Buchner, known for his work on decentralized identity at Proof, brings a technical and game-theoretic lens to the debate over Bitcoin’s monetary focus versus attempts to restrict arbitrary data.
The conversation covers narrative shifts driving spam to Bitcoin, the limits of relay policy versus consensus rules, why the house analogy fails, economic node power over basement operators, and the lack of miner or buyer support that dooms the proposal.
Timestamps:
01:31 — Locusts Flock to Bitcoin’s Last Pasture
03:32 — Core Policy Tweaks Aren’t Consensus Rules
08:44 — Spam Hides in Any Public Key or Hash
11:12 — Spammers Adapt in a Day, Consensus Can’t
14:59 — BIP110 Debate Exposes Major Inconsistency
20:44 — Why the House Analogy Totally Fails
25:25 — Nodes Get Cheaper Even With Max Spam
28:08 — Set Tolerances Assuming Worst Case
30:35 — No Legal Liability for Bad Chain Data
33:04 — Filter Regime Creates Government Backdoor
35:13 — BIP 110 Risks Centralizing Devs Around Luke
37:33 — Economic Incentives Trump ‘Good Guy’ Miners
39:03 — Economic Nodes Outweigh Basement Node Runners
43:49 — BIP 110 Has Near-Zero Economic Support
48:43 — Why Game Theory Kills BIP 110
55:52 — BIP 110 Fork Dies With a Whimper
Links:
Stephan Livera links:
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Full Transcript
[00:00] Stephan Livera: Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today we’re gonna be talking about one ten or BIP one ten. Joining me today is Daniel Buchnerfrom Proof, and Daniel has a lot of experience with, in the world of DID, decentralized IDs, and things like this. And so obviously as part of this conversation, we’re gonna be getting into a lot of the stuff around BIP one ten and data on chain. What does it look like? What would it mean to try and stop it? Is it even possible to stop it? I think these are some of the questions that we can
[00:30] Stephan Livera: Look, you have been commenting a lot anti one ten. I myself am also anti one ten. Can you maybe start with an overview, what is BIP one ten, and then we’ll get into why are you against it?
[00:41] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, absolutely, happy to. you know, I, I think setting the table with what the perceived, the problem or perceived problem is is probably important. So,
[00:51] Daniel Buchner: you know, there’s, for a long time, in a lot of these other chains, there have been NFTs and, you know, monkey JPEGs and silly shit coins and all sorts of stuff. And we, we know what, what that story looks like, right? We know why people are doing it. The vast majority are speculators. It’s very scammy. you know, they’re obviously
[01:11] Daniel Buchner: We’ve seen that for years and years and years, and, and it’s sort of burned out on these other chains, because the narratives get exhausted, the number of marks you have goes down, you know, it just kind of becomes old news and people say, “Hey, I’m not falling for that again,” right? After half a decade of it. And so- We started seeing that on Bitcoin a few years ago, the, you know, the move to bringing the stuff to Bitcoin, and it, it wasn’t, in my opinion, at all because of anything like, you know, what the reference implementation did or any settings changes. It was more a narrative shift. People who exhausted their marks and their opportunity narrative in another chain adopted new narratives for why Bitcoin was gonna be the true answer for their ecosystem of, you know, scammy stuff. And, and it was mostly predicated on Bitcoin being, you know, a stronger, more long-lasting chain, like, you know, it’s, it’s a place where if we put data here, it’s really gonna stay for all time. so nothing, there didn’t have to be anything to enable that, it was just more or less a narrative shift and the locusts go to the last pasture that still has, you know, vegetation, in, in a sense. So, that’s really what, what started was a move of this stuff that’s spam Spam onto Bitcoin for, for these various narratives. And, you know, the perception there is like most people, I think myself included, believe Bitcoin, its purpose is monetary, you know, its goal is
[02:41] Daniel Buchner: to upset the authoritarian centralized fiat complex, and that’s why it was created, right? It wasn’t better coffee payments, it wasn’t, to inscribe monkey pics, it was, it was money, it was to change the foundation money. And so I understand why people would say, “Hey, I don’t want that stuff.” On Bitcoin. That makes total sense. and that’s really what one ten is. It’s, it’s saying, you know, we think we should do all these things that can stop that. Now, they point to things Core did, like this change of relay policy, for OpReturn, for instance, these things that are really inconsequential as, “This is why we have to do it now. This is what changed.” You know, “Yes, the spammers have been doing this for a long time. Sure, it’s not gonna last, it’ll burn out as we…” I think no, just as it has everywhere else, but they did this thing in Core, and I think one thing to, to, to note that I, I don’t think maybe most of the proponents of one ten understand as lay people is what Core changed was not actually Bitcoin. Bitcoin is its consensus rules, the rules that say if you don’t adhere to this particular rule, you’re gonna fork off and you’re gonna be on a different version of Bitcoin, a different, a whole different coin effectively. And that- That never changed, right? Core never did anything to that. They changed a, a, a node preference. I even– I hate the fact that we even call it standardness or even policy, ’cause it actually makes it
[04:11] Daniel Buchner: sound much more consequential and like part of the protocol than it is, when really it’s sort of like horse blinders, right? You can put horse blinders on your own node and maybe not see this thing coming, but it’s still there. And primarily the reason why policy- Went from sort of working early in Bitcoin’s days, like when I got into it in 2011, to, to now, is because it was a much smaller network then, full of a lot of us fanatical people. I remember meeting you in, like, Seattle for that dinner years and years ago. And it’s like, it was like a tighter group who all believed, and we kind of all ran the same stuff, and it hadn’t expanded. But since then, we’ve gotten things like Libra Relay and direct miner APIs, and these things have turned these per node Node preferences of what we, you know, node will relay, kind of making them meaningless in many areas, because, you know, the spammers don’t care, they’re just gonna go run whatever relay, and if a miner is running a permissive version, they’re going to get these transactions through. The entire point of the peer-to-peer network, in fact, is that it is unable to be censored, so it’s set up so that even if a few nodes are permissive, relatively speaking, out of the, the bunch, messages and transactions will make their way through. And that’s a good thing. We shouldn’t sit there and say that’s bad, that’s exactly what we want. If you’re creating a peer-to-peer network, you don’t want to make it so that, you know, valid transactions can’t get through. So that was the impetus for 1.10, and it’s full
[05:41] Daniel Buchner: of all these sort of, what I would say, S- you know, strange wonky attempts at playing whack-a-mole with where people can put data, and we’ve already seen them largely invalidated. Like before, you know, the first cut of it, before it was even, you know, the paint was dry, all these spammy sources of transactions had already routed around everything. There was one just published yesterday that was like byte for byte contiguous, you know, you know, bytes, just yet another method, and it doesn’t achieve its goals of spam, and when it was clear that That it didn’t, it pivoted. So I get the desire of the layperson populace of saying, “This is why I want to do it.” I don’t understand where one ten is a solution ’cause it provably isn’t, or why we would pursue it if we know it can’t be.
[06:29] Stephan Livera: Yeah. Now, we should, you know, just to be fair, we should spell out, you know, what it is. So if you go to bit one ten dot org on their own site and if you read the bit, now this is a common criticism, because what will happen is they will often say, “Oh, it’s not about fighting spam, it’s about this particular…” And they’ll say, “Well, temporarily limit the size of data fields at the consensus level in order to correct distorted incentives caused by standardizing support for arbitrary data and to refocus priorities on improving Bitcoin as money, And so on, there are seven consensus changes, and I will note there was one extra consensus change that was, undocumented that Murch spoke about. So there are, let’s say, eight consensus changes involved with Bib one ten. Now, of course, one of them is to restrict op return at the consensus level to eighty-three bytes, not, you know, just at the relay, it’s actually at consensus level, and various other changes that amount to things like blocking the Taproot annex or blocking what’s called the inscription envelope, right? So I guess these are- What are some of the, the goals as of the Beponteen camp, right? To not to, try to strawman them, that’s what they are claiming to do. Now, it’s probably a good point here, maybe Daniel, you can explain where are the Let’s say the main places in a Bitcoin transaction or the, the chain that can be spammed into. Maybe that would be a good spot to sort of explain so people get a sense of the layout of this land.
[07:54] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, so I mean, I guess, I guess there’s two approaches here. There, you can go either at the detailed level of each of those areas that those seven, you know, those seven consensus changes, what they, they wanted to attack in terms of spam. but I actually think that’s not helpful because it’s, it’s a more generalized statement, right? Those specific things try to go after like tap trees and like the depth of them, which is like a tree of hashes and how many, how many levels it can be, right? How, how many hashes you can
[08:24] Daniel Buchner: In terms of like what, what does that data blob look like? What’s the size of it? But it all sort of obscures the generalized point of you can hide data in Bitcoin anywhere there is a public key or hash. Anywhere. And there’s many opcodes and many areas of Bitcoin where you can do that, right? And, and this is, you know, in jest I sort of put out there the fact that we could have a very successful bit that would stop all spam. All we need to do is, is remove all public keys and hashes from Bitcoin. And if we can just do that, if we just have Bitcoin without public keys and hashes, then I assure you, we can eliminate all spam. but we can’t, because those things are in– they’re, they’re integral to Bitcoin. You literally can’t have Bitcoin without those things. So if I had to blow this up into a general statement, I’d say any script anywhere that those two, two types of, effectively inherently obscured forms of strings or data can reside, spam can reside. So what are we really talking about with these seven changes? All we’re really talking about, if you kind of zoom out, is going from transactions that are tall Or fat with spam, right? An op return, one transaction, lots of data. Or, you know, a tap tree that’s very, very deep, right? Lots of hashes. One transaction is a taller, fatter You know, shape of spam. All this is doing at the end of the day, if you removed all the opcodes, everything that made Bitcoin interesting to program against, and it was just like one to one peer sender, you know, public
[09:54] Daniel Buchner: key,
[09:56] Daniel Buchner: all you would do is you’d just make spam very flat. You’d just have spam taking up many more transactions horizontally, right? So you’re, you’re kind of just– It, it, it’s like you’re– It’s like you have water in a glass, and you’re trying, you know, you’re putting your hand down But it’s, it’s still gonna be the same amount of fluid, right? Like you’re, you’re not actually doing anything other than, virtue signaling in the end, and, and it’s intractable. It’s intractable because you can’t- Remove those things from Bitcoin. So, do you want three thousand transactions a block that are spam, or would you like four, right? Five, ten, whatever, depending on how you shape it. And so I think it’s un– it’s unhelpful to even discuss whether Tap Tree should be seven levels or twenty or unlimited or, you know, it’s just not helpful because none of that matters in the question of whether you can actually stop spam.
[10:51] Stephan Livera: I see. And now of course, this is where, let’s say, the pro one tenth side will say to you, “Okay, Daniel, we get it that you can’t stop spam, but we can minimize it, we can mitigate it, and we can try to, you know, really reduce it.” That would probably be what they would say to you. So what would you say to that? Why, why can’t you minimize the spam by doing these consensus changes?
[11:13] Daniel Buchner: Mostly because it’s, it’s effortless to change. Like the, the amount, it’s almost like the refuting bullshit line, you know, it takes ten times the amount to refute the bullshit. If the spam is the bullshit, it takes ten times the effort Much more, in fact, I’d say orders of magnitude more than ten times, to gain consensus in a community, to spin up a fork that patches or removes opcodes, hobbles other features of Bitcoin, to attempt to deprive them of one more taller, fatter area of putting this data. and the spammers can react in a day, right? They can, they can– Now, now with AI, I mean, you– some of these, some of these things to patch around take like a couple lines of code and can be done in minutes. So you are constantly- gonna be, you know, chasing that. It’s a dragon chase, you’ll never catch it. and, and that’s why I would say it’s, it’s, it’s just foolishness. Yes, it’s, it’s not something we want, but it’s also not something you can stop. And so you kinda gotta, you gotta look at this and say, “Yes, it’s a centralized system, it’s used in ways that I don’t really personally love, but that’s just…” That’s the inherent nature of the beast that we’re dealing with, and you’re not gonna inflict any pain on them because in, in, I, I was reading some tweets and some content online from some of these folks that are in these protocols, these spam protocols, they get a kick out of it, man. You know, the, the idea that you spend a, a month of your time and you, you generate a whole fork and you have people signaling over it and it’s taking, you know, half a year, and then they’re able to route around it in a day, right? And
[12:44] Daniel Buchner: Others have mentioned, you’ve gotta keep forking, right? If, if you really intend to stop the spam, you gotta keep doing this. We know we’ve already worked around all those seven patches you talked about, so what, what are we doing next, right? Where are the spammers going next? What’s the next fork gonna be? And in fact, if you wanted to chase them all down to a flat transaction space of just hashes and public keys that weren’t tall or fat, you would have to fork, you know, dozens of times, right? So we would have to put in place
[13:15] Daniel Buchner: To put our finger in all these holes of the leaky ship, and in so doing, creating a very, very sort of,
[13:23] Daniel Buchner: you know, a regime effectively of this spam filtration thing that looks a lot like the TVA, you know, the, the, timeline, time variance authority from like Loki, right? Like, who is gonna be this regime that’s put in place to constantly fork? I don’t want that. I think the more times we fork Bitcoin and fuck around with the consensus rules, The more opportunities that creates, for, for a bad motion in the ecosystem. I don’t want that to be ingrained, I want them to be few and far between, personally.
