{ "episodeId": "SLP724", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "charlie_spears": { "name": "Charlie Spears", "role": "guest", "tag": "CHARLIE" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.26, "text": "I think it's a much bigger existential issue that normal transactions aren't pricing out what many users consider to be spam." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "00:10", "start": 9.73, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast. Today I'm chatting with Charlie Spears. Charlie is from Blockspace, which is a Bitcoin media and, publication focused on, you know, Bitcoin technology aspects and also organizers of the Opnext conference. So, Charlie, welcome to the show. Glad to be here, Stephan. Long time listener, first time caller. Well, thank you. Yeah, well, look, there's lots of arguments going on right now, some of which I'm getting into those as well around, you know, Bib10 and this fork around ordinals and all that stuff. I know you're obviously a lot closer to the, the spammer ecosystem and the ordinal side of things. what is your- A" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:52", "start": 51.57, "text": "spam sympathizer. A spam sympathizer." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "00:55", "start": 55.38, "text": "So I'm part of the problem, but also like- Now, to be clear, I'm not endorsing, An accusation, so I'll just say it again, I don't take any money from shitcoin or spam companies, I'm not invested in any shitcoin or spam companies, I'm just, you know, copying the flack anyway, but nevertheless, let's, get your view, how are you seeing all this now?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15", "start": 75.13, "text": "With regards to the fork and the filter debate, I mean, this is really on year three of the long debate. What a lot of folks think was a debate which started in like May May of twenty twenty-five, that was actually probably two years into the modern iteration of it. Yes, it goes back to the genesis of Bitcoin, yes, it goes back to the original, like, op-returned debate of two, two thousand thirteen or fourteen or whatever, but the modern version of it, the same like conversations we're having right now, really started the first couple weeks on the mailing list in, right after Casey threw out the Ord client in January 'twenty-three and February 'twenty-three, because I remember that. I myself- Was, hanging out with Casey on Discord just kind of by accident, and, as a longtime Bitcoiner, I was conflicted, and I saw a lot of the early discussion, on the mailing list, and I realized it wasn't an issue. And what's funny is, no, I would say no new information has been introduced into this conversation since those first couple weeks. The com- the argument has just evolved and I won't say matured, but it's, it's degraded." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "02:33", "start": 152.73, "text": "Yeah. I mean, I would say there's been some little nuances of things that have shifted. So as an example, Libra Relay is probably, like, you can't deny that's something that kind of changed a dynamic, an important dynamic in terms of relay. Yeah. there have been elements of, you know, evolution along this journey. I, you know, I would say, you know, i-in the earlier, you know, as you said, in ' And more like late twenty twenty-three, there was, you know, this fee spike was happening, a lot of people were angry about it, and, you know, there was a sense of, \"Should there-- What's the response from the community? Should it be like a social thing? Should it be like a, an effort to actually try to filter it? Should there be a consensus change, et cetera?\" And, and at that stage, most of those guys were saying, they were kind of swearing up and down, \"No, no consensus change, only po-policy is enough to stop this Where are you at there?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:25", "start": 204.6, "text": "Some people swore that they would never advocate for a consensus change, any accusations of doing that was an outright lie, they are now, advocating for that. I'm glad that it took them three years to come around to the fact, something that we all knew years ago, that to reduce these types of data would require a consensus change. But again, that's something that was well known years ago. As it relates to, like, something like Libra Relay Yeah, that's actually a new evolution, but I would say, like, I kind of subscribe to information theory that, it doesn't really make sense to try to limit this type of data at a policy level long term. If Bitcoin is going to be ready for, like, global adoption, then, we should be talking about consensus changes. The policy is like guardrails, that helps Bitcoin bootstrap to the first maybe few trillion dollars market cap. Beyond that I think if we wanna think adversarially, policy isn't really a feasible solution. So I think Eric Wall actually characterized Peter Todd in such a way that Peter, is a little bit like a wizard sitting back and saying, \"Well, there's these incentives which will eventually play out, and he will kind of occasionally throw things into the mix,\" Libra really being one of them, and I kind of believe that too. I'm a bit of an accelerationist in that I also think that, for relatively benign Things like ordinals or inscriptions or just arbitrary data, as we see it today, that type of thing being introduced to the network today is probably way better than truly adversarial, types of information, which I do anticipate will happen if we want to think that nation states will try to, attack Bitcoin in some ways, they will do it through ways. So I'd rather much, I prefer, I prefer it to be benign things. and, also I just think that the, onboarding narrative of thousands, tons of new Bitcoin users, is underappreciated by the existing legacy Bitcoin community. So that's my opinion, yeah" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "05:39", "start": 339.32, "text": "What's your take on whether any of, you know, the spam can actually be dangerous right now? Right? Obviously this concern around illegal data, right? Yeah. where are you at on that?