Why BIP110 Won’t Change Bitcoin | Mr Hodl & Wicked

25:10Wicked:A lot of people out there are just telling people to go and run nodes. And that's not good. So for a couple of reasons. It's one thing if you download a node to accept Bitcoin transactions, or if you're running a Lightning network, you have channels open, you need a node for that, you're an economic actor. That's fine. That's good. That's what we want. There's another reason you want to run a node is to support the network. Now, in order to support the network, you can't just download Nots and just let it run thinking that you're supporting Nots. You're not supporting Nots. You're just assembling the network.

25:47Wicked:In order, if you want to serve the network, you have to at least, at the minimum, go into your router settings and port forward to 8333 so you could at least serve blocks so you're able to help bootstrap newer nodes. If you're not doing those things, if you're not receiving Bitcoin with your node, or you're not helping the network grow with new nodes, you are a resource hog. You are a negative to the network. You're not helping the network. You're not helping in consensus. You're not doing anything. You're just taking bandwidth away for no reason. So please, if you want to help the Bitcoin network, at least at the minimum, just port forward to A333.

26:30Wicked:So at least you're helping bootstrap new nodes. And the better solution is to have a wallet that you accept Bitcoin to have to connect it to your node. It's connected to your node. Now you are an economic node. You're actually, you have a way to reject blocks that you don't like. Now you actually have a say. You, like, if you don't like the way Bitcoin Core is doing things, you know, and you want a fork in the future, you, you know, and you have, you know, your, your family's connected to your node. you have a couple of friends that are connected to your node, your wallet is connected to your node, and if enough people do what you do and they reject those blocks, well, then you get us a fork.

27:11Wicked:You get a successful fork and you move on. And that's why I'm personally... But do you think that's really what people are doing in terms of downloading not just leaving it running? Surely these people are downloading not and then connecting to a Sparrow wallet or whatever. They're not just downloading it to VirtuSignal, surely.

27:26Mr Hodl:I think that it's probably a mix, and I'd hope that most people who are downloading any node or connecting it to their wallet. But the truth is there's probably a good amount of people just downloading a node to VirtuSignal as well. And then on top of that, you have things like very clear CYBAL attacks with pumping node count numbers. And this happened, by the way, with SegWit as well. There was pumps in the node counts at times that were clear CYBAL attacks with various clients, both in support and then against SegWit. But speaking of nodes, there's another dashboard I have, which is the Bitcoin node count.

28:06Mr Hodl:And this is using Luke Dashier's data. So this is directly from his website. I just presented it on my own dashboard. But here you can see basically the node counts of core V30 plus nodes in orange, Notts nodes in green, and those are non-BIP-110 Notts nodes, and then BIP-110 nodes in blue. And anytime you see any of these spikes, like this spike here or this spike here, or these earlier spikes, these are cyber attacks. They're very clear cyber attacks. It's basically someone spinning up thousands of nodes all at once, probably on a virtual instance like AWS or something. And then they do it for a little while, and then it collapses.

28:55Mr Hodl:What you want to see happen for real node counts, and this also we saw it like with SegWit adoption, we saw this, right? You see older nodes go down at roughly the same rate as newer nodes coming online. And staying online. And that tells you that these nodes running the new client that is in favor of this update are real people, right? And so, for example, to give them credit, you see how these non-BIP-110 NOTs nodes, it's trending down, but then the BIP-110 nodes are trending up. This is probably real. Real people turning off their older NOTs and then updating to BIP-110. This is not real. This stuff is not real.

29:45Mr Hodl:So when you see on Twitter like, oh, BIP110 reached 25 % of the nodes, that's because someone spun up 10 ,000 nodes overnight, right? And that's why you can't really trust those numbers whenever they spike. It also doesn't really do anything.

29:59Wicked:So Bitcoin is cyber or cyber resistant. Like it's not like it doesn't do anything. It just like, OK, so people, so you spun up 10 ,000 nodes. OK, now what? Like, congratulations. It does nothing to the node.

30:12Mr Hodl:Well, so again, to go back to the earlier point, in the game of bluffing, right? Because I think, especially in the endgame here, where they're starting to realize this thing's not going to work, now they have to start to paint a narrative. Like, for example, oh, so many people on the network are running this. Are miners really going to risk those people rejecting their blocks and forking them off the network? And so when you have a higher node count, it's something that you can kind of bluff with and say, oh, there's so many people who are running it. Now, obviously, it's not going to work because I don't think miners are dumb enough to fall for that.

