In this interview, Stephan Livera chats with Charlie Spears from Blockspace about Bitcoin’s ongoing debates on spam, protocol upgrades, and the future of Bitcoin development. They explore the nuances of on-chain data, the impact of ordinals, and the importance of ecosystem diversity.

Takeaways:

🔸The history and evolution of Bitcoin data debates, including the fork and filter strategies 

🔸The real impact of spam and arbitrary data on Bitcoin’s security and censorship resistance 

🔸Analysis of proposed protocol changes like BIP 110 and their effectiveness in curbing spam 

🔸The game theory behind spam vectors and how the ecosystem adapts to soft forks and filters 

🔸The role of different Bitcoin clients and the importance of client diversity for network robustness

🔸The future of ordinals, inscriptions, and their potential resurgence tied to Bitcoin’s overall adoption and price cycles 

🔸Insights into Bitcoin Layer projects and the importance of ecosystem tracking and transparency 

🔸The significance of Bitcoin conferences like Opnext for fostering developer-institution collaboration and debate 

🔸The overarching principle: increasing Bitcoin adoption as the best solution to data and spam concerns

Timestamps:

(00:00) – Intro

(01:13) – The BIP110 fork and filter debate

(03:59) – Consensus changes vs. policy solutions

(08:36) – Understanding spam and data on the Bitcoin blockchain

(11:29) – Diversity of Bitcoin clients

(14:29) – What is considered spam?

(17:55) – Will BIP110 stop or curb spam?

(24:51) – Evolution of spam tactics in Bitcoin

(29:18) – The future of Ordinals

(32:16) – Does Ordinals & spam make Bitcoin a worse money?

(37:04) – What is ‘Bitcoin Layers’? 

(43:02) – What is OPNEXT 2026?

(52:49) – Closing thoughts

Links: 

• https://x.com/cbspears 
• https://blockspace.media/ 
• https://x.com/blockspace 
• https://x.com/opnext2026 
• https://x.com/oklahomabtc 

Stephan Livera links:

• Follow me on X: @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Subscribe to Substack

Transcript:

Stephan Livera (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast. Today I’m chatting with Charlie Spears. Charlie is ⁓ from Blockspace, which is a Bitcoin media and ⁓ publication focused on Bitcoin technology aspects and also organizers of the Opnext conference. So Charlie, welcome to the show.

Charlie (00:24)
Glad to be here, Stephan. Longtime listener, first time caller.

Stephan Livera (00:29)
Thank you. Yeah, well ⁓ look there’s lots of arguments going on right now some of which I’m getting into those as well around You know pip 110 and this fork around ordinals and all that stuff I know you’re obviously a lot closer to the Spammer ecosystem and the ordinal side of things What is your yeah?

Charlie (00:46)
spam sympathizer. I’m a spam sympathizer. I’m part of the problem,

but also like, yeah.

Stephan Livera (00:50)
Yeah, now to be clear, I’m not endorsing, I do not spam the chain,

I don’t take any money, I get a thousand accusations, so I’ll just say it again, I do not take any money from shitcoin or spam companies, I’m not invested in any shitcoin or spam companies, I’m just, you know, copying the flak anyway, but nevertheless, let’s get your view. How are you seeing all this now?

Charlie (01:13)
With regards to the fork in the filter debate, I mean, this is really on year three of the long debate. What a lot of folks think was a debate which started in like May of 2025. That was actually probably two years into the modern iteration of it. Yes, it goes back to the genesis of Bitcoin. Yes, it goes back to the original like op return debate of 2013 or 14 or whatever.

But the modern version of it, the same conversations we’re having right now, ⁓ really started the first couple of weeks on the mailing list right after Casey threw out the org client in January 23 and February 23, because I remember that. I myself was hanging out with Casey on Discord just kind of by accident. ⁓ as a long time Bitcoiner, I was conflicted. And I saw a lot of the early discussion.

on the mailing list and I realized it wasn’t an issue. And what’s funny is, I would say no new information has been introduced into this conversation since those first couple weeks. The argument has just evolved and I want to say matured, but it’s degraded and yeah.

Stephan Livera (02:31)
Yeah.

I mean, I would say there’s been some

little nuances of things that have shifted. as an example, labor relay is probably like, we can’t deny that’s something that kind of changed a dynamic, an important dynamic in terms of the relay. Um, there have been elements of, you know, evolution along this journey. Um, I, you know, I would say, you know, in the earlier, you know, as you said in 23 and more like late 2023, there was, you know, this feast spike was happening. A lot of people were angry about it.

Charlie (02:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephan Livera (03:02)
And, you know, there was a sense of should there, what’s the response from the community? Should it be like a social thing? Should it be like an effort to actually try to filter it? Should there be a consensus change, et cetera? And at that stage, most of those guys were saying, they were kind of swearing up and down, no, no consensus change, only policy is enough to stop this. Where are you at there?

Charlie (03:25)
I mean, ⁓ some people swore that they would never advocate for a consensus change. Any accusations of doing that was an outright lie. They are now ⁓ advocating for that. ⁓ I’m glad that it took them three years to come around to the fact, something that we all knew years ago, that to reduce these types of data would require a consensus change. But again, that’s something that was well known years ago. ⁓

As relates to something like Liber Relay, yeah, that’s actually a new evolution. But I would say I kind of subscribe to information theory that ⁓ it doesn’t really make sense to try to limit this type of data at a policy level long term. If Bitcoin is going to be ready for global adoption, then we should be talking about consensus changes. The policy is like guardrails that helps Bitcoin bootstrap to the first maybe

few trillion dollars market cap. Beyond that, I think if we want to think adversarially, policy is not really a feasible solution. I think Eric Wall actually characterized Peter Todd in such a way that Peter ⁓ is a little bit like a wizard sitting back and saying, well, there’s these incentives which will eventually play out and he will kind of occasionally throw things into the mix, Levi really being one of them. And I kind of believe that too. I’m a bit of an accelerations in that I also think

that ⁓ for relatively benign things like ordinals or inscriptions or just arbitrary data as we see it today, ⁓ that type of thing being introduced to the network today is probably way better than truly adversarial ⁓ types of information, ⁓ which I do anticipate will happen if we want to think that nation states will try to… ⁓

Attack bitcoin in some ways they will do it through way. So i’d rather much it prefer i’d prefer it to be benign things ⁓ and also, I just think that the ⁓ onboarding narrative of thousands tons of new bitcoin users is Under appreciated by the existing legacy bitcoin community. So that’s my opinion. ⁓ yeah

Stephan Livera (05:43)
What’s your take on whether any of the spam can actually be dangerous right now? Obviously there’s concern around illegal data. ⁓ Where are you at on that?

