Alright, I think we're almost live here. We're live. We've got a big audience today and I'm excited. We are live.

What's up, party people? This is Chris DeRose, and with me today is the one, the only, Paul Sztorc.

Paul, introduce yourself while I turn off the AC system here. Hold on.

Okay. My name is Paul Sztorc. It's actually Paul Sztorc, but it's unpronounceable, unspellable Polish last name.

God, what else do you need to know, right? I mean, I hate introductions. They're ad hominem fallacies, aren't they?

I hate, that's why I never watch, I hate going to the conferences live. I always watch later so I can skip the introduction.

I hate the introduction. It is completely irrelevant.

You scammed whoever was at the conference. They let you speak, so you cleared the bar. I scammed Chris DeRose into letting me speak on his show.

So that's it. That is the introduction, right? Who cares about what I say about myself?

No kidding. I'll do something more ironic.

This is Chris DeRose, and I am manspreading right now. No one ever asks what's underneath the table, but now you know they're wide open legs.

Paul, are your legs crossed?

No, they are not crossed.

Are you similarly manspread?

You know, I think I would say so, just slightly.

All right, that's the intro. There you go. It's just as meaningful as any other intro you've ever heard.

Let's get started. Let's start off with Giacomo. What do you think? Is that a good place to go?

Okay, yeah. Well, that's why I wanted to come on, because I listened to your interview with Giacomo, and I thought it was pretty good.

It is good like a primer. So you throw it on your walls, and before you put all the real paint on.

So by that I mean it's really good if you're new, and you want to get up to speed on a lot of things that are commonly believed.

And that's really good. Giacomo's point of view is very representative.

He's managed to absorb all the different points of view and slowly kind of set them against each other and disentangle most of the contradictions, but not all of them.

But he's not here, so I don't really want to do a thing where I totally criticize stuff that he says, because he's not here to maybe clarify or defend the points.

But I thought that what he said was good, but I thought there was a lot of stuff missing. So that's kind of why I wanted to come on the show.

I love all conversations. They're some of my favorites.

Should we go over either what you disagreed with, what you thought was important?

Okay, well, you know, it's hard because everything is so nuanced and complicated.

But basically I think there is a little bit of a shell game or an overgeneralization where certain things are bad ideas, but that doesn't disqualify the entire creative process.

So what I mean by that is SegWit2x was not a good idea, and I didn't support it.

And there's a long story about why, and in fact, a couple of prominent people even emailed around, even before I, without my knowledge, I didn't find this out until later.

When SegWit2x was announced, they were like, oh, why don't you just do, you know, a large block drive chain, and you could have all sorts to it, and it would definitely have been done with all that kind of support.

It would have been done, you know, before August. So there's a long story with that.

And then the futures markets came out, and it split 85-15, and so you knew it just wouldn't work.

Like, I knew completely that it wouldn't work, and I knew why.

But I don't really want to talk about myself. What I mean is that the fact that SegWit2x was not a good idea, and the fact that it failed, and that it was a good thing that it failed,

that does not disqualify the entire process of science, which is subjecting knowledge to criticism and trying to improve it by unearthing these errors.

And so I think what Giacomo has done, and what you didn't really challenge him enough on, is that he's saying, like, well, we have this one side, and our side is really well done.

And look at that other side. That other side is a complete joke, and he even said it was impossible to compare the two.

That's not the way I feel at all, and so hopefully we'll get into that. It is possible to compare the two.

But he's saying, I totally reject that the other side exists in any serious form, and we've got all of our stuff figured out.

And then a lot of the stuff was kind of based on this, on one or two things where there was a consensus against one or two things, SegWit2x being one, larger blocks being another.

But I think that invalidates the entire ... he's trying to invalidate, like, for example, Coinbase, which has the number one app in the App Store.

It's like a unicorn Silicon Valley giant company that has all these users.

He's trying to invalidate, you know, Roger Ver, who's incredibly connected and motivated, has all these resources.

Very, like, Kai, you know, in the past few months has been flipping people to Bitcoin Cash.

He's just trying to say it's not serious.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so are you saying that he's trying to create social distance for the purpose of marginalizing a demographic that's real? Would that be a fair characterization?

Yeah, I think that's ... the crux of the matter is I don't think he realizes that he's just campaigning.

So he brought up in his speech with you, he brought up that it wouldn't be weird if a politician said something that was the party line.

But it was something that was, you know, they didn't believe or that wasn't serious.

So he, in fact, introduced this example where he says, like, it wouldn't be if you had a Republican candidate and they said some random Republican thing that was part of the Republican canon and the, you know, the platform.

He said it wouldn't be, and he was right, he said it wouldn't be taken as that strange.

Because everyone knows that you're not supposed to say what you really believe.

You're just supposed to say whatever performance will maximize your chances.

And even the diehard Republican Party members, they know that they're only in the party for the convenience and the odds, you know, the fact that it will help them win.

So they'll say, they'll make whatever excuse they can for their candidate.

They'll say, you know, you go, buddy.

Like, whatever gets us to that win on election night, any weird lie or anything like that.

But I don't think he realizes that he's doing it, which is unfortunate because then how can you be trusted on anything that you say from that point forward?

Well, this is like the Spuderman of finance, and it's going to be the Spuderman of governance, is my suspicion.

So, like, what I think, we'll see how this interview goes and how this discussion goes.

But for the audience that's tuning in right now, what seems to be the elephant in the room of Bitcoin politics is the time and place for motivated ignorance.

It seems that many of us are coming to the conclusion that there is, in fact, a class system and that we should motivate ignorance in those who are not part of the know.

And I think what I'll probably propose is adding to the nomenclature of Bitcoin that we should call this underprivileged class the hoi polloi.

You can look it up if you'd like. It's rooted in a lot more depth than I'm going to present on the show.

But if, in fact, the Bitcoin hoi polloi is real, then we have all kinds of hilarious questions.

And what's also funny, and you know this about Bitcoin, we'll have a meta discussion about ourselves to the degree that, like, makes it OK, but also invalidates the original point.

But which also doesn't matter because we'll go ahead anyways, having gone through the thought exercise and arrived at a conclusion.

That's my suspicion. So I guess you tell me if you agree or disagree, and let's, I guess, continue from here.

Yeah, OK. So let me try to translate that for some of your poor listeners.

So I think what Chris is saying is that there are these people, everyone's knowledge is sort of different and their expertise is different because of specialization, and that is inevitable and a good thing.

But what it means is that you have to outsource some of the things that you know, and you have to trust some people, which is very funny because we are now escaping.

We're going back to the pre-Bitcoin world. We're regressing to it.

You have to trust certain experts. And because there's no, you aren't as specialized as they are, and you have your own life and you have your own specialization.

And so you've got to choose who you're going to outsource your beliefs to.

And then when you do that, you have this tremendous potential for them to either mislead you or to be lazy or for something to get lost in translation.

And when many people...

Or succeed.

Sorry? Yeah.

Or succeed. That should be fine.

The other thing is if it's done well, then you have a very cohesive group. No infighting. Everyone is on the same page to defeat the other candidate.

Of course, like you couldn't win if one side had a political party.

If you had the Democrats and then you had a bunch of individuals, they would be crushed by the mathematics of voting.

There would be no way. And in fact, this is why, you know, you can't.

This is why we have primaries and political parties in the first place, because everyone figured out long ago that if you...

Because Ken Arrow won the Nobel Prize for this in part, but people figured it out before he won the Nobel Prize.

Ken Arrow won the Nobel Prize for proving that it would actually be impossible to solve.

There's absolutely no way of fixing this problem.

But even before Ken Arrow proved it was impossible to solve, people realized that, you know, you have a left party, you have a right party.

And you add a new candidate who's even further to the left.

You might pick up some people on the left.

I mean, you are likely to pick up some votes for him, super left.

You know, Bernie Sanders was Hillary Clinton versus whatever, Jeb Bush, let's say, just to make it a little, you know, cleaner.

And so Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, and then you add Bernie Sanders further to the left.

Bernie Sanders is going to clip away the Hillary Clinton votes because they're both on the left.

And that means they'll be divided and lose.

So adding someone further to the left will move the entire election result further to the right.

It will be irrational.

So groups are very important.

That is not a function of democracy or first past the post.

It is a function of everything.

Check out Ken Arrow's impossibility paradox, if you like that kind of thing.

It's impossible, though.

So, yeah, so groups are important.

And that's kind of what you were trying to say to Giacomo, which is also I think sometimes – I think – I don't know where I heard this, but maybe I'm just making it up.

But there's something like a Machiavellian imperative or something, which is something along the lines of if –

Florida sounds.

It sounds like Florida.

Yeah, it sounds Florida.

So it's like if we have a bunch of people who are willing to do anything to win, like torture children or whatever, they will do whatever it takes.

Yeah, but that's group A.

And then it's like you want group B to defeat them somehow.

But group B is constrained by these weird ethics.

So how?

They're just making their position worse and worse.

Either they're just superfluous constraints that aren't very meaningful, right?

Because who cares about a constraint that doesn't really matter?

But if the constraints aren't meaningful, then you're just saying you're putting the ethical side at a disadvantage.

It's kind of this idea that you have to just be as ruthless as the other people are willing to be, which might be maximally ruthless.

So that's what you were trying to say to him about like, oh, should we have secrets?

Should we have meetings?

Should we have all this efficiency?

I don't think he really—he didn't really engage with that point, I thought.

You're right.

Well, I have to say, you and I have been around for a good while in this space.

Giacomo probably has as well.

But when we first started here, there was this idea that we could, together, with transparency and goodwill and empathy, create a better world.

Right.

And it was naive for so many reasons.

We were just like, well, if we pursue this idea of liberty and we believe, then good things will come.

And what happened was, I guess, what was completely expected in hindsight.

The masses came, like, just in droves.

But what was surprising, I think, to me was that they didn't comport with our morality, our cognition, our sense of purpose.

And, in fact, outnumbered us in the end, or at least to the present day, to where they are here, albeit the dumbest people in every room they're ever in.

Yes.

And, like, you can plot blockchains like ascendancy to normies in the sense that the number of yogis per capita was zero for, like, the first four years.

And then just steadily, the number of, like, yogis per capita has been increasing.

And, like, I don't even mean it, like, derogatory to yoga.

But, like, I go into these rooms now, and with a straight face, I hear these blockchain experts who, that's their pedigree.

Like, they've been studying yoga for ten years, and that's what makes them good at blockchain.

And I can't even argue it at this point.

That might actually make them good at blockchain.

But for people like Jacoma, you, and I, and many of the original people, we have to figure something out.

Because, like, those people are very easy to steer, and they're very hard to, like, they didn't reason their way to their beliefs.

They, uh, all kinds of things happen, but typically, the first person to get to them is the person to set the anchor from which their beliefs sprung.

And they will argue until they're blue in the face to defend the relationship they had with that original person, and or the sanctity that they feel for that initial experience.

And so, like, what do you do with that?

Yeah, well, you took it in many directions at once, I think.

