There will be no real non-controlled currency in the world.

Because a lot of people from some propaganda hate Bitcoin Cash.

It's a fair market, especially for Bitcoin Cash is having fun, staying poor.

Today, BCH, $208.34, which is down.

One BTC sat buys an amazing 308.5 BCH sats, and one ETH is 806 mega sats, also down there.

Selene, 30 days, is 671, and the Tokenaut TVL is actually doing pretty well at 16,284.

Today, we have a panel of our BTC sibling chain guests to update us on all the latest of what's happening in BTC world

and what BCH is doing wrong and needs to do better to win them over.

This has been inspired by Vlad, who did an eight-hour marathon stream recently featuring a whole bunch of BCH guests.

It's a fantastic stream. Go check it out if you haven't watched it.

The whole thing is actually really, really good.

But we are here to return the favor.

So welcome to the show, starting with you, Vlad.

How did you get into Bitcoin?

Hi. So just for the record, I've always wanted to be on CoinSpice.

It's been my dream since I was a teenager.

Vin Armani, you seem to have lost some weight, and Colin, you grew your hair.

It's very strange.

But I guess people change over time, and everything changes.

And I changed, too. I'm fatter than I was 10 years ago when I was watching CoinSpice, hoping that I would one day join CoinSpice.

You'll have to resurrect it. We've got to get those guys to come back, you know?

We've got to convince them.

Are we going to get the weather report from Mike and Space?

I mean, CoinSpice, I also really enjoyed those guys, especially the BSV hash war stream,

which has now, I think, even been taken offline.

So I'm really hoping we can dig up an archived copy of that,

because that is an amazing piece of Bitcoin history for anyone that remembers that one.

Yeah, I think that was the peak of...

I think Bitcoin had Bitcoin Uncensored, and Bitcoin Cash had CoinSpice.

And that was the most fun we've ever had in this space.

Then the bankers came, and they took over, in a sense.

Now we're dealing with sailor narratives and trying to please the suits and whatever.

Paul wants to join the stream. Do you have a link for me to share?

Yeah, it's just in the group there.

In any case, Vlad, give us the story. How did you get into Bitcoin?

Man, it's a long story.

But it's a story of dismissing it and then looking at it again a year later or something.

So I remember I first read about Bitcoin in 2013, but at the time I was doing my bachelor thesis, I think.

I think the timeline checks out. I started university in 2011, so yeah.

And I was very much interested in internet privacy.

Here in Romania, there was this bill that was going to pass called ACTA, which was going to limit access to the internet.

And the purpose was to destroy piracy, which is very well embedded into the culture in my country and in lots of parts from Eastern Europe.

I don't think many of us would have learned English and got jobs in computer-related stuff if it wasn't for the piracy of the 90s and the 2000s.

And I actually got 100,000 signatures online. This was the peak of collectivism.

But people actually signed that, and I was a celebrity for a week because of that.

And I was serious about it. I looked into ways to make my internet connection more private.

I was looking into VPNs and whatever.

And I stumbled upon Bitcoin on a meme page of all places.

It was called 9gag.com. And there was this meme from Cyanide and Happiness.

It's a series of comic books, which basically presented a burglar going to a normal person saying, give me all your money.

The burglar, of course, had that sock covering his face because that's how you distinguish, I guess, villains from normal people.

And the person basically said, I don't have any money. I just have Bitcoin.

And then the burglar handed him some dollars and said, oh, take this. You need it.

It reminds me of, I always like that one of the guy and it's the government tax collector comes to him and says, give me all your money.

And the guy says, I only have Bitcoins. And the government tax collector says, that's not real money.

And then the guy says, good. And then they both look at each other.

And then the tax collector is like, give me all your Bitcoins.

And I'm like, that is the best meme about the value of Bitcoin is money.

It is funny. But I looked at what Bitcoin is at the time.

I remember I just came back from a Deep Purple concert here in Bucharest.

And yeah, Deep Purple, like old people, they're in their 70s, but still a rocking concert.

I looked at Bitcoin on Wikipedia and it said it's for banking the unbanked and the third world and whatever the narrative was at the time.

And I thought to myself, oh, you know, I have a bank account. I can send money to whoever I want.

I'm not unbanked. So why do I need Bitcoin? Anyway, it's stupid.

And then I stumbled upon some FUD article saying that it's going to die and blah, blah.

I was like, OK, it's just maybe that the meme people on 9GAG were right.

But I went to Paris two years later. I was an exchange student.

And one of our professors, Lex Paulson, he had a class about advocacy for new and emerging technologies.

And my group was assigned to do a presentation about Bitcoin.

And it was kind of amazing that I did my homework.

I did the presentation in front of the class explaining about the 21 million cap and how the blockchain works and blah, blah, blah.

But I treated this as homework, so I didn't practice what I preached.

I did my advocacy part. I got a good grade.

And then I looked at the Bitcoin price. It was like three hundred.

No, I think it was five hundred dollars at that point in 2015 or 16.

No, it was 15. And that was basically what I was paying for rent.

And I was eating McDonald's meals for 10 euro a day.

So I was on a very tight budget.

I was also thinking that I need to buy a whole Bitcoin if I wanted to get in.

I was like, probably not a good time.

But a year later, I actually wanted to buy. I had some savings.

I was back home. Maybe I had like two hundred dollars.

I wanted to buy Bitcoin. And then there was that article from Mike Hearn who said that Bitcoin is a failed project.

And I congratulated myself. I said, you know, Vlad, you're actually smart.

You didn't buy this. It's a failed project. It never went anywhere.

But I was spending a lot of time on the Silk Road at the time.

Not for buying, but for researching what's going on.

And there are a lot of websites on the dark web like Intel Exchange, which had supposedly information given away by government agents or whatever, exposing conspiracies and whatever.

UFO pages. I was spending a lot of time because I was doing my master thesis this time around about Internet governance.

And this was like a chapter in my thesis about the dark web and what's happening there.

So, of course, a lot of the economy there was fueled by Bitcoin.

And I don't know why I had this mental... How should I put it?

I did not make the connection between Bitcoin being used and then someone saying that it failed.

Why does the opinion of a developer matter as long as there is an entire underground economy that's using it?

This proves that it's really not a failed project. It works.

I didn't know the whole context of the block size wars. I've learned about everything years later.

I've read pretty much everything I could, including Roger Ver's book, which I think I got my hands on like two years ago.

And finally, the moment when I decided to buy Bitcoin was when the price went back to $1,000.

And that was when I realized, OK, there's a disconnect here between what I'm being told in terms of media narratives and also what's happening on markets.

The market is telling me that everyone else is wrong and maybe that there's more to this than I initially thought.

And then I spent most of 2017 investing in ICOs and chip coins that never went anywhere because I had a job and I was making money.

And I also watched from the sidelines what was happening with the Bitcoin Cash Fork, SegWit2x.

I was super confused. Bitcoin.com became a Bitcoin Cash website.

Our Bitcoin was a Bitcoin website, but our BTC was a Bitcoin Cash, what do you call these Reddit pages? Subreddit.

Subreddit, yeah.

So it was confusing. Then in 2018, I guess I picked sides and it made sense for me that we're going to have lightning and layers and whatever.

Like the internet scales in layers, so why shouldn't Bitcoin?

And I was very hopeful about this until I actually used lightning and I ran a node and I did all of that.

And then I still kept the hope that it's going to get better, but it never did.

And it just became more deranged in this sense.

Like, don't worry, we'll fix it.

Well, it's not efficient in its current state. Maybe we should centralize it more.

You shouldn't run your home node from a Raspberry Pi.

Let data centers run it.

It's fine if layer twos are centralized as long as we keep the block size small and anyone can run a node.

And then it becomes absurd to the point that, yes, anyone can run a node, but it's not very useful for being used as money.

And in the meantime, we get ETFs and the bankers start controlling the narrative.

And I don't recognize anyone anymore.

I remember two years ago when I went to Nashville, and that was my first time in the U.S., my first time at a United States conference, which I understand are bigger and they do like to show off.

But watching these politicians and, I don't know, it felt like for the first time I was not part of a revolution anymore.

And there was nothing exciting about it, maybe except the expectation that I might get rich because of this.

But that's not really why I came here.

Like, I could have invested in Nvidia or something or Tesla and got similar results.

I mean, famously, I've heard that particularly those conferences 2024 and maybe also 2021 or 2022 were just known for being the hype of like cult excitement that I've had a guest on the show who was there.

And she said it was like being in a cult where everybody was like on the same page, like Michael Saylor, you know, was on stage.

There was that one where Max Keiser said, like, fuck Elon, you know, and it was just such a cult energy.

I think that was 21, because after that, Max Keiser went on a tour and sold tickets for people to listen to him whining about Elon Musk, basically.

He pivoted.

Robin, you're nodding along there.

Let me get you in here.

So you're currently at BTC Prague.

Maybe you can give us a little insight into the BTC conference scene.

I was just thinking about what Vlad just said, and I have a little fun side story about that.

A friend of mine, he found like some multi-level marketing scheme on the internet, and they invited people to a cruise to basically brainwash them into joining their system.

And he was like, hey, let's just go on that cruise to see how it works and just see how they are brainwashing people and we get a free cruise and everything.

So we did that.

And what Vlad just said about the 2024 Bitcoin conference reminded me of this brainwashing thing on the cruise where they tried to hype up everyone with irrational narratives.

Yeah, just like trying to trigger people's primary reactions of group thinking.

Robin, was it called…

I can understand that.

Sorry?

This pyramid scheme or whatever, was it called WorldVentures?

No, I think it was called Global Information Network or something.

Okay.

That was a very grand sounding name.

I've been to one of their seminars at WorldVentures and they were saying, well, you pay like $100 per month and then you're going to go on very exotic vacations.

And basically the way that it works is that, of course, you have people who never go on vacation and then people who profit off of them.

And it's like Ponzi, where they're profiting off of people who pay but never go.

But at one point they're going to want to go and they're not going to be able to afford it or there's not going to be any money.

The whole scheme depends on how early you get in.

There's Paul.

Hello, Paul. Welcome back to the Bitcoin Cash Podcast.

Maybe I'm like backstage, like no one has acknowledged that I've popped up onto this thing.

And then I couldn't see or hear Robin, just a guest ID in use.

Because both Vlad and Robin sent, so just FYI, there's something.

Interesting.

There could be like 50 other people here with Robin, Linus, and Link that are just hidden off.

They're all guest three in the link.

I was like, what is going on?

I was like, this is really weird.

Top tier software for the real world.

Hello to all the guest three listeners.

Then you're talking to Vlad and then you start talking to Robin and I can't hear Robin.

And then I'm like, this is weird.

And I was like, okay, I could hear Vlad.

But anyway.

It's actually a fourth world social experiment we're running on you.

Like a Darren Brown production where we're going to reveal to you later that this was all scripted.

See how you'd react.

Yeah, and it was interesting.

So I got to hear all about Vlad, talk about how it was a cult.

But then I didn't hear anything Robin said about how it's...

But the cult...

It must be the beginning of the end.

It must be the beginning of the end when now everyone's turning on Michael Saylor finally.

Yeah.

Because he was like, yeah, he's gone stage.

He says, I never told anyone.

No, I sort of disagree with that.

Because Michael Saylor was smart enough to get people, by people I mean community members, Bitcoiners.

High profile influencers to invest in his SDRC or MSDR or whatever.

So they're financially tied to the success of his Ponzi.

They're mag holders.

That's why I say long MSDR, short Bitcoin.

Because the illusion that he has is that, oh, this is the same thing as buying Bitcoin.

But really it's not at all.

The fact that the MNAV premium changes proves that they're exact opposites actually.

If it was ETF, they would be like kind of the same thing, sort of, arguably.

Even then, not really.

But if it was ETF and it just said you buy one, we'll set aside a certain amount of Bitcoin.

But because he said that it can vary and because the crazy Asian CEO was like, oh, the MNAV premium, yeah, it just went from 1 to 2.

It could go to 10 or 20.

I remember he said that on like, I don't know, like an official Bitcoin magazine podcast or interview or something.

And he's like, yeah, the MNAV premium could just keep going up like forever.

And then Jim Chanos shorted it.

He was like, yeah, it said 2, but it should really be less than 1 if you really think about it.

Yeah, I was like, yeah, yes, that is right.

And it should kind of, honestly, arguably it should be zero if you add the overhead, the agency costs, the risk of them just losing it.

Exactly, right.

So why would the taxes, the lawyers, everything, why would it actually be?

It would be like 95%, but it would be like some weird like eigenvalue, eigenvector thing where you just multiply by 95% like an infinite number of times and you just end up with zero.

So that's, but you know, we don't, we live in like a, you know, this is the thing.

You know the podcast is lit when we start talking about eigenvectors.

I have this background.

I don't even know what that is.

This is the curse of the economist often is that you kind of like figure out like the equilibrium.

But then it's like, yeah, it takes like 15 years to get there.

And so often people just like, oh, and then like I thought like, because I was like, when they came out with Snapchat, I was like, this is the stupidest idea.

Because computers don't work that way.

You can't just have disappear.

But now every, not only was Snapchat like, right after I said that, they were like bought for like a billion dollars.

And then now everyone's doing disappearing messages.

You know, it's like a really cool.

It's like a very useful thing.

Now, everyone's lawyers got them.

You got them.

They're in telegram.

Now they're in signal.

They're in everywhere.

So everyone loves.

So I was totally probably don't work on any of them.

Of course.

It's all a scam.

I love it on WhatsApp.

It's like you can delete the message and it's like delete for you or delete for everyone.

It's like, why would I want to delete my own message only for you?

I know.

I always thought about that, too.

But I always when I saw that, I would always do like a kind of like a like a little take where I look at the camera.

Like, kind of like what?

Like what?

And I never thought about how stupid it was until now.

Of course, everyone goes to delete for everyone.

It's like I'm going to delete it for me.

They're still going to see it.

And they're going to from their point of view, it looks like I wanted them to still see it.

That does sound.

I think it's completely.

I think it's so that you can delete other people's messages in there and just delete it for you.

I don't want to see this message in my feed.

But we can't delete them for everyone, right?

That doesn't make any sense.

Is that possible?

Can I just delete other people's messages?

Admins can.

And they might have just copied the same interface that admins have.

That doesn't make any sense.

But I agree with you that that's the only way.

That's the only theory that explains the data, I think.

So I think you're right.

But that's a terrible idea.

Just have a little admin color or a little icon.

Delete for everyone.

Not give it to every option.

Especially when you have two people talking to each other.

That's right.

It's a one-on-one conversation.

You're just deleting your own half of the conversation.

That doesn't make any sense.

It's also funny that when you delete a message for both of you, then they see a deleted message.

Yes.

Then it's that weird signal of like, what was the deleted message?

What did you delete there?

Usually it's better to just leave it.

Usually it's better like, okay, we're in this thing.

We're going to just plow forward.

If I made a typo, I just got to retype it below.

Even if it's something else.

It's like, oh, I think we should get married.

And then it's like, delete.

And then it's like, oh, sorry.

Can you pick up milk from the store?

Sorry, typo.

It's a smokescreen.

Does it happen often to you?

No, I was just wondering if that happens often to you.

I don't very frequently propose to someone by accident.

But maybe some people do.

It was just an example of something that you might want to take back.

That came to mind.

That's a typical kind of scenario.

I can just imagine that every couple of days he accidentally proposes to someone and really he just wanted milk.

It's really challenging for him.

Now I'm getting some insight into why he deleted the messages that he sent to me.

That's what it was the whole time.

He's going to go back and scroll through all the messages to me and be like, wait a minute.

Yeah, exactly.

I should have had a life of happiness.

That's it.

Here we are instead.

Sorry to everyone who missed out on marrying Paul as a result of the new disappearing message.

We have to ask, is the spell really broken?

Because Vlad is right that sometimes this is the way the cult works is that the rational people just start leaving.

And the cult gets more insane.

Like when they have the rapture.

They say the rapture is going to be on Tuesday.

Or whatever.

The end of the world is going to be on Tuesday.

Tuesday comes and goes.

Nothing happens.

Then usually a few people leave.

But then the cult is stronger than ever.

They'll say, well, it wasn't clear which Tuesday.

There's another Tuesday next week.

Sometimes they make it pretty clear.

Sometimes they're like, it will be March 12th, 2012.

Or whatever that was.

Yeah, but according to which calendar, right?

They made a whole movie about it.

Is it the Gregorian one?

Is it the Julian one?

But I think it is ending.

I honestly think it is ending.

And the reason I know is because Bitcoin University, Matthew Cratter, he started criticizing Michael Saylor before this happened.

And if he's starting to put the pieces together and figure it out from how deep down the rabbit hole he is, then clearly the message is getting around, right?

He's like the fifth layer of abstraction of what's actually happening.

He's like so many layers deep in the matrix that if he's starting to be like, wait a second, what's going on here?

And so then he made that video calling out Michael Saylor of like, look at this guy lying.

And he's so deep in it that he couldn't even just make it like a straight-up video.

He had to satirize it and be like, well, this looks kind of contradictory, but I'll let the audience make up their own mind.

Ha, ha, ha.

He did a big audience capture problem, I think, you know, like where he wants the views.

So you just work the format, right?

So you don't want to be like too – maybe not, I don't know.

I would think you would get a lot of views to just be like Michael Saylor fraud or whatever.

I don't know. I have no idea, though.

I don't pretend.

I don't know that he was ever in the Michael Saylor camp, Matt Cratter.

I suspect he was always in the camp just by Bitcoin.

No, I think he was because –

So in the beginning when he started doing these videos, which by the way are awful,

but at the same time they sort of became like a personal brand where he just types and he switches tabs in his Chrome.

Like it's very low effort, but it works for some reason.

Michael Saylor actually tweeted about him and said, this guy is offering very good Bitcoin education.

And you got to understand that when he first landed on the scene,

Michael Saylor used some of his domains like hope.com and a couple of others to turn them into Bitcoin education websites.

But what education meant for him was to change the narrative to drift away from anything concerning cash and payments

and turning everything into savings and store value, digital energy, whatever, cyber hornets.

He came up with a lot of these silly metaphors.

Actually, that's all he's got.

All he's ever had was just silly metaphors and people were somehow oblivious of the fact that there was a large headline with him losing $6 billion in one day as a CEO during the dot-com bubble.

And we're like, how's 6 billion to lose it though? I think that's people's logic where they're like, well, at least he had the 6 billion to throw away, you know, more than I've ever had.

He made the front page. So people think, well,

No such thing as bad publicity. He must have been doing something important.

Yeah.

Anyway, Saylor was very smart in some ways, and I think his strategy, pun unintended, should be studied.

He was able to capture the whole narrative yet on every podcast except for mine because I never invited him.

I always felt like there's something off about him.

But he was able to become bigger than everyone who's ever given him a platform.

Everyone is invited to your podcast except for Michael Saylor.

No, that's not how it works.

He's welcome on this call, by the way, if anyone wants to shoot him a link.

Yeah, join us.

Have a chat with him.

Tell us all about how Stretch works.

I'm keen to hear it.

Yeah.

But Robert, if you're there at Prague where he famously met, were you watching live?

Were you in the audience when he was saying this famous clip that's now going around?

No, I wasn't in the audience.

The famous clip was, I think, on the VIP stage, which was in the speaker's area.

He gave a talk at the main stage as well.

I went in there for a couple of minutes just to get a feeling for the level of retardedness in the community.

Was the audience still full when he was talking?

Yeah, it was by far the most crowded talk of the entire night.

It's depressing.

But I feel like he's making people bullish.

Sorry.

I met a couple of people who were just more like business people, less like cypherpunk developers, people who just bought Bitcoin to make money.

And they seem to be changing their minds about Selah.

They don't believe anymore that he's the savior.

And then they start to question his narratives and the gamble that he makes.

And I felt like that's a good thing.

It's a sign that there's some healing going on.

But do any of you guys actually know people who have strategy stock and all that?

I've literally never met a single person in real life.

I know a few.

And I don't want to...

Oh, man, it's hard to phrase this in a polite way.

But these are nice people.

These are kind of like...

Okay, you ask these people...

This is like Finance 101, where you go up to people.

You just strike up a friendly conversation with them.

And they say, oh, yeah.

And you just say something like, well, what do you think fair value is for MSTR?

What's the price target?

Now, this is a hard question.

But this is something that every real investor would do.

Is they would look at the situation.

And they would say, okay, I think...

They'll have some answer in their head.

You know what I mean?

And they'll say, oh, I think the market cap...

They'll say something.

Like when people say, well, actually, for SpaceX, I think a $2 trillion market cap is possible.

Because if you look at whatever, they're going to just say something.

Or they'll say, I think it should go to like $15 a share or something like that.

But these people give...

They give the wrong answer, which is they say something like, I think it can go up from here.

Or they say, I think Sailor knows what he's doing.

And I'm just telling you out there, for anyone who's listening, that's the wrong answer.

The right answer for any other thing, like when you would think of like...

This is what Hal Finney did with Bitcoin back in the day.

Where he's like, you take out your...

Even if it's just envelope math, you have some idea in your head where you say, okay, listen.

This is the value of all the money in the world.

And then if you divide that by 21 million coins, you get like a few million dollars per coin.

So that's what a real investor would say.

And a fake investor would say, I think it's going to keep going up or something like that.

And that's what all these people say.

And it's depressing to watch.

And these are not sophisticated people.

And especially with Michael Sailor constructing these hybrid equity debt convertible stuff.

Where, frankly, you do need like a PhD in accounting to even figure out what's going on.

And that is a really bad sign.

That's exactly what has happened in past crises.

It happened in 2008.

Where people didn't even know what they were buying.

And there's that great scene where Big Shorty picks up the phone.

I don't even think they know what they've done.

Perfect line.

And yeah, so there you go.

I know some people, but it's not impressive.

I do think just anyone who has MSG or one of those products.

And how were they swept up into it?

Because it's very ironic that the whole premise is about Bitcoin.

And yet the more you know about Bitcoin, the more involved you are in the scene and stuff like that.

The less likely you would be to have some.

You know what I'm saying?

I don't know.

Sorry.

Yeah, I don't really know.

I'm completely uninterested in these products.

So he was like, oh yeah, I've got some whatever it's called.

I don't even know which one.

It's been down, I think.

Let's change the topic.

I know one person who mentioned that he has some.

Okay, so they are real.

They do exist.

I've kind of been wondering if there's just some way that this is just another layer of manipulation.

But of course the world is a huge place.

You know that it's not because the numbers are so big.

But yeah, this is these retail investors who are swept up in the cult.

And it's not great.

Although you can often win.

Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Like him, he's making everyone money.

Sometimes you just post the one-year price chart of MSTR, which is this huge negative number.

And then you can just like, I don't want to say win the debate.

But you can just be like, well, this is what you're getting with him.

And then I've done a thing too where I say, well, hey, listen.

Before Michael Saylor, it went from like one cent to like $100,000.

So it literally went like 10 million X up.

But now Michael Saylor, you can go to SaylorTracker.com.

It's the greatest thing, one of the best things to happen if you're trying to fight the cult.

Because it just shows you like, okay, yeah, he bought a lot of Bitcoin.

But at really high prices.

He actually hasn't made any money.

He's lost a lot of money with Bitcoin.

His MSTR has gone up.

I don't know if this is the case.

I strongly suspect that it was because the equity value is so low because the expectations were so low.

Like he had this fiefdom, this kingdom with a bunch of cash.

MSTR had all this cash that he had like raised.

And he's kind of limping along pretending to be a fake company, pretending to be this analytics company.

It's kind of fake. This is all speculation.

So any lawyers who may be suing me right now for defamation, I just say this is all my – I haven't looked into this at all.

But this is the only thing – again, this is the only thing that fits the story.

Why does he even have this company?

Because people don't really use microstrategy products.

It's not like Apple or something or Tesla where you see people driving the Tesla around.

You're like, oh, I guess that's a real company.

So I think he had all this money, but then the equity holders realized he was just going to waste it all and spend it all.

Because it's cool to be this – you can expense all these things.

You can get the private jet even if the company is fake and it doesn't really – so apparently it has some revenues.

But it had this giant pile of cash, and then it was very low.

So I don't know. Someone can actually look into that and figure out if that's true.

But I was trying to explain why the MSTR price go up after he started buying Bitcoin if he hasn't actually made any money through the Bitcoin purchases.

But yeah, who knows? I don't know. Is it even worth it?

Well, he's not down that bad.

He's down – so right now he's down $9.7 billion, which sounds bad.

But it's only negative 15%.

I mean, that's terrible. In Bitcoin – no, see, this makes sense.

In Bitcoin terms, that's like a one day. It could turn around tomorrow. It could be up 20%.

But think about it like this. Most of the people that we all know who invested in Bitcoin – I mean, you and I at least.

I don't know about people who are new.

People who have invested in Bitcoin have made 100x, 1,000x.

Some people have made – you and I know people who have made a million x on Bitcoin.

So Michael Saylor is one of the least successful Bitcoin investors of all time down there at negative 15%.

And those people are up here at plus 99 million percent, which is not even an exaggeration.

You'd think that would be a hyperbole, but it's literally not.

For someone like Roger Ver who may have bought at less than $0.10 and then sold at $100,000.

Well, he'd be up 99 million percent on that.

So Michael Saylor – some people – we've got Eric Voorhees over here and all these other people.

And then we've got Michael Saylor down at a negative number, whatever.

So I'm not sure what to make of that, but it doesn't translate to the savior.

Well, Paul, the funny part is that we are all governed by these funny narratives that are very tribal.

And according to the BTC Maxi narrative, Roger fumbled the bag and sold in 2017 to buy BCH.

And he has been losing ever since.

He sold a lot, but I don't know.

And he also sold – I know that he bought lots of other things when they were just starting.

Like a super early Zcash type of a thing is my understanding.

I think Zcash, Ripple, Stellar.

Just more diversification.

But yeah, I don't know.

Even 2017, that was a time when – by then BTC was already going up to almost $20,000.

So again, if you buy at $0.10 and you sell at $20,000, that's a lot.

That's a lot more than negative 15%.

It's just such weird analysis to me.

The fact that if anybody who has that point of view is kind of like they've boiled everything down to this kind of one-dimensional analysis.

Because they can't handle any more than that.

And it's just like if you sold at anything less than the top, bad.

You must be a complete moron.

And there's no – doesn't matter if they haven't done that.

Doesn't matter if nobody has done that.

Doesn't matter if that's super unlikely.

Doesn't matter when you got in, when you got out.

Doesn't matter what contributions or influence you had on the space or the scene.

Besides just whether you timed the Ponzi correctly.

Nothing.

It's so weird seeing people – I mean, you don't see it now.

But a few years ago, you see Roger makes a post.

And some guy's in there being like, have fun staying poor.

And you're like, what?

Telling Roger to have fun staying poor.

There's no logical –

I think it's a reasonable thing to say if you're talking not about material wealth.

But rather about some other kind of wealth.

Say he's poor in other ways.

Well, that's the funny thing.

Because that's why the whole Bitcoin Jesus thing is so funny.

Because he actually hates the name Bitcoin Jesus.

He never wanted to be Bitcoin Jesus.

And then people say, oh, who does he think he is?

Like big-noting himself as Bitcoin Jesus.

And instead he got crucified, and now they call him Bitcoin Judas.

Which ironically makes him even more Bitcoin Jesus.

More like Jesus Bitcoin Judas now.

That's right.

Of course, Jesus was hated at the time.

For telling the truth, exactly like he did.

He suffered and died and was buried.

And then was born again.

That's right.

Exactly.

He's just got to wait out his gag order, and then he'll be back.

But I don't know.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Michael Saylor is going to be going the other direction.

The hero that becomes the villain.

Or maybe it's the same cycle.

Is Michael Saylor going to be the next Bitcoin Judas 2.0?

There is no second Judas?

I mean, he's sort of more sinister, I think.

So he's kind of like more cutthroat and evil in a way.

Because Roger always had this earnestness, I thought.

And he was like.

So it's kind of, I think people get a little more fun tearing him down.

Whereas Michael Saylor is like, oh, I'm a cutthroat CEO.

My headquarters are in the CIA building.

Or across the street.

Or whatever.

And I don't know.

He's also such a, with all the metaphors.

You know what I mean?

Roger would just be some guy talking.

And then Michael Saylor is like, listen.

It's like when they added electricity to hotels.

You don't want to be in a hotel with no electricity.

He's like a hypnotist or something.

You know?

So I don't know.

It's just not as fun to talk to him.

I like the analogies.

That's one thing that I think is really positive and persuasive.

And fun to think about is analogies for this stuff.

And I think he's good at coming up with them.

I also like his analogies for the same reason.

Even though I agree with Paul.

That it is basically reasoning by analogy.

Used as a form of sort of hypnosis.

Because analogies are very useful.

Of course they exist for a reason.

