Josh, welcome to the podcast.
Hi, thanks for having me.
No, it's my pleasure.
So this episode is going to take a slightly different format to usual.
For those of you that tune in from time to time,
Josh and I have, we're 30 minutes late starting
and I have a hard cutoff in 30 minutes time.
So I don't know if that's going to change the conversation per se
because I do slightly like the longer stuff,
but I'll try and just get as much out of you
in kind of 20, 25 minutes as we can.
My first question remains the same, Josh. For whatever reason, you were mining Bitcoin 2010, and you then stopped doing that and maybe forgot about it or whatever. And relatively recently, we're able to recover some Bitcoin that had been stored somehow. And like, it's changed your life. Holy shit.
I'd love to hear, like, tell me that story.
And, like, you know, this is crazy, right?
Yeah.
It took me a long time to process it myself, personally.
The arc of it is very long.
So I basically started as a computer nerd.
And I'm learning about Linux because I'm a web developer.
and then as now the majority of websites are deployed on Linux
and I couldn't rightly claim to be a web developer.
I'm in my early 20s at this point.
And I wanted to be able to say I'm a web developer
and most websites are deployed on Linux.
So I put my nose to the grindstone and said,
okay, I'll learn this thing.
And very quickly ran out of things to do on Linux
because there's not much to do on Linux.
So I did a Google search.
That was literally, quote, what do I do with my Linux?
Very sophisticated search.
And because Pizza Day had just happened, Laszlo had bought two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin.
A lot of people don't know that he kept buying pizzas throughout the course of that summer.
And I think he spent 70,000 Bitcoin in about three months strictly on pizzas.
So it saturated the news results.
It's saturated search results.
And so when I search an unrelated thing, what do I do with my Linux?
One of the first results that comes up is, well, you could put Bitcoin on your Linux.
So I, being a sort of curious technology nerdy type, thought, okay, this is kind of neat.
I'll do this.
And very quickly messed with it, did a couple things with it.
And then almost as soon as I got into it, I got out of it.
So I'm a bit of a pack rat.
I disassembled a computer.
I take the hard drive out.
I put it in a box filled with all the other hard drives from all the other computers that I had disassembled.
And then it sat in my shed for approximately 13 years.
until, and I completely forgot about it.
It was not on my radar at all.
And I'm a bit of a newsie, so I would hear about Bitcoin.
I remember hearing about the block size wars.
I remember hearing about Michael Saylor and these dips
and all this stuff going on.
It would bubble up in the news,
but I never identified as a Bitcoiner.
So I didn't think this is me.
This is happening to me.
So it just it was off my radar. And then and then in late and late 23, I.
Basically, my whole life falls apart. My mother is really sick and she because of the nature of her illness, there was no one to take care of her.
She lived in a remote location, so I had to move out to take care of her.
And I chose to do that to make the right choice, I felt, and paid a price for that.
I lose my jobs.
Girlfriend leaves me.
Basically, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
Also, my grandpa, he passes, sadly.
and the silver lining is that he gives me a little bit of money in an estate
and it was enough money that I needed to figure out what to do with it.
So I did due diligence.
I said, you know, what do I do?
Do I get gold?
Do I get bonds?
Do I get stocks?
Do I real estate?
What do I do?
And I sat on it for a little while there thinking about that
And then still being a nerdly type, I think, well, maybe I get some Bitcoin.
And then almost as soon as I have that thought, I remember.
I'm like, wow, okay, I think I did this all once a long time ago.
And then I'm thinking, because I'm in a bad way at this point, I'm thinking, there's no way.
You know, even if I find it, it's going to be corrupted.
You know, if there's a drive out there, it'll be broken.
you know there's just no way this is not my life i'm not that lucky you know but but i remembered
enough that i was like uh could be it's too much i can't not check right i'll never be able to sleep
again if i don't at least check so i end up in uh go to the garage you know go through the house
end up in the shed find the box with the hard drives start plugging them in and then i find one
that has a matching operating system,
which was Ubuntu and a matching manufacturing date And it worked It booted up And I was like okay this this could be it All right Well I know I serious
And at this point I know I'm, I'm, I'm still, you know, tech guy.
And I just know, I know enough just to be dangerous.
Right.
So if I start trying to mess with this thing and figure it out myself,
there's a good chance I'm just going to lose it all anyway.
Right.
And, and I knew I couldn't just go on Craig's list and then like,
Ask people hey guys come to my house and help me get my bitcoin because that was not
Going to work out so
So I sat on it for about
I don't know seven or eight months
My life is getting sort of progressively worse at all at the same time because my mom is sick and
It was just it was
It was a very interesting time to be me and then
Then in the summer of 24, I basically get a wild hair and decide I'm going to go to the Porcupine Festival in New Hampshire, which is a libertarian festival that had been going on, still goes on for 20 plus years.
They've been there for 30 some years, but the festival itself is like only 20 some years old.
and it was literally the only thing that I did for myself that summer.
And so I knew my time constraints were only going to get worse
because of the nature of her illness.
I had one family member who was able to kind of pick up the reins for this week.
So I was just like, okay, I got to do this for me.
And then I went up there and I wasn't even really thinking about Bitcoin, to be honest.
I was just like, the Porcupine Festival is a libertarian festival.
Ron Paul was speaking.
These were kind of my people.
I was thinking I would make friends, make enemies, whatever.
It would be a good time.
And it was, and I'd highly recommend freedom-oriented, freedom-minded people.
You can make it to the Porcupine Festival in New Hampshire.
It's annual.
It's a lot of fun.
It really is.
But at any rate, I'm at the festival and I meet a guy there, Joshua Groth, who is starting a company that does self-custody consulting.
And he is hosting a workshop.
And the workshop is about self-custody, Bitcoin self-custody.
And his bio is essentially, he's an adventure guy.
He does base jumping.
He's skydiving.
He's jumping off of buildings and paragliding and just doing all this wild stuff.
And then he's talking about Bitcoin.
And I'm just like, well, this is a really cool guy.
I wasn't even really thinking about Bitcoin either.
I was like, maybe I want to meet this guy.
So super adventurous.
This is the total opposite of me, right?
And so, yeah, long story short, I go through the workshop.
He makes an offhand remark that he'd help somebody recover some Bitcoin.
And I could tell just by talking to him, he was a man of integrity and he wasn't just going to shoot me and run off to Mexico.
So at the end of the workshop, I went up to him and I said, you know, hey, I could have some.
Could you help me? And he said, sure, if you fly out to Colorado, they would.
And so long story short, cut to about three weeks after that in his basement, we press the button with a team of three other people that he assembled to recover the Bitcoin.
And I go from broke and alone and in poverty to being financially stable for the rest of my life.
Wow.
What a story, Josh.
I'm so upset that we've started halfway through the time that I set aside for this.
No, it's totally, it happens, mate.
I've learned with this podcasting stuff
that getting stressed about that
is just totally not worth it.
The story here, though,
I don't want to gloss past the difficulty of illness
with family members.
And thank you for sharing that.
It's really hard.
But what immediately resonated about your story
for me personally is one of the main lenses
on Bitcoin that I have is inheritance.
And my father died when I was young and he was actually pretty young himself.
And I got money in my 20s.
And it's like, what do you do with it?
And basically, I've spent the last 10, 15 years figuring that out.
I tried different asset classes.
I tried different investment philosophies.
I just didn't know anything.
And it's only through making mistakes that you slowly but surely figure things out.
anyway i do agree with you that i think bitcoin is a key part of any future wealth strategy for
anyone um but it's it's through asking that question what the hell what the hell am i going
to do with this money like obviously i want to keep it but i also want to grow it i don't someone
else i don't want someone else to have it what if they take it and don't give it back you know and
you realize that that's actually a question of of counterparty risk you know to like jazz up the
term. It's like, what if I give my shit to someone, they don't give it back. So that for me resonates
a lot, because it's one of the key drivers in why I see value in Bitcoin is that fact of like, okay,
well, I'm passing wealth from one generation to the next. And I think Bitcoin is just a much better
way of doing that. Gosh, Josh, okay, we've got, I'm gonna go 10 more minutes, right? So I want to do
if we can, this is a different interview to normal. We'll try and do some like fast questions for that
time, if I may. So, so, so what did it feel like? And this is
not a quick answer What did it feel like the button goes and you like Oh my god there it is Well the first thing it felt like was checking the number constantly That my my were glued to the chart for a good year there
Wow.
You know, just, and then I was lucky in that, uh, the groups that helped me recover the
corn, they also aren't pill chain.
And, uh, and so by the end of it, I didn't think, well, I gotta get rid of this asset
and get some, you know, good old fiat.
I thought I need to get rid of all the fiat that I've got and put it into this asset, which is what I did.
So I'm completely allocated now.
And I live on a Bitcoin standard and advocate running nodes and self-custody.
And I'm fortunate in that I already had a tech background.
But to answer your question more directly, it was very chaotic.
On one hand, I was ecstatic that I had gone from zero to hero with this button press and that it was this freedom money and that this meant so many things for my future.
On the other hand, I was resentful that my whole life had to fall apart before I got there.
and I you know thought you know maybe if I've been smarter or what if you know then my life
maybe couldn't that didn't need to fall apart before all that happened but you know I think
now in retrospect I don't I wouldn't have taken it back but at the time um it was certainly an
emotional roller coaster and so what's fun about listening to this from my I bet I'm fucking
emotional, right? I mean, talk about like, what a crazy story. And that's why I love doing this
podcast. Like people have all these incredible things that happen to them. But to kind of
highlight a few things. So you're already technically focused. That's awesome. You were
then thinking about inheritance and like, what do you do if you had money? And then this third point
of like, oh my God, let's try and recover it. But equally coming at it from a libertarian lens,
I find generally that people need four, five, six quite serious experiences in their life that blend
together to go ah maybe this bitcoin thing is more valuable than i realized because you know
you were you were mining bitcoin at a time when people were buying pizzas with it with 70 000 of
them you know it was just so goddamn early back then no one knew what the hell this thing was and
your your natural attention span you got distracted and went somewhere different and that's a
spiritual journey um and in many ways like unless you're ready things don't open up for you so it's
strange isn't it bad things have to happen for good things to happen too um and so josh can you
tell me like what are some of the major things that change in your day life as a result of the
click of that button and this bitcoin being accessible to you well bitcoin broke my brain
uh and in a good way okay like i once you once you're 99.9 allocated to something
and accidentally or not,
it just totally, you need to like figure out how it works,
why it works, who's in charge of it,
who's, you know, what's going on with this thing.
So I immediately go public,
which is not something I would generally recommend to people,
but I did.
And then I just day in, day out, 10, 12 hours a day,
I think about nothing but Bitcoin,
I'm just pure fugue state trying to, you know, use my tech brain, my programmer brain to just figure out what this thing really is.
And also go back into the historical record because I've been around for a while technically in Bitcoin, but also not.
So I had to kind of figure out what happened, what's been going on in Bitcoin for the last, you know, 17 years now, I guess.
So and then I guess 14 years since I got into it.
But nonetheless, I basically just dedicated myself to Bitcoin.
I pivoted to this industry and I work in and around Bitcoin every day.
Now, I know there's like no company, there's no CEO.
You know, we're all volunteers.
But that said, there's still work to be done.
And so do you now offer any kind of services or products in and around the Bitcoin space for people?
So I'm working on a few things.
The first project that I worked on was a self-hosted privacy respecting Bitcoin treasury management application.
So when I've got the stack and I'm thinking to myself, I need to be able to do basic accounting with this thing.
And I do a sort of survey of available solutions out there.
And what I find is basically everything wants complete transparency into my stack such that, you know, they can see all the moves I'm making, which is not very Bitcoin.
And then there are some options out there which are more sort of open source, but they include chipcoiner.
And, you know, to my mind, that's an attack vector.
That's a no go.
So it's Bitcoin only or bust.
And so I just didn't see any solutions out there that suited my particular preferences.
And then AI showed up.
I've got a long programming background.
I just figured, well, I'll just make it.
So that's what I started doing.
