Bitcoin Core From the Inside | Jon Atack | BIS #195

0:00 Welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Today, I am speaking to one of my heroes, John Attack, a Bitcoin core developer who I wouldn't be here without him. So, hello, John. Hey, how you doing? So, instead of doing the regular letting John tell the world who he is, I'm going to give you a story about who I am, And it's going to lead in nicely to this conversation here. So I started studying Bitcoin in 2016, where I took an online course at the University of Nicosia. And Andreas Antonopoulos was one of the teachers.

0:42 And then I started writing about it on Medium in 2017. One of the articles about how to take control over your private keys when the whole Bitcoin cash hard fork happened went sort of semi-viral. So I kept on writing and I compiled these articles into a book. And then that was the only book that I had to my name. And I wasn't very happy with it. So in late 2018, I figured I should write a proper book about Bitcoin. And I promised myself to write a page a day for the entirety of 2019 as a New Year's resolution, right? And as with all New Year's resolutions, you break them after a while.

1:26 And I broke mine after 106 days. And what came out of that was a book called Sovereignty Through Mathematics. It's my first proper Bitcoin book. It looks like this, or it looked like this, rather. Nowadays, it's been slightly re-edited and redesigned. It looks like this. And I published it in June, or I think in June, or May or June, and nobody gave a crap. No one read the book. Nothing happened with it. I published the first chapter on Medium, I believe. And there, John happened to find that chapter, and he really liked it, but he thought my writing was kind of crap. And John is a multilingualist who speaks like seven languages fluently and is very good with grammar and stuff.

2:09 And the AI wasn't a thing back then. It's also a thing to know. Grammarly wasn't invented yet and so on. So John started helping me rewrite the book to make it better. And he also had a lot of technical knowledge and expertise and could point out where I was wrong and just make the whole thing a whole lot better. and after that i took 50 books um 50 of these paperbacks in my uh i brought them in my hand luggage to baltic honey badger in riga uh the og conference and uh i i sold 25 of them for cash on chain and lightning payments and i gave the other 25 away to bitcoiners that i liked and after that the book sort of started to take off and it got a life of its own and i got a lot of new contacts and a lot of good things happened uh eventually uh michael saylor put it on his hope.com website when uh when he got into onto the scene i i got a very surprising dm from saylor saying that he read the book and really liked it and that would not have happened hadn't it been for John Attacks. So a deep warm welcome to this show, John. I have been wanting to tell this story since 2019 because you haven't been properly given proper attention to all the work you put into this book. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything you did there.

3:42 Yeah, seven years later. Yeah, exactly. And the story doesn't end there, though. I'm going to babble on for a bit longer here because we had conversations from, I believe, from May to August in 2019. That's when we worked on the book. And you devoted quite a bit of time to it and really did the work. But then all of a sudden, at one of the very last chapters, I think the very last chapter, actually, you suddenly pulled out and you said some things that were sort of surprising to me. And I'm going to read from a DM here. This is John talking. While I understand very well the ideas you express in it and can relate to them as someone who is also on the spectrum, it is too unnuanced, too unbalanced, and too unpolitically correct to risk putting my name to it, particularly for any potential open source sponsors in San Francisco and New York City. This is the sort of content that has nothing to do with my work on Bitcoin and could be damaging in the same way it was for James Damore. Do you remember? I hope people remember James Damore. He was the whistleblower about the DEY stuff in Google, right? If I remember correctly. So what happened there?

5:06 Where were you and what led up to you pulling out and not wanting your name on my book? So I guess that is an interesting segue into our discussion. I think that was, you said, in August 2019. So I had been trying to learn to work on Bitcoin Core and contribute to Bitcoin Core starting in February of that year. and we can backtrack to that and discuss how that actually went down and what happened during that time because it was a very interesting time of change. But I had come back from spending two and a half weeks in the month of June in New York City in the offices of Chain Code Labs and I realized that it was probably better for me as I was at that time non-funded and working more or less full-time for free trying to contribute to Bitcoin for free and now that it was without any sort of support of any kind.

6:08 And I was no longer working in my previous role of freelance software engineer, a very well-paid one at the time before. And so I was concerned about my ability to get funding. And at the time, pretty much my only task to get funding at that point where it was clear that I was not going to be funded by Chaincore Labs, my only other real option was the newly announced creation of Square Crypto. by Jack Dorsey, led by Miles Suter, who I did recommend to Miles that he select Steve Lee as the first manager of the new initiative. And that is, in fact, it could be just a coincidence, but in fact, Steve Lee was the first hire.

6:50 But my only real chance to have funding at that time, and there were very few other funding organizations, was really to convince Steve Lee. And so I needed to keep my profile as controversial as possible at a time when there was a strong push for other types of profiles and identities than mine for developers. And we can get to that later if we need to. I don't hear you, Knut. Yes, I got a tweet here from Matt Corallo back in April 2018, where he says, it's long since time the Bitcoin community spent a ton more effort on recruiting and ensuring underrepresented groups, including women and especially folks with a different background, feel welcome in the community.

7:41 So I think this is sort of a start of the DEY culture coming into Bitcoin Core, right? I think I missed that tweet in 2018, but I did see the same person watch a series of tweet storms And in May of 2019, about three months after I had been trying to more or less full-time become a Bitcoin Core contributor, that was my one goal. And so it was very clear to me which way the wind was blowing and even the way the process with ChainCore Labs took place. I had been planning for years to contribute to Bitcoin Core since maybe 2016 when around 2015 or 2016, I don't recall exactly Vladimir Vanderland then a long time mid-maintainer of Bitcoin Core began to follow me on Twitter and to my surprise and so I began to follow Vladimir's work on Bitcoin Core and I very much liked the kind of leadership style that I saw. To my mind, that was the best leadership of an open source project that I had seen. And I had spent considerable time, a number of years working on open source in other areas.

8:58 And I wasn't pleased with the leadership style. And so Lighting Your Style appealed to me immensely and basically inspired me to consider Bitcoin Core as my next path in life. And at the Same time, my work environment, I was doing a lot of ass-saving, high-profile, saving missions for large multinationals in Europe when they would get caught with a bad choice of software team to implement something key and critical for them. And so they would call a very small number of people. I was on that list of the sort of top little elite in France where I was to go and fix things for them and save them against time and against space.

9:43 and the cost would usually be rather a bit higher than with the Indian and Ukrainian and wherever subcontractors they had been working with before that caught them in the hot water. And so that was getting a bit, well, a bit woke. And woke isn't really my thing. And I thought both at the same time, I had been saving in Bitcoin for years and believing in Bitcoin and Bitcoin spoke to me. And I felt like the cypherpunk ideals of Bitcoin meant that maybe I would be moving towards a team that would be grizzled, gray-bearded sea hackers. And I thought this was perhaps the place where it's still going to be a bit safe from the encroachment of the...

10:25 I don't like to use the word woke or even DEI, but there was critical race theory. There was all these radical left theories that I had glimpsed during my university days. even way before and they terrified me to be honest i never thought they would go anywhere but they did this totally you know as we all know now in in took over terrain in the academic circles and institutional circles and then it sort of exploded during the mid-2010s uh more or less and and that's what i was fleeing and i was thinking okay bitcoin seems to be a place where i can maybe avoid this nonsense and that turned out to be wrong because just as i just as i started working really full time and stopped doing my previous work to dedicate myself to Bitcoin Core, it came to Bitcoin Core as well. Yeah. And so the people funding Bitcoin Core developers at the time, the two companies that come up, Brink and Chaincode Labs, right? Brink did not exist yet.

11:28 Brink did not exist. So it's Chaincode Labs first. Brink came about two years later. Yeah, yeah, I'm getting it wrong here. But Chaincode Labs is a private company, right? I believe the two founders of Chaincode Labs, they ran a high-frequency trading firm, I believe, called Hudson River Trading or something similar. and that allowed them i believe to have the means to have a to dedicate part of their very lovely offices in this in a new york skyscraper um to improving bitcoin and for years both to us and um and uh marcos i forgot his first name we're working on bitcoin as software engineers as well um Alex Marcos yeah I mean around the same time here as Corallo's tweet in 2018 Adam Jonas comes to the scene who is a guy that was taught at a school called the Flatiron School in New York a coding boot camp that was started in 2012 I believe yeah very iconic building in new york the thing is so i'm not sure but at the time jonas he prefers to be called jonas um and not adam jonas was um i believe relatively new to chenco labs he came

13:02 just before that residency john newberry um i believe began began working at chenco at around 2017. And so in 2018 or late 2018, perhaps to very early 2019, or perhaps earlier, John was just hired. But, you know, John was very, very, very active. He had a lot of energy. He was creating a lot of initiatives. Not only was he very prolific as a contributor to Bitcoin Core, he also created the residency. He created Bitcoin Optech, which was the newsletter, as well as the enterprise outreach for getting them to move to tap using tapper and understanding tapper he later created the bitcoin core pr review club in early 2019 as well which i co with him for the first two years and then he later created Brink with Jonas So John Lumberry created the Bitcoin Core Review Club created a co Bitcoin Optic, co-created what was the main name attached to Brink in 2021, as well as I think the person behind the residency idea at Chaincode.

14:11 And the 2019 summer residency was very ambitious. They were selecting about a dozen people to spend three months in Manhattan, fully housed, all costs covered, as well as receiving, I think, around $8,500 per month to work, basically to dedicate themselves to Bitcoin for three months. It was very ambitious and very well funded. And it only ever happened once. Yeah. The reason I mentioned this school that he came from is that they were very into the DEY thing. on their website, there's explicit race and gender-gated fellowships, BLM era DEI task force.

14:53 I mean, New York City, academia, what do you want? Yeah, yeah. No, no, but just to mention that this is, I mean, it was in full bloom back then, right? They had Feelings Friday. What is a Feelings Friday? We had Freeling. he must have taken that with him from there then yes he did so so what what is a feelings friday i mean i think it was just where people were were encouraged to become vulnerable and and expressed what they were happy and not maybe not so happy i don't remember exactly it was sort of a circle we all went around i think it made people both feel good and maybe it was a form of bonding, but it was also vulnerability and sharing.

15:39 I wasn't entirely comfortable with it because, well, I don't know. It's just... It's not like a bro kind of thing, definitely. Not that I'm a bro kind of person either, but it's just, I don't know. I don't know how... How do you behave in a situation like that? I mean, as someone who's maybe a tiny bit on the spectrum, I wasn't the most comfortable I could be. No, and I imagine a lot of developers to be sort of more introverted than extroverted and maybe not. Yeah, I mean, personally, I'm only happy working alone. I can't get things done well working in an office with a bunch of people around me.

