Inside the Hidden Power Struggles of Bitcoin Upgrades | Steve Lee & Ren

If North Korea got— just hacked Coinbase and just got all the Bitcoin, they're like, I'm not giving it back, I'm sorry, we're North Korea. Do you guys think we should hard fork it or not?

I do not think we should hard fork. We just have to suck it up and deal with it.

I see a lot of failed attempts at forking Bitcoin, but someone might look at a Coinsplit token chart and say, wow, like it started trading at 0.2 BTC. 0.2 BTC today would be larger, would be 2 times the size of Solana. Like, so the amount of money at risk, the value of this network will probably precipitate into some form of chain split in '25 or '26.

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Thank you. Thanks for having us.

You still reporting to Jack?

Yeah, over 5 years now.

That's cool.

He hasn't, he hasn't ditched me yet.

That's cool. That's good. So the reason that we're having these folks on is they recently published a paper on the Bitcoin consensus mechanism. And before we bore you and put you to sleep, because I know Bitcoin consensus mechanism is not something that we talk about a lot on Empire, let me— I want to give a little bit of context for this episode. So This paper is the deepest thinking I have seen in probably several years about Bitcoin consensus from a game theory perspective. And why is this important? To me, it's important because this actually used to be this big issue in crypto. And for anyone who was around in 2017 and 2016, you'll remember the block size wars. It's funny, Steve and I were talking about this before the episode. I was talking to some, some new Blockworks employees who recently joined the industry. They've never even heard of the block size wars. So this is this topic that used to be super important. It's now not really discussed, but I think it will be discussed again soon. And the motivation for that is there are different like covenant opcodes and there's going to be groups who say this is terrible, we should not make Bitcoin programmable and enable L2s. And this whole Bitcoin Renaissance is super stupid and Bitcoin should just be sound money. And then there's this other group of people who I think are probably going to take the other side of that, basically. And there's these really important stakeholder groups. There are the ETF providers, there's Coinbase and Kraken and OKX, and there's the wallets, there's retail users, there's the media companies, there's developers, there's miners. And I think we could see this huge debate again in Bitcoin. And the last time this happened was— led to a split, which was Bitcoin versus Bitcoin Cash. And I think it's a really— this paper is the best analysis of what could happen and what maybe should happen. But anyways, one of Stephen Wrenn on— so actually, Steve, maybe Steve and Wrenn, I don't know who wants to take this. I'd love to, before jumping into the paper, get to your why. Like, why is this the thing that you guys decide to spend time on? Why is this a really fundamentally important issue in crypto today?

Sure, I'll start. Um, thanks for having me on the show for the first time. Uh, great to be here. Just so folks know my context, so I've, I've been leading Spiral at Block for 5 and a half years now, and it's an initiative at Block where we have complete free rein on what we do. We don't work on the commercial business at Block. We, we are— our mission is to, uh, help Bitcoin specifically. So We mostly do open source software development, but I work on a lot of different projects. So this is one of them. So why did I start working on it? Actually, what you said, Jason, was part of the motivation. At the beginning of this year, I saw more and more discussion and starting to see some contention about possible covenant changes to Bitcoin. And some people, you know, some proponents wanting to activate it. And it didn't really feel to me like there was consensus. And it just got me to thinking back to 2017 during the block size wars. And I realized my own knowledge of forks and how, how these situations work out was very rusty. I hadn't really thought about it for 7 years. And then I realized 95% of people in the space weren't even around in 2017. So the best knowledge they might have is just reading like the book Blocksize Wars. So I— and then also I realized the space has grown up, like look how much bigger it is today than 2017. You know, any metric you want to pick. So I thought it was a good idea to like take a look at this. Create, you know, do some analysis, create a project that could educate people and sort of, you know, increase people's knowledge of how this, how this appears to work. I think it's important to note that this, you know, there's no blueprint on how to change Bitcoin or not change Bitcoin. So this is just our observations of how it works. Um, it's also— we made an open source project. So there's 3 of us, Ren, myself, and Lynn Alden, uh, created this, but we, we made it open source project. We welcome contributors over time because it needs to be a living document and living project to adapt over time and improve. Um, so yeah, we're, we're super excited to have gotten it to a good starting point. And looking forward to talking about it on the show.

Nice. Maybe we could actually revisit 2017 for a second. I think you guys are going to inspire me to do a couple of other episodes about the 2017 block size wars just because they're such an interesting moment in history. But could one of you guys give just a brief overview of what happened in 2016 and into 2017 with the eventual split into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash?

Brent, do you want to take it?

Yeah, sure. So most of my study of 2017 has been done by looking at on-chain data and historical markets and reading facts after the fact because I wasn't around in 2017. But 2017, the way that it played out, led to a lot of the downstream work of the paper, which is in these different communities, when you have irreconcilable differences and frustration in terms of one group of developers' ability to change the consensus of the network, those frustrations eventually boil over and lead to oftentimes very rash and this repeated game theoretic process in which the two sides vie for the resources of the network, in Bitcoin's case, hash power and node adoption, in order to push for the change that they want to see played out. So in 2017, probably some of the most notable moments include the New York Agreement, which was a consortium of quite a lot of the different stakeholder groups that we have highlighted in the paper. It ranged from large investors, large mining pools, manufacturers of the ASICs, and also some quite large economic nodes in terms of, in terms of the centralized exchanges. And through this back and forth process, different sides were forced to play cards or actions that precipitate reactions in this repeated game, game theory type of process. And the paper has this heat map that shows the different stakeholders and the different cards or actions that they play back and forth. But ultimately what ended up playing out is the market voted with their dollars and with value, which led to things like chain split tokens, which heavily dissuaded some previous fork attempts, um, and ultimately decided that Bitcoin would be the token that retained the vast majority of the hash power.