But let's go back to the very first thing you said, which is that we have this naive understanding.

I don't think it was totally naive.

I just think that the skills that are required to keep a community, I think it was not understood that a blockchain is like a community.

And it's, you make a shared sacrifice of different things, and in return, everyone in your community is bound by those rules.

And an obvious way of seeing it is, of course, in Bitcoin, there are rules against double spending, and rules against broadcasting invalid transactions, and definitely invalid blocks.

You know, you get a big ban, you get thrown right out of the community if you do that, you know.

So I don't think, even though that was clear, it was not very well understood, or salient.

People weren't really thinking about blockchain equals community.

And so I think people didn't realize that the skills required to keep a blockchain kind of together are actually similar to the, yeah, we're a lot of Florida today.

Yeah, this is especially pronounced.

Spring break.

Spring break this week.

Okay, there you go.

And yeah, it's a good week for spring break because it's freezing here in the northeast.

It's horrible.

It's really terrible.

It's nice and bright, though.

We've got our sun back.

Anyway, the skills required to keep a community together, those are like different skills than like being able to program C++ well, you know.

So we have a leadership that doesn't actually know literally like what the problem is or what it's doing because the reaction.

Well, apparently they knew enough, or we knew enough, or however you want to draw those lines, because the rejection of Bitcoin XT was sort of successful.

I mean, we have this stuff where people are kicked out of Bitcoin, and then they form their own groups.

And for a while, those groups were ignorable.

And now I think they're less ignorable.

So maybe that's where the conversation should go from here.

But I think that's the naive thing was that it would be a computer science project.

Agreed.

It's not a computer science project really at all.

Well, it sort of is, but it's really not, though.

It's a different project.

It's a political project, or like a leadership project that is sort of, I don't know what to say, like bolstered or kind of, it is kind of like a bulwark or a kind of defense around this political project that is made out of computer science.

So it's something that is really helped by the fact that these technologies exist, but it's really more of a political movement all along.

And so the idea that you would have to maintain the cohesion of this group, that was something that we should have appreciated.

But I think people didn't really appreciate.

But I don't think the original position was naive, because there was always this way, which is sidechains.

There was always a way of keeping the same community together, but there was not as much interest in that.

And I think that is also where the conversation should go.

So we can talk about why that is the case, I think.

Or we can talk about...

Well, something I realized with Giacomo is that this project, this whole space, this frontier that we're exploring, started in a world where censorship was real.

And in that world, there were a lot of things that we did to prepare, to strengthen, and to motivate what we thought the citizens would need.

And absent any form of censorship whatsoever, the frontier has expanded into a place where computer science is not only irrelevant, I'm not even sure that mining is irrelevant.

It may almost be a stigma.

Right.

But I know what you mean.

Well, let me rephrase it just a little bit, just to maybe help the audience again.

Certainly.

You imagine a rich ecology or something, and some bacteria develops some kind of antibiotic resistance or something like that, because the bacteria is worried about the day when this antibiotic will show up and just kill off everything.

That's not whatever, gram-negative, whatever, resistant.

It's a strain of whatever, whatever.

But let's just say that has some tiny little cost.

And meanwhile, there's all this other bacteria that's not antibiotic resistant.

And now it's thriving because there are no antibiotics.

So it's eating up all the food and all this other stuff, taking all the good spots or whatever it is.

So there's this ecology here, and there's a multidimensionality to it.

And being antibiotic resistant is only one dimension.

So you're right.

Bitcoin is designed with this one thing in mind.

Again, it's irrelevant because with sidechains, you can have all the different strains that you want, and they can all be the same.

So this whole thing is kind of surreal for me because even when I first heard about drivechain in November 2015, even at the very top of the little summary, it says that you can have Bitcoin and Bitcoin XT at the same time, and they can be peacefully coexisting.

So the whole kind of thing is just kind of dumb to me.

I really kind of have a little bit of a smugness about the whole debate because I really see that sort of a transcendent – the sidechains is like a transcendent philosophy.

It just says it doesn't matter.

You can make all your own mistakes on a sidechain if you want.

But at this point, again, we've drawn the conversation off into yet another thread, but we can talk about how entrenched the political thinking has become where the idea of the other party getting what they want is an utterly foreign one.

People's creativity has been so disabled by the conversation that they can't appreciate many points of view.

One of them is – well, you could call sidechains kind of an extreme ecumenical position maybe.

I don't know.

I'm not sure if you could.

I think maybe you would almost not even need ecumenism.

What do you get – in a world without censorship resistance, what do you get from a sidechain if not Bitcoin virtue compliant?

That's a good point.

It's a fair – yeah.

If you don't need mining, then maybe you don't even need sidechains, which is to say who cares about the hash rate security per block or who cares about being interoperable with Bitcoin.

In fact, it is a disadvantage because Bitcoin is slandered as being part of the dark web or these other things, whereas Ethereum gets a free pass.

There's no congressional hearings where someone brings up Ethereum, and then they say it's used in darknet markets.

We could easily – it would be very funny if there were people in the Bitcoin community who tried to write smart contracts on Ethereum that were especially distasteful or something to try and work that angle so that it would apply equally.

As you say, there's this world where we don't – Bitcoin has a certain set of design parameters, but if it doesn't match the world, then Bitcoin won't be a good fit.

If the world isn't actually dealing the censorship out, then it's just – all of it is just dead weight, which is an interesting thought.

Yeah. Well, to be clear, because I got Shinobis in here who's being Shinobis, I do believe that censorship resistance matters.

I think that we are in a pre-action phase of blockchain and that the tide will turn there, but that makes the timing for any project really hard that's a Bitcoin project.

I'm looking at Rootstock, who is trying to do the sidechain and Bitcoin virtue compliance. That is kind of their pitch, even.

It's that they do all the things that Ethereum does, but with Bitcoin virtue.

With Bitcoin virtue, exactly. Precisely.

Right. And here's the other thing, too. I just spent the weekend in Puerto Rico with a lot of the EOS people, and I don't think a single one of them gives a crap about Bitcoin.

Right.

That's it. Yeah.

No, I agree. A lot of these people don't.

And now you don't hear – now you always hear the phrase, like, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

It's just a given that there are other ones. I don't think that should be the case. It should not be a given.

And the experiments should be on different blockchains, but they should be sidechains, in my opinion.

So now let's tie it back to the Hoyt-Polloy idea, which is that does what other people think matter?

And I think the answer is clearly yes, because of the very strong network effects of money.

I mean, we see what does the U.S. dollar have going for it, other than the fiat Hoyt-Polloy or whatever.

Yeah.

It really is annoying to open a checking account with all this stuff. You need all this ID. It takes all this effort.

You've got to maintain a minimum balance. They're reporting everything you do to the IRS and to the government, and there's an inflation tax.

And it's really not that convenient for merchants to accept fiat currency or for you to use it, other than the fact that everyone is using it.

And so there's this huge—it's not like you don't know how to pay with cash at a store.

You know because your parents told you or your friends told you, and you've been doing it for the last 30 years, so you know exactly how.

But the only reason you have all that is because of this huge network effect.

Well, you know, I was watching the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in a while, and as I was watching it,

I was thinking to myself, you know, there's a degree of indoctrination that goes with that.

And to be clear, I love America. America is my primary grouping.

But even still, and I think it's a good thing to do even for this reinforcement,

but the hoi polloi need to be reminded that they have an allegiance, and they even at a young age

need to be indoctrinated into that allegiance. And therein lies a lot of the value in the dollar.

Like, we would conceivably be well-served

by a Pledge of Allegiance to Bitcoin that was

required of our children as Bitcoin hodlers,

which is hilarious. Someone should write that, if only because it's so funny.

It is funny. Well, yeah, it's true. I mean, joining a group is efficient.

In many cases, you have no choice. So something like the ozone layer

around the Earth, and we have the Montreal Protocol. We said everyone's going to stop

creating CFC gas because it's destroying the ozone layer.

And we're all stuck. We've only got one planet,

so it's not like we can just teleport to other planets and then the planets can compete

on their ozone policy or something.

We're all in the same boat when it comes to certain things.

We can't have someone do a weird physics project,

and they built the CERN particle accelerator.

Someone had to check. I think it was actually Stephen Hawking,

RIP. But they had to check to make sure that it wouldn't create a tiny black hole

that would just obliterate the entire planet.

And if it would, and someone wanted to do it anyway,

people would have bombed them or whatever.

At a certain point, you have no choice because the interrelatedness of everyone

takes on a form that is just not ignorable.

So there are benefits to being in a group,

and it's very funny when you have things like the Pledge of Allegiance.

It's known in psychology and in game theory that it doesn't matter

if the information is false. It can still be very, very persuasive

because you just don't know what else to do. Lots of people complain about Facebook.

Facebook rolls out a new layout, and they say, I hate this layout. But where are you going to go instead?

You'd have to go somewhere else, and then you'd have to persuade all of your friends to go.

But when are all of your friends going to go?

Only if they can persuade all of their friends to go. Some of your friends will be difficult to reach,

and some of them don't go on Facebook every day.

The task just becomes basically impossible, and the same thing goes for the U.S. dollar,

and the same thing goes for U.S. laws.

We know the laws aren't perfect. Slavery used to be the law.

Women used to not be able to vote.

What are you going to do instead? There is no clear alternative,

but we have the legislative branch to theoretically

fix the laws, and we have the judicial branch to theoretically root out

inconsistencies in the laws. Of course, in practice, they don't do

a great job, but they do some job. But yeah, it's like, what are you going to do?

If you're not going to use that, what are you going to use? And that's the problem.

It's the hoi polloi. It's the problem.

I hate to be as classist as I'm going to sound, but we need to ask what the hoi polloi

need in order to stay content, and the answer has been fast gains.

The hoi polloi were going to these projects because Bitcoin wasn't delivering

the gains that they felt were reasonable, and I don't know to the degree that we can really

satisfy that without an enforcement of

the nonsense, so maybe we have to wait and let that distraction

run its course. Because think about it. By the EMH,

fast gains cannot be just

delivered. You can change aspects of the project

so that it gains a lot of money.

You can pack all the losses onto a tiny square that you hope that you

don't hit for the next 40 days or something,

and so you can do this weird stuff where all the losses are hidden in one spot,

and then it looks like you've got fast gains, but then it explodes, and the loss is more

than wipe it out.

You saw that with these groups, though. The Bitcoiners would be like, no, there's a science here,

and it says this, and then the masses were just like,

they couldn't understand that. They literally could not understand that. We were asking too much

of them in many ways, so they went ahead and did it anyways, and then,

absent any use, absent any censorship,

these things took off like rockets because they all appealed to each other's sense of

nonsense. It was weird. It makes sense now,

but someone comes to you and says they need a time machine, and you're like, I'm not going to build it because that's retarded.

But then he goes to his friends, and they all put it together, and it's just like

pasted together with glue and sticks. That's fine.

Absent regulation, the hoi poi will, in fact, set themselves on fire,

and I realize that now.

Who knows how people may learn about things

or what new institutions would develop to help

protect them.

