John Newbery joins me to talk about his new bitcoin research and development center, Brink. John is a regular Bitcoin Core contributor, works on Bitcoin Optech, started PR Review Club, and mentors new bitcoin core developers. In this show we talk:
- Why Brink
- Priorities for development
- Mentoring new developers
- Bitcoin development culture
John Newbery links:
- Twitter: @Jfnewbery
- Site: Brink.dev
Other episodes mentioned:
- SLP216 Gloria Zhao Learning Bitcoin Core Contribution & Hosting PR Review Club
- SLP200 Christian Decker – ANYPREVOUT, MPP, Mitigating LN Attacks
- SLP222 Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing What’s MuSig2? What Does it Mean for Bitcoin Multisig?
Sponsors:
Stephan Livera links:
- Show notes and website
- Follow me on twitter @stephanlivera
- Subscribe to the podcast
- Patreon @stephanlivera
Podcast Transcript:
Stephan Livera:
John welcome to the show.
John Newbery:
Hi Stephan, it’s good to be here.
Stephan Livera:
So, John, I hear you are back in London now and you’ve got a new projects that you’re working on. Can you tell us a little bit about you know, being back in London now?
John Newbery:
Yeah, it’s something that I’ve been planning for a while. I, I moved away from the UK about 10 years ago and it’s been on the cards for a little while now and then 2020 happened and it felt like a good time to leave New York and move back to the UK and be closer to family. So I did that in summer and I’ve been in London for a couple of months now. And as you know, Chaincode is fully based in the office there in New York. So I’ve left Chaincode and I am setting up my own project to work on Bitcoin critical development.
Stephan Livera:
Great. So tell us a little bit about the project here.
John Newbery:
Yeah, it’s called brink. And that name should be familiar to Bitcoiners from our heritage and the aim of the organization is to fund open source Bitcoin protocol developments, whether that’s basically a Bitcoin or layer protocols. We’ll do that in a couple of ways. One is funding, independent developers through grants, and the second is onboarding new developers through a fellowship program where people who want to work on Bitcoin who have the talents and potential to make big contributions will come to brink for a year on program, learn all about contributing to Bitcoin core and other Bitcoin projects. And then after that, they should be well, well positioned to go and make some really impactful contributions.
Stephan Livera:
So is this a presume then this is going to be set up as a physical office then in London.
John Newbery:
That’s right. Yeah. The grants will be for anyone anywhere in the world. So they’ll be distributed independent. The fellowship program will be out of the office here in London.
Stephan Livera:
Great. And so just in terms of motivations, perhaps, could you spell out why you saw the need for this kind of organization?
John Newbery:
Yeah, there are a couple of things. One is the funding side, so I think Bitcoin or Bitcoin core and Bitcoin in general is a pretty unique project in the way that it is so decentralized. There are a lot of open source projects, but most of them are centralized into one single foundation or sponsored by a single corporation. Bitcoin is pretty special that we don’t want that to happen. We want the development of the protocol and the developments of the implementations of that protocol to be decentralized. So Bitcoin core is worked on by people out of MIT, people out of chaincode, blockstream, square crypto, DG, and then a whole host of independent contributors. Brink is another model for funding developers, and I think that’s really important and healthy for the Bitcoin developer ecosystem to have more and diverse ways of funding development on this project.
John Newbery:
Brink will be a 501(c)(3). So we’ll be able to accept donations from individuals that will be tax exempt in the US or at least that’s the plan we’ve, we’ve put in the application for 501(c)(3) status, and we expect to get it. So again, that’s slightly different from the other models. You know, square crypto is a public company. MIT is an academic institution. Chaincode is a private organization. None of these organizations are taking funding from the general public. So that’s, again, something that’s different about Brink. And I think that’s important that, you know we have that diversity of funding and the other aspect is we will be doing onboarding as a central part of our mission. So I’ve always done a lot of mentoring of new contributors to the project. You know, I’ve done the residency at chaincode run that for a couple of years. I started the PR review club, had interns, mentored a lot of people informally. And I think for the long-term health of the Bitcoin project, having new developers come into the project is really important and it’s a very steep learning curve. So you know, having those pathways for people who want to contribute, but don’t have the experience that’s something that we’ll be doing at Brink.
Stephan Livera:
Very cool. And from my earlier discussions with Steve Lee off square crypto, he has mentioned as well, this idea that it’d be nice to have more and more different organizations that have their own different way of contributing to Bitcoin and other related protocols and the development of that. I’m curious from your perspective, how many development organizations do you believe Bitcoin needs or do you just think it’s like, more is better?
John Newbery:
I think generally more is better. I don’t think there’s a magic number, but if you think about Bitcoin’s robustness against threats, having a decentralized model where you have diverse locations, jurisdictions, organizations that are developing Bitcoin a diverse model of funding, diverse models of organization, the more diversity you get, I think the more robust you are against different threats and we want Bitcoin to be decentralized. So, you know, adding more can only help I think.
Stephan Livera:
Got it, and also different organizations may have different priorities in terms of what they are focused on. And, you know, there may be some that are more focused on design or lightning or different other things. So I suppose from a Brink perspective, is there anything there in terms of how you would be prioritizing Bitcoin or other related protocols for development.
John Newbery:
That really depends on the people that we get and the projects that we award grants to personally, I work on Bitcoin core. I work a lot on code quality and testing and making sure that we don’t have bugs that’ll be very central to the mentoring that I give new people who come through Brink. But if there are people that want to work on lightning, that’s great. If there are people who want to work on other layer two contracting protocols, that’s also great. It really depends on the personalities, I think.
Stephan Livera:
With Brink, who else is involved, if you can share that?
John Newbery:
Yeah. So I’m setting up with Mike Schmidt who I’ve worked with at Optech. He’s done great work at Optech and you know, I can throw work at him and he gets it done, he is company secretary and co-founder and then we’re both on the board and we have a third independent board member and David Harding has been around in Bitcoin forever knows more about the technical details of Bitcoin than probably anyone else on the planet.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, certainly I’ve enjoyed reading some of his work with some of his summaries and things. So I guess in terms of your role, then what would your role be?
John Newbery:
I’m the director, so I’m both on the executive team and also on the board. And so we have the executive team is me and Mike and the board is the two of us plus Dave Harding. And we’ll be expanding the board with more independent directors. You know, as soon as we can.
Stephan Livera:
Talking about funding in the space as well. So I think as you mentioned that there are a range of different funding sources. Sometimes those are like a benefactor model. In other cases, it’s organizations, in other cases, it’s an exchange, who’s just funding an individual. And in other cases it might be more like Patreon or github sponsors style. So perhaps you could just chat a little bit about the difference then with brink, I guess you’re soliciting individual donations and perhaps other Bitcoin companies might choose to support you as well. Right. I guess that’s, the model.