Yeah, the way I remember, it was such an interesting time though. So there was, um, just to remind listeners who maybe weren't around there, and thanks for that, Ren. Satoshi obviously said there's going to be 1-megabyte blocks. And then what ended up happening in 2017 is the blockchain got clogged up because people were actually doing things on it. And so people started to say, hey, look, Bitcoin's got, you know, 7— what is it, 7 transactions in a— 7 transactions a second. Ethereum had 20 9 or 30 back then, and Visa has 1,700. So if Bitcoin's really going to scale payments around the world, we need bigger blocks. And so there were basically the big blockers versus the small blockers. And the first thing was Bitcoin XT, which said, uh, look, we should take Bitcoin from 1 megabyte blocks to 8 megabyte blocks. You guys should correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong, but there's Bitcoin XT. And then that was like, okay, 8 megabyte blocks, that's too big actually. So then, um, I forget the developer. I think it was Peter Weil or Wheel. But Willa put forward SegWit, which was the 2-megabyte blocks. Said, okay, maybe 8-megabyte blocks are too big. Let's do 2-megabyte blocks. And, and then that led to the New York Agreement, which was this super contentious thing. It was the middle of 2017 and there were like 50 or 60 crypto companies who met in this closed-door meeting and they came up with this two-phase solution to activate SegWit and then to double the block limit. I think it was activate SegWit to 2, and then they wanted to double it again to 4, if I remember correctly. You guys should correct me if I'm wrong. But there were the small blockers who said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's all these crypto companies getting together, these, you know, executives here in a room. We don't like this. We need— this is— this does not stand for what Bitcoin is, which is this open decentralized network. And actually, there's all this contentious debate. And then the proposal was finally suspended in November 2017. I don't know, how did I do there, Steve?

You did well. The SegWit, it wasn't an exact 2x increase. What SegWit did is it segregated witness, meaning it moved the signatures out of the block. So the block size of 1 megabyte actually stayed fixed. But because it reduced the amount of information that needs to be stuffed in there, it gave anywhere from a 1x to a 4x increase. So 2x approximately. And then separately, SegWit2x, the second part of that agreement, as you said, it was, it was an actual 2x bump from 1 to 2 megabyte blocks.

That's right. So let's lay, let's lay the groundwork for this episode maybe, and for this conversation. Can you guys remind me, because I have not thought about this in 7 years, Can you just lay the groundwork for understanding Bitcoin consensus? And I'm going to ask some super dumb questions. For example, can you honestly remind me, like, hard fork versus soft fork and like why soft forks are typically preferred for Bitcoin upgrades? And like, I'd just be curious. Yeah, give us a reminder.

Yeah, we can do that real quick too. Just so the audience knows that. So this project, Bitcoin Consensus Analysis Project, or BCAP, for short. Um, it, it's important to people who want to change Bitcoin, and it's important to people who don't want to change Bitcoin. Uh, and, and there's a range of people in, in between, but there is definitely a camp who absolutely does not want to see Bitcoin changed, very conservative views. And they should care about this project because what actually prevents Bitcoin from changing You know, and because it's software, right? So what actually prevents it from changing? And then obviously, if someone wants to see a change, understanding the lay of the land can be helpful too. So yeah. Yeah. So to get into your questions about what does consensus even mean? So yeah, hard versus soft fork. A hard fork is a change to consensus rules, which is not backwards compatible. So every node in the network would need to support and enforce the new rules by a certain block height or, you know, time, or else they'd be forked off and it would be a separate network. Whereas a soft fork is by, you know, by the name soft, it's a softer landing basically. Like if your node doesn't upgrade you would not be booted off the network. You'd still stay in the network. You would not be able to support the new functionality. So you couldn't— like, you're— if you wanted your wallet to support the new functionality, you would need to upgrade to support those rules. But you'd, you'd still be able to spend your coins, receive coins into your wallet, as long as those new coins didn't need the new rules. So it's backwards compatible in that way. There's pros and cons to to each approach. So it's not like one approach is— it's not like soft forks are completely better than hard forks in all situations. But the reason soft forks are preferred in Bitcoin is that it's so difficult to coordinate a change. There's just— Bitcoin is such a large ecosystem to coordinate a change where everyone upgrades at the same block height is incredibly difficult. And there's a strong desire not, not to see the network fork and split.

Yeah. So I could, I could hard fork it tomorrow. I could hard fork tomorrow. But, but the reason the consensus is important is because, well, nobody's going to go follow me into, into my hard forked Bitcoin, right?

Yeah. Any of us, you know, any of us could like change the code on our computer and run different code, change the rules however we like. We have self-sovereignty. We can do that. But if we can't convince anyone else, then we're off on an island.

Yeah. So how did— back in the day, so Satoshi, if he wanted to hard fork it, would just send a memo out to the small group of Bitcoin folks and say, hey, we're doing this, and everyone would just get on board. But now there's all these stakeholders, right? Who— and they all have different incentives. And so it's actually much harder to actually get anything done.

Yep.

Why is it— how does it differ from something like Ethereum's consensus? And like, yeah, how does it differ from something like Ethereum's consensus?

Yeah, so maybe I can take that one because I sit across these different ecosystems. On Ethereum in proof of stake, We have not yet seen cases where the upgrades rolled out by the core developers and the client teams have gotten opposition in terms of the holders of Ethereum via the validators choosing to not accept those upgrades. But In terms of the upgrades being rolled out on Ethereum, as long as more than 66%, I believe, of the stake adopts the upgrades, the upgrade becomes live. There are the beginnings of forms of validator-based signaling on Ethereum for certain types of features, including increasing the block gas limit. So we are starting to see some echoes of the block size wars from Bitcoin starting to play out on Ethereum. But today I looked at the numbers, maybe a week ago, it was only 3 to 5% of the stake was starting to be, was starting to tag their blocks with this type of signal. But The Ethereum upgrades tend to have very fast finality in the sense that once the upgrades are rolled out, they end up becoming quite permanent due to the proof-of-stake nature.

Whereas it takes longer on Bitcoin, or it takes longer on Bitcoin, you're saying?

It does, yeah. So for proof-of-stake, the network effectively will upgrade at a specified block height. Whereas on Bitcoin, the upgrades will often take a median of 40 weeks for the nodes on the network to upgrade. In terms of the activation mechanism for Bitcoin upgrades, they often embed a grace period of 6 to 12 months, which allows the rest of the network an opportunity to upgrade their nodes.

What about, where, what is It's such a— it's very interesting to me because it's such a— it reminded me reading this paper, it's such a soft consensus. Like, it's so rough. There's no— there's no, like, you follow this step, then this step, then this step. You're basically just trying to influence other stakeholders. And it's very messy, actually.

It's definitely very messy. I think a lot of people in Bitcoin, including myself, like that. We think that's a benefit because if there were a clear blueprint, it's much easier to game it and take control of it.

Yeah.