Which is for somebody who doesn't understand things at a deep level.

You have to get them started somehow.

So you give them a rough approximation.

And that helps them get the first or second step.

And then the more deeper you get into it.

Then you can say, okay.

You know when I told you.

Like when I was in high school.

My chemistry teacher said to me.

He said, okay.

For the first year, all we're going to do is lie to you about chemistry.

We're going to tell you all these things about atoms.

And about the way the material world works.

And all this stuff.

It's all fake, right?

None of this is actually true.

But it's how we kind of get you started on the right path.

And then we'll take away the lies later.

But if you don't ever take away the lies.

Then it is just a scam basically.

I think he's a huge bullshitter.

And so the analogies amplify his ability to just.

Like he'll say these things.

And it's like it almost.

It doesn't even matter if they're true or false.

Like he'll say Bitcoin is digital credit.

And then he'll say Bitcoin is digital capital.

And then he'll say like Bitcoin is digital energy.

And it's like they can't be all those things at once.

It's all Manhattan real estate.

And then so.

But he uses the analogy just to evade criticism.

He doesn't use it to really explain.

He's a little too fast and loose with the truth.

But he doesn't care.

He doesn't even care.

So it's not even a lie.

And I find that annoying.

Really and truly.

I find it depressing.

And many of the analogies don't make any sense at all.

And you know.

When Danny from Bitcoin.

Where Bitcoin did.

And he tried to ask some simple questions.

That was so good.

Those were the simplest questions you could get.

Softball questions like.

Hey a lot of.

Now you're doing these.

He basically said there's a lot of treasury companies.

You are doing these preferreds.

If they also do preferreds.

How should we think about that?

Whatever.

And then.

There was like this 45 minute tirade about.

They don't compete with.

These treasury companies don't compete with each other.

But they actually do.

And then the hotel electricity.

And then we're all buying Bitcoin.

Why are you criticizing.

And then he was like Danny.

You should be criticizing these companies that don't buy Bitcoin.

It was like none of that was even the point.

It was very disturbing.

And so.

He's clearly feeling some kind of pressure and insecurity.

Which is good.

Because maybe he'll stop weighing in on everything.

Because you know.

What if.

Also us are getting trapped by him.

Because we are complaining about him.

For like an hour now.

It's just like Donald Trump.

Like you can't stop talking about him.

And it makes him.

It gives him much more power.

For Donald Trump it was easier to see.

I think for Michael Saylor.

So but let's just not move then.

I go for weeks and weeks at a time.

Without thinking about Michael Saylor.

So I'd be happy to move on to some other topic.

If anyone else is willing to.

I want to hear.

Before.

I know Robin is going to have to go.

In the not too distant future.

So I do want to hit a couple of key things.

Maybe we can't do your whole.

How you got into Bitcoin story.

That we traditionally do with everyone.

The opcodes.

Because you wrote into the show.

You know previously.

Or into Vlad show really.

To say you were loving the BCH VM opcodes.

So give us your breakdown.

And thoughts on that.

Also specifically.

Are we missing anything.

Because they might be good.

But is there any gaps you've noticed.

I'm not super familiar with the opcodes.

I just like skimmed the docs.

And I found.

That just got added.

The functional codes.

In last month.

And I found that very interesting.

Because that solves.

A fundamental problem of script.

If you want to build.

Anything complex.

Like a snark verifier.

Then you end up with huge scripts.

Or you have to enshrine.

Very high level opcodes.

For example pairing opcodes.

That you actually don't want to maintain.

And yeah.

I think that solves.

An interesting problem.

And.

Yeah.

I wonder if you guys are working with snarks.

Or if you're even trying.

To build anything.

On top of snarks.

Or something.

Maybe it's not necessary.

Because you can scale on the base layer.

You're not scared of that.

So I wonder.

If there's actually any need for snarks.

Maybe for privacy protocols.

Yeah. I mean as far as I know.

It's kind of the same as like lightning network.

Where everybody has this complete hopes.

Where they think that big blockers hate lightning network.

When nothing is further from the truth.

If you go back and you listen to the block size.

Everybody was just like.

Why don't you just do both.

Obviously you can do lightning network.

And bigger blocks.

In fact they're synergistic.

Because if you have bigger blocks.

The whole thing will just function smoother.

And it's kind of the same with any of this.

Like snarks or snarks or anything like that.

Layer twos of any different variety.

Where as far as I know.

And certainly from my own point of view.

I would love anybody.

To come and build any of that stuff in BCH.

It just doesn't happen as a combination.

Of like you said.

A. It's not super necessary.

So it's not the priority that everybody is looking at right now.

And B. It's just a small community.

So the combined aggregate resources.

Are too small.

But as it grows.

I'm sure more and more people who are interested in that stuff.

Will jump in and do it.

So you could.

Or anybody could.

Anybody who's listening.

We've prepared all the building site.

All the foundations are there.

Have at it.

We'd love that.

I personally think blocks are too big.

The more we come up with solutions.

That allow us to compress UTXOs.

I think the reaction among node developers.

Should be great.

If 10 people can have the same UTXO.

Then we can reduce the block size.

By 10X.

From its current size.

But there's no real energy.

For that sadly.

But yeah I think currently blocks are too big.

It'd be cool to make them smaller.

As these technologies keep getting better.

Those ideas are becoming more prominent though.

I mean Paul you're trying to do that.

With E-cash right.

Reducing the 10X.

And also the filter guys.

They also like that idea of smaller blocks.

They maybe just have started with spam.

And then they're going to get around.

To smaller blocks later.

But it's not even totally out of the question.

In terms of growing prominence.

For that type of idea.

Interestingly.

Well the block size you know.

It's a blessing and a curse.

Because of course more block space.

Makes a lot of things easier.

The full node has to do more work.

So my reading of the scaling war.

Which is very different than most people's.

But it was like people couldn't disagree.

On how much the full node should cost.

So I think it's neat when you have.

The mandatory L1.

That should be cheap.

That should be a very very cheap small block.

And then you can just add on to that.

The optional L2s.

I always thought that was the real.

What the real debate was about.

And I didn't even.

At the time I didn't even think of that as scaling.

Because I just thought.

It's the same software.

But with a bigger block size.

So it's not like doing more with less.

Doing more with less would be like.

More technology.

That's what I thought the Lightning Network was.

I think the smartest thing the large blockers ever did.

Was hate on the Lightning Network.

I didn't like it at the time.

Because I thought a lot of the critiques.

Of the Lightning Network in 2017.

A lot of them were unfair.

Some were kind of like half-baked.

They were like this is just going to end up being.

Banks 2.0.

Which that ended up happening.

But I think at the time.

That was kind of clear.

That that wasn't totally fleshed out.

That was like a kid comes up to you.

With a fair coin.

And they say this coin is going to land heads.

I'm certain of it.

And they flip it and it lands heads.

And it's like how impressed are you?

You're just kind of annoyed honestly.

One thing about the Lightning Network.

One that remained undefeated the whole time.

That people made.

Was that there's not enough space.

To even onboard people.

To get the channels up.

You need some kind of super convoluted thing.

People were saying in the Lightning Network world.

In 2017.

They were saying we will invent something.

To fix that.

They had a lot of credibility back then.

And so I believed them.

They were totally.

Because now it's all custodial Lightning.

Blah, blah, blah.

So the smartest thing you guys did was hit on Lightning Network.

And I think that.

Lightning Network.

Is not going great.

Interestingly also.

It just happens to be the case.

That from my point of view.

The bandwidth used to be the bottleneck.

Now bandwidth speeds have increased enormously.

Especially you have like Elon.

Remember Elon's tweet.

One of my favorite Elon tweets.

He was trying to shake their fist at the sky.

Talking about what if people.

I don't remember exactly what it was.

It was something like what if people.

I'm not going to make this up and screw it up.

But it was something like.

What if people in Brazil buy Starlink internet.

And then the Brazilian government tries to.

I don't know if it was Brazil or not.

I'm sorry about the Brazilian government.

If that's not who it was.

But it was someone who was like.

What if they try to make it.

They outlaw it.

They outlaw the case program.

So Elon can just tweet.

Shake their fist at the sky.

And it was like.

And now that internet is super fast.

So.

And now one thing I always say about.

This internet bottleneck thing too.

Is that you got people playing.

Like I got friends who still play.

Like Call of Duty and stuff.

And you get like a mandatory Call of Duty update.

It's like 120 gigabytes.

You just routinely download these giant files.

And then the larger blocks.

Is improved.

Like by leaps and bounds.

Over the last 10 years.

And the case for the Lightning Network.

Has I think collapsed.

And I think.

The real problem with the Lightning Network.

Is part of the cult.

The cult is the number one dimension to watch.

I think in crypto.

This is the big.

Because it's like.

The cults have these like weird life cycles. You know. Like there's the Dan Larimer cult.

You know. Or there's the Vitalik cult. Or whatever. So there's all these cults.

The cult is the thing to watch. And if the cult is too.

Irrational. It means that we're all doomed. And Lightning.

That's the important thing with Lightning. Is that it became a cult.

But you need a little bit of cult. To kind of bootstrap. You need a little bit of.

You know. What you might call. Cooperation.

Yeah. But the way you pop the cult.

Is just with better information. And people in the cult.

Like you said. Consistently being proven wrong. So that people at the edges.

Who are the most connected to reality. And the least connected to the.

You know. Investing in the cult. I would like to hear an example.

Of something the Lightning people were wrong about.

Well yeah. For instance. Like what Paul is saying.

That I think is a really good point. It's a very simple.

Big blocker point. Made back in the day. Still true today.

Which is that. By raising the block size. You are getting.

By default. All of the world's improvement in internet infrastructure.

And all of it's computer hardware improvement.

Like that's a ginormous industry. Right? And they're working ceaselessly.

Night and day. To figure out how to improve hardware.

And internet connectivity. And all that benefit just flows.

To Bitcoin. To BCH. As a result. Like with no expenditure.

On the case. On the behalf of the BCH community.

But I mean. One thing that specifically the Lightning Network community were wrong about.

I agree with Paul. Like they said. They'd find solutions.

To the napkin math. That you can only onboard.

Like however many people. In one megabyte blocks.

And that just never appeared. Right?

I think it has. One of the things that was frequently talked about.

Was channel factories. That was a big talking point. Back in the day.

They were talking about. It would be easier to build channel factories.

If we had Cache no input. But they were also possible without it.

And I think we've started to see that. You know the Arc team.

Second in Arcade. Both made implementations of channel factories.

So yeah. I think that's materialized.

After 10 years.

And like billions and billions of dollars in investment. It's starting to appear.

It's a fair.

Sorry? Without covenants.

It's custodial. And also the channel factories have a horrific

problem. Where one single person for free. They have no coins.

They just join. They can then hold the whole thing hostage.

These are the old version. Now okay. Here's the thing. It becomes a cat and mouse game.

In 2017 they said we'll come up with all this stuff. And then there was L2.

And there was factories. Now each time. This stuff has like a two and a half year

time period from when it's proposed. Then eventually people give up on it.

But then they give up on it. It's like a magician. Or it's like when you're trying to keep

a young child happy. And you're kind of like. Well we don't have your

favorite toy. But we've got ice cream or whatever. You just swap a thing out.

And it takes a while. And this has gone on and on. And this is why I hate ARK.

And I know Supertestnet likes ARK. Now I might be wrong about this.

But you got to look at it from my point of view. From my point of view

these two Bitcoin Cash people are kind of like getting the last laugh to some extent.

Because four times in a row I was kind of like maybe they'll be able to fix

Lightning. Now I'm like hating on Lightning and saying Lightning sucks.

Now the two of them are switching back and saying Lightning and Bitcoin Cash is actually great.

I don't think it's good at all.

We should all be pluralists. We should try lots of things.

All of us are subject matter experts. So we should weigh in on what we think is

seriously worth trying. Should we try? It's like if we can put a man on

the moon. Maybe we can put a man on the sun. And it's like

no. That's probably not going to work.

Lightning people have said three or four times. They had coin pools.

They had channel factories. Every single time this hasn't worked.

Then there was ARK. Then it was like Moon Settler. We were talking about

ARK and he was like yeah it doesn't actually work without CTV.

In the real world everyone does custodial Lightning anyway.

And then all these objections about the ARK liquidity. You need more coins

like eight times as many coins tied up than are actually circulating.

And it's the opposite of how credit works where they say we will negative circulate.

We won't circulate the coins but you can pay in advance. We'll settle up later.

It's like you and your friend. Oh I don't have the cash but I'm good for it. This is the way the real world works.

Instead of no worry it's like oh I need to pay you eight times as much

to buy this chicken sandwich. So that's no good.

So maybe they'll fix all these things. But the point is this is

exactly what Dan Larimer used to do. This is exactly what NXT and all this other stuff would do.

They'd say oh we're going to fix all this stuff later. The fix doesn't come.

And it's ultimately I think a huge Rube Goldberg machine

and it's not worth it. This is just to keep extending

this is the gambling addict who's in denial that they have a problem.

And the whole thing is just how can we avoid the pain

of having to admit to everyone that we've screwed up

and that Lightning was a big mistake. It's all just trying to keep the Lightning idea moving.

And say well you know sure those other things didn't work but now there's Arc

and now there's going to be Cube and now there's other. The more new things that are invented

this is actually the clue that something is really wrong.

Is there actually one called Cube?

Clearly you haven't been paying attention. No but apparently I did because I made a troll post

saying you need Lightning Network to fix your Layer 1 and then you need Arc

to fix your broken L2 Lightning and wait until you hear about Quasarix.

Is that actually called Cube? If you have Quasarix that'll fix your Arc.

I literally got it. Okay perfect. I even have the letters right.

I don't think the Cube proposal attempts to fix Arc.

I think the Cube proposal attempts to combine Arc with BitVM

and make it so you can do computation stuff inside of the point.

I think that's true. But I think the issue with Lightning is that it's

introducing all kinds of band-aids

to make it work for end-users because it's not working for end-users.

End-users just use Wallet of Satoshi and everyone was fine with that

until it got banned in the EU and so on.

Then new solutions came up like Spark for example and

they are just introducing lots of complexity, lots of

centralization and a lot of trust assumptions.

Now we invent these new narratives to gloss over these

facts. Spark is just non-custodial

because they write it on their website for regulatory purposes

because they want to lie to regulators. I think lying to

regulators is actually fine but they are also lying to users and users are lying to themselves

telling themselves that it would be non-custodial even if it's not.

If the Lightning scaling vision would have been clear about that

in the beginning then nobody would have bought into it. If they had said,

we're going to build all kinds of stuff on top that is actually trusted and comes

with all kinds of complexity and all kinds of narratives to

make ourselves believe that it's actually what we promised, then nobody would

have bought into it. I feel like nowadays

we invent all kinds of new narratives to

make ourselves believe that stuff.

I don't look

at it that way. From my perspective, there was talk of the possibility

of doing channel factories and coin pools early on

and now we start to see them emerge.

Because we don't have CTV, there are

problems. They don't work as well as they would with CTV or

one of the other easier covenant opcodes

but they do work. I don't think it's accurate to say that

ARC is custodial. It depends on how

it's used, I suppose.

It relies on this covenant emulation thing.

And I think it would be fine to say, yeah, let's do ARC to solve it.

But then you should be very clear that

if you don't have CTV, sure you can make the users

also cosign but that is just impractical. You can

theoretically do it but you cannot do it in practice and nobody is trying to do it in practice

because it's just so impractical. So they are resorting to custodial

solutions. You can say, yeah, it's one of an assumption but it's still custodial.

And I think people should just be more

clear about this fact that it's just fucking

custodial and that you cannot solve it without CTV because then people would

feel the pressure to actually activate CTV and not be like,

let's keep it stewing a little bit for another two or three years until we

actually know if it's what we want. Because that is a

bullshit narrative. And I also think

we should be clear that the original Lightning narrative just

failed. It failed because the original narrative was like, everyone

is going to run a Lightning node and people will make money with routing and everything.

I remember that. I've actually run a node hoping that I'm

going to get routing. And it's not happening. This narrative

certainly failed and it's okay to say it failed. Even if you're not

opposing Lightning, it's okay

to say this failed and now let's try to fix it.

I'm fine with that. I think it is a valuable path to explore.

I don't think it's the best path for us, but I think it's

worthwhile doing it or trying it. But I think it's very

important to be aligned with truth and not tell ourselves bullshit all the

time. I don't remember a narrative saying that everyone

will run a routing node if it was everyone will run a node. And I think that

narrative has succeeded in that there are a lot of nodes

on phones now that people run. Just a standard Lightning wallet is

a node on a phone. But if you're saying that everyone is going to

run routing nodes and earn money, I don't remember a narrative that

everyone can make money by routing payments and everyone will want to do that.

I remember saying, it's good that anyone can, but I don't

remember saying the majority of Lightning users will also run routing nodes.

But that's maybe the case.

With Christian Decker, who is the inventor of L2,

and I think he's one of the most OG Lightning developers.

He's one of the lead developers of C Lightning and so on.

And he said that the original vision was that everyone runs a node

and he said he doesn't think that worked.

I also remember a tweet from Alex Busford where he said, I just made

one Bitcoin from routing fees. You can do this to run a node.

Some of us on this chat, we lived through

it and the logic, I don't know how clearly it was articulated, but the logic of the

scaling debate was, and I think it was poorly understood even

by the haters and the lovers on both sides, but this was the logic

if you dissected it, I think. I think this is just objectively the case.

Which is that the small blockers were saying, we don't want

the full node to cost more. So they were saying, we want to keep the

full node cost down. And they were saying, instead of running an expensive

large block node, and the small blockers

were kind of right to say, if you move it from one megabyte to eight megabytes

then maybe it'll just end up unlimited and then it'll be uncapped and

where would that end? And even people would say, such as Greg Maxwell would say

okay, even if we had unlimited block size, that would be a big improvement over

the world of JP Morgan or whatever that we have today.

But he was saying, we want to keep the node cost down.

The clear implication of that is that you wanted it to be easier for

more people to run the nodes. The lightning idea, the lightning

node, you're saying there's a lightning node on a phone. I have to kind of disagree with that.

Because the logic of the lightning node is that it needs to talk

to a full L1 node. So the idea was that the L1 full node

that's with the small blocks, plus a second node on top of it

the combined cost would be less than

the Bitcoin cash node. But that is objectively no longer true

in the sense of psychology or utility theory and economics

or just in practice. Because people find it too annoying to use

yeah, take your pick. We got a really strong silent guy

strong silent type who's just vaping and laughing the whole time.

And that's great. But it's like, take your pick.

People don't run the lightning nodes, I think. The full stack

the intended lightning node where it's actually watching for

if someone broadcasts the old spend and it's going to trigger the HTLC or whatever.

I just think having a lightning app on your cell phone and saying

that that's a cheap node. Well then, how is that any different from all

the large blockers who are saying, oh, SPV nodes are real.

Yeah, you can explain it to them. Some of them weren't around.

Well, that's why I just think it's like all these things

complexity is the enemy of anything working in the real world

including in engineering. And the Bitcoin community actually kind of

loves complexity a bit for a few reasons, which is like it's generally a contrarian

community. It's also quite a technical community and engineers love playing

and fiddling with stuff at the cutting edge, which is always a bit more complex.

But at the end of the day, you just really want things to be simple, which is why Satoshi was like

okay, here's a node. It's layer one. You just flood the network.

There's no routing. There's no central point. Like Cardano

they have all these different weird multiple different types of nodes

and stuff like that. Bitcoin is literally there's just one node. It's layer one.

Everything sends to everything. That's it. It's that simple. You can ask any node.

The engineering design couldn't be any more fundamentally

straightforward than that, except to the extent that, okay, then you have your wallets

connect via SPV, which is exactly like a client-server model that

has existed in computer science forever. It just makes sense

that that is going to work. So as soon as then you add, okay,

we're going to add our lightning nodes, and now we have this unsolved routing problem,

which not only is technically a huge amount of work to do, it's also

economically infeasible because the optimal solution

is just to converge on large hubs, which is exactly what's happened.

Whatever it is, BitRefill and three other guys run

like 90% of it. Yeah, exactly.

They end up being the large share of where all the routing

is going through, just because that's economically the most efficient

solution. At least the big bloggers knew that was going to

happen right from the start, and now it has. And even worse.

Currently, the entire ecosystem is gravitating. Not the entire ecosystem,

but large portions of the ecosystem are gravitating towards Spark.

Half, at least, of all lightning

users use some sort of wallet with a Spark backend.

And then I have Alex Gladstein talking to me about how when you do a primal

to primal zap on Nostar, that that's a lightning transaction and has the lightning

icon, and there's no lightning transaction that takes place

in the slightest.

So this is also like, I don't know, SuperTestCenter, if you saw

my, I know you weren't at TabConf, I thought, but I did the

lightning debate, and I tried to draw a distinction between like, okay, there is

a lightning cult, and then there's kind of like, the lightning technical community

is a lot, a large percentage of them, like Tadge Dryja, is not in the

lightning cult, even though he created lightning. These are a lot of people who are very honest

about lightning. But another thing that happened from 2017

on, basically continuously,

is, this is very hard to articulate,

but basically it was, lightning was held up as

this idea of, this is how we scale Bitcoin.

There's a huge difference, so it's hard to articulate the idea, because in the

lightning technical community, it's usually pretty honest, and then in the lightning

white paper, there's this line that's often cited by the large blockers, where they say,

well, hey, we need 133 megabyte blocks, actually, plus the lightning network

to make this work. But there was this idea

that took place in the culture. It was in everyone's brain, in the

BTC world, after 2017. So maybe it wasn't

written down, and it's not easy to find, but it was everywhere you went,

every person you talked to, they were like,

Bitcoin is the future of money, and lightning network

will scale it to 8 billion people. And that was the real idea that people

believed, and so that idea was

fake, and these people didn't know anything about channel factories. Now,

you could argue that this is a normal part of life, and this normal part of specialization

of labor, like when I go to the supermarket, I don't really know anything about where the

mushrooms come from, or whatever, how everything gets where it is.

So you could say, arguably, that's healthy, and a normal part

of just an advanced civilization. Of course, and I'm not asking these

people to be experts in whatever, channel

factories, but this is

what Robin was trying to say about, we should be honest about the fact that it's not

working, which is like, I don't know how to make the analogy totally work. It's like

if you said – Well, it's just getting bad information from the experts

or the people who – the problem isn't that you don't know

what happens to get all the vegetables in the grocery aisle, but if you then had

farmers, you were like, the mushrooms are not there this week,

and then you went to the farmer advocacy group or whatever, and they were like,

no, the mushrooms are definitely coming because we've got this new kind of fertilizer that's going to

fix everything, and then suddenly everybody came to you and said, where's all the

food? And that's what you told them, and then later it turned out you'd just been lied to.

It's like you're building a supermarket, it's not finished yet, and you're saying

there will be a bunch of stuff, a bunch of food here, and then we know that

it's 10 years later, the food's not arriving, or what's going to arrive is instead going to be

like frozen TV dinners or something that's not quite the same.

I think that is really important, and I

don't even blame the lightning technical people, because the cult kind of became

self-perpetuating, but in this way, the lightning cult has become more dangerous

than I think anyone realized, or even

I think I'm the most pessimistic maybe out of everyone here,

that you have fed – you slaughtered the truth and fed

it to this monster, and it was getting stronger every day, and it's

spreading like a cancer, and I think it's very bad.

To me, it's amazing.

Sorry, you go ahead.

Let's play rock, paper, scissors or something.

Fine, I'll be short, because I'm not short

in real life. Anyway, it's amazing that this community

that hates so much people who step out of line, and basically

now they're not shy in calling this a church anymore. When they go to

conferences, they're like, oh, this is the gospel, the Bitcoin standard, and we

just went to church together, which is the conference. They're not shy

about suggesting that this is a huge cult, and

they have their class system, and they hate people

who are not like them. They hate shitcoiners. They hate people like

me, who are somehow part of their group, but

at the same time, not invited to events, but I can show up

because I paid a ticket or whatever. I get a free ticket from someone.

They hate me, but they don't hate people who promise them stuff,

but then it never happens.

Because that's what they're receiving. They feel good validation.

It doesn't matter if the thing that was promised gets delivered, if what you've been promised is

a good time in the meantime. You all get to hang out at the conference. You all get to

congratulate each other and feel superior, moral Bitcoiners that are

saving the world. That's really what's being sold, is participation in

a group and a crusade, just like any cult.

Yeah, maybe, but if I was a developer and I raised $100 million

to fix Lightning, like Matt Corallo, I think, did,

he raised a lot of money from Jack Dorsey to

rewrite Lightning in Rust, and he's still running a

third-party client, which, to be honest, is being used by Square right now

for their payments integrations. But still,

he hasn't really fixed Lightning. He just rewrote some parts.

But that's because it was never about fixing Lightning. That's why I see this a lot, and I don't understand

how it hasn't clicked yet. The other example, which is the same case,

is Blockstream. People are like, well, Blockstream is going to deliver all this shit.

No, they're not. They said they were going to do sidechains. They said they were going to make this, that, and the other.

They've been running for 10 years. They've made freaking no products that are really that

compelling or interesting. They only put them out there as marketing cover

because the actual transaction is, we will fuck up

BTC at the core level, and we need an excuse to get

paid off. That's exactly how politics works.

Oh, actually, I need to sell you this abandoned parking

lot for $400 million, even though it's worth $10 million,

the transaction is just for me to actually get a payoff. That's how corruption

works. It's the same thing. I doubt Matt Corallo was ever

planning to fix Lightning or whatever. He was just getting paid $100 million

to sandbag the whole thing. I don't think it was that much, anyway.

But what I'm trying to say is that everyone forgives

because everyone gets rich, right? So as long as the number goes up,

they forgive any promises that did not work out,

anything that did not get delivered, and they're like, it doesn't matter. I got rich.

Have fun staying poor. Ha ha. Whatever.

One of the things that I really admire about what's

happened in the Lightning community is the prevalence of wallets that let you select

what node you're connected to. It's very common in

Lightning wallets for them to say, you can connect this to your own L1 node.

I think it's very likely that most users don't do that.

They never download an L1 wallet. They never go into settings. They never hook it up.

But I don't think that is

the Lightning network's problem. I think that is a humanity problem. Everyone's just like,

oh, well, I just want the easy thing, and I don't even want

to do the work of downloading a Bitcoin node.

I don't view that as a problem with the Lightning network that all the users choose to use

it in some optimal way.

I think that's a humanity problem, and the Lightning network actually did it.

The developers of the Lightning network actually have done it the right way.

Isn't that what I said, SupertestNet, about the technical crowd is not

in the cult, and they're mostly okay.

Parallel to them is this huge idea that

includes Michael Saylor, where he's saying, and he'll say,

Bitcoin and these Layer 2 and Layer 3 and Layer 4 protocols

bullshit something about whatever.

Then he'll say the market will provide that or whatever. But then there's this whole group of people who

think, well, the Lightning network is how we scale Bitcoin.

You could imagine maybe a parallel thing where you say, oh, I think

self-driving cars,

I think self-driving cars will be the next big thing. Their car has the self-driving option,

but 99% of people get in the car and then they drive it

themselves. And they're driving it all around and they're getting into car accidents

and there's still 40,000 highway deaths a year. And then someone like you

could say, rightly so, totally fair, you could say, well, you know, this isn't a...

It's not the internet's fault. It's not a self-driving

car problem, it's a human problem. But it would still be false to say that

in this reality, it's a fake reality that I just made up.

But it would still be false to say that self-driving cars are the next big thing, because objectively, no one cares.

And so Lightning is not the next big thing. And this is for a wide variety of reasons, including that people don't understand it or care, and not limited to.

Yeah, it's just about reality.

...don't want their car to drive itself.

But it would be wrong to... I don't think that's the narrative, though, or at least that's not the promise I heard. It's not that everyone will choose self-sovereignty.

It's that this is the path, or this is a path, that it can actually succeed at making that an option for everyone.

And I think it has. I think everyone can run an L1 node and a Lightning node.

And that has been made available to everyone. You can make the pool available for people to drink from, but you can't make them drink from it if they don't want to.

And I think the criticism is leveled at the wrong people. I don't think the Lightning people, either the engineers or... I'm not aware of any cult people in Lightning.

I don't think they have done it wrong.

If you're saying, okay, we build the Lightning part, but no one uses it, they prefer custodial, or they prefer whatever, SPV, or they prefer some third thing, then why keep calling it Lightning?

And why contribute to the narrative that Lightning is how we scale Bitcoin?

Because it's accurate. The scaling solution that works is available and continues to be improved.

But I think most people just don't, at least we're in a stage where most people do not want self-sovereignty.

Yes, but that's a reality that you have to adapt to.

This whole idea of Lightning is going to provide self-sovereignty to everybody, that is within a larger bubble, to me, of the...

