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April 1, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:49:57

FREEDOMAIN INVESTMENT ROUNDTABLE 11: OPPOSING BITCOIN!

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	How are you guys doing? Good evening.
	Sorry to displace the regular old live stream on the Wednesday night, but I like to mix it up.
	It's like my dance moves.
	Chaotic, vaguely dangerous, and often unsettling.
	So thanks, everyone, for joining us here tonight.
	We've got some people listening who are going to contribute, I think, just audio only.
	We've, of course, got some regulars, some new people.
	The regulars, hi.
	Jared, of course, you know.
	Seth's new. Tim, you know.
	We did comment on him escaping the inside, which I find alarming and unsettling.
	We've got Philip here.
	We were just commenting that he appears to be beneath a security camera in the corner of what I can only assume is somebody else's house.
	And Ryan, we chatted before, is that right?
	Yep. I remember some stuff over there.
	So, okay, if we could get an intro from Seth and Philip, and if anybody wants to know the intro from the other people, well, you just have to go back to the last show, so too bad.
	All right, so if you guys wanted to say hi, Seth and then Philip, and tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're here, what you're doing.
	Sure. So, the three main skills that I've been working on developing for some time are philosophy, logic, and economics.
	So I'm very interested in improving the power of my mind, understanding how the world works, and using that to live a good life.
	And you dropped by the parenting one recently, so great to have you back.
	And how long have you been in the crypto space?
	Well, I haven't invested in it, but I've been keeping a watchful eye on it for some time.
	And I find the idea of liberating us from the theft of central banks very interesting.
	Right. I'm also interested in Ethereum and smart contracts and Web3.0 and all that stuff.
	Oh, I've got a few things to say about Ethereum.
	Oh, that's right.
	You take that child from the room, Ryan, because that child should not be in the room when I'm talking about Ethereum.
	I refuse to be Zen about this, the brutality of what it has done to the world literature scene just today.
	We'll get into that in a sec. But before I pop a vessel on that one, Phil, hi, welcome.
	And don't forget to unmute.
	Tell us a little about yourself, your history in the crypto space, and feel free to look at the camera so it doesn't look like you're looking directly at my groin.
	Not that I mind that, but it's just something to remember.
	Copy that. So I found Steph when I was in art school.
	I went through what I would assume is a similar situation to what you did, Steph.
	You realize they're all Marxists and communists and have a tough time there.
	I've since moved to Hollywood.
	I do some work with Cernovich and with Scooter Downey, who you've had on the show before.
	We've worked together. There's a small coalition out here, but Small but mighty.
	In terms of crypto, I got into it probably early 2014 was when I started and really started in it heavy mining and noting for Bitcoin in the last two years or so.
	So I wouldn't say I'm an expert as Jared or anybody else in here, but I got a little experience.
	All right. Well, we've got a lot to talk about tonight.
	We're going to start off with a quick game of Spot the Zebra.
	Just kidding. So, yeah, we got a lot to talk about tonight.
	Criticisms of Bitcoin.
	Unfortunately, there was a guy who had lots of criticisms.
	I've got them in writing here, and we can see, but there are lots of criticisms of Bitcoin in particular.
	You know, I think in order to really be devoted to something as I am to Bitcoin, you got to take the punches, right?
	You got to take the opposition, you got to roll with the negatives.
	I do find it quite amusing slash horrifying, which is my general experience of the modern world these days.
	When you've got a whole bunch of international banksters who fund wars saying, oh, but it might use too much energy.
	Not enough energy is used in the destruction of human beings in Iraq and Afghanistan and all these other places.
	Or the same kind of class of people who are happy to enslave the unborn in massive intergenerational surf events.
	be used for nefarious things, you know.
	And what was I just read the other day that I think it was Deutsche Bank alone?
	What is it?
	Trillions of dollars, $2 trillion over the last couple of years, something like that, that they apparently have been accused of laundering.
	And oh, my gosh.
	I also wanted to talk about if you guys know much about what's happening with LBRY and the SEC, that's, I think, important.
	And people really need to keep a track of that.
	But I guess we'll just start with, you know, what are your thoughts, your criticisms?
	I think we'll start with Jared. And you guys can obviously take a smoke break as Jared, you know, pops his Klingon blood vessels and talks about Bitcoin.
	But no, listen, we do want to unearth the The bad stuff that's out there because no human endeavor is perfect, obviously, and this is a human endeavor.
	So, Jared, you've obviously had some thoughts about Bitcoin over the years and you sort of major criticisms.
	Now, we can talk about the criticisms in technology and so on, but I think those limitations that we've discussed before, but there seem to be some...
	Corruption questions, some financial incentive questions, some potential censorship questions we've touched on before.
	And of course, you know, we do want to talk about the energy requirements and so on and the China having sway, you know, the fact that China has a significant amount of churn when it comes to mining, although the fact that China controls the vast majority of the world's shipping doesn't seem to be as big of an issue to people, but what the heck? And then, obviously, we will continue the conversation until a giant supertanker blocks our communications channels and we all just go home.
	So, Jared, go for it.
	So, criticism of Bitcoin, like, getting into the technical stuff, like Blockstream's involvement, some of the players and how corrupt they may or may not be.
	Uh, that kind of stuff, when it comes to trying to find out the nitty gritty, the truth of what's going on is, is the claim the, the, for me personally, the cost benefit time to get in there and figure it out generally isn't worth it because the amount of time and effort it takes me to find out what's It's actually happening.
	It's like I've got a life to live and manage and career to take care of on top of that.
	And I could spend so much time working on those things.
	What I try to go to personally when I'm looking into crypto is the community.
	I can go there and I can directly interact with the people and get an inkling of the culture that's going on.
	Beyond that, for like personally, I like to say, like, Ethereum is, you know, you're gonna find a lot more face metal and purple hair, you know, in the Ethereum crowd.
	And there's, there's a little bit of socialism that comes along with that, you know.
	So that's the kind of, that's the way I tend to judge a blockchain is by the people, because A, I'm not as qualified to To qualify the technical sides, the code level, I can do it by novice, you know, stuff, but I can't really get in there as well as some other people can.
	And at the end of the day, I believe I don't care how great the code is.
	The human beings are what will determine the future of these things.
	Code blasphemy! Code blasphemy!
	Sorry, go ahead. I know we weren't going to talk technical stuff.
	And so for me, when I interact with the Bitcoin core community, not all of them, but there's a growing and plenty big enough percentage that are just more sophist than philosopher.
	And it's like that to me is poison, that therein lies the state, you know?
	So that's my criticism in a nutshell.
	I go out and directly interact, like for each individual, make your mind for your own, like these communities and see what you think, you know?
	Okay, thanks. Seth, is there anything that you've got in terms of criticisms of architecture, motives, rollout, and so on of Bitcoin?
	Okay, so a few things.
	First, when it comes to energy, I really don't like that criticism in the sense that they just say it dismissively, right?
	So if you were to approach it logically, it would be, okay, well, why don't we just switch nuclear power?
	Bam, we got energy.
	Or... Okay, well, why don't we switch from proof of stake to proof of work?
	What bothers me about Bitcoin is the fact that it's slow.
	Right now, it's good for big transactions, but it's not good for the typical day-to-day transactions.
	So it seems to be used more for speculation.
	Than it is for actual transactions.
	Although that is starting to change now that, uh, places like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal are starting to accept Bitcoin, which I think is a big move forward.
	But my biggest concern is just the scalability when it comes to the original Bitcoin.
	I know that other alternatives like Hashgraph are much faster, but Hashgraph isn't decentralized.
	It's made by one, five of the own companies.
	So So yeah, my primary concern is just that it doesn't seem to scale well.
	I know that someone in the space is going to win.
	There's too much value in the space itself, so I'm not invested in any particular coin.
	I'm invested in the concept because I know somebody's going to make it to the top.
	Well, it's funny, too, because as far as speed goes, you guys are younger than me for the most part.
	So when I first got online, I mean, it was like you had a small Japanese guy etch-a-sketching the web pages as they would download one character by one character.
	I remember a 300-board modem.
	No matter how fast you type, it was like letter, letter, letter, letter.
	And, you know, all of the productivity enhancements from the early web were completely nullified by the fact that it took forever.
	You could watercolor the webpage quicker by painting it than you could just waiting for it to download.
	So the idea that things and people say, oh my god, the web is so slow.
	The web is like, yeah, yeah, of course it's slow.
	You know, it's new. Of course it's slow.
	You know, we'll sort it out. That can be figured out.
	Wait a minute, Stefan. My understanding of Bitcoin, correct me if I'm wrong.
	Is that it's kind of intentionally slow.
	So it's kind of like the more transactions you have going, the slower they have to make it.
	So it's not necessarily a processing speed issue.
	It's an algorithmic issue.
	Well, I mean, that has to do with block size and all of that, which we talked about last round.
	So, Philip, did you want to jump in to criticisms and issues you have with the itty-bitty coins?
	Yeah, I mean, in terms of other people's criticism of Bitcoin and its energy expense, I mean, I run a Bitcoin mine, obviously a small operation, but it's kind of like having a second refrigerator in your house.
	In terms of energy use, state funding terrorism and spending $10 trillion a year, that's probably the first.
	If I was going to cut a pie, I would cut that part out first and then start to figure out a better way to manage Bitcoin.
	Yeah, I mean, everyone's going to talk about the speed.
	Speed's an issue. There's probably, in terms of the actual limiting of 21 million, even if you rattle off it down into Satoshi's, a lot of that's going to end up in fees and stuff also.
	So I think looking at Bitcoin as the staple and then other altcoins as, you know, the fluid that moves the system around might be a better way to think about it.
	But that would just be my opinion, obviously.
	Right. Tim, I'm sure that since our last conversation, you have found a genuine Vesuvius fireworks of optimism that is now powering you to new heights of joy and satisfaction in life.
	So just bring us the tsunami of love and joy, man.
	Yeah. So I feel like I got a lot of my complaints out during the last few shows.
	And so I'm just, I don't know, it's been very cathartic.
	But I did, sort of, looking back on it, I did realize that there was...
	I still think there's a thing that is happening that you are not aware of.
	Like, there's just an aspect to how Bitcoin is running that you are, like, just don't see yet.
	And then... And I think I can...
	I finally figured out how to distill it down to, like, a simple part, you know?
	So... Okay, so on the last show, I had this spot where I said, you know, when there was the Bitcoin Core-Bitcoin Cash conflict,
	both sides said that they needed to go down a certain protocol evolutionary path in order to avoid state interference in the future.
	And then you said, can you explain, like, why there's a disagreement about that and how this issue, like, why are we disagreeing about this?
	And then we never, the conversation kind of continued and we never really rounded back to that.
	And I, so I think I could state it simply.
	And that is that, so there's, they're not, They're not being totally honest.
	So, like, they say that the smart technical thing to do is to not just rely completely on the base layer, but to build layers on top of it, because just technically that's a smart thing to do.
	But that's not the reason that they're doing it.
