00:00 Thank you so much for jumping in, Jameson. I'm really excited to talk through this topic. I've followed you for a long time. I know we've had a lot of different interactions over the past few years, but it seems like you're pushing a little harder on this ossification subject and the idea of making calm, rational changes to Bitcoin to make sure that it can continue to fulfill the goals that I think at least people like us have for it. And I thought it would be a great time to just sit down and chat through a lot of this because this topic of ossification, which we'll define when we get into it, this topic of making protocol changes to Bitcoin, better privacy, better scalability, all this stuff has been talked about relentlessly over the years.

And a lot of the things that I was promised when I got into the space don't seem like they've come to fruition, at least as they were promised. So as there's been kind of a revival around this concept of can we make changes to Bitcoin specifically with covenants, I think it's a really good time to dive into just this topic in general. So I'm excited to talk about ossification, protocol changes, a lot of different things with you today. But before we get too deep into that, why don't you just introduce yourself?

I know you haven't been on the show before and my audience is not a like Bitcoin-er only audience. So they may not know you. So I'd love for you to just introduce yourself, tell people who you are, and then we'll dive into the topic at the end. Well, that's okay, because I'm not a Bitcoin owner cypherpunk. A Bitcoin-only guy, that is. I mean, and that's why I get canceled sometimes. I'm Jameson Lopp. I've been in the Bitcoin space for a decade now, full-time, focused on security, self-custody, and in general, just doing a lot of research side projects.

So I'm always just trying to understand Bitcoin better and try to figure out where we're going. And so, you know, I'm a technical guy, computer science background. I'm the chief security officer at Casa, where we basically focus on helping high net worth individuals set up extremely robust multi-sig self-custody. And I guess the short version of a lot of why I do what I do is I feel like, you know, Bitcoin is fundamentally a collaborative open project.

And so the most important thing that we can do is continue talking about it, researching it, discussing it, and proposing ways to improve it. So I guess you could say that I see ossification as kind of an existential crisis to one of the fundamental strengths of the project. Yeah, I definitely understand that. And I think something that would be helpful here, if you don't mind just kind of defining how you view ossification, and specifically if there are like natural and unnatural types of ossification, because that was something that was really interesting that you brought up in your debate with Jimmy Song in Legato, which I was able to go back and watch, was that there's like natural ossification that will happen, and there's unnatural types that we can force into place.

So maybe just define ossification and kind of hit on those two different ways that ossification can happen. Right. So ossification from a dictionary term sense just means sort of calcification or turning to bone, you know, making something more brittle and, you know, slowing down its flexibility and ability to grow and change. From a protocol perspective, I actually see this almost as a law of network physics. And that basically means that when you have a protocol, which is just a fancy technical way of saying a shared communication language in order to accomplish some specific task, that protocol, the value of it grows as the network grows, as the number of entities using the protocol to speak the same language with each other grows.

And as the size and the value of the network grows, it also becomes more and more difficult to coordinate changing the protocol. So, you know, you can almost think of it as like, you know, what, how difficult would it be to make fundamental changes to the English language or, you know, any language that has a billion adopters? Um, those type of changes do sometimes happen organically over extremely long periods of time. Um, but you can't just make sudden changes.

Otherwise, uh, it would be chaos and confusion and people would no longer know how to talk to each other. And the, the value of the network would kind of drop off a cliff. So this, we have seen play out with network protocols, uh, like TCP IP, um, like SMTP email protocol, really, um, any of these fundamental protocols that hit mass adoption with hundreds of millions or billions of people using them, uh, tend to ossify. So this is the natural progression.

I think of a, a network kind of collapsing under its own weight. It becomes unable to change because everyone understands that you're trying to do so would be a net negative for the value of the network. And what we're talking about these days with Bitcoin ossification is almost more of a artificial preemptive accelerated ossification of, of saying that, well, you know, Bitcoin ain't broke. Don't try to fix it. Uh, there are unknown unknowns and any change that you make could have negative consequences.

Therefore we should stick with what we know, stop changing the Bitcoin protocol and just kind of declare it ossified. Even though there's no one who can declare it ossified due to the sort of game theory and governance of Bitcoin as a protocol. If enough people are apathetic and going to veto or not participate in upgrades and changes, then it's certainly possible for a preemptive ossification to happen. Yeah. So the, the inevitable is ossification at some point.

The conversation right now is more around, do we want to force ossification faster than the weight of the network itself would cause it to happen? Or do we want to understand that we literally cannot stop ossification at some point, but take the chance now before that natural ossification happens, that hardening of the consensus changes. If we want to take advantage of that right now to continue to improve the protocol. And that's that we're in this gap right now where we do have the chance to still do that.

It feels harder and harder. Like I feel like that natural ossification since I got into Bitcoin in 2017, I'm a little bit of a late bloomer when it comes in, comes to the terms of, of when we got into the space, but it seemed like there was a lot more openness at that point. Obviously there were the block size wars and that was not a consensus change that went through, but there was a lot more kind of discussion and ideation over what could happen seemingly leading up to that.

And like kind of hit a wall. And it feels like in the last few years that I've been in the space, there hasn't been much progress. And do you feel like that is just the natural ossification? Like we do have many more people in the space now in 2024 than we did in 2017. Or do you think that that's some sort of like narrative taking hold that's preventing people from having an interest in proposing changes or trying to get them through soft works, et cetera?

So the block size wars, I think on their face, it was this debate about, do we prioritize the cost of transacting or do we prioritize the cost of auditing the system and running a full node? But underneath that, I would say it was actually a war about the governance of the protocol. And on one side, it seemed like the quote unquote big blockers were more in favor of giving miners more governance power in determining the future and path forward of the protocol.

Whereas the small blockers were more in favor of the independent node operators retaining more power. And, you know, I would say the independent node operator idea won out. And along with that seemed to come a fair amount of trauma. And the result was that, you know, we didn't even really have anyone seriously suggesting consensus changes for several years after that. And so then we did get the, you know, taproot upgrade, but ever since then, even though we've had some proposals, a lot of the proposals have not come with proposed activation parameters.

So it's like we have, we still have a decent amount of brain power that's thinking about ways to improve Bitcoin, but few developers.

