People ask me, I'm just like, but again, I'm a journalist,
so that should be good, right, that I don't have a position.
So when the strange thing happened
that I was invited to moderate this,
I mean, I was more surprised than anybody.
I said yes, and then the organizer said,
have you looked at the site, are you sure?
And I was like, oh, of course.
Come into Netherlands, hosting a Bitcoin conference,
how could I say no?
And then I started looking and I was like, wait a second,
there's kind of a slant here to this.
I don't know if this is quite an impartial thing.
And I started really, what did I just sign up for?
Is this gonna hurt my credibility?
If I have credibility as an impartial journalist.
And I've had people everywhere from Peter Todd
and Samson Mao to JVP and Bitcoin Jesus himself.
So I really do wanna remain open to all sides.
So I guess I just wanna make sure that,
I want you all to love me.
I wanna make sure this isn't seen like,
I am somehow aligned with, basically,
I mean, this is all the groups here,
I feel like that hate Bitcoin Core.
And I mean, does that, I don't know.
Okay, don't hate Bitcoin Core, just a little annoyed by,
I mean, I have to admit, Adam Back,
I thought was a pretty cool dude,
but he's gotten a little trollish lately on Twitter.
I mean, he didn't used to be quite as just, yeah.
So it's tough, because at this conference,
at any conference, everybody seems about the same to me.
You all seem as nice as any other people.
Everyone seems super nice, and everything I'm hearing,
again, I'm not that smart, sounds very reasonable.
Segwit people, they're like, I mean, that sounds reasonable.
Segwit is gonna die.
I mean, I hear people, I've heard both opinions,
because we've got some small blockers here too
about what happens when the chain splits.
Very dramatic differences of opinion.
And since everyone who's giving me those opinions
is so much smarter than me, I'm just, I have no idea.
But just to kind of be a little bit more equal here.
I wanted to put this on.
I am impartial.
I don't know anything.
I'm not a big blocker or a small blocker.
I'm just the MC, I did not organize this event.
So I just wanted to make sure I can still be a journalist.
Yes, small blockers, go ahead,
get the picture with me on here.
Big blockers, forget you saw that.
And I actually reached out to Jameson before this,
because I felt like, okay, he's someone
I can kind of hold on to,
his maybe values were a little bit different
than everybody else's here.
So I actually reached out to him and told him,
I'm glad you'll be here, Jameson.
And so our next speaker is Jameson Lopp.
Woo!
Woo!
Woo!
Woo!
Woo!
Woo!
Woo!
All right.
Well, thanks everybody.
It's great to be here at the future of Bitcoin.
Now, the motto for this conference
is discovering Bitcoin's future.
And I think that that is on point.
Now, as I have extensively argued in my writings,
it may not be possible for any of us
to fully understand this system.
And it may not be possible for us to steer it
onto the path that we want it to go on.
We're really all just learning about the system
as we go along.
Regardless of what point you may be
on this understanding Bitcoin curve,
we're all huddled together on a life raft
in an ocean of financial turmoil.
And we're just trying to figure out
how the hell we build it into a battle cruiser.
So we all know where the story begins.
On an obscure cryptography mailing list in 2008,
someone using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto
sent an email with a white paper and he said,
I've been working on a new electronic cash system
that's fully peer to peer with no trusted third party.
And Satoshi was far from the first person
to propose an electronic cash system.
Many of the cypher punks on this list
had grown weary of the slew of failed attempts
over the decades.
Many of those who responded to Satoshi
poked and prodded at the proposal
claiming it could never work in practice
due to fundamentally flawed assumptions
around the scalability or the game theory
of the system itself.
The names of those first few respondents to Satoshi
will be lost to history.
While the name of the man who responded differently
shall never be forgotten, Hal Finney.
Where most cypher punks cynically saw
only the potential for failure,
he saw the potential for success.
Nevermind that Hal had previously devised his own system
of digital cash called reusable proof of work,
which was also based upon hash cash.
