1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:12,720 Welcome to another episode of the Blockchain Debate Podcast, where consensus is optional 2 00:00:12,720 --> 00:00:17,200 but proof of thought is required. I'm your host, Richard Yan. Today's motion is 3 00:00:17,200 --> 00:00:21,840 Toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin I hear many no-coiners say that 4 00:00:21,840 --> 00:00:26,960 the worst thing about Bitcoin is the Bitcoiners. They're referring to their negative encounters 5 00:00:26,960 --> 00:00:32,720 with staunch Bitcoin believers on social media. The criticism here is that these Bitcoiners are 6 00:00:32,720 --> 00:00:38,400 irrational, vicious, and annoying on social media. And they attack no-coiners in unison 7 00:00:38,400 --> 00:00:43,280 like a coordinated army. The essence of this behavior is captured by the term toxic Bitcoin 8 00:00:43,280 --> 00:00:49,280 maximalism. The idea here is that Bitcoin maximalists believe that Bitcoin is superior 9 00:00:49,280 --> 00:00:54,000 to all other currencies, which includes fiat, obviously, and all other cryptos. 10 00:00:54,560 --> 00:01:00,160 And Bitcoin maxi's impolite behavior online is justified in promoting Bitcoin or defending 11 00:01:00,160 --> 00:01:06,240 its legitimacy. Well, obviously not all Bitcoiners are like that. Today, we'll have two Bitcoiners 12 00:01:06,240 --> 00:01:11,840 facing off on whether such behavior continues to serve Bitcoin well. If you're into crypto and like 13 00:01:11,840 --> 00:01:16,400 to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We feature some 14 00:01:16,400 --> 00:01:20,320 of the best-known thinkers in the crypto space. If you would like to debate or want to nominate 15 00:01:20,320 --> 00:01:25,120 someone, please DM me at blockdebate on Twitter. Please note that nothing in our podcast should be 16 00:01:25,120 --> 00:01:29,440 construed as financial advice. I hope you enjoy listening to this debate. Let's dive right in. 17 00:01:32,080 --> 00:01:35,360 Welcome to the debate, consensus optional, proof of thought required. I'm your host, 18 00:01:35,360 --> 00:01:41,040 Richard Yan. Today's motion, toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin. To my metaphorical left 19 00:01:41,040 --> 00:01:47,120 is Giacomo Zucco, arguing for the motion. He agrees that toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin. 20 00:01:47,120 --> 00:01:52,720 To my metaphorical right is Paul Sztorc, arguing against the motion. He disagrees that toxic 21 00:01:52,720 --> 00:01:56,800 maximalism is great for Bitcoin. Let's quickly go through the bios of our guests. 22 00:01:57,360 --> 00:02:02,400 So, Giacomo first heard of Bitcoin in 2012 and quit his fiat job to focus on Bitcoin full-time 23 00:02:02,400 --> 00:02:08,240 in 2013. He has since co-founded and supported Bitcoin startups in several sectors, including 24 00:02:08,240 --> 00:02:13,280 mining, wallets, consultancy, research, and so on. He is currently a shareholder in a few companies, 25 00:02:13,280 --> 00:02:20,480 including Relay, B-Academy, BHB Network, and he is a freelance educator consultant. He supported 26 00:02:20,480 --> 00:02:27,200 some floss projects during the years, including Open Timestamps, Proof-Martial, Bolt, RGB, 27 00:02:27,200 --> 00:02:33,760 BDK, and so on. Paul is a self-branded independent Bitcoiner. He is perhaps best known as the 28 00:02:33,760 --> 00:02:39,840 proposer of Drivechain, a project that seeks to leverage sidechain technology in order to introduce 29 00:02:39,840 --> 00:02:45,680 additional functionality to Bitcoin. One use case of this is a Zcash-like fully encrypted 30 00:02:45,680 --> 00:02:49,520 sidechain using Drivechain. Welcome to the show, Giacomo and Paul. 31 00:02:50,080 --> 00:02:50,580 Thank you. 32 00:02:51,120 --> 00:02:51,620 Thanks. 33 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:55,360 Great. So, we normally have three rounds, opening statements, host questions, and audience 34 00:02:55,360 --> 00:03:02,480 questions. Currently, our Twitter poll shows that more people believe that it is not beneficial 35 00:03:02,480 --> 00:03:06,400 for the Bitcoin community to be toxic maximalists. 36 00:03:06,400 --> 00:03:10,400 I'm actually surprised to learn that. I thought for sure I would be on the ropes. 37 00:03:11,040 --> 00:03:13,280 Okay. I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but... 38 00:03:13,280 --> 00:03:18,800 No, I was 100%. I was surprised, because the toxicity is very dominant, 39 00:03:18,800 --> 00:03:25,200 like culturally, at least in the world that Giacomo and I came from, the past. That's how I see it. 40 00:03:25,200 --> 00:03:29,760 But it's good to be the underdog, so it's easier to have a positive change. If I started in 41 00:03:29,760 --> 00:03:34,880 advantage for the way you will measure the success, it's actually better to be the underdog 42 00:03:34,880 --> 00:03:35,600 in this case. 43 00:03:35,760 --> 00:03:38,800 I think the toxic Bitcoiners are intentionally voting the other way, 44 00:03:38,800 --> 00:03:40,960 and then changing their position for the post-debate poll. 45 00:03:40,960 --> 00:03:43,840 They may. It may be the case. They'll do anything to win. 46 00:03:45,600 --> 00:03:48,880 I didn't think about that until now, but that would be really toxic. 47 00:03:49,440 --> 00:03:54,400 Yeah, exactly. After the release of this recording, we will also have a post-debate poll. 48 00:03:54,400 --> 00:03:58,400 Between the two posts, the debater with a bigger change in percentage votes in their favor wins 49 00:03:58,400 --> 00:04:04,400 the debate. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So, Giacomo, you're in the pro position. So, 50 00:04:04,400 --> 00:04:08,560 explain to us why you think toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin. 51 00:04:09,120 --> 00:04:13,360 First of all, we have to understand what we mean. We have to start with a definition. 52 00:04:14,240 --> 00:04:20,080 I would define Bitcoin maximalism, that it's mostly reappropriation. What happened with the 53 00:04:20,080 --> 00:04:26,240 term queer in queer studies, and also more historical terms like political terms like 54 00:04:26,240 --> 00:04:33,600 wig, or even some artistic terms. So, something was used as a slur against some category of people, 55 00:04:33,600 --> 00:04:39,200 and then these people ironically embraced and self-ironically embraced the slur. So, 56 00:04:39,200 --> 00:04:46,160 I don't think to be particularly toxic, especially in person. But I also think to have an average 57 00:04:46,160 --> 00:04:53,440 toxicity online, especially for the typical mediums that I use. So, it's nothing over the top, 58 00:04:53,440 --> 00:04:58,640 nothing more than the average. But the reappropriation of both terms was mostly done 59 00:04:58,640 --> 00:05:04,960 in order to find some kind of positive spin on something that was invented as a slur. So, 60 00:05:04,960 --> 00:05:12,800 let's divide the toxic maximalist meme. The first part is maximalism. So, maximalism is mostly about 61 00:05:12,800 --> 00:05:20,000 being Bitcoin only, thinking that the novelty of Bitcoin is not replicable, and to try to replicate 62 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:26,160 it is actually bad either for Bitcoin, or especially for the people trying to do that, 63 00:05:26,160 --> 00:05:33,200 or for the people affected by that into this very asymmetric environment in which we have this kind 64 00:05:33,200 --> 00:05:38,800 of eternal September. So, many people are getting it all the time. So, they need some kind of very 65 00:05:38,800 --> 00:05:45,360 clear distinction between all the bullshit and what is not bullshit. So, maximalism will be 66 00:05:45,360 --> 00:05:50,880 Bitcoin only, for many reasons. Some of the reasons for maximalism are descriptive and not 67 00:05:50,880 --> 00:05:58,080 prescriptive. They will be something like money tends to be a winner-takes-it-all game, so money 68 00:05:58,080 --> 00:06:04,400 tends to converge instead of becoming more fractionate, and Bitcoin has some kind of network 69 00:06:04,400 --> 00:06:10,640 effects that may remind of the protocol wars of the internet in the 90s, where we had many 70 00:06:10,640 --> 00:06:16,800 contendants, but then we had the real de facto open source standard that basically took over 71 00:06:16,800 --> 00:06:23,840 everything and swallowed everything else. So, this is a descriptive level of maximalism. We think 72 00:06:23,840 --> 00:06:30,720 that Bitcoin will eventually dominate for network effects, not just technological, but especially 73 00:06:30,720 --> 00:06:37,200 monetary network effect. Then there is a prescriptive and non-descriptive form of maximalism, 74 00:06:37,200 --> 00:06:43,920 which says that it's not just a reality that we think will happen, but it's actually also good 75 00:06:43,920 --> 00:06:50,080 that we think that Bitcoin will dominate in an absolutely asymmetrical way over any kind of 76 00:06:50,080 --> 00:06:57,040 attempt to replicate it, because of monetary reasons, because of digital scarcity. You can have 77 00:06:57,040 --> 00:07:04,320 scarcity when you have 21 million Bitcoin. You cannot have scarcity in the so-called cryptocurrency 78 00:07:04,320 --> 00:07:10,400 equivalence class. So, there are 21 million Bitcoins, less than that. There are infinite, potentially, 79 00:07:10,400 --> 00:07:17,120 altcoins. There is no scarcity in the cryptocurrency space. There is no scarcity within many altcoins, 80 00:07:17,120 --> 00:07:23,920 but even if you consider altcoins with some kind of a schedule, like Bitcoin inflation schedule, 81 00:07:23,920 --> 00:07:29,840 the overall class of cryptocurrencies cannot replicate scarcity. So, we argue that it's not 82 00:07:29,840 --> 00:07:36,560 just probably going to happen, but it's also very good that there is this kind of strong convergence. 83 00:07:36,560 --> 00:07:43,280 And then the third level of maximalism is that of bad incentives. Even if there was some possibility 84 00:07:43,280 --> 00:07:50,880 of some strange monetary configuration with more than one digital gold, even then the incentives 85 00:07:50,880 --> 00:07:57,120 that bring people to print money, basically, and shield their shitcoins as a better Bitcoin 86 00:07:57,120 --> 00:08:06,240 are so bad and so overwhelming that it's a good heuristic to just ignore shitcoins and just 87 00:08:06,240 --> 00:08:13,520 filter shitcoins with some kind of spam filter. This is an argument similar to there may be some 88 00:08:13,520 --> 00:08:20,320 honest Nigerian prince offering you a very good offer that will make you rich and also enlarge 89 00:08:20,320 --> 00:08:26,960 your penis, but as a general heuristic, given the situation and the bad incentives, it's better to 90 00:08:26,960 --> 00:08:34,080 assume prima facie heuristics that the Nigerian prince will actually not really help you. So, this 91 00:08:34,080 --> 00:08:42,080 is maximalism. Another is toxic. Toxic is mostly a reaction to the way, the style. I don't think that 92 00:08:42,080 --> 00:08:49,760 when we re-appropriated the label toxic, what we meant was really about being rude. Again, I consider 93 00:08:49,760 --> 00:08:57,760 myself pretty nice in person and basically average online, but especially it was something about the 94 00:08:57,760 --> 00:09:05,440 style of trying to cut to the chase, filtering bullshit. So, what people tend to call toxic 95 00:09:05,440 --> 00:09:11,760 on Bitcoiners is this kind of no bullshit disposition, which reminds also what was called 96 00:09:11,760 --> 00:09:18,720 toxic in Linus Torvalds, for example. There are some scandals about Linus Torvalds being a toxic 97 00:09:18,720 --> 00:09:23,440 person because if you said something that he considered bullshit, he was just calling bullshit 98 00:09:23,440 --> 00:09:30,080 without any kind of niceness around that. And there is also consideration that in an environment 99 00:09:30,080 --> 00:09:37,040 where the signal to noise ratio is very, very, very low and where bullshit is everywhere and where 100 00:09:37,040 --> 00:09:43,680 noise is overwhelming and when scams are overwhelming, every tweet that I give out, 101 00:09:43,680 --> 00:09:51,120 people has to know that I have to basically block at least 50 to 100 answers which are a promotion 102 00:09:51,120 --> 00:09:58,720 of some kind of defy scam. I literally had to go to block them individually or using lists 103 00:09:58,720 --> 00:10:04,880 because they are always everywhere. In this environment, usually to be excessively nice 104 00:10:04,880 --> 00:10:11,120 just means the social equivalent to opening spam folders in email. You need heuristic, especially 105 00:10:11,120 --> 00:10:18,480 in this eternal September, new people will need heuristic and I personally need heuristic. 106 00:10:18,480 --> 00:10:25,520 Of course, we have people being really mean, but my contention would be that mean people in Bitcoin 107 00:10:25,520 --> 00:10:31,520 are not any more than mean people over the internet in general. I think that the level of 108 00:10:31,520 --> 00:10:37,280 real and non-self-ironical toxicity you will find in Bitcoin is comparable to the level you will 109 00:10:37,280 --> 00:10:44,000 find about a debate of Veeam versus Emacs and probably inferior to what you will find on 110 00:10:44,320 --> 00:10:50,800 Twitter and especially considering that Bitcoin is a very politically loaded project with a very 111 00:10:50,800 --> 00:10:57,600 adversarial mindset. So all that considering, I would say that Bitcoiners are on average nicer 112 00:10:57,600 --> 00:11:03,280 than other online community and when we talk about real life, really, I don't even remember 113 00:11:03,280 --> 00:11:08,720 meeting somebody who was not nice. Okay, great. By the way, before we move on to Paul's opening 114 00:11:08,720 --> 00:11:14,560 statement, just one quick question for Giacomo. What is the eternal September you're referring to? 115 00:11:14,560 --> 00:11:19,600 Oh yeah, sorry, I gave it for granted. There was this moment where the internet was really 116 00:11:19,600 --> 00:11:25,600 opened up for new users coming in and it was basically a September and there was this new 117 00:11:25,600 --> 00:11:31,920 amount of people flowing in chat rooms and asking basic questions and being defrauded by fraudsters 118 00:11:31,920 --> 00:11:39,360 and incurring old misconceptions about everything about the internet and so people already inside 119 00:11:39,360 --> 00:11:45,440 the internet culture was calling this moment where in September usually you have people 120 00:11:45,440 --> 00:11:51,120 coming back from vacation and entering stuff and this was an eternal September because new people 121 00:11:51,120 --> 00:11:56,880 were coming in eternally always with a very huge information asymmetry and so they were 122 00:11:56,880 --> 00:12:03,680 very, very easy to scam, very, very easy to confound, to confuse and to manipulate and so 123 00:12:03,680 --> 00:12:10,880 eternal September is an eternal inflow of noobs basically. Okay, got it. All right, Paul, go ahead 124 00:12:10,880 --> 00:12:16,880 with your opening statement. Explain to us why toxic maximalism is not great for Bitcoin. 125 00:12:16,880 --> 00:12:21,120 Okay, yes, I've got my work cut out for me because that was quite an opening statement from Giacomo 126 00:12:21,120 --> 00:12:26,560 but I'm going to try to just give you a little bit of where I'm coming from and then maybe 127 00:12:26,560 --> 00:12:33,360 react to a little bit of what he said. I definitely used to be, I still consider myself 128 00:12:33,360 --> 00:12:38,400 to be a Bitcoin maximalist and I've always been a Bitcoin maximalist and in fact my sidechain 129 00:12:38,400 --> 00:12:43,360 project I think is a pretty, it's almost the zenith of maximalism because it says 130 00:12:43,360 --> 00:12:49,040 there is no place for any other project and anything else, even a bad idea, will be copied 131 00:12:49,040 --> 00:12:54,960 into Bitcoin so I consider myself to be totally 100% a maximalist. I think that it's the toxic 132 00:12:54,960 --> 00:13:00,400 maximalism part has become, very recently I've been brought around to the opinion that it causes 133 00:13:00,400 --> 00:13:07,840 more problems than it solves. There was a time long ago, like Litecoin I think is an outrageous 134 00:13:08,560 --> 00:13:14,880 copy-paste of Bitcoin. You compare the effort it took to go from nothing to creating Bitcoin, 135 00:13:14,880 --> 00:13:18,800 which Satoshi Nakamoto had to do, and then you compare that to what it took to create Litecoin, 136 00:13:18,800 --> 00:13:22,880 which is just copy and paste and change like four or five lines of code and then to frame that like 137 00:13:22,880 --> 00:13:29,920 a new thing is outrageous and a crime against truth and extremely detrimental to 138 00:13:30,640 --> 00:13:39,360 Bitcoin's message and its ability to achieve its goal. So I definitely thought that it was horrible 139 00:13:39,360 --> 00:13:45,360 to do that type of thing in the past but now I think actually some of the new alternative projects 140 00:13:46,560 --> 00:13:52,480 have some merit and are at least worth thinking about and the toxicity has become a kind of prison 141 00:13:52,480 --> 00:13:58,000 of the mind and it is closing people's minds I think. This is just my opinion. So I think that 142 00:13:58,000 --> 00:14:03,920 the toxicity, it's something like Star Wars where it used to be really really cool but then people 143 00:14:03,920 --> 00:14:08,480 learned all the little tropes and the little lines or like the member berries from South Park is 144 00:14:08,480 --> 00:14:13,760 something else that comes to mind and people are like well you just use the word shitcoin and then 145 00:14:13,760 --> 00:14:18,800 you can dunk on someone and it's funny. So basically my concerns with it, I made a little 146 00:14:18,800 --> 00:14:24,400 list here, things that I think I wish we could change a little bit about maximalism to make it 147 00:14:24,400 --> 00:14:32,000 I think a little better. One, the whole staticity is a kind of xenophobic paranoid hatred of all 148 00:14:32,000 --> 00:14:36,480 change, which I think is a little unfair. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I wrote that. My second 149 00:14:36,480 --> 00:14:40,480 bullet point is it's too easy to learn the tropes. So like people show up and then they just 150 00:14:41,120 --> 00:14:46,880 they can learn the tropes and you never really know if they actually understand the real maximalism 151 00:14:46,880 --> 00:14:51,760 of the world or if they just learned the talking points. And this is all, number one, this emphasis 152 00:14:51,760 --> 00:14:57,600 on staticity that bitcoin is already perfect and it can't possibly be replicated and everything 153 00:14:57,600 --> 00:15:01,840 about it is everything that you need. That's obviously attacking a straw man a little bit but 154 00:15:01,840 --> 00:15:06,640 I think that meme has made it into the toxic world and it's related to my second point which is that 155 00:15:06,640 --> 00:15:11,680 there is an intense peer pressure in the toxic maximalism community. You feel this need to care 156 00:15:11,680 --> 00:15:16,320 about what other people think but I would be more comfortable if it was just something that people 157 00:15:16,320 --> 00:15:22,080 just believed because it was true like something in physics or thermodynamics or something where 158 00:15:22,080 --> 00:15:25,920 if people didn't believe it you just said well you could just say have fun staying poor. I think it's 159 00:15:25,920 --> 00:15:29,760 fair game actually. Some people think it's outrageously insulting but you're just saying 160 00:15:29,760 --> 00:15:34,800 it's not my responsibility to teach you anything which I think is better than hunting down people 161 00:15:35,360 --> 00:15:39,920 who argue against maximalism and then trying to say that that person's a scammer. And the 162 00:15:39,920 --> 00:15:46,720 stakes are pretty high because many people get hired for sinecure jobs like easy jobs that maybe 163 00:15:46,720 --> 00:15:50,800 we could say some of the exchanges or whatever just based on their tweets. You just tweet and 164 00:15:50,800 --> 00:15:57,280 you can get an easy job doing very little here. Point number three, it has this creeping kind of 165 00:15:57,280 --> 00:16:03,680 totalitarian cult thing. I hate to use the word cult but it's like you go into bitcoin and then 166 00:16:03,680 --> 00:16:08,720 all of a sudden you're like a registered republican in the United States and then you're carnivore 167 00:16:08,720 --> 00:16:15,440 and then you have to lift weights. You can't like you can't do cardio and then all of a sudden 168 00:16:15,440 --> 00:16:21,840 everything modern is the worst. All music made after 1971 is bad. What are we really signing up 169 00:16:21,840 --> 00:16:26,640 for here? It has this kind of creeping way of just striking diagonally into the other. So these are 170 00:16:26,640 --> 00:16:32,640 things that I just wish could change. The four and five, one you mentioned Giacomo on your statement 171 00:16:32,640 --> 00:16:38,080 I have a hypocrisy written down for four which is that people are nicer in person but only online 172 00:16:38,080 --> 00:16:43,920 they have a fake they feel a need to project like a bravado or something that I think is hypocrisy 173 00:16:43,920 --> 00:16:48,080 which is that some people even say you meet them in person they say well you know toxicity it 174 00:16:48,080 --> 00:16:52,400 actually isn't that great for bitcoin but then they go right back to being toxic online and I 175 00:16:52,400 --> 00:16:58,240 don't know how to frame that as either being clever or not taking it yourself too seriously 176 00:16:58,240 --> 00:17:03,360 which would be a good thing or if you can just regard it as hypocrisy. A lot of the most toxic 177 00:17:03,360 --> 00:17:09,040 people I mean we have some other things that we might talk about like people like a Fluffy Pony or 178 00:17:09,600 --> 00:17:16,160 David Vorek they have launched altcoins and then what I'm really thinking of is like magical crypto 179 00:17:16,160 --> 00:17:21,680 group which is like a bitcoin maximalist group but it had a Charlie Lee from Litecoin and 180 00:17:22,800 --> 00:17:30,160 and Ricardo Spogni from Monero was like half non-bitcoin then we could talk about other people 181 00:17:30,720 --> 00:17:36,160 maximalists who have done ICOs on Ethereum and it becomes unclear as to whether how seriously 182 00:17:36,160 --> 00:17:41,120 the people who advance this on Twitter are actually subscribed to it in their heart and soul 183 00:17:41,120 --> 00:17:46,240 I also think there's a little bit of a grift this is point number five my last point which is that 184 00:17:46,240 --> 00:17:51,120 you have an idea of like friends could meet for dinner like we met in Miami a bunch of people 185 00:17:51,120 --> 00:17:56,160 bitcoiners and someone went to pick up the tab for everyone but someone else had already picked 186 00:17:56,160 --> 00:18:00,400 up the tab for everyone because it was just a friendly meeting of old bitcoiners so that was 187 00:18:00,400 --> 00:18:06,160 very nice but I compare that to like when people sell like the steak dinners for a very high price 188 00:18:06,160 --> 00:18:09,520 if you're friends with someone you can just join them for dinner you don't have to sell tickets 189 00:18:09,520 --> 00:18:13,440 and make it like a big event that was something you can already do without so I wonder about if 190 00:18:13,440 --> 00:18:17,280 there is a grift there's definitely a libertarian grift if you've been around the libertarian 191 00:18:17,280 --> 00:18:21,440 community for a while you know some people are big libertarians they throw these big conferences but 192 00:18:21,520 --> 00:18:27,200 you know they got to sell tickets there's weird people there so that's just something I think to 193 00:18:27,200 --> 00:18:32,960 be aware of does it have to be like okay the fuck elan tour I like max geyser a lot I think it's 194 00:18:32,960 --> 00:18:38,960 great but you know he's selling tickets which I think is totally 100% fair I just say is it a 195 00:18:38,960 --> 00:18:42,800 performance or is it real these are just things that I think if they change I would feel a lot 196 00:18:42,800 --> 00:18:47,680 better about so Giacomo said a lot of things I'm going to try to run through a couple of them 197 00:18:48,320 --> 00:18:54,240 number one about reappropriating a slur and that the internet is toxic I definitely think that's 198 00:18:54,240 --> 00:18:58,000 the case I mean I spoke to we're just going to name drop Adam Beck because he's so famous 199 00:18:59,040 --> 00:19:03,120 he told me he was like this is actually nothing compared to what happened in the past and he says 200 00:19:03,120 --> 00:19:09,760 you just need really thick skin that's a classic metaphor idiom or whatever sometimes I feel really 201 00:19:09,760 --> 00:19:13,520 bad for Giacomo because he's not a native English speaker you know he said you really need thick 202 00:19:13,600 --> 00:19:20,080 skin in the industry and he Adam Beck said it was much worse in the flame wars of the 90s or 203 00:19:20,080 --> 00:19:27,200 whatever so I think that's true I think definitely think new people come in and some paternalism is 204 00:19:27,200 --> 00:19:33,920 warranted I wonder if though if the toxicity is not rational enough if it doesn't give cover 205 00:19:33,920 --> 00:19:38,240 to people because the scammers because the scammers can sometimes just say well those people 206 00:19:38,240 --> 00:19:43,840 are just toxic maximalists they think everything is a skin they're closed-minded so I think it has 207 00:19:43,840 --> 00:19:49,520 to be rooted in some kind of rational calculation I agree on the point about the network effects 208 00:19:49,520 --> 00:19:54,480 I completely 100% agree with that sometimes I lament the network effects I wonder if they're 209 00:19:54,480 --> 00:20:01,120 like a prison because it's difficult to beat them and that means there's less room for creativity 210 00:20:01,120 --> 00:20:06,640 and fun I've definitely noticed a decrease in fun which I attribute to the toxic maximalism 211 00:20:07,600 --> 00:20:12,960 in the past we had the meme bitcoin user not affected and people would just laugh all the time 212 00:20:12,960 --> 00:20:17,360 this was before the block size debate got really big the block size debate forced everyone to pick 213 00:20:17,360 --> 00:20:23,760 sides and to religiously adhere to their side so I think that this has contributed to a kind of 214 00:20:23,760 --> 00:20:27,360 problem maybe I can tie this back to what I said at the very beginning which is that 215 00:20:28,080 --> 00:20:34,960 I was you know a fan of maximalism and even toxic maximalism at first but now I wonder if it has 216 00:20:34,960 --> 00:20:40,480 become especially via the route of the peer pressure if it has become just like a self-referential 217 00:20:40,480 --> 00:20:45,840 if it's become like a circle a big circle where people are just enforcing the beliefs of the cult 218 00:20:46,400 --> 00:20:54,720 for no other reason other than that is uh how to get popular and it has now broken away from reality 219 00:20:54,720 --> 00:21:00,640 so I wonder about that I mean we have now some pretty interesting projects I think that people 220 00:21:00,640 --> 00:21:06,640 should keep an open mind towards it's just when the the new projects seem interesting and just when 221 00:21:07,360 --> 00:21:14,960 you really seems as though bitcoin core might be just a little too conservative and slow moving 222 00:21:14,960 --> 00:21:20,160 now this is the time when maybe people should react a little bit against maximalism toxic 223 00:21:20,160 --> 00:21:28,160 maximalism and instead it is going full throttle I think although apparently not because you did 224 00:21:28,160 --> 00:21:33,440 that poll and it seems that most people are skeptical that it is good for me that's just a 225 00:21:33,440 --> 00:21:39,360 small sample and I've had many non-bitcoin projects on my show and I come from non-bitcoin background 226 00:21:39,360 --> 00:21:47,280 so maybe there's a lot of non-bitcoiners bias yeah okay great so that's some of my thoughts there 227 00:21:47,280 --> 00:21:54,000 okay Giacomo go ahead okay now actually I would like to acknowledge some of the points that Paul 228 00:21:54,000 --> 00:22:00,960 made I think this conversation is unfortunately for your format uh getting too nice 229 00:22:02,400 --> 00:22:07,440 but I think maybe debates are played out though maybe and I don't think the public really likes 230 00:22:07,440 --> 00:22:13,360 them as much as they yeah I don't know I mean people like fights but then they say they don't 231 00:22:13,360 --> 00:22:19,120 it's complicated the relationship between uh content and personal behavior is not easy but 232 00:22:19,120 --> 00:22:25,040 anyway I will start acknowledging some of the points I think that most of the people that will 233 00:22:25,040 --> 00:22:32,640 repeat the mantra shit coins are bad and who shit coins is a scammer they will probably not even 234 00:22:32,640 --> 00:22:39,840 understand why I think I have um I have a justification I think I just gave a very brief 235 00:22:39,840 --> 00:22:45,680 justification but I can go on and on and on giving more justification I really reflected on that 236 00:22:46,400 --> 00:22:54,160 when I was first a shit coiner in 2013 and then when I became a toxic maximalist I really gave it 237 00:22:54,160 --> 00:22:59,440 a thought so I think I can justify it I think that's also the case for other famous toxic 238 00:22:59,440 --> 00:23:05,120 maximalists but I also think that the majority of people that will replicate the slogans will 239 00:23:05,120 --> 00:23:12,160 replicate just parroting without any kind of understanding so I absolutely agree with Paul 240 00:23:12,160 --> 00:23:18,320 here the difference probably is