Hunter, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Nice to have you here.
Good to see you, Gennett.
Yeah, good to see you too. We had some long, interesting conversations in San Salvador just after adopting Bitcoin.
I know I was done with all my talks and all my interviews and all of the other stuff I had done, both historical and adopting.
and then I finally got the chance to relax a bit
and that's when the real deep, interesting Bitcoin conversations happen.
And you were part of some of that.
I mean, I can't remember half of it, but we should...
Yeah, what did we talk about in San Salvador? Do you remember?
Yeah, we talked about it a lot.
I especially remember when we spoke with Giacomo
And we talked about the topic of arbitrary data on Bitcoin, also known as spam.
That really kind of set a few gears in motion in my head, just kind of thinking, you know, like, what is the real impact of spam?
Like, you know, is it really like a violation of the non-aggression principle?
And if so, how much and what is the because here's the thing, like I got into Bitcoin not because I want to put JPEGs on a blockchain.
Right. Like I get into Bitcoin because I learned about how bad central banking is and how like how much of an impact it has on our society that is not positive.
And Bitcoin is the best nonviolent way to sort of get rid of that system in an organic and meritocratic way just by simply being better.
And like, obviously, like there's more to it than just like, oh, this is the best thing.
Like, because like if it was, then we'd all be using it already.
Right.
But there's a lot of a lot of problems with Bitcoin that, you know, still need solutions
like privacy and scalability and things like that.
But it is certainly good enough to replace all the money that we use today.
It is the best money we have.
And I would never want to jeopardize that through my own actions or encouraging like,
you know, irresponsible behavior. I mean, like, here's the thing in a polite society, like we,
we, we actually, there are a lot of things we don't do, or at least we discourage, we criminalize,
we penalize, we, we say like, and, you know, and as, as, as libertarians or, or, or cypherpunks or,
or, or however you want to call yourself as somebody who rejects the state, we often say
that we don't need to be coerced or have a threat of force in order to do in order just to do the
right thing. Additionally, we frown on things like that, that discount the future heavily,
such as for lack of a better way of putting it, there seems to be some sort of like,
weird, dark, I feel like we're really getting to it like immediately right, right into the podcast.
But this is, but we know each other, we've had this conversation.
No, no, no.
Yeah, yeah.
I think our listeners want the deep stuff instantly.
Well, the thing is, like, I'm starting to become aware as just somebody who's not very religious.
I do think that there is a sort of spiritual war going on that sort of like, you know, there's some dark stuff happening.
I don't know if you've seen anything related to like Moloch worship or child sacrifice or just how that discounts the future heavily by essentially exploiting those who can defend themselves the least.
Those are weird.
I haven't looked into it, but it sort of makes sense that, you know, in ancient times you would sacrifice something vulnerable to.
And it's like so many other things, it's humans, like not understanding cause and effect properly.
And we reiterate.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it's you do something because you believe that it will you use some means to try to reach an end of less uneasiness.
And I think Aztecs, who sacrificed babies on top of pyramids, did so because they wanted to relieve some feltonaseness, like everything else a human being does.
It's not stating anything. Praxeology itself is not stating whether something is good or bad. It's trying to be value-free in that sense.
So it's only saying that, yeah, the person probably did or the person must have done this because they thought that the future would be better for them if they did so.
That is a very grounded and I would say objective way to see that.
Yeah, it's an objective way of viewing subjectivity. Like, I think it's one conversation with Robert Breedlove of all people that he said something that I think, like, put the nail on the head. Like, praxeology is to the subjective what mathematics is to the objective. And I think that's a perfect way of putting it. It's like the logic of the subjective rather than the logic of the objective.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that makes sense, right? Like understanding incentives, first principles, some people call it like values investing or whatever. I think I'm not into investing stuff, but the only thing I put my money in is Bitcoin. But I don't really consider that investing so much as just saving. But yeah. What do you want to talk about?
no we were i mean i i love this rabbit hole and i want to like i've done several interviews now
with uh people on the core side people on the not side and and i've done my own takes like on other
people's shows and regardless of what i do i get shit for it from the other side so so that's uh
but but i love this meta discussion about the whole thing and i love the whole like you were
talking about property rights and property rights violations in terms of spam. I'm soon
interviewing Kansa, an Australian economist who's great. And he's always recommending a book by
Conrad Graf, who's another great economist, called Are Bitcoins Ownable? And I haven't read the book,
but the TLDR of it, as far as I know, is no, they're not ownable because it's just a string
of information. So it's not really ownable. What is ownable, though, is the hardware you own and
the software you run in your home. So your node is your property. And you have a right to defend
that from malicious use. So that is the ownable part. But the funny thing about Bitcoin is,
since it's just remembering a private key or the location of a private key, the pin code,
the whatever, 12 magic words.
It is just a string of information that gives you the ability to act as if you owned the
thing because you control it.
You sort of possess it, but possession is also too strong since its information is by
its very nature not ownable.
It's copyable.
and even if the the secret is where your hardware wallet is located that information can be copied
too so so in that sense it's not ownable by the definition ownership is a relationship
a legal relationship between you and your property and according to natural law you have the rights
to that if you homesteaded it or if you acquired it by
unviolent means or what you thought was unviolent means.
So, yeah, the thesis that I
think I agree with is that the node is the actual thing
you own. Interesting. I don't know about that for a number of reasons.
One is, of course, you know, like civil attacks and
node IP voting, right? Like that's not really like how Bitcoin
works uh the and also like a private key isn't something that's supposed to be copied by others
right or known by others like you're supposed to have sole possession of it in like a traditional
single sick scenario and so uh like if you can keep a secret which is a big if of course um
in this day and age.
But essentially,
it's a part of protecting your property
is a secret,
like is something that you can use.
I mean, the secret,
funny thing is that,
sorry for interrupting,
but the secret is the asset.
There is no,
there's nothing separating the secret
from the asset.
Like the Satoshis aren't really
on the blockchain or the time chain.
The digits are there,
but the ability to move them,
which is the important part,
is the secret keeping it's all in our heads like that that's my thesis and that's what i'm
like trying to that's the view of this that that makes most sense to me i mean i i can't i can't
dispute the fact that you know this is all just like a social construct i mean it's it's literally
a currency which is also a social construct it's predicated on the fact that we can design
like better ways to protect custody based on the asymmetry that we get from public key
cryptography.
And so that used to actually be like military grade technology that, you know, that wasn't
like commonly available to the individual.
And so we have people like Daniel J. Bernstein and all the people, you know, in the 90s who
were fighting for that, the right to encrypt.
And we're very grateful for that because encryption and signatures and all that stuff is privacy tech.
That's freedom tech.
That's nonviolent resistance.
It's almost like how you don't necessarily try to, like, train a cat.
You can't necessarily, like, instruct a cat what to do or punish them.
It doesn't make sense to do that.
You simply have to just prevent them from doing something that you don't want them to do.
Like confiscating sets, like the cat.
That's the name of the fork, right?
Yeah.
You were talking about literal cats.
Although that's really interesting stuff.
I have a lot to say on that too.
I mean, like one thing that, although I do recognize that there are good arguments against spamming the blockchain
and making it harder for people to run nodes.
And I mean, I think it's very important that we keep the block size small.
I come from a generation of Bitcoiners that just kind of understood that's the case.
I've also heard rather convincing arguments that, you know, there might be reason to increase the block size.
But despite working directly for a big blocker for a year now at Mara as my supervisor,
I still will not concede that we need to increase the block size. I will not. I mean, like, we're not going to litigate the block size wars if I have any say in it, other than just saying that we need to find other ways to scale, just as the financial system currently has other ways to scale.
But the point I want to make about arbitrary data in particular, though, is that I think one of the engineering constraints we need to make sure we have solved is censorship resistance and in particular resistance against state actors.
And when people bring up statist arguments like, oh, if CSAM or Mohammed is on the chain, then, you know, nation states will reject Bitcoin.
I'm like, well, or go after node runners or something.
I'm like, you know what?
Like Bitcoin is designed to resist the state.
And so however we need to do it in that we can make Bitcoin exist in a way that they can't interfere with while also allowing us to run whatever software we want in the privacy of our own homes.
I think that's like the better engineering constraint than necessarily preventing data that some people might find to be objectionable.
Okay, so I'm going to try to both dissect and devil's advocate that argument for the sake of conversation here.
So when you say it's a social construct, I would use slightly different words.
I call it an agreement on a fixed set of rules.
And the reason we agree on this particular set of rules is that it's the only rule set known to man that is as robust as Bitcoin is.
that has the 21 million coin limit, that has the halvings, that has the block intervals,
like all of the things that we do agree on in Bitcoin.
Like most of the parameters aren't mempool policy stuff.
It actual consensual We have agreed to this and this is how it works So if that is true then code is not law but consensus is law which is what human beings agree upon So the thing enforcing
the rules is not really proof of work. It's what software people choose to run. And when they run
certain pieces of software, the proof of work works, but it works because we agree on a specific
set of making it work, right? So with that out of the way, then the censorship resistance
is not really in the code, but in what we allow, we as Bitcoiners collectively allow to go through
the thing. And if we don't, some of us want to let some stuff through and others do not want to let
some stuff through. That's why we run different mempool policy filters, right? And the different
filter policies, depending on our own preference on our own node. And some people say this is
completely inefficient because they will be routed around and it's a network that signals to, it goes
fast anyway, and you need like 92% at least to have any effect at all. Still, the thing that at
the end of the day sets the rules and carves the path forward is what we collectively agree upon
is the limits of the thing. So yeah, I'm struggling to find words a bit here. But I think, for instance,
this catfork that has been proposed, just the threat of that and the notion that something
that like that could happen has already decreased the spammers incentive it has already removed some
of the incentive for doing bad shit because all of a sudden everyone's reminded that holy shit we're
we're doing something that people people accept but do not approve of like people unwillingly
accept relaying it but they do not approve of it they they do not endorse it it has a sort of
moderating influence yeah so so and who knows what happens in the future and this is this is
like the the meta thing that i'm missing from the whole debate is like it's all about human beings
and what they choose to do or not do in the end and that's what it is and and then that's why
there's discussions of whether spam is an actual property rights violation or not and i don't think
it is. I think it is like, but nor is it a property rights violation for me if I receive
spam from someone to choose to not relay it to others. Because no one forces me to relay anything.
No one forces me to run the node. Like none of this would work if that was the case. So in your
opinion, like where in the greater scheme of things, what secures Bitcoin? Like what makes this
robust? Well, there's a few factors. It's not necessarily cryptographically secure in its own
right. It's crypto economically secured. There's, you know, a market, there's a value for the energy
required to secure it. And so it's definitely more real than proof of stake, which is also more
vulnerable to like a 34% attack instead of a 51% attack. But I mean, what secures Bitcoin is the
belief that it's valuable and the people who support the protocol and in the various ways that
it's designed to be supported and used. And that sort of disincentivizes many different kinds of
attacks, including civil attacks and DDoS and spam of various kinds. People would say like fees are
the best filter, right?
Yeah.
I mean, the real threat in spam is not that spam would be, there would be so much spam
that it would hinder people from, or disincentivize people from actually using Bitcoin as money.
And therefore it loses its value and therefore every other proposition.
That would be a huge problem if that was the case.
Yes, yes.
So that could be a potential state attack.
Like if we can just spam this spend, if we can print a billion dollars of spam in the
network, we can stop it from functioning and thereby people lose interest. And then it goes
to underground again for a long, long time, hundreds of years. Yeah. What's ironic is that
like state actors don't necessarily think that way, though. They think of like
markets and manipulating markets. They think of being able to print money and make laws.
They think of just like a bunch of other fake and gay bullshit that they like to do that Bitcoin
just completely sidesteps and they don't really think about like the actual like fundamentals
necessarily no i don't believe so either like it's this dilemma between is the state this
is it the deep state and everyone's super smart and these secret agents and evil evil
villains in their lairs or is the state just fucking stupid yeah like it can't be both
lifelong bureaucrat well i mean it kind of can right because like i mean in the case of the
united states like there is a deep state and it's pretty fucking gnarly yeah yeah yeah but
yeah it's it's probably not at this stage what what the people who like started these institutions
up uh like what what they envisioned it's not what they are right now the fbi is not others
like would they agree with the deep no no they would not they would yeah in fact the deep state
is very anti-liberal, actually, like classically liberal.
Yeah.
If you go back to the constitution, like they would just shake their heads and say, what
the fuck are these people on?
There's a ton of shit that the government does that is completely unconstitutional.
Like even just like laws states make up, like there are unconstitutional laws, the Second
Amendment, even First Amendment, there are things that are just like blatantly, but there's
still laws on the books.
And it's just a reminder that, you know, the laws of man are made up, right?
Like, like there, there, there, there's something that that humans made.
Humans are flawed.
And, you know, that we're just not making sense.
And also, I want to want to get back to you mentioned the cat.
And, you know, like, although I'm not necessarily supportive of the idea of oracleizing Bitcoin in a way that would like make it ordinals aware or stamps aware,
because then you only need one more Oracle
to make it OFAC aware, right?
Yeah, but you also need consensus.
Oh, of course.
Well, actually, also the cat isn't based on...
Wait, is that a consensus change?
Well...
So like bit.10 or 444 formally,
that's definitely consensus change.
that's as more as a relay is a policy a mempool policy change right but
and the cat is specifically so good so good targeting these things but but but i want to
make a point about the cat and so i agree with you that it's it's very existence and sort of
popularity amongst a certain faction of bitcoiners is a bit of a moderating influence on usage of the
protocol broadly. It likely has an impact on these markets that, you know, maybe make one
Bitcoin a day selling JPEG pictures or something. And that's just not a very robust or deep market
by any means. The thing is, I recently became a backer, like a financial sponsor of Brian Lunduk
of the Lendik Journal.
He's a kind of a podcaster journalist
who, I'll call him a citizen journalist
just because journalism has become
such a sullied profession,
almost like disrespected.
Regardless, Lendik, I like the guy
because he's, even though he hates Rust,
he sees it as a negative fact.
And I've been a Rust developer since 2018.
I think it's important to push back on the radical leftists who would like to politicize and infiltrate and corrupt open source meritocracy.
And so like open source should be a meritocracy of the marketplace of ideas.
Right. And so things should be based on their merit and not necessarily who introduced them or what they what they believed politically that has no bearing really on like kernel drivers.
Right. Like it's it's it's it's dumb. And so I'm supportive of things that push back on things that corrupt an ideology that that that is counter to what is essentially merit based.
And instead trying to push ideology, which is basically religion, like it's just it's not it's not necessarily like anything founded in truth or objective reality.
They're trying to push back against it with sort of social consent, sort of like peer pressure.
Right. And so like it's that I'm I'm supportive of of things like that.
And so I think cat kind of the cat, I mean, is similar, is similar.
I'm supportive of it. Right.
I don't necessarily want that to become how Bitcoin works.
But that said, I support the ideas behind it in at least at a high level.
Maybe not necessarily the implementation details, but I definitely like resonate with the thinking behind it.
I also am careful about any kind of change to Bitcoin because, I mean, I don't know about you, but like we live in a in a in a fucking clown world.
And I have to have to admit, like one of the few things keeping me like grounded, insane and not running for the hills to like join a militia to like fight against the deep state is.
Yeah, it's Bitcoin is the fact that I can sort of, you know, I have a mission that is nonviolent right now.
And if that mission becomes compromised, however it may be, you know, I will likely, my future will have a very different outcome, I think, knowing what I know now.
Yeah, 100%. I mean, yeah, I try not to be a cynic.
And I guess I tried to be an optimist before Bitcoin too, but it's certainly easier to be optimistic about the future when Bitcoin exists than before it did.
Yes, exactly.
much more so but the principles it's built upon are still true and it's still existed before and
will exist after if there is an after i mean like laws are man-made you say but i love the idea of
natural law and libertarian thought of or rather praxeological law natural law whatever you want
to call it, like first law that is discovered rather than just conjured up by some dude
who thinks one thing is better than another.
And I do believe that laws are discoverable.
You can, if the goal, you always have to have some if, right?
And if the goal is civilization, if the goal is civilized society, then laws are definitely
discoverable.
And it's property rights.
That's the thing.
There's only one human right that can be universal and for all times,
and that is the right to be left alone.
So I think all other thinking around this and what we ought to do and ought not to do
and what ought to be forbidden or not should be based on that.
And that can be tricky because there's so much nuance,
and it's kind of hard to get to the core truth of it.
But if you do, if you have this cemented grounding or whatever you may call it,
to base your philosophy on, then it becomes easy.
What is and what isn't property theft?
I have the opportunity to ask somebody much wiser than me on this topic,
this question that I get sometimes where, you know, like the ideas behind,
you know, anarcho-capitalism or, you know, anything on that level,
towards that direction of freedom-minded, voluntary exchange of goods and services
is there are people who will use their money to do bad things.
And like, how is like, how should we handle that?
Define bad things.
In particular, I think one of the more common arguments against that kind of philosophy
is that an anarcho-capitalist, powerful person
could create some kind of child slavery or something.
Yeah, like we have now, public schooling.
Yeah, that's pretty nonsense.
I'm supportive of dismantling the Department of Education.
The way I see it, we already live in Ancapistan, and we always did.
It's just that some bad actors have a lot of influence on others.
Like the most violent gang, the gang with a monopoly on violence in a territory, they
can coerce people into certain behaviors.
That's what we're living in.
