0:00 John Attack, welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity show. Lovely to have you back. And warm welcome to your flyswatter too. How are you doing, Knut? I always want to say Knut and not Knut, but hey. Yeah, a lot of people do that. I know you'll forgive me. It's like Knott's Knut. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm the one with the non-silent K. We don't do very many silent letters in Scandinavian languages. We don't see the point of them. I don't think Finnish has any silent letters. It's Finnish in more explicit language then. Yeah. Anyway, John and I recently did a pod.

0:41 You haven't done very many pods at all up until 2026, I believe. But if you go back to Bitcoin Infinity Show number 195, that's a couple of months back. John and I did one where we tell the story about my first book, Bitcoin Sovereignty to Mathematics, who looked like this back then. John helped me up with that. And John gives his story in that pod. So if you want to listen to the story about John's background and how he became a core developer and how he ceased to be a core developer and all of this, you should listen to that pod. Or I don't know if you have ceased to be a core developer. I don't think that's how it works.

1:21 But anyway, in this, we're just going to dive into whatever we're going to talk about today. And at least a part of that is Hodlumlot's wonderful articles that have come out over the last couple of months too, I guess. So if I can share my screen here, let's see. Here we have a, yes, these three things here. Capture is the title of all the articles. There is one more coming, I know. So there will be four in total. The next one, The Lever.

2:01 And the third one that came out like a week or two ago is called The Merge. So you find them at citadel21.com. So make sure you check them out and read them. Regardless of what side of this debate you're on, these reads are very interesting and they're based on real events but you were in the middle of all these debacles john so so you have maybe a slightly different perspective than hodl or not and yeah what are your what are your thoughts on his articles let's let's start there shall we yeah that sounds good i brought some props while you were talking these are bananas right from the land here. They're small and they're super good. They're so sweet. Homegrown bananas and a bullshit meter. And so we can use this to check some claims as to how much bullshit is in them.

2:55 I actually have, I think, a finely attuned internal bullshit reader detector. I'm probably the oldest person in Bitcoin Core, easily. So I don't really need this, but this can be fun sometimes as a prop for reading bullshit, levels of bullshit. So the articles, well, I've actually sent a lot of corrections and modification proposals to over the past months. Like anything that seemed to me incorrect or weak, I actually sent him, I tried to help him so that at least factually they were not easily attackable. There were some things that I did not still understand about the merge article until after it was published.

3:38 For instance, I had an exchange on Twitter where I asked if anybody knew why the op return change had not, why it's history as Clementine Bridge had not been updated for the op return uncapping, why they had stayed with the method that they outlined in their white paper of using a small 83-byte operaturn plus two unspendable, untrunable taproot outputs. And I had thought that they had not updated, but it turns out that they, and I learned thanks to Twitter, that they recently had. And it shows a weakness of AI because I actually tried to find out using AI just to verify it.

4:19 And AI consistently said, nope, nope, they never updated. but in fact Twitter had tipped to Lauren MT in France and then to Ikram Bal himself who confirmed directly from Citria that they did begin to update. It was merged into a testing branch but it is not yet on mainnet and my main interest curiosity out of personal curiosity was what were the criteria that Citria used to determine if they should upgrade and when and that was a factual part of the last article that I did not know until after it was published. And it got me thinking, I was curious, hey, everyone says that Citraea was the justification.

5:01 The example, oh no, Citraea is using unfunable outputs. Well, that didn't make sense to me. Then why didn't they upgrade? Financially, it probably didn't change a lot for them. So yes, there was some engineering effort required to upgrade. The main hesitation I could see Satria having, and that was my working progress hypothesis, was that they had to be absolutely sure that it would be relayed in mind, those transactions would be relayed in mind into a block within the time window for the watchtower challenge. And that window was a week or two weeks, I don't recall off the top of my head, but they had to be absolutely sure that those would get in and enough of the network had to be relaying and mining the core V30 and onwards for that to work.

5:52 That was my hypothesis, and I think that was pretty much confirmed by Ekrem. So that was something that I learned after the article came out, which was good. Yeah, he wrote, we ran some experiments to see how quickly these transactions get mined, Ekrem Val, and also looked at the total hash rate currently mining large op returns. The Watchtower transaction is time critical. The window for submitting it is seven days, so a week. And I replied to him, I appreciated him confirming that the main criterion was sufficiently reliably mined in the time window. So that was interesting to me because a main part of the article in my eyes was, well, why didn't Citroën update? And if not, if they did or did not, why?

6:34 And at least now, thanks to that article coming out, I became curious and dove into that and learned about that. about that because it seemed very odd to me that Citria would say in their white paper, we didn't use op returns because we couldn't due to the limit. And then if they didn't update, I wanted to know why. And so at least now I have my answer. I found that interesting. Now, those articles, did you have some other thing you want to say about that, Knut? Yeah, no, I find it interesting too that they didn't update right. Like, it's very strange to me that in the first place that that whole thing was because as i understand it they only needed this operate this bigger op return like twice a year or something maybe i'm right they weren't going to use it hardly very often exactly yeah so it was it was it was odd to make such a big deal out of it oh no someone's gonna every once in a blue moon used yeah and they had to be sure they their mind on time. So I find I find a bit odd. Overall, my position is neither that of core nor that of nots or I do believe the core developers dislike spam. Maybe the way so the way Gloria in some extracts from her podcast brought it out did look not very good for core or herself, I would argue. But I think that most of the core devs I am in contact with very much dislike the spam as well. The problem to me isn't that core is technically wrong. It's that, first of all,

8:10 with the original documentation change, you could have done it two ways. You could have said, yes, they did the easier to merge, less controversial way, which makes complete sense to me as a core developer. If the code and the documentation diverge, you fix the documentation first That makes sense to me What was interesting was the snowball effect of what built on top of that But I don think Marco did anything wrong with that documentation update And I said that to Hobonaut So the problem is that people see changes coming out of CORE that they don understand but they don know why And that was the whole thesis behind my Plan B talk, which probably angered some people in CORE. But the idea was for me to clear up questions in the outer community as to why CORE was doing these things because the outer community didn't understand them. And so they would lead to, oh, well, it's financial corruption by VCs and grant money and this and that. And I have not seen that. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I've never been. There is some pressure to perform. Your grant money can be cut. And I think that personal relationships formed at these conferences and meetups around the world, which I don't attend very much. I think they weigh a lot. They come a lot into the equation. Like someone maybe makes friends with Casey Rotomar and, oh, this guy is really nice or he's really good looking or whatever.

9:30 or he's quite charming. I like this guy. He's a good fellow. I haven't met him. I'm just saying this is the kind of thing I think I see happening. Or I met this guy and he's actually really good and we should support him. And it's actually just based on personal friendships that are formed first. And then when the ordinal's bid draft gets refused, these sort of people say, oh, it's a shame. I was really, you know, Casey didn't deserve that. And so personal relationships come into play, maybe much more than any sort of financial corruption apart from what you need to do to be funded or get a job in the Bitcoin industry as a developer. There's human nature behind all of this. Now, that doesn't mean that, I mean, I personally believe that Core has brought most of this on itself, but not because the change itself was technically incorrect, but for other reasons, which I've tried to portray in podcasts since that time, be one with you and one with Bob Burnett and in my talk to try to explain what really did change to help people understand the context, because you can't argue with facts against someone's position that was reached emotionally. And if you have a cultural difference in values, a chasm that gradually widened between, say, the core developers and the outer community, politically, during COVID, during the DEI and woke wave that swept through coming from the U.S.

10:51 to outward, during lots of things like the radical shift from Trump to Biden politically, and then back to Trump, the increasing Americanization of Bitcoin funding and development and even maintainerships. So there's all these things that combine to, in my opinion, create a wider chasm between the outer community and Bitcoin core. And I saw this being here in El Salvador. I see a lot of the outer community coming here and visiting and meeting them. And I hear what they have to say about what they think is going on. And so I understand both sides, the taco plebs or whatever they're called, or the maximalists, or just the regular Bitcoin, or, you know, hardcore people, and the developer community. And these are very different people. And culturally, it's just has widened over the last half decade, since 2018, and the calls for woke DEI initiatives in the developer community, coming from certain people. And so this whole cultural thing made it that there was an increasing distrust, which I don't think Kor understood. And so they reckoned all they had to do was argue technically. And from their technically superior knowledge, it just, they footgunned themselves by coming off as condescending, snarking, sneering, snobby.

12:13 The ivory tower classic syndrome of someone who technically works on it all day and is very familiar deeply with everything. But what they didn't understand is they were arguing against people who'd arrived at their position of distrust long before the operator in position. And the operator in position changed was the drop too many or the straw that brought the proverbial camel's back. And if I talk about this with Luke and Mechanic and they disagree, they say, no, the central issue is the spam. I said, yes, we all hate the spam, more or less. And I found it personally deeply depressing when the ordinals and inscriptions things were hitting the blockchain and causing the thesis spike in early 2023, the first half of the year. And it was an awful feeling because I felt helpless. Even as a core developer, I felt helpless to do anything to stop this. But all this bleed up of the past half decade and more, people say it started in the last two years.

13:05 Kvalonov wrote that maybe. It's actually been coming since seven years, since the entire... I joined working on Bitcoin for development in early 2019. The cultural revolution was already starting the year before with the call for DEI. I have been watching core development very closely since 2014, 2015, when Vladimir Van der Land, lead maintainer for nearly a decade of Bitcoin Core, followed me for some inexplicable reason to me on Twitter. And I started thinking, wow, wow, let me look into this person and what they're doing. Oh, I love their leadership style. I love their humble, servant-oriented, but wise yet strong fashion of leading the project.

13:47 It was unlike any other. I had had extensive open-source experience before, and I had always often disliked the leadership style of the leaders of the project. And here was Vladimir, who was completely different. And it was refreshing and an inspiration to me, and it still is today, even if he is no longer, or she now, is no longer lead maintainer, stepped down three years ago, and there was a sort of revolution in the palace of sorts. Kind of like when Dumbledore died in Harry Potter, things changed and they didn't change in a way that helped me continue contributing and made it very difficult. But all this was a lead up, a cultural, you know, the politics, the COVID-ism, you know, all the colleagues, most of the colleagues went full blown into the COVID-ism.

14:31 you had to be tested and and to to you had to be up to date to visit the offices or to attend the meetups and if you weren't up to date maybe you could attend the meet the private meetup but if you had done the test that morning i've never stuck a column swab into my brain yet now that is probably a terrible self-incrimination in the eyes of most of my colleagues but i am quite proud never have taken to have taken the jabs and quite proud never have to have done the swabs into the brain through my nose. I didn't believe that. I thought the whole thing was as it is coming out now. It was labeled by core leaders as a conspiracy theory. And it turns out that all the conspiracy theorists, quote unquote, were correct. And I felt that I made the right choices. And most of my colleagues went down the coitus path. And yeah, it's all this lead up. When core doesn't understand why our community has all this almost radicalization against core. That's what it's coming from for me.

15:34 It's cultural. It's a cultural difference in values and not about I am four against spam. It's deeper than that. And you cannot overcome that with arguing over logic, especially if you argue in a condescending way. We have core developers who you almost want to wonder if they aren't part of some sort of covert marketing team for knots. I mean, their communication over the past year has really, in my opinion, damaged Bitcoin Core's public image and coming from within. And they mean well. I'm quite certain they're not on the payroll of someone who's asking them to develop knots. But, you know, and even Core today, the Havlonauts' latest article referred to a thread on Bitcoin meta that came out only about three weeks ago, started by Jameson Lopp, about banning people for actions outside the repository.

16:26 And it's just another attack on Luke. And Luke's been repeatedly attacked over the years by people in core who wanted him removed, forcibly removed as maintainer, as the OG BIPs editor. They wanted him banned from the repo now in the latest thread by Lott. I argue that people's contributions shouldn't depend on what they do outside the repository. I mean, obviously something like death threats aside, that would be reason not to, okay, that's fair reason for banning someone if they're doing threats and so on. But if they're just doing what Luke does, should they be banned from within Bitcoin Core as long as they behave within Bitcoin Core is the question. I wrote that it should be about merit, as always. I mean, this is supposed to be contributions to be judged on their merit.

