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May 12, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:48:18

THE WORLD OF ALT COINS! Freedomain Roundtable

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	Um, yeah, so, um, what do you think all, uh, all coins are, I don't know, most all coins are, uh, uh, the whole space.
	I just, I remember you saying that, uh, um, yeah, I'm, Assume so.
	And I've worked a lot in the software space, which doesn't make me any kind of final authority, but I did spend 15 years and to some degree was part of a pump and dump scheme, not because what I had created was pump and dump.
	But because when the company that I co-founded went public, because we were in the environmental space, we satisfied a lot of green requirements for investment portfolios.
	And man, it's, you know, the fever greed that takes people over with this kind of stuff.
	I've seen it firsthand.
	I wrote about it a little bit in my novel, The God of Atheists.
	It's just astounding.
	You know, people just literally staring at, you know, our stock started at two cents and like went up from there and It drives them crazy.
	It drives them absolutely mental.
	They lose focus on work.
	They've just got stock pictures up on their screens.
	They're distracted.
	They're planning all their wealth.
	They're getting all loosey-goosey.
	They get kind of punchy because they feel like they don't need you as a boss anymore, and the investors are being told stuff that is technically impossible.
	And the mania is just extraordinary.
	And of course, it has a lot to do with bad childhoods and lack of bonding and all of that.
	But yeah, it is the fear of missing out, the greed factor.
	You know, we're very stimulated into these kinds of things, the desire to get something for nothing.
	So yeah, there's a lot of coins and they don't have the network effect of Bitcoin.
	They don't have the general acceptance of Bitcoin.
	They don't have the technical acceptance and proof of concept of Bitcoin.
	And, yeah, they're like, oh, it's got this cool thing.
	It can do things way faster than Bitcoin.
	It's like, well, of course it can. You know, I mean, you guys, I'm sure you know the whole challenge of Bitcoin, right?
	The block size thing, right?
	How many transactions are you going to process in any particular...
	block size.
	And the big battle was, well, if we make it large enough that we can process a whole bunch of transactions, then it can't be decentralized because it's too much data to go over people's, if they want their home networks, their home nodes.
	So you'll need these big server farms with these dedicated T3 pipes and all this kind of stuff.
	And then it's centralized.
	It could be attacked.
	It could be shut down.
	And the whole point was to keep it decentralized.
	So that's just a factor of the decentralization is a relatively lower number of transaction capacities.
	And so a lot of these guys are like, yeah, look at this, you know, Bitcoin takes this amount of time and we'll do it in a quarter of a second.
	It's like, well, yeah, because you're small, right?
	I get that. I get that.
	I mean, it's like a guy who's got, you know, a thousand people on the network going to another guy who's got one person on the network and the other guy says, my network is way faster.
	It's like, well, no, it's not. It's just a few people using it.
	So there's a lot of, is it scalable?
	And does it need centralization?
	If it scales up to a World finance situation, and this isn't necessarily just the coffee and donuts thing, but if any crypto is going to scale up to a world currency thing, there's two big tensions.
	One of the tensions is we want to keep it decentralized, which means the blockchain has to be updated everywhere, which means it's going to be slow relative to a centralized thing like Visa or whatever.
	If it's centralized, then yeah, you can process a lot more transactions, but...
	The whole point of the decentralization was to avoid the power of central banking, to avoid the power of a centralized server farm that's vulnerable to attack and so on, and hacking and all of that.
	So a lot of the altcoins, have they dealt with this issue?
	Are they up front and say, well, yeah, we're faster because we're smaller, we're faster because there are fewer people using the network, and we're faster because we have an architecture that will require It's centralization when it comes to processing the millions of transactions a minute or a second that could be the case in a world economy situation.
	I'm no expert on this, but my understanding is That the Bitcoin is, you know, there's going to be stuff that happens at a faster situation like the Lightning Network.
	And if you know more about this, please correct me, right?
	This is sort of my very rudimentary understanding of it, that you're going to have a parallel network that's going to settle transactions quicker, which then is going to be resolved to the blockchain over time, just as when you do a Visa transaction, it settles the next day or maybe the end of the week or whatever it is.
	So to say I have something vastly superior to Bitcoin...
	That's a pretty tough statement to make and be credible because Bitcoin has really underwent the whole growth scenario and scalability situation.
	And the other thing too, if you're a new coin, I'll tell you that this is a case I would hate to make.
	But having seen salespeople, I know how they can make a case that they feel is worse very quickly and much, you know, with great sophistry.
	But the case that I would not want to make as an altcoin, and I'm not talking about the major ones like, you know, Bitcoin Cash maybe or to a smaller degree, Tesos or something like Ethereum.
	You know, so I'm not talking about that. I can talk about the 3,000 other coins or whatever out there.
	What I... What I would not want to say to an investor is, my coin will cause people to abandon the trillion dollar value proposition of Bitcoin.
	They will abandon that.
	They will give up their money in order to come to me.
	Because if you want to get people onto a crypto, if you want to get people off Bitcoin and onto your crypto, then you have to explain to an investor how people are just going to abandon a trillion dollars plus of value.
	And not just individuals, but now entire institutions.
	I'm sure countries have it in their back pocket.
	What is it? Mark Zuckerberg just put out a tweet saying that he's got two goats.
	One is named Max. The other one is called Bitcoin for maximalist Bitcoin.
	You've got Tom Brady going laser eyes and Paris Hilton going laser eyes and all this kind of stuff.
	So you have to explain...
	It would be like, I'm going to build a house so good that people will simply abandon their existing houses.
	They won't even sell them to some degree, right?
	Because if everyone sells Bitcoin, it kind of goes to zero, right?
	So you're going to have to explain to people who are coming into your space how you are going to displace the fastest asset to ever reach a trillion dollars in human history.
	And I have no idea how you could make that case.
	I have no idea. You've got a huge community in Bitcoin.
	Most of the major holders are withdrawing their Bitcoins from the exchanges, right?
	I'm sure you're all aware of that.
	The Bitcoins that are changing, you know, you get this It's cooking around, you know, 53, 56, 51 US. So all of the people who were doing that are short-term people.
	They're sort of innocent day traders.
	They're buying and selling, buying the dip and selling the height.
	And I mean, that's fine.
	That's perfectly, you know, the sea is surf as well as depth, right?
	The depth of the long-term holders.
	And they're pulling off their bitcoins from the exchanges.
	Why? Because... Everything that has been predicted is absolutely coming true.
	I mean, for those of you who are younger, you may not remember.
	I mean, the 70s were a fucking nightmare.
	Excuse my French. The 70s were a complete, total nightmare.
	When I was in boarding school in the 70s, we had no food.
	We were short of water.
	It was cold.
	When I was a kid growing up in England, there were coal shortages, meat shortages, water shortages, food as a whole.
	We were eating nothing but old plants.
	And I froze my ass off because we had to put coins in the meter to get heat.
	And it was very expensive because there were coal miner strikes and all of that.
	And so that stuff where you get shortages.
	And I remember seeing as a kid these pictures, these videos of...
	People lining up for gas, right?
	And that's like the worst thing in the world, right?
	I mean, a little hyperbole there, but I hope you'll forgive me.
	It's a pretty bad thing because, you know, everybody knows you go to the gas station, but you're almost out of gas.
	And if the gas station is out of gas, you're screwed, right?
	You can't get to the next gas station.
	So... I mean, it's lineups, but go for blocks.
	You look at the price of lumber has gone up to the point where it's now $35,000 adding to the price of a house.
	The price of housing has gone through the roof.
	Raw materials have gone through the roof as a whole.
	And there was a hacker attack on a gas pipeline that's causing gas to go through the roof, gasoline to go through the roof, oil to go through the roof.
	I mean, this is all, you know, hyperprinting of money is going through the roof.
	And now inflation is going through the roof.
	And so this is exactly what Bitcoin was designed to survive and not to survive, but flourish through.
	So for an altcoin, like I'm sorry for the altcoins as a whole.
	I mean, I get this passionate people that they believe that they've got the better solution and so on.
	But there's no time.
	There's no time. There's no time.
	You know, the old thing that you dig a well, you don't wait until you're thirsty to dig a well, right?
	And you don't wait until you're attracted to a woman in order to work out and be reasonably attractive.
	And there's no runway left.
	Like fiat currency, I mean, there was a guy saying that he expects, it's a big economist, I think it was, or a big investor saying that he expects the US to no longer be a...
	A world reserve currency within 15 years.
	I'm like, 15 years?
	Are you kidding me? That might have been the case.
	It might conceivably have been the case if it hadn't been for the baseball bat to the knees of the economy called COVID. It's not 15 years.
	Are you kidding me? There's just no runway left for an altcoin to gain the kind of prominence that's going to be needed.
	To survive, like the storm is on the horizon, it's getting closer, and people are like, I have a plan for an entirely new house, and it's like, well, that's great, but you can't possibly build it before the storm hits, and you can't possibly transition enough mindset and investment mindset and market share away from Bitcoin into your altcoin before, you know, the significant inflation, if not the hyperinflation hits.
	That's all coming, all coming, and it can't be resisted.
	I hope that The sort of very brief overview gives you some kind of sense of where I'm coming from, at least, just sort of my personal opinion.
	Yeah, I understand.
	I think the strongest argument for me was the thing you said at the very end where there might not just be enough runway, basically, to make it happen.
	So, with that in mind, though, I think there's one...
	So, I was looking up market caps just now, and so...
	Even when you look at what I would also consider pump and dump schemes, you know, Doge and such, there's still a drop in the bucket compared to what Bitcoin is right now.
	So you're saying, you know, all coins would tend to dilute investments in Bitcoin, right?
	Well, I mean, there's a couple of characteristics you need of a coin, right?
	The first thing, it needs to not be centrally controlled.
	It needs to not be massive whales that are controlling it.
	You know, not having a founder, and I know there's Satoshi Nakamoto, who knows what the hell happened to that guy, right?
	But it'd be cool if he phoned in one day to the show.
	That'd be kind of a get, right?
	Hey, I listened to your show, and I, you know...
	Back in 2009.
	But yeah, who knows what happened to that guy.
	So I don't want, when it comes to an altcoin, a couple of things I don't want.
	I don't want it to be printed and ad infinitum.
	I do not want it to be created.
	I want that to be, I mean, created obviously over time, but the 21 million bitcoins that's in Bitcoin in the architecture, that you want.
	I don't even want 3% growth.
	I don't want any of that stuff.
	I want it to be massively fungible, right?
	So you can go down to the Satoshi level.
	I want it to be completely limited.
	I want it to be scattered in terms of its ownership.
	And I want it to have survived the pump and nub phase, right?
	Because there are, and forgive me, I'm just going off ancient memory here, but was it Litecoin that the guy, like he made a bunch of money, that he dumped it, ran off, or whatever it was, which is perfectly fine.
	It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle or anything.
