Defending Bitcoin: Cybersecurity for the Monetary Grid | Luke de Wolf | BIS #202

0:00 Welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity show, Luke DeWolf. This is your show, or half of it is, so welcome back. We haven't seen each other for a while in this format, at least. Good to have you here. Hey, Knut. Awesome to be here. Yeah, love it. We'll explain a little bit of why I've been so absent in this episode, I think. But yeah, looking forward to the big reveal, so to say. Yes, you have some really big news And man, I just have to say from the bottom of my heart I'm super proud of you for this thing It's so cool I have not been participating very much at all In the process of making this thing And you have bloomed into an author in your own right After we wrote The Inverse of Clown World together it's like two years back now, or even three years.

0:55 I can't even remember. Time flies. Released 2024, so yeah, coming up on two years. Yeah, so the big news. What's the big reveal? I'll leave it to you. I mean, why don't you introduce yourself like every other guest does? For the people who are... I mean, we have quite a few new followers, I think, since you sort of semi left the, well, you didn't leave the show, but you left the visible part of the show and the audible part. So tell us a little about yourself and about our show and where things are and lead into the big news here, please.

1:36 Definitely. Perfect. And yes, you're exactly right. I'm maybe a little bit less visible than I used to be on this show. So yes, the TLDR on me. So my background is that I am originally from Calgary, Alberta. I, you know, in technically still in Canada. I was born in Canada and from the great province of Alberta. That's where I started my career. And my career and background is in computer science. And that transitioned into working with industrial control systems. That might be a little bit of a gobbledygook, but that's basically all of the stuff that runs factories and electrical grids and oil and gas pipelines and things like this.

2:22 I got the chance to start in that field and basically never left. It's super exciting to me. It's still my day job, actually, doing security for industrial control systems and operational technology is another word for it. But basically the summation of that is that I've spent the last decade working with these types of systems that keep the world running. You can call it critical infrastructure. Also, that's a technical term for a lot of these domains. We would be nowhere if we didn't have electricity, if we didn't have oil and gas energy, if we didn't have factories making the stuff that we use all the time. So that's basically the field that I have been working in.

3:06 And then enter Bitcoin. basically. So I discovered Bitcoin while I was in the process of moving from Canada to Finland. And I mean, that's a whole other story, I guess. But my affinity for Finland has been going on for a long time. I've liked a lot of the music from Finland and from the region. And my wife and I wanted to see the world a little bit and experience living somewhere else. And well, the original plan had been to just visit Finland, but then COVID happened and the lockdowns and all this. And well, we just decided to move there instead. So basically, the craziness of my shift from Canada to Finland also included my discovering Bitcoin. Specifically, and I'll call this out Robert Breedlove series with Michael Saylor. That's what pushed me over the edge 100%.

3:58 And the reason I say it like that is because the economic angle has always been the thing that has convinced me. The 21 million supply cap, all of this, I never understood any of that. I dabbled in crypto the previous cycle, 2017 or so. It was just the talk of the office at the time kind of thing. But the whole point was I never understood the ideas behind Bitcoin. I was one of those people who thought, hey, Ethereum is better because it's just Bitcoin except improved and newer and everything. And I had no idea. I had no idea about the Dow issues or all of the crypto scams or anything like this. No idea. And so the real light bulb moment for me was discovering a true explanation of money and how money works and the ways that Bitcoin fixes all of that. And so huge, huge credit to Rob and to Michael Saylor for that series. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who took the orange pill through that discovery. And honestly, I was all in. The thing about it was, because maybe it took, okay, a year or so for me to really get all the way in down the rabbit hole.

5:15 But I was reading a whole ton of classics, EG's 21 Lessons I found really helpful. For example, I found your books that were out at the time, Knut. And I actually remember seeing you for the first time on Rob Breedlove again. That show was in my perennial watch list. And I thought to myself, ah, this guy is pretty interesting. And you were like, you would lounge in your chair a little bit and talk about your prognostications and everything. And I just thought you were fascinating. And little did I know we would end up connecting not even a year later or something, I think. So that was pretty cool.

5:56 So let me get to the point because I'm kind of bad at that sometimes. Well, we've been working together for a good long time now. It's basically like, what, it's three years, four years, something like that. It's a while. And I was just looking for a way to contribute, basically. And my entrance was your previous publisher, Consensus Networks. They translate Bitcoin books into Finnish. and me being in Finland, I thought I would try to help the organization that is producing books in the language I'm trying to learn. And they connected us together. We started the Freedom Footprint show and basically the rest is history. We can partially skip to the end there. We've done a lot of awesome stuff in the last few years and I've immensely enjoyed all of our collaborations.

6:42 Yeah, I mean, we've been on an adventure to say the least. I mean, we met for the first time in person in Riga, I believe, in 2001. 22? 22? Yeah, I can't remember anything. But I have never seen a person do such a nosedive into the rabbit hole as you. Like you spend every non-sleeping hours since like deep diving into understanding Bitcoin on a deep, not only a philosophical level, but on an economic level, of course, and also a computer science technical level. I've learned a lot from you about this thing, and we've been brainstorming back and forth about not only what we do together, which is primarily the pod, but also the inverse of clown world when we wrote that.

7:34 There was a lot of back and forths, but also about almost everything from marriage counseling to quantum mechanics. I mean, we've explored a lot of topics and had a lot of brainstorming sessions. And it's been a pure joy ever since I saw this weird, you know, pseudo-Fin, as you called yourself back then, metal music fan who moved to Finland with his wife at a quite early age. It's not the most common path. But, yeah, I mean, we've had a lot of fun. And it's been leading up to this moment, we could say, for you at least.

8:16 You are so much more than just my sidekick at this point. It's something completely different. So tell us more about what this moment is. Thanks. Well, hey, I appreciate you, man. It's been great. And yeah, really, really couldn't have done any of this without you. So yeah, first of all, just thanks for that. And yeah, so here's the announcement. For the last six months, I've been working on a book combining these two areas of my life, what I talked about at the beginning, this cybersecurity, industrial control system, cybersecurity, and all of the Bitcoin stuff I've been doing. So the title of the book is Defending Bitcoin. You can see it behind me. Industrial grade cybersecurity for the monetary grid, a term that I'm hoping catches on a little bit.

9:01 I think you can probably see how that works, the grid of miners and all this. So the monetary grid. But the thrust of the book is basically to be as complete a cybersecurity reference as can fit into something you can hold in your hand for all facets of Bitcoin, focusing on, first of all, the personal applications of cybersecurity in the Bitcoin world. For example, why you should get your coins off an exchange, how to secure them properly with hardware wallets and the privacy considerations as well. And then taking a bit of a look at how Bitcoin stacks up in terms of the network itself. And it's meant to be a combination of educational.