Charlie (05:53)
Yeah.

⁓ Yeah, governments could, state entities could ⁓ look at illegal stuff on Bitcoin and use it as an attack vector. ⁓ I think that is impossible to stop. it’s also very incoherent that like this type of information in this format ⁓ is materially different than

⁓ information in like pub keys like the like it’s very weird to draw an arbitrary distinction between non contiguous data in smaller data pushes versus larger data blobs or the truly unsensible nature of information in pub keys or like hashes on Bitcoin. So yeah, I just think that’s kind of ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah.

Stephan Livera (06:49)
Yeah, so let me just take a second here just to explain for listeners right because obviously you and I both get it but for the listeners

There are various way now Whether we like it or not there are various ways to spam data into Bitcoin right there are public yeah in if you break down a transaction there’s things like public keys there’s signatures there’s scripts and There are various ways that people can spam into those right so for example op return is a special kind of output

Charlie (07:02)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Stephan Livera (07:17)
⁓ And I guess some of these arguments are going back and forth on what is the maximum size of contiguous data? And so that became a talking point from the, let’s say the knots and the 110 filter camp and.

Charlie (07:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephan Livera (07:32)
This has also been argued back because people were saying, well, hang on, even in the Taproot inscription envelope, you could have theoretically just put in 400 kilobytes that way. So why are you making a big deal about 100 kilobytes now? And then the argument back comes, well, no, but you’re making it easier for people. And before, it was harder to do 100 kilobyte opreturn. And then we get into arguments of like, well, hang on, some people were doing 100 kilobyte opreturn even before Call V30. So why are you making a big deal now about Call V30? So there’s all these different arguments back and forth.

Charlie (07:51)
Mm-hmm.

Stephan Livera (08:02)
but I guess this point of contiguity, what is the steel man of that argument? Is it actually that much easier to decode and transform? I guess one other point just to make clear for listeners, it depends how you say it, but ultimately Bitcoin blockchain data is hex data.

you have to actually select the transaction, decode it, transform it into an image or some kind of illegal data. So there’s a bit of ⁓ a point of contention around that. And I think the argument seems to be, well, the community needs to speak out against illegal data being on chain. And ⁓ contiguous data is one of the things that the filter guys want to stop, or at least try.

Charlie (08:57)
Yeah.

Stephan Livera (08:58)
Bye for

Charlie (08:59)
Yeah, the steel man for contiguous data, and I do think that this is probably the best I can steel man the filter argument is that they want to impose additional cost to what they consider to be spam. ⁓ And so do think that’s the strongest angle that they have. ⁓ I think this ignores the fact that we have already done this through block space pricing. And ⁓

It implies that this hasn’t already been a thing that the Bitcoin network has prioritized putting a cost to what you can put on chain and having a limit to that. We fought a whole war over that. So ⁓ and I do just want to, know, there’s this I get that we Bitcoiners want to think of ourselves as adversarially minded. We want to say, well, we want to imagine that the state

wants to We want that the state wants to attack Bitcoin and that they will leverage legal means and stuff like that. I I share that view I think if you are to at a consensus level Try to reduce potential legal attacks for Bitcoin. That is the most fucking cucked mindset I can ever imagine so sorry, you can bleep that out, but like I just think that Bitcoin at a

protocol design level should not be ⁓ affected by what we think a couple governments might do. So if that were the case, then I think we should take a lot of other, would say increasingly cut positions on how we design Bitcoin as a protocol and not just like be that. So I think it’s a very incoherent argument to like try to argue against like posting legal data because legality

is an arbitrary definition based upon which jurisdiction you live in. What is illegal in the United States is not illegal in other countries. And to me, that would be like the same thing as saying there are evil images that we as a society consider to be morally bankrupt and evil. But the definition of those images is different in China because they censor freedom.

Information in China like the Tankman image. That’s one of the first things I inscribed on Bitcoin ⁓ so ⁓ I think that these normative moral definitions of what is illegal and not legal ⁓ are not relevant in the protocol at the protocol design level for Bitcoin, so ⁓ Yeah, I Cannot steel man the filter argument very well. I can steal man other positions on like other protocol changes

really well, I think. ⁓ Because a lot of people will frame me as a core supporter or core sycophant. And I’m not really what’s funny is ⁓ I’m I’m long time pro client diversity. This is the great irony is that ⁓ I love to see more people running different clients. ⁓ The landscape for like functional

Clients which are not core is very sparse and thin and because not says that fork of core It’s like very hard to actually say that’s very differentiated other than it’s got you know more knobs and new Luke will eviscerate me for making that reductions comparison, but I Want a more diverse client set so, you know the recent core appointee to talk, you know the core maintainer ⁓ Who’s focusing on like little Bitcoin kernel and like?

pulling out consensus. I love to see that because I think for a robust ⁓ adversarial adversarially designed Bitcoin network, it’s very important for us to imagine a world where there is not a leading project which defines ⁓ like which is a de facto ⁓ definition of core of Bitcoin consensus. So it’s funny because like you would think if you were to take that view, you’d think I’d be like a not sky but I’m not really because I believe

that ⁓ is not positioned for a robust ⁓ dominant reference client. But ⁓ I do like that people are finally know the difference. Like the average user didn’t know the difference probably years ago. And now for a bit like, I think perverse reasons, the average person and user who’s involved in these arguments probably does differentiate between like client consensus.