	But if a coin is going up significantly in value, I want it to survive the pump and dump phase.
	I also want it to survive the cycle.
	I want to see it have survived the cycle phase.
	It goes way up and then it goes way down.
	People are still going to buy in.
	It doesn't create it to virtually nothing and then just become a preserve of hobbyists with bitter regret or whatever.
	The altcoins, they just don't have seasoning.
	They don't have maturity. They don't have what we in the software world used to refer to as the salt and pepper factor.
	The salt and pepper factor is...
	If you have a company that doesn't have a guy who's a little bit older, you know, in his late 40s, early 50s, you know, when he got salt, he got a little bit of gray in the hair and the beard.
	That's this thing called the salt and pepper factor.
	You just need someone who's been through this stuff before.
	You need someone. You know, this is why the media is constantly portraying older people as idiots.
	And the young people are just wise and attractive and vital and all of that.
	And yeah, attractive, yes.
	Vital, yes. Wise, not usually.
	I mean, this crowd accepted, of course.
	But because those of us who've been through this kind of stuff before, like, why was I always skeptical about global warming?
	Because I went through about three of these things before and they all turned out to be complete and total bullshit.
	So yeah, when the fourth round of bullshit comes along, it's like, yeah, no biggie, right?
	I assume this is bullshit too.
	Whereas the people, it's the first time, that's what they say in the stock market, right?
	That the bears make the money off the people who've never been through a bear market before, right?
	Because once you've been through a bear market before, you know what it's like and you know when to sell.
	Whereas the people who've never gone through a bear market before, they hang on thinking it's just about to turn around.
	So you just need to have been through these things a bunch before and the salt and pepper factors for cryptos to me is even more important.
	I just need to have seen it survive because when people found a crypto and it just takes off like crazy and they make, I don't know, they could make a couple of hundred million dollars I suppose, right?
	Okay, fantastic. So they're likely going to sell and that's going to crash the price and also it's going to crash confidence.
	And then, does it survive from there?
	I don't know. Well, Bitcoin's already been through that a bunch of times.
	I was around for the, when it went from 20k to 3k, and it's bounced back from there, so I just like to see the salt and pepper factor in my Bitcoins.
	And it's important, right? I mean, I remember...
	When I was the head of research for a software company, the one I co-founded, I was trying to solve some abstract problem that was fairly rare.
	And the salt and pepper factor in mine, the CEO, salt and pepper factor, he didn't throw me up against the wall, but he kind of It was a bit of an LBJ grabby by the shoulders and pants breathily in your face where he's saying, so, you know, why is the software being delayed, right?
	You know, I need to sell this software so we can pay the bills and you've got a new version which you've been promising now for three months.
	And I said, well, you know, but if it's this kind of printer and it's this kind of operating system, it's like, okay, Have you ever experienced that?
	No, but it could happen. It's like, I do not want this company to go bust because you've got some theoretical thing that could happen once in five lifetimes because what will happen in your lifetime very close is that we're going to run out of money.
	So give me something that I can sell and we'll fix it down the road, right?
	A very great perspective because I was so nose deep and like nose to the technology stuff that I couldn't think straight about cost benefit analysis.
	And so the salt and pepper factor there was very important.
	I didn't turn out to be a great CEO in my opinion, but I remember that speech as something that just, okay, you got to give a full 360 degree cost benefit analysis.
	And you need that in the crypto world, and Bitcoin has proven itself for 11 years, which is about 1,000 years of the regular economy, and I just don't see other coins.
	How have they solved the centralization versus decentralization issue?
	Because if it's decentralized, it's going to be slow.
	If it's centralized, it's going to be vulnerable.
	And they haven't solved that.
	And they haven't solved how to transfer value.
	They haven't solved much.
	And they certainly haven't gone through a cycle where people are going to hang in there.
	Because you need the crazy, culty adherence to crypto in order to have it survive.
	And they have to be motivated by a lot more than just pump and dump money.
	And so people have hung into Bitcoin through the highs and lows.
	And I think that matters a lot, I think.
	So it's going to be tough to objectively break through that.
	Hey Steph, it's John.
	Hello. Can you hear me, by the way?
	I'm in my car, so it might give you a problem.
	No, I can hear you. Excellent.
	So, last night I sent you a message because the idea came to my mind about non-fungible tokens.
	I know you are obviously familiar with it.
	So, about a month or two ago, whenever it first came out, it seemed like a bit of a novelty.
	But I thought of an idea of an application, probably started being done, but if you apply that to the digital sales of games, now you have a unique identifier to your digital copy of the game, and if you give somebody permission to resell that game as a distributor, or whatever method, now Can gain a big market share, especially if you can make it available on your market to resell that.
	I just wanted to get your thoughts on that concept.
	So, sorry, reselling something you already own?
	Rather, okay, so imagine this.
	You purchase a digital copy of a game, but it is identified or whatever is linked to it through a non-fungible token.
	So your non-fungible token uniquely identifies your copy of the game.
	And now, since it's connected to you as a person, you could resell that.
	You could sell that as a used digital game.
	And you could sell at whatever price you want.
	That way, it's appealing to...
	To people to come to your platform to buy and trade and sell games that way.
	Oh, so if it's my copy of Doom, then somebody could buy my copy of Doom and they would know that it was my copy of Doom?
	Exactly. And you're going to sell it for whatever price you can get.
	So if you want to sell it for less than whatever, the standard price would be $60 right now.
	Let's say you're selling it for $59.99 and somebody takes it because they're saving a penny because they want to buy them in bulk.
	Or let's say, honestly, it's not that important to you, so you sell it for $20.
	You have the rights to gain that money.
	And for the people who own the platform, let's say GameStop, for example, because I know they're trying to go digital.
	Let's say that they create that platform and say, okay, via us, you link your bank account or whatever way to pay to us.
	And now when you sell it, resell it, it will be sold to the person who now owns it and you get whatever price you decided to put up for it.
	And now there's a market for it, for used digital games.
	I just wanted to mention my connection is a little funky here.
	You guys can hear my voice coming through clear and strong, is that right?
	You're coming through clear to me.
	Okay, good. That's fine.
	So I don't know what the legal structure is with regards to selling a video game.
	So if I buy a video game, I think, isn't it mostly just for your own consumption and not for resale?
	Essentially, yes. You are only technically borrowing it, or rather you have the license to play it, but they technically own the game.
	It's different in nature to owning a physical copy.
	Right. Right. And I think France has just changed – with the legal ruling, they've changed on that a little bit.
	So I think that the problem you were going to have is certainly companies don't want other people profiting from their games, which, of course, I can completely understand.
	So, I think that that would be your legal challenge.
	If people start making a significant amount of money reselling video games, then a company would not like that for two reasons.
	Number one, they would rather, you know, keep the money themselves if they could find a way to do it.
	And number two, let's say somebody buys a copy of Doom from me, then they're going to go and play that for, you know, 20 or 30 hours or whatever, which means that they're not buying some other game that the company...
	True, but at the same time, they're not pirating as well, because you've created an incentive to not pirate, to spend money you would otherwise not be willing to spend.
	And let's say you as the platform...
	No, no, it's the time. Sorry, it's the time issue, right?
	So it's not just the money.
	The money is one factor, but if you are playing...
	My copy of Doom, and then selling it to someone else who knows that it's my copy of Doom, and then I guess that gives people a certain amount of, oh, it's cool, it's Steph's copy of Doom.
	Then, because they're buying that and playing those games, they don't have time available for new releases from the company.
	Okay, let me make sure I'm understanding you properly.
	So, when I say it's uniquely identified as an NFT, It is still transferable, but it's just uniquely, I'm just using the NFT aspect of it to uniquely identify it.
	You know, it's calling number 5,208.
	Right. But now, my question then is, let me make sure I have you clarify on that a little bit.
	I apologize, I'm just navigating some traffic, so I kind of forgot part of the response.
	I think it's an interesting idea.
	I know that people have tried resale markets before for video games and my guess would be that they ran into legal issues because the companies didn't want other people profiting.
	From their work.
	Or to put it another way, they didn't like that people were enjoying the game without the original developer and publisher getting a penny, right?
	So that's my guess that there would be some challenges and they would want you to buy their new games rather than you making money off their labor rather than, you know, them It's the same thing with libraries and, you know, if you have book resellers, right? Like if I write a book back in the day, I write a book and somebody buys that book for $20 and then they sell that book for $10, then I don't get any of the $10, right?
	Even though somebody's buying my book, which I wrote, I get nothing from that.
	And is that fair?
	Couldn't you just incentivize the aspect of the transfer part itself?
	Let's say have a fee to sell that.
	So the person's making their 20 bucks, but you take a small cut off the top as well for the resale.
	And now the problem in which you are losing profitability from piracy and from Having been sold to other people is now not there anymore.
	That liability is not there because you're always constantly taking a cut off the top, especially if you control the platform in which it is bought and sold.
	You would actually want to encourage more volume trading for that period of time.
	Right, right. Yeah, listen, I'm going to move on because that's more of a business development idea.
	It's a very interesting idea and I would certainly look into it.
	You know, the first thing that I would suggest is that if it's a good idea to you, you should definitely be proud of it and happy and maybe it's a great idea.
	But if it's an idea like resale video games, then for sure people have thought of that before, right?
	Because there's a huge amount of value that's stuck in people's, you know, shell, you know, used to be...
	Yeah, that's the first thing you need to do.
	When I first wanted to do the show, it was kind of easy because it was a virgin continent apartment.
	It wasn't really there. But you want to just look at the competition, look at people who tried to do it before, look at the legal obstacles or whatever other business obstacles they may have experienced.
	And I'm not trying to make you less enthusiastic about your idea.
	I want you to be enthusiastic about your idea.
	But don't pursue it without checking.
	You have to assume everyone's had this idea.
	I mean, I hate to say it, but I didn't come up with philosophy, right?
	Or even conversations about philosophy or anything like that.
	So you have to assume that, you know, a thousand people have had this idea before you.
	Now, maybe it's still a great idea.
	They just didn't have the willpower to go and execute it or whatever.
	But I would assume that a thousand people have had the idea before you.
	And go and check and see what happened to them.
	And maybe it's, you know, fantastic and you just have the willpower to make it happen.
	But if it turns out there are, you know, massive options to make up things like...
	You know, if you want to set up a competitor to PayPal, my understanding is that there are different legal requirements for every state in America, and so you need a massive legal department to make sure you're in compliance, and it's really tough, really tough to set that kind of stuff up.
	Yeah, so I'm getting on, but it's a very interesting question.
	Do they know what you come up with as you go forward?
	Sure thing. Thanks, Steph. All right.
	Thanks, man. Drive safe. Alright, what did I miss?
	Did we solve everything? Well, I had asked what question it was that was asked that spawned your response with regard to Bitcoin and altcoins, and then MK was asking me about a wallet.
	Oh yeah, just sort of my...