17:11 I feel the contributions are they are of course very strongly judged on non things like who is the author Yes also capital does matter a great deal in a project like Bitcoin Core Your review carries much more weight If you have shown over the years a lot of solid review and experienced good review and contributions, that gives you much more credibility and weight than someone who just rolls up that no one knows. So there is an inherent importance to who. But I think that the author of the pull request of a proposed change has become much too important.

17:53 I think it's fair for it to be important in reviewing. But when you propose a change, if you're on the list of people that other people don't really like, your pull request, you may as well close it and wait for someone friendlier to the cohort or the regime, take it up and propose it again. and then it has much more chance because it's extremely or too important whose name is on the change proposed into Bitcoin court. And so we actually saw Gregory Maxwell come out and reply to me that my endorsement of meritocracy was borderline, was naive to the point of being harmful. Literally coming out against meritocracy in order to justify banning Luke. And, you know, and that's an interesting one because I think, first of all, I believe strongly that you need to give people the benefit of the doubt. When in doubt, assume the most charitable interpretation of their writing. And so when I say that merit is what should matter, I'm talking global merit.

18:51 I'm not talking about some pseudo-specific narrow merit that can be faked with AI or something. I'm talking about merit in general, including your prior contributions, who you are, the weight you carry on a project or don't carry in people's minds. And so that matters too. And I thought It was strange that Gregory Maxwell just sort of took a specific domain of merit and raised it up as a sort of maybe straw man in order to punch down on it and say, you know, that's naive to the point of being harmful. So all that to justify the viewpoint that Luke should be banned, which Matt Corral, as usual, jumped in and also supported.

19:31 Back in the day, John Newberry and David Harding were in support of removing Luke against his will as BIPT main editor, which also is maintainer and moderator. BIPT editors also moderate and maintain. They have pretty wide responsibilities. So basically, over the years, it's the same group of friends who don't like Luke. Now, Luke is exasperating. Luke can drive you batty. I understand that. I've experienced those emotions myself at times, five, six years ago, even last year. Luke can do things that are unpredictable to me. But that doesn't mean I don't like him as a person. I actually consider him a friend.

20:14 In a way, I've only met him a few times in life and discussed things with him. We talk regularly directly via chat. But, you know, just because he's unpredictable, perhaps to me, or can be maddeningly exasperating, doesn't mean that I don't think those are grounds for banning him from Bitcoin Core, as long as he's providing value. And he's still reviewing and he's still proposing what, to his mind, are important things to contribute. Some are accepted, some don't make it. I think that's just another example of the ongoing sort of anti-Luke sentiment and we should ban him. I don't think that helps core and if it's Bitcoin core were to ban Luke from the Bitcoin core repository which would mean he wouldn't be able to review he wouldn't be able to submit pull request I believe then I think there would just be another acting by Bitcoin core that hurts its own it hurts itself in its own image and they don't seem to see that and maybe I'm wrong but I think that all All those things hurt CORE more than they help.

21:18 Yeah. Sorry, that was a long, long comment. It's great. It's great to hear all of it. I mean, yeah, I think it would be disastrous for them to ban Luke. I mean, and this whole anti-Lukeism, Luke is the way he is, but he's also single-handedly saved Bitcoin a handful of times. People have good and bad strengths and weaknesses. Yeah. Yeah, and some view it as Luke is saving Bitcoin once again here with Notts and BIP110. BIP110 is not written by Luke, though, but by Dathomom. I reacted to one thing you said about... Well, it came from Luke originally. I don't think that's a secret.

21:59 The commits were by Luke. The original draft was, I'm quite certain, drafted by Luke. And then Datum, whoever it is, because it's a pseudonym, took over being champion of it. And he's rewritten, modified, edited. But the base was Luke. And I actually did advise Luke. I don't think I'm spilling some secret. And I think it's fine for Luke to do it and pass the baton on. But I did advise Luke. Personally, I told Luke that I thought it would be better for him to just put his name on it if it was by him. but he thought it was better this way. Maybe a sort of shell and fry sort of thing.

22:40 I don't know. Yeah, back to your rant there. I picked up one thing that I reacted to and this changing of the documentation. I have a slightly different point of view there because you say that Cord changed documentation because of scientific evidence of how the protocol was being used. So it's natural to change documentation. No, no. It was just that someone realized that the documentation just was incorrect as to what the configuration option actually was doing. But based on what? Based on behavior or based on empirical evidence or what?

23:23 Well, I mean, back then, the change was only for op return. And so the definition was narrowed in a way that reflected what the code itself had not changed since, I believe, had not changed since the pull requests in 2014 that came out in Bitcoin, in their Bitcoin release, Bitcoin Core release in early 2015. I could be wrong, but I don't think the code itself had changed. At least its behavior had not changed. And so the documentation was really catching up to the fact that for seven or eight years, no one had noticed the discrepancy. Core is said to have this most amazing review process, but to be honest, a lot gets past review. It's definitely very human and very foul.

24:04 So the thing I think the monetary maxis, if you will, reacted to with changing the documentation was that changes to the documentation should not be based on, they should be, if made at all, they should be based on principles. And I think this is like at the core of the problem, pun intended. Should Bitcoin be designed from first principles or should Bitcoin be designed from empirical evidence of what people actually do with it? And I think this is the big thing. Right. The question is, did the config option behavior have been changed instead of the documentation, which would have been a harder change to argue for because you're actually changing the behavior of what is an eight-year-old config option that users are expecting to do something, and you actually would be widening its scope in order to cover more spam.

25:01 Now, I appreciate that you can very well argue for the code being updated to match the intended first principle, but as a core developer, I see completely why Marco chose to update the documentation because changing the behavior of the code itself is a wider change. It's more controversial in any case. At the time, there was already some initial spam taking place with multisig, bare multisig. And a config option was created that same year, 2014, called permit bare multisig, which defaulted, I believe, to true, but you could set, it allowed users to turn off allowing it permit bare multisig so that that vector of spam could be controlled by the user with a config option.

25:49 At the time, there was already spam that was not opportunity related via that vector. With pay to script hash that was also possible but not yet perhaps not being widely used It was starting to be with open timestamps like Peter Todd and there was the Eternal Wall I mean there was originally some other spam besides op-return back then. So I can see why. I think the problem is not that Marco did something wrong. What Marco did was actually quite logical. The problem is that it was a snowball effect. The problem in the eyes of Hoblonaut is that it's the process that HODL... I think HODLNOT isn't actually attacking.

26:31 And at the end of the day, it's not really a technical issue so much as the whole how the process happened. HODLNOT did think that Marco and H.A. Towns were financially perhaps influenced by their common funder. I don't believe that to be the case because I have never personally seen a grant funder influence me directly. But I can see why, because the outer community is trying to understand, I can see why they would reach for that, look for that possibility and verify and investigate it. I don't think it was actually the case that Paradigm influenced, Marco and AJ. Well, if I may interrupt you.

27:13 That's my personal opinion. I have no proof either way. You may be more, first of all, you may be more untouchable than many of the others. And also, I have an example of you changing your behavior because of the allure of a grant when you pulled out of my book project because you thought that would adventure your chances of getting that grant. So there is like not, I mean, it's not direct. I had no grant at all. No, no, but you were planning to apply for some. I mean, I should let you tell the story and I'm not accusing you of anything here. I'm just saying that even the smallest change in an economic incentive will change the person's behavior to some extent.

27:57 So what do you say to that? No, more than to some extent. I waited until early this year to even discuss, start saying what I thought. Because I was self-fenstering for the past seven years. Because I was afraid for my funding. And maybe I was going to be defunded. But I did lose. My grant funding was not renewed was viral. And then though after four years, they gave a rationale that didn't hold up. So I was disappointed by the reason they gave it because I knew it was nonsense. But they gave me a rationale that I knew was nonsense. They stopped my funding. Maelstrom didn't renew in favor of another developer.

28:39 And so I don't know if I'll be funded much longer. There was an initiative from Core, two of the leading core. maintainer and one leading developer went to the board of open sass and talked to them about me behind my back yeah there are there is dirty stuff going on with funding for sure and i i always was afraid even back in 2019 with you i was afraid that it would hurt my chances of even finding funding and it was hard enough as it is it took me 14 13 14 months of unpaid work on bitcoin core to actually start being funded and and at about half the rate of say some of the other arrivals at that time who were, I was, I started at 80 grand for the first year and other people were getting 150, the favorites from the same residency that I attended. And I had probably shown more proof of work than most of the residency combined in Bitcoin Core, at least well before having gotten my funding. But you know, life isn't fair, definitely not fair, but yes, you are right.

29:35 I was afraid that would hurt my chance for funding if I came out as a co, as a co-editor helper of a book that was based at a time when wokeism was clearly infiltrating the community that I was trying to find funding it there absolutely I I absolutely love this story and I like I I wear this as like the fact that that is the case like it's it's it's exhilarating to me in a way because because it points it points to everything wrong because I think everyone in the monetary maxis camp or i can't speak for everyone but i think this is a taco plebs or whatever you call them before like the plebs in general i think this is their thinking around this if if you can if you are because you're jon attack you're one of the most the highest integrity bitcoin core people i've ever met like if not the highest integrity one and and if you're self censoring what the hell do you think the others are doing like because they would be self-censoring even more than you would to the point where where where this woke creep or whatever you call it corrupts everything and all of a sudden they base the decisions on the behavior of the current users of the network instead of the first principles that bitcoin is money other use cases do not add value they leak value from the monetary use case they shouldn't be there we should do everything in our power to stop other use cases that is not the case instead they you know have dinners with citria

31:08 people and and think that these baps and and whatever they're called and brc20 tokens and monkey jpegs and dick butts are are adding value somehow to bitcoin when it's from an economic perspective super clear that they don't money ought to be money and as little else as possible yeah yeah that's that's my five sets yeah i mean yes i started off when i wanted to when i decided i was going to launch myself into working on bitcoin core what i started off by was approaching the project from a social group processes angle my first work the first thing I did was invest a lot of time in observing who was who how they interacted what they liked and what they did not like I tried to analyze and understand the group social processes in core and it turned out that my initial intuition that these group social processes were extremely important to how things are getting done in core that initial intuition turned out to be completely 100 on target it's it's the key and I when I saw the direction that the core was that Bitcoin core, a certain, let's say, intolerant minority in Bitcoin core was heading with the world, the DEI, the COVID-ism. Actually, that was not a minority. I was the 80, 85% of my colleagues went full into the COVID-isms. You know, where's your mask? Did you test this morning? Why didn't you get jabbed and boosted? What's the matter with you? You know, and you know,

32:42 on that Bitcoin meta thread that we referred to, the most interesting part of that thread to me, perhaps was not the typical Gregory Maxwell and then Matt Corral, Blue Matt, agreeing with G-Max that meritocracy was naive to the point of being harmful or whatever. It was Matthew Zipkin who I like. Matthew, like me, we both have a past in music, right? We've been in bands. We've done sound engineering. Matthew Zipkin is in New York and he's now at Chaincode. And it took him a long time to get into Chaincode. I think he got us put in the door by doing sound engineering for for ChainCodeLabs podcasts like five, six years ago. And one thing led to another, and he had come from another crypto protocol.

33:25 I can't remember the name of it. And so he became an engineer. And now he's actually one of the two moderators for Bitcoin Core of doing the moderation on the repository on GitHub. And Matthew Zipkin wrote, he's a good guy. And I think that he and Will Clark, the two moderators, are good people doing a good job who are stuck in a difficult position between some of the angry plebs and those above them in the hierarchy, and Bitcoin Core is indeed very hierarchical, much more than I wish it would be, who want them to enforce things and keep the peace and make life easier for the contributors and the maintainers. So Matthew Zipkin, that background having been given, said, the real question is maybe how does the project improve its own public relations?

34:14 And that is the key question. And the only problem is that, to me, the answer is quite clear, but most in Bitcoin, Chrome won't accept the answer. And so it's easier and human, very human, to shoot the messengers and blame the critics. You know, whether the critic is a messenger, whether the critic is HODL or not, or whether the messenger is myself, or, you know. And HODL or not is a tough one for them because he was, was the leading integrity person standing up speaking the truth against Craig Wright, fake Toshi. And his life was nearly destroyed for leading that integrity, honesty, first approach against Craig Wright, who tried to destroy him with lawfare.

35:01 And he was helped and he was a hero. And his integrity is well known. And so I think it's a very difficult thing for Bitcoin core proponents like Adam Back to go after him because he's a hero and his integrity is clearly not in question. And I don't understand actually Adam Back's transformation. It's like he's part of the Knotts marketing team. I've never seen in eight years of watching, more than a decade of watching Bitcoin Core, I've never seen Adam Back do a pull request, make a commit or do any review on Bitcoin Core. He's a businessman now. I haven't seen him, but he's so attached to Bitcoin Core in a way for someone who I have never seen participate directly.

35:48 So, you know, he's a businessman, but I don't think he's helping. And whoever it is doing the tweeting for him isn't helping. It all comes back to Adam should fire his intern. Yeah, it makes no sense. And he didn't begin following me until last year when, early this year, when I started presenting, talking about it. I don't think he's blocked me. I think he still follows me. I don't follow him back. But the idea in core is that the problem is misinformation. It's like, it's, you know, like during COVID when people like me were being denounced as dangerous and, you know, people were spreading misinformation because they didn't want to mask, but they didn't want to accept the mRNA experimental vaccines, if they can even be called vaccines misinformation isn't the root here and this just looks bad it's the people outside of bitcoin core are trying to understand what and why and are looking for answers yeah it sounds suspiciously like something the government would say like it's all it's all fake news and trust the trusted sources and don't listen to anything else anything outside yeah don't do your own research anything outside of the overtone window yeah that just literally tweeted i couldn't believe you posted when you said Bitcoin development doesn't need your help. I'm not a reply guy.

37:11 But man, I was tempted because we say over and over that the bottleneck in Bitcoin development, in protocol, Bitcoin protocol development especially, is lack of experience review. It's lack of developers, good developers, seasoned developers doing seasoned experience review and testing with long, long experience with the code base, bringing to bear that cumulative experience of the code base onto their review. We need these people. We need people to come in. We need developers. We're not, we do not have an oversupply of experienced eyes on the code. We really do not. And that's obvious to anyone working and everyone says it. The number one constraint is review.

37:59 To move things forward and to take care and more eyes on code means more bugs fixed. and to come in and say, we don't need your help, where are we going to get these reviewers? I don't know. It just blows my mind. It's like, we need people so badly, but just not you because you're not like us. It comes back to the problem of selection criteria. Yeah. So if they only want the young ones in New York City who are willing to move from wherever they live to New York City or to Amsterdam or to London or to San Francisco or to Boston or maybe to Amsterdam. You know, that is a self-selection process.

38:40 If we need people who need to agree, that is a self-selection process. If we want developers who want to work in person in an office and hang out in that office and live in the big city, because they're only in big cities as far as I know, that is a selection criteria. You're obviously excluding the guy who's got three kids who's living far away and isn't going to up and move to Manhattan. The guy with 20 years of experience in open source, You're making life harder for them. Now, these people do exist in Bitcoin Core. And we need more of them. And Bitcoin Core maintainers used to all be like that. And now, are any of them like that? Well, there's one, the new one. And that's a good sign. He's from South Africa. But what he did to establish himself as a future maintainer was he spent his time on the road visiting all the offices.

39:27 I asked him, I said, how did you become maintainer without being in offices? He said, I spent my time in the offices. I've rotated, I've visited every office, every person, every three months. I said, smart, that's it. You did what I'm not willing to do, but that's what needed to be done. If you're not in an office, you need to be hanging out in the offices. It's all about hanging out and spending time with the people. So it didn't used to be like that. When I joined CORE, all the maintainers were spread across the world. this this sounds just like the feminization of public schools where where merit used to be the thing and you you got a test and whoever scored high on the test got the good grade and now it's the worst it's the worst environment for little for young for boys it doesn't work for young boys because now you all it's all feminized because you have to work in groups all the time and all the kids have to present to other kids and and and give so so the introverted developer type simply doesn't thrive at all in such an environment like if if you're a good if you're a fit for being a bitcoin developer you're probably more likely to be a recluse in let's say a concrete house in the jungles of el salvador for for right no they'd rather go they'd rather cold email the block the the person working on blockchain tech at Berkeley or the guy running the Bitcoin club at MIT.

40:53 I don't know. The communication by some of the core devs, there's like a half dozen that really damaged core's public image. Back to Zipkin's real question, how does the project improve its own public relations? The honest truth is, first of all, a lot of those core devs who are wannabe memers and wannabe reply guys on X really should just stop doing that because they're hurting Core really badly. Adam Back isn't helping Core. Shinobi isn't helping Core. I'm not going to name the Core devs to where the most reply guy is on X, but basically, you know, if Core stays with a strategy, and I wrote exactly what I'm going to read you a message I wrote recently to Mike.

41:33 I talk a lot with Mike. Now, Mike is the CEO of Brink. Mike is the CEO of Optech. He co-founded both of those with John Newberry. And so, yeah, he had some historical baggage to overcome. But Mike's a good guy, even though, you know, people, he's deeply on the side of core, whereas I'm on the side of Bitcoin. Now, is that different? Is that the same? Is it okay to be on the side of Bitcoin, but not on the side of core? That's a whole discussion. But I wrote to Mike, literally, in a friendly way. We were having not an argument, but a typical friendly discussion. I like Mike because I can open up to him, for better or worse, and say what I think. And I wrote to Mike, if Core stays with a strategy that looks like double down, deflect, deny, condescend, blame the critics and the non-Choir Boys, and doesn't occasionally humanly admit to mistakes when needed, and do honest mea culpas and self-examination, and open up to alternatives, say, can code or bring funding devs working on non-Core but friendly alternatives that cooperate and share butt fixes with Core?

42:40 etc. Well, Mike, you get the idea. I mean, that's what I would do if I was, there's no CEO of Core. Well, there kind of is or was in my opinion, but that's what I would do. But of course, Core is not going to do that. And Core is not going to listen to me in any sort of way. I want to specify, I am not part of any implementation right now. I'm not working for Knott's. I'm not working for Libetcoin. I'm not working for Production Ready. I'm not working for anyone in particular. I'm not advocating right now for anyone, but that's what I would do if I was core. But the way it was handled and done and communicated around this op return whole thing was a disaster. And it still is not improving.

43:20 And it back to the cultural chasm Hmm So yeah this is also it such a farce when you dissect it like this And it's so reminiscent of politics in general, where like the science goes too far and becomes propagandized. And then some people immediately start thinking Alex Jones is right about everything and the earth is flat and so on and so forth. So you get this discrepancy between the two worlds, which is just ridiculous. And it's not because the, it's because the quote unquote science side.

44:03 Arrogance is what creates all of this, right? And thinking that you're better than others. I mean, yeah, not the adoption curve is as much a gift from core. some of the loud people who advocate for core as much as anything else yeah so speaking of that perhaps the healthy core perhaps the core that was culturally more similar to the outer community perhaps would have not been as affected nearly as much it's a sign of of a problem that miss info would be so and i hopefully i really want core to emerge from the process in a better place. I'm on Team Bitcoin. I want Core to be better. And I want alternatives to Core to improve and be better. And as they become better, Core will have to up its game as well. You know, it seems healthy to me. And I actually, I asked Mike, I said, philosophically, would you be willing to fund a developer working on not Core, but something else friendly? You know, and I would ask the same to, I did ask the same on Twitter to Jonathan Beer of Maelstrom. He said that he doesn't have the capacity.

45:09 And I said, well, but if he did, yes, sure. He probably has the capacity to fund four developers right now. And they are all working on core or on Pageline. So they say that in theory, they could be open to it. But, you know, I mean, at the moment, OpenSats is, I think, the only one that is explicitly open to the idea. OpenSats is open to funding and they do fund Libetcoin. And they do fund Floressa. Not nuts. They are willing to fund NOSTER, and I think people like NVK and Matt Odell have even tweeted or posted on NOSTER their willingness to fund NOSTER developers.

45:49 The thing is that I've been a volunteer helper for OpenStats. Some people think I'm on the board or something. I'm not on the board. That's flattering, but I'm just a volunteer reviewer. And so I see the applications that come in for grants. And since November 2024, a year and a half, a little more than a year and a half, I have not seen one from a developer proposing to work on Nuts. That's the simple truth. No one is asking for grant support. So, yeah, yeah. So it's a non-issue then, I guess. I mean, there are grant support requests from Libetcoin, from BTCD.

46:36 Floresta, I mean, OpenSats is actively supporting initiatives like that, as well as many, many others in mining and so on. My question is, yes, to the core orthodox funding offices, do you, will you support competitors to core? Not only to help competitors to core, but core itself be better. As core has more competition, core will improve. who want different things while remaining in consensus of course remaining in consensus going there yeah but it's about strengthening bitcoin right that's a good way of looking at Team Bitcoin. What does being on Team Bitcoin mean? Team Bitcoin means I want to seek robust, healthy, decentralized, well-resourced options from node runners and Bitcoin devs, including the one alternative I personally know well, which is the...

47:42 yeah so so so over to bip 110 so first of all what do you how do you think this plays out uh do you have any predictions for that and also what are your criticisms and why and why what what what stance do you take and why do you take it oh you really got to try some of these homegrown bananas they're so good i love that answer because i'm also super tired of talking about that. I should really try your bananas. I'll try them in November, hopefully. You know, I mean, this conversation, this topic will drive people bananas, so might as well, you know, own it. They're very small and very sweet. They actually have a different name, Maniocas, I think, or something like that. All right.

48:28 So, BIP-110. So, did Nott's adoption start stalling when BIP-110 reduced data temporary I could be wrong. So personally, my issue currently with 110, first of all, Luke thought it was very, very urgent. That's why he self-assigned BIP444 on Twitter. He was thinking CSAN would be in a block the next day, possibly, and we had to be ready immediately that Bitcoin's demise was imminent due to CSAM and some governmental reaction to ungodly CSAM in the blockchain.

49:14 I don't think Luke is anti-Bitcoin. I think Luke is very sincere. I am friends with him. I'm friends with Bitcoin Mechanic. I like hanging out with them. I think they have all the best intentions. I am probably more in the Giacomo Zucco. Some will call us fence sitters. It's sitting on the My issue with BIC 110 is more about scope at the moment. Scope, right? So there's three possible scopes that I would imagine that a BIC 110 author would be thinking about. Right? One was the clear one would be to do a comprehensive, full, well-researched change for good, like solve the problem for good and be done with it, which is probably how they usually approach other softwares to approach.

49:54 Not completely. They didn't go all the way with SegWit that they wanted. They didn't do everything they wanted to do, like Sista, cross-input signature aggregation. Sometimes you have to scale back. But I think the BIF 110 could have been a full-scale, permanent solution. I have trouble. The middle road of doing a temporary one-year solution is philosophical for me. It doesn't make sense to me. I understand why they did it. They felt that this was the only way they had any chance or the best chance of the software succeeding. that is why they chose a temporary soft fork. However, I think it's very odd because a soft fork is so hard to do nowadays. Every time we do a soft fork, and there's not been many, We don't have a solid process roadmap we can follow. Some would ask if we even can soft fork at all anymore.

50:50 And in this aspect, it might be interesting to see what's going to happen come this summer. But it is so difficult. It was so hard and challenging to get Taproot activated, even though it had very wide consensus. Not the activation method, which was hotly contested, but the actual change, there seemed to be very wide, rough consensus. And it still was not easy to get activated. The segment before was obviously a battle. With Taproot, though, one could say that it still wasn't hard enough since it's mostly been used for spam. I mean, Taproot, I've said this before, I think it was actually under-reviewed, and that sounds...

