CTRL/SHIFT - 14 06 2026 CHAPEL STAGE - ERIC WALL - AN ODE TO BITCOIN AND HER POLITICS

Control shift. [laughter] challenge speaker wizards Bitcoin Eric Wall All right. I don't know what that meant, but that was sound sounded beautiful. Was very very very nice sounding uh Italian language. Um so yeah, I'm Eric Wall.

Uh nice to see a bunch of people here. Um, we are going to talk about Bitcoin consensus politics or uh more or less we're going to talk about the death of Bitcoin consensus politics. Um, this didn't turn out the the resolution didn't turn out so well. So, um, we can actually go to the next slide. Uh, hold on.

I think I got the the clicker here right. This is this is a this is supposed to be back in 2017 there was a war between those that wanted big blocks in Bitcoin and those that wanted small blocks and when you try to activate a change in the Bitcoin protocol and there are multiple different factions that have different views of what they want the system to do. uh you can turn it turns into what's known as a chain split situation where you can model these different outcomes depending on how much hash rate is supporting each fork of the system. Um there's a bunch of game theory involved and that the system can split into um uh a myriad of different networks. And for those that were around then uh the only thing that happened was that we got well we got two forks.

the the one that we're currently on now, the SegWit fork, and we also got another one that's called Bitcoin Cash. Uh, but for those that were really interested back in the day to understand all the myriad of things that could be happen could happen, this is a a diagram that me and my friends drew at the time. Um, so we're going to I'm going to skip to the next one and see if uh see. Okay. Uh, does anyone know recognized this?

Anyone have anyone? Has anyone seen this before? Maybe one person. I'm just I'm just trying I'm just trying to get a a vibe check of of the kind of audience that that's in the room. Uh, so this is this is the screen that everyone was looking at in let's see 2018.

No, 2021. That's the date. Uh 2021 was the last time that we actually activated a soft fork in Bitcoin and that was the tap routt upgrade. And what you're seeing here in this uh screen here is that each little square is a block. Each block that signals that they want to activate the taproot upgrade creates a green block.

and the ones the the miners that create blocks that aren't signaling for tap red activation create red blocks. So for the for the people that were like super interested in Bitcoin uh upgrades, they were like watching this as as it as if it was the Super Bowl, like come on, give me one more square, one more green square. It's like oh now it's a it's a it's a red square. And we needed, if I remember correctly, we needed uh 90% of the squares to be green to get the upgrade that was that was tap routt. Um, let's see this.

Considering only like two people had seen the previous chart, I'm guessing that no one has seen this diagram before. Is this I know it's hard to read, but for the people that look at this a lot, they'll like recognize it immediately. Uh this is the the diagram that uh sort of most represents the most recent consensus struggle that we had in Bitcoin which was around uh one year ago two years ago mostly I think it peaked around 2024 2025 we're trying to get covenants uh covenants into Bitcoin and for those that don't know what covenants is it's like a small functionality thing that we can get into Bitcoin I mean actually it could unlock tons of useful things like trustless bridges to any kind of system privacy systems um smart contracts um but uh the the conversation sort of stalled here um what so for each of these rows sorry for each of these columns the one with the most green in it that's the one that's doing the best and this was the one that I was uh championing and that's one is the one that's called cat and as you can see it has the most green but not enough Uh so uh we're still here and we we don't have opcat in in Bitcoin today. Funny fun fact, if we had OPCAT in Bitcoin, we could actually do zero knowledge proof. So all like the cool technology from Ethereum could exist on Bitcoin if we had this tiny little upgrade called CAT.

Um and what I'm going to talk about now is I don't think that there's like a good good book you can read. There's no good talk that you can read that talks about like what happened to Bitcoin because a lot of people now, especially with quantum and other things, they come up to me and say, "Okay, well, Eric, uh, the Bitcoin price is going down. We need to we need to um fix Bitcoin. We need to fix the security budget and we need to make Bitcoin quantum proof. We need to get quantum postquantum signatures in Bitcoin."