	Yeah, and I did include a caveat for, you know, that Tezos was not necessarily included in this.
	I was talking about the 3,000 altcoins or, you know, what I considered obviously is a meme coin or a joke coin, which is Dogecoin and stuff like that.
	Stuff without, you know, so that was sort of the question is where does my skepticism towards the potential pumper dump coins, where does that come from?
	Did you see yesterday this project that's been being developed by DFINITY called Internet Computer just popped up at number five on CoinMarketCap with a $50 billion market cap.
	Did anybody notice that?
	Yeah, I mean, look, $51 billion would be crazy.
	$50? Come on.
	That's just common sense.
	Well, I mean, as soon as I saw it, I'm like, there's got to be a lot of...
	It's not an entirely centralized project, in my opinion.
	And I think we're going to see more of this coming forward, where the original core values of crypto are going to be overwhelmed by the get-rich-quick kind of stuff.
	Now, do you want to mention, we had talked about TASOS a little.
	I'd like to hear more about this.
	So I was talking about one of the big issues is centralization of So you can get it fast if it's centralized, but then it's more vulnerable and more easy to corrupt through central control of a big server farm or something like that.
	But when it's decentralized and every node and every blockchain has to update, you're going to have limits on what can be sent and received because slow home computers that you'd be running a node or home networks and so on.
	So what does Tezos do as far as scalability and centralization versus decentralization?
	How does that play? So, in terms of evolution in general for the chain, it does a regular update that's voted on via the network.
	So that whatever's developed by, you know, any other, whatever methodology, it can be integrated into Tezos.
	And also knowing that you can look forward to a regular update, for example, there's not a rush to open the chain up completely and entirely right from the beginning.
	Like, so, for example...
	The smart contracts were made in such a way that they were limited.
	Well, this stops people from rating really big, complicated contracts that cause a lot of the problems that Ethereum is having right now.
	But as time goes forward, and we just went through the Florence update, that opened up the contracts to make them even larger and cheaper.
	Part of Tezos' methodology is regular updates.
	So it solves all of these problems and keeps the community together and cohesive.
	And it's working pretty great.
	I'm sorry. That is a wonderful answer to a question I'm afraid I did not ask.
	Oh, sorry, please. I'm sorry to be annoying, but that's great.
	Regular updates doesn't solve.
	So as you know, the blockchain question in Bitcoin is...
	If we make the blockchain big, we can process more transactions but then we can't be decentralized because not everyone can update their copy of the blockchain quick enough.
	I'm really reducing it and probably getting a few details wrong but that's my sort of general understanding.
	Okay, so from my understanding, the Bitcoin Core approach so far is make the blocks smaller in general.
	Like there's people that even want to make it smaller than whatever it is right now, like one megabyte, I believe.
	And yeah, they're aiming towards having as cheap or as little a hardware as possible or as low level of technology as possible capable of running a Bitcoin node.
	And that, to me, is running too far in an extreme in one direction.
	Because what's coming with that is it does make the transactions more expensive, you know, on-chain transactions.
	And that comes with turning off part of your user base and part of the people that would normally support it.
	And it's my opinion, you know.
	And so what I'm seeing a lot more now is that the Bitcoin core community really turning a lot of people off, you know, over time.
	And so basically what they're doing is they're opening up a vulnerability in terms of people support in order to over-engineer, you know, in the techie code world, this other avenue.
	They're prioritizing one thing at the expense of another, in my opinion.
	You know, I could completely be wrong here.
	So what Tezos does in comparison is it bounces things a little bit, you know, more in the other direction.
	There's still an ocean of nodes.
	I'm able to run multiple Tezos nodes from my home on plenty cheap enough software and internet connections and stuff like that.
	Decentralization is a balancing act, in my opinion.
	It's not just a one...
	It's a triangle of things you're trying to balance that kind of tip the scale either way.
	Sorry, let me just tap my mic here.
	Make sure that the right mic is. Let me just tap.
	You guys heard the tap? Did not hear a tap.
	Did not hear a tap. No?
	No tap. No tap.
	Oh, interesting. I wonder if it's...
	Does the mic sound tinny or anything?
	No, it sounds good. All right, so I'm going to switch.
	So if you're doing a switch receipt, I'm just on my tablet here.
	Let me just switch that. I'll be back in a second.
	Let me just add another question. Yeah.
	Okay. Well, can I tell you?
	It looks like the microphone has fried itself.
	You know, it's like a $200 microphone, but if that little connection at the end gets all jinky, we'll toss it up.
	Steph, you were grilling me about Tezos decentralization, and I would say it's a...
	All of the cryptos like Tezos, Ethereum, such and such like that, they would err more towards more nodes, more distribution, not having, what do you call it, big whales all from the get-go, you know, is all part of being decentralized.
	And so one of the things that Tezos also did to not have big whales in that sense is with the Tezos Foundation, now don't get me wrong, there were some initial funders like Tim Draper, The Tezos Foundation held on to, like, so for example, Arthur is a person who, Arthur Brightman wrote the white paper for Tezos, and in my opinion, has done an excellent job of not being, like, the head leader or figure.
	I'm on the inside of the community, and he gets argued with and told no, and, you know, it's not like his word is gospel by any means.
	Anyways, the amount of Tezos that he got He had to wait and get it vested over time.
	He didn't just get a big payout.
	No, no, I get all of that. So again, I have to circle back and say that this is great information, but the central question for me at least remains unanswered.
	Maybe you have answered it and I've sort of missed it.
	But the central question is this, is that once you get to the scale of a world economy, if things are centralized, you can process a lot of transactions, but then you're vulnerable because you need a server farm that could be shut down.
	If it's decentralized and everybody's got to update their blockchain, then you can process fewer transactions.
	Now, I don't know that there's any way to solve that and that's the challenge, right?
	And so if you look at scaling up to the number of transactions or the size of transactions that Bitcoin is doing, where does Tezos stand with regards to updating everyone's node so that it's decentralized and then processing fewer transactions or Centralizing it and processing more transactions, but then it being vulnerable to control and shutdown.
	So in that sense, and please, Leo, stop me if I'm not answering your question.
	I'm really trying to.
	Third time, I will. So the demands of the hardware are not such that a person like myself can't run an operation from home.
	You know, and also there's, yeah, so that's part of the decentralization.
	There's not a farm somewhere running it.
	It's many people distributed across the globe with an economic incentive to keep this hardware up and running.
	Yeah, so that's the Bitcoin model, right?
	Yes, and now where Tesla differs is that it's proof of stake versus proof of work.
	And so that is a different, and by all means, it absolutely is more experimental in comparison to proof of work.
	But it has been running since 2018 successfully, you know?
	Okay, so give me the 4-1, explain it to me, like I'm five years old, proof-of-stake versus proof-of-work.
	Oh, man, I wish I understood this on a more technical level to be able to explain it, but at least, so basically, I take my Tezos and I lock them up.
	They've got to be locked up for three weeks, and I register on the network as a baker, is what the term in Tezos for staking, and then...
	What happens is I get an opportunity, a random opportunity to stake for the network.
	And so what happens is my machine gets a random opportunity to process the transactions.
	And I'm sorry, I don't understand how it's cryptographically secure at that level.
	I just don't.
	But... That is like in practical terms the way it works.
	So proof of work is when you throw hardware and electricity and computational cycles at solving the problem and that means you're invested.
	I understand what you're saying.
	For Tezos, it's more like an escrow.
	An escrow is when you put things into an account until the deal is done.
	You put stuff into a third-party account between you and a house seller until the deal is done and whatever it is.
	It's more like you are tying up the value of your coins for a certain period of time in order to be part of the network and process things.
	Is that right? Yes. Yes, and on a regular basis, and whenever you do successfully bake for the network a block, that's still locked up for like three weeks, and you don't get it until long afterwards.
	It doesn't get unlocked and given to you, and when it's locked up, you also have to lock up like – I forget what the bond is exactly right now, but to make like 20 Tezos, you're locking up 500.
	And if anyone catches you doing anything shady, you forfeit that bond that you've put on the network.
	And also, anytime someone is baking a block, there's, I believe, 32 endorsers who are watching the transaction and looking for if they did anything shady and supporting that transaction or not.
	And then everyone else in the network is running an accuser.
	That's another level of watching to make sure nobody's doing anything suspicious.
	Right. Okay. Okay. So what does this do to volume of transactions?
	I'm sorry if this is really boring and technical to everyone else, but that's sort of my big question with regards to altcoins because the Bitcoin community, for better or for worse, and we talked about this in one of the roundtables, which we should do another one soon, by the way, but they are all looking at things and saying, okay, how are we going to solve this?
	And it didn't go the right way or whatever it is.
	But nonetheless, these are the decisions that have been made.
	So what is the...
	What number of transactions should Tezos get to Bitcoin size and scale and user base and all of that?
	What are the number of transactions that can be processed that you know of?
	I think if I recall correctly, Tezos is at 60 transactions per second, but let me double check that.
	Can I just jump in on this?
	Because I think I might be able to help a little bit, even though I don't know the specifics of Tezos here.
	Okay, so as I understand it, Tezos isn't going to have a higher transaction volume per...
	Per byte, I guess. Not necessarily per block, but per network traffic, for any given node, because it still runs on the same blockchain.
	And it's got a more complex scripting system, so you need a little more verification.
	So it runs basically on the same type of blockchain.
	That's not accurate from my understanding.
	It's already processing more transactions than Ethereum, or has the capacity to, and Ethereum already processes more transactions than Bitcoin.
	Well, that's in terms of per block, not per network byte, is it?
	I know per second is the way I've looked at it, which is how many transactions you process over time.
	I don't know about per second.
	Right, so most of that is because of the proof of stake versus proof of work thing, whereas with Bitcoin you need to mine, you need to prove that you've done the work.
	With Tezos, either you need to prove that you own enough You have enough, basically, to make a vote that says, hey, I'm invested enough in this system to be able to...
	Okay, so sorry, I don't want to get too much into the nuts.
	Right, yes, sorry, sorry.
	But my question is, so Casos is a decentralized blockchain, is that right?
	So everyone has to update to reflect transactions?
	Yes, yeah. Okay, so when you scale up to the number of users, the number of nodes, and so on, how does it solve the fact that everyone's got to update, which is going to bottleneck your transactions?
	How does it scale up so everyone's got a bottle?
	Sorry. Okay, so you're saying it's doing, what, 60 transactions a second, right?
	I'm looking for it right now.
	I believe that is the case.
	So that's where it is now, right?
	That's where it is now. But the question is, let's say it starts having to do 10,000 transactions a second or whatever.
	That's the big challenge, right?
	How do you update everyone's blockchain all around the world to reflect these new Uh, transactions or how many do you need to do it in order to consider the transaction valid and not double spent or anything?
	Oh, gotcha. Okay. Um, well, part of that is in that, uh, regular updating over time.
	It's like, okay, we're good enough for right now.
