Nodes: Can you handle the Truth? | Bitcoin Education | Hashpower Academy

Video Transcript:

Hello there and welcome to the HashPower Academy. My name is Jacob Scandalan. I’m the lead educator here at the academy and this is your place to learn anything and everything to do with Bitcoin from the fundamentals. Now the topic of today’s video is looking at the current debate uh with the Bitcoin community, Bitcoin core and their decision to want to increase the OP return limit which allows essentially more arbitrary information to be able to store in the Bitcoin blockchain. And the key question for you is what price would you pay? What price should you pay to store information online forever? And the the back end of that very interesting question is that the Bitcoin nodes are the volunteers of the Bitcoin network. They are storing all of this transaction information. Tik Tok next block. That is a group of people all around the world, thousands of them that all individually have a storage device for storing all of our transactional truth because you can only add Bitcoin blocks to the chain with an expended amount of energy from the mining sector producing compute producing Bitcoin. and those holding Bitcoin, those are the ones paying to store their transaction information in the Bitcoin blockchain. So the nodes are a series of interconnected people having updates from the miners of a new block for new transactions to be stored and they are being informed as to that minor saying, “Well, I want to store this group of transactions in the blockchain.” And you got everyone holding Bitcoin and those running nodes broadcasting that they want to store their transaction information in the block. And so the nodes are these volunteers in the middle whilst the Bitcoin holders are paying fees to the miners and the miners are continually adding more blocks to the chain to collect those fees. So miners are incentivized to produce as much block space as possible because they get paid for doing so and they get subsidy as well. And subsidy right now is the majority of a miner’s revenue. It’s 98 99% of the total block reward of both subsidy and fees. But we inevitably into the future go to a point of time where there is no more subsidy. the 21 million units of digital real estate of Manhattan, the first purchases of this prime digital real estate that is a bidding auction of electricity and compute that is continued now for over a decade at least and is going to go forward multiple more decades 100 plus years of the bidding auction of electricity and compute into Bitcoin. But with price sitting on top as well, uh price has been the one thing that a lot of people have focused on the most. But let’s go back in time. Let’s go back to the dawn of Satoshi Nakamoto consuming a small amount of energy in his CPU to produce a small amount of hash rate which he produced his own Bitcoin blocks and stored his own Bitcoin with his own private key. And so you have this complete vertical integration of all the responsibilities and node running at the start of Bitcoin was that functionality that every computer was producing hash rate, producing blocks and preserving their own private keys. And so at the dawn of time, mining wasn’t an industry. and holding your private keys and being a Bitcoin holder wasn’t an industry in the sense of it’s fragmenting now into wallets and platforms and exchanges and layer twos and ETFs that on the financial side above the Bitcoin blockchain the responsibilities of holding your own private keys has obiscated. If you’re if you’re holding your Bitcoin with an ETF, you’re essentially, you know, letting someone else be responsible for your for your digital money. That is a double-edged sword. And then on the mining side of things, as mining got harder and harder because as more people uh joined the party to get their slice of the cake, more people, smaller slice. And so the the timeline of mining has required more energyintensive, more efficient computers and it’s broadened out into its own industry. It’s a m mining is a multi-billion dollar industry and it’s delving deeper and deeper into the energy sector. And so you’ve got everything underneath Bitcoin producing blocks expanding out into the energy sector. And you got everything in the financial side expanding out into the financial sector. But what has not changed in the middle? It’s those that run a node. That you’ve got the miners incentivized to add more information to nodes broadcasting blocks of, hey, take this file, add it to your file storage, and let’s all preserve the transactional truth of the Bitcoin chain. And you’ve got holders performing all different types of economic activity all across the planet wanting to pay to store their information in the blocks. But the nodes in the middle are the volunteers. And so going from the past of all responsibilities to produce blocks, store blocks, and own the information, the Bitcoin data money in the blocks started as one in the same job role. But coming to the present, we’ve got now a system which is adding 50 to 100 gigabytes of data uh every year and that will increase. Why? Because if we increase the amount of arbitrary non-information that’s not monetary in form, different file types so to speak into Bitcoin blocks, yes, it does stimulate an increase in the fee rates. Miners, well, well, like Marathon, they are allowing these large files to be stored in Bitcoin blocks because they’re paid for doing so. So to miners, they care about the uh the fee rates because inevitably subsidy disappears and you’re only just getting paid fees. That is the inevitable finality of mining from the mining perspective. that miners are when subsidy is gone, miners will be able to arbitrage, energy, compute aspects of heating systems and selling electricity, but it’s all priced and benchmark against the amount of Bitcoin they can capture per block mined. And so their avenue to capturing this Bitcoin is to store as much information in the block. So this just helps you understand where the miners sit in this debate. And then people holding Bitcoin, they want the fee rate to be as low as possible. So So the access to block space is cheap. So you got miners who want the fee rate to be high as high as possible and Bitcoin holders that want the fee rate to be as low as possible. And interestingly enough, from the things that we teach here at the Hashpower Academy is block rewards get priced against a miner’s compute and energy. If block rewards go up, the value of hardware goes up. But also, the price in which miners are willing to sell their electricity goes up. Alternatively, if you’re holding Bitcoin and the fee rate is really low, the amount of electricity you can buy with your Bitcoin increases. So, paradoxically, the lower the fee rate that the amount of uh sats per virtual bite that you need to to store your transaction information in blocks, uh well, if the fee rate is really low, your Bitcoin allows you to buy more electricity and thus increasing its purchasing of power by literally uh being able to buy power from miners in in a future state. And then the miners, they want to be paid as