John Newbery:
That’s the model. Yep. So we’ll be soliciting donations from both HODLers and organizations we’re launching as we record we’re launching next week. So that’d be November 24th. I don’t know exactly when this will go out. We have, we may have already launched by the time people hear this. And then our launch, we have partnerships with a few organizations who have already committed to fund either grants or fellowship programs through us. Our initial funding was provided by John Pfeffer and Wences Casares who have both been very generous with their funding of Bitcoin over the years. So they put in the initial funding that pays my wages and the admin costs of getting this thing set up and then any additional funding beyond that goes directly to our grant and fellowship programs.
Stephan Livera:
I’m interested to chat about any of your priorities around development, as you mentioned, you’re interested in code quality, testing, bugs. I know there is also a general drive towards his idea of modularizing Bitcoin core code. So can you tell us a little bit about that, what that is?
John Newbery:
Yeah well, when Satoshi wrote Bitcoin core versions, 0.1 they were presumably working alone and trying to get something complete and out the door. And consequently, there was not much architectural structure to, you know, the initial version of Bitcoin core. And that’s fine. That’s not a criticism, it’s merely an observation. You know, everything was in a single file, almost everything was in a single file and there wasn’t a good separation between the different components or functions. And over time as the project has matured and we’ve had more contributors join the project, there’s been an effort to modularize different components and different functionality so that there are clear boundaries and interfaces between those components. And this is really helpful. It’s really helpful for developers to build a conceptual model of what is doing what’s in the code base. It’s really good for testing.
John Newbery:
It’s really good for debugging problems. If you have spaghetti code, that’s reaching into other components, it becomes very difficult to reason about and bugs hide in those kind of fuzzy gray areas between components. So taking the system, breaking it apart into really well-defined functional areas and having clean interfaces between those is a really good way to improve the project and reduce the risk of bugs. So we’re moving that direction. It takes a long time because we’re very careful about what we do in Bitcoin core and we don’t want to break anything. But I hope, I hope we will make some really good progress over the next year or two. And two areas that I’m looking at specifically are the boundary between our net layer and that layer is responsible for opening connections to other peers you know, reading bytes and writing bytes into sockets that get sent over the wire, that low level stuff and net processing, which is the layer above that, which does the kind of application logic of receiving peer to peer messages and acting on those messages.
John Newbery:
So that’s one boundary, it’s one of the most important boundaries in the Bitcoin core code base. And then another very important boundary is between net processing that’s processing those application messages and validation, which is our kind of consensus engine. So for example, if you, if you think about receiving a block from your Bitcoin node, it will come in as bytes on the wire and that’ll get received by net and get passed into a message type. And then that message will get passed up into internet processing that sees it as a block message and knows how to process that kind of application. And then the block itself will get passed from that processing up into validation, which does all of the consensus validation and checks if it’s a valid block and has the right proof of work. And the transactions are valid and advances the tip of the block chain, if it’s valid. So that lead between net processing and validation is also really critical. And having a clear separation there is very important. Carl Dong is working on that and I hope that we’ll make progress on cleaning up that interface as well over the next year.
Stephan Livera:
So in terms of things that are currently quote unquote in, or that are in Bitcoin core, what sort of things actually should be taken, let’s say out of Bitcoin core or kind of packaged alongside it, but not directly in Bitcoin core if you get what I’m asking?
John Newbery:
I do get what you’re asking. Yeah. so you can think about Bitcoin core is composed of three main, like top level high level components. There’s the node software, and that does all of the networking, the consensus, validation, all of that stuff. Everything I was talking about just now is all within that node software, there’s also a wallet included within Bitcoin core. And you can think of that as a separate component. It runs in the same process, but there’s a project to split it out. So it’d be running in a different process with its own memory. And the wallet receives notifications from the node saying, I’ve received this block, I’ve received this transaction and the, what it looks at those blocks and transactions and tries to determine whether it is interested in those transactions, whether it’s a transaction that is sending funds to an address that it owns or sending funds away from an address it owns.
John Newbery:
So there’s two components. And then the third component you can think about this GUI Bitcoin QT, which is the graphical user interface that people can use to interface with both the wallets and the node. So you could imagine a future where those three different high-level components are broken out into separate projects. I don’t know whether we’ll do that, but I think it could be a good thing to do in the future. Partly because people working on those different things have different skillsets and different priorities, like the skill required to make a nice user friendly interface is very different from the skills required to make a consensus critical application. And again, very different from the skills needed to create a wallet. And so you can imagine those three things being split out and worked on by different teams and again, having a well-defined interface between the node and the wallet and between the node and the GUI such that those things can be worked on semi-independently. You could also imagine a future where someone implements a different wallet that is backed by Bitcoin core and uses that same well-defined interface. Now, I don’t know if that will happen, but you know, that that might be a good future to inform.
Stephan Livera:
Right. It seems I know there is the nunchuk project by a Hugo Nguyen and I think he mentioned something about trying to have a like his multisignature wallet that directly uses a lot of Bitcoin core code. And I know also Specter Wallet does does via RPC into Bitcoin core. But I guess, yeah, those are slightly separate. But in terms of things like the wallet, as an example as I understand, there’s work being done on things like hardware wallet interface, and having that work kind of more easily and trying to do things like, you know, maybe have your hardware wallet directly work with Bitcoin core in a way that’s kind of easier for the user. But it seems that, you know, some of these there’s there’s work being done in these directions, but it just takes a lot of time for progress. And then, so in practice, what happens is people are using applications that call into Bitcoin core, right?
John Newbery:
Yeah, that’s right. And I think modularizing and potentially splitting up the project would be helpful there because they are by their nature difference, different projects and different styles of projects. And they should potentially be run in different ways. We want the core node software to be pretty slow moving, I would say in terms of changes to its interfaces. And we want to be very careful about changes there. The wallet is more of a user facing application, and obviously we want to be careful that we don’t lose money. You know, don’t write bugs that lose people money, but it could probably move at a faster tempo and potentially have more frequent releases. Having different implementations of what it’s backed by Bitcoin core would be useful because maybe someone wants an enterprise grade wallet backed by Bitcoin core someone wants a lightning wallet backed by Bitcoin core. Someone wants a very bare bones, low feature set wallet backed by Bitcoin core. And they could all use the same interface potentially. And then the GUI is something different again is currently written in QT, which is okay, it does the job, but I don’t think anyone would argue that Bitcoin core has a beautiful interface and maybe another team might be able to implement something that’s beautiful and people want to use. So I think there’s a lot of potential there.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah.And in terms of second layer, lightning, or others, perhaps DLC smart contracting and other things like that, are there any other things that you’re I guess interested into support, maybe not from you personally developing, but from an organization perspective, things that you would be interested to see or interested to fund?
