A new person was added to the list of what are called Bitcoin Core maintainers.
Each person kind of has, like, a special domain that they focus on, and so the most recent addition focuses on something called the Bitcoin kernel and the consensus code, which is, I think, one of the most interesting things about this.
At the heart of a lot of this d- discussion, and I think a lot of existential questioning in Bitcoin is, is Bitcoin Core, which is a client, should Bitcoin Core be the only dominant client?
And there's a lot of people who disagree. I have publicly said I want different clients which run Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core is a bunch of code, it's a client, and it's a whole thing.
It's got libraries, it's got a wallet component, it's got all these things to it.
But what is actually absolutely essential for it to remain in consensus with the other nodes on Bitcoin is this concept of it has to be consensus compatible.
So it has to validate the same blocks as all the other nodes, and it's got to have the same opinion about what is Bitcoin.
And it's much harder said than done because it's actually, when you write all this code and y- and you, and you pull it all, it's actually not clear sometimes what is a peculiarity of the actual client, Bitcoin Core, and what is actual, actual Bitcoin consensus.
This is a, a project to define what even is Bitcoin consensus and separate it so that you can take these rules and this code and build a different client with it.
A mysterious new person was just added to the elite six people who control Bitcoin. Yeah, you heard that right. There's a conspiracy, and only a few people control the fate of a $2 trillion network.
This is inside the rabbit hole of how Bitcoin code is governed. [upbeat music] Charlie, is that intro true?
No, the intro is total bullsh- I'm only saying that because, uh, it hooks people in, ev- you know, especially Bitcoin critics, and it's been, like, the subject of Bitcoin criticism over the past year.
We've done endless conversation about the filter debates and Bitcoin Core, yada yada. We won't get into, get into it.
But some news happened over the past week, Colin, where, uh, a new person whom most people who aren't in Bitcoin development don't know, a new person was added to the list of what are called Bitcoin Core maintainers.
Now, inside of explaining what this is, uh, is a little bit of h- history lesson. It's a little bit of time explaining how GitHub works and also kind of talking about the social layer of, like, Bitcoin code.
And then we can sit back and be like, "Okay, so who's this new guy?"
Um, if you're listening to this, uh, you can already go and read, uh, a, a modest profile that we published yesterday, on Friday, about the new Bitcoin Core maintainer, but we'll get into that in a second.
So first of all, Colin, do you know what GitHub is? [laughs] I do know what GitHub is, for sure. But it seems like, uh, we might not know everything about the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo- Yeah...
per what you were saying before we hopped on the horn here. Yeah. There's a lot in, there's a lot in this. And so, um, I think it's expl- simple to explain what GitHub is.
It's basically where, it's like the premier place that people go to post and work on and talk about code, um, and reference code. Uh, but I- you don't actually really need to know all that.
It's actually, what, what's more important now is that, um, uh, is to explain, like, the accounts hierarchy system of how GitHub works. And so you can just know that GitHub is where code goes to live.
It's like, you almost might call it, like, social media for code/work. Uh, like, uh, work for code. That's what I think is interesting about GitHub, is it's simultaneously a database and a social media platform. Yeah.
It's all of that. And, um, so you can have code live in a certain place.
So if you just got, like, a certain project, like a personal project, you can have your profile, you can have different open source projects or, like, professional, your company projects you can contribute to all those.
Bitcoin Core, which is a client that runs Bitcoin, um, the effective, like, the, the only client that really matters right now, that is where all the code for Bitcoin Core lives.
And the organizational structure of who the actual accounts are that coordinate, like, this big project that is Bitcoin Core, that is what we're gonna have to explain.
So because it's open source, and all this stuff happens out in the open, um, you have, it means anyone can walk in and say pretty much anything.
Now, there is a moderation system, but, like, people post code, post ideas, people comment on that, and they make revisions, and people comment on those and give feedback.
But there have to be, like, janitors, like, moderators of this process, and there have to be people, um, who, like, push the big red button to turn the proposed code into the official code that is, that you download the file and you run the client for.
And so really, these, this is, these are like key holders, but they're more like janitors with keys, is what I would- Dare we say custodians? Custodians. [laughs] But not in the way that most people think.
