Bitcoin will humble the BIP 110 people

This is an advanced video. If you are not an advanced Bitcoin user that’s deep in the technical weeds, then ignore this one because this one will not be valuable or interesting to you. All right. So, this is my opinion about BIP 110, BIP Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, which is an effort by a small number of people to filter what they perceive as spam out of the Bitcoin blockchain, as I’ve talked about before. Hold on one Okay, I’m back. Uh, as I’ve talked about before, it is possible to etched messages in the Bitcoin blockchain by structuring stuff that looks like financial transactions but isn’t. For example, if I want to spell, you know, I love you to someone, I could transfer nine Satoshi’s, which is the letter I. It’s the ninth letter of the alphabet. Then I could transfer, I don’t know, zero satoshi’s or a thousand or whatever. And then I could transfer L is the 12th letter. And then O is the 15th letter. And then V is the 22nd letter, maybe something like that. E is the fifth letter. I could transfer that amount of the smallest unit of Bitcoin called the Satoshi. And if somebody was running a blockchain scanner that was looking for that pattern, it could say, “Hey, this guy says, “I love you on the Bitcoin blockchain.” Now, people like Matthew Crowder and um a guy that goes by the name of Bitcoin Mechanic are absolutely convinced that spam on the Bitcoin blockchain is just the worst of the worst of the worst thing and that nobody could possibly be allowed to use Bitcoin for anything other than pure monetary monetary transactions. One second. Now it gets more complicated because there’s Bitcoin ordinals and there’s BRC20 tokens and there’s inscriptions and there’s the op, you know, op code, you know, ops size limit for op codes, you know, op return, you know, these are like the opsiz wars. I call them the ops size wars instead of the the block size wars. It’s the ops size wars like how big of an op return are we going to allow and blah blah blah. Anyway, and you can just store arbitrary data and if you stitch it all together, you could, you know, store images or short tiny little postage stamp videos on the Bitcoin blockchain. Anyway, it’s just a bunch of stupid stuff. Um, now Bitcoin already has a spam an anti-PAM management system built in called the fee. When you transfer stuff on the Bitcoin blockchain, you’re paying 5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, whatever it is for a financial transaction. So, if I want to etch I love you to somebody in the Bitcoin blockchain, that’s I L O V Y O U, whatever, eight letters, something like that, which means it’s going to be an expensive transaction. I’m going to pay a couple of dollars to etch I love you into the Bitcoin blockchain. And guess what? The the thing that deters me from doing that is if enough people start doing that, the price starts to rise and it becomes unaffordable. So eventually I don’t want to spay $10,000 to etch I love you into the Bitcoin blockchain, which is what everybody that was ever doing ordinals and inscriptions and BRC20 tokens and all the stupid stuff, runes, all the stupid stuff in 2023, 2024, whatever. The reason all of that stuff went away is because nobody wanted to pay the fees anymore. Everybody got sick of it because it was stupid. And yeah, during the time that they were all being stupid, you might have to pay 50 cents instead of 10 cents to transfer an unlimited amount of money on the Bitcoin blockchain, but who cares? It it it effectively prices it out. Unlike email where there’s no way to filter spam because email is free. It’s effectively free. And so you can just blast millions of emails about stupid stuff and scams to everybody. It doesn’t cost you anything. Bitcoin is not like that. Each block of transactions is limited at one megabyte. Which means if you want to bid to get in that transaction, which is when you transfer Bitcoin, that’s technically what you’re doing. Even though it’s all done behind the scenes for you. When I transfer Bitcoin on River or Coinbase or Bit Key, it’s figuring out a fee on the back end and it’s telling me it’s 25 cents or 50 cents or 10 cents or 5 cents or whatever it is, but it’s figuring out what the going rate is to get a transaction in the next Bitcoin block. and then it’s bidding an amount higher enough than that that even if a bunch of bids come in right after I bid that I still, you know, so if the going rate is six cents, it’ll bid 10 cents. That way it guarantees I get in the next block even if a bunch of people, you know, effectively show up right after I do. Um, so anyway, so Bitcoin already has an