Every two days in France, a robbery, an abduction happened.
They stuffed his wife into the trunk of a car for 48 hours and they took one of his fingers.
Don't be an idiot such as ourselves.
Don't be public about Bitcoin.
That is something that might bite us in the ass in the future.
If cash would be a newly invented thing, they would not invent or allow it to happen.
We need to improve Bitcoin and make it as private and as scaled as possible.
before you know the government fully captures uh bitcoin in in one way or another satoshi left
that left he left us all in our own terms and now we have this great thing that that he came up with
and we should not that up curious too because you mentioned scaling bitcoin and privacy around
bitcoin which sounds like changing bitcoin and i'd just like to ask when did you become compromised
if you truly believe bitcoin needs to scale to eight billion people and self-custody should be
done by your grandma, then we need to improve Bitcoin just a little bit.
Let's dig in, you know, let's end some career.
Are we in the midst of the fourth turning or do you stand by the bugle thesis that we're actually
already in the first turning? Where are you at with this?
So this would be my first turning that I presently observe to quote Steve Lepka, be gentle,
this is my first turning. I don't know what to expect. I'm here for a good time, not a long time.
I always quote my grandmother, like she in French said,
said, if you like don't worry about things that you cannot change essentially, like the
essence of that, and I try to, you know, take care of me and my family. And then you know,
what happens happens.
Yeah, it's a, it's a good mentality to have. Turns out it's like, when push comes to shove,
realize what's really important i've just had a bit of a health emergency recently you just kind
of realize like oh my god wow none almost none of the stuff i was worried about or was pissed off
about matters at all and so i've just cut so much shit out yes am i posting fewer memes you know and
fewer trolls sure uh is that a loss for the world perhaps but not not for me you know so it's uh
It's all about that balance.
But, dude, I'm stoked to have you on here.
People may know you as the moderately tall European guy who sells industrial-grade washers with a 50X markup for Bitcoin self-custody, CEDOR.
Yeah, I jest, I jest.
But you do a lot more than that.
You've got BitSurance now.
you are quite a
quite a memetic savant I would say
which again is always pleasantly
surprising to see as a European
just that like you know
Are we known to be a funny
people as Germans? Is that something
like a stereotype I'm unfamiliar with?
I actually didn't want to assume
you're German
I thought maybe Scandinavian
just given the height
I wasn't sure if German
emotional repression had led to more
stunted growth patterns, but clearly not. You've managed to break free of that. So that's fantastic.
I know. I jest. But you do post some dank memes, and they're very much appreciated.
And we've got a bunch of stuff I want to cover with you today here. But I mean,
maybe, I actually don't know your origin story with like Cedar and Bitcoin. How did you end up,
when was the point where you're like, here's the thing, guys, we're just going to throw a bunch of
washers on a pipe, and it's going to be a really efficient cold storage solution. By the way,
our marketing strategy is just me making absurd memes and it's going to work.
Because it has worked pretty darn well, I would say.
I absolutely agree.
And that is the perfect encapsulation of how that happened.
So as this tradition, as a German person, I studied mechanical engineering
and I worked in aerospace.
And as a material scientist, I did some process simulation,
but I'm not a proper coder.
And luckily, I didn't go into coding because that is all useless now.
but I thought about how can I contribute to Bitcoin
because I've been in this space for quite some time.
I really enjoyed it and I saw what is at stake after like,
of course, I entered the space by a number go up
and I was amazed by like, wow, you can get rich.
And then I realized, oh, there's more to this.
It's freedom technology.
And probably I should, at least as a side project,
help contribute, make this better.
And like the only thing as a material scientist
that I could do is come up with the best, you know, backup for your private keys.
And then I looked at all these 74 different competitors and went to the hardware store
and went to my CNC milling shop and, yeah, created C-Door.
And, yeah, having no budget at all allocated for this, I just, you know, created a personal
brand or like a heavily doubled down on my meme skills that I've honed over, like, I
I don't know, over a decade on Reddit.
On Reddit, it was important to be original.
You were not allowed to repost or steal other people's content.
You would have been shamed.
Something that is like, you know, on Twitter, like everybody does.
But on Reddit, you have to like, oh, can't steal content.
So I really pride myself in only making original memes.
And they are an acquired taste, I would say so.
But enough people seem to like them.
And yeah, it helped CEDOR not only grow from a site passion project, but into an actual Bitcoin job.
So it pays my salary.
It pays all my travel expenses.
If I go to a conference and I enjoy time with friends on the company Dime, and I can pay people a salary with CEDOR, which is amazing if you think about it.
At the same time, I also invested in a small startup called BitSurance, where we, you know, again, deal with the topic of loss and the physical threats to Bitcoin or rather to Bitcoin holders.
and yeah that's an insurance company that protects not your bitcoin but yourself in the event somebody
robs you threatens you or your family and then asks for bitcoin in the yeah event that that you
are robbed you can yeah give the attacker the bitcoin and you would be covered so far only only
available in europe but my good friends over at anchor watch they do something very similar in
America and it is an entirely underserved market.
And yeah, so having observed this gap in coverage and being a mechanical engineer, as I always
say, jack of all trades, master of none, I have like a good top view of things and I
can, you know, contribute a little bit to all of these things.
And yeah, but I think Bitcoin memes are my icky guy.
I continue to do them.
I want to get into the meme side of things a little bit too.
But first, I do want to say, I mean, it's good that you guys are providing this product in Europe because, I mean, in France alone, I don't know.
I mean, I kind of know what's going on over there.
I know there was somebody that somebody inside the government was like selling actually personal data and like basically working with the, I don't know if you call them gangs or whatever, le gang or something like that.
With criminals.
Yeah.
Can you break that down?
What was happening over there?
So, yeah, in general, we've seen a very steep increase in $5 venture tax globally.
But like the number one country that they occur right now is France.
And that has to do with the fact that the IRS equivalent in France, an employee there leaked not just crypto or Bitcoin holders' addresses, but wealthy people's addresses for as low as €800 a pop.
and then it's not like regular like criminals but like professional criminals they are like
masterminds in the behind scenes and then they they hire like hoodlums off telegram to come visit you
and they then know okay this person is showing me a decoy wallet but given they uh you know
obediently paid their taxes i know they must have more so you know take a finger and uh yeah there
has been increasing um number of these events so much so that like just this year alone every two
days in france a robbery an abduction happened like james and love keeps tracking them and he
only has public sources and he recently had to redact some of them because like or not he had
to he had to correct them because he said oh i only reported on 37 but so far it has been almost 50
the official police report came out
because if you are in such
a robbery or
abduction event, you're not necessarily
talking to the media to have
additional press coverage
and afterwards the police crime
statistics, they associate
the encryptor with that specific
crime.
I always say that
the best insurance for that is to
tell nobody about your Bitcoin
or that you have Bitcoin.
don't go flaunting wealth
the second best thing
is to have some kind of
$5 wrench insurance that would give you
a bargaining chip in the event somebody
comes and robs you, there's kidnap and ransom
insurance, there is
bit insurance where we can
you can say here's 100,000 euros
500,000 euros worth of bitcoin
be gone, go with god
and in the end
you save your skin
and hopefully you get the bitcoin replaced
or your fiat to buy Bitcoin again.
But these things, you know, they're on the rise
and it just makes sense because it is this perfect asset
that can be transferred under coercion
and there is no undo button.
There was this very famous case one and a half years ago
with the co-founder of Ledger.
He was abducted in Vierzon and he's no longer with the company,
but he's like a hundred millionaire
and he took some innocent pictures of his new house.
And that was enough for the criminal gangs to find him.
And they abducted him.
They asked for 20 million euros in Bitcoin.
They stuffed his wife into the trunk of a car for 48 hours.
And they took one of his fingers.
And that is a guy who had a special team taking care of his security.
He had all these kinds of training in that kind of situation.
And there was a very smart negotiator apparently who managed to convince the criminals instead of taking Bitcoin to take Tether, which was then instantly frozen, which is kind of like you're getting that far and then you take Tether.
come on uh and yeah i mean uh and like he was he was luckily uh liberated uh on a pure coincidence
like there was a a police officer who who noticed a um report uh coming in of a invalid or stoner
license plate uh seen uh near nearby a hotel or something and that's why they then found and
rescued him and later found found his wife in the trunk of a car but like that scenario that is that
is insane but bitcoin is an asset that you know did 100x from 2017 and people go around flaunting
their wealth and don't think they can be a target and you know people need to step up their offsec
now it's it's very true and it's sadly in europe you guys don't have uh don't have guns uh which
which makes things uh that is a misconception we have we have all of the guns and i would even say
like except for weapons of war which would probably also be quite difficult to get maybe outside of
Tennessee but like we we can have guns that's it's no problem like we don't have these open carry
licenses unless you're like a licensed investigator or something but home defense like with guns is
possible but yeah the best defense is a good security strategy and like to not let it get that
far. But yeah, I mean, there have been cases in America as well. Like in New York, they had a guy
abducted for several days and they tortured him and very, very gruesome cases because it's just
information that can be beat out of you. And then there's this report by Guard.io, a company by
Elena of Satoshi Labs and Mark's
formerly Wasabi, they
looked at all the
reported cases and what I've heard
like a lot of feedback that I've gotten
due to all these $5 wrench attacks
is it actually smart to have your Bitcoin
in self-custody should I not have
it on an exchange
and like that report flat out
showed us it doesn't make
a difference whether it's on an exchange or
self-custody, either you log into your
Coinbase account or you have to unlock
your hardware signer. There are
ways with like, time lock, multi stick, etc, to to to protect
you, or rather protect your Bitcoin, but not to protect you,
like your health, I would say. And yeah, it's, it's, again, the
perfect assets and that comes with a lot of downsides to
it's an interesting point on the, let's say the multi sig
front, because like, you know, like, without getting into
details, like, there's no way that I can even act like I can't
do anything with my Bitcoin, you know, if I'm at my house, and I can't even do it in the country,
like there are, you know, are multiple geographic redundancies. And like, the difficulty there is
that some people may be too, your attacker may be too stupid to understand that, like, look,
like, I'm telling you, I can't access my, like, it's literally impossible for me to do anything,
they'll be like, okay, we'll take another finger, then we'll see. And we'll see if you can access
those bitty coins and you're like no i'm i'm telling you don't understand it's it's it's
multi-sig like come on yeah manuscript manuscript i have this very mimetic slide in my presentation
of this guy next to a whiteboard frantically explaining like oh it's geographically distributed
i cannot access right now like the hoodlum that is hired he does not care like you will have to
give up something uh if it is a kidney or something else so in that event it is probably
smart to have a decoy wallet or like an old ledger that you can give out with some sum that
seems plausible at least. So make it worth their time. And then yeah, don't I'm not turning my own
horn. But insurance, you know, can can be a part of that. But I don't want to lose the last Nostar
live here. We should probably stop talking about insurance. No, no, I mean, I think I think the
operational security side is like a really, really important thing for people to pay attention to,
because it's also a function of like, okay, you may not think that you have a lot of wealth right
now. But fast forward, you know, if Bitcoin does what we all believe it is going to do,
and what it has done historically, like, yeah, you know, I like if you're like me, and you know,
you only got into Bitcoin a few years ago, and you're like, okay, yeah, it's not like I'm a big
whale, you know, like, why would anybody target me? Well, in the future, anybody who's buying right
now in 20, you know, if you go to 2035, if you were buying in 2025, people are going to be like,
or 2026 people are gonna be like oh my god they must have you know a bajillion trillion dollars
in bitcoin like it's it's all just like a game of time right and so i think being better prepared
in the present just is the is a prudent choice for people like you should be paying attention
to these things you should be careful it's going to be just like yeah careful about what you post
more broadly because you especially with with ai it's so much easier to geolocate these days too
You can do it trivially easy.
And so people are like, you should be conscious of that, right?
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Yeah, I mean, like, everything becomes much more accessible through AI, like deception, social engineering, like voice models, video fakes, all these things.
be vigilant and don't be an idiot such as ourselves.
Don't be public about Bitcoin.
That is something that might bite us in the ass in the future
because even 17 years in, everybody that gets into Bitcoin now
is, in my opinion, very, very early to this.
And yeah, no price prediction.
But nominally, I would bet my ass that we will see an increase
at an all-time high in your time and all these things.
like correlate very closely like these these five-dollar attacks correlate really closely with the price and yeah there's
don don trust um yeah verify i would say and don don count on other people helping you in that case Yeah Yeah Speaking of things that AI enables AI has enabled you to post previously unimaginable
levels of memetic slop, but it's unfair to call it slop because you have quite a gift
for memetics, I think.
And I'm curious too, do you think the vibes have been weird for a while?
But from my limited time in Bitcoin, I was around for the 2022 bear.
And that was like the memes were the best during that time.
The memes were bad because all the, quote, tourists or whatever, the lettuce hands got out.
And it was just a lot of people who became really hardcore Bitcoiners or already were
but were forged in the fires of the bear market and then decided to just start using memes as their outlet
for frustration, for hope, for whatever it might be,
for dunking on Greenpeace.
Like Carl and I, that was when we really started going hard
into making our videos was in the depths of that bear market.
And I'm curious if you think right now the memes feel bear market-ish
or bull market-ish.
Does that make sense?
I mean, they feel very institutional-ish.
Like currently it's captured by a ton of institutions.
And every other week there is a new synthetic derivative that promises yield.
And it is, I agree, it is different.
I remember the Reddit days.
I remember early Bitcoin Twitter days.
And I tried to keep this kind of spirit alive by memeing as much as my time permits.
And luckily I'm not alone.
But it feels, I agree, it feels different this time.
I guess everything is different this time.
What's the best meme, not one that you posted,
what's the best meme that you've seen recently?
So I promise to not say this publicly,
but there is a person that I think is the better memer than I am.
And it's my guilty pleasure to see these memes.
He works at BDC Inc., Dan Webb, Heartland Bitcoin.
He does some other things under pseudonym 2, but there are so many of these memes that are hyper-targeted into my center of humor.
Difficult to pick a favorite. It's like Sophie's Choice.
If you ask what is my favorite meme that I made, it's always my last one.
You always need to be better. You can always improve.
but usually there is no correlation between how well a meme performs and how much of a great
meme I think it is like it's absolutely or how much effort I put into it like there is no
proof of work that is associated with like performance like I've done I don't know hour
long CapCut edits on my phone and that they hardly made like 12 likes and they pooped out like a
meme quickly and usually it's a Michael Saylor meme and that's like a thousand likes and then
all right okay give the people what they want it is funny I've noticed and I think anybody who's
done any sort of content creation has noticed that too that it's like and maybe it's the fact
that when you pour so much time into something perhaps it ends up getting too in the weeds or
it's you know it's it becomes too complex I don't know but like this was always a frustration for
carl and i when we were making making our crypto couple videos was like you know it'd be like
multiple days of you know of script writing of filming you know then she's like you know she's
editing she's getting you know within a centimeter i'm saying this for the you know for your european
mind uh centimeters not inches a centimeter of the computer screen and you know for multiple days
and and so much thought and and care goes into it and you post it like it does pretty well but then
you know, if she was to just like post a picture of like her foot hold, you know, holding a Bitcoin,
it would, you know, that's like 5000 like, you know, but maybe that would be for other reasons.
I'm not sure. She hasn't done that.
Maybe she should start.
I know. I know. It's it is. It is interesting that you mentioned kind of the institutionalization
of Bitcoin. Do you think that that is what's happening? Or do you think it's like,
who's trapped in the room with whom?
You know what I mean?
Is Bitcoin trapped in the room with the institutions
or are the institutions trapped in the room with Bitcoin?
I mean, I would say every bear market in the past
has seen some kind of, you know, sacrificial lamb,
something that, you know, needs to blow up.
Something needs to unwind, something needs to, you know, crater.
And like, it has to get worse before it gets better.
Like we have to go deeper into the crevice
and then we will see the light eventually.
And at that point, we will see who is wearing pants
and who is not if the tide goes out.
So I'm holding judgment on that.
But yeah, I mean, some of those AI memes Michael Saylor posts,
I die inside.
When I see the earnings calls and people are AI dancing
and like, oh my God, send it to zero.
I try to.
I'll take the other side on that, though, because I did hear him talk about once he was like, they strategy basically got rid of like a ton of their market.
This was like previously, I think with STRC, they've probably poured a lot of marketing money into that, obviously.
But prior to that, they basically like got rid of most of their marketing budget at strategy for a long period of time.
And there's that I'm forgetting what there was a particular account.
Sailor was reposting a lot or like tweeting the guy.
I'm forgetting.
My Dojo?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you.
And I'm pretty sure they just like brought that guy on, like paid him a fat salary and like, you know, cut their marketing budget by like 95%.
They're like, okay, you just make these sailor AI, you know, pictures.
Michael, repost them.
They get more visibility than any of our other marketing stuff.
So, hey, let's do that.
But it is interesting.
I guess it speaks to the changing dynamics around marketing,
around let's just say around propaganda more broadly,
because there's good propaganda and bad propaganda, right?
Like not all propaganda is bad.
All that we do with memetics is propaganda, right?
And it's about propaganda and that propaganda.
It's, you know, confirming our biases, yeah.
Exactly, exactly.
But even like, I don't know if you've seen this as like a US politician thing,
but he's blown up a lot on X, so maybe it's come across your radar,
but the spencer pratt in la this guy who he was like previously a reality tv guy and he's just
like his you know ai video like campaign videos have just been just fantastic you know like really
fantastic stuff but we're entering this sort of new world where it's like you don't have to spend
10 million dollars on political ads to have the same impact like you can have the same impact with
a guy buying you know a couple hundred bucks worth of you know of of image generation video
generation tokens versus a budget of a couple million and a massive team and this whole market
and and like the ai slop may reach more people and be more effective and i feel like that's like
like the old world is not ready for that yet like boomers boomers will see like jesus christ riding
a unicorn on facebook and be like i can't who was able to get this image this is incredible like
where was this photo taken?
You know, no natural defenses.
Boomers getting one-shotted on Facebook
is like kind of a poetic justice, I think.
Like, you know, you got to buy your house cheap.
Now you get like your wallet drained
by like some really, really bad AI slop.
That is kind of poetic.
But yeah, I would underwrite that.
Like AI is like the cult, like the great equalizer.
It does not have to be slop.
Like I've seen wonderful art, wonderful campaigns made on a very teeny tiny budget, and you would not know it.
At the same time, you see slop, but I don't think the amount of slop has, I mean, it probably has increased, but like not necessarily due to AI, just because, you know, people don't have taste.
if you have taste like the world is your oyster right now and i've seen developers who were not
able to design build something themselves now and the same vice versa designers who did not know how
to code uh make make their ideas now into reality and i myself like i like initially i i wanted to
make my parents not proud and not become a mechanical engineer i wanted to go into movie
making i wanted to become a cinematographer and i always like i've written as a passion project
i've written uh screenplays and um like i've written movies and television show screenplays
and like five people have read them um and and now i think we are getting to the point maybe there
will be a cruise production like in the near future even if it's just a short movie because
now you know there is nothing that you can lose and there is uh just you know you spend some time
some credits and maybe your idea, you know, connects with people and then you can make it properly.
But these kind of tools are, they arrive just at the right time, I think.
Yeah. I mean, even podcasters, you don't even have to be a designer or a developer or a
mechanical engineer. Like Peter McCormick had posted just recently, he was like, you know,
I basically was using Claude and what would have cost me a couple hundred thousand pounds
previously because I've done this same thing before and I had to pay for it.
I did it for negligible cost and just me.
And it's of high quality and it works.
It is really being able to just do something.
You can just build things, right?
And you can just do things.
But prior to this, it was very difficult for a non-technical person,
for a non-developer to build any sort of software
because you needed to bring in developers.
you need to pay them a lot of money or if you're building a company you need to give them a
substantial portion of equity since they're going to be doing a large part of the work now you have
this ability to just build things yourself and that's not to say that really great developers
are irrelevant i think they're even more relevant because they become you know as much as ai makes
the non-technical person able to do things they never could before i think it also makes the
highly technical person the highly skilled person it turns them into like a superhuman right like
Like they, because they actually know how all this stuff works.
You're going to be able to do so much more with a greater depth than, you know, you or I.
Certainly more than me.
I can't speak to you, but, you know.
No, but I mean, if you look at Kali, like that guy, like, I don't know when he sleeps, like he has five different projects and tweets five times a minute.
That is so impressive.
And like, don't roll your own crypto and don't, you know, vibe code a wallet is what I would say.
stick to proper security-hardened premises,
but all the other things,
the things that make your life more efficient
and the day-to-day things that can be freed up
if you know and have a healthy use for AI.
But yeah, I'm surprised that Peter McCormack jumped on that train.
Instead of asking him what's an expert,
we should ask him what's a markdown file or something.
like we need to update the meme on that yeah that's that's that's a good meme look at this
this is a brainstorming session no i think peter peter is not a dummy he just plays one on tv you
know it's all part of like his charming act you know yes we know quite cunning and he is curious
that is his superpower he's curious and he knows how to ask a question i always say like when he
interviews lynn alden i'm like i'm the grog brain listening and then i just telepathically you know
I would ask this question because I'm dumb.
And then suddenly like Peter comes out with the exact same question.
Like he's a wonderful interviewer.
So nothing but love, Peter.
Yeah, no, he's the, he's the, nobody ever, nobody ever did it quite like him.
And he still continues to do it.
It's interesting too.
I think his pivot was very successful.
Initially I was like, oh, sweet.
I'm going to fill the vacuum.
Peter is leaving.
And then Danny comes in and he's like, well, look at me.
I'm doing what Bitcoin did again in it, you know?
Did you just give Danny and Australian a British accent?
Yeah, okay.
My Australian accent isn't as good.
Neither is my British accent.
The American line.
Yeah.
One's a penal colony of the other.
It's basically the same thing.
But no, I think it is interesting.
I'm curious too, in the realm of memetics,
and what made me think of this is Peter kind of pivoting to
not just being a Bitcoin podcast,
but being like, it's just a politics.
It's a, you know, it's a current events.
It's a culture.
He very much leaned into politics, obviously, because there's things going on in the UK that require the hero of Peter McCormick to put on his Batman cape and go save them.
But I'm curious how much you think a kind of Bitcoin only or let's say Bitcoin specific content continues to be this viable niche versus how much it is actually beneficial for Bitcoin to have more branching out like that.
to have you know as Peter says like Bitcoin is still the heartbeat of the show he still brings
it up but it's not what he leads with you know what I mean so you're it's kind of the maybe the
foot in the door versus door in the face like you're starting off you're not even mentioning
it you know and then you you come around to Bitcoin later as a logical conclusion but
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts yeah I mean uh he he sold the top quite well like he
figured out like I mean like the Trojan horse like he has this like star prowess he gets a lot
of really important guests that would otherwise not come on a Bitcoin podcast.
And it's probably growing the space much further than a circle jerk Bitcoin only podcast.
Not that I don't love them, but yeah, if you dig long enough into every problem that society
has, you inevitably end at like corrupted money.
And Bitcoin is the answer to that.
And by the Socratic method of myiotic, like you can lead people to the solution without
having to spell it out for them.
And I think he does that quite well.
And I think it was a really smart play of his.
And then you see like other podcasters or like content producers or like entire teams
like BTC sessions now moving to sovereign sessions,
which is very important because like with AI,
everything becomes easier.
So it becomes surveillance.
So it becomes all these things that we are like out of convenience.
We use all these Google and Facebook and whatever tools or some of us do.
And it is important to broaden the horizon.
And if you create this content, like you can, yeah,
don't have to lead with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin inevitably becomes part of the conversation and you reach people.
I think it's smart, but I'm not saying you should change the name of your podcast.
Is mine too on the nose?
Is that what you're getting at here?
The Bitcoin podcast is a little bit too specific.
I thought it was Bitcoin podcast.
I'm not, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It goes by many names, by many names.
No, it's a good point.
And I think that is basically the conclusion that every Bitcoiner comes to when you go deep enough down the rabbit hole, right?
Is it kind of all roads lead to Bitcoin.
some just take more meandering paths to get there and i do think it's interesting too it's
from my own experience again i have not experienced that many cycles you know now um but from the
recent uh let's say recent price action you know like fuck the cycles like let's just assume they
don't exist but just speaking in near terms it has felt like there hasn't been let's say a new
class of bitcoiners do you know what i mean like where it's like there there wasn't a massive retail
influx?
Or maybe I just missed it.
Maybe that new class appeared in different ways.
Maybe it appeared in the treasury companies.
Maybe it appeared in people just passing by ETFs.
I don't know.
The suit coiner is the new class that is here probably to stay.
The suit coiner is not interested in the privacy or in the freedom aspect of it.
They are interested in the scarce properties of Bitcoin.
And that is fine.
does not interest me that much, like leverage yields and whatever.
I wouldn't say they need to be fought,
but I would say they can be wholeheartedly ignored
during discussions about Bitcoin policy or relay or whatever.
We need to definitely, in my opinion, improve Bitcoin
and make it as private and as scaled as possible
before the government fully captures Bitcoin in one way or another.
But yeah, I think the new class is the suit coiner.
That's an interesting perspective there.
I'm curious too, because you mentioned scaling Bitcoin and privacy around Bitcoin,
which sounds like changing Bitcoin.
And I'd just like to ask, when did you become compromised?
When did you first notice you were compromised?
Yeah, when Luke Dasher sent the FBI after me.
No, so I've always, first off, security is a moving target.
So everybody who says Bitcoin can ossify does not know fuck from shit.
And it will always have to have security vulnerability updates.
And we will, it probably won't be quantum, but like there will be some upgrade in security.
because even classical computers improve vastly, maybe not during my lifetime, but again, four decades from now.
So we should very prudently, very conservatively, very well debated talk about improvements.
And there are very many improvements to Bitcoin.
Some of them are more urgent and necessary.
Currently, we're discussing BIP54.
There are four known vulnerabilities in Bitcoin as of right now, like a miner with sufficient hash rate could mine all of the rest of Bitcoin within two weeks.
And all these things can be patched.
And we should do that, not just to prove that we can still soft fork Bitcoin.
then there are proposals like CTV or template hash, French CTV, that would make Bitcoin far better in many regards.
It would be able to scale lightning.
It would be better for Bitcoin and self-custody.
We would have reactive security instead of proactive security.
we could have a much easier self-custody, meaning more people would not rely on Clownbase or Bitfinex or all these exchanges as they are right now.
Because not many people use Lightning in a self-custodial way.
Not many people use Bitcoin in a self-custodial way.
And if we did just that, like Jeremy Rubin proposed it like 10 years ago, I think, like 2015, 16, CTV.
It has been velvetted.
There is no bug in there.
We could just push that, immediately scale lightning, immediately make Bitcoin much, much more secure.
And suddenly we would see more on-chain activity, pricing out all of the spam that some people worry so much about and actually use Bitcoin as intended as peer-to-peer and not peer-to-exchange-to-peer.
I would just check to mempool.space.
Medium priority is one sat per V-byte.
Yes.
Low priority, 0.8 sat per V-byte.
High priority, two sats per V-byte, which is great.
So if you need to do some, moving some Bitcoin on chain, you know, boy, it's been, now's a good time.
And it's been a very good time for quite a while.
It's been incredible.
It's insanely underpriced, but the free market gets to decide that price.
And currently it valued at less than one sat per V which is sad because that allows spammers to put idiotic spam on there And if more people were excited about Bitcoin and would use it in a self way that would not be the case So that why I think Bitcoin you know
who said it, was it Paul Stortz?
Not to endorse Paul Stortz,
but he said like Bitcoin developers
lost 40 IQ points during the block size wars.
They became too scared to ever, you know,
champion another soft fork.
and we have been, you know, lost our way in that regard.
So I hope in the near-term future we see PIP54,
we see a variant of a covenant proposal,
whether it is CTV, CSFS, or TX hash or template hash.
All of these would be fine, in my opinion,
but don't take my word for it.
Don't trust, verify, have your own opinion.
The materials are out there.
I just think if you truly believe Bitcoin needs to scale to 8 billion people and self-custody should be done by your grandma, then we need to improve Bitcoin just a little bit.
It's interesting because I think you and Luke are actually in full agreement on that.
He's literally said ossification to ossification is death.
But he's literally like, he said exactly that.
Like you can just search ossify or ossification on his X feed and you'll find he's very clear about that.
He thinks that if Bitcoin ossifies, it is dead.
It's interesting that many adherents have the opposite position.
If I argue, like if I relapse on my very excellent time management and I go back on Twitter and argue with not supporters, a surprising amount are vehemently against CTV.
first of all because likely they do not understand the implications
but they're not aware that like Death and Ohm
and Chris Gita and Luke Dasher and all of these people are very big proponents
of that and Luke Dasher
despite our disagreement, he wants
what's best for Bitcoin from his point
of view. Where I disagree with him, Luke Dasher
thinks Bitcoin is his project.
So, you know, there are some difference
of opinion there.
But yeah, on that
regard, like I can find common ground
with most everybody, even
Michael Saylor. So, you know,
that is the message that you can take away from this.
Like, instead of looking,
you know, to
differentiate you from one another,
find the common things and ignore the rest.
And then you will realize
we probably get much further
in this community if we, you know, focus on what we have in common.
I mean, I completely agree with that.
And that's the thing.
At the end of the day, it's like there are different flavors of Bitcoiners
and many, many different opinions about what should or shouldn't be done with Bitcoin,
what needs to be done to save or to not save Bitcoin,
who is a good actor, who is a bad actor, who is compromised,
who is the knight in shining armor.
And that's fine.
And I think that that's ultimately good.
And I truly agree with you that the important thing is remembering that I like to assume at least, and perhaps this is a naive assumption, but I will assume good intent if I have the evidence to show that the intent is good.
That the person's coming from a place of genuinely wanting to do what's best by Bitcoin, which I believe that Luke absolutely is.
um and i think you know uh certainly everybody uh i've tried not to talk about uh i don't i
haven't talked about you know that whole side of things uh let's end some i don't know i don't
even i don't even know let's wait for them to fork off in august hopefully they will wake up
you know but you know yeah it's going to be interesting uh i i think that well this brings
me to something I wanted to ask you about, which is everybody has a different opinion about what
is the biggest threat to Bitcoin. Some people may say it's spam on the blockchain. Some people may
say it's a nation state level type co-option. Others may say it's centralization of coins in
the hands of corporations. Others may say it's failure to ossify that if we, you know, or failure
to ossify. Others say that it's, if we don't ossify it, or if we do ossify, it's death. You know,
So many different perspectives.
What do you actually think is, you know, you mentioned privacy, you mentioned scaling, you mentioned, you know, some of these BIPs.
What do you think is the biggest actual threat to Bitcoin at this time?
Yeah, so let's go through this, like, one by one.
You mentioned, like, large single institutional holders.
I don't think there is a threat there.
If Michael Saylor is not taking his coins into self-custody, first of all, they're not just his coins.
They're like hundreds of thousands of investors' coins.
It's not just MicroStrategy, but there's people or investment funds behind this.
Maybe it will be seized by the government and this will be the budget-neutral American Bitcoin Reserve, which would be nice for you.
I'd be happy for you.
But I don't think that is a threat.
the game theory works
such as who's the most greedy
protects the network the most
and he's doing that quite well
nation state
attacks
they can be a thing
in the sense like we could do some secret
mining, we could do some supply chain attacks
these things need to be watched
out for
the thing that
I fear the
most, there are two things
at the social layer
So there is this famous video, it's called Operation Orchestra.
Everybody should watch it.
I'll send you the link.
It's by Paul Kemp.
He came up, by the way, with a phrase of bike shedding,
like he coined that term.
But that is a way where open source projects are
subverted by NSA actors or like secret service people that, you know,
then without doing it overtly, sabotage a project from the inside.
So again, with open source code, everybody says don't trust Verify.
You and I, we probably can't read code, so we have to trust.
We have to trust other people, and we need more code review,
and we need more developers, and we need more people that are at that level
that is adequate for this many trillion dollar asset.
And we have a few of these,
like there's 40 people, I would say,
that are on that level.
And what has been demonstrated
the last one and a half years,
that is the second point,
a lot of people have been violently attacked and smeared
and their private and social lives have been scrutinized
and people that led a private life, you know, have been, again,
attacked for like insane reasons up to the point where they then called quits
and then like left the project.
And having to replace these, I think that has done the largest
or the biggest amount of damage to Bitcoin as the project.
Like just recently with Gloria Zhao, like having a developer
of that nature.
She was great. She worked
relentlessly. She had so many contributions.
She was so good
that even Luke Dasher
recommended her for maintainership.
And then she merged one
single line of code that she didn't write
that others reviewed, her peers
reviewed and marked up for
it's ready to be committed.
And she merged it and
that was then enough
for quacks and
people with a
very sorry life to smear her.
And that led to her quitting the project, which again, find somebody else like that.
You won't be able to find somebody like one in a million.
And that is, I think, the biggest threat that we face right now.
And one way you can help ameliorate that is fund people.
Be generous with your stack if you are early to Bitcoin or if you're not that early.
But like everybody can donate some amount of Bitcoin to either one of the organizations that distribute this fairly or directly to a developer to help them, to encourage them, to give feedback on their work, actual feedback, not just brigading on GitHub.
And, you know, speak words of encouragement.
That can be privately.
That can be like openly.
And to like a single message can help somebody from burning out.
And that is, I think, what we saw the last one and a half years or so, that the community is not as grateful as they should be about the people that help Bitcoin what it is today.
Because Satoshi left. That motherfucker left. He left us all in our own terms. And now we have this great thing that he came up with. And yeah, we should not fuck that up.
And I think we need constant development and we need the best developers.
And so we should not scare them away.
So you don't think quantum is the biggest threat to Bitcoin?
So quantum, again, I'm just a dumb engineer.
I'm not a quantum physicist.
I talked to very smart quantum physicists.
So like we as Europoers in Austria and Innsbruck, we have one of the world's leading quantum laboratories.
And I've talked to them like early as 2022, 2023, because we had a Bitcoin conference in that town.
And I've been keeping up with their progress.
And I've been, again, from a scientific mind, you know, I used to be a researcher.
I try to grok these things.
And AI, of course, helps me with that.
But from my understanding and from the people that I respect and have talked to, it is far from an urgent threat.
And as an engineer, I'm missing quantifiable data points to even extrapolate anything from that.
There are all these charts. My good dear friend Nikata puts out these charts. And he has this wonderful vehicle that recently gave out a one Bitcoin price for somebody who submitted a random number generator, which, you know, it's a good use of your money.
and they say by 2030, ECDSA will be broken
and 256 or 128-bit keys will be broken,
which I think is some gobbledygook.
Cryptography is always on the side of the weaker people
and we already, with a lot of really smart people
like Jonas Nick or Ethan Heilman,
we are working on defense
and it's much, much easier to defend yourself.
I always say like against a nuke than to build a nuke.
And like we already have post-quantum signatures
of a certain size.
They could be implemented,
but they would cuck the chain right now.
We would have to do a block increase
and we know how that is like going down.
But we continue to work on that.
And it is, I think, correct.
And I wouldn't say it's due to Nick Carter
because we've been doing it for like years prior.
Like there's Presidio Bitcoin Conference
and all these people have been working on that.
Like we should pay attention to it
and we should have a plan.
Mike Schmidt said in the bullpen,
in the event there is a canary that shows us,
hey, quantum is not just fake,
but we have so many more urgent problems
facing Bitcoin, I would say,
that we should not focus all of our developers' time on that
and we should not be crying wolf.
And I'm very confident sooner or later we will find a PQ signature
as small as Nick Carter and then we'll save.
It's interesting to learn the quantum thing
because if anything, I hope that if people have been paying attention to this,
one of the things that they've taken away from it
is just the practical tip that what's one of the best ways
to make sure that you're to be are going to be quantum safe.
Well, just don't reuse addresses like that.
You know, just don't don't reuse your address, which you shouldn't be doing anyway.
Like that's a that's a good bit of advice anyway.
You should. That's a best practice.
You should already be practicing is don't reuse addresses.
And that basically mitigates, you know, the vast majority of even the,
you know, longer tail risk on these things, which I think is like it's a, you know,
And it's like, hey, that's something you can do literally right now.
And nobody has to do it for you.
You can just go ahead and do that.
Obviously, the question is Satoshi's coins and all that.
Yes, yes, yes.
But like for you as a person.
There is this like maybe benefit of this quantum panic.
Like the biggest people messing this up with address reuse are exchanges.
Like we should bully more exchanges into not reusing addresses.
There's no reason to do that.
And again, like the short range attack of like attacking a transaction in the mempool when like the public key is revealed, like that is so far out there.
And like most quantum computer types like are not capable of doing that.
Like those neutral atom quantum computers, they can't do a nine minute attack.
Having said that, I think the actual quantum debate won't be about actual PQ mitigation.
It will be way earlier than that.
There will be a class of Bitcoiners afraid of quantum and they want to act now and others who are not afraid.
And then there will be like a split.
And then the discussion will come, you know, what to do with Satorish's coins.
That is like the only like foreseeable actionable thing that I see right now.
And I believe there will be a futures market somewhere as we had with Segwit2x or something.
And then the free market gets to decide.
And I believe Bitcoin's promise is immutability and it's permissionless and property rights need to be respected.
And Satoshi had any amount of time or any chance to burn those Bitcoins if he actually wanted to show us that he's not just LARPing and he wants to never move them.
Like he could have known that sending it to an op return would forever make them unspendable and it would have saved us a lot of headaches.
But maybe like the game theory of Bitcoin is so strong that it just mutates that in the end, the biggest holders like Coinbase or BlackRock or Michael Saylor, again, also just Coinbase, they're incentivized to protect their bag.
and so they, after
nation states got their
quantum computer
they will not play their hand, they will
crack encryption of Chinese governments
or whatever, they will not go after Bitcoin
and say, hey, by the way, we have
this thing and we can read all your
communications. The next
people who will have a quantum computer will be
private companies
they will be very expensive, they will be very slow
and the largest
holders want to protect their bags and they
will go out hunting and satoshi's bitcoin are i believe on 22 000 individual p2pk addresses
and then you have to expand capital and you have to reclaim those bitcoin and then maybe you have
to sell some some of them and then you can put some of them into your balance and because you
want to protect your investment you maybe you know do this transaction and add an operator and
signifying hey by the way coinbase it's us we we are not dumping it we're putting into our balance
and that sounds strikingly similar to mining
and that is the future that I envision
that there will be mining
and there will be like a security budget upgrade
just in a different way with post-quantum
but again, that is way, way, way out.
That's a really interesting way to think about it
that it's almost this new form of mining or treasure hunting
that kind of develops out of this.
So it's safe to say you're not a fan of some of the, even like the rate limiting, you know, kind of let's say the hybrid approaches.
Because there's obviously like the full, like freeze them, you know, freeze it.
Anything that's in one of these addresses, not just Satoshi's coins, but any coins, freeze them.
Then there's like the kind of BIP 360, the rate limiting side of things.
There's various proposals on how, or various kind of sub-proposals on how to do that.
You're saying just like the kind of like do nothing.
if it happens, okay, it happens.
We haven't changed the core premise of Bitcoin
in such a way that it would be ultimately like
invalidating of the Bitcoin thesis
by taking one of these actions
that subverts one's property rights within Bitcoin.
Yeah, so I would think it would do greater damage to Bitcoin
to change the property rights proposal
or the promise than to have Bitcoin move
again, Mt. Gox was hacked for 800,000 Bitcoin
and the market survived.
Again, you could argue it was at a much, much lower market cap.
But I believe a million point one
and some Bitcoin, it is possible.
Again, of the, I think, six million, six and a half million Bitcoin
that are supposedly quantum vulnerable,
most of those are on reused addresses.
and those are probably likely still with owners who are alive and kicking
and they can mitigate and migrate.
Essentially, we're talking probably about 2 million Bitcoin.
And we will have a future where we have post-quantum signatures
and people have ample time to move and migrate.
And yeah, I'm adamantly against freezing and burning.
I am not opposed to having this hourglass thing where you only have so many pay-to-pup-key spends in a block.
But again, let's discuss it.
It's worthwhile to have the discussion.
And again, I am thankful for Ian Smith and what's his name, Luke and Jameson Lopp for like BIP361.
They got a lot of flack because people only read the headline, but that is a Bitcoin room proposal discussing potential things.
They are not in favor of those, but like it's worthwhile having the discussion and we should separate who brings those ideas to the forefront from the idea itself.
And we can explore and talk about it for the next 25 years.
At least.
I'm of the same opinion on kind of the base case and then also with regard to the rate limiting hourglass.
I think that's the most palatable of the potential options that have been thrown out there, in my mind at least.
And yeah, the nice thing about this conversation is that it is one that is not purely technical.
Like there are technical solutions for how to do this, but the larger question is actually more philosophical or game theoretical, right?
And so I think that's a nice thing because it allows actually a larger group of people to be able to contribute to that conversation in a meaningful way who may not be, you know, they don't understand how different address types work at a technical, you know, core level.
You're talking about Bitcoin podcasters. Exactly.
Exactly. What I'm saying is there's still room for the humble Bitcoin podcaster to get their two cents in.
So we need the post-quantum podcast now, the post-quantum podcast.
That going to be necessary to get us through this I think Okay so maybe a couple other things I wanted to I guess just more broadly get into with you is a state of kind of like medium of exchange adoption versus store of value adoption
Because we talked about the, obviously, like the suitification, let's say, of Bitcoin and very much, especially in the West, especially in the United States of America.
the primary kind of use case for most people has been store of value, right?
Now, if you go outside of America, that obviously changes drastically, right?
The future is here, but it's not evenly distributed yet.
Places where people need to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange,
where they don't have stable banking, they don't have the U.S. dollar,
they use it far more as a medium of exchange.
They also use stable coins and many other things.
There's also much higher usage of that, obviously, outside of the U.S.
You know, that's where, you know, the global south, right?
I'm curious because I've seen the debate recently about, you know, is holding Bitcoin, is just holding Bitcoin using it?
Or do you have to spend Bitcoin to use it?
Where do you fall on this in terms of, you know, I guess I don't like to tell anybody how to use their money in whatever way.
Like, do whatever the fuck you want.
That's the whole point of Bitcoin.
But I do, I would like to know your perspective on, you know, does, let me ask you a different way.
Does Bitcoin need to be widely used as a medium of exchange, either on layer one or subsequent layers, for it to achieve its true potential?
Or is it being a pristine piece of capital, pristine collateral?
Is that enough?
No, you have to use Bitcoin as money in order for this to work.
Not everybody has to do that.
And saving is a valid monetary use case.
And if you just huddle it, that is perfectly fine.
and if you huddle it and proclaim that you will never, ever, ever spend it,
that is also fine.
I think that is retarded, but it is fine.
That is your right.
But in order for miners to make a living,
you have to have a transaction and you have to eventually pay a fee.
And Bitcoin was not intended as a peer-to-peer digital rock, but cash.
So I always encourage people to spend and replace.
I understand that law-abiding people have a problem with that due to taxation.
In Germany just now, there has been – because accidentally it was very easy in Germany to spend your Bitcoin because if you held it for longer than one year, there was no capital gains tax.
It was entirely by accident because they classified it similar to gold.
It's one of those – like Germany still uses fax machines and had very idiotic internet laws.
but that they actually got right.
However, now the Greens proposed a new amendment
to have capital gains after forever,
similar as they changed in Austria,
because there's a crypto accounting company
that lobbied and made some phenomenal moon math
and told them, hey, if you change the law like that,
you will have billions upon billions of taxable,
surplus next year, which never materialized, but they are trying to run the same scam again
now and it's being discussed in Germany.
So long tangent there, but I myself, again, use Bitcoin literally daily in my company
privately, like we send and pay and receive Bitcoin.
And it brings me so much joy and it doesn't get old if I pay a distributor in Australia
or like an influencer in Canada or something globally.
That is the whole reason for me as a businessman to use Bitcoin.
Of course, I also do save on Bitcoin because it is the best store of value.
And with, again, advanced miniscript, also inheritance is a perfectly good use case.
Therefore, I believe it is perfectly fine to also store output descriptors data on the blockchain,
which is also another controversial subject.
But yeah, so your question was, is Hodling using?
Yes, it is.
But it should not be the only one.
And it is perfectly fine if you're thinking like in the history of something becoming your money, you always start out with a store of value.
And then it becomes a medium of exchange, then a unit of account.
And these things, they're like overlapping and they don't occur globally at the same time.
And some of us have to use this technology now to build the tools so that we are ready once it becomes more broadly adopted.
Or when the government is putting the thumbscrews tighter, that we are not caught unprepared.
And it's great to see in the global south.
Like just today, I saw that in Kenya, the Tando released that like 40 million Kenyans now have essentially like an URL, just your phone number at Bitcoin.co.ke.
In South Africa, like they have 800,000 merchants that do not know that they accept Bitcoin through money badgers, similar to like the square terminals in the US.
And that is huge.
So I want to see as much adoption of Bitcoin as money.
And again, that's why I also want to see these certain soft fork proposals happen so that not people are like reliant on custodial solutions.
Yeah, I saw the Tando thing, which was fantastic.
And on the Square piece as well, I think that that was genuinely one of the most just bullish developments that has happened, at least since I've been in Bitcoin.
I mean, what an incredible, like 4 million plus merchants and first it was opt-in, but now they're just like using, so you're just using Bitcoin as the rails by which you move either, you know, fiat value.
Like if, you know, I mean, the amazing thing about Square is they have both sides of the counter, right?
They have Cash App on the customer side and they have Square terminals on the merchant side.
And they've got a lot of customers.
And like just that alone, turning that ability on and using Bitcoin in such a way that it's not necessarily evident to the user unless they are actively trying to use it.
But it's not necessarily evident.
They're just getting lower fees, a better experience, like all these things.
They're getting an improved experience without even realizing they're using Bitcoin.
And I think that's a really, really powerful thing.
Shout out to Jack and Miles and the whole teams over there at Square and Cash App, because that, to me, was one of the most bullish things I have seen in all of my time in Bitcoin.
And again, because I do think the medium of exchange side is so important.
I agree with you 100%.
Holding Bitcoin, just saving in Bitcoin, that is using it as well.
Absolutely.
It's just an earlier part of your progression along, as you said, from store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account.
Like, this is naturally.
And again, you know, the future of Bitcoin is here.
It's just not evenly distributed yet.
But I agree also that spending Bitcoin is just fun.
Like, you can spend and replace.
Not that I ever would, nor that I would ever, you know, like, there's another cool thing that somebody could do, which I would never advocate for.
I would never do it myself as well.
But you could just engage in commerce with somebody via Bitcoin and not tell anyone else about it.
Of course, you should.
Is that possible as a podcaster to pay somebody in Bitcoin and not have videographic evidence of that?
I wouldn't know because, again, I actually don't have any Bitcoin at all because of the unfortunate boating accident.
I'm such a bad driver of a boat.
Bang, you know.
But you could just do that.
You could just engage in commerce between two people, just like handing cash back and forth.
Cash is actually great.
Like fiat sucks.
Cash is fantastic.
Cash is so very private.
It is wonderful, right?
Yeah.
You can do that with Bitcoin.
If cash would be like a newly invented thing,
they would not invent or allow it to happen.
It is too good.
It could not be done again.
Without the correct precedent, they would say,
no, no, let's not have that.
Christine Lagarde would be out there being like,
I think not.
I mean, it is, but this is where we're going also.
You know that, I don't want to say they, but I'll just say they generally, whether they're in Europe, whether they're in America, whether they're in China, they don't want you to use cash.
They want to get rid of cash.
They want to implement complete surveillance coins.
They want to implement central bank digital currencies.
But because that's the cash is like this within the fiat system.
It's the last vestige of private transaction that you have.
There's nothing else.
Anything you send through the banking system, there's no way, you know, you can't custody
fiat digitally.
It's not possible, right?
It necessarily needs a custodian.
You can custody fiat in cash.
Granted, it's still a promise of a central bank, right?
So, you know, do you actually own it?
Do you own anything?
Whatever.
But the point being, it's like cash is still something that you can use outside, even though
it's using fiat still, still outside of the surveillance panopticon.
that is really powerful and that's also why they need to get rid of cash so that you know they can
and this this is where what you see happening too i think this all goes in tandem with all the age
verification stuff online all of the the language about how dangerous vpns are you need to be id'd
before you get into any sort of social media it's to protect the kids chris it's to protect the kids
yes somebody think of the kids somebody please think of the kids it's either counter you know
How would you like it wrapped counterterrorism or protect the children?
But all of that dovetails together.
And you enter into this.
You very easily get to the place where you see, oh, crack down on access to physical cash or just get rid of it entirely.
Make any interactions that you have in the Internet traceable back to you and your real identity.
No longer allow pseudonymity or anonymity because everything's been ID'd.
Perhaps not even at the application layer, but at the ISP level.
That's going to be the next step, right?
Get rid of VPNs.
Make the punishment for VPNs incredibly, incredibly harsh.
All these things to remove any vestige of privacy that you have left.
And it's one of those things, once you start going down that very, very dark, black-pilled rabbit hole, you just say, oh, my God, thank God for Bitcoin.
Like, I'm so, you know, like, Bitcoin doesn't solve all of that.
You need a lot of other freedom tech tools to do that, to protect yourself, to still move along that spectrum of sovereignty.
But at least there are those tools.
And that's what, yeah, to your earlier point, go and thank a developer or zap a developer on Noster or, you know, donate to them somehow.
Like it makes a difference.
And you want these people to keep developing open source freedom tech because many of us need it already.
And certainly all of us will need it before too long.
But a lot of people just don't give a shit is the other thing.