9:42 So filling gaps, I don't expect all readers to have deep dived on every part of the, say, the technological aspects or even the economic aspects. So I include a lot of educational components in each chapter just to make sure that all the ideas are there that you need to know to understand. And then finally, I wrap up with a little bit of a coverage of things outside of Bitcoin that maybe could be a threat. Things like the political and regulatory landscape and the big boogeyman of quantum and AI and all this. There's 15 chapters. The first five chapters are a sort of get everyone to a baseline kind of thing.

10:26 I've also written this not just for Bitcoiners. That's, of course, going to be the audience of this podcast, of our show, but also for people in, say, the cybersecurity or general IT technology sector, the people I work with who might be skeptical about Bitcoin and not really know so much about it yet. So the whole idea is to get everyone up to speed. There's two chapters on Bitcoin, the economics and the technology of Bitcoin. Then there's two chapters on cybersecurity. So essentially a baseline on the cybersecurity fundamentals that I use every day in my job. I'll credentialize myself a little bit. Also, I hold the CISSP certification, Certified Information Systems Security Professional, and the GICSP certification, Global Industrial Cybersecurity Professional certification.

11:16 And these two are basically the top two certifications in both general cybersecurity and industrial control system cybersecurity. So that stuff for factories and operational technology and all this. So I know my stuff is what I'm trying to say here. I'm not by any means an expert in the sense of that I know absolutely everything on the topic, but I know where to look and I know who to call when my knowledge base ends. and I've been working with these systems for over a decade. So yeah, that's my credentials in the cybersecurity world for those who aren't familiar with that. Fifth chapter, fifth chapter is where I synthesize everything together and explain why Bitcoin is critical infrastructure and should be defended as such.

12:00 That is the thesis of the book and the entire rest of the book covers basically how that applies. So I've created a custom framework based on industry best practices that goes over and categorizes various threats to your Bitcoin, the Bitcoin network as a whole, and then applies the ways you can defend against it. So the entire book is about defending Bitcoin in a few different ways, defending your own personal Bitcoin, defending the Bitcoin network. And the whole point is there is always something you can do, no matter the domain of Bitcoin that we're talking about. Every one of the 10 chapters that covers the sub areas, there is always something you can do. That's the point I want to leave you, the reader, the listener reader with, is that no matter what, you can always do something to improve your security and improve the security of Bitcoin as a whole.

12:52 So that's the elevator pitch or a pretty long elevator, I guess. So it's a Bitcoin book for computer security people and a computer security book for Bitcoiners. In other words, it's a book for LinkedIn people to realize that not everyone on X and Noster is an idiot. And for X and Noster people to realize that most people on LinkedIn are. Would that be a fair assessment? Yeah, well, hey, I'm not going to deny that one at all. But yeah, the dual audience thing, the whole thing with this is that I want to appeal to people who are coming at it from different backgrounds. And so I think for Bitcoiners, the whole idea is you're going to see Bitcoin presented in a slightly different way with a slightly different set of words, of vocabulary.

13:45 And what I want to actually get into a little bit here is helping cybersecurity to become second nature Once you read this book 100 you going to be thinking a little bit more in terms of the threats you might see in everyday life and the ways you can control and defend against them. And I go through the vocabulary that we use in the industry all the time here. So it's aligned to what these certifications and best practices teach. So the book by the end of it, I want to leave everyone with a sense of having learned something and also that you can do something and go out there and improve your security posture so that you don't get hacked, you don't lose your Bitcoin by some means. And also having an honest look at some of the structural things going on in Bitcoin that that there's a lot of fight about going on.

14:41 Yeah, and there's a lot of attack vectors, and most of them are not. I'd say that people's assessment of different attack vectors is often very wrong, for lack of a better word. I mean, people are worried about quantum when they should be worried about spam and such things, and maybe that's a biased view too, but I think the social attack vectors are very interesting. Does the book talk about social attack vectors a lot? Sure. Well, I think if I'm interpreting you correctly with this, the internal dynamics that are going on in Bitcoin, we've got a lot of different constituencies that have a say in how Bitcoin comes to consensus and how it works.

15:26 Andreas Antonopoulos did essentially a five constituency thing of those groups who are able to influence consensus and need to come to some agreement. I only go to four. I consider that node runners are basically those who set and defend the rules of Bitcoin, make it so that you can't change the rules arbitrarily, at least the consensus rules. Then, of course, there are the miners who find the blocks and keep the chain moving, right? That seems obvious. There's, of course, the developers, and those are the ones who are making changes to the node software and all of the other things that are going on in Bitcoin.

16:11 And then I also make the case that essentially the holders of Bitcoin that aren't doing any of those other things are another group that has influence. Those are the people buying and selling Bitcoin and essentially setting its price. Andreas makes the point that effectively both merchants and exchanges should be considered kind of in their own right. But I lump them together with essentially that those are different types of node runners and holders and they have different levels of influence kind of in the world here. So the four is to simplify it a little bit for the perspective of those who maybe aren't so familiar with those dynamics. Anyway, the point I'm getting at here is that each one of those groups has their own concerns, right? If you're a holder of Bitcoin, you're concerned with how do you make sure that your stack stays safe. So I spend three chapters on that at the beginning of the second part of the book.

17:07 than the issues of mining and node running. So there's a chapter each on the primary concerns for running a node at the moment and for mining. With node running, I mean, there are so many things that can come up. Node software is constantly under attack. And there are great people trying to figure out how to keep, say, your Bitcoin node software as secure as it possibly can be. There was a great article that came out just recently about how Nicholas Goetge, who's working with Brink, for example, is doing all of this fuzzing security testing and honestly, legitimately finding security bugs and things like this. The flip side, though, is that the latest couple of releases of Bitcoin Core have released with bugs.

17:54 One of them was honestly a pretty catastrophic bug that could have resulted in wallet files getting deleted. You could have lost your Bitcoin if you didn't have a separate backup. And then a recent one on this V31 recently here was something like forcing any unnamed wallet to be migrated to a new system and get a name, causing a lot of hassle. You couldn't use older Bitcoin wallets once you upgrade to the latest version of Core or something like this. So the thing is, it's a double edged sword, right? Node development that as much as you want to add new features and security fixes, which are actually important, I 100% do not recommend running older versions of Bitcoin node software because there is stuff that accumulates over time that just you need to upgrade or else you could be vulnerable.

18:47 And I cover all this in the book, of course. The main thing, though, is that if development is moving to add new features, there's always a risk of adding new vulnerabilities and new attack vectors. So I cover that with a whole chapter on kind of the risks that you can run into with your node software and development and all this. And then, of course, I think what you were alluding to is sort of the interplay of spam and governance. So I cover this in two chapters, and this is probably going to be the part that is most controversial with those in the community. I'm clear about my stance on arbitrary data, And I spend the whole chapter making my case for why that should be considered a security vulnerability. To keep it short here, the vulnerabilities that were identified by Luke Dash Jr. that effectively allowed arbitrary data to get onto Bitcoin, I consider those vulnerabilities for really simple cybersecurity reasons.