And it not really a political philosophy it more of a lens to view the world through Is this morally right or wrong And if it theft it wrong If it property violation
it's wrong. And that goes for any type of aggression. If I take your stuff or if I
violate your body, I'm doing something wrong. If I'm not, I'm not doing anything wrong.
wrong. Like if I litter, for instance, on my property or in nature and no one's property,
like who's to say what littering is? Who gets to define it? Like, did I litter or did I alter
nature to make it into my whatever I wanted it to be, to art or whatever, if I tape a banana to a
tree? So in my mind, it's pretty simple. Victimless crimes aren't crimes. And also I hear this all
the time from people who misinterpret anarcho-capitalism that everyone's going to scam everyone else.
But scamming is not free market. It's a crime. It's also a crime in Ancapistan. A free market
does not mean a market where you get to take people's stuff by being insincere. A scam is
a breach of contract is deliberately fooling someone to steal their stuff so that is not
a part of the free market a an nft is in a gray zone i would say because you could claim that it
has value to some to to have access to a certain but you can also pretty easily make the case that
that is true for this like if it's that's why all the cryptos survive right because the same logic
can be applied to them as to Bitcoin in a certain sense.
But if you look under the hood,
you see that the Satoshi is truly special
and has events like the block size wars and stuff
to prove that it's actually decentralized and secure
and you can't be rugged.
None of the others have it.
The idea that all value is subjective.
Absolutely. And dynamic.
And so in a way,
like if somebody finds an NFT subjectively valuable
and they like voluntarily throughout without coercion voluntarily like exchange their money
for it then you know like yeah it's hard to classify the fraud though the fraud though is not
in that they find it valuable the fraud is in that they say it's non-fungible and that it's a token
because it's not non-fungible you can put the same picture you can right click on the picture
and save it to your computer and you have exactly.
And also, like...
There's a misunderstanding of NFTs though, right?
Because an NFT is more of just a proof of purchase, really.
Yes, but for instance, it's the proof of purchase of a picture.
But that is the same as proof of purchase of a star in the Andromeda galaxy.
Because if it's on the time chain, everyone can see it.
I can see it.
I may need a third-party website to see the picture.
but it's the data is there for everyone to see and i as the owner have no other things to do with it
than anyone else has so the very notion of ownership is that's the scam that's where the
scam lies you can't really own it because you can't do anything with it that everyone else can't
well it's sort of like the like it's the same problem of like tokenizing real world assets
That's a sort of Oracle problem, right?
Yeah, token makes no sense to me since everything in the computing realm is copyable.
I mean, this is why I fell in love with Bitcoin in the first place.
It's because the promise of something on the internet that couldn't be copied, or rather something in computing that couldn't be copied.
I found that outrageous.
Like, how can something not be copyable?
It's an incredible idea.
Yeah, and so like NFTs, like they might be able to have the same arbitrary data, some kind of JPEG or whatever.
You can copy and right click save and create a new one, but it won't be the same one.
There's a, you know, like there's a record, right?
A historical record of that proof of purchase.
Yeah, but claiming that that record is immutable, that's what's wrong.
Like even if it's on the Bitcoin blockchain, it still requires a third-party website to actually assign the ownership.
You can run an index or you run your own.
Yeah, but there's no proof that that will last forever.
It will last as long as Bitcoin lasts?
Not necessarily.
If the cat, for instance, happens, it won't.
So they're making an empty promise even from that perspective.
To some degree, but like I would suppose that I mean that whether Bitcoin will be amenable to arbitrary data forever is probably hard to say.
However, and yes, things like the cat would essentially remove the capability to spend them.
And so it would essentially have like a like a chilling effect on the market for it.
But there's also like that doesn't necessarily disincentivize or prevent the archival use case, which is kind of like similar but different.
And so like the thing is, like we can't necessarily go back and just like take out all that has currently been mined on without like making unverifiable.
Right.
No, no, I know.
But so that is the promise that the NFT salesman sells you.
However, my point is that the promise is not as robust as advertised.
And therein lies part of the scam.
The other part of the scam is that you can't really own data.
Like, data is by its very nature not ownable.
All you can have is a receipt.
If you're the only person who owns a private key, then are you not the only owner?
But my whole argument from the beginning here, and this is quite fun, I think,
because we're doing this argument thing here now,
is that a Satoshi is not really ownable.
You can just act as if you own it
because if you have access to the secret.
The secret gives you the superpower
of acting as if you owned it,
but it's not physically ownable.
It's not by definition.
You cannot own data.
You could be the only owner of a secret key, though.
I would say you can be the knower,
but you have no way of knowing
if someone else knows the same key or not.
I cannot prove that I'm the only owner of a key.
I can find it plausible.
There might be ways to do that, actually.
There's a couple of ways.
One is through quantum computers,
because they can detect eavesdropping.
And that's one of the more, how would you say?
Okay, yeah.
I hear you coming from this
from a much more technical approach
and me from the much more philosophical approach.
Because I think a good balance, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's where we want to meet.
That's the part of the Venn diagram that we're looking for here.
It's a good conversation.
I mean, you're obviously a master of your craft.
With respect.
I've been practicing mine for 13 or 14 years now.
I feel like I'm a skilled enough protocol engineer now
that I could speak to Bitcoin with some measure of,
I don't want to say the word authority,
but some measure of experience and skill.
Some gravitas.
Yes.
That's a good word.
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By the way, we're doing this in the wrong order.
My first question ought to be, Hunter, please tell our listeners who the fuck you are.
Because they don't know you.
So introduce yourself, please.
Well, I mean, if you go by what you hear about at X, I'm just like this gay furry that's attacking Bitcoin.
and I talk about quadric computers a lot.
Yeah.
What are you apart from a gay furry?
Yeah, well, I mean...
The interesting stuff.
That's probably the least interesting part of me, actually.
You're right.
And it's funny.
I mean, like, I'm married to a guy.
It's legal here now, you know?
I mean, we have discussed perhaps a divorce just to own the libs,
just because we can.
Right. You know, yeah.
But did your baker bake a cake and what was their struggle getting the cake baked?
Like I hear these strange stories from the U.S.
Oh, we did not have a formal wedding of any kind.
Back then it was just like, you know, like this is what gays did.
You get go to the courthouse, you get you file some paperwork.
And then I'm thinking, you know, back on that.
And I'm just like, wow, like, like that's that's that's really statist bullshit.
Like, you know, like, like, I mean, are you married?
Yes. And I did a statist marriage because I didn't want to do it in church because I'm not religious.
And I realized in hindsight, like, what the fuck?
I like Christianity more than I like the state, even though I dislike both.
like no no i i like i like uh christianity a lot too even though um that there is uh some measure
of like rejection other other other other you can you can reject certain parts of christianity
say homosexuality or wrong which like i i don't really want to like dwell too much in that but
the thing is um it's i think what i will say is that it's not for everybody because if everybody
was gay then like we wouldn't have another generation to hand everything to you know like
It would be the end of the human race.
Yeah, it would be great for that generation, I'm sure.
But then it would all be over.
It would either that or we enter some kind of weird transhumanist like dystopia where the next generation is growing in the pods, comrade.
Yeah.
But yeah, I am a developer and for the role of engineer.
I don't have a formal education, so I'm reluctant to accept the title of engineer, but that's essentially my title.
I act as a protocol engineer.
And I have a pretty good understanding of photography, but there's still a lot I don't know.
I'm still learning a lot of things from the great people who have worked in that field, like Dan J. Bernstein and also Ethan Hellman.
He's a co-author of MyBip, and he's a trained cryptographer who works at Cloudflare.
Which company do you like less, Mara or Cloudflare?
I would say Mara because I know more about them.
But, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I would say that Cloudflare has done more to harm the Internet than really any other company.
But also, I mean, arguably, they provide a lot of utility as well.
I should be fair and not necessarily.
Yeah.
But anyway, you know, there's a lot to be said.
But do you work for Mara now?
So I am a contractor.
Okay.
And also, they might actually split out some of their more philanthropic stuff at some point in the future.
So it'll probably be a different organization, but maybe with some kind of funding.
I don't know.
Can you make Mara stop doing stupid shit somehow?
Well, I mean, I mean, like, I think that's a that's a complicated question, right?
Because like I mean if you think of Mara as a state corporation that has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to maximize value extraction like they essentially they legally obligated to extract as much fees from operation however they can right Oh but this is given that they denominating they equivalent they denominate in dollars
is what I'm trying to say here.
If they were actually concerned about their shareholders
and their miners or their hash salesmen,
their main objective would be to make sats last forever.
Like the longevity of the Bitcoin network
would be top priority, right?
Of course. But the thing is, they're state capitalists, right? Like, like, like the thing is, I, as an agorist, I sort of identify more with agorist thinking and that they make a distinction between, you know, an ordinary like entrepreneur who isn't necessarily trying to benefit from the monopoly and violence that the state has to their own personal benefit, like state capitalist or Cantalian or Wood, right?
Like, I think that sort of like as a state corporation, they have to play by the fiat game.
And the fiat game isn't like to make long term investments that pay off well into the future.
It's to make as much money as possible for shareholders now.
Which is so retarded.
Like that is the case.
I don't disagree with that.
It's short-sighted and irresponsible in the long run.
I do agree with that.
So educate me here.
Why is it a state-run company?
Like, I don't know how this works.
Well, I mean, like any corporation that registers and pays taxes to the state is in my opinion.
You mean in that way?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's all based on faking gay man-made laws.
Funny you should use that word, but it's spelled G-H-E-Y, right?
right right of course right there's a distinction there maybe i hope people won't review bomb this
episode like they did with a stranger things you know with a coming out scene uh oh well first of
all that was not not super cringe oh very cringe uh i think this uh what we're talking about here
are very serious issues and probably the very the most opposite the full almost as far as removed it
from like,
like,
we'll Hollywood slop then,
you know,
yeah.
We're talking about actual strange things.
There are some strange things,
not CGI.
There's some real monsters out there actually.
Yeah.
And I mean,
yeah,
if a brief side note on that stranger things thing,
I think this,
I laughed my ass off when I saw that got review bombed because it wasn't that,
that bad.
It wasn't as preachy as Hollywood used to be.
like a couple of years ago
and they were completely tone deaf
during COVID, you know.
So, but I find it hilarious.
Like Peak Woke was a Marvel series
called Echo,
which is a Native American,
slightly overweight, lesbian, deaf woman
that is a superhero for some reason.
Hasn't even crossed my radar, honestly.
No, but I think the whole Woke,
I think people,
they're so fed up with it now.
So whenever they shoehorn in
something like that,
they get completely bombed because it's super unnecessary.
Yeah.
The era is just over.
Yeah.
I think that actually put people like me in harm's way because, you know, like that should
be a private thing.
That should be not something we encourage or celebrate necessarily.
It's something we should just not do anything about because it's a private thing between
consenting adults, right?
There are definitely big problems for when the agenda is being used to corrupt and indoctrinate the youth.
I mean, that's the future.
And fiat has a way of discounting the future and extracting value from the people who can least afford it, especially like inflation, right?
Inflation impacts the poor far more than anyone else.
And in many ways, like when you were saying, like we were saying, you know, there are monsters, there are real monsters out there.
I would say like Jerome Powell is like one of those, like any central banker really, like has like a lot of, let's just say sin to account for at some point.
Absolutely.
No, no, no.
But we're back to the beginning of the conversation sacrificing infants.
That's what we're doing.
We're using fiat money.
We're sacrificing our kids.
It is.
It's awful.
It hurts.
Yeah.
I mean, I recently read an Arthur C. Clarke novel called Childhood's End.
Have you read it?
No.
It is probably the most depressing ending I've ever read, ever.