He was focused on the big picture.
Bitcoin seems to be a very promising and original idea,
he said.
I'm looking forward to seeing
how the concept is further developed.
Hal realized that he had once thought
that similar systems would also fail
for the same reasons that others were thinking
Bitcoin was going to fail,
but he was wrong and wasn't gonna make that mistake again.
Hal cooperated with Satoshi over the coming months.
He found many bugs in Satoshi's code and fixed them.
He mined many Bitcoins with his CPU
and received the first ever Bitcoin transaction
that was sent peer to peer.
Hal went a step beyond simply being an adversary
to Bitcoin proposal.
He brought a builder's mindset to the game.
Now I bring this all up today
because I see many Bitcoiners acting
like the first respondents to Satoshi,
overly pessimistic from years of adversarial thinking
and frustration.
Now, when you're involved in public discourse
about the future of Bitcoin,
I hope that you'll ask yourself, what would Hal do?
Several years ago, Balaji Srinivasan
gave an introduction to Bitcoin presentation
in which he stated that Bitcoin mining is a co-opetition.
When what he meant by this
was that Bitcoin miners are simultaneously
competing 24-7, 365 to find the next valid block
and they are also cooperating
to secure and extend the same blockchain.
This got me to thinking,
perhaps we've been going about this all wrong.
Perhaps we've been focused on the wrong things
and fallen into a trap of our own making
and by being too focused on competition
and throwing cooperation out the window,
we are missing opportunities to grow this ecosystem.
So I make no claims to being an expert in game theory.
I only got interested in this concept a few months ago,
but my understanding is that every game
is comprised of the same few basic elements.
And today I'll mostly be talking about players and rules
in respect to this game that we call Bitcoin.
As Craig noted yesterday,
Bitcoin is not a democracy.
Bitcoin is not an oligarchy.
It's not even left-leaning anarchy, it's capitalism.
And the four types of players in games of capitalism
are customers, suppliers, competitors, and complementers.
It's important to realize that
none of the players in a game are fixed
and effective strategy may entail bringing in new players
or pushing out existing ones.
For example, if you only have one supplier,
you might want to pay for other suppliers to enter the game
in order to make new material for your markets cheaper.
And you may want to commoditize those products.
On the other hand, if you're considering becoming
a new player to a game as a supplier,
you should actually try to get compensated upfront
by your future customers
because you're bringing competition into the game
and you're gonna be saving the existing players,
customers a lot of money.
So within this players element,
we can actually use the concept of the value net
to express the relations between the players.
And the value net is a way to explain the interdependencies
between players in a game.
Now there, as you can see,
are both vertical and horizontal components
to this value net.
Vertically, it demonstrates that users or customers
and suppliers are both value creators.
Now organizations should listen to the needs
of both players in order to maximize the value of the system.
Horizontally, you see that competitors and complementors
are exact mirror images of each other.
And customers will value your product more
when there are many complementors,
whereas they will value your product less
when there are many competitors
because they act as substitutors.
Now understanding this relationship
highlights a deficiency in common competitive practices,
which is the business as war concept
where you only focus on eliminating
and out competing your competitors.
Instead of thinking of it this way,
organizations should also try to develop
commodity complementors where the long-term value
of the system will be increased overall.
So by understanding these two symmetries,
we can use this type of value net model
to give us a greater potential for understanding
the game theory and successfully applying new strategies.
Instead of only focusing on the conventional players
like customers and competitors,
we can see that there are actually four different strategies
that we can target.
So I brainstormed a bit,
just trying to think about some of the different players
that are in Bitcoin's value net.
And this is by no means a comprehensive list,
and I hope that in fact some of you
may be able to contribute additional ideas to it
so that we can improve our understanding
of Bitcoin's game theory.
For users, this is a tough one.
They add value to the system by creating demand
and by, in our case, increasing the network effect.
