Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
nick carter who is a partner
at castle island ventures co-founder of
coinmetrics.io
and previously a crypto asset research
analyst at fidelity investments
he's a prominent writer speaker and
podcaster
on topics around decentralized finance
and especially
bitcoin quick mention of our sponsors
the information athletic greens for
sigmatic
and blinkist check them out in the
description to support this podcast
this conversation with nick carter is
part of a series of episodes on
cryptocurrency
that is a small journey of exploration
i'm on because i find decentralized
finance
and especially bitcoin fascinating
technically and philosophically
especially because it may be the very
mechanism that achieves
a global decentralization of power
giving more sovereignty to the
individual
and making our systems more resilient to
corruption
manipulation and in general to the
darker side
of human nature please let me also
address something
for a few minutes that happened recently
that's been weighing heavy on me
if you find me annoying to listen to
please skip to the actual conversation
with nick
i had a recent podcast episode with
anthony pompliano
where we spoke about bitcoin and life
in general for three hours i was curious
inspired
positive or at least i tried to be as i
usually do
someone clipped out out of context a
short segment of me mumbling something
about having a phd and i started getting
mocked
online because that made it convenient
for people
to mock me for being yet another
quote-unquote
expert who learns about bitcoin and
thinks he knows everything
i almost never mentioned that i have a
phd except to make fun of myself
as i was doing or at least trying to do
in the full context of that conversation
i brought up grad school as a random
example of one of the many journeys i've
taken
that was hard but where the destination
was in itself
not very useful i was saying i enjoy
exploring with a curious mind
and i'm willing to be patient to learn
to listen
to humble myself with knowledge for the
sake of knowledge itself
grad school was an example of that the
phd means nothing
at least to me i never call myself an
expert
or at least try not to because that
would be dumb
because i know how little i know i'm not
a
influencer or a thought leader or
whatever else
silly self-aggrandizing label people put
on their linkedin
i try to be the opposite of what i was
mocked for
i try to think deeply about the world to
look for the beautiful ideas in the
minds of others
and to be inspired by them i wanted to
say all this because
psychologically it struck a bit of a
blow
it made me realize that even when i
approach things with love
i may be mocked i may be derided i may
be taken out of context or even
lied about with the growing platform
this is sadly only increasing
i now have learned that there's people
who are waiting for my missteps
so they can point the finger laugh and
say
see i told you so that guy's a joke he's
a fraud
as a fellow human being the knowledge of
this is painful
yes i know people tell me to toughen up
and
my life has been about strengthening my
mind in the face of my limits
but i refuse to not be fragile and wear
my heart on my sleeve
it's who i am in some sense this is the
immune system of the internet
but let us be careful not to destroy the
good ones in the process
the bitcoin community had to endure many
years of attacks from quote unquote
experts
and also fraudulent cryptocurrency
efforts that scam people out of their
money
this created a powerful immune system
that fought the attackers and the
scammers
i understand this and i also understand
that one of the beautiful aspects
of bitcoin is its community of humans is
decentralized
but some small part of this community
has come to enjoy the
us versus them battles sometimes for the
sake
of the battle in itself this happens in
political discourse as well
i understand this but to my limited mind
it sounds like group think which has
powerful defense mechanisms against bad
ideas
but has dangerous consequences if taken
too far
as in many periods of human history that
i often talk about
where the us versus them thinking has
led to the suffering of many
again i understand the value of this as
many bitcoin is explained to me
but it's not the way i as a sovereign
individual
choose to walk in this life by the way
none of this podcast should be treated
as financial advice
before nick kindly gifted me with a
hundred dollars worth of bitcoin
in hardware form i didn't own any
i'll probably buy some bitcoin on cash
app coinbase and
other platforms and also transfer to a
hardware wallet
just to learn how to do it but other
than that i don't necessarily make wise
investment decisions
money is not a motivation for me
personally i try to avoid it actually
i'm grateful for every day i'm alive no
matter how much money is in my bank
account
for long stretches of my life that
number was very close to zero
and i was always fortunate to be free
and happy
so i encourage you to listen to people
much smarter than me
for actual good financial advice here
i'm just exploring ideas and as if this
has not already gone on too long
let me please make another comment on
the style of discourse among
some bitcoin maximalists on platforms
like twitter
that in my humble view i may be wrong
but i believe
is not conducive to the nuanced
empathetic exchange of ideas
i very much look for and enjoy again i
appreciate their style of discourse
i think i understand the value of it but
it's not my thing
so i don't want to engage in it i want
to hear the quiet voices in the room
i look for people to inspire each other
and when we disagree
i look for disagreement that is grounded
in respect
and empathy i think that mockery and
derision
destroys the possibility of those
nuanced conversations
it drives away the quiet thoughtful
empathetic voices and i try to give
those voices space to be heard
to shine to exchange ideas whether we
agree
or disagree so if i happen to block you
on twitter
i block you with love honestly
i will never speak poorly view or even
think poorly of you
i would love to hang out in person give
you a big old hug
and talk about life over some beers if
you see or hear me say something stupid
which i'm sure i do often or something
you disagree with
and you still respect me as a human
being please show your love as i always
do to you
but also send me some links to blogs
books
videos podcasts where people describe
why
my stated idea may be totally wrong i
love this kind of long-form disagreement
i humble myself every day by reading
books and blogs by people
much smarter than me sometimes it
strengthens my ideas
sometimes it totally changes them but i
always learn
this is a two long way of saying that
i'm here
trying to walk with grace and with an
open mind
a bit of patience and always love
if i make mistakes cut me some slack
like you
i'm only human allegedly
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation with nick carter
what philosopher or philosophical idea
had a big impact on your life
not just in the space of cryptocurrency
but in general oh so we're
we're going now we're rolling going
right in rolling because you majored
philosophy
i did i majored in philosophy i didn't
know what to do
with my life and my parents said do
whatever you find interesting it's like
okay philosophy great
i find that interesting yeah um and it
had way more of an impact on my career
actually
uh than i thought it might you know
typically i guess if you do philosophy
you go into a lot of finance so it sort
of makes sense but
um there are a number of philosophers i
really admire
uh the big one of my favorites would be
descartes probably the notion of
skepticism
it's sort of a rabbit hole it's kind of
hard to pull yourself out of it
basically the brain in the vat theory
pulling yourself out of that
but yeah i really like epistemology you
know questioning what it is to have
knowledge
um so descartes was was one of my
gateways to that
do you think everything is noble like we
humans can
can know fully the objective reality oh
definitely not
no i mean i reality is very much
processed through your own
you know subjective lens so
how much do you think do we understand
about this world
because a lot of your ideas a lot of
things we might talk about today
are kind of trying to figure out human
civilization how
humans how human behavior works at scale
all those kinds of things that kind of
assumes that we have it
or we're able to somehow figure most of
it out
right so in your sort of when you step
way back
how much of it have we really figured
out well i think that's the conceit of
economics is
thinking that you can model human
behavior right in these unbelievably
complex systems
and then i think that's the modern
critique of economics like the sort of
tilapian critique
is that you can't have true knowledge
and they're much
less predictable than we think they are
and you know we behave
according to our accumulated assumptions
and we're using tiny sort of
data sets trained on the last fifty
hundred years
and they turn out to be horribly askew
and that's when we have our grace wands
and our black swans
uh so i'm i'm much more on the sort of
you know reality is much less notable
than we think side of things
but it is nice to have very concrete
things like bitcoin that's for sure
oh so you think so most of it is shaky
ground but there are some things there's
like islands of sturdiness
yeah bitcoin is one of them that's
that's a good way to put it yeah i mean
like look at the dollar system not to
pivot this into the dollar right away
but
the dollar is like shaky ground
who truly understands the dollar system
i mean the totality of it the euro
dollar system
the way that monetary policy interacts
with the economy
is monetary issuance inflationary
what's the relationship between
unemployment and inflation
even policymakers don't understand these
things economists don't seem to
understand them
what is deflation how do you define
inflation none of these things are
really known
or knowable so a lot of people kind of
make a claim that there's a lot of
manipulation possible with the dollar
with the
with those currencies if you couple that
with
the fact that people don't understand it
and yet
there's claims that being manipulated by
centralized power
how do you bring those two ideas
together if no one understands it how
can you manipulate it
i think what we don't understand are the
long-term consequences
of our structures so like the fed's
mandate
to target unemployment and steady
um you know exchange rates or low
inflation
you know what we don't understand is
okay what is the result of doing that
continuously for 40 years
right what is the net effect of that
what is the consequence of the long-term
accumulation of debt
and you know basement interest rates
what is the net effect of that on
society
we might understand just much short
short term
features of the system but i think it's
the longer term features we don't
understand
do you think there's like malevolent
people
like people that don't have good intent
in central banks like
in the system you know uh
when you have centralized power any
forms
it's susceptible to somebody hacking the
system
taking the power and in the shadows this
is where conspiracy theories come in
right in the shadows be able to
uh you know act
out things that have a lot of negative
impacts on the large percent of the
population
in self in greedy self-interest do you
think there's people like that or do you
think
fundamentally most people are good even
those
associated with the sort of central
banking
oh i mean i don't villainize those
people i think everyone is the hero of
their own story
right so they all believe that they're
forced for good in the world you have to
are there any true villains i don't
think so i think
they get socialized into a world where
they believe
their particular skills and their
mandate
is you know what they should be doing um
i think they might be presumptuous or
arrogant in some cases
and you know i think it's more of a
systemic issue where you have
a small handful of very homogenous
types of people with phds from the same
institutions that are brought up in the
same cultural context
that you know set policy and wield a
tremendous amount of control over
society
and i think they have this notion that
you can tinker
society you can play with a few key
variables and tinker society
into a state that is desirable or good
and that's what they're trying to do and
i think the consequences of that can be
pretty bad
but no i don't think it's born out of
malevolence
there's an interesting idea i think
michael malus brought
up as a test whether you're on the left
or the right
the question he asks which is do you
think some people are better than
others if you say
yes he claims you're on the right if you
start
answering if you start like saying a lot
of things
like uh uh you're on the left
so if you start explaining yourself well
okay
yeah it's a good term for it i was
really
so in this in this test i suppose
i would be on the left because i'm
uncomfortable with the idea
that some people are better than others
as a basic
feeling as a starting point in the way
you think about the world because
as we're talking about everybody's a
hero of their own story
when you start to think some people are
better than others
as a starting axiom
it's like a slippery slope to where
you think you're way better than others
and then you start to like basically
it's okay to
take advantage of a large percent of the
population
for the greater good totally and then
you go into stalin mode
in hitler mode where it's okay to murder
a larger part
of the population for the greater good
so it's like it's this
very dangerous slippery slope in my mind
so i tried to
not uh i was always uncomfortable with
that kind of test
or even that kind of thought and yes the
same applies and suppose
in in government in central banking is
if you think some people are better than
others
applying your idea what is good can have
large-scale detrimental effects
of course yeah i i'm glad you didn't
pose me the question
i mean i think it maybe not the left
right axiom isn't
uh the disjunction isn't the way i would
sort of
put it but um you know to me it's just
if you reason in a consequentialist way
you know that lends itself to
authoritarianism
yeah where whereby you think you can
shape society and only you can shape
society in a positive direction
according to your you know specific
objectives
so let's step onto the land of
sturdiness that is bitcoin
what is bitcoin and um in your view what
are
you know the principles the
philosophical foundations of bitcoin
well bitcoin the term i think refers to
two things specifically
so one is the protocol for conveying
value through communications channel
so just a set of rules that we
collectively opt into
in order to transact online or just add
a distance
and then the other thing is the name of
the
asset the sort of monetary unit which
circulates
within the system and that always
confuse people a lot because it's like
well you've got uppercase bitcoin
lowercase bitcoin
why didn't satoshi just give them
different names like in ethereum you've
got ethereum
the system and then ether although
people don't really talk about ether
very much but
they you know chose to distinguish them
in bitcoin for whatever reason they're
not distinct
uh so the two bitcoins get co-mingled
all the time
in the explanations did you find that's
a problem that confuses things
i mean what's what's really a
distinction between the protocol and the
currency
well they are sometimes uh distinguished
practically
like you can transact with bitcoin
outside of the bitcoin protocol for
instance right
uh so you know you can transact with
bitcoin on
ethereum or i have bitcoin on an open
dime here
this would be a bitcoin transaction it
wouldn't settle on the bitcoin network
do you mind explaining what you have on
the table before us yeah so i brought
you
