Is Quantum FUD BS

We've seen no basis whatsoever that this is anywhere near around the corner. We've seen no basis whatsoever, in my thinking, that this is a decade away, two decades away.

Hi everyone and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today we're gonna be discussing whether quantum is BS. And rejoining me on the show is James O'Beirne, James O'Beirne. He is a long time Bitcoin developer, has been working focused on the custody side of things also, and was the creator of the OpVault proposal, has lots of different views. Today we'll mainly chat on the quantum stuff, but maybe we'll get into some of the other, you know, covenants and general kind of core and, protocol. discussion. But, yeah, first of all, welcome back to the show, and, you know, give us your overview on, quantum stuff. What, what, what is the deal with this quantum computing and Bitcoin?

Hey, thanks, Stefan. it's good to be back. Yeah, it's been a little while since I've been on the show, but, yeah, I always love coming on. it's funny, quantum, while it's been sort of a recent highlight for a lot of people, I was, kind of reminiscing the other day about when I first heard about it, and I was in, an undergraduate computer science program, freshman year, and, they had us go, to a seminar about this thing called quantum computing, The year would have been two thousand seven, so it's been almost nineteen years that I've been thinking about this stuff, you know, albeit very passively. for the first maybe ten years, I had heard about quantum computing I was very agnostic about it. You know, people who you would talk to who would, who were sort of close to quantum computing, were anywhere from, you know, alarmist to kind of ambivalent to agnostic about it. and so I, I never really knew what to make of it for at least like the first ten years of knowing about it. I always assumed it was something that was practical, maybe on, on the horizon, you know, but still quite far off or, you know- You know, maybe was, incrementally making progress in the same way that AI sort of incrementally made progress for, for decades. but I would say maybe six or seven years ago Through an accumulation of reading as well as talking to people, anybody, you know, with a physics background or with a heavy-duty cryptography background, I would kind of pull on quantum computing to see where it was at, and kind of the response that I would get, you know, roughly directly correlated with, You know, how, how smart I thought the person was, you know, in their given field, was basically that, you know, we haven't seen any kind of appreciable progress, it's really far off, maybe it's theoretically possible, maybe not. and in fact, the people who I polled, who were closer and closer to having a rigorous physics background, were increasingly skeptical that it was even a, a thing at all, And so, you know, in the last two years of quantum kind of coming to the fore, in terms of, a quantum, you know, a cryptographically relevant quantum computer posing some kind of a challenge to Bitcoin, that kind of ramped up both my interest and consequent skepticism, because Quantum is being used as a sort of, wedge, I think, to potentially, drive the adoption of a bunch of new cryptography. so anyway, I'll, I'll pause there, in case you have any interjections. Yeah, okay.

So, I mean, obviously, you know, the threat that most people are concerned with is this idea that if a-- if there's new advances very quickly in quantum computing that, and that combined with Shor's algorithm, which may allow people to sort of back- out the private key for our bitcoins and then steal the coins, et cetera, especially if you have an exposed public key for that, for those coins or your xPub was exposed at some point. That's, that seems to be the main threat, and then of course, that has spurred a lot of research and discussion, the Hunter Beast, pay to Merkle root, proposal, BIP, has now been merged just as a BIP, so there's, there has been some progress on that. But on the other hand, there are, let But at the same time, there are real trade-offs to this as well. It's not just free, it's not just-- you can't just snap your fingers and, "Ah, now we're quantum secure." Like there are, there's real work to be done. but let's just dig into the possibility aspect of it, right? Because- It seems to be that there's been some recent announcements, you know, from, you know, Google and some other big quantum labs, and they're saying things like, "Oh, well, we've got this Willow chip," or, "Oh, you know, now it's not a matter of, you know, it's, it's a matter of engineering capability." Where are you on that?

Yeah, so if you look at the timeline, debatably the largest number ever factored by, a quantum computer is, fifteen, and that was done back in two thousand and one, by IBM. And, fifteen, I guess, has some special structure that was particularly amenable to quantum computers, and so, when the next attempt was made at factoring, which was twenty-one in, twenty twelve, that was a ten x effort over fifteen, and there's even some debate about the structure of that as to whether or not it was a, a legitimate use of, Shor's algorithm. so we really haven't seen, you know, any demonstrable progress past that. There have been these kind of- Kind of, sleight of hand type experiments, using quantum computing or, you know, some physical apparatus, but those are typically handicapped by, classical pre- or post-processing. so it's not a purely quantum thing. Oftentimes, the way the quantum circuit is set up is with some knowledge of the solution. So, really these are, these are toy sort of meaningless examples. you know, what- Well, I think-- I'm not an expert on, on the experimental state of, you know, things like error correction or, you know, increases in coherence time and so forth. I, I think, to my knowledge, there remains this, truly fundamental gap in terms of the idea of, you know, one of the, one of the big fundamental questions is can these qubits, which are basically, you know, probabilistic bits, so in, in a computer, all con- Computations happen, on these deterministic bits in, in our classical computers where there's either a zero or a one state. in quantum computers, those computers work on qubits which have a sort of probabilistic state, and there's an entanglement between all of the qubits in a computer, which creates, all kinds of problems because maintaining, a coherent quantum state is this very finicky physical process that we We really, you know, don't have great methods for in terms of scaling everything up. and so there's this, this philosophical or, or, or kind of theoretical, question that's, that's basically like You know, for a, a quantum circuit of sufficient depth, you know, say shum-- something like Runge-Shores on even, you know, a hundred and twenty-eight bit, ECDSA,

does the depth of that gate, does the, the time spent in the computation kind of outstrip the, the, the physical limits of, how long these qubits can maintain coherence? and so, so that's like an open fundamental question that, that even, prompts people to wonder if, if quantum computing is like, a, a, a feasible thing in the first place. That's setting aside all of the physical challenges that would accompany, a quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits, to actually make something cryptographically relevant, you know, applicable. you're, you're talking about the need for, you know, thousands of logical qubits, which translates into- To, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of physical qubits, you need multiple physical qubits basically to construct a logical qubit, and a logical qubit is kind of the, the equivalent of a single bit, you know, in, in a classical com-computer so there, you know, there are varying reports on, all the different physical problems associated with this. there are different methods of constructing qubits, And, I, I couldn't tell you what sort of the largest physical qubit arrangement, that's been come up with is because, again, there are these, these different techniques, all of which are kind of fraught in their own various ways. you know, some things require keeping, you know, the, the, these, these highly tuned machines at like, you know, totally frigid temperatures and, so, so, so there's different physical means of achieving, achieving these qubits, and, and, and they're all kind of fraught and, you know, there's no indication that we even have the, the physical means of scaling these things up.

Yeah. So you're definitely more on the skeptic side. So do you see it as like it might never be a thing, or do you see it more like, no, it's like decades out? Like, where are you at there?

