stage you outline after research is a proposal. So as you mentioned earlier with the BIP, what are some of the forms that a Bitcoin proposal can take?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah, so I think that every single change to the Bitcoin protocol has been in the form of a BIP. You know, after, BIPs started which was pretty early in the game. But obviously, I mean, Satoshi was making changes willy nilly without putting out a proposal. And I actually, I think that’s an important thing to dig into, which is that Bitcoin’s governance has been formalizing in a sense and maturing as Bitcoin itself has been maturing. And as the amount of value that is secured by the Bitcoin network has been increasing. So back in the day, like Satoshi could put out a change to the Bitcoin protocol and not really, you know, have much scrutiny made to it and it will just get merged and he would release it out into the wild and people would run it without really questioning it.
Pierre Rochard:
Now changes go through a lot of scrutiny and that scrutiny starts with the proposal. And so when they send an email to the Bitcoin BIP mailing list it might link to a BIP eventually, that BIP will have a number assigned to it. And that BIP number is kind of what will colloquially be known as a short hand. And you’ll, you’ll hear, you know, references to different BIP numbers, you know, 144, 142 or 140, or whatever and or BIP 148 for UASF. So these these BIP’s have no, they’re not binding in a sense, right? So they’re more about trying to solicit feedback from people and seeing, gauging what the level of interest is within the developer community about different changes. And, and it’s also that they’re written in plain English. Now. Some of them have like more specification to them and they may have some pseudocode in it, but generally it’s something that a the general public would be able to read and provide feedback if they’re knowledgeable about Bitcoins Protocol.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Great points. I think, you know, Satoshi naughty boy not putting in a BIP for all those changes he did.
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah. Although, I mean He didn’t really have a lot of people to communicate it with. Right?
Stephan Livera:
I’m kidding.
Pierre Rochard:
But he did put out like forum posts in the Bitcoin talk forum. But yeah, it’s just, it’s a completely different world.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. The process has just evolved and changed. And I think we’ve all been learning as we go in a sense of how what is the quote unquote correct way to make a change to Bitcoin. And then not just the small changes, but really the big consensus changes which are the ones that get more contentious. Okay. So then let’s say you know, we’ve gone through research, we’ve gone through proposal, what’s the next stage?
Pierre Rochard:
So the next stage would be to take that BIP and to actually write the code that would be implementing that BIP essentially. And that implementation would generally happen as kind of a pull request on the Bitcoin core repository on the reference implementation written in C++. And if there’s a process of code review around the implementation, both of BIP’s of changes to the protocol, but also of any kind of change to Bitcoin’s a reference implementation. But the changes to the protocol receive a much higher degree of scrutiny than any of the other changes. Because if there were to be a bug in a change to the protocol, then that bug essentially, I mean, either becomes part of the protocol or could cause a loss of funds, could cause a chain split could cause some real damage to Bitcoin if it were to slip by the reviewer’s eyes.
Pierre Rochard:
And so this is a very important stage in the process where at the end of the day, it’s what’s in the code that matters. It, what’s in the BIP is irrelevant. People are not running the BIP, people are running the compiled code. And so having a level of quality assurance around that of testing of people really trying to break it essentially and deploying it on a test net and trying to figure out ways where this will have unexpected results or cause side effects that were unanticipated. So it’s really hard to anticipate the unanticipated, but that’s what has to happen at the implementation stage if we want to minimize and mitigate the risk of a consensus change.
Stephan Livera:
Yep. Great points. And then are there, we’re sort of leaning towards this concept of can Bitcoiners try to implement a certain tech and wraps around so to speak, what the developers actually wanted?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think that there’syou’ll often hear people say that the Bitcoin core developers or core contributors are gatekeepers because they are the ones who control the what’s, you know, the reference implementations git repository. And they’re the ones who release the client, the node software. It is widely seen as being the unofficial, official client, nodes software that should be run by everyone. And so there’s an element of truth to that obviously in that participants in the Bitcoin ecosystem are going to be very apprehensive about running other pieces of software. And part of the reason is that there’s kind of a path dependency in that this, this git repository on git hub. You know, Bitcoin/Bitcoin is in a sense the successor to Satoshi codebase and is kind of on on this path where it is the descendant of Satoshi codebase and thus realistically has the lowest risk.
Pierre Rochard:
And you know, as the more most battle-tested codebase. But I think that can be overstated. I think that it’s more than just the fact that this, this get repository and set of contributors has been around for awhile. I think that it has a lot to do with the Bitcoin core project’s philosophy as well. And their competence, frankly that they have been very good stewards of this codebase and have released very reliable software over the years. So there’s been some hiccups along the ways. You know, for example, the 0.7 to 0.8. And you know, I don’t want to point fingers around that, but the people who were most directly responsible for that are no longer with the project. But at the end of the day, I mean, it’s kind of, it’s on everyone, everyone involved with the Bitcoin core project to be releasing the highest quality software possible.