This is another thing you were trying to explain

to Shinobis, I think, where it's like

if a riot breaks out, sticking near

the people who are visibly similar to you,

maybe they're the same race or something, that is sort of an institution.

Wow, this is a bit of a loaded term, but it's literally

a racial institution.

That is, to a first approximation, something that you would use

and you would say, or someone with a similar tattoo or something

like that, anything that's something that you know

represents some tangible way of sorting the groups together

and you could say something like, okay, we have some substrate upon which we could

make these teams that you and I just discussed are

efficient and effective.

But you see that in the Tinkerbell effect, what works

is what is majority.

It's a nuanced point, right? When something first starts

off, there is no Tinkerbell effect

and it's all meritocracy, it's all meritocratic, because

no one has joined yet. Even if there are network effects, it doesn't matter.

If you have Facebook with a layout that people like and Facebook with a layout that people don't like,

it doesn't matter how many, because both of them have zero users.

But over time, you get more and more users and

eventually now the network effects tend to dominate the meritocratic

effects. That's what I believe anyway. I think you see that happen many, many times.

The Twitter 280 characters or these other things.

It doesn't matter, even if most of the people, if the network effect is really strong,

we know there's stuff in the United States that definitely a huge

majority of people do not support.

It would be funny to find all these random lists.

There are these crazy laws that no one really

has ever been happy with.

They tend to be around loaded issues and things where you can

smuggle these things around. Some are like the domestic spying.

No one has ever supported that, but everyone just keeps their mouth shut about it

because they don't want to be spied on or be accused of helping

terrorism or these other things. I think the drug war, I'm

not sure if you had reliable private polls or that.

I think the support for it is super low,

but we have it anyway. We have all this stuff that

no one really...

It's the loud minority, and this has been written up by

Rakhont.

Is that right? But it's true. What I'm noticing, I see this having

primarily been explored by the left

in America, but this notion of disgust and outrage as

an emotional appeal over rationalization

has been extremely effective in motivating large groups of people

from a minority grouping.

I just think it depends on lots of different things.

In the United States, the elections,

there's lots of gerrymandering. There's lots of apathy. No one really cares.

You need to move the needle on just a few persuadable

voters in the swing districts or the swing states.

There's only 10 or so swing states, sometimes 8.

There's very few persuadable voters.

Somehow you need to get to them.

It's not going to work if people say,

I don't really support the drug war, I oppose the drug war,

but I don't really feel that strongly about it. If people say something like that,

it's not really going to bleed through. What you need to say is that

Hillary Clinton is literally the devil, blah, blah, blah.

Anyone who votes for Donald Trump is no better than

the Nazis and all this stuff. You need to totally go for the extreme.

These kind of

swing voter, they're just showing up at the ballot because

they've been told that that's the right thing to do. They couldn't think of anything else to do

with their Tuesday. They're just like,

here I am. I don't really know anything about either of these candidates at all,

but I heard that this person is,

some people really don't like this guy. I'm like, wow, I don't really want to hurt those people's

feelings. They really don't want this candidate, so they go with the other candidate.

It doesn't work that way in markets, for example. You can't

tank the price of GE

by saying that Immelt or whoever,

whatever the guy's name, the new CEO, I forget his name,

but you can't say, oh, this guy's Satan or something.

He's putting witchcraft into the light bulbs, blah, blah, blah.

No one will care. They'll just laugh at you. It's totally indifferent.

You can't do it in the physics department either of a university.

There are other offices where you can't.

It depends a lot on what kind of movement you're trying to do,

but even in stuff like the right nonprofit, it just won't go anywhere.

If you go to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you say that malaria nets

are sorcery or something. You're outraged.

Why would they prioritize this over that? It's like no one cares because they're all too busy.

You're not going to get past

his secretary. He's busy.

What is the population we're dealing with in blockchain now?

I don't really worry about these other projects for exactly the same reasons

that I haven't worried about them for years, which is that

they're like a fast fuse. They show up. They get a lot of attention.

Someone says, people show up and they're brand new.

They've just heard about Bitcoin, and they've just heard about EOS.

As far as they're concerned, they're just two members of the same category, and they have no knowledge

about either of them, really. They're just like, well, EOS looks like

it's doing all these things, and they say, well, we're the next Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah.

Then EOS, the price is going way up, so they get involved with EOS.

That's fine because they get only the ...

It's like a filter for the most naive people.

There's many people repeating the same scam, so it's a big fan out.

You only get one over N

portion of the most naive people. They just show up.

They all commit to their various weird projects. Then those projects explode,

and those people, since they're faithless to begin with because their convictions

are not built on a real, enduring commitment of any kind,

they will abandon those projects.

We see this all the time. The market cap

of some project will go way up, and then it will just go way down, and then it will slowly

just fade out forever and die.

That's the exact same reason why I am worried now. This goes to the market cap

Bitcoin dominance discussion

because we haven't just seen ...

It's been over a year since ... The Bitcoin dominance

index used to be more than 95% very reliably.

That is why it was very easy not to take these other projects seriously.

You have something like Ethereum, which is 18% to

Bitcoin's 42%.

It's been that way for months

and months, and this is not just a weird flash in the pan, unfortunately.

Absent any regulation,

Bitcoin is the worst solution. It's necessarily the worst because

it has all these decentralization benefits that nobody needs.

Again, I guess Shinobi is probably going nuts on the channel and people like him.

I'm not saying that that's the case.

If you're making him upset, that's probably a good sign.

I agree. He's hysterical. He always gets hysterical. That's his thing.

He terrorizes the chat.

One of the things that Giacomo did not ...

Let's cycle it back. There is a way

for the Bitcoin

cash side to win.

The main argument ... It's exactly as you just said.

There's this dimension that is not actually relevant, it turns out,

because of something.

In our case, what Giacomo is saying is that a lot of the best scientists

are all on the core side.

All this is open source software. The cash side can just copy all

the software. It so happens that they weren't a huge mistake.

By far, the biggest blunder of Bitcoin cash is their decision

not to do that. Bitcoin cash has substantially altered the codebase

from Bitcoin core to the point that it's very difficult to even

create a patch set or something that is basically Bitcoin core

but that would connect to the Bitcoin cash network. So a huge mistake

of Bitcoin cash. But the point is

it's still, in principle, possible to just take all this stuff.

Bulletproofs, whatever it is. Lightning, all these things.

Tumblebit. You can just take them and just

move them over. They made a huge blunder by making it more

difficult than it would otherwise be, but it's still possible

to just take all this stuff. And then

there's a second dimension of the monetary property of

recognizability, which is that

how do people feel about this being a reliable

form of money? And in that sense, if you've got people like

Brian Armstrong, Roger Ver, you've got BitPay,

you've got Purse.io, which is basically Amazon,

that's big stuff. And if you have all that

promoting Bitcoin cash only, and you have the tech

being equal, then it's kind of

one-sided in the other direction. The promotion is the only part

that is not an advantage that you can easily

steal. Bitcoin Core might have an R&D advantage, but you can

just steal it.

Yeah, no kidding. One thing that is possible is let's just say

cash were to continue to grow and eclipse the market cap of

Bitcoin Core. I don't see any reason to believe that the Bitcoin Core developers then

wouldn't be able to be either bought by

them, by Bitcoin Cash, for continued development.

Exactly, they hire someone else to build a little bridge.

And the Bitcoin Core devs will tell you that they'd rather have seen so many

things done different. They could just create a competitor to Bitcoin at that point, and

maybe even do it in a way that they're getting paid by Bitcoin Cash simultaneously

while developing their own coin. I don't think anybody in the cash department would care about that.

We sort of even see that already happening to a tiny extent.

Bin with Mimblewimble, exactly. And we see that where

people prefer doing it. There's a disagreement on tech

and the sidechain elephant and other

elephant in the room we haven't talked about yet, but people don't want to go for that.

They don't want Mimblewimble as a sidechain,

which is shocking, right? Can you believe? Because Mimblewimble is deep,

deep in Republican territory, deep in

blockstream chain code, conservative block size territory.

It's deep. It's practically coming from the RNC chairman himself.

Right, right.

RS Protege.

Still, that's going to splinter off and be an altcoin.

But you also see it in like Joseph Poon gets insulted on the Bitcoin

debt mailing list and then leaves for Ethereum to do Plasma, which is sort of Ethereum

but not really, but question mark, question mark, whatever, like it doesn't matter.

You do have these people who splinter off, like Monero

can't join. Again, I keep saying the sidechain

thing and I don't want to keep bringing it back to that, but it's like, you know, you've got these other projects.

What are you going to do with like Monero, Namecoin, Siacoin?

What are you going to do with that? They can't join. And even Litecoin,

there's like this kind of uneasy friendship

with them. It's very interesting. This friendship is, I think, politically

motivated, of course, by now that you've got cash, you've got to establish

a bigger group of friendly coins

that includes the magical crypto friends that got

Litecoin on there. But in contrast to Bitcoin Cash, which of course

is not represented, you know what I'm saying? It's like you want to give

this impression that Bitcoin Cash is extra bad,

et cetera, et cetera.

But this is the point that I'm trying to make is that I think

that's the point is that Litecoin is what, I don't remember exactly,

but I think it's like 4%. Bitcoin Cash is like 6%.

Litecoin is very, very old. Monero is old.

And it's only 1%. People bring up these other things.

I think the dominance index and the market cap,

those are very valid metrics, in my opinion. And people say, well, they can be

manipulated easily. But if they are, they get unmanipulated very quickly.

In the short term, if something

changes in the short term, then that's fine. Then it'll be gone soon.

But these things are not gone soon. And this is an objective metric. When you see people who are so

biased, they don't even realize

what they're doing.

I've told new people that they probably want to invest in an index at this point.

And I don't know what to say about that, but it's

becoming increasingly obvious that that's a wise investment strategy.

It depends, of course, on many different things.

It's unfortunate that it can't easily be summarized, I think. But what you

have is a situation where probably

a lot of different things they would do, they would be acceptable.

Because as far as

financial sovereignty, there really isn't that

big of a difference between Litecoin and Bitcoin.

There are more frequent blocks, so there's more overhead.

It's harder to run a node. There's more headers

and these other things. But Bitcoin launched in

2009, January, and Litecoin launched in 2011, I think.

Computers have gotten better

since then. Litecoin steals a lot of this stuff.

A lot of the technology has lightning.

The only

people who are harmed

are the current investors in Bitcoin.

But technologically speaking,

a lot of this stuff is just as efficient for payments as anything else.

What's the marginal economic cost of a payment in Bitcoin

versus one in Litecoin or Bitcoin Cash or these other things?

They're very similar.

The point that I'm at now is there's only two

factors in these things that I can tell matter, liquidity and fungibility.

Bitcoin has been fungible enough.

It may be that somebody wants or doesn't want that feature, TBD,

but the other side of it is liquidity. There's no reason why Litecoin can't have the liquidity that Bitcoin has

if the community grows bigger.

These are all very transient.

What I think the Republicans don't appreciate is that

it's plausible.