19:43 The big thing about critical infrastructure that is important is availability. Availability of the system is absolutely paramount. And in the cybersecurity world, there's a concept called the CIA triad. So, hi, CIA. No, it's coincidence. Actually, coincidence. It stands for confidentiality, integrity, availability. And these are the three primary things that cybersecurity defends against attacks on. So confidentiality, someone attacking a confidentiality, that's trying to find your sensitive information, basically. You know, your passwords or your financial information or embarrassing pictures or whatnot.

20:25 Attackers are trying to find that information so they can do something with it. Integrity is making sure that stuff doesn't get tampered with. And this can have a lot of other implications. It's a little more subtle, but basically your information is changed and you can't use it. or say someone hacks your account and starts using it for bad means, that's an integrity attack, essentially. You weren't able to keep your information unaltered. Then availability is the final point, and this is critical in the sector of factories and electrical grids and things like this. It's not necessarily as important for, say, a company's IT systems or even your personal computer to stay up and running.

21:06 You can handle some downtime for a couple of hours in the worst case scenario. But if your electricity goes down or you can't keep the heat running or the water pumping or something like this, you notice the issue a lot more quickly. And Bitcoin is basically the same thing. That's the whole point of why I consider it critical infrastructure is that it has that in common, that availability of the system is paramount. And the point that I make with arbitrary data is that the worst issue with the spam is not, to me, the load on node runners. That is something. The decentralization risk on node runners is for sure something.

21:49 But it's estimated that it's around 30, 40 gigabytes of additional block space has been used by this arbitrary data. In the scheme of things, that's not so massive as maybe the scope of what we might have been thinking about, those of us who have been vocal about this. The UTXO bloat is worse. So, I mean, the whole coverage of this, of that every individual new spam transaction is creating all of these UTXOs, yeah, that's bad. And I would love for some ways to solve the UTXO bloat problem. Theoretically, there's a lot of work being done on making the UTXO set a lot smaller and a lot easier to run for node runners.

22:32 So I'm much less worried about those two specific points. The issue I have with arbitrary data is that it prices out or competes with monetary transactions. And these are two entirely separate markets, right? There's an entire separate incentive for the spammers to be putting their transactions onto Bitcoin. And they're willing to pay different prices than those who are simply using Bitcoin for its intended purpose. And by the way, on that, I always go back to peer-to-peer electronic cash in the white paper, not peer-to-peer electronic database, not peer-to-peer electronic JPEG archive system. It's cash in the classical sense of the word.

23:12 Many people think that fiat bills are cash. They're not really cash. Cash is supposed to mean final settlement, right? Absolutely. A bearer instrument that settles finally. Exactly. And I mean, the light funny aside on that is that e-cash is kind of the more exact way of doing this. But Bitcoin, of course, was just the solution that has worked, the technical system that has worked. And there are e-cash protocols building on top of that, like Feddeeing and Cashew. But anyway, okay, aside, done. The availability angle for this with spam I don't think is talked about enough. And if you were around in 2023, 2024, you had to pay exorbitant prices to get into a Bitcoin block at all.

23:57 There are periods of time where you had to pay 50, 100, 200 upward sats per V-byte in order to get into a block. And you had no idea when it was going to clear. I think 30 sats per V-byte was pretty, it stayed afloor there for a really long time. There's all this data available in a lot of places here. So the facts on this are clear of what happened. And the thing is, it doesn't matter to me that arbitrary data and spam has gone down somewhat and are paying lower fees and all this. You can reliably get into a block. What I'm worried about is the next time that it becomes a frenzy, right? We don't think about cybersecurity during business as usual.

24:38 We think about worst case scenarios and we think about the bad things that can happen before they happen. And that's why I've been an advocate against arbitrary data for this entire time. I've seen the cybersecurity angle this entire time. And the vulnerabilities that were raised by Luke Dasher properly in the common vulnerability and exposure system, the formal way of tracking vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity world, these are textbook cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Even if you disagree that the specific things that caused the arbitrary data weren't necessarily anything that can be fixed or that the proposed fixes aren't feasible or something like this, that's not how cybersecurity works.

25:20 You still highlight the vulnerability and you highlight that there is an issue and a thing happening. So we have to be honest about this in the community that there is a risk of the system being degraded for users of monetary transactions. And who knows how much the adoption of Bitcoin was harmed in 2023, 2024, because people just saw massive high fees and, you know, the meme of paying $50 for a coffee, something like this. That's terrible optics for Bitcoin. And I just do not believe it's the right course to try to cram every use case onto Bitcoin when it's at the expense of the monetary use case or the only use case. Yeah, the tricky thing there is where do you draw the line?

26:05 Draw the line. What is monetary and what is not? Like a multi-sig time lock, this and that smart contract thing. Is that really a monetary use case or not? Like I find that hard. Yeah. You mentioned Andreas Antonopoulos there. I'm thinking of an attack vector that is a bit more abstract. Back in 2019, I wrote my first proper Bitcoin book, Sovereignty Through Mathematics, and it came out at the same time as Andreas' mastering Ethereum. And so Andreas was, of course, all of our... Everyone looked up to Andreas because he was so knowledgeable about computer networks and stuff. He was a great source of information back when.

26:46 my entire generation was sort of orange-pilled by him. But then he chose to write this book for this or that reason, thereby sort of proving that he was kind of compromised. If you know what Ethereum was and about the 70% pre-mine and how it was a shitshow from the beginning, I mean, sure, I don't know. I suspect that there's a high risk that he lured a lot of people into buying this thing instead of just stacking sats. And people have correctly pointed out to me that I'm much less knowledgeable about computer networks than Andreas, but the fact still stands.

27:27 If you read my book back then instead of Andreas' book, you would have 10x your money instead of losing 90% of it. So what do you think about attack vectors like that? Like if people get compromised because there a lot of reputational capital in Bitcoin if you will people seem to have good intentions And then a couple of years later they fall out of line and they do something really dodgy Who knows why? I bet some people, not specifically Andreas here, but I bet some people lost their stacks and then now they need to claw their way back for relevance and stuff like that. Or maybe they never got the really mind-blowing part about absolute finite supply in the first place and misjudged Bitcoin.

28:13 There's so many people that seem to be good actors until the day they're not anymore. Does the book cover this at all? It does to some extent. The idea of essentially the capture and coercion of, say, developers, I certainly cover it. I haven't so much influencers. Maybe that's something that I can work in before we go to final print, for example. But because this is coming out as the day that we launch the book. So the book website is out now and it will be launching on June 15th on Amazon and BitcoinInfinity.com, of course.