16:21 That probably was how most Bitcoin Core developers were. And that is no longer the kind of Bitcoin Core developers we have today, perhaps, because most of them are now in offices. So either they're all miserable as I would be if I was in office, or maybe they actually like it, or could be a bunch of nuances in between. But that has completely changed. But back to Change Code. So I'm hesitant to discuss on Newberry too much because I owe him a lot of gratitude in a way. Because Adam Jonas, my first contact with Jonas was an interview for the residency where he basically told me in the first three or five minutes that I would not be going further in the selections.

17:08 This was in early March 2019 because they were looking for long-term contributor material and I didn't fit the bill. What I did not realize at the time was how I did not fit the bill. And I do believe, based on what I saw afterwards, that they were looking for certainly younger, less, perhaps less independent, more malleable, moldable, maybe more compliant or willing to be in an office. I was an experienced, independent, mature adult, you know, and I had responsibilities. I had mortgages. I had things to pay for. And so I didn't fit the bill.

17:48 And I believe now that ultimately we're looking for something, they had a specific mission in mind. To put it gently, I believe that their idea was that Bitcoin Core should professionalize and become a bit more like Google and corporatize and offices and professional people who otherwise would have gone to Google was sort of the idea, I think. and I think there was a more specific idea as well in the minds of people like John who created the residency and Jonas who was hired by John to help co-run that residency and Jonas was running the interviews so I was rejected and there are only two funding organizations in all of Bitcoin that have rejected me over the past seven to eight years and that was first one was Chainco and later on the next one was Brink but and all the other ones I'm very grateful to have said yes.

18:45 But I didn't tip the bill without even knowing more about me based on more or less who I was. So things that probably couldn't change about myself. And then John, to his credit, saw that I was doing more reviewing and commits on Thor than probably half to all of the rest of the group combined over the next two months. They were working, meeting together two or three times a week online, preparing for the residency during spring of 2019. Me, I was at home in France working on Bitcoin 4 without any supervision whatsoever. And I was starting to rack up the reviews as best I could as a new contributor, learning, reviewing.

19:32 And then I started getting some commits. Jonas did say to me, look, we don't know you. You should get some commits. Maybe you should do a podcast. You should get your name out there. all I wanted to do was work on core I didn't care about being famous playing the fame game and that's basically how I've done it for the last seven years I didn't really and that was a mistake fame is very helpful and more so in El Salvador in fact but in general but yet I believe that my work was speak for itself and it did and within two or three weeks I had a call from JCO Labs and it was basically Jonas saying hey John Newberry has watched what you've been doing and he would like to know if you want to speak with him and I said sure And Mr. John encouraged me and said, you should be more ambitious, team higher, you could do this, keep going.

20:18 And so I did. And then late May, right around the time when the Blue Mat was writing about diversity in DEI, they did call me back and say, hey, you're kicking ass more or less. You want to come to New York City? So the rejection turned into come participate even though you're not in the full program and getting your costs covered. and you're not going to earn $8,500 a month. But I was still invited to come for two and a half weeks to the Bitcoin part of the residency, the Bitcoin seminar before they would roll, receive some work every day in the office. And so I covered my costs of travel, and I did go, and they did place me in an apartment in Queens with the other residencies, residents.

21:02 They called themselves residents, the resis. And it was a very interesting experience. in many ways. I did come out of it a bit depressed. I can explain why. But yeah, and so my experience with John was very helpful to me, and I'm very reluctant to. My goal is not to, and I've always been reluctant to, to come out with the other things I know because I'm grateful. There's a lot of nuance here. And of course, people have different political opinions and stuff. I'm just very interested in the connection between wokeness and moral relativism.

21:43 And I think like for Bitcoin plebs, they are mostly, I mean, they're leaning towards freedom values and, you know, anarcho-capitalism and such things, which is something I don't see in shitcoiners at all. And if I look at Brink's sponsors here, for instance, you have Coinbase and you have Zappo Bank, the Draper Foundation, and Marathon, and OKX, and Nexo, and BlockFi, and Gemini. At the time, there were very few funders. And to be frank, well, Zappo was one of the only other organizations willing to fund Bitcoin Core developers. They were funding Anthony Towns, H.A. Towns at the time.

22:26 And OKEx was also one of the few that was willing to fund and did fund for a time. And Coinbase said they would, but they never really did it well. And they were pretty flaky. And they left some core developers out to dry, all of a sudden cutting off the funding, if I remember correctly. So Coinbase was never very good about fulfilling their promise to support developers on Bitcoin, open source developers. But OK, X did. Sapo did. And, you know, I'm uncomfortable with some of the criticisms. Yes, there may be shit corners funding. But as far as I have seen, and you have to be fair, I have never, ever felt any coercion in any way.

23:07 Maybe I was lucky, but I don't believe I heard it. I haven't heard from others either. People telling them to. I think that sort of coercion happens more in terms of soft power, soft influence, friendships, social friendships, time hung out together. Not so much because your funder asks you to. I've never heard of a funder putting strings on their grant. No, but... Apart from doing work. no no and i i don't believe there's a direct like i'm not accusing anyone of being corrupted directly and getting a bag of money for for doing corrupt things but but no if if there is corruption and corruption with quotes i don't want to use overuse air quotes but but if there is sort of that sort of thing going on it's on a social level yeah but that's sort of what i'm getting at like Is there a problem if the funders are shitcoiners and then probably not as freedom-oriented?

24:10 I don't think anyone at Kraken sees Bitcoin as important as a Bitcoin maximalist does. If you think that these other things have value too. Actually, Kraken had a very base founder. Chesty Howell was base. Yeah, maybe that's a bad example. Yeah, and I'm going to do a lot of bad examples here because I'm not very good at understanding what these things are in terms of what the companies do. But I'm interested in the connection between softening up core to DEY values. And I think in the beginning, Bitcoin Core developers were very, what's the word?

25:01 They weren't afraid of conflict, let's just say that. They were very disagreeable is the word. And they managed to somehow cooperate anyway. And I feel this DIY thing is a sort of a forced agreeableness upon the whole thing. I don't know. What are your thoughts around that? And that isn't what concerned, that isn't what impacted me. I have been personally, I felt very, very, very impacted by the DEI push. The number one issue for me for working on CORE has been a small number of people who are pushing. I wouldn't say purely necessarily for DEI, but the result of their, they desired a social change in CORE.

25:49 that they then enact it. And the problem was that if you were not on board, someone like me was expected to support this. I wasn't going to be, at the time, I wasn't going to be the next maintainer because it was quite clear that at the time it was very desired for a female maintainer to be the next one or two maintainers. And in my eyes, it was quite clear, based on many things I saw up close, in person as well as in interactions on the repository and other things that the goal was to train up and groom a certain person who was chosen to be groomed as a maintainer at the time probably the peer for the peer-to-peer layer and then that person at some point another person appeared on the scene who was also chosen and we were more or less expected to support and promote that and help market these people who benefited from immediate runway of funding, media coverage, podcasts, articles in the press.

26:55 And I personally helped promote them because I was contributing for two years to Bitcoin Optech. And so I wrote articles that were favorable to their work. And then after two years of this, I realized that, hey, it took me a little bit of time because first I just wanted to become a contributor and find funding. And as I wrote to you, I had to be very careful and self-censor. And once I did manage to succeed and find my place, I became less and less comfortable with the role expected of me because I felt it wasn't the right thing to do. I didn't think it was a pure meritocracy if there were people who were chosen based on their relationships or based on their identity who we were expected to support And the problem got much worse than that I can kinpoint it was that time when my Bitcoin poor prolific contributions came to an end when I was seen as, it happened on one specific pull request when I made a review that was, I believe, taken personally and caused a conflict.

28:08 with John Yugen. Yeah, is this in June 2021 by any chance? Yeah, I mean, it was a full request made by Amidi, who at the time, I believe, it was pretty clear to me that she was being trained and groomed. She had much higher privileges on the repository than many other people did. And my review was just technical. It was not personal. and it led to a whole bunch of fallout because the course, the trajectory of that pull request changed after my review because it was an area of code I knew well.

28:48 And I realized that I was expected to social approve things that I didn't technically agree with because, and then if I did not, I was seen as not being supportive of the agenda. And the whole thing blew up. It came out that John was actually behind the boy quests because he was defending it rather than Amidi. And, or he was, he took it on himself. There was a sort of armor around these people when they were chosen. It was very risky for you. See, Amidi had a mentor who was the same A.J. Towns. and so you would get John and AJ and also Fankwake on your case if you were not seen as supportive of these people and there was a sort of a tight group of there was a violence of Roman soldiers ready to step in and protect these chosen people if you were not supported and they all came to have had it that one full request which we can name that changed the course of my career so you mean they defended them because of their gender or because of their cultural background and not on technical you know I think it was a mix of this person was picked they were assigned them a mentor or a mentor would agree to come and help them I think they were hand picked whether that was based on their gender or not I mean

30:19 it looked that way it looked that way because it didn't appear like the person was exceptional. The people they picked were not exceptional in other ways. But, you know, how can you say? Maybe they just had a special relationship. Maybe they were mutual fans of each other. You know, this is human. There are nuances. But the problem was because the pattern kept repeating. And it was very clear to me that I had to be very careful. You were basically operating on a minefield. And that is still the case. It's just a little bit attenuated. But the PR in question, the pull request that changed the course of my trajectory working on Bitcoin, was Bitcoin Core pull request 22,245.

31:05 And there was fallout from that. I mean, Andrew H.L. acted, Peter Wheeler acted, Ben DeCarmen acted, Marco Falke acted, John Newberry acted. The whole list of the thing was going to be merged. Reacts. One neutral comment by Vladimir, the lead maintainer. More comments. And then I made one review comment. I didn't say knack or anything aggressive. I just suggested that this wasn't the right direction. and i got a bunch of private angry messages from john he took to he took me to the case to me on the bitcoin board of irc uh myself as well as vassil dimoff as well as the lead maintainer vladimir and then after that a bunch of people agreed with me suhas daftour who was the expert in peer-to-peer agreed with me people started lining up with my comment and the poll request was closed instead of merged after it had five acts by the most contributors.

32:13 So I got a shit ton of heat for that. And what was the pull request about? It was to stop, it was a sort of a fine P2P stop sending send adder V2 message to block relabel me peers. It was an area that I knew well for having reviewed it intensively and that Vasavvimov knew well because he was told he had written and Lidinger, Lander, Lander, Lander, Lander, because Lander had merged it so yeah, so the three people who really knew it well didn't agree and then everybody else aligned with my review but my review bucked five acts by future maintainer and project owner, Ed Chao by Peter Huera, who was also project maintainer and owner, Marco Falke, who was also maintainer, so three maintainers that already said yes John Newberry said yes.

