{ "episodeId": "SLP580", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "walt_smith": { "name": "Walt Smith", "role": "guest", "tag": "WALT" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:12", "start": 11.81, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, a show brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the best place to buy Bitcoin. Joining me today is Walt Smith, he is a venture investor at, over at Cyber Fund. Now, Walt, Walt, you wrote an interesting post, on MEV and- It's been, I guess, part of the discussion around Bitcoin and what, what direction should Bitcoin go. so yeah, first of all, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "00:38", "start": 38.49, "text": "Thanks for having me. I'm, I'm, super looking forward to getting into it. big, been a fan for a while." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:43", "start": 43.44, "text": "Oh, great, thank you. yeah, so, let's just start with, you know, why you wrote the article." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "00:49", "start": 48.94, "text": "Yeah, I think, you know, kind of the impetus was, a lot of tweets from some like interesting people in, in kind of the Bitcoin space who have some overlap with other ecosystems. I think, you know, the heart and center of, of crypto has always been Bitcoin, and I, I don't think that's ever changed, but I think, there's kind of been some technology developments outside of the ecosystem" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "01:14", "start": 73.58, "text": "Few, like, prominent bitcoiners who would tweet about, MEV or, or miner extractable value, quite a bit, and, you know, it's something I always wanted to dive into, so I basically just used it as an excuse to kind of research something I was curious about and, and, you know, it's strongly related to, kind of the Hash rate, market as well and, and the size of pools and, and kind of mining generally. So, and, you know, I have family who works in mining, so kind of always have just picked up on that on the sideline. And, yeah, basically just kind of used it 'cause I was curious, and then, you know, no one had covered it in depth. I think there's been like pretty good discussion since writing it, some of my views from the piece have changed slightly, but I think the overall like thesis kind of remains intact so far. But" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:02", "start": 121.74, "text": "Great. And so I think what has also happened is maybe there's been some movement in terms of how we define this, how we talk about this, right? Because for years people have just used the term MEV, just that term. Then I think in the Bitcoin world, there are people who have, as an example, Matt Corallo, longtime Bitcoin developer, now more probably focused in the Lightning world, but he's using the term MEV, right, to kind of specify kind of the bad form of that. And, another developer, Reden Code, aka, well, Brandon, aka Reden Code has talked about the term centralizing MEV, I think that's the term he uses. So there's kind of a few different words and things to try to disentangle. So from your perspective, how do you define MEV? How do you, yeah, can you just start with that? If you could start with the definition?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "02:54", "start": 174.02, "text": "Yeah, I think, you know, if you go back to the literature, it's, it's basically just the ability of a, a miner, to insert, reorder, or kind of, tinker with transactions otherwise, so maybe they're just delaying the propagation to other miners or, or something. But, Generally, it's just like the extra value you get from being able to ha-express some optionality over a block. So if you're the one building a block, whether that's, you know, block templating through like a centralized mining pool or through like vanilla, you know, at-home mining, if, if, if you're doing that, probably not doing that without a mining pool, but, It's kind of the ability to just kind of reorder and tinker with the block and then extract value. So you could insert transactions, you could like snipe an ordinal's mint, or you could just delay someone's transaction. And, I think, you know, the MEV and, and kind of the, the centralizing MEV is probably, directionally super correct. I think, you know, there's instances where MEV can actually break up kind of cartels or, or cabals, but there's other instances where it actually kind of leads to like There is building all the blocks or kind of directing the chain in, at least in other ecosystems. So I think, you know, Matt, I don't, I don't think the term's very good. I think it's just too many letters, but, I think the direction is generally correct for sure. I think actually Bitcoin in some ways will kind of benefit from MVB, which I think gets back to Brandon's point of, of centralization, because, you know- Generally, like most of the mining pools, don't really offer that much expressivity to the people using them. they don't really harvest that much MUV. And then, you know, as Coinbase issuance kind of goes down over the next, you know, ten years, which is one of the best things about Bitcoin, but, you know, other fees or non-standard UTXOs kind of become a big part of the revenue for miners, they actually have to get more, advantageous now they're building the blocks. So I think that can, like, lead to some of the hash rate But yeah, I think like, you know, you can kind of break this down in a bunch of, a bunch of ways, and you can look at the application side or, or kind of the routing side or the miner side or even the user interface side, right? Like if you have too much expressivity in the user interface, maybe the user signs a transaction that allows kind of this value to be extracted more than otherwise would be. And a-all these levels, there's gonna be MEB, and, and some of it's centralizing, some of it's not. but some of it Two more blocks to get confirmation on the Bitcoin chain. So I think we could kind of go into a specific, you know, specific examples, but I think the commentary and, and kind of the, the pushback on my piece was initially from Matt, with his, I, I don't know if you pronounce it Meval or something else, but," }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "05:40", "start": 340.01, "text": "I thought it was pretty thoughtful commentary, but, then it kind of gets down to like the semantics of each example." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:47", "start": 346.9, "text": "Okay, yeah. so a few things. So I guess to distinguish between if-- because if the term is really, really broad, then it's kind of just like even standard operations that everybody kind of has no issue with, let's say, just doing RBF, like Replace By Fee, like that, is that MEV? Is that a form of MEV that's an, i-- an issue? I think most people would say, no, that's not an issue. That's just Standard, you know, Bitcoin network behavior since RBF has been a thing. but maybe there are other forms of MEV, and I think you, you go through in your piece and you catalog some of these different ones. I think at the first one you have RBF there, then you have others like, you know, sniping, an ordinal mint or front running an ordinal mint, or miner cartelization. So I, I guess maybe if you could go through and spell out some of the different forms, it may- Mev, and then we can sort of go from there." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "06:46", "start": 406.29, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So I think, you know, replace by fees is a really interesting one, 'cause it's-- I, I don't think it's so much the activity itself, I think it's more so that, you know, changing how your client orders transactions based off of fees or based off of net new fees that enter in later, is a change from the rest of Bitcoin Core, and that is, you know, been broadly adopted, you know, from the, the smart people I talk to have told me like some Around thirty percent of miners are, are doing RBF, or full RBF. That was in, you know, like February, so I'm sure it's, it's probably much higher now. But I think with RBF, right, if, if you're changing how your client works, which has kind of happened in, again, in other ecosystems, then you can do more interesting strategies. So I think, I think you're right, you know, the categorization of the term is, is really broad. So kind of to get into some more of the specifics, I think, Starting point, but then it kind of launches into these other ones where it's like, okay, you know, for years, Bitcoin has kind of operated in this like technology box with very low expressivity. You had like discrete log contracts, contracts, you had like Lightning, you had maybe some sort of o-o-other like payments channel, but there wasn't a lot of like expressivity. But the second you add expressivity that gives the optionality that's natively embedded into the protocol that allows a miner to pick between doing full RBF or no RBF, right? that becomes an issue And I think, you know, the point of the piece and, and kind of what I think Matt is also pushing on and, and Brandon is, we're gonna have a lot more expressivity, whether Bitcoiners like it or not. Just the chain itself is such a good platform for censorship resistance. A-and if you can just get a little bit of code that, you know, has some use case outside of just payments, people are gonna use it. And then the censorship resistance element of Bitcoin means, you know, even if you hate this, even if you have your own mining pool that censors, want to use the chain, how they want to use the chain, which is, which is a great thing. and then, you know, the, the optionality is still embedded in the backend. So I think, you know, the biggest thing I wanted to do with the piece, besides, you know, learn for myself and, and kind of share that with, with, the broader space, was kind of push on this, you know, we're getting this expressivity, we're getting this, and we already have this minor optionality, and for years, Bitcoin's been allowed" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "09:13", "start": 553.1, "text": "External and i-internal. And now they do. And I think, you know, the best, the best example of this, which I think Matt and, and Brandon would totally agree with this, is, kind of what Marathon's done with Slipstream and what I suspect other miners will do eventually, right? Where Slipstream is kind of this, this API that you can submit non-standard transactions to, which just means they're transactions that normally would have a ton of trouble landing in a Bitcoin block if you just send it to the mempool, but if you go directly to the miner and And, you know, submit something that is sufficiently compliant given Marathon's a publicly traded company, then you can submit something to the Bitcoin blockchain that otherwise wouldn't be accepted, because they have, you know, a, a high percentage of hash rate. What this actually does is drive order flow that only Marathon order flow meaning transactions to Marathon that no one else sees. They earn additional revenue because of this, which is great, and I think, you know, it's really impressive what they've done, but now this is all happening off-chain. So the censorship resistance and, and kind of the participate in, mining generally becomes much higher, like the threshold to be a Bitcoin miner becomes a lot higher in, in kind of this private order flow world. So I think, you know, Matt and, and Brandon and everyone else in the community should be aware of this, but it's like Or they'd agree with this is, we're kind of drifting into this world, right, where like even just the small bit of expressivity that was unlocked in Taproot and, and with Ordinals and with BRC twenties and now with, you know, I think Casey's got a new one, runes, runes, yeah, thank you. I think with all that expressivity basically getting unlocked, like now we're drifting into this world where we should think about how can we get these things on chain so that they maintain their censorship resistance, so that Slipstream, you It's kind of legally and, and reputationally enforced through like normative law. That sounds right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:00", "start": 660.31, "text": "And so, I think, yeah, so there's a few things to disentangle here. So one of them is this idea, as you were talking about, with private order flow, or people refer to that as like private mempools. And so the concern is, okay, we want Bitcoin to be decentralized, therefore the everyday retail miner should be able to make a competitive block. Like in theory, he should be able to make a competitive block and the- let's say if private mempools were to become really normalized and there was all these extra transactions that only the private mempools or private miners or private order flow knew about Could that harm Bitcoin's mining decentralization? Because now the everyman can't just like plug in his, you know, Bitcoin mining rig and, Theoretically run, run a Bitcoin full node and sort of just get the transactions that are auto- that are on the relay network of Bitcoin, because, you know, there's these extra transactions in the private mempools. I guess that's the concern, right? Do you have any view on that?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "12:07", "start": 726.78, "text": "Yeah, no, I think, you know, there's always, you know, the, the light client and like, you know, people can verify the chain without, without building on it, but," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:16", "start": 736.01, "text": "I think- Sorry, but this isn't about the light client though. This is about whether the every, let's say, the everyman, the average user who's not like a multi-million dollar, you know, mining operation and pool, can he- see all the transactions and create a roughly competitive Bitcoin block, you know, to, to mine with even in, in like a Stratum v2 context. Do, do you understand what I'm getting at?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "12:40", "start": 760.01, "text": "Totally, totally. Yeah. So I, my instinct is like, like, yes, you probably could do this because the expressivity isn't that crazy yet. I think once you have, you know, more expressivity, if, if some of these things work, which it looks like at least a few of them will, that are being built kind of in, in the venture world, or even just by, you know, developers like Casey who, who are just doing it themselves, you know, some of the ma- some of these meta protocols are already working, then I think, you know, that revenue becomes more and more important with each, with each, with each having. But right now, you can build like a very non-standard block, right? Or just a very, a very standardized block with like, you know, no sophistication at all, and you're still earning like, you know, at least over three bitcoin. So, for now I don't think that it is an issue. I do know, like, like just mining is so expensive, to be competitive in this generally, you basically, if you're an at-home miner, you know, you need really low cost energy, you need to route it through a pool probably to kind of have decent, like, revenue smoothing, otherwise it's too variable and, and you actually lose money because energy's, you know, such a volatile input. But I think longer term, this is very much what the Bitcoin mining world looks like. And then, you know, the important Forked it, or they're trying to bring over some, some learnings from other ecosystems around MEV and trying to basically say, how can we outsource block building to like a credible kind of auction mechanism, and then that gets relayed back to a miner who gets to mine it because they own that hash rate, and maybe they split some of the profits with, with the person building, and hopefully the building market is, is so competitive that it's pretty censorship resistance, but it's also so, competitive that most of the