Errors have been made on all sides.

Why is the thinking so bad so often?

It's plausible. For Giacomo to say there's no

equivalence is mistaken because

you have these people who want revenge. You should never underestimate that,

especially when they're rich.

If they're rich and they're just smart enough, you've got your Roger Ver, you've got your Brian Armstrong,

you've got all these merchant acceptance people.

I just don't know.

What he's trying to say is that it's worth zero.

I don't think it is worth zero at all.

It's fine if people want to

support one side over the other.

That's great. But at a certain point, it does become

a crime against truth when you're just saying that

there is only one side.

It is just as bad if you go to the Bitcoin Cash side.

They will say that we are the only real side.

That side is just misled by Famos and is the illegitimate side.

It's only a matter of time before everyone agrees with us.

It's a crime against truth.

Did we decide that that is appropriate? When is motivated ignorance a virtue?

Motivated ignorance is effective.

But the question of whether or not it's a virtue, it depends.

If you want to be effective, then it's a virtue.

I think that you and me, we're on a little show here.

We should at least pretend to care about informing the viewers.

At a certain point, it will fall below a threshold

where if we can't even pretend to care about

speaking honestly to the viewers, if we can't even pretend

to care about that, then no one will listen to the show.

We are held in check

a little bit by just basic

requirements to move the dialogue along.

What if you called on someone

running for office in Florida and they were a Republican

and they said, the Republican party is the only real party.

There are no other parties in Florida.

I don't even know why anyone would even think about not voting for Republicans.

That would just be too much. There would be no way that it would be laughable.

We are kind of reaching that point. I was shocked.

I was so disappointed, Chris, in you. I was shocked that you even asked

if there were political parties. There have been political parties in Bitcoin

since before you did Bitcoin Uncensored with Joneseth.

They have been around for a very long time.

It's super obvious.

We kind of have a civil war, really, where

one of the parties formed their own country.

It's a little late for that.

I agree. A lot of times I feign ignorance. I don't know if I did on that question or not, but I feign ignorance if only so that I can have somebody else walk through explaining to me what I already know they're going to tell me so that I don't have to deal with the burden of personal issues encumbering the discussion.

That was too far for me. I was like, wow, how can anyone not know?

That's the thing, too. I'm having this hard time now because I want to throw a dog whistle in so that people know me, that are my friends who aren't the hoi polloi. They know when I'm merely advancing an agenda issue.

That's hard to do.

They know can arrows, impossibility, paradox. So they know that if they split, they might be in trouble. Metcalfe's law, etc., etc. So everyone knows that they've got to unite to defeat this foe.

So it's obvious if you have contact, but we have these bubbles, of course, in social media. It's very easy to accidentally get a little more comfortable with your side and then you don't want to listen to the other side. They sound shrill and annoying to you. Your brain doesn't process it quite as easily.

It sounds like you're at the point, though, where you seem to recognize or believe that willful ignorance of the existence of parties is no longer helpful.

I think at a certain point it's—so it depends if the willful ignorance is—see, as I said, it's effective, but I think you can always go too far where you just say—you just try to be willfully ignorant of facts that are just obvious, like willful ignorance of gravity or something.

These things would be helpful. They impair—they make the group less efficient, but they, in some ways, in terms of what goal the group is trying to achieve, but it makes each individual in there a good conformist.

And so it helps your standing within the group. It does harm the long-run effectiveness of the group. So it increases the short-run effectiveness of the group. It increases your social rank inside the group, but in the long run it's not helpful.

And depending on what you choose to be ignorant of is where that long run is. So if you're willfully ignorant of the wrong thing, then the long run will be tomorrow, or if you're willfully ignorant of gravity, then you'll be ignorant of gravity in the next five or ten seconds.

And you have a very hard time—you can't be—you don't want to open yourself up to ridicule. So it's a little bit like shuffleboard, where you want to be as ignorant as you possibly can without going over the line.

If you go over the line, then everyone will just laugh at you, and then you'll be ruined. That'll be the ruination of it all. So you can't—it's kind of a risk. But yeah, of course, there's no denying that, how effective it is to get everyone to believe that the soldiers who do well will go to heaven, and so then—

So at what point, then—so are we at the point at which denial of parties is, in fact, a—

That's it. It's no longer time to do that in my mind, it seems.

Unless Bitcoin Cash has kind of screwed it up, as I said, by the substantial changes to the code base, because they think that they—

Huge mistake is that Bitcoin Cash has decided to compete on a couple different things at once. Huge mistake. Giant blunder on their part. Possibly fatal. We don't know if we can fix the blunder or not. But they want to compete on not only which is the optimal block size parameter, which is one dimension.

Very small dimension at this point.

Yeah, it might not even—who even cares about something like that these days? And there are other things to say about that, like with the extension blocks that already exist in Bitcoin Core that we don't know about, and these other things like that.

Well, let me ask you this. Let me ask you this.

The other dimensions are, of course, whether or not it will matter to have people uniquely promoting the brand that compete on a different brand, like can Roger Ver get Bitcoin Cash accepted in more places than Bitcoin Core, these other things.

And then third, they just throw in for fun. They wanted to just throw in a completely different development team, Varian-wise, because they have a huge disadvantage.

But worse is that they don't want—you shouldn't want the competitive space to be that crazy. You only wanted to just compete on one or two things, and you'd want to make the other things the same, so that there's no criteria for competition there.

But even all those things are relatively minor, things that can either be fixed or that could change rapidly, and so it is, in my opinion, it is very unwise to just say it's a foregone conclusion.

Even Bitcoin Cash, I think one thing that people don't really know a lot about is that, I think, it's been a while since I checked, it's been a couple of weeks since I checked, but the balances, something like 84% of the UTXOs are still the same, and about 60% of the coins are the same, because there's a lot of tiny UTXOs that don't move.

But most people have not even picked a side, and that is, in fact, a lower bound because of the mandatory replay protection.

Someone who sells 10% of their coins on Bitcoin Core and then sells later 10% of their Bitcoin Cash, they'll still be perfectly synchronized, but it'll look a little bit like—if they sell them to the same person, you'll still have a complete synchronization, but it'll look like one-tenth of the person's coins got desynchronized.

So the true percentages may be much higher than that.

Someone who sells Bitcoin Cash and then rebuys it, they sell it on August 1st, thinking that they have no idea what this is, they're amazed that anyone pays for it, but then later on in December, they decide they want to rebuy it.

It looks like it's split even further, but it's actually just reversed the original investment allocation or reallocation.

So what I'm trying to say is that it's still very—a lot of people have not taken a side, possibly as high as 100%, in theory, but obviously with some people we suspect.

I don't know the extent to which the ownership sets are actually that different.

I don't think anyone knows.

So let me ask you this.

What are your top three threats to Bitcoin in order?

And then from there, do we design a boogeyman for the hoi polloi to believe in to combat them first?

That's a wonderful question because I think that actually the framing of the question is misleading.

Do you believe that?

So I'm going to just—the whole question I reject, actually, because I think that really what we're really learning is that the design, whether or not Satoshi realized this or not, there is no need.

Satoshi actually did—I don't know if Satoshi knew this or not, but he did think of everything.

It's perfectly fine the way it is and it doesn't need defense from people at all.

It's all just pretentious nonsense so that people can feel good about themselves and get VC funding to justify having no real responsibilities.

You're the defender of Bitcoin, but the job does itself because Bitcoin is so secure.

If Bitcoin fails in all these ways, it doesn't matter.

It can recover even if people put in very low effort.

Just imagine whatever attack there is.

What do we need to do?

If there's a big reorganization for miners, you can change the proof-of-work algorithm.

And then even if it doesn't matter exactly which side, you can try to say, I don't want to—I wish I had some people.

These are fair points, but I feel like what you may be expressing is that we haven't identified what failure—I agree that Bitcoin won't fail.

So then perhaps the question should be rephrased as what are the top three impediments to achieving higher liquidity in Bitcoin?

Right, so then the question is—right, I think that's right—is that the way Satoshi's blockchain technology works is such that over time, the errors are—it is antifragile.

So whatever weird, bad things happen to it, we'll know what those things are.

And we have the ledger's history, so we'll be able to recover to a tremendous degree, even if all the people with—even you and I and all the people with lots of knowledge about how Bitcoin works.

We all go to the same conference and die, and there's a 51% attack reorganizing 40 blocks, and the government bans Bitcoin.

Other smart people, they'll be able to pick up the pieces, even without us.

And that's the magic of having—really, you could call it an institution, which is just that the blockchain is kind of like an institution.

It just says, here's something that we have, and if there are problems, then they will be fixed.

The question is how fast or slow they'll be fixed.

Yes, so now you rephrased the question, which is a little bit more like how can we make sure that if you own BTC, you've got the best chance of doing well.

Is that, I think, what you're sort of referring to?

Yeah, and I think—I can't necessarily speak for Giacomo, but I think—and Giacomo, please weigh in on the comments.

He would have said his top concern was censorship from the government.

His second concern would be Bitcoin cash, and his third concern would be minor centralization, which may be the same as number two.

So I—so what would you say?

The channel wants to know.

This is not really the appropriate question, because Giacomo is the CEO of this business that makes money by renting out, you know,

access to Bitcoin experts.

So, of course, he would need—you know, I hate to impugn anyone's motives, especially if they're not here,

but, you know, this idea that you need to constantly have the right people.

And thank God we have Gregory Maxwell and Peter Todd protecting us.

You know, what would we do without them on the wall, guarding us at night, you know, as we sleep?

We would be lost without them.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know?

And what would we do without Giacomo, you know, building a blockchain lab in Italy, you know?

Thank God.

Thank God we've got all this stuff, right?

That we have all these great people defending us against these constant threats who are marauding.

It's just—they're the only thing standing between us and total destruction and failure of our mission, you know?

Blah, blah, blah.

That's just a bunch of self-serving, you know, kind of nonsense, I think.

So we can go through those if you want, though.

I think they're interesting.

Can we—can the channel get your top three concerns that are impacting Bitcoin liquidity?

Okay.

See, we keep—we're rephrasing it again.

So it's like, by Bitcoin liquidity, you mean we want everyone out there to be doing commerce in Bitcoin?

Or do we want a lot of investing in Bitcoin?

Do we want the market capitalization of Bitcoin to go up?

Like, what exactly do you mean?

Because I think they're slightly different.

Good questions.

I'm going to say liquidity as expressed probably in investing terms reluctantly at the moment.

Yeah, I agree that that's the right answer, and it's right to be reluctant about the answer.

But that should—by the EMH, that should fold into everything else, right?

Well, yeah, that's the best I can give you.

I agree, yeah.

Well, I mean, I think—it's clear from my actions.

You don't need to ask for my words.

I dropped my own project to work on sidechains.

With sidechains, we should be able to just have all these disagreements.

You know, community grows to a certain size.

It's inevitable that there are disagreements.

And we see, you know, people want to try their weird experiments.

So that's great, and they can do that on sidechains while still using the same 21 million Bitcoin.

So I think that sidechains are the way to go.