33:10 Of course, it came out that John had actually suggested to Amidi to do this change. And so Amidi was just a proxy. And I don't think that, I think it came to light that a lot of that was going on, where basically John was suggesting things. The problem back at Chaincode that I saw was that we were expected to help people that were being, the hand-chosen people, we were expected to help them. And that came in the form of private requests to help understand Bitcoin for technical details or to help review code or to help maybe help them figure something out with the code. And I asked around and it wasn't just me. It was happening to the other residents who said, yeah, yeah, they asked me too.

33:53 And they asked me too. And basically our role was to help train and support the handpicked people. But I didn't realize at the time, I just realized that after the months that came after that, nobody was funded except the hand-picked people. And all the guys were just unemployed and wondering what to do, and there were no perspectives on finding funding. And I believe three people from that residency are still active on Bitcoin Core and Funded NAN. But it took me almost a year, and the other two, it took them literally years, maybe three years, to find funding. and these guys are active today but it was crazy the sacrifice you had to make at the time to find funding in terms of financial sacrifice and so it was very blatant to the people who were spending a year, one year, two years, three years with no income trying to make it work that's really painful, my dude that is super painful that is fucking painful And I say that with real feeling because I went from earning a lot of money to earning zero money because I was a senior engineer and technically saving assets at multinational corporations on intense missions that were very well paid to being basically a free software open source developer.

35:16 And we were watching as the hand pit people would just glide right through with zero financial loss, zero drop in income from maybe their previous job or maybe just straight out graduation later on, right into funding with zero financial difficulty or sacrifice. And so to my eyes, it was relatively blatant. And I don't want to speak for the other people, but we were all discussing it. Like we were sharing our difficulties that we were experiencing in life because here we are. We wanted to work on Bitcoin or Bitcoin Core or Lightning, as it were, depending on the developer. And there was no funding and no support.

35:58 And we were all struggling. And so we were taking freelance missions and discussing what we can do and supporting each other. and while the chosen ones just glided right through on the red carpet that was rolled out. And it was a little bit disgusting, to be honest. I mean, yeah, there is bitterness. And would I have done it again? Probably not. As much as it was my goal in life, all I wanted to do in life was work on Bitcoin. And did you apply for funding from Brink here? And did you get it? Or what happened? It didn't exist until... I think Brink was created the same year as that whole request I cited that pretty much ended my career in core.

36:42 And I didn't explain how that happened, but that could be explained. But it marked a before and after, a very clear before and after. I was extremely prolific up to that point. And after that, everything changed. And was that just the funding or did you feel like... I was funded at that time by Spiral. That was called Square Crypto at the time. Oh, yeah. But then Brink was created a little bit after that. No, Brink was created before that, late 2020, early 2021. And I had applied before that pull request that I cited. That pull request I cited was in June 2021, June 14th.

37:26 How interesting. That's my birthday. It was created on my birthday in 2021. So I think the week or two before that whole request, I had received word from John, again, that I was rejected. I did apply to Brink, and I was rejected. So the only two funding organizations that ever rejected me, and thank you to all the other ones, our chain code labs that said no to me, and then later sort of said yes. And then to, thanks to my working super hard. and then um brook i applied to bring in and somebody said no but what was it only the funding or did you feel a motivational hit there or like were you depressed by this whole thing is that why you became less prolific i started being funded in march 2020 after on my in my 13th month of working more or less half time to full time on bitcoin core it was all i wanted to do So in my 13th month, I started, I received my first funding with a grant that began with Square Crypto.

38:32 At the time, it was $80,000 a year. My first grant was for $80,000 for one year. So definitely not an upper echelon of core developer pay, but it was a start. And I could, you know, yes, it was several times less than I was earning previously as an experienced developer. But it was something. And so I was already funded, thankfully, by that time. And Spiral, Spirer Crypto, which became Spiral later on, did fund me for four years before dropping me. Some people within Spiral nowadays are not very friendly to me.

39:16 But did you feel less motivated after that? What did you feel internally? The most demotivating thing, as soon as you have even a little bit of funding to make ends meet, then it no longer really demotivates you until you see maybe someone else hitting three times more who's also a new developer. Just because the red carpet was rolled out for that person and not for you. But it might be twice more, maybe three times more. Some people sacked grants very effectively. I was actually accused of being the record holder in sacking grants. I wasn't the first. I only did it twice, actually. Every other year of the eight, I was on one single grant, as I am currently, with OpenThats.

40:00 And that is something I'd like to point out. I see a lot of people criticizing all of the funding organizations, cancel all the funding to developers on board. And I disagree with that. And I'd like to mention something. And this criticism does come from the, I would say, the NOS or the BIP 110 side. they lump all of the funding organizations together. But they really aren't all the same. They are very different, in my humble opinion. So some are more independent than others. Let's say for the sake of, let's say there's a core orthodoxy. Let's say there's the core, these are the people we want core.

40:42 There are some that will follow that orthodoxy, and there are others that are more independent. and happily someone wants to remain independent. And I would say the more independent ones would be OpenSats, notably, and perhaps HRF Foundation. They have their agenda. It's not so much tied to core as it is to other things. I would guess. And then on the other hand, you have the more core-centric funding organizations like Brink, Chaincode Labs, and Firewall is sort of in the middle because Spiral has a focus on lightning as well as on design. And so Spiral is sort of in its own category, but the development, the core development side of Spiral is fairly core centric as well.

41:29 Whereas OpenSats has been willing for years, I believe, to fund a Nox developer They have recently begun funding a BitCoin developer to work with Eric Fossil His name is Philip. And so that's a full-time grant to work on another implementation. And it's my understanding is that the only reason OpenStats does not currently fund a Notts developer is because they haven't gotten an application yet from someone who they felt was qualified enough to receive. Okay, yeah, yeah. But OpenStats is, I think, clearly willing to support non-core implementations.

42:12 Yeah. I've seen, first of all, a thread from Vitalik Buterin back in 2014, where he explains why he wouldn't why he didn't try to build ethereum on bitcoin because he was uh basically told to to fuck off and we don't want that here we we want bitcoin to be money and simple and one purpose and stuff and i see i think it's the start where guy i saw an interview with where he also says similar things that a a bunch of core developers back then didn't want that there the narrative is sort of like, but now Core is much more open and Core is much more willing to innovate and all of this. And at the same time, you have this Opnet stuff and the Citria stuff and people building or basically doing shitcoin scams on Bitcoin. And it's like the attitude has completely changed with this. And do you think this is connected? How is this connected to the whole wokeness slide and and like if it's not the funding what what is it why why why has the culture changed from from like protecting bitcoin as money to to more uh shit coins on bitcoin well first of all the people who were the chosen one that in my experience speaking with him were

43:45 much more spoke much more highly of Vitalik and shit-cundry in general, or Ethereum, if you will. Certainly than I would. I always considered Vitalik to be a bit of a soothsayer, you know, playing the magic flute and the snake charming the VCs sort of thing. But that, if I said that to at least two of the hand-chosen people, the chosen people, they would very vehemently disagree with me. And they did. I mean, some of my arguments with them were over shitcoinery and all that. I was definitely a Bitcoin-only person. I always have been. I have zero interest in Ethereum. I don't really have a high opinion of the other ones.

44:28 And so I'm certainly not an admirer of Vitalik, aside from that he's probably quite intelligent in this particular way, obviously, because he's been successful with Ethereum to an extent. But that's not something I want on Bitcoin or something that I admire as a coin core developer. And so, look, a lot of this goes back to my, as I mentioned in my presentation at TimeBee, selection criteria matters. And when you have an organization that is running the developer selection and training pipeline, the selection criteria they are using changes the way your organization will look. And there was a clear emphasis on a certain type of person.

45:11 It was clear for years that the OG maintainers and project owners were either burning out as maintainers, wishing to set back as maintainers, or perhaps preferring to work more on their strengths like research. And so new people had to be found to pass the torch to, but the selection criteria for those new people obviously changes everything. And so if you choose, if you select for people who are young, like shit coins from academia or from, you know, big cities or blue cities or whatever sort of background, woke friendly. I believe the people who were making the selection, John Newberry did have a what looked to me like a far left political leaning in his other Twitter profile.

46:01 He did have another profile account, which I found looking him up. And I was like, okay, this guy is like radical left. But I didn't talk about it to anyone actually until now because I was just keen on trying to make, on optimizing my ability to contribute. And so if you start attacking people, so I just noted and learned about it. And I said, okay, this guy's pretty far left. And he chose Jonas. Was Jonas far left? Maybe not so much. He was into baseball He was scouting baseball talent But what do you do when you scout baseball talent? You're looking at youth You're looking at young people And so I think that came through The goal was Maybe they were preferring Certain gender or perhaps they were preferring Certain racial diversity Maybe not, I'm not sure Gender I believe was clearly the case But they were also having preferences In age they wanted youth the wonderkin who was selected among the men was Antoine Antoine was probably the youngest guy he was I don't know 19 or something maybe 20, 21 but he was very young and you know he was brilliant until he had his following up with Cenkow which I think everybody knows about if they don't they can look it up he was also from France and a friend and it made me very sad what happened between Antoine and Spiral Steve Lee Matt Corral and between Antoine and his former employer, Chain Code Labs.

47:33 But he was the brilliant guy of the residency and Chain Code welcomed him. He was the only one, apart from the two women who participated, who got funding. And I've lost my train of thought. No, but it's very interesting to me, these dynamics, because I view the average pleb hodler as the red state shotgun pickup truck guy who wants to be independent and don't tread on me. And then you have the developer class that is getting more and more blue-haired the further down the wokeness, the slide you go. And then you have... And I found my train of thought.

48:15 So if you're selecting for young people who want to live and work in Manhattan or San Francisco or later on bringing office London, you're definitely going to be excluding the people like, let's say me, who doesn't want to be... I no longer want to be in big city. I had my big city days in Paris. I did spend some time in New York City. But that's behind me now. You're excluding the guy with three kids who's married, who has a mortgage to pay, who's not going to up and move to the Chenko Labs offices for a year. You're excluding the guy like me Who would rather be building a citadel in El Salvador Or surfing in France You're excluding a lot of people And so what kind of people are you left with?

49:04 Well, I mean It speaks for itself what you're going to get If you select for that And so I got some pushback on Twitter From somebody who said Well, it's pretty odd that someone who wants to make an office in El Salvador would be criticizing offices. Well, I no longer really think that I want to make an office at all because I already have too much on my plate and it's very hard to be productive already, especially in El Salvador. El Salvador is its own challenge. But if you were to make an office in El Salvador, you certainly would not be attracted to the same profile of people as Chaco Labs in New York and Spiral in San Francisco, wherever it is over there, or local host in San Francisco or MITBCI in Boston or London where Brink is.

