Bitcoin Core's Governance Problem | Secure Sovereign | Bitcoin Infinity Show #207

0:00 Josh, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Nice to have you here. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. Yeah, you have a fascinating story to tell. I think most of my listeners don't know who you are. So I'd urge you to give them a TLDR on who you are and why you're in Bitcoin. Sure. So primarily, I'm a software developer, IT specialist. I've been holding Bitcoin since 2010. I basically forgot about it for about 13 years life fell apart and then long story short I recovered it and it was a life-changing amount it was basically when I needed it most at the bottom and so it saved me and that's how I look at it so I've dedicated my life to Bitcoin and then I kind of had to go back through the record started going through the history of Bitcoin and I was a little troubled with what I found.

0:54 Okay, so, but what's your profession? You're a developer, right? Yeah, so I've spent most of my life doing software development, been coding for over 20 years in IT and around IT, mostly open source technology, full stack web dev. I'm familiar with managing distributed systems and open source technology. So I'm not like the greatest mathematician or cryptographer, but I've built plenty of complex applications. Yeah, that's a nice precursor. Like the second part of that sentence sort of nullifies the first part of it because you sort of have to be at least familiar with mathematics and cryptography and doing these things. Anyway, and you have some idea, like let's start with Secure Sovereign. What is that name and how did you pick them?

1:41 Yeah. So basically when I recovered my Bitcoin, I went kind of stir crazy for a little while, you know, changed my life completely. And so for about a year there, I was just spewing pro Bitcoin propaganda from the rooftops all day, every day, because it had totally changed my life. And I just wanted everybody to know. So yeah, so that was, I was, it was a different time than now. I'm a little bit more refined, a little bit more critical. But when I first started that handle, it was literally just, you know, trying to promote Bitcoin, try to tell people what they were doing. about how it changed my life and how it could change theirs too. Yeah, and what do you do now? Like, what are you working on?

2:24 So in late 25, I started doing a governance analysis on Bitcoin Core. I saw an old Princeton speech by Gavin Andreessen where he talked about how there are two kinds of governance. There was the technical consensus layer, then there was the social consensus. and by my estimation, one had been solved and the other one hadn't. So I kind of dove into that governance problem and then through that governance lens, I basically came to the conclusion that the easiest way to solve this would be with an alternative implementation and have two innovations, the alternative implementation and the commons governance system to manage it. And those kind of work in tandem. We can get into that later.

3:06 yeah absolutely there's a lot of talk about different implementations these days i mean uh the the longest running one i know of is lib bitcoin eric voskiel's thing there but that doesn't have very wide adoption i think and then there's of course the the project that jimmy and samson were talking about a couple of weeks back when i interviewed them knots is the biggest one I guess if you can call that a different implementation is basically very similar to core, except for a couple of parameters. But what's your view on all of these and why do we need yet another one? So sure, a great question. I looked at alternative implementations. I really didn't want to have to write one.

3:48 So that was kind of the first step. And then I, for one reason or the other, none of the ones that I saw really fit the bill. LitBitcoin, Eric's work is great. I commend him for sticking to it for so long. I think there's some technical reasons why that couldn't work out. I don't want to rag on his work too much because he's doing great work. I think from my perspective, the real question is, you know, does it need to be a fork of core? You know, NOTS is primarily a fork of core. Like you mentioned, you know, it changes some parameters, but it's mostly core code. And then, you know, I guess the question is like, what is Bitcoin, right? And the specification for Bitcoin, or rather how you define the protocol, is essentially the code base, the core code base.

4:33 So there is no specification, really. The code is the specification. And as a result, you have to follow core's code very closely or you risk breaking consensus. And this is kind of the first problem that I tried to address. And so as far as I know, there have been some attempts, but nobody has come up with a full independent specification of consensus up to this point. aside from us yeah that's i mean uh bitcoin is not bitcoin core and and they can't do what just whatever they want as as knots and and now bip 110 clearly has proven that uh a a non-neglectable part of the network can can dislike things core do enough to to try to break out so to speak So I guess the white paper is also something that is sort of referred to.

5:26 I mean, you can do that without being called a BSV-er. And parts of what people view Bitcoin as being, like people choosing what node software to run, I think they all want Bitcoin to be primarily be money and be an electronic, peer-to-peer electronic cash system, as the white paper says, and cash in the sense of being final settlement. I think that's super important to most Bitcoiners, too, or most Bitcoiners I know, anyway. Well, and I'll add to that, like, I think there's a failure of understanding a lot of people have when they think of the word consensus, right?

6:09 So when I was writing, building out this implementation, anytime I came to a bug with consensus, I treated it as it was a bug in my software that I needed to fix. Because consensus, by definition, is not something that I get to change. Because if I could, then it wouldn't be consensus. You know, it's either orange or it's not. It's either Bitcoin or it's not. And the goal with this project is to keep it orange and actually define what that means. Yeah, and how do you plan on getting people to go along with this? Like, what's the main strategy for adoption of this attitude? Sure. So there are a lot of reasons why.