I think, we don't know if it'll ever be a thing

Many, many, many decades out. The, the point of comparison that's often drawn, with quantum is one that stems from AI, and that's this idea that, well You know, for decades, you know, starting in the '60s, with the Lisp guys, and, you know, people had been talking about this, this notion of, of, AI and general intelligence, and really we didn't have any kind of, you know, impressive result, until, a few years ago when we got these, LLMs that, you know, i-i-if not being a kind of generalized intelligence, at least sufficiently mimic that, you know, to the point where they can sort of fool most people. and so this, you know, the, the argument goes, well, with AI it kind of came out of nowhere, so we should kind of expect something similar with quantum. And, well, I think that's kind of a nuanced discussion in itself, There was a ton of incremental progress with AI, and,

you know, AI is this kind of purely virtual software problem. quantum brings in this very thorny physical component, even if you set aside kind of the fundamental questions about whether it's, it's feasible or not. And I think we've, we've gotten really good as a civilization at dealing with these virtual software problems. it's a highly- The constrained environment. We haven't gotten so good, you know, in the last few decades at, at dealing with physical problems. I mean, you know, for something as relatively simple as, say, a nuclear reactor, we can barely put those together anymore, let alone the kind of, you know, metallurgical and engineering advancements that, that we would need for something like, a, you know, cryptographically relevant quantum computer. So, I think there's-- Yeah, there, there are lots of advantages The news, for profound skepticism when it comes to this stuff.

So when it comes to Bitcoin, then, what do you think Bitcoin developers and people building in this ecosystem should do? Should they be working on quantum mitigation, you know, these kinds of ideas or not? Or where are you at on that?

Yeah, it's kind of a tough question because it depends on what level you wanna answer it at. from, from a fundamental basis, setting aside market expectations or worries, on the part of, you know, non-technical people, I would say there are way better uses of our time as, as developers. you know, there's kind of an infinite list of things that we could be working on. And for me, you know, quantum doesn't even breach the top hundred things when it comes to Bitcoin, but, but we've created this situation where because there is this kind of, doomish hype around, quantum and, and its, its possibility, It's now created, you know, potentially, significant, price implications for Bitcoin, and obviously to some extent, you know, Bitcoin is this, You know, iterative self-fulfilling prophecy, and if we get to this point where, you know, institutions and, and, you know, other sort of large entities are convinced that, quantum's just three years around the corner and the, the Bitcoin guys aren't doing anything about it you know, that creates a massive headwind for Bitcoin adoption, and, I've, I've been really interested in kind of morbidly curious about the interaction between, say, a delay in Bitcoin's timeline, You know, if, if, if sort of the Lindy meter on Bitcoin gets pushed back, whatever, eight years, because people are worried about quantum, how does that interface with, you know, the security budget and the supply schedule, because that's a very complex dynamic in itself? So, a-a-a-anyway, I'm sorry to, to get back to what you were asking.

ironically, I think there are some really good dimensions to some of the proposed solutions, for these quantum, mitigations. You know, for example, like in the abstract, I'm very favorable to the content of Bip three sixty, as it's written, if not only because from the beginning in Taproot, it would have made a lot of sense to just have a spend to Merkle tree type without, you know, having that, yeah.

So I guess in a way, you're, you're sort of saying some of these Bip three sixty concepts might be useful anyway, regardless of whether quantum computing is a real thing.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I was much more, skeptical, hesitant, when the proposal actually incorporated specific, quantum-resistant schemes, because You know, when you start talking about putting new cryptography into Bitcoin, that's kind of a whole 'nother level, of severity of change. if you're just talking about introducing a new taproot type that, you know, in many ways just removes code from the existing taproot path, Then, you know, that's, that's a, significantly less sensitive change to be making.

Interesting. Yeah. And I guess the other, probably the other big one that people might want to ask you your view on is, look, James, what about NIST? National Institute of Standards and Technology? They are saying, "Oh, look, you know, they're, they're running these, You know, competitions or these ways to have people work on post quantum cryptography that recommending by a certain year that people should have post quantum, and we're seeing some instances of the technology industry update to using these kinds of things, like VPNs and things like this. I think that might be because of the so-called store-and, decrypt later kind of concern. So I guess what's your thought on that? Do you think that they are just overly panicked about something that's not gonna be real anytime soon, or w-w-how would you, how are you thinking about this concept that NIST and others are already doing some form of post-quantum?

I think when you're dealing with a government agency, especially NIST, who has a history of trying to, you know, in some cases, you know, maybe they were let into it by other agencies or, or, you know, maybe they themselves proposed knowingly some, some faulty constructions like, you know, their, deterministic, random bit generator, or even just, you know, kind of looking back at other incidents like the, the Clipper chip. I mean, really if- If the government is strongly pushing cryptography your way, y-you should be very, very wary. and, you know, there's a part of me, I, I don't, I don't really have substantial evidence for this obviously, but there's, there's a part of me that doesn't wonder if, well, you know, ECDSA is working just fine. it's a, you know, it's a, it's a good algorithm in the, in the classical world. if, if I were an organization like NIST or the Up with a scheme that was, you know, thought to be very strong, when it concerned most actors, but, you know, maybe I, I knew about the way that a certain parameter was specified or I was aware of some kind of structure that would allow me to, you know, given whatever information they have, you know, safely, unlock this scheme if, there was a national security risk or, you know, a warrant or something. I would be really concerned about that. I am really concerned about that, especially, you know, when, when you kind of, pick up on the hysterics, coming out of that community on, on this topic. But, you know, even setting aside the tinfoil stuff, I think there's just kind of a weird nexus going on between academia and, business when it comes to quantum, because there are a lot of people who have kind of based their academic careers, studying quantum computing. There's a whole sort of, you know, credentialing infrastructure there, and, you know, from my time in academia, I think there are a lot of really smart people and a lot of good work, going on, but you can also get into these situations where- You know, you haven't really thought hard about the fundamentals of what you're doing, and you're just kind of proceeding on something because your advisor, you know, is there and is a subject matter expert, and so I can see there being this kind of,

you know, emergent phenomenon around, there being a big scene in academia for quantum computing, there obviously being business interests around, you know, these companies, And the two kind of fusing together, and creating a situation where, you know, the, those three entities, government, business, and academia are, are, are sort of unintentionally hyping this thing up, if that makes sense. Yeah.

okay. And so it seems like, you know, from what we're seeing and hearing, it's Google, it's IBM, it's Continuum, and a few other Labs and things like this. And of course, you know, known in the Bitcoin space is Stephan Livera, and so he is actually working on a quantum computer at, I believe it's called Plan Q C. so he's like a cited researcher in the field, like postdoc working at Max Planck and things like this. But he also worked on Specter Wallet, as many of us know, and he worked on, I, I believe the underlying library, I think it's called mBit, which is underlying like Specter DIY. So he's probably one of the unique In both, b-b-in both sides of this. And I recall seeing him speak at, at a panel, and this is in, November, just of last year, so like two or three months ago, he was saying like, "Only start worrying about this in like twenty years from now." You know? So you have like, this whole range of different views, right? When a genuine, like, expert in the field, cited, working on this, he's saying, "No, it's like twenty years out before you even really worry about this," and

there'll They get to Bitcoin. You know, to me it sounds like, well, that's pretty reasonable. And then there are other people, like, you know, there are some other talks and things where people are sort of saying it's like, you know, twenty years out before Bitcoin is, you know, at risk sort of thing. But then you have other people saying, no, no, look, look at their timeline, it's coming in two to five years, we need to like do a, coordinate a big soft fork now.