49:55 I mean, these are completely different destinations and profiles. Yeah, and then you have the third category, which is a lot of miners fall into this category, I think. These are my biases. I'm showing them to the world here. And the VC funders that are just the Gordon Gekko types that are in love with money and just want to make as much fiat gains as soon as possible, right? Yeah, and see, if your office is also in the US where you have capital gains on Bitcoin, ChainCode Labs only pays you in dollars. They do not pay you in Bitcoin. Whereas funders like OpenSats and HRF, they, as far as I know, only pay or prefer to pay only in Bitcoin.

50:38 So you're encouraging different kinds of people. If you have the developer in New York City who has paid 100% in fiat, And who is in that environment versus someone in working remotely getting their grant paid in Bitcoin or in El Salvador or wherever they are far off in the field, perhaps in some Bitcoin circular economy. You're definitely working more with people who use Bitcoin as money. Whereas in the U.S., you have the mentality of the digital asset narrative, the Bitcoin as an asset, which justifies the capital gains taxes because it's an asset.

51:20 And I fear that we are more and more even here in El Salvador. And I spoke about this yesterday with a friend of mine in the Bitcoin office who runs the Bitcoin office for Stacey, Mario, who runs also the AI office. You know, I asked him, you know, I feel like the Bitcoin as money narrative is going down here a little bit since the INF deal, I could be wrong. And everyone, the talk of the town at the moment is assets on Bitcoin, even here in El Salvador. Oh, and it's awful because like, I think this is the worry of the shotgun pickup truck player, And I would sort of represent that as like the family man who just wants to say fuck you to the government as much as possible.

52:04 Because we want to be responsible for our own lives and therefore we get our freedoms because we earn it. That's why we are into Bitcoin. That's why any Bitcoin maximalist is into Bitcoin, in my view, because we understand money and we understand the importance of not diluting it. and all of this stuff. And then you hear these horror stories about the blue-haired stuff in development. And of course, it makes us super worried because you can be as knowledgeable as you want about computer networks. It doesn't say anything about how much you understand of economics.

52:45 So I see a very big risk there. And I think that's why NOTS is at 20% mostly because people are super worried that this thing has now taken... It has come to the point where the arrogance has taken over so much and they act like they run the show now and they can build whatever bullshit, like multiplayer online games on Bitcoin and stuff that will just make it worse as money. And to me, there are red flags everywhere in this. and it's just sad that it's gone as far as it has.

53:25 Well, yeah, to me, I mean, the off-return thing, and I try to be not in any of the tribes, right? I consider myself relatively disenfranchised by Core. The Core no longer invites me like they no longer invite Blue. There was a pretext that was used. It was a little bit bullshitty. it was used once but now since it was used once now I'm no longer invited at all and I don't really consider myself part of the BIP 110 tribe either and you know the other day I got a bunch of hate from Ordinal Sass because the Ordinal's BIP was closed but of course they conveniently forgot that only two months prior I was the one who closed the CAT BIP draft for reasons that I amply gave at the moment of closing it.

54:18 So, you know, you go from being hated by one side to being hated by the other side. I got some backstage heat last week from my Time B conference talk because it came out a week ago. And so that made some people angry. I got some heat from CORE. I get heat from BIP 110 when I closed the CAT. I got heat from the Ordnance camp when the Ordnance didn't move forward. I mean, you're going to be hated by everybody if you're trying to stick to your principles rather than sticking to a trial. And maybe my principles are flawed and maybe they, you know, and I'm a very human person, but it's just what happens. And, you know, right now, I've again lost my train of thought.

54:58 I've wanted to say that. Oh, well, I can say thank you for closing the Ordinals, Bip. Well, I mean, it was obviously a shit show that nobody wanted to step in. The Ordinals thing really is smelly because there's a few trolley accounts that go after you and say a bunch of nonsense on social media. And generally, I avoid responding to ankle biting and trolling, but I did respond a tiny bit. I never am happy if I cede to responding. It's better just to ignore it completely. I ignore the cat stuff, the cat snipe. at me. I ignored that almost completely. So sometimes I'm better at avoiding responding to ankle biting and yapping.

55:42 I think the cat had mostly a trolly kind of thing to it. It's like trolling back sort of. I don't think it was that serious. I remember you and Giacomo supported it. Yeah, yeah. I had so much fun with it. You posted pictures of cats and everyone on the other side went crazy. But you just said meow and everyone went crazy. So that was fun. But yes, back to what I was, I'm sorry, back to my line of thinking. I do believe the op return was not by itself the reason. I tried to advise Core to go gently or differently with this in a couple of core dev meetings. I was told that I was a problem for saying such a thing.

56:24 I think some people consider what I said and agree with it, but by and large it didn't go along with With the collectivist angle, Angkor, for about three years, did have a collectivism that was named as such, collectivism, and I tried to push back on that in meetings and I sort of met with, well, I was in favor of keeping things ad hoc and everyone having their own opinion and not having... Well, named collectivism. They called it collectivism. It was called collectivist action and collectivism. And I was like horrified. privately when I read that during four-debt meetings. Rightfully so. And I pushed back on that gently saying, well, no, I prefer an ad hoc approach and everybody able to have their individual, you know, and I was met with criticism for that.

57:11 I don't recall the exact criticism, but basically collectivism was the word and collective action. And, you know, the signing of the declaration about mempool policy was one such collective action, which I did. I refused to sign. I was asked in private time. and I gave my reasons for not doing so. But I believe that the operaturn, like I believe Jack and Will thinks as well, but I've always felt from the start that the operaturn thing was not advisable. Technically, there may be good reasons to do it. Sometimes you can get away with doing something that has technical good reasons, but people that will make people upset, but you can sometimes manage to do it by doing it in a way that is maybe wise.

57:57 But the way this happened was too provocative. And I think it should have been more consensual. It should have gone more slowly. It should have been less antagonistic. But, you know, we're not perfect. One could say, hey, you're a funny guy. You made people angry with your ordinal decision. Or, hey, you made people angry with the cat decision. So, yeah, it's possible to step in anyway while still trying to do things wisely. So it's impossibly perfect. But I do believe that OpReturn was the straw that broke the camel's back after a cumulative amount of things that eroded trust in Bitcoin Core, rather than just on its phone, an incident. And many people defending Core were defending it as if it was on its own.

58:42 Whereas to me, it was just the one drop that too many. And trust in Core has been, in my opinion, been eroding slowly over a long period of time due to the many things I've personally been seeing. And I have not even detailed them at all in this discussion. And there were points in my talk at Plan B that I didn't have time to get to that I would like to cover perhaps in another podcast. I mean, I've been out of time. You can cover them right here if you want to. Like, what were you thinking of? So my situation is a bit weird because if you see court, and I do, as, let's say, a royal court. maybe there's a king maybe there's a queen and then you have courtesans and there's royal intrigue and there are defenders of the throne and at any given moment i tend to look i follow the processes quite closely even when i'm not actively manifesting myself in review or pull request openings on core i've been watching the interactions for seven eight years now and i i really it's quite clear in my mind, okay, this moment, this person is the defender of the throne.

59:53 This person is the king. This person is the queen. This person is the king's advisor. This person currently has the king's ear. Of course, there are a couple, three kings, if we're going to be technical. You know, maybe it's more of a commit bureau. But there's a very hierarchical. And I was on the inside of this, and I was in the inside conversations where I saw how the process works socially. As part of the inner clique, but only as someone who expected to be a supporter. So, and then I sort of took my independence after that famous full request when I realized my core life was pretty much changing drastically.

1:00:34 I stepped down as Bitcoin Core Review Club co-maintainer. I stopped contributing to Bitcoin Optech because I realized that what I was expected to do was support the narratives. and I basically distanced myself from John Newberry because I saw things going on that I did not agree with profoundly in the way the open source project should be governed and should manage itself. I saw things that I thought were abusive and very unhealthy and I don't want to use the word corruption. That's not the right word, but there were things that were very unhealthy for a software project and I think that the smell, the tummy tests passed less and less for people. So we got to the point where I think the up return was not by itself the issue, but it was just maybe the final straw for a lot of people.

1:01:25 But that's hard to say because that's subjective. Wasn't there a changing of the definition of up return that upset people also? Yes, but all of this is all downstream from the complete change of guard in core. The whole leadership and whose opinion had sway completely changed over the years. As all of the maintainers, except the most recently named one, stepped down. And the most recently named one handpicked their person and then another person came and then another person came. And the whole power structure changed.

1:02:06 And there are things that I just don't recognize that are not core policy to me anymore that I see. Just even this week, a pull request was merged, that the same unhealthy processes are still taking place where it's behind the scenes people coming together to... It's not necessarily based on the right decisions for the code base or for the users. It comes down to friendships and cliques and connections. And this person was this person's maintainer. Sorry, this person mentored this person. This person then mentored this person. And this person opened the Poet Quest with a bad change. I didn't agree with the change. But their mentor intervened. And their mentor mentors intervened.

1:02:47 And the whole band gets together and socially pushes the change, in my opinion, in the wrong direction. For example, a maintainer literally said in the Poet Quest merch this week, well it doesn't matter if this breaks something because my objection was that something was being broken and there was no point in purposely breaking something that we could with a one line additional complexity as they called it keeping backwards compatibility for which I believe is extremely important it was always the philosophy of Bitcoin that Bitcoin would always be backwards compatible as much as possible unless it was an extremely if there was in any way easy to triple to avoid breaking, then why would you break it? It was clearly easy to avoid breaking it. But the justification by the current, I would say, lead maintainer of Bitcoin Core, unofficially, certainly the most longest serving actual maintainer right now, was no, we, this would be breaking something more than two versions back. That's no longer supported by our security policy and we anyway do not want to encourage people to continue running old versions of core so we should rather go ahead and break this thing to encourage people to upgrade to a recent version of bitcoin core meaning v30 v31 and maybe still v29 for another few months but as soon as v32 comes out then it's just v30 v30 or v32 my opinion is that that is no in no way justification to break things that are truly easy to not break or they literally took the position

1:04:21 let's break it because we want to encourage users to upgrade and i think that is not consistent with the way core's philosophy was for a long time no to me it sounds completely anti-bitcoin ethos all of it like the reason the reason i've got users yeah the reason they got to upgrade yeah no the reason i fell in love with this in the first place was that it was hard to change like that's and that was backwards compatible to forever so you could the people who just stacked and waited for 100 years would win in the end like that's the beauty of the system like that's the most crucial thing uh i i don't understand breaking things needlessly that are trivially easy to not break and in fact there was a version of the pull request that had listened to me that did not break anything and the maintainer can go instead no no no there's no reason to we prefer to encourage users to upgrade well you don't do that by introducing breakage needless even if it's minor it was minor the fix was minor and the breakage was minor but it's silly I don't understand that no and it sets a precedent right for breaking more things on and on over and over these actions when they accumulate A, it looks almost like it's about social process.