28:54 And then simultaneously, I will have books at BTC Prague just beforehand. just beforehand. So that will be the first time you can buy the book and get it signed, of course. So the concept of, say, influencer capture or developer coercion, things like this, getting captured by those of us who are against Bitcoin. Well, that's a tricky topic, right? Because there are so many different opinions about Bitcoin, what it is used for, what it should be used for. And I'm certainly in the camp of monetary maximalism that Bitcoin is money and Bitcoin should only be used for money. And I hesitate to sort of say this in a prescriptive way. It's just more like if Bitcoin is going to be worth, I believe that if Bitcoin is going to be worth anything at all, it's going to be worth something as money. And the more that non-money use cases of Bitcoin are done or put into place, the less good at being money Bitcoin is.

29:56 That's my position. And the thing is, I don't know necessarily that there are people who are Bitcoin advocates who take a position that we need to put everything onto Bitcoin. And I simply disagree with them. I don't necessarily know that people are, say, captured if their views on Bitcoin change or allowed to come to different opinions, different conclusions. I can certainly appreciate that maybe those who are into Bitcoin in the early days, such as Andreas, for example, could have seen Ethereum as an interesting secondary project because it was a different implementation of blockchain.

30:38 The thing about it is that I can see that people can make that leap. I acknowledge that people are capable of different thoughts than me on this one, essentially. Now, of course, I'm going to disagree with them, right? I'm going to disagree with them and point out that Ethereum is a total scam. All of the other cryptos are a total scam. I hardly cover any other cryptocurrencies in this book at all, except to say, first of all, that I believe that they are all not worth touching, as well as pointing out a couple of cybersecurity incidents that have affected other chains. Like, for example, this recent thing with Litecoin where there was a massive reorg, for example, that's illustrative of a worst case scenario that could happen on Bitcoin since there's similar architecture.

31:27 But also it is also evidence that these other chains just have way, way less security and are not worth touching from that perspective either. No, it's a proof of Litecoin not being decentralized enough. and like how do we know that Bitcoin is decentralized enough? We know that it has a track record of, it certainly looks like it's decentralized enough, but it's very hard to tell if it actually is. I think like the biggest proof I got was during the block size wars when the plebs won against the powers that be, so to speak. Like all the big companies in Bitcoin wanted one thing, the users wanted another and the users won.

32:09 So that's where I became a hardcore maxi instead of just a maxi because I realized that this is actually delivering on its promises. It is as decentralized as it needs to be. And I think decentralization is one of those buzzwords that got thrown around a lot back then. The biggest misconception about it is that it's an unfortunate means to a greater end rather than anything else. It would be better if we could just trust human beings and they wouldn't lie in sheet and steel. In that case, we would have had a much leaner, much more efficient system, and we could just trust that no one would print more money.

32:54 But that is not the case, and that's why we need decentralization. So it's not an end in itself. It's a means to a greater end, which is this absolute finite supply and the real solution to the double spending problem, I'd say. Thoughts? Well, absolutely. I tackle decentralization in the book, and I agree with you completely that decentralization is one of these things that we've maybe misunderstood. And also, it's not necessarily as robustly decentralized as we might believe. The mining angle is basically the point that I'm currently first highlighting here. The mining issue is that essentially there are only about 10 real big miners.

33:39 Everyone who is providing hash to a pool that aggregates all of the hash rate and provides the block templates, as in that's almost every pool. The pool themselves are the ones who are the miners in reality. They are the ones who are choosing the blocks that get mined, and they're simply pushing work to individual hashers, the people running the ASICs. Ocean and Datum and Stratum v2 protocols to make Bitcoin more decentralized, Bitcoin mining more decentralized. In other words, give the block template construction to the users, let users make control, make the choices about the blocks that they're actually mining.

34:21 That's hugely important. And we saw just recently a potential greedy mining attack from Foundry where they effectively they didn't broadcast a block that they found until after they found another one, which is strange practice, definitely. And we don't know if there was anything nefarious going on, but it effectively ate another block by another pool because the Foundry's chain ended up being the longest one. And there was 24 hours where they were almost 50% of the blocks found were foundry blocks. So theoretically, their hash rate is in the 30% range. But if they get a run of really good luck, yeah, they are almost half of the network, right?

35:04 And so I think it's crucially important for individual miners to build their own blocks and to use pools because pools are effectively necessary still. Another one of those necessary evil kind of things. For mining to be decentralized enough, you need to work together with others so that you can get a chunk of the rewards and share them together. I wish there was a way that didn't sound so socialistic, but basically we have to do it for it to make any economic sense. We can't have every miner essentially lottery mining because then there are only so many blocks found per day and we need more miners than that, right?

35:45 Well, there's nothing socialistic about voluntary things, group-centered or not. And now that we have Datum, for instance, I think that's a super important tool for decentralization. I urge you all to go and see my interview with unhosted Marcellus, where he talks about this pleb mining movement, which is great. You can rent hash power and become effectively a pool owner yourself because you're mining with another pool, which is ocean. But you still get to choose what block template you construct. And that's a huge thing.

36:25 It makes you a miner rather than a hash salesman. and actually makes the pool you're buying the hash power from the hash salesman and you the miner, which is sort of reversing this trend. And it's super cool to see that kind of development. Absolutely. Well, and you know, the thing is, I love Ocean, you love Ocean. I've pointed all of my hash to Ocean. I welcome other pools coming up that also implement decentralized mining, Stratum v2. This is important. And of course, if you want to solo mine, every once in a while, someone hits a bid axe or a nerd axe or just a single ASIC in someone's home, hits a block, and then they get the entire reward, and that's fantastic.

37:10 So more mining decentralization is the fix to many things. And I also talk about how effectively the miners are the final backstop in terms of arbitrary data. individual miners can decide whether to include arbitrary data or not, no matter what happens on other layers of the chain, right? And my view is that there are many miners who disagree with arbitrary data on Bitcoin. And it's not censorship if one individual decides not to mine a block with a transaction that they disagree with. It's censorship if it's done on the protocol level to say that, say, these addresses are never allowed to transact, or it is attempted coercion and censorship for a government to come in and say, hey, miners, you're never allowed to mine a block with these transactions like the OFAC list. But as long as there are plebs who are out there mining in a decentralized way, or say guys like Bob Burnett, who famously is pointing a lot of hash to Ocean and others, he's definitely an industrial miner kind of thing. As long as there are people who are mining in a decentralized way, right? You'll get into someone's block.