Pierre Rochard:
And that’s why I think that there’s such a strong culture of code review in Bitcoin core where you can have 6, 8, 10 people reviewing every line of code for a particularly important pull request. And that’s the way it should be. And so I think that that’s part of the reason why the, quote unquote reference implementation has so much credibility behind it is that it has a very good engineering culture. Now, all that said, if someone wants to take all of that code, which is open source, right, it’s all available for free as in beer and as in speech. And you can copy paste all of that code. You can fork it in, git sense, not in the Bitcoin sense, but you can clone that repository and make your own little changes to the code or, or big changes and compile it and release it out to the public and try to persuade people to run your code.
Pierre Rochard:
Now to persuade people to run your code and to run your binaries. You’re, going to have to demonstrate either that you have a track record that gives you some credibility in this or you put out some very well thought through medium articles or, some very compelling tweets or whatever it may be that persuades people that, Hey, you know, what not only am I and you know, I’m going to run this code and I’m going to rely on it and I’m going to use it to verify payments that I receive when I’m expecting to receive Bitcoins. And I expect other people to be running this code as well because it is obviously superior to the previous code that we were running. So that process of persuasion can be very challenging if you don’t have a track record of not only contributing to the existing reference implementation, but also of having ideas about changes to the protocol that are just widely recognized as being compelling and also not being compelling to the reference implementation to the Bitcoin core contributors.
Pierre Rochard:
Right. Because the premise of the question here is that the someone who has a change to Bitcoin, which the developers find to be lacking, but that the public would find to be compelling. And I just I think that that scenario is kind of farfetched even though it’s theoretically possible. And interesting but the closest we got to it was with UASF last year, BIP 148, where essentially Shaolin Fry who is a pseudonymous developer created a change to the Bitcoin protocol rules where after a certain point, blocks that did not have SegWit enabled in them would not be accepted by the node as valid blocks. And so if you were sending a payment to someone who is signaling UASF and UASF has activated that that payment wouldn’t go through if you were incapable of getting it included in a block that was mined by a UASF miner or not, sorry, not by a SegWit miner which is, it’s subtly different.
Pierre Rochard:
And so that was seen by the Bitcoin core contributors as if that were included in the reference implementation, that it would be disruptive to the ecosystem. And I think that they were right and having this concern. And simultaneously, I think that the UASF contingent, were right in asserting the sovereignty of the nodes over what gets included, what is a valid block because there’s kind of this perception that, Hey, it’s the miners to get to decide what a valid block is. And I think that’s actually a profoundly wrong reading of how the bitcoin system works in practice. Now maybe that’s not what was written in the, white paper, we can debate that because there’s language there that’s debatable as well. But in practice Bitcoin, the validity of Bitcoin blocks and transactions is set by people running nodes and accepting payments with them.
Pierre Rochard:
But anyway, I’m going kind of on a tangent here. Yeah. So UASF was a situation where Shaolin Fry copied the Bitcoin core repository, made the changes that he wanted to see made to that code and then released the binaries and persuaded such a large contingent of the Bitcoin ecosystem to run his code that the miners ultimately capitulated. And went along with SegWit. So it was kind of a a game of chicken of who would you know, turn the wheel first. But ultimately the SegWit activation happened. And there’s lots of controversy around that, but we can save that for another podcast. .
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, great points around how there’s a sense of path dependency but also a factor of competency of the team who are developing and coding into Bitcoin. The next thing that I thought it would be good for you to outline for the listeners would just be around the forms of signalling that are available.How can people signal which side or what they want?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah. So I guess we could first point out that there, there is no good and well let’s be more specific. There’s no perfect way of signaling. And thus in a sense Bitcoin’s consensus is a Schelling point which is a focal point that people agree on without ever communicating. And so the best example of it is this question of if you are meeting a complete stranger in New York city and you have to figure out where, where to meet them, where are you, where do you think that you would run into them? And at what time? And so I don’t know if you know the answer already Stephan.
Stephan Livera:
Yes. So I’ve, heard the the example, which normally is 12 noon at central station, which makes great sense to me.
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah. So it would be cheating if I asked you in earnest at what time, or where but so, yeah, that’s exactly right. And the point there is that like, it’s not that everyone shows up at Grand Central at noon and fact I think that it’s like 60 to 80% of people who do, but it remains that that’s kind of where the plurality of people show up. And that’s based on kind of the topography of the map, right? Which is when you think about, okay, what’s kind of the best transportation hub in New York Grand Central. Okay. And then when we think about, well, what do you know, what about the statue of Liberty? All right, that’s wildly inconvenient to get to, you know, the person wouldn’t be there. Or what about like the empire state building?
Pierre Rochard:
Well, that’s kind of out of your way as well. And so all of these different options where you can kind of rule them out and you can determine, well, you know, Grand Central, if you really think about it, is probably the best geographical location. And then in terms of the time, it’s like, well, you know, noon is kind of, you know, whether the person’s a morning person or an evening person, we don’t really know everyone’s awake at noon generally, unless they really had a hard night out. And you know, people are off for lunch. Noon just kind of makes sense. And so we can know these things without ever communicating with the other person? Right? and without ever telling them, Hey, look, what’s your favorite place to meet in Manhattan? Or what’s your favorite time to meet?
