My view:

• Generally an advocate for improving expressiveness including covenants
• Slow & steady mindset. I don't believe there is some closing window of time we have to slip changes in.
• In my mind there's a couple big differences between BIP54 and any covenants proposal. For one, BIP54 fixes consensus bugs and isn't adding new features. It should be able to more easily get consensus as long as the engineering is sound and well reviewed. Two, I'm not aware of 10 different competing proposals to fix those bugs. Whereas with covenants, there are a myriad of proposals all of which have pros and cons.
• So I don't have a fav covenants proposal yet, but I do appreciate quite a bit of advancement in R&D over the past 4 years, so we have more proposals, each has matured, there's more mindshare on it. I'd like to see TXHASH mature a bit more. Perhaps it is the best solution?

It was very successful in Vegas. I believe Square announced availability later this year at the conference. I too look forward to using it in SF!

Yeah you can find Presidio Bitcoin Jam, or PBJ, here https://www.youtube.com/@PresidioBitcoin

The elevator pitch is simple: "where bitcoin meets Silicon Valley." We don't have guests on the show. It is just the 3 co-hosts, all of whom have significant experience in Silicon Valley, but also very deep-rooted bitcoiners, discussing topics and news that pop up during the previous week, and layering in our questions and analysis. We hope to attract people from big tech to bitcoin, because we observe a big gap between what Silicon Valley thinks and understands about bitcoin compared to how bitcoiners think about bitcoin. We hope to close the gap! That said, I suspect bitcoiners will enjoy the show too because I'm not aware of another show that covers many of the topics we do in the way that we do.

If I may, I'll speak to 2:

1. Mining centralization
2. Making bitcoin everyday money

For 1, we're in a pretty bad state right now with 3 entities controlling nearly 90% of the hash rate, and 1 entity potentially flirting with 50% of the hash rate. We desperately need adoption of Stratum v2 to allow miners to select their own transactions. Longer term, I think the Braidpool project is promising. While still in the R&D stage, if it is successfully built, it can address the centralization risk that the FPPS mining pool payout method introduces.

As for making bitcoin everyday money, it is why I have worked in the space the past 7 years, and why I continue to work on it. While I fully embrace bitcoin as a store of value, I think that has already pretty much won. There isn't a lot of software and design improvements for it to succeed. Whereas, using bitcoin as everyday money has lots of software, design, and product work to be done. I think it is important because using bitcoin as everday money unlocks even more value for society and I think it strengthens bitcoin as a store of value as well.

Most of Spiral's focus is on solving these 2 issues.

1. vibe coding is going to yield an explosion of new bitcoin applications. non-coders can now build new applications with bitcoin payments in literally less than 15 minutes. while most of the apps created will be poor quality and useless, what we will see is a lot of creativity and even just 1% of thousands of applications is a lot of quality ideas that can then be built out in a scalable, secure way. result: new ways for people to use bitcoin everyday.
2. utilize LLMs for refactoring code, doing code reviews/audits
3. somewhat the opposite of #2 - attackers will use AI to DoS attack repos by creating enormous volumes of open issues and PRs. They may try to sneak in back doors. Developing tools to combat this and enhance our already-highly-sensitive paranoia will be important.

Thanks for the kind words.

I think the bitcoin ecosystem could use more proactive engagement on forward-looking design. Fast-forwarding to a future with a billion people using bitcoin as everyday money and what that could look like. Then working backwards from that vision and promoting design best practices to help us get there.

I'm a big proponent of "hide the lightning" and more generally "hide the technology behind making payments a great experience on bitcoin."

If you fast forward to the future, when bitcoin is used as everyday money, on-chain payments will be very infrequent. Payments are going to be made on a number of technologies which may include e-cash, Liquid, Spark, Ark, ZKP rollups, and of course LN, and of course LN will be the connective glue across all of these systems.

But end users don't need or want to know about all this complexity. They just want to see a bitcoin balance and to send and receive bitcoin.

Mining centralization

I like what Strategy has done to make buying and adopting bitcoin accessible to groups of people and capital that otherwise cannot be exposed to bitcoin. I hope Strategy begins to build useful products that makes bitcoin everyday money and that they fund open source bitcoin development.

I have the moneyball name on most services. Chose it way back in 2004 after having read the book.

₿ the standard. Make Sats bitcoin again ;-)

₿product is an unannounced new initiative. I guess I'll announce it here! Patterned after bitdevs, it will be a monthly meetup following Socratic seminar structure in which we'll discuss making bitcoin everyday money, apps and products in the space, and improving bitcoin design. The intended audience is application builders, product managers, designers, and anyone interested in making bitcoin usable every day.

We're going to start this at the Presidio Bitcoin in San Francisco. We'll meet the 4th Thursday of every month, beginning June 26. Eventually, I'd love to see this adopted in cities around the world, much like bitdevs has.

The fees are public. Let's say the fees are 1 basis point. How many ₿X payments per year would a node need to forward to generate a 10% return on ₿X capital?

Love SN! Disclaimer: I'm an investor in it.

I find it to be a very different experience than using Primal or Damus. I enjoy both.

I like the territory vision for SN and empowering territory owners to grow their territory. As with any social media product, the quality of people engaging is extremely important, so I think that's what SN needs to continue to cultivate.

Let me know how you'd like to improve bitcoin!

Had a local brew in Ghana with Jack.

Very much alive!

Only in a very abstract long-term way. In some cases, bitcoin doesn't fix everything.

I'm a supporter of nostr. I'd call myself mildly bullish. I'm definitely glad it exists and that there is energy devoted to it. I view its prospects more positively when viewed as a permissionless content protocol and as a development tool vs. viewing it as a "Twitter clone."

Spiral doesn't provide direct support for nostr but that is solely a focus reason not an opinion on its value.

Well this isn't Spiral, but I am also a board member of COPA (open patent alliance that defeated Craig Wright). We received some pretty wild claims by people purporting to be Satoshi.

1. SV2 has had broad industry contribution with funding or development from Foundry, Braiins, Galaxy, Hut8, Block, Spiral, and Blockstream. It is a true public good that isn't dependent upon a single company.
2. My understanding is that DATUM is closed source on the pool side. If Ocean's DATUM pool is open source, it'd be great if someone could post a link to it.

I do laud Ocean's intended goal of decentralization. My criticism of it is that they didn't introduce anything novel with DATUM, which functionality-wise is a subset of SV2, which already existed prior to Ocean. The Ocean team "doesn't like Rust" and also demonstrated a lack of understanding of what SV2 even is, which seems to have led them to a path of creating their own version.

I'm skeptical other pools are going to adopt DATUM. Worse, Antpool just announced a new decentralized mining pool solution. Details haven't been shared, but I worried it will be yet-another protocol. Competition is good in general, but in this case, if each pool has their own "protocol for decentralization" it defeats the intended purpose. Instead, it will create even more vendor lock-in as miners would have increased switching costs between pools. Therefore, it is very important for miners to adopt a single protocol standard that has widespread support in the industry.

The same thing! Either with another org or just on my own.

Despite having years of software experience under my belt knowing that things always take longer than expected, I remain surprised at how much longer it takes to get things done in bitcoin due to (a) being a protocol (b) being more decentralized than anything else. Having patience for that is the hard part.

My favorite part though is still how much progress so many people can make by building on top of the protocols. It is satisfying to see how much more usable bitcoin is today than 6 years ago, and I cannot wait to see what it looks like 6 years from now.

Matt and I both work for the CIA of course.