Is Bitcoin Mining Centralized? With Peter Todd

Hey, welcome back to the mining pod on today's show. We are joined by Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd. We recorded this conversation down at Bitcoin Plus Plus last week in Austin, Texas along with my co-host Charlie Spears. We basically went through mining pool centralization and should Bitcoin miners be concerned that a lot of hash ray is now flowing to AMP pool and Foundry mostly AMP pool by looking at a lot of these uh different disbursements to Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin mining holding addresses. So we went through that with Peter Todd. Thank you to him for joining the show and thank you to Bitcoin Plus Plus for opening up the venue for us to record. We have a little more content from Bitcoin Plus Plus coming up as well, including some stuff that's already live on our Twitter account. Ok. Before we get into the show, we want to thank our sponsors, Clean Spark America's Bitcoin Miner and Forman Mining Master, your Mining. Thank you to both these sponsors for making the show possible and you'll hear more from them in a little bit. Ok? Before we get into the show, we also want to push the Block Space Podcast Network where we have two other podcasts are growing pretty quickly. The Beat The Gort Show, which is conversations with cryptos, brightest lights on all things Bitcoin. So we're going through first principles about, you know, do we need another Blockchain? And why does this am M work or how does this marketplace work? And then Bitcoin season two with my co-host on the mining pod, Charlie Spears where he talks with all the new actors and faces within Bitcoin season two, from layer twos to op codes to ordinals and more, if you're into more of the technical discussions, definitely go check out Bitcoin season two. You can find all this content and more on blocks space dot media. OK. Thank you for listening to this show. Let's jump into it. 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Are you a retail or institutional investor interested in Bitcoin mining companies? The minor mag brings you free data and analysis from all major NASDAQ listed Bitcoin mining operations to know who stands out, check out visualize metrics and data dependent stories at the Miner mag.com Carminho. Uh and he, he led a team to do that uh election fraud thing down there. He led the team to do the election fraud. Yeah, exactly. That's, that was what I, yeah, well, actually I didn't get the full story but I, I'll, I'll probably interview him on III, I mean, we, we kind of laugh about it but the, the story there, you can almost twist it, say open time stamps did election fraud because what actually happened there was the ruling government that got kicked out of power. I mean, you know, and I could be getting this somewhere wrong but I'll, I'll give you the simple version of it. The ruling government that got kicked out of power did deliberate election fraud and then tried to go prove it to get the entire election thrown out. So had they succeeded? Yes. What? Yes, yes. So like, you know, they were losing right? And they wanted seat. So he had another chance at a new election. They said, no, look, we, we were fraudulent with the last election Well, it's, well, I mean, the idea there is, well, it isn't necessarily us that committed election fraud, the election has to be thrown out and had they succeeded in doing more of it rather than just a one small area. It would have been open time stamps helping prove to prove to the world. Yeah, there's probably election fraud going on here. We really should redo the election like the ruling party conveniently wants. But in this case, it was opposite because we could actually prove other than that one area there was in election f that's what Carin said. He was like, well, it got really political and he's like, I got, I have to hand here a bit but maybe that's what he was referring to is that, that's where it gets really, yeah, it's, it's a complex story and it's, you know, it may not necessarily make people happy. So, did you play, did you play much of a role in helping him design and talk through how to do that? They came to me like the last minute saying, hey, we're going to do this thing. Uh We want to go look at the design and like, tell us it's OK. And uh maybe, you know, make sure the servers stamp and you know, do one or two other small modifications. Like I had very, I compared to the work they did, I had a very small role. And now, so is this one of I mean, there's many people who have used open time stamps for a lot of things, you know, you look at this playing a major role in the Guatemalan elections. What's your kind of reflection on this being used at the scale? Well, I, I just push back a bit because II I always want to point out, I mean, open time stamps was just one of many things, you know, proving the validity of those elections. Like it's, you know, lists like it's on a list and it's on the list. It's probably like number item, number 50 right now. Item number 50 is still important. But, you know, it's not like it was the only, it was a thing that saved Guatemalan elections. It was a lot of stuff that saved it, but certainly in terms of impact, it's still one of the more interesting thing that has ever happened with open time stamps. Um And, you know, it was quite interesting actually being there in person at the, the elections headquarters. So you went down. Yeah, I was there in person. In fact, I was an official government contractor with a badge. Yeah, I was registered in their system and everything. It was great. And, you know, and then of course, I got access to the backstage stuff that Carlino actually couldn't. But, yeah, you know, at the beginning of it, it's like they have this kind of ceremony where they reset the database for the polling results, you know, and to be clear, it's interim polling results. So there's like two, there's two separate systems here but the ones that get results quickly, it's computerized, they go reset the database and sign their little form saying we've all done it, we've all witnessed it, then they scanned it in and time stamped it and like they didn't tell us they were going to do that and right in front of live TV. And, you know, with all the major politicians there, they're time stamping something and then of course they're waiting for confirmation and I think somehow someone kind of clued them in. It's like, you know, it might take a while. You might want to move on to the next step of the ceremony. Like no one's interested in watching you wait there for 10 minutes. Yeah. Well, the, the irony, the irony being that if there's, you know, hundreds of people there, government officials and it's streamed on television of all things, you need time stamp. That's probably the lowest on the, like I say, this is why in general it's like item number 50 you know, there are so many eyes on this stuff in so many different ways but you add them all up and together, they make something secure. So, you know, every part's important, it's just individually, they're not that important. It is kind of, yeah, it's, it's funny because I thought because, because Carlini was saying, well, it's like 25,000 polling booths and they've got to scan all these documents. But I guess, you know, and my immediate thought was, oh man, that's a lot of J PGS to put on Bitcoin. But no, you hash it, you produce a tree, tree, merkel trees, in fact. So another thing I did a few years back was I quote unquote, time stamped the internet. Now, of course, what I really mean is what does that mean? I download the metadata for internet archive, put that all together and then time stamped, all of that. But in total, that was like a bit over like half a billion individual hashes that were all assembled into one giant merkel tree and then just for kind of shits and grins, we then used a single individual Bitcoin transaction to actually time stamp all this. But certainly, you know, had I written the software slightly differently, it could have easily, just put into normal open time stamps queue and it would have ended up in a Merkel tree and just like everything else like Merkle Trees, solve everything. Uh 2017, I think it's open time stamps in the current iteration. Um It's 2016 and then I actually started the project in like 2012. Yeah. Yeah. There was a functional open time stamps running in like 2012, 2013. Um, probably 2013. I think I didn't know I was that old before we get too deep into it. Let's do uh the quick classic bio. So welcome back to the Mining Pot. We're at Bitcoin Plus Plus and Austin Tech. We're joined today by Bitcoin core contributor, Peter Todd also have open time stamps, but I'll let you do your full bio. And then we're going to talk about Bitcoin mining centralization Matt Caro's article the other day and mel Mev, your take on it. You know, me, me, it's such a cute name. It is kind of cute. I want me. Why did he name something so insidious, so cute. He didn't, well, he, he tried to go change Mev to something like that wasn't so unclear, but then he accidentally made it cute classic market, you know, the greatest murder, the word, the greatest travesty is that we have yet another acronym that we have to remember and argue over actually what it means. So, yeah, but I'll give it to you for the bias and this is a Bitcoin Mining podcast and miners don't know anything about Bitcoin Tech. It's just, it's still true. It's still true. Yeah, I'm Peter Todd. I've worked on Bitcoin Core enough that Craig Great sued me. It's the greatest bio ever. It's a low bar and, you know, for miners at least, um, lately I've been working on something called Leper relay which relays more transactions in Bitcoin core. Not a lot more because Bitcoin Core actually relays for a bit. But, you know, I've done a bit of work on, like basically telling Bitcoin core, like you can't do Luke Junior stuff. It's not gonna work and not shots. Yeah. And the other part of that is like I was working on something called replaced by fee rate which try solve transaction pinning. I wanted to get into RBF. But I feel like that might be. Well, I won the full RBF. So you did win it. I follow along all last year. It was great. I do think it might be a little much for this show. The only way I haven't won it is that Bitcoin core hasn't enabled it by default, but it's like 99 plus percent of miners enable it. I've won it. No, it's, what was the last group that Foundry said the other day? Not too long ago. All Foundry was not last, I think they were second last. I think it was like via BT C maybe because there was a lot of ordinal stuff right where