0:00 Welcome to another episode of the Blockchain Debate Podcast, where consensus is optional 0:12 but proof of thought is required. I'm your host, Richard Yan. Today's motion is 0:17 Toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin I hear many no-coiners say that 0:21 the worst thing about Bitcoin is the Bitcoiners. They're referring to their negative encounters 0:26 with staunch Bitcoin believers on social media. The criticism here is that these Bitcoiners are 0:32 irrational, vicious, and annoying on social media. And they attack no-coiners in unison 0:38 like a coordinated army. The essence of this behavior is captured by the term toxic Bitcoin 0:43 maximalism. The idea here is that Bitcoin maximalists believe that Bitcoin is superior 0:49 to all other currencies, which includes fiat, obviously, and all other cryptos. 0:54 And Bitcoin maxi's impolite behavior online is justified in promoting Bitcoin or defending 1:00 its legitimacy. Well, obviously not all Bitcoiners are like that. Today, we'll have two Bitcoiners 1:06 facing off on whether such behavior continues to serve Bitcoin well. If you're into crypto and like 1:11 to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We feature some 1:16 of the best-known thinkers in the crypto space. If you would like to debate or want to nominate 1:20 someone, please DM me at blockdebate on Twitter. Please note that nothing in our podcast should be 1:25 construed as financial advice. I hope you enjoy listening to this debate. Let's dive right in. 1:32 Welcome to the debate, consensus optional, proof of thought required. I'm your host, 1:35 Richard Yan. Today's motion, toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin. To my metaphorical left 1:41 is Giacomo Zucco, arguing for the motion. He agrees that toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin. 1:47 To my metaphorical right is Paul Sztorc, arguing against the motion. He disagrees that toxic 1:52 maximalism is great for Bitcoin. Let's quickly go through the bios of our guests. 1:57 So, Giacomo first heard of Bitcoin in 2012 and quit his fiat job to focus on Bitcoin full-time 2:02 in 2013. He has since co-founded and supported Bitcoin startups in several sectors, including 2:08 mining, wallets, consultancy, research, and so on. He is currently a shareholder in a few companies, 2:13 including Relay, B-Academy, BHB Network, and he is a freelance educator consultant. He supported 2:20 some floss projects during the years, including Open Timestamps, Proof-Martial, Bolt, RGB, 2:27 BDK, and so on. Paul is a self-branded independent Bitcoiner. He is perhaps best known as the 2:33 proposer of Drivechain, a project that seeks to leverage sidechain technology in order to introduce 2:39 additional functionality to Bitcoin. One use case of this is a Zcash-like fully encrypted 2:45 sidechain using Drivechain. Welcome to the show, Giacomo and Paul. 2:50 Thank you. 2:51 Thanks. 2:52 Great. So, we normally have three rounds, opening statements, host questions, and audience 2:55 questions. Currently, our Twitter poll shows that more people believe that it is not beneficial 3:02 for the Bitcoin community to be toxic maximalists. 3:06 I'm actually surprised to learn that. I thought for sure I would be on the ropes. 3:11 Okay. I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but... 3:13 No, I was 100%. I was surprised, because the toxicity is very dominant, 3:18 like culturally, at least in the world that Giacomo and I came from, the past. That's how I see it. 3:25 But it's good to be the underdog, so it's easier to have a positive change. If I started in 3:29 advantage for the way you will measure the success, it's actually better to be the underdog 3:34 in this case. 3:35 I think the toxic Bitcoiners are intentionally voting the other way, 3:38 and then changing their position for the post-debate poll. 3:40 They may. It may be the case. They'll do anything to win. 3:45 I didn't think about that until now, but that would be really toxic. 3:49 Yeah, exactly. After the release of this recording, we will also have a post-debate poll. 3:54 Between the two posts, the debater with a bigger change in percentage votes in their favor wins 3:58 the debate. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So, Giacomo, you're in the pro position. So, 4:04 explain to us why you think toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin. 4:09 First of all, we have to understand what we mean. We have to start with a definition. 4:14 I would define Bitcoin maximalism, that it's mostly reappropriation. What happened with the 4:20 term queer in queer studies, and also more historical terms like political terms like 4:26 wig, or even some artistic terms. So, something was used as a slur against some category of people, 4:33 and then these people ironically embraced and self-ironically embraced the slur. So, 4:39 I don't think to be particularly toxic, especially in person. But I also think to have an average 4:46 toxicity online, especially for the typical mediums that I use. So, it's nothing over the top, 4:53 nothing more than the average. But the reappropriation of both terms was mostly done 4:58 in order to find some kind of positive spin on something that was invented as a slur. So, 5:04 let's divide the toxic maximalist meme. The first part is maximalism. So, maximalism is mostly about 5:12 being Bitcoin only, thinking that the novelty of Bitcoin is not replicable, and to try to replicate 5:20 it is actually bad either for Bitcoin, or especially for the people trying to do that, 5:26 or for the people affected by that into this very asymmetric environment in which we have this kind 5:33 of eternal September. So, many people are getting it all the time. So, they need some kind of very 5:38 clear distinction between all the bullshit and what is not bullshit. So, maximalism will be 5:45 Bitcoin only, for many reasons. Some of the reasons for maximalism are descriptive and not 5:50 prescriptive. They will be something like money tends to be a winner-takes-it-all game, so money 5:58 tends to converge instead of becoming more fractionate, and Bitcoin has some kind of network 6:04 effects that may remind of the protocol wars of the internet in the 90s, where we had many 6:10 contendants, but then we had the real de facto open source standard that basically took over 6:16 everything and swallowed everything else. So, this is a descriptive level of maximalism. We think 6:23 that Bitcoin will eventually dominate for network effects, not just technological, but especially 6:30 monetary network effect. Then there is a prescriptive and non-descriptive form of maximalism, 6:37 which says that it's not just a reality that we think will happen, but it's actually also good 6:43 that we think that Bitcoin will dominate in an absolutely asymmetrical way over any kind of 6:50 attempt to replicate it, because of monetary reasons, because of digital scarcity. You can have 6:57 scarcity when you have 21 million Bitcoin. You cannot have scarcity in the so-called cryptocurrency 7:04 equivalence class. So, there are 21 million Bitcoins, less than that. There are infinite, potentially, 7:10 altcoins. There is no scarcity in the cryptocurrency space. There is no scarcity within many altcoins, 7:17 but even if you consider altcoins with some kind of a schedule, like Bitcoin inflation schedule, 7:23 the overall class of cryptocurrencies cannot replicate scarcity. So, we argue that it's not 7:29 just probably going to happen, but it's also very good that there is this kind of strong convergence. 7:36 And then the third level of maximalism is that of bad incentives. Even if there was some possibility 7:43 of some strange monetary configuration with more than one digital gold, even then the incentives 7:50 that bring people to print money, basically, and shield their shitcoins as a better Bitcoin 7:57 are so bad and so overwhelming that it's a good heuristic to just ignore shitcoins and just 8:06 filter shitcoins with some kind of spam filter. This is an argument similar to there may be some 8:13 honest Nigerian prince offering you a very good offer that will make you rich and also enlarge 8:20 your penis, but as a general heuristic, given the situation and the bad incentives, it's better to 8:26 assume prima facie heuristics that the Nigerian prince will actually not really help you. So, this 8:34 is maximalism. Another is toxic. Toxic is mostly a reaction to the way, the style. I don't think that 8:42 when we re-appropriated the label toxic, what we meant was really about being rude. Again, I consider 8:49 myself pretty nice in person and basically average online, but especially it was something about the 8:57 style of trying to cut to the chase, filtering bullshit. So, what people tend to call toxic 9:05 on Bitcoiners is this kind of no bullshit disposition, which reminds also what was called 9:11 toxic in Linus Torvalds, for example. There are some scandals about Linus Torvalds being a toxic 9:18 person because if you said something that he considered bullshit, he was just calling bullshit 9:23 without any kind of niceness around that. And there is also consideration that in an environment 9:30 where the signal to noise ratio is very, very, very low and where bullshit is everywhere and where 9:37 noise is overwhelming and when scams are overwhelming, every tweet that I give out, 9:43 people has to know that I have to basically block at least 50 to 100 answers which are a promotion 9:51 of some kind of defy scam. I literally had to go to block them individually or using lists 9:58 because they are always everywhere. In this environment, usually to be excessively nice 10:04 just means the social equivalent to opening spam folders in email. You need heuristic, especially 10:11 in this eternal September, new people will need heuristic and I personally need heuristic. 10:18 Of course, we have people being really mean, but my contention would be that mean people in Bitcoin 10:25 are not any more than mean people over the internet in general. I think that the level of 10:31 real and non-self-ironical toxicity you will find in Bitcoin is comparable to the level you will 10:37 find about a debate of Veeam versus Emacs and probably inferior to what you will find on 10:44 Twitter and especially considering that Bitcoin is a very politically loaded project with a very 10:50 adversarial mindset. So all that considering, I would say that Bitcoiners are on average nicer 10:57 than other online community and when we talk about real life, really, I don't even remember 11:03 meeting somebody who was not nice. Okay, great. By the way, before we move on to Paul's opening 11:08 statement, just one quick question for Giacomo. What is the eternal September you're referring to? 11:14 Oh yeah, sorry, I gave it for granted. There was this moment where the internet was really 11:19 opened up for new users coming in and it was basically a September and there was this new 11:25 amount of people flowing in chat rooms and asking basic questions and being defrauded by fraudsters 11:31 and incurring old misconceptions about everything about the internet and so people already inside 11:39 the internet culture was calling this moment where in September usually you have people 11:45 coming back from vacation and entering stuff and this was an eternal September because new people 11:51 were coming in eternally always with a very huge information asymmetry and so they were 11:56 very, very easy to scam, very, very easy to confound, to confuse and to manipulate and so 12:03 eternal September is an eternal inflow of noobs basically. Okay, got it. All right, Paul, go ahead 12:10 with your opening statement. Explain to us why toxic maximalism is not great for Bitcoin. 