Yeah, it just kind of, I guess, to me, the way I'm seeing it is like, again, I'm not an expert, I'm just, I'm an ADIQ podcaster, you know, it seems to me like If it's a real thing, it's more like fifteen or twenty years out.

Absolutely. that's my understanding as well. And even, I remember Hunter Beist, who's proposed bit three sixty, very nice guy, but I remember him, you know, kind of making a lot of noise on Twitter about this, experiment some other guy on Twitter had done, where he allegedly broke five-bit ECDSA, but it, it, it, it wound up that, you know, that, that wasn't at all true, in a quantum And there was a lot of classical processing done to kind of arrive at that result and a lot of, guessing, you know, that doesn't scale well with the number of bits. So I just think we've, you know, at, at a fundamental level, we've seen no basis whatsoever that this is anywhere near around the corner. we've seen no basis whatsoever, in my thinking, that this is a decade away, two decades away. so I, I think it all does come back to that in a sense, but, yeah Yeah, again, I, I am all for Bit three sixty as written, but it's really, nothing to do with quantum.

And so then, I guess that, to, I guess ask it in a more pointed way then, let's say hypothetically, you know, it go- it advanced like, okay, let's wave our magic wand, let's say Bit three sixty, you know, the community rallied around that and said, "Yeah, let's do this soft fork," but then maybe in the future it's actually, no, now let's do a soft fork to actually bring You know, and then at that time, there might be a conversation around, "Well, are we gonna raise the block size or have some kind of quantum witness discount to compensate for the fact that these quantum signatures are bigger?" And then also, it's also a more real thing, there are real costs that we will have to pay. So for example, we will no longer have HD hierarchical deterministic wallets, you know, things-- we're gonna lose MuSig two and Frost, we're gonna have-- we're silent payments, you know, theoretically, like some of these things would have to change,

Updated and upgraded to deal with quantum signatures or post quantum crypto. so let, let me ask you this way, do you think, would you be for or against that, let's say, that second step?

I think it's an absolute nightmare. i-if you just even look at how long it took to roll out SegWit, debatably Taproot hasn't even be- been fully rolled out in many, in many ways, most major custodians I've worked with don't support, you know, spending Taproot outputs they can send to Taproot, but, we, we all know that the, the deployment process for Bitcoin, takes a very, very long time in a full ecosystem sense. And And a proposed change like that for quantum, would take a, a very long time and a lot of effort, but that's not even my fundamental objection, okay? I look at cryptography the way that I look at, say, pharmaceuticals. it's, it's allegedly old nurse's wisdom that you shouldn't take a drug that hasn't been on the market for more than eight years, because, y-y-you know, these are very, very complicated things that we just don't fully understand, and really the only meaningful test harness is reality. cryptography to me is the same way. you know, you can do your reasoning on paper, but until you deploy a crypto system and, and put some actual, risk behind it, you just- You don't know what's, what your unknown unknowns are, and I'm very concerned that the quantum frost is going to lead to a situation where we even consider committing new cryptography to Bitcoin that hasn't seen that kind of testing and battle proofing, I think that would be a horrible risk, even if it's just opt-in, because if you can convince enough people that there's reason to add this cryptography to Bitcoin, it's a very short leap to convince, a similar number of people that they should, you know, encumber their coins using these schemes. And then what happens when, you know, we find out that we didn't understand the scheme as well as we thought we did, even if in the case of, like, Sphinx, it's based on SHA-256, which makes it sound very safe, but- You know, there's a big difference between being convinced of the efficacy of SHA-256 as a cryptographic hash algorithm versus SHA-256 composed, you know, together to, to, to make a signing algorithm. there's kind of a big gap there. I'm, I'm really, really averse to the idea of, adding any new crypto to Bitcoin unless we really, really need to. And I don't think there's, there's anything near a justification for that, for quantum.

Yeah. Okay. And so we've spoken about the BIP three sixty, Hunter Beast, and Ethan and Obi, Isabel, I think the other, the other author on that. So that's, I guess, one idea. There's also this Matt Corallo plan. So I don't know how much you know about that or if Kind of looked into that, but the gist of it, you, you're, are you familiar with it or no?

I, I think maybe you or somebody mentioned it recently. It's the idea of cloning Taproot and creating a new, a witness version that's basically just Taproot, but when you spend to that witness version, you have, sort of no expectation about being able to use the, the, the, the key spend. Is that right?

Yeah, oh, sort of. Yeah, yeah. So it would be, I think, so the way I understand it is like we would have existing wallets, you know, include this kind of post-quantum tap leaf in the script path. While people are still using the standard, you know, taproot stuff today, and then, the idea is inside of that people can do whatever they want, and it's not even revealed on chain today, so it wouldn't actually impact, but, but Post, let's say, hypothetically, Q-Day comes and the quantum computer is here, and everyone agrees, and I guess then at that point, the idea would be to have a soft fork to disable the key path, such that those users can now spend using their quantum, you know, tap leaf, fancy script path into whatever the new, you know, quantum scheme would be. So at least in that way, it's not taking up massive signature space, like at least- Today, and it would allow, you know, but of course, there's all these moving parts of like, is it a gradual break or is it a sudden break? And then can the community agree, "Yes, QDA has happened and it's time to now do something," but I guess as you understand that, let's say, the Matt Carallo quantum tap leaf plan, Are you like for it, against it, or do you have any thoughts?

It's inoffensive to me. I mean, it's not horrible, but I, I just think encouraging people to do things like that, with all the added complexity, just really isn't merited based on, what we know. It's certainly something that you could resort to, it's a plan to have, and maybe that's the way that Matt meant it, is, kind of contingency if, you know, whatever, five or ten years from now we have some new evidence that Getting closer, you know, maybe that's a fine halfway point, but I just think there's a real risk in getting people riled up about this stuff rather than Saying something like, "You know, look, we're technical people, we have good understanding of cryptography, and we really just don't think this is a problem. Here, here's maybe our list of contingency plans if we are presented with evidence to the contrary, but, you know, I, I think it's our job as engineers, To make those kinds of judgments and basically give people our best assessment of what the trade-offs are, and when, when one side of the trade-off comes with, you know, tremendous complexity and, you know, some, something like that, that, that really sounds simple, but for businesses and individuals and the wallet ecosystem is a pretty big lift. I just think, we're better served by saying, "Okay, we could do that in theory, but let's wait."