	And that works like, and also like you were saying, like the salt and pepper, it's like, don't try to solve tomorrow's problem today necessarily when we've got to be successful today.
	Uh, and so we'll, uh, What we do is we plan to change over time to reflect that, to head in that direction.
	And we've already seen Tezos went from 100,000 contract calls to over a million, I think, in April.
	And the network has seamlessly taken that on.
	So I think the plan there is to scale over time and scale the way it has been consistently.
	Someone said, I think Tezos is 1,000 TPS transactions per block, and the block time is 60 seconds.
	So I know for a fact already Tezos is doing the test network for a Tinder Mint update, which will drop the block time down to either 30 or 15 seconds and drastically increase the transactions per second.
	And from understanding the fees, it'll lower the fees.
	So, I mean, there is a physical limitation, right?
	So, to double spend is to say, I'm going to buy one thing from guy A and one thing from guy B. Now, you can't allow the double spend to go to guy A and guy B because then it's useless.
	Every currency then would be useless in that situation.
	Sure. And so the question is, how do you avoid the double spending?
	Now, maybe it's with the staking, which is that if you double spend, you forfeit your 500 tesos or whatever it is, or with the blockchain, it's like, well, no, it's got to – the first one's got to go through, and everyone's got to accept it before you can spend the second, as far as I understand it.
	Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's just the question is the scalability, right?
	Can you get to a world currency through Tezos?
	And that, to me, you know, if I was like Mr.
	Tezos, and you certainly are as far as I can tell, which is a great thing.
	But if I was Mr. Tezos, you know, I would demand of the architecture, okay, show me how this thing scales.
	Show me how this can be a potential replacement to Bitcoin.
	Show me how this can run, you know, 1% of the world's economy.
	And that would be... And this is so...
	I used to do this sort of back in the day, right?
	So this is just annoying, experienced guy, right?
	So we would deal with big corporations, and those big corporations would require a number of things.
	So back in the day, they would require, and this is going back quite a ways now, but they would require that we have a solution to the Y2K problem, right?
	And my solution was, if it's a two-digit year and it is greater than 30, then I'm going to assume 1930.
	Otherwise, I assume it's 2029.
	And you had to give, you know, how it was implemented, how it ran, how it worked, what the failsafe was, what the backup was.
	Was it at the data level or the form level, like the database level?
	So you had to have an answer to the Y2K issue, and I spent a lot of time doing that.
	And the second thing was, does it scale, right?
	Because, you know, it's one thing to – I would bring in a laptop and I'd show the computer software running and people would say, well, that's great.
	You know, that's on a computer.
	You know, what happens when we have 100 people locked in?
	What happens if we have 1,000 people locked in?
	And what happens if the data lines are slow for these people?
	And so I ended up with – we had distributed database that would all synchronize and overnight.
	And because, you know, there was like I remember testing when we were working with North Northern Telecom or Nortel, testing their data lines across the Atlantic.
	This is like 25 years ago.
	And we were getting 5K a second, sometimes at best.
	And the software was it was the most annoying kind of unusable, which is that it's just really slow.
	You don't know if it's saved.
	You can't exit.
	It's just kind of stalling there waiting for confirmation for the database that has received the data.
	And so what I had to do was I had to stress test all of my modules, right?
	So all of my code, I would say, okay, well, we're going to simulate 100 users, and here's the speed and response.
	We're going to simulate 100 users on 100k data line, which was fairly fast back then.
	And so I won't get into all the details, but you'd have to provide this big, thick binder of, okay, here's how it scales.
	Yeah. The one thing I look for, and for better or for worse, Bitcoin has made these decisions about scalability.
	It's like, well, we're going to keep the block size small so it can be decentralized and it's going to slow things down.
	We can't handle 10% of the world's economy as yet, but we've got this lightning network.
	There's a parallel pre-clearance or whatever you want to call it.
	They've been wrestling with that issue.
	So, this is my advice to the Tezos community, again, like 15, 20 years of software.
	Please, yeah. Yeah, my advice is, you know, stress test the shit out of this stuff.
	You know, there's got to be, you know, you've got to have to have a Tezos sandbox where you can just simulate, you know, people pounding Tezos from left, right, and center from various speed data lines and all of that because that's the real question, right?
	Now, if you've got a solution, right?
	And I think one of the solutions in Bitcoin was they were going to compress the block and then send it that way and then decompress it on the other end, which would certainly solve some of the issues of transmission over slower data lines or whatever.
	But the stress test question is a really important one when it comes to software because everything looks great in the demo, right?
	And my software was blindingly fast in the demo and then implementation sometimes could get a bit...
	A bit sketchy.
	I can remember one time, this is just stupid stuff that I remember from many years ago, one time we had the question of output, right?
	So when the software was running on a server, if you wanted a report, how would you get it, right?
	And one of the coders wrote a really cool program that built a report that was in the database, rebuilt it as a rich text format.
	Which wasn't quite as pretty, but definitely got you the data.
	So people would request a report.
	This guy's code would say, oh, how does the report look on the server?
	We couldn't send it to the client.
	It doesn't really matter why. We couldn't send the report directly because it was in a custom architecture, but we could send them an RTF file.
	We could redirect them to an RTF file.
	So this guy wrote code to scan the layout of the report on the server, convert it to rich text format, and then redirect the browser to the rich text format.
	They'd get their report. Anyway, so we tested the crap out of this.
	We stress tested it. The code was clean and beautiful and fast.
	I was really envious. He was a very smart coder.
	But when we finally went to install it, it didn't work if someone wasn't logged into the server.
	Because, of course, we'd only ever tested it if someone logged into the server to check the code, right?
	And so it was a huge problem.
	I was out there and suddenly it was like, hey, where's my report?
	It's like, well, this worked. And then you're like, oh, no, I get a flight this afternoon, which, by the way, I didn't make.
	So, you know, is it stress test in a sort of real-world scenario?
	And, of course, I said to the guy, look, just leave someone logged in on the server and you've got your reports.
	And he's like, no, that's against our corporate security standards.
	We can't leave someone logged into the server.
	I'm like, please?
	Can you pretend I'm Hillary Clinton?
	Will you do that? So yeah, we had to work like hell.
	So this sort of stress testing and real world stuff, I guess my concern with some of the altcoins is, yes, they look fantastic.
	In a smaller case scenario, just as when I had five testers pounding on my coat on the LAN, it was fine.
	But then when you had people in 12 different countries around the world playing on it, it wasn't.
	So I guess that's always my question as to what is the stress test stuff.
	Can you show how scalable this thing is?
	Because the only way that any kind of crypto is going to gain real value is if it can displace a fairly significant chunk of the economy.
	Bitcoin is hammered for its scalability issues, which I completely understand.
	People were working on that.
	But I don't know how other cryptos solve the scalability issue because, in general, the altcoins are relatively small in terms of penetration, and therefore they don't have the scalability issues nearly as much.
	Sorry for everyone who's listening in.
	I'm going to get back to you on a better response to how Tezos resolves that problem.
	Please, yeah, and I say this with no, like, oh, it doesn't, you know, I'm genuinely curious.
	I don't know because I don't know much about it.
	I am genuinely curious how the scalability thing plays out.
	And do you mind if I mention real quick the free domain staking?
	Yeah! So I am running a Tezos staking operation.
	And the purpose of, in order to get some donations over to Steph.
	So if you go over there, you can go to jaredwoodard.com forward slash free domain staking.
	And there you can find not only instructions, but also like a quick disclaimer of what to expect and where your expectations should be.
	This is kind of a beta thing.
	I haven't run an open public staking service with people, you know, delegating to me, so there might be some hiccups involved there.
	So, you know, body beware, all that good stuff.
	But the end goal is you go over there, you stake your Tezos to this address, and then instead of me taking, normally a banking operation will compete in the marketplace and take a percentage of your rewards, you know. So instead of you having to be at home and running all this complicated stuff, Someone else does it, and then they just take a piece of the baking reward.
	I'll charge a 15% fee, and I'm going to get as much of that over to Steph as a donation as I can.
	Unfortunately, I've got to claim it as income and all that for taxes and stuff.
	I also wanted to mention that all I hear now because I'm drooling is baking reward.
	I'm just telling you that right now.
	I've got crispy and frying in the nude and all that kind of stuff.
	Anyway, go on. Excellent.
	Sounds delightful.
	So yeah, just head over to jaredwoodard.com forward slash freedomainstaking.
	There's also a link there for a Telegram channel.
	If you have any questions, I'm happy to help out, happy to answer questions.
	And yeah, thank you very much for anybody that does so and wants to participate.
	And I really appreciate that too.
	It's wonderfully kind and thank you.
	You're quite welcome. I want to gird your expectations, too.
	It might be a little bit before it is a big thing, but then it's also one of those things that once we get it built and running, it's kind of self-sustaining.
	That's great. Sorry, I'm just canceling the Lambo.
	Just a sec. I'd hold off on the Lambo for just a moment.
	Come on, man. It's crypto.
	It's instant Lambo. That's how it works.
	All right. Sorry. So thanks for everyone's patience.
	So maybe it was interesting. I'm not sure.
	But if you wanted to bring up any other concerns, questions, issues, I'm happy to hear and chat whatever's on your mind.
	Slack, do you have something you wanted to share?
	Oh, I mean, I have been chunking at the bit to answer the scalability versus centralization thing, but if you want to move off...
	Do it! Hey, if nobody else is here, that's their punishment.
	You know, for being shy, you get more technical stuff.
	Sorry, man. We gave you a shot.
	Okay, alright, so the major thing to consider here is that you've been talking about blockchain stuff, meaning one blockchain, everybody has to synchronize it, there have to be blocks and they have to be linked to one another.
	That's not the only way cryptocurrencies can work.
	There's also more recent directed acyclic graph coins.
	I don't know if you're familiar with that at all.
	Assume no. Okay.
	All right. So it's basically, instead of a single chain, you have different configurations.
	You can think of it as maybe every account has its own chain.
	Think of it as basically a tree of blocks where the branches can interleave between other branches.
	So let's say I'm sending a transaction to another account.
	I... They publish basically a block containing that individual transaction to the network.
	It gets sent over to that tree branch, basically.
	And then they kind of interlink between each other without getting too technical, obviously.
	And with this kind of system, you don't...
	So right now it's all or nothing with regular blockchains.
	You have to synchronize the whole thing or you have to trust someone else.
	When you have a tree of basically branching paths of the transaction history, you can only synchronize what you're interested in.
	Like, if there are accounts that you've never touched, you don't have to know about them unless they send you money and then you verify that they have the money that they're claiming to have.
	So that means you can...
	You can still decentralize.
	You can still have zero trust, meaning you can verify everything that you're interested in yourself that you've received money from, while at the same time not having to store the entire transacting history of the entire system.
	So that's how you might be able to get both decentralization, because everyone's still verifying the transactions that they're interested in, and you have scalability because you no longer have to synchronize absolutely everything.
	Now, that's, you know, I completely get it.
	It's the same thing that sort of when I was working with database synchronization back in the day, we would say, one of the things that solved the issue of slow data lines was we said, okay, well, why doesn't Paraguay just synchronize with Paraguay's data?
	Like, why on earth does Paraguay care about what's going on in Norway?
	It's a different language, right?
	They don't care, right? So we had to slice and dice the data and we went down to the city in Paraguay, like they only need their own data.
	And so we would simply assume a subset of the most interested data or the most relevant data.
	And that's how we would synchronize the data issues.
	And yeah, I can certainly understand that.
	I guess... The challenge is trying to figure out which is the most relevant to everyone.
	The other thing, too, is that you always have to have, as you well know, the troll factor.
	If you have something like this, which says, oh, well, we don't have to synchronize the whole thing, the first thing that trolls and thieves and scammers are going to try and do is figure out, okay, how do we game this system so that we can double spend?
	I think the general Bitcoin blockchain thing says, well, you've got to synchronize everything and therefore you can't scam anything.
	And I think that the subset of data aspect of things is very prone to that kind of, oh, well, you know, if we can do this subset and do, you know, one VPN from Paraguay and one from Norway and it looks completely unrelated, then we could double spend, you know, that kind of stuff.
	I guess that would be my first, I mean, probably tons of other issues, but that would be the first thing I think of.
	So, specifically when I'm saying what you're only interested in, I mean what's only relevant to your account, meaning you can trace the entire history of all transactions that are related to your account, which will be, I don't know, depending on your account How old it is, how many transactions you've received might be something between, I don't know, 10,000th of the entire transaction history.
	It might be 50% or something if you're running an exchange.
	So you're still going all the way up to...
	Or I guess down the tree to the root of the sort of initial origin transaction of the entire system.
	But you can go through a whole bunch of subbranches or just basically one or two or three little paths.
	Does that make sense? Okay, but wouldn't someone need to have the whole thing?
	Um... I don't really know, actually.
	I would say probably not.
	I would imagine, just to absolutely prove there's no double spending, I think someone would need to have the whole thing.
	Now, if someone does need to have the whole thing, then the problem is then that whoever has the whole thing is vulnerable to You know, taking it down to hacking it.
	Well, I guess they're also vulnerable to hacking but it would be a central point of pressure that Bitcoin was specifically trying to avoid by keeping transaction size small and requiring the blockchain to be updated everywhere.
	That's how they make sure that there's not one central place.
	And listen, not having a pain point, not having a central pain point of vulnerability, I know about all of that.
	I don't think that's possible.
	That's my entire business model, right?
	My entire business model was like, hey, I've got people who want to advertise on my show.
	But if people advertise on my show, then that's a great place for people to, well...
	Pressure advertisers to stop advertising on my show.
	So if they wanted to de-platform me, that would be pretty bad.
	Now, you know, I went for a good deal of time and then what they said was, okay, well, we can't get his advertisers, so we'll go for his payment platforms or whatever, right?
	So there's always some way in which people will try and get you to stop doing whatever it is that you're trying to do.
	And that's sort of my question.
	So if there's a place where you do need some centralized clearinghouse of information, then you have...
	You've got an efficiency, right, which is you don't need to synchronize all the data, but you have a deficiency in that if you do need someone to be the central clearinghouse of the transactions, sort of final authority, so to speak, or the final arbitrage, so to speak, then the problem, of course, is that you now have a huge vulnerability that people can just shut down, you know, maybe just the long-term part of your network by hitting that, if that makes sense.
	So the specific, I guess a little bit of disclosure, some of this stuff.
	Now, I'm talking about, there are a couple of coins that run on this sort of thing.
	There's like a handful right now.
	The one that I'm most familiar with is Nano, or used to be Rayblox, from a couple years back.
	Now, I've done quite a bit of work on it.
	I've written... A client for it.
	I've written a sort of database stuff for it.
	So that's the one I'm most familiar with that I can kind of talk about, but I don't want to get too technical into the weeds, aside from just to answer your specific question of if anyone needs to have the entire interaction experience.
	Sorry, if you don't need the backstory introduction, we can just, you know, we're all technical.
	Sorry, yeah. We can get to the meat of the matter.
	Yeah, okay. So the philosophy there is basically the most interested parties will have the most We'll store the most data.
	So an exchange, for example, will want to have 100% of the transaction history.
	And they're also the most interested in, you know, keeping the thing afloat if they're heavily invested in it.
	And this is also a proof of stake type system where the more you have in your wallet, the more weight your vote has on whether or not a transaction is valid.
	I'm sorry.
	I thought that was going to be more of it.
	Is there? That's it? I don't mean that's it like that.
	I just want to make sure I understand.
	No, no. I mean, again, I don't want to get...
	We'll save the technical stuff for a crypto roundtable or something.
	I don't know. Okay, so does anybody else, if you've studied this kind of stuff, is there anybody else who has thoughts or issues about...
	of financial data.
	I mean, I can certainly think of like, okay, so what would Amazon need in terms of that kind of stuff?
	Well, I would assume it would need, well, a hell of a lot, right?
	And, you know, would that be so large that it would slow everything down?
	Is that another point of vulnerability and so on?
	Multinational corporations, you know, that kind of stuff, multi-currency, that's big and brutal stuff to try and deal with.
	So does anybody have any sort of other thoughts?
	Because I'm sure this was completely examined and explored in the Bitcoin evolution, which doesn't mean that the Bitcoiners were right, but, you know, this would have been chewed over Remember I was saying earlier, always assume that everyone else has thought of, a thousand other people have thought of your ideas before.
	Oh, this isn't my idea specifically.
	No, no, no. I just, I mean, when it comes to, okay, well, let's just not synchronize the whole blockchain.
	Right, right, right. Yeah, I can answer that.
	Do you know what the conversations were with Bitcoin about that?
	Yeah, so there's an option...
	Sorry, can I just throw in one thing?
	So in Section 8 of the white paper, Satoshi laid out something called simplified payment verification, and then that is exactly what he's talking about, that you can have wallets that can look at just the block headers,
	which is a small part of the blocks, and then you can tell from Just the block header, whether or not your individual transactions that you care about are in the blockchain.
	So Satoshi said that individuals don't need to run full nodes because they could run this SPV wallets.
	And then have just as much certainty that their transactions haven't been double-spent.
	And then when you talk to the Bitcoin Core community, they say, oh, Satoshi was just wrong about that.
	That part of the white paper, we should just delete it because it's just incorrect.
	And then I've heard their arguments for why he was incorrect.
	I never understood what their issue with it is.
	I'm sort of thinking about, do I want on my blockchain in my house somebody buying a car in Paraguay?
	Well, it seems a bit remote.
	It seems a bit removed.
	Obviously, if I want to buy that car, then I guess I'd need that.
	But how much computational power is needed to filter and sort all of the potentially relevant transactions and make sure that you're up to date?
	And it would also have to anticipate to some degree what you're going to buy next, right?
	Because if I just decide to go and buy a car in Paraguay, I'd need some Paraguay data to even initiate that, right?
	And maybe Satoshi changed his mind later on, but if you were going to talk to him in 2008 and ask him that same question, he would say, you don't have to.
	You can have just as much confidence in your transactions as somebody who runs a full node by using this simplified node.
	Yeah, it was right back to me in 1995 working with Nortel saying, well, Paraguay doesn't need Norway's data.
	Yeah, Paraguay doesn't need Norway's data.
	Okay, so we'll just do subset and there's no point synchronizing the whole thing.
	Now, head office does need the whole synchronization, but head office was pretty fast data.
	But yeah, I understand just a subset thing and I don't have enough knowledge of the history of Bitcoin and even though I read that white paper many years ago, I didn't remember that part.
	So we have to assume that everybody's thought about the subset of data stuff.
	And everybody's aware that the subset of data stuff would make Bitcoin blindingly fast, you know, I mean, relative to, you know, everything needing to be updated.
	And I would not assume that Sure.
	Sure. Sure. And he was saying, you know, like, you're working on maintaining some code.
	And I did code maintenance. My very first job was, I did write some new code, but my very first job was a lot of code maintenance.
	And there's a big chunk of code here.
	You don't know what the hell it's for.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	It's not commented very well.
	And you're like, oh, you know, we can probably just get rid of this, right?
	Yeah, but here's the thing, right?
	He said, okay, so the reason that code, you know, he said he did this early in his career.
	And the reason why that code was there, funnily enough, turned out because...
	If somebody was saving a file to a floppy disk and popped the floppy disk out in the middle or before it was fully saved, how do you recover from that?
	How do you recover the data?
	How do you make sure it all stays in memory?
	And so that's what that big chunk of code was for.
	And this is a question, I was actually posing this to my daughter the other day, sort of part of homeschooling.
	It is, let's say you're in the middle of a field is a gate.
	And, you know, it's got maybe a tiny bit of fencing on one side or the other.
	You just bought this field, and in the middle of this field, there's this gate.
	Okay, so what do you do with it?
	And, you know, the general tendency is probably just a vestigial leftover, just rip it up and have the, you know, the whole meadow or the whole field be clear.
	But the argument is, for God's sakes, don't rip it up until you know what it's there for.
	Now, I mean, we could sit here and theorize as to why there'd be this gate in the middle of nowhere, you know, like why did Joan of Arc find a sword in the middle of nowhere?
	There's a whole section of a movie kind of explaining how that could happen.
	But until you know why the gate was put there, you know, maybe there's a ball that breaks loose in the other field and you've got to just have some place to hide behind or die.
	I don't know. It could be any number of things, right?
	Maybe it's a marker of where somebody buried treasure and if you get rid of it, you won't know it and it could be any number.
	But until you know...
	So that's my question.
	Okay, subset of data stuff, yeah, it makes total sense.
	But, you know, the humility, for me, the big humility is, okay, so why wasn't it perceived?
	It is such an obvious solution that would make Bitcoin, I mean, almost infinitely more scalable and infinitely more digestible to the masses because you could have the mathematical proof of how it could scale to pretty much the entire world economy over time because the bigger it gets, you just slice and dice the data to smaller and smaller chunks to update.
	But it wasn't perceived.
	And I don't know why it wasn't perceived.
	I mean, again, I can think of reasons from my historical slice of data synchronization across disparate nodes kind of stuff back in the database world.
	But there's a reason why.
	And maybe it's a bad reason, but it's also a reason that has survived for 10 years.
	And if it was a bad reason, usually it wouldn't survive that long, if that makes sense.
	Yep. Well, just to make sure, like, the SPV wallets, they do exist.
	You know, there's There's a lot of them that are pretty popular.
	But then when you talk to individuals who want to run their own full nodes from their house and you say, why do you need to process every transaction?
	Why can't you just process the ones that matter to you?
	When I hear their answers, it just doesn't make any sense to me, which is fine.
	I don't have to understand everything.
	But until I have an answer that explains it to me, I'm going to default to what Satoshi said.
	And he said that this was good enough.
	Wait, so you mean the subset of data could be good enough?
	Yeah, that's what Satoshi said.
	I'm going to go with that until somebody gives me a convincing argument, you know, otherwise.
	Right, and I can certainly understand that.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so with Bitcoin, there's two different...
	There's processing and there's storing.
	Processing as it propagates through the network and then storing as it makes its way into the block and actually chained up.
	And so basically the first part is propagation and the second is, you know, actual databasing.
	And propagation, as far as I understand, every system we have more or less needs to propagate.
	I think it's everything.
	It's probably not everything, but...
	There can be some statistical methods which decide what transactions should be blasted more, which should be blasted less.
	So with Bitcoin, there's only one linear sequence of blocks that you can trim from the end once you've verified it.
	And you can keep a certain recent, I guess, window that you keep And the rest you've already verified, you can kind of store them away.
	You don't have to store them on the disk.
	Right. And so, to me, the challenge is, what if there's drift?
	Right? Now, if you have one central database...
	Sorry, what do you mean, drift?
	So, drift is something doesn't add up, something doesn't match.
	Oh, okay. Okay, yeah. Right?
	So, if you have...
	A centralized repository, which I guess in Bitcoin is the blockchain that's everywhere, then there's no possibility of drift because everything has to be updated everywhere.
	And again, I know I'm simplifying it ridiculously, but that's sort of my understanding.
	So that's how you solve it.
	And we had, you know, back in the Nortel days, we had a centralized database, which, you know, if there was a contradiction to centralized database at office, which is the one they reported their taxes and all of that stuff on, that's the one that won, right?
	And, or, you know, at least there'd be a manual review process, but if you have only bits and burps of data all over the place that's all supposed to knit together to a coherent whole, what happens?
	If there's drift, in other words, if there's one entry in one place that doesn't match an entry in another place for whatever reason, it can happen, right?
	It could just be data disconnections or some local file corruption or, you know, hard drives fail and introduce squeaky elements into the data and then it doesn't match anymore and which one's valid.
	And it could be any number of things, right?
	So that's, you know, Bitcoin solves that with everyone's got to update you.
	But the slice and dice bit, and the other thing too is that the more, like you think of Amazon, how much data would they need to run?
	It's huge, right? Because they have transactions, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of transactions admitted all over the world, right?
	And so... The challenge for the slice and dice stuff is the same as the challenge for Bitcoin, which is the larger the data transmission that's required.
	In other words, the business that's doing the most business is going to have the slowest results because it needs to transmit and update the blockchain.
	Even if it's a subset, it's such a huge subset relative to everyone else that it's just massive.
	So you have a problem in that people who are doing very little economic activity get their stuff processed very quickly, whereas people who are doing massive amounts of economic activity get their stuff processed really slowly, which is kind of the exact opposite of what you'd want.
	And again, I don't know the answers to all these things.
	I'm just saying when it comes to the altcoins and stuff, these are the questions I'd like to see answered.
	I hear a lot about cool features and stuff like that and speed in small environments, but I'm looking for something that's going to replace central banking.
	That's my thing. I'm not looking to make a quick killing in a pump and dump.
	Not that I'm saying anyone here is.
	I'm just saying mine. I'm looking for something that's going to replace central banking.
	I'm looking for something that's going to mean I honestly don't think there's going to be a single solution.
	It's probably going to be a plurality.
	Yeah, I'm on that sense of crypto is going to be a plurality.
	But on the DAG thing, the history of DAGs looks kind of bad.
	Personally, I'd like to see it work practically over a long period of time.
	So IOTA is one of the more famous DAGs, and they had issues of losing funds here and there.
	I'm looking at the Nano community, and on their wiki, they're like, Sustainability.
	Nano hopes to supplant Bitcoin.
	Do you guys know that you've broken with the convention of speaking English at this point, right?
	Are you guys just aware of that?
	It's actually pronounced dab and my daughter introduced me to it.
	But anyway, go on with your thing.
	So I'm looking at the Nano wiki and it's like as they're part of the wiki is sustainability.
	Nano hopes to supplant Bitcoin as a more sustainable cryptocurrency through legislation, regulation and climate advocacy.
	And I'm like, wow, that doesn't sound like a very decentralized project.
	And that's One of the big disparages usually when I hear against DAGs is they're centralized.
	I'm sorry. That's from Wikipedia.
	God, please don't quote Wikipedia here without crying out loud.
	That's fair.
	Wikipedia is...
	Is that a DAG, though? Is that a coin?
	What is that? Nano is a coin that uses this DAG approach.
	But what is DAG? I'm sorry.
	It's the thing I was talking about.
	It's a what? Directed Ecycligraph, that's what it stands for.
	It's the tree with...
	Yeah, as opposed to a blockchain.
	And from my understanding, like, with cryptography, it's capable of all kinds of awesome magical stuff.
	And maybe it is possible to be cryptographically certain...
	That nothing's going on, but I'm not someone who's going to be capable of understanding that technologically.
	I would need to see it work practically in the world.
	And IOTA, like these projects don't have the best reputation or the best history.
	I agree with you. I agree with you.
	I was, so like I said, I've worked on, or I looked at IOTA and never touched it with people.
	Yeah. Well, yeah, it reached a snake world to me.
	I'd recommend, if you love Nano and you want to prosper, I would recommend casting those commies out of the community, because that is no bueno.
	So, I mean, I saw the...
	Sorry, I just want to...
	Sorry, you guys want to take that offline.
	That's pretty technical for us. Oh, copy.
	But I would say, so for me, when it comes to altcoins, what I want to see is how are you going to replace a central bank?
	And again, Bitcoin has an answer.
	Is it perfect? I don't know.
	I have no idea.
	But it's working.
	It's working really well. We've got to 1% adoption, right?
	That's huge. Huge.
	We've got massive firms investing in Tesla and we got Zuckerberg and we got...
	Hey, once you got Paris Hilton, man, you got it, right?
	You got it. You just got it.
	And so...
	That's my question. Now, if the altcoins are very serious people, and I assume that a lot of them are, right?
	But if they're very serious people, I mean, if I were doing an altcoin, I would say, here's how it's going to replace central banking.
	Here's the data. Here's the facts.
	Here's the scalability testing.
	We can get to 1% of the world economy, and here's our simulation, and here's how it works, and here's how we deal with scalability versus decentralization.
	I mean, that's what I want to see.
	I'm just very skeptical regarding that stuff.
	And the Bitcoin people, as you know, Bitcoin was started to replace central banking.
	Bitcoin was started out of the 07-08 financial crash where Satoshi was disgusted and rightly so with the bailouts and the terrible financial system.
	And so it's a mission to replace central banking.
	And that doesn't mean it's the only thing that will ever work or the only thing that will ever matter.
	I get all of that, right? What I want to see from altcoins is, yeah, show me how you're going to replace central banking.
	Now, if you can't, show me that.
	Just my personal thing?
	No, not interested.
	Now, Bitcoin has shown us that.
	You know, will it work in the long run?
	Will it scale? I don't know.
	I don't know. But, you know, it's been doing all right so far, so to speak.
	And this is my, you know, I'm not saying this to be negative.
	I'm saying this to be hugely positive, which is, you know, if you're into an altcoin and you got an altcoin, Then this is my, I don't know, 15, 20 years of software testing experience making things work in a decentralized environment with technology so primitive it might as well have been two yogurt cups with a piece of string between them.
	So I have lots of bitter, painful, difficult, exciting, exhilarating experience with decentralization, decentralization, scalability stuff.
	It's baked into my bones from coding for many years for large organizations with literally dial-up modem sometimes, dial-up modems as the way of doing it.
	So, I'm acutely aware of the slice.
	It's just one of these weird things that has given me experience in this area, like so many things.
	It's just like, if God was writing my story, it's like, but I put this plot point in so you could understand this challenge later on.
	So, that's my challenge to the decentralized people.
	I'm sorry, to the altcoin people.
	If you can come up with an answer for this, man, I'm thrilled.
	And if you've got the seriousness of real-world scalability testing, I'm thrilled.
	I'm not thrilled with Ethereum, because...
	That's bullshit at the moment.
	You know, trying to sell a book, because Jared and I were talking about this, and he's kind of helping me do an NFT through Tezos, but Ethereum just does not work.
	It does not work as far as, you know, just wanting to get NFT, wanting to sell a book for $25 as an NFT, and the fees are...
	A crazy high. Like, multiple times higher.
	And so, like, that's not...
	Now, maybe they're solving it, working it, all that kind of stuff.
	And I'm pretty sure you could do that through Bitcoin.
	I don't know. Maybe you could at the moment.
	You could probably do it through Lightning or Sphinx or something like that.
	But that's my sort of challenge.
	If the people out there, you've got an altcoin, more power to you.
	The more competition, the better.
	I'm not down on altcoins.
	I just want to see people who are serious enough to say, Okay, let's really test the hell out of this and let's tell people how this is better than Bitcoin at replacing central banking.
	Because Bitcoin's got a hell of a head start and a hell of a proven record of 1% of the market.
	It doesn't mean you can't beat it, but man, you've got to...
	You've got to bust your nuts at that corner of things, which is kind of boring and technical, but that's what's really going to sell stuff.
	So, Seth, I really want to do this.
	You would like to hear, and I can get the answer.
	I know the people in Tezos. You want to see that we've done this big test network, and we can say, hey, when we get to a million transactions, 10 million transactions, 100 million transactions, we're going to be able to scale.
	You want to know our path and plan forward for that.
	Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, if you want people to put your money in, and, you know, again, I respect the altcoin community, and a lot of them don't...
	Here's the sad thing, is that I went from being the fresh-faced programmer, I'm now the salt-and-pepper guy, Saying, ah, technology's really cool, but, you know, have you tested the scalability?
	Because a lot of people are selling altcoins because massive market cap and it's going to take up vast sections of the economy and it's like, well, that's all well and good and it's great if you can.
	And Bitcoin certainly can, but...
	Have you done the nuts-to-bolts testing?
	You know, I had to sit there for weeks doing testing, compiling graphs and data.
	I think I even still have that binder somewhere, probably, of the tests that I did on my code back in the day to make sure that the modules could handle big, big loads.
	And the amount of optimization I had to do and compression, oh, it was a mess.
	It was a glorious mess.
	I kind of enjoyed the technical challenge, but that's what I want to see.
	I want to see the real-world scalability scenarios and how You're going to get even to 1% of the world economy and sustain yourself as an architect.
	Copy that. Okay, cool.
	Yeah, I can say from inside the conversation is like we're definitely taking over banks.
	They're not going to have a chance, but I'm going to have to come and get the arguments for that.
	So thank you, Steph. Thank you so much.
	Hey, I'm always happy to help whatever could replace central banking.