It was there all along. [laughs] It was right under our nose. Yeah, I mean, they're like, um...
So a lot of what they do is just make sure that conversation stays on topic, that the, uh, process of, like, the code review is clean and orderly, and that when it's time to, like-Take code and merge it into the official, like, uh, program that everybody downloads and runs.
They're the ones who have the keys which, like, officially, like, do that.
There are a only a select few people who they're known, they're pre- they're well known to the developer community, and men- most of them are pretty doxxed, but not fully doxxed depending on their own preference.
And, um, they use PGP keys, cryptography, to basically prove that, "Hi, it's me, Ava Chow," "Hi, it's me, Gloria," and we're, like, the ones who are turning the keys and merging this code. I'll also make a point.
GitHub is an, is a product that's owned by Microsoft, so, like, you're ki- there's an element of trusting the actual platform you're hosting all this on, and there is a different account which owns the repository.
So we'll get into that in somewhere down the road.
But, um, right now, the most important thing is there's a lot of people contribute code, but there's only a few people who have the keys to merge it, and that is the significance of the news this past week is that for the first time since February 2023, um, there had been five maintainers.
There are now six, and the sixth maintainer, um, Sedated or The Charlatan, The Charlatan are his two pseudonyms, um, has been a longtime contributor, and he's well-respected in Bitcoin developer community.
And so the other developers and a lot of the folks who talk in the various channels about Bitcoin Core all unila- you know, pretty much unilaterally agreed, um, yeah, this person's trusted.
This person should be given a key to merge the code and make decisions. Why did they decide to add a sixth maintainer, and who's the current lead maintainer? Those are both good questions.
As far as, like, a sixth maintainer, there's a, uh... I actually don't [laughs] I don't know if it's super clear.
It's kind of one of those things where everybody kind of agrees that, uh, this person has earned enough trust, and then there's another dimension which is of the existing, the previous five and now six, each person kind of has, like, a special domain that they focus on.
Mm. This may not be as well, this not be as well known. Um, the most conspicuous and controversial one is, uh, of recent is Gloria Zhao, who is, her specialty and domain has been mempool and relay policy- Yeah...
which is at the heart of the spam debate. But you have other people who are not as well known. Ryan Oakes who's, who does the IPC. You have Ava Chow who's more on the wallet side.
You've got, uh, uh, Marco Falke who's, like, on testing, and, uh, you've got Hannity Stepanov who's kind of like the GUI and the build person. Um, and these people have been doing this for years.
Uh, and so the most recent addition, uh, Sedated or The Charlatan, um, focuses on something called Libbitcoin kernel and the consensus code, which is, I think, one of the most interesting things about this.
Um, if I could speculate why they're added, um, at the heart of a lot of this d- discussion, and I think a lot of existential questioning in Bitcoin is, um, is Bitcoin Core, which is a client,
should Bitcoin Core be the only dominant client? And there's a lot of people who disagree. I have publicly said I want different clients which run Bitcoin, um, which are competitive, uh, to Bitcoin Core.
Um, I think that's good for the health of the ecosystem and decentralization. But to be able to, to make that really easy, not everybody agrees on this, by the way. There's a long history of debating this.
Um, when you have a- I don't know if I agree on it. Yeah, we-- maybe this is another debate. I gotta, I gotta finish this thought.
So, um, one of the things, uh, that's, that's really difficult to communicate, I think, to average people who don't, like, live and breathe this is that, um, Bitcoin Core is a bunch of code.
It's a client, and it's a whole thing. It's got libraries. It's got a wallet component. It's got all these things to it.
But what is actually absolutely essential for it to remain in consensus with the other nodes on Bitcoin is this concept of it has to be consensus compatible.
So it has to validate the same blocks as all the other nodes, and it's got to have the same opinion about what is Bitcoin, and it's much harder [laughs] said than done because it's actually, when you write all this code and you, and you, and you pull it all, it's actually not clear sometimes what is a peculiarity of the actual client, Bitcoin Core, and what is actual, actual Bitcoin consensus, and that is where there has been a multi-year project originally started by a guy named Carl Dong and, and he left and gave up on that and went to go build VPNs.
Now, Sedated or The Charlatan, the new maintainer, has actually been working on that a long time and is probably the domain expert in that category. Are you talking about the great consensus cleanup? No.
I'm talk- That's a, that's a PR to, like, improve the rough edges around consensus.
I'm saying that this is a, a project to define what even is Bitcoin consensus and separate it so that you can take these rules and this code and build a different client with it, and this is one of the reasons that it's, like, really confusing to explain, like, what Luke Dash Jr.
Knots is or what, um, Libbitcoin by Eric Voskuil is, and, um, that's because it is really difficult to build a node implementation, a client which, um, under all sorts of s- scenarios remains in consensus with all the other clients from the ground up, if you're building it from the ground up.
And so this would basically say-Here are actually the rules, uh, for what Bitcoin Core considers consensus, and you can take those and go build your own thing.
This is, in a way, almost like an admission that this is perhaps a healthy initiative, even if it's not agreed by everybody. So, so this is interesting. I, I, two parts to my response to that.
So it's, you could almost view Charlatan's, uh, ascension as a maintainer as a way to mollify the fire eaters amongst the, uh, how should we say, the anti-core crowd, right? Those who want, uh, [laughs]
those seditious, uh- [laughs]... filter boys who want to peel away from Core and start their own, you know, movement behind something like Knots, right? Which is Luke Dash's, uh, or Luke Dash Jr.'s client. Yeah.
You could, so you could- Exactly... almost view that as saying, "Okay, you guys are saying that we are trying to concentrate power within Core.
Well, we're gonna give you a template for building your own client that will be compatible with what we're doing." It is very much like a template. You can think of it like that.
It's a template where we're not defining what the template is. We're just saying, like, here's like the basics, so you can go do that if you wish.
Yeah, and so within my second part of this, to play devil's advocate on the other side, you could still see someone taking qualm with this in the sense that, well, this is what Core defines as consensus, and they're still the ones dictating what should or should not be followed so that every client is in consensus.
I don't- Oh, yeah...
agree with that necessarily, because going back to what I was gonna say about client diversity, I mean, yeah, in a perfect world, you do have alternate clients that are at least maintained enough to where they can be used in a nuclear scenario where you need to change over.
Like, if Core really was compromised and Libbitcoin or, uh, Libbitcoin and, uh, Knots were- Libbitcoin, yeah... viable, it, it's good that those exist, right?
Um, but, you know, going back to, like, we should have these things or we ought to,
you know, I, I just go back to we let the market decide kind of, and the fact of the matter is the mind share and the competency is on, is in Core.
They're the ones pushing out the best code, so- That is absolutely true... of course we're gonna go with that, right? Um- Yeah, that is absolutely true.
There's, it's really an unparalleled, Core is the standard and should be the standard until other clients demonstrate themselves, like, resilient and robust.
Um, but a step towards that, it's almost like Core, like, offering an olive branch to m- the, the kinda folks like me who think I would love to see a more diverse client set.
But it's just so much work, and, like, nobody pays. It's just hard to get money for it. It's thankless. It's such a weird skill set.
It's like if you've got the skills to do that, you could go make half million base salary, like, working for some AI company.
So, like, are you gonna go work for free and have people, like, hate you [laughs] 'cause you're, like, very being criticized? Anyway, so, like, uh, this is a- That's a really good point. Yeah.
You're already making pennies compared to what you could be making at a Coinbase or another, like, public company or a private company that deals with Bitcoin. Yeah.
And so it's pretty amazing the ones who have stuck around are dealing with abuse. You know, like, shout-out to Gloria Zhao, for instance.
She got put under fire from the filter crowd with some absolutely baseless and disgusting accusations. Absolute vile things, yeah.
Yeah, and, and she's out here still just trying to improve the relay so, you know, uh, amending pool relay policies- Yeah, so- So shout-out. [gentle music] We are CleanSpark,
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The, uh, second question, which I took a really long time to get to, is you asked who's the lead maintainer, and the answer is Bitcoin Core no longer has a lead maintainer.
Um, I, myself also actually kind of thought there was until I verified and I, I was trying to check up why. I guess I forgot who the lead maintainer is. But there, there is none.