Yeah, so wait and see. Yeah, it's, yeah, let's see, it's an interesting, point. I, I'm kind of inclined to agree there, but, Yeah, I just don't know what, what are people gonna think? And then, the other, I guess the other point w-with that, the quote-unquote MacKerrall plan, let's say, I don't know if there's like a proper name for this, like I didn't upset with him, I put it out recently, but, I guess the other thing in his mind was, because people can use, like, because a lot of the coins are, are secured, like, people have a bit thirty nine seed phrase, and there could be like some kind of zk proof to prove that they still have the seed, you know, the seed phrase for it, and then use a zk thing to then allow them, like, hypothetically, if you had disabled, you know, the key participant, those people could still recover their coins. So then in practice, it would just be like some of those early miners and maybe... Coincore wallet users and maybe some of the big exchanges and custodians and okay they would do something fancy and do some other thing,

like some kind of commitment thing, pre-commitment scheme. So I guess that's One thing, but at the same time, this would be also be, I mean, assuming quantum is real, all this stuff, it would still be kinda chaotic because then we would have to think about, well, how long is it gonna take for people to transition over, right? And are we gonna have like a bigger block size to allow that, to allow more people to actually transition out? And how big is the zk proof, right? Like some, I think, David Vexler, I believe, had an idea for it, but from what I read on a blog post, it looked 500 kilobytes on chain. Maybe there's some way to do like a proof, so, so it can be like a smaller amount that goes on chain and not the full 500 kilobytes. But, yeah, it's just, there's a lot of complexity around that, isn't

there? Yeah, one hundred percent. And, you know, again, I, I don't think there's anything wrong with some of these like provolactic schemes where you're hiding something in the tap tree for, for later reveal. I think the only qualifier there is that, You know, it-- ideally, it shouldn't have spend power today, because what you don't wanna do is turn your taproot metadata into this toxic waste where if anybody gets a hold of it and there's some kind of a, a fundamental issue, if it-- you know, say you're spending to, you know, like an op success or something in anticipation of a new, crypto scheme, i-if, if that gets loose. all of a sudden now, you know, your coins are at risk of, of theft even before anything has happened. So if it's, if it's a, if it's a scheme where it's like, okay, well, we're hiding this thing in the, in the tap tree, and then at some point maybe we can make some consensus change that turns it on and, you know, makes redemption given a zkP or something, possible. I, I mean, again, like, you know, my, my position is go nuts, have fun, but,

Now, I, I would not advise that, because it's a, it's a ton of work for something that's highly, highly speculative. I mean, a-all of this stuff, you know, the, the, the analogy that a friend of mine came up with is like, it's kind of like running around and being really, really fearful for the airline industry that like teleportation is two years away, because we have like the AIs thinking about, you know, how to do teleportation. It's, it's, it's- T-Day is coming. Yeah Exactly. Yeah, for, for me, you know, again, after years of kind of ruminating and reading about this stuff, you know, albeit cursorily, but like, it, it, it kind of strikes me as a similar thing. Now, granted, we don't have a teleportation industry, really, so, maybe it's not totally analogous, but I, I think that's like the level of, of, of, real threat that we're dealing with here or, or approximate.

Yeah, okay. Well, I'll let, listeners make up their own minds on that. let's, if you've got nothing else to say on the quantum specific side of things, let's talk just kind of Bitcoin protocol. I know you, maybe,

you have, let's say yo-your own views about how Bitcoin protocol development, let's say, should have gone, versus how it has gone. I know you were kind of flirting a bit with big blocker ideas, but also really interested in the governance side of things, obviously, as you were involved with the CTV and OpVault and, some of these, related discussions. So, I guess- Let's, let's hear from you, kind of Bitcoin protocol side of things. Where, where are you at there? Like, what's your overarching view?

Sure, yeah. well, you know, Stefan, I am, as you know, a contrarian, and that's-- I think, m-m-many of us are, obviously, if, if, if you're in Bitcoin, you have a maybe a disagreeable temperament that leads you to, you know, constantly, be prodding at things, and I'm certainly that way, a- As, as many of the listeners may know already, but, I'm, I'm glad that you brought up the big block stuff because I do find that really interesting. And actually, you know, you said something earlier about the ZKP proof size that, makes that somewhat of a relevant question, hopefully not too relevant anytime soon, but, you know, maybe, maybe the, the talk that I'm most proud of ever having given was, at the last OpNext, I think that was '25. I gave a talk, Basically, I, I, I wanted to sort of reevaluate with fresh eyes, a modest version of the big blocker view of the world, which is to say that, you know, maybe instead of doing, may, maybe second layer scaling isn't going quite as well as we all thought it would, and so what, what, what does the world look like where we kind of turn back to something like the block size, as a method to scale? And the way I went about this is I basically modified, Bitcoin Core to give me a bunch of timing information. you know, I, I was sort of putting a clock around every major operation that happens, between, you know, receiving a block and storing the UTXO, all that stuff, because I wanted to get a sense of how, my- Consumer hardware, you know, on residential bandwidth, you know, how much headroom I basically had to work with, and I was very, very surprised at the results, which I won't try and, you know, go, go too much into. You can go watch the Opnext talk if you like, it's something called, something like, modeling block size constraints, but, the long and the short of it is that I was very, very surprised with the amount of headroom that my, you know, thousand dollar computer connected to gigabit It needed me to kind of evaluate this larger question about like what, what's actually the trade that we made in terms of, you know, being really principled about small blocks, and, and whether that was just kind of this exercise in, you know, fetishizing like Raspberry Pi node runners and, you know, these like hyper-constrained situations where you have to beam, you know, blocks on, on satellite and, You know, I was, I was absolutely one of those guys in the, in the block size wars. I was as small blocker as, as they come. but, you know, to be honest, the things that I measured really forced me to reevaluate a-and, and kind of, you know, juxtaposing that on- How things have gone with Lightning, I mean, people forget that in the original Lightning white paper, you know, Dryja and Poohin basically say, like, "Hey, the only way this stuff, like, works in the way that we want it to work is, is with a block size increase."

Right. And they, I think, I can't remember the exact number, but it was like a hundred and twenty megs or something like this. Yeah. That was the number they gave back in the, I think,

twenty-fifteen or sixteen Lightning white paper. Yeah, yeah I mean, obviously, like the, you know, there are laughable, like, like parameters, like the, you know, the BSV guys doing gigablocks, yeah, yeah, like that's completely ridiculous and cartoonish, but, I, I think like writing off the idea of ever touching the block sizes, is, is not only like ill-advised, but maybe unrealistic, depending on, on what happens. So, so anyway, yeah, so that's, that's something that I was kind of looking into. To, just a-as a, as a fun contrarian exercise, but, you know, to your general question, you know, like how do I feel about Bitcoin protocol development, yeah, I'll, I'll be honest, when you asked me to come on, I was kind of surprised. I was like, you know, I'm, I'm like washed up and semi-retired at this point. What does he want to talk to me for? because, because of, you know, I think I,