that I just disagree on the fact that this is anyhow avoidable 241 00:23:18,320 --> 00:23:23,920 if you are going to create any kind of simple message at all I also know that my father 242 00:23:23,920 --> 00:23:31,600 doesn't really know why he has a spam folder and he will probably delete the Nigerian princess 243 00:23:31,600 --> 00:23:38,080 he just knows that it's a scam he doesn't really know what is the kind of monarch in Nigeria if 244 00:23:38,080 --> 00:23:44,400 there are princes what is the probability of this kind of stock money in the bank scheme 245 00:23:44,400 --> 00:23:51,520 he doesn't know details he just acquired a very simple slogan which I think it may be false 246 00:23:51,520 --> 00:23:55,680 in the same sense that everything may be false we live in a simulation and whatever but it's 247 00:23:55,680 --> 00:24:02,160 pragmatically a very good very very good heuristic a very very good approximation of truth so I agree 248 00:24:02,160 --> 00:24:08,640 that most of the people will repeat shitcoin bad because they are just parroting but I also think 249 00:24:09,920 --> 00:24:16,560 this is both unavoidable and also overall good compared to the other way around which is people 250 00:24:16,560 --> 00:24:21,520 mindlessly parroting shitcoins are good which is I think is the only realistic alternative 251 00:24:22,400 --> 00:24:28,480 also the second part is about peer pressure I agree that there is one and it's strong it is 252 00:24:28,480 --> 00:24:30,938 unpleasant I felt it myself 253 00:24:30,938 --> 00:24:35,538 one of the project that you mentioned it at the beginning that I am sponsoring RGB project 254 00:24:35,538 --> 00:24:43,298 that is basically about shitcoins some kind of shitcoins is inside of bitcoin architecture not 255 00:24:43,298 --> 00:24:48,978 unlike the idea of sidechain which is actually cooler because that is bringing the functionalities 256 00:24:48,978 --> 00:24:54,578 without bringing the actual shitcoin so sidechain will be cooler than RGB RGB is actually it's not 257 00:24:54,578 --> 00:25:00,818 a scammy project because I'm not printing money and not selling tokens but it's something that is 258 00:25:00,818 --> 00:25:07,858 explicitly designed to allow people to scam other people so I felt peer pressure I know that I'm 259 00:25:07,858 --> 00:25:14,258 working on thin ice when I presented that when I was in Lisbon presenting RGB I made probably 260 00:25:14,258 --> 00:25:20,018 60% of the presentation was about justifying myself in order not to be considered a scammer 261 00:25:20,578 --> 00:25:28,258 by other people there and then I managed to enter very late in the details so I feel that 262 00:25:28,258 --> 00:25:34,018 and I know it's unpleasant but I also think that this kind of peer pressure can compensate 263 00:25:34,578 --> 00:25:40,018 other very very bad incentives that I also felt on myself and I'm sure that most people in bitcoin 264 00:25:40,018 --> 00:25:46,338 since a while felt on themselves that if they only were a little bit more dishonest they could 265 00:25:46,338 --> 00:25:54,898 make so much more money just joining any kind of scammy ICO in 2017 or scammy DeFi scheme now 266 00:25:54,898 --> 00:26:03,138 if only once it would be more malleable about ethics we could be so much richer and this is 267 00:26:03,138 --> 00:26:10,898 a strong pressure and I think this pressure also won over some friends and that I respected 268 00:26:10,898 --> 00:26:16,738 and I mean I still understand but I think that the peer pressure is unpleasant but it is a strong 269 00:26:16,738 --> 00:26:23,058 social force partially compensating another very bad social force which is incentive to 270 00:26:23,058 --> 00:26:29,538 to take advantage of the huge noise and the huge information asymmetry in this environment so yes 271 00:26:29,538 --> 00:26:35,618 it's ugly but I think it's needed so the other two things that I want to acknowledge is true that 272 00:26:35,618 --> 00:26:42,738 toxic maximalism is not just about shitcoins it also expanded to somehow include other two things 273 00:26:42,738 --> 00:26:49,218 one is conservation of bitcoin as is so not changing bitcoin I think there are also good 274 00:26:49,218 --> 00:26:55,778 reasons to argue for this but this is not as clear-cut as shitcoins I think that shitcoins 275 00:26:55,778 --> 00:27:00,898 if you really think about that you will understand that it's mostly driven by bad incentives that is 276 00:27:00,898 --> 00:27:06,978 mostly going nowhere while if you think about changing bitcoin I understand the need to be very 277 00:27:06,978 --> 00:27:15,218 conservative very adversarial very skeptical very critical move slow but in a way exactly for the 278 00:27:15,218 --> 00:27:21,938 reason that I don't think shitcoin can succeed then I have to also think that bitcoin must evolve 279 00:27:21,938 --> 00:27:27,618 because if you think about that if shitcoins could succeed there would be no reason to change bitcoin 280 00:27:27,618 --> 00:27:33,938 at all because you can just do that on a shitcoin and it will work so if shitcoin were possible then 281 00:27:33,938 --> 00:27:40,018 we would not need any kind of change in bitcoin since I think that shitcoins are not viable long 282 00:27:40,018 --> 00:27:46,018 term that's the reason why I have to be careful not to be too much close-minded about changes in 283 00:27:46,018 --> 00:27:52,338 bitcoin so I mean all the debate with Paul about sidechain may be one example but even 284 00:27:52,338 --> 00:27:56,978 taproot itself was another example and now there is a good debate between John Carvalho 285 00:27:56,978 --> 00:28:03,458 and Adam Beck on Twitter a toxic one because both have a thick skin and both are very direct 286 00:28:03,458 --> 00:28:08,818 well Adam is very nice but John is very direct is a little bit toxic and he's basically saying 287 00:28:08,818 --> 00:28:14,738 you developers will just go on adding bullshit all the time you will never stop but we need stability 288 00:28:14,738 --> 00:28:20,818 TCP IP version 4 is not changing since the 80s and all the world is built on top in order to build 289 00:28:20,818 --> 00:28:27,298 on top we have to move change at the margins and leave the base layer alone and Adam is answering 290 00:28:27,298 --> 00:28:32,578 you are right but not quite yet because we can do this change which makes a lot of sense 291 00:28:32,578 --> 00:28:38,338 across input signature aggregation and then any prev out and then maybe simplicity which will 292 00:28:38,338 --> 00:28:43,458 allow any other future chain and I was watching today's and they both make sense if we ossify too 293 00:28:43,458 --> 00:28:50,418 soon then bitcoin misses out a lot of good things that it can do for people if we ossify too late 294 00:28:50,418 --> 00:28:55,538 then bitcoin is too easy to change and it will be changed forever and there will be no stability 295 00:28:55,538 --> 00:29:02,178 and no layerization you cannot build on top of a foundation that keeps moving and so I recognize 296 00:29:02,178 --> 00:29:08,338 both when maximalism is about shit coins I can try to give nuances but really I cannot find 297 00:29:08,338 --> 00:29:13,858 much nuances when it's about changing bitcoin I can see more space for discussion and nuances 298 00:29:13,858 --> 00:29:19,618 and the other thing that that Paul mentioned is the expansion of the maximalist culture 299 00:29:19,618 --> 00:29:26,818 or cult to other topics which are per se they seems completely unrelated with bitcoin like 300 00:29:26,818 --> 00:29:36,738 diet or modern art or whatever I think that this is also unavoidable in a way because bitcoin 301 00:29:36,738 --> 00:29:46,338 basically created one kind of social situation in which a group would think that all the authorities 302 00:29:46,338 --> 00:29:54,898 in the sector of money and finance are completely wrong and or dishonest now is starting to question 303 00:29:54,898 --> 00:30:01,538 if the same principle of authority and hyper specialization is not just failing in money 304 00:30:01,538 --> 00:30:09,218 but is maybe also failing in nutrition or maybe it is failing on climatology or whatever so the 305 00:30:09,218 --> 00:30:16,578 fact that bitcoin can generate skepticism and critical thinking and anti-mainstream views 306 00:30:16,578 --> 00:30:22,018 of everything else I think is quite natural I see it happening to myself I studied physics 307 00:30:22,018 --> 00:30:30,018 so I see a video about I don't know the standard model is fake by my perpetual motion machine 308 00:30:30,018 --> 00:30:38,018 and I would be just this is bullshit just like a maximalist but now I think if everybody was 309 00:30:38,018 --> 00:30:44,898 wrong on money and finance completely like if the most highest authorities on this economic stuff 310 00:30:44,898 --> 00:30:52,098 are actual morons and bitcoin proved that in their face what are the possibility that some 311 00:30:52,098 --> 00:30:58,578 other field I don't personally understand so it's an extension of don't trust verify 312 00:30:58,578 --> 00:31:05,138 so of course the output the outcome is not fixed I don't think that everybody in bitcoin 313 00:31:05,138 --> 00:31:10,578 will eventually start just eating red meat but I think that everybody consistently considering 314 00:31:10,578 --> 00:31:17,538 the don't trust verify meme after bitcoin proved the meme viable will probably question a lot of 315 00:31:17,538 --> 00:31:23,058 other stuff and I think this is the origin of the weird and then you have the typical social dynamic 316 00:31:23,058 --> 00:31:28,258 of a group of friends they will influence each other even in random stuff and of course some of 317 00:31:28,258 --> 00:31:33,218 this stuff will be completely idiosyncratic bitcoiners they just like this kind of music 318 00:31:33,218 --> 00:31:39,698 or this kind of it will just be random but it's also inevitable but I understand that why I will 319 00:31:39,698 --> 00:31:48,098 not give any break to shitcoin promoters I can give break to vegans because I know it's not a 320 00:31:48,098 --> 00:31:54,898 mathematical step from bitcoin to meat it's just a it's just a mindset probably of critical thinking 321 00:31:54,898 --> 00:32:00,418 then the other thing is about grift so since people will just start pirating everything 322 00:32:00,418 --> 00:32:07,458 including shitcoins are bad or shitcoins are good can you leverage these in order to make 323 00:32:07,458 --> 00:32:15,858 money without effort just writing the easy slogan yes you can I think that I may feel it on myself 324 00:32:15,858 --> 00:32:23,618 as well I mean if I just shout shitcoiners are bad I will receive some kind of likes some kind 325 00:32:23,618 --> 00:32:29,618 of retweet I will have some kind of visibility so this is a fair point I think it's not strong yet 326 00:32:29,618 --> 00:32:36,658 again in the context if you compare the advantage I get from being a toxic maximalist and soliciting 327 00:32:36,658 --> 00:32:45,378 this kind of knee-jerk reaction of shitcoiners are scammers and I can feel it but it's no way 328 00:32:45,378 --> 00:32:51,298 as seductive for now it's not strong as the alternative which is if you turn the shit 329 00:32:51,298 --> 00:32:56,818 corner you will have way more audience way more I mean it's so difficult to stay bitcoin only it's 330 00:32:56,818 --> 00:33:03,538 really difficult especially in a business I was confronted by so much pressure to include shitcoin 331 00:33:03,538 --> 00:33:10,738 stuff and to be a little less strict about that which compared to that the negative pressure of 332 00:33:10,738 --> 00:33:18,018 peer judgment or the positive pressure of grift I can capitalize of being a maximalist I think 333 00:33:18,498 --> 00:33:25,778 they just pale in comparison then there is the point about hypocrisy of being nice in person 334 00:33:25,778 --> 00:33:32,978 and being mean online I mean I agree with this as well I agree with Paul here it's not a completely 335 00:33:32,978 --> 00:33:38,978 integrated we behave differently online or offline I also think it's inevitable it's not bitcoin 336 00:33:38,978 --> 00:33:46,018 related I do the same with political Twitter on Twitter if you just tell to me I'm pro-government 337 00:33:46,018 --> 00:33:50,578 I will probably just block because first of all for me it's one too many because I have a few 338 00:33:50,578 --> 00:33:56,098 followers so I cannot really follow and it's just more natural there is not a face in front is I 339 00:33:56,098 --> 00:34:02,018 understand the dynamic that makes me more of an asshole on Twitter than in person it's true but 340 00:34:02,018 --> 00:34:07,778 it's not really bitcoin related I can see it in every other topic this is really what Adam said 341 00:34:07,778 --> 00:34:14,098 this is just about the interim so I will go back to my point and the last one is I agree completely 342 00:34:14,098 --> 00:34:21,858 with Paul that I'm not happy that maximalism is true network effects are a prison and if it was 343 00:34:21,858 --> 00:34:27,458 possible to have a multi-coin world everything would be easier we will not be forced to have 344 00:34:27,458 --> 00:34:32,738 bitcoin as our early shot and everything will be better I will have more money probably some lambos 345 00:34:33,298 --> 00:34:41,218 and we will have greater chances at succeeding to change things unfortunately I think maximalism is 346 00:34:41,218 --> 00:34:47,458 absolutely true otherwise I would be more than happy to be wrong if shitcoin theory is right 347 00:34:47,458 --> 00:34:53,858 I will gladly just start using shit coins for everything they can achieve people think that 348 00:34:53,858 --> 00:34:58,898 people have to push their bag like I have many bitcoins of course I don't I've lost everything 349 00:34:58,898 --> 00:35:04,018 in a boat accident but if I had lots of shit coins a lot of bitcoins then I have to pump my 350 00:35:04,018 --> 00:35:09,698 bags that may be true for very low liquidity altcoins but when you're talking about bitcoin 351 00:35:09,698 --> 00:35:16,818 what's the point my tweets will not change the price I mean hell a nation state adopting 352 00:35:16,818 --> 00:35:21,618 bitcoin as a legal tender didn't and China banning mining completely didn't move the price 353 00:35:21,618 --> 00:35:27,618 it's not my tweet changing the price bitcoin is too liquid for me to pump my bag if I believed 354 00:35:27,618 --> 00:35:33,938 in one coin or dent a coin on ether I would just buy them there is no reason for me to pump my bag 355 00:35:33,938 --> 00:35:39,858 I will just change my bag if I was convinced I was wrong unfortunately I am convinced I'm right 356 00:35:39,858 --> 00:35:44,498 if I may I actually want to come in with just one quick comment right so you guys are both 357 00:35:44,498 --> 00:35:49,538 talking a mile a minute it's hard to keep up but I think if we were to take the 10 000 foot view 358 00:35:50,178 --> 00:35:57,378 the success case of bitcoin in my mind is that it has achieved sufficient social consensus and that 359 00:35:57,378 --> 00:36:02,978 means a certain number of people and institutions are maybe you don't care about institutions 360 00:36:03,458 --> 00:36:10,018 but institutions are made of people so let's say a certain number of people believe that bitcoin is 361 00:36:10,018 --> 00:36:15,298 the best form of money or a great form of money right I think that to me is the definition of 362 00:36:15,298 --> 00:36:22,658 bitcoin success if you agree with that and follow that logic then I think it makes sense to say we 363 00:36:22,658 --> 00:36:29,138 need more people to believe it right as opposed to having fewer people believe it so I think 364 00:36:29,138 --> 00:36:34,418 some people say that the toxic maximalism attitude is actually turning people away from 365 00:36:34,418 --> 00:36:40,498 this community so if you think about people that are just finding out about crypto what will they 366 00:36:40,498 --> 00:36:46,738 think when they start asking some questions and then instantly getting blocked or how will they 367 00:36:46,738 --> 00:36:51,058 regard this community when they think that it consists of individuals that don't hold the same 368 00:36:51,618 --> 00:36:58,818 type of openness and let's say welcoming attitude as them so my question generally is 369 00:36:59,458 --> 00:37:06,498 if bitcoin requires the building of a bigger community how does toxic maximalism help that 370 00:37:06,498 --> 00:37:12,978 or how does that not help that so I would question this goal because it's not a pyramid scheme where 371 00:37:12,978 --> 00:37:17,218 we need people to enter of course it's nice to have a higher price but the point is that you 372 00:37:17,218 --> 00:37:20,818 have to enter you have to use it when you need it and when you know that you need it and when 373 00:37:20,818 --> 00:37:26,258 you understand it I disagree that we have to lure people in when they are not ready I don't think 374 00:37:26,258 --> 00:37:32,738 that's the the point even because either they will end up not just with bitcoin but with 375 00:37:32,738 --> 00:37:39,378 shitcoin scams as well or they will be burned by some bullshit and they will become the coiners as 376 00:37:39,378 --> 00:37:45,058 a reaction to the degree of bullshit they have seen if you get people in fast people will also 377 00:37:45,058 --> 00:37:51,538 pour out fast I think we need a sustainable slow organic growth not a forced growth but let's say 378 00:37:51,538 --> 00:37:58,018 even empirically I think it's false that toxic maximalist is driving people uh out or slowing 379 00:37:58,018 --> 00:38:04,578 down new people one of my friends was considered one of the most toxic maximalists ever Saifedean 380 00:38:04,578 --> 00:38:11,458 Ammous. Saifedean's book has been translated in what 25 languages read by millions uh and 381 00:38:11,458 --> 00:38:16,818 he convinced the billionaires of uh of public companies and Miss Universe contestants and 382 00:38:16,818 --> 00:38:23,698 Superbowl winners and it's working or even less toxic but considered less toxic but also maximalist 383 00:38:23,698 --> 00:38:29,458 Jack Mallers. Jack Mallers is considered maximalist because he said nah to shitcoins inside his platform 384 00:38:29,458 --> 00:38:35,378 he basically red pilled a nation-state people wants a clear vision people want to hear 385 00:38:35,378 --> 00:38:42,738 conviction people appreciate eventually signal over noise so niceness is a very effective short 386 00:38:42,738 --> 00:38:49,778 term strategy to get people in but it's not a long-term successful strategy to make people 387 00:38:49,778 --> 00:38:55,858 understand stuff yeah I think a lot of that is good I also agree with Giacomo that you've placed 388 00:38:55,858 --> 00:39:01,378 an emphasis on belief that I don't think is right I think the bitcoin success is just when it 389 00:39:02,098 --> 00:39:09,218 changes the way that all the banks of the world including all the central banks do business and 390 00:39:09,218 --> 00:39:14,178 possibly by just putting them all out of business or even changing the way they do business like 391 00:39:14,178 --> 00:39:18,578 the gunpoint not literally a gunpoint but like where someone asks them aren't you going to do 392 00:39:18,578 --> 00:39:23,138 xyz and they then they say something like well we can't because if we do people will just use 393 00:39:23,138 --> 00:39:28,338 bitcoin or something so our hands are tied or whatever so it doesn't really matter uh and I 394 00:39:28,338 --> 00:39:35,938 also agree with him that being nice is sometimes a sign of maybe you could call it lack of confidence 395 00:39:35,938 --> 00:39:41,058 or maybe submission or something like a lack of leadership it's not to say that being mean 396 00:39:41,058 --> 00:39:46,258 is leadership because I think that's actually false there's no real reason to be like when you 397 00:39:46,258 --> 00:39:50,978 go into the bank you want to make sure that they have all of your money and they only give it to 398 00:39:50,978 --> 00:39:56,978 you and not some other person you don't really care that much how nice they are you would prefer 399 00:39:56,978 --> 00:40:02,498 that they are nice but the important thing is that they do their job because you suffer quite 400 00:40:02,498 --> 00:40:06,258 a bit they can screw up it's not like they're screwing up your meal at a restaurant or something 401 00:40:06,258 --> 00:40:12,818 this is like accumulative your savings over over a while toxic maximalism I do think it might drive 402 00:40:12,818 --> 00:40:18,258 people out jock and I both know Chris DeRose he was mentioned as a kind of someone who keeps people 403 00:40:18,258 --> 00:40:25,058 from leaving but it makes the whole enterprise a little bit less welcoming which may be detrimental 404 00:40:25,058 --> 00:40:30,658 and I thought he was on to something with that I remember very clearly and I'm going to say this 405 00:40:30,658 --> 00:40:35,298 because it's happened in public and anyone could search it and read all about it but there was a 406 00:40:35,298 --> 00:40:40,578 time when a Joseph Poon was doing something as creator of the lightning network Tadge Dreija 407 00:40:40,578 --> 00:40:45,378 and Joseph Poon were the creator although if you talk to Tadge he says that really Joseph Poon did 408 00:40:46,018 --> 00:40:50,978 more work or something so the creator of the biggest sacred cow of them all the lightning 409 00:40:50,978 --> 00:40:58,898 network he was doing something and he thought that people had misunderstood him and some toxic 410 00:40:58,898 --> 00:41:03,218 people were calling him out on the mailing list and he tried to it's all on the mailing list that 411 00:41:03,218 --> 00:41:07,218 anyone can read he tried to get them on the phone and they refused and he literally at one point 412 00:41:07,218 --> 00:41:12,898 said that you know his feelings were hurt and that if I misunderstood and then he departed the bitcoin 413 00:41:12,898 --> 00:41:18,418 community so that's an anecdote but we all have a we all have a lot of instincts in our minds right 414 00:41:19,058 --> 00:41:23,778 for lots of different things and whenever we do anything we have many different motivations if you 415 00:41:23,778 --> 00:41:28,258 want to go out for a drink it could be because you're bored it could be because you're thirsty 416 00:41:28,258 --> 00:41:32,818 it could be because you're lonely it could be for a lot of different reasons we have some 417 00:41:32,818 --> 00:41:37,618 motivations to just be really mean people and to just see what we can get away with and I wonder 418 00:41:37,618 --> 00:41:45,138 if the toxic maximalism is just an excuse for people to be sociopathic like that many people 419 00:41:45,138 --> 00:41:50,978 I think have gone there was a famous essay geeks mops and sociopaths that I think people should 420 00:41:50,978 --> 00:41:58,658 read and it's a really interesting and I do think that it's weird because it's in between our two 421 00:41:58,658 --> 00:42:04,498 positions because the geeks need protection and even at the end of the article the person advocates 422 00:42:04,498 --> 00:42:09,298 that there'll be some kind of like sociopath tyrants that protects the geeks yeah the geeks 423 00:42:09,298 --> 00:42:14,818 need protection and yet it's not clear which of the people are the real protectors and which are 424 00:42:14,818 --> 00:42:22,658 just people who can't do anything except manipulate other people the sociopaths and I don't want to 425 00:42:22,658 --> 00:42:28,098 throw out names but John Carvalho was mentioned and I don't think he's 100% like this but this is 426 00:42:28,098 --> 00:42:33,618 the type of thing I wonder about I like John Carvalho I think he does have a lot of skills but 427 00:42:34,178 --> 00:42:39,298 he's like a specialist in being the toxic maximalist it's not like he's a Matt Corallo 428 00:42:39,298 --> 00:42:45,138 or something where he's doing all this networking code on for bitcoin also on the side and then he 429 00:42:45,138 --> 00:42:50,658 also happens to be of the opinion that presumably that bitcoin is categorically superior to 430 00:42:51,298 --> 00:42:55,298 altcoins some people like are they just turning into a career for them this is the grift point 431 00:42:55,858 --> 00:43:03,298 um so that's that so we agreed with again a lot of stuff in particular I'm happy that we agree 432 00:43:03,298 --> 00:43:09,778 that a lot of the people repeating the mantra are doing it mindlessly which is a concern and 433 00:43:09,778 --> 00:43:14,898 as again exactly as Giacomo said you never know easy come easy go right you never know what mantra 434 00:43:14,898 --> 00:43:21,698 those people are going to be repeating when they find a charismatic safety in Amos 2.0 who may 435 00:43:22,258 --> 00:43:27,298 have views that Giacomo and I don't agree with and then that's a problem I'm also happy that 436 00:43:27,298 --> 00:43:32,578 he agrees about the network effect prison it's a weird state of affairs although sidechains could 437 00:43:32,578 --> 00:43:36,738 help us escape the prison but that's all another conversation and so I want to hit on some other 438 00:43:36,738 --> 00:43:42,018 things that are interested like the idea that we have to have some kind of antibody to protect 439 00:43:42,018 --> 00:43:48,418 people from error which I also agree with that there are these these big errors and the altcoins 440 00:43:48,418 --> 00:43:56,258 are like these factories of error and they produce lies about the world um and we have to do something 441 00:43:56,258 --> 00:44:01,298 if we don't do something about it they will take over and destroy the community and I agree with 442 00:44:01,298 --> 00:44:08,178 that I'm not sure that toxic maximalism is like the optimal antibody but we should talk about it 443 00:44:08,178 --> 00:44:14,258 like what to do but I think that would be better what do you think are examples of these lies and 444 00:44:14,258 --> 00:44:18,418 what do you think is a better way to deal with them litecoin is a perfect example you know it 445 00:44:18,418 --> 00:44:23,938 was produced and then like silver to bitcoin's gold the idea that it was four times faster or 446 00:44:23,938 --> 00:44:28,978 whatever because the interblock time was shorter those were basically untruths people would say 447 00:44:28,978 --> 00:44:34,738 them because of the incentives of the situation um and then like just all the stuff I always 448 00:44:34,738 --> 00:44:38,738 remember Tim Swanson and he would come up with all these corny little phrases 449 00:44:40,018 --> 00:44:44,418 remember when Vitalik came up with multi-coin pluralism or something like all of that was 450 00:44:44,418 --> 00:44:49,298 so obvious it was absolutely obvious at the time but very obvious in hindsight that that was just 451 00:44:49,938 --> 00:44:53,618 Tim trying to say that he tried to open the door for Ethereum and then all of that 452 00:44:53,618 --> 00:44:58,098 the pluralism was mostly junk but not completely junk I have to say one more thing though then I'll 453 00:44:58,098 --> 00:45:04,098 stop which is that I think that you may have contradicted yourself Giacomo you're saying 454 00:45:04,098 --> 00:45:10,818 um in physics so bitcoin has stimulated everyone to be skeptical which is good I love when people 455 00:45:10,818 --> 00:45:16,418 are skeptical I'm a skeptic myself but then you also said that this is what happens when people 456 00:45:16,418 --> 00:45:20,578 are friends they all just start to conform basically and I was like oh well that doesn't 457 00:45:20,578 --> 00:45:24,978 sound consistent at all so I thought I'd bring that up which is that isn't this a problem that 458 00:45:25,538 --> 00:45:30,738 everyone is just feeling the peer pressure to conform and I agree 100% agree that that is 459 00:45:30,738 --> 00:45:35,058 what people do but I think that we have to constantly fight against it by always saying 460 00:45:35,058 --> 00:45:40,178 that the door is open for people to disagree and the Joseph Poon story is a little bit maybe we'll 461 00:45:40,178 --> 00:45:45,378 get into a lot of details about that which is maybe not important but people should be able to 462 00:45:46,338 --> 00:45:53,298 dissent from bitcoin core without it being like the complete end of their professional career 463 00:45:53,378 --> 00:45:57,378 I think and without being mobbed on twitter or whatever which I currently 464 00:45:57,378 --> 00:46:02,578 question if that's even possible so those are some of my thoughts well about the contradiction 465 00:46:02,578 --> 00:46:09,698 I think that bitcoin stimulates some kind of skeptical mindset about authorities mainstream 466 00:46:09,698 --> 00:46:16,178 the typical authority oriented uh thinking which is very very present in today's hyper specialized 467 00:46:16,178 --> 00:46:23,618 world so the best economists in the world could be complete morons it doesn't stimulate 468 00:46:24,418 --> 00:46:30,978 particularly skepticism about your peers and your friends so I think that the dynamic about 469 00:46:30,978 --> 00:46:36,818 the group think the dynamic about confirmation on the thinking of your group they are not really 470 00:46:36,818 --> 00:46:43,218 over average they are just normal for a new community new strong community I think they 471 00:46:43,218 --> 00:46:48,738 have drawbacks they have trade-offs of course such a trade-off could be tragic in some circumstances 472 00:46:48,738 --> 00:46:54,578 but really not different from anything I've seen any other active group activity have been I think 473 00:46:54,578 --> 00:47:00,338 it's wrong to design bitcoin as a strange or anomalous example of this especially because 474 00:47:00,338 --> 00:47:05,458 people we mentioned before Adam and John they fight all the time in bitcoin and Matt and other 475 00:47:05,458 --> 00:47:13,458 all the people we mentioned fights and fight and fought a lot and so it's not especially true 476 00:47:13,458 --> 00:47:20,338 but it could be true in particular the Joseph situation which is an example of the bitcoin 477 00:47:20,338 --> 00:47:27,938 community turning against some idea I had about the bitcoin community and so me using the shitcoin 478 00:47:27,938 --> 00:47:33,618 situation as a leverage if you are mean to me I will just go away so I think that the preferential 479 00:47:33,618 --> 00:47:41,298 way to react to strong criticism and even peer gang pressure would be to have a thick skin just 480 00:47:41,298 --> 00:47:46,738 like Adam suggested but I understand that there is a quick this is another problem of shit coins 481 00:47:46,738 --> 00:47:52,978 they offer an easy shortcut to avoid to have a thick skin and to respond and to resist and to 482 00:47:52,978 --> 00:47:58,418 make your point they just allow you the shortcut to say okay I just live for an altcoin yeah usually 483 00:47:58,418 --> 00:48:05,778 that just lives in nothing just like it happened with Jeff Gerdzik and in his ICO you can mention 484 00:48:05,778 --> 00:48:14,178 several people even to some degree Roger Ver and his shitcoin Ethereum itself was basically 485 00:48:14,178 --> 00:48:21,138 a little bit Vitalik rage quitting because nobody cared about on-chain Turing complete contract 486 00:48:21,138 --> 00:48:27,378 stuff enforced by miners which was a very bad idea and now it's obvious it was a very bad idea 487 00:48:27,378 --> 00:48:33,538 and they are switching away from that bad idea but it was like Bender in Futurama I will make my 488 00:48:33,538 --> 00:48:39,778 own shitcoin with blackjack it's a natural thing but just about the grief thing I agree that some 489 00:48:39,778 --> 00:48:46,898 people may become maximalist as a career choice that's true but the point is that now what I see 490 00:48:46,898 --> 00:48:53,698 it's even people being post-maximalist or anti-maximalist as a career in order to just 491 00:48:53,698 --> 00:48:59,458 rise a quick knee-jerk reaction this stuff is layered like you have shitcoiners then you have 492 00:48:59,458 --> 00:49:05,138 the immune response against shitcoiners which is important and we agree then we may have some 493 00:49:05,138 --> 00:49:10,098 excesses on the reaction but then you have the people who capitalizes on the idea that you may 494 00:49:10,098 --> 00:49:15,298 have excesses so you can in this metaphor you can have the autoimmune disease where the white cells 495 00:49:15,298 --> 00:49:21,698 will attack your own body and this is actually possible but now there will be a lot of people 496 00:49:21,698 --> 00:49:24,898 pretending there is such a case when actually there isn't 497 00:49:25,698 --> 00:49:29,778 in order to make themselves relevant because auto autoimmune disease 498 00:49:29,982 --> 00:49:56,982 yeah auto autoimmune. My proposal would be if there is a scammer you may be nasty or you may be nice but don't be nasty with people being too nasty otherwise we're adding this kind of meta-toxicity I mean you talked about authoritarian tendencies in this in this culture but actually I think that many example of anti-maximalism they are literally tote police there is people that when I say shitcoin they will try to 499 00:49:56,982 --> 00:50:02,702 police my speech about shitcoin so this is going all around in meta layers and we'll just end up 500 00:50:02,702 --> 00:50:11,102 fighting with meta meta meta immune responses so if you think we are too mean just be nicer instead 501 00:50:11,102 --> 00:50:15,702 of trying to be mean with mean people and I think that there are some people we are we're grifting 502 00:50:15,702 --> 00:50:22,102 the post-maximalist or anti-maximalist meme especially when they have to cover up for some 503 00:50:22,142 --> 00:50:27,942 kind of there was a friend of mine since we're mentioning many names I think I don't even 504 00:50:27,942 --> 00:50:34,542 remember his name but basically it was a maximalist it was Kauth doing a neo scam mining I don't know 505 00:50:34,542 --> 00:50:41,262 investment scheme and it was a private but it was called out and so he wrote a long article about 506 00:50:41,262 --> 00:50:47,422 being post maximalist which was very convenient after that or the same goes with the recent 507 00:50:47,462 --> 00:50:53,182 episode with the good guy Robert Bradlaugh I mean the thing itself about the cloud was not 508 00:50:53,182 --> 00:51:00,182 even so tragic but the response leveraging outrage against maximalist because you have 509 00:51:00,182 --> 00:51:05,582 been called out I mean that that's just grief on a second layer yeah no I think that's actually a 510 00:51:05,582 --> 00:51:11,142 really good point but that there is a counter grift and that's definitely true and I think 511 00:51:11,142 --> 00:51:14,702 that's really important to keep in mind and there was something I wanted to mention before which is 512 00:51:14,702 --> 00:51:19,942 that I was making fun of Max Keiser I want to be totally clear that because you brought up eos the 513 00:51:19,942 --> 00:51:27,222 stuff that the non Bitcoin team does it's really just way more outrageous than whatever little 514 00:51:27,222 --> 00:51:33,302 things that people in the Bitcoin community might do and it's important to keep that in mind that 515 00:51:33,302 --> 00:51:40,502 thought like eos putting the Times Square ad that is just the name and there's no information and 516 00:51:40,502 --> 00:51:46,902 they raise four billion dollars which is probably like mostly wash trading or whatever they call 517 00:51:46,902 --> 00:51:53,302 chandelier like wouldn't have ringers pay themselves and it looks like the whole thing is you know a 518 00:51:53,302 --> 00:52:00,702 giant mess I mean what we live in a world where I see companies are putting blockchain in the name 519 00:52:00,702 --> 00:52:06,622 on the stock market in order to get money yeah I just got the ice tea company I think the SEC just 520 00:52:06,782 --> 00:52:11,542 sued them for insider trading or something funny like that I think that just happened like yesterday 521 00:52:11,542 --> 00:52:16,182 or something funny like that so that's definitely true and yeah we have to live in the real world 522 00:52:16,182 --> 00:52:20,782 we have to at the end of the day you have to do something and so I agree that there is this kind 523 00:52:20,782 --> 00:52:27,382 of process unfolding this conversation is now colored by the fact that I think that sidechains 524 00:52:27,382 --> 00:52:34,862 are possible and easy so obviously my brain is just thinking well if if we had sidechains then 525 00:52:34,862 --> 00:52:40,462 we could inoculate everyone against shit coins by just deploying sidechains and then whenever 526 00:52:40,462 --> 00:52:46,302 anyone asks like a little question like what does Bitcoin support smart contracts have you ever heard 527 00:52:46,302 --> 00:52:51,422 that question and then you could just say yes and just point to the sidechain and stop talking but 528 00:52:51,422 --> 00:52:57,462 then there'd be no need to like involve any kind of emotional anything at all and it would work 529 00:52:57,462 --> 00:53:04,342 like 99% of the time it's hard for me to imagine what I would believe if I did not think that side 530 00:53:04,342 --> 00:53:11,662 chains were possible and you had to just be this giant war and the thing is the network effects 531 00:53:11,662 --> 00:53:17,982 are prison but you can't say that they're a hundred percent determinative because if they 532 00:53:17,982 --> 00:53:23,342 determined the outcome 100% then the US dollar would just crush everything yeah yeah there must 533 00:53:23,342 --> 00:53:29,222 be some merit difference there is a little loose coupling based on the merit of the protocol and 534 00:53:29,222 --> 00:53:35,502 then if you accept that now we have to wonder what would happen what if the country next to El 535 00:53:35,502 --> 00:53:40,262 Salvador says that they're gonna adopt Bitcoin cash or something and now you're like hello now 536 00:53:40,262 --> 00:53:45,942 it just becomes a giant question mark not that I think that that's likely to happen but very quick 537 00:53:45,942 --> 00:53:53,742 about sidechains I for one I as I'm a fan of the concept I'm skeptical not really contrarian 538 00:53:53,742 --> 00:53:59,902 a little bit skeptical about some parts of the Drivechain proposal and especially I'm skeptical 539 00:53:59,902 --> 00:54:06,742 that the community will adopt it because of the controversy but except for these meta discussion 540 00:54:06,742 --> 00:54:14,702 my skepticism about your idea of such an as an easy way out which I developed more recently is 541 00:54:14,702 --> 00:54:20,942 that I never thought that the driver for shit coins was a technical experimentation of course 542 00:54:20,942 --> 00:54:26,182 the drive was great was people trying to print their own money so that was the drive of course 543 00:54:26,182 --> 00:54:34,742 it was disguised as experimentation but I don't think anymore that removing the alibi so removing 544 00:54:34,742 --> 00:54:42,462 these fake pretends will actually make a big big difference because people just want to print money 545 00:54:42,462 --> 00:54:48,102 and to sell their money to people and that's the incentive and if there will be sidechain 546 00:54:48,222 --> 00:54:55,742 sidechains will basically be honest projects without millionaire ICOs and scammers will have 547 00:54:55,742 --> 00:55:02,222 a marketing department and a marketing budget in order to chill shit coins and sidechains will 548 00:55:02,222 --> 00:55:08,382 not by choice but by a good choice and so eventually I'm not sure that even functioning 549 00:55:08,382 --> 00:55:14,142 uncontroversial sidechains will really kill shit coins because shit coins are not happening 550 00:55:14,142 --> 00:55:20,062 because we need innovation they're happening because we want lambos basically well I think I 551 00:55:20,062 --> 00:55:24,902 do agree with that obviously there's a big disagreement in the community which I think 552 00:55:24,902 --> 00:55:32,022 is totally fair about to what extent if you kill the disguise or the pretext like how detrimental 553 00:55:32,022 --> 00:55:36,822 is that really gonna be and I think it would be pretty detrimental but it's a view I hold 554 00:55:36,822 --> 00:55:41,782 very weakly it could easily not be detrimental at all right because of the way people's brains 555 00:55:41,862 --> 00:55:46,422 work with cognitive dissonance and everything it might even make the situation worse somehow I have 556 00:55:46,422 --> 00:55:50,302 no idea because there's nothing stops the shit crime from saying that it also has sidechains 557 00:55:50,302 --> 00:55:55,102 and plus it has this other thing and whatever so it will ultimately destroy Bitcoin and whatever 558 00:55:55,102 --> 00:55:59,982 blah blah blah so who knows what will happen actually in that hypothetical world I hope 559 00:55:59,982 --> 00:56:06,622 people know by now my primary interest in sidechains isn't my own sidechain technology that 560 00:56:06,622 --> 00:56:10,062 I myself developed which is about prediction markets and doesn't really have anything to 561 00:56:10,062 --> 00:56:14,862 do with killing shit coins I guess that it would I only brought it up because I was wondering about 562 00:56:14,862 --> 00:56:20,022 what is the best way to make the antibody because the playing field is tilted it's like getting 563 00:56:20,022 --> 00:56:25,182 glasses where there's an inherent bias in the world towards altcoins because they will have 564 00:56:25,182 --> 00:56:30,262 the marketing budget obviously when you say that you're being both literal but more really abstract 565 00:56:30,262 --> 00:56:36,062 because and I agree that it's like this tilt towards that and if we want to see clearly we 566 00:56:36,062 --> 00:56:42,302 have to tilt it back the other way I'm not sure I don't know if it's better for Bitcoin to be 567 00:56:42,302 --> 00:56:45,822 again you drew the distinction at the very beginning between just being maximalist and 568 00:56:45,822 --> 00:56:53,102 being toxic I I can see it giving cover to the the people who altcoin it makes it easier for 569 00:56:53,102 --> 00:56:57,782 them to write like that person you mentioned it makes it just gives them more stuff to write 570 00:56:57,782 --> 00:57:03,142 about in their little article that says that they're post maximalist or whatever okay so let's 571 00:57:03,142 --> 00:57:08,702 talk a little bit more about this multi-coin universe right so Paul at the beginning of our 572 00:57:08,702 --> 00:57:13,302 conversation you had mentioned that you were looking at some other projects that have been 573 00:57:13,302 --> 00:57:21,342 happening and in 2018 you did write an article actually about Bitcoin I think yeah we're talking 574 00:57:21,342 --> 00:57:26,582 maximalism of Bitcoin yeah April 2018 they may have stolen that meme from me as far as I know 575 00:57:26,582 --> 00:57:32,742 who knows but yeah that's something I worried about so in that article I worried about to what 576 00:57:32,742 --> 00:57:41,302 extent will the network effects just carry Bitcoin to victory no matter how slow it is so one thing 577 00:57:41,302 --> 00:57:46,702 is the the soft forks used to happen multiple times per year and now it's like once per five 578 00:57:46,702 --> 00:57:50,982 years is that a good thing or a bad thing with sidechains it wouldn't matter at all because 579 00:57:50,982 --> 00:57:55,982 sidechains could then do whatever innovation they like but anyway am I interrupting you sure no not 580 00:57:55,982 --> 00:57:59,822 at all yeah so well my question is do you see Bitcoin being successful in a sustainable manner 581 00:57:59,822 --> 00:58:05,222 in a state of the world where many other old coins also flourish and let's define sustainably 582 00:58:05,222 --> 00:58:10,462 successful for Bitcoin as say being reserve currency for one of g7 central banks for a 583 00:58:10,462 --> 00:58:16,742 decade or something well yeah that's that is a weird thing I mean I think sustainable it's very 584 00:58:16,742 --> 00:58:21,102 clear to me what it means it means that there's no reasonable reason to think that it would go 585 00:58:21,102 --> 00:58:26,822 away anytime soon that's just what sustainable means to me but that seems like a low bar though 586 00:58:26,822 --> 00:58:33,982 what does going away mean hmm well maybe it is a low bar but that's just what it means so how 587 00:58:33,982 --> 00:58:38,782 about you do you want it to be number one on coin market cap or something and so what else do you 588 00:58:38,782 --> 00:58:45,022 want I think abstractly speaking bitcoins being successful basically means successful is different 589 00:58:45,022 --> 00:58:51,062 from sustainable of course okay well I said sustainably successful okay yeah well sustainably 590 00:58:51,062 --> 00:58:55,422 successful well again I don't think that's important I mean the meat of your question 591 00:58:55,422 --> 00:59:03,262 is if there's a lot of altcoins that are that have some real users so they're not just the 592 00:59:03,262 --> 00:59:10,382 Ponzi finance they need to have real users David Vork's project SIA it has you can argue about is 593 00:59:10,382 --> 00:59:15,822 it badly designed is it good design or is this fake or whatever you can either run his software 594 00:59:15,822 --> 00:59:22,622 just go to his website and there are users who actually use the service so and certainly for 595 00:59:22,622 --> 00:59:29,062 Monero I need to keep tabs on this in case it changes but there were I think now two darknet 596 00:59:29,062 --> 00:59:36,022 markets that only accept Monero I think one white market but yeah maybe I'm not the point is that 597 00:59:36,022 --> 00:59:43,382 the darknet markets those people are real users they would like to actually use the coin to to 598 00:59:43,382 --> 00:59:49,262 do something that you're using it for the privacy feature to me it's very clear when someone is 599 00:59:49,262 --> 00:59:56,142 using a crypto project for its task versus when they they just buy it on the exchange and hope to 600 00:59:56,142 --> 01:00:03,742 sell later that's not to say that I agree with the people who say that saving money is using money 601 01:00:03,742 --> 01:00:09,382 that's one of the many ways of using money and I agree with that but the point I'm trying to make 602 01:00:09,382 --> 01:00:16,062 is there are actually altcoins that have a feature that someone actually wants and then they use it 603 01:00:16,062 --> 01:00:22,982 for the feature so if in a world where that is happening you have an altcoin world it's open-ended 604 01:00:22,982 --> 01:00:29,142 as it would be in the sidechain world but anyone could create anything including bad ideas of which 605 01:00:29,142 --> 01:00:34,942 most new ideas are overwhelmingly likely to be bad because they're created more or less at random 606 01:00:34,942 --> 01:00:42,942 through trial and error but you have a lot of creativity and new ideas are created and you know 607 01:00:42,942 --> 01:00:48,302 how it is with evolution you have enough variation and enough selection and enough time good ideas 608 01:00:48,302 --> 01:00:54,902 happen accidentally I kind of think aetherium has had maybe one two or three ideas in this very 609 01:00:54,902 --> 01:01:00,022 Darwinian sense that they've just lucked into being good the ERC 20 token kind of being one 610 01:01:00,022 --> 01:01:05,382 where they accidentally reinvented it even though we had it in Bitcoin with colored coins counterparty 611 01:01:05,382 --> 01:01:11,382 etc they just hit on something and especially with the global community they hit on something that 612 01:01:12,102 --> 01:01:16,902 had something that people liked that is a bad example because it happens to be related 613 01:01:16,902 --> 01:01:23,542 intimately to just Ponzi scamming people but the ERC 20 part of it was something that I think 614 01:01:23,542 --> 01:01:29,542 someone liked so to just try and wrap up you asked me about what does Bitcoin look like in a world 615 01:01:29,542 --> 01:01:35,302 where it's Bitcoin is frozen and there's this creativity happening elsewhere I personally I 616 01:01:35,302 --> 01:01:39,942 would be a little nervous about that because you never know what it is that evolution or human 617 01:01:39,942 --> 01:01:45,462 creativity is going to assemble I mean no one ever expected Bitcoin to be assembled from from 618 01:01:45,462 --> 01:01:50,902 nothing there was from like the remnants of digicash and liberty reserve etc so I think but 619 01:01:50,902 --> 01:01:54,742 there's no limit to how good of an idea someone might have it's possible that would almost 620 01:01:54,742 --> 01:01:59,222 certainly be reinstantiated as like a hard fork of Bitcoin or something if it were super super good 621 01:01:59,222 --> 01:02:03,062 but I don't know I don't know about that either because then there'll be people out there right 622 01:02:03,062 --> 01:02:08,822 now thinking who are like 13 14 15 years old maybe and they're thinking like maybe they're 623 01:02:08,822 --> 01:02:13,462 also early Bitcoin adopters and they made like a hundred thousand x return on their five dollar 624 01:02:13,462 --> 01:02:17,462 investment and now they're thinking you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna come up with the next thing 625 01:02:17,462 --> 01:02:21,062 and I'm gonna set it up so that it's just like coin and everyone hates it at first and I'm gonna 626 01:02:21,062 --> 01:02:25,542 use the toxic maximalism as a big shield and then I'm gonna make it so it's the best investment in 627 01:02:25,542 --> 01:02:29,302 the world and I'm gonna trick everyone into thinking it's terrible at first and only after 628 01:02:29,302 --> 01:02:33,542 it's too late will they realize that how great it is and then it will like flip in Bitcoin and 629 01:02:33,542 --> 01:02:38,262 destroy it or something so that's obviously kind of a silly story but yeah I worry about that about 630 01:02:38,262 --> 01:02:43,862 where I think the creativity is ultimately going to win to put it in uh let's put it in one sentence 631 01:02:43,862 --> 01:02:50,102 okay great so I have another question for Giacomo how much do you think the toxic attitude 632 01:02:50,742 --> 01:02:57,622 with maximalism is correlated with the low cost basis in general it feels like the sort of 633 01:02:57,622 --> 01:03:05,382 attitude that we're seeing corresponds to the timing for when someone starts using or buying 634 01:03:05,382 --> 01:03:10,582 Bitcoin so do you think there's an element of how early Bitcoiners are already so wealthy in 635 01:03:10,582 --> 01:03:15,782 fiat terms that they might think that normal rules of civil discourse no longer apply to them 636 01:03:15,782 --> 01:03:21,942 oh I think that's an optic illusion I think that's like a selection bias uh it's the other way around 637 01:03:22,902 --> 01:03:30,102 people who have been around for a long time they tend to become typically Bitcoin maximalists 638 01:03:30,502 --> 01:03:36,182 one example of this would be me uh when when I first discovered Bitcoin in 2012 at the beginning 639 01:03:36,182 --> 01:03:42,182 I was skeptical like this cannot work but when Bitcoin during that year proved me wrong it 640 01:03:42,182 --> 01:03:49,542 basically broke my skepticism my it broke my spam filters so for one year after convincing myself 641 01:03:49,542 --> 01:03:54,742 Bitcoin was possible I just thought that everything was possible so any kind of bullshit you can 642 01:03:54,742 --> 01:04:02,262 imagine I started to study NXT to study Ripple because Satoshi Nakamoto himself inadvertently 643 01:04:02,262 --> 01:04:07,782 scammed me because he mentioned Ripple positively but he was talking about another Ripple a coinless 644 01:04:07,782 --> 01:04:15,062 project before Bitcoin but anyway I was really a shit coiner for one year and then I met a toxic 645 01:04:15,062 --> 01:04:22,662 guy Lawrence Naum the guy was I was working for him in green address wallet in 2013 at the end of 646 01:04:22,662 --> 01:04:28,182 2013 quite toxic to me I mean in a nice way but it was like you are full of bullshit everything 647 01:04:28,182 --> 01:04:35,542 you're saying is wrong it's monetarily impossible and I was not a developer I was just a guy with 648 01:04:35,542 --> 01:04:41,942 some vaguely technical background and he was like look at this fucking code people don't know what 649 01:04:41,942 --> 01:04:48,582 they're doing this is absolute garbage and in a very toxic way he made me understand the situation 650 01:04:48,582 --> 01:04:56,102 then this kind of awakening deepened when I added some monetary consideration about digital 651 01:04:56,102 --> 01:05:02,502 scarcity again the very simple sentence there is a scarce amount of Bitcoin there is an infinite 652 01:05:02,502 --> 01:05:10,182 amount of cryptocurrency so I convinced myself there was absolutely no way to have a stable 653 01:05:10,182 --> 01:05:17,782 long-term significant multi-coin market at least except with some kind of external 654 01:05:17,782 --> 01:05:23,702 I don't know if one government will impose one shit coin as legal tender then maybe you may 655 01:05:23,702 --> 01:05:28,182 have a fractioning like you have today with fiat the reason we are talking in English right now 656 01:05:28,182 --> 01:05:33,222 but we are using different kind of money is because government are basically artificially 657 01:05:33,222 --> 01:05:39,062 fractioning the standards while people will eventually naturally try to converge so this 658 01:05:39,062 --> 01:05:45,782 is my example I started out as shit coiner and I became a toxic maximalist meeting other toxic 659 01:05:45,782 --> 01:05:51,142 maximalists another typical example would be like I don't know famous podcaster Peter McCormack we 660 01:05:51,142 --> 01:05:58,662 disagree about many things sometimes he's considered too normie to be I mean in external topics like 661 01:05:58,662 --> 01:06:05,222 meat and global warming and that kind of stuff I'm the maximalist and he's the normie but about 662 01:06:05,222 --> 01:06:10,582 shit coins especially about the original significance of original meaning of maximalism 663 01:06:10,582 --> 01:06:16,262 he became a maximalist he just said okay I was following tons of shit coins any kind of 664 01:06:16,262 --> 01:06:24,102 bullshit narrative then I got hurt and now I am being selective and I'm rising anti-spam filters 665 01:06:24,102 --> 01:06:32,902 and I will just stay Bitcoin only and he still it tends to be nice even too much for somebody 666 01:06:32,902 --> 01:06:38,662 but so maybe it's not really toxic even if I would argue that it strictly depends on 667 01:06:38,662 --> 01:06:43,062 what you talk about but is another story of course there are counter example 668 01:06:43,062 --> 01:06:48,262 but in the counter example are less frequent less significant and especially typically 669 01:06:48,902 --> 01:06:56,982 driven by the dynamics Brian Armstrong was saying uh was saying very maximalist things in 2014 670 01:06:57,542 --> 01:07:01,382 there's still the tweet of Brian Armstrong which is why which is something like 671 01:07:03,062 --> 01:07:08,502 altcoins are a distraction we must focus only on Bitcoin and now he's like the king of shit 672 01:07:08,502 --> 01:07:15,142 coiners and and of course you have you have you have other people like Jeff Garzik and stuff 673 01:07:15,142 --> 01:07:21,382 like that you have many maximalists you have some maximalists turning shit coiners mostly I think 674 01:07:22,182 --> 01:07:28,262 it's bad to always think about very down-to-earth motives but I think it's about money because 675 01:07:28,262 --> 01:07:35,702 Paul knows that if he was going to launch a Truthcoin altcoin instead of inventing Drivechain 676 01:07:35,702 --> 01:07:44,662 he would be way richer maybe less proud of himself maybe less more cognitively more dissonant 677 01:07:44,662 --> 01:07:49,862 but he would be fucking richer and so he knows that and I don't know that so there is direction 678 01:07:49,862 --> 01:07:55,702 in the other way uh in a way I will play a very low jab uh to Paul right now uh there is also a 679 01:07:55,702 --> 01:08:01,462 famous tweet by Paul himself that was super toxic maximalist it was something like I don't remember 680 01:08:01,462 --> 01:08:07,222 the wording but it was anybody was working on altcoins are stabbing Satoshi in the back is 681 01:08:07,222 --> 01:08:12,982 that right so that was very maximalist so in a way there are counter example of people growing 682 01:08:12,982 --> 01:08:20,102 skeptical of maximalist but uh the typical evolution is you start you believe in anything 683 01:08:20,102 --> 01:08:26,662 uh so you are a shit coiner and then you gradually learn and only in a few occasion you become either 684 01:08:26,662 --> 01:08:31,942 too bored or too greedy and you have to go back to shit coins no first of all I don't think that's 685 01:08:31,942 --> 01:08:37,702 a low blow at all I think that's completely all my numerous tweets are fair game although the number 686 01:08:37,702 --> 01:08:43,702 of times I tweet while intoxicated is extremely high and people should keep that in mind I do 687 01:08:43,702 --> 01:08:49,542 still believe that actually that you are stabbing Satoshi in the back it's unclear whether or not 688 01:08:49,542 --> 01:08:56,342 it's good for society or good for bitcoin the motion of the debate was is it good for bitcoin 689 01:08:56,342 --> 01:09:03,862 so here's the thing if you think like it's often said that bitcoin core is a meritocracy 690 01:09:03,862 --> 01:09:11,222 I mean there's sort of an implication that the process for core development is like infallible 691 01:09:11,222 --> 01:09:16,982 and that it will always attract the best ideas and it will always sort out the bad ideas and 692 01:09:16,982 --> 01:09:20,182 obviously I have a conflict of interest because I'm floating an idea in the bitcoin core that 693 01:09:20,182 --> 01:09:26,102 is controversial but what I mean to say is that it can't possibly be infallible and even the people 694 01:09:26,102 --> 01:09:31,782 who have been in it for a while think that it's imperfect to say the least when you have that 695 01:09:31,782 --> 01:09:37,302 angle you have to wonder what is the best way to help bitcoin is it to challenge bitcoin by creating 696 01:09:37,942 --> 01:09:43,062 a different project I do think competition is good you know it's a shame because I used to 697 01:09:43,062 --> 01:09:48,342 make fun of Eric Voorhees for saying that which I still would when litecoin came out it was a fake 698 01:09:48,342 --> 01:09:54,102 pretext that was adding choice to the marketplace it really wasn't but yeah I do think altcoins are 699 01:09:54,102 --> 01:10:01,542 a distraction I do think that people are selling out um which is a shame but I wonder about what 700 01:10:01,622 --> 01:10:06,342 is the best way to address that I don't know I guess maybe it's just hard to describe but there's 701 01:10:06,342 --> 01:10:12,902 a lot of nuance in my brain I'm trying not to make this like the BIP300 referendum or whatever 702 01:10:12,902 --> 01:10:18,182 which is very difficult because what all these projects are they're either saying that there's 703 01:10:18,182 --> 01:10:23,462 something wrong with bitcoin core and or there's something wrong with bitcoin core development 704 01:10:23,462 --> 01:10:29,142 process because they'll never add my great idea which is the turing complete scripts or whatever 705 01:10:29,142 --> 01:10:35,302 that's like an essential part of their existence as I see it and sidechains would just kill all of 706 01:10:35,302 --> 01:10:39,942 that so that is where my brain is at and I'm trying to get my brain away from that but it 707 01:10:39,942 --> 01:10:45,782 is difficult um let me just summarize very quickly I feel that bitcoin maxis basically 708 01:10:45,782 --> 01:10:51,462 have three wars going on right one against no coiners we briefly touched upon that Giacomo was 709 01:10:51,462 --> 01:10:57,622 talking about people in finance or governmental high places have been wrong for many years and 710 01:10:57,622 --> 01:11:02,182 bitcoiners saw the light and now they're questioning many things in addition to 711 01:11:02,182 --> 01:11:06,662 monetary policies and then the second war is against shit coiners so people that are trying 712 01:11:06,662 --> 01:11:12,822 to steal market share people that are trying to essentially only make money not to say bitcoiners 713 01:11:12,822 --> 01:11:18,102 are not trying to make money right let's be real here bitcoin itself is a sort of money and early 714 01:11:18,102 --> 01:11:23,302 adoption signifies that you want to have more of the better money than the worst money which in 715 01:11:23,862 --> 01:11:29,222 bitcoin's early days was just fiat money but now there's this alternative form of worse money in 716 01:11:29,222 --> 01:11:35,302 bitcoiners minds which is shit coins so that's the second war and then the third war is I think 717 01:11:35,302 --> 01:11:40,822 civil war really right within the bitcoiner community you have people that are very 718 01:11:40,822 --> 01:11:45,782 conservative that do not want change and then you have people that are more aggressive and more 719 01:11:45,782 --> 01:11:51,062 creative right so let's talk about that last point a little bit more I know you touched upon that a 720 01:11:51,062 --> 01:11:57,542 little bit paul what in your mind are say top two or three proposals including Drivechain that you 721 01:11:57,542 --> 01:12:02,902 think are critical for bitcoin's thriving or even survival and what are the consequences for the 722 01:12:02,902 --> 01:12:06,982 canonical chain to not accept them sure well that's a very loaded question but let me say 723 01:12:06,982 --> 01:12:11,062 something else instead because I don't want to just say that BIP300 is the only thing you need 724 01:12:11,062 --> 01:12:14,262 to change I mean I'm saying it now but it's the only thing you would need it's the last change 725 01:12:14,262 --> 01:12:19,062 that you would need but I think when you brought up the civil war I mean maybe think of the block 726 01:12:19,062 --> 01:12:24,022 size debate I think everyone in their mind regardless of what happens with bitcoin you have 727 01:12:24,022 --> 01:12:29,302 to always be pursuing truth and obviously that's a very that's not a very controversial thing to say 728 01:12:29,862 --> 01:12:34,822 everyone always thinks that they are doing that I'm sure but a lot of seeds were sort of planted 729 01:12:35,382 --> 01:12:42,262 I think most people would agree that we should just team up and in order to defeat the others 730 01:12:42,262 --> 01:12:47,542 the large blocker versus small blocker side and in order to have a more cohesive team we need to 731 01:12:47,542 --> 01:12:52,502 get our message out and it has to be a simple message that the team can understand so that the 732 01:12:52,502 --> 01:12:58,662 team can coordinate and I do think there was a kind of sacrifice of the idea that the truth is 733 01:12:58,662 --> 01:13:04,742 really important in that event and I think that was a kind of a tragic collateral damage of the 734 01:13:04,742 --> 01:13:10,662 block size war and I don't know if anyone will ever agree on how big or small that that idea 735 01:13:10,662 --> 01:13:16,022 was but I think it is sort of there and it has planted other seeds that are related to your 736 01:13:16,022 --> 01:13:21,062 question it's like buying a house these days where the housing market is crazy but people want 737 01:13:21,062 --> 01:13:26,182 to buy a house that has good resale value so they want to make sure in the United States anyway so 738 01:13:26,182 --> 01:13:30,422 no one wants to buy like a weird house they want to buy a house that other people will buy and what 739 01:13:30,422 --> 01:13:37,862 am I talking about here it's kind of like people are afraid to back any idea that just doesn't seem 740 01:13:37,862 --> 01:13:42,342 to be getting attention even if it's totally circular so the idea I'm going to bring up is 741 01:13:42,342 --> 01:13:48,102 not even my own I'm going to bring up Jeremy Rubin's idea which is a perfectly good idea he 742 01:13:48,102 --> 01:13:54,902 has a whole website with lots of great use cases and how basically simple it is and how it would 743 01:13:55,622 --> 01:14:01,862 let people fix a lot of different things related to complexity smart contracts and fees and things 744 01:14:01,862 --> 01:14:06,902 but it's fallen as I understand it into this kind of weird loop where just people weren't 745 01:14:06,902 --> 01:14:12,582 paying it quite enough attention and then now it has attracted this stigma and I think for 746 01:14:12,582 --> 01:14:17,782 absolutely no reason whatsoever because he's never really done anything I'm very mavericky and crazy 747 01:14:17,782 --> 01:14:23,542 and I'll just do things to be unpopular on purpose because I studied at the Krista Rose school of 748 01:14:23,542 --> 01:14:30,022 being crazy but Jeremy Rubin was like chair of scaling multiple scaling bitcoin conferences and 749 01:14:30,494 --> 01:14:57,494 he's like very much like a full maximalist but his like idea what used to be opsecure the bag is now check template verify I think people change their names a lot though yeah any pre-vout used to be like four or five other thing yes see gosh no inputs and so that's a weird thing part of it is that everything is going so fast so much progress is happening at a rapid pace 750 01:14:57,814 --> 01:15:02,454 in direct contradiction what I was saying at the beginning about toxic maximalism being static I 751 01:15:02,454 --> 01:15:08,294 think toxic maximalism is static but unfortunately the reality is progressive which is so much stuff 752 01:15:08,294 --> 01:15:14,214 is happening in bitcoin so quickly in every direction all the different lightning implementations 753 01:15:14,214 --> 01:15:19,494 all the different like cultural stuff like the different conferences and meetups now 754 01:15:20,054 --> 01:15:25,494 the El Salvador stuff like all that stuff like so much progress technical progress 755 01:15:26,134 --> 01:15:32,294 translating stuff into different languages and stuff that's happening in Nigeria Zimbabwe whatever 756 01:15:32,294 --> 01:15:35,654 there's so much progress that it's hard to keep track of what everyone's doing which is a good 757 01:15:35,654 --> 01:15:42,214 thing but I wonder if this is a flaw that his idea is which I think is bib 118 but I cannot guarantee 758 01:15:42,214 --> 01:15:46,534 that and so I regret even saying it now because I don't remember which bib number it is because 759 01:15:46,534 --> 01:15:52,294 there's a lot of numbers but his idea is neglected you ended up with a very nice one for Drivechain 760 01:15:52,614 --> 01:15:59,494 because you can use like spartan you can also use spartan memes with uh lionidas king and you're not 761 01:15:59,494 --> 01:16:03,894 even big we're not even leveraging that it was very funny some people in our Drivechain group 762 01:16:03,894 --> 01:16:08,294 have made a photoshop to one or two but I was wondering like yeah I had the only ones that 763 01:16:08,294 --> 01:16:13,014 started with the 300 series I was like is this like some kind of am I being like slighted or 764 01:16:13,014 --> 01:16:17,654 something and then there now there's many with 300 so I was like oh I was like okay but I was 765 01:16:17,654 --> 01:16:21,974 getting a little paranoid there I was like why because there's luke seems to just he seems to 766 01:16:21,974 --> 01:16:27,894 sign them in like an utterly random order I mean yeah I can't make any sense of it at all so that's 767 01:16:27,894 --> 01:16:32,694 funny so I wonder if this idea is just being neglected for no reason and then if so if it 768 01:16:32,694 --> 01:16:39,014 indicates that the process is biased towards people are afraid because of what happened with 769 01:16:39,014 --> 01:16:44,294 the block size war there were some people who were actually emerged as leaders people know the names 770 01:16:44,294 --> 01:16:49,334 I don't know if I want to say them no there some people naturally emerged as leaders of the small 771 01:16:49,334 --> 01:16:55,334 block movement which won and now it's kind of just like they have a lot of influence over what it is 772 01:16:55,334 --> 01:17:02,854 that people find interesting so that's really the real answer your question is that a problem 773 01:17:02,854 --> 01:17:07,414 should people do anything about it should people be more aware of it or am I wrong when I say that 774 01:17:08,054 --> 01:17:12,934 and I'm just biased because no one likes BIP300 I don't know but that's really what I think is the 775 01:17:12,934 --> 01:17:18,774 more important part of what you are asking about because all of his thing does is basically like 776 01:17:18,774 --> 01:17:23,894 why it shouldn't this be a travesty if I try to explain you should get the explanation from him 777 01:17:23,894 --> 01:17:27,174 I don't even want to explain it because I know that it won't be exactly what he would say but 778 01:17:27,174 --> 01:17:33,094 his thing is very simple it just lets you pay to like a kind of a thing a little hash little box 779 01:17:33,094 --> 01:17:38,774 that can contain all kinds of stuff that you put into it later so his thing doesn't have these grand 780 01:17:38,774 --> 01:17:43,894 implications like what I'm trying to do with BIP300 it's just a simple thing I don't really see how 781 01:17:43,894 --> 01:17:49,654 it harms anyone people are just determined not to look at it though and by the way the aversion to 782 01:17:49,654 --> 01:17:56,134 all these changes they are generally hard forks right if it's a soft fork then no no no no no and 783 01:17:56,134 --> 01:18:00,614 I think no both mine and his are soft forks so I don't think that's the case because you know 784 01:18:00,614 --> 01:18:05,974 even just the a soft fork you have people who work with the code every day that I want some random 785 01:18:05,974 --> 01:18:10,534 person coming in and just saying well this is a soft fork so I'm allowed to change all these files 786 01:18:11,494 --> 01:18:15,334 it's very hard to remember where everything is I can understand that people want the code changes 787 01:18:15,334 --> 01:18:23,014 to be very infrequent I can understand that okay my takeaway is one of the most rational responses 788 01:18:23,014 --> 01:18:30,214 here is just that people are scared from history the block size war tore apart the community and 789 01:18:30,214 --> 01:18:36,934 I did hear from a certain maxi in a previous debate where he at the time actually also thought 790 01:18:36,934 --> 01:18:43,254 that the civil war was going to kill bitcoin so maybe people don't want to basically have things 791 01:18:43,254 --> 01:18:48,454 escalate back to that kind of level and they've decided to take a more conservative approach 792 01:18:48,454 --> 01:18:56,374 Jeremy Rubin's thing is 119 any pre-route is 118 I think okay god I hate to have gotten that wrong 793 01:18:56,374 --> 01:19:00,294 but it's very funny because I mean like if you just search for it online I just found like he's 794 01:19:00,294 --> 01:19:05,734 saying so he's well I don't want to get it too far into this but his thing is numerous you know 795 01:19:05,734 --> 01:19:09,974 he's a very simple idea that it's very powerful and I don't see why it's a controversy at all 796 01:19:09,974 --> 01:19:15,094 but it gets low minds low mind slippery slope thing you approve one thing more people come 797 01:19:15,094 --> 01:19:21,894 with proposals it just gets too messy and you risk basically devolving into the block size war 798 01:19:21,894 --> 01:19:30,534 situation again I'm just speculating well anyway so we are about at time and I would like to give 799 01:19:30,534 --> 01:19:37,494 both of you a opportunity for a last word I will let's see start with Paul this is an opportunity 800 01:19:37,494 --> 01:19:44,214 to summarize your position talk about some takeaways from this conversation how you might 801 01:19:44,214 --> 01:19:49,254 have shifted your position or picked up from your opponent somehow so go ahead Paul okay sure well I 802 01:19:49,254 --> 01:19:57,094 think we did agree a lot which I think is fair my position started as which I still believe that 803 01:19:57,094 --> 01:20:02,694 we may need to sort of start outgrowing maximalism or at least that it's changed over time so 804 01:20:02,694 --> 01:20:09,814 in the era of litecoin it made 100 sense but now when you have a situation where they have 805 01:20:09,814 --> 01:20:15,094 the one darknet market that is only accepting Monero you have to wonder like are we out of 806 01:20:15,094 --> 01:20:22,774 touch and so I find it concerning that the objective justifications for maximalism I think 807 01:20:22,774 --> 01:20:29,974 are winding down a little bit and yet it it doesn't seem to have reacted to that rationally 808 01:20:29,974 --> 01:20:35,734 it's still going full strength again those are five things that I listed that I think would make 809 01:20:35,734 --> 01:20:41,894 me feel a lot better about being a toxic maximalist I consider myself to be a maximalist but not a 810 01:20:41,894 --> 01:20:46,774 toxic one and so if there is more of an emphasis I'm just going to repeat it back if there was more 811 01:20:46,774 --> 01:20:53,414 of an emphasis on progress over time and change and clever ways to change while keeping the thing 812 01:20:53,414 --> 01:21:01,414 the bitcoin core static or keeping the core rules static or however you like to do that I think if 813 01:21:01,414 --> 01:21:06,134 there was less peer pressure I think the peer pressure is a red flag I think the totalitarian 814 01:21:06,134 --> 01:21:13,094 carnivore modernity I think that's a red flag like why if that if the thing the idea can cross 815 01:21:13,734 --> 01:21:18,614 species that effectively then how do you know it's not attacking you from some other domain 816 01:21:18,614 --> 01:21:24,854 where it originally evolved and has no place being in your mind maybe the hypocrisy point 817 01:21:24,854 --> 01:21:32,774 I do think it is weird if people are toxic online and nice in person if it's not going to be if this 818 01:21:32,774 --> 01:21:37,894 is just a way a feature of the internet then it's not really related to bitcoin and then we wonder 819 01:21:37,894 --> 01:21:42,614 it's just making people miserable for no reason is it suppressing creativity for no reason that I 820 01:21:42,614 --> 01:21:47,094 don't know I don't see the point of that certainly it's a red flag when people appear not to actually 821 01:21:47,094 --> 01:21:52,294 believe the things that they say on twitter that those things may be false the grift thing I actually 822 01:21:52,294 --> 01:21:57,094 think um I actually think Giacomo is right about that there is also a counter grift uh and you 823 01:21:57,094 --> 01:22:01,894 shouldn't I'm the wrong person to make the point because I have a this thing that I want out of 824 01:22:01,894 --> 01:22:09,414 bitcoin so I'm the wrong person to although I've never sold anything as a result of uh so um so 825 01:22:09,414 --> 01:22:17,174 maybe it's not so bad but yeah it is true that the maximalist grifts are not so bad some of them I 826 01:22:17,174 --> 01:22:23,414 think maybe are like again safetines book you that was stuff that you could have read for free online 827 01:22:23,414 --> 01:22:30,054 but instead you bought it in a book form I don't know is that a grifter is that just harmless fun 828 01:22:30,134 --> 01:22:34,534 I honestly couldn't tell you but I think Giacomo is right the fact that there is a counter grift 829 01:22:35,094 --> 01:22:39,014 and there's just so much altcoin grift that probably I should just discard that point 830 01:22:39,014 --> 01:22:44,054 completely so yeah I thought it was a pretty good conversation overall okay great thank you Paul 831 01:22:44,054 --> 01:22:49,574 Giacomo your turn yeah I agree the conversation was very good uh I will have to check back other 832 01:22:49,574 --> 01:22:56,694 of your debates to to find if if this is a typical I was expecting to fight more but yeah we were 833 01:22:56,694 --> 01:23:01,734 agreeing on many many parts the main disagreement is exactly probably not a matter of global 834 01:23:01,734 --> 01:23:08,934 consideration but of specific context for example I disagree that maximalism is less needed now 835 01:23:08,934 --> 01:23:15,814 than when litecoin came to the scene I think it's actually more needed I don't think now 836 01:23:15,814 --> 01:23:23,094 that that outside the specific bubble that we create for ourself there is a very strong 837 01:23:23,094 --> 01:23:29,094 distinction in people's mind between shitcoins and bitcoin and there is a clear understanding 838 01:23:29,094 --> 01:23:36,534 of the reasons why scarcity cannot be easily cloned and remain scarcity so I think that 839 01:23:37,094 --> 01:23:44,134 for example with litecoin everybody was mad at this copycat of bitcoin which was dishonest 840 01:23:44,134 --> 01:23:49,734 because it was presented as a gpu resistant that it wasn't it was presented as faster confirmation 841 01:23:49,734 --> 01:23:55,094 and it wasn't so it was dishonest but at least they had to mine it and then when people introduced 842 01:23:55,094 --> 01:24:01,254 a bit share with the ICO and then later on ethereum with this ICO and then all the ICOs on top of 843 01:24:01,254 --> 01:24:07,094 ethereum people started to be outraged like I mean what are you doing now are not even mining you are 844 01:24:07,094 --> 01:24:12,694 just pre-mining and selling everything ethereum was pre-mining 60% of the entire money supply 845 01:24:12,694 --> 01:24:20,374 I mean this is a scam but then normalization came in and now I talk with many people outside my 846 01:24:20,374 --> 01:24:26,454 toxic maximalist bubble that find natural that just some guy will create 70% or 60% 847 01:24:26,454 --> 01:24:32,614 of the money supply and sell it and and that's considered a fair attempt to to distribute the 848 01:24:32,614 --> 01:24:40,854 new kind of free open source money so I think that tolerance actually shifted over more tolerance 849 01:24:40,854 --> 01:24:48,134 for scams and at the beginning I think that we had a very strict resistance to bullshit when 850 01:24:48,134 --> 01:24:56,854 litecoin came out Luke Dashjr he just wrote a complete straight to the point direct rebuttal 851 01:24:57,654 --> 01:25:03,094 litecoin is a scam now it's very difficult to do the same with ethereum without having people 852 01:25:03,094 --> 01:25:11,334 trying to to policy my words like you cannot call ethereum a scam I mean I technically can 853 01:25:11,334 --> 01:25:16,694 there is a sentence which is unstoppable application which was false because this guy 854 01:25:16,694 --> 01:25:22,854 stopped an application in order to bail out insiders that lost money so I think I can and 855 01:25:22,854 --> 01:25:28,374 I think that the tolerance is increasing not decreasing and the reason for this is the eternal 856 01:25:28,374 --> 01:25:33,894 september dynamic I was mentioning I think there will come a point where maximalists will be 857 01:25:33,894 --> 01:25:41,334 redundant and useless and just a relic of the past especially in the in its toxic version I think we 858 01:25:41,334 --> 01:25:48,214 are no way close and in a way we are actually even closer to the uh to the situation of the dot com 859 01:25:48,214 --> 01:25:56,534 bubble where something is exploding and I think Goldstein called it the the scambrian explosion 860 01:25:56,534 --> 01:26:02,294 and I think we are still in the in the scambrian explosion and people is even becoming more 861 01:26:02,294 --> 01:26:09,894 tolerant for scams something that would be uh that would be uh really scandalous uh in in 2013 862 01:26:09,894 --> 01:26:16,294 when I started something that was told to me uh was really really outrageous from an open source 863 01:26:16,294 --> 01:26:23,734 point of view uh is now normalized among many people uh so I think that is still needed I think 864 01:26:23,734 --> 01:26:31,974 that about the toxic part I have nothing against people who are nice for example uh Junker bio is 865 01:26:31,974 --> 01:26:37,734 very direct not very nice not always and I'm not very nice especially online and I'm nicer 866 01:26:37,734 --> 01:26:42,214 in person this may be hypocritical I don't know but probably it's also a different medium with 867 01:26:42,214 --> 01:26:48,694 different trade-offs if I was nicer online I probably waste a lot of my time in person you have 868 01:26:49,254 --> 01:26:56,614 one one-to-few communication online I have a one-to-many communication I get to manage my spam 869 01:26:56,614 --> 01:27:02,934 filters in a stricter way even when I disagree I want to block because I'm saving my time from 870 01:27:02,934 --> 01:27:08,294 eternal disagreement over the internet in person that doesn't make any sense so I'm okay with being 871 01:27:08,294 --> 01:27:17,094 nice uh I say John can be toxic uh Saifedean can be considered toxic then again uh I think it's a 872 01:27:17,094 --> 01:27:22,614 very example of somebody who was successful to attract people to Bitcoin and not the other way 873 01:27:22,614 --> 01:27:29,254 around so I think it's very important to consider empirically that toxic maximalism in this self 874 01:27:29,254 --> 01:27:35,494 ironic way of course not not just being assholes with people for no reason is uh is actually working 875 01:27:35,494 --> 01:27:40,694 to attract people and not the other way around because it's giving a very strong distinction 876 01:27:40,694 --> 01:27:46,854 between noise and signal so I think it's empirically working but people like I don't 877 01:27:46,854 --> 01:27:52,374 know I can name probably Eric Lombroso Adam Beck there are some guys that are very very nice with 878 01:27:52,374 --> 01:27:59,254 people online they keep being nice and I see nothing wrong with them there is a strategy choice 879 01:27:59,254 --> 01:28:05,414 whether you want to be nice or blunt it depends on how much time do you have what is your mood 880 01:28:05,414 --> 01:28:12,214 how much do you want to appeal to slogans for noobs or to nuance for experienced people so it 881 01:28:12,214 --> 01:28:17,334 depends it's a strategical choice I have nothing against people who are nice the thing that really 882 01:28:17,334 --> 01:28:24,774 triggers me as I said before are people who are being uh blunt but only or specifically or 883 01:28:24,774 --> 01:28:31,574 especially against other people being blunt I when we get to that kind of meta toxicity I get mad 884 01:28:31,574 --> 01:28:37,654 even with friends I don't know when when if I disagree with Andreas Antonopoulos and he will 885 01:28:37,654 --> 01:28:43,094 say oh this is toxic I mean I'm just disagreeing you have to be nice to me if you want to defend 886 01:28:43,094 --> 01:28:49,414 the idea that everybody must be nice so if you are a nicest you have to be nice with us toxic 887 01:28:49,414 --> 01:28:56,214 maximalists we are the toxic ones so I hate meta toxicity but except for this stuff I think that 888 01:28:56,214 --> 01:29:04,134 it's always good to be skeptical of everybody including yourself sometimes toxicity can help 889 01:29:04,134 --> 01:29:08,854 you out really if you take it seriously and if you take it honestly I will give you another example 890 01:29:08,854 --> 01:29:13,814 one I gave you from my personal experience was I was a shit corner then I met Lawrence then I wasn't 891 01:29:13,814 --> 01:29:21,094 a shit corner anymore but the other one was when uh you know I used my my non-profit association to 892 01:29:21,094 --> 01:29:26,694 funnel sponsorship to open source projects and other people was doing the same Adam Beck and 893 01:29:26,694 --> 01:29:33,414 Alina Vranova and and other people and so we basically decided to go all together on a stage 894 01:29:33,414 --> 01:29:40,214 to present a super centralized uh donation system a little bit like Blink is doing now but that was 895 01:29:40,214 --> 01:29:45,734 before and the community reacted against that ferociously like this is centralization this is 896 01:29:45,734 --> 01:29:53,414 bad uh this is dangerous and I was tempted to just say uh you know these mean bitcoiners that 897 01:29:53,414 --> 01:29:59,734 they are just they are they are mocking me with memes and they are creating t-shirts and hats 898 01:29:59,734 --> 01:30:05,014 against my foundation this is very I was just trying to help and they are being mean and instead 899 01:30:05,014 --> 01:30:13,654 I I made an effort which was a difficult effort it was a a big effort to understand that the stake 900 01:30:13,654 --> 01:30:20,774 are so high and the skepticism is so the adversarial thinking is so needed in this 901 01:30:20,774 --> 01:30:27,094 noisy environment that I and I understand that I condone people thinking I'm a scanner I'm a 902 01:30:27,094 --> 01:30:34,854 scammer I will just try to make my point clearer and to I mean sometimes uh social pressure is bad 903 01:30:35,414 --> 01:30:41,014 but sometimes it's needed there there's always a trade-off but I think that in the context we are 904 01:30:41,014 --> 01:30:48,374 right now we are still 99 noise about the so-called crypto or I mean just read a mainstream 905 01:30:48,374 --> 01:30:54,854 publication about cryptocurrency or blockchain and the things that me and Paul agree about 906 01:30:54,854 --> 01:31:02,454 will be completely out of the radar and it will be just 99.9 percent complete bullshit and and lies 907 01:31:02,454 --> 01:31:08,374 and ridiculous things so I think we're really far away from the moment where we will not need any 908 01:31:08,374 --> 01:31:17,814 more toxic maximalist but maximalism and we can keep that going for a while until it will just 909 01:31:17,814 --> 01:31:24,614 become redundant great thank you Giacomo and Paul you have both been much more civil than I originally 910 01:31:24,614 --> 01:31:30,694 envisioned which is a blessing and and a curse maybe but thank you both for joining the debate 911 01:31:30,694 --> 01:31:34,934 today how can our listeners find both of you starting with Paul sure thanks for having me 912 01:31:34,934 --> 01:31:40,374 first of all and I'm Truthcoin on twitter because my last name is very difficult to spell so that's 913 01:31:40,374 --> 01:31:45,094 not a claim to make any kind of monopoly on truth or anything it's just related to a paper that I 914 01:31:45,094 --> 01:31:51,174 wrote long ago about peer-to-peer oracles t-r-u-t-h-c-o-i-n and then I have a site at 915 01:31:51,174 --> 01:31:58,454 Truthcoin.info which links to my other sites so that's where you can find me great Giacomo on 916 01:31:58,454 --> 01:32:07,814 twitter until I'm not banned I'm GiacomoZucco my name G-I-A-C-O-M-O-Z-U-C-C-O and I also have a 917 01:32:07,814 --> 01:32:14,374 telegram channel which is the same that's my username while GiacomoZucco.channel I think is 918 01:32:14,374 --> 01:32:22,294 the channel I don't even remember but anyway I have a website which is www.GiacomoZucco.com 919 01:32:22,294 --> 01:32:27,094 I should fix the content the videos are not working and I'm a little bit lazy but I will 920 01:32:27,094 --> 01:32:32,054 eventually fix the website so you can check stuff there okay and will you get on big cloud once 921 01:32:32,054 --> 01:32:38,934 you're kicked out of twitter yeah let's hope that it can stay on telegram at least okay great thank 922 01:32:38,934 --> 01:32:42,534 you both so listeners we'd love to hear from you and have you join the debate via twitter definitely 923 01:32:42,534 --> 01:32:46,374 vote in the post debate poll feel free to join the conversation with your comments on twitter 924 01:32:46,374 --> 01:32:50,294 we look forward to seeing you in future episodes of the blockchain debate podcast consensus option 925 01:32:50,294 --> 01:32:55,654 of proof of thought required thanks again to Giacomo and Paul for coming on the show 926 01:32:56,214 --> 01:33:01,094 for me one take away from the debate is that people are nicer in person than online which is 927 01:33:01,094 --> 01:33:05,654 always comforting in a way social media is a place for people to express their outrage without 928 01:33:05,654 --> 01:33:10,694 physically harming anyone it's analogous to how sports are a suitable replacement to wars 929 01:33:11,414 --> 01:33:16,854 I think whether or not toxic maximalism will do good for bitcoin it is now part of the brand 930 01:33:16,854 --> 01:33:22,534 it's a hallmark of the hardcore believers and it will continue to draw attention from bystanders 931 01:33:22,614 --> 01:33:29,334 no coiners or pre-coiners apologies Srinivasan has a quote on how certain types of content 932 01:33:29,334 --> 01:33:35,174 goes viral on twitter if it leads it bleeds if it enrages it engages I think that observation 933 01:33:35,174 --> 01:33:40,294 certainly applies here to toxic bitcoin maximalism as well well what was your takeaway from the 934 01:33:40,294 --> 01:33:44,534 debate don't forget to vote in our post debate twitter poll this will be live for a few days 935 01:33:44,534 --> 01:33:48,854 after the release of this episode and feel free to say hi or post feedback for our show on twitter 936 01:33:49,414 --> 01:33:53,814 if you like the show don't hesitate to give us five stars on itunes or wherever you listen to 937 01:33:53,814 --> 01:33:57,894 this this will help me grow the show and reach more audience members and make sure to subscribe 938 01:33:58,614 --> 01:34:03,654 and be sure to check out our other episodes with a variety of debate topics bitcoin store value 939 01:34:03,654 --> 01:34:09,494 status the legitimacy of smart contracts defi pow versus pos the case for government bailouts 940 01:34:09,494 --> 01:34:14,214 central bank digital currency and so on thanks for joining us on the debate today i'm your host 941 01:34:14,454 --> 01:34:20,694 again and my twitter is genso09 g n t s o zero nine our show's twitter is blog debate see you 942 01:34:20,694 --> 01:34:28,134 at our next debate