6:51 I think that recently you've seen a lot of controversy in the community, and that goes back all the way to the Bloxize Wars. It's basically one controversy after the other. And the argument I would make, the contention that I have, is that the social consensus layer and all the drama that we see is actually downstream from the monolithic code base. And you can't really separate one thing from the other. So in my view, essentially what we have in store for us is an inevitable series of escalating civil wars in Bitcoin because of this single monolithic implementation that basically everybody has to run because there is no definition of what Bitcoin is aside from those 300 or so thousand lines of code of Bitcoin core.

7:44 Well, my instinct question here is why is that necessarily a bad thing? Because one thing that happens after one of these civil wars have played out is that we weed out the bad guys. That's how I see it. To me, I got my belief that Bitcoin could actually function the way and deliver on its promises, especially the nodes are in charge and therefore we cannot change the 21 million cap ever and so on and so forth. The outcome of the block size wars was sort of a proof of that, if you will, or a proof that we could win the battle. It wasn't proof that we could win the longstanding war against the forever flow of shitcoiners wanting to change Bitcoin.

8:30 But at least we won the battle and did the opposite of what most of the money in Bitcoin wanted, what most of the fiat money, most of the big companies wanted. So in a way, I think the process is weeding out bad people. And I think I view BIP 110 and not as an attempt at doing that too. I mean, you can have different definitions of who's bad and who's good. But defending Bitcoin as money, I think, is like most Bitcoiners have that core belief. Then we have a slightly different definition of what that means. Does money necessarily have to include miniscripts and time locks and multisigs and stuff? Or is money just money? And I think there's where most opinions go apart.

9:11 What are your thoughts? Yeah, that's a great, I can follow up with that. So I would say that the first thing is we really need to define our terms, what we're talking about. Without a specification of what constitutes consensus, what is the money part of Bitcoin over time, then your implementation, which is a bunch of spaghetti code entwined with that specification that doesn't really exist. It's kind of encoded in the Bitcoin. then without that you have a drift you could potentially have a drift where the values of the maintainers the developers in the community they shift away from the values that are currently encoded in Bitcoin then those then the thing is about values is is that they are actually represented in the code base as engineering constraints.

9:58 So a lot of people don't make that, you know, that leap. They don't understand that, you know, the cypherpunk ethos is actually encoded in the code via constraint. And so we need to define what all those constraints are so we don't drift out of those constraints accidentally, which has happened multiple times in Bitcoin's history with the core developers having an inflation, you know, introducing an inflation bug. There's the wallet deletion bug recently. There was this remote code execution exploit. And I'm not saying they are malicious or bad or they did it deliberately, but without a spec, without a very clear idea of what the constraints are, it's easier to kind of drift away from what the money part of it should be. Does that make sense?

10:40 yes it makes a lot of sense just so i get you right here like would you would you call the exploit of taproot maybe taproot is such a drift that we taproot was implemented too early it would have been better if we had like cooled down a little first and and thought more about the implications sure yeah i get i buy that i'm not actually i guess the key distinction for me is i'm not going to make a lot of prescriptions about what consensus should be, okay? However, with this project, the goal is to reduce the barriers of entry to forking and provide maximum optionality. So if you want to build your own, where you remove Taproot or you change some options, that's a lot easier for you than it currently is. And if you want to have way more options to configure your node to run your node how you want rather than what the defaults are what bitcoin core necessarily says then that is more accessible to you obviously we all have to agree about consensus right itself and then that's a kind of a separate question about the specification and then like is there's this tension between uh things that are in kind of in policy but enforced through defaults And then what is consensus?

11:58 And I think maybe over time, you'll see, you know, some shift one way or the other. Some stuff that isn't in policy will probably become consensus just to simply preserve the Bitcoin as money aspect of it. And so I can definitely see that shift over time. But the issue I think I have is the project, from my perspective, because it's a monolithic code base, is largely paralyzed. And because of the spaghetti code, basically no one wants to risk their reputation on potentially breaking things because it's such a it's basically a mess. So the kind of the call of the day is to do nothing. And it has basically been that way for forever. And I argue, again, because there is no specification, because we're not actually able to reason about where the consensus boundaries are versus where the policy boundaries are.

12:45 and then kind of have a very, instead of having a political discussion where we're, you know, throwing around adjectives and calling each other mean names, we can instead have an engineering discussion and then people can just run whatever node that they want with whatever options they want. So does that make sense? Like, I'm not trying to tell you how to run your node, which that's not why I'm here. Yeah, it makes sense from a certain perspective. However, like you say fork, I think you mean forking or modding node software rather than forking Bitcoin, right? You don't want... Yeah, so there's a... Yeah, the language is a little ambiguous there. Yeah, so I prefer... Would it be correct to call it modding Bitcoin rather than forking it?

13:29 Yeah, that's good. Sure. So, and this whole... I mean, there is a danger to this line of thought, I think, because the spaghetti code you're talking about and it not changing is part of the reason why Bitcoin could save you when your life was going to shit right 100 So it a feature as much as it is a bug if even not more The fact that Bitcoin is hard to change is one of the things that I love the most about it I think that's what makes it good money. I totally agree. I totally agree with you. And I think that there was that Quark's lab audit and they found that the consensus code was about 30,000 lines of code.

14:11 And the code base itself is about 350, 300 to 400 maybe. So the argument I would make to that is let's, yes, absolutely 100% ossify lockdown the consensus code and actually lock that to a specification. So we have math checking the code and vice versa. And if those things fall out of line, then, you know, alarm bells go off and it's immediately obvious that that's happened. And then for the remaining 80% of the code, which is networking code and storage code and database code, you know, there's a lot of room for improvement there. And I think a lot of people, not necessarily yourself, but a lot of people conflate ossification between those two things.

14:52 Ossifying consensus and protocol, good. Ossifying everything else that isn't those things, that just is accumulating technical debt over a long period of time. And I don't think that's, you know, at the end of the day, it's just software. And I think, you know, we don't want Bitcoin to become this sort of ancient brittle thing that nobody wants to touch over a long period of time. Maybe the protocol, sure, but everything else, not. Does that follow? Yeah, I think I follow you. And I think we're more on the same page than it might sound like here, because my job is to ask tough questions, at least part of my job. Yeah, just being an idiot is the rest of it. But anyway, let me give you my views on ossification and see if we can find a point of agreement there.

15:35 So I don't believe Bitcoin can ossify. I think that the term is wrong because behind every node is a person. This is, it's all dependent on people making deliberate choices. A node is a person, a miner is a person, everything in Bitcoin is a person. The mathematics and everything are like, they come after that. The very base layer is the people running the software and buying the hardware and paying the electricity bills. Layer zero. Yeah, exactly. Layer zero. So, but if we're talking of, if we're using the word ossification for simplicity's sake, like what would we want to stay the same forever in Bitcoin?

16:17 And the only thing I'd really like to stay the same forever in Bitcoin is the notion that Bitcoin is money. So, and that every single developer, whenever they make the smallest change to anything in it, should always ask themselves, does this make Bitcoin better money? before they even propose a change. So that's the thing I want to ossify. I want to ossify the notion of Bitcoin is money, like that sentence, Bitcoin is money. Like that's the thing I want to see ossified or see live forever. Not necessarily the code, because code needs to adapt to the world around it. So that has to be. Then of course, I want the 20% consensus rules code that you talk about to be way harder to change than the other 80%.

17:05 I'm totally with you. 100%. Yeah, yes, yes. That's exactly right. So yeah, ossification is kind of a tricky thing. I guess the problem is, is that when it's all spaghetti code and it's all entangled and you can't really figure out what's consensus or consensus adjacent and what's everything else, then the impetus for most developers is to just do nothing because they don't want to be the guy who broke Bitcoin. And who would, right? So that's kind of that's the first question we asked was, what is consensus? And then I spoke recently on Cedric's podcast about how we basically define the consensus. We did the alternative implementation. And then what we did is differential testing against the entire blockchain to make sure that our implementation and our specification matched Bitcoin Core's behavior one for one, feature for feature, bug for bug.

17:57 And then anytime there was a divergence, we treated it, like I mentioned earlier, as a bug in our implementation, not as a bug in core. So essentially through that process, we created a feedback loop, amended our specification and our implementation over time to get more and more into consensus until we eliminated any divergences. And I think we're the first so far to test, do a differential against the entire chain. So as far as I know, other attempts have been samples of small bits of the chain in particular areas. All right. And when you say we, who's in the group and how big is the group and like who's behind this?

18:38 I think many, I mean, you're obviously behind it, but are there others that people should know of? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So right now I'm the tech lead. I'm doing like 90% of the work. I've dedicated the last almost nine months full time to pumping this thing out. And I'm currently working with a guy, Gil Roberts, who has a long background. And he's also dedicated himself to Bitcoin. I met him recently. And we're building a team out. Most of the people I talk to are really excited about the project. They see a lot of potential in it. We have volunteers popping up out of the woodwork. And I'm very thankful for that. And the team is growing very rapidly. We're talking with John Attack and Eric Lombroso and various people throughout the community to get as much feedback as we can and just creating an open forum for what are very hard issues.

19:27 And, you know, I have to be thankful to CORE. You know, this is in a way a continuation of their work. It's not replacing anything that they did, even though it's not a CORE fork. And, you know, I'm trying to be respectful to them, even though I'm pointing out, you know, potential conflicts of interest and skewed incentives and things like that. All in all, I don't think these are bad people. And, you know, alternative implementations will strengthen Bitcoin for everybody if done properly. And even if it doesn't reach wide adoption, just having the specification, having all these testing suites and stuff to test against is going to help everyone. yeah i i fully believe that i mean we want decentralization in all the aspects of it that can be decentralized basically i mean decentralization is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot and in in because i view it mainly in bitcoin as an unfortunate means to a greater end and it's unfortunate because it would be better if we could just trust people to not print money, but only in that sense.

20:32 So because of that, we need to verify everything in a decentralized way. Yeah, any other thoughts on decentralization? I mean, miners are quite centralized at the moment. How do you see us fixing that problem if you see it as a problem? Yeah, I think we want to decentralize as much as possible. That's why we called our implementation commons. Basically, a commons is a shared resource that everybody benefits from, but nobody owns. And they have ways that they can be stable, and they have ways that they can collapse, and we're trying to build something that will be stable over a long period of time without creating a leadership structure, without creating a top-down hierarchy, something that's like flat.

21:15 It's a flat hierarchy that, you know, I think there's research that shows that people are generally happier in horizontal or flat hierarchies. They're more productive, they're more free, And I think it will lead to better outcomes. Bitcoin Core has a very high attrition rate, about 90% right now. So most of the people who come to make contributions, they leave and never come back. To answer your question about mining centralization, that mining isn't really something I've looked into a whole bunch. I do think that it's a very serious concern, in particular the chip manufactories, the rare earth minerals, the supply chain. And there's a lot of things that go into building those rigs.

21:57 And, you know, there's multiple potential vectors of attack there. And they're probably very smart people, smarter than me, looking at that particular problem. I'm mostly a software developer, so I'm looking at, like, the node side rather than the hardware side. But I definitely see that as a risk. I hope that a better node that, you know, manages to lock down consensus and does networking better and storage better and does all these other things better, then that might be able to help the margins of more decentralized mining operations to help them compete against the other larger operations you know that that's kind of experimental remains to be seen so i don't want to speak too much on that yet no i i i i think so too and i mean everything works better in an environment where mining is more decentralized for instance the filters on your node will work better if mining is more decentralized. It will take longer for someone running Libre Relay or something to get spam into a block if we had more different miners and fewer of them to allow this stuff to happen. So you were saying about flat organizations. It's an interesting topic. Do you believe Bitcoin Core was a flat organization until the developers got funding like that's sort of how i view it that these people were doing it because they were cared about bitcoin up until the point where they got funded where where there was sort of a slippery

23:30 slope shift and now not all core developers are even bitcoiners any longer in any any true sense of the word i can very much recommend my friend hodl on its uh articles about this they were great Yeah, he's written, done some really good, apparently is a very good like Pulitzer Prize level journalist on top of being a space cat. And I enjoyed them a lot. And they are scary, though. It's scary to read that stuff. I mean, and as you say, I don't think anyone has bad intentions. I just think this is it's an incentive problem is created whenever, whenever people start getting funding from somewhere. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

24:11 So, okay, this is obviously contentious. And again, I think all the drama that we're looking at is downstream from the monolith to like 90% of it. Easy. And so if you change the code base, then it's more maintainable. So it's not as expensive to maintain. So you need less money to maintain it. And therefore, incentives skew less. There's a whole bunch of reasons why the skewing of incentives is going to drift the sort of values, the ethos, the engineering constraints of Bitcoin. over a long period of time, if not kept in check by the community. And I encourage the community to remain vigilant about me and all implementations of Bitcoin.

24:51 But nonetheless, you know, I think there's a, I don't know. We just have to keep our ear to the ground and we can't, I don't need to say, I don't need to say Bitcoin Core is captured, okay? All I need to prove is Bitcoin, as an informal oligarchy, which I think I've proven that it is, is capturable. And then all I have to do is demonstrate that, I don't know, state-level actors, very powerful money interests could use those attack vectors that I've identified. I'm not saying they have, that maybe they already have.

25:35 I don't need to prove that. I don't. What I need to prove is that you can specify consensus and that we can all agree that there's some math here that constitutes consensus. And then we can build alternative implementations on top of that. And then we don't have to worry about how incentives are skewed anymore. We can just choose our own node, run our own node with our own options, and then, you know, have more optionality that way. So the main thing I think is also in that vein, I would add that Bitcoin Core, as far as I know, has no self-sustaining way of making money. There's nothing in the project itself that makes the project any money. They have to rely on grants. They have to rely on third-party money and incentives skew as a result. So I think there are a couple of things that Bitcoin could do that would be appropriate for Bitcoin in a commons to generate some revenue for the commons.

26:33 Now, that's a tricky issue, but I do think that it would help in the long term to have Bitcoin make some of its own money. If that makes any sense. I think there are ways to do that without changing protocol or anything. Well, the simplest way to fund Bitcoin development is the success of Bitcoin, of course, like number go up. Sure. I think that's how every single Bitcoin developer thought of it in the beginning, at least. Like, if this works, we're going to be shit rich. And therefore, they devoted their time to it. And I mean, if that and that is a very good incentive. Like, don't if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Like having that kind of attitude must be paramount for a project like this.

27:14 I imagine it's a security critical project, I think is the main thing. It's not just financial software, it's security software. I mean, we just saw the U.S. military come out and basically give it a distinction of being national security, right? I mean, that's... Yeah, I saw there was some funny stuff there with some talking heads trying to express what they thought about Bitcoin. I found it amusing. They had been listening to Lowry I think Fair enough Yeah Well uh yeah amusing to me but I guess like sooner or later every talking head is going to have an opinion and an idea around this.

27:55 I mean, we're not getting around that. And it is a good thing in the end. Like we want more adoption, I guess. Sure. And to that end, I think that if we had a better node, we could have, we could drive adoption too. I don't know what that, like what that would translate into, whether it would be 5% or 10% or no percent, I don't know. But I do think that, you know, having this thing at the center of Bitcoin that's accumulated 17 years of technical debt and is, you know, heavily ossified, both the, also the good parts and the bad parts. That is, you know, I think that's actually leaving the room, leaving the door open for stable coins and shit coins and various other instruments that, you know, wouldn't necessarily be there.

28:44 I think there actually is a pretty great opportunity cost to governance paralysis in Bitcoin. And I don't even have any prescriptions for like changing the block size or any of that stuff. Again, consensus is not mine to mess with. It's by definition, not mine to mess with. You know, this is where a lot of people, like I said, this is where a lot of people get lost. They don't literally know the definition of consensus. So, you know, I don't need to be prescriptive. What I'd like to do personally is not create an alternative implementation, but create a market for alternative implementations. and just let a free market develop with enabling infrastructure.

29:26 Web browsers, they had the first browsers like Mosaic. You know, they had a spec for HTTP and HTML. And then you had this proliferation of web browsers. And then over time, a lot of innovation occurred. And then eventually one web browser won. And I think we're all better off because of that process and all these people competing and trying to build this in an open source way. And that never really happened with Bitcoin. You basically had the first generation and then people just kind of tacked on one thing after the other for now 17 years. And I think that is having some real consequences that are some of which are pretty can be hard to measure, but it's it's definitely real.

30:06 So in the process of disentangling the spaghetti code and turning it into mac and cheese code, which is the what's the biggest issue that Bitcoin Commons solves? like for Bitcoin node software? Like what's the biggest problem with spaghetti code in the first place? So just in general, everything running smoother or is there like a main purpose here? Well, the main purpose is that we can adapt the parts of the implementation that aren't consensus very quickly. So we can kind of shave off all of that, that technical debt and just lock down consensus and then everything else can kind of move smoothly.

30:48 and then because it's in Rust, it's locked down pretty heavily using a strong typing system. It's a little technical, but basically the risk that anybody could like break consensus is pretty minimal. Then because we have the spec and because the spec is locked to the implementation, when we give you a final release binary, which should hopefully our first pre-releases should be out by the time this airs, but we'll actually cryptographically sign that release binary with an attestation that it matches the spec. So when you download our implementation, you can rest assured that if you see 21 million in the spec, that is the total cap of Bitcoin in that download that you got.

31:31 Without having to know C++ and check the source code, all you have to do is be able to read basic math. So that's kind of a neat thing. Also, I don't know, there's a lot of different things that we're trying to improve. But the main one is just being able to block consensus and provably, verifiably say that we are a consensus valid implementation via differential testing on 900,000 plus blocks. So I don't think anybody has come close to that so far, but I'm willing to be corrected. What is that exactly?

32:11 What, with differential tests? Yeah. So differential testing basically just goes through every single block. It runs everything, single script, and it checks to see if our implementation accepts or rejects blocks in the exact same way that Bitcoin Core does. And it plays it against the entire historical chain. That way we're rerunning all the transactions, every single bit of it, to make sure that our implementation has the exact same outcomes that Bitcoin Core did in the past. So if you had to rerun it all over again and our implementation was the only one, then we would have had the same outcome that Bitcoin Core does, at least in terms of the blockchain. All right. So it's like testing the code by running it and see if you get the same results as core.

33:01 Like that's a proof of it working then? Or like that sounds risky to me, like that's still something could slip through that is not in consensus. But I don't know. No, that's fair. And that's why we also have extensive property testing, something core is not done as far as I understand it. We also have fuzzing, extensive fuzz tests, which check the edge cases. And we're also doing something called formal verification of the math spec using a mathematical prover called Z3, which ensures that the implementation is locked to as many of the algorithms in the specification as we can possibly lock. So if the implementation or the spec get out of whack with each other, it's immediately apparent that either the math is wrong or the implementation is wrong.

33:48 All right. I understood about 40% of that, but I believe it's all public on GitHub. I encourage people to go and, you know, throw their AI at it and, you know, have it. Don't believe me. Yeah, very interesting. I mean, I hear you like you don't really want to have opinions on what consensus is and you don't want to have opinions on anything really. But you want the community to be able to express their opinions more freely by implementing this software. Am I getting that right? Yeah, I mean, I have some prescriptions. I'd like to see certain things, but that's like a personal take.

34:31 You know, that's different from my kind of role as the builder of this software. No, no. But still, I'm curious about that. So if you take off your builder of this software hat for a bit, what are your opinions about Bitcoin and what's going on in Bitcoin right now? And is there anything that bothers you more than anything else? And is there anything that excites you more than anything else? Well, I think I wouldn't have dedicated the last nine months or almost nine months of my life to specifying Bitcoin and doing a whole alternative implementation if I weren't concerned about a drift away from the spec, drift away from our principles, drift away from Bitcoin as money. And then, you know, the skewing of incentives due to outside money coming in and, you know, well-meaning people being sort of inadvertently driven one way or the other to change Bitcoin in a way that most people wouldn't agree with, I think.

35:26 And so I think Bitcoin's market cap, you know, got over, what, $2 trillion. And then that was largely due, like, mostly all the way due to the fact that it's money, not that there are monkey JPEGs on chain. I think the spam issue is important. The way I would frame that as an engineer is I would say there are many different types of database software. You could make the argument in the very general sense that Bitcoin is database software. And then when you're writing database software, you can kind of cram different kinds of data into different kinds of databases, but it doesn't mean you should. Okay, so I could put tree data in a tabular SQL database, or I could put tabular data in a tree database.

36:08 Like I can do those things, but there are better tools for the job. And for monkey JPEGs, I'm pretty sure there are better databases than Bitcoin for monkey JPEGs. That's all. So it's scope creep essentially for Bitcoin to be supporting monkey JPEGs, you know, and we could argue about whether or not that should be supported. And, you know, I would say probably not. But nonetheless, at the very bottom, it's just people using the wrong tool for the job. yeah absolutely like the the thing is being promoted as the thing that bothers me like there are many things that bothered me about these monkey jpegs on chain but the scamminess of them is what bothers me the most they're promoted as something they aren't first of all a picture is on the internet is not ownable in any any real sense of the word i mean owning owning a monkey jpeg on the time chain is a bit like owning a star in the adoramada galaxy sure you can see it and you can say that it's yours but so can everyone else there's nothing making it especially yours and especially since these pictures aren't attached to the satoshis in the way that they pretend they are there's not no such thing as a rare satoshi like they're all rare but equally they're fungible so they're equally amounts rare like my analogy is like a centimeter doesn't change its length because I measure a body part with it. That's not how centimeters work. And that's not how sats work either. Not really. So therein lies the scam. And the saddest

37:41 part about it is like, okay, you own this star in this Andromeda galaxy, but the contract saying that you own it is actually messing. I have to write the contract on the telescope. So it actually fucks with the telescope and that's like the the data embedded on chain it's pretty bad uh far-fetched metaphor but but something like that is going on and you know uh they can come with all this value is subjective uh arguments but and that is true 100 true but that that scams are scams is also 100 percent true and that you cannot own data in the same sense as you can own an actual painting by an original artist that that's also true so yeah there's a lot to be said about that stuff i'm with you on that and i ultimately i think really this is graffiti it's like graffiti except the thing is with graffiti is graffiti can be painted over when it's on the blockchain it cannot be painted over it's stuck on the blockchain forever and then every node runner at least if you run you know, standard core. Every node runner from here to time immemorial has to participate in all of your monkey JPEGs, not you specifically, but you know, whoever's putting those on chain, we all now have to participate in that, whether we like it or not. And, you know, I am a big believer in the principle of free association. So if I don't want to participate in it, I still want to be able to sync, you know, a node without having to download whatever you're putting on

39:11 chain if it's not, you know, money. And that I think is the kind of the next step is trying to figure out a way to paint over the graffiti without compromising the permissionlessness of the money. That's like a very hard thing to do. But I think really at the end of the day, it'll come down to the node runners, all of us deciding collectively that we don't want this stuff on our nodes and then basically just not downloading it. Yeah, that sounds, it sounds like you're a bit 110 advocate there by that. Are you? So I have issues with BIP-110. I did a full analysis of BIP-110. Okay. So I did a full chain analysis.

39:52 I ran BIP-110 against the entire chain, 900,000 plus blocks, just to see which transactions it would block historically as if it had been always enabled. Fantastic. That's, yeah, yeah, go on. I'm just excited. Well, so I found a lot of very good things there. I think I support generally this idea that in 2015, I think there was this massive spike of non-monetary data. Then basically it trundled along. There was none of this stuff on chain for a long, long time up until about 2023. And then it just got out of control.

40:35 and now I think they call it block weight is much higher on average than it was in the entire time prior. So there's like massive amounts of data being dumped onto the blockchain like on a per megabyte basis. And that is, again, that's a cost that is going to be a burden that every node runner from here into the future is going to have to bear and at least with current technology and that, again, it's not voluntary. I don't want to participate in your monkey chain. No, but if you say at least for now, Is there a chance in the future that you will not have to do the initial block download? Like, what do you foresee there? Okay, so the first thing I looked at when I was looking at the IBD is UTXO set commitments.

41:19 UTXO set commitments have been sort of in the works, in research for a very, very long time, okay? Since maybe even 2011, 2012, you know? And, you know, like many things, they never really got their due. The governance paralysis the sort of slow moving aspect of the repo of core I think perhaps had something to do with it as well I know a lot of really good people worked very hard on getting that in and never got in There's Utrixo, there's some other people trying to do this UTXO set commitment thing. Without getting too technical, but basically it allows you to eliminate up to 98% of the initial blockchain download when you set up your node and maintain most of the cryptographic guarantees.

42:03 almost all the cryptographic guarantees that you would have syncing from tail to tip. So there's that. And that would probably eliminate 40 to 60% of spam if implemented. Also, it doesn't require a consensus change, which is nice. And then there are spam heuristics. So there's a lot of additional ways that you could potentially block spam, even beyond what Knots is doing, that aren't basically nobody's doing. And I think that we could have a lot more optionality there and give people, node runners, the ability to be even more restrictive than the current most conservative implementation not is. So there's that. And then finally, I'm currently working on a module for my implementation, our implementation, Bitcoin Commons, that we're calling Selective Synchronization.

42:54 And it's experimental, but basically the idea is that there's a registry of transactions that have been kind of aggregated by the community. And if you as a node runner want to use that registry, when you do your IBD, it will skip those particular transactions without changing the cryptographic hashes for the block. So the blockchain still remains valid, but you actually get to skip the payload. It looks like you got the whole block, but no monkey JPEG went over your Internet. But where would that file be? Like, where would it be stored? Who would make sure that that file wasn't corrupt? Like, or could you verify it somehow?

