Daniel Buchner: Why BIP 110 Cannot Stop Bitcoin Spam | SLP758

**Daniel Buchner** (0:00)
We have changed nothing with Bitcoin on the consensus rule level, but somehow we're forking. Like that is so beyond bad, that it should be comical. You can't claim that the party is changing zero consensus rules and just kind of likes Bitcoin as it is, is forking. That's absurd.

**Stephan Livera** (0:19)
Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking about 110 or BIP 110 Joining me today is Daniel Buchner from Proof, and Daniel has a lot of experience with, in the world of DID, decentralized IDs and things like this. And so obviously as part of this conversation, we're gonna be getting into a lot of the stuff around BIP 110 and data on chain. What does it look like? What would it mean to try and stop it? Is it even possible to stop it? I think these are some of the questions that we can get into. So first off, Daniel, welcome to the show. And yeah, look, you have been commenting a lot, anti 110, I myself am also anti 110 Can you maybe start with an overview? What is BIP 110?
And then we'll get into, why are you against it?

**Daniel Buchner** (1:00)
Yeah, absolutely happy to.
You know, I think setting the table with what the perceived, the problem or perceived problem is, is probably important. So, you know, there's for a long time, and a lot of these other chains, there have been NFTs and, you know, monkey JPEGs and silly shit coins and all sorts of stuff. And we know what that story looks like, right? We know why people are doing it. The vast majority are speculators. It's very scammy, you know, they're obviously trying to rug pull people. And we've seen that for years and years and years.
And it's sort of burned out on these other chains because the narratives get exhausted. The number of marks you have goes down. You know, it's kind of becomes old news. And people say, hey, I'm not falling for that again, right, after half a decade of it. And so we started seeing that on Bitcoin a few years ago, you know, the move to bringing this stuff to Bitcoin. It wasn't, in my opinion, at all, because of anything like, you know, what the reference implementation did or any settings changes. It was more a narrative shift. People who exhausted their marks and their opportunity narrative in another chain adopted new narratives for why Bitcoin was going to be the true answer for their ecosystem of, you know, scammy stuff.
And it was mostly predicated on Bitcoin being, you know, a stronger, more long-lasting chain, like, you know, it's a place where if we put data here, it's really going to stay for all time.
So nothing, there didn't have to be anything to enable that. It was just more or less a narrative shift, and the locusts go to the last pasture that still has, you know, vegetation, in a sense. So that's really what started, was a move of this stuff that's spam, or people call spam, on to Bitcoin for these various narratives.
And, you know, the perception there is like, most people, I think, myself included, believe Bitcoin, its purpose is monetary, you know, its goal is to upset the authoritarian, centralized fiat complex, and that's why it was created, right? It wasn't better coffee payments. It wasn't to inscribe monkey picks. It was money. It was to change the foundation money. And so I understand why people would say, hey, I don't want that stuff on Bitcoin. That makes total sense.
And that's really what 110 is. It's saying, you know, we think we should do all these things that can stop that. Now they point to things Core did, like this change of relay policy for OppoTurn, for instance, these things that are really inconsequential as, this is why we have to do it now. This is what changed. Yes, the spammers have been doing this for a long time. Sure, it's not going to last. It'll burn out as we, I think, know, just as it has everywhere else. But they did this thing in Core. And I think one thing to note that I don't think maybe most of the proponents of 110 understand as laypeople is what Core changed was not actually Bitcoin. Bitcoin is its consensus rules. The rules that say if you don't adhere to this particular rule, you're going to fork off and you're going to be on a different version of Bitcoin, a whole different coin, effectively. And that never changed, right? Core never did anything to that. They changed a node preference. I hate the fact that we even call it standardness or even policy, because it actually makes it sound much more consequential and like part of the protocol than it is. When really, it's sort of like horse blinders, right? You can put horse blinders on your own node and maybe not see its fan coming, but it's still there. And primarily, the reason why policy went from sort of working early in Bitcoin's days, like when I got into it in 2011 to now, is because it was a much smaller network then, full of a lot of us fanatical people. I remember meeting you in Seattle for that dinner years and years ago. And it was like a tighter group who all believed, we kind of all ran the same stuff and it hadn't expanded. But since then, we've gotten things like Libre Relay and Direct-to-Minor APIs. And these things have turned these per-node preferences of what we, you know, nodal relay, kind of making them meaningless in many areas, because, you know, the spammers don't care. They're just going to go run Libre Relay. And if a miner is running a permissive version, they're going to get these transactions through. The entire point of the peer-to-peer network, in fact, is that it is unable to be censored. So it's set up so that even if a few nodes are permissive, relatively speaking, out of the bunch, messages and transactions will make their way through. And that's a good thing. We shouldn't sit there and say, that's bad, that's exactly what we want. If you're creating a peer-to-peer network, you don't want to make it so that, you know, valid transactions can get through. So that was the impetus for 110 And it's full of all these sort of, what I would say is strange, wonky attempts at playing whack-a-mole with where people can put data. And we've already seen them largely invalidated. Like before the first cut of it, before it was even, you know, the paint was dry. All these spammy sources of transactions had already routed around everything. There was one just published yesterday that was like bite-for-bite, contiguous, you know, bites just yet another method. And it doesn't achieve its goals of spam. And when it was clear that it didn't, it pivoted. So I get the desire of the layperson populace of saying, this is why I want to do it.