I, I had this experience, navigating the process of proposing a consensus change and, You know, I, I wasn't really thrilled about, the way that Bitcoin development as a human system is set up to, to kind of process and evaluate that. a-and a lot of people think, I, I, I- I, I would expect that, you know, that really burned me out and jaded me, but the honest truth of it is that, you know, from the very beginning, of, of my development career in core, which was like twenty fifteen, it's really just been an uphill battle to do anything useful, and that's for a variety of reasons, I think, One of the things that, that people forget is that, in as much as Bitcoin is an experiment in crypto economics and distributed systems and, cryptography, i-it's also an experiment in human organization in terms of how the development works. And, you know, my belief is that for- many years, maybe up until Taproot, Bitcoin operated under this sort of implicit hierarchy where there were a few guys who really, you know, if, if they wanted to go a certain direction and it was like plausible and there, there weren't any obvious problems, like that's the direction that things went. And what happened was that, that those guys kind of abdicated in the sense that they stepped back and, you know, in some cases explicitly said, "Hey, I'm not gonna do this." consensus stuff anymore. And that created this, vacuum that I think everybody thought was gonna be filled by, some kind of a like leaderless merit, meritocratic, you know, cypherpunky online human organization. And, and I think that was kinda naive in hindsight. And I think it, that vacuum hasn't been filled and the protocol hasn't meaningfully progressed since Taproot, and, and really there are no signs that it's going to, despite some very credible pro- Proposals, you know, some serious work that's been put forth. you know, me and Jeremy spent a lot of time on CTV, I mean, Jeremy especially, for years and years and years and, I started out as a, as a sort of CTV misunderstander, critic. I didn't get it, when I was first presented with it, maybe in twenty nineteen, and then, You know, when I started working on custody involves and things like that, I, I finally got it and it clicked that was in '21. And, you know, there were, there were a lot of smart, well-intended people, you know, working on that proposal and just- the, you know, the way that it was received by many who are high status in Bitcoin, you know, didn't strike me as productive, and, really, I, I think It's an interesting time to kind of reexamine all this because, you know, I al-ultimately wound up kind of organizing, what, what some perceived as an ultimatum, it was really just meant as kind of an open letter, this, you know, c t v dash c s f s dot com, which is still up. You can go read it if you, if you aren't familiar, but the idea was that, you know, many of us who wanted to keep, you know, pushing forward this idea of covenants in, in a way, we're taken aback by, how little progress had been made. And so, you know, a lot of very, very smart long-time contributors signed this letter basically saying, you know, hey, we recognize that, you know, core, at least theoretically, doesn't like totally run Bitcoin, but at the same time, a-as the most popular implementation, if a consensus change is gonna be even evaluated, we need some engagement And support from Core, so we'd really like you to, you know, review these pull requests and merge the substance. you know, guys like Andrew Pulstra signed that letter, a, a lot of hash rate signed that letter unintentionally, really. and that was back in June, you know, and there was sort of a six month, hey, you know, can we, can we get this done by then? that would put us at, you know, December 25th. It's now, February 26th. So that effort sort of failed, and, that was about as composed an effort as I could muster. what we got in response was sort of a counter proposal from, Sanders and Ponceau that, you know, in, in, in plain terms, nobody really paid much attention to and just kind of served to fracture the conversation. Right. This is the Template Hash,

proposal. So in your view, how does Template Hash compare with CTV and Check Signature Stack?

yeah, Template Hash is basically just kind of a, a less featureful version of CTV in the sense that, it's taproot only, which is, a major constraint for custodians because it turns out that if you're a serious custodian, probably you've got an HSM deployed at the moment, and, almost-- well, no HSM on the market has native Schnorr support, so, I'm not-- I'm not aware of a single Tap, a single, custodian at scale that's, you know, supporting Taproot. Maybe, maybe BitGo, I think actually, I know somebody over there. Right, because they, didn't

Brandon Black work on their music too? Yes,

yes. Yeah, I didn't wanna say, not knowing if he, he was public about that, but yeah, yeah, yes. so, but even then, I, I'm not sure if that's, I'm not sure how mainline that is within, BitGo you know, don't really have plans to support Taproot because there isn't a compelling use case given, given how hard it is. And so, you know, with Template Hash being Taproot only, you have Certain uses that that just kinda rules out, in terms of doing things like, vaults and, and pre-signed transactions, or, or replacing the need for, for pre-signed transactions. The other thing is that, one of the, the appealing uses of CTV was kind of this, off-label use that the BidVM guys, had come up with, which was essentially committing to, other inputs within the transaction and, template hash strips. That out. the other thing the TemplateHatch does, and maybe the most, you know, fundamental objection that, guys like me and Jeremy Rubin had, is that it, it commits to the annex, and we don't really know what the annex is, is for yet, and so I just kind of think it's premature, to lock ourselves into, to that.

I, I mean, you can correct me, you probably know better than me, but I thought, there were some forms of LN symmetry that used the- Anex. I thought that was one thing that, you know, apparently might be used for, and I guess Greg, Greg Sanders is w- like, had done some work on LN, LN symmetry, so I don't know, maybe it's that, I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, it, it, it, I, I, I think that maybe was the motivator, was that he had applied it somehow. he had, he had, he wanted TemplateHash to work with LN symmetry. My objection was, you know, these are sort of orthogonal concerns. You could leave CTV as is and, you know, simply introduce some opcode that's like, you know, allowing you to commit to the annex if you want to. but, I'm sure there, there may be cases where you don't want to, for example, you know You ever get to, you know, cross input script aggregation, you know, there may be some metadata that you need to shove into the annex. And so I, I just think it's, it's kind of an unnecessary design choice, you know, to, to, to make that commitment if you don't need to, rather than decomposing it. So, a-anyway, it's not really that important because the, the upshot is that, you know, the conversation kind of fell apart because you had all these people who were very enthusiastic about- Using CTV and, you know, the, the sort of core ivory tower guys came along and said, "Well, we don't, we don't like CTV, but we like this, this other thing that, you know, we, we think does a better job." But unfortunately, you know, people's bandwidth is limited and, and, you know, I think there was, it's, it's very hard to, to reproduce the kind of Lindy accumulation of review and, understanding that, that CTV had had. And again, it kind of comes back to the fact that this, this consent manufacturing process that used to be very robust in Bitcoin, that was very robust during the SegWit, Taproot days, you know, for better and for worse. That just kind of no longer exists, because you don't have as strong a leadership hierarchy w-within the, the technical community.

I see, and I, I- I'm curious your view on, let's say, like, think about like an AJ Towns, where he's, he's got this kind of slow and steady philosophy in terms of how, you know, or he's written a bit about how he thinks, let's say, consensus changes should be pushed forward in Bitcoin. So as an example, there's this Inquisition, which as you know, but for the listeners, it's a signet, which is sort of like a testing ground for various Bitcoin ideas and, I think even right now, actually, there is a bit fifty-four consensus Just recently active in that Inquisition SigNet, and so I'm curious your thought on that, like, is it just a matter of like slow and steady, is it just a matter of like it just has to sort of,

take a longer time necessarily.

Well, I, you know, I think nobody's saying fast and loose, obviously. but, yeah, there are different gradations of slow and steady. you know, AJ and I have worked together a bit. we didn't have a great working relationship, for, for, some reasons, but, To my knowledge, right now he's, he's primarily focused on, like a LISP dialect that he's, working on as a kind of Maybe alternative to simplicity, and I just look at those kind of changes as, and this might surprise people that I believe this, I, I look at those kind of changes as inappropriate for Bitcoin at this stage, because I think Bitcoin should be done with these engine lift style massive overhauls that just introduce reams and reams of new code and substantial updates to the scripting model. I think those days are over for Bitcoin. I think, like we, we have and should, ossify past those things because Those are truly existential changes to the scripting environment. Adding something like, say, cTV or, Check Template Verify, or I-- I'm sorry, Check Contract Verify, which is Salvatore's, great proposal. Those, those are more akin to, you know, adding time locks, rather than like something like SegWit, SegWit or Taproot, which were really these like

marginal improvements rather than wholesale, like, take out the engine and plug in a new engine kind of changes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then there's like You know, Taproot was done in such a way that it's very, very upgradable. you know, T-Taproot was, you know, in many ways built as that framework so that, okay, we don't have to do this giant lift anymore to, to, to sort of change the world in terms of scripting. So I look at Simplicity, I look at Bullish, which is, AJ's thing, a-and I, I'm, again, I'm just very skeptical because if-- You know, Simplicity is supposed to be simple,

And number two,

you're shifting the question of what is consensus into what do the jets do? And which jets are you offering? And to make, you know, certain operations efficient, like say SHA two fifty-six, you know, you need this like jet for that, which is an escape hatch, because Simplicity itself is this, this hyper-simple, you know, constrained language. So you're really just kind of like moving the goalposts into what gets a jet, what doesn't, you know, how consensus can- Compatible or the Jets and so on and so forth. I'm not saying there wouldn't be benefits to simplicity, I, I do think there, there may be, but that's not incorporating the price of the complexity of the changes, which I think are substantial. So, so anyway, you know, in terms of AJ's slow and steady thing, I mean, I think that's, that's easy rhetoric to give, but the reality is that,

Bitcoin does have this natural hardening process, which should exist. There, there should come a day where we're really not touching the scripting of Bitcoin. I think that day actually may already be here, just because of the organizational realities of how Bitcoin changes, and, you know, you've got guys like Michael Saylor saying, you know, like, "No way, get the developers away from, from this thing." and, You know, that used to really, really rankle me, and I think I've kind of hit a, a zen moment with it more or less, b-because, and, and partially thanks to you and, and other people on, You know, other, other, other friends of ours, I've kind of realized that the, the limitation isn't really like, like, yeah, Bitcoin itself is technologically limiting, but, but really the fundamental limiter is like people and the way that people want to use Bitcoin. And, you know, the reality is like most people just don't want the responsibility of, of doing self-custody. And, a-and I thought for a long time, I still think, that it's, it's my job as an engineer to make that, to make that easier, to You know, let people take possession of their coins without really, really worrying about it or without it being a really, really hard process. you know, it's my job to try and future-proof the protocol when it's like the monetary backbone of the world and, you know, increasingly limited numbers of people can, can actually get access to holding UTXO themselves without a trusted intermediary. I look at that as my job, but I also understand that reality is what it is and Bitcoin may just kind of have run its course in terms of these script level changes, and, you know, there, we've got what we've got, and we should make the best use of it.

Yeah, interesting. And so, obviously setting aside things like, there's like this, timestamp bug in like 80 years from now or whatever, like, assuming everyone's gonna be, you know, cool to do, do an upgrade for that, that's not a big deal, but certainly, 'cause that'll be a hard fork, but from what I've heard, it's like the other side of that will actually not create a block because like it'll run out and, anyway, that's kind of a small thing, If you like, 'cause yeah, 'cause there is this question of should Bitcoin protocol development really go hard down this pathway of like CTV or LN hats or CCV and some of these ideas that enable things like, you know? L and symmetry or, or make it easier to do things like ARC and these various, you know, forms of, you know, L2s that then enable better self-custody. And, you know, on one side of it, it's like, yeah, I mean, obviously, you and I obviously would like more people to self-custody, but at the same time I, I'd, yeah, as, as I've mentioned before, it's like, where is the real, bottleneck? Is it actually just like a social and economic thing that, you know, even now, like if we look on Chain-- if we look on, you know, mempool.space right now, how, how costly is it to, you know, to get next block? You can get, one sat per vbyte, in fiat terms, it's nine cents to get next block confirmation, you know? So it's all like, we can talk about all these people Either custodial things or L2 stuff like Lightning and Ark and Spark and eCash and Fedi and, you know, Liquid and whatever. So I, I guess where, where do you sort of land on that? What's the next, you know, adoption pathway?

It's a great question. you know, I had this experience recently where, a few years ago, I set up this, home security system, these cameras that, you know, don't talk to the internet, they're cheap Chinese cameras that, that I've network isolated. It's totally self-hosted, all this stuff. and I, I, I love it. So I made a Twitter post a few weeks ago saying, "Hey, I did this thing, it's cool." And the response was overwhelming. People were like, "Oh, man, this Well, maybe I should productize this or something. But then it occurred to me that, you know, I spent like a good two weeks of, of difficult, you know, like running Cat 5 through your house is, is not easy, and, I- I, it dawned on me that a lot of people think that they want a self-hosted camera system, but probably what they really want in terms of a user experience is like throwing up three wireless cameras and then having their Samsung TV display a picture-in-picture when someone's at the front door, which I totally don't have. It's this crazy hackneyed, you know, setup that, that works for me because I'm highly technical. And so it was just this experience of realizing, you know, it's this, this, this classic issue that people say that- They want privacy, people say they want self custody, they say they want to be resilient, but when it comes to actually kind of doing the work to, to make it happen, it's very difficult. So yeah, I, you know, I, I really thought that, things like OpVault and CTV could create this situation where you had, y-y-you could just have a cell phone and maybe an exchange account, and you would have near cold storage level security, just receiving through your phone. that was kind of my like- You know, big golden dream, and then I thought, okay, well maybe then people will actually take possession of their coins in larger number, but, you know, I think the reality is that even then, people want like to be handheld, they want a great user experience, they want to be able to call somebody and say, "Hey, what's going on? You know, this isn't working," or they don't even want to get to that, that, that situation, and so the, the exchanges definitely offer that. In terms of future tech, You know, I, I've tuned out a little bit in the past few months. I mean, I know some of the ARC stuff was very exciting. I mean, in fact, is it, is the company called Second? Stephen Rus and Eric, yeah, yeah, yeah,

and the guys, Eric, lovely, lovely

guys, lovely guys. You just, you know, couldn't, couldn't be nicer, smarter guys working on this stuff. And so I'm really, I'm, I'm really happy that they are. But Stephen was one of the big guys pushing for C Because he said, "Man, it just, it reduces the interactivity requirements, it allows us to do things in ARC, that are really, you know, create this better user experience that people are actually gonna wanna use." You know, I, I think to, to, absent some kind of tail risk, you know, black swan event that really puts us in a, in a bad situation, you know, legally or geopolitically, in order to get people using Bitcoin natively for things like payments you know, or even storing their own wealth, you need to create a user experience that's like on par with credit cards, and that's very difficult, super difficult, and so I, I kind of- I'm glad those things are being worked on as a, as a sort of, you know, provolactic for, for if, if that day ever comes, and, you know, we've got this, this, this backup system that's like works well enough. I think that's great work to be doing, but I just think we're gonna, we're gonna probably continue to be disappointed by systems that roll out and it turns out that, you know, they're either more proprietary than we thought or, you know, they don't work as well in practice as we thought, which I think, you know, i-is my assessment of how Lightning has gone. I think Hype for Lightning in like 2020 was so strong, so big, and I think almost everybody in varying degrees feels a little bit of a hangover from that, because it, it didn't quite materialize maybe in, in the way that we thought. Now other, other people say it works great, and they're probably right, but I think expectations were, expectations were high, and so we should rein that in for any, any subsequent Layer Twos.