fees get passed back onto the miner, so it's actually compatible whether like, you know, Bitcoin can do that in or out of protocol or, or like force it through, I think like one, that's such a huge technology shift, it'll just never happen explicitly. I think the only way this could happen is kind of implicitly through like a business or like through Stratum v2 or, or something like analogous to that that gets forked. you know, in, in Ethereum, where all what this called proposer builder separation, PBS, a lot of people have pushed back on this now 'cause it looks like it actually has some serious Issues if you kind of like force this on everyone else. I think, you know, this goes back to proof of work, this goes back to, you know, one of the best features of Bitcoin is that if, you know, energy is the input, along with, you know, some hardware that has, you know, what, like, I mean, you would know this better than I would, like, maybe a four-year life cycle on, on ASIC, but if like energy is your main input, that's super globally distributed, it's typically tied to like a sovereign nation's, kind You know, really tied to the, the host nation. So, it's gonna be like a very distributed network already. And then if you think about like, okay, if the miners are all distributed, then they're probably gonna have their own pools that are kind of aligned with, the machines that they actually have. So then there's already gonna be this kind of private order flow. Now, if you standardize this at the protocol level and try to enforce some sort of like building committee or, or something, which you couldn't even do on Bitcoin today, it would take," }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "15:59", "start": 958.6, "text": "Would never be in favor of, which I think is a good thing. let's say you did enforce this, you would actually break up this property. If you forced everyone to kind of like walk through this, this box of, you know, let's make sure it's safe, cheap, you actually kind of ruin one of the best features of Bitcoin, which is that, you know, there's a really high churn in the, in the mining set, the, in the, in the nodes that participate in the network, just because energy is so volatile and, and things change so quickly" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "16:28", "start": 988.34, "text": "Which is a good thing, because there's no oligo- like, there's no stable cartel in Bitcoin. whether, you know, this like small miner kind of exists today, I think, you know, I think they're already routing through a mining pool. I think what will happen is, you know, the mining pools that aren't good at extracting MUV are gonna start losing those customers and start even losing some of the bigger ones who, you know, have their own businesses or, you know, have, an exit hash or something and, and point it to a mining pool because becomes more important, Slipstream starts to earn even more money, right? Now you have to do it. I think that actually will break up some of the mining pools because, you know, order flow and, and kind of co-location and all these kind of interesting concepts from, you know, high-frequency trading or Ethereum land as they kind of come into, to Bitcoin, they interact with like the proof-of-work energy layer in a really interesting way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:20", "start": 1039.66, "text": "Yeah. So interesting. Okay. A few things, I guess. Let me rephrase it a little bit. I, I guess my point isn't necessarily that, you know, every guy needs to be able to be a home miner per se, but more that even if you are a relatively smaller miner, you should still be able to theoretically, you know Hi, hi, hypothetically, can you run your Bitcoin full node, can you mine with an SV2, Stratum V2 supporting pool that allows you to, you know, maybe choose your own block template, choose your own, you know, transactions that go into that template, as opposed to, you know, maybe the criticism today is, oh, look, there's, there's, well, as I'm sure you're aware, there's this criticism now that there's a bunch of really proxy pools, and they're really just proxying to AntPool. Yeah. And so Paul plus a foundry, that's already-- now, granted, these are in different jurisdictions, so there's at least that, but the concern is, okay, Bitcoin mining is becoming very centralized into the, you know, into some of these pools. now there's a few different reasons for that. People are saying- because you need to offer a certain level of smoothness of, of the payout, and that's why people talk about the different payout structures, and that's where people are getting into like, okay, is it FPPS or is it something more like a PPLNS style, which is putting more of the variability onto the individual hasher or miners as opposed to the FPPS, which is sort of theoretically meant to be smoothing it out more, but- I guess we're kind of, we're going all over a little bit, but, I think if we were to talk about MEV and is it a problem, is it not a problem, I guess one other important point is to sort of talk about how much is there, right? Like as an example, as you mentioned with Marathon and, Slipstream, I guess for now it seems like there's not a lot of this Private, private mempool flow for now. But is the, is the, is your thought then that over time that is gonna grow? That's kind of the argument you're gonna make, right?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "19:24", "start": 1164.03, "text": "Yeah. Just to, just to double-click on, on your previous question, I think your proxy pool point is, is, like definitely an interesting question. You know, I think I, I kind of see arguments for both sides, so it's kind of tough to say. You know, just very quickly, I would say, I think, you know, these huge pools that are just I don't think that's like a super stable equilibrium when, when like Coinbase issuance goes down, as, as like Bitcoin inflation goes down and more rewards are denominated in kind of like fee variant things. So like maybe it's, you know, just weeks and weeks and weeks of, of vanilla transactions, but then you have that spiky week of MVB that you really need to win. Now you have to compete in an interesting way where, you know, if, if Antpool or another mining pool isn't really unlocking this expressivity for everyone and, and then sending it back to them No reason to use it. So I think, I think it will kind of like break up the mining pool, broadly. I, a great question though. in terms of kind of the size or like quantifying it, it's, you know, denominated in Bitcoin, which is volatile, so like the reserve that you're, like, measuring it in is pretty volatile. And then, so it's kind of always interesting how you try and market in the data, but then there's also a question of like, you know, ordinals themselves are really volatile or runes, you" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "20:44", "start": 1243.62, "text": "So far, they've kind of like done alright. I think, you know, like it's kind of an unknown, but I will say like the attitude of building on Bitcoin is hugely different than w-where it was two years ago or even eighteen months ago. And why that matters is if you add, you know, a decentralized exchange on chain, if you add something that needs an oracle, be it a lending market that, you know, takes one version of Bitcoin and spits out another, be that a stablecoin that's just fully backed by Bitcoin, if you add any of these things, Huge potential for MUV that can also kind of go down to the networking lay-layer and like affect chain stability at least temporarily. you know, Bitcoin's built in such a way that'll be fine, but it could like cause like some reorgs or something else theoretically. So I think like the, the short long of it is, is just to say there's so many teams building and it's kind of unclear what's gonna work and what's not. you know, some, some teams are trying to do like merge mine side chains, you know, partnering with Marathon, some teams" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "21:44", "start": 1303.52, "text": "Trying to build a rollup via like BitVM, other teams are just like, you know, we don't have OP_CAT, we don't, we don't know how to concatenate things on chain, so they're just very much going for like, you know, maybe it's a, a mini script like multisig where it's very, very secure from like a, how many people are on this multisig standpoint, how much would it take to conclude, but not like, you know, the theoretical maximum of like trust minimized. So, I think it remains to be seen It will grow, and as Coinbase issuance goes down, it'll become something that matters more and more and more. And even if it's just a small bit of, revenue difference, I think that matters a lot, especially in, you know, a, a market like mining where like energy can undercut you so bad, and it's all denominated by your margins, and it's very commoditized." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:34", "start": 1354.43, "text": "Yeah, right. And so just to- Summarize some of that and paraphrase for listeners. We are currently in the three point one two five block subsidy era, right? And then so over time, what we're- And I guess what most people are anticipating now, even that is debated, but what most people are anticipating is that over time, the block subsidy component is gonna come down and the transaction fees component is going to rise. Now, to what you were saying It's that if people are going to start using, or they're going to try to do other things with Bitcoin, that's going to necessitate more transaction fees, and then that in turn- May create more of a MEV," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:20", "start": 1399.82, "text": "let's say bounty, there's more of it to be won, there's more of it that could be, actualized by hypothetical mining pools in that future, depending on how things sort of play out, I think, because I think there's a few, there's a few question marks I would, I would still raise, and maybe we can sort of take them one at a time, but two, two of them, I guess, one is, will mining pools actually pay out those fees? As an example Right now, that one criticism that has been leveraged at some of the mining pools is this idea that, hey, you say you're gonna kind of take this, let's say, out-of-band fee and pay it out as part of your block reward, but are you actually? Because there are some miners who are coming out now and saying, \"Well, hang on.\" Maybe we're not getting that, and actually it would be better to kind of have a more transparent, and this is where maybe they're arguing, oh, this is why maybe they're like Ocean as an example, because maybe it's more transparent in that way, and that, you know, this, the, the style of payout is different. So that's kind of the first point of, will they pay out the fees that they theoretically should or that they say they are? and then secondly, I think people might also argue about how much expressivity comes to Bitcoin. So that's Will people actually fork in OP_CAT or maybe not, right? and, or will they find another way, right? Like you were saying, will they find bitVM and so on? So maybe we sort of take them one at a time. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this idea that pool transparency You know, may not-- Let me put it into a question. W-what if pools say they're gonna pay out a certain amount, but they're not, they're not going to pay that out? And what, what does that change in the Bitcoin mining dynamic if, you know, they do start to have private mempools, but they try to sort of withhold the benefits of that and not pay them out to the actual hashes?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "25:14", "start": 1514.1, "text": "Yeah, I think like the auditability is, is something you always like, you know, as a miner, like knowing where your revenue is coming from, why, why you're getting this revenue, why, why it's not lower, why it's not higher. I think in terms of will they like leave that, you know, kind of relationship or, or look for another one or build their own. they have to be able to, right? And like if you have very high fixed costs and your like variability as a solo mining pool is very, very high, then, you know, you could go bankrupt even if, you know, in, you know, let's say you had an amazing June, but you went bankrupt in May because in April, March, and February you didn't mine a block, you know, you're kind of in trouble. So I think there has to be like a next best alternative, alternative that you have Audibility, I think some people will leave and, and, and maybe that's when miners start getting into like more best practices, but whether they like completely, you know, change their behavior, I think, you know, that's like Maybe not. this is kind of a, a guess. I, I, I would say your understanding here is much, much deeper than mine, just on its face. But I think, yeah, I think that's a super interesting question. Right now, there's not really, you know, a next best alternative. What I will say is a bunch of teams are trying to get funding to build something that's more auditable, that's more transparent, that's kind of more, economically aligned in that it really shares all of the fees and just takes like a small," }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "26:42", "start": 1602.44, "text": "Hey, we're gonna pay you five Bitcoin and then show up at the door with four. so I do think that is something that happens. Whether, you know, I, I still think, you know, the, the, the bad practices will probably exist still in some form because you kind of get other things from participating them, but, you know, I, I guess, so yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:59", "start": 1618.93, "text": "so then let's, let's change over to the second point if you're kind of finished on that, like maybe we could talk a little bit about the expressivity point because I think that's, maybe To, let me just again set the table for listeners, maybe if people aren't as familiar with Bitcoin, the scripting language is arguably, it was, you know, there were certain functions that were taken out by Satoshi in twenty ten, right? This is around a, an early vulnerability. Listeners can check out my, my recent episode with Rusty, where we spoke about Great Script Restoration, which is his idea of how to sort of- Try and safely turn on some of those opcodes that were lost or turned off. And as an example, could you safely turn on op cat and some of these other opcodes? And then what would that mean for us in Bitcoin, right? So that's kind of one angle. There's a bunch of people who are sort of saying, \"Yeah, give us op cat, we want that so that we can build cat VM and some of these other ideas.\" now there'll be a contingent of people who are like, \"No, I don't want any of that, \"and just, you know, keep it the way it is, and, you know, if people go and build something like, on top of BitVM Okay, well, I can't stop that, but, you know, don't, don't turn anything on. I guess there'll be some people who might have that view as well. So I'm curious, how are you, looking at the, the ecosystem and understanding, okay, here are some of the different possibilities, here are some of the different pathways Bitcoin could go down?