Stephan Livera (13:30)
Okay.

Charlie (13:49)
and ⁓ other stuff. And even like having those tools and language is really important, I think, to set up the next decade of Bitcoin growth.

Stephan Livera (13:59)
Yeah, so in terms of different Bitcoin clients, think generally speaking, it’s nice to see different kinds of clients. The main ones, obviously Bitcoin Core. There’s Not. There’s BTCD, which is used for Lightning stuff and UTreeXO stuff. And then there’s libbitcoin by Eric Voskul and that team.

Charlie (14:13)
Yeah. Yeah. If you’re like a weird like

what’s that Terry written OS, it’s like the Temple OS of Bitcoin clients.

Stephan Livera (14:27)
Yeah, so anyway, yeah, I think that’s kind of the funny thing because the debate is kind of being summed up as, just core versus nots, but it’s more just like the filter camp versus disparate groups, right? Because there are different views, right? Even your view and my view is different on this even, right? Because we would have different views of what constitutes spam, but at the same time, I still think bit 110 is the wrong pathway. Like, just don’t think it’s the right move for the network.

Charlie (14:42)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephan Livera (14:56)
⁓ Well, let’s go to that question. In your view, I guess here’s how I see it. I basically, BRC20, stamps, JPEGs, I consider those as spam on Bitcoin, but the difference is I don’t think I necessarily have a good way to stop them. that’s probably the… But how do you see… Is there such a thing as spam on Bitcoin?

Charlie (15:12)
That’s a fair view, I think, yeah.

Yeah.

And that’s the fun is, yeah, and that’s the

that’s what was basically discussed on the mailing list the first couple of weeks, there’s a iconic post from Andrew Polstra, where he addresses ⁓ block space repricing, ⁓ like ability to impose additional cost to spam, ⁓ ways to reduce arbitrary data. And all of those said, this

None of these would have a material effect and ⁓ any doing any of these would invalidate like the core principles of Bitcoin and I was like, okay great. And so I read that and ⁓ I was like, okay, I don’t feel like this is a existential issue. I think it’s a much bigger existential issue that normal transactions are not pricing out what many users consider to be spam. Because we’ve seen empirically that ⁓

⁓ What you call spam is very Reflexive to fee rate. It’s very sensitive to fee rate We see that when we don’t have these major like secondary token mints like BRC 20s when it’s like we’re looking at like just JPEGs They’re very cost sensitive ⁓ Even around like a hundred to one attend like a hundred sats per vbyte ⁓ They dramatically fall off in like how how much block space they take up. So like I would say

that ⁓ if we were to see more actual like monetary activity on Bitcoin, we’re just see like average higher fee rates and a more dynamic fee rate market, we would naturally see this stuff priced out. We can back test this and look and you can look and say that these things do reduce, they are priced out. And then as far as like secondary tokens go, best of luck man, the deegens are gonna deeg in but they have a really quick half life. So if Bitcoin can’t handle crazy spikes in speculative activity, then I don’t know what we do.

Stephan Livera (17:15)
And so, again, there’s lots of little nuances and rabbit holes that we can go into, but I’m just trying to make sure the conversation is accessible and educational for people. But let’s go to this concept of if certain pathways for spamming the chain are blocked off.

Charlie (17:20)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Stephan Livera (17:35)
either by

policy or by consensus, is the BIP 110 plan, restricting, let’s say, opera term below a certain size, and they are trying to basically outlaw what’s known as the Taperoot inscription envelope, which is a specific scripting method that the spammer guys are using to spam their JPEGs into the chain. And not just JPEGs, right, because there actually are a lot of these ⁓ kind of small value in terms of… ⁓

Charlie (17:48)
Mm-hmm.

Stephan Livera (18:02)
bytes on chain inscriptions, like text inscriptions also.

Charlie (18:05)
Yeah, terms of like, yeah,

just for context for like, in terms of like raw transaction numbers, it’s like 99 % token mints. In terms of block space used, roughly, it’s like 30 % JPEGs, 70 % fungible token mints of that like category that we call, that you might call spam. I’m not conceding this totally. I’ll just, you know, adopt the semantics for, to have a good conversation.

Stephan Livera (18:28)
Yeah, yeah,

right. so, mean, tell us from your perspective, does BIP 110 either stop or meaningfully curb spam or, you know, yeah, does it meaningfully stop or curb spam in your view?

Charlie (18:43)
⁓ No, it would stop the existing tactics to put spam on chain. ⁓ So a lot of this is not being able to think one step ahead, which is ⁓ the more you cannot control what the secondary market will do. The secondary market will will will do will will have incentives of its own. It’s it’s exogenous to Bitcoin. What the secondary market can do for these

types of data is they can use certain data embedding schemes. 110 nukes the majority of those data embedding schemes that are popular. ⁓ What can happen though is if there’s still economic demand for these types of transactions, they will evolve into using different tactics. And there are an effective infinite number of tactics you can use to put arbitrary data on chain. So ⁓

What will happen is you will, through much gnashing of teeth and wailing, you will somehow, at great expense to your sanity, ⁓ execute a soft fork, we call it, let’s say 110, which nukes these known ways of embedding, or the popular ways of embedding data. But ⁓ it is asymmetrically, by several orders of magnitude, less difficult

for the big spam ecosystem to evolve and its tactics. so ⁓ just the novelty and like, ⁓ conspicuous nature of this, like there will be new spam embedding tactics, which will be popular ⁓ in this new data, reduced data soft fork. There is, I’ll actually steal a minute. You can argue that you can send a social signal and you can. ⁓

I will qualitatively say that the social signal has only boosted the like antagonism from these spammers to say this is such bullshit like We don’t want to do this and in fact, I think it’s antagonized people who are largely neutral because a lot of people really didn’t care about this especially like a lot of the Bitcoin devs are like, oh Not really into NFTs. I really need to tokens, but I don’t really care about this

but the anti-spam, the pro-filter arguments ⁓ became so intolerable and interwoven with essentially ⁓ very anti-freedom arguments that I think it antagonized a lot of people who were previously pretty neutral because they find the 110 camp so abhorrent. So you actually see, I use Rob Hamilton who is a true neutral character.

And ⁓ he’s always like making anti filter arguments and he is not really a JPEG guy. He somehow managed to be friends with everybody during this and he’s finally made some enemies and become an enemy number one in like the filter, among the filter camp. So ⁓ like there’s a lot more of those type of people who are not just Rob, they’re just, he’s a more prominent one. So like,

You know, you’ve seen an alignment against 110 from like the previously the I’ll say the silent majority of neutral Bitcoiners because they view it as anti freedom largely or just against Bitcoin like Bitcoin equal access, you might say so.

Stephan Livera (22:28)
I see, yeah. And so, yeah, as I said, you and I have different views on spam, but in a way, we sort of land in a similar way of like, I don’t think this is the right thing for Bitcoin. Even if I never spammed the chain myself, I don’t endorse it, I don’t like it, but sometimes, it’s a slight COVID, sometimes the lockdowns, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, you know, like these people are sort of saying, it’s only temporary. Where have we heard that before? Hey, just two weeks to stop the spread, you know, we’re just gonna, you know, and then there’s all these like elements of…

Charlie (22:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s a really good analogy weirdly enough,

Yeah.

Stephan Livera (22:55)
Parallels now, of course, there’ll be a lot of arguments from the other side about all your misrepresenting them this that and the other we don’t have time to get into every little nook and cranny because otherwise this will be a six-hour podcast

Charlie (23:03)
Yeah, but they misrepresent us all the time.

So like, I try to like be, you know, you can only have like an hour long conversation too. So like, to be exhaustive, it would take a month. Yeah, exactly.

Stephan Livera (23:13)
it’d be like a six hour podcast. We’re not gonna do that. But

like, let’s just talk about some of the key points, right? So I think this is probably not a very well understood point, right? So let’s say BIP one, now again, it’s very unlikely. Last I checked on a prediction market for this, it’s like less, it’s like 5%. And even that might be overstating the probability of success of BIP 110 here. But just for example sake.

If BIP 110 does get activated on the heaviest chain in Bitcoin and it gets activated,

I think it is likely to still get spammed. Now they might say, well, that’s fine, but at least it’s not contiguous. But you’ve seen different arguments on that because they’ve said, well, actually we’re going to also keep soft forking. And it’s like, well, how many rounds of this are you guys going to do to try to, you know.

Charlie (24:01)
You can, but it’s, mean,

think about it. Like 110 was originally framed as urgent, an emergency one that would have activated three weeks ago was the original target. was originally February 1st, 2026. A lot of people forget that it just the timeline keeps being pushed back and they keep moving goal posts and giving ground. like, yeah, you can commit to more future softworks, but guess what?

Stephan Livera (24:09)
Right.

Charlie (24:29)
That’s a similar thing that we didn’t want to do during the block size where a lot of the reason why we didn’t commit to raising the block size as a design goal was not necessarily because there is a perfect block size. I will get crucified for this, but rather because we don’t want to commit to future consensus discussion on block size. There’s a bunch of other reasons that are going on, but like that was a big one. cannot, like it is not.

a good protocol design and good for consensus to have to always be fighting like do we increase the block size and other two megabytes this year? So

Stephan Livera (25:02)
Right, was seen as a direct… Now, there were a few things there, fixing transaction malleability and quadratic hashing and this, that and the other, and obviously enabling lightning, etc. But, yes, it was also seen as a rejection of the big block pathway. It seen as like, we’re gonna do this layered approach, we’re gonna do lightning and maybe other L2s in future, and now we have some of those other L2s, we’ll get to that later. But, let’s just, on the spam question, can you maybe elaborate or explain for us a little bit, what would the game theory or whatever, maybe game theory is a dumb word,

Charlie (25:04)
Yeah, a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephan Livera (25:32)
But

what’s the incentive? What’s the system gonna do like basically? Can you talk us through what it would look like if Casey and their odd guys their odd indexer? They’re gonna have to go figure out a new spam vector which is like a new scripting pathway or whatever or even some I’ve seen

Charlie (25:44)
Mm-hmm.

Stephan Livera (25:49)
the again, not endorsing or promoting, but there are other vectors of doing this, right? There’s stamps, there is this, what’s it, or the knots, the taproot guys. And then there’s this other one called B-Pub, which is like literally spamming into like the pub keys. So can you just talk us through what would the next steps be? Like let’s say 110 gets stopped.

Charlie (25:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah.

Stephan Livera (26:09)
What’s the next spamming vector and is it more costly than the current? And let’s say how much more costly are we talking like 5 % more costly, 50 % more costly, 100 % more costly? Can you give us an idea?

Charlie (26:15)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. It could be more costly. It probably will. ⁓ I would have to look at each scheme ⁓ Probably what Casey would do and probably a lot of other people who are just frustrated all this bullshit would just look and see ⁓ Which data embedding scheme is the cheapest and and most user-friendly if we just update the word client because for the listeners like ⁓ There is a separate Software that you run

to look at the Bitcoin blocks and interpret the data inside there. And that we call the ORD, the ORD client, and it lets you see through your ordinal’s lens the fun stuff that’s on Bitcoin. ⁓ So what would happen is the client would just update how a client, Casey would ⁓ update to a new scheme to just look at the blockchain differently. so, ⁓ yeah, it would,

It would be fairly trivial to do. I don’t know which scheme they would choose, honestly. I think not scrum and I’d have to look. This is you caught me off guard here. I’d have to look at specifically how not identifies ⁓ the taproot spend script pushes. think it’s something to do with like the opposite or op one, whatever. ⁓ And they would. So it’s kind of actually hard coded in. So there’s other ways you could put it in the witness data. And yeah.

Stephan Livera (27:40)
Yeah.

Right, so as an example

of her, I’ve seen some people talk about, because they’re taking away op-if in tap script, right, because that’s one of the, that’s the tap root, or I forgot the exact encoding, but people have been talking about, well, you could use op-not-if, or there are other scripting mechanisms to do that. So maybe that’s like one of the top candidates that Casey would choose, but other people will have their own spamming vectors, maybe they’ll do something else, like, who knows? Yeah.

Charlie (27:52)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think that would be like the easy preferred one.

Yeah. So in

Stephan Livera (28:12)
So do you have a sense of

Charlie (28:12)
the market, like,

Stephan Livera (28:13)
how much more expensive it would be? Because that’s probably an important point, right? If you’re a Knots or a 110 fan listening, or hate listening, or hate watching, or whatever, you probably want to get a sense, how much more expensive is it if they get pushed to using the next best spamming mechanism?

Charlie (28:21)
Yeah.

So I don’t have the numbers on top of my head. ⁓ Also, haven’t actually looked at this. I haven’t looked at exactly how expensive different schemes are. ⁓ I would say 2x, 3x more expensive sounds like ⁓ something that it could be. Yeah, and I also don’t really think that would materially change ⁓ the ecosystem. We’re sitting at one sap review right now, so that would be an effective like.

Stephan Livera (28:44)
Kind of that bullpock, okay.

Charlie (28:55)
If you’re going to put a dirty JPEG on Bitcoin, it’s going to cost it three sats per V by and we don’t see JPEGs materially costing more than if you’re to do pub keys, it’s going to be probably the most expensive. Maybe it’s 10 X. And we don’t really see JPEGs drop off at the eight to 10 sats per V by level above that. Like it’s kind of dependent on the market. like, yeah, if you could impose 100 costs, 100 X costs on JPEGs, I’m pretty sure they like die or they’d be what I think to I think is.

They would just become much more special. So what you’d really do is you’d really just cull all of the really bullshit low effort stuff and you’d make it Bitcoin more of like a fine art blockchain, which, hey, I would probably prefer that because I don’t like looking at the dumb stuff. I’m an artist, so I like Bitcoin’s scarce block space to be used.

more as a more premium block space. while nobody’s using Bitcoin right now, like while fees are low, like have at it. I don’t really care.

Stephan Livera (30:03)
In your view, do you predict the Ordinals ecosystem making a big comeback in the future or do you think it’s in a lull? Where do you see that? Because some people might say, well, hey, maybe it’s just like, was a fad and it’s over. Or do you think, no, it’s coming back? Or where is it now?

Charlie (30:18)
⁓ I have no

I really don’t know. ⁓ I don’t really know. I mean, I own a lot of Ordinals and I will make inscriptions for fun all the time. I did it before they had value and I continue to do it for fun kind of as a personal interest and hobby. I don’t really sell many of them. I’ve sold a few, but it’s mainly because people like begging me for them. But sure. ⁓ And ⁓ I don’t know. I think a few of them will come back.

I think it’s dependent on Bitcoin itself getting a bid. And I also think it’s dependent on the on-chain economy of Bitcoin increasing because I think that you see largely at the price of these secondary on-chain assets increase when more shit’s happening on-chain, whether it be both degenerate and monetary and everything in between. So I think

Stephan Livera (31:12)
So you’re saying it’s kind of correlated to just

bull runs like if we have a Bitcoin bull run who knows when you think that might have a resurgence or lead that might lead to a resurgence in spam ordinal activity, let’s say or whatever

Charlie (31:17)
Yeah.

It

will lead to a resurgence in more activity of those things. I don’t know if like the existing assets which are out there. I don’t know what will happen to those because that’s like independent of like they tend to like get more interest. Yeah. Yeah. They tend to get more interest like more people are doing shit on Bitcoin, which is great. But ⁓ I really have no idea. I would love for them to go up because ⁓ it means that like

Stephan Livera (31:40)
Right, yeah, but we’re just talking about the ecosystem, not individual or existing assets,

Charlie (31:54)
These like the what one crazy thing is that the DGN’s Very quickly started running circles at a technical level around the average like Bitcoin pleb user The average DGN has a much more sophisticated understanding of tap script If you look at the mempool.space donations, it’s all jpegs ⁓ Because like these are power users on bitcoin and so I want bitcoin to have this giant top of funnel

To lure people into using it even if it’s for speculative means ⁓ Because I think that results in net more Bitcoin users net more sophisticated Bitcoin users and They tend to be very liberal with their support of Bitcoin projects. So I Think that’s good for the ecosystem

Stephan Livera (32:45)
And what do you make of this? So this seems to be kind of another moral or ethical reputational kind of argument we see from the filter camp. sort of give you this idea that, well, if people look at Bitcoin and see that it’s filled with JPEGs and not monetary activity, that that somehow harms the reputation of Bitcoin or makes it a worse money. So what would you say to that? Does ordinals and spam activity make Bitcoin a worse money?

Charlie (32:54)
huh.

⁓ You have to be you have to twist yourself to make it to make that argument you have to really like ⁓ You have to tie yourself in knots to say that Bitcoin functions differently that you cannot send Bitcoin transactions that you can’t have like ⁓ Sovereign access to Bitcoin ⁓ Empirically, we’ve seen that more users use Bitcoin because

Bitcoin we basically siphoned at all of the energy from these other NFT and crypto ecosystems on to Bitcoin and Now they own Bitcoin and they’re really these people weren’t using it before they’re all on ETH and they’re on Solana and yes They still hang out on those ecosystems, but now they have Bitcoin if you hop in these like Degen discord servers There is a broad agreement that

I trade on these other chains, I de-data these other chains, and I roll that into a Bitcoin savings account. I have tried for so long to convince people to do that for Bitcoin. And it’s really just pushing on a string. I’ve run a Bitcoin meetup for closer to a decade now. ⁓ yeah, it’s like talking to a brick wall when you meet a ripple person. It just doesn’t compute in their smooth little brain.

