Citadel Dispatch

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EPISODE: 62

BLOCK: 732582

PRICE: 2412 sats per dollar

TOPICS: mempool, bisq, open source licenses, transaction fee markets, miner incentives, the ideal privacy preserving trading protocol, vinyls

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[00:00:01] Unknown:

Most recently,   new technology has raised the possibility   of reduced alliance reliance   on centralized   intermediaries,   like banks   and credit card companies.   In 2,008,   a person or group of people   using the pseudonym   Satoshi   Nakamoto   proposed a decentralized   peer to peer system for making and processing payments.   A key challenge in digital payments   is to prevent the same assets from being spent twice.   The Bitcoin   white paper   proposed a novel method for validating   transactions   using cryptography   that addressed the so called double spend problem.  

[00:01:26] Unknown:

Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks.   It's your boy Odell here for Citadel Dispatch 62.   Citadel Dispatch is an interactive live show about Bitcoin privacy, freedom, and open source software.   We're joined here by   repeat guest Wiz. I will get to him in a moment.   We are both in person. This is gonna be a fun in person rip.   As always, I wanna thank all   the freaks out there for supporting Cielo Dispatch. Cielo Dispatch is a 100% audience funded without ads or sponsors.   Without you, I would this show would not be possible.   There are multiple ways you can support dispatch.  

You can stream sats to the show using a podcasting 2.0 app. My two favorites are fountain podcasts and Breeze Wallet. They work like regular podcast apps. Load them up with sats. Choose how many sats per minute,   you think dispatch is worth.   And then as you listen, it will stream sats directly to my node.   You can also contribute via BTC pay server located at sidildispatch.com.   Lightning and on chain is accepted, or you can   pay via my BIP 47 payment code, which is [email protected]/contribute.   If you are tight on stats   and you still wanna support the show, you can also support us   by sharing the show with your friends and family,   clicking the subscribe button in whatever podcasting app you like to use. It's available on every single podcasting app, including Apple Podcasts,   if you so desire,   and leaving a review. Reviews do actually help a lot in terms of getting the show,   you know, better algorithm placement or whatever the fuck they're doing over there.  

Anyway, with all that said, our great intro to this show was,   treasury secretary Janet Yellen explaining Bitcoin,   or at least her speechwriter explaining Bitcoin and her reading the words out loud, which was kind of unreal to see. I mean, when   a lot   myself included   Twitter, we thought it might be a deep fake,   but it turns out real. So momentous occasion, I guess.   Let's get to our guest. How's it going, Wiz?   Hey, Matt. It's great to be here.   So, Wiz, you've been on the show   Few times now. Was this the 4th time? I think once with Simon,   once with Adam back, and now it's just you and me. Let's fucking Adam back. It was a fantastic conversation. Did you meet him in Miami?  



[00:04:03] Unknown:

Yeah. I met him a few times. Once was at this, liquid meetup we had, and, of course, he was at the conference venue as well. But, yeah, Miami is great.   Yeah. Miami is fantastic. I guess let's start there.  

[00:04:16] Unknown:

Wiz was heavily involved,   with me on the open source stage,   which if you haven't listened to is available on on YouTube shortly, should be available on bitcoin tv.com.   All three   days of content are now live in Bitcoin. Awesome. And it's in this podcast feed. I don't know,   to the rider or die freaks out there, you might have noticed that I just started posting a lot of content on the podcast feed for you guys to get through.   Hopefully, you appreciate it.   I also posted   not just open source stage content from Bitcoin 2022,   but   also my mining panel I did,   with   Econo Alchemist, Diverter, coin heated,   and,   John, the man behind Futurebit.  

And I posted 2 of my Bitcoin takeover talks, which happened at Bitcoin comments in Austin, one with Mahler's,   and one with legendary   Andrew Polstra, which is probably the best interview I've ever done. So if you haven't checked that out, consider going back and listening to it after the fact.   And I have a spicy lightning conversation   that I will be posting shortly that,   was with Lisa, rock star, and Miles Souter. So,  

[00:05:28] Unknown:

be on the lookout for that. Yeah. All the panels on the open source stage were just pure fire. What was your favorite?  

[00:05:35] Unknown:

Well, of course, my favorite Besides the one you were on.  

[00:05:39] Unknown:

No. My favorite was definitely, the Mempools panel which I moderated.   I I can't deny that. I mean, it was just so fun to be on stage with, Murch and Gloria and,   Sergei from Good Refill talking about the mempool. All star lineup right there. Well, the best panels are just like   like right now. We're just friends hanging out, having a good conversation, and, everyone else on the Internet is listening. And that's that's when it's,   really great discussion.  

[00:06:06] Unknown:

Yeah. I mean, the open source stage was just I mean, it was, like, 8 months of work. Huge thank you to everyone who helped to make that possible,   with me. There's just a massive team involved. I mean, so many different moving pieces. And, of course, huge thanks to all the   all the speakers who joined us. Like, we had,   I mean, it it it wouldn't have been it wouldn't have been   the great content that it was if it wasn't for all the individuals who came out and actually  

[00:06:36] Unknown:

open source stage was the the real conference. That was, like, the real Bitcoin conference inside  

[00:06:41] Unknown:

the Bitcoin conference. Well, I mean, I think, you know, part of the balancing act of of these large events is is trying to make it   make it approachable to a lot of different groups of people. I mean, Bitcoin has there's a lot of subsets of Bitcoiners, and I obviously don't agree with all of them.   But if if we had to if we had to,   like or   agree with all Bitcoiners, then Bitcoin's already failed. Right? The beauty of Bitcoin is that it's for enemies.   There is there is definitely I mean, look, I mean, we see this with dispatch. Right? So I mean, open source stage,   if you listen to serial dispatch, was probably,   pretty familiar to you. It was basically 3 days of civil dispatch.  

But you always see that, like, the flashier stuff, the number go up, price stuff,  

[00:07:36] Unknown:

absolving you a personal responsibility.   That always gets way more engagement. Right? No matter what across the board, whether that's an in person conference.   We had the main stage, which was full of, like, announcements   by big names, and you had the humble open source stage, which was just the open source steps. Like, Evan was killing it up on stage moderating his own, panels and everything. And I just felt like   that was   the real Bitcoin energy. I mean, even a few years ago,   the entire Bitcoin conference was, like, the size of just that room. Right. It was, like, the size of the, like, the open source stage was, like, the size of Bitcoin 2019. How many people The whole thing. How many people would you say fit in that room, like, a 1000 or maybe 2,000 max? Fire code is 2,000. Right. So an entire Bitcoin conference being 2,000 people just a few years ago Right. Kind of pretty crazy pretty crazy to imagine. Now, we have just the open source stage with that much, so that was really cool. And the main stage, jeez, what was that? Like, 10,000 people in there? I think it was 15,000 person capacity.   That's insane.  



[00:08:36] Unknown:

Yeah. But, anyway,   one thing that unfortunately got cut because of budget cuts was   the live stream,   of the open source stage.   And   do you   sought out to to fix that. You wanna go into that a little bit?  

[00:08:54] Unknown:

Right. I think we all got there on the 1st industry day and   realized right away that, oh, no. There's no live stream at the open source stage. And you you tweeted out something like, yeah. Sorry, guys.  

[00:09:04] Unknown:

There wasn't budget for this or something. And even Jack replied. He's like I was like, I know everyone's disappointed, like, myself included. Like, there's no,  

[00:09:13] Unknown:

and I was like, well, I can fix this, you know. So,   we we got some guys together, some mempool guys, and,   you know, 1 guy ordered the   wired Internet connection at the convention center. 1 guy ran to Best Buy to buy, like, a camera, somebody else at the Apple Store to grab, like, a Mac Mini, and I think we rented an 82 inch TV. And,   yeah. I mean, we had, like, our own pirate livestream going for a while. And To bitcoin tv.com?  

[00:09:40] Unknown:

Of course. Where else? Which is what we work on together.  

[00:09:44] Unknown:

Yeah. Now we're in the, the world headquarter,   Bitcoin TV studio, also known as,   Rod's Garage.   Oh, no.   Okay. I I guess I'm kinda doxing it right now. Alright, everyone. Rod has a garage. You've you've officially told the world that he has a garage.   But, yeah, that's that's, that was a cool project. And Bitcoin TV is,   was was was in a really cool position because YouTube deleted   the Bitcoin Magazine channel, like, right in the health conference.  

[00:10:14] Unknown:

Yeah.   And there's there's just,   there's theories about why that happened, but no one really knows for sure. But it got restored pretty quickly. Why do you think   Ricardo Salinas.   So so, I mean, my focus was open source stage, obviously, was my baby.   So I spent 95% of my time there. I didn't really get to see any of the main stage talks   or any of the other stages at all. I mean, there was 5 stages in total.   And I need to go back and watch them. But supposedly, Ricardo Salinas, who is, I believe, the 2nd richest man in Mexico,   had a talk where he had   the what's the Bank of in International Settlements guy? Agustin Carstens,   Christian Lagarde, the big Okay. Christine Lagarde. Yeah. The big guy, Christine Lagarde, and,   someone else, and he had, like, demonic,   like like, demon   horns coming out. And   as soon as that went up, the account got nuked. So there there was No warning. There was a theory yeah. There was no warnings. Wow. But it got restored relatively quickly. But that just goes to show, like, you don't wanna have,   you know, Bitcoin Magazine was heavily reliant on YouTube as a streaming platform. Then they also had Rumble and Twitch.  

Right. But you don't want these central points of failure. And at the very least, just to be able to diversify. Right? So, like, all the content will be available on bitcoin tv.com. We're working with them directly. I think a lot of the videos are already up there,  

[00:11:47] Unknown:

on either I on the Bitcoin Magazine channel or on Bitcoin TV channel.  

[00:11:52] Unknown:

Just kind of, but, anyway, I just thought it was pretty cool to highlight that, like,   Wiz literally, like, went to the Wiz and a couple guys, like, went to the store. They, like, bought a DSLR,   like, an expensive Canon.   They used my podcast mic, my travel podcast mic,   Mac mini, and an Internet connection, and they were able to do the live stream, which was really fucking cool.   But as I said, all that content is is still available to be watched. And huge shout out to the video team. I mean, I worked with them directly to make sure that they got the open source. Like, the open source videos were on priority because it wasn't live streamed, so it did get up really quickly.   Okay. So, I mean, I work with you on Bitcoin TV,   but you're also heavily involved in a lot of other Bitcoin projects,   including mempool, bisque, and liquid,   all open source projects.  

So which one should we start discussing first? What do you wanna talk about first? You wanna talk about mempool first? Yeah. Sure. Let's talk about No one gives a shit about liquid.   So we'll start we'll start with mempool, and then we'll move to Bisc.  

[00:12:55] Unknown:

Yeah. Mempool space is, been getting really popular lately. We just launched the new mining dashboard   at,   meetup. At NASH Bitcoiners. At Nashcoiners. Yeah. That was, that was a really cool event. We had about, like, a 100, 200 people there. Usually, we get 200 every month.  

[00:13:14] Unknown:

I like to think it's the largest meetup not run by Parker Lewis.   But   that that that specific meetup, we had   a tornado watch. So we had, like, a 100, a 110 people there. Yeah. It was storm pretty good. Only the ride or dies came out.   And, really, only the the extra ride or dies stayed for a drink afterward. Like, a lot of people bolted as as soon as the meetup ended. Yeah. It was it was storming so hard that night. I remember,  

[00:13:42] Unknown:

stepping out of, like, an Uber and just put my foot into, like,   a foot deep of rainwater.  

[00:13:48] Unknown:

Yeah. I mean, when I went home just walking to the car, it was like,   it was like a 2 minute walk to the car, and I was just completely soaked. It was like I took a bath,   but that was great. But yeah. So we launched you launched,   the new mining dashboard, which as as the freaks know,   we always have we always have mempool space, which is Wiz's mempool,   up in the background.   But now they have this mining dashboard. I think I can switch to it. Boom. Switched to it. Thanks.   If you're watching the video, whether it's the recordings on bitcoin tv.com after the fact or you're watching us live on Twitch or Twitter, twitch.tv/cidlodispatch   is the best place to watch live.  

You can also watch on Bitcoin TV live, but it's   you won't get notifications or anything. Oh, yeah. So let's talk about the mining dashboard real quick here. Yeah. So it started last Miami conference. Actually, we had the Biscayne and Pull booth.  

[00:14:47] Unknown:

I guess the organizers of the conference just gave us this amazing   booth location and and, we went all out. We made a bunch of T shirts and everything. But we probably met,   jeez, maybe 2,000 people at this booth. Like, we just had, huge lines of people,   you know, coming to to get T shirts and make donations to the project and and talk to us. And one of the,   one of the groups people that that stopped by was Foundry, the,   what's what's now the largest mining pool in Bitcoin, but at the time was   basically zero hash power.   And, they said, we wanna give you guys a grant,   support the project, and   we flew up to New York to meet them there. And,   they they they essentially asked us said, you know, we'll we'll give you a grant, but we wanna ask you to make, like, more mining related features.  

So we   researched   all of the best   mining dashboards that were out there. And and most mining pools have their own, but they're not open source. Like, Splushpool has a really nice one or Luxor has a very nice one.   Btc.com   also had a bunch of charts and stuff. And so I guess we   just researched all the best ideas and remixed it with our usual mempool space,   passionate arguments between the guys. And, yeah, over the course of a few months,   our new developer,   Capa and and SoftSimon,   everyone   I basically locked him in an office for a few weeks and, changed him to the desk and whipped him until the mining dashboard came came out. And, yeah, it was it was great.   Now you can now you can see all the the historical blockchain data all the way back to the genesis of Bitcoin,   how mining pools evolved over time, how the difficulty evolved over time, all the typical features you would want if you're interested in mining. So we still have that first mempool dashboard on the home page. But if you click the hammer icon, you get the the mining dashboard, which is optimized for   not creating transactions, but  

[00:16:48] Unknown:

mining transactions. I think one thing that's really cool is, like, if you click the individual pool, you can see the pool's history.   So, like, I just clicked found you. You can actually see their hash rate climb over time and how quick it climbed. Yeah. It's interesting. Clean way of doing it. I also like the   if you go into the graphs, you can see   all the pools doms lined up.   Found you on the bottom. I guess it's linear order of current hash rate, right, from bottom to top.   So  

[00:17:18] Unknown:

so you can see, like Change it to, like, a 2 year time frame. It's just insane how QuickFoundry just I know. They just came out of nowhere. Right? Like, a year and a half ago, they were literally 0.  

[00:17:29] Unknown:

January December 27th like, January 1, 2021, they were basically 0. They were at 0.36%,   and now they're at   at 21.20%.   19%.   Anyway, so so one of the cool things about mempool. So mempool is an open source project, but then mempool dot space, which is this hosted,   version of the mempool open source project that obviously uses your node, but you can run the mempool open source project using your own node.   I know it's incorporated in pretty much   all the major node projects at this point.   That's correct. Yeah. We have integrations for one click installation on   Umbrel, RaspiBlitz,   MyNode, Ronin Dojo, Citadel, NixOS, and now Start not new sounded. Right? Just shipped it a few days ago. Yeah. So  

[00:18:20] Unknown:

pretty much any full node distribution that you're using, you should be able to very easily install   your own instance of the mempool open source project and monitor your mempool. And then you can you can use your own node with your own mempool.  