[13:56] Stephan Livera: Yeah, and I think that’s perhaps an inconsistent inconsistency in the advocacy of this thing, because sometimes people are trying to have their cake and eat it too, right? Because on one hand, they say, “Oh, hey, this bit one ten, it’s a temporary soft fork. These conditions are going to apply from, whatever, August or September-ish, for a year, for a year.” And then, in that year, supposedly the community is gonna decide what is the permanent approach against spam, and as you said, it’s going to require sort of not just one, but continual. But then, I, I believe you mentioned, can you outline a One of the leading proponents of Pip-10, you had an exchange with him which, I guess, exposed an inconsistency.
[14:39] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, yeah. So I, I was actually on, a space, a space with him, and we were debating. It was actually, it was really, it was pretty cordial, I think as far as these 1-10 debates go. And there was no like name-calling or anything like that, but I, I straight up asked him, I said, “Look,” You know, it started out saying “bit one times for spam” and that was what it was gonna counter. It’s already been routed around, so we know it doesn’t actually stop any spam, and it only increases the price of spam about point five percent, so less than one percent, which doesn’t, you know, they don’t care at all. So if you wanna continue to make this about spam, and you’re saying this is a first step, well, a first step implies a second step, maybe a third, right? In terms of forks. So are you saying– and I asked him For, for more forks, because all the stuff’s already been routed around, and I think your community of people doesn’t wanna just have like, “Let’s annoy the spammers this one time.” That’s not what I’m hearing from the community of one tenth, pro one ten people. They want it stopped. I mean, they wanna keep going after it, and I’ve even seen people say this. So can you get on the record right now and say whether you’re gonna do that? And he went on the record and said, “No, no, we’re not gonna push
[15:48] Daniel Buchner: for,
[15:52] Daniel Buchner: From one perspective, that’s positive. I, I don’t want them to push for an endless series of forks, I think that creates a lot of other negatives. It is also inconsistent, because if you wanted to actually, you know, harass these spammers enough that maybe they were dissuaded, you would have to relentlessly fork to go after them, maybe once a month, right? Because they’re gonna be able to, to turn on a dime. So I just– it, it sort of undermines the idea that this is, a, effective against spam or really about spam. In my opinion, and I don’t mean to be, you know, as disparaging this might sound, I think the only thing Bitcoin 10 would actually be effective at is potentially changing the center of gravity for Bitcoin reference implementation development and putting that in the hands of a different set of people, primarily Luke or maybe Mechanic and others being the outsized, quote unquote, authority in what this reference implementation is, who gets to check in code, right, that sort of thing. That’s really the only thing that might be very affected by it. and if you want that, at least be upfront about it.
[17:00] Stephan Livera: I see. And so- As you’ve said, it’s, it would either require just kind of continual rounds of fighti- of spam fighting forks, which can also act as like a centralizing force in a sense, and creates risks around chain splits all the time, creates risks around, you know, bugs in the implementation, which there have already been, at least two consensus bugs noted, and there were at least, you know, there was at least another one undocumented consensus change, as well as one by I believe Voicetech who found a way to even get around some other spam, and that was like another thing that they had to go around and fix. So that’s there. I, I, I think there’s also an interesting point that we have to make around Segwit, right? So I guess This is a point that I’ve heard from Moonsettler, and I think it actually makes a lot of sense because, think about it, as long as we have Bitcoin script and we have the SegWit discount, spammers will generally find cheap ways to spam into the witness. So what, what do I mean by that? Right? So just for listeners who aren’t quite following along, Bitcoin transactions have inputs and outputs. You know, the inputs get consumed as you, you know, send coins to the outputs. There might be a change output there, but In SegWit, in the twenty seventeen self fork that we did, there was a SegWit discount, meaning data that goes into the witness gets a twenty five percent discount, like it’s, oh, sorry, it’s treated as twenty five percent the cost. And so that naturally became a way for spammers to spam a lot of images into the chain, right? And so-
[18:32] Stephan Livera: Even if you ban this particular way of putting the inscription envelope, they will just find a new inscription envelope because we’ve still got Bitcoin script and we’ve still got the SegWit discount, and so that ends up being one of the cheaper ways to do larger forms of spam. So
[18:46] Daniel Buchner: what
[18:46] Stephan Livera: do you think?
[18:47] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s, it’s absolutely one of the vectors. And so if you, you know, remove that discount, you harm other things, that are legitimate things, things like tap trees, you know, that’s probably the, that’s the cleanest example of,
[19:02] Daniel Buchner: Like I said earlier, making spam transactions that are tall and fat into flatter and more, transactions is like, hey, if we go to seven depths, you know what spammers are gonna do? Consume seven depths, and they’re gonna chain another transaction together with another seven, deep tree. And so then everybody gonna go to five, four, three, two, it eventually comes back to what I said, which now it’s one depth. Okay, cool, so now we have a lot of transactions flat that are all chained together. It’s,
[19:28] Daniel Buchner: it’s just, it’s just script with a shotgun so much that it just looks like Swiss cheese, and it’s not expressive and useful for anything that could be monetarily related, and in the end, you’re, you’re not gonna achieve anything that you, you set out to. And it’s that futility that I think people, they hate, humans hate that, right? They hate the idea that something bad is happening I don’t like, and I can’t stop it. It’s so interesting though, that, and I guess philosophically it’s interesting that people have that feeling about spam, but that’s exactly What we like about Bitcoin, and we want other, other people to feel, is that Bitcoin’s unstoppable, right? You can’t– We want the monetary forces in the world think, “You can’t stop it, man. You can’t stop transactions from going through.” So in one sense, it’s very good, but you have these folks that want to say, “I just want it to be this certain type of transaction, and I’m willing to burn it to the ground to get there,” and it’s just so unhelpful
[20:24] Stephan Livera: Now, the common analogy, now this is another thing, because people aren’t as familiar with the actual technicals of what’s happening on chain, they are reasoning by analogy, right? So common analogies you’ll hear, oh, but it’s just like email filtering, or it’s just like water filtering, or it’s just like, let’s say, they will say it like, “Oh, Bitcoin core developers are just like leaving the door, front door of the house open because they know someone can come in the window.” And it’s like, in their mind, and it makes sense, That you can, right? You should try to close your window and close your door at night so that, you know, the robber doesn’t come and hurt you and your family, obviously. But can you help explain, in this, let’s say, the house analogy, why is that breaking down? Why is that not a good analogy for how Bitcoin works? ‘Cause I think that is gonna be very educational for people to really grasp that difference.
