Untangling Knots vs. Core | THE BITCOIN BRIEF 66 - Ungovernable Misfits

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
Bitcoin
is close to becoming worthless.
Bitcoin.
Now what's the Bitcoin?
Bitcoin's like rat poison.
Yeah.
Oh. The greatest scam in history.

(00:25):
Let's get it.
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.
Welcome back to The Bitcoin Brief, the show where me and q and a catch up every two weeks to talk about Bitcoin,

(00:49):
privacy,
open source,
keeping your Bitcoin secure,
and the news and software updates that matter.
I just wanted say a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting Ungovernable Misfits
and a big thank you to Foundation Devices
for supporting the show. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.x,xyz.

(01:14):
They make cypherpunk tools for fuckwits, and anyone can use this, even me. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, feel free, and I'll be happy to go through things with you. For anything super technical, I'll pass you on to q. If you wanna buy one of these incredible passports,
use the code ungovernable.
It will get you a discount, and it will let them know that I'm shilling.

(01:38):
I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the k Wallet team.
Not only are they supporting this show, but they're also bringing out some incredible features.
For those of you who actually use Bitcoin
and actually care about their privacy and security,
Cake Wallet make it incredibly simple for you to live outside of the traditional financial system.

(02:01):
You can use Cake Pay within the app to buy gift cards
for food, petrol, and whatever else you might need day to day. You can use silent payments,
and, of course, you can use Monero.
You can connect both Bitcoin and Monero nodes,
use coin control,
and this team are constantly innovating.
And I'm really excited to be working with them. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, but check them out at cakewallet.com.

(02:30):
Download the APK
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Enjoy the show.
Hello, my good friend,
my robot friend.
Bonjour,
how are you doing, mate? I'm good. I was doing the school run just now, rushing to get here. My eldest was asking about you. Really?

(02:56):
Yeah. I was explaining
they were like, why am I going to school, and where are you going, and what are you doing? And I was like, well, I've gotta go and work. And, like, what are you doing?
Like, okay. Well, I'm speaking about sort of computers and stuff
and
who too. And I was like, Q? He was like, Q?
Like, yeah.

(03:17):
And then,
Q? And I was like, yeah. They're a robot. They're like, a robot? Let me see. And they wanted to see pictures and stuff and know all about you. So we did about ten minutes of who is Q and what is it. Yeah. Well, obviously, I won't dox the kids' age, younger age, trying to explain that concept
of there's a guy that I talked to on the Internet about this thing called Bitcoin. A nim. And he's a nim, and we do it about this thing called Bitcoin.

(03:43):
And, oh, yeah. It's on a podcast, and then you have to explain podcast. And I haven't had that conversation with mine yet to be like, this is what daddy does. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Because it's such, like, an obscure thing. So what are you trying to do? Oh, we're trying to change this thing called money, and this this thing It's it's such a a peculiar thing to try and explain. My little one is pretty smart, much smarter than me, but I think a bit too young for that. Yeah. I think I'll give it a couple of years. Let them progress past the peppa pig years before I try and

(04:13):
help them understand that how we're trying to topple the global monetary
system. There's these pedophilic
lizards, and they live underground in caves, and they control the money.
Anyway, how are you, mate? I'm well. I'm excited for more jet setting this week. Gonna be
heading out to Madrid, a city I've never been to, actually, out on Thursday morning, going to the Watch Out Bitcoin conference, which also I've never been to. I believe it's pretty base group of Bitcoiners that run and attend that one, so I'm very much looking forward to heading out there. Gonna be giving a talk on Bitcoin privacy, obviously. We have a small booth there as well. Gonna be there with Jack, my colleague from Foundation, and we'll be doing demos of Prime Core, selling them, and just talking all things Foundation as well. So I believe it's a fairly small conference compared to the likes of Frigor and and obviously Vegas and the likes. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm looking forward to a bit more of a quiet one and an intimate one with a based Bitcoin crowd. So this will hopefully be live before I head out. So if you are in the area, please do head down. And, if you're coming from Portugal, don't forget my Nando's.

(05:20):
I think we said it on the maybe on the last brief or FreedomTech Friday, but the Spanish seem to be so much further ahead with, like, privacy
and their understanding of Bitcoin as a tool than most UK and US Bitcoiners. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's
some history with the government or something in the water.

(05:42):
I don't know. But they definitely seem from the ones that I've met some of the most
knowledgeable
sort of on our side of things,
people that I've met. Yeah. I I agree. There's always been, especially in the the samurai circles, there was always a massive Spanish contingent. And, yeah, I've I've never really thought about why that was. It was just that they always had a big strong foothold in the community, and that doesn't seem to have changed since the I don't wanna say the demise or the, you know, since everything that's gone down with samurai that I don't seem to have seen that kind of interest in privacy diminish any from the Spanish crowd. Maybe this weekend will give me a bit of an insight why that is. Yeah. Or if you're listening to this and you live in Spain or you are Spanish, maybe let us know why the mindset is different because The UK and The US seems much more cupped and on the finance side. And then, like, a lot of the Eastern European and the Spanish seem to be more on the sort of freedom side. And I just wonder if there's something in history dealing with government that makes it more that way. I know they had, like, all that stuff with Basque, and they were trying to sort of separate and have their own state away from the Spanish government. And you had what's his name?

(06:49):
Dictator guy. Franco. Franco.
I don't know. Maybe it's something to do with that. If you are listening and you know, let us know. Why are you so based? Educate us. Yeah. Let us know. Other than that, no AOB for me. Just, yeah, looking forward to heading out there, seeing a new city, and talking Bitcoin. But, what about you, mate, other than explaining
robots and podcasts to

(07:10):
a a child?
Anything else going on with you? Not really. Still doing, Fiat battles, but
maybe things are slightly better than they were last time we spoke, and that's a win. Even if it's one step, it's a win. So
I'm,
feeling positive. Yeah. Excited for
our conversation that I think we're gonna be getting into today because we had a bit of a pre pod chat about it, and this seems to be

(07:35):
in the news everywhere and seems to be something that we're gonna have to cover. We we can't be,
we can't be avoiding it any longer, it seems.
Yeah. So for context, what we're about to dive into is the whole core versus not debate.
My plan is to give a bit of a background. Before I do any of that, I wanna state my biases

(07:57):
towards I hate even saying I'm in one of the crowds, but, like, I align with the viewpoint more of the, quote, core side of this argument. But I'm gonna try and remain
as fence sitting as possible in my explanations.
Unbiased.
Yeah. Unbiased. Thank you. So that we can run through the kind of viewpoints of both. And I haven't so much just been hiding from this debate because, you know, anybody that follows me on Twitter or Nostril from my retweets and my likes and stuff. It's very evident which side I align with. But I don't know. The the whole discourse

(08:29):
has gotten to such a point now where I'm just like, I don't know. I just wanna verbalize it, run through with you, find out what you're thinking. And the main reason why this brief versus any other brief that I've chosen to talk about it is that the first news article is that there's been some leaked
DMs of which I'm conflicted on here as to how good or bad it is to be leaking DMs. But, yeah, Luke Dash Junior has been DMing with somebody on Signal. I believe it's not known as to who he was having the DMs with, but, basically, he's been having DMs with somebody on Signal. Basically, you know, his worries about the trajectory of Bitcoin or more specifically Bitcoin core and the updates that are gonna happen in version 30. Again, we'll get into that in a second.

(09:10):
So bad that he's
toying with the idea of implementing something that would cause a hard fork in Bitcoin.
Mhmm. So I'm gonna pull a couple of quotes from a rage article here. Again, will be linked in the show notes, and thank you to Lola and the team. Before you do, I'll make my stance clear
on this. Good idea. Leaking DMs

(09:31):
in any way,
no matter what it is, is a shit move. I don't like it. It's sneaky, especially when you don't know who the person is. If you have a problem with someone, I think you need to stand up and make it clear and not do snaky moves. And when something's a private personal chat on a literally a private
messenger,

(09:52):
even if the person's a bit of a you know, he's not my cup of tea, he's not the person I would go and have a pint with. But even so, I don't like that. I tend to agree. Again, we don't know who it is. I don't
hold anything against Lola here for breaking the story. Again, at the end of the day, she's a journalist. That's what journalists do. Yeah. I think the fault here is for the person who's leaked it. But do you know what? Like, cards on the table, like, I'm thankful that whoever it was did Oh, yeah. Because there's some serious potential ramifications

(10:20):
here for Bitcoin. I think he's got no chance of a successful par four, to be very clear. But I'm glad that whoever it was did leak it to Lola, and then she's published it. So Luke and the Knotts crowd, their latest worry and the narrative that they're trying to spin for the need for additional filters
is basically, quote, think of the children.
Such a classic. They wanna protect node operators from hosting CSAM,

(10:43):
which I didn't even know was a commonly used abbreviation.
CSAM? Yeah. I don't wanna say it out loud because it's it'll probably get the podcast delisted somewhere. But, yeah, just go and look it up yourself. No. Thanks. So, yeah, they're saying that the biggest worry at the moment is that there's gonna be legal implications
on node operators because in theory, somebody could
encode some data into a Bitcoin transaction that is some very horrible material, let's just say, involving children.