they did it for. I mean, basically, currently, if you don't rent full RBF, you lose thousands of dollars per block. Like here, you'd be crazy and a few of them learn that lesson. So, ok, let's talk about Matt Crow's piece. So we covered on the news round up and for, for listeners, you go back to that or listen in the next 30 seconds. Uh Essentially Mallo went on Marty Ben's podcast also here in Austin, Texas and they talked about the current landscape for Bitcoin mining pools, how all these Bitcoin miners seem to be using an pool's block template. Uh Matt Creo is not super happy about this. He's calling for uh STR B two to be implemented by all these Bitcoin miners and he, he lowered his very bullish take on Bitcoin mining saying not 5% anymore, but it's going to be less than 5% chance of Bitcoin succeeding. So he's calling for like action very quickly. And that's why we want to talk to you about it. You know, he should give me homework because I actually, I don't think I've actually read that. That's your spicy takes are more in a pretty good idea of what, what do you say anyway. So, but first of all, I'm not clear that thing with Aunt Pool is actually correct because I was following full RBF adoption very closely and it did happen in stages. It was like one pool does it then clearly no other pool like, you know, no, it's not, you know, two pools doing it at once and then, you know, yet another pool doesn't so on. However, what that could have happened is maybe they all just adopted like can pools templates, right? Like III I don't actually know. What do you, what would that look like on the back end? Like assuming if we imagine that a significant amount of different pools, we're using the same block template producer, what's what what is assuming we're talking to like a, a guy who plugs in a six all day. Um, well, so we were talking to that guy from his point of view, not, not much changes directly. Um, we not even notice because he's not running stratum V two. But I, I mean, I like the thing with it is interesting question is, let's assume for the sake of argument that this has actually happened. Why are mining pools doing this? Like, what's the actual advantage? And there, there's a lot of scenarios, I mean, one could be, you know, maybe some spook is just paying them to do this. It's like, you know, we'll pay another 1% on top of your reward. If only you do this thing for reasons, we're not going to tell you. But yeah, it's not really clear and win, you know, so far I haven't seen any clear statements by mining pools that they're not doing this like, or that they are like, it seems kind of something where people aren't talking about it much. So it's kind of hard to know, you know, in the tech wise, like the way this could happen is something as simple as they just have a, you know, a URL somewhere and just redirect it with like some query path to say, hey, you know, the hash is actually coming from here, not here, make sure the payouts go to the right place. Of course, it gets to the custody thing of, well, seems a lot of people are using the same custodian for these payouts and it's not clear what that means or why. Yeah. So for listeners also, we, we did talk about this as well, so I think it was XXB one something. Wow. Very good memorization of Twitter handle. Uh He backtracked a lot of the payouts for pools and found that there's one entity behind a lot of an entity called Cobo, the co-founder Kobo, clear one entity behind where the payouts are going. Not the same thing, the same one entity behind the pools. Definitely, definitely. So the flows are going to one entity, Cobo as either a custodian or exchange. It's unclear like where the MS are, yeah, where they're liquidating if they're liquidating. But the co-founder of that has a relationship with ant pool. Uh So there's, there's also that there, what do you take on like the current landscape? Pool centralization though? Like because Matt was very clear and I don't know if it was like a scare tactic thing being like, hey, like we really want to get miners attention or if it is like, really that bad. A lot of the miners I talked to were like, I think a lot of it, it's hard to know what's going on there and what that means. And you know, like I can give a hypothetical, I mean, let's imagine that this is a and pool. Well, what happens if they do something bad with this, you really then give miners, you know, I really, we say hasher is a choice. Do you want to continue pointing your hash rates at a pool or do you point it somewhere else? And we do have other places to point it to that are probably independent. I mean, I highly doubt Ocean is part of this but you know, that could be an ugly process and that could involve people losing a bunch of money initially or getting delayed payouts for a while. I mean, you know, one explanation for why all this is happening could easily be something as boring as yeah, there's one service that Apple started using and it was really good at turning incoming Bitcoin into cash which miners need and who knows, maybe that's really all this to it like much other people thought, well, we'll use them too. It's hard to know in the competitive world of Bitcoin mining. 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Well, I mean, the thing that solves this the best has always been miners being able to point their hash rate at other pools and still make money like if something goes wrong, I mean, one of the issues with this is it's hard, you know, it's so Stratman V two is an Stratum V two doesn't necessarily prevent censorship because their hash rate can be rejected. And I think that's actually a hard requirement because with stratum V two, you could be submitting a block template. That's stupid. And for instance, rejecting a bunch of inscriptions, they're gonna make everyone money like like it or not, that's a valid reason to go and reject a block template. The more important thing is can miners switch their hash rates somewhere else and still stay in business. And unfortunately, things like Ocean aren't so great for that because Ocean has weird ideological stuff that doesn't make them as much money. Can you expound on that? Just for an aside? Yeah. Well, Ocean is not mining all the transactions that are paying fees for ideological reasons because they don't like Jay pigs in the Blockchain. It's a good reason. Well, you know, it's a reason that's gonna make you less money. So like it or not, you're gonna earn more money in the long run. All things being equal by going to a pool that does mine those transactions for much. The same reason as now that full RBF has non will free fee difference. You'd be crazy not to turn it on. And in this case, basically all the pools turn it on. Um One of the exceptions would actually be the small percentage of hash power going to ocean with the Bitcoin core template, which is turned off because core is turned off by default. What do you think? And I'm gonna say in the ocean thing for a second and maybe we'll go back to Matt Carlo's piece. But what do you think about Bitcoin core contributors having jobs and industry where their revenue incentivized or money incentivized as opposed to being like independent, unpaid, et cetera. Well, unpaid is out of it because we like the eating. People do like to eat. I mean, I don't, I, yeah, I think it's fair to say I don't get paid for any bit core contributions right now, which is why if you look at the G repo, I haven't made any for years now. You could argue I'm contributing in ways such as like replace my fee rate, but that's not merge code. That's actually in Bitcoin core, that's more like Bitcoin contribution. OK? The thing I'm hinting at there is like Luke Dasher is now the CEO of a mining pool, ironically, a mining pool that's not maximizing income. And, you know, I, I think you certainly need people with that kind of experience. You know, it's, it would be very weird if no Bitcoin core contributor actually ran any miners. Like you, you know, currently, like getting into true mining where you create your own block templates. It's not obvious how to do it. Like, I don't currently have any Bitcoin hashers. I should though just to be able to say like I've actually looked at this whole thing. Yeah, we can, we can help you out. Well, I mean, if you got something that it'll consume about 1000 watts and you'll plug it into a normal outlet because I, I don't have any good place to plug this stuff in which is why I'm not running it right now. Like I used to have butterfly lab stuff but, you know, back in the day, butterfly labs would use like say 405 100 watts. So you could easily run off an outlet where it's like annoying your landlord. Uh We have future bits now. They're kind of fun. Have you seen, you've seen future bits? I'm assuming John Stephanopoulos. This Yeah, it's like you plug and play device that's on your desktop or sit on your desk and you plug it in and you solo mine a block is the idea probably won't ever make money. But if you mind solo block. That would be pretty lottery money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a shame that, like, not, not many of us are, say mining on test net. You know, like I should at least have done that in the past. There are some is, uh, well, I mean, you know, the bigger picture there is this idea that you'll somehow make test net useless for anything other than testing. I don't think the proposals floating around Bitcoin core are anywhere close to doing that. I mean, for one thing, they're still hanging on to this idea that you keep the same coin issue in schedule as Bitcoin and somehow it will still be worthless. Like, like it or not, people find excuses even if you claim you're gonna reset it because if you reset it, like every time you do that, it's a huge pain in the ass. I mean, I personally run a, you know, test DNS seed and I don't know, I'm gonna bother turning into test Net four or something like screw that. Like there's more important things to worry about. I, I think they would be much better off just taking test net as it is and hard forking it to just remove the coin issuance to at least make that not a problem. But you still have the issue that test net block space is potentially valuable in a test net for block space. Some scammers probably still going to use it for something. I mean, that was one of the points if I, because I did kind of stumble my way through some of the Bitcoin mailing list discussion on this of saying, well, like we could just reset test net to V four. But what does that solve that? Just, yeah, and it doesn't solve the. And also because you've done this, you've kind of given marketing