A couple days ago, a pseudonymous account put out a proposal that says spammers have all this Bitcoin, and we're going to burn that Bitcoin so that spam becomes untenable.
There seem to be people who seriously consider seizing users' Bitcoin, even if it is the dirty spammers and gamblers. Do they enjoy the same access to Bitcoin as the rest of us high and mighty pure Bitcoiners?
It's almost like a reverse jubilee. So instead of everybody, like, their debts being wiped away, we're going to impose- We're gonna seize everything. [laughs] We're gonna seize everything.
I think they have a name for that, actually. Yeah, it's, uh- I think it's- 1601, 1640, whatever that thing- Yeah... Roosevelt it... Yes. It's basically like that, but for your ordinals. [laughs] Mr.
President, a second filter has hit the timeline. That's right. They're still trying to filter your Bitcoin transactions. A new proposal suggesting we burn users' Bitcoin, and guess what?
It is the worst proposal I've ever heard. We're gonna explain it.
[upbeat music] A couple days ago, a pseudonymous account named Claire Ostrom, spelled Claire like the name, O-S-T-R-O-M, Ostrom, put out a proposal called The Cat, not to be confused with Opcat, but actually, like, The Cat, like an actual animal who is a cat,
that says spammers have all this Bitcoin, and we're going to burn that Bitcoin so that spam becomes untenable.
This proposal was denied from the Bitcoin developer mailing list, Spicy, we'll talk about in a sec, and then the proposal also kind of ham-fistedly tries to impose a cost onto the spammers. Now,
I'll explain how that doesn't really seem to be very effective.
We'll go into some of the game theory, and then, um, we will also talk about how ridiculous it is that there seem to be people who seriously consider seizing users' Bitcoin, even if it is the lowest of the low, the dirty spammers and gamblers.
Do they enjoy the same human rights and access to Bitcoin as the rest of us high and mighty pure Bitcoiners?
Your permissionless network is only as strong as the reprobates that use it, or rather as the rights for the reprobates that use it. Bitcoin only works if it can be used under situations that people don't like.
I don't have to like how you spend your Bitcoin or how you use it, but that's kind of the core property. It's money for enemies. Its whole fucking thing is being used for things that people don't want you to use it for.
Yeah. Not your keys- The whole thing, that's the Silk Road. That, we've covered it a thousand times on this podcast. That was the first big use case for Bitcoin, and it proved why it was valuable.
And doing this will do the exact opposite because it hampers one of Bitcoin's core properties. This hamstrings Bitcoin to a level...
Uh, so the thing is, I was actually really surprised because, uh, initially, when I was reading through this proposal, uh, I thought it was very clearly a joke.
So I thought someone had spun up a pseudonym to write a BIP or a proposal which was so, um, unconscionable that it was, that it would be used as a way to demonstrate the end goal or, like, the terminus of, like, your attempt to filter Bitcoin, and to demonstrate how ridiculous it is that we would actually consider seizing users' Bitcoin, burning it, confiscating it.
But I'm actually really surprised how many, I would say, like, Bitcoin thought leaders, people who call themselves Bitcoin philosophers, are not just tacitly endorsing this, but in some cases saying that they actually think it may be a good idea.
Kind of, uh, I, I've, I have actually held off using this term in the filter debate to date, but this is a mask off moment. Um- It's 100% a mask off moment. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is on-chain communism, everyone.
[laughs] You, you are, they are proposing to seize the means of your ordinal production and take it, not necessarily even for themselves, 'cause they're too stupid. Actually, they can't do that.
I shouldn't say they're too stupid. They can't take it for themselves. But they're trying to seize what is someone else's for the greater good, right? And I, I just wanna point out one thing really quickly.
Look, if you are a developer and you're trying to get in a sneaky gotcha with some wordplay, please come to us or something.
Calling this The Cat just as some weird subversive, [laughs] "We're sticking it to the Opcat guys," it makes no sense. What, like, you're a cat chasing rats out of a building? I guess that's the analogy.