[21:12] Daniel Buchner: Well, I, I think it, you know, i-it’s a door, right? But the door can– many different people can enter it, right? People you want in your home can enter it and can use those same features for monetary purposes. So you’re hindering, you know, do you want all of your guests to have to climb through your second story window? Is really one of the, one of the questions, like, a-and then, you know, it’s, it’s the experience for having to do that is, is ridiculous, right? Like, now we’re having to build ladders around these things and whole apparatuses, and the same number of transactions that get through. You say, “Hey, my house can hold one hundred people,” or “This building by fire code.” Well, I mean, yeah, man, you can, you can have ’em all jump through a single window, and there’ll still be a hundred people in there at the
[22:02] Daniel Buchner: Same. So, do you want this expressum, do you want a nice looking house that has, you know, useful, you know, openings and doors and windows, or do you want this weird, obscure building that still ends up with the same people inside? they just have to crawl through, right? I, I don’t see any point to it. It’s, at the end of the day, that one window represents public keys and hashes, and if you don’t get rid of them, Bitcoin The window’s there, and everyone’s gonna crawl through, right? And your guests are gonna be pissed ’cause they’re gonna be like, “What the heck are you doing, man? We have one window to crawl through.” And, and the uninvited guests are gonna just say, “Whatever I need to do to get in.” You know, it’s just, it’s, it’s silliness.
[22:43] Stephan Livera: Yeah, and I think these, some of these analogies can mislead because it’s basically impossible to stop spam, right? Like, I think that is– that’s the message that people are trying to convey, and some of these analogies from the Pro One Ten camp will mislead people into following them because in their mind, yeah, you should try to shut the door, you should try to shut these windows against– to stop the, you know, bad guys from getting in, et cetera, et cetera. Permissionless system, and that’s perhaps that’s the difficulty to convey for people. now also on the topic, another– I mean, we’re gonna try to go through and hit some of the different talking points. So another talking point is, oh, the cost of running a node is going to blow out, right? In their mind, you know, all the spam is gonna be hitting the chain, and everyone who wants to download and run an archival node has to download the chain, and that’s gonna get harder and harder because the hardware costs are gonna blow out in their, in their view.
[23:39] Stephan Livera: Blowing out.
[23:40] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, I mean, this is actually the easiest one, right? we’ve, we’ve known what the block weight, four megabyte block weight was for a long time. it’s been that way for, you know, about a decade. and nothing’s changed, right? And, and as an engineer, a technical person, when I look at a system and setting tolerances for that system, which is really what the block weight is, every block being a certain size and no, no larger.
[24:05] Daniel Buchner: I would have sh- sure hoped that when we did that back then, people would have understood that’s the system tolerance. It’s the, it’s the level we can run the system at comfortably and not run into bad issues specifically related to storage and other things that that implies. And when that, when that was passed, you know, almost a decade ago now, I looked at it and said, “You know, you should have been doing the math and said, ‘Okay, four megabytes.’ My assumption was always four megabytes every block today, right now.” Right, right now, if we– it’s gonna be that way. I have to assume it would be that way, because that’s what you do when you set tolerances. You don’t say, “Well, we’re gonna set this tolerance, but it’s actually terrifying, and we’re just gonna pray to God that, like, you know, it averages one quarter of that tolerance until we find it tolerable.” that’s, that’s a, a silly way of doing engineering. There’s a BitFury paper actually that talked about block size and sort of like what was the optimal, and you kind of at six megabyte weight, you kind of really start having nodes drop off because you, you encounter this stuff. And that was at the prices of, of storage and bandwidth back then, when, when that paper was published. Now, to address it head on, the tolerance is great for four megabyte blocks, even if we had that starting today. And every block consumes four megabytes. It still well undershoots the cost and capacity curve, like the Moore’s Law type curve for storage and bandwidth that we’ve consistently observed, because Bitcoin grows at that linear rate no more than four megabytes in weight per block, and these other curves far overshoot it. So in fact, it is
[25:35] Daniel Buchner: even if we were, you know, stacked to the gills of spam, starting today, endlessly. Bitcoin nodes will get cheaper and cheaper to run every single year, and that’s, and that’s something people should take comfort in. They should take comfort in the fact that there were smart people who set those tolerances, after doing the math and, and looking at the system’s dynamics and saying, “Yeah, it’s gonna be okay.” So, you know, take heart, those aren’t founded fears, and they certainly aren’t– they aren’t now and they aren’t long term. And I think it’s gonna be silly when we sit here ten years from now or fifteen years from Different types of storage, things like holographic storage and stuff that, that increases orders of magnitude, storage isn’t a problem, bandwidth isn’t either. and, and we are– it’s just, it’s something that if you’re a layperson, you might be afraid of, but just do the math, man. It’s really not that– not even hard. You have linear growth, you have something that compoundingly expands in terms of bandwidth and storage.
[26:34] Stephan Livera: Yeah. So in simple terms, the chain can only grow linearly at maximum, and, in other words, and the tech- Technology price deflation over time is compounding over time at, like, at a rate faster than that. So yes, there’ll be times where you get a spike, at, like, right now, there is arguably there is an AI spike. So yes, let’s say SSD costs are a little bit higher right now, but the general trend, and there, there have been spikes before, but the general trend is that the, you know, the cost of SSDs or hard drives and storage and networking and CPU is coming down over time and it outpaces the chain growth.
[27:09] Daniel Buchner: Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, another interesting
[27:11] Stephan Livera: nuance is that, yes, it’s probably fair to say, yeah, well, it is fair to say that ever since the kind of Ordinals kind of explosion of, you know, twenty twenty-three onwards, blocks have been larger on average, right? But remember, we were probably at like– I can’t remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but we might have been, an average block size might have been like one point five meg, one point six meg, something like that, and then with all the spam- Maybe it’s another thirty percent or forty percent more, something like in that range, in that ballpark. So we’re like maybe two megs, something like that, maybe a little over two megs per block. So we’re not even at the four meg kind of limit really, except for like rare occasions, right?
