 Now some have said that I seem a little nitpicky when I talk about scripting and programming I'm a big efficiency guy. I think that everything you need to spend lots of time even in single lines of code Just optimizing everything that is the kind of person I am I think that everything we are making technologies the world is going to be based on so you got to do things right And I want to give you in this video one of the best examples of the earth shattering ramifications of getting a single line of code wrong like Doing something Inefficiently or really the problem here is an ad hoc solution Estipulated like a just covering your butt kind of solution to a bug that actually ends up creating a far more trouble than the bug What have originally caused probably this is one line of code that has already in the past 10 years had Significant impact on a lot of people and it will probably I mean it has already changed the course of software and Will probably change global finance in the future just because of this one teeny tiny thing In fact entire technologies exist to solve the problem created by this one line of code Okay, hopefully wow, this is a this is a really good hook to get you in What is this line of code and the best part of it is that this line of code was written by one of the I mean, it's not even code, but this like a random bug fix was written by one of the greatest programmers of all time Um, and that is Satoshi Nakamoto the founder the creator of bitcoin He's one of the best program Well, I don't know if I want to call him the best programmer of all time or something like that Because I I don't know c++ and I can't assess his skills. I assume they're good But he's definitely one of the greatest Cypher punks cryptographers of our time Just by virtue of creating the concept of cryptocurrency and you know using blockchains like this So let's talk about this What what is the line of code? Well, the line of code is actually right here Right here as you can see Um, and what is the significance of it? Okay? Now I will actually I should say a lot of people watching this video I know what happens whenever I talk about bitcoin or cryptocurrency a lot of people. Oh, I hate bitcoin. It's a scam I you should feel bad for doing this I don't want to hear about this. No, you actually if you are thinking stupid things like that firstly that's stupid But secondly you should actually watch this video because you are going to learn the deep lore the deep problems about bitcoin that you can throw in bitcoiners faces and You can feel superior to them even though you're poorer and probably don't even know enough about this to talk about it But you can learn about this um, anyway, so The this single line actually if you're a bit if you some bitcoin maxis watching this are probably seething already because they know Where this is going they probably know what i'm going to say because this this will this will really hurt some bitcoiners They oh, oh no not this uh, because this is I guess controversial for stupid reasons that i'll talk about later Um, okay way back in the day Let's you don't need to know how bitcoin works, but let's just put it this this is 10 years ago This is way back. No one has ever bought or sold bitcoin They just mined it on their random computers the network is so small you can mine it on your your your laptop or something like that Uh, bitcoin is worth zero. It's worth nothing. No one ever thought of it I mean, it's just like a hobbyist project that people are working on in 2010 um, so Uh, it it is based on a blockchain a blockchain is just a log of all the legitimate transactions That's all it is and blockchains of course have blocks in them And what a block is every 10 minutes the bitcoin network creates a block a minor creates a block That logs all the legitimate transactions in the past 10 minutes. That's that's all it is. So every 10 minutes you have a new block More 10 more minutes. You have another block 10 more minutes. You have another block. That's how it works Okay, and it's approximately 10 minutes. It's not always The cryptography of it. You can look it up either way So here is one problem that satoshi, uh and friends ran into Hypothetically speaking, let's say you have uh a troll or a seething no-coiner or someone who just wants to mess up the bitcoin network Or just annoy people one thing they could do Is they could create a million? Uh bogus transactions or dust transactions or just random micro transactions of You know moving just like a one sat around like small amounts of bitcoin around Uh that don't mean anything or moving bitcoin back and forth and like doing all this kind of stuff And the reason you might want to do that to troll people Is because it could uh You would have all these bogus transactions in the blockchain And then it would increase the size of the blockchain. I mean it you might have you know 10 kb Of legitimate transactions and then you can have like a gigabyte of bogus transactions, right? Some something crazy like that if you really wanted to troll them So the blockchain itself would be bloated up with a bunch of bogus like nonsensical transactions That's the problem. So what satoshi did and this is something just totally sensible totally again