Well, the analogy is that this is an endless, spam is an endless cat and mouse game, and so we're gonna introduce The Cat. Ah, there you go.
And this is, this is a, this is a one-legged cat that is, like, on its dying leg, so- But, but even that kinda gets to, sorry to belabor this, but we do words here, right? Mm-hmm. We don't do technicals.
I can't code, but I can- Yeah, we're wordy... speak all right. And the fact of the matter is, like, that analogy, that metaphor breaks down because a cat and mouse game is one in which the cat never catches the mouse.
Yes. Correct. Like, and so this is almost like a, a, a... Maybe it's incredibly self-aware. Maybe that's why you thought it was a joke- Yeah... because- Well-...
this is- I thought it, I thought it was a joke, and we'll, we'll get into this, because the name of the author is Claire Ostrom, who maybe on their email would abbreviate to colostrum.
You'll have to go ask your parents about that. Um- [laughs] And then also if you're, it's, Claire Ostrom is an, is an anagram for moralist core, so, like, a moralist version of Bitcoin core.
So I thought it was so obvious that it was-A joke. Okay, I actually wanna get into reading the BIP. We made it a few minutes in. We, we actually need to ta- I need to explain what the BIP does.
So I'll try to do this, um, kind of clinically. So the CAT, a non-monetary UTXO cleanup, documents a soft fork consensus change which snapshots a bunch of UTXOs and burns them.
The snapshot for the UTXOs
will be determined by using ORD, or the program that tracks the ordinal Satoshis, and looks at where those Satoshis exist, and if those sats, those ordinals, exist on a UTXO, on an output, under a certain threshold, they're burned.
This would kind of be like taking dust outputs, small UTXOs, and burning them. Currently, the number for, like, the threshold for s- uh, UTXO size is 1,000 Satoshis.
Dust on Bitcoin is, is currently considered to be 300 sats. So this would be, like, 50 cents, basically.
This is not a proposal which uses, uh, like, relay policy or standard as, as many of the filter discussion has, like, has, uh, used to- to date.
This is a software, this is a consensus change which says there are some, there are tens of millions of these outputs which are known to be, um, ordinal theory outputs, and we're gonna burn those.
And it's going to be indiscriminate about, uh, if they are 100% confirmed to be ordinal outputs.
They're just going to be inferred by the ordinal client, that's the ORD client that, uh, kind of the ecosystem runs off of for ordinals.
And I'll also point out that this says, um, the point of this is so that we can, uh, prevent these users from trading these assets because those UTXOs are burnt, and it doesn't extend just to ordinals, but also Bitcoin stamps, which are not using ordinal theory.
We'll talk about it in a sec. And, but they're another type of NFT scheme on Bitcoin. Okay. What, so how are they burned exactly? And explain to me why that doesn't constitute a hard fork, because that to me seems
like- Well, you're right. So they would be burned by being made unspendable, similar to how an op_return is unspendable.
These would just be the same thing, like bl- if you, if you are enforcing the rules of the soft fork- I see...
uh, a, a miner which tries to include one of those transactions with those outputs, uh, that would be invalidated by the soft fork. The thing is, it would be a hard fork if not everyone adopted this, uh, this...
I mean, it's the same rules any soft fork, if for, if, like, the 444 fork or Taproot or SegWit was not- Right...
adopted by the majority, those who attempted to create invalid blocks according to the new soft fork would be rejected.
So likely you would have, in this case, if you had anybody do this, it'd be a mi- minority chain split, so.
Yeah, I think y- this absolutely would lead to a chain split, and it's probably why John Atack and the Core guys didn't give it the time of day. We'll get to that in a second.
Um, but so then the other question I have, and we talked about this earlier, do you... Those snapshotted coins are made unspendable. Yeah.
Do you then have to continue making a snapshot for new ordinals that are created after the soft fork, or are those grandfathered in as unsp- like- That is- Is-... not addressed in this proposal.