The code is finished.

So what is impacting—we don't have to answer it, but what is impacting sidechains might be your number one consideration?

Right, well, I think we—the scalability debate has never been about scalability.

It's always been about decentralization at least, which is the cost of running a full node.

But there has always been—

I think it's been about leadership.

Yes, there has always been a much darker subtext, which is that it's about who is in control of which—who changes what.

Giacomo is representing a conservative position where all changes were bad.

If you watch the interview carefully, you see the idea of a change that is an improvement to Bitcoin is not—

you know, he just dismisses that as being almost unthinkable, which is kind of weird.

But I don't know how he feels about soft forks and SegWit and these other things.

I thought that was sort of strange.

But the point is that we have—let's see, what were we talking about?

Sidechains?

I lost my train of thought there.

Well, no, the top three concerns would be great.

Yeah.

So sidechains being number one—

Oh, no, I was talking about why.

No, it's about control.

Control is what the debate is really about.

And sidechains take control away from a lot of the people who have it now.

It takes some control away from miners, I think, if you ask me,

but it takes a lot of control away from, you know, like the Bitcoin dev mailing list

and Luke Jr. who does the BIP administration

and all these people who are gatekeepers for what goes in or out of the Bitcoin code base

because right now they're required—permission from them is required to change anything in Bitcoin Core,

as debatably it should be.

But I think there's many conflicts of interest.

You know, even the idea of a Bitcoin expert loses a lot of its meaning when anyone can try their dumb idea.

When you have to go to the Bitcoin expert for bureaucratic approval

and some weird process to get your idea into Bitcoin,

then the experts have a monopoly on whether or not an idea can be tried.

But if there is no monopoly, then they do not get as much rent, so to speak,

and there's not, you know, so much exotic conferences, you know,

and luxury hotels and all these other things.

So that's kind of one thing.

I think maybe awareness of conflicts of interest for sidechains would be one.

You know, just kind of generally, I want to fold into number one concern.

It's just kind of like overconfidence and just like fiddling while Rome burns.

It's weird because this is a long number one, and they're not going to be like little bullet points, I'm afraid.

But you realize that you have to, like your job as a leader is in fact to create 140 character understandings for the whole company.

So I think the number one will be then, it won't be to shorten it,

it will be just overconfidence slash, you know, neglect of network effects.

So if we put a dash in that, it's just that people don't, they don't appreciate what you've been saying at the Hoyt-Polloy.

They don't appreciate that, you know, we have the QWERTY keyboard.

QWERTY keyboard is like a stupid keyboard layout.

But, you know, even if you use Dvorak, people are going to say, oh, I use Dvorak, whatever.

You type Dvorak on a QWERTY keyboard.

Like, don't mess with me.

Like when you go to the store and buy a QWERTY keyboard, it's got QWERTY on it.

And why is that?

You know, it's a stupid keyboard.

English is ridiculous.

You and I had this conversation before.

We got English versus French, which was supposed to be the language of diplomats.

Asim Taleb took that from our conversation and put it in his book.

I didn't get it from his book, his new book.

I think he got that from us.

It was an idea whose time had come.

There's a lot of these going around.

But yeah, we have this stuff, gets network effects.

We have Facebook.

Now people are realizing that Facebook's evil and they've just realized it now.

But now, how many people are going to switch off their Facebook tomorrow or this evening?

Sad, you know, people just ignore all this stuff.

You know, English is the international language.

It's not the easiest language to learn.

That was something that was designed to be easy to learn called Esperanto.

But no one speaks Esperanto because that's not how language works, you know.

So we don't need – we need people to understand the importance of network effects

and that someone like – you know, I think Giacomo was correct to be worried about the –

he called them the – what did he call it?

The CEO mafia or something like the U.S. Silicon Valley.

You know, he's right to be worried about these people.

Brian Armstrong, BitPay, et cetera.

I hate to keep – I feel bad just calling these people out.

I mean I have solutions to a lot of those problems, but they all require organization in my mind.

Like I would love nothing more than to work on Bitcoin's defenses.

And unfortunately, there are people who don't seem to want to acknowledge that that problem exists.

Yeah, but it's like what would they need to – my challenge to them would be

what would convince you that there is a problem, you know?

Like the market cap – the market – the Bitcoin dominance index being below 50%

for like an entire year or like three years or like what is it going to be?

Because it's been a long time since it was like above 80 or so.

Well, there's this decentralization fear, the culture that I understand

wherein people need the illusion of decentralization more so than they need anything else

in order for these products to comport with the virtue that is their selling point.

Like that seems to be the way things have shaken out.

And for me, I think it's great for the hoi polloi to believe that.

But I know that anybody who's been around for five years or so

understands that decentralization isn't as simple as like a projection.

And there's a degree of maintenance that is needed to either ensure that projection exists –

Well, all things need to be – all virtuous things need to be maintained.

Yeah. Yes, it's true. Did you get that from somewhere?

That sounds like it's actually true.

Maybe. I probably got it from somewhere. I can't exactly remember.

But there is – I could send you some links. There's about –

No, that's okay. You don't have to.

Okay, so my first thing was overconfidence, neglect of the network effect.

I think really all of my concerns are the same concerns.

I would have them about Bitcoin or I would have them about the U.S. Congress

or I would have them about Facebook or I would have –

and I think you really want to embrace the principles of science.

And I want to define what science is because people don't know what it is.

Are you sure that's what you want?

I'm going to tell you exactly specifically what I want.

Science, in my opinion, is a process for deleting errors.

So that is what it is.

Our minds are trying to build a model of reality, a map of reality.

We want it to be a very helpful map that always helps us find our way around.

Our brain only weighs like three pounds or something.

And most of it is about how to balance and keeping your heart rate up or whatever,

visual perception and things like that.

So this thing is small, and it's not going to be able to model the entire universe,

which is the ideal.

But even in that ideal, that would be a very funny thing

because it would actually model a different universe that –

I'd love to talk more about that, but it's actually –

it's not possible nor desirable to have a perfect model of the entire universe.

And since everything is related to each other because there's no contradictions allowed in knowledge,

the only way you'll ever know if you're correct about anything would be to be omniscient

and know everything and have the perfect model of the universe, which I just said is impossible.

Kind of a weird way of talking here, but what I'm saying is knowledge is imperfect,

and we're always approximating better, so we always have error.

And we want to make sure that we get the errors out.

And that is why I love your show, and I love Bitcoin Uncensored because of the rule.

Rules number one and two.

And guys, I embrace the principle of real Karl Popper science, which is fallibilism,

which is that we don't know a lot.

The human brain only weighs 3 pounds.

It has structural defects and biases that are trying to mislead us all the time.

Can I jump in on this?

The problem I have with science is that literally the hoi polloi cannot do it.

And if you try to get them to, they'll believe crazy shit.

Because they can't discern claims.

So let me ask you a quick question.

Some people aren't as good at it, and it's possible that some people can't do it,

but everyone does some version of it.

You wouldn't be able to learn how to speak English if you couldn't slowly delete errors.

So the point is not being right or being wrong or being good enough.

The point is just that you care about the first derivative, so to speak.

You care about making progress over time, trying to get better and better at it over time.

But the hoi polloi believe that the borders of the United States is objectively true.

They believe that the universe is configured in such a way that the map was always like this.

Or even that the United States is a thing.

Yeah, right. It only exists in our head. It's a great thing.

But as I say, that's not an issue because all of our knowledge only exists in our head.

And it's all slightly imperfect.

So the map can still be useful. It can still be more accurate than not.

I feel like if we show them how the meat is made, they then start making their own meat.

Except that their meat is so discombobulated from science

because they themselves don't understand that they're beholden to these principles.

Good point.

So I'm going to say that my concern is not so much...

My concern is that because we're doing this show and who knows how many people will listen

and if they'll be in the hoi polloi or not.

We bored them to death. We bored them to death at this point.

They're going to resent the intro enough to where they won't get this far.

We hope. We can only hope.

But that is still my concern.

So that's what I was trying to say is that all my concerns are just flavor of the absence of science.

Today we do not have... It's very difficult when you have two...

political parties. Since it's post-Civil War, you really have two states. They're both one-party states. One is the Republican one-party state and the other is Democrat one-party state. Ideas do not rise up. In a few trivial areas, they do, where it doesn't matter. But on the big questions about like, you know, how should Bitcoin... What's Bitcoin's plan for crushing all the altcoins? Or how is Bitcoin going to do that?

How is Bitcoin going to win? You know, we want to make sure that it's a big part of people's lives 10 years from now. On big questions like that, you are not allowed to...

If you say something that neither like Greg Maxwell or, you know, I guess I could say Roger Ver, but he's not really the right person.

If you say something that the large blockers and the small blockers won't like, you're like running third party. And so you're kind of doomed, I think, which is important for people to recognize.

So the advice is don't run third party. Pretend. Pretend to be on... Put all your chips on one or the other in public when you talk and when it doesn't matter.

So like you have these friends and you can be, you know, you should fake it. But that is all of my... If I were to make three bullet points, they would just be expressions of this idea that we have something where errors are either persisting or they're not being deleted quickly enough.

And so I think, you know, when people, you know, the dominance index falls and stays low for so long, I don't understand why people don't perceive the need to do anything about that.

And I think that I hate to impugn people's motives, but I would say that a lot of them are just people trying to show off how loyal they are to the Republican Party or whatever. They're just trying to say, well, you know, wow, it's unthinkable that anything bad would ever happen. And that's why I call it the fiddling while Rome burns scenario. And I find that to be very overconfident.

Motivated ignorance eventually extends into this, like, nothing is wrong here as the building is burning. And I think we're... I don't think the building is burning, but I think we're a little in that territory.

Yeah, like, it would be something like, like, if you show up and you show up to the Republican Party convention, and the RNC leader shows up and says, this is the best convention hall, super fireproof. You know, it's really great. We spared no expense. So wonderful. And then he leaves to go get some coffee or something. And then the place starts burning down.

People who run out, and then the fire department comes and puts out the fire, and only like two or three people die or something. But the people who stayed in the building, the RNC leader, he knows he can really trust them. You know, the other people are the free thinkers. You got to get...

When time comes around for who's going to be part of your... who's going to be your chief of staff or something, you don't really want the independent people. You want the idiots who stayed in this building while it literally almost burned to the ground, you know, killing them all inside. So you don't want... that's why I say the motivated ignorance, it helps. It helps the party be cohesive. And it helps you. If the party wins, you, you're doing great.

So it is helpful. There's a reason why it exists and why we all do it. We absolutely all do it. But it wouldn't matter if we had more of a scientific process. This is why I was disappointed that people weren't more interested in the Fork of Futures idea. That would be very simple. There'd be no need for any of this psychology, politics stuff. Of course, everyone wants to say out loud that they don't like politics or manipulation, but secretly they do want it, of course.

Of course, yeah, that's what you...

We see that all the time. And I even do that sometimes. But...