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:51", "start": 351.02, "text": "Governments could, state entities could, look at illegal stuff on Bitcoin and use it as an attack vector. I think that is impossible to stop. So To-- it's also very incoherent that, like, this type of information in this format is materially different than information in, like, Pubkeys. Like The, like, it's very weird to draw an arbitrary distinction between non-contiguous data in smaller data pushes versus larger data blobs or, the truly unsensible nature of information in pub keys or, like- hashes on Bitcoin. So yeah, yeah. So let me just take a second here just to" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "06:37", "start": 397.04, "text": "explain for listeners, right? Because obviously you and I both get it, but for the listeners, there are various ways-- Now, whether we like it or not, there are various ways to spam data into Bitcoin, right? There are public, like, in, if you break down a transaction, there's things like public keys, there's signatures, there's scripts. And there are various ways that people can spam into those, right? So for example, OP_RETURN is a special kind of output, and I guess some of these arguments are going back and forth on what is the maximum size of contiguous data. Yeah. And so that became a talking point from the, let's say, the not and the one ten filter camp, and this has also been argued back because people were saying, \"Well, hang on, even in the Taproot inscription envelope, you could have theoretically just put in...\" 400 kilobytes that way, so why are you making a big deal about 100 kilobytes now? And then the argument back comes, well, no, but you're making it easier for people, and before it was harder to do 100 kilobyte op-return, and then we get into arguments of like, well, hang on, some people were doing 100 kilobyte op-return even before Core v30, so why are you making a big deal now about Core v30? So there's all these different arguments back and forth, but Transform, beca- like, I guess one other point just to make clear for listeners, you-- it depends how you say it, right? But ultimately, Bitcoin blockchain data is, you know, it's hex data. You have to actually, you know, select the transaction, you know, decode it, transform it into an image or some kind of illegal data. So, it-- you know, there's a bit of a Point of contention around that, and I think the argument seems to be, well, the community needs to speak out against illegal data being on, on chain, and espe-and, contiguous data is One of the things that, you know, the, the filter guys want to stop or at least try to stop." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:35", "start": 515.17, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. The, the steelman for contiguous data, and I do think that this is probably-- the best I can steelman the filter argument is that they want to impose additional cost to what they consider to be spam. and so I do think that's the strongest angle that they have. I think this ignores the fact that we have already done this Through block space pricing, and, it implies that this hasn't already been a thing that the Bitcoin network has prioritized, putting a cost to what you can put on chain and having a, a limit to that. We fought a whole war over that, and I do just wanna- You know, there is this-- I get that we Bitcoiners want to think of ourselves as adversarially minded, and we want to say, \"Well, we want to imagine that the state wants to-- we want that the state wants to attack Bitcoin and that they will leverage legal means and stuff like that.\" I, I share that view. I think if you are to, at a consensus level, try to reduce potential legal attacks for Bitcoin, that is the most fucking cucked mindset I can ever imagine. so, sorry, you can bleep that out, but like, I just think that, Bitcoin at a protocol design level shouldn't be, affected by what we think a couple governments might do. So if that were the case, then I think we should take a lot of other, I would say, increasingly cocked positions on how we design Bitcoin as a protocol and not just like be that. So I think it's a very incoherent argument to like try to argue against like posting legal data because Legality is an arbitrary, definition based upon which jurisdiction you live in. What is illegal in the United States is not illegal in other countries. And, to me that would be like, the same thing as saying, there is evil, there are evil images that we as society consider to be morally, bankrupt and evil. But The definition of those images is different in China because they will, they censor, freedom, information in China, like the Tank Man image. That's one of the first things I inscribed on Bitcoin. so, I think that these normative moral definitions of what is illegal and not legal, are not relevant in the protocol, at the protocol design level for Bitcoin. So, yeah I can't steal man the filter argument very well. I can steal man other positions on like other protocol changes really well, I think, 'cause a lot of people will frame me as a core supporter or core sica-sica fan, and I'm not really. What's funny is, I'm, I'm, I'm long-time pro client diversity. So the great irony is that, I love to see more people running different clients. the landscape for like functional clients, which are not core, is very sparse and thin. And because Not's is a fork of Core, it's like very hard to actually say that's very differentiated, other than it's got, you know, more knobs. I know Luke will eviscerate me for making that reductionist comparison, but- I want, a more diverse client set. So, you know, the recent, core appointee to talk, you know, the core maintainer, who's focusing on like the Bitcoin kernel and like pulling out consensus, I'd love to see that, because I think for a robust, adversary, adversary-designed Bitcoin network, it's very important for us to imagine a world where there isn't a leading project which defines, like, which is a de facto- definition of, of core, of Bitcoin consensus. So, it's funny, 'cause like, you would think if you, if you were to take that view, you'd think I'd be like a not guy, but I'm not really, 'cause I believe that, not-- is not positioned for a robust, dominant reference client, but, I do like that people are finally knowin-- that finally know the difference. Like, the average user didn't know the difference probably years ago, and now, for, I'll, I'll bet, like- I think perverse reasons, the average person and user who's involved in these arguments probably does differentiate between like client consensus and, other stuff, and even like having those tools and language is really important, I think, to set up the next decade of Bitcoin growth." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "13:30", "start": 810.29, "text": "Yeah. So in terms of like different, you know, Bitcoin clients, obviously, y- I think generally speaking, yeah, it's nice to see different kinds of clients. The main ones, obviously, Bitcoin Core, there's Not, there's like BTC-D, which kind of is used for like- Lightning stuff and NutriXO stuff, and then there's Libbitcoin by, you know, Eric Voskuil and if you're, if you're like a weird" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:48", "start": 828.3, "text": "like, what's the, what's that, Terry written OS? It's like the temple OS of, of, of Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "13:57", "start": 837.15, "text": "clients. So anyway, I think the, the, that's kind of the funny thing because the debate is kind of being summed up as, oh, just core versus not, but it's more just like the filter camp versus The, disparate groups, right? Because there are different views, right? Even your and my-- Your view and my view, view is different on this, even, right? Because we would have different views of what constitutes spam. Yeah. but at the same time, I still think bit one ten is the wrong pathway. Like, I just don't, I don't think it's the right, move for the network. Yeah. well, let's go, let's go to that question, like in your view, like, I guess, here's how I see it. I think basically BLC20 stamps JPEGs, I consider those as spam on Bitcoin, but the difference is, I don't think I necessarily have a good way to stop them. So that's probably the, probably, but how do you stop-- Is there such a thing as spam? Yeah, and that's on Bitcoin. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:53", "start": 892.89, "text": "that's what was basically discussed on the mailing list the first couple weeks. There's a iconic post from Andrew Polstra where he addresses, block space repricing, like ability to impose additional- Cost to spam, ways to reduce arbitrary data, and all of those you said, this, none of these would have a material effect, and, any, doing any of these would invalidate like the core principles of Bitcoin. And I was like, okay, great. And so I read that, and I was like, okay, I, I don't feel like this is a, a, a existential issue. I think it's a much bigger existential issue that normal transactions aren't pricing out what many users consider to be spam. because we've seen empirically that what you call spam is very reflective to fee rate. It's very sensitive to fee rate. we see that when we don't have these major like secondary token mints like BRC twenties, when it's like we're looking at like just JPEGs, they're very cost sensitive. even around like a hundred to one, ten to like a hundred sat per VByte, they dramatically fall off in like how, how much block space they take. Up. So like I would say that, if we were to see more actual like monetary activity on Bitcoin, or to see like average higher fee rates in a more dynamic fee rate market, we would naturally see this stuff priced out, and we can backtest this and look, and you can look and say that these things do reduce, they, they, they do, they are priced out. And then as far as like secondary tokens go Best of luck, man. The deagens are gonna degen, but they have a really quick half life. So if Bitcoin can't handle crazy spikes in speculative activity, then I don't know" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "16:38", "start": 998.04, "text": "what we do. And so, again, there's lots of like little nuances and rabbit holes that we can go into, but I'm just trying to make sure the conversation is accessible and, you know, educational for people. but let's go to this concept of- If certain pathways for spamming the chain are blocked off, either by policy or by consensus, as is the plan, as is the Bib10 plan, restricting, let's say, op return below a certain size, and they are trying to basically outlaw the, what's known as the taproot inscription envelope, which is a specific, like, scripting, you know, method that the spammer guys are using to- Spam their JPEGs into the chain, and not just JPEGs, right? 'Cause there are, there actually are a lot of these, kind of small value in terms of, bytes on chain, inscriptions, like text inscriptions also. Yeah, in terms of like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:29", "start": 1048.77, "text": "yeah, just for context, for like, in terms of like raw transaction numbers, it's like ninety-nine percent token mints. In terms of block space used, roughly, it's like Thirty percent JPEGs, seventy percent, fungible token mints. Of that like category that we call-- that you might call spam. I'm not conceding this totally. I'll just, you know, adopt the semantics, for, to have a good conversation. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "17:53", "start": 1073.16, "text": "right. And so, I mean, tell us from your perspective Does BIP 110 either stop or meaningfully curb spam or, you know, yeah, does it meaningfully stop or curb spam in your view?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:09", "start": 1088.98, "text": "no, it would stop the existing, tactics to put spam on chain. so a lot of this is not being able to think one step ahead, which is, the mar-- you cannot control what the secondary market will do. The secondary market will, will, will, will do, will, will have incentives of its own. It's, it's exogenous to Bitcoin. What the secondary market can do for these types of data is they can use certain data embedding schemes. One ten nukes the majority of those, data embedding schemes that are popular. What can happen though is if there's still economic demand for these types of transactions, they will evolve into using different tactics, and there are an effective infinite number of tactics you can use to put arbitrary data on chain So, what will happen is, you'll, you'll, through much gnat, you know, gnashing of teeth and wailing, you will Somehow, at great expense to your sanity, execute a soft fork, we call it, we'll say one ten, which, which nukes, nukes like these known ways of embedding, of, or the, you know, the popular ways of embedding data, but, it is Asymmetrically, by several orders of magnitude, less difficult for the big spam ecosystem to evolve and its tactics. And so, just the novelty and like con-- you know, conspicuous nature of this, like there will be new spam embedding tactics which will be popular, in this new data re-reduced data soft fork. You know, there is, I'll actually steelman this. You can argue that you can send a social signal, and you can. I will qualitatively say that the social signal has only boosted the, like, antagonism from these spammers to say, \"This is such bullshit, like, we don't want to do this.\" And in fact, I think it's antagonized people who are, who are largely neutral, because a lot of people really didn't care. about this, especially like a lot of the Bitcoin devs are like, \"Not really into NFTs, not really into tokens, but I don't really care about this.\" But, the anti-spam, the pro-filter arguments, Became so intolerable and like interwoven with essentially like, like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:48", "start": 1248.45, "text": "very anti freedom arguments that I think it antagonized a lot of people who were, were previously pretty neutral because they find the one ten camp so boring. So you actually see, I, I use like Rob Hamilton, who is like a true neutral character, and, he's always like making anti, anti filter arguments, and he- He is not really a, a JPEG guy. He somehow managed to be friends with everybody during this, and he's finally made some enemies and become an enemy number one in like the, the filter, among the filter camp. So, like, there's a lot more of those type of people who aren't just Rob, they're just-- He's a more prominent one. So like- You know, you've seen an alignment against 1.10 from like the previously, the, I would say, the silent majority of neutral Bitcoiners because they view it as anti-freedom, largely, or just against Bitcoin, like Bitcoin equal access, you might say. So." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "21:50", "start": 1310.2, "text": "And so, yeah, as I said, you and I have different views on spam, but in a way, we sort of land in a similar way of like, I don't think this is the right thing for Bitcoin. Even if I never spam the chain myself, I don't endorse it, I don't like it. But sometime-- It's just like COVID, sometime, the lockdowns, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, you know? Like these people are sort of saying, \"Oh, it's only temporary. Where have we heard that" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "22:17", "start": 1336.8, "text": "Arguments from the other side about, \"Oh, you're misrepresenting them, this, that, and the other.\" We don't have time to get into every little nook and cranny, because otherwise it's gonna be six hours podcast. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:24", "start": 1343.99, "text": "but them misrepresenting me all the time. So like, I try to like be, you know, you can only have like an hour long conversation too. So like, to be exhaustive, it would take A month." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "22:33", "start": 1353.22, "text": "It'd be like a six hour podcast. We're not gonna do that. But like, let's just talk about some of the key points, right? So I think this is probably a, not a very well understood point, right? So let's say BIP one, now, again, it's very unlikely. If last I checked on a prediction market for this, it's like less, it's like five percent, and even that might be overstating the probability of success of one ten, of BIP one ten here, but Just for example's sake, if bit one ten does get activated on the heaviest chain in Bitcoin and it gets activated, I think it is likely to still get spammed. Now they might say, \"Well, that's fine, but at least it's not contiguous.\" But you've seen different arguments on that, because they've said, \"Well, actually, we're gonna also keep soft-forking.\" And it's like, \"Well, how many rounds of this are you guys gonna do?\" You can try to, you know," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:18", "start": 1398.48, "text": "think about it. Like, one ten was originally, Three weeks ago was the original target, it was originally February 1st, 2026. A lot of people forget that it just the timeline keeps being pushed back and there's, and they keep moving goalposts and, and, and re- and, and giving ground But like, yeah, you can con- you can commit to more future softworks, but guess what? That's a similar thing that we didn't want to do during the, during the block size war. A lot of the reason why we didn't commit to raising the block size as a design goal was not necessarily because there is a perfect block size, I will get crucified for this, but rather because we don't want to commit to future consensus, discussion on block size. there's a bunch of other reasons that were going on, but like, that was a big one is not a good protocol design and good for consensus to have to always be fighting like, \"Do we increase the block size another two megabytes this year?\" So" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "24:18", "start": 1457.91, "text": "right. It was seen as a-- Now, there were a few things there, fixing, transaction malleability and quadratic hashing and this, that, and the other, and obviously enabling Lightning, et cetera, but yes, it was also seen as a rejection of the Big block pathway. It was seen as like, \"We're gonna do this layered approach, we're gonna do Lightning and maybe other L2s in future, and now we have some of those other L2s, we'll get to that later.\" But let's just on the spam question, can you maybe elaborate or explain for us a little bit what would the game theory or what maybe game theory is a, a dumb word, but what's the incentive, what's the system gonna do? Like basically, can you talk us through what it would look like if Casey and, and the AUD guys, the Which is like a new scripting pathway or whatever, or even some-- I've seen, the, again, not endorsing or promoting, but there are other vectors of doing this, right? There's Stamps, there is this, what's it, Audinots, the Taproot guys, and then, there's this other one called Bpub, which is like literally spamming into like the pub keys. So can you just talk us through what would the next steps be, like, let's say one ten gets stopped, what's the next spamming vector, and is it" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "25:30", "start": 1529.84, "text": "Costly? Are we talking like five percent more costly, fifty percent more costly, a hundred percent more costly? Can you give us an idea? it could be" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:37", "start": 1537.0, "text": "more costly, it probably will. I would have to look at each scheme. probably what Casey would do, and probably a lot of other people who are just frustrated with all this bullshit, would just look and see, Which data embedding scheme is the cheapest and, and, most user friendly if we just update the old client? Because for the listeners, like, there is a separate Software that you run to look at the Bitcoin blocks and interpret the data inside there, and that we call the ORD, the Ord client, and it lets you See through your ordinal's lens, the, the fun stuff that's on Bitcoin. so what would happen is the client would just update how, or client Casey would, update to a new sc- new scheme to just look at the blockchain differently. And so," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:32", "start": 1592.2, "text": "yeah, it would, it would, it would be fairly trivial to do. I don't know which scheme they would choose, honestly. I think Not's-- oh, man, I'd have to look. This is-- you caught me off guard here. I'd have to look at specifically whi-- how Not's identifies, the, the, the Taproot spend script pushes. I think it's, I think it's something to do with like the OP zero, OP one, whatever. and they would-- so it's kind of actually hardcoded" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:01", "start": 1621.44, "text": "The witness data. And right. So as an" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "27:04", "start": 1623.55, "text": "example, I've heard, I've seen some people talk about, because they're taking away OP_IF in TapScript, right? Because that's one of the-- Yeah. That's the Taproot, or I, I forgot the exact encoding, but people have been talking about, well, you could use OP_NOT if, or there are other scripting mechanisms to do that. Yeah, OP_NOT. I think that'll be like the easy preferred one. So maybe that's like one of the top candidates that Casey would choose, but other people will have their own" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "27:27", "start": 1647.13, "text": "So, I, yeah, so do you have a sense of how much more expensive it would be? Because that's probably an important point, right? If you're a noth or a one ten fan listening or hate listening or hate watching or whatever, you probably wanna get a sense how much more expensive is it if, if they get pushed to using the next best spamming mechanism?