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March 21, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:16:34

BITCOIN: THE HISTORY OF A REVOLUTION!

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Time	Text
	Well, hello to everyone.
	Hello. Good morning. Good morning. How are you doing?
	Good afternoon here.
	It's Greece. Oh, you're in Greece?
	Oh, very nice. Yes, it's five in the afternoon.
	Wow. My wife is Greek.
	And I actually thought what I was going to do last year was I was going to go to Greece and do a history of philosophy while walking around the ruins.
	If you can, please tell.
	Oh, I would love to.
	I would love to. She speaks Greek.
	Yeah, she's quite down with the culture.
	And I would love to visit.
	Oh, you know, there's a rough thing about this COVID stuff.
	Is the lack of travel.
	I mean, the lack of travel is really, really rough.
	All right. Well, hi, everybody.
	Good to see you, Thomas.
	Good to see you. Oh, you put Greek letters in there, didn't you?
	I can see a Nikola.
	Nikola? Yeah, we've talked about two years ago in one of your shows.
	Yes, that's right. We talked about the challenges of surviving in Greece on a salary, right?
	No, no, no.
	No? Was it separate? Was it a call?
	I got divorced.
	I have a child.
	He's nine years old now.
	Excellent. And I'm pretty happier.
	Oh, you were happier after the divorce?
	Yeah. And he is too.
	Fantastic. Fantastic. All right.
	Well, hi, everybody.
	We've obviously been chatting since dawn.
	And we've got some new faces here.
	So for the new faces, if you'd like to introduce yourself...
	Christoph actually has been a friend of mine for many years and has agreed to join us.
	So if you'd like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your history, he's actually kind of known in the Bitcoin space.
	He's like a dude. He's like a, you know, obviously he's up there because the major concern of people is what happens if the internet goes down.
	So he's, as you can see from his backdrop, he's up there with the Tesla stuff.
	The Starlink stuff, just making sure it all works.
	So it's very nice for him to take off his time from making sure the internet beams around the planet from orbit.
	So, Christoph, if you'd like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself, that would be delightful.
	Sure, yeah. Just checking in for my moon bunker here.
	Yeah, so my name is Kristof.
	As you mentioned, I have been working in the crypto space for a few years and primarily in the capacity of focusing on security.
	So that's my main wheelhouse, but obviously I've been involved in investment and been interested in economics, fostered through your show and all that kind of good stuff.
	So yeah, glad to be here.
	All right, nice to meet you.
	Everybody knows me. Jared, we've met.
	Tim, we talked to before.
	Oh, look who ended up in the center of all things.
	Who gave us his Greek letters?
	If you'd like to introduce yourself.
	Greek man with beard. Please go ahead.
	You're muted. Oh, yeah, you got to unmute yourself.
	Hello, me? Okay.
	My name is Nick. I live in Greece.
	I'm a pharmacist. And I've bought Bitcoin about 2016.
	So we have, of course, a first year.
	This is a man named Nick from Greece.
	Very unusual. Very unusual combination.
	And Thomas, we talked before.
	You keep changing your backdrop, man.
	Last time I was in the CIA bunker.
	Right. Okay. Red Pill Songs.
	Good to see you again, brother. How are you?
	MK, we've got a bunch of people here who aren't on video.
	It's totally fine, of course. I've got a bunch of stuff to talk about, but one of the things I wanted to get into is, this has nothing to do with my addiction to gossip in any way, shape, or form, but just for archival, historical, technical purposes, we had promised the fine listeners That we would be chatting a little bit about the blockchain wars, the history of the battles over control of Bitcoin.
	And I wasn't part of the Bitcoin community in any particular way during this sort of, I guess, sort of close to four or five years where a lot of these battles were going on.
	All I know is that they were and remain savage.
	Not as savage as the battle between bitcoins and what are sometimes colloquially called shitcoins, but the battle is real.
	The battle was strong.
	The battle has...
	I think elements of cocaine cult religiosity to it, if I can characterize it that way, which, you know, I appreciate.
	I mean, I love the irrational passion that drives these things forward.
	So Christophe was around for a lot of these battles.
	Now, remember, Christophe has a very soothing and calming voice.
	So I will be screaming in the background occasionally just to provide the additional drama.
	But Christophe, if you'd like to lay out the general The story of what happened.
	And also so people understand, you know, Bitcoin is not physics.
	Bitcoin is not something that operates independent of human choice, human consciousness, pressure groups.
	I won't say it's political because it's not enforced at the point of a gun or anything like that.
	But it's kind of like language, right?
	I mean, we all have to at some point agree to adopt Certain phrases, right?
	I mean, I've tried to inject certain phrases into the known universe.
	Occasionally it works. Most times it doesn't.
	We all have to agree that we're going to use the word bling for, you know, six months or so, and then maybe it's going to stay, maybe it's going to fade.
	So language is a living thing.
	Bitcoin is a living thing, but it does require a general consensus in order for a particular model to move forward.
	People have to accept it. In that sense, it's very democratic.
	But if you could tell us a little bit about, well, actually a whole lot if you want, the history of what was going on in the Bitcoin universe since, I guess, I was last around.
	No pressure, man. But, you know, if you could just encapsulate and consolidate all of this into one tasty soundbite series, that would be fantastic.
	Yeah, sure. So everyone else, feel free to jump in and provide corrections for sure.
	So the history around Bitcoin There's a lot of little details there, right?
	And if you try to go on the web and surf around for some of the histories there, man, it is really difficult to find a single article that tries to put all the stuff in, you know, the important details.
	Sorry to be annoying. Could you just remember to look at the camera rather than at us?
	Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, sorry.
	So it's hard to kind of condense it all into one, you know, comprehensible article, but There's a couple important things to keep in mind as far as the Bitcoin history goes that will help put it in perspective.
	Part of the story is Bitcoin versus the state.
	We know that going back all the way to the 80s, there's organizations out there like the NSA, GCHQ, all those You know, spy, military, cyber warfare kind of organizations.
	They've been thinking about the issue of internet money for a really long time and talking about it semi-publicly, right?
	And they have experts in cryptography, economics, etc.
	And so as the internet was sort of becoming more and more popular, really blowing up, they early on got the idea like, you know, someone could make an internet money.
	And the most obvious way to do that would be to create a company to make its own currency, right?
	And some people tried that.
	What tended to happen is that those company backed currencies that were not pegged to a particular fiat currency ended up getting used by some less than savory folks for less than savory stuff.
	Then they got targeted by governments for For abetting criminals, basically.
	And so they were shut down.
	And some of those people actually went to jail for having the incredible attitude that they could niche their own currency, right?
	That's not something that you're supposed to do.
	But also, these government agencies kind of got like...
	If you combine the background with economics and also their expertise in cryptography, they're like, wait, someone could probably use cryptography to create kind of an internet money here that's not necessarily tied to a particular company.
	Maybe it would be tied to some kind of pseudonymous entity, or maybe it would even be able to turn it into a protocol that many people could run on their computer.
	That became more apparent when BitTorrent came around.
	BitTorrent certainly was in this vein of like, you know, cypherpunk or cyberpunk kind of technologies where all these people were running the software on their computer and some of them were doing illegal stuff with it.
	They were downloading movies and violating copyright law and all that kind of stuff in a way that really irritated some fairly powerful people, but they had a heck of a time trying to snuff it out.
	And so to the point where I think that, you know, a lot of the way that streaming services work these days, there's a lot of conveniences afforded to the customers of those streaming services that probably wouldn't be if it weren't for the fact that you can do BitTorrent kind of stuff, right? So that shaped that industry as a whole.
	So they got the idea that there would be an internet money coming around.
	And as soon as Bitcoin was released, To the public and some of these early sort of cypherpunks were chatting about it on newsletters and all that stuff.
	NSA, similar organizations, were well aware of this technology, taking a close, keen look at it.
	And they immediately got the idea that like, well, in the extreme scenario, this currency could start to compete with fiat currencies and break up this agreement between thieves of central bankers that like, yeah, okay, There's going to be a competition between currencies, but there's going to be some agreements about how that competition is allowed to happen.
	Ultimately, everyone ends up paying their taxes in their local currency and that gives it a specific kind of value that ultimately backs that currency.
	And so as soon as Bitcoin came around, they were studying it.
	They were looking at how to monitor such networks, how to disrupt them.
	They started creating job postings that are pretty publicly out there saying, hey, we want to hire people to study Bitcoin and figure out how to mess with it, right?
	And so far, that hasn't overtly happened, right?
	And part of that probably goes to the incredible success of Bitcoin Being launched and being pretty robust from the get-go.
	There were some bugs early on that had to be fixed and so forth.
	There's been bugs here and there in Bitcoin over the years, but nothing that has proved catastrophic.
	Part of that is the success of that, but also probably there's a bit of a waiting game there for them to reveal their hand a bit.
	They're probably building some capabilities to mess with cryptocurrencies that they haven't decided to exercise quite yet.
	Now, the other way that you would go as a spy organization at trying to disrupt a cryptocurrency would be to get involved with the people.
	It's pretty clear that Bitcoin, and to my knowledge, there aren't any other cryptocurrencies that have surpassed this, is limited in the sense that when it first came out during the first few years of its existence, It clearly did not have the capability to support a global economy, right? It needed to go through some software meteration in order to get to that point.
	So if we're starting at point A and point B is Bitcoin is capable of the entire world using Bitcoin, right?
	If you need to get from point A to point B, as a spy agency, part of your expertise is to be able to insinuate yourself in the process to get from point A to point B and disrupt that process.
	And really, all you would have to do is stall.
	If you can get people to just not make progress, you've won.
	This is a little bit speculative, but we can probably guess that spy agencies are doing some sort of effort to stall the progress of cryptocurrency so that they have time to catch up.
	They're these big, slow-moving organizations, and it takes them a long time to You know, to deal with new threats like this.
	And this is a very new kind of threat on their radar.
	And so it's to their benefit to kind of stall that process.
	I'm somewhat known as like a big blocker, so to speak, in the crypto space.
	But I'll try to be really fair about how I sort of present this information.
	I'll try to do it in a neutral way.
	Big blocker means that One of the limitations that was apparent for Bitcoin initially was you can't do a whole lot of transactions per second on the Bitcoin blockchain because there's a maximum amount of data per block that is added to this chain of blocks and that defines the maximum number of transactions that could be done per second if you're fully utilizing all that space as miners are solving these riddles and finding blocks and then using that to include new transactions into the I think?
	And so I'm one of these people that was sort of in favor of increasing the size of these blocks so you could stuff more transactions in there.
	And there's other people that might call themselves small blockers or something like that.
	I guess that's a bit of a derogative in the other direction who want them to stay at the current size or be sort of moderately increased over time.
	Or even some people wanted to actually make them even smaller than they are today.
	There's even that contingency.
	That's a bit of the lingo there is the small blocker versus big blocker kind of divide.
	So people with the spy stuff happening in the background, we all know that it's there, but obviously the spies are trying really hard not to be pointed out.
	I'm not disagreeing that that is a possibility, but what led you to that conclusion?
	Because I'm not tracking with the spies are there.
	Maybe the spies are there, but how do we know if they were or weren't there?
	Well, I know that the spies have particular interest with regards to Bitcoin, that they have the capability to get involved in the community process.
	We know from leaks that have happened from the NSA and so forth, that they've gotten involved in other A kind of software development processes in order to subvert them.
	Somewhat famously, the NSA created and promoted a protocol that a cryptographic standard that is most likely backdoored in the way that the NSA is able to decrypt data that uses that standard.
	And they pushed it into particular software projects saying, hey, please use this standard, right?
	Yeah, that's really just the tip of the iceberg if we get into the CIA and some of these other kind of spy agencies.
	I mean, they get into communities, they get into companies, they blackmail people, they do all kinds of nasty stuff.
	So I don't think there's a person out there who can say, It's been involved in Bitcoin.
	He's definitely a spy or something like that.
	I guess he's doing a good job that he hasn't been spotted in that way.
	But, you know, the accusations have flown around quite a bit.
	So maybe it has happened, maybe it hasn't, but it's always been this cloak of sort of mistrust, mutual mistrust that's happened into the crypto space.
	And certainly as we got into this kind of historical arguments over how Bitcoin should be changed, that's been the backdrop there is accusations and mistrust.
	Does that make sense to you?
	I just wanted to mention as well that if, I mean, Bitcoin does really threaten the status quo, and if there was no infiltration on a mechanism that really undermines or challenges the status quo, it would be the first time in the history of power that this had never occurred.
	So I think the default position would be Yeah, people are really good at ruling us, you know?
	I mean, we're not idiots, and they're really, really good at dividing us and ruling us and sniffing out threats to their power.
	I mean, look what happened to the Liberty dollar, which is a gold-backed currency that just got smashed.
	And yeah, so I mean, I think the default position should be, yeah, they may not be very good at the free market, but they're very good at owning people.
	And very good at sniffing out threats to their power.
	And that's been the big question.
	You know, is Bitcoin something that they want to transfer their wealth to, in which case it's going to be a little more safe?
	Or is it something that they're going to want to get rid of as a competitor to what are called the cuck bucks, the fiat currency?
	And so, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt.
	I just wanted to point out that I think the default position should be, yeah, they're good at this stuff.
	And this is a... A threat to the existing power structure.
	However, the other big threat to the existing power structure is math.
	Which is that you simply can't create this much currency and have it be sustainable.
	Plus, the people in charge know that it's the end of the run.
	Democracies last 250 years.
	They're always characterized by people voting for extra free stuff at the expense of the future.
	And that future then closes in.
	And when you have 40% of all US dollars being created just in the last 12 months alone, you're kind of at the end run.
	These guys know the history of the Great Depression.
	They know the history of Weimar. They know the history of the French Revolution.
	They know this stuff, because you've got to study how to keep your power.
	And so right now, the way that they used to do it was they would simply grab gold and leave the country.
	That's not such a viable strategy if everybody's hyperprinting and COVID is everywhere.
	So are they going to want to transfer their value to Bitcoin and then try and make a go of it there?
	That's my guess. But sorry, I didn't want to go on a tangent, but I think that the assumption should be, yeah, it's a big threat to the existing system, but it's also a life raft to the value that's been preyed upon for the last couple of hundred years.
	I'd like to add that we're used to public employees being woefully incompetent, but as an organization trying to, in its own way, survive and continue ruling, they're not going to put their best and their brightest on the front lines.
	You know, even in the biggest, the highest positions in, you know, public office, things like that.
	So there is, I don't think we can take for granted that all public employees are, and all state organizations are incredibly incompetent.
	All right, so Christoph, if you want, sorry, does anybody else wanted to add something?
	Christoph, you had a nice slow, and I didn't want to interrupt you.
	Stephan, I think they don't really know yet what to do.
	They don't really know what to do.
	To put their money in Bitcoin or fight it.
	I think they do both.
	There's no real they unified, like, all one lump of people.
	There's competing interests in the CSA versus the NSA. There's a ton of governments competing against.
	They're not a conglomerate of, like, one unified, powerful people.
	Like, these are conflicting interests when we talk about they.
	Well, there's going to be three groups of people as a whole.
	Those who think the current system can continue, in which case they're going to fight to oppose Bitcoin.
	There are those who, I don't know, 50-50, is the ship going to sink?
	Is the ship going to keep going?
	In which case they're going to want to keep Bitcoin as a life raft.
	And then there are those who genuinely understand that the existing system simply cannot continue and are desperate to keep Bitcoin afloat.
	Those people will be at battle within the state.
	And I think that those are three levels of intelligence.
	And I think that the more intelligent will probably win out.
	So, sorry, Christoph, if you wanted to continue with...
	Oh, yes. No, sorry, Tim. Nick, you had something to say?
	Yeah, I just want to add in the...
	So I don't want to echo what Christoph is saying.
	Like, as an observer of the conflict at the time, There was a lot of concern from all sides that we couldn't just let the protocol evolve any which way.
	It had to be managed carefully in order to avoid the state being able to interfere.
	So the conflict at its root was about how do we make sure the protocol is in the safest position relative to the state trying to interfere with it.
	And that was the core thing.
	Yeah, yeah. I agree, Tim.
	Even though I think Tim and I are probably likely on opposite sides of the way that the scaling went.
	We're all brothers in the sense of like that, like, well, anyone who's on the NSA rooting for us was rooting for freedom, separation of money and state ultimately.
	And the how to get there was, I think, the big difference between the small and big blockers.
	I don't know if you'd agree with that, Tim. Yeah, so when you had the big blockers and they were explaining why this needs to be done this way, at the end of the argument it was, therefore we will be safer from government intervention.
	And then the small blockers, at the end of their argument, they said the same thing.
	Yeah, totally. The ones who are in good faith, which I think is most...
	Now, does anybody want to explain to me?
	And remember, it's been a while since I've done technology.
	My last job, God helped me in the technical field, was a director of marketing.
	So I'm afraid you have to give me those Scott Adams googly eyes when you're explaining this stuff.
	If you could step me through why the small blockers and why the big blockers both believed that their solution was protecting Bitcoin.
	Do you think the fairest way would be for the big blocker people?
	I don't know where everyone falls on that, but just try to articulate the small blocker and then get corrected.
	So we have the fairest steel man version of that.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm not on either side of the fence.
	I tend to be a small blocker when it's cold out, but that's probably because I'm rhyming.
	But sorry, go ahead. I'd personally be interested in Kristoff continuing where he was going and seeing how that wraps up.
	Yeah, that's fair. Sure.
	So, yeah, so the SPY stuff is sort of the background, right?
	So in about 2013, I mean, Bitcoin was kind of growing and developing and people are making changes to the protocol slowly over time.
	Things were going okay.
	Some acrimony had certainly set in already.
	And part of that had to do with people's original vision for exactly how Bitcoin was going to work.
	Some people wanted to do like many, many small, cheap transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain that had created companies based around that idea, right?
	So they were pretty invested in it.
	And other people thought that was not necessarily so wise for technical reasons that we'll get into.
	And so as Bitcoin became more and more popular and all these new companies were sort of using Bitcoin, the fees started going up because of this limited block size space.
	So once you start to use up more and more in the blocks and they get more full, now when people are, when they submit their Bitcoin transaction to the network, they have to attach a fee to that to tempt the miners to include that.
	So it starts to become a auctioning system, a bidding system where you're trying to outbid other people.
	So around 2013, at the start of the year, typical fees might have been like two cents per transaction or something like that.
	And it sort of crept up and up and up to the point where it got to maybe like 40 cents per transaction or something like that.
	And some of these use cases started getting priced out of the market where Satoshi Dice was one of these famous companies started by Eric Forgeys, who's a pretty epic entrepreneur in the space where people were doing gambling on there and often in these small amounts and each gamble might be one transaction.
	And so as the fees started going up, those kind of apps were getting priced out of the market.
	And so, you know, people really started speaking up at that point.
	And they were like, hey, we need to raise the block size because that's just the most obvious, dumb way to alleviate the situation.
	It's like, okay, we have limited space.
	Let's just make more space.
	And then some people said, well, what kind of precedent is this going to set?
	Like, are we just going to keep bumping up the space?
	What if it starts going logarithmic?
	You know, like, what's the deal there?
	And the other important thing to keep in mind here is It's to do with the different roles in the Bitcoin network.
	So a lot of people know about the miners, right?
	They're solving these math equations.
	They're doing these big beefy ASIC machines that are dedicated to just doing mining.
	And some of these operations are huge in their warehouses and China with hydroelectric power and all that kind of stuff.
	The other kind of computer that is important in the Bitcoin network is the full nodes.
	These are people that are running the original Bitcoin software, right?
	That are validating transactions.
	And there's a good deal of debate over just how important those full nodes are, but they're another part of the network list, let's say.
	And some people really want to be able to run their own full node.
	They feel that this is core to the security model of Bitcoin, that many people can also validate transactions.
	You know, they saw in 2013 and on the centralization of mining in a big way in China, places like China, where, you know, at some point, maybe more than 50% of the mining was happening in China.
	And that's a special number in Bitcoin because we had the 51% attack where if you get...
	The majority of the mining power in the network, you can start doing all kinds of nasty stuff with cryptocurrency.
	So people saw that kind of centralization and they were worried about that being housed under the Communist Party of China.
	Maybe they would just swoop in and take all the miners suddenly and do something like that.
	And so they said, well, look, we need to be able to validate these transactions aside from the miners.
	We need to keep tabs on what's happening with this Bitcoin blockchain and not just trust a small number of people there.
	And so there's a very active debate about who is important in the Bitcoin network.
	Was it the miners that were the most important?
	Was it the businesses? Was it the users?
	And there was a lot of arguments over that.
	And so if we were to keep just raising the block size, That starts to price people out of being able to validate the transactions, right?
	Because they need to have the bandwidth, they need to have the CPU speed, they need to, you know, have all that stuff in place.
	And you go from, you know, I could do this on a Raspberry Pi to like, you know, you could We hypothetically need a supercomputer in order to participate in the Bitcoin network.
	And some people literally thought, even today, they're like, yeah, supercomputers.
	We'll just have only supercomputers doing this Bitcoin stuff and everyone else will find some other way, some level of trust from there, but they won't be participating directly in the network, validating everything.
	And that concerned a lot of people.
	So there was a lot of argument over that.
	So the fees really drove this argument.
	And then... One of the really important historical things that happened was there was this guy named Mike Hearn, who was a former Google engineer, really excited about Bitcoin, but pretty overtly not a libertarian.
	And a lot of the people who were originally involved in Bitcoin were libertarian folks.
	A lot of cypherpunks, meaning We're good to go.
	Bitcoin client is called Bitcoin XT. He got a bunch of the companies in the space to sort of back him.
	And he was like, yeah, we're just going to make this decision for y'all.
	And people are going to run Bitcoin XT for a little while and they're going to stop using the previous client.
	Screw the huge team of developers that were working on this stuff previously.
	We're just going to move on without you.
	And then once you've accepted that we've moved on and we've got bigger blocks now, People can go back and move to your client once you get back up to speed, but we're tired of this.
	Wait, so the guy from Google wanted to create a new monopoly?
	Huh. Yeah, yeah.
	That was slightly concerning for some people.
	Was he extraordinarily persuasive?
	Did he have a lot of money?
	I mean, how was it that this one guy was able to get the architecture to pivot?
	It wasn't that big of a community back then, and he was just influential.
	Sorry. Also, Satoshi, when he left, he kind of handed the keys to the Bitcoin Core GitHub account to Gavin Andreessen.
	So Gavin Andreessen was like this very notable person who, you know, when he talked, people cared what he said.
	And he was also like, it was like Batman and Robin, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andreessen.
	So when he was on the project also, he landed a lot of weight to it.
	I really don't understand.
	By making books bigger, how do you control It's just that some people can't run in their PC, right?
	Well, there's control and there's the spy stuff as well.
	I mentioned the spy stuff. Is there any other difference?
	One way as a spy is you could stall out development.
	The other thing you might do as a spy is you might try to find a particular weakness in the protocol and kind of steer the protocol In the direction of those weaknesses and exacerbate them, right?
	So there's the 51% attack.
	There's other kind of variants of this that involve having control over a lot of miners that are involved in the Bitcoin mining process, right?
	And so if you could steer development in a direction where miners would just be hugely, hugely influential, that might put it in a place where states still The state could kind of swoop in and take control of the miners directly because it's always more difficult to hide those, right? If you have some big warehouse that's hooked up to the power and all this kind of stuff, you can't really hide that.
	You can't be a secret person in the same way that you could be a pseudonymous person contributing to the Bitcoin software.
	You just create a GitHub account and you've connected nothing else to your identity about that.
	And you could reasonably get away with that for a while.
	And so that was what small blockers thought was like, okay, the spies are getting involved here and they're trying to push us to big blocks where no one's going to be able to validate transactions anymore.
	Everything, all the power is being shoveled off to the miners who are going to get swallowed up by the state.
	And so that's what their suspicion was.
	Yeah, if you want an example of when you grow too big, there's a counterattack.
	If you look to your top right on the screen, Hello.
	Right? No, it's a big question, right?
	Do you go for sort of big influence and then you get the inevitable blowback?
	Do you stay under the radar until you're big enough to survive counterattacks?
	It's all out-of-war stuff.
	And the out-of-war stuff was very...
	I mean, when I was back in the Bitcoin community giving speeches and meeting with people, this question of how are we going to grow To the point where we're big enough to be influential and can survive a counterattack, how long do we stay under the radar?
	Do we grow horizontally or do we grow vertically?
	Those are big, big questions.
	And personally, obviously, given the price of Bitcoin and its influence now, kudos to everyone.
	All the decisions, whatever was made, and I find it fascinating.
	So thanks, Christoph, and please keep going.
	But whatever decisions were made, like, great decisions, man.
	I mean, now Bitcoin is worth more than the three biggest payment processors in the world and is dwarfing PayPal.
	Love it. All right. So, sorry.
	Sivan, if I could argue, make an argument back.
	So the problem is you're not comparing the seen versus the unseen.
	You don't know what Bitcoin would have been had it gone down a different road.
	And perhaps it could have been a much stronger thing today.
	I know it's strong now, but I believe it would have been in an even much stronger position.
	Right. But it's the old thing that at this point, the forks of the road, so to speak, have already been passed.
	And you've got to... You know, go to war with the army you have rather than the army you wish you had.
	So I hear, yeah, of course.
	And if every alternate history and I could look back and say, well, if I had made different decisions, I'd still be on YouTube and so on.
	So all of these things are certainly possible, but given that we don't have a time machine, you've got to double down and push on.
	So, Christoph, sorry, please continue.
	Can I ask one? Yeah, please.
	Is there any real danger that having the 51% of Bitcoin, you can actually attack it?
	I think... I think it doesn't make sense.
	Tell us why.
	If you have something valuable and you have the most of it, why attack it?
	I think you're destroying your own fortune, your own value.
	What if that allows you to not control people and you value controlling people more?
	Or what if the real value to you is ruling people?
	To own other people.
	There's still real danger that I think many pools own more than 50% of Bitcoin.
	Is that correct?
	It's not about how much of the Bitcoin in particular they own, it's about how much of the mining they own.
	I think 5-10 pools own 50% of Bitcoin or more.
	Can they really shut down or destroy the value of Bitcoin?
	I think they could be temporarily very disruptive.
	And who knows what other kind of exploits they've been sort of baking up in the background.
	I think if the state wanted to launch all out against cryptocurrencies, they could be incredibly disruptive and really set back trust in cryptocurrencies quite a bit if they decided to.
	I think they had that capability.
	Alright, to ask a technical question, the current block size is one megabyte, right?
	Roughly speaking, depending on how you count it up.
	What were some of the proposed sizes between these other standards?
	Okay. Oh, great. Yeah, great question.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, just, okay, so one thing is I want to mention that big blocks was the original plan according to Satoshi.
	The very first question that Satoshi was asked after he posted the white paper was, They said, isn't this going to be a very bandwidth-consuming network?
	And then Satoshi's response was, he said, the way that Bitcoin formats transactions, it can process roughly the same amount of transactions as Visa in blocks that are equivalent to a couple HD movies.
	And then he said, so going forward, the blocks are small now just because there's not enough, you know, no one's doing transactions.
	But going forward, even if they get up to visa levels, like $30,000 a second, the network is going to be able to handle that fine.
	And then in other places, Satoshi just never...
	It was always, from his perspective, going to be gigabyte blocks or terabyte blocks.
	And then it was after he left that people changed the narrative and talked about different attack vectors.
	So for me, when I first got involved, I read the white paper.
	I read all Satoshi's messages and I thought that we were all like on that plan and it made sense to me and then when they change it I'm like this doesn't make sense and then so they're doing something new the president was large blocks and then the new thing was small blocks so they're changing it I didn't move they moved Yeah.
	I would agree with that interpretation, generally speaking.
	But to play devil's advocate, I mean, Satoshi is not God, right?
	He's not the master of all things cryptocurrency design.
	So he had a great design initially, but it's perfectly reasonable that other people would come along, notice some issues with his original design, and modify it or, you know, sort of urge a kind of conservatism around those issues.
	So I'm not sure that it serves as a great technical principle to argue against small blocks necessarily.
	I completely agree with that.
	That if people say, hey, this aspect of what Satoshi said isn't right, we need to make a course correction.
	I completely, that makes sense to me.
	But one of the things that was like very common in the core community at the time was they said, if you are trying to change things without getting 100 people, 100% of people on board, you're like a villain.
	Like you're an attacker.
	And then I'm like, That doesn't make sense.
	But even if it did, you're the one trying to change it.
	You're the one changing it.
	And then you're saying, I'm changing it.
	No, you know, like, does that make sense?
	Yeah, there was a tremendous amount of dishonesty in the technical arguments around that time.
	Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily recommend the best path forward, you know, technically speaking.
	But yeah, there is a lot of subterfuge and deception happening during that time.
	And maybe it was because there were other entities involved, or maybe it's just because people on the internet are generally jerks.
	You know, we don't know.
	I mean, I see this as if the fees get high enough, people will respond.
	And if this is the easiest way to reduce the fees, you'll get to the point where you don't have another choice, right?
	Even to transfer between your own wallets, you know, like Bitcoin you own, if you have to pay that much to move it between one wallet of yours to another one, people are going to start looking at other options, right?
	You know, yeah, I... What about the Lightning Network?
	I was going to say, I... So from working Coinbase, I've got some maximalist friends.
	It's just a chat group I've gotten there.
	I'm the only one who's not a diehard maximalist.
	Can we just not poison the well against people who think Bitcoin is the most viable path forward?
	Let's just say... Hold on.
	I'll finish and you're welcome to go.
	That's fine, yeah. There you go.
	So... Sorry, where I was going with that.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've got all these maximalist friends and...
	The other day, I'm reviewing the chat after every once in a while, the conversation comes up.
	I'm the only non-maximalist.
	And someone mentioned, like, oh, yeah, we might also increase the block size.
	And I was like, you mother expletives.
	If you increase them, no, you are stuck.
	I'm hyperbolic, but I'm like, no, you get one megabyte forever.
	You don't ever get to touch the block size.
	I'm like, if you're going to increase it now, oh, my God, after everything that that's caused.
	Okay, sorry. That's my name.
	Please go ahead, Red Pill. You know, ultimately, the market has really spoken.
	You can really look at the way the prices have gone, right?
	It's not the only way to measure these things.
	I could think of about eight metrics of measuring it, but really, it's spoken that way.
	But I really appreciate the narrative that Christophe had going, and I think we kind of interrupted him four times.
	Oh, if I could just say one more thing.
	So, yeah, the past is the past, right?
	There's no reason to just keep going over it, besides for that it's informative for people to understand why there's hard feelings about it, you know?
	Yeah. One of the reasons...
	I can narrow down the two big reasons why I'm still kind of not easy about it.
	And another one of them was, I'll just go to the big one.
	The big one is there was massive censorship on the main forums for Bitcoin at the time.
	I think we'll get into that.
	I know Chris is probably going to cover some of that stuff.
	You're right. Maybe Tim can refresh my memory on some of that stuff as well.
	Tim, what was it about the censorship that...
	That's still stuck in your craw.
	So everybody was on, you know, BitcoinTalk.org and our Reddit, or I'm sorry, our Bitcoin on Reddit.
	And those two forums were controlled by the same person.
	And like, there just was like a day where if you made any point about the Like, the original plan for scaling, you were just deleted.
	Like, every single post that was pro on-chain scaling got deleted.
	And everyone who, like, articulated that position well got banned from those forums.
	I remember Thamos was his name, or is his name, and he said, I remember the Bitcoin XT, they banned the entire thing because they said, you're talking about an altcoin.
	There was no debate.
	The way that they won, I don't know if they would have won outright if there had been a debate, but there really wasn't one because they banned everybody.
	Well, Tim, that absolutely happened and there was lots more censorship of discussion in the technical debate.
	I guess my question, having had a few years of separation from that whole stuff, is how much did it really matter?
	Is it possible that controlling a few particular venues of discussion of something ultimately decided the results of the way things went?
	I don't think so. There's so many stakeholders involved.
	The vast majority of people who use Bitcoin never heard of any of this stuff.
	They don't know about BitcoinTalk. They don't know about the I don't think it matters.
	I don't think it ended up mattering a whole lot or as much as people were really focused on at the time.
	Maybe you have a different view. I would agree 100% with what Christoph said.
	And ultimately, like, I mean, to Tim's point about, like, we're changing it or who's changing it.
	Ultimately, though, the code is the law.
	And the code would have had to have changed to enable a larger block size limit.
	So status quo was, code-wise at least, was let's just keep it the same.
	And that's kind of what ended up going moving forward.
	So if just Joe Blow that just uses Bitcoin and saves in it, isn't really thinking about it, isn't involved in all those forums that you guys mentioned, he wouldn't have necessarily updated it and wouldn't have necessarily changed it.
	Sorry to interrupt, but just from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I don't care about the banning.
	I mean, because the banning is not censorship.
	If you're banned, I mean, I say this obviously from intense personal experience, if you're banned, you can either roll up and go away, or you can just, you know, you can start your own forum, you can start your own conferences, you can start get your own funding, you can make the case, you can stride center stage, Julius Caesar style with your big swing and whatever, and make the case.
	So it's, oh, I got banned, therefore I lost.
	Come on, it's a will to power universe.
	This is not a moral.
	Argument, right? This is not a good versus evil.
	This is a block size argument.
	This is a technical argument.
	And so in a non-moral situation, there is simply a will to power.
	And if you get banned, so what?
	Just go start your own forum, make the case, go speak at places, go learn how to become more engaging, go find some donors if you need the cash, go set up a GoFundMe.
	Like the idea that, well, they got banned and therefore the bad guys won.
	In this kind of situation, you know, there's don't strangle hobos.
	Yeah, you know, that's a moral argument.
	But this, you know, what size should the blockchain, that's just a straight up Nietzschean will to power situation.
	And if you've got the forum, which is where everyone is, and you ban people, yeah, that's not a moral thing.
	You don't have any right to use anybody's forum.
	You just ban them. And then it's a test to see how committed you are.
	You know, how committed are you?
	And if the people who got banned just kind of rolled away, then they weren't clearly that committed to fight back to create an alternative to and you want the most committed people to be in charge because that's just what's going to win in the long run in these sort of will to power situations.
	I'd like to push back on why the censorship or how the censorship or the banning matters, not to say it was seminal in the way things went, is that it's indicative of that culture.
	As I've always argued from the beginning of the show, it's the people that matter, not so much the technology.
	A constitution, no matter how great it's written, doesn't mean nothing if the people don't act it out.
	Actually, Jared, sorry. Will I give you one second, brother?
	Let me finish up. Do you have this culture of the argumentation or philosophy and stuff like that, or do you censor and push out the side?
	I'm not saying it is, objectively, one or the other for that side, but it's a signal in that direction for the community to go that way.
	That's how and why, to me, censorship matters.
	The purpose of the organization is to build, not to debate.
	And if the debate is becoming wildly unproductive, at least in the eyes of the people who want to build, yeah, I can see that.
	At some point, you can debate strategy until the enemy is pouring over the hill, and then you've got to put your differences aside.
	Sorry, Red Pill songs you wanted to mention.
	Fair, but there's consequences.
	Yeah, sorry for cutting you off so consistently on this call.
	No, I've been reflecting a little bit on the idea of like, it's all about the people.
	And to a certain extent, there's some truth to that.
	But I think ultimately, like, it's hard to get your head around the idea of Bitcoin.
	But really, it's not a democracy in the sense of like, 51% will decide what majority do.
	Really, it's about if I run my own full node and I can verify the actual rules of what I'm going to make a Bitcoin to be with my own personal node, then it's not like a democracy in that sense.
	The way the mining goes is, yeah, if you have 51% of the network, you can kind of decide you have...
	A probability of being able to push the network for a while while you control 51%.
	But when you run your own node, you need to verify it's very binary.
	Do I accept this transaction into my node or not?
	So it's not democratic in that sense, which is hard to really think about.
	It's actually hard to get your brain around it because we're so used to the idea of democracy being 51% rule.
	I hate the idea of democracy, like, volunteerism.
	If you're a minority and you think it's better to do it some way, go off on your own and do it that way.
	And that's what it is, yeah.
	That's sort of true, but also I think that might be a little bit over-glorified.
	You know, if some bank comes along and decides to put $1 billion, invest $1 billion into pushing Bitcoin development in a certain direction, it's going to go in that direction, right?
	They can find a way to spend $1 billion to To have a tremendous amount of influence over what people think and what they perceive as the best course of action.
	So yeah, there's a tremendous amount of meritocracy involved in Bitcoin development, but let's not overly romanticize the extent to which that's the case.
	The interesting thing to mention as well, I hope at least, is that yes, human beings are corruptible.
	Human beings are greedy.
	Human beings will censor others.
	That's exactly why Bitcoin needs to exist.
	Like if you had a pure community So the fact that there's, quote, corruption within the Bitcoin development community or the boards, it's like, yeah, that's a very real fact.
	All human beings are susceptible to corruption, and that's why Bitcoin exists.
	So the very reason that the corruption is there is the very reason which makes Bitcoin so valuable, because it does the most of any currency in history to resist that.
	Other than whales moving Bitcoins into exchanges to signal a sell when they just buy the dip.
	And we'll get to that in a second.
	Okay, real question.
	After all these years, after all these attacks, can you really believe that there's any chance?
	You're going to have to repeat that.
	You froze out for a sec. Sorry. Okay.
	After all these years and all these attacks, can you really believe that there's still a chance that someone can destroy the value of Bitcoin in some way?
	Well, and is that larger than an asteroid hitting the Earth and destroying us all?
	Because, you know, there's risks in everything.
	Is it larger than the chance of you being stung by a bee or being hit by lightning and dying of, you know, whatever, right?
	I mean, is it larger than you being hit by a bus, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, I would imagine there's theoretically some risks, but the sun could explode tomorrow, but, you know, we're going to have to plan like it doesn't, right?
	Now, devil's advocate, what's the incentive on the side of evil to push that, you know, to make that the case?
	How big is it for them?
	What do they stand to lose? They've ruled people since the beginning of time, owned them.
	What's the incentive for them to Corrupt this, to destroy this.
	And how successful have they been in the past doing this thing?
	They will destroy it when people buy bitcoins instead of bonds.
	That's when the big issue becomes, right?
	And all I'm saying is we realize that you're acknowledging that possibility and be ready and have a plan to, hey, we're not married to this one thing.
	We're ready for plan B, plan C, whatever.
	Okay, sorry. This is a great point.
	What is plan B? Sorry.
	So the they that Jared's talking about here, right?
	If you look at their interest, right, as a big conglomerate, yeah, it makes total sense they should be freaking about it 10 years ago.
	However, if you look at any individual, these are just, they is just a bunch of individuals, right?
	They're just people. And any one of their individual game theory, they should be buying Bitcoin and getting off that sinking ship.
	I don't agree with that.
	We have a conflict of interest right now.
	We can agree there's a conflict between the conglomerate they and the individuals who compose that they.
	Hold on, hold on, hold on.
	So good people have an interest, at their core, have an interest to see Bitcoin.
	Something like Bitcoin, volunteerism, those kind of stuff succeed.
	Evil people have an opposite interest.
	So we're used to the magical way the invisible hand of the free market works.
	You know, is that these people don't have to communicate together, don't have to be organized in any way, shape, or form.
	They all pursue the same interest, and it all comes together to create wealth, okay?
	Whether we're coordinating or not, okay?
	And that's because we had this aligned interest of voluntarism and creating wealth, you know, without committing evil.
	People who are A-OK with committing evil, they all, whether they're coordinating, organized or not, still have an aligned interest to destroy this thing, to harm this thing, to see evil done.
	Yeah, but even evil people get better for Bitcoin.
	That's my point. Bitcoin's for enemies.
	It's not for good people, right?
	No, that's not true. That's exactly what I'm saying.
	The influence of people that have the power of the state will drop massively in a Bitcoin ecosystem.
	They might still be very wealthy if they get in early on it, but that wealth is not going to be able to allow them to achieve the same things that they can achieve right now, right?
	So I don't agree that the individual evil people in the system are incentivized to jump on the Bitcoin debt, Megan.
	They might hedge against it with Bitcoin.
	Wealth is not enough for some people.
	For most people, it's like, okay, well, we've got some wealth, so that's a pretty good thing.
	I don't want to control others. And there's an empirical example all across corporate America.
	The value of corporate America is being currently absolutely eviscerated by the woke warriors within.
	So they're willing to completely destroy the economic foundations that give them employment, that give them pensions and healthcare and so on over their lust for power over others.
	So sane people, healthy people are like, yeah, okay, having some wealth is a good thing.
	I don't really want to control others because that's kind of a hassle and there's blowback and it means you can't have love in your life and all of that.
	But it's always amazing to me.
	People come into places like the NFL or Coca-Cola or all of these woke corporations And they're just like completely eviscerating the shareholder future value of that.
	Or people who are like, oh yeah, no, we should all be locked down.
	But yeah, you know what we should do?
	We should grab people coming across the border illegally, not test them for COVID and dump them into communities.
	So there are a large number of people out there.
	They're only...
	Brief flash of joy is thwarting others and controlling people, and wealth will give them influence without power, right?
	Because wealth, you can offer money to people, but they still have to say yes or no.
	That's not having direct power over them.
	And of course, we know that there's lots of millions of human beings out there.
	They just have this lust for power.
	Bitcoin is going to interfere with that.
	Now, some of those people are like, oh yeah, I'd give up political power in return for $10 million, right?
	Or whatever they might be able to get out of Bitcoin.
	But there are other people, they simply will fall into a suicidal, catastrophic, nihilistic depression if they're deprived of political power.
	And actually, if you give them money, it's even worse for them, right?
	Because you all know the stories of the people who win the lottery, right?
	The people who win the lottery, nine times out of ten, their life becomes a complete shite storm.
	And they really wish they'd never won the lottery and all of that.
	So for this, a lot of people, wealth is like, it's a bad thing.
	Compared to political power.
	And those people will be absolutely willing.
	You can't bribe them with Bitcoin to not destroy Bitcoin because they want power.
	Hey, I just want to say one more, just my last thing about being mad.
	This is Tim's therapy time.
	I love it. It's a group therapy session.
	Yeah, this is like a call-in show over me.
	So when I got involved in Bitcoin, you know, I remember watching those videos back in the day where you had Andreas Ananopoulos and he was saying, you know, Bitcoin is the internet of money.
	And then he said, money is just the first thing.
	You know? And then he said, there's all these other things that are going to come with it.
	We're going to completely reduce how stocks work and land titles work and IDs and we can even do Twitter and like all sorts of different It's amazing that on the same payment network, you can do large and small transactions.
	I remember when I was going around bothering people and trying to convince them about it, and I would just add, I would just say, the reason why you should get involved in Bitcoin is not just because the dollar sucks, but because Bitcoin's this amazing thing.
	It can do so much.
	And then over time, what it could do just got chopped off, just taken away little by little.
	They just took it all, like all those, all that usability, it's just gone to where it is now.
	It's, you know, they argue, oh, you basically could just store value in it.
	And that's it. There's a software developer out there who over-promised a beta.
	Wait, hang on a second.
	Hold the phone. I myself have been guilty of that sin in the past when I was in software.
	So yeah, listen, it's a whole new world.
	You get your whole Disney song going and all of that and what often gets developed and what the market works with and what gains value is often not what was promised.
	But yeah, beta sheets are bullshit.
	Sorry, it's just the way that it works.
	If I had heard about it back in the day and then somebody said, yeah, its use is that you can store value in it, then I would have said, well, what's the difference between that and gold?
	We already have something that's not an inflationary currency that you can store value in.
	This is But you're wrong about that.
	And the market shows that you're wrong because people are not buying gold, they're buying Bitcoin.
	So they don't view the two as equivalent.
	They're not putting 50-50. You can see gold price going down, Bitcoin investment going up.
	People prefer Bitcoin to gold.
	Gold bars you've been teleport across the universe in the second.
	It's gold bars you can teleport across the world.
	It's gold bars that fit in your head that you can walk across a border with a 12-word phrase.
	Like, I'm sorry, you try that with gold, you're going to have a bit of a migraine.
	I have one last point.
	I swear, I'll pause.
	It's fine. We're all here to talk.
	Go for it. I know. I just want to cram it in.
	So the current bandwidth, transactional bandwidth of Bitcoin is such, you could just put numbers on it.
	You could do about 100 million transactions a year through that network.
	And then there's 8 billion people.
	If Bitcoin grows to global saturation, that means that every person could basically do one transaction their whole life.
	This is only going to be used by banks unless they increase the bandwidth.
	And they give every indication that they're not going to.
	I'm like, what would it have to look like for us to say that the state is intervening trying to dismantle and slow down and stop?
	It can't look any more like than it currently is.
	Maybe one transaction a year on the blockchain, but then you have the Lightning Network too that's in development.
	Yeah, the Lightning Network requires at least a little bit of on-chain transactions.
	And if you can't even do that, then the Lightning Network is not going to work either.
	What if it's used for, like, buying a house, right?
	Like, the assumption here is that this is going to be the one currency to rule them all, it's just going to kill fiat.
	It's like, nope, we got an ecosystem of cryptos, you know, maybe this one isn't the coffee and donuts one, and that's totally fine.
	This can be a store of value if it does that well, that's...
	Better than you could say about pretty much any other currency out there.
	I'm with you on that.
	It's crypto in general, but where I point out one of the less desirable side of things is where, from the Bitcoin core community, you largely get this attitude that everything else is fraud, is a scam, is wrong, is bad, is a shitcoin, yada, yada, yada.
	It's like, all right, guys, well, you've now aligned what would be your allies into People who are less motivated to help, let's say.
	Sorry, I'll just try to articulate the maximalist position here.
	We do think that you have to scale technically with layers.
	That's the basic maximalist argument.
	You can't just, like to Tim's point of, you know, only one per year.
	Okay, let's say we... 100x the block size.
	I think what you're saying here, Tim, is that, you know, if we were able to double, triple, whatever it is, the block size, we'd get more transactions.
	And so then it's like three a year, four a year, maybe 100 a year, whatever it is, right?
	You can't exponentially do that unless I think Christoph would agree.
	You raise the cost of running a full node.
	The ability for me personally to verify all the transactions that are coming in and out of my balance myself.
	So there's a trade-off.
	All we're saying is there's trade-offs, right?
	Layers is one possible solution to that and seems to be working okay.
	I'm running my own Lightning node and it's working pretty well.
	Yeah, but just to make sure, like the numbers, it's not that it's one per year, it's one per lifetime.
	Oh, sorry. Yeah, I didn't mean to misrepresent you.
	Sorry, sorry to sound like a newbie question.
	Has these future projections of when Bitcoin becomes the coffee and donuts potential, has it taken into account extrapolations in bandwidth size and Morse law for CPU power doubling every 18 months?
	Has people sort of mapped that out?
	The block size is fixed right now.
	It's not growing with anything to do with Morris Law and so forth.
	So one of the proposals that was out there when people were talking about raising the block size was, yeah, let's try to follow technology, right?
	So one of the proposals was like, every 90 days, we will allow the block size to grow a maximum of 4.4% if there's demand for that volume to kind of push it up, right?
	There was a proposal like that.
	There's many other kind of Variants of that and ultimately it was decided that people were not willing to do the hard fork change to the protocol to enable that to take place.
	I'd just like to make a couple brief comments.
	One being that I don't think at this stage it's important that Bitcoin is able to scale because the technology has In the whole crypto space has advanced to a point where you can have bridges and cross-chains.
	So Ethereum recently has created a cross-chain for Bitcoin with RATBitcoin and I'm sorry.
	Bridges and Cross Chains?
	Can you... Sounds like the name of a Fleetwood Mac album.
	If you could break that out a little bit for the listeners, that would be great.
	So basically...
	There's a variety of blockchains in the space now.
	And Bitcoin, it's an old technology.
	It's kind of slow.
	It can do around seven transactions per second.
	But there's other blockchains which can handle much more.
	And basically, a bridge is where you can transfer your Bitcoin to and from that blockchain.
	So it's interoperable.
	So you can sell or send your Bitcoin on various chains.
	So when Ethereum is able to scale better and deal with more transactions per second, which is hopefully in the next couple of months, we'll see something called ZK rollups come out, which basically, you know, increase Ethereum's throughput, you know, By hundreds, by hundreds, you know, so it'll be able to do a couple thousand transactions per second.
	So you can have your coffee and donuts on Ethereum or on Polkadot or Cardano, these various chains which are kind of selling themselves as NRL and you can, you know, so, okay.
	Sorry, let me say, to that point, like you're making the case that like we have all these solutions in other places, and my contention, my argument was that the Bitcoin Core community seems to be at odds with everything else in crypto.
	And now, Red Pill Songs, you said, well, it's not our fault that we believe, genuinely believe this is the way forward.
	That's not my argument against that, or criticism as far as a technical difference.
	It's their approach of attacking and- Oh, yeah.
	Okay. Hold on, hold on. And frankly- Lying about other projects that they're just, they're inherent scams and fraud.
	You know, that's like, oh, come on.
	That's not good faith at all.
	And that's rife in the core community.
	Just to give an example of that, like, when the fork happened, you know, there was, like, Bitcoin and then Bitcoin Cash.
	And then everyone on the Bitcoin side said, don't call it Bitcoin Cash, call it Bcash.
	Because we have to, brain-wise, we need to remove people's awareness that there's any connection between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin.
	Yeah. That there's any shared history.
	And there's consequences to that.
	Yeah, okay, great. So I think we've got it down to, so you're salty that Bitcoiners are very adamant about, I think we're going to win, right?
	And get on the shelling point.
	Come with us. This is the shelling point.
	Come with us. We're going to win.
	Let's do it together. But ultimately, you...
	You know, there are consequences.
	Personally, I'm salty about their fraudulent lying behavior, their despicable behavior.
	I mean, people behaved really poorly in a way that...
	Sorry, now we're getting to the gossip.
	And so now we've finally reached the real Bitcoin core.
	It's not the technology. It's, and I'm sorry, but no, so Christoph, break it down because, I mean, the ethics of people who are in charge of this, I mean, I know I made the case it's like a will to power stuff, but that doesn't mean fraud, right?
	I mean, that's not a valid thing, right?
	Or slander or whatever.
	So yeah, break it down. How did this play?
	Yeah, I mean, so I had mentioned, you know, Mike Hearn had a Proposed this Bitcoin XT thing.
	He got a bunch of businesses in the space to kind of back that idea.
	And that really took the fight to the next level.
	And I think it got to the point where people on all sides were making a lot of dishonest arguments.
	They got so fed up with it.
	They were just trying to delete each other's Parts of the discussion and to smear people's names and all this kind of stuff.
	And there was a lot of suspicion about many of the people that became influential kind of late in the Bitcoin core dev process.
	I hate to pick on a particular company, but you can't really cover the history without discussing Blockstream.
	I know people who work at Blockstream.
	Some of them are good people.
	I know people who work at Blockstream who are not so great.
	But that was a company that sort of came late into this space, more into this kind of like 2013 kind of timeframe, you know, not 2019.
	Not 2009, not 2010, but later got a big capital injection from some financial kind of bankster type organizations.
	And all of a sudden, they seem to be all over the place, having huge influence in these discussions.
	And some of those folks were making some pretty nasty, dishonest arguments, some of which I've personally experienced at the time.
	I remember with XT, it was the first large competing development team outside of the core group.
	It's hard to explain this if you don't know already, but there's these nodes, and then the nodes sometimes will tell you what type of code it's running.
	And then I remember that if you ran an XT node, you were going to get a DDoS attack.
	And I remember one story.
	The DDoS attack on this one node was so strong, it knocked out the internet for the entire town.
	Like, the guy thought that his house was, like, internet was down in his house.
	But then he goes to the bar and finds out the internet's down there, too.
	And the whole town got knocked out.
	And I understand.
	I completely agree, Stefan.
	The thing is, we were naive.
	I was naive. I just thought it was this happy community.
	We're all going to be in this together.
	And then just going, no, they're going to use every single tactic in the book possible to win.
	On this issue. And I just wasn't ready for that.
	Thanks for bringing that up.
	The DDoS stuff was pretty interesting where people were trying to come up with new Bitcoin clients to kind of compete and people were actually doing cyber attacks against each other to knock them offline.
	On the other side of the story, when fees were sort of getting driven up in 2013 and blocks were starting to get more full, there was accusations that Companies on the big block side were spamming transactions to the network to make it look like there was more demand than there actually was.
	And people did some forensic examination of that and had some Evidence to support it.
	I don't know that we ever got a final answer on whether that actually took place, but it was, you know, it was another thing that was in the space.
	People even got to the point where they were accusing each other of racism, you know, where people are saying like, oh, you don't trust minors in China because you're against the Chinese, you know, stuff like that.
	So pretty much every possible, you know, crummy, scammy kind of thing Uh, tool was pulled out of the toolbox during this, this argument.
	And, um, you know, ultimately there was a split in those two communities.
	I think it's very healthy, you know, that, that they, they took different directions.
	I agree a hundred percent. Yep.
	Absolutely. Sorry.
	Can I say a couple of things?
	Yeah, go for it. Uh, first.
	Hey, um, I'm curious, very curious, why people don't care about Bitcoin.
	I mean, first of all, store value, it's just fine.
	Just that. Do you disagree?
	Oh, so hang on. Sorry. We're still doing some of the history stuff.
	So let's say the big picture questions.
	I got some stuff I want to bring up later.
	But Christoph, I don't think we finished the gossip.
	I mean, the important history of Bitcoin.
	So if we wanted to, whatever you can do to bring us up to the current day.
	Yeah, I'll give the highlights, right?
	And we'll kind of speed through this, right?
	So there's Bitcoin XT thing that fell apart.
	That guy left Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin and told everyone he sold his Bitcoin and sort of left in a huff and got into some blockchain not Bitcoin type ventures.
	There were more proposals, how we're going to raise the block size limit.
	There was one that was, we're going to bump it up to eight, and we're going to do two.
	I mentioned the one where there's going to be progressive growth, 4.4% over every few months.
	And what we got to this point where there was a lot of people that were really passionate about Bitcoin.
	The solving this issue of, of fee congestion or transaction suggestion, the easiest way to do it was to just raise the block size.
	Right. And because it was so easy and there were so many people that were opinionated, um, um, about Bitcoin, right.
	That were really passionate about it. Everyone wanted to give their opinion about it.
	And we got into what's called in technical communities as bike shedding.
	Right. And so bike shedding is, is a metaphor of like, um, See that you're presenting to your boss and you want to, if you were going to ask for all this money to build a nuclear power plant versus a bike shed.
	Well, if you pitch the nuclear power plant, you say, I want a million dollars to build this.
	That's probably way under, but a million dollars to build this thing.
	It's such a complex, massive ask.
	That people are just going to, your boss is typically just going to be like, okay, all right, a million dollars, right?
	Stamp it, right? Versus if you ask them to build a bike shed, well, everyone could build a bike shed, right?
	It's such a simple, small task, right?
	So then everyone who gets involved in the decision-making process is like, well, what if you do this with a bike shed?
	And should there be a swinging door on this side?
	Or should it be a double door? Or should we use this type of screw?
	Or that type of screw?
	And I think we We could shave a little bit off of the cost of this bike shed if we downgrade from nickel screws to that kind of stuff.
	We really got flooded with opinions at that time about what should be done from people that probably didn't have a whole lot of business in getting involved in the debate.
	They weren't really computer scientists.
	Experts in their field, they were just Bitcoiners.
	And if you look at the Bitcoin core discussion groups at the time, and we have in Bitcoin a notion of creating publications that explain how we want to improve Bitcoin over time.
	Those are called Bitcoin Improvement Proposals or BIPs.
	There's all these BIPs that relate to how we're going to grow the block size.
	And they took up like a big block of consecutive numbers that were sort of allocated for this stuff.
	So people became pretty obsessed and opinionated with it.
	And it got to the point where there was many different views on how that was going to work.
	Companies were getting really fed up with it because They just wanted to resolve the block congestion that was happening and the crazy fees that they felt from their perspective were not working for how they wanted to use Bitcoin.
	So in 2016, there was actually a fairly unilateral A decision from many of the companies in the space called the Hong Kong Consensus Agreement, where they said, okay, look, like, let's just, like, we're going to all get together as stakeholders in the space, miners and companies and so forth.
	Here's how we want to move forward.
	We're going to, if we can get widespread consensus about how to do this hard fork For increasing the block size, we're going to do that.
	In the meantime, we're moving forward with an alternative means of approaching this, which was called segregated witness, or just segwit for short.
	And in segwit, the idea was like, okay, we can get a small temporary bump And how many transactions we can cram into the blockchain by changing what data about transactions being included there.
	If we exclude some of that data, if we segregate the witness data from other kinds of data in the Bitcoin blockchain, and we can push this out in a way that's sort of an opt-in, right?
	So if people are still running the old software, It doesn't break their node at all.
	They have a little bit less information about those particular transactions, and that was called a soft fork.
	I won't get into the whole technical details about soft work for hard fork, but basically the idea was a soft fork was something that was gentler, less likely to break the system, that if people forgot to update their nodes or if there was disagreement, We could all still kind of move forward and still be on the same blockchain.
	Whereas a hard fork is like everyone needs to update to this latest version.
	If they're not on the latest version, then chaos happens, right?
	Backwards compatibility, right?
	Yeah, that's fair to say, backwards compatibility.
	And so at that point, SegWit started moving forward.
	There was a movement online from some hardcore Bitcoiners that they wanted to activate the SegWit stuff on their own.
	And they were like, They were kind of dismayed that miners and companies were getting together in these agreements and trying to speak on their behalf.
	So there was a user-activated source software movement that wanted to activate segregated witness or segwit in 2017.
	There was another attempt for companies to get together and try to push something through.
	In May 2017, they had the New York agreement, which people are calling the SegWit 2 megabyte proposal.
	And basically what they're saying was, okay, we're going to do SegWit now because we'll get a temporary bump out of this.
	And it's also, it happens to also have some properties that are helpful for the Lightning Network, right?
	So maybe we're laying the ground to moving over to Lightning Network, putting some of the volume that's currently on the Bitcoin blockchain into the Lightning Network instead.
	And we're also going to bump up to two megabytes with a hard fork as well, right?
	And what everyone told these people at the time, it was a very silly agreement because it's supposedly all these big wigs in business that signed this agreement, but it You could tell just by the way it was structured, it wasn't going to happen, right?
	If you say, we're going to do the Segwit thing, we're going to give the other side what they want.
	And then a little bit down the road, we're all going to get our side of what we want as well, right?
	And so what happened was they just got Segwit and the two big bump never happened.
	And that's what, you know, everyone was on the big block side was like, hey, this is what's going to happen.
	This is obvious. This is ridiculous.
	And that's what took place.
	So And so, you know, once that became apparent, like, okay, the other side's getting their Segwit stuff, they're getting their Lightning Network stuff that wants to do two layers, you know, additional layers and stuff like that.
	We're not getting anything that we want.
	Then people really started putting their energy into Forks.
	So Bitcoin Cash was August 2017.
	There is even another fork off of that called Bitcoin SV, which we don't need to talk about.
	There was sort of a peak of transaction fees in December 2017, where like fees got up to like around $50 per transaction, something like that.
	And it seems like SegWit may have alleviated some of the pressure there.
	Some people have suggested like, okay, well, the other reason why fees have gone down is because companies just gave up on Bitcoin.
	They stopped putting transactions into the Bitcoin blockchain.
	And that's what brought the volume down and lowered the fees temporarily.
	And that's in dispute.
	I don't personally know whether that's true or not.
	I know of some companies that got out of Bitcoin for that reason, but I don't know if it was enough to make a really big difference.
	And ultimately, this issue hasn't really been settled.
	At some point, Bitcoin is going to get popular enough where the fees are going to go back up again, and Segwit won't have enough of a bump to permanently alleviate that issue.
	Lightning As design currently relies on putting at least some transactions into the Bitcoin blockchain.
	And so it hasn't been settled yet.
	They haven't figured out the master plan for how to make Bitcoin Core sort of scale to world size.
	Maybe that's okay. Maybe we don't need it right now.
	Maybe we have more time to figure that out.
	But that's... In brief, some of the highlights of what sort of happened there.
	And I think that Steph's point is excellent.
	It's like, well, what does the market say about this?
	The market, I guess, has not said that Bitcoin Core made the right decision, but the market has said that If they made the wrong decision in some way, if they made a bad decision in some regard, it doesn't outweigh the network effect that's already there for Bitcoin Core.
	So this is a good enough decision from the market's perspective in terms of what cryptos people are investing into.
	Yeah, and that was a really balanced overview.
	I hope we're recording this. It's easy to poison the well on either side.
	So one interesting thing to add to that is that around the time when they agreed to Segwit and then they were going to bump the size up later, there was an actual futures market that said, okay, what do you want to put your money on?
	Do you want to put your money on double the block size or not?
	And it was very clear what the market was saying with the futures market that, yeah, we prefer the blocks to stay the same size.
	We're going to put our money behind that and put actual skin in the game on that.
	And that's for me.
	So I jumped in right after the rage quit of Mike Kern.
	And I did try to balance the look of both sides.
	To Tim's point, there might have been some censorship happening, but I legit went on and looked at, what are you saying?
	I would tweet Craig Wright.
	Hey, Craig Wright, what do you think?
	Hey, other guy, Adam Beck, what do you think?
	And I came to the conclusion that I think layers are the way to go.
	And I still think moving forward that Bitcoin is such a far, like the market has really spoken and it's such a huge network effect and for a bunch of other reasons that we need to get on the shelling point of Bitcoin right now, whether or not it was the right decision in the past.
	We need to get on this shelling point and we need to stop pretending that like some coin that someone invented two months ago is somehow going to usurp a trillion dollar monster.
	Even if technically there's one element is better, the 10 or eight things that go in to make Bitcoin as a network so powerful are not going to be replicated.
	I don't want to be a rude person to the shitcoiners, but you're putting your...
	Come on. You're making...
	You're demonstrating the argument against Bitcoin Core.
	You are acting it out. Okay.
	I'm a mean, horrible person, but I'm right.
	I didn't say you're mean. God.
	Okay. Yeah. Good luck. Do you have any other argument that I'm just mean?
	I would say, like, Bitcoin was a real...
	No, you have this...
	If you're irrational, if you're like, be my ally, bitch!
	You know, it's like... Or be my ally, bitch!
	It's like, yeah, guess what?
	I'm not really motivated, fucker.
	To your loss, though, Jared.
	Like, we would love to have you here.
	That's fine. When Bitcoin was originally made, we talked about what does using it mean?
	It had the ability to do prediction markets and stocks and Twitter and all these different use cases, and people were building You know, things to utilize that ability.
	And then as the core developers, like, removed the ability to do that stuff, all of these businesses got shut off.
	And then, so like, I just, I cannot think of Bitcoin as just being a store of value.
	Like, I can say the words, but in my head, I'm just like, I used to go up to people and like, oh, here's a wallet.
	Show them how to use it. Isn't this amazing?
	And then now I'm supposed to go up to people and say, go log into a bank account and just buy it and hold it and don't do anything with it.
	And that's not Bitcoin in my head.
	I wish we could have a hug or something.
	I totally get it, Tim.
	And it's bad that it went out of the way.
	Let me tell you a story. I think this is a good analogy.
	I used to go and play at this pub, and Justin Bieber's mom would come see me play.
	And she told me about this kid, Justin Bieber, he's on YouTube, and he's singing outside the steps at the Stratford Festival.
	It's amazing, right? Justin Bieber, check him out, right?
	And so I was one of the first 50,000 people that liked him on YouTube, right?
	And I could chat with his mom and have a beer with his mom.
	But then one day, he blew up, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Next thing I know, I'm at the supermarket, and I'm seeing, like, Justin Bieber with little heart icons on him, right?
	He changed, and the networking factor on Justin Bieber really changed, and now I can't just call his mom up anymore.
	It's sad. And I miss those days, but, you know, that was his destiny to become Justin Bieber, right?
	And Bitcoin has had the same kind of growth and it left out some use cases that maybe weren't viable, like rolling Satoshi's dice for five cents.
	And it secures a trillion dollars worth of value.
	We'd love to have you on board with this because you guys, we're all brothers in the sense that we all want.
	We all want to see ultimately separation of money and state.
	We want to see free people able to transact with each other freely.
	That's what we all want. Except for the CIA spies.
	Right. We don't want those guys. But no, we can't.
	Bitcoin's for enemies. We want them too.
	Everybody's in. Right?
	We can't exclude, you can't exclude one person and not exclude everyone.
	That's ultimately the math on that.
	You have to, it has to be a fully inclusive network.
	The reason why I ended up going from being a technology guy to being a marketing guy is that when you're a technologist, and I started as a coder, right?
	So when you're a technologist, you look at the code, and you compare code to code.
	And this code is better.
	This code is more efficient. This code is faster.
	And you just get into what's the code.
	And that's your measure of quality.
	And the reason I ended up moving from being a chief technology officer to Director of Marketing was because once you've got a good enough code, the network trumps the code.
	The network trumps everything.
	Because if you can't get it out there and get economies of scale going and get general knowledge and general participation and general interest from the market, code has no quality without the network.
	Code has no value without the network.
	Because people look at the code and say, well, this code is better.
	This code can do more. This code is faster.
	This code is more scalable. And, you know, when you're looking at the code, I completely understand that.
	And as a technology purist, I love that stuff.
	And, you know, for me, making that back of the day, you pop up the status bar, how long it takes to do something.
	Getting like being the force of wind to push that blue dot status bar faster was like my crack.
	I loved doing that.
	Whatever I could do on the server rather than on the client, whatever.
	I loved getting that status bar to go faster.
	But the only status bar that matters is adoption.
	The only status bar that matters is adoption.
	And technology purists, and again, I'm in both camps, right?
	I mean, I really understand both.
	We look at this and say, but it could be so much more.
	Whereas the network and marketing people look at this and say, it doesn't matter what it is if it's not adopted.
	It doesn't matter what it is if nobody knows about it.
	It doesn't matter what it is If it's not actually being used.
	And it is actually being used.
	When you say, oh, well, all it can do is store value.
	Yeah, that's a pretty good thing when you've got fiat currency coming out of people's butt, like windy farts after Indian food, right?
	I mean, you've got to recognize that simply storing value, it's like saying for a fridge or a freezer, well, all it does is store food.
	It's like, well... That's good because if it's out and you get sick from eating food that has rot on it, that's pretty bad.
	And it's like saying to preppers, well, all you're doing is storing ammo and food and water.
	And it's like, well, yeah, that's kind of the whole point.
	The whole point of money to store value and to measure who has more purchasing power in an economy.
	So if you look at the technology and you say this or this or this is not present, If Bitcoin becomes the operating system, it's another way that I look at it.
	So if Bitcoin becomes the operating system, or Bitcoin is like the core code, or Bitcoin is like the server code in a database application, like all the SQL stuff that triggers on the server and all of that, and maybe other coins or other methodologies become a user interface to it.
	Maybe that's a way that it can work because Bitcoin suffered from not having a user interface in the same way that back when the internet was infinite DOS, the internet was typey.
	You had to change directories and you had to type in website addresses and it gave you menus and it was DOS. Basically, it was ASCII text characters for the internet.
	And what made the internet blow up was, of course, putting the GUI, the HTML, over top of the infinite DOS that was the internet.
	And so making things more user palatable, making things a better user interface and so on.
	When you're the core technologist, it's really hard to remember.
	I used to call it the grandma test to my coders.
	Okay, take your thing to your grandma.
	And put it in front of her and see what she can do with it.
	Right? Because, you know, we all like moving around in the code stuff and we all, yeah, I get this.
	I look at this blockchain. Oh, I can read that.
	I can read binary if I have to and all of that.
	But it's the grandma test right now.
	Again, we have the boomer test, which is a bit of a, you know, the boomer investors, the boomers control the most wealth of any generation in history.
	And if you can't make things user friendly to them, You might as well not build it if it comes to storing value.
	And now we finally have a situation where the elderly boomers who were in charge of the big financial institutions are finally getting the tsunami of cash on the one hand and the safe haven of Bitcoin on the other.
	So let's just... All we're doing right now is we're grabbing people from the flood.
	We're just getting people, oh my gosh, we should have better deck chairs and we should have a smoother ramp.
	No, we're just yanking people out of the water and putting them on the ark at the moment.
	That's what matters. If it does end up needing to be, you know, the coffee and donuts thing, somebody will build a gooey layer in a sense between whatever is faster and the Bitcoin core, and there'll be ways to manage it, ways to do it.
	Never bet against the combined multi-trillion dollar incentive of the smartest people in the world.
	Of course, there are problems.
	I mean, that's life. Life is problems.
	But we have no better way of solving problems than multi-trillion dollar incentives and the smartest people in the world and the greatest danger of the tsunami of Federal Reserve notes coming in or fiat currency coming in from every single government in the world.
	And so I just really wanted to provide that perspective because I was always good at explaining technology to clients and people and investors and all of that.
	And that's the perspective that I got that you got to prioritize off from the code and look at the GUI, look at the user interface and recognize that the market for money is more important than the technology for money.
	The perception, the network effects of money is the greatest Network effect in the world because money is ubiquitous.
	It's universal. We use it every day.
	It's everything that the economy runs on.
	And therefore, the network effects matter more than anything else.
	And getting the information out about cryptos to the general population, you know, we win the war, then we divide the spoils.
	But if we fight amongst ourselves, we lose the war.
	And right now, Bitcoin is the battering ram that gets us into the general consciousness.
	And after everybody accepts Cryptocurrencies as a whole, then we can say, here's how it's better.
	But people don't even know what it is.
	They don't even know what the issue is.
	Bitcoin is still only 1% to 2% of the economy.
	And we got a hell of a long way to go.
	And the more infighting we have amongst ourselves, this complementary development I think is fantastic.
	But the complementary developers, in my view, you know, this goes to you, Jared, as well.
	I could be wrong. But I think that you have to recognize that to get what you want, Bitcoin has to win.
	To get what you want, you can't compete against it right now.
	I mean, nobody's going to write about altcoins at the moment.
	Bitcoin is going to bring whole cryptos into the general consciousness, and from there you can make your case.
	But if people don't even know what a cryptocurrency is, why it has value, if they think it's just digital gold or whatever, You've got to get people educated and people will get educated out of self-interest and Bitcoin is what is going to get down the door to the castle.
	Then we can go in and start divvying up the gold or whatever, but I think getting behind Bitcoin is the best and fastest way to get what you want in terms of altcoins.
	That's been my case from the beginning.
	So sorry for the long speech, but that's my thoughts.
	And so maybe BTC maximalists are a little rude, whatever it is, right?
	But it's kind of like, use Steph's arc analogy.
	We're on the arc, and you guys are swimming on a little log, and we're like, get on the arc!
	And you're like, well, you guys kind of have BO, you're jerks.
	Like, you're a-holes, right? It's like, maybe we are, but get on the boat.
	No, no, no. It's the dishonesty and being disrespectful.
	Hey, maybe we're dishonest. Maybe we're dishonest.
	I'll even accept that. I don't think we are.
	I think we're actually legit looking up.
	But just get on the boat. To respond to Steph's point, I'm with the point that Steph is making.
	Bitcoin's got to win for the rest to win, and that's fine.
	I'm out there pushing crypto.
	Core can join me as a community, but that's what I'm doing.
	And in the same, you know, as arguing for crypto in general, that's going to include Bitcoin, but, you know, that's not my, you know, that's not my primary and that's not my push.
	You know, that's not where my, you know, my passion is.
	That's Well, and my case is that there's no way to satisfy your passion better than to push Bitcoin.
	I know, and it feels like joining the orcs, maybe, but it is very much that there's no better way.
	I mean, it's appealing to your greed.
	I love altcoins.
	I really do, because I love a multiplicity and all of that, but...
	We have a situation that it's not, like I said, the original Infinite DOS of the internet, you had a whole bunch of different operating systems, you had a whole bunch of browsers, but they all sat on top of the original thing, right?
	They all sat on top of the Infinite Unix DOS or whatever it was of the internet back in the day.
	But Bitcoin is kind of not like that.
	It's not like you're just going to need to get people's conceptions out there.
	People don't even know what money is right now.
	They think money is Federal Reserve notes.
	They think money is what's in their bank account.
	They think money is what they borrow from the bank.
	They think that money... Is something that the government does.
	There's no other way to do it.
	Everything else is weird and wrong.
	They've never been through hyperinflation.
	They've never been through, I mean, they've been through the financial crisis, but the financial crisis was successfully rebranded by the government as being a result of, well, there's just not enough regulation, you see, and we just didn't have enough control and enough power over the financial system to prevent all of this.
	So right now, They are receiving, you know, information and they have since birth, right?
	Which is that money is what the government tells you it is.
	And when they start looking at Bitcoin and they hear, well, you know, it's terrorism and it's bad things and all that, despite the fact that the banks using fiat launder $2 trillion a year.
	I mean, that's just money laundering, let alone everything else that they do, right?
	The idea that So that's what I'm saying, is that people don't even know what money is right now.
	Bitcoin is something that fragments a mindset, because even asking the question, what is money?
	Money. People aren't even there yet.
	Now, Bitcoin comes along and says, okay, here's an alternate version of money.
	And then it's like, okay, does that denormalize people's perception of money?
	I mean, to come up with UPB, I had to ask myself, okay, well, I don't even know what morality is.
	I don't know what morality.
	I have no idea what good and evil is, right and wrong morally is.
	And so from that blank slate, you can get a lot of creativity.
	And Bitcoin...
	Comes along in a way that nothing else does at the moment, because at least people know.
	And they also think, why is something important?
	Well, because people are talking about it.
	Like, nobody was talking about UPB before I came up with it.
	So I was able to do that.
	But that's, you know, I'm a philosopher.
	That's kind of the gig, right? So Bitcoin is coming along and saying, you know what you think of money?
	That's not money. Money is just another government program.
	It's just another, it's the matrix.
	It's just another government delusion.
	And you need to break that.
	You can't break people's stuff intellectually.
	I mean, I've been 16 years, man, I was doing the stuff in the public.
	You cannot, and I did a whole presentation about this, I wish I'd listened to myself, about the death of reason, that people don't listen to reason.
	And the only thing that they can, the only thing that would get them to start thinking is a paradigm breakdown that comes from new evidence.
	Right? You can't reason with people for the vast, which is the whole problem that everybody in the world is dealing with, that we have a lot of unfortunately very dumb people who've been propagandized for most of their lives.
	And how are you going to break that?
	You can't break that with reason.
	Now, if you come in and say, well, my altcoin is better because this, this, and this, I'm sure you're entirely right.
	But people don't even know what you're talking about.
	We have to recognize there's a lowest common denominator we kind of got to get to.
	And they can't even ask the question, what is money?
	Because they just point at the government, say, what is justice?
	Well, they point at what's called the Justice Department, man.
	I mean, it's right there in the title.
	And well, is the Federal Reserve a government agency?
	Well, it's got the word federal in it.
	Well, you know, Federal Express has the word federal in it.
	Is that a government agency?
	Ah, right?
	You start to just break down the matrix in people.
	Altcoins aren't going to be able to do that.
	Now, people say, well, Bitcoin must be important because a lot of people are talking about it.
	And looking from way outside our community is how it grows.
	Looking way outside our community is how it grows.
	It's the grandmother test. It's like, does it break people's paradise?
	Altcoins, where there's the view from the outside, it's the narcissism of petty differences.
	Well, my altcoin does this, and your altcoin does that, and my altcoin is more scalable, and people have no idea what we're talking about.
	It's like you wandering into a room where people are trying to discuss complex, abstract, quark-based physical problems.
	You're like, okay, they seem very passionate, but no idea what they're talking about.
	You get very quickly bored and you very quickly move on.
	But people say, well, Bitcoin must be important because it's in the Financial Times.
	It's being talked about all over the places.
	I see it everywhere. And then people are like, okay, so then Bitcoin raises, okay, it's a store of value.
	What the hell does that mean? Isn't my fiat a store of value?
	Well, no, because your fiat steals at least two to 3% of your wealth every year.
	And your fiat is based on debt and your fiat is based on exploitation and your fiat is held.
	People, I mean, good Lord, people are like, oh my gosh, China has control of a lot of Bitcoin mining.
	It's like, hello, do you know who buys the most US treasuries?
	China! Fiat currency is almost completely controlled by totalitarian regimes.
	So anyway, that's sort of my point that you're looking from way outside where you are, from way outside where you are.
	And the way to do that, of course, and again, I did this in marketing all the time, the way you do that is you go to people who know nothing about what you're talking about and ask them what they know.
	Just, you know, it's the grandma.
	Hey, grandma, have you heard of cryptocurrencies?
	You know, hey, Uncle Stu, who's a plumber, have you heard about Bitcoin?
	Oh, I've heard about Bitcoin. Yeah, do you know what it is?
	Just ask people what it is.
	And then realizing the vast chasms of ignorance that is out there about what we're talking about.
	The infighting, which from the inside looks very important, and maybe in the long run, it certainly is.
	It will be the competition. But look, you've got to look at things from way, way outside.
	You say, well, we don't want to get to 6 billion people using this or one transaction, a lifetime, and so on.
	How are we going to get to 6 billion people using crypto, right?
	Because, Jared, for what you want, they have to know what crypto is.
	They have to know what money is not, which is fiat currency.
	They have to understand debt.
	They have to understand inflation.
	They've got to go through Austrian Econ 1 or whatever it is going to be, right?
	And I've been doing this for you.
	Oh, sorry. You know, that's sort of my brief pitch.
	So the majority of my professional life has been as a poker dealer or working at a casino, things like that.
	And so I'm talking with people all the time.
	There's money moving, changing hands, and crypto comes up all the time in that community.
	So I've had the pleasure of talking crypto for seven, eight years with these folks.
	And yeah, we're perfectly capable of promoting crypto in general.
	And yeah, so for the most part, they're going to say Bitcoin first.
	And it's like, yep, rock on. But they don't talk about crypto, they talk about Bitcoin.
	It depends. But yeah, in general.
	In general, yes, people think crypto and Bitcoin are synonymous.
	And gauging where that person's at, you can be like, yeah, that's probably the safest one for you to stick with for right now.
	And just... Having that conversation.
	We are fully capable of promoting crypto in general or just Bitcoin and having the same net effect.
	But if what you're doing is being pulled along by Bitcoin, go ahead and push Bitcoin.
	You'll get there faster. If you're a sled behind a bunch of horses, add some horses and you'll get there faster.
	I hold Bitcoin Core.
	And one is capable of promoting Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core, crypto, without interacting with the core community.
	I guess that's my contention.
	It just, I mean, the Bitcoin core community, it's not even Bitcoin core, the people that, I'm just telling you where my head's at in good faith.
	I just think it's in interest to get in on Bitcoin from at least the short and middle term.
	And who knows what the long term, you know, like Steph says, let's just spoil this, you know, figure out the spoils later.
	I completely resonate with what you're saying.
	But we can't just wait for Bitcoin to finish its trajectory before starting to work on other things.
	I remember there's like 20 million Americans who can't get a bank account.
	They're not going to get into Coinbase to buy Bitcoin.
	They can't do it.
	We have to work on other options.
	Tim, those other options are being developed right now.
	There's a million different coins out there.
	All kinds of stuff is being developed right now.
	It is out there already.
	It's just not happening on the primetime coin, but it is happening.
	And I don't try to – I'm very, like, honest with you.
	I don't try to confuse people.
	Like I said, Bitcoin is, like, the thing that everyone's talking about.
	That's where the money is.
	But just so you know how it works, this is Bitcoin Cash, and then you can actually see how it runs.
	But that's not the investment one, really.
	So, you know, go ahead.
	Well, if someone is asking, like, if I don't want to swim in this world of technical details, which one should I just park my money at for the tour?
	The fact of the matter is, they're probably better off with Bitcoin Core for now.
	They've got the name, they've got the market share, they've got all that stuff.
	That's where it is at the moment.
	Now, there's potential to go for that to happen another way, for cash or something else to overtake at some point in some way or some other coin.
	There's potential for that, sure.
	But if that individual wants to take the time to invest in learning about these other things and learning about investing in finance and that kind of stuff, and that's a whole other thing to take on, is moving money around and trying to make money that way, like investments.
	I just really believe that the best way to educate somebody is to actually demonstrate it in real time.
	And that's one of the advantages if they're interested in these other things.
	But when I'm talking real estate to someone who wants to get into cryptocurrency, I'm not trying to push him on Tezos.
	Or I'm not trying to push him on anything.
	I'm asking where he's at and what he's interested in.
	And of course, he's going to say Bitcoin and be like, hey, rock on.
	Here's what you do. I also wanted to mention too that I think it's probably worth, I mean, I am a big one for, like, I know how hard success is, right?
	I know how hard it is to be successful.
	Yeah, probably it was a bit of an ugly battle.
	Let's just say a couple of moral corners were probably cut.
	But let's give props where props are due.
	You know, like, I mean, this thing's now got a trillion dollar plus valuation.
	It's been talked about...
	In all the major newspapers, talk show hosts are on it.
	It's on, you know, money shows.
	Jim Cramer's got Anthony Pompliano on his show.
	I mean, this thing has really worked.
	And again, I'm not a pragmatist.
	Like, hey, man, if it works, therefore it's the good.
	I mean, from what Christoph is saying and from stuff I've heard, yeah, there's a couple of bodies along the way.
	There's no question of that.
	But we also have...
	Very little time.
	And I think that's a really, really important thing to remember.
	We don't have a lot of time.
	You know, COVID has absolutely accelerated the decline of fiat.
	By at least a decade.
	At least a decade.
	And probably it's gone even more than that.
	So the amount of money printing.
	What is it? Seven bailouts.
	Multi-trillion. Endless bailouts and borrowing.
	So we have an accelerationism here that none of us could possibly have foreseen.
	And this accelerationism is even faster than war.
	It's even faster than war because, no, seriously, if you just look at it from an amoral practical standpoint, at least war takes a lot of people who aren't very economically productive out of the economy by going out and getting them blown up.
	Right? So this is even more accelerationist.
	This is about the most accelerationist situation that could possibly have occurred to wreck the fiat currency.
	And so this is why I'm doing these shows and why I have this urgency, and I'm sure we all feel this, but I just want to remind the audience, That we had a certain, okay, well, it's going to rain, we're going to build this ark, and, you know, we're going to try and get it just right, the right number of funnels, and we're going to hire the right band to entertain the people when they come on the ark, because the water's going to rise at this level.
	And then suddenly we lock up and, like, all of the, I don't know, some giant asteroid filled with seawater hit the skyline, and we've got, like, four trillion, trillion tons of water coming down all at once.
	And it's like, get on the damn ark.
	Get on the ark! You know, it's like, well, it's not finished yet.
	Okay, our alternative is to drown.
	And so for me, the accelerationism that has is one of the reasons I'm back into Bitcoin, is that the accelerationism that has occurred in the realm of fiat is something that is beyond our comprehension.
	And we don't even know the numbers right now, because the numbers that are inside are way worse than the numbers we're hearing about.
	We don't know the true numbers of inflation.
	We don't know the true numbers of money printing.
	But the rich were buying bunkers in New Zealand before coronavirus.
	And COVID, there's no evidence that it's going to slow down in terms of people's panic about lockdowns and opens up and lockdowns and opens up and so on.
	And so the accelerationism right now is going on.
	And I think the point of, you know, we have an arc that can hold just about everybody.
	And yes, people have plans for much better boats.
	But the rain is coming down, the water is rising, and we're running out of time.
	And I think if you don't have a well-positioned coin at the moment, it's too late for evangelizing right now, in my humble opinion, right?
	Because the amount of inflation, the amount of money printing, the amount of debt has gone up.
	I mean, you've all seen the M1 charts, right?
	Just going completely insane at the moment, right?
	So if you don't have a well-positioned coin at the moment, I mean, I feel for you.
	I wish we had more time. I really do.
	But we don't. We don't.
	And I think that the concern, like the plans for, you're going to get people drowned.
	I mean, honestly, think of the numbers.
	If you don't have a coin that can store value at the moment, that's well recognized, that's translatable, that's transferable, that's got money and interest and all that behind it.
	Or, to put it another way, if you don't have a coin where A lot of powerful people have invested because those powerful people are going to protect that coin.
	They're not going to protect your coin. They're going to protect the coin they've invested in.
	And that's just Bitcoin. Maybe a bit of Ether, but that's Bitcoin as a whole right now.
	So if you don't have that right now, I guess my concern is that in your focus on your own coins, I'm not speaking to Jared in particular here.
	This is just everyone. Again, it's just my opinion, right?
	But if you focus on your own coins, are you willing to accept the potential guilt of people not getting to your coin?
	Fiat currency collapsing, Bitcoin going through the moon, and you kept people off this to some degree because of some alternative coin.
	And again, if we had 5 years, 10 years, I'd say, oh man, let's view what we got time to build boats.
	We got time to build the boats. But right now, we got no time to build the boats.
	We got no time. And that's my particular concern.
	So I want the altcoins.
	I'm desperate for the altcoins. The more competition, the better.
	I think it's absolutely fantastic.
	But the altcoins come after the 40 days and nights on the arc, you know, where we can get to some dry land.
	That's where we can get to the altcoins.
	So that's my particular thought.
	Can I say a couple of things?
	Go for it. Okay, thanks.
	First of all, store value is just fine.
	Just fine. It's amazing.
	There's no such thing right now.
	Maybe gold. I own gold.
	Many years. But as it goes out, it's not the same.
	Maybe it's the same, but Bitcoin is something else.
	The store of I.O. I mean, so many people wanted that.
	So many people were searching for that.
	And they didn't have it.
	And now they have it. It's just fine.
	And the other thing, I try to talk to people about Bitcoin, such as you said before, Stefan.
	And it's really mind-boggling.
	They can't hear you.
	It's just like fantasy.
	You're talking about something they don't understand.
	They understand nothing.
	It's like What are you talking about?
	It's just air.
	It's internet. The internet will go down.
	You will lose your money.
	You get caught. It's a fraud.
	It's nothing. For most people, that will be the case.
	Most people will miss it, but you've got to have your conscience that you try it, right?
	No, no, no. I try really hard and tell them, look, the government steals your money.
	Okay? That's the truth.
	The government sees your money.
	Every year, you have inflation.
	You know what inflation is?
	Your purchasing power goes down.
	Every year, that's what's happening.
	And you don't understand it, really.
	Okay, and most people go, what are you talking about?
	My grandfather was starving.
	I have the latest typo.
	I have the latest iPhone.
	I have my laptop. I have my 50-inch TV. I have Jaguar.
	I have a Mercedes.
	What the fuck are you talking about?
	And I realized that technology is a problem.
	We live in a world.
	Technology has offered us Cars, TVs, phones, many things.
	And most people don't understand that every year they're losing money.
	They've been robbed.
	They don't understand it.
	And the reason is their fathers, their grandfathers, they had nothing like this, like we have now.
	And so they're comparing to the Not next, the previous generations.
	And they think, what government?
	I have money. I have the new iPhone.
	What the fuck are you talking about?
	Let me just mention this, because in every single culture that I've ever read about, there is a saying which goes something like this.
	Every single culture, Arabic culture, it's even in sub-Saharan Africa, and it's called rags to riches to rags in three generations.
	Yeah, we've all heard of this. They call this shirt sleeves, right?
	And in Arabic, it's something like, you know, my grandfather rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my children will ride a camel, right?
	I drive a Mercedes, my children will.
	I'm sorry. It's very hard to explain.
	And the other thing, people do understand inflation.
	That's why there's a stock market.
	That's why the supercharged stock market occurs.
	It's why people buy securities and bonds and GICs.
	And this is why people invest, because they know that if they don't invest, they're going to lose that.
	They know about inflation. I think everybody understands that.
	What they don't understand is how it's all built on debt.
	And you can say to people, it's all built on debt.
	It's all built on lies. It's all built on force.
	It's all built on the enslavement of the next generation.
	And you can say that, and some people will listen.
	But if you've got a cure to an illness and everyone thinks that your cure is actually the disease, the whole key point is just keep moving.
	This is marketing, right? So when I was in the software field, we had a very specialized piece of software for reducing pollution from very large corporations.
	And we were first to market.
	So nobody knew even about the market.
	So I'm telling you, we had a metric.
	It was at least 100 to 1.
	At least 100 to 1.
	Contact to sale. In other words, you would have to contact about 100 people in order to make one sale.
	Now, one sale could be $100,000, could be half a million dollars, could be over a million dollars, so that was good.
	But the 100 to 1 ratio is really important.
	And this is just business.
	This isn't even something as fundamental as the physics of money and storing value in government and fiat and crypto.
	So this was just, do you have a need?
	Does it coincide? Do you understand?
	And are you willing to listen to a new product?
	Bitcoin is a totally new paradigm, not even a new product.
	The fact that most people aren't going to listen, yeah, I mean, that's, of course, most people aren't going to listen.
	And at some point, but here's the, you're just planting seeds, right?
	So what will happen is at some point, people will remember the crypto conversation, because everything we give to people sits in their heads, right?
	And so what will happen is at some point, and you can see this tension a lot, right, because we've been talking about this stuff for years, Bitcoin is going to the moon, and people are really, really tense.
	Because they're mad at themselves. They're frustrated.
	They're angry that they didn't listen.
	And they don't want to come and say, well, you were right.
	I was wrong. I could have been wealthy.
	It's really, really hard.
	Those of us who've lost some coins, it's tough.
	So most people are going to not listen.
	But they're not going to listen in the moment.
	I mean, I've been doing philosophy 40 years privately, 16 years publicly, and at some point, people are going to start to listen.
	And they will, right? It's just that you have to plant the seeds and then wait for the right conditions.
	You can't make people think any more than you can grow a rose and make it grow.
	You've just got to create the right conditions.
	So just sowing the seeds, saying that fear is bad.
	Inflation is coming. Crypto, Bitcoin in particular, is a great store of value.
	And if you said this to people five years ago, you're just some fringe lunatic who's, you know, obsessed and thinks that the price of magnesium determines the future of the planet or something.
	But now everyone's talking, and they remember, they remember.
	And then you face the emotional difficulty of them Being really mad.
	Like, you know, we're all like, wow, if I bought $10,000 worth of Bitcoin for 50 bucks in 2010, I'd have $1.6 billion.
	Of course, like we all have that.
	Sorry, they're not even mad at me.
	They're there. Just ignore it.
	Most of them. No, no, they will.
	But it sinks in and they'll listen at some point.
	But the longer it takes for them to listen, the less likely they are to ever circle back and tell you you were right because they're mad at themselves.
	Because they're mad at themselves.
	You know, like, you know, you tell some guy to quit smoking when four out of five doctors say it's not bad for you.
	And then, you know, later he finds out it's bad for him.
	It's pretty tough.
	All right. So, Christoph, is there anything that I really appreciate?
	The history is fantastic.
	And I really thank you for taking the time to do that.
	And I also thank you for, you know, what's going to happen to your inbox when we publish this, because, you know, people don't understand.
	I mean, you're messing with people's identity in many ways.
	Is there anything that you wanted to mention about, I don't know, anything that's on the horizon at the moment that we need to keep an eye on that could be a tipping point in one way or another?
	Yeah, so I think the next big thing in Bitcoin is really the focus on the Lightning Network.
	It's coming along, getting to the point where less technical people can start using the clients that are surrounding that kind of ecosystem.
	It still has a little ways to go.
	I think we still have a ways to go where we can feel really confident that it's going to be the same kind of robust security model that we've gotten very comfortable with, with the original Bitcoin blockchain.
	But, you know, it's showing some promising signs.
	And even if lightning doesn't work out, There may be other kind of layer 2 networks out there that will advance on the state of the art.
	The other thing that could happen is if, like you said, if COVID has changed the world and we're going to see a big dump into Bitcoin and crypto in general, we might see another fee event in the Bitcoin blockchain.
	Right now, Coinbase, for example, is a well-known exchange, particularly in the United States.
	They have tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of users at this point, quite a few.
	A good portion of those people are keeping their crypto With Coinbase in their custody, right?
	And so if they actually want to, something that happened back in like 2013 was the empty ox thing, right?
	Where this exchange exploded, right?
	And they got hacked and people all at once were trying to pull out whatever little bits of Bitcoin they could get from that exchange to the last possible moment.
	And it created quite a havoc event.
	Something like that could always happen again with Coinbase or one of these other exchanges out there.
	And that's going to be tough, right?
	Because there's actually enough people in crypto right now that have crypto, in other words, they've got deposited with some custodian for them, that if they actually try to pull it into their own wallet and take ownership of that crypto in a really meaningful way, there might not be enough space to actually make that happen in some reasonable period of time.
	So we might see another kind of panic A moment like that, you know, that could drive up the price or it could drive down the price.
	I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if we see something like that again in the next few years here.
	I just wanted to mention here, somebody says, you haven't lived until you traded 540 Bitcoins for altcoins.
	Pain City Fam LOL. Yeah, I think we can take a moment of silence in our minds for that.
	And somebody has asked, what's the Lightning model in layman terms?
	Just briefly, it's about taking Bitcoin transactions and rather than broadcasting them to the Bitcoin network, you're keeping them to yourself.
	You're opening these connections directly with other peers and kind of a new network that's outside of Bitcoin.
	And you do it in a way so that if the other person...
	So when you have a Bitcoin transaction that's not Broadcasted to the network yet.
	It's been signed, cryptographically signed, so it could be, but it hasn't been put off to the Bitcoin network.
	There's a security problem there because it's like, then the other person can try to create their own transactions spending those same funds, a double spend, right?
	That's the whole point of what Bitcoin is trying to achieve is by resolving this double spend issue.
	So there could be like a kind of a race there to spend those funds.
	So Lightning Network tries to structure those transactions in a way that deals with that double spending issue and allows you to do a bunch of transactions with other people in a peer-to-peer network.
	It's decentralized still, but without needing to, while still feeling relatively secure in your ability to do that without necessarily needing to get those included in Bitcoin blocks right away.
	But just by my explanation, you can kind of tell this is a level of complexity that is a magnitude above just a normal Bitcoin transaction.
	Lots of people have trouble understanding just the Bitcoin side of things.
	So with it goes all the complexity of trying to implement it, make it user-friendly, and make sure that the ways that it can Fail in complex ways.
	Don't surprise the users.
	We're still at the point where if you get into lightning, you're going to run into bugs, and some funds are going to get trapped in little pockets here and there, and you're probably going to reach out to your technical friend to try and help you unscrew those funds, which is why they're telling people to use really small amounts for the moment.
	It's still very much in the beta.
	All right. All right. Well, first of all, I literally could talk about this stuff all day.
	So I really, really do appreciate everybody coming by.
	And this is the kind of robust discussion that I think is incredibly helpful to the world Bitcoin community as a whole.
	If there's anything that people wanted to say as a closing statement, I've certainly had my say's.
	If anybody wanted to dive in with a last thought, I'm certainly happy before we close on.
	Yeah. I just wanted to...
	Say something positive about the alts, which I think often gets overlooked, which is that they win when Bitcoin wins because all the alts are trading against Bitcoin and Bitcoin's where all the liquidity is at.
	So when Bitcoin is rising in price, you know, you're getting that altcoin that's trading against Bitcoin is also getting the gains that Bitcoin's gaining.
	And we see altcoins doing really well when Bitcoin's going up and, you know, there's a lot of buy pressure as well.
	So altcoins win when Bitcoin wins for that reason.
	And also that, you know, I got into crypto through earning altcoins for free, which is something you can't really do with Bitcoin anymore.
	In the early days, you could get into Bitcoin for free and that was really great.
	You'd be able to mine it on your laptop.
	So, if you want to earn some free crypto, the same way that I did, have been doing for the past couple of years, you can use PreSearch, which is a decentralized search engine.
	It pays you about one cent in crypto per search.
	And that's a really great way to get involved, to start off with, to set up a wallet, to kind of Learn the basics.
	And then you can kind of, that's a good way to start out.
	So look into the pre-search.
	Not already. And you want to, you know.
	All right. Thanks. Sorry. I'm going to need you to mute because something's, I think you've got a ferret attacking your mic or something like that.
	So anybody else? Any closing thoughts?
	Yeah, I wanted to just throw in something here.
	I've had a lot of folks reaching out.
	I gave my email address and I got my website.
	If people are curious about some things I have to say on the introduction to crypto, it's jaredwoodard.com forward slash crypto forward slash introduction.
	And a lot of people are reaching out about what exchanges to use.
	I'm not going to go out of my way to say like any exchange in particular, but I would say I would generally recommend at least three exchanges.
	And if you think you'll ever buy crypto, start the process now because it is a headache.
	They never have enough support when you really need something.
	And this is most any exchange.
	It's hard to get support.
	And this is really technical stuff, especially if you're not used to the technical stuff.
	So get started now so that when you do want it, you have the option and Probably get set up on at least three exchanges in different jurisdictions, in different geographic places around the world.
	Of course, go with stuff you're familiar with, research online about the more notorious ones because there absolutely are cases of shady exchanges that take your money and just disappear.
	So use the obvious blue chips is my general recommendation.
	Yeah, the exchanges can shut your account down.
	Like, I know a few people who Coinbase has gone, oh, something doesn't seem right.
	And then they pause their account just to make sure that people aren't, hackers aren't getting in.
	And then it could take like a week or something to get out.
	I worked in support there and I was on the other side of that where I'm helping the people who get shut down.
	Good gosh. Internally, it was kind of a nightmare.
	It's like, guys, no one reads their emails.
	You just send them an email with a link and they click the link, not knowing that that link says, we're going to freeze your account.
	And then people have nightmares and heart attacks because they need that money for cancer treatment for their wife or whatever.
	And it's like, for the love of God, people, make it 20-point font size red on fire with skulls and crossbones so that people read it before they click it because nobody reads email.
	Jared, are you ready for me to make a totally petty point?
	Please. So people won't even read their emails, but they're totally going to understand Tezos before Bitcoin.
	Touche. Just my petty point.
	I just, you know, I'm not saying I'm above this.
	The challenge is on me to bridge that gap.
	Okay, anything else people want to say?
	You don't necessarily need to buy from an exchange.
	You can just buy from your, hopefully there's someone in your life that's been pushing Bitcoin that's made you watch this thing, hopefully.
	Or you know someone, you can just buy directly from them with cash, right?
	And then you're out of any risk on that sense.
	And that's what I would recommend, at least for a stack of your Bitcoin, you want to have it off the grid, would be my suggestion.
	Consult your lawyer before making such decisions.
	And your accountant. Yeah, none of this is investment advice.
	Don't buy us all anything. Anybody else?
	Yeah, so I've been like one of the primary whiners about the history.
	Actually, that's not the word we were using, but I understand that that also could be a word that could be used.
	Sorry, go ahead. Just kidding. And I said it on the last show, but I really just say again, this has really been helpful for me to kind of process.
	I was naive, you know, and it's really, really helpful for me to get closure.
	It has been like a call-in show in a way.
	And then to just say, man, it is such an honor to be on your show, Stefan.
	Like, I know it's weird for you to hear that probably because in your head you're just like a normal person, but you're like a freaking superhero to me or something.
	Thanks. I don't actually feel like a normal person because that would be disrespectful to my abilities, but I really, really appreciate your very kind words.
	That appreciation is always very moving and I thank you for that very much.
	Anybody else? I got one or two things to say at the end.
	I'm excited to be here.
	Thank you for your questions as well.
	Fantastic. All right.
	Anybody else? Last chance.
	Going once, going twice. All right.
	So I just wanted to mention a couple of things that I think is important stuff.
	Satoshi Nakamoto is now the which number richest person in the world?
	Anybody?
	Number one.
	No, he's the 20th richest person in the world as of yesterday.
	And he's anonymous.
	I just think that's pretty wild.
	So, Bitcoin is now worth more than the three largest payment services in the world combined.
	That's Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal from $1.11 trillion to $1.09 trillion.
	Germany's Green Party is a strict opponent of Bitcoin.
	I think that's just, they say an undermining of the money in currency monopoly through private currencies in the euro area may not be allowed, right?
	So remember, they don't care about the environment.
	They're just watermelons. They're red and green on the outside, red commie on the inside, right?
	So that's kind of important.
	As of yesterday, the last correction in Bitcoin was 28 days.
	As of yesterday, I guess today, this correction is 27 days.
	27 days today.
	So just get ready for that to go up.
	Because there was a while it was cooking at the same price every day, pretty much.
	And I'm like, wow, is Bitcoin frozen?
	Does somebody need to reboot it?
	Because I'm just so used to all of this, right?
	Here's a comment I thought was interesting.
	If people say, well, what if the government tries to attack Bitcoin?
	And the statement is quite interesting, I think.
	And what the statement is, is the U.S. government will defeat Bitcoin, just like it defeated Vietnam.
	Drugs, illegal immigration, Afghanistan, sin, cancer, North Korea, witches, civil rights movement, AIDS, P2P file sharing, Iraq, dot, dot, dot.
	So I think that's quite interesting.
	It is interesting that there is a complaint that the whales move there.
	So cold storage is when it's on the network, of course.
	It always has to be on the network. Cold storage is when you move it off an exchange.
	And just on March 20th, just yesterday, $69 million of Bitcoin was moved from Coinbase to cold storage.
	You can see all this stuff moving around, right?
	Which is 1,201 Bitcoins off the market.
	I think that there is a bit of an issue when whales move their Bitcoins from cold storage onto a market because then people assume that they're going to sell them and then the price can go down.
	They can buy the dip. There's nothing really to solve about that.
	But Morgan Stanley is reportedly bidding for BitThumb, Bithumb, the South Korea's top crypto and Bitcoin exchange market for a $2 billion valuation.
	That's quite, quite important.
	With regards to energy usage, do you know how much energy in the U.S. is actually wasted?
	Like, not used for anything productive, just bleeds off, dries off.
	Do you know what percentage of energy in the U.S. is wasted?
	Anybody want to put a guess as to the percentage of energy generated that's completely wasted?
	66%. 50%.
	69%.
	Yes! Wait, are you the 69 guy from my chat window?
	Anyway, yeah, you guys are bang on.
	And it is 67.5% of energy in the US is completely wasted.
	And Bitcoin, of course, people try to leverage the wasted energy.
	And this doesn't even count on how much energy gets wasted from stimulus spending, right?
	Because stimulus spending provokes consumption in the here and now.
	And so when people talk about, oh, Bitcoin is wasteful of energy, it's like, you know, more than two-thirds of all of the energy in the US is wasted.
	Bitcoin tries to fix this by converting it into something that can store value.
	The first Bitcoin ETF in Latin America was just approved in Brazil as of Two days ago, Elon Musk didn't stop with Tesla.
	SpaceX apparently owns Bitcoin on its balance sheet.
	Elon Musk owns over $5 billion in Bitcoin via Tesla, SpaceX and personally.
	And that seems pretty cool.
	So, who's selling?
	Who's selling at the moment, right?
	Because you've got this low 70s going on Canadian with Bitcoin price.
	Oh, and by the way, does everybody know there's no such thing as a Bitcoin?
	This isn't important. The only thing that matters is Satoshis and Bitcoin is just an aggregation of Satoshis, but it's kind of arbitrary.
	It's a good thing to have, but it doesn't really exist like a dollar would.
	So... The long-term hodlers, hodler is holding on for dear life.
	It's a typo of hold in a sense.
	So long-term holders, three to five years, continue to accumulate Bitcoin, but it's the newbies who are selling the one to two years and so on, right?
	And the one to two-year-old addresses haven't experienced a full bull market before.
	So if you've been in Bitcoin, three to five-year-old addresses, they have experienced a full bull market.
	They know what comes next. And so if you're looking at sort of the cycle of what's going on, the people who've experienced the bull market who've been around for a long time are holding onto their Bitcoins and the newbies are taking their gains, which is totally fine.
	The newbies are taking their gains one to two years and selling it off, which I think is quite important.
	March 19th, I shouldn't laugh because it's just absolutely tragic, but not tragic for us.
	So from zero hedge, the Treasury injects a record $270 billion in cash in one day.
	In one day, 270.
	It's just absolutely, absolutely incredible.
	So here's another thing too.
	So to feel like a millionaire in 1971, how much money do you need in the bank today?
	Anybody want to throw that out there?
	To feel like a millionaire in 1971, how much money do you need in the bank today?
	$5 million. $17 million.
	Yeah, it's a little over six and a half million dollars.
	And that's, again, assuming official rates of inflation, blah, blah, blah.
	So that's how much that currency is devalued from when I was five years old.
	Now, for some of you, that may seem like a long time.
	For me, it's not, right?
	So in other words, if you had a million dollars in the bank in 1971, it would be not exactly worthless, but pretty close to worthless right now.
	And that's how much the currency has deteriorated.
	The first Bitcoin ETF in Canada has reached $1 billion in its first month, and that's pretty cool.
	Yeah, do you know there's no such thing as Bitcoin?
	Bitcoin is actually a network protocol that tracks a unit called Satoshi, or SATs for short.
	Stacking SATs is the big thing.
	A whole Bitcoin simply refers to an arbitrary amount of 100 million SATs.
	So there's no such thing as a Bitcoin.
	It's just another mind-blowing kind of thing, which is pretty wild.
	So I think that everything else is kind of graph related.
	Of course, as you know, Visa is looking to put a layer over Bitcoin, which would be pretty wild.
	And let's see here.
	It took 28 minutes for the Bitcoin blockchain to squeeze out a block with over $2 billion.
	When gold tried to be internet money at its peak 2006, it mustered an output of $5.8 million a day.
	That's 340 days of e-gold in one Bitcoin block.
	A 17,589 times difference.
	So when people refer to it as digital gold, that's kind of rough.
	What uses more energy than Bitcoin?
	Explaining Bitcoin to no-coiners.
	Boom! Boom.
	That's just a little joke there.
	Visa announced that they're enabling Bitcoin to be automatically converted to fiat to enable morning coffee purchases.
	So that's kind of important.
	Morgan Stanley's announcement to offer Bitcoin to their clients.
	Five trillion in April ushers in a new era.
	A tidal wave of money is about to flow into Bitcoin.
	Every major bank will follow. Nothing will ever be the same.
	And more people filed for first-time unemployment the week of March 18th compared to last week.
	The economic reality is much worse than most people will admit, and that's quite true.
	Bitcoin adoption is about 1% to 2% of the world.
	You haven't missed the boat.
	You haven't missed the boat.
	So I think that's pretty important.
	Given just 2.4 million Bitcoin left on exchanges, there are only 30,379 sats left person on Earth.
	Right now, you can buy this amount for $17.50.
	It's still so incredibly early as of March.
	And Morgan Stanley becomes, as I said, the first big U.S. bank to offer its wealthy clients access to Bitcoin funds.
	That's rough, man. It's kind of inevitable, but it's rough.
	All right. So, yeah.
	Thanks, everyone. Boy, time flies.
	Time flies. I really, really appreciate everybody dropping by.
	And remember, it's not investment advice.
	You make your own decisions.
	Consult with experts. Don't buy or sell anything based upon our ramblings.
	Well, my ramblings, everybody else's pointed arguments here.
	And don't forget to check out Free Domain NFT. I'm doing my non-fungible tokens.
	I'm actually going to take some of my...

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