Transcription
This is Matthew Crater's Bitcoin University. Today I want to talk about Bitcoin Core getting deprecated. And make sure you watch all the way to the end of this video for some special fireworks.
Deprecated is nerd speak for something like a feature that's no longer supported or recommended and that may be removed in a later release. And this has become sort of an inside Bitcoin core joke. Anthony Towns writing here, "Wow, Gloria Zho's account apparently just got deprecated. I mean deleted. This is what happened to her ex account before and it looks like that either Elon deleted it for her or Gloria has bowed out of the public square due to all the pressure. Gloria Zhao of course the first female Bitcoin core maintainer. There's been a lot of problems under her. She was the one who merged the data carrier sizes oper PR and caused all these problems. If you want to learn how she ascended to the top of Bitcoin Core and became a lead maintainer and the amount of nepotism involved, I'll put a link to this video in the description notes below so that you can watch it.
What I wanted to point out here too, someone just sent me this. It looks like when Gloria was at UC Berkeley, she was involved in teaching people how to launch an ICO, which is one of these scams that you build on top of Ethereum, one of these ERC20 token scams. So she was actually teaching other people how to run a ICO scam initial coin offering. This makes a lot more sense when you hear her sort of postmodern approach to what belongs on Bitcoin and how really you can put anything on Bitcoin just like you can put anything like an ERC20 on Ethereum. But let's listen to what she had to say a couple years ago.
>> Like you like if you don't like cat photos, you don't like wizards or whatever, that's like your choice, right? But I don't think um this is not a legitimate transaction or you know this is a waste of blocks you know because NFTTS are bad or whatever. I don't think that language has a play well I don't think that should be considered when you are talking about writing policy code. Yeah,
>> that's sort of the same postmodern nihilistic cultural Marxist approach you'd expect from a graduate from UC Berkeley. And I can poke fun at UC Berkeley graduates because that's where I got my PhD in English literature and I know exactly the sort of intellectual infection that has now spread to the greater the greater culture.
This is uh Mike Schmidt from Brink opening up a PR to remove the deprecation for data carrier size. So we can see another another use of this. So, this hasn't been deprecated yet in Bitcoin Core version 30, but it probably will at some point. And the joke at the title of my video, Bitcoin Core getting deprecated. Give it 6 to9 months. Knots will flip core and Bitcoin Knots nodes continuing to skyrocket as we can see here.
Following up on yesterday's video, another Bitcoin core smoking gun in which I discussed how Bitcoin Core devs changed the definition of Bitcoin or Bitcoin Core on the GitHub repo. just a few months before Bitcoin was taken on a trajectory that involved injecting more and more spam into the network via inscriptions, BRC20 tokens, that's the equivalent of ERC20 tokens on Ethereum, BRC20 tokens, and large OP returns. So whereas the Bitcoin website, the Bitcoin core website used to look like this uh back in 2021. Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency, what it looks like now is that there's no mention whatsoever of its monetary function. and Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-p peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. And accord according to lead maintainers like Gloria Zhao, those transactions and blocks can contain spam as well.
But the reason I'm bringing this up in today's video, that video was about Vladimir Vanderlon, who was also a lead maintainer who stepped down. He was basically the one who put forward this PR to change the language on the website and he was appearing to be leaning more and more pro- spam. But what's interesting, someone pointed out and sent me this. If you go back to the Bitcoin talk forum in 2010, here is Vlad writing. Let's adhere to the KISS principle, the keep it simple, stupid principle and keep it simple, simply a digital currency. Talking about Bitcoin. This is back when he understood that Bitcoin was money. As he writes here in 2010, it's already confusing enough for new users without bringing the kitchen sink in and it could affect security. You can fork the chain if you want to store alternative information. And if only Bitcoin Core devs and Vlad in his later years at Bitcoin Core understood this, we'd be in a much better place.
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I also wanted to do a follow-up to another video, this one, in which I said Bitcoin is not magically anti-fragile. And the language of that title was remarkably similar to the language of this post from Asenoa Gold from August 2025. I do follow Asenoa, so I'm going to assume that I did see this and I subconsciously use the title, so I wanted to give him credit where credit is deserved. Bitcoin is not magically antifragile. Great post. The antifragile characteristic of Bitcoin is created through social and cultural consensus of users choosing not to run client implementations that have ship code merged. You can follow Asenoa on X. I'll put a link in the description notes below as follow as well as following the project where he's the editor-inchief Bitcoin art magazine which looks really cool. Looks like a very beautiful artifact. So be sure to check out the links for that as well.
Then closing another loop in Bitcoin history. Remember when Mechanic got banned from GitHub for calling out Jameson Lop for being an investor in Catria while acting in other words approving Jameson Lop approving a pro spam Bitcoin core poll request that one for one surrounding oper heard around the world that got a lot of us to wake up and pay attention again to the spam wars. If we go back and see mechanics post from that, he's saying someone pushing for a major change to Bitcoin is affiliated with a company whose current exploit of Bitcoin was the motivation for the change. Pointing this out in the GitHub discussion on Bitcoin Core has resulted in me being banned. Of course, this company we now realize and remember was Citria, which is one of the investments of Jameson Lop as he discloses on his website. Here we can see Citria, which is basically trying to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum.
But again, when I watched this clip here, I didn't really put two and two together that this is unbelievable that Lop would be admitting this in public that basically this change was made for Citrio. So, let's listen to this once more.
So this was a question that came up with uh one of the guests we had on arguing the side of knots and his core question of contention was what problem does taking the the ceiling from of opturn from 80 to uh was it 80 bytes to 100 kilobytes I think you said what problem does that solve? Yeah. So, you know, this specifically solves the edge case where someone needs to have visibility of that data in an unconfirmed state across the network and they they can't wait for the data to show up in a block.