[00:18:33] Unknown:

You don't have to trust Wiz and Co. Exactly. And you get the privacy benefits of not hitting your servers. Right. You get the security benefits. You don't have to trust what our server  

[00:18:44] Unknown:

say,   the Bitcoin blockchain, because you can verify on your own node. Privacy benefits because any TXIDs   or addresses that you look up will   only go to your node. And you also get the censorship resistance in case mental space   is attacked or or censored off the Internet somehow.   You don't need to rely on our infrastructure.   But, of course, if you do   want to use mempool space, just to quickly check something or maybe you don't have your own Raspberry Pi full node,   we don't,   we don't do any, like, long term logging of of,   user data. We don't share any data with third parties, and it's completely self hosted. So we don't use any hosting companies.  

Whereas, I think, blockchain dot info is hosted on Google Cloud and blockchain dot info is hosted on behind CloudFlare or something. So their trusted third party has a trusted third party. Yes. Well It's literally man in the middle as a service. Right? Yeah. They have all the Cloudflare is. Yeah. I mean, they have all the SSL private keys. They're logging all of your IP addresses with the literally, their service to do that. Yes. And I see why they use it because it's very easy to protect yourself against denial of service attacks if you put yourself behind a trusted third party,   but you  

[00:19:56] Unknown:

should not trust third parties. I mean, trusted third parties or security holes. This is basic. Or at least minimize your trust as much as possible. So, I mean, so you said specifically that you guys don't keep logs, which is obviously great. You wanna hear that from your companies, but it's important for the freaks to realize that there's no way for anyone to independently verify the   the nonexistence   of logs. You can't prove,   that they're deleted or they don't exist.   So whenever someone says they're not logging, just always take it with a grain of salt,   because   a lot of times, they are still logging.  



[00:20:30] Unknown:

Yeah. I mean, we Not to accuse you of anything. No. We delete logs after 10 10 days, which is Right. So that's a trust that's a trust model. Of course. But you should not trust me or anyone. Right. And you don't have to. You can just run the Yeah. The open source code yourself with your own node. Even with one click installation, even,   Boomer Uncle Marty can do it on his Raspberry Pi. Right? Just one click and you have your own Exactly. And it's it's,   yeah. It's pretty cool how far we've come on that. You know? Yeah. That was that was the original goal of the project was to make   a self hosted explorer because there was no really good,   like, one click installation Explorer on a Raspberry Pi at that time.  

And so when we started the mempool project,   just about 3 years ago, maybe longer now,   it was just a mempool visualizer, the mempool v 1. And that   was very easy to get up and running, but mempool v 2 with the full block explorer functionality   took several months of of hard work to get that working. We had to   wrap, like, make an interface between different back ends on the Raspberry Pi. So it doesn't only use Bitcoin d. It also uses the, Elektris back end,   Romancy   Elektris back end. Right. Electromer server. Right. Which is the typical lightweight one that runs on Raspberry Pis very easily.   And then for a production server like mempool.space,   we use Blockstream's fork of that. Blockstream Electris has its own REST API.  

And so we had to kinda go back to the Roman c Electris   and in our own wrap around that, reimplement   the Blockstream REST API   so that you could use it on Raspberry Pi as well. And that's when No. That's interesting. Yeah. So we had a bunch of really cool ideas how to make that work on Raspberry Pi. And once it,   you know,   became one click installation on Raspberry Pi, it's you you get the full API. So if you go to mempool space and you click on the I think it's like the doc the documentation, the book icon, All of those APIs,   of course, work on the mempool space site. But if you have your own Raspberry Pi and you do one click installation on mempool, all those APIs will work exactly the same on your own self hosted Memble instance as well. So you can do at,   address lookups or transaction lookups   using your own node very, very easily.  



[00:22:43] Unknown:

I mean, what are the trade offs if you're using   with your own node?   So it's less performant   than if we are hitting yours,   professional server or whatever? It's  

[00:22:58] Unknown:

fine for most   home users.   So the only real limitation is that the Roman c Electris back end will only support lookups   on Bitcoin addresses with fewer than 100 transactions.   So if you're trying to look up a very, very   popular Bitcoin address,   that lookup will just   fail on your Raspberry Pi.   And, that's not a big deal for most people looking up their own transactions because most people don't reuse addresses. Most wallets shouldn't. Yeah. Right. You should never use reuse reuse addresses, and, most wallets these days are very good about that. I mean,   HD wallets have been around for a long time now.  



[00:23:36] Unknown:

Everyone those are the wallets that automatically give you a new address every  

[00:23:40] Unknown:

every time you click receive. Right. Every time you click the receive button, you your wallet will generate a new address, and you typically only have 2 or 3 transactions   per address.   So you would not hit that,   Roman c Electris limit.  

[00:23:54] Unknown:

And then what about, like so the whole mining dashboard is also built into the  

[00:24:00] Unknown:

Edison? Well, we haven't shipped that for Raspberry Pi. But it will be shipped? It will be. Yeah. So right now, the latest version on Raspberry Pi is 2.3,   which   we were running on the site until about, I guess, 2 weeks ago.   And   now that Miami is over, we can go back to   shipping, you know, working on shipping the 2.4   with the mining dashboard for everyone to Raspberry Pi.   So I think it's it's it's pretty,   big project nowadays. I mean, we have total of 8 people,   working on mempool, and   we're funded directly by the community.   We just,   I guess,   you know, we we got all the the grants from all the   the best Bitcoin companies in the space.  

Like, huge thanks to Spiral and Gemini   and Foundry and Exodus and Unchained and Blockstream of all been very, very gracious. And especially Jack, personally, also,  

[00:24:51] Unknown:

very generous donations to the project and the whole He donated personally, and his company donated. Yeah. He's he's,   probably our biggest supporter,  

[00:25:00] Unknown:

both in terms. Not the first supporter, though. Oh, yes. I can't. Who is the first supporter of of the mempool open source project? That would be the man right across from me, mister Matossel.   First   and James and Lop actually sent his, donation transaction first, but because Matt had a higher fee, it was confirmed one block before priorities swaps transaction. Yeah. I used a high fee rate on that. So   once does it you know, Blockchain will show that you were the first to know. Blockchain does not lie.  

[00:25:30] Unknown:

So, I mean, I wanna talk about that a little bit. But before I do,   you know,   I forgot to mention at the beginning of the show. As always, if you wanna join our live audience chat, which makes the show special,   we have a fantastic matrix room,   which is a distributed messaging protocol   that is you're able to self host.   And you can get to that, if you're going to citadel dispatch.com   and clicking that Citadel chat link. It'll take you there, and just you follow the steps, it's easier to install and run it than you might think.   And we have a great group of Bitcoiners in there. We have almost 1100 Bitcoiners in there, and we're talking Bitcoin   distributed systems, privacy, open source software, all sorts of FreedomTech,   every day of the week, not just when the show's on. But when the show's on, it becomes our live audience chat. So definitely come join us there.  

So, Wiz, we were talking about,   you know, mempool is an open source project.   Funding.   How you deal with funding is is mostly grant based and individual contributor based. How do you look at that? Is that a sustainable method? Is that  

[00:26:40] Unknown:

You know, I think in the early days of the project when it was just me and Simon, if if,   we only have a couple guys taking salary   from the, the funds of the project,   it's fine. But one but as the project has grown I mean, now we have very large apps like Cash App sending us all of their users, and we have servers in multiple   continents,  

[00:27:02] Unknown:

you know, and and we When you say Cash App sending users is because mempool.space   is their   Correct. Is their block explorer. So when, like, you click in details for an address, it opens up mempool.space.  

[00:27:14] Unknown:

Yeah. It's it's so cool to,   to see someone use Cash App in the United States and, click on that block explorer button and and see it open up in mempool space.   I mean, like I said,   Square and Spiral and Block, they're they're just our huge supporter,   but it's   also the open source project. I mean, they just support open source in general. Right. And when you talk about funding, yeah, they they've also been our our biggest fund backer. But but I think, going back to your question,   you know, now that we have, like, 8 people in the project and we're self hosting our own servers and network   own ISP.  

We, you know, we own our own IP blocks and we have   trans peerings with all these tier one providers all over the world now   just to   mitigate the risk of of third party   surveillance and censorship on our website.   It's become a huge responsibility   for the community   to operate this site.   I'm actually,   you know, right after this podcast is done, about to get on the plane and fly to another data center and work on some more servers just to   to   improve mempool space.   So as the funding as the expenses of the project grow up, yeah, we we really need to think about how to, keep it going long term   when   if, you know, now that we've now that we've gotten so many donations from the community and so many grants from all the enterprise sponsors,   You know, how do we   ethically,   I guess, monetize the site without ruining it so that we can fund the development of the open source project? And I think a lot of projects in the space   have the same kind of dilemma. Right?  

For example, Evan with, like, Sue Swallet or Right. Any, like,   great open source projects in the space, they're all thinking the same thing, like,   you know, you could just put ads on the site and and ruin it. Right? And and that's what Right. All the ads. Right. Exactly. All all the developers started dispatch.   So,   yeah, I think I think one,   business model which might   be a good fit for mempool space   someday would be to build, like, a   player   2,   I guess, mempool market or maybe more accurately market for space in the Bitcoin blockchain.   I mean, right now, the mempool is totally empty, and you can use 1 sat for byte. Mhmm. And it confirms, like, 2 blocks or something immediately. Right? But as we saw last year, when the mempool gets full,   all of a sudden, we have 9,000 messages   every day from   lost newbies. Help me. My transaction is stuck in a mempool. Can you please confirm it? And I think it would be really cool   if we had a button on the website when you're tracking your transaction   where you could just pay some sats over lightning,   and we could have one of our friends at a mining pool manually prioritize your transaction   and provide a useful service to the community  

[00:30:08] Unknown:

to help. And so out of out of band fee payments. Right. I think that's as opposed to so   in band is, like, when you when you construct a Bitcoin transaction, maybe you go to mempool.space   to see or your own mempool instance or in the wallet that shows you, like, what different fee rates you can pay to get into a block,   but it's not exactly a perfect measurement. So then after you send it, if you wanna bump that fee, if you wanna increase that fee, then you can maybe go to mempool.space   and pay an additional fee that goes to a minor to to get it into a block. Right? Yeah. And I think the the usual,  

[00:30:42] Unknown:

response   when I talk about when I bounce the idea off people is, like, well, why wouldn't I just use RBF or Right. CPFP even?   And, yeah, you should absolutely use RBF   or or CPFP if you have to. And,   usually,   most wallets these days are very good about supporting RBF.   Right. So RBF is replaced by fee. Right. So if you so if you you made a transaction with 10 sats and the mempool spikes up suddenly and now it's buried, you can   replace that transaction by increasing the fee of the of the transaction Right. 20 sats, 30 sats. And then the major trade off there is  

[00:31:19] Unknown:

when you actually send the first transaction, you have to have RBF enabled to begin with.  

[00:31:24] Unknown:

Right. Or your wallet has to support it. Right. Your wallet has to basically have it enabled. Or you have to have enough extra sets in the wallet to be able to increase the fee. Like, if you were just sweeping all the funds from the address, and then you have nothing to add. Exactly.   So there are some times when you can't use RBF for various reasons.   And CPFP   child pays for parents   is another good way to increase increase the effective rate of a transaction. So this is actually one feature that mempool space has that no other blockage score has is the ability to see the effective  

[00:31:55] Unknown:

fee rate of a trend. Right. If you use child pay for parent so child pay for parent is, like, if I send a Bitcoin transaction and it has changed, the change goes back to me.   If I then spend that change with a higher fee,   then a miner is incentivized to mine both transactions   at the same time. So that effective fee rate of the first transaction   needs to include that child transaction. Right? In terms of that's what the effective fee shows on the website. Right? Exactly. And so if you have 2 transactions  

[00:32:24] Unknown:

that are the same   number of bytes, same size,   then the effective fee rate would be the average of those 2 transactions.   So Right. If you've made one with 10 sats,   but now you need to pay 50 sats to get into the net into the next block and you really want it to be confirmed, you could just make you could spend the   change somewhere else with a very, very high fee rate, like 200 sats, and then the average would be closer to a 100. Right. And, specifically, with child's pay for child pays for parent,  

[00:32:54] Unknown:

which, by the way, I just think is such a funny   Bitcoin term, but because most usually, pay parents pay for their children. But,  

[00:33:02] Unknown:

the if you're sending to yourself, you can always do child pays for parent because you can take whatever that output of that transaction is, and then you can then send it again. Well, it gets complicated. Right? Because if you, again, if you swept all the funds from an address and you don't have any funds left to But you send it to a a new address that you control, and then you just send that transaction again in child space for parent. But but the problem is that if your first transaction gets purged out of the mempool  

[00:33:29] Unknown:

Right. Right. If you're in a high sustained   high  

[00:33:33] Unknown:

Yeah. So if, say, you set a stake and you used 1 sat per on your trend and the mempool surges up, and that gets purged and deleted. Right. What's the default mempool size? 300 megs? Is that it? Right. 300 megabytes. And the last so everyone  

[00:33:48] Unknown:

everyone by default, their Bitcoin node is holding   the way I like to think about the mempool is like it's a big,   waiting line. Like, you're trying to get into a restaurant or something, and it's this big line.   In in in the Bitcoin defaults, that line can be 300 megabytes   big. And then if if someone's paying a the and then the lowest fee transactions start getting dropped out of that line because they're not paying enough. Right? Right. So if you get outbid  

[00:34:18] Unknown:

so badly   that you get bumped out of the line,   your transaction will just be in not even in the mempool. It'll just be stuck in your local nodes Right. Mempool.   And your low your local node or wallet will try to rebroadcast it   to the network.   But you have no way of CPFPing   that transaction because the miners don't see the parent. Correct.   And that is a huge problem which, Gloria Zhao has been working very hard to fix in Bitcoin Core.   She's working on this feature called package relay accept, which would which would allow you to broadcast   2 transactions together in a package   where   their effective fee rate is above whatever that limit is. Right. This is a big problem for layer 2,  

[00:35:01] Unknown:

like, Lightning, for example. Like the trust model. Right? Where you need to be able to  

[00:35:06] Unknown:

And and you should watch the mempool panel video on Bitcoin TV where Gloria explains this, much better than I am. But   she   very is working very hard to solve this problem, which is essentially a security hole in Lightning. Right? Where Lightning makes a lots of assumptions about the mempool that you're always gonna be able to   settle a transaction,   within   a certain time frame.   It's just not true. And if we're in the system, there's no guarantee that your transaction will be confirmed. And so   CPFP   is one way to   increase the effective   fee rate   unless the first transaction has such a low fee rate that it is completely rejected and purged.  