Pierre Rochard:
And you just show up and there you are. So that’s kind of a Schelling point. And I think that Bitcoin functions much in the same way. Now, a big part of it is back to this issue of path dependency, right? And so the default place for us to meet is where we met yesterday. And so that’s kind of what the consensus rules were when Satoshi put them in place. So that’s what we have today is that the overwhelming majority of the existing block and transaction validation rules are what Satoshi made them on day zero of Bitcoin. And we’ve kinda been on this path of, all right, we’re 500,000 blocks in are the validation rules for what Bitcoin is today. Ah, well, I mean, they’re going to be the same that they were 10 minutes ago. And, to change that schelling point is extremely difficult and thank God because if it wasn’t, then we would have Keynesians we’d have inflationists, socialists, all sorts of people who want to change Bitcoin’s monetary policy.
Pierre Rochard:
Trying to shift that 21 million Bitcoin Schelling point you know, any way possible. So it’s good that it’s hard to shift. But it’s, it’s, it’s bad in the sense that if we’re trying to make it so the Bitcoin the base layer is improving and upgrading, then we’ve gotta kinda herd a bunch of cats because people are going to have all sorts of different ideas about how to change the, the protocol that might be pulling in different directions. Or are just pulling against the status quo. So you gotta signal, what changes to the Bitcoin protocol we want to make and what schelling point are you going to be showing up at? And you can’t really, so the way to do this is on social media, right? So you #UASF or #no2X. No2X in that case was about, you know, staying on the existing Schelling point and keeping the status quo.
Pierre Rochard:
But UASF was about moving to a new Schelling point of refusing to accept a non SegWit blocks. And so these are, these are imperfect forms of signaling due to what’s called a cybil attack, which is basically that someone could create a bunch of fake Twitter accounts or pay people on Twitter to, signal these things. And the countermeasure to a cybil attack like this is ironically enough, is having a web of trust that is having people that you know, in real life, you know that they’re intelligent people. You know, that they actually do use Bitcoin. They actually owned Bitcoin, they actually care about Bitcoin. You actually respect their opinion on Bitcoin and what Bitcoin is and what it stands for and what its future is, what its philosophy and its
[inaudible]
all these really soft, yeah. Social aspects of Bitcoin of a bitcoiner you know, we each have our list of who we consider to be Bitcoiners and who we consider to be shitcoiners and who we consider to be nocoiners.
Pierre Rochard:
Right. And, and we have within those lists, people we trust more or less, for lack of a better word. And it’s the, the paradox, the idea of it is that we talk about Bitcoin being a trustless system and wanting to maximise trustlessness. But I actually, I think that Bitcoin is a way of compartmentalizing trust and of really having trust be limited to the things that you want to trust people for. And then removing trust in a lot of other aspects of it. And in a sense it actually kind of makes trust more important. It shifts trust. It doesn’t remove it entirely in my mind. But yeah, so if you have a web of trust and you know that, Hey, I trust Stephan Livera. I know that he controls his Twitter account.
Pierre Rochard:
I’ve never met him in person, which is crazy to think about, but I’ve known you on Twitter since 2013. So if you had a hashtag on your account about what kind of consensus change you want to see happen and what kind of software you’re running and what kind of software you want to see other people running that’s gonna have a lot more credibility than someone who just joined Twitter a month ago and has, you know, the default Twitter, bio and the Twitter image. Yeah the egg, and they don’t have any tweets. They don’t even follow me. Yeah. It’s like, okay, why would this account have any credibility?
Stephan Livera:
I think the lesson there is, if you’re not following Pierre Rochard, are you even a Bitcoiner?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah, that’s a valid question at this point. But now that, you know, we’ll give people the benefit of the doubt.There’s, there’s folks out there who haven’t gotten around to hitting that follow button. So if that’s one of you, take a moment right now and log on to Twitter and do that and follow Stephan Livera too obviously. Yeah, so this web of trust is kind of a way to mitigate the issue of being Sybil attacks. Now the, the other signaling mechanism that people will talk about is minor signaling. And I actually, I think miner signaling is even more problematic than Twitter hashtag signaling. And the problem with minor signaling is that miners really don’t have a strong view on what should be going on with the Bitcoin protocol itself. What they care about is kind of the Fiat value of Bitcoin, right? Which is that if the Fiat value of Bitcoin is going up they’re paying their electricity costs at and Fiat, and that creates a spread for them to make a handsome profit on.
Pierre Rochard:
Until, you know, obviously the hash rate goes up and the difficulty adjusts. But the Fiat value is completely disconnected from changes in Bitcoin’s protocol. And I think that that’s something that is very hard for people to wrap their minds around because we kind of have this instinct of, well, if the Bitcoin protocol improves, then Bitcoin’s price is going to go up, right? I think that’s really misguided.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. It’s not a one to one relationship and it’s, it’s sometimes leading us sometimes lagging.
Pierre Rochard:
I would question whether there’s a relationship at all actually. I think that the, the relationship between Bitcoin’s protocol and the price is the monetary policy, right? The 21 million Bitcoins. And so that has to do with the block header verification rules. And so the block header has the you know, the mining in it, right?
