The Data Behind the BIP-110 Fight | Renaud Cuny | BIS #208

0:00 Renaud, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Bienvenue is the correct term, right? Yes, merci beaucoup. You're an interesting fellow. You haven't been on the scene for very long, but you've built a couple of really useful websites here. We're going to go through one of them today, the Bitcoin Portal, I believe it's called, right? Yes. But first of all, since you haven't been on before, could you tell our listeners a little about yourself and how you found Bitcoin and just whatever you want, what you're working on and so on?

0:42 Yes, sure. So I kind of discovered Bitcoin quite recently. It was in 2023. And of course, I knew about it way, way longer than that. but I always kind of thought it was a little bit of a scam before that. And in 2023, I was kind of maybe more open at that time. And in fact, I stumbled upon a video from Matthew Cratter, who you had, I think, a couple of days ago.

1:22 And it kind of clicked at that time. And basically, I was kind of liking the way he was presenting things, you know, very analytical, but also very precise. So I kind of thought, OK, now it's time for me to kind of jump in. And since then, I've been very, very focused and interested on Bitcoin and trying to find a way and maybe a niche where I can contribute. So that's the idea. So quite recently, you know, two or three years. But your background is in, you're a developer basically, right?

2:06 So I started in the telecom industry about 30 years ago, right? So I started at Nokia in the late 90s, doing some research on telecommunication networks. And so it was 2G, GPRS, 3G at the time, then moving to 4G. And so first I kind of was doing the research and the solution development, and then I moved to product management in the telco industry until 2023, actually. And yes, I have a lot of background exposure to data analytics and collection and, you know, analysis.

2:51 And I thought it would be interesting to use that background to analyze Bitcoin network. That is also a network. So yeah, basically 12 years, 12, 13 years in product management and doing some software for telco operators. All right. And the site you're working on, how long has it been up? So I started about a year ago to put it up and it was April last year. And basically, I, yeah, I'd say, you know, at the beginning, it was just one page trying to show a few things, collecting data from my own node.

3:34 And then adding more data source, you know, price, but also other things like nodes, accounts and stuff like that. so I have kind of expanded a bit the scope and lately I'm trying to evaluate the different, you know, qualities monetary qualities of Bitcoin based on the various statistics that we can collect from the network and I think we can go deeper later in the interview, yeah Yeah, so there are a lot of blockchain analytics sites, of course I think mempool.space is probably the most popular one.

4:17 But what people don't realize is that they can run these instances themselves. So like your site, is that also like it's data from your node? Is that correct? Or is it open sourced so you can connect it to your own node and they use that data? Or how does it work? Yeah, my site is collecting data from my own node. But I know there are other ways, right, to collect data from the Bitcoin network. And I think it's right that you could actually query mempool.space probably. I think there are some APIs that you can use. But yeah, I'm using my own node at the moment. And it's not, my site is not yet open source.

4:59 But this is something I'm thinking about. I would like to have it, you know, very kind of ready before I go there. So if it's still kind of in construction, it's a bit early maybe. Yeah, not to bash memple.space too much here, but I prefer memple.guide, which has the shit icon for crap data. Instead of playing these games and calling them whatever the spammers want to call them, like BRC20 tokens. Yes. Because like many of these projects, they're funded by grants.

5:42 And when you get funded by grants, sometimes you want to appease the people giving you the grant. And I suspect that something like that has happened to memple.space, who used to have the little turd icon for all arbitrary data, but now it's sort of legitimizing the thing. So if you don't want that, but still don't want the hassle of connecting it to your own node, but you can go to memple.guide instead, which I view as better. Yeah, I'm using it actually also on my site, memple.guide. So when you drill down to a certain block, you go there. Yeah. Yeah. Having said that, I love the memple.space site.

6:23 It's very useful and very well presented. I use it a lot, especially for fee estimations. I prefer to estimate the fee myself most of the time and not use default settings in wallets Anyway, this is not an interview about that site so it's about your site So you're collecting data What's the main point of the site? What kind of information do you want to convey to people? Yeah, so basically I kind of during this V30, core V30 debate It was then a lot about the spam, right? Spam on the blockchain.

