{ "episodeId": "SLP637", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "will_foxley": { "name": "Will Foxley", "role": "guest", "tag": "WILL" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.19, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Bold. For American listeners, go to getbold.io to buy, sell, and store your Bitcoin, and over at Bold, you have a two of three vault that you can use to custody your own coins. Now, joining me on the show today is Will Foxley. Will is a co-founder of Blockspace Media. He is Is a podcast host of The Mining Pod and also, what the Blockspace Media guys are doing is hosting this conference called Op Next. So, we're gonna get into all that today, but first of all, welcome to the show, Will." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "00:42", "start": 42.14, "text": "Yeah, thanks for having me on. we're doing a podcast with a podcaster, so that's always fun as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:47", "start": 47.49, "text": "Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, the trajectory, after you've been in for a while, yeah, people end up starting podcasts, and then eventually the podcasters interview each other. So, yep. There you go. But, look, let's start with Blockspace Media. I know this is something you've been focusing on, and you, you obviously you're a co-founder of it. Tell us" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "01:12", "start": 71.82, "text": "Publication for Bitcoin media, of Bitcoin magazine, is really focused on events, CoinDesk doesn't really do Bitcoin content anymore, doesn't seem like there's a lot of Bitcoin content out there besides people just kind of having one-off podcasts like you and I have both had for a while, and then there's, just like Twitter influencers who are putting out Twitter content. Doesn't seem to be like an actual industry publication or a trade publication which you would kind of expect for, you know, a asset class that's worth two trillion dollars. and so I started working on this idea about two years ago, the first podcast we had was the Mining Pod, and we kind of built that out into like a newsletter and TBD soon event to be, launched for that vertical. And then we added Charlie Spears, who's really well known in like the Ordinals and BRC20 kind of degenerate token community for, for Bitcoin, the Bitcoin assets as I like to call them, whether you think they're worthwhile or not. he kind of does that, so he has a podcast called Bitcoin Season Two. And, then we started working on an event idea. We saw that there Part in the Bitcoin community for a scaling Bitcoin conference. Yeah, we started working on the idea of a, a scaling conference for Bitcoin, so, that's basically what I wanna come on and, and share about and talk about is like, do we need any changes to Bitcoin? I, is it a good time to run a conference around these things? And Blockspace as a trade publication space is like intimately concerned with these questions. We're concerned with things that a lot of people don't care about. we, we run stuff on like ASICs all the time. People aren't reading that Stuff on like border seizures, we run stuff on institutions buying Bitcoin, we, we do it in more of an investigative reporter style way as opposed to like, I'm a Twitter influencer sort of like get likes and clicks." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:56", "start": 176.25, "text": "Right, well that's, that is the challenge nowadays getting, attention for things that you either write or put out as a podcast. but, nevertheless, okay, we, we get into a bunch of these things. So obviously, like the ordinal stuff, you know, controversial, I, I think that stuff is It's more like spam personally, but fine to have a conversation about it and let people hear different views. and of course, I mean, look, let's talk about this OpNext thing. I think that's, you know, interesting as well. So this scaling conference, now I know, as I'm sure you're aware, there have been, you know, scaling Bitcoin and conferences like this in almost, you know, twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen era, right? And this is kind of, and at that time there was the whole block size wars and all this Now, there has been a lot of discussion about things like covenants and CTV and OpCat and other ideas and LN hats and other ideas like this, but of course, there will be the other side of that where people will say, \"Hey, actually, there's a lot of headroom right now because maybe the mempool is, you know, relatively, it's relatively low right now, right?\" If I just quickly pull it up right now, mempool dot space has us, next block at three Sats per vByte. So let me put the question to you that way. Is scaling an urgent thing that everyone has to talk about right now, or are you seeing this as a future conversation?" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "04:24", "start": 264.04, "text": "Yeah, I'll kind of paint a picture 'cause you brought up like the stuff from twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. So that's actually where we came up with the idea for OpNext. Like we just sort of took this idea of scaling Bitcoin back in the day. that conference ran from twenty fifteen to twenty nineteen. it was really influential. So, like a lot of SegWit conversations came out of there. Miniscripts came out of these conferences. a lot of Taproot conversations, Frost, like these ideas came from somewhere. And a lot of people talk about" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "04:54", "start": 293.62, "text": "Podcasts, and I think a lot of people just think they just kind of organically appear and bubble up, but in the background, there is like a deep academic community that is interested in these topics, and they had a place to meet, you know, over those years, you know, those very formative years for Bitcoin from twenty fifteen to twenty nineteen, where, you know, we did go through the block size wars, and we did go through like these different scaling issues, and we did make decisions on like what Bitcoin's going to look like. And then it just stopped. Like around twenty nineteen, the organizers for Scaling Bitcoin, which was a global event, ran for five years, the last one was in Tel Aviv, they just decided not to run anymore. And from my understanding of it, it was just a lot of work to get a conference like this up, became controversial after a while, people became embittered towards it and weren't frustrated around things, and you know what? They just kind of pulled the plug. So, there's, there's a few well-known Bitcoin community members who are part of that. Jeremy Rubens, He's obviously the author for, CTV, which is an active bit, but I'm sure you've had him on the show before, and then he's also, was one of like the Bigger pushers for, Taproot as well. He kind of helped organize getting that, that going, even though he didn't come up with the bit, but he was a champion of sorts. And so we contacted him About a year ago, this time, we're like, \"Hey, we're interesting in scaling Bitcoin back up. We think this is a good time in the community. The cat conversation was really hot at the time, about a year ago. And we said, 'You know, there's all these conversations on Twitter, and people are launching NFT collections around this as a way of signaling for cat ticker.' But why don't we just go back to what works, which was a scaling conference that, you know, they-- we didn't make decisions in these scaling conferences, but they were helpful in Moving towards consensus. They were a mechanism for people around the globe, different stakeholders in Bitcoin, to get to know each other, on a first name basis and not just throw hot lobs on Twitter or IRC and actually talk to one another. And so, through conversations with Jeremy and some other stakeholders who were part of scaling Bitcoin back in the day, we kind of started formulating how we could do this, and we ran the first OpNext at the Fidelity HQ center in Boston in November. Was around a hundred people, super intimate. We had Jeremy was there for CTV, Years present, we had a bunch of other speakers and panelists talking about things like OpVault, talking about, different L1 solutions, Taj Tricia, the co-founder of the Lightning Network, was there, or co-author of the Lightning paper, I should say, was, was present, and that ended up being, a success in the sense that we got people into the same room to talk about scaling Bitcoin for the first time in about five years. Yes, there's other ways people have been meeting up to talk about scaling Bitcoin, obviously like there's- The Lightning team does like a round table once a year, and there's, there's other events, but this was truly the first like scaling conference to come back, and we see as important as Bitcoiners who are non-technical to do our part and sort of help bring these, various developers into the same room. So we're running it back again, actually really quickly, just six months later at the MicroStrategy HQ, and, and that actually, I can go into that for a second, is like- Kinda funny because most people don't associate Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy with being interested in developer work. there's that really famous clip of Michael Saylor on what Bitcoin did with Peter McCormack, saying he wasn't interested in anything changing with Bitcoin. He's essentially in the ossify camp. Now, of course, like- Most people listening to the show and, and you and I would know, like, we can't completely ossify Bitcoin because there's a few actual, like, long-term things that do need to be tweaked. they're not huge things, but like, you do have to do them at some point. the quantum conversations, one obvious one we could chat about. And so, like, even on those topics, it's worthwhile for a company like MicroStrategy, which has a huge amount of Bitcoin on its balance sheet, to be invested in scaling conversations for Bitcoin. And then if you take, A more pragmatic approach, and you want Bitcoin to be more than just digital gold, you want to be some sort of medium of exchange and be used for people for buying and selling goods and services. Bitcoin does have some limitations there, and I think a lot of people, including some long-time Bitcoin, Bitcoiners from back in the day, are like, \"Let's talk about how we can scale Bitcoin using the current set of rules, or let's talk about what a possible bit for inclusion, like CTV or covenants, could look like in the next- Five to ten years. To summarize and get to your, your question at the end, I don't think we necessarily need anything to happen right now. Like, I'm not actually like a huge proponent for change at the moment. The mempool's obviously very dry, not a lot happening on chain. I don't think it's a big deal. I think miners are, are doing pretty well right now. They'd always like more fees, but the Coinbase reward is still there, and every year it seems like we come up with better ways to scale Bitcoin. I think from my purview, we just need a place for people to talk about these changes and continue to have better organization around what scaling Bitcoin could look like." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:56", "start": 596.08, "text": "Sure. Okay. So yeah, a few points to get into, but, yeah. I guess if we could first start with, like, to-- from the event perspective. Can you just differentiate this a little, or maybe it's similar, from, let's say, a TabConf or a BTC++, like do you see this as a similar kind of event to them, but maybe differentiated from the, let's, let's say, broad, you know, mass market or large, let's say, you know, broader conferences that are just about Bitcoin generally?" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "10:24", "start": 623.69, "text": "Definitely, and it's all about that scaling conversation, right? So Bitcoin Plus Plus, I love it, great conference series. Every single one is very focused on a specific topic, and so sometimes the, the scaling conversation does come up. But for instance, the one that's gonna be in Austin in two months or so from now is on the mempool, you know, and we're gonna talk about cluster mempool and probably MVD or MeV, as like Matt Crell likes to put it. Those are the conversations that are gonna be pretty much focused on, a-and that kind of Pulses you in to only having those specific conversations and not getting to like the next place, which is what are things outside of the topic and then what do we do with it as well, like sort of the application, like what does, scaling Bitcoin actually look like in a pragmatic sense? For TapCon, my understanding, never been to TapCon, probably just kind of like followed it over the years, but I've, I've never made the journey down to Atlanta to, to join. Seems to be like more focused on, You're bringing kind of like the Atlanta community together, and then also just like lots of different conversations. It's not necessarily very pointed. It's like, hey, here's all the things that are happening in Bitcoin development, but it's not necessarily like, hey, we have like a north star for what the conversations are supposed to be. And for us with OpNext, we wanna have that north star. We wanna have that conversation around scaling, because we do want Bitcoin to be global money. Like, we do wanna onboard billions of people to Bitcoin. I don't think that's a controversial point Use Bitcoin, and I think Bitcoin++, and Tapcom focused more on like the, the focused version of that conversation and on the development front. and so we encourage people to kind of think about that in their presentations. We mostly do keynotes, thirty minute presentations with Q&A, limited panels. We, I think we, we did two last year, and we'll do four this year, and now we're a two-day event, so that's why we doubled it. Very limited. This is supposed to be presentations for people to talk about their L1 or L2. to scaling ideas, it's very editorially driven. We take a deep look at these things. Colin, Charlie, and I at Blockspace have been doing Bitcoin media for seven to eight years, Bitcoin Magazine, CoinDesk, Forbes, et cetera. So like we, we have a good handle on these things, and we bring in a lot of outside voices to help us kind of curate and throw out bad ideas. And, and we just kind of focus on those keynotes and those presentations in order to kind of drive forward the conversation about what does scaling Bitcoin look like." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:49", "start": 768.67, "text": "Gotcha. and I guess also on the topic of, I think this will be interesting for listeners also, is that it is being hosted at the Strategy Office, or previously known as MicroStrategy, and as you said, Michael Saylor's view has- I guess in recent years on podcasts, has mainly been a quote-unquote ossifier stance, although I think that sometimes the ossifier view gets a little straw manned a little bit, but I, I think the, the steel man of the ossifier view would be something like bug fixes and maintenance only, right? It's not that it's literally no changes to, you know, Bitcoin Core or the implementations, it would be more like, should there be only kind of necessary bug fixes? And no further future features. And I think that's probably the more, the real, let's say, debate. And interestingly, for some listeners, I hosted a debate between Jimmy Song and Jameson Lapp on that at, the le- recent Lugano conference, so that was kind of October last year. But I'm curious to get your stance on that around, let's say, the, the steel man version of the ossify debate, whether-- basically put it this way, is your view, what would be your counterargument to the, to the- unquote steel man of the ossifier, he says, \"No, just bug fixes only.\"" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "14:09", "start": 848.59, "text": "Honestly, like, you might surprise people that I'm organizing this conference with Blockspace, but I'm actually more on that ossifier side, and, and I think like you did a good job kind of describing it. So the, the ossifier argument is Yes, there's some bug changes that need to happen, like if we need to update to quantum proofing addresses and figure out what a soft fork for Satoshi's coins look like in the future. That should obviously happen, because these are like existential problems for Bitcoin, that, that could obviously like deteriorate the network and really hurt price, kind of lead it to like fall apart. So there's that, there's bug fixes, et cetera. I think like that is, that's a fair, fair way of describing it. It kind of does get straw maned online, it becomes like, \"Hey, we don't need to do anything or change anything with Bitcoin.\" And I think there are some people who do think that, and but it's a very, very small community, and, most people don't feel that way. For OpNext, we want to bring the conversation back because I, I think we want to enable anyone with any idea for Bitcoin to come forward, as long as it doesn't move too close into the shitcoin About, you know, ways to enable new token," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:21", "start": 921.2, "text": "on token chain, to, on token, yeah, on chain tokens and things like this." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "15:26", "start": 925.8, "text": "And so we like, we don't have booths at the event, you won't see one. There's no token shilling, so we don't have projects that come and talk about their tokens. we have projects that are interested in scaling Bitcoin. So, you know, we have, the Lightspark guys this year are gonna be coming to talk about some of their new state chain stuff, which is really cool. we'll At the last one in November, talking about some of their ZK solutions for scaling Bitcoin, and some of these things do require soft work, so I think that's where the controversy comes in. But I do think like it's a service to everyone in the Bitcoin community to at least platform people and have the conversation, like, yes, you do need some filter policies, just to make a joke, like, you need some filter policies on these things so we're not, all getting spammed at a conference and having to listen to, the, you know, the next shitcoin pitch," }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "16:17", "start": 977.26, "text": "stage talking about how they, how they see Bitcoin scaling, because we don't have all the answers, right? Like Bitcoin's an elephant, we can touch different parts of it and see it different ways, but no one has the full picture, and by enabling good conversation across the aisle, you're gonna see things happen. So, like one example I like to give to people is that we had the- Co-author of the CatBIP sitting next to the co-author of a Lightning paper at our dinner, in November. It's a pretty powerful moment, just to have like these different groups sit next to each other at the same table and be able to converse about, like, what do they see Bitcoin looking like in the future? And just to have other people in the room Being accessible to those conversations, you don't have it happen too much because it's all on Twitter, it's all on IRC, it's sometimes these BitDev events that kind of cross, but it's important for Bitcoin to keep having the, the conversation cross-pollinate." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:11", "start": 1030.59, "text": "I see. Yeah. and also, I, I'm curious to get your view on what the conversation was like to get, I guess, Michael Saylor or Strategy, the company," }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "17:22", "start": 1041.96, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:22", "start": 1042.38, "text": "to agree to all this. Like, did they sort of come around or did you pitch them? Like, can you talk, talk us through a little bit of that?" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "17:30", "start": 1050.06, "text": "Yeah, they actually pitched us. So, Ed over there, who is now with the strategy team and kind of works on the educational side for Bitcoin initiatives at Strategy, he's a fan of what we do at Blockspace. He listens to Bitcoin Season Two quite a bit. He came to the last event when he was at Marathon previously, and he pitched us and was like, \"Hey, you should come to Strategy and do your conference here. We have a lot of Bitcoin developers in-house that would love to hear these conversations.\" You know, they're trying to work in-house On different Bitcoin applications, whether it be Lightning browsers or, or new ways of spending and, and, selling Bitcoin, they're working on this in-house. You know, Strategy obviously has a, a, a dog in the race for, for all these or a horse in the race for all these things for, for Bitcoin actually taking off. And so they pitched us on bringing the conversation there. It was, excuse me, pretty funny just to see The, the outcry at first when we put this out, so we had like Luke Dasher and a few other people tweeting about the event and we're like confused because they heard about the event in November last year, and the immediate conversation in more like the ossify camps, if I may use that, was like, \"Hey, there's like a new shitcoin conference trying to push CAT,\" was basically the overarching narrative, and we were aware that that was, that was gonna be like a stigma for us just for the first year. And then when we launched that strategy, there was- Confusion, 'cause they're like, Michael Saylor's more of an ossifier. Why is he like allowing this conference to be there? Truth be told, like, he doesn't really have that much involvement with it. Like, Strategy is a big company, and like, he is doing a lot of stuff, you know? Like, he's, he's pretty busy. So, if he shows up, that would be cool. I think he could benefit a lot from the conversations that we're gonna have there. He might not. We're really focused on the Bitcoin developers." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "19:24", "start": 1163.91, "text": "future of Bitcoin with their companies, we're not too focused on, you know, the big influencers in the room. the one example I'll give is like, there's a Cheat Code conference is happening in the UK at the same time that Opnext is happening. I think there's like a good, example of like the type of audience we're looking for. We're looking more for engineers. I don't think Cheat Code would necessarily be looking for engineers, they're, they're looking more for like Bitcoin lifestyle and cultural people, which I think is also very important to have that, like" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:54", "start": 1194.27, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. 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Yeah, and certainly an interesting, yeah, I think- I think the, yeah, as you said, like the, the public stance, let's say of a Michael Saylor, at least at that time, maybe that's, you know, shifting a little bit over time, but, certainly interesting to see. in terms of the speakers, so do you wanna just run through some of the speakers, who's coming, just to make that clearer for listeners?" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "21:18", "start": 1277.81, "text": "Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing about this conference versus the last ones, we're trying to differentiate the content. So if you're interested in this, The, the stuff up on our YouTube channel and our website, so it's on opnext.dev for the website if you wanna watch the older stuff. The stuff from the last conference was around OpVault. Peter Todd came and gave his presentation on different covenants, a covenant review, the Bitcoin Pipes paper, which is basically like this very math-heavy way of, of, of simulating a covenant on-chain. we had the OpCat authors. So those were sort of the conversations for the last one. For this one, we're actually focusing more on custodians and we Obviously, where it's strategy, you know, they have a lot of Bitcoin and they're a pretty big company, so I think just focusing more on institutions makes sense for this one, because you do wanna get institutions involved with Bitcoin, and there's like this- Hardcore maximalist side that has been made fun of for a lot of times, and, and I actually kind of vibe with it, so I don't know why people make fun of it. But that's like, we don't need institutions involved with Bitcoin. Fact of the matter is, most people are gonna buy Bitcoin through an ETF, you can see that through the numbers of the last year, and most people in the future will probably buy Bitcoin through their bank, which is kind of a funny idea, but that's probably where a lot of this will happen. So we want to get the institutions more involved" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "22:36", "start": 1355.74, "text": "On the open Bitcoin core, ecosystem. And so to that kind of