And then as I got into that process, I started thinking about the governance of layer one
and what has and hasn been happening over the course of that time And then sort of fell into doing a governance analysis of Bitcoin Core And that governance analysis led to coming up with an alternative governance model
which I think would be more appropriate for Bitcoin compared to what we have now.
And then also an alternative Bitcoin node that is consensus valid.
So I don't have any particular prescriptions for consensus.
My position is consensus is not mine to mess with.
A lot of people, Bitcoin fixers, they come to the space and they have all these ideas about changing Bitcoin.
And then they end up forking off the network and then it's not Bitcoin anymore.
So it's either consensus valid Bitcoin or it's not Bitcoin.
And so I'm just trying to kind of solve an age-old problem that's been called for at least since 2014, if not earlier.
Gavin Andreessen was Satoshi's handpicked successor, and he was responsible for doing a lot of the refactoring of Satoshi's code.
And in 2014, he called for alternative implementations of Bitcoin.
And at the time, BTC Suite was really, and I think that's become BTCB now, but they were trying to do this re-implementation.
And he said we needed to have these re-implementations in order to prevent some, quote unquote, horrible bug.
That way you've got multiple people all trying to kind of figure out what this Bitcoin consensus thing is.
And then if one of these implementations has some horrible bug, it doesn't completely obliterate the network because a certain percentage of the nodes are not on the quote unquote reference implementation.
Unfortunately, that never materializes.
materializes. And now something like 99.5% of nodes run Bitcoin core. And before you say,
oh, but what about knots? Knots is 95% roughly Bitcoin core code. So in terms of the code
concentration, it's all Bitcoin core. And so I think the smoking gun in that sense is that
is that in 2018, there was an inflation bug.
So all of our institutional effort was consumed with this block-size war.
And then the very thing that Gavin Andreessen had been warning about in 2014
and a horrible bug that we miss because we're not really properly testing consensus,
we don't have alternative implementations, that happens.
And we were lucky, Bitcoin was lucky, in that it was responsibly disclosed by somebody who didn't want to hurt Bitcoin.
But had it been a bad actor, then that could have been devastating for the price of Bitcoin, the reputation of Bitcoin and other things.
Wow. Oh, my gosh. I mean, Josh, I must say, I've not had this happen to me in the last year or so.
I've got about 50 more questions.
And the thing that's so cool is like,
I'm going to leave it at this
because we're going to wrap it up here.
I've got a hard finish in a few minutes time.
What I love as a person that now is,
you know, very much allocated to Bitcoin
in a serious way and has changed their life
and is now on a Bitcoin standard as well.
It's the talent that is slowly but surely,
inch by inch, day by day, year by year, sucked into the vortex of Bitcoin and brings with it
decades of experience that they then reapply. And brilliant, Josh, all those things you just
mentioned, I really hope that those projects go well for you and you uncover what you're looking
for. And I agree to just comment on the consensus stuff. It's kind of like how a democracy should
work it's like the rules are here great these are the rules that we agreed at the start great okay i
want to change them slightly can we change them guys here's how we will change them here's how
you benefit no thanks or sure let's do it and that's why you have bips and it's just like oh
my god this is the kind of coolest thing right and if only democracy did work like that you know
and that's why i like that phrase like bitcoin is is ruled by rules not by rulers um josh i'm
I'm going to leave it with you to, you know, hand off.
So if anyone wants to get in touch or reach out,
then how do they best do that?
And I'm so sorry.
This has been the most rapid fire of episodes I've ever done.
Oh, no, all good.
I really appreciate you.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you.
I am available on X primarily.
I go by Secure Sovereign, SEC Sovereign.
I'll pass you a link.
But, yeah, basically I'm, you know, open to discussion.
and I'm just all Bitcoin all the time.
And if you want to talk about Bitcoin governance
or alternative node implementations or treasuries,
I'm doing all kinds of stuff in this space.
I'm currently working out of the free co-working space
that was launched by Strategy in Northern Virginia.
So I'm in and around the district area, just working with Bitcoin as much as I can.
So yeah, it's been a wild ride and I appreciate you having me.
No, it's my pleasure.
Josh, thank you for joining today.
All right.
Likewise.