30:51Mr Hodl:But what it does do is it probably convinces other people who are dumb and don't really understand this to maybe switch over or they get worried and they start fighting things. right? I think it's just bluffing. Ultimately, right? And the other thing, one more thing, it could also be a false flag on the other side. It's not necessarily that the BIP-110 guys are sibiling their nodes to try to bluff. It could also be that the anti-BIP-110 guys are sibiling their nodes to make them look like clowns.

31:24Wicked:Again, it doesn't... I mean, okay, I guess, but if you understand Bitcoin, it really doesn't matter. like, congratulations, you spun up 500 nodes. It doesn't do anything, man. You just spend money for no reason. You wasted money that you could have bought Bitcoin with. It makes no sense.

31:40Mr Hodl:It's very cheap to do this because you can use one singular blockchain and then point tons and tons of nodes to that same blockchain. So it's not like you need to have a terabyte hard drive per node. You're literally just spinning up tens of thousands pointing to the same underlying chain. So it's extremely cheap.

32:00Wicked:What a mechanic is also counting on is that there's a fork that eventually that side of the chain will wipe out the legacy side of the chain. And that's why it's important for everybody to run BIP110. So, again, these are like past truths that he's saying. It's true that the minority chain on the soft fork can override the legacy chain 100%. And that was what a lot of people that were running BIP-148 nodes were counting on if there was a fork. Eventually, because of what was happening on the legacy chain at that point, there's empty blocks, fees were going through the roof, Bitmain was holding the chain hostage, adopting SegWit.

32:49Wicked:The idea was that, and we also knew that there was a few Bitcoin ports. The mind share of the devs? Yeah, you're about to say that. Yeah. We also knew that there was a few Bitcoin core members, developers, that were running BIP-148 nodes as well. The idea was that the economic activity would quickly flow to the minority side once we actually had a real split.

33:18Mr Hodl:Also, can I jump in real quick? You had enough hash rate even before flag day, which was August 1st, you had enough hash rate to at least get you crawling through the chain. So even with a fifth or a third of the hash rate, that gets you block times of whatever, like 30 minutes or 40 minutes, which is reasonable. But if you have no hash rate and you fork off, now you're talking about block times on the order of days. or weeks even, which is like crazy. Your chain comes to the vault,

33:54Wicked:and then you have absolutely no chance of overtaking the legacy chain. You're so far behind that it's just not realistic for miners to switch over at that point. So like his thing of trying to scare the ecosystem into thinking that, oh no, if BIP110 forks, it has a chance to wipe out the legacy chain is honestly like, it's so far-fetched it's not even like worth debunking. Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Well, Ledin makes that possible. They're the global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending. And since 2018, they've issued over$9 billion in loans with a perfect record of protecting client assets.

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36:19Wicked:Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55 % and are available for individual and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to Anchor Watch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage, visit anchorwatch.com today. That's anchorwatch.com. There's one thing that I want to get into because I do want to talk about what happens when they do this user activated software. But we talked about Bit.48 and you didn't really mention the comparables that Mechanic's drawing and why you think he's wrong, Hover. All right, well, for one, we were talking about SegWit nodes before.

37:00Wicked:We had, for about almost a year, when SegWit was released, we had 90 % of the network, 90, 95 % of the network was running a SegWit ready node. So we knew there was more than enough support to one SegWit. At the time, we learned, so Bitcoin was in really bad shape in those years. The fork wars were well on its way. And during that time, fees started to go through the roof. And at the same time, while fees are going through the roof, Bitmain, well, with their pool and pool and via BTC, every block that they mined was empty. So that was just building more fee pressure on top of the spam attack that was happening.

37:54Wicked:The chain was wrecked, man. Like the chain was not, it was not good. Like we weren't getting lightning anytime soon because we need a malleability fix. Bitmain was preventing that from happening. Hard times, hard times. So there was a Bitcoin Core Slack channel. There was a group of people that got together and they're like, all right, well, we need to do something about this. Like, this is not, this isn't good. Like what's happening right now isn't good. Then we learned that Bitmain wasn't even selling machines. They refused to sell machines to people that were like ProSeguit or, I don't remember the details exactly for that, but it was bad.