John Newbery:
Yeah certainly any Bitcoin related technology, any protocol work that is Bitcoin or Bitcoin adjacent definitely open to funding.
Stephan Livera:
How about some other areas, like, for example, privacy in the space, is that, is that an area that you would see, you know, Brink could be putting development effort or time or funding into?
John Newbery:
Yes. and it’s a very wide subject privacy in Bitcoin. You can argue a lot of things are good for privacy in Bitcoin. Most, most development work, you could kind of twist around and say, this is good for privacy. But in general, like making, making the nodes less fingerprintable is good for privacy using technologies like Schnorr and taproot and making those easy to use as good for privacy. There’s lots of areas where privacy can be improved and yes, we’ll certainly be working on those.
Stephan Livera:
What about in the, in the area of, let’s say mining that might be an area where and I guess the reason I’m asking is there’s been a little bit of recent chatter about one particular mining organization, and I think they were small as well, but there was this kind of threat that the mining organization would be trying to censor transactions that involved addresses or transactions coming from an address that’s listed on the OFAC sanctions list and things like that. So I’m wondering in your mind, are there any things that you would like to see from a mining perspective that would improve Bitcoin’s censorship resistance and that kind of quality?
John Newbery:
Mining isn’t something that I’ve looked at very much recently. I know that Matt Corallo was working on better hash that I think became part of Stratum V2, which would allow the individual miners in a pool to do their own transaction selection, which I think would be, be good for this because a single pool couldn’t censor, a transaction, or a class of transactions. More mining decentralization will be good for this because if there’s one mining pool that accounts for five or 10% of blocks, and they’re censoring a transaction, it’s not necessarily a problem because all of the other miners will be mining that transaction. And the censoring pool is simply leaving money on the table for the other miners. And it’s not good for Bitcoin, but it’s not the end of the world, and it’s not gonna destroy Bitcoin’s fundamentally. I think if just a small number of miners are doing this.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, I see. So in your view, it’s, it’s it could potentially be a thing that some mining organizations or perhaps miner and this is probably be at the pool level. Right. and but I guess in your view that would not necessarily be a showstopper issue because there’d just be enough other mining pools that are not censoring transactions. But I suppose there is that potential risk there that, you know, let’s say, you know, the price runs up further, it becomes more important governments now start to try to maybe try to impose control at the mining pool layer, maybe that is something to be wary of. What do you think?
John Newbery:
Yes. Yeah, certainly. We hope to build a system with Bitcoin that is incentive compatible. And if we are relying on certain governments, not taking actions then Bitcoin as an incentive compatible system has perhaps failed. The incentives here are, if a miner is leaving transactions out of its blocks, then the fees attached to those transactions should incentivize other miners to include them in a block. And as long as mining is decentralized, one would hope that that would be enough to make the system robust against this kind of thing unless as a 50% takeover of mining power by a hostile actor. But the whole point of Bitcoin is we’re trying to build a system that is robust against this kind of thing.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And I guess we’re not relying on the good graces of certain individuals or companies or governments to not intervene. And I guess to the point you were making also and I think people like Eric Voskuil have been quite vocal about this idea that, okay, if in that world, in order to keep Bitcoin censorship resistant, you would have to pay a bigger transaction fee such that your transaction would still be mined by some kind of mining pool operator because you know, maybe they have to operate in secret or they have to operate in some other jurisdictions such that they are not being clamped down on by the government of that area. That kind of thing.
John Newbery:
Yeah. Perhaps, perhaps. But if the transaction is attaching a fee, then that is an incentive for a miner somewhere in the world to mine, that transaction.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And I think the other aspect of when we’re talking about censorship, I think, so this, I guess this gets a bit more complicated and a bit more technical, but people talk about this quote unquote idea of taint, right. And saying, Oh, let’s see that transaction is tainted or this, you know, coins at this address and so on. And it gets quite technical. But I think the point is it’s, I don’t know how sustainable it is to actually have tainting because sooner or later every coin will get tainted or it kind of becomes difficult because then people might just move it out of that address to another address. And it just kind of, it feels a little bit like some of the rules almost fitting this old sort of square peg into a round hole when people might move them around or people might do CoinJoin. And then it’s kind of like, how would the censorship work if the miner doesn’t know which exact transaction to censor? So I guess it’s probably a bit of an open question now, unless you’ve got any thoughts on that?
John Newbery:
The coin analysis companies need to sell their product somehow. So they have sell that. And I guess the compliance people or the exchanges need to spend the money somehow and they do that, but you’re right there are techniques for, you know, mixing and moving coins around. And if it’s widely known that a taint of a coin lasts for four hops from that coin, while you make quite transactions into mixes and your coins, they’re not tainted. And, and as the technology improves, as we get Schnorr signatures and taproots and, you know, better mixing and better fungibility on the base layer. And then layer two technologies like lightning, which are potentially privacy enhancing. It just becomes more difficult to enforce this thing until it’s impossible.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And hopefully the, so after the Taproot soft fork, then there might be interest and hopefully some developers would be interested to work on the signature aggregation one, which would also help with the coinjoin incentive for people to use these kinds of privacy techniques. Because right now, I guess it’s like there is a cost. And so there is a trade-off here for people who want to be private. And, you know, I guess the reality is whether we like it or not, most people in Bitcoin are here for the number go up. Right. So it’s like until it kind of gets to a point where maybe the privacy is not costing that much more. And perhaps in fairness, this is more like in a high fee environment, in a low fee environment, perhaps it’s not as much of an issue. But that’s, I guess that’s one thing. And also while we’re on this topic, I know you were recently tweeting about some issues you had with getting a bank account and AML laws. Tell us a little bit about what happened there.
John Newbery:
Oh, it’s just very difficult to get a bank account. If you are running a business that doesn’t fit in their normal categories, I guess. The thing is you don’t know why your bank account has been frozen or closed. It’s a system where the compliance that these banks flag a transaction is potentially suspects and potentially that goes to the regulators and they potentially say that the account should be closed or even internally within the bank that happens. And by law, they’re not allowed to tell you that they’re investigating you or they’ve raised your transaction as suspicious because that counts as tipping off so you open bank account for your business. If you can open a bank account, some will just say no, and you receive a transaction and they block that transaction. And then what happened to me was say, I opened an account in UK for setting up this business.
