S17 E38: Keagan McClelland (Keags) on Lightning Metrics, Covenants, Consensus Politics & Verifying Bitcoin

Keagan McClellan (Keags) co-founded Start9 Labs, worked on Sapio with Jeremy Rubin at Judica during the CTV saga, spent time at Lightning Labs maintaining LND, and is now building BTC Verified, a formal specification and verification project for Bitcoin's consensus rules written in Lean 4. He is also a self-described member of Bitcoin's "progressive wing" who nonetheless defends the rising bar for consensus changes, a pluralist who spends all his working hours on Bitcoin, and a security thinker who refused to dunk on Coldcard even while sitting across from someone who very much wanted him to.

Time stamps:

00:00 – Intro and sound check 00:27 – Introducing Keagan "Keags" McClelland 01:14 – Bitcoin origin story: darknet markets and a CS degree in 2015 03:42 – Procrastinating at Amazon by reading ICO white papers 05:11 – Leaving Amazon for Salt Lending 06:24 – How Start9 Labs was founded 07:52 – Leaving Start9 for Jeremy Rubin's Judica (Sapio) 09:47 – What CTV (formerly OP_SECURE_THE_BAG) enables 12:35 – Mastercoin's original pitch, Rare Pepes, and play before serious use 15:44 – The Lindy effect and institutional inertia 18:20 – Sponsors + giveaway rules 22:24 – The road to Lightning Labs and LND 23:55 – Lightning as a complexity class change 25:28 – Data locality, privacy, and incentives in payment channels 27:33 – The 133 MB block problem 30:20 – Scaling takes decades: internet lessons 31:24 – Centralization, Moore's law, and what scaled the web 34:58 – Zcash's Near Intents as outsourced Bitcoin privacy 37:05 – Pluralism and the freedom to transact 39:05 – The gravitational well of money 41:36 – When does a shitcoin stop being a shitcoin? 45:43 – Every soft fork since Satoshi 47:36 – The consensus wall: CTV and BIP300 51:56 – BIP 110 case study: incoherent goals, broken design 56:05 – Why information theory defeats spam filters 58:56 – Node mythology and economic weight 1:05:17 – Miners can activate invisible soft forks 1:07:18 – Luke's soft fork definition and herd immunity 1:10:45 – Chat drama and "how much Bitcoin do you own?" 1:14:15 – RBF, Bitrefill, and policy vs consensus 1:17:21 – Can fees alone secure Bitcoin? The 50% hash rate threshold 1:24:56 – Giveaway reveal: the number is 37 1:26:55 – The Coldcard exploit 1:34:10 – The AI exploit era: "cannot be affected" vs "have not been" 1:39:13 – Why the conspiracy theories teach the wrong lesson 1:42:51 – Against security through obscurity 1:47:27 – Onboarding friction and the paranoia continuum 1:55:42 – Vaults explained, and building them without CTV 2:00:42 – Pre-signed transactions, toxic waste, and Liana 2:05:45 – Would covenants have saved Coldcard users? (No) 2:16:53 – Magic wand: why Simplicity beats CTV and GSR 2:20:33 – Witness size, block size, and what BCH got right 2:24:50 – Why Bitcoin should copy homework 2:29:49 – The two hard forks: BIP 110 vs Ecash 2:33:16 – BTC Verified: formal verification of Bitcoin consensus 2:37:10 – TABConf plans 2:39:23 – Outro and sponsor thanks