This Could Change Bitcoin Forever... | Andrei Jikh

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]So, I'm not I'm not going to get like too into it, but in 2017, there was a fight for like the soul of Bitcoin, right? And that was called the block wars. Essentially, people were split into two factions. One half thought, well, what is Bitcoin? One half wanted it to be a currency and the other half wanted it to be a store of value. So, the currency people wanted the block size to be increased to like 4 megabytes. Okay? Right? It was originally like one >> and the uh store of value people were like well let's keep it at one because if you allow Bitcoin to become a currency which has a much higher TAM or total addressable market size currencies are much bigger than a commodity like gold right it addresses a much bigger market. Okay. So if we allow Bitcoin to become a currency and increase the block size, then eventually like let's say 5 10 years from now, it'll be prohibitively expensive to run your own node to basically secure the Bitcoin.

[00:01:00]The only people that can do that will be like big mining companies and big corporations, right? And so you effectively centralize Bitcoin to big business. And big business is subject to what? Government control, right? So they're like, let's not make it a currency. let's make it a store of value. That was like my introduction to like the craziness of it. And I followed this whole battle. And at the time, the argument that made the most sense to me was to have it a currency. Cuz I'm like, well, if Bitcoin is going to grow beyond this point, it needs to be a bigger thing, like a currency. Right.

[00:01:31]>> In terms of currency, you're saying just something that you use to pay for goods and services, >> like a dollar. Exactly. Use it to pay and buy things. Um because even in the Bitcoin white paper, it says a peer-to-peer currency, right? Right. And so I was like, "Okay, so Bitcoin should increase block size." Um, in retrospect, I'm glad that it stayed small because then it means it's decentralized and anybody can run. It's pretty cheap to do.

[00:01:53]>> So that was the block size war in 2017.

[00:01:57]But fast forward to today and in 2025, uh, there's another war for the soul of Bitcoin. Not a lot of people know this cuz it's like really nuanced and nerdy.

[00:02:06]I mean, I'm not the best person to explain this. kind of did a lot of the research yesterday, but essentially what's happening right now is there's a fight between again two groups of people. Uh one that's trying to say is Bitcoin money, right? A store of value or is it a store of information like all information, not just economic data but all sorts of data, right? So there is a split between these two. Now let me just ask you this hypothetical question. What is the best way do you guys think to destroy Bitcoin? Like if if you were trying to take it down or destroy it, what is the best way to do that?

[00:02:43]>> Unplug the internet.

[00:02:44]>> That's one way. It's really hard to do though. It's not really >> In all seriousness, I would say to destroy Bitcoin, you would have to destroy it the the faith of Bitcoin. So, I think if Satoshi somehow dumped on the market, everyone would lose faith in that. Mhm.

[00:03:00]>> Um or I I think like a huge solar flare that somehow takes out networks.

[00:03:07]>> Okay, not bad. So, we can't do Satoshi, right? Cuz like he's gone. He's never coming back and we can't invoke him to come back.

[00:03:13]>> How do you know he's gone?

[00:03:15]>> Because he would have come back at this point. If he was like incentivized financially and Bitcoin is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, at no point in time is is there a person that's like, I'm going to wait. I have a couple hundred billion dollars now. I'm going to wait until it hits a trillion or whatever it is.

[00:03:30]>> And you can see wallets. That's how you know.

[00:03:32]>> You can see it. Yeah. His coins have not moved since I forget.

[00:03:35]>> His coins.

[00:03:35]>> Yeah, it's in his wallet.

[00:03:36]>> How many coins does he have?

[00:03:38]>> Wasn't it like a million? Roughly a million coins. Yeah.

[00:03:40]>> So, what's the value of that?

[00:03:42]>> It was like $128 billion.

[00:03:45]>> Yeah. He's like one of the top sitting in his >> And you've never seen that is his wallet >> transacting.

[00:03:50]>> It's never moved and it never will.

[00:03:52]>> It hasn't moved since when? It was like 20 >> I want to say 2011, but I might be wrong. Yeah, something like that.

[00:03:57]>> So, are people speculating that he's passed away, that he's gone?

[00:04:00]>> Most likely he's passed away. Yeah. The people who think he was, but the Bitcoin community doesn't really like to talk about who Satoshi is because that's an attack vector, right? Cuz if you figure out who that person is or who that group was, you can attack. That's a vulnerability.

[00:04:12]>> It's interesting. Michael Sailor has been asked who is Satoshi Nakamoto. And yeah, he just like like it it triggers him like he does not want to answer it >> and he gets like visibly upset.

[00:04:23]>> Yeah. He calls it the uh the immaculate conception of of Bitcoin, right? Because it's like no one knows who gave birth to this thing. And it's smart. Like we shouldn't really try to figure that out.

[00:04:35]Um but the point is is that uh the best way to really attack Bitcoin is not a solar flare. We can't induce a solar flare. We can't get Satoshi to spend his coins. The best way to do it is to destroy it from within. Okay. So right now in Bitcoin, there's five pillars of power that make it decentralized. Users, nodes, businesses, the miners, and the developers. Okay, so like a lot of criticism that you hear people that don't understand Bitcoin, they'll be like, "Well, how do you know it's 21 million? Like what if they like write in the code and they change it to like 40 million just to give themselves some more?" And it's like they could do that, but they wouldn't be able to get that through without the majority consensus, right? Like everyone would have to agree that it's in their economic interest to do that. That's what makes Bitcoin so cool is the game theory aspect of it. So it's the fundamental rules of Bitcoin have never been changed. But if you were like a rogue nation or or a government and you wanted to destroy Bitcoin cuz you're like, "Hey, this this Bitcoin thing looks cool. Like how would I control it?" Well, I would figure out who the developers are and I might offer them like a salary like a like 20 or $30 million a year and I would tell them, I want you to make certain propositions in the software that changes the core aspect of what Bitcoin is. And I would put out a huge propaganda campaign that's like, what is Bitcoin? Is it really gold? Is it really digital gold? Is it really money? Or is it a a a database of all sorts of immutable information? Right? So, here's specifically what I'm talking about.