Yeah, I think it didn't happen the way we all thought it would. And, you know, I put my hand up as well, like I was obviously a promoter of Lightning, I still am, to be fair, but, you know, that vision of like everyone having a node in their own home and like connecting to it over Tor and like paying-- Now, now I did that, but it's just most people won't, and, you know, it just kinda- It's sort of becoming more like a professionals game, you know, it's more like a professionals game of running lightning and being an LSP and, you know, sort of, it's, it's not really seen as like a quote-unquote, you know, everyday pleb, thing nowadays. now, you know, maybe, maybe we're just kind of in a local bottom, you know, like maybe there isn't, an element of growth, like maybe we're gonna see a lot of Fetty instances come up and that's gonna be like one way that like lightning

Seeing, improvements in the self-custodial, like at least the mobile UX, right? Phoenix is amazing, I use Phoenix like it's my daily driver. Wallet of Satoshi have a Spark self-custodial version now, which works pretty well. you know, the Ark guys are working and they've got their own kind of version of it. The Bull, Bull Wallet has kind of Liquid, but Francis is experimenting with Ark in the background there. So, you know, it's almost like- In one way, maybe we scaled too well, loosely speaking, right? That like, because so many people are now using these different L2s or whatever you wanna call it, if, you know, I know some people get stickler about like, is Liquid an L2 and so on, but whatever, like if we just consider them broadly as L2s. They've, they've brought the fees down a lot and people are using them now. And, yeah, Coinbase and Binance and OKX and Bifanex and all the, all these big exchanges, they have Lightning now. So in that sense, we won. But, you know, it's still, not the-- it's not as, let's say Trust minimized as maybe, the initial dream was.

Yeah, well, it's very much like the development of the internet, right? I think if you and I were hanging out in '93, you know, we'd have these grand visions about everybody having a mail server in their house and, you know, it, it being this, this great decentralization of data, and it's a bit of a sobering comparison because if you look at the way the internet functions now, I mean, obviously it's, it's magical in many ways, but in other ways- Everybody's either going to like TikTok, Facebook, X, Instagram, and, and that's, you know, in some ways like the entirety of the internet for ninety-nine percent of people. So yeah, I think, it, it, it is that principle that running infrastructure is very hard, especially reliably. And so if you have, say, a FedMe installation, you know, or, or an ARC, an ASP, you have to make sure that stuff stays up, and, and that's not an easy problem. I'm, I'm speaking as a, a former DevOps guy, you know, still, still current DevOps guy for my household, and, you know, even for someone like me, it's It's challenging, so yeah, maybe at some point we'll get some kind of a technological bailout and, and, there'll be some incredible way to, to, to do this stuff, but I do think that things are gonna centralize just as a, as a course of nature and, maybe that's okay. The AI stuff is very interesting because, I do think it brings a lot of power to, individuals to, to run these kinds of things, you know, people who maybe otherwise like- Weren't programmers, don't really know how like Unix works, but they can get the AI to, you know, teach them essentially how to, how to do this stuff. I think that's kind of cool, but it's pro-- that's probably a marginal phenomenon rather than some kind of a, a huge phase shift in the way the computing works.

Yeah, it's almost like, the limiting factor is agency, right? Like, as in personal agency, the kind of person who will go and like try and use this tool now to figure it out, whereas maybe before it was like you Like figure out, oh, here's how you do your command line stuff and whatever. I guess another thing we should chat about is obviously you were the guy behind Assume UTXO, and of course, maybe some of this ties into kind of the big blocker stuff as well, Because, you know, these approaches like assume UTXO and UTXO, some of these ideas, maybe they can be sort of combined in such a way that, quote unquote, grandma can have an easy validating node, that spins up really quickly. So do you wanna just comment a bit on that, like in terms of, like, you know, obviously you were the guy behind assume UTXO, do you wanna give it, give us any updated thoughts on that and what it means going forward with Bitcoin nodes thinking?

Yeah, I couldn't be More bullish on that arrangement. I actually, am kind of maybe working on something in this department, but, you're exactly right, the union of, assume UTXO and UTXO, and pruning, as well as, you know, technologies we've had for a while like, compact filter block or, compact block filters that, yeah, one,

bit one fifty-seven, one fifty-eight.

Yeah, good memory, good memory. Yeah, the union of, of that tech creates a really, really exciting node environment, I think. And, I'm sort of almost amazed that nobody has gone at it. I'm, I might have to myself, because I think when you combine those things, you, you create a situation, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious, have you seen the Floresta project?

Yeah, I have, I have, and I, and I think that's a really cool direction. I'm, I'm totally supportive of, of what those guys are doing, and I think there, there could be something very exciting there. I'm a little bit of a rust bear. I was, I was kind of poking through their, cargo dependencies file, and there's just a lot of stuff in there, and when it comes to, you know, things like node software, I'm very, very conservative in terms of the dependencies that, that I take on. So, but, but in general, I'm, I'm, I'm highly supportive Very exciting pro-project with, with some very exciting features behind it, but even if, you know, what's, what's funny is like, even if Core itself was packaged with slightly different defaults, like if it was set to, say, retrieve an assumed UTXO snapshot, the latest one from whatever bitcoincore.org, which again isn't, isn't a security assumption, it's not a trust assumption, because the hash of whatever is being retrieved is hardcoded in the source code, it's checked against whatever snapshot's being loaded in, and then you can figure- You're pruning, you know, UTXO is a little bit space age and, and a, a, a bit more of a, kind of a scaling feature, but e-even just those things, you know, you'd have a lightweight, node up in operation for most people, I think, within like an hour. So, I think that would be really, really exciting, and yeah, maybe you'll see some developments from me there, maybe not, we'll see.

Yeah. and so- I've got a few directions to go here, but as an example, I mean, last I checked, maybe one or two days ago, I looked up these numbers. So on, the kind of global node stats, I think this is Luke Dashow's stats, actually. Apparently there's about 88,000 Bitcoin nodes around the world, and of that 88,000, it's about 24,000 that are reachable on, I think, Bitnodes dashboard. You know, isn't it kind of funny that we have, you know, the estimate for Bitcoin adoption is something like a hundred million, maybe two hundred, maybe three hundred million, something in that range, and then out of all these people, it's only You know, call it a hundred thousand people who are running a Bitcoin node. on, you know, why is that in your view? Is it just again the agency aspect of it, like most people are happy to just trust? Treza, ledger, servers, or, you know, their exchange, this kind of thing.

It, it really is. It's like, well, what benefit am I getting out of this on a daily basis? You know, you and I know there's an abstract benefit, but it's very abstract and it's, it's hard to quantify in your daily life. And, you know, again, I, I just, I wanna reiterate, keeping computers up and running reliably is difficult, you know? Managing a network connection between, say, your home computer and your It's, it's not hard, but for most people, it's just a domain they, they have no experience with, familiarity with. They, they don't, they don't really know what's possible, what, what isn't, how hard it is, how hard it isn't. And so, Yeah, I think it's kind of the same, it's, it, you know, it's, it's the same problem as like, oh, why aren't, you know, more people running their own lightning node or Fetty Mints? it's, it's that same sort of thing.

What about this concept of just mobile only? Because we are kind of moving into this world where there are people who don't have a laptop or a desktop, they just have a mobile. and maybe the UTXO thing of like having a compact state node or a FLARESTA thing, which is like, you know, the proverbial grandma can just have a phone that is a validating client, let's say, something like that. But where are you at on this concept of mobile nodes and mobile, yeah, just mobile nodes?