12:16 Okay, yes, I've got my work cut out for me because that was quite an opening statement from Giacomo 12:21 but I'm going to try to just give you a little bit of where I'm coming from and then maybe 12:26 react to a little bit of what he said. I definitely used to be, I still consider myself 12:33 to be a Bitcoin maximalist and I've always been a Bitcoin maximalist and in fact my sidechain 12:38 project I think is a pretty, it's almost the zenith of maximalism because it says 12:43 there is no place for any other project and anything else, even a bad idea, will be copied 12:49 into Bitcoin so I consider myself to be totally 100% a maximalist. I think that it's the toxic 12:54 maximalism part has become, very recently I've been brought around to the opinion that it causes 13:00 more problems than it solves. There was a time long ago, like Litecoin I think is an outrageous 13:08 copy-paste of Bitcoin. You compare the effort it took to go from nothing to creating Bitcoin, 13:14 which Satoshi Nakamoto had to do, and then you compare that to what it took to create Litecoin, 13:18 which is just copy and paste and change like four or five lines of code and then to frame that like 13:22 a new thing is outrageous and a crime against truth and extremely detrimental to 13:30 Bitcoin's message and its ability to achieve its goal. So I definitely thought that it was horrible 13:39 to do that type of thing in the past but now I think actually some of the new alternative projects 13:46 have some merit and are at least worth thinking about and the toxicity has become a kind of prison 13:52 of the mind and it is closing people's minds I think. This is just my opinion. So I think that 13:58 the toxicity, it's something like Star Wars where it used to be really really cool but then people 14:03 learned all the little tropes and the little lines or like the member berries from South Park is 14:08 something else that comes to mind and people are like well you just use the word shitcoin and then 14:13 you can dunk on someone and it's funny. So basically my concerns with it, I made a little 14:18 list here, things that I think I wish we could change a little bit about maximalism to make it 14:24 I think a little better. One, the whole staticity is a kind of xenophobic paranoid hatred of all 14:32 change, which I think is a little unfair. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I wrote that. My second 14:36 bullet point is it's too easy to learn the tropes. So like people show up and then they just 14:41 they can learn the tropes and you never really know if they actually understand the real maximalism 14:46 of the world or if they just learned the talking points. And this is all, number one, this emphasis 14:51 on staticity that bitcoin is already perfect and it can't possibly be replicated and everything 14:57 about it is everything that you need. That's obviously attacking a straw man a little bit but 15:01 I think that meme has made it into the toxic world and it's related to my second point which is that 15:06 there is an intense peer pressure in the toxic maximalism community. You feel this need to care 15:11 about what other people think but I would be more comfortable if it was just something that people 15:16 just believed because it was true like something in physics or thermodynamics or something where 15:22 if people didn't believe it you just said well you could just say have fun staying poor. I think it's 15:25 fair game actually. Some people think it's outrageously insulting but you're just saying 15:29 it's not my responsibility to teach you anything which I think is better than hunting down people 15:35 who argue against maximalism and then trying to say that that person's a scammer. And the 15:39 stakes are pretty high because many people get hired for sinecure jobs like easy jobs that maybe 15:46 we could say some of the exchanges or whatever just based on their tweets. You just tweet and 15:50 you can get an easy job doing very little here. Point number three, it has this creeping kind of 15:57 totalitarian cult thing. I hate to use the word cult but it's like you go into bitcoin and then 16:03 all of a sudden you're like a registered republican in the United States and then you're carnivore 16:08 and then you have to lift weights. You can't like you can't do cardio and then all of a sudden 16:15 everything modern is the worst. All music made after 1971 is bad. What are we really signing up 16:21 for here? It has this kind of creeping way of just striking diagonally into the other. So these are 16:26 things that I just wish could change. The four and five, one you mentioned Giacomo on your statement 16:32 I have a hypocrisy written down for four which is that people are nicer in person but only online 16:38 they have a fake they feel a need to project like a bravado or something that I think is hypocrisy 16:43 which is that some people even say you meet them in person they say well you know toxicity it 16:48 actually isn't that great for bitcoin but then they go right back to being toxic online and I 16:52 don't know how to frame that as either being clever or not taking it yourself too seriously 16:58 which would be a good thing or if you can just regard it as hypocrisy. A lot of the most toxic 17:03 people I mean we have some other things that we might talk about like people like a Fluffy Pony or 17:09 David Vorek they have launched altcoins and then what I'm really thinking of is like magical crypto 17:16 group which is like a bitcoin maximalist group but it had a Charlie Lee from Litecoin and 17:22 and Ricardo Spogni from Monero was like half non-bitcoin then we could talk about other people 17:30 maximalists who have done ICOs on Ethereum and it becomes unclear as to whether how seriously 17:36 the people who advance this on Twitter are actually subscribed to it in their heart and soul 17:41 I also think there's a little bit of a grift this is point number five my last point which is that 17:46 you have an idea of like friends could meet for dinner like we met in Miami a bunch of people 17:51 bitcoiners and someone went to pick up the tab for everyone but someone else had already picked 17:56 up the tab for everyone because it was just a friendly meeting of old bitcoiners so that was 18:00 very nice but I compare that to like when people sell like the steak dinners for a very high price 18:06 if you're friends with someone you can just join them for dinner you don't have to sell tickets 18:09 and make it like a big event that was something you can already do without so I wonder about if 18:13 there is a grift there's definitely a libertarian grift if you've been around the libertarian 18:17 community for a while you know some people are big libertarians they throw these big conferences but 18:21 you know they got to sell tickets there's weird people there so that's just something I think to 18:27 be aware of does it have to be like okay the fuck elan tour I like max geyser a lot I think it's 18:32 great but you know he's selling tickets which I think is totally 100% fair I just say is it a 18:38 performance or is it real these are just things that I think if they change I would feel a lot 18:42 better about so Giacomo said a lot of things I'm going to try to run through a couple of them 18:48 number one about reappropriating a slur and that the internet is toxic I definitely think that's 18:54 the case I mean I spoke to we're just going to name drop Adam Beck because he's so famous 18:59 he told me he was like this is actually nothing compared to what happened in the past and he says 19:03 you just need really thick skin that's a classic metaphor idiom or whatever sometimes I feel really 19:09 bad for Giacomo because he's not a native English speaker you know he said you really need thick 19:13 skin in the industry and he Adam Beck said it was much worse in the flame wars of the 90s or 19:20 whatever so I think that's true I think definitely think new people come in and some paternalism is 19:27 warranted I wonder if though if the toxicity is not rational enough if it doesn't give cover 19:33 to people because the scammers because the scammers can sometimes just say well those people 19:38 are just toxic maximalists they think everything is a skin they're closed-minded so I think it has 19:43 to be rooted in some kind of rational calculation I agree on the point about the network effects 19:49 I completely 100% agree with that sometimes I lament the network effects I wonder if they're 19:54 like a prison because it's difficult to beat them and that means there's less room for creativity 20:01 and fun I've definitely noticed a decrease in fun which I attribute to the toxic maximalism 20:07 in the past we had the meme bitcoin user not affected and people would just laugh all the time 20:12 this was before the block size debate got really big the block size debate forced everyone to pick 20:17 sides and to religiously adhere to their side so I think that this has contributed to a kind of 20:23 problem maybe I can tie this back to what I said at the very beginning which is that 20:28 I was you know a fan of maximalism and even toxic maximalism at first but now I wonder if it has 20:34 become especially via the route of the peer pressure if it has become just like a self-referential 20:40 if it's become like a circle a big circle where people are just enforcing the beliefs of the cult 20:46 for no other reason other than that is uh how to get popular and it has now broken away from reality 20:54 so I wonder about that I mean we have now some pretty interesting projects I think that people 21:00 should keep an open mind towards it's just when the the new projects seem interesting and just when 21:07 you really seems as though bitcoin core might be just a little too conservative and slow moving 21:14 now this is the time when maybe people should react a little bit against maximalism toxic 21:20 maximalism and instead it is going full throttle I think although apparently not because you did 21:28 that poll and it seems that most people are skeptical that it is good for me that's just a 21:33 small sample and I've had many non-bitcoin projects on my show and I come from non-bitcoin background 21:39 so maybe there's a lot of non-bitcoiners bias yeah okay great so that's some of my thoughts there 21:47 okay Giacomo go ahead okay now actually I would like to acknowledge some of the points that Paul 21:54 made I think this conversation is unfortunately for your format uh getting too nice 22:02 but I think maybe debates are played out though maybe and I don't think the public really likes 22:07 them as much as they yeah I don't know I mean people like fights but then they say they don't 22:13 it's complicated the relationship between uh content and personal behavior is not easy but 22:19 anyway I will start acknowledging some of the points I think that most of the people that will 22:25 repeat the mantra shit coins are bad and who shit coins is a scammer they will probably not even 22:32 understand why I think I have um I have a justification I think I just gave a very brief 22:39 justification but I can go on and on and on giving more justification I really reflected on that 22:46 when I was first a shit coiner in 2013 and then when I became a toxic maximalist I really gave it 22:54 a thought so I think I can justify it I think that's also the case for other famous toxic 22:59 maximalists but I also think that the majority of people that will replicate the slogans will 23:05 replicate just parroting without any kind of understanding so I absolutely agree with Paul 23:12 here the difference probably is that I just disagree on the fact that this is anyhow avoidable 23:18 if you are going to create any kind of simple message at all I also know that my father 23:23 doesn't really know why he has a spam folder and he will probably delete the Nigerian princess 23:31 he just knows that it's a scam he doesn't really know what is the kind of monarch in Nigeria if 23:38 there are princes what is the probability of this kind of stock money in the bank scheme 23:44 he doesn't know details he just acquired a very simple slogan which I think it may be false 23:51 in the same sense that everything may be false we live in a simulation and whatever but it's 23:55 pragmatically a very good very very good heuristic a very very good approximation of truth so I agree 24:02 that most of the people will repeat shitcoin bad because they are just parroting but I also think 24:09 this is both unavoidable and also overall good compared to the other way around which is people 24:16 mindlessly parroting shitcoins are good which is I think is the only realistic alternative 24:22 also the second part is about peer pressure I agree that there is one and it's strong it is 24:28 unpleasant I felt it myself 24:30 one of the project that you mentioned it at the beginning that I am sponsoring RGB project 24:35 that is basically about shitcoins some kind of shitcoins is inside of bitcoin architecture not 24:43 unlike the idea of sidechain which is actually cooler because that is bringing the functionalities 24:48 without bringing the actual shitcoin so sidechain will be cooler than RGB RGB is actually it's not 24:54 a scammy project because I'm not printing money and not selling tokens but it's something that is 25:00 explicitly designed to allow people to scam other people so I felt peer pressure I know that I'm 25:07 working on thin ice when I presented that when I was in Lisbon presenting RGB I made probably 25:14 60% of the presentation was about justifying myself in order not to be considered a scammer 25:20 by other people there and then I managed to enter very late in the details so I feel that 25:28 and I know it's unpleasant but I also think that this kind of peer pressure can compensate 25:34 other very very bad incentives that I also felt on myself and I'm sure that most people in bitcoin 25:40 since a while felt on themselves that if they only were a little bit more dishonest they could 25:46 make so much more money just joining any kind of scammy ICO in 2017 or scammy DeFi scheme now 25:54 if only once it would be more malleable about ethics we could be so much richer and this is 26:03 a strong pressure and I think this pressure also won over some friends and that I respected 26:10 and I mean I still understand but I think that the peer pressure is unpleasant but it is a strong 26:16 social force partially compensating another very bad social force which is incentive to 26:23 to take advantage of the huge noise and the huge information asymmetry in this environment so yes 26:29 it's ugly but I think it's needed so the other two things that I want to acknowledge is true that 26:35 toxic maximalism is not just about shitcoins it also expanded to somehow include other two things 26:42 one is conservation of bitcoin as is so not changing bitcoin I think there are also good 26:49 reasons to argue for this but this is not as clear-cut as shitcoins I think that shitcoins 26:55 if you really think about that you will understand that it's mostly driven by bad incentives that is 27:00 mostly going nowhere while if you think about changing bitcoin I understand the need to be very 27:06 conservative very adversarial very skeptical very critical move slow but in a way exactly for the 27:15 reason that I don't think shitcoin can succeed then I have to also think that bitcoin must evolve 27:21 because if you think about that if shitcoins could succeed there would be no reason to change bitcoin 27:27 at all because you can just do that on a shitcoin and it will work so if shitcoin were possible then 27:33 we would not need any kind of change in bitcoin since I think that shitcoins are not viable long 27:40 term that's the reason why I have to be careful not to be too much close-minded about changes in 27:46 bitcoin so I mean all the debate with Paul about sidechain may be one example but even 27:52 taproot itself was another example and now there is a good debate between John Carvalho 27:56 and Adam Beck on Twitter a toxic one because both have a thick skin and both are very direct 28:03 well Adam is very nice but John is very direct is a little bit toxic and he's basically saying 28:08 you developers will just go on adding bullshit all the time you will never stop but we need stability 28:14 TCP IP version 4 is not changing since the 80s and all the world is built on top in order to build 28:20 on top we have to move change at the margins and leave the base layer alone and Adam is answering 28:27 you are right but not quite yet because we can do this change which makes a lot of sense 28:32 across input signature aggregation and then any prev out and then maybe simplicity which will 28:38 allow any other future chain and I was watching today's and they both make sense if we ossify too 28:43 soon then bitcoin misses out a lot of good things that it can do for people if we ossify too late 28:50 then bitcoin is too easy to change and it will be changed forever and there will be no stability 28:55 and no layerization you cannot build on top of a foundation that keeps moving and so I recognize 29:02 both when maximalism is about shit coins I can try to give nuances but really I cannot find 29:08 much nuances when it's about changing bitcoin I can see more space for discussion and nuances 29:13 and the other thing that that Paul mentioned is the expansion of the maximalist culture 29:19 or cult to other topics which are per se they seems completely unrelated with bitcoin like 29:26 diet or modern art or whatever I think that this is also unavoidable in a way because bitcoin 29:36 basically created one kind of social situation in which a group would think that all the authorities 29:46 in the sector of money and finance are completely wrong and or dishonest now is starting to question 29:54 if the same principle of authority and hyper specialization is not just failing in money 30:01 but is maybe also failing in nutrition or maybe it is failing on climatology or whatever so the 30:09 fact that bitcoin can generate skepticism and critical thinking and anti-mainstream views 30:16 of everything else I think is quite natural I see it happening to myself I studied physics 30:22 so I see a video about I don't know the standard model is fake by my perpetual motion machine 30:30 and I would be just this is bullshit just like a maximalist but now I think if everybody was 30:38 wrong on money and finance completely like if the most highest authorities on this economic stuff 30:44 are actual morons and bitcoin proved that in their face what are the possibility that some 30:52 other field I don't personally understand so it's an extension of don't trust verify 30:58 so of course the output the outcome is not fixed I don't think that everybody in bitcoin 31:05 will eventually start just eating red meat but I think that everybody consistently considering 31:10 the don't trust verify meme after bitcoin proved the meme viable will probably question a lot of 31:17 other stuff and I think this is the origin of the weird and then you have the typical social dynamic 31:23 of a group of friends they will influence each other even in random stuff and of course some of 31:28 this stuff will be completely idiosyncratic bitcoiners they just like this kind of music 31:33 or this kind of it will just be random but it's also inevitable but I understand that why I will 31:39 not give any break to shitcoin promoters I can give break to vegans because I know it's not a 31:48 mathematical step from bitcoin to meat it's just a it's just a mindset probably of critical thinking 31:54 then the other thing is about grift so since people will just start pirating everything 32:00 including shitcoins are bad or shitcoins are good can you leverage these in order to make 32:07 money without effort just writing the easy slogan yes you can I think that I may feel it on myself 32:15 as well I mean if I just shout shitcoiners are bad I will receive some kind of likes some kind 32:23 of retweet I will have some kind of visibility so this is a fair point I think it's not strong yet 32:29 again in the context if you compare the advantage I get from being a toxic maximalist and soliciting 32:36 this kind of knee-jerk reaction of shitcoiners are scammers and I can feel it but it's no way 32:45 as seductive for now it's not strong as the alternative which is if you turn the shit 32:51 corner you will have way more audience way more I mean it's so difficult to stay bitcoin only it's 32:56 really difficult especially in a business I was confronted by so much pressure to include shitcoin 33:03 stuff and to be a little less strict about that which compared to that the negative pressure of 33:10 peer judgment or the positive pressure of grift I can capitalize of being a maximalist I think 33:18 they just pale in comparison then there is the point about hypocrisy of being nice in person 33:25 and being mean online I mean I agree with this as well I agree with Paul here it's not a completely 33:32 integrated we behave differently online or offline I also think it's inevitable it's not bitcoin 33:38 related I do the same with political Twitter on Twitter if you just tell to me I'm pro-government 33:46 I will probably just block because first of all for me it's one too many because I have a few 33:50 followers so I cannot really follow and it's just more natural there is not a face in front is I 33:56 understand the dynamic that makes me more of an asshole on Twitter than in person it's true but 34:02 it's not really bitcoin related I can see it in every other topic this is really what Adam said 34:07 this is just about the interim so I will go back to my point and the last one is I agree completely 34:14 with Paul that I'm not happy that maximalism is true network effects are a prison and if it was 34:21 possible to have a multi-coin world everything would be easier we will not be forced to have 34:27 bitcoin as our early shot and everything will be better I will have more money probably some lambos 34:33 and we will have greater chances at succeeding to change things unfortunately I think maximalism is 34:41 absolutely true otherwise I would be more than happy to be wrong if shitcoin theory is right 34:47 I will gladly just start using shit coins for everything they can achieve people think that 34:53 people have to push their bag like I have many bitcoins of course I don't I've lost everything 34:58 in a boat accident but if I had lots of shit coins a lot of bitcoins then I have to pump my 35:04 bags that may be true for very low liquidity altcoins but when you're talking about bitcoin 35:09 what's the point my tweets will not change the price I mean hell a nation state adopting 35:16 bitcoin as a legal tender didn't and China banning mining completely didn't move the price 35:21 it's not my tweet changing the price bitcoin is too liquid for me to pump my bag if I believed 35:27 in one coin or dent a coin on ether I would just buy them there is no reason for me to pump my bag 35:33 I will just change my bag if I was convinced I was wrong unfortunately I am convinced I'm right 35:39 if I may I actually want to come in with just one quick comment right so you guys are both 35:44 talking a mile a minute it's hard to keep up but I think if we were to take the 10 000 foot view 35:50 the success case of bitcoin in my mind is that it has achieved sufficient social consensus and that 35:57 means a certain number of people and institutions are maybe you don't care about institutions 36:03 but institutions are made of people so let's say a certain number of people believe that bitcoin is 36:10 the best form of money or a great form of money right I think that to me is the definition of 36:15 bitcoin success if you agree with that and follow that logic then I think it makes sense to say we 36:22 need more people to believe it right as opposed to having fewer people believe it so I think 36:29 some people say that the toxic maximalism attitude is actually turning people away from 36:34 this community so if you think about people that are just finding out about crypto what will they 36:40 think when they start asking some questions and then instantly getting blocked or how will they 36:46 regard this community when they think that it consists of individuals that don't hold the same 36:51 type of openness and let's say welcoming attitude as them so my question generally is 36:59 if bitcoin requires the building of a bigger community how does toxic maximalism help that 37:06 or how does that not help that so I would question this goal because it's not a pyramid scheme where 37:12 we need people to enter of course it's nice to have a higher price but the point is that you 37:17 have to enter you have to use it when you need it and when you know that you need it and when 37:20 you understand it I disagree that we have to lure people in when they are not ready I don't think 37:26 that's the the point even because either they will end up not just with bitcoin but with 37:32 shitcoin scams as well or they will be burned by some bullshit and they will become the coiners as 37:39 a reaction to the degree of bullshit they have seen if you get people in fast people will also 37:45 pour out fast I think we need a sustainable slow organic growth not a forced growth but let's say 37:51 even empirically I think it's false that toxic maximalist is driving people uh out or slowing 37:58 down new people one of my friends was considered one of the most toxic maximalists ever Saifedean 38:04 Ammous. Saifedean's book has been translated in what 25 languages read by millions uh and 38:11 he convinced the billionaires of uh of public companies and Miss Universe contestants and 38:16 Superbowl winners and it's working or even less toxic but considered less toxic but also maximalist 38:23 Jack Mallers. Jack Mallers is considered maximalist because he said nah to shitcoins inside his platform 38:29 he basically red pilled a nation-state people wants a clear vision people want to hear 38:35 conviction people appreciate eventually signal over noise so niceness is a very effective short 38:42 term strategy to get people in but it's not a long-term successful strategy to make people 38:49 understand stuff yeah I think a lot of that is good I also agree with Giacomo that you've placed 38:55 an emphasis on belief that I don't think is right I think the bitcoin success is just when it 39:02 changes the way that all the banks of the world including all the central banks do business and 39:09 possibly by just putting them all out of business or even changing the way they do business like 39:14 the gunpoint not literally a gunpoint but like where someone asks them aren't you going to do 39:18 xyz and they then they say something like well we can't because if we do people will just use 39:23 bitcoin or something so our hands are tied or whatever so it doesn't really matter uh and I 39:28 also agree with him that being nice is sometimes a sign of maybe you could call it lack of confidence 39:35 or maybe submission or something like a lack of leadership it's not to say that being mean 39:41 is leadership because I think that's actually false there's no real reason to be like when you 39:46 go into the bank you want to make sure that they have all of your money and they only give it to 39:50 you and not some other person you don't really care that much how nice they are you would prefer 39:56 that they are nice but the important thing is that they do their job because you suffer quite 40:02 a bit they can screw up it's not like they're screwing up your meal at a restaurant or something 40:06 this is like accumulative your savings over over a while toxic maximalism I do think it might drive 40:12 people out jock and I both know Chris DeRose he was mentioned as a kind of someone who keeps people 40:18 from leaving but it makes the whole enterprise a little bit less welcoming which may be detrimental 40:25 and I thought he was on to something with that I remember very clearly and I'm going to say this 40:30 because it's happened in public and anyone could search it and read all about it but there was a 40:35 time when a Joseph Poon was doing something as creator of the lightning network Tadge Dreija 40:40 and Joseph Poon were the creator although if you talk to Tadge he says that really Joseph Poon did 40:46 more work or something so the creator of the biggest sacred cow of them all the lightning 40:50 network he was doing something and he thought that people had misunderstood him and some toxic 40:58 people were calling him out on the mailing list and he tried to it's all on the mailing list that 41:03 anyone can read he tried to get them on the phone and they refused and he literally at one point 41:07 said that you know his feelings were hurt and that if I misunderstood and then he departed the bitcoin 41:12 community so that's an anecdote but we all have a we all have a lot of instincts in our minds right 41:19 for lots of different things and whenever we do anything we have many different motivations if you 41:23 want to go out for a drink it could be because you're bored it could be because you're thirsty 41:28 it could be because you're lonely it could be for a lot of different reasons we have some 41:32 motivations to just be really mean people and to just see what we can get away with and I wonder 41:37 if the toxic maximalism is just an excuse for people to be sociopathic like that many people 41:45 I think have gone there was a famous essay geeks mops and sociopaths that I think people should 41:50 read and it's a really interesting and I do think that it's weird because it's in between our two 41:58 positions because the geeks need protection and even at the end of the article the person advocates 42:04 that there'll be some kind of like sociopath tyrants that protects the geeks yeah the geeks 42:09 need protection and yet it's not clear which of the people are the real protectors and which are 42:14 just people who can't do anything except manipulate other people the sociopaths and I don't want to 42:22 throw out names but John Carvalho was mentioned and I don't think he's 100% like this but this is 42:28 the type of thing I wonder about I like John Carvalho I think he does have a lot of skills but 42:34 he's like a specialist in being the toxic maximalist it's not like he's a Matt Corallo 42:39 or something where he's doing all this networking code on for bitcoin also on the side and then he 42:45 also happens to be of the opinion that presumably that bitcoin is categorically superior to 42:51 altcoins some people like are they just turning into a career for them this is the grift point 42:55 um so that's that so we agreed with again a lot of stuff in particular I'm happy that we agree 43:03 that a lot of the people repeating the mantra are doing it mindlessly which is a concern and 43:09 as again exactly as Giacomo said you never know easy come easy go right you never know what mantra 43:14 those people are going to be repeating when they find a charismatic safety in Amos 2.0 who may 43:22 have views that Giacomo and I don't agree with and then that's a problem I'm also happy that 43:27 he agrees about the network effect prison it's a weird state of affairs although sidechains could 43:32 help us escape the prison but that's all another conversation and so I want to hit on some other 43:36 things that are interested like the idea that we have to have some kind of antibody to protect 43:42 people from error which I also agree with that there are these these big errors and the altcoins 43:48 are like these factories of error and they produce lies about the world um and we have to do something 43:56 if we don't do something about it they will take over and destroy the community and I agree with 44:01 that I'm not sure that toxic maximalism is like the optimal antibody but we should talk about it 44:08 like what to do but I think that would be better what do you think are examples of these lies and 44:14 what do you think is a better way to deal with them litecoin is a perfect example you know it 44:18 was produced and then like silver to bitcoin's gold the idea that it was four times faster or 44:23 whatever because the interblock time was shorter those were basically untruths people would say 44:28 them because of the incentives of the situation um and then like just all the stuff I always 44:34 remember Tim Swanson and he would come up with all these corny little phrases 44:40 remember when Vitalik came up with multi-coin pluralism or something like all of that was 44:44 so obvious it was absolutely obvious at the time but very obvious in hindsight that that was just 44:49 Tim trying to say that he tried to open the door for Ethereum and then all of that 44:53 the pluralism was mostly junk but not completely junk I have to say one more thing though then I'll 44:58 stop which is that I think that you may have contradicted yourself Giacomo you're saying 45:04 um in physics so bitcoin has stimulated everyone to be skeptical which is good I love when people 45:10 are skeptical I'm a skeptic myself but then you also said that this is what happens when people 45:16 are friends they all just start to conform basically and I was like oh well that doesn't 45:20 sound consistent at all so I thought I'd bring that up which is that isn't this a problem that 45:25 everyone is just feeling the peer pressure to conform and I agree 100% agree that that is 45:30 what people do but I think that we have to constantly fight against it by always saying 45:35 that the door is open for people to disagree and the Joseph Poon story is a little bit maybe we'll 45:40 get into a lot of details about that which is maybe not important but people should be able to 45:46 dissent from bitcoin core without it being like the complete end of their professional career 45:53 I think and without being mobbed on twitter or whatever which I currently 45:57 question if that's even possible so those are some of my thoughts well about the contradiction 46:02 I think that bitcoin stimulates some kind of skeptical mindset about authorities mainstream 46:09 the typical authority oriented uh thinking which is very very present in today's hyper specialized 46:16 world so the best economists in the world could be complete morons it doesn't stimulate 46:24 particularly skepticism about your peers and your friends so I think that the dynamic about 46:30 the group think the dynamic about confirmation on the thinking of your group they are not really 46:36 over average they are just normal for a new community new strong community I think they 46:43 have drawbacks they have trade-offs of course such a trade-off could be tragic in some circumstances 46:48 but really not different from anything I've seen any other active group activity have been I think 46:54 it's wrong to design bitcoin as a strange or anomalous example of this especially because 47:00 people we mentioned before Adam and John they fight all the time in bitcoin and Matt and other 47:05 all the people we mentioned fights and fight and fought a lot and so it's not especially true 47:13 but it could be true in particular the Joseph situation which is an example of the bitcoin 47:20 community turning against some idea I had about the bitcoin community and so me using the shitcoin 47:27 situation as a leverage if you are mean to me I will just go away so I think that the preferential 47:33 way to react to strong criticism and even peer gang pressure would be to have a thick skin just 47:41 like Adam suggested but I understand that there is a quick this is another problem of shit coins 47:46 they offer an easy shortcut to avoid to have a thick skin and to respond and to resist and to 47:52 make your point they just allow you the shortcut to say okay I just live for an altcoin yeah usually 47:58 that just lives in nothing just like it happened with Jeff Gerdzik and in his ICO you can mention 48:05 several people even to some degree Roger Ver and his shitcoin Ethereum itself was basically 48:14 a little bit Vitalik rage quitting because nobody cared about on-chain Turing complete contract 48:21 stuff enforced by miners which was a very bad idea and now it's obvious it was a very bad idea 48:27 and they are switching away from that bad idea but it was like Bender in Futurama I will make my 48:33 own shitcoin with blackjack it's a natural thing but just about the grief thing I agree that some 48:39 people may become maximalist as a career choice that's true but the point is that now what I see 48:46 it's even people being post-maximalist or anti-maximalist as a career in order to just 48:53 rise a quick knee-jerk reaction this stuff is layered like you have shitcoiners then you have 48:59 the immune response against shitcoiners which is important and we agree then we may have some 49:05 excesses on the reaction but then you have the people who capitalizes on the idea that you may 49:10 have excesses so you can in this metaphor you can have the autoimmune disease where the white cells 49:15 will attack your own body and this is actually possible but now there will be a lot of people 49:21 pretending there is such a case when actually there isn't 49:25 in order to make themselves relevant because auto autoimmune disease 49:29 yeah auto autoimmune. My proposal would be if there is a scammer you may be nasty or you may be nice but don't be nasty with people being too nasty otherwise we're adding this kind of meta-toxicity I mean you talked about authoritarian tendencies in this in this culture but actually I think that many example of anti-maximalism they are literally tote police there is people that when I say shitcoin they will try to 49:56 police my speech about shitcoin so this is going all around in meta layers and we'll just end up 50:02 fighting with meta meta meta immune responses so if you think we are too mean just be nicer instead 50:11 of trying to be mean with mean people and I think that there are some people we are we're grifting 50:15 the post-maximalist or anti-maximalist meme especially when they have to cover up for some 50:22 kind of there was a friend of mine since we're mentioning many names I think I don't even 50:27 remember his name but basically it was a maximalist it was Kauth doing a neo scam mining I don't know 50:34 investment scheme and it was a private but it was called out and so he wrote a long article about 50:41 being post maximalist which was very convenient after that or the same goes with the recent 50:47 episode with the good guy Robert Bradlaugh I mean the thing itself about the cloud was not 50:53 even so tragic but the response leveraging outrage against maximalist because you have 51:00 been called out I mean that that's just grief on a second layer yeah no I think that's actually a 51:05 really good point but that there is a counter grift and that's definitely true and I think 51:11 that's really important to keep in mind and there was something I wanted to mention before which is 51:14 that I was making fun of Max Keiser I want to be totally clear that because you brought up eos the 51:19 stuff that the non Bitcoin team does it's really just way more outrageous than whatever little 51:27 things that people in the Bitcoin community might do and it's important to keep that in mind that 51:33 thought like eos putting the Times Square ad that is just the name and there's no information and 51:40 they raise four billion dollars which is probably like mostly wash trading or whatever they call 51:46 chandelier like wouldn't have ringers pay themselves and it looks like the whole thing is you know a 51:53 giant mess I mean what we live in a world where I see companies are putting blockchain in the name 52:00 on the stock market in order to get money yeah I just got the ice tea company I think the SEC just 52:06 sued them for insider trading or something funny like that I think that just happened like yesterday 52:11 or something funny like that so that's definitely true and yeah we have to live in the real world 52:16 we have to at the end of the day you have to do something and so I agree that there is this kind 52:20 of process unfolding this conversation is now colored by the fact that I think that sidechains 52:27 are possible and easy so obviously my brain is just thinking well if if we had sidechains then 52:34 we could inoculate everyone against shit coins by just deploying sidechains and then whenever 52:40 anyone asks like a little question like what does Bitcoin support smart contracts have you ever heard 52:46 that question and then you could just say yes and just point to the sidechain and stop talking but 52:51 then there'd be no need to like involve any kind of emotional anything at all and it would work 52:57 like 99% of the time it's hard for me to imagine what I would believe if I did not think that side 53:04 chains were possible and you had to just be this giant war and the thing is the network effects 53:11 are prison but you can't say that they're a hundred percent determinative because if they 53:17 determined the outcome 100% then the US dollar would just crush everything yeah yeah there must 53:23 be some merit difference there is a little loose coupling based on the merit of the protocol and 53:29 then if you accept that now we have to wonder what would happen what if the country next to El 53:35 Salvador says that they're gonna adopt Bitcoin cash or something and now you're like hello now 53:40 it just becomes a giant question mark not that I think that that's likely to happen but very quick 53:45 about sidechains I for one I as I'm a fan of the concept I'm skeptical not really contrarian 53:53 a little bit skeptical about some parts of the Drivechain proposal and especially I'm skeptical 53:59 that the community will adopt it because of the controversy but except for these meta discussion 54:06 my skepticism about your idea of such an as an easy way out which I developed more recently is 54:14 that I never thought that the driver for shit coins was a technical experimentation of course 54:20 the drive was great was people trying to print their own money so that was the drive of course 54:26 it was disguised as experimentation but I don't think anymore that removing the alibi so removing 54:34 these fake pretends will actually make a big big difference because people just want to print money 54:42 and to sell their money to people and that's the incentive and if there will be sidechain 54:48 sidechains will basically be honest projects without millionaire ICOs and scammers will have 54:55 a marketing department and a marketing budget in order to chill shit coins and sidechains will 55:02 not by choice but by a good choice and so eventually I'm not sure that even functioning 55:08 uncontroversial sidechains will really kill shit coins because shit coins are not happening 55:14 because we need innovation they're happening because we want lambos basically well I think I 55:20 do agree with that obviously there's a big disagreement in the community which I think 55:24 is totally fair about to what extent if you kill the disguise or the pretext like how detrimental 55:32 is that really gonna be and I think it would be pretty detrimental but it's a view I hold 55:36 very weakly it could easily not be detrimental at all right because of the way people's brains 55:41 work with cognitive dissonance and everything it might even make the situation worse somehow I have 55:46 no idea because there's nothing stops the shit crime from saying that it also has sidechains 55:50 and plus it has this other thing and whatever so it will ultimately destroy Bitcoin and whatever 55:55 blah blah blah so who knows what will happen actually in that hypothetical world I hope 55:59 people know by now my primary interest in sidechains isn't my own sidechain technology that 56:06 I myself developed which is about prediction markets and doesn't really have anything to 56:10 do with killing shit coins I guess that it would I only brought it up because I was wondering about 56:14 what is the best way to make the antibody because the playing field is tilted it's like getting 56:20 glasses where there's an inherent bias in the world towards altcoins because they will have 56:25 the marketing budget obviously when you say that you're being both literal but more really abstract 56:30 because and I agree that it's like this tilt towards that and if we want to see clearly we 56:36 have to tilt it back the other way I'm not sure I don't know if it's better for Bitcoin to be 56:42 again you drew the distinction at the very beginning between just being maximalist and 56:45 being toxic I I can see it giving cover to the the people who altcoin it makes it easier for 56:53 them to write like that person you mentioned it makes it just gives them more stuff to write 56:57 about in their little article that says that they're post maximalist or whatever okay so let's 57:03 talk a little bit more about this multi-coin universe right so Paul at the beginning of our 57:08 conversation you had mentioned that you were looking at some other projects that have been 57:13 happening and in 2018 you did write an article actually about Bitcoin I think yeah we're talking 57:21 maximalism of Bitcoin yeah April 2018 they may have stolen that meme from me as far as I know 57:26 who knows but yeah that's something I worried about so in that article I worried about to what 57:32 extent will the network effects just carry Bitcoin to victory no matter how slow it is so one thing 57:41 is the the soft forks used to happen multiple times per year and now it's like once per five 57:46 years is that a good thing or a bad thing with sidechains it wouldn't matter at all because 57:50 sidechains could then do whatever innovation they like but anyway am I interrupting you sure no not 57:55 at all yeah so well my question is do you see Bitcoin being successful in a sustainable manner 57:59 in a state of the world where many other old coins also flourish and let's define sustainably 58:05 successful for Bitcoin as say being reserve currency for one of g7 central banks for a 58:10 decade or something well yeah that's that is a weird thing I mean I think sustainable it's very 58:16 clear to me what it means it means that there's no reasonable reason to think that it would go 58:21 away anytime soon that's just what sustainable means to me but that seems like a low bar though 58:26 what does going away mean hmm well maybe it is a low bar but that's just what it means so how 58:33 about you do you want it to be number one on coin market cap or something and so what else do you 58:38 want I think abstractly speaking bitcoins being successful basically means successful is different 58:45 from sustainable of course okay well I said sustainably successful okay yeah well sustainably 58:51 successful well again I don't think that's important I mean the meat of your question 58:55 is if there's a lot of altcoins that are that have some real users so they're not just the 59:03 Ponzi finance they need to have real users David Vork's project SIA it has you can argue about is 59:10 it badly designed is it good design or is this fake or whatever you can either run his software 59:15 just go to his website and there are users who actually use the service so and certainly for 59:22 Monero I need to keep tabs on this in case it changes but there were I think now two darknet 59:29 markets that only accept Monero I think one white market but yeah maybe I'm not the point is that 59:36 the darknet markets those people are real users