So that would have been really easy. But of course, people don't want to do that. Because they want the control because they thought they had a better chance of controlling it themselves. So it's a question of, it's a question of, you know, it is really all about control the whole time. And no one wants to take the control away from themselves and give it to like the user where it belongs and belongs with the investors and the users. Everyone will say that they are working to help the investors and the users. But of course, they secretly will not.

My advice to all the listeners is to fake it and pretend. Don't go on a crusade against it. It's fun for a few people to be the truth crusaders, but it's very ineffective because you end up being like Ron Paul, where you can't win, but you start the movement.

And so you want...

Okay, perfect. What do we want? Give me an outcome. Do we want guns to be restricted or do we want guns to be not restricted?

I think right now the ball is in the court of the people. They've made a big swing and they say we want banning assault weapons or something like that. So that's a popular one, I think.

Okay, so then like what we do is we start off with gun safety. Paul, do we believe in gun safety?

Right. Of course we do. Right. Yes. Yeah.

And so, Paul, do we believe that the people who don't believe in gun safety or sorry, the people who disagree with us don't believe in gun safety?

And then like the license to we just goes from there. Like I can just keep on going with it as much as you want. And before you know it, like we'll take an outcome that was completely disjointed from the license to we.

But you've been because of the seg, you've been strung along the entire way, along with like minded people who were responding to virtue signals and no action towards an outcome, at which point then the leader and the man who carries the license to we has achieved his outcome.

So like we can do this here in Bitcoin, but we have to decide what it is we want. And we have to decide who's coming with us and who's the whole. Yeah, well, it's easy. You can't have that conversation. It depends. But you still like if it's easy, if it's that easy, then the opponent can just copy it in the alternate direction. Right. So there's a little bit more complicated than that.

I've been watching this and I agree that's more complicated than that. But like it's so like I've been kind of like looking at some of the stuff more like you find like people don't evaluate ideas at all. So like they evaluate people. And like I see this a lot in the feminism stuff. And maybe this is new. I don't know. But like I'm literally seeing these feminist outcomes now that are effectively segregation list.

And it's hilarious to me because if you look at what the outcomes are, it's like segregation is the outcome of what was originally a pro assimilation belief. And and like I'm like watching this, like I'm the only person who can understand this. And I think I'm going crazy sometimes because it's like very obvious to me. And other people are champing it the whole way because they believed in people.

They believed in the people around them who also had that same belief in people. And they found that joining in was the less risky cause. So like we could do that here by casting affinities into this notion of we under the lead of some charismatic leader like that doesn't that doesn't there's not going to be.

Back to the Machiavellian like imperative here where it's like, should we use every dirty trick? Or should there be a line that's not crossed?

Like how easy it is to change people's minds or whether or not people are even persuaded by arguments or if whether what they're really persuaded by is that they're worried about like how humiliating it's going to be.

To be clear, Paul, I didn't make this accessible here. You, the people watching the show are not the hoi polloi. Like you are people who are have been through this episode thus far. You know who I am. You know who Paul is. This is a conversation amongst us.

I get that the herein is a manifestation of the license to we. But like, this is the way it seems to be. Sorry, continue, Paul. I was talking to them. Well, yeah, that's funny. I mean, we'll see like how well that holds up after it gets shared. You know, I'm going to be inspected like like if I took this video private at this point, like that'd be great.

Like I, I don't like whitewashing stuff, but like somebody has to have these conversations because right now there's chaos.

It's still okay. It's good that the number two project is Ethereum because Ethereum is such a giant nonsense machine that is just totally crazy that that's not as good. Bitcoin cash is a much stronger competitor to Bitcoin core than Ethereum is. And so I'm not.

But it is, I think there is a lot of stuff. There are many instances where things just aren't known. People don't know things. And they don't know like about this, you know, kind of leadership or community management or whatever you want to call this weird new thing.

It's hard for me to even talk about it because, again, I just think it should all just be inside chains and I would just solve the problem. People will never, people will always disagree because there's always so much to learn and talk about. So people will always disagree in general. I don't think we'll ever reach like a nirvana where everyone agrees about it.

No, of course. But but politics is like the art of consensus. I mean, it is sort of proof of stake model. It's weird. No, politics is the art of consensus.

Yeah. And I mean, like something I was thinking of, I would start doing. I don't think I will, but it would be hilarious if I could just start saying that I represent Bitcoin core. And the nature of the politics right now is so crazy that anybody who would take that title from me would bear greater social risk than not claiming it. Right. So then I could I can march into the nihilistic sort of chaos that we have.

Declare myself leader of Bitcoin core, run unopposed and and take the hoi poi with me, hoi polloi with me. And like, I'm not going to do that unless I do it through the irony. Yeah, well, exactly. And like, what's also interesting, too, is that like I've seen this time and time again, this is very blockchain specific. If I do it with the irony, people won't oppose me. If I sit here and I say, like, this is funny.

People who oppose you because they don't get that you're joking. So it'd be funny. Right. Yeah. I think you should do it. I mean, what what's the downside?

For me, nothing like reputationally, I don't really care because, like, I've always been this sort of antagonist.

What's the downside?

Yes.

I don't I don't think there is any. I mean, what's funny is that I could very easily just I could see myself finagling like a television appearance or something out of it if we did it right.

You know, but it comes down to the community and how much they want to laugh. That's the thing about me.

If you imagine if you sold it, you sold the meme successfully, but then people dig up all of your other crazy videos where you're doing all this, this crazy nonsense.

And they have, oh, here's a clip of the guy behind Bitcoin. And it's I don't know, like, what would be your craziest clip that would be difficult to.

Well, I want to, like, groom somebody. I really, really want to take some with a pristine reputation and just like March.

And I love I love, like, experimenting with people. You know, I see what, like, Steve Bannon couldn't be president or like Karl Rove couldn't be.

She's just fine because, like, find like an actor or someone and just hire them.

Someone who is a pristine record like like you would be perfect. I got you. I'm not I'm not I'm not actually.

See, I'm not because the side chain thing is is anti it's not Republican.

It's just it's whatever it's what's good for the people. And so that's what's not good for the Republican Party.

By definition, everyone's got a little bit.

See, yeah, that's it. Right. That flaw is even better because it's so people.

You got to watch out. The bullshit detector can go off.

Like if I put some guy out there who, like, just looked like the Winklevoss, like exactly and had no history prior.

And that would be a little bit like weird. I mean, that is how we find our fakes.

The flaws do make people a little bit more human, you know, more relatable.

Well, people like the sort of like reformed story.

You know, the narrator, like the guy who, like, went left.

Yeah, I learned everyone knows their own mistakes and they want they secretly want they project their own reform.

But like, oh, that's like me when I made all those mistakes in the past.

I was a different person, but now I'm perfect.

Exactly. Right. Exactly.

That risk, you've been de-risked of that option now that you've gone through the trenches, come back reformed.

So, yeah, we could we could do that with you.

Paul, do you want to be the leader of Bitcoin?

I don't think so. Right. Because I feel like that's going to lead to interesting, like, mafia conversations or something.

Right. There's no other. Giacomo is also talking about.

You should vehemently you should vehemently protest that position because that would make it maximally, maximally funny.

And then people would start promoting you.

And then Bitcoin Core wouldn't know what to do because you didn't ask to be that person.

Right. Some some some like banal like platitude like that.

It just it has a lot of room for growth.

I think that the audience can decide how much they want to see something.

Yeah, I would like to know how much because my guess is not very much.

But we'll see. You'd be surprised.

There's a guy in here called Mayor of Bitcoin right now.

Mayor of Bitcoin. That is good. He does get it.

He does get it. That's good. No, I actually think that would be funny.

I would not want to be like I want to be someone like it's just a slightly weirder title.

It's like Mayor of Bitcoin is kind of like that's a kind of perfect.

You know, it's that person is doing really well.

You know, I like Rick Falk being like the CEO of Bitcoin.

Just a little too serious.

He's dialed back.

Say it again?

Rick Falk being. Remember he wrote the letter about he was CEO of Bitcoin or CEO of Bitcoin Cash or whatever he was.

That's the thing. You can't come in here with too much reverie.

CEO is too much. You got to be mayor. That's Mayor of Bitcoin.

It's a small town but it's growing, you know.

It's got to be the right kind of bed.

It's got to be like an opening of the door to where like people can take it as either a joke or real.

And then it just kind of like propels from there. That's the use.

You got to get the joke people and the real people temporarily before they're like, oh, it's a joke.

I knew the whole time. That's what they would say.

Yeah, like I think what did I see recently?

Like useless token.

Useless Ethereum token or something like that as like a market cap.

Yeah, we had like dust coin, like idiot coin or whatever.

Of course, they all did.

I don't know how well they really did, but they appeared to do okay.

Yeah, I don't know.

I have to think about what fake leadership title I would find to be perfectly appropriate.

I think what your strategy should be is reluctance.

Yeah.

Reluctant leaders are the best number one.

People can rally around them.

So when the joke becomes real, then it can be like…

Can I be like Reluctant Chancellor of the Exchequer?

No, I think you should just not want the title.

You should just be like, this is crazy.

I don't want this title.

It would be a funny meme.

My friends and family would get a huge kick out of it.

Yeah, I think everybody would if you played your cards right.

And you just like actually didn't want the job for long enough.

Well, that's the joke.

It's like, what is the job?

As I just explained, I really think Satoshi thought of everything.

We don't really need to do anything.

So it's like I'm in a way more qualified.

When people can't rationalize, they will trust the prime believer.

And that's what the job is, like spiritual leader.

Oh, that would be funny.

Yeah.

No, actually, that would be great.

Spiritual leader.

There you go, spiritual leader of Bitcoin or Bitcoin coin.

I feel like almost Luke Jr. is the spiritual leader.

So, you know, the interesting thing about the engineers is I'm kind of figuring this out.

Engineers are weirdly the most faith-based people, albeit they're also the most loyal.

So like, this is my own theory.

I haven't quite figured this out yet.

But you look at some of these people who like are engineers.

They're often like super religious people.

And I think it's because in a lot of ways they have the most faith.

But they adhere to whatever they heard first.

And frankly, that's one of the things we also, this discussion is like who gets to who first.

Because these new people are showing up and like EOS gets to them first.

Ethereum gets to them first.

Times Square.

So engineers and scientists are very different, actually.

So scientists are about the unknown and they're very comfortable with ambiguity.

And they're just trying to say, well, let's try this theory out and maybe let's try this experiment.

Oh, this suggests maybe there's a Higgs boson.

Maybe there's not, though.

Who knows, whatever.

Engineers, they actually, it's very similar to, you know, being like a Bible study or something.

They learn this stuff from a book.

And they've never had anything in their life that contradicts what they learned in like a static textbook.

So when they build a bridge, they just take all that stuff as true.

And so engineering and science are very different.

And I think another point to your point that you were sort of saying about them being loyal is engineers, they don't have a lot of, oh, this is going to be, you know, I don't want to say they don't have a lot of like social skills.

But they just, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

So I think they are really vulnerable.

They don't, it's like they don't have a good immune system for like, I don't know what you might call, what you might call this.