	I'm completely thrilled to do that at any time of the day.
	Alright, any other thoughts, comments, issues?
	It's nice dropping in with you guys and having a chat about this stuff.
	You caught me off guard with the Tezos challenge.
	I wasn't ready yet.
	I didn't know the answers. You must always be ready.
	This is true. Always be ready to sell.
	Hey, I had one last thought.
	I'm sorry, I know you're maybe trying to get off.
	No, no, no. I'm always trying to get off.
	Wait, sorry. So I think you're presenting what appears to me to be a false dichotomy, because you're saying that the choice is between scalability and decentralization, but not every node is sort of equal when it comes to contributing to decentralization.
	So if I have my garage and I put 50 computers in there and I have them all running nodes, Yeah, I've increased the node count on the planet by 50, but because those nodes aren't economically valuable, so whether or not they're there or not, it doesn't add to the decentralization of the system.
	And then, from the Bitcoin Cash kind of perspective, is that the only nodes that are necessary to To exist are the ones that are economically valuable.
	And then you know if they're economically valuable or not by whether or not you make money from running them.
	So, yeah, if we made the network so resource consuming that, you know, not even one person could run a node, then that's a problem.
	But just because we make, if we bump up the resources needed to run, a node up to where one node drops off of the network that you know that might be a a good trade-off and then in bitcoin core right now or bitcoin proper they there's no calculation that they're doing at all as far as um figuring out where the appropriate trade-off this the number that they are at right now was accidentally decided and then they give Give every sense that they're not going to be moving at all in the scalability direction at any point in the future.
	So they're not making a calculation when it comes to doing the trade-off.
	So, like, I'm perfectly happy with… Sorry, but, I mean, you could be right, of course, but you're just saying nobody's thinking about scalability or nobody – the number was completely arbitrary.
	You know, that's pretty damning, and again, you could be right, but there are a lot of really smart people in the Bitcoin space.
	I would assume that the number is arbitrary or that nobody's planning for things.
	You've got to be careful with these kind of broad generalizations.
	And again, maybe you're right, but that would not be my first guess.
	I mean, I've been paying tons of attention, and they've never given an argument for why one megabyte blocks is the correct number, or why two is better than...
	No, that's not true, though.
	No, that's not true. That's not true.
	Whether it's a megabyte at one point, one megabyte of whatever it is, right?
	No, the whole argument, as far as I can tell, and, you know, correct me where I'm astray, right?
	The whole argument is the bigger the block, the less decentralization can occur.
	And so, again, right or wrong, like it or don't, there has been thought into it.
	You say, oh, but it was arbitrary.
	It's like, well, okay, but you can say it's arbitrary at the beginning, but it's worked to a trillion-dollar valuation.
	And, you know, I'm not like every success is perfect, but it's kind of tough to argue with success, if that makes any sense.
	And so they got to a trillion-dollar valuation, and you can say, you know, it's all made up, it's all arbitrary, it's all nonsense, and so on.
	It's like, yeah, maybe you're right.
	Maybe you're right. Or maybe there's more thought into it than you or I know about.
	And that's the challenge, which is what do you do when there's stuff you disagree with and doesn't make much sense to you but is staggeringly successful?
	And you can just say, well, they're not putting any thought into it.
	But I would suggest that may not be the wisest approach, right?
	I mean, the wisest approach might be to just go and ask people in the community, why did you decide this or why did you decide that?
	I've asked tons of people that, and no one has ever given me any reason why one megabyte.
	Maybe I'm asking the wrong people.
	You're probably asking why was it objectively valuable to the nth degree for one megabyte, right?
	Okay. That's not a particularly fair question, right?
	I mean, it's like saying, well, why was the original IBM PC at 640 megs, right?
	Like, why? Show me the objective that was optimal and ideal.
	It's like, well, you had to decide something, right?
	You had to make some decision.
	And the decision that was made was 640, right?
	And this is back in the day, right?
	Bill Gates saying, ah, 640 megs ought to be enough for anyone, right?
	And of course, back in the day of WordPerfect 5.1, you know, it kind of was, right?
	So that is the question to me.
	If you're asking, you know, show me the objective metric by which 1 meg was determined to be the perfect size and, you know, every other option, like people, well, we had to decide something and it's been working, right?
	And you're saying, well, that's not objective.
	It's like, yeah, but we kind of do that a lot in life, right?
	I mean, you buy a house of a certain square footage, you know, so you buy a 2,000 square foot house and people say, Why was it 2,000 square foot?
	Why wasn't it 2,100? Why wasn't it 1,900?
	It seemed about right. If you're looking for the exact answer, you're probably going to be looking for a long time.
	I'm fine with Bitcoin the way it is right now.
	I'm very happy for them.
	I do believe it's a great advancement over central banking because this is going to enable people to live with a currency that doesn't have government money printing.
	But to me, I really want to also have a currency that you don't need to use banks to use.
	And then, you know, right now...
	Sorry, but why would you, in the long run, maybe, I'm sorry if I'm missing something, but in the long run, why would you necessarily need banks?
	So right now, Bitcoin can do, you know, like four or five transactions per second.
	If... Adoption continues to where, you know, the whole world is using this.
	Four or five a second kind of adds up to where each person only gets to do a transaction, you know, once every 80 years.
	No, no, I get that.
	So, I mean, I'm sure you're aware of all of the parallel work that's being done to try and create a layer that can do transactions faster, right?
	I'm excited about that.
	I'm glad that can happen. Until that happens, until that materializes, I'm not convinced that that's a direction that is going to yield much fruit.
	Until that happens, I have to go with where I think we're heading.
	I think we're heading in a world where you can only use Bitcoin through banks.
	And then it would be great if some other thing comes along and makes that not the reality, and then I'll, you know, eat my shoe or something.
	Sorry, I apologize if I'm way up, but isn't that sort of what the Lightning Network and other layers of faster settling is for?
	Yeah, so my issue with the Lightning Network is that even if it Even if it is very successful and they're able to work out routing problems and all that stuff, you still need to open and close channels on a somewhat regular basis.
	And each opening and closing of a channel is a transaction on the base layer.
	And then if you only ever get to do a base layer transaction once in your life, you're not going to be able...
	I don't understand how the Lightning Network is going to be a functional long-term solution if you're not able to even open and close channels regularly.
	Or once a month or once a year or something.
	Expanding the base layer, to me, is a prerequisite for the Lightning Network being a viable long-term solution.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I don't know enough about the technology, if there's anybody else...
	Who does? I'd be happy to hear about it.
	Obviously, there's no easy answer.
	If I'm wrong, then I'm completely happy to just go, I'm sorry, everybody.
	I was wrong. I should have trusted the people more or something.
	But when I look at where this is heading, I don't think the Lightning Network is going to work based on their condition of never, ever expanding the base layer.
	So I'm glad, even if, so if I'm right, it's still great that Bitcoin creates, gives us the ability to have a currency without inflation, but to me, I want to also not to be able to use, I want to be able to use it not going through a bank, and then the Lightning Network does not seem to me like it's going to get there.
	So that's why I'm on another project.
	No, and I think that's great, and if there's another project that can solve this, I would love to give a platform for that as well.
	But the speed and the centralization being one of the same versus the decentralization and the survivability of attack and power corrupting and so on, I am very clean.
	It seems to me that these are kind of wrapped up in the laws of physics.
	So, again, that's my sort of understanding that you kind of have to make these trade-offs.
	One dial goes up and one dial goes down, right?
	Well, absolutely.
	But because you said we don't have very many good, objective ways of proving this out, there kind of comes a point where you just make a judgment call.
	And then the judgment call that's kind of in the Bitcoin core or Bitcoin proper...
	Community, I just disagree with.
	I don't think that...
	It just is a personal opinion that the trade-off that they're making, the amount of scalability that they are sacrificing for the amount of centralization that they're getting in return for it, I don't think that's a good deal.
	I think... We would...
	I'm not going to buy into that.
	I mean, I have a little bit. And I've said this before, for those who haven't heard it, I mean, my sense of how things are going to shake out if this problem can't be solved, and I'm not convinced that it can be, and neither are you, of course, right?
	Is that you've got the gold and silver, right?
	Gold, silver, and copper, for those who were back in the Dungeons& Dragons days, right?
	You had your gold coins. Well, you had your platinum coins.
	You had your gold coins. You had your silver coins.
	You had your copper coins. And maybe Bitcoin is the platinum and the...
	The gold, so it's used for big transactions and maybe there's something else that's going to be used for smaller transactions and you can have sort of parallel systems and then there'll be exchanges between the two, right?
	In the same way that you could go and what was it in D&D? You could get like 20 silver coins made a gold coin or 10 silver coins made a gold coin, something I can't remember exactly what it was.
	So, yeah, I mean, this is why, you know, it makes sense to me what you're doing.
	If you don't believe this problem can be solved by Bitcoin, then Bitcoin will be used for larger, slower transactions.
	Maybe it would be used in the business-to-business.
	I think on one of the very first investment roundtables, I was talking about the business-to-business sector, which, again, I know really well because that's where I did my entrepreneurship.
	We didn't sell to customers at all.
	We only sold to Fortune 500 corporations, basically.
	And so the business-to-business sector is huge.
	Maybe that's where Bitcoin is going to be more.
	Maybe there'll be convertibility to something leaner and so on.
	But then the faster it gets, the more you're going to need to centralize and the more vulnerable it's going to be to control the disruption.
	So yeah, I love that we've got some of the best minds on the planet.
	Working on these issues, I think it's fantastic.
	And, you know, it's the one thing I'd be doing if I wasn't doing this is doing that because it's really cool.
	Yeah, we thank you for everything you do.
	Thanks. I appreciate that. All right.
	Anything people wanted to mention as we take another question or comment?
	Sorry, I just want to correct something real quick, an error of mine.
	I was telling people where to go for free domain staking.
	In my own domain.
	In your excitement. Yes!
	So it's jaredwooder.com forward slash free domain hyphen staking.
	Sorry about that, guys. Thanks for the correction.
	Ah, you know, and it's funny that we're including a Dash when we're talking about cryptos.
	Boom! Could be the last Dad joke of the day.
	Because Dash is a crypto and...
	Okay, never mind. That actually came up because someone was like in the Tezos chat like, we need a rebranding.
	And I was like, nope, the last rebranding I remember was Dash and that wasn't exactly a success story as I understand it.
	Right. And what was the history of Dash?
	I don't really know much about it. It was originally DarkCoin, and well, back, this is 2014, I sold DarkCoin on eBay a little bit until PayPal and eBay ruined that.
	But anyways, they were using, I think, ring signatures.
	It was one of the original privacy coins.
	And then they also, like, it's actually very similar to Tezos in that they ran these masternodes with voting and stuff like that.
	But I just, I haven't really heard much of it go anywhere.
	It seems like they're their own community, and I don't know if they're ignored or just not very vocal.
	It's a big scary thing, right?