But because there are potentially so many use cases
for Bitcoin, we could say that potential users
are everyone in the world,
or at least everyone above a certain age.
So other people that we could be targeting,
we could be targeting the unbanked,
we could be targeting people who are seeking shelter
from hyperinflation,
we could be targeting people
who are seeking financial privacy,
and censorship resistance.
We could be targeting high-risk speculators,
entrepreneurs who want to build on the platform.
Of course, we could be targeting libertarians and anarchists
who want freedom from the control of state and central banks.
Suppliers, on the other hand,
they increase value by adding resources to the system.
Some examples that came to mind,
developers who write software,
thus adding utility to the Bitcoin ecosystem,
miners who are providing their hardware
and capital and electricity resources
to securing the system from computational attack,
full nodes who are essentially validating data,
replicating data,
enforcing consensus rules on the network,
and traders and market makers
who are providing liquidity to markets,
and hopefully, as we go along,
continuing to increase and stabilize the exchange rates.
With competitors, these are entities
that decrease the value of a system
by acting as substitutes.
So on a similar vein,
because Bitcoin could be used for so many things,
you could say there are also
quite a few different competitors,
some obvious ones being fiat money,
other payment rails like credit cards and wire transfers,
precious metals, other stores of value,
other crypto assets, of course, central banks,
or even if we're thinking of Bitcoin
as a new type of economic voluntary interaction system
where we're getting rid of authorities,
we could consider all authorities, rule creators,
and rule enforcers to be potential competitors
to this system.
On the complementer side,
these are entities that increase value
by bundling extra utility on Bitcoin.
That would be things such as consumer apps,
other use cases, wallets, tumblers,
even non-monetary applications like notarization
and timestamping services.
And of course, merchants accepting Bitcoin,
especially unique merchants such as darknet markets,
and second layer networks could bring
completely new types of utility onto Bitcoin.
So an interesting revelation that I had
from looking at the value net
is that there are three different player types
that we could target without threatening any competitors
and still increase the value of the system.
So I pose to you that there may in fact
be many opportunities by targeting
those three player types that will be easier
and offer a greater return on our investment.
Remember, we are tiny.
We are vastly outnumbered and outcapitalized
by our competitors at this point.
We've heard things like Bitmain, Blockstream, Enchain,
many other entities in this space
who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars,
which is great.
They have war chests,
but that's still a drop in the bucket
compared to what we're facing.
I pose to you that we do not want strong competitors
to feel threatened by Bitcoin
until it's too late for them to respond.
The crypto asset industry is in competition,
not just with itself and with alternate coins,
but we're in competition with many, many industries.
One example, we're in competition
with the entire high tech industry
over a very limited supply of software engineers and talent.
As such, we should be trying to develop
and foster a welcoming community for these developers.
And I would point to Ethereum as a potential model
to follow in that regard.
They seem to be doing pretty well on the developer side.
Speaking of developers, in terms of the developers,
we already see cooperation happening
amongst developers on a single team.
Unlike corporate software development,
there are no project managers or architects
passing down feature requirements from on high.
Instead, we have multiple developers
who may propose similar competing changes
that attempt to solve the same perceived problems
in a system.
If a proposal begins to gain traction,
other developers would jump in,
probe the idea for weaknesses,
and then eventually decide to cooperate with a proposer
to go ahead and improve it.
On a related note, I've observed a fundamental conflict
between how the vast majority of software development occurs
versus how public consensus networks operate.
So most software developers take the approach
of envisioning the system how they want it to be.
They then write the code that will create
that functionality and those rules and then deploy it.
But in Bitcoin, you have some developers
who take this approach historically
with not a lot of success in the past few years.
You have other groups of developers
who consider the existing rules of the system
to be constraints within they have to work
in order to be able to deploy changes.
And that methodology has historically tended
to be more successful.
Now, I'm sure that this is a particularly contentious point
amongst many of you.
And many of you have changes
that you desire to see implemented in Bitcoin
and you have been frustratingly failing to activate them.
Perhaps we can just dismiss this as another inefficiency
of a decentralized system.
But it seems to me that this in the long term
could potentially have a chilling effect upon development
and result in a lot of wasted resources
that end up never actually getting used.
I myself am a former Bitcoin XT supporter.
I know full well the feeling of seeing months of work
and waiting go up in smoke.
I hope that we can break out of the cycle
of failed initiatives.
A plethora of businesses based upon Bitcoin
and its platform have emerged over the years.
And many of them are in direct competition with each other
because they have customers seeking
to feel the same specific use cases.
Yet many of these businesses are forming partnerships
and trade services with each other.
And they're doing this in order to form
mutually beneficial relationships
that leverage the strengths of each business.
I can tell you that this is certainly true at BitGo
as we wish to provide our services
to as many different people in the ecosystem as possible.
It's clear to me that the root cause
and the rift of the scaling debate is conflicting needs
between different types of Bitcoin users
and their use cases.
And enterprises that service some of these users,
especially those who are transacting
in smaller value amounts, are feeling the pressure
to improve their customer's experience.
As a result, many of them are trying to change
the rules of the Bitcoin game.
But other players in the game consider this rule change
to be hazardous to the value of their own use cases.
Due to the strength of the status quo in Bitcoin,
we find ourselves at an impasse.
People within the ecosystem are broadcasting their thoughts
across mailing lists, forums, chat rooms, and social media.
They argue about the nature of Bitcoin,
the direction it can go,
and they're trying to earn respect and social capital
and group other people behind their cause.
Unfortunately, this process has degenerated
over the past several years,
and tribalism has taken a toll on the community.
It is fractured discussion.
Many devs have left the Bitcoin mailing list
to avoid drama and harassment.
I've been tracking mailing list activity
and it's been on the decline for quite a while.
I think that one of the greatest problems
is the classification of people
as small blockers, large blockers,
or a number of more derogatory names
that are being slung around.
This is a very nuanced discussion,
and we should avoid grouping people
based upon some similar viewpoints.
In fact, I think it is best if we stop talking about people
and start talking and focusing on ideas.
The vitriol, the tribalism,
this has all led to communication breakdowns.
I've lost count of how many times
I've had someone message me privately
to tell me that they won't be participating
in a conversation because they've blocked
or muted or ignored some of the primary participants.
The blocking has even gotten to the point
of causing more misunderstandings.
Take, for example, a recent Twitter blunder
where Alice attacked Bob
because Bob was saying
that he thought Bitcoin needed a CEO,
but Bob was actually arguing against Bitcoin needing a CEO,
and Alice lost the context because Charlie had blocked her.
Thus, entire portions of the tweet thread were missing,
and the meaning of the conversation drastically changed.
In this situation, no one is to blame,
and yet everyone is to blame.
Similar problems have happened on the Bitcoin subreddit
where the removal of comments by moderators
combined with complex CSS rules
automatically expanded collapsed removed threads
that also caused portions of conversation
to mysteriously disappear imperceptibly,
changing the meaning of the conversation.
I speak from personal experience here
as someone who has had posts removed from our Bitcoin,
as someone who has been attacked by trolls
on every platform I've used,
been banned from our Bitcoin for posting inconvenient facts,
and even as a moderator of the Bitcoin XT subreddit.
I consider every Bitcoin-specific forum to be flawed,
and this is because they all tend to be skewed
due to the tribalism of either the moderators or the users,
who are nearly guaranteed to have some sort of vested interest
in seeing their own vision of Bitcoin promoted.
That's why these days you'll mainly find me on Twitter,
because no one is stifling my speech there.
It seems to me that back when we were all using
the same few forums, we were doing a better job
at fostering co-opetition,
but now the focus on competition has divided the community
and wasted our most valuable resource, time.