38:21 I think that's the thing. So it's the answer to so many angles. And ultimately, if there's a small percentage of the network that is mining clean blocks free of arbitrary data and making it easier for monetary transactions to get into the network, that's nothing but a good thing. And I hope that that signal increases, that individual miners take the position to mine clean blocks. And there is also evidence that Ocean's payout model pays more than the average FPPS pool or the traditional pool model, where we don't see the real formula of how payments get made. I believe the key figure from Ocean's last year is that it's about 3.6% better.

39:14 You get a 3.6% fee for using FPPS pools on average. So Ocean pays more. To explain this a bit further, FPPS stands for full pay per share, which is you sell hash power to a mining pool and you get paid out a sum that is relative to how much hash power you give them and that sum is fixed per time unit whereas if you mine with ocean you only get a payout whenever they find a block so you're not you're not paying extra for the the pool to take on that extra risk of not finding blocks uh that's that's the basic thing yeah this uh this whole thought thread inevitably leads to the question which I have to ask you at this point, and that is here at the 29th of April, 2026, what's your stance on BIP-110? Yeah, thanks. So I'm going to just say that at the moment I do not support BIP-110, and I'm going to get into why. There's a chapter after the arbitrary data chapter on essentially governance centralization and governance risks. And this is everywhere where I point out what I see as issues with the current structure of Bitcoin node development. The primary issue that I see there is that Bitcoin development is largely concentrated in the hands of two companies, Brink and Chaincode. There's also Spiral that's

40:47 funding specific developers. And the thing with it is that I'm not implying anything directly nefarious or anything. It's just simply that Bitcoin Core as an organization is not being run as a open source, decentralized, literally. It's being developed like a traditional software with teams in physical offices that talk to each other over their coffee breaks who are making decisions about the direction of Bitcoin protocol development that aren't necessarily in line with what the community believes. And as we've seen since September, October, or before that, when the change was announced with the Op Return debate, that basically the Bitcoin core goes ahead with protocol decisions that are unpopular with their users And what I say to that is generally that no other software is not accountable to their users And the answers that have come back as far as that Bitcoin Core should not be directed by a mob rule, So, well, that's just completely irrelevant because the users will then choose to use another form of the software in Bitcoin Noughts.

42:05 And I go into the whole history. Our friend Hod Lanott has also done some fantastic work in the article series that he's been putting out. The second article in the series is coming out today, I believe, like when we're recording this, called The Lever, so in Citadel 21 magazines. And so looking forward to reading that later today. Yes, absolutely. And the threads he's been putting out as well have been very good. He's gotten a lot of attacks for simply pointing out things that are available in the public record. And I mean, the most charitable, just trying to steal man here a little bit, the most charitable I can be is that maybe some things are being misconstrued in the raw text and all this.

42:52 But honestly, it's extremely compelling stuff that there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Your interview with John Attack, for example, was another big piece of information reveal on what has been going on in Bitcoin Core. And so there's a whole history that you can read. I touch on what I consider the most important elements of the story here. But ultimately, the result is that a group in Bitcoin has decided that enough is enough. And effectively, if the protocol layer for arbitrary data, the policy layer, sorry, is no longer relevant, if the default node implementation, Bitcoin Core, is going to take a position that mempools should match what is likely to be mined, taking away agency from users. And I do assert that the goal of the operaturn change, at least a partial secondary goal, is to make basically everyone's mempool the same. Homogenous mempool is absolutely a goal. This has been said multiple places by prominent core proponents or developers, that everyone's mempool is the same and that all transactions, if their consensus valid should be relayed to miners and make it into blocks.

44:18 And this is just as prescriptive as anyone saying that Bitcoin should only be used as money, except it has the opposite result, of course. Is this mostly for fee estimation? Yeah, it's for a combination of fee estimation and also the block validation as well. if you don't have transactions in a valid Bitcoin block, it takes you longer to find out, to validate if it was really a valid block, if all the transactions were valid. It's basically technical concerns that are, yeah, okay, the performance of the network could be a little bit degraded here. But the point that I make to that is that individuals are choosing not to implement all the features that Bitcoin Core is implementing. And individuals are choosing not to relay all transactions. And individuals are choosing not to hold transactions in their mempool that they disagree with. So this is happening. You can't engineer a decentralized system the same way you can engineer a centralized piece of software that's running entirely on systems that you control. You just can't do it. And I've been getting into a lot of conversations with Adam Back on this topic. And, you know, I find it a little bit funny that, you know, he's called me out specifically. Yeah, I'm saying conversations, they're really kind of arguments. But one point that he has made is that basically multiple node implementations are a

45:50 massive security risk for Bitcoin and not within Satoshi's original vision for Bitcoin, that Satoshi understood this particular risk. What he's meaning is that different implementations have technically the risk of going out of consensus with each other, which results in a chain split, literally, until they fix it and get back in line with each other. But the point is that it's already fragmented. There are dozens of versions of Bitcoin Core available and every single one of them technically could include some kind of consensus bug that we've never found. Bitcoin Noughts is growing in popularity. I don't know exactly how popular it is right now. I'm currently using that around 20% of nodes are Noughts nodes. There appear to be some some either neutral researchers or core supporters who have been spooling up a lot of BIP-110 nodes and NOTs nodes to inflate the numbers, to make the conspiracy theories that to make the community look like it's more confident than it is at the outcome.

47:05 But I don't care. A significant portion of nodes has migrated to NOTs, and a significant portion of nodes is running BIP-110. The point I say to Adam specifically is that you can't expect there to only be one type of node when you already have all of these types of nodes elsewhere. The cybersecurity perspective on this also is that more decentralization means that a lower proportion of users are going to be affected if there's a bug found in one version of the software. The Core v30 bug that I talked about earlier, that one only affected those users who had upgraded to Core v30 within those first few months.

47:48 It took a few months to find the bug, though. And if that had been a bug that was in every Bitcoin node software for years and years and years, well, yeah, there could have actually been catastrophic results for the entire network. But the decentralization of node implementations is actually a really, really good thing. and I completely welcome the development of Production Ready, Samson and Jimmy's effort. That interview that you did with them a few weeks ago, fantastic stuff. It's great to hear that there are people who are trying to build more node implementations and I agree with a conservative approach. Nots is working for me. It implements the things that I like that are more in line with my viewpoint and make it easy to essentially have the settings that I want.

48:38 It fixes the specific vulnerabilities as well that Luke raised those years ago. So I'm happy with Notts, but when a third implementation comes out, I'll happily run it as well. And I mean, this is also a thing. If you can afford to run more than one Bitcoin node, running multiple implementations is absolutely a good thing. And it keeps you sheltered in case there's a critical bug in one of those implementations, but not the other. Okay, so I'm finally getting to the point of the original question you asked me. So BIP-110, the issue with this that I have been basically convinced with through guys like Giacomo and Jimmy and Samson and all this, John Attack even, is that the solution to the problem through BIP-110 is maybe, first of all, it's technically not done in a way that won't break anything.