So obviously messiness and chaotic has downsides. It can take a long time to get a change through. But I think that's what— that is a huge part of the attraction and value of Bitcoin. Is how difficult it is to change. So yeah, anyone trying to change Bitcoin absolutely gets frustrated and a lot of people get burned out and leave. And this goes all the way back to Vitalik leaving and starting Ethereum. So it's always been— I mean, it's been present for 10 years and it's only going to become harder to change because it's growing, getting bigger, and there's just more and more stakeholders.

Yeah. Before we get into the stakeholders, because I want to hear about these different groups of stakeholders and how you think about them, there's one interesting— I don't know if this was your guys' term, or someone else's term.

I'm—

for anyone on YouTube, I'm sharing my screen and showing the paper. I will try to find this. Yeah, it's states of mind, SOM, SOM. And you define like SOM 1 through 6. Can you define what SOM is or state of mind for these stakeholders and how— yeah, how you guys— I don't know if this is your definition or just an actual Bitcoin definition, but tell me about this, these different SOMs.

Yeah, we, we, we introduced this terminology. The genesis of it was I realized one difference today versus 2017 is that if there's going to be contention today, it's around a soft fork change, soft forking in one of these covenant proposals, whereas in 2017, the contention was around a hard fork. And with a hard fork, if you actually fork and split the network and have two coins, investors have tremendous power then because investors can choose to sell one coin and double down on the other coin, and that can impact the price. And if one coin is worth tremendously more than another coin, that goes a long ways towards defining what is Bitcoin. Um, but with a soft fork, the observation was that investors aren't really involved in that process or at that stage of a change. Um, so getting back to state of mind, you know, as people who can see the screen, what you're showing is, um, state of mind 4 is unaware. So there's— I mean, right now I'd say most people in Bitcoin are unaware of the 10 different covenant proposals and the details of those covenant proposals. Maybe they've heard of covenants and that there's some kind of like discussion or drama, but you know, most are unaware. Um, and so you can, you can imagine you might start in an, or everyone starts at an unaware state because, and then you, when you, you know, before you learn something and then you can progress towards either being supportive or not supportive. And the different states of mind, you can be supportive or not supportive or so, so extremely supportive or not supportive that you're willing to expend resources. Your, your money, your time, your energy to either fight or support a change.

It's, uh, Steve, I have a very dumb question. I think, I think I understand covenants. Covenants are, um, covenants are synonymous with spending constraints. Is this right?

Is this, um, yeah, particularly, um, you know, for, for people familiar with the, the Bitcoin UTXO model, you know, any transaction there's in you have coins that you are inputs. Like if I'm sending you money in a Bitcoin transaction, I choose some of my coins as inputs and then the outputs would be from your wallet if I'm sending it to you. And right now there's no mechanism in Bitcoin to put constraints on the outputs. You can put constraints on the inputs, like some of my coins, I might own and control them, but they might have a time constraint, like a time delay where I can't spend them until a future block height. But there's no such constraints right now on outputs, and, and, and there's like 10 different proposed technical proposals for how to add constraints to those outputs, and that's what is referred to by covenants.

Got it. And the reason this is actually very important is because these generalized covenants could enable a lot of new applications for scripts, right? Like, uh, Turing-complete contracts or um, uh, uh, like scripts with unbounded length that could include different things. I don't, I don't know, this is actually, this is way above my pay grade, but is that, is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin's always had smart contracts, but they've been limited in functionality. I mean, you can do multisig, and you can even do loans and futures contracts on Bitcoin script. Um, but, uh, like Ethereum and other, um, virtual machines and, and consensus mechanisms or script languages allow for much more extensive functionality. Covenants would— it wouldn't take Bitcoin all the way to Ethereum-level expressiveness, but it would be a pretty substantial improvement to expressiveness.

Got it. Okay. So when you said— I think you said the number is 10. There are 10 covenants, like, out right now for proposal?

Just different technical proposals at different stages, anywhere from, like, an idea sketched out in an email list to to a dev email list, all the way to several are like fully implemented with test suites and sort of ready to press the button and go.

Got it. Okay. And why this? And this is really important because there's all these, like, I feel like there's this moment in time right now, Bitcoin Renaissance. There's all these Bitcoin L2 applications getting built on Bitcoin. The more of these covenants you put into the Bitcoin code, the more applications you can probably build on top of Bitcoin. However, I would guess the argument against that is, well, you're kind of taking away from the purity of Bitcoin. It introduces new risk vectors. Is that the— that's the pro and the con side of this?

That's the pro and the con. And I mean, I say there's 10 proposals. No one's arguing all 10 should be activated. It's more like either pick one of them or maybe 2 or 3 could be merged together and it makes sense technically to merge them together.

Got it.

But there's definitely a camp too that doesn't want to see any of them merge. The reasons for that, that camp would say no. One, they still don't see sufficient value, like valuable use cases emerging from this. And then two is the risk factors that you mentioned, and particularly around MEV or MEV, like evil, evil MEV, which does impact Ethereum. And the Ethereum community, you know, is having to learn and grapple with that and deal with it. So there is definitely a group of people in Bitcoin who don't want to see that exacerbated on Bitcoin.

Yeah. Ren, can you walk us through the stakeholders and how you guys came up with these stakeholder lists and why these are the people who matter? And I'd love to hear— yeah, I'd love to just— this section might take a while, but would love to hear about these different stakeholders.

Yeah. So In terms of the stakeholders, we try to think about both the powers and the incentives that drive the different stakeholder groups. And the way that we separated or categorized the stakeholders is simply by looking at non-overlapping powers and interests. So in terms of the 6 stakeholder groups, we have In alphabetical order, not in terms of how important they are, we, uh, there are the economic nodes, the investors, the media influencers, the miners, the protocol developers, and the users and application developers.

Wow. So you're saying, you're saying Blockworks has a, is a stakeholder here? That's a—

Blockworks is a stakeholder, uh, quite, quite an important stakeholder. To start off with the economic nodes. So when most people think about an economic node, they include cryptocurrency exchanges. The key differentiation between an economic node and a node that someone is just running on a laptop at home is that economic nodes handle a significant volume of Bitcoin transactions in terms of Bitcoin being sent to that node. Bitcoin being sent from that node. Whereas if I were to just spin up a node at home, it's highly unlikely that that node will see a significant volume of Bitcoin being sent to that node and Bitcoin being sent from that node. So that's, that's the key difference between just a regular node that someone can run at home on their laptop and a node that, for instance, Coinbase, Binance, or OKX is running to help facilitate the transactions of their users.