The real promise of Bitcoin was a peer-to-peer electronic cash that the entire world is going to use, which is going to get them off of fiat currency, right?

And we're going to have sound money.

So, to me, that's the actual goal we're shooting for.

Now, of course, in that pursuit of that, is everybody going to become an expert in Bitcoin and everything?

No, of course not.

But in order to get that technology to everybody, you just have to give the consumer what they want.

That's capitalism.

That's how economics works.

Like, you can't...

People want what they want, and you just have to give them what they want.

Now, ideally, you pair that with something that is good for them.

But if they fundamentally don't want it, then trying to force it to them or say there's a different or another option doesn't matter.

Like, a technology that is not adopted or that stays niche is not going to change the world.

So, you have to be pragmatic.

I think it's more than mere preference also.

It's like, if they don't like it, maybe there's actually many hidden costs about it.

So, for example, let's say SupertestNet.

He has that example about the well or you can lead people to the fountain.

So, he's going to build a fountain.

You go to this community where everyone collects the rainwater in coconuts or something.

That's what they do.

And then you build this fountain.

And you say, hey, listen, you don't have to wait for rain.

On a hot day, there's no rain.

Come to the fountain.

But for some reason, people just don't.

They don't go for it.

That's kind of one scenario.

But I think there's an infinite number of things you could conclude about why they don't like the fountain.

Like, maybe they think it's poisoned.

Or maybe they just don't want to talk to anyone else.

Or maybe they don't like the fountain.

The coconuts are sacred.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, right.

So, yeah, exactly.

The coconuts could be sacred.

It could include a number of false beliefs, like superstitious beliefs.

But then you could still say, okay, you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to install.

If it's what they like is staying at their house, then I'm going to install pipes.

I'm going to have running water.

Or if it's something else, I'm going to sell them bottled water if they don't like talking to others.

But we're going to have the milkman come around.

Or we're going to ship people cartons.

Or we're going to do the giant.

So the work isn't quite done.

And you can always be upstaged.

Even if you're just a technologist building things.

Someone could say, at the end of the day, all the technology, you know, all of the technology is related to, like, meeting people's needs.

So that's always going to be a trump card, even in the technological world.

You say, you know what, what this really needs is something else.

And so if people don't go for it, that is a clue, I think, of something deeper.

Not necessarily an accurate clue because some things are ahead of their time, right?

So, like, some things people try them, and actually they're the right idea, but they don't work.

But I don't – I really – I think – I really agree, and I think – well, I'm not sure how many – but I think Robin and I are, like, you have to say – we have to say out loud that we have to break the spell about lightening doesn't work.

And so that we can just move – and then once we do, we just rip off the band-aid and you just move on to something else.

I think people rightly understand that it's like a – the lightning network is so inherently bound up in the propaganda for small blocks, just like every site has their propaganda.

But then people are saying, oh, then it's going to be played, it's going to be – everyone's going to clip it and whatever.

So in a way, it's – I think it's just killing BTC and it's making the whole thing more into an irrational cult.

But that's my point of view, so I've said basically –

One of the things that makes me pessimistic in this space – or it's not even in this space, it's just pessimistic about humanity in general – hang on, there's a truck driving by.

One of the things that makes me pessimistic is I think that even if everyone knew how to use Bitcoin, how to use lightning, how to be self-sovereign, they understood all of that, and they also compared it with what's the alternative?

Well, it's having a bank control your money. I think if most people understood, fully understood both of the implications of those, most people would choose the banking option.

I think most people would say, I don't want the thing you told me of with the self-sovereignty.

I want the bank to control my money and for them to be responsible, because there's one thing that people hate the most in this world of ours, and it's responsibility.

Not public speaking, the number one fear in our world is responsibility.

If you did teach everyone how to use all this stuff, I think they would reject it and say, I want the banks.

I want them to control everything so that I don't have to be responsible.

I mean, I think that's a good point.

And it's true that people are always going to be looking for ways to offload and outsource responsibility.

But then you kind of get into a bigger like civilization scale discussion where, of course, people outsource their responsibility and they outsource their responsibility until whoever they've outsourced it to eventually abuses that and then their life gets a little bit worse.

And then the cycle carries on until eventually they're in such a crap situation that they're like, holy crap, we need a revolution.

We need to get the power back.

And then at that point, they discover, you know, it's like whatever.

But even then, it's like times like type of thing, right?

But even in the hard times, it's like 5% of the people become good men, become the good men that the hard times create.

Because you can look at anywhere like Venezuela or anywhere that is in a hyper inflating kind of currency situation like those people switch on quick when it suddenly becomes a matter of like we can't eat unless this works.

Then all the lies and propaganda starts to fall apart pretty fast.

And suddenly everyone's a big fan of personal responsibility.

Part of the reason that most people don't want to be personally responsible is actually because they live in societies where things are easy enough.

And most of the time, you can get away with not doing that.

Right. And so that lasts until there is a huge problem, which is just sort of an inherent part of Bitcoin that we're kind of like do more prepping or something.

I just wanted to make a quick point before I leave.

I think it's interesting to look at the entire history of how Bitcoin evolved.

We started with Satoshi saying, yeah, don't worry about the block size.

We're just going to scale it up and it's no problem to have like 600 megabyte blocks or whatever he said in his first email.

And kind of like everyone agreed with that until some point.

And then Satoshi left and then it became that huge debate.

And then suddenly we were like, yeah, no, we need small blocks for everyone to be self-sovereign and to participate trustlessly.

And then we went on and maybe we had a short phase of people trying to make lightning work with SPV clients, which is kind of like the same thing as what Satoshi suggested just with small blocks.

But then eventually we ended up with the vast majority of the ecosystem just using Spark.

And it's more centralized as it could have ever been with big blocks.

And that's kind of like absurd that we don't talk about that or that we don't see that as clearly as the facts are.

And I find that a bit weird that we are always bending the narrative so much.

In practice, the lightning node is more expensive than the BCH node.

And in practice, the custodial lightning node has an infinite cost much higher than any.

I don't actually agree with super testing, but I do think the burden of responsibility falls more heavily on some people than others.

And I think also people are different sometimes.

So if there's something that I don't know a lot about, then you would want to offload that responsibility to someone else.

You'd say, oh, I'm just really not very good at whatever it is.

We're playing some sport and I'm not good at it. And then people tell me, go over here.

Like when I had to play on my friend's softball team, I was the catcher temporarily because they were down to eight people and they got an automatic out.

So, of course, I just play the catcher, the easiest spot.

You know, that's not that hard. You have to do one or two things, though.

We're in a different space, though. We're all like makers and doers and podcast creators and software designers and things.

People who make things for a living are often not in that role.

They are willing to take on responsibility and it doesn't resonate as much.

But I think most people, you look at them, they like being cheap.

But we might not know if I had to make like if I had to cook like a three course meal or something at a Michelin star restaurant, I might suddenly become a lot less opinionated.

And I would just be like, someone just tell me what to do.

Or I might just walk out and say, I don't want to be responsible for this beef Wellington or whatever the hell, you know, whatever they have to make.

So I think if people actually really did know a lot, they might do different things.

Like they might want the responsibility because, yeah, you can coast for a while, but ultimately you end up.

This is like, yeah, in the USSR had this appearance of stability and many other kind of quasi authoritarian or super authoritarian.

Like they have it sort of looks OK at first. And then later on, you realize how much it really had cost you.

But I think if people really knew everything about the whole lay of the land and they wanted to get rid of responsibility.

Wouldn't instead they just go with they would go with SPV large blocks because they say, now I'm not as responsible.

I've outsourced it to. Whatever large block world, but I was with four megabytes of headers per year, which is.

Then if you want the path of ease, then I think BCH is free and things like that are a much better solution.

I think one of the things I like about Bitcoin.

You would go with SPV large blocks.

I mean, yeah, I think we need something that works.

And currently what we are seeing is like people are using Spark or MicroStrategy.

And we don't have SPV of MicroStrategy.

That would be nice if we did.

Yeah, like we are far away from making it work.

Like if the hard path or like the proper path would work, then it would be good.

But it's not like it's making it way worse than the easy path.

There's another car right next to me, so I'll wait till he goes away.

Yeah.

The ice cream truck or like Carnival or something like that.

It's March by in a second or something.

It's in El Salvador.

Oh, okay.

I'm in Puerto Rico sitting next to a coffee shop, which is the only place I can find reliable Wi-Fi.

That's cool.

San Juan.

Well, it's nice there.

I almost did the Act 20 tax scheme.

I was like, I don't know, this isn't right for me.

I think another important dimension is to quantify the notion of responsibility.

Because responsibility is not equal to responsibility.

Does responsibility mean I just have to take care of my key?

Or does it mean I need to understand about liquidity, channel management, and all kinds of things that are just so far away from regular users that they will never do it?

And I think that's a huge difference.

I think managing a key can be made reasonably easy such that a lot of people can do it.

But I think pure lightning cannot be made practical for people.

Yeah, like the average person.

This is why I believe that we can pragmatically get Bitcoin to 8 billion people.

It's because even if the average person definitely does not want the full responsibility of everything, the average person can look after their smartphone.

They can look after the cash in their wallet.

They can probably look after their passport and their valuable jewelry.

Those are all standard, normal things that everyone who isn't a very young child or maybe in a nursing home and out of their mind can manage.

And then even for those other people, they can have people around them who are trusted, who are directly adjacent to them.

So if we can make using Bitcoin as easy as managing one of those things, then there's no reason that it couldn't become a global currency from the point of view of people taking responsibility to do it.

They just need to not know any more than the very, very bare minimum, which is look after this thing and tap to pay whenever you see the Bitcoin symbol.

And that's it. That's basically how tap to pay cards work.

So it's all about approximating that and hopefully improving on it as much as we can.

And that was the whole big blocker philosophy.

It's basically just pragmatism.

I do think it's possible to make the inbound liquidity problem of pure lightning intuitive and understandable for users.

And I think Phoenix has done a really good job of this by just saying, when you receive an inbound payment in Phoenix and you don't have enough money, you just get less than you were going to get.

And it tells you, hey, it cost a dollar to receive the inbound liquidity for this payment.

And so that's why you receive ninety nine dollars instead of one hundred.

I've seen people try it and they get it.

OK, OK, I can understand it.

So I think it can actually be made to work in a way where the user doesn't have to manage anything.

They just receive inbound liquidity when they need it.

And I think that's great.

Why is it failing in the market, though?

Remind me again which wallet you use to make your payment today.

I mean, I'm not representative for the masters.

I think if you look at the distribution of lightning wallets, most of them are using Spark.

Most users are using Spark-based wallets.

I am certainly in a bubble.

I don't see that.

I don't see Satoshi dominating.

Wallet of Satoshi is by far the biggest.

And that is Spark.

Then you have these other ones like Blink, Cake Wallet for sure, and Bitcoin Beach Wallet.

These ones, they're all using Spark.

I mean, three of the ones on there, I don't think they're very successful in the market.

Wallet of Satoshi is very successful, but I bet Phoenix beats out all the other three ones you mentioned.

Yeah, I think of the top ten, probably eight or nine are Spark.

Well, it'd be cool. I'd like to see a spreadsheet that makes this more clear.

It surprises me to hear that.

I know Spark has been very successful, but I don't think that they are eight of the top ten.

Even if ten out of the top ten were non-custodial, it wouldn't convince me.

Fundamentally, the channel problem is a very inefficient way.

We can't open enough channels for everyone.

But there's more to it than that.

It's like the whole community has...

It's hard to get any reputable evidence because there's this funhouse mirror

where everyone's tempted to paint the lightning with a favorable brow or place in a very favorable light.

People really want lightning.

The wishful thinking has corrupted basically everything.

People really want lightning to be good.

So now it's impossible to believe anything that so many times you investigate and it's not true.

And this is true of every...

This is true of MSTR.

This is certainly true of BCH in 2017.

It's certainly true of Ethereum when it was getting started.

We all have to be idealists and optimists to some extent.

But I'm just saying it's certainly true of lightning.

And I'm just saying that the true lightning is much worse than it appears.

And so even however it appears right now, it's worse than that.

It's a big illusion that's cast over the whole thing.

But yeah, we don't really see it working.

I think the sun is setting on lightning.

Even with Barack inventing ARK and saying,

Oh, basically lightning, I fail to see it scaling.

So I invent this other thing, which is great.

But I think that's...

It's not the case that lightning...

If ARK had never...

Even if ARK works, which I don't think ARK will work.

I think it's just the latest in a parade of mutations of lightning.

That's not even the latest anymore.

CUBE is the latest.

That's what I mean, though.

But the fact that...

That's what I was trying to say before is that the fact that we have another one,

it kind of says, oh, people are getting tired of that old one.

It's like we've never seen...

We've never seen whatever...

Spider-Man fight...

We've never seen Superman fight on the moon before.

It's like they're just coming up with a new thing.

Oh, they did that in Superman 3.

Yeah, I think it was in Superman 4.

That's why I said it as a joke.

Yeah, with Nuclear Man.

And it looks absurd, but it's very meme-able.

So the point is...

To make it quickly, Wallet of Satoshi has, at least on Google Play,

they show the number of downloads.

And Wallet of Satoshi has a million downloads.

And Phoenix has like 100,000 downloads.

So roughly...

I would be prepared to believe that Wallet of Satoshi bought the downloads

for some commercial.

It's like...

It's like even if ARK worked, the idea...

I'm talking about ARK.

I'm switching back temporarily.

I finished my thought.

About Barack's ARK and Cube.

Even if those worked, which I don't think they will,

the premise that lightning would have been just fine

if they hadn't been invented,

that is at least contradicted by the inventor of ARK, Barack,

and also me, for what it's worth.

So we don't think that.

Now, I don't know if...

I don't know.

Maybe it'll all work.

It's great.

We all love lightning.

Imagine if we could switch it around.

A world where everyone uses...

I don't know.

Big Wallet and Blink Wallet also have 100K.

So they have as much as Phoenix.

So I think it's pretty fair to say that 9 out of 10 lightning wallet users

use a Spark thing.

When I talk to someone, 9 out of 10.

I think it's more like 95%.

Yeah.

When I talk to people using lightning,

they clearly have no idea what the word custodial even means,

let alone they're saying several million miles from...

I mean, they shouldn't know.

I don't need to know.

They are using custodial lightning.

Especially because they'll be like,

oh, I'll send you some sats.

They send me like 10 sats.

They arrive instantly.

And I never opened any channel.

It's like the whole thing's fake.

That's the problem.

It's fake.

It's all lies.

It'll all be lies.

It isn't necessarily true that if you didn't open a channel,

then you didn't receive the money.

It's possible that they paid for the channel opening fee for you,

and you really did receive the money.

That's true.

You're right.

You got me there.

But these people, there's no way.

And when they were sending me 10 sats or something,

there's no way that they would pay.

There's no way you can receive the money.

You're right.

It's true.

You're all right.

You got me there on that little.

That's theoretically possible.

Of course, they arrive instantly.

That's also a clue that they're prioritizing the fake user experience

over showing the reality of what Tadge Dreiser was describing,

which is the Lightning Network is these bi-directional two-of-two channels

that are linked by HTLCs.

To me, that's what the Lightning Network is,

or that's what the word refers to.

And that's not.

So I don't know.

You're right.

They could have paid for the channel open,

and then the block could have actually been found immediately,

and then they could have just displayed one confirmation.

Sure, yeah.

I think that none of the wallets that make the inbound capacity problem simple,

none of them show pending, and they really should.

They just show received, even though the channel is still pending.

So I do think that's a problem.

I don't think that is a problem.

That's an interesting area, right?

Because in Selene that we use, we just use bch0conf,

and it just works every single time.

And yes, okay, technically, yes, you need confirmation, yada, yada, yada.

But in the entire history of Selene,

we've never had one problem with any user with any transaction ever.

And so why are we going to degrade the UI?

The reason why you need to have that UI that just instantly arrives

is because that's how Fiat works.

It's what people expect, especially now.

I mean, maybe 10 years ago or 12 years ago,

Bitcoin was the cutting-edge thing that everyone, wow, this is instant.

But now people are just like, duh, my payments are instant.

Well, I think if it's an L1 payment, then it's like a channel open.

It isn't instant in Bitcoin.

You can't treat it like it's Fiat because it's not Fiat.

It works differently, and the sender can take the money back.

They effectively can't, so it's never a problem.

How do you solve the double-spending problem in BCH?

Well, see, that's the thing.

It's just zero-conf is reliable in almost all cases.

So obviously, we still have a blockchain.

Obviously, we still have proof-of-work.

Obviously, you still need to accumulate time, right?

Is it only reliable because people aren't doing it?

Or is it reliable because you found some way to solve the double-spending problem?

Well, I mean, there's future ideas that we could implement.

But the basic premise is that just when your node relay policy just accepts first seen as a rule,

which is how Bitcoin worked until BTC broke it,

and since we don't have RBF, that doesn't exist at all,

between those two things, you have 99.999% reliability just off the bat.

And if you're doing anything under, of course, like $1,000 or $10,000 the majority of the time...

$10,000 the majority of the time, then people, it's going to be more effort to fraud that

than it is the amount of money that it's worth.

When Peter Todd decided that... Oh, hang on, there's a truck next...

When Peter Todd decided...

So I have to go.

Thank you so much, Paul, for being here.

And great, as usual. It was nice to drop in on you guys.

And I'll see you guys later.

Thank you.

We can talk about that later. I'm very intrigued by that.

When Peter Todd decided that he didn't like ZeroConf and he made LibreRelay,

it was no longer the case that 99% of nodes were running the software that made it difficult.

And so I started to see video guides saying, here's how to steal from merchants on Bitcoin.

You download Electrum wallet, you connect to a LibreRelay node,

and then this thing will say it showed up, but then you can take it back.

And when I saw that, I was like, clearly, maybe in BCH no one's done that yet.

But just saying a filter policy can solve this, I don't think is accurate.

Well, that's the thing. That's exactly what I was saying.

It can't fully and forever and for all time solve the problem.

And so we're lucky that to this point, nobody has made a concerted effort

to attack it, like you said, right?

So that's possible that that will happen in the future.

But when that happens, there are solutions and I think we're already working on.

So BCH already also has double spend proofs, right?

So what you can do is you accept a transaction and then you monitor for double spends,

and then you alert the user if you see a double spend within,

it's like two or three seconds, right?

And you know, and now there's actually even another proposal,

which is still very vague, called Sunlight,

which is that you would be checking to see if people publish their lower difficulty mining shares

so you could see what the hash rate was actively mining on.

So you could be like, okay, 95% of the hash rate is already loving these shares, right?

So it's true that double spending is always a theoretical possibility.

And in fact, it's even a practical possibility in some tiny minority of cases.

But every payment system in the world has some percentage of error in it, right?

Visa is used globally by billions of people.

And there's fraud, there's times where the internet goes out,

there's times where the terminal machine is broken.

You don't need to hit 100% to have a working payment solution.

Pragmatically, 99.99% is good enough,

because almost nobody is ever going to hit those problems in practice.

And when they do, you can have a backup for that,

whether it's showing a message, oh, potential fraud detected, don't trust this payment.

And that might happen to one person, one in 100,000 payments or whatever,

and they'll be annoyed at that one thing.

But that's not going to stop a payment system becoming globally viable.

Also, I think the strongest argument with this entire story is that

the original RBF was like, yeah, it's opt-in.

You can still use whatever you want, right?

And then at some point, it was like, yeah, no, we're going to do full RBF,

because it's just stupid to use RBF.

And then it became paternalistic, and people didn't even have the option anymore to use it.

And I feel like that was not very honest.

It was a weird story that fell off.

Yeah, well, we could always say that.

The big blogs could always see that coming.

That's why this whole thing is so funny, because it's like,

Peter Todd is busy sabotaging and destroying our network,

and he's managed to undermine the reliability of zero-conf transactions.

That's been a project of his for the last decade,

and he's been supported and cheered on by the community.

And it's like, well, if you put a bunch of arsonists in your house,

and then you're later like, oh, shit, our house is on fire.

It's like, no, you encouraged that the whole time.

Not to say, of course, I'm going to leave now.

Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.

Thanks for having me, man.

Yeah, it's very interesting discussions.

Bye, Robin.

Thank you for coming.

Talk more soon.

Two out of three of our discussions have been very interesting.

We spent way too long on Michael Saylor.

Yeah, no, I agree.

I agree, but we have to somehow get through a marathon stream.

Super, do you want to pick the next topic, then?

You're welcome to, if you've got something else.

What do you want to discuss?

Well, we briefly started talking about filters, and that has come up again.

Perhaps that could be a good segue into the filter talk.

Yeah, let's hear it.

I'm fascinated.

I mean, I have my takes that my listeners will be familiar with,

so I think maybe we should start with you guys,

where you're at on filtering.

I don't know, where are you at on the whole filter brigade?

I consider myself part of the filter brigade.

I think mempool filters are a good idea for some of the reasons I was just mentioning,

about improving payment experience for users.

I think it's a good idea, and I think it's a good idea to have a filter brigade.

I think it's a good idea to have a filter brigade,

about improving payment experience for users.

But yeah, I think they're, in general, a good idea.

And in theory, the PIP 110 software proposal is an attempt to encode

some of the mempool filters as also being consensus rules.

And I think some of that is okay.

I think some of those could be made consensus rules in the way that they describe.

But specifically with that BEP, I think it goes too far,

and it bans things that are good.

Namely, it bans opif from being used in Tepri transactions.

And so that is the main reason why I am not supportive of it.

Because it goes too far, and instead of just banning bad things,

it also bans good things.

So I recently did a debate with Chris Guida about it,

and I encouraged people to search YouTube for the PIP 110 debate,

and we had a recent one that's really interesting.

Yes, it's on the Forrest Hoddle channel.

I watched that debate, and I also recommend it.

It was quite interesting to hear that sort of clash of opinions.

But one of the things that Chris said in that debate,

and which I've also heard Bitcoin Mechanic say,

is they accept that you are asking for them to make changes to the proposal,

and they say, okay, fair enough,

you have some things you don't like, you want them changed.

But from what I understand, if those things were changed to be as you prefer,

it would not switch you from against the proposal to in favor of it.

It would just make you go from against the proposal to neutral.

Is that right?

If both of the changes I propose were made,

then I would move to in favor of the proposal.

If they stopped doing the opif,

if they stopped targeting opif specifically,

and just targeted the inscription envelope,

and if they modified the activation method

so that the user-activated software doesn't happen,

has a blank date that doesn't get set

until after there's a significant economic minority in favor of this.

If they made both of those changes,

then I would support the bill, not just be neutral on it.

If they only made the one change,

if they just changed the opif to just target the inscription envelope,

I wouldn't exactly be neutral.

I would still recommend people against running the software

because I think the user-activated software in August

will likely cause users of it to get forked off the network.

But I would at least support miners activating the other rules,

like just the consensus changes they made,

I would support that part.

And so that's why I think they said that's not enough.

They're definitely not going to modify the user-activated software component.

And so if we made his other change, he still wouldn't support it.

But yeah, that's because I think even if he did change

the consensus change that I want,

still the activation method is also dangerous.

So I wouldn't support it unless they change both of them.

Yes. So pragmatically speaking then,

because I'm trying to hear from their point of view,

it sort of makes sense to me, setting aside the technical element,

but politically, if you change these things, I would jump on board.

You might be one of the only people that is sort of in that camp,

or do you think if they made those changes,

it would win them significantly more support,

like yourself and others as well, too?

I don't know about significantly.

Probably not.

I think that I am also a very niche minority opinion in the Bitcoin space.

And so I'm probably not the very uniquely only person

who has the set of opinions that I have about this.

There's probably not very many of us,

and it probably wouldn't win them a huge amount of support

if they did make the changes that I want.

Yeah. See, that's kind of where the rub is for them,

because even if they liked your ideas,

which I think they probably don't,

then it still kind of wouldn't make sense for them to adopt it just for that reason.

And when you say, especially about changing the date,

that they need to build more consensus for that kind of a change,

which I agree with, and I think probably actually a lot of people

who are being critical of it agree with,

the problem is they've kind of snookered themselves in a way

because first they got in a panic,

which was when they were going to do,

oh, we need a three-month emergency fix.

And then they then walked that back to be this one-year change

to August or September.

But now that's kind of what they bet their chips on, right?

That's now where they have the momentum,

they have the energy,

they have at least among themselves aligned on,

okay, this is going to be our game plan.

And sort of fracturing that or delaying it,

then something else will be the trending topic

on Bitcoin, Twitter, and their whole chances go to zero

if they delayed it at this point.

What do you make of that?

I think it's a problem.

They are likely to fork themselves off of the network.

And I think it is fallacious to be like,

well, we've already come this far, we have to see it through now.

No, if it's a bad idea, you can just stop doing it

and come up with a better idea, fix the idea,

and then do the good idea that's not problematic.

I mean, yeah, I agree with you.

I agree that it is a fallacy.

It is a bit of a sunk cost fallacy,

but that's kind of what we're here to speculate about,

I guess, the fact that once you've, you know,

they say when you're in a hole, like step one is stop digging, right?

So I think, and you think it sounds like

that they have dug themselves into quite a bit of a hole,

but how could it be sort of presented to them

that they would think, okay, you know,

we got to stop making things worse for ourselves.

Like, I think they just know the reality that

whatever the chances of BIP110 activating,

even if it's relatively low, if they now walk it back

and then retool for like a later second salvo,

like that's just not coming, even if they had a better idea

or they had, you know, it's kind of like,

you couldn't really imagine that with BCH,

you know, back in the day, like Amore was kind of like,

let's split, everybody did it and split.

And then BCH was like rolling and it was rolling.

If it had been like, oh, okay, let's negotiate another round of,

let's figure out a better way to do this, this, that, or the other,

there probably just never would have been a BCH, right?

And in fact, that's why BCH came up,

because several attempts at compromise had failed.

And, you know, you can't die on every hill,

but you do have to die on a hill

because otherwise you just get pushed back forever, right?

And that's the point that they are at emotionally,

from what I understand.

Well, I don't know how to,

the only thing I can do is present my reasons for stating

why I think the way I do and try to persuade people to them.

And so that's been the primary tactic I've been trying to do.

And you are accurate, I don't seem to sway many of them.

But yeah, I don't feel that as a failure on my part.

I feel it as a success that I am stating my reasons

and giving them and making them known.

And so I feel good about that.

And I merely pity the fact that they are so wrong

and hardened in their ways.

Yeah. Do you have any speculation?

And of course it is just speculation on what's going to happen.

Are they going to get the mandatory signaling,

fork themselves off,

and then kind of reality is going to wash over them

and they'll think, okay, let's, you know,

maybe that is when they start to revisit.

Or do you think, like we've been talking about

with the cult mentality,

they're all going to double down and create,

I don't know, are they going to go for a proof of work,

change and just split off?

Like that seems to be something Luke is kind of open to.

Where would you expect this to go,

given that we're two months out?

I really don't.

All of those things seem like pretty decent possibilities.

It'll probably just be a mess, a small mess, I should say.

The small number of people who are in favor of this fork

will probably go various ways.

Some of them will double down on,

let's actually continue working on this new fork of Bitcoin,

and some of them will probably come back to regular Bitcoin.

I hope that those people can rally

and then make a good proposal

and then move forward with something that's not bad.

But yeah, other than I think

that this small contingent of people

will have a mess come August,

that's about the only prediction I'm willing to make

as to where it's going to go.

Yeah, okay.

I want to get Vlad's take on the same thing,

but I'm actually just checking the BIP110 signaling.

Shout out to WickedSmartBitcoin,

wickedsmartbitcoin.com slash BIP110 underscore signaling,

and you can have a look.

They, in this latest signaling period,

which is 13 out of 18,

which is just about to finish,

they've found 16 blocks signaling in favor,

or 0.8 percent.

That is actually up from the previous,

which was seven blocks.

So they've more than doubled in this last period,

although they're still a very, very tiny fraction,

but they constantly say

that they're relying on sort of a snowball effect

as people get on board.

And I mean, do they have time?

Let's see, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256.

Let's round up to 1%.

Let's imagine they have 1% right now.

There are three more difficulty periods before August.

So if they double again, they'll be at 2%,

and if they double again, they'll be at 4%,

and if they double again, they'll be at 8%.

So if they can double every time,

which I don't think they can,

it's costing them quite a bit of money and capital to double.

I imagine with the strategy they've pursued of renting at rate,

and I don't think that they have enough income

to support continuing to do that.

But even if they do,

they could get them up to 8%,

which is nowhere near the 51% that they need at minimum.

I mean, their logic is kind of like a mechanic has said several times,

like he thinks 10 to 20% somewhere in there

is sort of the breakpoint that then it would quote-unquote

game theoretically force the other miners to get on board,

or obviously it would be a much more topical thing among people as well.

People start to get antsy and nervous.

Maybe? I don't know.

I think any antsiness or nervousness among miners

plays against them adopting BIP 110.

I think narratively, if they did end up getting into the realm of 20%,

which again, I don't think they will.

I think they're going to get maybe somewhere close to 2%.

This is where I expect them to top out,

or considerably under 2%, let's put it that way.

But if they end up getting up to 20%

and miners start getting antsy and saying,

what are we going to do about this?

I think the narrative that's more likely to emerge

is that BIP 110 is an attack on the network.

More likely than siding with the attackers

is that they would shore up, make a rallying cry of

doing something contrary to it, like a user-rejected software.

I think that is more likely than that.

First of all, I think it's unlikely that they'll get beyond 1.6% of cache rate.

If they do end up getting to 20%,

then I think it's unlikely that other miners are going to side with them.

I think it's more likely that miners will say,

this is a serious attack and we need to do a user-rejected software

or a miner-rejected software to fight against it.

Yeah, the miner-rejected or the URSF type of ideas I find fascinating

because if I was in BTC, which I'm not,

but if I was, I would say, guys, let's just get this ready just in case.

If I truly was against the filters and everything,

I would say, look, let's just at least have a contingency plan

just as a matter of being pragmatic.

But at the same time, I understand that a lot of people might think,

well, there's no point making a contingency plan

for something that's not even a real threat.

And I understand that in making that URSF or planning for it,

you would then give a whole bunch of fresh ammunition

to the filter people to be like, look, it is going to happen.

That's why they're preparing a URSF, you know?

So it makes sense.

Sure.

Politically not.

I am in favor of a user-rejected software proposal,

and so I wrote one.

Four months ago, I made a prototype

of one of my typical proof-of-concept software,

but that's all that I know how to write, so that's what I did.

And I put it out there, and it has not gained significant traction.

A Telegram group did emerge where people discussed

whether to make a real version, and the consensus was,

no, not unless they get more hashrate, more than 1%.

So, yeah, we'll see.

I do think they'll probably end up with a bit more than 1% at this point.

So we'll see.

That's a really interesting insight, though,

that it was an idea that was seriously considered.

You think there is an appetite for, at some threshold,

people would be like, okay, this has gone far enough.

We really need to make sure it's not going to happen.

That's interesting.

Maybe.

I don't know how serious it was considered.

There was a Telegram channel with some serious people in it.

Aaron Van Weerdum was in there.

Shinobi is in there.

I'm in there.

I was the one who kind of got it going.

So there's like three.

I think WickedSmartBitcoin is in there.

ZND Toshi is in there.

But everyone except me doesn't want to do it,

or doesn't want to do a user-rejected software.

Every other serious person is saying,

no, not unless they get a significant amount of hashrate.

Right.

And you think it would be like 2% or more

that would be quote-unquote significant in that context?

Different people have given different numbers.

The one that got the most attention in there was 1% as a trigger.

Several people said, if they get more than 1%,

then I'll start working on a user,

on a real version of what I made.

Another person said 2%.

One person said 20%.

He said only if they got the 20% of hashrate

would he consider working on one.

So we'll see.

We'll see.

But there is a place for discussion of it,

which is a Telegram channel I made.

Anyone can reach out to me if they want in there.

And I would certainly welcome anyone

who wants to help make a real version of this.

I think it would be great to start working on it now

and start getting a review on it

so that if it becomes necessary,

which is unlikely,

but if they start crossing these thresholds

where people start saying,

hey, it might be worth worrying about now,

we won't have to start then.

It would be great to already have something in the works

and say, now this needs review

and start getting hashrate behind it.

Yeah, I think that's very smart.

Decentralized Creative says,

are we going to talk about BCH on this show?

And the answer is yes, maybe, and no,

which is that, yes,

we already kind of did a little bit with the opcodes,

and maybe we'll chat about it more.

But also, this is the BTC crossover stream,

and we have guests who are in a good position

to give us insight about the current state of BTC.

So in the same way that Vlad did plenty of chat about BCH,

I'm definitely planning to keep doing a lot of chat about BTC.

So if you're looking for BCH insights,

I mean, you can keep listening.

Maybe we'll touch on it,

but that's not the primary directive of this show.

Of course, there's all the other episodes of the podcast,

and there's all the Bliss streams and everything

for plenty of chat about BCH.

Vlad, talk to me about these filters.

Where are you at on that?

So no offense to SuperTestNet,

I think he's one of the smartest people in Bitcoin,

but it's a huge waste of time.

And I wish this was used for something more productive.

It's been almost one year since Luke started,

no, it's been longer,

since he reported Ordinal says a critical vulnerability

and said that they're on attack.

And it's been going,

and this deranged one has been going for too long,

and it kept us from actually accomplishing

something more meaningful.

I remember when we were very close

to the great script restoration.

In the meantime, Rusty Russell,

who was the champion of the proposal,

actually left Bitcoin altogether.

And we were close to activating UpCat at some point,

and then CTV, and then CTV and CFS, CFSF, I think.

Yeah, CFSF, yeah.

Anyway, these were heavily influenced

by the Covenant soft forks that already exist on BCH,

which is an admission,

which Jeremy Rubin made on my podcast.

My point being right now is that

we could have used this time much more productively

to build something that actually helps Bitcoin

become better money

and make the value proposition greater

and maybe fix lightning or something.

And yet we're stuck trying to define what is spam

and trying to promote all of these edge cases

where, well, maybe someone's going to put child porn

on a blockchain, and let's not call it child porn.

Let's call it CSAM or whatever.

And then let's make core developers like Gloria Zhao quit

by basically bullying her for months

and turning her into this enemy,

even though she's been one of the most prolific contributors

to the project.

And then let's split the community into camps.

It all sounds like upside up to me.

And honestly, I refuse to participate.

I would rather spend my attention on something else.

No, you don't. You go and make podcasts about it.

I've been on your podcast specifically to talk about this.

Sure, but I make a new podcast every week.

I'm not like Mechanic or whatever, who's always talking about this.

I'm not like Matt Cratter, who seems to have developed an obsession with telling people to rent Hashrate.

I move on.

I get someone who talks about a topic.

If I find it interesting, I have that topic once again with someone else.

But if it's really not something that I find interesting, I just let it be a one-time thing.

And I think it's been since September or something.

I think you've done more than one episode about BIP110.

Okay, man, do some research.

See how many of them were actually about BIP110 and how much of a proportion that is compared to.

The amount of content that I put out there.

All right.

But no offense, SuperTestNet, I do believe that your time is better spent doing something else.

I remember you were doing Hedgehog, which was interesting.

You did a lot of crazy and at the same time useful stuff.

I remember there was a tool that you made for finding coin joints in blocks.

That was cool.

I used that for a while just for my personal curiosity.

I think it's built into Mempool Space now.

I mean, probably not my code.

They probably didn't even know about my code and just wrote their own.

But I think Mempool Space has one of their little Mempool goggles things to look for coin joints.

So I was happy to see that it's being done by better software makers than me.

I'm not saying it's better.

I just think it has nicer UX.

But yours was finding the latest block.

Basically, you could scroll through the pages to see every block and how many coin joints there are in every block.

And you could distinguish between one that's made by Wasabi, because they had more inputs and outputs,

and one that's made by Samurai, which I think had five inputs, five outputs.

I don't know.

Mine had a lot of false positives, because if an exchange happened to have several people receiving the same amount,

mine would say, that's a coin joint, which I guess technically it is.

But it's not like they're not deleting their logs or anything.

So it doesn't have the same properties of a normal coin joint.

But yeah, mine had a lot of false positives.

Yours might be considered false positives, too.

What I'm trying to say is that you're a smart guy, and you could use your energy for something much more productive and useful for Bitcoin.

Would you guys like to hear what some of my latest Bitcoin projects have been?

Yeah, let's hear it.

So I've been working in the past couple of months.

There have been three things that have held my attention.

One of them is point-of-sale software.

One of them is disintermediating hash rate markets.

And I forget what the third one is.

Oh, making educational tools about the potential outcomes of the fork stuff.

So I bet you guys would be interested in hearing about the disintermediated hash rate market idea.

I would love to hear that. Tell us.

Cool. Have either of you two ever purchased or acquired in some manner an ASIC?

No, but Jet might have.

Some people buy an ASIC or get one at a meetup or whatever, and they'll plug it into their wall.

And it asks you for something.

The first thing that happens is connect your computer to it, and it says, give me a Stratum link.

And Stratum is a protocol by which a computer can tell an ASIC, a mining machine, what to do.

Here's the block I want you to mine. Here's the block from before it.

Here's the transactions I want you to put into it.

That's all done using something called the Stratum protocol.

So it'll ask you for one of those, and there's a couple of ways you can get one.

You can either run mining software on your computer, and it'll give you a Stratum link,

and your own computer will tell your miner what to do.

But most people, what they end up doing is they go to a pool, like F2 pool or Ant pool or one of these big pools,

and they'll get a Stratum link from them and plug that into their miner.

And then they get a payout. It's regular.

Once a day, or depending on how powerful your machine is, you'll get $3 or something like that.

But what people often have, what they discover is that it's costing them more money,

or usually it's for most people, it's costing them more money to run the machine

through increased electricity bills than they're making from whatever pool they picked.

So there's a solution to this, or one thing that people can do instead of just pointing it at a pool

is you can point it at a hashrate market instead.

Have either of you ever heard of hashrate markets before?

I've definitely heard about it.

I don't know that I'm, and I know it's also related to, or maybe it's related to this idea

that Bitcoin Cash Autist has of making a coin that tracks the price of hashes

using the on-chain difficulty, because the difficulty is on-chain,

so you can calculate how much a hash should cost in Bitcoin terms.

So I feel like there's, again, maybe that's not what you're doing,

but I feel like that's related to this idea.

It might be related.

In the Bitcoin space, there are three hashrate markets that I've researched.

I think there's probably a couple others, but the ones that I looked into

when I got interested in this niche area of Bitcoin are NiceHash, MiningRig Rentals,

and the newest one is called Brain's HashPower, which is run by Brain's Pool.

They also now are running a hashrate market.

And what you can do with these things is instead of giving a stratum link from a pool,

you can give your mining equipment or your computer, your ASIC, a stratum link from a hashrate market,

and then your machine will stay dormant while it's waiting for someone to rent it.

And you get to set a price.

So you can say, like, my break-even point is I need $5 a day for you to rent this machine.

That's when I'm making money.

And so only if someone comes along and sees your listing and is like,

yeah, I'm willing to pay $5 a day for this amount of hash power,

then it'll turn on and start running, and then you're happy.

Then you're making money.

So this exists. This is out there in the world.

And it occurred to me that, in theory, that should be a more efficient way of mining than pointing it at a pool.

Hang on, let's wait a second.

Can either of you guess why or think of a reason why that might be more efficient than going to a pool, theoretically?

Well, would it be because you have all the different mining distributed amongst all those different people,

and so they can individually set their rates.

So then when you're coming to buy, it's a hashrate market. That's what it is.

So you could just take up the amount of liquidity that you need,

whereas a pool, if they had in excess of that amount of capacity,

they would be losing money on the overheads for that hash that they were not using at any given time.

So that's one reason I can think of. And the other is also just the overheads in general.

I didn't think of that reason. That sounds perfectly right.

I think you're right. That is a reason why it'd be more efficient that I didn't think of.

The reason that I thought of why it would be more efficient is because,

let's say that a miner who has an ASIC, often they want to find whoever's going to pay them the most.

They want to find whatever pool is offering the best rates at the current time.

And so you might do some research, but some of them might not be available to you.

Some mining pools require KYC. Some of them are only available to people in certain countries.

Some of them require specialized contracts. So you might not be able to get the best deal.

You might not even know what the best deal is. But basically, with a hash rate market,

you could theoretically outsource this. You could find the best deal you know of,

one that's going to pay you $7 a day for your equipment.

You could say, all right, I'm going to go to, instead of pointing my thing at that pool,

I'm going to point my ASIC at a hash rate market, set my minimum to $7 a day.

And if no one can beat that, I will rent from myself and point my hash rate at that pool.

So now I'm getting $7 a day. But if someone knows a better place, a better place to point my machine at,

maybe one that pays $10 a day, they can rent it from me, point it at this better place and split the difference.

And I get more money than I was making. They get some money.

And it outsources the discovery of the best place to point your machine to the market.

And it gamifies it and incentivizes people to do this because you can earn money by finding the best place.

Whereas if you're just doing it on your own, whatever one you find, even if you do your research really well,

and you find the very best one on Tuesday, on Wednesday, there might be a different place that's the best place to go.

So it just makes it, I think, theoretically, it turns your targeted revenue stream, your targeted income, into a minimum income.

And that's theoretically more efficient than going to a pool.

So that's my theory for why people, in theory, miners should be using,

it should be the more dominant strategy is instead of going directly to pools, to go to hash rate markets.

But that's not what we see. Most people point them at pools instead.

And I think the reason for that is because of the brokerage fee.

When you point at a nice hash or mining or rentals or these other ones, there's a couple of downsides.

And one is they take a 3% fee. They also take custody of the funds of whoever is paying you for renting your hash rate.

And sometimes they don't give you your money. They don't pay out.

There are people who have signed up for these things, and then suddenly they start doing shotgun KYC,

and they won't give you your payouts or even the person who's renting from you, they won't give them their money back

because you're from the wrong country, they learned during the KYC process.

So all of those things combined to say, look, I'm not going to do, even if I did it,

if I found a place that's going to pay me $5 and then I decided to rent for myself,

so I put $5 a day into this market to rent for myself, I'm not going to get $5 out.

Even if that's what the pool pays, I'm going to lose 3% of that to the broker.

So I'm going to get less than I would if I just pointed it at the pool itself.

So it was in discovering all of this and thinking about hash rate markets that I came up with a protocol

for disintermediating hash rate markets and eliminating the broker.

So with all that preface, do you have any questions so far?

Yes. So my question is, and you're kind of touching on it a little bit at the end there,

but I think it's in the same vein, which is the example you gave at the start

was somebody who has a home miner that they put on their desk,

and maybe they don't have a lot of infrastructure around it or whatever.

It's just for home miners, and then if you obviously link up a lot of them,

it becomes a decent pool of hash rate that people could rent.

But then you're going on to the medium and large size miners

either haven't caught on to this yet or they haven't found a reason to switch.

How do we know what is the spread of people using which markets?

Oh, well, that one is at least pretty easy because they are marketplaces.

They have to make the listings available.

So you can go and see what amount of hash rate is available on these renting websites

and compare it to how much is the actual hash rate at work in pools.

Like compare the unrented hash rate to the ones that's actually at work doing stuff.

So you could make that comparison. I haven't done it to check.

If I had to guess, I would guess there's somewhere around 10 terahash.

That'd be my expectation of just having done the little bit of research I've done.

I would guess about 10 terahash is on hash rate markets,

and I think we're at about a zetta hash.

So it's like maybe 1%, somewhere around 1% of total hash rate

is available for rent on hash rate markets is my guess.

I don't know how exactly I got that impression,

but I looked at several of the websites where you can do this,

and that number jumps out as a possible sum.

That sounds right, but it would be growing, right?

Like this hash rate markets is a sort of a quote unquote relatively recent innovation, right?

So how long has this been going on for?

Well, NiceHash has been around for quite a while,

and Mining Rig Rentals is even older than NiceHash.

So they've been going around for quite a while.

They had some competition, though.

There used to be this thing called cloud mining where you would –

well, it had a similar model, at least the ones that weren't scams had a similar model.

But some of these things would go pretty far back.

They are becoming more popular now with the BIP-110 stuff happening

because a big strategy of the BIP-110 people is to rent hash rate

and point it at tools that are signaling for BIP-110.

So there's more demand now than there has been before for this stuff,

and therefore more people are –

it's more profitable now than it has been before to point your rigs at a hash rate market.

So we're seeing some of that, which I think is really cool, actually.

The BIP-110 people are so, I guess, serious about what they're trying to do

that they're willing to pay money.

They're actually putting their money where their mouth is

and essentially paying miners to – or buying the equipment,

or I guess not fully buying, but renting the equipment to make this thing happen.

I think that's really neat, and I want to give them kudos for doing that.

It's having a significant economic impact in changing the market space,

and it got my attention and got me thinking about this space, too.

So kudos to you guys for doing that.

I think that's really cool.

Yeah, I agree.

If anyone in the BIP-10 community is watching.

I think it's a super fascinating innovation.

I'll let you get on with what you're going to explain the next step in a minute,

but just to linger on that point just for a moment,

I think that's a super, super interesting case

because it's sort of almost coming full circle in a way

to this sort of pure theory of Bitcoin in that you can imagine

that if hashrate markets became more and more prominent

because of the advantages like you were explaining,

then you could get to a point where even theoretically 100% of the hashrate

would be available on the hashrate markets,

and so whoever wanted to get signaling for any specific proposal

could buy up to the amount that they needed to make it,

and then it would become a bidding war amongst groups of supporters

for different proposals who is going to put the most money on the line

to show that they are serious,

that their proposal should be the one adopted, right?

And then the miners have just, you know, Satoshi's one CPU, one vote,

but just abstracted through a market and available to the whole world

for people interested in Bitcoin governance.

I think that's a fascinating idea, and they've created that.

But in order to get there, I think you need to get rid of the broker

because as long as the broker is there, he has to charge fees,

he has to do KYC on his users, and he has custody of user funds,

and that means it's going to be less efficient

than if you bypass him and go directly to a pool.

In a sense, a pool is renting hash rate for most of its users.

Unless your foundry owns all of their equipment,

they're making contracts with their users.

They're saying, if you have a mining farm and you point it at our pool,

we'll pay you a certain rate for the use of your equipment,

and that's a rental contract effectively

because they don't own the machines.

Whoever the mining farm is that's contracting with them,

they're the ones who own the machines,

and the pool is effectively just renting it and mining blocks with it

and giving a payout.

Most mining pools are effectively participating in hash rate markets.

They're just not doing it through nice hash and brains hash power.

They're just doing it directly with mining farms, making direct contracts.

But I thought it'd be cool to get rid of the brokers

and make this more accessible to people with at-home miners,

and so I thought of a way to do it.

The way that I thought of to do it is you leverage the fact

that proof-of-work is self-validating.

So if I say that I have a machine that can do one terahash of power,

of hashing, as someone who wants to rent that from you,

I can validate it by giving you a block template

and seeing how many leading zeros you get over time.

I can say, okay, after one minute of hashing,

you should get this many leading zeros,

and after two minutes of hashing, you should get this many leading zeros,

and over time, it should increase.

So my proposal is pretty simple.

It's still have the people make a listing and say,

I've got a machine that can do this much hashing,

and here's my rate, or here's how much I want for it.

But the renter, instead of going through a broker,

he just makes a lighting payment to the hasher

or to the person with the equipment once a minute.

He says, here's the block template I want you to work on.

Start working on this, and I'm going to investigate

after a minute whether you've reached your target,

and if you have, I will give you a payout,

and then I'll do it again.

The next minute, I'll check if you've reached your target,

and I'll give you another payout, and you just keep doing that.

As long as the payer, the renter, keeps paying,

the miner keeps hashing, and as long as the miner

keeps hitting his targets, the renter keeps paying,

and now you don't need a middleman.

You don't need a broker.

You just have the renter and the hasher and no one in between,

and I think that would work,

and it would make it so that that's the way to go

if you have an at-home miner,

or even if you're a bigger entity,

it's theoretically more efficient than going to pools

because you outsource the discovery

of the best place to mine at.

And you could even make it, quote-unquote,

scam-free, I believe, because you can publish,

like you said, the proof of work is self-validating.

You could publish a proof of that, so maybe not on BTC,

but I'm almost certain on BCH, where we have the improved VM,

you could have, instead of having those one-minute

lightning payments that you were talking about,

you could have a one-minute on-chain transaction

which locked up the funds for the hash rate in an escrow,

which would be either refundable to the original person

after a time lock, or the miner, the hasher,

would be able to grab if they could provide a proof

of a proof-of-work template or whatever

matching the difficulty level that was specified.

So you could make it...

If you were doing it once per minute,

you'd probably have to do it on a larger time frame

than once per minute, because let's say that they only have

half of a tera hash, but they're claiming they have

one tera hash. If there's a time lock on there,

they could just mine for another minute,

or mine for however long it takes them,

and then provide the proof, and so they'd get the money,

even though they didn't actually have one tera hash.

Whereas with lightning, because the payments can be so rapid,

I think it's a...

Well, anyway, yeah.

Cool, so it sounds like you like the idea.

You're even adding to it.

Yeah, of course I like the idea.

I think it's a great idea, because then this is what I'm saying,

and then if you had people making those escrow contracts,

so they're effectively putting up hash rate bounties

on-chain, locked in the UTXOs, this is the signaling,

or this is the template, or whatever.

This is what I want you to do, which could even be off-chain, right?

So you could even just publish a hash on-chain of,

here's a link to a document that has what my exact specifications are.

Here's the amount of mining that I need done,

and here is the escrow, which you can unlock

if you can match that criteria.

So then if you have those on-chain, then, again,

you've got a disintermediated market, exactly like you're saying,

because then you can scan the chain, and you can show a dashboard,

and you can visualize it however you want,

of here are the current bounties, and then, of course,

you can compute a market price, market liquidity,

the depth, and everything like that.

And then you just connect your wallet to it,

your wallet connects to it, and you could just say,

it would be like Binance or something, but on-chain for Hashrate,

which is, I want to support this proposal,

or I want the network to be going in this direction.

Let me buy templates for that thing directly out of your wallet.

And that also improves censorship resistance.

I'm sure you have thought this through as well, too,

which is that if for some reason somebody is trying to censor me,

the answer is always, well, another miner will put it in,

and there's enough miners that someone will put it in.

Well, with this system, that means you could be that somebody.

You could just be like, okay,

I need to get this payment through for $100,000.

So you're going to launch your Hashrate and push it through,

and you get most of your money back because you also mine a block,

and so you get the rewards and the fees for mining that block.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. I think that's so cool.

I think that is super cool.

Well, if any BCH developers also agree that it's a good idea,

go for it. Make it. Make it happen.

And then maybe we Bitcoin people can copy it.

Yes. I think you might have a hard time with copying it

because it will almost certainly involve a bunch of protocol upgrades

that you probably won't be able to get through.

But, yeah, I really hope somebody does take this idea and run with it.

So let me mix in this idea about the Hashrate coin as well, too,

because I think that's related, right?

So the idea is, and I can send you more about this afterwards,

but Bitcoin Cash Odyssey has this idea of trying to sort of price

the world in energy, right?

That energy is a more fundamental currency than Bitcoin

or than fiat currencies or gold or whatever, right?

And that is approximated through proof of work in an unfakeable way,

exactly like you were saying, that the proof of work is unforgeable,

basically self-validated.

So in that case, then, on BCH, the difficulty adjusts

every single block.

And from, of course, you have access to the on-chain data

from within the chain itself.

So you can see what the difficulty is and then figure out

how much energy was spent to produce that proof,

which gives you a price in BCH sats for that energy.

So if you had the Hashrate markets, you could then also track

or calculate those markets, not in terms of BCH,

but just in terms of raw energy spend,

which I'm sure there's a synergy or overlap there somewhere.

Maybe.

But I want to circle back to something Vlad said.

He said that he wishes that I was working on some things

that are more useful to the Bitcoin ecosystem than...

the fork stuff. Well, I just want to mention that if it wasn't for the fork stuff that was happening, I wouldn't have started paying attention to Hashrate markets. And so I wouldn't have come up with this idea. So I want to thank all the people who are doing the fork stuff for bringing my attention to something where I can come up with a significant improvement to Bitcoin. So thank you, BIP110 people. Keep on bringing my attention to good things.

Yeah, and I completely co-sign that for all the coverage that I have done of the filter drama and especially Bitcoin Mechanics' personal involvement in it.

And I've said many times that I think he's completely on the right track when it comes to like ocean mining, decentralizing the templates, and now it's turned into this Hashrate renting.

I think this is all brilliant stuff. And this is stuff that I would love to have more of in BCH. And it's something Bitcoin, broadly defined, definitely needs, which is that the mining industry, despite being one of the most economically significant parts of the whole thing, also gets some of the least attention from, like you're saying, this decentralized ideas and thinking.

That is not my experience. I think many of the top developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem work for mining companies, and they're constantly improving their software. And that comes out, you know, the Stratum software that started coming out recently is really cool. The Datum software from the Ocean team is really pushing the innovations there.

What's his name? Portland Hoddle, his work at Mara with their custom mining, the private mempool stuff they've been doing. There's a lot of innovation in the Bitcoin space that's been coming out from the mining scene. And I think it's really expressive of the fact that they've got a lot of talented developers working in that industry and part of the industry.

Yeah, maybe you're right, or probably I would say, yes, you are right, which is kind of maybe because the reason that I am not seeing it, well, although I'm fascinated, maybe you have a theory for me on this is that, like in the entire history of the BCH podcast, 180 plus episodes, I don't think we've had any episodes with miners, like just in and it's something that I want to do at some point.

But just in my experience, in my journey of Bitcoin, I don't run into many miners. They just, A, they seem to have their own somewhat segregated, you know, sub community. And then also B, BCH is a much smaller percentage of the hash rate. Of course, like it's tiny. So for that reason, they're much less interested in what's going on in BCH, I guess.

Yeah, my experience has been a bit different. I often, in 2023, I lived in Austin, Texas. And Austin is one of the places where they combine. There's a lot of Bitcoin developers in Austin. At one point, we had three different coworking spaces for Bitcoin developers. And there's also a lot of the mining industry that's centered in Texas and Austin's the capital. So at our BitDevs and at some of these workspaces, you got to interact a lot with people who were working on mining stuff.

And it was a really wonderful and magical time.

But I think this whole mining stuff is just fascinating. And I would love to be more aware of it and more involved in it and so forth. But for whatever reason, I think I'm in like maybe like one Telegram group that the miners talk about stuff. So I try and keep an eye on it. But I'm actually surprised.

I see you now.

There we go. All right. Now ask a question.

It wasn't a question. I was just saying that Adaptive Block Size Limit pointed me towards a little home miner that's specific, like a space heater, essentially. And considering that these miners are just throwing away heat anyway, and the cost to heat is the same, right? I think I might buy a couple of these and heat my house over these cold Canadian winters with them. So I might be the first miner on the show.

Cool. There you go. Yeah, that's another thing that's been innovative. There's a lot more mining stuff now. At the most recent BitDevs here in Puerto Rico, not the most recent one, like two or three BitDevs ago, the guys from Parasite Mining, which is a mining pool in Bitcoin, came and they've got an innovative thing they're doing where they combine lottery mining with pool mining.

And they make it so that if you're mining as part of the Parasite pool, and your machine is the one that finds a block, you get a whole Bitcoin. And then the remainder two point something Bitcoin is split up between the other participants in the pool.

And they're able to leverage the fact that people love lotteries as part of their marketing for their pool. They're able to go around and say, if you mine with us, you get a chance at a whole Bitcoin every time we find a block, which is neat.

I mean, I think that's neat that people can offer these sort of features.

Yeah, it is super cool. I love the idea when I heard about that, because if I had hashrate and stuff, I feel like I'd be pointing it to that pool. Maybe it doesn't make sense if you have an enormous amount of hashrate.

But if you have a small amount of hashrate, I would totally be on board with that, where you're getting a chance at the lottery, because it feels so bad for people who are those tiny miners, right?

Yeah, you get a chance at the big one. But even if you don't get the big one, you still get the regular rewards. Just they're smaller than other miners pay out.

Yeah, I think it sounds like a good trade. I don't know, Vlad, have you interviewed a lot of miners? How much visibility do you have in the mining scene?

I've interviewed some people from Brains, which is the first mining pool in Bitcoin. It used to be called miningbitcoin.cz, and then it became Slushpool. It was cordially referred to as Slushpool.

Satoshi himself noticed it in 2010. And I've had Slush on my show. I've had his friend Stick, the two of them co-founded Trezor, and also ran Slushpool for a while.

And recently, I traveled to Prague to interview the current people running Slushpool. And right now, I'm in a group with some people from F2Pool on Telegram, and we're trying to figure out a mutually convenient time to record something, because apparently, I got their attention, their CEO and founder, I'm not exactly what his name is, but on Twitter, he's SatoFishy, and he is one of the first people to fly into space with SpaceX, which

is quite amazing, to be honest, when you think about it. He was a pioneer of Bitcoin mining, and then he started this lifestyle where he was flying every day to a different country just to stamp his passport, which I could never really understand. But I guess it's what you do when you run out of stuff to accomplish, and you're rich and have no reason to work anymore.

And now he's going to be an astronaut, which is amazing. And I hopefully will interview someone from F2Pool soon. It's just weird. Maybe I should message them right now, since I remembered. Thank you for the reminder.

