April 1, 2024
A Bugle News team was able to organize an interview with prolific Bitcoin developer Andrew Poelstra over the weekend to discuss OP_CAT, a proposal to allow Bitcoin script to add different pieces of data together. He was kind enough to invite us into his home for a sit down interview on Saturday afternoon. Pulling into the driveway we saw Luke Dashjr, also a prolific Bitcoin developer, getting into his car. He seemed to be struggling with something underneath his shirt.
The first thing we noticed upon entering his home was the cats. There were cats everywhere. Siamese cats, tabby cats, little kittens, maine coons, every type of cat that you could imagine that is legal to possess in the United States. The team almost dropped their recording gear all over the entrance hall trying to rush inside without letting any of the cats out.
He had us set up in the living room right next to the kitchen. While the team was setting up the recording gear I couldn’t help but look around the house. The signs of cats were everywhere, catnip scattered all over the floors in every room, frayed fabric on every piece of furniture in sight, food dishes scattered everywhere. I noticed what looked like a roast being prepared for the oven on a cutting board in the kitchen.
When asked about why he supports activating OP_CAT, he had this to say: “Well to really understand the depth of utility CAT provides we have to look all the way back to ancient Egyptian times. To Egyptians at the time cats represented justice, fertility, and power. These elements are pretty similar to the properties offered by the Bitcoin blockchain, which acts as a kind of court system for settling contracts, or a justice mechanism. CAT can bring back power and fertility to Bitcoin development with its flexibility, allowing people to birth new second layer systems. It’s unquestionable that the wisdom of the Egyptians is exactly what Bitcoin needs today.”
His reasoning seemed strange, but it did have a kind of logic to it. After a few more basic questions he got up and offered to show us some experiments he had been conducting recently with OP_CAT. We were excited at first to see some demonstrations of new second layer protocols, but after we saw what he came back with was not his laptop, things took a very dark turn.
Andrew returned with two kittens that seemed to be superglued together at the shoulder. In a live demonstration of what he called a “transaction accelerator”, he sewed a third kitten’s ears to each of the others’ abdomens, so that the three kittens together seemed to form an arrow. After setting them on the floor they scrambled away from Andrew across the wooden floorboards faster than I’d ever seen a cat move.
“See, the three of them working together can approach speeds none of them could alone,” he said.
He went on to describe the concept of gluing two cats’ paws on top of one, and doing so successively in a reverse pyramid (again citing the brilliance of Egyptian engineering) to allow for more efficient cat movement. A single cat walking would be able to move a theoretically infinite number of cats across a room. He did note that balancing them properly presented a significant challenge to making the concept work. While packing up the equipment to leave, he made mention to a new set of experiments he was beginning into OP_SUBSTR, which was essentially the opposite of OP_CAT. Instead of combining pieces of data, it cut them apart.
It was at that point I realized the cutting board in the kitchen was not Andrew’s dinner. Leaving in a rush, and having a day to look over the recordings, the Bugle cannot make heads or tails of anything Andrew said. But we can tell you one thing, that man should never be let near the Bitcoin codebase ever again.
This is a guest post by Bitcoin Bugle. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