So, so it's fair— is it fair to say the nodes, the power of an economic node— so this could be, you mentioned the exchanges, but it's also probably the, you know, BitGo, Anchorage, the custodians, things like that, PayPal, maybe like these economic nodes. Is it fair to say that their power is in there, is correlated with their volume of basically transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain?

I think that's fair to say. It is certainly correlated with the amount of volume that they do.

Okay, so that's the economic nodes. What is the next group?

So the next group are the investors or—

Excuse me, actually, what is their incentive? What is their main incentive, these economic Right.

So most economic nodes run a take-rate type of business. So they are looking to maximize the transaction volume and the trading activity on their platform. And that is oftentimes correlated with the amount of Bitcoin that is being custodied by that exchange.

Got it. So they just want to maximize transaction volume basically of Bitcoin. More Bitcoin on their platform equals good. More volume equals good. Right. Okay. All right. So that's the economic nodes. Bucket number 2.

So the second bucket, probably. So the second bucket is the investors. The investors, they include large individual holders of Bitcoin, active and passive institutional fund holders of Bitcoin, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, governments. Even, even publicly traded companies. Um, uh, they don't tend to play a role in the day-to-day operations of Bitcoin. They don't tend to run nodes on their own. They tend to use qualified custodians, um, in today's day and age. Um, and their main power is that they're able to influence market prices through buying and selling Bitcoin, and they can also signal their preference to the market through futures markets, prediction markets, and historically chain split token markets, which are, which are a subset of, which are a form of prediction market that allows the investor to express their preference in cases where you have contentious consensus changes. So for example, in the 2017 SegWit upgrade, there were coin split token markets that were listed for Bitcoin Unlimited and SegWit2x, which were two proposed consensus changes that were ultimately defeated in the ChainSplit token market because the investors sold those ChainSplit tokens down to nearly zero BTC, which meant that it would have been economically unviable to actually go through with that fork process.

Yeah, I'll just interject real quick there. Going back to the history of 2017, that the, the SegWit2x futures that Ren just mentioned was, I think, occurring in October of 2017. Bitfinex was listing it, and I remember the kind of impact it had on, on me and other observers. The, the price of the legacy Bitcoin chain was like 10x over the price of of SegWit2x. So there was a clear indication by people willing to risk their coins on that market to show that there is a strong preference for the legacy chain. I don't think we'll ever know how much influence that had.

Yeah.

For, on like Coinbase and other exchanges and the miners who eventually capitulated and dropped the SegWit2x fork idea, but it definitely was a factor.

Yeah. Is it— it feels like the economic nodes are slightly more powerful, I would say, than the investors for two reasons. One is the investors mostly custody their Bitcoin with the economic nodes now. So like the economic, you know, they're the investors. Bitcoin sits with the economic nodes. That's one. But two, I mean, Steve, to your point, I remember 2017 as well and into 2018 and stuff like, you know, if you owned Bitcoin on Coinbase, I remember there were these moments in time— this was when all the— all these Bitcoins were coming out, right? And it was like, oh, Coinbase chooses to support this Bitcoin. And you'd wake up one day and you'd have more Bitcoin in your account. It's just a different Bitcoin. And then another day it was like, Coinbase doesn't choose to support this Bitcoin. It's like, all right, well, I guess that Bitcoin's going to die. So it does feel like the economic nodes— I mean, just in the two groups that we've discussed, do hold a lot of the power.

We, um, Ren will get into it in a little bit, I think, on the timing. But I think early, early phases of a potential change to Bitcoin, I would totally agree with what you just said. But later stages, especially if there's contention and you do get to this point where there's a split in two different coins, then, you know, I think our analysis with this project demonstrates that investors have substantial power, then, like, definitely the most power, because they're— because even, like, if you take a large investor owns, like, 50,000 Bitcoin or something, even if they're custodied with Coinbase, the investor still owns them and can sell them, can move them off the platform. Um, and, and actually, another thing we'll, we'll talk about, um, we can talk about now or in a few minutes, is the extra power, um, or, or the, uh, um, disproportionate power that self-custody investors have. And this is actually one of the— my own personal delights from this project is seeing how self-custody investors have extra power. Maybe, Ren, do you want to skip down, or can we skip down to where we segment the investors and you can speak into that a little bit.

Yeah, this, this part right here.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so the investor— there are, there are a lot of different types of investors. So you have the self-custodying proprietary owners of Bitcoin. My guess, and it's just a guess, is that this group is actually, uh, the largest investor group in Bitcoin, just due to the nature of, of how Bitcoin came to be and grew. They tend to self-custody their Bitcoin. They are accountable to no one except themselves, and they have a very— and they have a high ability to act very quickly because they own their own Bitcoin. The second group are institutional investors. So these might be venture funds, these might be long-only funds, these might be hedge funds, they, they often are required to use a qualified custodian, but they often use more than one qualified custodian, and they do have the ability to switch if a qualified custodian is not fulfilling their needs. They tend to be accountable to their general partners and their limited partners, which means that their ability to act quickly in a contentious consensus change scenario tends to be a bit slower because in some cases, the ability to act might be outside of the mandate that they have been given by their limited partners. The next segment of investor are corporations with Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Again, they often use qualified custodians. Often that qualified custodian might be an exchange. They are accountable to their board of directors, their shareholders. And as a result of being accountable to their board and shareholders, they often have a low to medium ability to act quickly, especially in cases where the Bitcoin is being used as a treasury type of asset. And then the final segment of investor are the ETFs. They use qualified custodians. The ETFs are run by the ETF sponsor and portfolio manager. So for example, BlackRock would be the ETF sponsor of the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF, and their ability to act quickly in the current regulatory regime as of December 2024 is highly constrained because in cases where Bitcoin forks into two different coins, the ETF has to abandon their coins on one of the forks and not be able to hold them on behalf of the ETF holders. So the ETF holders would not, under the current, under the current laws, would not be able to get the quote unquote airdrop from Bitcoin fork.

