{ "episodeId": "SLP672", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "hunter_beast": { "name": "Hunter Beast", "role": "guest", "tag": "HUNTER" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.13, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. The podcast brought to you by Bold, the Bitcoin banking platform where US listeners can buy Bitcoin for the industry's lowest fees and earn the highest Bitcoin back rewards with the Bold debit card. Now joining me on the show today is Hunter Beast. Hunter is working over at Anduril, which is a research Search focused sidechain incubated by Mara and many of you will know Hunter for his work in terms of, BIP 360 and quantum resistant forms of Bitcoin. So, first off, welcome to the show, Hunter." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "00:44", "start": 44.3, "text": "Hi, great to see you. I, it was fun, bumping into you at Vegas, so, we, we actually have met in person. So- Yes, yes, yeah, I remember that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:56", "start": 56.45, "text": "as well. Yeah, yeah. although, at Vegas things are very, things are very quick and sometimes you don't get a lot of time to" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:03", "start": 63.49, "text": "actually catch up with people. We didn't have much time there, yeah. It was, it was a very busy, very cool, conference" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:09", "start": 69.03, "text": "though. Excellent. So let's talk a bit about what you're working on so people can learn a bit about that. Now, as you will know, and listeners may know, I just did a recent episode with, Clara from Chaincode Labs and Anthony, who were also talking about their quantum report, which they put out, you know, relatively recently. so some of this material will obviously be related or some of it's, let's say, revision, but, it's probably good for people to hear different perspectives anyway. so maybe you wanna set the background for us. what was your interest in this? Like, how did you get interested in this whole topic?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:48", "start": 108.08, "text": "Well, i-it always struck me as a bit of one of the more potent sources of fud out there. Like, I'm not the kind of Bitcoiner that likes to just dismiss fud outright. I like to address it. I like to have, a good answer for things. And, I, I didn't have a good answer for what to do about the potential threat of quantum computers and so, I, I even looked into it. I was, I was looking around for BIPs, I was looking around for, discussions, and it'd been discussed as early as twenty thirteen in Bitcoin Talk, but And then there were also some discussions in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty around the Taproot, upgrade, but then after that it just kind of stopped. We stopped having those discussions, at least, back when I was looking into it in twenty twenty four, about mid, middle of the year, and so, summer. And, oh, and what I was hoping for was that we have a plan for it, right? We have a, like a, a decent plan, a- Decent solution, hopefully maybe even some software, a soft fork, that sort of thing for us, waiting in the wings for us to at least be prepared, right? And so, that's kind of the motto behind Bitpie sixty is, be prepared, not" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:14", "start": 193.95, "text": "scared. And the obvious question that most people will have is They may be coming from a place of skepticism about this technology in general, and even just a few years ago, that may have been, let's say, the common view amongst most Bitcoiners that, you know, it's, it's just not really a real thing that, these quantum computers won't advance to that level or maybe they won't get the right level of error correction. Now, I don't understand this, I'm just-- This is what you, you know, you would have heard if you spoke to different people. Oh, yeah, for sure. What has changed recently Hardware innovations have kind of taken it to a level where now there is a, there is a feasible pathway to this kind of thing." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "03:56", "start": 236.4, "text": "Well, yeah, I think One of the major pr-problems has, has been, advances in error correction co- There, there are three, sort of like fronts in the quantum computing realm. There's, the hardware itself, with like however many qubits they're able to, establish and all the gates and all this, on, on the chip Then there's advancements in quantum error correction, and then finally there's advancements in the algorithms, like Shor's algorithm implementations that would, potentially affect, or be used for, quantum key recovery essentially. And so, the- so that's, that's like a, I would say like," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "04:50", "start": 289.84, "text": "there, there have been billions spent on research for this, a-and, a-especially in recent years, there's been over forty billion dollars spent on research total, and, we're seeing just announcements of like billions of dollars investment in various things, and it's just a, it's, although the technology isn't there yet. As far as we know, it, although it could be there in, sort of like a, like, who knows what the spooks have? I'm not a spook, so I don't know what the spooks have. But, you know, I, I'm just one of those, I'm just looking at, I, I'm just like highly paranoid of anything the government does. And, which is, which is kind of ironic because we're using NIST cryptography, which we can get into in a bit, but, no, I mean, like, I, I, I keep an eye on what they're doing and, they're telegraphing just about every signal they, they, they can without outright expressing the fact that, elliptic curve cryptography is broken, that we need to get ahead of this, we need to prepare for, this particular, like, we need to essentially upgrade, from elliptic curve cryptography in RSA to post-quantum cryptography." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:17", "start": 377.03, "text": "I see. And so- The point about Shor's algorithm is that that part already exists, and I guess what, what I have heard some skepticism, or some forms of skepticism have been expressed about quantum computers about whether they can do anything useful. But in the case of, at least with Bitcoin, there's already Shor's algorithm that already exists that would theoretically, you know, if, if the right, let's say hardware with the right number of gates and error correction were to exist, that It could back out your private key from your public key in short times. Right," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "06:53", "start": 412.91, "text": "right. You-- any exposed public key would essentially, make those, the coins behind, In it or backed by it or, or behind it, right, in that address essentially, it would make them kind of vulnerable." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:08", "start": 427.56, "text": "And so, I guess Do you have a, I mean, maybe you don't, but do you have an idea, like in terms of timeframe, when do you think this is a realistic risk? Like, is it now? Is it five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years? Do, do you have an idea or not really?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "07:23", "start": 443.16, "text": "It's, it really is a difficult question to answer because it s-spreads the gamut of, like we may already have that capability, it's just not widespread, to it may never happen. And then there's also, of course, like, you know, the startup roadmaps that are highly optimistic. There's the more corporate roadmaps that are more like, you know, more like five to ten years out. then there's, the, you know, like what the, the national security guidelines are, and those go out to twenty thirty-three to twenty thirty-five, and, so it's, it, it's, it's, it's somewhere- I, I would say cer-certainly within the next five to ten years, we're going to see some fireworks, that's just like my sense from all the things I've read. it may also happen sooner, though I hope it doesn't, because we need lots of time. Bitcoin is notoriously difficult to upgrade. This will require a soft fork, and also not only will it require soft fork, where there'll be a, need to be a transition period as People migrate their funds from quantum vulnerable addresses to, post quantum cryptography addresses," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:46", "start": 526.32, "text": "like P2QRH. Gotcha. And so just again, for people who maybe if you didn't catch the earlier episode with Clara and Anthony, I'll just kind of offer my, you know, layman's explanation, just for people who are trying to understand this stuff without necessarily being, you know, really deep in the detail. When we secure our Bitcoin, we have Private keys that you can represent using like those twelve or twenty-four words, and that, you know, in most contexts, like if you've got like a hardware wallet that, you know, you've got, you know, the twelve or twenty-four words that represents that master private key, out of that, you might have a master public key, and then the way you can-- your, our software, our, you know, your phone wallet or your hardware wallet and things like this, in the background, really what's happening is it's generating these public-private key pairs, and the way Bitcoin works today is When we, when I wanna send a transaction to Hunter, really what I'm doing is I'm signing a message, and for, in order for me to sign that message, I'm not revealing my private key, but I'm doing this operation in a way that I can sign The message that sends coins to Hunter without revealing my private key. But the risk here that we're talking about is in the, let's say five or ten year horizon, it's possible that a quantum computer can, let's say, see your public key And reverse out the private key, meaning that quantum attacker, he can see, if he can see your public key, he can, if he can see those public keys, he can steal your coins, basically." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "10:20", "start": 619.89, "text": "Yeah, and there's one point I wanna make sure is clear, is that, in, in order for the, for this to be clear, we need to get a little bit more technical. So, there's your BIP thirty-nine mnemonic seed, right, which is the twelve to twenty-four words. that encodes for- Entropy, like no-- well, randomness, right? That, it has to be very random, it has to be very good randomness, like a lot of randomness, right? And perfectly random, like noise. Hopefully we get it from, like, say, an avalanche noise generator chip or maybe a Geiger counter or something just really random, right? That's, that's, that's a good, m-maybe coin flips, I don't know. But, yeah. Anyway," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "11:05", "start": 665.42, "text": "the other, the-- so once you go, once you go from the, the Entropy that goes through what's called a bip thirty two, hierarchical- like HD" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:14", "start": 674.07, "text": "hierarchical deterministic wallets. Yes," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "11:17", "start": 676.89, "text": "hierarchical deterministic key derivation and When, I won't go into like the particulars of that, of like key derivation and derivation paths, but what I will say is that, the seed goes through a hash that then turns it into what's called an xPub or an extended pub-private key. And so, the, and then once you go from the extended private key, that, then is used to derive addresses, both receive address Addresses and change addresses, and this, and, and, and it'll generate multiple addresses in your wallet for, based on these criteria. And in order to do that, it generates new private keys for each address, and then it, it derives public keys for each address, and then it encodes those public keys or hashes those public keys and then encodes them into an address that, supports, say, base-32 encoding. And so, essentially, the thing to-- I wanna make sure is clear is that Although when you spend your coins, you have to reveal your public key for that address, it's just for that one address, it's just for the coins in that one address. So even if, a po- like a, a quantum computer were to derive, Like, a private key to a public key that you've revealed, it doesn't reveal the seed, it doesn't reveal your twelve to twenty-four words. That is safe because it is kept behind a number of hash algorithms and, it requires a much more powerful quantum computer to break a hash algorithm. It is like, like it's something that we're, we're not even thinking about, and so, we just think it's just, it's kind of hard. And, Also, that, that, that said, if you've revealed your xPub, your extended public key, you've basically given the keys to Castle, you, you, to anybody who, can then derive all your addresses and then all the public keys and then, get into all your, private keys if they have a sufficiently powerful computer. So, that Does that all make sense?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:46", "start": 826.29, "text": "Yeah, I, I, I think I'm following, but I think the spelling out one implication of that, it means that there will be users who have used wallets like Electrum, as an example, and maybe not just Electrum, but Electrum-based wallets, things like, let's say, Sparrow Wallet and Blue Wallet and, yeah, I don't know, Nunchok and various others that might have Electrum functionality. They are now potentially being exposed too, because if they have sent, now I'm not sure exactly, maybe this is like a more technical question on whether they send the full xPub or just Paul's, it queries addresses. It usually just queries the" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "14:23", "start": 863.0, "text": "addresses, right? The address and that's like an election index will, will index addresses. And, that said, sometimes you have to provide your xPub to like CoinJoin Yeah, or even" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:36", "start": 876.37, "text": "certain services might ask for the co- for an xPub to send you, like, \"Oh, we're gonna send you coins, you know, as withdrawal.\" Now, in the quantum future, that could also be another way that you get pwned, right?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "14:48", "start": 887.96, "text": "Yeah, exactly. That's, that's, that's a great point because, like generally, w-w- Xpubs will be used for, preventing address reuse, and address reuse is really bad for quantum, like from like a, a quantum perspective, but then also revealing your Xpub is also really bad. And so, there's, it's a complicated, question of how we keep things secure under this threat model, and we're still like examining it under new lenses every day. So it's, it, it's, it's definitely like it's, it's, it's, it's a challenge to keep, like, consi-- to not only think of how we fix Bitcoin, like with BIP 360, but also how we keep existing coins safe. one thing to also be aware of is that over two thirds of Bitcoin out there, like of the coins out there, are in, quantum-safe addresses or quantum-resistant addresses. They, like, they're, they're, they're public key hash, they're not reused. We don't- Don't know the public key for them. It's just, but that said, six point two million coins are vulnerable, and of those six point two million, one point seven million are, kind of the original public key format used by Satoshi, called P2PK or P2PKH." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:10", "start": 970.34, "text": "This episode is brought to you by CoinKite, the makers of my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet, the Coldcard Q. Now, some people think self-custody is too hard, but it's really about taking responsibility for your Bitcoin wealth and understanding that self-custody gives you a true feeling of liberty. The Coldcard Q has a full keyboard and big screen. It's got two secure elements and a true air gap, allowing you to go fully air-gapped using QR codes from seed generation to transaction signing. You can power the device using three triple-A batteries, so you don't even have to plug" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:40", "start": 1000.1, "text": "For PC or nunchuk on mobile, and you can dial it into the right level of security and complexity that you choose. If you want a simple setup, just use twelve words and single signature. If you want passphrase, it's easy. If you wanna add multi-sig or co-signing features, you've got those too. So go to coinkite dot com, use code livera to get ten percent off on your cold card or other devices and level up your self-custody today. 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Whether you are launching a modern financial institution from the ground up or you are adding Bitcoin backed lending or payments to your product offering, talk to the team at Galloy, visit galloy dot io, or reach out to the team at b i z at g a l o y dot io. Gotcha. And then, right, and this aligns with the numbers, Clara and Anthony were mentioning in there, in the episode with me and in their report, where, I think it's something like four and a half million coins are vulnerable because of address reuse, and I guess there are There's also kind of ex- maybe there's operational reasons why or maybe psychological reasons why people do address reuse, but of course, that's bad for quantum, and bad for privacy too." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "18:27", "start": 1106.65, "text": "In some ways, it's, it's, i-i-in some cases, it's a, it's a business, requirement because, some exchanges will need to abide by something called proof of reserves. And The problem with proof-of-reserves is that, if done in a, how would I say, naive way, it, It, it, it will expose the public key as soon as it's been spent from, like the cold wallet for that exchange has been spent from. The," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "19:02", "start": 1142.22, "text": "like a better way, would be to maybe, encode multiple script paths in a taproot address and then only reveal the public key for each of those script paths, each, each time. that That still requires a soft fork though for us to keep that secure, because not only does it need, you need to disable the key pass spends, but you also need to make sure that you don't, you can't spend from this address type if, If it has like a," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "19:42", "start": 1181.99, "text": "if it has, if for any keys that have been spent from, so, so you wouldn't be able to reuse this address, but you could s-still send coins to it and spend from it, the same address because it's a Taproot style commitment, or even, even better would be what we call Q-bit or PeduQRH, which, is, still very Taprooty, but it dis- It removes actually the key pass spend, and we can get into that in a bit, but, yeah, like proof of reserves, there might be solutions for that, they're, they're complicated, but I think still worthwhile, and that's something that I, I've been, noodling on the ba-bac-background, but that said, it's, it's a little further off a question than, how do we keep, say, taproot, taproot secure?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:35", "start": 1234.82, "text": "I see. Okay. so let's get into kind of your overall idea then of quantum resistant hash. This is obviously the BIP three sixty idea. Links will be in the show notes and it's BIP three sixty dot org to see the overall website. can you give us an overview there? What are some of the solution ideas? And I believe you mentioned three signature types. Maybe just walk us, walk us through a little bit what is the proposal here?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "21:02", "start": 1261.61, "text": "Yeah, we actually, had to re- Remove one of the signature types just to address a bit of feedback that, three is too many. And, it also made sense to remove one just because, it was It used the same, the same or similar, not, not the same, but similar security assumptions as the, as, as one of the other ones. And so ideally, we just have two highly different, signature types, one that can be depend- like either can be dependent on, should another one break. right now post quantum cryptography isn't super well- how would I say, understood in the same way that elliptic curve cryptography is. like the, we, we don't have computers that can run it, and so, or, or break it at least. we have post quantum cryptography runs in classical computers, w-w- but we don't have A, a good way to, to be adversarial against it other than just, in theory. Like, you know, mathematically we can say that these are safe, but then there's also like the potential for side channel attacks, just a lot of things that we haven't put enough thought into. So, I'm not confident to commit enough in, in, in any single algorithm to commit to just one, but two, having a fallback for every address would be really helpful. In addition Into, committing to, a, a, a, an elliptic curve, public key. So you have your, your choice basically with P2C quantum resistant hashes to, if you want to spend with a, a traditional public, public key cryptography, elliptic curve cryptography, or you can spend with, PQC. So you could spend with, one, one called, one is called MLD-SA, and, it's also known as Crystals to Lithium. And, the other one is Sphinx, or SLHDSA. And, so MLDSA is based on lattice cryptography, whereas Sphinx is based on hash-based cryptography. So they're fundamentally different protocols." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "23:24", "start": 1404.33, "text": "also" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "23:27", "start": 1407.19, "text": "like with, with one, like one of the major things that pay-to-coin resistant hash does is it completely-- so it's, it's, it's, it's built on Taproot, but it completely deprecates the concept of what's called a key path spend. so, one thing you, your, your listeners- Might know about Taproot is that, and I like you have very sophisticated technologi- technically, adept, listeners. That's one, one thing I know about this definitely favorite podcast is that you, you go deep on some, some, some things. one, one thing is, they, they might know is that Taproot addresses are, they are essentially a tweaked public key, and that tweak comes from, so it's, it's a public key that has a, an additional number added to it, a-added or multiplied, I'm, I'm not a hundred percent sure, it might be even both, but it's, it's, it's a-added or multiplied, but it, it, it, it essentially, kind of like it's still on, on, on, on an elliptic curve, it's just, they've added a number to it, and, the, this number would be a hash that i-corresponds to the script path spends. And so there's a key path spend that's just the, the, a public key that, that, that will then be tweaked, and that tweak comes from, the, the script path spends. And the script path spends, you can have multiple script paths, and when you go to spend them, you have to provide Like, the alternate," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "25:06", "start": 1506.0, "text": "tap branch hash. And so, it's, it's, it's, it's essentially script path is a merkleized, some call it an alternative script tree, some call it a, a, abstract syntax tree, but it's basically a merkleized binary tree of script path, tap leaves that specify what's called tap script. And so, and that all goes into the witness, which is interesting, because, like you can commit to it in the output, you can commit to like a tap, a tap, like a tap root witness program, which is essentially like the, also known as a xPub key, but, it's very simple, it's just like the number one To indicate this is Segwit version one, and then a thirty-two bytes, tweaked public key. And, whereas, the, I hope I'm not going too far in the weeds on this, hopefully you're tracking, but, awesome. Then," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:15", "start": 1575.0, "text": "let's see. The, oh, to be honest, I'm, I'm, I'm sorta struggling, but let, let's, let's go through it anyway. Taproot is" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "26:21", "start": 1581.3, "text": "incred- Taproot, I don't understand that, you know, we've" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:24", "start": 1583.7, "text": "got a key path spend and there's a script path spend, and the basic idea, the short version of what I understand, you tell me what I'm getting wrong, but the short version is We might have to disable the key path spend, and we might have to only have script path spends to make this all quantum resistant. That's as much as I kind of get here." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "26:40", "start": 1600.02, "text": "That, that's a good takeaway. That was a really good summary of what I'm trying to explain," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:44", "start": 1604.02, "text": "yeah. Okay, so, take us through the idea then. So, you know, just walking through the broad idea, is the idea then that Pip360 would be a soft fork introducing a new script type, quantum-resistant hash, and not a new script type," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "27:06", "start": 1625.93, "text": "but a new, but a new output type." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:09", "start": 1628.55, "text": "Sorry, okay, gotcha. A new output type that, a-and people would have to spend out of their old- Things out of their old, whatever, you know, outputs into the quantum resistant type, and in the new paradigm, that's where we'd be o-operating only on script path Correct. Okay. And so I've heard various kind of different ideas, maybe this is unrelated to your idea or it is related, but, people have spoken about this idea of like, oh, could you have like wallets that-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:46", "start": 1666.3, "text": "have, ha-kind of have both, right? They kind of have, they're, they're, they're doing," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:54", "start": 1673.72, "text": "maybe my explanation here is gonna be really bad, but the idea is that they're kind of, they've got both, but eventually they would, you know, once the quantum day happens, you would have to do another soft fork to sort of disable all the key path spends, and then from that point on, it's only the quantum-resistant script path spends." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "28:11", "start": 1691.35, "text": "Yeah, that's, that g- that gets into like a different proposal, or different proposal set of proposals, but yeah, 'cause like, like the, there's, there's the proposals that are meant to give us a safe place to put our coins. And then there's the proposal of what to do with quantum vulnerable coins." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:30", "start": 1710.31, "text": "I see, okay, gotcha. Okay. and so can you walk us through a little bit, like what, what would be on the BIP 360 plan? What is the What, what's the idea? Is the idea that, you know, we get enough support, enough people are kind of like, okay, yep, I agree with Hunter's plan, let's do it, let's do this soft fork, create this new output type, and people just move their stuff over? Is that the plan, or can you tell us, like, can you walk us through what your intent is here? Yeah, well," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "29:00", "start": 1740.15, "text": "what's interesting about Bit 360 is that we've-- it's gone through a ton of review. like, we have like multiple drafts Inversions of it that we've been working through, and I even brought on a co-author, Ethan Halman, who, as, his, his claim to fame is that he's, he's a, he, he's also done, he's, he's done a, at least one of the BIP, and he's also, a PhD cryptographer, who currently works for, Cloudflare on their post quantum cryptography team. And so, he- He's a very capable, and, and, well, and he, he contributes to the Bitcoin Dev mailing list all the time, but a very capable contributor and, I'm, I'm very happy to have him as my co-author because he's like fifty sixty before he came on versus fifty sixty after he came on is completely different thing, completely different beast. It's, we've been putting in a ton of work over the past month or two since he's come on, and really helped us Let's, figure things out. And, there's, there's just been a number of, of changes and, and developments, but everything that I've, I've described about the Taproot stuff is the most up-to-date stuff now. So in earlier versions of Bit360, we used to, have, kind of like a different way to commit to the quantum-resistant hash from public keys, and we also had, introduced what's called a, attestation, which was Also known as a quantum witness and, yeah, or quitness. We, we couldn't really come up with a good name for it at the time, but, we, we had to do away with that because," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "30:55", "start": 1855.38, "text": "So, Ethan engaged another guy, his name is Bas Westervan, and he, is, is a, a, a post quantum cryptography, understands PQC very well, and he wrote on the Bitcoin Dev mailing list a little, a, a good amount actually, research that he did into, what, what, what we- Cheekily term JPEG resistance, but it's essentially like, looking into how difficult or easy it is to add arbitrary data to signatures that are used by these algorithms, and it turns out that Sphinx only has, seven eighths, no, one eighth, quantum resistance or JPEG resistance. so, I misspoke, it's JPEG resistance that it, it doesn't have. So, so, basically, you could put seven eighths of the signature as arbitrary data of your choosing, if you, like, if you d-designed it, if you- Develop that correctly. And so as a result, it would be really foolish to, increase or, or provide a increase in the witness discount, especially if that could affect mining incentives or various other things like the fee market, the, just like, and especially node runners, right? Like because if we, if we were to, you know, for example, increase the witness by a four X, which is something that was considered Considering before I did all the math behind it, it, it, it would essentially, go from the worst case scenario, which is a four megah, to a worst case scenario that's a sixteen megah, and, it would go from worst case scenario two hundred gigabyte chain growth per year to, worst case scenario eight hundred gigabyte, chain growth per year, and so, that is something that, is It's just not really attractive to node runners. It's, it's not a, a good sale, like, like sell, selling point, P2PKH. And so we, we, we always deliberately kept that discussion out of BIP 60, but also, After doing that research, it's become clear that that might not be the right way to scale, post-crown cryptography on Bitcoin. So the, the long and the short of it-- So what is the right" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:31", "start": 2010.9, "text": "way to scale?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "33:33", "start": 2012.74, "text": "Well, Ethan actually put together a proposal for, scaling post-crown cryptography on the Bitcoin devs mailing list. I call it BitZip, but you can't find it under that name on the, on the mailing list. It's just, he just described it. Like basically as," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "33:53", "start": 2032.99, "text": "like how to scale PQC on Bitcoin and, on the mailing list, and that was Ethan Hellman's proposal. And so, he goes into essentially, a block wide minor coordinated transaction compression algorithm, that could be, implemented using Starks, and he does the math on how much of, how much of a, a, a, how, how much Which more could we get from that? And it could result in at least one or two orders of magnitude like increase in transaction throughput, even with post quantum cryptography, which is, could be very exciting. And it's not like we're introducing STARKs into Bitcoin as an opcode. It's more, like a, a minor coordinated activity to compress transactions using STARKs, and, and still have them be, be verifiable on- chain and, then, mi-miners will then commit to that and, and of course, because they've, they've, they've compressed all these transactions, they can squeeze more fee revenue out of them and so that way it's, instead of compatible with miners." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:05", "start": 2104.92, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. For listeners in the US, Bold lets you secure your financial future with complete peace of mind by integrating a low fee Bitcoin only brokerage with next gen multisig vaults. With Bold, you can smash buy Bitcoin or set a DCA plan for only 0.99% fees and seamlessly deposit the Bitcoin direct to your Bold Vault. The Bold Vault is a 2 of 3 collaborative multisig where you hold 2 keys and Bold holds 1 as a redundant backup. Backup, protecting against loss or theft. You can use Trezor, Ledger, or cold card hardware wallets to spin up a Bold Vault in just a few minutes, and the Bold Vault is the only collaborative custody vault available with zero monthly fees. They're also offering zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty-five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try Bold today and upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold.io. And now back to the show. but okay, so I guess let's bring it back to, you know, this Particular idea though with quantum witness, as I'm understanding then, the point is these signature sizes are going to be larger than today's Schneor or ECDSA signatures that we currently use in Bitcoin today, I think from your paper, it was like, off the top of my head, it was like sixty-four bytes or seventy bytes. That's like currently what we, what we have today, but these are gonna be, it could be like twenty x bigger or even much bigger. You know, wouldn't, wouldn't another idea be to just accept less transaction capability per block in Bitcoin? I mean, I think" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "36:38", "start": 2198.07, "text": "that's acceptable for now just because fee rates are so low and, like, we've actually seen periods Recently where entire blocks go, unfilled. And so, it, like, one thing people have put forward, some people have, my, one of my favorite Bitcoiners, Luke Dash Junior, he has advocated for like a, a block size decrease, the famous three hundred" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:12", "start": 2231.83, "text": "kilobytes, yeah?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "37:13", "start": 2233.17, "text": "Yeah. And, I, I just, I, I might just suggest that instead of decreasing the block size, we increase transaction size." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:24", "start": 2243.77, "text": "Well, yeah, I mean, with quantum, resistant transactions, I guess with these quantum-resistant outputs, and, yeah. So can you give us an idea, like- What, what size increase are we talking? What do you think is likely? but I guess even here it's a moving target or there's moving parts here because there might be More optimizations or more other work, but just kind of as we stand today, what is it looking like?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "37:51", "start": 2271.28, "text": "Well, it's, it's not great. it's, about, so this is, this is, The, the main figures to pay attention to are, the total of public key and signature pair, bytes used, and you can compare this to, so in, And, and with traditional Taproot and Schnorr, you have, a thirty, a, a, a thirty-two byte x-only SECp256k1 public key and a sixty-four byte Schnorr signature. So you have essentially ninety-six bytes that correspond to elliptic curve cryptography. So let's just round that up to a hundred because, like, there's also push bytes thirty-two, there's push bytes sixty-four. So let's just, yeah, call it a hundred. Yeah, yeah. And then, going to postcard photography, it's more like four thousand and eight thousand kilobytes or megabytes, just, just bytes. So four, four and eight kilobytes, sorry. so it's, it's about, forty to eighty times more. Forty to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:05", "start": 2345.06, "text": "eighty x. Okay. Gotcha. But that, but that's, that's" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "39:08", "start": 2348.18, "text": "just the signatures, whereas there's other parts, a-and, and the thing to know, to know about these signatures is that they g- they do receive a witness. Discount. So what you can do is you can divide that by four, and you, then you add it to the rest of the transaction, cost, and you get more of a, balanced equation there. So it, like, i-it sounds like a nightmare at first, like, like on, on the surface, but still, if it's like, if we just make the, the, the signatures ten times bigger, and then the rest of the transaction is, is accounted by the same, and by ten times bigger I mean like forty divided by four, right? discount at, at present, then, you, you get like maybe ten times more data in the witness per transaction, and then you, have like the scrip hub key which doesn't receive a discount and, various other transaction fields." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:07", "start": 2406.65, "text": "Okay. Right, so I mean, kind of loosely speaking, a ten, one tenth of the current block size." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "40:14", "start": 2414.24, "text": "Well, let's see." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "40:18", "start": 2418.29, "text": "I mean, like, the thing is, the, the thing to, to like be aware of is that we don't fully use all the block size in the regular course of things, right? Because, like, usually we'll see maybe one or two megabytes, used, but like, that's because not all the transaction data goes in the witness. What this will do is it'll provide, it'll put more data in the witness, which receives a, a, like a decent-sized account. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:47", "start": 2447.02, "text": "Because the signatures are bigger, there's gonna be more in the witness and it might make the blocks bigger on average, let's say. fair assumption, I guess. Okay, yeah, I think I'm sort of, I'm sort of loosely following you here. Okay, and then I, I wouldn't say like" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "41:06", "start": 2465.52, "text": "it's a whole, wholesale ten-stre decrease in transaction throughput, it might be more like a, a five x, maybe. Gotcha. maybe closer to five, just because like, if we're going from like, you know, one and a half to two megabytes to more like three and a half megabytes per block because we're, we're using so much more of the witness, then that might be more The scenario that we, we'd expect, and at, of course, at three and a half megabytes per block, that results in an average chain growth rate of about a hundred and seventy-five gigabytes per year, as opposed to, say, a hundred, which is, where we're roughly where we're at now" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:45", "start": 2504.99, "text": "Gotcha. Okay, so it's not like end of the world, and I think most people today, I mean, theoretically, in 2017, we agreed to, you know, max four megabytes theoretical limit, we, the community, node runners, whatever you wanna call it, hodlers, whatever, so that's been Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "42:04", "start": 2523.97, "text": "for the past eight years. Like, so it's not-- Yeah. So if you're okay with it since" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:08", "start": 2528.2, "text": "2017, then theoretically- I don't know. Now, I mean, look, the question of block size is going to be a controversial one, no matter which way you slice it, because there'll be some people who think, \"No, we-- you should,\" because there might be other people who say No, you should increase it a little bit more to, you know, to kind of compensate. And there might be others who, you know, the Luke Dashers or others who would say, \"No, we want it smaller.