43:36 Right. So basically you would have to have it, you'd have like a peer consensus thing. And then also there would be community registries. They'd probably be decentralized. We're building that out, but we're pretty sure that technically it's possible. And it would obviously be voluntary as well. If you wanted to run a node where you just downloaded everything, I would encourage people to still run archival nodes. That's up to them. But if you didn't want the monkey JPEGs, that's an option for you too. So just trying to provide maximum optionality to people when they're running their own node, not to try to make prescriptions about what should or shouldn't be on chain. We don't really have a lot of control over that, but I do have complete control ostensibly over what goes over my node. And that's kind of what I'm trying to focus on.

44:18 So would you call that a pruned node or a semi-pruned node? What's the correct way to define such a node that gets the proof? from this decentralized file. Yeah, it's kind of like selective pruning. So if someone else asks you for a block where you've used this sync shortcut, then it just tells that node that you don't have that block and it needs to find it somewhere else, essentially. So it doesn't break the whole networking gossip protocol of Bitcoin, that can still function just fine. It's just that stuff never has to go over your node. So you don't have to know about it. All right. Yeah, that sounds like a neat little tool. Okay. What else is going on? Is there something we missed here, something we haven't talked about yet?

45:08 Well, we're trying to shoot for grants. And we're gonna have our release probably very shortly here. Probably by the time this is broadcast. I would encourage people to run a node look at our documentation look at our specification we definitely need review on the security side we're trying to get some audits together any contribution is necessary any contribution is welcome even critical feedback is welcome be gentle but uh i'm open to any feedback and we're we're just um we're at the bitcoincommons.org we currently have one implementation we're hoping we can get some more forks in the future more modules um and and uh just get through all this testing get into phase two where we activate governance and then uh you know then it's kind of out of my hands at that point it'll take on a life of its own.

46:22 Yeah. So, so go to thebitcoincommons.org and check it out. Interesting stuff for sure. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah. Um, uh, yeah, let's, let's see here. What other topics have we missed to discuss here? I have a whole list here. So all right. So pick something from the list. Well, so one of the things that we did is we put together Compact. And the Compact is a complete, it's like our constitution, but basically in the Compact, it's completely voluntary. And it says essentially that authority in Bitcoin flows from users, not developers, not miners, and not institutions.

47:04 And also that the technical implementation follows from social consensus, never the reverse. So essentially that means that, you know, the people who are developing Bitcoin, who are running Bitcoin, they have their principles, they have their values, and they kind of encode those values via engineering constraints into the code directly or choosing which code they're going to run. And so the social consensus of what Bitcoin is ultimately determines the technical consensus at the end of the day. And I'd like to be very clear about what our principles are. And you kind of alluded to this earlier. Anytime we're making a change in the implementation, whether it's to consensus or to some other aspect of the library, we need to check that change against every single one of our values, very consistently checking our principles.

47:55 So we call Bitcoin Commons a commons because it's based on the work of Eleanor Ostrom. And there was a book by a guy named Hardin called Tragedy of the Commons. And in Tragedy of the Commons, he posits that all commons are basically destined for collapse. Anytime you have a shared resource, it collapses. And Eleanor Ostrom, with her work in commons, basically proved that in certain conditions, commons doesn't have to collapse. And so my contention is that the Bitcoin code base is essentially a commons. It's a shared resource that everyone benefits from, but nobody owns. And I don't want to set up a top-down, I don't want to see a top-down hierarchical system of governance. I want to see a flat hierarchy and then a very clear set of rules that even strangers could use to coordinate to ensure that the commons of this code base is stable.

48:53 And there have been many stable commons throughout history. Some have lasted for hundreds of years. And this is something I think that we can bring into the sort of digital cryptography age. And it's something that is very specific to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is a very peculiar technology. I think everybody would agree that it's very special. It has unique properties that are unlike most open source software. And so I would argue that its governance also needs something very peculiar, very special to apply to it. And it can't be the same old thing. It can't be that same corporate top down hierarchy that we do everywhere else. And so it has to be tailored to Bitcoin. And that's and that's essentially what we're trying to do. And then make it very forkable, too.

49:41 So, you know, if you disagree, which I'm assuming many people will, then the barriers of entry to forking their own implementation or their own governance are very low. And then we kind of play ball with them. We don't exile them and put them in the corner with a dunce hat. We tell them, you know, come on in. Let's all learn from each other and copy each other's homework, you know. That's, I think, the main goal there is just building a strong, healthy ecosystem based on rules, not rulers. That sounds like Bitcoin to me. You mentioned a couple of like functioning commons. Do you have any examples of that over the last couple of centuries?

50:22 Sure. Yeah. So there was the Icelandic Commonwealth. That was a big one. We had Swiss farms. And then my favorite one is the Hanseatic League. It was a. Yeah. They had no constitution, no permanent bureaucracy, no standing army, no central treasury. They operated through periodic assemblies, and they had over 100 cities at one point under their sway. No, I guess it says almost over 400 years here for them. Yeah, the history of the Hanseatic League is absolutely fascinating. And those cities where they operate are some of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

51:06 A lot of them in Northern Europe, I mean, they sort of invented the equity or stocks in a way because you could own, like it cost the individual ship owner quite a lot when one of their ships sank. Like they had their entire lives tied up in that. So they figured out that if we band together and we all bear the cost of a sunken ship, then we can all benefit from that or all have a smoother risk profile, let's say. So that's where that whole thing started. And there's a pretty good argument for why that is not only a good thing, because if your ship, if the cost to your ship sinking is lowered, then you will take less care in making it not sink.

51:57 So that is the tragedy of the commons, I guess. And maybe that has something to do with why it didn't work more than 400 years. Sure. Well, to that end, I will say I'm completely allocated to Bitcoin. So if I fail, I'm only screwing myself over. Yeah, yeah. Same here. Like I prefer to make my own mistakes for as stubborn as I am becoming a stubborn old man, but I've always been a stubborn man. Well, yeah, so that it's honestly looking at the history of it, I think there's really been no more stable or prosperous example of, you know, a working system that is sort of human oriented than the commons. That's why I named the project commons. And to try again to apply our principles consistently. We look at Hayek, we look at Ostrom, we look at various cypherpunk, you know, I don't know if philosophers is probably the wrong term, but, but influencers maybe, you know, anytime we make a change, we're checking it against our principles to make sure that, you know, we're maintaining that mission of Bitcoin is money and doing something that is consistent with our values. So that's a high priority for us. And also, you know, it's either Bitcoin or it's not. It's either orange or it's not. We're trying to make it more orange, not less. And, you know, hopefully, hopefully we'll be able to prove that to people over the next year or two. And again, I encourage people to go test out the release, do the IBD.

53:25 We'll make a comment, contribute however you see fit. We've got people popping up out of the woodwork, like I said earlier, to help. There's a lot of, I don't know, there's a lot of, I don't know, disappointment in the community for a lot of different reasons about the current status quo. So I think that we're trying to provide like a viable third way for people instead of just the core VNOTs or the, you know, some other thing, something viable that people can really get behind and could have some very important long term outcomes for Bitcoin and make it healthier, maybe even drive number go up, make it more secure and improve the properties that we've already enshrined and coded in Bitcoin.

54:10 take our principles and take them even further, not remove any of our principles, but go even further with our principles. Go deeper, maybe? Would that be a correct way? Yeah. Well, and so, and we want to take the same principles that were applied by Satoshi in solving the Byzantine generals problem and solve the social consensus problem, that kind of Byzantine layer. And we solve that as well. Yeah, the Byzantine retards problem. Yeah. It's a different problem. You could argue it's a harder problem. So we have our work cut out for us. But fortunately, I have lots of tokens. So we'll figure it out. Maybe that's... There's something there. Democracy can never truly work until we solve the Byzantine retards problem.

55:01 I like that. That'll be quote of the day. You can put that in the headline for the podcast. I'll tweet it. I'll tweet it. Yeah. No governance can ever work. The solution to solving governance, governance is first solving the Byzantine retards problem. I'm with you on that. I know I'm totally with you. So actually the, we kind of assume that by default and with, with our governance model, we have an Ostrom's principles for maintaining a commons. One is transparency. Monitoring is what she calls it. And so we have a radical transparency. transparency approach. So how we're doing what we're doing when we're doing it, all that stuff is logged, auditable. And then over time, we get we can build credibility with the community by just being very open with everybody about what what they're getting, rather than trying to like hide it and put it in private channels. And, you know, some of the stuff that john was complaining about recently, where we're important Bitcoin discussions are happening in dark rooms, not out in public. And that has to stop. No, that's, that's no good at all. And it's like posting it all out there in the open. It's like the opposite of what the government is doing because they want to survey their subjects and keep everything they're doing secret. And it should be the other way around. Like the, everything the government does should be transparent. A hundred percent. And then they shouldn't survey us at all. Exactly. And then I have to make the distinction too, a lot of people, you know, they hear the word governance and they assume government and they're very different things, you know.

56:32 Governance is like there's a ship at sea, it has a direction, somebody is steering it and that's all that means. And we're just trying to figure out, you know, where the wheel is so we can get this thing going into the wind. Government is a totally separate thing. That's, you know, an organization at the center of society with monopoly on the use of force and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like a whole different thing. And we're definitely not trying to do that. I think we can all agree that is failing, if not already failed. No, yeah, but to me, it sounds like the opposite. Like you're trying to free things up here and it's all good. Josh I wish you the best of luck with all of this Yeah but maybe before I wrap this up are there more points there on your list I mean Well come check me out on X I do have an X handles sexsovereign, SECsovereign.

57:21 I go by Secure Sovereign. The bitcoincommons.org is our website. And we basically have everything available publicly. There's nothing hidden. There's nothing, you know, that isn't just out in the open. So people are welcome to scrutinize and criticize and come to whatever conclusion they want. And we're trying to just make it, like I said, as transparent as we possibly can. And I'm open to discussion. We have a sub stack as well. So we'll be posting articles there as well. And hopefully soon we're going to have our first alpha release and go from there. Fantastic. Looking forward to that and seeing how the community reacts to it, hopefully in all the best ways.

58:09 I appreciate you having me on, and I hope to come back after we have a significant release and we can chat about it again some more. Absolutely. You're welcome back again when we know more about what this thing actually looks like in reality. So thank you very much, Josh, for coming on the show. Thank you. The show, which is the Bitcoin Infinity Show. You should brush your teeth. Thank you for listening.