some presents this is awesome this isn't
a bribe this is just a proof of concept
okay so this is basically
um a bitcoin bearer
instrument so i put 100 bucks of bitcoin
on here
and to spend it you have to basically
physically destroy
part of the device you have to poke a
hole and um you know poke off one of the
little transistors on this
so it can only be spent once uh
so and you can't extract the private key
from this device
so the private key was generated on
device always stays on the device
so what it means without uh
like breaking off like a small part so
this basically is a way to physically
instantiate bitcoin
so it's um it's kind of
cold yeah effectively so here thank you
so much this one's limited edition it's
orange
so what is it called again open dime the
point is
if you wanted to settle a bitcoin
transaction instantly
the kind of same way that a cash
transaction is instant final settlement
right you would do it with a device like
this so
if i was buying a house from you you
know
you might prefer to do it with a
physical bearer instrument
as opposed to waiting for a confirmation
on the bitcoin
blockchain so the moment i hand that
over to you
goes in your possession you're the owner
there's no way for me to have retained
the private key like
i could have created a bitcoin paper
wallet and given that to you but
you have no assurance that i didn't copy
down that you know the key elsewhere
so this solves that problem so this is a
physical instantiation
of the the bitcoin uh
transaction outside the bitcoin protocol
that's right
this is you're transacting the currency
outside of the protocol so it's analog
bitcoin we're
we're running an analog which i always
like because bitcoin is this immaterial
thing
and so it's nice to have physical totems
how much does it cost to manufacture
this
you know like 15 bucks or something
is it so this is just kind of a almost
like a philosophical statement
versus um something that's scalable for
for use like you know the point of
bitcoin is to be in the digital space
right but
this shows like bitcoin can be anywhere
it's useful for gifts but yeah i mean
i don't know if it would be a suitable
foundation for a physical
bitcoin economy in theory these would be
like cash-like instruments that you
could use to transact
well i just mean post-apocalypse yeah
yeah but
you still need you still need to plug it
into your laptop to actually verify
that there's coins on there so you still
need the internet
so i have to take your uh word for how
much money is on here
no i mean you can you can plug it in
and check yeah but to transact to
extract
bitcoin from this i need to break yeah
you have to poke a hole through the
the little hole and that renders it
spendable exactly
so you know that's protection again so
you spending it and then representing
that it's still loaded that's
fascinating
cool yeah so that the other thing i
brought you're basically dice
uh 12-sided they don't have any bitcoin
on them
so they just have a bunch of different
critiques of bitcoin on each side
uh we'll go through them then this is
awesome i i don't know if we have time
to do all 11
because there's one with my funds logo
on it but um
it's just basically a tongue-in-cheek
joke that
the critiques of bitcoin are so formalic
at this point that you can just put them
on dice
yeah um it's it's silly
well some of them might be topics for
interesting conversations
oh yeah we can even arrange the
conversation that way you can roll the
dice and see what you got
all right but first uh the
the philosophical foundation is a
bitcoin like how do you see bitcoin
outside of just
a basic protocol and a basic currency it
seems to be like you said
uh it seems like sturdy ground so what
do you mean by
yeah yeah so it's not just any protocol
for moving valley around it's not just
any currency it's got specific
rules and values that are embedded in it
and this is an important point as the
bitcoin is the encoding
of certain values which are often
misunderstood
or not acknowledged necessarily
um and so it's sort of impregnated with
values
and what they are specifically is a
topic of debate and there have been
civil wars fought over the values
inherent in bitcoin
you know one of them was should bitcoin
be this
cheap scalable the base layer low fee
payments system
with an emphasis on pdp payments or
should it be more of this
like gold like digital commodity
that would eventually settle
infrequently
and mainly between institutions right so
that's fundamentally a conflict of
visions
right uh but the so
you know keep in mind that this is just
one man's opinion i don't speak for
bitcoin
right so i would say the key the key
number one value that's embedded in
bitcoin is the notion of
non-discretionary monetary policy
so algorithmic monetary policy as
opposed to human
based monetary policy satoshi was very
clear about that bitcoin is an
alternative
to modern central banking where you have
constant tweaking constant intervention
which
satoshi felt leads to credit bubbles and
so on
so bitcoin proposes a completely
non-discretionary monetary policy
um sort of decays over time 50
of the coins were issued in the first
four years and then the next 25
the next four years then 12 and a half
percent in the next four years
until you get to 21 million units and
none of those numbers really matter
like it could have been 25 million units
and it could have been a more aggressive
slope or more gradual slope
but what matters is that this schedule
was proposed
even before the code was public the
schedule was proposed
and then we all collectively agreed to
stick to it
and that is kind of a first for monetary
system
i mean gold kind of has that property
right because
goal the supply of gold above ground
only really increases at one to two
percent a year
so it's it's sort of inhuman which is a
good feature right you don't want to
give humans that much control over it
bitcoin is a much more
you know fastidious approach to that it
really is super concrete about what the
supply schedule is and the fact
crucially that it can't change
so we can't have a bailout of debt
debtors
a lot of people would say a lot of
people had debts denominated in bitcoin
and we needed loose
accommodative monetary policy to bail
them out that's not possible we couldn't
have a jubilee denominated in bitcoin
because the social contract
we've all you know bought into and
committed to
is that it's not just non-discretionary
so that's sort of one of the first
things
um and i think ultimately that comes
back to
basically a strong respect for property
rights
because if we were to have unanticipated
inflation let's say
you know really charismatic leader
somehow commandeered bitcoin and
convinced everyone that we should have
30 million units and not 21 million
that would basically be dilutive on
everybody that
held bitcoin and had opted into the
21 million set of coins
an additional 9 million unanticipated
would have a dilutive effect on everyone
else
and that would be a covert way of
effectively stealing their purchasing
power
through inflation is that possible that
kind of thing i mean uh
what what's the mechanism of bitcoin
that resists that kind of charismatic
leader
well we've had people that have had
a lot of influence in bitcoin in the
past and they've tried to make changes
to the protocol not as
dramatic as that but bitcoiners
have generally resisted those
individuals
institutions and they you know
bitcoiners have a good track record of
sort of staying true to
to those core values so that you know
the you mentioned
values and and like sticking to the
monetary thing
but there's bigger values uh
there's almost like psychological values
that are instilled in bitcoin uh you
make a point
that bitcoin for many is a vessel quote
for their expectations hopes and dreams
uh can uh the bitcoin protocol support
this kind of complexity of
the human condition so like there's
ideas of freedom
that seem to be spoken about there's a
sort of ideas of um
of i mean even love yeah i mean
some people kind of use it as a meme
like you know bitcoin is love or
something like that
you know mostly to troll me because i
talk about love all the time
but you know these bigger ideas than
just
the exchange of currencies yeah i mean
bitcoin itself is very uh simple i would
say like ultimately
it doesn't you know pretend to do very
much it really just settles transactions
um but people do superimpose their own
views on it for sure um and bitcoin's
qualities give rise
to these perceptions of it having
censorship resistance
or giving you transactional freedom or a
measure of transactional privacy
so because anyone can
operate a node and join the consensus
process and because mining is a
competitive free market process
that means that it's likely that
you can't be censored by the miners so
that means you have transactional
freedom so you have these
computer science technical features of
the system that cause it to have these
political qualities which is
it's very hard or impossible to censor a
specific individual
so it's it's interesting to see that
flow
but so that's one of the core values for
sure is the censorship resistance
then you have the fact that it's a
cryptographic based system
and uh you can hold value in your brain
by memorizing 12 words for instance
that gives it seizure resistance which
is again a political concept if you
wanted to
desert your jurisdiction with your
wealth intact in your brain
you know that you know cryptographic
feature of the system the fact that it's
built on public key cryptography
and that you can encode a bitcoin
private key
in 12 words that gives it this political
salience
that you know you can you're now
empowered
relative to a despot basically yeah i
mean
there's so many beautiful concepts
behind
cryptocurrency behind bitcoin that
stand for sort of freedom some of the
basic things that the founding of this
country
the one thing i don't like personally
behind
uh bitcoin and cryptocurrency is that
money's involved
and it's like people's life savings
sometimes are involved
so there is naturally a kind of
fear a self-preservation
uh like instinctual kind of dogmatic
thing that comes in
where you're not the best of human
nature you're you stop being a george
washington
and you lose touch of the like
foundational principles which i think
are beautiful just like the founding
principles of this country
so that's that's just like um so i like
staying on the
level of like the philosophy versus the
level of like all my money is invested
in bitcoin
and that that becomes very tricky
territory to have
principal discussions yeah about ideas
well it's an interesting intention i try
to stay balanced despite being very
exposed to bitcoin so
let me ask the ridiculous question just
in case
who's satoshi is it you
we don't know it's probably not me
because i was
um like 17 when satoshi mounted bitcoin
16. so unlikely and also i'm not really
a programmer so um
there's a lot of theories but honestly
it's one of the greatest mysteries of
all time because
even bitcoins that have been around
since
day one really you know people that were
around
before bitcoin came out they're on the
mailing list they were active in the
cypherpunk community
you asked someone they sincerely will
not know and they may not even have a
good guess
as to who satoshi is is it important to
know or is it like actually important
not to know
do you think that's a feature or bug
that you we don't know
some people don't like the uncertainty
especially you know folks on wall street
they really want to know
and uh if you read the coinbase s1 their
disclosure pre-ipo that's a risk factor
that satoshi could come back
so the the risk management crowd wants
to know
because they want to know if maybe
satoshi had you know
undesirable political opinions or
something that would forever taint the
project
do you think they were just trolling
with that risk with the
satoshi's identity being a risk factor
or is that like actual
like was there an actual meeting and a
discussion of that being a risk factor
i think in the risk factor sections of
the prospectuses it's really just the
lawyers doing a total brain dump to
cover absolutely everything they can
think of so it's just lawyers it's not
like
uh you know it's like i think elon was
somewhere in the legal documents where
spacex
mentioned that like uh earth governments
have no jurisdiction on mars
like they threw that in there and it
feels like yeah that could be lawyers
but it could also just be elon trolling
yeah so i wonder if it's like the
coinbase folks trolling
or if uh i don't know if it's lawyers i
hope it's the trolling not the lawyers
the the coinbase leadership they're not
as big uh
trolls as elon is but uh i mean it's a
it's a risk for sure from their
perspective because
let's say satoshi returned doesn't seem
likely and let's say they decided to
spend all their coins
which also seems very unlikely um that's
you know
rumored to be or estimates have it at 1
to 1.2 million
bitcoin which is like 50 60 billion
dollars worth
so some people consider that to be a
risk you think it's
uh you know this is almost like a topic
of leadership
it doesn't feel like anybody any one
person speaks for bitcoin
not there's not even like prominent
figures like you have for like ethereum
you have vitalik buterin
it doesn't there's a lot of like top
minds talking about
like yourself but it's not like one or
two
do you think again is that a feature or
a bug like uh
do you think for effective for bitcoin
to effectively
have a role in um society that like
is as large or larger than the dollar
there needs to be like
leadership that represents it almost
like democratic kind of thing
well that's a real counter-intuitive
point because most bitcoiners including
myself would say no the lack of
leadership is
a great quality to have because if you
have a charismatic leader and a
foundation or corporation that controls
it
maybe they can control the features of
the protocol and maybe they can
expropriate holders of the coin or
you know build in an endowment that pays
them off and
gives them privileged access to the
units of the coin for instance so
you know we call people that have
privileged access to the money spigot
cantillon insiders which is there's this
economist that pointed out that
as you know i think richard county on
that as money enters the economy has an
uneven flow right so you see this in the
last
last decade or so before that too
the consequence of money printing in
this country is people that own
financial assets
made a lot of money and people that
didn't didn't so you see that
cantelon insider cantelon outsider
effect
and it's the same with a cryptocurrency
in many other alternative
cryptocurrencies that do
have these corporate entities or these
leaders and ceos
they're able to make specific decisions
regarding
the protocol and the currency of the
asset the benefit themselves their
cronies etc
and that's not a good feature to have i
mean
it does grant you you know the ability
to orchestrate decisions
in a faster and more efficient way but
long term what you're trying to optimize
for if you're creating a money
is monetary credibility and soundness so
you don't really want it changing all
that often
and you don't want to have the
appearance of
you know these elites that are engaging
in rent seeking or anything like that so
there's definitely people that are
influential in bitcoin there's core
developers that people listen to because
it's
i would say meritocracy largely and
they're sort of self-appointed high
priest of the protocol
i write a lot about bitcoin people
listen to me but it's a completely free
market
of ideas right i don't have any
authority within bitcoin whatsoever
i'm just a scribbler you know you use
the scribbles
so was aristotle uh socrates
and nietzsche okay at the high
level uh technically how does bitcoin
work
is there interesting things you could
say like what are minors
what are nodes full nodes what are
blocks
what's proof of work is there uh a nice