They're the only pool that's come out explicitly against BIP110. So that is a cool thing. If anyone ends up making a user-rejected software client, maybe we could pitch it to them and say, here's how you can run, not just state your opposition to BIP110, but run it as code.

Yeah, I mean, the whole history of mining in Bitcoin I find really fascinating, because maybe in another world, in another reality, things went differently around the block size war, around this filter war. Even after BCH split off, there was for a long time people interested in this idea called the Bitcoin mining parliament, which was because people into Bitcoin like proof of work,

and they like the blockchain. They like blocks. They understand that it's hard to fake and that you have skin in the game. And so people constantly come up with these ideas about miner signaling and stuff like that. But it's still pretty, what's the word, basic. It's still pretty underdeveloped in terms of, it's only now in 2026, nearly coming into the end of the second decade of Bitcoin,

that stuff like these more advanced hash rate markets is starting to catch on and be looked into, or even the miner signaling like dashboards. There's so much more that could be done with that. It seems like a really unexplored area of Bitcoin.

And it's also just been fascinating and a learning point for everyone. I think that miners, on average, aren't interested in throwing their weight around in governance, because from the white paper, one CPU, one vote, like the idea was they were going to be the ones driving the coin in the direction that they chose. But that's never really manifested. It seems more like they come in once other people have...

Well, they did with Segwit. There was quite a big battle in which miners took various sides and had a big voice when we were activating Segwit. There was less of that, I suppose, with Taproot. Almost everyone seemed on board with Taproot. So there wasn't as much controversy. And now the BIP110 thing is the next thing we've been doing.

And one miner has, I guess there's two. Yeah, I was saying that there used to be some significant participation in governance discussion from miners back when we had the Segwit wars, or the block size wars. There were miners who really wanted Segwit, like Slushpool was one of the miners who actually preferred running the BIP140 gates. And there was miners who were really opposed to it.

I think Bitmain was... I'm not sure. They weren't a pool, though. But there was a pool that was running Bitmain's hardware, and they didn't like Segwit. With Taproot, there wasn't as much opposition. Hardly anyone disliked Taproot when that was proposed. So I didn't see like, there wasn't a real opposition from any miners or any participation in the governance there that I observed, other than just running it. I mean, miners did signal for it. So I guess that's a participation.

And now we're in the BIP110 thing, and there's one pool that seems largely in favor of it, which is Ocean, and at least one pool being F2Pool, who has stated their opposition to it. So there's some minor participation in governance.

I'm fascinated about Taproot. I've still never understood, because at the time, I wasn't following Bitcoin overall, I guess, as closely. I certainly wasn't following BTC in any great depth, how that sort of got activated and reached consensus.

And I've even heard people, especially in light of the filter discussion now, people sort of trying to track back in the history and be like, wait, how did this become so popular and universally endorsed and then activate in hindsight?

I think it was oversold, to be honest. The narrative behind Taproot for many years, before it was called Taproot, was that we're going to bring Schnorr signatures to Bitcoin. And it was not the Schnorr upgrade that we expected. To have that, to a more complete degree, we also required the cross-input signature aggregation, or CISA, something that we seem to have forgotten about. But it was still part of the conversation in 2021, I think.

So Taproot is basically like half of the way to get there, to get Schnorr signatures on Bitcoin. But for some reason, we got to this point where we don't talk about Schnorr anymore.

And the benefits that Taproot gives are actually pretty small. You can have better deniability because it will not be obvious on the main chain whether or not it's a multi-sig spend or if you open the lightning channel or whatever. So that's sort of the extent of it. You have a new address type, which makes the UX worse.

And I think one of the benefits is going to be if we're going to get a post-quantum upgrade, like BIP 100, what's the number for it? 360.

360, right.

If we're going to get that one, it's going to be built on top of the existing Taproot architecture, which is cool. It makes it more necessary, gives it more utility in hindsight. But it's not something that makes Bitcoin a better form of money. It's not something that really helps with adoption. It's like a bet that some developers had that multi-sig was going to be a much bigger deal. And it didn't turn out to be such a big deal outside of institutions.

Speaking on quantum there, maybe let's hit that briefly. How do you feel about BTC's level of quantum preparation? Are you worried about that? Do you think things are moving in the right direction? Is quantum all a scam? What's going on there?

Is the question for me or Super?

Either. I want to hear both of your takes on it. So whoever wants to jump in first, go for it.

I think he's smarter than me, so maybe I can talk first and then he'll correct me. But I think we have some of the smartest developers in the world thinking about ways to fix Bitcoin's vulnerability to quantum computing. Specifically, CDSA, which is the elliptic curve digital signature aggregation. That one is what's actually vulnerable to quantum.

What a quantum computer can do is derive the private key from the public key. So there are certain address types that reveal the public key, which are more vulnerable than others. So I think that we have some of the smartest people working on the problem.

The real problem is just the culture and the complacency and the fact that some people claim that that's not even necessary. Bitcoin is perfect. Satoshi left us with this ideal design that should not be changed at all.

I also think that the quantum debate opens up Pandora's box for increasing the block size because all of the post-quantum signatures are much larger in size. And I do believe that for the sake of maintaining the usability of Bitcoin, you should increase the block size to at least match the current degree of transactions per block.

And if we're not going to do that because it's controversial, it will only make Bitcoin worse overall, more expensive to use. Some people might like that. They dream about $100 fees. But I'm not sure most users will be willing to join the Bitcoin network and pay $100 fees when they have much cheaper options which don't have too many tradeoffs in terms of security.

They can wait an entire day to get the same thermodynamic security as one Bitcoin confirmation and you only pay one cent for that. I think most people will be fine with the tradeoff.

But yeah, TLDR, it's not something that I worry about technically. It's something that I worry about culturally that people will be against it. And to be honest, once this quantum conversation started, we forgot about actually scaling Bitcoin and CTV was one way to scale Bitcoin.

DriveChains is also one way to scale Bitcoin. DriveChains is going to get a hard fork this summer, which is going to use the technology just to prove that it works and everyone else was possibly wrong in dismissing it. And CTV is something that scales Bitcoin in time.

So if you have times of lower demand for block space, you can actually broadcast your transaction at that time, thus making the fees more efficient and making the fee market more predictable. That's something that's cool because you have moments when there's a lot of demand for block space and the fees get high. And then you have moments like right now when you can get into the next block with a sub one Satoshi per Vbyte fee.

I think CTV is smart. It's been around for a long time. It's been tested. But guess what? Jeremy Rubin is in the Epstein files, right? And now a lot more people hate him than before. And for better and for worse, we seem to have this culture where it doesn't just matter.

I used to think that Bitcoin is a meritocracy, right? And the best idea wins. But it turns out it's also about who's promoting that idea. And if it comes from Greg Maxwell, then it's going to be regarded like it comes from Satoshi or something or the second most important person after Satoshi. If it comes from Jeremy Rubin or someone else who worked at MIT, or if Gavin Andreessen comes back and says, we can do this, it's not going to be taken seriously.

So, yeah, not very bullish on the culture. I'm still trying to change it. That's why I do my podcast. I try to bring people from around the space, promote new ideas and show what can be done on the Bitcoin design. That's why I had the Bitcoin cash episode. That's why I had the Zcash episode. These are all Bitcoins. They're different versions of the same software that have different optimizations that we can still bring to BTC, except that the culture somehow has become very complacent.

Maybe we should liquidate Ziller first and then talk about upgrades. I don't know.

Concurrently with the Bitcoin 10 activation signaling, there's also an activation client for OpcTV. And it has also been like we're in the middle of its signaling period. So miners could be signaling to activate ZTV right now and users could be running Ziver.

I don't know what the users would do. I don't think it's a user-activated software. I think it's a miner-activated software. But I think Moonsettler is involved in that project. So if you want to have him on your podcast and talk about that.

I've had him on my podcast for 12 hours straight. That's my absolute record.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah, he talked about a lot of stuff in 12 hours.

Cool.

No toilet break. Just 12 hours of talking.

Surprise to the vocal cords held up.

Was there anything else you wanted to talk about from the slide you had about the stuff that you wanted to know from me? Because I'm going to be getting gone here pretty soon, too.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, there's loads of stuff. I would love to ask you about actually a lot of this different stuff.

But I also kind of want to get, just to mix it up, some of your thoughts on some of the BCH stuff.

So maybe if you want to mention quickly quantum and then also like one-minute blocks.

I don't know if you know, but this is the thing that the BCH community is considering to do next year is to cut the block time 10x and go from 10-minute blocks to one-minute blocks.

Of course, the coinbase reward and the difficulty algorithm and the block size and everything would be adjusted 10x.

So it's not like we're 10x-ing the scalability or something like that.

It's just increasing the frequency that a block comes in.

So I'm wondering what your take is on that.

So quantum and one-minute blocks.

So on the quantum stuff, I personally am not worried about quantum vulnerabilities.

I think quantum computers are, I suspect that they don't work.

There's some fundamental limitation that makes it so that they can't do what some researchers claim they might be able to do in the future.

If they can, everyone seems to, every year it's going to be another 15, 20 years before they can do this stuff.

And they've been saying that since the 60s or something.

So we'll see.

But I am in favor of giving people options.

And so if anyone is concerned about quantum vulnerable signatures, I think they should have the option of using quantum invulnerable signatures.

And to me, you had on this podcast today, one of the voices.

Hang on, there's a truck coming.

You had on your podcast today, one of the voices who I think has provided the most recent,

has done something incredibly innovative in that department.

Robin Linus, a couple of months ago, came out with a paper called VinoHash, which paves the way for, or which paved the way, rather,

and illustrated that it's possible to do hash-based signatures on Bitcoin today without needing, and those are quantum resistant.

And so then after he published the VinoHash paper, some of the guys from Starkware elaborated on it and demonstrated that on L1 right now,

in a non-standard but valid transaction, they showed that you can do a quantum resistant signature.

The transaction is really big, but it's within comparable levels of size to the quantum resistant signature proposals given by the people who are involved in BIP360.

But it works today. It's a thing.

You have to go to a direct miner submission unless the Bitcoin software gets updated or more clients come out with this form of signature, but they work.

We have a form of quantum resistant signature in Bitcoin right now, and it's thanks to some research by Robin Linus, who was just on your show.

That's amazing. That's very, very cool.

And I remember seeing that go past on my feed.

I did not dig into all the details.

And for sure, Robin is a fascinating guy.

Of course, we already had him on a roundtable episode here, so we couldn't go into all the details.

But maybe another time, I'll see if I can get him back.

Because the amount of different stuff, we didn't get into BPM at all.

I have so many questions about all of that, honestly.

I would be super in favor of seeing someone make a software implementation of these hash-based signatures they came up with,

and then getting a push in Bitcoin Core, or maybe in LibreRelay.

I think the LibreRelay people would be even more open to it, to saying this is an allowed transaction type.

And if you did that, then I think that would satisfy a lot of people.

If you said, here's some wallets that support quantum-resistant signatures right now,

I think that would alleviate a lot of people's concerns.

Yeah, yeah, very true, very true.

Okay, and one-minute blocks.

What do you think?

Are we barking up the wrong tree?

Are we completely mad?

Is there something possibly good here?

Don't care?

What's the thinking?

I didn't know you guys were doing that until you sent that PDF over.

So this is completely all new territory to me as far as your current motions.

In the past, when I thought about very rapid block times in proof-of-work networks,

I think that they are generally bad ideas.

The longer you can get the block times, the better for decentralization.

Because when blocks start propagating through the network,

the miner who found the block has an advantage

compared to other people who have to validate the block.

They have to take extra time doing that and not mining while they're doing it,

not mining on the latest block, whereas he, whoever found it, doesn't have that.

And so the relatively longer time there is between the previous block and the next block,

the less of an advantage he has compared to other miners on the network.

So generally, my thought is 10-minute block times even are too fast.

And it would be better if blocks came out something like once every hour.

So I think that's the wrong direction for decentralizing mining to go into faster blocks.

And I also don't think that when it...

I assume the push is so that people don't have to wait as long

as they're making a transaction for a confirmation to show up.

Yes.

But I also don't think one minute is very good either.

If you're standing at the coffee table for one minute waiting for a confirmation,

that's still really bad.

It seems to be the wrong approach unless you can get it down to about 15 seconds.

So without having looked into it, except in previous thoughts on the subject, in general, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

I mean, it's interesting to hear you say that you think even one hour blocks would be good because, like you said, you wanted to maybe lower the block size, one hour blocks.

This is a super test at Bitcoin. Super Bitcoin, I think, could be quite an interesting experiment, actually, between these various ideas that are maybe not super prominent in the community, but you've got an interesting combo of them.

I mean, nobody has done longer blocks, basically, in any cryptocurrency, as far as I'm aware. Everyone has always gone faster to try and improve the UX, basically.

Yes, but I don't think that L1 UX is very good unless you can get it down to 15 seconds. And if you do that, then I think you're really sacrificing decentralization in a terrible way.

So yes, 10 minutes hasn't shown itself to be very harmful yet, but I think in the future we may find out that that's way too fast.

Interesting, interesting. OK, all right. That's kind of everything I wanted to. Well, given that we're running out of time, that's the bulk of what I wanted to cover. I don't know how much more time you've got. Maybe we could do one more topic or if you've got to go.

No, I think that's it. This is a good three hour podcast so far. So I want to thank you for your time. But yeah, I think I'll head out and just wish you well in your continued podcasting endeavors.

Thank you for coming on. It's been great talking to you. I'm always interested in following your Twitter perspectives. Like I told you before, you have a very interesting, unique mix of takes. So I really appreciate seeing that diversity of opinion and free thinking. Thank you for coming on the show.

You're very welcome. See you guys later.

See you later. OK, Vlad. So what are we at now? Yeah, we're at about three hours. So if we can knock out another 45 minutes or so, you'll be the record holder for the longest marathon VCH podcast.

I mean, I do like records, but it's not owed to me. I wasn't the only one who talked for four hours. But I can do 45 minutes if you want.

Well, we'll see how long we go. I guess that's the spirit of it. I don't know that we're going to hit eight hours unless we can rustle up some fresh guests. But given that you did eight hours, I thought we should at least make a decent crack at it. Tell me, where are you at on one minute blocks? Have you been following or looking into any of this?

I gave it a thought. Supertestnet is very conservative when he says one hour blocks. You can only have one hour blocks if you enable zero conf, which Bitcoin does not. It's been defaulted. So the client for Bitcoin Core now defaults to RBF on by default.

And most people will assume that if you do enable RBF, you need to wait for a confirmation. And the mentality is that a transaction is not final unless you do that. And we know what Satoshi said about this in his first reply to James A. Donald back in November of 2008.

And then later to Dan Larimer, who said, well, you cannot have adoption and get people to wait for 10 minutes to get a confirmation. And then Satoshi said something about zero conf and said, if you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to explain it to you. Sorry. I don't know. We drifted away.

One minute blocks can be a good idea if mining is sufficiently decentralized. I also believe that a lot of people operate on the same mentality as they did 10 years ago during the block size wars when they were assuming that the Internet is slow and bandwidth is expensive and storage is also expensive.

And maybe that faster blocks is not such a bad idea now that we have Starlink. Now that we have faster Internet across pretty much every provider around the world, we have 5G for mobile, which is much faster than anything that we had in 2016.

And maybe it's not really centralizing mining unless I guess you're mining in the middle of the desert or something or in the Amazon forest and you don't have any access to cable Internet. But even in that situation, you have access to Starlink.

Or maybe there's 4G Internet, which is just good enough for a few megabytes every minute.

The concern about mining centralization because you need more data, I don't think it's necessarily valid. There's stuff out there like Caspa, which does blocks every, I think it mines 10 blocks every second or something.

It's really crazy. And it doesn't orphan any blocks. It has its own design. But that one is possible. So I think one minute blocks in BCH is conservative in comparison.

OK, sounds like you're actually kind of interested. You're kind of open to it, which is quite interesting to hear. I mean, I do wonder if maybe if we make this change, whether maybe like the covenant upgrades or like anything else, that it then starts to trickle more into the BTC discussion.

I think it's pretty radical. It took the BCH community a long time to sort of chew over it and think, maybe this is a good idea. There's also people then concerned about, oh, well, it's not the real Bitcoin. Satoshi said 10 minutes. It's like some sacred number. I can't see it taking off in the BTC community immediately, but maybe on a long enough timescale if we did it. I don't know.

I remember I was on a podcast with a guy named Yoshi Levo or something who lives in Liberland, and he was doing a campaign for Roger Revere's clemency, or I'm not sure exactly what it was. It was FreeRoger.org. And he was raising some money and he sent me a token, asked me to install a wallet.

What he did was send me the token and then asked me to donate the token to some address. And all of this happened within the same block. And I was thinking, it's really not an elegant design that essentially you're spending the same money multiple times before you get a block confirmation. And I think with a one minute block, this could be solved by getting a confirmation faster and that increases the security of the transaction.

So if you're going to be using this as cash, it just makes it more difficult to perform essentially double spends before the confirmation.

Yeah, that's part of the idea and part of the sort of logic is that, yeah, obviously for four use cases that require confirmations, you get them faster. And then obviously you can chain zero conf transactions together. But specifically in the case where you're doing stuff in DeFi and then you want to make a cash payment, it's really nice if that's not a long time of like, well, we're kind of waiting, hoping, you know, because the DeFi is more likely to be subject to some.

May have or whatever, you know, so it's just kind of like if the blocks are coming quicker than that, that won't be as much of a problem, that's definitely one of the upsides to the to the proposal.

Jonathan is asking me to bring up and get your thoughts on BTC once BCH has. I'm sure you know, I've got that thread where I've just been slowly compiling all the various things that the BCH community has done.

You're in there at least once. I know for funding, crowdfunding, you were talking about, oh, what happened to all our crowdfunding? And on BCH, we still have that. We have fund me, we have the contract setups that was sort of what people were asking for back in the block size war and so forth.

I mean, we still have it's still not super advanced, to be honest, like it works and it's good. But and it takes a lot of the community thinking, OK, is this a good proposal, etc. So it does have its flaws and there's a lot we can do to develop it.

But we do still have that kind of stuff. What do you make of that list of things? Is there ever an item or length of that list that you would then think, oh, you know what, time for me to cut and run and switch to BCH?

Where do I find that list?

I'll send it to you. It's called BTC once BCH has. I'll put it in there.

I really don't want to talk about something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You might have. Yeah, I'm fairly sure you would have seen it, but it might be in there.

OK, so introspection, Upcat, ABLA. What's ABLA?

That's the block size limit algorithm that adjusts our block size.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Transactions. Yeah.

The dynamic block size, something that was proposed with Unlimited.

Yeah.

Like 10 years ago.

Exactly.

VM limits GSR, I guess, stands for rate script restoration.

That's it. Yeah.

So this thread, the start of this thread, this is from September of 2024. Right.

And so at that time, VM limits was proposed, but it hadn't locked in.

It hadn't activated, then activated in 2025.

And then you can go down the thread and look dead.

Robin Linus is in there a few times.

I should have asked him about that.

I'll have to remember to ask you about that.

But we did 64 bit integers.

We have like cache script tooling and covenants tooling that BTC doesn't have

because you guys don't have the covenant stuff to need it.

The bigger ints, that is better for snarks and so forth.

Obviously, yeah, we have our brand that we have fixes from like, what's it called?

The great consensus cleanup.

We've already fixed all those things.

We've got cash tokens for state on your UTXOs.

We've got multiple op returns.

We've got the ability to throw out hijack.

We've got op return tokens.

Let's see, no segwit taproot, liquidity-based stable coins,

a culture that can reject bad actors, opmul and opcat,

VM limits, non-propaganda BTC research,

supertest that was asking for a reliable annual upgrade schedule,

which we have, I forgot that he was in this thread,

or I would have asked him about that.

Our bank runs, the unlimited mempool chains,

quantum-resistant stuff, better wallets, basically,

dev culture of shipping stuff, documentation of the hijacking,

funding, number 26, that was one where I quoted you.

And then the most recent one is these Bitwise opcodes,

opinvert, opupdown, aka left, right, shift,

and other stuff like that.

So this is just my attempt to sort of create the impression

for people or help update them to the impression that BCH is not just,

like you said, it's not just BTC with bigger blocks,

because fundamentally that's not interesting or captivating

to people.

We need to be able to prove that with our smaller community

and different mentality, we've produced a lot of good stuff

out of it.

So this is kind of how I'm trying to get that message out there.

I mean, I'm not sure what you expect me to say right now,

like admit that you guys did a much better job scaling Bitcoin.

You did.

I mean, it's not a gotcha.

I'm not here to – in fact, I don't know what you're going to say.

Jonathan just said in the comments that he wanted

to get your thoughts on it.

But like I said, my angle was is there some point of this list

getting longer and longer that you would eventually be like,

okay, maybe BCH just is the better option overall?

I would like to see some privacy stuff.

Like if you guys activated zero cash in its latest iteration,

I would be very interested because you already have

a pretty good network effect and merchant adoption.

I would love to see some of that.

But my point is that I think the tipping point,

and you were right in a recent tweet that I saw from you

where you said that you should stop trying to appeal

to what people want and just get adoption, hash rate,

listing exchanges, trading volume, the stuff that's really undeniable

because that's really what builds the network effect.

If you're building good technology but nobody cares

or only a bunch of geeks care about it but nobody comes to use it,

that's a big problem.

And that's something from which we should also learn.

I know that in Bitcoin we've had the botanic spider chain,

which was shut down last week, I think, or this week.

I'm not even sure.

The time goes by very fast.

But that was essentially a way to bring the Ethereum EVM on Bitcoin

with some trade-offs.

But still, you could have had all the expressivity

that Ethereum smart contracts are giving you.

And that one somehow got no traction.

And I see patterns with Citrea,

which was promoted as something that's going to be big,

the first ZK roll-up on Bitcoin.

I'm not sure how many users they have,

but I haven't seen anything in my feed from people saying,

oh, this is so cool.

Maybe it happened in the first couple of weeks of this launching.

And now they're talking about launching their own token,

which they said they would not.

But what I presume this means is that they're in dire need

for some funding to keep going.

And that's why they need to launch a token.

And it's really unfortunate that, on one hand,

we have this culture that says we build on Bitcoin.

Everything that's not on Bitcoin is a shitcoin.

But then you get the technology that gets built on Bitcoin,

and nobody's using it because they're psyched into holding

and doing nothing else.

And I think it was part of the 2018 presentation

from Baltic Honey Badger by a guy that I like to call

Guacamole Zocola,

because he blocked me and he called me a lot of names,

so I don't want to give him too much credit.

But he did put that on the slides,

that any attempt to get people to spend their Bitcoin is a scam.

And if you try to get people to spend their Bitcoin,

you're a scammer.

It's really unfortunate that that somehow

got treated very seriously.

And I remember I was talking to some organizers

of the El Salvador Adopting Bitcoin Conference in 2022,

and they were discussing whether or not they should allow

some businesses to set up some booths at the venue.

And one of the guys said,

well, aren't these scammers if they ask people

to spend their Bitcoin?

And we actually had to have a conversation about this

in the debate, like, wait a second,

what does this mean?

What do you mean scammers?

Well, they're trading something which is depreciating

for the Bitcoin, which is scarce and depreciating,

like you should not be spending your Bitcoin

for papusas or whatever, like snacks.

It's just crazy.

Yeah, money has to circulate.

Sometimes I think it would be a good idea

if we logged off, just shut down all our accounts

for a week and went back to reading the white paper first

and then maybe some Nick Szabo articles

about God protocols, blockchain, smart contracts,

like just to philosophically remind ourselves

why we're here.

And then come back to where we are

and try to figure out what went wrong

or how we can improve our path.

I don't see too much introspection, pun intended,

like people looking in the mirror and saying,

well, we started from this idea.

I've seen this video from Trezor

when they launched in 2014, I think, or 2013.

They launched the Kickstarter campaign

and they had a bunch of high-profile Bitcoiners

endorsing the product.

And one of them was Gavin Andreessen,

who said that Trezor is right in the step direction

to enable Bitcoin as a payments network.

And that was so cool, just hearing these words

like Bitcoin as a payments network.

That's what it was all about.

And then somehow we decided that, well,

since it's scarce and there is a vague mention

in the white paper about this being mind-like gold,

then maybe we should turn this into digital gold

and promote this as an institutional asset

that they should be holding on their balance sheets.

And, of course, these people want...

So Bitcoin is not a proof-of-stake system.

It's a very evident statement.

But once you get very big investors buying large chunks,

they do have the social capital

to discourage improvements from being made.

And they can say, well, I'm happy with Bitcoin as it is.

Don't touch it. Don't change it.

If you do touch it and you do add scaling or privacy,

you're going to be competing with what I'm offering,

which is an ETF or paper Bitcoin or whatever.

And I don't want that to happen.

So just keep it the way it is.

Maybe it's not useful for the way in which it was intended to be,

but it's very useful for this institution.

And this is where we're at right now.

We're stuck.

And I see in my podcast,

I interview a lot of frustrated developers

who are trying to get their way

or putting their life and effort

and energy and everything

into pushing this tiny upgrade like CTV.

That's why I had Moon Settler talking for 12 hours,

because it was his way of expressing himself

after so many years of seeing attempts

that seemed hopeful that somehow failed in the last moment.

And he's also disillusioned with Adam Back in particular,

because there is a story about him

and in 2022, I think,

one year after the Tapper upgrade,

the CTV guys were going to go for a speedy trial,

which means that they were going to try to get the miners

to signal support for activating this.

And Adam Back was personally triggered by this

and he entered the CTV Telegram chat.

You can still find that.

It's called Cult of the Covenant.

You scroll up until I think it was May of 2022 or something.

You're going to see how Adam Back personally

spent about a week demoralizing everyone

and telling them that they don't have technical consensus

and they're doing something wrong

and they're bad actors

and they're trying to destroy Bitcoin.

He was presenting every piece of FUD out there

about CTV, why it's not good,

including a video from Andreas Antonopoulos

where he said that covenants are a trap

for getting governments to confiscate Bitcoin,

which he admitted later that was a wrong assessment.

It was a mistake for him to say that,

but still it's out there and it was used for propaganda.

And you would assume that if Blockstream is this propaganda machine

for keeping Bitcoin tame,

he would at least, I mean by he, I mean Adam Back,

would at least have a couple of sock puppets or whatever.

Just accounts that do the dirty work,

but he did this himself and he killed the movement in one week.

Then Jeremy went on a hiatus.

I think he took one year away from working on Bitcoin stuff.

And the whole movement that was very hopeful

about making Bitcoin more useful in this way.

And useful means, for example,

being able to open a million lightning channels

in one transaction or something

to perpetuate what is really inefficient right now.

It's not ideal, but at least it could be slightly better.

It's very much in line with the ideology

and the narrative of what Bitcoin is.

It's just that my personal theory about CTV

is that it never got pushed

because it was not created by Blockstream.

I think that Blockstream essentially is not the sidechain company,

is not the satellite company,

is not the hardware wallet company,

Block Explorer, Liquid Wallet or whatever.

It's the company that's trying to pitch to investors

the fact that they're in control of the upgrades that come to Bitcoin.

And I think that their track record proves this.

That they pushed Segwit,

they pushed the Lightning Network

as the one true solution for scaling Bitcoin.

They have one of the clients for enabling the Lightning Network,

which is called C-Lightning,

and it got rebranded into Core Lightning.

And they also had three of their cryptographers

working for them at the time, pushing Taproot.

And there was no actual opposition for it.

Nobody said it's a bad idea.

Everyone was cheerful and said,

yes, this is how we improve Bitcoin.

It's just that we haven't had anything significant since.

And we see some efforts from Blockstream accounts.

Whenever something new comes along

and a new proposal is pushed and gets some momentum,

they sort of discourage it.

And I think the biggest effort from Blockstream

towards improving Bitcoin lately

was from Rusty Russell,

who proposed the great script restoration,

which packaged some ideas together.

He said, let's have Upcat and CTV and Mull

and this and that.

Basically, all this until she upcodes

and everything that is useful.

And not try to judge each of them individually

according to their merit,

but give the developers a tool set

that they can use for making interesting stuff.

And right now, Rusty quit Bitcoin.

And I don't know what this means

for the great script restoration.

I heard SupertestNet when he said that

I think it's a bit mischievous,

or I don't know how to describe it.

Like you're going to push this BIP-110

and say you want to filter this type of transactions.

And if this one activates,

then they also have CTV coming along the line,

almost as if the activation of CTV

is conditioned by BIP-110 first.

I don't know.

To me, it makes no sense.

Well, I think he was just saying

that there's currently a client that in theory,

but I mean, of course, in reality,

nobody seems to be talking about it.

Nobody's made a dashboard.

There's not CTV guys everywhere hyping up,

like we're going to activate CTV.

