Protecting Bitcoin From "MEVIL" | With Matt Corallo

After starting full-time in Bitcoin straight out of college (as a co-founder of Blockstream… NBD) Matt Corallo is one of the most long-standing and prolific Bitcoin contributors in the world, having worked on several of its most influential projects—including Lightning, Stratum V2, the original sidechains paper, and more.That being said, he’s arguably best-known in recent history for sounding the alarms about potential risk vectors for miner centralization—including the risks of “Miner Extractable Value,” aka “MEV” or “MEVIL” (not-so-affectionately).MEV, of course, is a subject that most Bitcoiners haven’t spent much time thinking about. Widely considered an “Ethereum problem,” most diehard maxis ignore the potential of “Ethereum-style” MEV on Bitcoin—despite rapid development of the technologies that could easily bring these risks to Bitcoin sooner rather than later (think: trustless bridges and “Bitcoin DeFi”).In this episode, Matt breaks down:-What MEV actually is—and how/why it could be coming to Bitcoin-How Bitcoin can protect itself against these risks—and may have a leg up relative to Ethereum-Matt’s work on Stratum V2 and the development of decentralized mining pool tech-The complex influence of Ocean Mining—and whether or not they're “succeeding”-Matt’s plea to enact the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act—and the future of Bitcoin development without itAs always, you can view this episode on YouTube or Spotify via the linktree in my bio. This episode is powered by Best In Slot (@bestinslotxyz), the leading API for Ordinals and BRC20 data aggregation and indexing—as well as Citrea (@citrea_xyz), a leading 'Bitcoin Rollup' technology and core contributor to the BitVM alliance. TIMESTAMPS:___01:25 Matt Corallo: Discovering Bitcoin in High School05:00 The Wizards Chat: The OG Idea Space for Bitcoin07:00 Contributing to Bitcoin Core08:15 Becoming 1 of 11 Blockstream “co-founders”13:10 Blockstream’s Goals: Helping Bitcoin Grow15:00 Researching Decentralized Bitcoin Sidechains18:30 How the Liquid Sidechain was born20:40 Lightning Network and payment channels explained26:00 Matt’s exit from Blockstream to Chaincode Labs28:15 Working with Chaincode Labs31:00 Moving to Spiral: Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin Company33:15 Making Bitcoin the “best money”36:00 Building Lightning Development Kit (LDK)37:00 Matt’s Concerns w/ Mining Centralization39:20 Creating a Decentralized Mining Pool42:27 Stratum v2 vs Stratum v145:00 Will OCEAN see a competitor in decentralized mining?48:30 Matt’s optimism about solving miner centralization50:30 What is Miner Extractable Value (MEV) on Bitcoin?54:00 How MEV creates economies of scale for mining55:00 Flashbots attempt to solve MEV on Ethereum57:50 The downside: Ethereum is losing censorship resistance59:30 How MEV could crush pools like OCEAN01:01:20 What happens to mining when programmable Bitcoin arrives?01:04:10 A potential solution: MEVPool01:07:40 Weaknesses of this model01:09:30 Are Bitcoiners even aware of the MEV problem?01:12:45 The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act01:14:00 Who in crypto counts as a “money transmitter?”01:15:30 Changing the law for non-custodial entities