In fact, um, the, we have to get into the history of this and why that's the case. So there is no person who runs point, uh, officially in title. As we all know, with social circles,
you can intuit what you want on, like, social hierarchy and dominance, but in title there is no official lead maintainer. So let's, like, roll the clock back.
Where did the code originally live for Bitcoin back when Satoshi was writing it? And I had to jog my memory.
It was originally posted on SourceForge, which is kind of like a pr- like a message board, but proto, like proto GitHub. Um, and Satoshi and other contributors worked on this.
They would email it back and forth and, like, work on the code and run the clients and stuff. But then Satoshi left, and that's when Gavin Andresen took formal lead of the project.
There was kind of that hand, that torch handoff that Satoshi had to Gavin Andresen, and Gavin led the migration of the code and the re- and creating a Bitcoin repository on GitHub.
So in 2014, that repository and the project officially comes, uh, becomes, like, referred to under the name of Bitcoin Core.
Then Gavin hands it to Wladimir van der Laan, who most people don't know, but then Wladimir has, was the lead maintainer for the next nine some odd years. Legend. Um, yeah, legend.
And, uh, they did it with relative, like, inconspicuous, inconspicuity.Whatever. Low profile. They did it with a relatively low profile in a relatively neutral manner. Think about it.
That's the block size wars in the middle of all that, um, and the, the Bitcoin Core conspiracies. Then we have what I think is the, an underappreciated shift in how
the governance of the Bitcoin GitHub repo works, which happens when, um, he who must not be named, but we will on this podcast, Craig Wright.
Craig Wright, backed by billionaire Calvin Ayre and head of the fork Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision, leverages the tools of the state and the, and the courts to, uh, sue people with their giant treasure trove, uh, with- or whether with, with, uh, um, Calvin's giant, um, war chest,
uh, sue people. And it, like, created incredible stress and friction for anyone who was in any kind of ca- leading capacity for Bitcoin.
And Vladimir, uh, kind of through, for a bunch of reasons, uh, decided to resi- uh, just step back and no longer be the main guy. And so there has honestly been a bit of, like, wandering the desert since then. Um,
it was understood that Vladimir was the one who, like, had the, owned the Bitcoin account which owns the actual repository where Bitcoin Core lives.
And then under that account, you can de- you're the owner, but you can designate admins and people with, like, certain access privileges.
And so, um, uh, it is not known who Vladimir, if a person or an entity or a group of people or a network of people, how that account was handed off.
Um, uh, it- we just know that it, it was that Vladimir was no longer the guy. And, uh, so
now we have no lead maintainer, and this is specifically, uh, or this, the stated reason for this is be- is because there will be more Craig Wrights out there, whether it be the state or individuals or wealthy, insane billionaires, who seek to, uh, you know, use what is really a comparatively small amount of money to inflict huge friction and pain on the project of Bitcoin and to leverage particularly the social and legal layer to make people's lives difficult.
And so, um, part of, that's part of why, um, uh, the structure has kind of evolved the way it is. Now, I personally, I'll make the assessment, I feel like it's a pretty, like, fair, egalitarian...
It's in a pretty good place as it is. Um, but there is some warranted, uh, conspiracy and speculation about how neutral is the project if we don't actually know who owns the GitHub repo.
Because the GitHub repo itself, I will push back really h- really hard and say that itself is not Bitcoin. It, however, is the absolute clear guiding light of what Bitcoin is.
So the Bitcoin network itself is the code people choose to run. Um, but the, uh, like, the repo that people download all their code from, the ownership of that is actually ki- surprisingly murky.
And this is one of the, the criticisms and subject of conspiracy that the Notts camp had, which was,
"We don't know who it is, the banks, the spammers, the CIA, Mossad, they own, they're in charge, everybody's, like, working for them." And while we cannot prove that's not true, um,
you know, they don't seem to be behaving like that. I think accusations of, like, um, complacency and, um, appeal to process are good accusations for another time. But, um,
but that's ki- that's actually kind of, like, how we got to where we are today and why we don't have a lead maintainer, and it's also why, like, talking about this to the average pleb or even, like, trying to explain this to your dad is just so confusing.
And this is why, like, you know, if a, if a, if a dumb little reportal- reporter dawdles along and, like, Googles a couple things and is like, "What?
We don't know who owns this," they can spin up some conspiracy, and it can take on legs of its own and run a really far... and run really far. And, um,
uh, so we could go a few other places after this if you wanna, unless you have a couple questions.
I was thinking maybe we could, like, give you a little TLDR on this, uh, the new guy, uh, 72 or whatever his- Yeah, I'd love to learn more about charlatan. I just wanted to double tap what you said. Yeah.
It's hard enough to explain how Bitcoin works without explaining how it's maintained and how upgrades are pushed and how they're integrated into the system. Yeah.
You know, and if you start explaining this, you almost sound like a crazy person, and you- Yeah... almost sound... You know, you try to...
This is why my father-in-law will never touch it, because if I tried to explain any of this, he'd say, "This is a $2 trillion asset, and the code base, you don't even..." First of all, he wouldn't even know what that is.
Yeah. But he would say, "And no one knows who actually operates the code base?" That, that just breaks a lot of people's worldview, especially I think older, uh, generations with institutional trust.
I think this is part of the reason why Bitcoin has been such a younger person's game.
If you grew up in a time where every world event just chiseled away your trust in institutions, and you have the internet to kind of augment that feeling and show you all the reasons why those institutions no longer deserve your trust, you're going to think something like Bitcoin is actually not that crazy.
It's also why for the older folks who are into it-They, they tend to be more of the Austrian camp, right? Or, you know, gold bug adjacent. So... Yeah. And you make up a really good point.
I actually think your dad's hypothetical criticism is a pretty good one.
Uh, and this is also [chuckles] why I would say, what if there are multiple clients that, uh, influence a Bitcoin and, uh, we had different risk profiles we could assign to them?
Maybe Bitcoin Core, you know, I'm thinking hypothetically, make up Bitcoin Core, is one of the most, like, technical legitimacy, mind share, history review, but the actual ownership of the repo itself is a little ambiguous.
Now, anyone could go fork that repo, copy that, start their own exact copy of Bitcoin.
It's like, it's really more of, like, um, you- it's almost like you have a Facebook page, and, like, everyone can download the Facebook page.
But, like, if you post something fake on the Facebook page, it can do a lot of damage. Doesn't mean that, like, you own what is reality in the information, but it's like you, you have a lot of influence.
And so the ambiguity and unknown, like, kind of like, nature of that hierarchy and that, uh, governance structure, which is GitHub and platform specific, could be an issue.
So other clients, uh, could say, you know, we have a different team. Maybe it's a private company. Um,
you know, it can allow users to, uh, assess risk better, and I think investors will like this, but I, I know that's a toxic word for a lot of [chuckles] the technical folks. Um, so that's it.
Um, or, or it could be, like, other Luke Dash Jr.'s who aren't insane, maybe other, like, you know, uh, crusaders who wish to take upon themselves, like, infinite work, uh, for personal vision.
There's a few of those out there. And they-- It makes that-- It makes it more feasible for them to do it, and they can accumulate acolytes to, uh, you know, run their code for them.
I think this actually can be a good thing. Okay, so this new guy. Again, he has two pseudonyms, Sedated and The Charlatan.
I think I'm gonna just refer to him as The Charlatan 'cause that's what his, um, IRC chat name is.
Uh, longtime comp sci guy, uh, from Europe, went to university, studied, you know, your sciences and your computer sciences.
Um, and he worked on a lot of, like, wallet vulnerabilities, um, including wallet vulnerabilities in other ecosystems, namely Monero, um, which is the only, like, somewhat okay blockchain to have feelings for if you're a Bitcoiner these days.
Um, and because it's really difficult and because, like, Sedated or, I'm sorry, The Charlatan, I would say might be a little bit like of an outsider in terms of, like, his, like, entrance into Bitcoin contribution.
I think that might be why he had been working on separating the consensus out and contributing to that project. And that's-- And it also just requires a lot of very specific, domain-specific knowledge, um, and so
years go by, lot of contributions, regularly hanging out in IRC, and I assume some in-person meetings to, you know, um, grab a beer and be like, "Hey, I'm a real person.
I actually, you know, I'm not some AI model on the other side of the screen." Um, that has garnered a lot of trust. I've got some quotes from it. I'll kinda, like, wrap up with a couple quotes here, which is,
um, I asked him in an interview recently, pretty directly, um, why he is working on this and his view on other client implementations besides Core.