51:33 I could be dunked on because someone could say, but wait, look, we had this massive initiative, well-organized, to... There were like three months week that initially attracted 160 around 150, 160 developers to three months of weekly study sessions on Taproot before the stop fork to review it. So in theory it should have been extremely well reviewed but I still think that it was not that deeply reviewed Some other people also felt the same Bitcoin OG developers I mean really fully reviewed I not sure there were there were not very many people not enough Okay, let me interrupt.

52:14 A year after it was activated, they received a bounty that I was unaware of. I was thankful to receive one third of a Bitcoin bounty. Why did I receive one third of a Bitcoin? Because I was one of only three people who got the bounty. The bounty was for reviewing Taproot. They gave it to three people. You know, back then, Bitcoin was $1,500 or something. So, okay, let's dissect this. Because Taproot was supposed to be reviewed a lot, but you're saying it wasn't. It was, but how deeply and by how many people all went through. Given history, now more than 99% of the Taproot transactions are used for absolute shit and things that don't even execute.

52:56 and it's spam. I failed to foresee that. Yeah. So regardless of this reviewing, and you were one of the reviewers and you couldn't foresee that. So how much did this, the wokeness of core, if you will, or the funding, the culture in core, let's say, let's call it the culture in core. Do you think that had any influence on the reviewing of Taproot? Wasn't it under enough, the lack of scrutiny was that because of is that connected to that somehow or or not or is that your theory just too wild well there were very very powerful people behind the taproot the taproot at the final push for taproot was very very well orchestrated and i'm not saying that as a gotcha I'm not saying that as a criticism.

53:50 I am saying that as simple observation of what I saw. It was extremely well orchestrated. OpTec, their main mission was to promote Taproot, Spiral, Square Crypt at the time. Their head, let's see, organized with AJ Towns, one of the most OG developers in Bitcoin Core, and with John Newberry and David Harding, the OpTec people. that there was this extremely well-organized push to get it over the line. Massive mobilization. And like I said, they got 160 developers roundabout, signed up to these months and months of study sessions.

54:32 There was a lot of organization. It was really well done. I mean, I forgot your question, but yet the culture, look, a very small handful of people have a lot of power and core. And that has only become, I mean, I think it's always been the case, but it's hard to say because I became increasingly aware of it at that time when I saw, I mean, it's the same names who behind funding, behind offices, behind initiatives like this, the product managers, You know, the CEO of Chancor Labs, the CEO of Spiral, the CEO of local host now is an up and coming, very ambitious up and coming office.

55:17 Very ambitious. I think they've raised already six million or something more, probably more than that by now. Brink. And look, I've had some talks, as I mentioned with Mike, and there was a couple of my criticisms of Brink that I'd like to clarify if I can. Just to be fair to Brink, because I don't want, like, Brink was singled out for a couple of reasons that are no longer true. So to be fair to Brink, Brink had a monopoly of maintainers, of Bitcoin coin maintainers. They had three at one time out of only four in their office. So they were being criticized as having a monopoly of maintainers. That is no longer true. They now have two. So they still maybe have more than everyone else, but it's no longer a majority of maintainers. There are now five, I believe, and only two are in the Brink offices.

56:00 To the extent that Brink was perhaps linked with co-founder John Newberry was linked to the DEI push and the woke and extreme far left stuff, he's no longer there since 2022, late 2022. And I don't believe that the current people on the board are necessarily our DEI currently. Finally, about the offices versus the remotes, Brink, Mike pointed out to me that Brink does fund remotes. I did think for a long time that Brink strongly encouraged its grantees to come work in the office in London. I did hear that from a grantee, but there are some who managed to not be in the office. And Mike said that they've even funded more people not in the office now than that are in.

56:42 And I think a current example, I could be wrong, is the latest grant funding by Brink for Conduition to work on cryptography primitives for quantum resistance. I don't know if that person is in the office, but I tend to think they are remote. So Brink isn't anti-remote. If they ever were, they no longer are. They no longer have a monopoly on maintainers. They're no longer DEI. Mike himself doesn't seem to be at all woke. So I don't want a single Brink out. And people tend to lump all these funding organizations together, and they each actually have their own thing. And policy, OpenSats is definitely a part because they're not part of the core orthodoxy. orthodoxy, HRF has its particular mission, and the core orthodox offices are each quite different.

57:26 So, for example, Chaincode Labs does not do remote. As far as I've ever heard, you have to be working in the office in Chaincode Labs. That is their culture. But Brink is not remote, hostile, apparently. So I wanted to correct that. But the culture is still very... The culture is still very strong within CORE, and it's still very different from... And there was a change, you know, that's a big change. There was a revolution in the palace in the sense that it used to be all cypher pumps living there was one in holland there was one in switzerland maintenance one in new zealand one in the south of australia one from germany in new york one from belgium at the time in san francisco and so all over the world none were in are you still with me i just got a pop-up on my screen did did i cut out i lost you there a bit i lost you there for a minute yeah i got a pop-up from from riverside okay what does it say it asked if riverside could look for local okay yeah yes maybe i i'm sorry to say but i'm a bit short on time we're having dinner here soon and my family is flying out tomorrow as i won't see them for a while so so i can't do very much longer but before we round out is there anything else you wanted to talk about that we haven't talked about yet that we're all right we could pick up for like another 10 minutes just about el salvador and other random things and then close it so okay we're going to run low on time we can we can pick this up later there's a lot more there are many

58:58 more topics to cover but we'll do that another time about the culture about some of the things that worry me in the bitcoin core development system also in the bips there's some weirdness that's been happening behind the scenes the last three four months last two months actually It has me a bit worried, but yeah, it is what it is. In the worst case, I'll just go back to working on protocol directly rather than the BIPs. I am definitely not in favor of the financialization of Bitcoin that we've been seeing, and it's unraveling probably will be a healthy thing, even if it does short-term hurt Bitcoin. I believe that the Bitcoin digital asset narrative, digital gold narrative, has been hostile to Bitcoin as money.

59:39 And I hear I'm in El Salvador, I'm using Bitcoin as money. I'm only using Bitcoin, and that's not always easy. You have to find workarounds. If you do come to El Salvador, well, El Salvador has been kicking my butt pretty hard lately. And that's actually not new, but there was a period of two or three weeks, so it was really rough. This is, it's a very seductive place to come to and visit, but it's, be wary. If you're a Bitcoiner coming to El Salvador, be particularly wary of the people who seem to, who you saw at Bitcoin conferences, who seem to be going out of their way to help you. Their real goal is, look, new Bitcoiners coming to El Salvador looking to invest is really like fresh blood for mosquitoes.

1:00:26 And you've got to be careful. They'll want to be your intermediary for sightseeing and for whatever, but also for buying land or investing in real estate. And there is a whole infrastructure set up to milk fresh Bitcoin people coming here And I would advise you to all be quite wary of who your friends really are It especially it not easy here and it very important to be well informed And. There's there's a whole bro thing as well. It's it's it's mostly on the beach. It's people who don't actually live using their Bitcoin. They don't spend their Bitcoin, but they said a Bitcoiners that go to Bitcoin meet up. It's all about networking.

1:01:06 And really what they're really about is trying to find a way to to make money, which is human, which is fair. People need to survive. But just be wary as a new Bitcoiner here in El Salvador that there's a whole system here whose goal, their income depends on you. So be wary of that. Personally, I stay a bit out of the Bitcoin scene in El Salvador. I just try to focus on doing my work and solving my problems here in El Salvador. And there are always many. It's not a plug and play country yet unless you go to the city. Perhaps there it's a bit more plug and play but if you want to live completely on a bitcoin standard and own your own land and have your own water and your own electricity and your own food there's quite a so sounds a bit sounds a bit like a bitcoin conference like a prolonged bitcoin conference where they're the story you meet a lot of bitcoin and friends but quite a few of them are out to to promote whatever it is they're promoting and take your money yeah and you know as a single guy it's not easy here either single women are very very welcome because the the local salvadorans would very much like to have many of them very much like to have a a gringa girlfriend you know a white girlfriend moving here and they'll be very welcoming but as a single guy you're kind of an invader you know it's it's not easy uh it's very it's a very close very conservative society outside of the city.

1:02:34 I mean, if you're a guy like me, I'm not particularly interested in the city dating life or the party dating life on the beach. I'd be looking for someone a little bit more serious. You know, in the city, you'll meet people, but not necessarily the people I would personally be interested in. So yeah, El Salvador, it's amazing. I love it here. But there are definite challenges. It's not plug and play. The infrastructure is really, it's best to do it yourself. But that's a whole challenge on its own. Energy, water, internet, payments. your own Bitcoin network, your own personal Bitcoin circular economy. You'll want to build that yourself so that you can do everything you need to do with Bitcoin if you're the kind of Bitcoiner who wants to actually spend their Bitcoin in El Salvador. That's why I came here, was to live on Bitcoin and not just hang out with Bitcoiners while spending dollars and using my credit card. So I feel actually quite different from most of the Bitcoiners here. And many of the Bitcoiners here are just really looking to other Bitcoiners as a source of income. So just be wary of that. Don't be naive. There's a whole ecosystem here of Bitcoiners that aren't really Bitcoiners who are looking to make their living from Bitcoiners. And I just try to say that completely myself. I do try to be involved with the Bitcoin offices, the National Bitcoin Office's educational efforts, teaching the students, doing lectures, doing interactive workshops. They have a great team. I love the people that Stacey has got around her helping to work on Bitcoin here in the country.

1:03:56 she's doing as best she can it's very impressive and you know if you come here definitely good people but be wary some of the people who claim to be your friends that you met at bitcoin conferences are actually just there too hoping to make money from you so what about the state of it what about the state of exception the book like lawlessness alleged lawlessness is that Is that worrying you? It's heavy here. Well, yeah, it worries me in the sense that, look, I love how safe the country is to come. And I can only massively applaud. The reason I'm here and still here is how safe it is. And that is amazing. And it had to be done.

1:04:37 I don't criticize. There was only one way to solve this problem. And the president did the way that was needed. There is a backside to that. Behind the scenes, once you get away from the tourist areas, it's a very heavy climate because people are afraid of going to jail and not getting out for a very long time. You need to afford to afford a lawyer. It's not easy. I myself was arrested on a false accusation. And if I had not had connections with the Bitcoin office, I would have gone to jail for for at least five days. Not the thickot where the gang members are, but jail, Conchalio's, the city where that one is.

1:05:18 So I would have gone to jail on a false accusation. It's quite heavy here. Someone can call and say their neighbor is part of the gangs and the police will show up, as far as I understand. And so it makes people a little fearful, makes people heavy. People are very worried about what other people might say about them. You know, and I have some friends here in the mountains. And the stuff I hear about me from other people, they say, oh, they're your friends only because of your money. or this and that. I've heard someone say that I bought someone's kids. Weird stuff. It's heavy. There's a very big disconnect to bridge between, say, your life as a foreigner working on Bitcoin protocol and things like that and the local people around you who live with very little money and life seems to be very basic to them.

1:06:02 It's all about local gossip and that gossip could actually get you in jail. Someone says something bad about you, you could find yourself in jail. So it is heavy. behind the scenes. And there is a little bit of privilege in being the foreign tourist or looking like one. The police will stop you less on the road, though you still, I do not advise drinking and driving in this country. It's very strict in that way. I do not advise doing drugs in this country. It is very strict about drugs. Just because you're a tourist or a foreigner doesn't mean you're going to be, you're not going to get caught. There are foreign people who were caught doing drugs as we're in jail. I don't advise messing with that. But even for the locals, They get, they're very, very fearful. So the state of exception, it would be nice for it to end, but I don't know when they can.

1:06:47 It's also very nice for the country to be safe. It's, you know, I think it's a difficult balance and I'm not in any way able to advise how the government could do it better. And I don't wish to. It's a tough job. I personally have my reservations about some things. So like the electrical towers they put in nearby here, I'm measuring, they're starting to go live. I'm measuring with my bullshit radiation meter to see how much exposure there is. For the moment, there's very, very little. It's only a test signal going through them. I can tell that myself. But yeah, I don't know if this is interesting to podcast listeners, but I mean, in any paradise, there's also a hell.