they would like to actually use the coin to to 59:43 do something that you're using it for the privacy feature to me it's very clear when someone is 59:49 using a crypto project for its task versus when they they just buy it on the exchange and hope to 59:56 sell later that's not to say that I agree with the people who say that saving money is using money 1:00:03 that's one of the many ways of using money and I agree with that but the point I'm trying to make 1:00:09 is there are actually altcoins that have a feature that someone actually wants and then they use it 1:00:16 for the feature so if in a world where that is happening you have an altcoin world it's open-ended 1:00:22 as it would be in the sidechain world but anyone could create anything including bad ideas of which 1:00:29 most new ideas are overwhelmingly likely to be bad because they're created more or less at random 1:00:34 through trial and error but you have a lot of creativity and new ideas are created and you know 1:00:42 how it is with evolution you have enough variation and enough selection and enough time good ideas 1:00:48 happen accidentally I kind of think aetherium has had maybe one two or three ideas in this very 1:00:54 Darwinian sense that they've just lucked into being good the ERC 20 token kind of being one 1:01:00 where they accidentally reinvented it even though we had it in Bitcoin with colored coins counterparty 1:01:05 etc they just hit on something and especially with the global community they hit on something that 1:01:12 had something that people liked that is a bad example because it happens to be related 1:01:16 intimately to just Ponzi scamming people but the ERC 20 part of it was something that I think 1:01:23 someone liked so to just try and wrap up you asked me about what does Bitcoin look like in a world 1:01:29 where it's Bitcoin is frozen and there's this creativity happening elsewhere I personally I 1:01:35 would be a little nervous about that because you never know what it is that evolution or human 1:01:39 creativity is going to assemble I mean no one ever expected Bitcoin to be assembled from from 1:01:45 nothing there was from like the remnants of digicash and liberty reserve etc so I think but 1:01:50 there's no limit to how good of an idea someone might have it's possible that would almost 1:01:54 certainly be reinstantiated as like a hard fork of Bitcoin or something if it were super super good 1:01:59 but I don't know I don't know about that either because then there'll be people out there right 1:02:03 now thinking who are like 13 14 15 years old maybe and they're thinking like maybe they're 1:02:08 also early Bitcoin adopters and they made like a hundred thousand x return on their five dollar 1:02:13 investment and now they're thinking you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna come up with the next thing 1:02:17 and I'm gonna set it up so that it's just like coin and everyone hates it at first and I'm gonna 1:02:21 use the toxic maximalism as a big shield and then I'm gonna make it so it's the best investment in 1:02:25 the world and I'm gonna trick everyone into thinking it's terrible at first and only after 1:02:29 it's too late will they realize that how great it is and then it will like flip in Bitcoin and 1:02:33 destroy it or something so that's obviously kind of a silly story but yeah I worry about that about 1:02:38 where I think the creativity is ultimately going to win to put it in uh let's put it in one sentence 1:02:43 okay great so I have another question for Giacomo how much do you think the toxic attitude 1:02:50 with maximalism is correlated with the low cost basis in general it feels like the sort of 1:02:57 attitude that we're seeing corresponds to the timing for when someone starts using or buying 1:03:05 Bitcoin so do you think there's an element of how early Bitcoiners are already so wealthy in 1:03:10 fiat terms that they might think that normal rules of civil discourse no longer apply to them 1:03:15 oh I think that's an optic illusion I think that's like a selection bias uh it's the other way around 1:03:22 people who have been around for a long time they tend to become typically Bitcoin maximalists 1:03:30 one example of this would be me uh when when I first discovered Bitcoin in 2012 at the beginning 1:03:36 I was skeptical like this cannot work but when Bitcoin during that year proved me wrong it 1:03:42 basically broke my skepticism my it broke my spam filters so for one year after convincing myself 1:03:49 Bitcoin was possible I just thought that everything was possible so any kind of bullshit you can 1:03:54 imagine I started to study NXT to study Ripple because Satoshi Nakamoto himself inadvertently 1:04:02 scammed me because he mentioned Ripple positively but he was talking about another Ripple a coinless 1:04:07 project before Bitcoin but anyway I was really a shit coiner for one year and then I met a toxic 1:04:15 guy Lawrence Naum the guy was I was working for him in green address wallet in 2013 at the end of 1:04:22 2013 quite toxic to me I mean in a nice way but it was like you are full of bullshit everything 1:04:28 you're saying is wrong it's monetarily impossible and I was not a developer I was just a guy with 1:04:35 some vaguely technical background and he was like look at this fucking code people don't know what 1:04:41 they're doing this is absolute garbage and in a very toxic way he made me understand the situation 1:04:48 then this kind of awakening deepened when I added some monetary consideration about digital 1:04:56 scarcity again the very simple sentence there is a scarce amount of Bitcoin there is an infinite 1:05:02 amount of cryptocurrency so I convinced myself there was absolutely no way to have a stable 1:05:10 long-term significant multi-coin market at least except with some kind of external 1:05:17 I don't know if one government will impose one shit coin as legal tender then maybe you may 1:05:23 have a fractioning like you have today with fiat the reason we are talking in English right now 1:05:28 but we are using different kind of money is because government are basically artificially 1:05:33 fractioning the standards while people will eventually naturally try to converge so this 1:05:39 is my example I started out as shit coiner and I became a toxic maximalist meeting other toxic 1:05:45 maximalists another typical example would be like I don't know famous podcaster Peter McCormack we 1:05:51 disagree about many things sometimes he's considered too normie to be I mean in external topics like 1:05:58 meat and global warming and that kind of stuff I'm the maximalist and he's the normie but about 1:06:05 shit coins especially about the original significance of original meaning of maximalism 1:06:10 he became a maximalist he just said okay I was following tons of shit coins any kind of 1:06:16 bullshit narrative then I got hurt and now I am being selective and I'm rising anti-spam filters 1:06:24 and I will just stay Bitcoin only and he still it tends to be nice even too much for somebody 1:06:32 but so maybe it's not really toxic even if I would argue that it strictly depends on 1:06:38 what you talk about but is another story of course there are counter example 1:06:43 but in the counter example are less frequent less significant and especially typically 1:06:48 driven by the dynamics Brian Armstrong was saying uh was saying very maximalist things in 2014 1:06:57 there's still the tweet of Brian Armstrong which is why which is something like 1:07:03 altcoins are a distraction we must focus only on Bitcoin and now he's like the king of shit 1:07:08 coiners and and of course you have you have you have other people like Jeff Garzik and stuff 1:07:15 like that you have many maximalists you have some maximalists turning shit coiners mostly I think 1:07:22 it's bad to always think about very down-to-earth motives but I think it's about money because 1:07:28 Paul knows that if he was going to launch a Truthcoin altcoin instead of inventing Drivechain 1:07:35 he would be way richer maybe less proud of himself maybe less more cognitively more dissonant 1:07:44 but he would be fucking richer and so he knows that and I don't know that so there is direction 1:07:49 in the other way uh in a way I will play a very low jab uh to Paul right now uh there is also a 1:07:55 famous tweet by Paul himself that was super toxic maximalist it was something like I don't remember 1:08:01 the wording but it was anybody was working on altcoins are stabbing Satoshi in the back is 1:08:07 that right so that was very maximalist so in a way there are counter example of people growing 1:08:12 skeptical of maximalist but uh the typical evolution is you start you believe in anything 1:08:20 uh so you are a shit coiner and then you gradually learn and only in a few occasion you become either 1:08:26 too bored or too greedy and you have to go back to shit coins no first of all I don't think that's 1:08:31 a low blow at all I think that's completely all my numerous tweets are fair game although the number 1:08:37 of times I tweet while intoxicated is extremely high and people should keep that in mind I do 1:08:43 still believe that actually that you are stabbing Satoshi in the back it's unclear whether or not 1:08:49 it's good for society or good for bitcoin the motion of the debate was is it good for bitcoin 1:08:56 so here's the thing if you think like it's often said that bitcoin core is a meritocracy 1:09:03 I mean there's sort of an implication that the process for core development is like infallible 1:09:11 and that it will always attract the best ideas and it will always sort out the bad ideas and 1:09:16 obviously I have a conflict of interest because I'm floating an idea in the bitcoin core that 1:09:20 is controversial but what I mean to say is that it can't possibly be infallible and even the people 1:09:26 who have been in it for a while think that it's imperfect to say the least when you have that 1:09:31 angle you have to wonder what is the best way to help bitcoin is it to challenge bitcoin by creating 1:09:37 a different project I do think competition is good you know it's a shame because I used to 1:09:43 make fun of Eric Voorhees for saying that which I still would when litecoin came out it was a fake 1:09:48 pretext that was adding choice to the marketplace it really wasn't but yeah I do think altcoins are 1:09:54 a distraction I do think that people are selling out um which is a shame but I wonder about what 1:10:01 is the best way to address that I don't know I guess maybe it's just hard to describe but there's 1:10:06 a lot of nuance in my brain I'm trying not to make this like the BIP300 referendum or whatever 1:10:12 which is very difficult because what all these projects are they're either saying that there's 1:10:18 something wrong with bitcoin core and or there's something wrong with bitcoin core development 1:10:23 process because they'll never add my great idea which is the turing complete scripts or whatever 1:10:29 that's like an essential part of their existence as I see it and sidechains would just kill all of 1:10:35 that so that is where my brain is at and I'm trying to get my brain away from that but it 1:10:39 is difficult um let me just summarize very quickly I feel that bitcoin maxis basically 1:10:45 have three wars going on right one against no coiners we briefly touched upon that Giacomo was 1:10:51 talking about people in finance or governmental high places have been wrong for many years and 1:10:57 bitcoiners saw the light and now they're questioning many things in addition to 1:11:02 monetary policies and then the second war is against shit coiners so people that are trying 1:11:06 to steal market share people that are trying to essentially only make money not to say bitcoiners 1:11:12 are not trying to make money right let's be real here bitcoin itself is a sort of money and early 1:11:18 adoption signifies that you want to have more of the better money than the worst money which in 1:11:23 bitcoin's early days was just fiat money but now there's this alternative form of worse money in 1:11:29 bitcoiners minds which is shit coins so that's the second war and then the third war is I think 1:11:35 civil war really right within the bitcoiner community you have people that are very 1:11:40 conservative that do not want change and then you have people that are more aggressive and more 1:11:45 creative right so let's talk about that last point a little bit more I know you touched upon that a 1:11:51 little bit paul what in your mind are say top two or three proposals including Drivechain that you 1:11:57 think are critical for bitcoin's thriving or even survival and what are the consequences for the 1:12:02 canonical chain to not accept them sure well that's a very loaded question but let me say 1:12:06 something else instead because I don't want to just say that BIP300 is the only thing you need 1:12:11 to change I mean I'm saying it now but it's the only thing you would need it's the last change 1:12:14 that you would need but I think when you brought up the civil war I mean maybe think of the block 1:12:19 size debate I think everyone in their mind regardless of what happens with bitcoin you have 1:12:24 to always be pursuing truth and obviously that's a very that's not a very controversial thing to say 1:12:29 everyone always thinks that they are doing that I'm sure but a lot of seeds were sort of planted 1:12:35 I think most people would agree that we should just team up and in order to defeat the others 1:12:42 the large blocker versus small blocker side and in order to have a more cohesive team we need to 1:12:47 get our message out and it has to be a simple message that the team can understand so that the 1:12:52 team can coordinate and I do think there was a kind of sacrifice of the idea that the truth is 1:12:58 really important in that event and I think that was a kind of a tragic collateral damage of the 1:13:04 block size war and I don't know if anyone will ever agree on how big or small that that idea 1:13:10 was but I think it is sort of there and it has planted other seeds that are related to your 1:13:16 question it's like buying a house these days where the housing market is crazy but people want 1:13:21 to buy a house that has good resale value so they want to make sure in the United States anyway so 1:13:26 no one wants to buy like a weird house they want to buy a house that other people will buy and what 1:13:30 am I talking about here it's kind of like people are afraid to back any idea that just doesn't seem 1:13:37 to be getting attention even if it's totally circular so the idea I'm going to bring up is 1:13:42 not even my own I'm going to bring up Jeremy Rubin's idea which is a perfectly good idea he 1:13:48 has a whole website with lots of great use cases and how basically simple it is and how it would 1:13:55 let people fix a lot of different things related to complexity smart contracts and fees and things 1:14:01 but it's fallen as I understand it into this kind of weird loop where just people weren't 1:14:06 paying it quite enough attention and then now it has attracted this stigma and I think for 1:14:12 absolutely no reason whatsoever because he's never really done anything I'm very mavericky and crazy 1:14:17 and I'll just do things to be unpopular on purpose because I studied at the Krista Rose school of 1:14:23 being crazy but Jeremy Rubin was like chair of scaling multiple scaling bitcoin conferences and 1:14:30 he's like very much like a full maximalist but his like idea what used to be opsecure the bag is now check template verify I think people change their names a lot though yeah any pre-vout used to be like four or five other thing yes see gosh no inputs and so that's a weird thing part of it is that everything is going so fast so much progress is happening at a rapid pace 1:14:57 in direct contradiction what I was saying at the beginning about toxic maximalism being static I 1:15:02 think toxic maximalism is static but unfortunately the reality is progressive which is so much stuff 1:15:08 is happening in bitcoin so quickly in every direction all the different lightning implementations 1:15:14 all the different like cultural stuff like the different conferences and meetups now 1:15:20 the El Salvador stuff like all that stuff like so much progress technical progress 1:15:26 translating stuff into different languages and stuff that's happening in Nigeria Zimbabwe whatever 1:15:32 there's so much progress that it's hard to keep track of what everyone's doing which is a good 1:15:35 thing but I wonder if this is a flaw that his idea is which I think is bib 118 but I cannot guarantee 1:15:42 that and so I regret even saying it now because I don't remember which bib number it is because 1:15:46 there's a lot of numbers but his idea is neglected you ended up with a very nice one for Drivechain 1:15:52 because you can use like spartan you can also use spartan memes with uh lionidas king and you're not 1:15:59 even big we're not even leveraging that it was very funny some people in our Drivechain group 1:16:03 have made a photoshop to one or two but I was wondering like yeah I had the only ones that 1:16:08 started with the 300 series I was like is this like some kind of am I being like slighted or 1:16:13 something and then there now there's many with 300 so I was like oh I was like okay but I was 1:16:17 getting a little paranoid there I was like why because there's luke seems to just he seems to 1:16:21 sign them in like an utterly random order I mean yeah I can't make any sense of it at all so that's 1:16:27 funny so I wonder if this idea is just being neglected for no reason and then if so if it 1:16:32 indicates that the process is biased towards people are afraid because of what happened with 1:16:39 the block size war there were some people who were actually emerged as leaders people know the names 1:16:44 I don't know if I want to say them no there some people naturally emerged as leaders of the small 1:16:49 block movement which won and now it's kind of just like they have a lot of influence over what it is 1:16:55 that people find interesting so that's really the real answer your question is that a problem 1:17:02 should people do anything about it should people be more aware of it or am I wrong when I say that 1:17:08 and I'm just biased because no one likes BIP300 I don't know but that's really what I think is the 1:17:12 more important part of what you are asking about because all of his thing does is basically like 1:17:18 why it shouldn't this be a travesty if I try to explain you should get the explanation from him 1:17:23 I don't even want to explain it because I know that it won't be exactly what he would say but 1:17:27 his thing is very simple it just lets you pay to like a kind of a thing a little hash little box 1:17:33 that can contain all kinds of stuff that you put into it later so his thing doesn't have these grand 1:17:38 implications like what I'm trying to do with BIP300 it's just a simple thing I don't really see how 1:17:43 it harms anyone people are just determined not to look at it though and by the way the aversion to 1:17:49 all these changes they are generally hard forks right if it's a soft fork then no no no no no and 1:17:56 I think no both mine and his are soft forks so I don't think that's the case because you know 1:18:00 even just the a soft fork you have people who work with the code every day that I want some random 1:18:05 person coming in and just saying well this is a soft fork so I'm allowed to change all these files 1:18:11 it's very hard to remember where everything is I can understand that people want the code changes 1:18:15 to be very infrequent I can understand that okay my takeaway is one of the most rational responses 1:18:23 here is just that people are scared from history the block size war tore apart the community and 1:18:30 I did hear from a certain maxi in a previous debate where he at the time actually also thought 1:18:36 that the civil war was going to kill bitcoin so maybe people don't want to basically have things 1:18:43 escalate back to that kind of level and they've decided to take a more conservative approach 1:18:48 Jeremy Rubin's thing is 119 any pre-route is 118 I think okay god I hate to have gotten that wrong 1:18:56 but it's very funny because I mean like if you just search for it online I just found like he's 1:19:00 saying so he's well I don't want to get it too far into this but his thing is numerous you know 1:19:05 he's a very simple idea that it's very powerful and I don't see why it's a controversy at all 1:19:09 but it gets low minds low mind slippery slope thing you approve one thing more people come 1:19:15 with proposals it just gets too messy and you risk basically devolving into the block size war 1:19:21 situation again I'm just speculating well anyway so we are about at time and I would like to give 1:19:30 both of you a opportunity for a last word I will let's see start with Paul this is an opportunity 1:19:37 to summarize your position talk about some takeaways from this conversation how you might 1:19:44 have shifted your position or picked up from your opponent somehow so go ahead Paul okay sure well I 1:19:49 think we did agree a lot which I think is fair my position started as which I still believe that 1:19:57 we may need to sort of start outgrowing maximalism or at least that it's changed over time so 1:20:02 in the era of litecoin it made 100 sense but now when you have a situation where they have 1:20:09 the one darknet market that is only accepting Monero you have to wonder like are we out of 1:20:15 touch and so I find it concerning that the objective justifications for maximalism I think 1:20:22 are winding down a little bit and yet it it doesn't seem to have reacted to that rationally 1:20:29 it's still going full strength again those are five things that I listed that I think would make 1:20:35 me feel a lot better about being a toxic maximalist I consider myself to be a maximalist but not a 1:20:41 toxic one and so if there is more of an emphasis I'm just going to repeat it back if there was more 1:20:46 of an emphasis on progress over time and change and clever ways to change while keeping the thing 1:20:53 the bitcoin core static or keeping the core rules static or however you like to do that I think if 1:21:01 there was less peer pressure I think the peer pressure is a red flag I think the totalitarian 1:21:06 carnivore modernity I think that's a red flag like why if that if the thing the idea can cross 1:21:13 species that effectively then how do you know it's not attacking you from some other domain 1:21:18 where it originally evolved and has no place being in your mind maybe the hypocrisy point 1:21:24 I do think it is weird if people are toxic online and nice in person if it's not going to be if this 1:21:32 is just a way a feature of the internet then it's not really related to bitcoin and then we wonder 1:21:37 it's just making people miserable for no reason is it suppressing creativity for no reason that I 1:21:42 don't know I don't see the point of that certainly it's a red flag when people appear not to actually 1:21:47 believe the things that they say on twitter that those things may be false the grift thing I actually 1:21:52 think um I actually think Giacomo is right about that there is also a counter grift uh and you 1:21:57 shouldn't I'm the wrong person to make the point because I have a this thing that I want out of 1:22:01 bitcoin so I'm the wrong person to although I've never sold anything as a result of uh so um so 1:22:09 maybe it's not so bad but yeah it is true that the maximalist grifts are not so bad some of them I 1:22:17 think maybe are like again safetines book you that was stuff that you could have read for free online 1:22:23 but instead you bought it in a book form I don't know is that a grifter is that just harmless fun 1:22:30 I honestly couldn't tell you but I think Giacomo is right the fact that there is a counter grift 1:22:35 and there's just so much altcoin grift that probably I should just discard that point 1:22:39 completely so yeah I thought it was a pretty good conversation overall okay great thank you Paul 1:22:44 Giacomo your turn yeah I agree the conversation was very good uh I will have to check back other 1:22:49 of your debates to to find if if this is a typical I was expecting to fight more but yeah we were 1:22:56 agreeing on many many parts the main disagreement is exactly probably not a matter of global 1:23:01 consideration but of specific context for example I disagree that maximalism is less needed now 1:23:08 than when litecoin came to the scene I think it's actually more needed I don't think now 1:23:15 that that outside the specific bubble that we create for ourself there is a very strong 1:23:23 distinction in people's mind between shitcoins and bitcoin and there is a clear understanding 1:23:29 of the reasons why scarcity cannot be easily cloned and remain scarcity so I think that 1:23:37 for example with litecoin everybody was mad at this copycat of bitcoin which was dishonest 1:23:44 because it was presented as a gpu resistant that it wasn't it was presented as faster confirmation 1:23:49 and it wasn't so it was dishonest but at least they had to mine it and then when people introduced 1:23:55 a bit share with the ICO and then later on ethereum with this ICO and then all the ICOs on top of 1:24:01 ethereum people started to be outraged like I mean what are you doing now are not even mining you are 1:24:07 just pre-mining and selling everything ethereum was pre-mining 60% of the entire money supply 1:24:12 I mean this is a scam but then normalization came in and now I talk with many people outside my 1:24:20 toxic maximalist bubble that find natural that just some guy will create 70% or 60% 1:24:26 of the money supply and sell it and and that's considered a fair attempt to to distribute the 1:24:32 new kind of free open source money so I think that tolerance actually shifted over more tolerance 1:24:40 for scams and at the beginning I think that we had a very strict resistance to bullshit when 1:24:48 litecoin came out Luke Dashjr he just wrote a complete straight to the point direct rebuttal 1:24:57 litecoin is a scam now it's very difficult to do the same with ethereum without having people 1:25:03 trying to to policy my words like you cannot call ethereum a scam I mean I technically can 1:25:11 there is a sentence which is unstoppable application which was false because this guy 1:25:16 stopped an application in order to bail out insiders that lost money so I think I can and 1:25:22 I think that the tolerance is increasing not decreasing and the reason for this is the eternal 1:25:28 september dynamic I was mentioning I think there will come a point where maximalists will be 1:25:33 redundant and useless and just a relic of the past especially in the in its toxic version I think we 1:25:41 are no way close and in a way we are actually even closer to the uh to the situation of the dot com 1:25:48 bubble where something is exploding and I think Goldstein called it the the scambrian explosion 1:25:56 and I think we are still in the in the scambrian explosion and people is even becoming more 1:26:02 tolerant for scams something that would be uh that would be uh really scandalous uh in in 2013 1:26:09 when I started something that was told to me uh was really really outrageous from an open source 1:26:16 point of view uh is now normalized among many people uh so I think that is still needed I think 1:26:23 that about the toxic part I have nothing against people who are nice for example uh Junker bio is 1:26:31 very direct not very nice not always and I'm not very nice especially online and I'm nicer 1:26:37 in person this may be hypocritical I don't know but probably it's also a different medium with 1:26:42 different trade-offs if I was nicer online I probably waste a lot of my time in person you have 1:26:49 one one-to-few communication online I have a one-to-many communication I get to manage my spam 1:26:56 filters in a stricter way even when I disagree I want to block because I'm saving my time from 1:27:02 eternal disagreement over the internet in person that doesn't make any sense so I'm okay with being 1:27:08 nice uh I say John can be toxic uh Saifedean can be considered toxic then again uh I think it's a 1:27:17 very example of somebody who was successful to attract people to Bitcoin and not the other way 1:27:22 around so I think it's very important to consider empirically that toxic maximalism in this self 1:27:29 ironic way of course not not just being assholes with people for no reason is uh is actually working 1:27:35 to attract people and not the other way around because it's giving a very strong distinction 1:27:40 between noise and signal so I think it's empirically working but people like I don't 1:27:46 know I can name probably Eric Lombroso Adam Beck there are some guys that are very very nice with 1:27:52 people online they keep being nice and I see nothing wrong with them there is a strategy choice 1:27:59 whether you want to be nice or blunt it depends on how much time do you have what is your mood 1:28:05 how much do you want to appeal to slogans for noobs or to nuance for experienced people so it 1:28:12 depends it's a strategical choice I have nothing against people who are nice the thing that really 1:28:17 triggers me as I said before are people who are being uh blunt but only or specifically or 1:28:24 especially against other people being blunt I when we get to that kind of meta toxicity I get mad 1:28:31 even with friends I don't know when when if I disagree with Andreas Antonopoulos and he will 1:28:37 say oh this is toxic I mean I'm just disagreeing you have to be nice to me if you want to defend 1:28:43 the idea that everybody must be nice so if you are a nicest you have to be nice with us toxic 1:28:49 maximalists we are the toxic ones so I hate meta toxicity but except for this stuff I think that 1:28:56 it's always good to be skeptical of everybody including yourself sometimes toxicity can help 1:29:04 you out really if you take it seriously and if you take it honestly I will give you another example 1:29:08 one I gave you from my personal experience was I was a shit corner then I met Lawrence then I wasn't 1:29:13 a shit corner anymore but the other one was when uh you know I used my my non-profit association to 1:29:21 funnel sponsorship to open source projects and other people was doing the same Adam Beck and 1:29:26 Alina Vranova and and other people and so we basically decided to go all together on a stage 1:29:33 to present a super centralized uh donation system a little bit like Blink is doing now but that was 1:29:40 before and the community reacted against that ferociously like this is centralization this is 1:29:45 bad uh this is dangerous and I was tempted to just say uh you know these mean bitcoiners that 1:29:53 they are just they are they are mocking me with memes and they are creating t-shirts and hats 1:29:59 against my foundation this is very I was just trying to help and they are being mean and instead 1:30:05 I I made an effort which was a difficult effort it was a a big effort to understand that the stake 1:30:13 are so high and the skepticism is so the adversarial thinking is so needed in this 1:30:20 noisy environment that I and I understand that I condone people thinking I'm a scanner I'm a 1:30:27 scammer I will just try to make my point clearer and to I mean sometimes uh social pressure is bad 1:30:35 but sometimes it's needed there there's always a trade-off but I think that in the context we are 1:30:41 right now we are still 99 noise about the so-called crypto or I mean just read a mainstream 1:30:48 publication about cryptocurrency or blockchain and the things that me and Paul agree about 1:30:54 will be completely out of the radar and it will be just 99.9 percent complete bullshit and and lies 1:31:02 and ridiculous things so I think we're really far away from the moment where we will not need any 1:31:08 more toxic maximalist but maximalism and we can keep that going for a while until it will just 1:31:17 become redundant great thank you Giacomo and Paul you have both been much more civil than I originally 1:31:24 envisioned which is a blessing and and a curse maybe but thank you both for joining the debate 1:31:30 today how can our listeners find both of you starting with Paul sure thanks for having me 1:31:34 first of all and I'm Truthcoin on twitter because my last name is very difficult to spell so that's 1:31:40 not a claim to make any kind of monopoly on truth or anything it's just related to a paper that I 1:31:45 wrote long ago about peer-to-peer oracles t-r-u-t-h-c-o-i-n and then I have a site at 1:31:51 Truthcoin.info which links to my other sites so that's where you can find me great Giacomo on 1:31:58 twitter until I'm not banned I'm GiacomoZucco my name G-I-A-C-O-M-O-Z-U-C-C-O and I also have a 1:32:07 telegram channel which is the same that's my username while GiacomoZucco.channel I think is 1:32:14 the channel I don't even remember but anyway I have a website which is www.GiacomoZucco.com 1:32:22 I should fix the content the videos are not working and I'm a little bit lazy but I will 1:32:27 eventually fix the website so you can check stuff there okay and will you get on big cloud once 1:32:32 you're kicked out of twitter yeah let's hope that it can stay on telegram at least okay great thank 1:32:38 you both so listeners we'd love to hear from you and have you join the debate via twitter definitely 1:32:42 vote in the post debate poll feel free to join the conversation with your comments on twitter 1:32:46 we look forward to seeing you in future episodes of the blockchain debate podcast consensus option 1:32:50 of proof of thought required thanks again to Giacomo and Paul for coming on the show 1:32:56 for me one take away from the debate is that people are nicer in person than online which is 1:33:01 always comforting in a way social media is a place for people to express their outrage without 1:33:05 physically harming anyone it's analogous to how sports are a suitable replacement to wars 1:33:11 I think whether or not toxic maximalism will do good for bitcoin it is now part of the brand 1:33:16 it's a hallmark of the hardcore believers and it will continue to draw attention from bystanders 1:33:22 no coiners or pre-coiners apologies Srinivasan has a quote on how certain types of content 1:33:29 goes viral on twitter if it leads it bleeds if it enrages it engages I think that observation 1:33:35 certainly applies here to toxic bitcoin maximalism as well well what was your takeaway from the 1:33:40 debate don't forget to vote in our post debate twitter poll this will be live for a few days 1:33:44 after the release of this episode and feel free to say hi or post feedback for our show on twitter 1:33:49 if you like the show don't hesitate to give us five stars on itunes or wherever you listen to 1:33:53 this this will help me grow the show and reach more audience members and make sure to subscribe 1:33:58 and be sure to check out our other episodes with a variety of debate topics bitcoin store value 1:34:03 status the legitimacy of smart contracts defi pow versus pos the case for government bailouts 1:34:09 central bank digital currency and so on thanks for joining us on the debate today i'm your host 1:34:14 again and my twitter is genso09 g n t s o zero nine our show's twitter is blog debate see you 1:34:20 at our next debate