EB82 – Mike Hearn - Blocksize Debate At The Breaking Point

Transcript

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allcoin exchange rates updated in real time coinc cap is the Authority for cryptocurrency Market information hi welcome to epicenter Bitcoin the show which talks about the Technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency Revolution my name is Sebastian quo my name is Brian fan crane uh we're here today with Mike Hern Mike has been on the podcast before I think just over a year ago or just about a year ago episode 25 episode 25 and uh and we're back today to talk about a super important topic that I think anybody who's been following the bitcoin news has not managed to miss which is the whole debate about increasing the block

size for one the 20 megabyte or and there's been a lot of a lot of controversy about it and Mike has been one sort of one of the I guess fault leaders are the ones driving that discussion on on the one side so I'm super excited that he's able to join us today thanks for coming on Mike it's a pleasure to be here yeah it's I mean you you were working on Lighthouse before and we can come back to that at the end and I think recently like like many I mean the Reddit has been literally BL plastered with posts about the debate about increasing the block size and uh I I gave a talk about this topic at the

conference in Prague uh just recently and I on the way I read through the entire Bitcoin Dev mailing list and it was as well there completely preoccupied everything so to give some context for our listeners can you can you talk about why this has come up so much and and what the what the problem is we trying to solve this first place um yeah so uh years and years ago um when Satoshi was still writing most of the code for Bitcoin um he uh put in a temporary like cludge if you like a temporary hack um to limit the maximum size of a Bitcoin block to one megabyte and as there's uh one block on average every 10 minutes

and transactions take up space in blocks that implies there's a limit on how many transactions Bitcoin can handle um when he did did this it was sort of um uh he wanted to avoid people creating like really really massive blocks by just stuffing them with rubbish it was basically an attempt to fix a potential way that people could bloat up the blockchain and and you know just attack the system if they just wanted to troll and cause trouble um and his intention was always that when the block size becomes less relevant to most users that that limit be removed um and uh over time actually what has happened is every time people have talked about bum in this limit or or even removing it completely um it's triggered these sorts of big debates and um the group of people who were you know

sort of succeeded um Satoshi didn't agree um and so nothing was done and now what's happening is that our traffic levels they're growing or well they our traffic levels tend to grow in the um northern hemisphere winter and then they sort of stagnate a bit in summer because everyone's outside but uh is is that the reason yeah that that seems to be the reason why these um it's uncommon for internet services to show seasonal growth patterns like this I've seen this many times before and um so it looks like you know after next Winter's growth season assuming you know Bitcoin does grow as like it did last year then um we will Bitcoin will be full we will actually run out of capacity and so uh this debate has come up now because uh

Vladimir velan who is the Bitcoin core maintainer in theory he's the decision maker he posted the release schedule for the next couple of releases of Bitcoin and um you know I emailed him and said look we you know it given the schedule we're going to run out of capacity unless we make a decision right now and then that sort of kicked off this whole uh thing again because um you know he wasn't willing to make a decision there so then so you mentioned that there are different sides to this debate can you talk about what the different sides are the different sides yes of the of the current debate yeah well there's there's two there's obviously there's the side that myself and Gavin have been championing championing um by writing

articles and and doing testing and simulation and working through the objections and that's raise the block size limit of course uh add capacity to the system effectively um and then the other the opposing side is saying no we we don't want capacity to ever increase we want it to stay as it is and then when Bitcoin fills up uh people will be forced to migrate to other systems um that's the that's the debate it sounds a bit ridiculous when I phrase it like that but that's actually the the core of this debate and it is a bit ridiculous I feel I I mean of course there is there is some some subtlety uh we can talk about later know especially when it comes about the this the idea of security and and I think that's one of

the sort of yeah I I still think they're slightly they're wrong about it in that I don't believe it actually will increase the security but of course uh you know one of the reason reasons why some people are against increasing the block size is because they think blocks need to be filled so people compete for space and miners make more money when the block aard goes down I mean there's a lot of different arguments that have been marshaled in favor of doing nothing and a big chunk of the work that myself and Gavin have been doing in the last few weeks is going over all those arguments and you know responding to them and debunking them effectively um so yeah the most of these arguments coming from a small group of people who they don't want to see um Bitcoin you

know grow effectively and then they sort of constantly coming up with new reasons they thought of why it's why it would be bad so it's sort of the cart before the horse I feel a little bit but we can go over the different arguments if you like well let's I think before we we dive into these arguments can you tell us a little bit about what you wrote in the blog post especially in the in the crash landing post because I thought that was a really sort of a really Vivid uh illustration of what a worst case scenario could look like if Bitcoin runs out of space in a sort of you know relatively unprepared manner which may well be the case if it happens soon yeah sure um right so for

background um I worked at Google for about seven and a half nearly eight years and several of those years about three and a half of those years were spent doing capacity planning and traffic management for some of the world's largest websites where I worked on Google Maps I was on call for Google Google Maps and Earth um so um you know I I have experience of capacity planning for systems and I know what happens when they run out of capacity because I've actually seen it happen um and so I wrote this article because there's a lot of people um who maybe don't have experience like that who was saying oh it's no problem if we run out of capacity you know there will be this nice controlled fee Market will establish itself and and everyone's say oh I love markets I'm a capitalist libertarian you know Market loving

person so what could possibly be bad about that um but then when you when you just drill down into technical details that's not actually the guaranteed outcome and there are many other outcomes which are much worse right you just have to work through how does Bitcoin work at a technical level to see this kind of thing so I wrote this article to explain you know what could happen and um you know the ways that software can malfunction the way that um you know Bitcoin can destabilize um and you know the consequences of actually hitting the capacity limits can you talk about what that scenario would look like uh if we were to hit those capacity limits as you described in your article yeah so um what tends to happen when systems run out of capacity is uh firstly the service degrades

simultaneously for everybody um there's sort of an assumption uh in some of these Arguments for leaving the block size as is that you know we would get this nice priority ordering of where people would pay higher fees and so on but what actually happens is you know people just keep paying the fees they are paying right up until the point where um you know blocks are really really full and you're seeing hugely unpredictable confirmation times so the first thing that happens and we're already starting to see this a little bit is people send a payment and they expect it to go through quickly and they discover it takes you know 68 hours maybe to go through um which can easily interfere with business right if you're expecting it to be much faster than that uh so that's the first uh problem and the next problem that can happen is um

you know if you actually if if the rate of incoming transactions is becomes permanently higher than the rate at which they're being put into the blockchain you can get this ever growing backlog and uh the backlog of transactions in Bitcoin nodes is stored in memory which is you know often a quite limited resource so before just before you go into that I just had a question regarding uh what you just said do you think that the transaction volum would increase because people would just resend those transactions assuming that they didn't go through or something like that why would why do you assume that they would increase well I mean we're talking about organic growth here right as Bitcoin ads uses growth goes up naturally um and then you know the coordination of the Bitcoin Community globally is not you know it's not like everyone reads Reddit or everyone