(11:09):
Right. Which Okay. Has always been possible to be very clear. Like, you can embed whatever data you want in multiple different ways.
But, suddenly, now this is a huge issue, and we need to get the lawyers involved. So in these DMs again, I'm not gonna read them all, but Luke alludes to the fact that he wants to create a trusted multisig committee

(11:31):
who would review transactions
after they've been mined in the block, to be very clear, to check that there is no
CSAM and then publish a zero knowledge proof
so that node operators
that are running said implementation
could remove this data from their nodes.
So instead of having, let's say, a couple of transactions

(11:52):
that have this horrible material
embedded in them, they instead
store this zero knowledge proof that kind of points to the transaction.
Right. Which on the surface of it, if you use only that information, you think, okay. Well, fine. I mean, nobody actually wants that kind of data to be anywhere near any of their hardware. Right? I think we can all safely agree on that. Yeah. Obviously. But the slippery slope here is and you might hear me say that quite a few times on this call is that who are the people, the multisig, that are defining what this horrible material is? Yeah. Who are the arbiters of truth?

(12:28):
Exactly. Who are the arbiters of truth and who says that they get to decide
what is not necessarily a truth here, but, like, bad material?
Again, we can all agree any content that involves
children to that extent, everybody on planet Earth with the exception of a few wrong ones agrees that nobody wants that shit. Again, we're going back to slippery slopes. It's like, if you have a centralized authority that deems what is or is not acceptable to live on your node, That's a centralization point. And today, it could be CSAM. Tomorrow, it could be a transaction that's constructed in a specific way. The day after, it could

(13:04):
be we don't like that person. Do not let him transact. Do Do you know what I mean? It can quickly get out of control. I definitely know what you mean. But from what you said, it sounds like it would still be mined in the same way anyway. So it's not like the transaction could be blocked or stopped or not be stored.
It sounds like there would then be some sort of what whatever you said, zero knowledge proof or or something

(13:28):
of that transaction. So the transaction still goes through. The payment's still made, blah blah blah blah blah. It's just that the actual
data within that transaction wouldn't be stored on someone's hardware.
It would be a
hash of it or a proof of it or whatever else is. Zero proof. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So at that stage, you're not actually making Bitcoin less spendable.

(13:53):
You're just
preventing the storage of data. But
it doesn't mean that that doesn't become a major problem in the future because we don't know what Bitcoin's gonna be used for. Like, obviously, yeah, money. Okay. Great. But there could be other things that could be useful. And
by suddenly giving
a lock and key over to a group of people that decide that they're in control

(14:18):
to decide what data is and isn't seen
by who
may not sound like a massive problem today, but it could really actually be something that causes
huge issues in the future. Yeah. Absolutely. I've done a little bit digging here to try and find an answer, and I'm sure there's some smarties listening to this thinking, yeah, well, this is obvious. But I'm not crystal clear on where or how this becomes a hard fork. I think is that if one of these transactions that is removed or deemed as unwanted by the multisig quorum and is then removed from a or you don't store the full transaction data on your node and you have a zero proof, is that if that output becomes spent from in the future, a node that's running this software will not have the necessary information

(15:03):
to do all the proper checks and balances and consider the future transaction valid,
I think Of course. That's where this becomes a hard fork. That does make sense, actually. Yeah. Because you can't see it. Yeah. Nobody wants that. I mean, there might be some people as I do. Well, yeah. Yeah. Because everybody wants the airdrop coins and all that sort of stuff. But from a health of the overall network, nobody really wants this to go through, do they? Well, I don't know. I can't imagine that there's that many people that

(15:32):
actually we're gonna go through all the details, but actually think this is a good idea. I don't think there really are that many people who actually use Bitcoin who think this is a good idea.
And then you might just have a couple of quite wealthy people who think it's a good idea, and then you have a hard fork like we did with BCash.
And for some reason, it has some value for some amount of time.

(15:54):
And then the likes of you and I can sell
the LUKEcoin
to Luke and whoever his friends are who want that. And then we suddenly have some extra Bitcoin that we didn't have before, and everyone's happy. And I I well, I'm not worried
personally. I I could be completely wrong, but I'm not worried about, like, most people going, do you know what? I really want this loot coin. I actually don't want Bitcoin. I'm not worried about that. I'd like some extra money. It'd be fucking amazing.

(16:22):
Yeah. To be clear, I'm not worried about any likely success of this actually happening. From the the messages the screenshots of the messages, should I say, which again, linked in the show notes, this doesn't seem like it's any more than an idea in his head at the moment. It's been met with understandable amounts of backlash. It's not like this is something imminent that everybody needs to really worry about or anything like that. And even if it was pushed, again, I still don't think it has any success in coming to fruition, shall we say. No. But worst case, I don't think it would be a major problem anyway. And I think, potentially, people who want to create hard forks or create these divides

(17:00):
might fudge the numbers on note count to some degree, and then they might also fudge the numbers on values to some degree to try and create a divide. And then at that point, things that are forked get more value than they should ever have, and
it puts the people in a stronger position who decide to sell those coins

(17:20):
who can maybe start businesses and do more stuff Yep. That actually helps grow Bitcoin. So it's kind of it's a double edged sword, isn't it? It's,
who knows? But I don't know. We said that. Not too worried. Do you think it's worth, like, recapping, like, the short history leading book to this as to why Luke even wants to fork in the first place? And I know I've given, like, a bit of a back history, but there's a lot that's gone on earlier this year, which I think we may have touched on in various little comments, some previous briefs and stuff. But I think it'd be good to have a how did we get here because there's a very clear divide in the Bitcoin community at the moment of basically core versus not. I think it would be really useful to do how did we get here

(17:58):
and then an
unbiased even though we are both biased and we have our thoughts on the situation, obviously, but an unbiased rundown of, okay, what points have the people on this side got, what points the people on that side got,
and try and do it as fairly as possible if there are reasonable. Because what we don't want is, like, ungovernable
to be

(18:19):
aware this side, we're this team, and we'd no matter what, we're this side. Like, if there are good points, if there are reasonable arguments that are being made,
we need to highlight them. And if there are really reasonable points and it is really reasonable, then maybe I change my mind on the thing. So it's worth being as fair as we can for something so important. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Where do I begin? So for the past, like, two or three years, if you've been in around Bitcoin, Twitter,

(18:45):
you will have heard about various different NFTs,
inscriptions,
various different protocols that have been built, quote, on top of or using Bitcoin that have different kind of nonmonetary
purposes
as their primary goal. So NFTs, like, is just basically just degen's kind of trading

(19:08):
nonfungible
tokens.
You've got ordinals that try to give, like, serial numbers to SATs. They say that different SATs have different
values based on whether they were an early block maybe closer to when Satoshi was around or whether they came from a Coinbase
transaction or something like that. And
these different things kind of give different viewpoints and use Bitcoin transactions

(19:31):
to
embed
different types and different amounts of data so that their secondary and tertiary networks can reference that. But the crucial point here is that all of this is in some way, shape, or form tied to the Bitcoin blockchain
by
some additional
data being
included in some way, shape, or form. Again, we'll get into how shortly

(19:53):
into Bitcoin transactions.
Mhmm. There's different ways in which you can
embed data. There's loads of different ways you can do, like again, I won't go into the full details of all of them, but you've got, like, fake public keys. You've got weak private keys. You've got witness envelope data.
You've got just creating additional

(20:13):
UTXOs.
You've got op return data.
They're all stored in different parts of the transaction, so to speak, or parts of the blockchain.
Some of them are deemed to be more
harmful than others. The crux is it's additional data that, let's say, the monetary maximalist side of Bitcoiners, I e, the kind of not crowd, deem as unwanted.

(20:36):
All of these types of transactions
are all consensus valid. They don't break the rules of the network.
They all pay their fees, and they are consensus valid. None of them required any changes to Bitcoin. They all fit within the existing rule set. They all just kind of go about it in different ways. Any questions on that so far before I move forward, Max? Or is that kinda clear? That's fine.

