Citadel Dispatch

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Ocean Mining is a new and innovative bitcoin mining pool focused on transparency and freedom for the individual miners who choose to use them. With their new DATUM release miners who use Ocean will be able to construct and broadcast blocks themselves removing a key trust component from the process and reducing censorship risk. We had the pleasure of having multiple key members of their team join us for this conversation.

OCEAN on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1qtvl2em0llpnnllffhat8zltugwwz97x79gfmxfz4qk52n6zpk3qq87dze

Luke on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1lh273a4wpkup00stw8dzqjvvrqrfdrv2v3v4t8pynuezlfe5vjnsnaa9nk

Mechanic on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr

Learn more about OCEAN: https://ocean.xyz/

EPISODE: 140
BLOCK: 864648
PRICE: 1582 sats per dollar

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Outro Music by TIP NZ: https://primal.net/p/npub1hrctsg2qwu5gsp65gvj29968z460g0th755jq92c8uaz620lewmq6qk525

(00:00:00) Julian Assange: WikiLeaks and CIA Revelations

(00:02:34) Introduction to Citadel Dispatch

(00:03:20) Discussion on Ocean Mining Pool

(00:14:28) Challenges and Innovations in Bitcoin Mining

(00:23:08) DATUM: A New Approach to Mining

(00:36:02) Decentralization and Block Construction

(00:52:20) Security and Trust in Mining Pools

(01:04:39) Spam Transactions and Mempool Policies

(01:25:54) Bitcoin Transaction Volume and Future Outlook

[00:00:00] Julian Assange:

By March 2017,   WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties.   It's spying on French and German leaders.   It's spying on the European Central Bank,   European Economics Ministries,   and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole.   We revealed the CIA's vast production of malware and viruses,   its subversion of supply chains,   its subversion of antivirus software,   cars, smart TVs, and iPhones.   CIA director Pompeo   launched a campaign of retribution.   It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo's explicit direction,   the CIA   drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian embassy in London   and authorized going after my European colleagues,   subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks,   and the planting of false information.  

My wife and my infant son were also targeted.   A CIA asset   was permanently assigned to track my wife, and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my 6 month old sons, Nappy.   This is the testimony   of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press,   which has been additionally corroborated by record seized   in the prosecution bought against some of the CIA agents involved.   The CIA is targeting of myself, my family,   and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial   and extraterritorial   means   provides a rare insight   into how powerful intelligence organizations   engage in transnational   repression.  



[00:02:34] ODELL:

Good Monday.  

[00:02:37] ODELL:

It's your host, Odell here   for another Citadel Dispatch.   The interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion.   That intro   clip you just heard was Julian Assange,   speaking for the first time since he's been a free man,   quite the indictment   on the US intelligence services,   and I I have to give him a lot of credit for being out there in public after everything he's been through.   If I was him, I   would have taken a little bit more time off, but,   he's a man who who cannot   be stopped. But anyway, with all that said,   we have a great group joining us today. We will be talking about   the newest mining pool to enter the Bitcoin fray,   ocean mining, with a focus on trying to solve a lot of the mining centralization   issues   that we've seen crop up.  

I have multiple guys from the team here.   We have we have, we have Mark who's one of the cofounders of Ocean. How's it going, Mark?   Hey. Pretty good, Matt. Thanks for having me. It's a it's a pleasure. And I think we have Luke here. I don't know if we have Luke here. Luke, are you here? Yep.   Nice.   2 so that's 2 of the 3 cofounders.   The 3rd cofounder,   isn't joining us today, but we have,   Bitcoin Mechanic who's been kind of the face of the operation. How's it going, Mechanic?  

[00:04:10] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. Real good, man. Thanks for having us. What's your official title, mechanic?   Chief Boiling Officer.  

[00:04:16] ODELL:

Chief Boiling Officer in charge of boiling the oceans.   And, we have Jason here who's   who's, like,   kind of low key one of the most important people at Ocean, I believe, I think over there doing a lot of the lot of the hard behind the scenes work. How's it going, Jason? Alright.   Awesome. And Jason, by the way, has one of the best backgrounds,   we've had in dispatch history,   because he appears to just simply being in Forrest.  

[00:04:44] Jason:

I'm actually just outside.  

[00:04:47] ODELL:

Fair enough. Well, you sound great. You probably have the best mic quality out of all of us.   So guys, I don't know where to start. I think,   the best place to start   is,   why Ocean and,   like why are you guys doing what you're doing   and why should people care and I guess we'll kick that off to mechanic since,   he's gotten quite good at this.  

[00:05:10] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Thanks. Yeah. Why Ocean? Because Bitcoin mining has really become more and more centralized   over the years. It's not what it was a long time ago. It's a very far cry from how it was described in the white paper and what we envisioned here. It's become bifurcated. It's become the separate element of the Bitcoin ecosystem.   There's none of those,   principles like not your keys, not your coins, don't trust, verify.   In mining, there's been a whole lot of trust. There's been a whole lot of closed source everything.   There's been a whole lot of centralization   around manufacturers.  

And it's just been its own thing, and it's gone off into, you know, crypto kind of territory that just doesn't carry with it the same kind of ethos that exists in the Huddl culture.   So,   we came around trying to say, we need to fix this.   You can't come up with naive solutions either, like saying everyone just needs to solar mine, and that's it.   Never even use a pool. You have to come up with a pool that wants to allow miners   to take their sovereignty back without having to make over the top self sacrifices for it, like wait 3 years to solo miner block and, you know, get all the rewards themselves.   That's not realistic for most miners. So they're gonna have to pool together.  

But how much the pool does   is entirely up to the ethos of the people running the pool and the demands made by miners.   So when it come to Ocean, we're saying we don't wanna hold your coins.   We wanna pay you out when we solve blocks. We also don't want to have control what goes in the blockchain. We want that to be your decision as well.   All we want to do is coordinate reward splits. And by the way, we don't want to do that in an opaque manner. We want everyone to know what those splits are and how we got there. We want you to be able to verify all that.   There are lots of principles that we could adhere to,   and we have done.  

But far and away, the biggest thing about what it is we wanna do is make miners actually construct templates   on the miner side rather than on the, you know, request. Even if the pool gives you multiple options for what you might like, we don't wanna be the ones even selecting that stuff.   And we wanna push it out one rung because there's only so many pools you can have. Right? I'll round off at this point. You can't have more than, let's say, optimistically, you can have a 100 pools out there. That's about the best you can do. After that variant   and,   we'll just sold online. So if pools are making templates, that means you necessarily have, at most, a 100 people in the world deciding what gets in the blockchain. That's not decentralized.  

So you have to push it out one rung and say, well, it's the miners actually, because there are tens of thousands of mining operations. There's only a 100 or so pools. So you have to push that out one wrong and say that's up to the miners to do. Then if and when censorship   starts to become   less of a theoretical issue and actually manifests as it's right to at the moment,   we have to be able to say, well, you got to go and find miners. And by the way, we don't know who any of them are. All you have to go on is a Bitcoin address. You have to go and find that miner who constructed that block and then, you know, do whatever punitive stuff you want to do to him. Coming after the pool is useless.   So that was long and short, that's why Ocean exists and that's what we're doing.  



[00:08:28] ODELL:

Awesome.   Yeah. I mean, I would I would say for some context   right now,   Bitmain which is,   one of the largest,   manufacturers of ASICs in the world,   is also,   one of the largest mining pools. And between them and their proxies,   they control about 50% of the hash rate. They they construct the blocks of, about 50% of Bitcoin blocks   that are distributed across the network.   And when we say constructive blocks, that means someone is, you know, who is deciding which transactions go in a block and get confirmed into Bitcoin.   And   obviously, I mean, I think when you have that kind of   centralization,   I think Bitcoiners should be very concerned.  

This is something that many of us have   been watching and been concerned about for a long time, but it hasn't really seemed like any real progress has been made. I will say, like, for a little bit of context is, you know, maybe bit main had even more control over the network in 2017 or something like that, but it hasn't gotten significantly better. Let's put it that way.   Now one of the things that we cover a lot is that Bitcoin mining is one of the hardest businesses to be in in the world being actual miner.   I think less so people realize, like, running a mining pool is   is probably up there as well, especially launching a new mining pool. And I'm curious, Mark,   on   on your thoughts about how, like, the I mean, when when did Ocean launch? Ocean launched, like, 8 months ago, I think.  



[00:10:07] Mark:

Yeah. It's 10 months 10 months and 1 week about Yeah. Like, how  

[00:10:11] ODELL:

what what are your thoughts on the last 10 months of   spinning up basically a brand new mining pool from scratch and and trying to join the market?  

[00:10:20] Mark:

Yeah. It's definitely been been a wild ride so far.   When we when we launched Ocean,   we we did it as as a rebrand of Allegius.   So it's not not   exactly a a new mining pool, but it is a new brand.   And so I guess we did have the advantage of of having,   having Luke and and Jason, the, you know, 2 guys on the call here,   running very successfully one of the earliest mining pools in Bitcoin. I think I think their pool dates back to 2,011,   so they were one of the first ones the first one to put their name in the Coinbase.   So we definitely had,   a bit of a head start in terms of, you know, the the tech. And and when when Luke and I, were   originally kind of,   spitballing ideas of of this was like pre ocean.  

Our parent company is called Mummelon, so this was even pre Mummelon.   We were just sort of new entrepreneurs   deciding to go into business together   and   looking at the landscape.   And, Luke had Luke had kept the the   domain active, you know.   I think that they ran the pool successfully until about 2017.   It was it was shut down and Luke and Jason went on to pursue other,   other interests successfully.   But Luke kinda kept the the domain active with the hopes that one day he would resurrect the Aegis.   And it just turned out that what Bitcoin, what the Bitcoin ecosystem was facing in terms of the centralization threats,   It was just the the prime opportunity to bring it back.  

And,   so it was,   I guess the challenge was was in terms of just   the the similar challenge that every startup faces in terms of coming up with, you know, with seed capital to fund the operation, putting together,   a winning team to to build the products and the tech,   and then and then getting the the name and the brand recognition out there to try to, you know, capture some of the market share. But we were fortunate to have 2 of the best developers   in the space being Luke and and Jason here. And Jason, I think as you mentioned, is is kind of like quietly one of the most, you know, influential   people in the space due to all his contributions.  

And then, you know, we added some really key key people like like Bitcoin Mechanic who can describe and articulate this stuff better than anybody else.   So I think I think we put together probably the best team in the business, and that that actually made it,   easy for us to actually start, making some some progress. And,   and, you know, we were fortunate to have the initial seed investment from Jack Dorsey   along with   some very wise advice for him from him to to adopt the new name for the pool because originally we were gonna call it Elegius.   And, funny joke inside, Luke between me, Luke, and Ian, none of us could agree on how to pronounce the old pool. I said I said Elegius.  

Ian said Elegis, and Luke would say Elegias.   And and Jack was like, fellas,   you can't even you can't even agree on how to say the pool. I think you should come up with a new name. And so so we we, we chose Ocean after,   a little bit of time going to the marketing drawing board. But,   yeah, it's been great. 10 months over in, and I think we're we're doing great, and and we're really hopeful for the future.  

[00:13:44] ODELL:

And Ocean's a great name. Definitely,   that was that was a good   not not,   I don't even know how to pronounce it now. I always pronounce it Elegius,   but Elegius always has a special place in our hearts, especially if you've been in Bitcoin for a long time. So not to diminish the,   the history of the name, but it's it's cool to have a fresh start, and it's just a very clean, punchy name.   I mean, Jason,   with all that said,   what I mean,   we were talking early   we were talking early on,   but before everyone else joined, before we even went live, we were talking about the recent downtime you guys faced and you being on the ground, getting it back up and running.   Do you wanna go into that a little bit about,   I I mean, when the hurricane hit, ocean went down for a little bit.  

What did that look like, from from your side?  

[00:14:39] Jason:

I mean, without getting too into, like, kind of our behind the scenes security aspects,   we do have redundancies in place. So there's there's that.   But this is just a   once in a lifetime thing. I mean, the location of the primary data center is in a spot where   we there's a Microsoft data center, a Google data center, Amazon data center, I mean Apple's there.   There's there's a bunch of places right in this spot because they don't get hit by this kind of stuff. And then everybody got hit with this. And so everybody's,   redundancies are falling 1 by 1, and it's just there's not a whole lot you can do in that. You can't really plan for   everything falling and then additional redundancies having some problems.  

So, yeah, I was boots on the ground, actually physically going and  

[00:15:25] ODELL:

getting things back up and running. How long was it down for?  

[00:15:29] Jason:

6 or 7 hours I think it was total.  

[00:15:32] ODELL:

I mean, that's pretty good considering, I mean, your office is outside. You don't even have a roof over your head.  

[00:15:39] Jason:

Alright. Yeah. Pretty much. No. It it worked out okay. The biggest issue was actually getting over there.   Get it I had to physically,   go over to the data center and make some changes to make sure everything got back up and running with with redundancy that didn't even exist yet. We had to kinda put some new things in place.   But with that, like, physically getting around, I mean, to get from   basically where I'm at to the data center, I physically had to get out of my car with a chainsaw, move like 5 trees.   It it was a day. So  

[00:16:12] ODELL:

work.  

[00:16:13] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. No joke. To date before launching Patum.  

[00:16:17] Jason:

Exactly. So   it's perfect timing and  

[00:16:21] ODELL:

Was that like, were you the Tatum launch was still was it was always planned for when you launched it. It wasn't like, oh, we went down. We might as well hit them with a new launch at the same time. No. That was that was planned for that. I was actually supposed to be there also, and that didn't work out. So   well, we can talk about data in a   second. I mean,   Luke, do you have anything to add here? I know you I think you're still with us. Luke is audio only, by the way, guys, because he has a very secure setup over there. So,  

[00:16:53] ODELL:

we're just I don't know.   Is there anything to add now?  

[00:16:57] ODELL:

I'm I mean, I'm curious, like, I mean, Allegius was however the hell you pronounce it was, you   know, it was a heavyweight pool. Right? And I think,   you know, you were   Mark said one of the first. I thought you were the actual first public pool,   but I mean, you guys know the history better than me. But regardless, it was like a very heavyweight pool.   Right now, I mean, I think people have really high expectations for Ocean, especially coming out of launch.   And I'm kinda I'm just I'm really curious just like how you guys are thinking about   at the end of the day, right, it comes down to growing hash and   what, like, bit main and his proxies   control probably, like, 400 x the amount of hash that you guys have so far or something like that. I mean, I'm not a mathematician.  

Like, how do you how are you how are any of you guys thinking about it? I mean, I I'll just open that up. I don't know who wants to answer,   but it's gotta be the thing that's on top of everyone's mind.  

[00:17:56] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. Naturally getting more hash rate. Like I said, there's only so many pools you can have. Right. Which implies there's just a bare minimum to be viable. Right?   And, I mean, that's that shakes out both ways.   Naively, the FPPS payout model that has become dominant,   which is a super high time preference   option that miners have gone for, where you get paid no matter what.   And you sort   of tell yourself the sweet lie that that is somehow a fair split of what comes out of the blockchain. Of course, it isn't. And when we launched Ocean, we were like, guys, this is super high time preference. Like, if someone's guaranteeing to pay you sats no matter what happens in the blockchain,   they're gonna take an enormous cut for that. They just have to because they have to deal with the randomness instead of you. So   Ocean with a low time preference approach that says, look, you know, if you wanna deal with the randomness of the blockchain, it's a lot more volatile,   but you'll make a lot more money overall. Where do where do we see that, you know, in Bitcoin otherwise. Right? You deal with years of bear markets and then you have an unbelievable bull market. It's just it's exactly the same thing. If you can stomach that kind of volatility,   then you can make a lot more money. If you can't and you want someone to come and clean it up and make it all pretty for you, then   then that's not going to be Bitcoin anymore. That's just going to be fiat again. Predictability   is just the essence of fiat. Right? It just always kind of sucks. It just sucks enough that people will tolerate it, and we all boil as frogs.  

So to that end, the fact that we have the payout system we do, unfortunately, is exacerbated.   The smaller we are as a pool, the more variance or the, you know, the longer it can drag out for before we resolve to a 100% luck. So Ocean is sitting there a couple of exahash now, which is good. The first exahash was the hardest. Of course, the second exahash was a lot easier.   And with what we're rolling out at the moment, we've actually seen a lot of organic growth.   And, you know, I think   around 3, 4, or 5, it starts to become that the variance is tolerable for 99% of miners, and they can just focus on revenue at that point and go, yeah, I mined with Ocean for   5 weeks, and it was enough for me to do my comparison with another pool. I earned   11%   more or something. These are the kind of numbers we've had thrown at us by miners. But the bigger our hash rate, the faster they can do the maths and do the comparison.  

Since launch, that has been since before launch, that's been our primary concern. The more hash rate we have, the better a product we can offer. Because if we're finding 1 block a week, that sucks for mine. If we're finding 3 blocks a day, that's fine. Then they can then they can have a viable operation and pay their utility bills without sweating it.  

[00:20:41] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean, that's the brutal part about,   the mining pool business, particularly   launching it or relaunching a pool or launching a pool, whatever you wanna say,   in terms of of this pool launch. I mean, I think so when when just to the listeners, when when mechanics is variance,   in in practical terms, what that means is is just how often the pool finds a block, so how often you get paid. Right? And, obviously,   people have rent rent costs, labor costs,   hardware costs. They have things they need to pay and,   humans don't like waiting to get paid.  

So so that variance figure is and then also you have ASICs that   go out, you know, they they they they lose their competitive advantage over time as as new a six enter the market so you wanna get paid quicker and it's kind of like success begets success and it becomes hard to bootstrap.   On on the opposite side, on the flip side of that is we saw Foundry launch.   We saw Foundry launch maybe 2 years ago, 3 years ago and they, like, quickly became the largest pool. Now, they had something up their sleeve which is that they just they KYC all their minors and they provided loans to their minors.   And the suits really liked it. Like the suits thought KYC was a feature so they had like kind of like a unique competitive advantage. And I actually think there's kind of some similarities with you guys that you are very unique in the pool space.  

So once you get your stride, maybe   we start to see momentum really build there.   So   I would say   from my perspective, I'm looking at it like,   you guys have 2, 2 key things that you're focusing on. You're focusing on   educating minors. Right? That this FPF PPF FPPS   model where they're basically outsourcing or outsourcing   block construction   and risk   to like the Central Bank of Geehan,   who is financing all of it is incredibly high risk for the golden goose that is Bitcoin. So you have the education side which like mechanic is focused on.   And then you have like the tooling side, like making the pool competitively   unique,   in the pool landscape.  

And it seems like that's where Jason's main major focus is, and and that's what's so important about this DATAM launch.   So I mean, Jason, do you want to explain I mean, you're the one who built it, I believe. Right? You wanna explain   what the hell Datum is and why people should care?  

[00:23:08] Jason:

So I mean, normally, when you connect to a pool, the pool gives you the work. The pool is the one that's running the Bitcoin node, and the pool is the one that's constructing the work that your miner is going to   try to find hashes for. Datum   shifts that. So where the pool is no longer giving you work, in fact, the pool gives you basically nothing except for how to split the rewards.   And you are running the node. You are making the block. And when you find it, you submit it to the network.   The only thing that Ocean's coordinating   is the payout split. So we're keeping track of how much work you do. We're making sure it is doing work for the pool,   and for the rest of the miners, including yourself.  

And that's pretty much it. So you are actually the miner again, and this is kinda taking you back to it it is solo mining. You you are solo mining with data. So the pool the pool's role is greatly diminished   in that we no longer have control over what is actually going into the block. That's all you as the miner.   Hopefully, it answers your question.  

[00:24:10] ODELL:

So I mean yeah. I you're it's like solo mining from the   position of you construct your blocks yourself.   Yeah. I mean, that that is solo mining. And then it's pool mining from the point of you don't have to deal with the variance of just being a small miner. You get to Exactly.   Share the work with others.   So this is something,   is absolutely   massive. Right? This is, I mean, this is the dream. Right? This is what we wanna see essentially,   within a pool, there's almost like all these   mini pools or, I don't know, solo miners, I guess. It doesn't matter. It's like They're solo miners. Metaphor.   And you kinda   distribute you distribute that censorship risk. Maybe some miners are censoring certain transactions, maybe some are,   censoring different transactions, but usually a transaction will get through regardless. There'll be there'll be some subset that isn't.  

And at the end of the day, the miners get to have total control over what they want to construct.   Now this is a this is a dream that,   a bunch of people have been working on on like the Stratum V2 side   and I   as part of your launch there's a lot of back and forth there   about Stratham v 2 versus Datum,   and why not do Stratham v 2? Like, how do you guys think about that? Like, why did you,   like, Jason, why did you just, like, build up, I mean, anyone can answer this, but why did you guys create a whole new   setup instead of using Star v 2?  



[00:25:44] Jason:

I mean, I can take it or mechanics kind of been in the weeds on it more than I have. It's a Yeah.  

[00:25:49] Bitcoin Mechanic:

I I look at it as it's it's not really that much of a technical question. Right? And if you approach it that way, it's kind of misleading. Like, there are multiple tools that do similar jobs in every domain.   Right? It's just, ultimately, it comes down to people and what they wanna do and what they wanna use things for. So   there have been s v 2 pools already.   And do they do anything for decentralization   of template construction?   No. Does that mean s v 2 isn't capable of that? No. Of course not. It actually is capable of decentralizing templates.   But I think I mean, look at a pool like brains. Right? It's an s v 2 pool. They have s v 2 firmware that you can use it for. But s v 2 does a lot of things. It doesn't just decentralize templates.  

