Transcription
This is Matthew Crowder's Bitcoin University. Today I want to talk a little bit more about the Bitcoin Core dumpster fire. I just wanted to provide a good summary of what's happened the past few years, plus add a few new things that have just happened yesterday. But make sure you watch this video all the way to the end for some talk about the upcoming soft fork as well.
Basically, the argument is that Bitcoin Core has failed to be a good steward of the Bitcoin reference implementation over the past few years. And I would say that's the understatement of the year. We can start with back in 2022 when Bitcoin Core devs changed the definition of Bitcoin and 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, and large OP returns. I went on to say, taken together with the changed definition of data carrier size, this looks to me like an example of Marxist-like subversion of the project.
We can see what the Bitcoin Core repo used to look like. "Bitcoin is an experimental digital currency." All all mentions of money or currency have been removed from the new one. "Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions." There's no indication here that has anything to do with money. And Bitcoin Core has gradually been drifting away from Bitcoin as money and introducing new use cases, or at least not fighting against new use cases as they should be.
Bitcoin Core's original sin. And I'll link to all these videos in the description notes below. Bitcoin Core's original sin, as I call it, involved changing the documentation for data carrier size. And then using that changed documentation to reject Luke Dasher's patch for inscription spam. And then again, viewed in this context, the recent forced changes to operator return data limits take on a new, more sinister aspect. As Arthur points out here, since 2023, the Bitcoin blockchain grew 125 gigs in data spam transactions and only 25 gigs in native transactions. That's pretty unbelievable if you think about it. And as Renault points out here, 37% of Bitcoin block space is now non-financial data. Over half a megabyte per block, 6 megabytes per block. The transaction fee spammers pay are very low for getting their files stored forever on someone else's computer. They're essentially freewriting on a $2 trillion network built and secured for payments.
And now version 30 was just released. This gets worse. Inscription-related UTXOs, in other words, chunks of unspent Bitcoin, account for 29.6% of the entire UTXO set, almost a third of the entire UTXO set. And when it comes to the new address type from the Taproot, uh, the Taproot software, of all pay-to-taproot UTXOs, 86% are sub-$1,000 SATs. So they're dust and they're basically a result of inscriptions. I got that from this article from meool.space, which I'll link to in the description notes below. As it goes on to say, "The UTXO set contains 173 million UTXOs requiring 11 gigabytes on disk under default compaction and indexing settings. This large size means most users will store only a small portion of the UTXO set in RAM, slowing initial block downloads."
So this is one of the problems with Bitcoin Core completely blowing open the UTXO set. And what did they do that for? For more adoption of Bitcoin as a monetary network? No, they did it for this garbage, which is now forever on the Bitcoin blockchain because of Bitcoin Core. After two years of watching the chain fill up with spam and watching the UTXO set skyrocket and still doing nothing to patch the inscriptions exploit because it was quote unquote too controversial, as someone said at Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Core decided to open up an even wider attack surface by blowing open the opportun filter, a filter that had been in place since 2015. And this has now opened up everyday Bitcoiners to a host of legal risks that come with relaying and storing arbitrary content that does nothing to make Bitcoin better money.
Bitcoin Core devs offered many weak technical justifications for this, but it turned out that the real reason was probably some backdoor deal with Bitcoin affinity scam startups like Catria. As part of their pushing through this contentious PR, this contentious pull request, they also subjected us to endless gaslighting. It was a lot like the return of COVID propaganda. They said things like, "Spam is subjective. No one can define it. Filters don't work, but we need to blow open this particular filter. If you don't like our node software, then you're free to run different node software." After they said that, 20% of the network dumped Bitcoin Core node software and started running Bitcoin knots. And what was their response? "No, don't run that software because Luke is crazy." In other words, my way or the highway when it comes to Bitcoin Core. They also said things like, "If you really want to solve the spam problem, you should push for a change at the consensus level with a soft fork. We propose a soft fork." No, you guys are so crazy. Why would you want to do that?
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As a part of this whole process, we also learned that the lead maintainer who is pushing through this contentious OP_RETURN PR had apparently slept her way to getting right access to the most important software project in the world. That's an accusation that I talk about in this video called "Bitcoin Core Nepotism and Commit Access." This is Gloria we're talking about, and let's hear what she thinks about Bitcoin. "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 NFTs are bad or whatever. I don't think that." And she's saying that when we've literally had 125 gigs of this garbage put into blocks, it doesn't seem to matter to this particular Bitcoin Core lead maintainer. "Language has a play. Well, I don't think that should be considered when you are talking about writing policy code."
I think there's a lot more dirty laundry from Bitcoin Core that will be coming out. As Samson Mau points out here, "whole, I think there are a lot of problematic individuals in Core and a lot of structural problems with the organization itself, and I don't want to get into it, but eventually Danny, you're going to have someone on and they're going to air a lot of dirty laundry, you know, dealing from, uh, backstabbing, internal politics, uh, brigading, cancelling people. There's a laundry list of stuff, and you know, you, you'll get it eventually. I think it'll come, it'll come to light." I think Camino Drummer sums it up quite well here, with reference to this post, which says, "Target a respected institution, kill and clean it, wear it as a skin suit while demanding respect." And Camino Drummer points out, "Bitcoin Core in 2025 is a perfect example of this. All the old wizards are checked out and just collecting cash, and the woke illiterates are running the show."