[27:48] Daniel Buchner: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So we’re not even hitting that tolerance today, but even if we were, I mean, I– People should, anytime you set a system tolerance, you assume the worst case. That’s the whole point. You know, it’s like your, it’s like your red line in your car, right? The red line for RPM is set, it’s not like when you first hit that red line, my engine explodes and I’m on the side of the road, I’m like, “Oh man, I just touched it for one second.” You set tolerances even below your At four megabytes per block, every block, you’re, you’re not gonna blow a cylinder, you’re fine. Like it is totally within tolerance. So I, I think we just have to be mindful of that and continue. It’s funny, I’m not, I’m, I guess I’m, I feel like I’m a negative person a little bit on Twitter, but this is one area where I feel like I have the hopeful, positive, you know, side of this to say, “No man, the, the sky isn’t falling. This isn’t catastrophic. We
[28:49] Daniel Buchner: Naturally, just like it has before. So like the, the anti-one ten side, if you look at it, is sort of a brighter perspective. Like we don’t have to go bashing everything, the system actually is working, and it will continue to work with proof of work in the fee market.
[29:04] Stephan Livera: Okay, now another more controversial topic, because this was also motivating some of the, the pro-one ten side, was this concept of, let’s say illegal data, right? Like illegal data that could get- Put into the chain. Now, again, it’s ones and zeros, and as of Bitcoin Core version twenty-eight, blocks are XOR’d by default, so we should just remember that to start with. But how do you address the, the concern around Illegal data, you know, abhorrent kind of content that theoretically people could post into Bitcoin.
[29:35] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, I mean, I think right off the bat, I think obviously no one, no one wants terrible things on chain, terrible images of terrible things. I think, I think we can all say that. one thing to keep in mind obviously is, y-you know, if you flatten the spam, it, it can always just need more transactions to get you to that same outcome, so we can’t really stop that. there’s been things anchored on Bitcoin, you know, imagery That has been bad in that way already. So this is, if you wouldn’t wanna run Bitcoin ’cause it contains a bad thing, then sorry, you know, you’re already sort of running foul of that. but How would I, how would I look at that, right? If we know we can’t technically stop it,
[30:15] Daniel Buchner: I, I look at some of the legal arguments people make. I think that’s actually a fascinating thing to explore. Some of the legal arguments around, oh, is everyone who runs a node going to be, you know, brought up on charges for disseminating these things, for being, you know, a willful, you know, circulator of this stuff? And the, the awesome part is, the, the bright side is that, you know, there’s
[30:40] Daniel Buchner: In a system, it wasn’t intended to, to, to sort of circulate that. There’s a lot of cases out there that say you, you aren’t as an operator liable for that because it requires more than this just general intent to run a system that happens to contain something. you have to have specific intent to view and specific intent to send that to someone else with the purpose of them viewing it. And that’s kind of roughly, you know, where the law sits on it, and we’ve had decided cases on it already. So I’m not super concerned legally about that. I think it’s, it’s a, it’s a concern where I understand people don’t want it, but we can’t stop it. And legally, we’re, we’re not running afoul of anything. The, the legal thing I actually get more afraid of in, in this regard is not about this silly imagery or bad imagery that’s gonna be on chain. It’s more of what precedent do we create if That has this really robust filter mechanism where we, you know, it, it, it imports filters quickly, pushes out forks, potentially streaming filters on the relay side That regime actually represents a serious legal threat, in my opinion. There’s, something called the All Rites Act, which is, you know, a couple hundred years old, effectively, law. But what, what it says is that as long as it isn’t an undue burden to comply with something that is by the government deemed to be either like national security or some like very, very serious topic, you know, they, they can do it for monetary things as well, you
[32:10] Daniel Buchner: have to comply if it’s not an undue burden, right? And this was actually- Actually tested with the San Bernardino terrorist case, right, for Apple, like they said, “Hey, you know, you need to give us this data off this Apple device, you need to insert backdoors and do all these other things to your system.” And Apple was able to respond to them and won the case, and there’s been many other cases that have tested this, where they said, “Well, actually, we don’t have an engineering staff to do that. We don’t have a mechanism in iOS right now to do that. We would have to hire a bunch more engineers, set up a regime
[32:44] Daniel Buchner: A release pipeline for it, all things that don’t exist right now. My fear is that if Bitcoin shifts its dev center to these other individuals, who would be compelled or really have to to pursue this, creating this filter regime, this forking regime, and fast tracking all of that, so it had this whole process around it where- You know, it becomes not an undue burdening, where a government seeking to say, “Hey, you know what? I want my filter in there in consensus rules. You’ve already created this regime that lets us fast-track consensus rules to a very willing body of people who seem eminently capable to comply by running the right fork with the right filters at consensus level. here, we’ll even write the code for you. Just, just go ahead and stick this in.” Right? And, and, and it’ll be all good, and it’s, it’s not an undue burden. I, I think you start degrading Bitcoin’s really great neutrality by saying, “No, no, we don’t have any of that. We don’t have any of that.” Now people will respond to that like, “Oh, well, no one would run that client.” Well, the government will go to the next client. It’ll go all the economic nodes, you know, all the economic actors in the system say, “You’re gonna run that one, because that’s the sanctioned one. That’s the one we get our filters into, right?” And there’s no undue burden for you at Coinbase or something to just use that piece of software versus this piece of software. So I, I don’t– I’m much more afraid of the knock-on nth order legal effects of setting
[34:09] Daniel Buchner: I am of the naughty crap that someone, you know, a nascent amount of people would put on chain.
[34:15] Stephan Livera: I see. And so you see it like centralizing the development You know, right now, to be fair, right now the only client that is compatible with one ten is not IDTS. There are no other, to my knowledge, I believe someone tried to make a PR into Bitcoin Core, but obviously didn’t, you know, get past there, and, to my knowledge, no other client is compliant with one ten. And so This is one of those, sticky situations where some of the proponents of one ten see themselves as assisting the decentralization of Bitcoin, but sadly in the decent– in the development of Bitcoin, it’s arguably a centralizing factor
[34:53] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, I mean, because not, you know, is– it’s objective to say that it has far fewer reviewers, it has far fewer people who can push code. the reviews are often dubious. I mean, we have people who, you know, Luke is pushing Some changes that are sizable, with seemingly little review in comparison to something like Core. and really, as I went to earlier, one thing that BIP, that BIP one ten might be successful at if it was to become the dominant, version of Bitcoin is displacing and centering all dev gravity really around knots, and that really means a couple of people, and, and getting way more centralized for a guy who, you know- Has check-ins that aren’t very reviewed and commented, who managed to lose his own Bitcoin, who then involved three-letter agencies as a result, like, I, I just don’t know if I want to center the dev gravity of Bitcoin around that person being the de facto, I wouldn’t say like, you know, CEO, but certainly a leader or, or a, a leading dev as the standards bear, I just wouldn’t, I wouldn’t personally want that.
[36:05] Stephan Livera: Yeah. Now, on the question of, I guess this, this notion of- Filtering and who should do it, right? Because I think the people who come from the one ten camp, they tend to have more of a worldview of, no, the miners should be good guys who filter out spam. And I think that contrasts with the anti-one ten view, which arguably also relates to the twenty seventeen block size wars as well, because you sort of saw some of the camp saying Oh, it’s okay. the big blockers were sort of saying, “Oh, it’s okay that maybe only big bus-businesses can afford to run nodes or will run Bitcoin nodes, ’cause, you know, you can sort of trust them or there’ll, there’ll be enough of them there.” Whereas the others, the other side of that was saying, “No, it needs to be accessible for people to run nodes,” and that’s kind of why the, you know, the small blockers won in the, in twenty, in the twenty seventeen battle, let’s say, or, you know
[37:02] Stephan Livera: What are your views on that idea? Should the miners, quote unquote, be, be good guys trying to do the right thing, or do you believe it’s the economic incentives that have to carry the day?
[37:13] Daniel Buchner: A- absolutely the latter. I mean, we, we can’t have a system that’s, that’s built on people being good guys. I mean, it has to be a system that’s actively adversarial, in the sense that it’s, it’s repellent of bad guys. and it has to be repellent of bad guys, not because we install some authority-like regime to, to make it that way. It has to be that way because the technicals we believe in can endure. And, and so, yeah, I don’t want the, the miners being bad
[37:43] Daniel Buchner: And I’m not going to invest an ounce of my care in whether they are good actors, they just have to play by the rules. And I think the economic rules are what really lead here, and I think this is a great segue actually into another topic that’s very related, which is economic nodes, right? I, I see– my definition might be a little different, but I see miners as economic nodes, really anyone who’s participating in for value transfer, purchase, any of that stuff with Bitcoin, and miners obviously are engaged in that, exchanges are engaged in that. Wallet app operators are engaged in that, and those nodes, they could be individuals, but those nodes matter far more, in this ecosystem than lots of other types of nodes. And that is another thing that I’ve seen rankle the Pro Run ten side is that You know, they sort of got sold a bill of goods when it came to, Segway, that it was all this small, tiny percentage contingent running this one fork that overthrew everyone And that’s sort of like the narrative you feel out, you know, on Twitter, it’s just not true, right? Like, there was broad support for SegWit and fixing, you know, ASIC, covered ASIC boost and all these things. There was broad support for that. The majority of exchanges supported it, the majority of miners supported it, most users, it was like eighty-five, eighty percent of users supported it. So we had a completely different landscape. Whereas today, we look at one ten and it’s supported by maybe twenty-five, twenty percent of node runners, which is in Tens of thousands
[39:13] Daniel Buchner: of people. Now, how many people exert demand and transactional influential pressure in Bitcoin? Well, we know there’s been about like three hundred and fifty million people who’ve bought Bitcoin. Yes Most of their custodial, you know, purchases and are holding with custodians, but that’s actually an influence exertion on custodians, right? I can tell you right now, and we might upset some people, that one Joe Blow who bought Bitcoin, a bunch of Bitcoin a year ago, but has done nothing and is running a node in his basement, isn’t worth anything. Close to Coinbase or some exchange that represents, you know, ten million actors of, active buyers of Bitcoin that day, right? It isn’t the same, right? Even though Bitcoin, or even though Coinbase operates one logical node and this person in their basement operates one logical node, there is a disparity in terms of the influence, right? And, and it, it’ll hate– people will hate to hear this, but someone who just happens to own a bunch of Bitcoin and constantly buys a bunch of Bitcoin custodially on an exchange that doesn’t run On a node and never has, has more influence than someone who owns a little bit of Bitcoin and runs a node who, who hasn’t bought in, in years. And they’re, they’re– That’s because the, the monetary velocity and the volume of transactions and purchases and all of that demand is actually what directs most of the protocol. And, and it’s not just that, it can be totally inferential. This is an example I gave, the other day on the space, which is like, one of the really great Bitcoin devs that we all like the PRs from and,
[40:44] Daniel Buchner: completely of Bitcoin, didn’t run a node and participated nothing involving nodes at all, but just had great PRs into Bitcoin that like everyone happened to like, like all the exchanges, all the individuals running nodes, you know, miners, all kind of looked at and said, “Hey, wow, that’s like, that’s like a really good addition to Bitcoin, that’s a really good modification to Bitcoin, you know, we want that.” It wouldn’t matter if they run a node or not, they’re influential, they’re influential in consensus because they’re bringing something to the network that all the collective participants and their fluid, dynamic weighting of, of influence like And that’s it, that’s what decides the protocol. You’re not gonna spin up five thousand nodes on Amazon and think that that matters, it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter at all.
[41:28] Stephan Livera: Yeah, because, there are these different actors in Bitcoin, right? There are developers, there are miners, there are node runners, there are, as you said, exchanges, custodians, big merchants,
[41:41] Stephan Livera: you know, all of who have some Level of sway, some level of influence perhaps, but really the economic weight is really what drives a lot of these other points, because ultimately, if you are a miner, you don’t want to point your hash rate to a chain that is worthless. Like that’s, like at the end of the day, that’s just what it is. If you want to get paid, because you, let’s say you’re a miner, you’ve got operational costs to pay ongoing. You can’t just sort of sit on your hands. You’ve gotta pay those bills, and you might have investors too. They may not be happy if you’re just kind of ideologically mining a minority chain. And I think, you know, sort of coming to where things are now, as you were touching on, right? Last I checked, the hash rate signaling for one ten, as in Pro one ten, is like one percent, a bit under one percent. As you said, the number, the percentage of nodes who are running RDTs or BIP one ten nodes, depending how you count, anywhere from six percent to twenty percent. But as, as far as I can see, there are zero large economic actors who are signaling pro one ten. There are no large prediction markets, or futures markets where people can see the, the price, right? Like if you think back to twenty seventeen, in the no two X saga, Bitfinex ran B one X coin and B two X coin, and people were trading one against the other, and, I mean, off the top of my head, it was something like point one five for the two X coin and point eight five for the B one X coin, right? Like, i People didn’t want Segway 2x, they wanted
[43:11] Stephan Livera: just, you know, no 2x, and that was influential in terms of helping people understand, okay, they’re putting their money where their mouth is. Whereas in this case with 110, it’s a very different landscape, isn’t it? So can you outline how you see the current landscape just as we speak? Today is the twenty-second of July.