38:38Wicked:So, Shalon Fry, who was, at that point, he was a pretty well-known Litecoin developer, decided that he obviously also held Bitcoin, and he was a developer. He knew how this works. He knew how these things work. He pitched the idea of a user-activated software, BIP-148. And he convinced a lot of people in the Bitcoin for Slack, on Bitcoin Twitter, that this was the right move to make. Because what was happening on the network, we didn't have time anymore. So the way we upgrade Bitcoin, the safe way is BIP9. It basically allows a pool to signal readiness for an upgrade. And instead of them just signaling readiness for an upgrade, they took that and they weaponized it.

39:32Wicked:They basically used BIP9 to prevent SegWit from happening. Now, again, there was really no one against SegWit. Like everybody, like the network was, you know, the node count real nodes that were running 0.3.13.1. They were, you know, it was super, super majority of the network. It was a very, very small minority that was preventing an actual upgrade to make the network actually better. So, you know, the justification was there for UASF. They, you know, if miners, if pool operators want to pay out their miners with UTXOs that are valuable, they're going to mine the chain that the users, the ecosystem, the economic nodes want them to mine.

40:24Wicked:They work for the network. It's a thing that they do. So there was more than enough justification at that point to do a UASF. Jihon did not want the UASF. He did not want users activating SegWit. He was really against that. He did not want to set that precedent. So there's a lot of in between. A lot of things happened in between that and the activation of actual SegWit. But to make a long story short, he ended up bending the knee and he ran BIP91, which other pools ran BIP91, and then we instantly got 100 percent of signaling way before August 1st. We never even reached that flag date.

41:14Mr Hodl:Just to give you some context, you see that in the data right here. So the non-signaling blocks are these little gray lines, if you can even see them, right? Maybe I'll change the marker. So it's this gray, these gray boxes here. And basically, right after that meeting, you see virtually everyone stops signaling. Or sorry, everyone starts signaling, and all of the non-signaling blocks disappear. And that happened well before August 1st, which was in the next period. Yeah. So just some context there.

41:44Wicked:Yeah, and that was James Hillard doing. I mean, James Hillard went to Bitmain and basically he gave him an out and they took it. They took the out and then that's basically how we got segwayed and enforced. BIP 110 is nothing like that. BIP 110, besides a few loudmouths on Twitter and the cible of nodes, there really isn't any support. We don't have exchanges making comments about BIP 110. There's no one talking about it. the threshold that they set was 55%. And by the way, a 51 % attack is exactly what they want. If this gets, if somehow some magic unicorns are flying and they start giving fairy dust and this succeeds somehow, this would literally be a 51 % attack if this gets activated with 55%.

42:40Wicked:Do you see? It's not the same. It's completely different. The mechanism of activating is different. The reason of even doing it is completely different. The whole thing is different. And I view it as a literal attack, not as like, let's do this temporary and see what happens in another year. No, I think if you could upgrade Bitcoin, if you could change Bitcoin with 55 % hash rate, we got bigger problems. We got big problems in the future. That's not a good thing. But again, I think it's so unrealistic. If it was realistic, I will bet you anything that people would be talking about user rejected softworks.

43:29Wicked:You would have people talking about it from the mountaintops. But this is so unrealistic to the point where I'm kind of mad at myself that I have to come on here and do this because I really don't want to give any oxygen to it. But Mechanic has tried to distort history so bad that he may become anitutis. I mean, do you think it's the same? Do you think it's similar? No. The 55 % is one of the biggest issues I have with it because I think Segway was 95%. Taproot, I think, was 90%. It's like an overwhelming majority. 55 % is just not even close to that. But realistically, Wicked, what do you think will happen?

44:04Wicked:Do you think they will get anywhere close? Because as of right now, there's six or seven blocks that have actually signaled for this.

44:10Mr Hodl:Yeah, so I changed this dashboard to be looking at the BIP-110 signaling now. And so in stark contrast to SegWit, you see how sparse the blocks are coming in for BIP-110. Their highest signaling period had had seven blocks, which was the last period. And they got a little lucky and got two blocks early on in this period. But it's still nowhere near the threshold they're aiming for, which is 55 % or 1 ,109 blocks. I don't think they're going to reach that threshold. Even if they got all of Ocean's hash rate, for example, they'd be in the low dozens of blocks, right? Because it's a couple percent at most.

44:59Mr Hodl:So even if Ocean fully signaled, which, by the way, most Ocean miners are not, which is interesting and telling, but even if Ocean fully signaled, that wouldn't be anywhere close. I mean, what you really need is you need to coerce larger mining pools to come join you in order to get it over the threshold.

45:18Wicked:Which is definitely a possibility because this all started with if you're running a pre-30 Bitcoin core node, you're accomplice to criminals. Like it's I don't put it past them to have their lawyers write, you know, an email to some of these pools in the U.S. But even, you know, like even that, though, even if they go and they could somehow force foundry into mining BIP 110, signaling BIP 110, like in the next, like, you know, not maybe now, but like say in August or July. Foundry doesn't own those machines, right? Like, the only, at least from what my understanding, the only entity that actually owns the hash rate, the machines, is Maro.

46:12Wicked:And so they're about 5%.

46:15Mr Hodl:Well, they're the only ones who are solo mining. But you have large entities like Riot and other publicly traded companies that control their hash rate. They're just pointing at pools. Right.

46:25Wicked:But now, if you think, if you're Riot, you own Bitcoin, right? Like your whole business resolved around Bitcoin. And if you think this pool is going, because I'm pointing hash rate to this pool, the chances of Bitcoin being devalued becomes higher. I would rather stop mining than being forced to point hash rate at a pool where I know the value of mine. Yeah, you think it's an attack, right? You don't want to support an attack. An attack, yeah, of course. So if you're holding Bitcoin and you view this as an attack, and because you're an institutional miner and you have to point hash rate to a certain pool, and that pool is now being coerced into doing something that you think is an attack, you simply, you'd stop mining, you liquidate the machines, and you call it a day.

47:14Wicked:Like, you don't continue on with it. I mean, you don't even have to do that. You just point at a different pool.

47:19Mr Hodl:Well, but if you're a large miner, you might have some regulatory constraints. And so a lot of the reasons why they point at Foundry is because it ticks all the boxes. Right. And so it's hard as one of these large miners just to switch pools. No, no, no. I think it's what Mr. Hott was saying. No, no, no. You don't switch pools. Just turn your miners off.

47:36Wicked:You turn your rigs off. Yeah. You sell your machines. Yeah. If you're stacking Bitcoin, you sell the machines for more Bitcoin and you call it a day with the operation. Like when you just do it on a smaller scale or you stop mining in general. Like you just, you stop. You know, like that's kind of what I'm hoping happens. I mean, if you do hold Bitcoin and you are one of these institutional guys that is pointing cash rate to one of these pools and you think it's an attack, you stop mining. You don't switch, you just stop.

48:05Mr Hodl:You're saying if they're legally pressured and the option is mine on this fork that they believe to be an attack or shut off their rigs. Now, if they're not being legally pressured in a way that is going to coerce them, then the optimal result is just to ignore it.

48:20Wicked:Yeah, you would just ignore it.

48:21Mr Hodl:Which I think is the most likely outcome is that most mining pools, even the American ones, will probably just ignore this and then continue to mine.

48:29Wicked:But again, the pool themselves, the pool operators themselves could be all for it. But you have to convince the people that are pointing hash rate to your pool to continue pointing hash rate to your pool. That's what I mean by like the only ones on American soil that has the machines themselves that are like you could coerce into doing something is Mara. But the other ones are pools. They're not miners. I know that Mechanic is trying to change the definition of a miner. Oh, man, he did so many things. So since DatM came out, they're trying to change the definition of a miner. They're trying to tell you that it's not the person that owns the hash rate.

49:09Wicked:It's not the person that owns the machine who's the miner. It's the person that's constructing blocks. Okay, fine. But that has never been true in the history of Bitcoin. Since the launch of Bitcoin never has a person where they solo mine with their CPU, constructing their own blocks templates. What they were doing is whatever got into their mempool, that's what got mined. We trusted Satoshi Software to do that. That's what we did. They want to make you think if you're not selecting your own templates, if you're not creating your own templates, you're not a miner. Crazy. Absolutely crazy. um they're also we're in a world now where they could rent hash rate and because of dayton because of you have like sv2 you're able to use somebody else's hash rate someone else's miner and you can signal through your node yeah run it through your own node and that's what makes you a miner listen this is great technology mining is improved i'm not saying mining the mining pull software hasn't gotten better.