But these DGNs, like they get it because they’re like, ⁓ I want Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s like this thing. It is now their savings asset. And so ⁓ I don’t remember what.

Stephan Livera (34:53)
Yeah, so interesting. I would frame this as like

a kind of like a platform maximalist argument as opposed to the let’s say the monetary maximalist argument of like so the platform maxi in this in this context is like hey we should bring these other uses to Bitcoin whereas like let’s say the monetary maxi is more like nah piss off go somewhere else that’s it that’s kind of the that seems to be a bit of a dividing line ⁓ but yeah I mean yeah

Charlie (34:58)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, but I’ll say like,

I believe both like, ⁓ the only time we actually disagree is when we’re talking about consensus changes, we’re talking about consensus changes, the motivation behind these consensus changes, because ⁓ it’s really blurry to say if you are an op cat supporter, if you’re a platform or a monetary maximalist, it is a broadly popular opcode, ⁓ because it, ⁓ it checks boxes for many people in many camps.

⁓ CTV is a more narrowly defined opcode and probably benefiting ⁓ more monetary maximalists. But the thing is, because like the difference between what is spam and what is a monetary transaction is way more ambiguous and blurry than almost anybody I think acknowledges. Like a thing which makes Bitcoin better money also provides use cases to JPEGgers and vice versa.

So you find that like this is really just a very big tent and we’re on opposite sides of it is my view. ⁓ And I just think that ⁓ there is a lot more like the moral arguments are very foreign to me. That’s not the Bitcoin I knew 10 years ago. That’s a very, there’s a very anti-Cypherpunk arguments. And like, know, the Bitcoin culture and how we think about Bitcoin does evolve and change. Maybe we are.

a morality first network, ⁓ my morals and ethics are centered around providing more sovereign access to Bitcoin to people. And so like, I think that ⁓ the ⁓ normative statements about what is okay and not okay data is much more risky and harmful ⁓ to making Bitcoin freedom technology than making the accidentally making Bitcoin

a little bit better platform for some JPEG tech.

Stephan Livera (37:13)
I see, yeah. And I think ⁓ it is going to be one of those things where certain upgrades…

Maybe they do help certain uses more, ultimately there’s certain upgrades that everyone wants. Not everyone, to be clear. let’s say, people in both sides of that divide could want, for their own selfish reasons. So I guess, yeah, as I said, even if I think some of that stuff is spam, I don’t think we have a good way to stop it, or a principled way to stop it. I think the cure is gonna be worse than the disease. think a lot of the core developers are kinda getting blamed for things

Charlie (37:26)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephan Livera (37:51)
spammers did really like I don’t I think there’s a bit of shooting the messenger going on but speaking of sovereign access let’s you know we’re gonna spend the whole time on spam let’s talk about this layers project also so I know you acquired Bitcoin layers I believe was it Yanis was doing that so tell us a little bit about that and what you’re aiming to do there

Charlie (38:00)
Yeah

So Bitcoin layers, ⁓ we saw like in early 2024, an explosion of like Bitcoin L2s, ⁓ the majority of which were glorified multi-sigs or even single sig bridges, ⁓ and a lot of degenerate Chinese capital, but that’s fine. ⁓ And through that, it happened to coincide with Yannis and ⁓ a team of his had built

for an open source project called Bitcoin Layers, which like try to track and categorize and define what these things are because as much as a lot of this is implicit knowledge on the mailing list or in like the high the Bitcoin discourse like it’s really not defined anywhere. And if we think about like side systems and L2s are federated, side systems, know, how is lightning different from liquid is different from arc is different from spark.

What are the differences between the state chains? What are the security assumptions? There really was no place to figure all this out. And on top of that, there was no place to track all of the activity happening on these other side systems and chains or L2s. ⁓ so that’s the project that Janus and Red and Michael and some other folks ⁓ started working on. ⁓ I actually was an angel into that project back in the day.

⁓ But it’s really hard for them to make money. It’s really hard to make money as an open source project. ⁓ So ⁓ BlockSpace, or a media company, it makes a lot of sense for us to track this data, dashboards, ⁓ do deals with these other L2s, using the term broadly here, L2s to like, we will help you describe what’s happening in your network. ⁓

And that’s really valuable. ⁓ it’s not an open source project anymore, but we are taking it internal and we will be building several things. The obvious ⁓ ones are if you look at Bitcoin layers, all of the data has gotten a little bit out of date, just updating it, bringing it back to life and just basically resurrecting the project. ⁓ We think it fits really well into our broader media strategy because we like, is there a newsletter that tracks, you know,

all the wrapped Bitcoin held in all the other chains because that’s a massive part of the Bitcoin economy. ⁓ So if it’s in the broader Bitcoin economy, then like I think that’s in our jurisdiction to talk about and cover. So Bitcoin layers is a very obvious ⁓ integration and acquisition for us.

Stephan Livera (40:56)
Yeah, I see. And so then, I guess as I’m reading you then, it’s mainly around showing these different L2s, what are the different trade-offs, what are the, you know, just to help like people who are sort of not deep in the trade-offs understanding this.

Charlie (41:09)
Yeah, so there’s not a lot of money in describing

trust assumptions of your various, say, BitVM bridges. But ⁓ it’s really value adding to track ⁓ what’s happening in those other ecosystems. So ⁓ the project, Layers, had historically focused on defining risk assumptions. Because most users don’t know that they’re bridging Bitcoin to ARK.