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "28:27", "start": 1707.33, "text": "Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think, you know, like first off, just like all the different teams that are, that are doing that, are all kind of taking their own approach, and I think they have like very specific reasons when you talk to them for why they think, you know, whether it be like merge mining, whether it be BitVM, whether it be a multisig for now, whether it be, you know, OP-Chain in the future, I think they all have like pretty big arguments for them, but I think ultimately it's like how Whether it's a Dex or a rollup or something else, and that kind of will determine whether it trickles down to like the MEV layer, are you able to attract these users? Are they gonna use your, your product? And then you can kind of look at the technology itself and be like, okay, what's the user experience like on a Bitcoin rollup? Well, it's really nice theoretically 'cause it's trust minimized, right? But it's also very, very expensive 'cause if you use Bitcoin to post your data to, it's gonna be, you know, as expensive as Ethereum" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "29:27", "start": 1766.65, "text": "Not a great user experience. there's different ways to kind of like, get, you know, much, much cheaper DA, but, you know, in terms of like bec-best practices and stuff, I think that's a separate question to actually attracting the users and getting them on your chain. But yeah, I think, I think for right now, it's, it's kind of like an open question, whether Kat gets included, I think like Erica Nudi or like, you know, next twelve months, from Taproot Wizards, that is. I You know, like whether this is through BitVM, which we're big fans of, whether this is through OpCat, like a consensus change, whether it's through something else, it doesn't really matter. What, what matters is like all these people are trying something, and there's a big enough market where some of them are gonna stick, some of them won't. And this should happen, we should be okay with getting censorship resistant financial legos on top of Bitcoin. There's some other stuff that comes, you know, along with this. With any technology, it's, you know, a two" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "30:27", "start": 1826.83, "text": "Use their Bitcoin in, you know, a like a MakerDAO style thing where they can borrow against their Bitcoin, never have to sell it, and, and, and do other things with those dollars in the real world, and then get it back, you know, after it's appreciated for ten years or maybe over their full lifetime. That's a huge unlock, and that's a good thing for Bitcoin, 'cause it drives net new demand for Bitcoin, it kinda makes it more useful for people, which will help stabilize it long term so that it becomes more attractive externally for like things like payments in the real world Huge fans of, of, of kind of this idea of expressivity on Bitcoin. I think, it doesn't really matter which solution ultimately wins out, as long as it's, you know, like sufficiently secure and has, good decentralization under the hood, so it maintains kind of Bitcoin's core property of censorship resistance. but yeah, that's, that's, that's kind of the general take. I can get into like a specific one if, if you want, or I, I don't really know how you want to take it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:22", "start": 1881.6, "text": "Back to the show in a has a mission to onboard millions of people into Bitcoin. I also work at Swan, helping on some educational content for the team. Now, the team have also put out a new version of the Swan Bitcoin application, which is available on your smartphone, whether it's Apple or Android. Now, this app has a really fast onboarding experience. It's now just a few minutes to go from zero to Bitcoin. So if you are standing there with your family or friends and you might have been having trouble trying to get them onboarded, well, try this now. Now, recommend Swan Bitcoin, and you can do this while you're standing next to them, they can click through, and most of them will be able to set up and do this in just a few minutes. Also, the team at Swan have rolled out a new promotion, there are zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys, so this is a great way to go from zero to Bitcoin and in a guided and managed way. So, reminder, go to your app store or Play Store and search \"Swan Bitcoin\" to get onboarded with Bitcoin today. This show brought to you by By CoinKites dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum Or Vector Desktop or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now, you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrase, or you can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi- Signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away. They are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code livera to get a discount on your cold card. This show also brought to you by mempool dot space, the leading Bitcoin and blockchain visualizer. I use it all the time when I'm checking transaction fees and trying to understand what is the state of Bitcoin's mempool. You can search transactions, historical as well as unconfirmed ones, and also see a great way to visualize things across the Lightning Network, Liquid, mining, and so much more. Also, for those of you with an enterprise, they offer a mempool dot space enterprise program. So for those of you as- Part of that enterprise program, you might wanna get increased API limits, and you might wanna have increased access to the team in terms of feature requests. You might wanna have special branding in terms of how your custom instance of mempool dot space looks. So to sign up for that, go to mempool dot space slash enterprise. And now, back to the show. Okay, so one other area that people are like, now, I guess, okay, so there's a few things. So first of all, I think I'm a bit more cautious about What exactly, you know, of the, which of these things should be brought to Bitcoin? I, I, I, I'm kind of more of the don't break it style. Now, I'm not an ossificationist personally, but I'm more like, I guess I'm more conservative in the sense of like, let's I, I'd, I'd be more cautious about what exactly gets brought in. I personally, I'd be open-minded to something like, like a low-risk covenant, something like a CTV or an LN Hertz, something like that. But maybe, you know, maybe if there's enough discussion and kind of debate and people are kind of okay with Some more expressive things, whether that's great script restoration or maybe it's op cat, you know, I guess we'll put it that way. one other question that came to my mind, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this also, is some of these MEV concepts relate to front running, and they relate to somebody knowing a price for something, but there's like an oracle for something else, at least that's my understanding of it. But one counterargument I've heard in the Bitcoin world is that Bitcoin has ten minute block times, right? So this- It's just not, there's just not really this kind of, same front-running opportunity like there is in other, you know, in, in altcoins, with DEX's, w-what's your view on that? Does the ten minute block time impact things there?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "36:03", "start": 2162.64, "text": "Yeah, no, I think, the ten minute block time certainly kind of affects the price that you would land a transaction at. The miner, you know, let's say like you send it and then it doesn't confirm for ten minutes, you know, on, on average, I think Bitcoin has like an hour long block once a week, like it can, it can be even longer than ten, ten minutes that you're waiting. basically your transaction has finalized, it's, it's, hasn't been fulfilled. So it's kind of like just an order. If you put like a limit order out there and then the market moves for you and then it moves against you really, really hard, but you don't, you know, if it happened in like discrete ten minute time windows, that's basically what would be happening. So I think it's like Super fair. you know, we've talked a lot about this internally and, and have a lot of familiarity with kind of the other ecosystems, and then I've spent like a lot of time in Bitcoin and, and, and stuff. and I think our kind of in-house view is DeFi applications or, or what you would call decentralized finance applications probably don't belong on Bitcoin's layer one. You know, it has these ten minute block times, it has, kind of a, a variability in the block times, it has, you know, really expensive