A new development from the Bitcoin mailing list. Alaman, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing your name right, into the mailing list. "Hello Bitcoin developers, my name is Juan Alaman, and this is my first post to the mailing list, but I've been involved with Bitcoin since 2017. First only as a hard money investor, but later also as a developer, especially fascinated by this permanent medium. I hope this proposal can be appreciated by all perspectives as a pragmatic, maybe unorthodox, but timely solution to move forward in agreement." The changes in version 30, Bitcoin Core version 30 defaults, got my attention, similar to many of you, as they are completely opposite to what has historically been quote unquote standard practice. A highly controversial change that surfaces the influence over default policy in the network, escalating to the point of a soft fork proposal. First, it must be reminded that a fork should be unnecessary if defaults are simply reverted while still allowing all policy possibilities.
After my second pull request attempt was also closed and I was blocked from the repo. Again, we've seen this pattern from Bitcoin Core. I realized that the main issue here is social political, not technical. It's about the powerful influence that the quote unquote official reference implementation centralized node software repository has. This needs a different kind of solution. I like to propose a high-level structural change to the official Bitcoin repository.
And he goes on to elaborate on that, but I wanted to look and see, um, Greg Maxwell's response. "If you want and think it would be valuable, feel free to create it. No one will stop you and you don't need anyone's permission." Juan writes back to Greg. "Hello, Greg. Thanks for your feedback. I'm already starting to do something, but the main point is about the centralization risks of the official repo." Uh, Matt Carlo says he should probably look into the Bitcoin, uh, etc. Greg responds to Juan, "Other people don't do what you want because they believe it would harm Bitcoin and they have no interest in spending their efforts trying to harm something they love just to satisfy other people who disagree with them." You can see the ranks closing here around Bitcoin Core. Maybe they're wrong, but fortunately, you have the freedom to go your own way. There's no official anything. Well, that's just a lie. Continuing to try to coerce others to do what you want when they think it would be wrong and harmful is a bad choice. Ironically, it's exactly what Bitcoin Core devs did with the default settings for mempool and data carrier size. Continuing to try to coerce others to do what you want, what you want, when they think it would be wrong and harmful is a bad choice, which will make enemies out of people who otherwise would be indifferent to your efforts that they regard as misguided. Will Bitcoin Core and Greg, in particular, know how to make enemies in 2025? Uh, Juan responds, "Thank you, Matt. Hello, Matt. Thanks for your response, Matt Carallo." But again, my focus is specifically, this is Juan speaking, "My focus is specifically on the powerful influence of the Bitcoin Bitcoin repo itself. If you don't, if you don't think this merits a BIP, what would be the appropriate avenue to address and potentially do something about reorganizing the repo itself?" This is a little bit like approaching the US government and saying, "We don't really like how you're doing things or the CIA or something. How can we submit a request, a customer service request to change things?" Obviously, Bitcoin Core is not going to listen to them. Uh, Greg.
And then Juan responds said, "Greg, Greg, I actually agree that there should be no official anything. That is why I purposefully always use quotes around it. Unfortunately for both of us, this is not a reflection of reality. Official Bitcoin Core has become itself the power grab. Official Bitcoin Core has itself become the power grab." Juan goes on to say, "My proposal is about bringing this to the forefront. Most discussions I see revolve around who can win an argument. All these are distractions in my opinion. The issue here is with the structure we have quote unquote trusted for so many years is no longer viable." I thought that was a really interesting exchange, and this just happened recently.
As Modus points out here, to some degree, we're suffering under under the consistent trope that Bitcoin Core development is decentralized and no one has control because it sounded cool to say that. That led to people blindly throwing money at people because if it's quote unquote decentralized devs, then more money is better, right? And this was something that Michael Sailor rather presciently pointed out that maybe overfunding Bitcoin devs is a really bad idea and it's a way of hurting Bitcoin. You can't have true development developer decentralization if a bunch of key core devs can get together and expel devs like Luke Dasher that they don't like, and there have been others as well. That's really the original form of centralization via scapegoating that people like Rene Girard have spoken about.
It's funny. If you go to Bitcoin Core here and take a look how you can contribute to Bitcoin Core, you go down here and there is a donate button. Where exactly does this go? Maybe Greg Maxwell could tell me, uh, where this goes, because there's no official Bitcoin Core, and yet this money, I assume this money is not flowing, uh, it's not flowing to Luke Dasher. Bitcoin Core appears to be a lot like the US government. It pretends to work for the people while actually answering to different masters who want things that end up often being quite bad for the people.
Fortunately though, there is hope because the Bitcoin network is routing around these bad actors at Core and moving to Bitcoin knots. Bitcoin knots up to around 21% of the network here. It sort of bounces around that number. And then there is the soft fork that is currently being debated online. I thought that mechanic had some good thoughts about forking. General thoughts about forking. The plebs just want you not to screw with their money and will take steps to preserve their money should it become threatened. That's the sum total of their interest in the ongoing discussion about spam and Bitcoin. More generally, they just want you not to screw with their money. And the plebs don't have paid sponsorships. They don't have investors or interest in treasury stashes. They don't speak at gigs at conferences, relationships. They want to build, maintain, horse trades. They're in the middle of grants, funding to protect personal likes, dislikes getting in the way of development, discussion, agendas to satisfy, targets on their back due to their influence, risk of blackmail, boredom, frustration with the conservative nature of Bitcoin development. The minute you do anything within the Bitcoin industry, all this stuff immediately starts clouding your decision-making. It's the first thing that gets brought up about me in any discussion. The fact that I work at Ocean, to which I gladly point out that I was running Ordis Disrespecter or Disrespecter before Ocean existed, or I knew of Luke's intention to revive his old mining pool because I'm a Bitcoiner and a bunch of crypto scammers were screwing with my money and I wasn't having it. And I believe once again, the power of those who have a single focus on Bitcoin succeeding is ripe for expressing itself again as a software, while people with other options can make use of those instead.
As for specifics of consensus rule changes to limit arbitrary data, that's clearly underway, but I don't think anyone knows what it looks like exactly yet. So stay tuned.
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