1:07:27 And it's, you know, it's not that simple. And it's not plug and play at all. I've learned a lot since being here about infrastructure, among other things. And how have you solved the problems that come up? Like, is it easy to find handymen and stuff? I have a full-time team of about, on average, seven to eight people and a four-man and a full-time caretaker assistant. I don't know how long labor will remain inexpensive here, but as long as it does, the way to get things done is to hire people, have people. I have a full-time steady team since three years. And it's the only civilized way, actually, in a country.

1:08:08 What makes the country feel civilized is that you do have staff because they are so far inexpensive. You go to a hotel, there's staff. You go to a restaurant, there's staff. There's people to help you. It's not like going to the United States where you have a whole hotel with just like one person full-time working in it and the others are just contractual. It's quite civilized in a colonial way, I guess. So the thing to do is to have people and to rely on these people. And I do. I have a full-time team. And I don't see an end to that. I'm not looking when I can stop hiring all of them to save money because I think that it's not a good savings. You need people and it's very worthwhile to hire people. And quite a few young people in the nearby town have worked for me over the years. So my answer has been, thankfully, that I have a good team.

1:08:55 It's not always simple, but I try to take care of them and do right by them. it's not always difficult also because you're a foreigner and so that introduces additional complexity in your relationships with people um you're the you're the rich guy on the hill uh to the townspeople clearly and there's lots of gossip but you know you do what you can it's sort of yeah it's it's a different life you're suddenly the rich guy you're the employer you're the rich guy everyone expects you to be but are generous. And there is a different standard. You need to be generous and you need to be helpful in taking care of people. That's what people are wanting from you and expecting from you. And there's a whole aspect of education very badly needed in this country. And that's why there's so much push for educators and grassroots initiatives in the circular economies and about Bitcoin, but not just Bitcoin, education in general. This country is coming out from a dark place. And there's a lot of work to do. And a lot of the Salvadorans who escaped 30 years ago, who are called hermanos lejanos, far off brothers, were coming back. It's not always simple. The relationships between them and the local population either. The population you stayed are very different from what they became. The people who were coming back from Canada and the U.S. There is a cultural divide. And the issues I've actually seen the most are with these people coming back. And the locals are great, but it's not easy and it's quite heavy. There's a certain heaviness here once you look behind the curtain. And I in no way mean to be critical of the government. They've done

1:10:29 amazing things here and they're trying as they can. And it's probably very difficult, especially with the financial situation, the pressure from the IMF, the pressure from the United States governments, especially Biden before Biden, I think was quite hostile. Trump's seems more supportive, but Trump's also doing things that aren't helping us either, us Bitcoiners with his tariffs and yeah, it's not helping Bitcoin right now. The financialization of Bitcoin that's gone in the US, all that stuff is not helpful. I do not mean to criticize President McKellie and his government. It's very important that they made the country safe. That is the fundamental base from which all the rest can grow and be nurtured but it will take time and i think the president is correct in putting so much focus at the moment on schools and education of the children because those that's your future yeah absolutely lena saiche is working on that too i i believe i've she she talked about that and at the last bitcoin historical helping out we're renovating like 500 schools or whatever it was like a lot of them and it's it's looking fantastic so yeah i'm certainly looking forward to coming back i i love el salvador in its own little way but i i had no like preconceived ideas about it i i spent parts of my childhood in various african countries where my dad was also had like people employed all the time for very cheap and so i i know of this colonial

1:12:02 thing. Like, I've seen it before. So I sort of expected that. And that's how El Salvador was. I mean, maybe not in El Zante and up in the city, but in general, developing countries are different, for sure. No, El Zante was very backward. I mean, they only went from dirt roads to paved roads two and a half years ago. El Zante has the worst infrastructure. It's the most expensive small town while it has the worst infrastructure that I have seen in this country. I mean, the water, the electricity, the internet in El Zante, it was terrible. It really penalized me as a developer because nowhere I could rent in El Zante was plug and play. Nowhere would just work without water going out, the internet going out, electrical outages. It was absolutely a horrendous place to get things done. And that was what pushed me to buy and set up my own environments because there were no good environments. And I would talk to the locals about it and the locals actually thought that the rustic, flaky infrastructure was actually a charming draw for the surfer girls and the yoga girls and the kind of people who were going to Zodte. They thought, oh, that's what we want to be. We want to be this rustic, flaky, water goes out kind of place for the eat, pray, love people, you know, the hippie vibe.

1:13:24 But for a Bitcoin protocol developer, it was a freaking nightmare. And And everyone said, well, you got to be in the city. Well, I don't like the city in general, and especially not here. I go in the city for two hours, do my class at the national Bitcoin office, buy something that I need to buy and get out. The traffic is trying to, it's ugly. It's not my thing at all. I'm not in El Salvador for the city and the city feels way more fiat, way less Bitcoin friendly than here in my small town where I have my local economy set up where I can pay for everything I'm interested in using Bitcoin. El Zante, which is fully Bitcoinized as well. So, yeah, you kind of have to, it's the kind of place where you still can come and create your own adventure.

1:14:06 That window will close. El Salvador is not going to last like this forever. Things are getting more expensive. There's more regulations. Things are getting more complex. Permitting is getting harder. Prices have gone up. Even though the war in Iraq, thanks to the U.S. and Israel, prices for building materials here have gone up 20%. Gasoline is up by half for more. Prices are going up. Realist-filled price of land is kind of crazy. I think it's way too high. I thought that two years ago as well, and it's kept going higher. There's a window of time when you can come here and build, and I'm trying to do as much of it as I can while that window is open, thinking that it won't last very long.

1:14:46 Yeah, well, hyper-Bitcoinization could make it last forever, in a way. Well, yeah, but El Salvador, if anything, I mean, it's challenging right now with Bitcoin. I mean, the emphasis, if you look at the Bitcoin office, it's actual emphasis that it's pivoted to AI. The AI conference has been added. The government is thinking more about AI. It isn't talking about Bitcoin anymore. Bitcoin is not really much of a topic. Now, maybe I'm overly exaggerating, but it feels here in your tummy that Bitcoin's moment has passed. And that's since the IMF deal, maybe. Now, I hope that's just a false feeling and that it will come back when the market price goes up and then people get excited again.

1:15:29 But now is the time to build and it's harder now. Because, yeah, and Bitcoin doesn't feel like it's adoption. It might be increasing at the grassroots level, bit by bit, person by person. But with the retail outlets and the chains and the banks and all that, it doesn't feel friendlier. KYC is way more hardcore now than only two years ago. I just tried to open yesterday a DitoBanks account. DitoBanks is sort of a new bank that works with Bitcoin and allows you to have a credit card to pay everything using your Bitcoin here. And my friends have been recommending it for years. They said, oh, just a snap. You just signed up a form and you're good. And I started it and I'm going through several days of KYC and closing an apartment on the beach.

1:16:10 KYC took one freaking month. The KYC is going way up through the roof. The checking, the background checks. Now, I don't think it's about gangs and gang-related activity. I think it's related to increasing KYC requirements all across the globe. And it's definitely extremely been ramped up here. There's a new KYC law since last October, November. It's come into effect, and it is hardcore. It is super hardcore. So, yeah, those are a good sign. At the same time, I understand it's not easy for a country like El Salvador to integrate as best as it can with the international community, international finance, and lending, and having funding for its development needs, but at the same time being able to resist the encroachment of over-the-top KYC and surveillance. And I hope that this country will resist it, but right now KYC AML compliance has gone up incredibly. It's hard. I mean, the thing to hope for, whatever the government does in any country is grassroots Bitcoin adoption.

1:17:14 And El Salvador's got quite a bit of that, at least. So as long as that keeps growing... You can live only with Bitcoin. Yeah. You can do it, but you have to make an effort. And most Bitcoiners I know, most Bitcoiners in El Salvador aren't going through the crazy effort that is required. Sorry, message. That is required to... I'm sorry. My phone just screwed up because I got a message. I'm sorry. Sorry. No worries. yeah you can live all on bitcoin here i'll start off you can't live all on bitcoin and so many bitcoiners are from the united states and don't want to spend their bitcoin at all anyway so it's actually quite rare to live using only bitcoin we need more people doing that so the adoption will continue to increase especially with merchants and big retailers and so on So yes we need more people here actually living using their Bitcoin Good God.

1:18:15 Here we go again. John, I'm... Sorry. Unfortunately, I'm running out of time. So before we round this out, anywhere you want, in particular, you want to send my listeners to? Or our listeners to? Sorry, nothing off the top of my head except, I guess, my X account. I do like X. I do appreciate that Elon Musk bought X. I'm very grateful for the freedom of expression. I wonder what sort of place we would be in right now. It looks like the dystopian surveillance is definitely trying to reorganize and counterattack after the COVID stuff. And here it is again with the age verification and the digital ID and the ramping up of surveillance and KYC and all that.

1:18:58 Yeah, it's awful. I hope that it's awful. And it's all across the world again, just like the COVID crap was. So resist, people. My main thing is please use your Bitcoin. It's not an asset. Use it also as money. Move if you need to to escape the dystopia. If it comes here to El Salvador, I will sell and I will move. I will leave. I will vote with my feet. It's the only best way you can vote is with your money, your feet. So, yeah. I'm not actually very hopeful about those things. And I think we have another battle ahead of us, just like COVID was. I hope not, because COVID was a serious, not the virus, the reaction to COVID, the agenda was the most frightening thing I think I've seen in a long time.

1:19:40 And I feel like it's on its way back and we need to be careful. Absolutely. And I urge every kid in the UK and everywhere else also for that matter to learn how to use a VPN and learn how to use... And self-custody, self-custody. Don't buy Bitcoin stocks. Don't buy Bitcoin ETFs. Self-effing custody so that you can move with your Bitcoin anywhere you need to go. Yeah. Yeah. Don't. Yeah. No, seriously. And be careful with borrowing against your Bitcoin. You don't have self-custody and you can get liquidated. For all we know, Bitcoin could keep going down if the cycles hold. I say this as a complete way, person. If the cycles hold with Bitcoin's bottom will be in October, November.

1:20:23 We may not have seen the bottom yet. Be careful out there. Don't get liquidated. If you're going to speculate on Bitcoin going up, I think you've got to wait a little bit longer. But what do I know? I don't trade. I don't trade. Hello there, John. How are you today? Hello, Knut. Good to see you again. Good to see you again. We're recording from Bitcoin Beach. Yes. The ocean here. Yeah, I won't ask you to film there because then we'll have to put the camera back in the correct position. And that can take a while. But two days have passed since we last spoke, and we wanted to cover a few more topics that we missed last time.

1:21:03 So let's just get into it. What do you want to talk about? Well, I think we should retouch on the Hopelnot articles and maybe also the discussion yesterday with the BIP 110 people on X. And I wanted to talk about the BIP a bit. Yes, one thing I know that you wanted to, because we sort of got lost in that topic, the BIP-110 topic. We never got to what your stance is, really. So please talk about BIP-110. That's like 80% of what we talk about in this channel nowadays. So let's just chime in here. Right. It's kind of funny because I think people see the HODLNOT articles as purely being about supporting BIP-110.

1:21:50 And BIP-110 people and NOT and CORE each think I'm working maybe for the other side, when in fact I'm just trying to stay out of the camps, tribes, and the fray. I have been asked repeatedly by the NOTs and BIP-110 people to do a deep review of the implementation of BIP-110. I've just had a really clown show of a year this year so far and just having so many issues. Part of that being where I am, not being a very plug-and-play place to live, infrastructure issues and so on. BIP-110, my main concern is none of the usual ones that people talk about, I guess.