Pierre Rochard:
The nonce and all of that the difficulty. And how many Bitcoins are getting created in a block. But so that monetary policy I think is kind of the first driver of Bitcoin’s price. The second one is the credibility of that monetary policy. And so that has to do with what we’re discussing today, right? The governance of Bitcoin. And so the harder it is to change that 21 million cap the more credible Bitcoin’s monetary policy is and that lends a lot of confidence to investors. And then the last element of it I think is just how much time has elapsed since Bitcoin’s inception. And I think those three combined form the fundamental value of Bitcoin around which the price oscillates based on the animal spirits of these insane speculators that are on BitMex going a hundred X leverage, right.
Pierre Rochard:
And that are piling in when the price is going up and really momentum trading and then freaking out and panic selling when the price is going down. And you know they’re trading on noise on use, on epiphenomenon like that. But really I think the, yeah, the monetary policy is what all of this oscillates around. And in time the Lindy effect, if every day that Bitcoin continues to exist is another day that we can continue to expect it to exist. So all that to say that I think that adding, you know, a new op code to Bitcoin’s consensus rules or, or increasing the block weight limit or, you know, SegWit like I don’t think those increase Bitcoin’s price and I don’t think that they increase Bitcoin’s value. So they occur because people have an itch to scratch. And that might be that they want to use Bitcoin as a settlement layer or as a payments layer. And so that’s why they’re going in and making these changes to the consensus rules. But I don’t think that it changes Bitcoin on a monetary level and on an investment level it helps on a payments level.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah.Agreed. Okay. Well, I think that while we’re on this topic of the schelling point, do you have any comments on what parts of Bitcoin would be very difficult to change or almost impossible? And what other parts of Bitcoin are more amenable to change?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah I mean there’s, I think there’s a long list of entirely non-controversial changes that could happen even in a hard fork. And really the controversy is about the hard fork itself, not the changes themselves. But yeah, things like we can actually, we can look at past changes to Bitcoin’s validation rules and see what schelling points are very easy to shift. And so I think that transaction formats, you know, like SegWit, like that was probably the most controversial change that’s happened in the history of Bitcoin which was you know, removing signatures but also just changing signatures. So right now we’re using ECDSA there’s a proposal or there’s. So I think there’s a BIP now. Yeah, that’s right. There was recently a BIP made for changing to Schnorr.
Pierre Rochard:
And right now it seems like a shoo-in, but I would really caution, and I might start harping on this on Twitter soon. I think that there’s needs to be more input from a wider range of people, especially cryptographers on what Bitcoin’s signature you know, scheme should be, and right now we have Pieter Wuille you know, who’s associated with Blockstream and he’s kind of the main driving force behind Schnorr . And there’s a lot of other people who agree with him. And I think that there’s no harm in having more people vocalizing either their opposition or their support to Schnorr. What I would not want is that Schnorr kind of gets decided on by default rather than by a strong process of deliberation. And then rough consensus. So it seems that that’s going to be uncontroversial, but I want there to be more controversy about it.
Pierre Rochard:
And then you can, on the other end of the spectrum, you have things like changing the block reward. So increasing the block size limit beyond 21 million and having like a continuous inflation rate like that – hugely, hugely controversial. And in my mind, basically inconceivable at this point. I don’t there, there are people who are debating the long term security of Bitcoin without having, if there is no inflation and we’re entirely reliant on transaction fees, I think that debate is worth having. And it’s interesting, but at the end of the day, I don’t think that it actually will lead to an increase in Bitcoins hard cap. And I would be very disappointed if it did. And so the only reason that I think the 21 million hard cap would be changed is if there was a serious security issue around it.
Pierre Rochard:
And I don’t think that even the people who are saying that there is a problem with a hard cap, I don’t think that the arguments that they’re coming up with are compelling enough to say that it’s a serious security issue. I think that what they’re pointing out is kind of an inconvenience, not as security issue, which is that we’re going to have to wait for a lot of confirmations in the future. And so to have the same level of finality that we have with six confirmations today, maybe we’ll need 60 or 600 or 6,000 confirmations in the future. But that’s not, I don’t think that’s a reason to change the 21 million hard cap. Now, so in between those two extremes, we have changing the block weight limit. And I’ve seen people argue that we can do that with a soft fork.
Pierre Rochard:
Some people argue that that’s only doable with a hard fork in either direction. It’s controversial. The reason it’s controversial is very similar to the reason that the plot size limit debate was highly controversial before SegWit, which is that the full nodes maintain a full history of the Bitcoin blockchain and in order to have a UTXO set that is kind of fully validated and that they’ve looked at every single block since the Genesis block. And that’s what has formed this UTXO set that is the record of who owns what Bitcoins which I mean, frankly is like the most important thing in Bitcoin, right? The UTXO set you have to download every single block in the history of Bitcoin and then run it as a, you know, a change to the UTXO set and validate everything associated with it, all the transactions, all the inputs and the outputs and the block header.
