Roger Ver has presented an alternative narrative about Bitcoin's history. I've read it, so you don't have to.
Why he's trying to regulate the blocksize wars, and my response to his claims that Bitcoin's true potential has been stolen.
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWIB
LINKS:
Music:
Why he's trying to regulate the blocksize wars, and my response to his claims that Bitcoin's true potential has been stolen.
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWIB
LINKS:
- Recent Interview w/Roger Ver
- Inside The Blocksize Wars with Adam Back and Jonathan Bier - YouTube
- This Week in Coins: Bitcoin Ends on a Downer as Rival Bitcoin Cash Shines - Decrypt
- Bitcoin: Supply Last Active 5+ Years Ago - Glassnode Studio
- Bitcoin: Supply Last Active 2+ Years Ago - Glassnode Studio
- bips/bip-0101.mediawiki at master · bitcoin/bips
Music:
[00:00:05]
Unknown:
Welcome to episode six of This Week in Bitcoin. I'm traveling to Austin, Texas this week, so I wanted to focus on one topic, and it happens to be Roger Ver's new book. He's a well-known individual in the Bitcoin community, and he just released a new book. It's about hijacking Bitcoin, and I read all 253 pages, so you don't have to. You're welcome to, but I actually think we can get to the heart of Roger's argument pretty quickly in this episode. So Roger has a position that Bitcoin was stolen from its potential and that it was maybe intentionally done to limit its functionality.
He says whether due to incompetence in the book, sabotage, or perhaps a mixture of both, he says the takeover happened roughly from 2014 to 2017. So I sat down, I read the book, and then I went to go find Roger's own words on his version of what happened. And we'll go through some of that and I'll give my rebuttals. The block size were really heated up. The big blockers, the people that wanted Bitcoin to scale to be money for the world, was like 90 plus percent of the ecosystem. It was almost all the businesses and almost all the actual users that were using it. And there was just a very, very loud, vocal, very small minority of people that were going to do everything that they could to block Bitcoin from being able to scale to be money for the world.
Now, I was around during this time and a very active user of Bitcoin, and my recollection is slightly different. I do agree with Roger that the majority of businesses that were accepting Bitcoin were amenable to the idea of larger block sizes, the idea being making transactions cheaper. And I do agree with Roger that we had more businesses accepting Bitcoin back at that time. I do not agree with Roger that most of the users using Bitcoin also wanted larger blocks. That's Roger's version of history, in my opinion. That's Roger and his friends who thought that they were the business savvy and that it was these tech plebs that were the ones that wanted small blocks because they were concerned about their hard drive size.
Well, I was one of those plebs, and I was concerned about my ability to participate in the network. And I was concerned, although not totally opposed to larger blocks. But to have Roger kind of paint it as 90% is kind of exaggerating just from my recollection. Not because – I think some of them probably understood it, but a lot of them were just useful idiots in that respect. And a lot of them thought that like, oh, limiting the block size, that'll keep Bitcoin decentralized and keep it free. Whereas now we have almost a decade to look in the rearview mirror there. It had the exact opposite effect. The small blocks led to more centralization, more censorship. everybody's using a custodian, people can't afford to transact themselves.
So it had the exact opposite effect of what those people were claiming. And so like, I think a lot of them are now starting to realize that, oh, maybe limiting the block size wasn't good for Bitcoin's decentralization. It wasn't good for its freedom promoting aspects. It was actually a net negative for the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. For the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, and we're regretting it now. You'll hear this claim quite a bit. I'll back it up a little bit, out because I think we. Should walk through this promoting aspect of what those people were claiming. And so like, I think a lot of them are now starting to realize that, oh, maybe limiting the block size wasn't good for Bitcoin's decentralization. It wasn't.
Let's start with the decentralization. So he makes this claim about the decentralization is worse off because of small blocks. I can agree it's more centralized from one particular lens. If you look at the use case of people trying to use Bitcoin for day-to-day payments, like the proverbial coffee, or to zap somebody on Instagram or boost a podcast, a lot of times that is using a custodial wallet and service. Not always, but a lot of times that is true in that one particular lens. But when it comes to generational life-changing wealth savings, the blockchain data is clear.
The vast, vast vast portion of the Bitcoin supply is being huddled by long-term users. And that portion is staggering in size to any of the custodial Bitcoin providers. Coinbase, the ETFs, MicroStrategy. I will link to the Glassnode two-year and five-year and three-year analysis of coins that haven't moved. It's clear that that is in cold storage. It's not in custodial wallets. We have the ability to tell that. The data is there. So I'm not really a big – I'm not going to cosign his statement there other than I will acknowledge that in certain slices where we're trying to use a bare instrument for day-to-day transactions, it is more likely that there will be a custodial service there.
However, as somebody who bought Lunch and other services in El Salvador using my completely self-hosted wallet setup, using Zeus and my own node over Tailscale, I can tell you that you can also use those similar types of services using your own self-hosted infrastructure because it is an open network. It wasn't good for its freedom-promoting aspects. It was actually a net negative for the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. The entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. So Roger's argument, he may bring it up again later, but I'll address it right now. Roger's argument is these forks of Bitcoin into these other forks like Bitcoin XT, eventually Bitcoin Cash and all this, you know, the vision crap, all of that, all of that has reduced the overall amount of liquidity and money that could have gone into Bitcoin if we all could have just held it together.
And so we would have an even more explosive price for Bitcoin, even greater gains and returns. I mean I'm trying – I'm being a little sarcastic but that is I think a very convenient version of how that would have played out as if Ethereum wasn't going to eventually become a thing or Cordana. I mean, all of these things, yes, they started actually around the block-sized war. But human nature, you can see it in open source over and over again. There were always going to be forks. There was always going to be a light coin. It never really mattered.
There would always be all of these other coins, now these VC-backed coins that we see, that were going to be sucking liquidity away from Bitcoin. No matter what the big block or small block decision was, no matter what direction the block-sized war went, we were always going to have altcoins. And you'll see some people that aren't thinking clearly say, oh, Bitcoin, $70,000 today. Bcash is $500. It's like, yeah, well, you're looking at what's seen. What's not seen is where could the entire market cap of all cryptocurrencies have been had Bitcoin not run into these intentionally designed scaling issues, right?
When you had companies like Microsoft and Expedia literally stop accepting Bitcoin, and some of them still don't accept Bitcoin again to this very day. I don't necessarily agree that they stopped accepting Bitcoin because of the transaction cost, right? Because if they had bigger blocks, they would have lower transaction costs. So you could use Bitcoin for smaller and smaller transactions. The cost would be less and less. So Microsoft, maybe you're paying for some Azure service with Bitcoin in this theoretical world. And they would have done it only if the block size had been larger.
That's ridiculous, right? I mean, it pretends like the SEC and the companies being afraid of SEC involvement. You know, all of these companies are risk averse. The moment it got a little risky to accept Bitcoin, the moment it got just a little bit of taint on it from either cybercrime or whatever narrative was going on at the time, they were always going to bail. At that point in time, Bitcoin was seen more as an alternative to PayPal than it was as maybe a potential replacement for the Federal Reserve one day. It was really seen – the mentality was you got to spend Bitcoin.