Interesting. Yeah, I was thinking, I just saw this stat today. It was Eric Balchunas from Bloomberg said the US spot ETFs have just passed Satoshi in total Bitcoin held, now more than 1.1 million, more than anyone in the world, and they're not even a year old yet. Yeah, it made me think about like actually your guys' paper because it was like, okay, well, the like BlackRock, right? BlackRock is a Bitcoin ETF and they obviously hold a boatload of Bitcoin now. But Coinbase custodies their Bitcoin. So who's the more powerful entity there if there was a consensus? Um, if there, you know, in, in, in all the things that we're talking about here, if you play this forward, I know we're kind of skipping through some sections here, but like, if you play this forward several years, do you guys have any concern that, you know, BlackRock could create the, the BlackRock Bitcoin?

Well, that, that's one reason we were I mentioned a few minutes ago about the disproportionate power the self-custody investor has, and we are quite happy to see that logic because it helps address the concern and risk about too much power from BlackRock or an ETF issuer. While BlackRock might, you know, there might be hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin or, you know, it'll be over a million for just BlackRock themselves, but they neither own nor control them. Right? As you mentioned, the control of those Bitcoin right now is with Coinbase. That can shift over time. It could shift— like, like Fidelity, for example, with their ETF, they self-custody. So that's an example of the second biggest ETF issuer. They do control the Bitcoin, but in neither of those cases do they own the Bitcoin. Their shareholders own, own the Bitcoin. So if you do fast forward to a contentious change to Bitcoin where there is either a threatened fork or there is a fork with a, with a split of the coins, we don't think it's realistic that the BlackRocks of the world are going to be able to dump one coin and buy the other. They would face— first of all, there's, there's many people involved in that decision. Including a lot of lawyers, right? And, and, and I, I think it's, it's much more realistic. They're going to be conservative, hold both coins, let the dust settle, and then it, you know, which is, which is considered Bitcoin by the world will emerge from that. So that gives a self-custody investor a lot more power, even if they don't have a million Bitcoin, because they can actually sell one coin, double down on the other coin, and that will move the price.

Just to clarify for the listeners, so, so, so the reason why the self-custodying owners, by selling one coin and buying the other, is so important is that creates a hash— that, that creates a hash profitability spread that moves hash power from the sold coin to the purchased coin. And the reason why the speed is so important is because as one, as one coin gains a hash power lead, the lower price coin has a disproportionate amount to catch up in terms of a price increase for the hash power to switch back.

Huh, that's interesting. Okay, I hadn't thought about it like that.

Um, so speed to be able to dump one coin and double down the other does matter.

Yeah, it's this column, it's the ability to act column. It's, uh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was interesting, you guys. I mean, I— it's very deep research. There was a You guys found this line in— oh man, where is this? The perspective of BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. It says, quote, we'll use our sole discretion to determine in good faith which peer-to-peer network among a group of incompatible forks of the Bitcoin network. Furthermore, the sponsor may also disagree with shareholders, the Bitcoin custodian, other service providers, the index administrator, crypto platforms, or other market participants on what is generally accepted as Bitcoin and should therefore be considered, quote, Bitcoin for the trust purposes. Very interesting. Um, all right, let's move past. So we've got the economic nodes, we've got the investors, we've got 4 other groups to cover.

Yeah, so the next group are the media influencers. They play a crucial role in shaping public perception, disseminating information, and broadly in terms of educating the public about the ongoings in Bitcoin and the rest of the space. So for example, this podcast would be a great example of that. And in terms of their powers, their powers are quite—

so it's generally just any— it could be Blockworks, it could be independent podcasters, it could be Koby, it could be the anonymous, you know, threaders on Twitter. It's anyone who kind of exerts like soft influence. It's less of the hard influence of like, oh, we're going to accept this Bitcoin on our as on our, on our crypto platform. It's more like, hey, here's a thread on like why this soft fork is a good or bad idea.

Yes.

Yeah, anyone with an audience got it, and, and can help influence and shape a narrative.

Got it.

Yeah, and, and media groups are— media influencers are especially powerful in the early stage of a consensus change because they can oftentimes distort the perceived support level of a consensus change by either making it seem larger than it is or smaller than it is. And in terms of their incentives, they, in cases where the media influencers have sponsors, they often act in the best interest of their sponsors. They historically try to maintain some semblance of credibility and neutrality, but there have been cases where media influencers in the past have effectively built up a lot of goodwill and then burnt it all in a very quick period.

What's the power of these? There's— this is just like soft power stuff, right?

It's soft power, but it's also quite important, and it's probably more powerful today than it was in 2017. Yeah, sentiment does drive price. There are tons of studies that show that. So the power of the media influencers is not to be underestimated.

Got it. Got it.

Okay, next group, miners. So, so the miners are individuals or organizations, but today largely organizations that use specialized hardware to effectively mine blocks, include transactions, produce block hashes. And they're of course solving a quite expensive problem to find a solution that is less than or equal to the network's difficulty target. And miners today often mine on the behalf of a pool. So they're contributing their hash power to a pool, and they often do not run the Bitcoin software on their own. They are submitting solutions based on a pre-provided template. But if the pool acts against the interests of an individual miner, the miner can switch off from the pool. So one of the broad public perception is that pools have all the power. But that's, I think, not nuanced enough because miners have the abilities to switch from one pool to another pool. There's no reason that they have to stick with a single pool.

What is their incentive?

Miners' incentive is to generate revenue. Their costs are purchasing the hardware, paying for the power to mine, and they're looking to grow their percentage of the network or grow their, grow their mining revenue. Some are starting to sell secondary services, but those are quite small when compared to just their ability to produce blocks. And that That is ultimately their North Star. And because they are making longer-term capital commitments in a proof-of-work chain compared to a proof-of-stake chain, they have an incentive that the price of Bitcoin not fall tremendously while they're paying back their CapEx costs.

Do they run? Oh God, this is going to out my understanding of. They don't run Bitcoin software, right?

Steve, do you want to take that?

Yeah. So the pools run Bitcoin software. The miner— well, we're calling the miners like the hashers— do not run.

Do not. But some of the pools do, right?

Well, the pools have to. All the pools.

Yeah, of course.

And just for the audience's understanding, what we're saying, what we mean by run Bitcoin software is like who's selecting the transactions that go into a block. And today that is pools and not miners. However, there are technical, um, uh, proposals and projects in place to allow miners to do the— to run the Bitcoin software. And we're just at the, the, the beginning of adoption of that. So that's an example of something that is going to change over time. We are going to see miners selecting transactions in the future. But that, that doesn't describe—

why is that? Why is that changing?

Um, well, step one is just having the software to actually enable it, and that both the protocol and the software exists now. So now it's a matter of adoption, which just takes time, and aligning incentives.

Hmm. How much power do you think— it's funny, I can't help but think of Barry Silbert. In a lot of these examples, whether it's like, you know, does DCG still own Foundry? Because Foundry is the biggest pool. And, you know, hearing you guys talk, I can't help but think of ETH and ETH Classic, of which Barry was obviously a massive ETH Classic bull, which never really took off. Hmm. I don't know. There's not really a question there, but just— Yeah, well, I think Barry—

I mean, I I think you're just thinking about like centralization and power dynamics here. Another thing that the audience should understand is from a pool distribution perspective, it's even worse than what this graph shows because Bitmain, the large ASIC Chinese company that makes ASICs, they control about 50% of the hash rate because they own or control Antpool, via BTC. And they also— a number of the smaller ones shown there now have partnered with Antpool and Bitmain to, to, to do transaction selection and manage the Bitcoin payouts. So, so actually, Foundry is the second largest pool in terms of, of controlling which transactions make it into a block. So that, that is concerning and is something that my own team and a lot of others are working on improving. But as Ren said earlier, it's not as bad as it would seem if that's the only information you had, because miners themselves are much more distributed and decentralized, and they can switch pools literally within milliseconds. So the switching costs are low, but it's still not a, you know, we, we We working on Bitcoin want to improve that situation.

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Yeah, so we broke out the developers into two separate buckets because the parts of the codebase that they tend to work on are, are different. So for instance, the protocol developers, including the group that people refer to as the Core Devs, these are the developers proposing and implementing consensus changes in addition to maintaining the Bitcoin protocol and clients. The protocol developers, they don't have unilateral power over Bitcoin. Because for instance, if the core developers shipped an outrageous change to Bitcoin Core, the economic nodes do not have to run that software. The miners do not have to run that software. But in some sense, what we realized through this work is that the core developers of the Bitcoin Core client have a veto-ish type of power. In the sense that because of how difficult it is to bootstrap and grow adoption of an alternative client that provides them with something with the semblance of a veto. And on the flip side, the application developers and users, these are developers who are building things like a marketplace that lets you trade like Runes, Ordinals, NFTs, DeFi applications. These are devs who are working more at the app layer.

Got it. Okay. What are the different incentives of protocol devs and app devs?

Yeah. And here, part of it may be differentiated by their willingness to take on risk, especially to the base layer and the base protocol. So for the protocol developers, they're really, really careful, which is great. They want to increase Bitcoin's technical capabilities and security, but they want to do that in a very measured and secure approach, whereas application developers tend to be venture-backed. And startups, which means that they are taking on a huge amount of risk. They're very risk-on. They're looking to grow the adoption of their product, and they're looking to grow, grow, grow. Whereas the protocol developers are maintaining the protocol and upgrading it in a very measured approach with— I think it's also fair to say a lot more testing than what an application developer might do.

Hmm. Okay, let me just pause because that was a lot of info for folks. And also just for me, and I'm kind of processing it. What is your— just kind of getting to the end of those 6 stakeholders, like, maybe just line in the sand before we move on to anything else. Like, what is your analysis of those 6 stakeholders and like how they interact? And like, I don't know, if you're able to share who you think has more power than other people. Obviously they all have power. And I thought it was one of the interesting things of this paper was, oh, all these groups actually have a lot of power and they all influence each other in weird different ways. And it's not like— I think there's this idea that like, oh, this one company has more power than the other, and maybe that's kind of true. But actually there's— power is more evenly distributed than I think people think. That was my takeaway. But I'm just curious to get your guys' takeaway from from this part of the research in the paper?

Yeah, I would agree with everything you said. I think it's a strength of Bitcoin. And we talked a little bit earlier in the show about its chaos and messiness. Again, I think that's a strength. I think the fact that there's these 6 distinct groups, all of which clearly have substantial power, but each of the groups' power is is different than the other groups. It's like kind of a unique power. Um, I think it's really— I think that's fascinating to say. I think anyone— I'd love to see academics dive into this. Like, they don't— they don't have to be into crypto or Bitcoin, but just from an organizational perspective, I think this is really fascinating.

Yeah.

Um, and I do think it's, it's a strength of Bitcoin because I think it makes it really hard to change Bitcoin, which again, I think is what gives Bitcoin which is one of the, the factors that give Bitcoin a lot of value. Um, and it's hard to gain. Um, it is— I mean, another takeaway is that even though there's these 6 different groups we've identified, um, one person or one entity like a company can, can fall into multiple stakeholder groups. Um, so, so, so it's not like you can only They're not mutually exclusive groups. And so, yeah, a large, a large company or a wealthy investor might be in 2, 3, 4 of these groups or even impact others. Like if you're, if you're a wealthy investor, you can fund developers and influence those developers as well. You can create your own media or, you know, or fund media and influence media outlets. But even with that, you know, I don't really see one entity having, you know, sort of unilateral power control right now. And even projecting in the future, I think it's— the future is pretty bright. My own personal biggest concern about Bitcoin just decentralized, maintaining decentralization, is around mining.

I think it's around this Bitmain.

And yeah, well, there's, there's a, there's different payout mechanisms for like when a pool finds a block and then pays out the miners. And I won't get into the details of all the different mechanisms, but you have to make a trade-off. Who's taking the risk? Because you know, when a block is found is a Poisson distribution. So like, you might have 1% of the hash rate, but that doesn't mean in 1% hash rate, on average, we'll find a block about once a day. But you might go a week without finding a block, you might go 2 weeks, there's like a luck factor. So who takes that financial risk? Is it the pool or the miner? Yep, you had to make that decision. So there's one payout mechanism called FPPS, which is where the pool takes the risk. And that is a centralizing force. And that is why all these other pools are partnering with Bitmain because Bitmain's raising more—

less financial risk.

We'll take that risk.

Yeah.

And obviously the larger liquidity pool you have, you can withstand— you're less likely to go bankrupt. If you're a small pool, you risk bankruptcy if you don't have enough liquidity to handle a bad luck streak. So that's, uh, you know, I'm optimistic we'll figure that out. But like exactly figuring out how to combat that centralization force is an open research issue.

Yeah. Ren, what are your, uh, what is your biggest risk to Bitcoin at this point?