	If you go and listen to the conversations Like I have, like where I'm just obsessively watching every little comment by everybody.
	The real reason why they don't want to expand the base layer is because they tremendously value the ability to run what they call full nodes from their home.
	And so to run a full node from their home, and I got like, If I'm going too long or anything, please pause me.
	No, no. Go for it. We got time.
	We got time. Yeah. So a full node to most people is something that they're going to be like, well, what does that mean?
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	But basically, it is kind of hard to describe what it is to somebody who...
	Like, to say that real simply, but basically, they want to be a network participant and...
	They believe that if they're not able to run a full node from home, then the network will become overly centralized and then the network will be able to find, there will be too few of them, and then the government will be able to find those individual ones and kind of crack down somehow.
	And I don't really believe that's the reason why I think the real reason is they just enjoy, like it's fun for them, like a hobby.
	So they have fun running this node from their house, and then when someone tries to expand the network capability beyond where they're able to continue to have a full node from their home, then they don't want to give that up.
	You know, like when Satoshi, he's got a quote that said, you know, at first, like basically everyone is going to run a node, but as the network expands, it's going to be more and more a specialized thing.
	And then, so from Satoshi's viewpoint, that's why he never even thought that there was ever going to be a scalability issue.
	But if you Change the design goals to where everyone can still very easily run a full node, then the network has massive scaling problems.
	So that's why they're not going to Lightning or sidechains because that's just the technical thing they think is the smartest thing to do.
	They're doing that because they have to in order to keep running these full nodes from their house.
	And I know that's a long explanation.
	Right, right. No, I think I'm with you.
	I think I'm with you. That makes sense to me.
	I appreciate that. Thank you.
	And if we can get to Ryan, who also makes me a little confused as to how Jared can be in two places at once.
	You guys look a little similar. That's all I'm trying to say.
	One of you is the good twin, one of you is the evil twin.
	We're going to tease that out among us style during the course of the conversation.
	But yeah, high forehead, full beard.
	Go for it, man. Okay, so I've written down just a couple notes in our chat message that I'll refer to.
	So Roger Veer, who's the Bitcoin Cash guy, not the creator of Bitcoin Cash, but one of the strongest advocates, He often says that Bitcoin is slow, expensive, and unreliable.
	And what he means by that, I think we've already covered slow.
	Expensive is a big problem.
	I don't know if we've covered that too much.
	But unreliable is also an issue that's more related to just not knowing how or when, if your Bitcoin transaction is actually going to get confirmed.
	Or when it's going to get confirmed.
	And so that naturally pushes people off the protocol onto other protocols.
	So we've talked about the Lightning Network also.
	That's not here yet.
	So until that's here, I'm still skeptical about Bitcoin, both currently and the future.
	So they've been promising Lightning Network for 18 months for about, well, 18 months times 3 or something like that.
	So it is a huge challenge to bring Bitcoin onto the Lightning Network.
	So, you know, in your ideal cryptocurrency, you just want transactions to be very fast, very, very cheap and very reliable.
	And there are cryptocurrencies that do that.
	And the main criticism against those cryptocurrencies is usually that Well, those are centralized.
	And it's really easy to get those properties with centralized cryptocurrencies.
	And they're not really even cryptocurrencies in a lot of Bitcoiners' eyes.
	But I would challenge that.
	I think that's a discussion that's probably too technical for me to get into right now off the cuff.
	But if you listen to a lot of the Ethereum podcasts, they do a really good job of this.
	And Bitcoin people generally like to think that Bitcoin is the most secure coin.
	And that's debatable.
	So although proof of work has been very effective up until now, and the market cap makes it very, very secure from just a market cap perspective, like it's, you know, it's harder to take down a system that a lot of people have a vested interest in.
	It is still vulnerable.
	And like I said, the fact that mining is very centralized, that's a problem.
	That's an issue. So those are some criticisms, but my main, what I would say my kind of unique perspective on my criticism with Bitcoin is that it's not a real economy.
	It's not a real internal economy.
	When you've priced out the ability to spend your Bitcoin on goods and services because of the high fees, then you can't really do what the function and the real purpose of money is.
	So if we're talking about money, you have to know what money is.
	And money is what money does.
	So if you ask some random person on the street, what is money?
	They'll tell you, it's the thing that I earn.
	It's the thing that I save.
	It's the thing that I do my accounting in.
	And it's the thing that I ultimately spend on goods and services.
	So what Bitcoin has done, unfortunately, is it's chopped off the two ends that are the most important.
	Earning Bitcoin.
	As a way to get Bitcoin.
	So right now, most people that get Bitcoin, they have to buy it, which has centralization risks and, you know, you're giving up privacy information when you do that.
	So there's no real easy way to earn Bitcoin.
	That's a problem. So you can store it.
	And that's why people are, you know, so heavy on that meme of like store value, store value, number go up.
	That's all that matters is because that's really all that Bitcoiners have left.
	When the fees are so high.
	So the other end that they've chopped off is the getting Bitcoin into goods and services.
	So if you're just stuck with a currency that has only the middle part of the saving and maybe possibly doing the accounting in Bitcoin, You've kind of neutered your currency into something that is questionable that you could even call it a currency at that point.
	At that point, it's more like an investment than a currency because you're not going to be earning crypto.
	You're not going to be spending crypto.
	You're just buying it and saving it.
	That's not a currency in my opinion.
	That's not money in my opinion.
	So, I mean, just from a, you know, semantic standpoint, but also a functional standpoint, it's not money.
	And it probably never will be unless it fixes those issues.
	And so, the sort of top three issues that you would like to see Bitcoin solve in order for you to accept it as money, what would they be?
	That normal people, average Joes, are able to easily earn Bitcoin.
	And that they're easily able to spend Bitcoin for goods and services and do that all with the native currency, not on some side channel, not on some second layer, not on some custodial service that's just telling you that you own Bitcoin, just like banks tell you that you own dollars.
	There are going to be, it's basically forcing people into using custodial services to keep fees low.
	And then now you're just using custodial services again.
	That's not the point of cryptocurrency.
	The point of cryptocurrency was to be currency, not an investment that you just leave on an exchange in a bank that the bank then gives you a substitute for that then is used as the currency.
	Because like right now gold is not a currency.
	It's not a currency because it's not being earned.
	People don't go to work and earn an ounce of gold.
	People don't spend an ounce of gold.
	So gold is not a currency either.
	Well, I mean, to be fair, though, the primary utility of gold at the moment appears to be the generation of Peter Schiff memes.
	So there is that aspect of it as well.
	But here's the thing.
	So, I mean, as far as earning goes, yeah, I mean, it'd be great to get paid in Bitcoin.
	That's obviously going to take a while and people get paid.
	You know, the tax implications.
	And of course, if you pay people in Bitcoin, it's kind of tough to do all of the deduction at source taxes and the pension deductions and the unemployment insurance deductions and the healthcare deductions, all of this stuff, and then remit it to the state.
	I mean, one of the things that is dragging down the adoption of crypto is all of the paperwork and reallocation of resources you have to do with the state.
	I think the other thing, too, I mean, I'm really with you.
	Like, I mean, there are... You know, the stacking sats hold on to them like grim death crypto people.
	But, you know, I don't know that you...
	Nobody really expected, A, the Spanish Inquisition, and B, like the China virus, right?
	The China virus coming in and causing the absolute wrecking ball of money printing to hit at the base of the US dollar and, in fact, Western fiat currencies as a whole.
	The accelerationism that is inherent in the massive expansion of the money supply, What was it, last year?
	Over the last 12 to 14 months, the US has printed more money than the entire time previous.
	Like, it's completely mad. And so I think that tsunami of incoming cash and debt is something that is making people hold on for dear life because they're just waiting for that tsunami of inflation to hit.
	And then, you know, it's going to be kind of ironic if it does, right?
	People, it's sort of funny that All of the younger people who think the world is going to end because of climate change.
	It's like, well, shouldn't you be Learning a real practical material skill then rather than, you know, art history and Marxist terminology.
	Like, if Greta Thunberg was genuinely believed that civilization was coming to an end, she'd learn how to spear fish, not take private jets to climate conferences.
	But yeah, it's just kind of funny. The world's going to come to an end, so I'm going to get a useless abstract degree and live right in the heart of a big city.
	No, you don't believe the world's coming to an end.
	You're kidding anyone.
	Stefan, if I could just jump in.
	I say that every time, I'm sorry.
	Tim may jump in.
	Go ahead. They are just not really being honest about the reason why.
	The reason why it can't be used at a much wider level is because they don't want the bandwidth requirements to go beyond what they can run from their home computers.
	And then if you don't believe that It's important for, I don't believe it's important for individuals to be able to run these notes from their house, then I'm completely fine.
	We'll just keep expanding.
	Like, I'm fine with all these extra use cases, but they're not.
	They really want to keep the base layer throttled so that way they can continue to run these notes from their house.
	And then it's not obvious to a lot of people why that is needed to happen.
	Why do they want to, for the mining profit?
	Why do they want to run the nodes from their house?
	The reason that they give is they say if there's too few nodes, then the government can come and find those individuals.
	And then if the bandwidth requirements are really small, then everyone can have one, and then the government won't be able to find all those people.
	Or enough of them to be able to, you know, stop it.
	But then they don't really admit that there's a trade-off.
	If you keep the bandwidth tight like that, then there's not, then everyone's going to have to, like, they say, oh, don't worry, because we will come up with new protocols that we can put on top of it that mean people can still transact with it without going through a bank.
	But then those new protocols haven't really come into an existence yet.
	And then so they don't admit that they're forcing a lot of people back into the banking system.
	And that's also a dangerous thing.
	Right, right. So now those large number of nodes though, at least like the security implication of having a lot of people using the node, that's like, okay, so we like to see people directly, the people who are more of an advocate of on-chain transactions, like to see people directly being able to exchange crypto.
	Okay, and part of that is there's a security in that.
	When Bob and Joe are directly trading Bitcoin or they've got it right on their wallet, you know, and they can earn five bucks, six bucks, whatever, there's a security in that because Because the more people invested in that, the more people that have that, it's the same kind of argument that when the government comes after it, if everybody's using it, okay, they're going to say, it's a little too late, fellas, you know?
	So there...
	Between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash, there's two sides of a different way of going about things.
	Personally, the way I'd like to see it go forward is say, how about we value both of those?
	That's what it should have been long ago.
	You can value both of them. They could have increased the block size, and then you would not have alienated this whole portion of the community and all these evangelicals.
	In the future, they can say, we were wrong.
	Please come back. And we're going to increase the block size.
	Probably not going to happen, but it's possible.
	But they say if you increase the block size, then you're walking down a road where they won't be able to run these nodes from their house.
	These guys are smart engineers, and they know that every decision comes with a consequence somewhere.
	And you can have Fast, Cheap, or what are the three in the coding world?
	I know somebody knows this.
	Fast, Cheap, and Good. Okay, yeah, you can have fast, cheap, good.