John Newbery:
I received transactions from my first two donors. Those got blocked. They sat there for two weeks blocked. They wouldn’t tell me what was going on. Those transactions got reverted and the bank account got shut down and the decision is final and there’s no right to appeal. And that’s how, that’s how the banking system works. You know, you haven’t, I haven’t done anything wrong. Trying to start a business and employ people and make a living. And my bank account shut down in the US we are on, I think our third or fourth bank trying to open an account. I think we finally managed to do that. But this happens all across the Bitcoin industry ecosystem companies find it very difficult to open bank accounts.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. And in my understanding, it’s, they have typically had it a little bit easier with some of the more Bitcoin focused banks and things like Silvergate and so on. But with many of the traditional banks, it’s just been difficult and people are just getting their accounts shut down or transactions blocked. And you know, obviously Bitcoin has been designed to help us get around some of these issues. But I I can understand that for some donors they would like to donate in Fiat money, not in Bitcoin. And so that’s obviously going to be for some time to come, that’s going to be a hurdle that we all have to face. Right.
John Newbery:
Yeah. I hope one day bitcoin will kind of wash all of this stuff away, but right now running a nonprofit it would be irresponsible of me to keep my working capital in something like Bitcoin, which can go up and go down in the short run. Our expenses are in dollars or fiat, expenses of paying employees and paying for offices and paying lawyers and accountants and all that stuff. So I can’t keep all of my working capital in Bitcoin. I need to be plugged into the banking system and it’s difficult. They make it difficult for you.
Stephan Livera:
So on the topic then of mentoring new developers, I know you have been doing that. And I recently interviewed Gloria on the show as well. So can you tell us a little bit about what your experience has been like with that?
John Newbery:
I really enjoy it personally, and I find it very enriching. And alongside that, I think it’s vitally important for the project that we get more people working on protocol and people from more diverse backgrounds working on the protocol just widening the expertise there. So I came into Bitcoin in 2016 or was interested sometime before that, but actually started working on Bitcoin in 2016 through the bank of residency, which was a program run by Matt Corallo at the Chaincode offices in New York. I applied for that. I haven’t worked on Bitcoin before. I hadn’t been working as a software developer for several years before that I didn’t expect to get in and they accepted me and I flew to New York and spent a month working on Bitcoin. And that is what’s allowed me to be a full-time Bitcoin protocol developer. So I’m grateful forever to Matt Corallo and Alex and Suhas for giving me that opportunity.
John Newbery:
And then I started working full-time at chaincode and pretty soon I knew I wanted to repeat that residency for other people who wanted to get into Bitcoin development and everything kind of flowed from there. I ran two residencies and then we hired Adam Jonas to run the residency last year, and it was bigger and more ambitious. And I helped put together the program for that. I had an intern last year. You know, last year I wanted to expand the reach of the residency, but realized we couldn’t bring everyone from New York to work in the office. So I started the PR review club, which is a weekly club for people to discuss pull requests in Bitcoin core and learn about the process of contributing to Bitcoin core. And I also have regular weekly calls with various people that I’m mentoring, people that I think have high potential and just need a bit of guidance and help and say, get established in Bitcoin. So it’s important to me. I find teaching something makes you learn it better for a start. So that’s a selfish reason. I learned Bitcoin by teaching people. I also enjoy it. And like I said, if we want this thing to succeed and expand, we’re going to need a lot more protocol developers over the next few years. So I’m just doing my little bit.
Stephan Livera:
How do you find a good new developer? Do you look for someone do you just find when they’re doing a pull request and you say, Hey, this is a new person I could try and help them. What’s the thinking around that?
John Newbery:
Different ways. Yeah, you see people on the repo, but that’s already quite a big step for someone to take, to either open a PR or review an existing PR. And I think a lot of people who aren’t involved in Bitcoin development would see that and be intimidated by it. You know, that thought that they could contribute somehow to Bitcoin core seems like such a big thing. I remember it was a big thing for me back before I did the residency. I hadn’t contributed and things Bitcoin core. So various places where you look at university clubs, Bitcoin clubs we look at meetup groups, I do the Optech newsletter and send that out and people subscribe and, you know, somehow, sometimes they interact with that. The PR review club is supposed to be a very low barrier place where people can just drop in and ask questions. And if I see people coming to that regularly for a few weeks, maybe I start talking to them and see what their interest is in whether they want to start contributing more or eventually move to working on Bitcoin. Full-time so always looking out for people who have potential and talent.
Stephan Livera:
In terms of the culture around contributing and supporting for new contributors. Actually recently an interesting book I read and you might’ve heard of this one. I’m not sure if I can pronounce her last name correctly, but I think it’s Nadia Eghbal and I think it’s called working in the open. And there was some interesting,
John Newbery:
Working in Public.
Stephan Livera:
yeah, sorry, working in public. And I found a really fascinating book and I was seeing some interesting parallels into the Bitcoin world there. So in that book, Nadia explains how many open source projects they have a certain kind of ethos and the way they work and that they’re often trying to motivate people to become a continuing and sustained developer or contributor in that project, as opposed to being like a drive by one-off pull request. And so I guess, and that book also to me outlined a little bit around the difference between, the work that a contributor, like a person who’s doing a pull request versus the, you know, the review time and then perhaps also maintainer time. So could you just spell out a little bit of your thoughts whether, you know, you see a similar kind of structure there in terms of Bitcoin core.
John Newbery:
Yeah, I did read the Nadia Eghbal book and I actually spoke to her a couple of weeks ago. A few of us in bitcoin core had a call with her because we found the ideas in her book interesting and wanting to discuss a bit more. And yeah, the, I think the central thesis of that book, there are a lot of ideas, but I think the central idea is that the scarce resource in an open source project is the time and attention of the maintainers. And I would also add, I think she, when she uses the word maintainer we could probably use long-term contributor and Bitcoin core because we have people who aren’t maintainers, who are full-time working on the project and doing very deep review. So those people that time and attention from those people is the thing that we should prioritize in terms of the productivity of the projects.
John Newbery:
And there are certain types of contributions where the value added by that contribution does not exceed the cost on the time and attention of the maintainers and long-term contributors. And she terms those contributions and since being extractive. And then there are certain contributions where the value to the project exceeds, the time and attension of the long-term contributors, and that would be a non extractive contribution. So that’s adding value to the project. So those ideas about what is valuable for the project, how we get the most value. They’re interesting. And they made me think about things in a different way. Now one idea she talks about is when you look at someone’s first contribution, that will often be an indicator of how valuable that contributor will be in the long term. So if someone comes and opens a pie and you’ve never seen them before, and they just want to get their code merged, once they’ve got their code merged, there’s a high chance you’ll never see them again. And that probably won’t be the most valuable contributor. Whereas if someone slowly works their way into the project starts by reviewing, asking intelligent questions, trying to help out in different ways. That person probably has more potential to be a long term effective contributor. So thinking about how we can encourage people who we think have potential to be very high value, long term contributors is something that I got out of that book. And in structuring the way that I interact with new contributors and seek out people who I think will be high potential. Those are things that were kind of triggered in my mind by reading that book. So I definitely recommend it to people who are thinking about scaling up open source projects.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. I found it a really interesting insight and I saw a lot of parallels as well. So one of one interesting idea as well, that I saw from that book was this idea that in some cases, once someone’s already been a maintainer, they kind of, they’ve already got some social credit out from the community or from out from the world. And then, then sustaining that. Now it becomes a bit more, I guess they have to find some kind of internal motivation to sustain that, because now it’s kind of expected that you just keep doing that. And in an open source project world, it’s a sort of funny dynamic there where now in non Bitcoin projects, you know, maintainers hand on to somebody else once they’re kind of done with the project. But in kind of the Bitcoin world, it’s like, it’s really gotta stay. I guess not that not that you can’t leave the project, but it just, there’s a real importance to this project.
John Newbery:
Yeah. There’s a real importance to it. And we hope, I think one difference between Bitcoin, the protocol and other open source protocols/projects is fundamentally, we want Bitcoin the protocol to be non substitutable. I think if we’re maximalists in some sense, and we think Bitcoin should be the global currency and that the network effects make it much more valuable than being one of many currencies. Then we don’t want Bitcoin to be substituted by something else. And it’s important that we make Bitcoin a system that everyone uses or everyone has access to and wants to use that would be contrasted with something like Linux, where if Stephan, you’re using, I don’t know, mac OS and I’m using Linux, as long as we’re speaking the same, like TCP IP to each other. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care what other people are using. Whereas if you’re using Bitcoin cash and I’m using Bitcoin and I want to pay you, then it really can’t
Stephan Livera:
talk together. Yeah.
John Newbery:
Like on the protocol level, we want Bitcoin too, I think, eat everything else that is aspiring to be a global currency on the implementation level, maybe that’s different. Maybe you might think we want different implementations that are running Bitcoin core and able to speak to each other. I think that’s still potentially an open question. Some people think it’s a good idea. Some people don’t. But that is very different from other open source projects. I think not that I’m an expert on other open source projects, but it does seem to be a difference in terms of the developers leaving and cycling through. I think we want that. So I think or at least we want that to be a possibility. If we’ve reached a stage where there were insiders who could never be displaced, and that is another centralized point of failure because those people could be compromised in some way. So we want to build a system which is not depending on specific individuals. And again, I think bringing new people in making the process as open as possible. So if something happens to a maintainer and they were not very able to work on the project, or if they got de-motivated or bored or something happened in their life and they just wanted to move on, someone else could step up and the project itself would not be affected.
Stephan Livera:
Really interesting insights there. And I notice in the open source world, there’s this acronym, the BDFL that Benevolent dictator for life kind of thing. And I guess this applies to certain people like Linus in the Linux world and other people out there I guess in the Bitcoin world, there’s you know, people don’t want to stick their neck out too much because then if they’re seen as like the authoritative person in Bitcoin, then maybe they become a vector for government or someone to go and threaten them and things like that. So I guess that’s why there’s a real importance around making sure it kind of stays distributed. Right?
John Newbery:
Yeah. And I don’t think anyone wants that. No one, you know, as far as I’m aware and have observed, no one is working on Bitcoin core because they want to be the King of Bitcoin. Those projects that have a BDFL, they were started by that person, like Linus started Linux and he can control the direction of Linux and that’s okay because it’s his project or it was his project its opened up and there are more people contributing to it. But if he abused that position and enough people disagreed with him, they could fork off and start their own projects in Bitcoin. If we installed a King who was telling everyone what Bitcoin was, what the definition of the protocol was first of all, you wouldn’t want that, but a fork event of the Bitcoin protocol is a value destruction event. I think like taking a global network of money and spreading it too. I think, destroys value if the value is in having a global currency or a global monetary system splitting that up is a value destruction events. So a fork I think, is we want to avoid folks in the protocol. And that is something that’s different from other open source projects where they’d probably want to avoid a fault, but it wouldn’t be an economy destroying event.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, you’re right. It’s certainly a much more catastrophic level or, I mean, not catastrophic, but it’s really like, it just completely it would really just wreck the ability for people to be able to transact and you would get another whole, you know, Bcash drama like we had. So yeah, I guess it’s also kind of the importance of people.
John Newbery:
I think it could be much more disruptive than Bcash. Bcash was a minority, an extreme minority for walking off and, I was fight for them and it was fine for Bitcoin because it was such a small portion of the economy that decided they wanted to leave. If we saw a flock where 40%, only one thing, and 60% wanted another thing, that’d be much more destructive, I think.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, you’re right. It would be catastrophic now that I think about it. I guess when we’re talking about accessibility as well, I think that may be an interesting point that comes over the next few years. So let’s say we see the block space market, the fees rise, or maybe it, gets harder for people to run Bitcoin nodes, or maybe it’s a, maybe another way to put it is like we have this eternal September problem. Right? So a lot of new people are coming in and they are just using some app and they have no idea what it is to actually run your own Bitcoin node and do all those kind of self-sovereign things. Do you see that as something that, you know, has to be encouraged does it have to be driven by the culture in the Bitcoin community? Or do you just see that as like that’s a role for a user experience and design or education?
John Newbery:
I think that the important thing is not necessarily that everyone holds their own private keys or everyone runs their own full node, but that as many people as possible have the option to do that both on a cost level, on a technical ability level, we can’t expect it to be everyone’s priority that they run a full node and hold their own keys. But we can make it as easy as possible to do those things. And that’s how we should design the system. We make Bitcoin robust and decentralized by making it easy to move up those steps I think.
Stephan Livera:
Some of the, maybe this is going back a few months now, but I remember there was some discussion around on the mailing list around, I think like the whole compact block filters discussion sort of flared up again. And I think if I recall correctly, you made it, you had a really interesting post there as well, where you were essentially saying, well, if we give people an option to kind of go in the direction of trusting less than that’s better than trying to be polarized and expect people to go all the way over to the left or all the way over to the right, in terms of like fully being self-sovereign or fully trusting somebody else. Right.
John Newbery:
Yeah, I think so. Like I said, the important thing is how people having the option and not everyone will do that. Compact blocks is a tool and a solution that works with some use cases and some people. And so we shouldn’t expect, we shouldn’t stop that because we find it distasteful, or it’s not how we would use Bitcoin. I think we should make Bitcoin as usable as possible for as many people while at the same time, encouraging people to move in the direction of self-sovereignty running their own node, pulling their own keys.
Stephan Livera:
Is there anything going to change then with Bitcoin Optech or is that just going to continue running as a separate project, a kind of unrelated to Brink even if actually all the people involved. There’s a very strong Venn diagram there.
John Newbery:
Yeah. There’s an overlap. Because I worked with Mike and Dave before and I trust them and I know that they do really great work. So when I was thinking about who I wanted to work with on this new project, it’s people that I trust and know do great work. So there’s, there’s an overlap. I hope there’ll be more, there should be more independent directors for brink that are not involved in Optech obviously, but those two, those two projects are completely separate. Optech was set up to help businesses adopt scaling technology. We have the newsletter we used to used to do workshops before the world of COVID. So obviously we’re not doing any of those in-person things anymore, but the newsletter is still very important. I think a really important pretty important resource for the technical community and several thousand people read that every week. So we are certainly not going to stop doing that. But it is entirely separate from Brink. They’re completely separate projects.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. And I guess also from a brink perspective, will you essentially end up doing more managerial aspects as opposed to being more directly into the Bitcoin core code and, are you going to be okay with that, John?
John Newbery:
I ain’t going to be okay with it. Freely admit it’s not my favorite thing in the world to fill out forms from the IRS and talk to lawyers, read through contracts and do all of those things that are involved in setting up a new organization, but no one else is doing it. And I think it’s probably the most high impact thing I can do or the most high impact thing I can think of doing for myself that contributes to the Bitcoin project. I think it’s really important that there are diverse sources of funding. I think it’s really important that there are onboarding paths for talented new contributors and starting an organization that does that is therefore the most high impact thing I can do, it does mean that I’ll get, spend this time working on the code in the short run. I hope eventually it will be manageable and I’ll be able to spend a portion of my time working on the code portion of my time, mentoring new contributors to this and a portion of my time running the operation. And I will be recruiting people to help me with the parts that I don’t think I can add particular value with.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. And so when it comes to onboarding new developers, I’m also reminded of a comment by Michael Folkson. And I think he was saying, Oh, it doesn’t look like, you know, potentially right now you kind of have to go through chaincode to be a Bitcoin core developer or like a long-term established contributor. Perhaps this is now with Brink. There’s now another way. There are multiple pathways that somebody could take. And also I’m curious your thoughts on how long does it take for somebody to kind of go from zero to becoming a well, someone who’s already a developer, but just not a Bitcoin core developer, how long does it take them to sort of get up to speed on Bitcoin core and start becoming like a long time contributor?
John Newbery:
Well, I’m still working on it, Stephan. So I’ll let you know, once I become once I become an expert in Bitcoin core, but seriously, it takes a long time, even for a skilled developer. There are so many so many concepts and ideas that are difficult to grasp and fully kind of internalize like cryptography part of Bitcoin core, even though it’s basic by cryptographers standards. It’s still quite a lot to learn for someone who’s not a cryptographer. The peer to peer networking is it’s different from anything I’ve ever worked on and different from what people most people have worked on. Consensus is something different again, there’s just so many aspects of it. It just takes a long time. So I don’t know. I’m hoping that after a year I am targeting really exceptionally talented people who have the potential to be high impact contributors. And I hope that after a year they will have a history and a grounding in Bitcoin core that will stand them in very good stead to get around to work full time on Bitcoin core. It takes a long time it’s a very steep learning curve, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it.
Stephan Livera:
How important is it also to be a good I guess presenter or you know, because you might be a great developer, but if you gotten some kind of name for yourself, it might be difficult to be noticed and found such that someone wants to fund your work, right?
John Newbery:
Yeah. I think that is potentially a problem with the Github sponsorship Patreon model that the established names. And so the names that are good at marketing themselves are the ones that will receive the funding. And potentially there’s a class of developers who are heads down doing really good work and just not very good at selling themselves who would get underfunded in that model. So I hope that brink will be a way that we’ll be able to fund people who are doing really important work. And the reason it’s different for Brink that I, and the rest of the brink team are very deeply ingrained in what’s going on in the technical community in Bitcoin. You know, I know the, I know the history of all the contributors. I know the potential of new contributors. I’ve spoken to all of them, I’ve mentored some of them.
John Newbery:
And so if people fund brink, they can be sure that money is going towards people who will make impactful contributions. And I will be able to make sure that they’re delivering on their promises and if they apply for grants and they say that achieve X in 12 months, then I’ll know whether that’s realistic and I’ll be able to check that they’re actually doing that work. So I think Brink as an intermediary there potentially adds a lot of value and people can be sure that their money is being put to really effective use.
Stephan Livera:
I see. So as an example, there might be individual Bitcoin holders out there who want to donate for Bitcoin development, and maybe they’ve looked on sites like Bitcoindevlist.com and things like that. But they’re just not sure who to pick because they don’t really know who they want to fund. I presume then as you were mentioning, this is something like, if they, if they like the direction that you’re going in or what you’re talking about and what you’re interested in, then that’s an option for them to donate or fund towards Brink.
John Newbery:
Yeah, exactly. Right. And this isn’t just a theoretic problem. It’s something that I’ve heard from people who want to fund from organizations that want to fund, you know, there are a few exchanges around who funding developers, and it’s really difficult for them to start that operation because they start off with the intention that they want to fund an open source developer because well, it’s the right thing to do. It’s good for their publicity and marketing their business is built on top of Bitcoin. So he wants somehow supported, but they’re not involved in the open source world. And so how do they know where to put their money and how do they know that they’ll get good value and effective use from that money? They either have to find someone internally who knows a little bit open source and get them to spend their time researching and getting involved in the open source world, or they need to outsource it to individuals or advisory boards.
John Newbery:
And it becomes quite difficult. I hope that Brink can help those companies. They can come to brink and say, we want to find open source development. I can say to them, you know, what are your priorities? What kind of thing are you trying to fund? Oh, you want to fund privacy. This person’s working on this privacy project. Maybe we can either link you up or you can fund Brink and we can fund people working in that area. And the same for hot list, like people who have Bitcoin ideologically believe in Bitcoin, wants to see it succeed and want to help in that success, but don’t necessarily know how they can use their money to affect that.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah. Sounds really interesting. And I think one other point that comes up there is perhaps in the space and just in general, it’s not Bitcoin, it’s just in general. People might feel that they want to donate to things that have a tangible impact or tangible benefit when maybe in reality, the thing that actually is going to move the needle the most is say review time and review time is not as sexy, right?
John Newbery:
It depends who you ask. I spend much more time on review than I do on writing code. One of my, probably my priority is making the code quality of Bitcoin core higher. And if I think about the ways I can do that, either I could write high quality code myself, which would add a little bit of high quality code, or I can spend my time reviewing and helping nudge all code to be higher quality. And that probably has more effect. It doesn’t matter how it doesn’t matter the quality of your best quality code. What matters is the quality of your worst quality code, because that’s where the bug will be. And that’s where you’ll have the crash or, you know, whatever. So reviewing is probably more impactful in terms of improving the quality of the project. And that’s how I judge my time. That’s how I kind of allocate what I want to work on is how can I have the most impact on, on the Bitcoin project. And they’re quite cool. If that’s your mindset, then you’ll probably spend most of your time reviewing if you want to get a commitment to Bitcoin core. So you can sell it for when you’ve got a commit into Bitcoin core, you can do that, but you probably won’t be sticking around for very long. And you won’t be a very impactful contributor over the long run. Yeah.