And then they ask like, "So, who do we talk to? like what what's the who's the person that we go and say like make the upgrade and that's it's it's a funny question to ask for a system that has tried its entire lifetime to hide that person to hide that button. So Bitcoin is a system where everyone is working the hardest they that they can so that there is no there is no person there's not supposed to be a person that you can go and talk to. Bitcoin is a system it upgrades when the system wants to and not because you went and talked to a particular person. Uh so it's it's always a funny question like take me take me to your leader like we we we worked 10 years not to have a leader so it's I can describe to you how the system has worked in the past it's not a guarantee that that's how it's going to work in the future but if you are interested in this and you're trying to find the way in then having some of this background uh can be helpful to you.

Um so yeah none of these slides are showing very well but it's not important. Uh we at my company we actually try to make like a little diagram of how it goes when someone proposes an upgrade and all the different steps that that uh you have to go through. So like it it starts with you have to write something on the mailing list maybe. Um then it turns into a GitHub conversation and then it goes through a bunch of trolls that has to comment on your upgrade. uh if you did a little mistake, you go to the graveyard, you have to start over all over again.

Uh eventually what where you want to get with your upgrade after like the GitHub uh ups and uh thumbs ups and thumbs down has essentially approved you. You go to what's known as a group called the council of mergers. These are the people with merge access to the GitHub repo in Bitcoin. Uh there are five people. Uh there used to be six.

Uh but one person got ousted recently. I'm going to get into why. Her name is Gloria Zhao. Um prolific young uh female Bitcoin developer that we had that we recently lost. Um and this goes on like so we made this we made this diagram uh so that people could sort of look at the whole flow of how a proposal goes from its inception to finally being merged in Bitcoin and it ends sort of here.

Um, so it's it's a very long and windy road. And for the people that are involved in the process, they looked at this and it was like even the people that hate me and my company that thought that this was very funny because it was sort of on point, but uh I think I'll have to send you the PDF if you actually want to see it or you can go to quantumats.xyz and you'll find it there. Um, so I I have this quote that I think is very apt when it comes to how we make changes in Bitcoin. I don't know if you've heard this is a popular meme.

people people make all kinds of variants of this. Uh my father-in-law is a builder. He's insanely gifted. Uh we were we were in a cathedral together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build it today. I will never forget his answer.

We can't we don't know how to do it. So if someone asked you, how do we build this thing like today? Like maybe you just not lost the knowledge. We don't know how to do it anymore. And it's the same thing with Bitcoin upgrades.

Like we we used to be able to do it but uh we can't. We don't we don't know how to do it anymore. Um but I I'll I'll I'll try to get a little bit more specific. So some people believe some people think that Eric what are you talking about? Like everyone knows how Bitcoin upgrades happen.

It's just u you know you just these are all the Bitcoin nodes and you can see like which percentage of the nodes run which client. And isn't it just so that like if everyone runs a particular client then the network upgrades? Yeah, you you can look at you can look at it that way, but that's like studying a system from the outside and like measuring something that doesn't really describe how something actually happens in the network. Like these numbers aren't just going to change themselves. Like there needs to be there there needs to be something way more important than nodes.

And it's not minor. Could be minors, but it's not minor. It's uh it's people. And uh now I'm going to talk about those people uh and how they work. And um so uh who who here recognize?

Does anyone recognize anyone in this picture? You recognize all Peter Willie? Which one? Which one is Peter Willie? That guy.

That guy. Okay. So usually how it works in Bitcoin consensus politics is the guy with the biggest beard is has the most power. Um, so Gregory Maxwell is like a little bit like Peter Willie has a lot of power, but he's more like sort of the hands and arms and Maxwell sort of the gigab brain. Um, they these three men uh came up with and uh implemented and made so they made tap routt happen.

They invented taproot. They coded up taproot. They deployed taproot. people ran the client and uh and uh because of that Bitcoin has this latest upgrade called Tap Routt which uh not a lot of people like right now like some people think it was an accident because it kind of threw quantum safety out the door and it invited a bunch of people like me to make JPEGs and spam on the Bitcoin chain. So a lot of people are actually angry about that.

I actually get death threats uh uh about misusing taproot for not the purpose it was intended for. Um, so anyway, how they came to be in this position was how it essentially works in Bitcoin is that if you are if you make if you're powerful enough to get an upgrade through. So in the in the 2017 uh block size wars, these guys were the winners. They were on the side of segregated witness. Peter Willie, he um also coded and wrote up segregated witness and it was deployed and ever ever since then like it was the two camps of Bitcoin, the the big blockers and the small blockers.

And the small blockers, they looked to these wise old men. So, okay, what's the what's the next upgrade? And they're just sitting around just waiting, okay, tell us, daddy, what's the what's the next next next upgrade for the system? And and so they they did they did tap routt. Uh but after that something changed.

So Peter Willie uh and so Vladimir Vanderland is also a little bit important. He has like a janitor role in the GitHub repo. He's the one that actually merges changes into a package software that you double click on. He was the lead maintainer on GitHub. Uh he resigned in 2023.

So I'm going to try to describe to you why the situation like why can't we just look to these wise old men to come up with a new upgrade now where did they go? So the lead maintainer is not pictured um he removed his own merge privileges. He thought there were more important things to do in the world. Uh Peter Willie also stepped down from consensus uh discussions altogether. uh he uh doesn't think that he should have any he shouldn't be touching any code that changes the consensus logic of Bitcoin anymore.

So um he's out. Gregory Maxwell has been fighting with trolls on Reddit for um he's still he's still alive, but you have to go to the Bitcoin Cash subreddit, which isn't even the main Bitcoin forum. It's like a failed fork of Bitcoin where he is still like to this day fighting with people that he thinks is wrong about a previous debate. So I don't know lost his mind. Uh still brilliant still respect him a lot but it's not really being uh engaged anymore in in current uh governance proposals of Bitcoin.

So both of them kind of stepped back. Some of it has to do with a lot of it has actually has to do with that crazy Australian guy. Have you heard about that crazy Australian guy who said his name Craig Wright who who said that he was Satoshi? He ended up suing a bunch of Bitcoin developers. That's he is a big reason for why many of these people like withdrew from from important stuff in Bitcoin.

And then there's Andrew Andrew Pstra. Andrew Prosa is still alive or sorry all of them are alive. Andrew Pra is still breathing and he's active and uh he really wants to make things happen. So 2024 he was uh promoting this upgrade that I was talking about the one that I was promoting which is up op up cat. So he really wants it to happen but it turns out that Andrew Psterra is not strong enough in his own he doesn't have the power on his own to make census changes.

So Andrew Pa really really like cat and he went on podcast and he said I think we should act you. He said you the listener go and upgrade cat right now. And then nothing happened. So one man's beard is not sufficient. you got you need like three of them or something.

Uh so he really tried and so but now we know that like the there is no power or like there's no high priest, there's no credible wise men in Bitcoin enough to sort of drive upgrades in Bitcoin anymore. And um I think maybe that's going to get worse. You know, Bitcoin is not the same system like this. It's not the same system anymore when it was just a bunch of nerds with beards that decided what happened. Now you have like the black rocks and you have the Michael sailors that own five, six, seven, 10% of the supply and it's turning into, you know, it's a we got the institutions here, but when you invite in invite the institutions like no no one even remembers these people's names anymore.

Like most people in here have haven't even seen their faces or knew the work that they did on tap routt. So it's like hard for them to to to to keep making upgrades. Also, they don't want to because getting involved in Bitcoin consensus politics is really annoying and hard and you get and you burn out. So, now there's um a vacuum, a power vacuum in Bitcoin. There's um no one that really can uh now there's a uh my my screen is locked.

Um that was a very powerful vacuum that sucked out the presentation into I know how computers work. Maybe I'll just click on some buttons here. Oh, there we go. Um, yeah. So in the vacuum of these three wise men that are not there anymore, uh if you look in the Bitcoin GitHub repository, there are still people that have merge access.

And when I say merge access, I mean they have the ability to take proposed changes in the GitHub repo and push it into the latest Bitcoin client, the Bitcoin core client. And uh most of them are even like less known than the bearded men that I showed you. And um they're also super scared to touch anything, right? Because they weren't they weren't there. They weren't working on segregated witness.

They weren't fighting with the uh big blockers in the block size wars. Um they didn't invent and come up with like something like tap routt. There were huge complicated changes. So they are more they're left with like the control, but they're all very scared. They don't they don't want to mess up.

Like Bitcoin is a two trillion dollar system. you want to be the one that like oh I think this parameter should be changed this way and oopsie now everyone lost $2 trillion like so they're like oh I I don't want to touch that uh so they are young younger less less experienced and they're the one actually this is a little bit outdated Gloria like I told you is not there anymore and I want to talk a little bit about that because that's also important to understanding Bitcoin consensus politics what happened to Gloria uh Gloria was a prolific um fantastic uh developer. Uh she made uh the during the time that she was active in the repo. If you read like how structured she was and how much thought that she put into the actions that she did in the in the GitHub repo, it's uh very sad that that that she was kicked out. But Gloria, she never made any consensus changes.

None of these people made any consensus changes. Like they didn't make any changes to the root system itself. Gloria was a maintainer of a part of the repo that had to do with um the relay network. So like how transactions are relayed and the the me the meool. So it's like a sort of like a cache of transactions that are trying to get into the system.

So she's working on like a small peer-to-peer networking part of the uh of the system and um yeah um because she changed a parameter uh not a consensus change like nothing that changes the protocol of Bitcoin. It was just the standardness of a particular transaction type. She increased the size limit of it. It didn't result in like larger transactions being propagated on the network. It was just like she reasoned essentially like okay there are multiple transactions types here.

The largest transaction that you can make is 400 kilobyte. This particular transaction is has a limit of on 80 kilobyte. That doesn't make any sense because if someone wants to spam the network they can just use this 400 kilobyte one. So I'm just going to remove this limit on the on this other one. And uh then her action was like misconstrued as as she was being a part of a group that wanted to destroy Bitcoin with.

And I'm not joking. She uh maybe maybe you heard about like all the dickbutts on the bit on the Bitcoin chain that like 2024 people started spamming the Bitcoin chain with pictures of wizards and cats and uh dickbutts. Uh that's just like people having fun and using like the bitcoin system. The transactional uh the transactional part of the system wasn't really used for much. People using lightning, people are not transacting much.

They're like buying IUS and micro strategy shares. So a bunch of like the fun, you know, trolly culture of Bitcoin decided to flood the system with with with these kinds of things. And it was interpreted that Gloria had something to do with this. Um, and then she um got so much hate and threat uh hate mail, death threats that she is now no longer with the project. So that that's not even someone that's like try that's someone not even trying to change the consensus of Bitcoin.

That's someone like tweaking a small parameter, getting the mob against you, and then having your essentially like life career sort of ruined. Uh and it resulted it resulted in u these people that were upset about the JPEGs about the dickbutts they were so so upset that uh actually 20% of the nodes here if they're real we don't know like can can also be uh like fake but uh we think it's real. So around 20% of all the nodes in the Bitcoin network are now like the the the burning cause like what gets them out of bed. What's what they're you know burning for is to get less dickbutts in the Bitcoin system. Like it's this doesn't have anything to do with should we fix the security budget?

Like that's that's kind of like you know the mining revenues are always halvening every four years and we haven't seen transaction revenue like go up to compensate for that. Should we do something about that? Maybe. No, we want to get rid of the dickbutts. That's uh that's the what what do we want to do about quantum?

Like quantum computers seem to like a lot of there are papers coming out showing that maybe these are easier to build than we thought and you have people like Dan Bonet and SK Scott Ironson long time like people have been critical about like the advent of quantum computers. Do we want to maybe start preparing Bitcoin for quantum attackers? No. We want to get rid of the dickbutts. That's that's the issue.