10:00 have the interest in becoming a consensus change champion and having to deal with all of the negativity that goes along with that. Yeah, I think we've seen that with even some of the big covenants proposals like with CTV and Jeremy Rubin tried to start pushing a little bit towards consensus change and propose some activation methods and there was a kind of an all-out war against him as a result and there was a lot of mess and thankfully he's still in the space and still kind of ideating on how we can do covenants in smart and efficient ways but there's definitely been a lot of examples of when people do propose activation methods they get hit pretty hard for it. I know someone was proposing activation methods for Ellen Hance a couple days ago on Twitter and was immediately called out by Bitcoin Core Dev as being an attack on Bitcoin because they were proposing activation methods which is that feels kind of like where we're at is even just the idea of not even having people run the code but even just saying this is how this could be activated is kind of a violent

attack somehow. Yeah, that's a one of the fundamental disagreements that I had with the Bitcoin subreddit moderators nine years ago the early days of the scaling debates was that they basically enacted a rule saying that you can't even talk about proposed forks because you know that is detrimental to Bitcoin consensus, right? And I'm like well if we can't discuss proposed changes to Bitcoin what are we even doing here, right? And so you know I I considered that a a form of censorship and at the time I actually went to go become a moderator of the Bitcoin XT reddit which is one of the many reasons why people like to cancel me every now and then because I dared to you know go against the sort of mainstream consensus at the time but it was it was less that I was like in favor of that particular block size increase BIP and more that I felt like it was a negative way of maintaining discussion healthy discussion in the space and so you know I get it I mean the like the the Bitcoin moderators have their the whole thing about you know if you don't kind of maintain some semblance of order within your walled garden then it can turn into wild weeds and overgrowth and and the sort of quality of the

the discussion can go down but I think that it went down significantly just from that one rule and they were a bit heavy handed about that but you know we have so many different platforms now that we can discuss things on and kind of to your point I think it's almost it's almost asking for trouble of even talking about proposed consensus changes on social media because I mean the vast majority of of people on social media aren't even really relevant or participating in consensus or technical consensus changes for the network yeah it can be maybe helpful to just find like a rough community consensus but even then like if you're talking like Bitcoin Twitter it's a tiny fraction of the Bitcoin ecosystem that's going to actively engage in a discussion around activation parameters for a covenant or something like that it's it's interesting I think like you talked about that that censorship ultimately prevents finding consensus if there's not a good way and there's not an openness to just having the discussions like having open nuanced

calm rational discussions like obviously i'm not saying anyone should just go crazy on either side and start attacking start attacking people but if you can't have that calm rational discussion you're never going to find consensus and ultimately you will then by default be choosing to leave bitcoin as it is if you have well i mean it's actually fine you know it's also a problem with each platform uh every discussion platform has its own set of game theory so you know twitter x for example um with its short form really prioritizes uh quick emotional reactions you know dunking on people uh kind of like it doesn't really matter if what you say is logical like if it get if it emotes some sort of quick knee-jerk response then it's going to get engagement and do well and so that's the feedback loop that it creates of the type of interactions that you should expect to get on there um your reddit is kind of similar with the upvote downvote system in the sense that um if if you go against the grain of of what the terminally online redditors are thinking then you're you're just

going to get downvote into oblivion and once again the the quick witty retorts that don't take much effort to read and parse and think through logically are going to outperform the longer form nuanced discussions so i don't know i'm kind of of the mind that you know for for those longer form nuanced discussions the better platforms are you know mailing lists or potentially just you know simple linear discussion forums that aren't manipulated with upvotes downvotes likes so on and so forth yeah i know delving bitcoin has been a really good resource that i've i've enjoyed following i haven't actually contributed much to it but that i've enjoyed following that's had i think a lot better discussion than any other platform i've been on i haven't followed the mailing list but that's just because i feel like actually following a mailing list is very time consuming just in the the format um so i haven't bothered too much with that but but delving bitcoin has been useful there i i want to kind of pull us back to to why this discussion today um and it's felt like for a long

time that we're kind of at a fork in the road in bitcoin where if we leave things as they are there's general agreement there's a very limited ability to support a good portion of the population on bitcoin as it is today even when we're talking lightning i think the number that you gave at in lugano was 100 million i know there's been different estimates but i think 100 million is probably the most consensus that i've seen around roughly how many users we could support even with using lightning because you still require lighting channels for each of those users and if we leave things as they are we're necessarily choosing that we're going to limit who can access the base layer and the bigger or not bigger but equally as important issue in my mind is that privacy on bitcoin is is obviously quite poor um i think you said in a podcast that that we did while we were at the the plan b forum in lugano as well was essentially like privacy is the antithesis of how bitcoin was designed it's designed to be transparent it's designed to reveal all of this information to the world

and to go against that grain is incredibly difficult with the way that it's built today um and so we kind of have these two paths right now where self-custody is going to get more and more difficult and privacy has gotten more and more difficult even just in this year we've seen how how much harder that has gotten and how app level privacy is very vulnerable to state level attacks um so those are kind of the like the two pillars that i view as core to freedom money and it feels like we're kind of at a fork in the road where if we don't choose to improve those two things soon that natural ossification is going to be too great the weight of the network will be too great to be able to improve on those two things i'm curious what what's the driver for you like i've heard you talk about this very loosely in the past but i've never seen such a concerted effort from you to talk about this topic as i have at the the point before i'm in logano and your blog post on x recently so i'm curious what what was kind of the the breaking point if you will or or what's the the main driver

behind you wanting to to kind of spark these discussions now i think the short version of it is uh is actually bitcoin's success and um related to that the institutions arriving um and so i i think the problem that i'm foreseeing is really complacency because number go up um and i think people aren't thinking too critically about why number go up um i i think the short version that should make it more obvious is look look at the price charts right now and then look at the activity and the mempool on the blockchain anyone who's been around for a cycle or two should find this odd and why is it odd uh it's because in my opinion all of the activity is going through a few centralized providers it's going through the etfs the custodians um and the a large portion of the inflows into you know bitcoin as a monetary system are now happening through a few gatekeepers and so they're in

20:00 We're not using many on-chain transactions. And this is a way of scaling Bitcoin. And in fact, this was one of the first proposed ways to scale Bitcoin. Hal Finney talked about, I think, in the first few months of the network. He said, oh, we'll just create a bunch of Bitcoin banks and they will offload a lot of the on-chain transactions. And so there are many ways that we can scale Bitcoin. But if we're not continuing to make improvements at the protocol level, then I expect that the scaling of Bitcoin will come with the tradeoffs of more centralization, less sovereignty, less privacy.

