Gregory Maxwell

And still, a lot of people loved it just because the right people pushed for it.

And Paul Stark actually said the right way to activate a soft fork is you need the approval of Greg Maxwell and then you need Peter Werler to implement it and then just post it on the mailing list and then say, I

don't want to have anything to do with the activation.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to do this, but here's the code.

That had a 100% hit rate and everything else had a 100% miss rate.

So we should try that.

We should try to get something that has Greg Maxwell's approval and then we should get Peter Wöller to implement

it.

So let's start with bullet proofs and confidential transactions.

This is joint work with my student, Benedict Bunz, as well as our collaborators, Jonathan Boodle, Andrew Palestra, Peter Woolley, and Greg Maxwell.

Andrew, Peter, and Greg are in a company called Blockstream, and they're actually also some of the core Bitcoin developers.

Okay, so this is work that appeared earlier this year.

[laughs] That's, you have to do it.

Um, in 2014, Greg Maxwell co-found Blockstreams.

Um, and this is pre-history, but it's gonna come up later.

So in April of 2015, uh, Gavin gives control of the Bitcoin Core SourceForge and GitHub repositories to, uh, Vladimir-

June, July, August, September.

Yeah, so in September 12th, 2015, we have Scaling Bitcoin 2015: Phase One, which was a conference in Mo- Montreal, Canada, and it's sort of like an attempt to resolve the conflict.

So in attendance is Gavin Andresen, uh, big blocker par excellence, and, uh, entering our narrative is, uh, Greg Maxwell on the small block, blocker side.

I learned that the big blockers called Greg Maxwell, uh, One Meg Greg, and he was, like, the number one enemy of the big blockers.

Like we use majorities to like make decisions.

And then I think like maybe the more sort of early, Adam Back and some other guys like Greg Maxwell kind of, you know, theorize this other route, which is that, uh bitcoin should allow you as the minority like even the minority of one to like not be disenfranchised by the majority so like even if some 99 of people decided that like you and your relationship with bitcoin like shouldn't exist like you couldn't have that relationship dissolved so it's a question is like who dissolves that relationship between you and the protocol and i think the answer should be like it should be no one like that that would be ideal uh obviously quantum is problematic because now you you basically have to make inferences about this relationship right like this whole thing about satoshi's coins it's kind of based on the idea that satoshi like isn't actively making a choice to hold his keys a certain way right now which you don't know and so it's like the ideal is like you have a bond with the protocol that can't be changed other than by anyone other than you and so the problem with upgrading and making changes to like bitcoin software is that Well, now you have a mechanism where that bond is sort of shipped, shipped away.

Or there's some kind of elaborate mechanism for subverting it.

So I prefer the one where, you know, really you want no one.