I'm Luke de Wolf, Author of Defending Bitcoin: Industrial Grade Cybersecurity for the Monetary Grid, a Bitcoin cybersecurity book based on over a decade of experience securing industrial systems. https://defendingbitcoin.com/
I'm also the Head of Programming at BTCHEL, the Nordic Bitcoin Conference from Helsinki, Finland, second edition taking place September 25-26. /
Heard you on What Bitcoin Did recently discussing your book and you were decidedly anti-BIP110, though clearly lukewarm about the reasons. Your post history recently on X is decidedly pro-BIP110. What changed?
Interesting to hear I was on What Bitcoin Did, I'd love to chat with Danny, or Peter, but I don't recall getting on either of their shows!
Short answer: I re-evaluated the risk profile and find 110 activating smoothly to be the less risky scenario.
Slightly longer answer: I've always supported 110's goals and I consider the technical tradeoffs to be reasonable. Previously, I thought the right choice was to advocate against the change, even if I agree with it. Less change was the less risky move. But now, it's clear that 110 is happening no matter what, and I consider its failure to have the highest potential for negative consequences.
What makes you think that BIP110 is happening no matter what?
Edit to clarify my question:
What I’m seeing is:
NODE_KNOTS_BIP110_UASF (27)service bitAre you seeing something else than me?
Hey Murch! My definition is that many noderunners will start rejecting blocks. That's happening. It hit a threshold in my head where the amount is enough to have the potential to cause significant chaos. Any efforts from my side to advise caution weren't working.
Mea culpa, I posted and then amended my post to clarify my question, but you answered before I finished my edit.
How would a bunch of home nodes without economic activity rejecting blocks cause chaos?
Two ways, no matter what. One is that until there is some finality, there will be uncertainty. Does your on-chain transaction land in a 110 compliant block or not? There are things to consider. I advise caution. Don't transact until there is certainty if you can avoid it. Certainty might come quickly, but we won't know that.
The other is that a group of users is likely to essentially ragequit and fork off, and I don't like that. 110 activating smoothly avoids that outcome.
Why would you care about block bip-110 compliance if your client is on a non-compliant chain? You won't see the BIP-110 block as confirmed?
The moment the current mechanism activates is when its either going to have close to 40% of hash power and have a chance to overtake, or not. The first block mining an inscription will cause 110 nodes to fork off and that's that?
What do I miss that causes this uncertainty?
you don't think there's an equal, or large, risk of that happening if 110 activates...?
Users forking off after being told for nine months that their action will cause them to fork off sounds like an expected outcome, not chaos.
If there is about one RDTS-compliant block per day, it will be indeed difficult to get confirmations on the RDTS chaintip. Not getting confirmations delays things and makes for a terrible user experience, but could you spell out for me how that would translate to "chaos"?
Sure, but my answer still stands. I'm not saying that it will activate and become the longest chain. I'm saying that a certain proportion of nodes will start rejecting blocks.
Shit, my bad, I listen to a lot of podcasts :) It Was Bitcoin Audible with Guy Swan.
When you say "it's clear that 110 is happening no matter what" you mean that come mandatory signalling they will fork off on their own chain? Or do you mean something else?
No worries!
Both of those things you mentioned, essentially. I'm convinced that the number of node runners is significant enough to cause miners to think twice about not signaling. And the 110 node runners aren't backing down or diminishing. The train has left the station. It's just a matter of what the impact of that train will be. Bit of a bad analogy. Oh well.
Did bitcoin change your view cybersecurity? If so, how?
Interesting question! I think the biggest thing Bitcoin convinced me of is that public/private key cryptography will be the only way to tell that something is real on the internet in the future. I'm bullish on Nostr, I'm bullish on cryptography.
A bot can’t create a key pair?
They can't match the identity of somebody previously-known through web-of-trust.
What is in your opinion the most impactful habit any individual Bitcoiner can develop today, to harden both their own setup, and (given enough people do it) the network as a whole? And why?
I'll give you two answers.
On a personal level: always have multiple channels to contact people important to you. If they start acting suspicious on one channel (Telegram or X for example) try to verify with them on another channel (Signal, phone call, email, etc).
Network level: decentralize mining. This has the largest potential to hurt the network in the medium term in my view. Try out home mining if you can, or renting hash rate. Build your own blocks. Foundry has 30% of the hash rate. That's not ideal.
If all Bitcoiners do those things, we and the network are much more robust.
Legit had that exact problem in recent weeks. Redundancy is ridiculously overlooked
Yes. It's critical in this day and age.
what do you think people who do not support BIP 110 are missing?
The thing I like best about 110 is that it sets sensible limits (in my view) on development. New features will have to prove themselves, not have massive explore space to experiment. We have testnet for that.
I really do believe Bitcoin becomes more secure through 110 activating. And it's temporary, at the end of the day.
I can sympathize with the critique of the governance and methods.
Just to clarify, when you say "new features will have to prove themselves, not have massive explore space to experiment" are you referring to Taproot?
I'm also curious how to combine the following two statements:
and
Why make it temporary if it makes Bitcoin more secure?
(I don't relish going through another round of debate about a soft fork just to make 110 permanent, should that be the outcome)
I'm definitely not sold on the temporariness being the right choice. I definitely have my issues with 110, I think it's suboptimal in a few ways.
With that said, there's a humility to the temporary approach. If there's some massive unforeseen issue with 110, at least it expires in a year. The rationale was more about thinking there should be something different as a permanent solution.
Again, not my BIP. It's a binary choice. Support the thing that exists, or don't. I'm supporting it.
Taproot and Segwit both provided ways to upgrade and make development exploration either. Segwit has upgrade hooks which I understand to be ways to do future upgrades as soft forks. Taproot has the annex.
The rationale I've heard for these things is that we don't know what Bitcoin will need, and so there was a bit of a guess that these features would be useful to make development easier.
My general pushback is that 99%+ people just want self custody and to be able to pay for things. A lot of development is developing for a hypothetical future without having real demand.
I'm not saying don't do development, just that making the base layer protocol more flexible has lead to some security issues, and could lead to more in the future. I lean conservative. Therefore: make new features prove their value.
I respect that attitude of leaning conservative, and I suspect most Bitcoiners would agree with it.
I admit, prior to this recent debate, I'd never really considered what Bitcoin might do should a soft fork prove to be a choice the majority of the network regrets.
I think you are also right that most bitcoin users want self custody and to be able to pay for things. My experience of lightning is that most users aren't willing to set up a node and manage channels, and so then we very quickly are out of the world of self-custody and into things like Spark and Cashu (both may be great solutions). I can see how big upgrades to Bitcoin are alluring because they might finally allow self custody and payments to exist in one place.
This leads to another question: what do you think of some of the covenants proposals?
To be honest, I've been too caught up with 110, my book, and my conference to dig in detail to the covenants proposals. I don't understand why they're not further along. I'm pro in principle. I don't see a whole lot of issues with them.
Two things are true at the same time here: one shouldn't get a feature on Bitcoin just because you want it. And, I think the covenants proposals have done enough to be considered soon.
That said, overall, maybe we don't need covenants yet. UTXOs aren't difficult to come by, yet.
if bip110 doesn't get very much hashrate supporting it, what happens next? after september?
My preference would be that everyone advocating for BIP-110 admits defeat and returns to advocating for Bitcoin in other ways. Truthfully, that's probably not likely.
How much STRC and MSTR do you own?
Zero.
do you deny the gospel of our lord and savior King Saylor?!
I do not participate in Saylorism at this point.
@BlokchainB will be sad to hear this. He's a big Saylor twat
Highly recommend to everyone that can, to attend BTCHel. It's one of the highest signal, smaller conferences that I've had the pleasure of speaking at. I can't make it this year, due to family commitments, so please go and support their efforts if you can!
smaller, he says. scuff, bigger in heart ❤️
Cheers for that! We don't ever want to get too big. We want to keep that intimate feel.
I appreciate you Derek, looking forward to next time seeing you in person! Open invite to all future editions of BTCHEL, obviously!
absolutely! as long as i don't have another family wedding next year ill be there :)
Do you have a sauna routine? (I know a lot of the sauna studies come out of Finland.)
I try to visit the sauna as often as possible. I admit, I'm not a daily user. It's a bit harder to make or find the time with a young kid. Post gym is good, but the best is a weekend evening to wind down. Wood sauna is better than electric sauna. Infrared isn't sauna :)
I guess I jumped the gun by an hour. Oops! I'll stick around longer.
What's something you've learned securing industrial systems that all programmers should know but don't?
Critical systems need you to get out of the way and let them do their job. Security can't degrade performance.
Being both minimalist and non-interventionist are the differences in the approach compared to traditional programming or security.
Although, to some extent, industrial systems are losing some of their constraints and connect to the internet more than ever. It's one reason why my job is challenging.
If I walk into a supermarket 5 years from now, what do you think the odds are I will be able to pay with bitcoin?
Depends where you are. Fairly low odds in most of the world.
I feel that there is a non-minuscule group of bitcoiners who do not support BIP 110 and who do not like or want spam, yet the conversation around BIP 110 has been pretty tough for this group to navigate. It seems I must either be a Knotzi or a Coretard, and I don't really want to be either.
I suspect some of this is caused by the activation method. It feels like the issue is being forced rather than consensus being built. If it succeeds, I'm not clear what will stop future passionate movements from attempting to use the same playbook.
I get your view here.
I consider myself a moderate 110 supporter. I have my issues with it, the activation method included. But I'm being pragmatic about it. I don't want to see Bitcoin fracture. I'm certainly not going to follow a hardfork all the way to the end.
At the same time, if it fails, we'll have genuinely learned something. The difference between BIP-148 and BIP-110 will have been made clear. Or more clear.
Do you have a favorite lightning wallet?
My daily driver is Bull, I like the Boltz swaps. But there's counterparty risk there. Coinos was the easiest to set up Bolt 12 when I did that a few months ago. I'm not the biggest fan of node on the phone solutions. My own node is great, but channel management can be a hassle.
I haven't tried Bull. But i've been seeing them a lot. Need to check that out.
Aqua is also good. They both are Liquid under the hood and swap to Lightning. A bit of a tradeoff, but I think it's solid. As long as Boltz is operating. It went down in the middle of BTC Prague for a few hours. Not ideal.
What's something you believe about bitcoin that few bitcoiners agree with you on?
I think my anti-spam reasoning is fairly unique. It's an attack on the availability of the system. In cybersecurity, we largely protect Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. DDoS is a form of availability attack. I see spam as a DDoS, and the effect on monetary transactions is the biggest issue with non-monetary transactions.
I find UTXO bloat and especially storage concerns to be largely overblown, and less important than the fee competition.
mkdir(dir:"CIA")Coincidence ;)
If your main concern is that data embedding increases competition for blockspace, how do you square that with feerates being under 3 s/vB for the last two years, under 1 s/vB for the last year?
What Bitcoin product is missing from the market?
More people adopting it.
I don't think there are products missing. We need more education, more than anything.
that's a pretty good answer.
of your many activities promoting bitcoin (podcast, book, conference) which do you think has been most successful in getting more people to adopt bitcoin?
I'm really proud of BTCHEL. I'm not sure how much it actually did for real adoption, but I had "normie" friends seeing news articles covering the conference and asking me about it.
My book is at least somewhat aimed at an audience outside of Bitcoin.
Those two are the ones I've seen to be most impactful at this point.
What "new functionality" soft fork would you support? (Things like covenants, etc.)
What do you think about all the talk about quantum computers? Should we be moving more quickly on getting quantum safe cryptography in Bitcoin?
I mostly think the FUD is overblown. There's a real chance that quantum will never amount to anything. But quantum breaking ECC is a maximum criticality event. We should prepare for it. Good people are doing good work.
Are you very familiar with Voskuil's Cryptoeconomics? or the node implementation he maintains, libbitcoin?
What do you think about the criticism that is sometimes raised toward alternative implementations that if we have a chain split between two implementations, how will we know which one is the "real" bitcoin?
I read it a while back, it's not front of mind. I'm aware of libbitcoin.
I'm definitely aware of that criticism, and it's a difficult issue to square away. At a really basic level, the chain enforced by the majority of nodes is the "real" Bitcoin. Any new entrant needs to ensure that it won't go out of consensus. Onus is on the new implementation.
Optimal situation is probably only one implementation, from a consensus integrity perspective. But that leads to a different security risk. One bug could take everyone out.
Since multiple implementations exist, no one implementation being the majority is the most secure option.
What's your advice to a newbie?
Get some Bitcoin. Get it as far away from exchanges as you're comfortable. Custodial lightning wallets are a perfectly good first step. Phone wallets that let you take backups are better (Bull, Aqua, etc). Hardware wallet next. Keep going on the journey.
This type of project is excellent. I'm new to this ecosystem and I'm wondering what changes this will bring to the Bitcoin rabbit hole?
Do you have an opinion on the new Radar app from the Cake Wallet people? A plus security wise? Introducing risk?
Interesting development. A bit too early for me to recommend. I've heard of people having issues with it. And, truthfully, the Cake team has some issues, I'm not sure if I trust them on faith. But developments like this are directionally good, no matter what.
If you eat meat, what the juiciness of steak do you prefer?
Far left. I'll take second to the left.
I mean, I guess I'll eat all of it. But yeah, far left.
Oh yeah, I'd eat it all too, however medium rare is the most preferable
Alright, I think I'm packing it up for the night. But I'll check again in the morning and answer anything that comes in. It's been fun! Thanks for participating!
Sorry, lunch arrived, so I got up mid-sentence. I left you a couple more questions. If you would be so inclined tomorrow, I’d be curious for your answers. Thanks!
What's one thing other than Bitcoin that you're most passionate about?
At the moment I'm loving what I can do with AI, but that's a bit of a cop out. I've always loved learning languages. One side project I'm working on is a Duolingo alternative for personal use.
block rate is too low. Nobody is going to wait 10 minutes for a coffee.
We have that in common, definitely need more of this perspective in Bitcoin
I find it surprising though you support 110. I am sympathetic to the narrative for it and think Core is reckless/captured, but 110 specifically leaves carve-outs for abuse such that it has all the hallmarks of controlled opposition... Luke supporting Covenants, acquiescence to Taproot at large.. etc.
Does your background suggest to you that Bitcoin has long been feature complete as money and only hardening is appropriate, that added "expressiveness" presents asymmetric downside rather than upside?
If so, why not a more maximalist position that 110 does not address? One that rugs the crypto-theater kids rather than leaves the door wide open to them?