fact, we brought on the Coinbase Custody head, Rick Schonberg. He is the, the head of Coinbase Custody, where all the ETFs basically put their Bitcoin, you know, that's twenty percent of- Bitcoin supply outstanding as how many ztfs and a lot of it's in a Coinbase address, so we wanted to get him to the conference to talk with developers to talk about different custody solutions, including enabling or enshrining different custody solutions right into the base layer. I mean, you kind of opened the show talking about multisig. And, you know, that's one way of doing custody for large institutions, and I'd be interested knowing like Coinbase's setup, but there's other ways of doing it as well, and, and one that was interesting the last few years has been OpVault, which sort of enables you to have a vault application, I believe like some time delay function on chain. And there's different ones, there's like HashLocks, things like that. but yeah, Coinbase will be there, which we're very excited for. We're working very hard to get some of the ETFs there, Yet, but like very, very close on all of them. We'll be doing, quantum conversation with Hunter Beast, he's CryptoQuick on Twitter, he's been kind of leading the charge talking about quantum proofing Bitcoin, or at least like enabling a quantum address. we'll have DemandPool, Alejandro De La Torre talking about different ways of decentralizing mining pools. And then we brought in some people from the Bitcoin Core community that we're very thankful for. So Mike Schmidt, who's the co-founder of Brink, will be there, just moderating a panel people and we'll also have, Intanja Gibbs presenting and Greg Sanders. I'm not actually quite sure what he's presenting on. Intanja? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll, we'll be having- them on, they have a few presentations slated. So we, we honestly have quite a wide grouping of people, everyone from Bitcoin core to major custodians, to mining, all the way to people who are interested in, in developers in Bitcoin but not really associated with any camp." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:41", "start": 1481.29, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And I think it's a, it's a fair point about institutions, being a part of Bitcoin. I think part of it comes to, I guess, in one sense, what is your view of Bitcoin, right? Because some people have this view that it's almost anti-all banking, whereas I don't necessarily hold that view. My view is it's more kind of chal-- directly challenging, let's say, central banking or government control of money. I'm not necessarily opposed to Bitcoin banks existing, of course, I want it to be a full reserve system, and of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:11", "start": 1510.89, "text": "City and that, you know, that enough people do that, that the system stays decentralized. But personally, I believe it will be. But I think maybe that kind of flows into maybe that next question from my perspective, which is, what is, you know, the view of Bitcoin, right? Because- Some people do frame it like, \"Oh, see, it's just digital gold,\" and then there's other people who are saying, \"No, it's not just digital gold. You should be able to, you know, you know, trade it and, you know, earn and spend it directly.\" and I think my view is more like, \"It, you can, you can do everything with it today, but what in practice is gonna happen is people will sort of push off to other things, right?\" So, and what we saw, you know, in twenty twenty-three with Tardinals or spam. What we saw is a lot of people pushed off into using, okay, Lightning. Now, yes, some of those people were custodial, some of those people pushed off to using side chains like Liquid and things like that. And okay, yeah, a lot of other people just went custodial, right? They just use exchanges and now the ETF in from twenty twenty-four onwards. now of course, we can sort of lament, oh no, not all eight billion people can go on chain. But you know what, I, I, I just don't know that that was ever a realistic thing. And I think while I would like to, you know, I would like to see more people be able to self-custody, I, I think, you know, we, we've got a lot of headroom, and I think that's kind of, that's kind of how I'm summarizing it. But I'm curious, how do you see that then? Like, if you're-- What's your view of Bitcoin? Are you seeing it currently like it's only digital gold, and You know, more scaling soft fork ideas or how do you see it?" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "26:55", "start": 1615.42, "text": "Yeah. I mean, for me, I'm just about opening the conversation. So, you know, I've done a lot of mining stuff for the last four or five years, and it's been amazing to me to watch Bitcoin miners just dump billions of dollars into data centers on the belief that Bitcoin will be valuable and useful over the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. They are the most long Bitcoin, is what I like to say. You know, developers and like startups, yes, they're long Bitcoin, but- Bitcoin miners are buying infrastructure and putting it into the ground that would be worthless otherwise. Now, today we have AI HPC that can offset a lot of these things, but a lot of Bitcoin mining sites are still not very useful, unless Bitcoin was around. And so for me, I saw like these, these like truly bullish Bitcoin miners who were bullish on Bitcoin, the asset, but they had no place at the table with the Bitcoin developer community, and I said, like, I can be someone to help that because I've, I did Bitcoin development coverage at CoinDesk and- 2019 and 2020, I've been in those rooms, now I'm in the mining room, and I can bring these two groups together. And so that was a big reason for, for launching OpNext. I see Bitcoin very closely to what you just said, like I, I probably lean more heavy towards like the halfling theory about like Bitcoin needing some sort of neo bank in the future and people kind of custing their Bitcoin in bank institutions, whether it be the banks of today or banks of tomorrow, who's to say? I think the big- biggest thing is that you have the ability to withdraw that Bitcoin into self custody whenever you want, and that is a huge upgrade from fiat. It's a completely different game than fiat where it can't be debased and I can take my asset and walk away with it whenever I want. Those two things are a huge bonus just for the liberty movement, so I'm, I'm a big fan of that just being the simple case. Now it'd be nice to have our cake and eat it too, and I think that's where we can have these conversations around Why can't we scale Bitcoin to a billion people? Why can't we get applications on Bitcoin that don't cost spam and don't cause future problems? Why can't we look at these things? And so that's where I wanna have the conversation. I think over the last few years, especially since the twenty-one class of Bitcoiners came in, there was just like a lot of these conversations were shoved off to the side because it was seen as just complete shitcoinery. But a, a lot of the important conversations that have moved Bitcoin forward have come from different ecosystems. systems or have come from different ways of thinking about Bitcoin, and so we wanna bring those conversations back to the forefront at Opnext, obviously keeping a hand on filtering out the bad conversations and focusing on things that are going to be useful. So I'm not a big proponent for soft fork, honestly. I mean, like I do think covenants are important, and like if a covenant was to be moved forward, I would be more interested in, in that. I don't see the need for anything at the moment. I can see an argument for it, but I, I'm- Actually more in like team slow and steady, and that's why in this conference we're focusing more on custodians, we're focusing more on some of these other conversations. the last one I'll mention that I'm really interested about is the- great consensus cleanup, what Matt Grelo and a few other people, and now Anton Ponset over at, Chain Code Labs, I believe he's at now, i-is working on, like, how do we just clean up Bitcoin? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we can do that. Great script restoration is also very interesting to me. Seems like that is sort of project that's gonna take a little longer. We had Rusty, from Blockstream give a presentation on that at our last one. It was a great topic. So, yeah, summarize. I'm" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "30:33", "start": 1832.66, "text": "It's very unclear what Bitcoin's gonna look like in ten, fifteen years. Probably it's gonna be more like neobanks, people custing at some sort of bank. But as long as you can have that ability to withdraw into self custody, I'm a pretty happy Bitcoiner." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:47", "start": 1846.91, "text": "Right, yeah. so yeah, a few things I wanna dig into. So firstly, I think the conversation around miners is an interesting one because I would say, a-and I mean, maybe you're closer to the mining world than I am, but, I, I would say the perception at least, you know, going, you know, a few years back, is that they weren't-- maybe they weren't as kind of focused on the technical kind of latest soft fork, this, that, and the other, they were just kind of more focused on, well, staying alive, being Profitable, they just kind of finding cheap energy, getting their mining rigs, mining machines and this kind of thing. And, then I think you sort of had this, I, I guess I would characterize it a bit like, and I'm curious to get your reaction on this, but I would characterize it a bit like some of the, you know, at least earlier days miners were kind of more mercenary and a little more, let's quote unquote, a little bit more shitcoiner compared to, let's say, the ideological Bitcoin Maxi on X or Twitter, Bitcoin only and saw, you know, s-any sort of support for shit coins as sort of, that's a bad thing. You know, that, that was kind of the mindset change-shift. I would say that was kind of the difference in sort of the mindset. Now of course, in more recent years, we've had the rise of public Bitcoin miners, right? And so this is kind of also another- Kind of sea change we've had in the scenery, let's say, that now you've got these large publicly listed mining entities. Now there is a conversation there around, okay, are they gonna do like OFAC sanction compliance and KYC and AML and this kind of thing? and does that represent a centralization risk? You know, the-- these are some of the concerns that we're seeing now. but I think- Historically, the miners maybe weren't seen as so involved in like the Bitcoin soft fork proposals and things like this, because maybe, you know, they were just kind of heads down in their own world. And actually, funnily enough, I was from looking at your website, you have, Alejandro Delatorre of DemandPool, but, you know, in a past life when he was working with F2Pool and, you know, working with, he was one of the ones helping coordinate the Taproot upgrade, right? Because at that time, it, it was- It's like the core, Bitcoin core developer community wasn't so connected with the miners, and so it was like, how do you, how do you safely coordinate this soft fork upgrade? And he was one of the key, let's say, people who helped move that over the line. I'm curious any reaction from your perspective." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "33:11", "start": 1991.28, "text": "Yeah, I, I think one thing that changed was that China mining ban in '21, and that completely flipped the Bitcoin mining ecosystem on its head, where previously about five percent of hash rate had been in the United States, North America maybe more broadly, fifteen percent, 'cause Canada had a pretty large footprint at the time. It's, it's gone down as like the, where social, socialistic policies up there have been pushing Bitcoin miners out. Very small group of Bitcoin miners in the United States, and they all knew each other really, really well, but there wasn't much capital there. There wasn't a lot of interest. Riot and Marathon were basically the only public companies at the time. They got interest when Bitcoin was hot, but there wasn't much there, right? Fast forward after four years, three years of that ban, we now have thirty to forty percent of hash rate in the United States. We have twenty-five publicly listed companies. We have companies with treasuries with over ten thousand Bitcoin on their balance sheet, and billions of dollars and other assets in their treasuries, and they're talking with, you know, large governments about rolling out more mining initiatives, whether it be in the Middle East or now here with the Trump administration in the US. The game for Bitcoin mining has changed so dramatically that I think a lot of the Bitcoin community loses sight of it, and I think the Bitcoin developer community probably knows about it, they're probably aware that there's a lot of money here, and I think that's probably- The best interest as like developers are like, \"Hey, can we get some funding?\" But I think they should also realize that there's a new professional class in mining now. Like these are public companies, they can hire engineers, and a lot of them have engineers on staff now. Mostly just for managing systems, but they can talk a little bit about Bitcoin and understand what's going on there, and they might even be interested in it. And some of these companies, like Marathon, have hired actual Bitcoin engineers to build out things like, Marathon Pool or build out different systems like Enduro. And I know that the other Bitcoin companies, Bitcoin miners, are also interested in these things. It's not as big as a reason to be involved as a like increasing efficiency across their fleet But it is interesting to them. And I think if the Bitcoin core slash Bitcoin developer community was more aware of this, they would actually be more interested in working with the Bitcoin miners, because there is funding there. And Bitcoin miners, again, are long Bitcoin. They're the most long Bitcoin out of anybody in the room, anytime you walk into a Bitcoin conference. And they pay for the Bitcoin conference basically every year, right? The, the miners have the cash. And I think if we could get these two communities to talk to each other, we'd find that there's actually more similar- similar- There is, and there are differences. A lot of people just assume that, like, the legacy, the block size wars is going to be like this friction between the two camps, when in reality, like, that was a problem a while ago, but, you know, most Bitcoin miners They're probably more in the ossify camp. They don't wanna hurt the base asset that they have, these huge contracts for mining going into future four. There's some bitcoiners who are like, \"Yeah, fees are low, we'd love to juice fees right now,\" but a lot of Bitcoin miners are actually more ossifiers, more in that slow and steady camp. And I think getting them into the same room with Bitcoin core and Bitcoin development community is only a benefit for everybody who's involved in Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:36", "start": 2195.75, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKite 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 passphrases, 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 episode brought to you by Galloy, they are building banking software. For the Bitcoin age. So if you are with a bank, a FinTech or a startup looking to offer some kind of Bitcoin product, whether that is a Bitcoin collateralized loan, deposit accounts or payments, Galloy can help you. Their latest product is called LANA. It is a loans management platform, and you can use this to come to market quickly and offer a loans or Bitcoin collateralized lending product for your customers. Now, Galloy have a lot of experience in the space. They started with Blink Wallet in twenty twenty, and they've since grown This to become a community favorite over time, and so they have a lot of experience making things work in a secure, reliable, and scalable way. So if you need assistance coming to market quickly with a Bitcoin banking product such as lending or deposits or payments, talk to the team at Galloy. You can email them, the email is biz at galloy dot io, or go to the website galloy dot io. And now back to the show. Yeah, okay. Well, I'm curious though, because I-- I mean, I, I, I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm curious your view on, you know, in the 2023 era when, you know, the spam was, you know, going strong on chain, there were a lot of miners who were interested in that, right? They were trying to lean into that, they were trying to say, \"Hey, oh, how do we support this, you know, ordinal stuff or what, you know, inscriptions and all this other stuff, right?