to certain types of these scammy projects. I mean, much the same way as let's say, like, you know, the reaction we got to ordinal's inscriptions that gave them all the marketing they needed. If Bitcoin had done nothing other than just shut the fuck up and not interact with them. I don't think ordinal and descriptions would be the thing it is. Do you, I mean, you know, you, you time stamping things, you're posting data to Bitcoin, not quite open time stamps. Yes. Technically the open timestamps, calendars put some data in the Bitcoin chain, but you know, there's like four of them and each of them only has to put 32 bytes in one return no matter how much is used. So the amounts is minimal. The other thing too is like all open time stamps doesn't do this right now. Um without changing the client side, like without changing the proof format, it can do clever tricks to embed hashes in ordinary transactions in a way where the hash isn't actually in the transaction, right? Because time stamping is not about putting something in the chain. It's about making the chain commit to data and commits is a mathematical term that's basically hashing but not quite well, commitments can be done through hashes. So the data itself is not actually anywhere near there. Not to mention, of course, open timestamp itself behind the hood. You know, it's got Merkel trees and Merkel trees and Merkel trees. So the your data, when you time stamp, it comes nowhere near an open timestamp server, let alone a Blockchain. So I know you like you're not a fan really of putting J pgs on Bitcoin. I I mean, I'm agnostic about that. Like, do you feel any, I think we have to accept, it's going to be feasible and there's not much we can do about it. Like, unless we're willing to, that's stupid. I mean, like my fork lever relay deliberately expands the filters slightly in the one like the one notable way where they're kind of paternalistic, which is the limit. Um You know, having this 80 byte return limit thing is just laughable when people are in standard transactions putting like 100 K JP. So I I submit a poll request to concord to remove the limit and that got rejected for silly reasons. So that's the one thing lever relay really does you, well, a bunch of people rejected me but um I forget who actually closed it, but it might be a ch but isn't the actual consensus maximum for Oper return. Is it one megabyte? Well, it is one mega well, technically slightly less than one megabyte because it is not in witness space. Right? So it's in the original because it's in a, it's in a script pub, not a, not a witness. So, um and I got to point out like Oper turn is a very expensive way to put data in the Bitcoin Blockchain. Like nobody actually uses it other than a few other than a few niche things, you know, ruins now. Well, I mean, like I say, other than a few relatively niche things, open timestamps is an example. And the reason why it does that is because it makes the open times sense proof smaller because it doesn't have to go through the Coinbase to prove it. One of the things Casey water, our come up with the ruins. He's joked about as well. Are we gonna, you know, we've seen people make a, a JPEG close to four megabytes. Um His joke is where are we going to see the first one megabyte ruins transaction? Hey, someone can do it if they want to lever relay will help. So you lever relay, relay transact oper returns. Yeah. Leper relay is Bitcoin core um minus the oper return limits. Um So there's no limit on the size of data and O return and there's also no limit on how many you can put in transaction. And then it has code that makes sure it's peered with other relay instances. So that advertises service bit, the Liber relay, service bit and make sure you're connected to at least four of those peers. It also advertises the full RBF service bit because I did all that same thing with full RBF nodes and Liber relay also of course, has full RBF enabled by default. And then the final thing it does, which I think is the one thing it's kind of technically interesting is it does replace by fee rate which is unrelated to any of these discussions. But basically means rather than just replacing a transaction, if it pays more in total fees can also replace transaction if it pays more in fee rate, which happens to go solve transaction pinning attacks which affects lightning. Now, I don't think the ordinals people care about any of that, but I was going to go do li relay. Someone paid me to figure, well, screw that. I'm gonna do this other thing I want and experiment with it need Asic help check out bit of mine one a bit mean certified repair shops located in Washington State with satellite offices in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas PSU us hash boards, immersion setups in and out of warranty repair. Famine. Has you covered? Want to train your technicians, bring Vine to your site for hands on training in the art of Asic repair. Complete with Bitman AM TC Certification. Contact Vine today at Dan at VM asic.com again. That's Dan at VM asic.com. When you think of Asic Repair, think vitamine. Let's go to MEV. We kind of dance around a little bit with ordinals and fee rate, stuff like that. What did you think about Matt's piece? Assuming you read it? I think I read the MEV thing because he had, he had two things recently. Yeah, I think I read MBV. Or, as he would say, me, me, we should make an ordinal collection called Evil and it'd be like little plushies Evil. I'll give you one, we'll give you an honorary and they only count if they're submitted out of band. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can only buy them by transferring an on chain transaction that was submitted at a band. It has to have two actually. No, it has to have not just like two oper tunes in it, but also a script hub key that doesn't fit the standard format which leave a relay will not relay and you create a, you know, max max transaction. You're listening to this, please help us out. I think marathon said they're not going to do that. So. Ok, well, that's lame. What did you? It's OK. They're not sponsoring podcast. So, yeah, maybe one day. Ok, so tell us a little bit what you thought about that blog post because we are of the opposite opinion of what he came to. But he's also, you know, pretty smart. I, I forget off the top of the head, what his conclusion was. But I know what my conclusion is over Mev, which is, it's a very dangerous thing and we should design protocols and standards and so on that the opportunities for MEV are as limited as possible. Leper relay is one of those things, you know, one of the reasons why I made Liber relay is I want to say, hey, you know, Bitcoin core, if you try to go filter stuff, it's completely useless because filtering invites a form of Mev where people just broadcast stuff out of band. Well, if they can run Liber relay that cuts down on that particular type of Mev, can you walk that out a little bit more for? I mean, let's suppose l I mean, for Oper return period, let's suppose you want an Oper return that's really big without Libba relay, your options are to go to a minor and probably pay them some extra to convince them to go mine. Your weird opportunity thing with Liber relay. You can just download copy of Liber relay and run it. I mean, technically compile a copy of Liber relay and run it lever relay will figure out how to peer to other Liber Relay people. And there are Liber relay nodes that are connected to have two pool. So I hear maybe it's Souther Pools as well. Um I think May, yeah. May said, yeah, there were two. Yeah. II, I like I haven't actually followed on chain. But they, they told me they did. So. Yeah, M or F two pool, they'll happily manage. And now you are paying a fee with a marketplace rather than some special deal. Any miner who wants to do this could just run Liba relay. And the moment off return becomes notable in terms of fee revenue. They will just like with full RBF, they all ran for RBF. The moment it became notable. OK. That makes sense. So Matt's piece, one of the conclusions was that he didn't think that Mev mattered as much as people were letting it on to be and it came down to, I think that's, I don't think he's wrong there, but I think, you know, Mev doesn't matter as much as people are worried about because we're pretty good at engineering it away. And that was a conclusion here. I don't know if you went to the A panel. It was, it was a covenant panel but, and they talked about Mev and how I'll give you an interesting example actually, which is so all this, all these full RBF transactions or full RBF replacements that are happening are actually an example of what would have been Mev, because you've got these, you know, inscription ordinals, whatever guys doing these weird bidding systems were long story short. If your bid wasn't market priced, basically, I can replace your bid with my own transaction. Get closer to, you know, closer to market value. But how do I do that? Why I pay a higher fee? And as long as there are two people optimizing this, they will wind up paying pretty much all the value in excess of wood. The fee should be to the miners because they compete with each other. So full RBF actually prevents that type of MEV. But what we're seeing right now is that what is a mark? What is a market inefficiency turns into like real revenue to miners in certain, in certain types of MEV? That happens to be a nice example where that works other types. It doesn't work. Um You know, like one example of MEV which fortunately not too um not too important is just making really big transactions because due to how the mental code works, it isn't really feasible to just allow like near full block size transactions to be broadcast because it screws with how well I mean it, it screws with a few things, but one of them is like it screws with the block packing algorithm. So without doing better block packing algorithm, you're not going to make as much money generally if you increase the maximum transaction limit. So that's why the the the core standard relay size is what 300 kilobytes, 404 100,000 weight units, which is basically 1/10 of a block. And like a way to think about this is if you do the really dumb packing of transactions into a block where you just go highest for your rate to lowest the amounts that you could be incorrect compared to a much more clever packing algorithm is related to the size of the biggest possible transaction. So basically the whole like a kind of way to describe it, sort of the hole you could leave. And how many fees you could get is basically that and if it's 1/10 that's the numbers I think were cut to be like 5% and 5% is, who cares? Um This may be the dumbest thing. Maybe everybody else has come up with ideas but like leave it relay functions almost to ameliorate the existing core relay. Uh That's kind of, that's kind of true. But the catch with that statement is contrary to what Luke Junior would go tell you core actually doesn't filter very much. Yeah. Yeah, like the, the filters core has nearly all of them are for very solid arguable technical reasons that there isn't a good reason to change that. Um You know, an example is like core will not relay transactions with non-standard version numbers. Well, what are non-standard version numbers? That's actually, you know, that's really the space we leave for future upgrades to Bitcoin. So if you're a minor and aren't paying attention to your setup and you allow non-standard version numbers and you could easily wind up mining in valid blocks on the next software. Well, I think one of our design requirements is we want people to be able to run miners without looking at them and without touching them for years. Like I know there are a small number of miners who still run P Two Pool with ancient ancient setups dating back to when PP two pool still worked. Occasionally, they find blocks and those blocks are valid even though they're like kind of two soft forks behind or something because of the standard rules, they only allow in what's valid. And you know, those guys don't make as much money as they could, but their systems still work and don't create invalid blocks. And that's important. The other thing too is like when it comes to things like version numbers, the actual commercial demand for doing non standard version numbers is so small, it doesn't really matter. You told me that you think there's maybe a few dozen people running Libre and that alone is able to get, you know, sufficient transaction inclusion right now. It seems um what do you, what do you, is there like a threshold here? Like how many people, how many people would you like to see running lever relay? Uh Well, I mean, prefer like enough that, you know, replaced by fee rate goes and works and maybe gets adopted by Bitcoin core, but not enough, they have to start answering support requests like lever relay is a political project. You know, it's not like Bitcoin Knots and I want everyone to go run it. It's like, oh man, if people start actually using this for a lot, I'm in trouble because I might have to start maintaining it properly. Currently, it doesn't even have a read me. Like the, the difference is, doesn't or leave a relay. I haven't actually bothered to make a read me. All it is is just a branch on my github and the branch is signed by the way, just be clear, you can check the PHP signature. So, you know, it's coming from me, but like there's really not much to it. I don't have binaries or anything and it's just the bare minimum necessary to, to kind of make the point now with replaced by fee rates. I think it would be very interesting if some miners adopted Lipa relay. So you could actually see replaced by fee rate work. And you know, that would get us on a path where probably Bitcoin Core would adopt it too eventually. But the bare minimum necessary to do that is really just convince marathon or Luxor or whoever else, please just run like that little bit of code. I'll, I can help you if you want. Ok, we're coming up on the end here. What are some things you'd like to see miners start to do proactively. And again, I'm going back to that Matt Carlo piece where he was like imploring people to look at SV two. He's imploring miners to care more about block template construction, stra stratum V two is interesting. Um I'm not maybe as excited about it as some people are, but we are much better if it exists since at least some people start using it. And also people start using it in a way where like we figure out how economically viable certain parts of it are. Um you know, and a good example of this is like, you know, one answer could be to tell people, oh, you know, just go mine on ocean. But the fact is variants cost money like, like it or not, there are good reasons to win on big pools if you have big operations, which have big bills. So there's a reason why miners do what they do. And I would like to see for instance, like a new version of P two Pool out that fixes issues P two pool had. And there are people who have very interesting ideas about this and they can probably, you know, actually do this, but it doesn't necessarily, it's like something like your average guy with hashing power has to worry about directly unless they wanna, you know, do some donations and fund some development effort. But honestly, I'd say like the most concrete thing they could possibly do is probably just point some of their hash power at one of these smaller pools just to make sure that if something goes wrong, they know how to point all their hash power at it. Gotcha. Ok. What about Hopcat OP C TV? Anything else? There was a big conversation topic here, like everything. Just this is a conference full of developers. Of course codes will be big conversation, developers, love codes. And I sent a text. I just gave a talk in my op expire proposal to like three people. Yeah. Uh it's, it's thoroughly developer conference. I sent in a message to a, like a deep minor chat. I mean, yesterday I was like, does anyone know about Op Catt? And what do you think? I got one text back because I don't think anyone else knew what OP Catt was and there was a guy big OG minor and he goes, I don't care about occa I don't want to hear about it until bip nine happens and that's all that happened. What do you think about minors in the next upgrade with like a speedy trial or an op code or something like that? Where did they place into this ecosystem? I mean, for starters, we have to come up with an upgrade that's reasonable. And I'd say the, the upgrade that makes the most sense um to do in the near term is probably actually the like consensus clean up stuff because there's a whole bunch of stuff we have around Bitcoin, you know, Bitcoin protocol. That's kind of screwy. Um One good example being, well, what is one of the reasons why we have lock filters or, you know, um, mental filters. Well, it's because version zero scripting has a lot of issues with it that can turn in straight up do os tacks. You know, you can construct blocks which will take minutes to validate. And if a minor manages to do this most, for most miners, they're screwed because, you know, they're, they're probably probably get over and out equally for certain miners who are really big. They could also screw other miners and we're much better off if these problems just don't exist. Um, there's also the time warp attack which really should be fixed, like it's kind of a hypothetical attack but it's not implausible, it gets attacked and it would just screw up Bitcoin in so many ways. It's far better, just fix it. I didn't know there was a solution to the time warp attack. You know, I could not explain the time warp attack is what it really comes down. It's like an off by one air in how difficulty is calculated. And because of this, er, basically you can drive like, yeah, you can basically, like, drive difficulty down and then create far more blocks than you should be able to create and it screws up everything. I mean, you can create, you can get into a place where Bitcoin is very insecure. It's, it's a mess and apparently it can be done. It can be fixed with soft fork that like soft forks out the specific way. That you drive difficulty down off the top of my head. I could tell you how the hell that works. It's, it's one of these attacks, which is like, alright, whoever figured this out is pretty smart. It was probably Greg Maxwell or something. But, you know, it's, it's an ugly attack. You might as well go fix it and once you fix it, well, you just don't have to worry about the silliness and it's just one less thing to, you know, and this is why I'd say like these kinds of fixes in theory, they should be pretty uncontroversial fixes like version zero scripting. We're, we're confident we don't need to have all these edge cases that will, that can create D OS attacks like it's OK to fix this stuff. So there's some basic core clean up that you think would make very, be very low lift comparatively to, to like it's low risk precisely because it's all reducing risk. And hopefully it would be uncontroversial now knowingly, like, you know, the time warp tax is an example. Well, there is some crazy proposals. People have had to leverage the time warp attack to do certain other things. But honestly, I think like some of those proposals, it's, you know, it's kind of like, it's like if, you know, you noticed your toaster happen to be able to go and turn your furnace on and off and like when your furnace turns on and off that also like, controls the temperature of your fridge. You know, and if your fridge has behind a glass wall, you know, it might be easier to use this convoluted scheme to go make sure your ice cream doesn't melt like it. You know, that makes total sense. Right. Like you could do this other thing by just breaking down the glass wall and rebuilding it later to go fix the temperature sensor in your fridge. But, you know, if you really don't want to break the glass wall, well, why don't we just keep on doing the toaster furnace? Like whatever thing sounds like you just described the Bitcoin core consensus process and how we even describe some of the problems or the discussions on the upgrade. People will get hung up on the particular brand of the first. Well, fortune. In this case, I think I'm I'm describing crazy people who don't have that much influence on Bitcoin developments. But I can guarantee you like if someone actually pros a concrete soft fork, fixed time warp, some of these are, people are gonna come out of the woodwork and complain that their pet projects are getting eliminated. It's like, dude, your stuff is so convoluted. No one would ever actually want to implement that nuts. Do something simpler. OK. As we wrap up last question for you, do you think we get something in the next two years for an op code for an op code or a soft work? I should say um for an op code, I think. No, for a soft work maybe. Um but I would, I would not bet in favor of this happening within two years. I think it would be a bit longer than that. I mean check to verify which was very boring and controversial. It was a four year project and Bitcoin was a lot smaller then. Yeah, burn out from that one. Alright, Peter Todd. Thank you so much for joining the mining. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.