Transcription
This is Matthew Crowder's Bitcoin University. Today I want to talk about an accident waiting to happen. But first, my prayers go out to the family and friends of Charlie Kirk who was brutally murdered yesterday, most likely by an intel agency or other state level actors. And when you see this picture, it really breaks your heart to see someone who now doesn't have a husband and some kids who don't have a father. I'm not going to be covering this event today and there's certainly no lack of coverage of it everywhere else.
But here's the big picture as I see it. As the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and various countries in the e EU and elsewhere begin their descent into civil war and as the wheels continue to come off the US dollar global financial system. We desperately need a good working form of digital money. I'm not interested in stable coins or CBDC's. I like Bitcoin and I'd really like for Bitcoin to remain functional as we continue our journey through the fourth turning and final stage of the long-term debt bubble imploding because if we lose Bitcoin, we lose all hope that we can eventually make our way out of this mess.
So, I thought I'd spend today getting back to our roots with Satoshi. We're going to be going back to October of 2010, which was just not too long before Satoshi left the project. This is a post. These are all posts from the Bitcoin talk forum. This is Shadow of Harbringer writing, "Bitcoin is great, but it misses one thing that usual bank transfers have, payment title."
Now, it's funny to laugh at someone like this and uh and observe their their critique of Bitcoin here and I was about to do that. Then I realized in 2010 I had no idea what was going on with respect to Bitcoin. But it's always interesting to go back and see what's happening in the forums like this. "Bitcoin is great, but it misses one thing that usual bank transfers have, payment title. Perhaps it should be possible to include short less than 512 bytes short messages for each transaction. The message could be encrypted with public private keys so only the receiver can see its contents. What do you think? P.S. I might be wrong. But the messages could also be used to increase randomness of hashing process by the way, couldn't they? If not, never mind."
So then there's some discussion. Grandaloo points out what about the increase of the block size? Maybe this isn't the increase of the block size, but he's talking about this will add a lot more data to each block. Even if the 512 bytes per transaction is small, it might represent a significant amount since it all has to be stored in the blockchain. And this is a legendary comment to be worried about this so early on, be worried about uh being very respectful when it comes to block space.
And then here's Satoshi's answer which we have and again this discussion I should have read the the title of the original thread. "Should we allow short messages to be sent together with bitcoins?" Satoshi's response to this discussion is that ECDSA, which is the signature algorithm for Bitcoin, ECDSA can't encrypt messages only signatures. And then Satoshi goes on to say something very wise. I think he he says it would be unwise to have permanently recorded plain text messages for everyone to see. It would be an accident waiting to happen. If there's going to be a message message system, it should be a separate system parallel to the Bitcoin network. Messages should not be recorded in the blockchain. The messages could be signed with the Bitcoin address key pairs to prove who they're from.
And looking forward, this is a very good description of something that was developed much much later by someone else, but it's a good description of Noster, which I'll put a link to this video in which I discuss it in the description notes below. And if you don't follow me on Noster, that video will show you how to follow me on Noster. So this is where I got the idea. I got the idea from Satatoici or Satoshi here. Uh this post Satoshi in 2010 number one and he's referring to this the same uh post in the Bitcoin talk forum that we've been examining.
Satoshi in 2010:
1. Plain text messages should not be recorded in the blockchain.
2. Plain text messages = an accident waiting to happen.
3. Separate message system should be created if needed.
TL;DR version: Bitcoin Core 30 is malware per Satoshi's reasoning. And I think that makes sense especially when you think about the historical context of OP_RETURN. OP_RETURN was provided in 2014 well after Satoshi had left the project as a small place to put 40 bytes of arbitrary data into a Bitcoin transaction like timestamping for example, timestamping the hash of a much longer document. So you can take for example the whole Declaration of Independence, which I've taken up here. I've hashed it using a SHA 256 hash algorithm and this is the output right here. So this is actually, I don't know if you can see it, but this is the entire Declaration of Independence and now it has this uh deterministic output. You'll always get the same thing if you have the exact same characters. You'll get the same hash output and that hash, if we take a look at it, is 32 bytes. So that's more than uh 40 bytes of OP_RETURN is more than enough to to accommodate a SHA 256 hash. And so what you do, you can hash something and that gives you a very small output that's very easy on the blockchain. And then when you put it in the blockchain in an OP_RETURN, that's almost like a timestamp or proof of existence at the time. So this is a legitimate use, I think, of arbitrary data on Bitcoin. And 32 bytes, 40 bytes, even 80 bytes is not a lot.
Here's the thing though. OP_RETURN was never intended to be used for large amounts of data and blowing out OP_RETURN data size from 80 bytes to 100,000 bytes in one fell swoop as Bitcoin Core devs are preparing to do in 2025. This really would have been unthinkable for most of Bitcoin's history. Are Bitcoin Core devs blowing out OP_RETURN because they care about UTXO bloat? Of course not. If they actually cared about UTXO bloat, then they would have done something about the inscriptions bug that came with Taproot. And we're going to talk more in detail about that in a later video. And it was this bug that allowed the UTXO set to explode from 8 gigabytes to 12 gigabytes on the current Bitcoin Core dev team's watch. This is a sign of pure, pure incompetence. As Ghost of UNH hosted Marcelus writes here today, and this is back in June of 2025, "Today, 89% of all Taproot outputs in the UTXO set hold dust. 89%. And this happened on the current Bitcoin Core team's watch. And 62% of all dust in the UTXO set is in Taproot outputs. These are inscription outputs. This is uh one of the big problems." So when when Bitcoin Core devs tell you they're worried about UTXO set blow, they weren't too worried when it happened when it involved putting more spam on Bitcoin. They're only worried about it when they want to blow open the filters and allow even more spam on Bitcoin.
And now to add injury to insult, Bitcoin Core devs are about to open up Bitcoin to the worst kind of attack imaginable with their new software version, Bitcoin Core version 30, forcing node runners, as we've been discussing, forcing node runners who use the default settings to circulate illicit material from meool to me and help it get mined. This is why I've said that Bitcoin Core 30 is a CSAM relay service. Bitcoin transactions with OP_RETURN data that are swirling in your mempool, in your node's mempool, are in plain text, as I understand it, and that plain text may contain illicit, illegal images up to 100,000 bytes after Bitcoin Core version 30 ships. It's exhorted when it's in the chain, but in the mempool, as I understand it, it's just plain text, which is exactly what Satoshi has been warning us against putting on the blockchain itself in this post that we've been discussing today. Again, plain text messages should not be recorded in the blockchain, and they certainly should not be circulated in mempools. This is sort of a free relay service for perves when you understand what it means to blow out OP_RETURN.
So what's been happening is Bitcoin Core devs have been rapidly leading us closer and closer to what Satoshi wisely called an accident waiting to happen. The question now is, will they pull back at the last moment before it's too late? Do they even possess the wisdom, wisdom to do so? And I certainly hope they do, though I have my doubts.
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