49:35 There's an argument to be made that you can't sort of restrain arbitrary data without having some collateral damage breaking some things. I do make the point that cybersecurity is all about trade-offs. This is throughout defending Bitcoin. that security always comes at a convenience cost. There's always a trade-off. And the thing is, if there is going to be some kind of an impact in order to implement a security change or a security upgrade that is going to make it harder for, say, development to happen or make it so certain features have to be redesigned, I do believe that that can be considered a valid trade-off. And in the case of BIP-110, I've gotten into some discussions on Exxon on this point, even after I've publicly come out saying that I no longer support the fork itself, that basically the trade-offs that BIP-110 is attempting to put in are completely valid, completely worthwhile. I do not believe that restricting Tapscript a little bit, or restricting certain ways that you can embed arbitrary data is so constricting on developers that if the network chooses to implement this soft fork, they won't be able to continue.

50:56 You can still develop things. You just have to do it within constraints. And I do also believe that the development community has been the one that hasn't had to make sacrifices, right? The node runners, even back in the block size wars, effectively had to make a sacrifice by implementing the SegWit discount. That has been a block size increase. The average block size since SegWit is 1.5 to 2 megabytes per block. That was a block size increase. And that was accepted in order to get these new features and also to kind of bring an end to the block size wars itself. And the miners, of course, didn't get what they wanted either. They had to not get their Bitcoin cash be the thing that won the day in the market, right?

51:39 The development community was then able to go and push Taproot in a lot easier than maybe they previously would have. And similarly Segwit itself, right? There's a combination of technical debt that I go into in defending Bitcoin that led to the arbitrary data. And basically, my argument is that Taproot was a little undercooked. it needed a little bit more work to get things exactly right and maybe needed to go in with the same level of restricting arbitrary data and all this. And it didn't get the chance to do that. 99% of UTXOs that use Taproot, more than that, are spam, are dust. So in a results-based metric, Taproot has entirely been a failure, even if it has created some privacy improvements that certain users do use, the vast majority of people still use Segwit or legacy addresses. So Taproot is a tool for arbitrary data that, in my view, has been enabled entirely by essentially a rushed development if I'm being as charitable as possible. If there had been a little more scrutiny on Taproot, maybe we wouldn't be having the same levels of issues. You want to focus me back to the point, right?

53:00 So the thing is that this is very reminiscent about my conversation with Hodlonot about a month back. Because we were in complete agreement and he was still at that point against BIP-110, but has since changed his mind and is now signaling for it. So I hear a lot from you. I hear the same arguments that I'm making as to why I'm for BIP 110. So I'd like to like the specific question, what makes you against this thing rather than pro, given its temporary nature and that it doesn't really fuck things up?

53:42 You just don't think the tradeoff is worth it, I guess? Okay. One portion of that, just to address the very last part. I do think that BIP 110 could have been engineered a bit differently. and I have said this online quite a bit, that I do think it's a mistake to cap the opportune at the 83 bytes when every other thing that BIP-110 does is at the 256 byte mark. It effectively makes those other vectors more worth it to use and also gives some level of cover for protocols that want to put a little bit more data using fake pub keys and things like this.

54:25 I thought a compromised position of 256 across the board would have been pretty much okay. But okay, anyway. And then the other point of the simply disabling op-if in Tapscript, If a better technical solution isn't possible, okay, I can get there. But honestly, I don't think they had to be that sweeping in order to make that specific decision. There's more collateral damage than there necessarily needs to be, is my view on a technical level. Again, I come all the way back to that. I think the trade-offs that result from BIP110 are perfectly reasonable.

55:06 And I've had these discussions on X a fair bit. And I do think this is a point where I, as a cybersecurity professional, think that those things are still fine if the network implements it, decides to implement it. And that's the point. So the thing is, I realized my position on Bit.10 through the process of writing this book, that I can't, justify support for this thing if it's going to cause a risk of a chain split. And my view on this is that, first of all, miners have to mandatorily signal for BIP-110 after a certain block height.

55:51 Otherwise, BIP-110 nodes will reject those blocks. So it's not enough for miners to simply mine blocks that don't contain arbitrary data or that only contain transactions that follow the rules of BIP-110. They also have to signal their support for BIP-110. So that's it. Yes, this is something I learned from you. Like, I didn't know that. I thought that you could just follow the rules without signaling, but that's not possible. Yeah, so the miners have to make a decision for it, right? So since the soft fork is organized the way it is, I believe the miners have a massively outsized power in this particular venue.

56:32 Now, okay, if 90% of miners eventually get there and say, yes, that we're going to signal for BIP110, a 10% holdout isn't going to have much sway here. But as far as it looks, all of the major mining pools aren't going to signal for BIP110. So if we're talking about the hash rate from people mining with Ocean, okay, great, fantastic. But likely after the BIP-110 launch date, it's going to be the case that way more miners are mining non-compliant blocks. And what do we have after that point? We have some kind of split. And the argument, the fair argument that it's a soft fork, first of all, it's entirely compatible on core nodes, for example, or non-BIP-110 nodes.

57:23 BIP-110 blocks are entirely compatible with the rest of the network because it's a subset of what is currently valid. That there is no risk to miners for mining a BIP-110 signaling compliant block. And there is risk by mining non-compliant. blocks. Those could be wiped out if the chain eventually catches up. So the issue I have is that I just don't see, I see this wide gap of scenarios where either there's three outcomes to this to try to be a little more organized. One is that Bit.10 activates overwhelmingly, Like, say it gets to the 55% hash threshold and, yeah, just activates overwhelmingly.

58:11 It's just the longest chain. Okay, great. Then it's in. It's in place. And I fully support it going in and the temporary nature of it and all of those arguments. Absolutely. The second one is the opposite. The overwhelming amount of hash is against BIP110. and yeah, basically it just gets crushed immediately. If it's 10% of the hash rate is on BIP110, I don't even see that being enough to sustain to become the longest chain eventually. And then there's this big middle ground where maybe there is a couple of competing chains. You have a BIP110 chain and you have a non-BIP110 chain.

58:54 I just see this as too big of a structural risk and that it would be bad for Bitcoin in both the short term and potentially the medium term and long term. I do not want to see the community fracture. I believe the risk of a chain split through a fork like this is just not worth undertaking the endeavor. And I would rather approach solutions to arbitrary data that are on the level of decentralizing mining and supporting alternate node softwares that allow for different policy settings. And maybe trying to find consensus through a way that isn't going to be so controversial.