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:45", "start": 1664.56, "text": "So I don't have the numbers on my, on top of my head. also I haven't, like, actually haven't looked at this, like, I haven't looked at exactly how expensive, different schemes are. it's, I would say like two x, three x more expensive sounds like kind of that bullpup. Something that it could be, yeah. And I also don't really think that would materially change, that would materially change the ecosystem. we're sitting at one sat per view byte right now, so that'd be an effective like, if you're gonna put a dirty JPEG on Bitcoin, it's gonna cost you three sats per view byte. And, we don't see JPEGs materially costing more than, if you're gonna do pub keys, it's gonna be probably the most expensive, maybe it's ten x, and we don't Dependent on the market, but like, yeah, if you could impose a hundred costs, a hundred x costs on JPEGs, I'm pretty sure they'd like die, or they'd be, what I think, to, I think is, they would just become much more special. So what you'd really do is, you'd really just, call all of the really bullshit low effort stuff, and you'd make it Bitcoin more of like a, a fine art, blockchain, which, hey! I would probably prefer that 'cause I don't like looking at, I don't like, I don't like, I don't like looking at the dumb stuff. I'm, I'm a, I'm an artist, so I, I like, I like Bitcoin's scarce block space to be used more, as a more premium block space. But while nobody's using Bitcoin right now, like, while fees are low, like, have at it, I don't really" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "29:18", "start": 1758.21, "text": "care. In your view, do you predict like the Ordinals ecosystem making a big comeback in the future, or do you think it's kind of, it's in a lull? Like, where do you see that? Because some people might say, \"Well, hey, maybe it's just like it was a fad and it's over.\" Or do you think, \"No, it's coming back?\" Or like, \"Where is it now?\" No," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:34", "start": 1774.41, "text": "I have no-- I really don't know. I mean, I own a lot of Ordinals, and I will make inscriptions for fun all the It's mainly 'cause people are like begging me for them, but sure. and, I don't know. I think a few of them will come back. I think it's dependent on, Bitcoin itself getting a bid, and I also think it's a dependent on the on-chain economy of Bitcoin increasing, because I think that you see largely that the price of these like secondary on-chain assets, increase when more shits happening on chain, whether it be both degenerate and monetary and everything in between." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "30:23", "start": 1823.46, "text": "Right. So you're saying it's kind of correlated to just bull runs, like if we have a Bitcoin bull run, who knows when? Yeah. You think that might have a resurgence or le-that might lead to a resurgence in spam ordinal activity, let's say, or whatever. It" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:37", "start": 1837.29, "text": "will lead to a resurgence in more activity of those things. I don't- I don't know if like the existing assets which are out there, I don't know what'll happen to those, 'cause that's like independent of, like they, they tend to get more interest, yeah, yeah, they tend to get more interest, like more people are doing shit on Bitcoin, which is great, but, I really have no idea. I would love for them to go up because, it means that, like These, like the, what one crazy thing is that the Deejuns very quickly started running circles at a technical level around the average, like, Bitcoin pleb user. The average Deejun has a much more sophisticated understanding of Tapscript. if you look at the Mempool dot space donations, it's all JPEGs, because, like, these are power users on Bitcoin. And so I want Bitcoin to have this giant top of funnel, to lure People into using it, even if it's for speculative means, because, I think that results in net more Bitcoin users, net more, sophisticated Bitcoin users, and they tend to be very liberal with their support of, Bitcoin projects. So, I think that's good for the ecosystem." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "31:55", "start": 1915.44, "text": "What do you make of this? So this seems to be kind of another moral or ethical, reputational kind of argument we see from the filter camp. They sort of give you this i-idea that, well, if people look at Bitcoin and see that it's filled with JPEGs and not monetary activity that that somehow harms the reputation of Bitcoin or makes it a worse money. So what would you say to that? Does ordinals and, you know, spam activity make Bitcoin a worse money?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:22", "start": 1941.65, "text": "You have to be, you have to twist yourself to make it, to make that argument. You have to really like, you have to tie yourself in knots to say that Bitcoin functions differently, that you can't send Bitcoin transactions, that you can't have- Have like, sovereign access to Bitcoin. empirically, we've seen that more users use Bitcoin because of Bitcoin. We basically siphoned all of the energy from these other NFT and crypto ecosystems onto Bitcoin, and now they own Bitcoin, and they're really-- these people weren't using it before. They're all on ETH and they're on Solana, and yes, they still hang out on those ecosystems, but now they have Bitcoin. If you hop in these like Deejin Discord servers, there is a broad agreement that I trade on these other chains, I Deejin on these other chains, and I roll that into a Bitcoin savings account, like I have tried for so long to convince people to do that for Bitcoin, and it's really just pushing on a string. I've run a Bitcoin meetup for like close to Closer to a decade now. And, like the-- Yeah, it's like talking to a, a brick wall when you meet a Ripple person. It just doesn't compute in their smooth little brain. But these Deejens, like, they get it 'cause they're like, \"Oh, I want, I want Bitcoin. Bitcoin's like this thing. It is their-- It is now their, their savings asset.\" And so, I don't know." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "33:57", "start": 2037.25, "text": "Yeah. So interesting. I would frame this as like a, kind of like a platform maximalist argument as opposed to the, let's say, the monetary maximalist argument of like, so the platform maxie in this, in this context is like, hey, we should bring these other uses to Bitcoin, whereas like, let's say, the monetary maxie is more like, nah, piss off, go somewhere else. That's, that's kind of the-- That seems to be a bit of a dividing line, but Yeah. Yeah, but I'll say like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:20", "start": 2060.3, "text": "I believe both. Like, the only time we actually disagree is when we're talking about consensus changes. We're talking about consensus changes, the motivation behind these consensus changes, because, it's really blurry to say if you are an OpCat supporter, if you're a platform or a monetary maximalist. It is a broadly popular opcode, because it, it checks boxes for many people in many camps. CTV is a more narrowly defined opcode and probably benefiting, more monetary maximalists. But the thing is, because like the difference between what is spam and what is a monetary transaction is way more ambiguous and blurry than almost anybody I think, like, acknowledges, like, a thing which makes Bitcoin better money also provides use cases to jpegers and vice versa. So you find that like, this is really just a very big tent and- On opposite sides of it is my view. and I just think that, there is a lot more-- like the, the, the, the moral arguments are very foreign to me. That's not the Bitcoin I knew ten years ago. that, that's very-- these are very anti-siphon arguments. And like, you know, the Bitcoin culture and how we think about Bitcoin does evolve and change. Maybe we are a morality first network. My morals and ethics are centered around providing more sovereign access to Bitcoin to people, and so like I think that, The, normative statements about what is okay and not okay data is much more risky and harmful, to making Bitcoin freedom technology than, making, than accidentally making Bitcoin a little bit better platform for some JPEG tech." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "36:17", "start": 2177.2, "text": "I see, yeah. And I think, it's, it is gonna be one of those things where certain upgrades, maybe they do help certain uses more, but ultimately there's certain upgrades that everyone wants, that like would-- not everyone, to be clear, that let's say most people, i-i-people in both sides of that divide could want, for their own selfish reasons, and so I, I guess, yeah, as I said, like even if I think some of that stuff is spam, I just, I don't think we have a good way to stop it To stop it, I think the cure is gonna be worse than the disease. I think, a lot of the core developers are kind of getting blamed for things that the spammers did, really. Like, I don't, I, I think there's a bit of shooting the messenger going on, but Speaking of sovereign access, let's, you know, we're not gonna spend the whole time on spam, let's talk about this Layers, project also. So I know you acquired Bitcoin Layers, I believe, was it Giannis was, doing that, so tell us a little bit about that and, what you're aiming to do there" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:18", "start": 2237.54, "text": "So Bitcoin layers, and we saw like in early 2024 an explosion of like Bitcoin L2s. The majority of which were glorified multisigs or even single sig bridges, and a lot of degenerate Chinese capital, but that's fine. and through that, it happened to coincide with, Giannis and, a team of his had built, for an open source project called Bitcoin Layers, which like tried to track and categorize and define what these things are, because as much as a lot of this is implicit knowledge on the mailing list, or in like the high-- the Bitcoin discourse Like it's really not defined anywhere. And if we think about like side systems and L2s or federated side systems, you know, how is Lightning different from Liquid? Is different from Ark? Is different from Spark? Are, you know, what are the differences between the state chains? What are the security assumptions? There really is, there really was no like place to figure all this out. And on top of that, there was no place to like track all of the activity happening on these other side systems and chains. Or L2s. And, so that's the project that Giannis and, Rad and Michael and some other folks, started working on. I actually was an angel into that project, back in the day. but it's really hard for them to make money. It's really hard to make money as an open source project. so- Blockspace, we're a media company, it makes a lot of sense for us to like track this data, dashboards, do deals with these other, you know, L2s, using the term broadly here, L2s to like, we will help you like, describe what's happening in your network, and that's really valuable. So, it's not an open source project anymore, but we are taking it internal and- And we will be building several things. The obvious, ones are if you look at Bitcoin layers, a lot of the data has, gotten a little bit out of date. Just updating it, bringing it back to life, and just basically resurrecting the project. we think it fits really well into our broader media strategy because we like- Is there a newsletter that tracks, you know, all the wrapped Bitcoin held in all the other chains? 'Cause that's a massive part of the Bitcoin economy. so if it's in the broader Bitcoin economy Then like, I think that's in our jurisdiction to talk about and cover. So Bitcoin layers is a very obvious, integration and acquisition for us." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "39:58", "start": 2398.5, "text": "I guess as I'm reading you, then it's mainly around showing these different L2s, what are the different trade-offs, what are the, you know, just to help like people who are sort of not," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:08", "start": 2408.34, "text": "yeah, there's, so there's a lot of money in describing like trust assumptions of like your, your various, say, BitVM bridges, but, it- It's really value adding to like track, what's happening in those other ecosystems. So, the, the project Bitcoin Layers had historically focused on defining risk assumptions because most users don't know that they're bridging, you know, Bitcoin to Like ARC, like, who's your counterparty? Are there counterparties? Which ARC implementations are different? What do they do? and so there can be Twitter threads about this, there can be like open source repos to track this, but, it's also very clearly like a value add, like educational and ecosystem tracking, like River Learn, the best like educational, you know, resource there is, and that's a huge top of funnel for their other like products. So like- If we can maintain, the Bitcoin layers, work, then we can also like do other value-added stuff, such as, you know, ecosystem intelligence on You know, if, if, if there's, if there's a thousand wrapped Bitcoin on, like, on, you know, it-- Well, how much does Bitcoin have? Bitcoin has, you know, Bitcoin and wrapped Bitcoin has hundred million, a hundred is huge, yeah, I've forgotten how much. Yeah, huge. it's like, what's happening with the wrapped Bitcoin? That affects the Bitcoin economy. That, that kind of does relate to the Bitcoin price. So it's really important and I think valuable to be able to, like, watch that. And, ETH and like DeFi, like L2 trackers, it's like L2Beat and stuff like that. They track these layers, but they're not Bitcoin native. And what I've found is I thought all these like crypto people like knew their stuff about Bitcoin, they really don't. They're like totally clueless about how Bitcoin works. And so there's this huge dislocation in like media and coverage between Bitcoin media and crypto media. They don't understand Bitcoin, and they think they've, they've reduced it to this really Simple asset for a decade. It's not a simple asset. Yeah, you can treat it like that, but it's this incredibly deep, complex, rich ecosystem and, protocol. So that's my view. Interesting. I would love to be able to do more Bitcoin layers. It's- There's a lot of work 'cause we have several irons in the" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "42:38", "start": 2557.89, "text": "fire right now. Yeah. and then of course, I know you have OpNext as well. So I, I mean, I spoke last year with Will about it. I, would, would have liked to come, I couldn't make it. It's, you know, hard to, hard to, but, I, I caught a few of the talks on the YouTube channel and some, you know, they're, they're pretty good. Like, I think you got a pretty good lineup I mean, what's the goal?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:07", "start": 2586.97, "text": "Yeah, so it's a Bitcoin technical conference. There's a handful of great Bitcoin technical conferences. I fell in love with BTC++, years ago, and, so I love that beat. We are a small two to three hundred person technical conference, and we want to be, capture the capstone conversations about the future of Bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin scaling, opcodes, software conversations, what's happening with core work, and, the whatever the topic du jour is right now. Obviously, everybody in their dog's talking about quantum. We have, we are overweighted quantum right now, but it's not the bullshit just VC funded quantum fud. It is your, you know, Jonas Nick, Blockstream, hash-based signature schemes. Ethan Heilman, OP_CAT author, but also CAT plus Lamport signatures. so like we have like that type of stuff and A little, the difference is, is that because I think there is a gulf, a giant divide between the technical world of Bitcoin, Bitcoin development, and the actual like investors in Bitcoin. we are in New York focusing in particular on bringing institutions, funds, and the actual people who decide, who like, who drive the Bitcoin price, because those people, if we just let the ETFs be giant multisigs, or not even that, and- And they have no engagement with protocol development. How do we ever improve Bitcoin in the future? How does the great consensus cleanup happen if it's just core and BlackRock doesn't want it to happen? I believe, yes, there can be conflict and tension here, but, you'd be surprised how much like more, how much, how, how still open like, the ability for these people to talk to each other is. So if we can have a conference which brings in investors, they send their analysts, if we can have, like, if we can be the one conference beat a year in New York, 'cause everybody's in New York, that the investors and the, and the, the miners go to, to talk to the devs, then I- I think we've accomplished our goal. We have nailed, I think, the programming 'cause we've kind of won the trust of the developers, 'cause we have a really wide range of like people, you know, BIP authors, core contributors, People who don't talk at conferences that often, and we have like the, the L2 people, you know, people designing bridges. we've got the technical programming, that's really been my domain. we want there to be more investor and institution representation, 'cause you talk to these C-suite, to these, these companies, and they- They don't know how Bitcoin works, they don't know what a client is. They've-- they don't know that Coinbase holds it for them. so we're doing that. I'll also say that because like Blockspace has, we have like the dominant mining coverage We've always been able to punch above our weight and get a lot, a lot of mining representation. So the past two up nexts, we've had, the first one at Fidelity in '24, we had a third of the hash rate. Last year at Strategy, we had over half of the hash rate, or like block producers in the room, yeah. Yeah. And so, we have like significant representation and buy-in from representatives of, the various block producers. So, I mean, like Luxor- There's a sponsor, CleanSpark sponsors a lot of our stuff, they're like second or first largest miner. So like, we have that, Foundry has come every year, Foundry's coming this year, and so like- If you remember, there's a paper by Steve Lee, Ren, and Lin Alden on like Bitcoin stakeholder groups and Bitcoin consensus." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "46:58", "start": 2817.72, "text": "The, I did a podcast about it. But basically it was like, how do consensus changes happen? And which groups have which powers? And this, this and that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:06", "start": 2825.5, "text": "Yeah. if, like, I, I, but I, I want to see the Bcap paper play out at, at Opnext because there are conference beats which focus on one or the other. You can go to your Bitcoin for Corporations conference and it's just everybody circle jerking Michael Saylor for, you know, ten hours. you can go to Bitcoin Technical Conference, this is great, but like- It's all really niche stuff that doesn't get outside that little circle. I think that, these people can talk more. There's also a lot of, I say, arbitrary arguments in Bitcoin, setting aside the knots one ten thing. Like, there's, there's always little beefs and people who like- Post block size war, there's a lot of just exhaustion and a lot of people angry at each other, and that's kind of continued. I really think that just hanging out over beers and, also in the same conference room in a small like- you know, little conference is does wonders, for just the harmony of the Bitcoin ecosystem. I like to imagine like, the Greeks, they would, they would have, they would argue on, you know, they would argue in, you know, on the Senate floor or whatever, and, sober, and they would talk, and they'd put, they'd, they'd, they'd struggle through these ideas, and then they would get drunk, and they'd talk about those ideas too. It's like- That's kind of how HopNext, works because you have a very intense day of programming and then we go to the pub after. So like that's the, that's the model. That's the format, yeah. So