Folks, welcome back to Behind the Podcast.
It's been a little bit.
The last person we interviewed on the show was Stu, but we're back.
We're coming back with a bang.
Today, joining us is a man who you probably know.
Another shit coiner.
If you don't know him, you should become familiar with him.
he's oftentimes uh you know he he's the guy that you know comes out with ideas
like five or six years in advance before anybody starts talking about them and taking them
seriously he uh kind of i think he's a lot more uh grounded in reality than mike brock
uh mike brock refers to himself as a reluctant cassandra but paul sports truly is a reluctant
cassandra in a lot of ways uh paul sports how you doing today what do you got going on
i'm doing great guys hey thanks for having me that was i mean that was a good introduction
for paul sports but can i don't know exactly how to introduce you or like how do how do you
explain uh your involvement in bitcoin like what what your journey's been because you're you've
been around for a while and you've been pretty close to um the industry like what are you working
on now and like how did you get to this point well yeah now i work on this thing drive chain which is
like the only real implementation of the sidechain idea which is itself was a pretty old and
revolutionary idea that today that word is, you know, it's come to mean all the kinds of different
things that are useless. But the original idea was that you would be able to send Bitcoin to
other pieces of software and back. And so that in that way, you'd just be able to have like basically
something that does what Ethereum does, but with Bitcoin or something that does what Zcash does,
but with Bitcoin. And I think this idea is, you know, much better than every other idea in Bitcoin.
It's much better than Lightning.
It's much better than Covenants.
It's much better than just working on another hardware wallet.
It's much better than just whatever.
I don't know, you know, whatever everyone else is doing.
So I thought this was a really important idea.
And so I work on that now.
When did you come up with this?
When did you start developing this protocol, this new layer?
Yeah, I was originally interested in prediction markets back in the day.
and I designed a whole prediction markets on Bitcoin thing
that was called Truthcoin, and that was back in 2013, 2014.
And then it came time to attach it to Bitcoin,
and Blockstream, this company, had come out,
and they had to come up with this sidechain idea.
And so I wanted to look into what they were doing,
but the truth was that they really weren't doing that very much
with the sidechain idea.
So they didn't really have anything that you could use
to attach the prediction market thing to Bitcoin.
And then everyone got distracted with the scaling more.
This was like 2015 or something.
But I published this DriveChain post in November 2015.
So it's been 10 years.
And I didn't really work on the sidechain's idea for a while.
But eventually, as I grew frustrated with all kinds of things
that were happening in Bitcoin, I decided to pick it up again.
And so that's why I work on it now, kind of out of obligation to finish it, even though it is also like a fantastic idea that would bring privacy to Bitcoin.
It would bring scalability to Bitcoin.
It would bring extensibility to let you just change Bitcoin, move it to an L2 where you can make it whatever you want and then send it back.
So this is the greatest thing.
If you want to ossify L1, this is the best idea because now it's easier to actually ossify L1 in like a credible way.
and a sustainable way when you say, well, actually we have those L2s
where you can be a playground to do whatever you want.
And so it does all this great stuff.
It fixes governance.
All these people today are debating overall which soft fork should we have
and which soft fork should we have next or should we have any
or should we have none or what do we do about this?
But all these questions about both the soft fork and the hard fork are resolved
if you just say the L2 can do whatever.
ever so it's pretty important idea but uh for some reason and a lot of people agree with me too
that's the thing is i'm like seen as like a fringe character by many but i'm also seen as
extremely popular person among like super uh many elite type people uh you can go to the
layer2labs.com slash friends list i like collected a bunch of like quotes and stuff from people who
agree so it's kind of a bizarre situation to be in but the all the answers are i've got all the
answers to explain how the situation seems bizarre, but I know exactly why it's bizarre.
And it has to do with just culture of Bitcoin and the history of the block size war and with
dysfunctional bureaucracy in Bitcoin core and stuff like that. So I think it's pretty
interesting, the situation that I'm in. It definitely interests me. But yeah, if you want
to make sense of the Bitcoin world, there are a lot of illusions that have to be pierced, I think.
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the challenges that, you know, Rod and I were talking, Rod
pointed out that Aaron Redwing does a really good job of translating the things that you're
talking about. So what you just described is you don't connect with the plebs. And one of the
reasons why you don't connect with the plebs is because you don't speak in plebslop you you speak
in you know a technical manner that takes a lot of context that you're not going to be able to
understand from having just watched simply bitcoin videos you're going to have to dive a little bit
deeper you're probably having to spend some time on github to understand some of the language maybe
read mastering Bitcoin, uh, and you, you know, did a lot of digging now, you know, I don't want
the plebs to turn off this interview, even though this podcast isn't really, you know, for the
plans, but you know, what's probably screeching through their brain right now is this guy wants
to bring shit coins to Bitcoin. Uh, I think we have to get the elephant out of the room right
away if from what i understand drive it's been a while since i've looked at uh you know your
bitcoin improvement proposals 300 and 301 but from what i understand in order to implement drive
chains in the way that you want to you would need uh a soft fork and uh correct me if i'm i'm wrong
in my you know language or terminology but what what the plans are wandering right now what i
Imagine what they're wondering right now is if these improvement proposals were merged into the protocol, would that mean that there would be CSAM on their nodes?
Yeah.
I mean, it's a very – when you put it like that, I think like we – in a way, it's a good thing that all this – this is all not – all this stuff with Luke and with the CSAM and all that stuff is all nonsense.
But it's kind of good that it's come to light because it just means that it's pointless to even try to like reason with a lot of these people.
And we have to like, you know, do something else, I think.
Because the standards for convincing them are like so low.
They're so easily manipulated.
It's kind of like – but yeah, BIPs 300 and 301 require a soft fork.
Historically, this was not – back in 2015, that was a really easy thing to do.
Now it's basically impossible. So I think that's something I'd like people to think about is, you know, why is it so difficult to do the soft work these days? And the answer is not a good one. The answer is just that everyone's deranged.
but yet this is the position that most people have and it feeds this whole ecosystem of
i don't want to say like parasites it's not really what i think but even like when they do
like the op next conference it's like there's a whole food chain you know there's a whole thing
you can do that way there's a whole prestige economy you can be like oh we will be the one who
who facilitates the the next soft fork so i don't you know it's kind of a mean way of putting it but
But there's a whole ecosystem managing this weird idea of that we have to care so much about the next off fork.
When really they're all opt-in and reversible and ignorable.
They're all perfectly safe.
We used to do many per year.
We used to do on average two per year for the first seven years of Bitcoin.
The fact that it's even possible is amazing because they're all backwards, forwards compatible.
You can just have some people run one temporarily.
And so they're really – the soft fork is nothing.
Back in 2015 when I wrote it, that was nothing.
And even today, the new versions of DriveChain I have now, they don't require any code changes to Bitcoin Core, which is itself like – but they do require like basically 51% enforcement by miners.
So that's kind of similar but not the same.
But I think other people would be surprised to learn that this is even possible to separate all this stuff It like very technical But it like changing the lines of code in Bitcoin Core that has people people are all really worried about that for some reason And yet they not worried at all Every six months Bitcoin Core will like refactor the code They will touch lots and lots of the many lines of code to get it to do nothing um but just to refactor it and so that uh we got a situation where
people the protocol doesn't evolve but many lines of code are touched so it doesn't make sense but
when you talk about code you talk about different node clients and like here's a pull request and
This is how the code changes.
And like the plebs heads are already spinning.
Like, right.
Like it's gone.
It's kind of a joke.
Anybody who knows how to code, it's probably one of the easiest skills, cheapest or like
most cost effective skills to learn.
And in fact, like people are so intimidated by learning how to code, it kind of tells
you a lot about their approach in general.
Like if you care so much about this protocol and you have like this religious awakening and attachment to it, but you're complaining all core treats is bad because we don't know how to code.
It's like you can just watch some YouTube videos in a few months if you actually care and stick with it.
You'll be pretty good at this.
I mean, you can go to Jimmy, Jimmy Song's boot camp and learn Python like in a weekend.
um but that's really not what is like the most important at least i guess it depends on the
context but thinking and problem solving and living in these like abstractions like you have to
think about everything from an it's an abstract a complex abstract concept and it's theoretical
until you can kind of prove it out you can you can get nodes or users to kind of start
We're following these new rules.
The code itself, not that difficult, but thinking abstract.
How do we get the plebs to be able to think in abstractions?
Do we have to?
I think Richard was talking about this a little bit offline before you came on.
It's like, can plebslop bring success for a drive chain?
Can plebslop help?
Can you take these complex concepts, feed them through chat,
run the white papers through chat GPT and give a digestible piece of slop to the
pledge to help them understand what you're trying to do or what a new proposal
aims to do, what the incentives, how those change.
Like is slop the answer that we hate it,
but maybe it's provides a net benefit to society and to the pledge in general.
I don't think I know enough about slop.
I mean it must be theoretically possible, right?
So for someone to calculate the perfect slop, that's like the whatever, thermal exhaust port.
And you just hit at one – for every political cause must have like the one meme that –
Well, that's what it is, right?
Like a meme is not something you engineer in the lab.
And meme is something that you put out there and you know it's a good meme by the way it's received, by how other people are able to connect with it.
They're able to identify with the message of that meme, whether it's a direct message or kind of a more subtle hint, whatever it is.
So it's, it's the slop is, there's no such thing.
I don't think as like an academic slop as somebody who can sit in, in a, in a classroom
or in a, in a science lab and create the perfect slop to create good slop.
You had, it's like being a standup Canadian.
You have to go out into, in front of an audience every single day and puts a slop out there
and gauge the feedback to see if it's good slop.
Yeah, I can, I can speak on maybe, I was sorry.
I can speak on this a little bit. I can translate this for you, Paul. So, you know, like a project manager is like a shepherd for autistic developers, right? So you've got a bunch of retarded executives that want things done by the developers, and they have no idea what they're talking about.
And so the project manager has to be an interface between the two.
So that's kind of the role of a podcaster in a lot of ways as a project manager.
So what computer code is, so you look at like a language like Python or C++, is it's an
intermediary language communicating between humans and computers.
So it's translating zeros and ones into something that's a little bit more decipherable for a
human because unfortunately we're not that good at or efficient at communicating in zeros and ones
and so plebslop is like computer code for retarded plebs if that makes sense
it does i think i mean i think in general there's like a specialist versus generalist
idea because really the executives are trying to do what the customers want and the customers are
like the least specialized of all.
So maybe they know they think they want something
and then the executives have to like figure out
what do they really want.
Then they have to tell the programmers.
Then the programmers have to tell the computer.
Then the computer just has some electrons or whatever.
I think, you know, I think it must be possible
to engineer a perfect slop.
Like of all the diseases that have ever afflicted humans,
most of them evolved over many, many years or possibly millions of years in the wild.
But then I think eventually if you understood it enough, it must be theoretically possible.
But yeah, I don't know.
Does DriveShare need better outreach?
The answer is yes, but isn't it yes asterisk?
because just think of like what these people fall for, you know?
So it's kind of like I kind of was thinking more it's a lost cause
and we want to somehow create a situation where we can use people's ignorance
or mistaken beliefs against them.
That's like more what I think would eventually work is to say,
can we profit off of ignorant plebs instead of educate the plebs?
I've become even more cynical, maybe even than the two of you.
I don't know.
Maybe not.
But for now, I'm just working on the product and making it good.
And I have many, many supporters and fans.
And people always try to, you know, like a lot of people try to apply to work there to labs.
And so we have a lot of great people.
And we put out a pretty good product.
and I think I like getting the right answer.
So I like having an accurate view of the world.
So I just think if I go into the plebslop world,
then I'll become like a different type of person.
I might become like a Steven Spielberg maybe.
If I was super good at it, you'd be like a great entertainer.
You know what I mean?
World-class entertainer.
Of course he's great.
And of course you have like a Freddie Mercury or something.
These people are amazing.
But it's like a different type of thing maybe.
than just building a piece of software that does its job.
You don't want to be a gay rock star.
You want to be a cypher pump, right?
Yeah, sure.
So you mentioned this, that your drive chain idea,
like these layer twos, a lot of people agree with you,
and I believe you.