	So every once in a while, we have to switch that up and focus on one thing, all right?
	So right now, we can focus on increasing the block size for a period, and then as a community, switch over to focusing on layer two for a while, but without just having this idea that we're just going to reject one path of development forever, you know?
	All right, sorry, just to pause, before I put my glasses on, I thought we had Joe Rogan as a surprise guest.
	No, in fact, it's Kurt. Kurt, welcome.
	Thank you for joining us.
	If you wanted to tell us a little about yourself and your history with crypto.
	So I'm the Chief Bitcoin Historian at Coingeek.com.
	I'm sorry, we're looking for experts here.
	Do you know anyone who might be able to...
	Sorry, just kidding. Go ahead. Very few, no.
	So I've been a Bitcoiner since 2012.
	I was involved in mining back when you could mine with pretty simple equipment.
	I watched stuff change from GPU to ASIC mining and I've been involved in the space for quite a long time, so I'm here to help.
	I don't even actually know, other than this is a Bitcoin talk, somebody sent me this link and said, hey, I got this link from somebody that Stefan sent, so I'm here to help.
	It's great to have you.
	I appreciate you joining us.
	Oh, I have a question. The Point Geek, if I'm wrong, that's a Bitcoin SV. CoinGeek is a member of the Air Group, but the organization is mining on all three SHA-256 derivations of Bitcoin, so they mine BTC, BCH, and BSB blocks on a regular basis.
	I don't think we've had a...
	I'm sorry, we just got a comment.
	Somebody has said, given that you're a Bitcoin historian, I think we can all chip in and give you maybe $14 or $15 to tell us who Satoshi is.
	Is that something you can, unless it's you, unless it's you.
	It's Craig Wright, right?
	I assume it's an Irish guy, but just based on the name.
	All right. So we're just talking about sort of criticisms of Bitcoin.
	We want to really absorb the blows, so to speak, and roll with the punches.
	So if you wanted to give us your thoughts on ways, as Shakespeare said, in which Bitcoin doth sucketh.
	I think that was the phrase.
	But yeah, if you could tell us your thoughts, I'd appreciate that.
	Well, I think more than anything, I mean, Bitcoin's a technology.
	It's a tool. And, you know, only humans act.
	So I think the things that suck about Bitcoin are the things that suck about people who use Bitcoin.
	And, you know, that's 7 billion things as far as I see it.
	But I guess in the Bitcoin world, it's only really truly a few million of us at this point.
	But as for the people that actually understand what Bitcoin is or what it's capable of, Bitcoin really is two things.
	It's two words, right?
	It is bit and coin.
	And everybody's been very, very heavily focused on the coin part.
	I think people in a basic sense understand money, the concept of sound money, gold.
	People love this concept of digital gold that you can store and share and keep away from the bad guys and that sort of thing.
	But very few people talk about the bit part.
	They don't talk about Computation and the value of data and the value of having data that's distributed and that you can attach value to data, that you can monetize data in ways that are impossible any other way.
	And that's actually, when you read the white paper, Satoshi's first problem that he brought up is that Commerce on the internet is hampered by the high fees of centralized payment processors, which in 2008 when he wrote it was Visa, MasterCard, PayPal.
	I don't think there were many other payment processors on the internet in 2008.
	And he talks about the way that there's a massive amount of commerce that happens under the $5 fee mark that those things enable.
	And the conversation went from that in the early days, but very quickly turned to, well, What we really need is this store value that can't be penetrated, can't be confiscated, and all these different things.
	And a lot of that feature set was deprecated in order to focus on the coin aspect of Bitcoin.
	And for a very long time, we just haven't talked about the bit.
	We haven't talked about the data.
	And I'm a BSV supporter specifically because we want to emphasize that about Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin's innate ability in script to deploy unstoppable applications, computer programs, Overlay networks that allow basically Bitcoin to be the backbone of everything.
	And it's not trivial, it's not simple, but it is possible.
	And if we put the greatest minds in the world on solving data problems, data integrity problems, data ownership problems, you know, being a person who owns your data and isn't constantly getting scraped and raped by Twitter, Facebook and Google.
	I mean, that's an incredible amount of value.
	That really deserves to be looked at.
	And so that's what I'm most excited about.
	That's what BSV offers. It's the superlative that isn't available across any other blockchain, simply because they either don't scale, can't scale, or are purposely malicious in that they exist The token is the product.
	They just want to sell tokens and there's a lot of money there.
	So it's juicy, but there are bigger, more important problems that Bitcoin can solve.
	I like the hardcore rap element of scraped and raped.
	That's some gangster talk there.
	I appreciate that. Now, so BSV, I don't want to say elevator pitch because we've got some time here, but it's not a...
	A value environment I know much about.
	So if you could tell us a little bit about it, history and problems it's designed to solve and where it sits.
	Absolutely. So Bitcoin is a protocol.
	The protocol enables a network and that network enables a distributed database.
	That's what Bitcoin is in a very basic sense.
	When people disagree about the way that that protocol should implement the database, the database can split.
	In 2017, the database split into Bitcoin BTC and Bitcoin Cash.
	The Bitcoin cachers wanted more data to be able to go over the network per 10 minutes.
	BTC has this opinion that 6 megabytes of data should be the limit to how much data can go across the global network.
	Per 10 minutes, ever, forever.
	So that's it. Between four and six.
	So kind of a small limit.
	I wouldn't buy a six megabyte hard drive or a thumb drive for anything, personally.
	So Bitcoin Cash split.
	They were like, hey, we're going to be big blockers.
	We're going to try scaling on chain, see what comes of that.
	And about a year later, there was another debate about scaling back up again.
	So there was a 32 megabyte block size limit in Bitcoin Cash.
	And the other side, the people that became the BSV people said, hey, We should, every single opportunity we get, we should raise that limit.
	We should eliminate more hard and soft limits across the network.
	We should let Bitcoin grow organically.
	We should let the mining community decide the emergent block size limit of Bitcoin.
	And rather than having a software developer say, this is the hard limit in the code, let's eliminate these limits altogether and let miners decide how big of a block am I willing to try to propagate across the network.
	Because if I fail, if I try to push a two gigabyte block across the network and nobody else wants to take it, then I fail.
	I've lost money. I have realized that emergent consensus is smaller than my...
	My, you know, my will to push.
	So if I understand, sorry to interrupt, if I understand this right, it's sort of like instead of a fishing limit, whatever you can dynamite to the surface, so to speak, it's just whatever fish you can get up.
	Pretty much. I mean, we don't know what Bitcoin's capable of.
	We do not know what the software or the network or any of it can actually do because we've truly never tried.
	And the BSV community says we're going to split off, we're going to take off all of the protocol level limits, and we are going to let people Push.
	Let's let people push the pedal to the metal and drive it around the racetrack until we all fly off.
	And when we fly off, now we know what we need to tune in order to keep the car on the track and do a faster lap next time.
	So that's the logic.
	Now, where do you sit in BSV with regards to the programmability of the environment?
	Because I took a couple of years off from Bitcoin because I got sucked into the vortex of politics.
	Fun though, that was. And I had a pretty big presentation, I think it was 2014 or something like that, where I waxed rhapsodical about the programmability of a Bitcoin, the smart contracts, the automatic wills if you show up in some obituary.
	And when I came back and waxed rhapsodically about all of that stuff, people were like, no, no, no, that was all originally there, but it's kind of been slimmed out.
	So where do you guys sit in terms of the programmable environment?
	It's the complete restoration of the original Bitcoin stack.
	So it is a complete programming environment that allows you to loop scripts, have multiple scripts that can either sit in op return or push data transactions.
	So you can upload, for example, you could push an entire operating system in a transaction and then you can interact with that operating system higher up in the stack.
	You can also deploy overlay networks on top.
	So, I mean, what is Bitcoin from a physical standpoint, if not a distributed supercomputer network?
	Now, granted, they're specialized supercomputers, but these miners can also deploy GPU acceleration of various processes.
	It's a distributed supercomputer.
	So if you can build it on a computer, you can build it on Bitcoin SV. And right now, today, there are social networks that are deployed 100% on-chain.
	You can interact with them, every like, every interaction, every follow, every...
	Branch, which is sort of like a retweet.
	All of these things are transactions.
	You can also upload things.
	I wish you would get on one of those things.
	They got memo.sv or memo.cash.
	It's like Twitter, but it's all on-chain.
	I just think it's so cool.
	You would never get censored or banned again once you're on this thing.
	It's fully yours. You own the keys to that account.
	It's your property. I feel like you're getting me drunk in a bar and talking about not getting deplatformed.
	It would be so great.
	I've got my beer goggles on. Man, you look pretty good right about now.
	I don't want to freak out, too, because you'd be the biggest name on those platforms, too.
	If I recall, I believe you're on a platform called Streamantity, and you may be on a platform called Twitch.
	Yes, both. Yeah, so I follow you on both, but I don't recall exactly where I see it because I follow you in a lot of places, but...
	Those are examples of things that are built on Bitcoin SV. There's other people that have similar things, but a lot of these things have rate limits that you wouldn't expect otherwise.
	So every other blockchain either has the number of scripts that you can push per transaction or the amount of operations that a script can produce directly.
	You know, at a given time, but BSP has removed all of those limits.
	So you can deploy something that is set to be practically Turing-complete.
	It's not technically Turing-complete, but it is practically Turing-complete.
	I'm sorry, Turing-complete, can you?
	So this is a long debate.
	Sorry to get all pointy-haired on you, but if you can dilbert that up for me a little, that'd be excellent.
	For sure. A Turing machine is a really stupid name for a computer.
	Alan Turing invented modern computing.
	If you say Turing machine, I just think the Eagles, but go ahead.
	If a program can run itself, if it can run in perpetuity as long as it has power, it is considered a Turing complete.
	So BSV is that. You can deploy something with application language that tells it to continue to run until the plug is pulled.
	So no other blockchain.
	There are blockchains that do that, but they have other limits that make it practically not dysfunctional basically as well.
	Well, wait a minute. So my understanding of Turing complete is essentially if a problem can be solved by a computer, then your programming language can do it.
	Correct. So it's essentially whatever space of problems can be solved by a computer, if your programming language is Turing complete, it can compute anything that's computable.
	Yes. Well, Ethereum's big, you know, selling point was that they said they were turning complete.
	And then people in Satoshi's vision said, well, actually, if you think of How Bitcoin works, you could make it Turing complete if you are a little...
	From my understanding, it's actually...
	Turing completeness is actually relatively easy as the way it's been presented in the past.
	Please correct me or I'm wrong.
	Okay, this is great. Now, I... Sorry, just since somebody did mention the word Ethereum, I'm just wondering, and I hope you guys don't mind if I swear a little because...
	Let me tell you my experience with Ethereum over the last little while.
	So... I thought, hey, NFTs are kind of cool.
	You know, I mean, I got the platform from everything except I think I can still trade in fucking Polynesian seashells somewhere in the past, or maybe I can use Wasp Hornet Ness as earrings in some alternate dimension.