Remember what Anthony spoke about yesterday.
Cooperation increases value,
and value can foster increased cooperation,
creating a virtuous cycle.
If you spew vitriol at your fellow Bitcoiners online,
you aren't just hurting your target,
you are indirectly hurting us all.
I mentioned that this presentation was inspired
by a reference to mining co-opetition,
though at this point I think it's work
digging a little bit deeper into the example,
so that we might compare it
to the other forms of co-opetition already covered.
In the early days, folks were solo mining
with CPUs and GPUs, but it didn't take them long
to figure out that they were cooperating
and pooling resources to offer a more consistent return.
So this pooled mining concept
also expanded the crypto economy
by creating business opportunities
for people with the operational skills
to maintain a reliable and trustworthy pool.
Good times for everyone.
As you're surely aware, there are a handful of companies
that now control a significant portion
of Bitcoin's hashing power.
You're also aware that any entity
that gains a majority of hashing power,
or possibly less with selfless mining strategies,
can effectively control the blocks
that get added to the tip of the blockchain
over a long period of time.
So it's not a stretch to imagine
that a handful of mining companies
could communicate in private
and decide to form a cartel by working together
to orphan all the blocks being mined
by entities outside of the cartel.
This could shut out the rest of the competition
and thus split the pie amongst a smaller number of people,
giving them larger slices, larger fees, and block rewards.
And Nicola recently made an economic argument
that logically this could cause mining
to devolve into a duopoly.
So why don't we see this cartelization happening?
I pose to you that it's because miners know
that Bitcoin is more valuable
when they're building on top of each other's work,
rather than just throwing away large amounts of work
for a short-term game.
Miners are cooperating to secure
and extend the same blockchain.
If some miners change the protocol
to be incompatible with the rest
and the blockchain forks as a result,
these two sets of miners are no longer in co-opetition,
they are merely in competition.
And this drastically changes the game theory
and equilibrium of the system
by also reducing the security
because it's now computationally cheaper
to attack each chain fork separately.
And this is but one of many reasons
why we should be cautious
to avoid contentious forks of all kinds.
Bitcoin is a very interesting game.
None of us are being forced to play.
We all have our own incentives for playing.
But I think that a fundamental disconnect
between the different sides of this debate
is that they're playing different games.
And those who view Bitcoin as digital gold
and accept a trade-off of higher transaction fees
in return for a lower cost of full blockchain validation,
they believe that the rules of the protocol
are intentionally hard to change
and that we should work within the confines of the rules
to improve the system's scalability
without compromising forward compatibility.
On the other hand, those who view Bitcoin
more as a payment system
that needs to have low transaction fees
in order to be competitive and reach mass adoption,
they believe that the rules of the system
must change in order for it to evolve
and increase in utility and value.
Neither of these views is necessarily wrong.
They're just different games.
It's a lot harder to foster co-opetition
when you're not playing the same game.
Is it possible that this is an irreconcilable difference?
Sure.
I completely agree with what Peter said in his talk
that Bitcoin is fundamentally based upon ideology.
We are just using science to bring our ideology into reality
by running fully validating nodes
that automatically enforce the rules
that we, the node operators, agree with.
But I hope that you agree with me
that the game of Bitcoin is more fun and more valuable
when it has more players.
Should Bitcoin endure a permanent chain split,
I fear it would set a precedent
for more fracturing in the future,
causing further loss of network effect
and greater confusion over the identity of Bitcoin
for users who are trying to decide what they want.
With regard to rule changes,
I think it's also worth looking at how the competition
ends up being affected.
I pose to you that any rule change Bitcoin implements
can also be made by its competition
in the crypto ecosystem.
If Bitcoin can change to use huge blocks,
what's to stop Litecoin or Ethereum
or any other open blockchain system
from doing the same in response?
I suspect that changing the protocol
to target low on-chain transaction fees
will result in a cryptocurrency price war
with a race to the bottom,
and price wars tend to end in Pyrrhic victories.