But like loyalty-based attacks or something.

They just, you know, they're kind of like, what is it, Robin Hanson had a little line about like some people like onions, and they have a lot of layers.

It's continuous.

But other people are like eggs.

And once you get through, I think the engineers are like eggs.

Once you get through, then you're in.

And that's it.

You're in.

You're into the yolk.

And that's it.

You can just inject all your crazy ideas in there.

And that's it.

Man, I got to think of like, we got to think like the kids more.

I hate to say it that way because I did this talk for the kids.

And like, it's obvious that like that's a battleground.

You know, I don't love it.

But I don't think we should be like advocating that we get to them.

But we should be at least considering it like as an 18.

See, Giacomo criticized projects that emphasize marketing.

And I don't know what to make of that thought because like, what is marketing?

You know, like that's kind of hard to say.

But I kind of understand what he was getting at,

which is that if you invest in a resource into marketing,

then you spend a dollar on marketing, you know,

you make the sign and you paint the thing on it.

Whether or not you paint Democrat or Republican or Green Party

or just some random nonsense letters, it's kind of the same.

So it's necessarily not really a fundamental information sharing type thing

that you do when you do marketing.

So it's kind of a zero-sum game for attention.

And it's not good.

The 18-year-olds have like tons of sweat equity.

Like you and I are not putting in tons of sweat equity into some of these projects.

But the 18-year-olds sure as hell will.

But I think like can we do it a different way, you know, that's not marketing?

Can we have a better idea?

I really think, you know, side chains is one way.

I liked, you know, when you guys did the show and you did the scammies,

like stuff like that, I think that helps, you know,

and you have this defense of that bad idea.

There's no room for skepticism anymore.

It's ridiculous.

I know the market is shocking.

I think the market is bigger, but as a percentage, it's plunged so much

that I'm not sure how people would take one look at it

and they'd look at the view count or something.

It's also tough fucking work.

People throw eggs at you like, God, like not that I can't take it,

but like I'll be damned if I'm going to put this many hours into something.

Like I'd rather go ahead and build something at this point.

And not that I'm going to start an ICO or anything nonsense like that,

but like, you know, build morale or something like that at least

than deal with some of the skepticism work.

Well, yeah, of course it's difficult because you're going against these people.

Well, I mean, in a lot of sense, it's a lost cause.

I mean, can anyone imagine really going?

Like what if you went to like the Democratic National Convention

and you went down and you tried to convince those people

to become like libertarians or something?

Like what a total waste of time that is, right?

Exactly.

That's a waste of time.

Yeah.

So obviously going for the young, it's more efficient if you go for the young,

but everyone's going to go for the young.

So it's like everyone's figured that out.

But we have to keep up.

That's the battleground.

These kids are jumping in and they believe that they can't get into Bitcoin

because those gains have been won.

And on top of that, as you've experienced,

there's not a lot of warm reception coming out of the Bitcoin camp from them.

Granted, I can come up with tons of shit for them to do,

and I bet you even Bitcoin core programmers or whatever you want to call them

can as well, but there's no interface by which we can control these people.

And you know what?

The truth is we've got to separate some of these people out.

Immigration should not be completely unencumbered.

We have to say this guy can come, that guy can't.

But good luck trying to get consensus on that.

I agree with a lot of what you said.

What did we miss?

What did we miss?

What else should we talk about?

What did we do?

Did we get through most of our stuff here?

I don't know.

Who knows what we did or not.

Oh, my USB mouse went crazy, so I have to scroll.

Mouse.

The keyboard.

Do you think blockchain is a programming language for people?

I get so much slack for that, but I maintain it.

Oh, no.

I'm so glad you brought that up.

Did you put that in these notes?

I don't think so.

So I was going to say, if I was going to do, I was thinking about, yeah, what I would say

if I did my own podcast or something, and I was thinking like the second episode or

something would be, Bitcoin is not written in C++.

Because I don't think it is.

That's true.

I don't think it is.

My real estate agent was like, what is blockchain, Chris?

I'm like, you don't need to know.

It's really complicated.

No, really, Chris, what is it?

I'm like, well, it's a programming language, but rather than like program computers, you

program people.

Yeah, I know.

And I realize that's really what I think it is.

And what I'm realizing is people show up with greed, and it's like, oh, you have greed.

Wonderful.

And now I can take an assessment of what it is that you're greedy about, what you value,

and I can steer you in a direction based on that.

And that's how the instructions are fed into your computer cell.

And I'm not immune from this.

Also, that applies to the free market in general, or whatever.

Yeah, I think it's a good thing.

In hunter-gatherer societies, how did you motivate people if not through this state

of greed?

And then how do you coordinate them if not through some propensity to be led?

Because, again, in this sort of model of the show, the hoi polloi, I hate to be classist,

but we have to realize that there was a certain level of...

Cognitive function, ethic, socioeconomic privilege, call it whatever the fuck you want. But it's sort of allegiance and adherence to a unified identity that is becoming less and less the case. And that's okay. But what can we give these people to do? Because right now, some of them are just doing nonsense.

I'm not sure. Again, I think it's similar to what I was saying before, where I don't know that Bitcoin needs to be defended. And I think that oftentimes, it is a fake thing that we say in order to make ourselves seem more important. Like, we've got to do all this work to defend Bitcoin or whatever, protect these people.

If they go into bad projects, they will waste their time, and the project will explode and fail. But I think there is a difference now in that we have... There is a risk of... Ethereum could be so dumb, and it could appeal to so many of the hoi polloi, that it could possibly be like the QWERTY keyboard or something, where at the end of the day, a lot of this stuff doesn't matter.

You can make darknet purchases with Ether. It's not like you can't. So you still can.

Right. I totally agree. Post-Dow Fork, Ethereum has demonstrated that there are actually a bunch of people in charge who can make decisions.

Now, that comes with its own set of risks, which is like that those people get kidnapped by the mafia and tortured to death for their money or something. But see, that hasn't happened. So it's exactly the case of the antibiotics or the censorship. It's exactly that just iterated again, where, well, maybe we live in a world where you can...

You know, it's strange. You would think that, based on my conversation with Jason Seibert and with you and all this other stuff that we all know, you'd think that Vitalik would be in prison for violating SEC laws or something.

For whatever reason, that hasn't happened. So it's like if you can convince people that your project is really, really big, the laws don't apply to you, or at least the regulators get nervous about applying the laws because they don't understand what's going on.

So it's exactly this principle of what you've built has to match the threats in the environment. And if some of those threats aren't there, or they are there, or whatever, then you may need to include or not include things.

Well, I think we've covered all the big stuff for today. I don't know that we got a lot of conclusions.

I don't know either.

I just think we need more organization of like-minded, non-Bitcoin cash people. And not because I don't like the Bitcoin cash people. Actually, I have really no problem with Bitcoin cash.

This notion that they're competing with us, I think it's really stupid. Because what kind of denialism, I think, does a person have to be a part of that they see Bitcoin cash as a bigger antagonist than any of these other coins?

And like, I love Monero. This is also what's hilarious. I love Monero. I think you love Monero. I think most Bitcoin core proponents love Monero. But the reality is that Monero probably competes more with Bitcoin core than Bitcoin cash does.

Well, I think you have the separate issues. It's like, will they compete in terms of your investment, your personal wealth, not doing very well. So in that sense, they all compete directly.

I agree. I think that what it really is is the fact that there's a religious component here, or at least a faith-based component. And it's more offensive to people's morality that Bitcoin cash exists. And it's completely decoupled from an assessment of risks.

Which I can come up with narratives for the hoi polloi to believe. And if we just say them, they will. So I don't know why we don't just do that.

Like, if we all voted and we all said, okay, let's hear me out. I know it's stupid, but if we all voted that minor centralization was the biggest problem, I'll come up with a narrative that we can all agree to that promotes motivated ignorance in a number of ways that will achieve that outcome.

And, you know, there's a lack of coordination. I don't know what can be said of that.

But instead, we've reverted to, honestly, what is just like veer hatred in a lot of ways. So much so that if like veer says not to do something, that's what you'll do. Which is hilarious, because now he controls. If you profess to hate this man, why would you give him this power? I don't hate him.

Well, I think you and I both like him.

Yeah, I do.

He's very honest. He really wants Bitcoin to succeed.

He's bringing more people to Bitcoin. He still is. I don't care what the fuck you say.

I'd rather Roger Ver do cash than a noob use Litecoin. And I even kind of, whatever with Litecoin.

No, I feel the same way. Well, and I also feel that he's not, you know, Giacomo tried to cast him as irrelevant, but I don't, I doubt it.

He's not irrelevant. And the irony to me is that by hating him, you've now created, you've created more power there. Because like, there's this notion of like valence, or valence, I think it's pronounced valence. So like, if you're ambivalent, you have no valence.

Yes.

In psychological terms, maybe you know more about this than I do. But like, if you hate Ver, and then Ver asserts a positive valence on an idea, you will hate that idea.

Right.

So like, regardless of who you recognize the leader is, like, as long as he exists as an entity with which you have strong emotions, he will steer you.

It's like the case of the burning Republican convention building, but just in reverse, where someone, the Democratic guy says, like, oh, I love the Ritz Carlton, it's the best hotel. And then like, no one can stay there, because if they did, it would be, it would send a mixed signal.

Like, are they saying that because they like the Ritz Carlton or because they are trying to switch sides? So it's your flake. But yeah, you're right. It's so dumb. The whole thing is dumb. I wish people would be more aware of how blatantly political they are. Like, almost everything that is said is a campaign.

I'm going crazy over here, because like, I'm watching these people, and I'm just, I know I'm not stupid on some of this stuff, but it's like, okay, but they're just new. So I don't know, it'd be nice if we had, if we had some organization on like, hierarchy, so we could have conversations amongst ourselves.

I think you should create a different character. That would be funny.

I agree. I was thinking about doing like a perversion of my name, maybe like Roman, you know, so it'd be like, I don't know, anyway. But like, if ideally what I'd like to do with the channel is, and I'm not going to do this because it's me, but I could have groomed someone to become a more charismatic leader, given all the bullshit that I've done over the years to test the limits.

Instead, what I'll be doing is I'll create a different Chris DeRose identity, that like, I'm going to try to keep a play with on this channel. And for the noobs that come across it, it'll be like the first thing, my hope is it's the first thing they hear, so they anchor to me. And then I'll promote them towards civility in a way that I think is responsible, to be clear. And in comportance with, I think, a lot of the people watching, this is their values.

But yeah, it would be like eight minute stuff. It's just like easy. This is why we came here. This is what to think. And this is how we believe. And then just kind of march them up from there. And that's basically what I'm doing, is creating a march in the chaos. But, you know, we'll see if that's what ends up materializing. But I think that's what you need.