50:16Wicked:It's gotten better and that's fantastic. But in the end of the day, the person with the machine, if he's renting that machine to you or not, he is the miner. The guy with the hash power that has a say on where his hash power is going, he is the miner. You are just a person that's renting hash rate from that entity. That's all you're doing. and the fact now I want to be honest with you if we had these options in 2017 if Datum existed in 2017 there's probably a good chance that we would have gotten way way way over 20 % of the hash rate right from the get go right like there's but that was we didn't have that custom software that allowed you to like create your blockchain

51:04Mr Hodl:rent hash and signal with it yeah by the way these these most recent miners who have been signaling, so peer-to-peer money, roughnecks, and then store of value up here, I'm guessing these are rent-to-hash miners because I haven't heard of them before, whereas you have Barefoot Mining, who that's Bob's company. So he's obviously not a rent-to-hash miner, but you are seeing some blocks come in from this rented hash rate, which is interesting.

51:38Wicked:You should see it, right? I mean, if you're going to spend dollars that you could have gotten Bitcoin with, but instead you would rather go and buy some hashrate because you think it's more important for the health of the network to buy a hashrate, because if BIP110 doesn't succeed, Bitcoin's going to die, then you should start seeing more blocks that are being signaled by that group of people. But it's still not enough. Like, you know, if all of a sudden we saw 80 % of the network doing it, then okay, I get it. But we're not seeing that. Like, you know, we're not...

52:13Mr Hodl:It's very... Well, unfortunately, 80 % of the hash rate isn't up for rent. Yeah, there you go.

52:18Wicked:But help me understand what happened. Because like, it doesn't look like they're going to get 55%, but they're still going to do the user activate software anyway. Danny, that's the thing. That's the thing. I don't think they want to activate it through miners. I think the point of this is they wanted to activate with the UASF. They don't care about that.

52:38Mr Hodl:Can I talk through this real quick just technically? Because I think there's a lot of confusion around how soft forks activate, especially in regards to user-activated soft forks. When you're first trying to activate a soft fork, typically you give the miners a chance to reach some threshold to do a miner-activated soft fork. In the case of SegWit, they used BIP9, and it was a 95 % threshold. in the case of RDTS, they're using 55%, right? Or BIP 110, they're using 55 % threshold. So if the miners reach that threshold in any given period, if they mine that many blocks, then it gets locked in and activates.

53:18When the user activated, SaltFork kicks in

53:22Mr Hodl:is basically when you reach some sort of flag day. And in the case of SegWit, You had a flag day on August 1st. And in the case of BIP-110, they're not doing a particular day, but they're doing a particular block height. So it's called this mandatory signaling period. It starts at block height 9061, 632. And basically at this block height, all of the BIP-110 nodes begin rejecting any blocks that come in that are not signaling. So if you look at the version here, you see that little one that's orange. right if a block comes in and it doesn't have that one in the version then it gets rejected so that's the idea um and the problem is if you don't have enough blocks coming in that have the ones even when you start rejecting the ones that don't then you won't actually even get through this mandatory signaling period and you're not going to actually even reach the activation because the activation doesn't happen until first of all you get through this entire period then you get through the lock-in period and then activation starts roughly 4 ,000 blocks 4 ,032 blocks after this mandatory signaling period so if you have blocks just trickling in a few a day or whatever maybe a few more, maybe a dozen a day at most you're not going to get through these two periods to actually even reach activation before the chain is abandoned completely because it will have fallen so far behind the legacy chain that it won't even be worth championing anymore.

54:56Mr Hodl:You know what I'm saying?

54:58Wicked:So you think that they won't even reach the activation? You don't think they'll ever actually do this?

55:03Mr Hodl:No, because, so, you know, again, as soon as you reach this block height, 961, 632, okay, this is when mandatory signaling starts. So even if they're lucky, and let's say they get lucky, they get the first block signaling. support. There's no chain split. The legacy miners and the legacy nodes are still following this new block that has the new rules. To them, it just looks like, oh, this is just an ocean block that has more restrictive rules, whatever. We're going to accept it. We accept all these ocean blocks anyways. These blocks are most likely already running BIP 110, so they're not accepting larger op returns and that type of thing.

55:44Mr Hodl:It's not like we can't accept these. We accept them, And then all the legacy nodes and miners just, well, the legacy miners just start building off of that. And so as soon as a legacy miner finds a block on top of the BIP110 block, that's when you get the split. And one of the interesting things about this dynamic is that the legacy side always starts with a one block lead, right? Because the BIP110 side, their blocks are accepted by the legacy side. So at best, they're even, but at worst, they're behind by a bunch, and they always start behind by one block, which is a huge advantage when you're talking about a hash rate split, which is blown out.