I think he was just saying that theoretically

there is a client out there

and the desired window is currently ongoing.

But it is kind of a sad case of nothing's happening.

It's just Bitcoin.

It's actually so political like that.

It's not really so much about the blocks

or the hash rate or whatever.

That all comes down to what are people talking about?

What are people excited about?

What are they pushing for?

You know, nothing happens accidentally.

It takes a whole community pushing it

to make it go anywhere.

It's really depressing when you realize

the hopes and expectations that this project had

and all the energy and all the money

that was spent on developers and the conferences.

And I think one major reason why

I'm not excited about going to conferences

is that I already know what to expect.

I didn't go to BTC Prague because

I don't expect anything interesting to be happening.

It's just a large party where you hang out

with some people you know from Twitter.

And that's kind of the only purpose.

And conferences used to be places where

important proposals were being presented

for making Bitcoin more useful.

I think you guys are doing a good job with BCH Bliss

because that's sort of the place where...

you talk about the work that's been done over the past year and what can come next.

We don't have too much of that. And when there's an announcement, usually so...

I think for some reason we became deranged enough to accept federations as just good

enough solutions for scaling and adding features. I think a large role was played

by the normalization of custodial Lightning. When in the beginning they were saying,

well, it's just $10. It's fine. You shouldn't worry too much if this liquidity

provider that sets up your Lightning node decides to steal from you. It's not such a big deal.

And then they sort of increased the amount. That's normal. You said $100.

And then they said, well, there's a good track record for Wallet of Satoshi.

They never stole from anyone. So I trust that they're going to be honest.

And then they built this layer that's called e-cash on top of it. It's built by this guy

Kalle who did Cashew. That's the name of the project. And what it does is to provide

some privacy for custodial Lightning. So if you have funds in Wallet of Satoshi,

with this custodian, you can at least transact without giving too much information

to the custodian and between custodians. It's basically reinventing banking.

And once again, it's depressing because Bitcoin was released as an answer to e-cash,

which was a centralized way of having Internet money that has privacy.

And it sort of solved the double spending problem with incentives.

It was game theory, not cryptography, that got us to this point.

And also it gave a very fragile type of privacy that says in chapter 10 of the

white paper that as long as you don't reuse the same address for receiving transactions,

you're probably fine, which turned out to be just, I guess it was just good enough

for its time for 2008, 2009. This was the best Satoshi could give us.

So we shouldn't judge too harshly. But it's not like we haven't had a decade and a half

of research, academic papers and protocols that got published. It's just that I think

there's also a sort of arrogance that was perpetuated in the Bitcoin world where

we believe that there is no second best, like truly. And right now, I think the Bitcoin

dominance is like 56 percent or something. I haven't looked too much lately, but that

was the percentage. So if your project is 56 percent of the entire market and your

assumption is that everything else is a shit coin that's going to die on a long enough

time frame, I don't think it's healthy. Like there is real competition.

It used to be 90 percent Bitcoin and 10 percent everything else. It doesn't seem like

we're going back to that status quo that we have had. And yet we're so complacent,

dangerously complacent to the point where the project is much easier to capture.

Another aspect of it is the fact that so, OK, we dismiss every other project as

dangerous and horrible shit coin that's going to die. But we are also horrible at

keeping track of our own project's history. And the more you discover about the people

who are involved and what they're trying to build, we're going to realize that what

Robin is doing, what Casey is doing with Ordinals and everything else was already

discussed at some point more than 10 years ago on Bitcoin Talk, on IRC channels.

And the reason why it hasn't happened was, first of all, there were not enough

resources in terms of paying developers to do it. Secondly, maybe they haven't

figured out some stuff that maybe we got later with some extra features with Segwit

and Taproot. But my point is that nothing new is really happening and innovation is

happening somewhere else, which is becoming increasingly agnostic and independent

from Bitcoin. We used to think that shit coins are just copies of Bitcoin with small

changes. But now something like Ethereum is so much different. Something like Monero

has become so much different. Zcash is also very different from what it was 10 years

ago. But our mentality is still stuck in the year 2017. And it is very hard for me to

compute. Even this argument that you shouldn't have one minute blocks and if

anything, they should be one hour blocks is something that you would say in 2017,

but doesn't make as much sense today with the technology that we have and the access

to the Internet and everything else. And I'm not even sure how we can fix this

because you present the facts, but they're still not convinced that they're true.

Maybe that the market will solve this and the only solution is that we promote

competition to Bitcoin. And once we see the developers leaving and we see that

nothing interesting is happening outside of the circle jerking cult, maybe then when

the price doesn't go up according to expectations, we're going to have an actual

renaissance of development. It's really unfortunate, for example, Paul is

launching Zcash in August, which is going to be in two months and a week or

something. I think the planned date for launch is the 21st of August. For a long

time, Paul was the most convinced Bitcoin maximalist and he was like, no, we don't

need to launch any more altcoins. We can take everything and bring it to Bitcoin.

And it's really sad that it got to this point where he lost his patience and he's

been patient. He proposed drive chains, I think, in 2015 for the first time.

So being around for more than a decade and pushing this idea and then realizing

that you're getting mocked and ignored and it's never happening and then you

realize, well, you're only young and full of energy and hopeful once in your life

and then you don't want to wait 50 years until you see that you're vindicated.

And then you see that Ethereum gets PolyMarket, which is a prediction market,

which was Paul's idea and everything else is happening elsewhere. It must be

really depressing. I wouldn't want to be in Paul's shoes right now, but I think

he's doing well. He raised five million for his project recently, which proves

that there is still some hope and sanity in the market. I wish him all the best.

But once again, I think we should have, if anything, there should be more hard

forks of Bitcoin and let them compete. Let's see what the market thinks about

all of them. If anything, Bitcoin Cash has been very resilient in ways that were

initially not expected. I think there's some fireworks outside. I'm not sure if

Yeah, I could hear that. I was wondering if somebody had just started drilling in

the next room or something.

I think there's a wedding or birthday or whatever. They had a party. What was I

saying? Yeah, Bitcoin Cash, the expectations were that it was going to fail.

And there were many moments when it seemed like the movement has died out.

I think that the BSV fork was one of the first moments when there was doubt

whether or not the movement is going to make sense. And then I think BSV took

the argument of large blocks to the absolute absurd point of giga megs.

That was what Calvin said. And it makes no sense to have that kind of throughput

without actual demand for it. But I think they sort of put BCH in a shade and made

it look like it's tame and uninteresting because this other fork is going for much

larger blocks and has more aggressive marketing. And then there was also the

moment when Omari started demanding for a tax so that he gets paid from every

block that gets mined. I'm not sure what the percentage was. I think four or five.

It was eight, I think.

Yeah, it's since been, I believe it's now 32 percent. So it's like the typical

government tax that goes up.

I've spoken with people who told me that they stopped believing in Bitcoin Cash

the moment when Omari left. And maybe it was a painful fracture. Maybe some people

left along with Omari, like maybe he had a dev team and ABC was the main Bitcoin Cash

client. I know that now you have something else that's called the Bitcoin Cash node,

which actually ran like a year or two ago. And I posted the results. My point is that

there are many unfortunate events in the lifecycle of BCH, but it's been pretty

resilient. The fact that right now it's flipping Litecoin, which as I'm aware, is

being used in some circles in the US and it's listed by payments processors that don't

support BCH. It's kind of a big deal. Congratulations for that. And the fact that

new community members are coming to BCH and they believe in it and they build on it.

That's also something that should not be neglected because ultimately the value of

things is given by the people who use it. So kudos to this one. I didn't think I would

say it like maybe four or five years ago. I would think, oh, I would never go on a Bitcoin

Cash, BCH podcast and admit that they were right about something. But it seems like

Bitcoin BTC was not exactly as successful in the ways that I expected. It became

something else, which sometimes I feel weird for endorsing. And I don't mean the whole

Epstein stuff. That's just maybe the icing on the cake. There's more stuff underneath

with promises of upgrades and all the conferences that I attended were serious

developers were talking about stuff that never happened. And an ideology of Bitcoin

maximalism that sort of makes sense when you think about it in very basic terms like,

OK, we want this one project that has the best chances to win to actually get there.

And if we're going to fragment our efforts, then maybe we will never get there.

So let's just focus on this one. But then what does it even mean to focus on this one?

Because there is nothing significant happening to make it work in the way that it was

intended. There is institutional adoption there. There is this whole paper Bitcoin

summer thing that happened last year. And ironically, most of these treasury companies

sold at a loss and they just wanted to get out as quickly as possible, which is a really

bad sign, by the way. For the people who still hope that Bitcoin is going to be a

successful treasury company asset, I got some bad news for you. The signals from the

market are not positive. Saylor himself sort of pioneered this movement with paper

Bitcoin and issuing stocks or other assets on top of the Bitcoin held in a reserve.

He's not doing very well. He's underperforming. There are some people who actually

did an index of whether that would have happened if Saylor bought some other coins

and he could be performing much better if he wasn't only buying Bitcoin all the time.

So the ideology is really falling apart in key parts. And I think the most painful one

is the price because everyone expected, especially when the ETFs got approved a

couple of years ago, that the price is going to go parabolic and these institutions are

going to be buying our bags for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I remember

narratives like, oh, they're going to be begging me for my scarce Satoshi's and they

will want them and I will not sell them to them because I'm such a convicted hodler

and whatever. That never happened. These guys are not idiots, OK? BlackRock, they

know what they're doing. They're not going to be pumping your coin to the million

dollar point. They know exactly how to suppress the price. They've been doing this

to gold for a long time. I don't know why anyone thought that this was such a

brilliant idea and we're all going to get rich. I guess some people got rich. I'm not

going to complain. The network is still out there. It can still get fixed. The price

did much better than expected. When I first got into Bitcoin, I never even dreamed

of a hundred thousand. I was thinking, oh, maybe that ten thousand that we reached

in November of 2017 and then 20,000. I was really happy with that. If we never went

to 100k, that was really fine as long as we got adoption and we actually started the

revolution. But right now it doesn't feel much like a revolution. It feels like we

actually got lucky investing into something early on, which became just another asset

for the elite class. I'm not going to try to speculate on what they're doing and the

reasons why they're investing in Bitcoin, but I think essentially it boils down to

making more US dollars in different ways. So we basically invented this for them and

we popularized it for them and then we handed the project to them to just have fun.

And now we're cocked at the helm just watching them make more US dollars, hoping

that we're also going to make more US dollars. But why? Why are we even here?

I've seen a bunch of people retire, quote unquote, just leave in the sunset saying,

okay, I've made my gains or whatever. I think Bitcoin has given to me everything that

I expected I'm out. I used to despise that, but now I sort of respect it because

at least they're not contributing to a broken culture anymore. And they sort of

admitted that this was the goal all along, just to make a lot of US dollars.

I just wish we fixed something because there is so much virtue signaling. When I

first stumbled upon Bitcoin, there was this Wikipedia page that said it's about

banking the unbanked. It doesn't really scale for that. And the solutions that we

created for banking the unbanked are in the spirit of 18th and 19th century

colonialism, where you give the people who have, I guess, more difficult economic

conditions, you give them also the second class experience where they never touch

the blockchain. They trade on this federation or something that was built

explicitly for their use cases, which is suboptimal and also depressing when you

think about it. In a perfect world, there would never be a block size war in the

first place. We would just compromise on something and be like, OK, let's get four

or eight megabytes. We did get four megabytes with SegWit, so I'm not even sure

where the disagreement was. Maybe it was just the hard fork or maybe it was just

people not liking each other and wanting to break away from that context.

But I feel like the revolution that I joined never happened. And now maybe that I

might have made some US dollars, but it doesn't really make me happy. It doesn't

make me wake up in the morning and say, let's go and get another shop to adopt

Bitcoin. I feel sorry for the businesses or waiters or waitresses that I tipped with

Custodial Lightning because I think some of these services even shut down. So if

they haven't used that for some gift card on bit refill or something, then they

basically lost everything to the custodian. And I don't know where this is going to

end. I'm hopeful that guys like Robin or Supertestnet are going to use their big

brains for something good. But the question is, will it get adopted? That's the

other issue. Robin wants to build something that's called Shielded CSV, which is

basically a way to replicate the Zcash shielded pool on Bitcoin. But if nobody's

going to use that because they all want to huddle, then it's going to be just

another disappointment. So first, I think we need to work on the culture and get

people to try stuff, maybe adopt like I had a campaign last year where I was

telling people adopt the shit coin. OK, you know, it's a shit coin. Don't invest

money in it. Just join the community. See what they're building. Try to figure out

how you can bring this to Bitcoin. Have like a six months journey and come back

and see what you're learning from that. Because not everything is just a lazy copy

of Bitcoin. There's stuff out there that actually tries new ideas and innovates in

ways that maybe we're not on Bitcoin or at least not yet. I think we need like a

post-maximalist ideology where we're not afraid to look into stuff and there is no

shame in doing it. Like you're saying, OK, Bitcoin Cash is doing a good job. Let's

take some of this, bring it to Bitcoin. Or Litecoin is doing a good job with their

MWeb or whatever. Is that compatible with Bitcoin? Are there limits to this? Is this

useful at all? If anything, I think there's too much gatekeeping and a bad culture.

If we had much more of an openness to experimentation, maybe we would get to

this idea of adopting Bitcoin for payments much faster. The problem is that I think

we got corrupted by the sailors and the Black Rocks and everyone else who turned

Bitcoin into digital gold in the worst sense. Because digital gold used to mean

that you can mine it with your computer and it's scarce. But what it means right now

is that it's hard to move around and costly to move around, even though that's no

longer the case. The fees have become so small that the miners are pivoting to AI

because they make more money with their infrastructure doing that. And it also

means that it's being held by custodians, just like gold. And it's really

unfortunate that we got to this point. I don't know. Long rant. Do you want to

comment on any of these points?

You can continue as long as you want. I think this is good. This is clearly

something that you need to be able to say that maybe you haven't been able to get

out there in the same way. So if you want to keep going, I have a couple of things

to ask you. But as far as I'm concerned, carry on as you have been.

It's also funny that last year I went to BTC Prague undercover. I didn't buy a ticket.

I don't want to give any money to these assholes because they treated me in a

horrible way after I interviewed Roger. And I don't feel like I deserved any of

that. But someone came up to me, a fellow podcaster who's also a book author and

high priest in some ways. And he told me, oh Vlad, it's so good to see you. So

unfortunate that you're not doing your podcast anymore after you interviewed

Roger. And I was attending this event just a few days after I interviewed Vitalik.

And that was even bigger than the Roger of Year interview. Vitalik got me like

70,000 views on the first week. It was crazy. The chat was going crazy. I don't

know what's special about this guy, but after talking to him, I've gained more

respect for what he's doing because I realized, OK, he's not overrated in any

way. He's really that smart and he understands what's going on, even if he's

the subject of memes and people project a lot of ideas and thoughts onto him that

aren't really true. But my point is that the perception is very different from the

reality. And these people are stuck in a circle jerk bubble where they make up

narratives. They say even about Roger, for example, they said once he started

supporting BCH, they said, well, he sold all of his Bitcoin and now he's poor.

Stuff like this. They don't know anything. They're just trying to create these

narratives that are convenient for perpetuating the cult. And I'm sorry that I

contributed to this cult because now I realize how it really works. I'm happy

that I'm outside. I'm proud of the people who still listen to my podcast, despite

being not pure enough or whatever that means. And I guess I'll keep going for as

long as I find it interesting, because I'm not sure about you, Jeremy. Why do

this podcast? And I see your producer that became very bored right now. He's

looking at me like, is this guy just had dinner? That's what he's like. Digesting.

That's what's going on.

Well, what I was going to say is that I don't know why you do this podcast. Maybe

you feel like you're serving your community or something. But I think the

primary purpose should be that you're learning for yourself and you're growing

and feeling like you can contribute to the project in more meaningful ways.

Because that's also what I feel about my podcast. I don't do it for my audience.

Honestly, I don't care who's listening. I just do it because I want to learn

something new every week. And when I learn something new, I feel like I have no

idea what I'm going to do with this knowledge, but I do like learning. So it's

a very selfish project from this point of view. I don't care too much about what

the audience wants, but it seems like they like what I'm doing. So keep going.

I don't know. I think in some ways I do it the opposite and in some ways the same.

Like, why do I do the podcast? Honestly, I do it for humanity. Humanity needs

Bitcoin to succeed. It's that or we get captured by the bankers and it's all over.

And I knew that once I got into Bitcoin and it's still true now. And when I

started the show at the start of 2021, it was right after Amore had split off

with eCash in November of 2020. And also coincidentally at that time, I had

been taking a break, but I became more interested in Bitcoin. The price was

skyrocketing at that time. And so I looked into it and I thought Amore's left.

BCH is actually the answer that we've been waiting for. Like you said, it was

a very traumatic time and a lot of other people had left. So I looked at that

and I thought, oh, BCH was never going to work with him there as a benevolent

dictator, which he says is just a joke about Linux and everything. But truly,

you can't advertise a project like that and say it's decentralized even in a

shocking way like that. So after he was out, I was like, this is it. This is

BCH's one shot to actually prove the big block thing to overcome the hijacking

and et cetera, et cetera. And so I got involved. And then in December and

January, I was working on things. And, you know, after I had sort of invested

some money and I'd done a couple of little different things, I thought, what

else more can I do to make this a success? And I thought, well, it's not the

node protocol that I need to code. That's going great. In fact, that was one

of my biggest things at the time. But the community needs a rallying point and

a mission. And they also need to debunk, get debunked from a lot of this

propaganda on both sides. One, of course, there was loads of BTC propaganda.

And I was like, I'll get around to debunking that. But in the short term, I

actually needed to fix the BCH community that also had loads of propaganda.

Like the price doesn't matter was like one of the big copes that I had to be

like, oh, guys, the price does matter. The price indicates public sentiment.

It indicates liquidity. It's a measure of popularity. You know, it's one of

the most attention attracting things.

BCH could possibly have. So I had to like, get through that. There was also just loads of griping and whinging and regressive trauma and so forth in the BCH community. So I had to make the podcast, make it at least decent enough and get some signal out there. So that then I would have the clout to go in the telegram groups and be like, this guy's just whinging and complaining like this cannot be the way forward. And that got some pushback at the time. And I was like, no, I'm not going to do that.

At the time, some people sort of saw what I was trying to do and they supported it, although mostly quietly, you know, at the time, I didn't get, you know, tons of messages saying like, oh, Jerry, this is a great idea.

But I just saw that people were like some people were starting to say that what I was saying was right. And then also, you know, some people got cheesed off and eventually had their little rage quit or their little moment.

Because ultimately, if you're just whinging and complaining like that is not the answer as much as BCH might have had some things right.

And we did and always have, you know, whether it was the lightning network or the big block scaling was viable or whatever, there's a lot that BCH has had wrong.

And that's what I posted just the day or two when I was talking to Justin Bonds, you know, it was amazing talking to him and trying to explain to him that the BCH now in 2026 is wildly different from the BCH of 2020.

Like there's been six years of huge upgrades, which are important not only technically, but they're also important from a cohesion and a narrative point of view that just the community has reoriented and got back on the same page.

And like you said, the network effect is simply growing again, you know, from those years from where the big block of community pre-BTC split was becoming more and more of a minority because while there was so much propaganda and control of the media channels,

but also, you know, things were felt the small block way in the box as well.

And then the BSV split and the XCC split, you know, that's a shrinking and a shrinking group.

But from 2022, 2023, and especially through to now, the BCH community has started growing again.

And the reason is because it's doing the right things.

It's actually just confronted a lot of the nonsense and lies that within the BCH community were affecting it from succeeding.

And then, you know, also changed our attitude and our public presentation.

You know, I mean, obviously, I've spent a lot of time trolling you, so I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that.

I never took it personally.

And I did see some spite there sometimes, and you're making fun of me, but it's fine.

As long as it progresses, the understanding of how Bitcoin works and or how it should work, I'm fine with it.

I do remember at one point that you asked the community to give you like a grant and you were asking for like,

I don't remember exactly, like $5,000 per month or whatever.

And I think David Shares was very much against it, saying that you don't deserve that.

Yes. And where is he now? That's the thing.

You know, that was like a couple of years ago.

He was flaming out and raging as a result of the issue with George Donnelly and censorship for people who want it.

There's an episode, I think it's episode 111.

You can go back and listen to the show where we covered all that in detail.

There was this touchpoint around the Reddit thing, and he was raging and whinging because he wanted things to go one way.

And I even invited him on the show to give his point of view.

He didn't want to do that.

And so then afterwards, he tried to like slander me that I was this evil person in the community or whatever,

and that I had unfairly got this like money,

even though I have delivered on every single thing basically that I've ever promised to the BCH community.

And so it was just, yeah, you know, like that's an example of what I'm talking about,

that there was people who have those negative attitudes in the community that had to be purged, essentially,

you know, putting it that way is maybe a little harsh,

but they had to find that this was not the project for them,

or they at the very least had to have their influence go down in order for things to reorient in the correct direction.

And so to the extent that you or other people that I go around like, you know, Eric Wall or even maybe John Carvalho,

I don't know, different people, Bitcoin mechanic, all these different characters that I go to,

and I individually like troll you or mock you or, you know, it's not malicious.

I'm not doing it because I'm trying to, you know, insult you or tear you down or anything.

It's because I'm trying to get your attention.

And that's been the hardest thing about it, you know, was now it's maybe a little bit different.

Now the situation has changed.

But certainly four or five years ago, like you said, you wouldn't have thought you would be on a show like this,

and you maybe wouldn't have taken any of the ideas discussed seriously.

And it's just been a lot.

It's just like, you know, a wolf pit or a gladiator type of thing on Twitter.

You know, it's not like you can't get credibility if you just come in as Mr. Nice Guy.

That's not how, like, you know, all male communities work.

You have to prove that you know your stuff before people will take you a little bit seriously.

And that might mean taking a few knocks, and it might mean handing out a few.

And so I've had to do that.

But I do, and in each of you, like, my approach is tailored to your individual personality,

to what I think will help connect the message the most.

And I usually do try and balance the mocking and the ridicule and the memes and whatever with,

you know, posts that are more constructive.

And hey, why don't you look at this and so on and so forth.

But to be fair, I have on at least one or two occasions, I have genuinely been frustrated.

It took so long to maybe get you to take these ideas seriously.

But I'm glad that you have.

And, you know, now there'll be no need for it, right?

I won't need to anymore.

And it is I'm only doing it in service of BCH and in service of Bitcoin, you know,

to the extent that I'm able to debunk different pieces of propaganda and whatever.

I don't think that can hurt Bitcoin.

And I'm not involved now.

I own zero BTC, and I'm not involved in the BTC community at all.

So if the BTC community can figure out the answers, then great.

They can all just ignore me, block me, mute me, whatever many of them have.

And that's fine.

But the reason that that's not a sustainable or viable strategy is because at least some

of what I'm saying is true.

And you can't, you just can't ignore that forever.

So like coming full circle, you know, why did I do the podcast?

I mean, I do the podcast because I think humanity needs Bitcoin.

But there's also a selfish side.

Like you said, to me, the podcast is also more of a self-improvement project in that

for the podcast to get like at the time when I started it, I was in lockdown in London

during coronavirus at one of the just lowest points in my life.

It was absolutely horrible.

And I was thinking, like, why is all this stuff happening?

Like, I have all these ideas or I'm able to predict that this is how things will go

with Bitcoin specifically, because I'm so obsessed with it and been following it for

such a long time.

But, you know, why can nobody else see this?

And then I was like, well, because someone like me who thinks I have a different point

of view isn't getting it out there.

And so in creating the show, I've now been able to be full time, you know, working in

the BCH community, which is just like my dream job.

Like, I just love it.

I work, like you said, I mean, you kind of said the opposite.

But, you know, I'm sure at a certain point, you know, you wake up every day thinking,

fuck, yeah, like, what else would I rather be doing?

I mean, if I didn't have this podcast, this mission, you know, Bliss and Celine and everything

that I'm doing, like, what would I do with my life?

I'm sure I could figure out something like, you know, before I was doing this stuff full

time, you know, I would travel around the world or get drunk.

Nowadays, I'd probably like to do a lot more, you know, bachata dancing or maybe I'd get

into woodworking or something.

I don't know.

You know, I'd find some other passionate way to spend my time.

But really, like somebody said, it's one of those, what do you call it, like quotable

things where it's like, think about what is the most important thing you could be doing

with your life and then think, do I wake up every day doing that?

And if not, why not?

You know, it's as simple as that, right?

So I can't see any point where I could have more leverage on improving humanity than doing

that.

But in doing that, it's a personal challenge for me, which is the amount of skills and

stuff I've had.

Like, I'm not a very public type of person by default.

I mean, maybe similar to you in that, like, I have a strong privacy mentality and I always

find it ironic.

All these guys that are talking about privacy, but it's like, I know what you look like,

bro.

Like, clearly, you're not that into privacy.

If you were, you wouldn't be posting yourself on the internet everywhere.

That's not what privacy means.

If anything, privacy and security are tied together.

If you're this guy that nobody knows who he is and he makes one privacy mistake, maybe

that you're going to disappear for various reasons.

You have enemies or whatever.

Nobody's going to know that you disappeared.

You can get replaced very easily.

There are some layers to this.

I think Peter Todd said this to me, which is very true, that sometimes your house is safer

if you let the kids play on your lawn.

Yes.

Because there's going to be lots of eyes on your house and nobody's going to come breaking

into your house.

So sometimes being out there, but being also careful with the information that you're giving

out is much better than being this paranoid person who's only using Tails OS and logs

into stuff with one-time passwords and I don't know.

Uses Tor and Monero for everything.

There are some benefits to that, but I'm not saying that you should be chasing that kind

of lifestyle because it has lots of trade-offs.

Being able to participate in debates publicly, representing yourself.

For example, I understand why Cobra doesn't want to reveal his face.

He's most likely very rich or Tamos or whatever.

But for the average person who just discovered Bitcoin or Monero or whatever, who's super

paranoid about their identity online and whatever, I do understand the concerns.

I'm pretty sure we're training some AI right now by live streaming on YouTube and there's

going to be someone using these statements potentially against us in the future.

I don't know where this is going to end.

It's just that I think we're evolving human beings and it's part of this large political

game that we learn and we express opinions about what we want and essentially what we

get is the lowest denominator of what everyone wants eventually, which is unfortunate.

We're not getting the best stuff out there, but if we voice our opinion and we try to

raise the standard a bit, at least hopefully the outcome will be a bit better.

That's what keeps me going, at least.

I hope I'm not going to get depressed again in a few years.

But my point is that I also think during the pandemic, I realized that I was working for

Bitcoin Magazine, which was interesting as an experience, but I was super undervalued

and I was basically the janitor picking up what everyone else throws away.

I was writing the stuff that the other writers did not want to write.

That was kind of my job there and I was getting paid by the article.

So I didn't have a full-time gig, even though I was working full-time for them, but they

were only paying me when something was getting published.

And during the pandemic, I sort of rage quit.

I was like, you know, screw you guys, I'm going to double down on my podcast project,

which I started like a year prior.

And it was possibly the best decision of my life, meaning that it was the first time when

I realized, OK, I'm not making any more money right now.

I might as well work on a personal project that doesn't make any money and keep going

until maybe it does.

And in hindsight, it was crazy, but also I was able to make this work somehow.

And I feel sorry for spending so much time in the cult and not paying attention.

For example, I missed out on DeFi Summer.

I missed out on lots of movements that could have potentially taught me something and made

me rich or whatever.

But I did miss out on stuff which could have been very educational and I could have brought

some ideas to Bitcoin if I was a bit more courageous.

But I think I'm doing that now, even though I'm sure that the people who cast me out or

excommunicated me or whatever verb you want to use, I don't think they're listening anymore

or they care.

But I'm very flattered that when I invite them on my podcast, they always say yes.

Nobody says, oh, you're such a horrible shit coin or I don't want to talk to you.

They all think maybe that they have this naive missionary mindset where they think that if

they talk to me for a couple of hours, they're going to convert me or something.

Or maybe that they think that they're much smarter and they want to dunk on me.

But I don't care too much for that.

And for example, I have the CEO of Swan Bitcoin, Corey Clipson, I think.

He wants to join my podcast again, even though we're very opposed in terms of where we stand

with Bitcoin right now.

He was on the side of institutional adoption and he advised Sequence, which was a company

that started their own BTC reserve and became a treasury company.

And then they sold everything at a loss, which is very funny.

But he was behind that and he still believes that it was a good move, but maybe the timing

was bad or whatever, or maybe that the people behind the company, Sequence, did not have

enough conviction to hold.

Or I'm not sure exactly what the explanation is going to be or the post rationalization.

But he is very popular with Bitcoiners and he would like to join my show.

And I'm genuinely flattered and would love to have a debate with him about this.

