Bitcoin Core v30 Explained: Spam, Filters & the Knots Debate | Antoine Poinsot

28:31The RPC user and RPC password have been deprecated for 10 years. and because so many people use them, we just undeprecated them after 10 years and just gave up. Okay. But do you not think that it is or it should be up to the person running the node to set these settings? Yeah, at the end of the day, people have the agency of running whatever software they want. They have ultimate control on what transactions they're going to relay or not, or not have a mempool at all. but it's I guess it's just an argument how how do you want to design the best bitcoin software possible certainly it's not going to be having every tweak possible on every post relay policy setting I can tell you there is hundreds of them hundreds of configurations you could have at the end of the day you're

29:28you're using Bitcoin Core because you think that the Bitcoin Core developers, outside of the consensus rules, are making good decisions about what is good for end users, what is good for big relay nodes and big economic nodes, and what is good for miners to be able to join the mining market. So that's why they're deferring their decision to Bitcoin developers that are experts on this tiny topic. And they always have the choice to go elsewhere and use another software or use a previous version or use one version with tiny bit of cut changed. And we cannot maintain a setting for everything. It's just insane.

30:08It's bad software development. So my take is that we shouldn't have this setting in the first place. They make no sense. But since we have it now, we need to deal with it. And people want to use it, so we will leave the setting. And like you say, people can go and run whatever software they want. And we've seen that happen. Notts has grown massively over the last year. I think by some accounts, they're 20 plus percent of nodes. I know those numbers are... Correct numbers. I get that, because people can just spin up 10 in their bedroom or whatever. Do you have actually any idea what the number of actual economic nodes are running Notts?

30:45I don't have an idea. But I don't want to minimize it either. I talked with a lot of people that were concerned about the situation, a lot of people that were maybe not quite on board with Luke, who is a character of his own, to say the least, but just wanted to switch implementation and in practice to Bitcoin Core. I think it's due to a misunderstanding, but I understand it. And it's real. I think we shouldn't view it as like, these people are not real or, oh, it's all bots on Twitter. Now, it's not all Bust. There are real people that work. For sure. And you see that, like, we were at PubKey last night, and it was a conversation about this.

31:28And there's people in the room who are clearly on the Knot side. Like, this is a real growing set of users who are choosing to move away from Core. Is that an issue in any way? Like, Core has always been the reference implementation. It's kind of like, it's been the sort of source of truth, as it were. If Knotts or any other implementation grows to a larger degree, Does that ever become an issue for the network? Nuts itself has a much lower risk of being consensus inconsistent with Bitcoin Core. So I'd much rather see people run Nuts at scale than alternative implementations from scratch. Because it's just a fork of core with however many changes.

32:11Which is the other issue. So, of course, it's great. That's the key property of Bitcoin is you choose the software you want to run. And it's good that people can change. I'm just trying to warn users that there is massive changes that have been applied to not reviewed by anybody, by a single man who has interesting views. So I think this is a really important thing to get into because Luke has clearly done some amazing things for Bitcoin. And you don't have to agree with all of his personal takes on the world, which I certainly don't, to accept that he has been very good for Bitcoin. But I have been sort of shouted at in the comments for saying this on a number of shows where I'd say this is run by one developer.

32:56And people are like, no, there's lots of developers moving to NAS. And I'm sure in the past year, there have been developers move over and start looking at the code. But at the same time, Luke has the ability just to push code without much review or any review. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay, and is that happening? Yes. So maybe it'd be worth you explaining why that is a risk. This is the main reason. I've really... I've said on other shows that I'm going to stick with version 29. And that's the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that you just can do that. It's backwards compatible. You don't have to upgrade.

33:32I just kind of want to see what happens here. But I've also said I would not feel comfortable telling anyone to run NOTS for this exact reason. So maybe it's worth you explaining why this is such an issue. Sure. But maybe just to touch on the 29, Bitcoin Core maintains three releases at the same time, exactly for this reason. For people that do not want to upgrade too quickly, people that maybe want to take some time and reconsider before upgrading. So we're going to, we call them branches. You've got the code that is added one after the other, like a blockchain, essentially. And then you've got a version that forks from this blockchain, the development version continues, and then this branch eventually becomes a release.

34:14And we maintain the past three releases. So currently we have 27, 28, and 29. And as we're going to release 30, we are going to continue maintaining 29 and 28. So we're going to release patch for some bug fixes. Unfortunately, we cannot release all of them. But it's a good idea. Well, it's never a good idea to just rush to upgrading. Anything. Anything. Yeah, it depends on what type of software. But if it's your fucking Tesla that has a critical vulnerability, you're not going to inspect the code, just upgrade. You're trusting them in the first place. For Bitcoin, there's more of a balance. You want to make sure the developers didn't change the definition of Bitcoin before you upgrade.

35:03but you also want to upgrade before bug fixes like security bug fixes are made public. So I would say it's this window of three releases. Make sure to upgrade to the latest batch releases and make sure to upgrade before, because after the three window, like for instance, now that we arrived to 30, we are going to disclose the vulnerabilities to 27. Then you can make your own judgment about how much you're impacted by the security vulnerabilities, but by default, it's a good idea to upgrade from it. So, yeah. That's good context, because I'm lazy. And so probably six months ago, I was like, I don't even know which version of core I'm running.

35:46And I had a look, and it was 27. So if people are running 27, they need to be moving to 28 or 29. But they don't have to move to 30, and that's a key point. Yes. All right, so then let's talk about the issues with a single developer running NOLS. Well, the issue is like for any other software, except here we're talking about a very important piece of software. I'm talking about all the security vulnerabilities that we disclose in Bitcoin Core because there is a lot and there is a lot of developers, a lot of very qualitative developers having eyes on the code base, reviewing the code base. There is massive testing going on of various parts of Bitcoin Core.

36:26And still, almost every release we fix security bugs that were disclosed. And it happens with, it's like 20 people day to day working on the project and 40 people on the broader group having eyes on the code base plus all the people that reviewed the code before upgrading. It still happens. And no matter how qualified you are, what is going to really change the risk of minimizing the risk of bugs is the number of people. People come from different perspective, from having thought about the code this way or having thought about the protocol this way. So they are going to look at the code in different manner and have possibly find bugs.

37:15That's the very famous quote from Linus Torvalds, given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

37:26And well, Nuts is on the other extreme, which is they're using Bitcoin Core as a basis, which is very good, but then they have like 1 ,500 additional changes unreviewed on top of it. And these changes are not only tiny changes to RPC comments or the GUI, even a lot of them are, but not all of them. Some of them touched the validation code. You start being like the peer-to-peer code, and you start being, has anybody had any eyes on it? No, and then you start looking at the test, and then because it's such a massive undertaking to be rebasing on top of Bitcoin Core and maintaining everything, some of the tests get disabled, so it's also not tested as much, it's unreviewed, untested, straight to the user.

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40:05BitKey is a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App. It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature into an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over. It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress. And time named BitKey one of the best inventions of 2024. Get 20 % off at bitkey.world when you use code WBD. That's B-I-T-K-E-Y dot world and use code WBD. Maybe we should talk again. One of the talking points coming out of the Knot side is that Luke has somehow been sort of ostracized from the conversation in the Core team.

40:45Maybe it's worth giving the kind of history of Luke working with Core, how that's evolved and what the situation is right now. Well, I think it's unchanged, really. I think the accusation of ostracization are unfounded. That's not true. I think it's really one of the things about the decision process of how Bitcoin core makes changes. Whether your code is coming from a pseudonym, from someone well-known, or from someone with ideologies that you strongly disagree with, such as me with Luke, for instance. We look at the code and if the code is good, the code is included. If the code is bad, the code is refused.

41:36And that's what happens with Luke. Luke has never been a major contributor in terms of volume. He's always been fairly sporadic. He was running his business. He was running a religious pool at the very beginning. He was doing some stuff and he's contributed a bunch, but he was also sometimes some very farfetched projects that did not attract a lot of attention from other developers. And if you can attract attention of other developers, your thing is going to go nowhere because in Bitcoin Core, we have standards of review, no review, no code merge.

42:18But a lot of his code was merged because he was reviewed and it was good. And it still happens today. Just the other month, as Luke was insulting me on Twitter, he made a poor request that made sense. So I just watched out the code and I was like, code is good, act. I acted, the poor request was merged, and it's actually being shipped in 30, I think. Okay, so maybe I'm trying to think of the best place to go from here. Maybe it's worth talking about how policy change is handled within core as opposed to sort of consensus changes. Because this is a really important distinction and something that I've seen misconstrued on Twitter.

43:05So like policy change obviously does not require broad consensus from Bitcoiners. This is something that is decided by the core team and core maintainers. Is that correct? Yeah, it's like any other thing in the software, like what database are you going to use for your wallet? It's a local change. It's a local change which has implications network-wide. So it's very important. I wouldn't say it's also only up to the Bitcoin core developers. I think it's up to the larger group of Bitcoin developers. for instance a lot of the what you like everything is part of relay policy if you are going to have a new message on the protocol you need other implementation to be to interconnect you need people that are speaking the PR2PR protocol that are not necessarily nodes to be able to be compatible so it's going to happen on the mailing list it's going to happen in the BIP repository, more so than on Bitcoin Core.

44:06Of course, it's a lot of Bitcoin Core people in these discussions, because that's the most active implementation, it's the reference implementation, but it's not Bitcoin Core specific. Okay. And so this is another place where some criticism has come at core in that when this change was first proposed, there were people trying to have the conversation on GitHub who ended up getting blocked from the GitHub or having their accounts banned. Do you think Core handled that correctly? Or is that just not the place to have that discussion? You know, I want to say no, but it's also I always try to, from being in the position of receiving a lot of criticism from people that it's easy to criticize.

44:51It's very hard. So I'm not a fan of the moderation guidelines personally, but I don't want to be criticizing it because I don't know what is better. It's just like, are you going to let trolls come and derail threads in your workplace? Probably not. You don't want that. Are you going to have moderation guidelines? Well, the guidelines can be weaponized. Are you going to have no guidelines, but then it's more arbitrary control from the maintainers? I think that would be the solution I favor, but there was good arguments on all sides. So I think Core could have undollared it differently, but I don't know what could have been done better.

45:37I think a few people, it's also, all the intervention was very mild. It was dramatized on Twitter and everything. I've got banned from Bitcoin. Some people were muted for 24 hours. not the only one so i think when i spoke to mechanic um on the podcast nearly six months ago now he i'm quite sure he said okay that's fair maybe it's not the place to have the conversation i could be misremembering that but i think he did all right so then let's get on to the next big one which i saw i had samson mile on the podcast recently um i know you listened to that one and one of the things that he said which i found a little surprising was that he thought core has essentially become corrupted in some way and that there were going to be kind of whistleblowers that would come out and tell the story.

46:23Do you want to, I don't even exactly know how to phrase the question to you, but do you want to respond to that as an idea? As an idea, it's just a wrong framing. It's, it's always the things of if someone comes to you as an accusation and they always frame it with the way where you say yes, or you say no, you're incriminating yourself either way. It's like, have you stopped bidding your wife? You say, you say yes, you imply that you actually did it. You say no, you are continuing to do it. So no, core is not corrupt. In the sense that I think corruption for core would be that we do not put the best interest of the Bitcoin users first, that the way the decision process relies more on politics or you have the right view, the right ideology, therefore we're going to merge your code.

47:23That's what I would call corruption and there's nothing of such happening in Bitcoin Core. Now, I cannot quite reassure you of everyone is a saint in Bitcoin Core. I don't know everybody personally, they work in Core. Or after all, we are all pretty paranoid around, I don't know what the other guy that is opening this pull request, his real motive is. That's our job. Our whole job is assume everybody is corrupt. Make sure it doesn't impact the software and eventually the Bitcoin users. So no core is not corrupt, but I will continue acting as if it was. Okay. I think you touched on something there that's another important point for you to address is that there's also accusations that, and this kind of comes back to the corruption side, that there's something ideologically wrong in Core, that Core want Bitcoin to be this Ethereum-like thing and it's becoming woke, is like a common thing that you see on Twitter.

48:21Yeah, I mean, it's exactly the same framing as before. It's like, oh, have you stopped painting your hair blue? Yeah, no, it's not true. It's not true. People overreacted to a few changes in the past from people that were stopped. For instance, the block list, allow list thing of people that were like, just stop shouting at me. I'm just going to make the change. People on the other side of the spectrum being like, oh no, you bend the knee. It doesn't matter. It's just Bitcoin Core developers are doing a lot of things and taking a lot of heat from making right choices all the time. This is inconsequential.

49:11And from this and from a lack of communication from a lot of Bitcoin Core contributors with the wider Bitcoiner community, I think you've got this people coming from the perspective and they have this perspective. And now, because there's not much communication between the two, they're going to have reinforcement bias. They're going to have new information come, and it's a confirmation of what you thought. You're going to see an event as, oh, it's another proof that Bitcoin Core is work. It's another proof that Bitcoin Core is corrupt. Whereas if you start from the facts and try to derive a conclusion from the facts, there is no way you can reach a conclusion of Bitcoin Core being work.

49:58If we understand work ideology being collective identity primes over the individuals and everything that goes with it, Bitcoin Core is the perfect polar opposite. And people that are interested in Bitcoin and spending their life working on Bitcoin are the polar opposite of this ideology. And interestingly, it's an ideology that I see being pushed more, not by all people who filter people, but I see there is some recuperation being done by some influential people from the people being angry at Bitcoin Core, they smell blood in the water, and they're trying to do recuperation, which I think is pretty damaging.

50:43And I will be honest, I think Samson Moe is doing this, trying to infiltrate politics into Bitcoin Core. So it's just like, you've got Bitcoin Core that is extremely neutral, changes are made, no matter your ideology. And sometimes it's hard. Luke's ideology is terrible, in my opinion. But if Luke is making a good request, his request will be merged and I will review it. And this is the standard of Bitcoin Core. And people make the accusation of something neutral. oh, it's politicized, to actually bring their own politics on top of it. And I think it's not going to end well if we try to bring politics to be concord.

51:22So when you say the other side is showing some of these ideas of wokeism, is that essentially cancel culture is what you're seeing? Yeah, cancel culture is part of it, but it doesn't end there. All right. Wokeism is going to justify violence against individuals, not because of their actions, but because of the actions of other people. It's collective responsibility, essentially. So other people that share your identity did this to me, therefore, you are going to suffer. And I think it's terribly wrong, obviously, but you really see it. And not from the other side. I don't want to characterize everybody that is discounted with Bitcoin Core at at the moment has pushing this narrative, but it's definitely one narrative that I see being evolving as the narrative evolves, it's getting more and more into this.

52:15And actually Bitcoin Core is not a piece of software that we choose to use and we form the Bitcoin network. Actually Bitcoin Core is in control of Bitcoin Core. It's kind of the Bcash arguments, right? And the maintainers of Bitcoin Core are therefore of kind of the philosopher kings of the Bitcoin network. If it was the case, Bitcoin has no interest whatsoever. You just recreated the same institutions as before. So this is obviously nonsense. This is dangerous because then it can be used to justify coercion against developers because you start by assigning collective identities. We are the users.

52:56They are the developers, obviously mutually exclusive. The developers cannot be users of Bitcoin now. And they are responsible and we need to have power to create a power structure. They attack the power structure and they say, there is the power. We need to have some control of the power. They need to represent us. It's just like, what does this hand? Do they want Bitcoin to be a democracy? It's just, I don't know. So I think it's nonsense. I think we need to stick to Bitcoin core working on rough consensus, objective, technical facts and leave the ideology and the social work outside of the decision for the software.

53:36All right. Let's talk about one of the most controversial bits. In, I don't know, the last few months, this conversation around illegal or just inappropriate content being put on Bitcoin, and particularly the illegal stuff being a risk factor for Bitcoin, because if you're running a this stuff is on your node, you are then subject to, like the laws. So that has always been an issue with Bitcoin, an issue, a weakness of Bitcoin. You are going to store it on people's data. That's how Bitcoin works. This is a risk of running a Bitcoin node. The recent changes have no bearing on this risk. Can I just push back on that in a slight way?

54:24You say it has no bearing, but it does mean that entire images rather than broken up images can be put on Bitcoin. The encoding of data is not going to change the legality of the data. It's just if you've got child porn in MP4 or in MOV, it's still child porn. So when you say it's chunked or it's contiguous, it's just encoding at the end of the day, first. And then second, you can also just have contiguous data, even if it's chunked, using some smart encoding. Some clever guy on the mailing list proved it, what Adam Beck brought up yesterday night. Some guy put a penguin image in an inscription.

55:09And you can see if you try to just use it, it's contiguous, it's just going to have tiny red dot in the middle that you don't even see. So this contiguous thing, it does not make any sense at all. And I think it's kind of concerning because there is no way, there's maybe ways, but it would severely damage Bitcoin's utility to address Bitcoin nodes, storing potentially illegal data. And it's not something that developers can really fix. It's not something that developers are going to make worse. But we are going to make it worse by trying to create a narrative around this. And it comes exactly at the right time.

55:57It's like the shift in system narrative. I took a step back. I was like, we have seen all these attacks on developers. People sometimes don't realize what are our primary concerns as developers. If you ask anyone in the room here at Chaincode, probably one of the main concerns is going, I don't want to end in jail. They have been after developers working on privacy stuff. Privacy stuff is enabled at the core by Bitcoin. And even if the new administration is maybe more favorable to Bitcoin stuff, they're going to be more favorable to the economy boosts, maybe to the digital gold narrative, but they're not going to be favorable to anti-KOC, the KYC.

56:47They're not going to be favorable to - They've proven that. These cases, while brought up in the previous administration, the samurai devs are being charged under the Trump administration. And that's very, very concerning. And so I was like, is this shift in narrative trying to get us to incriminate ourselves? Is it, are they trying to, because at the same time they were like, debate me, debate me, debate me. Do they want me to go on a podcast and say on the mic that it's what we do or something? But at the end of the day, I think people are not evil. Unless you have strong evidence that they are.

57:26But you shouldn't just assume that they're all evil. I think it's just a lack of perspective. Again, from the two, we're going in parallel. And with very little communication, we can open source developers and the wider group of Bitcoiners. And I think they don't realize how important to us and scary to us. I think some of them are. Some of them try to call for legal attacks on developers. Some of these people are just evil. They didn't know that we have been attacked in the past by fucking clowns. What is it going to be if we are attacked by actual real people? So is this really a problem without a solution and just one of the consequences of cypherpunk software?

58:14Yeah. The storage of data that is illegal. Fortunately, it's not like the law is completely retarded on the subject either. It seems, not legal advice, but it seems that the law around illegal material is whether you are trying to view it, where you're trying to download it for the purpose of viewing it, which is not in the case of Bitcoin, it's just spammers. Obviously, spam transactions are trying to carve out some ways of inserting data into transactions. It's pretty obvious it's not the purpose of our software. I think there would be a very strong case for Netrunner to protect himself in court, but it's not a given.

59:04It's like if you're very, very concerned about this stuff. It's your only answer really just you can't run a node then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk more deeply about filters. I mean, start with a broad question. Do they work? They work for what? To stop spam transactions. They don't work to stop spam transactions entirely. They don't work to stop spam transactions to any realistic extent. They can work to prevent bootstrapping use cases. For instance, you could make a case that if inscriptions were non-standard to start with, maybe this use case would have never been bootstrapped. And if it was never bootstrapped, then there would have been no incentive for miners to change the policy.

59:56And there would have been no hype around it and so many fees paying the miners. So you could make these arguments. But once miners have chosen to put some transaction in their block and people are willing to pay them for doing so, you need to change consensus rules or deal with it. Do you think this does end in a fork? No. You don't think so? Again, the spam is not an existential threat to Bitcoin. I think there is a lot of dramatization of the topic. But once we get to speak about actual consequential actions, such as a fork, it gives a very strong incentive to people to actually look for objective information, to be more rational.

1:00:54Whereas now, people have a strong incentive to be rational. They can just yell on Twitter. It's a new vibe, so you can grow your Twitter accounts by just taking a dig at core devs. And you're actually incentivized to go with the narrative. But once you have to change the consensus rules on your node, back to rationalization, rational decisions. And I think in this case, you're going to think, all right, the spam is not going to make it any more expensive to run a node. The spam is not going to change much for me, except insofar as in the long run, it outbids financial transactions. Which I can't see happening.

1:01:42If you think, yeah, so either you can't see a penny. And if it happens, if in two decades, financial transactions do not count outbid fucking JPEGs, then - What's Bitcoin done? Yeah, exactly. 100%. I agree with that for sure. Okay. So the analogy that is used all the time from the Knot side is this idea of a lock on your house. Just one more analogy. Another analogy, but let's go with it. So the argument is a lock on your house doesn't stop a dedicated burglar, but it does put off people from actually trying to get into your house. Do you think that analogy works for filters? No. No, it does not.

1:02:31Filters is also kind of newspeak. It's just local relay policy rules. So you can stop relaying things for older people, but it's not going to prevent them from having them in blocks and you are going to keep accepting the blocks. Really, the lock on your door is closer to consensual if we want to have the analogy. But analogies are terrible when we want to actually understand a subject. Because we're talking about specifics here. It's because analogies are useful when you try to communicate to a large audience and you just assume the audience is going to give you 1 % of the brain time. Think about the analogy and be like, oh yeah, it makes sense.

1:03:15And you're going to win them over. For anybody that cares about it, actually, probably your listeners care deeply about this topic. I care deeply about this topic. I think we need to refrain from using analogies in this case because it's just going to reframe the problem into another problem, and then we can discuss this as other problem. But it's not the one we're talking about in the first place. Yeah. Okay. And so I think probably a concrete example of why filters don't stop these transactions from propagating the network is the sub one sat per V byte mining fees. So we saw those start happening in the last few months.

1:03:54And I would guess that 99 plus percent of nodes were not relaying those transactions. So you have to assume that Notts needs to get to 99 % of node implementations to actually allow the filters to work. Is that correct? I don't think it is. I think people really think of Bitcoin as being one network that is very defined and concentrated. You have the Bitcoin network. If you can reach this percentage of nodes on the network, you're going to prevent people from putting stuff in blocks. It's not the case. Anybody that wants to put stuff in blocks is just going to use a separate network, for instance.

1:04:36You can just, it's like, you can use, for instance, it's very useful to have thought experiments about extremes to think about what would happen. What would happen if Bitcoin Core stops relaying transactions that pay less than 10 ,000 sets? 100 ,000 cents. Probably people are going to start just making minimum payments, 10 ,000 cents, 100 ,000 cents. Probably people are going to start either stop making these payments and use other methods, or they're just going to use, if there is one available, another network. One Bitcoin, obviously, just what it's going to do is make the old network irrelevant, and you're going to have a new network.

1:05:18And that's what I mean in rooting around. It's just you can have 99 % of filters in your network. It's just going to make your network irrelevant. So what you're talking about there is people going out of band directly to miners or? Other peer-to-peer network. It's like the current peer-to-peer network of Bitcoin is an emergent network of people starting the Bitcoin software, interconnecting with each other. and if the peers are not useful to your node, it's like, for instance, we have a lot of spy nodes and we have a lot of peers when you're a Bitcoin node, you make connections in the dark. When you just pin up, you don't know, you don't have reputations of nodes and you just have peers that are useless to you.

1:06:03So when they're useless, you just drop them and you start connecting to new peers and you can just have the same mechanisms when they just don't relay your transactions. You're a Bitcoin user, you want Bitcoin Core does not relay your transaction, you use Bitcoin version 2 or Bitcoin 3. And it's all going to be compatible because they all use the same consensus rules. It's just going to make the peer-to-peer network irrelevant. Okay, so Core30 is not going to be a threat to Bitcoin? No, I don't think so. I think Bitcoin Core30, on the contrary, had brings good improvements for all users. and the changes in Core30 aren't just the mempool policy changes what else is in it?

1:06:46yeah, thankfully that's maybe something to underline as well I'm here talking about this topic I've been out there on Twitter because it was initially my proposal and I I care about people not having misconceptions about stuff so it was like talking with people that are oftentimes pretty aggressive toward us on Twitter trying to correct people So I've been very associated with this change. It's not the main thing I've done. I didn't even make the change myself. I just made the proposal, defended the proposal on the technical circle. Took a while. Eventually it got pre-requested. Then it took a while.

1:07:22And now we're finally releasing it. But during all this time, I'm doing what I do more, which is work on the security issues that get reported to us. Try to find more security bugs myself to report to the group. Work on my B54 for consensus cleanup. I've been helping with the Covenant stuff as well. With Greg Sanders, we have a new proposal called TemplateHash, that is another way to achieve the functionality that is offered by CTV that we believe is better, and that is currently on the discussion whether it's better or not. So we do a lot of stuff. That's a very tiny part of what we do. So did you ask what else is in core?

1:08:03Certainly. Okay, so I would need to see the release notes, but I can go through off the top of my head. Or anything that's particularly interesting to you that's happening. One thing is the package relay made robust. What I mean by this is that in previous situation of Bitcoin Core, there was work on package relay, which is making the transaction relay network more usable for Lightning. So a second version of Lightning Commitment Transactions, the transactions that build the Lightning channels. currently they have a lot of inefficiencies and more probability to force close and more complexity associated with them because of limitations and the bitcoin network and the bitcoin transaction relay network not not the the consensus rules and one proposal to improve this was a package relay along with truck, if people have heard of it, TRUC, and Ephemeral Anchor and Ephemeral Dust.

1:09:08That's a whole package of what I call the mempool guys, which is Gloria, Greg Sanders, and to a lesser extent, Suez and Peter. These are going to make it possible for Lightning to bring substantial improvements to Lightning users. and it was shipped at first in 28 and 29 with the first version that was less robust, that couldn't be used in adversarial scenarios, but it was still opportunistically useful for, let's say you don't have a transaction that needs to be confirmed in a timely manner. It's not security critical, like your wallet, an unchain wallet, you can start using these features. However, with v30, it's made actually robust to use in adversarial situations.

1:09:59So Lightning can start actually using it for their commitment transaction where it's security critical. And do we know, is there a firm date of when Deep 30 is going to be released? So there is, we try to have firm dates, but it's always subject to bugs that we find in testing that we need to backboard, potential security issues that when we actually make release candidates, more people test and stumble upon that we need to fix before. We're very conservative before shipping a binary. This release has been baking for, well, it's been baking for six months of developments, but one full month of it has been, one month and a half actually, no more features, only bug fixes, only testing, only bug fixes, and we make a new release candidate and more bug fixes and new release candidates.

1:10:51And eventually when we stop having bug fixes, we release a final binary. So the actual release date depends on the duration for which we don't find bugs at the very end. But what we target right now is the 10th of October. So very close. Very close. Finally. It's been exhausting. And are you hoping that when this is released, you'll be proven right that this is not a threat to Bitcoin in any way and this conversation falls by the wayside? Yeah, I hope that a lot of people that were caught up in the fear-mongering realized that it was just fear-mongering and hold people that were spreading this FUD accountable.

1:11:40It's like, this guy's been spreading bullshit for six months. I will take what he says in the future with a grain of salt. So that's what I hope. but I don't need to be proven right that it's not going to break Bitcoin. It's not going to break Bitcoin. I hope that this conversation does fall by the wayside as well but I don't see it happening personally. I think even if you are proven right which I think you will be I still think this conversation will be happening. I think so but I think anybody there is a lot of very active people on both sides a lot of which are not Bitcoin Core contributors or Bitcoin Nuts contributors whatsoever.

1:12:27And these people will still be engaging on Twitter, growing their accounts, and you get the dopamine hit. You reach to your tribe on Twitter, you troll the other side. So that's continuing to evolve, but I don't think it's going to be to be reaching anybody reasonable whatsoever after they've been proven wrong. It's like very clearly. Okay, Bitcoin30. What else? Oh, the net travel soul, maybe. So historically, Bitcoin Core shipped with a protocol called UPnP, which is used for nodes that are at home, that are listening. You've got your node at home that is listening for connections, but because it's behind your router, your router acts as a firewall.

1:13:25So it makes it impossible for people outside to connect to your nodes and you have to open ports on your node. It's like a lot of, probably a lot of your listeners are going to be familiar with open port 8333 on your router and direct it to your node. So historically Bitcoin Core shipped with a protocol that was doing this automatically, as long as you are listening on your node. You can choose not to listen on your node. But if you were, you could set this option. Unfortunately, this protocol was fairly insecure in itself. It was using unadvisable protocol messages and encoding. It was using XML and it was all implemented in a not very secure manner.

1:14:14and it actually turned out to enable, to open security vulnerabilities in Bitcoin Core. This functionality was disabled for years, for almost a decade after we found that it has these security vulnerabilities. But eventually, because this functionality is so important to have diversity on the network, you don't want the Bitcoin network to be like Ethereum where 99 % of the nodes are in AWS. Yes, you want the Bitcoin network to be robust and diverse from people at home because then the way the internet is structured, you're going to do the connections coming, going to home networks are going to be spread from connections going to big data centers.

1:15:01So it's better for resilience of the network. and people have put some efforts into rewriting from scratch in a very secure manner in Bitcoin Core dysfunctionality. So this was done last year. It was shipped in 29 as opt-in and it's going to be enabled by default in V30 because of the testing we've done with 29. So I guess it's a good example of improvement of tangible features, of things that you see a lot of Bitcoin users being like, yeah, don't touch Bitcoin. It's perfect already. No, it's perfect because of all the disasters that could have happened that were avoided by these people doing this stuff.

1:15:53Is that one of the things that worries you about this conversation in the sense that a relatively minor policy change, I don't mean to downplay it, is causing this much controversy that it makes things like ossification more likely. Yeah, I mean, I would say personally that there is more risk to unadvisable consensus changes to Bitcoin than there is risk from ossification. However, I think that ossification is suboptimal today. Because there are known bugs in core. Yeah, there's no in the Bitcoin consensus rules, what I'm working on. But there is also very good optimization we could make of features like Lightning and bringing new features at the scripting level to enable more scalability in Bitcoin, more privacy preserving protocols, and having more flexibility for this layer two protocol designers to find the right trade-off with Bitcoin users.

1:17:00And I think it's also critical to Bitcoin that Bitcoiners be able to use Bitcoin in a direct way without having to go through third parties. Makes total sense. Okay, I tried to put to you most of the big arguments from the not side. Do you think there's anything I missed?

1:17:21Let's think. because I read a lot of stuff that usually just doesn't make sense to me, so I discard it. Contempt from core developers toward node runners, for instance. It's just nonsense. This is the idea that core see themselves as elite in some way, and they don't have to worry about the people actually running the nodes. Yes, I think it's the specific things I've read a few times on Twitter of, your node doesn't matter. as if any Bitcoin Core developers that is working full-time on your node has ever said that. But I mean, it's controversial, but is there some truth that a lot of the nodes out there don't matter?

1:18:04Because we know that economic nodes are the only ones that are particularly important. Well, they do matter for enforcing consensus rules. Your node matters to you. I think that's the key distinction. It matters to you. Yeah, it matters to you to enforce your consensus rules. And having a lot of individuals enforcing consensus rules themselves on their own without being coordinated brings resilience to being able to make reckless consensus changes to Bitcoin. That's what makes Bitcoin different. So I think it's very, very important. Nodes are what make Bitcoin different from other shitcoins. I think, yeah, I heard Adam say this, or maybe it was not Adam.

1:18:47maybe it was someone else, but that your node matters to you for consensus rules. Consensus rules are decided by node runners. What gets into block, the mining policy, relay policy, is decided by miners, by design of Bitcoin. And I think it's a good way to put it. Your node matters, but just you cannot decide what miners are going to put inside the blocks as long as consensus is valid. Yes. Okay. Before we close out, anything else that you think we've missed in this? Because I want to make sure that we address all the big issues that are being thrown up from the not side of this debate.

1:19:25Yeah, I feel like we could talk more about what Bitcoin Core is doing and the narrative of the Bitcoin is perfect because I think that a lot of the what the fear mongering was hinging on was that a lot of people have been onboarded in the past three or four years, and they were told repeatedly that Bitcoin was perfect already. And that from this perspective, I can totally understand how they would think that, sure, you have reasons to tweak some knobs on stuff, but why would you even try to do this? Developers just don't touch anything and it's not worth the risk. But the reality is that it's really this perspective.

1:20:17I've got a friend of mine that told me when I hang out with Bitcoiners, they're all so overconfident about Bitcoin. And when I hang out with the developers that see all the risk there is and all the things that get fixed at the last minute for the network to continue operating, they're all under confidence about the network. The truth is probably in the middle. The network is resilient by itself. Even if you don't upgrade for a few years, it's probably going to be fine, but it's going to be severely suboptimal. Bitcoin is not perfect yet. We still have, I think, at least a few consensus changes to actually fix the bugs in the consensus rules, enable more use cases to make it more possible to use Bitcoin in a censorship resistant way.

1:21:00And then there is a lot of maintenance of the peer-to-peer network that needs to adapt to the real world conditions that Bitcoin operates in. So there is risk to action. There is risk to inaction. And the whole thing with the all day is think about the risk, ponders the risk, think about the second order consequences, third order consequences, what could happen in any cases. And we try to make the best decision for all Bitcoin users and not trying to make changes to appease some particularly loud segment of users. We try to think about all people, people that don't have Twitter that are still relying on Bitcoin for being inflation resistant in their third world country.

1:21:46People that just don't have a voice as well that they can have this loud movements. Bitcoiners are a minority of Bitcoin users, I'm convinced. I think Bitcoin users are a much, much, much broader group than Bitcoiners. It's not to say that Bitcoiners do not matter. I think it's extremely important to keep this community of end to the rest about Bitcoin because they are doing so much good at large, convincing people, creating businesses and contributing to open source software. And I don't want to minimize it, but we need to keep in mind that when Bitcoin Core developers work on the software. They try to think of all Bitcoin users and not only those users that have the luxury of spending time on Twitter and talking about Bitcoin.

1:22:28Yeah, I mean, I think your point there about Bitcoin is thinking it's perfect and then developers not. Matt Corralo is a perfect example of that. Like whenever I, I use Lightning fairly regularly and it like, it works great for me. But as soon as you talk to Matt Corralo, he's like, this thing's broken, it's terrible. Like this, I mean, last time actually was interesting because the first time I've spoken to him where he's been like, no, we're actually, we're really getting somewhere. But I think that absolutely exists. All right, Antoine, this has been amazing. Yeah. Thank you. I massively appreciate all the work everyone does on Core.

1:23:02I'm sure you're not hearing that enough at the moment. Yeah, I appreciate your work, and I appreciate the work that everybody is doing for Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core is just one piece of it. Yeah, we're moving this thing forward. Before we close out, is there any way you want to send anyone to find out more about you? I was going to say on my Twitter, but maybe not. I've got my website where I post blog posts there. It's AntoineP.com.

1:23:29Antoine Poinsot:Perfect. Thank you, Antoine. Thanks.

1:23:46Thank you.