So currently the proposal says it's a one-time event where, um, it's almost like a reverse jubilee. So instead of everybody, like, their debts being wiped away, we're going to impose- We're gonna seize everything.
[laughs] Seize everything. I think they have a name for that, actually. I, I think it was- Yeah. It's, uh, 1601, 1640, whatever that thing- Yeah... Roosevelt did. Yeah.
It's, it's basically like that, but for your ordinals. [laughs] The filter debate is kind of a microcosm, or at least you get refractions of a lot of the cultural debates that we're having in the US currently.
And, like, I'm just trying to think what goes into someone's head thinking, "You know what will help this problem is a really controversial, totally temporary, and ephemeral solution that will maybe reduce UTXO bloat."
Oh, wait. It won't reduce UTXO bloat- Well, so the- Now that I'm thinking about it- Well- 'Cause those UTXOs don't go away. They're still in the- So- They're still in the- You ask a very- Right?... good question, Colin.
You make a very good point. So if these are unspendable, then they could be removed from the UTXO set, similar to how op_returns do not remain in the UTXO set.
So, like, this would be a temporary one-time UTXO set reduction of a subhuman class of, uh, UT- You know, I think your debt jubilee is, is probably the best reverse analogy here because- Right...
this is like the COVID stimmy checks. It's like, "Oh, you just lost your job, and all of your, your portfolio got cut in half? Here's $1,200 kid. Good luck." [laughs] You know? And it was treated- Yeah...
as something that was gonna help everyone, and in fact, it just made everything worse because it, it exacerbated inflation. Um, so and this reminds me of that. It's, like, very short-term thinking for- Yeah...
to try to find a solution that is not really a solution for a problem that, like, quite frankly, is not a problem except for probably what? [laughs] Like, what, I mean,.1- Well-....01% of Bitcoin's holders?
We can, we can get, we can get into this, Colin. I mean, I wanna, I wanna double tap a little bit more on the actual BIP before we, before we just- Okay... beat this dead horse.
Um, so one theme, uh, commonly here is that, uh, there is this new term, it's not a new term, but it's, like, codifying this term of a non-monetary UTXO, and it's basically saying there is an external software that has a record-Of like what could be a non-monetary UTXO, and we're going to use that and blanket burn anything of that classification.
Now, that would be 99.8% like effective for like burning what I think they actually intend to burn.
But the thing is, are you, are you willing to burn, you know, even a, a not, an, you know, a, a, a tenth of a hundredth of a percent of people's Bitcoin in like, uh, the pursuit?
Is this-- Are you, are you going to make the unviola- envio- inviolable action of like confiscating any Bitcoin bo- from the network? So, um, and then I will say that the, this, uh, BIP does come with a rationale.
So I'm, uh -- I know I'm gonna get torn apart for this, but I'm really not going to read the rationale that much. I encourage you to read it yourself.
So I think the first thing is, uh, we can address this pretty quickly. Um, the way that the BIP's process works, in order for your proposal to be, uh, deigned to give a number,
uh, the official way is to throw it up on the mailing list or delving Bitcoin now apparently, have it be discussed, then create a PR, which will then be, be given a, a number, hopefully.
This proposal was rejected from the mailing list, and this is the first mini controversy, and we can
possibly talk about this very briefly without losing track of the whole discussion, which is, um, there is some rationale by a
somewhat connection of the show, John Attack, who, uh, is one of the editors on the mailing list and BIP's repo, who said, uh, here's the reasons why we did not include this on the mailing list.
One of the primary of which is that it entertains or suggests, uh, confiscating users' Bitcoin. Um, so
I will just say that I think it's good that this was kept off the mailing list, but this does bring in a bigger existential question of if you can't get onto the mailing list, then you can't really receive a, a BIP number according to the procedure that many appeal to.
So there is a gatekeeping process. Like, um, I think it is-- it does demonstrate here
that the process to upgrade Bitcoin through the conventional like happy path is very much a gated process, and while I think it's been, it's been guarded and gated very well, like, uh, it is not, it's not open.
And, uh, and I do think this is probably the only real just like critique of, uh, in this entire, uh, enmired like, uh, issue here of the fact that a rationale is this BIP would confiscate users' Bitcoin, and yet we look at the quantum, various quantum proposals, which do, uh, propose confiscating users' Bitcoin, which have made it to the mailing list.
So this is an inconsistent rule that's applied.
Um, and I kind of throw this at the ecosystem and say, "This is something we probably need to figure out," because this is-- I see this only increasing and pissing off more people.
Yeah, I think that that's a decent point to bring up.
Uh, b- but, but I would say that John didn't necessarily say, we can't have this on the mailing list or in GitHub, but he specifically said, you need to have this conversation more outside of these venues- Yeah...
on social and, and, you know, you need to find some sort of rough consensus with enough people on social media or other discussion forums to see whether or not this is something that people actually are going to want.
Yeah. Because he does point out like this is going to be highly controversial and would, like we said earlier, lead to a chain split almost certainly. Yeah.
But the reason why, and we can get into the game theory stuff now maybe and touch quantum a little bit later a- as well, but just to touch on quantum again, the, the reason why I think quantum gets a different consideration is kind of the same thing that CoinJoinChris, friend of the show, actual friend of the show, sometimes I say that and they're not friends of the show, but he, he, he has this thread here where he basically unpacks the difference between one of Bitcoin's scariest, uh, events, the inflation bug, um, in 2018, as well as the current filter discussion.
And he makes a point here that, at least for me, is like the most clear-eyed way to explain why these are so different. And, um, I'm gonna read it from here in full.
"You're mixing categories that have nothing to do with each other. The 2018 inflation bug was not a policy preference, it w- it was, it was a consensus inconsistency leading to objective protocol breakl- breakage.
Left unpatched, different nodes would have accepted different chains, destroying the fundamental safety properties of Bitcoin. Fixing it wasn't changing the rules to get a desired outcome.
It was restoring the rules everyone already agreed to and believed they were enforcing. That's the opposite of inducing new normative behavior.
Freezing or rejecting UTXOs because you personally dislike their content is not repairing a consensus violation, it creates a new one. You're not fixing a broken invariant.
Instead, you're adding a subjective filter that was never part of the system's guarantees. That pol- that's policy, not correctness, and it's inherently political, not technical.
Bugs threaten consensus because they break safety." This is the part I like. "Spam threatens your patience because you dislike what other people find valuable.
These are not remotely the same class of problem, and if I had to put my-"Self in John's shoes, I'm not gonna speak for him. I don't know what he was thinking.
But the quantum problem is actually a serious security risk to Bitcoin. In as much as it involves coins being hacked out of wallets, like, that's ultimately what will happen with a quantum viable computer.
Bitcoin's encryption will be broken for those wallet types for the first time, the quantum vulnerable wallets.
That is a much scarier thing, and it involves anywhere from, like, a 20th to maybe more of Bitcoin's UTXO set being dumped on the market as a result.
That kind of echoes the inflation bug, not in the sense that it's an unforeseen danger, but in the sense that it's a serious problem that ultimately impacts everyone.
The spam debate really only impacts the people who talk about it all the time, and it lives rent-free in their head.
I mean, seriously, it, you know, you can't even make the argument at this point that it's impeding transactions. Transactions are one sat per vbyte right now. Two sats- Yeah... maybe three at worst.
You, you could arg- you can argue that it slows down the sync time or the initial block download of very, very, very old nodes.
Like, somebody who's running a Ras- Raspberry Pi 3 for 10 years and hasn't upgraded that, um, it may make that node less performant.
Um, it doesn't break nodes as far as we've seen, it just degrades some of the ancient, ancient, um, ones that people may be using out there.
Uh, and that is, like, the real only negative, like, uh, object- like, what we can define as an objectively- Right...
undesirable, like, uh- And, and I'll often see there's this kind of, like, think about the people from the Third World argument about it, right?