7:07 And even the justification for V30 was that, yeah, anyway, there is, you know, already plenty of spam. And it's better to, you know, to open up this op return so that spammer can use it. And then it's less harmful for the chain, right? That's one of the justifications. But the thing is that there was not really data shown to back this up. So I thought, okay, now maybe it's time to kind of try to see what's going on in the blockchain. What is the level of spam? What is the percentage of spam versus financial transactions?

7:50 what are the different ways the spammers are adding data. So you have the ordinals, you have the op return runes, but these ones, they are typically below a certain size, below 80 bytes, for instance. And then you have the large op return. So different type of spam going on. And I thought, okay, probably good to start having some visibility on that. So that's what I started to add. And then it's kind of expanded to also other things. So what I try to do is really to show the status of the network in terms of spam, but also other indicators like, you know, mining, concentration, things that you can also find in other sites like maple.guide as well.

8:42 but I thought, okay, having everything under one place umbrella would actually help. And then I expanded that further, so I thought, okay, why don't I try to kind of characterize and give a kind of score for the Bitcoin monetary health? And using, of course, the underlying network indicators, trying to derive a certain state health of the network. So that's what I'm doing right now. Yeah, is that a percentage of health or like how do you present that?

9:25 Yeah, it's exactly, it's a percentage. It's a score between 0 to 100. Of course, it's subjective. so you need to kind of use a certain formula to arrive to that score. But the thing is that it's kind of open, so I'm presenting the methodology. And what is more important than the actual score is the direction it takes, right? So now, for instance, it's saying like we had 57 for security and 52 for decentralization. But what's more interesting is the direction that it takes so we can look at the evolution across months and years to see where we are going, basically.

10:16 That's the idea. That's a very neat idea. I bet in the future people will measure the health of the network in Renaults. So, yeah, we're running at 97 Renaults per block here. and that's pretty good. But the good thing is that always those scores, they kind of reveal underneath the actual indicators. So the percentage of spam, the moment we had 45% of spam in the blockchain, the amount of large up return, the top mining pools. So now, like Matthew said in your interview, I think top five mining pools, they collect, they gather more than 90% of the hash rates.

11:05 So this is, these kind of indicators are always shown. And then I derive a score. Yeah. Yeah. And a point that a lot of people miss is that the more decentralized mining is, the more the filters work. So the mempool filters only work if Bitcoin is functioning as it intended with decentralized mining, which is sort of coming back with this hash renting thing, to a certain extent, at least. So I hope that's where we're going directionally, even if it's going to take a while to solve the problem completely. I mean, who knows? I think it's really a revolution, this hash renting, because the scale is totally different.

11:48 So, if you want, before that, if you wanted to kind of, and I've done that, you know, rent a miner, you know, it's maybe you hash at 120 terash, but with the mining, you can go much higher. What kind of beta hash that you can have. Yeah, bit access and whatnot are very neat, but this is a whole different level. It's the equivalent of thousands of bit access running in your home, and you don't have to listen to the fans blowing all day.

12:30 So it's very neat. I mean, enabled by Datum and Ocean, in a sense that now you can become a miner rather than just a hashmonger. Exactly. because I love that distinction. Because if you don't know what block you're mining on, you cannot really call yourself a miner in any sense. You're just a hasher. But yeah, we're going to try something here that we don't usually try on this show, but I think it'll work. And that is, why don't you just start showing us the site and walk us through it and what information you can find there and what you can use it for.

13:11 That's great. Let me share my screen. Hello there folks! You have now reached the part of the episode where I read you the ads, where I show you products from our sponsors, because we like the products our sponsors provide, and or they've given us a bunch of money. First off, Firefish.io, the open marketplace for Bitcoin back loans. You should check that out because that is where you can use your stupid KYC stack to use as collateral to get a fiat loan for your bitcoins so you don have to pay taxes on it because you got a KYC stack Also Bitbox Check out the new Nova Edition A great hardware wallet.