One of the greatest programs of all time if anyone thinks oh i'm saying something bad about satoshi. I'm not it's a sensible ad hoc solution But what he did is he said okay, let's just throw in this limitation That Every 10 minutes we have this block and the block has to be less than 1 megabyte. That's it can't be more than 1 megabyte Okay, and at the time that's a great solution That's a workable solution because I mean no one's using bitcoin people are you know, maybe there's 10 kb of uh Of transactions on the bitcoin network or maybe 100 kb either way It's not going to get close to 1 megabyte like if you get a 1 megabyte block. Well someone's spam attacking Okay, that's what you can conclude So that rules out all these spam attacks, but here's what has happened 10 years have passed bitcoin is not worth zero. It's worth 46 000 dollars, okay There have been millionaires and billionaires made in bitcoin banks countries businesses use bitcoin and Speculators of course most of the people using bitcoin are speculators But it it is a crazy market and guess what we have way more than 1 megabyte of Transactions every 10 minutes that want to be approved that are legitimate transactions So what has happened now the bitcoin network has this limitation that it cannot process process more than 10 megabytes of transactions In a given time years and years ago that because that always meant a spam attack But now no one can get their transactions to go through. So how does that affect you? Well, it affects you because You know, let's let's say you like what this guy is doing. Well, we'll talk about what he's doing in a second But let's say you like this guy's a little diff here. So you want to send him some money at his bitcoin address Let's say you just want to send him five bucks. Okay, five bucks five american dollars in bitcoin Well That you could send that to him, but you have to send a transaction fee with that And because you are competing for that 1 megabyte of space, which is very limited You have to really in order to get approved. You have to send a massive transaction Uh, uh fee with that. So you might if you want that to arrive to him within the next You know 30 minutes, you're basically going to have to send that five dollars with a 20 dollar transaction fee Or if you want it to be approved in the next day, maybe 10 dollars I mean if you want it to be improved like if you don't mind if it if it takes like a month to be approved Maybe you can get away with a five dollar transaction fee But you are going to be paying these Extraordinary transaction fees and the reason you're doing that is because you are competing with everyone else in the world Who are advertising the transaction fees? They're providing to these miners and the miners have the choice. Okay, I'm going to give I'm going to accept the transactions and fit them into this one megabyte if they give me the most money Duh like that. That's what you're going to do. Um, so that now what what this has caused what this bug fix has caused is um You have to pay all this money to transact bitcoin. Okay, and it's only going to get worse if bitcoin is a global currency I mean think about this like if if rockerfellas and rothschilds and central banks across the world are using bitcoin in the future No one is going to be able to get into that one megabyte because you're just going to have big banks And extremely rich people using bitcoin. You're not going to have average people able to get into this one Yeah, so you'd have to pay, you know hundreds of hundreds maybe thousands of dollars in transaction fees It's actually pretty nutty when you think it through So this is one of the big big like terrible things about bitcoin now Um, I'll go ahead and talk about this form We'll talk more about this like there's a lot to say about there. The lore goes deeper and deeper and deeper This has caused so many controversies splits People hating each other. I will explain that in a second but way back in the day again go back to 2010 This is not a problem. We're not dealing with the block size problem yet But this guy says hey, he he offers a patch. He says listen, we got this one megabyte limit Let's at least pump this up. You can do the math here, but I think he suggests Let's put it up to seven megabytes. Okay Now if bitcoin if we had a block size limit of seven megabytes now that would be great But here's the problem. Um, the first guy here actually notes this problem He says applying this patch will make you incompatible with other bitcoin clients The the thing about bitcoin is it can't just be you can't just update your software You can't just change the block limit Everyone in the network has to agree. They have to be running the same software for that to work So if you actually just increased the block size on your thing It wouldn't make any difference for like everyone else would be still be on the same thing And you wouldn't be able to interface with their clients. Okay Um, so that's what you know satoshi one ups. Why am I running? Hold on Okay, my computer was going slow for a second. I don't know what that was. Um Uh, so anyway, so so satoshi says oh, yeah, that's right I mean, you wouldn't be compatible and he says we can phase this change in later if we get closer to needing it Now someone later says they go they talk about this for a little bit But someone later says well if we upgrade now We don't have to convince as many people later if the bitcoin economy continues to grow and this is prescient This is like if they had fixed this back in the day if they had increased the block size That would have been one thing but this is something that nowadays It's basically impossible to increase the block size. In fact, some people have tried Uh, and that's where bitcoin cash came from. I'll talk about that in a second But either way now satoshi now the correct solution I think if you want a real principled solution, of course, that's what we're talking about here Like getting things right when you're writing things. It's obviously not to just have one variable They're like, oh, here's what the block size limit is But as the system scales up, you're going to want to scale up the block size, right? And that's what satoshi says. He says it can be phased in like oh Well, if the block size is greater than so much or the block number how many blocks you have in the blockchain Then we can increase the the block size or something like that And we can it can start being in versions way ahead So by the time it reaches that block and goes into effect the older versions don't have that don't have it are already obsolete So that's what satoshi suggests. You could have an if statement That checks the block number or a switch statement case statement, you know what I mean? So that that just checks the block numbers Like the number of blocks and then says, okay, well, we'll increase the block size limit depending on that But here's the problem they talk about it. They know it's a problem They know it's going to be a big issue But they don't really deal with it then and as this guy sort of says Well, it's going to be harder to convince people as time has gone on and that's how it's happened Now as I said, there's this thing called bitcoin cash eventually got to the point Like transaction fees were so extortionate in bitcoin a couple years ago There are these people who created this thing called bitcoin cash Which is really just bitcoin forked with a bigger blockchain or a block size. Excuse me So they I think changed the block limit to I want to say eight megabytes originally and it scales up like satoshi said here to I think Like maybe 32 or 64 megabytes or something like that Oh, excuse me. Uh, so it gets bigger and bigger. So that's what bitcoin cash Stroke to do but the thing is at that point Like there were so many people in the bitcoin network and the people who knew about this problem Like realistically speaking most people in bitcoin, they're in it for a line go up They're in it for speculation. They don't freaking know what's going on here. So The bitcoin cash people only got like a small segment of the bitcoin Community to get behind their fork then increase the block size So that means that everyone else is still using this old this the original system with one megabyte of block size And ironically enough so few people use bitcoin cash. It's not even getting to more than one I mean, it's definitely had block sizes bigger than one megabyte But I think most of the time like during the past bear bear market like they weren't even getting close to one megabyte of transactions So that's the catch 22. Um, so we're now dealing with this kind of problem. Um Just because no one fixed this now the the funniest party. Oh, actually, hold on the funniest part I got a little cartoon for this Uh, here here two guys at a wall, uh, it's not finished. Uh, don't know. That's how satoshi left it The funniest thing is there are actually people who think like these guys Uh, it has now become controversial. In fact, I know for a fact, there are probably seething bitcoin Maxis right now who are getting angry that I'm even doing a video talking about this as if this is a problem The blocks it's supposed to be at one megabyte Because now there are people actually let me give you the bitcoin conspiracy first. Okay. This is the conspiracy theory Bitcoin cash people will run with this and oh, I mean it's sort of conspiracy theory, but it's it's happening in plain sight Okay, so basically there was a company called block stream Which is you know, ooh related to like mastercard and stuff And a lot of the people who were against the increasing the block size thing The small blockers are on the payroll of block stream and the conspiracy theory goes something like this Block stream wants the block size to be small Because it artificially debilitates like keeping this bug fix that it doesn't even it fixes a bug that isn't even a problem At this point because I mean if spam attacks are happening I mean well, yeah, it's preventing spam attacks, but it's also preventing like normal use of the network I mean this is like It's doing more harm than good at this point, but um the the block stream people are basically like Oh, we got to keep this one megabyte Uh limit here and they have their reasons. I'll talk about their reasons for a second, but they're bad reasons I'll just tell you that um But people will say block stream is trying to keep the block size low Because they are writing all this new