	So this is what I was talking about earlier.
	So, you know, the big concern.
	And again, this is sort of – I remember a whole bunch of my customers.
	And I had really good relations with my customers, as you could imagine.
	We worked together on pretty – Tough projects at times and whenever they'd come into town, we'd take them out for like comedy clubs or we'd go out for a long dinner and chat.
	I got to know them on a pretty personal level.
	And I remember when we sold the company, there was this concern and people would say like, okay, so like if you've made some money, are you just going to vanish from this project, from this environment?
	Because, you know, we had to support the software and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So there was that whole question of cashing out, right?
	Do you cash out?
	Do you just bugger off and, you know, go and pick grapes in Queensland or look for seashells on a beach in Tahiti or something like that?
	And again, it wasn't like I made that much money or anything like that because it wasn't like we were Microsoft.
	But there was that kind of concern and that is a very real concern for people as a whole.
	And that's always the question with if there is a coin that's got, you know, developers and it requires a big community to make it work and scale and so on.
	And then a whole bunch of people make a bunch of money when it gets big.
	What's going to happen to it?
	Are they going to end up – I think that happened to the Litecoin guy.
	I could be wrong, but that's a big question.
	I know that Bitcoin survived that because Satoshi vanished and so on.
	I also know that people aren't cashing out of Bitcoin even though it's gone up five times this year.
	People aren't cashing out for the most part, certainly the long-term people.
	They're really holding tight.
	They're really holding tight to this thing.
	So that's the big question.
	What's going to happen? And that's the altcoin question.
	Are people going to say, woohoo, we made $50 million and that's all I ever need, so why on earth would I sit there and stare at a keyboard and, you know, Yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. Principles and values first, stuff like that. And the guy, like I said, I made this case in one of the roundtables.
	I researched the people that did it.
	And so his handle online is Merbard, which is short for Murray Rothbard.
	Long story short, the guy comes across as an incredibly libertarian, or if not anarchist.
	Not to say he is. I'm not representing him, of course, by any means.
	But yeah, he's definitely someone who's got principles behind here.
	This is a values thing that's part of his project.
	Well, so listen, that's a great answer, except for the salt and pepper guys, like me.
	That's not a great answer.
	You say, well, this one guy in Tezos is the reason I have full faith in him.
	Oh, no, no. You know why that's a bad argument?
	Sure, one person's a target.
	Well, you get hit by a bus.
	He decides to quit. He gets COVID and can't think straight or whatever, right?
	I absolutely agree.
	I absolutely agree. And we've argued this with him in chat.
	And he's like, well, that's why I'm not the man.
	I'm not the head. There's several development cores.
	There's people like me.
	There's a lot of people with shared similar values that make up.
	So let's say you get $50 million valuation on your Tesos, right?
	Yes. What are you doing?
	If my Tesla becomes $50 million, I'm selling some.
	Absolutely. I'm going to sell enough so that...
	Okay, so let's say you sell $10 million and you don't have to work again for the rest of your life.
	You can go travel. You can go and see the Northern Lights in Finland.
	You can go and surf the rapids and the Amazon and do all of these wonderful, cool things.
	Actually, first, I would hunt down a wife.
	That would be my mission. I want to take a private cruise with Stefan.
	Of course. That goes without saying, obviously, right?
	But no, this is the big, important question that you need to ask yourself, I think, right?
	And I'm just curious about everybody who's involved in crypto and this.
	Let's say you go to 50 mil.
	It's not unthinkable, right?
	Let's say you go to 50 mil. What do you do?
	And don't tell me you'll be exactly the same, because you won't.
	Well, see, here's the thing, Steph, though.
	I would not sell a whole lot of my Tesla.
	Don't get me wrong. I'd sell enough so that I have a nice chunk in the bank and have a little bit of financial.
	Okay, so you get 50 mil.
	I know this is theoretical, but let's put some numbers, right?
	Okay. Your holdings in Tesla go to 50 mil.
	What are you going to sell? Okay, so a very small amount of Tezos, but here's why.
	Here's why. I'm staking the Tezos.
	No, no, what's the number? Sorry, I'm just curious.
	Let me just be the annoying...
	Okay, sure, sure. Absolutely.
	Great question. How much fiat would you want to be secure?
	Well, first of all, that's just verboten.
	It would not become fiat. It would become other cryptos as a hedge.
	Well, no, let's say that you still got to spend some fiat for taxes and whatever it is, right?
	I spend the fiat, like I just transfer crypto into fiat as I need it.
	And if I did, let's say I did have to hold fiat, I would hold it as USDC, which I can hold with blockchain and get blockchain.com and get like 13% interest on that.
	Okay. So, but let's say, you know, it's called the FU money, right?
	Uh-huh. Which is, I don't have to listen to anyone.
	I don't have to do anything. I'm not subject to financial pressure anymore.
	What's that? And again, just give me a number in fiat.
	Whether it's convertible to fiat or not doesn't really matter.
	Let's say if it's 50 is what I got, and let's say, I don't think I would, but let's say 10 million.
	I turn 10 million dollars of Tezos into...
	into something else.
	And yeah, some of it fiat, of course, for taxes, things like that.
	Yeah, because even if you're only getting 5% of that, that's what?
	That's pretty good, right?
	But here's why I- That's still got you half a million a year, right?
	But here's why I wouldn't do that, because I'm staking Tezos, and I'm getting a large amount of Tezos every month, or every day, every three days, I get Tezos.
	So I don't have to sell a big block.
	I just sell a little bit to pay as I need.
	Like, why would I get rid of...
	Well, I would assume, though, that when Tezos goes to 50, you're going to get a whole lot more competition in the baconing.
	Was it? Baking. Sorry, baking.
	I love that, the baconing.
	Yes. You're absolutely right, but now I've got the resources to hire people, you know, to help cover that, so...
	I just know that the Bitcoin mining got pretty brutal there for a while and people had to turn off their servers and all of that.
	Well, that was a hardware issue and that is one thing, you know, with proof of stake, you know, you don't have the same kind of competition, you know.
	Right, right, right, right.
	So, yeah, so it changes, you know, when you get that kind of money from the people I've, I mean, I've known some people in the software industry who've made some serious coin.
	It just takes some of the wind out of your sails.
	For a lot of people. Not for everyone, right?
	Not for everyone, but... For a lot of people.
	It's the golden throne of indifference.
	And the younger you are, the more it tends to, because you're like, oh, I can start working again later.
	I'm going to enjoy this money while I'm young.
	And why do I want to go and sit in some stinky office and get yelled at by people when I've got this amount of money?
	And again, some people still remain motivated.
	Mark Zuckerberg obviously remains motivated to do his part in harming the West.
	So he's got whatever he gets out of bed for.
	Maybe his goats, but some people do still stay motivated.
	But that's the big question with the altcoins.
	If they do become as successful and people become multi-decker millionaires, what happens?
	Are they still as hungry? Are they still as keen?
	Are they going to keep burning the midnight oil to make this thing work?
	The people in the community are here for, like, the same reason we're here in this philosophy show.
	Like, that's the kind, not saying it's by all means the same, but here's one example.
	Like, I was looking to get a job with one of the Tesla's companies, and they actually, the way they knew me is because I mentioned FreeDomain in the chat.
	And I was like, this is the first kind of, like, job interview where FreeDomain and Steph comes up, and it's, like, comes up at all, but nonetheless, it's positive and not like a, ew, you need to get the hell out of here.
	You know, you're promoting. I'm calling Wikipedia!
	I know. No, that's great.
	And listen, I think that's fantastic and that's going to go a long way for sure, that sort of philosophical commitment.
	And that's why I said Tezos was probably – like I said earlier, Tezos was outside the sort of general skepticism of altcoin stuff because it is – you know, ideology is more powerful than just about anything, as we know from sort of the modern world and the way in which it's going wrong and some of the ways in which it's going right.
	My ideology is the most powerful thing around it.
	So if you have a group of people who are committed, and as you know, Satoshi was committed to, I think, replacing central banking or getting rid of the existing predatory financial system, all wonderful good stuff.
	And that's very powerful.
	And there are, of course, people who are in the Bitcoin space for profits, short-term profits, and that's fine too, right?
	Speculators versus investors.
	But as the system's getting worse, more and more long-term holders are taking their coins off the exchanges and putting them someplace safe.
	And that's not because they think it's going to go down.
	Yeah, so I think that the ideological drivers behind Tezos is pretty good.
	And that's one thing I would be looking for.
	You know, if I was investing in some altcoin, these are all the questions that I'd be asking.
	And these are some of the questions that I was asked when I was selling a company was, okay, So we can, you know, we can get you to sign a stick-around clause, right?
	You've got to stick around for a year or two.
	We can get your stocks vested over time.
	We can do all of that. But how do we know you're not just going to show up as an empty shell and play, you know, Unreal Tournament all night?
	It's like, hey, I will be playing Unreal Tournament all night, but I will do my work first.
	So, yeah, that is the big question.
	Where does your motivation go with this kind of stuff?
	And I think for a lot of the altcoins, it's just like, woohoo, we've made good money.
	And bye-bye.
	Is that what happened with the Doge guy?
	He made a lot of money. There's not any development going on with Doge, is there?
	Yeah, from my understanding, he was somewhat socialist.
	It was a complete joke.
	And yeah, it's...
	The joke's on him.
	Well, actually, no, the joke's on everyone else, I think, over time.
	Yeah, to me, it's an internet joke.
	And boy, yeah, I'm salty about it.
	Yeah, and I think it's a rush.
	I don't know what the hell Elon Musk is doing, honestly, other than maybe just getting people to not buy Bitcoin so he can buy it cheaper.
	I don't know what the hell is going on, but it's a strange thing for a businessman that astute to get involved in and pump that much.
	It's crazy. I mean, the guy buys Bitcoin on his corporate ledger and then pumps another crypto.
	It's like, what the hell are you doing, you freak of nature?
	But again, I think it's sort of explainable, but it's not very complimentary, the explanation.
	And the joke coin is the easiest one to do that with, because whenever people lose their, you know, lose their ass on it, you just say, what do you, you thought it was serious?
	It's obviously a joke.
	What do you want? It's got a dog.
	Yeah. All right.
	Well, listen, guys, I got to get some dinner, but really great chatting this afternoon, and we should do this more often.
	I'm sorry that I've been a little busy with other stuff, but nice to chat with you all, and I will put this out to the top as a whole, and let's, yeah, let's do, I think we may have something Thursday night, but that's going to be more Theological.
	I'm curious about people's thoughts on theology these days.
	And yeah, well, maybe we can do a roundtable, investment roundtable this weekend because it's been a while.
	But yeah, thanks everyone so much.
	A great pleasure to chat and we'll talk soon.
	You guys, I'll just leave this running if you want.
	I'll just leave myself, but feel free to chat obviously amongst yourselves.
	We'll talk soon. Bye.

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