Now, if you're not familiar with the cypherpunk manifesto,
I recommend giving it a read.
While privacy is but one of the many aspects
of this ecosystem that is integral to it,
I believe that the spirit of competition rings true
in the cypherpunk manifesto that Eric Hughes wrote years ago.
I find these excerpts to be particularly relevant.
Cypherpunks write code.
We know that someone has to write software
to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy
unless we all have it, we're going to write it.
We publish our code so that our fellow cypherpunks
may play with it and practice,
and our code is free for all to use worldwide.
For privacy to be widespread,
it must be part of a social contract.
People must come together to deploy these systems
for the greater good.
Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation
of one's fellows in society, and we, the cypherpunks,
we seek your questions, we seek your concerns,
and we hope that we may engage you
so that we do not deceive ourselves.
Bitcoin was born from the efforts of cypherpunks.
Cypherpunks knew the value of co-opetition.
I know there's a lot of bad blood in this space,
and you may be tempted to attack individuals
who have offended you, but let's not waste energy
perpetuating a vicious cycle.
Yes, this is an adversarial environment,
but in order to foster a constructive adversarial
environment, it must be adversarial
in the intellectual sense, not the emotional sense.
We have too much left to build,
and we can't afford to spend the time over petty squabbles.
What would Hal do?
In highly segmented industries with strong network effects,
such as the tech industry, co-opetition may be the only way
to avoid stagnation.
In fact, it is often difficult in the tech industry
to get new products off the ground.
The market demands technical standards
before it can adopt anything at a mainstream level,
but it can take years of fruitless cutthroat competition
that inhibits the overall growth of the system
before a clear winner emerges.
Co-opetition can help us avoid that
by finding win-win scenarios.
And I'm sure you've all seen this chart plenty of times,
the tech adoption life cycle.
Personally, I think we're still way on the left side there
in the innovation phase.
Co-opetition can be an extremely valuable strategy
for technology dependent upon network effects
when they're still trying to bootstrap.
Since the early market is small,
competing for market share does not make much sense.
Instead, in the early market stage,
we should focus on creating demand
and getting past the chasm or the tipping point.
Co-opetition can create win-win situations
for everyone involved and in fact, get us closer
and lower the tipping point for reaching mainstream adoption.
If we accept the premise that we don't have resources
to quickly ramp up the entire ecosystem
for mainstream adoption, how do we find the path forward?
I'd argue that once you convince someone
to own and store value in Bitcoin,
they are incentivized to use their skills and resources
to help make the system more valuable.
In this manner, we can bootstrap the system organically.
And what if instead of targeting low value use cases
during the bootstrapping phase,
we adopt a Tesla-esque strategy,
that is court the wealthiest of entities
to be early adopters in this system,
incentivize them to pay for the hard work,
the innovation of the ecosystem.
This could be high net worth individuals, hedge funds,
even tiny nation states with currencies
already dwarfed by Bitcoin.
Last I checked, there are 140 countries
whose M1 money supplies were less than Bitcoin's money supply.
Surely, some of them have far more to gain than to lose
by taking a first mover advantage
in the global transition to crypto assets.
The tricky part here is that Bitcoin
does not have a marketing department.
It's up to each of us to spread it like a mind virus.
We would need to find people already in the community
who can build bridges to these high value networks
that we wish to target.
If you think you fit this criterion
or are interested in the idea, please contact me.
Now yesterday, Jihan mentioned
that there's an incentive problem with development.
Many contributors are unpaid volunteers.
So what if instead of relying upon a poorly defined process
for funding protocol development
with a scattering of grants
and a scattering of companies
that are paying for their own developers,
we instead created some sort of multi-sig fund
where enterprisers and high net worth investors
contribute to and control
in order to hire full-time protocol devs
and or post bounties for feature development.
I don't think that an idea like this
needs to be baked into the protocol itself
as some cryptocurrencies have done.
These are just a few random thoughts.
There are certainly many more unexplored possibilities
that are still out there.
I suppose what I'm really trying to say
is that we need to play a long-term game.
We aren't building a technology
that we want to take down a path
that causes it to fail or become obsolete in a decade,
like those RadioShack products
that Andrew showed us yesterday.
We're building a system that must last for generations.
The lifespan of the average fiat currency is 27 years.
Imagine the global confidence that Bitcoin will acquire
if we can exceed that mark.
I'm confident that we can and will find safe ways
to take us down the path to mass adoption.
All that is required is creativity and perseverance.
Now, there's a famous quote by Herbert Swope that states,
I cannot give you the formula for success,
but I can give you the formula for failure,
which is try to please everyone.
Bitcoin clearly cannot be everything
we all want it to be at this stage.
Otherwise, we risk it becoming nothing
any of us want it to be.
We're currently working with what amounts
to a very small pie.
Many of you are rightfully frustrated
because you're watching use cases get priced out of Bitcoin,
effectively shrinking the slices of the pie.
You may feel powerless to stop portions of Bitcoin's user base
from defecting to other crypto assets.
For your own peace of mind,
I recommend letting go of your anger and frustration.
Accept that Bitcoin is beyond your control
and instead focus on figuring out the things
that you can control with regard to Bitcoin's value net.
That is how we can grow this pie.
We can always compete later over how to slice up the pie.
When developers, businesses, and users
switch from co-opetition to competition,
it makes us all weaker.
The great thing about co-opetition is that
it allows us to leverage free market capitalism
to accelerate innovation,
while still retaining the strengths afforded to us
by network effects.
And as Craig said yesterday,
it doesn't matter how much we may hate each other.
We're all in the same boat together.
And as I see it, we're all huddled on a life raft
in an ocean of financial turmoil.
Instead of waging war with one another
and splintering the raft,
let's build a warship so that we may raid the coffers
of the overconfident bankers
and their overladen galleons.
My fellow Bitcoiners,
I look forward to co-opeting with you
for many years to come.
Wir es in Numeris.
Thank you.
All right, is the tossable mic back there somewhere?
All right, anyone have some questions?
Let's start in the back.
Can you give it to the guy back there?
Thanks.
Hey, very good talk, by the way.
There is two things that you said
that seems to be somewhat in opposition this day.
So I would like if you can expand on it a bit,
that'd be great.
So this is the idea that we shouldn't fork
because it weakens the community
and the strength of the coins
and the security and all of that.
On the other hand, you said that a sure way to fail
is try to please everybody.
And right now the solution to avoid the fork
seems to be SegWit 2X,
which is trying to do exactly that.
So I would like for you to expand a bit
on that subject if you can.
Right.
We should fork.
We should fork as much as we possibly can
without shedding off too much of the ecosystem.
And I think what the contention comes down to is
how do you measure the contention?
How do you measure how many people you're going to lose
by making some sort of change?
Now, it just so happens that historically
we've managed to do a lot of soft forks
where we didn't lose really anyone perceptibly.
There was one hard fork a long time ago
where some miners tried to keep giving themselves
50 bitcoins for every block reward
and that didn't last very long.
But on the hard fork side,
I think the problem is because it's ideological
that you do have some people on the extremes
who regardless of which direction you're going to go
are going to steadfastly say,
I'm staying here.
You can't make me do anything.
So can we please everyone in that regard?
No, we have to cut some of the fat as it were
for the greater good.
And it's unfortunate, but a consensus system like this,
you can go for a super majority
of whatever metric you want to use,
but you'll never be able to get 100%.
We've just got too many people,
too much diversity in the ecosystem
to make everybody happy with the change.
And so while from a technical standpoint,
sure, maybe we can soft fork Segwit
and a lot of people will be really, really unhappy
about having Segwit in the system,
but at least we can't force Segwit upon anyone.