technology and there are new layers of software on top of bitcoin Because bitcoin can't work by itself They want to add the they want they are looking for a problem for their solutions And they're saying oh well, let's use something like the lightning network. So the lightning network is this It's a Basic it's the most I don't want to call it the most soy debbie thing in the world because I don't it's probably well written However, it's you know soy debbie in the sense that it's an entire system created to solve for this one line of code Okay, basically bitcoin can't uh transact more than one megabyte of transactions every 10 minutes So let's build this entire network on top of bitcoin Where transactions occur off-chain. So you stake your bit. Well, it's not really staking But you put up bitcoin to create a channel on the the lightning network Then you can transact on lightning And then those transactions after you know let the lightning network It has its own ledger of transactions and then once you finalize that it is uh, it what's the word they use It is uh, I don't know finalized, you know, and I mean it's settled settled on the the blockchain So a bunch of transactions in the lightning now. I'm not saying the lightning network is all bad. I'm just saying it's a bad It's it's solving an unnecessary problem. There are benefits Hypothetically to using they're also deficiencies to using it. I'll talk about that in a second But what the lightning network is basically it's it's bitcoin But without bitcoin or bitcoin supposed to be based on bitcoin, right? Where we have this extra layer that's doing transactions and then we put it on the blockchain after afterwards, right? So that is supposed to solve the problem the thing with the lightning network There are many things wrong with the lightning network one of the big ones is like cryptocurrency is supposed to be Like or one of the worrisome things about the lightning network and all this like layer two layer three technology kind of crap is that like You know Bitcoin is supposed to be peer-to-peer electronic currency. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be And the lightning network preserves some of that peer-to-peer thing But you really end up using hubs and other things that you know involve a little bit more trust And as more layers are being added to bitcoin It becomes less and less decentralized less and less peer-to-peer less and less free More monitoring. Uh, for example You know the lightning network you can't really do what this guy has here, you know, oh, he has his bitcoin donation Link on the lightning network. You can't really do that. You can't say. Oh, here's my lightning donation link because really you have to Like each transaction has to have its own Things and stuff like that. Um, so the lightning network doesn't really Do that thing that the core functionality of bitcoin does so what you have to do is you have to build another layer on top of Lightning so there's a company a stripe stripe is a company that lobbied El Salvador to Uh, accept bitcoin as their legal tender and they said, oh, well, everyone can just install our proprietary know-your-customer Application to use it over the lightning network. So now you have You know bitcoin has problem this problem Therefore we'll use the lightning network the lightning network is hard to use and it has its own problems It has its own deficiencies. So we'll use this proprietary know-your-customer application Thankfully stripe is at least. Um, you do have your private keys at least. It could be worse. It could be custodial. Um, but, um So you that's the worrisome thing you have you have these simple problems that could be easily solved But people don't want to solve them. They would rather build entire layers of software Like increasing the soy debris increasing the monitoring Increasing the centralization and it might be it might be just by a little bit I'm not totally against the lightning network, but I'm just saying this is why it's so worrisome It's it's solving up an unnecessary problem. Okay um So and of course it does other things too people say oh lightning network does this and that and the other but you know I'm not going to talk about that now People have asked me to do a tutorial on setting up a bitcoin node in the lightning node, but um There are reasons. I'm not going to do that. Well, maybe I will but either way Um, what was I going to say? So this is the kind of the problem all of this has happened because of this one Issue now. I should say this. Let me explain the blockchain or the blocks stream people the people who still want one megabyte of transaction Uh, they want that limit in place. What is their rationalization for that because it can't be They can't agree with satoshi here and that it's for spam attack spam attacks or something like that What they say and this is the stupidest argument ever I I just have to say it's the dumbest most oblivious argument ever. It is scalability. Okay Which is like no that's like the opposite like bitcoin isn't scalable because this is in place But their argument is basically well if we increase the block size Then the blockchain is going to be really big because it's going to be it's going to be storing all the