what's the date and the timing for this one? It's April 16th, 2026 in New York City at the New York Times Center, so we're kind of bumping up the production. So you saw the live streams last time, now it'll look more like a TED talk, and I'll like, I'll like flex a little bit. you know, we just talked about the knots. The filter controversy, that comes, the recent flare-up comes out of OpNext, and it's because I really think a lot of the core developers hadn't been engaging like the Bitcoin ecosystem as directly, and so I was like, \"There's like a specific Satraea roll-up data posting scheme that I don't think these like, you know, some of the co-major co-operators even like pay attention to. We need to make sure they're in the room and that, Satraea's a Really interesting BitVM2 presentation, and then that turned into a mailing list issue, which then unfortunately kicked off this recent, the recent round of this fight, yeah. So like, as much as that's frustrating for me, that is like, that does showcase like that this is where the conversations start, and I would hope they'll be more productive things. for example, we have Antoine Fonseca doing the Grand Cetus cleanup Presentation, he's taken over that banner from Matt Carallo, and that seems to be like the core, like accepted, popular, one. And it's really important that your Galaxies, your Nidix, your Foundries, your other large, other large institutions, your Coinbase, that they like know about the GCC and they know to like talk to Antoine or these other people so they can understand it, because as the Bcap paper says, like The developers can put something out there, but the investors do seal it. And so if there's no bridge and there's like the investors have no idea what any of this stuff is, then, then it's important. Also, like, I don't think investors are pricing in a lot of Bitcoin risk, like the poison block attack? That also dates back to OpNext, the same OpNext last year, where I had Portland demo poison block attacks, and I had him on my podcast, and then that turned into his mailing list issue, which then Luke replied to, which then turned into the 1-10 debate. So like- I really spend a ton of legwork as a non-dev, trying to figure out who are the insightful people talking about Bitcoin, and, while I'm not neutral about all things, I try to-- we try to like be pretty neutral about, like, how How we present conversations so that people can at least like talk about them, because too much of us argue on the internet, not enough of us actually hang out in person and argue offline. The best arguments happen offline, and that's why, I want those to happen at OpNext." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "51:42", "start": 3102.37, "text": "Interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, there's a range of conferences, range of events, I think, you know, these things just kind of, like, I, I recall even a couple years ago there was like a BTC++ in, I think it was Austin, and that was kind of like, that was like a big, I think there was a debate there at that point, and there was like, you know, there was a one in Lugano, and like that one, there were like, you know, big arguments, going back and forth about" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:11", "start": 3130.77, "text": "Lightning was just rehashed stuff that had already been said. The thing is, like, none-- there's no new information introduced with these. What I want is there to be new information introduced. and" }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "52:21", "start": 3141.22, "text": "I disagree a little bit. Like, I do think, I do think there were different-- there are different things like that get kind of brought up in each of these, you know, conference, in and around those conferences. But nevertheless, you know, not against Opnex, I think it's, it's, good, programming, good speakers there, and, I haven't been, but, I'd like to go in future. obviously I won't be able to make this one, but, We need to get you to host a panel" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:44", "start": 3163.5, "text": "next time." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "52:45", "start": 3165.18, "text": "yeah, maybe, maybe in future, yeah. Yeah, but, a-anyway, any, any closing thoughts? we're running, up on time, so any, final thoughts and where can people find you online to learn more about Opnext?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:59", "start": 3179.35, "text": "The best thing, you know, we, we spent the first half of this argu- talking about filters. you can take everything I say and throw it away, you can take everything, Stefan said and throw away. If you use Bitcoin as money and increase Bitcoin adoption, all of these problems don't become problems anymore. and then, so I just think the best thing you can do is just increase Bitcoin adoption. The, other thing is, yeah, Bitcoin Blockspace, we do, we have podcasts, we do, newsletters, this conference, you can hit my Twitter at cb spears, you can go to block at block space on Twitter, blockspace dot media. Newsletter, so we do it all, and, if you have an issue, please leave it in the comments and I'll try to respond. and I know I'll just be evasive, but I'm fine. I'm, I'm fine being a punching bag, so." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "53:51", "start": 3230.7, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, well, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's a definitely a contentious time in Bitcoin, but, you know, so be it." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "54:00", "start": 3240.15, "text": "I think, it is good for people to go to, go to the, some of these events, learn about Bitcoin, learn about these different aspects of it, and, yeah, I mean, I definitely agree this idea about getting more people to actually use Bitcoin as money, like even just literally DCA and withdraw. Like if we could just get more people just doing that, DCA and withdraw, and, and then, collapse your UTXOs. Yeah, eventually, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, I'm, my point is just if, if we even had a ton of chain, you know, on-chain demand, which would pr-price out a lot of this spam. So yeah, I, I think I'll just leave that there. Like, even if you're a filter guy, you can probably agree with that message. So, let's leave it there. Price it" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:43", "start": 3282.62, "text": "out. Yeah, price it out. That solves like ninety-nine percent of our problems." }, { "speaker": "charlie_spears", "time": "54:48", "start": 3287.53, "text": "Yeah, so we'll leave it there. listeners, make sure you share this episode if you, found value in it and, find Charlie in the, in the show notes. Thanks, thanks for joining me, Charlie." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:58", "start": 3297.56, "text": "You bet." } ] }