1:05:47 Like, let's dunk on this guy again. Because I was more or less the code owner. I had written that code. I knew it as well as anybody because I had written it. It was in an area of the code base where I was probably the primary author at this point. All of my criticisms were overruled. I mean, it's awful. The PR in question is 26988. 26988 yeah no and two people they didn't even review the code directly so much as they reviewed my review in order to dunk on it it's so scary the things you're saying here because like was it this easy to change the culture that's it's so depressing that it's so easy to just it's group process it's group process you know the problem is if a bunch of friends get together and socially support each other mutually on review then you know and the people who were reviewing here weren't even habitual reviewers at this part of the code base but because one friend one person the author of the pull request was mentored by someone who was mentored in turn by someone else and these people sort of got the band together and um just for that change so so let me see this is i i made a a thread like a month back or maybe two months back about the op return thing just to see if you agree with this framing because like what what i understand for the core argument was that

1:07:17 it would be better if they did this shit on op return than than anywhere else basically so therefore it's it's good to open the policy so it'd be easier to do that because it causes less damage thing i got upset with and i think most people did was like this defeatist attitude that we we shouldn't actively try to stop the spam we should we should just make it less harmful and just accept that it's there and and that change of attitude is is like uh to me that was the thing because like yes if you live in a vacuum like in an all else being equal scenario uh you're right it would be better if they just shifted to op return.

1:08:01 Four times more expensive for most of it, but let's just say that every spammer was altruistic and put everything in op return. So the problem with all else being equal scenarios is that they don't exist in reality. So sending a signal that this is something that Bitcoin accommodates for and that Bitcoin is okay with, that I think pissed a lot of people off. but that was the, at least that's what pissed me off. This is okay now for some reason. We shouldn't try to fight it. When these were clearly exploits and not monetary use cases, what do you think of that?

1:08:42 Do you agree with that framing or would you frame it differently? So I think Core, I understand Core's technical reasons for doing what they did. I also understand the position that culture matters and signaling matters. And I sympathize with both arguments. And there are times when I read, for example, there was a recent thread on Bitcoin slash meta where someone brought it up saying core could still fix the rift. And a discussion ensued. And there were times that I would agree with both the pro core and the opposite view because there are good points on both sides And I don see it as black and white I don see it as Cora right and the others are dumb shits I don't see it as Cora is completely wrong either.

1:09:38 I think there's nuance. I do worry about the shitcoinery. I do worry deeply about spam. I think one of the other most depressing period thing in Bitcoin Core, besides the DEI and the social click, power click processes, was the introduction of ordinals and the very high fees. And it seemed like there was nothing we could do. And I found that sound very depressing because it felt like Bitcoin was changing from underneath us all. I don't understand, to be honest, how anyone could think that ordinals are good for Bitcoin. apart from fee income perhaps but i think that's a short term way of thinking about it um yeah i'd like i'd like your take on on on my take about the minor fees also because uh the way i see it is all has to do with time preference right so so there's this narrative uh among the the shit coins on bitcoin's camp that it's good for bitcoin because miners make more fees but to me that's such a ridiculous argument because like we're on what are we now like if i go to bitbow here uh 885 uh exahashes per second that's 885 followed by 18 zeros uh guesses on the correct hash per second. If we lost 99 miners out of 100, Bitcoin would still be as secure anyway,

1:11:13 because it's like orders of magnitude more secure than it needs to be. And it's also like, it's like believing that Bitcoin cannot go up in value more. If it doubles in value every four years, the problem is not there. And I believe if it can keep on being money, it will do that at least until everyone on earth is on board. I mean, it's such a weird argument because Bitcoin is not for the miners. The miners get paid by the users to secure the network and create block space for them. It's the other way around. The miners should be the employees of the users of the network.

1:11:54 And so it's such a nothing burger argument, the fee argument. Yeah, I tend to agree completely. I mean, my focus is on users and people using it as money. And I thought one of the dumbest things I actually saw tweeted of the past year was, your note does not matter by someone who is trying to be clever, I guess. Yeah. But, you know, I placed the user first and foremost. And at my Plan B talk, I gave a lot of suggestions on how I would, the guidelines for governance or leadership of an implementation, if it was me. And I actually did have a private meeting recently with the new maintainer of CORE, Sebastian Kahn from South Africa.

1:12:37 And to my surprise, I believe that he and I agree on a lot of the things that we would like to see. And we were both also inspired by the leadership style of Vladimir Vanderland, the lead maintainer for almost a decade of Bitcoin Core, who was an amazing leader of Bitcoin. And, you know, when I say that I'm not into the woke stuff, that doesn't mean I'm criticizing, for instance, the transgender, the two transgender people, I believe, on Core are two of my favorite developers. So, you know, it's not, I'm not against their choices. I don't actually care if your hair color is blue. No, and like, why would anyone care whoever they are?

1:13:18 If they have the merit, then like meritocracy is the most inclusive thing ever because it doesn't care about your race or gender or sexual preferences. As long as the playing field is fair and everyone sort of gets the same rules and treatment. The thing that really gets my go maybe more than anything else, and maybe this is the personal weakness of mine, is I display deeply double standards. I deeply, deeply, since a child, display double standards. Yes. And probably the main thing I would want, I would sigh for if I was running an implementation, would be to try to diminish the double standards.

1:14:01 And no one's perfect. I'll probably get it wrong. And maybe as Bips maintainer, co-editor, I've gotten it wrong. But I really try to be fair. At least it's important to me. And I think that we've seen some really blatant double standards. Yeah, but that's exactly what Bitcoin is about. Like Bitcoin is about equality before the law. If code is law or really just the network is law, whatever, sound money is law. If we have fair money, then we have leveled the playing field and the same rules apply to everyone. Like that's what Bitcoin is for. it's exactly for that it doesn't give a shit who you are that's the whole point so why would anyone give a shit about the core maintainer's gender or sexual organ because in open source development there is a thing there is social capital and even the readme of the bitcoin core repository says that different people's opinion carries different weight depending on their social capital and contribution and amount of history with the project.

1:15:17 And so there is social capital, does matter. Everyone is not equal. And some acts carry more weight to maintainers than other acts do. That is how it works. But I still think that there are other double standards that really get to me. And not that one, that some people's act might matter, carry more weight because they have more experience or they know the code better there. That's fine with me. But still, there's other kinds of double centers, like things that you cannot change about yourself, like your age or your gender or where you're from or how well you speak English.

1:15:59 if you learn English as a second language and you say, hey guys, not knowing that and having a U.S. person reply, no, no, there's women present too. That's a real example. But that isn't a real example that I saw a maintainer rebuke a non-meaning speaking developer for. I mean, you know, I just would lighten up with the identity stuff. I don't give a crap what your hair color is, where you're from. These things should not matter. It should only matter how much time you spent working on the code and reviewing it and your contribution to review and how good your review work has been.

1:16:39 And just because you're hand-chosen, but you've maybe reviewed several times less than someone else that was not chosen doesn't mean... You know, that's the kind of stuff that gets to me. There's some really blatant unfair stuff that's taken place over the years, and I really dislike that. And, you know, that's criticizable, and I'll probably be dunked on harshly for saying that, but that is something... I know there's so many things in my presentation at Plan B that I didn't get to that I could cover. I was taken to tasks about my comment that was maybe not very, very well said about how bugs, how you had to be careful about reporting bugs in core because it depended who was the author of the bug and how they would see your relationship to them if you reported the bug because they could see your bug as your bug report as getting a personal attack rather than reporting a bug.

1:17:30 And that really does happen. But that's awful. You can't handle code like that. Of course not. That is how it happens. I found a bug. There's one example. In 2021, in August, I found a bug I reported on the IRC channel and then I opened a fix. And yeah, it was just, it was a complete shit show because I had found a bug written by someone who took it personally. Who thought I was attacking them for finding a bug. And the way it went down was very political and very sad. It's the math is racist thing.

1:18:12 It was PloyQuest Bitcoin Core PR 22831. And, you know, I was told, hey, it's not really a serious bug. Don't make a big deal out of it. And then I wasn't allowed to fix it because my fix, they didn't like the way I fixed it or they didn't like my tests to test it. I introduced the test to verify that it wouldn't break again. And a fix that didn't have any test coverage at all was preferred by the original author, who was very upset at me for finding that bubble. And it's just one example of many. And that kind of thing just makes me sad. That just sounds like OCP, you know, the organization, the corporation that builds RoboCop. if you remember the Robocop movie and that guy who keeps defending ED-209, the robot that doesn't work and kills everyone and he just refuses to fix the robot that's what it sounds like to me You know it's funny, I stopped watching any kind of movie entirely after COVID Real life was so much stranger than fiction Yeah, yeah, yeah Robocop was a couple of years before COVID Yeah, right but the COVID thing was a real a real it's like you also had a group of people who could continue going from office to office because they were jabbed and boosted and those who did not, who were not doing testing and jabbing and boosting for one or two years could not visit the offices, could not they were during the core dev meetups, they were in separate

1:19:43 housing or separate meetings, I understand I didn't even go I mean, it really slipped core down with the vast majority being in the camp of testing every day and testing all the time and being up to date with boosters or MNR. Yeah, this reminds me of a Free Cities conference I went to after COVID. So it's the Free Cities Foundation, right? So it's not really a Bitcoin conference, or not at all a Bitcoin conference. It's about Prosperon Roatan, for instance. That's one of the free private cities around the world. They have this conference every year. And at that conference, there's a Bitcoiner in the board of the organization who had invited a lot of his Bitcoiner friends.

1:20:28 I was there and Daniel Prince was there and a bunch of others. But there were also Ethereans and shitcoiners. And the funny thing is that they were still wearing masks, most of them. So all the Bitcoiners were, of course, unjabbed and not wearing masks. and the shitcoiners were concerned about if people had boosters and wearing masks. And it was just an observation that that was much more prominent for shitcoiners. There's something there. Oh, yeah. It made me very sad that, I mean, I just stayed at home and worked and was productive, but it was a real shock to me the first time I went to a Cordeaux meeting finally in 2022.

1:21:11 A, how crazy, how centralized interactions were. Everybody seemed to, most people in the room seemed to be people who were working together every day in offices and knew each other like as if they were in the same classroom. You know, and these were people I almost never met. And of course, that very first and only core dev, I got doxed to the FBI because the FBI asked the organizer of the core dev for all the identity of the participants because of the reported theft of Luke Doucher's Bitcoin. If I heard somebody say that Luke doxed everybody. That is false. I believe it was the FBI who requested the dox. Yeah. Speaking of Luke, in April 2021, there was a coordinated effort on the Bitcoin dev mailing list to remove Luke Dasher as a BIP editor.