anti-PAM filter built in, which is called the fee. You know, if you want to do stupid stuff on the Bitcoin blockchain, like you want to spell out letters and stuff like that, you can. But guess what? It’s expensive and you’re competing with everybody in the world that wants to transfer monetary value. All of which is going to outbid you because when I’m moving $25,000 around, guess what? I’m willing to pay a dollar or 50 cents or 25 cents and you’re only willing to pay two cents to etch your stupid little message of the Bitcoin blockchain. So, I’m going to outbid you. And even if you’re like, “Yeah, but what if everybody was stupid all at the same time?” Well, we saw that with ordinals and runes and BRC20 tokens and inscriptions where the fee price did rise. It rose into the I don’t know 25 cents, 50 cents, a dollar. You know, at one point it was a couple dollars. Uh when everybody was being stupid simultaneously, chasing a bunch of stupid stuff because they all thought they were going to like etch stuff in the Bitcoin blockchain and then turn around and sell it like an NFT, which is just dumb. But anyway, so all these people, Bitcoin Mechanic, Matthew Crowder, they all think that they’re going to introduce a new Bitcoin client, a new piece of software in the next 45 days and everybody’s going to run it and if you don’t run it, you know, then you’re not going to be filtering spam and they’re positive everyone’s going to adopt it. But the way they’re going about it is by forcing adoption, which is not going to work. Uh, Bitcoin is a voluntary network. People run the software they want to run. Almost everybody runs Bitcoin Core. Some people run other versions of the software. Uh, obviously you’re only running Bitcoin software if you’re an advanced user like me. The average person doesn’t need to worry about it. You don’t need a Bitcoin node. The average person does not need a bit Bitcoin node for the average person I’m talking to does not need a Bitcoin node. Now, if you, you know, Stefan Laa and your, you know, your podcast audience is a lot more advanced than my typical YouTube and Twitter followers, well, sure, then sure, you need a Bitcoin node, whatever. But the kind of people that are watching this video do not need a Bitcoin node unless you are a advanced Bitcoin user that just loves the techy side of it. And you don’t even need a Bitcoin node in that in that case. It’s just cool. So if you want a Bitcoin node because it’s cool to be part of the network, great. But the Bitcoin network does not need you to have a node and it’s going to be fine if you don’t have one. And the average person does not benefit from having a node because they’re not technical enough to even know how to use it. So it doesn’t even matter. You don’t need one. Um, okay. So all these people the the activation date is like 45 days and so they’re all on Twitter like you better run the same software we’re using or you’re going to get left behind whatever. Nobody’s paying attention to these people. So the reason they think their strategy is going to work is because in 2017 there was a big disagreement about the block size. Not the op size but the block size. And the the the group that won was a was the small fervent major uh minority. They won that debate. But the difference was which is huge in politics. It always matters. Are you trying to keep the status quo or you trying to change the status quo? So Bitcoin always favors the people trying to keep the status quo. So if you want to change Bitcoin where it’s got more than 21 million coins, you have to convince everyone else to change. If any of them don’t want to change, you can’t change it. The same works for all the different rules on Bitcoin. You want to change something, you got to convince everybody to change it. Well, guess what? Back in 2017, a bunch of people, including a bunch of very large companies and a bunch of Bitcoin miners, they all tried to convince everyone to change the block size to allow more than one megabyte uh limit per block every 10 minutes. And which had some downsides. that made it you had to run a more advanced computer to hold the entire Bitcoin blockchain. Right now you can run a Bitcoin node on like a random computer you buy at Best Buy, but that would have changed it and you would have had to have a computer with a much larger hard drive and all that sort of stuff. But anyway, so there was the minority, the smaller group won that debate because they wanted keep to keep things the way they were with the one megabyte block size that Satoshi Nakaboto himself put in the Bitcoin blockchain specifically to prevent spam and specifically to make sure that the blockchain size did not bloat with people putting stupid stuff in it. And the easiest way to do that is you just limit the block size and you make people bid for, you know, bid for transactions. And then you move all the smaller transactions to the Bitcoin Lightning Network and ARC and all this other stuff. So, you know, basically if you want to buy a cup of coffee, you can do that for almost free on the Bitcoin Lightning Network. But if you want to lose use uh the Bitcoin network to move large amounts of money around, well then you got to actually pay a fee and that prevents spam. What Matthew Crder and Bitcoin Mechanic and all these people misunderstand is that they believe they are the fervent faithful minority with a messiah complex that they’re going to somehow be the crusaders that make Bitcoin better. What they are totally missing is that the minority in this case is not asking for the status quo. They’re not fighting the big bad boogeyman that’s trying to change Bitcoin. They are the big bad boogeyman trying to change Bitcoin. And guess what? If you’re the big bad boogeyman trying to change Bitcoin, you can’t do that. It doesn’t matter if you’re the minority or the majority. It’s a stupid endeavor. Bitcoin doesn’t have a spam problem because you have to pay a fee. email would not have a spam pro problem. If you had to pay one penny every time you sent an email, there would be no spam in bit in in email at all. SO, BITCOIN ALREADY SOLVED that problem, you know, whatever. At at the beginning of Bitcoin, the spam problem was solved by Satoshi Nakamoto himself. And Matthew Crowder and Bitcoin Mechanic are trying to solve the problem a different way with a bunch of filters and a bunch of random stuff. Nobody’s going to want run their stupid client that’s maintained by like one person. They claim they’re going to activate it and force everybody to pick sides in 45 minutes. Sorry, 45 days is what I meant to say. 45 days. Nobody’s even paying attention to these people. Nobody even cares. One of two things will happen. Either in 45 days from now, they will activate their client and they’re going to find out that they’re on a network by themselves with no Bitcoin hash rate, no miners to secure the network, and nobody cares. they’re literally going to be on a Bitcoin, you know, knockoff network that’s got zero transactions and can’t even process transactions. Either that will happen or much more likely because these people with Messiah complexes are never going to put themselves in a pass fail situation, what they will do instead is they will come up with some stupid reason why they need more than 45 days. So, as we get closer to 45 days and it becomes clear that these people are going to be seriously humbled because they’re on the wrong side of history, they’re trying to change Bitcoin. and they’re being stupid. They’re going to say, “Hey, it’s actually not 45 days, it’s 180 days.” And then they’re going to spend the next 180 days running around on Twitter claiming that they’re, you know, saving Bitcoin from this from spam and, you know, they got this Messiah complex and if it wasn’t for them, the world would, you know, be a catastrophe and we should all be so thankful that they, you know, the world has them, blah blah blah. Look, I’m not saying these aren’t good people or well-meaning or that they’re not good software developers. I’m just saying nobody gets to change Bitcoin. Like, I’m sorry. I don’t care if you’re in the minority or the majority. Unless you have broad consensus by like everybody, you’re not changing Bitcoin. They’re not they’re not implementing BIP 110. It’s not going to happen. and they’re either going to fail or they’re going to push the deadline to that to to they fail far enough into the future that we never find out they fail or they’re going to give up with some stupid reason of why they actually won, but they don’t need to prove it by anybody running their software. The whole thing is stupid. Like it’s it’s the biggest nothing burger stupidity. They’re going to get humbled. They’re going to be irrelevant. You know, they’re going to come up with some excuse of why it was so important that they went on that crusade even though it didn’t matter. Blah blah blah. I don’t care. I’m not following BIP 110. I don’t care. I hope it fails in 45 days. They’ll learn a lesson. They’ll be humbled. Everybody needs to get humbled now and then. They’ll be But Bitcoin doesn’t care. If you want to change Bitcoin, tough luck. You can’t change Bitcoin. Neither can Bitcoin Mechanic. Neither can Matthew Crowder. Sorry, guys. Bitcoin doesn’t let people change it. That’s the whole beauty of the system. It’s that simple.