transactions for the world on it Uh, and then it's going to be, you know, 100 terabytes of transactions Um, and yeah, that's that's true. Let me let me say two things about that firstly Okay, yeah, but like hardware is pretty easy to scale And there are also ways for us to find more efficient ways of storing the blockchain or pruning it and stuff like that That can be dealt with that is not a big like storage space. Like we're not running out of it Like that is one of the few things that is actually in You know continued to increase over time and there are ways of probably again pruning it or mitigating it in some way And secondly if that's your argument, that's really just an argument against The blockchain and cryptocurrency because that like if you're arguing against cryptocurrency and the blockchain So be it but like Don't pretend to be a bitcoin or you know, don't pretend to be for this technology if you're saying Oh, well, we can't Increase it because of this problem because at that side you might as well say Oh, well, let's half the bitcoin block size if that's really the problem. Let's have it Let's have everyone transact over lightning and crap like that um So that that is one thing the second thing is uh, what is the second thing that I already say the two things uh, oh, yeah, yeah, so I Totally uh, yeah, so file size is not a big issue um, and yeah If if you're against that it's more just you're against cryptocurrency like that you're against blockchain You're just saying something that's inherently bad to blockchains And there's no reason to draw that line at one megabyte as opposed to like, you know 500 kb or something like that or I mean otherwise then that's just what it is um, so for people outside of that Mindset Well the real scalability problem for bitcoin when I'm trying to get at it's not like blockchain size It is the fact that bitcoin literally can't transact more than like one megabyte of transactions every 10 minutes That is the issue that is the problem. That is the actual scalability problem I think I said earlier in the video, but I'll say it again when bitcoin is going to be a global reserve currency A global way of storing value used by Rothschilds and Rockefellers and banks and You know governments and stuff like that that one megabyte of block Size, you know, is not going to be enough for average people No normal human is going to be able to send bitcoin from one person to another You are not going to have that what that means is you have to use Lightning you have to use layer two which involves Some layer of increased trust some layer of increased centralization Um, and that ultimately means that the core of cryptocurrency that is founded to be this decentralized network Is totally compromised. You're now building and now we're building proprietary know your customer and probably custodial Applications on top of all this stuff because it like the core functionality doesn't work because of this One line of code and you know other things there are other flaws the bitcoin, but this one thing has caused So much annoyance so much drama and frustration And if only if only if only satoshi had taken his own advice Uh, and again like a great programmer not saying anything bad about satoshi But if only he had taken this his own advice and put in something like this We would never have to talk about this. There would be no block stream. There would be no need for a lightning network Everyone could just send Money to a bitcoin address and wouldn't have to worry about it It would be much more scalable and I guess we we will deal with increased hard drive usage of Actually being able to transact like have legitimate transactions over the system. Oh my goodness. Oh no We have so many transactions. We have to store them. Well, that's what a blockchain is. Okay So That's all I have to say that that also I'll just add Add to this. This is why I'm a manero person now, of course I don't have any reasonable amount of manero. I have more bitcoin than manero But like in terms of dollar value, but manero solves this solves the privacy problem of bitcoin. It solves the asic You know the problem of mining being centralized Um, you know manero is asic resistance. That's why Um, manero is I mean, it's not perfect. I have lots of critiques about manero I've thought about doing a video about the problems I have with it. However Um, especially if you want to transact nowadays, like if you want to send someone five dollars Forget about it on bitcoin. It's just not going to happen Uh, manero or litecoin or anything like basically it every other cryptocurrency This is the most maddening thing every other cryptocurrency Has solved this problem or like doesn't have to deal with it And bitcoin like there are some dogmatic bitcoin maxis who are just tethered to this It probably seems ridiculous. I'm harping on this But there are people who like dogmatically hold to this and will like talk as if this is the most difficult problem to solve And like we just don't know how to do it and oh man, it's so hard What you think you think manero can scale You think bitcoin cash can scale? How can they process more than one megabyte of transactions? Anyway, this is stupid. This video is way too long. Uh, that's it