1:22:01 A role he has had in 2012. Yes. There was. I was at that meeting. Yeah. What happened? Newberry was involved. I know. Publish, we endorsed it. I mean, in the private OpTec discussions, I mean, they were all vehemently anti-Luke for some time. I don't think it's a secret. It's public knowledge, I believe, that David Harding very much disliked Luke. And he publicly tweeted that Luke was a net negative on the face. And yeah, basically, I recall that I was there and Newberry called for Luke to be removed, I guess as well, by the project owners.

1:22:42 Who could have done that? Well, Newberry called on the lead maintainer of Vladimir to do that during the meeting. And it was an unpleasant and hostile exchange. And afterwards, I remember Vladimir refusing to do so. One thing I always respected about Vladimir was that he was a reluctant servant leader. He was reluctant to use or abuse his power to satisfy someone. And he did not give John Newberry satisfaction in calling for Lutte literally And afterwards I did have a conversation privately with Vladimir where I said that was intense And he says I don know why he was so aggressive with me but he was dumbfounded I think and a bit tired by the whole thing When did you say that was? In July 2021?

1:23:29 No, April 2021. Okay, well, shortly after, in June 2021, there was an equally aggressive exchange. after the pull request that changed my trajectory on core, John Newberry on the IRC channel more or less went after myself and Vasil Dimov and Vladimir again. And Vladimir got tired of it, and he basically signed off IRC for two or three days. He disappeared. He's like, I'm done. And I was wondering how long until he would come back, because usually he was always present. But the aggression was coming to a head around that time. I think the peak, things are maybe a little bit better now.

1:24:12 Every now and then, the power clip is to get the band together again to do something not so cool. It's slightly improving. Like Giacomo talked with Walker on a podcast a day or two ago where Giacomo said the DEI thing seems to be fading. Well, if it's dying a slow death, it's a very slow death in court. um and di well i don't know i might be misusing the word woke but i mean it's going to take time there's there's at least three key people i think that would still need to leave before things would really change three or four and uh i don't know how long that will take to be honest i've been waiting for a very long time for things to improve i i believe the shift has sailed on my ability to contribute effectively now to bitcoin core since years, because basically since 2021, my ability was affected.

1:25:09 And so I believe, like some other people, that we do need more implementations to welcome developers who are perhaps not in the... who don't have the same politics as the ones in Bitcoin Core or who are not socially popular or who just disagree on views on things. Right now, it seems to be very much dominated by Chaincode and Brink and a bit by Spyro. And local hosts now as well, which is a newer one. I mean, one of the things that worries me is I've seen a few cases of people who I thought were very nice get hired by Chaincode, move to New York City, and change fairly significantly during their time in New York.

1:25:58 Become much less pleasant. And I don't know what goes on. But I've seen that multiple times now And I have to wonder Why are these people changing? Yeah, you would like to know The underlying mechanisms That makes this happen Because even if woke is temporarily dead How do you make it not come back ever? What's the cure? And when I say they changed I don't mean they became woke But I mean they maybe became Much more aggressive Arrogant maybe? I start seeing them aggressively tweeting on Twitter very aggressively, being very sensitive to replies and not letting things go.

1:26:41 And just being, on the whole, much less pleasant people. And I don't know what happens if it's them being in contact with somebody specifically or with the group in general or if it's the environment of New York City, maybe New York is a place where people are more aggressive. but wow I mean I know several people I've discussed this with they say yeah that person was a nice guy and they went to chain code labs and don't recognize them anymore So you talked about more implementation so the natural question there is why not NOTs then? Like why not just what's wrong with NOTs?

1:27:22 The problem, I don't want to say there's a problem with NOTs but for instance I did mention that OpenSaaS has been willing to fund Knots for some time. There are public posts on X by people like NBK or maybe Matt O'Dell, I'm not sure, on Knotser. But the problem is, my understanding is that they haven't actually received a good application yet. So Knots maybe is having trouble attracting developer talent. And that could be due to Luke being... Look, I consider Luke a friend. I think Luke is very gentle and soft-spoken in person. Much nicer in person very nice in person compared to the persona people might imagine when they just read only the posts on X but maybe not the easiest person to work with and I don't want to be criticizing of Luke I like Luke but there's also a lot of social, it looks very much like Luke's project to people so maybe that's part of the difficulty like a personal project I think that the fact that Nots has gained so much market share.

1:28:27 I mean, how many Nots nodes do I have right now? Around 20%, right? My node right now has like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Nots spheres, at least with Nots in the subversion, out of around 12, 15% in my personal node at this moment, but it varies. So Nots has gained market share. I think not so much because I think it's more because of Core. Core has been the best marketing for Nots. And not Core altogether, but I would say two or three people behaving like absolute assholes for Core on Twitter or X.

1:29:10 I think they're doing great marketing. I mean, okay, Nots has much better memes. I'm not on the Nots side, but Nots definitely memes much better. There are some core devs who want to be memers who cannot meme. What's the main reason that you're not on the Nuts side then? Is there a technical reason? I mean, look, I consider Luke a friend. And I believe that they would be very happy if I would dedicate my time to contributing to Nuts. But I believe that I'm not quite fully on board with the way Luke sees everything. similar to the way that Giacomo is not fully on board and I believe that Bit.1.10 is not quite what I think needs to be done I would be more comfortable working on or perhaps co-maintaining a fork of core with perhaps different types of developers maybe more older, maybe not in the big cities Maybe more Bitcoin is money people who are married, who are mature, who have kids and responsibilities and who are not leading with their youthful ambition and ego to make changes to Bitcoin.

1:30:29 Maybe a bit more of a conservative, slower, maybe it would pull in some things that Core is doing, but maybe more slowly, conservatively with a bit more another review layer. I think we do need another implementation that is for developers who don't fit into the current core mold that has been engineered. All right. Yeah. I mean, Luke is a very special person and I don't agree with a lot of his views, but I do agree with most of his views on Bitcoin. And I do think that he's a very trustworthy guy or a guy that holds integrity very high. Absolutely. And even Adam Back was tweeted a couple of years ago, I believe, that you should be very careful if you find yourself disagreeing with Luke on something.

1:31:22 Exactly. Luke has been right. Yeah. And for that reason alone, I find this like pushing him out of court to be such a, like, what are you doing? Like, this is your most senior guy, like one of the most important people for Bitcoin ever. Like, everyone agrees on that. So it's like, how can you get to that? Yeah, his class of 2011, along with Vladimir Vanderland, Peter Wille and Matt Corral. These four people. And I think Luke was the first. At least he was among the class of 2011. he hasn't been that active on Core over the past half decade because he's also been busy working on Nuts Ocean Mining Datum, he's got a lot on his plate right, and that's why he also Bips maintainer, Bips editor he's the OG Bips editor since 2015 I believe yeah, and to be clear I'm pro Nuts and I'm pro Bip 110, I've stated so publicly uh mostly for the the the middle finger of it all i i i uh i admit that i have no problem with you know in hindsight if it doesn't work or if if it becomes a nothing burger that i risk my reputation or anything like that i'm passionate about bitcoin and i'm passionate about what i think is best for bitcoin and that's that's why i want to send a message

1:32:54 a temporary message that we won't take this. We're not going to take it, the twisted sister thing. But having said all that, I still think the more important thing there is that. Twisted sister, yeah, that's good. The more important thing there is datum and fixing the centralization of mining. Decentralizing mining, absolutely. That's paramount. That's the big one. and it sort of gets overshadowed by this other debate, of course. Well, I think a lot of plebs that are on board with you, they're unhappy with the new core that was, let's say, socially engineered a bit by the selection criteria of the developer pipeline centralized in chain code labs developed by a very small, less than a handful of people.

1:33:44 And that has led to a situation where the plebs feel very alienated And there's definitely a chasm between the new core, maybe not the new maintainer, but some of the loudest voices of the past two years in core has definitely been a complete chasm with the users due to the selection criteria being centralized and so on. Of course, all that is heavily criticizable and I'll surely be dunked on very harshly for what I've just said. But it's still a fact You re-prop what you saw When it comes to your criteria Of selection for your new developers And Core has also faced A shortage of new talent lately They've had trouble recruiting new people To Core Yeah So I mean there are knock-on effects When you go woke I mean I'm not saying that Core When you know they say you go woke Go broke Well, I think right now it's not so much in fashion as it was back in 2020, 2018, 2019, when the blue map was calling for diversity.

1:34:51 And behind the scenes core is still that way. They're still reaching out and looking for certain profiles and identifying and tapping people to be chosen. Whereas people who might be Bitcoin actually aren't necessarily the profile that the chain code that people are reaching out to and looking for. No. And it's been that way since a long time. Yeah. No, it's a mess. Well, it just means we just need another, probably another implementation, which is way easier said than done. And that's why we don't have one. And now we're in the bear market. So funding might be a little tougher than it would have been six months ago. But yeah, Giacomo evoked it. I believe we need one.

1:35:32 We need a place for people who don't fit into the current Bitcoin core hold. Now, it's not a uni mold. There are very good people in core. I believe that currently I like all of the maintainers in Core right now Except one I think they have very good maintainers There's just one who I know is hostile And you know Core could come around And I hope they do My goal is not to punch down on Core The way Core has sometimes punched down on me My goal is to help improve Bitcoin I'm on team Bitcoin No and of course that would be preferable But aren't we beyond that point? Well, it does seem like the ship has failed, but, you know, never seen ever.

1:36:18 No, because they did put this on themselves. Would you agree with that, that BIP-110 wouldn't exist had Core not meddled with the policies and made decisions that nobody liked? I think that they were not deft in the way they did their change. And I think that that change alone would not have caused the issue that it did if they had not been losing trust over years. I think it was a cumulative action. Yeah, so it was the straw that broke the camel's back or whatever it's called. Yes, that's right. But still, that it was the straw that would break the camel's back, it seemed so obvious that if you do this, there will be consequences.

1:37:05 Right To you and to me yes but not to my colleagues No but to Bitcoin If now the change was made to make spam a little less destructive and people didn't agree with that, then they're taking one thing for granted, but they're only seeing one chess move ahead and not two. If this leads to that, then that's a worse outcome. If you're taking this utilitarian approach, why can't you have a lower time preference and see a little further into the future that this will trigger side effects that are even worse than what you're proposing from the core perspective?