In general, the continued erosion of several of the most valuable attributes of this network. And I put out some posts recently where I was basically saying that one of the things that should cause people concern is the fact that it's entirely possible for the Bitcoin exchange rate to go to the moon while we continue to erode these fundamental properties. And so that's why I think Bitcoin is an amazing system. And it's gotten 15 years, almost 16 years so far because the game theory and the incentives were all somewhat magically aligned.

But I think that this is one particular area in the game theory where the incentives are not aligned optimally for the sort of the long term health and longevity of the ecosystem. And so kind of tying that all together, I think that that actually can create a negative feedback loop where if we have more and more money and quote unquote Bitcoin adoption coming in through a few centralized providers. That actually further disincentivizes the continued improvement and evolution at the protocol level.

Why? Because nobody is going to care about the protocol because they're not using the protocol. To put this in context of one of my favorite network protocols to talk about, SMTP. I think if you ask the average person right now, is email a global mass adoption success in terms of network protocols? And they would say, absolutely. I use email every day. Everybody I know uses email every day. It has billions and billions of users. But if you're a really technical guy like me and you look at the actual architecture of email network and how people are using it, nobody is actually using the email protocol.

The email protocol is used by probably a few hundred or few thousand entities. 90% of people who are using quote unquote email are actually using one of 10 centralized providers. This is sort of one of the ways that email was scaled out. And that's a whole 40-year history that I've talked about of how that happened because it wasn't always that way. In the early days, lots of individuals or almost every corporation ran their own email servers and they were running a quote unquote node on the email network.

And over the decades, due to a variety of problems that came up, mostly around spam, the bar to operate as a sovereign email node on the email network got higher and higher and higher until we ended up with basically a dozen gatekeepers owning a super majority of the network. And so the point being, I find the path forward of Bitcoin doing that same thing to be fairly likely if we're not out here screaming about it and trying to prevent it. And maybe it's all for naught.

You know, maybe I undertake all of this and yell about it. And, you know, a few decades from now, we'll look back on my post and people will say, well, he was right. We should have listened to him. But oh, well. Hopefully, hopefully that's not the outcome. Hopefully we can prevent the SMTP, SMTPization of Bitcoin becoming something that's much more centralized. But I think you, yeah, I think you hit on a really good point there that many people, especially in this bull run, they're not actually using Bitcoin.

And I run into this all the time of, especially when I'm talking with people about using the Lightning Network. Talk to people and they're like, Lightning is fantastic. It works perfectly for me. I never have any problems. Inevitably, when I get down to it, 99% of those users, I go, okay, what wallet are you using? And they go, oh, I'm using wallet of Satoshi and I'm paying another wallet of Satoshi user. Okay. Yeah. You're not using Lightning. You're sending a transaction by just changing a field in a database.

This is totally centralized. It's not actually using the Lightning Network. And this, it's kind of a growing theme. I've heard the same thing when people talk about privacy. They'll say, I'll just use an exchange to make payments and I'll pay from Coinbase. Because then I know that when I pay someone, they'll know that it came from Coinbase, but they're not going to know who it came from. They're not going to know the rest of my funds. They won't have any visibility into what I do.

And I see this as a growing, quote unquote, solution that people see is I'll just use centralized providers. And I think even when we get into this, kind of this promise that I was made by many of the loud voices in the space when I first got into Bitcoin, was basically there were two things. We'll build everything we need in layers. And anything that an altcoin, or I'm sure they use the terminology shitcoin, implements that's good, we'll bring it back into Bitcoin.

And we'll improve Bitcoin. And we won't need that altcoin. It'll just test what we need. We'll build it into Bitcoin. Unfortunately, neither of those things really happened. None of the stuff from other chains has been brought back into Bitcoin. And then scaling in layers has become increasingly difficult. All there is really today is Lightning. And Lightning is a fascinating technology and can be very powerful, but has also not been the self-custodial success that I think it was also initially pitched as.

We're actually scaling Lightning to individual users who actually have their own channel and hold their own keys has been minimal. And those promises haven't played out. And if we ossify, those promises only become harder and harder to happen. So, yeah, it's just really interesting to see that where even in the last, I feel like, six to 12 months, we've seen a shift in the Lightning space where Lightning is supposed to have solved these problems.

Again, these are promises that were made to me on social media. I'm not saying that it was actually feasible, but there were promises that were widely talked about in the space when I got into Bitcoin. And yet now we see many Lightning wallet providers shutting down because they're having too many issues solving the problems of Lightning for their users. We're seeing a shift in focus to custodial solutions, whether they're full custodians, like in the traditional sense of Wallet of Satoshi, or they're custodians in the sense of an e-cashment, where people want privacy and they want a simple UX.

So they give up custody to get that. And it all hits on the point that you made where people are not actually using Bitcoin, I would argue, because it's too hard to do so for self-custody in many scenarios. And it's too hard to do so privately. So people are looking for alternative solutions. And because we don't have good building blocks to build out things that help with self-custody and things that help with privacy on Bitcoin, that path seems to be the one that's been chosen.

I know I kind of got into a lot and fell down a rabbit hole there, but any kind of thoughts around that scale in layers idea? I know you, I'll bring it back into a concise question. So I know in your debate with Jimmy Song, one thing that you brought up that really struck me was you talked about if we don't make changes to Bitcoin that give more building blocks to developers, the scale in layers scenario becomes increasingly complex or even impossible to be able to scale out and build the things that we want.

We're already seeing that with the limitations that ARK has, with the limitations that Spark has, with the ways that they're essentially having to hack around the lack of covenants. And we're already seeing that play out right now, which is even earlier than I expected to see that play out. But could you maybe dive into a little bit more of that idea of like, if we don't change Bitcoin, scaling in layers becomes increasingly complex or centralizes or introduces custody, etc.?

Yeah, I mean, pretty much all of these discussions come down to trade offs and and a lot of it, especially if we're talking about how user adoption progresses, then often it's a trade off between convenience and something else. So I think that's convenience and convenience and convenience and convenience and convenience and convenience and privacy, convenience and security, convenience and complexity in navigating, you know, a higher bar of knowledge required in order to be able to operate, you know, sovereignly or, you know, to actually use some of these protocols.

So I would say over the past year, for example, we have seen a lot more quote unquote layer to Bitcoin projects, but I think it's important to look at them and analyze them to see, you know, what are the things that are going to do?