And I'm not saying that we shouldn't be worried about people in disadvantaged places, but it's like this idea that, like, the El Salvadoran who's running, like, 50 nodes out of his garage is somehow going to be at a disadvantage now.
Well, Colin- And, and- Think, think about- Yeah... the Third World.
Think about the unfortunate Third World, the person who has $5 in five $1 UTXOs to their name, and two of those UTXOs are so unfortunate as to happen to have an ordinal inscribed sat on the first output of that UTXO, which now we are going to seize 40% of their net worth.
Now, again, this is a dumb hyperbole. This is a dumb example, but, like, that is something that will happen to someone.
There is someone out there who has a UTXO which is not a actual non-monetary UTXO, which we are voting to seize. Do we save one person, uh, you know, for, for a dubious reason, protect the network?
Okay, I wanna actually get into the game theory 'cause I don't want this to go too long. So I do have to treat the game theory of this. Okay, so Claire and other cat non-monetary- If that is your real name.
[laughs] Okay. So this proposes that there is a snapshot that happens, and then at a later date, or perhaps soon thereafter, the UTXOs in that snapshot are burned.
Tell me, Colin, without really even knowing much about degens and, uh, the crypto world, if somebo- if you know there's going to be a snapshot in some kind of token farming game, do you think that may, uh, affect user behavior at all, especially if you have a clearly telegraphed move to snapshot balances in an account at some future date?
100%, and that might be their goal, is to get everyone to just flush these things back into the UTXO set and stop using- Right... ordinal theory to count them and divvy them up, right?
So that is somewhat addressed, and you're right. In fact, I think that is an interesting effect.
So that could happen, but at the very least, you're going to create a stampede for users to look at their own wallets and consider the trade-off, and can they migrate to a safe UTXO above the currently 1,000 Satoshi threshold.
I'll also say there's 110 million enscripture, inscriptions right now, of which 100 million are clearly junk. They're like junk BRC-20s. They have no value anymore.
Um, I think this is another oversight of, of Claire's in that, um, they would be burning, uh, inscriptions which are not like JPEGs, which are low value.
They're actually no, of no value according to the protocol, the token protocols they're in. I think this actually is an oversight about the actual mechanics of the ecosystem from the author, Claire.
So the second one is, um, so we know there's gonna be a snapshot. Um, you actually now create a hard price floor [laughs] for inscriptions.
You, you create an actual objective US dollar priced heart, uh, floor for all inscriptions which are now, if the current, the size of the UTXOs, say 1,000 sats, 50 cents maybe.
Now every, every [laughs] surviving inscription will have a monetary value of at least 50 cents.
Um, and I can tell you, you're actually probably net increasing the value, [laughs] the, the net wealth in the ordinals ecosystem because of this. You're effectively giving everyone a free...
It's, uh, another, it's almost like a, a, a market cap jubilee in that, uh, you're culling all the worthless inscriptions that, that plague people's, even these spammers' wallets themselves are filled with, uh, useless inscriptions.
So let's say there is a stampede, though there's tens of millions of these worthless inscriptions. Um, one as- assumption is that each of these outputs is ex- exists in a single address. But, um,
in reality, [clears throat] a lot of these, uh, like, the actual consolidation of these, uh, is gonna be much, much smaller and more compact than I think the author of this BIP an-Imagines, 'cause the author of the BIP says, well, not everyone can get-- can consolidate, uh, or s- preserve or save their UTXOs in time.
Um, but I think this actually is a big oversight to the speed and, uh, efficiency with which, um, a lot of these consolidate-- the UTXO consolidations can and will happen.
If we assume, uh, say, 10 to 100 outputs per wallet, of which all of them are going to be cold or burnt, then a, then, you know, now you reduce the s- the amount of these, like, inscriptions by 100 or so, uh, uh, 100-fold or so.
And so I think that there needs to be some serious actual modeling, um, using Ord, of course, and market and secondary marketplace pricing to figure out if, uh, if this actually, uh, would create, um, too small of a funnel or of a pipe for like all the, all the, um, inscriptions to squeeze through and consolidate.
So I actually think it's not very effective. I actually think it's, it's a, weirdly enough, a bullish signal to the Ordinals market. I think you have-- this is a, um, snakes in India example or a rabbits in, um,
Australia example where, I don't know if you're, you're familiar with this, where it was like, you know, we're gonna, uh, government's like, "We're gonna introduce snakes to eat all the mice 'cause there's a rat prob- or a rat and mice problem."
And it, it just, it created this whole, um, you know, na- bad, bad balance in the feedback loop where now there's too many snakes and all that jazz.
So I think you may actually have a similar effect to the Ordinals market. There's an argument for that at least. So that's like kind of a game theory of like how well this even works.
I'm very skeptical, and then I'll make one point which is, in the BIP, Clair writes that they wish to sabotage both Ordinals users and Stamps users.
Stamps is another type of Bitcoin NFT scheme which does not use Ordinal theory. And if the purpose is to sabotage Stamps, this BIP fails miserably. In fact,
I would actually go to sh- go so far as to say, um, that, uh, Clair fundamentally misunderstands how the protocols they are trying to sabotage work.
As the inventor of Bitcoin Stamps says, Mike in Space says, "This is hilariously wrong, Clair. Counterparty, and by extension Bitcoin Stamps, use an account-based model to assign ownership.
Only the art is stored in the UTXOs, so freezing UTXOs does nothing." Stamps can still be traded after this, and the whole purpose of the BIP is to make it impossible for these users to trade their assets.
I'll also make the point that the majority of the outputs, which are BRC-20s, are not traded assets. They are simple mint functions.
And if Clair were to spend half a moment looking at how BRC-20s proliferate the UTXO set of Ordinals, they would realize that none of those things are being traded anyway, nor have any incentive to.
Not because of price, because the protocol does not require it. The token protocol does not require it. So okay, I just yammered a lot. Thanks for listening to me.
Colin, I think it's about what time we get into more just the existential discussion of like, why is burning people's Bitcoin even on the table? If you do anything on a technical level to seize someone else's Bitcoin,
I just don't understand how Bitcoin as a network comes back from that for a lot of people. Maybe this is
a little bit intellectual masturbatory and kind of like Bitcoiners sniffing their own farts because, uh, uh, when I think about it, it's like the boomers who are holding Bitcoin in their, in their 401Ks or people who've bought the ETF, sovereign wealth funds, institutions, they don't really care about Bitcoin censorship-resistant properties.
But like a lot of the early adopters, I'm not one of those, but even guys from like twenty-seventeen on, like a lot of clubs, that is what is most interesting to Bitcoin for them.
'Cause they don't need that censorship resistance right now, but we don't know whether or not we're gonna need it ten, twenty, thirty, forty years from now, maybe even five years from now.
But I would just see that as a clear violation of one of Bitcoin's core properties, which is, you know, censorship resistance and permissionlessness to be able to use, you know, um, your Bitcoin the way that you want to, and also the seizure-resistant aspect.
And the fact that it's coming from within is really discouraging. A lot of people that I've respected in my prior life as a ardent Bitcoin maximalist, I don't understand what game they're playing unless they are just
retarded and a lot dumber than I thought that they were- Lost the plot...
or, or they lost the plot, or like maybe they are just bad actors, or they're just kind of captured by the algorithm and they're doing what gives them the most engagement and the most influence.
We're all social creatures. I think a lot of people attach themselves to bad ideas because they're rewarded for that, and then they just are too scared, and they just kind of run with it, right?
Because they're getting prestige, they're getting, you know, likes on social media. They're getting some sort of social benefit to it. I don't understand what the social benefit of this is, though.
To me, it's a very antisocial proposal, and it's the same reason why ultimately I think when push comes to shove, I'm gonna be on the do not seize quantum vulnerable coins camp.
I think that that sets a bad precedent too, even if it is for, you know, trying to protectYou, uh, you know, an investment that would- who knows how much it'll be worth by the time quantum vulnerability comes in.
But the thing that I think people miss about that is like, what do you think, what do you think has the longer lasting impression on people? A soft fork that seizes a 20th plus of the Bitcoin supply
and says, "Hey, all that stuff about sound money, censorship resistance," yada, yada, yada, kinda goes out the window, or letting those coins come to market, absolutely drilling the Bitcoin price on a short timeframe,
and then letting Bitcoin recover, because here's the thing about it. If you have a million coins coming to market, it's obviously going to impact Bitcoin's price.
It's going to impact Bitcoin's price a lot more if it's at 100,000 versus a million, of course, and even less so if it's at 10 million. But like, if Bitcoin's at that price,
and a known event forces selling that people can look at and say, "Those are quantum coins being moved, and they're being sold," and that tanks the price, nothing fundamentally changed about Bitcoin.
You could say, yes, okay, quantum-vulnerable addresses were broken, but we knew that.
The entire world's gonna have a h- crazy wake-up call when they are talking about quantum resistance for literally everything, so it's not just gonna be Bitcoin.
But that is a known event that people can see in the future, and if they see that sell-off, they know what caused it.
If Bitcoin's trading at a million at the time, goes down to like, I don't know, nuclear scenario, 200,000, 100,000, you think people aren't gonna buy it?
Like, it's going to get hoovered up so quickly that I think the rebound would be a lot quicker than what people think.
I could be totally naive, but I think the short-term impact of quantum coins going to market is much more, uh, palatable, at least to me, than the long-term impact of what quantum seizure sa- o- of, of what seizing quantum-vulnerable coins says.
Yeah. I think, y- you know, you covered the quantum angle. Uh, I w- I would like to, uh, point out that, like, this is an existential question of, is it okay to seize Bit- users' Bitcoin?
Um, you now, even though you, you may know that with a high probability that UTXO is being used for something which isn't really Bitcoin as a monetary network, as you define that, but you now do create a class system for users' Bitcoin.
This is equivalent to the OFAC list. I know a lot of you are gonna point, push back and say literal bullshit like it's not the same thing. This is the same thing.
You are creating a hierarchy- But the state's not doing it, so it's okay. It's a free market. Yeah, exactly. And, and so, uh,
this is, uh, creating very much a, uh, a, uh, you're assigning now a, a subjective value to what should be an objective system.
Uh, and I think that it's wild to me that a lot of-- I'm gonna call out some specific Bitcoin armchair philosopher types who purport to think from first principles and write long, flowery, circular, onanistic, um, uh, lo- wr- uh, you know, articles, uh, saying, "We're going to really explore what val- you know, what Bitcoin is," and they'll often, like, parrot phrases such as, "Nobody can take it from you.
Nobody can seize that. You can have these fif- six, 12 words in your head, and nobody can steal that from you."
These same philosopher types are now entertaining the idea of stealing that from you, even if we can be probably sure you have monetary UTXOs. Um, maybe you would just get caught up in the big cleanup and sweep.
Then it's very shaky to me, uh, if, uh, you are, uh, you know, the heuristic for which you declare certain UTXOs verboten or not, same as the OFAC list.
Here, and I'll call out Newt Svanholm, still nobody knows how to pronounce his name.
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick on him here because this guy spends all his time s- in, in, in acts of self-pleasure talking about how smart he is and how flowery his words are.
And here he is saying, "This is a really int- the cat is really interesting from a philosophical perspective." Bitcoin's just a bunch of rules, bro.
Um, and, uh, the thing is, he does make a point, uh, which I actually agree with, that Bitcoin is social, that Bitcoin is like this social consensus enforced and powered by, uh, like real physical world things like proof of work.
Um, but I would say, Newt, you seem to totally miss the point that you are not just like tacitly, but you, you go so far as to say you like this proposal to seize people's Bitcoin.
Um, quit LARPing as a first principles Bitcoiner. Quit LARPing as somebody who's pro-freedom. You're anti-freedom. You are pro your own morality, your own, you're pro your own ethics.