1:22:33 My main question is of scoping. So BIP-110 chose to scope its action as a temporary one-year software. And I have discussed with Bitcoin Mechanic as to why they made that choice, and he explained it to me. But I still don't agree with the idea of a temporary soft fork. The other two options in my mind being a very minimal soft fork, both other options being durable, not temporary. Either a minimal viable change that would satisfy everyone, like Get Together Core and NOS People and others. at a round table and try to knock something out that has rough consensus, maybe like the Rob Hamilton or something similar proposal. Get everyone together, do something simple, not risky, that has rough consensus would have probably been my preferred approach. Or try to come up with a more comprehensive solution as well that maybe covers more cases that BIP 110 authors are concerned about. But the problem is that temporary is hard for me. The mechanic explained to me that ultimately the logic behind the temporary was that it was the only way, it seemed the most likely possible activation of the three scope, minimal but long, but henceforth temporary or full complete and henceforth. The thing is that softworks are so difficult to accomplish to get activated and agreement on. We don't have a recipe

1:24:04 that works every time and it seems like every time we have to write a new adventure and figure out again how to activate it. And it has generally been acrimonious and difficult. Cycwit, Caproot. Caproot had very large rough consensus around it. And yet, despite that apparent consensus, the actual activation discussion was very acrimonious. And it went on for months. And yeah, and there, I think, are still many hard feelings from certain people about how it was essentially done with the speedy trial activation method. So it's so difficult to do a stuff for it and i think it's actually a reasonable doubt that one could raise if we can even do one now that it just seems like so much effort for a temporary one year rather than sitting down hammering out a a long lasting sustainable proposal i think the and that's that's my difficulty is the scope i think the the devil's advocate for that and the answer you'd get is that this one is to buy us time to do exactly what you're proposing which is something with more teeth that we buy ourselves time to figure out what that is.

1:25:11 And also... Yeah, but it's so expensive. It's like saying, well, I'll just buy a Lamborghini to temporarily have a solution to get myself to my job. It's so difficult to do a soft fork. Now, maybe I'm wrong. Luke obviously knows soft fork mechanics much better than I do. I have no claim to expertise, but I only see that they're very difficult to do. And I can't imagine doing all of that for a one-year one. The lead-up has been already eight months. I think that we're getting into a very tribal and contentious period over the next two or three. All that for a soft feat for one year, it doesn't make sense to me. But I think the reasoning by the BIP-110 people is that it was simply the most likely chance of success in activation.

1:25:52 I don't know, but I think it's just the temporary nature just doesn't make sense to me. So what's your memory of what kind of a role BIP-148 played? Because people have different memories of that. And my memory of it and what seems to be Mechanic's memory of it, too, at least this is my interpretation of his interpretation of it, is that the intolerant minority soft fork actually worked pretty well. And we didn't need that much support to scare miners into activating SegWit. Like, what's your take on that? I mean, it felt to me like a game of chicken was being played.

1:26:35 Or, you know, the two trucks driving each other on the road until you see which one gets scared and veers away from the collision. You know the market decided right The price quickly shifted in favor of one of the two I haven gone back and re that history into memory So I don't feel qualified to give a more complete answer off the cuff. I don't know. I just think that temporary is a very unlikely thing to try to do, a temporary software. Hey, I could be wrong. I don't have any sort of condescending or huffy stuffy thinking about it. I think in general, I find it works best when I'm humble when it comes to Bitcoin.

1:27:19 You know, it's easy to be wrong. It's hard to be right. And often you tend to be more often right if you're right and correct. In fact, if you come at it with a humble approach than if you think you know it all, and that's when I fall on my face. So I don't know. Yeah, regardless of anyone's opinions on it, this is the soft fork that is on the table right now. Like this is the one that is happening in August and we'll see how it plays out. I mean, I'm willing to. I'm going to stay out of the fray. I have no plans to be involved in the tribal mudslinging for, and I guess this is it. It already cost me a lot of time and energy moderating the discussion of the BIP draft. It was very, very annoying, not fun.

1:27:59 I was all alone. No other BIP editors were around during that time. And so, yeah, I feel like I've done my part in dealing with this bit, and I don't really have an intention to take a side and be involved further, and I will see what happens. I mean, I will run, I plan to run a NOS node, I mean a Bit.10 NOS node in addition to my other nodes, and I will just see what happens. Yeah, I guess, yeah, each to its own. That's how Bitcoin works, and we'll all see. Currently, I just run my little Fork with Core. I have my own informal fork. I evaluate core mergers and decide whether to accept them or modify them in my own personal fork.

1:28:41 But yeah, that's what I run up to now. I basically stopped following Core's master blindly. I started customizing it a few years ago already. Yeah, okay. So Core, is there anything else to be said about Core that we didn't cover two days ago? i mean so i've had a few discussions with with core developers that i talked to and i believe this solution is not to post at each other it's not the gotcha reply guy posting and i've actually told a few of my friends in core that i don't think it's helpful if they do gotcha and reply guy tweeting on x i think what helps is for people to and i also got caught up in that yesterday in the kerfuffle about me owing review of BIP 110.

1:29:28 But it's better to actually talk to people directly. And I think what solved the kerfuffle yesterday was I actually sent a few private messages to Bitcoin Mechanics saying, hey, you know, remember, I'm not against you guys. I'm not. I've done my part. I've tried to be fair. I've tried to be neutral. And I'm not messing with you guys like Datum thinks. Datum had the impression I was messing around with the Notscam. No, that's not my intention. I'm trying to be fair. I'm trying to be neutral. I'm on Team Bitcoin. And to my mind, what Team Bitcoin means in this case is I want to see multiple, robust, well-resourced, strong implementations. That includes Bitcoin Core, which is the implementation that I far and away know the best.

1:30:13 So I, you know, I have colleagues in court as they are And you're trying, why are you so hostile at court? Are you trying to destroy court? Are you impostering suffering? I'm like, no I think that has had issues, very deep ones I think the court hasn't come clean about it They've kept an omurta They've kept quiet about certain sensitive points That's their choice But I believe that that's contributing to the situation they're in You know, sometimes you need to go down and touch bottom confront yourself and that then only then can the renewal and and healing process begin of and i don't want to see a weak bitcoin core a weak bitcoin core is more is wounded or it's a bitcoin core is more dangerous i want to see a healthy strong bitcoin core that has healthy processes and and and not skeletons in the closet that are being hidden away and so it's healthy if the truth comes out, is dealt with, and then we move on, we move forward, and that involves change. Now, change is something that human beings resist, me like anyone. And it took me a long time to get over the idea that I would probably no longer have a future in core, particularly if I said some of the things I know. But at the end of the day, you have to think about Bitcoin and not your personal circumstance. And I sort of gave up on having a future in core. But being on Team Bitcoin is about thinking about the overall system and how Bitcoin can benefit.

1:31:37 And Bitcoin will benefit from a better core just as it will benefit from better alternatives to core for developers like me and for node runners. I'm starting to discuss with people like Mike Hedbrink or Jonathan Beer at Maelstrom, Bitnext Research, Maelstrom. And I'm saying, philosophically, do you have any obstacle to supporting developers who are working on implementations other than CORD that could work in a cooperative and friendly way with CORD. Not necessarily a hostile alternative, but yes, working on a competing perhaps version. Besides resource and capacity, would you be philosophically against that?

1:32:19 And I'm starting to try to open minds up to the idea that we need alternatives for there to be a healthy decentralization of power and a healthy ecosystem. And not one where there's the dominant reference client, as we've had up to now, with unhealthy processes that don't get addressed because there's simply no competition forcing them to do so. Hmm. So since we talked two days ago, I had a conversation with Dr. Jack Cruz yesterday, and there's also been a Simply Bitcoin episode about this, framing this as a deliberate attack on Bitcoin and that powerful forces, deep state forces, have infiltrated Core to accommodate spammers more and more, and thereby clogging the network more and more, and that this is a long-term plan to destroy Bitcoin from the inside.

1:33:13 Do you think there's any truth to those claims? Or what do you say when you hear such stuff? So the Harbo Not article, I did see that last night, And I, in fact, sent a message to several friends on both sides of the fence about it, saying, wow, look at this. I think I sent a message to Mechanic. I sent a message to Mike Schmidt and Brink and so on. And, you know, I saw that the Hoblornot articles recites it. Now, Hoblornot is, I think his integrity should not be questioned in the way that it is. He has his position. He has his concerns. And he's trying to find the truth. And I have had quite a few private discussions with him explaining my point of view and where I don't think he's necessarily gotten it right.

1:33:55 But I understand the conclusions that he is. I understand the context that he's trying to understand and glean the truth from. For instance, the fact that Paradigm VC Fund was sponsoring two of the developers, AJ Towns and Marco Falke, who supported the documentation pull request change. I don't think that is some sort of, yes, it looks bad, but I could be naive, but I have not yet seen an instance of funders actually saying, you need to review this. I haven't seen indirect financial corruption in influence. I have seen indirect. I believe I have found some cases of influence trafficking that no one knows about yet that has not come out.

1:34:41 But the ones that have been discussed, like Paradigm or those two, I don't believe that there was over-influenced trafficking via their funding. I don't think that documentation change was, I mean, it made complete sense that that change made sense. It was the change that made sense to do because it's a more minimal change to change the documentation when it disagrees with the code than to change the actual code and its behavior of the configuration option. Changing the behavior is a much larger step that requires communication, perhaps, you know, whereas just aligning the way it is described to be what it actually does actually is how, it's fully the way Core would have done it. Now I think that and I talked about this with Hobl and he understands that he said yes and his reply is but it a part of a process and it a chain of events This I cannot this is true It's part of a chain of events that each in isolation makes sense, but together look the way it looks.

1:35:39 Now, I'm just saying that I don't think there was anything shocking or financial corruption involved in that documentation change alone. Alone, it made complete sense what that change did. And I don't think it's the original sin as portrayed. But I see how the chain of events has people really thinking and looking for the chain of events and explanations behind it. Havnolot, I think, has very high integrity. I believe, I mean, he proved that when he stood up to Craig Wright and he paid a very high price. Those people probably would not want to pay in their personal life standing up to Craig Wright. Fik Toshi, myself, was named on a list of the lawsuit. But I didn't have any financial consequences. I didn't have to go to court. I didn't have to find funds for lawyers and legal defense.

1:36:21 What he did is really hard. So I don't think it's fair to say that he's writing conspiracy theory or AI stuff. He's probably using AI to help his writing, certainly. But he's basically motivated to try to find out the truth. And I've tried to help guide him a little bit. With Citria, we talked about last time, my main concern was, why didn't Citria actually update their watchtower method in the Clementine Bridge for the operator and change? I mean, it doesn't make sense to do all that if Citria actually didn't end up wanting to use the uncapped operator. Turned out, in fact, they did recently update, but it's only in testing stage. It's not yet on mainnet. But, you know, things like that encourage me to dig myself deeper to try to understand what's going on.

1:37:03 Because there are many gray zones and it's actually not easy to understand everything that's happened. Yeah, I think we covered that two days ago. You talked about this. Yes, I don't know if you plan to reuse that. We'll see how the edit works here. But, yeah. Right. I'll keep most of it in. But you see, the problem with Korra, I think, is that it has a tendency to circle the wagons and go after the messenger, go after the critic, go after the non-choir boy, like the Reese's thread about, again, about banning Luke, another attack on Luke. I mean, Luke can be exasperating. Yesterday, I was openly and publicly discussing, you know, Luke is inflexible and he sticks with guns in a way that is not necessarily easy to deal with.

1:37:50 And I'm not saying Luke's perfect, but I don't think banning people is the answer. And I think if Cora's reaction is always to sneer down, condescend, dunk, ban, try to remove any critics, make the abstainers and the non-supporters, non-loyalty, fealty, showing supporters of the crown of the court. If they always pay a price for saying what they think, then I think that you have a very unhealthy system. And what we want is for to complain, address the issues that is actually not really wanted to address, which is human. And that will allow renewal. So, you know, as long as I said last time, as long as it's deflecting and sneering and condescending and shooting the messenger, that's not going to be helpful.

1:38:35 So what do you think? Right now, the topic right now is misinformation against core. Well, I don't think, I think a strong core, first of all, would not be vulnerable to misinformation. And yeah, I don't want to go back over that over and over either. But yeah, there are issues. I've been talking about them quite extensively with Mike Schmidt, for example, of Brink and Bitcoin Optic. And he did push back on a couple of things, which I think it's fair to relay. I don't know if you covered them last time. Brink does support remote developers. I did think that I'd even heard that you had to be in the Brink's office, or you were strongly encouraged to work from the Brink office in London.

1:39:17 That is apparently not the case. Indeed, as Mike pointed out to me, Brink has funded at least as many, if not more, remote developers than it has developers funded in its office. The other thing is it used to be a frequent criticism of Brink that it had a monopoly of core maintainers in its office because it did have three out of four at one time. So it was a fair criticism. I think that has stayed decentralized. It has now only two. Unfortunately, one of the two has, in my opinion, much too much power within core. The one who emerges more than half and probably this year two-thirds of all pull requests in Bitcoin Core is, in my opinion, a level of centralization around a lead maintainer that it would be perfectly fine if you had three or four healthy, separate, robust clients, each with a benevolent dictator.

1:40:03 but when you have one that is wants to be the reference implementation with originally 97 98 percent of adoption now it's maybe 75 or 80 percent adoption i don't know depends on how you count the nodes then i think it becomes more of a problem when you have one dominant person who's merging half to two-thirds of pull requests and who actually in this case also use names use with trusted friends as proxy deputy maintainers to decide whether something is merge worthy it's just a bit too centralized. And I don't think that's healthy in a dominant reference implementation case. I think it's perfectly fine if you have three or four, each with a 20-25% of the market, then yes, one strong leader in this one, one strong leader in that one, one strong leader in that one.

1:40:46 And then developers and node runners have options between that style or this style, that leader or this leader. That's fine, but not in a dominant reference implementation. I think that's quite obvious. Yeah, one of the notes I have here is about BIP standards in general, like with LLM written drafts. What do you have to say about that? With the BIPs? Yeah. Can you say that? Yeah. Suggested topic here is BIP standards with LLM written drafts. Right, exactly. Sorry, it's a bit noisy here. run by the ocean and there's a lot of, there's a rumble of white noise coming off of the ocean.

1:41:30 So yeah, hopefully you can screen that noise off, filter it out for your listeners. So in the BIPs repo, one issue that I am concerned about is historically, BIP editors were quite tolerant of BIP submissions as long as they were in scope for the BIP suppository. However, with the advent of AI, we're seeing overuse to abuse of AI to generate bit drafts. And that has made me rethink completely. And I found myself tending to prefer a stronger selection criteria, a higher bar for quality of BIPs, because otherwise, it's so easy for people to generate a BIP with prompting and then just send us the LLM output that I think it would be, if we're not careful, I think it would be quite easy for the BIPs repository to be just filled with AI slop and become sort of a trash dump.

1:42:33 Now, there is some iffy, there are iffy BIPs. There are BIPs of various quality already. And the historical thing has been, give everybody, give every BIP a number, give them a number, numbers cost nothing, might as well just give everything a number. But if you do that now in the age of AI, you'll just find yourself dealing with all these BIPs filled BIPs that are made up of LLM output with perhaps hallucinations or you know, slop. And there's a symmetry at the moment between the ease with which people can generate AI, LLM written BIPs and throw them over the fence at us and the humans will have to review them. Now, you can start to try to use AI to review the AI. But I mean, the question is, where are we going with this? And I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle this. I think in general, we need to raise the bar of quality acceptance into the BITs repository. And there is disagreement about that. I think some of the people would really prefer that we keep the bar low and just give everybody a number, make everybody happy, you know, give a BIT number to the cat BIT, to the ordinal BIT, to the AI generated stuff.

1:43:42 And everybody's happy and everybody's content, except we have a BIP repository full of specs written by LLMs. Is that good? Is that bad? I don't know. I personally prefer to review work done by humans and not LLM output that I'm expected to fix. And BIP editors aren't necessarily the reviewers of the BIP drafts. They just make sure that the BIP drafts reflect the format and are in scope. But if we're not careful, we could end up with a lot of junk in the BIP repository. And this worries. me. And then there's a bit of a, there's some weird stuff behind the scenes in the BIPs repository since about two months now. I think that there's a chance that there's going to be a push once again to get Luke out, to have him removed as BIPs editor. There have been pushes in 2021, 2022. And I suspect that's coming again, along with every thread in Bitcoin meta about banning Luke from the GitHub Bitcoin repository.

1:44:40 But not just Luke. I suspect that since over the past two years, a bit more than two years, there were five new editors named, one of which was myself and Merch. And Merch and I have been the two that have been active and the others have been in appearance much less active, but actually quite helpful behind the scenes and discussions when it came down to, let's say, not trivial decisions or controversial decisions that need to be made. made such as subordinates, what to do with the Ordinals bit, but not just. And so they've actually been very helpful to be able to bring to bear their experience combined. You know, Rose Beach from Lightning Labs is brilliant. Brian Bishop has his experience and his approach and philosophy.

1:45:20 Ruben Thompson, who was invaluable his advice and thinking behind the Ordinals draft decision. And so, and they're less active, but I really like the team we had and the dynamic we had. I think if all six, including Luke, had been active, it would have been too many cooks in the kitchen. As it is, just myself and Murch, sometimes I have to sit back and make sure I leave him some space. I don't know how he feels, but I feel like already two who are active is actually quite a lot. But there was a mailing list post by Murch where basically he said that he's the only one who's doing the work over the previous months and pushing for a change of bit editors and asking for new faces. And I see that he has a couple of, bought a couple of new people on who are sort of becoming active in reviewing BIPs that I imagine will be his proposals or nominations for new faces.

1:46:08 But at the end of the day, I guess what I'm expecting to see is a push to, an initiative to push out all the existing ones except perhaps him and he'd be the lead and bring in two people under his wing. So I may not be long for this world, though I've been very active with BIPs maintainer and I often found myself alone in some of the hottest moments, like dealing with BIP-110, dealing with BIP-54, there was acrimony there, dealing with the cat and so on. But, you know, when you close BIPs like Ordnose, I think there is some latent background pushback where people are angry and upset and maybe they want to see you also oust in the hands of the BIP editors, only one, maybe one and a half, were actually in favor of BIPs. So out of sticks, that's why the Ornos BIP was closed.

1:46:51 But, you know, then you might have some underground pressure welling up to have those people who were against the Ornos BIP. Well, you know, maybe, maybe not. I cannot say. But there definitely is a movement afoot for change in the BIPs repository. And it's a little bit weird. It's a little bit creepy. I don't like that kind of drama. But at the end of the day, you know, I'm perfectly happy to move on from the BIPs and maybe get back to protocol code development, reviewing core, maybe running a client that reviews every emerging core and then decides whether or not to accept them as is or with modifications or not at all into a fork of core. I've been talking with all the different, I've been talking with Libetcon, great team, met Eric, hung out with them in Vegas, talking a lot with Noughts, Noughts people, talking with the BTC Commons people.

1:47:43 And there's also BTCD. And there are two other core developers who are no longer active in Core who I believe are actively working on their fork or implementation, completely different implementation of Core of the Bitcoin plant. So there is movement afoot. I don't know if I want to join any of those projects. At the moment, I don't see one that there's production ready as well that wanted to get started on something. At the moment, I have not joined any. and at this time I don't know if I plan to. So I'm observing and keeping my eye on the BIPs and on BIPingPort most of all, because that's what I know. Could one say that the BIP repository has a spam problem?

1:48:25 Oh, it definitely does. I would say that three quarters of the BIPs that are submitted nowadays are AI generated. They're just a result of prompting. perhaps sophisticated prompting, some ideas are better than others. But it's AI. There are really intelligent, there are good ways to use AI and there are bad ways, abusive ways to use AI. And the filters aren't working as far as the BIP repository goes? Well, yeah. I mean, the filter has often been me and it's not necessarily a fun position to be. It's not necessarily nice to be the guy who has to say, And yeah, this is AI Slop and closes it.

1:49:09 And it doesn't make you a popular guy. And, you know, there's a philosophical difference. Do we want to be stricter about selection into the BIPs repository? Or do we want to be, hey, a number for you, a number for you? Everybody gets a number. It's number time. And that's traditionally how it's been. It's quite easy to get a number and get a BIP. But nowadays, with the AI Slop, making it easy to throw hot, steaming turds over the fence at us. Yeah, it calls into question, at least to my mind, the question of quality going forward and what the future of the BIPs repository should be. Yeah. On to the next subject. Where are we here? What else do we need to cover here? I mean, back to court real quick. There are changes going on. They're not loud, advertised changes.

1:49:50 But, you know, well, obviously, Gloria stepped down. But a quieter change that perhaps is as important, if we want to say that if Gloria's departure was important, then this would be, I think, equally so or more so. I recently learned that the CEO of Chaincode sat down when I was not aware. I don't know what he is doing now, perhaps moving into AI like everybody else is. But yes, there is a new CEO of Chaincode Labs. So the person who was the CEO for a long time was one of the proponents of the diversity, equity, inclusion sort of thing. So I don't know. I don't know if this is part of an evolution.

1:50:32 Soft changes. personally as we discussed previously I think there an issue of trust by the outer community in CORD court has lost some of their trust and the way to restore that trust is probably not with quiet evolutions but but coming out saying hey we screwed up bear yourself say here's our skeletons in the closet come clean me a culpa we we we messed up and here's what we're going to do moving forward But I don't think Core is going to do that because doing so would require probably changes that Core doesn't want to do or some people in Core aren't agreed to. So I don't know. I think it's something that people in Core are thinking about as I talk quite a lot with some people in Bitcoin Core.

1:51:16 I don't know. There's a lot of resistance. And probably at the end of the day, if I continue working on the protocol, it will be either mostly with the BIFs or when that comes to an end and then maybe with a maybe launch my own client. I'm not particularly eager to do that. It's a lot of work. But there definitely seems to be users who would like to see that. Team Bitcoin. Yeah. Have you heard of the Bitcoin commons? Oh, yes. I've talked to them quite a lot. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. I've talked to them. Yeah. I'm in their group. Up to date on what's going on. Yeah. I think this is all good. And we want to encourage these different initiatives.

1:51:58 I don't know which, if any, will become a sustainable, robust, well-resourced alternative for people. For now, in my mind, Bitcoin Core is the only game in town. They have all the developers, or most of them. Libitcoin has two who are funded, I think, maybe three soon, plus Eric. So that's a pretty good team. That's a pretty good start. Notts apparently has, I mean, OpenSats has always agreed to fund Notts's office, but no one has applied, as I explained before. but apparently there are other funders who are stepping in as well, and maybe Notts will. I would like to see Notts also be robust and not be just Luke, and I think Luke would like it to not be just Luke. He's got a lot on his plate, Luke.

1:52:39 Or she Notts, he still reviews for development, and he still submits pull requests into Bitcoin Core, unless they ban him finally, which I think would actually probably be a foot gun for Bort to do so, but that's a minority position, I fear. But yes, Bitcoin needs more developers, not fewer. I was shocked when Adam Back wrote that Bitcoin Core doesn't need your contribution. Well, Bitcoin Core does need more developers of all kinds. Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin generally, Knox does, Libbit on it, VTCD, Calvin Kim. I think we'd love to have developers join him working on VTCD as well as U3XO and Floresta, the client that integrates U3XO.

1:53:21 We need more resources, more people, not fewer, and not necessarily only loyalists or people who are, you know, following whatever the dictates are from certain court. To me, those are obvious observations, but maybe not so obvious in the minds of people who disagree. That's fair. Yeah, I mean, regardless of how this whole thing plays out with BIP-110, I will respect the people who eat the humble pie afterwards, regardless of what happens. Yeah, if you can admit that you were wrong, mea colpa, as you say, that's a sign of strength.

1:54:03 Absolutely. It seems that, I mean, there are some very sensitive things that people feel they cannot say inside of court. But the problem is that people, I think people feel in their tummy that there's something that's being covered up or hidden or just not talked about. And, you know, and that doesn't help. I don't think that helps court. I don't think that helps big. But it does protect certain people who have made certain choices for better or worse. And I'm not here to condemn or judge. I'm observing that I think it's not helping Bitcoin Core come into a renewal. I mean, even Bitcoin Core, I think, has faced a shortage of new talent in their pipeline. I have heard that. I believe it.