59:39 Simply to sum up, I believe there's enough of the network are just not going to support BIP 110 on principle. Maybe they're even going to do an intentionally rejected hard fork so that they, in fact, force a chain split and force a new token and all this. A very valid steel man against my position, just to also sum this one up, is that if not now, when? And I can kind of get there that maybe plebs, node runners, Bitcoin users feel that they have no recourse against changes being made from a more centralized perspective by Bitcoin Core, by miners, whatever, and simply want to go ahead and push this thing through no matter what happens.

1:00:29 I'm about the results. And right now, the results do not look like Bit.1.10 would succeed and would cause more chaos than good, might even lead to great Bitcoin developers who are essential for the space to leave. I wouldn't want that to happen. Node runners and users and all this in the space, monetary maximalists that I respect. I don't want any of that. And so that's my point. And again, I found it, I became intellectually honest with myself that I'm going through all of these threats to Bitcoin, the threat of what could happen after a chain split and in the aftermath of a chain split.

1:01:10 That one of those things that it low likelihood but really really really high impact And I don I can recommend going with a fork and I can support it All right I going to slightly try to devil advocate that just to state my position. First of all, the op return being 83 rather than 256. I think the thing there is to send a clear signal that all data can be hashed and they can be a hash of a hash of a hash like a Merkle tree hash thing. So you could put all the data in the entire universe onto the Bitcoin blockchain via a single hash. And the only thing you can do in terms of owning, like, is by putting it on the time chain is you can prove that that data existed at a certain point in time.

1:02:04 So there is no legit need for any op return above 83 bytes. You could even make the argument that there's no need for any op return over 40 bytes because you can fit a hash into 40 bytes. So that's my rebuttal to that. The other thing about the damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of scenario here is that I'd like to do a callback to the first chapter of Inverse of Clown World where you have the prisoner's dilemma thing. So all your arguments for this being a risk short term is like sort of invalidated by if you play these games into infinity, you are better off cooperating.

1:02:46 If you're playing the prisoners, if you see this whole scenario as a prisoners dilemma type situation, where in the short term, it's better to just give in to the scammers and let this thing play out. but if you play it over and over again the tit for tat strategy is better even the risk of a chain split I mean in a sense that would be good because we would remove the bad actors and that's to me the long term health of the network is more important than the short term trade offs and that's why I'm pro this thing and why I'm signaling for it and telling my followers to do so as well so but I love the fact that we are not collectivists you and i we we we uh create this show we do stuff together and we can have a civil conversation about it and we can come to two different conclusions about a certain topic without having to kick each other in the balls all the time so uh i appreciate that a lot um yeah on to the next subject, I guess.

1:03:54 If you don't mind... Just to state my position, but yeah, it's not supposed to be a BIP 110 debate this episode, but yeah, anyway. If you don't mind, like a last word on this is that, first of all, the opportune thing, I completely agree with you on that. All data can fit into that 83 bytes or 80 or 40 or whatever it is. The thing is people just don't, right? Right. That's the problem. It's that there are people who have decided to not follow those rules. I know. I know. And you say that the UTXO bloat is worse. I'd say that that's the temporary thing, because what we want in the end is for these people to not be on Bitcoin at all. We want them to fork off if that's necessary. I don't want any single spammer to ever use Bitcoin again.

1:04:44 But I know that's utopian, but still, that's what I'm going to fight for, because this is the most important thing in human history. Well, that's the point that I agree with. I end most of my threads or articles on this post with basically that Bitcoin is the only real shot that we have at fixing the money in our lifetimes. And I really, really, I despise the people who are making this harder, that doing this, I really believe that they are harming all of humanity by making Bitcoin worse at being money and degrading its ability to be money.

1:05:26 Anyway, so the whole point with it is that I'm still happy if BIP110 succeeds. I am happy with that, absolutely. But I don't think its chances of succeeding are very high. And I do not advocate for going into any fork situation if it's going to cause a split. Now, what I do say in the book, though, is make your own decision. Make your own decision. Evaluate what your priorities are and if you do believe it's necessary. Because this book is coming out in June, right? Tip 110 is going to go in in August, it looks like, or early September or something like this. It's going to happen, right? This book is not about this one moment in time. It's about the concept of threats and controls and defenses, right? So that's the entire thing the book is about.

1:06:14 And so speaking on a concept level of what can happen in the governance of Bitcoin, if there is a disagreement on the direction that Bitcoin can take, go into it with eyes wide open. Understand the difference between a hard fork and a soft fork and understand the implications of either one of them going through and evaluate that no matter whether we're in the middle of one or not. Yeah, this is why Satoshi Nakamoto was not Jesus. He was Brian of Nazareth telling his followers to think for themselves. we're all different and all that you know remember that scene from a life of brian i think that's who satoshi is not jesus he's brian anyway uh look we uh we are traveling to a couple of uh conferences let dive into let wrap this up by by giving our uh listeners some information about where where you can meet us or specifically where you can meet luke uh before the book is launched in Prague don miss Prague Go to Prague get your ticket now use code Infinity for a huge discount I'm not going to say the percentage, because I think they increased it, actually.

1:07:20 Well, we'll see. And you can also meet Luke in Dublin a couple of weeks from now. The book won't be out by then, but I guess you'll bring a copy or two to just show off, right? Won't you? and you can use CodeInfinity there too. Dublin is going to be great this year. There's a ton of great speakers, a lot of them from the US, which is uncommon for European conferences. I'm looking forward to that a lot and having a pint of Guinness or two with you or maybe 12. And what else? Where are we going on? Oh, of course, BTC Hell. And BTC Hell is not right around the corner. It's in October this year, right?

1:08:01 Oh, September this year. Sorry, September. It's in late September this year. You could use Code Infinity there too, of course. And of course, Luke and I will be present there. We are part of this conference, especially Luke, who lives in Helsinki. And we are still somewhat in charge of the speakers and the schedule and all of that. And you're absolutely head-chefing that. What else can people expect from B2C Hell this year? Let's focus on that. Great. Perfect. Again, Ireland and Prague, don't miss those. But yeah, BTC Hell, I mean, this was the thing that was my entire last year, right? That was the new cool thing that I'm just super proud of being involved with. It was a massive success the first year, beyond all of our expectations.

1:08:50 we're going to be in a different venue this time it's got a little bit more capacity not just because we wanted to grow a little bigger but because the original one was no longer available they were getting out of this type of event sort of thing so we had to find something new but we landed in a great space it's called the cable factory so it's got this industrial vibe and all this and it's in a really nice neighborhood in the city also right by the sea What's that in Finnish cable factory? Kåprite er tasa Okay, good. Yes. And then the focus that we're having this year, I mean, of course, we're in a bit of a bear market to a certain extent. These prices still all feel a little high if you've been in it for a little while, but yeah, it's dipped a little since the all-time highs.