\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:19", "start": 2359.42, "text": "Do you, do you, you know, do you think that was, do you" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "39:23", "start": 2363.08, "text": "agree or disagree? I mean, I think at the time there were some miners who were certainly involved with it, and, you know, they are profit maximalists and also it's a permissionless chain, you couldn't really stop the Wardle's movement. And you saw miners to the other side of it, right? Like Oceanpool spun up, not really around this narrative to be honest. Right, but that was like late" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:43", "start": 2383.19, "text": "'24 sort of thing, yeah. Yeah, I mean, like" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "39:46", "start": 2386.39, "text": "Oceanpool, Decentralizing Bitcoin hash rate more and adding another pool into the mix, it was not about spam, but they left in the spam." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:57", "start": 2396.64, "text": "Although some of the personal views of some of the ocean people is anti-spam, but the actual company, the mining pool itself is more about decentralizing mining, right? Probably fair to say that." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "40:07", "start": 2406.61, "text": "A hundred percent, yeah. I think that narrative got mixed up within, you know, their go-to-market strategy seemed to be like anti-spam to get people onto it, and it worked to a degree. So, I think- Just to kind of answer your question, like we see both sides. Like we see miners who are like, \"Yeah, more fees, let's go, that's great,\" and we saw others who are like, \"No, this is bad for Bitcoin, we need to push back.\" Kind of both sides. It's a very delicate line to walk when you're a Bitcoin miner because you have to be careful with that, especially if you're a pool. I mean, Foundry was very, very careful about the information they were putting out this time and they're trying to be very politically neutral around it. But they're also long Bitcoin and they're interested in the future of Bitcoin. The scaling conversation around fees is certainly more pressing than it was three years ago. I mean, the mempool clearing just a few weeks ago is, is not a great sign for Bitcoin long term, I think. I think maybe right now it's, it's okay, but like, miners can be a little, a little freaked out. And for the most part, most miners, like, the ordinal thing was fine, like maybe they bought one or two, like, personally, but like, you didn't see Riot or Marathon, well, you saw Marathon a little bit, but you didn't see Riot, Hudate, CleanSpark, these companies really push into it as like a narrative. They keep focusing on efficiency and energy and getting ASICs for cheap. the only companies I've kind of like diverted I wouldn't put that much funding into it, to be honest, like compared to their SG&A costs, for example, it's minimal." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:37", "start": 2496.92, "text": "I see, yeah. and so, yeah, I mean, like you said, there were probably-- it's fair to say that there was a gamut of views that, let's say, on one side you had, you know, the Luxus of the world who did that, what they did that four mega, right? So that, that was kind of on full, you know, retardinal side, and then on the other side you had" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:55", "start": 2515.09, "text": "the Say much out of, say about it. so okay, fair enough. and then, I think there's also that question of, I mean, and maybe this is also part of the conversation, this should also be part of the debate. I mean, there would be others who say, \"Look, there's not an issue, right? Because over time, there'll just be so many more people who use Bitcoin, or even if there were an issue, the, the whole point is if your transaction is being censored, you need to pay more. Simple as that. And You know, fee sniping or some other kind of systemic issue that the miners won't be able to survive, whereas maybe the counterargument would be more like, \"Look, not all the current existing miners will survive, only some will, and it's just gonna be survival of the fittest, and so be it.\"" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "42:45", "start": 2565.33, "text": "Yeah, I mean, it's kinda hard to know what the mining ecosystem's gonna look like in three years, let alone one year. I mean, sometimes it's like people just drop off the map very, very quickly. one example I'll give is MegaPool, which launched in like '23, and they went to market with like a ton of marketing money and like pushed really hard to try to get hash rate onto their pool, and they were belly up within like six months. No one moved over to them, the, the marketing money ran out, and they sponsored a lot of stuff at That year, and then they kind of disappeared. And, you know, they're probably doing other stuff and mining at this point, but the mining game is difficult. You have to be laser focused on efficiency, you have to be laser focused on finding cheap energy, you have to be focused on procuring cheap ASICs. And a lot of people go after miners because they see it as a money pot, and so local regulators go after them. you see a lot of companies in the space trying to get marketing dollars from them, me included, right? So it's a tough game, and for them ecosystem and see a way to generate more revenue through ordinals and other things is certainly logical, I see that there. However, I would, I would just keep pointing out ninety nine percent of a Bitcoiner's money or Bitcoin miner's money is coming from Coinbase rewards for Bitcoin, and if you mess that up, then the entire thing falls apart. Take Riot, for example, they've had a ten year lease on their power station at Rockdale. If Bitcoin fell apart at some point in that, they'd have a lot of unhappy shareholders who are- Holding the bag on a company, that still has a very large land lease for, a substation in, in the middle of Texas." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:25", "start": 2664.59, "text": "Yeah. and I think- That's also driven, I mean, there's also been a lot of back-and-forth conversations on the efficiency of some of the public, the large public miners, right? And I'm sure, again, you're, you're more of a specialist in this area than I am, so I'm curious your view on that, like the- Efficiency or inefficiency of some of these public miners, are they just leveraging cheap access to, you know, capital, and in some ways being inefficient relative to, you know, other, the private miners, let's say? I'm curious your view there." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "44:58", "start": 2698.31, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So we do a lot of coverage of mining, obviously, at Blockspace, with the mining pod sort of being our like general content for it, and then we do a, a weekly newsletter kind of diving into questions like you just asked about these things. This one you can go back and forth on a lot. So, example that I've gotten actually from the public landscape, from the CEO, told me this. Said, \"You know, they, they have about one billion that they've raised through the public markets, through ATMs or just initial capital offerings, these sort of things, and now their market cap is four billion dollars. So by every metric, you'd say that's a wealth creation event, wealth generation event. Now, of course, there's like sad stories in there where people like bought- High sold low, those sort of things, but in aggregate, you know, you went from one billion to four billion, that's a twelve generation effect. We see this with most of the public market caps for miners, that they're always like over time going up if you're in the bigger ones, the big get bigger faster, and the small ones kinda just, they're generally going up, but they're not going up super faster, very interesting. And so that's where you get the conversation around like, when should you go public? At what size should you go public? Does the market really have appetite for yet another publicly listed Bitcoin miner? And should you just stay private? there's a few interesting private models out there that are really interesting. I really like what Jamie McCaffrey and the Courtman guys have been doing. They raised Bitcoin- Bitcoin and then they, sort of generate a Bitcoin yield over time and then are able to offer that Bitcoin back to investors in the future. And the only reason this works, is because it's a debt instrument, so it's, it's a traditional debt instrument. I know people get scared when they hear Bitcoin yield, but it is actually traditional debt instrument and they have like everything by the books. They're using, you know, like, you know, the SEC forms for raising money in this format, and they're able to give Bitcoin back because they're a big- Bitcoin miner who makes Bitcoin for less than it costs to buy, and they're consistently one of the lowest cost producers of Bitcoin. You know, they're like, her, I believe, sub $30,000 to produce a Bitcoin right now, at a time when Bitcoin's trading for a hundred K, right? So they're able to offer Bitcoin back to those original investors. And then continue to use the investment money, to generate new sites and build up new sites. So kind of depends on the playbook. There's a lot of private miners who just have gotten washed out We certainly saw that this summer, where difficulty didn't really rise all summer, in fact, it dropped a little bit, in some instances, and more than likely, hard to know because it's private markets, more than likely, there was a lot of private miners going under or being consolidated, turning off for a little bit. Meanwhile, we saw public miners continue to deploy hash rate, continue to increase their sharehold of the network. What does that mean for Bitcoin? Like, I, I would love to see kind of stop at a certain point or at least these public miners diversify to different jurisdictions, Ethiopia, South America, even China again are hot markets for Bitcoin mining, and I'd love to see these, these pri- these public miners who have so much access to capital use those funds to move elsewhere, help diversify the network. so not to sit on a fence post, but I do think that both models work as long as like you're focused on Your North Stars of cheap energy, cheap ASICs, efficient deployment." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:27", "start": 2907.07, "text": "Right. Yeah. And what we've seen, I, I, as I understand, is this, this model of some of the larger public miners have been trying to go for the AI sort of, let's say, having another business line, and the idea is this AI and HPC side of it is sort of used to help them stack sats in the bear market or at least stay alive, stay afloat in the bear market so that they can buy cheap machines. And then ride the next bull market, right? And so it sort of, they're, they're kind of diversifying their businesses as opposed to, all being pure play Bitcoin miners. would you say?" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "49:03", "start": 2942.55, "text": "Yeah, I mean, there's different ways of, of cutting it. So like the AIHPC stuff, you're, you're seeing some large pivots into it, whether they want to or not. Riot has recently had like an activist shareholder get involved, and they're basically trying to push them towards using their megawatts of power for AIHPC. They think it's a better way of using shareholder capital. And then you see others like CleanSpark, they're like, \"No, we're a pure-play Bitcoin miner. We're focused only on this.\" And the ones that are We have this deal, CoreWeave, twelve billion dollar deal over the next decade or so, and, you know, they're just gonna be building out and retrofitting their sites for AIHPC. The reason that works so a lot of times is because there's experience. The CoreScientific team is one of the oldest groups of Bitcoin miners here in the US, so they have like such intimate and deep knowledge of Bitcoin mining, but they also come from the data center game, when a lot of Bitcoin miners don't come from the data center game, they come from like- All kinds of walks of life. I mean, I've met Bitcoin miners who were into running video game stores, who were personal trainers, you know, they just like found Bitcoin, were trying to figure out what to do with it, and decided to, to mine Bitcoin. Yeah. But the people who have the data center experience are really going to be the ones who are able to pivot successfully in both mine Bitcoin and do the AIHPC." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:25", "start": 3025.12, "text": "Yeah, interesting. Okay, yeah, so a-and yeah, as you, it's a fair point, as you said, there are some miners who do remain pure-play Bitcoin miners and others who are doing the diversification and having multiple streams and lines of business, going. I'm also curious if you have a view, I mean, obviously every four years Bitcoin, the re-the re-the block subsidy halves, and so- And most of the reward for today is coming out of the subsidy, not out of the transaction fees. So, you know, I guess just kind of very ru-loose, rough analogy, but it's almost like every four years the bottom fifty percent of miners are kind of getting culled out, aren't they? And so I'm curious if you have a view, is it like only the top ten percent or the top twenty-five percent who are kind of really making good money, or what do you think?" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "51:13", "start": 3072.95, "text": "Yeah, it's, it's difficult to answer. The, the way I'll phrase is like, you have to be worried about two metrics, hash price and hash cost. So hash price is like all-in metric, how much you're gonna be earning from mining Bitcoin, sort of like your Bitcoin mining revenue, it's gonna include your coin base and your transaction fee, and then your hash cost is going to include, depending on how you break this down, and public miners love to mess with this metric to make themselves look really good, but hash cost is like, what does it take you actually to mine a Energy, we're talking infrastructure, we're talking ASICs and the depreciation schedule for those ASICs. We're talking about SG&A, does the company have a lot of staff members, does it, throw a lot of parties for themselves? Do they, do, you know, whatever, those sort of things you have to take into consideration. And then it's just as simple, you know- revenue minus expenses equals profit. For, for most Bitcoin miners, getting to a place where your hash cost is, well, we'll use a different metric for this, getting to a place where you're able to mine a Bitcoin for a significant discount on the price of trading Bitcoin is quite difficult because these things add up over time. You make a wrong purchase on the energy, you make a wrong purchase on the ASICs, your depreciation schedule's off, and before you know it, you're not mining Bitcoin for that much lower than the- The predominant market price, and if the price swings against you like it has in the past, then all of a sudden you are mining Bitcoin for more than it cost to purchase, which is, you know, the worst case scenario as a Bitcoin miner. I'd say like in general, yes, you can look at the halving event as a cooling thing where fifty percent of Bitcoin miners are fired, and what you're really seeing is just like good capital stewardship It, capital is like forced into the good stewards b- by the Bitcoin network itself. It's a pretty harsh event, honestly. Like, if you, if you look at a lot of other systems the way we design it, there probably could have been a w- better way to have this depreciation or this schedule, this halving event, be a little softer so we didn't have people like losing their jobs every four years by the Bitcoin network. but that's how it is, and Bitcoin miners know the game they're playing, so they play it. In the summer, we certainly saw a Hashed out, and you just have to assume that those were the miners that had too high hash costs versus predominant hash price. Hash price has been low, like we're, we're kinda coming out of a hash price bear market. In the fall, we got as low as like thirty-eight dollars per petahash, which is really, really low. people don't really need to know that metric, but that's, that's bad. And now we're back to like fifty-five or so, which is like, is like doable." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:50", "start": 3230.14, "text": "I see. Yeah, and of course, a lot of this is driven, obviously, by the price of Bitcoin, right? As, you know, Bitcoin, and things like the mining difficulty and all these, you know, all these factors sort of play into that. so yeah, it's interesting to see that. the other big one, and you, you touched on this a little bit earlier in the conversation, but around custodians, right? So you mentioned, you know, getting, the head of Coinbase custody to come. Now, I think part of the difficulty around having, around motivating people to care about these soft forks is to sort of prove, I guess, prove out, quote unquote, that there's commercial demand for these things. And I think people like, like James Obie, who I know is also a speaker at the conference, That they're trying to show, look, maybe some of these high-grade custodians and big Bitcoin companies and, you know, Bitcoin neobanks or whatever, whatever we're calling them They, they, they would like OpVault, or would, you know, the reta-- the so-called retail pleb, would they benefit from having OpVault because maybe it enables like new ways of custody on the phone, but with this kind of OpVault feature that helps them, things like that. So I'm curious if you, if you can touch on your thoughts around The commercial viability of some of these ideas, especially at the custodian level." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "55:16", "start": 3316.02, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. The custodian level is actually really interesting, and a lot of people are like, \"Oh, I don't wanna talk about like vault, like vaults for my Bitcoin,\" it's kind of boring, but it's super important. The, if you wanna protect your wealth, Give an example, Plan B, that Bitcoiner, infamous for his, Bitcoin price predictions, recently tweeted that he moved all his Bitcoin into ETFs, and I believe his reasoning for it was he just didn't wanna have the self custody on his mind. A lot of Bitcoiners were like, \"Hey, like, it's not that hard to self-custody Bitcoin. I fall into that camp. I don't think it's that difficult, and there's tons of two, three solutions out there.\" But a lot of people still want that. I like the idea that an institution like Coinbase or an ETF would also be interested in figuring out better vaulting solutions for Bitcoiners for their property in case that something not only happens to them, but also gives a different way of access for Bitcoiners who are purchasing a Bitcoin ETF. I mean, we can imagine a world where in the future, if you're buying Bitcoin from your bank, that you have some sort of multisig scheme with the bank in order to get the Bitcoin back if there's a run on the bank. And there's things like that that we could start like thinking about with the Bitcoin network that would be quite interesting. And the fact that these institutions are willing to have these conversations, I think, is really bullish. really shout out to the Anchorage team, they've really been interested in this, they came to the first OpNext where Great presentation, you can check it out online. OpVault presentation from Sean Ryan, and they'll be following up with another one to talk about OpVault and the fact that these custodians are zeroed in on what the Bitcoin network might need to make self-custody better for Bitcoin plebs. I think it, like, it is worth some applause, even if you are someone who says, \"Hey, just use a multisig or, or figure out something like, Miniscript, like, the new Trident project that, Rob Hamilton just launched. Like, there, there's obviously solutions for that, but the fact that these institutions care about it too, I think, is really noteworthy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:22", "start": 3442.15, "text": "Yeah, interesting. I guess one, I guess we're coming up to the end of, you know, the hour that we normally do. Yeah. one other kind of, I guess, harder question I wanna put to you is- Totally. Would you, or do you have someone representing, quote-unquote, Ossifya view at the, at the event? Right? Would that be interesting? Because if, if the only people who might be interested to go are the people who are, who want to change, what about the-- Because, and I'll give you a reason why. It could also be that, you know, some of these events are, let's say, attended and promoted by the Call it the few hundred people on Earth who are most involved with Bitcoin and who really want a change. But what about the kind of silent majority of all these people who, as an example, now the ossi-- some of the ossifier arguments might be like, \"Look, if you bring in this new change, now it requires-- it's, could it be creating future technical debt, something that has to be maintained into the future that people aren't necessarily gonna use?\" Or maybe there are people who, you know, see that as, you know, so for the-- I guess in that sense A quote unquote ossifier or someone who is more, quote unquote, Bitcoin conservative come and represent a view there." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "58:35", "start": 3515.13, "text": "No, I'll raise it to you. We've, we've tried, honestly, we've, we've reached out, to, you know, a few people we've mentioned on the show and people in the ossifier camp to attend, not only the last one, but this one, offered them speaking slots, offered them panel slots, and I think just to the larger conversation we've had on this podcast, it's hard to get some of these people to go into the" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "58:58", "start": 3538.06, "text": "That being said, there is a team or group that is similar to Ossify Camp, which is the team Slow and Steady. Right. Like, AJ Towns is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:08", "start": 3547.65, "text": "the probably the proponent, he had a blog post called this, so yeah, go on." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "59:12", "start": 3551.79, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So the team Slow and Steady is probably the best we can do for now, 'cause they seem to be more open to conversations, and like Steve Lee is on that team, and he was at the last, last Opnext, and he presented his paper that he wrote with Lynn Alden and" }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "59:29", "start": 3568.56, "text": "Oh, right. This is the B," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:30", "start": 3569.81, "text": "B Cap, the consensus, project. Yeah? Go on." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "59:33", "start": 3573.07, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So they did a presentation on that, and Steve was there all day. I don't think he's able to make this one, unfortunately, just the conflicts. But we have actively pitched getting other groups in. I mean, I myself, I think, fall more into that as well, just as one of the conference organizers, one of three conference organizers. So, yeah, if you are an ossifier and want to come to the conference, let me know. We are available to have conversations. We're filling up panel slots and speaker slots, about ninety, ninety-five percent done. But we'd love to have different viewpoints and get people into the same room just to have a conversation, just to have dinner with each other and share and exchange views on like where Bitcoin can go to help scale it to, the next billion users." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:19", "start": 3619.0, "text": "Fantastic. Well, look, let's leave it there. As I, as I said, I think it's, yeah, an interesting, discussion that, you know, people should have. I've been These discussions myself, but, people who wanna check it out, it's opnext dot dev, and on the Blockspace Media side, it's blockspace dot media. My guest is Will Foxley. Will, thanks for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "will_foxley", "time": "01:00:40", "start": 3640.03, "text": "Awesome, thank you so much. Appreciate the show and the work you've been put into it for the last few years." } ] }