30:00 what are the trade-offs that are being made? And so you did comment on eCash mints, the trade-offs there being you can get really strong privacy, but generally with rug pull risk because you have a custodian running the mint. I think Fedimint improves upon that somewhat. So what I'm seeing and one of the reasons I keep talking about, one of the reasons we want better building blocks at the base layer is because if you're building a layer two right now, then most likely you're either doing pegging into a custodian or a federation, which is not great.

Or if you want to make it more, quote unquote, permissionless and censorship resistant, you're having to come up with some crazy game theory. And one of my favorite examples, I don't know if you're familiar with the spider chain concept by Botanix or Botanix. I'm not sure exactly how they pronounce it, but suffice to say that they've come up with this idea of sort of rolling cycles of multi-sig wallets that kind of act as the pegging slash staking layer in between the base chain and the second layer that they are building.

And it's just, it's extremely complicated and it's hard to analyze the game theory. And this is one of the reasons why, you know, there's a number of, you know, kind of economic and technical parameters that are involved in all of this. And it's really hard to say what the optimal ones are. And so that's going to probably a multi-year process of them going through multiple phases to try to tease out, how do we make this as secure as possible? Or, you know, if you look at BitVM, it's just, it's complicated.

You know, trying to do even fairly simple logic in a more permissionless manner has a lot of overhead. My favorite, though, was the one that just came out a week or so ago, the covenants with hash collisions. The short version is, yeah, we can do covenants on Bitcoin. The only caveat is you have to burn tens of millions of dollars worth of electricity doing proof of work in order to, you know, find some hash collisions. And so, look, that's really cool.

Like, you totally nerded out on this idea and you proved that something is technically possible. But I don't care what's technically possible if it's impractical and feasible to the point that I don't think that it's actually going to get much adoption. Like, we have to find the right path forward where the technical improvements and whatever we're building can actually be used. Otherwise, we're just kind of sitting around, you know, mentally masturbating, basically, saying, oh, look at this really cool idea I came up with that nobody's ever going to use.

So, you know, if we actually want to progress the ecosystem forward, we have to find the practical stuff. And so, the way that I look at it, and I think it was actually Adam Back who used this term a number of years ago, but he said, you know, I look at the Bitcoin base layer as a cryptographic accumulator. And so, I think that that makes a lot of sense in the context of second layers, especially if we're talking about the low-level functions and operations that will be most useful in order to make building permissionless second layers easier for people.

And basically, that is if there is some set of operations that is either impossible right now or requires you to do just a ton of gymnastics in order to recreate, but you can distill that down into like one opcode on the Bitcoin network, you know, that's where you have potential orders of magnitude of improvement, of efficiency and developer friendliness that can then boost and, you know, accelerate the future development of the entire ecosystem.

Like, that's how I think we should be looking at improvements to Bitcoin is if it can greatly simplify the burden that we're currently putting on layer two developers, then it's something that we should be interested in. And so, I wasn't able to go to the recent conference in Boston, Op Next, but, you know, it looked like there was a lot of good discussions there. And one thing that I saw happening from some of the social media discussion was, you know, a lot of those layer twos, they're already building stuff, but they've done the analysis and they can show in many cases, you know, if we had this one opcode, it would greatly improve X, Y, and Z aspects of our second layer.

And so, you know, that's why I'm in favor of things like OpCat and, you know, re-enabling some of the old opcodes on Bitcoin. And I think that it's possible to do that safely. We don't need to be afraid of, you know, edge cases if we build a proper safety framework around it. Yeah, I definitely agree. And that part about, like, doing gymnastics, essentially, to build out these second layers is wild to see what they could look like, especially like Arc is all the rage these days.

Lots of people talking about it. Looking at the user experience that we could have with Simple Covenants and Arc, which is essentially enabling people to use Lightning in an easier way. So, like, it is expanding Lightning, allowing things like channel factories has a lot of interesting use cases. Comparing that to the user experience of what we will have with Covenantless Arc is wild. Because instead of being able to just use one or maybe two opcodes to commit to transactions only looking a certain way in the future, which is necessary for the Arc protocol to function smoothly, you have to do these massive pre-signed Bitcoin transaction collaborative things between all of the users in a round and the Arc operator.

And it gets crazy compared to what it could be, like you said, with relatively simple changes to the base layer, something like opcat, something like opctv. And you can't assume that just because you can do something means that it will gain adoption. And the harder the user experience hurdle is to get over, the less likely it is to actually see use. And, like, the best case in these layer twos is generally that the user experience will be drastically worse than it could be with simple changes to Bitcoin.

But in many of these examples, they actually lose the trustless nature that we come to accept with the base layer. Like, normally, our barrier of entry is I want to be able to get funds out no matter what. And there are generally unilateral exits and things like Arc and Spark, but a lot of the things, like anything, basically anything using BitVM for a bridge is not trustless. you need one operator to, one operator or a threshold of operators to be good or to be apathetic for funds to not be lost or stolen.

And you lose that trustlessness because you don't have ways to build layer twos that have those trustless bridges. And, yeah, it gets really weird because it looks like we're, like, trying to scale in layers right now when we don't actually have the building blocks to do it in a way that's approachable from a user's perspective or trustless or extremely trust minimized. Yeah, I mean, it's also ridiculous because we did three different forks to get Lightning Network enabled.

There are some, I've seen some ossifiers say, well, we could have done Lightning Network without those things. And, like, yes, you're technically correct, and it would have sucked even more. Like, the game theory would have been even worse. You wouldn't have been able to have, like, infinitely long-lived channels and so on and so forth. And so, like, once again, this is all about trade-offs. I did have, someone was asking me recently, like, how we should be thinking about making protocol changes going forward because they felt like something shifted where it used to be.

Oh, you know, we have this great idea for a future of things that we could build on top of it. And, like, that's how we ended up saying, okay, we should add, like, these lock time op codes and we should fix transaction malleability so that we can do, you know, Lightning Network channels and get all of those benefits. And it feels like I think a lot of people are pushing back against the idea of us just enabling more building blocks without specifically saying, okay, we're only doing it for this one use case.

they're afraid that, like, there's so many use cases out there. Some of them might be bad. Some of them might be immoral. Somebody might get scammed because somebody, you know, builds a building

40:00 Ponzi scheme or builds some sort of pump and dump, call it NFT project, token project, whatever. This is kind of tangential, but I've seen what you might call the Bitcoin Puritans or moralists overlapping a lot in the Bitcoin ossifier space of basically, we basically want to gatekeep Bitcoin to only be what we consider to be pure monetary transactions. And if you're using Bitcoin for anything outside of what we deem to be appropriate, then you're a shit coiner and we don't want you on our network.