The hardware there is getting really impress- I mean, it's been really impressive for a while, and bandwidth doesn't seem to be a limiter by any stretch of the imagination. So, I think it's technically feasible, probably, you know, today, even if, if you're just saying, okay, we pick a sort of aggressive, assume UTXO height that's, you know, relatively recent or whatever, in terms of just receiving the block and checking the sig- I haven't done any benchmarking, you would definitely need to do that. That doesn't strike me as a, as an inconceivable thing. It's probably, you know, v-very easy from a computational standpoint for these phones. What, winds up being the kind of unexpected difficulty with something like that, which I found out a, a, a few years ago, is that mobile operating systems are very hostile to, programs just running in the background. Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, it- It's, it's almost, it's funny because that's not like any kind of fundamental limitation, it's just sort of the way the platform operates. And so I think that's probably where most of your, your trouble would be ironically, if you were willing to pick a kind of aggressive assuming TXO height.

Yeah, interesting. So it may just be-- I mean, that's, that's probably why most of the mobile wallets, that I know are just kind of the Electrum server model. So they're just calling out and saying, you know, feed me my balances. And, you know, maybe there's a reason for that, right? Like it's kind of, you know, in one sense, yes, we can say, you know, there's not a lot of, let's say, we can go out and morally lecture people that you should be self-sufficient. Like, the finger-wagging isn't really gonna do it for most people, right? They're not gonna care, they're just gonna do whatever is practical and cheap, you know? Yeah. Or another example would be like, people love to complain about economy class long-haul flights, but

People aren't necessarily gonna admit these things, but that might be a big driver for them, like just the price. It's, it's more expensive to fly business class or whatever, and can we blame them for that? Like, and so I guess my point is like, with the phone thing, yeah, we can say, "Well, Apple and Android are really aggressive about battery saving, "but could that be because the end users want full-day battery life? " Yeah,

yeah. The, the average case for that is, is better. Yeah, it's like that, that's a rational decision for them to be making. It's a, it's a good feature probably. Most apps shouldn't be running in the background, you know, unmitigated. So, no, I totally agree.

That kind of fundamental shift in self-responsibility to happen in any appreciable amount, it's gonna take something really catastrophic, man. Like, you know, a, a, a major exchange is gonna have to go under, or, you know, like, people need to feel pain to-- a-and, and that too is a rational adaptation, right? Like, I mean, if, if-- Like, not everybody can be like you and me, in that, you know, we're, we're like thinking about these eventualities and like kind of preparing and like- You know, spending a bunch of time, you know, worrying about our, let's say, privacy footprint or whatever, like most people don't have time for that. They just like, they have to take out the trash and go to their job and make money and, you know, feed their kids and whatever else. and so for people to actually rationally reallocate attention to something like Bitcoin custody or even paying attention to Bitcoin, I mean, people aren't incentivized to pay attention to Bitcoin because their money is obviously evaporating in front of their eyes. And so it's like, They bail me out, out of that very thorny problem. But in terms of actually taking self-custody, it's like, there's, there's no hair on fire thing in recent memory for most people. Now, you and I, you know, remember when NotGoX went under, we, you know, watched BlockFi go under. events like that, you know, should make an impression on people, but, I, I think it's gonna really have to be something, big and scary and, and probably painful to kind of like shake

people's confidence in I mean, or like a BitGo or, you know, one of these like massive custodians. Yeah. and

what would that do, man? What do, what do you think would happen? Like, if Coinbase custody goes under, do you think that, the, the economic world is just gonna kind of let that fly like, well, I mean, Bitcoin would

survive, but yeah, it would be a, it would be a pretty, you know, you know, disruption.

I think there would be some very uncomfortable proposals put forth if something like that happened.

You reckon they

would try to roll back or try to, you know-- I could, I could, I could believe that. I mean, I, I wouldn't even know who would propose it necessarily, but I, I could absolutely see people saying, "Well, we, we, we can't let this like-- " And maybe, I don't know, maybe,

remember, there was, CZ or someone floated the idea to, for Binance, right? When Binance had something and, someone didn't, I thought Jeremy

proposed some kind of like very crazy For like a reorg attack that would, you know, in, in incentivize miners to org out the, the bad blockers, something like that, I, I seem to recall there being some kind of crazy scheme, scheme pitched along those lines.

But I just, I mean, to be honest, I think it's unlikely to happen, but I mean, who knows? Yeah.

And people are kind of a bit bearish. you know, I, I think people just have to like learn to zoom out and understand, like, I mean, here's how I'm thinking about it, and, you know, I'll, I'll get, your response on that, but the way I'm seeing it is, look, we're gonna get a lot of the things we wanted, not all of them, and not when we thought they would happen. You know, like when I was a noob, I thought it was all gonna happen so quickly, and It, you know, it's, it's a long process. And nowadays, I'm kind of looking at like power law in terms of like adoption rates and things like that. And so, you know, I'm just kind of, I guess, resigned to that aspect of it, but I do think Bitcoin is gonna change the world. I think adoption is gonna ca-carry on. It might be a few more decades, maybe it's two, two more decades or whatever, in that range. And it will have a real impact on economics and the world, even if it's not the ideal vision. And, you know, I, I still, I'm still hopeful that we get some kind of a CTV or something like that, and maybe not right now, maybe people, will eventually come around to that. So I guess that's where I'm at, wh-where do you, wanna, where do you wanna land and, h-have any closing thoughts?

I'm happy to say I, I agree with all that, although I'll, I'll put my, you know, signature, pessimistic bent on it, look, fiat debase ment is realer than real. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that. gold and silver have seen their day in the sun, But, you know, as someone who's like reevaluating those things periodically after being a bitcoiner, you, you just can't look at them seriously in the same way. It's like, okay, you know, can China like fabricate gold? How, how do I know this thing's real? I don't have a mass spectrometer. If I wanna sell it, I'm gonna take some huge spread right on the chin and, you know, trust UPS with however much money. It's like, it's, it's, it's just a nightmare and, there- There really isn't any alternative to Bitcoin. It's really the only halfway plausible way out of this like storm that's headed for us. And so- I still really appreciate it in that sense, you know, I, I think it's, it's still working for that use, even not like in short term, literal terms. it's still from a technological standpoint, kind of the only plausible thing that can, you know, operate on the other side of whatever's coming, unless- You know, unless, yeah, we really do revert to some kind of, bizarre gold standard where, let's be sure if you're being inflated, and, you know, countries are like carting around, you know, giant planes of gold to do net settlements and stuff. I mean, maybe, maybe that happens, but by comparison, Bitcoin just seems to be such a, a better medium for that kind of value transmission. so it's still a beautiful thing. It's, it's, it's still absolutely, one of the coolest things to work on but, yeah, it's just, it's, it's tough as an engineer when you kinda see what the possibilities are and what the things, you know, you, you, you could be getting are, but you're not getting, and,

trust me, you want, you, you want some level of disgruntlement among your engineers so that they're working to get more for you.

Well, yeah, let's leave it there. So, yeah, we covered a few things. obviously the quantum bearishness, as well as Protocol aspects. listeners, make sure you follow James online. You can find him at james o'beirne, and of course, the website c t v dash c s f s dot com. James, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me on, Stefan. Always a pleasure.