Who’s your counterparty? Are there counterparties? Which ARC implementations are different? What do they do? ⁓ And so there can be Twitter threads about this. There can be like open source repos that track this. But it’s also very clearly like a value add, like educational and ecosystem tracking, like Riverlearn, the best educational resource there is. And that’s a huge top of funnel for their other products. So if we can…

maintain ⁓ the Bitcoin layers ⁓ work, then we can also like do other value-added stuff such as, you know, ⁓ ecosystem intelligence on. You know, if there’s a thousand wrapped Bitcoin on like, ⁓ you know, well, how much does Bitcoin have? Bitcoin has, you know, Bitcoin and wrapped Bitcoin has 100 million plus. Yeah, huge. It’s like, what’s happening with a wrapped Bitcoin?

Stephan Livera (42:31)
I’ve heard it’s huge, yeah, I’ve forgotten how much, but yeah.

Charlie (42:36)
That affects the Bitcoin economy that that kind of does relate to the Bitcoin price So it’s really important and I think valuable to be able to like ⁓ Watch that and and things like the other like ETH and like DeFi Like L2 trackers. It’s like L2 beat and stuff like that They track these layers, but they’re not Bitcoin native and what I’ve found is I thought all these like crypto people like knew their stuff about Bitcoin They really don’t

They’re like totally clueless about how Bitcoin works. And so there’s this huge dislocation in like media and coverage between Bitcoin media and crypto media. They do not understand Bitcoin and they think they’ve reduced it to this really simple asset for a decade. It’s not a simple asset. Yeah, you can treat it like that. But it’s this incredibly deep, complex, rich ecosystem and ⁓ protocol. So that’s my view.

Stephan Livera (43:32)
Interesting.

Charlie (43:32)
I would love to be able to do more of the Vicklin Lairs. It’s… There’s a lot of work because we have several irons in the fire right now.

Stephan Livera (43:40)
Yeah. And then of course I know you have Opnext as well. So I mean I spoke last year with Will about it. I would have liked to come, I couldn’t make it. It’s hard to, but I caught a few of the talks on the YouTube channel and they’re pretty good. I think you got a pretty good lineup. At least some of the talks I saw from your YouTube last year. I know you’ve got a few interesting people coming for this one. Tell us a bit about Opnext. What is it? Who’s coming? What’s the goal?

Charlie (43:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it’s a Bitcoin technical conference. There’s a handful of great Bitcoin technical conferences. I fell in love with BTC++ years ago and ⁓ so I love that beat. ⁓ We are a small 200 to 300 person technical conference and we want to be ⁓ capture the capstone conversations about the future of Bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin scaling, opcodes, software conversations, what’s happening with core work.

And ⁓ that whatever the topic du jour is right now, obviously everybody and their dog’s talking about quantum We have we are overweighted quantum right now, but it’s not the bullshit just vc funded quantum. But it is ⁓ your you know, jonas nick blockstream hash based signature schemes, ⁓ Ethan heilman, opcat author, but also cat plus lamport signatures ⁓ so like we have like that type of stuff and

a little the differences is that because I think there is a gulf, a giant divide between the technical world of Bitcoin, Bitcoin development, and the actual like investors in Bitcoin, ⁓ we are in New York focusing in particular on bringing institutions, funds, ⁓ and the actual people who decide who who drive the Bitcoin price. Because those people, if we just let the ETFs be giant multisigs, or not even that,

And they have no engagement with protocol development. ⁓ How do we ever improve Bitcoin in the future? How does the great consensus cleanup happen if it’s just core and BlackRock doesn’t want it to happen? I believe, yes, there can be conflict and tension here, but you’d be surprised how much like more how much how how still open like the ability for these people to talk to each other is. So if we can have a conference which brings in investors,

They send their analysts. If we can be the one conference beat a year in New York, because everybody’s in New York, that the investors and the miners go to to talk to the devs, then I think we’ve accomplished our goal. We have nailed, I think, the programming, because we’ve kind of won the trust of the developers, because we have a really wide range of people, know, BIP authors, core contributors, ⁓ people who don’t talk at conferences that often.

And we have like the the L2 people, you know people designing bridges ⁓ We’ve got the technical programming that’s really been my domain ⁓ we want there to be more investor institution representation because you talk to these C-suite to these these companies and they They don’t know how Bitcoin works They don’t know What a client is they’ve they don’t know that coinbase holds it for them so

We’re doing that. I’ll also say that because like Blockspace has, we have like the dominant mining coverage. We’ve always been able to punch above our weight and get a lot of mining representation. So the past two opnecks we’ve had, the first one at Fidelity in 24, we had a third of the hash rate. Last year at Strategy, we had over half of the hash rate or block producers in the room. Yeah.

Stephan Livera (47:27)
as in pools representing,

Charlie (47:30)
So

we have like significant representation and buy-in from representatives of The various block producers. So I mean like Luxor is a sponsor CleanSpark sponsors a lot of our stuff. They’re like second or first largest minor So like we have that foundry has come every year foundries coming this year ⁓ and so like if you remember there’s a paper by Steve Lee Wren and Lynn Alden on like Bitcoin stakeholder groups and Bitcoin consensus

Stephan Livera (47:57)
Yes, B-cap.

I did a podcast with them about it, but basically it was like, how do consensus changes happen and which groups have which powers and this and that.

Charlie (47:59)
Be cat.

Yeah. If like I but I want to see the B cap paper play out at Opnext because there are conference beats which focus on one or the other. You can go to your Bitcoin for corporations conference and it’s just everybody circle jerking Michael Saylor for you know 10 hours. ⁓ You can go to Bitcoin technical conference. This is great. But like it’s all really niche stuff that doesn’t get outside that little circle. ⁓ I think that these people can talk more.

There’s also a lot of I say ⁓ arbitrary arguments in Bitcoin setting aside the nots 110 thing like there’s there’s always little beefs and people who like post block size war there’s a lot of just exhaustion and a lot of people angry at each other and that’s kind of continued. I really think that just hanging out over beers and ⁓ also in the same conference room in a small like you know little conference.