>> It's it's an extreme edge case and like we said uh I think Citria is the only example of that.
This is the insane thing of changing meool policy for a single startup, a single Bitcoin affinity scam like Citria, which Lisa invested in. And so it turns out that Mechanic was correct and he should never been banned from the GitHub. It seems fairly minor at this point and it was never something that he was that upset about. But it's funny to hear Lop go on a podcast and now basically reveal everything.
I wanted to finish with a thread that I had with Stefan Laa. There's a lot more that's happened here overnight that I haven't read through, but there was a thread that I thought would be educational and it's pretty funny what happens to it at the end. So, I just wanted to read through that. I'm responding to uh a post that he did and he had a couple questions here. The question I'm responding to here is, "What percentage of the mining hash rate, in other words, all the large mining pools in the world, Bitcoin mining pools, what percentage of the mining hash rate do you believe will filter these things out?" meaning inscriptions and BRC20 tokens and all the spam that is approved of by Bitcoin core devs.
My response to Stefan, I'm not interested in speculating about what mining pools will mine if left to their own devices. They've obviously already developed an unhealthy taste for spam if we look at what's getting currently mined. In other words, there's a lot of spam in current blocks. If there's no adult supervision from the P2P network and in other words, your node and my node and Bitcoin social layer, malicious mining pools will do lots of things that are bad for the long-term health of the network. They will mine spam. They'll try to run SegWit 2X. This is an illusion back to the block size wars. And they will attempt to create OFAC compliant blocks, which is what Mara the mining pool did a few years ago. That's where node runners in the social layer of Bitcoin come in. I don't want inscriptions, BRC20s or large op returns in blocks or in my memp pool and so I filter them. I build my own block templates with DATM gateway and do solo mining or mine with ocean. So I'm actively using my knots node for my transactions and for mining. I would suggest that you do the same thing if you actually hate spam, which you probably don't. If lots of people people filter spam, it makes it harder for spam to get into blocks. Malicious actors can attempt to bypass the wishes of node runners by sending spam directly to mining pools via things like Libra Relay. That's still something we need to talk about, but it's basically a way of sending spam garbage directly from the scammer spammer directly to a mining pool. And Libra relay was set up by Peter Todd, the same guy who wants to add a tail mission to Bitcoin and believes in demarrage as well. These people need to be called out on the social layer. people like Peter Todd who should be disinvited from all conferences make him a pariah and also these things should be fought using things like Chris Guided's garbage man to take out Libra relay nodes this is some software that he developed there's also some built-in protection against blocks that are really full of Libra relay or slipstream spam and other non-standard transactions that the P2P network hasn't seen yet since those blocks will take longer to be verified by nodes that need to request transactions they haven't seen yet. This is something we talked about a few weeks ago in a video. And thus, these blocks could lose an erase condition where two blocks are mined at the same time by different mining pools. It makes no sense for a mining pool to risk the block subsidy for the sake of $100 of spam transaction fees.
And then I go on to basically talk about Stefan uh and how I've been feeling about him lately. Stefan, you've been taking a really passive and beta approach to this problem of spam. You should be shouting ocean and datam from the rooftops and running knots and calling out the offenders on the social layer, but instead you're a little cucked weasel, moaning about how it's so hard to get mining pools to agree with us. How about becoming a man for once and learning how to use a sword and fight the enemy? Or are you too scared about missing out on potential interviews for your podcast or being disinvited from the conference circuit? You clearly care more about your influencer career than you do the long-term health of the Bitcoin network.
And then I go on to respond to another of his comments. Contributing to the demand side for block space by transacting more onchain is great and that's definitely something we should all try to do. But it's pointless without filters. There's always going to be more demand for non-monetary data in block space than monetary data. This myth about monetary transactions eventually pricing out everything else is one of the stupidest narratives that I've ever heard. And I believe it was first propagated by bad actors like David Bailey of the Bitcoin conference and Bitcoin magazine and the Taproot Wizards who profit from spam. And Tap Routt Wizards was obviously funded by Jameson Lop and David Bailey. Say hi to them for me at your next conference. Then go look in the mirror and ask yourself who you've become. You actually used to have one of the best podcasts out there and now you're pathetic core apologist and a Bitcoin treasury company pusher.
And then my final note, and if you're willing to put up with unconfirmed large operturn CSAM transactions swirling in your memool and sitting in plain texting RAM, then I don't know what to say to you as a fellow human being and father.
Then Nick Zabo responds to me uh leaving out the case obviously of spam getting into the blockchain, which I should have mentioned. Nick writes, "It's far worse still when it gets on the blockchain. At that point, you can't be an archival node without hosting CS SAM. you can't delete it without destroying the financial archiving functionality of the node. And then what's really funny is Stefan tries to respond to Nick saying, "Nick, how's this different from the up to 400 kilobyte incriptions that were already being relayed and stored by most nodes on the network, even pre-core version 30?" And Nick cuts them off. Uh, for F's sake, get some logic in your brain. Making a new bucket bigger without making the old bucket smaller increases the risk. Effing obvious. Are you really this much of an effing idiot or you just think your followers are such big effing idiots?
Those are interesting explanations for why Stefan does what he does. But it was good to see Nick helping out there. Here's Stefan Lever if you want to follow him on X or unfollow him on X. And we can see here he's become an investor and adviser in another one of these Bitcoin Treasury companies which is down looks like 30 or 40% since launch. So obviously his interests uh may be trending elsewhere to more sort of fiat scams.
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