transactions rather relative to doing something off-chain and just posting the data back. So where we've kind of fallen our, our house view is because of like the issues you would have with something that's oracle reliant when you, in a world without finality, when you have like reorgs, I think it's very unlikely that like DeFi on Bitcoin L1 takes off. That said, I think if you kind of have this off-chain box that you prove things out of and people can go and lend and borrow and trade with their Bitcoin, I think that's hugely valuable and to kind of have it run out of Band Then it can kind of be really fast, even though Bitcoin's really slow. And, just to hop back to your other point, I think, you know, Rusty's done like a really good job evangelizing this, and I'm glad, I'm glad he got you on the CTV side to some degree. But I think, you know, can we break Bitcoin is kind of this like looming question. I don't think any of these things do break Bitcoin in the worst case. I think if they're horrible solutions, you could add them to Bitcoin. You know, the DOS vector is" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "38:15", "start": 2294.56, "text": "In terms of like the actual use case of a BitVM or an OP_CAT or something, I don't really think these, these break Bitcoin as long as you like resource constrain them within a block well, because if the off-chain logic that you build sucks, no one's gonna use it, so it's not gonna have like this incentive compatibility. And then it's like, okay, would someone just use this because they're like a malicious actor to attack the network? Well, then you just have to price it correctly so that it's in line with all the other, you know, kind of resource constraints on" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "38:45", "start": 2324.58, "text": "So strong and, and so robust, I, I really think it would take a lot to, truly mess with the chain." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:50", "start": 2330.0, "text": "Yeah, I think maybe I disagree a little bit. I think, I mean, the way I, I see it is more like Would the benefits for Bitcoin self-custody outweigh some of the downsides, right? Because I think there are some downsides in terms of would it enable more shitcoins? Does it enable more spam, right? Like for those of us who view inscriptions as spam and, you know, BRC20 and runes as kind of creating shitcoins on top of Bitcoin, we sort of see that as like a That's a negative, right? Like, but I-- but the difference is, I see it like, I can't stop these things, right? I can't stop inscriptions, and I can't stop people creating meta-protocol, you know, shitcoin layers on top of Bitcoin. But for me, what's important is that people can, you know, self-custody and that they can use Bitcoin as money. Like, to me, it's, it's this idea of money as technology, right? Like, just-- to me, that's what's really important. And so" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:45", "start": 2384.68, "text": "Of like having decentralized exchanges and borrowing against your coins in some kind of protocol thing. For me, I'm kind of more comfortable with that, just, you know, like keep Bitcoin as the money, and if there's a company who wants to offer these services, I'm okay with that. Like, I guess that maybe also comes to this view of like, what exactly do you view Bitcoin as being, right? So for me, I view Bitcoin as challenging central banks, ma- ma- mainly. I'm not In principle opposed to the existence of retail banking, it's that I don't want retail banking with fractional reserve and with a expanding fiat currency and, and government control for, you know, government support or subsidization. These are the things that I'm more opposed to. So I guess that comes down to that view of, do you view Bitcoin as, you know, just-- and maybe that's kind of where there's this kind of difference in opinions where some people are like, \"No, I just want this thing to be the money and don't mess with it,\" and, you know, I, I, I fully encourage people hodling, and other people are kind of like, \"No, no, I wanna be able to do things with their Bitcoin, and I wanna be able to borrow against it, and I wanna have, you know, these different collateral markets and things like that.\" So maybe, maybe that's the difference in the mindsets or the viewpoints." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "40:54", "start": 2453.76, "text": "Yeah, no, I think, I think you like nailed it, I think that's like a really concise way of putting it. You know, my view and, and kind of the way I've seen these things is, I understand like the fears that comes with adding expressivity, and I think, you know, the developers who have pushed back on this are much smarter than me and, and could think about attack vectors that I just, I've never, you know, come near thinking about. But I think, you know, when you talk about Bitcoin as money, right? Like, what do you wanna do with money? You wanna borrow, you wanna lend in it, you wanna, you know, maybe you, you, you deposit All of that right now is done through centralized entities. Maybe some of them do like pretty good custody practices, but some of them explode, like we saw this last cycle. Like BlockFi was a really reputable business, and I think, you know, they did a pretty good job, and then they, they just had some-- I actually can't even remember, it's been so many years, what specifically happened there, but" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:50", "start": 2510.47, "text": "so I think that was a case of The, GPDC premium. Yeah. So I think what happened, so my understanding there is GPDC had this premium, and there were people who wanted to borrow to take advantage of that. So Three Arrows Capital was one of them, and, you know, and there was kind of-- I think there was a lot of people borrowing, and BlockFi were openly rehypothecating, and that was another area of criticism. A lot of us were critis-- critical of them for rehypothecating, and I think it came to bite them in the ass in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:23", "start": 2542.66, "text": "Related front end, but actually in the back end there's kind of all this like crazy gambling going on. Yeah. Similar with Celsius, FTX was a, you know, scam show. So I think that was the criticism. And so in a world where, I mean, to be-- I mean, there's different ways you could view this. You could say, \"Look, it's a good thing that these companies went bankrupt because they were doing irresponsible things, and it's good that there's no bailouts in Bitcoin, you know?\" And that's-- and that, for many of us as kind" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "42:53", "start": 2572.84, "text": "Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's super fair, but I think like the money itself has to have applications and, and stuff that goes along with it to make it really useful. I think, you know, I don't want it, I want it to compete with the Federal Reserve too, but the Federal Reserve has, you know, JP Morgan, it has Morgan Stanley, it has Chase Banking, it has Venmo, it has all these applications that make kind of the system work. And I don't think we can put all those on chain, nor do I think we should try" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "43:23", "start": 2602.66, "text": "costless, Lego bricks where, you know, if you wanna withdraw your money, it's there, you can see it, you can audit it, you can prove that it's there. Because if people don't have this, what they end up doing is they go to the blockfights, they go to the Celsius's. Even if, you know, you and I can sit here and say you should huddle it and it's a mistake, and I do agree with that, not everyone's gonna do that. In terms of the degeneracy that comes with it, in terms of the" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "43:53", "start": 2632.68, "text": "Be very, very speculative if they wanna, you know, gamble on the Mavericks last night or if