So she's, working very hard to fix that. And, hopefully, that'll but but this kinda leads us to the the third way to bump a fee transaction,   which would be   the out of band method.   And a few mining pools have done this in the past where you could   pay them essentially bribe them with a very, very high overpriced,   payment.   Usually via credit cards or sometimes through shitcoins. It it is it has not been implemented well. And it was also, like I mean, I remember it in, like, the 2017  

[00:36:21] Unknown:

during the 2017 fork wars when fee fees got really high. A lot I mean, it's it seems pretty obvious after the fact that that was part of a b cash attack to try and inflate fees,   But that was pre lightning. Right? So you didn't even have lightning to be able to   accept a Bitcoin out the native Bitcoin out of band payment. So it was either credit cards or shitcoins.  

[00:36:44] Unknown:

Right. And now there's a number of layer 2 networks we could use like Lightning or Liquid and and a whole number of ways which you could do an out of band payment to, you know, get your layer 1 transaction   unstuck from the mempool and confirmed into a block quickly.   So I think that's what   the long term,   goal of the the project will be is to help the community   get their transactions   confirmed.   And   this is something that should be fixed by Bitcoin Core in the long run,   you know, through the efforts of Gloria and other very, very smart   people working to   make a fair market for everyone where you shouldn't need the service.  

But in the meantime,   I guess this is where Mempool Space can come in and and kind of help, you know, just with our friends at different mining pools and and our develop developer resources   to try and,   you know,   help the community provide a useful service   and charge a a fair,  

[00:37:44] Unknown:

price for it. And And it's definitely more useful if it's,   it's definitely more useful of a service, I imagine, if it's if if it's multiple mining pools instead of just  

[00:37:57] Unknown:

a single mining pool offering it. Right? Right. And then it's very complicated to do this because it presents a number of or maybe it it kind of highlights a number of problems that already currently exist. For example, I think I remember a few months back,   the owner of of, was it, the fish mining pool,  

[00:38:15] Unknown:

f two pool? F two pool. Yeah. He It used to be discus fish. Right.  

[00:38:19] Unknown:

They still use the fish fish emoji in the Coinbase text. He Wang Chung. Wang Chung sent a one Bitcoin payment. So I think it was Luke Dash junior. Yeah. But he just flagged. And it had, like, 9,000 Bitcoin change too on it or something. Exactly. He spent a 9,000 Bitcoin UTXO   and To send 1 Bitcoin. Which is already a massive flex. But just to be just just to be, like, over the top, he also paid zero fee. And then mined it with his own pool. With his own pool. And  

[00:38:48] Unknown:

it  

[00:38:50] Unknown:

flex. Right. What a flex. But if if empty   and the blocks are   full,   then that's okay. But the minute the pool is congested,   he would have essentially been   basically, by not paying a fee to his own pool,   he's essentially,   I don't wanna use words thing revenue, but he should have paid Sats to the pool to have that transaction. There's an opportunity  

[00:39:13] Unknown:

cost because   if if them pools are full, if mempools are full, he could have mined a different transaction where they would have got paid a fee.  

[00:39:21] Unknown:

Instead, he mined a zero fee. Right. And this is just one example, and it's not an issue if the mempool is empty. But when the mempool is full and   people want to get their transactions manually prioritized to get   confirmed and mined into a block,   then mining pools would now have this problem where, okay. I   prioritize this guy's transaction,   and we took some money for it. They have to be they have to pass that revenue onto the pool, onto the actual miners,   and they have to do this in an auditable and transparent way.   And mempool fixes this because   mempool   it's not exposed on the website yet, but mempool will have the ability to   show a projected mempool block and compare that against   the actual   mined block in the blockchain   and say what transactions   should have been in there or shouldn't have been in there   and what the difference in fees   actually was. And so,   for example, in in the that case of that 9,000   Bitcoin UTXO transaction,   mempoolspace would say, oh, yeah. He should have paid 500 sats fee for that.  

It can, you know, make this visible on the website, and then the mining pool or or or we end up doing it would have to, you know, debit this guy's account 500 sats and   credit the account of the pool 500 sats,   and that would make it a more fair system. And it's and it's actually a bigger problem with Stratum v 2,   which I'm sure Matt can explain this better than I can, but,   Stratum v 2 allows for all home miners,  

[00:41:01] Unknown:

or at least one component of it,   one aspect of Stratum v 2. And so right now as it stands, I think that's where you're going with it. Right now, as it stands, the mining pool operator   is constructing the blocks. They're deciding which transactions are in each block.   Even though there's   there's miners located around the world that are maybe using this pool and contributing work to a pool, they don't choose which transactions are in the block. The mining pool operator chooses it.   In stratum b 2, part of their proposal   is that,   the miners themselves, all the individual miners themselves can construct the block.  



[00:41:39] Unknown:

Exactly. And so this   doesn't solve the issue of people prioritizing transactions out of band and pocketing the revenue for it. It it just transfers the problem to every home miner can now do this. Right. So   if Matt has a few miners in his garage and he chooses to prioritize my zero fee transaction because you're paying me separately. Right. Cash under the table or however we do it. Sats under the table. Sats under the table, then the pool misses out on that revenue.  

[00:42:08] Unknown:

And you could say that Matt And that's an unsold problem. I mean, that's part of the reason why that aspect of Stratham v 2 hasn't rolled out yet. Right. But they've rolled out the other aspects of Stratham v 2, which gives you better performance, more secure connection.  

[00:42:22] Unknown:

Right. And because the mempool's been empty, this wasn't a huge concern. But the minute the mempool gets full and and out of band transaction,   prioritization  

[00:42:30] Unknown:

becomes a very lucrative thing to do. This would be a huge problem with STRATOMY too. And so I'm and, also, there's some I believe there's some,   at least in my head, there seems like there could be some, like, there's just attack factors there of maybe miners   going into other pools and and and trying to basically,   it's like a denial of service. Yeah. Right? Exactly. By just not including any transact like, the extreme is  

[00:43:00] Unknown:

mine empty blocks, right, where you don't add any transactions to the block. Yeah. The game theory is quite complex, but I I'm very excited to try and help solve this problem with the mempool open source project.   If we can,   using our   dashboard and our projected mempool blocks   to calculate   what a miner   should have included in the block   and identify rogue transactions that got prioritized,   then the mining pool   operator   is essentially a coordinator for the accounting at this point to say,   Matt prioritized   with transaction,   so we're gonna debit his account by so many sats because we can see that and, you know, verify. You can verify it. Exactly. And everyone   running their own Raspberry Pi at home would also see the same thing on their own self hosted mempool.  

So Oh, that's interesting. Right. This this is this is kind of gonna be, like, our attempt   to, contribute to stratumv2   and help fix this accounting issue. And so if a mining pool operator   has this implemented   and they would be able to roll out Stratum v 2   and let home users pick their own transactions and then And they do it in a nonprofitable  

[00:44:10] Unknown:

maximizing way,  

[00:44:12] Unknown:

They can penalize them financially. Exactly. And, likewise, they do prioritize transactions   in the honest way and pass and pass that revenue onto the pool somehow, however we end up figuring out how to do this, then it would create a new revenue stream for the entire pool.   And so it would incentivize   pools to,   I guess, fix this problem and implement transaction acceleration out of band and just open up the free market   a little bit more for these stuck transactions.  

[00:44:40] Unknown:

So, I mean, one of the cool   aspects to me is of of the Bitcoin fee market   is that it's it's this truly free market where people are basically bidding on this scarce resource, which is block space,   to get included in the transactions. And as demand goes up,   at any given time, the fee rates that you need go up. And if you're willing to wait, you could pay a lower fee rate. It's this really beautiful free market,   that's available to all and and free like, easily to view and verify and whatnot.   Are there   there this idea of out of band payments has come up a lot in the past. It's not a new concept.   But now, all of a sudden, you're adding another   more opaque variable   to that   to that free market.  

I respect that   it seems like your   plan   for mempools   out of band payments is to try and make it more open. But I'm just curious from, like, a Bitcoiners perspective.   Should we be concerned about   out of band payments in general,   you know, fucking with   maybe incentives or fucking with the free market. Right? Like, is there a  

[00:45:58] Unknown:

a Well, I think the important thing to remember is that you can already do out of bank payments now Right. By bribing a miner to mine whatever you want. And   we do see this Or your way, Sean, you just call up the engineer and tell him to include the transaction. Exactly. Right. I mean, people already do shenanigans all the time with mining and include random transactions,   nonstandard transactions,   extremely large transactions. I mean, I think there's been some blocks where,   like, an entire 1 megabyte transaction  

[00:46:29] Unknown:

was the only transaction in the block or something like this. And it's more than just out of band payments. Right? There could be, like, basically out of band partnerships or something where, like, like, if a let's imagine, like, a Cash App becomes one of the major transactors on the network, and they just have a relationship with a single mining pool that just every time they broadcast a transaction just shows no fee and they have, like, a subscription or something. Right? Yeah. I think the market for  

[00:46:52] Unknown:

mining   will develop has a has a lot of room to evolve and develop over time. And it's simply because the mempool's been empty for most of Bitcoin's tree. But once the fee market or blockchain space market  

[00:47:05] Unknown:

someone Me and Wiz got a lot of got a lot of flack and pie in our face because we got FIFO more last year. Well, I wasn't the one who said Bitcoin fees are designed to pump forever. I don't know who said that. Someone's gotta go check the tapes. They wanna know.  

[00:47:20] Unknown:

But, I mean, it's kind of true if you figure that Satoshi   intended the block subsidy reward to   trend and have down to 0 over the next 100 or so years.   Obviously,   we need this fee market or space market to develop.   And   the way it develops is yet to be seen. Right? I mean, we'll all be dead by the time the by the subsidy gets But there is an argument that, like,  

[00:47:46] Unknown:

as Bitcoin increases in purchase   as Bitcoin increases in purchasing power,   so does the purchasing power of that base fee, which is you know, like, you can't pay a transaction that's lower than 1 sapper byte.  

[00:48:01] Unknown:

Well, there's been discussion purchasing power of that 1 sapper byte fee has gone up   as Bitcoin price goes up. Right? There's there's been discussions to reduce the min relay fee   and min fee rate below on SAP for Vite.   Whether that gets adopted or not, I don't know. And and that's another thing that could be done out of band. Right? Because it's only the policy of the peer to peer network Right. That restricts such a low fee transaction from being propagated.   You could just like Wang Chung did. Or even with this this mempool's Exactly. Idea, you can do a 0 fee transaction,  

[00:48:36] Unknown:

broadcast it to mempool.space,   and include an out of band payment with it. That's less than 1 separate byte presumably. Exactly. So I think this could be a really interesting,  

[00:48:46] Unknown:

feature of the site to to work on and a and a service for the community   if they if they wish to use it. Of course, you should always use RBF or CPFP when you can. You should always use   a accurate fee estimate.  

[00:48:59] Unknown:

I feel like there's another point here that should be clear.   You know, so with Bitcoin on chain fees, it's not how much you're sending that dictates the fee.   It's how much data is   the size of the transaction. So   for   and the the biggest contributor to the data size is is how many UTXOs on that input side when you're combine when you're creating the transaction, how many UTXOs you're using to create it.   But there's situations where, for instance,   a 10 Bitcoin transaction   could be paying a less fee than a 1 Bitcoin transaction because the 1 Bitcoin transaction is larger in size. So it's not data size, so it's not how much you're sending. Now with Lightning,   it's a it's a completely different fee method, which is a percentage based fee, which people are probably more used to in the fiat world, which is this idea that you're paying a percentage on the amount you send.  

So this is a key difference in the 2 the 2 fee markets, so the lightning fee market and the on chain fee market. I think it should be interesting to see   how they complement each other and play off of each other as as the networks develop.   One thing I definitely wanna touch on here is   you keep saying the mempool.   The mempool doesn't exist. There's no the mempool. There's a lot of mempools   throughout the world that are hosted by different individuals.   Right? It's kinda funny, but one takeaway I have from Miami is that when a lot of Bitcoiners say the mempool, they mean my mempool.  

[00:50:30] Unknown:

And I don't mean that in, like, an arrogant way. It's just it's just mempool. Stay humble, Wiz. I mean, mempool space is becoming,   I guess, really popular, and and all the best wallets and exchanges use it.   And so when they say their transaction is stuck at the mempool,   they usually look on mempool space to to   indicate that. But, yeah, everyone   every node has their own mempool, and   you should not trust my mempool or our mempool. You should verify in your own.  

[00:50:58] Unknown:

And it's it's still I mean, even if you're using your own mempool, it's   still   but, I mean, when we're talking about mempools, we should really be saying mempools, not mempool, and we should say, a mempool, not the mempool even though it sounds weird.   But even if you're using your own mempool   and your own node, there's still a lot of value to have a,   basically, trusted third party mempool that you can   confirm off of and and double check what what your node is showing and see if there's any That's true. Bullshit happening. Right?  

[00:51:30] Unknown:

And ideally, a couple. Right? I I mean, I know the Knicks guys also run their own mempool instance. Right? Right. And one of our contributors, MC, also runs his own mempool instance, like mempool.mc.d.   So you can theoretically use your own mempool and then confirm against 3 others or something. Yeah. That's a that's an excellent way. And and we've thought about making some kind of federated model for this. But I think in practice,   most people just want, like, a single,   oracle to to quickly check something. And it's actually a very common request from exchanges.   For example, in Exodus Wallet,   they when they sell someone some Bitcoin Closed source wallet. Don't use it. Continue.  

Well,   if, say, for example, you're connecting your Trezor to your Exodus wallet, so you're verifying with your own hardware wallet that funds were received.   They actually link to mempool space for that. And the reason they don't want to run their own mempool instance   and do want to link for us is because they are the counterparty   to the transaction. Right. So   mempool space acts as like a neutral third party to   it's like an  

[00:52:32] Unknown:

it's an arbitration kind of or an arbitrator.  

[00:52:35] Unknown:

Right? You're like a Well, that's something that this has. Venmo is more of an oracle maybe. Right. So   but it doesn't have to be if you run your own.  

[00:52:45] Unknown:

Cool. Cool. Cool.   So, I mean, I, yeah, I I look forward to seeing what you guys have in store in terms   of creating a more sustainable open source project. I think,   obviously, that's a major topic of discussion,   on dispatch.   I I I because open source software   is the future we wanna see is is a world built on top of open source software and proliferation of open source software   because this code is not controlled by a single company or an individual.   It will outlive all of us.   But,   historically,   funding for open source projects has been a very difficult task, and it is pretty cool that Bitcoin seems to enable certain funding models that didn't exist before because all of a sudden,   these open source operators   are able to accept a global money without a third party,   in a trust minimized way. So because that addition of Bitcoin, all of a sudden,   there's all   these cool different models that are prop popping up where you can still fork the code. You can use the code however you want. You can run it yourself,   but the actual operators and maintainers of the code have some kind of value add service,   that generates Sats.  

Is pretty novel and pretty new, and it's really cool watching it all develop. You know?   Yeah. The real power of Bitcoin and open source software together is what makes the project so powerful.   And every   open source project contributes to the ecosystem in its own unique way. Right? Like, you'll have Evan making his Lightning Wallet  

[00:54:27] Unknown:

or mempool or bisk or all of these projects, and they all fill their own,   use case. But all of them together is is like the cypherpunk arsenal. They all build on top of Bitcoin. And   there's so many companies that will do closed source.   For example, just the mining dashboard. You know, all of the mining dashboards we looked at were all closed source. So by making an open source one, I kind of feel that now nobody needs to reinvent the wheel 10 times. Right. They can just fork yours. Sure. And that's the beauty of open source. Right? And the world runs on top of open source software like this.  