No one can force you to create those addresses,
receive money into a wallet
that you think may be less secure.
So, I mean, I would like to see hard forks happen
in the future as well.
I have always been a big blocker from that standpoint.
I think that second layer solutions are magnifiers
and you need to have a larger base layer
in order for your magnifier to work better.
But I have my own opinions and I guess I straddle both sides
and I catch flack from a lot of people.
But at the end of the day,
I guess I have adopted this Zin outlook
and that Bitcoin will continue in one form or another
and maybe there will be multiple Bitcoins.
No one can stop anybody from leaving.
If you believe that you have a use case
that is gonna be more valuable and have more utility,
then we can't stop you from doing whatever you wanna do.
So the question becomes,
do you have the incentives to stay with the rest of us
or do you believe that you can overcome
the loss of network effect from leaving?
All right, any other questions?
All right, up here.
Here you go.
Thank you.
So when you talk about not being able to,
you talk about a we as in there's like,
we need to push SegWits,
but it's really asking the authority who controls the rules.
So the developer, there is no we pushing SegWits,
there's the developers asking the miners
to implement it for them.
But just to get onto the network effect,
I think you said we might lose people if we hard fork,
but I would say if you look at the empirical evidence,
we've lost a lot more people by not hard forking.
When you look at all the adoption
that's happening outside of the network
and all the people that are selling Bitcoin
and now promoting altcoins,
what do you think of that?
Yeah, and if we want to compete with those use cases,
then we would need much larger block sizes.
We'd need to have much lower transaction fees.
And it's certainly an option, I cannot stand up here
and tell you that like Craig Wright
and Peter Risen are wrong.
I believe it's certainly possible
that we could have gigabyte block sizes
and try to suck as much of the global transaction volume
as possible onto blockchains and just have really high,
expensive nodes that are doing high volume stuff.
Let's just keep with $50 nodes and eight megabyte blocks.
Sure, so yeah, so we go to the extreme
of like $20,000 nodes and then the other extreme,
we have $5 raspberry pies.
And this ultimately comes down to what is the right cost?
We're doing this trade off of the cost of a transaction fee
versus the cost of full validation.
And I don't have the authority to tell you
what the optimal cost of that is.
And I think that we have completely missed the ability
to find a consensus on this cost of node operation metric
or cost of transaction metric.
It would be great if we could have some science.
I think I postulated a year ago in an article
that we could come up with some multi-dimensional matrix
algorithm to determine a cost of full node validation
and then try to target that
as technology continues to improve.
But then we'd just be bike shedding
over what the actual targeted cost should be.
So I wish that I could stand up here and tell you like,
this is what the cost of this should be
and this is what the cost of that should be.
But then I would basically be devolving
into the role of central banker.
And we just have to figure that out ourselves.
Great, thanks.
And on the topic of cooperation or co-
Co-opetition.
Co-opetition, you mentioned sparing vitriol
and creating adverse environments.
What do you say to dropping grenades
on cooperating competition?
Yeah, so there are adversarial issues
that have come up in the technical side of things
of like exploiting various problems in software
that have caused a lot of people to get upset
and believe that the good faith
in the development process has broken down.
On that standpoint, I would say that the most
that you can really do is either ignore people
who are being unnecessarily vitriolic
or you believe are sucking your time up
and not cooperating, not providing meaningful feedback
and value to what we're trying to do as a system.
Or you can go the method of trying to call them out
and yell at them and try to get other people
to band behind you to say we all need
to shout this person down.
And I've tried both of these.
And whenever I've tried to shame someone
or shout them down for being unnecessarily vitriolic,
then I just get flack from the other side
that why am I supporting this particular person?
So, unfortunately, I have really found
like being silent and ignoring bad behavior
to be the best option for me.
All right, any other questions?
All right, we're gonna be ahead of schedule.
All right, thanks, Jameson.
Thank you.
You