follows mailing list or whatever right so as Bitcoin grows and people show it to their friends and other people hear about it in the news you know they download the software they they get some Bitcoins and so on and then so traffic is going going up over time um and then you know as that sort of natural organic growth hits the ceiling what you do start to see is cases where people say oh my transaction is not going through so I'll rebroadcast it I'll send another transaction you also start to see um you know people uh who were holding coins but suddenly their faith in the system is shaken and now they they decide now is the time to get out so they start moving coins um into exchanges and if you look at graphs of transaction activity whenever there's a big change in Bitcoin prices up or down suddenly a

whole lot of coins that were stagnant for a long time start to move and so you know if you if you get a sudden um Step change in people's confidence in the system then this causes another increase in traffic which you know causes almost a kind of cascading failure and it gets even worse um an analogy of this is you know um when we had outages of major websites with Google what we we would actually see um traffic go up and not down short for a temporary period of time because people would try and load you know YouTube for example it wouldn't load and then they' hit reload reload reload they keep trying because they really want to watch their videos and so suddenly um normal traffic uh changes completely and often you get pushed into an even more extreme overload situation as everyone simultaneously retries okay

so it can be quite hard to recover from that actually and then of course even if we assume like those things don't happen in sort of an ideal thing I mean if you start having you know 1.1 1.2 1.3 2 megabyte of transactions every 10 minutes and there's only one megabyte to go in a block well the the amount of space taken up by these transactions that aren't in a block just keeps growing growing growing then that's never going to stop right uh and then then of course that that can be even exacerbated by situations like that where people panic and everybody tries or people resent transactions yeah I mean what would actually happen is you know people would

there there'd be a spike in traffic as people you know suddenly lose confidence in the system and try and get out um and then you know as the system slowly turns its way through these the usage would drop again because people would say this is stupid I'm not going to use Bitcoin right my transactions aren't even reliable you would get if the blocks were completely full um you know you would get cases where people are trying to pay for things um you know pay for a coffee for example is the classical example right and then the it would never confirm because they would blast it onto the network and then discover you know they weren't paying enough fees to to ever be confirmed and then payments would just break basically right they there wouldn't be this nice fee Market the the user experience would be just a paying people doesn't work and

then people would get upset you know they would feel betrayed because they put all this effort into evangelizing Bitcoin and telling their friends how great it is and how cheap and fast it is and suddenly it's expensive and slow and it's not working so they would they would leave so let's come back the to the client so the M Pools start filling up and can you explain then what what happens after that um well no one knows because it's never really happened before um but some nodes will eventually if this keeps up long enough um will fall over and crash because they don't have any limits on how many transactions they will store in memory um and it's not entirely clear how long it would take to do that because um you know it it's obvious that it would happen eventually if pressure is higher than um if demand is

consistently higher than Supply but like I said you know users will also give up and go away so um while you know it's possible that we could have a sort of Crash scenario where nodes actually start um quitting basically being killed by the operating system and have to manually be restarted you would see a lot more like Network instability the network would shrink but you know we we don't know exactly how quickly that would happen so Regarding Ms I I so I learned about this you know through your blog post mhm I'm curious why do these transactions stay in Ram like it seems like a weird software design choice to have these transactions stay in Ram and not get written to some file on the hard drive uh effectively like not cing so much bom like on the system they could

be but bear in mind that um you know bitcoin's original design actually had a limit of like 32 megabyte blocks because that's the largest message that can be passed on the network and holding 32 megabytes of of transactions even in the average case you know even if you double that and get 64 70 80 megabytes of data and even if you add a bit of you know overhead because a transaction in the men pool is not represented as efficiently as it is in the blockchain um sorry even if you take into account all that overhead you're talking about like 100 megabytes of data Maybe which is very cheap right so why would Satoshi you know having code to write stuff out to dis and load it back again is additional complexity and From satoshi's perspective it's just just unnecessary complexity right so why

would you why would you implement that well for this reason exactly well but he he never planned for Bitcoin out of capacity this this debate would appall him everything he always said was like no no no Bitcoin can scale up this is no problem this is no problem right this was like the first question he was ever asked about Bitcoin and he explained this is no problem so the fact that people would actually want Bitcoin to run out of capacity artificially isn't something that he would have ever planned for I mean I think also one of the ways to to think about about this whole debate is to think about it through the lens of the sort of Outsider right the person who's been sort of known a little bit about Bitcoin but they're not they're not like deeply involved in it like we are following all

the discussions and debates and know the different trade-offs because I mean if you talk about Bitcoin to a lay audience or technical audience you know there's some ways you have to explain it and I think there are certain metaphors people come back to like for example you know money is like his information and and sending it should be like fast and instant and like Global and cheap yeah um you know that's like one of the things that we always tell about it's like hey the the remittance use case whether or not it's actually being used but it's one of the it's a great way to illustrate how powerful it could be you know if someone can send like instantly money for free or you know for a few Cent from Kenya to China and it's there

yeah right so when when you now think of like but let's say this does happen and you start having one of first of all it starts taking a long time to get confirmed second of all it starts getting really expensive and then also think of the user experience let's say you send out a transaction and then you have to wait and you don't know if it gets in a block or not and if not then you have to you have to think about what fee even that like is a crazy idea and then resend it it it all everything breaks down yeah and and I I saw somewhere on Reddit Luke J make this comment um he was like yeah I mean it could be right but if if it does break down then

I'm sure in a few weeks we could like uh come around and then then we could do increase the block size this is and then that's just in My Views this is so delusional you know the idea that you have a few weeks cuz I mean I think a Bitcoin is is very fragile in in that way in that there's the trust is extremely important and if the trust Falls away the the believe in the system and it has already even with things that as bitcoiners you think well they actually have nothing to do with Bitcoin like Mount GX right in a way it wasn't the a problem of Bitcoin but it hugely undermined uh the image of Bitcoin and I think of something like this happening

which is actually a problem of Bitcoin I think it would be a huge disaster yeah I agree it's time for word from our sponsors Ledger now if you've been in the Bitcoin space if you've been following this it's no it's no mystery to you and it's no news to you that security and securing private Keys is so important and when I got in first got involved in Bitcoin space I heard the same thing and I was like I'm going to be a model bitcoiner I'm going to do it the right way so what I did was I bought this like refurbish cheap old netbook for1 on eBay and I set up Armory on there and I have offline Army and online Army and tried to run a full node on my laptop and it was a truly horrifying experience and and I still have not been