[00:55:01] Unknown:

So, I mean, my last dispatch,   the topic of I mean, I apologize to the freaks of the audio quality. It was poor. It was, in person in a warehouse in Miami,   and it just had really bad acoustics   and whatnot. But,   it was a great conversation, especially for those who joined us in person. We had a 100 ride or dive freaks there.   They each paid sats to come, which included drinks, but also helped support   the show and keep it ad free. Talking about one of my favorite topics,   which is open source licenses.   And we had a couple guys on there that are really big on completely   unrestricted open source licenses, like MIT,   or the unlicensed.  

I mean, we had Paul on there who's big on that, Evan Kloudis.   I mean, you mentioned Evan was,   in in multiple panels in the open source stage. Like, all the all the rider dies a little bit dispatched gas order.   And we had Tony who also did 2 panels,   and they're all pro MIT guys, and then we had MBK who likes a really nice restricted license.   And then so you guys sit in the middle. You have a GPL license.  

[00:56:15] Unknown:

Well, yeah, that's so you mentioned many projects. That's an interesting comparison. I think   it really depends on   what license is the best. I mean, this is this is a whole, like, huge discussion in itself. I think you've had entire episodes, like, 3 hours. Literally, the last one was an entire episode Right. To it. Right. So   favorite topic. Yeah. And, you know, for NVK, he's making hardware. Right? So maybe   the MIT license is not a good fit for his business model, whereas for   some projects like, obviously, Bitcoin Core needs to be MIT licensed because Completely unrestricted. Anyone can do whatever they want with it. Exactly. Because that's a very low level, protocol level building block. Foundational.   Everyone needs Bitcoin Core to use anything with Bitcoin.  

And also projects like, Rust Lightning or or LDK by the Foundational.   Right.   Whereas projects like Bisc and Mempool   use a license called the AGPL   or the or, in Mempool's case, you can choose AGPL or GPL.   But the idea is,   I guess, created by Stallman in the eighties.   Decades ago. This guy figured it out that   in order for software to remain free,   it has to   accomplish what he coined as the 4 freedoms. And you can go   read his his long form essays, and he he's he's written length about it. So I won't try and, do it justice now. But, essentially, the GNU licenses that Stallman pioneered   are much more complex than the MIT license or the BSD license or the unlicensed, which MIT licenses you can just do whatever the hell you want.  

It's out there. But the GPL is quite   strict, relatively speaking, saying that if you fork the project,   your changes need to also be free software.   They also need to stay   under the same license.   And so, for example,   if you fork Bitcoin Core and you make changes to it or integrate it into your other code, that's   your business and nobody   can say anything about it. But if you fork the mempool project   and you add some feature,   then the Mempool open source project can take those   feature additions that you made and merge it upstream back into the Mempel project. And so   that keeps the free software free. The resulting  

[00:58:35] Unknown:

whatever resulting modifications happen or whatever is used with that code needs to remain the same license, needs to remain open. Right. And the GPL and the AGPL, which is even more,  

[00:58:46] Unknown:

strictly enforcing this   freedom, is   somewhat   controversial   with large enterprises   like Google.   And I think Square also bans use of the AGPL because the lawyers are,   for whatever reason,  

[00:59:01] Unknown:

paranoid about using this AGPL code. Well, there there's an argument that it's and this is actually the argument I the one of the reasons I like it is it's almost like weaponized code. It's it's a it's a open source poison pill. So, like, if you use that code,   unless you're just completely breaking the law, and this was an argument that was I thought it was really interesting in the last discussion, which is,   ultimately, all of these licenses require a state to to basically enforce them. But unless you're willing to just completely break the law and just keep it closed and just not tell anyone and hope you don't get caught,   using GPL code,   a GPL code,   is is essentially this poison pill where where you need to make everything open with it.  

That's a hot topic these days. But so you said Square doesn't like it, but they gave you a grant.  

[00:59:51] Unknown:

Oh, yeah. I mean,   I I mean, we have a dual license.   So you can so even though Square doesn't like AGPL, we also make it available under GPL if you don't like AGPL. It's just that we would prefer AGPL. But they don't really like GPL either. Right? No. I think the lawyers are only paranoid about AGPL. So what's the difference between AGPL and GPL? It's one paragraph in the license, and it basically says if you   make   the service if you make the software if you use a software to run like a website   and that website is available on the Internet,   then you also need to make   the whole stack of that   website   available as open source on this license. And so that's a very,   oversimplified   explanation, but they're worried that so then it's really a poison pill where, like, everything needs to be open. Right. And with GPL, it's   less   strict. So, for example, with GPL, you could run   I mean, Linux is GPL version 2. Right? So you can run Linux on the TV here right next to the table, but whatever other software you run on top of Linux  

[01:00:58] Unknown:

is a separate piece of software. Right. So just that kernel needs to be Exactly. Open, not the   not the dependencies. Exactly. And   yeah, the opposite.  

[01:01:08] Unknown:

Right. So so you can have lawyers argue what   constitutes   the same program and and there's been,   a lot of debate about this. But   AGPL   is much more   poisonous. It's a unique terminology, right, in the sense that it if you used   any other web server software in this, then you would have to make that open source as well. And so mempool   is a application,   not like a protocol layer.   It's a web application that has its own community and and integrations and everything. And because it's a standalone app,   also just like this, we felt the AGPL is the best license for the project, essentially. And if you look at other,   I guess, community projects like PureTube   or Mastodon   or BISC, which has a huge community around it, and they're all standalone   applications, web applications. They all use AGPL. They all came to the same conclusion.  

So   Square wouldn't be able to run a Mastodon or a peer tube,   for example, under their Right. Policy.  

[01:02:11] Unknown:

Got it.   And then just to   just to think about this in practical terms, so, like, do you know what   what is the open source license for UNIX? Is it MIT?  

[01:02:23] Unknown:

Well, UNIX is like a family of operating systems now. Right? I mean, the original UNIX is probably from, like, the sixties. Right. I think there's, like, AT and T Bell Labs. So now nobody runs, like, the actual Unix operating system. They use, like, derivatives of it. Like, for example, FreeBSD is BSD license. Right.   Yeah. I mean, Linux is GPL   version 2.   Every   OS is so old that they set their license Right. Right. Decades ago. That makes sense.  

[01:02:53] Unknown:

But, basically, like, if you if we're if you're in a situation where you have, like, a completely free and open license, like a MIT license with no restrictions,   then in practice,   what could happen is, like, a big tech company can basically just take it, keep it in a closed source stack, make some modifications,   and not share with the rest of the world.  

[01:03:11] Unknown:

That's the trade off. Right. But,  

[01:03:14] Unknown:

on the other hand,   people can build on it in a more free way.   That but that's that's   the back and forth trade off. Right? Yeah. I mean, we could talk about this for hours. There's so many trade offs. There's so many, you know, attack vectors. One of my favorite topics, because it's a very nerd hot hot button issue. Like, people have very strong opinions on it.   It's like arguing about politics, but a lot more fun.  

[01:03:36] Unknown:

Yeah. If you if you run into Rutsal in a in a bar in Germany,  

[01:03:41] Unknown:

you you know, you'd be talking for hours with the guy about all you have to do is just, like, cough in your hand and say licenses, and he'll just go.  

[01:03:50] Unknown:

Yeah. Rutsal is,  

[01:03:52] Unknown:

maintainer of RaspiBlitz projects. And shout out to him, by the way. Him and Ben Arc, really, they they helped out a lot in terms of the workshop experience of the open source stage, and I really appreciate it. Yeah. They're they're great too. The whole Fullmo team. Yeah. They had these,  

[01:04:06] Unknown:

really cool devices. And FOMO himself. FOMO himself. Yeah. They they, it's, like, for, like, $5 or something, they made this device   that you can build in just a few minutes with with, I guess, easy to obtain parts   that can essentially receive   was it on chain? It's offline lightning payments. Yes. Like, offline lightning payments. So the device doesn't connect to the Internet at all, but just using math and cryptography. Well, it uses so so the phone that pays is connected to the Internet. Right? So your phone's connected to cell signal,  

[01:04:37] Unknown:

and then you pay an ln URL.   And then once you pay the ln URL, it shows a PIN.   And if that PIN is the same that the merchant sees,   then you get whatever goods you have. It confirms the payment without the merchant needing to be online. Now people say, okay. Well, why would I need a situation   where the cell phone obviously already has Internet, but the terminal doesn't. Well,   Benarck had a rudimentary vending machine,   and on with the vending machine, it actually has a PIN pad, so you don't need a merchant there.   And after you pay it, you get PIN, you put the PIN in, and then your goods come out of the vending machine. And that makes deployment   way, way easier because all of a sudden, all you need is power for the vending machine.  

The vending machine doesn't need Internet access.   Only the payer needs Internet access, so you don't have to pay a subscription for the Internet or whatnot.  

[01:05:29] Unknown:

Yeah. And if you've ever been to El Salvador, the mom and pop shops all over accepting   Bitcoin lightning,   they don't even have a smartphone.   They just have a piece of paper with a QR code on it. An l n URL? No. Not even an l n URL. They were using a Bitcoin Beach Wallet or whatever? Right. Which is just their username, essentially. Correct. And   the way they would know if you sent them funds or not is they would look at your phone, which is obviously  

[01:05:53] Unknown:

not a secure way to Right. It's a trust trade off. They can be lying to you.   Right. So  

[01:05:59] Unknown:

this device would Massive improvement. Yeah. In El Salvador. And you wouldn't have to use the government's, like, Chivo Wallet. You wouldn't need a smartphone. You would just know it's very, very inexpensive.  

[01:06:07] Unknown:

And I guess, like, another major use case of it is something like the conference where, like, everyone has Internet issues at at big events plus people,   and just to not have all these different lightning payments. I mean,   one of the cool parts about the conference was all light all anything at the conference, including beer and food and whatnot, could be bought with lightning.   But the first day, they were having Wi Fi issues. So lightning payments were failing because   of of just straight up Wi Fi issues, and that got sorted in the next 2 days after that. But,   if you had offline ln POS,   then you wouldn't have to deal with that issue. Now the major trade off right now is not all wallet supports spending to lnurl.  

But that's a whole another   whole another rabbit hole. I mean, I remember,   we had mallers in town,   and I excitingly   told them. I was like, we got these POS systems. You can buy beer at this brewer in POS, and he's like, man, are you trolling me? I was like, why?   And he's like, because that one's   at me for not supporting Ellen Ural. He can't pay these terminals.   Was like, nope. Not intentional. Did not realize.   Yeah.   Fuck. Yeah. Awesome.   I had one more question for you. There's a question in the chat,   from Highside   for for you is, how much time do we have before a fee market is necessary to keep up network security? I would guess we have around 10 to 15 years left.  



[01:07:36] Unknown:

Yeah. That's a good question, and I think it's not going to be like a black or white thing where it's just all of a sudden we have a fee market. Because as we saw last year,   when the market was pumping hard and everyone's   moving money around to   trade on exchanges or bucket shops or whatever they're doing, the fees surged up, and they stayed congested for I think it was, like, six and a half months last year.   So   after the market calmed down a bit, the mempool emptied out, and it's been empty ever since. So   when are we going to see a fee market? I it it won't   be just   here today, gone tomorrow kind of thing. It's it's going something that will continuously   be more   congested   over the next 10 to 15 years until some point where it's mostly full all the time, and then clearing out every day or clearing out every week or clearing out every month will become  

[01:08:31] Unknown:

a more and more rare occurrence. Right? Right. I mean, we've seen that in periods of high fees where it's like on Sundays, it clears because people don't transact as much.   I think the conference last year, like, everyone went down to Miami and cleared because people stopped transacting.   Yeah. Like, Bisk traders   would always trade on Sunday for a long time  

[01:08:53] Unknown:

because that had the lowest fees, So just in the interest of saving money. And, I mean, Lightning definitely adds another element to it.  

[01:09:00] Unknown:

I mean, the perfect example is at the conference. Right? All the payments were Lightning enabled.   So those transactions aren't hitting the chain. They're essentially batched transactions,   if you wanna look at it from a Bitcoin macro lens.   And in times of high fees, people might be more likely to switch to a lightning or   maybe even a liquid. But Sure. If you wanna open lightning channel, Sunday's a great day to do it, Sunday night, or when fees are low, unless you want PTLCs, and then we gotta close all our lightning channels to migrate, but that's a whole another.   I think there's another question. Yeah. If the parent I think we answered this. If the parent has been dropped because the fee is below the mempool limit this is from orange surf.  

If the parent has been dropped because the fee is below the mempool limit, could the parent not broadcast a new transaction spending the same UTXO with a higher fee without r RBF?   We did not answer that. You would have to  

[01:09:54] Unknown:

double spend your own first transaction.   And, yes, I've done that before.   And it and it it's tricky, but it can work. But   you can't you can't just tell, like, your your mom to  

[01:10:08] Unknown:

double spend a transaction out of a wallet. It's Well, also some wallets just don't make it. Like, I guess   and one of the things I look forward to is,   if I look forward to I mean, I still think the jury's out if we're gonna have a sustained high fee market.   And I would just go back to Wizz's previous answer about how long do we need to see fees increase. Because if if purchasing power keeps going up,   and purchasing power keeps increasing, then even though the subsidy is having,   right,   with on a 4 year having cycle,   each subsidy   and purchasing power terms is higher than the previous one. Yeah. Significantly higher to the point where, you know, we have 2,000,000 Bitcoin left to mine. At time of issuance, those 2,000,000 Bitcoin being paid off as a subsidy to miners will   almost most definitely be   higher than the previous 19,000,000.  



[01:11:12] Unknown:

Right. So quick example, when the blocker when the block subsidiary war was 50 Bitcoin, Bitcoin was worth about $100.   So if you solve the block Right. It would make, what, 5 grand USD? Right. But now   even though the block reward is halved multiple times to only 6.25,   at the current price, that's about a quarter $1,000,000.   Right. So even though the amount of Bitcoin is much, much less purchasing power of the reward is significantly  

[01:11:36] Unknown:

higher. Right. So I think that puts it off. I mean, the other thing is we do have the difficulty adjustment, and there's always a question of how much security is enough security.   So, you know, in situations,   where miners are do not think it's profitable for them to mine, they will pull off their miners, and then the remaining miners will be more profitable. And at the same time, people will be raising their fees   to be included in blocks. So there is a dynamic there   that should make it so it's never unprofitable to mine. It's just who is it profitable for   rather than just across the board being unprofitable to mine by design, by this by this mix of the difficulty adjustment and,   the dynamic fee market. Yeah.  

I,   I lost track.   So there was another question, but that previous question   alright.   The point I was trying to make earlier was we haven't seen a high sustained fee market. If we do see a high sustained fee market,   there's going to be a lot of UX and protocol things that change because developers will be focused on that pain point. One of the things we see with Bitcoin   is Bitcoin is robust   because it's, like, almost this open bug bounty program,   but that only happens when the system gets stressed and you see the pain points. And one of the things I talk about a lot with El Salvador is, yes, it's a   it's a country of 6,000,000 people, but   bringing low income 6,000,000 people all onto a Bitcoin standard the same time where they're transacting a lot, all of a sudden exposed a lot of pain points   in day to day transactions where people weren't making that many day to day transactions before. So while developers and protocol developers did not see those pain points, they see the pain points, then they attempt to mitigate the pain points. And it's gonna be the same for sustained high fee market if we see one where there's gonna be all these pain points that emerge that we never really noticed before because we just weren't in that stressed environment. And when that happens,  

[01:13:36] Unknown:

you might see wallets offer the ability for you to easily double spend a transaction that gets dropped from mempools, for example. Yeah. Exactly. There's been this common misconception that you can always broadcast the transaction for 1 SAP per vByte. Right. Shout out to our friend, Ketan, who's   always tweeting about this. Well, he won that round. Well, but but during that six and a half month stretch last year, I think we trolled him a lot, and then all of a sudden, 1 sapper bite got into the next block, and then now he's been trolling us since. But during that high fee sustained time, he had to transact Bitcoin, and   he, at one point, tweeted he's like, yeah. I guess you have to use 4 or 5 Sats per click or something to get you know? So that was the the point was that   you to to go to your point about the wallets UI changing,   a lot of people made these assumptions, and they coded wallets or exchanges. Like, for example,   Unchained   Capital, when they were doing their transactions, I guess, were using too low of a fee and the the transactions their customers got stuck in the mempool. But these guys are awesome. They called us up and they said, hey. We wanna   sponsor you guys. We just want some help with our, you know, fee estimation.  

And so now they're using the mempool space API for their fee estimation, and they always get   in you know, included in the next block. Same with Exodus Wallet. Right? They're using our fee estimation for very, very high   priority transactions, and it works well. Of course, now the mempool's empty.  

[01:14:58] Unknown:

Mempools are empty. My mempools. There's no such thing as them. Yeah. When I say the mempool, I mean my mempool. Okay. So we're Not a broadband. Let let that be let that be clear,   going forward. Whenever he says the mempool,   mister Wiz over here is,   talking about his mempool.   So I we have another question from Arne Serf. This is one of the earlier questions that I noted,   which I thought was really good. Why would an out of band payment be lower than just paying the miners   in band with the normal fee?  

[01:15:32] Unknown:

Well, like I said,   if you   you don't know when the next block is gonna get mined. Right? So Right. If you make a transaction now,   even if you're   using the high priority fee on mempool space, there just might not be any blocks mined for the next 2 hours. It happens.   You know? It's just might variant, variance in mining. And so during that 2 hour period, your The target is 10 minutes, but it can be  

[01:15:56] Unknown:

however long. We've seen long periods with no blocks. Exactly. And and so your transaction  

[01:16:01] Unknown:

in that 2 hour time period could get buried deep in the mempool,   and new transactions are surging in so that   your transaction gets more and more and more buried and then eventually purged   in the worst case scenario. So,   sure, if you if you if you get a block bind in 10 minutes later and use the high fee and you didn't get bumped out of that next block, then, yes, you will be confirmed. But quite often,   if you're   trying to estimate   it, what would the   best fee the optimal fee be, It's it's a moving target, and it's hard to hit, and you can't always hit it just Especially when, like, demand is high. Like, if if I've I've been in situations where I, like, I paid on the lower end of a fee, and it just keeps going on me.  

[01:16:46] Unknown:

Right? And it almost lets you do a more calculated transaction. Right? Because it's you pay the lower fee. I mean, the out of band payment allows you to. You can pay a lower fee. So, like, what happens is you end up in practice, what happens is if you really wanted to confirm, you end up overpaying just to guarantee that you get into a block.   With this out of band payment, you pay a lower fee, and then you just   instantly pay whatever the exact market price is   for   Right. To get into a block. Right? So you In that example. Pay the low you you basically pay the lowest you could practically pay to get  

[01:17:24] Unknown:

could become like this, oracle for   what the price was to get into that block at the moment it was mined.   And At the exact moment. The exact moment. Right? Because the the fee market changes so quickly. And then whatever you paid on the fees, even it was too much or too little, we could   credit or debit you the difference, and mining pools could, you know, make these type of agreements with people who create a lot of transactions. For example, there used to be something every day called BitMex o'clock where BitMex would just it was, like, 9 AM EST. Right? Whenever they process all their transactions.   They would just broadcast, like, hilariously unoptimized,   you know, huge multi They literally only did one withdrawal per day, and it was at the same time every day. And it was huge. It was, like, several blocks full. So if you're even in the next block ready to get mined, boom, you're suddenly buried.  

And I think they've fixed this maybe a year or so ago, so we don't have bit next clock anymore. But anybody who's watching the mempool remembers this event. And other and and they would they would pay way too much fees. Like, they would pay   1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of sats   more than they had to for, like, a simple relatively,   low fee transaction they could've gotten away with. But just because they wanted their customers to get that money right away confirmed,   they would overpay by quite a bit. And Binance and all the large exchanges typically do the same thing. They overpay   way higher than they need to just to make sure that they get into the next block.  



[01:18:52] Unknown:

Right.   So we have another question. This one from Mark Hughesat.   There are companies that use GPL software, but don't publish  

[01:19:11] Unknown:

Well, that's just   software piracy. Right? If you break the GPL license and you don't publish source code, then you are pirating that free software, ironically. And you would have to catch them just like Hollywood has to catch when you torrent a movie or something. You would have to to somehow find out that they are pirating your software,   which yeah. If they never publish it, then you could never know. But if you're just a home user and you hack on the mempool code on your Raspberry Pi, you know, nobody would ever know about that Or care. Who would care. Or care. Exactly. But there are many cases when the GNU,   the Free Software Foundation   sues a large company like Cisco   because they've decompiled the Cisco operating system and found the new libraries in there and say, yeah. Take them to court where you're violating the GPL, and they would force Cisco to open source   all of their forked libraries. It's really just like a it's it's mostly a threat to, like, rich public tech companies that you have this massive liability if you do it. Right? Exactly. It's to keep the software free   from large enterprises that would otherwise pirate it, basically. Would you would you say that in a perfect world,   there's no such thing as piracy and there's just no enforcement of this stuff, or do you prefer to have the state there to   enforce these things? Well, juicy question. Yeah. That's a deep topic, though.  



[01:20:36] Unknown:

I I'm afraid to answer this Matt will call me a status. I mean, no matter what, you're gonna get canceled by half of the audience.   That's why it's a good question. I I think as a cypherpunk,  

[01:20:45] Unknown:

you need to use the rules of the system against the system itself. Maybe a good example is,   3 printed guns in the United States.   Obviously, the government doesn't like if people can just print their own guns,   and   whoever's publishing the 3 d CAD files to print the guns   can just go to court and play their game and put put on the table, yeah, first amendment, second amendment,   and they win in court. Just coded speech. Exactly. And so there are instances   when the most hardcore cypherpunks   are the ones like Adam Back in the nineties going to the supreme court   or,   what was his name?  

Dj b, Daniel j Bernstein.   They went to the Supreme Court   and fought   the US government   that   code is you know, there's there's no reason to block people from exporting cryptography   because code is free speech, and they won. And so so some of the most respected Cypherpunks   actually use the state's own system against the state and won. Right. And so to say I mean, look at open source. Right. But so there's there's, I mean, there's this I would say there's a strong argument  

[01:22:00] Unknown:

that probably most people   don't disagree with that if if you have these systems that already exist, you know, kind of don't hate the player, hate the game,   There's a strong argument to use those systems   to   basically further our interests and to protect ourselves. But my question is really beyond that.   Would you prefer that those systems didn't exist in the first place? Right?   Like, in a   like, in a post Bitcoin open source world,   where we're fractured into many independent city states or citadels,   there there won't be widespread   easy enforcement of any of this shit.  

I think that's a massive net benefit for everybody.   The transition might be messy, but I think that's a because everyone can just build on this open infrastructure.  

[01:22:57] Unknown:

Right? The current   free software movement is heavily dependent on the state to enforce that. And so if it did not exist in this hypothetical situation and a post Bitcoin, then all software  

[01:23:10] Unknown:

is MIT licensed. I might it's just fully open, unrestricted. It's the anarchy of the Internet. Right? And and then Which seems to me like a massive net benefit. I mean, obviously, it has trade offs. But Right. But in the meantime,  

[01:23:22] Unknown:

I don't want   a large company to take free software and make it not free.   And so if we can use the state system   to keep free software free in the meantime,   then   I guess that's the the the world that we live in right now. I mean, obviously, you can go to China and pirate stuff and you won't get in trouble. I mean, it's, like, literally the government strategy. Right? Or Russia too now. Right? They just,   you know, any any airline jets that were in Russia owned by foreign companies. They're like, no. These are ours now. Right? Right. So   there are already places where this   this intellectual property enforcement system does not exist,   and you have this anarchy of freedom and information.  

And if you go to places in China, they'll print any book you want in a very nice professionally printed hard,  

[01:24:15] Unknown:

hardcover book. Right? So that to me is, like, the pinnacle of open information. Right? Sure. And if you're a good content creator or author, then   you should still be able to figure out some kind of way to sustainably monetize  

[01:24:29] Unknown:

your work. Right. It's like it's like trying to monetize the Memble open source project.   You can't really control the distribution of the source code. Source code is free. I mean, you still see and and you see, like,  

[01:24:41] Unknown:

I believe, Andreas did it. A bunch of other Bitcoin authors did it where they provide the PDF for free.   That they've self published, and   they've still off of the books because people wanna support the author,   but also the  

[01:25:02] Unknown:

access. Right? I think this is just all volunteerism.   Right? If   if you want to   if you wanna support an artist, you donate. This is how the MEM pool opens   those project is funded from donations directly from the community. Right. We give away all the   software for free. The website is totally free with no advertising. It's just a 100% funded by the community based on   the, you know, the voluntary they're voluntarily donating. They don't have to give us money.   And   you're kind of supporting the creators so that they continue   or you're you're paying for the next version of software. Right? Right. In a way. So And that that it's secure and robust and Right. So so in the future world maintained. Which which are arguably Menpool is already living in. Yeah. We're we're living in this post   Bitcoinization   world where everything is volunteerism.  

But it but, you know, at the end of the day, we still have to use this copyright to enforce open source licenses or or trademarks to you know, we don't want   people stealing our or pirating our logo on T shirts. We wanna make the mempool shirts. Oh, you wanna talk about my favorite Explorer?  

[01:26:16] Unknown:

Was it mempoolbch.com   or some  

[01:26:19] Unknown:

Oh, yeah. I mean, many many The b cache the b cache mempool clone? Yeah. Many shipplings fork the mempool project and make their own Bitcoin explorers   where we have to very politely ask them to not put our logo   or our profile photos on your website.   I mean,   yeah, yeah, typically, if you fork an open source project, you need to call it something else.   You can't  

[01:26:45] Unknown:

Well, like, specifically in mempool's case,   mempool dot space is trademarked.  

[01:26:51] Unknown:

Yeah. Right. It in the logo. Right. So the source code is copyrighted,   and then we have an open source license that code to make it available for everyone. And just logos are trademarked   in the United States and and other countries, and then we   put, like, a open trademark policy on those trademarks so that   essentially, if you run an unmodified   copy of the mempool open source project,   then you're permitted to use the the mempool logo so that everyone knows what that is. But if you fork   the project and put Dogecoin on there or b cash or or some shitcoin of the week, yeah, you can't put our logo on there because people   trust that logo to be a Bitcoin Explorer, not a Shitcoin Explorer. Right. The logo is an open source is a brand, not an open source project. Exactly. And and for example, Linux is a registered trademark of Linus. Right? Right. And so if you fork Linux,   that's one of the ways they monetize the project actually is the the royalties from   trademark usage. So if you fork Linux and you make Wizz Linux,   I would have to pay a role to Linus for the use of the trademark, but not for the code because it's open. Right. So if you fork the Linux kernel, you call it something else. Linux.  

No. That's   piss off Microsoft or or Linus or something. Right? But but I think there was, like, Microsoft Windows. Someone's like Windows.   Yeah. Windows. WizzNix. Yeah. So, yeah, if it's not confusingly similar, you can not have to pay royalties.   And just like yeah. You you're free to fork the mempool open source project, but   then you can't call it the mempool open source project. That's our project name. You have to call it something else.   It's free   software, but you can't call it what we call it. Got it.   Interesting.  

So we're  

[01:28:35] Unknown:

very at an hour and a half. I mean, I did discuss this.   So let's discuss this. I mean, a lot of the freaks are already aware of Bisc. I talked about Biscol Time, swacking awesome product. You're heavily involved.   Bisk is a is is is software that you can freely run on your computer   and connect to other people in a   p to p way,   to trade Bitcoin,   for either Fiat or shitcoins.  

[01:29:06] Unknown:

Yeah. Bizkit is a great project and a great concept   made by very, very smart people. And   I think everyone loves BISK because   the the message is so strong.   The message is that KYC is the illicit activity.   We   I mean, Bisk is a is an open source software   program that connects you to other people running Bisk   so that you can trade Bitcoin peer to peer with other Bitcoiners directly   without other   trusted third parties knowing about your transaction details or even your name. Right. So in practice, it's like instead of  

[01:29:44] Unknown:

using Cash App to broker the transaction, which is a centralized regulated entity that could spy on you or a Gemini or Kraken or something.   Bisc allows 2 peers to connect directly to each other and exchange only the information that they want to exchange.  

[01:30:00] Unknown:

Right? This is a 100% routed over Tor.   Everyone just has an onion address and connects to each other in the app, and you can make an offer or take someone else's offer to trade Bitcoin for fiat in a number of payment methods all over the world.   I think in the United States,   US postal money order or Zelle   or,   few other methods are supported. I mean, you could also meet in person and exchange cash, or I think Amazon gift cards are popular now. There's a number of ways to   trade Bitcoin   privately   and peer to peer using Bisk, and and it's just a beautiful app.  

[01:30:38] Unknown:

Awesome. How long have you been working with the Bisk project?  

[01:30:42] Unknown:

Probably I think it was slightly before Mempel, so maybe, like, three and a half years ago. But the project is very old. The project is probably,   jeez, must be, like, 7 years or older now. It's it's one of the early Bitcoin It was, like, 2013 or 2014, maybe. Right. Right around 2013. Yeah. Sounds about right. So and even before then, I know they were thinking about it for a long time too because   it started from   what we called Satoshi Square, where you would go to a Bitcoin meetup and   I remember that. Yeah. There was there was not a lot of exchanges back then. There were not a lot of  

[01:31:15] Unknown:

infrastructure where you could trade. So you would just wanted just gotten crushed.  

[01:31:20] Unknown:

You would just show up at a meetup and say, hey, I'm looking to buy Bitcoin, like, out loud in the room. Right. And someone say, yeah, I'm looking to sell. And you would just open outcry  

[01:31:29] Unknown:

trading. And But they even had, like, some are more formalized, right, where it was, like, almost like a like a mercantile exchange pit or whatever where, like, someone would be standing up on a podium, and then people would   be orders, maybe yelling bids.  

[01:31:45] Unknown:

Form of peer to peer trading.   So   the digital version of that   was the idea for Bisk or Bitsquare at the time. So from Satoshi   Square,   the founders of Square Project tried to implement that same energy, and they created this  

[01:32:01] Unknown:

essentially like  

[01:32:03] Unknown:

on a peer to peer network, on the Bisk peer to peer network where you could make or take offers to trade Bitcoin and you can   directly with the counterparty. You don't even need to know who they are.   I mean, you could set up, what's what's the the cool way to do it? A Wyoming LLC with a PO box and use US postal money order, and then nobody knows   I think Econo Alchemist does guide for that. Right. Either he or Diverter does. Yeah. There's some ex   guides out there on how to trade private disk and the  

[01:32:35] Unknown:

the the centralized part that's collecting information, your counterparty in every transaction is gonna get information on you. Right? That's why some people set up LLCs. They like the postal orders because it doesn't have any bank account image tied to you. You just pay cash at a post office.  

[01:32:49] Unknown:

Right. There's there's very little,   and and so the the obvious questions are as much information as you wanna provide. Right? Because it's up to the peers how they want to use it. So the obvious questions, when I tell someone about Biscard, well, what if the other guy   scammed me? What if I send them money, he doesn't send me the Bitcoin? And this is just the key problem. Right? So this has this   decentralized organization, the   this DAO to resolve trade disputes, essentially, and   manage the parameters of the peer to peer network. For example, if   Bob and Alice are   agreeing on some terms to buy 1 Bitcoin for $1,000,   if Bob wires the money to Alice on whatever payment method they agree on, but Alice doesn't   release the Bitcoin.  

First of all, it's in a 2 of 2 multisig.   Previously, it was a 2 of 3 multisig   where   an arbitrator from Bisk would hold one of the keys.   But early on, we realized this is an obvious security flaw because   the arbitrator   could just go to Bisk and take every offer,   and now they hold 2 keys.   Right. So   the newer version of DISC now uses the 2 of 2 multisig with a time lock.   And this way, only Alice and Bob have the   keys to settle their transaction on their own. However,   if some time goes by, which is either 10 or 20 days depending on the payment method, if they cannot   settle this trade on their own,   then the funds will essentially be sent to the BiskDAO.  

And,   well, first of all, they'll they'll start mediation. So before the the funds go anywhere,   mediator will just join the chat and or not join this chat. They'll make separate new chats, so they can't even see what you guys discussed previously. But the mediator will see the details of the trade and talk to Alice and Bob and and try and work it out. Because usually, newbies make mistakes or they mess up their node or   whatever reason that the mail got slow and so they didn't get it. But, eventually, the mediator helps them out, Or   if they can't resolve it with the mediation, then it would go to arbitration where one of the parties would broadcast this time locked transaction.  

After 10 or 20 days, funds would go to Bisk, and then the mediator   would make a suggested payout   on the Bisk dApp. Alice   Alice showed me, you know, enough sufficient evidence to where she sent the US Postal money order. She has a photo of the envelope and the receipt from the mailbox.   And I checked on the post office website that it was indeed cashed at this post office for this amount, so I I suggest that,   you know, she gets the the payout.   And, usually,   this   combined with security deposits   is enough to to prevent any scams   or this this disincentifies scams anyway. Because a scammer doesn't like to lose their own funds. A scammer doesn't like to risk their own money. So if they have to put up security deposit   and if they try to scam on someone and they lose their security deposit, well, they don't   come in. Right. You're adding a cost to the scam. Right. So   the game theory and the incentives are all there to resolve disputes. And then because of that dispute resolution process and security deposits,   the game theory is that scammers don't really maybe, like, once a month Right. It's not perfect. Yeah. It's not perfect, but it's been mitigated enough.  

Right. Without using any form of KYC  

[01:36:12] Unknown:

or Right. The alternative is a centralized third party that is KYC ing everyone and has huge fraud departments and lawyers  

[01:36:20] Unknown:

and all this bullshit. Exactly. Are don't get access to markets because of it, and they can't. And the biz network bypasses all of that and just says, okay, what are the 3 threat models? They're always security, privacy, and censorship.   So for the security side,   arbitration can resolve this   scam risk   and disincentivize it with security deposits and the ability to confiscate them.   And privacy risk, only the 2 transaction parties, Alice and Bob, will know about the transaction.   If they have a dispute, then   a mediator would also see those transaction details. But for the most part, it's as private as it can get. And then censorship, because there is no BIS company,   there is no BISK servers. It's all peer to peer over Tor.  

It's extremely censorship resistant and   unregulated.  

[01:37:15] Unknown:

Awesome.   So, I mean, there one of the cool panels that I put you on for the open source stage was, the decks panel,   and CSU Wildcat was on there. He's working with Square,   on his decentralized   identifiers.   TBD is what it's called. Right. No. So but he's he's working specifically on DIDS, his decentralized identifiers, which are gonna be integrated into   their TBD   protocol, which is,   basically   their the open network decentralized exchange protocol,   that allows you to trade   Bitcoin for other things, whether that's Fiat or   Sandwiches. Sandwiches or   I I use cars as an example.  

How do you what are you what are your thoughts on so so BIST doesn't have first of all, if you haven't listened to that panel,   which day was that? I think it was day 2, the first general admission. Right. So if you go to all all three open source stage is,   are on the podcast feed, and there's actually time stamps where you can click the individual panels. But if you go to day 2, click their individual panel. Your podcast app should just pull you right to that moment.   But what are your thoughts on   using basically a reputation system as an additional   fraud layer? Like, if I mean and we've seen centralized reputation systems, stuff like eBay   or Airbnb, where   if you've used Airbnb a lot, you know it's always more risky to book from a host that doesn't have a bunch of reviews. But if a host has 60 good reviews and you're like, wow, this host is awesome, you feel more comfortable,   renting a room from them.  



[01:39:02] Unknown:

Yeah. That's a good question, and, obviously, there's going to be trade offs with the reputation system because   if you're optimizing for maximum privacy,   you would not want a reputation system because a reputation system is literally linking all of your previous transactions and   Currently, it's a one   one single identity where I can see everything they've been doing. So Bisc does not have any form of a reputation system or,   you know, even an identity system,   really.   There are few mechanisms in there where,   like, the hash of a payment account   can have   some street cred on the Bisq network. Like a hash of a bank account or something? Right.  

And that could be considered a decentralized identifier if you wanna call it that, but it's nothing like   the newer protocols and where everything is based around these   decentralized   identifiers.   I mean, Bisk doesn't wanna have an identity system. Right? I mean, you can we've we've discussed having   one Tor Onion host name per transaction.   Right now, it uses the same onion, but you it's very easy to delete it and make a new one.   The   the cost of creating a new Onion host name is basically free. So   if you want anonymity   and you want privacy, yeah, you don't want a reputation system. Right. TV DEX trade off there. Yeah. TV DEX has the problem of being developed by a centralized regulated company, and so, obviously, they need to do KYC AML compliance.  

And so, therefore,   their protocol inflammation,   obviously,  

[01:40:36] Unknown:

gonna focus around. Well, the the cool part of TBD to me is   very similar to the corporate of Fisk to me, which is   if you create this   this open protocol,   you can allow people to use it however they wanna use it. So there could be   what affects to a KYC compliant transactions on TBD,   where   both entities   require   your did or whatever we wanna call it, your your   your reputation to have hash commitments from some kind of KYC authority. Right?   That has maybe checked your passport and checked all this in information for you and and then basically   hashed a reference into your did that says, you know, this person is who they say they are, and they talk about all these different things where it can be more,   robust   than typical k current KYC systems where it's, like, they're above a certain age or they live in this state or they're not a felon or, like but not the specific this is a their selfie and their passport or whatever. But then also, you could have   transactors in that open protocol that are,   maybe they don't require   that that   in-depth information, but they just wanna know,   which country you live in or maybe even less than that. They just wanna know what your social media account is or something, and that that is hashed into your did. Right? So   the   idea my understanding of their idea is that it's this open protocol where there'll be different layers of how much people want in terms of reputation or KYC,   and it just comes down to the individual transactors. But it's interesting the different trade off between just no reputation system period   and working around that with basically the security deposit model that Bisca has  

[01:42:22] Unknown:

versus a reputation system. Right. And and I think   the whole and in fact, the first time we discussed this,   jeez, it was years ago, I think, on TFTC with uncle uncle Marty.   We talked about with Steve also was there, and you asked Steve Yeah. Similar question.  

[01:42:41] Unknown:

First time I ever met you in person, it was Yeah.  

[01:42:44] Unknown:

The start of a beautiful friendship.   And, Steve had a very elegant answer, I thought, to this question. And he says, you know, why have reputation systems?   All you really need is the integrity.   Right? Because what is the actual threat model   for why to have a reputation system   is the first in the in the first place. Right?   If   you know that you're gonna get paid on the trade, either through the ordinary honest way, or if you do   unfortunately   have a dispute that the Bisk DAO will make it up to you somehow,   then why would you care about the reputation? If the integrity is there,   then there is no need for such a reputation system, and it is only   going to hurt your privacy.  

And, sure, if you with a decentralized identifier system, you could make throwaway identities, one for every transaction. You can do that. But you get penalized in that system because, like I said, with Airbnb,  

[01:43:45] Unknown:

like, by design because there's a reputation system,   hosts that have good reputations   on the network or even guests that have good it goes both ways that have good reputations on the network are more likely to   get matches with peers or get higher prices on their Airbnb rentals because  

[01:44:05] Unknown:

I think Airbnb has a very, very different threat model from trading Bitcoin,   online. Right? I mean, if you're physically going to be in somebody else's house,   you probably want some assurance that they're not a murderer or something. Right? And,   likewise,   in an Uber ride, for example,   you know, it's a peer to peer centrally managed peer to peer riding system. You wanna make sure Right. You wanna have some assurance   from the Uber company that this guy is legit and not gonna  

[01:44:35] Unknown:

drive you into,   like, a sketchy corner of the city and Right. Rob you or do worse. So for those threat models, sure, rep reputation system might make sense. But  

[01:44:46] Unknown:

when you're purely doing a financial trade of sats for cash,   you do not need a reputation system. And Bisk has proven this. Wait. I mean, cash is different. Right? Because cash is instantly settled.  

[01:44:59] Unknown:

There's all these fraud elements that happen in the traditional financial system. It's a fiat side that   that causes issues. Like, I mean, especially, like, if you look at,   I would argue,   if you're trading Bitcoin for shit coins,   you really don't need a reputation system because it's all just cryptographically verified instantly settled. Exactly. Right. And those shitcoins could be stable coins or whatever Exactly. Tokens, whatever it is instantly. So the the fraud issues you see are   they come from the fiat system and the inefficiencies of the fiat system and Like, someone could write someone a bad check. Or Right. Or or or they could I they could steal someone's account and send you fraudulent payments that get charged back and then get reversed. Or   Right. So like, if like, imagine someone gets access to someone's bank account, so then they instantly buy a bunch of Bitcoin on Bisk with that bank account.  

The bank then realizes,  

[01:45:55] Unknown:

what happened and just reverses the transaction on their side. Yeah. Some payment methods do have chargeback risk. Right. And so   Bisk has this duty to mitigate those chargeback risks. So, for example,   in our bank transfer   system is   not chargebackable,   so there is no chargeback risk. If I wire you money, it's instant and done, and the transaction cannot be reversed at all ever without, like, a court order or something very, very difficult to obtain.   Whereas in the US,   it's almost a joke. You can just call up the credit card. Oh, yeah. My thing got hacked. Can you just charge back that money? And they'll do it. Right. And so in the US,   one of the popular payment methods, Zelle, does have some chargeback risk. And so to mitigate this, the Bisk developers came up with this clever idea   where   the hash of your payment account data   gets propped through the BISK peer to peer network so that every node knows the age of your payment accounts.  

And so   if your account age is   older than 30 days or something like this and other people have cryptographically   signed it who were signed. So it's, basically, if your payment account was vouched for by another vouched person,   then Because they made a successful trade with you. Right? Right. And it did not go to arbitration. So that is a reputation system in that regard. In an anonymous way. And then so if there  

[01:47:21] Unknown:

if there's fraud with that Zelle account, then does that person get blackballed from the system? Exactly. So that's the mitigations. Right? So Without knowing the specific Zelle account, you know the hash, which is a unique identifier that can't be reversed. Correct. And so that's  

[01:47:35] Unknown:

if you wanna call it a reputation system, sure, it's more of a decentralized web of trust or blacklist or something. And so if an arbitrator   or mediator on DISC sees some fraud and and chargeback, then, yeah, that payment account is now,   nuked. And that's the that's the mitigation. Right? And, also, the Bisk DAO   can always reimburse traders out of the out of their own DAO funds, which has happened in the past.   Couple years ago, there was this   security vulnerability in the Bisk app where I think it was, like, 6 people 6 traders on the Monero to BTC market got   some funds stolen   through a very elaborate attack where Bisco wasn't verifying   the correct payout address or something.  

And they they sold probably,   like, almost $200,000   worth of Monero, I think. And so the did   a proposal. Alright. Should we, you know, divert the trading fee revenue to pay these guys back? And they did. They got   their   $200,000 back or whatever it was. I mean, it took, like, a whole year to pay them back, but they got they got made whole.  

[01:48:37] Unknown:

So, I mean, you've been working with Bisk for over 3 years now.   Bisk is obviously an extremely vital project in in a world where   we're seeing more KYC   go throughout its KYC is just   insidious. It just enters every aspect of our lives. You have all these centralized parties that are getting regulated and cracked down on if they're not implementing   these these stringent regulations, these burdensome regulations that don't actually prevent crime because criminals use bought or stolen information and get around it in other ways, just hurts honest individuals.   So we're seeing all these crackdowns happen, and I will say before I get to this question that   whether TBD is successful or things like Robosats   or even HODL HODL, which is a more centralized trade off balance,   We we want as many options for Bitcoiners as possible. I mean, at at the end of the day, that makes the whole system more robust that that people have all these different options in terms of   using their Bitcoin   and and obtaining more Bitcoin.  

But 3 years over 3 years working with this, what,   like, what have you learned? What what are the pain points? What are the   what do you wish it did better? But, like,   in your view, I I think you have a very unique perspective here.   Like, how can the overarching   Bitcoin ecosystem,   you know,   see the the lessons that were learned in this development and and maybe build a project that's better or improve this itself?  

[01:50:13] Unknown:

Yeah. That's a good question.   This is not perfect by any means.   I mean, the first of all, the code is   quite old and aging. It it was written in Java in in a time, you know, starting, like, 6 or 7 years ago, I think.   That's   it was written in the time where   SPV was still used.   Bloom filters were still used. This technology is not really used by Bitcoin anymore now. The you know, it's moved on to   better ways of having light nodes on the network   with their own trade offs and everything.   But I think more more more than anything, the code base is just this kind   of aging Java code base that's very difficult to work with, and it's very heavy to run a Java virtual machine on your computer. I mean, if you anyone who's ever used Biscuits known that the fans in your laptop will   start spinning and your laptop will get very hot   because your disk node is using all the CPU power and trying to sync all this data. And so   I actually made a proposal a couple years ago to reimplement this in Rust lang,   which   we actually got a very simple proof of concept working where we had the   the proof of concept Rust   biz cap look in implementation. It's called risk, r I s q,   running inside of an Android app   so that on my Android phone running like Graphene OS, I had Bisc running directly on the phone with no computer, no Raspberry Pi, connecting directly to Tor network, connecting directly to other   BISK peer to peer nodes   and getting the the orders on the market the offers on the market.  

And   the and I made a proposal to basically get the bat Biscount of fund the development of this Rust implementation,   and the proposal was rejected by,   you know, the the founders of the of the project, basically, who voted against it. Because they hold the most DAO tokens. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's their project. Right? Right. It's like if you made a proposal to mempool sore a mempool space and said we wanna reimplement it in a different language,   me and Simon would probably say no. You know They could just do it anyway. Right. I mean You just won't fund it. I just wanted yeah. I wanted them to pay for it.   I had this other developer, Justin, I was working with the time who's, I think, now with the money. But he worked very hard on it, and, you know, there was some drama. Basically, the I think the founders wanted to keep using the Java code base.  

And despite our really cool proof of concept,   which we, you know, we got up and running very quickly in Rust, they said,   no.   We want you to use the Java code base with this new RPC API that we're developing.   Jeez, it must have been, like, 2 over 2 years ago,   and I think that RPC API is still not ready to go. Right? So that was just, like where whereas if if we would have kept working on that Rust implementation  

[01:53:10] Unknown:

for 2 years now, we would have had a kick ass BISK app running on every Android phone. Right. So you have 2 trade offs there. You have or 2 pain points that you've felt with the best project, which is basically tech debt, which is just you have this this massive old code base that's hard to work on, hard to iterate on. And then the second thing being,   I would say, is that we're increasingly moving towards this mobile future where people don't even own computers.   And if you want real usage of something,   there should be at at least a mobile   capable way of using it. But I would say I would even go further where it should be almost a mobile first development where you're   you're expecting the overwhelm. Like, I even so, like, I I self host analytics for for civil dispatch, and, like, you see on the analytics that   there is the overwhelming majority of people are coming in through mobile browsers. Right? And that's obviously a very basic,  

[01:54:10] Unknown:

rudimentary data point, but most people, their main their main computer, if not their only computer, is a mobile phone. Yeah. I mean, there's just so many reasons why it should be mobile first or even having the ability to run a headless disk node on a Raspberry Pi running Umbrel,   you know, where you can one click install disk from the Umbrel app store or something and have it remotely connect to your phone. Zeus model where you have the LND or core lightning node running, and then you have Zeus on your phone that natively connects back to it. Yeah. And and every day, I get like samurai model where you just scan a QR code, same idea. Exactly. Able to connect to your dojo. And and every day, 9,000 people ask me when disk on Umbro. And Right. I have to explain to them that there is no web interface for this, and there is no mobile app for this that can connect remotely to the headless daemon if it ran it headlessly. So and even the RPC API is not,   I think, a 100% ready to go either. Even though it's been years, they've been working on it now. So   while you could, in theory, run Bisc on a Raspberry Pi, you have no way to interact with it. And it would be so huge for Bisc to do this because most people do not keep their computer on 24 hours a day. And so they just   close their laptop lid, and their Bisk node goes to sleep, and all of their offers disappear from the other outstanding trades. Exactly. All the liquidity just appears from the the market.  

So if you had Bisq running on Raspberry Pi, you would probably triple the liquidity   or more because of the 24 hours, offers being available. And then secondly, you'd have people remotely being able to trade, so  

[01:55:44] Unknown:

you could respond to those offers much quicker, which is an obvious pain point for anyone who uses BISK, which is that the liquidity   is is not nearly   not it's it's light years behind the liquidity of, like, a centralized regulated exchange.   And, really, to get a good price, you want to have your offer up there for a while because of the liquidity. So you're you're stuck in a situation where you're always running your your computer.  

[01:56:07] Unknown:

So you really can't use your main laptop for something like that. You almost need a you need a desktop that is just always on. Right. I know lots of people who actually have a whole extra laptop, like their old MacBook or something just for business. That's like running in the corner of their their bedroom or office that is just constantly has their Bisk offers up. Right. And when you go to their house and you ask to borrow their MacBook charge or whatever, they're like, no. Don't use that one. That's powering my laptop. You know? Don't unplug that.   Yeah.  

So it would be nice to reimplement DISC in a modern   protocol way, in a modern programming language, mobile first,   probably integrate it with all the popular wallets so that when you need to to fund the bisque trade, it just opens your and in practice, what you're seeing is something getting built from scratch in that situation. Right? I think at this point, yeah, it would be a full reimplementation.   So while while the Bisc app is great and it works and people use it every day to trade,   it could be   reborn.   And there are efforts to   well, I guess, BISK 2, they they've been working on this for a while now, which which my understanding is it's gonna be a more generic contract execution environment, but they're still not addressing,   a lot of the the problems I see, which is, like, the aging code base. I mean, they're still gonna break it in Java with the you know, just So, I mean, I think that's an interesting thought process to go down. So if  

[01:57:27] Unknown:

if if you were to build an alternative to BIS that tries to accomplish the same goals as BIS from scratch   today,   what would you what would be the key highlights of of that? And maybe, obviously, like, this is from your perspective, but, obviously, someone else could build it.   You're the dream the dream alternative. What is the dream alternative today if we could   Yeah. That's what we know today. I I guess, nowadays, everybody I mean, there were there were no Raspberry Pi full node 6 or 7 years ago when this got started. Even 2 years ago. Exactly. Like, Umbrella is still quite the newcomers in the space have no idea how bad it was. Yeah. It's it's and people say, like, development of Bitcoin goes slow. Right? But, like, on that on that front, it's amazing how much  

[01:58:10] Unknown:

Even Memphill's space. Has been made. Yeah. We did not Memphill did not exist, like, over 3 years ago. Right? Right. So When I got into the space, the block explorers we were using was just fucking   out of garbage. Yeah. I guess if I had to implement this from scratch, the wish list would be something like of course, you separate the back end daemon from the front end daemon in the typical Zeus model where you pair a mobile app to   a Raspberry Pi,   back end. But I would also wanna what what I what we also made, this proof of concept was that you did also didn't need a Raspberry Pi because That's even better. Right. If you wanna onboard someone to Bisq in a bar,   like, at a meetup Right. Like, okay. Install the Bisq app on your phone.  

You know,   you can fund their first trade for them or something if they give you cash in person. I mean, that's a big trade off of this is that you need sats to buy sats. After you're at a meetup though and you had the mobile apps, that wouldn't be a problem because you could just give cash to someone and, you know, have them Or they could be a friend and just That that too. Right? Load you up some sets for your first trade. Or if there's a Bitcoin ATM at the meetup. Right? You could buy 8 stats on the on the ATM and load them into your business. So there's there's definitely you would wanna be have a a separated back end and front end. Whereas right now, the bisque node is,   you know, very, very high. Blob. One big blob. Exactly.  

And it's very heavy, and it's very slow. So you'd want it to run   24 hours a day on your Raspberry Pi just like just like your Bitcoin daemon, just like your Lightning daemon, you want your Bisk daemon to run on your Raspberry Pi 24 hours a day, obviously.   All your offers should be up all the time, and anybody should be able to take your offers 24 hours a day. Right now, if you close your computer, all those offers disappear, and nobody can take them.   The second wish list item is that it should be integrated into   you don't need to keep funds on your Bisc app. You can just keep them in your Moon Wallet or your Zeus Wallet or whatever.  

And   that way or you could even connect your Trezor to your phone and load them directly from your Trezor into your Bisc app to fund the trade Right. Or the other way around. Right now, Bisc has wallets for every single  

[02:00:23] Unknown:

cryptocurrency that they support integrated directly.  

[02:00:26] Unknown:

Bisc only supports Bitcoin.  

[02:00:29] Unknown:

If you wanna buy if you trade shitcoins on Bisq? So say, for example, you buy Monero on Bisq? Yeah. You need a separate Monero wallet? Correct. Oh, okay. But the the the Bitcoin wallet is built into Bisk. Correct.  

[02:00:40] Unknown:

Yeah. And the mediator would have to verify your Monero trade on some Monero block explorer. Right.   So, yeah, that's a whole another thing. But but yeah. So the so the the trade protocol also could be,   improved. And this is something they are improving right now with the BISC V2. It's more of a generic contract execution   thing. So you could agree   on pretty much anything. Right? You could agree to trade   dollars for euros is the example they like to use where   it doesn't even have to be Bitcoin based. It could be lightning. It could be liquid. It could be anything.   Right? And you just make up whatever arbitrary contract terms you want. Of course, you'd wanna, like, normalize those contracts so that they can be on a or off offer book and and have the market book. Yeah. Market price discovery.  

But I think once you have it running 24 hours a day on a Raspberry Pi with a slick mobile app that's integrated into all the other mobile apps   and   arbitrary   contract terms,   then you could do DLCs. Right? Like, Chris Stewart at Surebits   Right. Saw the Bisk offer book. He's like, oh my god. It's exactly what we need for our DLCs because he's figured out the DLC side, but he doesn't have any  

[02:01:49] Unknown:

offer book. Right. So if you don't have the order book, there's no like, it it's it's really hard to take advantage of liquidity. It just makes the market completely inefficient.   Right? And   so, I mean, so you go you're going back and forth here. I mean, obviously, the easier access point is   you're running   the bisque back end   on a home server, whether that's a Raspberry Pi or something more powerful, and you connect back to it on your phone. That's the very more that's that's that's an easier reach. It's more actionable.   I mean, we have Mark, you sat in the comments   saying what the first thought that comes to my mind as well is, like, if it's mobile only   if it's everything's running on your phone, I mean, you're gonna run into battery issues probably is the main issue. Right? Actually, that's not.  



[02:02:34] Unknown:

Zeus Wallet, right, or any wallet app on your phone that doesn't drain the battery. But Zeus is not running 247 on your phone.  

[02:02:41] Unknown:

It's just   it's it's connecting back.   It doesn't have so there's different threat models. Right. Zeus Zeus, you're running on a home server. You're running your your Lightning and your Bitcoin node, and then Zeus is connecting back to it on demand when it needs to. Right. But take another okay. Take a non, Zeus wallet like,  

[02:02:58] Unknown:

I I don't know, Moon Wallet or Phoenix Wallet or something. They all they all have their own trade offs in terms of Oh, so not running 247, though. Right? And with with the Bisk model,  

[02:03:07] Unknown:

you need to be running 247   Not  

[02:03:10] Unknown:

necessarily. So there's there's some more technical   tricks you can do to   keep your offers live on the network,   right, without actually having to run a full note all the time. So we're, like, you're, like, broadcasting your offer to peers. The peers are keeping it alive, and then you just need to be online when it's time to process the trade. Is that the thought? Something like that. Right? Where you would get a push notification and then your note wakes up and then actually does the the more heavy lifting. But the reason why Bisc is so heavy on a computer right now is mostly just because it's implemented in Java and because it's using bloom filters and SPV  

[02:03:45] Unknown:

Right. To Which most newcomers have no idea what that is. Right. It's just this very  

[02:03:49] Unknown:

inefficient well, first of all, Java is very heavy because it's a virtual machine that's, you know,   inefficient in its own way. But then on top of that, to to make it, like, exponentially more heavy,   you're processing, like, every block of bit Bitcoin with very heavy,   computationally expensive bloom filters.   And so,   I mean, this is not used by any wallet anymore except this. That's how old it is. So   if you fix that to use something more modern, Nutrino protocol   or even Electrum protocol   I mean,   it's it's all trade offs. Right? If you have your own Everything is trade offs. Yeah. So you can save battery   by using somebody else's  

[02:04:29] Unknown:

node to use to having lifting. Right? Or you can run your own Raspberry Pi. The key is, like, figuring out a way to implement it in a way that you don't have to be online 24 7 running at 247.   Correct. But you still want your offers to be live 247. And you don't want censorship risk of a centralized server holding the offers.   Exactly. There is no centralized server in this, but I'm just saying, like, that would be the easiest way to implement it would be, like, there's a centralized web server that's holding all and that's what RoboSats does. I don't know if you're familiar with RoboSats, but RoboSats   is an onion only service   that the centralized server is is holding all is holding the full order book,   but it's connected through Tor, and you don't need KYC. And the actual orders are p to p, but the order book is centralized.  



[02:05:11] Unknown:

It's kinda like a local Bitcoins on tour. Yeah. That's interesting. Lightning only. That's interesting. Yeah.   Right.   Yeah. So there's just a 1,000,000 ways Very new. To improve   this.  

[02:05:23] Unknown:

What's that question in the chat? No. No. He's saying what we said, which is moon is not 24 7. A push notification wakes up the app when it Right. Exactly. Yeah.   And a centralized server is sending the push notification, which is a different trade off, obviously.  

[02:05:39] Unknown:

Yeah. Every wallet has its own trade offs.   Every   every back end payment.  

[02:05:44] Unknown:

Is there anything else on the wish list that you would have for a BISQ alternative?   Probably remove the BSQ token.   So let's go into that. So the BSQ token is used for the BISQ DAO.  

[02:05:55] Unknown:

Or at least change the way it works because you you So how does it work right now? HD kind of want like, obviously, the founders of the project   or or maybe I should say the contributors to the project,   you know, any random new pseudonym can start contributing to BISK, which is great. But you don't   there's a lot of reasons why they need this, basically, shitcoin token to govern the BiskDAO. Right? Because you need to have, like, for example,   centralized exchange like Kraken has a corporation   with shareholders  

[02:06:26] Unknown:

and name, like, directors and Like, we saw with Twitter and Elon and stuff. Exactly. It's this huge power struggle. Bureaucracy   And regulated.  

[02:06:36] Unknown:

If you have a company, then that's what you have. But what does Bisc have? Bisc cannot have because Bisc cannot be a company because   then the governments of the world could go to Bisk and say you need a KYC. Like they did with Bitmax. They could arrest the founders. Oh, yeah. And so   jail. Bisk arguably needs a DAO and a governance. This is like the one legit use of a governance token. Right? There's 9,000 shitcoin scams out there that all have their own tokens.   But the purpose of those   tokens is just to   pump pump bags and numbers. The founders. Exactly. But with this, you you know, the contributors actually need it to, like, manage the network for censorship resistance.  

And   it works well when  

[02:07:17] Unknown:

So it's 1 BSQ, 1 vote.  

[02:07:20] Unknown:

Correct. So it works well when you make a contribution   to to bisque, the open source project. And   as a reward for your contributions, you get some BSQ token,   and then you can vote on important,   proposals or, you know, should should we change the fees, or should we change the   the whatever? Should we list this new shit coin, or should we tell them to fuck off? You know, like, all of the really important proposals,   that's when your voting rights come in. And the more contributions you make to the project, the more votes you get, which is a really cool system, and it works extremely well. And there's also,   you know, votes for things like, okay, well, should we should we add Wiz as a,   price server operator? You know, should we add mempool space as the explorer,   or should we let mempool project run Biscott Markets website for the DAO? These things are cool because then the contributors like, the more contributions they've made, the more merit they have to weigh in on these important decisions. Right.  

But the problem I feel   yeah. In my personal opinion,   it's   kind of perverts the incentives of the project. Like, the minute you have a token,  

[02:08:27] Unknown:

now the incentives of the contributors is to pump their bags. Right. They want the token to they're getting paid in the token. They're holding the token. Exactly. And They want it to increase in value.  

[02:08:36] Unknown:

It it works well, I feel, if   the toke like, the token is only used by the contributors internally   and   Or for votes. Right. For voting. Doesn't have monetary value. Exactly.  

[02:08:48] Unknown:

Yeah. Something like this. But how can you actually stop that when things like Bisq exist? Couldn't they just trade the tokens for sats?  

[02:08:55] Unknown:

Actually, there's something called merit. So even if   you sell or transfer your tokens to someone else, you still retain the voting rights, and this is to prevent the quote, unquote Roger Ver attack where So you just buys all the best tokens. Exactly. It's proof of stake.   Makes it p cash by default or whatever. Right. So it's kind of resistant to that attack to some extent.   And, also, you you know, some contributors just HODL their BSQ tokens. But, yeah, once you once you apply the financial part to the token, it kind of perverts the whole incentives of of everything.   And so   if I make a large contribution to Bisq, say, I sponsored the Bitcoin 2021 conference and got a Bisq booth and I used my own fiat to pay for that, Cool. Now I got a bunch of BSQ token.  

And   that's great until I realized that now I'm incentivized   to pump this shit coin, essentially. Right? Like You either dump it immediately for sats or  

[02:09:50] Unknown:

Yes. You're incentivized  

[02:09:53] Unknown:

to pump the price of it. Exactly. And then and then a lot of contributors' time is now   diverted to how do we pump our bags. Right? How do we make this token go up in price? How do we dump on retail?   And it's it's it's terrible. And so   now I now I realized, like, yeah, I just wanna dump this as fast as possible, but I can't help but feel it ruins the project in a lot of ways. So, yeah, I mean, to answer your question about the wish list, I would definitely   think about changing the   the economics. So there's really all like, all Shitcoin scams can be boiled down to, like,   3 steps. Right? 1st, you   fill your bag, then you pump your bag, then you dump your bag   on on Right. The normies coming into FOMO in.  

And so   if if if it's if there's, like, a Howie test for a security,   like, the wiz test for a shitcoin coin. Is, like, are they filling their bags with some kind of pre mine or issuing tokens? Which this was fully pre mine. The founders have the majority of it, I presume. I mean, you'd have to do some blockchain analysis to figure that out? Like gut wise, probably.   I mean, there's so many students now. I have no idea. It could be.   And  

[02:11:04] Unknown:

and if they did yeah. But it well, you well, you're right. It was premined. So they had them all in the beginning. Yeah. But What are the can we can we go through the mechanics of the BSQ token? So,   so trading fees on Bisk, you can pay with the BSQ token or Sats.   Yes. And I and I suggest you to pay in Sats and not participate. Well, the idea is that if you're a contributor, you can then use the BSQ token to pay for your trading fees. Right? So then   when when a contributor   receives BSQ,   is that newly minted BSQ?  

[02:11:39] Unknown:

Does it get created out of thin air? They're essentially They're losing it. Them. They're they're basically coloring their own sats into colored Bitcoin   with the DAO's consent and approval.   So when you do some   contribution of bisque, you then you can go on the DAO and make a compensation request   to approve your coloring of SATs into BSQ.  

[02:12:01] Unknown:

And then so then okay. So, obviously, if you pay your trading fees with BSQ that goes into this   treasury.   Right? Right. That can then get distributed for projects?  

[02:12:12] Unknown:

So   there's essentially   a role called the Burning Man who takes all the Bitcoin revenue of Bisk and goes on the market and buys BSQ and burns it. And I think Oh, is that what's happening? And when you pay stats when you pay stats, it's essentially pumping the BSQ price?   Right. And so if it were balanced   and the amount of BSQ issued and the amount of BSQ burned was equal or the supply even decreasing,   then it would work. Right?   But in practice,   people can't resist the urge to print tokens. And, also,   some more BSQ is getting created than is being collected in trading fees, whether that's directly as BSQ or as Sats that get burned that get I mean, it's very buy BSQ and then burn it. Like, some sometimes this is quote unquote profitable when the supply goes down, and sometimes they're not, and they inflate the supply. And that's   okay for a company to issue more shares or redeem more shares. This happens all the time. But I think, again, going back to the 3 step test,   are the are the founders are the contributors to the project now   distracted   with the incentive to pump their bags?  

Right. And this ruins the project in a lot of ways I feel. Right? Like, with mempool, obviously, we don't have any mempool token. We don't need a mempool token. We just have a Bitcoin treasury for our expenses and to pay salaries and and, you know, data center bills and everything, and it works extremely well. And if Bisk had simply set up a Bitcoin treasury   6 or 7 years ago when the project started,   then   they would be super, super wealthy now. Right? Right. I mean, 6 or 7 years ago, the price was, like, what, $100 in 2013.  

[02:13:54] Unknown:

You know, all think about all the donations they got. I mean, I feel like you can do all of this except for the voting, which is Saks. Right? Like, you collect your trading fees in sats. You hold the treasury in sats. You pay out contributors in sats. Yes. And and I and I think the the thought at the time was that  

[02:14:11] Unknown:

if you have a Bitcoin treasury,   then whoever controls that treasury   is like a target. Point of failure. Exactly. I mean, they are. But this still exists anyway with the Shitcoin too. Right. Right? So  

[02:14:25] Unknown:

I think The ShitCoin doesn't really solve that, but it solves the No. But I think the voting  

[02:14:32] Unknown:

right. So so you need the So you make a voting token. That's own voting. You can't use it for anything else, and it can't be tracked. Like, once you   get those voting rights, like, you can't You can't sell them. Yeah. And then if you block sending. And then if you   whenever someone pays their   trading fee revenue to Bisk,   that,   UTXO  

[02:14:55] Unknown:

should get, like, randomly distributed to the to the BSQ holders somehow. And there's there's clever ways to do this with because BSQs are already built on top of Bitcoin. So Right. Pretend I have Every every BSQ token has a Bitcoin address associated with it. You could technically just send it to one of those Bitcoin addresses. Exactly. Right. So now you see where it goes. Now, like So now you're paying out Sats dividends to to the contributors. And then the the token is just a voting token. Right. That's that's  

[02:15:20] Unknown:

that's one thing I feel That's pretty cool. Would improve the project quite a bit because then the contributors are longer distracted with the incentive to pump their bags. They wanna pump stats. They wanna pump stats. I mean, this is how it's supposed to work where all of our incentives are supposed to be aligned. We're not supposed to have a shit coin that we wanna pump. Right? Right. This is why the mempool project is so successful. We got all these donations and sats, and then Bitcoin goes up in price, and now we have more money to   Right. And operations of the site. So   yeah. This has Awesome. This has an agent code base. This has   a lot of technical debt. This has this tokenomics thing, which I think they need to fix.  

But if it did get reimplemented   with the mobile app and the Raspberry Pi back end daemon that runs 24 hours and they fix this token thing to not be  

[02:16:08] Unknown:

incentivized. But they have an incentive never to fix that token. Exactly. Right. Right. Right? Now now that all these contributors are bag holders, they're not gonna like Even the contributors, not only do the founders have an incentive, even the contributors have an incentive. Exactly. It's typical shit coinomics where now everyone's part of the scam,  

[02:16:25] Unknown:

and   even I felt like this is fucking when you dumped on retail?   No. I sold it to the burning man, and then he burned the BSQ.   But you're you're incentivized to pump the bags. Right? Oh, you sold it to the Burning Man, but it doesn't matter because it's a liquid market. So it's retail somewhere about it. Right. So that's the that's the unethical part I feel about it. Right? Right. Is that   people are speculating on these BSQ tokens,   and the contributors want to   pump the price so that they can dump at a higher valuation.   And it just ruins the project. Right? Well, if the incentive was,  

[02:17:01] Unknown:

if more people use this, you know, KYC   free distributed service, you get higher trading revenues,   everyone wins, and they get paid in stats.  

[02:17:12] Unknown:

Yeah. I mean, I I love this. I I think we should all use it, but it can be it's just an old project that can be improved in a lot of ways. And No. I think this is very productive. I appreciate the  

[02:17:22] Unknown:

candor.   So, I mean, we're 2 hours and 20 minutes in.   I,   and this is a little bit I mean, this is completely unrelated to Bitcoin,   but,   you bought me and my lady a beautiful record   player, and, you set it up for us. You wanna talk a little bit   about your your love for panels? Or   Yeah. I guess I'm in infrastructure. He was in people think Wiz was   was born to run ISPs. I mean, he's running 2 ISPs right now. But if you watch them with a vinyl player,   you'd think of completely different ways.  

[02:18:02] Unknown:

Yeah. It's so low tech and analog. I   You're like a kid in a candy shop. I mean, it's a whole new world. Living room. It's a whole yeah. I mean, it's a it's like a rabbit hole, right, in itself.   And, I live in Japan, so I have access to,   you know, 40 year old vintage,   but still mint condition vinyl record players from the, Yahoo Auction Market in Japan.   And first, I bought   this vinyl record player for Matt, and I opened it up in my office in Japan. I'm like, I am keeping this. I'm buying a second one.   And, you know, it's just this rabbit hole you go down. You have sister players. He's got one in Japan, and I got one here. Right. So we just set up one in Matt's house. And, yeah, it's   it's beautiful when you get it all put together and,  

[02:18:49] Unknown:

what was it? Biggie? We were Yeah. We were listening to Biggie. Let's fucking go and Bob Marley. Yeah. It was fucking it was banging.  

[02:18:56] Unknown:

Yeah. And and it's such a rabbit hole. Right? Because even if you're into, like, high-tech infrastructure,   like servers and networks and ISP and cryptography,   it's so nice to   forget all that and play with a vinyl record player, which has no   microchips in it. Right? It's, like, a 100% analog.   Just pure magic. Just pure magic. I mean, if you put your ear close enough to the stylus, you can actually hear the   We did that.  

[02:19:25] Unknown:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, this is,   your first show on dispatch to   consider getting a   old school record player that will last It's a very low time preference like device. Don't go out and buy a  

[02:19:40] Unknown:

plastic you want. Yeah. Wiz didn't Wiz didn't mention it yet, but don't don't go and buy a piece of shit. I mean, you can go to, like, some retail store like Best Buy and get a new vinyl record player for, like, 2, $300, and it's plasticky and   probably   terrible quality and it'll break in a few years   versus the one that that Matt and I have is over 40 years   old. And it was built in So crazy. The peak of that, you know, format.  

[02:20:08] Unknown:

And still bangs. And, yeah, it sounds amazing 40 years later. Like, they don't build a like that anymore. Well, anyway, Wiz, I appreciate the gift, and it was honestly humbled one of the best gifts I've ever gotten.   I know my lady is super excited about it, and,   you probably cost us a lot of sats and time because it's just the beginning of the rabbit hole, and I'm just gonna just gonna be a sats pit, big money pit. But, I'm very excited to go down it and go down it with you. You know, we're gonna basically   both that same player, different continents across the world, going down the rabbit hole at the same time, which is pretty fucking powerful.  

So, I mean, as you know, I've you've been on the show multiple times. I like to wrap it up with final thoughts.   What final thoughts do you have for the freaks today?  

[02:20:55] Unknown:

Bitcoin is growing so fast, and to to see that Miami conference or even the Nashville meetup now is so huge. And,   you know, you have entire countries adopting it, and and you're gonna be able to use it all over at the grocery store, everything. I mean, this is it's like nothing we've ever even dreamed about just a few years ago. Right?   I it'll be so exciting to see how Bitcoin continues to evolve and grow   and and, how it will improve. And it happens so quickly. People feel Bitcoin is is so slow, but, really, in just a few years,   it's it's taken off so much just since last Miami. Right? 1 year ago, not even.  



[02:21:31] Unknown:

I mean, the the size of the conference alone doubled in size. Amazing. Yeah.   Things are moving fast. I know they feel like they're moving slow, but they're moving fast and slow at the same time, I guess, but   it's pretty crazy watching the whole thing.  

[02:21:47] Unknown:

I think the coolest thing though is you can go as a the coolest thing about being a Bitcoin, you can go anywhere in the whole world, and you have family.   Yes.  

[02:21:55] Unknown:

You know? That's what people miss when they like, it's great, I think,   that these events have, you know, free access to the content online.   But the really powerful thing is just is just meeting Bitcoiners, spending time with Bitcoiners, and having online conversations that are not recorded, and,   bouncing ideas off each other is just being super super powerful.   And, I know it can be a little bit scary and   overwhelming,   but, you know, you don't have to give up that much. And you should be careful to a degree in terms of theft and privacy, but,   like, go to a local meetup   or, you know, just,   you know, meet people, talk to people, talk to like minded individuals. Because at the end of the day, open source code is extremely powerful, but it's only as powerful as as the individuals that choose to run it and build it and support it.  

And if you don't have a meetup, consider starting a meetup, you know, and it doesn't have to be   super high production value. You guys can just meet in a bar,   and drink some beers and drink some whiskey and take it from there and do something more significant in the future. But I would say that, especially   for for developers,   like, one of the single most powerful things you can do   is is meet people in your local community, work together with them, build circular economies,   build local Bitcoin grassroots, Bitcoin economies is extremely, extremely powerful.   And one of the things I think a lot of people miss with the story of El Salvador is the story to me of El Salvador is not a story   of a president deciding top down that he was gonna make Bitcoin legal tender in this country. The story is a group of like minded individuals that started a grassroots local Bitcoin economy   that grew to the point that he couldn't ignore it anymore. He had a choice. Right? You either embrace it or fight it, and he chose to embrace it. So if you're out there and you're thinking about it,   you know, every every person you work with, every merchant you onboard,   every meetup you attend really does make a difference.  

Our good friend, 6102 Bitcoin, who's still out there even though he's quiet on Twitter,   has a meetup website at bitcoin dashonly.com/   meetups.   You can see if there's one in your area. And like I said, if there isn't one, consider starting one.   Talking about 6102,   you know, I'm probably not long for the Twitter world myself.   So if you are a freak out there, consider joining our our   fantastic matrix chat, which I will show one more time. You go to silodispatch.com   and click that silo chat.   I love you freaks. You guys keep me going. I think together, we we we can win, we will win,   but it's gonna be it's not gonna be easy.  

Personal responsibility is never the easier path. I appreciate all you who continue to support the show,   whether that's financially via SATS,   or by just sharing it with your friends and family. And once again, a reminder that CIL dispatch is available on all podcast apps. All you have to do is search CIL dispatch, and reviews do help.   They do make a difference.   So with all that said, I wanna thank Wiz. I wanna thank the freaks,   and, we'll see you next week. Cheers, guys.   But they just can't kill the beast.   Love you, freaks.  

Stay humble. Stack stats.