What about privacy? What about the fact that, you know, anyone with like a reasonable reasonably intelligent AI can like do analysis on the entire history of all Bitcoin transactions and sort of draw links between different transactions and figure out what you did when you bought your first drugs with Bitcoin in 2012 and also how you sent money to your mother and how she spent those Bitcoin. Maybe we want to do something about that. No, we we want to do something about the dickbots. dickpots on the chain.

That's what we want to fix. Um, so that that is the sorry state of Bitcoin. Like I I we after I came to this part of the of the presentation, uh, I was thinking to myself, I don't know how to proceed with the presentation here, like what's the what's the good message here? What's the how do we how do we leave this room feeling like invigorated and happy and that we can do things and things are not things are not awful. So, actually, I had to pause my presentation and go for a walk for a while and think about how how do I turn this around?

I've dug myself into a hole here. Um, so, u, Bitcoin is alified and we should all go home. Like, just give up. There's nothing to do here. There's no one that can change anything.

There's Should we just go home now? I don't know how you feel. Um, so I get I've got this kind of question. I've gotten it so many times uh in Bitcoin before that Eric Eric what uh what should we do with the security budget problem? You can see right that so this is uh when Bitcoin was new there was 15 bitcoin in each block and every four years it happens goes down and the the hope has always been that this this green stuff which is the transaction fees the user generated fees not just what the system mints itself it should grow and then like take over from the orange stuff but that's not happening and for a long time like I have a lot of Ethereum friends that are like Eric you know that the security budget problem in Bitcoin is going this way, how can you still support Bitcoin?

Like, yeah, how can you still support this knowing that it's going to fail? And um uh I I I have a answer for that that I've been giving uh for I don't know, five years now. And uh it goes pretty much like this. Um this sounds like a copout answer, but I'm going to describe what this is. Bitcoin is a UTXO set.

And um I'll have to explain what that means a little bit more. Uh so bitcoin is essentially a list of unspent bitcoins like it's a list of this key has this number of bitcoin and he can he has the right to spend them today. So, Bitcoin is a bunch of transactions and the last transactions on each chain is like the spendable balance. And if you have that, if you have like the historical log of Bitcoin transactions, you have uh you have you have the list of of of the of the spendable bitcoin and all this other stuff. All this Yeah, I used to chat GPT to make this look, you know, cool and everything.

uh all this other stuff like the consensus rules. Yes, they're were very important. Some people say that the consensus rules of Bitcoin are so hard to change that it'd be like finding uh for an as finding gold on an asteroid in space and they're like rock hard. At the end of the day, it's like people, it's consensus. So, we have consensus rules around this UTXO set that decides like who can spend these who can who can modify this UTXO set.

The UTXO set is the important thing. The the list of who who owns which point B bit Bitcoin. That is the important thing. We have these very complicated consensus rules with cryptography deciding how that can be modified. We have price.

The price goes up, the price goes down. We have memes. We have culture. We have the social layer like people talking about Bitcoin, people arguing, people with beards. Um, and we have the computers that areworked all across the world sending messages to each other.

And we have the miners, the shot 256 miners, these giant data ser centers. Um, but all of that can set on fire and it can go poof. Now there's nothing. Now there's just the UTXO set. It's just a list of who owns which Bitcoin.

And uh if if all that goes away and this is all we have left, we still have little guy that can download the UTXO set to his computer. And you know what he can do? He can come up with new consensus rules, new social layer, uh new uh consensus mechanism. It can be proof of stake, can be proof of work, it can be uh anything he wants. So anyone in the world can always just take a copy of the UTXO set and start a new social layer and a new consensus mechanism.

So as long as the UTXO set lives, as long as the database of the Bitcoin lives, there will always be someone that says, you know what, I want the system to survive. So if there was something about the previous components around this that didn't work, then um then I can just create new parameters. I can get another group of people to agree with me. And if that is if that is the most functional bitcoin, if that is the one that people appreciate the most, then that will be the new Bitcoin. That is how Bitcoin forks work.

So no, I'm not worried about like some parameter failing uh that uh proof of work mining doesn't work or that um subsidy like the the the security budget isn't enough. I'm not I'm not really afraid of that because at the end of the day, you end up with a UTXO set and this can always live as long as there are computers that can download it. Uh there's only one small problem that I'm going to leave you with and that is what if this happens. What if you get an aquatum attacker in there and he starts changing the UTXO set itself? If a quantum attacker gets into the UTXO set and he starts to change all the like who owns which UTXOs, then it becomes a situation that we cannot recover from.

So um that is why like the quantum question is the hardest problem that Bitcoin has ever had to solve before because if it gets to this point it becomes extremely difficult to recover the system. So uh for that reason that's something that we the Bitcoin community has to work on now preemptively before uh before uh the UTXO set gets corrupted. So um all types of attacks uh in Bitcoin before I think they've been manageable in some way. Uh this is one that for various reasons the corruption of the UTXO set may not be manageable. It also requires uh us to be out there and acting ahead of time.

Uh we need to migrate away from this system to to another one that where you can have quantum safety and that process like it can take five 10 years. So you can't really wake up one day and be like okay now we're going to now we're going to prepare Bitcoin for quantum attacker. Um so how do we do that? And I think uh hopefully I think that there are a bunch of other presentations on this conference that talks exactly how about about how uh how to protect Bitcoin against quantum attackers. So that's not going to be a part of my presentation.

This is like a historic background of Bitcoin as a consensus system and how it works. And uh yeah, I think that's pretty much the end of my talk. Um, so I I was going to if I have some time left, I was thinking that we could pass around a microphone. If there's anyone that has any questions that uh that they want to ask, we can pass it around. It's a man over there.

Does it work? Yes.

Okay.

Eric, thank you so much. Um really appreciate the history and the background. Uh very helpful. Two quick questions. What space you know just talking about the last page.

What is your view on the quantum attack and how do we solve for it? And second I which is the most important question is where's the wizard hat? I was looking forward to that.

The hat.

The hat. Sorry about Yeah. Sorry. I um um didn't fit into the into the into my luggage this time. I'll bring it the next time.

Um yeah. So, what do I think is going to happen like with with the quantum and everything? Um so, I think I I see a lot of people that are very critical right now and thinking that Bitcoin is not acting fast enough and uh they're not doing enough and the conversation seems very stalled. I think like at at least right now if you compare it to a year ago, this is the most healthy the most healthy the uh climate the Bitcoin conversation has ever been in. Uh started with a shout out to u well didn't start with but sort of got really amplified when Nick Carter started writing articles uh in a in a language that regular Bitcoiners could understand.

Uh and then so for like what does a healthy what does a healthy uh discussion climate about quantum look like? Well, it has multiple parts, right? It has people that are panicking like screaming from the top of their lungs, freaking everybody out, saying your Bitcoin is going to go to zero if we don't do anything fast and a quantum computer is going to be here tomorrow. You need this people. You need those people to rile people up and then you need some other people that say, "No, uh I'm not convinced."

And uh in because you need that for every type every type of thing like if if someone comes around and screams something that the the world is going to explode to tomorrow. You need some people who are more on the pessimistic side and then those people need to argue and uh for a while until it sort of becomes apparent who has the weaker arguments. So you need both the panickers and the ones that are trying to calm everyone down and saying Bitcoin is a stable network that moves slowly and only upgrades if it's really proven. Right now in quantum we've ne we don't we don't have uh we haven't proved that we can run shor's algorithm on a fall tolerant quantum computer. We've never factorized a a number larger than 15.

Like these are I don't think they're good enough arguments but they are arguments and they need to be explored. Uh and then you also need cryptographers that are inventing uh uh new uh postquantum safe signature schemes and we are doing that. So like I think the ones that is most popular right now uh is shrinks and shrimps that are from Nick Jonas from lock room research. Um it's trying to figure out a way to use hashbased signatures that are as small as possible. Uh still still big.

Uh other people are looking into lattice based schemes. There are people looking into isogyny based schemes. Uh and there's a conversation around that. So we'll see we'll see what eventual um postquantum safe signature scheme we move to. And um then you need a game theorist to think about okay now we we know which kind of postquantum scheme we want to move to.

We know we know that we eventually want to move to one. How do we sort of phase out the old ones and at with which which timeline and what do we do with the with the Satoshi's coins and what do we do with the um the new tap routt outputs that uh so so there are different camps all of them have a lot of work to do now uh all I can say is right now they're doing it I think maybe they're not doing it fast enough they're not realizing how urgent it is but maybe I'm the one that's wrong so I cannot prove that the risk of a quantum attacker is really really uh you know it's going to be 2029 or 2030. I can't prove that. Uh but what I can say is that the Bitcoin system is not asleep. It is acting and there are people running around and saying hey this is a type of attack that we need to prepare for way ahead of time.

Way way ahead of time. Like we can't do it like tap routt where we argue about nothing and then comes out three years later and you know is doesn't cover all the cases that you want to. So we're doing the work. Is it going as fast as maybe we would want to? No.

Is it a complete disaster? I don't think so either. So, we still have a chance.

Okay, we still have a little bit of time. Hi. Um, I'm Luchia. Nice to meet you. So you talk about the security budget problem and many solutions have been proposed such as increase the supply make the supply of Bitcoin from uh infinite or uh making the token holders to pay like a fees that that will alterate the nature of Bitcoin or there are projects that are trying to build a marketplace on Bitcoin and that that are trying to use the Bitcoin layer uh to create um a secondary economy that will increase the transactional fees and reach the same level of the subsidy basically.

So I don't know if if you know some projects and if you have any idea I'm talking about the DMT not protocol. I don't know if you have heard about it.

What's the name?

Um digital matter theory non arbitrary token. No, I haven't heard about that. But I've heard about like a myriad of different meta protocol layers on Bitcoin that are trying to increase the fee revenue of the Bitcoin system before. Some of them are building decentralized exchanges. Some of them are building other type of like rollup like systems using Bitcoin as a data availability layer.

Um generally what you want to um make sure is that when you're designing another mechanism on top of Bitcoin uh and you have some type of fee revenue to capture it has been sort of proven that these spiky fee revenue um like protocols. So with this uh dick butts and images and when when people really wanted to buy those there was a lot of short-term demand and and we got these like spikes in demand but uh you cannot build a security budget based on like very volatile market driven uh you know hype based uh short-term like blips like it has to be something that people really want in the long term. So it can't be like the flavor of the month like the new the newest hot protocol where people trying to get into early. Um so in order to to really solve this in like in a long term it has to be something that people are really comfortable with using for the long term I that's why I I personally I tried this I tried to spam the chain with dick butts and it was very successful like we I think let's see uh let's see it should be here. Yeah, I think it's around here.

This is me and my friends with with these spikes. And a lot of people get angry uh about that. I thought I was doing something good. Like I was saving Bitcoin. I was causing more fee revenue.

I was, you know, me and the gang saving the security budget. It was a great time. Uh but I have since now matured a little bit and come to the conclusion that we need to we need this to be thick and steady. And I think the way that you do that is by let's say for example that we had a way to um uh have transactions in Bitcoin that are fast private uh you can make as many of them as you want. Uh yeah maybe it would require more space on the chain but if the miners are getting paid like maybe that's a way.

So if you just have like a high throughput system, everyone's paying a little bit, your transactions are large and the actual use case that you're fulfilling is everyone wants to use Bitcoin now because it's private, it's fast, it's not depending on like lightning with like you need inbound liquidity and uh so if you built just a better transactional layer that actually gave people properties they wanted, maybe people will actually start using Bitcoin as a transactional layer more. Um, so I'm mostly in favor of just like improving the functionality of the Bitcoin base layer itself so that people can transact with it. Uh, because right now people are like afraid they'll make a transaction in Bitcoin. It exposes all their privacy. Um, and it also takes 10 to 20 minutes or they use a second layer which has all these other kinds of uh weirdnesses to it.

So I think the solution is just make the base layer a little bit better, add a little bit better functionality so that people can transact with it in the way that people want. Thank you so much, Eric. Let's give a round of applausees to Eric. If you have other questions, he will be here. I think you will stay here.

So if you want to ask him something, you will find him