And that has kind of seeped into the whole, how do we improve Bitcoin space to be greatly afraid of, well, if you can't prove that this change won't be used in a way that I disagree with, then I'll never agree to run it on my node. I don't know. I don't even really want to engage with those type of people and argument. And I'm hopeful that they're just a tiny vocal minority. But, you know, it is a fundamental conflicting perspective. And I think how people see Bitcoin and many people see Bitcoin in many different ways.

And I've always been quite open about the fact that, you know, I'm a technologist and I see Bitcoin as a database. And, you know, there's a protocol around how you buy space in that database and make updates to it. And I'm kind of a hardcore free market maximalist that if someone finds a use case for block space that fits within the constraints of the protocol and they're willing to pay market rate for it, then they're not a spammer. They're just a consumer of block space.

And the permissionless nature of the protocol is such that, you know, you don't get to gatekeep them. The only gatekeeping that happens is from an economic perspective. Yep. They pay a fee. That's the core spam filter. Memple policies aren't going to do it. You're not going to work around the game theory of privately passing a transaction to a miner. There's that's a whole nother can of worms, I feel like. But it is tied in because, like you mentioned, a lot of the pushback that I see as well is basically, well, we don't know what this could cause.

Yeah, it's the unknown unknowns argument. And, you know, that's one of, I don't think it came up specifically in my debate with Jimmy. He was smart enough not to go there because ultimately, and I put this in my article that I published later, the unknown unknowns argument actually cancels each other out because there are always unknown unknowns. And so the ossifiers often say, you know, any change that you make has unknown unknowns. But what they're unwilling to admit from what I've seen, because it's not convenient, is that not making changes also has unknown unknowns.

And you're trying to quantify that one is more than the other, I think is, it's naive. And it goes, it's actually a historical. Just look at what happened to email, for example, not changing the email protocol had unknown unknowns that were unforeseeable, because what happened was the rest of the world changed as the protocol hit mass adoption, a lot of new problems came along, and they had to get solved. And, you know, one of the only people who tried to solve the spam problem at the SMTP layer was Adam Beck.

But guess what? He got ignored. So I wonder if I'm going to, you know, end up being the Adam Beck of the Bitcoin protocol in regard to, you know, this particular issue. I certainly hope not. But point being, I expect, you know, if Bitcoin ossifies, the world will continue changing, there will be more problems, and those solutions are going to get haphazardly bolted on, generally in a centralized manner, and we're just going to end up with more gatekeepers.

Yeah. And I think, too, there are known problems that need to be solved. I would say, I think Jimmy used the terminology of imminent and necessary as his barrier. I would say the lack of privacy is imminent and necessary. We're seeing people targeted based on the on-chain activity that they had. Someone is now serving a sentence in jail because one transaction that Chinalysis says was his was used to buy a domain for a centralized mixer, which was a whole other topic that there were centralized mixers because privacy was poor.

But he is said to have done that because there was no privacy in between that. What seems to have happened, just as a side note, is that he traded Bitcoin peer-to-peer frequently, and it's very, very likely that at a Bitcoin conference, he bought Bitcoin from the operator of Bitcoin Fog and then had that link directly to the funds that that Bitcoin Fog operator then used, or sorry, he sold Bitcoin to that Bitcoin Fog operator. Bitcoin Fog operator used those to purchase what he needed, and the lack of privacy landed him in jail.

I would say that that's pretty imminent and necessary that the average person has access to privacy to protect them from what at least over the last four years has been a clear attack against Bitcoin and against privacy and cryptocurrencies. Just like scaling, yes, maybe the fee market right now is ridiculously low, which is potentially a problem on its own. As you mentioned earlier, that we're hitting a bull run and no one's using the chain, which is an interesting combination that has, as far as I know, never happened before in the history of Bitcoin.

Yeah. And so actually, I had a presentation in Lugano. I don't know if you saw my block space economics presentation. Not yet, sadly. Yeah. And so this is another controversial topic that I'm sure will get me canceled by some people. But I believe another one of the very long term problems that we should be thinking about with Bitcoin is block space. I don't know if you call it the block size debate, but I think that the block size debate of the 2015 to 2017 era was one thing.

And I think that the block size debate of the future is going to be a very different thing. We've already decided on how we're prioritizing low cost of on-chain transaction versus low cost of auditing the system. That's already decided. I don't expect that to change. But what I do think will eventually become an issue will be fees, you know, sustainable thermodynamic security and cost of sovereignty, basically. This is, you know, some people have said, well, should everyone be able to own their own UTXO?

You know, that's kind of its own debate. But my point from my presentation that it'll probably be published in the next few months, was that I think that we should desire to have an adjustable block size that takes into account all the different stakeholders in the ecosystem. And, you know, prioritizes safety, of course, prioritizes node operators not getting priced out from auditing the system, but also prioritizes the economics of block space. And so, you know, I would argue that right now the block size should actually probably be smaller than it currently is if we had an appropriate adjustable block size algorithm.

Yeah. It's a very interesting aside, but this is something that I've really liked about the game theory of Monero specifically. And it may not be the exact approach that you're mentioning. And I definitely want to see that presentation. So I did mention Monero. Nice. In my presentation, I went through every Bitcoin BIP related to block size and I explained why they all sucked. And really the only one that I said didn't suck was Peter Woola's one that was based upon network bandwidth growth.

I felt like that was an appropriate, you know, safety based one, but it still didn't take into account economics. And then I went out and I looked at, you know, all of the other systems, at least all of the other major cryptocurrencies that have adjustable block sizes and tried to understand the game theory around them. And the only one that I thought didn't completely suck was actually Monero. And the main reason for that, as I'm sure you're well aware, is because although it does give miners the ability to increase the block size, they can only do that if they also increase the fees.

Right. So there's actually that economic component. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the beautiful things is if they choose to just arbitrarily increase the block size, they sacrifice subsidy. And so they have to make up for it in fees or the game theory of financial incentives will break down for them and they'll be burning money to be able to do so. It's a really fascinating system and one not meant for just permanently increasing the block size, but handling short term amounts of increased on chain activity and then shrinking blocks back down to a size that's reasonable.

Yeah.

50:00 It's a really interesting one. I don't want to get into the details, but I'm glad that you you looked into it and covered it a bit too, because it's one that's been working very, very well in practice for a decade now. Um, so circling back to, to this topic of ossification, I think maybe the harder thing to actually discuss, like, I love the theory, but I'm really curious on what you think for, like, what are the real steps we take towards helping Bitcoin to continue to evolve?

Like I know you're talking about block size and that presentation. We've talked a lot about covenants and other potential changes like op cat. You briefly mentioned the great script restoration, which we'll get to a little bit more later with a listener question, but what are the like actual things that we can do? It feels like to me, like every day it's getting murkier as to like, how would I go about, Hey, I have this perfect privacy, Bitcoin improvement proposal.

How do I get that done? Or is that something that's worth pursuing? So maybe just your thoughts on like, what are the, what are the actual steps that we can take as people who want to see changes continue to happen in Bitcoin? Um, yeah. Well, part of the problem is that there is no well-defined process. And I would say there cannot be a well-defined process because ultimately what does it all come down to rough consensus and running code? Uh, it's, it's very hard to quantify.

That's why it is rough consensus. Um, but I think, you know, one potential problem is that there just hasn't been a improvement proposal that has gained significant momentum and, and collaboration from people. You know, it seems like it's always been like a few people over here, a few people over there. And, uh, and really, you know, if, if you want to build consensus there, it's kind of its own bootstrapping and network effect problem. Um, you, you have to actually boots on the ground and start talking to a lot of people and get them interested in, and get them, you know, devoting time into contributing, uh, to that idea and voicing support for it and trying to move it forward.

And, um, it seems like Jeremy Rubin was the, the last person who really tried to do that. Um, and unfortunately rubbed some people the wrong way, uh, it's, it is kind of a delicate process and it may even be the case that you should not champion your own proposal. You know, that I think some people may see that as a red flag in and of itself. So maybe if there's something that you really want, uh, it's better for you to find other reputable people in the space to champion.

Yeah. Yeah. I definitely can see that. And I feel like that's been part of the reason why the covenants discussion has been much more pressing. I mean, like what Jeremy proposed CTV in like 2020, maybe 2021, but I think 2020 and only really now have we circled back to the serious discussion around the concept of covenants, not necessarily just op CTV. I think that's a lot of other proposals and op cat now and great script restoration, but it, I, it feels like that's kind of happened because a lot more people in this space, not just the devs working on the proposals are actually willing to talk about this stuff publicly and have conversations around it.

And I think that's definitely a key point. It's yeah. Rough consensus is, is very, very rough. It does require almost like a, it's, it's more a social aspect. Like obviously the technical proposal has to be sound for there to be any chance. Obviously that's, that's how it should be, but it ends up being more of a, a social effort than it is a technical one. Once you have a good technical proposal and that hurdle is just so high these days, it feels like.

Yeah. And here's the, here's a good example. Um, so there was a panel at Lugano about op cat, or at least it was, it was about like covenants and layer twos. Um, and there was like five or six people on the stage, all very well known Bitcoin folks. Um, they all said that they liked op cat. However, one of them said I'm against it for social reasons rather than technical reasons, simply because they're pissed off with like taproot wizards and Udi and you know, him going off and triggering people on social media.

And I'm like, you, this is like the perfect example of, of this process going wrong as you're letting your emotions get in the way of the sort of cold stoic logic of, of looking at these things and how they're going to potentially improve the network. Yeah. Choosing based on if people you like support something and if people you like, you don't like, don't support something is a very interesting bar for what should, what changes should happen to Bitcoin.

But I have seen a lot of that. That's not a one off case. Like there's a lot of people who say like, because this person supports it, I won't support it. I also think that an appropriate description of a Bitcoin consensus is, is it's like a non Newtonian fluid. And, and this is where some of the delicate social nature comes in is that, you know, if there's, there's some unquantifiable velocity of force at which, um, if you push too hard, then it, it turns into a brick wall.

And so you just need to ease into it slowly and steadily, you know, slowly building consensus and getting your champions together, uh, to, to show that, you know, your proposal does not have any substantial objections. Yeah, definitely, definitely seems like the way. And I think that might be one of the reasons why covenants have gotten further than I expect is that it has been a kind of kind of a low and slow conversation over the past few years.

That's just continued and slowly grown and grown. Um, I would love to hear if there's any specific proposal or just general change or improvement that you're particularly excited for, particularly would want to see happen. Um, obviously I know maybe there's some things that just can never happen that you would love, but maybe on the practical side, um, something that you think needs to happen in Bitcoin that you'd like to see adopted. Yeah, there are many things. Um, I think my highest priority at the moment would be basic building blocks that will help improve development of layer two networks.

And so op cat seems to be one of those. There's a few other op codes out there that layer two developers seem to be in favor of. And, you know, whether that happens as a one off or perhaps through the great script restoration, then, um, I'm kind of ambivalent. Um, I do like, uh, great script restoration because I feel like it would be better for us to just do a one and done, you know, just get it over with rather than, uh, fighting about sort of one off op codes here and there.

Um, if we can have, you know, one clean sweep of that, that would be great. Um, medium term, like over the next 10 to 20 years, uh, I think the quantum computing issue. Um, is going to potentially reach a critical point. I gave a presentation about that a month or so ago. Um, and it's, you know, it's sufficiently far away that I think people aren't concerned about it, but also, as we know, it's very difficult to change Bitcoin. Um, and, um, and, um, and this particular change, um, I believe is going to violate some principles of Bitcoin one way or another.

Uh, the point being that if we were basically going to have to decide how to deal with non quantum safe Bitcoin funds, Bitcoin UTXOs at some point. So, you know, we can start the process of agreeing upon like what the best quantum safe, uh, cryptography is that we should implement in Bitcoin. But even once we do that, and once we kick off the migration process that will take years and years, I think for people to actually migrate. Um, and eventually not everyone is going to migrate and at least part of that is due to lost funds.

And so then the real question is going to become, do we either sit on our hands and allow lost funds to be stolen by quantum adversaries? Or do we say at some point, okay, this has gone far enough and we're going to do a soft fork to essentially make those funds unspendable. So one way or another that that's going to violate a principle of basically the principle of, you know, your keys, your coins, uh, either, either, uh, you know, those coins are going to get stolen.

