{ "episodeId": "SLP229", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "john_newbery": { "name": "John Newbery", "role": "guest", "tag": "JOHN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:10", "start": 9.77, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast. Today, for episode two hundred and twenty-nine, John Newbery joins me to talk about his new Bitcoin research and development center, Brink. For those of you who don't know, John is a regular Bitcoin core contributor. He works on Bitcoin Optech. He started PR Review Club and he mentors new Bitcoin core developers. This show brought to you by swanbitcoin dot com, the best place to auto stack your Bitcoin in the US with incredibly easy setup and low fees. Swan recently announced availability in New York, so they are now available in all fifty US states. 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You can also buy Bitcoin through their OTC desk, and this is great also for self- Directed Bitcoin retirement accounts and for companies moving Bitcoin to treasury, Unchained offer advanced business accounts, OTC desk and concierge service to help you move your corporate treasury to Bitcoin where your team controls the private keys. Check them out and enter code LIVERA when ordering a concierge onboarding service to get fifty dollars off. Go to unchained-dashcapital dot com. John, welcome to the show. Hi Stefan, it's good to be here. So, John, I hear you are back in London now, and, you've got a new, project that you're working on. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, being back in London now?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "03:06", "start": 185.66, "text": "yeah, it's something that I've been planning for a while. I, I moved away from the UK about ten years ago, and, it's been on the cards for a, a little while now, and then twenty twenty happened, and it felt" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "03:22", "start": 202.05, "text": "For a couple of months now, and, as you know, Chaincode is fully based in the office there in New York, so I've left Chaincode and I'm setting up my own project to work on Bitcoin protocol development." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:34", "start": 213.9, "text": "Great, so tell us a little bit about the, project here." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "03:39", "start": 218.67, "text": "Yeah, it's, it's called Brink, and that name should be familiar to, to Bitcoiners, from our, from our heritage. And the aim of the organization is to fund open source Bitcoin protocol development, whether that's base layer Bitcoin or layer two protocols. we'll do that in a couple of ways. One is funding independent developers through grants, and the second is onboarding new developers through a fellowship program, where people who want to work on Bitcoin, who have the, the Talents and potential to make big contributions, will come to Brink for a year-long program, learn all about contributing to Bitcoin Core and other Bitcoin projects. and then after that, they should be well, well positioned to go and make some really impactful contributions." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:25", "start": 264.75, "text": "Great. So is this, I presume then, this is gonna be set up as a physical office then in London?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "04:30", "start": 269.71, "text": "That's right, yeah, the grants will be for anyone anywhere in the world, so they'll be, distributed independently. The fellowship program will be out of the office here in London." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:41", "start": 280.67, "text": "Great. And so just in terms of motivations, perhaps could you spell out why you saw the need for this kind of organization?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "04:50", "start": 290.04, "text": "Yeah, a couple of things. one is the funding side. So I think Bitcoin, well, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin in general is a pretty unique project in the way that it is so decentralized. There are a lot of open source projects, but most of them are centralized into one single foundation or sponsored by a single corporation. Bitcoin is pretty special that we don't want that to happen. We want the development of the protocol and the development of the implementations of that protocol to be decentralized. So Bitcoin Core is worked on by, you know, people out of MIT, people out of Chaincode, Blockstream, Square Crypto, Digi, and then a whole host of independent, contributors. Brink is another model for funding developers, and I think that's really important and healthy for the Bitcoin developer ecosystem to have more and diverse ways of funding development on this project." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "05:50", "start": 349.99, "text": "Brink is-- Brink will be a 501c3, so we'll be able to accept donations from individuals that will be tax exempt in the US, or at least that's the plan. We've, we've put in the application for 501c3 status, and we expect to get it. so again, that's slightly different from the other models. you know, Square Crypto is a public company, MIT is an academic institution, Chaincode is a, a private organization, none of these organizations are taking funding from the general public So that's, again, something that's different about Brink, and I think that's important that, you know, we, we have that diversity of funding. And the other aspect is, We will be doing onboarding as a, a central part of our mission. So, I, I've always done a lot of mentoring of new contributors to the project. You know, I've done the residency at Chaincode, run, run that for a couple of years, started the PR review club, had interns, mentored a lot of people informally, and I think for the long term health of the Bitcoin project, you know, having new developers come into the project is really important, and it's a very steep learning curve, so, you know, having those pathways for people who want want to contribute but don't have the experience, that's something that we'll be doing at Brink." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:05", "start": 424.6, "text": "Yeah, it sounds very cool, and, from my earlier discussions with Steve Lee of Square Crypto, he has mentioned as well this idea that it'd be nice to have more and more different organizations that have their own different way of contributing to Bitcoin and other related protocols and the development of that. I'm curious from your perspective, how many development organizations do you believe Bitcoin needs? Or do you just think it's like more is better?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "07:32", "start": 452.29, "text": "I think generally more is better, you know, I don't think there's a magic number, but if you think about Bitcoin's robustness against threats, having a decentralized model where you have diverse locations, juris-jurisdictions of- Organizations that are developing Bitcoin, a, a diverse model of funding, diverse models of organization, the more diversity you get, I think, the more, robust you are against different threats, and we want Bitcoin development to be decentralized, so, you know, adding more can only help, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:09", "start": 488.85, "text": "Got it. And also different organizations may have different priorities in terms of what they are focused on, and, you know, there may be some that are more focused on design or light- Lightning or different other things. So I suppose from a Brink perspective, is there anything there in terms of how you would be prioritizing Bitcoin or, or other related protocols, development?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "08:34", "start": 514.05, "text": "That really depends on the people that we get and the, the projects that we award grants to. Personally, I work on Bitcoin Core, I work a lot on code quality and testing and Making sure that we don't have bugs, that'll be, you know, very central to, the mentoring that I give new people who come through Brink. But, you know, if there are people who want to work on Lightning, that's great. If there are people who want to work on other layer two contracting protocols, that's also great. it, it really depends on the, the personalities, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:10", "start": 549.73, "text": "So, with Brink, who else is involved, if you can share that as?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "09:14", "start": 553.93, "text": "Yeah, so I'm setting up with Mike Schmidt Who I've worked with at Optech. he's, he's done great work at Optech and, you know, I can throw work at him and he, he gets it done. he's the company secretary and, and co-founder. and then we're both on the board and we have a third independent board member and that's Dave Harding, who's been around in Bitcoin forever and knows more about the technical details of Bitcoin than probably anyone else on the planet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:44", "start": 583.93, "text": "Yeah, certainly I've, enjoyed, reading some of his work Work with, some of his summaries and things, So, I guess, in terms of your role then, what would your role be?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "09:57", "start": 596.96, "text": "I'm the director, so I'm, I'm both on the executive team, and also on the board. And so we, we, we have the, the executive team is me and Mike, and the board is the two of us plus Dave Harting, and we'll be expanding the board with more independent directors, you know, as, as soon as we can." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:14", "start": 613.81, "text": "Talking about funding in the space As you mentioned, there are a range of different funding sources. Sometimes those are like a benefactor model, in other cases it's organizations, in other cases it's an exchange who's just funding an individual, and in other cases it might be more like Patreon or GitHub sponsors style. So perhaps you could just chat a little bit about the difference then with Brink, I guess, you're soliciting individual donations and perhaps, other- You know, Bitcoin companies might choose to support you as well, right? I guess that's, that's the model." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "10:51", "start": 651.02, "text": "That's the model, yeah. So, we'll be soliciting donations from both hodlers and organizations. we're launching, as we record, we're launching next week, so that'll be November 24th. I don't know exactly when this will go out, we, we may have already launched by the time people hear this. and in our launch, we have partnerships with a few organizations who have already committed to fund, either grants or fellowship programs through us, Our initial funding was provided by John Peffer and Vences Casares, who have both been very generous with their funding of Bitcoin over the years, so they put in the initial funding that, that pays my wages and pays the admin costs of getting this thing set up, and then any additional funding beyond that goes directly to our grant and fellowship programs." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:43", "start": 702.74, "text": "I'm, I'm interested to chat about, any of your, priorities around development, as you mentioned, you're interested in- p-code quality, testing, bugs. I know there is also, a general drive towards this idea of modularizing Bitcoin core code. So can you tell us a little bit about that, i-what that is?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "12:03", "start": 723.48, "text": "Yeah, well, when Satoshi wrote Bitcoin core version zero dot one, they were presumably working alone and trying to get something complete and out the door, and consequently, there was not much architectural structure to, you know, the- The initial version of Bitcoin Core, and that's fine, that's not a criticism, it's merely an observation. you know, everything was in a single file, or almost everything was in a single file, and there wasn't good separation between the different- components or functions. And over time, as the project has matured and we've had more contributors join the project, there's been an effort to modularize different components and different functionality so that there are clear boundaries and interfaces between those components. and this is really helpful, it's really helpful for de-developers to build a conceptual model of what is doing what in the codebase. It's really good for testing, it's really good for debugging. Debugging problems. If you have spaghetti code that's reaching into other components, it becomes very difficult to reason about and bugs hide in those kind of fuzzy gray areas between components. So Taking the system, breaking it apart into really well-defined functional areas and having clean interfaces between those is a really good way to improve the project and reduce the risk of bugs. So we're moving that direction. It takes a long time because we're very careful about what we do in Bitcoin Core and we don't want to break anything, but I hope, I hope we'll make some really good progress over the next year or two. and two areas that I'm looking at specifically are the bound- Between our net layer and that layer is responsible for opening connections to other peers, you know, reading bytes and writing bytes into sockets that get sent over the wire, that low level stuff, and net processing, which is the layer above that, which does the kind of application logic of receiving peer-to-peer messages and acting on those messages. So that's one boundary. It's one of the most important boundaries in the Bitcoin core codebase, and then another very important boundary is between net processing, that layer that's processing those application messages, and validation, which is our kind of consensus engine. so for example, if you, if you think about receiving a block from, for your Bitcoin node, it'll come in as bytes on the wire, and that'll get received by net and get parsed into a, a message type, and then that message will get passed up into net processing That sees that it's a block message and knows how to process that kind of application message, and then the block itself will get passed from net processing up into validation, which does all of the consensus validation and checks that it's a valid block and has the right proof of work and the transactions are valid and advances the tip of the blockchain if it's valid. So that, that layer between net processing and validation is also really critical and having a, a clear separation there is, is very important. Carl Dong is working on that, and I hope that we'll make progress On, on cleaning up that interface as well over the next year." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:15", "start": 914.58, "text": "So in terms of things that are currently, quote unquote, in-- or that are in Bitcoin Core, what sort of things actually should be taken, let's say, out of Bitcoin Core or kind of packaged alongside it but not directly inside Bitcoin Core, if you're, if you get what I'm asking?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "15:32", "start": 931.81, "text": "I do get what you're asking, yeah. So you can think about Bitcoin Core as composed of three main, like, top level, high level components. There's the node software, and that does all of the, the networking, the consensus, the validation, all of that stuff. Everything I was talking about just now is all within that node software. There's also a wallet included within Bitcoin Core, and you can think of that as a separate, Separate components. It runs in the same process, but there's a project to split it out, so it's running in a different process with its own memory, and the wallet receives notifications from the node saying, \"I've received this block, I've received this transaction.\" And the wallet looks at those blocks and transactions and tries to determine whether it is interested in those transactions, whether it's a transaction that is sending funds to an address that it owns or sending funds away from an address that it owns. So those are two components, and then the third Component you can think about is the GUI, Bitcoin QT, which is the graphical user interface that, people can use to interface with both the wallet and the node. So you could imagine a future where those three different high-level components are broken out into separate projects. you know, I, I don't know whether we'll do that, but I think it, it could be a Good thing to do in the future, partly because people working on those different things have different skill sets and different priorities. Like the, the skill required to make a nice user-friendly interface is very different from the skills required to make a consensus-critical, application, and again, very different from the skills needed to create a wallet. And so you can imagine those three, three things being split out and worked on by different teams, and again, having a, a well- Well-defined interface between the node and the wallet and between the node and the GUI, such that those things can be worked on, you know, semi-independently. you could also imagine a future where someone implements a different wallet that is backed by Bitcoin Core and uses that same well-defined interface. You know, I don't know if that will happen, but, you know, that, that might be a good future to aim for." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:43", "start": 1063.02, "text": "Right. It seems, I know, there is the Nunchuk project by, Hugo Nguyen, and I think he, he mentioned something Have a, a, a like his multi-signature wallet that directly uses a lot of Bitcoin Core code, and I know, also Specter Wallet does, does via RPC into Bitcoin Core, but I guess, yeah, those are slightly separate, but in terms of things like, the wallet, as an example, As I understand, there's, you know, there's work being done on things like hardware wallet interface and having that work kind of more easily and trying to do things like, you know, maybe have your hardware wallet directly work with Bitcoin Core in a way that's kind of easier for the user, but it seems that, you know, some of these, there's, there's work being done in these directions, but it, it just takes a lot of time for kind of progress, and then so in practice, what happens is people are using applications that call into Bitcoin Core, right?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "18:43", "start": 1123.0, "text": "Yeah, that's right. and I think modularizing and potentially spreading out the project would be helpful there, because they are by the nature different, different projects and different styles of projects, and they should potentially be run in different ways. We want the core node software to be pretty slow moving, I'd say, in terms of changes to its interfaces, and we wanna be very careful about changes there. The wallet is more of a user-facing application, and obviously we wanna be careful That we don't lose money, you know, don't write bugs that lose people money, but it could probably move at a faster tempo and potentially have more frequent releases. having different implementations of wallets backed by Bitcoin Core would be useful because maybe someone wants an enterprise, enterprise grade wallet backed by Bitcoin Core, someone wants a, a Lightning wallet backed by Bitcoin Core, someone wants a very bare bones, low feature set wallet backed by Bitcoin Core, and they could all use the same interface potentially. And then the GUI again, is something different again. it's currently written in QT, which is okay, it does the job, but I don't think anyone would argue that Bitcoin Core has a beautiful interface, and maybe another team might be able to implement something that's beautiful and people want to use. So I think, I think there's a lot of potential there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:03", "start": 1203.41, "text": "Yeah. and in terms of second layer, Lightning or others, perhaps, you know, DLT, smart contracting and other things like that, are there any other things that you're, I guess, interested in to support, maybe not from you personally developing, but from an organization perspective, things that you would be interested to see or interested to fund?