It was really extraordinary to be in the capital of the United States, not being persecuted, welcomed by an elite university, welcomed by the Kennedy Center itself.
To me, the Satoshi is one of the only things on planet Earth that are actually sacred.
The biggest frustration for me in this discussion is that it's not a dialogue a lot of the time.
It's a debate and it's not a debate fought on rational merit.
It's a debate on who is the most insulting of the other person.
We worship the lead developers.
We worship these people who had protected, preserved, advanced Bitcoin for some time.
And so we wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, right?
It wasn't don't trust, verify.
It is the most valuable property in the world.
It's a new form of property.
It's not well understood.
For the rest of your life, Bitcoin will be under attack.
And as is your state, as is anything that's valuable.
We really have to avoid the Disney remake of Bitcoin.
That would be the worst outcome ever.
Why do Albertans want to secede from the state of Canada,
from the federation, from the nation of Canada?
Well, they're being stolen.
I wish I could live 200 years just to see the outcome
of what's going to be with Bitcoin and sovereignty
and city-states and culture.
Tomer, my friend, welcome back to the Bitcoin Infinity Show.
Nice to have you here.
Thanks for having me back.
I'm thrilled to be back.
the highlight of my life is getting to come on your show. Fantastic. Yeah, I just spent a couple
of hours with you though. That's what I mean. Always a pleasure to talk to you. It was a long
time now since we last saw each other. I think Madeira was the last one, right? That's the last
time we saw each other in person and maybe did this podcast. I do think you and I spent New
year's eve oh yeah yeah yeah at one of our friends house in miami that was good fun yeah
but we haven't seen each other since new year's and it's now practically white paper day yeah
almost a year has passed but not quite um what have you been up to since well most recently yeah in
In the fall, at the end of September, beginning of October,
I was involved in the BTC in DC conference,
which I'm eager to tell you a few details about without spending too much time.
And then just last week, there was the Canadian Bitcoin conference in Montreal
that I attended as well.
Both were good Bitcoin-only conferences.
Yeah, I saw some stuff from the DC thing.
I hear Larry Lepard was the bassest boomer ever,
like doing his bass boomer thing.
Yeah, he was also at the Canadian Bitcoin Conference
and at the Canadian one, the event was quite far from the hotel.
It was like a 30 to 40 minute walk
and I had the privilege of walking back with him and Cedric Youngelman
and we had a really good long talk.
Larry is a real treasurer in the Bitcoin community.
He calls him as he sees him.
He's a wise old man,
and I mean that in the kindest and most flattering way.
And he's very thoughtful.
He's got a lot of experience to bring.
So he's definitely worth listening to
for as long as he continues to be a contributor.
But switching to the BTC and DC conference,
that was a really interesting event
that was put on by the George Washington University,
which is like a top 10 university in the United States and a private university.
And the fact that they had an interest in Bitcoin and Bitcoin only,
rather than rejecting the whole idea as part of a scam or bringing all the scammers in for something novel,
was really excellent.
It was held at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts,
which I'm sure almost everyone everywhere in the world is familiar with.
You've seen honorary events televised from there,
like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Dr. Sled Zeppelin.
So it was really extraordinary to be in the capital of the United States,
not being persecuted, welcomed by an elite university,
welcomed by the Kennedy Center itself.
there was something about it uh you know you know people dressed up uh bitcoiners dressed up i know
a couple of people who were there who said that they bought a suit to attend the event and i
commented that it was the first time in seven years that i tucked my shirt in so it was it was
there was i had an opportunity to have a conversation with one of the administrators at the
university because we're I'm talking with them about something more formal for Bitcoin and the
point that came up to me during the conversation which I made is you know Bitcoin is built off of
the most advanced mathematical theories the most rational economic know know-how that we have it
utilizes the most advanced microprocessing manufacturing technology and the most efficient
energy markets. It stands to change a lot about how we think about our time preference, economics,
philosophy, so many different things. So coming into a university for the first time where
knowledge has perhaps been, well, exclusive of Bitcoin, not embracing of Bitcoin, one can be
even more critical of a lot of the stuff that's gone on at universities, is a homecoming. It's a
coming home of great ideas into institutions that are meant to develop, protect, espouse,
teach great ideas. So to me, the Bitcoin arrival at Washington, D.C., at the George Washington
University was like the prodigal son returning and hopefully being welcomed. And I'm seeing very
positive results in the conversations that I'm having there. So it was unique, right? It was a
milestone albeit acquired when bitcoiners dressed up not because they wanted to bow down to the um
to the establishment but to present themselves as you know credible uh to the establishment
and uh and and to your comment larry lepard didn't exactly mince his words he said the
something to the effect of these you know the government is filled with evil
fuckers i can't remember the exact quote but it was it was that was the sentiment and and verbiage
of it uh and and it received applause but you know sitting next to him was a u.s senator
when he when he said present company excluded uh it was well it was well received so this met
metamorphosis of bitcoin to a mature widely known widely understood respected asset took a step
forward there i don't want to say it's there yet i think we still have a long way to go but um but
it was nice and i understand that they're planning on doing it again next year same you know same
place same supporters the great speakers came to it as well uh from all walks but you know lots of
lots of the most prominent bitcoiners especially the ones who do the north american circuit were
there yeah uh larry is not afraid of calling a spade a spade and calling theft theft so right
that's always and i i find it i i bet there was a lot of suit coiners there like uh the the latest
saying is you either die a bitcoin or live long enough to see yourself become a suit coiner yeah
you know it's um i actually think there are more suit coiners at the canadian bitcoin conference
because they gave a lot of stage time there
to the idea of treasury companies.
And I think the treasury companies had to put on a suit
because their valuations have been diminished a fair bit
so that they don't really have much else to stand on.
But the BTC and DC conference,
because it was put on by the university,
had a lot of intellectual topics.
So like Giacomo was there
and he was talking about Bitcoin education
and Bitstein was there from the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute.
He was talking about the importance of preserving knowledge and know-how and talking about his communications with the university.
So there was an intellectual air about it that, you know, maybe I think Giacomo wore a suit jacket, but a T-shirt underneath.
And I can't remember exactly what Michael wore, but it was like, it wasn't Bitcoin in corporations.
It was Bitcoin in the mind, Bitcoin in the government, Bitcoin.
It wasn't that there was no discussion of it or no presence of suit coiners.
But we didn't have a bunch of people pitching.
We didn't see a bunch of people pitching treasury companies on crazy ideas.
That wasn't present at all, actually.
That's great to hear because if there's one phrase that I miss hearing from all of these conferences like the last couple of years, it's the phrase, not your keys, not your coins.
Nobody says that anymore, but it's still just as true as it always was.
And we're missing the bigger underlying truth here that Bitcoin is not like other assets.
It's not something that corporations really can own, is it?
Yeah.
They delegate the ownership to a committee, and a committee is a composition of individuals.
Yeah.
Let me pick your brain on this one.
This is one of my pet peeve rabbit holes here.
The way I look at it and the way I try to explain it to suit coiners and the likes of them,
Like in Lugano, you meet a lot of bankers and similar.
It is that like you cannot really own a Bitcoin or you cannot possess it.
Like ownership is a legal relationship between you and a thing.
But Bitcoin isn't really a thing.
And if you're if you believe in uncapped principles, then there is no such thing
as owning information because you don't have intellectual property.
It's not a thing.
Like we all know that if I have information, I don't lose anything by you having the same information as me.
Unless it's your private key.
Exactly.
I'm coming to that.
Possession is when I actually physically control something.
So if I steal your car, you still own it, but I possess it if I stole it.
So, but Bitcoin is, to me, it's a layer deeper because it's just information, but it's asymmetric information.
meaning like that i can act as if i owned it because i i find it improbable that someone else
has access to the same private key as i do so so it's it's just a secret i keep from others i also
find it improbable or implausible that the the network will change to such an extent that it
will render my Satoshi useless because the 21 million cap is changed or some other technical
change that will lead to unforeseen consequences.
So like that's the only reasons that I can act as if I own the Satoshi.
So the thing that is valuable is not the Satoshi itself.
It's the ability to move the Satoshi.
And the Satoshi itself is not really ownable.
Would you agree with this?
Or do you have another view?
I will not agree because it would be a boring podcast if I agree.
Exactly.
Please debunk me.
Yeah.
Well, what I'm going to come down to is a bit of an epistemological point, which
is, you know, working with concept and their definite and their definition.
So none of what you said technically is, is incorrect.
And some of the words are significant understatements like improbable, you
know, like profoundly astronomically improbable is the, are the right
adjectives to qualify improbable with in in the case of cryptography and bitcoin but um when we
talk about when we use a concept like ownership um and historically the concept would have referred
to a combination of possession and legal retro legal enforcement right like a right situation
where really there's no state you know it's like two kids playing with a ball and the one who
who has it, is the owner of it, the one who possesses it. But if there's a dispute,
you expect, you know, they're either going to fight it over and one's going to walk home with
the ball and say it's his at this point, or the parents are going to come in and say, no,
you have to respect the property rights. So it's not a legal thing per se, but there's authority
and enforcement. So the ability to enforce your possession of something is something that we would
have called ownership. And, you know, and in Bitcoin, there is, this is, I think, where it's
important that we don't get lost in the technicalities. You do own a Bitcoin, right? The manner in which
you own Bitcoin is not physical enforcement because it not a physical good You enforce your ownership by knowing something that you don disclose to others right So the secrecy is ownership of
an idea. If we broaden the concept of ownership to having control, possession, like exclusive
control and possession of something. So you need to keep your private key secret to keep your
bitcoin and i don't think that there's anything wrong with that sentence though the word using
your implying it belongs to you you're the you're the owner of it right and that's what i mean by
you can act as if you know it and sufficiently improbable right and so it's sufficient so you
know being if we if we're going to language i don't think you need to make qualifications right
well when you say not your keys not your coins they are your coins they are your keys the manner
in which you keep them is by having a secret that you don't disclose to anyone that you generated
with entropy, which allows you to enforce your exclusive control of the desk, you know, of what
ends up happening, if anything ends up happening to those things. It's actually a more powerful
form of ownership because you may own a ball, but I can come with a screwdriver and, you know,
and damage it. And now you own a damaged ball. So your ownership of it was still constrained by my
ability to damage it. I can't, I can't physically damage your Bitcoin. And, you know, unless I roll
back the chain and I need so much power to do that, it's much more than a screwdriver. It's more power.
You know, if your blocks are a thousand, if your coins are a thousand blocks old, like I need more
power than the human race is capable of generating, like to try to overcome the race and unspend on,
you know, unreceive your coins if I was the one who sent them to you. So it's like, it's more
powerful form of ownership than has ever existed. And it is more powerful because it's more than
just you holding something in the physical realm with your hands or putting a box around it. It's
encased by a cumulative proof of work, a cumulative expenditure of energy. So it's the most powerful
form of ownership we've ever seen. It's unusual, and it's one of a kind. So it adds to the definition
of ownership at the concept.
We don't need a new concept, I don't think.
I think it is the concept of ownership,
but it's maintained and exercised in a different manner.
Yeah, I would agree to that.
It's close enough to the old definitions of ownership
to actually call it ownership,
because you can act as if you own.
And this is also why I find it so overwhelmingly retarded
to claim that you can own other data in Bitcoin,
like owning a DIGPIC, JPEG,
or whatever token that is supposedly attached to Satoshi
akin to owning a star in the Andromeda galaxy.
I mean, you can claim that you own it,
but you have the same ability to change it
or move it as anyone else on Earth.
Once it's inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain,
you can't move it and you can't modify it on the chain.
Everyone else can see it.
And everyone else can see it and everyone else can copy and everyone else can modify their copies of it.
So your ownership doesn't give you any control over this thing that everybody else in the universe doesn't already have as well.
And so, you know, that is a destruction of the concept of ownership.
Like if you say I own something, but everyone, but I can't do anything with it that some complete stranger can't can do with it as well.
Now you've destroyed the concept of ownership because ownership really does come down to this definitional thing of ownership of a thing means you have exclusive control over it and its use.
And if it's public information on a public data store, then it's not yours.
There's no concept of ownership.
And even Casey, who the creator of inscription says, well, only if we pretend, i.e. lie, you know, detach ourselves from reality, pretend like not only if not in reality, do we think that we own this thing because we're following the trace of a chain of signatures, then we can say we own it.
But look, if there's a beautiful image and I want to display it on the wall behind me that's inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain, there's no way its alleged owner can prevent me from doing that.
If I want to modify it, there's no way he can prevent me from doing that.
If I want to make copies and sell them, there's no way he can prevent me from doing that.
Unless he invokes the copyright law, but he's not relying on the fact that it's on the blockchain then.
He's relying on copyright law and the blockchain has no relevance to it whatsoever.
So this concept of ownership, it's an important point that you're making here. What is secret is in a sense owned because only I can control it and have it.
And cryptography gives us this remarkable capability of not disclosing the secret, but proving that we know the secret.
I can prove I have a private key by signing something and sharing the public key.
And that's what allows this new concept of ownership to exist.
And it was historically only used to prove identity and authenticity.
But now in Bitcoin, because we have this property on the chain, which is the Bitcoins,
we suddenly have ownership of information, so long as we understand how to retain our ownership of it.
Yeah, I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here because I want to end up at a point which is that we have to get there in mysterious ways.
Because just before this pod, we decided that the core versus not debate is getting a bit tiresome and that the deeper meta debate is really more interesting, especially from a philosophical perspective.
And I absolutely love talking to you, especially you about these things, because I think we have such similar mindsets here.
And I'd like to find where we differ in our definitions and such.
So what we've been talking about up to this point reminds me of two things.
One is Gigi's The Map is Not the Territory article, if you remember that, where he explains why Bitcoin is the first time that the map actually defines the territory.
Yes. So we define what reality is by the map we draw of it. That is what the time chain is.
And it also reminds me of this chapter from everything divided by 21 million,
Alchemy, which is about element zero, an idea I stole from Jörg Hamersdorf, which is a very bright
guy. And the basic concept there is that the information about the asset is the asset. This
is what makes bitcoin so unique so so i think it all has to do with the sacredness of the satoshi
this is what makes the satoshi so insanely special because there's nothing like it and there never
will be they cannot be by definition because um um uniqueness is it's very it's in in in its very
core, pun intended. So I love hearing you use the word sacred.
Yeah, I use it unironically to me that the Satoshi is one of the only things on planet Earth that are
actually sacred to me. I can't find a better word for it.
Right. And these words all have down to earth meanings.
They do. Even if they're just in the sense of an ideal that is never realized. But I think Bitcoin realizes certain ideals that we have had for forever in the real world. It makes the ideal property real. The ideal scarcity real. We've had things that are scarce, but not fixed in supply. Well, now we have something that's scarce and fixed in supply. So it's knowably scarce.
yeah and also divisible definition right it it takes you to a nearly platonic form of scarcity
right like that there is perfect and we're seeing things from the platonic realm
from plato's cave or as they really are you know which we didn't think could exist so we get into
a lot of really philosophical intellectual absolutely logical stuff hey there everyone
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I want to get to the question at the end of this.
So like, I'm going to go on another tangent too, since you mentioned the word sacred.
Uh, I also feel blessed to have this conversation with you to spend the, to have spent the last couple of days in Lugano doing amazing things with amazing people.
Like, uh, I can't find a better word for it.
I truly feel blessed and I truly view the Satoshi as sacred.
Right.
And this is coming from a very skeptical mind.
So so but where I was getting at with the meta debate is like I had to think about it myself, like what what hill is worth dying on here and for what reason?
And I think the the people have got their priorities a bit wrong here because I think the the meta debate is that first of all, everyone should be happy that this is happening in Bitcoin, that there is a controversy.
and that people are not agreeing and that people are reacting and acting and doing stuff to protect
bitcoin regardless of what side you are on the in the debate like everyone should be happy that
something is going on and that people are taking this seriously uh the the other one is exactly
what we were talking about about there's no ability to all actually own an nft and it's it's
It's all bullshit.
I think that that hill for me is I love dying on that hill, like just explaining to people
why shit coins are shit.
If we do that, if we can rid the world of gullible morons that fall for these scammers
projects, then then we won because there will be no more ordinals because there's no one
to sell them to anymore.
So that's like the most important battle in my mind.
And then there's the decentralization of mining.
And in my mind, like Datum from Ocean is like the real groundbreaking innovation.
And that's more important than not even.
I think that decentralizing mining again is...
And now, of course, we're probably a bit behind here because now they're proposing soft forks and stuff.
But let's not go into that.
but more the meta debates like in your mind what's the what's the most important hill to die on here
uh and anywhere really in yeah debates about these are all good things to fight for but
let's let's start with this discussion around you said people should be happy that uh there's a
dispute uh in bitcoin and happy is maybe not exactly the right you know we're we're going
and they pick on words a lot, I think, you and I.
People, you know, should welcome...
We have nothing else to do.
Yeah, you know, why are people unhappy?
Like, people don't like to see other people in disagreement,
partly because they're afraid it will lead to some bad outcome,
like violence between the two people arguing,
or a breakdown of a system, you know,
that they were hoping was already done and baked and you know an uncontroversial So I can understand why some people are unhappy about it But then when you take the context of where we are
when Bitcoin is only 16 years old,
it's not widely accepted by everyone in the world as money.
It has a lot of discovery to do,
which also then bleeds into the other two discussions
that we want to have.
But if we try to remain focused on the fact that we need to embrace and go through the process of controversy, right?
We shouldn't evade controversy.
We shouldn't turn our eyes away and say, oh, there's a controversy about data storage on Bitcoin or the governance of core or how the developers ought to behave.
Let's pretend it doesn't exist or let's cover it up because that might disincline new people from coming into Bitcoin.
And it's like, no, if we if we avert our eyes from it, if we evade the confrontation of it, then if it's a problem, it festers.
Right. And it can metastasize into something bigger.
And if it metastasizes into something bigger, when Bitcoin is bigger, it presents a bigger risk.
So let's get let's get through our controversies, our disagreements, however we get through them sooner rather than later.
Let's confront them. Let's not be shy about calling what we see as wrong or stupid or short-term thinking by those terms. And then let's reason about it.
So the biggest frustration for me in this discussion is that it's not a dialogue a lot of the time.
It's a debate, and it's not a debate fought on rational merit.
It's a debate on who is the most insulting of the other person, who can score, you know, what are the points that they call in political debate?
I forget what they're called, but like, you know, who can get a jab in here and there rather than how do we work towards what the realistic outcome is?
A lot of insincere points, a lot of, you know, attempting to score points rather than make rational and valid points is part of the debate.
But I think I welcome that too, because I think it then ultimately demonstrates that the people who are, make one-liner posts and think that that's a victory or who claim that another side is stupid when, in fact, the other side has a lot of merit and intelligence behind its point, are ultimately going to be shown to be wrong.
And then they have to confront the ego issue here, which is, I was wrong. Am I going to admit that I was wrong or am I, I was wrong and I'm going to dig my heels in and pretend that I was right and, you know, and play another card towards this losing hand of being metaphysically wrong.
So I think we've got this incredible chemistry going on right now.
And by that, I don't mean everyone's getting along.
I mean, people are challenged every day to say, was I right?
Was I wrong?
Like, you know, everybody knows, or, you know, everybody should know.
You and I both have been leaning on the knots side in terms of the decision of what node to run for, maybe possibly for different reasons.
But where I was going with this.
Because for me, everything I'm doing, I'm trying to have a rationale behind that I can explain that's not an emotional, irrational point. And I'm trying to get at something. And for the people who've taken numerous victory laps prematurely on the other side, telling me, when are you going to admit that you were wrong about this, that, the other, when some new piece of news comes up and they think that it's the end of the discussion because it was mildly incorrect.
or embarrassing, but not core to the fundamental discussion is, um, is, you know, it's something
that I try not to rub in people's faces, but I hope that they're self-aware enough to say,
you know, if you leaped to a conclusion that said that this was, that this was over, that
that could be done, that this is, that, you know, this debate is over, um, you're, you
were mistaken and you should do a post-mortem on what your mistake was, or maybe you knew
you were mistaken in the first place, but you were trying to score a point by saying the argument is
over. I'm walking away. I'm done from it. Like I win, you lose, right? Like, you know, you don't
really win in reality just by saying I win, you lose and walking away. Sometimes if you have won,
there's no point in having the debate with someone who's lost, but there's a debate going on here
and there's actions being taken by network participants that demonstrate provably that
there's a debate that's still going on here. Sorry for the long-winded answer.
No, no, it's fantastic. You said a profound thing to me in Madeira, I remember, and that is like the block size wars. We were all happy about that we won the block size wars, but you pointed out that we won the battle, but the war is still ongoing.
Like it's proof that Bitcoin could be resilient once, but it's not proof that it will be forever.
Like, and it was resilient because people did care and because people did the necessary things to protect the network from being taken over by bad actors.
But it's by no means a proof that it will do that forever.
Arguably, it goes more resilient the more people that are connected to it.
But only if those people are actually doing their homework and caring enough about the thing.
And that's not just running your own node.
That's like all the other stuff as well.
I genuinely believe that us having chats like this and talking about these things and being present on Twitter and stuff has a huge influence on how people act.
It's not just economic nodes to me.
I like, um, but taking the humble pill, if, if you're wrong about something is super important.
I can, I can say that I was probably like a little too happy about taproot too quickly.
And I think we may, we should have, we should have been more careful and not, I, it was sort
of a group psychology thing.
Like everyone wanted segwit and we got segwit and we won the block size wars.
Yes.
And then everyone was like, everyone wants taproot.
It's done.
let's fucking go and we just did the thing right and maybe we should have thought it through a bit
more like was it worth it yeah i mean i i think these things are super super complicated because
in hindsight you can't you can't objectively know if a change was good or bad like not even the seg
with the witness discount it didn't happen what it probably wouldn't have been the end of the world
Well, if the two times that hard work happened, that would have been bad because that would have been corporate control.
But we could have just fought for nothing, for no changes, and had the same outcome.
And today's controversy around core versus knots would not be the same controversy.
No.
There wouldn't be the taproot annex.
And as much as I like that the Lightning Network exists and the people are working on it,
it wouldn't have been that bad if we went if it took another decade like would that really be
because i think we would have had a slightly more vulnerable we would have still had the
lightning network but we would have had to have different mechanisms which were more cumbersome
to protect us from the malleability bug which is too technical to get into but i think i think i
think one of the things we find is if we give more time we can find workarounds with that aren't easy
but are still thorough.
And making changes to make things easy
also opens up attack surface.
There's the big lesson from SegWit and Tap.
And indeed, SegWit was so driven by the enthusiasm
and demand for the Lightning Network
because it sounded like such a great solution.
I don't think anyone realized how long it would take to build
and what all the hurdles along the way were.
But when Taproot came, it was, we weren't really sure what the supposed benefits would be, right?
Like it was very technical benefit claims.
Not, there wasn't like a white paper around.
Here's the amazing thing you can build with Taproot.
With Segwit, it was like, you can, we want Segwit so we can build the Lightning Network.
And here's the white paper on the Lightning Network.
And some speech vulnerability.
We didn't have that with Taproot.
And so it got activated because we worshipped.
I'm going to use another word that I think you might have.
We worship the lead developers.
We worship these people who had protected, preserved, advanced Bitcoin for some time.
And so we wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt rather than don't trust.
We trusted them, right?
It wasn't don't trust, verify everything left, right, and center.
It was a lot of, okay, these guys know what they're talking about.
They're benevolent.
let's let them have the next thing.
We're bound to benefit from it,
even though we're not exactly sure what the benefits are.
Right. And so I think now those chickens have come home to roost.
It turned out people aren't really doing much with the alleged benefit,
but there was an exploit available with, you know,
you can look at it in whatever way you want,
but now we've got these inscriptions, which are, which have been a problem.
Maybe it was taken care of by the fact that there's a block size limit and
those things got expensive and the free market demonstrated that they weren't very valuable.
So maybe no big deal. But we've got this acquiescence issue of like Bitcoin can be used,
however it can be used, and we shouldn't try to prevent it from being used, however,
which is at the core, I have to use that word ironically, at the core of the debate between
core and nots right uh that you know do we want to restrict its uses from everything that it can
do to the more strictly monetary uses sorry if these are long long answers no no but i agree
with every point and this is where this is where this changing of definitions debate comes in
because they have been like slowly but surely it's changing some of the definitions of words
like what what off return is for and and and such right right in the documentation around it
yeah when you change that when when you're in charge of the dictionary and you change the
definitions of words as as a metaphor here uh you're you're trying to police the use of the
use of words and and here where the you know the it's it's the opposite of policing and it's more
Well, you're not policing, you know, what was expected to be policed.
No, the meme is like, you have a broken rib, but we fixed it in Photoshop.
It's very reminiscent of the definition of vaccine being changed in Oxford dictionary for the COVID vaccine to be legit.
like right uh which is this has come up like three or four times in our conversation already
which is around ownership around uh the proper use of bitcoin around what a bug is like
we're we find ourselves constantly especially in bitcoin and i think because it's a new concept
that's complicated and unprecedented and does many things that nothing before it is done
struggling to understand it and struggling to define it like all the words we use the
coins aren't coins, right? They're not physical minted things. They're a physical, ideological,
duplicated entries, right? Like everything in the digital realm, we try to give it terms that come
from the realm which we come from, which is the meat space realm. And always those metaphors,
and so it's a metaphor, and always the metaphor is broken in some sense. It's a physical,
digital translation layer, but it's, that breaks other things about the metaphysics of the concept.
So, you know, when we talk about digital something, it's always different from the physical thing that
we use the same thing term for a digital coin that not behave the way a physical coin behaves.
And Gigi's article, Bitcoin is Time, talks about this, this first ever unification of the notion of a
token and ledger as being one in the same.
So for people who haven't read Bitcoin is time,
it's the best article there is on Bitcoin coming from this year at least,
and speaking to another writer.
It's just like that.
There's a penny that drops when you read that for the first time.
And the other one I recommend, though, where the map is not the territory.
This is not a pipe or whatever.
But yeah, profound work.
Yeah, so do you think, long and complicated question maybe, but do you think, not so long, but slightly, a lot of nuance.
a lot of these developer types and the people working in core allegedly are like more more of
this san francisco liberal type like more left-wingy and thus some people say that that
automatically means more nihilistic and less principled and that's why that's if you're more
like open to that you're somehow more open to changing definitions of things if you are
like inclined to do that politically Do you think this is a real thing or is that just like scaremongering well it makes me think at the uh canadian bitcoin conference i had a long
talk um very civilized you know so but it was a debate it was a disagreement it was a argument
whatever you want to call it but it was very civilized with someone on the on the other side
and these conceptual conflicts kept coming up and it left me thinking and I'm very loathe to
generalize like a whole group of people anyone who's in favor of the opera term being blown out
must be a nihilistic Marxist communist right I'm very careful about this and I haven't had a chance
to meet many of them face to face but one of the things that I found in this rather lengthy
conversation is that there is like when i say philosophical there's a philosophical disagreement
around the idea that things are built with a purpose um and yes so like bitcoin was built
with this purpose to be money and the debate that came from the other side i'm trying to do it
complete justice was bitcoin is a set of rules and the set of rules allow you to put inscriptions
into the taproot thing.
Someone came up with a way to do this.
And so you have to accept that that's the way that it is.
Like there's nothing you can do about it.
And to me, it's like, well, if there was a bug
that made 42 million coins or something,
we would call that a bug.
We would say that's against the purpose of Bitcoin.
And so we would fix the bug.
And in fact, if you say a thing is what it does,
which I've heard, you know, a thing's purpose is whatever it does, which I've heard others in that
camp say, I think that is an attempt to destroy the concept of purpose. Because if you say whatever
a thing is, whatever a thing does, that's its purpose, then you can't ever say, well, this,
this thing that you built does not fit for purpose. I hired you to build a house and you dug a hole in
the ground. And it's like, well, I, you know, that it's a hole in the ground. Its purpose is to be a
hole in the ground, not to be a house for you. I was like, well, I know I wanted shelter to cover
me and protect me from the rain. And you're just saying that whatever the thing is, is its purpose.
So it's, it's not true. And like things are, we as human beings are purposeful beings. We can set
our mind to a purpose and build something that attempts to fulfill that purpose, to meet that
need. And if it fails to do it, we haven't built it according to the purpose. If it's close to it,
we can maybe tweak it and fix it so that it better fits the purpose. If it should the purpose,
we can then look at it and say, what other purpose might it fit? But we can't say that
nothing has any designated purpose that comes from our expectations of it, our contemplation of it.
And so I think that that's a flaw that I can't say I've heard everyone on the opposite side
repeated, but it seems to be a flaw in conceptualization of what Bitcoin is that often gets invoked.
And I think part of the word game, the concept game that we're playing to an even greater extent
is like, you have some people that say, oh, I hate spam, but I can't define it. Some people say,
there's no such thing as spam, right? There's no, there, it is what it, it is what it is,
or there is spam and you can't stop it. And so we just end up with a multi-pronged, uh, set of
invalid arguments, right? Like if you can't, and I think this is really important. If you can't
define every single instance of a thing, because there are edge cases, it doesn't mean the thing
doesn't exist. Like for example, chairs exist, right? We know what chairs are, but I can make
an edge case of something that's both, that can be both a chair and a table. You know, it's this
man-made flat surface that's low, but expands and you, you know, you can choose to sit on it,
but you can also place something on it. So it's an edge case definition of a chair, but you can't
then say, bring that and say, so is this a chair or isn't it? I don't know. I guess chairs don't
exist, which is, which is the, the edge case of some of these, uh, you know, if I do something
that's a lightning network anchor, anchor inscription, and it's used as a justice transaction
for this and that, is that spam? It's like, well, it may or may not be, but the JPEG is a spam,
right? Like don't, don't try to look at the edge case and deny the existence of the undisputable
case, which, well, of which there's millions, you know, like, and then, and then pretend that they
don't exist so the and this to me is where what i was talking about before it's like rational
argumentation requires rational conduct not these gotcha escape hatches you know oh i i said i don't
know what spam is so we can't argue whether you know whether something is spam or isn't because
i just keep keep playing dumb right like when you're in the goalposts right yeah maybe that's
moving the goalposts maybe it's called playing dumb maybe they're they're one in the same uh
sort of thing. But ultimately, you have to move forward. If you can't engage in rational
dialogue with somebody and you make a valid point and they don't acknowledge it, not because
it's wrong, but because they don't want it to be right, now you're dealing with someone who's
evading the truth. And so you're not in an honest debate. And this is where the term bad actor
kind of arises and has one of its two meanings, which is if you're not an honest debater,
you're not really there to help resolve the issue in the best interest of Bitcoin.
You're there to win an argument.
You may have ulterior motives.
And I think a lot of the questioning of what's going on here is the questioning of,
like, if there's no good explanation for the change that we're confronting,
maybe there's a bad explanation.
But, you know, the sure as heck isn't a good one.
I met a lot of people on the core side in Prague at the Trezor event.
In Europe, there's a lot of technical Bitcoiners.
Right, makes sense.
And they have a point that their main point was sort of like that it's useless to run these filters and stuff
because at the end of the day, these things are going to get relayed anyway.
But where I philosophically disagree with them is like,
yeah, but I don't really care.
I'm not going to help facilitate this.
And regardless of the success of my not helping facilitating this,
I'm still not going to help facilitate it.
Because it's only true because everyone thinks that way,
that it's pointless to resist.
But yeah, it's true.
You probably have to get to like 92% momentum in this for this to actually work.
But the same is true for the new proposed defaults here.
Like the 100k thing also has to get to at least 8% or 10% before it starts actually relaying this stuff.
And yes, it's true that you could always bring a briefcase full of dollars to a miner and do that.
Which is why I think that datum and decentralized mining is more important than this debate, because right now you can bypass it.
But still, I think it's sort of a philosophical difference there.
I view my node as the thing I'm using for this stuff.
And what I do with it is none of your business.
I don't have to agree.
Well, just as a point of order, we're finding ourselves dipping into the core versus not specific debate, which we wanted to avoid.
Right. So for me, the last point I'll make about this, and I'll try to make it really quick, is like my disappointment in the whole debate is it should have gotten much more quickly to a framing of.
For years, we have relied on policy, which was effective because, as it turns out, it was a gentleman's agreement.
People didn't route it, miners didn't mine it, and everyone abided by the policy, except for special one offs.
But there were such a minority of the issues that it didn't happen.
And then that broke. One, it broke because there was an exploit that policy didn't cover in the inscriptions. And two, then Libre Relay and other things and Mara Slipstream were breaking that agreement to enforce policy. They were like, look, we can violate policy.
So the conversation should have been, now that policy is no longer enforceable, which elements of policy do we want enforced and how do we enforce them? Presumably through consensus rules because we can no longer rely on gentlemanly behavior to enforce policy.
policy and we didn't have that conversation a bunch of people defaulted to well it doesn't
work so those are no longer rules which is dangerous because there are policy rules that
that are absolutely essential to the continued functioning of bitcoin and you know and now the
and there are ones that are undesirable by many bitcoiners so we haven't been having the right
debate for whatever reason then there's maybe some lessons to be learned there but that's that's my
last on the Bitcoin core versus knots, I hope for this.
Yeah, and I absolutely agree.
I think it's that debate is not being had like Bitcoin is money, like the literal first
row of the title of the white paper is big.
You have to do zero on a cash system.
Yes.
So if it's not functioning as that, but as arbitrary data storage or whatever, then obviously
something is wrong and sure I could agree to that maybe we're doing this the wrong way and something
needs to change but but like the definition like the very purpose of the thing has not changed like
you cannot fix the broken rib with an x-ray like then then you have to do something else like and
and yeah I agree I missed that from the debate yeah anyway you know and again you end up with
people saying you know oh you know you're citing the white paper do you remember that the bcashers
cited the white paper this that the other it's like the distinction here is is really important
like the b cachers were weren't saying that bitcoin itself wasn't cash it was the people
weren't using it as cash and we intended a second layer not that bitcoin you know we didn't have the
pro seg with camp saying bitcoin isn't cash and we shouldn't try to use it as money right like that
so again we we end up with these very flawed arguments being used to defend keep the status
quo or comply with tolerance, acceptance, defeatism over non-monetary use cases of Bitcoin
being permitted. But there's a spectrum. I mean, there are the people who say, look, technically,
you can't stop it. There's always some other way to get it in there. And so you might as well not
resist it. And that, again, is an argument that can really be had. But let's move away from it,
because people have heard this to death.
And we want to talk about, at the very least,
this is healthy for Bitcoin, right?
Like this is, unless we disagree,
this is important that Bitcoin go through this.
It's important that it go through the growing pains.
It's important that the users of Bitcoin
have to fight for what they view Bitcoin to be.
And it's important that when there is legitimate debate
that it be had and that it end up being resolved
without the destruction of Bitcoin.
And I think that's one of the things that's really valuable.
And for people who find this really uncomfortable
to the point where they don't know
whether they should own Bitcoin
because it makes them so uneasy,
there's really only two recommendations I would have.
One is close your eyes and ignore the debate,
you know, or two is sell your Bitcoin.
Like, because this is going to be
a recurring theme in Bitcoin. Like this isn't, we didn't win the war to, or we won a battle.
The war to protect Bitcoin, just think what we're saying Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is money. It's
potentially going to become all the money in the world or the most dominant form of money
in the world. You think people aren't going to fight over that? You think tricksters and hucksters
aren't going to try to separate you from your Bitcoin through any means necessary, any means
possible, including undermining the protocol itself, the development, writing fake walled
books.
There's many, many attacks to come.
It is the most valuable property in the world.
It's a new form of property.
It's not well understood.
For the rest of your life, Bitcoin will be under attack.
And as is your state, as is anything that's valuable, right?
I think this was kind of the point that was not explicitly made, but in the undertones
of Jason Lowery's thesis of software.
It's like people try to get things from other people.
And life tries to get things from other things in life.
And the protection of it.
So how we protect Bitcoin is a new frontier
for us to fight on.
And how we protect even Bitcoin's definition and purpose
is a new frontier for us to fight on.
But we have to fight on it and probably always will.
Just like everything living has to always fight for its life.
So yes, Bitcoin is alive.
Thank you.
I'd like to test out another metaphor that just popped into my head on you.
So if the block size wars was like us winning the first Star Wars movie
and we blew up the Death Star, like the big blocker Death Star, right?
And this debate is sort of the return of the Jedi.
The Death Star isn't ready built yet like this.
The scaffolding around half a Death Star and we're about to win this battle too.
But the real thing, but we should expect Disney remakes and crap, and we really have to avoid the Disney remake of Bitcoin.
That would be the worst outcome ever.
So that's your metaphor?
I actually used the Star Wars metaphor just yesterday, I think, on one of my Bitcoin philosophy spaces.
To wrap up, it had something to do with using force, right?
For good or for easy.
use the force. So there's something to the Star Wars, there's rebels, and there's the empire,
right? And I was talking about it in the context of Bitcoin is a rising empire. It exists in many
places. It has a currency. That's essentially all it has that's protected by force, right? The use
of energy, the use of force is, you know, so when I say use the force for good rather than for evil,
That's what the, this will take us to the mining debate that you want to have or the mining decentralization discussion.
Decentralized mining is the light side of the force.
Centralized mining is the dark side of the force.
It's too much power for anyone to possess and they can abuse it.
Yeah, so I think Star Wars provides a really interesting metaphor because we were talking about really the mythology of Bitcoin when this came up and how the story of Bitcoin's creation.
and its origin story, everything that goes onto it is a big part of the value of Bitcoin in that
how we as human beings often rely on storytelling to get themes and important ideas across. And,
and, you know, Star Wars is the success that it is because it told a really powerful story of the
little guys fighting the big guys. Well, that's, that is the Bitcoin story of the, you know,
of those who are oppressed by those with power and control can come back and win with hope, a new hope.
No, yeah, yeah.
There's a lot of common themes between.
Absolutely.
And this goes, I mean, this goes so deep.
That's also why the Matrix is a good metaphor, because it is a hero's journey story.
Like Campbell's hero's journey story is all over Star Wars and the Matrix and all of these things.
And I used a Star Wars metaphor in one of the older books. I don't remember which one of them, but where the Death Star is the establishment and most people and taxes and inflation and all of that. It's literally the empire.
and the rebels are
you know the rebels
us we are the crypto anarchists
and you know whatever they call it
the ANCAPs
and Bitcoin is the photon torpedoes
going into the thermal exhaust
vent in the Death Star
that's what Bitcoin is
it's going to blow the fuck up
because now they can't do anything about us
so that's
the analogy I had a couple of years
I think you can certainly have fun
with it
the bitcoins are the hackers. Luke Skywalker built these droids, you know, and he's, so he's a bit of
a hacker as well, but it's, um, it's this big idea, right? That the little guy can defeat the
overwhelming established empire, especially when he's on the side of good. Like this, this belief
that good is victorious over evil has really powerful, uh, roots and it has rationality behind
because the idea of evil is,
evil is dependent on taking
what is unearned from the good, right?
It's like, well, you know,
to use your labor, to use your productivity,
it really just does come down to theft, taxation,
all these kinds of, you know, murder.
These things are evil because they take away the free will
and the product of the free will of individuals.
So it's all good versus evil
is always a battle of freedom versus slavery
or freedom versus some other.
antithesis of slavery at the end of the day. And evil always rises in environments of good,
sometimes overtaking them because the good is benevolent, charitable, giving, and generous. And
so when the evil sees the generosity of the good, it takes and takes and takes. And then it feels
entitled and keeps on taking and taking beyond what the good can produce and generously give.
And so we end up with moments where we're confronting evil that is taking so much that even the good can't keep up with it.
I think that is a description of where the Western world finds itself today.
Like government has just grown so big, so out of control.
And it's taking, you know, and it's commitments to give only in exchange for the people granting it more power to take from others that things are inverted and unsustainable.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, this is another hero's journey story.
The Shawshank Redemption is what I used for the last chapter I added to the Praxeology book.
And in that, like the Shawshank Redemption is really a metaphor for hope.
It's a very good Bitcoin metaphor in that too.
Like the low time preference of digging yourself up out of the prison with a teaspoon while everyone thinks you're doing something else is great.
And also, Morgan Freeman's character tells Andrew Dufresne, Tim Robbins' character, that hope is dangerous because you are going to die in here.
And if you're hopeful, it's only going to lead to depression.
And he says, look at this 90-year-old guy that got released and two weeks later, he kills himself.
Because he's so institutionalized and used to the three meals per day and the rules of the prison and stuff.
But the meta point of the whole movie is that hope is always a rational choice because guess what? You're going to die anyway. So you might as well live as if there is hope. Because it's only when we live as if there is no hope that there actually isn't any hope.
Like, look at the Soviet Union, the giant prison, continent-sized prison for 70 years.
Hope got them out of there.
Only when they started denying that these things are real that they stopped being real.
So we can never let...
I think this is a really important point here because part of what these repeated wars in Bitcoin are, these repeated battles,
they're battles between those who have hope and are fighting for what they hope is true versus those who say, you might as well have no hope.
Yeah, because the protocol does this.
You can't do anything about spam.
You can't do anything about the government.
You can't do anything.
And it's like Bitcoiners are, I'm going to try.
So thanks for your defeatist advice.
I'm still going to try because I have hope.
Because I can see a path to realizing what I hope for through Bitcoin.
And I mean, it is amazing.
You and I have been in Bitcoins long enough to have seen it,
not just win these wars, but on a much more personal level, deliver many of the things that
we hope for within our personal lives and our family lives. Bitcoin has given me the ability to
stay at home and take care of my kids who have special needs. Bitcoin, which I always hoped to
do, but was unrealistic under the fiat system. And now I have it and now I can exercise it. And so
my hopes have been realized. Bitcoin's, and that's what I want to do with my freedom,
which the state won't let me do, right? And the traditional system wouldn't let me do.
So there's a real hero's journey constantly happening for lots of people. And there are
climaxes that end up happening, you know, and many people's hero's journey ends not because they died,
but because they managed to achieve the goal that they had hoped to.
So there's a lot of happy endings all over the Bitcoin story.
I'm not saying it's only happy ending,
but if you fight for what you believe in within Bitcoin,
that's positive, that's a good outcome
rather than an evil, treacherous, parasitic outcome,
you can see that happen over and over and over again.
Absolutely.
You said happy ending there.
I got a picture in my head of a Thai massage for Sats.
That's you. That's your problem.
I heard someone mention Swedish massage the other day.
I was like, what the fuck is that? Oh, it must be a massage with a sad ending.
That's funny. That's good confidence.
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Brush your teeth.
No, but would it be right to say, first, Bitcoin must win the war within you
before you can be a soldier for Bitcoin in the external world.
I think there's something to that.
Yeah, I think that both happen simultaneously, though, right?
It's not...
I mean, I appreciate the point.
Like, if you're going to fight, you have to believe in yourself, right?
Because if you're approaching this with a defeatist attitude,
the only sense of continuity and effort you get is,
there's other people saying we're all defeatist,
and you're acting out of fear, defeatism,
you know, complacency and, and surrender. And so you're not fighting, you're acquiescing,
right? And you're maybe standing in the way of those who are fighting. And so it feels like a
fight because you're just standing there doing nothing. And other people are saying, get out of
my way. And you're like, ah, why bother? Just let them do what they're going to do. They're going to
do it anyways. And so you feel like you're in a fight with people, but you're really, you know,
get the hell out of the way. Like you're just being in the way. You're not fighting for something.
You're standing against something. And, and if you really, you know, assess like, am I, am I on the
side of good or evil? That's really, that's really important. And if you find yourself in a position
to say, there's no such thing as good or evil, then you've missed out on something, right? Like
my advice to you is really think hard about the fact that there actually is good and evil.
if you check out and presume that these concepts don't exist you're going to be lured into doing
something that you think is neither good nor evil but which is evil yeah and if if if you don't find
that distinction to be you know sexy enough go go read economic science and the Hans Hermann Hoppe and read up on argumentation ethics Because sure science cannot derive an ought from an is but can come pretty damn close to an ought not
If you're deductively reasoning from first principles, you can...
Well, listen, it's actually so overcomplicated.
You know, the people who say you can't derive an ought from an is, I is hungry.
right yeah i ought to eat food right yeah that is deriving it's anyone who say you can't like why
ought you to eat food because you'll die otherwise well what you know why don't i want to die because
there's because the very definition of value at some time at some point you have to pick your
axioms like your figure maybe that's a vulgar word word to use in this context to some but
first principles can do a lot.
The argumentation
ethics, I absolutely love it.
If I argue with you, by the
act of arguing, I show
you that I think communication
is an appropriate
method for conflict resolution.
And then if I start stealing anyway,
it's not argumentation
anymore, it's bullying.
So it's
literally the non-aggression principle.
I think there's
Like, I would love if this was in the backbone of every Bitcoiner, like everyone had this in them.
But it seems like since Bitcoin is for anyone.
And it includes those who don't.
Yeah, exactly.
I think that's when these wars happen in Bitcoin, it is this pulling back of the curtain.
Like we thought we were all Bitcoiners and that it all meant the same thing.
But then we find out, no, different people actually in this group have different values,
are prepared to take different risks, are prepared to stand up for different things,
and their philosophies are different.
And even if they seem to agree on a lot of things that in the traditional world would view,
they're all crypto-anarchists.
Well, are you a permissive crypto-anarchist?
Paranoid.
Aggressive crypto-anarchist?
Look, are you extremely paranoid crypto-anarchist?
What are you paranoid? Are you paranoid about corruption? Are you paranoid about weakness?
Like, so there's a lot to fight over, to argue about, right? And it doesn't always mean that
there's one right side and one wrong side. I think that's also a false dichotomy. Sometimes both sides
are wrong. Sometimes there's nuance in both. Sometimes there's a meeting in the middle.
Sometimes neither side is extreme enough in one direction. And that's why, you know, there's
there's a dispute. So getting to a workable solution, sometimes there's many workable
solutions, right? Like there's more than one way to skin a cat. And yeah, so you can do it in
different ways. I heard someone say that organizing Bitcoiners is like herding cats. I like that.
It is. To tie this back to the movie analogies here and stuff, like,
have you seen a South Park episode called The Death Camp of Tolerance?
I don't think so
I haven't seen
I love South Park
but I don't watch it
regularly or religiously
no no
this is from one of the
earlier seasons
and it's great
probably not
because I didn't get into it
until at least the movie
came out
yeah yeah
but this is after the movie
but still quite early
like one of the first
10 seasons
you have to tell me what the episode
was about then
so it's about
in the episode
Mr. Garrison
the school teacher
figures out that
someone has been given
a million dollars
because they were
fired for being gay from a school. So he does everything in his power. The rest of the episode,
he does everything in his power to get fired for being gay. Which means he starts doing more and
more outrageous gay things with his partner, Mr. Slave in the classroom, including inserting small
animals in various orifices of this Mr. Slave. And the more he tries, the more courageous everyone
else seems to think he is because everyone just applauds him and he gets awards and stuff and at
the same time there's a side plot about the nazi camp where everyone is supposed to be or forced
forced to be tolerant uh which is hilarious in itself but i think this is that there's a bitcoin
metaphor in here somewhere i think that the the uh morale of the story is like um just because i
tolerate something does not have to mean that I approve of it.
Like I can tolerate stuff, but I don't have to approve.
Bitcoin is like that all the time.
There's the consensus rules, which means I tolerate.
I can still use my node and use my filter settings or whatnot to show
to the world, maybe in vain, but I don't care that I don't approve.
Like I can tolerate, but I don't have to approve.
And I think that that's the nuance that people are missing.
I mean, we have lived with this.
There are things that are unacceptable.
And we pass laws to say, if you do these unacceptable things,
then the state is going to come after you.
That's been the history.
The state's overstepped its boundaries, but that's the concept behind the law.
Then there are things that are unpopular, right?
And we tolerate those.
And so we draw a line.
And we ourselves don't do those things.
Popular is like, they're not for me, right?
But I don't think people should go to jail for doing them, right?
Like happy endings.
Yeah.
So we don't have laws on these things, but many of us frown upon them.
And it's okay to frown upon the things that you don't like and to say to somebody,
hey, you know, like you just, you know, you burped in the movie theater, you, you know,
you spilled popcorn all over the movie theater, you made a mess of the place. That's not
offensive. We need to get the state apparatus involved in, but to call somebody out and say,
think about what you're doing. Maybe you ought not to be doing it is completely legitimate,
right? They can't say, well, you know, so soon someone might say, so sue me, right? And it's
against the law. But that is, and that's always in a free society going to be a large area where
people dispute without violence, unapproved of activities, but not illegal activities, right?
And so that's a difference between like what we consider valuable and moral. And
we just have to accept that that's always going to be the case. And to your point,
which keeps dragging us back into the
knots thing but it's like you know
I don't think anyone should go to jail for putting
a normal inscription on
their monkey JPEG
but I don't like it and I'm happy to tell
them that I don't like it and that I think they're doing something
stupid with their own
time and energy that isn't
benefiting them and it's also causing
some harm to other people
so that they ought
not to do it
they ought to use
Bitcoin exclusively as money
And some people will simply do the opposite out of mischievousness.
And I think we're always going to have to tolerate that because the good has to tolerate some amount of not good.
I don't want to describe these things as evil because people will put them in the same camp as best.
Well, stamps are evil.
I mean, yeah.
So those are intentionally mischievous things to exploit the goodwill of Bitcoin.
right like to to do something not aligned with the interest of bitcoin that is permissible
because bitcoin has to ultimately tolerate these things right and so but the behavior the conduct
of it is is not good right it's intentionally malicious uh and it's malicious to other network
participants but it's not able to be forbidden or maybe maybe it can be eventually but that's
that's the way it is and so you're always going to have these people who are
foreigns in the side of any system uh and you and and this is indeed where you know someone's saying
well you might as well let them do anything because they can still do this is like that's a
tolerant that's taking tolerance too far you know you do want to stop people from doing the things
that you can stop them from that are wrong to do if you can stop them we don't want perfection to be
the enemy of the good.
If you say, well, we can't stop all crimes,
so we might as well not have police and laws.
That is a very defeatist and obviously invalid argument.
And so, you know, but I don't want to talk anymore
about spam and any more metaphors in that regard.
So I'm done.
Well, good.
What do you want to talk about, Tomer?
Well, you were talking about mining.
You wanted to talk about mining decentralization.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that's a really important thing
because it's like the next big attack in Bitcoin,
or I don't know what the next big attack,
but a future big attack in Bitcoin,
it's going to come from,
there's three or four parties that can mine
that have more than 51% of the hash power between them
and they want to do something
or they don't want something to be done
and they have unilateral control over that.
And that's going to bring us to a debate about this.
So we can try to, if we can permanently prevent that situation from arising by decentralizing mining, that's a war we avert.
We averted through a distribution of power so that no one can abuse that particular power.
And the decentralization of mining is very important.
There's arguments that are made as to how best to decentralize it, but certainly the most relevant present matter is ocean mining and datum, which is part of the previous controversy we don't want to discuss anymore.
But it's this notion that you can actually have a pool where participants are each forming their own block templates according to rules that they decide upon.
And so they're not all in cahoots with one another.
And there isn't someone on top of them telling them what to do.
And so they're free and sovereign.
And this is a big deal.
And whether or not that all ends up happening exclusively with an ocean pool, because ocean pool really isn't a pool in the same way that the others are, thanks to Datum, or others use Datum, that's all going to be good.
So I think the pushing forward of Datum for mining decentralization is really important.
And I'd like to see other significant pools adopt it.
Absolutely. And alternatives to ocean and Datum would be nice.
Because right now, if you're mining with another pool, an FPPS pool, you're basically not a miner, but a hashmonger.
That's what you are.
You sell your hash power, but you don't know what block you're mining.
So you can't really call yourself a miner in that case.
Also important to point out that you can mine 100 kilobyte op-return with core using that.
of like you it doesn't it doesn't stop you from doing any of that uh and and there's there's
another actually actual um like it say for instance if all the bigger pools more centralized
pools uh refused to mine these 100 kilobyte operaturns now we're getting back to this again
sorry i know we shouldn't talk about it but but this is in a different context uh then there's
actually a bigger risk that one of these smaller miners that is making his old block template is
the one that is going to actually put the thing on the on chain so that's the irony of that but
that aside like i agree with you like the the thing i'd really like to see is competitors to ocean
like other pools with similar models because it's not good if they are they are the only one and the
only alternative That never good Like with I like to see others I heard like I think it was at that Abu Dhabi conference where someone mentioned that they were doing something similar or maybe it was in Slovenia this minor conference
You've already had too many conferences.
Someone in the Terra was going to be launching a Stratum V2 pool, but it's now more than a half
later, and it hasn't launched. And I think, you know, this, again, is perfect, being the enemy
of the good. The Stratum Big 2 is a long-term project that hasn't delivered a working pool yet,
even though there's pools that say they're going to use it, whereas Datum and Ocean developed Datum
quickly, and it is working. It may not be perfect, again, but they haven't let
perfect become the enemy of the good, and what they're doing is good, and they're growing.
There's a long road ahead of them. They're still under 2% of the whole network cash,
rate. So we've got a long way to go, but I mean, I'd love to see my actual miners mining, right?
Not miners, just hashing someone else's template, but being able to take the sovereignty over,
spread it to surety 40, 50% in the next few years. I don't think that's inconceivable,
but it requires education, lobbying, and explanation to the people who control a lot of the hash power.
And I think historically, you know, certainly what we saw in the block size wars was that
miners back then, they were just trying to make a very short-term buck, literally dollar,
as quick as they could. So if it came a little bit, you know, they might, the hash rate got
distributed between Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin precisely according to where the most, the highest
nominal or marginal cent in dollar terms was going to be earned. And quite often, you know, like, you
know, it would even be the case that fees were ignored or the hundred block wait time was ignored
because, you know, Bitcoin cash might be crashing. But it was if it was worth one one hundredth of
Bitcoin, then miners ended up putting one one hundredth of the hash rate to Bitcoin cash as they
did to Bitcoin because it was just like revenue neutral or profit neutral. It was entirely on
without principle, right? It was entirely, the only principle was make a buck. And I think
mining is such a hard business long-term. The difficulty adjusts every couple of weeks to
take away any advantage that you had over the network to have you touch your rewards and
difficulty adjustment works both ways like this is why i think like anything about tailor missions
it's not half the time it works in your favor and half the time it doesn't it's like no no
almost all the time it works against you because other miners because if you're profitable then you
and other miners have the incentive to mine more. And if there's someone selling mining equipment
to the market, it's like either you buy it or they buy it. And if they buy it, they're going to
increase the difficulty and get more of the market share, which is a fixed reward. It's not like the
market is growing. The amount of Bitcoin being issued is fixed at every block. And so I think
that's what makes it a uniquely, nearly perfectly competitive market. And it uses game theory,
The best way to win the mining game is for miners not to add hash power and nobody else to add hash power to the network.
Then it would be super simple to make tons and tons of money.
But, of course, people are tempted by the opportunity to earn more money.
And so they continue to add hash rate as long as it seems profitable.
And oftentimes they overshoot because many of them are adding hash rate at the same time,
Which makes the business, when you zoom out at it a long time, there's been lots of bankruptcies in mining.
There's been lots of periods of losses.
It hasn't been a great investment.
And now many of them are making this, the industrial miners are making the shift to being also data centers for AI computation because of the pure play thing.
So I think pure play mining is getting harder and harder to be profitable at.
And it'll end up being infused or part of power generation facilities or at least managed for power generation.
Or heat.
Yeah.
Yeah, like trying to extract the heat, trying to do it.
So there's all sorts of different strategies that develop, whether you're trying to get cheap energy that's stranded or whether you're trying to get benefits from the secondary effects of using the energy to mine, such as heat.
all these strategies are not about pure mining and that's where the differentiation ultimately
comes in. And I think principled mining may, may well end up being like, we get, we get to see a
blow up of long-term financial support for publicly traded mining companies. That doesn't
mean mining is going to go away, but it may mean that many people mine at home and, you know, and
actually do it to protect their freedom, you know, to secure their coins and secure their ability
to have their transactions included in blocks because they'll be mining in a pool where people
generally prefer to be permissive of the proper use cases and not permissive of spammy use cases
that prevent financial transactions from making it into the blockchain too expensively.
There's a whole unstructured future ahead of us here that we just haven't confronted yet because the challenges haven't come.
The attack hasn't come to say, I'm a miner with 50% of the network or a substantial amount.
And some governments are paying me to fill the blockchain to either mine empty blocks or fill it with stuff that isn't ordinary users transactions.
And so people are restricted from using Bitcoin.
how do we overcome that? And there can be all kinds of solutions, but mining centralization
is a problem. And mining philosophy could be a problem. If we have very decentralized miners,
but they all act the same because their philosophy is just take whatever I can,
rather than take what's good for the network. And there's someone putting a lot of stuff that's bad
for the network out there and mempools, then we've gotten the same sort of problem on our hand.
But I'm sure we're going to confront all of these battles and they'll all be stressful and straining and we'll have to figure out how to resolve.
I think though that directionally they will have to be more philosophically aligned because they will over time realize that the Satoshi is more valuable than a dollar.
Like that a quick buck is not as desirable as the Satoshis themselves.
That will be crossing the Rubicon. When miners want to hold on to Bitcoin because energy providers to them accept Bitcoin as payment for their energy, and then energy producers are accepting and holding Bitcoin, we will be in a new world then, and hopefully an easier world.
I guess it'll have all sorts of new challenges that we haven't discussed yet, but we will have one and important or, which is the acceptance of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, especially for energy, which is kind of the base.
Yeah.
The commodity in our Western industrialized world.
Yeah.
And I love the fact that in the future, we're going to have to figure out parallel use cases to mining.
And heating is the most obvious one.
I'm just waiting for I'm going to give them a shout out.
Of course, I'm waiting for my often two from 21 energy, which is a Bitcoin
minor and a house heater.
And it's really good to have it down here in Spain because the houses aren't
insulated. So like January, February in Spain is really shit cold inside.
Right.
So it's very good to have one of those and it's going to be super fun to install
it and start mining.
And it's just a room.
It's a room heater, like a space heater.
Okay. Yeah.
It's an indoor room heater, exactly.
So instead of gas or electricity, well, it is electricity, but it will not only heat up the room, but mine Bitcoin as well.
And why not?
Yeah.
Another funny aside is that the fact that hash rate is constantly going up because Bitcoin is awesome, also means that the 10 minute interval is
in reality wrong it's more than it's more like nine and a half minutes yeah which is interesting
right but it is what it is i guess yeah well i mean yeah but the faster blocks end up you end up
paying if you're a miner you and you think you're getting blocks faster but you're ending up paying
for them in higher difficulty yeah yeah yeah so it all levels out in the end it's just like
it's constantly working against you you're like i'm helping you bitcoin it's like well you know
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm helping you too, but you need to lower your time.
I'm a bitcoins.
Bitcoin's reply is yes, I'm going to help you too,
but only if you can be patient for a decade.
Like it.
Yeah, yeah.
Lower your time preference and I'll pay you too.
Yeah.
So maybe another little pivot is you turn me on to Hans Hermann Hoppe and I've.
Oh, you did.
Yeah. You've been reading Hoppe.
Excellent. Yeah.
I've been reading some of his stuff and one of the topics that comes up a lot
and I was talking that I was at the Canadian Bitcoin conference,
is this topic of secession.
Like states or provinces seceding from a federally established government.
And he talks about it as cities being able to secede from European states.
I think he says 10,000 Liechtensteins somewhere.
That's what we would want.
Yeah. And he says, you know, this is the correct action for when the federation, when the larger, higher level of government oversteps its boundaries and becomes illegitimate.
I mean, he's very big on using the term illegitimate. When the government becomes evil, that's my term, it becomes illegitimate and it becomes right to take the power away from it.
And, you know, and when you actually have like a two party system where both parties are corrupted, and so your only choice is to vote for one or the other, secession is the legitimate action to remove the illegitimate government.
And in Canada, we have 10 provinces and three territories, and two of the provinces are stirring about talking about secession.
And one of the challenges that you have when you have a fiat currency issued by the federal establishment is all of your money is made up and controlled by the federal government.
So if Alberta or Quebec tries to secede from Canada, what does their money become?
They become the El Salvador's of the nation once known as Canada.
And so they need to have reserves of money that will be accepted elsewhere that can't be overinflated at their expense.
And I think Bitcoin has this incredible candidate for restoring the justice of legitimacy of government or the option to exit illegitimate oversight that hasn't existed before.
And so, you know, I don't want to expect these things to happen quickly, but I think the view of Bitcoin as being this Austrian libertarian empowering tool, not just for savings, but for enforcing government legitimacy or exiting illegitimate government hasn't really been something that's been talked about.
But when there conversations at Bitcoin conferences around this thing I really encourage people to read his essays on illegitimacy and secession and to consider how Bitcoin may be a valuable instrument in a province a city a state establishing for themselves So you know people talk about strategic Bitcoin reserves for what purpose right
Well, ironically, for the purpose of a local government seceding from a tyrannical, overarching
government, it could be the reason.
So when states and cities start forming these reserves, it makes a lot more sense to me
than when federal governments start accumulating these reserves.
Because I don't know what a federal government that's issuing a fiat currency is going to do,
but a local government that doesn't issue a fiat currency
and is subordinate to the fiat currency legal tender laws of the federal government,
it does create options and value.
Absolutely. I mean, I visited the state of Alberta this summer.
province the province no the province of albert i would say the state of alberta
and the and yeah there to in order to do so i had to uh accept some interference from the bigger
mafia that wanted me to use uh their uh cock buck uh money and put up a border and some signs
saying canada all over the place but i was never in canada i was in alberta and i used bitcoin
with the real Albertans that already use Bitcoin.
Bitcoin already fixes this.
And there was a lot of state agents from the Canada thing roaming around,
but I was never with those people.
I was with the true Albertans, and they all used Bitcoins.
And they lived in Alberta, and I loved it.
Yeah, I think, well, I mean, this will maybe be a shorter conversation,
But it is remarkable how Bitcoin reaches the individual and then it reaches these organizations.
And I think, I can't remember if it was before we started recording, but when we talk about companies trying to hold Bitcoin, well, Bitcoin's meant to be held by the individual.
But, you know, it's not ridiculous to think that Bitcoin could be held by a dependent state, right?
A state that's part of a federation that's seeking independence through secession and needs to secede.
Like, why do Albertans want to secede from the state of Canada, from the federation, from the nation of Canada?
Well, they're being stolen, right?
They're actually in Canada, something called transfer payment, which is the government looks at how much income everybody has with the average income is in different provinces and says, well, yours is too high because it's higher than these other people.
So we're going to increase your taxes and send the money over there.
So they're being stolen from by the power of fiat usury.
And if they just tried to secede with the fiat dollars that they have, the government would simply print more and not distribute them in Alberta.
And even though Alberta seceded, it would essentially become poor from its financial resources.
So it needs to divest itself of the Canadian dollar and into something else.
But how can it really divest itself of the Canadian dollar without Bitcoin?
What are people going to use as money during the years that it takes to divest itself of the Canadian dollar?
There's nothing else.
So the importance and the need for low time preference around the adoption of Bitcoin for citizens to have future choices for themselves and their posterity can't be overstated enough.
It's really, really important because if you're subordinate to a money printer, then you are a slave of the money printer and you can't escape the money printer.
And this is the sly roundabout way that gets you freedom from, even though it may take many, many years.
Absolutely. It's the Bitcoin fixes this thesis playing out in real life.
And yeah, I absolutely agree.
Smaller and smaller units, ultimately the responsible individual holds the Bitcoin.
And that's the way it should be.
like we're taking back the driver's seats of our lives here on multiple levels.
But I think this is an underappreciated level, like the secession narrative.
It's not taken seriously by federal governments.
They think, oh, we'll bring in the troops, we'll pass a law,
we'll print them into oblivion.
But if you look at a place like Madeira, for instance,
I mean, we were there, how long ago was that?
like almost two years now?
Last string, yeah.
So a year and a half.
Yeah, a year and a half.
And that place is already kind of independent
because it's on an island and it's far off.
So the bigger Portuguese government
can't do too much to them.
But what they can do though,
and what the EU can do,
is malevolent the euro
and control them that way.
But Madeira now has like almost 200 retailers,
except in Bitcoin and a thriving Bitcoiner community.
And what can they do about it?
Nothing.
They are regaining independence
through just having this thing around.
It's a small economy that it won't be fought over, right?
But Alberta and Quebec or Texas,
they're going to have a harder time
if they want to declare independence
than Madeira might.
Madeira is geographic.
It's more likely that it's on a city level than on a province level.
I wish I could live 200 years just to see the outcome of what's going to be with Bitcoin and sovereignty and city-states and culture.
because one of the things that we're seeing,
and this again is an underappreciated cost of fiat money,
it's not just that people are stolen from,
it's the culture becomes vastly diluted
because you may have whatever legislature you want in Spain.
If you use the euro, it's that European Central Bank
that controls the debasement and so many other things.
And the only country we've seen secede from the European Union
is the one that never surrendered its currency to the euro which is the uk right but like they
there are other countries that didn't surrender the currency though right but they may be able to
succeed much more easily than the countries so some of them are like they have different ties
to the euros like the swedish krona the czech krona the the bulgarian lev are all detached from the
euros to the different degrees now bulgaria is switching over though which would would have been
a great opportunity for them to switch for to a real money instead but but you know there's a lot
of boomers momentum of history doesn't shift quickly it is history is a slow thing that you
study over decades and centuries right not months and weeks um though like as historic as i think
Bitcoin is, I think it's important to recognize that its historic impact is going to be felt over
centuries. It's really cool. It's really interesting to be involved in it now and to be able to
have your voice heard and to form an opinion that it matters what your opinion is on the adoption of
it as money and its direction. But it's really big impact is going to be to
liberate humanity from broken money and broken government, right? It's a historic,
political, economic phenomenon of unprecedented proportion. And so it's, oh, the humanity
developed industrialized civilization, but suffered from centralization at this point.
And the only real thing that's actually going to matter in decentralizing industrialized humanity
is Bitcoin. I know that's a bold statement. I probably need to write a book or two about it
rather than spend the last five minutes or 10 minutes of a podcast on it. But I rationally
believe that. It's more than just hope. It's more than just platitudes. It's like, this is going to
take over the money and the money is the, it's the one really bad thing about government. Like
if government didn't have the ability to print money, it wouldn't actually be as bad as it is.
No, they would be held accountable to a much larger degree, like it's the illusion.
But it's also what people want.
They want the free lunch.
The urge to have the free lunch is the source of all evil in that sense.
Because it is the source of all money.
And it's a little failure to recognize that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
You're paying for it.
With your freedom, you're paying for it.
With the civilization's culture, you're paying for it.
with your ability to create a long term plan for yourself.
And, you know, you're paying for it in all sorts of different ways.
And we've been through this before, Tomer, nor is there such a thing as a second breakfast.
You can only break your fast once.
There is no second breakfast. Yeah.
Okay.
And then there's some I'm not technical enough to understand.
And there's no such thing as a damn brunch because that's gay and retarded.
It's a breakfast for fucks sake.
Slightly late breakfast with lunch and food.
No, no, no. Fasting is good for you. Eggs and bacon are good for you.
Yeah, it's a breakfast.
Anyway, I mean, if you want more from Tomer, you should check out the legendary treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto.
It's a beautiful piece of Bitcoin film art and a beautiful piece of writing, I'd say.
One of my favorite pieces.
And also the Bitcoin Philosophy Sundays, right?
That's the name of your space.
Yeah, that's what I do on Twitter on Sunday mornings at 8.30 Eastern time, depending on what your time zone is.
Definitely a good time for Europeans to join in because it's early afternoon for them.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's great fun.
I join every now and then.
I think I've even been invited to host it at one point, but unfortunately I couldn't do it that time around.
Well, I have plenty of vacations, so to have you fill in the guest post would be really good.
Anytime, man.
I love it.
Next month.
I've got to reach
November.
Anywhere else
on the internet
where you want to
send our listeners
or anything you want
to promote?
I think if you're
going to read
some of my stuff,
there's some really
interesting articles
that are finding
a second life.
They're on my medium,
so tomerstorlight.medium.com.
There's one that people
are really enjoying
a lot lately.
I've had a lot of
requests to read it.
It's called
Hello, I am Bitcoin.
Oh yeah, that one.
Yeah, it's like
Bitcoin speaking to you.
I wrote in the first person view of mine.
So if you want to talk,
if you want to listen to Bitcoin,
that's a good one.
And another one that's been finding
a little bit more life and enthusiasm
is called Why People Wonder
if Bitcoin is Alien Technology,
where I talk about how different
Bitcoin's technology is
from everything else on Earth.
And so there's like four or five
unique things that Bitcoin does
that nothing else on Earth does.
And so it makes people wonder,
like, well, maybe Satoshi was an alien.
No, I've read them both and I love them. They're great pieces of work. So go check out Tomer's
stuff. And yeah, nice to have you on again.
Yeah, thank you for inviting me. It's been too long.
Yeah, it has. Live long and prosper. And to everyone else, this has been the Bitcoin
Infinity Show. Go like, subscribe and brush your teeth and all of that. And see you next time.
Cheers.
Thanks, Tomer.
Bye-bye.