You got to spend Bitcoin. Well, that's how people like me who have been in Bitcoin since the very beginning lost a lot of our Bitcoin was that very mentality. Mentality uh i mean i'm still torn up about it today the gear i'm speaking into my mixer my microphone the mic stand the table i'm sitting at all paid for with bitcoin back then would i buy it today with bitcoin probably not i'm glad i have this stuff and i didn't have the cash, so it enabled me to you know pursue a small business and enable my work so i don't totally regret it but it was a mentality that was drilled into us and roger still seems to be of that that mentality that we should be using this scarce digital asset to pay for everyday items.
And we could have done that if the block sizes had been larger, ergo the fees would have been smaller. Microsoft would have kept taking Bitcoin then. I just don't agree. I think the fear of regulation and the risk avoidance was always going to lead them to step away from Bitcoin because there are cheaper and more economical ways to accept Bitcoin today, and they're not re-engaging. Bitcoin not run into these intentionally designed scaling issues, right? When you had companies like Microsoft and Expedia literally stop accepting Bitcoin, and some of them still don't accept Bitcoin again to this very day.
And so the entire world could have been in a much better position today than it is had we not ran into that scaling issue that was literally done with a bunch of censorship and dirty tricks that are outlined and cited right there directly in the book. And I think a lot of people's jaws will drop when they realize just how many dirty tricks were played and how much censorship went on within the community. And if I had to pick one single mistake that I made in my strategy and history involvement in Bitcoin, it's like I underestimated how incredibly effective censorship is. The only mistake Roger's made, the one single mistake, according to Roger, is that he underestimated the power of censorship.
Hmm. Now, is it that censorship has played a role since 2015 and managed to bamboozle all of the plebs and all of the node operators and all of the miners and all of the businesses like Strike and others that have come along since? Have they all just been bamboozled and not intelligent enough to see through the censorship? Or is it that your idea hasn't been successful in the marketplace of ideas? And the explanation to yourself is censorship. Censorship now i do remember reddit posts getting censored i do recall some of that happening so again you but you might not be able to appreciate from afar now is this actually did get pretty down in the dirt at the time so there likely was censorship back in the day and that may have affected people's understanding but i just don't think it holds up as an argument so many years later because.
At the time when the censorship first started everybody knew the truth and i didn't think who's going to fall for the censorship but now that so much time has gone by a lot of people think like, oh, Roger's, you know, Bitcoin Judas and didn't ever do anything for Bitcoin and the big blocks were stupid and the Bcash is stupid. And like, they don't know the censorship was so incredibly effective. And that's why even today, like, if you take a step back and take off your censorship, you know, influenced goggles, you can see Julian Assange is a hero. Edward Snowden is a hero. Yet the government propaganda against these people have fooled the majority of citizens into thinking that these people are bad people and that they did something wrong.
Is he comparing himself to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange? I actually think people don't think about Roger. I think that's the more likely scenario is people don't think about Roger and they don't think about Bitcoin Cash. They don't think about big blocks. But that's why we should be thinking about this. Because there is an insidious nature to this. This idea that, well, it's just code. We can just change it. We can just make the blocks bigger. There's a viral nature to it. And Roger thinks that this is the time to discuss it. He thinks there's a movement within Bitcoiners to reignite this debate.
I don't necessarily agree. But again, I don't find the argument that it's censorship today that really holds up. He'd argue that it should be voices like his, like Roger's, that should be on the megaphones and not voices like Saylor is what he would argue. you. And so the same is true with the block size wars. The censorship was so effective into tricking people via the censorship and to think that big blocks were a bad idea or that Bitcoin was never supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, even though it's right there in the title of the white paper. Nobody argues that. Nobody argues that.
And I don't understand his concern here because, doesn't really he's not really addressing the fee issue and i the bitcoin fees are not horrible, they've been they've remained very reasonable even post etf i don't know if when roger wrote this book knowing it would come out after the etfs perhaps he was hope hoping for his for his argument that the blockchain fees on the bitcoin network would be ridiculous but they're actually still quite reasonable so even this is it doesn't really in in actuality hold up we've had times of congestion. We've had times of congestion. But on the average, fees have been historically low this last year.
Or that Bitcoin was never supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, even though it's right there in the title of the white paper. And that Satoshi himself, he literally wrote the software code to increase the block size on Bitcoin so it could scale to be money for the world to compete directly with PayPal and Visa and MasterCard and these sorts sorts of things. Whereas nowadays, you know, and a lot of new people won't know, like I was one of the, if not the main face of Bitcoin for quite a number of years there. And now we have people like Michael Saylor is one of the main faces of Bitcoin, literally telling people, Hey, let's not compete with the U S dollar.
Let's all pay our taxes. Let's not rock the, you know, let's not, you know, rock the boat at all with this. And it's like, you've missed the entire point of Bitcoin. If you think it's not going to rock the boat and it's not going to disrupt the the way the entire world works. I think it's ironic because I think he's missed Saylor's point and people like him. It's funny, you know, pay your taxes, follow laws. What a radical bastard that Saylor is. But what Roger seems to be missing, in my opinion, is, and he addresses in the book, but I don't buy it, I don't buy it.
He says that in order for Bitcoin to become a store of value, it must be first a medium of exchange. People must be using it to buy things before we can use it as a store of value. I don't understand that logic because we all kind of know traditionally that's not how things work. You know, usually it becomes, I mean, just traditionally in history, it becomes a store of value first. And once it's a trusted store of value, for something to be widely accepted as a medium of exchange, it has to be a trusted, reliable store of value. That's just generally how it works. People need confidence that they can retain their purchasing power over time or perhaps even increase their purchasing power over time.
Um, and once it's proven its ability to do that, that it's a dependable store of value that preserves worth, um, then it generally becomes a currency and a medium of exchange. Roger tries to argue the different, but difference, but I, I just, I don't buy that argument. And again if big blocks would have been merged well then it would have been a major change to how bitcoin works if we would have accepted the bitcoin xt fork that would have been a fundamental shift in the network you couldn't argue that bitcoin is as hard of money as it is now which is sailor's point part of what makes bitcoin hard money is that we've avoided those fundamental hard forks that the protocols remain fairly compatible and that we make minor small small improvements over time.
If you start messing with that, then you mess with the hardness of Bitcoin. You mess with the value. You mess with people's savings. Bitcoin, if you think it's not going to rock the boat and it's not going to disrupt the way the entire world works. And sadly, at this point, Bitcoin isn't nearly as disruptive as it otherwise could have been if people could still use it as peer-to-peer electronic cash. So anyhow, the book covers all the ways in which the Civil War dirty tricks and tactics that were employed to literally undermine Bitcoin's usefulness as peer-to-peer cash for the world.