they wanna buy the latest Beam coin, they can do that with their money. It's, it's financial sovereignty. At the same time, I understand, hey, this is spam and it's kind of annoying that it's clogging the, the chain for like, you know, maybe someone's Venmoing their, their grandparent who lives or, you know, sending a Bitcoin transaction to their grandparent who lives in another country, and that, you know, from like a moral or like ethical kind of You kind of design the system to allow people to do both. You scale the system to kind of all use cases, and that's how we really compete with the Federal Reserve, where we can kind of offer all things to all people. And if people want to be dumb with their money, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, that's okay. But at the same time, like getting these things on chain and verifiable is important to actually competing with the Federal Reserve. It's important to kind of getting stable coins on chain and have them be on Bitcoin versus some other network that's not as secure Kind of the pushback I would have is that, you know, the mini money legos kind of incentivized usage of Bitcoin, which is good for Bitcoin as money. It creates lower volatility in the actual asset price, which makes it more attractive to use externally in other economies. So if we can grow like the Bitcoin on-chain economy, you know, the price is gonna be a lot better, so then people are gonna go use it in the real world. It's gonna be a better currency for everyone." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:18", "start": 2717.61, "text": "Yeah, so I think we can agree that more people using Bitcoin is a good thing. I think the way that is achieved, right? Is it achieved through using some kind of on-chain protocol or some kind of change at the protocol level, or is it more just acceptance of certain corporates, businesses, and, okay, not ideal, but custodial providers? I guess that's sort of, one of the distinctions. I think the other distinction, maybe the other kind of thing is people might say, \"Uh, I'd rather you go do the shitcoin things elsewhere,\" right? Like that's kind of, you know, historically been the mindset of a lot of bitcoiners of like, \"Uh Go do those shikoin things elsewhere and like let me keep my money pristine kind of thing. I think one other area that, people are gonna maybe wanna hear discussed is this idea of How decentralized are some of these things, these other protocols? Like, this criticism which people have is more like, \"Oh, see, it's actually just a multisig, right?\" Like, you're talking about all-- people are talking about all these new protocols and they're, they're giving us all this flowery language, but actually it devolves back to a multisig, and that's really what it is, you know? I'm curious what your view is on that, and will that evolve over time?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "46:29", "start": 2788.55, "text": "Yeah, no, this is like such a good question. you know, I think it's, has evolved over time, it's certainly improved over time. You know, I think when The first kind of rollups on Bitcoin talks were happening, I think, you know, Trey wrote the first piece on it, and then John Light wrote like Validity Rollups in Bitcoin in like mid twenty twenty-two, I think with a grant from, from" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:51", "start": 2810.98, "text": "some- From HRF, I believe, yeah." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "46:53", "start": 2812.78, "text": "Yeah. So like, you know, when this kind of discussion was going on, like zero knowledge proofs weren't that great. Now, you know, we're about a year away from the, us having like real-time proving, like really fast proving, which is like one of the things" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "47:09", "start": 2828.75, "text": "You know, there's, all these things are certainly improving. in terms of the immutability of like specific applications, it really varies. I think, you know, some things are reliant on oracles 'cause they have to trigger liquidations if it's a lending marketplace. And, you know, the oracle problem probably never goes away. You kind of, you need to be able to bring this logic of what's happening in the real world to bring it on chain With a slight delay somehow or another, you can make it really robust and have like fifty providers or something, but you're still, you know, kind of having that assumption, right? But, you know, something like Uniswap, right? Like where it's completely on chain, the contract's immutable, you know, Uniswap V2 got forked by SushiSwap, and it was like an exact copy, totally immutable, and there was nothing they could do about it, right? that allows kind of like instant swapping. So if you had like a stablecoin like US You were like fleeing like a hostile regime with like crazy inflation, right? That would have a lot of value, and you wouldn't have to go to a custodian who, you know, has to KYC you, has to-- This is the same thing in our view as kind of like tokenization, which, you know, a lot of the big banks are pushing, pushing for now, because with tokenization you can kind of amplify a good regime's kind of capital markets into the world without figuring out how to deal with KYC, AML, and custodians without founding a whole new bank and New regime and playing that political game with a whole new central bank. Instead, you can just amplify from one jurisdiction to another one with a neutral network. I think doing that on Bitcoin is awesome. Like if I could own, you know, tokenized Apple stock on Bitcoin and also have it be pretty much non-custodial besides like the settlement of the Apple stock on the back end, and also, you know, use my, my Bitcoin to take out a loan to pay for college or something, that'd be incredible. So, I think, I think there's like tons of use cases for these But I think generally they're improving a lot. And, you know, the really bad ones-- and this is just kind of, you know, how free market oriented are you-- the really bad ones exist and explode after a couple years. They take people with them, and financially, and that's horrible, but it's just kind of the reality of the situation. And then it becomes like a very hard philosophical question of like, how into free markets are you? Should people be able to do anything they want with their money, or should we have some sort of regulation in Bitcoin that stops people from, you know" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:31", "start": 2971.02, "text": "Yeah, I mean, look, obviously I, I don't, I don't, believe in tell-- stopping people from doing what they want to do with their own money. I think the concern is more just about, okay, there's a few, I guess, probably the two main ones. So the main one which we've been kind of talking a bit about is like, does it create a centralizing MEV or some kind of centralization at the mining level? And that's the opposite of what we want. We want decentralized Bitcoin mining, right? That's one thing. The Kind of invite the eye of Sauron, right? For the same reason that Satoshi didn't wanna, you know, have WikiLeaks donations or whatever back in 2010 or whatever, like does creating- You know, more opportunities for shitcoining and, you know, spamming on Bitcoin, o-on Bitcoin. does that invite the bad form of government, you know, control, right? Now, I would say that, you know, we're recording this twenty-seventh of May, twenty twenty-four, and it seems to have just, you know, just in the last week or so, it seems to have flipped, right? As, as I'm sure you're very well aware, but just for listeners, up until recently, it was kind of seen almost like, \"Oh, Crypto army and all this stuff, and now all of a sudden it seems like Trump has gone full pro-crypto, and, you know, the SAB one twenty-one was, you know, rejected, and, you know, senior Democrats were going against Elizabeth Warren. So it sort of, it seems like the environment has shifted as well from a regulatory perspective. So You know, while I obviously don't wanna control what other people do with their money, I, you know, personally stay Bitcoin only, but I, you know, people do whatever they want, and I believe Bitcoin will just kind of win on its own merits because it is a, just a better money. So I guess that's kind of- A few of my reactions, but, I guess to bring it back to our, our question, I guess, like I said, the two concerns would probably be, does it centralize the mining in a bad way for Bitcoin, that could be easily censored, or two, does it invite kind of the eye of Sauron, the governmental regulatory ban hammer?" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "51:39", "start": 3099.15, "text": "Yeah, I think on the first point, like, I think just proof of work is so nice that it's so globally distributed, and then people tend to align with exchanges that are like kinda local to the, the nation they're hosted in, or they're gonna have like a rollup that's like, you know, they're just gonna be like, the rollup for Bybit that's Bitcoin aligned, there's gonna be the rollup for Binance that's Bitcoin aligned, which actually kinda breaks up the mining pool, a little bit as like MEV again becomes something that matters More and issuance goes down over the next couple decades, I think we actually kind of see the centralization element that's largely been driven by the revenue smoothing go away because the revenue smoothing itself will kind of go away. so I think, you know, in, in that regard, it's actually really nice, unless you have some sort of like client push where everyone has to run the same client, I think, you know, that won't happen in Bitcoin, that's kind of happened in Ethereum, but that's a separate discussion. In terms of kind of your second point, which" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:38", "start": 3158.39, "text": "Like the regulatory banhammer, right? Like if the government comes because of, you know, there's shitcoin scammers and spammers and whatever." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "52:46", "start": 3165.51, "text": "I love, I love the way you phrase it with that concern. you know, I think this is just something that all of, all of crypto grapples with, w- you know, you suffer from success, and this is gonna happen one way or another. And this, you know, this idea of separating state and money in one way or another, you know, has to come to grips with it, even if it's, you know With Elizabeth Ward, or if it's later down the line when they're, you know, when we have like people saying, \"Oh, you can only build compliant blocks, OFAC compliant blocks someday if we, if we get into that world,\" which I don't think we'll have it on Bitcoin, just because of the way Bitcoin's built, I think this could happen, you know, China banned Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin didn't go offline, Bitcoin was fine, it, you know, a huge part of the network was partitioned and the network stayed live. This is a superpower of Bitcoin Other like, you know, significant network has, and I think it's actually something that'll, you know, as people start to use Bitcoin more and interact with it more, or as the eye of Sauron turns to Bitcoin, we'll be like, \"Wow, this thing is like World War Three grade censorship resistant.\" And that's what's so amazing about it, you know, like no one can mess with this, no one can mess with these applications, no one can mess with my money that's in these applications, like I am sovereign. I think, you know, so I think I invite Personally, but, maybe edit that out. But, I think like for Bitcoin, it's, is, it-- I think it's less of an issue, and it's something we'll have to grapple with eventually, so might as well grapple with it now and really test our systems and be sure that like no one can mess with the chain." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:26", "start": 3265.86, "text": "Yeah, see, 'cause I, I can imagine there'll be a bunch of people saying, \"Well, no, let's have more runway, like let's have some more runway before you can't-- Let's, let's, you know, there's safety in numbers. Let's get more people onboarded into Bitcoin, and so it becomes harder to stop.\" so I guess that would be, you know, what do you, what do you think about that? The idea of Growing the base of Bitcoin holders and users more before sort of trying to fight a very powerful opponent." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "54:53", "start": 3293.47, "text": "I don't wanna, I don't wanna misquote it, but I think like over thirty percent of Americans in the US now own, and, you know, I think the reason that's relevant is just the US historically has been the biggest financial kind of controller around the world, the US government. and then I think internationally it's even more popular. Like, you, you go on any trip for, for- For a Bitcoin conference or something, and, and you go into like a local cafe or something, they accept like USD, Deontron, they accept Bitcoin, like, there's Bitcoin ATMs all over the world. So I think, you know, the adoption is really, really great. I think that's, you know, at this point, it is such a network effect and there's so many people campaigning for it that, Bitcoin adoption's gonna be phenomenal. I think in terms of the numbers games, we're already there. I don't think, you know, I think China" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "55:45", "start": 3344.74, "text": "And, and totally fine. So, it's not something I'm particularly worried about, but yeah, I think generally, I think you're right, more adoptions always better, more hodlers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:56", "start": 3356.42, "text": "Great. Okay, so, alright, so I mean, we've covered a lot of things, we've spoken a bit about, a bit about MEV, the kind of, the nature of, you know, shitcoin and scams and w-what, you know, genuine building and, constructive building, on Bitcoin might look like, So, let's, I guess, finish up. do, do you have any thought on, I guess, closing up with, is MEV good or bad for Bitcoin? I guess that's the question" }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "56:26", "start": 3386.26, "text": "I think it's, I think it's, you know, kind of the cliche good of like expressivity is a good thing, getting expressivity that's censorship resistant, kind of this, you know, it goes back to, I think, the cypherpunk movement that it's code is great because it's something that can't really be destroyed. It's, it's freedom of speech that is lo-- has a low cost to replicate and can just, like, be transmuted all over the globe. I think Bitcoin is just a amazing platform to kind of host, other not generally on itself, but to secure them. And, and I think, that drives MEV. So in that respect, you know, Bitcoin won't now suffer from success, it'll suffer from having MEV, but that is just a hallmark that it has greater utility, which is, you know, good for every individual on the planet, I think. So I would say yes." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:15", "start": 3434.83, "text": "Yeah, interesting, interesting framing. so yeah, let's, let's leave it at that. listeners, check out, the, I'll put," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:24", "start": 3444.48, "text": "And, let's see what, what people think. Obviously, you and I have, have some disagreements about what Bitcoin should do, the path it should take, but, let's see what people think. So, thanks for joining me, Walt." }, { "speaker": "walt_smith", "time": "57:34", "start": 3454.02, "text": "Thanks so much for having me on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:36", "start": 3455.57, "text": "I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, make sure to give it a thumbs up and share it out there with your family and friends. Check out my website at stephanelivera dot com, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }