You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Chris, I've been enjoying your game, sir, online.
I had to reach out and say, I need to get you on the podcast to talk about Bitcoin.
How are you?
Doing well.
I'm very slatted.
Thank you.
You're the tallest troll on Bitcoin Twitter.
How's it feel?
That is actually something I've never heard.
I've heard like tallest shit poster, but tallest troll, that makes a lot of sense.
I take it.
Yeah, I was thinking, guess what?
We're three days past the 17th anniversary of the Genesis block.
And I think you've been in Bitcoin for quite a while.
We had the pleasure of meeting in person in Riga, Latvia at the Baltic Honey Badger Conference in 2024.
I haven't caught up since.
And like I said, I've been observing your game.
on x and i think 2025 particularly was a crab year in bitcoin price we sort of ranged
and people get very crabby when they range we had narratives popping up whether it was uh
the op return limits getting lifted uh bit 444 bitcoin knots and we we tied the year up with
quantum fud uh what are your thoughts on just the the state of discourse around bitcoin protocol
development specifically so protocol development i think is doing like it's just chugging along just
fine um besides like this like critical bug that they just found in bitcoin version 30 that deletes
legacy wallets but other than that like uh yeah i mean i tried to uh make light of the filter
situation uh the entire last year i think and i'm very happy that we moved on now to like the
quantum fund like i think february 1st is like bit44 signaling day or something i have not seen
a single node signal that or like a single miner um yeah that's not gonna happen but
why do you think why do you think these narratives manifest within bitcoin quantum specifically for
me was like come on guys we've been talking about this for years now all of a sudden
yes some people suffer from like main character syndrome and then it's a good angle to remind
people hey i'm still around um uh i mean the the irony like i have nothing against nick carter uh
even though he blocked me um but like he he like came up with these very nice dice
the FUD Bitcoin dice
where like quantum was one side
and now he's
like investing with his VC
finally he led and invested in like a
company that makes blockchains quantum secure
and like that company
like I stalked it on LinkedIn
now proudly says we're making Solana
quantum secure which you know
sure scams and VCs
I'm fine with that
but like preaching or like
he ended with like
everybody's going to dump on Bitcoin now because I said so and I wrote this blog post.
And I think that's too much.
I mean, it's worthwhile having these conversations.
And I like to see that our smartest cryptographers are working on something
and that we're not unprepared and we actually have contingency plans.
But yeah, I mean, it's just boredom, I think, because not that much happens
and everything has been going too well.
Price has been quite high.
You know, need a new narrative.
yeah and now as the price is drifting higher to start the year people i haven't heard any quantum
fund since uh since around christmas time so yeah i mean it's it's gonna happen soon that they're
factoring like larger numbers like i mean there was this paper um i think reardon um brand black
like he he went through it and like um who was the physicist from fidelity um bob
what's his name
yes Miguel Ras
there was a paper claiming
oh we have a broken
6-bit ECC key
like an elliptic curve key
and then he went through this paper
and like he saw
you guys guessed 100 times
and a 6-bit key to the power of 6
is like 64
there are 64 possibilities
and you guessed 100 times
so I'm not that flustered
that like any sort of key is being broken in the near term future let alone like 128 bits
but so yeah yeah what um again like what do you think of just like the broad state of bitcoin
itself not the protocol well the protocol and the industry you've been working as we were
discussing before this on satskeeper you're working on a bitcoin insurance company i mean
I have a few companies that deal with self-custody, with inheritance and insurance of Bitcoin.
Mainly, I'm focusing my energy on the store value aspect of Bitcoin.
I wish more people would use it as a medium of exchange, but that simply is not the reality.
I use my BitBox and they have a BitRefill integration. And from time to time, I use
BitRefill to purchase goods and stuff, but I know that I'm in the absolute minority.
And I would have thought like 10 years ago, like in 10 years from now, like we would see a lot more adoption that way.
And again, I'm a Europe poor.
I was not blessed with like 4 million square terminals where you can now pay with Bitcoin everywhere.
I think this is like the most enormous news that has happened last year.
But yeah, I think so more companies are coming in more like retail investors.
the interest is not really there or isn't back like it was in 2021 but we have a lot of interest
from uh yeah institutional holders to to have bitcoin on the balance and have it properly and
self-custody so that's what i observe you mentioned that you're a euro poor uh what is the uh the
state of the bitcoin industry and the posturing towards bitcoin as an asset from uh european
officials and what are the boots on the ground reports of individuals so i reside here in the
small grand ducy of luxembourg i'm sure you can point it on a map as an american high school
educated person um and our finance minister he just spoke in bitcoin at bitcoin amsterdam
the sovereign wealth fund of luxembourg purchased one percent of their like holdings into like
ibid which is like a ginormous step i would would say like luxembourg is like a small country 600
000 inhabitants but like ton and ton of people from belgium and france and germany come here to work
and there is this thing where if you work for 10 years even if it's minimum wage um you are
entitled to like a fat pension um once you reach retirement age and that was paid out from this uh
wealth fund that this uh it's not a kingdom like it's like we have a grand duke um and that was set
to expire like in 2045 or something like because markets whatever and they're spending too much
money as all governments do um so i think it's like the right choice to pivot a little bit into
bitcoin exposure um so i'm bullish on that uh i'm natively german i'm not that bullish on that country
we have a really strong bitcoin community and i would say of all the european countries
we have the most toxic bitcoin only maximal crowd like if i go to a french bitcoin meetup it will be
a bitcoin meetup but people will yeah show you iota and ethereum and solan and all those good
things um iota is still around yeah iota is german by the way and and it is quantum secure
because i know that i invested like in 2015 2016 when did it come out like i i bought that whole
bullshit um david soncibel was his name like oh it's not binary it's uh ternary like you have
minus one plus one and zero and like i bought this whole quantum bullshit like 10 years ago
and my my iota bags during my my shitcoin period um yeah uh those would have been some some
cool cool bitcoin but um yeah it's still around like just yesterday i saw like a paid ad
for for iota which is like insane to me but they were funded in bitcoin i guess
i remember uh i remember the iota day my shitcoiner day around days around that time too
it seems like we've been in bitcoin around the same amount of time what what drew you to it
originally um so i had a friend in in university who was really into this like he was really
paranoid um and he gave me bitcoin um like for free like a ton of bitcoin and i was thinking hey
uh i don't need this i have paypal i have all the means to to pay for stuff and goods and services
and once it reached like uh not euro parity like was at 50 cents or so like i i sold my my bag for
like uh a graphics card um and uh then neglected for like two years and then it came back like
fuck should i have kept this but i was not a cypher punk i was an engineer i was at university
with like technical minded people and there was a lot of conversation about like bitcoin but um i
didn't grok it until let's say 2017 when i realized hey hang on uh all my my stock gains
like i came in and i always i'm gladly emitters like i came in for number go up like i always say
like there's two two kinds of bitcoiners people that come for number go up and fucking liars
and i admit that people come into it and then they change and then they stay for the sovereignty and
they stay for the freedom money and like the fuck you money and those great great aspects but
and maybe today with all the education that we have like a lot more people come into it from
that side without this number go up but like back then i would vager everybody went into bitcoin
because wow this this is an asset that goes up and you know that's why my genesis number go up
is the best technology that humans have ever
come into contact with.
It is
somebody, because we were discussing this
earlier,
I use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
I pay Logan.
He's on here now. He gets paid in Bitcoin
every two weeks.
Other members of our staff get paid in Bitcoin
by my VPN service
with Bitcoin.
And the payments aspect is
very
useful
incredibly important but i think people try to over index on that even though i use it every day
literally um as a payments means people over index on that and try to fade number go up because it's
like uh we're we just sound greedy here but i think it's they get down to bitcoin's sort of
path towards success you need number to go up massively over time yeah i mean it's uh inevitably
like people will have more eyeballs on it and more people will accept bitcoin and want to be
paid in bitcoin um if it's like crab walking for like five years i'd be fine but i would assume
that adoption would like not grow as steadily um i i use bitcoin daily again in my company like i
pay people in canada and in australia and i'd rather put a bullet in my brain to do like a wire
transfer and wait like three or five days and pay like 50 bucks in fees like from a german bank to
a luxembourg bank to like a singaporean and like it takes ages and with bitcoin like just like and
it doesn't get old like every time i get like a separate invoice and i just pay it in like a couple
seconds and then the guy texts me man are you ever like asleep or what no it's like sending like this
bearer asset like this digital cash at the end of the globe in like a second and like there's nothing
i can do to to take or claw it back and that guy is paid and no intermediary has been paid maybe like
i don't know lightning or like an on-chain fee of like a couple cents right now that's amazing
but i get that i'm like an enthusiast like i run my own nodes i have like enough liquidity
management to like pay any invoice like i pay several million sets uh easily when other people
struggle with that uh like the technology is not or the ux is not there yet like i really bullish on Arcade and all these things and I happy that people like smarter people work on that But yeah I want to see more people use it
Are we a dying breed? People
that run our own nodes and
self-custody?
I think if you did last year
taught us anything, is that
running a node makes you a
Bitcoin.
There's a lot of LARP
around that.
every customer that i get they're really like privacy conscious these days like it used to be
like only uh like the tinfoil wearing uh weirdos uh like we're like into this like us like we are
oh i'm using a vpn like that is like weird nowadays it's absolutely normal and now when i
onboard people like i'm a big fan of liana wanted um i always explain the the privacy implications
of connecting your wallet descriptor to an external node
because then, of course, you leak your holdings.
There's no loss of your keys, but you lose some privacy.
And especially with a wallet like Liana,
it's a single click and have a pruned node installed fully.
There's no porting magic.
Everything happens in the background,
and it's like 35 gigabytes of blockchain data downloaded
over the next two, three days or so.
And I show this to people, and they're excited.
wow now i have my own like full node like i can onboard people now 100 the right way they get like
a hardware signer they get like a multi-sig they get a node um and i think that interest has grown
so no we're not a dying breed not on my watch that's good to know what um what do you think
about uh obviously jameson lopp has been following the the wrench attacks on bitcoiners and i think
that as a and then as somebody who's really focused on self-custody multi-sig self-custody
specifically um what do you think about the conversation around self-custody and the fears
that are beginning to increase because of these wrench attacks which if you look at it and you
take eight billion people into accounts um and all right maybe we'll shrink the the total
addressable market to the amount of people that hold bitcoin or wider crypto to maybe hundreds of
millions um i think there was 35 five dollar wrench attacks last year um how do you think it was even
more like i think jameson lob actually like he used to manage this github all by himself and now
he has like somebody who puts all those data entries in there because it was like one one a
week like 52 or something at least um yeah i mean that that drove me to to launch biturance um like
I know how to perfectly protect my Bitcoin against any form of cyber threats.
That is solved.
We have hardware signers.
We have geographically distributed multisigs.
I would say it is because the magic of Bitcoin script,
as opposed to any other shitcoin,
you have all the primitives,
all the security built in natively on Bitcoin to be protected against hacking.
You can be socially engineered,
but like most of these hackings again like they they are like down to user error like in the end
like the person being hacked signed the transaction because he was duped like that is solved like you
can like i i would wager actually like there has not been a hardware signing device that has been
hacked like we all wear these tinfoil hats like i don't know cold card with like a ton of secure
elements etc like everything like that is solved but like i for my life of me could not figure out
what i would do in the event somebody kicks in my door like if somebody comes in and threatens me
my family or like anybody i love um i can of course start drawing like a chart and tell them
hey i have a five of six whatever multi-sig i have like this time decaying thing like
you can't uh physically like uh you have to like abduct me to different places for me to sign the
transaction um wouldn't it be great uh if i could give them like an old ledger or something with
some Bitcoin, even like a larger
sum, and they would be happy
and left me alone maybe.
Why can't they insure something like this?
We're looking around like in 2022,
2021, when we
launched the idea, the company was founded in
2022.
And nobody would want
to touch Bitcoin as an insurable
medium, whereas you can insure your gold bars
against a robbery. You can insure
your fine art against robbery.
That's no problem.
But Bitcoin back then was uninsurable.
and that's why we like launched insurance with the hope to like give you a bargaining chip um in the
event of a five dollar wrench attack and since then like anchor watch has also come along and i think
that is the last missing mosaic like the puzzle piece and like your perfect security setup if you
have like cyber protection plus five dollar wrench protection and what what do you think changes the
minds of lloyds and london and other insurers out there that are getting them comfortable too
i mean becca is very persistent i think
there um so like we when we launched we talked to virtually every single insurance company in europe
um and they laughed in our face and like uh closed the door and some people re-invited us
and kept like stringing us along and sooner or later you realize oh there's like two people three
people five people in these calls um suddenly you realize oh you're being abused for like uh
educating their staff on bitcoin but they're never gonna sign or underwrite your product
um and that abruptly changed uh in 2024 when was it like the the bitcoin etf launched i think as
soon as like larry fink blessed this asset as like okay this is here to stay um you get a callback
from allianz you get a callback from all these other insurance companies because they realize
realize, okay, this is not just some crazy assets.
There is some money to be made.
Insurance companies, they need to invest in products that are of interest to be insured.
And yeah, that was a blessing in disguise.
We launched in 2022.
We had a white label insurer, which was kind of unknown.
And yeah, they went under, sadly, not because of us.
They had a financing round for 50 million euros.
And then by the end of 2024, they had to file Chapter 11.
No customers of ours was hurt by that.
We could migrate.
And now we have Liberty Mutual, one of the largest species insurers in the world as an
underwriter.
And they are not messing around.
It's good to have these financialization developments.
I'm not a big fan of BlackRock, but it helped bring the conversation forward.
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how social the social aspect of a social signaling from those we perceive to be successful comes into
play here and is weird like uh i think that's another thing i've been grappling with but just
sitting back and observing over the last few years since the ETFs launched and here in the
states as we've had these treasury companies launch and Michael Saylor really skyrocketed
himself to the top of Bitcoin fame, if you will, for lack of a better term, is this sort
of confrontation with the cypherpunk for rates that Bitcoin was founded in and grew up with
and the suits coming and saying,
all right, we like this asset too
and people reacting to it.
I think, I mean, I've always been in MBK's camp
where Bitcoin is successful.
Everybody's going to want to adopt it
and you just have to accept that.
It's a great thing.
What do you expect?
Everybody wants a piece of the pie
if we build something that's good.
Of course, nation states will come.
of course like the financial players will come like bitcoin is for for anybody who who wants it
and uh it strengthens the network like the more greedy somebody is the better it is for everybody
else um but there's like yeah entirely new dynamics now like i don't know with venezuela i
don't know if that is fake news or something like really it's really weird uh that's like okay there's
They stayed with 600,000 Bitcoin and Donald has just abducted.
We were talking before we hit record about how Odell likes to troll in the chat.
He's actually trolling me in the chat right now because I did a short video on the Venezuelan story.
And then our team here at TFTC clickbaited it.
And the tweet says, what if I told you a DEA informant might control access to 600,000 Bitcoin?
That's a wild theory.
But I don't know.
do they have 600 000 bitcoin maybe i mean it's just like some some assumption uh and i'm pretty
sure that maduro didn't i mean he had like five different output changes maybe at like
a lot of hardware designers stuck in and what is the nike what is the european perspective on what
the u.s just did over the last five days so like demonstrably like it's not constitutional what you
did um pretending like otherwise it's like a little bit like muddying the the waters there but
these constitutional rules
they work in stable systems
it's like currently the world is not
that and I think
the general
reaction in Europe would be
like orange man bad and like
he can't do that
but if you talk to anybody who has actually
lived under Venezuelan communism
they understand
viscerally
they're very relieved, they're very
happy that he has been removed
and it's like one of the cleanest military operations to have ever occurred.
Like so clean that some people might say, okay, this was like,
he cut a deal and voluntarily like came to the drop-off spot.
But like my take is again, like this was necessary.
It's I'm happy he's gone.
And yeah, even though like I believe more so than Trump,
I believe in soft power and he does not believe in that like at all.
like he like soft power only works on people that listen to reason and there are some international
players right now who would not listen to reason and yeah occasionally reminding everyone uh where
the largest stick resides um that recalibrates like some incentives uh much faster than like some
un statements or like some european finger wagging so yeah i'm on board with this move but
i i would not want to be on the receiving end like i think there was definitely a pre-range deal
like if you look at how happy maduro is when he's like sitting with the dea agents it's like you
knew uh happening um but like going back to i mean again who knows whether or not they have 600 000
bitcoin but i mean people have been speculating and these stories been out there it's been actually
funny to watch um the venezuela bitcoin story hit mainstream because i sure as you know if you been in the industry for a decade you know that Venezuelans I think on a per capita basis were some of the largest adopters of Bitcoin
simply because they needed to,
because they had hyperinflation
and the dictatorship that they were trying to evade.
And Bitcoin mining was big in Venezuela.
I think they were top three country at one point
about 10 years ago.
Then Maduro came in and ruined that
by seizing all the mining operations.
obviously the diaspora that has resulted from the socialist dictatorship over the last 25 years.
You have people sending money back to Venezuela using Bitcoin and stable coins.
And so Bitcoin's been a big theme in Venezuela for well over a decade now at this point.
But I think the theories about how the Maduro regime may have acquired 600,000 Bitcoin again,
And whether or not they did is yet to be determined.
But the theory is that they were doing two things,
one of which was swapping gold for Bitcoin with other countries.
They're a gold-rich country,
and they wanted to diversify those gold holdings into Bitcoin
because it allows them to do things that you can't do with gold,
mainly send large amounts of money over the Internet.
And then the other was they were selling oil,
routing around sanctions, selling oil for Tether,
and then converting that Tether to Bitcoin
because they don't want Tether to blacklist them.
And if you think about them doing that,
like you said, I did not like the Madura regime.
I'm happy that he's out of power,
but let's run with the assumption that they did acquire 600,000 Bitcoin
and did it in that way.
It's pretty cool because it highlights Bitcoin's value prop,
which is this neutral reserve asset outside the purview of
the five i's the g8 un whatever you want to call it yeah i always say like to me as a businessman
like the uh number one use case it's like international trade with bitcoin because it's
it saves so much time and you can find enough crazy people on every continent that accept
bitcoin and it makes things like much much quicker like i i like i don't know i have it's not around
me like i have this in germany we're not trusted or like in europe in general we're not trusted
with a shopping cart you have to put like a coin like yeah to release it and i thought to get rid
of the last fiat i will create like a bitcoin commemorative thing that you put in but you can
remove it immediately like you can crack essentially like shopping carts and i wanted to have this made
out of like brass and i was looking like where to manufacture this and like in china with alibaba
I found a brass molding company.
And they had commemorative coins with Ethereum and Monero, etc.
already in their product lineup.
And I asked them, hey, you manufacture this.
Do you also accept Bitcoin?
And they said, yeah, sure we do.
And instead of sending a wire transfer to Alibaba,
it goes again, Luxembourg, Singapore, China.
It takes at least three days and it costs me 50 euros.
um i like just sent bitcoin with like 22 minutes like on chain they confirmed like a balance payment
was not out yet but like the initial payment and like in less time than it took for them to like
would have received the money via wire transfer they already like seen cmult the tool they showed
me pictures of like here this is the tool like wow this was fucking fast and of course they could at
any point could have like rugged me because there's no you know chargeback but they wanted to have the
other 50 of the money and then they like delivered uh 2 000 of these like stamped uh yeah brass uh
coins to me uh and i was like wow this is like international trade like this was like five years
ago um like why would i ever like use a wire transfer or like people tell me oh i use transfer
wise like even there like you pay a ton of fees and then like the currency conversion and there's
slippage and it takes time and yeah bitcoin just just works globally but now we have stable coins
stable coins are here why do we need bitcoin at all yeah that's uh but people say like michael
saylor has done the most for bitcoin adoption um i always like challenge that idea like he has done
like more than you and i probably definitely ouch i mean he he has uh again also a very big stick
but paolo aruino to me like he is the one guy in the space who discovered and understands product
market shit like i'm not i don't care about tether like i i have no use for it myself but i 100
understand why like everybody in argentina uh like prefers the the brand of dollar attached to
something than like oh it is a volatile asset of bitcoin like he has probably driven crypto
adoption and with that also bitcoin adoption more than any other other person i would say globally
I would co-sign that.
And it's funny listening to him tell the origin story of Tether,
the stable coin specifically, because he's like,
ah, we had some customers asking for it,
and we thought it would be like a $100 million market cap coin,
so we did it.
And lo and behold, now we're one of the largest buyers
of U.S. treasuries in the world competing with nations.
Can you imagine, he wrote that entirely without cloud.
He didn't vibe code it.
imagine you get to create this like before llms it is uh and it's it's been funny watching uh
over the years the tether fud obviously had bitfinexed um yeah who emerged after the 2016
bitfinex hack uh again i fell for the quantum i fell for the bitfinex i fell oh you fell for
of course i i fully i thought oh yeah like why why is there no big four audit why aren't
and then like you see okay they had like liquidation events where they paid out like 20
without like flinching and i like no bank would have survived that like they they are fully funded
like nowadays i believe that um but like back then i mean again i'm a gullible person i guess
i i believe that for for some time well what was it uh i think it was i think around the ft yeah
i think the summer before the ftx blow up in summer 22 i think they had like a three-day
redemption of like 20 billion tether and handled it yeah handled it seamlessly
they they are very very liquid i'm saying like pound for pound like with 200 employees or so
like they are the most profitable company on this face of the planet uh i mean what who's beating
tether as a company like in profitability i don't think there's some vibe coder out there who's uh
he's got a fire under his ass right now that's saying i'm gonna be a company of one that uh
is more profitable i think it's gonna be very hard to be more profitable than tether like they're
buying 8888.888888 bitcoin per quarter it's insane like i mean i used to work in china and
there they are really like big into the number eight because it brings luck and you had to pay
like more if your phone number that you were assigned to had more aids like yeah is there an
association with that like what is the reason why i mean i know the the port is like 88883 like
but i'm i'm assuming there's some they're paying an homage to the chinese uh the chinese
tradition of of admiring the number eight that's just my assumption but uh yeah some some
superstition like i i would also buy 8800 bitcoin if i could but you know different size pockets
the um you mean you mentioned earlier you're excited about arcade and that's something
whether it's Arcade or just Arc generally is,
I mean, you have competing Arc protocols,
but Arc as a sort of high-level protocol,
bringing new extensibility to Bitcoin via second layer
and being interoperable,
lightning, another second-layer protocols.
That's something that I've been really excited about,
and I think it's happening relatively under the radar
behind the scenes.
Not many people are paying attention,
But I think the foundations for the sci-fi banking stack of the future are being built right in front of our eyes.
Like if you combine Lightning, eCashments, ARK, Liquid, Liquid's having its day.
It's been around for a decade now.
People are finally starting to use it.
And then what else is there?
You have Spark as well.
It feels like we're getting to the point where you can really begin to build out the sovereign banking stack.
on top of the protocol yeah i mean bitcoin uh is like we have the scarcity with the limitedness
through that and we can verify it and then yeah i've been using arcade os like the the arc
implementation from um not second btc what's their name i think they're called arc arc labs
arc labs yeah the wonderful like ux like with lightning always say i have this bitcoin why
can't i receive oh you need inbound liquidity like this this conversation alone like you would
not pick up a normie onto anything non-custodial like they they were fine with wallet of satoshi
speaking of europe world of satoshi closed their custodial wallets in europe uh like
one week ago or so like european union asked for some uh data on the users and they said yeah fuck
it we only like you get to withdraw your funds and you can move on to the semi-self custodial
uh world of satoshi version and they're using spark right because they i mean they shut that
on the us years ago but they just came back with their non-custodial spark implementation so i think
it's like some form of like super not private multi-sick thing i have not looked all too much
into it like i i onboard people if it's custodial i onboard them with blink um but uh yeah i mean
it's uh again the tangent i was on was like lightning is too non-user friendly and arcade
is amazing like for that i mean it's again like a beta but you can use arcade os and just deposit
bitcoin and then you can pay lightning invoices and it just works it's like amazing um the only
downside you have to be like come online like every month or so which for some people is too
much of a hassle i guess but um it's amazing that this works without any soft fork which is like a
thing you know yeah and i think they're working on that liveliness ux problem um but it's a
protocols where you can just automatically push things into the next round um
what uh what doesn't exist yet that you that you want to exist within bitcoin
i mean so i'm facing like we work with a traditional bank here in germany one of the
first traditional banks to adopt like a Bitcoin only education program.
And there we had like a very like 3000 people German Bitcoin conference,
like just in October of last year.
And there I had a ton,
like I had a couple of workshops and I did my quiz show.
And then like in the workshops,
I was like blabbergasted and taking it back.
How many older people attended?
There was like 80 people and they were like 50, 60, 70 years old.
into Bitcoin. I was like, wow. And the number one question that came up was always,
how do I make sure that my kids get to my Bitcoin? And I was like, yeah, we are kind of young,
you know, like we're not really thinking about inheritance planning. We're not thinking about
like writing a will or something. But Bitcoin is a special asset where like, if you want to
inherit it properly, like it's in self-custody, like it's not on Coinbase. And Coinbase, it's
trivial to have your death certificate and your family gets your Bitcoin. Maybe. But with self-custody
Bitcoin, there are so many foot guns. And in the audience, there are so many really smart people
asking these questions and think there needs to be much more user-friendly experience for this
kind of customer. Because you can do it with a cold card, with a Bitbox. The Ana wallet, I think,
is the best go-to way to do bitcoin inheritance where you can just have like a multi-sig that
degrades essentially if you're inactive for 15 months and there i would wish but this is only
possible this soft fork that this 15 month relative time lock window would be increased to like five
years or 10 years or something like that so in the event that i kick the bucket that my air just
has to wait can have a pre-registered like hardware signing device and just have to plug it in like
the ux there needs to improve like a little bit and yeah i mean jack dorsey's working on something
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What software would you need, like some sort of covenant?
So, yeah, covenants would be great.
I mean, covenants essentially solve everything.
They would make lightning better.
they would make self-custody
better, like we would have reactive instead
of proactive security
again, yeah, I'm like
just fucking ship CTV now, please
or from me, like
CTV just in French, like template hash
like I'm fine with all of these
but like the development and that's like
very slow, it's good
that it's slow I would say
but yeah, I'm
afraid that too many people
say like being one
of them are like
preaching the ossification of bitcoin which in my opinion is way too early like we're not
there yet the uh we have the 20 what is it the uh 2064 bug we need a hard fork at least once
yeah i mean eventually we need to have those like and again like we wasted the entire year of 2025
talking about a fucking nothing burger about like a data carrier size limit increase which is like
There are so many strong economic incentives that this will not be used or abused.
And like all these, whatever, I'm not going to repeat Matt Crater's favorite word now,
but like all these things were like such a distraction.
We could have spent so much more time on actually improving Bitcoin.
And we know there are bugs like BIP54 right now, like it reached also some maturity.
Like two years ago, three years ago, Matt Corralo had like the great consensus cleanup proposal.
and I think Antoine also worked on this now
where we have the inflation
not inflation, but the
time warp bug, like the time warp
attack that a miner can do
that has been fixed on testnet now
this needs to be merged into
Bitcoin, like in Bit54
there's a bunch of known bugs
known critical bugs that can be exploited
now
and we should focus on actually
discussing those instead of
Nuts vs Core or whatever
in my opinion
No, you said CTV development slow, but CTV has been sort of in an end state for years now. It's been tested.
I mean, everybody, like I made this meme, like the Saw guy, welcome to my Saw trap. You're a Bitcoin developer. There's a perfectly fine covenant proposal in front of you. Your challenge is to leave the room and leave it untouched. It's perfectly fine.
and like everybody comes along oh let's have tx hash it doesn't do enough let's do
check stick from stack two and this and like let's put a template hash like there's so many
like it's the engineering disease like ctv is good enough it has been around i think like 10 years now
2015 or so um there's a big bounty nobody has come up with any way to exploit it
it is safe it will improve bitcoin dramatically um yeah i i don't know how you could be opposed
to to this kind of thing well make the sell you mentioned reactive versus proactive
sort of defense and security what how would you describe those and why would you argue that
reactive is preferable so right now the way bitcoin works we have coins utxos so if you
have a big UTXO and you spend it, you risk all of your wealth and hope that 99% comes back at the
change output, which is a crazy design if you think about it. It's not like Ethereum is account
based. You have a number and it goes up and down, but Bitcoin is UTXO based. And every time you
spend something, you risk your entire, you dump out your entire bucket of gold and hope that the
UTXO comes back. And we make sure, like hardware signers check that the change output has not been
10 byd with it there's no like um yeah there's some kind of attack that replaces the change output
um and with all the security premise that we right now have like i make my living selling
steel wallets like you emboss your 1224 words into steel and that is your backup that you need
if your hardware center fails you go back to this and you can recover everything but what if somebody
else finds it he has access to all of your bitcoin like that is like a single point of failure
and with a covenant you can define this is my vault i put my bitcoin in here i can define
something like velocity meaning i can only spend this much of my bitcoin per day even if there is
a breach like the the thief cannot steal all of the funds or i can define this is my my vault and
from here i can only spend to this known address where like a hot wallet with like kraken or like
another address that is also like secure there's an intermediate step and if i spend to any other
address um i have this big red button that i can push and that will claw back the transaction
and will send it to like another like 24 words hammered on steel like hidden underneath a tree
or somewhere like you have these options where you see okay somebody's happening and i have an undo
option now or i can limit the amount of bitcoin that i can spend and all of these things if i like
point them out everybody yeah i want that like everybody tells me yeah this sounds great
I want that. How do we achieve this? And we jump through a lot of hoops right now with like these decaying multi-sigs with mini-script. Just having a covenant would make this much easier, much smaller, and yeah, the Yerks much better.
I've always been partial to James O'Byrne's framing of it
obviously he had OpVault which looked at CTV
it was like okay if people are afraid of
check template verify because they think it's going to bring too much
let's just focus on the vaulting aspect and bring it to Bitcoin
and make it so that his framing was
make it so exchanges can never get hacked again
and I think that's
if that's exactly what it does or that's one of the products
of implementing something like OpVault is you have the potential to create these
transaction structures that make it very hard to get hacked or not to get hacked but to lose
Bitcoin after getting hacked. That seems like something that is very obvious like we should
all want that but we have this social aspect of Bitcoin development that throws a wrench in that
which is good it's a it's a double-edged sword you want that sort of rough consensus um gridlock
what is that exist what is it what is rough consensus that's a great question i think we're
still trying to figure it out i think it depends on what you're trying to get into bitcoin right
rough consensus is if all the graybeards are agreed and then the
plebslog podcasters are also on board then that is rough
well let's dive into that like how do you view it
as a pleb slop podcaster that has deferred to the great beards in the past
what else am i supposed to do that's that's the million dollar question like i would so i see it
as my um relative to like educate as many people and have this like uh not astroturf like what is
the grassroots like people want this and people institutions want this and if there's enough
yeah incentive from a monetary perspective um people again you vote by having bitcoin like if
you are an economic player in this you can you can vote and be vocal about it um and then we can
achieve like another soft fork i think um but for that we need proper codes proper tests benchmarks
fuzzing and a lot of check boxes need to be ticked uh and the problem with bitcoin is that every four
years we have this big halving event a lot of new people come in and if we talk for four years
more new people come in and they say bitcoin is perfect and then we just start from a new
so i think um yeah to to achieve another soft thought we need to figure out a way to
to get everybody on board in like one to two years to signal for something.
But yeah, I'm kind of bearish on that.
I am too.
I mean, I'm also an advocate for covenants.
I know some people may find that blasphemous,
but I think having been around for a while
and understanding that reactive versus proactive sort of security posture,
that you just described.
I mean, I think that's objectively preferable in my mind.
And I think there's a lot of people who look at the magnitude of the changes
that came with SegWit and Taproot, and they have shell shock
or post-traumatic stress syndrome from the unintended consequences
of those upgrades, and they assume that something similar may happen
with any other future software, whether it be CTV, CAT, whatever it may be,
which is not to say there isn't any unintended consequences that may arise but i think
people do not appreciate how relatively small of a change something like ctv is to segwit or
taproot yeah then again like block size increase is like three lines of code and like one parameter
so that is never a good uh indicator oh it's just a teeny tiny bit of code um but yeah like
the unintended consequences
I hear this a lot and to quote my
favorite shitcoiner Jameson Lopp
like the unintended consequences
are not quantifiable
if you do it and
also they are not quantifiable if you
don't do it like we don't know if
you don't do this upgrade maybe Bitcoin like
apathy will kill it or
like people will move
on to other things and
therefore because you can't quantify both of them
like they even help so
unintended consequences always exist um and that's why we move slowly and have a lot of
eyes on there so that like they are not uh yeah large large mistakes being forked into bitcoin
that's why i'm also like not uh all too keen on having a a quantum uh fork i bet is now with some
non-hardened
quantum, post-quantum
algorithms or whatever.
We need to take time
and we need to improve it because
there will be a lot of tech that if you now
introduce a new post-quantum scheme
that is way too heavy
and way too difficult to verify.
So, yeah.
I just had Jonas, Nick,
and Mikhail Kudnav on to talk about
their hash-based
signatures,
their research paper. It shrinks.
Yeah.
And I don't think people understand or appreciate
like how much you need,
like you're going to need to overhaul
every wallet software that exists.
Like, cause...
Yeah.
Like, standards like PSBT,
you're going to have to change.
It's not like...
uh it's not like you just get quantum resistant addresses you can use everything that's existed
before and that was the most disheartening thing about the narrative and the the uh main character
syndrome sort of forcing itself into the conversation it's just like nobody's talking
about this it's like we've been talking about it for years yes like steve lee had an entire
conference and invited you and you didn't come um because i mean if the rush to upgrade is
i would argue riskier than um being slow uh because who like you mentioned earlier like
who knows when quantum is actually going to manifest and you can really there are so many
there's so many canaries that will drop before like ecdsa is threatened like
again we know with the snowden leagues the nsa is working on quantum computers for quite some time
and you can't assume that not everything will be out in the public not every achievement but with
all these other companies these these private companies like google and sciquantum and like
microsoft and like this small ion q like as soon as they factor like a larger number and they need
like a bridge loan from a vc they would come back and like look look what we did like they will
they will telegraph like their advances so i'm just taking my lap here um and like we have more
than a decade at least and in that time again journalists like uh and then tim ruffing they
they improved on the post-quantum algorithms that the national institute of standardization
and technology suggested and said like yeah we have these i think they call sphinx algorithms and
then they said hey we take this out and we can shrink them make them smaller they're still way
too large to to have like proper throughput in a block but you see there is steady progress and
then there's like lara scheichelman like a lot of other like really smart people that are not vcs
are working on it give them some time and do not distract them with like bullshit discussions
yeah so i mean that was the uh the illuminating thing from my conversation with jonas and mikhail
just like the wallet like particularly if you have low power relatively low power hardware wallets
like the amount of time it's going to take to sign those signatures is going to be
um significantly longer than it takes today and if you've ever done something like a dlc
um even on a mobile wallet you know the signature sort of rounds for that take a minute up to two
minutes sometimes yeah i mean like a multi-state with like 50 cosigners or something like you can
test it like you realize uh i mean mvk is is not cheap it's like a security that's the design
decision to not have like a fully functioning computer in there you could add more oomph into
this of course but like you want to have its purpose built and now it's purpose built for
that but for post-quantum like we have to change like mining qr codes wallets like nodes like
there's a ton and ton of things and we need upgrade hooks so like everybody's on board and like
nothing breaks um it's these things where you realize yeah a decentralized system has a lot
of advantages but also a lot of disadvantages if you want to like move into one direction quickly
like a bank can do key rotation a bank can easily become post-quantum and like not a weekend maybe
but like it's possible with a centralized exchange with bitcoin there will be like uh yeah
a two-year process software has been built up over some projects more than a decade and they're
literally gonna have to just throw out all the uh throughout the engine essentially and rebuild
from scratch yeah i mean jonas and like they're working on on the sccp256k1 library like lipsecp
yeah uh that is uh the the yeah central part of like every like note and wallet and that's
i think is an amazing work and like a lot of a lot of people don't know this and they don't know
know about like who jonas nick is i think i'm always like amazed that like these are the people
that keep like a low profile and these are the actual builders and not the people that are the
loudest on twitter i was very uh very impressed with him i think it was the first time we've
definitely the first time we recorded i'm pretty sure it's the first time we ever met too but he's
like he can explain things very easily he is very personable um you can tell he cares deeply about
this and understands the uh the third or second third order effects of these changes that people
are flippantly trying to uh rush uh bitcoiners into yeah i mean so in germany we have a bitcoin
community and they recently made uh how do you say it because i've had i've had people
um on rhr rabbit hole recap i've had people zap us and uh pump the uh the german speaking bitcoin
podcast how do you say it i don't 20 i i in swanzig means 21 like i is one and 20 is 20
i and i and swanzig okay i don't you can just say 21 people will know
but yeah like we have this community and an artist made like a trading card game and made
like 21 like bitcoin personalities and for some reason i'm one of those which is like undeserved
but like jonas nick has one christian decker has one a lot of people like gg has one and i think
it's like these are the the actual people doing stuff um again not vcs not mechanics on twitter
yeah mechanics on twitter um what uh what else should we cover here what are you what are you
looking forward to in 2026 what do you think the priority should be so i haven't made my prediction
list yet but i really really want i don't have my hat in reaching distance right now i want to
see like a pardon or clemency for kian and bill um like yeah uh i actually like again kian like celebrated christmas and then i saw like i mean he must be happy to go into prison because the last two days before he had to be arraigned he was arguing with Mechanic
on Twitter.
I mean, this can't be it.
The last days in freedom, he has to argue with people on Twitter and justify things.
Oh, a Nazi's on your side.
Shut the fuck up.
I want Donald Trump to be cool and send a message that writing code, even if it is abused by criminals, is not a crime.
You're not responsible if you write privacy software.
You're not responsible if people abuse technology.
That's my only wish for 2026.
The rest, I don't know.
Bitcoin can go down to 30,000 and shake on all the treasury companies.
I'm fine with that.
But I really want to see Trump doing another solid similar to Ross.
Do you think the onus is on the industry in the United States to preserve, from a legal perspective, I guess, preserve the ability to use Bitcoin?
It doesn't seem good in Europe right now.
i mean so i have to say the the laws around bitcoin in germany are better than in the united
states uh but that is i think purely purely by accident so uh whereas uh you will always be
tax liable in the event of you like selling or using bitcoin in germany uh if i hold it for one
year i'm free there's no capital gains i can just spend it and that is like really really nice and
you have a right to
your privacy.
I'm fine with that, but that is
born not on purpose.
I think it was done on accident.
They're talking about
let's get rid of this.
People are speculating and making money on that
and we need a cut and they want to remove
this one. You're holding limits
and maybe even backdated.
I agree.
It is good
to have
people
in the White House
I mean I wish they were more pure
I wish they wouldn't do
so many crypto scams on the side
but
as long as
the United States
allows
for Bitcoin to thrive
game theories at play other nations
will not forbid it
and that is again
yeah America can be a shining light
and
other than that yeah now it is this weird uh weird transitionary period at least from my
perspective that we're in we're getting the suits the big guys the nation states are coming and it's
like oh what are you gonna do with bitcoin and going back to the conversation like softworks
covenants specifically if nation states do step in in size in the next few years like will softworks
be impossible i think yeah i mean i have this article and i think shinobi has never published
it um why nation states uh need covenants or rather people living in nation states that have
adopted bitcoin need covenants because one of the key advantages of gold is that you cannot take a
pallet of gold onto a helicopter when you flee the south american country whereas if you amass
your bitcoin uh of the money that you take out of uh your your population um that is very easy to
take with you if you if you flee uh to i don't know i mean it has happened that some kind of
dictator has rugged a population and stolen money um by like transferring it in a swiss bank account
um bitcoin makes it so much more easy and there you could have a proper like covenant where like
okay as long as you're in power you get to sign uh if you um yeah get voted out uh your your key
will be rotated out and yeah i've written an article about like we need covenants for nation
state adopting too like the next article needs to be like we need covenants to prevent quantum
like we need to attach it somehow uh to to fork in covenants i think well i think you're uh you're
touching on something that i think is very important and something that bitcoiners really
need to get better at is framing these things i think of one thing that i'm passionate about and
would love to see is pay join get implemented widely particularly with large exchanges and
um i know a lot of the exchanges outside of bull bitcoin um shy away from it because they're like
oh well like the privacy thing is too much it's like no you just frame it as transaction batching
we need to save shareholder capital by being more efficient when we spend bitcoin on chain when we're
to to our users um yeah not only that framing is very important yeah yeah like like tip 77 like i
mean the bull bitcoin integration is great um who was it um there was an article with the
bitcoin policy institute gerald gerald gerald glickman wrote something and it was really like
an interesting spin on that where he's saying exchanges should be mandatory coin joining and
obfuscating funds because you have a from a banking law perspective you will have to have a
certain level of privacy you are mandated as a bank to have private customer funds and with bitcoin
currently they like grossly reusing addresses and like they not doing these things and he had like
a very interesting article a couple years ago like four years ago so i need to find it i'll
send it to you um where he's like arguing exchanges need to coin join by law yeah
it's just this aversion to private i mean i know why the large governments of the world don't like
privacy because they are losing control of many aspects of uh their ability to rule as they print rent more money go into more debt and begin to lose the narrative in the realm of the social But I think that the most disheartening thing
is we have the potential, like I said earlier,
especially with these second-layer protocols maturing
to build a completely new banking stack on top of the Bitcoin protocol.
And it's desperately needed in this day and age.
I think the banking infrastructure is completely antiquated
and not suit for purpose.
in the digital age and for some reason or another i think mainly because they worry about losing
control or being hindered from actually building out this sci-fi banking stack
i just dropped off i'm back sorry yeah just you cut you cut out a little earlier
the when you're giving your whole coin join spiel i only caught the tail end but uh luckily all this
is being recorded uh recorded locally so it'll look good in post yeah so um yeah coin joining
the ux is great another thing that would improve it is sisa like a signature aggregation um has
been discussed for quite some time uh um if we implemented that i think greg ross said it would
be cheaper than a regular transaction to do coin joints with visor or cisa that was funny like going
back to the quantum thing too it's like how much of this stuff are we going to focus on and then
it's like oh we have to do quantum resistant addresses that completely i don't know if you
could do cisa with quantum resistant addresses but if you could that would make more sense too
yeah we need a bitcoin pr department to to spin these things that is yeah
who should do that i mean i don't know if you're being facetious there but i think uh
these things do need to be uh articulated to the broader market in better ways
yeah it's it's oftentimes you see uh very smart bright developers we need
all to translation services for for bitcoin yeah we need uh autism to adiq translation services um
yeah more and better communications also like a learning from 2025
if communication can be improved lots of trauma can be avoided
Yeah, there was a lot of drama in 2025.
Here's the hoping that there's a bear market in drama in 2026,
but I won't be holding my breath for that.
I guarantee you there will be more.
I'm really, really bullish on drama and trauma.
What are your hopes for 2026?
um selfishly i hope that uh that bitcoin collateralized residential mortgages become
a thing here in the united states i think that would be massive but uh okay i think uh no i mean
it was a big theme in 2025 i wrote about it talked about a lot but again
as you may be able to tell i think this emergence of these interoperable second layer
protocols is really powerful and fascinating to me and i guess my hope for 2026 is
instead of quabbling about different protocol changes getting distracted by
op return or quantum resistance let's begin people begin focusing on like okay how can we leverage
these second layers to create
more extendable
Bitcoin user experiences and build
cooler
end products at the end of the day
that make Bitcoin more useful for
individuals
Are you bullish on Citria?
I mean
am I going to use
Citria? Probably not
i mean as soon as there will be a polymarket calci prediction market type
on bitcoin and i think like with citrea you can build something like this
i think that will be a very big inflow into bitcoin um and there will be a lot of you know
prediction markets not only funded by rob hamilton but like actual prediction markets like
do too yeah well like what's wrong with something like predicts right do you need to do all that
predicts is like custodial yeah and with like in evm type of layer 2 which i'm always very
impressed like robin linus is a close friend of mine um and i really like appreciate what what
they are building there um like alpham and citrea and like all these things that i i didn't think
were possible to build on bitcoin without any changes to to the code um i think it's very
cypherpunk i again i i'm not interested in any sdr whatever virtual machine um but
yeah prediction markets uh i'm very surprised how big they have become and these things
yeah i think that they will come this year are you surprised why are you surprised it was
predicted that prediction markets would become a thing this is uh it's a long awaited
there's this great quote by michael say like i think in 2018 where he's like denigrating bitcoin
says like oh bitcoin is a fad it will have the same future as um online gambling and online
gambling is bigger than ever as is bitcoin like he's right on the money he took the wrong under
on that bet um i'm i'm not a like yeah i played the tone race poker tournament uh poorly um and
i not really into gambling but uh i see what like it a very nice way of um finding truth because if people put their money where their mouth is like I trust those polls more than like a general Twitter poll let say
Agreed.
And that's what it was actually, I'm not sure if you saw it, but Brian Armstrong came out, I believe it was yesterday or the day before.
And people were saying like, hey, you guys just recreated gambling.
And obviously, yes, to an extent, some of these prediction markets are gambling.
But he acknowledged, like, hey, this is actually a way to discover truth faster because you have insiders who are financially motivated to leak information playing on these prediction markets.
And we've seen that come true.
And you have a bunch of people saying, oh, my God, this is terrible.
We don't like insider trading in traditional markets.
and it's like it's true like i don't like when politicians insider trade off of information um
that they they glean from subcommittee meetings that are not public um but i think this is
different i think the dynamics is it more that you don't want them to have it or is it more that you
would be fine if everybody could do it exactly because i feel like yeah in a free market like
again there is no such thing as like insider trading like and it truly truly like doesn't
exist anywhere in the world but like in a truly free market i think yeah instead of trading is
just called trading yeah i think you articulate it very well my thoughts on it it's like as long
as everybody can do it um it should be beneficial and like you saw it with uh over the weekend with
maduro there was an insider who hopped on the poly market fat trade and made a bunch of money
i was looking in my in my signal chat whether or not i was invited to the pete hexath maduro
signal
what would you say if you if you hopped in that group chat i mean i would like would be a fly on
the wall and then i would uh put a outsized bet and then i would do the dennis porter style huge
breaking as soon as we have like internal confirmation like that the ego has landed
or something i don't know i would i would monetize it i i think i agree with you i think prediction
market's going to be continue to grow whether or not they manifest on bitcoin i think i would not
i mean i think they should manifest on bitcoin and i think ultimately they will but i i think
more broadly people don't understand still don't grasp the profundity of what's happening right now
and don't grasp how this is going to change the world like right now we're seeing it
in dinks and dunks like one-off events but once that hits scale and the people are conditioned
to go to prediction markets to make bets about certain events with particularly insiders with
knowledge of these events it's going to really change the dynamics of how information flows and
how the world actually operates yeah i mean one of my favorite stories um i'm not sure if i'm
supposed to share this but i'm gonna do it anyways uh like you remember the uh electric uh money
um documentary about who satoshi like hbr this documentary like two or three years ago peter
Todd. And everybody
says, oh, it's Adam Beck, it's
Hal Finney, it's
Lanzazeman, and there was
a Polymarkis, and
there was one very outsized
bet on Peter Todd.
And with documentaries that have been
recorded months in advance,
people that have been part of this
documentary
had some insider knowledge.
And yeah, some people
do bet on themselves.
Which, you know...
it was a big fan when i learned that like don't hate the player hate the game uh like why would
you bet on something like i mean i get betting on like an election where you like everybody knows
the outcome at a certain point in the future but why would you bet on something that has been
decided in the past like movies are generally not like uh live streamed like there's like an entire
production team that knows what happened there but yeah yeah it's a brave new world it's a brave
new world chris where um or anybody so curious find out more about you what you're working on
seed or biturance yeah uh follow me on on twitter at coinjoint um i i post about my work i do uh
weird acquired taste memes um you can write me an email chris at cdor.io or at biturance.io
always happy to talk about Bitcoin.
Always, yeah,
up for conversation there.
Well, keep it up. Like I said, I've
been appreciating your game from across the pond
here. It's a very good game.
It's my star rising.
I don't know if
you're very tall. I don't know how
high it can rise from here, but
yeah, thank you
for doing this. This was fun.
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Marty.
All right. Peace and love, freaks.
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