Is does wonders? For just the harmony of the Bitcoin ecosystem. I like to imagine like the Greeks they would they would have they would argue on, you know, uh, uh, would argue in, you know on the Senate floor or whatever and uh sober and they would talk and they’d put they’d They struggle through these ideas and then they would get drunk and they talk about those ideas, too. It’s like That’s kind of how opnext works because you have a very intense day of programming

And then we go to the pub after. like that’s the that’s the model. I think we’ve yeah. It’s April 16th, 2026 in New York City at the New York Times Center. So we’re kind of bumping up the production. So you saw the live streams last time. Now it’ll look more like a TED talk and I’ll like I’ll like flex a little bit. You know, we just talked about the knots. Filter controversy that comes.

Stephan Livera (49:39)
That’s the format, yeah. So what’s the date and the timing for this one?

Charlie (50:02)
the recent flare up comes out of Opnext. And it’s because I really think a lot of the core developers had not been engaging like the Bitcoin ecosystem as directly. And so I was like, there’s like a specific Satreya roll up data posting scheme that I don’t think these like, you know, some of the core major core categories even like pay attention to. We need to make sure they’re in the room and that Satreya has a really interesting BitVM 2 presentation.

And then that turned into a mailing list issue, which then unfortunately kicked off this recent bat in recent round. So like as much as that’s frustrating for me, ⁓ that is like, that does showcase like that. This is where the conversations start. And I would hope that we were productive things. ⁓ For example, we have Antoine Fonso doing the great gets us clean up.

Stephan Livera (50:38)
the recent round of this fight, yeah.

Charlie (51:01)
presentation, he’s taken over that banner from Matt Corallo. And that seems to be like the core, like accepted popular ⁓ one. And it’s really important that your galaxies, your nidigs, your foundries, your other large institutions, your coin bases that they like know about the GCC. And they know to like, talk to Antoine or these other people so they can understand it. Because as the BCAP paper says, like,

The developers can put something out there, but the investors do seal it. And so if there’s no bridge and the investors have no idea what any of stuff is, ⁓ it’s important. Also, I don’t think investors are pricing in a lot of Bitcoin risk. The poison block attack, that also dates back to Opnext, the same Opnext last year where I had Portland demo poison block attacks. And I had them on my podcast.

That turned into his mailing list issue, which then Luke replied to, which then turned into the 110 debate. like, I really spent a ton of legwork as a non-dev trying to figure out who are the insightful people talking about Bitcoin. And while I’m not neutral about all things, try to, we try to like be pretty neutral about like how we present conversations so that people can at least like

talk about them because too much of us argue in the internet, not enough of us actually hang out in person and argue offline. The best arguments happen offline and that’s why I want those to happen at Opnext.

Stephan Livera (52:43)
Interesting, Well, I mean, yeah, there’s a range of conferences, a range of events. I think, you know, these things just kind of, like I recall even a couple of years ago, there was like a BTC++ in, I think it was Austin, and that was kind of like, that was like a big, I think there was a debate there at that point, and there was like, you know, there was that one in Lugano, and like that one, there were like, you know, big arguments going back and forth about forks and not forking and so on. But,

Charlie (52:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, but those arguments

just rehash stuff that had already been said. The thing is like, none, there’s no new information introduced at these. What I want is there to be new information introduced. And, cause it’s otherwise just people using rhetoric.

Stephan Livera (53:21)
I disagree a little there. do think there

are different things that get kind of brought up in each of these, know, conferences, in and around those conferences. But nevertheless, not against Opnex, I think it’s good programming, good speakers there, and I haven’t been, but I’d like to go in future, but obviously I won’t be able to make this one, but you know. Yeah, maybe, maybe in future, yeah.

Charlie (53:34)
Yeah.

We need to get you to host a panel next time. Yeah.

Stephan Livera (53:49)
Yeah, anyway, any closing thoughts? We’re running up on time, so any final thoughts and where can people find you online to learn more about Opnext?

Charlie (54:00)
best thing, we spent the first half of this talking about filters, you can take everything I say and throw it away. can take everything ⁓ Stephan said and throw it away. If you use Bitcoin as money and increase Bitcoin adoption, all of these problems don’t become problems anymore. So I just think the best thing you can do is just increase Bitcoin adoption. other thing is, yeah, big block space. We have podcasts, we do ⁓ newsletters.

this conference you can hit my Twitter at CB Spears you can go to block at block space on Twitter block space media newsletter. ⁓ So we do it all and ⁓ if you have an issue, please leave it in the comments and I’ll try to respond. ⁓ And I know I’ll just be a viscer but I’m fine. I’m fine being a punching bag. So yeah.

Stephan Livera (54:51)
Yeah, well, it’s it’s a yeah, it’s a it’s a definitely a contentious time in Bitcoin, but you know, so be it I Think it is good for people to go to go to some of these events learn about Bitcoin learn about these different aspects of it And yeah, I mean I definitely agree this idea about getting more people to actually use Bitcoin as money like even just literally DCA and withdrawal like if we could just get more people just doing that that alone

Charlie (55:14)
Yeah. Do you say withdraw

and then collapse your UTXOs? Yeah.

Stephan Livera (55:21)
Yeah, eventually like yeah, but I

mean I’m to my point is just if we even had a decent number of people just doing DCM withdrawal that alone would provide a ton of chain, you know on chain demand which would Price out a lot of this spam. So I think I’ll just leave that there like even if you’re a filter guy You can probably agree with that message. So ⁓ Let’s leave it there

Charlie (55:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Price it out.

Yeah, price it out. That solves like 99 % of our problems.

Stephan Livera (55:48)
Yeah, so we’ll leave it there. Listeners, make sure you share this episode if you found value in it and find Charlie in the show notes. Thanks for joining me, Charlie.

Charlie (55:58)
You bet.