But if you're on the wrong algorithm on social media,
were the loudest post reactionary most volatile emotionally plebs live in and post every day
um you would not think that people agree with you in fact there's a lot of people when it when it
comes to l2s there's none that a certain sector of the industry have as much it's drive chain
derangement syndrome i guess is what you could boil it down to and it why do you think where do
you think that dry chain derangement syndrome comes from do you think that it is because you're
so you're you know you're astrophobic you're so critical of lightning um you're so critical of
like these sacred cows that people don't to reject anything that that you propose or is it because
maybe you know 50 of the population women they they see drive chain and they think oh great like
i'm not going to be good at this when you're not for the drivers i'm not going to be good at using
this l2 in an islamic country they're not even allowed they would maybe not even be allowed to
use you know that's what their concern is that's an insightful question i think um but the thing is
i was critical i've only like recently started i think it goes the other way with the criticism of
the sacred cows and lightning because of course drive change is very old it's from 2015 and of
course i didn't really push it very um aggressively but i kind of have been pushing it the whole time
And I kind of was thinking like, why don't we live in a world where everyone just dropped everything they were doing to just work on this?
Because it really is that much better.
And so the answers are kind of bizarre, I think.
But I think it's not because of the criticism of like lightning.
Because I kind of just – I had nothing to lose by just ramping that up and up and up because I just think that I was already disliked and the idea isn't very good.
So lightning isn't very good.
And yet it's just – it's part of this complex of the sacred cows.
They all overlap each other.
And so if you're in the cult, you have to just say that lightning will just fix everything.
And it's part of the belief of the future of Bitcoin.
And whatever scales Bitcoin will probably just retroactively be labeled lightning at this point, even because the connection between –
Lightning really just refers to the saving of Bitcoin in the future I think the reason why there a couple of historical reasons So reasons So one was that DriveChain is a little bit miner centric and that is why it is decentralized
because the whole way to get something to work without having like an individual
administrator is to tie it into the mining process. But mining was very unpopular at around
that time because of the scaling war.
So I think that's one reason.
Another reason, though, is I think DriveChain actually reduces the developers from a position
of prestige to make them more competitors.
So it's kind of like YouTube.
It's kind of like what's the relationship between YouTube and like CNN or Fox News or
something where it's like before you were one of these big players in the post-DriveChain
world, anyone can just use any software.
In the pre-drive chain world, you have to care a lot about what happens in Bitcoin Core
because you think, oh, if we let something in, it will destroy the project.
So you need like the safety officer, whatever it is.
You need these people to guard the safety of the protocol.
But in the drive chain world, you just have ossified L1,
and then you have all these L2s that compete.
The L2s maybe fail every once in a while,
but when the L2 fails, it doesn't bring down any other L2s.
So this is like a paradigm shift.
I think DriveChain is hard to understand also because I care – since you're allowing for the L2s to fail, it makes it seem like you don't care about the safety of users' funds.
But that's just – it's sort of the reverse.
It's like here you have a food court where you can order whatever you want.
Whereas right now we have just like one chef.
we have like one Gordon Ramsay or whatever, and he's very expensive.
And he can't cook enough food for 8 billion people. But that's like what we have right now.
And I'm saying, we'll just throw it all open. And then you will have microwave, you know,
TV dinners, in addition to having a Chinese restaurant, and an Indian restaurant and whatever.
So I have all this variety and choice. I think it inherently humiliates some people. So like,
I think all the lightning startups might be destroyed.
And once there's a version of scaling that works,
it might look bad for Blockstream or the other people who theorized the
sidechain idea, but they never actually realized it.
So this includes really prestigious people such as Greg Maxwell.
A lot of people are like sort of basically afraid of him in the technical
community.
So I think you have that dimension.
Also you have like a lot of people benefit from the ossification grift,
as you guys know,
So there's just this interlocking set of beliefs that people just use and that only affords a few business models.
So these business models are like parasites.
They kind of force out – like you could be a podcaster.
It's easier to just not do anything significant because if you do something significant, you can be criticized.
But if you just do the Bitcoin maximalist podcast and you just say, this is, you know, it's just easy to just talk and it's easy to just say like, or even to throw the conference or to throw the, do the steak dinner book thing.
And so it's just so much easier to be on this team stasis and just say, we're going to just defend ossification.
We're just not going to change anything.
So I think these are some of the reasons.
And even when stuff is allowed to change, like stuff like Covenants or OpCat, it's unbelievably slow.
And you can see that actually in practice, like nothing happens still.
So still there's nothing with CTV.
Still there's nothing with even Luke's thing with 444.
So people have tried all kinds of strategies.
But I think overall, it's just that over time, the community actually has subconsciously ossified.
It's very different than the active ossification that people think that they are a part of, but it just actually subconsciously had already happened by like 2021 or something.
So that was the taproot.
But taproot was also a special case because it was in some sense a mirror image of Segwit, which took too long to activate, and the miners felt guilty about that.
And they felt bad about losing the scaling war, and they felt like they wanted to have some kind of apology or whatever.
so they quickly activated Taproot by Speedy Trial.
Taproot also came from basically Greg Maxwell.
Again, so the whole thing is actually Taproot is like just the echo of Segwit,
Segwit from 2017.
We've had nothing since then.
Other than those two things, we've had nothing in the last,
I don't know how many, a long time.
But back when DriveChain was written, there were three soft forks in Q4 of 2015.
So they used to be regular and they used to be uncontroversial.
There was no controversy about them at all.
And in fact, there was no real controversy about Segwit.
The controversy was about the block size war.
Miners just said, we will hold up.
This was just the next one in the list.
And they just said, we will hold this one up until we get the 2x block size increase that we want.
That was a very foolish decision that they made.
But that's just the history of the situation is that this is all like became weird political landscape.
So that's – I think those are some of the reasons.
I also think one final thing is that some people don't want – like Michael Saylor does not want privacy in Bitcoin, which he has said sometimes openly and sometimes sort of secretly.
But – so again, if you improve Bitcoin's privacy, then they won't like that because their view is that Bitcoin has to cater to mainstream finance and that it must become more palatable to like whatever, Wall Street or something.
So that's what they think.
A lot of people have arguments for why they're right and a lot of people have arguments for why they're wrong.
I think they definitely are wrong
because it's not like the internet catered to magazine publishers
or something like that.
That's how it became big.
Oh, what we really need is for the internet to be more like
people's magazine or whatever.
That's not what happened.
The internet is just so different that it couldn't be like what came before.
I think Bitcoin is the same way.
We're dropping the ball on all the cool things that Bitcoin could be
in order to cater to people in the past.
We're letting them off the hook also.
We're saying you don't need to learn about what Bitcoin really is.
It's just another ticker.
So those are some reasons.
I think it's a very valid question.
I do have a drive chain misinformation page
where I do go through 10 or so reasons of what is going on.
Why are people think this and that?
And it's even things that are completely 100% false or even the opposite.
it. So that's on drivechain.info. If people go to the sidebar on the desktop or they go all the way
down on their phone, you can see all the sections. So I have a misinformation page that... But yeah,
another sense is that I don't really know because you would think if people really cared a lot about
Bitcoin, they would really look into all of the issues. And then they would see that this idea is
the cost of trying this idea is very cheap and the benefits are very high. So you would think
a lot of people would support it and again a lot of people do support it but these are like people
like robin linus creator of bitvm or even like renee picard the author of mastering lightning i
have like all these like very elite supporters um but then uh as you say uh we have not mastered
the pleb slop uh you know our pleb slop game is like a d minus or something so but i kind of
I just like, you know, whatever it is, but yeah.
You need a sidekick.
Yeah.
Just before I let Richard at.
Yes.
There you go.
You need your sidekick.
Yes.
I know.
There you go.
I know that was my mistake, right?
I mean, where's that?
Who would have thought?
Who's who's scamming who in that relationship?
I don't know.
But well, you know, mechanic is going to be fine.
He's a company man.
He does what Ocean wants him to do.
He doesn't care what people think.
He goes out there and he tells the company line, he's going to be all right.
People always want to find a company, man.
But real quick before we talk about anything else, I went to drivechain.info and you did.
You said, you know, we haven't mastered the PLEB slot.
So I go down and I see a section called explainer memes.
and these explainer means are very busy.
There's a lot of information.
There's a lot of scribbles.
It's, you got to condense those down.
You got to, you see a picture in like four words.
If you can't do it with a picture in four words,
it's on explainer means.
I mean, it makes a very good point.
I mean, in my defense, I'm not saying that you're wrong.
You're definitely right.
But the drivechain.info, that was always supposed to be,
again, I think this is a very important conversation
for everyone to hear, I think,
because drivechain.info, I made the site in like literally like January 2017 or something.
And the intended audience of the site originally was just like people like Adam Back, Peter Todd,
whatever. This was like my site to dump out the info so that they would have something to look up
and read. And I never even thought that you'd have to do this like big convince the masses
type thing. And so, yeah, I think you're definitely right about that. And then some
stuff was like added like piecemeal later, like the FAQ and all this stuff was like added later
and the misinformation page. So, but yeah, I think that's, so the question is, do we want,
this is again, the specialist versus the generalist idea, like the, you know, the plebs
versus the elites where it kind of like do we want to live in a world where the specialists don talk to each other and become like super specialized team
Because that has a lot of benefits of saying,
we're going to push the envelope as quickly as possible.
We're going to do like a Manhattan project.
You know what I mean?
Like imagine if they had to explain every step,
every single like differential equation in the Manhattan project,
they had to explain it to everyone in Louisiana or something, you know,
it would be pretty hard to get it done in time to stop New York City from being obliterated by
nuclear explosion. So it's kind of like the specialists maybe should have their own little
like club and their own little vocabulary. But yeah, I agree with you that, well, yeah,
and like those memes, those of them like whatever, I don't even know. Like,
I don't remember when I put that up, like 2018 or 2017 or something. But yeah, those aren't very
good. I agree. And this site just kind of grew as I just stapled more and more stuff on. The FAQ
was eventually, that was composed of questions that I literally was frequently asked. It wasn't
even like a written thing. I was just like, I'm so tired of getting these questions. I put it on
there. But yeah, yeah, I don't think DriveChain.info is a good site for the masses. But then it's kind
of like the masses, you know, they have no idea. So SegWit activated. And, you know, there are many,
many stories we could tell about SegWit activation. But, you know, there are common myths that people
believe about SegWit making the transaction smaller. That's not true. It actually makes
the transactions bigger, but since it can use the four megabyte space, they get the discount.
And, you know, people, there are people, one, so for example, Bitcoin error log, John Carvalho,
he has tweeted about this. So this is why I bring this up, but anyone can kind of trace this up or
have Grok look it up for you. He is like, he was a huge militant supporter of SegWit activation.
He was kind of like a pleb slop, a pleb shepherd.
But then years later, he had to admit that he was like, oh, yeah, I was really misled.
It didn't work the way I thought that it did.
I believed all these things that weren't true about it.
And so then he concludes that maybe it was rushed.
Everyone has this conclusion that we have to inform everyone first so that people make an informed decision to upgrade.
I kind of think almost the reverse where it's kind of like we are never going to inform enough people.
And so what we instead need is some kind of like leadership or accountability or something where – because I just think – I just don't buy it that everyone will understand BIP-300.
Even BIP-300 is simpler than SegWit, I think.
And I think Taproot is more complicated than SegWit, but maybe BIP-300 is the simplest of the three because it's really under the hood.
It's just counting to 13,000.
with OpNop 5.
But I just don't think people will understand it.
And in fact, I think much simpler than BIP300
is this whole op return thing,
which is even simpler than that.
But you can see that we've run aground on that issue.
So it's kind of like trying to explain it to people.
Seems like a lost cause.
Well, it's important to understand the landscape.
And I think this is something
that we've been trying to educate people on
is just, you know, how the way the world works.
Because there's a perceived way that the world works.
Like in many ways, we live in a feudal society
where the podcasters, the communicators are like the lords
communicating for their, you know, kings or whatever.
So you've got Luke as the king, mechanic as the lord,
the lord commands the plebs and you got craters another lord and then you've got um
you know you know the very the various you know justin bachelor's a lower lower lord uh you've
got these dynamics in different places and so you know like on the core side you've got you've got a
similar you know situation where you've got like adam back or you know whoever is you know towards
atop and is the royalty commanding lower lords like shinobi you know and they're directing
different plebs to go fight each other uh you know in battle and this is kind of the you know
the game that is played you know and what you're saying which i think is correct and you know people
are going to be offended by this reality but sometimes if reality is offensive is uh you know
the kings and the lords they they oftentimes play the game because they understand the game that you
can't you kind of have to be mock valiant sometimes to accomplish your goals and you can't communicate
everything to the plebs and now honestly sometimes just communicating everything outright is
counterproductive and what you have to do instead is is use distractions and and culture war stuff
um i'm not i'm not like you know a huge advocate for this because i i don't like to uh you know
just mess with other people's lives but this is how the game is played and is being played right
now uh the the plabs are hurling themselves as useless cannon fodder not understanding the
incentives and goals that they're trying to to further uh they're being you know
in many ways misled because you know the the plebs in the allegory of the cave
like i think this is one of the dangerous dynamics in the bitcoin ecosystem
is the plebs think they're outside of the cave
but they're actually inside of the cave and they're terrified to get outside the cave yeah
like the defenders of bitcoin
you know like they they think you know many of these many many people are bots that aren't even
real but many of them are like people who own like 0.00003 bitcoin or something and then they
join and then they're told this is how to contribute to bitcoin is just be very toxic to
everyone so then they're like oh i can do that it's like an on-ramp with people with no skills
yeah I mean I hate to say this about
Shinobi also but it's like yeah what can you do
if you have the Shinobi skill set like this is
as high as you can get on the
skill like this is your best way you know
it's kind of like you know it's like
Adolf Hitler you can't draw he can't
paint very well but there's this
other thing I guess that's not a great example
but it's like you know he where's
Shinobi's code where's Shinobi's like
technical
documents where's his you know
when you know what else but if
So if all you can do is troll people online, then you have like a little bit of an opening in this climate because that's one of the few things that – one of the few models, like a few business models that sort of works.
But yeah, I think – sorry?
I would say that's one of the – people think that they tried to get Shinobi to step down from the core maintainer because he supported core.
but the reason he needed to step down
is because he wasn't contributing, he wasn't coding
he was online calling people retards
if that's what you want to do
that's fine, but get off
get off of the core maintainer
roster, you know
Right, I mean, we so much are really just
if only they could just put it, we should just make a list
of all the people who actually are on the
core roster and then we would actually know
who was, you know, if there was like
a site that just tracked, you know
every time someone made a contribution
that would be very helpful for organizing.
Well, we do a ranking list.
We do the power rankings for core contributors.
We used to do it every month.
It was literally just based on how many lines of code you committed
over the past 30 days.
And I can't see a better way to do it.
Right.
That's obviously – anyone who works with software knows that it's just –
The more lines of code you touch, the more efficient you are.
The more invaluable you are.
The more skin you have in the game, the more lines of code you touch, the more bugs you might have introduced,
the more fuck-ups you might have added to the code that we can blame you for later.
So if you're going to do 100 lines a day, they're the fall guy.
It's like sleeping under the bridge after you build it.
The engineers, if you start to sleep under them.
The guy who's touched 100 lines a day, you can't be fired.
So, I mean, that's something.
So, yeah, I don't know about like persuading the masses.
I'm not sure.
Maybe we need more competition of a different kind.
I've said on a few previous podcasts that maybe the hard fork should be rehabilitated.
Like everyone hated it when Roger Ver did it with Bitcoin Cash.
But he like tried to say it was the real Bitcoin and he owned the Bitcoin.com domain.
And so if we had a little bit more competition of some kind, then it wouldn't just be about like, can we persuade everyone? Because you see that the persuasion route is like just so inefficient and slow. And it's so easy to distract people. I mean, there are these, there are cynical theories that every time we get close to a soft fork, there's like a new distraction.
I don't really believe this, but like Moonsettler, my friend Moonsettler, he kind of thinks this and he just thinks like there's something – although I think – I'm pretty sure Robin Linus thinks something like this.
These are like super smart people.
They're totally real and they think you should have them on the show if you haven't already.
They're great.
But they're like something is intentionally halting the progress in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a lot less threatening.
If it's – instead of being something that people really use every day, it's just like a ticker symbol.
It's not that.
But then I also think it's unlikely that – I don't think it's true.
Like a lot of people think Michael Saylor is like a spook or like a CIA operative or something because of course the MicroStrategy headquarters is like right across.
across the street from the CIA and he went to like West Point and he was in
trouble in the past for like with the SEC and like for fraud and like,
so that he's been like flipped.
So there's always like funny theories.
And not to mention like our strategies,
customers and vendors are all the state agencies,
contractors,
hospitality,
healthcare,
very,
very sensitive,
but very pertinent and important information about the whereabouts,
the habits,
the records of people.
Yeah, absolutely.
So people should be aware of that theory
because it's like a fleshed out theory.
But I kind of just think it's much easier to imagine like –
well, I mean the question is,
is there like an actual room somewhere where people calculate out,
okay, this is what's best for Bitcoin and this is what's worst
and this is what we think we can achieve?
will send Michael Saylor out there to say that it should be digital property.
And it's kind of like that's really hard to believe.
That's just too hard to believe.
It's hard to believe that it's a room.
It's not as hard to believe that it could be a group chat.
I mean, the group chat, sometimes in some ways the group chat is worse
because the group chat, you can get screenshots.
Whereas the room, someone's got to get the recorder in there somewhere.
and you know as local as luke learned the hard way yeah screenshot of your combo so it's hard to say
um but uh i you know like do they really one question is do does do these people really
actually know like this is better for bitcoin versus this is worse right that's really hard
to figure out and do they care that all the time so yeah i don't know do they really have that out
and then they say we're going to kill privacy on bitcoin and the way we're going to do it is we're
going to have Michael Saylor kill a deal to donate money to poor developers.
I feel bad for some,
many of these developers because I'm kind of a little bit more of a Bitcoin OG.
So I'm not an impoverished developer and, you know,
had all his coins stolen sadly.
But I think if someone's starting now,
there's a lot of pressure to like, how, how are you going to earn a living?
And it's like, Oh, you know you really can't afford to make certain people
upset so you can't touch anything controversial anyway yeah i think you wanted to say something
yeah i i don't like the first to fund court ads right yeah i don't like the framing of uh good
for bitcoin because that's such like a there's like an impossible thing to define i think there's
what's good for individuals so like the plebs don't know what's good for them they're told by
the podcasters what's good for them and they just kind of pick and choose which one sounds more
attractive it makes them feel good you got Udi spam's good for bitcoin in Udi's mind and then
you know privacy is good for bitcoin in other people's mind um you know for people in the
finance world like Saylor having you know the banking system have a monopoly on on money laundering
where you have to go through individuals like Jeffrey Epstein
to get all your dirty laundry taken care of for you
and it's not democratized for the masses,
that's good for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is just a store of value
that once your funds are laundered by Epstein
or another folk, you can park it in and sit on it.
Bitcoin has a lot of different individuals
interacting with it
who have different incentives and desires and needs.
And so –
Well, that's kind of my point though is that to figure out what is good for Bitcoin overall
is actually really hard and very controversial.
But I do think there is something like you could say when Bitcoin –
when the price of Bitcoin goes up, when Bitcoin has more users,
when more people let it into their hearts and minds
and they decide that it's not just a fake thing, it's actually some real thing.
when more people accept Bitcoin.
I think people accepting Bitcoin in return for goods and services
or in return for labor, like if someone says,
can you give me $200 and they send a Bitcoin address,
that itself is pretty good for Bitcoin.
I do think all the money, every type of money in the world,
like the euro versus the US dollar versus the Japanese yen,
I think all the money in the world, it has like these strong network effects.
So you tend to – one tends to gain at the expense of the other.
You don't normally see a place where we like, oh, we take both euros and Japanese yen.
It's usually there's just one and then it kind of hits a limit.
Like there used to be different money.
If you go even a few hundred years back in American history, there was like a local bank had like its own local money and there were many, many, many kinds.
And so the only reason we didn't have a single global currency was just because people didn't do that much travel or didn't do that much international trade because the world was a lot smaller place.
But as the world has gotten bigger, now the US dollar is like – whenever there is a forex trade, the US dollar is one of the two legs like 85% of the time or something.
So you really – like there's a strong – so when I talk about like what's good for Bitcoin, it's kind of like are we maximizing the chances that Bitcoin like survives and is the winning coin?
Or are we making it so that it's less likely that that will happen?
Because I think if that doesn't happen, then Bitcoin will fail.
I agree with Satoshi said, like, Bitcoin's either going to succeed or it's going to go to zero.
And I agree with that.
I don't think it will be like some intermediate.
If it's in some intermediate state, I think it will always have to be looking over its shoulder for like some kind of event that will just wipe it out.
you know something something that i think johnson talked about on the coin uncensored that i thought
was a good point and this was like years ago was that if you like money is not people think that
the fed just prints money and that's where the money comes from in reality most money is created
when any sort of loan or credit is generated by individual banks and like every if you thought
about it as like every individual bank issued its own dollar right like you you could go to
coin market cap and you could see that it was trading a few points you know below par above
or whatever like that maybe would could come to fruition now if like every bank issues its own
stable coin you got tether versus circle versus paypal usd versus you know farmers credit union
of iowa usd versus whatever like adding maybe that would might bring more perspective to it but
that's an interesting but i wanted to get back to something because i had not thought about this
until this conversation.
But is there a difference?
And if so, what is the difference
between persuasion and building consensus?
Because I think people conflate those two things.
I think the bigger conflation is the word consensus,
which unfortunately has like screwed us all.
Because when Satoshi,
or in the context of the problem of like creating,
e-cash or creating Bitcoin, the word consensus meant that every single node, it meant that you
were solving the double spend problem and that every single piece of software would agree on
what the blockchain contains and which branch of it forks, which branch is the real version and all
the other ones are fake. So the word consensus came to have this like mythic property. And now
everyone cares about, oh, do we have consensus on this soft fork, which is something that we never
had before and no one ever wanted before. And all this is a myth. So building consensus, I think,
is actually an evil thing as I've gotten a little bit older, but especially I have this firsthand
experience with it in Bitcoin, the soft fork world becoming completely deranged. You never really have
a consensus and you can't want one either because it opens the door to like a kind of counterattack
by these people who just say, well, hey, I wasn't convinced. Even if they really were, they lie.
and they say that you go down the list.
So basically imagine a world where you had to get,
and this was actually the Polish political system
for a while and it led to disaster.
But it was like,
you have to get all 100 senators to agree on something.
At a first glance, this seems like a decent idea
because it says, well,
the process is only going to let something through
after everyone agrees that it's good.
And so if anyone has a concern,
if anyone has an idea, they think,
oh, hey, wait a minute, this might be really bad.
Then everyone will stop.
It's kind of like a Star Trek kind of idea too.
You know, like the captain will bring everyone into the room and they'll talk it out and everyone will share their expertise and their idea and then they'll decide on the best course of action.
But the problem in a political context is that, you know, often people want different things or something at the expense of another person.
So one person could say – you can contrast it with something where it says if you win 51 percent, 51 senators, then you're good and the 49 are ignored.
And you could say – but the problem is with the consensus version where you need all 100 is that each individual of the people who may disagree.
So maybe you have something where 80 percent of the senators already agree and there's 20.
each of the 20 can start demanding a personal concession and they can say you need to cater to
me and my because i've got a veto on this and so you need to give me everything that i want
and then what do you do in a situation where two or the three senators they each ask for something
like mutually exclusive they say like oh i want i want you to give me the next i want you to give
me this city or i want you to name the next opera after me or something you know you can now it impossible The problem can be fixed And in fact the Polish system had to be abandoned because people would come in they would bribe one of the equivalent of like the nobles one of the equivalent of the senators
And they would say, we won't destroy your province and we'll give you this bribe.
And then they're just veto anything about defending the country or a standing army.
And then they would get constantly get invaded.
So you need to have something where the threshold is like basically a majority, 50.00001 percent, because it is the only way of assigning responsibility accurately is when you say actually because when you have these supermajority thresholds, it creates this toxic limbo.
So, for example, you have – maybe you have a 75 percent threshold.
These are in the US Constitution.
to override a veto or to do many things need two-thirds or to amend the constitution you need
75 percent and um so you need when you have something that's a 75 threshold let's say you're
making it very close and you're at 74 you just need a few more people well now it's you have 26
of these people who can demand the concession and so maybe if when when the proposal ultimately
fails to pass, you no longer know who should be blamed. Because if it passes, you know you can
blame them. They're responsible. If it fails, you know exactly what to do. If it fails, you know
you didn't convince enough people. More people were not convinced than convinced. So you need to
just find – if you're at 48 or 49 and it fails, you know, okay, I need to find someone out there
that I can flip and then I'll get to a majority. But until then, I haven't succeeded in my goal
of persuading people.
So this is the difference
between persuasion and consent.
Consensus is this 100% agreement
and persuasion is just,
persuasion is more of the 51.
Because even when in a single individual mind,
like even in your own brain,
when you wake up and you decide,
oh, what do I want for breakfast
or what should I do today?
You don't really,
you very rarely have like 100% of the thoughts
or 100% of the neurons
or whatever it would be.
100% of the ideas agreeing that you should, oh, this is exactly what I want to do. I want to
immediately go and get like whatever, an egg McMuffin or something. Usually you have a couple
thoughts in your head where you say, you kind of pulled in a couple of directions at once.
And you say, well, maybe I want to go to the post office and maybe I want to go to
get a bagel. But you don't, when you decide, you go all in on whatever you decided. You don't like
go to a point that's like halfway between the post office and the bakery and then – which
could be in the middle of nowhere and then you just kind of wonder about like – so
when you have these decisions that have all these – so that's – I just think the
bigger problem is consensus is actually a bad idea and what you really want is just
to persuade enough people and that – I think true consensus among human beings has never
been achieved and probably isn't even desirable.
That's like when you have like Peter Thiel had that line about if the voter
turnout is a hundred percent and the guy wins by a hundred percent,
you're probably in North Korea and the election's not real.
So it's bad.
It's better to live in a world where it has a little bit of this messiness.
That is what preserves people's right to dissent in the first place.
And the dissension is good.
Sometimes it breeds creative, creative problem solved.
creative thoughts he you mentioned the accountability aspect and it makes me think like
you know recently x added the feature that it shows the country that an account is posting from
and that's controversial whatever but there i think have been some or at least are some benefits
to like knowing like all of these political propaganda accounts are from malaysia and
envy it's like it's it's been to know that i kind of suspected that already and we talked about the
dead internet theory a little bit like are these bots like are these knots people bots and i think
part of that dead internet theory is is important to at least i think realize that even if they're
not bots if they're indistinguishable from bots what's the difference but back to the accountability
I think that X should add a feature that shows whether or not you put a green box in your profile in 2001 to signal support for Taproot.
So you can't come back and say, oh, I always thought Taproot was a bad idea.
Right?
Because people are doing that.
Kind of like anytime you jumped on the bandwagon.
I would like that.
Anytime they did like the pylon.
And you could say, these are the pylons this person was on.
and then if they pile on someone today you kind of think well okay what's that worth because it's
very easy i mean people learned with the mob and pitchforks that the mob and pitchforks era
innocent until proven guilty and so it's very very easy to just have people freak out and just
stone someone to death for imaginary crimes like witchcraft that are unreal well you know we talked
a little bit about ossification of layer one maybe that's already up here however uh one of the big
trending pieces of fud lately or concerns or just it's the it's the current thing is quantum
computers and quantum computers are going to do you know break bitcoin's going to break
at least the legacy signatures.
And people have proposed solutions,
ways to make Bitcoin quantum resistant,
which would require another fork.
But I'm curious at a high level,
I personally think that quantum computers are plot slot.
I think it's, I'd yet to be convinced
that I should be worried about it
or that it is a practical concern, at least in the near term.
I'm curious about your perspective.
And do you think that this is going to cause some serious problems?
I think this is the perfect thing for a prediction market, by the way.
Well, I agree that this would be an ideal prediction market thing
because it is something where a lot of people are clearly like bullshitting
and they have a strong opinion that they say they have,
but they don't really know what they're talking about.
This was like one of the nice examples I used to use for prediction markets
was like global warming because the phrase global warming is actually really, really vague,
which helps make it a political football, but helps make it much harder.
So you could change the question in very many ways, which I did.
And I could say when people bet on this, they can bet on like what will, as reported by this satellite,
what will the average surface temperature anomaly be?
Like there's this NASA satellite that's just like pointed over this part of the ocean,
and it just tracks the temperature like every day.
and then they just point at to like what is it you know compared to what it normally is
at this time of year and um so when you make it more specific then suddenly it becomes a more
productive conversation and even the creativity increases where people can say something like
okay well that's not really what i meant oh well then what did you mean oh well then maybe we'll
bet on this oh maybe we'll bet on something else that's like easier to measure like co2 concentration
is like way easier to measure than global warming because global warming is like this vague thing
So I think quantum computers is a very good example of that.
I think the problem with quantum computing is that you have to be a specialist in quantum computers to know the truth.
None of the three of us are.
Even someone who's a specialist in Bitcoin is not necessarily also a specialist in quantum computers.
Of course, some people have looked into it more than others.
And again, Robin Linus, we hosted a debate on the quantum computer threat.
It was a Twitter space, so people should be able to find it on the Layer 2 Labs Twitter account or should be able to find it somewhere.
And we heard lots of arguments about that.
But I think, you know, really, I don't think there has been a verified example of a quantum computer factoring the number 35 or something yet.
So – and they are really complicated to build because you have to like basically make it so that not a single photon of light escapes because then the universes will split or something.
So you have to be able to recombine later.
Yeah, it's pretty weird.
So –
The concept that we already talked about, the concept of consensus.
i i'm too retarded to elaborate but i just feel like the concept of consensus when it comes to
any sort of outcome in quantum computing is going to be a problem like all right you were able to
observe some sort of outcome from this quantum computing task how is that relevant to any other
person any other observer in the world and any in this uh realm whatever you want to call it it's
like all right you did something cool with quantum computers and you got a bunch of data but like
what does that mean to me the cool thing would be if they could if they could just like break
rsa or something at will like for everyone you could just go to a site and be like okay factor
this unbelievably enormous number into two primes and it would just do it for you every single time
that would be like you that would break all that um that would break all that encryption and then
that would just be permanently broken for everyone and then you know there's a lot of like conspiracy
theory shaped stuff like of course this has like some like because since the military uses encryption
this has like some ability so maybe there's secret computers in china or secret computers in america
or whatever the cia black side has the computer and and and they're they're going to get it before
everyone else and stuff like that.
So unfortunately, it is a situation where it is hard to tell what's going on because
on the other side some quantum computers as I understand it have been demonstrated to exist whereas with like four qubits or something they have those working And there this other thing called the Mach interferometer
which is not a quantum computer per se,
but it's basically a thing with mirrors and photons.
And it kind of basically proves that the quantum computer is possible
because it does like something.
It's like basically bounces light off of a mirror
and it never arrives at some other mirror that it could arrive at.
So these things are all real, I mean, as far as I understand it.
And so it's hard to know like what on earth – and I also think it's inevitable that a quantum computer will be constructed at some point in human history.
It's also the case that the quantum computer, I don't think it will be like switching from like a black and white TV to a color TV where you would never go back.
I think the quantum computer will always be worse than the classical computer at many types of computing.
And it's first because it's so much more expensive and difficult to build.
It has to be like cool to absolute zero or whatever.
I'm not sure.
Don't quote me on these details.
But the point is it's like extremely difficult to like a science project to like get the quantum computer to work.
whereas we're much better at just normal CPU, graphics card, et cetera,
that uses 120 volts of electricity coming out of the wall.
So I think only in a few cases can you actually take advantage of the quantumness.
So I think it will be kind of a niche thing.
But yeah, I don't actually know.
I mean you asked me about my opinion.
The thing is I really have no idea.
I think the prediction market on it would be a good – we would say is there –
what we would want to know, and again, this is a case of,
the clarifying effect of the prediction market text where you would say,
will there be a site where you can just break, you know,
4,000 bit RSA or something by this date?
And then people would just bet on no because I think it probably,
but maybe there would be a bunch of people out there who know that it will
happen by certain.
You could have them for different dates and you could see, Oh,
the probabilities are really, really low for the first two years,
but then they're really, really high.
So all that would be, that's a better.
To me, the prediction market represents consensus in a much more helpful way than the idea of until we'll just talk until everyone agrees.
I think that is useless.
But the prediction market always returns one number.
And you can see that a market context is one where you have people who disagree completely, often fighting each other.
You have like the big short or you have betting on zero or whatever, or you have like the Herbalife thing, or you have Theranos or whatever.
you have the stuff where there's stuff is a certain market price.
The market price is a product of intense disagreement,
but it's like a tug of war and the price lands where it is.
And then that's,
that's the price.
So yeah,
I would definitely,
whatever the prediction market says,
I would defer to.
And I,
but I do think the word quantum,
it just has this weird effect on people where it's just these,
one of these fancy sounding words.
So everyone wants to have,
it triggers people to be more idealistic.
I think psychologically,
psychologically.
What do you think the timeline is for Start9 to develop a home quantum server for the plebs
that they can buy for $900?
Yeah.
When will you be able to just click a button, right, and just download the quantum computer?
Yeah.
I mean, this is funny too about like the – like you should run a full node.
It's like part of the Ten Commandments of Bitcoin or something.
And it's like the most sacred thing.
And then people don't do that.
And then it's always funny when people say stuff like, oh, you should make it easier to run a full node or stuff like that.
And then Casa had the, oh, we'll just send you a full node.
And then I saw Jameson Lopp, I think it was in the Miami Beach conference, which is maybe like 2022 or 2023, one of those.
And I was like, oh, yeah, that's the Casa product.
It's really great.
And he's like, we discontinued that.
And then I was like, oh, this is embarrassing.
for me. But, and then I was like, why? And he said, because the support was too difficult.
Because of course, people would get it. This is an intriguing idea also. It's like people would get,
it's all related to like what you were saying, like, okay, someone says they have a quantum
computer, what does it mean? And it's kind of like, you have a full node, people only do it
because they're told to do it. They don't really know what it means. So even if you ship them the
full node they don't know like how to operate it or what it's they don't know what it's like what's
the difference between when it's working versus not working they don't even know the difference
some same as the quantum computer like okay what's the difference between we have we have quantum
computing versus we don't they don't know what knows so the full node if it doesn't like explain
itself to the user and kind of like persuade the user, then it's useless because the user
is trying to, they have to use the full node for something, even if it's just like, look
at the blockchain or measure confirmations on transactions that are going to them.
I think like, so the idea of start nine might be a contradiction.
Maybe not.
I don't know.
But the idea of like we'll just do it all for you.
I mean I'm all in favor of – we have our own thing, BitWindow, where it's like you download BitWindow, which is small.
And then BitWindow lets you download like you can download Bitcoin Core.
You can download the Bit300, 301 Enforcer.
You can download like other stuff.
And so we have like our own little like kind of like a start nine thing.
So I like that.
And I like the idea of the user being able to like zoom in.
and they only commit to a tiny little 50 megabyte piece of software at first.
Then they can download the wallet and do other stuff.
Then they can download maybe Bitcoin Core,
which will ask them for 800 gigabytes or 900 gigabytes.
So you kind of ramp people up.
But yeah, it's a good question.
When will there be the quantum nine or whatever?
Have you ever considered starting your own university?
Like this is something that the Nazis have realized.
They've been very successful.
You know, university professors like Matthew Crowder are very effective at indoctrinating the youth.
A lot of the stuff that you've talked about on this show, this is like, you know,
master's level college curriculum in my opinion in the bitcoin world
i'm just curious if you ever thought about starting a university
well i mean who how can we when matt cratter is doing such a great job i was like well this is
another thing that i thought i might make like i've had like various like kind of feuds with
people and then like literally like like clockwork it's like only six to 18 months later they get
like canceled by the bitcoin community so i'm like a canary in the coal mine this goes way back i mean
ancient ancient days but there was like i had like a funny feud with like emin gonsire in like 2014
or something he blocked me on twitter and like scaling bitcoin one era and then like after that
everyone like uh decided they didn't like him or whatever but this goes back a long a long and even
shinobi like shinobi is like one of the chief drive chain haters but then like uh he's still
around but people kind of figured out that he is just a soundbite that he just calls people
retarded and he doesn't actually have that many like real ideas himself and he's just like it's
kind of it is what it is so um but yeah i think that's the thing is um do people if people really
want to learn like the whole uh i'm actually a huge beneficiary of school per se i got like
multiple master's degrees and also career in academia but as an individual i'm very pessimistic
about school and i have become like a school skeptic and like a radical anti-school person
i think school is a waste of time for most people now you can get on youtube you have your podcast
you got your youtube you can play something and you can pause it and go back and rewind and
And you can track the person down on Twitter and say, hey, what did you mean by this?
They'll probably answer you even if they're whatever, professor of chemistry or something.
So it depends.
And I think that will only improve.
Over time, we'll have something like the Telegram Stars thing where if you want to message someone for the first time, you have to pay $5, $10.
But then it keeps the thing open.
So that deters spam.
So now if you're like a chemistry PhD and you put out a video on something weird, like we had that – what was that called?
That like K99 or something.
It was supposed to be like the room temperature super magnet or something.
It's kind of like if you have something, you can just put it out.
And then if it's really important, someone will be able to find like the $10, $15 to message you and say, oh, I think I found a mistake in your video.
Or I think what you're doing is really important and I want to finance your operation.
you can now it'll be much easier for the internet to get people in touch with each other
um and so i think uh and then they have the ai tutor so i'm like totally against all forms of
school i mean i know your question is partly to bring up matt cratter but i was just like
the this whole premise that there's going to be a curriculum and there's going to be a teacher
even and that people are going to pay 790 dollars yeah well i think it's ridiculous that i can't i
I can't believe how many people take it.
There is a guy, I go to many different Bitcoin meetups around the world and in Connecticut
and in Miami where I've lived and in San Francisco and I live there.
There's always these Bitcoin meetups.
And yeah, you can find some people who like the Bitcoin University content.
But I just think like why do they like it Because every time and then he ends it with the thing saying pay a lot of money to subscribe to like this thing And I just don think like why doesn that discredit him more
It's so like no one else.
Where else would anyone imagine if like Adam Back did something like that?
I've never heard of like anyone, even people who have like sold out.
They crucified Natalie Brunel for her $800 course in 2001.
Maybe it's the $800.
Maybe that's the threshold.
If it's $800 or more, it's unreasonable.
If it's $790, you've got like the Costco pricing model, gets past the filters.
That's a very good point.
I remember when she was – people wouldn't let her hit the end of it.
And it's kind of like if people – because Bitcoin is confusing.
So if someone could actually teach it and if people found it helpful, I can definitely imagine that there being a market for that.
But yeah, I think it's depressing, especially because he clearly doesn't know very much.
So that's the other thing is I don't know like where he gets his information.
It's certainly like not great, whatever it is.
I think he kind of gets it from Jimmy Song or something too, which is kind of funny because Jimmy Song is also – he's like kind of like an old – I would consider him a friend or whatever.
But he's also not that – even though he's often like an expert witness in court and something on Bitcoin, he has his book.
But he's also like not super, super, super great, I would say, but he's definitely better than many.
And but yeah, like it's kind of like what is the food chain and who is who's getting their information from who.
But in this modern time, I'm just I just think like if you're a self-directed learner, first of all, everyone is a self-directed learner.
Like it's not like you can't like steal someone's attention like against their will.
It doesn't really happen.
I mean, maybe in some really bizarre scenarios, you could argue stuff like if someone's starving to death and then they smell food or something or something like extremely highly engineered like AI pornography or something could maybe like hijack your attention.
But really not like in a serious sense like over a long period of time.
People, they either want to learn something or they don't.
And if they want to learn, now they will be able to, I think, with a decent amount.
They just need a little bit of money for their – they just need internet or they could use the free – plenty of places have free Wi-Fi these days.
So even a really, really poor off person will be able to – it's like a – it's a giant library.
The internet is a giant library in addition to the other things that it is.
It's a huge library and it has something that every school could only dream of having.
Like it would even be beyond the imagination of, you know, there would be, it would be impossible for Montessori or Socrates or any of these people to imagine the type of learning opportunity that is available today to literally like something like 4 billion people.
It would be impossible.
So I, and now this makes me even more skeptical of regular school.
I think regular school is now really wasting kids' time when it's now – the opportunity cost is very high since they could now learn anything they want and they could learn literally whatever their hearts desire.
And if all they want to do is learn about Roblox and Call of Duty meta or something, then I think that's fine because eventually these people will all become adults and they'll have to decide, oh, do I want to have more money?
Do I want a better future for my – do I want to have a girlfriend or whatever?
Do I have a better future for my family?
And people will just decide whatever they decide.
And all these attempts to curate the curriculum or to get children to learn a certain thing that people think they should learn or they learn Bitcoin the way someone else thinks they should learn it.
All this stuff has ended up backfiring, I think, and it's a waste of time.
But yeah, Matt Cratter, like, you know, what do you really – I mean, how much does he really know about Bitcoin?
that's the other thing is like these people show up like after 2020 it's like okay like that's more
than 10 years in i'm just gonna turn this light so yeah i don't know um what but yeah i guess
that's how you want to he's got he's got a product to sell so everyone's got to eat
trinkets for the plebs selling solutions it's a great business model um
so we i think we're gonna transition here in a minute to the end of the show but uh
you know i'm curious paul uh do you have any favorite polish jokes
polish jokes yeah i know a few um i mean the best one is the norm mcdonald joke
that do you know this joke about the sandwich shop i don't want to tell it because it takes
too long but just look it's great i don't and i don't want to do it where norm mcdonald can do it
better than but yeah i mean everyone knows about oh why did the polish navy sink the polish
submarine say oh they left the screen door open i mean a classic um but the the norm mcdonald
sandwich joke is
it's very old but
and just no one can tell it like
you know you gotta some jokes need a great
delivery and to have him
run on that joke for
three minutes on like
basically international broadcast television
that's
just but yeah
it's funny about the you know like where did
the stereotype even come from
you know because I know a lot of Polish people
all very bright
but you know hey a
stereotype is a stereotype. What can you do? Are you, are you relieved that, uh, like the most,
I guess, controversial or disliked in a green group is now the Somalis and the people leave
the Polish alone? The Polish, you know, everyone's got to have like the little time, right? So then
it was like Irish need not apply. And then, so if people have their time, I, you know, I, we should
leave it to maybe the sociologists to determine like, what is the time window? You know, how much
time do you have to you put in your hours but yeah then a lot of people even like uh i was thinking
when i saw that movie in theaters uh gran torino he's like has an extremely on the nose like polish
name like kowalski or something and i was kind of like oh like and then it's like polish and then
there's like the asian korean family is like moving in so i was like oh now polish that was
like 2005 or something and i was like that's like polish is now officially like old guard
american it's like you know you're in like whatever you're like a virginian you're like a
you're like a puritan so you're like a massachusetts bay colony full i was thinking
so i don't remember when that movie exactly came out but i was even thinking this is way in so you
You know, everyone's like, you're way in.
For America, the melting pot.
And yeah, certainly, you know, it's hard to know online, like whenever there's a political story, because you got the online derangement, and then you got people's politics.
But yeah, that does seem like if one-tenth of those stories are true about.
And then, of course, the other funny thing about Minnesota is it was like extremely Scandinavian.
And the Scandinavians have a very good work ethic, some would say.
And they're very – so then they're always – people are always like, oh, why doesn't – socialism works for Norway and why couldn't it work and whatever.
But I think this is true.
Maybe it's not.
Someone could look it up.
But I think Minnesota is like extremely – was mostly – was very Scandinavian and now they let in all Somalians.
So, but yeah, we're living through some interesting times.
There was a time I've noticed that for a while, like being a racist was like the worst thing you could be.
It was like being a pedophile or whatever.
And then, but now we're living, we're slowly living through an era where like race-based arguments.
Racist-based.
Coming back, phasing back in.
I don't know what that portends.
You know, obviously a lot of prejudice in addition to other.
Well, you have the prejudice already exists.
I think at this point, it's like policing a few types of prejudices.
It just seems hypocritical because you have prejudice about everything else.
Yeah, people only.
It's the same as the specialist versus generalist idea where people don't have enough time to make an in-depth investigation.
investigation of every single thing they come across that wouldn't make any sense to the point
about x adding the location there's definitely one case where it's kind of like justified where
the account is like clearly some kind of nationalist account of some country and then the
person is from a different country so it's like pro america underscore usa and it's like the
the eagle and like whatever and then they the accounts like not from the u.s it's like from
russia or something and you're like what the heck so some x i think x should if they if they notice
any kind of like overt fraud they should like let everyone know like by the way this account is a
fraud and you shouldn't listen to them they're lying to everyone so i think that's i thought
that was funny they exposed the in miles strong for you know he's very very patriotic and he's
not even been in the United States.
He's based out of Malaysia, I think.
And he went on a defense of, despite not being an American,
despite not living here, why he was patriotic.
And I think that a lot of it is because agencies, companies,
they're paying these foreign accounts to be patriotic,
to uh post about certain messages and i don't think that that's right i think as long as you
have homeless veterans and poor american citizens who you could pay them to be patriotic we shouldn't
be paying foreigners to be patriotic well it's obviously the whole thing is very sketchy and it's
it is fraud at a certain point uh and many of the times it's not just that the account like the
account has like a screen name it's not just the name the whole personality of the account is like
this it'll have like tweets these are the type of people we're letting into our country and then
it's like the person's not even from there and so you're kind of like so the whole personality i
think there were a few uk ones that i saw where they had people had screenshotted like all the
tweets the name and then it was like the location at the bottom and it doesn't add up and we know
that there are you know that there are bot farms and we know that there are you know proxies and so
So I think that is – I mean it's unfortunate because X has to decide the more – what do they want people to think when they see a tweet?
Do they want to think, oh, this is just spam that might be a bot?
Or do they want to think, oh, this is something that I should – someone really took time out of their day and they thought about this for a little while and they wrote this tweet because they wanted people to read it.
And they wanted it to be a tweet for the ages and to go down in history and be part of the record of human thought.
And so if they want that, they're going to have you.
even if that's a side effect of why it exists and is not the number one reason,
you could have shows and even there were some shows that had like an educational dimension
or an activist dimension, but they were actually still pretty good
and a lot of people watched them.
And so you could say X, even though X exists for whoever's paying
and for the advertisers and the investors and the people who buy premium or whatever,
that it could still, it still has to decide,
does it want to care about being a place
where people kind of are honest?
And if they're not honest,
then what's the point of reading it?
It's all just like a kind of a crapshoot.
So...
Yeah, flood slop sells,
but it doesn't mean flood slop can't be interesting.
It doesn't mean a flood slop can make you cry.
It doesn't mean public flood slop can make you think,
have think something feel creative you know i mean it can be good it can be interesting it can
be beneficial yeah even the slop has some nutritional value i assume do you do you think
that x should uh devise some sort of purity test for what a bitcoiner is so that if somebody's
tweeting about bitcoin it says whether they're a bitcoiner or not it's i mean there was a site
during the block size war where you could like sign the message with your wallet or endorse it
and so there was like a leaderboard of something that maybe only one person had written but like
was endorsed by these accounts that had like tens of thousands of coins and so there would be like
a leaderboard where it got up to like 400,000 coins or something.
And I think that definitely had some advantages,
but I don't know how much it really –
because it was funny that originally that site came out.
Then it was like a small blocker.
Small blockers had the edge,
and then some people started citing them,
and then word got out,
and then a large blocker argument got higher.
That also had an interesting side effect that it also made people care about exactly how they worded the claim.
So they dialed back the rhetoric to try to make it appeal to as many centrists as possible.
This is a good thing.
There's two types of these – there's like different types of arbitration.
So like sometimes people go and they plead their case and then the mediator has to like draft a compromise.
but this is has isn't this has some disadvantages like people exaggerate their case and they say oh
this person's the worst so like this is like in family court they do this and then usually when
people get divorced they everyone tries some like kind of extreme routines where they file for like
a restraining order and they exaggerate the person's drinking or something because it's like
pretty normal for someone to drink at some point in the marriage like at new year's party or but
then they exaggerate it and they do all this stuff.
So then, but then in contrast to that,
they have a situation where the arbitrator must choose
one of the two sides to agree with completely.
And this has the opposite effect
where the people try to make their case
as honest as possible.
And they try to say, I will not exaggerate
because if the arbitrator, the mediator,
if they don't believe me,
then it will hurt my chances.
So they try to make their case as reasonable as possible,
appealing to the – because the moderator knows if it's pulled too far,
they'll just think, I don't believe this.
So I think that is an interesting thing to think about in the context of this site
that logs people's amounts where they would try to –
some people would try to write them like, I think Bitcoin should be used as money
or these platitudinous statements that everyone would agree with.
You could think maybe what would happen if someone wrote Bitcoin is hope or something
and then it would just get like a million endorsements.
And that was tough.
They had like a privacy problem too.
But yeah, I don't know.
I do think there is a problem with the Sybil attack.
And this is a problem with measuring people's opinion on Twitter.
And there was the scaling Bitcoin conferences in 2015.
And people – they made a huge deal.
They made it explicit.
They said on the website and in the announcement and they said, we will not make any decisions at this conference, which is funny.
It sounds kind of funny.
But what they were getting at at the time was they wanted to really preserve the ability for anonymous or private people to contribute.
and they knew that if you had an in-person meeting,
that would ruin privacy for a lot of people.
And so that the hypothetical Satoshi would not be able to attend.
And so that was a really important talking point for them to say,
we will not make any decisions at the in-person meeting.
This is just like a supplemental thing to like help out.
But then online you have the flip side of that
where you have endless fake accounts.
I kind of think right now the endless fake accounts problem
is worse than the privacy problem.
But yeah, I don't know.
That's a good point.
Definitely, I think Twitter,
you know, you have this,
I certainly have this love-hate relationship
with Twitter where on one hand,
it's amazing that you can message,
I can just message anyone,
any book author or something
or anyone about anything.
And it is kind of fun
to watch all the ideas compete.
The ideas compete on, you know,
and you could learn the rules and get better
and you could put more effort into it.
At the same time,
every now and then you think like oh my god if this is the way society is going like we're all
like gonna die or something so you know i don't know what to make of twitter i think elon has
improved it in many ways but he's also made it like he's given it this um he's seeded a certain
culture that has like also kind of like monocultured it or something also in a different way so i but
he did improve it a lot and he did when he fired all those people and it's and it's kept working i
I kind of thought, well, I guess those people are probably useless.
No offense to that.
You know, you probably been around long enough to know that, like,
forum moderators have a bad reputation.
Nobody likes the mods.
Nobody hates the mods.
But I think what's happened with Twitter X, whatever,
the last two or three years, I think people are starting to respect
the credentialed moderators a little bit more.
Maybe the mods have had too much of a bad reputation,
and they aren't all bad.
They're not all as bad as the R-Bitcoin Reddit mods.
Yeah.
I mean I disagree.
In my point of view on that, this happened during the block size war and many times since.
But I felt that the R-Bitcoin suppression of large block stuff, I felt that that was helping the large blockers a lot.
But who's to say if that was really true?
But I also think there's a lot of stuff.
There's a lot of interesting stuff that could have been different.
So I thought R-BTC was just like we'll be the uncensored R slash Bitcoin.
But I think that was a mistake.
What they should have just done was said we will mirror.
They should have maybe made a different site that has like the same layout as Reddit and just said we will mirror R-Bitcoin.
But we will also include all the – we will snapshot and include all the censored posts in like a special box.
And that move would have single-handedly eviscerated R slash Bitcoin.
So this is a very interesting idea, like a different – the right media strategy, I think.
But instead they just created RBTC because they thought we want to be the king of our own new subreddit where we'll do it right.
And of course they had to have their own moderation problems, which they did.
And then the question was how should they treat – yeah, you had people like, again, Greg Maxwell who's very active on Reddit.
And also in his dealings with the RBTC people, I thought he wasn't completely unfair, but
he was very critical.
And then he would always get downvoted to hell So like the Reddit thing would be like flag him when he go to rbtc as like just like a spam person who should never be shown but he that was not what he was he was
just unpopular so then he had to be like whitelisted and all this other like weird stuff
would happen so it's very very intriguing um that's a very interesting stories yeah that's a
good um more like a example of the the guys with spam derangement syndrome the nazis were just like
so obsessed with spam and like keeping spam off bitcoin the the problem with that is that
it's it's it's it's it's it's an ambiguous term anything could be argued whether well or or not
well that it's spam and that it shouldn't be allowed like in greg maxwell being uh flagged
and filtered on reddit as spam is a good example of this where it's like just because a lot of
people are triggered by by your content or by the name by by the the the the the you know nature of
your existence um doesn't you know they could call you spam he was a reportedly like he would
be tagged rbtc as you may as people probably know when you can like tag someone in a post
on reddit they'll get it they could get like called over from like wherever they were on reddit to go
participate on rbtc so he'd be like invited over then he would give his so they were like honestly
having it this was like civilization at its best in a way you have two people who really disagree
and really hate each other and they're typing it out in in text in chat they're not even like
throwing crazy memes or gifs at each other or something you know they're just typing it out
and everyone can benefit from it but of course he would get uh downvoted and so then of course if
you program a subreddit you know if you're the reddit mods and you see someone always gets
downvoted here they always have a negative score or whatever um you would think well we just
shouldn't show this to people this is not what they came from the subreddit for and then so i'm
not sure exactly how to what to make of it all i think it is definitely the case that different
people are interested in different content and if you want to curate the content the right way
you need to be very smart you can't just say like you can't just write the word cold and tape it to
a refrigerator that's not plugged in or if it's broken the refrigerator is broken or it's not
plugged in you can't just write like cold and tape it on you can't just write like not spam
You need to have like a complicated sifting sorting idea as to exactly what will be displayed and what will not be displayed.
And so that's part of why the nots people are incorrect is because they have an extremely simplistic idea over something that is not simple at all.
And of course, one thing that everyone brings up is that Bitcoin already has the sorting based on fee.
That's the whole reason it works at all.
So it already has this engine of suppressing insincere messages, and it works perfectly.
And so – but yeah, this has already been talked to death, I think.
But yeah, what will become of the Knotts cult when this peters up?
You're not – you're just not going to succeed trying to vibe code a vaccine for Bitcoin.
Yeah, I mean, you're not going to say Bitcoin.
Yeah, the Bitcoin core has some of the most, the highest standards, sometimes unreasonably high or high in an insane way, such as inconsistent camel case requirements and other nonsense.
But, you know, the idea that you, that would be like, that was like the worst place in the entire universe to try to bring the vibe coded pull requests.
That's like – so that was just by itself kind of – I was almost thinking like is there like a third or fourth layer to that where they're like we want you to know that we don't take this seriously either and we're just wasting your time and look, we can get away with it.
Right.
the book the book uh market wizards uh about the infamous traders from the 70s like ed coyote i
think i might be getting it right now but um hit his whole like market trading thesis was psychological
like that where he thought if there were people like outcomes that were determined by the fact
that these people were like psychologically expecting themselves to fail but like not
not having the self-awareness to realize like the vid that they have that predisposition to be
self-sabotaging and that they would lose money or succeed in the market totally based on um
their efforts to sabotage themselves and to try to lose right like some people do this like by
trading meme coins or just the way that they or maybe kept extra careless with their bitcoin it
is their keys like it might not have been um some catastrophe or security uh exploit that some
hacker figured out it's just like the risk was that they were self-sabotaging and that they
didn't believe in themselves and that they they were careless for their keys and that's why they
lost them so it almost feels that way with the nazis where it's they're not aware they are there's
no self-awareness here, but they are just demonstrating with histrionics and just over
the top dramatic narratives that they're self-sabotaging.
They're trying to lose and they're showing us that this isn't meant to be successful.
They are not actually trying to achieve consensus as they would describe it.
Yeah, I agree.
I think there are so many holes in the plan.
even it's the idea that it's a temporary soft fork we have never had anything like that um and so
it's kind of like well if it's a good idea then why is it temporary like it's there's so many
things about it that are like well so i think that you didn't think about this right it's like
you can just tell they didn't think about the very next step or like what if this it was just like
as long as it gets rid of the spam, it will be fine.
I thought it was interesting also that they didn't appear to feed the AI,
here are all of the soft fork BIPs in the past,
and just make it look like that.
It really doesn't, which is interesting,
because the BIPs already have to be a certain format,
so of course they all superficially resemble each other.
But I thought this is just weird how the style of this
is just um it's not actually like they don't have well i don't want to like but it's like um
i just thought it was strange it's the whole thing is strange and even the the fact that luke
gives it 444 because he thought it might activate before i got home like the whole thing is like
every aspect of it is like just a little bit off you know you're just like it's with these people
it's like it's the the plebs it's the plebs slop code it's the plebs slop software and it makes me
think of like think of the guy that shot charlie kirk like this assassin and all we found out or
all we know in the aftermath is like how sloppy this guy was like he was just in the group chats
in taxi saying exactly admitting to his crime like it oh i left my sweater just like in all
of us are sitting at home and we're like i thought about the game theory a little bit about doing
some kind of high profile assassination you know and i would have taken more precaution here i would
have thought about this very obvious clue that he did and it's like anybody who follows bitcoin it's
like dude if i was going to try to do a four if i was trying to compete with like you know i'm
getting compared to uh roger veer like all right i'm gonna fucking come correct i'm gonna have all
my my dot box uh or my i's dotted my t's crossed this is going to be good i would have thought of
this and they didn't do that and it's it's we just live in the world in the era of of pleb slop
glory everybody's trying to get glory they're trying to take a shortcut to fame and like oh
dude i pulled off i pulled off the fork or i saved bitcoin dude bitcoin is money i saved it
And it's like, dude, it's just a plump slap at hand.
Yeah, parts of it are very disappointing.
Like you watch the debate.
First of all, the fact that this is even getting people's attention at all is kind of depressing because other things are much more worthy of the attention.
But then for some reason, you can just hijack attention by just making a lot of noise or whatever.
But you'd see like this is like the main point, the Luke point or the mechanic point is they would say something like we think Bitcoin should be used as money, not as file storage.
But even that doesn't make any sense.
Like each Bitcoin transaction is a file.
And so you just kind of think like it is already a file storage.
But then like everyone will just lap it up.
and they just – it's almost like – it's kind of like an NFL game
or something where you get two different colors.
People have a red shirt and a blue shirt or whatever,
and it's just people want to divide.
And it is like wrestling where it's like you just cheer for your side
and you're just happy to be included I guess or something.
And it has – the fact that none of it has any bearing on the facts
doesn't even bother people.
well it's the the the ice one last thing uh they people tried for decades maybe longer to create
a bitcoin right like a decentralized peer-to-peer system um and we know that and that's what you
know they were building up to what ended up being the white in the white paper but
They tried to solve this consensus problem for decades in Satoshi did it by making a database a decentralized database a um proof of work database so then they like oh bitcoin money not a database yeah i know it like no that
was the whole point the whole point is money is also and also like every form of money is a database
to some extent it's like who has more money who has less so it's right like can you think in
distractions is the problem they can't think in distractions it's like a kind of hypnosis or
something too it's just like we are you know we are not the database team and it's just kind of
like wow like what like what are they talking don't they know that if you if you look in the
if you run bitcoin or if you look at the source code there are plenty of databases there there
there they all they're all right there like so i don't know again it's kind of has this
this third or fourth layer where it's like it's almost like humiliating it's like a humiliation
it's like this is what this is what you're stuck talking about this is maybe why i don't do the
pleb slop thing as much because i'm like i don't want to get dragged down into this world i'm just
going to hang out of my own bubble you know i'll hang out of my own bubble i'll be very happy there
but who knows and this is just the irony of it is they basically hate the fact that uh bitcoin
is a database that was originally run on the Cal Berkeley,
the woke Cal Berkeley fucking data library.
Like that is the origin of Bitcoin.
That's the only reason any of this exists today.
Yeah, I know.
Thanks to Gloria and Cal.
I do.
I am kind of curious in like a kind of historical way
as to how Matt Cratter came to be anti-core.
Like was it because you guys were making fun of not?
And then he – like I really want to know because – with the core, I was like, oh, well, at least this is like kind of like the end of Matt Cratter because these are like – first of all, these videos are super deranged and weird.
I think any normal person would just be like, what the hell is wrong with this person?
But they're also like, you know, I criticize Core all the time.
And I think Core is lazy and corrupt.
I really do.
But it's not like I think they are like, he is like, his criticism of them is so extreme and so weird.
And it's like, based completely on what?
Like, just based on just like wanting to side with Luke?
Like, what the hell is the point of it all?
So I just think like I would be curious as to why do people feel so strongly about this one thing?
Like out of all the things you could latch on to, you know, and you could jump on the – you could say, oh, this is the topic du jour and I really want to talk about it.
You just like go on with this thing.
I think that's so strange.
And of course these people in core, you know, I think they have bad priorities but they are unbelievably specialized and they have been doing this work, you know, for years and years and they have their own little stuff worked out.
to, you know, keep new versions coming out.
And so they are, I respect them in that way.
I just think that they,
their claim to be doing what's best for Bitcoin
is not always true.
And so I think that that's open to being criticized.
But yeah, I just, I would love to know why,
how it came to be.
And because if it is like a fundamental effect,
then there will be,
that just means that in the future,
even more deranged people will all come together and they'll all clump together on the same thing
and and so i i just think like that's kind of interesting like why why i do that i don't know
but who's to say i think like just giving them these guys the benefit of the doubt without
trying to espouse some sort of you know machiavellian intention uh because it's hard to know
but it's the the easiest way to bootstrap a company with a marketing effort with minimal
resources is to use the plebs in a crusade you get you give them a moral crusade because the
plebs tend to be made up of people that don't feel really good about themselves so they're
they're looking anywhere for a sense of meaning like they want a priest to tell them how to live
which podcast to listen to which uh shit coiners to attack on twitter which pleb slop terms to
parrot that they don't understand they're looking for that guidance in that direction
and they want to displace their feelings of insignificance and and dislike for themselves
onto something else so if they can project all their feelings and so you know these individuals
that are a little bit more sophisticated like okay well how do we how do we scale a business
uh that isn't that impressive well we identify somebody to attack so instead of anybody ever
evaluating our product and what we're doing they're so focused on attacking these individuals
and supporting us and i feel like a lot of individuals fall for this trap over and over
again we saw it with um swan and uh you know the whole bitcoin only prime trust cabal um
i think you you would yeah i agree swan it's just like i don't know it's like um i think
i didn't you guys figure this out or someone was like oh swan just takes it from pleditor or
whatever like that's the and then they just they package it into like a product so it was kind of
like uh and i was like oh that actually makes perfect sense uh but of course they're all getting
it from somewhere they get it like they just think these are the talking points and it's like whether
or not they even believe these talking points i think that doesn't even matter they just think
this is the this is a magic incantation it's a lot of a it's a huge bitcoin affinity scam
So, you know, the treasury company, this is not the first and it won't be the last.
And a lot of people do this.
Even Lightning, I think the treasury companies and Lightning are also all an affinity scam where it's kind of you have two circles.
You have Bitcoin and you have like the Lightning network.
And people try to get them to overlap as much as possible inside someone's brain.
And then they just think, oh, yeah, Lightning equals Bitcoin.
And same for the, oh, if I buy the treasury companies, I'm helping, I'm buying Bitcoin.
and if you know whatever what's good for swan is whatever what's good for bitcoin that's like uh
that's that's the scam so there have been many bitcoin affinity scams over the years and uh
but yeah whether or not they even believe the talking points i don't even think they care
it is weird like still what is the ultimate origin of one talking point or another that is uh
interesting and this is interesting the number of people who are just complete liars and hypocrites
in the space and even there are other things where a lot some lies are
like plenty of people who have you know plenty of the loudest bitcoin maximalists today they
you know i remember them doing ico sales or something on ethereum or they did token sales
on ethereum in the past and it's like uh and even like swan was caught like putting everything like
gotten ripple or something or what i don't even remember what it was but it was like something
else something like you wouldn't even believe it was like even it was so dumb that even you had
trouble wrapping your head around it but it whatever it was it was very funny and uh so it's
kind of like and then of course like even like uh you know i hate to like but you can go down the
list like jimmy song was like a d cred guy he was even like d cred jimmy or something like back in
the day like i hate to like bring up like ancient ancient ancient history but it's like every single
person who is like uh giacomo zucco he did the block bhb blockchain something lab he did like
normal fundraising for it wasn't even bitcoin so i'm not trying to say like too much about
but you can go down the line for many of these people and you know uh even things like uh this
This isn't as big of a deal, but it's funny that certain people like I think – like Pierre Richard worked for BitPay, but then they all started to hate BitPay.
So that's not quite the same because you could maybe say that they learned by working there to hate them or something.
But then Michael Goldstein did 21.
So everyone was kind of like taken in.
Everyone had this phase where they were much younger and they were early in their career and they had like no money and they just wanted a job.
Everyone was excited about Bitcoin and everyone wanted a job in the space.
And it was so cool to be working in Bitcoin.
But some of the other examples are really funny where the people are just – they are actual like complete actual shitcoin scammers.
And then they become Bitcoin maximalist affinity scam.
So yeah, it's like why does Michael Saylor – who is saying Bitcoin is a scam in whatever that was, 2013, 2015.
And then he's joining – if you join in 2020, you're still very new.
so why would his opinion ever outrank anyone who had joined in like 2019 but the people say he's got
a lot of skin in the game but you know skin in the game it just means that you're not lying it
doesn't mean that you have the right idea it doesn't even mean that sometimes so there's a
lot of funny little quirks absolutely well paul we've been rolling completely different too like
the Monero.
Oh,
sorry.
We've been rolling for almost two hours.
I think I'm going to get through.
So one thing that we do at the end of all of our shows is we read the,
the fountain boost for the previous interview.
So,
you know,
one of the things that we're trying to show people is that a custodial
lightning works.
And you a great guest to show this It very easy to get it Well it like the driverless getting the driverless Waymo to road This is what I in the tab conf you get the driverless
how do I get the driverless car to work?
You just have a human driver and then they drive you to the destination.
Problem solved.
And then everyone will be amazed to be like, wow, it drove me.
It drove me from my house to my work, you know,
and it didn't make any mistakes.
So it definitely does work.
absolutely um so our first boost is from soap miner who sells homemade tallow soap
and sell it for satoshis only uh if you want girlfriends of bitcoin you have to
you have to shower on occasion
so you've been you've been around a while good advice you've been around a while there's a lot
of stinky bitcoiners uh do you think there's any hope for these guys getting girlfriends
well uh man some of them
you know and you don't want do you really want like imagine you have a really good friend
suddenly they strike it rich and then some people want to be their girlfriend but
Imagine like they get into a relationship or even they get married or whatever, but the woman doesn't really respect him.
It's just using him, you know, as an ATM.
Is that really that much better?
You know, that's a sad thought.
Don't we want – I think it's nice if people – two people, they each like each other.
You know, that's a more stable arrangement because then they'll – through thick and thin, they'll fight for each other.
It's best interest.
And that's a good thing.
So can even some of these people, you know, I think, yeah, is it really Bitcoin that will help them?
Or should they – some of them experiment with like these very strong drugs.
They should maybe take the psilocybin magic mushroom and reflect or, you know, the MDMA, they say, you know.
So I read.
Maybe that would be better.
Because, you know, a lot of these people clearly – you said it before about what type of people can be led into a crusade by the priests.
And it's, you know, these people don't have a lot going on in their lives.
They need something to latch on to.
So, yeah, if you want – I mean, sometimes – this may sound funny, but sometimes people do ask for – I mean, I think if people want a girlfriend, you should just start doing push-ups right now.
And you can buy a guitar and the top three notes on a guitar are a minor chord and then the next three are a major chord and you can learn one, four, five that have dots on them.
So you can learn a lot of songs right out of the gate.
And so now you can play the guitar and now you can do push-ups.
And then I would try to – but yeah, of course, I think it's not – now we're delving into topics that are even more forbidden than Bitcoin.
But yeah, I think it's, you know, men have like a higher sex drive than women on average. So now we're all going to get canceled for making these generalizations. But so in that way, you know, it's not unfair, I think, for the women to ask, like, listen, is this person going to be financially a contributor or a drain, you know?
And so actually I don't think it's so mysterious or weird that you should be able to pay for dinner and flowers and stuff.
That's not that so – but yeah, I think most people say they want a girlfriend, but they're unwilling to do push-ups today until they physically cannot and then to repeat that every other day, which only takes like a few seconds.
So how bad do they really want it again?
I question that sometimes.
100 push-ups a day till 100K and shower with beef tallow soap that you paid for with Bitcoin.
Yeah, I mean, just because you need soap, you need to take a shower.
It doesn't necessarily mean you need this soap, but because every CVS sells some kind of soap or another, I think.
We're all going to boost this.
So we're going to recommend his soap.
Don't go to CVS, actually.
Could be great.
2,121 saps from the Daniel.
He said, this podcast has gone too highbrow.
And I don't know what he's talking about, except for maybe we've been kind of teasing and trolling Nostra.
And he really likes Nostra.
So, yeah, we got a post over and got to start picking on the guys on Nostra.
Paul, do you ever use the Nostra app?
i don't but i really should because um you know fiat joff is a huge supporter of drive chain he
was one of the earliest and he was also one of the earliest haters of lightning even before i was
he like years before i was just kind of like well i think drive chain is like a little bit better
than lightning but he was like no lightning doesn't work and it's a huge distraction and
we should we should burn it all to the ground he was saying that i think in like he was at least
saying that publicly on the internet in early 2023 but i think i heard it earlier in like a private
telegram chat uh like even before then years before then and he was like this doesn't work
and it's a huge distraction and but he's always been a big supporter one of the biggest supporters
of drive chain and he had the drive chain.xyz site which is a little bit more pleb facing and
He was kind of with you guys about you should communicate this to people differently or something.
He was probably right about that.
And so I do think the fact that Twitter is – or ex-formerly Twitter is so – it's like it has this unsatisfying vibe somehow.
And so the question is can you fix it?
And if so, why not just fix it and launch your own project?
And I think that – I think it will actually need a few ingredients.
I would prefer it if we had like the Namecoin sidechain backup.
I think Namecoin is a totally underexplored idea and I wrote a blog post about this on truthcoin.info.
And I think – so with the – if it was amped up with the human readable names – but I think there are a lot of unanswered questions about like is Noster supposed to relay every like?
like to everyone and you know i think i don't know i'm not sure exactly how it will
how it will work under under pressure in a way that i think actually something if you wanted
like a private relay thing kind of telegram kind of already does a little bit of that where you can
just have different many many many different groups and so i don't know i'm not really sure
uh i'm not really sure about it but i probably should get it but uh i don't know like who am i
gonna be talking to on nostor it's like so so but whatever i know that some people some cool people
are there i don't think like if i go he supported your drive chains and you won't even i know host
on around on nostor for a few hours i had amethyst on my phone for like a few weeks at some point
i don't know is that still like what are the good uh you know what are the good what are the good
apps what are they good i don't know none of them are good man yeah ux is terrible yeah well that's
the problem is that um people i don't think they realize exactly they they have a decent idea that
there's a problem but no one really knows exactly what the problem is and it's very hard to solve
the problem if you don't know what it is although that does occasionally happen but i think it's
kind of like people don't like the algorithm but then you choose when you wake up in the morning
you choose to like go on twitter or whatever so in a way you do like that it's like guys but then
Why did Elon have to buy Twitter for billions of dollars?
Because you could replicate the tech stack easily for like $2 million, right?
So why pay over 1,000 times, over 10,000 times more?
Because the network effect, because all the other people are still there.
So that's what it's worth.
So in that sense, it's very pessimistic because it says we're just locked in.
we're locked in the same room as everyone else and we can't escape.
We're in like a weird equilibrium.
So I don't know. I don't know. I think that question,
I'm very open-minded, but very skeptical to that.
To me, the telegram project seems to be going better where, and then again,
this is just completely ruled by one ruler, but they,
the user experience is good. Mostly stuff is unsent.
You can use the telegram to just censor.
you have encrypted messages that you encrypt and just send them back and forth to people
um i think a telegram bot situation or like a telegram you know they have like the little
telegram like you can do like little stuff or you can have like a little store or a little thing
uh that seems like it works it seems like that's actually making progress towards something
i don't know what not what nostor because again of course nostor was partially created
in the wake of rampant censorship on Twitter
from the US federal government
that was blatantly illegal, I think,
of like with the government pressuring them
to suppress people's speech.
And so, but then Elon bought it.
So that made that different.
And then we have the administration switch
from Democrats to Republicans.
So both of those things got shuffled out anyway.
So I'm not exactly sure.
But I'm not sure what to make of it.
But I think I should probably get on there at least and experiment with it more.
I think so.
But still, I'm skeptical and open-minded at the same time.
Well, the revolution won't have good UX.
So that's my Nostra thought.
it's tough if you don't have the good ux because
that's just it makes it hard for anyone to yeah get what they want so
yeah i guess my final thought is on it is that you know it's a question of identity um
what is it for like it is nostre for you know zapping each other's custodial lightning wallets
for what slot you know is like that what we need nostril for we can do that on on twitter
i think that's a very good point that this has fueled people's misunderstanding of lightning
like of course when a lot of times people will invent something in technology and then they'll
do whatever they call the pivot you know it will it'll evolve into being used for something that
was different than intended and so is that the case is that is is nostril as is it just a vehicle
is it just a giant lightning marketing campaign?
Because imagine this.
Imagine you're raising money for your lightning startup.
You use a non-custodial.
You have a non-custodial lightning company.
And the numbers aren't going great because it's non-custodial,
so it doesn't work.
You have whatever it is.
I hate to give an example, but whatever.
You have Moon or something, whatever it is.
And so then, but you have an edge, which is that you also secretly on the side, you run Primal, which is fully custodial.
And then you link it with Noster because you're like, this is great for the Lightning brand.
So it's all the Lightning brand.
So you just say, oh, I'm just going to pump up the Lightning brand with all these fake Lightning transactions where there's no Lightning transaction at all.
When you do the Primal to Primal zap, there is no Lightning transaction.
There's no HTLC.
There's no anything.
so it'll be completely fake but it'll make lightning look good and then i'll be able to
raise money for whatever it is phoenix or whatever and so then i then i get the real plan is to get
three million dollars and then i can just spend it however i want after you you know you raise it to
do lightning and now like you have now you have a job so uh i don't know use the money to advertise
on podcasts yeah right then that's all that's that's the last ingredient ingredient uh just a
And then some virtue signaling on the regular Twitter.
So yeah, that's like probably at least like 60% of the business models in Bitcoin today.
Some version of that of just like how do we keep certain words in vogue, you know, certain popular words somehow.
And through some combination of open source software and paying people off.
um so yeah then the real thing it's like what they would always say why do the pharmaceutical
companies advertise on news it's not to that because they care about anyone buying the product
it's because they want to make the news companies feel uncomfortable uh criticizing
the pharmaceutical company under any circumstances this is the same thing it's like you know the
lightning people will sponsor stefan levera or whatever and then it's like oh okay like so
you're never going to get the truth about how lightning doesn't work uh from them or at least
it's much it's going to go a lot slower so yeah but uh yeah now it's uh there's more than two hours
so um this has been really fun i know i know at least one good luck in your quest to mess with
people i'm sorry oh we're just reporting the news we're not messing with anybody but yeah i know at
least one company that was upset with me for writing that uh they had bad ux and that lightning
had bad ux in uh bitcoin magazine but uh yeah well i'll read the we got only got a few more
but sean 1000 sat says i'm immediately buying a first trinket that was oh sorry
i said paul you can run we can finish the boosts no no i'm fine i can't have more time so yeah
let's do see if there's any good boosts
i think i cut out for the last one uh apologies folks i've got a bad internet connection but um
sean says i'm immediately buying the trinket that runs temple oos there you go
knock us 808 sats live aloha
rev hodl says all bitcoin transactions are economic transactions the more hash one owns
and operates the more clear this becomes i think yeah if you buy the if you pay for the block space
you are the you at least the rightful owner of that block space we already have the consensus rules to stop people from spamming the blockchain with stuff that will shut off people nodes So I would definitely agree
Next one, 500
stats from Sasha. Great show.
Congrats on the University of Bitcoin
scholarship.
Hell yeah.
So just for context,
Paul, Stu was
expelled from bitcoin university and so the university i remember yeah i i caught i got caught
a few episodes that was one of the ones that i that i saw that was great that's one of the funniest
screenshots i've seen in bitcoin in a while just the i got expelled or whatever i'm just like why
would you but i mean that's what's really funny is like i think he's mortally afraid of like anyone
who actually knows about bitcoin like going through the thing it's seeing like because and
And without any doubt, I'm sure there's just a lot of mistakes in there too.
So I hate to say that, but it's just – it's obvious from the way he talks that he's not really that interested in Bitcoin actually.
He's just like kind of an operator.
He's just there to get the eyeballs or something.
Collect his tuition money.
Yeah.
uh shadrack 323 sats is mile high boost hashtag 40 hpw
we got pies 121 sats yo yo yo
pies is probably the most prolific bitcoin podcast listener of all time
And our final boost, BTC on board, 100 sats, two thumbs up emojis.
Thank you for the boost, folks.
So what do you think, Paul?
You just witnessed custodial lightning.
Well, yeah, and you get 100 sats.
So, of course, it makes no sense.
If you understand the design of lightning, like there's no way that they have to have a special carve out for amounts that are too low because the ink it would require to write the HTLC to the blockchain.
it doesn't actually work.
You would lose more money just broadcasting to the chain
than the 100 sats you would collect.
And so it's like they have a special carve-out
that doesn't use the HLCs.
But when you do the intermediate notes,
so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, I'm a huge lightning skeptic,
and everyone can watch my debate.
I debate the whole room at TabConf,
which is like the most technical audience you can find.
But yeah, that last guy had the Activate CTV,
or Ellen Hance in his name.
And, yeah, I see this a lot too because some people had – not that many, but some people had like a BIP300 car-like icon thing.
And because this is how Taproot activated and how SegWit activated, so people have kind of been trained to do this.
But I think it's important.
I like when people do that and they say activate – they put it like in their name.
I support CTV or I support Ellen Hance or whatever.
I think, though, that we have to reflect on how little progress they have all made towards activation and like that nothing has happened at all.
So every time you see that, you have to wonder, like, is this person, do they not realize that this isn't working at all?
Or are they, do they realize that it's not working and are they so passionate that they are willing to endure this humiliation in order to help change the world?
i hope though i hope those same people feel to realize the same thing about uh hashtag free
samurai like are we is there are we really getting anything out of this it's nice it's cool it's glad
to see that you support that but anything else well i really would have preferred um i actually
made a whole site for this but i just didn't i had a lot on my plate and i by the time i launched
the site it was too late uh and it was like basically uh but i wanted to make a site where
I wanted to do because I was very confused.
You guys helped make me confused and deranged.
I slightly blame you guys because you had your funny video with the – where it was like for the Las Vegas conference and then it was like there would be like people in tuxedos who kind of vaguely look like Michael Saylor.
And then it was like, oh, but then we're going to have midget wrestling in Las Vegas.
And so you guys or at least your constellation of Twitter associates were the originators of this.
That's how I found out about this thing.
And there's going to be a samurai – there's going to be a fundraiser for samurai there.
And I dragged multiple extremely rich friends.
I was like, you got to come to this and donate.
And I was like, it's midget wrestling.
It's insane.
These guys are like punk rock.
They can't be controlled.
They are literally insane people.
And I dragged them there.
But there was no – when I was there, I mean I was a little late, but there was no like – what I was expecting was like we're going to like send around the hat or whatever and people are going to like write down donations or something.
And that never actually happened.
I was like confused by that.
And then by the time I figured it out, I wanted to make like a new site and it may still even be on the internet or something.
And I made like a big thing.
I made like a big FAQ with like a lot of texts You would hate it because there lots of it very busy But it was like I was going to raise money for like a prize There was going to be something like we will give all we going to raise all this money
and we will give it to Samurai's lawyers if they get off scot-free.
But if not, we will give it to Samurai or their families or something.
And I was going to do something like that.
And I thought that was way better.
And I know someone personally who donated over, I think over a million dollars to the free Samurai.
And so it just goes to the lawyers and now they didn't get freed. I'm not trying to go too deeply into this thing. I don't know that much about it. But I've had tremendously good luck with the prize model is a very good model.
And you see there's kind of an underlying logic to it, even though it's very skeptical and it's kind of like it's not great for – it's not great for getting people to like you, but it is good for getting a job done.
And there was even like debatably – it's debatably – I'm not sure the legality of like if they're ordered to pay the restitution, if they could have seized that money or something from the fund.
But there was also a lot of precedence that even in like a famous movie, there was that famous movie about the Aaron Brockovich or whatever, where she has to sell it to the plebs basically.
She has to explain to them like why are they agreeing to this like 30 percent cut in thing.
And because he had already structured the lawsuit that way, knowing that these clients are like too poor to take on this giant company.
So I was interested in that.
And so, yeah, I'm an enemy of cheap talk.
And if you're in favor of prediction markets, you're an enemy of cheap talk and you really want to get at the truth.
And, yeah, I think in the Bitcoin community, there have been times where we found a lot of money to do all kinds of fundraising in the past.
And I think a lot of those people are still out there.
But it's just – with the samurai, I do think it was like – it was kind of confusing because you didn't ever really know.
So maybe you could – I mean my thought was you didn't really ever know like what to donate to or how it would help or how it would actually move the needle.
And eventually I decided to try to do it myself and by the time I finished this website, it was too late.
And that was just me making a website just describing like what I would do.
I think you might be able to say that we have been infiltrated by people either intentionally or not who are just very good at jamming all the communications by just dumping all this spam.
And it's a lot harder.
also the community is larger now
it's a lot harder
but in the past you did have
people who would
the thing where you would find someone like
Jack Dorsey to do the
COPA lawsuit
that I think
that I can remember all the previous times
when stuff like that would happen where we would find like a
patron I think other things
that contributed to this being different
was that like people like Roger Veer
he was a huge
small i mean excuse huge large blocker and so then we kind of like forced him out we also forced
like brian armstrong out so where there were there were like some like rich business people
who in the past i think they did finance a lot of stuff like for free uh and as just a partly as a
casualty of the block size war this all got like kind of ripped apart to some extent but even in
the small blocker world there were these there are these huge super rich people people behind chain
code and stuff like that. So I'm a little confused as to why this, the samurai case went the way it
did exactly. And I don't understand it. I tried to figure it out and I'm, I'm a little baffled by
it. So I don't know what that meant, but yeah, I'm in favor of a free samurai. I think you got
to start, maybe if you don't know what to do, you just start with putting free samurai and then you
just hope that the right people will find you and, uh, or something. So, but yeah, uh, cheap talk is
also not not great but i guess it's better than no talk at all i love the idea of the prediction
market but um you know paul you have so much to say that is interesting i i i like that you're
doing these twitter spaces but i i think it's important for you to start a podcast and um
this has been this has been an absolute pleasure i wish that we could keep on going uh but i'm
I'm currently sitting in a room that is approaching pitch black.
There's no lights in here.
You're easily the smartest Polish man.
Hey, just invite me on.
You can invite me on at any time.
We'll have to do it again.
You're easily the smartest Polish man I've ever met.
Well, thank you.
Poland's looking great.
The GDP per capita is like higher than the UK and they're going to like – pretty soon we'll have a Polish Manhattan project and it will be a world power.
Polish – Poland is setting the example in Europe and that is the truth.
And they took in – they kept out – I don't want to make – we don't want to touch too many hot button issues.
But let just say their immigration policy was to keep certain people be very skeptical of certain groups and then also to welcome with open arms an enormous number of a certain other group that was in dire straits and take them into the country which both decisions have paid off
So they don't have like a cookie cutter, like we close the border or open the border.
They instead actually thought about what they would want and what they thought was the right
thing to do.
And they did that.
And it seems to have worked both times.
So I'm very happy now.
I'm being more proud of being Polish than ever.
in recent years.
Well, thank you for coming on.
I agree.
Maybe we should end it here
or we'll just keep going on and on forever.
Because I think one person's going to be,
he's disappearing into the shadow realm.
Where have all the breaking posts gone and where did Dennis go?
Paper Bitcoin winter is feeling cold as I trudge through the snow.
Is there any hope of important announcements to come and save the day?
It feels like all hope is lost and all I can do is pray
I need an announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to get back into the fight
He's gotta be brave and he's gotta be sharp
Or things ain't gonna be alright
I need an announcement
Announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to set things right
He's gotta be bold and he's gotta be loud
He's gotta bring the bull market back to life
I look at macro charts and all the models all look really bad
People who are bullish seem to be filled with hope
The outlook looking sad
The price dips once more
As the OGs sell their bags
Paper Bitcoin isn't cool no more
The cobbler is wearing rags
I need an announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to get back into the fight
He's gotta be brave and he's gotta be sharp
Or things ain't gonna be alright
I need an announcement
Announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to set things right
He's gotta be bold and he's gotta be loud
He's gotta bring the bull market back to life
The cold begins to grow as doubt takes its hold.
Longs are getting liquidated as sentiment implodes
Satoshi action is more like Satoshi running high
The bears are in control and we all need a guide
But the night is always darkest before dawn
Maybe Dennis has been working to protect our rights all along
Protect our rights all along
Dun dun dun dun
I need an announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to get back into the fight
He's gotta be brave and he's gotta be sharp
Or things ain't gonna be alright
I need an announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to set things right
He's gotta be bold and he's gotta be loud
He's gotta bring the bull market back to life
I need an announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to get back into the fight
He's gotta be brave and he's gotta be sharp
When things ain't gonna be alright
I need an announcement
I'm holding out for Dennis to set things right
He's gotta be bold and he's gotta be loud
He's gotta bring the bull market back to life