Galaxy, Citrea, and Bitcoin Spam

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]This is Matthew Crowder's Bitcoin University. Today I want to talk about Galaxy SRAA and Bitcoin Spam. I wanted to do a follow-up to yesterday's reaction video which I'll put a link to in the description notes below. It was an interview of Matt Carallo by Galaxy and this guy. I've wanted to start by comparing our two comment sections. If we take a look at Alex Thorne's comment section here over at Galaxy, he has all of his comments turned off, whereas I have 210 comments. I thought this was interesting. It reminds me of the fact that heavyweights like Peter Woola, Greg Maxwell, Bitcoin Core, nowhere to be found on X or Nostra these days, preferring also just like Alex Thorne to hide out in heavily moderated places like Reddit, GitHub, and the Bitcoin dev mailing list where they can do their rants in a safe space where they will not be disturbed by reality. This is one reason the core has been so easy to dismantle over the past 12 months because so many core devs prefer to stay in their aironditioned Midtown Manhattan skyscraper or San Francisco Presidio bubbles and not interact with actual users of their software. Now, when I made that video yesterday, I didn't realize that this was the same galaxy that was started by Michael Novagratz, which is this guy. He's the guy who's famous for getting a tattoo of the Luna cryptocurrency just a couple months before it completely uh completely imploded. We remember at Docoin and covering this at the time and I warned a lot of people uh about this.

[00:01:28]Unfortunately, a lot of people were able to get out. But as we can see here, Galaxy is basically a shipcoin company focusing on Ethereum and DeFi and all this stuff. So, we can see why they probably don't like uh the views of the BIP 110 people. If we take a look here, we can see Satoshi's, this is from their their blog, Satoshi's legacy meets the Salana ETF error. I can't even believe that that's a real essay. I can tell you Satoshi is not happy about that if you've seen it. Then there's also this Galaxy's Alex Thorne, who is the guy, as I said, who was interviewing Matt Carallo in yesterday's video. He seemed to really hate the idea of Bitcoin knots in BIP 110 for some reason. And he and Matt Carallo had a few chuckles about this and also spread quite a bit of uh technical halftruths and lies. But I think I found the reason that uh Galaxy Alex Thorne and Galaxy are hostile to BIP 110. And here it is on their website. In late 2023, Galaxy Ventures led Citra's 2.7 million seed round and began work supporting Citria with their venture platform. So they're literally funding and benefiting from the sort of Bitcoin spam and trying to turn Bitcoin into Ethereum that Citria wants to do.

[00:02:35]And I think that would have been a great thing to disclose when talking about the problem of Bitcoin spam on Bitcoin because Citra has been one of the companies central to the de debate. But it's probably unrealistic to expect ship coiners to behave ethically in other areas when they're literally ship coiners like all the folks at Galaxy. We can see here the blog that that's taken from from stealth to industry spotlight.

[00:02:58]How Citra launched Bitcoin's first zero knowledge rollup with Galaxy Ventures platform. And if we scroll down here, we can see uh the funding that I just cited, 2.7 million seed round. So that would have been something nice to disclose if they were doing responsible journalism. Citra was of course the company that was planning on putting 64 bytes of data into fake pub keys. This these are unspendable outputs in Bitcoin because they needed 144 bytes for their Bitcoin affinity scam and oper could only hold 80 bytes. So they needed that extra 64 bytes. And all of this was really just for a transaction that's never intended to take place. It's basically like a uh a sort of justice transaction similar to the sort of things we have in lightning if someone tries to cheat in which case uh this would only happen with Citra if the coordinator went rogue and they need to get this justice transaction into everyone's mempool. So this was something that was never intended to take place. 64 bytes of data that was never going to happen. Uh very very low probability of it happening. That's a tiny amount of data as well. So that would have been 64 bytes of potential UTXO set blow, which is a very small amount of data. While Bitcoin core had already sat idly by and allowed the UTXO set to balloon from 4 GB. So we're talking about the difference between worrying about bytes and worried about worrying about gigabytes. But Bitcoin Core sat idly by allowed the UTXO set to balloon from 4 GB to 12 GB from the inscriptions exploit of 2023. Mostly BRC20 tokens doing this. UTXOs are just unspent chunks of Bitcoin that need to be kept on nodes, kept track of on nodes. They cannot be pruned and this is a huge burden to new node runners and makes spinning up a new node more expensive and more timeconuming. So fewer people end up running nodes and this hurts Bitcoin's decentralization.

[00:04:48]So core was worried about 64 bytes of UTXO set bloat. Meanwhile, they weren't worried about the UTXO set going from 4 GB to 12 GB. So an additional 8 GB of UTXO set bloat and core never closed the inscriptions exploit because Bitcoin core maintainer HA considered it quote unquote too contentious but somehow core was fine with blowing open operator turn for Citria and other Bitcoin affinity scam companies which was such a contentious decision in itself when Hal saying that Bitcoin core tries not to do contentious things blowing open oper was obviously so contentious that it led to Bitcoin core losing 20% of market share this was the implementation the nodes software implementation that's had 99% market share really for the entire life of Bitcoin or since the very early days.

[00:05:33]But because of this very poor decision, it demonstrates how contentious this was, they ended up losing 20% of market share as people bailed on Bitcoin core and node runners started running Bitcoin knots instead. We can see here that almost 21% of the network is running Bitcoin knots as well as almost 10% of the network running BIP 110 also known as RDTS reduce data temporary software.

[00:05:57]This is BIP 110 also known as BIP 444.

[00:06:00]But what it tries to do is close the attack surfaces that come from Bitcoin spam in a in a temporary way to give us some breathing room and to figure out more permanent solutions. So, what this does is it basically rolls back Bitcoin to the state that it was in. Uh, we'll never be able to get rid of all that UTXO set bloat. Um, or it could take a very long time for it to consolidate and resolve itself. But what RDTS, what BIP 110 does is is um enforce uh 80 byte op returns at the consensus level and closes the inscriptions exploit and BRC20 exploit at the consensus level as well. So it really goes after the large data fields where spammers like to put their spam. If you want to fight spam, if you want to fight crime, it's the same thing. You have to show hostility to criminals and you have to show hostility to spam. Whether you do it at the mempole level, the social layer level or the consensus level as BIP 110 is seeking to do. And it looks like overnight we got another BIP 110 block uh that was mined on Ocean by someone named SOV. I'm not familiar with who this is, but if we scroll down here, we can see that they are now signaling for BIP 110. So, that's quite encouraging to see. You can try to mine blocks and signal for BIP 110 as well. I put a link to this free tutorial in the description notes below, how to mine Bitcoin from home using Start 9. And what this will teach you to do is how to mine with quite a bit of hash. This will give you the equivalent of a,000 to 5,000 bid axes. This is using rented hash pointing it to your own node and data gateway and building your own blocks in which you can include whatever transactions you want. You don't have to include spam and you could also signal as part of this.

[00:07:41]You can signal for BIP 110. So you might end up actually creating a block that looks like this. So be sure to check that out in the description notes below.

[00:07:49]And there are a lot of resources below that you can check out as well. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to hit the subscribe and like buttons. Hit the notification bell if you want to be notified when I publish my next video.

[00:07:58]and let me know your questions and comments in the comment section below.