The Future of Bitcoin with Nic Carter, Eric Wall, & Udi Wertheimer

bankless Nation it's time for state of the nation we've got the topic that uh everyone is talking about right now who is in the Bitcoin driver's seat who's in charge of this thing right now who's running it at least from a social layer perspective of course I know David Bitcoin runs itself but there's been a disturbance in the force this thing called ordinals it's consuming a lot of Bitcoin block space and there seemed to be some maybe social fracturing as a result so what are we going to talk about today we're going to talk about yeah who is in

the cultural driver's seat over the Bitcoin world uh Bitcoin fundamentalist Bitcoin Maxi zealots I don't know what to call them but that camp we all know what they look like and sound like uh have been in control for a very long time until Taproot comes in until this ordinals protocol and uh our three guests uh just got back from Bitcoin 2023 uh and we want to uh ask them what they think about the current state of Bitcoin uh there's a lot of questions to ask uh mainly my biggest question is why is the most viral thing out of Bitcoin

2023 a video of Eric wall and Udi wertheimer dress up as Wizards dancing on stage I think that's the most important question of this podcast but also why are so many bitcoiners upset by this uh and so we're going to unpack all of these details about what's going on in Bitcoin culture land uh with three Taproot wizards but first before we get into that show we have to talk about this thing called diligence fuzzing which has nothing to do with taproots wizards but is a similarly weird and funny name uh what is diligence funding fuzzing for smart contracts solidity devs Auditors Enterprises engaging in web3 and need to ensure that their smart

contracts are secure before going to mainnet diligence fuzzing is an auto-grade security tool that helps you and find all of your code vulnerabilities in a automated way with fuzzing of course uh but diligence fuzzing from consensus there are other fuzzing tools on the market but this one is better it's an extra layer of protection for your smart contracts in addition to and Beyond typical code audits there is a link in the show notes so you can go fuzz your contracts yourself go pause yourself it's free fuzzing as we said before as well free

fuzzing tools here all right David so uh who do we have on and what size to the Spectrum do our three guests uh take in in this kind of I guess spectrum of full Bitcoin fundamentalism versus more open-minded bitcoiners um do our guests all occupy the same side of the spectrum how would you characterize them as we get into this yeah we have Eric Wall Udi wertheimer and Nick Carter who I'm gonna ask them what they would call themselves other than Taproot Wizards although Taproot Wizards is a great name uh also call them Bitcoin Builders Bitcoin

progressives uh people that want to move Bitcoin forward instead of uh it being uh in the way that it it is at least with his culture um there's always nuances to pack apart with the people around Bitcoin uh versus the blockchain itself but that is another topic of conversation that has floated to the top of crypto Twitter lately is the idea of a Bitcoin hard Fork because the last time that there was a cultural division there was a hard fork and so people are thinking like oh cultural division therefore hardcore because I want to ask that question as well uh and so these are the this is the

context going into this but mainly I think the question is that you asked at the start who's in the Bitcoin cultural driver seat I think uh that this episode will be helpful for bankless listeners who are trying to predict where Bitcoin goes next I think it's been maybe one of the most interesting years for Bitcoin on record uh and uh I feel more bullish on bitcoin lately and I'm not sure where that feeling's coming from but I hope we can find out through the course of this episode guys we'll be right back with our guests talking about who's in the driver's seat for Bitcoin but before we

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back to this nation today on the show we have three Taproot Wizards Eric Wall Nick Carter and Udi wertheimer Eric Wall is a previously ostracized bitcoiner and has recently entered the Bitcoin Citadel via the Taproot Trojan Horse committed to bitcoin and Sovereign Technologies through the best and worst of times Eric has recently begun seizing the current moment in bitcoin's history to steer Bitcoin back into the best of times he is also Taproot wizard number two a Bitcoin pfp project built on ordinals protocol Eric welcome back to bank list thanks for having me on

Nick Carter is a partner at Castle Island Adventures and a long time reoccurring bankless podcast guest uh and also writer on the bankless newsletter who like Eric Wall has also had his fair share of run-ins with the incumbent culture of bitcoiners similarly has stayed steadfast in his support of the power and values that Bitcoin presents to the world regardless of the machinations of the surrounding bees that buzz around in the Bitcoin space and Nick is also Taproot number three Nick welcome back to bankless thank you and thank you for making me your number one Bitcoin guest on this show

Eric you can't come back I heard your number two so you actually you have to leave thank you and last but definitely not Rudy wertheimer is a perpetually beloved Bitcoin troll who was attempted to never say anything serious whatsoever on crypto Twitter yet still manages to run circles around the average Bitcoin fundamentalists who are frequently left days and confused by the layers behind Udi's ship posting Udi is also Taproot wizard number one Udi also welcome back to bankless

pleasure to be here again hey great intro guys I'm really uh really looking forward to this uh conversation and I really just want to get this one this big question kicked off Nick ericudi in the Bitcoin world is there a new party arising a new party in power um I'll start with you I mean we've always been there you know I think it's just like uh I think people are just sick of everything else at this point it's like it's been so long man of all of the macro podcasts and uh and

just talking about how there is no second best you know you go to um the top Bitcoin figures at this point and similarly to the way I used to be on Twitter like if you look at their Twitter feeds it's all about ethereum it's all about proof of stake it's all about how nfts suck it's all about it's like wait you're not talking about Bitcoin at all you don't have anything to say about between at all so so yeah we're we're just trying to you know break the mold and as bitcoiners talk about Bitcoin a little bit and and some people seem to be driven Driven Crazy by that

Eric same question to you what do you think about this uh shifting cultural ties in Bitcoin land we've always been here of just uh find a way to express ourselves and to sort of find ourselves uh for the first time so we've always been here it's just now that we're sort of congregating and making expression in a statement that we are bitcoiners we're not we're not like uh ostracized bitcoiners or altcoiners

we're just bitcoiners and we you know belong under the same umbrella as other bitcoiners who choose to express their interest in Bitcoin differently so we're just bitcoiners Nick I recently learned that you actually uh observed Bitcoin 2023 from afar uh so what's your take on all the the recent events and how would you just describe and characterize them yeah I mean I live here so I didn't really ever here is Miami right yeah so I mean I was physically near the venue I did not go in the venue I did pull out

um I didn't want fruit to be thrown at me at you know Eric and nudie seemed like really interested in that happening and I think it'd be good for their brand if it happened there was no upside in me having Tomatoes start at me or whatever it's just not you know not fun so I I want to clarify this Nick so you felt completely unwelcome to even attend and how many previous uh Bitcoin Miami events had had you attended up to this point both yeah I think I spoke at both of the previous ones

um I was due to speak at this one um and I didn't want to do anything silly like get armed security or whatever you know I think that's just really unnecessary yeah but so the risk wasn't worth it worth it I mean there were there were actual threats so um I think you have to take that seriously even if you think that they're idle so despite that I think I'm the least ostracized of the of the three here um but I would Echo what they said I think there have always been moderates they're the majority of people are

moderates I mean it's it they the uh the fundamentalists see they're disproportionate in the in the discourse but they are not actually the most numerous sect within Bitcoin and I think people are tired of their shtick I think they had their moment in the sun it from sort of the clubhouse era to present but uh a lot of what they said didn't happen you know we didn't have hyper bitcoinization we didn't have some kind of Bitcoin Rapture if yet didn't go to zero stock to flow model was fake you

know everything that they promised was ended up being false and people are now interested in new ideas and they're interested in actually using the Bitcoin protocol again which is nice so you know some people actually want to transact with Bitcoin as opposed to just sort of jealously guarding their coins and looking at them so you know thankfully um yeah I think there's a breath of pressure and uh both from the sort of developer side and the user side so it's great wait I I want to be clear about this kind of this division in Rift I I uh I thought it mainly occupied the

digital realm I thought it was like mainly like people on Twitter who were just like pissy and like you know add-ons and who knows who they actually are but and I would I would um characterize the three of you as as like basically Bitcoin Heroes at least that's what appears to me like I'm I'm a bitcoiner but I'm not sort of immersed in Bitcoin culture you know uh I've not ever gone to a Bitcoin conference but like ooh you haven't gone to a theory well that's that's true David but like uh the three of you guys seem like a year ago you you would have spoken at one of these events without worrying

about having fruit uh thrown into your armed security how is it that you feel like you are no longer welcome I'm curious like Udi you went there Eric you guys were on the ground like was it tense I mean what's going on I gotta say um the so it's funny up to the conference we did receive like multiple like a lot honestly of of death like actual death threats online from people who said like there are people who like started Twitter accounts to like go and reply on

on tweets about us and say that you know they they want to pay people to hunt us down you know there's there's some crazy um and there's also been a lot of like very brave keyboard Warriors after the conference but at the conference itself I didn't feel any of it at all whatsoever um so at the conference we actually when you know there's been a lot of controversy in the last few days about the debate that me and Eric participated in but actually at the debate at the audience almost everyone was cheering

agent for us like literally I'm not even exaggerating um people enjoyed it it was fun um people had a good time of course some people didn't like it so I assumed they didn't attend or they just sit there quietly but um there was no you know I I didn't see any type of like violence or even you know um unwelcome sort of attention it was it was it was for me it was a very good experience yeah and I can I can just Echo that that actually surprisingly it was one of the the warmest events uh that I've ever

been to there were a lot of people who were just very friendly and I just had a great time at the conference and I didn't there were a lot of people that came up to me and told me why and asked me why Udi is such a douchebag but that's pretty normal though that's pretty normal they did that they did it last year and the year before too so it's like that's usual pretty much okay so give them I have a bone to pick with you guys though because the last time I did this conference like on this show I got in so much trouble because I did one I think summer 2022

when I had a falling out with maximalist in a big way at the time and I said in our Infamous phrase I said something like my star will continue to rise do you remember this I remember this oh I remember this I remember the songs someone wrote a song about it someone got so mad they wrote a song I didn't actually listen to the song I trust that it's good but thank you leaving the Bitcoin religion with Nick

Carter they hated the show they already hate Vegas they watched the show these are these comments they watched the 26 000 views that's a good shows they hey watch bankless we introduced them to bankless they they hated that they had to watch this show and some of them are in the comments right now oh yeah I then they say that my star has

since Fallen which is false to be clear I want to correct the record on that my star has indeed risen okay has indeed risen so the verdict is in the Star Wars okay the star Rose thank you now they're going to screen account this then they're gonna be another hit cycle and then we'll have to do a third show what do you want to say to the haters right now who are tuning in and watching Nick why don't you just suggest them right now um I don't know um I don't you know welcome to bankless Nation check out the sponsors

um here's some fuzzing I don't know con smart contract fuzzing I don't know um check out topper Wizards it's a really great collection so there you go that was probably the worst thing you guys did to Nick like before his episode you just showed the most horrible reel of ads before Nick gets to speak I think of an episode before it even starts yeah I know it's perfect it's it's engineered to uh trigger uh fundamentalists

can we switch back to Nick's Temple wizard I want to make sure everyone noticed the most important part about it but yeah as long as we're showing here it's the worst honor so it's this one number three yeah it's wizard number three you can see that it looks like Nick but also you can see the rising star behind him notice that that is amazing wow that's me I really do appreciate that the meme and cultural layer on bitcoin has been able

to get really really nuanced yeah including with the help of these uh I don't even know how you want to call them the fundamentalists I have a bone to pick with whatever artist that you guys contracted to do these because the early honoraries are terrible the Art's really bad and then the later honoraries are incredible like this one I don't know like they're great so the early ones suck and so you're punished I'm yet again punished by virtue of my

friendship with Udi and Eric that only brings me pain only brings me pain how much are these things going for is anyone selling them no one is willing to sell I've I've I literally am not aware of any single person who was willing to sell their wizard so I don't know prices Infinity I mean they don't trade right they don't trade all of them have been given away for free uh so far so yeah we don't know what the what the price is sure okay so uh yeah at the uh Bitcoin 2023 conference just

now um despite the uh dominance that the Bitcoin cyber Hornet seemed to have perceived to be uh dominating the the Bitcoin sphere y'all did a thing uh which was you went on stage when you guys had your talk and I want to ask about like what you guys actually talked about but before you guys dressed up as Wizards uh did a fortnight floss dance uh and then proceeded to have your guys's talk uh

and so I just uh Eric I want to just ask you about the thought process behind this this decision to put on some wizard costumes and to go on stage and uh what was the strategy here I mean it wasn't like some grand plan it was I mean of course if we're the Taproot Wizards creators or of course we're gonna wear a wizard costume when we go to the biggest Bitcoin conference and then sort of on the way there I just asked like I asked Udi if he wanted to floss he said that he didn't know how you can see on his

announced that he has no idea what flossing is or how you're supposed to do it all right I'm gonna play this oh wow that's a breaking Bitcoin song hey I'm doing some cheers Judy that's a good floss that's a good thing I mean the idea the idea is the problem with Bitcoin culture is that they uh you know what has been the problem with this conference and and the sort of General attitude around it is that people just take themselves way too seriously uh

so this is a way to sort of prove that we don't take ourselves seriously we're here to explore and around and improve the protocol by stress testing it uh not by like trying to pretend that this is like some perfect thing ordained by God or Satoshi or something like that so it's just like we gotta be a bit more humble with ourselves because I mean we try to like make uh a Bitcoin a nation state currency in El Salvador with

lightning and like from all things that I've heard about sort of the lightning progress in El Salvador it's not a huge success like even the people are trying to use it in a decentralized way we need to be more humble with the actual state of some of these tools uh we definitely need to be more humble with sort of the user experience and the privacy of these tools so I think bitcoiners we have a lot of more around to do before we can sort of go on these stages and be like we're saving the planet we're saving children in Africa there's a lot

more to do here and I think you know Bitcoin is a bit of a clown show um a lot of bitcoiners are clowns so I think that me and Udi usually there are there are uh bioms at the conference that are dressed like Maxis this is the first time that you have clowns actually dressed like clowns David you mentioned like the um cyber Hornets before and I uh I learned to call them laser eyes you know because uh previously we called

them Bitcoin Maximus but it turns out we talked about this before it turns out they don't they don't talk about Bitcoin at all like these guys they talk about ethereum they talk about how they hate like nfts and how they identify and how they ate like exchanges like Finance but they they don't talk about Bitcoin at all so um so why call them Bitcoin maximally so we started calling them laser eye maximalists and because that's physical that's visually what they look like right and we the the the important point is that's not the majority of bitcoiners at all

like the vast vast majority of bitcoiners I mean first of all I consider you guys bitcoiners like David and Ryan I I consider you bitcoiners I don't know if you identify as bitcoiners but I think you are I think metallic return is a is a Bitcoin or I think that a ton of people uh in the larger like crypto ecosystem are bitcoiners in the sense that they hold Bitcoin and they want Bitcoin to succeed they're bullish on it right um but no one can identify as a bitcoiner anymore because what happened was there's this small like called that took over the Bitcoin brand essentially and

when when new people are coming into you know Twitter or online or what have you and they look at like what is bitcoin that's what they see so they think that they represent it and in reality it's very small like there's like a few thousand people really that they're not big at all we assume that there's around 100 million bitcoiners in the world I think that's like the numbers that people are talking about um even if that's off by like you know you know uh tenfold it's still much much bigger than the few thousands of laser eyes on Twitter so it's just it's just

been captured like the discussion has been captured online but it is not reflective of anything that that Spirit of of you know around finding out just testing things out breaking things and seeing you know how they react and building from there that has always been Bitcoin culture for at least since you know 2010 to 2018 that definitely has been Bitcoin culture and somewhere along the way it kind of got lost but I think you know we're not in a state where we can stop doing that not at all like not even close so it's

basically I don't need to go back it's a it's a bit like you know that Kanye West's uh thing where he did and he went upstage and said Taylor I'ma let you finish that's basically like Max he's taking them they're taking the microphone and they're like bitcoiners we're gonna let you finish but you know we haven't finished yet we haven't finished at all but what we want to do with Bitcoin so Eric this is why I I describe this as Tapper and I know this from your memes actually so this is credit to you is that Taproot was a trojan horse and it's

allowed Bitcoin to do things that uh previously to like Taproot I heard about Taproot just because like my friend CK at Bitcoin magazine and Bitcoin media and just a number of other like close to being laser-eyed uh bitcoiners were like Tapper Tapper Taproot uh and then now it turns out Taproot allows for these things called ordinals that allows for jpegs on bitcoin that allows for Bitcoin to have um uh chain fees that allows a certain uh uh previously uh censored previously

oppressed culture of Bitcoin to like have Foundation have like scaffolding to and like Market validation that there are these silent majority of bitcoiners that are allowed to like kind of say hey get out of the driver's seat like we're we're taking over now uh and so I'm just asking for your Reflections on on that Eric but also like where do you think this goes from here like is is is this like how big of a Tap Root how big of a moment is Taproot in Bitcoin history uh so Taproot is a marginal uh just a