And it's already, you know, at the top of its category on Amazon. And I invite people to go over there and order it. You can go to hijackingbitcoin.com. Yeah, there you go. I gave him his plug since I used his audio. And I read the book and I do like some of the history in there. But you're probably, if you've gotten this far, you're thinking, well, why does Roger not acknowledge Lightning? I think Lightning does get discounted by Roger. It does enable Bitcoin to be used as a day-to-day medium of exchange without having to hard fork Bitcoin.
I've personally bought things using completely self-custodial solutions. And I realize that he doesn't agree that Bitcoin is a good solution and Bitcoin. Cashers, they like to laugh at lightning. Fair enough. To me, it seems like a brilliant solution. And we could have multiple different types of layer twos. It doesn't have to be just lightning. So we don't have all our eggs in one basket either. And they hate the argument that the market has clearly decided because it is a good argument. argument their response seems to be well censorship prevented the market from making the right call all these years I don't buy it, I don't buy it. And I think one of the bits that gets left out in Roger's version of history can be explained by the author of the Block Size War book, Jonathan Baer, who explains the details of how their fork activation dynamics worked and the funkiness there that kind of set this all off wrong from the very start.
Yeah, it was a rolling vote. So as soon as they got to 75 percent, activation was locked in. The miners would add into a block space their agreement of wanting to participate in the block, just I'm summarizing, would want to, they'd signal that they wanted to participate in the Bitcoin XT fork. And they had these rolling windows to do this. Which I thought was pretty stupid. So there wasn't these windows because that meant that basically at the time it activates, you're guaranteeing there's at least 25% of the miners who are not upgraded and not running XT. So you're also ensuring that there is going to be a chain split.
And a much better idea would be, okay, we're going to have these windows and the vote could be 75% or more. So it's at least theoretically possible for 99% of the miners to upgrade at the time of activation. But the way they did it, they were locking in, in my view, 25% miner opposition to the hard fork, which made a chain split even more likely, almost guaranteed. So, yeah, I don't think they thought through the activation dynamics that much because they were so, at this point, the large blockers were very confident and positive that they would at some point succeed.
And they didn't worry about all these kind of game theory scenarios. But, yeah, they had quite a controversial activation system. My recollection was the big blockers were very business focused. They thought they were the money people. They had Gavin Andreessen on their side. They thought that they had the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation working with them, and they were very concerned that all of this was going to go – they weren't very concerned that this wasn't going to go their way, I should say. They were, I think, confident that everybody would see it their way.
It was a series of mistakes. That hubris might have led to a series of mistakes that sort of split the attention. That was another huge mistake from the large blockers to spin off Bitcoin Cash and then also try to do SegWit2x at the same time. So they weren't all united behind one fork. Their efforts were split. And from their point of view, I was speaking to some of them in Hong Kong at the time, and they were like, Bitcoin Cash shows the small blockers we're serious. If they don't go ahead with SegWit2x, we're all going to leave to join Bitcoin Cash. Therefore they know we're serious now, we've actually got a coin, and this is going to make the small blockers all agree to SegWit2x, which of course was completely wrong in their thought processes.
The small blockers were not going to support SegWit2x because of the existence of Bitcoin Cash. If anything, Bitcoin Cash significantly took all the momentum out of the SegWit2x attempt. Certainly from the point of view of exchanges who just kind of had to support Bitcoin Cash and had all the complications of kind of splitting customers' coins, listing Bitcoin Cash, the technical teams at these exchanges didn't want to go through this whole process all over again with another SegWit2x coin. And again, it's about precedent. precedent. The large blockers had done their hard forks, split their coin off, and it wasn't known as Bitcoin, and it traded at a significant discount to the Bitcoin price, which set a precedent for, well, the same thing again will happen with Segwit2x.
The large blockers will split up a coin. It will then be called Bitcoin Cash. It will be called Segwit2x coin. And again, it will trade at a significant price discount to Bitcoin and won't be known as Bitcoin. Coin so again they got their tactics completely wrong they thought that this would you know help win the war help let the small blockers know they're serious but actually completely undermine their case split their camp into different coins and you know helped ensure the victory for the smaller blockers so. They essentially made a series of mistakes in those days that split the energy, And when I look back at it, I guess I could have seen Bitcoin survive with larger blocks.
I don't think it really... I don't think it really would have fundamentally changed the self-hosting scenario unless they'd gotten really large, right? The part of the proposal was to move it from one megabyte to eight megabytes, and then the block size would double every two years. So eventually you could see it kind of getting out of control. There are a few main agreed-upon properties of a currency, right? It needs to be a medium of exchange. Well, Bitcoin is that. It needs to be a store of value. You bitcoin is becoming that it needs to be a unit of account and we definitely have it as that it needs to be portable bitcoin is the best at that and it needs durability um like so for a physical currency that means it needs to be resistant to wear and tear it has to have longevity and acceptance over time i think in a digital world that means forks are the greatest sin Sin, especially the, I mean, a hard fork is the greatest sin.
And Bitcoin has a network effect. And that also gives it durability. And then another aspect is limited supply, which we know Bitcoin has. These are the properties that ensure a currency can effectively serve as a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account, facilitating economic transactions in general. These are sort of the agreed upon properties of a currency. And I don't really hear anything in Roger's arguments that don't make Bitcoin as it is today, all six of those things. So where I see it today, it actually seems to me, taking the adoption route of a real currency, the store of value aspect of it could take multiple generations.
It's entirely possible. It took gold like what, a thousand years? And we're just the first generation of Bitcoin users, the very first generation. I could see something like that taking a really long time. And maybe to us alive right now, it may for some like those on the big block side from that time may still see it as a failure for the rest of their life. Bitcoin's a thousand year technology and the store of value and people beginning to accept that is it's really just part of the process. All right, coming up, your boosts, project updates, clip of the week and more. So let me say thank you to my sponsor, Podhome.fm.
Podhome.fm is a podcasting, Twitter hosting platform. It's the one I use. It has unlimited shows and episodes. It's got Podhome AI that's fantastic. fantastic it'll automatically transcribe to give you a transcription in the podcast app it'll figure out your chapters it can even make clips and the ui makes it really easy to add remote items like value for value music set up your splits so you can send a little sat love to a guest if you have it if you use the promo code twib you'll get the first three months for free that's twib this week in bitcoin i love pothome.fm it's great for live streaming too they've got a a fantastic setup over there.
So go to pothome.fm, promo code TWIB, and thanks to Pothome for sponsoring this week in Bitcoin. Now, we did get some boosts, and I mean some. Last week's episode sucked, so I knew it was going to be rough in the boost department. I mean, I didn't expect it to be this bad. Woo, it's bad, boys. It's bad. But Adam Curry is our baller booster. He came in with 10,000 sats hello mr curry thank you very much for the support uh he writes boosting to remind everyone that you can stream sats per minute i stream this week in bitcoin 200 sats per minute because i value thank you podfather yeah i see that um my totals that i read in the messages don't include the streaming stats but i'll often see the total uh for each individual contributor after the week and you're always high on that list thanks to those streaming sats and those boosts appreciate Appreciate that.
No second best is back again with 15,042 stats. Also art baller. Hey, look at that. Uh, thanks for staying focused on the signal during a noisy week. Read the pomp problem. I'd say watch him for a bit and then see how he does and keep us posted. It's very reasonable. Thank you very much. Nullifier comes in with 2001 sats. Just a little concern. I'm beginning to have the morning zoofication of podcasts. I find the soundboard clips a bit cheesy, but at least you aren't putting them on. So at least you aren't putting on some persona. Aha. I could try. He says, I know it's, this is Adam Curry's influence at play.
And I picture Nullifier shaking his fist. You know, so Nullifier, I do appreciate for some people they find the sound effects annoying. We could probably get like a new set for this week in Bitcoin. But there's a process at work here. You see, we have memes that get created by the audience, like a row of ducks and space balls boost. And part of what makes that magic work is to have a sound effect that goes with that particular type of boost, kind of then organically takes off. And they generally come from the community. It's kind of part of the fun is you boost in a certain amount, you trigger a certain sound effect. It doesn't work for everybody, but on the whole, it does seem to work.
And it also just kind of makes it fun, keeps it moving and things like that. I also, I guess I take issue with calling it the zoofication of podcasts, the morning zoofication. I mean, you're talking about a handful of soundbites for 10-15 minutes in part of the podcast, compared to like the absolute ludicrous ridiculousness that is actual morning radio with all of their commercials and all their stupid antics and guy laughing in the background off mic and all of that like. It's not really a fair comparison, although I appreciate that some people come to podcasting to get away from radio.
So anything that kind of reminds them of radio is triggering. But I think it's a little bit of a dramatic statement to say it's morning zoofication. I think there is a balance to be had there, though. Loomer comes in with 5,000 sats and writes, I like your examination or explanation of why the supply can't be changed in Bitcoin. I appreciate you keeping an eye on the mainstream media, but not sure I'll keep listening if it's the largest part. Not counting the boosts. I'd be curious to know what you think of the balance today. EPC comes in and just says, boost! So five boosters.
With 32,543 sats. That's rough. That's a low hourly wage. But also on me. It was not a good episode. I'm probably going to take next week off. Because I'll be traveling and I want to think about retooling the show a little bit. Because I wasn't happy with the results either, and now it's reflected in the boosts too. So thank you, though, for everybody who did, for all five of you who did send a boost in. I do appreciate that. Some project updates for you. I just talked about Mutiny Wallet recently, but they have another release, version 0.62. This is a big deal, you guys. So Mutiny Wallet, I like it a lot because you can self-host it yourself, or you can use their web-based version. When we use their web-based version, it's so quick.
Spin up a Lightning Wallet, start using it immediately. If you just need a quick, disposable Bitcoin Lightning Wallet, it's so awesome. Really good. And they've semi-recently introduced Mutiny Plus. Now, this is a subscription of 16,000 sets, but you get early access to new features, your own Lightning Address, an iOS test flight app, and, of course, you're supporting future development. And Lightning Addresses is one of the new features they've added in 6.2. And they also are working on the ability to receive payments while you're offline. Which is a bit tricky with Lightning. They say in the announcement, they write, our new feature uses eCash locked to your pub key so you can only spend it when you're back online.
Your wallet listens for DMs on Noster and unlocks tokens once received. It's using Fetament on the back end, so you need to set that up. They keep pushing Fetament further and further and federated systems further and further. It kind of is an alternative to Liquid, and it's really fascinating what they're doing over there. The UI has recently got a refresh. I covered that not too long ago. go. The Mutiny Wallet is an app that even if you don't need a wallet, you need to go be aware of it so you can recommend it to friends and family or just people that need quick wallets. It could be a great way to consolidate UTXOs, something to definitely look into.
And then in my also high esteem category, one of my absolute favorite Bitcoin apps, the Zeus Wallet version 0.8.3 is now available. This is a big one. It's got on-chain coin control. They write in their announcement, Quote, all three of our L&D interfaces now support CoinControl when crafting on-chain transactions. There's still work to be done, though, including adding the ability to send full UTXOs without manually calculating the fee difference. For now, we recommend users who need to burn a full UTXO to put it into a channel using the send max flag. Yeah, that is actually really handy.
Also good news, if you're using their liquidity provider for Lightning, I should say, they have reduced the Zeus Pay Lightning address fees. Quote, the new fee structure will see most users paying less than 50% of the fees they were previously. I'm going to recommend The Block Size War to you. It's a book that I picked up back in 2021, and it's fantastic. It covers the Bitcoin block size war, which was waged from August 2015 to November 17. And at the heart of it, it is really about the users deciding the future of Bitcoin. I know Roger and his crew wouldn't like that version of history, but that's the version that I remember, is that the users picked the direction of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network.
Despite what the companies and all of the business smart people wanted. For better or for worse. I think for better, but The Block Size War captured. It's a pretty short read. You know, it may be shorter than Roger's book, actually. They're about the same length. And if you're going to get Roger's book, definitely get The Block Size War because you should read both accounts of history. If you've heard of this book and you've never picked it up, please, please consider this the thing that pushes you over to actually read this book. It's not a difficult read it's a great read and it'll give you stronger conviction about bitcoin's future and direction too definitely did for me now i'm gonna play a clip from mr sailor i know um i risk going mainstream with this one but to be honest there's only so many people that are getting interviewed these days and i think it would probably drive roger nuts to hear a sailor clip so shortly after him but, Mikey tries to make the argument why modifying the block size could wreck the value of Bitcoin.
And if that's true, I guess you could say Mikey's in the ossification camp, as they like to call it now. The commonly understood reason for why you don't want to change the block size is we don't want to centralize the network. We want to keep nodes that you can run. But it's not actually, in my opinion, it's not the best argument. I mean, the truth is you could probably make an argument that an eight megabyte block space will also be decentralized or not. Now we're in this little debate over the cost of storage versus the rate at which the Bitcoin blockchain increments.
And the better debate is don't change it because it's unethical to change it. It. Don't change it because it's evil. It's unethical. That's why you don't do it. Do you agree? Is it evil and unethical to make large changes to Bitcoin as more and more people try to store their generational wealth into Bitcoin? And if you do agree with that, does that pose a challenge to Bitcoin's future? Or is there a positive to it? Perhaps you could argue that as well. Let me know. Send a boost into the show. When I'm back, I will read them. I'm going to to wrap up with just a reminder that I'll probably be out next week, although depending on how things work out, I may have an episode for you.
I'd still like to hear what you'd like to hear from the show. Does that make sense? I want to hear what you want to hear. Let me know what you, yeah, anyways, you know, as I'm taking some time to think about how to retool the show, it's a great time to get your piece in and share it with a friend, maybe another Jupiter Broadcasting community member, somebody in the podcasting 2.0 community. I'd really appreciate that and love to hear their feedback as well. I am going to leave you with a value for value song. This is by TJ Wong, and it is so many years. Thanks for being here.
Welcome to episode six of This Week in Bitcoin. I'm traveling to Austin, Texas this week, so I wanted to focus on one topic, and it happens to be Roger Ver's new book. He's a well-known individual in the Bitcoin community, and he just released a new book. It's about hijacking Bitcoin, and I read all 253 pages, so you don't have to. You're welcome to, but I actually think we can get to the heart of Roger's argument pretty quickly in this episode. So Roger has a position that Bitcoin was stolen from its potential and that it was maybe intentionally done to limit its functionality.
He says whether due to incompetence in the book, sabotage, or perhaps a mixture of both, he says the takeover happened roughly from 2014 to 2017. So I sat down, I read the book, and then I went to go find Roger's own words on his version of what happened. And we'll go through some of that and I'll give my rebuttals. The block size were really heated up. The big blockers, the people that wanted Bitcoin to scale to be money for the world, was like 90 plus percent of the ecosystem. It was almost all the businesses and almost all the actual users that were using it. And there was just a very, very loud, vocal, very small minority of people that were going to do everything that they could to block Bitcoin from being able to scale to be money for the world.
Now, I was around during this time and a very active user of Bitcoin, and my recollection is slightly different. I do agree with Roger that the majority of businesses that were accepting Bitcoin were amenable to the idea of larger block sizes, the idea being making transactions cheaper. And I do agree with Roger that we had more businesses accepting Bitcoin back at that time. I do not agree with Roger that most of the users using Bitcoin also wanted larger blocks. That's Roger's version of history, in my opinion. That's Roger and his friends who thought that they were the business savvy and that it was these tech plebs that were the ones that wanted small blocks because they were concerned about their hard drive size.
Well, I was one of those plebs, and I was concerned about my ability to participate in the network. And I was concerned, although not totally opposed to larger blocks. But to have Roger kind of paint it as 90% is kind of exaggerating just from my recollection. Not because – I think some of them probably understood it, but a lot of them were just useful idiots in that respect. And a lot of them thought that like, oh, limiting the block size, that'll keep Bitcoin decentralized and keep it free. Whereas now we have almost a decade to look in the rearview mirror there. It had the exact opposite effect. The small blocks led to more centralization, more censorship. everybody's using a custodian, people can't afford to transact themselves.
So it had the exact opposite effect of what those people were claiming. And so like, I think a lot of them are now starting to realize that, oh, maybe limiting the block size wasn't good for Bitcoin's decentralization. It wasn't good for its freedom promoting aspects. It was actually a net negative for the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. For the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem, and we're regretting it now. You'll hear this claim quite a bit. I'll back it up a little bit, out because I think we. Should walk through this promoting aspect of what those people were claiming. And so like, I think a lot of them are now starting to realize that, oh, maybe limiting the block size wasn't good for Bitcoin's decentralization. It wasn't.
Let's start with the decentralization. So he makes this claim about the decentralization is worse off because of small blocks. I can agree it's more centralized from one particular lens. If you look at the use case of people trying to use Bitcoin for day-to-day payments, like the proverbial coffee, or to zap somebody on Instagram or boost a podcast, a lot of times that is using a custodial wallet and service. Not always, but a lot of times that is true in that one particular lens. But when it comes to generational life-changing wealth savings, the blockchain data is clear.
The vast, vast vast portion of the Bitcoin supply is being huddled by long-term users. And that portion is staggering in size to any of the custodial Bitcoin providers. Coinbase, the ETFs, MicroStrategy. I will link to the Glassnode two-year and five-year and three-year analysis of coins that haven't moved. It's clear that that is in cold storage. It's not in custodial wallets. We have the ability to tell that. The data is there. So I'm not really a big – I'm not going to cosign his statement there other than I will acknowledge that in certain slices where we're trying to use a bare instrument for day-to-day transactions, it is more likely that there will be a custodial service there.
However, as somebody who bought Lunch and other services in El Salvador using my completely self-hosted wallet setup, using Zeus and my own node over Tailscale, I can tell you that you can also use those similar types of services using your own self-hosted infrastructure because it is an open network. It wasn't good for its freedom-promoting aspects. It was actually a net negative for the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. The entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. So Roger's argument, he may bring it up again later, but I'll address it right now. Roger's argument is these forks of Bitcoin into these other forks like Bitcoin XT, eventually Bitcoin Cash and all this, you know, the vision crap, all of that, all of that has reduced the overall amount of liquidity and money that could have gone into Bitcoin if we all could have just held it together.
And so we would have an even more explosive price for Bitcoin, even greater gains and returns. I mean I'm trying – I'm being a little sarcastic but that is I think a very convenient version of how that would have played out as if Ethereum wasn't going to eventually become a thing or Cordana. I mean, all of these things, yes, they started actually around the block-sized war. But human nature, you can see it in open source over and over again. There were always going to be forks. There was always going to be a light coin. It never really mattered.
There would always be all of these other coins, now these VC-backed coins that we see, that were going to be sucking liquidity away from Bitcoin. No matter what the big block or small block decision was, no matter what direction the block-sized war went, we were always going to have altcoins. And you'll see some people that aren't thinking clearly say, oh, Bitcoin, $70,000 today. Bcash is $500. It's like, yeah, well, you're looking at what's seen. What's not seen is where could the entire market cap of all cryptocurrencies have been had Bitcoin not run into these intentionally designed scaling issues, right?
When you had companies like Microsoft and Expedia literally stop accepting Bitcoin, and some of them still don't accept Bitcoin again to this very day. I don't necessarily agree that they stopped accepting Bitcoin because of the transaction cost, right? Because if they had bigger blocks, they would have lower transaction costs. So you could use Bitcoin for smaller and smaller transactions. The cost would be less and less. So Microsoft, maybe you're paying for some Azure service with Bitcoin in this theoretical world. And they would have done it only if the block size had been larger.
That's ridiculous, right? I mean, it pretends like the SEC and the companies being afraid of SEC involvement. You know, all of these companies are risk averse. The moment it got a little risky to accept Bitcoin, the moment it got just a little bit of taint on it from either cybercrime or whatever narrative was going on at the time, they were always going to bail. At that point in time, Bitcoin was seen more as an alternative to PayPal than it was as maybe a potential replacement for the Federal Reserve one day. It was really seen – the mentality was you got to spend Bitcoin.
You got to spend Bitcoin. Well, that's how people like me who have been in Bitcoin since the very beginning lost a lot of our Bitcoin was that very mentality. Mentality uh i mean i'm still torn up about it today the gear i'm speaking into my mixer my microphone the mic stand the table i'm sitting at all paid for with bitcoin back then would i buy it today with bitcoin probably not i'm glad i have this stuff and i didn't have the cash, so it enabled me to you know pursue a small business and enable my work so i don't totally regret it but it was a mentality that was drilled into us and roger still seems to be of that that mentality that we should be using this scarce digital asset to pay for everyday items.