It's like, basically, I won't spoil the book, but I mean, all the children have to leave.
and they just
and then that's the end of humanity
like everybody just loses hope
and it's over
it's over within a few years
it's all over
it's really sad
did you see a movie called The Mist?
no
it's one of my
a pet favorite movie of mine
where there's a big mist coming to a small town
and there's monsters in the middle
the Stephen King novel
yeah that guy is like woke as fuck
no no no
but the film adaptation is Frank Darabont
It's the guy who wrote Shawshank Redemption, wrote the screenplay for that.
So it's great.
It's none of the woke garbage or anything like that.
Or like kid rape or something.
No, no, it's from before that.
But there's tentacles with fangs and stuff coming out of the mist and taking people away.
And well, the whole ending scene is super depressing because the guy has four bullets in his gun.
and he gets to shoot his family
to save them from being torn apart
by these monsters.
And as soon as he's done,
he's got no bullet for himself left.
The mist settles
and there are no more monsters
because the military won.
So he didn't have to do that.
It's a wonderful ending.
I love everything goes to shit endings,
by the way.
I find them amusing for some reason.
You should definitely read that book then,
Childhood's End.
Anyway, where were we?
Yeah.
The gay stuff and the woke stuff.
Like if I was a homosexual, I would hate pride parades because I would be embarrassed by them.
They were embarrassing.
Yeah, frankly.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's why I pushed back on the woke stuff.
I pushed back on – I voted for Trump.
I started my husband.
And like, I mean, there's a lot to say about that too.
But one of the major reasons we both did that was just to sort of do our part to send the signal that this has to stop.
Like this woke shit is not helping anybody except for maybe pushing a radical, weird agenda that nobody wants.
And like transgender in particular is something – is a topic that is really only important to like maybe less than 1% of the American population.
and it's just interesting to me to see the left really like kind of die on that hill of like a
less than one percent issue. And I mean, and if you have a problem with that, that's also a good
illustration of the tyranny of the majority, right? Like people say a lot of good things about
democracy, but there's a lot of bad things about it as well. It's, in my opinion, there's no
one right person to putting charge over a country of hundreds of millions. Like it's it's that that
makes very little sense. Hayek, you know, he he talked about the use of information in society
or news of knowledge in society. And he said, you know, basically like command economies don't work.
One size fits all solutions put on everybody are inefficient. And in an inefficient market,
You get scarcity, you get starvation. And that's why socialism, communism and command economies just don't work.
And conversely, on the other side of it, one of the best examples that proved Hayek right was the fact that after the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution from Mao and all the nonsense he had in his Red Book,
All the stupid shit he'd say about planting, you know, seeds three times closer together.
And you need to, like, take all your agricultural implements and take all the iron out of them and send them to Beijing or whatever.
It's like all that nonsense.
Here comes Deng Xiaoping.
And Deng Xiaoping, the reformer, he comes in and very humbly looks across the pond.
And he sees all the great success the Japanese economic miracle is having.
And he humbly comes over and he asks them, what did you do to make that happen?
And you know what they told him?
They didn't do shit.
No, no.
What they told him was they needed to have a bank in every village.
Uh-huh.
And that arguably is what led to the rise of the growing Chinese middle class and the prosperity they enjoy today.
because they were able to empower more economically incentivized actors in the economy
to not have a one-size-fits-all solution, but have a bank in every village.
That's the very opposite.
It's very capitalistic, actually, in the free market sense.
And it's in many ways like the rise and success of China is validation of Austrian economics.
Yeah, and it's the same the fall of the Soviet Union.
I talk about this all the time when Gorbachev come over to the U.S. and saw that in the one-horse town in the middle of nowhere, they had more food than they had ever seen.
And he was very elite.
I mean, if you haven't already, I mean, look up old footage of Soviet grocery stores, how depressing they were.
Yeah, yeah.
And then for contrast, you see, you'll drive maybe half an hour and you'll go to a Buc-ee's, you know, or a Costco and you're just like surrounded by abundance and it's glorious.
Have you been to a Buc-ee's yet?
I don't think I believe I've ever been to a Buc-ee's.
Next time we're both.
I've been to a Costco.
Yeah, we should.
Costco is probably one of our better exports.
I think it has achieved some success outside the US, right?
Yeah, I think so, too.
But I think the ones I've been to have been in the U.S.
I don't remember, though, like a supermarket is not.
But it's incredible, right?
Like it's incredible, like, like, like a sign that, you know, like, like, like the fact that we're capable of economically sustainable supply chain like that without necessarily an enormous amount of government subsidy.
It doesn't go free of government subsidy because there's a lot of subsidy of dairy and oil and all sorts of, you know.
Yeah, but it would be even smoother and even more efficient without it.
Yeah, it's true. It's true.
And all capitalism is, it's just a voluntary exchange of goods and services.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what makes, you saw the Milton Friedman about the pencil, iPencil, right?
Yeah.
I don't think he wrote it, but he does a very good version of it.
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Anyway, interesting parts.
We've been through the uninteresting parts about you now.
What about BIP 360? Tell me about that.
Yes. So Bitcoin improvement proposal 360. What is that?
But Bit360 is essentially, we've whittled it down into the most, basically the smallest thing we think we need to change about Bitcoin that will then essentially give us the position, will be much better positioned to adopt and make use of as it makes sense to post-quantum cryptography.
We need post-quantum cryptography because, not necessarily because Bitcoin is vulnerable entirely right now, but in the BIP we're very careful to explain that there will probably be a distinction between the kind of quantum computer needed to attack Bitcoin if you had all the time in the world with the public keys of cryptography.
exposed on chain. And if you only have 10 minutes at most, and if the money gets moved to a different
key before you're able to recover that key with your quantum computer, then you've essentially
wasted a lot of energy and compute and you lost your chance at those coins. And so like those,
the distinction between a long exposure attack and a short exposure attack, which is what I just
described, could be quite substantial because of the kind of quantum computer needed.
However, Bitcoin is about two thirds resistant against long exposure attacks and basically
zero percent resistant against short exposure attacks.
