This Could Change Bitcoin Forever... | Andrei Jikh

0:00 So, I'm not I'm not going to get like too into it,

0:01 but in 2017, there was a fight for like the soul of Bitcoin, right?

0:06 And that was called the block wars.

0:08 Essentially, people were split into two factions.

0:11 One half thought, well, what is Bitcoin?

0:14 One half wanted it to be a currency and the other

0:17 half wanted it to be a store of value.

0:20 So, the currency people wanted the block

0:23 size to be increased to like 4 megabytes.

0:26 Okay?

0:26 Right?

0:27 It was originally like one

0:29 and the uh store of value people were like well let's keep

0:32 it at one because if you allow Bitcoin to become a currency which

0:36 has a much higher TAM or total addressable market size currencies are much

0:40 bigger than a commodity like gold right it addresses a much bigger market.

0:45 Okay.

0:45 So if we allow Bitcoin to become a currency and increase the block size,

0:50 then eventually like let's say 5 10 years from now,

0:53 it'll be prohibitively expensive to run

0:56 your own node to basically secure the Bitcoin.

1:00 The only people that can do that will

1:02 be like big mining companies and big corporations, right?

1:05 And so you effectively centralize Bitcoin to big business.

1:09 And big business is subject to what?

1:12 Government control, right?

1:13 So they're like, let's not make it a currency.

1:15 let's make it a store of value.

1:17 That was like my introduction to like the craziness of it.

1:20 And I followed this whole battle.

1:21 And at the time, the argument that made the most

1:24 sense to me was to have it a currency.

1:26 Cuz I'm like, well, if Bitcoin is going to grow beyond this point,

1:28 it needs to be a bigger thing, like a currency.

1:30 Right.

1:31 In terms of currency,

1:31 you're saying just something that you use to pay for goods and services,

1:35 like a dollar.

1:35 Exactly.

1:35 Use it to pay and buy things.

1:38 Um because even in the Bitcoin white paper,

1:40 it says a peer-to-peer currency, right?

1:43 Right.

1:43 And so I was like, "Okay,

1:44 so Bitcoin should increase block size." Um, in retrospect,

1:48 I'm glad that it stayed small because then

1:50 it means it's decentralized and anybody can run.

1:52 It's pretty cheap to do.

1:54 So that was the block size war in 2017.

1:57 But fast forward to today and in 2025,

2:00 uh, there's another war for the soul of Bitcoin.

2:03 Not a lot of people know this cuz it's like really nuanced and nerdy.

2:06 I mean, I'm not the best person to explain this.

2:08 kind of did a lot of the research yesterday,

2:11 but essentially what's happening right now is there's

2:14 a fight between again two groups of people.

2:17 Uh one that's trying to say is Bitcoin money, right?

2:22 A store of value or is it a store of information like all information,

2:27 not just economic data but all sorts of data, right?

2:31 So there is a split between these two.

2:34 Now let me just ask you this hypothetical question.

2:36 What is the best way do you guys think to destroy Bitcoin?

2:39 Like if if you were trying to take it down or destroy it,

2:42 what is the best way to do that?

2:43 Unplug the internet.

2:44 That's one way.

2:45 It's really hard to do though.

2:47 It's not really In all seriousness, I would say to destroy Bitcoin,

2:50 you would have to destroy it the the faith of Bitcoin.

2:53 So, I think if Satoshi somehow dumped on the market,

2:58 everyone would lose faith in that.

3:00 Mhm.

3:00 Um or I I think like a huge solar flare that somehow takes out networks.

3:07 Okay, not bad.

3:08 So, we can't do Satoshi, right?

3:09 Cuz like he's gone.

3:11 He's never coming back and we can't invoke him to come back.

3:13 How do you know he's gone?

3:15 Because he would have come back at this point.

3:17 If he was like incentivized financially and Bitcoin

3:20 is worth hundreds of billions of dollars,

3:23 at no point in time is is there a person that's like, I'm going to wait.

3:26 I have a couple hundred billion dollars now.

3:27 I'm going to wait until it hits a trillion or whatever it is.

3:30 And you can see wallets.

3:31 That's how you know.

3:32 You can see it.

3:32 Yeah.

3:32 His coins have not moved since I forget.

3:35 His coins.

3:35 Yeah, it's in his wallet.

3:36 How many coins does he have?

3:38 Wasn't it like a million?

3:39 Roughly a million coins.

3:40 Yeah.

3:41 So, what's the value of that?

3:42 It was like $128 billion.

3:45 Yeah.