And we could have done that if the block sizes had been larger, ergo the fees would have been smaller. Microsoft would have kept taking Bitcoin then. I just don't agree. I think the fear of regulation and the risk avoidance was always going to lead them to step away from Bitcoin because there are cheaper and more economical ways to accept Bitcoin today, and they're not re-engaging. Bitcoin not run into these intentionally designed scaling issues, right? When you had companies like Microsoft and Expedia literally stop accepting Bitcoin, and some of them still don't accept Bitcoin again to this very day.
And so the entire world could have been in a much better position today than it is had we not ran into that scaling issue that was literally done with a bunch of censorship and dirty tricks that are outlined and cited right there directly in the book. And I think a lot of people's jaws will drop when they realize just how many dirty tricks were played and how much censorship went on within the community. And if I had to pick one single mistake that I made in my strategy and history involvement in Bitcoin, it's like I underestimated how incredibly effective censorship is. The only mistake Roger's made, the one single mistake, according to Roger, is that he underestimated the power of censorship.
Hmm. Now, is it that censorship has played a role since 2015 and managed to bamboozle all of the plebs and all of the node operators and all of the miners and all of the businesses like Strike and others that have come along since? Have they all just been bamboozled and not intelligent enough to see through the censorship? Or is it that your idea hasn't been successful in the marketplace of ideas? And the explanation to yourself is censorship. Censorship now i do remember reddit posts getting censored i do recall some of that happening so again you but you might not be able to appreciate from afar now is this actually did get pretty down in the dirt at the time so there likely was censorship back in the day and that may have affected people's understanding but i just don't think it holds up as an argument so many years later because.
At the time when the censorship first started everybody knew the truth and i didn't think who's going to fall for the censorship but now that so much time has gone by a lot of people think like, oh, Roger's, you know, Bitcoin Judas and didn't ever do anything for Bitcoin and the big blocks were stupid and the Bcash is stupid. And like, they don't know the censorship was so incredibly effective. And that's why even today, like, if you take a step back and take off your censorship, you know, influenced goggles, you can see Julian Assange is a hero. Edward Snowden is a hero. Yet the government propaganda against these people have fooled the majority of citizens into thinking that these people are bad people and that they did something wrong.
Is he comparing himself to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange? I actually think people don't think about Roger. I think that's the more likely scenario is people don't think about Roger and they don't think about Bitcoin Cash. They don't think about big blocks. But that's why we should be thinking about this. Because there is an insidious nature to this. This idea that, well, it's just code. We can just change it. We can just make the blocks bigger. There's a viral nature to it. And Roger thinks that this is the time to discuss it. He thinks there's a movement within Bitcoiners to reignite this debate.
I don't necessarily agree. But again, I don't find the argument that it's censorship today that really holds up. He'd argue that it should be voices like his, like Roger's, that should be on the megaphones and not voices like Saylor is what he would argue. you. And so the same is true with the block size wars. The censorship was so effective into tricking people via the censorship and to think that big blocks were a bad idea or that Bitcoin was never supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, even though it's right there in the title of the white paper. Nobody argues that. Nobody argues that.
And I don't understand his concern here because, doesn't really he's not really addressing the fee issue and i the bitcoin fees are not horrible, they've been they've remained very reasonable even post etf i don't know if when roger wrote this book knowing it would come out after the etfs perhaps he was hope hoping for his for his argument that the blockchain fees on the bitcoin network would be ridiculous but they're actually still quite reasonable so even this is it doesn't really in in actuality hold up we've had times of congestion. We've had times of congestion. But on the average, fees have been historically low this last year.
Or that Bitcoin was never supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic cash, even though it's right there in the title of the white paper. And that Satoshi himself, he literally wrote the software code to increase the block size on Bitcoin so it could scale to be money for the world to compete directly with PayPal and Visa and MasterCard and these sorts sorts of things. Whereas nowadays, you know, and a lot of new people won't know, like I was one of the, if not the main face of Bitcoin for quite a number of years there. And now we have people like Michael Saylor is one of the main faces of Bitcoin, literally telling people, Hey, let's not compete with the U S dollar.
Let's all pay our taxes. Let's not rock the, you know, let's not, you know, rock the boat at all with this. And it's like, you've missed the entire point of Bitcoin. If you think it's not going to rock the boat and it's not going to disrupt the the way the entire world works. I think it's ironic because I think he's missed Saylor's point and people like him. It's funny, you know, pay your taxes, follow laws. What a radical bastard that Saylor is. But what Roger seems to be missing, in my opinion, is, and he addresses in the book, but I don't buy it, I don't buy it.
He says that in order for Bitcoin to become a store of value, it must be first a medium of exchange. People must be using it to buy things before we can use it as a store of value. I don't understand that logic because we all kind of know traditionally that's not how things work. You know, usually it becomes, I mean, just traditionally in history, it becomes a store of value first. And once it's a trusted store of value, for something to be widely accepted as a medium of exchange, it has to be a trusted, reliable store of value. That's just generally how it works. People need confidence that they can retain their purchasing power over time or perhaps even increase their purchasing power over time.
Um, and once it's proven its ability to do that, that it's a dependable store of value that preserves worth, um, then it generally becomes a currency and a medium of exchange. Roger tries to argue the different, but difference, but I, I just, I don't buy that argument. And again if big blocks would have been merged well then it would have been a major change to how bitcoin works if we would have accepted the bitcoin xt fork that would have been a fundamental shift in the network you couldn't argue that bitcoin is as hard of money as it is now which is sailor's point part of what makes bitcoin hard money is that we've avoided those fundamental hard forks that the protocols remain fairly compatible and that we make minor small small improvements over time.
If you start messing with that, then you mess with the hardness of Bitcoin. You mess with the value. You mess with people's savings. Bitcoin, if you think it's not going to rock the boat and it's not going to disrupt the way the entire world works. And sadly, at this point, Bitcoin isn't nearly as disruptive as it otherwise could have been if people could still use it as peer-to-peer electronic cash. So anyhow, the book covers all the ways in which the Civil War dirty tricks and tactics that were employed to literally undermine Bitcoin's usefulness as peer-to-peer cash for the world.
And it's already, you know, at the top of its category on Amazon. And I invite people to go over there and order it. You can go to hijackingbitcoin.com. Yeah, there you go. I gave him his plug since I used his audio. And I read the book and I do like some of the history in there. But you're probably, if you've gotten this far, you're thinking, well, why does Roger not acknowledge Lightning? I think Lightning does get discounted by Roger. It does enable Bitcoin to be used as a day-to-day medium of exchange without having to hard fork Bitcoin.
I've personally bought things using completely self-custodial solutions. And I realize that he doesn't agree that Bitcoin is a good solution and Bitcoin. Cashers, they like to laugh at lightning. Fair enough. To me, it seems like a brilliant solution. And we could have multiple different types of layer twos. It doesn't have to be just lightning. So we don't have all our eggs in one basket either. And they hate the argument that the market has clearly decided because it is a good argument. argument their response seems to be well censorship prevented the market from making the right call all these years I don't buy it, I don't buy it. And I think one of the bits that gets left out in Roger's version of history can be explained by the author of the Block Size War book, Jonathan Baer, who explains the details of how their fork activation dynamics worked and the funkiness there that kind of set this all off wrong from the very start.
Yeah, it was a rolling vote. So as soon as they got to 75 percent, activation was locked in. The miners would add into a block space their agreement of wanting to participate in the block, just I'm summarizing, would want to, they'd signal that they wanted to participate in the Bitcoin XT fork. And they had these rolling windows to do this. Which I thought was pretty stupid. So there wasn't these windows because that meant that basically at the time it activates, you're guaranteeing there's at least 25% of the miners who are not upgraded and not running XT. So you're also ensuring that there is going to be a chain split.
And a much better idea would be, okay, we're going to have these windows and the vote could be 75% or more. So it's at least theoretically possible for 99% of the miners to upgrade at the time of activation. But the way they did it, they were locking in, in my view, 25% miner opposition to the hard fork, which made a chain split even more likely, almost guaranteed. So, yeah, I don't think they thought through the activation dynamics that much because they were so, at this point, the large blockers were very confident and positive that they would at some point succeed.
And they didn't worry about all these kind of game theory scenarios. But, yeah, they had quite a controversial activation system. My recollection was the big blockers were very business focused. They thought they were the money people. They had Gavin Andreessen on their side. They thought that they had the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation working with them, and they were very concerned that all of this was going to go – they weren't very concerned that this wasn't going to go their way, I should say. They were, I think, confident that everybody would see it their way.
It was a series of mistakes. That hubris might have led to a series of mistakes that sort of split the attention. That was another huge mistake from the large blockers to spin off Bitcoin Cash and then also try to do SegWit2x at the same time. So they weren't all united behind one fork. Their efforts were split. And from their point of view, I was speaking to some of them in Hong Kong at the time, and they were like, Bitcoin Cash shows the small blockers we're serious. If they don't go ahead with SegWit2x, we're all going to leave to join Bitcoin Cash. Therefore they know we're serious now, we've actually got a coin, and this is going to make the small blockers all agree to SegWit2x, which of course was completely wrong in their thought processes.
The small blockers were not going to support SegWit2x because of the existence of Bitcoin Cash. If anything, Bitcoin Cash significantly took all the momentum out of the SegWit2x attempt. Certainly from the point of view of exchanges who just kind of had to support Bitcoin Cash and had all the complications of kind of splitting customers' coins, listing Bitcoin Cash, the technical teams at these exchanges didn't want to go through this whole process all over again with another SegWit2x coin. And again, it's about precedent. precedent. The large blockers had done their hard forks, split their coin off, and it wasn't known as Bitcoin, and it traded at a significant discount to the Bitcoin price, which set a precedent for, well, the same thing again will happen with Segwit2x.
The large blockers will split up a coin. It will then be called Bitcoin Cash. It will be called Segwit2x coin. And again, it will trade at a significant price discount to Bitcoin and won't be known as Bitcoin. Coin so again they got their tactics completely wrong they thought that this would you know help win the war help let the small blockers know they're serious but actually completely undermine their case split their camp into different coins and you know helped ensure the victory for the smaller blockers so. They essentially made a series of mistakes in those days that split the energy, And when I look back at it, I guess I could have seen Bitcoin survive with larger blocks.
I don't think it really... I don't think it really would have fundamentally changed the self-hosting scenario unless they'd gotten really large, right? The part of the proposal was to move it from one megabyte to eight megabytes, and then the block size would double every two years. So eventually you could see it kind of getting out of control. There are a few main agreed-upon properties of a currency, right? It needs to be a medium of exchange. Well, Bitcoin is that. It needs to be a store of value. You bitcoin is becoming that it needs to be a unit of account and we definitely have it as that it needs to be portable bitcoin is the best at that and it needs durability um like so for a physical currency that means it needs to be resistant to wear and tear it has to have longevity and acceptance over time i think in a digital world that means forks are the greatest sin Sin, especially the, I mean, a hard fork is the greatest sin.
And Bitcoin has a network effect. And that also gives it durability. And then another aspect is limited supply, which we know Bitcoin has. These are the properties that ensure a currency can effectively serve as a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account, facilitating economic transactions in general. These are sort of the agreed upon properties of a currency. And I don't really hear anything in Roger's arguments that don't make Bitcoin as it is today, all six of those things. So where I see it today, it actually seems to me, taking the adoption route of a real currency, the store of value aspect of it could take multiple generations.
It's entirely possible. It took gold like what, a thousand years? And we're just the first generation of Bitcoin users, the very first generation. I could see something like that taking a really long time. And maybe to us alive right now, it may for some like those on the big block side from that time may still see it as a failure for the rest of their life. Bitcoin's a thousand year technology and the store of value and people beginning to accept that is it's really just part of the process. All right, coming up, your boosts, project updates, clip of the week and more. So let me say thank you to my sponsor, Podhome.fm.
Podhome.fm is a podcasting, Twitter hosting platform. It's the one I use. It has unlimited shows and episodes. It's got Podhome AI that's fantastic. fantastic it'll automatically transcribe to give you a transcription in the podcast app it'll figure out your chapters it can even make clips and the ui makes it really easy to add remote items like value for value music set up your splits so you can send a little sat love to a guest if you have it if you use the promo code twib you'll get the first three months for free that's twib this week in bitcoin i love pothome.fm it's great for live streaming too they've got a a fantastic setup over there.
So go to pothome.fm, promo code TWIB, and thanks to Pothome for sponsoring this week in Bitcoin. Now, we did get some boosts, and I mean some. Last week's episode sucked, so I knew it was going to be rough in the boost department. I mean, I didn't expect it to be this bad. Woo, it's bad, boys. It's bad. But Adam Curry is our baller booster. He came in with 10,000 sats hello mr curry thank you very much for the support uh he writes boosting to remind everyone that you can stream sats per minute i stream this week in bitcoin 200 sats per minute because i value thank you podfather yeah i see that um my totals that i read in the messages don't include the streaming stats but i'll often see the total uh for each individual contributor after the week and you're always high on that list thanks to those streaming sats and those boosts appreciate Appreciate that.
No second best is back again with 15,042 stats. Also art baller. Hey, look at that. Uh, thanks for staying focused on the signal during a noisy week. Read the pomp problem. I'd say watch him for a bit and then see how he does and keep us posted. It's very reasonable. Thank you very much. Nullifier comes in with 2001 sats. Just a little concern. I'm beginning to have the morning zoofication of podcasts. I find the soundboard clips a bit cheesy, but at least you aren't putting them on. So at least you aren't putting on some persona. Aha. I could try. He says, I know it's, this is Adam Curry's influence at play.