We do need it would be nice if we had there's no like, Bitcoin textbook or something like that. You know, we have like Andreas's thing, but it's like for programmers. And I don't know if it's even helpful for programmers to read that a lot of people say they like the book, but I don't know if they really like it or what it what about it is that they like, we do need like a Bitcoin textbook that acknowledges more about the community of Bitcoin. And

I would just ask the engineers like engineers, dudes, you guys are fucking the ones have to do everything at the end of the day. What what what do you want me to out what outcome do you want me to achieve? And like, don't tell me what to believe. Don't tell them what to believe. Tell me what you want to happen. And then we'll work from there. And then we'll make it happen. You know,

yeah, I suppose. But then how would you resolve disputes among engineers?

And from there, we can see a general, either, you know, an illusion of control from that class, or at least greater adherence to party lines.

That's a great idea. I don't think it's ever been tried, which might speak to how bad the idea actually is. But the idea was that the people making the decisions would never be able to own any property or they would never be able to do so their interests would always be pure because they would not be able to they just get bread and water every day. And they'd be protected by a different class.

Yeah, them is elements gold, silver and bronze. This sounds like a damn crazy idea. I love it nutty. I like it. Actually, I think it applies to the blockchain itself. Kind of where the blockchain is the gold people, but the gold people would they would make the decisions they'd be trained in philosophy at a young age, and they could leave at any time, I think, and be part of the other groups that you could go in one direction, but not the other. But I'm not actually sure if that's the right because we have the revolving door problem.

And I think maybe it's not right. Maybe you could only move between gold and silver. Silver is basically like the police. And they guard their jobs to guard the gold people and enforce the laws as written. But it's kind of applies in the Supreme Court a little bit to where they you know, lifetime appointment, whatever they say goes, they're guarded, they get their stuff, but they don't. They can't like profit immensely from their judgments or something.

I mean, I'm watching people in the channel, like, I think most people are fairly aligned on some of this, but like, okay, so like, guess just dots here. And he says that Chris wants to program young newcomers to cryptos his minds and like, no, guess not. We want that's the thing we want to you do too. Like if we like if we all come to like the idea, the idea isn't like the crystal rose wants this. The idea is that we want to hear what it is.

It'll be very difficult, like if the time ever comes, or there's a conflict between the communities, desires and your own, we would any rational person would expect you to even if you didn't realize it, you would go with your own thing. And that's why people are wary of putting anyone in a position of being like the speaker.

Absolutely. No, I completely agree. People don't appreciate it enough that that's it's called poppers governance, ideal governance that that's it, you get to give it a thumbs down, right? And that's why.

It's not the worst thing that Trump was elected at all. He, in fact, is very healthy in a lot of ways. But the, the referendum is just what it really does. It's great, because the election of Donald Trump gives us some, some expectation or some feeling that the Democrats will bring a stronger game next time.

They'll bring us, they won't bring the stupid game. Well, we don't know how dumb, you know, they might never, never, you know, you they can always be dumber than you think. But, but we would hope that they, the new the next guy will be someone who more convincingly cares about next candidate, be someone who more convincingly cares about like real economic problems.

And the miracle of like the American government, in my mind, is that everyone believes they have control. It's this illusion of control.

Well, I don't want to say that it's a mirror. I don't want to say it's like perfect or whatever, you know, it's not, it has a lot of flaws.

Well, I agree. But if we could, if we could create the same illusion of control in Bitcoin.

I've seen that, you know, we do that with technology, with the side chains. And again, people have never, people always disagree.

And there will always be a fixed cost to change. So we'll not, we won't be able to make every change.

So maybe the solution is to, is to enable Bitcoin playground that is the side chain playground.

And through that playground, people can either, you know, at some level compete for inclusion with the class of engineering.

Well, I think the fork futures idea is also one where, you know, it's reasonably easy to set up.

I don't know who knows how many weird laws you're breaking, the CFTC or something, because those laws are, you know, let's face it.

I have no idea how they intersect with the blockchain world at all.

Like where someone can just create futures contracts, you know, in an afternoon with their C++ compiler.

But they are something where you can just, you can know what some people want this.

Some people want, oh, no, they do, they want proof of stake.

And then you find out, oh, no, no one wants that.

And then it's laughable because you have this, the stigma of this, of this, these two prices, you know, you have the 85 and you have the 15 in the case of SegWit2x.

And that's it. That's what you got. And I believe those numbers.

And look, it's actually, isn't it shocking that Bitcoin Cash, I think, is trended in between like 10 and 20% of the market cap of Bitcoin Core, kind of unexpected outcome.

But it's tracked that 15% number very reliably.

And that's not a zero, but it's not 51 either. It's low.

Let me add it this way.

Do you believe that Bitcoin's ascendancy is guaranteed or not?

And if not, do we recognize that these strategies for organization are being done with competing coins?

And is there room for that?

Yeah, OK, right.

I realize we're not really talking about what you're trying.

And I think what you're talking about is really important.

Like, so Bitcoin Core, is it guaranteed?

I think definitely no, nothing is really ever guaranteed.

But in particular, we have this situation where the dominance index is below 50%.

The others category, how can there be an unassailable network effect?

When look at the others category, it's gone from being nothing, slowly up.

People will say, oh, these are ICO projects that don't matter.

These projects are very small.

Like, it's not really driven by dumb projects that are zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero percent.

This, the others category includes like real projects like Zcash or Zcoin, these other weird stuff like that.

So that's, those are things.

Since it's long distributed, a lot of the dumb projects are just dust and they're not picked up anywhere.

But the others is now the number two.

It's 20%.

It's more than Ethereum.

I don't actually know.

I checked it like last week and we've had a crazy couple of days, haven't we?

So I don't know where it is right now.

Ripple's up 12.6% in the last 24 hours.

But look at the dominance index.

Cardano's up 23%.

Look at the dominance index and look at where the others is and see if it's above.

You see, it's been above Ethereum for like the last,

consistently for like the last month or like last three months or so.

And so how can you, someone say we have an unassailable network effect when the lowest group is consistently gaining over years,

over years and years, and the biggest group is plummeting.

And then we have the others, these other things.

We have the other nexus of Ethereum and Ripple show up and they have big chunks of it.

Litecoin still has 4% somehow or whatever the percentage is.

I don't remember.

Bitcoin Cash has, maybe it was Bitcoin Cash has four and Litecoin has two or something.

I can't remember the precise figures, but we don't see,

we see a world where people want to try out things in different blockchains and then they,

well, that's weird that you say that you don't believe that core and cash compete,

but then you say you want to start up a, like a media empire.

That's like a rock type.

I want to, I want to expand the Overton window on, on this topic is really what I want.

And I don't think, I don't think that Bitcoin Cash and core compete as much as,

you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I think I agree with that.

Yeah, I think.

Yeah.

Because so in the issue, in the interest of like, you know, ecumenical Bitcoining,

I wouldn't mind seeing like a Bitcoin party or a pro Bitcoin organization.

I wouldn't mind that being a Bitcoin core thing or not.

But I think that has to be a function of a problem, right?

You have to have a problem first, like the block size debate,

and then there's two different takes on that.

So I think that's a weird way of putting it.

So I think you'd have to pick your problem first.

And then you have to not be afraid of once it's solved, shutting down the party.

Because people don't do that.

That's always the thing.

People never do that, right.

Because a lot of people are addicted.

They're addicted to the problem.

That's the, that's the problem of the SJWs.

Of course.

That they don't want the problem to really be solved,

because then how would they go to their charity gala?

Or what would they do with their, you know, time?

What's their identity at that point?

It's fighting this war.

And we have, I really think we have that in, in Bitcoin.

Do you think we, I think we absolutely have,

well, it's maybe only a sidechains type thing,

but I think that we have something like that going on right now.

People don't want.

We do have it in, in Bitcoin core.

Okay.

And I think it's great that we do.

It's, it's the, it's the willful and motivated ignorance in that,

like there is no party that I think is the bigger issue.

Because I believe that there is a party and I believe in the party.

And I know that the people of the party right now are saying,

shut the fuck up, Chris.

Right, exactly.

And you guys.

No, but it's funny, right?

You know, that's, that's kind of like we,

if you have two rooms, room A and room B,

the person walks into room A and you there, you have all,

you have signs, core and cash,

and you invite people in and they go to their right room

and then you take the labels off.

And then you have, you know,

the alien visit from outer space or something.

He goes into the first room.

Everyone in that room will say,

you know, they'll say like,

oh, we have the real, you know,

we don't listen to those other people.

We're right.

There is only, there's only one valid point of view and it's ours.

And then they'll even go in the other room

and then they'll hear exactly the same thing,

just with the words switched around.

All right.

I got to piss like a racehorse.

I say we wrap this episode up.

We talked about a bunch of stuff,

super political today, but I appreciate it.

You're great, Paul.

Well, you know, I happen to be.

Where can people find out more about you?

I don't know.

Nowhere.

Follow me on Twitter.

Truthcoin, T-R-U-T-H.

That's not, I always hate giving that up, you know,

because it always seems like I'm trying to claim a monopoly on truth,

but it's not.

It's just my projects.

It's my white paper's title.

Well, you're our spiritual leader, Paul.

Spiritual leader.

And I can change it, but no one can spell my last name.

So what am I supposed to do?

I guess I could change to Paul Sports if that,

I didn't think of that,

but I think someone has, I think someone has taken that actually.

Can you, I don't think you can copy, right?

So we'll have to see about that.

Maybe it'll be Paul Sports, BTC.

I'm sure everyone's going to, everyone's going to claim a billion of those,

but if they watch this video.

All right, Paul, I gotta pee.

Okay, it's been fun.

Guys, if you, if you found this outrageous, outrageous,

leave your comments below, tell everybody,

or if you liked them, if you liked the video,

you can tell me that too.

You know, the truth is that I come from an era

where exploring ideas in and of itself was worth doing for that reason alone.

And now the hoi polloi is making that a difficult thing.

And it's just not, it's not exactly the way things once were.

And maybe, maybe I'm the problem.

I get that, but I don't know.

I think there's a time and place for it.

Do you think there's a time and place for it, Paul?

Time and place for what?

Discovering that doing science and deleting errors from your ideas

and making your map of the world more accurate?

Yes.

What else would you do with your time?

Okay.

I don't know.

Promote, promote politics.

I know, but for what purpose?

Like, it doesn't matter, right?

And Plato was right.

The life of the mind is the only,

the only good is knowledge of the truth.

I like that.

He is right.

He is right.

Thanks for coming on.

All right, guys.

I'll see you later.

I got, oh, you know who I got coming on Friday?

You'll like this.

Robin Hanson.

Oh my God.

Are you seriously getting him to come on your show?

Oh my God.

Yep.

He comes out on Friday.

If you have any questions for him, why don't you let me know what they are?

And I'll probably be able to fit those in.

I've been reading his blog for like 12 years or whatever.

All right.

I got to start reading that now.

I know him very well.

Oh my God.

I don't even know.

I don't know if I should warn him or you about what you're going to get into.

Okay.

That's great.

I'm glad we didn't talk about, I'm glad we didn't talk too much about motivated ignorance

because you can talk about it with him.

He's the maestro.

So.

Wonderful.

I look forward to that.

Great.

Great.

Peace out party people.

Okay.