3:45 He's like one of the top sitting in his And you've never seen that is his wallet

3:51 transacting.

3:51 It's never moved and it never will.

3:52 It hasn't moved since when?

3:53 It was like 20 I want to say 2011, but I might be wrong.

3:56 Yeah, something like that.

3:57 So, are people speculating that he's passed away, that he's gone?

4:00 Most likely he's passed away.

4:01 Yeah.

4:01 The people who think he was,

4:03 but the Bitcoin community doesn't really like to talk

4:05 about who Satoshi is because that's an attack vector, right?

4:08 Cuz if you figure out who that person is or who that group was, you can attack.

4:12 That's a vulnerability.

4:12 It's interesting.

4:13 Michael Sailor has been asked who is Satoshi Nakamoto.

4:16 And yeah, he just like like it it triggers

4:19 him like he does not want to answer it

4:21 and he gets like visibly upset.

4:24 Yeah.

4:24 He calls it the uh the immaculate conception of of Bitcoin, right?

4:28 Because it's like no one knows who gave birth to this thing.

4:31 And it's smart.

4:32 Like we shouldn't really try to figure that out.

4:35 Um but the point is is that uh the best

4:38 way to really attack Bitcoin is not a solar flare.

4:40 We can't induce a solar flare.

4:41 We can't get Satoshi to spend his coins.

4:43 The best way to do it is to destroy it from within.

4:47 Okay.

4:48 So right now in Bitcoin,

4:49 there's five pillars of power that make it decentralized.

4:54 Users, nodes, businesses, the miners, and the developers.

5:01 Okay, so like a lot of criticism

5:03 that you hear people that don't understand Bitcoin,

5:04 they'll be like, "Well, how do you know it's 21 million?

5:07 Like what if they like write in the code and they

5:09 change it to like 40 million just to give themselves some

5:11 more?" And it's like they could do that, but they wouldn't

5:14 be able to get that through without the majority consensus, right?

5:18 Like everyone would have to agree that it's

5:20 in their economic interest to do that.

5:22 That's what makes Bitcoin so cool is the game theory aspect of it.

5:26 So it's the fundamental rules of Bitcoin have never been changed.

5:29 But if you were like a rogue nation or or a government

5:32 and you wanted to destroy Bitcoin cuz you're like,

5:34 "Hey, this this Bitcoin thing looks cool.

5:36 Like how would I control it?" Well,

5:38 I would figure out who the developers are and I might offer them like

5:42 a salary like a like 20 or $30 million a year and I would tell them,

5:47 I want you to make certain propositions in the software

5:51 that changes the core aspect of what Bitcoin is.

5:54 And I would put out a huge propaganda campaign that's like, what is Bitcoin?

5:57 Is it really gold?

5:58 Is it really digital gold?

5:59 Is it really money?

6:00 Or is it a a a database of all sorts of immutable information?

6:04 Right?

6:05 So, here's specifically what I'm talking about.

6:07 just kind of gets nerdy.

6:08 But there is this feature inside of Bitcoin

6:10 called the OP return feature, op return.

6:15 And that feature has an 80 byt limit,

6:19 meaning like that's the storage capacity of it.

6:21 It's very small.

6:22 It's about the size of a tweet, right?

6:25 You can attach certain random points of data like metadata

6:28 or some kind of proof or some kind of message.

6:31 Fun fact, in 2017 during the block wars,

6:34 the core development team which runs the Bitcoin software,

6:37 these guys are like the smartest like nerdiest people, right?

6:41 They they do not like having a debate with people.

6:44 So they shut people down.

6:45 They censored people.

6:46 And so the big blockers, the people who wanted a Bitcoin to become a currency,

6:50 they made a decentralized Twitter through this OP return mechanism.

6:55 And the way it worked is you could send a fraction of a fraction

6:58 of a fraction of a bitcoin from your own wallet back to your own wallet.

7:02 So you sent the money back to yourself

7:03 and it cost you like a fraction of a penny.

7:06 But in that transaction,

7:07 you embedded a small tweet and somebody made that into a website.

7:11 It was like a decentralized into that data into that data.

7:14 Yes.

7:14 A text, a piece of text

7:17 basically,

7:17 right?

7:17 And so they recreated a decentralized immutable Twitter on the blockchain.

7:22 That's how it was used.

7:23 But again, it has that limit of 80 bytes.

7:26 Actually, I brought a a cool thing to show you.

7:29 A really scary truth is just how vulnerable your digital life is.

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7:38 So, don't be like my roommate Kevin,

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7:43 And guess who's still paying for it?

7:45 Me, because the one thing he still can't recover is his Venmo.

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8:55 Actually, I brought a a cool thing to show you uh what that looks like.

9:00 Um so, here is an image of an 80 uh by size image.

9:06 Can you tell what that is?

9:08 No, I you can't really tell what that is.

9:10 That looks like Trump.

9:11 It does kind of.

9:12 I could see it.

9:13 The suit, the blue suit and the hat.

9:15 That is actually It is.

9:19 Wow.

9:19 Did you figure that out?

9:20 I had no idea, actually.

9:21 But it's hard to see.

9:23 Holy crap.

9:23 It's really hard to see, right?

9:25 Mhm.

9:26 That was good, Jack.

9:27 Good job.

9:27 Your eyes.

9:29 Okay.

9:29 So, so right now the fundamental disconnect in the core development team is

9:34 that they want to upgrade Bitcoin to remove the limit of the OP return, right?

9:40 They want to get rid of the 80 byt limit.

9:43 What does that mean?

9:44 That means that within a transaction,

9:47 people will be able to include images and videos up to 4 megabytes in size.

9:54 So now that image that looks like nothing to most people,

9:58 unless you're a an autist like Jack, uh, that's the real image.

10:04 Wow.

10:03 Right.

10:03 That's that's the Trump image.

10:05 Okay.

10:05 But but that's like a like a good example.

10:08 What's the benefit of doing that, though?

10:10 Well, the benefit is now you can essentially have programmable money, right?

10:15 Like you can have Bitcoin that's somewhat programmable.

10:17 You can have NFTTS on it.

10:18 You can do a lot of like more

10:20 advanced things is sort of like what they're saying.

10:24 Sure.

10:24 But the Bitcoin community disagrees and they're like

10:26 this is the worst thing we can do

10:28 because imagine you're you're essentially bloating now the the software

10:33 now the whole ecosystem with with BS, right?

10:36 like with images and imagine if I was

10:38 like like a like a pizza file person, right?

10:41 Wanted to send illegal images or videos

10:44 to somebody and they didn't want to be stopped.

10:45 They didn't want to be censored.

10:47 They could now use Bitcoin and attach an image

10:51 or a video that's illegal to transmit into this transaction, right?

10:57 So, if I were a government, I might want to regulate that.

11:02 I might be like, "Hey,

11:03 all these nodes that that are handling all these transactions,

11:06 you guys are transporting and transferring all these illegal illegal images."

11:10 But but here's the thing.

11:11 Wouldn't that all be on the blockchain?

11:14 And then eventually, if that were ever to be cashed out, you could trace it.

11:20 Correct.

11:19 And so the person who cashes out five transactions down the line,

11:23 10 years later, they're going to get caught.

11:25 It's not about who cashes out.

11:27 It's about you transmitting things that are

11:30 not necessarily something you agree with transmitting.

11:32 You have no control over this because they remove that limit.

11:35 Sure.

11:35 But their argument is like, "Yeah, but you'll be able to do like NFTTS

11:37 on it." People like Michael Sailor and people like myself, investors were like,

11:41 "I'm buying Bitcoin because it's the best

11:44 place to preserve my economic energy, right?

11:47 It's like the best place for me to put my time

11:50 and I don't want Bitcoin to be graffitied over with data.

11:55 Bitcoin is not meant to be non-economic data.

11:58 It's purely for economic information, not NFTTS and videos and pictures, right?

12:05 So, there's a big divide in the community right now.

12:08 And the core development team, they're proposing that this change goes through.

12:11 They want to get rid of this limit.

12:14 The people on the opposite side, the people who oppose it,

12:16 not that you need to know this, but it's the Knots development team.

12:19 And there's this guy, I think his name is Luke Dash Jr.,

12:21 which a lot of people don't like, but he he's like, "Let's let's just keep it

12:24 as is." And a lot of investors are like, "Let's not change anything.

12:27 Bitcoin's not broken.

12:28 Let's not upgrade it.

12:29 Let's not do anything." So, the most likely outcome that will happen in October,

12:34 this is this is this upgrade is going to happen in October,

12:37 is that there will be no upgrade.

12:39 So, the nodes and the miners,

12:40 they're not going to upgrade their software to software 30.

12:43 They're going to keep it at 29.

12:45 That's most likely what's going to happen.

12:46 So, only people like Michael Sailor really understand what's happening.

12:49 But I think in the next few weeks there's going to be a huge wealth transfer.