(20:58):
Sorry.
No. I think that's good. Okay. So
in the course of those past couple of years, again,
some of the more harmful ways of inscribing this data have become quite popular. We've seen a big rise in the size of the UTXO set, thanks to some of these inscriptions
and runes and I forget some of the other names, where basically a lot of additional very, very small outputs have been created that

(21:25):
increase the burden onto node runners because they've got to manage all that data, verify all that data, and to deal with it essentially and keep it in their memories, which raises the cost of running a node. So Bitcoin Core Hold on. I do have one there. When we say raises the cost of running a node,
we're talking about
storage?

(21:46):
And RAM.
Specifically, when you have more UTXOs in the UTXO set, which is kind of like all of the unspent coins on the network. It's like the state of the network, essentially, which address owns what coins. Your node has to manage all of that information. And the more data that is, the harder it is to do on shitty hardware. If you're running a node on proper computer, it's insignificant, the rise, but there's a rise nonetheless. And it it has priced out some

(22:12):
cheaper crappy hardware like Raspberry Pi threes, etcetera.
Okay.
And is there anything you know, like, we were talking about Fulcrum and how that gained a load of efficiencies
over, like, Electrum, etcetera.
Are there ways that software that you're running on the hardware
can help manage that better,
not just upgrading hardware as well? Obviously, like Raspberry Pi, no one should be running a node on a Raspberry Pi. It's silly.

(22:38):
But is there, like, other stuff that can be done? Yeah. Probably a little bit above my technical pay grade, unfortunately. I'm gonna say probably yes, but I believe the secondary piece of software
like Electrum, etcetera, I don't know whether they deal with or handle UTXO set
specifically. I think that might be more of a Bitcoin core or Bitcoin knots thing. It's like handle the the I don't wanna say base layer, but the the underlying software that then powers things like Fulcrum.

(23:04):
I might be completely wrong there. Like I say, I'm I'm very much at the end of my technical limits here. Okay. Alright. For the past couple of years, Bitcoin Core has talked about relaxing or removing the op return limit, which has been a very popular way to add additional
data to Bitcoin transactions.
But crucially, in such a way that number one doesn't bloat the UTXO set because op returns are not part of a UTXO, so nodes don't have to store them. Op returns are provably unspendable.

(23:31):
Again, so nodes can just check it and forget it. Well, that's essentially it. That's why this has been one of the the least detrimental ways to do it. For version 30 of Bitcoin Core, which is due out in the next couple of weeks, Bitcoin Core have said that they're gonna completely remove the op return
limit. So the there is no relay policy
limit on op return sizes.

(23:53):
The only limit remains when this goes live is the consensus limit, which is basically the size of a block. So what that means is that if you're running one of these protocols and you wanna store large amounts of data, you can do so in an op return, a very large op return if you want to, in such a way that nodes can if they're not interested in it, they can just not store it. But if you are partaking in some of these additional protocols, like, again, inscriptions, ordinals, or there's additional, like, zero knowledge proof protocols, like scaling solutions and stuff that are in the works as well, they all look to use this op return. You're not interested in any of that, like, you can just disregard the upturn and just keep calm and carry on, so to speak. Now here's where the contention comes in. By relaxing or essentially removing this upturn

(24:41):
data carrier size limit, I believe, of, like, 83
bytes So that the by default, Bitcoin core nodes will then just relay any transaction containing not returned so long as its consent is valid. This is where the contention comes in because
not proponents will say, well, by removing this filter, you're essentially
welcoming

(25:01):
the people that we call spammers
to do more of this, to do more nonmonetary
stuff on Bitcoin, and we do not want that. Whereas the core proponents would say, well, we don't think that filters
are effective
anyway, which is why we're removing it. The reason that core people say that is, well, there's already

(25:24):
massive op returns
being mined
even with the default limit in place. The reason for that is that anybody can have an out of band deal with a miner
to say, hey. Here's my transaction.
It's got a one megabyte
of return. Its consensus valid, but most nodes will not relay it to you. So I'm sending it straight to you. Here's a little bit of exchange on top. Will you mine it for me? And, of course, as you well know, miners are Mhmm. Rational financial actors, and they're gonna go, well, yeah. Give it it. It's valid. And then from that point, once it's been mined, it gets stored

(26:02):
by everyone even if they didn't relay it. Yeah. So that's another good point. Right? Is I'm still talking about the core proponents here where they say filters are ineffective because you can bypass them. I don't think anybody can argue with that because you just gotta look at the blockchain and see what's in there to know that Mhmm. People are circumventing
default
filters.
And Core would say that by removing these limits, they're acknowledging this reality, and they're focusing on better

(26:28):
fee mechanisms
so that anybody who is running the default
software now has a better view of the network so that they can see and price their fees appropriately.
Whereas if we force
these quote, unquote spammers to go direct to minors,
we can't see that. We can't include that transaction in our fee estimations.

(26:49):
And it also potentially
increases
mining centralization
because if miners are taking these
outbound fees from very large well funded actors,
they can become very powerful pretty quickly. And as we know, mining centralization is already a huge problem, if not the biggest problem we have in Bitcoin.
So they don't want to do anything that can force user behavior that further

(27:13):
exacerbates that problem. Makes sense? Any questions? I don't think so at this point. So to flip onto the not side of things, they would say, well,
filters
are effective and have worked historically
because
I think they use the dust limit as a good example of this is that the dust limit is something like 546

(27:34):
sats.
And for as long as Bitcoin's been alive, there's never been a big problem with
transactions creating very, very small UTXs below that limit because
all of the default nodes just won't relay it. They'll just throw away that transaction. That is a fact. Right? But I give them some credit there. But that doesn't mean to say that it is impossible.

(27:55):
Because once again, if you wanted to,
you could go back to a minor.
I don't know why you'd wanna do this, and that's probably
part of the reason why we've not seen it is because there's probably no financial
incentive to do this behavior. But you could go to a miner and say, hey. Mine this transaction for me. I'll make sure one of the outputs is once that. Yeah. Yeah. I believe that that is still within consensus rules.

(28:19):
And the reason we've not seen it by now is because well, twofold. It's
makes no rational sense. And number two, most nodes if you just did it from some default software, it wouldn't even reach a minor because it would be filtered out. Mhmm. So that's the kind of sticking point in terms of the effectiveness of spam filters. I just had a really weird thought. You know, you have all these dust limit UTXOs,

(28:41):
and, like, so many different users have these tiny UTXOs
that are either unspendable or close to being unspendable, and they just sit there.
And sometimes you get sent them, like, you get dusted by people trying to, like, find out some information on you. Weird one. But is there any way
that you could have many

(29:02):
users across the network
create a transaction
using multiple people's
dust limits and small amounts and then have a miner
who agrees to mine it, that that transaction
goes to some type of funding or some type of thing that would benefit Bitcoin as a whole

(29:23):
rather than that sitting as the dust limit or too small to send. It doesn't make financial sense. But, collectively,
with everyone paying a transaction together or a miner doing it knowing it's better for the network, could that then go to fund something? I know this is not the topic we're talking about, but just suddenly I was like, is that possible?
I think, yeah, if you got a miner that was willing to do it for free

(29:46):
and
yeah. I think in theory, it would be possible, but, like, imagine the coordination effort required to get all of those users to sign and pass around a transaction.
Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's probably never gonna happen. But I think True. In theory, it's technically possible.
Okay. Alright.
Alright. So
I guess the the next point of contention would be, like, the definition of spam because, like, spam is, like, the the hot word in in the not proponents camp. They would say

(30:14):
spam is, like, nonmonetary
data abuse,
which is like they would say all the stuff we've just been talking about, like inscriptions, NFTs.
Mhmm. Anything that isn't using Bitcoin
Bitcoin for something
other than money, essentially. They contest that it would congest the network,
bloat the ETXO set, which is absolutely true if done in the most harmful way, can increase node costs, and just basically just deviate away from what they see or what to be honest, what most people see is Bitcoin's core value prop, which is, like, peer to peer electronic cash. Again, I can absolutely align with that. I get it.

(30:51):
SPAM is a precooked,
shelf stable, canned lunch
made from ground pork shoulder and ham mixed with salt, sugar, potato starch, and sodium nitrate, then vacuum sealed and cooked inside the
can. It is sold in rectangular
metal can as a soft, pinkish
brick of meat

(31:12):
surrounded by a natural
gelatin layer. While it can be eaten cold, SPAM is often cooked to be more palatable
and is a versatile ingredient used in various dishes from sandwiches
to stir fries.
Nice. Never actually tried it. Yeah. It's fucking awful, mate. It's horrible.

