UTXOs, Spam & Bitcoin's Integrity with Martin Habovstiak | SLP729

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
If you use the right techniques, now again, not endorsing spamming the chain, but above a certain size, if you are using some alternative opcode, so let's say hypothetically, even if BIP 110 were to be activated on the heaviest chain, and it was, you know, everyone was using Bitcoin with BIP 110, spammers who want to economize on their cost could use an alternate inscription method, and they would be only paying 0.4% more. Do you believe that if someone is spamming the chain today, that you are going to deter that person by making them pay 0.4% more? Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Joining me on the show today is Martin Habovstiak. Martin and I actually first met, I believe, around 2019, around the Lightning Conference. And I know Martin is a Bitcoin developer and had some interesting views to share. Martin is the creator of the knotslies.com website. And so I thought it would be interesting to elaborate on some of these views and have them explained, so people can hear different views. So Martin, welcome to the show. And give us some of your, I guess, your rationale. People want to hear why. Why did you want to create this website?

**Martin Habovstiak** (1:11)
Thank you. Hello. Well, the thing was like, you know, probably everyone heard about the BIP 110 discussion and people were making various really weird claims around it. And one of those claims was that the data in the transaction, like if it's contiguous, then there could be legal issues stemming from it. And I thought that this is really a weird argument because like if you are some sort of criminal that splits your files into different chunks, then of course you wouldn't be deemed not guilty just because you split the files. That doesn't make any sense. So why would splitting data help? But from very early, I knew that there are actually ways, like even if you kind of try to force the issue of splitting by basically chunking the data and putting some garbage between the chunks, garbage from the point of view of the format you are trying to put into the chain, of course. There are techniques to either like make it corrupt the file only a little bit, so it doesn't matter, or even like make it so that the data don't get corrupted basically at all. And I knew it from the beginning, and at the beginning of the discussion, I demonstrated an image that had like red dots every 520 pixels or something like that. Basically, it was red because of the encoding of the length. So that's like 253, and there is whatever other number for blue and green. So if you know like RGB, so red, green, blue, red is one byte, and it matched the encoding perfectly. So if you encoded an image like that, where you would put a red dot every 520 pixels, it would damage the image a little bit. But if there is illegal content, it's still visible to content, you know, like you won't hide the entire image. There is just a bunch of dots on top of it. And I don't think it would make an image legal just by putting dots on it, of course. And actually, I discussed this with a lawyer and he confirmed that this is basically bullshit, that even if you damage the image, it's still illegal. So that was my argument, but I only posted the image alone and described like, okay, I did this. But then someone objected to it, that yeah, but you know, you can do it, because you are technical, but others can't. He didn't know that I used LLM that spit it out correctly on the first try. But anyway, I thought that, okay, the argument is debunked and I moved on. But months later, I still saw people making this claim about configuals data and I was like, what? Like this was discussed to death on the mailing list. It was debunked and I didn't hear any economists in contract when the people are still saying this. And I got more and more fed up with this. And I was like, okay, I can see the problem. People are basically assuming... Some people or most people are not actually reading the mailing list. That's the first issue. But the second issue is that even if they are on... They might assume like, yeah, this is all theoretical or, you know, like it's very vague. Like it's hard to convince someone of something that, like, you know, in theory works, but if someone doesn't understand the theory, then it's really difficult to convince. So despite my real distaste for spam, and I really didn't want to put data on the chain, but I thought that doing just one transaction, just once, just to prove the point, might be reasonable and make sure that it's not super trivial to repeat, like not publish the code, of course. So I wrote code, actually, to assemble the transaction for me, because it will be pretty tricky to do it by hand.