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "20:26", "start": 1225.99, "text": "Yeah, certainly, any, any Bitcoin related technology, any like protocol Work that is Bitcoin or Bitcoin adjacent, definitely be open to funding." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:37", "start": 1236.74, "text": "How about, some other areas like, for example, privacy in the Bitcoin space? Is that, is that, an area that you would see, you know, Brink could be, putting development effort or time or funding into?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "20:51", "start": 1250.85, "text": "Yes, a-and it's a very wide subject, privacy and Bitcoin. You can argue a lot of things are good for privacy and Bitcoin, in mo-most, most development work You could kind of twist around and say this is good for privacy, but in general, like making, making the nodes less fingerprintable is good for privacy, using technologies like Schnorr and Taproot and making those easy to use is good for privacy. there's lots of areas where privacy can be improved, and yes, we'll certainly be working on those." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:26", "start": 1285.65, "text": "What about in the, in the area of, let's say, mining? that might be an area where- and I guess the reason I'm asking is there's, there's been a little bit of recent chatter about one particular mining organization, and I think they were small as well, but there was this kind of- Threat that the mining organization would be trying to censor transactions that involved addresses or transactions coming from an address that's listed on the OFAC sanctions list and things like that. So I'm wondering in your mind, are there any things that you would like to see from a mining perspective that would, improve, Bitcoin's, censorship resistance and, that kind of quality?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "22:09", "start": 1328.91, "text": "Mining isn't something that I've looked at very much recently. I know that Matt Corallo was working on BetterHash, that I think became part of Stratum v2, which would allow the individual miners in a pool to do their own transaction selection, which I think would be, be good for this, because a single pool couldn't censor a transaction or a class of transactions. more mining decentralization would be good for this, because if there's one mining pool that accounts for five or ten percent of blocks and they're censoring a transaction It's not necessarily a problem because all of the other miners will be mining that transaction and the censoring pool is simply leaving money on the table for the other miners. You know, it's not good for Bitcoin, but it's not The end of the world and it's not gonna destroy Bitcoin's frontability, I think, if just a small number of miners are doing this." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:06", "start": 1385.92, "text": "Yeah, I see. So in your view, it's, it's, it could potentially be a thing that some mining organizations or perhaps mine-- this would probably be at the pool level, right? and but, but I guess in your view, that wouldn't necessarily be a showstopper issue because there'd just be enough other mining pools that aren't censoring, transactions. But I suppose there is that- That potential risk there, that, you know, let's say, you know, the price runs up further, it becomes more important, governments now start to try to, maybe try to impose control at the mining pool layer, maybe that, is, something to be wary of. What do you think? Yes," }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "23:47", "start": 1426.66, "text": "yeah, certainly. You know, we, we, we hope to build a system with Bitcoin that is incentive compatible, and if we are relying on certain governments not taking actions, then Bitcoin as an incentive compatible system has perhaps failed. the incentives here are If a miner is leaving transactions out of its blocks, then the fees attached to those transactions should incentivize other miners to include them in the block. and as long as mining is decentralized One would hope that that would be enough to make the system robust against this kind of thing, unless there's a 5% takeover of mining power by A hostile actor, but the whole point of Bitcoin is we're trying to build a system that is, robust against this kind of thing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:41", "start": 1481.1, "text": "Right. And I guess we're not relying on the good graces, of, certain individuals or companies or governments to not intervene. And I, I guess to the point you were making also, and I think people like Eric Voskilled have been quite vocal about this idea that, okay, in, in that world, in order to keep Bitcoin censorship resistant, you would have to pay a bigger transaction fee, Such that your transaction would still be mined by some kind of mining pool, operator, because, you know, that maybe they have to operate in secret or they have to operate in some other jurisdiction such that they aren't being clamped down on by the government of that area, that kind of thing." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "25:20", "start": 1520.26, "text": "Yeah, perhaps, perhaps. but if the, yeah, if the transaction is attaching a fee, then that is an incentive for a miner somewhere in the world, to, to mine that transaction." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:35", "start": 1534.54, "text": "Right, and I think the other aspect when we're talk-- when we're talking about censorship, I think, so this, I guess this gets a bit more complicated and a bit more technical, but people talk about this quote-unquote idea of taint, right? And saying, \"Oh, see, that transaction is tainted, or this, you know, coins at this address, and so on.\" And it gets quite technical, but I think the point is, it's-- I don't know how sustainable it is to actually have tainting, because sooner or later every coin will get tainted, or it Just move it out of that address to another address, and it just kind of, it feels a little bit like some of the rules are almost fitting this old sort of square peg into a round hole when people might move them around or people might do coin join, and then it's kind of like, how would the censorship work if the miner doesn't know which exact transaction to censor? So I guess it's, it's probably a bit of an open question there, unless you've got any thoughts on that?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "26:29", "start": 1588.74, "text": "Well, the coin analysis companies need to sell their product somehow, so they, they have some- Retains and they, they sell that and I guess the, compliance people at exchanges need to spend the money somehow and they do that, but you're right, there, there are techniques for, you know, mixing and moving coins around and if it's widely known that a taint, taint of a coin lasts for four hops from that coin while you make five transactions into mixers and your, your coin's no longer tainted. And, and as the technology improves, as we get Schnorr signatures and Taproot and, you know, better mixing and better fungibility on the base layer, and then layer two technologies like Lightning, which are Potentially privacy enhancing, it just becomes more difficult to enforce this thing until it's impossible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:21", "start": 1641.2, "text": "Right, and, hopefully, the-- so after the Taproot soft fork, there, there might be interest and hopefully some developers, would be interested to work on the signature aggregation one, which would also help, With the CoinJoin incentive for people to use these kinds of privacy techniques, because right now, I guess it, it's like there is a cost, and so there is a trade-off here for people who want to be private. And, you know, I guess the reality is, whether we like it or not, most people in Bitcoin are here for the number go up, right? So, it's like until it kind of gets to a point where maybe the privacy isn't costing You know, that much more, and, and perhaps in fairness, this is more like in a high fee environment. In a low fee environment, perhaps it's not as much of an issue, but that's, I guess that's, one thing. And also while we're on this topic, I know you were recently tweeting about some issues you had with, getting a bank account and AML laws. Tell us a little bit about what happened there." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "28:23", "start": 1702.59, "text": "Oh, it's just very difficult to get a bank account if you are running a business that is, doesn't fit categories, I guess. the thing is, you don't know why your bank account has been frozen or closed. It's a system where, the com-compliance at these banks flags a transaction as, you know, potentially, suspects, and potentially that goes to the regulators, and they potentially say, that the account should be closed or even internally within the bank that happens. And by law, they're not allowed to tell you that they're investigating you or they've- Raised your transaction as suspicious, 'cause that counts as tipping off. so you open a bank account for your business, if you can open a bank account, someone will just say no, and you receive a transaction, and they block that transaction, and then what happened to me was I, I opened an account in the UK for, setting up this business. I received transactions from my first two donors, those got blocked, they sat there for two weeks blocked, they wouldn't tell me what was going on, those transact- Transactions got reverted and the bank account got shut down, and the decision is final and there's no right to appeal. and that's how, that's how the banking system works. You, you haven't-- I haven't done anything wrong, I'm trying to start a business and employ people and, Make a living, and my bank account was shut down. In the US, we are on, I think, our third or fourth bank trying to open an account. I think we finally managed to do that. but this happens all across the, the Bitcoin industry ecosystem. Companies find it very difficult to open bank accounts." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:05", "start": 1805.31, "text": "Yeah, and in my understanding, it's, they have typically had it a little bit easier with some of the more Bitcoin-focused banks and things like Silvergate and so on, but with many of the traditional banks, it's just been difficult and people are just getting their accounts shut down or transactions blocked and- you know, obviously Bitcoin, has been designed to help us get around some of these issues, but I, I can understand that for some donors, they would like to donate in fiat money, not in Bitcoin, and so that's, obviously gonna be, for some time to come, that's gonna be, a hurdle that we all have to face, right?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "30:49", "start": 1848.65, "text": "Yeah, I hope one day Bitcoin will kind of wash all of this stuff away, but right now running a nonprofit, it would be irresponsible of me to keep my working capital in, in something like Bitcoin, which can go up and go down in the short run. you know, our expenses are in dollars or fiat, the, the expenses of paying employees and paying for offices and paying lawyers and accountants and all of that stuff, so I can't keep all of my working capital in, in Bitcoin. I need to be plugged into the banking system and it's-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:21", "start": 1880.65, "text": "Back to the show in a moment after a message for the sponsors of the show. Knox is a Bitcoin custodian dedicated to ensuring their insurance protection covers the full value of their customers' assets. For example, suppose a fiduciary wants to hold two hundred and fifty million dollars of Bitcoin with Knox. Knox will seek to obtain two hundred and fifty million dollars of insurance dedicated exclusively to that account and adjustable to volatility, no fractional coverage or narrow scope, insurance for what it's worth, a tool to transfer risk. Also So make sure you check out Alex's recent post on the site. So if you are a Bitcoin company, investment fund, trust, or family office, check out Knox for your insured custody. That website is knoxcustody dot com. And finally, HodlHodl, the peer-to-peer exchange, now with a new lending platform, Global Anonymous, and using Bitcoin multisig. This is a fascinating new product with a great user experience, allowing peer-to-peer lending and borrowing between users. Bitcoin is locked up in a multi-signature escrow, and the loan is funded using a stablecoin such as USDT. If you are a hodler who wants some liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, this is now another option to get fiat stablecoin liquidity. Or if you've got stablecoin And you want interest? This is Bitcoin DeFi with Hoddle Hoddle's lend platform. You set your own terms, or you can put up offers, depending on how long you want to borrow or lend and the interest rates. So go and check it out, lend dot hoddlehoddle dot com. So on the topic then of mentoring new developers, I know you have been doing that, and I, I recently interviewed Gloria on the show as well. So, can you tell us a little bit about what your experience has been like with that?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "33:00", "start": 1979.98, "text": "I really enjoy it Personally, and I find it very enriching, and alongside that, I think it's vitally important for the project that we get more people working on protocol and people from more diverse backgrounds working on the protocol just widening the expertise there. so I came into Bitcoin in two thousand and sixteen or was interested sometime before that, but actually started working on Bitcoin in two thousand and sixteen through the Chaincode residency, which was a program run by Matt Corallo at the Chaincode offices in New York. I applied for that. I hadn't worked on Bitcoin before, I hadn't been working as a software developer, you know, for several years before that. I didn't expect to get in, and they accepted me, and I flew to New York and spent a month working on Bitcoin Bitcoin, and that is what's allowed me to be a full-time Bitcoin protocol developer. So I'm, you know, grateful forever to Matt Corello and Alex and Suhas for giving me that opportunity. And then I started working full-time at Chaincode and Pretty soon, I, you know, I knew I wanted to repeat that residency for other people who wanted to get into Bitcoin development, and everything kind of flowed from there. I ran two residencies, and then we hired Adam Jonas to Run the residency last year and it was bigger and more ambitious, and I helped put together the program for that. I had an intern last year, you know, last year I wanted to expand the reach of the residency, but realized we couldn't. Bring everyone to New York to work in the office, so I started the PR review club, which is a weekly club for people to discuss pull requests in Bitcoin Core and learn about the process of contributing to Bitcoin Core. and I also have, you know, regular weekly calls with various people that I'm mentoring, people that I think have high potential and just need a bit of guidance and help as they get established in Bitcoin. So it's, it's important to me, I find, you know, teaching, teaching something makes you learn it better, for a start, so that's a selfish reason. I, I learn Bitcoin by teaching people. I also enjoy it, and like I said, if we want this thing to succeed and expand, we're gonna need a lot more protocol developers over the next few years, so I'm just doing my little bit." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:22", "start": 2122.29, "text": "How do you find, good new developer? Do you look for someone, do you just find when they're, you know, doing, a pull request and you see, \"Oh, hey, this is a new person, I could try and help them,\" what's the, what's the thinking around that?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "35:36", "start": 2135.52, "text": "Different ways, yeah, you see people on the repo, but that's already quite a big step for someone to take to either open a PR or review an existing PR, and I think a lot of people- Who aren't involved in Bitcoin development would see that and be intimidated by it, you know, the thought that they could contribute somehow to Bitcoin Core seems like such a big thing. I remember, I remember it was a big thing for me back before I did the residency, I hadn't contributed anything to Bitcoin Core. So various places, we look at university clubs, Bitcoin clubs, we look at meetup groups. I, I do the Optech newsletter and send that out, and people subscribe, and you know, somehow, sometimes they interact with that. The PR review club is supposed to be a very low barrier. place where people can just drop in and ask questions, and if I see people coming to that regularly for a few weeks, maybe I'll start talking to them and see what their interest is in whether they want to start contributing more or eventually move to working on Bitcoin full time. So always looking out for people who have potential and talent." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:51", "start": 2210.63, "text": "In terms of, the culture around contributing and then supporting for new contributors, actually, recently, an interesting book I read, and you, you might have heard of this one, I, I'm not sure if I can pronounce her last name correctly, but I think it's Nadia Egbal, and it's, I think it's called Working in the Open. And, Working in the Open. There was some interest. Yeah, sorry, Working in Public. and, I found it really fascinating book, and I," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:21", "start": 2240.59, "text": "In that book, Nardio explained how many open source projects they, they have a certain kind of ethos and the way they work and that, they're often trying to motivate people to become a continuing and sustained developer or contributor in that project as opposed to being like a drive-by one-off pull request, and so, I guess, and that book also to me outlined a little bit around the difference between, you know, the work that, contributor, like a, a person who's doing a pull request versus the, you know, the review time and then perhaps also maintainer time. So could you just spell out a little bit of your thoughts, whether, you know, you see a similar kind of structure there in terms of Bitcoin Core?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "38:07", "start": 2286.95, "text": "Yeah, I, I, I did read the Nadia Ekbahl book and I actually spoke to her a couple of weeks ago a few of us in Bitcoin Core had a call with her because we found the, the ideas in her book interesting and wanted to discuss a bit more. and yet the, I, I think the central thesis of that book, there, there are a lot of ideas there, but I think the central idea is that the scarce resource in a Bitcoin, sorry, in an open source project is the time and attention of the maintainers, and I would also add, I, I think she, when she uses the word maintainer, we could probably- We use long-term contributor in Bitcoin core because we have people who aren't maintainers who are full-time working on the project and doing very deep review. so those people that, that time and attention from those people is a thing that we should Prioritize in terms of the productivity of the project, and there are certain types of contributions where the value added by that contribution doesn't exceed the cost on the time and attention of the maintainers and long-term contributors, and she, she terms those contributions as being extractive, and then there are certain contributions where the value to the project exceeds the time and attention of the, the long-term contributors, and that would be Be a non-extractive contribution, so that's adding value to the project. So those ideas about what is valuable for the project, how we, how we get the most value They're interesting and they, they made me think about things in a, in a different way. you know, one idea that she talks about is when you look at someone's first contribution, that will often be an indicator of how valuable that contribution will be in the long, in the long term. So if someone comes and opens a PR and you've never seen them before and they just want to get their code merged. Once they've got their code merged, there's a high chance you'll never see them again, and that probably won't be the most valuable contributor. Whereas if someone slowly works their way into the project, starts by reviewing, asking intelligent questions, trying to help out in different ways. That person probably has more potential to be a long-term, effective contributor. So thinking about how we can encourage people who we think have potential to be very high-value long-term contributors is something that I got out of that book, and structuring the way that I interact with new contributors and seek out people who I think will be high potential, those are things that were kind of triggered. Triggered in my mind by reading that book, so I, I definitely recommend it to people who are thinking about scaling up open source projects." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:54", "start": 2453.98, "text": "Yeah, I found it a really interesting insight, and I saw a lot of parallels as well. So one, one interesting idea as well that I saw from that book was this idea that In some cases, once someone's already been a maintainer, they kind of, they've already got some social credit out from the community or from, out from the world, and then, then sustaining that now becomes a bit more, I guess, they have to find some kind of internal motivation to sustain that, because now it's kind of expected that you just keep doing that. And in an open source project world, it's a sort of funny dynamic there where, now in, in non Bitcoin projects, you know, maintainers hand on to somebody else once they're kind of done With the project, but, in, in, in kind of the Bitcoin world, it's like, it's really, it's really gotta stay," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:42", "start": 2501.58, "text": "I guess not that, not that you can't leave the project, but it just, it, there's a real importance to this project." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "41:48", "start": 2507.68, "text": "Yeah, there's a real importance to it, and we hope I, I think one difference between Bitcoin, the protocol, and other open source protocols slash pro- slash projects is fundamentally we, we want Bitcoin The protocol to be non-substitutable, I think, if, if we're maximalists in some sense and we think Bitcoin should be the global currency and that the network effects make it much more valuable than being one of many currencies, then we don't want Bitcoin to be substituted by something else, and it's important that we make Bitcoin a system that everyone uses or everyone has access to and, and wants to use. That would be contrasted with something like- I don't know, Linux, where if Stephan, you're using, I don't know, Mac OS, and I'm using Linux, as long as we're speaking the same, like TCP/IP, to each other, it doesn't matter. Like, I, I don't really care what other people are using. Whereas Bitcoin, if you're using Bitcoin Cash and I'm using Bitcoin, and I want to pay you, then it really doesn't matter. We can't talk together. Yeah. So, like on the protocol level, we want Bitcoin to, I think, eat everything else that to be a global currency, on the implementation level, maybe that's different, maybe you might think we want different implementations at a Running Bitcoin Core and able to speak to each other, I think that's still potentially an open question. Some people think it's a good idea, some people don't. but that is very different from other open source projects, I think. not that I'm an expert on other open source projects, but it does seem to be a difference, in terms of the developers leaving and cycling through. I think we want that, I think, or at least we want that to be a possibility. If we reached a stage where there were insiders who could never be displaced, then that is another centralized point of failure, because those people could be compromised in some way. So we want to build a system where, which is not depending on specific individuals. and again, I think bringing new people in, making the process as open as possible, so- If something happens to a maintainer and they were no longer able to work on the project, or if they got demotivated or bored or something happened in their life and they just wanted to move on, someone else could step up and the project itself wouldn't be affected." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:23", "start": 2662.83, "text": "Yeah, really interesting insights there. And, I noticed in the open source world there's this acronym, the BDFL, the benevolent dictator for life kind of thing, and I guess this applies to certain people like Linus, or Linus in the Linux world, and, other- People out there, I guess in the Bitcoin world, there's a, you know, people don't wanna stick their neck out too much because then, if, if they're seen as like the authoritative person in Bitcoin, then maybe they become a vector for government or s- or someone to go and threaten them and things like that. So I guess that's why there's a real importance around making sure it kind of stays distributed, right?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "45:03", "start": 2702.72, "text": "Sure, yeah, and I don't think anyone wants that. No one, you know, as far as I'm aware and have observed, no one is working on Bitcoin Core 'cause they wanna be the king of Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "45:17", "start": 2716.62, "text": "Those projects that have a BDFL, they were started by that person, like Linus started Linux, and he can control the direction of Linux, and that's okay because it's his project, or it was his project, it's opened up, and there are more people contributing to it. but if he abuses that position and enough people disagreed with him, they could fork off and start their own project. In Bitcoin, if we installed a king who was telling everyone what Bitcoin was, what the definition of the protocol was, first of all, we wouldn't want that, but A fork event of the Bitcoin protocol is a value destruction event, I think. Like taking a, a global network of money and splitting it in two, I think destroys value, if, if, if the value is in having a global currency or a global Monetary system, splitting that up is a value destruction event. So a fork, I think, is-- we want to avoid forks in the protocol, and that is something that's different from other- Open source projects where, you know, they probably want to avoid a fork, but it wouldn't be a, an economy destroying event." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:28", "start": 2787.73, "text": "Yeah, you're right. It's certainly a much more catastrophic level, or maybe not catastrophic, but it's just, it's really like, it just completely, It, it would really just wreck the ability for people to be able to transact and you would get another whole, you know, B-Cash drama like we had. so yeah, I, I guess, it's also kind of the importance that people--" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "46:49", "start": 2808.57, "text": "I think you could be much more destructive than B-Cash. Like, B-- B-Cash was a A minority, an extreme minority, forking off, and, you know, that was fine for them, and it was fine for Bitcoin because it was, you know, such a small portion of the economy that decided they wanted to leave. If we saw a, a fork where 40% wanted one thing and 60% wanted another thing, that'd be much more destructive, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:12", "start": 2831.93, "text": "Yeah, you're right, it would be catastrophic now that I think about it. a-and I guess, when we're talking about accessibility as well, I think that may be an interesting point that comes over the next few years. So let's say we, you know, see, the block space market, the fees rise or maybe, it, you know, gets harder for people to run Bitcoin nodes or maybe it's, maybe another way September problem, right? So a lot of new people are coming in and they are just using some app and they have no idea what it is to actually run your own Bitcoin node and do all those kind of self-sovereign things. do you see that as something that, you know, has to be encouraged, has-- does it have to be driven by the culture in the Bitcoin community or do you just see that as like, that's a role for user experience and design or education?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "48:00", "start": 2879.91, "text": "I think that the important thing is not necessarily that everyone holds their own private keys or everyone runs their own full node, but that as many as, as many people as possible have the option to do that, both on a cost level and a technical ability level. We, we can't expect it to be everyone's priority that they run a full node and hold their own keys, but we can make it as easy as possible to do those things, and that's how we should design the system. we make Bitcoin robust and decentralized by making it easy to move up those steps, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:38", "start": 2918.19, "text": "some of the, maybe this is going back a few months now, but I remember there was some discussion around, on the mailing list around, I think, like the whole, compact block filters discussion. And sort of flared up again, and I think, if I recall correctly, you made a, you had a really interesting post there as well where you were essentially saying, \"Well, if we give people an option to kind of go in the direction of trusting less, then that's...\" Better than, trying to be polarized and expect people to go all the way over to the left or all the way over to the right in terms of like fully being self-sovereign or fully trusting somebody else, right?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "49:15", "start": 2955.01, "text": "Yeah, I think so. Like I said, the important thing is have people have the option, and not everyone will do that. Compact blocks is a tool and a solution that works for some use cases and some people, and so we shouldn't expect, we shouldn't stop that because We find it distasteful or it's not how we would use Bitcoin. I think we should make Bitcoin as usable as possible for as many people, while at the same time encouraging people to move in the direction of Self-sovereignty, running your own node, holding your own keys." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:54", "start": 2994.44, "text": "is anything going to change then with Bitcoin Optech, or is that just going to continue running as a separate project, kind of unrelated to Brink, even if actually all the people involved, there's a very strong, Venn diagram there?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "50:08", "start": 3008.2, "text": "Yeah, there's an overlap, because I've worked with Mike and Dave before, and I trust them, and I know that they do really great work, so when I, when I was thinking about who I wanted to work with on this new project It's people that I trust and know could do great work. so there's, there's an overlap. I hope there'll be more, there should be more independent directors for Brink that aren't involved in Optech, obviously, but those two, those two projects are completely separate. Optech Was set up to help businesses adopt scaling technology. we have the newsletter. We used to, used to do workshops before the world of COVID. so obviously we're not, we're not doing any of those in-person things anymore, but the newsletter is still very important, I think is really important, really important resource for the technical community, and several thousand people read that every week, so we're absolutely not gonna stop doing that, but it is entirely separate from Brink. They're, they're Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:09", "start": 3068.77, "text": "And I guess also from a Brink perspective, will you essentially end up doing more managerial aspects as opposed to being more directly into the Bitcoin core code? And, you know, are you gonna be okay with that, John?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "51:24", "start": 3083.81, "text": "I'm gonna be okay with it, yeah, yeah, I'll freely admit it's not my favorite thing in the world to fill out forms for the IRS and talk to lawyers and read through contracts and Do all of those things that are involved in setting up a, a new organization, but no one else is doing it, and I think, it's probably the most high impact thing I can do, the most high impact thing I can think of. Doing for myself that contributes to the Bitcoin project, I think it's really important that there are diverse sources of funding. I think it's really important that there are onboarding paths for talented new contributors and Starting a, an organization that does that is therefore the most high impact thing I can do. It does mean that I'll get to spend less time working on the code in the short run, I hope eventually that it will be manageable and I'll be able to spend a portion of my time working on the code, a portion of my time Mentoring new contributors and a portion of my time running the, the, the operation, and I will be recruiting people to help me with the parts that I don't think I can add particular value with." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:34", "start": 3154.24, "text": "Yeah, and so when it comes to onboarding new developers, I'm also reminded of a comment by, Michael Ferguson, I think he was saying, \"Oh, it, it doesn't it look like, you know, potentially right now, you kinda have to go through Chaincode to be a Bitcoin Core developer or like a long-term established contributor. perhaps this is now with Brink, there's now another way. there are multiple pathways that somebody could take.\" and also, I'm curious your thoughts on how long does it take for somebody To becoming, well, someone who's already a developer, but just not a Bitcoin core developer, how long does it take them to sort of get up to speed on Bitcoin Core and start becoming like a, a long-time, contributor?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "53:17", "start": 3197.21, "text": "Well, I'm still working on it, Stephan, so I'll let you know once I've become a, once I've become an expert in Bitcoin Core. But, no, but seriously, it takes a long time. E-even for a skilled developer, there are so many, so many concepts and Ideas that are difficult to grasp and fully kind of internalized, like the cryptography part of Bitcoin Core, even though it's basic by cryptographer standards, it's still quite a lot to learn for someone who's not a cryptographer. The peer-to-peer networking is, it, it is Different from anything I've ever worked on and different from what people, most people have worked on, consensus is something different again. There's just so many aspects of it, it just takes a long time. So I don't know. I'm hoping that after a year, you know, I'm, I am targeting really exceptionally talented people who have the potential to be high impact contributors, and I hope that after a year, they will have a history and a grounding in Bitcoin Core that will stand them in very good stead to get a grant and work full time on Bitcoin Core. it takes a long time, it's a very steep learning curve, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't try." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:36", "start": 3275.62, "text": "How important is it also to be a good, I guess, presenter or, you know, because you, you might be a great developer, but if you haven't, gotten some kind of name for yourself, it might be difficult to be noticed and found, such that someone wants to fund your work, right?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "54:53", "start": 3292.79, "text": "Yeah, I think that is potentially a problem with the- GitHub sponsorship, Patreon model, that the established names or the names that are good at marketing themselves are the ones that will receive the funding? And potentially there's a class of developers who are heads down doing really good work and just not very good at selling themselves, who would get underfunded in that model. So I hope that Brink will be a way that we'll be able to fund people who are doing really important work, and the reason it's different for Brink is that I and the rest of the Brink team are very deeply ingrained in what's going on in the technical community in Bitcoin. You know, I know the, I know the history of all the contributors, I know the potential of new contributors, I've spoken to all of them, I've mentored some of them, and so if people fund Brink Then they can, they can be sure that their money is going towards people who will make impactful contributions, and I will be able to, make sure that they're delivering on their promises. And if they apply for a grant and they say they'll achieve X in twelve months, then I'll, I'll know whether that's realistic, and I'll be able to check that they're actually doing that work. So I, I think Brink as an intermediary there potentially adds a lot of value and people- People can be sure that their money is being put to really effective use." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:24", "start": 3383.92, "text": "I see. So as an example, there might be individual Bitcoin hodlers out there who want to donate, for Bitcoin development, and maybe they've looked on sites like BitcoinDevList dot com and things like that, but they're just not sure who to pick because they don't really know who they want to fund. I presume then, as you were mentioning, this is something like if, if they, if they like the direction that you're going in or what you're talking about or what you're interested in, Donate or fund towards Brink." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "56:54", "start": 3413.7, "text": "Yeah, exactly right. And this isn't just a theoretic problem, it's something that I've heard from people who want to fund, from organizations that want to fund. You know, there, there are a few exchanges around who are funding developers, and it's really difficult for them to start that operation because They start off with the intention that they want to fund an open source developer because, well, it's the right thing to do, it's good for their publicity and marketing, their business is built on top of Bitcoin, so they want to somehow support it, but they're not involved in the open source world, and so how do they, how do they know where to put their money, and how do they know that they'll- Get good value and effective use from that money, they either have to find someone internally who knows a little bit about open source and get them to spend their time researching and getting involved in the open source world, or they need to outsource it to, you know, individuals or advisory boards, and it becomes quite difficult. I hope that Brink can help those companies. They can come to Brink and say, \"We want to fund open source development.\" I can say to them, \"You know, what are your priorities? What, like, what kind of thing are you trying to fund?\" Oh, you want to fund privacy? This person's working on this privacy project, maybe we can either link you up or you can fund Brink and we can fund people working in that area. and the same for hodlers, like people who- Have Bitcoin, ideologically believe in Bitcoin, want to see it succeed, and want to help in that success, but don't necessarily know how they can use their money to, to affect that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:28", "start": 3508.24, "text": "Yeah, sounds, really interesting. And I think one other point that comes up there is Perhaps in the space and just in general, it's not Bitcoin, it's just in general, people might feel that they want to donate to things that have a quasi-tangible impact or tangible benefit when maybe in reality the thing that actually is gonna move the needle the most is, say, review time, and review time isn't as sexy, right?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "58:57", "start": 3537.35, "text": "It depends who you ask. I, I spend much more time on review than I do on writing code." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "59:06", "start": 3545.72, "text": "One of my, probably my priority is, is making the code quality of Bitcoin Core higher, and if I think about other ways I can do that, either I could write high quality code myself. Which would add a little bit of high quality code, or I can spend my time reviewing and helping nudge old code to be higher quality, and that probably has more effect. It doesn't matter how, it doesn't matter The quality of your best quality code, what matters is the quality of your worst quality code, because that's where the bug will be and that's where you'll have the, the crash or, you know, whatever. So reviewing Is probably more impactful in terms of improving the quality of the project, and that's how I judge my time, that's how I kind of allocate what I want to work on is how can I have the most impact on, on the Bitcoin project and Bitcoin Core, If that's your mindset, then you'll probably spend most of your time reviewing. If you want to get a commit into Bitcoin Core, so you can tell everyone you've got a commit into Bitcoin Core, you can do that, but you probably won't be sticking around for, for very long, and you won't be a very impactful contributor over the long run." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:16", "start": 3616.45, "text": "Yeah, I see. And, and that could also be not just for developers, but it might just be for people funding as well. So it could be, a situation where, you know, an exchange wants to fund and they might be more interested to fund a project that had, that, that has a specific name and it's got a nice branding around it as opposed to, let's say, review time, you know? And that's the real, you know, scarcity part." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:00:37", "start": 3637.71, "text": "Yeah, maybe it's, maybe it's just a messaging and marketing issue, Stephan. Maybe, Review, then people would be, like funders would be more interested in funding it. I think there's a really compelling story to say, \"I reviewed this PR and I found this bug, and if I hadn't found it, there would be a crash bug in Bitcoin Core.\" I think that's much more interesting than I added this new bell and whistle to Bitcoin Core. it, it, I think, yeah, it's, review is really important. It's, it's a priority for me, and maybe we can improve the messaging so other people agree." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:16", "start": 3676.75, "text": "Yeah, sure, sure. certainly, I think, and I think the messaging around that has, improved in, you know, kind of the last few months or year or so, Also interested to chat around Taproot activation. So, wondering what your thoughts are on that and, you know, yeah, do, do you have any, ideas on when you, would, potentially see that coming to fruition?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:01:43", "start": 3703.88, "text": "well, zero point twenty-one, the next Bitcoin Core release is coming out very soon. I think it will be branched today. so we have our master branch, which is where all the development work happens. And then at some point we branch off release branches, and the next one is zero dot twenty one, that'll happen today, and then there'll be a bunch of release candidates for zero dot twenty one, and eventually there'll be a, a release that people can download and run. 0.21 contains the code for Taproot, so there's been the, the specification that's gone through the main list review, there's been the implementation, there's been through code review, it'll be released, and then people will have that code. That can be run, can be run in test mode, on their Bitcoin Core nodes. Once that's out, then it's time to start thinking about, oh, sorry, not time to start thinking about, people have been thinking about it for a while, then the conversation will move on to, okay, how do we activate this? people have been working on that, AJ's been working on it, I know Matt Caraldo's been working on it. I expect within a couple of months, We will have advanced that conversation and then there'll be some kind of consensus emerging around how we should activate this thing, and then, you know, all going well, in the next minor release, that'll be twenty-one dot one, there'll be some kind of activation code. But I can't predict any better than anyone else, you know, this is a decentralized project. If, if there's a lot of contention and disagreement, then maybe that won't happen, maybe twenty-one dot one will be delayed. I, I can't predict with absolute certainty, but I would hope that that next minor release will come in the next, I don't know, three months, and there'll be some kind of activation mechanism in there. And then all going well, Taproot will activate shortly after that, but I can't predict the future." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:36", "start": 3816.91, "text": "Yeah, sure, sure. and, it also does look promising that we've seen some of the Bitcoin mining pools come out in support of Taproot also. So I recall seeing Aaron Van Wierdem, put out an article recently, I think it was Paulin plus Slashpool plus one other pool, and I think combined they represent just under thirty percent of Bitcoin's hash power, mining hash power. Power, so, potentially some, promising signs for support there also." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:04:06", "start": 3846.75, "text": "Yeah, that's a good start. I should highlight always that miners don't control Bitcoin, and this isn't a vote where- For the miners, this is miners signaling that they're ready to, to make that change and enforce those rules. But yeah, that's, that's promising. the cleanest way to do a soft fork would be to have everyone agree, and all of the miners agree, and then to switch over. So if thirty percent of the miners are already say, saying they agree, that's, that's a pretty good start." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:36", "start": 3876.51, "text": "also curious to ask your views around disagreement in open source and open source contribution, you know, a couple months ago. So there was that whole drama about the, you know, was it blacklist and blocklist and whatever, but I'm just curious as well, more just generally, how you think w- of, how you think disagreements in terms of Bitcoin Core, The code should be addressed and how should it be handled?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:05:04", "start": 3904.76, "text": "Yeah, that blacklist/blocklist debacle was," }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:05:13", "start": 3913.53, "text": "I think a very good example of extractive. Contributions, from a lot of people who weren't involved in the Bitcoin Core project, And brigaded onto GitHub and made life very uncomfortable for maintainers and contributors, you know, abused people online. Did lots of really kind of nasty stuff, and just took a lot of emotional energy and attention away from important issues like reviewing Taproot, for example, that was happening at the same time." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:05:53", "start": 3953.65, "text": "that's, I think, different from most disagreements in Bitcoin Core, which are between long-term contributors, people who have a lot of context and Have a history and know each other and respect each other's intellects, but have differing opinions on how to do things or what the priority should be. that happens all the time, you know, the Bitcoin core contributors aren't, don't roll over and don't just give their agreement to things that they don't agree with. There's lots of robust discussion and disagreement, and eventually some kind of rough consensus generally emerges. I think long-term reputation is a good," }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:06:44", "start": 4004.44, "text": "it's a good check on bad behavior. So people can disagree respectfully and have very strong opinions, but They care about their reputation within the project and they care about their relationships with other contributors, so that tempers destructive behavior, which isn't the case for People who come in with a pseudonym or, have no history in the project and have no intention of sticking around. So I think long-term relationships and building up. rapport and understanding with each other is a way that we can have disagreements and we can have arguments about what's best for Bitcoin respectfully and hopefully come up with the best solutions without being destructive." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:32", "start": 4052.85, "text": "I see, and I see then that, when people want to disagree, perhaps in a more productive fashion, they are typically doing things in a more objective way where, let's say, they are trying to run some statistics and show, okay, here's an argument for my proposed approach because of these statistics I've run, and if you wanna disagree, well, what's your statistics and try to hash it out that way, but I presume then in some cases where it's kind of like a- Sort of a stalemate, it just maybe that code doesn't go in or sometimes maybe a maintainer just kind of has to make a call based on if, what's the overall consensus of the developers who are either contributing or reviewing that, particular piece of code, right?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:08:18", "start": 4098.58, "text": "Yeah, I think so. The, the maintainers Don't run the project, that their decision isn't more important than anyone else's. But yes, sometimes they need to make a decision where, they're trying to assess kind of rough consensus and, and what people as a whole who contribute to the project want. and sometimes, you know, sometimes decisions just don't go your way. Like last week, I-- or this week, I had a PR open that was backporting a, a feature to a pre-- a previous branch, It had got some review, some people came in and said, \"No, we shouldn't do this.\" I disagreed, but eventually the decision went against me, and, you know, that's okay. I- I will move on and work on something else. what's important is long term being able to work with these people and contribute to the project." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:09:09", "start": 4149.21, "text": "Kind of stepping back more broad, what's going on in the space? obviously as we-- well, as we speak, so it's the eighteenth of November, and, you know, the price is kind of pumping and stuff. I, I know John, this isn't your first rodeo, you've been through a bull cycle before. Does it get distracting for you as a developer when there's all this kind of bull market comm" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:09:30", "start": 4170.88, "text": "Yeah, it's a little. I mean, it's exciting, isn't it? Like seeing, seeing number go up is always fun. but like you said, it's not, it's not my first rodeo. This happened in twenty seventeen, price went from what, a thousand to twenty thousand in the space of twenty seventeen. And suddenly, this, this bull run is, is pretty quiet and tame in comparison, right? No one's, it's not in, it's not in all the national newspapers, and I'm not getting messages from people I went to school with twenty years ago asking what Bitcoin is. Not yet, anyway." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:03", "start": 4203.49, "text": "Not yet." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:10:06", "start": 4206.86, "text": "But Yeah, it's, it's, it's fun, but the important thing is working on Bitcoin, and that's, that's what will endure, I think. The price will go up and down, but we're trying to build something that lasts for decades, so. Let's just remind yourself that is what we're doing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:24", "start": 4224.53, "text": "Right, and, when I speak to people who've been around Bitcoin for a longer time, they tend to talk less about the price, although on, you know, in days and in moments like these, it's kind of difficult not to think about that, but perhaps on the plus side of that, as we see more attention come to the space, as we see number go up, we will see potentially more funding become, more funding being available as well for Bitcoin developers or other- projects and things that, you know, add to Bitcoin's censorship resistance, so maybe that's, kind of a long-term positive that we'll see there from the whole number go up." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:11:01", "start": 4261.82, "text": "Oh, definitely, yeah. I mean, the whole point of- Working on this project is that we want Bitcoin to succeed and be used around the world, and I think the number go up is not the aim, but it is an indicator that that will happen, and like you say, it's a spur to people to work on the project and work on businesses that work on Bitcoin because there's value to be captured there. so the number does need to go up, and it is a, an indirect indicator of success. but I think over the long run, like, I'm not a trader, and if number goes up and then number goes down, and- There's a lot of volatility, that's, that's fine for traders, but it's not something that we should expend our energy and focus on. of course. To your other point about funding, yeah, I agree. If you bought Bitcoin at one hundred and it's now worth twenty thousand. And you're a millionaire because of that. You might consider spending a little bit of that money on ensuring that Bitcoin is successful in the long, long run. And I think one of the best ways you can do that is fund open source development, because there are bugs, it's software, it requires maintenance, and that maintenance requires skilled people to do." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:23", "start": 4343.45, "text": "So if we had to maybe project out a few years into the future, let's say, you know, over the next five years, what kinds of tech- Technologies or projects would you like to see either come to Bitcoin or be built on top of Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:12:40", "start": 4360.33, "text": "I think the next couple of years at least will be spent Digesting Schnorr Taproot, there's just such a huge space of potential innovation that opens up once Taproot and Schnorr are activated on mainnet that. talking about other soft forks is probably premature. There's just so much work to be done just to incorporate Schnorr and Taproot and take advantage of those possibilities. I'll give you some examples. In Lightning, we currently use HTLCs, Hash Time Lock Contracts, where the Lightning payment is contingent on getting the preimage to a, a hash. With Schnorr signatures, those can be changed for PTLCs, point time lock contracts, where the payment is contingent on getting, you're signing with the private key for a public key points on, on the curve, and just doing that change, changes the scripts involved in Lightning, potentially makes them more compact because you can use signature, signature aggregation, opens up all these different application possibilities, like selling secrets on Lightning, But that's a lot of engineering work, and it would take a long time to incorporate that fully in Lightning. Taproot again adds possibilities for, making the script more compact, more fungible. It opens up possibilities for different kinds of contracts, there two contracts. So there's like, there's all this possibility, And application, there's just a whole new toolset for application developers to build applications on top of, of Bitcoin. So that, that move towards making Bitcoin more efficient, more fungible, more scalable, more private Adding functionality that will all come from Schnorr and Taproot. And then maybe in five years time, you know, once people have explored that entire territory, maybe we can think about doing another soft fork, but I think short term Work on Schnorr Taproot, get adaptive signatures working, get DLCs working, get Lightning really efficient. that's, that's all really exciting stuff, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:14:47", "start": 4487.21, "text": "Yeah, actually I'm curious you say that, John, because, I know there are some other soft forks in waiting. So for example, Christian Decker and AJ are working on NPreVout, which would be a great one for the Lightning guys and potentially, well, it would enable the L2 version of Lightning, that's E L T O O, just for listeners. and I know Macorale has that other one, is it called the, the soft fork cleanup? I can't remember the exact name. so Great" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:15:13", "start": 4513.63, "text": "consensus cleanup, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15:15", "start": 4515.25, "text": "Yes, that's the one. Yeah. So, would we not, you know, let's, I, I guess hypothetical, maybe this is famous last words and I was totally wrong, but let's just say we got Taproot activated, you know, next year, sometime or the year after even, would we not want to also look at some of those other, you know, either Macor" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:15:37", "start": 4537.37, "text": "Yeah, potentially. I, I am offering you one view, and there are many other views, but yes, there are, I'd say, three potential soft forks that we might think about in the short run, and there are You know, potentially other soft forks that people might come up with that, that we don't know about yet. The three that people have been talking about most are L2 or, sorry, any prevouts, SegWit any prevout, that would allow L2 and other re-binding, structures for layer two contracts, and that's really exciting. Another one is macro, is great consensus cleanup, that doesn't really add any new functionality, but cleans up some gnarly edge cases in the consensus. which will be nice to clean up, and the third is, OpCTV, which is Jeremy Rubin's proposal for a governance-enabling feature. Those three are all important and exciting, and I'm not saying we shouldn't do any of those, but for me, when I look at focus, when I look at What I would prioritize working on, it would be using Schnorr and Taproot. all these three things are great, maybe we'll get them, I don't know, I can't, like I said, I can't predict the future, and I'm not in charge, but," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:16:58", "start": 4618.7, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:16:59", "start": 4619.02, "text": "there's just so much work to be done with Schnorr and Taproot." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:01", "start": 4621.8, "text": "Yeah, for sure. and even in that world, MuSig two, is another one that people might-- so let's say we get that, then there'd be need to be work done to get, you know, the software and the hardware wallets and everything to kind of and Lightning to work with MuSig two potentially. So that's like another thing that-- that's another implication of having Taproot." }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:17:19", "start": 4639.88, "text": "Exactly. Yes. So, MuSig is a way of aggregating signatures, and it- It allows, basically allows a multisig to look like a single sig on chain. It's not, music two is a client technology, it's a cryptographic protocol between different signers in a, in a multisig on the chain, it's simply a Schnorr signature. so having Schnorr signatures allows all of this innovation to happen external to consensus, and having music would allow multisig to be more private, more efficient and scalable. Potentially more secure, so there's just all of these benefits, but they, they take a lot of engineering work outside of consensus." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:18:01", "start": 4681.78, "text": "Great. Alright, John, I think, that's probably a good spot to start wrapping up. So if you just got any closing thoughts, why should listeners, you know, get interested, get involved in, Brink? and where can listeners find you online?" }, { "speaker": "john_newbery", "time": "01:18:15", "start": 4695.63, "text": "Well, the listeners should get involved because they want to support Bitcoin development and they want to ex- to support the Bitcoin developer ecosystem and onboarding new contributors Users and making Bitcoin more secure for the long run, they can go to Brink.dev and they'll find all the information about Brink there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:18:32", "start": 4712.82, "text": "Excellent, well, thanks very much for joining me today, John. Thanks, Stephan. It's great. Get the show notes for this one at stephanlivera.com/229. Subscribe to the show in your podcatcher application. Thanks, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }