We have to be wary of making changes to Bitcoin because there will always be unforeseen consequences.
The flip side of that that few people talk about is that not making changes to Bitcoin also has
unforeseen consequences. Greetings and salutations, my fellow clubs. My name is Walker, and this is
the Bitcoin Podcast. The Bitcoin block height is 820-270, and the value of one Bitcoin is still
one Bitcoin. Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk, where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and many
other things as well. Today, that guest is Jameson Lopp. Jameson is the co-founder in CTO at Casa,
a multi-sig solution for self-custody. In general, he's a cipherpunk, a Bitcoin engineer,
and an educator. He's been in the Bitcoin space for a long time, and has a great perspective on the
past, present, and future of Bitcoin. In this talk, we dig into a ton of topics, including sovereignty,
Bitcoin, censorship, no-ster, lightning, ordinals and inscriptions, and a whole lot more. Jameson
also goes deep into the controversial topic of protocol ossification regarding Bitcoin. I think
everyone should listen carefully to the perspective he provides on this. As always, you can watch the
video version of this episode on Rumble, YouTube, or X by searching at Walker America, or listen on
fountain.fm, or wherever you get your podcasts, by searching for the Bitcoin Podcast. If you listen
to the Bitcoin Podcast on fountain, consider giving the show a boost or creating a clip of something
you found interesting. If you haven't checked out fountain yet, I highly recommend it. You can
send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters and earn Bitcoin just for listening to this show. And if you
are a Bitcoin-only company, interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
go to bitcoinpodcast.net or hit me up on social media. Without further ado, let's get into this
Bitcoin talk with Jameson Lopp. I know Bitcoin never sleeps, but hopefully you're able to relax
a little bit on the Friday. I know you're a busy guy, so I appreciate you taking the time to
jump on another fucking Bitcoin podcast. Yeah. So Saturdays are when I normally publish my blog
posts and I have one going out tomorrow. So it's the last hurrah trying to put some finishing touches
on this one because it's not even related to Bitcoin. Okay. Well, I'm intrigued. I look forward
to reading it. I was just going back through some of your older stuff today. Actually, I was looking
through the last one I was looking at was your one on just Bitcoin memetics, which was, I had
looked at it before, but looked at it again and I was like, man, this is such a actually great archive
of every single prominent Bitcoin meme. Like it should be some sort of required reading. It's an
interesting concept too, just in general. I don't know, but that was a, it was very helpful. I'm curious
which means like so many of the Bitcoin memes have been around since long before I've been in
Bitcoin, which is only since like 2020 when I really went down the rabbit hole and started
diving into all of this. And so I think that's the case for a lot of people that were class of
2020 or 2021 or even 2022. And it's nice to have a little bit more of the historical perspective
on some of them. Like even the, the, the hodl meme is a great example of that because a lot of people
just think, oh, it's someone just decided to misspell hold, right? And it's like, no, no, there's an
entire, there's an entire post about it. He goes in this rant. The rant is amazing. You know, my
girlfriend's out at a lesbian bar, like whatever. And it's, it's always nice for people to have that
context of what's the origin story behind these things that you say and say a lot.
Well, yeah, you know, stuff evolves, right? So hodl, hodl turned into a, a backer name, right?
And that's because people didn't know the long nuanced story. And it's probably the case for
several memes is they morph over time. You know, much like, you know, I've written extensively
about Bitcoin maximalism and the narratives around Bitcoin and how those evolve over time. And you
can, you can kind of trace the inflection points and the pivots. And, you know, that, that, I think,
you know, this is just sort of like a natural sociological phenomenon. And I mean, it's, it's
all memetics, memetics upon memetics. Yeah, I actually, I just started reading recently,
René Girard's Things Hidden Since the Creation of the World or Things Hidden Since the Start
of the World, forgetting the title exactly, decent way into it. And it's all about that,
you know, a quiz of memetics and how that plays out in human history. And he's basically saying
that everything is a result, every, you know, interaction that we have. And all these myths
throughout history too are just tales of acquisitive memetics. And that really started to blow my mind
a little bit. I was like, wow, I mean, he makes very compelling arguments. I'm sure one can make
very good counter arguments to that as well. But it's an interesting lens through which to,
to look at the world just, you know, copying and replication, and ultimately the goal being to
somehow acquire something through that. I think it's pretty fascinating. But Jameson, thank you for,
thank you for coming on today. I'll, this will be pretty open form. There are no rules for another
fucking Bitcoin podcast. We'll, we'll keep it, keep it flowing. However, we so choose. I've got
some topics I want to run through with you just because I really respect your opinion in the space.
You've been around a much longer time than I have and have a pretty interesting career before
that as well that I think really feeds into what you're doing now and just your has probably
informed a lot of your viewpoints on that. And I want to dive into that a little bit too. But if
you're good with it, we'll just kind of roll into this. I'll do my short little spiel of an intro
and then we'll dive right in. Go for it. All right. Well, greetings and salutations, my fellow
clubs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Today it is Bitcoin talk and I am joined
by somebody who talks about and writes about and works on Bitcoin quite a lot and that is Jamison
Lopp. Jamison is the co-founder and CTO at Casa. He's also more generally a cypherpunk, a Bitcoin
engineer and an educator. He's got a ton of incredible resources on Lopp.net. I highly
recommend you check that out and I'll link it in the show notes. But Jamison, thank you for coming
on to another fucking Bitcoin podcast. I know you have done quite a lot at this point, so it's
good to have you on here. Yeah, I think I've probably done several hundred podcast episodes
over the past decade and I'm such a data archival nerd that I have all of them hosted on my own
server and I've used AI to transcribe them all so I can juice that SEO as much as possible.
That's pretty incredible actually. Yeah, I mean I like talking about Bitcoin or about privacy,
self-sovereignty, libertarian ideas. It's all over the place and as I think we were
just mentioning I've got yet another article coming out which has nothing to do with any of it.
It's actually like medical and health related stuff. So it's all related though in the sense that
I follow the don't trust verify philosophy. I actually saw a tweet you had put out and I think
there may have been an associated article to it now. I'm forgetting but you were talking about
kind of your recent basically like let me try out this health journey and see how I can optimize
this for my own personal health and ignore all of the noise out there. And from what I saw in
the results it looks like it's been a pretty successful journey for you so far. So I mean
that's fantastic because there's so much bad information out there. Yeah, well especially
when you get into the health stuff, I mean it's a lot like the crypto space in the sense that
like there's a lot of scams out there and in many cases it's hard to verify if you're not an expert.
And so especially when you start going into the like supplements or people who are selling you
specific regimens because it'll do X, Y or Z. Even if I think in some cases they aren't total
bullshit, it's problematic because we as humans are incredibly complex creatures and I think it's
very difficult to distill down to just a couple of variables of like if you do X, Y and Z you will
get result A, B, C. I think you probably saw my article about going keto and weightlifting and
losing 40 pounds in four months and that was kind of the beginning of my health journey and that was
the like what is the most effect I can get with the least amount of effort? Like I want to be as
lazy as possible and just stop being a big slob and that was pretty successful but then I plateaued
and so now for basically the past six months I've been like kicking it up a notch and I've been
simultaneously doing a lot of stuff around epigenetics and longevity and you know trying to
improve my body at a cellular level which is pretty tricky because it's hard to even say like how do
you properly test for all of these things. So I'm actually doing a ton of different tests through a
ton of different companies just to try to see if they're in rough consensus with each other
and then the article that I have coming out tomorrow is more mundane and just it's
cholesterol and it's because I went in for a routine annual physical and came out and the next
day my doctor calls me and says we need to put you on statins immediately otherwise you might have
a heart attack soon and so then I've spent the past month going through this whole journey of
doing a lot more advanced testing and learning about cholesterol and realizing that the common
trope of like good cholesterol and bad cholesterol that doctors will tell you is I think a gracious
way to say it is oversimplified but a more precise way of saying it is that it results in them
leaping to the wrong conclusion a significant portion of the time and actually prescribing
medication when it's not required. The whole statins thing is kind of fascinating in a bit
of a terrible way because I think there's been more and more research coming out that like there
are a lot of unintended consequences of putting someone on statins and that's kind of been like
the go-to for the medical establishment right it's like well your your bad cholesterol is high I
guess we better put you on statins because that's just that's what we've always done. Yeah it's
the easy thing for them to do instead of going in and doing the much more advanced tests that I
ended up you know I ended up paying out a pocket for all this stuff because it would have taken me
months and months to like go through the proper channels to get all these tests ordered. Because
they would view them as somehow not necessary for you to take and overkill for them to you know
actually try and get answers to what may be happening. Yeah I mean the short version is you
know the the medical industrial complex doesn't care about you obviously they have their own
incentives and they prefer to push their solutions at you and make you go away and
that's what was disconcerting about the experience that I had with my doctor was I felt like my doctor
and their incentives were to do the least amount of effort possible to get the most likely overall
average good result which means give me statins and if if and it's true that if I was in a position
where I was having plaque build up in my arteries the statins would help and they probably wouldn't
hurt me too much if I wasn't in that position. It's like I think 10 to 20 percent of people
they're having side effects with statins but yeah it's it's complicated. It's like a this classic
game of okay yeah let's let's get you in and get you out the door and passed along to the
pharmaceutical industrial complex so that they can you know get their little piece of the pie and so
as long as we've got you on some sort of medication we did our job. Pharma gets paid and you'll probably
improve we think so yeah well I look forward to reading that because it's it's always nice to see
bitcoiners like yourself diving into these other topics with the same rigor that they dive into
bitcoin because if there's one thing I've learned about bitcoiners it's that they really excuse me
really do the research and do the work to a level that might seem somewhat psychotic to others
but it's like that's how you actually figure out what's going on and actually get answers like you
you have to actually do the work and if you just accept what's out there well you end up with the
same answers that everyone else has so I'm looking forward to that. I'd like to kind of start off this
discussion a little bit. I think that most pretty much everybody probably knows who you are. You've
had a huge impact in the space you've been around for a long time. You've worked you worked at Bitco
previously you're you know a co-founder now at CASA and for those that don't know CASA does
multi-sig solutions is that a fair classification multi-sig solutions for bitcoin? Yeah I mean
the way that I pitch it for normies is that you know we help you be your own bank you know without
even going into any of the technical details you know we help people put themselves in a self-custody
architecture that eliminates single points of failure so you can be human and you can make
mistakes and not suffer from catastrophic loss due to a single mistake for whatever reason. And
that is I think a very good thing and maybe the idea of multi-sig is still somewhat scary to some
people who are like man I just figured out how to set up my one hardware wallet like now you're
asking me to have multiple keys and I want to maybe get into that a little bit a little bit later
but can we just can we just start with who is Jameson Lopp and how did you get here today from
you can and go back as far as you want here I'll leave this open to you but who the heck are you
and how did you get here to be who you are now? Yeah I mean I am a long-time nerd you know classic
loner who got bullied a lot as a little kid wasn't the best at socializing because I was
reading way above my grade level and using vocabulary that my peer group didn't understand
and thus thought was just fucking weird and thus ostracized me for being the weird nerd.
And as a result ended up when I went to university there was only one possible thing I could study
and that was computer science I looked at everything they were offering and the only one
that didn't look completely boring was computers so did very well on my computer classes in school
not so well on some of the other classes but managed to to get out with a degree and I actually
I hit the job market in 2007 so then you know the 2008 crisis hit and it actually ended up being
good for me I was lucky enough that I ended up at a an email marketing company and the economic
crisis was good for us because what happened was all of these other retailers and really any company
that was doing advertising ended up getting their marketing budget slashed and so they what they ended
up doing was moving a lot of their budget from traditional things like print and billboard and
television and radio and moving it to online because they realized that once they moved their
advertising online they had metrics and they could actually figure out what the return on their
investment and their various advertising promotions and channels and stuff work so that was good for
us we we went over the next decade that I worked there from being 10 employees and a company that
was sending maybe a few hundred thousand emails a day to being 300 employees and sending 100
million emails a day so major scaling operations both the technical and the the HR front.
Wow and I think that you know one of the talks that I've heard you give that really stuck with
me was one you gave at Lugano last year and that was you were declaring the you know it was basically
an obituary for SMTP and and you going through that and kind of saying some of your you know
experiences working on this and how you know you saw a little bit of how the sausage was made on
the inside how some of these decisions were being made but then the ultimate repercussions of that
being email trending towards centralization I'd love if you could kind of explain that a little
bit why you declared SMTP dead and kind of how you went through that journey yourself and then
also how it sort of impacted your views about Bitcoin and other protocol let's say protocol
ossification. Yeah so you know SMTP as a protocol it still exists and it's still used and in fact
it is probably one of the most widely adopted networking protocols in existence there's probably
billions of people who are using it though using it should be in quotes you know almost no one who
is actually sending or receiving email is running an email server or client that is directly using
SMTP rather what they're doing is they're they're going through a trusted third-party gateway that
is doing all the the SMTP stuff way under the hood behind the scenes and and really this
this was a multi-decade journey where I think email really started in the 70s
and and back then if you wanted to use email you would actually have to run email software and
and you speak SMTP to the other people that were running email servers on the early internet
and that was all good and well email as a protocol was specifically designed for message
reliability aka if you sent an email you were basically guaranteed that it would get to where
it was going and that worked very well until the 90s when millions of people started joining the
internet and some of them were not very nice and they were malicious and wanted to you know use
email to basically sell stuff to people and you know send messages that were not desired the rise
of spam and and spam became really the the greatest problem of email for the next several
decades and you could probably argue it still is we've mostly solved spam at this point but not
in a very good way there were many different solutions that were attempted to solve spam over
the years like various filtering mechanisms and none of them really worked well and they usually
also had false positives which wasn't great because that would harm the reliability of getting the
emails that you did want and what ended up happening is that we after trying many different you know
automated systems to to try to filter out email based on content we changed to instead filter out
email based upon this idea of reputation so we started creating identity and reputation around
things like domain names and IP addresses and and really all of these things that have their own
forms of centralization you know domain names are issued by an authority and they can revoke it
and similar stuff with with a lot of like SSL certificates and IP addresses and stuff there's
usually someone further down the line that actually has control over those things and it's not you
so what happened with these reputation systems is you know you can't have a million reputation
systems you know you can only really handle a handful of them and so we had the rise of what
was really known as the the spam blacklist services they essentially became gods of the email ecosystem
because if they put you whether that was your name your IP address your domain whatever on the
blacklist then you would find that like the vast majority of your emails stopped being delivered
and then you had to go beg for forgiveness and we actually this is when I started realizing
what was going on this is probably around 2010 or so at my company we started hiring people
that their title was email deliverability specialist and I thought you know this is great
because you know deliverability is a problem that we as a company were always grappling with
because we would have all types of different clients we would have clients who were very good
about their list hygiene and made sure that all the email addresses had opted in wanted to receive
emails and then sometimes we'd have one come in who had just bought a bunch of random emails off
of a shady website and of course the vast majority would bounce or get marked as spam or whatever
and that would harm us as well because you know we were sending all of the emails through our IP
addresses so these email reputation and deliverability specialists they actually were not working
with me in the engineering department and I found that to be odd because you know this is a protocol
right and so you know if an email if you send an email via smtp you get a response from the
server and it should include a code and some sort of message that should either say you know
accepted or some form of like a soft rejection or delay or throttle or a hard rejection of like
we're never going to accept this and then there should be a reason why but it turns out that
wasn't good enough because in some cases you know we were getting on the spam blacklist and there
was no automated way to appeal that rather what happened and what had to happen is you had to have
a human who had a preferably a ongoing relationship with the major blacklist providers who when we
found ourselves on the blacklist they would basically come to the engineers and we would figure
out you know which of our clients did this and whether it was intentional or unintentional and
like if we were going to fire them as a client or what we were going to do to prevent that client
from fucking up again and then the email deliverability specialist would you know get on the phone
or you know send an email to their contact saying okay we know we see that you put us on the blacklist
this is what happened this is how we're remediating it we promise this won't happen again please take
us off the blacklist you know basically begging for forgiveness so you know this goes to show
you the kind of that the power that the gatekeepers had in the system and this is ongoing to this day
and it you know continues to consolidate and the problem is that as of right now something like
90% of all email users are essentially captured by the top five or ten email companies in the space
I mean and it's it's kind of absurd to think about just the fact that we all take email for
granted right like I think most not somebody like you perhaps but the majority of us just think
out email and most people when they think of email they may even think of not they don't even go
any layer below just oh that's just google or yeah if you're still using you know yeah who mail or
aol perhaps uh maybe you're you still have a aol email address but you don't go any deeper than
that and you don't think about the fact that oh this wasn't always this way this started out
differently and choices were made that you know not necessarily intentionally uh you know maybe it
wasn't a like a grand plan or you know some some evil design for to centralize email but it's just
what happened and it was the result of choices and it's a incentives yeah incentives and human
nature to find the most like convenient simple solution to things well and I think that's that's
such a good point it's like that there's always a trade-off even if we think about just like sovereignty
right like I don't think that sovereignty in general is a it's not a binary state right it's
not it's not zero or one it's it's a spectrum right and oftentimes where you are in that spectrum
is determined by how much convenience you are willing to forego to do something that is necessarily
harder but allows you to move a little bit in the better direction on the sovereignty scale
it's a but it's a slippery slope too right maybe the majority of people don't actually really give
a shit about are they sovereign um but it's also a thing where you're kind of like approaching a limit
that you're never going to you know it's like bitcoin's never going to get fully to 21 million
coins right it'll be like just below that you're just going to keep approaching it closer and
closer but maybe you can't ever be fully sovereign and I know that's something you've written about
as well I think you had a piece of sovereignty versus society uh something to that effect and I
thought that was a really interesting one because you basically made the point that look in a society
where there is division of labor you can't necessarily be truly sovereign in every aspect
like you're always offloading some responsibility for something to someone else so that and that's
for convenience for efficiency but I'd love to know kind of your your thoughts on that and like
how do you grapple with that personally in the decisions you make what do you you know how do
you gauge okay this is actually something that I should care about in order to improve my sovereignty
or this is something that you know what I'm comfortable offloading this responsibility
because ultimately it's negligible compared to the other trade-offs yeah yeah it's it's a matter
of time and resources and risk management I think you're threat modeling um if you want to be perfectly
sovereign it's funny because this is some of my favorite shows are the the folks who like live in
Alaska or in the arctic circle and it's it's very fascinating to me to see these people they are well
I'll I'll say in most cases even they are not 100% sovereign in many cases they are still getting
shipments of some raw materials during the summer that you know give them the tooling that they need
to be able to you know provide for themselves throughout the the rest of the the winter there
are very few cases at least in first world countries where people are 100% sovereign and
and really the only way to be 100% sovereign is to essentially live a primitive lifestyle
another very interesting avenue that I've seen some people explore I know there's at least one
guy on YouTube who he he went through the whole evolution of man of like starting out you know
at the stone age and trying to bootstrap his technology to see how far up he could get into the
the technological evolution to you know improve his ease of living and convenience and whatnot
but it's a it's a long slog to do that where you you still have to have access to you know a decent
amount of of raw materials and resources and knowledge and time and and that's where for most
of us it doesn't make sense to do that because we have we have skill sets that are the result of
years if not decades of specialized experience that are that is very difficult for other people
to reproduce and so our leverage of what we can accomplish in that specific area due to our own
knowledge it's better for us it's more valuable for us and for the economy for the world for us to
be doing that specific thing this you know specialization of tasks this is how humanity has
evolved and civilization has advanced and the the weird trade-off to that is that it creates a more
fragile society where we do have a lot more interconnected dependencies and especially
in the most recent modern day society as we have continued to find more and more efficiency gains
and do things like create you know just-in-time supply chains those are great for efficiency and
productivity but once again the brittleness of if if a chink hits the system and the supply chains
break like the cascading effects which I think we really saw like during the pandemic for example
can have massive repercussions if you're trying to become more sovereign one thing you need to do
is get your bitcoin off exchanges and into your own custody go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use
the promo code walker for five percent off the bitcoin only bitbox o2 hardware wallet it's fully
open source you can go to their github and verify for yourself it's super easy to set up and it's a
great tool for seasoned psychopaths and new bitcoiners alike go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use
that promo code walker so you not only get five percent off but you also help support another
fucking bitcoin podcast now it's it is definitely the most uh let's say near and dear example that
we have right like we've seen the it's globalization and just-in-time supply chains like it's fantastic
right things are getting cheaper and cheaper they're getting you know delivered to us at our front
door whatever we you know you can if you can order just about anything you want off of amazon like
it's sort of ridiculous too right it's like uh i order a like five or ten dollar little trinket
that i could easily pop over to the local drugstore and get but what happens in my mind is okay it'll
take me like 20 minutes round trip to go get the thing and so what i'm really paying for is the
convenience and the time saving no and it's such a good point it's like there's a lot of things that
like i just got some you know some new uh new charging cables and it's like i could have definitely
gone to a local best buy or honestly like walmart casco anything and gotten them but i was like
i've got too much other things that i need to do and uh wow i'm just gonna have this delivered
right to my front doorsteps i just have to reach my arm outside and it's it's a beautiful thing
convenience right but it's certainly not a very sovereign practice but again it's everything is
is a trade-off right and so i think even where perhaps sovereignty gets even a little bit more
interesting is in the digital realm like it's it's really easy i think for for people to start to
conceptualize okay what would sovereignty mean for me if i'm you know if i'm homesteading and i'm
trying to live off the land and you know just farm what i eat and you know have a very uh
basic but sovereign subsistence versus once you get into the digital realm and things get a little
bit hairier because i think it's a lot more difficult for anyone who is not trained and educated
and has spent time working with these technologies to understand first of all but even more so there
are more i think unknown unknowns for people where they just don't know what they don't know
and what they don't know they don't know can absolutely hurt them maybe not now but as we
see ourselves getting towards a uh let's say cbdc future where every piece of your online activity
can conceivably be linked to all of your economic interactions even in the physical world i don't
think people entirely grasp the ramifications of that and how that you know that is truly uh i mean
that's a it's a totalitarian wet dream but for anybody who enjoys a even a mild amount of freedom
in their individual lives i think that that should be something that's really terrifying so i guess
you know what do you think as far as uh what's your message to people who perhaps just don't get
the dangers of that sort of a future as somebody who's also seen how technologies can quickly evolve
from decentralized to very centralized a cbdc is the ultimate centralization of money right uh maybe
they can come up with some even more centralized but right now maybe besides one world currency that
is also issued by the bank of international settlements or something individual nation
state cbdcs are are fairly uh fairly close to perfect centralization so i don't know what's your
take on that i think you don't have to be too philosophical or or kind of like even futuristic
when it comes i mean all you have to do is look at what china is doing that is what is going to
happen everywhere else like china is the authoritarian or the techno authoritarian testing playground
for all of the you know dystopian things that technology could do um you know how finney had a
great quote that you know technology can basically you know be a tool of liberation um but it's like
any tool it's a double edged sword and that you know we should assume that the powers that be will
seek to leverage technology for their own purposes and you know this is actually my own mission statement
you know when i when i left the email engineering world and and went into bitcoin i decided that i
wanted to have like an actual uh career mission and and that mission was not bitcoin the the mission
is to use my skills as a technologist to empower people and to make that the the empowering aspects
of technology easier for normal people to to actually grasp and leverage and make use of and
you know bitcoin was the most obvious thing to go after because it has so much potential
and yet as you've said you know there's a really high learning curve there's a lot of pitfalls there's
a lot of ways that you know you can screw up and and unfortunately if people come in and they lose a
lot of money because of some stupid mistake that's going to be a major turn off and we would
think prefer that not happen and it's it's such a great point that that first experience that
people have with you know not just with bitcoin with anything right we have that recency bias
where it's like the last thing that happened to me with regard to this other thing if it was good
or bad that is going to impact how i think about that for a long time until i have another experience
that is different and so i think you know people there's been a lot of talk for a long time about
the fact that uh say so-called normies or pre-coiners i think is a kinder term they'll come around
eventually but right now they're pre-coiners the majority of people just aren't going to do self
custody right even though there's this this way that you can actually be your own bank uh that you
can be a little bit moving a positive direction on that sovereignty scale that most people just
won't be either able to do that because they won't be able to understand it or they won't care enough
to do that and you're actively you know you have built a company co-founded a company that's trying
to make that i think a little bit easier for folks and so i mean what what's your what are
your thoughts on just do you think that the you know are the majority of people in a if we look
20 30 40 years down the road are the majority of people who are using bitcoin going to be
self-custodied are they going to be using it in a as close to sovereign as possible way
or is there going to be a trend towards just massive consolidation in custodians and every
major wallets a custodial wallet and very few people operate using bitcoin in a sovereign way
well there's a lot of variables there one that i've brought up a number of times recently
kind of in the context of ossification is that there's an open question around what do we as
bitcoiners prioritize when it comes to the ability and cost of self-custodying you know in 2017 and
the scaling wars we we were faced with a fundamental question and the question was what does the bitcoin
ecosystem value more does it value more to to target a low cost of transacting on the blockchain
or does it value more to target a low cost of validating the entire system and we settled on
the latter and you know we and of course we have solutions and a number of things people are working
on to alleviate the former though you know this is the creation of other protocols and adding
more complexity and whatnot but there are still plenty of unresolved questions and i had another
article i wrote a few years ago that was basically an attempt at listing a lot of the quote-unquote
inviolable properties of bitcoin and some of these properties are in conflict with each other so
as you said you know decades from now will a significant people a significant portion of
bitcoiners be self-custodying well the problem with that is that the way the protocol is currently
set up that's simply not possible now there are other projects that are going on that may result
in sort of hybrid solutions or sort of you know localized or regional you know friends and family
custody i do think that those are better than what would happen otherwise it was even half any i
believe who speculated in the first weeks and months of bitcoin that eventually the system would
essentially become owned by a bunch of custodial banks you know kind of like gold and vaults but
it would be digital gold in third-party digital vaults and that's how most people would be
transacting and you know i think that if we don't do anything that is inevitably what happens
at least somewhat because that's how most people get into the system is they
they create an account at an exchange they buy some bitcoin i o use and then that's it yeah
i am also somewhat hopeful that if we can change things around and expand the bitcoin economy to
be more circular that if we onboard more people by them earning bitcoin then it's more likely that
they will be in a self custody setup in that case you know to actually be receiving it directly
themselves rather than receiving it to a third party but you know that's somewhat pie in the sky
you know optimism you know it doesn't solve everything but i think that's one of the major issues
with where we are today i'm curious what your thoughts are and kind of there's been a fair
amount of lightning network fud recently perhaps a lot of it is also valid but just even if we look at
you know we look at custodial lighting services like wall of satoshi that was just is just moving
out of the us uh because they're going to get slapped with some money transmitter laws and
aml kyc crap and all that and that's a whole different rabbit hole but you know i think
one of the big critiques of lightning is that it works really well for in a custodial sense if
you're using wall to satoshi using something another custodial service but most people again
are probably not going to use lightning in a non custodial way because it's more difficult and
it's more complex and you know i think that that's a fair critique in a number of ways i also i asked
myself the question is does the layer two need to be fully non custodial in terms of working in
day-to-day operations or is it okay for there to be a little bit of centralization on the
layer two as long as the layer one remains pure let's say and i'm curious of your thoughts of
kind of lightning and then we also have things like that are kind of built on top and around of that
like fediment and then you've got things like kai is working on with chami and e-cash um and where
you kind of see those fitting into the ecosystem do you think that those types of uh other layer
solutions are good good ways for us to still have a degree of sovereignty but solve some of the uh
the issues with the base layer um and can you talk a little bit about that
well they're good for dealing with smaller amounts of money um the problem is that it's
i don't know that i can prove it but i would say it is impossible to create a second layer that has
the exact same security model as the base layer um pretty much all of these like even in the best
case like with lightning which um doesn't involve trusted third parties if you're doing it yourself
it's some pretty complicated game theory and so you know we're still finding edge cases
um and issues because it is a more complicated protocol but it also seems to be improving i mean
from my own experience i've been running my own lightning node for i guess four years now um and
it has certainly gotten better in terms of reliability the tooling around managing liquidity
also continues to get better and i do believe that a lot of these liquidity issues will be
solvable in an automated fashion i think some people are even applying ai to help solve liquidity
stuff um i gave a talk in berlin i think in 2018 or 2019 where i said that one of the
big looming issues with liquidity on lightning is that it's always going to be hobbled until we
get all of the exchanges on the lightning network um and that was both for economic reasons with how
lightning works as this like circular rebalancing mechanism um and and the ability for the exchanges
themselves to be liquidity providers and for people to be able to um automatically rebalance
their liquidity by sending payments you know out of band uh to and from the exchanges uh also from
the fact that something like 50 of all bitcoin transactions are just going from one exchange
to another so it really really makes sense for the exchanges to all be on lightning and just be
sending you know these settlements off chain because they're doing it on chain right now and
i think in many cases they don't even know that they're doing it um we we were actually in a privileged
position when i was at bit go because we were powering a lot of the exchanges so i was able to
run analytics on you know private information where i could see that just the exchanges were sending
a lot of money back and forth to each other and and it was from a efficiency standpoint it was
kind of gross to to see but but there wasn't a good solution for it without destroying privacy
basically um but lightning is that solution and it sort of automatically deduplicates a lot of that
back and forth liquidity flow just by having some big beefy channels in between these exchanges where
you're not having to actually uh make an on-chain transaction each time you're just you know rebalancing
that channel essentially right yep um you know it was there was also an interesting coincidence
when i first joined bit go the bit go office was actually a rented unit inside of aol's headquarters
well that's kind of that's kind of wild does aol still have a headquarters
somewhere uh as of a few years ago they did in palo Alto wow okay okay that's that's good to know
not i think it's a fair point about the exchanges and just we do have some evidence of the impact
on liquidity that exchange is getting on board lightning has because i believe bitfinex had
provides something like a third or more of the liquidity on all of lightning like it's it's a
big big chunk of that because i think that they i believe they were the first exchange or at least
very large exchange to start doing that and obviously that has a huge impact and that's
one exchange you know you start getting that in bigger multiples and it's like okay that liquidity
just you know it doubles and triples and and and keeps going up and that's better for all the users
of the network you know not it's also beneficial for the exchanges but i'm i'm curious a little bit
i want to circle back a bit to ossification because i think that that's again i'm still new around here
but from my readings of you know a lot of older bitcoin articles and older bitcoin talks
it seems like ossification is a pretty perennial discussion and perhaps this is the case with
any network protocol that it needs to be discussed and that maybe there's always a
a trend towards ossification eventually but it becomes a question of when is the right time to
do that if there is ever a right time and again something that comes back to trade-offs where it's
what are the benefits of ossifying versus what are the dangers of doing that and what are we
potentially what risks have we not thought about that we're closing ourselves off to
by ossifying and i think there's a lot of folks who come from the let's say more monetary side
of bitcoin if i can call it that that thing that okay the reason to osfie is because look we have
this perfect 21 million we have sound money we have a base layer that works so if it ain't broke
don't fix it let's not introduce potential chaos and unforeseen consequences by messing with something
that is you know a once in humanity discovery on the other side of things you have people to say look
there are some things that need to be addressed like UTXOs are are going to you know there's not
going to be enough essentially for you know every one on the planet and certainly it's gonna
bitcoin base layer is gonna price out most people from any sort of small transactions
and so i'm curious where you fall on that or perhaps a better way to address is how do you
how do you approach ossification on bitcoin how do you approach that discussion in terms of you know
you mentioned earlier some of the basically inviolable qualities of bitcoin some of which
are in conflict but you do have some lines in the sand i think but i'm curious what is your
take on that general discussion and maybe what do you think are some blind spots that folks are
are missing when it comes to that conversation well first of all i i kind of reject the premise
that a lot of people seem to act like ossification as a conscious decision it's really not it is a
phenomenon and all networks experience it it's it's almost a law of physics in the sense that
a network grows to a size at which it's no longer feasible for the participants to coordinate upgrades
or at least to coordinate upgrades that are breaking changes right because there's no authority
that can just make everybody update their protocol it's basically like asking people to switch to
a different language and if you're no longer speaking the same language you've lost that
network effect so you know bitcoin has built up in a pretty immense network effect at this point
obviously we don't want to break it and we saw what happens when you do break it in 2017
these other networks end up being a tiny fraction of a percent of the network effect and thus value
but you know i think any serious engineer that you talk to is going to tell you that your
software is never finished that there's no such thing as a perfect software perfect protocol
you know smtp isn't perfect really none none of the networking protocols that we use don't have room
for improvement it's just no longer feasible to improve them because there's billions of people
and billions of devices that are running the software that can't all be coordinated to update in
concert with each other so my sort of techno accelerationists and optimists perspective is
that we need to keep pushing forward and keep trying to improve bitcoin as much as possible
before it's too late because it will become a point at which no one will be able to you know
propose changes to bitcoin that are able to get consensus and one of the other things well
i i don't really push for any specific protocol change i think that we should prioritize
protocol changes that a improve the like efficiency and scalability of bitcoin especially to act as
a sort of cryptographic accumulator like anything that will help people build other layers and and
and also anything that will make permissionless innovation in the bitcoin ecosystem easier
and you know specifically around that one thing that i keep mentioning is the the trustless two
way peg is kind of the holy grail of side chains that we were promised a decade ago that have never
materialized there are a few people that are working on that type of thing it's it's not clear
you know which of them if any are going to end up being viable but the other thing is that while
as you mentioned we have to be wary of making changes to bitcoin because there will always be
unforeseen consequences the flip side of that that few people talk about is that not making
changes to bitcoin also has unforeseen consequences and this kind of ties into the smtp history
is that the way that i kind of summarize all of this is that you can ossify a protocol but you
cannot ossify the rest of the world and so what happens in the question you have to ask yourself
is if a protocol is ossified and something changes about the world and how people are using that
protocol for example with email as it as it hit mass adoption and and all of a sudden there were
spammers that started using it this was an unforeseen adversary that that smtp had not been designed
to withstand you know if if a new adversary or some new issue arises that degrades or breaks
the usage of bitcoin you know what are we going to do are we just going to throw up our hands and
say okay well it's ossified so we'll have to deal with it you know if you want to get really nerdy
at some technical level like there are some things that will have to be changed in the protocol
probably in a non-backwards compatible way you know these things are many decades away
but part of me because i think about bitcoin from a generational perspective part of me wonders
is what happens if we stop making you know changes to bitcoin at the protocol and consensus layer
and then we need to make a change and literally no one who is a bitcoin developer has been around
to shepherd such a change through the system is it possible that bitcoin as an ecosystem
could grind to a halt because it's not able to coordinate a change anymore that's like one of
the weird edge case long-term future things i worry about well i think that it's a good thing to
worry about the long term and it's also natural if you're operating from a place of a low time
preference thinking about generation to generation transfer like that has to be part of our thinking
right because you know we where everyone here is going to die eventually like we this is just a
humans have not figured out a way around that yet right like with certainty we will all die and
we have uncertainty about when that will happen but given that and given the fact that bitcoin is
actually a viable tool for storing wealth and being able to pass that wealth along to other
generations i think that it's something that should be very much at the forefront of these
discussions and i'm curious i mean if you can go a little bit more into the specifics because i think
for some people they've heard it's often difficult to separate what is the fud about bitcoin from
what are the actual things at a protocol level which are going to cause some problems down the
road especially for folks who aren't technical so can you give kind of the the overview of what are
the the main concerns at the protocol level that are kind of let's say those intergenerational concerns
oh i mean there's there's a few weird things like you know maximum integers that that are used
for things like timestamps and block heights that you know are probably 50 plus years away
from overflowing and breaking the protocol if nothing has changed on the more immediate
time scale i think it's people will talk about quantum computing possibly in the next decade or two
you know does does bitcoin need to upgrade to quantum resistant hashing to protect our
addresses and funds and whatnot kind of related to that which i have a half written blog post is
what do we do with satoshi's stash if we assume that satoshi is gone possibly dead and would not
be able to you know move and update their funds to be quantum resistant do we just allow people
you know early quantum computer builders to get those funds as a bounty or do we burn them or what
you know there's some interesting philosophical questions there as well i that is actually
that's a really interesting question that'd be i mean that would be really the bounty of all bounties
wouldn't it i mean that's a wow it's quite an incentive i guess to try and build a successful
quantum computer to be able to attack the the network i suppose you know i you mentioned also just
the unforesee or when people say oh you know we implemented this change and we didn't think
that somebody would use this new this new enhancement to do xyz do you put like the the
ordinals and brc20s into that bucket or what is i know it's a very polarizing topic depending on
who you talk to and depending also where on the industry they fall because for instance miners
tend to really like that fees have been up but we've also seen you know fees are likely going to
continue rising regardless and obviously going to continue rising in fiat terms uh because of the
nature of bitcoin i don't buy much of the bitcoin security model is broken thing if we talk about
bitcoin repricing the entire world but i'm curious where you fall in that because obviously
that is one of those cases where it was not anticipated that people would use upgrades in
this way and oh it's made a lot of people angry it's made a lot of people very happy you think
it's very fun what's your take on that whole i mean using bitcoin as a database as data storage
that's not new the only thing that was really new about inscriptions was that they were able to
i think take advantage of taproot to to put data into transactions more cheaply than was
possible before it was always possible before we've had people inscribe the white paper into the
blockchain like 10 years ago there's actually a really cool command you can run on the command
line to extract and reconstitute the pdf of the bitcoin white paper if you have a full node
but just using bitcoin as data storage i don't think that's a problem i think that you know the
economics work themselves out there where if you're if you're going to be using bitcoin as data
storage that data better be pretty damn valuable and you're going to need to be able to compete in
the market against people who are doing other valuable things so you know i i i wasn't surprised
by people you know taking the sort of nft hype and transferring it over to bitcoin but i also
don't think that it's as sustainable as say nft is on salana um just due to how much more expensive
it is i i suspect that if bitcoin is able to maintain some semblance of an nft ecosystem it's
going to be relegated to you know hundred thousand dollar type uh really niche artwork uh the sort
of like board ape crypto punk level stuff and it's not it's not going to be for the the layman you
know creating five dollar ten dollar things because in most of those other ecosystems you know they're
not actually storing the entire file in in the blockchain or the the data layer or whatever
they're just putting pointers in there so it's a lot cheaper and it's cheaper for other reasons too
uh i appreciate the explanation there because i i tend to agree that a lot of the problem or quote
problems that people see with something like inscriptions and then ordinals on top of that or
you know any of these things a lot of them work themselves out because the economics need to work
and if they don't like you know unless you want to really try and control that uh and i suppose if
you do really want to try and control that and have that not be possible anymore uh that means
maybe you don't have a ton of faith in just the operation of the free market to try and seek you
know effective ways to deploy capital because at a certain point it's like okay if you want to
you know spend transaction fees on this then okay great eventually that will price out the majority
of the market who may want to use that and i think it's also something that's missed which you
pointed out which is that inscriptions have been done for a long time ordinals is something a little
bit different i suppose the actual creating a number system assigning a little bit more of
uh you know value to certain numbers or like the rare sats idea but ordinals is just a meta protocol
right and and so you can you can kind of think of it as a second layer that's that's it's
much more amorphous in nature than the other layers in the sense that it's not even really
creating any other data outside of the blockchain all that it's doing is looking at data in the
blockchain and then ascribing other value to it um and i think people are free to you know
hallucinate and create their own meta protocols that don't change bitcoin in any way they're just
creating completely other software that interprets the blockchain data in a different way but i
bet that what almost nobody realizes unless you've been around for a decade is that there was an
intense debate in probably 2013 or 2014 maybe even earlier about the uh op return size and
back in in the early days i think when op return was first introduced it allowed
40 bytes of data to be stored in the op return output and there was this massive debate
between the protocol developers about like whether this should be good or bad or whatever and it was
from one perspective it was considered good because i think the op return UTXOs themselves are
prunable so the nodes can throw them away because they're they're they're unspendable um but then
i think there were some i forget if it was the what eventually became the omni protocol uh i
think it was master coin back then but there were some developers who said when 40 bytes isn't enough
can we get 80 bytes and so there's massive debate for i think several months if not longer and
eventually the op return data size did get bumped up to 80 bytes but you know this just kind of goes
to show you like storing arbitrary data in the bitcoin blockchain is not new by any means uh
you know history is just repeating itself in a slightly different way it's a always good to be
a student of history in that regard then so you can have a little bit more perspective on what's
actually happening there i'd like to switch gears a little bit but stay on the topic of protocols
and talk a bit about uh noster because i think that it's something that's i mean over it's we're
coming up on about a year it was kind of early december uh when when i joined noster last year
uh that's when things started really you know jack posted about it on twitter uh maybe
third week of december something like that and it just blew up uh i was actually just the other day
i was talking with will kasarin and we were kind of just recounting the absurd uh progression and
pace of development on noster this year and also the many attempts at censoring from elon calling
it out uh when everyone was like what what is this noster he's listing by mastodon and these other
things uh and then to the chinese app store of pulling it down two zaps getting pulled off of
ios clients and in the meantime all these developers building just at a rapid fire pace
and building all sorts of things but you know you've been pretty active on noster since very early on
uh and i'd love your thoughts on kind of where you see it evolving to next as someone who is an
engineer and a technologist obviously it's being used as a social media protocol right now but it's
notes and other stuff transmitted by relays there is and it's ultimately just a censorship resistant
messaging protocol right so the possibilities for how it can be used are pretty endless and i'm
curious where you see the that ecosystem moving and developing or maybe some applications of it
that you are really excited about yeah so i think about a month ago i published uh my own
exploration into sovereignty on noster and um finally getting around to your running my own relay
and um migrating all of my tweets uh over to it and and copying all of my past year of notes
from other relays over to mine just uh you know so that i could have better you know data integrity
guarantees that i wasn't going to get rug pulled um i would say you know it still has a lot of
problems um i still have open questions around the like long-term economic incentives um one of my
favorite things about it is just the lightning integration uh i've been using lightning daily
as a result of this uh where i was before i was barely ever using lightning i barely had the
opportunity to make lightning payments but but zaps have really changed the game there and uh
the i think that if we improve the onboarding experience and make discoverability more twitter
like then that could get more people to come over but right now it's still too high a bar i hear a
lot of people say you know they they poke around and they install an app and and don't necessarily
know like what to do next and that's that's a result of the decentralization you know we're
not putting all the data in one big honeypot and running analytics over it and machine learning
all this other stuff though though i think you know some of the services like primal and stuff
are starting to do that um but yeah so from bigger bigger than just social media i think the
the best way that i've heard it described and this will probably go over a lot of people's heads
but uh it's a decentralized message bus and this is getting like really low level like
talking about like almost like motherboard hardware level of what is this new network
it's a new communication network but it's one where you you basically you you put data out
onto a server and then anyone who wants to can connect to the server and read that data
that's a very simple primitive way of describing it but if you think of it it means it's just a
new way of sharing data and you it just happens to be that the data itself has some integrity
guarantees due to cryptography and you know the signing of of these notes so what does that mean
it means that that now we have a communications platform with authentication built in at the
message level and what do i mean by that well you know if you go to facebook or tech talk or
twitter or whatever you see a feed and you see posts from other people but you don't actually
know that those people made that post you're trusting the third party server that they got
that post and they authenticated that person's account and that person hasn't been taken over
and of course anyone who's been on bitcoin twitter knows that like one of the biggest scams out there
is to you know sim swap someone hack their twitter account and put out you know some some sort of
phishing scam or giveaway or airdrop or whatever that then drains people's crypto or you know
you know praise upon their greed to get them to send you money um that's not feasible on this new
network because uh they have to actually get your private key you know they can't just uh
fool a a third party authentication service and claim to be you and bypass it and then start posting
as you so that means we can do this now we can use this as a mechanism for other forms of interaction
it's it's almost mind boggling to try to say what does that mean but you know you can look at
at some of the example one of the first non social media examples that i recall uh being built a year
ago was a chess game right so so now we have the ability uh you know without a trusted third party
to play a game of chess with someone else you know over the internet uh and and we know that you
know each move that you make is posting a note and you can then update your own your local database
where all the the chess pieces are and you know that when you get a move uh that you're reading
from a relay you know that that's the your actual opponent because you know cryptographically signed
messages authenticated the protocol level now it doesn't sound very interesting unless you're
really into chess but now you know take that assurance and use it for something that's more
valuable that's more sensitive so in the context of bitcoin there are other things that you may want
to to be able to you know coordinate between multiple parties so um a tuning casa's horn uh
earlier this year we had a team went a hackathon where they created a project called Munster
and basically it was a way of um setting up a you know multi-person multi-sig wallet where
you're using noster to coordinate so you're using it to coordinate the initialization of the wallet
and the exchanging of the public keys and derivation pass and wallet descriptors and then when you
want to actually go spend the funds from the wallet you're using to coordinate you know the
partially signed bitcoin transactions um you could do the same thing i think i think there's some
projects right now that are doing that for coin join you know uh once again any sort of multi-party
usage of bitcoin uh it would be directly applicable and and really the possibilities beyond that are
are pretty enormous i think that that's such an important thing that maybe a lot of people are
missing right now is just the importance of being able to uh economically coordinate because if you
are trusting okay we have bitcoin which is no trusted third party right if we're using it in
as close a sovereign way we're holding our own keys and maybe we have a multi-sig setup but
if we don't have a way to coordinate the exchange of that value so i want to send bitcoin to somebody
on the other side of the world and i'm trusting uh whatsapp or telegram or some other form of
messenger to relay the communication of okay you know they're going to send me their address i'm
going to you know copy and paste that and and send the bitcoin over to them but i'm then not having
trust uh you know i have no trusted third party in bitcoin but i've just introduced a trusted third
party into the economic coordination at the messaging layer and so having a way to have a
censorship resistant and cryptographically signed economic coordination mechanism which is what
noster already is and can be in as you just described multiple other ways is an incredibly
valuable thing you know aside from the obvious benefits of having a social media protocol for
free speech having a way to freely coordinate is a really really powerful thing and i'm excited to see
the other intersections that are created between bitcoin and noster i i love zapps zapps are a
brilliant thing using value to actually provide uh the ultimate social signal which is a value-based
signal right not just a meaningless like which can be spammed by a million bots providing something
that actually has monetary value attached to it that is also incredibly powerful just from the
social protocol perspective but i'm really excited to see what else is built a will's prediction in
this next year is that it'll be the year of the algorithm for noster but the opt-in algorithm so
i'm i'm excited to see what that means because i think it's going to help with discoverability
it's going to help with onboarding because it's more familiar to be able to say okay you know even
something as rudimentary but brilliant as twitter's old in case you missed it algorithm that you know
okay you've been off for a day here's you know in case you missed it here's what you probably
would like to see those things are really beneficial and and help to just keep people coming back as
well so one random idea that i pitched a few months ago was uh only zapps like there's no reason why
we couldn't recreate only fans on noster and have the content creators you know hosting their content
on their own paid relays and you have to you know zap them and then they get the money directly and
there's no third party taking a huge cut and and and the reason that i say this is because i think
there's there's a well-known trope that you know any sufficiently new and disruptive technology
needs to be adopted by the porn industry the sex industry it's a trope for a reason though right
but it's it's an interesting thing too not just for adult entertainers let's say but for anyone
the idea of content specific paid relays so having that because we talked about just the
the economics incentives of you know of relays for example obviously there is a
a cost associated with running those people are doing a lot of subscriptions or that sort of thing
right now paying to access the relay but i think another model we'll see emerge is content specific
where you know or creator specific whatever that might be but you're paying to access that relay
because that's the only place that this whatever type of content it is that you want to see it's
the only place that it's available or it's curating an incredibly high signal uh you know
collection of those you know bits of data that fit that particular criteria and i'm interested to see
kind of how that develops as we see more and more relays pop up but it's exciting to see this uh
see it really take off and i mean it's it still hasn't been very long uh we're still early to
you know use a covenant meme but uh so james i do want to be i want to be conscious of your
very scarce time here i know you have a newsletter to finish up uh but i would like to just end with
a completely uh non-related bitcoin question which is are you reading anything right now
even if it is bitcoin related that's okay but are you reading anything right now that you'd
recommend uh that's really got you excited or that you've found particularly interesting
oh well right now i'm in the middle of reading outlive by dr peter atia
um okay i may be mispronouncing his name but uh he's basically a longevity doctor and that actually
ties into the article i'm writing right now about my recent cholesterol saga with my doctors
okay well i'm i'm excited to check that out i'm i'm always curious what what bitcoiners are reading
because especially for someone like you you've probably read um the vast majority of the bitcoin
books that are out there so at least you've got that backlog taken care of and then i'll i'm gonna
link to uh obviously to your noster to your twitter and to uh your website because i think it's one of
the best resources around for uh new and experienced bitcoiners alike is there anywhere else that i
should send people uh bitcoin dot page and kasa dot i o or all you need all right all right well
i'll include those as well uh but jameson thank you so much i know uh bitcoin is scarce but bitcoin
podcasts are abundant so thank you for spending your scarce time to come on to another fucking
bitcoin podcast really enjoyed this uh learned some new things as well and can't thank you enough
you bet thanks for having me
and that's a wrap on this bitcoin talk episode of the bitcoin podcast if you are a bitcoin only
company interested in sponsoring another fucking bitcoin podcast head to bitcoinpodcast.net or hit
me up on social media on noster head to primal.net slash walker and on twitter search for at walker
america or at titcoin podcast you can also watch the video version of this show on x or on youtube
by going to youtube.com slash out walker america or rumble by searching for at walker america bitcoin
is scarce there will only ever be 21 million but bitcoin podcasts are abundant so thank you for
spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking bitcoin podcast until next time stay free