way to wrap up
a clean explanation of the protocol oh
man
that's uh that could be a whole that
could be another five hours
is there interesting because i'd love to
talk to you about block size wars and
sort of the
the the politics psychology the
principles around that but sort of
building up to that it'd be nice to talk
about how the thing works
that's fair i mean and the block size
wars are really fascinating
discussion of how governance debates
intersect with technical features um
so i guess we can yeah so basically
at the highest possible level bitcoin is
a
globally shared uh it's really a
replicated ledger that
um any participant that wants to be an
equal peer on that ledger
they want to maintain that ledger and
they want to stay up to date with the
global state
of the ledger and really any monetary
system is just
a ledger with physical cash
we benefit from the physical
instantiation
of the money so the physics is the
ledger the physics is a ledger right
same with gold right you can't just
produce new units of gold
so we trust that gold atoms are hard to
create
um although not impossible right um you
could uh
fire a bunch of protons and whatever is
the adjacent metal uh and create gold
atoms would be expensive
uh and the same with dollars you know we
trust that it's hard to counterfeit a
dollar
so we trust the physical analog world to
help maintain the state of that ledger
with digital money
like um you know the money in your bank
account
your checking account we basically trust
our institutions or banking institutions
to keep a faithful record
and then ultimately we trust the central
bank to administer that system
so there's kind of a handful of nodes in
bitcoin we trust that the economic
incentives of the system
are carefully poised basically so
we trust that the free market mining
competition
will lead to the miners assembling
transactions
into blocks in a faithful and correct
way
and that we are going to converge on a
global state of the ledger continuously
which updates every 10 minutes or so
with some variants
and then the miners aren't the sole
entities that control the system to
really
participate if you're a merchant and
you're accepting bitcoin
you really want to run your own full
node and check the whole history of
transactions
sort of something like when i say five
to 600 million transactions that have
ever occurred on bitcoin
so full node contains all the
transactions ever transacted
on the the bitcoin blockchain and that's
i saw it's like 200 gigs or something
like that it's like 350 something like
that
it's doable on a regular consumer laptop
and that is going to be
really key later on in the discussion
sure
but so you know that's really the
ultimate trust models first of all we
trust that the miners that assemble
transactions into blocks and
they are the archivists you know they
inscribe those transactions onto the
ledger
and they have an economic incentive to
sort of behave correctly because they're
getting
paid and no units of bitcoin that's part
of it but then really
you are also you're not fully trusting
them
you're actually if you want to run a
node you replay every single transaction
in the history of bitcoin
from the beginning to the current day
and you arrive at the present state that
way
so you don't really have to trust too
many people or entities
you can validate the correctness of that
all the rules have been followed
that all the bitcoins that were created
were done so in the valid
way that the inflation rate was adhered
to
and that there's no covert inflation you
know that
if you're spending 50 units of bitcoin
uh you had that bitcoin to spend
in the first place uh so it's sort of
delicately poised between node operators
who who you know engage in this validity
checking
kind of anti-counterfeiting checking and
then also the miners which are an
industrial entity
and they basically produce block space
and
assemble transactions in the box and
everybody so the miners are incentivized
to not mess with the system because
they're getting value from the system
so if they mess with it it's going to
decrease the value of their physical
work investment yeah so they have to
incur a real physical cost
to produce a block right so right now
you get uh 6.25 bitcoins in a block at a
minimum and then maybe some fees
as well and how hard is it to produce a
block now
well challenging i mean you need uh
so six point two five bitcoins and a
bitcoin's worth fifty five thousand
dollars or so
so it's probably going to cost you about
that amount
to produce it because it's a free market
competition
and miners have very free thin margins
so
it's like if i auction off a dollar you
would pay up to 99 cents
to buy that dollar for me it's exactly
what happens with miners
they're you know basically competing for
the right
to obtain new units of money so
logically speaking
they would pay up to the value of that
money in order to earn it
and for people who are not familiar the
process of mining
is solving a difficult cryptographic
problem
that's a computational problem it's i
would say it's not like
people sometimes represent it as like a
really challenging puzzle
like the individual puzzle is very
simple like you can do with pen and
paper if you wanted
you know like shawn 256 it's just that
you're searching through the big
mathematical space to find the needle in
the haystack
you're just doing lots of iterations of
a simple puzzle that's just brute force
hence like the stability of of the whole
idea of the proof of work
if it was a if you if there was a
shortcut it wouldn't be
it wouldn't work exactly so let's hope
nobody
solves sha-256 yeah there's a lot of
discussions in
from the quantum computing space but
everybody i i talk to
all my colleagues and that work on
quantum computers
uh say this we're quite a way quite a
long way away from that being an issue
in uh cryptography and then and
certainly in asian cryptocurrency
that should have been one of the sides
on these dice should have been quantum
because i don't think it is i forgot to
put on this edition
people should check out scott aaronson
there's a lot of people that are kind of
um
selling quantum snake oil so you should
be very careful
i think it is a really exciting space
that might
change the world in the next decade or
100 couple hundred years uh especially
for simulating quantum mechanical
systems
but in quantum machine learning uh
people should check out tensorflow
quantum
it's a nice way to sort of educate
yourself about the space
and actually if you're pragmatically
minded to
you know through software engineering
explore how you simulate quantum
circuits how you run machine learning on
those quantum circuits
the the main point that scott makes
scott erinson
people should check out his blog too is
that like
there's not yet a single machine
learning application
that doesn't do almost as well on a
classical computer so it doesn't
like yes the dream is somehow
uh quantum computers will change the
nature of
artificial intelligence but there's yet
to be an actual
algorithm that uh or a problem set or a
data set
where that would be the case so
skepticism is good in this space
anyway that said so you kind of
explained
uh how bitcoin works
you also wrote a blog post recently
giving a shout out to the new book
the block size wars
what is the block size what are the
block size wars
its history its importance its uh
philosophical foundations
yeah i mean bitcoin at this point we
have our own civil wars if you're
wondering
about how politically intense it gets
it's currently not hot it's cold
it's oh yeah we're in a dayton right now
there's no tanks or missiles at least
not yet hopefully
it can get a little violent i guess i
think one of the bitcoin core developers
or
one of the participants in the war got
swatted at one point
what's what it means when someone does a
fight a fake
uh phone call saying that you're holding
someone hostage at your house and the
swat team goes
it's pretty scary wow internet warfare
tactic
yeah but uh the block size warf i would
say effectively ended
um although we're definitely gonna have
more
civil wars in bitcoin for sure but
basically the core argument was
a technical one on its surface but a
very deep
political one at its core the technical
question is
how many megabytes should be in each
successive block
so satoshi basically installed a limit
of one megabyte per block
so we should backtrack there was no
limit
in the beginning and it seems like
satoshi
what is this 2000 the war started in
what 2017 or something like that
i don't know when the 15 was when the
you know
the battlecry what was the first battle
in the civil war
i don't remember but sort of satoshi i
don't know if you can comment it
on it like why does satoshi set the
limit to one megabyte
all of a sudden almost secretively
and in the beginning there was no limit
whatsoever
yeah i mean we can get into and people
have spent thousands of hours poring
over satoshi's writings to find
you know which side satoshi was on and
you can find
like any textual exegesis you can find
evidence for either
side right but uh yeah i mean
effectively when bitcoin was launched
there was a block size because
if you made a block over a certain size
with the first edition of the code
it would have crashed nodes but then
yeah in 2010 satoshi added the one
megabyte limit
in a covert way with no comments or
anything
and uh that's stock basically and uh
and then bitcoin blocks filled up and
people that had been socialized into
this vision of bitcoin as an effectively
free
transactional network like why pay a
transaction fee
if you're not at congestion if the block
isn't full the miner will mine your
transaction for free right
um people that had been brought up in
that
status quo from 2009 to kind of 2015
they noticed the blocks started to fill
up and they're like okay well let's just
remove this arbitrary limit
right what what could possibly be the
harm right and then
a whole other faction said no you need
to
cap the data throughput of the system
because if you increase it it's going to
be highly exclusionary
and ultimately regular folks are not
going to be able to run a full node
so there's a fixed number this is a
fixed frequency of blocks
and so if you want to increase the
number of transactions
per second you want to increase the size
of the block so
huge blocks allow you to shove in a lot
of transactions
right small blocks don't so that's what
you mean like constraining the system
so what's the benefit of a small block
size where transactions
when you can squeeze in only a small
number of transactions
and what's the benefit of a huge block
size where you can squeeze in a lot of
transactions
well it really comes down to the way you
think about the system
so a lot of people wanted bitcoin to be
visa scale
so to have blocks sufficiently large
that you could accommodate
a visa level scale of transactions so
which is many orders of magnitude more
transactions that's right i mean
preposterously larger in terms of data
throughput
then you know bitcoin offers up or at
least it used to 144 megabytes of space
per day
and your average transaction is 350
bytes so
you know you could add a push to for 500
000 transactions a day which is not many
so if you wanted to get to visa scale
you'd have to increase blocks
obnoxiously large uh the small blockers
claimed that this would
overwhelm the ability of any regular
person to
ingest that data and stay current at the
you know state of the ledger
to rebroadca to replay all those
transactions to ensure that the protocol
rules were valid so basically
the small blocker contention is that you
eliminate the trustlessness
of the system by pushing a ton of data
through the system because only one or
two
industrial heavy duty nodes would ever
be able to run
the protocol at that point so by the way
in the civil war the two sides
as you as you're calling them the small
blocker and
the big blocker sides and so that
takes us back to the uh the thing that
you mentioned that a regular computer
could be a node
and uh with a big with big blocks
that's no longer going to be the case so
just the number of transactions
is going to blow up the size of the
blockchain
that every full node has to store and so
then
as opposed to a regular mom-and-pop
type of node you're going to have to
have data centers
so they're going to have to be owned by
large organizations there's going to
have to be very few of them
and that's how you centralize the
control over this whole
operation so the big blocker
yes it allows you to be visa and do a
huge number of transactions but it
becomes centralized and the small
blockers
you cannot actually do kind of merchant
style transactions
but you get the decentralized benefit
well i don't even think the big block
approach would allow you to be visa
frankly
because there's effectively one node at
the visa network
right so you don't really need to
maintain this peer-to-peer architecture
at all
and the amount of data you'd have to
push through the network
to reach visa scale is a really
preposterous amount
i mean and we have now evidence for what
happens
when you try and scale up as a
blockchain and do 10 million
transactions a day which is still not
visa scale right you know
i've i've you know seen what it's like
to operate
those nodes and it's not pretty so there
are totally
genuine computer science physical limits
because it's a it's a broadcast network
everyone has to be aware of every
transaction
and that model which gives you the
trustlessness the nice guarantees where
everyone's an equal peer on the network
everyone has audited the full
history of the transactions that model
falls apart under stress
so the small block of vision is that
ultimately you would scale in a layered
approach
with the base layer transactions being
settlement style transactions
and you know payments happening at the
other layers basically
is that universally agreed upon or like
to a large degree agreed upon that the
small blockers have won in this
in this debate well where would you put
the the current state of affairs
there was a wave of competing bitcoin
implementations
in starting in 2015 with bitcoin xt
um actually gavin anderson who is the
guy that satoshi handed the reins to
when satoshi left gavin supported this
large
block proposal uh and so that was that
didn't achieve
consensus and then there was bitcoin
unlimited
and then later on there was a genuine
hard fork
where the small blockers couldn't or the
large blockers couldn't push through
their proposals
on bitcoin itself so they just created a
competing version of bitcoin you know so
by the way uh
maybe you can comment on but sort of
hard fork versus a soft fork a hard fork
is
when it's not no longer compatible
what's the right way to put it
they can't operate on the same
blockchain they say with the same
protocol
yeah so there's a few ways to define
them and it's
pretty it gets controversial as well but
um
one one way to define it as a hard fork
is
a expansion of protocol rules and a soft
fork as a shrinking of protocol rules
that's an interesting way to find it
it's not very intuitive so i don't like
that way
um another way is that a hard fork is
backwards and compatible whereas
softwork is
in theory backwards compatible so in
august 2017 basically the large blockers
had had enough
and they said we're going to hard fork
bitcoin we're going to
create a clone an alternative version of
bitcoin
which has the same a shared history
as bitcoin itself but you completely
fork it and you create a new future
and uh but you know everybody that had a
balance on bitcoin at the time
also had a balance on the alternative
coin bitcoin cash
and so that was really that's what it's
called bitcoin cash is the hard fork
that was one of them there were more
actually i mean what what the heck
is bitcoin satoshi uh satoshi's vision
bsv
bitcoin sv so this is all talking about
increasing the max
the limit of the block size more and
more and more yeah that was one of the
changes they wanted to push through uh
but bsv was the fork
of bitcoin cash so hard fork of bitcoin
yeah so and so now there's multiple big
blocker
block chains floating around it's like
what are your thoughts about them
well i was pretty popular sorry to
interrupt
uh are they popular i mean if you look
at the metrics they're not and
oh they they don't trade they i think
each trade below one percent of the
value of bitcoin itself i see so
measuring popularity is like how much
they actually oh
value uh value frequency of trade oh no
no i mean
they they do like a fair number of
transactions but there's an there's no
way to know that that is genuine
or just contrived so you know ultimately
the true measure i think in my mind is
just
where the market prices these protocols
relative to bitcoin
uh because that's like a prediction
market if
if bitcoin cash was being priced at 50
of bitcoin you could say
the market has given it a 50 chance of
unseating bitcoin
right but both bitcoin cash and bitcoin
sv which was a hard fork from bitcoin
cash itself
are well i believe at this point well
below one percent of the value of
bitcoin
and in the so in like the ranking of
different cryptocurrencies
what is it bitcoin ethereum is ethereum
in value
uh yeah number two and then bitcoin cash
is the one that
it's in the top five right but it's just
a fast drop off
you know i haven't checked lately but i
think it's it's reached kind of
morbidity
you know it doesn't really have much
traction
um the blocks aren't full so the whole
value proposition was
you know we will get all this merchant
adoption if we increase the block size
that just didn't materialize
in my view they had a flawed vision of
how adoption works
and what blockchain should optimize for
uh maybe maybe you get a bitcoin cash
supporter on the show they'll give you a
different answer
but yeah full disclosure you know i have
my sympathies and
i think the small blockers won that
skirmish for sure so at this time
there's no
merchant adoption and so on so it's kind
of its vision the whole
reason for existence for at least for
now hasn't materialized
and so that's that's the indication it's
possible that
well it's a sign that perhaps that's the
wrong way to accomplish the scalability
well you know first of all i think the
layered scaling model is definitely
definitely correct i mean that's
absolutely the way these things have to
work
given the constraints of blockchains
what is the layered
scaling model it's really how all
payment systems scale
blockchain or otherwise and i think a
lot of people don't understand this
is that there is no equivalent to
scaling at the base layer
in the regular payment space that
totally doesn't happen
all of them are built on layers so visa
is like the fifth layer
in the payment stack that ultimately
depends on these utility scale
settlement systems like fedwire
chips ach basically interbank settlement
systems
so you've got these slow moving but high
assurance
settlement systems fedwire is probably
the number one
you know like when you send a wire
that's using the fedwar system typically
on top of that you know you have banks
and then you have payment processors
and then you build up these layers and
layers and layers and then you have
these fast payments you know
venmo paypal credit debit visa
you name it those payments are not final
when they occur
you know a credit card transaction will
not be final for
90 to 120 days so
that's fascinating you've decoupled the
payment the financial message
and the settlement those are distinct
concepts and the settlement happens on a
deferred basis
so that's how you get scalability is you
have lots and lots of
messages but that they don't settle for
a long time
they might settle on a net basis on an
end-of-day basis
but so that's really how it works and
then you have fed wire where your
average transactions in the millions of
dollars
and there's only a few hundred thousand
transactions a day it's sort of an
interbank
settlement network so that's my
vision for how i think bitcoin will
develop
too bitcoin itself on the base layer is
the
slow moving high assurance final
settlement network where if you're
sending money to the other side of the
globe
to someone you don't trust where you
want that payment to be final
in a short period of time and both
counterparties know it's final
then you would use that but if you
wanted to buy coffee you could do it on
a second
you know second layer uh lightning would
be one way
there's a bunch of side chains now or
you could
use you know a more centralized solution
if you wanted
it's kind of a profound idea that in the
space of transactions when you're buying
coffee or buying anything really from
merchant or exchanging goods and all
those kinds of things
that most of the time like basic
honest behavior human behavior which
it does appear that most of our
societies is based on the fact that
we're all
most of us are honest is
like stuff is not going to go wrong when
you do the transaction
and you only need like the base layer
well there's bitcoin whether it's
uh i forget the terms you use for the
for the credit card version
but you need that just to verify
just to like resolve any disagreements
or shady
yeah and and that's a really rare
occurrence
so it's okay for that to be handled uh
in this in the small block debate uh
handled at a rate that's much much lower
than the rate of the transactions
that's kind of it's a really interesting
idea that when we spend money
we didn't actually exchange the money
most of the time yeah most of the time
you're not getting final settlement when
you do a transaction
and oftentimes that causes there
are there's pluses and minuses on the
plus side you have huge efficiency
if you use a credit network like visa
but that it's in the name credit
right visa is extending you credit right
they're kind of guaranteeing your
reputation to the merchant
but fraud happens all the time right
there's always fraud
because you have this reversibility
right
um and so you can you know engage in
fraud against a merchant
um if you have a final settlement
there's no possibility for fraud so
that's one reason merchants kind of like
accepting bitcoin because
once you receive an inbound bitcoin
payment and you
deliver some good or service you know
that payment can't be reversed
but frankly most of the transactions we
you know undertake on a daily basis
do not require those strong assurances
of final settlement
there's one exception which is physical
cash with physical cash
or the open dime a cash-like product
you actually are getting final
settlement but
online most online banking transactions
most p2p
digital wallet transactions in the
dollar system
they're not really final at all you
mentioned lightning
lightning network what is it what are
your thoughts
on it and what are your thoughts about
any kind of alternatives
so lightning is one potential
payment solution built on top of bitcoin
where you have different assurances
different transactional assurances
but ultimately it's very proximate to
the base layer so if something goes
wrong you can always basically settle to
the base layer this layer two
yeah layer two you could say and
basically the intuition is kind of like
opening a bar tab
so you go to the bar and you might drink
a dozen beers over the course of the
night
maybe half a dozen um
and well i guess nobody goes to the bar
these days but
let's say you did yeah you open a tab
and at the end of the night you settle
up once you're not
necessarily paying each time you get
another beer
so it's it's the same idea you're
opening a channel an ongoing
relationship with your counterparty
and so lightning has you open a channel
the counterparty and you're sort of
sending back and forth these
cryptographic commitments saying you
know i agree to send you some bitcoin
but you don't necessarily settle each
time you make a transaction so you do
hundreds of thousands
of transactions in a channel the other
thing lightning proposes is saying okay
well
now that we have channels established
what if we interlocked a number of
channels together
so if you and i have a channel and you
know me and my buddy have a channel
my buddy can now pay you because you're
you have a relationship through me
basically and so lightning is this
network this overlay network that sits
on top of bitcoin
and allows people to transact in a much
faster and less frictional way
without the need for bitcoin's kind of
slow periodic settlement
um assuming that everything sort of goes
well uh
do you see any downsides to this like
have you seen flaws in the whole system
from a security perspective from a
scaling perspective
any of that or is it is lightning
working well
it works i've i use it um when i
initially
sold those dice i sold them on lightning
i was one of the first
merchants to use lightning back in the
day uh the first edition of the dice
so people could buy these guys somewhere
well they used to be able to i haven't
made a new addition
recently they're very scarce and very
special
they're like physical nfts just kind of
yeah i mean the flaw with lightning is
really that you
you know and this can be remediated a
number of ways but you have to sort of
pre-fund these channels so it's
it's a weird concept to have to inject
liquidity into a channel
in order to accept a payment you know so
i'm sure those user experience problems
can be solved
but it's still uh in a state of relative
immaturity
so we'll see in terms of other ideas
that are
side chains or soft forks of bitcoin
you've mentioned something about schnoor
and taproot
what are your thoughts about this update
to bitcoin
and in terms of its promise to improve
privacy and scaling
and so on and what what other things are
you interested excited about in terms of
the development of bitcoin
well schnorr and toproot that's the
first new protocol upgrade
since segwit in 2017 which was what
laid the groundwork for lightning to be
developed basically
and fruit is really the first protocol
change
in three almost four years now
so it's we're very excited about it
what uh what are i mean is there any
something interesting to say
technically about what are the things
that's actually going to improve
and um maybe on a on the politics side
bringing a protocol change
uh on bitcoin what does that actually
involve yeah i mean it's a huge deal
because the last time we tried to make a
change to the protocol we had whole
civil war over it
and it was incredibly difficult to get
segwit activated in 2017
uh and it took all this bricksmanship
and threats and all these campaigns
and it was this whole thing luckily i
think
things have quieted down and there's
much more consensus that schnorr top
rate is a good
change to bitcoin and everyone generally
supports it
but everyone kind of has ptsd over the
last time
when we tried to change bitcoin and so
we're sort of really dithering over how
we actually want to implement it
so it's taking forever because we're
trying to set the protocol
for how do you change bitcoin itself and
that
all of our assumptions went out the
window last time so we're trying to
reset and decide
what is a legitimate way to institute a
change to bitcoin
so that's actually the big question
right now it's not should we implement
these changes we basically all agree
that we should it's a meta question is
what's the valid way to implement new
changes to bitcoin
what's a way that is scalable in the
long term and will last and people
consider credible
even if this one isn't controversial at
all so that's
where we're at we're basically debating
over how do we implement this change
that we all want
if to get a feeling of how slow bitcoin
governance is and how deliberate it is
everybody collectively wants the change
but we haven't fully agreed on how we're
going to put it into bitcoin
so it's a classic sort of bitcoin
situation
but what it is is i mean schnorr is an
alternative signature scheme i think it
was encumbered by a patent
and it only just been unencumbered when
satoshi created bitcoin i believe
it's a better signature scheme than
elliptic curves which is what
uh big than ecdsa which is what bitcoin
uses
and uh so it's been long enough that we
now trust it
you know kind of in cryptography it's
meant to be lindy you know it's sort of
you want to test it over time and then
it's considered safe to use so schnorr
has been around for long enough that
we've decided to rip out ecdsa
and insert snore which is just a
different signature scheme which is more
efficient
um and it has better properties like if
you want to do a multi-signature
transaction where
many people collectively sign in order
permission a spend
that would be more efficient in a bytes
sense
than uh ecdsa for instance so it's
pretty incremental
and then toproot is all about
having transactional conditions
that are sort of withheld from final
entry onto the blockchain
um so it it's kind of a way to
um have more private conditional
transactions on bitcoin
so both of them i would say are
incremental uh
changes is this an over-exaggeration
that channels approve might improve
privacy and scaling
which is it like at the high level
things that people mention
is that just like a dramatic way of of
trying to frame
uh what's fundamentally an incremental
improvement
yes but incremental is the word right
it's not we're not going to get an order
of magnitude enhancement to either
privacy or scaling but we
will get a considerable enhancement
but privacy and scaling are actually two
sides the same coin because
you get more transactional privacy by
removing data from the ledger
so that there's less metadata for people
to surveil and analyze
and that's also you scale by compressing
and being really space efficient with
transactions
and the more parsimonious you are the
more economically
dense each bite that everyone has to
retain on the ledger is
and so those are you know very closely
allied concepts
so do you mind if we go through some
potential criticisms
of bitcoin totally yeah i've spent the
last five years
you know tackling these every day so are
the
the dice the same uh those two are the
same yeah
there are three editions so let's go
[Applause]
okay go with the dice what do we got oh
silk road
what does that mean road classic classic
situation
so i mean that was the darknet
marketplace set up by ross albrecht
in the early days of bitcoin that's one
of the first killer apps for bitcoin was
being
the payments network behind this darknet
marketplace
and uh you know where you'd go to buy
drugs and things
and so that became associated with
bitcoin if you remember the press
coverage from back then
but over time that faded and it became
less of a critique but
so like the the critique is that uh
bitcoin is something you
would use for illegal activity for drugs
for crimes all those kinds of things
as opposed to for any kind of legitimate
transactions yeah
in the merchant transactions and today
bitcoin settles 10 billion dollars a day
and the vast vast majority of it is you
know completely legitimate it's just a
useful
alternative system but back then a huge
fraction of all bitcoin transactions
were related to the
basically illicit marketplaces and if
you're just tuning in
this incredible 12-sided die has 11
common criticisms of bitcoin that nick
yeah in in a genius way has put together
maybe we could do a couple more
oh said that it was satoshi something
satoshi coins satoshi coins we we
touched on that early in the episode
what if satoshi returns and sells
all of their coins so we don't know for
sure how many coins satoshi actually
mined or produced because there's a
degree of probabilistic analysis
that you would do there's a few
few thousand blocks that were mined by
what we think is a single entity in sort
of 2009
and so if you add them all up you get to
about a million so people think that
satoshi
mined a million coins and then they're
worried that satoshi would return and
market sell all the coins
thus crushing the price of bitcoin
so looking at some of these uh
no ceo i think we touch we've already
hit on
the dice no merchants that that's
no longer true about that yeah
there's a scalability one and i think
that one has addressed
the idea that you're mentioning with the
block size debates and the lightning
network that
by adding extra layers on top you can
you can achieve scalability
that's my vision that's my theory um
and you know you can do it in a
permissionless and a permissioned way
like coinbase
is a big bitcoin exchange they provide
scalability
they're a financial institution you know
you can settle up
internally on their own database and
then you know periodically settle to
bitcoin so
oh so they don't uh they do something
like the lighting network internally so
something like this the middle kind of
mechanism well honestly i'm not sure
exactly how it works they might have
that
built in but just generally speaking
institutional scaling
is a model for scaling right where you
could have
banks holding bitcoin and they issue
notes against bitcoin and
those are your payments and then the
base layers the settlement
layer i think that's what you're getting
with the
boiling oceans is this is like the
impact
on uh weather and the environment and
the environment
so uh you know that is a concern that
people have in terms of like the proof
of work requires that there's
a lot of computational resources and uh
being used and that
requires a lot of energy and like some
large percentage of the world's energy
is used to
to mine bitcoin what's how how would you
respond to that criticism
yeah i mean that's been the loudest
critique of bitcoin this year
in the press this year really yeah so i
mean it's not like a new
criticism but bitcoin is consuming more
energy than ever
so as the price rises the electricity
consumption rises and so
we've we've heard renewed uh
you know bellyaching over this for sure
i mean it's
if you don't believe that bitcoin is
useful then you're inclined to think
that all the energy consumption is a
waste
so that's you know it's it's it's
something that's sort of unrebuttable
if you fundamentally contest the
validity of the bitcoin system
so if bitcoin is like a thing
that will take over it will become like
the main
mechanism of financial transactions
or transactions period in the world then
you say well the cost of energy use is
actually quite low relative to the
benefit it provides
if you think it's not going to be if
it's just a
volatile uh way to
uh to make a little money in the short
term then you see the energy used as
really wasteful that's totally spurious
yeah yeah so
so then there's no really response i
suppose
that's so i can totally you know get
into the details of bitcoin synergy mix
and things like that but
that's like at a high level what the
debate is it's this normative question
like does bitcoin have an entitlement to
consume any of the world's resources
and that's actually where the debate
should end much of the time
because a lot of people fundamentally
dispute
the the validity or usefulness of
bitcoin as a system
and so of course they're gonna consider
the energy usage illegitimate
now there's a lot of mitigating factors
if you you know think the bitcoin is a
potentially useful system which is
bitcoin
consumes energy in a very peculiar way
which virtually no
other industry does which is that
bitcoin
is a geography independent buyer of
energy
which is not how we humans
typically consume energy like we need
energy to be produced near to population
centers
and we need it to be produced at the you
know corresponding to the peaks and
troughs of our consumption
right because we have to 100 match the
demand and the supply at all times
right otherwise we have blackouts so
bitcoin doesn't care
about any of that it just buys energy on
a constant basis
and so it's you know indifferent to
where it's being produced
and so the the consequence of all that
is that
bitcoin will buy energy that's otherwise
being wasted
basically so it will buy so-called
stranded
energy assets that would not make it to
a population center and in fact most
energy produced is ultimately does not
sort of make it
to you know your your socket in your
wall
um and so this is why so much bitcoin is
mine in china for instance
it's not because you know chinese
industrialists had a special affinity
for bitcoin
it's because the chinese grid had a
massive overabundance
of energy in particularly in four
provinces sichuan yunnan
inner mongolia and zhang jing so in
those four provinces those are all
pretty distant from major population
centers
so because of that you can't really
transport the energy that easily and so
huge amounts of energy are curtailed or
basically wasted in all these provinces
and so miners set up shop there because
they could mine bitcoin with the excess
energy they could monetize this thing
that otherwise was going to go to waste
so you know there's things like that
which you know
i think mitigate the the reality bitcoin
is not really
rival um with our consumption of
electricity it's not depriving anyone of
electricity it's mostly
these stranded assets that are going
into supporting the bitcoin network
so maybe let's do a last one since you
mentioned china says china control
so so much mining is happening in china
how do we not uh how do we prevent
nation states from controlling much of
bitcoin yeah that's the flip side of a
large
portion of the blocks being mined in
china due to this energy feature which i
discussed
which is that there's a lot of chinese
miners for sure
now the question ultimately is what
degree of control do miners have over
the bitcoin system
right and that was part of the block
size
debate i mean the miners when we
implemented sub-graded witness in in
2017 the miners just
didn't want to do it eventually the
users the regular folks running nodes
rebelled and basically said look we're
going to implement this whether or not
you do it
and it was a threat to the value of
bitcoin because if
this threat had gone through it could
have split bitcoin and it had been
really messy
so the miners sort of capitulated so
i think the current consensus is that
miners do not have unilateral control
over bitcoin
and the governance is more poised
between people that run nodes
developers and miners it's sort of a
triumvirate
where neither of them has you know total
control
uh so that's my current model for
controlling bitcoin
i think if you asked a minor they would
tell you they didn't feel that they had
sort of unilateral control over bitcoin
either
almost as a thought experiment can i ask
you to think about
if you're if some of your predictions
some of your analysis
some of your understanding of bitcoin is
wrong
in in the following sense where it will
not have the impact
uh that you have a
vision for it that you will not have the
scale of impact and perhaps in terms of
value will go to zero to something very
low and other cryptocurrency or other
financial systems will
overtake it what would be the reason
for that in your mind like why might you
be
wrong if you look back at it yeah in the
future
what did you not understand about
bitcoin that uh
will result in that yeah that's a great
question
i think for that to happen one of two
things would have to
obtain one of two things would have to
happen for bitcoin to just
be irrelevant basically um
either central banks totally clean up
their act and uh
you know stop engaging in rampant money
printing
which i don't expect that to happen
anytime soon i mean it looks like we're
normalizing this new regime of inflation
you know pro-inflation just to remediate
the debt issues we have
uh so that would be one thing that would
make bitcoin
cryptocurrency much less relevant as if
everyone becomes totally assured of the
soundness
of sovereign currencies basically
namely the dollar like the dollar being
the main one uh
that it seems like we're going
completely opposite direction
but most people seem to be noticing the
stirrings of inflation in society
and you might have noticed it too it's
showing up in commodity prices lumber
prices
and food obviously in financial assets
and
it'll show up in consumer prices
generally soon
but so that would be one way for bitcoin
to basically become irrelevant
because it's a you know it's a
dialectical thing
bitcoin is held in opposition to
the established monetary regime so if
they
completely reform themselves and you
know the dollar becomes
super sound once again and the fed stops
tinkering
the way they constantly do then uh
then we wouldn't need cryptocurrency as
much the other thing would be if
a completely superior design
for a new sort of state independent
monetary system emerged
but it's really hard to even imagine how
that would come to emerge
and there's good reasons to think that
bitcoin
the conditions of its launch were
extremely favorable and hard to
replicate
can you speak to some of those
conditions why it's a unique uh
timing wise uh moment for bitcoin to
emerge
yeah so obviously bitcoin was born in
the depths of the financial crisis which
gives it a nice
nice historical element but that was
kind of a coincidence honestly we know
that satoshi had been working on it
earlier in back or in 2017.
um the really special thing about
bitcoin was that
it was launched anonymously by an entity
that did not seek any glory or credit
for what they did
and apparently never monetized it at all
so they never really
moved any of their coins satoshi sent
one test transaction
to uh hal finney who's one of the
earliest bitcoiners
aside from that as far as we know
satoshi never spent any of their coins
so you have this wonderful promethean
quality
whereby it's almost self-sacrificial i
mean
it's like this borderline god-like
figure in terms of their restraint
finds this monetary technology and
releases it to the world
and pays the price they never took
advantage of their filthy luger you know
they never
they never recognized any of the 50
billion dollars that they
made from bitcoin right and satoshi also
didn't
assign themselves any privileged access
uh to the coins you know satoshi could
have just written in the code
i own ten percent of the coins but they
didn't they just mined
in the open free market competition like
everyone else it's just that
satoshi is an early miner to support the
network
accumulate a lot of coins for sure but
they didn't have any privilege
special access so that's one thing
that's
extremely special about the launch is
that we had a founder
that was truly committed to the monetary
protocol and didn't seek
either recognition or financial spoils
and then also left you know satoshi left
in 2010
2011 and hasn't really been heard from
since it's a very george washington
move gangster move where he didn't want
power and once he got power he let go of
it
precisely that was a key actually move
when that was that was uh probably one
of the most important moves at the
founding of this country
that's right george washington could
have been a king probably if he'd wanted
and satoshi could have been jerome
powell
if he'd wanted and satoshi could have
held on to power
indefinitely but chose to leave the
other thing is that bitcoin
circulated for a long period of time
from january 2009
to about july 2010
without really having a financial value
so
there weren't really any marketplaces it
didn't have a value
and so that gave it this really great
distribution
you know among a broad set of
stakeholders and there were no venture
funds or hedge funds
you know trying to aggressively buy up
all the supply back then
now when you have new cryptocurrencies
launched they're like aggressively
pre-mined
and some gigantic silicon valley venture
fund
is going to own 30 of it and so it's
sort of impossible to conceive of how
that could become a global money
because how could you know a
silicon valley investment firm own
30 percent of the money supply that
doesn't make sense that's just so
oligarchical right it's unbelievable so
bitcoin by contracts is a very bottom-up
thing
it was the early enthusiasts uh
people that were you know really um
excited about the
technology they're the ones that obtain
those early coins and so
there was a real element of fairness and
just an organic nature to its launch
which would be incredibly hard to
recapture today let's say
satoshi came back and they
said okay i made bitcoin 2.0 i'm going
to release it
there would be the most aggressive land
grab ever
by you know gigantic pools of capital to
sort of get favorable allocations of the
new system
right can satoshi with bitcoin 2.0 build
in
a resistance mechanism or a prevention
mechanism for the land grab
it would be hard to because you know if
you have capital and resources
i mean if it was a proof of work chain
you just have people that would invest a
ton of money in mining for instance
but most new blockchains
cryptocurrencies are just
sold basically they're you know issued
in token offerings kind of thing so
so it's hard to enforce through the
protocol the decentralization of
control yeah power it'd be challenging
too and people have tried to do air
drops you know
where they you know distribute coins to
a large number of people basically
doesn't work
most people don't care about the air
drop so it's hard to have an equitable
distribution
i think the conditions of bitcoin's
launch were so lucky
and favorable that they're very unlikely
to be replicated
so i do think it's going to be real
challenge to ever have a new competitor
that's as decentralized as leaderless as
dispersed sort of distributed as bitcoin
as has its credibility
i don't know how you could overrule it
on those important features
what about bitcoins comparison to other
current cryptocurrencies so
bitcoin versus ethereum for example
why um is it possible that ethereum
overtakes bitcoin
that's certainly possible yeah i'm not
ruling it out
um ethereum leadership is sort of wise
enough to understand
that they shouldn't compete with bitcoin
on those
most profound qualities like ethereum
doesn't really aspire to be
more sound from a monetary perspective
than bitcoin
right the in fact the ethereum
leadership are sort of constantly
tweaking the monetary policy
so they went for a completely different
trade-off right
they also don't compete to be as
decentralized from a governance
perspective right
because there's leadership there's an
eth foundation there's a charismatic
leader of italic
and ethereum has this policy of hard
forks
so in bitcoin hard forks extremely rare
in ethereum it's the default way to
change things so it's a much
more adaptive system and it changes more
frequently
but that also means that it's sort of
they're incurring more risk
when they introduce those changes
there's much more complexity so
ethereum is smart because they sort of
understood bitcoin as the top dog when
it comes to a sound
money a digital gold type thing
and they went for all of the different
trade-offs they wanted to be
more of a platform they wanted to have
more complexity the transactional layer
they wanted to take on more risk in
terms of changing the protocol they
wanted to change more quickly
they wanted to make the monetary policy
more mutable
so ethereum takes that completely
different tack of course
you know i'm not ruling out that it
could take over bitcoin from a market
cap perspective
it's just a very different system and i
tend to think the bitcoin is the most
disruptive one because it's
the most equipped to challenge sovereign
currencies
in the grand scheme do you think they
can co-exist
so like in the future is do you see a
world where
you know uh ethereum captures
some large percent of the market and but
nevertheless the minority
a hundred percent 100 percent bitcoin
has already been tokenized and put
on to ethereum many units of bitcoin i
think over a billion dollars worth
so not only do they coexist they are
actually mutualistic
so they're like two creatures that have
this you know it's like the
the rhino and like the bird the pecks
the parasites off the rhino's back or
whatever
yeah right so i don't know which is
which in the analogy but
yeah i don't know who the parasites are
yellow or you know the alligator and the
teeth cleaning fish or whatever right so
oh you know i always wonder why the
alligator doesn't just
eat the fish but uh i guess they're
brushing its teeth
basically so um ethereum
is it gives you more transactional
flexibility there's much more
experimentation happening there
it has this whole decentralized finance
element
there's a huge number of bitcoins that
circulate on the ethereum protocol
right because ethereum is open to other
asset types
basically so i think that's actually
accretive to both systems
because ethereum gets to have this good
form of collateral bitcoin
on the system which is good volatility
characteristics
and then it's a supply sync for bitcoins
which are sort of now they're injected
into this third-party protocol
and that i think reduces the velocity of
bitcoin overall and it's probably good
for the valuation
so you see it it quite possibly could be
a symbiotic relationship that's really
interesting
i think so i think so uh what are your
thoughts
about uh vitalik buterin
what are your thoughts about some of the
other figures in the space
outside of bitcoin i think vitalik made
some mistakes with ethereum
ultimately like i disagree with some of
the decisions that were made
along the way like there's this infamous
case of this bailout
where 14 of ether was lost in the smart
contract
or really the this smart contract that a
lot of ethereum leadership were sort of
backing and supporting was hacked
and then the foundation with vitalik
support
chose to make a change to the underlying
protocol
to undo the hack right so
to me that was not the most
prudent approach because you're
basically
violating the core protocol rules in
order to undo
you know to bail out a specific contract
which is failed
granted there was a lot of ether in
there but
i think that shook the credibility of
the ethereum system
it happened back in 2016 i think uh that
was one reason why i
i became disenchanted with ethereum so
basically
even if in that case that might fix an
important problem that opens the door
to centralized like
manipulation of the protocol in the
future yeah it basically demonstrates
that there's certain elites
at the protocol level that can exercise
specific control
over the system and you know
a lot of people have lost money in hacks
on ethereum and a lot of contracts have
gone south
a huge amount of value but they didn't
get a bailout
and it was just when you know this
specific
contract called the dao dao
was hacked that you know the leadership
intervened
and and you know to their credit they
haven't had a significant intervention
or bailout since then
but it did normalize the practice and i
think it weakened the social contract
so i would prefer that you sort of bite
the bullet in that situation
and you accept the failure of that
contract
that would be a ballsy move to bite that
bullet
yeah i mean and then you would have had
like what they thought was a malicious
entity in
control of a lot of coins i think the
real reason they
sort of felt that they had to undo it
was because they'd always plan to move
to this proof-of-stake world
where your political control over the
system is a function of your wealth in
the system
and they didn't want this attacker which
would have inherited
all this significant wealth to have
influence
over that future proof of stake version
that's sort of my theory
yeah i mean that makes sense this it
kind of reminds me
of the bailout of car companies
you know this this is difficult there's
a lot of people that criticize the
bailout of these
large companies you know but creative
destruction i mean i
i was critical of the bailouts that
happened
during covid i mean i generally think
that it's healthier for society for
bad firms that aren't making money to
fail or be reorganized
under the various you know forms of
bankruptcy
and you saw what happens you see the
you know the corporate sector in japan
uh in the 90s
there was this like slow motion
insolvency where
basically firms weren't allowed to fail
and the japanese corporate sector lost
competitiveness because
bad firms did not fail and so
you know the process of actual
capitalism for the market clearing
didn't occur
so i'm always in support of um
you know of the free market being
allowed to clear for non-profitable
firms to fail
it's complicated man because uh creative
destruction
seems to be in the long term a positive
but human civilization is such that
short-term pain has real impact on
people
you know yeah policymakers don't ever
want to incur that short-term pain
because they have a short-term
outlook and term limits often
so but and also just it's short-term
pain
forget policy they just forget
politicians it sucks to lose a job
for an individual you know you could say
the company the creative destruction of
a company
means the company was inefficient and
that's going to have a ripple effect
of teaching everybody else what an
efficient operation looks like
but like there's jobs that are being
lost there's families that have to
suffer because of that i mean
that's attention we live in society is
having a
basic safety net for our world um
because there's a level beyond which
like if through creative destruction
that you have
some percent of the population that dips
below a certain level that you would
call
like suffering we don't want that and
that's a difficult
thing to live with like yes in the long
term
you want inefficiency to be destroyed
and
efficiency to be rewarded but there
there does seem to be a base level of
like quality of life
that we want to uphold that's a
difficult thing to think about i think
about that a lot there's a doctor called
paul farmer that um
you know there's like a in in haiti or
in africa there's a child who's dying
and as a doctor
you want to give everything you have all
the money you have to save that one
child
but there you know and you do actually
but that's uh
that's a very human action it's not an
economic
it's not a it's not a rational action
from a game theoretic perspective
because there's no way you can take that
action for every child who is suffering
but there's something deeply human about
doing that for that one particular child
in that same sense creative destruction
is an economic principle
but it's not it's not necessarily that
same kind of human principle
and there's a tension there i've i see
it i mean i think that's
the that's the issue with modern central
banking really is that
the central bank always has an incentive
to
lower interest rates and they've been
doing that from the 70s
towards today on this you know well 80s
really on this slow march down
because whenever there was a hint of a
crisis in the economy
where financial asset prices started to
fall
their reaction is okay we'll inject more
capital into the economy we'll save it
but my view is that these political
short-term measures
cause the buildup of a huge amount of
fragility in the long term and then the
ultimate collapse is much worse
than the counterfactual situation where
you raised interest rates
you you know you took your medicine and
the economy was healthier
so and that's sort of that's why you
know people like ray dolly
point out that you have these long-term
debt cycles
and we're sort of at the end of one now
is because we couldn't
take our medicine we couldn't you know
let interest rates clear
we constantly wanted to ward off any you
know difficulty and we didn't ever want
to deleverage
truly and then when the when the debt
crisis happens and it hits
it's you know horrendously bad
so do you think bitcoin might reach
a million dollars in value it's
uh it's having a current resurgence a
crazy one in 2021
in the recent months of uh over 60 000 i
guess it is now
do you think it's possible it goes over
a hundred thousand do you think it's
possible goes to a million
you can't rule anything out with bitcoin
so
i mean i'm not you know wanted to put
price targets on it but
one way it could reach a million dollars
is bitcoin's value stays unchanged in
real terms
and dollars crashes all it appreciates
against
um not that i expect hyperinflation but
yeah i mean
look bitcoin is worth about one tenth uh
slightly under one tenth the value of
all the gold in the world
and uh you know gold is worth ten
trillion eleven trillion dollars in the
aggregate
do i think bitcoin can be more
culturally and economically salient than
gold in two decades time
100 bitcoin was unknown
12 years ago and today 100 million
people worldwide
own bitcoin so just extrapolate that
what is the level of penetration you
think we'll get 500 million a billion
you know it you can easily tune these
adoption curves
however you like i i don't think it's
done
you know monetizing and being adopted
globally
do you think it become it can become
like the base layer for a lot of our
financial operation like you become
the main base layer for all our
transactions so like even
banks will use bitcoin essentially and
like visa would use bitcoin
as the base there like it would actually
operate very similarly at the
at the surface layer but at the base
there would all be bitcoin
that's precisely what i expect and banks
and visa are already using bitcoin
so visa has uh
embraced bitcoin in a really big way
actually and it's always funny to the
people saying bitcoin has to
change in a certain way so you can
compete with visa no visa adopted
bitcoin
right uh paypal adopted bitcoin
square adopted bitcoin obviously they're
not tearing out all of their existing
infrastructure but
they're totally engaging with this thing
uh banks
have now begun they got the green light
to provide custody
for bitcoin for their depositors that's
the first step
uh eventually like you know it'll happen
one of two ways either bitcoin native
financial institutions will become
banks that's already happening there's
bitcoin exchanges that have gotten
banking licenses
or banks themselves will start to engage
with bitcoin
as a reserve asset it'll converge either
way that's
totally happening uh and yes i mean i
don't think bitcoin is going to power
every financial transaction i think it
will coexist
alongside sovereign currencies but i
think it's a
great reserve asset it's a very powerful
asset to build a financial system on top
of
because it's highly highly auditable
it's something you can take physical
delivery of very cheaply and those are
great qualities
if you're a depositor in a bank they can
prove to you how much bitcoin they have
they can't really easily prove you know
in the old system how much gold they
held on deposit
and you can easily conduct a run on the
bank you can hold them accountable
because you can withdraw it because
you know making a bitcoin transaction is
pretty easy at the end of the day
unlike fiat currency it's like kind of
you can't really withdraw all your
dollars from the bank i mean
you sort of can but you're not going to
want to take delivery of
pounds of cash or anything like that so
it's a good modern asset upon which to
build
a financial system basically you you
mentioned square and
visa sort of investing in bitcoin what
do you make of uh
probably one of the higher profile big
investments in bitcoin which is tesla
and elon musk but there's also a few
billionaires like chamath and all of
them
investing what do you make of this whole
movement why do you think they're doing
it
i mean tesla is an interesting case why
do you think tesla's putting uh
buying so much bitcoin i honestly don't
know and i would love to truly know
elon's genuine thoughts on bitcoin
um because he's kind of sending us mixed
messages
honestly with his embrace of dogecoin
which is sort of playful not exactly
sure which one
what point he's trying to make there so
you were involved with deutsche kern you
mentioned offline a little bit
in like in the early days or at least
like uh
played around with it what do you make
of deutsche coin what do you make of
elon and doge
what do you make of this particular
meme coin is it is it one like a
legitimate cryptocurrency
or is it too like a
funny internet way of saying fu to the
man
yeah it's it's a good question i mean so
i wasn't like a figurehead in dogecoin
or anything but that was totally my
introduction to crypto was
mining dogecoin in my dorm room and then
tipping people online in dogecoin which
i just
thought was the funniest thing
so i guess that was really easy to
entertain back in 2013
but it was very playful at the time
there was a culture around dogecoin
and the people liked it because it was
in opposition to the bitcoin culture
which was really serious and involved
lots of austrian economics
and rothbard and hayek and stuff like
that so
that was my introduction to
cryptocurrency was because
i thought the bitcoin people were pretty
lame yeah and they were like way too
serious about all this stuff
and i was like okay i'll just be a part
of the dogecoin community and they did
all these funny publicity stunts like
they paid to send the jamaican bobsled
team to the olympics
you know like great stuff like they put
the dogecoin logo on top of a nascar car
yeah um and i just that tickled me so
much because it's like this
made-up internet coin this was back when
crypto was pretty novel and still like
kind of funny and stuff
and that was really entertaining fast
forward
seven eight years dogecoin is way less
entertaining now frankly because
it's the leadership left the community
spirit
evaporated um the meme didn't persist i
mean doge itself is not really a
contemporary meme
right i mean it's an old meme although
that new refresher the meme like doji
haven't heard that name in a long time
like where does like in a hat smoking a
cigarette i mean there's some sense
where elon is reinvigorating the meme
and it's funny because like one
influential figure could
do just that which just speaks to the
tension that you're talking about
like tesla is investing bitcoin and yet
elon he also tweets about bitcoin but
yeah he's i mean who am i to question
the meme right like yeah i i can't
you know dissect internet culture and
financially sit here and tell you it's
an invalid meme
yeah you know if if people believe in it
then it's real
is there a space for meme coins at this
at this time
like like doge or somebody or somebody
else to almost like
um you know there's it does serve a lot
of purposes which is
like you said it pulls in people into
this
whole space of digital currency in the
digital in
uh into cryptocurrency allow them to
explore alarm to have fun
as opposed to taking everything very
seriously is there still space for that
yeah yeah and i mean the crypto
landscape is very broad
today so whatever you know cultural
element you seek to find within crypto
you will find
it was a bit different in 2013 because
bitcoin was kind of the only game in
town there were a couple altcoins
and so dogecoin made a lot of sense as a
counterpart to bitcoin as the less
serious counterpart
today crypto is just this like gigantic
cultural
and economic trend so it's you know very
multifaceted
dogecoin is one of the many you know
ways that people have to engage with it
i think
a lot of people that buy dogecoin based
on elon's
implied guidance are going to lose money
because
fundamentally there's nothing enduring
about dogecoin it's an ancient
fork of bitcoin it's unmaintained
they're you know it's probably at risk
actually from a protocol perspective
it's merge mined with litecoin i think
um
if there was an inflation bug on
dogecoin it's unclear who would sort of
be able to remediate that
you know so it's not technologically
very sound
um so i wouldn't recommend that anyone
stores wealth in it
you know yes it's funny because
cryptocurrency
like my interest in cryptocurrency is in
the exploration of technical ideas
but cryptocurrency is also like in the
case of dogecoin
uh like for lols at least
originally like a meme coin but it's
also a uh mechanism for investment
and so those are sometimes attention
100 and it's unclear sort of like yeah
you know there's the meme with those
just almost become to take it to
i guess to a dollar trying to drive the
price of the value up to a dollar
but you know implied in that is like
this overlap of the meme
coin and like legitimate investment and
so you have a lot of young people i
think
who almost start getting greedy and want
to make money like as opposed to
uh having fun and that becomes a
different beast then because you're
essentially
making financial decisions that can have
a long lasting
like you know money is freedom
and uh if you make stupid financial
decisions
it you can remove freedom from your life
and that's
it could be detrimental in that sense so
i don't uh
it's difficult i don't know what to do
with that with that set of ideas because
a lot of cryptocurrency including
bitcoin is very volatile
because it's new so you're trying to
figure out the space of like
what's actually going to be a large part
of
like you speak of network effects like
what's going to take over the world
and uh through that process there's
going to be a lot of volatility
and if you're talking about
cryptocurrency
as a investment mechanism
then it can have a real detrimental
effects on people's lives
yeah and that's really the challenge
with operating in the crypto space
talking about it overlaid on top of
everything that's interesting
politically or culturally about it is
the financial incentive
yeah and so you know it's not
all fun and games because they're
literally billions
over a trillion dollars at stake now so
if you buy dogecoin because some
influence around tick tock said so
yeah you've now made a financial
decision right so
i'm not gonna scold any dogecoin buyers
or any
crypto asset buyer for that matter but
be aware
that there are like billions of dollars
of really elite hedge funds that are
trying to front run all of your
decisions and
evaluate social sentiment things like
that so it's water full of sharks
basically
and by the way if you're listening to
this uh don't take this podcast
or anything i ever say is financial
advice that's definitely not my interest
or expertise level
the the interest here is to explore
different ideas
speaking of which you've written a
little bit about nfts
i'd be interested to hear your opinions
on this space of ideas these
non-fungible tokens
they seem to have a cultural impact
currently but do they have a long
lasting technical financial or cultural
impact or is this just a fad
what do you think of nfds yeah i think
the in current enthusiasm
for nfts and the financial metrics you
see
the growth there in that sector is
partially a function of where we are
in the actual credit cycle so
oftentimes when inflationary events
occur
you have correspondent speculative
manias that
occur at the same time because people
intuitively feel
that the fiat currency that they hold is
being debased
and so they frantically look around for
other places to put it so
stocks property commodities
and then other asset classes
nfts are an asset class and this is the
case with
any inflation you look at in history you
saw these corresponds speculative
manias basically speculative episodes
so a lot of us feel that inflation is
occurring
whether it's in cpi or not the basically
lots of dollars are being injected into
the economy
we've all seen stocks massively
appreciate even as gdp contracted
and so a lot of people sort of got
caught on to this notion that
wow as the fed you know lowers interest
rates and
congress spends a huge amount of
stimulus dollars into the economy
financial assets going to go up so i
better have exposure to all that stuff
and so you see virtually every asset
class is awash with cash right now
people are
investing like their lives depend on it
investing trading whatever
whether it's options volumes on robin
hood you know like
kind of retail brokerages things like
that whether it's stocks
whether it's crypto and then other
collectibles baseball cards
their valuations have been skyrocketing
and so i think nfts are part of that
it's a new asset class it's basically an
opportunity to invest in sort of
art or collectibles in-game items things
like that
i think that explains a large degree of
the
enthusiasm the excitement is that it's a
novel asset class that people can trade
and right as you know these inflationary
tailwinds pick up
now as for the sort of virtues of the
actual technical
phenomenon nfts are actually not a new
idea at all
so you've had nfts i didn't call them
nfts but
in 2016 built on bitcoin for instance so
it's been around for a while
what it is is a serial code basically
a string of data that is inserted onto a
public blockchain
and then circulates as a unique token
and then the question is
okay well what does that data refer to
what's the external reference
and that has to be defined there has to
be some entity which says oh yeah this
unique
string refers to like this piece of art
or digital content
or you know trading card or whatever so
nft the concept itself is like an
incredibly broad idea it's just well
what if we took
uh you know barcodes and put them on
chain so that they could be traded
and so they could circulate freely on a
peer-to-peer basis and
plugged into exchanges and things like
that so that concept is super valid
clearly has protocol market fit right
people are using it for a really wide
array of purposes
it's completely going to exist may the
valuations contract
of nfts in the aggregate definitely
possible probably likely
uh but i think the notion of
creating enduring collectibles or
artworks that have accompanied you know
accompanying signatures
basically autographed art on the
blockchain that has totally been
validated i think that won't go away
i wonder if there's ideas like big cloud
for example i don't know if you saw that
if there's ideas built on top of this
concept it doesn't have to be enough
like ethereum an ft it could be just the
concept of non-fungible tokens
whether those kinds of things can take
hold
and they it's less about financial
transactions
and more about almost like
um i don't i don't know how to put it
but
like staking identity in some way
whether it's big cloud or
identity of objects like there might be
some way
of connecting physical reality and
digital reality in some interesting ways
so just the financial aspect is a way to
like put
some validity behind the identity
i don't i wonder if there's like ideas
there that are yet to be
discovered or ideas that
yet to be take hold like big clout seems
interesting yeah it seems shady as hell
seems a little scammy yeah i don't know
if i like the idea that you can
bet on people essentially right
yeah i think my market cap on big cloud
is like 90 000
and i haven't done anything there so
uh did you take did you like take uh
like verify yourself or whatever
i have not i think people would yell at
me on twitter if i did
so and it's unclear whether it's a scam
yet or not right it's unclear where it's
coming from
well there are some details about the
you know investors it's it's backed by
some pretty big name investors so
i probably wouldn't use the word scam to
describe it but it's got
ponzi-like dynamics like everything in
crypto
yeah so is very questionable and then
also is
using using people's likeness without
their
permission which is i think a legal
question you know so there's
open questions around it but you know is
are public blockchains and you know
that sort of architecture is that going
to be useful for decentralized or
alternative forms of social media
yeah a hundred percent yes you know i'm
super super bullish on that idea
basically creating open protocols
open name spaces ways to organize
without the dependence on a single node
effectively in silicon valley you know
the twitter node or the facebook node
i think it's a matter of urgency that we
create
you know digital gathering spaces where
you have strong
property rights you know you have a
claim on your identity you have a claim
on your data
and open architecture is our way to do
that i don't know if it'll be a
blockchain
but certainly i think the the general
you know concept introduced by
blockchains is a good template for
how to you know organize these systems
yeah
value freedom value decentralization
of power whatever the mechanism
let me ask you about love so uh there is
a bitcoin maximalist
community that
sometimes so those folks in general
have a strong belief that bitcoin is
good for the world
and it's almost an ethical imperative to
to sort of uh help bitcoin succeed
which i think is uh as a member of any
community i think is beautiful to
believe in the vision of the community
right there does seem to be some
properties of what
some may call like toxicity or derision
and mockery and those kinds of things
um so you know uh some folks have
criticized this
right that uh bitcoin maximalism is not
necessarily good for the world
even if bitcoin is good for the world
what are your thoughts about this kind
of approach
philosophically or practically to uh
the spread of bitcoin and is there a way
that we can add more
love to the world while we add more
bitcoin to the world
oh that's a great question i mean i you
know bitcoin is sort of what you make of
it so
you can define your own path as you
uh advocate for bitcoin or don't for
that matter
so my chosen approach is the approach
you see here
which i try to minimize the amount of
sort of harshness or mockery
although i've been known to be mean on
twitter too
you know what twitter is a specific
sorry to interrupt there's a specific
medium where this takes
its worst form so i'm learning listen
i'm actually
because of this podcast but in general
i'm part of different communities
and some are full of like unabashed love
and some more like when i experienced on
twitter
the bitcoin community at first i was off
put
yeah in terms of the intensity the
mockery
i bet the layers of lull
like the layers of not taking anything
seriously
and i think there's power to that
there's freedom to that i appreciate it
i have respect for it but it's not my
thing
on twitter it's just not not the way i
enjoy communicating on twitter
i retired from twitter i hit i hit a
hundred thousand followers and then i
retired
so i'm free now i don't have to tweet
anymore it's great
but i i totally can see the point i wish
that
bitcoiners were gentler in their
approach
not all bitcoiners are like that of
course there's you know 50 to 100
million of them worldwide
and a few tens of thousands on twitter
so
i'm not going to claim that they're
necessarily representative the toxicity
though
is kind of a learned habit because
uh bitcoin has had so many episodes
where
strong willed institutions the dice
billionaires
the dice were pretty toxic you could say
right i'm
basically mocking critics of bitcoin but
at the same time
you're saying that the criticism has
been predictable and repeatable and all
it's been the same throughout yeah and
that's a that's a pretty
you know dismissive thing to say right
that i can reduce you to a
an algorithm of you know with 11 uh
right yeah permutations um
but you know the thing to remember i
guess is that
some of the best funded companies in the
bitcoin space the most powerful miners
billionaires have tried to change and
co-opt and alter bitcoin
um to shape it to their liking
and without these incredibly hardcore
sort of high priests of the bitcoin
protocol
it would have been hopeless hopelessly
malleated in all number of ways
and so there is a reason
why someone would be incredibly
protective
of bitcoin uh does that justify
immense toxicity on you know on social
media
probably not but it's a leaderless
uh protocol so the whole point is that
it's money for enemies
and you know some of the bitcoin
maximalists came for me too
when i made suggestions that they didn't
like um
but you know i'm happy to use it the
protocol because
i know that that transaction will be
final regardless of how odious
my counterparty is or how how you know
politically disfavored their opinions
are
see i mean and this is where there's
there could be disagreements but i
i think you have to think about what's
effective
as a defense mechanism of strong ideas
and i personally think that
uh like kindness and thoughtfulness
and like is much more effective because
it lets the idea shine
as opposed to the personality of the
individual humans
overriding it but there's debates on
this
you know i i mean i take your side on
that
i think a patient and careful approach
is the way to go
now do all critics deserve good faith
engagement right
no i would say a lot of critics of
bitcoin operate an extreme bad faith
and the reason why is because we're not
just talking about technical questions
in fact most of this conversation has
not been technical it's been political
because bitcoin is an intensely
political idea
and so a lot of people are predisposed
to totally hate it
and to wish you know death on bitcoiners
i mean there was a professor at gw
this i saw earlier this week that was
amusing about
getting all the big corners on a boat
and sinking it it's like in what other
context would a
you know upstanding professor muse about
mass murder
but in the context of bitcoin it's sort
of okay
um you know within his peers because
you're talking about something that most
people don't like you know it's a
concept that's alien to them
that doesn't jive with the way they see
the world and so
because it's so you know pitched from a
political perspective
uh there's a lot of critics as well as
defenders that operate in bad faith
i would say but that's the nature of the
beast it's because we're proposing a
very disruptive thing
and there are people that would be
disrupted by it
you wrote a blog post titled on writing
you're i think an excellent writer
so let me ask what does it take to be a
good writer what does it take to
write some of the blog posts you've
written
sort of condensed set of ideas in your
head the mess that's probably in your
head and putting down on paper
in a way that's uh communicates the idea
clearly and powerfully so that was
basically the point of the blog post is
that being an
impressive writer is different from
being an effective writer
you know so i think the answer to your
question is humility
basically so i think
if you let pride and vanity seep into
your writing
then you risk uh creating a very noisy
signal
you know creating very inefficient
channel for communicating
neural arrangements from your brain to
someone else's brain and that's what i
think about when i write is like
wow i have the power to at scale
change the literal physical composition
of people's brains
right to rewire them if i make an idea
that's so persuasive that's so sticky
if i coin a phrase that is so pithy
then i can alter their brain that's
crazy
i mean you're letting someone reach into
your head and like mess with it a little
bit
that's unbelievable and that's like a
superpower and if you could do that to a
hundred thousand people at once
how powerful is that right you mentioned
descartes i think therefore i am
that's like literally rewired millions
of brains throughout history
right i mean that's one of the most
powerful like cocodo or gosam
one of the most powerful phrases ever
written
and that sent a zillion philosophy
undergraduates on a rabbit hole of
skepticism
that some of them didn't make it out of
you know and they're convinced that
you know with the brain in the vat
theory is true and there's no way to
know
you know what our tangible experiences
um but yeah that so that's the beauty of
writing
and um the thing that interferes with
that
is our pride our desire to you know
impress people and
you know look good to them and show off
our uh
our vocab and stuff and that's
that was the point of that piece is that
i went on this journey where i
eventually realized that
i don't know if i'm any better of a
writer for having realized it
but i think that is a necessary
condition so does that mean
there is a value to striving for
simplicity in
in the words as opposed to
i mean complexity i think so for sure
and we deal with complex topics all the
time in crypto
and that's always a huge red flag for me