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know goes into detail about the road map of the company they're building some really interesting infrastructure for Bitcoin security so uh go to Ledger wallet.com and give it a try and we'd like to thank Ledger for their support of episenter Bitcoin do you have any idea can you just it's hard to quantify I suppose but this uh this Crash Landing over how many days or weeks are we talking about here like how do you think that would play out I I I don't know I've never seen Bitcoin R out of capacity before of course of course but uh are we talking days are we talking weeks are we talking months here I would say there would be problems like the buildup um well there going to be problems from now on actually because blocks are already sometimes being full

and we're already seeing backlogs but um and for example Bitcoin wallet for Android by you know Andre shb back he's already bumped the fee paid um by default so we're going to see more and more of that over the next 12 months um so that user experience degradation will will keep happening um steadily and then if we actually if we reach a point where every block is um at the minor maximum whatever they've got it set to then I think we would problems within days or we will see serious user complaints within days and te you know serious serious technical problems within weeks but it's hard to say because the moment these things break right what happens is users abandon the system and then the pressure goes down again so we might what we might happen is it's kind of

bumpy equilibrium where users complain a lot another batch leaves you know leaving behind the only the more hardcore types who are willing to stick it out and you know it might be that the system never really stays over Capac for very long because demand Falls away yeah I think it was Gavin andron who who said I believe it was on L talk Bitcoin that he saw it differently that he didn't think that we were going to reach the capacity cliff in some s catastrophic Crash Landing as you described in your blog post but that people would in fact when we start reaching limits people would in fact start leaving uh perhaps resort to other means of uh of sending transactions through offchain Solutions or I don't know I thought perhaps stop stop using or just stop using Bitcoin

yeah yeah yeah I it's a lot of it depends on time and events we can't predict like if there was a kind of a panic you know if it was in if if you start seeing articles in like the New York Times saying you know Bitcoin on brink of technical collapse and then lots of people who bought some coins have them lying around but otherwise weren't really paying attention to the Bitcoin Community which I think makes up quite a lot of people from you know people I've talked to and then they all suddenly try to you know sell their coins um then you know that sort of Spike driven like press driven Spike could could sudden unexpected problems these things are very hard to predict though I don't want to put my my you know my hand down and say that's exactly how it will play out we should never

ever even get close to finding out right of course that that's like a complete disaster if we ever get close to this I I mean maybe maybe I'll come back to that let let's first talk about some of the arguments against okay against this so it's I I don't know where to start so personally I I I have I have really difficulties finding them very convincing and and maybe maybe let me give this context first so the way I think about this whole question of increasing the block size right is that you look at how does Bitcoin work today and then we think of like what will happen when the transaction volume

increases and then you have two scenarios right either you increase the block size or you don't and then the question in my view is which is the bigger change and I think it's pretty clear to me that full blocks are a much more radical change to the network than having a higher block size right yeah so I think in that context if you want to leave the block size the same that is the thing that has to be justified that is the thing that you have to put research behind and stuff whereas the the sort of argument I see a lot of people doing but there's not enough of research we don't know enough what happens with the 20 megabyte stuff and then and maybe that's true but I think it's more much more clear to me

that there's even much less research it seems nobody has actually for example written up coherently how such a fee Market could work right it's it's just like they say fee market and then think that solves it but yeah I I agree I think um you know if if if you can imagine it another way if there had been no limit and now people arguing to put this limit in place and to force Bitcoin to run out of capacity and they were arguing for it instead of you know um for the status quo I don't think anyone would really um you know go for that I don't think they would get anywhere right people would say no it's working fine why would we why would we do such a thing why would we make such a change um so unfortunately this is basically a case where you know Bitcoin

is sort of riding along On inertia and things that Satoshi would have not even hesitated to do or just not getting done but so okay so let's talk about a few of these arguments so one of them was pet Peter Tod said on the let talk Bitcoin episode uh we'll have a link to that in the show notes as well is that you won't be able to run a full note behind tour anymore what do you think of that show me people who are doing that today I mean this is a trivial number of people running uh things behind tour you know the the idea that so he talks about this in terms of people running nodes in countries where Bitcoin is banned or being censored um right and of course they can use electrum or something like that yeah I mean they have to run a full

node but even if you accept they want to um you know they can use vpns for example which are far far more popular than tour has ever been for evading uh government firewalls and things right if you look at the popularity of a just depict One commercial VPN service out of thousands um hotspot not Hotpot sorry um yes sorry it's called Hotspot Shield and um it's done by a company called anchorfree and they are orders of magnitude larger than tour right um whenever there's a major censorship event in say turkey their traffic goes up you know by around you know thousands and thousands of times more than what tours does so this fixation on tour you know it doesn't really make any technical sense when you look at the market um and this idea that uh if if

you're in a country where Bitcoin is banned you know you're going to be mining and things it doesn't seem like a very realistic idea to me anyway yeah I know I agree with you I mean I'm pretty sure like doing this right now would be a pretty miserable experience trying to run a note behind tour well yeah right it's it's not I mean it's adding a lot of latency for no real reason you don't need tour to get through fbls and when you're up against arguments like this I mean it's pretty clear that you're trying to make an engineering argument uh uh in front of an ideological argument so I mean it's sort of like trying to argue with um fundamentalist Christians and some it does some yeah it feels like that sometimes yeah it is a

bit of a caricature but with the extent of debate right it's been a major frustration of me and Gavin for a long time now we've been saying look you know make a proposal put numbers in it right when you object put numbers in your objection right we're we're supposed to be Engineers here to do engineering and what you get back the the people who are against these sorts of things they have never ever done this right they never sit down and they do they never do back of the envelope calculations in the way that Engineers do and it's incredibly frustrating because they they often pick some extremely academic or theoretical point and just assert it as truth and if you don't degree you must be an idiot you know so these sorts of engineering based arguments you know tour isn't that popular there are other systems that are

they work just fine for mining if you want to do that then you know they don't um they don't convince these other people because they weren't really open to being convinced in the first place so there's one um one point I think that that does probably have some validity and I'm curious on your view on that so one question right is the what kind of an advantage do large mining pools have over small mining pools and over solar miners I mean of course one is the variance but then there are other things uh in particular there's a risk of getting orphaned and uh orphan means basically if you mine a block you you find a block so you think like you may

get the block reward but then someone else finds one around the same time and in the end you lose out and and you are at a disadvantage with that if you small mining pool and some some listeners may remember the episode we did about selfish mining with am grer and it a who wrote on this so um it it does seem to be true probably right that if you have bigger blocks and they propagate more slowly then actually becomes a little bit more of a disadvantage right if you are a smaller mining pool as opposed to a bigger one do do you is that a concern you have well no so Gavin has written about this quite extensively you know if

everyone is making bigger blocks then the orphan cost doesn't change because you know your competitors get orphaned as much as you do so in the end it it washes out um if you're making if you if you're a bigger mining pool you get less orphaned right no it has nothing to do with how big your mining pool is it's to do with your connectivity right and your connectivity to other miners but in terms of the number of people hashing on your pool it makes no difference well but if you find a mining block if you find a block right and you immediately start mining on your own block right because it that doesn't have to go anywhere yeah and so if so that's an advantage right if you're a bigger minor mean you get blocks more frequently I mean the point of the point of the

difficulty adjustment is you shouldn't be you know finding a block immediately after another block that you've just found like with any frequency right that that will happen very very occasionally but it's not supposed to happen uh frequently if it is then that the difficulty adjustment will kick in and I guess I guess the way what you can think about is this way right so if if you find a block as a mining pool uh then there's probably some period if someone else finds a block there's probably some period you're not mining on that longest chain so your work is probably wasted but if you're the biggest pool and you find it and then you can immediately M on that like that time you lose because you don't have the longest chain is is less compared to other pools I mean I I

think this is probably true but it's also uh it's a you know it's a fairly small effect and there are all kinds of other things having that effect as well yeah I mean with respect to the orphaning costs and so on I mean it's fairly low today um but we don't have a optimized protocol really at all right so we've known for a long time that we can um every transaction is broadcast twice in the Bitcoin Network which doesn't make much sense there are various ways to fix that and so on Gavin has researched some of these mechanisms but um you know bear in mind that what we're raising what we want to raise here is a hard limit whenever you have a a system uh a large Software System there are a variety of scaling bottle necks

right you you encounter one you remove it then you move on to the next one you remove it you move on to the next one you remove it there's always going to be a next bottleneck to fix so by you know it looks like we're going to hit this self-imposed one uh fairly soon so right now the effort is on removing that one and then maybe we get up to 4 megabyte blocks or whatever with enough time and organic growth and growth of the the Bitcoin user base and then we discover that miners don't want to go beyond 4 megabytes because of orphen costs or whatever and they're they're deliberately capping the size of the blocks they make to less than the theoretical limit that's called a a soft block size cap right a soft block size limit then we say okay then that's the

next bottom neck and then we work on fixing that so I'm not too worried about this because you know we can see some of these bottom necks coming up we don't know exactly where they'll hit but we anticipate at some point they'll exist and there are solutions already being researched and worked on so so we we wanted to ask that but maybe we can we can clarify this right now so with a soft a soft cap or a soft book is that just a minor in I mean right now A minor can mine empty blocks if they want to right so exactly uh is that this so does that just mean that if you have a 20 megabyte limit a miner can of course mine blocks of whatever size up to 20 megab yeah and is that achieved through

consensus of M or everybody do what they want it's just a configuration setting uh in Bitcoin okay cuz right now that's 750 kilobytes now is that well that's the default um I argued or I vaguely recall arguing when this was set to 750 that it should just be set to one megabyte it shouldn't be effectively the soft and the hard limit should be the same and I wish we' done that because now we have some miners who aren't they don't know about this setting or they don't care or you know whatever and they just leave it at the default and so we're actually we're hitting capacity limits even earlier than we should be right because just because miners aren't really paying attention and they're not raising this soft limit so what when we move the hard limit to 20 megabytes or whatever

whatever the final patch is um one of the issues that I'm going to be looking at is what do we do with a soft limit and I think the correct solution will be to um default it to the same as the hard limit so by default miners never throttle that block size Deli yeah yeah and they can okay um so regarding I had a question regarding Network propagation what we were just talking about earlier where large miners are at an advantage over small miners I I think that the assumption is that large miners have a much faster internet connection that can upload blocks a lot faster than a small minor that's where there would be no am I wrong I think you're wrong I think large miners large miners have an advantage mining but that's that's just the way right now I mean blocks bear in

mind that Satoshi set 10 minutes interval um on the idea that blocks would take one minute to propagate and there would be 10% wastage of work through orphaning and he was like yeah that sounds fine to me if there's 10% then that's cool right so obviously miners incentivized to make as much profit as they they can but um they're also incentivized to move people's transactions because otherwise Bitcoin doesn't have value so there's there's some kind of interplay there where some kind of um you know orphan rate is acceptable and and miners have the they they have all the tools they need to figure that out and at the software and network level we have the tools to reduce it as well um absolutely so one of the well let's address one small point

that I think that's also a strange argument I've seen so Greg Maxell brought up in one Reddit post that you know as as many people know the number of of notes on the network has decreased dramatically it was I think about 100,000 at one point and now it's about 5,000 um and you know that personally I'm not sure if this is related to the block size very much to some extent perhaps but do you think that first of all do you think it matters how many notes there are and do you think there is some sort of lower limit or amount We should strive for and and do you think if the block size was increase to 20 megabytes this could maybe worse than this and decrease the number of notes even further yeah I I

think I I I need to dig in a bit I think the claims that we had 100,000 you know full nodes at any point are a bit dodgy to be honest um these days we count number of nodes cuz we have pretty good Network crawlers that have been tuned and they craw the network and they measure up time and they ignore nodes that come and go quickly and things like that whereas you know several years ago we didn't have that um and the way we had accounting nodes was not that great to be honest you know um we weren't like measuring whether these nodes are stable and fully reachable and stuff um so I doubt we've ever really had 100,000 full nodes in the sense we would call we would use the term full node today but sure if it was it was in the past you

know even um once good quers were established you know we were seeing like 9 10,000 nodes and it's shrunk now um the number of nodes we need in terms of need for the technical operation of the network to function is dependent on how many um SPV wallets we have that are synchronizing with these nodes and we don't have any idea how many nodes we need for that um it's one of the sad things about Bitcoin engineering that you know all this work is being put into this arguing and actually very little work is put into basic measurement and metrics so we don't really know how many nodes we need to serve the current user base but apparently 5,000 is a lot 5,000 is a lot of machines um a lot of servers um just to put it in perspective um when

you think about how much work can 5,000 computers do uh all of WhatsApp was at one point running on 1,000 machines now 1,000 very good machines with very tightly optimized software but still a much smaller group of machines and Bitcoin today and they was they were rooting a million messages a second so Way Beyond um you know our one or two you know per second which is what Bitcoin is doing so we have a lot of computers doing not very much um in terms of serving the network so if if we assume that Bitcoin continues to grow but that uh let's let's make the assumption that that there are less nodes as a result of the block size increase what would that do to the network stability what what would be impact on yeah potential censorship or

centralization like issues uh with really to centralization of uh of Bitcoin well I wouldn't worry much about the centralization Bear in mind anyone who wants to can run a full node and in the past a lot of people were forced to even though they didn't really want to um so there's a natural decline as you know better options for those people come along um you know like a lot of the original idea right is all Merchants will run a full node and in the beginning they did but these days we have companies like bit pay and coinbase and they handle lots of things including running nodes for you so um that's more centralized and if those companies is but you know it's a sort of a weak form of centralization because you can imagine if bit pay or coinbase started charging really high fees or they got

really bad policies or whatever then people would say okay you know I'll just run my own nodes and I'll I'll put my own storefront in front of it it's not that hard um so to some extent you know uh people not running their own nodes is a it's a matter of convenience right if they wanted to they certainly could and the actual uh number of nodes we need is yeah like I said dictated by the serving capacity for these other kinds of wallets um if need be you know there could be techniques to incentivize the running of nodes paying for their services things like that but I don't see any signs we need that at the moment so it's time for word for more sponsor va.com the gold Bitcoin exchange now you may be asking yourself why do I

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Bitcoin like the sort of core Bitcoin where transactions are actually in the blocks is that scalable at all can that at one point or is it even desirable to try to make that scale to a point where it can handle I don't know uh maybe thousands or thousands of transactions per second or is really the future that transactions move off chain hopefully in some sort of trustless ways like like the lightning network uh and and that sort of evolution is natural and and I mean I guess you can agree with that and then you can still not agree with the uh related point that a lot of of the developers make is that this evolution

is natural and we need to sort of force it to move that way by you know not giving people any space they have no choice um what are your thoughts on I maybe first of all will transactions have to move offchain and second is it desirable to try to yeah you know you know I think in this case what we should be following is um satoshi's original vision for the system for a couple of reasons one is it's actually a pretty well thought out Vision um you know people questioned it on questioned him on it the moment he announced Bitcoin even before code was available and he had already thought through these issues right he had thought about scalability a lot um he made you know he made claims like oh you know even if we scale to Visa size then you know it's just the equivalent of

moving a few HD movies per day um you know he' done the he' done the calculations that I said even even though he had done that um you know he picked a reference point which is Visa which is not a bad reference point to pick if you're trying to design a financial system but then he went further and he said you know maybe people want to do really high frequency trading with each other maybe you want to see like you know 100 trades per second just between a few people and maybe that doesn't need to be on the blockchain so he designed um these high frequency trading protocols on top of Bitcoin and the the modern concept of lightning networks and so on is sort of vaguely based in some of the things that he was doing there um even though the original mechanism he designed got

disabled um a few years ago so he thought about these things and he he drew some lines in the sand he was like yeah we could totally move all the payments being done with credit cards onto Bitcoin that would work and then but if you talk about like high frequency stock trading that wouldn't work and he designed other mechanisms for that so there's clearly some kind of line somewhere and I think where he drew the line is pretty reasonable um you know Drawing the Line at one megabyte blocks and then saying everything else should you know be done on this different system actually even if at the end of the day it settles on the blockchain that's not reasonable I don't see any you know if you if you try and convince me that that's a good idea with the maths I won't agree because there's

just no credible if you just look at what computers can do and how fast they are doesn't make sense to draw the line there so I think we'll see um I think it is perfectly reasonable for Bitcoin to process thousands of transactions per second right I mean there are websites that handle thousands of hits per second lots and lots and lots of them do that and we don't say oh my God you know the web is decentralized even though you wouldn't run a website that handles that sort of traffic from home um you know people just don't do that but you know the web is still a decentralized system right so um I would I would worry about it less than other people do but do do you still think that it's likely that we'll get to the point where the same Bitcoin network is handling

really large high value transactions and really small transactions like coffee or even micro payments like well why not I mean people pay for you know expensive holidays and very you know even quite expensive things with credit cards and then also for their cups of coffee I see no reason why the size like the monetary size of the transaction should matter but but if we have uh systems like the lightning Network and you know I do realize that it's it's only a white paper for now but if those types of systems get implemented and we have really fast payments uh which don't necessarily require like a 10-minute confirmation time and uh are significantly cheaper than perhaps what Bitcoin would offer if you have all

these higher value transactions and fees start going up um don't you think people would start using those rather than uh yeah could be I mean if if you know some lightning network is sh Strom or whatever system is you know layers on top of Bitcoin I mean I think it it it's very likely we will see systems layer on top of Bitcoin um I'm a little skeptical of the B lightning Network specifically but it might be and that's fine right if that's the way the system evolves naturally because that's what people want then that's okay with me um being people being forced into it whether they want it or not is definitely not okay with me I don't I think if you look at ways in which people will get faster payments on top of Bitcoin I think uh the use of trusted Computing is a lot uh

more reasonable a lot easier to deploy and frankly it's probably closer I know there are companies working on this stuff already so the technical from a technical perspective I'd say the use of um uh remote atation and trusted Computing is a lot more likely to give us you know super high confidence uh instant payments for Bitcoin than lightning network but these are you know these are technical issues on which reasonable people can disagree yeah I mean I mean I think there's um the lightning Network it it kind of makes sense to me I think it's a reasonable idea it's all but I think what's what's been really uh deceptive and maybe intellectually slightly dishonest is sort of confusing those two right because first of all it's clear

that it's not nowhere ready I mean we we did a episode with them and they themselves said that and the other thing they also said well the two other the things are first of all even if it worked they still would need much bigger blocks and you know even if actually people only were using the lightning Network for all if you want to have Bitcoin at some scale you know people have to open and close channels and they actually have you know multi- transactions which are larger so there's no question you still would need to increase the block size significantly and then the other thing they said well their security model actually becomes worse if the blocks are full cuz that's a problem for them too so it's clearly whatever one thinks of it it is clear

another the solution to this um and of course it's also very complex to do right there are a lot of aspects uh like this whole server stuff one needs to build the wallets need to change Merchants need to change that so the idea that this is somehow achievable in a really short time frame is quite obviously not true yeah and I agree it's obvious and I wrote an article laying out why it should be obvious and um it sort of disappointed me that you know the blockstream guys um ignore that completely and now they actually hired a guy called Rusty Russell and said oh you work on Lightning Network and he published a blog post it was either today or yesterday uh where he outlined exactly the same conclusions he said this is not going to deliver a solution

in the time frame we need we need bigger blocks so everybody who has looked at this and the people who proposed this originally in their white paper to myself to Rusty blockstream have all said this is this is not going to happen we need bigger blocks and unfortunately this doesn't seem to have any impact on um people who are stalling this debate today's magic word is spoon SP o o n Go to let's talk bitcoin.com to sign in enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener reward so let's uh talk about the another topic has has come up in this

discussion especially on the mailing this uh so Gavin andreon proposed that uh if there was no consensus on increasing the block size that he would start pushing uh developers uh companies startups within the ecosystem to move to bitcoin XT which is a fork of Bitcoin that you uh developed can you first talk about what exactly is Bitcoin XD for those who perhaps don't aren't familiar with it as I was uh and um and also why this would be uh a possible solution to this resolving this debate yeah it's actually not my preferred solution my preferred solution is that Gavin revokes commit access from everyone else in the project

and then you know makes a change himself and says this is Bitcoin cor has made a decision and this is how it's going to be um he's reluctant to do that sounds Prett dangerous right that's going to that's going to get a lot of well I mean this this I don't know of any other open source projects that have this notion of development by you know quote consensus which is we can talk about that in in a minute but it's not really consensus every project that I know of certainly every successful open source project has a kind of benevolent dictator is what we call them right they someone who makes a decision right a technical leader um and Bitcoin core doesn't and that's a big part of the reason we have this issue so Bitcoin XT is a it's the same program as Bitcoin core with very small number of

modifications um to it and this Bitcoin XT arose last year because I needed to add a feature to the Bitcoin protocol for Lighthouse to make it us interface perform well basically um so I I prepared this change and I submitted it for inclusion into Bitcoin core and there was this like massive disputes massive technical debates not quite as big as the block size but you know it went on forever um same sort of thing right a lot of the arguments uh made against this very simple 50 line change didn't make a whole lot of sense to me and eventually actually uh Vladimir he did integrate it into Bitcoin core and I thought oh well you know that took forever but at least it's done and then a few days later um you know uh it got reverted by some other guy who has

commit access so I won't name and then when I submitted it again uh he was like oh this is this is quote a storm I'm not going to touch it so I you know threw it my hands at this point and I said look you know you guys cannot make decisions and stick to them I'm going to I'm just I need to launch Lighthouse right I can't wait around for you guys all day so I'm going to make my own version of it and and that's the Genesis of Bitcoin XT there were a couple of other changes that hit the same problem it's not just it's not like me it's like other people who made proposed changes also hit this exact same wall and then I went and I fetched um fetched at least one of those changes and put it in Bitcoin xt2 so I made it a home for

changes where I thought the arguments made sense and they hit this kind of stall you know we must have consensus over everything you know block blocking of changes now just to be clear that the changes that you that you made in in this xd4 don't uh I mean there's it's it's still compatible with a Bitcoin core yeah it doesn't change the blockchain right so and it does not include 20 megabyte blocks currently it does not no yeah and so what is the idea then that in some time after some uh assumed like you know all these startups start using Bitcoin XT then we include the 20 man B Block no in XT what's going

to happen is uh either today or tomorrow I I will release another version of Bitcoin XT which also doesn't include any block size changes but it it just tidies a few things up um and then probably within a week or two Gavin will have a change that's ready to submit to me for Bitcoin XT and then we'll integrate that and release it to as a new version of Bitcoin XT that anyone can upgrade to and that will include uh block size increase yeah well what it will include is code which effectively votes so as miners start running this code they will effectively embed a vote for bigger blocks into the blockchain and then once once the software sees that the there's a majority of people voting for this change then it will

start to create bigger blocks right and if at this point you're on the you're still running Bitcoin core then you'll get split onto a separate blockchain so so the Bitcoin XT software will communicate you know one bigger blocks and then they will we'll see how many messages they get back and at some point if it's a majority it was switch Yeah okay how does that work exactly how does this voting mechanism it's been used before so it's the same mechanism that we've used uh to roll out changes before every block has a version number in it and uh miners can for example set that block version to be block version three for example and then uh Bitcoin XT would look at the past you know it would it it would add

up the number of version three blocks in a past time window and then just calculate a percentage and by there through that rolling window of time in the blockchain it can see what the support for the change is okay um and so what would happen with those miners who remain on bitcoin cor so that means if they mine blocks they would just get ignored yeah they would go onto a side chain and and any coins they um uh were to mine wouldn't be recognized by exchanges or Merchants that were running Bitcoin XT okay um so does that mean is this going ahead is the the plan is to to do it this way and

then I guess does that mean uh you guys you and G maybe some other people who volunteer will will talk to minors will talk to people to switch over to XT um well I you know I emailed Vladimir earlier today to you know have one last attempt at convincing him uh that this is the correct path forward to to grow the block size and then yeah if that doesn't uh work then we'll do a um we'll do Bitcoin XT we've already been talking to a lot of places we've talked to businesses exchange owners we've talked to some big mining pools we've talked to a whole lot of different stakeholders in the Bitcoin ecosystem and the the support is extremely strong for Bitcoin

XT right some of these people are just saying just get on with it already so we don't know exactly how much support but we know there's a lot and um what we would do is yeah we would pick some Threshold at which point the fork would happen and then go and talk to minor and say look you need to you need to upgrade this is what the community wants so I've got a couple of questions about this um so essentially with then this is a hard Fork right you're asking people to change their software to another version of of Bitcoin core which is a fork um if you're going to do that like why not just ask them to to update their software to another Fork of Bitcoin core like well that's what it is effectively okay Bitcoin XT is just a name for a

slightly modified version of Bitcoin core but why Bitcoin XT why not just make a fork of Bitcoin core and called Bitcoin core 20 confusing right well I mean Bitcoin yeah it could have been called Bitcoin core 20 but when I you know I've already like done all the rebranding to XT and XT is it has a few other minor changes it's not just block size limits right okay and then so for for Bitcoin companies that are using Bitcoin core to power whatever yeah building right so let's say it's like I don't know chain.com or something like they're using Bitcoin core I I don't know I mean maybe they're using Bitcoin core but perhaps there are companies that are not using Bitcoin core uh and wallets for instance I mean I assume that Bitcoin J would include all these

uh changes as well CU you you um commit to it but what about the other Bitcoin clients out there it would require for them to rewrite their software potentially that could be no not really so most most wallets don't care about the block size at all um for example Bitcoin J you said Bitcoin J would need to be updated the by far the most common way Bitcoin J is used is in SPV mode in which it doesn't download the full blockchain in this mode it doesn't actually know how big blocks are it doesn't care so all of those wallets all of your bread wallet on iOS all of your Bitcoin wallets and And Hive and so on um all web wallets for example they don't need to change right it's only people who are running um Bitcoin core that would need to or you know a

reimplementation like there's one written in go called btcd but the the actual code change is very small right we're talking about it's not quite just adjusting one number but it's uh do you have an idea of how many companies are using Bitcoin core in the back end or or perhaps have written their own implementation of Bitcoin they they're basically all right running Bitcoin core at some level usually if they've written their own implementation it'll be connected to you know their own nodes which they'll run Bitcoin core um which connects to the PTP Network and then they'll connect their own version of Bitcoin to their own Bitcoin core so a few companies like coinbase might need to you know spend an afternoon writing a bit of code it's it's a very small change and how trivial is this change I mean cuz you know fundamentally you just

take one clim out put put in the other but uh you know for companies that have rigorous software testing procedures and such like how trivial would this be for them to actually change that How likely is this to happen is basically what I'm trying to get to it it's very trivial for these companies so the the best way way um to these companies should be organizing things I don't know if they all are but I know a lot are is um you know if they have software it's create calculating a database from the blockchain or whatever it is they want to do they should just be connecting to their own private nodes and then they can just take out the block size check bear in mind if their software is connecting to their own copies of Bitcoin or Bitcoin XT the check is already being made by those programs

anyway so doing it again doesn't actually add very much right unless they have some kind of philosophical desire to do it all themselves in their favorite programming language or whatever in which case okay you know they've taken on the burden of keeping up with changes in the Bitcoin protocol and they knew that when they started okay so so then in that case if well I mean if we extrapolate so if most companies that you've talked to are on board with this with switching to bitcoin XT then what what you're saying is essentially that this is going to happen this block size increase is going to happen no matter what I think so yeah the only question is um how long does it take for people to you know opt in um do we really have the majority that we

think we do I mean you know from poing you know going and talking to you know important players in the ecosystem we think we do but there's nothing quite like measuring it for real and then the worst case scenario is the majority of um the economic majority that we call it is in favor uh but the hash power the mining majority is not that would be a very messy situation for Bitcoin so uh can you explain that how how would that happen so you mean that like let's say coin base and the big companies and they all in favor but the mining yeah so let's say that um you know so there there've been some concerns raised by mining pools in China for example where there's a lot of

mining going on that their connectivity is extremely poor to the rest of the internet for a bunch of reasons um so if the needs of the wider Global Bitcoin Community start diverging from what you know minors in China want then who wins or the answer is the economic majority wins right the The Wider Community wins but it would require a bit of you a bit of a technical mess to to sort everything out in that case because you somehow have to get uh clients to ignore potentially the longest change only accept yeah so people again merchants and exchanges that would be running Bitcoin XT if we imagine this sort of worst case scenario happening they would ignore the longest

chain doesn't matter that it's the longest if it's um uh uh you know well let no let me rephrase that take the longest chain with that specific version of the software right yeah so let me rephrase that right like if miners were building a longer chain than the 20 megga chain um then you know the client would keep switching back to it and keep ending up with this bigger and bigger backlog um and at that point what we would have to do is like checkpoint uh block blocks into both the full nodes and the SPV wallets so that's a much larger and more complicated upgrade um to force it onto the larger chain right and in the worst case scenario if the miners and the rest of the Bitcoin Community end out in some

kind of like full-fledged war that would basically wreck Bitcoin so we would hope that miners wouldn't do that of course it's not in their best interests to mess up Bitcoin for everyone so but let's say even this XT XT and larger block size happens M uh I mean one thing that's that's really clear I think if one follows they Mist there is so much disagreement and animosity and and almost hatred between people it's quite frankly I find it a bit worrying uh and uh it there's does not seem to be a lot of sort of coldhearted rational analysis of what's actually the

best way to go and I mean it seems if if this happens and now we have most of the people with commit access to bitcoin core are are against this and they will be sort of Left Behind I mean it seems like that that can cause a big rift in the Bitcoin um Community why why did it come to this yeah good question um it's been a long time incoming let's say that um these problems were not unpredictable um you know I've been talking about them for a while mostly in private but sometimes you know these concerns surfaced in public as well on this show yeah on this show um you know

it's it's something where I've mostly been talking about this with you know like guys like Vladimir and Gavin and other people um and and guys like Gregory Maxwell as well what we've what we see in Bitcoin core is it started out as a traditional open source project Satoshi was in charge then he delegated to Gavin and Gavin was in charge right and then Gavin delegated to Vladimir and Vladimir was in charge and that's completely normal for any technical project right you have one leader who listens to input from people makes a decision um Vladimir unfortunately does he prefers to um not make decisions I would say I don't think he would disagree with his characterization when when there's a sort of dispute he tends to stand back and try and hope that it sort of resolves itself into a nice

consensus where everyone agrees and when that doesn't happen you know he just sort of ignores um what's happening so Bitcoin core sort of devolved over the last few years into this rule by consensus is what they call it and um but it's actually much closer to um anyone who wants having a veto right because as long as there's anyone who's sort of objecting and making vagally intellectual sounding um objections then there's no consensus and therefore the change won't happen so this has become a huge problem um especially because some of the people who um you know who value this and have Commit access and love to sort of make these sorts of arguments they uh they like you know Theory right they enjoy uh coming up with uh complicated theories

and complicated um proposals for redesigns of Bitcoin and other things like that and then what tends to happen is the needs the more practical Day-Day needs of developers get lost right they they'll say like oh I really need a simple change and it never happens because you know um theoreticians you know feel like oh I I would rather have a completely different design that doesn't exist like no one has ever built what I mean when I say it doesn't exist so there's this huge problem and this is a thing that triggered the creation of Bitcoin XT last year it was a similar dispute over a similar well not similar feature but a different feature and you know you could see this was going to come up again we've known that this was going to come up around block sizes for years and

now it finally has so I don't know what the fix for this is but I think Bitcoin core needs to get back to what it was supposed to be actually which is you know a traditional project with a leader who makes decisions doesn't happen then then that's what's going to trigger a fork that's a a very strange in a way that's a strange idea because now if we have if we assume that Bitcoin core keeps having this this big weight in sort of determining some of these rules like let's say the block size and then I find the argument a little bit strange that all these five people can agree well let's just give all the power to one person I mean that that may be fine as long as Gavin is there and he's IR rational guy and stuff but that's I mean

that really seems to be in conflict with the whole idea of a decentralized system where you know I mean the decentralization of Bitcoin doesn't come from like the fact there's like five guys instead of three or instead of two right or even instead of one like one to five people you might as well say well Central Bank has a committee that sets monetary policy so the dollar is decentralized right it doesn't make any sense to view the system way the decentralization of Bitcoin it comes from the fact that everyone can audit the blockchain check the rules for themselves it comes from the fact that you know there's a competitive market of implementations and ultimately from the fact that people can switch to other implementations and Fork the blockchain if they want I mean I guess that's where that's where you would have some sort of control and

check right is because well people have the option like it may happen now of XT to switch to another version um so that I presume that does that mean you will retain sort of the the control main control over XD if that becomes the main client or would you pass it on to Gavin or how would that work yeah I've been thinking about this um in the last few days what I suspect will happen is one of two things one is that if we go ahead well okay let me say one of three things one is um this is what I'm hoping Vladimir you know realizes this situation is unsustainable he makes a decision and if the decision is no block size increase then the fork will happen and if the decision is block size

increase then maybe you know we put off these problems for another day right we kick the can down rad a bit we have resolved the immediate issue the second possibility is we do Bitcoin XT and um we get the majority for the blockchain fork um and in that case I think you know uh Bitcoin core would have two choices one is to accept the Bitcoin XT patch right and and adopt the same rule set that XT is using or face IR relevance and I think in that case they would come into line right they would adopt 20 meg blocks or whatever the rule is um and the third possibility is they don't do that and Bitcoin core just becomes completely irrelevant right um and if if the fork happens and Bitcoin core has not released a version that