Even, even though, uh, you know, the adversary didn't originally have the keys or, uh, the keys will no longer be useful, uh, if that owner still has them. Yeah. And like you said, that's something that has to happen so far ahead of when quantum computers, quantum computers are actually viable.

1:00:00 So that's an interesting one that does need conversation sooner rather than later. And so then, you know, even looking out further beyond that is more of the block space economic stuff of, you know, how are we going to deal with the long term thermodynamic security? And the main reason why I think that's important and so complicated is that there are too many variables and in fact, you know, future unknown unknowns of the supply and demand of block space.

And I think people might raise their eyebrows and say, well, what do you mean there's unknowns about the supply of block space? Well, that's where layer twos actually come into play. Layer twos and, you know, centralized providers is effectively, you know, if a lot of adoption happens through centralized custodians or if certain layer twos gain sufficient mass adoption, those things can actually effectively act like a block size increase from the economic perspective as they are offloading a lot of demand from the base blockchain.

So there's a lot of transactions that might have originally happened on the base blockchain that no longer happen. And so, you know, that can cause a drop in fees for miners. And simply because we don't know in the long term future what all of these different variables of supply and demand are going to work out to, I think that having a static block size limit, whatever it is, like there is no magic number, I think that is the right number. One of the main reasons that a lot of the block size proposals back in the day were dumb is that they were just magic numbers.

And so, yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think in order to really fix this aspect of the game theory of Bitcoin as an ecosystem that similar to how we have difficulty adjustments right now for the miners, I think we need to have block space adjustments that take into account all the different variables that can lead to a healthier, unhealthy environment for the economics of block space. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really fascinating. I'm glad you pointed out things further down the line as well, because I think I can get kind of caught up in the current things, like just looking at covenant opcodes or something like that and not thinking long term about what would this actually look like for quantum resistant crypto for changing block size, something like that.

I'm glad you pointed out that there's no perfect block size. Like, I think there's this weird assumption that like either four megabytes is just perfect, like what we've chosen is somehow perfect and we should never change it or that we know exactly what the size should be. Like, oh, we should have one megabyte block sizes or something. And I'm not really sure how people can think that they know exactly what the perfect block size is when we're talking hopefully hundreds or maybe even thousands of years in the future.

There's no way to predict what it's going to look like. It requires a great degree of arrogance. And also, I think that one of the reasons that we should desire an algorithm to adjust the block size or block space is that we want really what I'm calling Goldie blocks. You know, you don't want small blocks or big blocks. You want Goldie blocks. And what is what are what are Goldie blocks? I consider this to be block space that is set sufficiently low enough that there is constant fee pressure.

You know, you're not getting basically free, cheap transactions. And the reason why you want this constant backlog with a robust fee market is is twofold and possibly more. One, of course, we need to pay the miners and we need to make this sustainable in perpetuity as the subsidy continues having. And two, it actually incentivizes people to use block space efficiently. So, you know, if if your blocks are too big, nobody is going to even bother building layer two solutions, at least not not for like cheap transactions, maybe if there's other functionality.

And if if your blocks are if your blocks are too small and and the fees are too high, then, you know, even that can cause problems where I foresee a potential future where even the layer twos have issues. So, like, you know, layer twos need to be able to settle back onto the main chain and let's envision a future where we do get enough protocol improvements, that there is a really robust and vibrant thriving layer two ecosystem. But the blocks are still really, really tiny.

You know, I could easily see game theory start to break down if the layer twos are the primary consumers of block space and they're all competing with each other over this. You know, it is once again, it's it's it's it's a type of pure free market capitalism. But that could be problematic and in fact, ultimately harm the thriving layer two ecosystem. And, you know, we're we're we're thinking like really out in the future right now. There's so many variables we're probably not even imagining.

It's very difficult to even talk about. But I'm just trying to tease out some of the potential future problems, because if we agree that natural ossification is a thing, then I think that if we wait so long until these problems actually become problems, then we may not actually be able to do anything to adjust course and be able to resolve them at the base layer. Yeah, absolutely. I think quantum computers are a great example of that, because if they're actually eminent, it's probably too late.

It's too late for most people's funds. Maybe you could save some, but that process is going to take a long time. So I've got one last question for you, and then I have a bunch of really good listener questions that people dropped on X when I let them know that we're going to be talking about this. So last question that I have, we touched on it a little bit throughout, but not in a really concerted way. So I just wanted to circle back. We touched on self-custody a little bit more or building better layer twos.

But when we talk about privacy, what's your view around how that fits in? Can Bitcoin continue to be called freedom money if privacy is not approachable for the average person? Is that something that you view as essential as improving self-custody or ensuring that we can build proper, trustless layer twos? Where do you see that fitting into this conversation? I mean, I think it's probably a lost cause to get what you might call strong privacy built into Bitcoin base layer.

And that it's a better path forward for developers to build strong privacy onto second layers because you have so much more leeway and flexibility in how you build them. And so that kind of goes back to, well, we need to actually make it easier for people to build second layers so that they can do that. And, you know, it could get pretty interesting right now. Now, even if you, if you give up on the idea of sovereign lightning network as a like mainstream adoption thing for people to be using.

I do think lightning network could easily have a place in the future of a vibrant layer two ecosystem of essentially acting as bridges between the different layer twos. And so that could get pretty interesting from a privacy perspective if you could hop between any number of layer twos trustlessly instantaneously. Would that hopefully be able to greatly improve privacy? Of course, as we're well aware, the state of privacy on the lightning network continues to be explored and weaknesses continue to be found and we'll need to continue hardening it from that perspective.

Yeah, absolutely. So to summarize, basically, like we need to enable better building blocks so that the scale of layers, they actually actually can become true. It's kind of the crux of it. And then we can get better privacy there. So maybe this is controversial, but one of the reasons why I don't really tell people to go use mixers is because I'm not convinced that that's going to be a sustainable long term solution. I expect that, well, if if the current course continues, that most people are going to get priced out of using mixers on chain, you know, unless we get other technical improvements that actually economically incentivize people.

I don't see that being sustainable long term. Yeah, absolutely. I would agree that they're they're really a short term bandaid. And if things happen to the fee market, as people expect,

1:10:00 not going to be a long-term solution and there's the double issue of they have traditionally either required very poor user experience or a centralized entity to help coordination that's not necessarily a technical requirement but that's how it's played out so far and that makes them much more vulnerable than a more decentralized layer two um yeah man a lot a lot of different things going on here but i feel like i got a lot more clarity out of out of our conversation so thank you for our time diving through my questions um but if you're down i've got a few listener questions that we can we can walk through and maybe just kind of do a rapid fire q a sure okay awesome uh you you did touch on the great script restoration already a bit um was there anything you wanted to add uh bob summerwill said i would love to hear your thoughts on the great script restoration as a potential let's let's fix it all i think you already pretty much answered that saying that that's one of the reasons you like it so you

could kind of do it all in one go but anything else you want to add there yeah so doing it all in one go also the the nice thing is that rusty is really focusing on safety here right and so um one of the the major aspects and changes to the great script restoration is is essentially you're coming up with a new way of kind of counting the computational resources required to execute a script that's we've had a few kind of half-assed ways of doing that over the years by like counting signature operations and stuff uh but that hasn't been able to capture all the potential complexity of uh validating transactions so um you know rusty seems to be making good progress on that and i think he actually just published a draft bit uh for for it in the past week so nice um you know it still could be a year or several years away from happening but uh i'll be keeping an eye on it yeah absolutely i'll be seeing if you uh if you choose to champion it it'll be interesting see if we can uh get a get a collective together to to push through

something like that it would be really really enjoyable to have a lot more building blocks especially now that i'm getting more on the bitcoin dev side on on chain and lightning it's been interesting trying to see what it's like to actually build more advanced solutions around it um the other main focus of really a couple questions was basically what's your view on getting better privacy at the base layer i know we just touched on this a little bit but i want to shift the focus a little bit um so like uh kai obinerv who's a dev in the monero community he asked what's your stance on privacy bips if opt-in privacy could be added today magically for the computational and bandwidth cost of a snore signature would you add it or do you best do you see privacy as best done by l2 solutions i guess getting more to the the theoretical if you could have that would you be behind it versus the pragmatic which is probably that you wouldn't be able to get something like that through consensus i mean even

if you could almost every privacy solution is once again uh beholden to the sort of network effect problem right so like you know the great quote of your privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's peers um from from that perspective i think and in a practical perspective it might be better and more sensible to have layer twos you know specific protocols that are for privacy so that you you know you get more people over they're using them so to to give a kind of counter example i think that one of the best practical ways that we could improve bitcoin privacy today without protocol changes would be to get everybody to use payjoin you know it's it's already a thing all we have to do is get people to actually uh implement that interactive protocol uh whenever you're accepting payments but i don't think it's going to happen you know just asking people to do anything uh seems to be too high of a burden yeah the the user experience hurdle is is definitely the the tricky part of gaining adoption there and it's it's best when you

can get privacy on accident just using something for the user experience i think that was one of the ideas behind how lightning privacy would be helpful is that people would use lightning for cheaper transactions and they would necessarily get better privacy because you're not publishing every transaction on chain um and that is one of the the good benefits there the hard part is the user experience of lightning hasn't quite lived up to expectations but i think that's definitely a definitely an issue there is the user experience getting there i guess if you could do it in a perfect way where the user experience was just the same as making a standard transaction you could probably get much better much better adoption but if we're still looking at needing to move like coffee transactions to a second layer base layer changes could help that bridge like especially when you're moving funds into uh you're moving into a layer two that's one of the weak points right now of lightning is the on-chain footprint

uh unless you do things a very specific way so those on-chain changes do help those layers that get built on top have better privacy in the bridging in and bridging out or pegging in and pegging out scenario um but yeah yeah thanks for jumping on that one um um another one to get into i think we already answered quite a few of these in just our conversations but another one that's an interesting kind of thought experiment uh and i think we'll probably end on this one end on this one is if you could rewrite bitcoin today as a brand new protocol what what would the core of it be what what are the core kind of differences that you would have in a bitcoin that you think could solve the problems that we've talked about throughout today it's a pretty general question so just dive in maybe if there's one or two specific things that you would you would change if you had the ability to kind of wave a wand and and build bitcoin differently yeah that's that's a tricky one i mean there are a number of um bugs in bitcoin right there's this uh there's this other project that's basically the great

consensus cleanup or something like that uh which are just a bunch of outstanding edge cases and issues and actually like safety issues some of which are kind of related to you know block size debate and um ensuring that people can't do a sort of denial of service on nodes by constructing weird transactions and stuff uh yeah bitcoin you know the the tricky thing is as i said earlier you really don't want to screw with the game theory and so i think i would go back to really what we've already spent a lot of time talking about which is like the the one aspect of the bitcoin game theory that i think needs improving is this sort of idea around block space economics but that is a long-term problem i'm i'm i'm not really convinced that there's anything at the protocol layer that would necessarily be a like 10x improvement for user experience and adoption um i think most of the friction around that just has to do with key management and i i don't have like a fundamental solution for uh like a protocol change that would

that would fix a lot of the key management issues yeah that's one where it just comes down to that initial barrier of are you willing to take personal responsibility and that's always kind of going to be the barrier of enter here we can minimize that and abstract it away as much as possible but if you can't keep something secret you can't use bitcoin or anything like it that'll always be kind of the the lower bar that people have to be willing to jump over to to be able to use these things awesome well i think that's all of the the main questions that i had like i said i think we hit on the majority of these already in our discussions um so if if you listeners asked a question and i didn't cover it let me know and i'll i'll see if i can get a text response or something from that but i think we we walked through the vast majority of it um so any any last thoughts or kind of closing things you want to you want to bring up jameson uh in closing basically the same as in opening which is um you know

the most important thing that we can do is continue talking about these issues i think the most dangerous thing that we can do is be complacent rest upon our laurels you know declare victory uh because if we declare victory today i can assure you we will not retain a victorious position over the long term very very well said well thank you so much for jumping on uh glad you were willing to do this and glad we got to talk through what i think is one of the most pressing topics in the the bitcoin space right now so hopefully this will help people better understand a lot of the thought process behind different views and and better understand uh kind of where we're coming from when we say that there there are some good ways that we can make changes to bitcoin to keep it a useful tool for freedom to keep it free to money so thank you so much for your time jameson thanks for having me thanks for listening and i hope you enjoyed this episode of opt out if you did please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast or if you already subscribed share it with one friend or family member

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