margin it makes it marginally more easy to around with the Bitcoin protocol not by a lot but it it has shown that it was just enough to sort of get us across the hurdle and make it just easy enough for people to actually start uh to around with Bitcoin um I think it's I think it's probably the beginning of of something pretty big like if the genie is sort of out of the bottle once you have proven that yeah you can take the Bitcoin block space and you can do more fun things with it even if you try to put the genie back in the

bottle um Andrew pulstra uh for example is one of the inventors uh of Taproot says that you know it doesn't really make that much sense to try to uh block this at the technical level because they will just figure out even more inefficient ways to sort of embed data in public keys and stuff like that so it's it's a game that you'll sort of lose from the start um it's so it is it is a little bit frightening like I've tried the one point that I sort of want to make

against this direction that we're going in is that I do have and I I have had a deep appreciation for the fact that Bitcoin and ethereum are very different systems uh and that's good because if ethereum fails in a particular way then maybe Bitcoin survives uh if Bitcoin fails in a particular way then maybe ethereum survives if the two systems are very similar to each other then that gives us uh you know more of a mutual attack surface so you know we weren't I

mean it wasn't me and Udi that made Taproot happen it was the Bitcoin maximalist and now we're just here trying to you know deal with the situation and I think the the best way to deal with the situation is by around with a protocol as much as possible so that we discover what actual situation are we actually in I don't think you know even though despite Udi being a Mossad agent I don't think that we are doing something here I mean hey Bitcoin should be resistant to both side agents like me like it it should be fine even if I am

yeah and I mean the important thing to remember is there's nothing outside of the protocol rules that is happening here everyone is still constrained by the same four megabyte limit it's just it was sort of a theoretical limit before and now it's a very practical limit as we figured out how to stuff more data into Bitcoin blocks nothing is fundamentally changed with Bitcoin people were inscribing data into Bitcoin arbitrary data from literally the first block you know it's in the first block right so can I ask a question it's here's why I still don't understand is

like so why is everyone so up not everyone why are the fundamentalists so upset about this right right it's like one thing I I picked up um actually uh from you I give you a mass amount of credit for this and so I was kind of understanding blockchain systems and the economics behind them of your emphasis on settlement assurances right and um the value of of block space uh just in general and it seems like ordinals and Taproot in everything that it's unlocked has been a revenue

generator a value generator for Bitcoin block space right and it does seem like it's this is a a fair efficient market like who gets Bitcoin walk space the highest bidder it's the free market kind of like this is libertarian ethos type stuff I don't understand why are people so why are some fundamentalists so pissed off about the use cases that are happening as a result of the free market right now well first of all because they don't believe in free markets and they're not uh austrians they're not

Libertarians anymore actually um so any any free market style bitcoiner would acknowledge that it's an open protocol anybody can bid for the block space and anyone can be included and that means you to accept all types of transactions is valid Bitcoin fundamentalists have a different teleology geology meaning sort of the purpose of the thing right so the Telos of this chair is to be sat on the Telos of Bitcoin to them is to mediate monetary

transactions exclusively with a preference for the global South right for the underserved globally that sort of need you know a hard monetary asset right to them they see through things to the lens of sacred and profane so it's sacred for a Salvadorian to transact with Bitcoin to escape you know whatever authoritarianism or to to buy coffee or whatever it is it's profane to

use Bitcoin to settle a JPEG transaction so it's not about Bitcoin uh having sustainability or accreting a vibrant fee Market to them it's about what's profane and it's about what's sacred and what Udi and Eric are doing is profaning the Bitcoin system by forcing bull nodes to incorporate their jpegs because nfts under uh Bitcoin maximalist Dogma they are not an acceptable uh thing as

are tokens like brc20s uh you know they're all unregistered Securities right so that's the problem is that they don't care about the long-term longevity of the protocol they just simply care that it's being used for the right things so they just have a different teleology but Nick even even if it's good for their bags like even if ordinals and Taproot is kind of good for its bag so one thing I've learned about sort of the crypto community and certainly the Bitcoin Community is number go up right number go up good can you make the case that like ordinals and all of the the consumption that's going

on the Bitcoin block space is actually good for the price of Bitcoin certainly good for the economic security of Bitcoin do they not respond to that argument I literally barely didn't barely own any Bitcoin well that's that's true they don't especially the newer ones they've only ever lost money with Bitcoin they see Bitcoin as something that you donate to like a tithe basically like it's your religious duty to put a portion of your page in a Bitcoin they've never made any money doing that because it's always sold off if you dc8 into Bitcoin starting in 2021