That said, short exposure attacks we consider to be a much longer term problem.
We don't need to solve it necessarily tomorrow, though we will need to have standards if we
want to build software that's designed to be future-proof for the coming havings and generations.
Like, ultimately, what BIP-D60 does is it resolves a concern with Taproot in that every Taproot
address is an exposed public key, which can be used to spend the coins if you can derive the
private key from that public key using either algorithmic break in what's called the discrete
log problem or DLP or an elliptic cryptography, or if you're just able to, in a way, brute force
it cleverly using Shor's algorithm on a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.
Even if that scenario is like not something that manifests, something that already is real is the
fear, uncertainty and doubt in markets that sort of acts as a quantum discount on Bitcoin's price,
which as I mentioned earlier, its value is part of the security model.
So if we don't value Bitcoin, then people won't mind to protect it.
And so it'll languish and not be able to protect all the wealth that it currently does at a
protocol level.
And so I think the quantum FUD is probably one of the most salient pieces of FUD out
there.
There's a lot of lower quality FUD that we've all heard in the past.
It's just tulip bulbs or it's going to be e-waste or mining is wasteful.
Daniel Batten, I don't know if you see his stuff on Twitter, but he is very methodical and meticulous and deconstructs all of those arguments.
He is great.
He's great at talking to his crowd.
He's definitely great at that.
Yeah.
And he's able to address a lot of that FUD quite effectively.
He recently paid me a compliment on X and that just made my day because like the most I care to do is just write a BIP and then say that you're gay if you sell your Bitcoin for FUD.
It's a lot easier.
It's a lot easier to just say, oh, you're afraid of quantum computers?
That's pretty gay.
So, OK, so let me see.
There was a lot to unpack there.
Let me see if I can pose a question here.
The reverse thing is, do you think people will value Bitcoin higher if they know that it's quantum or secure?
If it's provably quantum secure?
I know for a fact that is the case, yeah.
So that is one of the arguments for if there was a robust way to show that Bitcoin cannot be cracked by quantum computers ever.
So all this alt-coiner FUD, the shit-coiner FUD that spreads every time people start talking about quantum computing can be discarded.
Yeah, exactly.
So that's one of the motivations for actually making it quantum-proof, I guess.
Exactly.
Yeah. All right. So, and this is a question Luke pointed out that I should ask.
How big are these BIP 360 transactions?
Well, that is a good question because it has a nuanced answer.
It is very complicated.
So actually, PIP360 in its current form,
after being rewritten four times with a bunch of feedback,
and I've added not just one, but two other co-authors,
is it actually doesn't introduce any post-quantial cryptography.
It doesn deprecate or introduce any form of cryptography other than the fact that it creates a new address output type that is basically the next version in SegWit
So the original native SegWit addresses, they start with BC1Q.
Those are hashed.
Those are fine.
They came out in 2017, right?
Taproot, SegWitV1.
So the original was SegWitV0.
SegWitV1 is taproot or pay to taproot, P2TR.
Those are problematic, but they do add a very useful property, which is the capability to commit to essentially a Merkle tree of scripts, different scripts that you can decide which one you want to reveal at spend time.
That is really important for enabling sort of like signature scheme choice in your wallet.
So if you are worried about quantum computers someday and you think you'd like to prepare for that possibility where you may need to send some money and you don't want to necessarily worry about like this threat, you can sort of pay a premium and it will make use of cryptography that's harder.
That is not specified in BIP 360 itself.
We had to break it up because it is such a complex and deep rabbit hole.
And so we're just trying to make sure that we fix this flaw in Taproot so that we can then in the future decide what is a better signature scheme for Bitcoin.
And that's still hotly debated.
So how big are the transactions?
To answer the question, there will be no increase in size for sending money to one of these addresses.
And in the future, you will have the option of either using the standard cartography that ships with Bitcoin already, so there's no increase.
Or you could opt for more expensive post-quantum cartography, which could be anywhere from 100 times bigger to maybe 10 times or 5 times.
I know it's it's it's a lot there's a lot, but maybe three or five times.
It depends.
It depends a lot on like what we what we choose to do.
And also there might be a future or possibility where we like figure out how to scale post quantum cartography on Bitcoin.
According to like the the proposal that Ethan made earlier this year.
Actually, it's about six months ago.
He talked about something we later called Bitsip.
basically it's a stark space signature aggregation mechanism that could potentially
solve the scaling problem of bitcoin on layer one as well to some degree might like give us
like 10x the throughput or bandwidth from starks so that might be one option this is hard for me to
follow because it's deeply technical so so like so when can people expect a wallet that has a
service that says quantum proof your coins now and there's a slide and you can just push a button
and they move them into quantum proof others well the interesting thing about bitcoin is like making
any change to bitcoin itself is very difficult which is good and by design and not something we
should necessarily disparage it for because that's one of the bigger reasons why it's valuable
we can sort of like off upgrade the the cartography off chain and side chains that are secured by
Bitcoin and merge mind with it and even pay miners fees.
But the thing with sidechains, of course,
is they have different trust assumptions that are less than ideal.
Yeah. And they give the miner another incentive.
And that is also pretty dangerous, isn't it?
Like, oh, is like, like, like the, the, the concerns around drive chains,
for example, like the 300, right?
Yeah.
They could introduce like an incentive to perform MAV.
The kind of sidechains I think about, I spend time thinking about are the kind of sidechains that either add new cartography, like novel cartography or scalability for the payments use case.
Like it's if there are if there is like kind of like a bid assets protocol to it, that's that's useful and helpful.
But that's only useful and helpful if you couple it with monetary payments.
payments and so i think that uh i don't spend too much time on on all other units of account
other fungible token prices right or or tges right like or that kind of bullshit right like
icos like like that none of that makes any sense to waste an iota of um precious time on earth Of course not I find it to be very boring
Well, the use case is scamming people.
Yeah, yeah.
And I find it funny because when people say, there's a class of Bitcoiner that refuses to say all shit coins are scammed.
They say 99.99% of them are scams.
And therefore, they leave out, they save both ways because they leave out, because there might be something that isn't a total scam.
But why bother?
I think it comes from a case of a place of intellectual honesty in a way, right?
Like you don't, you don't.
Yeah, but it's honest and dishonest at the same time, because like it's in the same vein of saying that your company is Bitcoin first.
Like that means shit coins in my, if you're Bitcoin first, you're, you are a shit coiner, right?
Because why aren't you Bitcoin only?
That's kind of funny because that also sounds a little bit like America first.
And America first is supposed to be more conservative than MAGA, like make America great again, right?
So you have Macca, you have America first.
I don't hear of people who are like America only, right?
No, I bet those people exist though, but I'm not sure I would want to meet one.
It's not a great analogy, but it's just something I came to mind as sort of like a counter to the maximalist point.
For me personally, I consider myself firmly a Bitcoin maximalist, but I also am a...
I ultimately I'm a Bitcoin maximalist, not because I'm a Bitcoin maximalist.
I'm a Bitcoin maximalist because I'm a meritocracy maximalist.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think Bitcoin is the thing that has the most merit and by far because anything that could be implemented on these shitcoin protocols, if it has merit, if has sufficient merit, I think we'll find a way to make it work with Bitcoin.
in a way that would satisfy the demand, regardless using layers.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about the one-shot principle from my second book,
Independence Reimagined, because I tried to put it into a short couple of sentences,
as few sentences as possible, why Bitcoin is irreplicable or irreplaceable.
And the one-shot principle goes like this.
It's like absolute mathematical scarcity.
I would say finiteness nowadays, but it was scarcity back then.
So absolute mathematical scarcity in a sufficiently decentralized distributed network was a discovery rather than an invention.
It cannot be discovered again by people aware of this invention, since the very thing discovered was resistance to replicability itself.
Would you agree or disagree with that?
Well, I think I would agree with that so long as Bitcoin retains its position as the thing that is successful.
Yeah, because the interesting thing, I think when I think about that, if it turns out to be untrue, then none of it can work.
Because if you can replace Bitcoin, then the whole purpose is gone because you can just replace the next thing with the next thing with the next thing.
Like either you have this finite thing or you don't.
Like either you figured out resistance to replicability or you didn't.
Do you think the war of the currents is a good analogy?
Like how, you know, like AC sort of won out over DC because it can go further without attenuation losses, at least with older technology.
I haven't thought of it from that perspective, but it's a quite good analogy, even though AC versus DTC is one out of two and not one amongst 5,000.
I would like the wheel analogy.
So you can construct a hexagonal wheel, but the circle is the best way to construct a wheel and Bitcoin is the best way to construct an absolute final.
That not a great analogy either because even though like there the wheel well in a way it might actually be a good analogy because okay so let say the wheel shape is Bitcoin Not necessarily like the implementation detail Exactly That what I mean The circular shape A stone wheel and a Goodyear tire are essentially the same thing in that analogy because it
follows a specification.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But to me, Bitcoin is not the wheel, but the Bitcoin is the circular shape that shapes
the wheel.
And the wheel is money.
So you can use other money and you can use other shapes for wheels, but one shape is obviously better.
It's a bit of a weak analogy, but yeah.
It'll also be complicated in the Ancapistan utopia, right?
Because they don't have roads and they all fly in UFOs or whatever, because we get the deep state technology that they've been suppressing all this time.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot that we don't have roads in Ankapistan. Damn it, we have to start over again. The other analogy would be like discovering America. Discovering Bitcoin is discovering America. Can you do it twice? Well, a lot of people argue that it has been done several times by different groups of people, but yeah.
Yeah. Well, that is also a good analogy in a few different ways.
Also, because like as Bitcoin ages, we have sort of this this thing where we sort of have the eternal September.
We have people learning, you know, that like they'll learn about Bitcoin and the next day like I'm new to Bitcoin.
I'm here to fix it. Right. And like it's just like this, this, this, this tells all this time of just, you know, like seasons, newcomers, things like that.
And a way like the discovery of America has happened several times in history.
The Chinese like arguably knew about America, but then they burned their merchant fleet inexplicably because I guess they were afraid of, you know, too much, you know.
And then there was, you know, the Vikings.
There was, of course, the Anunnaki and the – I'm sure you're aware of the Talosians, the Atlanteans, the Lemurians.
the Klingon
the Dothraki
yeah yeah
everyone was there first
the Hutts
yeah
well
is there anything
we haven't covered yet
that you want to talk about
before we wrap this thing up
yes the Agarthans
I forgot about the Agarthans
Agarthans
they also have caverns
yeah
Agarthans have caverns
okay
well
I guess that was
adding to the previous point it's a rabbit hole it's a rabbit hole all right all right
literally yeah oh i love this conversation but i i'm gonna have to wrap this up pretty soon it's
pretty late getting pretty late here and i have to get back to my family but before we wrap up is
there is there anything else you want to that we haven't covered that you want to mention
if anybody is curious about the work we're doing to make sure bitcoin is ready against
these deep state faggots who broke our crypto.
Please look into our work on bit360.org.
I also have a substack, cryptoquick.substack.com.
And on XM, I'm CryptoQuick as well.
You're saying that very quickly.
Maybe that's deliberate.
CryptoQuick.
Yeah.
CryptoQuick.
Yeah.
Dot com.
And also on Nostre, my NPUB is NPUB1QQ.
It's got a bunch of other...
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sure people can find you there.
They have to hunt for you.
Yeah, so good.
Hunter, my gay furry friend, quantum resistant friend,
this has been a great conversation
and I hope to see you in real life.
Are you coming back to El Salvador, by the way, in January?
Not in January.
That's too soon, unfortunately.
All right. Yeah. But yeah, I'm sure we bump into each other at some one of these conferences and you're welcome back on the show at some looking forward to our next conversation already. This is great. Yeah. Thank you very much.
Thank you.