And I'm happy that despite all of the negativity in the community and this tendency to create

a unitary cult that thinks alike and acts like what Michael Saylor calls the hive mind

of cyber hornets.

There is still some place for contrarians, and I'm not sure if I'm the best of contrarians,

but I'm out there expressing some skepticism and people like to engage with this.

So it's good.

Like, I don't have real reasons to complain other than we haven't really delivered on

the promises of this technology.

And I've said this on another podcast.

I don't remember which one, but I was on a date during the pandemic with a girl.

I think the year was 2020.

And she asked me, I was telling her about Bitcoin.

I was very enthusiastic.

And she asked me, okay, so where can I pay with this?

And I will never forget my answer.

I was like, you shouldn't pay with this.

It's not meant to be used for payments.

And then she looked at me very confused, like, how is this even money if you don't make payments

with it?

I was like, maybe you can buy a gift card.

But yeah, it felt like I wasn't interesting or cool.

And she was right.

Like, where do you pay for this?

Where do you pay with this for stuff?

And it wasn't like the adoption hasn't even reached the point that it can.

I'm aware that Jack Dorsey did some stuff with his company that's called Square to add some

options at the payments terminals to choose Lightning.

But I think the whole setup requires KYC.

Because I remember they had a booth at the Bitcoin conference this year in Las Vegas.

And I tried to get their $20 free Bitcoin on the Lightning network.

And the first thing they asked me was to sign up to Square and then provide my bank account

to receive that.

I was like, I don't have an American bank account.

And they said, we're sorry, we cannot let you join.

You cannot participate.

So maybe that their whole adoption scheme relies on being registered with your KYC data to

this custodian.

I don't think that's the way to do it.

That was never the Bitcoin way.

Maybe it's useful on the short term.

And some people don't care because they buy it from exchanges anyway.

So they're like, who cares?

It's just the coins that I would draw from Coinbase or Kraken that I use for spending.

It's not much different from using your credit card.

But at least you're using Bitcoin, sort of.

I don't know.

Well, realistically, and this is a really important topic, I think, which is that realistically,

the world has to operate with some level of those systems.

It just does.

Even in a hyper Bitcoinized world, not every single person is going to be coin joining,

trading, you know, and honestly, even when the whole world was based on cash before digital

payments was a thing, you know, there was still payments that you needed to make that

were related to companies and could be traced to this and that and the other.

Right.

So that's going to be an aspect of it.

And it's in a way, it's part of Bitcoin winning, right?

So people who are kind of like, well, everyone should be in full cypherpunk mode.

I'm just saying that the people who choose to be in that mode should be included also.

Like you shouldn't push the adoption and the whole payments economy to be in line with

whatever regulations are in place in the U.S.

Exactly.

It's conditioned by adhering to this system.

Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

I agree totally.

And so I think that's where...

We're just reinventing banking if we're doing that.

It's like, even in the gold world, if you come with a gold coin that's not stamped by

the king of your country or whatever, and it's from somewhere else, it's still gold.

They will accept it.

Maybe they will give you less stuff for it.

I don't know.

Or maybe that they will evaluate the purity before they actually accept it.

But they accept it.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It does need to be a global payment system.

And so it's really going to come down to making the minimum possible concessions on that front

to get it to be a global currency.

There's going to be some of that.

So I think, yeah, some people are too naive that, oh, we cannot have any of that.

No, there's going to be some of that.

But on the other hand, you also need people pushing back on that.

Because in a vacuum, if nothing is done, if there aren't people working on

cutting-edge privacy solutions, if there aren't people working on ways to obfuscate transactions,

if there aren't people working on the legal and the regulatory side saying that

Bitcoin needs to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, then it's going to fade away.

And it's just going to be enveloped by the same forces that already control banking.

It's just kind of like the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

The price of a free Bitcoin is eternal work from us, the community who have

Bitcoin's better interests at heart.

Because if we're not going to do it, nobody will.

And that'll be the end of it in 20 years.

People will look back and think, oh, yeah, that was a nice idea.

But ultimately, we're back in the same hellscape we were.

People will be trying to invent a new Bitcoin.

I mean, of course, now there's just a million cryptocurrencies.

But something genuinely new, a new paradigm shift like that to try and escape the box.

Same again.

Also, we have to be aware that while we were fighting about what the ideal block size should

be, the banking system has caught up with making payments convenient.

Paying with your card used to be cumbersome.

You had to swipe your card.

You had to type your PIN.

Sometimes you had to sign the receipt.

It wasn't very nice.

But now you just tap with that NFC chip.

And that's pretty much it in most cases.

Sometimes if they're having some sort of antiquated accounting system, they ask you to sign the

receipt still.

But that doesn't happen too much anymore.

So nowadays, when you choose to spend Bitcoin, you're voluntarily opting in for a more

inconvenient system.

And the user experience for Bitcoin used to be much superior to that of banks.

So on this front, I think we sort of lost the battle by choosing to fight for 10 years

on how to make this technology work instead of actually pursuing adoption.

And Roger Ver was right when he said that we're going to waste a decade just stalling

adoption.

That could have happened.

And maybe that he was ahead of his time with the understanding of what adoption means and

what merchants actually require.

And where I'm going with this is that if we're going to catch up and we're going to make

this technology work, we need much easier user experience to the point where your grandma

can use it without thinking what's going on, without knowing anything about what the

blockchain is, without caring too much about how this technology operates.

And I compare this with AI a lot because we had this resurgence of AI technology and LLMs

and whatever.

I'm aware that it came in various moments of our history and that was also part of the

dot-com bubble, this idea of AI.

But now it's much more advanced.

And in order to use something like Cloud or ChatGPT or whatever, you don't need instructions.

You don't need to be explained by someone how the technology works, how neural systems

work, how it's stored somewhere on the server or you're operating it locally and how tokens

work and whatever.

Nobody needs to explain this to you.

You just open a website, you type what you need to be using, you can opt for the premium

feature for which you're going to pay, or you can get the free version, which is limited

in its capacity.

But everyone understands why they need this, what it's good for, and finds a way to integrate

it into their workflow.

And I wish we had something similar with Bitcoin where you want to adopt it, right?

You want to use it for payments.

And then there's a meme in Bitcoin right now that you need to listen to 40 hours of

podcasts every week to understand what this is.

It's really unfortunate that this technology requires so much, quote-unquote, education

on how to use it when it should be simple.

And I think the guy from Coinspice, I don't know if you watched Coinspice or you're aware

of that show, but Colin did a very cool advertisement for Bitcoin Cash.

It's just cash, bro.

You can find the video on YouTube where there's this guy explaining how Bitcoin works to the

clerk.

And then there's someone else who just walks in, takes whatever he wants to buy, and then

pays for it and leaves.

And that's kind of the point.

And that's what it should be.

And I think it's such a good campaign.

It's unfortunate that it didn't become as popular as it deserves to be.

I think it has very good production value and it sends a message that we need to be

reminded of perpetually, that this is supposed to be money that we spend, not some sort of

made up fantasy about reinventing the meaning of money.

There's actually a guy who does a podcast that's called What Is Money?

And he's using very fancy words to explain how this technology works and why

people choose to transact in this specific way and how it enables the

elimination of barter, like fundamental economic stuff.

But he went on for hundreds of episodes of just intellectual

masturbation of fancy words and ideas that you can summarize very easily.

And I think that's a good way to explain where Bitcoin is currently at, where

people overcomplicate something that is supposed to be very simple, which is

you have money, you make payments, and that's pretty much it.

I think when people ask, like, and it doesn't happen so often anymore, but

I got into cryptocurrency in April of 2016 and I remember when people would come up to

me and be like, oh, what can you tell me about this?

I would always go like, well, start with the white paper.

And now it's like you don't have to know anything about it because I feel like I

really just want to kind of hammer on the point that it's just money.

Like, what do you have to know about your dollar bills and your credit cards and

your dollar bills in your wallet that you can spend it somewhere and get a good or

service that you want?

Welcome back.

I mean, I haven't heard anyone actually trying to explain to you where the dollars

are printed and what the serial number means and what the different versions of the

dollars are and how you can identify them.

Of course, there are people who are into this and they collect all sorts of money and

they want to know more about the serial number and they collect rare numbers.

And they want it to be in mint condition and stuff like this.

Like, I respect that, but it doesn't mean that everyone using money needs to get to

that level.

And I used to also be in the run your own node cult or else you're not using Bitcoin.

And that's super unrealistic.

Like, you expect every normie to use their computer to install a software and then

wait for about a few days for it to sync and then finally use the money.

It is a bit crazy.

Like, people need to receive the money and then spend it.

And that's pretty much it.

Participate in the economy.

All right.

My laptop might just completely die at any given point.

I have plugged it into the power, but we'll say it's a pretty old laptop, so it might

just give up.

I did not anticipate we're doing like a five hour show that it would.

It's only four hours, 30 minutes.

Don't take the next 30 minutes for granted.

Are you guys tired?

I thought I would be starting to flag a little bit, you know, but no, I'm still still

still pretty with it.

I've still got a bunch of topics, actually, to ask you about.

What is it still watching this?

Let me check the live stream.

Yeah, the number was it was going up last I saw people were loving those rants.

I'm on your website and this is your YouTube channel.

OK, how many people are actually watching?

Leave a message in the chat like just let us know that you haven't just left your

computer on.

I'm sure I'm sure there have been a few.

There was about 250 people watching on Twitter.

Maybe there was a few more on YouTube.

Oh, I got to retweet that.

Good activity in the chat has been going as well.

Jingle Bob says, still watching, thank you, Jingle Bob, one of our dedicated

listeners, CSD Sindh, we see such ASC 1686 says, howdy, maybe from the Midwest.

Or the South, right, not the Midwest.

They say howdy in the Midwest.

I don't think so.

Who else we got here?

I got some feedback from John Silverblood who says, sorry, Vlad, I didn't mean to

throw this at you specifically, was hoping to hear Robin and SuperTestNet's views on

it and looks like it turned into a bit of a depressing monologue.

It's very interesting to hear and I wish things were different.

For reference, I haven't watched many of your episodes, just snippets here and

there and a BCH one, but listening to your recall story with accuracy, with the

accuracy you do is actually really impressive.

Glad you came on and challenged Jeremy to do this.

Oh, thank you.

This is nice.

I wish Robin and SuperTestNet and Paul actually stuck around for the interesting

part, but this is something I've learned during my podcast, like people loosen up

after a while, in the beginning, it's awkward, they just get to meet each other.

You're rambling about various topics and then you finally find the focus and that's

when it gets good, usually after the first hour.

That's why I usually do two hour interviews because the first hour is usually

awkward, but then it gets much better.

Unfortunately, most people don't listen past the first hour.

Well, you need to just chop off the first hour and just release it like an hour and

a half.

But live streams, it's very unpredictable.

It's like a radio show or something, except that there is no format.

There is nobody to establish what is the maximum amount of minutes or for how long

you can talk.

It's not like TV or radio where you have like 30 minutes and then 15 minutes of

advertisements and then maybe something else.

So the format is cool.

It's just that it requires good organization with timestamps and something that helps

people identify the talking points that they want to hear about.

Fortunately, we have AI nowadays and it's amazing.

On Apple podcasts, they integrated something which basically lets you navigate

through the transcript and search for keywords and it jumps automatically to the

moment when that's being discussed and it's really cool.

Yeah, it is. It is really cool.

I mean, one of my favorite things about AI in a similar vein is like if I remember,

oh, I was talking on the show about this this long time ago, or I remember somebody

said this, you know, I kind of know who said it roughly when they said it, what the

topic was or whatever.

And I need to track down the source.

AI is amazing for that.

Absolutely amazing in a way that even like Google search yet just can't match, you

know.

I know I use it for that also for researching or finding stuff.

And the hallucination rate has become much less obvious, at least like sometimes I have

to trust it that it's right, but I still check the source.

But it's become better over the years.

In the beginning, it was just making up stuff and that was depressing.

It felt like you were wasting your time, prompting when it was.

It wasn't able to say, I don't know or I cannot give you the data.

And that was also very recent.

I remember using Grok for putting the transcript from YouTube and then generating

timestamps from it.

And sometimes it was hallucinating.

It was basically taking information about the guest and assuming what he could have

talked about because the amount of context that I gave to it and the transcript was much

more than I was allowed to process with my Grok account.

So instead of saying, hey, you're limited to this amount of tokens or whatever, it was

just making up some timestamps that were not true.

And at first I was confused as to why it does this.

Right now, it's much better, the amount of progress is really impressive.

Yeah, have you been using it to build stuff?

I was doing the other day.

I was trying to vibe code some BCH stuff and honestly, it's getting pretty good.

Obviously, that relies on there being enough documentation of the tooling and stuff like

that. But it was pretty good in that under an hour, I was able to get my app with Wallet

Connect and that I could just connect my wallet.

And then it was making these certain kinds of transactions going to a certain address.

I didn't do any Covenant stuff.

Maybe I'll have to try that in the next iteration.

But I was super impressed.

And then Max, he made a prediction market that he also just he's not a big programmer

type of guy. As far as I know, he's a little bit technical, but he made what's called

it's called ClownMundo.com, I think Clown World, ClownMundo.com and any BCH person can

just make a prediction market as long as you're willing to trust whoever made it as the

Oracle. And yeah, you can just link up your wallet and stuff.

So once we've got Wizard Connect integrated into more of the wallets, and also once

there's a little bit more documentation, it all gets fed into the next round of AI, it's

going to be so easy to make BCH apps, even powerful ones.

Just I need a BCH app that just does this, add Wizard Connect, boom, and then it will

just plug into all the wallets and stuff automatically.

It's going to be amazing.

I feel like this is what we need for the actual idea of magic internet money.

Like that's finally going to be actually coming true, where people who want to make any

kind of website that interacts with money in any way will just be able to do it in a

couple of hours with very little starting point.

I think the entry fee has been lowered so much, you used to have to pay someone to do

this kind of stuff for you.

Now, all you need is time management and the willingness to organize everything, because

if you're using, especially I think, Opus 4.8 is really amazing.

I've been using it since 4.3 or something, and I'm not sure exactly what the difference

is, but it's been very consistent.

So, for example, you give out an idea of how to build an app, it's going to suggest how

you're going to build it step by step, and then basically you feel like you're the one

working for the AI and not the other way around.

It's telling you, OK, this is the first step, this is what you need to do.

Once you're finished, tell me and I'll give you the next sequence of code and tell you

exactly what to do with it.

But what I like about it is that it also tells you when you're wrong.

Like if you have a bad idea, it's going to tell you why it's a bad idea or why you

shouldn't go forward with that.

So in a way, it's like having an engineer friend watching over your shoulder and

telling you how you can reach your goal, which is really good.

What I don't like is that I think sometimes it forgets what it told you to do

earlier or loses context, and then it's going to give you instructions which are not

compatible with the previous instructions that you received, or it's going to forget

that it told you to do something after a few prompts and it will make mistakes on

code that was generated by Cloud itself.

So sometimes you need to basically take the whole conversation, put that in a file

like a TXT file or whatever, and then send it to Cloud so that it can read once again

and get the context of your conversation and continue from where you left off as

opposed to hallucinations or whatever else may happen.

It's more costly.

I sometimes think that this is made on purpose by Entropic so that when it loses

context, you're going to get angry and do more prompts.

And basically you're paying for all the tokens that you're burning doing this.

So they make more money off of you because you have to do backtracking.

Or you have to paste the whole code that it generated because you need to debug what

happened. And that's also super expensive, like a large prompt with a lot of context.

It burns many tokens.

Maybe you're going to be paying $10, $15, $20 for just one large prompt.

Yeah, I find it tends to, like for me, it quote unquote just works up until a certain

point. And then at a certain point, I don't know whether it's complexity or how long I've

been using it or whatever.

And then suddenly it just starts to like kind of first a couple of little errors start to

creep in and then it just explodes like errors or it does something really weird that I'm

like, what what is this?

This is not what I wanted anymore.

And I guess, yeah, maybe some people have more of a conspiracy mindset that they're

deliberately limiting the tokens or whatever.

I don't know whether it just gets out of a certain range of the context of our conversation

just gets too long and it loses the thread or I don't know.

I don't know. But it is kind of weird as a software developer that I used to have to

figure out all these things one by one.

And then the earlier AI models, you could kind of auto prompt while you were doing your

work in the normal way.

And then at a certain point, I was just like, OK, I barely even need to look at the code

anymore. And now, yeah, if I'm just vibe coding something like you don't need to look at

the code. In fact, you just iterate on it over and over and over until you have like a

final PR that you're ready to do.

And then you would want to manually review it step by step.

But people are not even necessarily doing that.

They don't even have to. You just say every once in a while on Twitter, somebody like,

oh, our AI that we had auto deploying to production just nuked everything and we're all

fucked. And you're like, OK, well, maybe you should have realized that that wasn't the

best idea. But I can understand the instinct to do it because it's just so much faster.

And if it works out, it works out until it doesn't, basically.

I've built my website, which is Bitcoin-Takeover.com using Claude and also the podcast

page, which is Bitcoin-Takeover.com slash audio.

Basically, what I did was replace WordPress, which I was using and was very convenient

with something which is pure PHP and HTML and JavaScript.

And I see very good results in terms of optimization and page load speed, which is very

important. On the other hand, it has some weird quirks and bugs, which I haven't had the

time to fix, but I will get around to them because I think Claude is very good for

completing 90 percent of your project.

And then you're left with that quirky 10 percent that you need to figure out with lots of

prompts. But still, it's much better than nothing.

I was using WordPress, which had cumbersome plugins that were eating up lots of

resources. And every time you were adding something, it was making your page slower and

your database more convoluted and larger to load.

So I'm happy that at least there is this option and you can optimize for it.

I don't know, I think we're going to be living in a wild world in a couple of years.

Like you said, the barrier to entry has just been lowered so much, which as a software

developer, it's interesting that some software developers feel so threatened by it, you

know, and they really don't want to embrace it.

They really want to avoid kind of thinking about, OK, well, maybe this has just

obsoleted like 20 years or 30 years of my skill that I've developed.

But I kind of see it as the other way around because I have way more ideas than I have

time to program them and I don't have enough money to hire all the people that I need to

program those things.

And to the extent AI helps them or me, then it just speeds up the rate at which I can put

out all the different ideas I have.

So I think it's better.

But somebody said to me the other day, which I think was very accurate, that basically

as an engineer, you need to become more product minded, like the role that a product

manager would typically be in a software company is so much more powerful now as a

result, because maybe that engineering like code monkey skills are not as relevant

anymore. And honestly, engineers should be the best place to have been learning and

thinking through those points of view over the years.

But if they've neglected that to just stick to figuring out the Boolean logic, then you

kind of played yourself because AI has replaced that.

But in the same way, it's done the same thing for like designers, for instance, you

know, I'm not a great designer and there are great designers and that's it.

But you can get 90 percent of a great designer, maybe more if you just go on Ford and

say, make this a cool design.

I want these colors.

I want it to be user friendly or I want it to imitate this or that app that I like the

look and flow of.

And boom, there you go.

So, yeah, I just think everybody's being impacted somewhat in the same way.

I think this way that we interact with AI makes me wish I got my degree in literature or

something that made me very good with describing situations.

Sometimes I feel like I'm lost for words or I don't know exactly what I want and it's

much easier to be specific.

And use the right words to describe what you want as opposed to prompting aimlessly

until you figure it out.

But I feel like that's more true with images, that's why one of the most interesting

things is you have an idea in your head, like I really like mid-journey, I got to say

mid-journey is absolutely amazing.

And it's kind of like you have an idea and I'll describe my idea and I feel like it's a

pretty good description of my idea.

And then what comes out, I'm often like, oh, that is my idea that it matches the

description. But also it's kind of gone in a different direction that I wouldn't expect.

Or sometimes it will be like that's one of the four things that it generates or the eight

things you do, two or three reps.

And then you're like, OK, this is the one that I was thinking of, but I like this one

more. And so then you kind of have that human machine synergy, which I'm sure things

are going to be more and more driven in that exact way, because it's very cool.

It's just so fast to iterate that it can come up with new variations, like not quite

instantly, but close enough to that somebody who is working without AI just cannot get

through that number of reps to figure out.

And then it's creative.

It's fun. Of course, you just say, like, I want this idea and then it comes up with

something you didn't expect.

And then you think, oh, maybe let's go further in that direction.

And it comes up with another thing you didn't expect.

So the latest scope, and I'm going to use this argument to get back on track with the

main topic, I think the greatest scope of this cycle is that cryptocurrency is going to

be AI money and not used by humans for payments, almost as if all along we have been

building this for autonomous computers to be settling debt or making transactions with

each other for various reasons.

And I was at ETH Denver earlier this year.

I think it was February.

And this was like the main talking point.

The event wasn't as large as other Ethereum conferences.

They're admittedly accepting the fact that much of the community has found other

interests or has migrated to Solana, but lots of builders were very excited about this

use case of making, for example, self-driving cars make payments whenever there is some

sort of damage happening or just getting AI to manage portfolios or whatever and

settling everything with Ethereum, which is what they want to make useful or stable

coins or whatever.

And I've also seen some of this in Bitcoin, where people say, well, the future of

payments is just AI agents settling because obviously they cannot have bank accounts.

And most people are reluctant in terms of allowing some AI to access their bank account

without any restrictions or just trusting them with this.

So it's easier to set them up with a wallet with like $20 or whatever it is that you're

comfortable allowing your AI to manage.

And it does feel like defeat, right?

Because the point of this was to maximize human freedom and bring more freedom of

transactions and bank the unbanked and whatever.

And then you're like, oh, we failed, but at least the AI can use it.

And I do expect this to be a major bullish narrative during the next cycle with

companies bragging about how they can integrate Bitcoin payments for settlements of

whatever with their AI.

I don't know. I'm like, well, it's just a win.

It's a cope, you're right, in the sense that it's kind of like, well, we built a thing

and it doesn't really do what we thought or what we wanted, but it does this other thing.

So that was what it was the whole time.

So it is a bit of a retrospective cope.

But it's a good thing for crypto in that it will help crypto get adopted faster.

And by it becoming money for automated payments, it will then have increased network

effect, liquidity, et cetera.

And then it will be more compelling as money for humans.

So I think in a way it's going to come around and go full circle on those cycles.

I think cycles is done, man.

Like, OK, maybe there will be another cycle or whatever.

But people who are just looking for these gains and these gains, like the coins are

becoming less and less correlated to each other over time.

BTC is going to pump less and less every single cycle.

Now people are off to putting their money into AI or they'll be moving off to something

else. The halving is less and less of a market shock each time, both in terms of people's

awareness of it and also in terms of the percentage of supply that it's changing.

So it really is just I think the super cycle was a hoax and a scam.

And the next cycle, like it's not coming.

I feel like crypto to get another cycle, quote unquote, cycle has to it has to be useful.

The next cycle has to be the coins take off that people are actually using and there's

real demand driving it.

Like, I don't think there's another round of scam in it.

There's altcoins and then ICOs and then NFTs and then treasury companies.

I think we're out of we're out of bullshit.

I think we're going to. So initially in 2016, one of the biggest use cases that kicked off

the bull market for Ethereum was DAOs or DAOs or whatever you want to call them,

decentralized autonomous organizations.

And I think after we have had the bad experience with institutions, people are going to

come up with automated institutions on a blockchain run by AI.

I think I feel like this is going to be the next narrative.

And they will say, well, of course, it failed because of human corruption.

They'll try to make like a Mt.

Gox type of narrative out of it or FTX or BlockFi or whatever.

And they will say, well, this time we figured this out with crypto that you can actually do

autonomous organizations that are run by AI.

I totally see that happening from the Ethereum team.

And I totally see that happening on Jimmy Fallon with Paris Hilton going to promote

something just like she did with her NFTs.

And I don't know, it's just that I think that old narratives can be brought back in a

different context to make up like Ethereum Foundation.

If you're listening to this, just take some notes, OK?

Because I need my bags to pump.

Someone sent me some of these and if those can be used for agentic payments, I'm not

going to care. I still have a Trump card that hasn't pumped.

Like, please pump my bags.

Like from the original Series One collection that Trump announced in 2022 or

something.

ETH is cooked, man. ETH is actually done. Bloody, what's his name? David Hoffman on Bankless.

He's like, I've sold my stack. It's all over. Turns out we haven't actually built anything.

If you watch the recent Bankless ones, I watched a little bit of one the other day.

They are straight up like in full capitulation, like, oh, we built all this stuff.

2017, 2020, it was all flying. ETH was this amazing money that was just flying around.

It was this amazing money that was going to change the world. But now it kind of isn't.

We haven't really built anything that matters. Just what are we doing here?

It's a weird coincidence, right, that the Ethereum Foundation did a restructuring and they cut off some of the funding that was going to their marketing.

And then David Hoffman decides suddenly that Ethereum is not useful anymore.

I mean, come on. And to be honest, I do think that he's going to pivot to Zcash because he's had some Zcash people on and he seemed very fascinated with the concept.

Maybe that the Zcash Foundation or whatever is going to have some money to pay him for marketing and he's going to keep going.

My point is that Ethereum did some useful stuff, especially on the research side.

And what they did with, for example, creating rollups, ZkRollups, they're very interesting.

And they're a way to do something similar to sidechains, but in a different way that uses math.

I think it's underrated. And the fact that they always came up with some weird use case, which somehow got a lot of traction like the ICOs and DeFi Summer and NFTs.

There's some merit to that. How the hell do you even pitch something as dumb as let's tokenize JPEGs, but you don't actually own the JPEG?

You don't store the JPEG on the blockchain, it's on some third party server, but you can trade this on this platform.

And we're going to sell this monkey JPEG for, it's not even the JPEG, it's the token of the JPEG for thousands of dollars.

And people are going to take this seriously and they're going to say this is the future of art.

It takes balls and it takes big brains to be able to come up with this because it's so ridiculous.

When you break it down outside of the narratives and you take away the greed that people felt in terms of how do I flip this or how do I sell my art for a lot of money?

Every mediocre artist out there who knew how to use MetaMask suddenly became a genius.

I mean, there is something there.

And I did go to a couple of Ethereum conferences and they do have some of these more institutional type of art people coming there and saying,

well, I set up this organization where people can tokenize their art and we have serious collections by whatever authorities that decided that this is real art.

I mean, Ethereum has things going for it.

I'm not saying it's going to die.

It will still be around and so forth.

But I can just see the intellectual collapse in their community.

Once upon a time, it was, yeah, we're going to flip BTC.

They're flipping.

We're coming for them.

And then it was ultrasound money.

We're going to be actually taking over.

Proof of stake, the merge.

They did the merge.

To be honest, if you look at the interview with Adam Beck and Greg Maxwell, they were on a podcast in 2014.

I wish I would remember the name of it, but it's the only one that you can find on YouTube where Greg Maxwell is actually on a podcast.

I'm trying to think of the name, but it will come later, hopefully.

They were making fun of the whole concept of proof of stake and they were saying it's never going to work.

And if you look at all the FUD previous to the merge, they were saying it will never work.

And they're not going to be able to do it.

And this is the end of Ethereum.

They're going to crash the network.

The merge is going to be a catastrophic event where this can happen and this other catastrophic phenomenon can occur.

And it never happened.

It didn't happen, but it was both ways, though, because I agree with you.

There was lots of FUD beforehand that they wouldn't successfully pull off the merge and the proof of stake would be fundamentally broken and blah, blah, blah.

And of course, yeah, that was mostly like FUD and wrong.

But it was also the other way around where the ETH people were like, once we have proof of stake, you aren't going to believe it.

We're going to be burning through coins.

The market cap is going to be rocketing up.

Everyone's going to see how genius our idea was, et cetera, et cetera.

And then, of course, none of that happened.

That's the marketing side, but the technical side actually has some merits.

And the fact that they took an idea which obviously couldn't scale and they came up with solutions to make it scale is also proof that they were pretty creative.

Because Vitalik came up with something which obviously could never scale.

Or not to the promises of a world computer or whatever it is that it got redefined as every cycle.

It was the DeFi platform.

It was the ICO machine or whatever.

The everything machine.

I think there's an actual book that's called this.

But they were able to come up with ways first with layer twos and then they figured out how to do on-chain scaling with roll-ups.

And they said, well, maybe that layer twos are not necessary anymore.

I think part of the reason why it's in such a dire bear market right now is that many of these people who built layer twos and companies and whatever, they're not happy.

They invested a lot of capital in deploying this.

And then they realized that the leader of the project decided to pivot away from this approach of scaling and try to be more like Solana, but in a way that uses smarter cryptography as opposed to centralized servers.

There is some merit to it.

I'm not saying it's a flawless project.

But the expectation from the Bitcoin camp was that it was going to fail in situations when obviously it did much better than expected.

It's just like BCH.