Pierre Rochard:
So all of this, all of this overhead is put on to nodes and nodes are not compensated for this. So essentially it’s kind of a negative externality. The reason that people run full nodes is so that they can verify payments that they personally are receiving. And to verify that essentially that there one Bitcoin is one out of 21 million Bitcoins and not one out of 26 million or whatever. And so, you know, they can make sure that they’re on the right consensus. And anyway all this to say that it changed to the block weight limit would be controversial because you’re, you’re increasing the negative externality. And you’re also changing the economics of Bitcoin in the sense of if we’re concerned about the Bitcoin hash rate and equilibrium in the future, then we should be concerned about how do we maximize minor revenue. And the way to maximize minor revenue is to create artificial block space scarcity so that we can have a good competitive fee market. And increasing block supply affects that, that market.
Stephan Livera:
Yup. Agreed. Okay. So I think that sort of is a good discussion around deployment. How about now enforcement? So I’ve seen some, one good way I’ve heard of putting it is one of the guys on Twitter stuff and decrypt one of his articles, he talks about Bitcoin as an impenetrable fortress of validation. So yeah. How are changes enforced in Bitcoin?
Pierre Rochard:
I hope you have Stop and Decrypt on your podcast soon because he is quite prolific on Medium. He’s written some really good articles. So I think that I did touch upon it earlier in the episode of essentially if someone is transmitting an invalid, a transaction or block, then they get disconnected from the network. And that’s what makes it an impenetrable fortress validation. But in terms of I mean with the deployment, you’ve got gotta make sure that everyone’s running the same consensus code that you’re expecting them to run. And what’s the enforcement part? What it comes down to is if you are selling a good or a service or let’s say you’re selling your fiat for Bitcoins and you want to receive Bitcoins, you have to choose what is my definition of Bitcoin.
Pierre Rochard:
So if you’re a BCasher your definition of Bitcoin BCH you know, you’re going to go download that, node software. But if you’re thinking that you want to stick to the current schelling point of Bitcoin BTC, then you’ve got to go download the reference implementation or other implementations that are currently compatible with the reference implementation. Now with the caveat that maybe maybe run both the reference implementation and an alternative implementation just to make sure that you’re in consensus. And then that person is going to create, the person that is selling Bitcoins to is going to create a Bitcoin transaction for you and they’re going to broadcast it to the Bitcoin network and your node as part of the Bitcoin network is going to eventually receive that transaction that’s being broadcast. And if, you determine it to be valid, then it will be added to, to your mempool and it will appear in your wallet as having been seen as an unconfirmed transaction.
Pierre Rochard:
So at that point, that’s how you have enforced a definition of Bitcoin, which is that if that person had sent you an invalid transaction, you would never see it in your mempool and you would never see it in your wallet, which is attached to your full node. And thus you would never recognize that that person had sent you Bitcoins and you would be on the phone with them asking them, where are my Bitcoins? Right? So you have, you have enforced the Bitcoin protocol by your actions, and by delegating your actions to your note and automating them with your node. Now eventually you would want to make sure that that transaction gets included in a valid block. So in minor, if they are running the same consensus rules of Bitcoin, a Bitcoin miner now granted I say, you know, a Bitcoin miner, but if they’re mining SHA256 squared, they don’t really care like what consensus rules they’re mining is a, you know, they want to get paid and whatever is profitable to mine at that point in time is with the mine.
Pierre Rochard:
But setting aside that they will include that transaction in a block that, then that block will get broadcasted to the Bitcoin network. And your note as part of the Bitcoin network will eventually receive that block and your node will verify that that block, the block header, has the correct proof of work in it. And the contents of the block are all valid as well, all the transactions in there are valid. And the, Merkle tree is all valid and all that, and, and that your transaction is one of those blocks or one of those transactions in the block. And at that point you can say with some confidence that not only do I own Bitcoins, but there is some finality to the transaction that was broadcasted to me. And your confidence in that finality only increases as new blocks come in. You validate them, they’re Bitcoin blocks, you add them and the depth which your transaction is in the blockchain continues to increase. And, you know, people have different rules of thumbs of what depth they consider to be safe. But you know, it can be from two to six.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah I like that. And that’s a good articulation as well of let’s say I liked one particular side of a fork and I didn’t want the other, well, that is how, running that node is how I can ensure that I stay on the chain or the side that I want to stay on. So, yeah, that’s a good point. I think now that we’ve sort of run through the process of, you know, Bitcoin governance with the full benefit of hindsight, let’s, you know, just I’m curious to get your comment or you know, sort of postmortem on some of the failed changes in Bitcoin’s history, so, you know, what did they do wrong? And one example that might be, it could be that they did not build consensus before attempting to fork. Do you have any comments?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah. Although, I mean, I think that, you know if you try to build consensus before you fork and you fail, but you really want to fork and you think that after you’ve forked that people will eventually recognize the superiority of your consensus then you really have no choice but to just go ahead and do it. Now as I was saying like, I don’t think that Bitcoin’s value comes from you know, making changes to the protocol itself. So I don’t think that that would ultimately results in success. And as we see with the Bitcoin cash hard fork where it’s really, it hasn’t, it’s trading has not broken out any higher than, you know, what it was at the beginning and it reflects the, you know, 10% of Bitcoiners ended up and that’s, being very generous.
Pierre Rochard:
It’s probably less than that. I ended up going to the Bitcoin Cash side of the hard fork. In terms of like, okay, you know, this person, you know, Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn and, and Jeff Garzik, they all failed to gather a consensus on their changes and let’s not take that as a given. Let’s look at why. Why is it that they failed? Is it because of the changes themselves? Right. The substance of the consensus changes. I think that’s certainly an element of it. I think that it would have gone perhaps lot more smoothly if the increases to the block size limit. And in Jeff Garzik’s instance, the block weight limit, if those changes had been at the margin rather than a doubling then or a quadrupling or, like, I think that that Gavin was wanting to go to 32 megabyte blocks, like crazy stuff.
Pierre Rochard:
But anyway those changes, are just much too radical. Like I don’t think that they had a chance on their merits from the beginning. So I think that if they had done a marginal thing where it’s like, we’re going to increase the block size limit or the block weight limit by let’s say 50 kilobytes a month or a quarter, then you know, that’s something that maybe would have gathered a lot more consensus around. So setting aside the substance of it, then we can kind of get into the communication strategy of it. So basically they were not, they didn’t get a lot of traction with the Bitcoin core developers. And so they took it to the public. And Gavin wrote some blog posts about increasing the block size limit. At the time.
Pierre Rochard:
And you know they circulate it around, they were posted on Reddit and they were widely read. They were widely discussed and ultimately they were unpersuasive I think that the Gavin did not engage in the rebuttals to his arguments. They, Gavin was either out of just incompetence on his part or maliciousness creating a straw man arguments and not steelmanning his opponents. And so I think that that reduces your credibility and reduces the credibility of the consensus change that you’re advocating for. Which is unfair. Like I think that the arguments for increasing the block size limit pre SegWit and then increasing the block weight limit post SegWit. And to this day there are very good arguments for doing it. And they, in my view, have not had a justice done to them by their proponents.
Pierre Rochard:
And it’s kind of a shame because you know, the strongest argument against increasing the block size limit and the block weight limit is that we need to break this expectation that transactions on Bitcoin are free or have a negligible cost and start attaching a cost to them because eventually we’re going to hit a block weight limit or let’s call it a block weight limit at this point. That does reduce decentralization and does so dramatically increase the cost of running a full node the decentralization is impaired. And that might not be at the limit that we’re currently at of 8 million weight units. But we’re not that far from it. And so why not break that expectation now? And once people have it firmly in mind that “No look, transacting on chain with Bitcoin has consequences to it and has a cost attached to it.”
Pierre Rochard:
And as the transactor, you will bear a significant amount of that cost, you know, as, as kind of a proxy to you know, it’s not like the transaction fees go to the nodes, but it certainly, it works as a deterrent for, you know, mindless consumption of block space. So I think that Gavin and Mike Hearn and Jeff Garzik could have put forth a really good solid case of, look, we agree that we cannot continue to increase block space consumption indefinitely. But and we agree that we’re going to have to break user expectations eventually and that every business can’t be, you know, visa on the blockchain and, you know, we’re not going, we’re not going to scale up to visa and, and that’s okay. But at this point in time it is sensible that we would bump the block size limit a little bit and kinda, yeah, it’s kicking down the road. But it’s the prudent thing to do and we’ll develop layer two over time. And it’s already in the works and that’ll be great when it happens. But in the meantime, like let’s buy ourselves a little breathing room. And I don’t think that they made that argument particularly well.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, I see. Yeah, no, that’s a good point as well. Okay. Let’s now contrast Bitcoin’s Network Governance versus other Blockchain Governance. There was an interesting statement I saw by Nick Szabo and he was saying blockchain governance generally comes in three varieties. One: Lord of the flies, Two: lawyers have Three: ruthlessly minimized. How would you fit Bitcoin into that category and maybe compare it against some of the other alternatives?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah so I think that in this framework it definitely fits under number three of ruthlessly minimized and basically in terms of minimizing the and I would almost characterize it as a attack surface. Which is that people can use governance decisions to attack Bitcoin’s consensus. And I would argue that’s what happened with the block size limit. But how you minimize that attack surface, how you, how you minimize the scope that governance has to deal with is that you minimize the set of validation rules that form the consensus, right? The, set of OP codes the set of different, denial of service countermeasures, whether it’s SIG ops or the block size limit. The set of block header verification rules. And so there you could say like, like the biggest can of worms you could open and the biggest maximization of governance that you could do would be to say, Oh, you know what, we’re going to have on chain miner signaling for how many Bitcoins get created with each block.