And he said, quote, "I would be fine with other alternative clients competing with us, hopefully reusing the kernel library to at least guarantee they can stay in consensus with us. I kind of welcome the competition."
And I personally, I really like that. I really want folks like that to have, um, kind of a little bit contrarian views for, for the project. 'Cause a lot of people, like, they, you know...
This is the thing with these open source projects. There's, like, this implicit kind of loyalty that, um, it, that is expected.
Um, and that's because there's been a lot of enemies which try to subvert the p- the goals of the project. And so, like, you know, when it's something like Bitcoin Core, uh,
you know, they're obviously anxious about people who have, like, non-core, uh, conventional views. So this really is honestly a bit of, like, a letting down of the guard by Core, um,
not in, not for, like, a bad reason of, like, they're, they're, they're slacking on their duty, but rather, um, they're not circling the wagons as tightly because they're like, it, you know, Bitcoin is in a new era.
It's much bigger than a s- than, um, you know, uh, a small conference room software project. It is now multiple trillion dollar asset, and it's on a path to become a hundred trillion dollar asset.
And so I love to see this. We'll see how it goes. I don't know, like, [chuckles] how far along we are on the project.
One of the things The Charlatan told me is that, 'cause I didn't know, like, where this, what the state, the status of, like, the Libbitcoin kernel consensus separation was, 'cause I just honestly cannot figure it out.
He's like, "Well," uh, quote, "we need to do a bit better at public engagement and communication." To which I say, damn straight.
Like, [chuckles] if the Core and a lot of the Bitcoin devs have a communication crisis problem revealed so clearly over the past year and, um, uh, yeah. So I'm excited.
Uh, what I, I almost feel like this didn't have to be a news item, but because it's kind of our beat, it's a news item, and we're, it's almost like we're making it a news item.But I don't really see other, other people covering this, and it, because it's so, like, deep in the weeds of, like, how Bitcoin works,
I just, I don't, I don't know if anybody, like, outside of the weird dev circles even follow this. But this is so important.
Like, it's wild to me that I guarantee you Michael Saylor doesn't know any of this sh- Most executives probably don't, outside of the ones that you would expect to care about this. You know- Exactly...
maybe your Jamison Lopps, maybe Dorsey, you know? But maybe not even him.
Yeah, the thing that really makes this notable for me is it's not necessarily that we added a new maintainer, although congratulations to Charleton, it's why we added him.
Uh, I say we, you know, like, like this is a sports team that I'm a part of. I didn't oppose it- You-... but also, yeah, I, my vote wasn't- But, you know-... even counted...
my point being the rationale behind, okay, he specifically
is m- he's specifically being appointed as a sixth maintainer partly because we want to give other Bitcoin clients the opportunity to stay in consensus with us and encourage competition.
Think it's a good thing after all of the shit storm that we went through last year, and to, uh, just to get the monkey off of Core's back, right? And kind of put some of those,
put some of that scuttlebutt to rest that they're out to just dominate Bitcoin, right? Yeah. Or that there's some grand conspiracy. And the thing is, uh, I- I think most of the grand conspiracy claims are really weak.
They're, they're weak as heck. Um, give me some real conspiracies about Bitcoin 'cause I bet you could concoct them. And 'cause I, I'm all about informed conspiracy mongering.
Um, none of this, like, half in the bag, like, bullshit. Um, like, Gloria Zhao, uh, you know, did these things to get maintainer, uh, appointment, 'cause that's very not, that's very absolutely not clear.
It was very much a merit-based appointment. So, like, um, get good, we give- Including by Luke-... criticism. I-... who asked her appointment and said she doesn't have a choice because she's too good. Bro.
Anyway, um- Bro. Well, we should end it there. Yeah. Um, I want a CTA, uh, call to action.
If you, if you got this far, go make sure to, uh, read the, uh, newsletter, the profile piece I put out yesterday, Friday, on the Block Space Podcast.
Um, otherwise, make sure to like and subscribe, and tell your friends, tell your mom, tell your dad about this episode 'cause the next one next week is gonna be spicy. [upbeat music]