[00:06:07]just kind of gets nerdy. But there is this feature inside of Bitcoin called the OP return feature, op return.

[00:06:14]>> And that feature has an 80 byt limit, meaning like that's the storage capacity of it. It's very small. It's about the size of a tweet, right? You can attach certain random points of data like metadata or some kind of proof or some kind of message. Fun fact, in 2017 during the block wars, the core development team which runs the Bitcoin software, these guys are like the smartest like nerdiest people, right?

[00:06:41]They they do not like having a debate with people. So they shut people down.

[00:06:45]They censored people. And so the big blockers, the people who wanted a Bitcoin to become a currency, they made a decentralized Twitter through this OP return mechanism. And the way it worked is you could send a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a bitcoin from your own wallet back to your own wallet.

[00:07:02]So you sent the money back to yourself and it cost you like a fraction of a penny. But in that transaction, you embedded a small tweet and somebody made that into a website. It was like a decentralized into that data >> into that data. Yes. A text, a piece of text >> basically, >> right? And so they recreated a decentralized immutable Twitter on the blockchain. That's how it was used. But again, it has that limit of 80 bytes.

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[00:08:55]Actually, I brought a a cool thing to show you uh what that looks like. Um so, here is an image of an 80 uh by size image. Can you tell what that is?

[00:09:08]>> No, I >> you can't really tell what that is. That looks like Trump.

[00:09:11]>> It does kind of. I could see it. The suit, the blue suit and the hat.

[00:09:15]>> That is actually It is.

[00:09:19]>> Wow.

[00:09:19]>> Did you figure that out?

[00:09:20]>> I had no idea, actually.

[00:09:21]>> But it's hard to see.

[00:09:22]>> Holy crap.

[00:09:23]>> It's really hard to see, right?

[00:09:25]>> Mhm. That was good, Jack. Good job. Your eyes.

[00:09:28]>> Okay. So, so right now the fundamental disconnect in the core development team is that they want to upgrade Bitcoin to remove the limit of the OP return, right? They want to get rid of the 80 byt limit.

[00:09:43]What does that mean? That means that within a transaction, people will be able to include images and videos up to 4 megabytes in size. So now that image that looks like nothing to most people, unless you're a an autist like Jack, uh, that's the real image.

[00:10:02]>> Wow.

[00:10:03]>> Right. That's that's the Trump image.

[00:10:05]Okay. But but that's like a like a good example. What's the benefit of doing that, though? Well, the benefit is now you can essentially have programmable money, right? Like you can have Bitcoin that's somewhat programmable. You can have NFTTS on it. You can do a lot of like more advanced things is sort of like what they're saying.

[00:10:23]>> Sure.

[00:10:24]>> But the Bitcoin community disagrees and they're like this is the worst thing we can do >> because imagine you're you're essentially bloating now the the software now the whole ecosystem with with BS, right? like with images and imagine if I was like like a like a pizza file person, right? Wanted to send illegal images or videos to somebody and they didn't want to be stopped. They didn't want to be censored. They could now use Bitcoin and attach an image or a video that's illegal to transmit into this transaction, right?

[00:10:57]>> So, if I were a government, I might want to regulate that. I might be like, "Hey, all these nodes that that are handling all these transactions, you guys are transporting and transferring all these illegal illegal images."

[00:11:10]>> But but here's the thing. Wouldn't that all be on the blockchain? And then eventually, if that were ever to be cashed out, >> you could trace it.

[00:11:19]>> Correct.

[00:11:19]>> And so the person who cashes out five transactions down the line, 10 years later, they're going to get caught.

[00:11:25]>> It's not about who cashes out. It's about you transmitting things that are not necessarily something you agree with transmitting. You have no control over this because they remove that limit.

[00:11:34]>> Sure.

[00:11:35]>> But their argument is like, "Yeah, but you'll be able to do like NFTTS on it."

[00:11:38]People like Michael Sailor and people like myself, investors were like, "I'm buying Bitcoin because it's the best place to preserve my economic energy, right? It's like the best place for me to put my time and I don't want Bitcoin to be graffitied over with data. Bitcoin is not meant to be non-economic data. It's purely for economic information, not NFTTS and videos and pictures, right?

[00:12:05]So, there's a big divide in the community right now. And the core development team, they're proposing that this change goes through. They want to get rid of this limit. The people on the opposite side, the people who oppose it, not that you need to know this, but it's the Knots development team. And there's this guy, I think his name is Luke Dash Jr., which a lot of people don't like, but he he's like, "Let's let's just keep it as is." And a lot of investors are like, "Let's not change anything.

[00:12:27]Bitcoin's not broken. Let's not upgrade it. Let's not do anything." So, the most likely outcome that will happen in October, this is this is this upgrade is going to happen in October, is that there will be no upgrade. So, the nodes and the miners, they're not going to upgrade their software to software 30.

[00:12:43]They're going to keep it at 29. That's most likely what's going to happen. So, only people like Michael Sailor really understand what's happening. But I think in the next few weeks there's going to be a huge wealth transfer.