Pierre Rochard:
Right? Like, all right, now, we have the FOMC. We’ve got it, we’ve got a central banking monetary policy Lord of the flies situation with, with Bitcoin’s monetary policy. Like that would be the ruthlessly maximizing the attack surface of governance. So I’m using that kind of as a reductio ad absurdum and so I think Bitcoin does a really good job of ruthlessly minimizing the validation rules that are being governed. And you can put Ethereum on the opposite end of the spectrum. We are running what was a, I don’t know if it’s still Turing complete world computer where there’s basically an unbounded number of verification rules of governance you know, attack surface. And not only that, but that’s kind of on a technical level. On a social level, we have an unbounded set of expectations from users.
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah, people want to have health records on the Ethereum blockchain. But they also want to do decentralized bedding on Augur. They want to do you know, ICO’s they wanna do DAO’s. And what we saw with the DAO hack was that there are negative externalities from all of these different user expectations that spill over onto the consensus rules where essentially you’re having to adjudicate disputes that emanate from people using your blockchain for non payment non-monetary use cases. And I was talking about Bitcoin improvement proposals. There’s Ethereum improvement proposals. And so you have a theory of improvement proposals relating to the monetary policy. You have them relating to fixing people who have created smart contracts, but you know, they’re pretty stupid stupid contracts that caused their funds to get stuck.
Pierre Rochard:
And the only way to unstuck them is with a hard fork. And now you have developers that are, you know, the judge, jury prosecution and defense of all these issues that are really are. You know what? It’s really unfair that I put Ethereum as the the opposite of Bitcoin because there are worse than Ethereum, there’s EOS and there’s Ripple. And, Ripple like has the ability to freeze XRP because ripple is like a centralized system and they have to conform with anti money laundering statutes here in the United States. And so if XRP needs to get frozen then ripple needs to comply with that. And, and then with EOS, they wrote a constitution like in a word document. So they’re, it’s like they’re trying to LARP, you know, they’re role playing as lawyers as the founding fathers of, this governance system. And then you have people saying, well, you know what people are creating Ponzi schemes on EOS and it’s giving us a bad name. We should ban Ponzi schemes and we should seize their funds and give them back to the people who entered the Ponzi scheme. So at that point, you’ve basically recreated the existing financial system in a ad hoc Lord of the flies slash fake lawyers scenario.
Stephan Livera:
Excellent answer. I loved it. Excellent. yeah, just a great summary of the distinction between how Bitcoin works and how every other coin basically works. Okay. So Bitcoin has changed and it’s morphed over time. You know, there are things that we have there are developments that happened that were just not described in the white paper. Do you have any examples of that?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah, I think that actually I would go check out David Harding. He has like a errata page on the white paper basically detailing a lot of things that were either inaccurate in the white paper have changed since the white paper. Or we’ve learned more things since the white paper. I think that was something to keep in mind. My first point on this issue is that Satoshi wrote the code before writing the white paper and this is kind of like a little known fact. And so we can kind of glean from that that the white paper is just a description of the software. He wrote a high level, very high level and not entirely accurate and not fully specified. Like he doesn’t say in the white paper well there’s only 21 million Bitcoins. And in fact the first you know, release of Bitcoin while while Satoshi intended for there to only be 21 million Bitcoins, the code that he implemented that was not that. It’s at the end of the creation of new Bitcoins, it resets.
Pierre Rochard:
And Pieter Wuille had to create a BIP that addressed this bug as a soft fork to change Bitcoins validation, block validation rules so that we don’t have more than 21 million Bitcoins getting created. So already we can see that first of all, the white paper is not a specification and is just a communication tool really of him trying to, because it’s very hard to put on a mailing list. “Here’s all this code I wrote. You guys have to go read through it now to understand what I did.” You know, like that’s kind of putting the burden on the reader. But Satoshi wrote a high level description of his solving the double spending problem with proof of work. And that’s, kind of what our expectation of the white paper should be. We shouldn’t try to expect more from the white paper than that.
Pierre Rochard:
What we should expect, what we should expect from his is the source code. And, and then the second point is that that source code has evolved a lot and the network has evolved a lot. And the reason that the network has evolved beyond what Satoshi described instead, it’s decentralized. So if Bitcoin was centralized, then yeah, it would be easy to set it in stone and make sure it never changes. But because Bitcoin is decentralized, there’s nothing stopping Bitcoiners from having Bitcoin evolve into something other than what Satoshi envisioned. And that’s okay. Like, I don’t think that we should manacle and shackle ourselves to what we think Satoshi’s vision was, right. Because he’s not around to tell us whether we’re correct about our reading into what he wrote. And we don’t know that Satoshi wouldn’t have changed his mind about things as they evolve.
Pierre Rochard:
So it’s wild to suggest that Satoshi had a foresight and he’s a soothsayer and he can predict the future and, Satoshi said that this will be Bitcoin and thus, you know, he would never have changed his mind and he would never have updated the code or something like that. It’s like, it’s bizarre to see people saying this and this, it’s, it’s the craziest form of worship in my mind. The, kind of uncritical assumption and, and then it’s all also utter and pure hypocrisy in the sense that a lot of the people promoting this point of view of Satoshi as a a soothsayer and a visionary is that they are in the Bitcoin cash camp and Bitcoin cash has not only hard forked to increase the block size limit back to where it was before Sitoshi implemented the one megabyte limit.
Pierre Rochard:
But they’ve also you know, made other changes to the validation rules that Satoshi didn’t envision either. And have added back op codes that Satoshi had removed and want to add new opcodes Satoshi did not predict what happened. So it’s kind of I don’t think that there is well, so the only implementation that truly follows Satoshi’s vision is the one that he released back in 2009. And no one runs that anymore. So I think that we should kind of accept that things have moved on since.
Stephan Livera:
Yup. Agreed. And I mean obviously I will link that David Harding page. It’s a great page. I think it’s called Bitcoin errata. I’ll definitely link that. And there’s definitely a lot of a lot of things that have changed. So there were many things that were not described in the white paper. So multisig, mining coins, the 21 million coin cap, ASIC mining 10 minute block times HD address generation. A bunch of things. And then another tweet I saw was explaining what the white paper actually got wrong. So the security model, Moore’s law is not reliable. The longest chain is not secure. The SPV, AKA the fraud proofs or alerts, this concept of one CPU one vote. So yeah, I think you’ve outlined a lot of great points around why Bitcoin has changed and it necessarily must change because it is decentralized.
Pierre Rochard:
The most important one in my mind at least politically that you listed there is the SPV security, which is that SPV currently in Bitcoin is like profoundly broken from both a security and privacy perspective. And I think that right now the only trustless way to use Bitcoin is to run a fully validating node. And so I think that if the Satoshi were around he would probably agree with that assertion and there’s a lot more work that needs to go into SPV before we can say that it is as secure or as trustless is running a full node. I mean, not that I don’t think that it will ever be as trustless, but at least approaching that.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Well, yeah those are good points as well. Okay. So I think have you got any other points that you wanted to make at this point Pierre, we might start wrapping up. So just any final comments on Bitcoin governance?
Pierre Rochard:
Yeah, I wanna see more Bitcoin core contributors. And I want to see more players in the ecosystem forming their own teams of Bitcoin core contributors. So like you’ve got like the Chaincode labs guys who are doing a fantastic job. You’ve got Blockstream guys who are doing a fantastic job. You’ve got independent contributors here and there, you know Jim Posen at Coinbase, done a fantastic job. You’ve got Sjors Provoost at blockchain.com. Excellent. I want to see more. I think that there is definitely room for a, a huge increase of Bitcoin core contributors both from people who are looking at the Bitcoin protocol itself and who are making improvements to the reference implementation, modernizing the code, refactoring it, reviewing pull requests with a very close eye improving the test framework for Bitcoin core.
Pierre Rochard:
Improving the tooling around it indexing, addresses you know, all these different things that it’s fantastic what the current set of contributors is doing and we’re getting lots of new contributors all the time. But I really think that it’s not like we’re at a saturation point. I don’t think that there’s too many cooks in the kitchen at all. And if you look at the Linux kernel there’s kind of, you know, it started out with just Linus Torvalds in the 90s, or I think it might have been the late eighties, early nineties, but it grew and grew and grew and now you have hyper specialized kernel developers who are very focused on one specific part of the kernel. And because the code base is highly modular they, they don’t actually have to, you know, worry about the rest of the code base.
Pierre Rochard:
I’d like to see the same with the reference implementation where we can have dozens of regular contributors that are working on their own parts of the code base. And there’s all of these changes roll up. The chain of maintainers so that there’s kind of a coherent you know, code style and all of this. But yeah, I there’s just more resources that can go into Bitcoin core development. And I’m disappointed when I hear people complain about the direction of Bitcoin core or complain about the perceived power of certain Bitcoin core contributors because I really think it’s just a matter of stepping up. And the sooner you step up and start contributing, the better because you start building a reputation and that reputation will allow you to make more and more substantive changes to the code base. Until finally, you know, you’re the one proposing a soft fork or God forbid the day happens a hard fork and you have the clout and the reputation and the credibility to actually be taken seriously. And so, yeah, I just want to see more Bitcoin core contributors. I think that’s the most, the healthiest thing we could see for Bitcoin’s governance today.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Fantastic. Agreed with that. Okay guys. So you can find Pierre on Twitter @pierre_rochard. Definitely if you’re not already subscribed, look up his podcasts that he co-hosts with Michael Goldstein? Look out Noded podcasts and you can find the website for that. I think it’s noded.org right?
Pierre Rochard:
That’s correct. Yes N-o-d-e-d yup.
Stephan Livera:
And also check out his site and company Bitcoin advisory. Yeah. So, so thanks very much Pierre and appreciate your coming on the show today.
Pierre Rochard:
Thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it.
Stephan Livera:
Okay guys, so that was the episode with Pierre and that is SLP 11. So if you go on my website, stephanlivera.com, you can find the show notes for that. If you got value out of this, remember to subscribe to the podcast, Stephan Livera podcast on Apple, iTunes, Stitcher, or Spotify. Just, yeah, subscribe to the show and share it with your friends. Any feedback? Come and find me on Twitter @stephanlivera. That’s it for me guys, and I’ll speak to you next time.