They're just like, oh, I got nothing to hide.
You know, cool about me, bro.
Yeah.
There wasn't even a question there, Chris.
that was just me ranting on this because it's like i'm i'm like charlie day you know and it's
always sunny like looking at all these things come together i'm like don't you fucking see it guys like
why aren't you paying attention to this but the sad thing is most people don't care and perhaps
my question would be what does it take for the majority of people to actually give a shit about
freedom money and freedom tech and privacy tech or will the majority just never do it and it's
care giving a shit about these things is a fibonacci distribution or round it to a pareto
distribution like and it's just most people never will and that's okay i don't know yeah so that that
is my my my bearish uh case um most people will never and there will always be some form of fiat
um like the glorified hyper bitcoinization will look like that there is 20 or let's have a 21
of people who no longer will be willing to uh share their goods and or services for anything
but Bitcoin. And then like, they will use it to the fullest extent, and they will reap the benefits
of that. And again, it's a free and public monetary system anybody can join. But the rest,
they like the convenience of a CBDC, and they like the promises of, you know, oh, I first have to,
you know, scan my ID before I can post this tweet. And that is probably okay. I wish it weren't so,
but like history and everything that I have observed everywhere I've been,
there's always like 20, 80% that is like usually the distribution of producers
and consumers or people that are like a Vogue and a vacant.
Like I would not believe if people tell me like, oh,
I just came from my time machine and it's the year 2040 and everybody's using
Bitcoin and everything is fine and there's no more wars and we are multi-planning
humanitarian would be great. But maybe that's the German in me, like, I'm a little pessimistic on that. But if you don't have any expectations, like you cannot be disappointed. Therefore, you know, I'm will be gladly, you know, shown shown an opposing view in the future. But yeah, so if 20% use Bitcoin, that will be a huge win.
Yeah. Happiness is reality minus expectations, right? So it's a simple formula. I want to be
conscious of your time here. So maybe just a little speed round suggested by our friends at
the very storied publication, the Bitcoin Bugle. They wanted me to posit some questions about
should plebs be allowed to do certain things?
So we'll just go down a list of a couple of them here
and I'll just get your, you just give me a yes or no.
Should they be allowed to?
Yes.
Should they not be allowed to?
No.
So should plebs, the first one is obvious,
be allowed to have sex?
If it is consensual, sure.
Okay, I agree.
Should plebs be allowed to start podcasts?
I mean, can we have enough? Yes, yes, we can. That's a tough one. That's a tough one. Like,
at one point, we do have enough, but we do not have enough good ones. So maybe, you know,
like even a blind chicken finds, you know, so I would say yes, like, just like monkeys on a
typewriter, eventually, it's greatness will arise. Yeah. So yeah. The interesting thing about that
one though is as soon as you start as you may be a pleb but as soon as you start a podcast
you you become a compromised simple influencer so it's like can a pleb even start a podcast because
at the moment of starting it's like when you observe the photons you've got me that
yes as soon as you start a podcast you ascend you become a better person you become a podcaster
yeah all right or a quartard simple influencer you know whatever it may be but so you can't exist
in both states you know like it's it's it's a tricky one it's it's actually a quantum problem
which i hope that will crack uh with once we get some more compute the pleb paradox yes yeah
uh should plebs be allowed to control the thermostat so a friend of mine is an hvac
engineer and like he has installed hundreds of of like hvac systems in like large office spaces
and usually he gets calls back that people complain or like we need to change this we need
to change that and he has taken to installing thermostats that appear to be connected to the
system but they are not and then the complaints stop so if you give monkeys the choice to change
the temperature like it's not automatically regulated but you have like a knob like suddenly
people everybody is happy so that's that's actually a like a fascinating social experiment
that's yeah it's like all these these kind of things like oh people were complaining about the
closed door button on elevators or people were complaining about the the duration waiting for
an elevator and just putting a mirror there like all the complaints went away so if you give people
the illusion of a choice or like a distraction you know so yes they should be allowed to to twiddle
all the knobs yeah okay i like it we didn't even get a chance to talk about bitcoin knobs um but uh
maybe another time okay should they should pubs be allowed to ride motorcycles
huh i i do not know the mimetic background behind that question
me neither but the bugle guys made me ask they're like this one's really important
i mean it is such an esteemed publication so there must be some deeper meaning to that
um so i myself i'm too comically tall to to like ride a motorbike like
all the coolness that like a cafe racer would like give a regular person like goes out the
window when they see my my my frog legs like to the left and to the right like you would like in
any like curvature like i needed like i don't know assistive wheels on my on my knees like um
it entirely depends on your stature i would say so that's i now i kind of want to see you
ride a motorcycle though you know so shout out to the bitcoin racing team in in in the uk um
we're sponsoring uh the the mini races there shout out to chris mckenzie um i will i will
personally fly over on the island and i will try to fit myself into a racing mini car so you you
will see how my my knees protrude from the from the windows um yeah i'm our the memes are going
to be glorious from that I can already imagine them. And then
last one should blubs be allowed to vote.
So that that's, I think, another trick question. Like, what is
voting and does it change anything? So you can vote with
your wallet. That is the only vote that I believe has proven
to work. Therefore, yes, you're allowed to vote with your
wallet. I like that. It's that old expression. It's like, if voting made a difference, they
wouldn't let you do it. But we, you know, we were positing before this, this last thing I'll say,
and then I'll let you free from this hostage situation, but that perhaps the fall of Rome
was actually because they allowed the plebs to vote. And I think we've got a thesis that we're
cooking on on this there's going to be probably a a long you know 12 part essay series on this
maybe a venture capital fund started on the back of this additionally uh so there's a lot of things
in the work there but that's a question i think that everybody should ponder is did plebs cause
the fall of rome by voting yeah that's i think that's we we have to end it we have to end it
with that there's historic precedent look further into that the plebeian council directly led to the
fall of Rome. So pond on that.
This is, this is my new rabbit hole now, right after this, you know,
screw Bitcoin podcasting.
I'm going to be a plebeian truther now about the fall of Rome.
Chris, this was a great time talking with you.
Appreciate you sharing your time with us very much.
Where would you like to send people either to get your,
your industrial grade washers or to not get kidnapped and have fingers cut off,
whatever it might be, send them, send them your way.
Yeah, check out CEDOR, check out Biturance. Follow me on Nostar or on Twitter. You will probably put the links down there. And yeah, if you see me at the conference, get mocked, take a picture and put it to the long list of people.
I was loving the updates that you had from Vegas.
I loved all the green line tests as well.
Just really, really nice, really nice work.
I was living vicariously from afar.
It was excellent.
And I will mock you.
Will you be coming to BDC Prague?
No more conferences for me.
I need to stay close to home, close to the pregnant wife.
So again, if people want to come and meet and talk to me next, I will be at BTC++ in Vienna and afterwards in Prague, June 11th or something.
Yeah.
See you there.
Love it.
Chris, appreciate it.
Appreciate everybody on NoStory.
well thank you we did actually we had more than 10 people joining on Nostra Chris that's fantastic
new record he just told me that's the highest that's ever been wow wow it's true it's true
and thank you guys for the zaps I appreciate every sat thank you for spending bitcoin uh
it means a lot genuinely so appreciate you guys appreciate you Chris and we'll see you next time
bye bye all right
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
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