[43:29] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, so I mean, we have effectively near zero, miners, signaling. We have, as far as Intel, near zero, large economic entities like exchanges and others. there’s a nascent batch of, you know, hardware manufacturers, like, you know, node hardware manufacturers and a couple others, a lot of people related to Ocean, were, were deep on that side who are, but it’s, it makes up, yeah, like you said, less than one percent of economic actors, a small minority of Node runners, and that’s not even all the Bitcoin holding individuals or Bitcoin exposed individuals. People who run nodes kind of like the fringe, right? It’s like us, us nerds, right? or people that are really deep into Bitcoin. The average person who holds Bitcoin doesn’t run a node. and so we don’t even know what they believe, but it’s likely because they haven’t made any economic moves to reflect the pro-one ten side, right? No one said, “I don’t see any large scale signatory campaigns against an ex- Exchange to say, “Hey, man, we’re all these non-node running users. If you don’t run, run, run one ten or stand behind it, we’re leaving. We’re going over to this exchange. It’s a one ten exchange, even though you can’t find any.”
[44:41] Daniel Buchner: there, there’s just nothing like that, right? And that’s because they just don’t care enough. They’re, they’re not looking at this as a problem that they need to support. So in this case, the apathy or the lack of care is actually a signal. If people were on And so it actually comes around to this thing where, where, as you, you already laid it out, no one really supports this on the economic side, even individual users, it’s nascent. Do we want that to flip Bitcoin? I mean, that’s like a really good question to ask yourself, like, the, the, the facts are, like, less than one percent of economic nodes care, and a small minority of users care. And if that Group could flip the consensus rules of Bitcoin, I would be much more worried about that, because that just means that a tiny amount of individuals can change Bitcoin’s fundamental protocol, and right now they see themselves as like the noble people, right? They, they think they have a, a good cause, a good reason to do it. But all you’re proving to me is that some cause can capture five, ten to twenty percent of nodes, right, of individual nodes and one percent of hash power, and that’s gonna flip Bitcoin Man, that’s not what I signed up for. I hope that’s not the case. That seems like it would be a very vulnerable system to other actors coming in and flipping the rules of Bitcoin. So, yeah, I’m actually, I’m, I’m glad that, that it can’t be that way. And when I think in August we see that it, it imminently is, is going to fail, I mean,
[46:11] Daniel Buchner: I think we see those signs now, I think ironically, those people in the rearview mirror should look back and say Shucks, I think it’s actually a pretty good thing that, you know, five thousand individual nodes aren’t able to flip Bitcoin’s protocol, man, ’cause that’d be, that’d be wonky if we were all, in it for that, you know?
[46:32] Stephan Livera: And so let’s talk a little bit about the so-called game theory, because there’s a lot of people who shout game theory, game theory, and I think the quality of that analysis is a bit lacking in terms of how it’s presented commonly. So the story goes, okay, so background for listeners, there is a period where block– where basically miners are so-called mandatory signaling, meaning all the one ten nodes, the nodes who are running iDTS, BIP one ten, not basically will reject the block coming from a mining pool or miner that doesn’t signal Pro one ten. That point is going to come around August eighth, maybe early morning August ninth, that’s the current, you know, projection, and as at that point There is a chance of a chain split, but depending on, you know, how much hash rate they actually have, it may never actually activate, ironically. But, nevertheless, that’s the You know, and then the game theory, the so-called game theory goes that, oh, there’s a wipeout risk, that if you, you know, if you are a miner, that you should just signal Pro One Ten, even if you don’t care about it, because it’s, quote unquote, free to do this, and that then there’ll be some, you know, people are all gonna start, you know, towards the end there’ll be a big ramp up in signaling Pro One Ten. That’s kind of the story you’ll hear from a Nod or Pro One Ten supporter Where would you disagree or do you, how, how do you see it?
[47:55] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, I mean, I, I think the game theory is, is decidedly against one ten in the sense that miners, at the end of the day, they’re net sellers, a lot, most of them, they’re net sellers of Bitcoin, you know, they mine, they sell, who do they sell to? Primarily OTC and exchanges, and that’s their, that’s their, the, the buyer base effectively. If that demand side set of entities isn’t demanding for one, you know, this fork of coins
[48:23] Daniel Buchner: Signals are saying this is, this is gonna be the state of play, right? This is, we’re gonna continue to sell Bitcoin. Really what the one time people are hoping is that the amount of individual users that they are virtue signal expressing is enough to get the purchasers of Bitcoin from miners to say, “Oh, we’re gonna lose enough people, right, that are gonna downstream purchase from us at the individual level, that that’s gonna trickle up into them changing their minds and then of course expressing that to miners that, yeah, we want you know- You know, this, this alternate fork, you know, that– those are the coins that we’re gonna buy from, right? None of that’s gonna happen. None of that’s gonna happen. There’s no, there’s no, there’s no good reason to believe that there’s a silent majority in effect. In fact, the game theory is decidedly against that in the sense that This is a contentious fork that gets, that gets more restrictive, even though it doesn’t actually restrict what it sets out to, so you don’t, you don’t actually benefit. If you’re one of these economic actors, you don’t benefit from taking a position here because you– when you take a position, you could alienate, potentially, especially if you’re an exchange, some amount of people that are buying from you. Right? So there’s an alienation risk really on either side. I would argue you’re gonna alienate far more if you’re pro one time, because there’s just more people on that side than if you’re anti, but there’s still an alienation risk. I wanna, you know, give some credit to the anti people, I’m sure they’re buying Bitcoin somewhere.
[49:41] Daniel Buchner: And if you’re doing that, you’re sitting there saying, “Well, what’s the best… game theoretically, what’s the best thing for me? I’m just gonna let it blow over. I’m already seeing no signal that I’m gonna be like, you know, you know, having any disturbances effectively in getting blocks through and having my service run, and the miners aren’t telling me that, you know, when we disc- when we talk to them, and they do. So why don’t I just sit here and be the neutral party and let it kind of just fade away into
[50:10] Daniel Buchner: its And that’s actually the most sound game theoretical, outcome, is that all the economic actors just sort of sit on their hands, look the other way, and say, “Hey, man, you guys fight it out there in your, your weird little, you know, individual node wars, do whatever. If, if something catastrophic happens, I guess we’ll react, but we’re certainly not gonna come out in favor of this, and we certainly don’t want it. It doesn’t enhance our value proposition to anyone to, to do this.”
[50:37] Stephan Livera: Now, there have been a lot of attempts to craft a narrative that people who are rejecting BIP10 are in fact the ones doing a hard fork, right? So we’ve seen, and I’m gonna quote, so not strawmanning, literally Luke Dashes’ tweet from the 13th of July. He said, “Removing rules is a hard fork that includes scheduled rules like subsidy halvings and, yes, even BIP10. Rejecting BIP10 is a contentious hard fork attempt, and unlike soft forks, hard forks need consensus to succeed. There is no consensus on You know,
[51:09] Daniel Buchner: what do you think
[51:09] Stephan Livera: of that?
[51:10] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, I mean, so I know Luke wore a gas mask for a while during COVID, right? and you see those people who, when I was in college, I wasn’t a big into weed, but there are people who would fill the whole gas mask with a bong rip, and I feel like that’s probably what you would have to do to come up with that perspective, is take a gas mask full of weed, because It is so out of balance, the idea that we have changed nothing with Bitcoin on the, on the consensus rule level, but somehow we’re forking. Like that is so beyond batshit that it’s just, it, it should be comical. Like someone with an objective perspective or, or, or mindset should read that and say No, man, I might be with you even on some of these other things. Like if you’re a pro in ten percent, I might be with you on some of these other things, but you can’t claim that the party that’s changing zero consensus rules and just kind of likes Bitcoin as it is is forking. That’s absurd. And I know they would want you to have this, you know, user-resistant soft fork. They’d like, you gotta spin up an alternate version of your own so we can have our own little, you know, like, you know, pocket universe battle. It’s
[52:15] Daniel Buchner: You’re the one trying to change Bitcoin, the impetus is on you, totally. You’ve gotta convince economic nerds, you’ve gotta convince all the Bitcoin holders, convince the miners, convince them that what you’re doing is a effective, and we know it’s not, or b is good for the long term health of Bitcoin, and we know it isn’t. And, and you have failed to convince them, and that’s why your fork is failing.
[52:35] Stephan Livera: One other point I would like to raise here, just for people to think about, right? If you are a miner, you can’t just fence sit. Like, let’s say come mandatory signaling, and even if there were to be a persistent chain split, you can’t just fence sit. You have to choose which chain to, to build on top of. And that is gonna mean something, right? Because remember, there is a one hundred block delay between when a miner, you know, mines that block and is able to get his reward and like spend those rewards. And you would need an exchange be willing to sell, you, you know, for you to sell those one ten coins on, whereas on legacy chain, just on Bitcoin, no consensus change It’s state, it’s business as usual. So there’s already that factor also in favor of inertia, of just no change. Yeah, I
[53:23] Daniel Buchner: mean, they’re not putting skin in the game, right? There’s no replay protection, that they’re, like, no one’s selling all their Bitcoin ahead of time. I mean, at least, when I look at, you know, I, I was a small block person, I thought I was a small block person, now I’m being told that four megabytes is actually big blocks. That’s, that’s news to me. Thought I was
[53:41] Daniel Buchner: a
[53:43] Daniel Buchner: But, you, you know, back then it was like, “Man, they, they really put their money where their mouth was.” I mean, like, you know, there’s a modicum of respect I have for that. Right. Say what you will
[53:52] Stephan Livera: about Roger and Jehan, but they put some money where their mouth is, right?
[53:55] Daniel Buchner: They did. They, they crashed and burned so hard, and they burned tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars, and God bless ’em with their shitcoin, whereas people here are, aren’t able to do that Of like cynically saying, “Yeah, you know, get forked off into oblivion.” I don’t want people to get hurt. Like, I, I don’t– I actually don’t want them leave the Bitcoin community. I want somehow for it to be a learning experience in the fullness of time, where they come back and say, “You know what? We learned that it wasn’t just a few thousand nodes that are gonna just change Bitcoin’s protocol. Like, yeah, sure, we’re still a little angsty about it or whatever, but I wanted to come back to Bitcoin because Bitcoin
[54:43] Daniel Buchner: Collapse of the fiat monetary system, and everyone’s gonna need the life raft. And the disservice that this sport does to these people is that if they rage quit, they’re gonna end up buying Bitcoin back at a much higher point Probably at a time of, of, tumultuous seas in, in the greater financial ecosystem and probably world, that could hinder their families. And there are people behind these, these avatars, right? There are people and families behind them. And, and I don’t wanna see anyone go that path, because, because at the end, we’re all in it together, even though this is, very contentious.
[55:21] Stephan Livera: Yeah, so probably a good spot to wrap up. So I guess closing thoughts and, I guess, where to from here? What do you see as the likely outcomes come August 8th, August 9th, around that period? Where do you see things going?
[55:32] Daniel Buchner: Yeah, I mean, I, I can’t see them being able to produce blocks that have this chain sustaining in any meaningful way. I think it’ll be, it’ll, it’ll kind of die with a whimper. I think it’ll follow a lot of what we’ve seen with the economic nodes silence and the signaling of miners and the relatively small minority of single node operators, and I think it’ll prove that Bitcoin, to change the consensus rules of Bitcoin requires a heck of a lot more influence and buy-in all around the ecosystem. It isn’t about miners versus users, exchanges versus users. It’s about a sea of actors who are all economically relevant in their own way, who have a shifting dynamic of influence coming together in a supermajority across them all to decide the future of Bitcoin, and we don’t have it in this board. We’re far from it, and I think that the, the outcome is gonna bear that out.
[56:24] Stephan Livera: Well said, Daniel. thank you for joining me today and sharing, some of your insights around, you know, spam and what we can do about it in Bitcoin. so listeners, make sure you follow Daniel online on X. Daniel’s handle is at csu wildcat. Daniel, thanks for joining me today.
[56:41] Daniel Buchner: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.