56:28Mr Hodl:If you have less than 10 % signaling support for BIP-110 or even fewer, because it's probably going to be less than 1%, when you get a one block lead on the legacy side, it basically blows out very quickly. and you might crunch through 100 blocks on the legacy side and only a few blocks have trickled in on the BIP-110 side. And I think by then, maybe within even a day or two, you'll see the BIP-110 people fold and say, well, it's not worth... Well, that's the question.

56:56Wicked:Going forward. That's the big question. I remember NVK a couple of years ago, I had a thing with him where she basically felt that they weren't even going to attempt a software. And I had a pretty good idea that they were going to attempt it. Like, why wouldn't they? The only question I had was, what are they going to do after the soft fork doesn't succeed? That's the main question. That's the big question. When you ask a mechanic or when you ask any one of these Bit.1 10 supporters, they don't have an answer for you. There's no answer. Well, the people that ran Bit.148 nodes, honestly thought that the network was in danger, really in danger.

57:37Wicked:It might have been different story if the subsidy was a lot lower, but we had a pretty high subsidy at that point. And there was no reason why Antpool or YBTC needed to stop mining empty blocks, especially when they had covert ASIC boosts. There was no reason for them to stop doing what they were doing. This is different. Once this fails, they're going to have to make a decision. Do we continue on and compete against Bitcoin? Are we going to be a minority fork? Which means they're going to have to add replay protection, which means they're going to have to either lower the difficulty or change the hashing algorithm.

58:19Wicked:This is something that Luke wanted to do for a very long time. Or maybe even merge mine with Bitcoin. There could be a lot of different ways to keeping a minority chain alive. But they're going to have to flat out say, okay, this is what we're going to do but to date and every time i ask them what happened what's the plan if this doesn't succeed you should have a plan they don't no one has an answer like they don't they don't tell you what's going to happen because they don't know they have no idea i have a feeling that nothing's going to happen and this is literally going to be a non-event um it's going to come and go but it would be interesting the right thing to do it would be like you know just call it a day but and compete.

59:03Wicked:But I don't think that's what they're going to do. They're just going to continue after it fails. We're going to continue hearing how we have to start a new software with different rules. We have to continue doing something until something sticks.

59:17Mr Hodl:Or you'll get something like BIP 149, where you just extend the activation.

59:21Wicked:Yeah, maybe something like that. And then we just have to hear more bickering for longer.

59:26Mr Hodl:For the next year.

59:28Wicked:Yeah. I mean, you saw a hint at something then, Ms. Tuttle, which like that was kind of my guess is that maybe if this doesn't get through the activation period and they do decide to fork that they will like Luke said he wants to fire the miners do you think that that has any chance you think they will just completely fork off and have their own new algorithm if Ocean didn't exist if there was no Ocean yeah he would have fired the miners a long time ago um but unfortunately for him he gets paid um his salary relies on shots with six miners so firing the very miners that actually give you a salary it's going to be a tough thing to do so i don't know i have no idea what they're gonna do i don't i don't think they can i don't think they're in a position to fire the miners um because of what mechanic mechanics jobs like luke's a mechanic's job they work for ocean ocean is a shot 256 mining pool um so you're gonna have a hard time firing the guys that are paying your salary.

1:00:30Mr Hodl:You could resign from Ocean if you thought. If you think ultimately that Bitcoin with SHA-256 is compromised or hijacked and you put yourself in Luke's head, maybe it's not worth working for Ocean and being on that chain anymore. He might just resign from that and then start his own chain. I don't know.

1:00:50Wicked:Maybe. I'm not speculating. Do you think we make a mistake by even talking about this? If you think it's as inconsequential as it's going to be like a nothing-bother, should we just not even be talking about this? Danny, that was my main thing of why I didn't want to talk about, even you having Mechanic on. The more we give this, the more oxygen we give it, the more they have a chance of making it. It still wouldn't succeed. I don't think it will ever succeed, but they could make you more interesting.

1:01:20Mr Hodl:Yeah, I don't think it matters.

1:01:20Wicked:Yeah, I don't think it really matters, honestly, at the end of the day, but it's it's just an unnecessary drama. But the reason I wanted to come out was because this fucking guy was just flat out just making up things from UASF in 2017 and he's trying to correlate that these two things are the same. That this is going to succeed because BIP-148 succeeded. Like, are you kidding me? It's completely different scenarios, completely different thresholds, completely different, like, everything. So that was my main purpose of coming on. But I'm with you. I don't know. Like, I maybe release it after.

1:01:56Mr Hodl:I think it's important. I mean, I think that the failure of this user-activated soft fork is historically relevant and actually, you know, hardens Bitcoin's consensus, at least the way that we think about it, right? Because if we prove, I mean, what we've seen in the past is, okay, you know, you had this movement, BIP-148, that may have contributed to pushing SegWit over the edge and getting it activated. Great. So, you know, the network users and the economic nodes are in control and they can push through updates. That's a great thing for Bitcoin and its consensus. But now on the other side of the coin, you have a minority, like an economic minority, right?

1:02:44Mr Hodl:A loud minority who are trying to push through a change. and when they fail, that's also good for Bitcoin. It shows that it can't be hijacked by a small group of people. So I think it's actually relevant to talk about it. It's relevant to track it, which is why I built this dashboard. And I think when it fails, it's actually bullish for Bitcoin.

1:03:03Wicked:I keep saying that this is... I don't want them to stop doing it. For a long time, I had BIP110 on my Twitter handle thing. I think this will be a great learning lesson for a lot of people. I think people are going to learn how Bitcoin works from this. I don't think it's a bad thing. I only think it's a bad thing with how they're framing it. Like, I think if you don't agree with Bitcoin Core, you should compete against them, right? Like, I don't think that's such a bad thing. That's fine. Go ahead and compete. Where it gets dicey is when you start making shit up and then you start comparing the two things that they're, because you label this UASF and BIP-148 was UASF, they're not the same.

1:03:46Wicked:They're not remotely the same. But just bamboozling people, thinking that they have some certain power, or just false framing of what a node is, why you run one, what's the point of running one. Just a bunch of things that he's been saying, they're just lies, wrong, flat out wrong. So, I mean, that's definitely important to correct. But I think the more oxygen we get, I mean, it would be good to talk about after it fails, I think. Like, you know, like, go back to it. But I don't know, man. I really don't have an opinion. I think it's going to fail regardless. I just think that the shit that he was saying is just crazy, crazy talk.

1:04:31Mr Hodl:I would maybe just say real quick, if you don't mind. So, you know, I have this expected fork time on this dashboard, this KPI at the top right here. So if you want to stay up that night, assuming where you are in the world, This is UTC, so it's probably going to be pretty early for most people. You can watch as they fork off. But, you know, that's when everything kind of comes to a head is early August.

1:04:57Wicked:That's when you get the popcorn out. All right, well, this conversation is going to be put to bed now. Maybe HODL will do one after. But I wanted to ask you, Wicked, because I saw you tweeting about it this morning. What did you think about Saylor selling Bitcoin?

1:05:15Mr Hodl:Yeah, I mean, it's, what was it, like 0.004 % of strategy stack. So I, you know, I compared it to if someone was holding one Bitcoin, and they said, I'm never going to sell any Bitcoin, but then they sold like 3000 sats. I mean, that's basically the equivalent here. So it's pretty much a nothing burger. I think even in the last call, he said he was going to inoculate the market by selling a little Bitcoin. And I think that's basically what he's doing right now. He's giving the market a little vaccine just to make sure that they know that it's possible for him to sell it. But at the moment, it's really nothing bigger.

1:05:54Wicked:Didn't he sell Bitcoin in 2017? In 2020?

1:05:59Mr Hodl:In 2022. Yeah, he sold like 900 Bitcoin or something like that. So, yeah, it's not like he hasn't sold Bitcoin before.

1:06:07Wicked:He's just testing liquidity. But the interesting thing there is, why is he trying to signal this to the market? Do you think it means that he's going to start selling Bitcoin in real size in the future?

1:06:19Mr Hodl:I heard something about S &P inclusion. And there might be some reasons around that. You have to show willingness to move around your Bitcoin and sell some and buy some. I don't know if that's true or not. But I think he's just trying to be a better buyer and seller of Bitcoin and time markets and do all sorts of crazy shit. I mean, I don't know. You've said before, Danny, on your show that you don't really think this strategy works long term because eventually fiat dies. And so you can't really play these fiat games in the far, far future. But in the meantime, you can play the fiat games and you can try to arbitrage fiat while stacking more Bitcoin.

1:07:09Mr Hodl:And so he's just finding more and more creative ways to do that.

1:07:12Wicked:So you're thinking this is really just a bit of a nothing burger?

1:07:14Mr Hodl:Yeah, I mean, it's such a little amount, it doesn't really matter.

1:07:17Wicked:It's all a bunch of nothing burgers.

1:07:20Mr Hodl:Everything's a nothing burger. Let me know when he sells more Bitcoin than he buys in any given quarter. That's when you pay attention. That maybe would be a better signal. Yeah. That's if he's buying all that Bitcoin. Mr. Hoddle said if he's buying Bitcoin at all. Yeah, show me the Bitcoin on chain. You don't actually believe that, right, Hoddle?

1:07:38Wicked:You don't believe he's not actually buying Bitcoin? No, no, no. I definitely think he's buying Bitcoin, but I think that there's a lot of exaggeration at play. I refuse to believe the amount of Bitcoin that he's saying he's buying is the real amount. Wait, so you don't think he has like 850 ,000 Bitcoin or whatever he says he has? No, I don't think he has 850 ,000 Bitcoin. He definitely has hundreds of thousands. I'm not saying that, but I don't think it's$850 ,000.

1:08:04Mr Hodl:I would take the other side of that bet. I mean, there's no way that he's buying that much Bitcoin and then not requiring Coinbase and his other custodians to segregate it and then show him the addresses where it's held and then checking it himself. I mean, I think strategy is probably running their own nodes. They're probably checking all of the addresses where the Bitcoin's held.

1:08:25Wicked:Coinbase could show you an address with Bitcoin in it, but how do you know?

1:08:29Mr Hodl:Yeah, but the other thing is, it's your strategy and you're the largest entity holding Bitcoin.

1:08:38Wicked:I've seen a lot of big regulator entities in the space go down for these exact things. They were saying they were doing what they really weren't doing. So I just don't believe anyone anymore.

1:08:48Mr Hodl:I'd imagine that he's checking notes with other entities, other institutions, making sure that there's no overlap.

1:08:54Wicked:It's Coinbase, man. Remember, Coinbase was stuck with dust UTXOs, millions of dollars in dust UTXOs that they couldn't move for like six months. So I don't put anything past them.

1:09:07Mr Hodl:Yeah, but again, as a relative percentage, I mean, millions of dollars sounds like a lot to us, but as a relative percentage, you're talking about 0.001 % of what they're in control of. So I mean, I think even numbers like that don't really matter.

1:09:19Wicked:No, but dude, that's at the price of Bitcoin back then. If they kept having those dust transactions and they never consolidated, it would have been way more than a few million dollars in the future. You have to know how to treat Bitcoin's UTXO model. And Coinbase, at least at that point, had no idea how to treat Bitcoin's UTXO model. I think that's the key point, though, at that point. I'm sure they've got better processes now. Yeah, me too. I can't see Zaylen not owning that Bitcoin. Like, yeah, that would be a very large scale fraud if that was not the case.

1:09:53Mr Hodl:There's no way he's not checking it. I mean, I don't know. I'm not really buying it. Also, you have on-chain sleuths like Sani, you know, giving what they believe to be the addresses where the Bitcoin's being held and it kind of, you know, matches up pretty well. I don't know. I mean, I'm not convinced. You can't fully trust it because, you know, it's like if it's not being put out there as proof of reserves and it's difficult to 100 % trust but it's also, I don't think there's any reason to believe that they don't have it.

1:10:21Wicked:Now that Cash App did a proof of reserves River did a proof of reserve Kraken's done a proof of reserve at this point it's kind of shady if you're not doing a proof of reserve. Yeah, I did an interview with Jeff Walton from Strive the other day and I asked him about proof of reserves I have no idea why you wouldn't do it It's such an easy lift. Like it's not that, like these are huge companies that could very easily afford to put a team on that and get it spun up in like a week. Like I don't understand why you wouldn't do it. But he just said the market doesn't demand it. Like no one has.

1:10:52Mr Hodl:One reason could be if you're kind of buying Bitcoin through shady entities because you're buying so much that you need to go OTC and kind of get it from shady places. That might be a reason. But I don't know. That's speculation.

1:11:09Wicked:Interesting. Right. I've got to go. I have a dinner, but I'm very glad we finally did the podcast hodl. Wicked, awesome to meet you. Yes, thank you. Tell Peter I said hello. I will do. After this fails, let's have another chat. Let's go. We can do one in person, maybe. Alright, yeah. If you're in New York, let me know. Alright, thanks, guys.

1:11:43Thank you.