Bitcoin Core

It was never supposed to be that.

And the thing I think Bitcoin Core... did wrong and is still doing wrong.

I met a lot of core developers in Vienna this spring, and the general feeling I get from that community is that they view their job as adapting to whatever is going on on chain they look at the chain and then they adapt the code to that to to function as smooth as pro as possible and keep fees low because fee estimation and keep this and that well functioning and well maintained so instead of and i think that approach i would prefer if they had another approach which is They approach Bitcoin as money and we are going to do whatever it takes to keep it be money and not to let it steer off into other directions because that is a real danger.

And I think some of them underestimate that danger.

Well, it was a suggested soft fork, a user-activated soft fork to Bitcoin's consensus rules, which failed to implement.

And some people see that as the miners were now rebelling against the nodes, and that Bitcoin is not Bitcoin anymore, so therefore they're hard forking off.

This specific user-activated soft fork was suggested after Bitcoin Core made an upgrade to... to the default Mempool policy rules.

Mempool policy rules are lighter rules on top of Bitcoin's consensus rules.

You know, the way we have decentralized mining, we should have decentralized governance.

And I think that even though it's a good thing to have Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Knot to have a few implementations, but we should have many implementations.

And I think I just truly believe that the more we have, as long as you're preserving Bitcoin's consensus layer, you know, what keeps it Bitcoin, we shouldn't have all the arguing in the community that we've had because Bitcoin shouldn't be It should be like autonomous.

It should be just like how the block, the predictability and the issuance is.

And what happened was... you know, these self-described white hats, minted 4,000 unbacked LBTC via like a software bug, right? In Elements, which is kind of the underlying technology.

It's like derived from Bitcoin Core and then redeemed them through a normal peg out and pulled 4,000 real BTC from Liquid's Federation wallet.

And it's interesting, they called themselves White Hats because they ended up returning Bitcoin, but they kept... 15%, like 600 BTC, so around like $50 million, they actually kept for themselves.

So I think maybe it's fair to call them like light gray hats or something like that.

And I'm hoping because- In terms of grant, uh, organizations like the Human Rights Foundation and OpenSats are really the only two organizations that we qualify for funding from, unless there's one or more that I don't know about.

There are-- there's like Brink and some other funding orgs, but they generally only focus on, uh, funding people that work on Bitcoin Core.

So OpenSats and HRF are kind of the only game in town for Seed Signer.

HRF, I feel like, has been very generous to us over time.

And then he's talking about how another implementation, again, it's just you're adding more variables, adding more complexity.

What if the implementation resolves of a function slightly different than Bitcoin Core and then now you've got a chain split? And there's so much good stuff in here, so much we can learn from Bitcoin history.

So one of the takeaways is every feature has a cost, guys.

It's increased amounts of code, increased amounts of states, increased amount of interactions, increased amount of text testing, increased amount of review needed, and ultimately an increasing amount of ways that you could be wrong.

Let's just make it safe.

And so what they write is they say one problem is infrastructure fragmentation.

Well, I mean, and I'll get into this in a second, everybody's poured their blood, sweat, and tears into Bitcoin Core, into the Bitcoin protocol itself.

And Satoshi's writing, you shouldn't have multiple implementations.

So these kinds of things are, you know, the, this is very important to be exceptionally conservative.

Um, I don't remember who said this, but somebody said that Bitcoin core, uh, engineering is more like engineering a rocket ship than it is writing, you know, web software.

You, you're basically sh- sending things off into space, and if it has a bug, you, you're not gonna have a real-time response to that bug because it's out in space.

It's out in thousands of nodes all over the world, and you just can't respond to it quickly.

I mean, we have AI now, and it's actually enabled a lot more people to work on these things that didn't have the deep experience in cryptography or, you know, game theory or whatever, because the LLMs are actually pretty good at that stuff and can give you a lot of context and a lot of knowledge very quickly.

So I don't think we're in danger of that.

I also don't think, you know, just because there's sort of, you know, a half dozen very well-known names in Bitcoin Core development, that that's like the entirety of the people in the world that know how Bitcoin Core works.

There's hundreds to thousands of people, or maybe even more, uh, across lots of different companies that have worked on this stuff.