1:09:37 But we're still focusing on adoption. Of course, our big focus is to grow Bitcoin adoption in the Nordics. And we're focusing also on a Nordic sovereignty angle this year. The whole idea of basically how Bitcoin can be used to decouple from the financial system and the dependence on the United States, even reduced dependence on the EU. That's a little bit controversial here in the Nordics, but it's definitely like how can people in the Nordics use Bitcoin as a tool? It's not for only people in the Nordics. Come to Finland, see what's going on here and all this. But we're focusing, of course, on the Nordics and this Nordic sovereignty angle track is going to be a big part of it this year.

1:10:23 Mining and energy is always a big part of BTC hell because Finland has such a great mining scene. And one of the reasons for that is that heat reuse is such a major part of Bitcoin mining up here. It's not cold all the time. In fact, it's already quite nice here in April, sunny and all this. But throughout the year, there are district heating systems in most of the municipalities that pump hot water around the entire municipality. And that's how a lot of people heat their homes and boil the water. And you need that all year. And Bitcoin mining is such a great synergy with that. You mine Bitcoin and heat water up and that goes around and heats everyone's homes and businesses and all this.

1:11:06 It's such a good secondary use case and so synergistic. And so exploring the mining community, we actually have a separate date. I should say the date's also at September 25th, 26th. So yeah, mark your calendar. But then there's the European Mining Summit. The website for this is miningsummit.eu. The website for BTCHEL is btchel.com. It's not btchel, it's btchel. So just saying. Btchel. That sounds more Finnish in a way. No, the Finns can't say the ch thing. Okay, okay. Not properly. So September 23rd, a couple of days earlier, is the European Mining Summit.

1:11:46 We're going to have a lot of, still a lot of, at the main conference, coverage of mining and energy. But yeah, the European Mining Summit is another piece that we're doing to emphasize the energy, the mining and energy case here right now. And then finally, we're focusing also on the human rights angles with Bitcoin because the thing is that's something that people in the Nordics care a lot about. And some of the things that the misconceptions about Bitcoin are how Bitcoin is used by people who are in oppressive regimes in the third world who are just trying to escape inflation and all this. And so those angles are maybe not so visible in the Nordic welfare states where life is actually pretty good.

1:12:29 Finland is the happiest country in the world for, I believe, the ninth year in a row. Fully endorsed, by the way. I'm way happier here than I was in Canada. I have my doubts about that specific figure. Well I don know nine years in a row So we latching on to that And so the thing is in these nice countries where life is pretty good for the average person it can be hard to see how Bitcoin is so good for people in other parts of the world And I think we hoping to work with the Human Rights Foundation who puts on the Oslo Freedom Forum a little bit with this. I can't go to that one this year, unfortunately, but I believe Remo, our CEO, is going to go to that one.

1:13:11 And yeah, so basically we're looking at three tracks, Nordic sovereignty, mining and energy, and human rights, Bitcoin for human rights, as our primary focuses. You'll also get a little bit of coverage of this BIP-110 debate and all of the aftermath because it's going to be just after the BIP-110 activation no matter what. We have what we're calling the OG stage. So it's essentially like a 50% between like the traditional VIP area that's like super expensive and really locked off and the main stages and everything. So we're having kind of a middle ground with an OG ticket that gets you into the OG stage. And we're basically going to have all of the coverage of the sort of the insider stuff is going to be on that stage.

1:13:56 So we'll see. We've got folks on both sides of the debate coming and we're going to cover all angles. So that's it. But yeah, I mean, I just have to say that B2C Hell has had so many good things. We've got a physical hub that has been really fantastic. We have events there all the time. It's not the ideal place for, say, a monthly meetup. Usually we have an after party there. And yeah, it's just fantastic to see the community keep growing. And at the end of the day, I'm all about encouraging local adoption in your area. And it's something anyone can do. I think one of the coolest things to come out of BTC Hill last year was that a butcher shop near me became orange-pilled and accepts Bitcoin for everything.

1:14:44 And they started to produce these Bitcoin beef bits, which is just a fantastic synergy to mining. They were already creating this dried ground beef for hikers and stuff to be able to rehydrate and have some meat on the go. So the guy, Chris, he's carnivore, describes himself as carnivore and head to tail use of the animal and all this fantastic stuff. But the beef bits was just such a synergy. And that came out of BTC hell. And now he uses a Bitcoin miner to dry this beef and make these beef chips. So, you know, you can buy those.

1:15:26 I think it's BitcoinBeefBits.com and you can buy those everywhere now. And yeah, it's just one of those things. I can go to a butcher shop and buy meat and all of these other keto-friendly things. They also do keto stuff, eggs. And I can pay with Bitcoin. And I think it's fantastic. And I mean, he's a real, like, this isn't some merchant who's accepting Bitcoin, you know, because someone asked them to. It's like he's really down the rabbit hole himself now, too. And I just want to see more and more of this, basically. And BTC Health, yeah, I'm going to be doing this as long as we can manage to keep it up. Yeah, absolutely. Another fun thing that sort of launched during BTC Health is the Gingers for Bitcoin organization.

1:16:13 Zero percent pigment, 100 percent conviction. And they're coming to Ireland with us to fish for more gingers to become Bitcoiners. And that's if you don't follow them, follow them on X. And also, of course, follow Luke DeWolf on X and on Noster. Primal.net slash Luke is like the best way to follow him there. Also follow the BTC Infinity Media account on X, which is, I believe, Primal.net slash Infinity on the easiest Noster thing. So this will premiere in Prague. That's the announcement here. And I'm super proud of you, man. You know, Luke, my young Padawan, you have now become a fully fledged Jedi Knight.

1:16:58 So congratulations on that. Thanks a lot, Knut. I appreciate that a lot. And well, also defendingbitcoin.com, you can find all the information about the book. If you want to get notified when it's available, sign up. It's just your email address. Leave a NIM address if you're concerned about privacy and all this. and there's also a threat model worksheet where we ask you a bunch of questions about how your Bitcoin stack is and everything. You can verify locally that we're not asking you any kind of, we're not taking the data anywhere else. It's all just locally on your browser, but it's how you can see how all the chapters in the book and all the threats and controls can apply to you.

1:17:42 And in many cases, it'll even be all of them. There are many, many cases that affect everyone. So yeah, defendingbitcoin.com. And I'll be adding more to the site as we go to make it more of a companion for the book and add additional resources as well. So check that out. Yeah, I've seen some of this and it looks absolutely fantastic. There's a lot coming there. Lots of things coming in the future as we develop this thing. So, Luke, if you want to give our listeners the outro mentioning dental hygiene and the gratitude for watching the show, since you're on, you might as well do that. So I'll leave it up to you. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show.

1:18:23 Like, subscribe and brush your teeth. See you next time. Cheerio. Thank you.