1:37:53 Because I don't think anyone in core likes that BIP-110 is now on the table and there's a risk that it will happen. I think it's a byproduct of the social process. When the main decision-making is taking place over a lunch discussion in an office in New York City or London, then you're not going to probably come to the same decision as someone who is interacting much more with the clips. I believe that there is an environmental factor involved, where they're all sitting around between themselves. and when I was visiting Chaincode Labs there was definitely an elitism there's an absolute elitism going on and that's I think that's a biotic of the social process like I'm here in El Salvador, who do I meet in El Salvador?

1:38:46 I meet players who comes to El Salvador? I mean yeah, every now and then you know, you come or Luke comes or Giacomo comes or Peter Todd comes those are probably the main the main developers I see here. I saw Merch here once, and Merch takes a lot of crap for his core, his argumentation for core, but Merch is someone who I like very much and get along with. I have a lot of respect for Merch. He's someone I can discuss with. We've had calls where I've talked about and had heart-to-heart talks with Merch. So, you know, one day Merch is getting heat for defending the core position. One day I'm getting heat for closing the cat. We all have our days of heat, but there are some very good people in Cora. I'm not criticizing. I would say 90% of people in Cora I like very much. It's not that they are all woke.

1:39:41 It's just that there was an element that sort of took it over in a way. And it's not just the developers, it's also the handlers, the people in the offices who are sort of deciding things like, who will we hire into our office? Who's going to get funding? And I said that as someone who also influences funding decisions since about a year, I help OpenStats review applications. But I'm just one opinion on a subcommittee or two. So I'm not the head of, you know, Brink or Chaincode or local hosts. But I think it's good to diversify the funding organizations and I think it's good to diversify the implementations so that there's a space for different people to feel welcome. We have to deal with the fact that Bitcoin is on a collision course with a vast number of normies and with Wall Street and with politics.

1:40:33 And that is responsible probably for a lot of the narratives that we see nowadays that are not Bitcoin is money or supportive of Bitcoin is money. But I hope that we can still come around because I do want to use Bitcoin primarily as money. And in my node, I don't want to store a bunch of other people's spam. And if your node runner seems like you naturally don't want to unless you have a limited bandwidth and resources, I did have to start turning my note at one time on my laptop because it only had one terabyte of SSD. That's not enough nowadays. No, and this is a forever problem. And that's why I'm so, one of the main reasons why I hate it so much is like, it's, what do you call it?

1:41:14 Like they're squatters. Yeah, it's a free rider problem. Yeah, exactly. it's the problem of abuse of pissing on the common to make money for your your stakeholders and that's not bitcoin to me you know human nature people get into bitcoin initially about greed no no no not make not make money for your shareholders make fiat for your shareholders and that's the saddest part they're not making actual money and this is the this is the ah it drives me mad like here you have the best fucking thing in the world that can benefit everyone on earth forever and you and you choose so like no i'm i'm gonna be i'm gonna be that guy from the matrix who chooses the stake instead yeah but making fiat money that's the gate that's the entry gate i mean when i made friends with the police that the neighbor tried to have me arrested by what they wanted to know was like the same as everybody else so tell us how we can make make more dollars with Bitcoin.

1:42:15 Yeah, and it's so sad because this is the tool to... They're all having tough lives because of fiat. So everyone's life is tough because of the fiat monetary system. This is so fixed. So few people see that, right? People, they're busy with their lives. They're not like you and me, most people, you know, thinking about these things. We're a fringe and we're on a closing course with an entire world that doesn't care about these things that we care about. And it's going to be a challenge. No, so, and that's why I think education is crucial and especially education about why scams are scams and why you shouldn't fall for them. There is no such thing as a non-fungible token.

1:42:56 There is no token on the internet at all, in fact. Like, all data is copyable. The Satoshi is sacred and special for very different reasons. It's because they live in your head, not on the internet. It indeed makes me sound to see good, more intelligent developer talent working on stuff like that rather than... And that's part of the reason why I think that it can be a mistake to prioritize for youth, because youth is very good for innovation and energy and ego and ambition. But then if it's channeled into making shitcoin and tokens and things like that, rather than making the... The main priority for me is just making the base layer robust.

1:43:37 having a robust face layer, having a robust lightning network, robust second layer for payments. Robustness. It's not about... I'm not particularly interested in all the rest. But, you know, that's maybe boring to a young person, but I'm not so young. I'm probably the oldest person in Bitcoin core. And I just care about it as money and making it robust and as robust and as decentralized as we can. Robustness and decentralization. AJ Towns wrote that on a blog post several years ago. AJ got that full on 100% right. Robustness and decentralization. That's where Bitcoin shines and that's where my attention is. And decentralization of funding developers, of developers, of mining, and making it possible to run nodes as cheap as possible.

1:44:23 So don't burden everybody with a bunch of crap on their node. I mean, Cora was good at that with the block size war in preferring to keep things light for the node users in blocks smaller. So yeah, there's definitely been a bit of a change in narrative by necessity or by other means, but it's concerning. Absolutely. I saw in one of the launch posts for one of these shit coins on Bitcoin things, I think it's Opnet, that the article said that there are so many sats just sitting there doing nothing. And it reminded me so much of Christine Lagarde saying that there are so many big piles of euros in people's savings account that are sitting there doing nothing, and we ought to do something with them. That's what they want to do. They want to steal your money. No, this is the thing that people don't get about money. It's never idle. It always provides its holder with a service. Saving is a use case. It is, in fact, the most important use case. That's how it fixes store value. It's so crucial. It provides proper incentives and peace of mind and freedom. Yeah, freedom is important. Yeah, and it's creeping in that that is not important anymore uh and it's it's so sad and it's sort of with the stable coins thing but what i dislike

1:45:57 about that is like the narrative is that it's this necessary bridge into the other world and we can bank the unbanked and stuff but to me like if fiat is smoking then then stable coins are nicotine patches but if you want to quit nicotine then you should use sats instead yes you see what i mean it's it's it's a substitute for but you're still you're still addicted to this drug so it doesn't fix the problem and i believe that developers it's healthier if bitcoin developers are funded in bitcoin rather than of course of course and what that presupposes more of them not being in the united states where you cannot use bitcoin really without capital.

1:46:42 Well, you can if you're ballsy enough to give the finger to the government and not give a crap. Right. I was actually made an example of Mike Jonas once in his blog of saying how things can go very wrong when your funding is in Bitcoin and that it's probably a bit safer and wiser to have it in fiat. My funder at the time, Square Crypto later became Spiral, did begin proposing to me to take dollars instead of Bitcoin. I wouldn't be where I am today with this Citadel if I had been accepting Gollum. It's so... No, and... It's so sad that you're so unique in doing that, like...

1:47:24 I'm not. There are other developers, but definitely the ones in the New York City office are obviously not being paid in Bitcoin. No, and that in itself is such a humongous red flag. Like, you don't believe in this revolution. or the ones in the local host in San Francisco. I don't know about the Brink office in London. I do imagine, though, that you could probably ask Brink to be funded partially or all in Bitcoin. It's surely possible, but how are you going to use that Bitcoin if you're in London, New York, or San Francisco? Whereas if you're in the Global South or some other countries where Bitcoin has, there are circular Bitcoin economies around the world, and just not very many Bitcoin developers in those places.

1:48:06 no and it's so sad because if you now buy your action to accept fiat instead of bitcoin show that you don't truly believe in this revolution then shouldn't you like that to me is the biggest red flag ever like if you're working on bitcoin and you do not accept bitcoin what do you even do you even bitcoin bro like What are the other incentives? I think it's the condition of the funding organization is imposing fiat, not that the developer is preferring fiat. It's case by case, of course, but I'm aware of cases where the funding organization doesn't propose Bitcoin.

1:48:52 No, and I'm not trying to... Whereas, thankfully, ones like HRF or OpenStats, and I believe Spiral did fund me entirely in Bitcoin the whole time, four years. It is possible, but sometimes you have to ask where you can push for it. OpenSats and HRF, no. OpenSats and HRF, they are all Bitcoin. That's it. You want to be paying something else? Go pound sand. You're getting paid in Bitcoin. No, but I mean, the whole thing, it just stinks. I'm sorry, but to me, it's very saddening to hear that the fiat mindset is everywhere. And I do understand that people live in the real world, and people with guns will come and take them if they do something illegal. So there's that. It's sort of the same thing as the fetish attitude with OpReturn. That doesn't mean you give up. In my world, it shouldn't lead to anyone giving up. So, John, we've been going on for two hours here and I absolutely love this conversation. Is there anything more you wanted to add to the whole your talk in San Salvador?

1:50:10 The points you missed there? Well, that could go on for a lot. It's not every day I have you on, so I have nothing against that. I mean... So, yeah, I mean... I'm really not interested in drama and so I don't really like these topics but at the same time in general i see plebs uh feeling something is off and there's a lot of speculation on social media and my impression has been that people will speculate because they don't know and i don't say everything i know um i have to hold back quite a lot unfortunately and i'm not interested in gossiping about this stuff but i think it's important for people to know what really took place or has taken place and what is still taking place.

1:51:02 To have a more informed view of what really has been behind the scenes. So my presentation tried to cover some things, and I think we should link to my slides in your podcast if you're willing to. Absolutely. A few quick points from my slides. I talked about the selection criteria being an issue, the leadership transition. where are the why are the new developers not cypherpunks and sovereign individuals and citadels spread around all the world all over the world um rather than being in few offices um there is a myth that the maintainers are just janitors following the reviews merging things that have had enough review that is not entirely true there are dynastic effects because maintainers are going to stay a very long time, five, six, seven, eight years, sometimes 10 years, sometimes.

1:52:00 And there are real social processes that are affected by when you become a maintainer, things change. And dynastic effects, I believe that it, I did believe that for core, it would be a good idea to turn maintainership to more of a jury duty where you don't like code, where you're not responsible for a project, where you just review and serve others for a limited time and then you go back to your life as a regular contributor the way politics should be. I had an uncle who was a congressman. He did two terms. He realized that for his third term, he would have to make too many compromises to donors.

1:52:41 And so he set back to private life to keep things sane and healthy. And I think it would be healthy for CORE to think about that. But at the same time, if you have several implementations then perhaps the diversification could be, perhaps the maintainers would be okay if you had a strong leader like Vladimir in place for a decade, if they are a good humble, wise servant-oriented leader as long as you have different implementations offering users choices and options then perhaps you could have someone long-term in place without jury duty regular rotation but if you only have core, that is 95, 96 98% as it used to be before not increased recently, then I believe it should have some sort of regular rotation of maintainerships to avoid dynasty effects and power clicks.

1:53:33 How maintainers are chosen in core, to be quite clear, it is not a vote of the core developers. They are chosen from what I've seen quite clearly by the existing maintainers. Often by a proposal from one of them and a strong vetoed from one of them could be enough to disable a nomination. So in core, the maintainers are chosen by the maintainers. With perhaps input from the project owners who are no longer maintainers. Project owners are the only people above maintainers in the core hierarchy. They are the owners of the GitHub repository. As far as I know, there are four of them. Two OGs and two newer ones.

1:54:17 Now, in quote, one thing that I was quite worried about these past few years has been an increasing level of opacity in the communications. It used to be that we had very good public IRC meetings once a week with Vladimir as the lead maintainer running the meetings. He was such a good meeting leader in coming to decisions in real life with intelligent, honest, humble conversations to come to a, often to come to a conclusion during that same meeting. and to arrive as a thing. Since then, working groups were created. These are private groups that communicate privately on signal. You have to reply to be admitted to them.

1:54:57 And that's where the real communication takes place now, on these silos, where someone like me who is watching from outside cannot see what communication is taking place. So the communication has become less public. It's gone private and it's siloed. And I find that personally worrying. So the private working groups have replaced public discussion in core meetings. Code of conduct. The core adopted a code of conduct that I, if I recall correctly, was written again by Jonas of ChainCodeLab. And I initially, I was, I believe, the first reviewer who came out who reviewed that pull request and I was not in favor of a code of conduct. I've never been in favor.

1:55:38 And if I was running an implementation, I would try to avoid one as much as possible. Core went just fine without a code of conduct for more than a decade Two dedicated moderators were named They good They do a very good job They good people I like both of the moderators who worked for CORE But they are unfortunately caught between a rock and a hard play because the way they are used is if for example I would make a comment that might be misinterpreted personally by a maintainer who then asks the moderators to investigate it who then come and investigate me over it And I say, no, it wasn't a personal thing. and I would remind the moderators that when in doubt in communication, such as in open source development, you by default must assume the most charitable and generous interpretation of what somebody wrote rather than assuming the worst unless proven so.

1:56:30 And this is the basic rule and the moderators were yes, you're right. And so the maintainer who told you to go after me for my comment was assuming the worst rather than giving it a generous or normal interpretation. So they're between a rock and a hard place. Basically, the code of conduct is used to protect the powerful against the weak, when it really, in my opinion, should be used, if at all, to protect the weak against the powerful. But that's how rules tend to be. Yeah, yeah. Code of conduct sounds like politicization to me. Like it's politics creeping in. Yeah. This came from the introduction, the creeping of woke into these open source projects.

1:57:14 So it comes back to we need alternative clients with different politics. Maybe we can have a woke one. Maybe we can have one that's maybe more just older, conservative, seasoned people who aren't based on anything related to their identity. We don't care what country you're in. If you have two kids or four, what color your hair is, anything. It doesn't matter. What matters is your work. There is a perennial lack of... The perennial constraint in Bitcoin core protocol development has been a lack of experienced reviewers. People always cite the most frustrating thing to them as being, my work doesn't get reviewed, it doesn't move forward, there's no good review.

1:58:00 And so I've seen it argued that we shouldn't have more implementations because that would disperse the reviewers across the already resource we are lacking against over more projects instead of concentrating the rare review talent. I disagree with that because in core, I've seen very good experienced seasons reviewers be disenfranchised just because they're more independent. And then we see what I like I mentioned earlier in our discussion where people are coming in not to review the pull request or the code, but just to review the reviewer. To dunk down on their on their review to to make it possible to ignore their review or to push it aside. I believe that there are people who are very good reviewers in court who are underutilized because of the social processes because they're not in an office they're not in the popular group maybe they are one guy alone in Eastern Europe or one guy alone in Central America and so on so there are double standards and there's ongoing social signaling of approval and disapproval who should be supported who is in, who is out that is maybe inevitable in human processes, but it wasn't quite as bad when I first joined Core as it became later.

1:59:15 So I have a list of, in my slides, starting from slide 49, culture, named culture. I have one, two, three, four, five, four pages of what I would consider to be the guidelines for an implementation. and at the end of the day really having one single dominant client creates monopoly risks it cifls developers who are not in the in-group, it cifls development maybe we could have one it's going to get harder with more implementations to introduce softworks probably, I could imagine but maybe we could have one implementation that does launch CTV or COVID and since the people want that one that does like not launch something like BIP 110 I am not certain how it will help or hinder innovation, having more clients, more implementations.

2:00:09 But having only one is still seen by, I think, a growing part of the community as being an engineer. They need options. I mean, more options is always good, right? And it's sort of like countries having to compete for talent if you have more. As long as you don't introduce Less resiliency With the consensus rules As long as they follow consensus properly and don have critical consensus funds But you right I agree that more implementations will have more network resilience, fewer single points of failure like we do now, more available choice, and it will incentivize Bitcoin Core to improve.

2:00:52 Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, but if they're not in consensus, they're a shitcoin. They're a fork, right? By definition. Yes, but you want basically on part of the reasoning behind the kernel isolation project in core has been to have a single kernel that other implementations could use while innovating elsewhere, but they all use the same solid, robust kernel. So the most important rules, and if you follow the consensus ones, that as long as the client is following that, then they should be free to innovate in other things, perhaps. But overall, I think the main thing is to offer more choice and to encourage Bitcoin Core to be more careful about what it does if it's more likely to lose market share.

2:01:43 Right now, Core, my understanding is that Core is having problems recruiting new developers. That could be wrong, but that's what I've heard. So Bitcoin maybe is not as much in fashion at the moment. or maybe it's just core is not as much in fashion i don't know but developing and training not only new users but also more developers is going to be important it always has been yeah and it's going and we have to be very careful and vigilant about where the developers are being trained and and educated so that it's not just one centralized place in one city.

2:02:23 No, and maybe not with emotional Fridays or whatever. Maybe we should have trained at another school that doesn't focus that much on feeling Fridays. If you do have feelings Fridays for one implementation, as long as you have three or four implementations that sort of have roughly equal market share, I think that's fine. Guns, steak and cigars Fridays for another implementations, please. Healings Fridays, Guns Shooting Fridays. Guns and Steak Fridays, yeah, yeah. I'll disappoint you all. I don't have any guns in El Salvador. And, you know, we have also AI is coming, and that's a real topic right now amongst the core developers.

2:03:07 Bitcoin developers in general is integrating AI. That's a whole other thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a whole other box to open. Oh, my. anyway how is life in El Salvador by the way? You're still enjoying yourself immensely? I mean I love El Salvador I love it here but I mean it's a challenge it's cost me a lot of money it's cost me a lot of time it's kind of like moving to working on Bitcoin Core, would I do it again? knowing how much it costs and how much time it took to become a Core developer the same could be said for El Salvador but it's very compelling if you're a freedom lover. I don't know how long the freedom window will remain open or maybe we will all get rugged.

2:04:01 I do worry that the government will introduce property taxes and rug all of us people who've been investing in land. That would be terrible because a lot of I think the value of the land here is coming from A, the security to safety and B, the lack of property taxes which could change. And I am worried about that. I think there's a real risk of the safety could go away. Maybe the CIA breaks open prisons. I mean, tinfoil on that. Or the property taxes could be introduced. And that would be honestly very sad. I would say that both those count as the safety going away. Yes. And so you don't know.

2:04:41 And it's actually, I've never invested so much in my life outside of work in terms of time and money as I have here. But at the same time, it's pretty cool here. I mean, there's a lot to love. It's beautiful up there. I mean, where you live. I thoroughly enjoyed that afternoon where I got to see your house and get all sweaty. And I had to leave my shirt and get a t-shirt from you because my flag was... Yeah, my hat is still there, right? I still have your hat. I still have your shirt. They waiting for you If I know you correctly they still hanging on that ladder right No they hanging on something else All right That good to hear And I so sad that I didn get to go in November here that I couldn make it to El Salvador Plan B.

2:05:34 You didn't come for Plan B. No, no. It turned out my passport's expiry date had an expiry date. so the expiry date was like five and a half months after my planned return flight so they wouldn't let me over there and I was at the airport and all stressed out of course having this thing planned and I didn't want to let people down I showed them pictures of me and Bukele and stuff just let me fly there and I'll sort it out while I'm there I'm sure I can sort it out but no, they wouldn't let me on the plane I have to say, I'm jealous of you and Giacomo.

2:06:16 You guys got to meet the president. I still have not met the president. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm being called a hypocrite all over the internet because of that now. I'm a statist cuck now because I went to dinner. You're a statist cuck. Of course, yeah. No, that was interesting for you. It was my second presidential dinner, if you count the president of Madeira. Well, you'll be coming next November then, I am sure. for adopting or for an historical something will there be a historical next year or this year I assume there will be because they're launching the same thing but with AI in April oh fantastic I mean the Bitcoin office is impressive because you know I try to help the Bitcoin office frequently and they're impressive how much they're able to do with little they don't have a big budget or anything I mean Bitcoin historical did look like it had a decent budget, but in general, they're not, they're operating on a shoestring.

2:07:14 And it's amazing the stuff, the innovation they're trying to introduce to El Salvador compared to some other organizations in the government that maybe are very well funded or very well, much better connected or more close to the center of power. And the Bitcoin office are just doing so much stuff with so little. It's amazing. Yeah. I didn't necessarily, I didn't know Max and Stacey before, and the more I worked with Stacey, the more there is to love. It's amazing. No, she's definitely a doer. She makes things happen. And yeah, thank you very much, Stacey, for inviting me to Historico. Yeah, she's incredible.

2:07:56 Yeah. And yeah, I'm doing a lecture for Kubo Plus on Monday, actually, online. Online? The second one. Yeah. So I already did one, which was an interesting experience, like between 50 and 100 students or something. And they were all, they didn't have their cameras on. So it's just random anonymous faces. And I'm like, okay, what do you want me to talk about? And it's just silence as a, all right, I'll talk about this. And I just went on ranting for an hour or two and they seemed to enjoyed it. That's great. Well, now the world knows that we collaborated on your first book. yeah and i'm so glad we got to get that story out maybe in a yet another revised edition i can put your name in the book uh i'm eternally grateful for that it sure made me a better writer uh and a better bitcoiner so once again deep thanks and uh yeah all the love in the world well i hope to see you soon yes any before before i let you go john is there anywhere on the internet where you want to send people anything you want to direct people to?

2:09:12 Buy my NFTs and JPEGs. You can follow me on X if you want to. That's about it. Yes, that's very advisable. Jonatak, thanks so much for doing this. I hope to return to El Salvador as soon as possible and have a ceviche or two with you. And maybe hop on your motorcycle again. That was adventurous. Come out and visit the Citadel. Absolutely. Yeah, hopefully I can bring my family one day too. Oh, fantastic. I love El Salvador. It's fantastic. Yes, sir. See you soon.

2:09:53 Yes, thank you. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Arrivederci. see you see you