1:54:43 AI is a hot new thing. All the developers are looking at AI as where they could make their fortune. Bitcoin is in the bear market. Even here in El Salvador, it feels like everything is pivoted to AI. No, no. Bitcoin is kind of like the old leftovers in the fridge that nobody wants to eat anymore. I don't know. I'm using only Bitcoin. I'm paying a high price in time and energy to use only Bitcoin. I really try to I don't even have a bank card anymore. Now I have a new virtual card. Thank goodness. So I can pay for my Starlink. Thanks to thanks to someone in the Bitcoin space who helped me out. But yeah, I'm trying to increase Bitcoin adoption, use only Bitcoin as money, not as any digital asset, not only a savings as money every day. I pay for my breakfast. I paid for my coffee.

1:55:27 I paid for my Starlink, everything using Bitcoin. Price up, price down, I use Bitcoin. This is the way, as we say, absolutely. It's not an easy path. It's definitely on the bleeding edge, even here in El Salvador, even here in Bitcoin Beach, where it's trivial to pay everything with Bitcoin and Bivoli Beach, thanks to the great efforts of the Bitcoin Beach team that have so far mostly paid off. I mean, last bear market, I saw some merchants reducing their desire to accept Bitcoin. But then when the price started coming back up, we got them back opened up again to accepting Bitcoin. This time, I don't see merchants shutting down Bitcoin payments. It seems to be more sustainable this time.

1:56:07 So far, we're at the start of the bear market. We may not be at the bottom yet. I suspect we are not, but I am not a trader. I do not know. I mean, I just see what the psychological effect is on the merchants here who accept Bitcoin. I mean, if we compare this to six, seven years ago, I mean, now you can pay with Bitcoin at almost all the Bitcoin conferences. Like they have B2C pay server terminals set up for NFC payments and whatnot. And also, like in the early years of Bitcoin, they tried to orange pill and Bitcoinize some places. Arnhem in the Netherlands, for instance, and then that sort of faded away, but now it's coming back again. It feels like it's slow, but it's robust. I mean, Madeira is not losing any Bitcoin merchants. They keep growing. El Salvador, as you say. Prague, it's very easy to live on Bitcoin in Prague So it is happening It just that people the way I predict hyper looks like in Europe at least it like I traveled around quite a bit in the early 90s so not to quite close to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

1:57:24 And back then, I mean, you couldn't speak English in Germany or France or Spain. Like they all spoke their own language exclusively. And... Territorial facts. Territorial facts. Territorial facts. Cool. So you saw what's his... November 9, 89. It was cold as hell that night. Cool. I was standing on the wall. That is awesome. I lived in Berlin back then, West Berlin. What's his name looking for freedom? David Hasselhoff. Yes. I love that David Hasselhoff was there. Yeah. Well, he was a star in Germany. Well, to continue the analogy, so the younger generations, they all speak English, like all throughout Europe.

1:58:09 And even my Swedish daughter speaks English with her Swedish friends. It's just happening. And I think Bitcoin adoption is similar. It's like the older generations don't speak Bitcoin, but the younger generations do, the ones that grew up with Sats. So I think that's how it plays out, reminiscent of that, rather than just a fast thing. It takes a couple of generations, probably. I hope so. Here in El Salvador, they're beginning to teach Bitcoin in schools. At least that's what I hear the Bitcoin office talking about. I have friends with children. They haven't seen that yet in practice, but I hope it's coming because I agree.

1:58:50 the emphasis here in El Salvador is very much on education at the level of the children for a better future because that is where the change needs to happen, absolutely. Yes. What else haven't we covered? I mean, it feels like it's harder and harder. When I was going through all these virtual car companies that were off-ramps for using Bitcoin for paying things like credit card, several had shut down their services. It feels like things are going in the wrong way. We're heading towards more surveillance, more dystopia, more regulation against wallets and self-custody and using your Bitcoin freely. The world is definitely, it feels like it's heading in a very wrong direction.

1:59:33 As if the COVID horror, I really felt horror when I feel horror when I think again about the COVID measures. I feel like they want to come back to that. They want to bring that back. But the only obstacle probably is instilling fear in the population to comply. They need to find a way to scare us. Not me, because I never complied, but the general population. And I really fear they're going to try to ramp this back up with a digital ID. It's obvious the direction that we're going. KYC AML compliance here in El Salvador has gone up radically. It's really getting hardcore. I needed help from friends at a fintech startup yesterday to get my virtual card activated to route around some of these regulations.

2:00:20 They did some magic in their app to route around some things because, yeah, it's getting harder. And the new compliance KYC providers are using adaptive AI intelligence, which is ridiculous. Why don't they just call it artificial AI intelligence? They're going to call it AI intelligence. But do they read their own copy? But yeah, and AI is probably not going to make things easier for people living on the frontier like you and I and using money to use our Bitcoin. I think it's going to be harder and harder to integrate with the fiat system. They're going to shut it down. I hope I'm wrong. El Salvador passed laws to help enable Bitcoin banks a year and a half, two years ago, a year and a half ago to great fanfare.

2:01:03 The Bitcoin office worked hard on those laws. I don't think I've seen any new Bitcoin banks. I could be wrong, but I feel like it's going the wrong way. It's all AI and attracting investment and construction and, you know, schools. Those are all important things. I don't deny that. But Bitcoin itself has me worried. It's going to be a tough fight against the final boss. I think we're still, we haven't seen anything yet. I hope I'm wrong. I mean, there's goods and bads. There are some new cards and stuff available. I guess it depends on what country you're in, where these companies are in. I know there's one in Shanghai.

2:01:43 I'm losing my train of thought here. Damn it. There's a handful. There's one called Two Fiat and one called Freedomia. They work pretty well. You can top them up with Bitcoin and use them. And I know there are others as well. So at the same time, things like this are coming. Then again, they are all transitory. The real deal is when people start accepting Bitcoin for their goods and services and stops complying. That's what needs to happen. And people need to understand. I just hope that they figure it out before everything else goes to shit.

2:02:25 Because everything else is going to shit. People need to ask to be paid in Bitcoin. You know, I was a grantee for four years at one of the Bitcoin grant institutions. And they actually, I had to affirm that I wanted to be paid in Bitcoin because they kept nudging me. Are you sure you don't want to be paid in dollars or maybe half and half? I'm like, no, pay me in Bitcoin. Yeah, and that's just ridiculous. Oh, Singapore. Singapore. They're set up in Singapore, I think, in one of these card companies. So there are, you know, different rules for different jurisdictions. So as long as we don't have a global government, I think it's... Well, I mean, when you see how they're all getting the same mandates for COVID and now for digital ID at the same time, you really wonder.

2:03:10 These leaders are just, you know, it does very much look like they're just employees working for the same boss. You know, Macron and whoever is the new prime minister of England and Spain and Germany, they're all taking the same marching orders, quite obviously, whether now or before with COVID. So there's something going on, you know, World Economic Forum or whatnot. But you know in the US it seems like these card companies they either work in the US and not elsewhere or they work elsewhere but not in the US So there I mean yeah we need to decentralize power and avoid this one world order as much as we can And to me that just obvious but yeah Yeah, resist, don't comply, brush your teeth and live your life.

2:03:54 Like this is the way. Use banking soda instead of toothpaste. Yeah, absolutely. But you know, whether in Bitcoin, within Bitcoin development, within Bitcoin mining, we want to decentralize. Decentralize the power, decentralize the control. social attacks are an obvious attack vector, but, you know, as are others. So, decentralized and mining hash rate, mine, I definitely want to get into mining. I'm building a mining facility at the moment. I hope I can get everything set up before things really go bad. I want to be completely off the grid up there at the Citadel. I mean, I am off the grid now, but I don't generate enough power. So I'm increasing my capacity. Maybe you can hook, maybe you can leech power leach power from the power line that they're building over your house.

2:04:37 Yeah, they've started, there's a test signal inside of them. I'm measuring current with my radio frequency meter. Yeah, the bullshit-o-meter, yes. The tri-field, I have the tri-field. Yeah, no, I see current is flowing but it's very low current. There's electrical but no magnetic. So they have test current flowing but it's not quite, they're going to wrap up I think over the next year. I'll be keeping tabs on that. Hopefully the electromagnetic radiation coming off power lines on the cell tower in the town below, which is a beautiful town on the central main street, is really high. And I don't know if I should publicize, like put up a video showing how high it is where people are walking on the street. But yeah, it's definitely not a priority at the moment.

2:05:22 People say when it comes to EMF. Yeah. Step by step. Have you looked into hash renting and this whole thing that you can mine without without actually running ASICs? Yeah, I want to give it a thought. I haven't done so yet. I figured I'm going to try that roughly around the same time as I switched my... I have one node that is not running on a typical directly... Like, all my nodes, they just run on devices. But I have one that I bought, which is the Startline Labs, to try it out. And it's pretty cool. And I'm probably going to switch that one over to BIP-110 just to have one BIP-110 node running and see how that goes. And at the same time, I'd probably like to try some of that hashrate stuff just to give it a shot.

2:06:04 For the moment, I have my own little collection of miners. It's very small, but it's enough to drain off excess solar power when my batteries are full during the middle of the day when the sun is shining, which is how I'm probably using it. I'm using excess solar to mine, and I'd like to ramp up capacity there. I don't really have enough capacity to mine seriously, and I want to increase that. So ultimately, I prefer to do my own mining with my own excess free power, free, quote unquote, rather than renting hash rate. But I want to give it a shot. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So yeah, I'm sort of running out of time here. I'm flying out to Lugano tomorrow. So I have a bunch of more things to do before pack, for instance, pack my suitcase.

2:06:47 And I mean, Lugano sounds fun. It sounds great. I hear it's expensive, but beautiful. Yes, it is expensive and beautiful. But yeah, we'll have a good time at the summer school. It's always a pleasure to come back there. Yeah, beautiful place. Good people like Giacomo there. Giacomo is, you know, awesome, massive respect for Giacomo. Yeah, we have a lot of fun together for sure. So yeah, I'm looking forward to that. And I'll see what podcasting ability I have there. I know there's a podcast studio. I don't know if I can just use it. We'll see what happens. but it's going to be fun to give some lectures and talk to some students again. It's always good fun.

2:07:29 Yeah, I did that just last week, last Saturday at the National Bitcoin Office in El Salvador with the Cuba Plus boot camp students. Yeah, I'm doing more online things with them. I think some praxeology courses here coming up later. That's all good fun. I did two already and that was very, very rewarding. The students were listening carefully. And yeah, it's kind of interesting to just sit. And most of them didn't have their, or none of them had their cameras on, I believe. So you just had like all these people in a room and just sitting here ranting and occasionally asking them if they follow along and you get thumbs up everywhere. And it's like, but you don't see anyone.

2:08:10 It was a very surreal experience, but I liked it. I imagine you do it in English, right? Yeah. Yeah, I did. My Spanish is not good enough to give lectures yet, for sure, unfortunately. I need to try. They want me to switch to Spanish, and I want to too. But getting close, getting close. I have to try doing it. I speak more Spanish in El Salvador than I do in Spain. You sort of need it more in El Salvador than you need it in Spain. It's getting harder in El Salvador. It's getting harder and harder to speak Spanish. Because more and more of them are learning English. they want to as soon as they see a white guy they don't want to speak Spanish to you anymore it's getting tough I mean in the mountains they only speak Spanish but here on the beach everyone wants to speak English to me it makes me sad because I'm not particularly a fan of English I feel like it's my work language but not my the one I really have close to my heart I prefer Latin languages like French and Spanish but yeah everybody wants to speak in the city of the same they all want to speak English too if you're white it's a little bit annoying if you're trying to learn Spanish and improve your Spanish but At least in the mountains where the Citadel is, nobody speaks English.

2:09:18 Yeah. Anyway, I wish you a good rest of your day and rest of the weekend, I guess. And always lovely to talk to you. People can reach you. You're on X, just at Yon Attack. Yeah. Yes, sir. And you're quite active, I'd say. A good follow. Yeah, it's not productive to be that active. But yeah, it's good. It's good and bad. Team Bitcoin. Go Team Bitcoin. Let's make Bitcoin succeed. Yeah. Go Team Bitcoin. Thank you very much, John. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.