It also allows encrypted and more efficient communication between the pool and the miner. It's an upgrade to centralized templates, and that's all it's getting used for. And it gets worse because brains is one of the most egregious Antpool proxies out there. They're they're box full of Antpools accelerated transactions.   And they switched to FPPS, which comes with its, you know, that's it's Faustian bargain of its own. If you're that small as a pool, being able to maintain the kind of money you need to be able to pay out to minors during periods of bad luck basically means you've got to turn to a parent company to come and bail you out. And you already said, you know, that's   its conjecture, but it's probably just Bitmain bankrolling smaller pools. And that's why you see them all having the same Stratton work, and you see them all using the same custodian.  

So   rather than be   congruent with what we wanna do with decentralizing templates,   their SV 2 use is entirely a virtue signal, and it's presenting the network as being more decentralized than it actually is. So that's a false sense of security.   It's the exact opposite of what we wanna do. Does it make SV 2 bad or anything? No. It doesn't. But I maintain that having a tool that does one thing and does it well is much better than having a tool that can do a whole bunch of things.   And because it theoretically can do something but never does,   it remains this sort of,   naively   superior solution. But if it never gets used that way, it's not gonna help anything. So it really comes down to the willingness of people in Ocean   to push for a thing. Right? That's why we've incentivized   it, saying, if you're making your own blocks, you get cheaper fees on Ocean than if you don't. We wanna push you to do this for the health of Bitcoin.  

If a pool isn't willing to do that, it doesn't matter whether a protocol exists or not. And it's not and   this was possible before   without Datum, but no one had any initiative to do it. The fact that we do, and the fact that we've made a, a protocol specifically to do it, speaks to exactly the way we think it should be done. Right? And s v 2 is just not quite the right tool for the job. And   some people took that as, like, you know, oh, I'm curious why you didn't use s v 2. I've been working on it for years. What's up? Other people took it as in, like, how dare you not use s v 2. You have to use it and got very offended by it. I mean, that's that's pretty ridiculous in my estimation. I I have said incorrect things about it before due to my own misunderstanding, but I've definitely corrected those and don't wish to imply   that it's not capable of miners creating templates themselves.  

It's more just looking at the social aspects and maybe even the political aspects of Bitcoin. And the fact that pools,   for the most part, don't really wanna give up template construction. They like it because it gives them a lot of control that they're happy not seeding over to the miners in a way that they just don't care about the fact that Bitcoin can't last like that. It can't last with less than a 100 people at best deciding what gets into the chain.   So   this but and it's not just that, right? Because Tatum is solo mining software.   First and foremost, that's what it does. You can use it to connect to an upstream pool that has Datum on the pool side that can verify everything you do and give you Coinbase splits if you request it. But if you don't wanna do that, this is just solo mining software, And it's been forever since mine like, anyone's solar mining,   for years, it's just you know, they usually use these things called solo pools, which are someone running a third party   Stratton server for you, running a node, constructing the templates on your behalf, undoing all of the sovereign aspects of solo mining, but giving you 98% of the reward split. And people have been calling this solo mining, and it just isn't. So I think it's good to try and re,   you know, redefine a few of these terms. Like, in our in our estimation,   Tatum is for solo mining. It can be solo mining where you split rewards with other people, or it can be solo mining where you literally just interact with the Bitcoin network permissionlessly   without anyone   having any sort of intermediation,   between you and the network. That's that's sovereign true solo mining, and there really aren't many people doing that.  



[00:30:43] ODELL:

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I I think you're mostly referring to, like, solo CK pool,   which is, like,   effectively  

[00:30:52] Bitcoin Mechanic:

yeah. They're constructing the they're constructing the blocks for you. It's not really solo mining. You need their permission. At the end of the day, when you find a block, you've got to ask them, hey, can you tell the network about this block? That's not sovereign. Like, with datum, if you're mining, even using ocean splits, if you're moving using datum, when you find a block,   your datum server tells your node about it, which tells the network about it. You don't need to ask So when you're when you're using datum,  

[00:31:18] ODELL:

the okay. But let's pull it back real quick. So I   what what appeals to me about   your strategy,   since very early on is just the idea of, like, simple robust solutions.   Right? That that's what appeals to me about Bitcoin, like, a lot of people are, like, a lot of non, you know, pre corners   or bitcoin deniers or whatever. They're, like, bitcoin is too complicated. Like, the reason I'm attracted to bitcoin is because it's actually incredibly simple and robust. It doesn't try and do all the things. Right? It's also why I've been so focused on Nostra lately.   It's just because it I feel it's a simple robust solution   to a problem that a lot of us have.  

And with DATM well, even pre DATM. Right? So you had this idea that   you're the I think you're the only pool that like shows the block template   that miners are mining predatum   on the website. Like, look, here here's here's what the next block would look like if we find a block. And then you went a step further and you were, like, okay, we're actually gonna provide multiple templates,   and instead of doing anything like really fancy,   it's like you're just putting a different stratum end point into your miner and then you're mining that template. Super simple. It's like very simple but that's the appeal to it. Right? And then with Datum,   I from my viewpoint,   the idea was we wanna solve really one main problem   which is   who constructs the blocks and let's try and do it in the simplest way possible,   and bring that back to who's ever actually   mining, who's ever actually running the miners.  

So, I mean, I   I I've I've spoken to you guys previously,   like, one of the key aspects of Datum   is how lightweight it is and that you can just easily run it on commodity hardware. So do you wanna talk about that briefly?  

[00:33:17] Jason:

Jason, we should take No. I'll jump in on that one. So, I mean, the that was written in c, and, it was kinda designed from the beginning to be as efficient as possible.   So, like, one of my test cases, I would run it on a pi 4   and throw 10,000 synthetic miners at it to see how it would go, and it does fine. So there's that kind of stuff. So we you can have reasonably specced hardware. You don't you don't need anything too crazy to be able to run datum. Actually, the heaviest load is the Bitcoin node.   Right. Because the Bitcoin node itself has to validate blocks from the network, take transactions into the mempool, keep the mempool, validate all that, etcetera. That's the heaviest part. The actual mining part,   some of our beta testers and alpha testers have been pretty surprised. They look at it like, oh, this is using 3% of one core with 8,000 workers connected.  

I mean, it's it's light. It's pretty light. So it's it doesn't take a lot of effort to once like, on the hardware side, there's not a lot of effort. And the setup of it is   pretty simple as well. If you can set up a Bitcoin node, you basically just have to add a few configuration options to the node itself and then run data alongside it. There's it's as   low friction as possible   to get you from   mining with the centralized templates that we make, that another pool makes, to actually mining your own template with your own node.   And I don't think we could make it much simpler than it is. Although, I think, like, mechanic with start 9 was trying to do   a package for it to make it even easier.  

But it's it's pretty simple and I think that's an important thing because then we can move away from solo pools   and things. If you want a solo mine, well just use Datum and mine either with split rewards promotion or get a 100% of the reward when you find your own block. Like no no middle man, no nothing.   So like like we'll get away from some of this stuff and kinda get people back to the network where they were 10 plus years ago.  

[00:35:18] ODELL:

Yeah. So, I mean,   I think   the most productive path for this conversation going forward is, I think we all agree,   that the ultimate goal is to have miners   construct their own blocks.   And if if that happens at scale via Stratum v 2, that would be fantastic. And if that happens at scale through Datum, that would be fantastic.   And let's just focus   on Datum rather than the comparisons because also I'm have   not as much knowledge about Straton v 2 as   as I probably should to, like, properly have that conversation. I don't know how much knowledge of it you guys have. But   with all that said,   so,   mechanic, like, you package this thing up for start 9. Right? So, like, I could have   I could have 4 a six   just like be like us really small humble home miner.  

I could have 4 a six or like a couple bid access or something like that and I could just run this on my start nine box with bitcoin knots connected to it because knots is   is basically what's what's powering a lot of the configuration and stuff like that as well.   And then I'm good to go. That's it.  

[00:36:30] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. On I'll get into the weeds a bit. So start 9 servers like to do everything by Tor or by n m DNS.   So everything's got dot locals at the end of it,   and you can't put a dot local into your Antminer. It doesn't know how to use that. You need an IP and a port. So there's one little hack you have to do on the current version of Star OS.   That's 3 lines pasted into terminal, and that's it. Then, you'll be able to access   your,   start 9 servers   datum service,   over your local area network.   It's it's really, really simple.   Accessing it over, like if you have a hosted miner and you wanna point that star 9 server, that gets a bit more complicated. But if you want to do stuff like that, there's probably other easier ways for it. But, yeah, with the if you have, like, an old Raspberry Pi 4 version of Star OS   running 0351,   which is the latest version,   I dare say you could have a 1,000 minuteus pointed to it, and it wouldn't even break a sweat.  

So if you have a garage with a 1,000 bit axis in it, you're fine. Go for it.  

[00:37:37] Jason:

Yeah. I think your biggest thing would be, like, block validation time with the node. I mean, the Pi 4 does  

[00:37:43] ODELL:

does take a little bit of time to validate blocks now. But Yeah. I mean, it's like a pie. Don't use a pie. But, like, if it was like,   like, a $125,  

[00:37:51] Jason:

like, old Intel machine or some shit. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's More than good. The fact that it can do it on a pi four is just kind of the benchmark. If you can go that low, then anything else you can just reasonably acquire is within reach.   And, and I think that's that's important. And I I don't see that with   any other solutions that are, like, potentially   potentially out there. It's just one of those things that's   not not much is designed to be lightweight anymore.   And   I don't know why, but that's that's one of the things I like to do. I like to code things to the metal and make sure make sure it's as as efficient as possible. If we have a task to do, that's all it should do. It shouldn't have 4,000 extra libraries and 4,000 steps that you gotta do and all these other things that have to happen in order for it to work. It should just do what it's supposed to do.  

[00:38:39] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Last binary you sent me was 240   kilobytes.  

[00:38:43] Jason:

Right? Yep. Yeah. It's it's not it's not big.  

[00:38:47] Bitcoin Mechanic:

I mean, it's all written in c.   Oh, maybe I'm not supposed to say, but it contains a totally unrolled SHA 256   just to get rid of one dependency.  

[00:38:59] Jason:

So Not anymore. We actually we actually changed that.   But but yeah.   So yeah. I mean, it's just it's just designed to be efficient, and that and that's part of it. So in that, it's,   the the protocol's encrypted.   It's binary protocol. So we're not sending just plain text JSON over the Internet anymore,   and doubling the amount of data that we have to do versus stratum v one.   And it's it's just does all of that in a more effective way.  

[00:39:27] Bitcoin Mechanic:

So it can use SV 2 as well, for the communications between the DATM server and Right. Miners. It can use SV 2 for that if and when Bitmain and Whatsminer will release s v 2 firmware, and it's not just, you know, a couple of aftermarket firmware like brains that allow it. We can still use that and it was between the miners and the datum server. Yeah. Datum can use s v 1 or s v 2. But right now between  

[00:39:51] ODELL:

Datum   and like ocean servers or if another pool adopted it, who knows? But between Datum and ocean servers, that's that connection's encrypted.  

[00:40:00] Jason:

Right. That's the so the Datum protocol itself is encrypted between   your we call it the Dedham gateway   and the pool.  

[00:40:08] ODELL:

So and then between your miners and the gateway, that's currently still s v one because everything supports s v one. Right. So that so that that solves the man in the middle concern unless they're in your local network. Yeah. And if they're in your network, you're in trouble anyway. You're probably really fucked. Yeah. Okay. So that's huge. Okay. That's so it's not just it doesn't just solve the block construction part. I mean, there's people have always been concerned   that people would sit in between   malicious actors   including potentially ISPs, you know, could sit in between the the pool and   and the minors and   and and basically try and steal money.  



[00:40:45] Jason:

Yeah. And and one of the big considerations with that was the encryption. It just it just had to happen. There was there was no reason not to do it. And to also make it a protocol that wasn't,   forgetting the term off the top of my head, but basically if you do manage demand in the middle of it, the amount of information you can glean from the connection or from logging it is not enough to know exactly what's going on,   just by other aspects of how it's how things are happening.   So there were there was a lot there to try to make sure   that this is this is as secure as that could possibly be for what it's doing.  



[00:41:20] ODELL:

That is.   Okay. So I mean then the other concern is   the other thing when it comes down to individual miners constructing their blocks,   is if I'm a miner and I'm constructing my blocks   and I'm trying to do it,   I'm a let's, you know, everyone says   like good faith actor, bad faith actor, usually it's like some kind of blend in between.   Like one man's good faith actor might be another man's bad faith actor.   But at the end of the day, like, you're almost in partnership with other people that are participating in your pool.   And one of the concerns is that what if I have a malicious actor   that is mining   with the pool   and is intentionally trying to disrupt operations at the pool and make it so it's less profitable for other people mining at the pool. And you could you can, you know, one one example you could point to is a com a competing pool. Let's say, you know, let's just use Jehan as our main bad guy at Bitmain.  

Like Bitmain is trying to disrupt operations at Ocean by   intentionally,   either, like,   block withholding or like mining   unprofitable blocks or less profitable blocks.   Like how does data handle that edge case?  

[00:42:39] Jason:

So I mean the the pool itself, I mean, you have to keep in mind that you are in a pool and it's we're trying to the pool's duty is to make sure that we're lowering variance for the miners and ensuring they get a fair split of rewards.   So in order to do that, we have we have to do   some   I don't know what term to use for it, but, basically, to ensure everybody's doing what they're supposed to do. And the goal behind the algorithm for the datum back end is to if you were to solo mine whatever you are mining,   that is the reward you would get over time. So if you wanna mine   a block that just doesn't have anything   of value in it anymore, like, you're just you're just doing all out of band 0 fee transactions, well, you can do it, but you're not getting the same reward as somebody else on the pool that's going to be mining   like what we would consider a normal block, I guess.  

So if the entire pool is mining blocks of x bitcoin and you're mining blocks of 90% of that where you're gonna get 90% of the reward.   The the actual algorithm and how that works isn't completely   publicly fleshed out and I don't know how much I can speak to it but   basically we have to protect the miners from attacks like that. And and we have to do it in a way where we're not making the decision for   what can be in your block. So we're still not we're not going to tell you, no. You can't do this. But we we have to tell you that, no. You can't lose this other miner money.   So   if you wanna if you wanna do a block that's   however you wanna construct it. If you wanna make empty blocks, I mean, I think that's silly,   but we're not gonna stop you from doing it. You're just not going to make as much money doing it as you would mining blocks with transactions in them. Like the next block the next block and the block after that, your proportion is paid less than it would otherwise be paid.  

So it it's it has to be based on something that's not   determined by us And   that the only way to do that is to make it determined by the entire the entirety of the pool. So if the entirety of the pool will set the baseline across the whole share log   and   that's the baseline.   If everybody's mind something?   Kinda. Like I said, I I don't know how much we've gotten into this publicly as of yet. But, but, yeah, I mean,   the short of it is we're not going to let somebody some malicious actor screw over the rest of the pool. And we're also not going to let somebody who, like, just is doing things that just aren't profitable for the rest of the pool   make everybody else's money. The other miners can't subsidize your behavior   whether it's good or bad.  



[00:45:14] ODELL:

Like somebody else isn't required to subsidize that. I mean, to me, this is like the most incredibly important aspect.   Right? Because a pool like Foundry   can solve it by just KYC ing everybody. Mhmm. It's obviously, to me, not a solution and obviously, definitely not a long term solution. You don't want the majority of minors k y c ed.   And,   you know,   to me, like, the idea that like, let's use Foundry again as an example, which by the way, like, I'm not   trying to shit on them too much because it's, like, the single best thing Barry Silber has ever done. There's some good people at Foundry, and it's, like, one of the last things that's, like, holding back Bitmain right now while we try and figure our shit out. Agreed.   So thank you to the k y c suits   over there.  

But,   like Foundry, you can't even permissionlessly   join their pool. Right? Like, you can't go and find a stratum endpoint and join their pool. Like, you have to have, like, a coffee meeting with them or something, like, I don't know how you go about joining that pool,   but if you have a pool that is people can permissionlessly   join   and they can construct their own blocks,   then this becomes a significant issue, and one of the things with Bitcoin is the beauty of Bitcoin is you don't have to assume   good faith. It it, like, in fact, it's the opposite, like, you can assume everyone's a greedy actor and the system is more robust for it. So, like, if we want a system that's actually gonna work at scale and is gonna attract serious hash rate,   it can't be based on that assumption. So,   I mean, I think on the surface, whatever you guys have cooked up here,   like, makes a lot of sense to me. It seems very clever. I wonder, like, do you guys have a plan? Is it going to be   transparent  

[00:46:57] Jason:

on how that calculation works? Like, I the Yeah. That that is the plan. That is the plan. We're still doing a private exclusive beta at the moment. So I mean, a a lot of the stuff isn't public including the code. We we plan on having that all out by 18th.   So   there'll be a lot a lot more questions answered in detail there. But the the main the main thing is that   again like another miner like I as miner a can't subsidize the behavior of miner b be it them a good or bad actor. What they may think what they're doing is a good thing.  

[00:47:31] ODELL:

Luke Yeah. I mean an example   an example you would have that's not necessarily quote unquote bad actor but would, you know,   absolutely suck if I was part of the pool with them and be like a race to 0   is if a miner in a high fee environment was literally just solely   taking out of band transaction fee accelerations and just not sharing it with everybody else. Right. Would be one of the examples here. And then you kinda create a tragedy of the commons   where it's, like, everyone's incentivized to have, like, these black market transaction fee acceleration   situations   because no one else in the pool is sharing with them. So they're all, like, hiding it and  

[00:48:07] Jason:

taking it you have you have the thing.   Like you said it is permissionless and it is it is non custodial. So at the at the end of the day, we can't stop somebody from doing that, but we can stop it from hurting somebody else's bottom line.   Right. That's that's the only thing that we can do as the ones that are calculating the reward split. Yeah. And the onus is on the onus is on us to do that. If we don't Exactly.  

[00:48:32] ODELL:

You just won't get the hash.  

[00:48:34] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Well, I mean, we can't make life horrible for the minors on the pool. And it is a sort of yeah.   You know, if you wanna be a part of the club, then you have to abide by the rules of the club. And if you don't like the rules of the club, you can leave the club. It's not, you know, I'm sure some people are gonna paint it in the most negative light possible.   But the end of the day, man, like,   we can't we can't   it's permissionless and permissionless,   like, anything that's permissionless is open to abuse. So it's on someone to try and make the abuse as minimal enough   that everyone else can have a nice time. So same with Nostra. Right? Nostra's permissionless and censorship resistant. And then you get these reply guys, spam things everywhere, just making it a miserable experience for everyone. Yeah. And Will and all the people working on Nostra   aren't being silly about it. They're like, let's figure out a way to deal with this. Otherwise, Nostra's gonna suck. Right. So, you know but if you have, in theory, you could have a centralized social network that had a way to get rid of all the spam. Somehow, they couldn't even do it. It's found your model. It's KYC. You I mean, you could get rid of you could take blood tests of everyone who posts,   and you don't ban them, and then you never have spam. Right. And how horrible a solution is that? Because it it doesn't even work anyway. Like,   Elon, it's Twitter is completely centralized, and there's still spam everywhere. You even see, like, blue check mark spam. Like, I don't so KYC isn't really a real solution, but, I mean, maybe that's because of the financial incentives. They're, like, inflating the number of accounts they have and stuff. I'm sure with centralization of a social network, you could minimize spam.  

But if you wanna decentralize it and make it permissionless,   it's hard to get those protocols   resistant to abuse.  

[00:50:17] ODELL:

Yeah. So you make a strong incentive. So, I mean, Jason, real quick, like, did you just hit me with,   it'll be open source in 2 weeks?  

[00:50:25] Jason:

Give or take.  

[00:50:27] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. Pretty much. What's 11 days? Let's say 11 days. Less than 1 or 2 weeks. Well, I gave him 3 days. I gave him a new business 3 days. But, yeah, that that is the goal.  

[00:50:37] Jason:

But, yeah, I mean, one of one of the things that people, like, just completely gloss over. There's a huge difference between in a pool that will KYC or any entity like that that does that and something that's permissionless. Because let's say you're a miner and   you you're mining to address a b c and   for some reason, you you do something you're not supposed to and and we want to stop you from doing that. Well, okay. We can let let's let's say we have the ability to do that, which we really don't. You could just change addresses or change IP. We don't know who you are. We we have none of that information. So we're we are truly permissionless. We're not we can't stop that. And so because we can't, every the guardrails have to be in place to make it so that the that the pool as a whole   is useful for everyone.  

And   there's a lot of different ways we we kind of spitballed on how to do that. And the consensus kind of was we can't base like that on, like, let's say let's say we had, like, a baseline template. Like, everything was judged by what we thought was the template. We we can't do that because then   then we're the arbiter again. Yeah. And and because of that, we we had to come up with a way where the miners are the arbiters and they're the ones determining what everyone's gonna make. And that way so when the ultimate goal is so if you solo if you mine and you mine with Datum and you solo mine with Ocean,   then   whatever you are mining is what you would earn   in the long term. So if you're if you're able to mine a block a year,   that would earn you 33.2   Bitcoin, let's say. Well, in a year, you should earn 3.2 Bitcoin. Well, actually, maybe even more because  

[00:52:19] ODELL:

you'd have better variance.  

[00:52:21] Jason:

Well, no. That's the variance doesn't necessarily change your reward. The variance gets you there. With spikes.   Right. It gets you there a little more more smoothly.  

[00:52:30] Bitcoin Mechanic:

It definitely makes it some resolution.  

[00:52:32] Jason:

Right. So but that way, like, assuming a 100% luck and you mine your block in a year,   like, that's what you would still get by mining your block with Ocean.  

[00:52:42] ODELL:

That's the goal. So if you wanna mine an empty block, you're gonna get an empty block worth of rewards at the end of the year. It's clever. That's it's a smart solution. It's it's a smart I mean, I guess, mitigation. I've never I'd it was one of those unsolved problems that everyone it was like,   you know, there's so many things like that with where people are like, oh, yeah. Well, we're just gonna send construction block construction to the individual miners or whatever. It's like, yeah. I just kinda feel like you're hand waving it away and, like, that's just not gonna work because people take out of them fees and this to me is a very pragmatic, clever, simple,  

[00:53:16] Jason:

mitigation  

[00:53:17] ODELL:

that I like a lot.   So you guys keep saying permissionless.   Am I correct   that   the individual minors are broadcasting  

[00:53:26] Bitcoin Mechanic:

their blocks when they find it or do you guys ultimately choose like I don't, like, we don't like that block. You construct it. We don't like you. We don't like that block. You can't We can't stop them. Heck no. When you find a block, we want you to tell the network about it. We don't wanna add another hop and slow things down because, you know, it's a 10 minute race, man. I don't want a 2 second delay. And it's   it it wouldn't be solar mining if you weren't telling   the network around the blocks you found. You need to tell the network directly. But there is configuration options in that one for you to add extra,   you know,   places to send it just because you want to blast that block out as as far and wide as it will go the minute you find it, just in case there's a, you know, a competing block that gets found, you know, 20 milliseconds later. You want your block to be known around. The pool wants that. Everyone wants that.  



[00:54:14] ODELL:

That's awesome.   Yeah. So, I mean, in short, we can't stop you from broadcasting your block. So you become more of just, like, kind of a, like, a coordination server. You're just kinda Exactly.  

[00:54:24] Bitcoin Mechanic:

And this, I mean, there's plans for us to disintermediate   further, but that's not going to be   DAM's first launch. But basically, the dream is P2Poo.   Every miner does everything, and there's no central point of failure.   Ocean's still doing a little bit because we're coordinating the rewards, but we have a way to,   you know, the plan is to minimize that even further.   But, I mean, I don't know how much we should get into that now. It's it's quite a way off.  

[00:54:52] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean, let's stick with the things we got now,   or at least in 2 weeks.   The   the   so, I mean,   mechanic, you know, me and you have and, I mean, I think Luke is still on the call. Yeah. Luke's still on the call.   Luke since Luke hasn't chimed in, it's important to realize that everything we've said up until this point, Luke strongly endorses   everything we've said because he hasn't spoken.   Okay. It's an endorsement. In 2 weeks.  

[00:55:25] ODELL:

What was that? In 2 weeks.  

[00:55:28] Jason:

In 2 weeks.   I I think it's important to point out that people are using this today. It's not something that is, like, that doesn't exist, and we're just saying it'll be out. It there's people that are using it, and we found they found blocks with it already. Yeah. We've had blocks shop on mental space that stayed the name of the miner that made it. Right? That's cool. I like that little piece because social signal's important. It's cool that  

[00:55:50] ODELL:

it shows who found the block. That's basically the only   besides picking which transactions are in the block and maybe you're picking some that are your own transactions or something, like, that's the main incent that's, like, the main bonus of you finding it rather than someone else finding it. Right? Well, importantly,  

[00:56:06] ODELL:

it's not it's not just who found the block. In fact, we designed and created the block. Right. So  

[00:56:13] Jason:

Who built the template? Right. Yeah. There's there's a difference between you as the miner and a pool that found the block, which is cool. Don't get me wrong. But if you didn't make it, I mean, you are not the miner. Like, that's that's just the line. There there is a line there. So anyway, where I was going with this,  

[00:56:29] ODELL:

was   mechanic, me and you have, like, we have I think we both care about Bitcoin a lot. I mean, I will say personally that I have a lot of respect for you,   and we both have very strong opinions about things,   which I think people should have strong opinions. Like, we'd it's just like a waste of time if you don't have strong opinions.   And we've been a little bit   kind of on the same side on the, like, the bullshit ordinals, inscriptions,   spams, stuff,   that we both think it's, you know,   more or less a scam,   and   it's fleecing retail, and people are buying things that are worthless.  

But   where we've differed   and that is trending to 0, like, long term, like, none of this shit will have any kind of value and we'll, like, look back on it in a few years and people just be, like, what the fuck was that, like, why   why were retards even doing that in the first place,   like ICO's and stuff like that.   And we're kinda already seeing it. I'm not gonna I don't wanna do the Jinx thing where I say that and then, like, Udi just, like,   launches a bunch of things on chain, because I feel like that's what always happens,   when people say that, like, oh, we're we're done with it now, and then it just happens.  

But where we've differed is,   like, how we respond to that situation.   Right? And I've been more of, like, a   transaction fee maximalist, like, oh, they're just gonna spend a shit ton of money and then they'll run out of money,   and you've been on the side of,   because you can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but you've been more on the side of, oh, well, like, there's, like, real things that we can do today to to to stop the effect on UTXO Bloat and stop it from happening.   Whether it's nodes not relaying   transactions or whether it's   Ocean not having a template that includes them in the first place.  

Was my synopsis relatively good before I continue?  

[00:58:27] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. Sure. I don't disagree with what you're saying. Awesome.  

[00:58:31] ODELL:

And so am I right though that in this situation,   like, if if this shit continues or whatever,   like, Ocean could be, like,   the, like, the best pool   to mine descriptions on. And, like, are you guys cool with that? Is that, like,  

[00:58:50] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Well, yeah, we've said that unequivocally. Right? It's   the deep principle is that miners should be able to put what they want in blocks. And we But at the same time, miners shouldn't protect everything in the block.  

[00:59:03] ODELL:

It's all for 2.  

[00:59:05] Bitcoin Mechanic:

I'm not sure if people are making you out. You kinda sound a little muffled. I have no idea what you said.   I I do believe in Luke Clark. Correct me if I'm wrong. You said that people shouldn't be putting that stuff in their blocks. You shouldn't do it. But you But that's a different question. Right? Yeah. It's it's a free speech thing. And if I if I don't care about speech I hate, then I'm not into free speech. Right? Right. You have to be able to do it. We want minors to be able to do it. There was also that, like,   happy irony I like to sort of pontificate on where if these things all get branded as unregistered securities and suddenly the centralized pools can't mine them, then the only way to do it is ocean. That would just be the kind of irony that happens. Right? Even though we were the pull against it. And I would just find that funny. That's That's what I'm saying. Like, it could be, like, it could be the pool.  

Yeah. For sure. I think I think   because people just look at it comes down as a retort, and this is a bit of tangential to the spam conversation. But one of the critiques of Ocean was and it's the last topic, which was, you know, if Mara can go out there and get, like, the world's best fees for its block space and, you know, take out of band transaction fees to guarantee that you get in the blockchain in 6 hours or whatever or give you 99% of a guarantee because they have enough hash   rate, then people are like, well, they're always going to have the most fees in their in their blocks. And Ocean with a decentralized model can never compete with that. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. It's just there's a flip side to that argument, which is centralized template constructors also have to comply with regulations.   Decentralized ones don't. So   in some circumstances,   decentralization   is more lucrative. In other circumstances,   centralization is more lucrative. It's not always just better to be centralized until you get shut down or regulated. That's not the case. Right? So that was kind of my point with that. I want to see block space get kind of weird. That that would be healthy Bitcoin to me, where what's in blocks just is kind of strange   and unpredictable because right now, like, you have this perspective out there. Most people refer to the mempool as the mempool implying that there is like a cohesive vision around what's going in the next block. That's how mempool space present it. Everyone talks about the mempool. And of course, if you had such a thing as the menpool, you wouldn't need a blockchain.  

Right. That implies that we have a complete   congruent   universal agreement around what there is and the order in which it was created.   That's not true. Everyone's menpool is different,   and your mempool is a reflection of ultimately what you'd like to see in the chain. So coming back to the spam,   the disagreement around spam that you and I have,   one of my contentions   is that as a node, you have absolutely no incentive to relay JPEGs around. You're not interested in storing them. They're unspendable. UTXOs.   They make IBD worse for everyone   and no one is paying you to relay it. At the end of the day, minus   maybe they have, you know, 8¢ worth of incentive to put it in a block. Sure. But as a node, I have absolutely no interest. So You have one you have one incentive.  



[01:02:04] ODELL:

What what's that? If you don't want Wiz to dictate   what your transaction fee estimation is.  

[01:02:11] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Well, mempool space uses a that's exactly it. Right?   Not not really. No. Well, mempool uses the fee estimation approach of there is 1 mempool, and we will use that to estimate whether you're gonna getting in the next block or not. But that's not how Bitcoin software actually usually does it. It looks backwards   and says, here's what the average things have been in blocks. Because   one approach is robust. And in the future, like, if every if everyone is solo mining and putting weird stuff in the chain, you don't look at your mempool and go, alright, here's how much I got to pay. If your mempool has nothing to do with what other miners are putting   into   into the chain. And the latter approach   implies that we have decentralization.  

The former doesn't. And it's a concern. If there is, like, like I say, if there is a the mempool   and you can predict what is in the next block with near 100% certainty,   that implies   that everything has become completely centralized.  

[01:03:12] ODELL:

It's always a guess.   I mean, it's it's an estimation. You're making an estimate. Right? And and,   I mean, I would go up further than what you said. I would I would say, like, long term,   like,   decentralized block construction or distributed block construction, whatever term you wanna use, is gonna be more like, way more profitable   than, like, centralized suit miners or suit pools or whatever,   that have a central point of failure and have, like, all this bureaucracy that's attached to it because   we will have a wide variety of transactions, and there will be a lot of transactions that they're just straight up not allowed to mine.   But in the in the meantime   in the meantime,   if we were in a situation   where   I don't know the exact number, but it felt like we were at, like,   70%,   80% of transactions   that were being included in blocks   was bullshit transactions.  

And if you weren't seeing those bullshit transactions,   you had, you know, you basically had to trust a third party to have any kind of insight there if you weren't running a node that was seeing them.  

[01:04:21] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Not really. Not really because,   I mean, you're looking at the blocks that have been found. Right? You're not looking at what's in any kind of mempool. Like, really, that is how Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots do fee estimation. They don't look at the mempool. They look at what was the last block. Right. But mempool space looks at,  

[01:04:38] Jason:

mempool the mempool open source project, like, if you're running that on your start 9 or whatever, is looking at your mempool. You're right. The thing about it is you have to keep in mind the only reason they're able to do that with any reasonable amount of certainty   is because everybody runs every miner is running Bitcoin core with default settings. Right. That's it. Centralization.   And so they they can predict with pretty good accuracy what's going to end up in the chain because everybody's doing the exact same thing. Until a Mara pool block comes along. Exactly.  

[01:05:08] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. And and that throws everything off, including all the FPPS rates. And we go, oh, well, let's pretend that Right. Right? So it's not a robust way for fee estimation to work. The the Bitcoin and it doesn't even,   you know, you have to deal with things like witness discounts and, I think who was it that was getting into this? It was AJ Towns, I think, that was like, no. There's a reason, like,   mature adult version of fee estimation looks at what's been happening in the blockchain. It doesn't look at some sort   of pretend mempool that's supposed to represent everyone else's mempool and be certainly what every miner will include in the next block, because you have no guarantees of any of that. It's all unknown. You can only go off the blockchain, which is like driving looking in the rearview mirror. Fair enough. It it's kinda ridiculous, but it's   what's in the rearview min mirror is agreed upon by everyone. What's in front of you is just a perspective.  



[01:06:00] ODELL:

Right. There's no global there's no global mempool. There's no there's no global state. There's a global state once blocks get confirmed. Or I mean, if you talk to There's a global mempool. Number of blocks are confirmed.   Right.   That's the innovation.  

[01:06:17] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. For sure it is, man. That's that is literally the Byzantine general's problem. It's like Right. If we could agree on a men pool, then we would both know to attack the city at 2 PM and neither of us would die. Right? You know the whole   the whole   fable or whatever you call it, the thought experiment.   But, yeah, I mean, it I just wanna address some of the other things you said as well. It's probably good to do so. Getting sucked into the whole spam thing,   with Ocean was very, very   stressful and,   ironic given that we wanted to make it minor's choice rather than anyone else.   But looking back on it,   I certainly learned a lot.  

And,   at the time, I had a kind of knee jerk perspective   on it. But over the over time, I sort of realized, actually, this is I was a lot more correct than I initially realized, and I wasn't really making very good arguments at the beginning of it. And over time, I began to realize how Bitcoin actually worked. And now I just when people are telling me that they have an ideological   difference with me based on how I feel we should treat arbitrary data and how they feel it should be treated,   invariably, they're always running Bitcoin Core with default settings, which literally just says   a transaction could be any size as long as it can fit inside the max block size limit. Right? It can't be 5 megabytes, but it could be any other size. It can fit as long as it fits in the block. But if your arbitrary data I'm setting you to 83 bytes as a limit. We've and we've done that forever. We've always treated arbitrary data as different from financial activity, and no one ever had a problem with it or characterized it as censorship.  

It was always like, oh, if you wanna do that, you gotta use op return. And if you're using op return, you're only allowed 83 bytes. You can't put, like, a whole JPEG in an op return. You can you can get a minor to do it because it's consensus valid, but   it's going to you're not going to be able to get it around the network. Right? So everyone stayed inside that limit. There were op returns all the time, but they would never be bigger than 83 bytes. And that was it. And knots had 42 bytes instead because that was an older limit that loop never changed in knots. And everyone suddenly was like, well, this is censorship.   And I was saying, well, wait a minute. You're doing the same thing just to a different degree. Like, no one is running completely laissez faire men pool policies that just say everything is equal. Go ahead. All of it. No one is. And so when people would make, I'm saying, ideologically,   we may disagree on paper. But in reality, what you're doing with your node that you've run-in completely default settings is ideologically   aligned with me. It's just you haven't actually taken the time to look at what your node is doing. And then there were projects like Libra Relay that Peter Todd came out with where it's like, actually, we do want to have the ideological opposite position where we say there is no difference between arbitrary data and financial activity. And that was a new concept that entered the fray. And I'm like, fair enough if that's your position.  

But all we were doing when we came out with,   you know, a more hostile attitude to arbitrary data   was, we felt, completely congruent with how Bitcoin's worked forever since the op return wars   since,   Satoshi's time even when he was talking about things we can do to minimize people trying to store JPEGs and MP 4s in the chain. This was this has always had a reasonable precedent.   I think I didn't do a very good job of explaining it when Ocean launched,   and my knowledge wasn't really there yet. But over the as time has progressed, I've become more and more convinced that it was completely reasonable for us to do it and that it just was a marketing fail.   And, again, I'm going to take most of the responsibility for that.  



[01:09:49] ODELL:

I would also want to point out that Liber relay is kind of just a larp because it still has most of the spam filters in place. It just removed the one offered from the limit.  

[01:09:59] Jason:

Well, we're getting I was gonna mention that, but yeah.  

[01:10:03] ODELL:

I mean, look. I think at the end of the day,   like,   one of the most beautiful things about Bitcoin   is that you you get to choose what you run.   Right? And,   I I I think mempool policy is a particularly strong example of that,   because it pretty much   only affects yourself.   And if if you wanna run a a different mempool policy than some if you if you want to, you can run no mempool,   and that's your prerogative.   The network should still function as designed.   I I do think there is a,   there is a concern   that you end up in a situation. I think it's mostly   a straw man or mostly I don't know if straw man is the right word. Maybe it's like,   it's it's one of it's, it's like a borderline straw man where you have, like, this theoretical argument that probably will never happen in real life,   but then people make you argue against it anyway,   which is more or less, I think, the def definition of a straw man.  

But   this idea that   we do I think   as big corners, we do want, in general,   the majority of transactions going through,   like, standard mempool relays around the world.   Just like people actually like independent node runners relaying these transactions around the world rather than, like, the extreme example of being, like, 90% of transactions are just going straight to the pool and, like, no one sees them. I think that would be a a net negative. I don't think   we really can comprehend, like, what the,   like, the knock on effects of that type of situation at scale for a while is. But I think also in practice, like, that probably will never happen. And it can't happen if mining is decentralized.  

[01:11:59] ODELL:

Yeah. Basically, it's no longer making this decision.  

[01:12:02] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. If you have that sounds like a pool problem rather than a PTP problem. Like, if there is only one pool,   it whether you have a mempool or not, that's a massive issue.  

[01:12:15] ODELL:

Right. But I mean well, I guess my point is is, like, there's something beautiful about the fact   that we don't broadcast directly to pools. Yeah. For the most part, the majority of transactions. Right? You broadcast or not. Well, that's the that was the Yeah. That's my point. Right? It's like but you're just you're just broadcasting it to the network. It's getting relayed, you know, it's getting relayed around nodes and, like, eventually, it gets to a miner that mines the transaction.  

[01:12:39] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. And that's that's an important part of what. That's your power as a node. It's one of the many things that happens if you are a node is that you   are relaying stuff that you think belongs in the chain and you're helping decentralize   the communication between people that want to use the chain and people that put stuff in the chain.   That's decentralized via the P2P layer.   And, yeah, you wouldn't want to degrade it, but it's every single person on it is a sovereign individual.   And if they're saying,   like my note, I have a couple of nodes. Right? They don't relay anything. One of them relays op return.  

The others don't even relay that. They don't relay,   arbitrary data. Right?   And they're both set,   they're both set to, 42 bytes.   But that 42 bytes of data carrying includes the new kind that came along after, you know, the combo of Segwit and Taproot that allowed them, you know, all the the stuff to get outside what data carrier normally pertain to.   And   that's my vote. Right? Like, this is my mempool. There are others like it, but this one is mine. Like, it's   if if they if minors find out about this stuff, they didn't find out about it from me, and I have no reason really to put it in there, and it's definitely not gonna make any difference to, to fee estimation.   So,   I think, yeah, keeping all that in mind,   that seems to me   a logical way for minors to offer for sorry, for people running nodes to operate on the network. I I I think it's overblown the idea that there's any fee estimation issues as a result.  

And,  

[01:14:11] ODELL:

It actually, improves the estimation if you use better spam filters.   But then you're no longer looking and saying, why didn't that transaction get in? Okay.  

[01:14:22] Bitcoin Mechanic:

That is that is true. If the minute there's a pool like Ocean exists as well, like but I'm not getting into the weeds of that one. I'm gonna start falling over myself trying to explain it.  

[01:14:35] ODELL:

Do you do do you wanna get into the weeds, Luke?  

[01:14:40] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean, good fee estimation algorithms look at what transactions you saw when they were broadcast, and then which ones got mined, how long it took them to get mined.   And if you're look if you're including spam in your memory pool,   and they're not getting mined, it it's gonna look like   maybe they didn't have enough beer, who knows what, and it's going to skew your fee estimation to think that you have to pay more than you might really actually have to.   But if you filter the spam, then you're just not paying it any attention. You're only looking at the transactions   that are most likely going to get mined by everybody.  



[01:15:15] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Interesting. So the the tab, the most accurate fee estimation,   if it works that way,   you wanna make sure you're only accepting transactions that are most likely to get in the chain.  

[01:15:26] ODELL:

Right. And even in   even Bitcoin Core, when it accepts transactions, if it thinks that it's something abnormal about it, it will exclude it from fee estimation,   which it it it doesn't work in the spam case because it's got the bug with the spam filters. But   there are other cases where   until   recently,   all RBF transactions were ignored for the estimation.  

[01:15:56] ODELL:

Oh, that's interesting about the RBF stuff.   I mean, what about the argument I'm kinda curious. So, like,   I I mean, I think part of it part of it matters, like, what percentage of these transactions there are, and it matters   how high the fee is of these transactions.   And   in our current situation,   they've seemed to once again, I don't wanna jinx us into UTXO bloat,   but it seems like mostly faded out. But I I mean, I I think a a decent example would be, like,   the 20 blocks following the halving.  

[01:16:31] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Mhmm.  

[01:16:33] ODELL:

Like, do you not see the argument that,   let's say let's say Datum existed at that point. Let's say Datum existed at that point and I'm constructing my own blocks,   as a miner. I I would like to see those transactions. Right? Like, what you're just gonna  

[01:16:49] ODELL:

Well, those transactions   Those transactions had a high fee, but they didn't actually they weren't actually scam transactions for the most part. They would have been if Ocean had found a block, they would have been in  

[01:16:59] Jason:

there. Yeah. I mean, that that's another thing. I mean, there were some,   the default templates Yeah.   The default template on Ocean,   still, it doesn't filter all data. It,   it enforces the original limit of   42 bytes. And it originally up until recently would would also allow that with the I forget what what that flag was called, but, like, nonstandard data carrier or something like that,   which was basically Inscriptions. So most of those were in Ocean's block. I mean, it's That's interesting. What we were trying to mine because they actually stayed within that limit for the most part, and a lot of the the current data carrying stuff does stay within that limit. So you'll see a lot of that in some of Ocean's blocks. Now we also give the template option of not mining any of that. And some people do that. And then Datum gives you the full option to do whatever if you wanna mine them or not. And that's up to you. And I love that. That's it's not our problem. You if you wanna mine it, you mine it. If you don't, you don't. Yeah. But there's our data and there's our data and there's there's bug abuse and there's non standard use. Right? Like,  

[01:18:04] Bitcoin Mechanic:

oceans blocks contain a lot of upturn data at the moment. I believe that's mostly just what people call ruins.   And Yeah. I'm kind of   while I don't like 90% of block space being, you know, up return stuff, at the same time, it is the least harmful kind of update that we've that we've seen over the last year and a half by far. Right? Ordinals was an attack on fungibility, which is insane. Like, Bitcoin's money. And if you try and say that one sat doesn't equal one sat, that's like Yeah. With that, you might as well start attacking 21,000,000 as well. It's that fundamental.   Like, if you try and turn it into a collectible so that different sets of a different amounts, you lose the entire efficiency of what money is in the first place because everything becomes barter again. You have to you have to value each unit of it independently, and you have to subscribe to some centralized interpretation.  

Yeah. Because it's not even inherent to chain on chain stuff either. Yeah. It's and yeah. And also, it's nothing to do with Bitcoin. It's a stupid is a statement of this, but yeah. KYC is an imposed interpretation on top of Bitcoin. It's like that's a good Bitcoin. That's a bad Bitcoin. We know that undermines the neutrality of the currency. Right? So ordinal was like its own kind of terrible. Then you had the,   what was it called? The, Stamps 1, which was just intentionally bloating the UTXO set. And that went from 90,000,000 in 2022   to 200,000,000   by the end of 2023.  

And now you can't sync a node on a Pi 4 anymore just because of that.   So, like, that was that was, like, a major detriment.   The stuff that's mostly making it in blocks   at the moment doesn't do that. It doesn't attack fungibility, and it doesn't bloat the UTXO set. And this is rooms?   Yeah. So I'm just, like, I don't mind that as much. Right? Because it treating it all as equal is, like, again, some spam is worse than others. You know, this is go on, Jason. I was gonna say on on the technical side, I mean, you have to keep in mind, there's been the compromise in place for years,  

[01:19:56] Jason:

to allow op return. And Right. They went within the framework of that, and   everybody was already on board with it. Not that anybody wants that to be a thing. I mean, to me, ideally, Bitcoin is financial transactions and nothing else. And if there were ever a way to, like, enforce that at the consensus level, that'd be great. I don't think we're anywhere near that. But the I don't know. Is that even possible?   There's Yes. Yeah. There's ways to hard work to do it, but, maybe even soft work to do it. But I don't know I don't know how we could do it. It's technically a soft work, but socially, it'd be kind of a hard work because you'd break all the old addresses.   Right. Exactly.  

So, I mean, it's doable, but would it ever happen? I don't know.   But anyway practice like I agree with that too. Yeah. Not not to defend the rooms or anything like that, but they are still sitting in in that compromised framework.   And that's been around for a while and   they're they're there. It's not as harmful.  

[01:20:54] ODELL:

The worst part of the rooms is this bug they have for minting new ones where everyone who makes a bid gets their bid to mind instead of just the winner.  

[01:21:03] Jason:

Right. It almost seems like there should be, like, a consensus level thing that people add on for it, but then that would be endorsing it and probably a mess anyway. But but at at least it's not something that's bloating the UTXO. It's not it's it's just adding the data, which is annoying.   But at the same time,   we kind of tolerate it.  

[01:21:23] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean, I   you guys know a lot about,   all of these shitcoin shit.   It reminds me of when I had to do it, like, a deep dive on the stacks bullshit just to, like, argue against everybody.   Yep. So I feel for you.  

[01:21:42] Mark:

Hey. Hey, Matt. Just to chime in. You mentioned the the high fees after the having.   The one of the ironic things is that a lot of the focus was on   on the, like, you know, filtering spam,   you know, potentially resulting in lower   lower revenues in the in the blocks, which I I think Jason's been been sort of monitoring, like, every single block we found, you know, with and without the spam has has been within a fraction of a percent in terms of overall   revenue that a minor sees. However,   the the FPPS payout mechanism, which is what all the other pools use,   is is completely breaks down when you see high like, a high transaction   environment.  

Because algorithmically,   what they do is   every day, every 145   block period, the the 3 highest paying blocks are removed as outlier summit from the calculation,   and miners' hash hash price is a result of the average of what's whatever's left over. So miners have mechanic mentioned this earlier, but miners have been telling us that, hey. I'm earning 10% more than this pool. I'm earning 15% more, 7% more. That money is coming as a result of these, you know, lopping off the top of these Right. Right? These these, these It almost like paying out the median. So when you have, like, these super high payout blocks,  

[01:23:01] Jason:

you're just missing all of it. That's exactly what we do. And and something else, when you look at the ocean blocks kinda compared to the like, we we have we have multiple templates. So if you compare the core template to the default template,   sometimes the default   wins in fees because of just the transaction packing algorithms able to get   different transactions   in that end up amounting to more fees. And it it doesn't happen all that often, but it does happen because   it that's just how it works. So it's it the the argument that, like, ocean miners earn less because we have some kind of data carrier filter or something like that on the default is  

[01:23:40] ODELL:

kind of crazy. No. I mean, I think I mean, just going back to what mechanic was saying earlier, like, I think long term, like, if you guys survive and continue momentum and   and and scale up and keep, like, slow and steady accumulating hash,   Like, I think   it'll it it won't it won't take too long before it'll be really obvious that you make more money mining a notion, which unfortunately Right. For unfortunate or good, you know, is probably a stronger argument than freedom for most people.   It's it is the strongest argument. It's just make more money.   But that makes sense to me. I mean, I I think I think at the end of the day, like, I'm pretty sure, like, everyone on this call agrees on 99%.  

And I I just wanna say just straight up, like, I'm just really grateful that you guys have been building out Ocean and that you exist and that would be a a lot darker timeline in   in Bitcoin right now if you didn't.   I mean, before we wrap, I have one last topic for you guys. It's a topic, that's near and dear to my heart,   which is,   the well, I mean, maybe not mempools.   Just the amount of Bitcoin transactions in general.   Like, how do you guys think about that? Like, just   Bitcoin on chain transaction activity? I mean, I've specifically have said, you know, I have   I have a a bet with Marty, my co host on my other show, Robert Hall recap, that goes all the way to the next having that I say mempools will not clear before next having.  

But even with that said,   I'm, like, a little bit disappointed in the lack of   real trend, you know, whatever. That's where all the argument comes. It's like, what is real transaction volume? But, financial transaction volume on chain, like, considering we have,   you know, the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock is in is is showing the coin and has their ETF, and it seems like Bitcoin has grown up in so many different ways. But it feels like transaction volume hasn't really.   And it's not something you can necessarily very   objectively measure, but I'm just curious. I mean, particularly,   Jason and Luke who have been in the space for such a long time, like, how do you   how do you grapple with that? Like, some days, like, I wake up and I'm just, like,   I send so many on chain transactions.  

Like, is there just, like, 15 of us that are just   doing it? Like, what's going on there?  

[01:26:07] Jason:

I don't know if Luke wants to jump in before me, but, but there's definitely more than 15. And if you look back at like a lot of the Aegis blocks from the back in the day, like, you would see a lot of blocks from that era were not full. Like they weren't packed to the brim full of transactions because there either weren't there weren't transactions to put in them. Yeah. And that   is normal.   Like it's there there may be a time. Nobody back then.   Well not even that. Like there were exchanges and there were then there were other things that were generating transaction volume that may or may not have been like actual people doing so. I mean there was a lot of automation happening.   But, like, there were blocks that were not full, and I I don't think that should be a scary thing,  

[01:26:50] ODELL:

if the mempool clears, quote unquote. No. I I never say the mempool clears. I say mempool is clear. I there's always an s p m. I'm very pedantic I'm very pedantic about that. There's many mempools. I can't be used with the mempool, Jason.  

[01:27:05] Jason:

Yeah. Well, I I did the air quotes thing for anybody who's just listening. I don't   but, but yeah. So I I don't think that should be a scary thing if there if there aren't a huge amount of transactions to mine. I don't think that's necessarily   saying that there aren't people transacting with Bitcoin because you have to think that, like, a transaction in Bitcoin. I mean, you can have   a less than 1 kilobyte transaction that sends the equivalent of 1 US dollar, and you can have the same size transaction in a block that sends a 1,000,000,000 US dollars. I mean, it's   there's there's a big distinction there. So, I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that people aren't transaction  

[01:27:42] ODELL:

transacting. And Luke was about to jump in, it sounded like. Yeah. If you look at all this band that's been going on the last year, it seems pretty apparent that we would be doing just fine with 300 k box sizes.  

[01:27:53] ODELL:

That was weird. I gave you the I gave you the t ball question for that.   I mean, just to be clear, like, one of the metrics when I look at Bitcoin that is hard to fake,   you know, is just fee paying transactions.   Right? It's like, I mean, we've seen in the past, like, the IOTA's of the world, like, all these shit coins that have come and gone that are, like, oh, we have, like, amazing transaction per seconds, like, this all this shit. And it's, like, at the end of the day, it's, like, okay, well, I mean,   you can fake that. If if you have a completely centralized network and you have 2 nodes,   you can send millions of transactions just back and forth between yourself and you're not paying any fees.  

But once you start having fee paying transactions there, there's a real cost doing it, and then that's actually an objective measurement.   So when I think about the health of the network a lot of the times, and this is not like,   I I mean, it's not something I track. It's something I, like, just gut emotionally feel about,   is is fee paying transactions and the quantity of fee paying transactions and how how often they're happening. And   and to me, it's just it's one of those metrics that just seems to be lagging behind everything else, and I'm not necessarily   I'm not giving the b cash argument because holding is using.  

I'm I'm not saying, like, we need this you need to spend bitcoin. I'm just saying, like, if it's actually your fucking money,   you're probably spending it, and it's objectively true, particularly if you're paying transaction fees.  

[01:29:22] Bitcoin Mechanic:

I guess I think I have the same,   like, concern. I've been around in Bitcoin for long enough that there's certain ideas that are supposed to transpire at some point. Like, the small block or argument was, miners are gonna carry on mining because there'll be so much transaction fees. You won't need subsidy anymore.   And it isn't really happening. But at the same time, subsidy is still 3.125   Bitcoin every 10 minutes. That's a lot of money. We're we're many harvings away from needing to prove that, you know, even even if people don't wanna frame it as a security budget thing, that that is a problem that defacto needs solving. I don't even know if I agree with that necessarily. I used to worry about it, and it used to be one of my rationales for small blocks. But if and when that problem manifest as being real, and if and when we prove that the theory around transaction fees filling the hole that subsidy has left behind,   that we are still at least a decade or 2 away from that actually needing to be something we have to address.  

So at the moment, 3.125   Bitcoin is enough, and it's 99% of what miners take home.  

[01:30:27] Jason:

Yeah. I mean, I guess   to to kind of jump on your original question of, like, what kind of volume is out there. I guess a good metric is, like, running a default knots node with the 300 kilobyte blocks. And I do run 1, like, myself to see that. And that node is in no danger of running out of transactions to mine.   Even even with   the the the full spam filtering,   I would never not have a 300 kilobyte block to mine and that block would yeah. Do you think on that node config,  

[01:30:58] ODELL:

mempools will never clear again?  

[01:31:02] Jason:

I don't wanna say never.  

[01:31:04] ODELL:

I don't wanna say never. It's very possible that Would do will we hit a point will we hit a point where there'll just always be a backlog?  

[01:31:11] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Well, when when's the last time where we mined an empty block? That was not like just bullshit empty block. No. Yeah. Just like a real empty block because the network found a block. Then a couple of minutes later, there were just no transactions in that time. So that next block was also empty. Has that ever happened?   That's I mean, after, like, 2010.  

[01:31:29] Jason:

I was gonna say it's been a it's been at least a couple of years since I've seen it,   but it has happened.  

[01:31:34] ODELL:

I mean,   the terms of our bet is, like, 3,   like,   3 not full blocks worth of,   like, transactions.  

[01:31:44] Bitcoin Mechanic:

I don't think You're right. Like, if you if you wanna if you if you wanna hit people with semantics, it's like, what is a clear? But Right. Yeah. Because you never know if there's someone else with a couple of transactions that are sitting there. Right? Like, you don't you just don't know, and someone is always gonna have a longer history on their mempool than you might have. If you don't lose that bet, you just send a few transactions. Right?  

[01:32:06] Jason:

Yeah. There you go. Yeah. I mean, I just think,  

[01:32:09] ODELL:

I mean, I just think you're not bullish on bitcoin if you think we're gonna   if, like, we will never be in a situation, like, there was there it's classic bitcoin. Right? Where   I was being provocative. I just wanted people to make sure that they had good UTXO management and were thinking about, like, long term fees,   in in terms of in terms of UTXO size and whatnot. And the best way to do that was to be provocative.   But, like, in classic Bitcoin fashion, like, there's a lot of counter, which is, like, mempools will always clear, that you'll always be able to get 1 sat per byte in   eventually at some point, and I'm just I feel like, first of all, I think we're never gonna have another block size increase, that's insane to me, and I think we're always gonna have more bitcoin users and more and more people are gonna rely on it on their as their actual money,   and as a result, if you do all three of those things, eventually we're gonna be in a situation where there's gonna be a forever backlog of transactions.  



[01:33:05] Jason:

Sure. And  

[01:33:07] ODELL:

I just I've fund fundamentally, like, that's how I think about bitcoin. And maybe it's already happening and we're at the very early stages of it and it's very low or,  

[01:33:16] Bitcoin Mechanic:

you know, maybe it's still gonna be a couple years down the road or but I like the way you put it, because in my opinion, anyone that speaks in terms of certainty with what's gonna happen   is blowing smoke up your ass. No one knows exactly what Bitcoin looks like in a couple of decades. There are different scenarios. Like, the covenants pros are telling you everyone's just gonna be using JPMorgan wallet to move their money around because no one will be able to afford on chain. Other people are saying, no, of course, they're all gonna fall back to 1 sat per byte. That's inevitable.   Like, there's there's just different perspectives on it and I'm not gonna sit here and tell you I know what the future is and I don't think anyone does. I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think eventually we probably will get to the point where we don't see one set per v byte anymore.  



[01:33:59] Jason:

I don't know if that's now.   Whether whether or not we're going to like hit that low again before that happens.   But I mean ultimately if Bitcoin is going to be adopted long term we'll need well that will probably necessarily need to happen and we'll have to have like layer 2 stuff like lightning or other solutions like that to to handle   the bulk of like smaller transactions and stuff because you won't be able to get a lot of that in chain. And I think that's that's one of the big things about decentralizing templates is giving the miners control over the block space again so that when that becomes a thing and you need to be able to get a transaction in the block space, you need a way to do that without having to just,   go to a pool.  

So that just kind of circling back to the whole theme of decentralization   there.  

[01:34:46] ODELL:

Oh, yeah, guys. Well, thanks for having a bit of fun with me at the end there. Sure.   I know time is scarce, so I think we should wrap.   Let's let's do some final thoughts.   Luke,   are you still with us? Final thoughts.  

[01:35:02] ODELL:

Yep. Hurricane hasn't taken me out yet.  

[01:35:05] ODELL:

Is that your that's your final thought? I'm that's good. I'm happy for you.   Do you have a final thought for us besides   yeah. You have another hurricane coming, dude.   Raise up.   Do you have any final thoughts to the audience on the topic of ocean and   making Bitcoin great again?  

[01:35:29] ODELL:

I don't know.  

[01:35:31] ODELL:

I respect it. I respect it.   Let's go to   mechanic. Final thoughts.  

[01:35:38] Bitcoin Mechanic:

Yeah. I think   Bitcoin is always the alignment of   doing what's right and making a lot of money if you have conviction about that or getting distracted and playing silly games and losing money. So Ocean is   really reminiscent of that. The people that came with us were mostly ideological   about it. They wanted the transparency. They wanted the trustlessness,   permissionlessness,   KYC free, all that stuff. And then they just made loads more money than the other pools as well. So I was like, beautiful. That's just the way Bitcoin works. Right?  

[01:36:09] ODELL:

Love that.   Let's go with,   Mark. Final thoughts.  

[01:36:17] Mark:

Yeah. We,   we we started   the Ocean   Resurrected Allegius mainly with the goal of decentralizing   the,   the intelligent parts of mining. This was the mission.   And along the way, we we learned that miners can actually make a lot more   money mining Bitcoin when you remove the middleman. So this is kind of like one of the, you know, the nice coincidences that has happened is like not only are we helping miners to be more in control   back in the power position, more sovereign, but they can actually make a lot more money too. So we're definitely the the practical pool for for miners that are concerned about the bottom line.  

[01:36:55] ODELL:

Badass.   Thank you, Mark. Jason, final thoughts.  

[01:36:59] Jason:

I think everybody summed it up pretty well, but one of the things that's interesting is that until Ocean came along,   since Elegius was around, there wasn't a way to compare a lot of this stuff. Like, there wasn't a transparent pool and there wasn't a way to know, like, that you were kinda   dealing with that middleman   with the with the existing pools and and it's opened the eyes of a lot of people and I think as more as more people jump on board and realize that that's that's gonna be a big thing. The transparency aspect And then just adding even more to that to give the miners even more sovereignty. It's it's it's definitely gonna be a   it's gonna be a big thing.  



[01:37:35] ODELL:

I love it. Well, I wanna thank you guys.   I also wanna shout out Ian, the only cofounder not to join us. He's awesome.   And   thank you guys for building.   Thank you guys for for keep pushing forward on Ocean. Thank you for joining us on the episode.   I know I personally will be recommending,   Ocean to to any miner that asks me, which pool they should mine with.   We need to get that hash rate up,   and I think you guys are the best place to mine.   So let's make it happen. So so thank you guys, and  

[01:38:10] Bitcoin Mechanic:

keep carrying on. Thanks so much for having us, man. Thanks for having us. Thanks, man. Cheers.  

[01:38:27] TIP_NZ:

Our world is chaotic,   but life found its way by channeling energy to bring order to chaos.   It is in our nature to seek signals amongst noise because it is through communication   our evolution thrives in exchange of all the info we try to convey. They flow through to the marketplace and form the signals to regulate how we coordinate where things need to be. Price speaks so we learn to compete.   This drives us to efficiently shape the world with our voice. Now let the market speak. So we build, we sow, we trade, we grow to meet our wants and needs. We specialize   and drive from the mind our creations into reality, we make progress in our process to get more for less, advancing society. We fought for the dawn of the age of technology that harnessed the energy to reach prosperity.  

Our money embodies the power to reap what we sow, so so the market becomes a channel for our collective energy to flow.   When value is traded for value, we are aligned and so we evolve. This is how amidst uncertainty,   life continues to grow.   But the dawn of tech gave rise to light speed information exchange, so to transact fast, we further abstract money from energy constraints   and became more aligned on a few large entities to coordinate trade, concentrating the power, resources, and authority to   create more and more of our money, distorting its signals, eroding its worth, and throwing us back into the darkness of chaos.   When we destroy   the mechanism of money, we destroy our ability to navigate   through uncertainty.  

And when we can't trade value freely and directly, we must trust the few to govern the many. What happens when all our means center around an authority? Complexity builds now coordination,   relies on conformity. Observe our thoughts, the sense of dissent and coerce our actions. Can there be true innovation when there's no freedom of expression? What happens to our voice for ones that shape social discourse now whose ideas get created and which problems get solved. If our progress depends on hearing many sides to resolve, then why would we suppress the voice that shapes how humanity evolves? When we cut off the perspectives   that make up society, we lose sight of the truth that forms our entire reality.  

Each person's contribution builds up our resiliency. Did we forget these differences are what strengthens humanity?   When communication breaks our words tend to silence, our acts become violent, and the world is divided, and our darkest truth is twisted by our pain and our bias, eroding the common ground, making us more and more fragile.   To navigate uncertainty, we must solve for robustness, so everything gets tried and tested by various efforts, until we discover the system that best coordinates us. Mirrors Life's process of channeling energy to create signal from chaos.   In the era of technology, we transform energy into computational power to process the noise of free markets into structured order, and just by looking at numbers, we can derive how much power is required to reduce chaos and inscribe a flow of value for order verify that our transactions happened in line with shared rules. We don't need to seek trust when we can see proof. It is real time consensus   that our lines is to evolve. This is how, amidst uncertainty, our lives continue to grow when we uphold our own rules. We preserve our own work and defend our own voice, which lets the true market emerge. The strength of the design lies in each of our participation since we are the nodes of channel, our energy end to end. As we claim this possibility   to uphold our own rights, we radiate the power that brings our truth   into light.  

And when that dawn of light touches all parts of the glow and it ripples throughout society and it returns us the hope that becomes the power that sparks humanity to thrive, the same power that fuels the creation of the mind. And when our mind and our money are truly set free and they transcend the limits   of past boundaries,   now knowing becomes owning and ideas become wealth. What happens now? We can all push to expand the edges of our existence and assume   evolution when things are in the harness. As we head for the light, we have to push through the darkness that is in these moments. We do what we do best. We take the chaos in the darkness and use our power to create. It is in these moments when we're all in alignment and our freedom of difference ascends us to our highest and distant depth of it all. Though that hope is not gone, it is always the darkest before dawn.