comes into line then no one will run core anymore right they will become effectively an X project with no users um and then at that point it's not clear what would happen but um I think you know we would probably we would you know people who were working on core would would move across right people don't want to submit their patches to a dead project effectively or where there's no chance of their code making it to end users so at that point um whether development momentum would shift to XT or whether you know core would sort of um core would sort of you know uh secede the argument there and and go with the bigger blocks is unclear as I think it was in yeah Andre anop put it

on on the LTB episodes it doesn't matter what decision we make as long as you're on the right side of the consensus that that's really where your where your decision lies so I wanted to come back to what you were saying uh earlier about other open software projects and the fact that most open software projects have a leader that has a veto of course with Bitcoin that's as mentioned Brian that's as Brian mentioned that's a little it's a little different because you know we have that decentralized uh ideology that's sort of baked in and it seems sort of contrary to to to have one person who can make all these decisions um what do you think is the ideal solution for Bitcoin knowing that it it would be difficult to pass the idea that

you know one person would have the veto and everything how do you think we can make these decisions smoother in the future because they will come up you know I think the current approach is completely unsustainable and cannot continue right it's not just me who's lost patience with this setup it's a lot of people okay there has to be one leader and if they make bad decisions then results is a fork that's how all open source projects operate right or virtually all of course but you know there there's the economic incentive in Bitcoin is much higher I would do I would say than other projects do you see some sort of maybe way down the line where would one would have a a type of voting where people maybe would vote if they're have

votes according to their Bitcoin Holdings or something like that no I don't foresee any situation except one guy makes a decision and if people don't like his version of software they switch to another side I mean the the notion that um you know like oh I bought the notion you can effectively buy votes over technical matters uh is never going to fly because again what you see in like a lot of these arguments is a lot of these you said it yourself earlier a lot of these arguments don't actually make a whole lot of sense when you dig in right there's a lot of um obfuscation going on a lot of arguments sort of superfici sound good and then when you stop to think about things like how quickly could this code be written who's going to write it um how much complexity will this add what will the user interface

look like when you stop to think about these uh questions you realize like a lot of these proposals are not very well thought out and and what happens if you get like one guy you know what happens if like Richard Branson or the Winkle Vos Twins or whoever have bought huge amounts of Bitcoin and they read like one mailing list post and then they say we're definitely voting for this change right and then other people saying well we're we're the ones who have to do the work right you can't tell volunteers what to do through a voting mechanism that idea is DOA so the um the way forward is basically to have the same system as when Bitcoin was first created right when Satoshi uh just made the changes um that he felt were correct to the code and then yeah if people didn't like them they could switch to a

different version I don't think Bitcoin needs anything more than that especially because actually think about it the core functionality of Bitcoin core or Bitcoin XT or whatever is not not that complicated it's basically ordering transactions and updating a database um and running little these these little scripts there shouldn't actually be very bitter disputes about what goes in very often right um that really shouldn't happen very much so the the fact that you know you need these um for you know the idea that you people have to switch to different version of the software to resolve disputes is really uh should be a very rare event yeah absolutely well I think that's we're going to have some

very interesting time ahead of us I think that's going to be uh very eventful and could be quite disruptive time for Bitcoin and let's hope that yeah the reasonable and best way will will go ahead and I mean p personally I I do feel that block size increases is a reasonable way and and I hope that will be possible to to accomplish in a way that you know does doesn't deepen even more all those resentments that obviously exist yeah I think this is if you dig into the core of this debate it's a clash of vision right um between people who want to follow satoshi's original

plan and people who have decided they don't like that plan and they want something radically different and they want to force people to go along with them right so yeah that's unfortunate and we'll see how it plays out but I'm hoping with minimum disruption is what I'm hoping for so before we wrap up do you want to give us last time you were here in this podcast uh we talked quite a lot about Lighthouse and Lighthouse has uh has launched now and it was I I used it I think it was like I used the first what was the first thing again was a charity Charity fundra mobile yeah uh and can you give a bit of an update uh yeah about how that project is going yeah so

actually I should have some interesting stuff to announce around Lighthouse um in the next few days or possibly next week I'm really looking forward to announcing some of this stuff the um the app itself is still in beta so uh the progress on the code has been somewhat slow in the last few weeks partly because of this block size thing partly because I was on vacation and so on I've had been doing other things but um I'm looking forward to once the whole you know Bitcoin XT Bitcoin core thing is resolved in whichever way it's resolved I want to get back to Lighthouse and um my my near-term plan for Lighthouse is to take it out of beta which means fixing bugs raising the quality of the product adding a few more features that should really be there right now it's still very much a beta quality product I

feel um and I would like to see it reach that next level of quality just so I can be totally happy with it um I also um so after that you know the question is where do we take Lighthouse after is reach 1.0 and it's a solid crowdfunding product um I'm I'm looking at the possibility of actually Evol in it into a more General sort of smart contracts wallet the name lighthouse is deliberately General so we might see features crop up in Lighthouse um that are not to do with crowdfunding but where you know the concept of a wallet that has sort of General feature set and can do more things than just sending money around that's that's sort of what Lighthouse is probably going to be all about cool that sounds very exciting so I'm curious um what's uh what what are

you spending your time on most these days other than uh trying to sell these disput yeah in the yeah unfortunately in the last few weeks um it's mostly you know I had to spend a lot of time reading things writing articles um doing doing a bunch of other things um I've I spend my time on a mix of Bitcoin J which is still you know by far the largest project that I manage and it's it's very widely used at this point you know we get um people um asking questions and announcing projects with it every day basically at this point so that takes up a fair bit of time Lighthouse and um yeah sort of more General like T doing tutorials teaching um speaking at conferences and yeah

advocacy cool cool fantastic so yeah I look forward to that also if people want to check out Lighthouse we'll have a we have a link in the show note it's it's actually it's it's really quite cool cuz I think it it sort of it sort of makes very concrete some of the promise that Bitcoin has especially the idea that you crowdfunding without a central party I think is is is really a really awesome thing um so yeah Mike thanks so much for coming on I think it's a super important topic and I'm I'm really glad we could s of dive into that and and talk about it because yeah it's absolutely crucial and absolutely crucial for the future of Bitcoin I think it's crucial that people are aware of what's going on and

understand the arguments yeah cool thanks for having me it's been good chatting to you guys yeah and yeah to listeners thanks so much for joining so we release new episode our Bitcoin every Monday you can subscribe to show on iTunes SoundCloud or your favorite podcast app on iOS or Android and you can also watch it on YouTube uh we at epicenter youtube.com/ Center BTC and uh of course you can always send us a tip which will be in the show description so thanks so much and until next [Music] time oh