	But anyway, so I'm like, yeah, let's try some NFTs.
	So I created one and I sold one.
	It was kind of cool. And then I thought, you know, well, I have this novel.
	It was a really good novel and I'll put a limited edition out and also sort of thing.
	And I'll, you know, put it out for like 25 bucks or something like that.
	Anyway, so I got a screenshot.
	Did you see this, Jared, today?
	This screenshot today, where somebody was like, hey, it's great that your novel's out for 25 bucks, but why do I have to spend $200 to buy it?
	Holy crap.
	Welcome back to the scaling debate.
	It's like, do not drop your soap in the shower when Ethereum is around, man.
	You will be hitting a high note like you wouldn't even believe.
	Like, what the hell?
	What the hell is going on with that freak of a crypto where it's virtually 10 times the price of something that ain't two cents to make a transaction?
	Gas fees?
	I mean, holy crap.
	I mean, are we in a Mad Max zone where gas has become as scarce as diamonds?
	Like, what the hell is going on with that?
	What am I not understanding about Ethereum?
	Because I'm like, yeah, it's a crypto.
	And I'm like, wow, Ethereum makes being robbed in an alley or fiat currency look like a positive, productive experience.
	I mean, dear lord above, I'd rather get a tax bill than a gas bill from Ethereum.
	I'm like, help me understand what the hell is going on with a $25 transaction costing more than $200.
	You should sue them for all of the therapy fees you've incurred as a result of their...
	Absolutely. So Ethereum is funny because it is also Turing complete.
	No, it's not funny. I just wanted to interrupt you right there at the beginning, my friend.
	The one thing it is not is funny.
	Maybe funny for you, not funny for me.
	So the Turing completeness.
	So Ethereum is something that would have been possible to deploy in the Bitcoin stack initially.
	And they removed this subset of this programmable.
	It's really programmable.
	This is why people develop in Ethereum is that the language is very discoverable if you're a software guy.
	The problem is it's only good for about 15 transactions per second globally.
	And when you get a lot of people around the globe, you create traffic jams, which means the toll booth price gets higher.
	And that's what's going on in Ethereum.
	I'm sorry, did you say 15 transactions?
	15. It's about two and a half to three times more than BTC globally, which is better.
	Sorry, what was the time frame for 15 transactions?
	Per second. Per second.
	And 14 of those transactions apparently are just being digitally punched in the gonads.
	Only one actually goes through.
	The rest of them are just them Mike Tyson-ing your nuts, because that's basically what seems to be happening.
	They're fighting at the toll booth.
	That's what it is. Is there a plan for this?
	Because it doesn't seem like even remotely...
	I mean, I was a software developer guy, an entrepreneur guy, and if I had gone to anybody in this universe outside of a fucking insane asylum and said, I got a great crypto, it'll process a $25 transaction for only $200, they would have said, okay, you know, get into that suit that lets you hug yourself and go back to painting stuff on the wall and your own shit.
	Because, like, what is the plan for this?
	So now you know the problem.
	That's the problem with both Ethereum and Bitcoin, the high fees.
	It's a temporary problem, though.
	Ethereum is planning to fix it.
	They've been researching it for years now, how to scale Ethereum.
	And by the way, somebody wanted to know the trilemma thing earlier today.
	It's actually, it's not the cheap, good, and reliable.
	It's two of those right now. It's decentralized Decentralized, secure, and scalable.
	No, no, no. You're talking in the crypto world.
	When I brought that up, I was talking in the software world.
	They have something in the software world where it's like, do you want it fast?
	Do you want it good? Oh, right, right, right.
	So in the crypto world, the challenge is to make a cryptocurrency that's decentralized, secure, and scalable.
	So Bitcoin is optimizing for decentralization and what they call it, security.
	And They're okay keeping the scale small, which means they're okay with high fees.
	Whereas Ethereum is saying, no, it is very important to keep the fees low so that we can scale out to different developers.
	And it's functional. So, you know, it's wonderful to hear these conversations.
	Let's get back to my needs.
	My needs and my needs alone.
	All right. You were asking, how is Ethereum going to scale?
	And there's sharding. No, I wanted to go back to something that Ryan said.
	Because I listen quite alertly to two things.
	And Ryan said two things that I thought were a little contradictory.
	And I'd just like him to break it out a little bit more, if you don't mind.
	Because it's kind of important. So you said, no, they're going to solve this problem, which sounds good.
	And then you said, they've been talking about it for years.
	Now, these two things do not appear to be in the same room without one of them beating the shit out of another one.
	Okay, so please tell me which is it.
	Is it that they're going to solve the problem or they have been talking about it for years?
	And after talking about it for years, it's $200 for a $25 transaction.
	Is that the result of them talking about it for years?
	Help me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	They've been talking about it for years.
	They've also been doing something about it for years.
	Ethereum. They're in the early stages of transitioning to Ethereum 2.0, and part of that is scalability, which means that they're going to be breaking Ethereum up into, instead of one chain, there will still be just one chain, but there will be, I think it's 32 other side chains that connect with the, I think it's called the beacon chain.
	Sub-chains. They have a stealing plan that will reduce the fees.
	That's the bottom. Right now, Ethereum is taxing me 90 fucking percent.
	On a transaction. That is some shitty leftovers.
	That's like somebody eats the prime rib and you get one cow testicle and a fucking tail.
	So they need to hit the gas on this thing because you can buy a $25 thing with a credit card, no problem.
	And it's like, why is it almost 10 times the price?
	Again, if this is the result of them working on it for years, I think that they need to get somebody else to work on the problem.
	Hold on, hold on guys.
	I have to make the Tezos pitch now because they're already doing it.
	They're already proof of stake.
	You can have NFTs, smart contracts, all that good stuff.
	Plus the development is governed on chain and paid on chain.
	There's avenues for that.
	Okay, so whereas Ethereum is planning on getting there, Tezos has already been doing it.
	And there's only more to come.
	Every three months it scales and adds something new to the chain.
	Tezos, yes. Steph, I was telling you, you can get NFTs for like pennies in transactions on Tezos.
	Now I feel like the guy whose friend gave him good advice, you know, man, that chick, she's hot, but man, she's unstable.
	I'm like, no, no, no, man, I can talk her into being stable.
	And next thing you know, I wake up without a kidney and a tattoo of a swastika on my forehead.
	So thanks, I apologize.
	I'll listen to you and I'm sorry I didn't earlier.
	Sorry, go ahead. It works. Just to be clear, I'm not here defending Ethereum.
	That's not my coin.
	I'm just here defending the fact that they have a plan and they're working towards scaling.
	So you'll get a different conversation from me depending on what I'm comparing.
	It's like what you always say, Steph, compared to what?
	So compared to fiat, Bitcoin is great.
	It's amazing. But compared to Ethereum, you know, Ethereum has a plan.
	They have the right roadmap.
	They're working on it. They're doing it.
	So that's great compared to Bitcoin.
	But compared to something like Tezos or some of these other coins that have engineered in scalability from the very beginning, including, you know, the coin that I'm most interested in, scalability is definitely achievable.
	And it's the only question is, can you get the scalability with the security and with the decentralization?
	And I think you can.
	So to me, it's not like a trilemma in the sense that this is an impossible thing.
	It's a trilemma in the sense that it's very difficult to do all these things.
	But, you know, Bitcoin is just kind of like laid over and it just looks like they're not even trying.
	So that's the problem that I have with Bitcoin.
	Who wants to take a swing at Bitcoin?
	Proof of stake versus proof of work and its relationship to scalability.
	Philip, go.
	I can't. I'd like to follow up on whatever is said here.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	You are welcome to. I deal with this every day because we mine crypto, we mine Ethereum.
	The problem I see with...
	So proof of work is the actual mining process, the actual validation of the block, adding it to the chain and increasing the length of the chain.
	Proof of stake is people who are holders of that currency staking their holdings on the validation of transactions.
	Okay, you know you can't use the word in defining the word.
	So when you say proof of stake is people staking, I'm sure that's not going to help.
	They're pooling together their resources to backstop the transaction.
	They're almost financing the transaction beforehand.
	So their holdings borrow against the transaction fee effect.
	Can I jump in real quick and clarify something?
	So proof of work and proof of stake, they're both saying you have to prove something to do two things.
	The first thing is you have to prove something in order for us, the Bitcoin network, to allow you to create new coins.
	So you have to prove that you've done some work to do that, okay?
	That's one thing. The other thing is you have to prove, in order for transactions, so moving coins.
	So there's creating coins and moving coins.
	And Bitcoin uses proof of work to validate both of those things.
	So Ethereum is using proof of stake to validate both of those things.
	It's saying in order to create new coins, you have to essentially have existing coins.
	That shows that you have a stake in the network and that you're the validator that you're running.
	Is not nefarious.
	So I'm giving a very simplified explanation here.
	But when you're saying proof of work and proof of stake, the high level understanding is that these are things that you're trying that you have that the network requires you to prove in order to be in order to both amend and amend the database, essentially, which is both creating coins And redistributing coins or creating transactions.
	So that's what we're requiring proof for.
	So that's just my addition there.
	And there's like often coins get locked up for a period of time.
	If you do something naughty, you lose them.
	So there's an incentive to make sure everything's on the level.
	Yeah, I mean, it's an open network.
	And so for it to be open, you have to have some kind of rules that dictate, okay, it's open to anybody, but that doesn't mean that there's no rules.
	It's just like anarchy, right?
	Anarchy doesn't mean that there's no rules.
	It just means that, you know, the rules are voluntarily adhered to.
	And the rules that are voluntarily adhered to in these crypto networks are of two main sorts.
	And that's... Proving that you've done some work and proving that you have a stake in the network.
	They're two completely different ideas, but they're accomplishing the same thing.
	And proof of stake does use a very small amount of proof of work, but it's negligible.
	It's negligible, yeah.
	The idea is that you're signaling your intent to maintain your reputation.
	And in proof of work, that's how much value you can put into the network.
	And in proof of stake, it is about how much value of the network that you currently hold.
	So they're different incentive models.
	So basically saying, hey, I'm heavily invested either in the coin itself, and therefore I want to keep the coin secure.
	But in proof of work, it's about, hey, I'm willing to fight for this network to actually maintain the validity of blocks proactively.
	I'm willing to burn electricity, and I'm willing to buy these machines and have, you know, Spend a lot of money to continue to maintain the network going forward.
	Right. And I would say to that that it's actually not...
	You said prove that you're adding value or something.
	You used the word value. I would push back a little bit on that.
	It's really not value.
	It's work. And more accurately, it's essentially electricity, which is just heat and noise.
	So at some point, all of that work is no longer valuable and that's the distinction that I'm making with proof of work is that yes it's secure because you have to prove that you've done a lot of work to do to participate in this network but that doesn't mean it's valuable.
	It's valuable to the point that it's securing the network but beyond the point of reasonable security it's just waste so in one sense it's actually proof of waste And that's what the proof of stake guys, like Ethereum, like other Tezos, I guess.
	I got to push back on that, Ryan, because what's happening there when the proof of work model, especially BSV, where they're competing for, they can choose whatever size block they're willing to fight for, but any proof of work.
	You have, it's not just like you got to burn electricity.
	That's not just what happens because you, as a capitalist, you've got to organize people.
	You've got to get, you know, get everything lined up.
	You got to invest in the hardware, the capital.
	It is proof of human will.
	As far as I'm concerned, that's the way I see it.
	And there's value in that.
	And people are on these networks.
	They are using them. And that's an expression of how they value them.
	So I definitely see value.
	And even though I'm Teso's proof of stake, proof of work is definitely a great thing.
	It's valuable in the sense that value is subjective.
	So who am I to say that it's not valuable?
	But it's not valuable to me.
	To me, after you've got to the point where you have a secure network, the energy input...
	Beyond that security is just waste.
	So that's my subjective value.
	No, I disagree. Because what happens is all this effort gets put into securing the blockchain for that time.
	And the value, okay, you're saying the value is lost or it's wasted at that point.
	But like I go and I buy a house, okay, when they do a title search, it's a chain of custody from the beginning of time.
	And that's where that old value is realized.
	Is that we reliably know where and how it came from way back there to right here and why it's still valid and good and a right chain.
	That's where I see it still being valuable in perpetuity.
	People talk about the computer science implications of these terms.
	So proof of stake and proof of work in a computer science standpoint, you can have a conversation about the relative utility between them.
	But both concepts are actually based on real world economic principles of incentive.
	And proof of work is...
	Basically creating an incentive to make sure that the king of the network is the person who is both providing the most value to the network at the time, but also investing to provide the most value to network in the future.
	Whereas proof of stake is just, it's the holdings of previous, it's the work that they did before.
	So like a central bank, for example, is proof of stake.
	They exist in their power position because they were able to absorb a lot of capital and power and influence previously.
	And then their stake in the system as a whole allows them to steer the direction of our network, our nation or our world network in the future.
	But that's based on previous work and previous power, which makes them lazy, which is why Federal Reserve Bank, for example, is inefficient and...
	It has poor incentives. They're not incentivized to give us the best life.
	They're incentivized to maintain their power, keep us happy enough, that kind of thing.
	Now I've got to push back against you, Kurt, and defend proof of sake.
	No, it is not like, first of all, I put my money into the network to stake it and invest it in some of those people.
	And that was voluntary. I voluntarily earned that money.
	It doesn't make me lazy.
	It makes me incented to maintain the security of the network and propagate all that good stuff.
	These people in these terrible positions who have pilfered money that they're just sitting on, they're not invested in interest in the people, that's often a lot of stolen goods they're working with.
	You know, so I completely and utterly disagree with the central banking model for proof of stake.
	What's your question, Steph, specifically regarding the proof of work and proof of stake?
	Because we might be on a little bit of a...
	Yeah, sorry. I just wanted to break it out.
	Now, can we...
	I got an email.
	And I wanted to get people's thoughts on this.
	Now, just before I read this, I want to be clear.
	I've not vetted this.
	Don't know if it's all true.
	If it's not true, I apologize.
	But this is a criticism that somebody wrote about Core, right?
	Core is like the central code base of Bitcoin, right?
	So this is what he said.
	He says, I wrote out a few of my arguments for why I think Core is compromised.
	He says, A, and again, you guys let me know if this is true or false, what you think of it, and I apologize if any of it is false.
	I've not vetted it, but these are the criticisms.
	He said, A, they have a financial incentive.
	All the core developers work for a company called Blockstream.
	Blockstream's main product is a thing called Liquid.
	They call it a sidechain, but basically it's a payment network that runs on top of Bitcoin, and they collect fees from it.
	If Bitcoin works as a payment network, Blockstream doesn't have a business model.
	They need Bitcoin to suck as a payment network in order for their product to have a place in the market.
	And I'm just wondering what you guys think of that, whether there's any truth or validity to it, and if it's a valid criticism.
	I think it is a valid criticism to be worried about that.
	But just one correction, I do not think that all of the core developers for Bitcoin work for Blockstream.
	In fact, I'm pretty sure that that's not the case.
	But many do, and that is a problem if they're being funded from an outside source.
	So that's actually one of my key criticisms with Bitcoin.
	So I share this concern.
	Somebody said here only a few core developers of Blockstream, most of them are not.
	They're key members.
	They're influential members of that group.
	There are hundreds of people that contribute to Bitcoin, but there are also the people that garner the most...
	and the maintainers, the people that even allow upgrade proposals to be pushed to the rest of the network, is actually a very small group of people.
	Who's holding the repository keys right now?
	And for anyone asking, that means who, like, so the Bitcoin code is hosted on somewhere like GitHub, and there's only people that hold these keys who can allow what actually officially goes in.
	Okay.
	Do we know who's holding the keys right now?
	Is it Adam Back?
	It doesn't really matter.
	So first of all, I hear this criticism a lot and...
	And while it's true that the Bitcoin Core code base is on GitHub and there are keys in order to push and merge pull requests to that repository, it doesn't really matter.
	Because you could just as well, if there was a significant problem with Bitcoin Core, somebody could just create a different repository.
	It doesn't even need to be on GitHub.
	It doesn't even have to be in source control for that matter.
	If they can push out An implementation that follows the Bitcoin core protocol, that's all that matters.
	So it's more of an issue of reputation of the core developers.
	Sure, but if we're asking about block streams like corruption, things like that, them holding the repository keys or one of their employees holding the repository keys would be kind of interesting, I'd say.
	Yeah, I think people say that there's a choice as to what software you can run, but I don't know that the Blockstream cabal has ever been practically...
	Removed from winning that battle.
	They have way too high of a reputation right now.
	So it's about reputation.
	But I think the bigger issue is with who is funding the developers of a cryptocurrency.
	So if your cryptocurrency is developed and funded by somebody outside of the cryptocurrency itself, that might be a problem.
	So I think that there are several cryptocurrencies whose core developers are funded directly from the mission of the cryptocurrency itself.
	And that's controlled by the stakeholders.
	So that to me is a better model.
	So it's just one more kind of nail in Bitcoin's coffin that they're not able to fund the developers from the stakeholders.
	It'd be like having a company, but all of the employees are funded by some other company.
	That would be weird.
	How are the shareholders going to feel about that?
	When you're creating new money...
	Oh, Steph, you're muted. Sorry. Sorry, yeah, so there's another one which is, I've heard this kind of story before, and if you guys know it, this may be in Kurt's wheelhouse, of course.
	In 2016, representatives of Core met representatives of Bitcoin miners to discuss increasing their block size.
	At the time, miners were signaling that they were going to switch to running code produced by a different development team.
	The Core developers promised the miners that they would double the block size if the miners promised to update their nodes to include a new feature called SegWit.
	Segwit was needed for Blockstream's Liquid sidechain to work when the time came.
	They insisted that Segwit be activated months before the block size increase and the miners complied.
	Then after the core devs got what they wanted, they refused to include a block size increase in their code, even though I had promised to earlier.
	Do we remember these dark days of 2016, Kurt?
	That sounds a little bit more in your wheelhouse.
	Yeah. Absolutely.
	I've written about this at length.
	I call this the Bitcoin Civil War.
	This was one of the major battles.
	It was a propaganda battle.
	And if you actually go up, something that I discovered after the fact.
	So I recall it from 2016.
	I was very much a big blocker.
	I supported the SegWit2x upgrade and all of that.
	I was a big blocker. So...
	But what I came to realize after the fact is that if you follow the money, and this goes up to most chains, I think you would be very surprised, or everyone would be very surprised if they look at where the funding came from on both sides of this.
	So you have companies like Coinbase, Kraken, BitPay, and some of these other people that were on the big block side versus companies like Blockstream, Lightning Labs, and other players who were on the small block side.
	They often share quite a small group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists at the top.
	So I've come to theorize, and I don't have absolute proof, so I don't want to oversell it, but I've come to theorize that perhaps the whole thing was sort of a controlled opposition collusion thing because the Chinese miners, the miners are primarily Chinese, didn't seem to understand the miners are primarily Chinese, didn't seem to understand the subterfuge at play.
	They made a deal.
	They understood and liked the idea of scaling block size, and they were signaling it for many months.
	They were putting flags in their block headers as they put them out and saying, you know, go Segwit2x.
	We want the update. We want the upgrade.
	And so it was very, very clear what their intentions were.
	And there was a very weird switcheroo that occurred.
	A lot of people got stabbed in the back.
	And stuff got really, really weird for a while.
	That's why Bitcoin Cash split.
	The certain smaller group of miners basically said, hey, we don't understand what your politics are or what's going on here, but we all agreed to something and you have reneged.
	And we're going to continue with the roadmap that we agreed upon.
	And if that's Bitcoin Cash, we don't really care what you call it.
	And that's when they decided to start mining both chains.
	In parallel. So it's a weird time, but I encourage everybody to follow the money.
	Look at the portfolio page of Digital Currency Group, and you will see a lot of very, very strange bedfellows all call the same couple of people boss.
	Do you have any of this written out anywhere?
	So I'm an author at Coingeek.com.
	You can find a lot of my articles.
	I have a history series.
	They're numbered. So you can go from the very beginnings of Satoshi before it launched.
	And I have a number of articles that touch on very specific, very weird issues too.
	But yeah. All right.
	So here's another criticism.
	They say, at the time, corporate opponents said that it was immoral to change the code if not everyone agrees to it.
	That doesn't make sense because they had no problem making an enormous controversial change to Bitcoin's design.
	But if anyone wrote code that disagreed with Core's code, it was an attack.
	I vaguely get what he's talking about there.
	Kurt, does this ring a bell for you?
	Absolutely. So a couple of the people that were particularly bad, there was Gregory Maxwell and Luke Dash Jr.
	were both very particularly toxic developers in that both were very...
	Greg Maxwell has connections to the Tides Foundation and Wikimedia.
	He's a professional social engineer.
	Filed tax returns from a couple of addresses in Dulles, Virginia, which is common for CIA agents.
	But he was a very big contributor in that era to Bitcoin Core's code.
	He's also a contributor to a lot of other things.
	He's an incredible software engineer.
	But he pushed for a lot of very specific things under the guise that Bitcoin was fundamentally broken, that it was dangerous, that it lacked a bunch of necessary security protocols.
	And so he was a big fan of reengineering, redeveloping.
	And it was he really cared about Bitcoin and we're going to fix it.
	And anybody that questions him is a fool.
	There are all these different things.
	So there was a big sock puppet troll war.
	But then you had Luke Dash Jr., who is himself also a very weird fellow.
	But he created a bunch of blacklists, which means that when you push software out, so you might do a special...
	Bit of software for a server project or something and say, hey, you want a Bitcoin integration?
	And in that Bitcoin integration, they were censoring addresses to players like BitPay.
	BitPay was the big one that was very upset that they had their main public key address blacklisted in a distribution of Linux that came out from Luke Dash Jr.
	And that...
	Created a whole bunch of problems. That was a big reason that Roger Ver, who's the CEO of Bitcoin.com, came out heavily in support.
	He's a big investor in BitPay as well.
	But he immediately was like, hey, this is the absolute antithesis of Bitcoin to have some software developer blacklisting the public key addresses of one of the flagship companies in the Bitcoin space at the time.
	BitPay was a very big deal.
	That almost strikes me as an industrial espionage or sabotage or something like that.
	Yes. Furthermore, you want to really look into some craziness.
	Look at the DDoSing of the entire ISP in the county where Mike Hearn lived.
	Mike Hearn is a British developer.
	He was a Google... Sorry, did you say the county?
	Yes. Is this the guy who couldn't get any good internet and he just goes down the street to the pub and nobody can get any good internet because the entire area has been blanketed with these denial-of-service attacks?
	I think that's a story Chris was sharing with us in the last week.
	Yeah, yeah. So Hearn, yeah, Hearn was a proponent for Bitcoin XT, which was another early big block version of Bitcoin.
	He was one of the main developers in the core repo at the time.
	And in 2013 and 14, he started to push out and say, hey, if we want two megabyte blocks, like we can test with my software, it's ready to go.
	He was an engineer from Google.
	He was a very talented fellow himself.
	People started saying, no, it's unsafe.
	It's very dangerous.
	Bitcoin XT is going to bring the network down.
	Well, very funny, when his nodes started to go online and miners started to favor the Bitcoin XT nodes for their efficiency and for the opportunity to mine bigger blocks, all of a sudden the ISPs that are all around where he's got these nodes set up start dropping off the line.
	They keep getting denial of service attacked.
	And it got so bad that he plainly just pulled his nodes off the network For the sake of the people that he lived around, saying, sorry, I'm under attack by an unknown troll army, but I think everybody basically knows who was...
	We know who orchestrated it, although...
	So basically you had civilian collateral damage in the blockchain wars.
	Wow. Absolutely. Okay.
	Okay. All right. Here's another one.
	He says they're wrong about important stuff.
	A big argument Core said at the time for why we shouldn't do a block size increase was because they said SegWit was already a block size increase.
	SegWit rearranges data in the block in a way that in theory can trick a miner into thinking a block is smaller than it really is.
	Core said... That effect would roughly double the amount of transactions the network could process.
	Then they said, if we do a doubling of the block size on top of SegWit, that would really be like a quadrupling of the transaction throughput.
	That would be crazy dangerous.
	In reality, SegWit had almost no effect on transaction bandwidth.
	Sorry to keep going back to your well, Kurt, but you almost got like a facial tick, if not a tear, forming in the corner of your eye.
	Does this ring a bell for you as well?
	I love it. You know, I could be doing anything else with my time right now, Stephan, so I'm glad to be here.
	But yes, Segwit.
	What Segwit does is...
	Let's take one step back.
	Bitcoin is essentially a chain of digital signatures.
	Those signatures have a certain amount of weight to them and how much space they take up in a block.
	If you aggregate those signatures and you hash them, you can process all those signatures separately, put them outside of the block, and it is just a hash that represents, hey, this X amount of signatures were in this block, and we'll give them to you if you request them.
	So now you can fit more transactions in this block because that signature data has been hashed separately.
	In theory, sure, it sounds great.
	In my opinion, the bigger issue is that it changes the transaction malleability.
	So you can't re-reference those signatures easily, which lets you play different data games.
	I'm a big fan of the data capabilities of Bitcoin.
	So those things become locked down.
	So rather than being a scaling tool, I think Segwit is much more of a tool for the sake of Liquid and Lightning Network.
	It acts as a way to lock a block down so that it can't be changing while your coins are doing something on a pegged side network.
	So without Segwit, you can't trust what's going on in the blockchain without something like Segwit.
	They call it the malleability fix.
	And there's a few ways to do it, but Segwit is...
	Obviously, it was the winning version so that things can go off-chain, onto liquid, onto lightning, that kind of thing.
	You know, I always generally – this is back from being a software – I was chief technical officer, head of research and development.
	Whenever a coder came to me with a totally confident solution to a massively challenging problem – Immediate red flags.
	Like, this chest thumping, I've sorted it!
	And it's like, maybe you have.
	And so when I wrote my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, like, the solution to the age-old problem of how do you get ethics without guards and government, the first thing I said was, hey, man, the odds of me getting this right are so infinitesimal that I can completely understand your skepticism.
	And I'm as skeptical as you are, like, let's work through it together.
	But there's so many people in this area who are like, you know, we've got it, we've got this huge, like, the routing problem, one of the huge Unsolved problems in computer science and everyone's like, oh yeah, we'll get it sorted out.
	It's like, are you really?
	I mean, is that just a cross your fingers?
	And to me, it's like, oh, I'll play the lottery, man.
	I don't need to save my retirement.
	Lottery's like this lightning network thing, right?
	So everybody recognized that there was a big issue with transaction throughput, but they said, no, no, no, we've got the lightning network, which is kind of like magic.
	There's a magic thing that's going to happen.
	It's not even a meme. It was like an old science thing where there was a huge bunch of equations on the left-hand side of the board, a huge bunch of equations on the right-hand side of the board, and then in the middle was a cloud which says, and then a miracle happens.
	And one of the guys reviewing it says, I'd really like it if you could break out this middle part a little because, you know, that seems a little bit like a leap.
	So, the core dev said, you don't have to worry about transaction throughput because the Lightning Network is coming, which is what, like...
	Five years ago? And where is it working even in concept?
	This guy says they promised it would be like a giant mess network so people could still pay each other peer-to-peer, but when they were asked how payments were supposed to route through the mess network, which is the most important part of the concept, they just pretended it would be this easy thing to solve and they'd figure it out later.
	The Lightning Network today is like four big banks that have payment channels with each other.
	You have to custodially deposit your money with them because there's no way to route your payments without their assistance.
	It's nothing like What they promised and said would be ready years ago.
	The routing problem is one of the hardest unsolved problems in computer science and the core devs were betting everything that they would just poof!
	It's a kind of magic.
	They just figure it out, right? And how does that play?
	Well, I actually shared a really funny thread a few days ago across Twitter.
	A couple of guys lost a bet.
	It was an Ethereum guy versus a Lightning Network guy lost a bet.
	And they had 25 messages between them trying to figure out how the hell to send each other $1,000 over Lightning Network.
	And it was, send me an invoice.
	No, send me another invoice.
	Okay, no, spool me up this other channel.
	No, okay, now I need to download another Lightning wallet.
	No, no. And it was just...
	It was hard to believe it was real, honestly.
	It was so comedic.
	It was like Benny Hill, fast motion, the clown and monkeys running by the screen.
	It was just absolutely insane.
	Sorry, just to interrupt for a second here.
	Did you know that the W in WETH, the W stands for where the fuck did my Ethereum go?
	That's something that not many people know.
	They think it's something else, but that's an important consideration there for the acronym.
	For sure. I actually have a theory about Lightning Network.
	It's the traveling salesman problem, the routing problem.
	These are major computer science issues that, like you said, have not been solved.
	However, I think Lightning Network is a meme.
	Going back to those venture capitalists again.
	It's a meme, did you say?
	It's a meme. What do you mean by that?
	No, seriously, what do you mean by that?
	When somebody says, oh, Bitcoin can scale or can't scale, the response is always Lightning Network.
	But it's exactly that. It's like, well, what does that mean?
	And it's an unsolvable thing.
	So it's on Twitter or on other social media places.
	It's literally like, show this guy the Lightning Labs logo or the Sea Lightning logo and then just...
	Go on. Lightning solves it.
	Don't ask how. But Jared, when we set up this Sphinx thing, right?
	I mean, that's lightning.
	Stuff's moving. We sent stuff back and forth.
	I mean, tell me where, like, it's not vaporware, right?
	That is true. Now, I've been critical of Lightning Network and everything like that, and we got Sphinx set up in the Breeze Wallet and had some technical issues here and there, but all in all, it does what it says it will do.
	And now, given the Breeze Wallet has a maximum limit on the amount you can even deposit there, and they tell you up front, like, this is, you know, this is beta wear, and, like, you can lose all your values.
	I mean, and that's, you know, take it with a grain of salt, but...
	I have to say it did at least beat my expectations.
	It's working. We can get Steph some Satoshis and it's great in that sense.
	There are compromises that can be made to make it work.
	It's not completely worthless in every situation.
	However, it's quite a bit different in implementation.
	I don't think I saw that in the review box.
	Kurt says it's not completely useless in every situation.
	Woohoo! Let's get some funding.
	And here's the thing. To me, okay, Lightning or second layer solutions are a universal crypto thing.
	It's like HD wallets.
	When we create HD wallets, we create that for all cryptos, okay?
	When we create a second layer solution methodology that works, it's It's not going to be that hard to say, okay, now this one, we can use it for Ethereum, we can use it for this, we can use it for that.
	Great, you know?
	So that's the way I view the second layer stuff.
	It's not just going to be for core, and we can do other things with it when it is actually working, you know, for prime time.
	Sorry, somebody else came up with a better joke than I did.
	So I'm going to have to just erase that.
	Hang on. They said it's called wrapped Ethereum because you're going to get fucked so hard by gas fees.
	You need some protection. Wrap it up, man.
	Wrap it up. That's not too bad a way of putting it.
	All right. So let's close this criticism on...
	Censorship. Now, I talked about this, or you guys talked about it, and I gave you some feedback, at least my thoughts on it last time, but let's do a backdrop here.
	So here it says, Our Bitcoin and BitcoinTalk.org were the main forums for Bitcoin discussion back in the day, and one day the moderators of both forums just literally started deleting and banning everyone who talked about the original scaling plan.
	Thousands of people making rational arguments got banned.
	I got banned, says this guy.
	It only looked like there was consensus to change the scaling plan because they banned everyone who disagreed with Core.
	From the CEO of Coinbase in 2016, he quotes, There continues to be rampant censorship on our Bitcoin regarding this debate, which is unfortunate.
	I continue to encourage everyone to move to RBTC as an alternative that is censorship-free.
	In case you weren't aware, our BTC is the main forum for BCH discussion.
	That's where everyone went when they were banned from our Bitcoin.
	Then later, the split happened that Bitcoin Cash had to take a new ticker.
	That's why it has the wrong subreddit name.
	Also, I wanted to mention Coinbase used to be very vocal, that they were only ever going to be a Bitcoin company, and it was after that meeting they realized they needed to diversify because the CEO of Coinbase, quote, realized we had a much bigger problem, the systemic risk to Bitcoin, if Core was the only team working on Now, I think some of you guys bear the battle scars.
	See, my battle scars were the election in 2016, but I think your battle scars were the other area.
	Well, the election in 2016 resulted in my censorship in 2020, but this was a wrapped up censorship in 2016.
	And who remembers these battles with the vividness of a 300 rock-hard abs Spartan warrior?
	I'd actually like to give a fun fact.
	A lot of people don't know this.
	Satoshi Nakamoto, most of what he wrote is available today on BitcoinTalk.
	However, he never wrote a word on BitcoinTalk.
	Early on, he owned Bitcoin.org and Bitcoin.org was where the original forums were hosted.
	It was only after Satoshi disappeared that BitcoinTalk was spun up by a guy named Marty Malmy and a guy named Thamos.
	And they moved those forums from Bitcoin.org over to Bitcoin Talk.
	And there's some evidence that some things may have been changed, some of Satoshi's words, but unproven.
	But a lot of people say, well, Satoshi wrote this on Bitcoin Talk.
	Just not the case. So we have like Dead Sea Scrolls authentication issues with the original theology text.
	Okay. Quite a bit. Got it. Now, I'd sort of poo-pooed some of this censorship last time saying, you know, it's kind of a Nietzschean will-to-power universe when it comes to these kinds of battles.
	But that's, you know, banning thousands of people and completely shutting down discussion.
	If that description of what happened is accurate, that does seem to be somewhat serious.
	That's accurate. That's an accurate description from where I stood then.
	Yeah, and they say that the reason why they need to go down this protocol evolutionary path is to ensure censorship resistance.
	And then they're all about censorship in a different spot.
	And again, we need to, you know, man up and just expect this sort of stuff.
	But still, they didn't, like, Saphon, you said, it's one thing For a company to ban you, but it's one thing, but they should tell you kind of the reasons ahead of time.
	And then if they change the reasons, then there's kind of an ethical Well, you know, in most of the places that I was banned from, I had these quaint little things called terms of service.
	And, you know, like a naive, trusting, virginal fool, I was like, well, you know, clearly I'm complying with what they want.
	And if they have any issues, you know, a big enough guy, they'll talk to me, or at least they'll give me some warnings or tell me what the issues are.
	And it's like, nope, boom. You know, smoking crater where 15 years of work was and the terms of service meant nothing.
	And that's my issue.
	My issue, of course, with the censorship is that, look, if PayPal, if YouTube had said, hey, man, if you talk about the science of IQ, you're fucking out of here, man.
	That's science that we simply don't count on.
	Or if you like smart people having babies, fuck you, you're gone, right?
	I mean, if you criticize Marxism because somehow you feel that the hundred million ghosts is a bit of a burden to bear on your soul and you don't want it to happen again, you know, if you criticize the ethics of the people who want to murder you in your sleep, that's totally against.
	If you oppose the violence of communism, that's totally...
	If they had just said that, I don't send my articles to fucking Mother Jones because they're all hard leftists out there and they're not going to be friendly to a free market guy.
	They're not deplatforming me because I'm not going to build a presence there.
	But if they say, hey, we're free speech, all legal speech is allowed and blah, blah, blah, and then they just invent these nebulous bullshit terms which are never defined and then they ban you without any due process or any feedback or any warnings or anything like that, then that's just straight up corporate fascism.
	That's straight up corporate fascism.
	And the idea that it's a private company.
	Yeah, it's a private company.
	Does that mean the bank can triple your mortgage payment on a fucking whim?
	No, because you got a contract with them, right?
	So they're not supposed to be able to do that shit, right?
	Can your doctor say, oh, by the way, I've just decided that you owe me a kidney and then drug you and take it out with a fucking spork?
	No, of course not, because you've got a reasonable, decent contract with these guys.
	Can Tylenol say, oh yeah, One out of a hundred pills is going to be a psychedelic roofie that's going to have you, you know, higher than Timothy Leary on a fucking space shuttle.
	Well, no, they can't do that because there's a little thing on the side that says here's what's in it, right?
	So the idea that we can just rip out contracts and just willy-nilly do whatever the fuck we want, well, that's my issue with these companies.
	Not that they're private entities, but because they're Lying, cheating, adulterous with the state, crazy, psycho, stalker, denialists of reality, you know, to put it somewhat mildly.
	So, yeah, I mean, this is my ambivalence around PayPal.
	Yeah, you're assholes. Yeah, you weren't very protective with my personal information, to put it mildly.
	On the other hand, you're taking Bitcoin now, which is bringing the price up.
	So, you know, even Steven, right?
	So... Don't give them any ideas.
	The last thing we want is these terms of service to be extended everywhere else in life.
	I would not be surprised if five years from now they try to pull this shit on us.
	Well, it's funny because I wrote many years ago about social enforcement through ostracism, but there was supposed to be due process and all of that.
	Well, I mean, you've got people on, you know, 12-year-old interns on Twitter yanking prominent immunologists' opinions about COVID. It's like rule of the idiots these days.
	As far as criticisms of Bitcoin, I mean, there's some pretty serious stuff here.
	And I think it is really important.
	I think people think of Bitcoin like it's just some objective decentralized thing like TCP, IP and so on.
	And I guess if we could just go around the table for sort of closing statements about this kind of stuff and remember that the fallibility and the power lust of the coderous is...
	A problem in Bitcoin and also a problem that Bitcoin is trying to solve.
	Because however much there may be, and I'm sure there are assholes even in this roundtable.
	No, but however much there are assholes in the Bitcoin Core Development Group and all of that, at least they're not central bankers, right?
	So this level of potential corruption and dishonesty and manipulation and power lust and banning, Okay, it's not great, obviously, but if it wasn't present, we'd put these guys in charge of the Federal Reserve and it would be a beautiful system, so to speak, right?
	So it's almost like a self-defining problem that this power lust does occur.
	And that's why something like crypto, however it's going to shake out, seems pretty necessary.
	So if you guys want to give me final thoughts on whatever you feel like, I'm happy to hear.
	I got it. Bitcoin Core.
	You've got to compare it to state, malice, vice, and incompetence to make it look good.
	But it still looks good.
	That's a fair point. All right.
	Ryan? Let's see.
	Final thoughts. Have you been working out?
	Would you take off your shirt?
	Because you're looking pretty buff there.
	Come on. Let's OnlyFans it.
	Just for a moment, man. Just kidding.
	Go ahead. Sorry. So my main point is that why do we need to just advocate for Bitcoin at this point when we have so much evidence that there are problems there?
	So I've heard your argument that like, well, people aren't going to understand all these different coins and everything.
	And that might be true, but I think it's only a five-minute conversation max to get somebody from understanding Bitcoin to understanding something that's better.
	So my hope would be that we who value freedom, that we just get behind cryptocurrency in general rather than Bitcoin because Bitcoin is compromised and I don't want to send somebody on a life raft that's got a hole in it.
	But wouldn't it be the case, though, that the exact same personalities that were present in Bitcoin would be present in every single potential of value?
	Like, I mean, so we say, okay, well, it's sort of saying, like, well, some other dev team is going to be pure of heart.
	It's sort of like saying, well, the next communist revolution is going to be full of selfless people who just want the best for mankind.
	I mean, if this is the fallen nature of man, going back to my early Christian understanding, which I'm really gravitating back towards, the fallen nature of man is, okay, so we could just replace the assholes in Bitcoin with the assholes in some other crypto.
	Tezos accepted, of course, because Jared looks pretty tough.
	But, I mean, isn't it the case?
	I mean, I'm happy to hear otherwise, but it would seem to me that, okay, well, we could start again from scratch, but, you know, the same...
	Either people...
	The people who succeed are these kinds of hard-driven, hard-nosed, no-compromises, amoral kind of people.
	Or as something begins to succeed, they just kind of glom in and suck onto you like some squid monster on John Hurt's face in a spaceship, right?
	So that's always my question is, okay, let's say some other crypto starts to bust through the roof.
	And I know this from when I was a software guy and we went public with the company and the financial squid sucker vampire assholes just kind of glommed in on the company and the, oh, there's a little bit of money to make and they stick their beak in your jugular and suck out your third born through your ass, right?
	And so I guess my concern is we can take the challenges of the Bitcoin people or we can go some other place and say, well, I'm sure that's going to remain pure.
	And I don't know how that plays.
	Okay, so it's the same argument that you have to make for the free market in general.
	So the free market in general, the argument isn't that the free market is full of great, you know, altruistic people.
	The argument for the free market is that there's competition.
	And at the competition...
	Is what makes a great product.
	So if we're just putting all of our eggs in the Bitcoin basket, and we don't have anything else that we're advocating, then they're going to get real comfortable.
	You know, if you took it to the state level, anytime there's a monopoly, there's a, you know, lower service and higher costs.
	And that's what is happening with Bitcoin.
	So the solution to that is to just let, you know, let Bitcoin fall on its own sword, which is kind of what it's going to do, I think.
	And if there is competition, there will be, you know, two, three, ten other coins waiting in the wings that can be transferred from Bitcoin to them just like that.
	And it's easier. It's not a difficult conversation.
	It's actually an easier conversation to bring somebody into one of these other coins that's doing it better.
	And without the other coins, I think I understand your point correctly, without the other coins nipping at their heels, there's absolutely no way the Bitcoin is going to remain honest, right?
	Because they don't have that risk of losing out.
	All right, Philip, did you want to jump in?
	Tim, we'll get you, I promise, man.
	Before the light vanishes and you return to your natural bat form, we will get to you, I promise.
	But Philip, if you wanted to jump in.
	Yeah, I would say everything we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes shows that the priority in those three things, decentralization, security, and scalability, should be decentralization over scalability.
	And that's what Bitcoin is doing.
	That's what staying away from something like proof of stake does.
	It creates a more We're even playing field with more people on it rather than a more centralized banking type structure where the people who have the most money or have the most Bitcoin have more control.
	If you favor something like that to get the scalability, you lose the decentralization, which leads to the problem we were just talking about.
	Tim, I feel like you had something to say.
	Can you shine the light from below so you come across full Hitchcock, like you're going to tell us a story about a guy with an axe around a campfire when I'm 12 and I wet my pants?
	But sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so I had a couple thoughts.
	So one is when I first got in, I remember people would say, oh, well, this thing is going to come about.
	And then it didn't mature.
	I get so excited.
	I tell everybody this thing's going to happen.
	And then it didn't happen. And then another thing and another thing.
	So I've completely worn out when it comes to expecting something to happen just because someone says so.
	I do not believe that what the developers say until it actually is something that I can use.
	But that's one thought.
	And then another one was like the...
	It's so stressful because I know every second is like 100,000 seconds wasted in the world.
	So yeah, competition is what keeps people honest.
	If there was no other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin would get just a little bit better than the dollar and then stop there.
	In order to keep it, it needs the competition behind it to keep it honest, I think.
	The cryptocurrency needs competition in order for this whole thing to work out well.
	So it's important that these other projects are happening.
	One thing that just freaks me out about listening to the Bitcoin core people is they really don't believe that.
	They believe that the whole system would be better without the competition.
	That's a common thing you hear from that community.
	Tribalism is one hell of a drug.
	Yeah, and I just wanted to thank you, Tim, for the wonderful impersonation of Jeff Goldblum.
	I'm waiting to see a lawyer get his ass bitten in two right behind you.
	So thanks very much for that.
	And let's go back to our gallery view here.
	Seth, is there something that you want to mention as we close up?
	Yeah. As we discussed, there are legitimate critiques of Bitcoin.
	It's not all this bullshit, oh, but what about the energy, or oh, what about this, or what about that?
	And to me, I think we could sum up most of the issues we discussed in the form of convenience, right?
	For the end user, it's slow, it's expensive, it's difficult for the average person to support it.
	And that's why I say I'm not invested in any particular coin yet.
	I'm looking for someone to actually solve these problems of scalability and security and performance.
	And then I want to throw all my weight into whoever that is.
	And I haven't seen any coin convince me that they're there yet.
	There's lots of plans to get there.
	Which, you know, it reminds me of in Spider-Man 2.
	There's a scene where Peter Parker's late on his papers.
	He tells his professor, I'm planning on doing a paper on this really amazing thing.
	His professor says, planning is not a major at this university.
	We're seeing a lot of hype.
	And a lot of promises.
	But as you've pointed out before, the sales team makes wild promises and then the developers have this crazy set of requirements they have to conform to to make it happen.
	And I'm seeing a lot of the sales side.
	I'm not seeing as much of the delivering.
	It's going slower than I would expect.
	So I'm very cautiously optimistic.
	Somebody's going to win. There's trillions of dollars on the line.
	I just don't know who it is.
	No, that's a good point.
	And my constant battle, I wrote about this in a novel called The God of Atheists, and my constant battle as a software guy was the pathological falsehoods of the marketing guys and trying to backfill.
	They got great bonuses, got to go home on the weekend, and I bled away my youth typing on the screen.
	All right. Kurt.
	Yeah, sorry. Somebody wanted to say?
	Go ahead. Yeah, sorry.
	So it just occurred to me, too, that if my crypto of choice was in the lead, I probably wouldn't want competition either.
	So I probably shouldn't judge that community as much as I do.
	Well, no, I get what you're saying.
	So a minor entrepreneurial story.
	So when I started my company, it was a very new space, this environmental management software.
	And then I read that IBM was marching into the space.
	And I was like, oh, great.
	You know, there's like 12 of us here.
	And now IBM is going to roll us over like King Kong on Godzilla, right?
	On Bambi. But my partner said, no, no, no, it's a good thing because we've got a better product.
	They'll go out and advertise the shit out of this space and then we'll go and everybody will find us because we've been around longer.
	And then we'll go in and we'll kill the presentation because you're great at presenting this stuff and I was.
	And so, yeah, it ended up being a huge bonus to us.
	So competition is almost always a good thing.
	Sorry, Kurt, if you want to look to your left, somebody may be there that you're not aware of.
	Yes, my delightful wife.
	Does she want to say hi? Would you like to say hi to Stefan Molyneux, dear?
	Come on, that's an homage hairstyle if I ever saw it from you.
	Hi, nice to meet you. Hi, how are you doing?
	Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
	Thanks for dropping by. We'll return him soon, none the worse for wear.
	Well, not totally the worse for wear.
	But yeah, thanks for lending us your delightful husband for the evening.
	It's been a great addition to the conversation.
	Awesome, no problem. All right, Kurt, take it home, brother.
	All right. Well, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I'm going to be a bit of a contrarian to the other people's opinions here.
	I actually think that Bitcoin itself is competition.
	The network itself is innately competitive.
	I think it is actually better when people take a step back And stop looking to, you know, everybody mentioned developers.
	We need developers to do this, but we need developers to do that.
	And I actually think developers, software people, have a tendency to think that they can solve all problems, but especially in the blockchain space.
	And I think there's this power, and I say this as someone who's a semi-capable software guy, but they look at these things as technical problems that can be solved with a technical solution, that we just need to make...
	We need to create better incentives in software.
	And they ignore the inbuilt incentives of human interaction that Bitcoin really gives us.
	And if we can humble ourselves a little bit and say, maybe we cannot create perfect software, but perhaps Game theory, a perfect game theory can allow imperfect software to create an exponentially better world if we're willing to compete for it.
	And that's truly what Bitcoin gave us as a protocol in the white paper.
	And then really in the initial implementation, if you really read what Satoshi had to say about these things, Dan Larimer and James Donald were two guys that very early on told Satoshi that he didn't understand Bitcoin, that No, this will never work.
	It can't scale. You need all these nodes to do all these different things.
	And Satoshi frankly laughed at them and said, no, you don't understand.
	It can do all of these things and here's how and here's why.
	And unfortunately, the Dan Larimer's of the world won because Dan Larimer is quite a bit more talented a software programmer than Satoshi Nakamoto was.
	EOS from a code standpoint, if you look at the actual software development and engineering that goes into it, it's extremely thoughtful.
	It's very, very elegant from a software standpoint, but it has constant governance problems.
	EOS has had multiple splits of the network and all these things, and it's because for some reason...
	You get to this certain level of intelligentsia where you believe that you can solve all problems for all people.
	And so you keep building a bigger and bigger set of solutions that apply to a narrower and narrower set of people that can understand the solution you're proposing to them.
	And I think Bitcoin's beauty is its simplicity.
	It has a very readable, very simple eight-page white paper.
	There's two pages of some jargon, but most of it is just plain paragraphs explaining an economic incentive that creates a network that can change the entire face of the global economy just through good incentives.
	And I believe truly that if we...
	If we treat it the way that it's meant to be treated, if we really let proof of work govern, it removes the power from money completely.
	But we have to actually compete.
	Miners have to not be passive.
	They have to take their role.
	They have to be the honest nodes that Satoshi described in the white paper.
	And then they have to fight for Bitcoin too.
	And frankly, they haven't for a long time.
	They took a backseat to the software engineers.
	They took a backseat to the venture capitalists that showed up with Frankly, a lot of money.
	And now we've got this economy of 6,000 chains that all do kind of the same thing in different ways and they compete with each other across a Venn diagram that is mostly crisscrossing.
	And I think that's really unfortunate.
	I guess that's my final word.
	Let Bitcoin be Bitcoin.
	Let's actually compete for real consensus the way that it was described.
	And we'll actually get to see what Bitcoin's capable of.
	Because frankly, it's an experiment that we have not actually given a chance.
	Right. So mostly a great speech.
	Most of what I got is that Kurt's really, really into minors.
	All right. So no, and listen, I just wanted to mention as well, right?
	This is an important thing. Let's spell that out, please.
	Can you? Sorry. ERS, ERS, ERS, ERS. But no, listen, I mean, look, for all the criticisms, and by the way, Bitcoin's gone up 500 bucks over the course of this show.
	So anyway, I just want to mention that. But no, can you imagine?
	Oh, kid here. Okay.
	Can you imagine how unbelievably sad it would be to not have Bitcoin or crypto in the world at the moment as we're sort of sliding over the money printing abyss?
	You know, what an unbelievable, dare I say, fork in the road.
	No, I don't dare say it.
	Spork in the road that we got going on here.
	Can you imagine? If we didn't have a place to store value other than, say, gold and diamonds, upper ass or whatever, right?
	I mean, that... Sorry, upper donkey for the kid here.
	But it would just be unbelievably tragic.
	And the fact that there is an alternative for fiat currency, that's portable, that's fungible and messy.
	Yes, it's messy, but it's nowhere near as messy as fiat currency.
	And that's sort of what I wake up when it's like, oh, you know, there's this negative thing or that negative thing.
	It's like, yes, but...
	But on the other hand, there's some life rafts coming off the fiat currency giant sucking sound as, you know, human souls get flushed down into the endless greed of the banksters.
	That's a pretty damn great thing.
	That's a pretty damn great thing.
	And what an unexpected thing.
	You know, I think, you know, I think, hey, I've done some good in the world.
	Yeah, not bad, not bad.
	But I'm no Satoshi, you know, because that guy, and the amount of good that he's done by giving us an alternative to fiat currency, First time in human history.
	Absolutely. I mean, I sit there and thought, oh, you know, I could work on philosophy, come up with a great theory of ethics and talk to thousands of people about how to make their lives better, or I should have just stayed in the software field and worked on this shit.
	Anyway, it's kind of funny because I was a pretty good coder in my day.
	James, thank you for joining us.
	I'm afraid we're going to have to give you a high buy.
	Happy to have you introduce yourself if you'd like.
	I'm sorry that you could, I think you were working, came in a little bit late, but if you have any final thoughts, I'm happy to hear them from you as well.
	Yeah, thank you very much for having me.
	Yeah, I'm here in Australia, so I got the message a bit late.
	I had to work in the morning. Thankfully, we're working from home still.
	So I want to talk a little bit.
	Of course, I don't have the time, I know, so I will not elaborate too much about the fungibility of Bitcoin.
	And as you said just now, we have the alternative to the fiat currency, and Bitcoin is definitely much more fungible than the fiat currency, so there's already an upgrade there.
	But these days, there are companies, and everyone knows that that's not really a secret, that work very hard to get to analyze the whole blockchain and make coins really unfungible.
	So if there's a coin that came through whatever dark web or hacks or anything, and you have acquired that, and you might not even know that it comes from a bad Then exchanges will not accept it and we'll have problems, maybe even with the law.
	So there's a core problem with fundability in the Bitcoin network.
	And in my opinion, it's good that we get higher and higher prices because that will push more people to move to Lightning networks and Lightning networks have the potential at least to give us more privacy and override some of these bad effects of But fungibility really.
	I know I don't have much time here so we'll not go through much more details.
	I would just say that Monero is the best alternative on this case.
	The only actual fungible coin out there.
	And it's not really sexy like other coins.
	Don't talk about smart contracts and smart this and smart that and 1 billion Transactions per split second.
	It's just a coin that works on privacy and these days is not really something really sexy.
	So I just want to mention that and if in another round table we have much more time, I'm happy to also give a little bit more detailed presentation Absolutely, yeah.
	I wish I could schedule these things ahead of time, but I'm way too impulsive for that.
	So, thanks guys.
	The fact that there is now, for the first time in human history, money without blood on its hands.
	Okay, maybe some, you know, smoking craters of community, a Accounts on a chat session, but no actual blood, you know, no blood of children mining gold, no blood of war and fiat by control and command.
	We have money without blood and hopefully we can get a much more peaceful world out of that.
	I love you guys for dropping by.
	Thank you so much for your time tonight.
	Fascinating conversation. I'm happy to be schooled on the history because I'm not up on it.
	As I said, I was out of the space for quite a while.
	It's great to be back. It's also gone up another $100 since the last time I mentioned.
	You know what? We've just got to stay on the call because clearly this is a vortex that's drawing the price up higher.
	So I'm afraid get a coffee, people, and pee in your seats because we're sticking around.
	Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.
	And I'll send out notes to people for joining the next one.
	A huge pleasure. And have a great evening.
	We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you.

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