Riccardo Spagni (“Fluffypony”), former Monero lead maintainer, says that Bitcoin's filter debate mirrors the blocksize wars, why most nodes don't matter for consensus, and what real Bitcoin privacy looks like. Plus: he accidentally becoming a WorldCoin top influencer.

Riccardo Spagni (Fluffypony), former Monero lead maintainer, joins the Bitcoin filter debate and explains why it's following the same playbook as the blocksize wars. Riccardo explains his early studies on Sybil attacking Bitcoin nodes, why filtering is fundamentally broken censorship, the thankless job of being a protocol maintainer. We also discuss his WorldCoin criticism, AI agent commerce, and why stablecoins will likely dominate machine-to-machine payments.

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**Notes:**

• Bitcoin nodes connect to 8 peers by default

• Fiber network enabled faster miner-to-miner relay

• Filtering OP_RETURN stops only 1 of 6 data methods

• Spagni maintained Monero 2014-2019 (5 years)

• Lightning privacy requires permanent open channels

• AI agents will likely use stablecoins, not Bitcoin

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

01:16 Who is Fluffypony?

06:45 Worldcoin influencer?

09:30 Filters (that don't filter anything)

12:53 Why don't "all nodes matter"?

18:35 Knots node count

23:16 OK, define censorship

31:24 Community criticism

38:26 The future of the "filter TM" debate

42:44 On-chain privacy

48:32 The state of Bitcoin privacy

53:23 OP_CTV

56:05 AI + Bitcoin

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