(31:34):
It it doesn't look great from looking at the can, to be honest.
No. That's horrible. Horrible. And I think only really British would eat it. Yeah. True. Alright. So back to the definition of spam. Obviously, the core proponents would say, like, spam is subjective. It's hard to define it objectively.
All valid transactions within the consensus rule should be allowed because Bitcoin is essentially a permissionless network. Things like up return,

(31:57):
data is harmless because it's pruneable and doesn't blow ETXOs, etcetera, etcetera.
I think where both camps can align is that most
of them
want Bitcoin's primary use case or overwhelming use case to be as money. The difference is that the not crowd see anything other than that as completely unwanted and should be stopped. Whereas the core people see the value in some of these alternative networks

(32:25):
or maybe don't see the value in it, but understand that because it's a permissionless network, it's never gonna be perfect and the consensus rules are there for a reason.
And if it fits within those consensus rules, then, yeah, we might not like it, but so be it. Like, their consensus rule for a reason,
if you don't break them, you're allowed in, so to speak. And they pay the fees. Exactly. Yeah. The bolt onto that is that the fees are the spam filter, so to speak and listeners, there is a great commentary and very long post titled fees are the spam filter or something to that effect by Kelly. That That'll be linked in the show notes as well, which is a a a very good article I urge you to look into or or to check out. So the next kind of point of contention,

(33:06):
which is sort of, I guess, tangential to what we've been saying is, like, the dichotomy between censorship resistance and, I guess, network
integrity.
The core crowd would say prioritizing, like, uncensitrability
is is number one. Filters risk introducing censorship.
They could destroy Bitcoin's value proposition.
They are again, I'm gonna use that term slippery slope. I've also used the term or heard the term whack a mole where it's like, okay.

(33:31):
We're gonna filter this today, and then the quote, unquote spammers find a different way to get around and embed data elsewhere. That may or may not be more harmful, then we try to filter that. And it again, that's when you get the whack a mole where you could it's an unknown, but you could find yourself in a situation where
Bitcoin core or whoever's running the primary reference implementation

(33:51):
are just following these spammers around the network,
trying to block them, and they just keep finding new ways to embed data. Trying to police, sir. Yeah. The North Side would say filters are not censorship, but they are node sovereignty
similar to kind of email spam filters.
The users choose what to relay. And without them, the network loses integrity and becomes a dumping ground for data, which can harm decentralization

(34:16):
and invite central regulatory
risks. The pushback to that that I would have is, yes, you can absolutely filter whatever you want on your node, and I'm never gonna tell anybody what node software to run or what to relay. That's the whole point of running a node is that you get to choose.
But it doesn't change the fact of the reality outside of your world as well and the wider network that you participate in. And, it ain't gonna stop these things getting into blocks if they are consensus valid. It's as simple as that. And

(34:43):
that's, again, one of the main reasons why I lean towards the core viewpoint of what we're talking about here. So I think that's kind of the the crux of it really is that core is removing the opt return limit in v 30 to try and how can I put it? To push nonmonetary
use cases that they know they cannot stop
to a less harmful way of embedding data in the blockchain, I e the opt return,

(35:09):
which again, I can absolutely align with. I'd much rather people do it in opt return because if I don't want my note to care about it, it doesn't need to worry about it. It doesn't need to store it. We can just prune it. I don't have to care about that data. My note just chugs on, stays at the chain tip. Happy days.
I think it would be fair to say that you're probably
aligned with that. Would it be fair to say, Max? Yeah. I mean, at least to my mind, I just kind of see and probably a reason we've not talked about this or gone into massive depth until today

(35:39):
is because I kind of see the argument as a bit fucking pointless.
The reason I've seen it as pointless is because
regardless of what you run,
you end up storing these transactions
anyway. To my mind, and nothing that you said today has sort of changed that really, is that if I was to run NOTS,

(36:00):
my fee estimation would likely be worse. And I do actually use Bitcoin
most days,
so that would probably be quite annoying.
That would be a negative. And then I wouldn't
stop any
so called spam anyway
because the miners are still gonna mine it. You're still gonna store it anyway. All you're doing is you're not relaying it, but that doesn't make a difference

(36:25):
anyway. So that's kind of why I've always just seen it as a bit of a, like
I always just saw it as a bit of, like, a a virtue signal.
A lot of the people who were doing it, they might, like, inscribe or or put their kid's date of birth within a transaction and then tell everyone on Twitter about that. That's fine. But that's fine,

(36:46):
but it's not fine for someone else to do something different. And I just sort of sort of sort of the whole thing as like You know that meme where it's like a park and then there's, like, a little gate and then, like, to the left and to the right of it, there's just open space. And it's like do you know the what I mean? I used it as a response to somebody in the knot's camp last week. Oh. So, yes, I know what I mean. Right. You know exactly. That's basically when I think about this, that image pops in my head. And so I've never really paid it any attention. And a few people have reached out to me saying, like, hey. You know, I know you speak to more technical people.

(37:19):
I use Bitcoin but don't really know, and I keep hearing about this thing. What's your take on it? And it's always just been like, don't fucking worry about it, mate. It doesn't make any difference. And I guess that's kind of still
where I'm at. I don't think I would rush to
update my notes and go on to the newest core version, but I I don't do that anyway. I always lag back quite a fair bit anyway.

(37:42):
I don't
know if
removing
the limit entirely
brings more people to potentially do more things. I don't know. The the only thing, like, I would give a bit of a nod to is
there could be an attack
on node runners
for storing
data that could be deemed to be bad by someone.

(38:06):
That could be an attack that a government could use.
That bit, I'm like,
yeah. Just like when we were talking about, you know, if you're running a lightning node, could you be a money transmitter? Could you be viewed as that? And all these kind of different potential attacks
that a government could throw at you. I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to think, but I just don't think the solution that they've come up with actually solves anything

(38:31):
at all. I will give them a nod there that it's like, that's a reasonable thing to have some worries about.
Outside of that, though, I struggle.
I agree. That is not a new phenomenon. No. No. No. No. For as long as as Opera turns existed or embedding data in fake pub keys and stuff like that has been possible,
that risk has also been possible that you could be storing

(38:52):
some encoded version of something nefarious. Like, this is not a new phenomenon.
No. And it doesn't stop it. So, again, how can I sign this off? I wanna sign this off with two things. Another signpost to the show notes where I'm gonna include a link
to some commentary,
a piece in Bitcoin Magazine by Shinobi

(39:13):
that, again, to be clear, he is in the core camp here very strongly. And the piece is you cannot stop Bitcoin meta protocols.
And he outlined in good detail, basically, where all of the different ways that you can hide arbitrary data in various different parts of the Bitcoin transaction or the wider network and just shows how fruitless it would be to try and play whack a mole and stop all of this. And then the final piece, which is kinda like an open ended question here, really, and the part that although I sit with

(39:43):
my feet more in the alignment with the core camp, something that I'm wrestling with is that when Bitcoin Core version 30 is out and there's no opportune mempool policy or relay limit,
and any basic client can send very large op returns and have them relayed by all other compatible
nodes,
is that I don't know whether that's gonna be enough to stop these degens from

(40:07):
using more nefarious ways to encode the data like the witness envelope, I think they call it, where they put it into the witness data of the transaction.
The reason I say that is that whilst it might seem on the surface of it nice and easy, it's like, oh, I can have one big upturn. I'll just lob all my arbitrary data for my protocol in that one UTXO
knowing that I'm doing the least harmful thing to the Bitcoin network

(40:31):
to achieve my goals. True.
But because with Segwit, the witness data gets discounted,
I'm financially incentivized
to continue using this witness envelope where I stuff all of my arbitrary data into the witness because it costs me much less to do that. And there is still an impact to the UTXO set because

(40:52):
whilst
witness data
can be pruned and discarded
after validation,
The fact that the matter remains is that you need to create a UTXO
and pay that associated
fee for it to be a valid transaction.
So the inscription data or whatever it is is in the least harmful and the cheapest part of the transaction,

(41:13):
but I'm still creating another UTXO and potentially bloating the UTXO set. I'm financially incentivized to continue to do that because it's cheaper than doing it in an opportune. Even though I can now do it in one very big opportune, it's still more expensive for me to do that even though that is the better way for the health of the overall Bitcoin network to get the the same job done, if that makes sense. It does make sense. That's the first time I've heard anything that makes sense at all from the last couple of years. Because if you think about it, people are gonna act in whatever way is best financially for them. You see it with mine as you see it as the the way Bitcoin's kind of built. So

(41:53):
if it makes more financial sense
for
someone to store the data in that way, but it's not as good for the network,
they're gonna probably do that because these are not people probably who particularly care about Bitcoin and, like, they're not, like, in our little groups. You
know? So that does make sense. And then
if they do a lot of that, it does grow the UTXO set, which is more of a burden.

(42:19):
And then do we not have the issue potentially that don't we have, like, a limit to the amount of UTXOs that we can create or something like that? There was all this talk of, you know, not everyone's gonna be able to have a UTXO, and then they're gonna have to be on second layers. You know, once we take over the world and everyone's using Bitcoin, it's like, I've always had the view with all those conversations of,
mate, I can't fucking convince anyone to use Bitcoin. Don't worry about it. Like,

(42:43):
it's, like, one SAP per byte. No one's fucking using it. Like, the only people who are doing it are buying ETFs and stuff. Don't worry about that right now. But, actually,
maybe do worry about it if this is the case and people do find a reason to store CryptoKitties
or whatever
stuff they wanna
put on there. Like, is that gonna be an issue? Yes. So I think what you're referring to is more like

(43:07):
transaction throughput, and you're probably referring to, like, the numbers that were quoted around of, like, yeah, if you wanted to onboard everybody to lightning, yeah, you know, everybody in the world to lightning over the course of share a UTXO. Well, yeah. But if you wanted to serve it, like, one UTXO purpose on earth, it takes something like the entire block space for the next ten years or something like that. Again, don't quote me on the numbers, but it's multiple multiple years. That's assuming that there are no other transactions, only lightning channel open so that everybody's got a UTXO. So is there a theoretical limit on the number of UTXOs?

(43:37):
No.
It's just block space is limited. You're only gonna get a couple of thousand transactions per block. You only get a block every ten minutes, give or take. So you multiply those, you get to multiple years before you get that number of UTXOs. So you just can't create them faster than that, I guess. Yeah. Makes sense. Okay. That maybe then is the first time, like I say, in a few years where I've heard anything where I've gone. That maybe makes some sense.

(44:02):
So I don't know. Is that what do you think? Do you think that's potentially a problem given that these people are gonna do whatever's best for them financially,
obviously? Is it sensible to make it cheapest
to
do
what is worse for the network?
Is there a different way of approaching this
where you're not saying I'm gonna try and filter and do this and do that, but maybe that it's better to do it in opportune

(44:27):
for them financially,
not just for the network and have some alignment there. Yes. So there is already people calling for a removal of the witness discount. Mhmm. But now you're getting into
soft forks or hard forks. I don't know how that would be classified. I'd need to kind of noodle on that. But you're talking about much bigger changes
than simply adding a mempool relay policy that you can either choose to run or choose not to run. Like, you're now messing with consensus rules. As you've seen the complete shit show that we've just talked about of over something so trivial of as mempool policy,

(45:01):
Imagine trying to get the witness discount removed or changed as part of a soft fork or, you know, how long have we been talking about CTV or
checksick from start? Like, the appetite to do those types of changes
is waning by the day and becomes more and more difficult, especially as the kind of community
or air quotes community

(45:21):
becomes more and more fractured. Like, trying to get something like that over the line, it just seems
well I agree. Yeah. You're right. An absolute insane impossible, but, like, it seems very unlikely.
I agree. And my guess is if people are gonna be using
that as a storage method rather than not return,
my guess is it's not gonna be as much as people worry about, and it's probably gonna be a massive nothing burger. But it's just worth pointing out that that is a valid

(45:49):
reasonable concern that could
be a problem.
But then I suppose if it was a problem, then there would be a way to look and make some adjustments potentially in the future. But I don't wanna be too one-sided. I'm still very much in the other side of, like, it's everything I've heard from the knots crowd and the ideas that have been passed to me seems silly to me, but that seems

(46:11):
potentially reasonable.
Yeah. Yeah. To summarize, I I can sympathize
with both sides.
I have zero interest in these NFT tokens, ordinals,
JPEGs. I think they're all complete bullshit, and it's just DJ gambling. I don't ever see a time where I would ever want to actively partake in something like that. So I get it. Like, I understand that in an ideal world, we wouldn't have that. But there is factual information that clearly demonstrate that it's almost impossible, if not, it is impossible to just prevent people from hiding data

(46:44):
in transactions. There's just so many different ways that you can do it, and it's a fool's errand
to try and play whack a mole. It's a bit like the war on drugs.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But I guess to put my my not hat on, then
they would say, well, you know, using that analogy,
that's just like the US government said, okay. Do what you want. Yeah. And you might say, well, yeah. Good. Because, you know, you think the war on drugs is stupid. So there's so many analogies that have been used in this. It's a difficult one, but I just think that, ultimately, we've got to align with reality.

(47:14):
Yeah. I would just say a final point on it as well. The
excuse
or reasoning that's being pulled out of Save the Children
is another one where, first of all, it's always a red flag because it's like,
okay. Right? It's that's always the one that's used. It's like Save the children. It's always to try and push something that's generally not better for the world. If people were gonna try and store that kind of data or information,

(47:39):
like we said, they would be able to do it anyway
regardless of the changes that you make. And I can't imagine
that Bitcoin would be the first choice
for that type of storage.
Do you know what I mean? It's expensive.
It's not why use it unless you were a government agent trying to cause disruption or something like that. I don't really understand why someone would use that to store that kind of data. It just doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. I tend to agree, mate, and that's why I align the way that I align. So, yeah, hopefully, that's been useful. Useful. Clearly, we've got our biases

(48:16):
and both of the articles that I referenced, one by Kale, one by Shinobi. Again, they align with our viewpoint. So bear that in mind, and that's why I'm linking them because I think they make sense. Have a read and, you know, if you agree, let us know why. If we've missed anything, got anything wrong, please do let us know. It's an absolute minefield, and it shows no sign of slowing down at the moment, and the discourse is only going backwards.

(48:36):
Yeah. Try and be nice to each other. Even though it's funny, like, some of the dunks and stuff that I see, they do make me chuckle at times, but, like, most of the people who bother to spend their time on Twitter and these other places as a general rule probably align with
95%
of their views.
Most people do care about freedom. Most people do care about raising strong families, and, generally, they're pretty decent people. If you meet you know, even a lot of the people in the nots crowd, which I don't agree with, like, a lot of them are people I'd happily sit and have a beer with, and they're nice people. And you agree with more than you disagree and try to just remember that because my guess with a lot of the arguments that I've seen over the last three years, five years

(49:20):
seem to
have a bit of a glow, and they seem to be more about trying to divide
an otherwise pretty strong community or group of people with pretty aligned views. And divide and conquer has always been the technique used. It will always be used, and it seems as though
it might be being used now.

(49:42):
So just I don't know. Maybe it's best just to be a little bit more respectful and kind to each other, and you can agree to disagree with some of this stuff that actually at the end of the day doesn't really change things.
Yeah. Agreed. To cosign that, yeah, it's just got very tribal at the moment.
I actively, like, tell myself to kinda check my biases when I I'll see a tweet from somebody,

(50:02):
not proponent.
My monkey brain is like, oh, they're a stupid fucking knob ad, and and I'm like, hang on a minute. Hang on a minute. Try
try and see it from their point of view. And, you know, like I said multiple times, I can sympathize with
some of the stuff that they're saying, but reality
is too big of a slap in the face for me, unfortunately. Fair enough.
Alright. Well, we've both lost some brain cells there. I haven't got many more to lose, so let's move on. Any other news, or are we into boosts?

(50:30):
Just one other news piece. And, again, this comes from the rage or an article in The Rage will be linked in the show notes as always. The good old government of Canada
have seized $56,000,000
of customer funds
from
Oh, is this this ogre thing or something?
Trade ogre that they're alleging

(50:51):
stems from illicit activity. Would you believe it?
So yesterday, Canadian author yesterday, when this article was published, it's probably like a week ago now,
confirmed that the exchange has been seized in a press release. In total, the funds now in possession of Canadian authorities amount to over 56,000,000.
But the funds seized appear to belong to trade over customers,

(51:14):
and no charges have been filed.
The police is now considering whether to forfeit the seized assets as property of the state,
the globe, the mail have reported. According to sergeant Lagarde,
the Canadian police believe Trade Ogo is run by a man in The United States who recently passed away. So TradeOgo, for those that don't know, is a custodial no KYC exchange, particularly popular among the Monero crowd,

(51:39):
where users can sign up with just an email address. A file on TradeOgo was first opened by Canadian authorities in June '24 following a tip from Interpol.
The investigation found that the platform contravened Canadian laws and regulations.
Pressley states, quote, specifically, it failed to register with the Financial
Transactions and Reports,
Analyst Centre of Canada, Fintrac,

(52:01):
as a money service business and did not identify
its clients.
However, the funds seized by Canadian law enforcement appear to belong to the customers and not to the operators of the website, and the investigation
is ongoing.
Not your keys, not your coins. Yeah. Exactly that. Couldn't have summarized it better myself.
I think in a bizarre twist,

(52:23):
I believe that the Canadian government, when they took control of the funds
sorry. When they stole the funds,
they did a an op return message
that said I'm just quickly frantically trying to find the op return. Here we go. Look. They embedded some spam into the blockchain, Max, by an op return.

(52:44):
It says crypto assets controlled by the RCMP,
and then it they've done it again in French.
So that was the first,
like, inkling that something
yes. That was the first inkling of this where, basically, they clearly got private keys from whoever's running Trade Ogre or was running if he's now dead. And then they've moved him somewhere and

(53:06):
put an opportunity to say, yeah. We stole this shit, which I thought was strange. Like, they clearly didn't need to do that. It's later come to pass that, you know, it was actually them because some people were saying, oh, you know, this is somebody trying to vote and accident their funds. But apparently, no. It is it is true that the Canadian government have got those in custody and what's gonna happen to them remains to be seen.

(53:27):
So, again, not your keys, not your coins. If you are gonna use an exchange, try using a noncustodial
one that preferably a peer to peer one like peach, Robosatz,
etcetera.
Yeah. Definitely do. Or if you insist on using a centralized one, just withdraw immediately.
And, also, with all of this stuff, I would say
do smaller amounts. Don't go and fucking

(53:50):
put your whole life savings onto an exchange to do it in one go because you've got all your eggs in one basket. They'll shotgun KYC you or you get hacked or they get hacked or the fucking Canadian government hacks you.
You like,
you'd just be a little bit thoughtful about spreading risk. Like, a lot of what we talk about is spreading risk, and then I see people, like, worrying about the most minute details. And then they go and put, like, in a 100% of their net worth

(54:20):
onto some exchange, which they now have no control over. And they're now back into the fiat system, but worse. Just think. Just be careful.
Yeah. Cosign that. Right. Shall we hit the boosts?
Let's do it. I'll, kick us off with expatriotic
of 0.166666667.
Excellent. Great show as always. I especially liked the part where the suits say using any kind of normal Bitcoin wallet with coin control should be illegal.

(54:49):
This is why I don't play with KYC Bitcoin. Mining it or buying with cash is the way. Yeah. I agree. If you've got those options available to you and they make sense, do it. A 100%. Thanks,
Thank you for actually getting the boost together so that we can read them, but also boosting
yourself as well. What a guy. What a guy. Liberty Pharma sends 5,500

(55:09):
sats and says,
5¢
is half the ETH network.
Amazing.
That was my incredible joke from last time. Thanks, Liberty Farm. Late stage Huddle with 5,000 sats. Thank you, sir. He says, oh, please. I've been held at gunpoint by local police many times in different jurisdictions.
It's totally fine.

(55:30):
New Orleans police were likely the scariest encounter, though. Definitely the biggest assholes.
Max, you better come visit us in the, quote, land of the free one day to experience our form of freedom,
which always involves guns whether you like it or not. Late stage, I will
I need more information. I need to know what you were up to to be held at gunpoint by police in New Orleans if you are able to share that information without doxing yourself. Doxing too badly. Yeah. That sounds like a story I wanna hear. Yeah. Oh, please. I've been held at gunpoint

(56:02):
many times. It's like, okay.
As you do. It's not enjoyable.
Honestly, like, my experience was not an enjoyable one. It's not something I'm like, oh, come on.
Live and let live. It's only a bit of gun in face action. Like, I don't know. It I found it intimidating. I'm obviously not as brave as you. Wartime.

(56:23):
Pip Pip and Cheerio
wartime again.
Nice. I was hoping you were gonna do that.
I love how Peter's become part of the show. This is his best work, to be honest.
And
a high five and
a little bit of a Okay. That's fine.

(56:44):
Pies. Hey. Chingy. Chingy.
Chingy. Do the 121
sats.

(57:04):
I think he's just generally talking about we do a lot of Freedom Tech. We actually this last month has been mainly Freedom Tech Fridays because Karim has had other stuff. He hasn't been able to edit the episodes I've done with John in time, and then we haven't had a confag for a little bit of time. So I think Pies likes to sort of be with his own, and I think he feels probably slightly intimidated by us Brits. And he thinks, like,

(57:29):
I need to have the American Badass on there so
that will make me happy. And Pies is coming very soon. Very, very soon. I think, actually, the next episode will be with our good friend, John. In terms of host split, we are fifty fifty between Brits and Yanks. Yeah. We are, actually.
Seth and John

(57:49):
and me
and you. And then, occasionally, we throw in a Canadian. Like, you just get a little bit of Jordan here and there. So I think we're very diverse.
Straight white men. Yeah.
Indeed. Right. Signers off. We've got Block 7 boosted 1,240
sats. Eric PP boosted 860
sats.
Shadowy Superbadger streamed 600 sats. And VMVD

(58:12):
boosted 340
sats. Thank you, everybody.
Yeah. Thank you very, very much.
Right. We have you can choose now, Max. We've got the weekly question, or we've got updates and releases. Which ones do you want? I would like the weekly question, please.
Okeydokey.
Well, this one came through just this morning. It was actually for Freedom Tech Friday. They used the hashtag as well. Thank you very much for using the hashtag. It helps raise awareness. But I thought it was proper for the brief. So I've notified TamTam Bam on Nosta. Thank you for your question that it would be answered on this show. Here comes the question. I've been having a little thought about p two p exchanges like BISK and Robosats.

(58:51):
As much as it feels nicer to not be buying any sats from the likes of Coinbase or even Strike with their KYC footprint,
the fact is these private exchanges
still have some traceability.
For instance, there is a Bitcoin movement from an address, possibly on chain to Lightning in preparation for the trade,
and then money arriving at a bank account often from abroad from an unknown third party.

(59:16):
There's also the fact that when buying that you know the third party's personal details, which always makes me slightly uneasy. It's not rocket science for law enforcement or government to see and synchronize these movements.
This, I would think, is especially noticeable when larger amounts are being sent or received as I'm sure this could be flagged by the various banks that handle the transfer. On top of that, you ultimately don't know the source of the Bitcoin you receive in the case of buying, which could be linked to some shady goings on somewhere which you are now associated with accidentally

(59:48):
unbeknownst to you.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts
on the perceived and actual anonymity of these p two p exchanges as for me, they seem tenuous
at best. What a great question.
Great question.
One, I think, though, that we have answered over the last,
how long have we been recording together? Five years or something like that? Six years? I don't know. A a long time. This is something that we have really,

(01:00:15):
discussed
to death, I think, especially with
my main concern being when you're saying about the p two p exchanges and someone has your details,
you're saying in there, like, oh, it wouldn't be that difficult to law enforcement or government to synchronize these movements.
Not only that, they might be the other side of it. I mean, that's what I would do. I I said this to Seth the other day, and he was, oh, I never really thought of that. And it's like, that's exactly what I would do. I would just set up and just sit and wait and gather data.

(01:00:44):
So
I don't know. That is a great, great question, and I think one that a lot of people just are not thinking through properly
when they say, oh, I'm KYC free. I'm untouchable. It's like, okay. Think of it fucking deeper, mate. Yeah. The way the question's outlined is wonderful. I will start off by saying, like, you're basically right in everything that you say. And I think

(01:01:05):
what needs to be said is change the way that you view what these types of exchanges are for. If you're a drug baron, you wanna use crypto to fund your operations, then number one, probably don't use a transparent ledger. Number two, probably don't start buying it with your bank account. Like, if the government is your primary
person that you want to hide any and all cryptocurrency activity from,

(01:01:30):
don't use pay to pay exchanges, don't use any exchanges,
and probably don't use Bitcoin either. I know that sounds weird coming from me. There's not many ways that you can hide from the government these days. And using something like peach or Robosats
on its own is not gonna do that for you. However,
if you're
worried
about
your personal information being leaked on the dark net market for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people to purchase at very low cost and then decide that they might want to pay you a visit with a very large hammer and say, give me all your fucking Bitcoin, and we're gonna cave your head in.

(01:02:02):
If that sounds like a scenario that you don't wanna find yourself in, then maybe buying Bitcoin from another peer on the network, which again could be law enforcement. But, again, you ain't doing anything unlawful here. Or could be a hammer wielding psychopath.
Yes. Fair comment. Fair comment. Then that's again a trade off that you make. And that's one of the main reasons that I say to people is it's more for your own personal privacy against

(01:02:26):
the general public. Yes. You're giving away depending on how you do the trade, you're giving away some personal information
to a trade partner. But if I buy from somebody
in France and I use Revolut, then that person sees my Revolut tag. They don't know where I live. They probably don't even know what country I'm in. They just see that I'm a Revolut user, and they may see my bank account account details where all the account that it's come from. If they are a hammer wielding maniac,

(01:02:51):
that still doesn't give them enough information to
come to my house and cave my head in. So I've avoided that, and I've also avoided the fact that I'm now not on a centralized database like Coinbase that could be leaked at any time and then be bought by the highest bidder. So I think people just need to shift how they
view these tools. They are not perfect privacy.

(01:03:11):
They just allow you to obtain Bitcoin
in a more private manner
than is the norm. Is that fair, Harrison?
It's fair ish. The the one point I would add to that is if you're using a service like Revolut and you're just giving your Revolut tag or whatever you're saying,
the
ability for the person that you're selling to relies

(01:03:33):
on Revolut keeping your details
private and secure and that they don't have any leaks as well because that is a centralized entity. And if that person was to gather that information that I imagine would also be sold on the dark net, they could put one and one together, and they would get two. And so that is also potentially
a risk, although it's less of a risk. It's like two FA. Like, you know what I mean? It's like it's one extra step, so it's better.

(01:03:59):
The other thing I would say is twofold is, one,
if you're using something like Revolut or
another bank to receive these transactions,
they can, at any point, seize your funds Probably will. Probably will seize your funds, ask a load of questions
over and over and over again, probably in some sort of ridiculous support loop with people that just have no fucking idea what's going on. You might struggle to get the funds back. You might have to release a load of information to them or probably will have to release a load of information to them to do, like, a shotgun KYC thing that they could then leak or lose or misuse.

(01:04:37):
And I would say if you are
doing this, probably have a dedicated bank account that is separate to all your other bank accounts
because, otherwise, suddenly, you can't pay your mortgage or anything else. That is something to be thoughtful. And the the final point that I'll make on this is
think about what you're gonna use the funds for
that you're selling

(01:04:58):
the Bitcoin or Monero or whatever else you're selling
for. Because if it's just to do your shopping and daily expenses and whatever else, I'd use a fucking gift card because that is a much less intrusive
Less friction. Something that attracts less, yeah, less friction and attracts less problems.
So if you're just saying, oh, I need to pay the fuel. I need to go to Tesco's and buy a fucking chicken,

(01:05:22):
a couple of beers, whatever,
go and do that with gift cards. That's much, much better.
But if you're saying, oh, well, you know, I've held Bitcoin for ten years, and I really wanna do my bathroom and, you know, I don't like the tiles and I wanna pay the person in cash, and that's the only way I can do it,
then, okay, maybe do it this way and do the peer to peer. But if you're gonna go and buy something larger like a car or a home

(01:05:48):
or
something
of larger value,
just know that you're gonna have a fucking nightmare
if you start trying to say, oh, what's your source of funds? Oh, well, I had some Bitcoin that I bought and I mined here, and then I sold it on this thing called Robosats.
And here's the transaction ID. They're gonna fucking flag the shit out of you and seize your funds.

(01:06:12):
Just know that. So if you are gonna do that, you're probably better off using an exchange in all honesty. Like, I know that's gay and whatever else, but it's true.
Yeah. Can't say more than that, really. Great question, by the way. Yeah. Love it. It's a very nuanced topic. It can be a useful tool in the right application.
Alright.
Onto the updates and releases. We just had a question about peer to peer exchanges, and the first one on the update list is Peach Bitcoin. Mhmm. Just released version 69.

(01:06:40):
Nice.
Nice.
So what's new in version 69? Nice. Well, until now, only sellers could post offers on Peach, And I'm quoting here. That worked, and it got us here. But it was always a limitation.
Buyers had to wait for what was available, scrolling through the options in the hope for basically a trade that met their criteria as in premium payment method, etcetera, etcetera. Well, with version 69 Nice.

(01:07:06):
Buyers can now post offers too. So that means that both sides can now set the terms, creating a true two way marketplace for more matches
and more liquidity and hopefully
less waiting around.
So this kinda brings it in line now with most of the other peer to peer models where you can go on and post an offer for a buy, or you can go on and post an offer for a sell. And depending on which end of the trade, you wait for the trading partner to come along to kind of meet your trade offer, if that makes sense. So it's it makes it, like the name suggests, more of a two way marketplace.

(01:07:41):
Always like the peach UI as well, actually. I think they've done a good job with that. It's just nice and don't know if you've used it lately, but it feels like just light and airy. I know that sounds like a weird way to describe a UI, but I know you, man. They've just done a good job. That's what you want. Nice job on the version number as well. Nice.
Nice.
Nice.
Yeah. And I just saw as well today, we have done 420

(01:08:05):
episodes as of today for Ungovernable Misfit. So we got 42069.
Nice.
No way. Yeah. Oh, shit. Nice.
42069.
420
episodes. Congrats. Thanks, mate. I'd be keen to know how many we've done together. Do you reckon it's more than a 100? I would think it's probably about a we used to put the number in, didn't we, how many

(01:08:28):
episodes? But then also we got the Freedom Tech Fridays. I think it must be about a 100. We did it monthly for a while, then the Bitcoin brief went fortnightly,
then we added in a weekly show.
Jeez. Do you know what? You lot listening to this. So lucky to have us.
I think it's the other way around, actually.

(01:08:49):
Like, how lucky are we that there are people who care about what we're talking about,
and they're weird enough to tune in on a weekly basis.
And then also We get we out. I agree. Unbelievable. Thank you.
Anyway, yeah. So thank you to listeners for turning up every week, every month, or every fortnight depending on what show you listen to. And hats off to peak Bitcoin. They seem to be standing the test of time, and, yeah, long may it continue. Next up on the list, we have Fulcrum version

(01:09:19):
two point zero has been released.
This one came across my radar thanks to Jordan. I saw him retweet that two point o is out. Fulcrumb, for those of you that don't know, is the, like, super performant Electrum server that was built by a shock shitcoiner. Mhmm. Bcash, aren't they? Not my words, by the way. I'm just posting the irony. But, yeah, he was a Bcashier, and he made a very performant Electrum server that could deal with all of the stuff, I guess, that they've got on their blockchain

(01:09:48):
and then made it compatible with the actual Bitcoin. And it kind of blew
all of the other, Electrum servers out of the water in terms of, like, index performance and stuff. So version two's out. The main highlights here are database reliability.
One of the main weaknesses of Fulcrum version one was that if the process was killed at an inopportune time

(01:10:09):
or should have some abrupt power loss, there was always a risk that the data directory would get corrupted and the the NodeRunner would basically
be forced to do a full database
resync. Yep. Well, apparently, this is no longer the case. And I want by a show of hands or comments if you're a fulcrum runner. I'm willing to bet more than 50% of the fulcrum runners in the audience

(01:10:31):
will have gone through this at some point. I know I have, and I know for sure you have as well. Oh, yeah. So, hopefully, now according to fulcrum version two no longer suffers from this problem. Processes can be killed at any time, including
power losses, and it will avoid database corruption. And at worst, the last few blocks worth of data will be rolled back, and Fulcrum will resync from the rollback point.

(01:10:53):
Big selling point. There's just some other performance optimizations as well. And I just wanna touch on Jordan's tweet. He said, thanks
to cc
elenu or however it is that you pronounce that, for developing this new version of Fulcrum. I've created a new branch for Fulcrum on start nine called two point zero, and I'm currently running the Fulcrum two point o beta.

(01:11:13):
As with the prior Fulcrum release, it works with Mainnet and Testnet, and he is currently testing on Testnet.
Yeah. It looks like you can already get this on the
Start nine beta
community store. Nice. So, hat's it. Well done, mate. Well done, mate.
Always there just hustling in the background, just getting shit done. I just got a message.

(01:11:33):
B t wrestle has just messaged me
for our, updates. Late as always. No. That's actually not true. He hasn't just messaged me. He messaged me
while I was sleeping. He has said,
listening and commenting live while crawling under someone's house. That's what he's just said to me. That was for the Freedom Tech Friday. That's true dedication.

(01:11:54):
We love you for that. And then he sent over
BISK,
seven day volume
1.3508
BTC
twenty four hour volume is 0.667
Robosats
had
33 public buy orders
1,549

(01:12:15):
active robots,
a 3%
premium on no KYC Bitcoin. There was also a twenty four hour contracted
volume of 0.234
Bitcoin. Ashigaru Whirlpool summary, Whirlpool is up over 10 BTC,
up $1,030,000

(01:12:36):
since the last brief. It now has an unspent capacity of 45.48 Bitcoin.
Capacity of 45.48
Bitcoin
and an unspent
value of $5,040,000.
Nice. Thank you, Beatrice Russell.
Maybe one of these days, we can get Max to remember to read them at the start of the show. I I thought I just threw them in as and when. I didn't know we had, like, a specified

(01:13:01):
section.
Well, let's let the listeners decide, shall we? When do you want it included listeners? Do you want it at the front of the show, at the back of the show, or just randomly in the middle?
Yeah. And, also, I'd like a little intro music for him. I think we've said about that. So if anyone has made some intro music, let me know, or maybe Karen will insert some intro music or something. But I think it sort of deserves that as he's bothering to send that over each week. Oh, feels like we've got a great opportunity here to pick out some great, like, wrestling walk on music. Oh, yeah. I don't know. You know, like, Triple H or something like that or The Undertaker. That's a good idea. I like that. And it just comes in unannounced

(01:13:37):
just like over the ropes, just body slams people. It comes out of nowhere. You never know when it's coming. Yeah. Okay. Alright.
What was the one where it's like?
I've I've butchered that, but, I'm gonna have to find it now. I never really watched wrestling. All I remember from wrestling is we had this one kid at my school who was obsessed, like, autistically

(01:13:58):
obsessed with wrestling.
And you just be sort of walking around or, like, just getting about your business.
You suddenly just fly off a fucking wall and be, like,
smashing you or do like, doing these different wrestling moves and stuff and then just run away again.
Fucking weird. What was the thing? Body slam.
Like, all that shit.