\" so I guess you're never gonna please everybody. Yeah, and, and, and," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "42:35", "start": 2555.02, "text": "like the, the, the problem with blocks is, is the bed of a tragedy of the commons, right? Like it's, it's one of those things where like it is a, a, a p-- one of the, the only cryptographically public resources out there, right? Where, where we're, it's, it's, it's like, It, it, it, it really is like one of those things where, it, it's, it's a unique thing in, in like the concept of peer-to-peer, and it's one of those things that, and dis-- and distributed systems in general, and it's, and as a result, it's, g-- established a very unique social component because in some ways it is a bit socialized. it is like the only socialized thing about Bitcoin really, other than, say, the fact that we- We all agree that consensus is, essentially like, like these are the, it's like the constitution, right? Like, like the genesis block and, and the parameters, that are encoded, essentially, are committed to in that, in that since then, a-along with All the consensus rules sin- since January third, two thousand nine, then, that's essentially our contract, right, with Bitcoin. That is, that is the, con- it's, it's like a constitution. It's, like it's, it's, it's very difficult to change as, for good reason. And it's gotten us pretty far so far, right? Like it's, it's done pretty well so far. two trillion dollars is a- Fantastic, like market cap for this asset is incredible, how far we've come, and so I, I totally understand why people are reticent to change that, right? The thing is, we also don't know how much capital could be coming in if, we, like, because there are- Bitcoin is considered quantum vulnerable. There are definitely like Goldbugs who will like make that point, and, that's, a-and they, and they do have like a, a salient point there, right? Like gold isn't quantum vulnerable. it's, it's vulnerable to debasement from the cosmos in like asteroid mining or whatever, but regardless, it's not, it's, it's not quantum vulnerable. And so, the thing is, we can upgrade Bitcoin. Like, I would like to think we can upgrade Bitcoin, let's, let me just say that, and hopefully we'll be able to do it in time before there's any major issue, we are fully pre- we will be fully prepared, to- Whether that storm, God willing, right? And so, that, that, that's-- But a-and, and what's interesting is that w-we can fix Bitcoin, we can't fix gold, right? And so, that's, that's why I'm really bullish on Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:37", "start": 2737.03, "text": "And so let's talk a little bit about what it would-- I mean, one other thing that I guess I'm thinking now and maybe listeners are thinking is, what other things in our ecosystem would change? Like, would we need-- I presume we would need new hardware wallets? So that can sign these special output types, and we would need like, you know, all of our software would have to get updated, you know, lightning nodes, like, there's a lot of these things that all these bits and pieces would have to get updated to kind of be, you know, quantum ready, let's say, like Y2K ready or whatever, right? but the problem here is we don't like, not like, it's not like Y2K when we know, okay, it's happening on the year two thousand, we don't know when it's" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "46:17", "start": 2776.6, "text": "Exactly. Yeah, it's, it's, sadly we don't have a date on it, and we, we also, there's, there's so much to upgrade. Every, pretty much everything will need to be updated in response to this. I mean, first of all, soft forks, that's, that's kind of the, the deal anyway, right? Like, I mean, either ninety-five percent of the network, hash upgrades or it kind of doesn't really work. And so, yeah, there's definitely upgrades to be had in the miners, and of course, economic nodes, Coinbase and Kraken and Binance. Imagine all of them, like, remember how long it took for them to get, native SegWit support even, right? And then people" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:03", "start": 2823.15, "text": "were yelling at Blockchain Dot Info for like, I don't know, four or five years when SegWit, right? So, yep," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "47:09", "start": 2829.05, "text": "yep. And, and, and then, and then, later on, there was a point where if you And from a Taproot address to a Coinbase address, which would, by then be native SegWit, if you tried to, to send those coins, they wouldn't show up, they wouldn't be- Like, they, some, something somewhere, they just wouldn't show up in your account, and so you'd nee- actually need to reach out to Coinbase support and, like-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:40", "start": 2859.9, "text": "Right. Get it manually credited somehow, yeah. Yeah. It was," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "47:43", "start": 2863.08, "text": "it was a total mess, and so, like- Hopefully we, we've, we've kind of gone through some of those, teething pains and we, we kind of like have a, as, as Bitcoin matures, Hopefully the, those problems won't be as bad, and we can also do our, our best to, as, as developers like m-myself, my team, my, my, the people around me, my community of, quantum Bitcoiners, I guess you could say, we're all, doing our best to Make it so that this upgrade goes as painless as possible for other developers on, in, in the ecosystem, in the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, such as, like Lightning nodes and Taproot assets and Frost multisig, Musig 2, and like, even like, who knows, maybe even Roast, right? Like, like things that, like, people are working on that, you know, just Just will need to be updated in order to, support p2kh. But the thing is, that's really nice about p2kh also is that it should be mostly Taproot compatible. I, I, I can't, it's difficult for me to imagine a scenario where it isn't Taproot compatible. so hopefully it'll just be like, oh, instead of going to, to, like, putting your tap tree in, in, a p2tr address, you put it to a p2kh address, and that's it, that's all you need To do. but that's, of course, it's never that simple because you, you of course need a, another derivation path, kind of like how we went from bip eighty four to bip eighty six, which, is essentially, those bip eighty fours for P2Wit public key hash to, and, and then bip eighty six is P2TR, and so or P2TR, and those are derivation paths used by the wallets that will generate new- New address, address output types ess-essentially, for the wallet based on the different parameters. Sparrow users are, are pretty familiar with this, also like anybody using Miniscript, you know, will know that you, you can put WPKH or WSH, and then you have like o-o-tr pre-prentheses and then eventually like the output descriptor" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:16", "start": 3015.76, "text": "section, yeah." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "50:17", "start": 3016.62, "text": "Yeah, exactly. And then, and then, or now, now eventually you'll be able to put But, QRH and that will give you quantum-resistant addresses." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:26", "start": 3026.17, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. So, I mean, there's so many things that are, would have to get changed here. and What about, you know, over the next five to ten years, I'm sure there'll be advancements on the quantum cryptography side of things. So, I mean, for now you've got this, you said crystals, dilithium, and sphinx, this, plus 128s Could those change as well in the next few years? Well, yeah, I mean, like one thing-- Because then it becomes like a moving target of what are we upgrading to, 'cause, you know?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "50:59", "start": 3059.37, "text": "One thing we, we discovered recently, I think, let's see, I think it was Ben Sigmund. He recently" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:09", "start": 3068.7, "text": "came out with a-- Oh, like a quantum-resistant version of BlueWallet, I think he made a, a soft fork version of that, something. Not a soft fork, but he made his own like fork version. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "51:19", "start": 3078.56, "text": "exactly. Yeah Blue, blue wallet and, tried to add, do his best to add post quantum cryptography to it, and in his experimentation, he discovered that on iOS, The SHA-2 variant of, of sh- of SLHDSA or Sphinx, ran way faster than, the SHA-3 variant." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "51:47", "start": 3107.18, "text": "I, I think it might be because Shake is, is also, I think, distinct perhaps from ShAThree, and so it just didn't benefit from hardware acceleration in those libraries that, like crypto libraries that, that, iOS p-provides and, whereas ShATwo wound up being accelerated by the CPU and, it just, it just wound up being a better wallet experience. And then there's also the, the flip side Which is like, one thing, there was a paper out, that came out that said, SHA two three eighty four would not be, quantum resistant. so like, think, there's, there's a number of different, like, considerations. in terms of picking exactly which variant of the algorithm we use and, but ultimately it may, it may behoove us in terms of, hardware compatibility To default to SHA2 instead of SHAKE and using the more modern algorithm that might be more quantum resistant." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:58", "start": 3178.39, "text": "Okay, yeah. So lots of different pieces there. we should also chat about the hourglass concept. as I understand, this is one of-- this is also a related idea. my, I guess the high level layman's understanding I have, you correct me if I'm getting something wrong here, my understanding is To try to kind of deal with this incentive problem of a quantum attacker, the idea would be to have like a special soft fork where there's only one I guess, transaction in the block that can include, the, the public key outputs, the quantum, what's the word, quantum vulnerable outputs, so that it's like a natural kind of rate limiter of you know, those, those vulnerable coins. can you just explain a bit more or elaborate there?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "53:51", "start": 3230.92, "text": "Yeah, so our class view one only really addressed the problem of P2PK coins, s-sometimes they're also called Satoshi's coins. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "54:07", "start": 3246.81, "text": "the, the, there's also, the thing that's, stipulates is that, Only one output can be included per block, and so anybody, like people, anybody willing, looking to spend those outputs at the time will, would need to do it one at a time and also pay, a, like a, a competitive fee to miners. Now, in order to be prioritized for that one spot in that block that those, those outputs can go when they're spent. Now, There's, the, the, the other problem with that is, so the solution, the reason why it's, it's a, it's an appealing solution is that, one point seven million coins, spread across thirty-four thousand different addresses with an average balance of fifty Bitcoin each. those could be liquidated within, like thirty-four thousand s-output spends could be liquidated within, certainly within a day, like s- even within hours, maybe. And, that amount of Bitcoin, like millions of coins just hitting the market, like the market within a day is could just be devastating to the price of Bitcoin. And although it's kind of, like- it's, it's not, it's not, like, how'd I say, in fashion for devs to talk about bit-price. The thing that we need to acknowledge about Bitcoin is, is the crypto-economic security model is predicated on the value of Bitcoin. And so, mi-miners will, will, the, the, there might be some co-capit-capitulation in the hash rate, for example, if, i-the price goes down too low. And so and that, that reduces the security of the system, and so it's, it's just like something to be, I would say, aware of. And although it might not be like serious enough to, present, say, oh, fifty-one percent attack, that takes a lot of-- There's a lot that goes on in a fifty-one percent attack, it's, it's very unrealistic in my opinion. It, it still would reduce the security of Bitcoin and what, how much value, i-i-i-can be secured. So, that, that said, that said, one point s- one point seven million coins hitting the market, like ideally w-we would, we would spread that out, and if we spread that out, Then it, it becomes thirty-four thousand outputs per, per block and the thing, or, or, or not per block, but per, one per block, and so we spend one of those per block, and so that's thirty-four thousand blocks essentially of spends, and that's, that corresponds to about eight months of Bitcoin blocks because there's about fifty-two thousand blocks mined in a year, there's a thousand blocks mined a week, a thousand and eight, technically because the difficulty adjustment happens every two weeks, and that's, twenty-sixteen blocks, right? So it's technically a thousand and eight or maybe some change. And" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "57:28", "start": 3448.11, "text": "the, there's, there's of course, like a problem with that, which is it's, it's not like, it doesn't address the problems of other kind of vulnerable coins, and also eight months might not be enough. And so- I came up with this potential solution called Hourglass V2 that I just wanna kinda put out there and maybe get some feedback on, is, and I haven't really formalized it in any kinda, any bit form, so I haven't put it towards a devs mailing list, but I'm talking about it because, like, it's, I think it's, it's good to like field these ideas before really starting to dive into them and work on them, is, To instead make it so that," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "58:20", "start": 3499.74, "text": "basically s- there will be a, a date at which No, new Taproot and no new, paid to public key and, addresses can be created, and also adr-addresses can't be reused. And so, like, like, like, like the network would reject somebody trying to spend coins to an address that, already, already had its public key exposed. And so, That would be one part of it, and then at a later date, it, th- th- those quantum vulnerable coins would then be, Subject to a rate limit of one Bitcoin per block. And if we do one Bitcoin per block, then instead of one, one, one fifty Bitcoin output per block, it'd be fifty, which is like capped at an actual limit of actual coins. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:22", "start": 3561.54, "text": "It's rate limited by the number of BTC, not the outputs." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "59:25", "start": 3565.02, "text": "Right. Then That would last Bitcoin one hundred and twenty years, potentially. it would take like s- those six point two million Bitcoin that are kind of vulnerable, it would takes, it would take one hundred and twenty years to s- to, s-spend them all. And, that, that's essentially what's-- well, i-it sounds kinda draconian, but it's, it's essentially what's needed in order to, keep the, the, the economic node runners happy, because Like, they're, you know, like, the different exchanges, different, ETF holders, th-things like that, they, they have a vested interest in keeping Bitcoin's price stable, and if there's one thing that could really destabilize prices, that, that dramatic increase in supply that could be caused by quantum computers. So, i-in, in a way, keeping your, your coins in quantum-vulnerable addresses even after something like P2K quantum-resistant hash has been published and activated, then you're essentially putting the network in danger unnecessarily. we need to upgrade all these coins and migrate them and all that, and so" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:00:44", "start": 3644.15, "text": "yeah, that's, that's, that's- Okay. Gotcha. That would be the, the solution," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:47", "start": 3647.93, "text": "yeah. Now, another thing people will be-- if we're just kind of broadly talking about the transition or people trying to- Move coins. How long is that gonna take realistically? Like, let's say people came to agreement on, okay, this is the path forward, I mean, is it gonna be like a year or two years for everyone to, or at least most people to move their stuff out of the res- the vulnerable addresses into quantum resistant?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:01:16", "start": 3676.47, "text": "Yeah, there was a paper that was published that inv-investigated that possibility, and their conclusion was something like a year, a-a-a best case Scenario, probably more like two years, maybe even more, depending on, you know, the congestion. What's nice about paid coin resistant hash is that, moving your coins to a coin resistant hash a-address doesn't really cost much more, at all. Like, i-i-it's, it's about the same as a taproot spend. And so, which are, which are slightly pricier than, gotcha. So then maybe it's not as much" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:53", "start": 3713.91, "text": "about the kind of on-chain cost, but it's more about the- The broader kind of getting a new kind of hardware wallet or getting a new kind of, you know, way to secure your quantum-resistant coins and all this sort of thing. Maybe it's more about that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. and of course, can't let you go without, getting your view on the whole burn versus stealing question. I suppose, different arguments on both sides. On one side, people would say, \"Well, if you burn them, is that confiscatory?\" On the other hand- I-if you, let's say, let the coins be distributed, let the chips fall where they may, law of the jungle, let whoever gets, let the, whoever gets the first quantum computer get those coins, you know, that could also be a problem, a problem too. So where are you on that?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:02:45", "start": 3765.25, "text": "Well, I, I would say that good arguments are made on both sides. I think the people who are, a-advocating for not necessarily, like," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:03:03", "start": 3783.77, "text": "Burning or, or freezing those coins, the, the people who are arguing instead that we shouldn't reduce the supply cap of Bitcoin, at a, at a protocol level, I think those, those people make a good point. I also think that, People like Jameson Lapp and, and," }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:03:27", "start": 3807.29, "text": "like, and, and Troy Cross also, are, they also have a point in that it might just be simpler just to burn them. But Hourglass is supposed to be a bit of a compromise, or at least a middle ground, and it, it doesn't, like, it doesn't reduce the supply cap, but it severely limits it, se-severely limits the spend, the spends of those coins. So the, the, the, the problem with, either Burning or with hourglass also is that, timing is everything, and so we'll have to be really careful and communicate in advance, you know, like What we intend to do if there is a big s- e-emergency scenario, and if we don't, react quickly enough To that particular, necessity for a rate limit or a, a burn, then a burn event or, or just like an upgrade that freezes those coins, then" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:04:40", "start": 3880.2, "text": "we could, we could see hard forks of Bitcoin. We could see, like kind of like a corporcoin, a Bitcoin that is backed by all the economic nodes, and then, you know, the, the miners have to make the hard choice of backing a hard fork, and then, that puts all the chips on the table for, whatever other upgrades, these economic nodes might want to Run, and that, that's like kind of a nightmare scenario. And so ideally, we have a solution in place for handling the mass liquidation of those coins because of the interests of economic node runners and miners" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:26", "start": 3926.36, "text": "I see, yeah. Yeah, it's complicated to really think about all these things." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:05:31", "start": 3931.29, "text": "there's game theory, there's like market dynamics, it, it's, it's incredibly complex and difficult question" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:39", "start": 3939.8, "text": "Yeah, I guess, we'll just sort of have to get feedback and see what people are thinking about and how they're thinking about it. So, I guess- From here, what, what are you looking for? Are you hoping for, you know, people to help you on the project or give their feedback? Do you need support? What are you, what are you looking for?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:05:59", "start": 3959.64, "text": "Yeah, feedback and review is also, is absolutely very useful. we ha- like, we have, some, like, right now there's like a, a GitHub pull request that Ethan's made into mine, where he's added all his thoughts and completely refactored the Bib, and we're pretty close to merging that, It depends on when this episode comes out, but it should be pretty close to being merged and at which point, it'll be published to bip360 dot org. So that's, basically the, the place people should go to kind of as a touch point for, learning more about the bip, reading it, and of course, there's a Substack link al-also there in which we, will provide like email updates as things progress." }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:06:53", "start": 4013.01, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:54", "start": 4014.49, "text": "that's okay. Yeah, I think that's probably a good spot to finish there. any closing thoughts and, where can people find you online?" }, { "speaker": "hunter_beast", "time": "01:07:03", "start": 4023.19, "text": "well, people can find me under CryptoQuick, on X and there's also an, nPub there in, in case you're inclined to noster. and, really, I mean, there's just so many unknowns in this that, I, I also just kind of- Turn to prayer, because it really is one of those things where like, w-we, we kinda can't know, and, it's, it's one of those things that's, that's, That we kinda need to leave to a higher power in some ways, and also, but that said, it requires a lot of work on our own part to be prepared, and so we're doing our best, to, come up with a good solution, but Hopefully, and hopefully the solution is timely, and hopefully it's received well by the community, and hopefully we're wise enough as a community to, recognize a good solution and activate one when it's ready. But there, that, that's a huge unknown, right? Like we haven't upgraded Bitcoin in four years, and so it's, it, it really is, like, people are right to be nervous, and, hopefully I, I'll be like, just get enough support and, you know, just people who are interested and, and in general, just people like putting their good, good vibes out there towards this, that, all of that's really helpful." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:36", "start": 4116.36, "text": "Yeah, well, thanks for joining and, explaining your view and explaining, some of these concepts for us. certainly, I think- The, yeah, like, there's, there's been a few new things I've learned, you know, just from, from listening. so yeah, thank you for joining me and, listeners, check out the links in the show notes, and, yeah, Hunter, thanks for joining me. Thank you." } ] }