i mean if you can't explain something
simply do you understand it
you know yeah so if you're talking about
something
complex if you can't find simple ways to
discuss it
my presumption is that you're actually
obfuscating the truth
and this is what orwell railed against
with political language
you know he really hated political
language because he felt that
its authors were using deliberate
obfuscation
uh and you know he hated euphemisms and
i hate euphemisms too
you know i i much prefer you know
forthrightness and clarity of thought
but most people when they write don't
really endeavor
to be particularly clear they might be
writing
to show off their startup or you know to
demonstrate to people
how cool they are or how well red they
are
you know they're displaying it's like a
peacock style display
what fraction of people write to
actually communicate meaning
small fraction it's especially difficult
because
what i've detected is something in us
humans as readers
assign more credibility to people that
obfuscate
so like simple clear communication of an
idea
is not like the immediate reaction
uh is is not one where we assign
credibility to the person like
like that was uh that was brilliant
there's a lot of people that i kind of
listen to without really understanding
what the heck they're talking about
and but it sounds musical and smart and
then
i see a lot of folks assigning
credibility to that person
and it's unfortunate
uh it's unfortunate that there's that
tension as a reader
that we appreciate the be the beauty and
power of like
complex weaving of words
without assigning as much uh
value to like actual clear communication
of an idea
and i'm almost skeptical in speech as
well when someone
will describe someone as articulate i'm
always
immediately skeptical of the valley of
what that person is saying
uh because if you articulate you can
make bad ideas sound very acceptable and
great
and norm chomskis has said this before
he uh as a way to defend the way he
speaks
he said that like he's suspicious of
charismatic people because they can
basically sell any kind of idea
he speaks in a very monotone and boring
way so that
whatever the value his ideas have
they'll it'll shine through
there's something to that there's
something to i love that but it's a
difficult journey it's a difficult path
because then i i think it's the right
path because ultimately you focus on the
quality of your ideas and in the long
term that wins
i agree just by way of advice
is is there if people are interested in
bitcoin or cryptocurrency
in your work what are good uh books or
resources on bitcoin
now from you and from others that you
can recommend that
in your own journey helped you or you've
seen help others
well it's very easy or it's much easier
today
to make the bitcoin journey because the
quality of content is so much better
than it was when i started i mean
when i learned about bitcoin there was
the bitcoin wiki
and the bitcoin stack exchange and the
subreddit and that was kind of it
and you had to just pick up everything
the economic theory hadn't really been
worked out very much
so you'd pick everything up from scratch
the good news is that there's a huge
abundance
of content and that's actually one of
bitcoin's greatest strengths
is that people are totally inspired to
write about it and
it's almost a rite of passage at this
point if you're like
a bitcoin thinker to have your book i
don't have a book yet i would love to
recommend my book i haven't written one
are you thinking about writing a book
yeah i think it's my duty 100
everyone that has created a lot of bit
of bitcoin content probably should
condense it into a book
to give it an enduring status it's
interesting because you mentioned uh
block size wars
and you've written on a lot of different
topics so you could both write
a like a big like sapien
style book about bitcoin or
cryptocurrency right
but you can also write a book on each
like a specific
thing and now that you put pressure on
yourself
and talk talk about simplicity right
yeah
where do you lean on those different
book journeys that you might take on
like do you have a new uh
eventually like a like a bitcoin book
i mean i tallied up the words that i
wrote in the last couple years on
bitcoin it's like over a hundred
thousand words a year
so that's two novels there um
but yeah i think i do um i think there's
so much
underexplored space in bitcoin i mean
uh a systematic interpretation of
satoshi's writings
for instance and a lot of people don't
want anyone to do that because they
don't want it to have these religious
overtones where you're engaging in
interpretation you know but
that's you know something that should be
done there's a lot of bitcoin histories
that haven't been written
there was a great bitcoin history
recently published that's this is one of
my recommendations
is on the block size war by jonathan
beer
who runs probably the best research desk
in the industry
so there's huge amounts of history that
has transpired
that hasn't been chronicled and some of
the accounts
are indifferent you know they're often
written by
outsiders you know journalists that
maybe don't fully engage with the
bitcoin system
but do you think the humans are
interesting in the story too
of course they're the most interesting
thing you know i mean bitcoin itself
doesn't really change that much
it's kind of this cold you know protocol
that just sort of takes along but the
characters are just fascinating i mean
and there's so many unbelievable
characters in the bitcoin story
unbelievable yeah that's the cool thing
about bitcoin
and uh cryptocurrency and just internet
is like
the weirdos the brilliant weirdos like
all the people in uh in the stuff that's
already established are boring
like economics professors are all boring
right but the interesting people the
wild ones
are are the ones that are innovating on
in the crypto space which
uh is you know that's where the
dangerous weirdos are
and the exciting brilliant weirdos well
you had to be kind of crazy to adopt
bitcoin in
in the first sort of five years of its
life so
there's a adverse selection element
there i don't know if that's an
uncharitable way to put it but
like some of bitcoin's earliest
evangelists are not the evangelists i
would have chosen
yeah but they were the ones that we got
so it's one we got but is there uh is
there resources
you're basically saying just throw a
dart
and uh most books are going to be good
or is there something that stands out to
you i mean your average book is you know
terrible for sure but
uh not on bitcoin specifically but just
in general um
it depends whether you like the computer
science the economics
or the history but my recommendations
would be
you know obviously the bitcoin white
paper that's uh and
satoshi's complimentary writings that's
very important
is to try to understand the intentions
behind the system and also to understand
the system
without having your view colored by some
third parties
description of it most descriptions of
bitcoin are really bad
uh so the just go to the originals go to
the hal finis
post satoshi's post on bitcoin talk
there's a huge amount of lucidity there
and actually most of our questions about
bitcoin today that we have a decade
later were really answered in those
earliest days
people just don't know it the canonical
economic
work relating to bitcoin a lot of people
don't like it
i think it's fine would be uh the
bitcoin standard
a lot of people don't like it i just
read it it's good yeah i like it i think
it's it's
a good uh description of sort of the
austrian perspective
and then how it relates to bitcoin there
isn't that much about bitcoin in there
but i think the point is
once you've understood you know
safedeen's view
of monetary policy bitcoin makes a ton
of sense so you don't actually need to
argue for it that much
so the bitcoin standard is a good
introduction to sort of the orthodox
thought
in bitcoin um there's a more recent
book called layered money which i liked
um by nick battia
which goes into more depth about what i
was talking about earlier in the
conversation the layout approach
to scaling and that's a really critical
thing to understand
then technical books about bitcoin i
like grocking bitcoin
uh which is a very computer
science-heavy one
there's a good textbook um called uh
bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies
um by arvind naranian
i think he's um a princeton um
computer science professor which is
really good at building intuition
um antonopoulos's books uh mastering
bitcoin
are good then there's like simpler
intuition building books that aren't
hardcore on the economics or the
protocol design
so you have like inventing bitcoin by
john pritzker which is good you have
bitcoin clarity by qr bickers
as you can tell i have like a my
bookshelf is like mostly bitcoin books
okay well that's a good selection and of
course like you said your
your writing and your book that comes
out
this year or next year next year i think
i'm gonna need 18 months
okay uh but you know they're most of the
good bitcoin content is just
online on medium on twitter so
um it's it's a decentralized you know
consensus kind of thing what about
the book recommendations that you could
give people love these
outside of the world of uh crypto that
maybe had an impact on your life
fiction like sci-fi maybe technical
philosophical
is there something you recommend that
people might read i really liked the
three body problem but that's a really
hackneyed recommendation but it really
made me think and i like the hard sci-fi
you know the commitment to science and
science fiction
so i thought it was very clever is there
one uh is there something that really
annoys you
in terms of the opposite of hard sci-fi
like that doesn't get stuff right
movies or um
i mean i have issues when i watch like
ostensibly sci-fi
or fantasy films that are not consistent
about this
the rules for the universe that they've
laid out
or where they're just impossible to
comprehend like um
uh christopher nolan's latest film oh
yeah
you needed like a spreadsheet to
understand that yeah
yeah i trust that maybe he was
consistent about the rules of his
universe i just did not
understand it yeah at all in that sense
i
i really probably one of my favorites is
the 2001 space odyssey
it's a it's so obviously it's many many
decades ago but
it's quite brilliant in both its
consistency
and the depth of thought put
into like what the technology would
actually be
uh not in like visually not
in kind of silly graphical ways
but in um
in terms of function and its impact on
humanity
so right but that takes care that takes
that takes a lot of work and that takes
genius actually which is why kubrick is
regarded for what he is
what advice you've taken an interesting
journey through your life
uh you've you worried fidelity your
philosophy major
uh you're now uh one of the seminal
minds in the world of bitcoin and
cryptocurrency
who the hell knows what the next five
ten years looks for you
if you were to give advice to somebody
uh young today
uh you know making their way through
life making a career
what would you what kind of advice would
you give
see the problem with advice is that in a
world where so much of success is
defined by
luck and serendipity is that
the advice givers often don't know why
they've been successful
right and so yeah they might say you
know i was wearing a green tie
on the day of my job interview and so
you should go out and wear green ties
and so they might just get the causality
completely wrong
right i mean i'm not gonna claim that
i'm
super successfully at it but um
see that's the problem is that i don't
think my journey is replicable
necessarily so
um you know who am i to give advice
although the one thing i will say
is that the thing i did right
was to become completely obsessed
with um a domain i found really
interesting
and held promise like if i had been
really interested in like magic the
gathering
i wouldn't have been able to like do
much with that aside from build like a
killer
you know card pack or whatever um
and i wasn't afraid to
you know really put myself out there um
and
you know float my thoughts online and
see how people reacted to them even if
i said stuff that was completely
erroneous or wrong all the time
the rewards to writing and just
publishing content are immense
as you know obviously it's the most high
leverage activity i think most young
people have available to them
um and i was very lucky
and i benefited from a lot of favorable
coincidences a lot of people that took a
chance on me
um and if i had more time i would sit
here and name them
but is there something you in your
actions that
made you more open to the uh the
benefits of luck
sort of uh you know luck can bring you a
lot of positive and negative things
so saying you're lucky means you were
able to
ride the wave of whatever positive stuff
luck bring brought you
well that's right you have to put
yourself in a position to be lucky
and most people don't so you just have
to get as many shots on goal as
and of course luck is plays an
undeniable role in any career path
for sure but you do have to
make yourself available to it
and you have to take a ton of chances um
but yeah that's the problem with advice
it's just so hard to replicate it so i i
find it illegitimate most of the time
uh you heard it here kids don't listen
to anything nick just said
exactly wear a green tie to your
interviews it'll work out well
uh do you think there's a meaning or
reason to any of this
this existence this life well we we make
our own meaning
for sure i find a huge amount of meaning
in what i do
um i find it beautiful i feel very lucky
and blessed to be in the line of work
that i'm in
uh you know to have your hobby and your
passion and your job just be a
completely integrated thing
so that's where i find meaning but
you're just a bag of like
cells and bacteria that eventually
dissipates dies and it goes into the
ground
and disappears back into the universe
i mean that doesn't make any sense well
that may be true but
uh i find the sublime in things like
bitcoin i find it
incredibly inspiring to work on it i
believe it's a 100 year
plus project and uh you know it stirs
those aesthetic
emotions in you as i'm sure your work
does
so you find it beautiful absolutely
absolutely
and and inspiring more than just
beautiful so you have hope for human
civilization
and bitcoin is part of that hope yeah
it's a very optimistic view
and people accuse us of being pessimists
and saying that we are you know rooting
for the collapse of civilization
completely false
um bitcoiners are compl are wildly
optimistic
because they believe that you can
monetize a completely new system from
scratch
and compete with the strongest
superpower in the military in the dollar
and
everything that goes with that that's
the craziest
most ludicrously optimistic proposition
imaginable
so i think bitcoiners are the most
optimistic people out there
i don't think there's a better way to
end it on that hopeful
vision of human civilization nick i've
heard a lot of amazing things about you
i was binge watching
your interviews binge reading your blogs
i fell in love with your work you're a
good dude
inspiring brilliant thank you so much
for wasting all
your valuable time with me today my
absolute pleasure
thanks for listening to this
conversation with nick carter and thank
you
to the information athletic greens
for sigmatic and blinkist check them out
in the description to support this
podcast
and now let me leave you with some words
about freedom and beauty
from stephen king some birds are not
meant to be caged
that's all their feathers are too bright
their songs too sweet and wild so you
let them go
and when you open the cage to feed them
they somehow fly out past you
and the part of you that knows it was
wrong to imprison them in the first
place rejoices
but still the place where you live is
that much more drab
and empty for their departure thank you
for listening and hope to see you
next time