(01:14:21):
I'm gonna have to find out now who that American wrestler was. There'll be somebody listening to this. He he used to have, like, American trunks on. Oh,
Not Hulk Hogan? No. No. He's after Hulk Hogan. Undertaker's
role? Like, in the late nineties. Know. No. Not Undertaker. Someone would have It was in the Triple H days anyway. I'll find it, but if I don't find it, somebody comment who was there. Kurt Angle. Kurt Angle. There we go.

(01:14:47):
Kurt Angle. That's what BC Wrestle's, intro music needs to be. Alright. I'm sure he can do that.
Anyway, on with the show. Yes. Liana Bitcoin version 13, release candidate two, has been released. This release mostly modifies the Liana graphical user interface by adding new features.
They've got encrypted descriptor support. So they've implemented encrypted descriptor backup and import functionality for enhanced privacy.

(01:15:12):
Encryption keys are derived from the
lexicographically
stored public keys
inside the descriptor or policy. Yeah. Yeah. I thought you thought they'd do it that way, didn't you? Yeah. I did. That's how I'd have done it. So any party who already holds one of the keys can later decrypt the backup without extra secrets or round trips. That's pretty cool. I like that. Fiat currency features, test net four support, and then some improvements, homepage refresh, UI improvements, network validation, bug fixes, code refactoring, blah blah blah. Nice. I like Liana. I like well, we've talked about Miniscript a few times, haven't we? So Mhmm. I, I'm excited to see the proliferation of these tools. Speaking of which, it's almost as if I planned this. Latest Nunchuk version is out one point seven point two. They have introduced a new feature called Zen HODL, and I want your hot take on this one, Max. Oh, okay. A new mini script template to automatically lock your Bitcoin for a set period.

(01:16:07):
Self enforced discipline that protects generational wealth. Why use it? True HODLing protects your staff from emotional short term decisions.
Tax planning creates an immutable record of your holding period for capital gains.
Find your zen, available now in the latest Nunchuk app. How do I feel about that? In theory, as long as it all works and they definitely unlock and everything's set up correctly and blah blah blah, maybe okay,

(01:16:35):
but I would just say
it wouldn't be for me personally
because you never know what life's gonna throw at you. Can you imagine? You're like, right. That's it. Like, it's probably good for, like, traders and stuff, especially people who are like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna fucking this is the top, and I'm gonna down. I'm gonna buy back lower. And if you're that if you're that person, probably this isn't the worst idea. And if it's not all your net worth, it's probably not the worst idea. Imagine locking it all up,

(01:17:00):
and then you're, like, right ten years, and then one of your loved ones gets cancer. Or you need to pay for some massive unexpected
thing that you would do anything you could to soar.
And you're like, I have the money in theory, but there's actually literally nothing that I can do because this is locked up. Mhmm. Imagine that feeling. Suddenly, Bitcoin that was such a useful tool

(01:17:24):
becomes completely fucking useless.
So I would say
probably better to have some self control and self regulate
rather than enforcing it on chain.
But if you don't have any self control and it's not all your money, maybe not the worst thing. That's my take. Yeah. Indeed. And to be fair, I think the limitations of the Bitcoin network mean that you can't lock it for, like, ten years yet anyway.

(01:17:48):
Right. Okay. I might be wrong there. I think it's shorter than that. But Okay. I'm not using MiniScript, I don't think. I think the maximum is, like, a year before you need to roll it over again or a year and a half.
You can lock it if you're technical enough, you can do it without MiniScript, can't you? You can lock coins?
Correct. Yeah. But then you don't get the benefit of, like, adding additional keys if you fuck up or removing valid keys and shit like that. Yeah. Fair enough. If you wanna be a complete retard and just use a time lock, then, yeah, go for it.

(01:18:19):
You're welcome. And if you wanna see what it looks like, click link in the show notes. Nunchuk, we've got some videos there as well. Okay. I do like the way that they're approaching it, though, where it's like they've got these models where I'm just looking at the screenshot now. They've got rather than you going in and having to kind of decide what a good miniscript
multisig
policy looks like, they have these guardrails where it's like, I want an expanding multisig, or I want a decaying multisig.

(01:18:44):
I want a flexible multisig, or now I want a Zen HODL.
So that's that's nice. Guard rails. Because it is it's a scary thing. It's not something especially when you get into the realms of time locks, you shouldn't fuck about. No. Although I think that that is retarded for most people, that specific
thing, I think from every I've not used Nunchuck, but everything that I've heard from you and others, they're doing a really, really good job of making Multisig more approachable. So, yeah, respect to them. Yeah. Just to correct myself, you can do it for a very long period of time in Nunchuk itself, so be fucking careful. Oh, and on that note, also linked in the show notes, BT Sessions got another great tutorial, video tutorial on using Nunchuk and all the manuscript features, so go check that out as well. Last one on the releases is

(01:19:29):
is Moxtro version one. They finally, got to a version one release.
The Moxtro mobile app is a secure mobile client for the Moxtro peer to peer Bitcoin trading platform. I'm quoting here, obviously. This is a fully featured mobile application that enables secure, private, decentralized Bitcoin trading
over the Lightning Network using the Nosta protocol.
Built with Flutter, it provides a native mobile experience for conducting peer to peer trades with advanced privacy

(01:19:54):
features and a modern UI UX design. So some of the key features, privacy first architecture.
They use encrypted DMs over the NOSTA network for all trade communications,
usual HD wallet and all that sort of stuff, multi language support, slightly network integration,
live order book, real time trading, etcetera. So

(01:20:15):
you can kind of look at this as like
Robosats or peach, but instead of the centralized entity in the middle holding the order book, all of that lives on the Nasdaq network
so that it's much more decentralized, and there is no kind of single head to chop off if you wanna take down Peach. Mhmm. Maybe Robosats was a bad example there because they do some Nasdaq integration, and they also have different coordinators.

(01:20:38):
But, yeah, especially if you're comparing something like HODL HODL or or Peach, whether it's a central entity,
Maestro aims to fix that by being nosta native.
This has been in the works for a number of years now, and, it's good to see them get out to a version one release, which, you know, communicates to me at least that there's a good level of stability here. So maybe we're checking out if you're in the market for a, a peer to peer mobile app and you're, a Nostril like my good self. Very good. Last two things, they're not releases, but stuff I wanted to to signpost people to because they're they're pretty cool. There is a a teaser video linked in the show notes for a name called Cypherpunk

(01:21:16):
teasing that Bull Bitcoin is about to do a release with ARC integration, something that we spoke about
at length in previous shows. And also on the ARC thread,
Roy from Breeze, done some wonderful,
articles in the past,
has recently had a piece in Bitcoin magazine
called ARC and Spark, the channel factories we've been waiting for. So if you wanna get your nerd on and figure out what the hell all this Arc and Spark is and the trade offs between them and what they can enable, link will be in the show notes. Very nice. That brings me to the end of the list.

(01:21:49):
Okay, mate. Well, lovely to speak to you. It won't be too long until we speak again, will it? Friday. Friday from Madrid. No idea where I'm gonna record from yet, but, I'll figure it out when I get there on Thursday. You'd be sat there with a nice cold beer.
Maybe. May I've I just looked at the weather, actually. It's, it's fucking freezing here in The UK, and I just looked and it's, like, nearly 30 degrees in Madrid this week. So it's gonna be a bit of a shock to the system. Lovely.

(01:22:13):
Alright, mate. Will you enjoy that? Yeah. For you, Yanks, that's, like, 85.
Alright, mate. I will catch you on Friday. Enjoy Madrid, and speak to you soon. Alright. Cheers, guys. Catch you later.
Before you
go, mine inbox.i0
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(01:22:35):
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Untangling Knots vs. Core | THE BITCOIN BRIEF 66

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Untangling Knots vs. Core | THE BITCOIN BRIEF 66