Stephan Livera:
And that could also be not just for developers, but it might just be for people funding as well. So it could be a situation where, you know, an exchange wants to fund and they might be more interested to fund a project that has a specific name. And it’s got a nice branding around it, as opposed to let’s say review time. Yeah. And that’s the real scarcity part.
John Newbery:
Yeah. Maybe it’s maybe just a messaging and marketing issue. Maybe. If we were better at marketing review, then people would be like, funders will be more interested in funding it. I think there’s a really compelling story to say, I reviewed this PR and I found this bug and if I hadn’t found it, there would be a crash bug in Bitcoin core. I think that’s much more interesting than I added this new bell and whistle to Bitcoin core. I think, review is really important. It’s a priority for me and maybe we can improve the messaging. So other people agree.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, sure, sure. Certainly I think, and I think the messaging around that has improved in kind of the last few months or year or so. I’m also interested to chat around Taproot activation. So wondering what your thoughts are on that and you know yeah. Do you have any ideas on when you would potentially see that coming to fruition?
John Newbery:
0.21the next Bitcoin core release is coming out very soon. I think it will be branched today. So we have our master branch, which is where often development work happens. And then at some point we branch off release branches and the next one is 0.21 that’ll happen today. And then there’ll be a bunch of release candidates with 0.21. And eventually there’ll be a release that people can download and run. So 0.21 contains the code for taproot. So that’s been the specification, that’s gone through the mailing list review. There’s been implementation, that’s been through code review, it’ll be released. And then people will have that code that can be run, can be run in test mode on their Bitcoin core nodes. Once that’s out, then it’s time to start thinking about, or, sorry, not time to start thinking about, people have been thinking about it for a while.
John Newbery:
Then the conversation will move on to, okay, how do we activate this? People have been working on that. AJ’s been working on it. I know Matt Corallo has been working on it. I expect within a couple of months we will have advanced that conversation and then there’ll be some kind of consensus emerging around how we should activate this thing. And then, you know, all going well in the next minor release, that’d be 0.21.1. There’ll be some kind of activation code, but I can’t predict any better than anyone else. You know, this is a decentralized project. It’s if there’s a lot of contention and disagreements, then maybe that won’t happen. Maybe 21.1 will be delayed. I can’t predict with absolute certainty, but I would hope for that next minor release will come in the next, I dunno, three months. And there’ll be some kind of activation mechanism in there and then all going well taproot would activate shortly after that, but I can’t predict the future.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, sure. And it also does look promising that we’ve seen some of the Bitcoin mining pools come out in support of taproot also. So I recall seeing Aaron Van Wirdum put out an article recently, I think it was Poolin plus slush pool plus one other pull. And I think combined, they represent just under 30% of Bitcoin’s hash power mining, hash power. So potentially some promising science for support there also.
John Newbery:
Yeah, that’s a good start. I should highlight always miners don’t control Bitcoin, and this isn’t a vote for the miners. This is miner signaling that they’re ready to make that change and enforce those rules, but yeah, that’s, that’s promising the cleanest way to do a soft fork could be to have everyone agree and all the miners agree and then to switch over. So if 30% of the miners already saying they agree, that’s a pretty good start.
Stephan Livera:
Also curious to ask your views around disagreements in open source and open source contribution. You know, a couple of months ago there was that whole drama about the, you know, was it blacklist and blocklist and whatever. But I’m just curious as well more just generally how you think of how you think disagreements in terms of Bitcoin core code should be addressed and how should it be handled.
John Newbery:
Yeah. that blacklist blocklist was I think a very good example of extractive contributions from a lot of people who were not involved in the Bitcoin core projects and brigaded on to github and made life very uncomfortable for maintainers and contributors abused people online, lots of nasty stuff. And just took a lot of emotional energy and attention away from important issues like reviewing Taproot, for example, that was happening at the same time. That’s, I think different from most disagreements in Bitcoin core, which are between long-term contributors, people who have a lot of context and have a history and know each other and respect each other’s intellect, but have differing opinions on how to do things or what the priority should be. That happens all the time. You know, Bitcoin core contributors don’t roll over and don’t just give their agreement to things that they don’t agree with.
John Newbery:
There’s lots of robust discussion and disagreement and eventually some kind of rough consensus generally emerges. I think long-term reputation is a good it’s a good check on bad behavior, so people can disagree respectfully and have very strong opinions. But they care about their reputation within the project and they care about their relationships with other contributors. So that tempers destructive behavior, which is not the case for people coming with a pseudonym or have no history in the project and have no intention of sticking around. So I think long-term relationships and building up rapport and understanding with each other is a way that we can have disagreements and we can have arguments about what’s best for Bitcoin respectfully and hopefully come up with the best solutions without being destructive.
Stephan Livera:
I see. And I see then that when people want to disagree, perhaps in a more productive fashion, they are typically doing things in a more objective way where let’s say they are trying to run some statistics and show, okay, here’s an argument for my proposed approach because of these statistics I’ve run. And if you want to disagree well, what’s your statistics and try to hash it out that way. But I presume then in some cases where it’s kind of like a sort of a stalemate, it just, maybe that code does doesn’t go in, or sometimes, maybe a maintainer just kind of has to make a call based on if what’s the overall consensus of the developers who are either contributing or reviewing that particular piece of code. Right?
John Newbery:
Yeah, I think so the maintainers don’t run the projects their decision is no more important than anyone else’s, but yeah, sometimes they need to make a decision where they’re trying to assess kind of rough consensus and what people as a whole who contribute to the project want and sometimes, you know, sometimes decisions just don’t go your way. Like last week I, or this week I had a PR open that was back porting a feature to a previous branch. It had got some review. Some people came in and said, no, we shouldn’t do this. I disagreed. But eventually the decision went against me and you know, that’s okay. I will move on and work on something else. What’s important is long-term being able to work with these people and contribute to the project.
Stephan Livera:
Kind of stepping back more broad what’s going on in this space. Obviously as we, as we speak, so it’s the 18th of November and you know, the price is kind of pumping and stuff. And I know John, this is not your first rodeo. You’ve been through a bull cycle before. Does it get distracting for you as a developer when there’s all this kind of bull market commotion going on?
John Newbery:
Yes, a little, I mean, it’s exciting, isn’t it like seeing number go up is always fun. But like you said, it’s not, it’s not my first rodeo. This happened in 2017 price went from a thousand to 20,000 in the space of 2017. And suddenly this, this bull run is pretty quiet and tame in comparison, right? No, one’s, it’s not in, it’s not in all the national newspapers and I’m not getting messages from people I went to school with 20 years ago, asking me what Bitcoin is. Not yet.
Stephan Livera:
Not yet.
John Newbery:
But yeah, it’s fun, but the important thing is working on Bitcoin and that’s what will endure. I think the price will go up and down, but we’re trying to build something that lasts for decades. So let’s just remind yourself of that is what we’re doing.
Stephan Livera:
Right. And when I speak to people who’ve been around Bitcoin for a longer time, they tend to talk less about the price, although on, you know, in days and in moments like these, it’s kind of difficult not to think about that. But perhaps on the plus side of that, as we see more attention come to the space, as we see number go up, we will see potentially more funding, become more funding being available as well for Bitcoin developers or other projects and things that, you know, add to Bitcoin’s censorship resistance. So maybe that’s a kind of a long term positive that we’ll see there from the whole number go up.
John Newbery:
Oh, definitely. Yeah. I mean the whole point of working on this project is that we want Bitcoin to succeed and be used around the world. And I think number go up is not the aim, but it is an indicator that, will happen then, like you say, it’s a spur to people to work on the project and work on businesses, and work on Bitcoin, because there’s value to be captured there. So the number does need to go up and it is an indirect indicator of success. But I think over the long run, like, I’m not a trader and if number goes up and the number goes down and there’s a lot of volatility, that’s fine for traders, but it’s not something that we should spend our energy and focus on to your other points about funding. Yeah. I agree if you bought Bitcoin at 100 and it’s now worth 20,000, and you’re a millionaire because of that, you might consider spending a little bit of that money on ensuring that Bitcoin is successful in the long run. And I think one of the best ways you can do that is fund open source development because there are bugs it’s software, it requires maintenance, and that means requires skilled people to do so
Stephan Livera:
If we had to maybe project out a few years into the future, let’s say, you know, over the next five years what kinds of technologies or projects would you like to see either come to Bitcoin or be built on top of Bitcoin?
John Newbery:
I think the next couple of years at least will be spent digesting Schnorr Taproot. There’s just such a huge space of potential innovation that opens up once Taproot and Schnorr are activated on main net that talking about other soft forks is probably premature. There’s just so much work to be done just to incorporate taproot and take advantage of those possibilities. Maybe some examples in lightning, we currently use HTLCs hash time contracts where the line new payments is contingent on getting the pre-image to a hash with short signatures. Those can be changed for PTLC points, timelock contracts, where the payment is contingent on getting, signing with the private key for public key points on the curve. And just doing that change, changes the scripts involved in lightning potentially makes them more compact because you can use signature aggregation that opens up all these different application possibilities, like selling secrets on lightning.
John Newbery:
But that’s a lot of engineering work and it will take a long time to incorporate that fully in lightning And Taproot again it’s possibilities for making the scripts more compact, more fungible. It opens up possibilities for different kinds of contracts. There are two contracts, so there’s like, there’s always a possibility and application, there’s just a whole new tool set for application developers to build applications on top of Bitcoin. So that move towards making Bitcoin more efficient, more fungible and more scalable and more privates adding functionality that will all come from Schnorr and Taproot. And then maybe in five years in time, once people have explored that entire territory, maybe we can think about doing another soft fork but I think short term work on Schnorr Taproots get adapt to signatures, working at DLCs, working get lightning really efficient. And that’s all really exciting stuff, I think. Yeah,
Stephan Livera:
Actually, I’m curious you say that John, because I know there are some other soft forks in waiting. So for example Christian Decker and AJ are working on ANYPREVOUT, which would be a great one for the lightning guys and potentially, well, it would enable the L2 version of lightning that’s E L T O O just for listeners. And I know even Matt Corallo has that other one. Is it called the soft fork cleanup? I can’t remember the exact name.
John Newbery:
Great Consensus cleanup. Yeah.
Stephan Livera:
Yes. That’s the one. Yeah. So would we not, you know, let’s, I guess hypothetical, or maybe this is famous last words and I was totally wrong, but let’s just say we got taproot activated, you know, next year, sometime, or the year after even would we not want to also look at some of those other you know, either Matt Corallo’s one or anyprevout and those other soft forks?
John Newbery:
Yeah. Potentially. I I’m offering you one view and there are many other views, but yes, there are, I’d say three potential sorf folks that we might think about in the short run and there are potentially other, soft forks that people might come up with that we don’t know about yet, the three that people have been talking about most are L2, or sorry. Anyprevout Sig hash anyprevout that would allow L2 and other re-binding structures for layer two contracts. And that’s really exciting. Another one is Matt Corallo’s great consensus clean up, but it doesn’t really add any new functionality, but cleans up some naughty edge cases in the consensus which will be nice to clean up. And the third is op CTV, which is Jeremy Rubin’s proposal for a Covenant enabling feature. Those three are all important and exciting. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t do any of those, but for me, when I look at focus, when I look at what’s, I would prioritize working on it would be using Schnorr and Taproot. All these three things are great. Maybe we’ll get them. I don’t know. I can’t, like I said, I can’t predict the future and I’m not in charge, but yeah, there’s just so much work to be done with Schnorr and Taproot.
Stephan Livera:
Yeah, for sure. And even in that world MuSig2 is another one that people might say, let’s say we get that, then that’d be need to be worked on to get, you know, the software and the hardware wallets, and everything to kind of in lightning to work with MuSig2 potentially. So that’s like another thing that’s another implication of having taproot.
John Newbery:
Exactly. Yes. So MuSig is a way of getting signatures and it allows, basically allows a multisig to look like a singleSIG on chain. MuSig2, is a client technology. It’s a cryptographic protocol between different signers in a multisig on the chain, it’s simply a Schnorr signature. So having Schnorr signatures allows all of this innovation to happen, external to consensus and having MuSig would allow multisig to be more private more efficient and scalable, potentially more secure. So there’s just all of these benefits, but they take a lot of engineering work outside of consensus.
Stephan Livera:
Great! Okay, John, I think that’s probably a good spot to start wrapping up. So if you just got any closing thoughts, why should listen as you know get interested, get involved in Brink and where can listeners find you online?
John Newbery:
Well, the listeners should get involved because they want to support Bitcoin development and they want to support the Bitcoin developer ecosystem and onboarding new contributors and making Bitcoin more secure for the long run that you can go to brink.dev and they’ll find all the information about Brink there.
Stephan Livera:
Excellent. Thanks very much for joining me today, John,
John Newbery:
Thanks too Stephan. That’s great.