I mean, layer twos is just like the ETH version of Lightning Network.

They actually have the Raiden Network.

I think one of the authors was one of the co-authors of the Lightning paper.

Exactly.

He actually worked on something which was like Lightning on Ethereum, but with a token.

And for some reason, it never went anywhere.

It got a lot of hype.

There was Plasma.

There was, what was the other?

It was like Casper or something called.

Casper.

Some nonsense like that.

That one was never used.

That's right.

All these things.

It's just the label that somebody has that they package up as a genius idea.

They get millions and millions of dollars invested into it.

Somehow or another, it doesn't work out.

Some of the investors are mad.

Some of them just write it off as, well, you're investing in new tech, and it doesn't always work out.

The narrative fades out.

Everyone forgets about that thing.

And then a fresh batch come in to re-hype it, reheat the same nonsense under a new label.

That's just what I see over and over and over again.

It happens in ETH just as much as it does in BTC, basically, from my point of view.

And to be honest, it happened in BCH as well, too, until we started getting things right.

That was the same thing.

Oh, we're going to have Wormhole.

We're going to have SLP tokens.

We're going to have Bitcoin mining parliament.

All this.

Every community just has to go through this until they actually start hitting on some real stuff.

But this is how evolution happens, actually.

You have to come up with iterations and fail, and then come back, pick up basically what makes sense from all the iterations, and try to improve on that.

And I think Ethereum, to be honest, is the most experimental place in all of crypto.

Of course, you're going to have the Ethereum killer.

I think one of the first ones was called NEO, and then there was EOS, and then there was Polkadot, and now there's Solana.

And there's always been Cardano, which was always technically inferior, but had very good marketing.

My point is that there are many attempts to bring this one down, but it's actually Ethereum that came up with the bull market narratives and sort of set the trends every cycle in regards to what is fashionable, what's the new cool use case that brings the next million users.

And if you think about it in this very cynical way, I think all the libertarians and all the anarchists are already here trying to build stuff and having their own purpose.

How do you get the normies to care about this tech?

In the beginning, they're not going to listen to any of the pitches concerning sovereign money or being able to unbank yourself or whatever.

They'll say, I'm fine with my life, it's comfortable.

But then you basically trigger their greed when it comes to something as stupid as monkey JPEGs.

And then they'll say, well, of course this one has value because this other person bought it for $1,000, so I'm going to buy it for $1,000 and try to flip it for $10,000.

And if they stick around long enough, they'll actually understand how the tech works, because once they lose their money, they'll try to rationalize what happened if they're smart.

If they're not smart, they will just go back to whatever they were doing with their lives and say, okay, this was all a scam all along, this is not for me.

But those who stick around actually end up building stuff.

If they're smart scammers, they'll come up with the next scam.

If they're principled people like Robin, for example, his first involvement in the space was with an ICO.

He doesn't talk about that too much.

But Robin Linus, or Linus, I'm not sure how you refer to him, but in German it's Linus, started out as a developer for an ICO project.

And he felt deeply regretful for his contributions to that, and then decided that he wants to build something legit on a project that's not scammy.

And that's how he came up with BitVM.

It took him years to get there.

But my point is that from all of this scamminess, you're going to have smart people who get in for the simple reason that they wanted to get rich.

And then they will realize they didn't get rich.

They will try to rationalize why they didn't get rich.

And then you're going to get a different kind of adoption and expand your community.

And I think the people who engineered this and they thought about Ethereum as being this place where you're going to have lots of crazy ideas that maybe are too crazy for Bitcoin.

I think the Peter Thiel kind of people, right, who put their money everywhere.

They're not tribal.

They don't care which one is going to succeed, but they just fund everything out there, hoping that it's going to somehow disrupt the status quo.

I sort of respect it once you look at it from this cynical perspective where it's not necessarily about building the best stuff, but it's also about marketing something so that it brings more users.

Because let's be fair, there are not too many people who came to Bitcoin Cash for the token system.

And cash fusion is not necessarily the most popular way to use Bitcoin Cash.

But if you do come up with a stupid game or something, or just a system that gets people to trade tokens for stupid reasons, like tokenize Magic the Gathering, or whatever is popular with kids nowadays, Minecraft NFTs, or I don't know.

Maybe it will get more young people to care about this network and onboard them.

And maybe it's scammy in retrospect because people lose money, but it's also valuable because people who previously never cared about this end up getting involved in this and potentially making valuable contributions that advance the technology and potentially help us get closer to the goal.

Because I think ultimately, and the smartest people in the room will agree, it doesn't matter which one of the projects is going to win.

Of course, it matters from the selfish reason that we want our bags to be the successful ones.

We want to tell everyone that they were wrong, and we want to get stupid rich.

But if one of them succeeds and pushes humanity towards more freedom and separates state and money and achieves all of these beautiful ideals, then honestly, I don't care if it's going to be BSV.

I will accept it.

I'll say they got it right.

I don't think it will happen because they have that confiscation opcode, which they embedded.

Proof of court, yeah.

Screw them.

I don't want it to be BSV, but if it's BSV, I will accept it.

I will say, okay, I'll buy some BSV and use it if this is the money that is actually cypherpunk and is useful.

If it's going to be BCH, cool.

If it's going to be BTC, then I guess I will just dunk on everyone and be like, I was right all along.

But I don't care about that part.

I think I had my ego destroyed so many times over the years that I don't care anymore.

If it's going to be Monero or Zcash or Zano or whatever is fashionable out there, I don't care anymore.

I just want something to actually work and bring us closer.

The problem of fragmentation, I think, is only temporary until we wake up and we realize either that we can put all of it in one network or else we can just accept that we're going to have instead of 21 million coins on this deflationary economy,

we're going to have maybe 500 million coins on this economy where you can swap between assets.

And if that's going to bring more freedom to the world, I don't care.

Honestly.

Yeah, so I want to hit on that, which is where do you think – well, let me put it like this.

I have got this new theory, which is that BCH needs to stop basically trying to appeal to old OGs to come back.

And to be fair, we've done – some of that is fine.

And, of course, some people who have left BCH will want to come back and see that we're doing things right and all that.

But my general trend that I've noticed, which was emphasized by my recent discussions with Justin Bonds, was like over and over again, I see these people who have left.

They're a bit traumatized or they're out of touch with what's going on.

And it's like they had their time in BCH and they got it wrong.

And that was why there was splits.

There was chaos.

There was bad reputation.

BCH wasn't working.

Of course, you can blame it all on the hijacking or conspiracy theories.

But at some point, you've got to take some responsibility that it wasn't all just that.

It was also like if you're doing the wrong thing, you're getting bad results.

Own up to it.

And so now, BCH is doing a lot better.

And it has, while some people have stuck through all that chaos, a few of them, which is good to have that wisdom and experience.

At the same time, those people have had to significantly change their views as a result of all that learning.

And the new people who have been coming in are some of the best ones, like people who pop up from wherever because crypto is open.

And they just get involved in BCH and they start contributing massively.

And I'm like, that is how we're going to win.

We're just going to get more and more of those people who are just popping up who you just completely wouldn't expect.

Maybe don't even have a background in crypto.

But whatever it is about BCH that resonates with them, they get drawn into the project.

And then that's how the culture becomes more unique and productive is because suddenly we have ideas that are not just being rehashed from the same people that have been there previously or that returned and are out of touch with what's going on.

From your point of view, what would you like to see in the BCH culture and mentality and outreach public perception going forward?

You kind of already talked about that for BTC, I think.

But for BCH, what advice would you give us?

I mean, I'm obviously a horrible benchmark because I don't have much skin in the game and I don't really use BCH.

So you shouldn't really care about what I'm saying.

But I do like the fact that there is that guy, Matteo, the French guy.

Yeah, he's amazing.

I met him in Amsterdam.

And there's also Kalisti who's building interesting stuff.

These guys were not around during the block size wars.

At least I'm not aware.

I don't remember them being around.

It was much louder and more arrogant people at the time that I was sort of dueling on Twitter and trying to dunk on.

It's a bit unfortunate that I don't get to.

I think I said this at the beginning of the podcast.

I said this joke that, oh, you look different being Armani and Colin.

These things have grown your hair.

I wish it was Coin Spice, the show that actually had me on and had me actually admit that there is some merit to BCH.

It didn't turn out to be because people move on with their lives and there are cyclical generations involved in every project that try to put their best effort and build something meaningful.

But I think in a way it's better that it's not been Armani and Colin and the Coin Spice guys.

I think it's actually cool that BCH had...

Maybe it's not the second chance.

Maybe it's like the third or fourth and there's a new wave of people coming in and deciding that the technology is useful.

I remember at one point in 2018, I think it was Vitalik who said that he's going to plan to use the BCH block space to unload data from Ethereum.

And that Bitcoin Cash was going to become this data availability layer for Ethereum.

Which maybe could have been bullish, but it also takes away part of the identity of why Bitcoin Cash still exists and what it's supposed to be doing.

It's supposed to be much more than some other projects, just data layer.

And what can I say?

It's beautiful that you have new people coming in who are not necessarily in this for the vendetta, for the long-term counts of Monte Cripto kind of story where you're trying to have revenge on the people who did something wrong to you.

I think Paul said this, that maybe the big blockers lost the war.

Like they did not change Bitcoin, but most of them became stupid rich because they didn't stay in this monoculture of one coin to rule them all.

And they invested in Ethereum and other projects that made them even richer than if they only held Bitcoin.

And a lot of these guys are now billionaires.

I'm not sure to which extent this criteria applies.

It's actually criterion for singular.

So this criterion applies.

But it's really interesting that this space was developed and how it developed after the block size wars.

Because at the time, Bitcoin had a huge dominance.

You had Brian Armstrong tweeting about Stellar and Ripple and all the other altcoins being distractions and we're going to get sidechains.

To this day, we never had real sidechains.

Blockstream, the company that wrote the paper about sidechains, came up with a federation and conceded that it's just good enough.

And then got community backlash.

It never worked out for them, which I think is poetic justice for all the harm that they did in dividing the community during the block size wars.

At least they were never successful.

So there is some justice in the whole situation.

But also it came at the expense of adoption and all the momentum that Bitcoin had.

And now it seems like there is less of it.

And we're dealing with more dire competition from other payment systems.

Like Apple Pay was not around during the block size wars.

And Google Pay was also not around.

Now they're so convenient, right?

I double tap this button on the side of my phone and then it brings up the card I pay with it.

It also has a privacy benefit, meaning that the receiver will not see my full name.

Which is not something that you get when you tap your card.

So Apple Pay is cooler from this point of view.

But I don't want this to be the money.

We're trying to fix the money also from the monetary policy point of view.

Also from the privacy point of view.

There are many advantages that Bitcoin as a concept has compared to fiat money.

And it seems like we're not very good at pushing this.

Except for the situation of, well, this is going to make you rich because there's fewer of it.

And if demand increases.

Do you remember stock to flow?

Yeah, of course I do.

I like scams.

That was the highest level of copium.

Where people assumed that the demand is going to remain constant.

Or else grow in time.

And the supply is limited.

And therefore the price is going to go up according to this model.

And the guy who came up with it actually rewrote the whole model multiple times.

So that he would always be right.

And people chose to believe in that.

Knowing fully, I'm pretty sure Adam Beck is aware that it's a scam.

And it's not good enough.

But he promoted it.

And Seif Adina Moos, who is this supposedly very smart Austrian economist.

He endorsed it.

And said, yeah, this is it.

It's going to work.

I'm pretty sure they used it as this self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hoping that if enough people are going to believe that it's the case.

Then this will happen.

Obviously it did not happen.

Because human nature is not that predictable.

And you cannot engineer it in this way.

But the fact that people still believe in it after it got reinvented.

It got broken.

And then the guy said, well, maybe I got this data wrong.

Let me change this parameter.

And now it looks like we're back on track.

It's just crazy.

And the fact that this is the only killer app that we have had so far.

Just the number go up factor.

And the expectation that there's only 21 million Bitcoin.

And therefore, if the demand is going to remain constant.

The price will go up parabolically.

It's crazy.

Instead of actually making it useful.

And saying, well, it's nice that you buy Bitcoin.

But then you can also spend it for this.

There are some shops.

I'm not saying that there's no adoption at all.

But it became worse.

And with the huddle mentality, it will only get worse.

Because what I've seen here in Europe.

And you've also witnessed it if you went to Slovenia for BCH Bliss.

The adoption is stalling or else disappearing.

Because of new regulations.

And these companies realize that they have to pay extra legal fees.

To become compliant.

And then they have to collect all the data about their customers.

And it's just too much work.

It makes no sense for them to support a way to pay.

That incurs the cost of like €10,000 or something.

And then also recurring cost of, I don't know what lawyers cost.

Just for the purpose of processing data.

Or hiring a firm that's going to handle it.

And the volume of payments that they were receiving from just supporting Bitcoin.

Was just not high enough to justify the costs.

Because the culture is designed in such a way.

That it encourages you to huddle.

Which according to some people means that you should never spend.

And I don't want to go back to Saylor.

But my point is that as we were huddling.

Not caring too much about the world around us.

And what's happening with policy.

The restrictions in terms of regulations got much worse.

To the point where adoption became more difficult.

If there's going to be companies that do accept Bitcoin payments.

It will be large corporations that can afford the fee.

But once again it makes no sense for them.

Because it's not profitable to accept Bitcoin for payments in Europe.

Under the current regulations.

Like you can't possibly stay profitable unless you have very high volumes of payments.

And Bitcoin is not really used for payments.

So it's a chicken and egg problem that was made worse.

By the fact that we just didn't care.

For example the Zcash people to be honest are doing an amazing job in the US.

Lobbying Congress and going to the top regulators.

And talking to them trying to explain why privacy makes sense for the average person.

And it's in line with the US Constitution.

And they should not ban that.

If anything they should leave it alone.

Or try to protect it with their regulations.

I don't think we have that kind of money here in Europe for lobbying.

And the members of the European Parliament are usually controlled.

I'm not going to say this.

But some of them are controlled by lobbyists.

Or they're more easily persuaded by resourceful entities that have the money to just talk to them.

Take them to dinner or whatever.

Explain to them how this works.

Or just groups that send a lot of emails.

And I think also the complacent culture in Bitcoin enabled bad regulations.

To the point where this stuff happened.

And we're saying oh it doesn't matter because we're holding them self custody.

And there's nothing they can do about it.

And we're going to make our payments between ourselves at conferences and whatever.

And this is going to enable the underground economy.

Well we don't have much of that.

It's very difficult to use Bitcoin in any useful way right now.

I think in the US it's even worse.

But here in Europe it used to be the case that some companies were accepting BTC.

And they had integrations with payments processors that were making it easy.

Now the payments processors gave up.

Because the volume was not that high.

And the legal fees don't justify this expense.

So from this point of view we failed the adoption factor.

Specifically because we were lazy or complacent.

Not caring about what's going on with regulations in Europe.

Maybe that there are parts of the world where it's much more free.

I'm aware that there's Serbia for example.

Where they're not part of the European Union.

And for example they have ATMs in Serbia where there are no limits for KYC.

In Europe right now it's that anything above 2000 euro has to be KYC.

Then has to go for a bank.

Which is really bad when you think about it.

The bankers were able to get in bed with the legislators.

So that the bank became an essential part of the economy.

You cannot actually engage in for example purchasing a car or buying a house.

Without using a bank account.

And they only use this for the reason that they say.

Well there's not going to be any more criminals or money laundering.

Which is bullshit.

If you want to have crime you're going to be using banks and you're going to bribe them.

As we have lots of examples from Deutsche Bank.

The British one.

I think it was Barclays or whatever.

There's a lot of larping to legislators about solutions.

And they tend to be in bed with whoever appears to be resourceful.

And takes them to dinner or something.

And we haven't been able to do that at least not in Europe.

And it's only going to get worse.

And the more we huddle and not care about what's happening around us.

The more difficult it's going to become when we finally decide that it's time to use our Bitcoin.

Maybe that the price is high.

But in order to be able to sell you're going to have to provide documents that you don't have.

And it will be a Kafka-esque situation where you have something.

Maybe you're going to be able to sell peer-to-peer.

Meet someone in a dark alley with a large suitcase of cash or whatever.

Assuming that there's still going to be cash by the time we are done with this.

And we decide that huddling has led us to the desired result.

So did Bitcoin enable more freedom?

I think if we wait long enough and not care about the world around us, then no.

And to me Bitcoin was never about this citadel meme.

Which was very popular in the pandemic.

That you're going to get so rich that you're going to move to this faraway place.

Outside of the fiat world.

Where you're going to live in a feudal system with fellow Bitcoiners.

And you're going to have a class system according to how many BTC you're holding in your wallet.

So if you don't hold more than 100 you're going to be washing someone's toilet.

My point is that I was never into this idea.

And I was more drawn to the concept of let's try to use this money to improve the world around you.

And try to maybe not change the world.

But at least help your family, help your neighbor.

Help people in a way that's tangible and makes sense.

And brings more happiness around you.

And if more people did this maybe it could scale at a higher level.

Unfortunately my optimist approach to it.

Is not the most popular approach.

To this as a whole, to this system.

And we are in this situation where.

I guess there's a lot of reasons to complain about stuff that didn't go well.

Does anyone still listen to my rants?

I think it's good.

I think we do want to wrap it up soon.

I have a couple more things here but we'll just open up a whole new Pandora's box with that.

I was wondering if you have any questions for me.

Or I guess for Jet if he comes back.

Or anything you want to know about BCH or point of view on something.

Now you've got the chance to ask it.

If you do, fine. If you don't, also fine.

Someone just sent me $3 of BCH to my wallet.

Thank you very much.

I'm using Selene which I understand is very cool.

Selene, highly recommended to everyone. The vest.

It's very lightweight. It loads fast. It's not cumbersome.

At some point that cum wallet was popular in the community.

Yes, but they started adding more and more junk.

And caring less and less about the BCH community.

And so Khaleesi and I had to start Selene wallet.

Yes, of course we are.

Of course, absolutely we are.

It is very funny.

I'm sure you're used to rehabilitate their image.

You're always saying on your show, now they've stopped saying that BCH is Bitcoin.

And they've rebranded to Orange and give them a look and everything.

Great, and I hope that's good. I hope it does open their minds of people

to their products and services because they're still great.

I don't want to say anything bad about them. Clearly they've moved away from having a BCH focus.

And that's fine. They're following their own business interests.

It's up to us to attract them back, actually, to just make a thriving economy that they want to be a part of.

But the fact that they were not making those tools and services

is the opportunity for Selene and other products to come in

and fill that gap, basically.

I can argue that the Bitcoin.com wallet was never BCH first.

It always had more stuff added to it.

There was a tab for news. There was always some other stuff.

And they added the swapping features and whatever.

So they always had a bit more than just the wallet where you receive funds

and you send funds from it, like Selene.

We're going to add all that stuff eventually, too.

We have the Explore tab, which we just haven't.

There's a lot of ideas and concepts we have for that, but it's just one step at a time.

And the most important thing is, of course, that it's a usable wallet.

So you can actually just send and receive BCH onboard people

in a very lightweight, quick way, impress them with their first use of cryptocurrency,

and then build from there.

But we have loads of other ideas for stuff to do.

We don't want to compromise that central, simple, slick onboarding use case to do it.

But who knows?

Worst case scenario, it's open source and anybody can fork it

and rip out all the junk or whatever they don't like.

And that's it, really.

I think it's really cool that nowadays these wallets are more like exchanges

that enable you to swap between assets.

And it's cool that it's sort of permissionless.

And it doesn't require any data.

You can do a swap, and then you're going to collect a fee as the wallet developer.

And it generates its own economy.

I think the Edge Wallet and the Cake Wallet people were very smart to figure this out

and integrate it very soon.

Any final last words or any last topics you want to cover?

Last topic? I don't know.

I did see that some BCH people went to Xano.

That's like the cool project right now.

And I do like the idea behind Xano.

I'm just not sure that the tech stack that they're using is necessarily the best one.

They're running on the same technology as Monero, which is CryptoNote.

With something that's called Zarkanum for issuing tokens.

I spent some time looking into it.

And I wish them all the best. I hope it succeeds.

It's just that the time for tokens has sort of faded.

At least during this cycle.

And they were not able to come up with any compelling use case outside of MemeCoins and the StableCoin.

So I don't know. Maybe in the future

it will work better.

Oh, you put something on the screen?

I think we've kind of covered most of the slides.

Maybe the one thing we should do before we wrap up is we've got to play that clip

of Michael Saylor for the historical records. We did a whole discussion of it

earlier, but we didn't actually play the original clip.

I want to say something which I hope

SuperTestNet is going to hear.

He's working so much on this BIP110 stuff.

He's almost dogmatic about the need for Bitcoin to

filter some types of transactions that he thinks are not good.

But he's sort of working on his own

time in moments when maybe

he could make money doing something useful.

While Luke Dash Jr. is making $750,000 per

year as the CEO of Ocean Mining.

So he actually has a very large financial incentive

to promote this and spend his time telling people what

kind of software they should be running. Whereas SuperTestNet is just this

independent developer who probably doesn't get paid for it.

And I feel like he could be building something that's actually useful.

I don't know. Money talks. All right, let's hear from

Michael Saylor, the state of BTC

discussion at the moment.

So there you have it. That's all, of course, flat-out lies.

It's been documented so many times and there's a bunch of people that have

produced all the clips and receipts that, of course, that's all complete lies.

It's the exact opposite of what you say.

It's funny when he chuckles like I said to you, I'm never selling you Bitcoin.

He knows!

Yeah, exactly.

Cry harder and have fun staying poor

like he didn't say it, but that's clearly what he was thinking.

All right. Yeah, so I guess, anyway, we do

let's just put it like this. We have a segment we always do on the show.

Last segment is always message to the community where you get a chance

to say to the BCH community, to the audience

of the Bitcoin Cash Podcast, whatever you think the BCH community

needs to hear, whether it's criticism, encouragement, a funny

story, like whatever you like. What does the BCH community need to hear?

So what you guys need to hear is that in the Bitcoin

BTC world, we had this story of the remnant

like this guy who always sticks around and believes in

his ideology no matter what, which is not very

applicable because BTC guys, they got rewarded every

four years on the clock with high prices that enabled them

to get rich, whereas the BCH guys, they never really had

that sort of euphoric moment. They never had the moment when they felt

like, oh, we're so winning right now. This is it. Everyone

agrees with us. We are the winning team. And in spite of

not winning, you guys kept going. I guess this also

explains why there was a changing of the guards at least once.

There was a moment when Omari left and a new bunch of developers

had to step in to pick up the pieces and rewrite

the client software and whatever. But I guess you guys always had multiple

node implementations, so it wasn't so dramatic.

But my point is that you guys stuck around and still

chose to believe in what you're building. And the outcome is pretty

positive, meaning that you have a bunch of opcodes that

are actually useful that enable or maximize,

dare I say, the ways in which you can use the stuff that Satoshi left us

with. So it's really cool. It's something that I wish

happened in BTC also, and we didn't have all of this silly

infighting. And we have this term called bike shedding, which means

we're just delaying for no reason something until more data appears

or maybe someone more famous is going to endorse the project to

the point where it comes back into discourse.

But you guys don't have this problem, and it's really

admirable. I presented the same argument to Colleen

and to Steve when they were on my show.

Do you think that if Michael Saylor came in and he bought billions of dollars worth

of BCH, you could be able to develop the protocol to

the same extent? And I'm not entirely sure that would be the

case. I think to a great degree, this much fiat money

corrupts projects, especially open source projects. And then you're going to get

developers who are there just to be sure

that nothing meaningful ever happens and just introduce

endless bickering and

infighting and cause drama.

I think we have a lot of drama in BTC.

BCH? Not so much. You guys used to be bitter for a while.

I remember when I was posting my podcast links on

RBTC on Reddit.

In a way, they were saying, well, we cannot censor you because

we decided that this is a free platform where anyone can

post. But on the other hand, we don't like what you're saying and we don't like you personally.

So just keep that in mind every time you post. I felt like

it was very passive-aggressive and I honestly

didn't come back. I don't use Reddit too much nowadays. I don't

like it that much. Our Bitcoin, our BTC, I don't care.

They're both awful from this point of view.

But I feel like the spirit of the community has changed for the better.

And maybe that it was necessary for some people to leave. I'm happy that it's not

Roger or Jihan or someone else big who's pushing

the project. I guess you guys are not happy about it because maybe you could get much

more attention for what's happening in BCH if

Roger was around to be the cheerleader for the project and he

went on Tucker Carlson or Alex Jones or

whatever and promoted BCH. That could help, especially to

the libertarian and sovereign individual kind of

audience that listens to these shows. But you also got the organic

development, which I think is valuable. People

coming in and contributing on a voluntary basis

without any promises of success, without any kind of

track record that's going to make them feel like they're going to get rich soon.

And there's no price tag for stuff like this

and it's the kind of contributions that open source projects that

are truly decentralized deserve.

Congratulations. Sorry for some of the mean stuff I've said over the

years. I was wrong in some ways. I was right in other ways.

It's very hard to beat network effects.

But at the end of the day, it's all permissionless open source

software. And we're on the mission to create the best

form of money. And the market speaks as we're working on this kind

of stuff. And in the end, I guess, may the best project

win. And I hope it will be the best one and not just the one that has the best

branding and marketing. The one that actually can onboard everyone

to provide to them more financial freedom. Maybe I

sound like Roger right now, but I'm not sure if I can say anything.

We don't need Roger anymore. We just get you instead.

Problem solved. Two birds, one stone.

And don't listen to my podcast. Don't listen. It's only for smart people.

There's no smart listeners to this show. Everybody knows that V-caches

are all stupid anyway. So they definitely should not listen to that.

Anything but Bitcoin Cash.

Anything but Bitcoin Takeover Podcast.

That's good. Okay. Shout out to our fund me contributors.

Majumalu, Eyes on the Ball, Molecular, the show we love.

I like big ints that I cannot like.

Emergent Reasons. Appreciate what you do. Hope you all will stay grounded in truth and reality.

Real money for the world. Cash Dragon. Essential work. Thanks.

Ricky Carl and HP, our patrons and our sponsors, General Protocols.

Check out bchbull.com. Of course, you can find more about

the show, information, FAQs, etc. at bitcoincachepodcast.com.

Particularly for this episode, if you are new to

the show, if you're from the BDC community, bitcoincachepodcast.com

and go to the FAQ section, there's loads of information

there about BTC as well and sort of a BCH perspective

on a lot of things, including a lot of it being propaganda and

lies and debunking all the different areas of it. So

I'm just saying, it may be worth considering some of that.

At least don't trust Verify that we are just

clueless morons by checking for yourself.

Yeah, that'll just about do it. Vlad, any final shout-outs you want to give?

No, I'm fine. I talk too much.

Alright, Jed, any final shout-outs?

Alright, and my shout-out goes to Vlad and our

other guests on the show today, SupertestNet,

Robin and Paul. I'm very glad, well, Paul was returning, but I'm glad

everybody could join for the first time

and I think it's really important to have those kinds of dialogue

and thank you, Vlad, for helping to coordinate that,

for doing that original BCH stream and then challenging

us to return the favor. I hope it's met expectations.

It hasn't reached eight hours, but relative to the average

length of my average show, we're well over

this is like two episodes at least.

Two long episodes worth of content, so

I'm sure the dedicated listeners will have plenty to chew over.

BCH, BCH, BCH, BCH, BCH, BCH, BCH,

I promised I was going to do this dance

and I forgot. Yeah, I think he does it like this, right? It's like

kind of like sad. BCH, BCH, BCH, BCH, BCH, BCH.

And then you give me the middle finger and that's how it ends.

All right. See you later.

Let me recap the earning call.

They said, Mike, don't touch the Bitcoin stack.

Now I'm buying more while they're fighting into black.

Engine running clean, watching debt transform into the Bitcoin

dream turned on the BTC drive. No shame in my face.

65 billion and I'm still winning the race. They panic when I say

sell a little coin just to prove the whole market doesn't break or get

destroyed. Company fine. Bitcoin fine. World still spins.

You scream Ponzi while the weak cave in. Bitcoin

getting stronger. Every cycle reborn while I keep building through the middle of the

storm. I'd like nothing better than to rip your wings

off. Every short position

getting weaker when we lift off.

I'd like nothing better than to rip your wings

off. We use the equity ATM. Yeah, yeah.

We said it was pride. Then this DRC machine came alive on the side.

More tools, more options, more fuel for the fire while the shorts pray

every quarter that the stock expires. I buy Bitcoin like

development land. Buy it low, build it up, then expand what we can.

Put the profit back again into more BTC. That's the difference between

conviction and jealousy. I'd like nothing better than to

rip your wings off. Watching every short seller

realize there's no second best.

I'd like nothing better than to

rip your wings off.

There is no second best.

There is no second best.