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14:40 I launched the new version on Monday. Basically, the first landing page is kind of explaining the concept, you know, what we are trying to do here. And the idea is that we scored Bitcoin monetary health with two indicators, decentralization and security. This idea is coming from Jeff Booth. Yeah. I think everybody knows that, you know, he has repeated many times that if Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure, then it's going to be fine right it's called the blockchain trilemma i believe and i i think jeff has popularized it for sure but i think it was around even before jeff if if i'm not wrong here uh but it it basically says that can only a blockchain can only do two out of three and that is decentralization security and scaling is the third one right and so so this is why Bitcoin has to scale via layer twos because you cannot scale on-chain without compromising decentralization and security, which are very much two sides of the same coin.

15:57 If it's not decentralized, it isn't secure. And if it isn't secured, then what's the point? Yes. So that first page basically explained the concept It also shows here the different dimensions that I'm using to score the Bitcoin health. So we have the mining, the first dimension, very important, of course. Then we have the block space. And I will go to the details maybe after that. But we have block space and governance. There's been a lot of talk on the governance in Bitcoin core.

16:37 something I thought would be good to look into and maybe gather objective indicators. That's really the idea here, to gather indicators that are out there that you can really collect. Then we have Bono. Yeah, go ahead. Would a number of different types of implementations be a scoring thing there in the governance? piece of the pie? Yes, also in the nodes, but also in the governance, exactly. And the governance, I'm developing the model now, but the idea would be really to actually to go to the GitHub and see and collect what can be collected objectively, the number of NAGs, things like that, that are objective metrics, and then, okay, derive a score.

17:40 And also it will include, you know, the process, what is followed when launching a new version, the quality criteria and so on. But it's under construction. We have, yeah, so, but that's, I think, is going to be kind of a tough one, of course, quite controversial, But again, I will just collect the things that are objective here. This is super interesting. It says three out of seven dimensions live. I guess the dimensions are the pieces of the pie. Yes, exactly.

18:21 And maybe I can go to those directly if you want. Yeah, just like when I see this, I get excited because I have so many opinions about this and that. fungibility for instance is super hard to to measure i guess because it's in the eye of the beholder to a lot to a large extent yes adoption like uh does it mean i mean do you count hodling as adoption as i i guess not but it's sort of uh the transactions per per time unit metric is a very Keynesian notion in my opinion. And it doesn't really say much.

19:02 Institutional is interesting too. Do we really want that? Yes. That's the question here because it's two-sided. If Bitcoin is going to succeed, for sure institutions are joining. But it's also a risk if they start to get too many of those, too many Bitcoin. so it's something that we'll try to balance the view here as well but there is still work to be done here yeah institutional I think the divider is like is it institutional on a Bitcoin standard or is it institutional on a dollar standard because the latter is not necessarily good for Bitcoin yes I fully agree So sure, the methodology, I guess that's what you want to dive into next year.

19:59 Maybe let's go first to the actual dimension. So it's a bit more kind of glee. So here you see the different dimensions here that are live. So we have the mining here with those cores, you know, security, highly secure because we have a lot of ASHRAE at the moment. and it's still going up while, I mean, in the last six months, it's kind of stable, but otherwise it has been really going up a lot. In terms of decentralization, as discussed, we have kind of an issue here and we can even go deeper.

20:43 So to get really the details, and this is the different indicators that are collected, you know, directly from the blockchain. So we have the hash rate. We have the hash rate stability as well. that we are using to score. Then we have the hardware concentration. This is something that is not often discussed, but it's a big, I would say, pain point in Bitcoin that you have only two main hardware vendor and they are both Chinese, right? Yeah, so this is the 82%, is that how big of a share Bitmain has in the hardware manufacturing? Bitmain and the other one. So they are- What's the other one?

21:24 Man, it's micro-BT. Okay. Yes. So together, they collect 82% of the hardware of the cell. And, you know, that's a security concern, of course, if they start to, you know, to misbehave. Which they may already have done in the past. There's a lot of, maybe I'd call them suspicions rather than conspiracy theories. There are some things pointing to that the Bitcoin, the Bitmain devices have been doing shady things on the hardware level in the past.

22:05 Like ASIC boost being the most obvious one, which is a patent they had that gave them a head start. So that's why they were against the whole SegWit upgrade, right? Yeah, but let's not get into that. We'll go on here. Exactly, but it scores only six here. And we have the top one pool share. That's foundry at the moment. Wait, wait. Sorry, ADD brain here. But six out of 100, what does that mean? It's the score, right? So we try to score all these indicators between zero to 100. Okay. It's scoring very low.

22:46 So it has 82% concentration means six Renaults in a how good is this score. Okay, I get it. Exactly. Again, this is just a formula that I'm using. But again, the more important is the direction. So if in six months you see 10, then you know that, okay, things have been going better. Great. Then we have the top one, PoolShare Foundry. 30%, 31%. And what we say here is that it's okay. It's not that bad. It's not that bad. But what is bad is the top five pool shares so that only a handful of miners.

23:31 We say pool, but they are actually the miners here. They decide the template and all things. And the signaling for B.10, for instance. So it's quite a big ad. that one is showing the official number, but the unofficial is worse than that because you have this so-called handpool entrance. Basically, all the other pools that are kind of attached to handpool and are doing exactly the same thing. So it's much higher. But anyway, it's going very low. Then, one thing, yeah? Yeah, just to dive a little deeper here.

24:12 So the ant pool and friends, that means that they have the same owner. And in that case, the incentive structure around Bitcoin is still pretty secure, but less secure than it would have been if mining had been more decentralized. Because they can do some shady stuff, but in doing so, they're also shooting themselves in the foot because no miner wants Bitcoin to stop functioning at all. So I think that's like, but it does create, you know, targets for people who want to destroy Bitcoin to, you know, point a gun at and force to do reckless shit.

24:56 So of course, it's not good. We want the incentive structures to be more solid than just, I don't want to shoot myself in the foot. Yes, definitely. I think one of those friend is Brains. I think they are in that group. But to play the devil's advocate there, Brains is also the pool that is one of the pools that is offering rental hash. That's true. That's a good point, I agree. So that, you know, when you look at that, you say it's pretty bleak, but the fact is that in Bitcoin, it's really easy to switch as you suggested here.

25:38 So, you know, the structural situation is maybe not great, but then the fact that a miner or a hasher can switch very easily to another pool is a kind of advantage of Bitcoin. So this is also taken into account. We have alternatives and one obvious is of course ocean but you know if one of those pool miners like on pool they start to misbehave then you would see quite quickly migration from them to other pools so here we have a high score that's kind of balancing right and that's something that's specific to Bitcoin because there are many other industries where you are kind of it's much more difficult to change once you have selected you're provided.

26:36 Then we have other indicators here, neutral pool share. So kind of, these are the ones that are not in the 90%. What do you mean by a neutral pool? Yeah, it's basically the one that are, you know, not the big one that we know, but the ones that are doing a little bit of alternative type of operation. Yeah. Yeah, yes. So basically where you can create your own block templates and stuff like that. It's actually, yes. And then two more indicators here. So migration evidence. So we have this pull alternative is good, but then is there evidence that this can really happen? And we have some evidence from the story that this has happened. So that's something that we also measure.

27:29 And the last one is kind of to really close the loop. So kind of how easy you can switch from pool to pool. Yeah So these are the kind of different indicators that I using And they provide you know in the end so each of them is either going to the security or the decentralization Sometimes they go to both, but in this case, it's just one or the other. And at the end, we have these two scores for the mining. So 57 on the decentralization and 80, so quite high for the security. So given this data, the biggest problem in Bitcoin is miner centralization and miner hardware centralization in particular, then according to this again.

28:21 Exactly. While the hardware concentration is scored on the security, but yeah, you're right. So that's one of those. And maybe let's go to the other one. So I think it's quite related to the ongoing debate, you know, that we have on PAM. So this is the other dimension here, block space health. And again, we measure this to decentralization and security. And what I'm using here is really objectively on the first one, objectively, okay, it doesn't show very well, but this is the percentage of non-financial data or spam that you get on the block on average.

29:13 So at the moment, we have 45.5% of spam in each and every block. And this is the last, I believe, this is the last 90 days. I should add it here. But 45% of spam in the last 90 days as measured on my node. And here also direction is the most important thing, right? whether it's increasing or decreasing. Exactly. Where would you say that the figure would go from yellow to red? Is that 50% or what? Yeah, I have a threshold.

29:54 I don't remember now, but it's something like 60, probably 60, 65 would be very concerning. So here, you know, the score is very straightforward with the 54% of financial transaction. No, it's not transaction, it's the actual space used by the traffic or by the transaction. Then we have the UTXO set. This is another one that, you know, SPAM, it's also bloating the UTXO set. That's something that we measure here.

30:35 somewhat less critical because also it has been going slightly down in the last couple of years actually so the direction here is more encouraging than the for the previous one we have also the trend for the growth that is also captured here and then the last one is the Sorry for interrupting, but what does that times 1.0012 mean? It's a trend. It's really a trend. So it's kind of going up, but very, very slowly, right? 1.0012.

31:16 So does that mean that within 90 days, an average block gets 1.0012 times bigger? Or what does the actual figure mean? It's the UTXO set. So it's basically exactly so. Over 90 days, you have a growth of 1.0012, which is very little, right? But yeah. So it's the increase to the entire thing. Okay, okay. Yes. The last one, maybe the most related to the V30. So I also measure the up return.

31:56 And basically, how many large hop returns there has been in the last, I think this one is the last. So here, saying in the last 30 days, we had 18 large hop returns. And typically, those are mined by nowadays by marathon, spider pool, also F2 pool. but lately, actually just last week, Foundry started also to mine those large or preterm. So by large, we mean above, you know, 80 bytes, but what I'm actually counting, I'm counting only those that are larger than one kilobyte.

32:47 So, you know, but you can have very different size here. maybe some are about one kilobyte some are about 100 kilobytes so and what's usually in those what what is the shit data is it pictures or moving pictures or what it's it's it's it's it's it can be it can be anything right uh but but i think so far they are kind of uh quite you know uh neutral, I would say. Not kind of problematic. I think yesterday I saw one mine by Mara and it seemed to be the white paper that was the Bitcoin white paper that was included there because it was saying PDF.

33:40 Actually, we can even go there. Let's, you know, I can show you. You can get it. You can get, you can drill down here, get more details and let's see what Mara was mining. So that's the one, right? And then we go to my pool. And we see the larger return. That's the one. And then we go there and we see white paper, Bitcoin white paper, and then PDF. So likely the Bitcoin white paper. But anyway, you know, So that's not something I'm going to dig too much because I said, you know, that can be, we don't know what there is there.

34:29 But from the mail bulldog guide, we can have an idea. Yeah, it's ironic that the white paper is included like that, spamming the chain, because why not use a hash of it? Very ironic that putting the white paper actually makes Bitcoin a teeny tiny bit worse as a medium of exchange over time. The irony of that is just mind-boggling that someone would do that. Yes, I fully agree. There has been some campaigns, some waves of spam on the pre-turn. Was it in April, March, April, I think this year? There was some kind of text.

35:10 it was text you know bragging about you know we okay we are spamming now so it's kind of uh yeah shit coinery i'd call it yeah yeah yeah exactly so but yeah we we have those uh those dimension and the last one that is uh that is live is the nodes this one is quite straightforward simple and i'm using uh by the way look dash here uh site there to collect the data i used to go to bitnode.io, but now the site is kind of shut down. I don't know why. So, but anyway, we have very good data also from Luke sites.

35:52 So total number of nodes and then implementation diversity. So this is 74% of core of various versions. And then we have different score here. So here I'm saying it's pretty good. Oh, it's actually very good. We have 100,000, close to 100,000 nodes. Probably enough, you know, to have a centralization on the Bitcoin network. But okay, I'm pretty sure some would say, no, that's not enough. We would need 1 million. But okay, you know, you need to kind of decide. And again, the direction is the more important here.

36:33 however on the on the you know diversity of implementation here i'm scoring quite low because this is definitely the 74 risk is really uh just for core space really kind of not so good i would say yeah some people would argue that that is a good thing though if uh which would somewhat be true if uh if everyone if that was implementation was all good and people didn't have any objections to that implementation. But I think it's very healthy for the network to now get several implementations developed and introduced.

37:16 At the end of the day, Bitcoin is first and foremost dependent on people voluntarily choosing what software to run and what hardware to buy. like that's even a layer deeper than proof of work yes for sure yes okay so that's about the site and maybe one last view on the on the live so here if you want to to see the latest what what is happening on the network you get most of the interesting metrics here so uh one of those boxes say NOTS and it's green, like NOTS adoption is going up? Is the site neutral in that sense, or does it just view NOTS as a good thing in general?

38:02 No, it's a good question. It's totally neutral. So it's just reflecting that it's plus, so more diversity basically. Yeah, because NOTS is the second largest implementation. Correct. And then you have the alerts, you know, like yesterday, we had the larger return and so on. And if you want more details, you can go to those box that are actually pointing to the page that we had in the previous sites. So all the details, all the detailed metrics, they are here. Nice. Yeah, so here it's really block by block how much of a spam you have. Yeah, so that's where we are with the Bitcoin portal.

38:50 And in addition, yeah, I'm trying to write every week or a bit less nowadays, but, you know, the latest. So I also have this newsletter where I kind of expose the latest information that I can see from the blockchain related to spam, related to, well. So about BIP-110 there and the adoption of BIP-110 is there any way to see those metrics like how that's going? Yes, it's here. So here it says zero block, right? So that's a little bit the pain point at the moment But that's within a 24 hour period and not a 90 day period. Yeah, it is So you can go here, I believe, and then you have the BIP-110 And you see it's we are And again, this is coming from Luke's page.

39:50 So 8.16% of the nodes are basically running B.10 at the moment. I think it's growing. The latest news on the nodes, I think you know, of course, but I think nowadays B.10 is integrated directly to the nodes. I'm not sure if that's already out or not. I think it is, and it's the latest Nodes version that's been out there for a week or so, maybe two weeks. So if you run the latest version of Nodes, you will automatically be signaling for BIP1.10.

40:32 And another thing I learned is that as a miner, you have to signal for it. You can't just tweak your filters to only allow compatible transactions. You need to actually signal for the block to be valid. Correct. That's true. By the way, are you mining? Are you renting? No, not at the moment. I've been focusing on other things. I was mining over the winter, but I haven't done the whole hash renting thing yet. I'm embarrassed to say. I've had a little too much else on my plate. Same here. I'm really going to do it, but I didn't find the time yet.

41:16 So if you scroll down there to the, what do we have? Signaling trend. That's the minor signaling, right? That's the minor signaling. Yeah, exactly. But we had two minor signaling, right? We have barefoot. Yeah bobber net Yes Bob Burnett And then another one I think Alberta or 234 four Alberta something Yeah yeah yeah the guy from Alberta there Yeah that super cool Alberta independence in action. Yes, right. So, yeah. So that's what we have here. You have some kind of latest news, what has happened on those different dimensions.

42:05 Yeah. Yes, a very nice site. I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops over the coming months here. Maybe we could stop the screen share now if you've shown all the things. Yes, I'm sharing. So what's your prediction for the future here? How do you think the whole BIP-110 thing plays out? What's your best guess of what will happen in August? Yes. I think it's there are different things what I what I wanted to say and what I wrote also in my newsletter is that B.10 you have to see it also as an ID right so B.10 is an ID is a kind of but as it's a statement and the statement is we don't want or we reject the large file use case on Bitcoin.

43:03 And that's Bit.10. And that's first, that's an ID. And then that ID has been implemented. And now we have the software and the nodes. So node runners can, if they want, run that software. So we have it. And what I think is that this side is not going to disappear. It's not going anywhere. and there are more and more people who want to follow that ID and to kind of also express that ID with their nodes. So that's the first thing. And the second thing, what happens in August? Well, you know, B.10 will activate and what it means is that all the nodes that run B.10 are going to reject blocks that are not conformant to B.10, meaning that have spam in them.

43:57 So it could be that a miner is not signaling for B.10, not really supporting, but not adding spam to the block. So that block would go through, you know, to those nodes. Really? Because that's the thing I heard that you need to signal for the block to go through, but that's not true then? I think if the block is kind of, you know, in line with B.10 rules, it should go in, I would say. Yeah, that sounds like that would work, but I heard from someone, I can't remember who, that that is not the case, that you need to signal.

44:41 Let me verify that. But anyway, so then if you have a block that is not B.1.10 aligned, then it will be rejected by those nodes. So the question is, and I think this look dash here, is kind of expressing this quite well. The question is how much miners will want to support spam. And that's really the question here. Do they have a strong opinion that spam is a must, is needed, and especially the large file spam, right? Because there is plenty of spam, or so-called spam, that B.10 is not targeting. So you have this small op return, all the runes they will go through, like they do today.

45:23 So the question is, will the miner in a position and make the statement that they want this support spam on Bitcoin? Or will they say, okay, we don't have a strong opinion. Maybe it's better that, you know, we go along here. And I mean, logically, I would say they would go to the second option and they will decide to go along. so that we will activate smoothly with no chain split, and then we continue from there. That's my guess, but there are a lot of unknowns.

46:05 There are a lot of incentives that we don't know about, so that makes things more difficult to predict. Yeah, I've heard that around 10% of the nodes need to signal for this for it to make sense for the miners to give a shit about it, basically, because if it's smaller than that, it's not really going to change anything. But yeah, I don't know the deeper technicalities of it. You can like, subscribe, brush your teeth, and call me an idiot in the comments below if you want. I enjoy that. And educate me on these topics if you'd like to do so. there's a theory that if a non-compliant block is mined and then the miners just choose to keep on mining on that chain instead of switching to the other as they should then the whole thing is a nothing burger because everything, all that will happen is that these, is that we that are signaling for it will just not be on the largest chain anymore but Well, I'm bad at explaining this stuff, but what are your thoughts?

47:17 Yeah, that would be the challenge if, you know, if we have a chain split and then the B.10 chain is having a small hash rate, it means you mine a block, not every 10 minutes, but much longer than that, right? So then you have new blocks every day or depending how much hash rate you have. Yeah, and then it'll take a long time for difficulty to just to get back to 10 minutes or so. I mean, that's what happened to when Bitcoin Cash forked off, they had to manually adjust the difficulty adjustment.

47:58 Yes. And in doing so, proving that they were not decentralized at all. So proving that they weren't Bitcoin. So I found that ironic. So I certainly hope that this doesn't happen with BIP110 because it's not a hard fork. No. And there's no, I mean, if you don't want a hard fork, you should just, and you're a miner, you should just signal for it and run it. Because that won't affect anyone in any negative way except certain spammers. Yes, exactly. but again regardless of what happens and i think that i'm optimist on on this one um you know the the id and the the need and the desire for a spam free or spam mitigated bitcoin is not going to disappear it's not going to go anywhere how do you kill that id really that's really the question yeah and also come August there's a theory that like there's right now there's no real advantage to being the first miner to signal for it but once one big miner starts to signal for it or a couple of them then it will sort of snowball because all of a sudden it makes a lot of sense to signal for it whereas when no one's signaling for it, it makes less sense.

49:28 Yes, exactly. I think that's also explained a lot because, you know, especially the big one like Foundry, you know, they kind of probably take their decision. They take really time to make their decision, right? So it could be that they are still evaluating and they target to decide end of this quarter and then implement next quarter. Let's see. Yeah, fingers crossed. Yeah. It's this or then they really have a stronger desire for spam. Yeah. So given that you're a fiat-minded high-time preference bullshit miner, so what's the trade-off for an actor such as what's it called, Parasite Pool?

50:24 The trade-off is risk losing all the blocks, and the reward you get for that is the extra fees collected from the spam, which is still minuscule in comparison to the block reward, right? So the fee part of the block subsidy is much smaller, or the fee part that comes from spam is much smaller. So that's why it wouldn't make sense to them to risk losing the blocks. Yeah, the fee part from spam is way less than 1% of the revenue. Yeah. It's like 0.1.

51:04 Yeah, 0.235 or something like that, I've heard estimates. But it's still super small, so it would make no sense to keep on doing that. however there might be ways we we don't see like if they get a a briefcase full of dollars under the table for for doing this stuff and it's a nation-state attack or something like there might be thing unseen variables here who knows but yeah what can we do except wait and run our nodes and rent the hash power and see what happens yes exactly but did you say at 10% of the nodes or is it 10% of the miner that should signal for it to make sense?

51:52 I think it's 10% of the nodes. Because, I mean, we are very close, right? Yeah, we are. Most likely we'll be much higher than that in August. Especially if it's mandatory for all nodes to do it, then it should be around 20%. So we should be far beyond the threshold. Of course, all of this is theoretical. The way I see it, Bitcoin is something to be studied rather than having opinions about. From a certain perspective, we'll just have to wait and see how reality plays out. It's so complex, so many moving parts. Yeah, it's super simple. The basic idea is super simple.

52:33 Money with a finite supply and it's information. So you keep the key in your head and that's it. But how that works under the hood, it quite quickly gets quite complicated. And no one really knows. I don't think a single person knows how it actually works in reality. Because it's not only theoretical, but it's entirely dependent on what software and hardware people choose to buy and run. So that's what makes it so hard to predict future events in it. Yeah, awesome. What else? Is there another topic that we haven't covered that you would like to get into?

53:13 No, I think that was really good. Yeah, I think everybody's focused on BIP 110, right? That's the big thing. Yeah, and I'm... Exciting times. Very exciting times, and I'm happy to see that my episode with Matthew Cratter is getting such attention. Yeah, it's great to see. So is there anywhere else on the web where you would like to point people to? Yeah, so the Bitcoin portal. And then from there, anyway, you can find the newsletter. But I am on Substack as well. And then I have a X account.

53:53 Yeah. Are you on Nostra too? Yes, but I don't post often enough. I forget. I'm there. Same here. I see it as a lifeboat. Yes. More than anything at this point anyway. I hope it takes off better, but yeah. So go follow Renault and go check out the Bitcoin portal. Go rent some hash if you want to do that. And yeah, it's going to be exciting times up ahead. Something is happening in Bitcoin. Bitcoin immune system is reacting to something that it thinks is a virus.

54:35 will see how much damage the virus does and if the immune system is able to direct the virus somewhere else, preferably to Ethereum. And yeah, what can we do except sit back and enjoy our popcorn? Yes. Anyway, thank you very much for this conversation, Renaud. And I wish you the best of luck in the future. Are you going to any of the conferences this year? Yeah, I was planning to go to Helsinki ETC conference. Fantastic. I'll most likely be there, yes. But not to Prague?

55:15 No. No. It's time. All right. So yet another reason to come to Helsinki. Use code Infinity for a discount, of course. And in Helsinki, you will definitely get to meet me and Luke because this is our conference, tied a bunch of other great Finnish Bitcoiners. It's the second year we do it now and in a bigger venue and it's going to be a great event. I just know it. Handpicking speakers is something else. It's absolutely love that event. Use CodeInfinity for that and for all other conferences as well, but just try it. And Helsinki is also going to be interesting for the reason that we will know what happened to BIP110 at that point, in all likelihood.

56:06 So that's going to be very exciting. Yeah, looking forward to it a lot. And to everything else. But anyway, this has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Like, subscribe, brush your teeth, rent some hash, and go follow Renault on social media. And check out thebitcoinportal.com. See you in the next one. see you bye thank you bye