Yeah, I think the biggest risk, and I have a counteracting force against it, um, is this concept of single entities that, that span multiple stakeholder groups and growing across multiple stakeholder groups over time. So for example, if you have a very large mining organization that owns a lot of Bitcoin on its balance sheet that starts to fund potentially some protocol developers, but at the same time is making venture investments in the application layer and might also own an economic node. Um, over time they can start to kind of like stack up a collective of different stakeholders to push a certain change. But the counteracting force against this is the self-custodying proprietary owners of Bitcoin who often are not very loud on crypto Twitter. There are often people with less than 5,000 Twitter followers who don't really partake in kind of like the sub-cycle narratives. And ultimately, because of the finite supply of Bitcoin and how the coins have been distributed across time, these individuals serve as kind of a final guard against that type of risk.

Hmm, yeah, that's interesting. Are you— huh, I'm trying to— it sounds like we just need more people self-custodying Bitcoin.

I think self-custodying Bitcoin is probably the most important thing to ensuring Bitcoin's longevity as a neutral store of value.

Steve?

Well, I mean, so I totally agree with that. It's a personal mission of mine, and I'm optimistic more people will self-custody over time. I mean, right now, there's two metrics. If you look at the number of Bitcoin that are self-custodied, that's actually a high percentage. But if you look at the, you know, if you look at the percentage of people who own Bitcoin that self-custody, it's a very low percentage. I'm optimistic that will increase over time, though. One, private key management, the self-custody software and solutions are improving over time. Way, way better user experiences are being created that are still quite secure. That makes it more palatable, reasonable, and realistic for normal human beings to do it. Um, and then secondly, I think anyone's Bitcoin journey, you, you might not see or feel the need for self-custody at first, especially if you live in like the US or in a market where you generally trust the, the legal infrastructure and the banking infrastructure and the government. Um, but your Bitcoin journey usually follows a path where you start to appreciate the value in self-custody more and more over time. So people from like the last cycle that got in, in 4 years' time, all of a sudden, like maybe 30% of them are like, now we see why we're going to self-custody. Coincides with products that are actually reasonable for them to use and more people are going to self-custody.

Yeah, I'd probably take the other side of that, unfortunately, which is just like basically the longer that Kraken and Coinbase and BitGo and everybody else exists, the more staying power they have and the more people trust them. So, you know, but let's say Coinbase has been around for, what, 11 years at this point. If Coinbase is around for 25 years, people— it's like JPMorgan. Like, I completely, without hesitance, trust that my money is safe with JPMorgan. I still have a little— like, there's always something in the back of my head when I open a Kraken or Coinbase or whoever it may be, Fireblocks, that I'm like, is the crypto going to be there or not? You know? But over time, that gets probably stronger. Yeah, maybe not.

I agree.

I mean, like, the, the force you're talking about is undeniable. I mean, the brand, brand power, the trust with that. But fundamentally, there is a difference between JP Morgan and Coinbase or Cash App or any other brand like that. And that's if, you know, if the— it's a— Coinbase is an enormous honeypot. Actually, speaking of risks to the whole crypto ecosystem, if, yeah, if a hacker, if a hacker is able to to steal Coinbase's Bitcoin or the Bitcoin that they control, that would be absolutely devastating. Right.

Okay. Let's go there because I've thought about— I've been actually thinking about this recently. Let's say that happens. You got to imagine there's just a hard fork though, right?

Well, I don't think so.

It would obviously be like discussed, but in Bitcoin, I don't think there would be.

So you don't— because the Bitcoiners— what do you guys think should happen? Let's say— so I don't know how much of the Bitcoin— do you guys know how much of the Bitcoin Coinbase custodies?

It's over— it's like 1.5 to 2 million, I think.

Okay, so they hold— let's say they custody 10% of all the Bitcoin in the world. If someone— if some— if North Korea got— just hacked Coinbase and just got all the Bitcoin, they're like, I'm not giving it back. I'm sorry, we're North Korea. Do you guys think we should hard fork it or not?

I do not think we should hard fork. We just have to suck it up and deal with it. I think that I value the principles over the 10-plus year, like, recovery. You know, it would take like 10 to 20 years to recover from such a disaster. I think it's worth it to future generations to just suck it up and deal with that versus lose the principle? And because to me, if we forked it like, um, Ethereum did with the DAO hack, that destroys the credibility of Bitcoin.

Maybe a better question is also, how would they fork it? Because if you're another exchange or a major economic node, one of your competitors suffered probably an unrecoverable, um, hack, which increases your market share.

Yeah, yeah. And then Kraken's like, all right.

And then on the miner side, the miner is still like, as long as there are other exchanges that they can sell their Bitcoin on, and if those exchanges are not aligned with forking, because it makes no sense for them to fork because they are better off actually on the other side of that, those miners would not have any incentive to support a fork either.

It's super interesting to think about this because then you're like, yeah, it's like the economic— what do the economic nodes think? But maybe some of the investor— oh man, that's a really interesting— hmm.

Well, let's just avoid that.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the risk by, by, you know, I'd love to see ETFs distribute the coins across more custodians.

Same. Same. Hopefully, I mean, hopefully people don't take centralized custody risk anymore after 2000, after the last cycle. So it feels like laying out these stakeholders, I like— it seems like the only one who's really incentivized to push major changes through at this point. I'd love to hear you guys argue why I'm wrong about this. Is the application developers. It's like the economic nodes, the investors, the miners, everyone's like, look, this thing's working at 100K Bitcoin, numbers going up, we're all happy, everything's great. But if I'm an application developer, I'm like, wait, I'm raising venture money, or maybe I just raised venture money. I need to build applications way faster than I'm building. I need to go raise more venture money. I need to get users on my, on my apps. I need, I need these changes to go through. So it feels like the group that might push for things to happen, the stakeholder in 2025, are the application developers. What do you guys think about that?

Generally agree. Although if you're an exchange, if like new functionality to Bitcoin leads to more trading and more trading revenue, then which it could, some changes will lead to more trading, more trading revenue, then an exchange is going to be supportive of this. I forget actually where did we land, Ren, on VC investors? Investing in application developers. Did we put those VCs in the application developer category?

Yes.

Yeah, you said VCs are application developers.

Yeah, well, and we did that. That's what I thought we did. We did that because, um, the, the— if you look at the powers and incentives, yeah, yeah, the same. So, um, but, but I mean, but that is, you know, that's a different group, or it's the same stakeholder group by our definition. But obviously VCs are a distinct group from application developers, but they do have aligned incentives. So that's another group of people who would be for changes. Um, and, and some, you know, and, and there's an overlap of people who are VCs investing in equity in these startups, and they also often hold a lot of Bitcoin, so they'd be in our investor category as well.

So, so what do you guys think? Um, let's start talking about next year and just like the years to come. I mean, so historically Bitcoin Core has been the dominant implementation, but you're starting to see alternative clients get some attention right now. Just curious how you guys think both about the opportunities and risks that these present. And I'm also just curious to hear your guys' predictions on like actually what happened, like what will happen. Like, do you think we'll see this big philosophical split similar to 2017, or is this just going to be a a little less contentious than, than back then?

Yeah, so the— so for first of all, the Bitcoin implementation. So Bitcoin Core is the dominant implementation of the network, basically, you know, 99% plus of the network uses that implementation. Um, and, you know, and I think it sort of earned that. Um, it has a strong track record of being conservative prioritizing security, quality, and it's generally a no-brainer choice to run that software versus other implementations if you're a, if you're in, you know, a business or a miner. Having said that, you know, we're certainly starting to see some signs of champions who want to see a change unable to get that change merged into Bitcoin Core, um, voicing support for an alternative client. Another important fact for everyone to know is that every consensus change to Bitcoin that's happened to date has always been merged into Bitcoin Core. So the historical pattern is you get a change, you convince the developers on Bitcoin Core that there's enough consensus for that change to get it merged, then it gets merged, and then the ecosystem chooses to or chooses not to adopt the latest version of Bitcoin Core. But historically, if it gets into Core, it does get adopted. So if— but yeah, if you can't convince the Core project to merge it, then your, your outlet or your option is to create an alternative client. But we do study that in this project. And it's an enormous hill to climb because of the coordination problem. Like, how do you get everyone to adopt that new client? Because most people that run businesses in the space are not super aware of or passionate about a change. So, I mean, let's say you run like a multi-million dollar business and someone's telling you— first of all, someone has to even like— yet you have to become aware that, oh, I'm I'm supposed to change to this other software and then like, do you? Well, we actually outline in this project, think questions you should ask and consider. And yeah, I mean, like, you know, there's a track record with Core of high-quality software that's secure. What do you know about this new project and the developers behind it? And are they going to be behind it in 3 years? You have to go through these series of questions and then is it— and just operationally switching to that software, does it make sense? And I think most are going to say no unless they see tremendous value to their business. And so it's a big barrier to switch to alternative clients, but it's also at the same time important that that's an option so that like the whole ecosystem is not beholden to, to the Bitcoin Core project.

Mm-hmm. Wren, what do you think? Do you, do you think, uh, what are your, some of your predictions for next year and the year beyond? Like, do you think that this becomes this big contentious we see something similar to 2017 or, or no?

Yeah, so I think on this side, I might differ from Steve in terms of what I think will happen, but the paper lays it out, I think, very clearly in terms of how a soft fork with an alternative client would ultimately lead to a chain split and likely failed outcome for the alternative client. But that being said, I think it will still happen because I think that—

You think we'll get a coin split in '25?

I think there will be a coin split in 2025 or 2026.

Around what? Sorry to interrupt. Around what thing? Like, what is the thing that will be contentious? Like, 2017 was the block size?

Yeah, I think it will be covenants. I think that they're like 2017. There are growing irreconcilable differences within the community that I hope can be reconciled through public discourse, technical debate, bug bounties, security review, and more of a standard process. But I also keep in mind maybe I also try to red team the ideal path, which is there's a lot of money that has gone into this quote unquote Bitcoin season 2. These application teams are on the clock. Startups are— all startups are fundamentally on the clock. They have a set amount of months that they're able to burn for. Anywhere between 2 to 4 years, and they are under tremendous pressure to deliver results. And I think that there is so much money at stake and the value of Bitcoin is so high that if anyone looks at— so from our perspective, or sorry, from my perspective, when I look at the Coinsplit token charts, I see a lot of failed attempts at forking Bitcoin, but someone might look at a Coinsplit token chart and say, wow, it started trading at 0.2 BTC. 0.2 BTC today would be larger, would be 2 times the size of Solana. So the amount of money at risk and the value of this network and also I think some of the underlying incentives in terms of some of the teams who are really, really pushing for change will probably precipitate into some form of chain split in '25 or '26.

Interesting. Hmm. Guys, I see we're coming up on time here. Any other— there's a— I'm going to link to the paper. It's a 40-plus page paper, so we obviously weren't able to get through. Everything. I feel like the whole back half, we weren't able to cover too much of it. But anything else that we weren't able to cover here or important things that you think people maybe are starting to be obvious to you two that aren't as obvious to maybe our listeners yet?

Well, I mean, the main ask I'd have is just to suggest people become more educated on this. And we're trying different forms because it is a dense 45-page paper, so it'll take hours to to really get through it. So if that's your jam, great. If not, you know, just listen to this podcast and there's other ways to learn about it. For those that are really into it, again, it's open source and we're seeking more contributors. So we would welcome people to file issues, make improvements to it. And we're pretty active on that GitHub repo. So if you could, you know, if you could drop the GitHub repo in the notes too. That'd be great. So we definitely welcome new contributors.

Yeah. Ren, anything on your end?

Yeah, I think the most important thing is going back to the state of mind, which is most, most of the different stakeholders for one reason or the other are often unaware or apathetic to the ongoing developments. And I think it is, it's not necessarily a criticism. It's very fair because they have their day-to-day operations to run. But one of the things about Bitcoin is that it is a repeated game between the different stakeholders. And the worst outcome would be if everyone wakes up in 5 years with a tremendous amount of regret and decides that the network has changed, it stands for something different, and I no longer want to be a part of it. So it's really important for the different stakeholders to still keep somewhat up to date with the ongoings so that they are able to use their powers when they are most maximally powerful.

Yeah. Hmm. Well said. Well, guys, thank you. I will leave a little bit of alpha for listeners who have made it all the way to the end of this, which is Blockworks is thinking about launching a Bitcoin Renaissance related podcast, a Bitcoin-only podcast. And I think it will tie in nicely with some of these topics in 2025. So stay tuned for that. And Steve and Ren, thank you for coming on Empire. I feel like this will not be the last time you guys are both here, so appreciate it.

Thanks, man. Thanks for having us.

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