And I picture Nullifier shaking his fist. You know, so Nullifier, I do appreciate for some people they find the sound effects annoying. We could probably get like a new set for this week in Bitcoin. But there's a process at work here. You see, we have memes that get created by the audience, like a row of ducks and space balls boost. And part of what makes that magic work is to have a sound effect that goes with that particular type of boost, kind of then organically takes off. And they generally come from the community. It's kind of part of the fun is you boost in a certain amount, you trigger a certain sound effect. It doesn't work for everybody, but on the whole, it does seem to work.
And it also just kind of makes it fun, keeps it moving and things like that. I also, I guess I take issue with calling it the zoofication of podcasts, the morning zoofication. I mean, you're talking about a handful of soundbites for 10-15 minutes in part of the podcast, compared to like the absolute ludicrous ridiculousness that is actual morning radio with all of their commercials and all their stupid antics and guy laughing in the background off mic and all of that like. It's not really a fair comparison, although I appreciate that some people come to podcasting to get away from radio.
So anything that kind of reminds them of radio is triggering. But I think it's a little bit of a dramatic statement to say it's morning zoofication. I think there is a balance to be had there, though. Loomer comes in with 5,000 sats and writes, I like your examination or explanation of why the supply can't be changed in Bitcoin. I appreciate you keeping an eye on the mainstream media, but not sure I'll keep listening if it's the largest part. Not counting the boosts. I'd be curious to know what you think of the balance today. EPC comes in and just says, boost! So five boosters.
With 32,543 sats. That's rough. That's a low hourly wage. But also on me. It was not a good episode. I'm probably going to take next week off. Because I'll be traveling and I want to think about retooling the show a little bit. Because I wasn't happy with the results either, and now it's reflected in the boosts too. So thank you, though, for everybody who did, for all five of you who did send a boost in. I do appreciate that. Some project updates for you. I just talked about Mutiny Wallet recently, but they have another release, version 0.62. This is a big deal, you guys. So Mutiny Wallet, I like it a lot because you can self-host it yourself, or you can use their web-based version. When we use their web-based version, it's so quick.
Spin up a Lightning Wallet, start using it immediately. If you just need a quick, disposable Bitcoin Lightning Wallet, it's so awesome. Really good. And they've semi-recently introduced Mutiny Plus. Now, this is a subscription of 16,000 sets, but you get early access to new features, your own Lightning Address, an iOS test flight app, and, of course, you're supporting future development. And Lightning Addresses is one of the new features they've added in 6.2. And they also are working on the ability to receive payments while you're offline. Which is a bit tricky with Lightning. They say in the announcement, they write, our new feature uses eCash locked to your pub key so you can only spend it when you're back online.
Your wallet listens for DMs on Noster and unlocks tokens once received. It's using Fetament on the back end, so you need to set that up. They keep pushing Fetament further and further and federated systems further and further. It kind of is an alternative to Liquid, and it's really fascinating what they're doing over there. The UI has recently got a refresh. I covered that not too long ago. go. The Mutiny Wallet is an app that even if you don't need a wallet, you need to go be aware of it so you can recommend it to friends and family or just people that need quick wallets. It could be a great way to consolidate UTXOs, something to definitely look into.
And then in my also high esteem category, one of my absolute favorite Bitcoin apps, the Zeus Wallet version 0.8.3 is now available. This is a big one. It's got on-chain coin control. They write in their announcement, Quote, all three of our L&D interfaces now support CoinControl when crafting on-chain transactions. There's still work to be done, though, including adding the ability to send full UTXOs without manually calculating the fee difference. For now, we recommend users who need to burn a full UTXO to put it into a channel using the send max flag. Yeah, that is actually really handy.
Also good news, if you're using their liquidity provider for Lightning, I should say, they have reduced the Zeus Pay Lightning address fees. Quote, the new fee structure will see most users paying less than 50% of the fees they were previously. I'm going to recommend The Block Size War to you. It's a book that I picked up back in 2021, and it's fantastic. It covers the Bitcoin block size war, which was waged from August 2015 to November 17. And at the heart of it, it is really about the users deciding the future of Bitcoin. I know Roger and his crew wouldn't like that version of history, but that's the version that I remember, is that the users picked the direction of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin network.
Despite what the companies and all of the business smart people wanted. For better or for worse. I think for better, but The Block Size War captured. It's a pretty short read. You know, it may be shorter than Roger's book, actually. They're about the same length. And if you're going to get Roger's book, definitely get The Block Size War because you should read both accounts of history. If you've heard of this book and you've never picked it up, please, please consider this the thing that pushes you over to actually read this book. It's not a difficult read it's a great read and it'll give you stronger conviction about bitcoin's future and direction too definitely did for me now i'm gonna play a clip from mr sailor i know um i risk going mainstream with this one but to be honest there's only so many people that are getting interviewed these days and i think it would probably drive roger nuts to hear a sailor clip so shortly after him but, Mikey tries to make the argument why modifying the block size could wreck the value of Bitcoin.
And if that's true, I guess you could say Mikey's in the ossification camp, as they like to call it now. The commonly understood reason for why you don't want to change the block size is we don't want to centralize the network. We want to keep nodes that you can run. But it's not actually, in my opinion, it's not the best argument. I mean, the truth is you could probably make an argument that an eight megabyte block space will also be decentralized or not. Now we're in this little debate over the cost of storage versus the rate at which the Bitcoin blockchain increments.
And the better debate is don't change it because it's unethical to change it. It. Don't change it because it's evil. It's unethical. That's why you don't do it. Do you agree? Is it evil and unethical to make large changes to Bitcoin as more and more people try to store their generational wealth into Bitcoin? And if you do agree with that, does that pose a challenge to Bitcoin's future? Or is there a positive to it? Perhaps you could argue that as well. Let me know. Send a boost into the show. When I'm back, I will read them. I'm going to to wrap up with just a reminder that I'll probably be out next week, although depending on how things work out, I may have an episode for you.
I'd still like to hear what you'd like to hear from the show. Does that make sense? I want to hear what you want to hear. Let me know what you, yeah, anyways, you know, as I'm taking some time to think about how to retool the show, it's a great time to get your piece in and share it with a friend, maybe another Jupiter Broadcasting community member, somebody in the podcasting 2.0 community. I'd really appreciate that and love to hear their feedback as well. I am going to leave you with a value for value song. This is by TJ Wong, and it is so many years. Thanks for being here.
Introduction to Roger Ver's New Book
Impact of Forks on Bitcoin
Revisiting the Effectiveness of Censorship
Reigniting the Big Block Debate
Understanding the Activation Dynamics of Bitcoin Forks
Mistakes in the Big Block Strategy
Bitcoin's Long-Term Role as a Store of Value
Sponsorship Segment and Boost Acknowledgment
Updates on Mutiny Wallet Features
Recommendation: "The Block Size War" Book
Michael Saylor's Argument on Bitcoin Changes
Show Wrap - Might be off next Week