This is the entire world and a human creation that Satoshi sought to distance Bitcoin from, to take subjective interpretation of what is, like, trust and value and embed that into the network.
So, like, I will single him out here, and that is, it is absolutely unconscionable to me that someone who purports to be, like, a thought leader from a philosophy first mindset would, like, even do this.
Like, this is the kind of shit feds say. But, like, it's crazy to me that, like, this is just set out there. Newt's not the only one.
There's other people who, uh, like say, "Oh- I think this is interesting from an idea standpoint-... this is what's interesting to me about this- Yeah...
is, like, some of the most vocal crypto anarchists, and I mean crypto anarchists in, like, the traditional sense of the word, and, like, um, some of the most vocal anarcho-capitalist and staunch libertarian types are okay with thisLike the Giacomo Zuccos of the world, I love Giacomo generally, but this whole filter thing
has just been, I think, a disaster for a lot of those people who claim to be by first principles. Yeah. This is violating so many first principles- Yeah...
of, of, of, of, [laughs] you know, of everything they've talked about, not just from a libertarian perspective, but looking at Bitcoin, right? Yeah. I mean, you're talking about stealing people's money. Yeah.
Now, I guess it's technically not stealing because they're not taking it for themselves, but if I go up to a man, take his $10 bill and burn it, what did I just do? Did I steal it? [laughs] Yeah.
I basically stole it and destroyed it, so- Yeah... you know, I- it's funny, I got more fired up on this one than you did. I think the reason I'm really just kinda over this is
ordinals aren't even doing anything right now. Um, the best argument against them was always, look at what happened to NFTs, that's going to happen here.
I was kind of always of that mindset, and I think- It's a speculative market, it goes in ebbs and flows, and the natural and Bitcoin's existing, uh, max, you know, block size, plus the fee market, will- is the only real tenable solution to this, and guess what?
It's kept it very well under check. Yeah, and, and- Yeah...
exactly, and perhaps why I'm also mad, and we can wrap up after this, 'cause we're getting close to time here, we're over time, but, um, there are so many soft fork proposals that have been through the wringer of discussion on social, on mailing lists, we're talking about CTV, CAT, great consensus cleanup, and the filter boys keep coming up with the absolute most retarded boomer slop that you can think of- [laughs]...
and they've got two soft fork proposals that they're trying to push right now. Pick one, at least, if you're gonna be absolutely ridiculous. Like- Yeah... there are more serious things right now, guys.
I- the moral panic around this is what absolutely sends me- Yeah... because these are the same people that are freaking sick of the moral panic that we've seen infect parts of the left, right?
And have led to a lot of the woke stuff. The, I mean, they, you should have seen Newt- Newt's, uh, 2020 and 2021 news in his feed.
It was all of that stuff raging against this, and somehow, that same moral panic has poisoned a segment of the Bitcoin community, and I don't know how we get out of this, but like- Yeah...
how are we still talking about this? Well, part of it's our own fault, because we need your views. Because we talk about it. [laughs] Oh, I just, I just walked into that one so hard. We're the exception.
We're the exception. We're allowed to- I don't know about that... we're allowed, we're allowed to be righteously indignant and use the platform to push back. Yeah.
Um, but, uh- The protected podcast class where- Yeah, we're-... everything you say, you demand to be taken seriously, but if you say something wrong, you could say, "It's just a podcast, bro" I'm talking head.
I have no real, uh, responsibility. No, everybody's got a role to play. On that note, thank you so much.
Um, please comment, and if you hate Colin, donate, you know, throw, uh- [laughs] Direct all of your, direct all of your anger at me. Colin, uh, he just, he talks about Bitcoin- I also don't like ordinals- Yeah.
[laughs]... is what people don't understand. [laughs] I, I'm out there, I'm the ordinals guy. I'm the guy you should like, uh, you should, you should point your finger and go, "You're such a slimy spammer."
I'd be like, "Yeah, um, price me out, bitch." Okay, thanks so much. Check you out later. [outro music]