much. And so holders want naturally low fee rates, but right now blocks are empty. And on the mining side, yeah, blocks being empty is an economic problem to the security budget. The the difficulty adjustment increasing is that as price and the value of Bitcoin increases, its security is increasing in tandem, which is important. And I think the key danger point is if we ever see one four-year cycle where difficulty does not increase, that would be the key danger I I believe for Bitcoin. And then what doesn’t change, we’ve talked about the past where it all used to be one in the same role. You ran a laptop, produced your own block, stor stored the information, and owned your own Bitcoin with your own private keys. And now it’s expanded out into wallets, apps, IUS, and not even running a full node anymore. People have pruned nodes and partial nodes and mining where the majority of miners don’t even run a node. They are just hash rate sellers. They’re not producing their own blocks. They are selling their hash rate, the the compute commodity, so to speak. They’re selling their hash rate to a mining pool and being paid Bitcoin whilst the whilst the mining pool is the the the the business entity of running a node so to speak. And mining as a mining and holding Bitcoin are the economical circulating economy around the nodes, but the nodes still in the middle are volunteers. So this is a very tricky and in intricate conversation when looking into the future. From my perspective, we’re coming from a debt-based money system going onto an energy based money system. We’re in the the ter the tumultuous change in that process right now in the point of time. And I believe if blocks are empty, that’s a problem. So, I don’t think this is I’m going to put out a an idea and I don’t think it’s the right or wrong approach, but I’m obviously looking for people’s thoughts and feedback that have a more technical leaning understanding of of Bitcoin from its from its uh developer sense, which is if blocks are empty, maybe the OP return limit should be slightly higher, but use the difficulty adjustment as as an aggregate for lowering and increasing um the the OP return so that in the peak of the bull market when there’s a lot of transactions flowing around um get rid of the arbitrary information essentially. But in the bottom of the bare market where the p you know the block space is empty and we’re just depending on subsidy which you know that’s not where we want to be. Then maybe open it so that blocks are being filled. But that that does endanger Bitcoin to becoming a cloud storage system. And I do believe that miners will have a lot more economic opportunity in not just hoping and crossing their fingers that the benchmark of their income is based on block rewards, but I believe that block rewards for miners are the least interesting final outcome for their use of compute. that there is, you know, the compute in of itself is the the representation that energy is available in the Bitcoin network and that energy can be sold and it’s being priced against um the fee rate of block rewards. the the global electricity grid of the blockchain comparing to their local uh energy availability that they’ve got a power contract with a quantity of kil and uh as their input and they got an output of bitcoin being mined and they can directly price those two and as they find buyers of energy the more they switch their machines off the more money that miners can earn. So I do see that miners should be building out in the physical root system instead of in the digital ethereical hope that other people’s other people uh take the cost of storing transaction information um aka the volunteers having to well we’re imposing more cost on the volunteers by having them store pictures and videos and music in the Bitcoin blockchain because the nodes if there is more cost to running a node less people will do it. That it’s great that there is mining on the physical side of Bitcoin’s decentralization fragmented across every country, every electrical grid, off-grid um with using network communications such as satellites um and ground stations and and the the internet in of itself is very decentralized. Um, but that digital side of decentralization, the transactional truth of that file, we want that in the hands of as many people running as many nodes, because if you think of the the millions that hold Bitcoin, and then the tiny percentage that run a node, that that truly began with the fragmentation of updating the blockchain, storing the blockchain, and owning the information on the blockchain. as those three fragmented out into finance and energy and running a node in the middle sort of became an enterprise business for mining pools which are still a for-profit business. That fragmentation I believe is where the problems began with people truly trying to wrap their head around the importance of running a node. So the key takeaway is run a node and if you believe that the op return limit should be higher, run Bitcoin core. If you believe it should be lower and you should just store monetary transaction information of economic activity on the network um in in a in a strictly monetary focus the the fragmentation of the central banking system debt based money um and transitioning onto an energy based money. Well, that’s that’s the path that I believe is is the most important from my side of things. I think the second most important transaction type that’s nonmonetary should be electricity because you’ve got you’ve got mining infrastructure deployed across the planet which is continually observing what’s happening on the blockchain already for the majority and it’s the other side of that trade is is is power markets. I do believe that that there should be some form of layer two that has net settlement to the Bitcoin blockchain to aggregate the amount of electricity being consumed and even pricing and trading of energy because as I’ve said there’s already a pricing system that miners right now especially in Texas if you if you Google demand response Bitcoin mining it will come up that miners are literally observing what’s more valuable with my power contract sell the power for X amount per kilowatt or mine into Bitcoin x amount per kilowatt. Which one pays me more? Machine off, sell the power. Machine on, consuming to produce Bitcoin. And that that means that Bitcoin’s most intrinsic market activity is not just block space, but also with energy markets. So, I believe if there was anything non-monetary that should be stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, it should be net settlement of energy trading. But that’s just me. Thoughts, comments, questions, queries? Um, I’m going to start adding links and donation things in the in the description because YouTube have demonetized me. Thank you very much. It’s just uh put an even bigger fire under my backside and um I’ve got to find other ways to keep this channel going because the time and energy to make this content is very important but also important for education. Thank you for listening. Hope you enjoy and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye.