Welcome to another episode of the Blockchain Debate Podcast, where consensus is optional

but proof of thought is required. I'm your host, Richard Yan. Today's motion is

Toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin I hear many no-coiners say that

the worst thing about Bitcoin is the Bitcoiners. They're referring to their negative encounters

with staunch Bitcoin believers on social media. The criticism here is that these Bitcoiners are

irrational, vicious, and annoying on social media. And they attack no-coiners in unison

like a coordinated army. The essence of this behavior is captured by the term toxic Bitcoin

maximalism. The idea here is that Bitcoin maximalists believe that Bitcoin is superior

to all other currencies, which includes fiat, obviously, and all other cryptos.

And Bitcoin maxi's impolite behavior online is justified in promoting Bitcoin or defending

its legitimacy. Well, obviously not all Bitcoiners are like that. Today, we'll have two Bitcoiners

facing off on whether such behavior continues to serve Bitcoin well. If you're into crypto and like

to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We feature some

of the best-known thinkers in the crypto space. If you would like to debate or want to nominate

someone, please DM me at blockdebate on Twitter. Please note that nothing in our podcast should be

construed as financial advice. I hope you enjoy listening to this debate. Let's dive right in.

Welcome to the debate, consensus optional, proof of thought required. I'm your host,

Richard Yan. Today's motion, toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin. To my metaphorical left

is Giacomo Zucco, arguing for the motion. He agrees that toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin.

To my metaphorical right is Paul Sztorc, arguing against the motion. He disagrees that toxic

maximalism is great for Bitcoin. Let's quickly go through the bios of our guests.

So, Giacomo first heard of Bitcoin in 2012 and quit his fiat job to focus on Bitcoin full-time

in 2013. He has since co-founded and supported Bitcoin startups in several sectors, including

mining, wallets, consultancy, research, and so on. He is currently a shareholder in a few companies,

including Relay, B-Academy, BHB Network, and he is a freelance educator consultant. He supported

some floss projects during the years, including Open Timestamps, Proof-Martial, Bolt, RGB,

BDK, and so on. Paul is a self-branded independent Bitcoiner. He is perhaps best known as the

proposer of Drivechain, a project that seeks to leverage sidechain technology in order to introduce

additional functionality to Bitcoin. One use case of this is a Zcash-like fully encrypted

sidechain using Drivechain. Welcome to the show, Giacomo and Paul.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Great. So, we normally have three rounds, opening statements, host questions, and audience

questions. Currently, our Twitter poll shows that more people believe that it is not beneficial

for the Bitcoin community to be toxic maximalists.

I'm actually surprised to learn that. I thought for sure I would be on the ropes.

Okay. I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but...

No, I was 100%. I was surprised, because the toxicity is very dominant,

like culturally, at least in the world that Giacomo and I came from, the past. That's how I see it.

But it's good to be the underdog, so it's easier to have a positive change. If I started in

advantage for the way you will measure the success, it's actually better to be the underdog

in this case.

I think the toxic Bitcoiners are intentionally voting the other way,

and then changing their position for the post-debate poll.

They may. It may be the case. They'll do anything to win.

I didn't think about that until now, but that would be really toxic.

Yeah, exactly. After the release of this recording, we will also have a post-debate poll.

Between the two posts, the debater with a bigger change in percentage votes in their favor wins

the debate. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So, Giacomo, you're in the pro position. So,

explain to us why you think toxic maximalism is great for Bitcoin.

First of all, we have to understand what we mean. We have to start with a definition.

I would define Bitcoin maximalism, that it's mostly reappropriation. What happened with the

term queer in queer studies, and also more historical terms like political terms like

wig, or even some artistic terms. So, something was used as a slur against some category of people,

and then these people ironically embraced and self-ironically embraced the slur. So,

I don't think to be particularly toxic, especially in person. But I also think to have an average

toxicity online, especially for the typical mediums that I use. So, it's nothing over the top,

nothing more than the average. But the reappropriation of both terms was mostly done

in order to find some kind of positive spin on something that was invented as a slur. So,

let's divide the toxic maximalist meme. The first part is maximalism. So, maximalism is mostly about

being Bitcoin only, thinking that the novelty of Bitcoin is not replicable, and to try to replicate

it is actually bad either for Bitcoin, or especially for the people trying to do that,

or for the people affected by that into this very asymmetric environment in which we have this kind

of eternal September. So, many people are getting it all the time. So, they need some kind of very

clear distinction between all the bullshit and what is not bullshit. So, maximalism will be

Bitcoin only, for many reasons. Some of the reasons for maximalism are descriptive and not

prescriptive. They will be something like money tends to be a winner-takes-it-all game, so money

tends to converge instead of becoming more fractionate, and Bitcoin has some kind of network

effects that may remind of the protocol wars of the internet in the 90s, where we had many

contendants, but then we had the real de facto open source standard that basically took over

everything and swallowed everything else. So, this is a descriptive level of maximalism. We think

that Bitcoin will eventually dominate for network effects, not just technological, but especially

monetary network effect. Then there is a prescriptive and non-descriptive form of maximalism,

which says that it's not just a reality that we think will happen, but it's actually also good

that we think that Bitcoin will dominate in an absolutely asymmetrical way over any kind of

attempt to replicate it, because of monetary reasons, because of digital scarcity. You can have

scarcity when you have 21 million Bitcoin. You cannot have scarcity in the so-called cryptocurrency

equivalence class. So, there are 21 million Bitcoins, less than that. There are infinite, potentially,

altcoins. There is no scarcity in the cryptocurrency space. There is no scarcity within many altcoins,

but even if you consider altcoins with some kind of a schedule, like Bitcoin inflation schedule,

the overall class of cryptocurrencies cannot replicate scarcity. So, we argue that it's not

just probably going to happen, but it's also very good that there is this kind of strong convergence.

And then the third level of maximalism is that of bad incentives. Even if there was some possibility

of some strange monetary configuration with more than one digital gold, even then the incentives

that bring people to print money, basically, and shield their shitcoins as a better Bitcoin

are so bad and so overwhelming that it's a good heuristic to just ignore shitcoins and just

filter shitcoins with some kind of spam filter. This is an argument similar to there may be some

honest Nigerian prince offering you a very good offer that will make you rich and also enlarge

your penis, but as a general heuristic, given the situation and the bad incentives, it's better to

assume prima facie heuristics that the Nigerian prince will actually not really help you. So, this

is maximalism. Another is toxic. Toxic is mostly a reaction to the way, the style. I don't think that

when we re-appropriated the label toxic, what we meant was really about being rude. Again, I consider

myself pretty nice in person and basically average online, but especially it was something about the

style of trying to cut to the chase, filtering bullshit. So, what people tend to call toxic

on Bitcoiners is this kind of no bullshit disposition, which reminds also what was called

toxic in Linus Torvalds, for example. There are some scandals about Linus Torvalds being a toxic

person because if you said something that he considered bullshit, he was just calling bullshit

without any kind of niceness around that. And there is also consideration that in an environment

where the signal to noise ratio is very, very, very low and where bullshit is everywhere and where

noise is overwhelming and when scams are overwhelming, every tweet that I give out,

people has to know that I have to basically block at least 50 to 100 answers which are a promotion

of some kind of defy scam. I literally had to go to block them individually or using lists

because they are always everywhere. In this environment, usually to be excessively nice

just means the social equivalent to opening spam folders in email. You need heuristic, especially

in this eternal September, new people will need heuristic and I personally need heuristic.

Of course, we have people being really mean, but my contention would be that mean people in Bitcoin

are not any more than mean people over the internet in general. I think that the level of

real and non-self-ironical toxicity you will find in Bitcoin is comparable to the level you will

find about a debate of Veeam versus Emacs and probably inferior to what you will find on

Twitter and especially considering that Bitcoin is a very politically loaded project with a very

adversarial mindset. So all that considering, I would say that Bitcoiners are on average nicer

than other online community and when we talk about real life, really, I don't even remember

meeting somebody who was not nice. Okay, great. By the way, before we move on to Paul's opening

statement, just one quick question for Giacomo. What is the eternal September you're referring to?

Oh yeah, sorry, I gave it for granted. There was this moment where the internet was really

opened up for new users coming in and it was basically a September and there was this new

amount of people flowing in chat rooms and asking basic questions and being defrauded by fraudsters

and incurring old misconceptions about everything about the internet and so people already inside

the internet culture was calling this moment where in September usually you have people

coming back from vacation and entering stuff and this was an eternal September because new people

were coming in eternally always with a very huge information asymmetry and so they were

very, very easy to scam, very, very easy to confound, to confuse and to manipulate and so

eternal September is an eternal inflow of noobs basically. Okay, got it. All right, Paul, go ahead

with your opening statement. Explain to us why toxic maximalism is not great for Bitcoin.

Okay, yes, I've got my work cut out for me because that was quite an opening statement from Giacomo

but I'm going to try to just give you a little bit of where I'm coming from and then maybe

react to a little bit of what he said. I definitely used to be, I still consider myself

to be a Bitcoin maximalist and I've always been a Bitcoin maximalist and in fact my sidechain

project I think is a pretty, it's almost the zenith of maximalism because it says

there is no place for any other project and anything else, even a bad idea, will be copied

into Bitcoin so I consider myself to be totally 100% a maximalist. I think that it's the toxic

maximalism part has become, very recently I've been brought around to the opinion that it causes

more problems than it solves. There was a time long ago, like Litecoin I think is an outrageous

copy-paste of Bitcoin. You compare the effort it took to go from nothing to creating Bitcoin,

which Satoshi Nakamoto had to do, and then you compare that to what it took to create Litecoin,

which is just copy and paste and change like four or five lines of code and then to frame that like

a new thing is outrageous and a crime against truth and extremely detrimental to

Bitcoin's message and its ability to achieve its goal. So I definitely thought that it was horrible

to do that type of thing in the past but now I think actually some of the new alternative projects

have some merit and are at least worth thinking about and the toxicity has become a kind of prison

of the mind and it is closing people's minds I think. This is just my opinion. So I think that

the toxicity, it's something like Star Wars where it used to be really really cool but then people

learned all the little tropes and the little lines or like the member berries from South Park is

something else that comes to mind and people are like well you just use the word shitcoin and then

you can dunk on someone and it's funny. So basically my concerns with it, I made a little

list here, things that I think I wish we could change a little bit about maximalism to make it

I think a little better. One, the whole staticity is a kind of xenophobic paranoid hatred of all

change, which I think is a little unfair. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I wrote that. My second

bullet point is it's too easy to learn the tropes. So like people show up and then they just

they can learn the tropes and you never really know if they actually understand the real maximalism

of the world or if they just learned the talking points. And this is all, number one, this emphasis

on staticity that bitcoin is already perfect and it can't possibly be replicated and everything

about it is everything that you need. That's obviously attacking a straw man a little bit but

I think that meme has made it into the toxic world and it's related to my second point which is that

there is an intense peer pressure in the toxic maximalism community. You feel this need to care

about what other people think but I would be more comfortable if it was just something that people

just believed because it was true like something in physics or thermodynamics or something where

if people didn't believe it you just said well you could just say have fun staying poor. I think it's

fair game actually. Some people think it's outrageously insulting but you're just saying

it's not my responsibility to teach you anything which I think is better than hunting down people

who argue against maximalism and then trying to say that that person's a scammer. And the

stakes are pretty high because many people get hired for sinecure jobs like easy jobs that maybe

we could say some of the exchanges or whatever just based on their tweets. You just tweet and

you can get an easy job doing very little here. Point number three, it has this creeping kind of

totalitarian cult thing. I hate to use the word cult but it's like you go into bitcoin and then

all of a sudden you're like a registered republican in the United States and then you're carnivore

and then you have to lift weights. You can't like you can't do cardio and then all of a sudden

everything modern is the worst. All music made after 1971 is bad. What are we really signing up

for here? It has this kind of creeping way of just striking diagonally into the other. So these are

things that I just wish could change. The four and five, one you mentioned Giacomo on your statement

I have a hypocrisy written down for four which is that people are nicer in person but only online

they have a fake they feel a need to project like a bravado or something that I think is hypocrisy

which is that some people even say you meet them in person they say well you know toxicity it

actually isn't that great for bitcoin but then they go right back to being toxic online and I

don't know how to frame that as either being clever or not taking it yourself too seriously

which would be a good thing or if you can just regard it as hypocrisy. A lot of the most toxic

people I mean we have some other things that we might talk about like people like a Fluffy Pony or

David Vorek they have launched altcoins and then what I'm really thinking of is like magical crypto

group which is like a bitcoin maximalist group but it had a Charlie Lee from Litecoin and

and Ricardo Spogni from Monero was like half non-bitcoin then we could talk about other people

maximalists who have done ICOs on Ethereum and it becomes unclear as to whether how seriously

the people who advance this on Twitter are actually subscribed to it in their heart and soul

I also think there's a little bit of a grift this is point number five my last point which is that

you have an idea of like friends could meet for dinner like we met in Miami a bunch of people

bitcoiners and someone went to pick up the tab for everyone but someone else had already picked

up the tab for everyone because it was just a friendly meeting of old bitcoiners so that was

very nice but I compare that to like when people sell like the steak dinners for a very high price

if you're friends with someone you can just join them for dinner you don't have to sell tickets

and make it like a big event that was something you can already do without so I wonder about if

there is a grift there's definitely a libertarian grift if you've been around the libertarian

community for a while you know some people are big libertarians they throw these big conferences but

you know they got to sell tickets there's weird people there so that's just something I think to

be aware of does it have to be like okay the fuck elan tour I like max geyser a lot I think it's

great but you know he's selling tickets which I think is totally 100% fair I just say is it a

performance or is it real these are just things that I think if they change I would feel a lot

better about so Giacomo said a lot of things I'm going to try to run through a couple of them

number one about reappropriating a slur and that the internet is toxic I definitely think that's

the case I mean I spoke to we're just going to name drop Adam Beck because he's so famous

he told me he was like this is actually nothing compared to what happened in the past and he says

you just need really thick skin that's a classic metaphor idiom or whatever sometimes I feel really

bad for Giacomo because he's not a native English speaker you know he said you really need thick

skin in the industry and he Adam Beck said it was much worse in the flame wars of the 90s or

whatever so I think that's true I think definitely think new people come in and some paternalism is

warranted I wonder if though if the toxicity is not rational enough if it doesn't give cover

to people because the scammers because the scammers can sometimes just say well those people

are just toxic maximalists they think everything is a skin they're closed-minded so I think it has

to be rooted in some kind of rational calculation I agree on the point about the network effects

I completely 100% agree with that sometimes I lament the network effects I wonder if they're

like a prison because it's difficult to beat them and that means there's less room for creativity

and fun I've definitely noticed a decrease in fun which I attribute to the toxic maximalism

in the past we had the meme bitcoin user not affected and people would just laugh all the time

this was before the block size debate got really big the block size debate forced everyone to pick

sides and to religiously adhere to their side so I think that this has contributed to a kind of

problem maybe I can tie this back to what I said at the very beginning which is that

I was you know a fan of maximalism and even toxic maximalism at first but now I wonder if it has

become especially via the route of the peer pressure if it has become just like a self-referential

if it's become like a circle a big circle where people are just enforcing the beliefs of the cult

for no other reason other than that is uh how to get popular and it has now broken away from reality

so I wonder about that I mean we have now some pretty interesting projects I think that people

should keep an open mind towards it's just when the the new projects seem interesting and just when

you really seems as though bitcoin core might be just a little too conservative and slow moving

now this is the time when maybe people should react a little bit against maximalism toxic

maximalism and instead it is going full throttle I think although apparently not because you did

that poll and it seems that most people are skeptical that it is good for me that's just a

small sample and I've had many non-bitcoin projects on my show and I come from non-bitcoin background

so maybe there's a lot of non-bitcoiners bias yeah okay great so that's some of my thoughts there

okay Giacomo go ahead okay now actually I would like to acknowledge some of the points that Paul

made I think this conversation is unfortunately for your format uh getting too nice

but I think maybe debates are played out though maybe and I don't think the public really likes

them as much as they yeah I don't know I mean people like fights but then they say they don't

it's complicated the relationship between uh content and personal behavior is not easy but

anyway I will start acknowledging some of the points I think that most of the people that will

repeat the mantra shit coins are bad and who shit coins is a scammer they will probably not even

understand why I think I have um I have a justification I think I just gave a very brief

justification but I can go on and on and on giving more justification I really reflected on that

when I was first a shit coiner in 2013 and then when I became a toxic maximalist I really gave it

a thought so I think I can justify it I think that's also the case for other famous toxic

maximalists but I also think that the majority of people that will replicate the slogans will

replicate just parroting without any kind of understanding so I absolutely agree with Paul

here the difference probably is that I just disagree on the fact that this is anyhow avoidable

if you are going to create any kind of simple message at all I also know that my father

doesn't really know why he has a spam folder and he will probably delete the Nigerian princess

he just knows that it's a scam he doesn't really know what is the kind of monarch in Nigeria if

there are princes what is the probability of this kind of stock money in the bank scheme

he doesn't know details he just acquired a very simple slogan which I think it may be false

in the same sense that everything may be false we live in a simulation and whatever but it's

pragmatically a very good very very good heuristic a very very good approximation of truth so I agree

that most of the people will repeat shitcoin bad because they are just parroting but I also think

this is both unavoidable and also overall good compared to the other way around which is people

mindlessly parroting shitcoins are good which is I think is the only realistic alternative

also the second part is about peer pressure I agree that there is one and it's strong it is

unpleasant I felt it myself

one of the project that you mentioned it at the beginning that I am sponsoring RGB project

that is basically about shitcoins some kind of shitcoins is inside of bitcoin architecture not

unlike the idea of sidechain which is actually cooler because that is bringing the functionalities

without bringing the actual shitcoin so sidechain will be cooler than RGB RGB is actually it's not

a scammy project because I'm not printing money and not selling tokens but it's something that is

explicitly designed to allow people to scam other people so I felt peer pressure I know that I'm

working on thin ice when I presented that when I was in Lisbon presenting RGB I made probably

60% of the presentation was about justifying myself in order not to be considered a scammer

by other people there and then I managed to enter very late in the details so I feel that

and I know it's unpleasant but I also think that this kind of peer pressure can compensate

other very very bad incentives that I also felt on myself and I'm sure that most people in bitcoin

since a while felt on themselves that if they only were a little bit more dishonest they could

make so much more money just joining any kind of scammy ICO in 2017 or scammy DeFi scheme now

if only once it would be more malleable about ethics we could be so much richer and this is

a strong pressure and I think this pressure also won over some friends and that I respected

and I mean I still understand but I think that the peer pressure is unpleasant but it is a strong

social force partially compensating another very bad social force which is incentive to

to take advantage of the huge noise and the huge information asymmetry in this environment so yes

it's ugly but I think it's needed so the other two things that I want to acknowledge is true that

toxic maximalism is not just about shitcoins it also expanded to somehow include other two things

one is conservation of bitcoin as is so not changing bitcoin I think there are also good

reasons to argue for this but this is not as clear-cut as shitcoins I think that shitcoins

if you really think about that you will understand that it's mostly driven by bad incentives that is

mostly going nowhere while if you think about changing bitcoin I understand the need to be very

conservative very adversarial very skeptical very critical move slow but in a way exactly for the

reason that I don't think shitcoin can succeed then I have to also think that bitcoin must evolve

because if you think about that if shitcoins could succeed there would be no reason to change bitcoin

at all because you can just do that on a shitcoin and it will work so if shitcoin were possible then

we would not need any kind of change in bitcoin since I think that shitcoins are not viable long

term that's the reason why I have to be careful not to be too much close-minded about changes in

bitcoin so I mean all the debate with Paul about sidechain may be one example but even

taproot itself was another example and now there is a good debate between John Carvalho

and Adam Beck on Twitter a toxic one because both have a thick skin and both are very direct

well Adam is very nice but John is very direct is a little bit toxic and he's basically saying

you developers will just go on adding bullshit all the time you will never stop but we need stability

TCP IP version 4 is not changing since the 80s and all the world is built on top in order to build

on top we have to move change at the margins and leave the base layer alone and Adam is answering

you are right but not quite yet because we can do this change which makes a lot of sense

across input signature aggregation and then any prev out and then maybe simplicity which will

allow any other future chain and I was watching today's and they both make sense if we ossify too

soon then bitcoin misses out a lot of good things that it can do for people if we ossify too late

then bitcoin is too easy to change and it will be changed forever and there will be no stability

and no layerization you cannot build on top of a foundation that keeps moving and so I recognize

both when maximalism is about shit coins I can try to give nuances but really I cannot find

much nuances when it's about changing bitcoin I can see more space for discussion and nuances

and the other thing that that Paul mentioned is the expansion of the maximalist culture

or cult to other topics which are per se they seems completely unrelated with bitcoin like

diet or modern art or whatever I think that this is also unavoidable in a way because bitcoin

basically created one kind of social situation in which a group would think that all the authorities

in the sector of money and finance are completely wrong and or dishonest now is starting to question

if the same principle of authority and hyper specialization is not just failing in money

but is maybe also failing in nutrition or maybe it is failing on climatology or whatever so the

fact that bitcoin can generate skepticism and critical thinking and anti-mainstream views

of everything else I think is quite natural I see it happening to myself I studied physics

so I see a video about I don't know the standard model is fake by my perpetual motion machine

and I would be just this is bullshit just like a maximalist but now I think if everybody was

wrong on money and finance completely like if the most highest authorities on this economic stuff

are actual morons and bitcoin proved that in their face what are the possibility that some

other field I don't personally understand so it's an extension of don't trust verify

so of course the output the outcome is not fixed I don't think that everybody in bitcoin

will eventually start just eating red meat but I think that everybody consistently considering

the don't trust verify meme after bitcoin proved the meme viable will probably question a lot of

other stuff and I think this is the origin of the weird and then you have the typical social dynamic

of a group of friends they will influence each other even in random stuff and of course some of

this stuff will be completely idiosyncratic bitcoiners they just like this kind of music

or this kind of it will just be random but it's also inevitable but I understand that why I will

not give any break to shitcoin promoters I can give break to vegans because I know it's not a

mathematical step from bitcoin to meat it's just a it's just a mindset probably of critical thinking

then the other thing is about grift so since people will just start pirating everything

including shitcoins are bad or shitcoins are good can you leverage these in order to make

money without effort just writing the easy slogan yes you can I think that I may feel it on myself

as well I mean if I just shout shitcoiners are bad I will receive some kind of likes some kind

of retweet I will have some kind of visibility so this is a fair point I think it's not strong yet

again in the context if you compare the advantage I get from being a toxic maximalist and soliciting

this kind of knee-jerk reaction of shitcoiners are scammers and I can feel it but it's no way

as seductive for now it's not strong as the alternative which is if you turn the shit

corner you will have way more audience way more I mean it's so difficult to stay bitcoin only it's

really difficult especially in a business I was confronted by so much pressure to include shitcoin

stuff and to be a little less strict about that which compared to that the negative pressure of

peer judgment or the positive pressure of grift I can capitalize of being a maximalist I think

they just pale in comparison then there is the point about hypocrisy of being nice in person

and being mean online I mean I agree with this as well I agree with Paul here it's not a completely

integrated we behave differently online or offline I also think it's inevitable it's not bitcoin

related I do the same with political Twitter on Twitter if you just tell to me I'm pro-government

I will probably just block because first of all for me it's one too many because I have a few

followers so I cannot really follow and it's just more natural there is not a face in front is I

understand the dynamic that makes me more of an asshole on Twitter than in person it's true but

it's not really bitcoin related I can see it in every other topic this is really what Adam said

this is just about the interim so I will go back to my point and the last one is I agree completely

with Paul that I'm not happy that maximalism is true network effects are a prison and if it was

possible to have a multi-coin world everything would be easier we will not be forced to have

bitcoin as our early shot and everything will be better I will have more money probably some lambos

and we will have greater chances at succeeding to change things unfortunately I think maximalism is

absolutely true otherwise I would be more than happy to be wrong if shitcoin theory is right

I will gladly just start using shit coins for everything they can achieve people think that

people have to push their bag like I have many bitcoins of course I don't I've lost everything

in a boat accident but if I had lots of shit coins a lot of bitcoins then I have to pump my

bags that may be true for very low liquidity altcoins but when you're talking about bitcoin

what's the point my tweets will not change the price I mean hell a nation state adopting

bitcoin as a legal tender didn't and China banning mining completely didn't move the price

it's not my tweet changing the price bitcoin is too liquid for me to pump my bag if I believed

in one coin or dent a coin on ether I would just buy them there is no reason for me to pump my bag

I will just change my bag if I was convinced I was wrong unfortunately I am convinced I'm right

if I may I actually want to come in with just one quick comment right so you guys are both

talking a mile a minute it's hard to keep up but I think if we were to take the 10 000 foot view

the success case of bitcoin in my mind is that it has achieved sufficient social consensus and that

means a certain number of people and institutions are maybe you don't care about institutions

but institutions are made of people so let's say a certain number of people believe that bitcoin is

the best form of money or a great form of money right I think that to me is the definition of

bitcoin success if you agree with that and follow that logic then I think it makes sense to say we

need more people to believe it right as opposed to having fewer people believe it so I think

some people say that the toxic maximalism attitude is actually turning people away from

this community so if you think about people that are just finding out about crypto what will they

think when they start asking some questions and then instantly getting blocked or how will they

regard this community when they think that it consists of individuals that don't hold the same

type of openness and let's say welcoming attitude as them so my question generally is

if bitcoin requires the building of a bigger community how does toxic maximalism help that

or how does that not help that so I would question this goal because it's not a pyramid scheme where

we need people to enter of course it's nice to have a higher price but the point is that you

have to enter you have to use it when you need it and when you know that you need it and when

you understand it I disagree that we have to lure people in when they are not ready I don't think

that's the the point even because either they will end up not just with bitcoin but with

shitcoin scams as well or they will be burned by some bullshit and they will become the coiners as

a reaction to the degree of bullshit they have seen if you get people in fast people will also

pour out fast I think we need a sustainable slow organic growth not a forced growth but let's say

even empirically I think it's false that toxic maximalist is driving people uh out or slowing

down new people one of my friends was considered one of the most toxic maximalists ever Saifedean

Ammous. Saifedean's book has been translated in what 25 languages read by millions uh and

he convinced the billionaires of uh of public companies and Miss Universe contestants and

Superbowl winners and it's working or even less toxic but considered less toxic but also maximalist

Jack Mallers. Jack Mallers is considered maximalist because he said nah to shitcoins inside his platform

he basically red pilled a nation-state people wants a clear vision people want to hear

conviction people appreciate eventually signal over noise so niceness is a very effective short

term strategy to get people in but it's not a long-term successful strategy to make people

understand stuff yeah I think a lot of that is good I also agree with Giacomo that you've placed

an emphasis on belief that I don't think is right I think the bitcoin success is just when it

changes the way that all the banks of the world including all the central banks do business and

possibly by just putting them all out of business or even changing the way they do business like

the gunpoint not literally a gunpoint but like where someone asks them aren't you going to do

xyz and they then they say something like well we can't because if we do people will just use

bitcoin or something so our hands are tied or whatever so it doesn't really matter uh and I

also agree with him that being nice is sometimes a sign of maybe you could call it lack of confidence

or maybe submission or something like a lack of leadership it's not to say that being mean

is leadership because I think that's actually false there's no real reason to be like when you

go into the bank you want to make sure that they have all of your money and they only give it to

you and not some other person you don't really care that much how nice they are you would prefer

that they are nice but the important thing is that they do their job because you suffer quite

a bit they can screw up it's not like they're screwing up your meal at a restaurant or something

this is like accumulative your savings over over a while toxic maximalism I do think it might drive

people out jock and I both know Chris DeRose he was mentioned as a kind of someone who keeps people

from leaving but it makes the whole enterprise a little bit less welcoming which may be detrimental

and I thought he was on to something with that I remember very clearly and I'm going to say this

because it's happened in public and anyone could search it and read all about it but there was a

time when a Joseph Poon was doing something as creator of the lightning network Tadge Dreija

and Joseph Poon were the creator although if you talk to Tadge he says that really Joseph Poon did

more work or something so the creator of the biggest sacred cow of them all the lightning

network he was doing something and he thought that people had misunderstood him and some toxic

people were calling him out on the mailing list and he tried to it's all on the mailing list that

anyone can read he tried to get them on the phone and they refused and he literally at one point

said that you know his feelings were hurt and that if I misunderstood and then he departed the bitcoin

community so that's an anecdote but we all have a we all have a lot of instincts in our minds right

for lots of different things and whenever we do anything we have many different motivations if you

want to go out for a drink it could be because you're bored it could be because you're thirsty

it could be because you're lonely it could be for a lot of different reasons we have some

motivations to just be really mean people and to just see what we can get away with and I wonder

if the toxic maximalism is just an excuse for people to be sociopathic like that many people

I think have gone there was a famous essay geeks mops and sociopaths that I think people should

read and it's a really interesting and I do think that it's weird because it's in between our two

positions because the geeks need protection and even at the end of the article the person advocates

that there'll be some kind of like sociopath tyrants that protects the geeks yeah the geeks

need protection and yet it's not clear which of the people are the real protectors and which are

just people who can't do anything except manipulate other people the sociopaths and I don't want to

throw out names but John Carvalho was mentioned and I don't think he's 100% like this but this is

the type of thing I wonder about I like John Carvalho I think he does have a lot of skills but

he's like a specialist in being the toxic maximalist it's not like he's a Matt Corallo

or something where he's doing all this networking code on for bitcoin also on the side and then he

also happens to be of the opinion that presumably that bitcoin is categorically superior to

altcoins some people like are they just turning into a career for them this is the grift point

um so that's that so we agreed with again a lot of stuff in particular I'm happy that we agree

that a lot of the people repeating the mantra are doing it mindlessly which is a concern and

as again exactly as Giacomo said you never know easy come easy go right you never know what mantra

those people are going to be repeating when they find a charismatic safety in Amos 2.0 who may

have views that Giacomo and I don't agree with and then that's a problem I'm also happy that

he agrees about the network effect prison it's a weird state of affairs although sidechains could

help us escape the prison but that's all another conversation and so I want to hit on some other

things that are interested like the idea that we have to have some kind of antibody to protect

people from error which I also agree with that there are these these big errors and the altcoins

are like these factories of error and they produce lies about the world um and we have to do something

if we don't do something about it they will take over and destroy the community and I agree with

that I'm not sure that toxic maximalism is like the optimal antibody but we should talk about it

like what to do but I think that would be better what do you think are examples of these lies and

what do you think is a better way to deal with them litecoin is a perfect example you know it

was produced and then like silver to bitcoin's gold the idea that it was four times faster or

whatever because the interblock time was shorter those were basically untruths people would say

them because of the incentives of the situation um and then like just all the stuff I always

remember Tim Swanson and he would come up with all these corny little phrases

remember when Vitalik came up with multi-coin pluralism or something like all of that was

so obvious it was absolutely obvious at the time but very obvious in hindsight that that was just

Tim trying to say that he tried to open the door for Ethereum and then all of that

the pluralism was mostly junk but not completely junk I have to say one more thing though then I'll

stop which is that I think that you may have contradicted yourself Giacomo you're saying

um in physics so bitcoin has stimulated everyone to be skeptical which is good I love when people

are skeptical I'm a skeptic myself but then you also said that this is what happens when people

are friends they all just start to conform basically and I was like oh well that doesn't

sound consistent at all so I thought I'd bring that up which is that isn't this a problem that

everyone is just feeling the peer pressure to conform and I agree 100% agree that that is

what people do but I think that we have to constantly fight against it by always saying

that the door is open for people to disagree and the Joseph Poon story is a little bit maybe we'll

get into a lot of details about that which is maybe not important but people should be able to

dissent from bitcoin core without it being like the complete end of their professional career

I think and without being mobbed on twitter or whatever which I currently

question if that's even possible so those are some of my thoughts well about the contradiction

I think that bitcoin stimulates some kind of skeptical mindset about authorities mainstream

the typical authority oriented uh thinking which is very very present in today's hyper specialized

world so the best economists in the world could be complete morons it doesn't stimulate

particularly skepticism about your peers and your friends so I think that the dynamic about

the group think the dynamic about confirmation on the thinking of your group they are not really

over average they are just normal for a new community new strong community I think they

have drawbacks they have trade-offs of course such a trade-off could be tragic in some circumstances

but really not different from anything I've seen any other active group activity have been I think

it's wrong to design bitcoin as a strange or anomalous example of this especially because

people we mentioned before Adam and John they fight all the time in bitcoin and Matt and other

all the people we mentioned fights and fight and fought a lot and so it's not especially true

but it could be true in particular the Joseph situation which is an example of the bitcoin

community turning against some idea I had about the bitcoin community and so me using the shitcoin

situation as a leverage if you are mean to me I will just go away so I think that the preferential

way to react to strong criticism and even peer gang pressure would be to have a thick skin just

like Adam suggested but I understand that there is a quick this is another problem of shit coins

they offer an easy shortcut to avoid to have a thick skin and to respond and to resist and to

make your point they just allow you the shortcut to say okay I just live for an altcoin yeah usually

that just lives in nothing just like it happened with Jeff Gerdzik and in his ICO you can mention

several people even to some degree Roger Ver and his shitcoin Ethereum itself was basically

a little bit Vitalik rage quitting because nobody cared about on-chain Turing complete contract

stuff enforced by miners which was a very bad idea and now it's obvious it was a very bad idea

and they are switching away from that bad idea but it was like Bender in Futurama I will make my

own shitcoin with blackjack it's a natural thing but just about the grief thing I agree that some

people may become maximalist as a career choice that's true but the point is that now what I see

it's even people being post-maximalist or anti-maximalist as a career in order to just

rise a quick knee-jerk reaction this stuff is layered like you have shitcoiners then you have

the immune response against shitcoiners which is important and we agree then we may have some

excesses on the reaction but then you have the people who capitalizes on the idea that you may

have excesses so you can in this metaphor you can have the autoimmune disease where the white cells

will attack your own body and this is actually possible but now there will be a lot of people

pretending there is such a case when actually there isn't

in order to make themselves relevant because auto autoimmune disease

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

police my speech about shitcoin so this is going all around in meta layers and we'll just end up

fighting with meta meta meta immune responses so if you think we are too mean just be nicer instead

of trying to be mean with mean people and I think that there are some people we are we're grifting

the post-maximalist or anti-maximalist meme especially when they have to cover up for some

kind of there was a friend of mine since we're mentioning many names I think I don't even

remember his name but basically it was a maximalist it was Kauth doing a neo scam mining I don't know

investment scheme and it was a private but it was called out and so he wrote a long article about

being post maximalist which was very convenient after that or the same goes with the recent

episode with the good guy Robert Bradlaugh I mean the thing itself about the cloud was not

even so tragic but the response leveraging outrage against maximalist because you have

been called out I mean that that's just grief on a second layer yeah no I think that's actually a

really good point but that there is a counter grift and that's definitely true and I think

that's really important to keep in mind and there was something I wanted to mention before which is

that I was making fun of Max Keiser I want to be totally clear that because you brought up eos the

stuff that the non Bitcoin team does it's really just way more outrageous than whatever little

things that people in the Bitcoin community might do and it's important to keep that in mind that

thought like eos putting the Times Square ad that is just the name and there's no information and

they raise four billion dollars which is probably like mostly wash trading or whatever they call

chandelier like wouldn't have ringers pay themselves and it looks like the whole thing is you know a

giant mess I mean what we live in a world where I see companies are putting blockchain in the name

on the stock market in order to get money yeah I just got the ice tea company I think the SEC just

sued them for insider trading or something funny like that I think that just happened like yesterday

or something funny like that so that's definitely true and yeah we have to live in the real world

we have to at the end of the day you have to do something and so I agree that there is this kind

of process unfolding this conversation is now colored by the fact that I think that sidechains

are possible and easy so obviously my brain is just thinking well if if we had sidechains then

we could inoculate everyone against shit coins by just deploying sidechains and then whenever

anyone asks like a little question like what does Bitcoin support smart contracts have you ever heard

that question and then you could just say yes and just point to the sidechain and stop talking but

then there'd be no need to like involve any kind of emotional anything at all and it would work

like 99% of the time it's hard for me to imagine what I would believe if I did not think that sidechains were possible and you had to just be this giant war and the thing is the network effects

are prison but you can't say that they're a hundred percent determinative because if they

determined the outcome 100% then the US dollar would just crush everything yeah yeah there must

be some merit difference there is a little loose coupling based on the merit of the protocol and

then if you accept that now we have to wonder what would happen what if the country next to El

Salvador says that they're gonna adopt Bitcoin cash or something and now you're like hello now

it just becomes a giant question mark not that I think that that's likely to happen but very quick

about sidechains I for one I as I'm a fan of the concept I'm skeptical not really contrarian

a little bit skeptical about some parts of the Drivechain proposal and especially I'm skeptical

that the community will adopt it because of the controversy but except for these meta discussion

my skepticism about your idea of such an as an easy way out which I developed more recently is

that I never thought that the driver for shit coins was a technical experimentation of course

the drive was great was people trying to print their own money so that was the drive of course

it was disguised as experimentation but I don't think anymore that removing the alibi so removing

these fake pretends will actually make a big big difference because people just want to print money

and to sell their money to people and that's the incentive and if there will be sidechain

sidechains will basically be honest projects without millionaire ICOs and scammers will have

a marketing department and a marketing budget in order to chill shit coins and sidechains will

not by choice but by a good choice and so eventually I'm not sure that even functioning

uncontroversial sidechains will really kill shit coins because shit coins are not happening

because we need innovation they're happening because we want lambos basically well I think I

do agree with that obviously there's a big disagreement in the community which I think

is totally fair about to what extent if you kill the disguise or the pretext like how detrimental

is that really gonna be and I think it would be pretty detrimental but it's a view I hold

very weakly it could easily not be detrimental at all right because of the way people's brains

work with cognitive dissonance and everything it might even make the situation worse somehow I have

no idea because there's nothing stops the shit crime from saying that it also has sidechains

and plus it has this other thing and whatever so it will ultimately destroy Bitcoin and whatever

blah blah blah so who knows what will happen actually in that hypothetical world I hope

people know by now my primary interest in sidechains isn't my own sidechain technology that

I myself developed which is about prediction markets and doesn't really have anything to

do with killing shit coins I guess that it would I only brought it up because I was wondering about

what is the best way to make the antibody because the playing field is tilted it's like getting

glasses where there's an inherent bias in the world towards altcoins because they will have

the marketing budget obviously when you say that you're being both literal but more really abstract

because and I agree that it's like this tilt towards that and if we want to see clearly we

have to tilt it back the other way I'm not sure I don't know if it's better for Bitcoin to be

again you drew the distinction at the very beginning between just being maximalist and

being toxic I I can see it giving cover to the the people who altcoin it makes it easier for

them to write like that person you mentioned it makes it just gives them more stuff to write

about in their little article that says that they're post maximalist or whatever okay so let's

talk a little bit more about this multi-coin universe right so Paul at the beginning of our

conversation you had mentioned that you were looking at some other projects that have been

happening and in 2018 you did write an article actually about Bitcoin I think yeah we're talking

maximalism of Bitcoin yeah April 2018 they may have stolen that meme from me as far as I know

who knows but yeah that's something I worried about so in that article I worried about to what

extent will the network effects just carry Bitcoin to victory no matter how slow it is so one thing

is the the soft forks used to happen multiple times per year and now it's like once per five

years is that a good thing or a bad thing with sidechains it wouldn't matter at all because

sidechains could then do whatever innovation they like but anyway am I interrupting you sure no not

at all yeah so well my question is do you see Bitcoin being successful in a sustainable manner

in a state of the world where many other old coins also flourish and let's define sustainably

successful for Bitcoin as say being reserve currency for one of g7 central banks for a

decade or something well yeah that's that is a weird thing I mean I think sustainable it's very

clear to me what it means it means that there's no reasonable reason to think that it would go

away anytime soon that's just what sustainable means to me but that seems like a low bar though

what does going away mean hmm well maybe it is a low bar but that's just what it means so how

about you do you want it to be number one on coin market cap or something and so what else do you

want I think abstractly speaking bitcoins being successful basically means successful is different

from sustainable of course okay well I said sustainably successful okay yeah well sustainably

successful well again I don't think that's important I mean the meat of your question

is if there's a lot of altcoins that are that have some real users so they're not just the

Ponzi finance they need to have real users David Vork's project SIA it has you can argue about is

it badly designed is it good design or is this fake or whatever you can either run his software

just go to his website and there are users who actually use the service so and certainly for

Monero I need to keep tabs on this in case it changes but there were I think now two darknet

markets that only accept Monero I think one white market but yeah maybe I'm not the point is that

the darknet markets those people are real users they would like to actually use the coin to to

do something that you're using it for the privacy feature to me it's very clear when someone is

using a crypto project for its task versus when they they just buy it on the exchange and hope to

sell later that's not to say that I agree with the people who say that saving money is using money

that's one of the many ways of using money and I agree with that but the point I'm trying to make

is there are actually altcoins that have a feature that someone actually wants and then they use it

for the feature so if in a world where that is happening you have an altcoin world it's open-ended

as it would be in the sidechain world but anyone could create anything including bad ideas of which

most new ideas are overwhelmingly likely to be bad because they're created more or less at random

through trial and error but you have a lot of creativity and new ideas are created and you know

how it is with evolution you have enough variation and enough selection and enough time good ideas

happen accidentally I kind of think aetherium has had maybe one two or three ideas in this very

Darwinian sense that they've just lucked into being good the ERC 20 token kind of being one

where they accidentally reinvented it even though we had it in Bitcoin with colored coins counterparty

etc they just hit on something and especially with the global community they hit on something that

had something that people liked that is a bad example because it happens to be related

intimately to just Ponzi scamming people but the ERC 20 part of it was something that I think

someone liked so to just try and wrap up you asked me about what does Bitcoin look like in a world

where it's Bitcoin is frozen and there's this creativity happening elsewhere I personally I

would be a little nervous about that because you never know what it is that evolution or human

creativity is going to assemble I mean no one ever expected Bitcoin to be assembled from from

nothing there was from like the remnants of digicash and liberty reserve etc so I think but

there's no limit to how good of an idea someone might have it's possible that would almost

certainly be reinstantiated as like a hard fork of Bitcoin or something if it were super super good

but I don't know I don't know about that either because then there'll be people out there right

now thinking who are like 13 14 15 years old maybe and they're thinking like maybe they're

also early Bitcoin adopters and they made like a hundred thousand x return on their five dollar

investment and now they're thinking you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna come up with the next thing

and I'm gonna set it up so that it's just like coin and everyone hates it at first and I'm gonna

use the toxic maximalism as a big shield and then I'm gonna make it so it's the best investment in

the world and I'm gonna trick everyone into thinking it's terrible at first and only after

it's too late will they realize that how great it is and then it will like flip in Bitcoin and

destroy it or something so that's obviously kind of a silly story but yeah I worry about that about

where I think the creativity is ultimately going to win to put it in uh let's put it in one sentence

okay great so I have another question for Giacomo how much do you think the toxic attitude

with maximalism is correlated with the low cost basis in general it feels like the sort of

attitude that we're seeing corresponds to the timing for when someone starts using or buying

Bitcoin so do you think there's an element of how early Bitcoiners are already so wealthy in

fiat terms that they might think that normal rules of civil discourse no longer apply to them

oh I think that's an optic illusion I think that's like a selection bias uh it's the other way around

people who have been around for a long time they tend to become typically Bitcoin maximalists

one example of this would be me uh when when I first discovered Bitcoin in 2012 at the beginning

I was skeptical like this cannot work but when Bitcoin during that year proved me wrong it

basically broke my skepticism my it broke my spam filters so for one year after convincing myself

Bitcoin was possible I just thought that everything was possible so any kind of bullshit you can

imagine I started to study NXT to study Ripple because Satoshi Nakamoto himself inadvertently

scammed me because he mentioned Ripple positively but he was talking about another Ripple a coinless

project before Bitcoin but anyway I was really a shit coiner for one year and then I met a toxic

guy Lawrence Naum the guy was I was working for him in green address wallet in 2013 at the end of

2013 quite toxic to me I mean in a nice way but it was like you are full of bullshit everything

you're saying is wrong it's monetarily impossible and I was not a developer I was just a guy with

some vaguely technical background and he was like look at this fucking code people don't know what

they're doing this is absolute garbage and in a very toxic way he made me understand the situation

then this kind of awakening deepened when I added some monetary consideration about digital

scarcity again the very simple sentence there is a scarce amount of Bitcoin there is an infinite

amount of cryptocurrency so I convinced myself there was absolutely no way to have a stable

long-term significant multi-coin market at least except with some kind of external

I don't know if one government will impose one shit coin as legal tender then maybe you may

have a fractioning like you have today with fiat the reason we are talking in English right now

but we are using different kind of money is because government are basically artificially

fractioning the standards while people will eventually naturally try to converge so this

is my example I started out as shit coiner and I became a toxic maximalist meeting other toxic

maximalists another typical example would be like I don't know famous podcaster Peter McCormack we

disagree about many things sometimes he's considered too normie to be I mean in external topics like

meat and global warming and that kind of stuff I'm the maximalist and he's the normie but about

shit coins especially about the original significance of original meaning of maximalism

he became a maximalist he just said okay I was following tons of shit coins any kind of

bullshit narrative then I got hurt and now I am being selective and I'm rising anti-spam filters

and I will just stay Bitcoin only and he still it tends to be nice even too much for somebody

but so maybe it's not really toxic even if I would argue that it strictly depends on

what you talk about but is another story of course there are counter example

but in the counter example are less frequent less significant and especially typically

driven by the dynamics Brian Armstrong was saying uh was saying very maximalist things in 2014

there's still the tweet of Brian Armstrong which is why which is something like

altcoins are a distraction we must focus only on Bitcoin and now he's like the king of shit

coiners and and of course you have you have you have other people like Jeff Garzik and stuff

like that you have many maximalists you have some maximalists turning shit coiners mostly I think

it's bad to always think about very down-to-earth motives but I think it's about money because

Paul knows that if he was going to launch a Truthcoin altcoin instead of inventing Drivechain

he would be way richer maybe less proud of himself maybe less more cognitively more dissonant

but he would be fucking richer and so he knows that and I don't know that so there is direction

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

famous tweet by Paul himself that was super toxic maximalist it was something like I don't remember

the wording but it was anybody was working on altcoins are stabbing Satoshi in the back is

that right so that was very maximalist so in a way there are counter example of people growing

skeptical of maximalist but uh the typical evolution is you start you believe in anything

uh so you are a shit coiner and then you gradually learn and only in a few occasion you become either

too bored or too greedy and you have to go back to shit coins no first of all I don't think that's

a low blow at all I think that's completely all my numerous tweets are fair game although the number

of times I tweet while intoxicated is extremely high and people should keep that in mind I do

still believe that actually that you are stabbing Satoshi in the back it's unclear whether or not

it's good for society or good for bitcoin the motion of the debate was is it good for bitcoin

so here's the thing if you think like it's often said that bitcoin core is a meritocracy

I mean there's sort of an implication that the process for core development is like infallible

and that it will always attract the best ideas and it will always sort out the bad ideas and

obviously I have a conflict of interest because I'm floating an idea in the bitcoin core that

is controversial but what I mean to say is that it can't possibly be infallible and even the people

who have been in it for a while think that it's imperfect to say the least when you have that

angle you have to wonder what is the best way to help bitcoin is it to challenge bitcoin by creating

a different project I do think competition is good you know it's a shame because I used to

make fun of Eric Voorhees for saying that which I still would when litecoin came out it was a fake

pretext that was adding choice to the marketplace it really wasn't but yeah I do think altcoins are

a distraction I do think that people are selling out um which is a shame but I wonder about what

is the best way to address that I don't know I guess maybe it's just hard to describe but there's

a lot of nuance in my brain I'm trying not to make this like the BIP300 referendum or whatever

which is very difficult because what all these projects are they're either saying that there's

something wrong with bitcoin core and or there's something wrong with bitcoin core development

process because they'll never add my great idea which is the turing complete scripts or whatever

that's like an essential part of their existence as I see it and sidechains would just kill all of

that so that is where my brain is at and I'm trying to get my brain away from that but it

is difficult um let me just summarize very quickly I feel that bitcoin maxis basically

have three wars going on right one against no coiners we briefly touched upon that Giacomo was

talking about people in finance or governmental high places have been wrong for many years and

bitcoiners saw the light and now they're questioning many things in addition to

monetary policies and then the second war is against shit coiners so people that are trying

to steal market share people that are trying to essentially only make money not to say bitcoiners

are not trying to make money right let's be real here bitcoin itself is a sort of money and early

adoption signifies that you want to have more of the better money than the worst money which in

bitcoin's early days was just fiat money but now there's this alternative form of worse money in

bitcoiners minds which is shit coins so that's the second war and then the third war is I think

civil war really right within the bitcoiner community you have people that are very

conservative that do not want change and then you have people that are more aggressive and more

creative right so let's talk about that last point a little bit more I know you touched upon that a

little bit paul what in your mind are say top two or three proposals including Drivechain that you

think are critical for bitcoin's thriving or even survival and what are the consequences for the

canonical chain to not accept them sure well that's a very loaded question but let me say

something else instead because I don't want to just say that BIP300 is the only thing you need

to change I mean I'm saying it now but it's the only thing you would need it's the last change

that you would need but I think when you brought up the civil war I mean maybe think of the block

size debate I think everyone in their mind regardless of what happens with bitcoin you have

to always be pursuing truth and obviously that's a very that's not a very controversial thing to say

everyone always thinks that they are doing that I'm sure but a lot of seeds were sort of planted

I think most people would agree that we should just team up and in order to defeat the others

the large blocker versus small blocker side and in order to have a more cohesive team we need to

get our message out and it has to be a simple message that the team can understand so that the

team can coordinate and I do think there was a kind of sacrifice of the idea that the truth is

really important in that event and I think that was a kind of a tragic collateral damage of the

block size war and I don't know if anyone will ever agree on how big or small that that idea

was but I think it is sort of there and it has planted other seeds that are related to your

question it's like buying a house these days where the housing market is crazy but people want

to buy a house that has good resale value so they want to make sure in the United States anyway so

no one wants to buy like a weird house they want to buy a house that other people will buy and what

am I talking about here it's kind of like people are afraid to back any idea that just doesn't seem

to be getting attention even if it's totally circular so the idea I'm going to bring up is

not even my own I'm going to bring up Jeremy Rubin's idea which is a perfectly good idea he

has a whole website with lots of great use cases and how basically simple it is and how it would

let people fix a lot of different things related to complexity smart contracts and fees and things

but it's fallen as I understand it into this kind of weird loop where just people weren't

paying it quite enough attention and then now it has attracted this stigma and I think for

absolutely no reason whatsoever because he's never really done anything I'm very mavericky and crazy

and I'll just do things to be unpopular on purpose because I studied at the Krista Rose school of

being crazy but Jeremy Rubin was like chair of scaling multiple scaling bitcoin conferences and

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

in direct contradiction what I was saying at the beginning about toxic maximalism being static I

think toxic maximalism is static but unfortunately the reality is progressive which is so much stuff

is happening in bitcoin so quickly in every direction all the different lightning implementations

all the different like cultural stuff like the different conferences and meetups now

the El Salvador stuff like all that stuff like so much progress technical progress

translating stuff into different languages and stuff that's happening in Nigeria Zimbabwe whatever

there's so much progress that it's hard to keep track of what everyone's doing which is a good

thing but I wonder if this is a flaw that his idea is which I think is bib 118 but I cannot guarantee

that and so I regret even saying it now because I don't remember which bib number it is because

there's a lot of numbers but his idea is neglected you ended up with a very nice one for Drivechain

because you can use like spartan you can also use spartan memes with uh lionidas king and you're not

even big we're not even leveraging that it was very funny some people in our Drivechain group

have made a photoshop to one or two but I was wondering like yeah I had the only ones that

started with the 300 series I was like is this like some kind of am I being like slighted or

something and then there now there's many with 300 so I was like oh I was like okay but I was

getting a little paranoid there I was like why because there's luke seems to just he seems to

sign them in like an utterly random order I mean yeah I can't make any sense of it at all so that's

funny so I wonder if this idea is just being neglected for no reason and then if so if it

indicates that the process is biased towards people are afraid because of what happened with

the block size war there were some people who were actually emerged as leaders people know the names

I don't know if I want to say them no there some people naturally emerged as leaders of the small

block movement which won and now it's kind of just like they have a lot of influence over what it is

that people find interesting so that's really the real answer your question is that a problem

should people do anything about it should people be more aware of it or am I wrong when I say that

and I'm just biased because no one likes BIP300 I don't know but that's really what I think is the

more important part of what you are asking about because all of his thing does is basically like

why it shouldn't this be a travesty if I try to explain you should get the explanation from him

I don't even want to explain it because I know that it won't be exactly what he would say but

his thing is very simple it just lets you pay to like a kind of a thing a little hash little box

that can contain all kinds of stuff that you put into it later so his thing doesn't have these grand

implications like what I'm trying to do with BIP300 it's just a simple thing I don't really see how

it harms anyone people are just determined not to look at it though and by the way the aversion to

all these changes they are generally hard forks right if it's a soft fork then no no no no no and

I think no both mine and his are soft forks so I don't think that's the case because you know

even just the a soft fork you have people who work with the code every day that I want some random

person coming in and just saying well this is a soft fork so I'm allowed to change all these files

it's very hard to remember where everything is I can understand that people want the code changes

to be very infrequent I can understand that okay my takeaway is one of the most rational responses

here is just that people are scared from history the block size war tore apart the community and

I did hear from a certain maxi in a previous debate where he at the time actually also thought

that the civil war was going to kill bitcoin so maybe people don't want to basically have things

escalate back to that kind of level and they've decided to take a more conservative approach

Jeremy Rubin's thing is 119 any pre-route is 118 I think okay god I hate to have gotten that wrong

but it's very funny because I mean like if you just search for it online I just found like he's

saying so he's well I don't want to get it too far into this but his thing is numerous you know

he's a very simple idea that it's very powerful and I don't see why it's a controversy at all

but it gets low minds low mind slippery slope thing you approve one thing more people come

with proposals it just gets too messy and you risk basically devolving into the block size war

situation again I'm just speculating well anyway so we are about at time and I would like to give

both of you a opportunity for a last word I will let's see start with Paul this is an opportunity

to summarize your position talk about some takeaways from this conversation how you might

have shifted your position or picked up from your opponent somehow so go ahead Paul okay sure well I

think we did agree a lot which I think is fair my position started as which I still believe that

we may need to sort of start outgrowing maximalism or at least that it's changed over time so

in the era of litecoin it made 100 sense but now when you have a situation where they have

the one darknet market that is only accepting Monero you have to wonder like are we out of

touch and so I find it concerning that the objective justifications for maximalism I think

are winding down a little bit and yet it it doesn't seem to have reacted to that rationally

it's still going full strength again those are five things that I listed that I think would make

me feel a lot better about being a toxic maximalist I consider myself to be a maximalist but not a

toxic one and so if there is more of an emphasis I'm just going to repeat it back if there was more

of an emphasis on progress over time and change and clever ways to change while keeping the thing

the bitcoin core static or keeping the core rules static or however you like to do that I think if

there was less peer pressure I think the peer pressure is a red flag I think the totalitarian

carnivore modernity I think that's a red flag like why if that if the thing the idea can cross

species that effectively then how do you know it's not attacking you from some other domain

where it originally evolved and has no place being in your mind maybe the hypocrisy point

I do think it is weird if people are toxic online and nice in person if it's not going to be if this

is just a way a feature of the internet then it's not really related to bitcoin and then we wonder

it's just making people miserable for no reason is it suppressing creativity for no reason that I

don't know I don't see the point of that certainly it's a red flag when people appear not to actually

believe the things that they say on twitter that those things may be false the grift thing I actually

think um I actually think Giacomo is right about that there is also a counter grift uh and you

shouldn't I'm the wrong person to make the point because I have a this thing that I want out of

bitcoin so I'm the wrong person to although I've never sold anything as a result of uh so um so

maybe it's not so bad but yeah it is true that the maximalist grifts are not so bad some of them I

think maybe are like again safetines book you that was stuff that you could have read for free online

but instead you bought it in a book form I don't know is that a grifter is that just harmless fun

I honestly couldn't tell you but I think Giacomo is right the fact that there is a counter grift

and there's just so much altcoin grift that probably I should just discard that point

completely so yeah I thought it was a pretty good conversation overall okay great thank you Paul

Giacomo your turn yeah I agree the conversation was very good uh I will have to check back other

of your debates to to find if if this is a typical I was expecting to fight more but yeah we were

agreeing on many many parts the main disagreement is exactly probably not a matter of global

consideration but of specific context for example I disagree that maximalism is less needed now

than when litecoin came to the scene I think it's actually more needed I don't think now

that that outside the specific bubble that we create for ourself there is a very strong

distinction in people's mind between shitcoins and bitcoin and there is a clear understanding

of the reasons why scarcity cannot be easily cloned and remain scarcity so I think that

for example with litecoin everybody was mad at this copycat of bitcoin which was dishonest

because it was presented as a gpu resistant that it wasn't it was presented as faster confirmation

and it wasn't so it was dishonest but at least they had to mine it and then when people introduced

a bit share with the ICO and then later on ethereum with this ICO and then all the ICOs on top of

ethereum people started to be outraged like I mean what are you doing now are not even mining you are

just pre-mining and selling everything ethereum was pre-mining 60% of the entire money supply

I mean this is a scam but then normalization came in and now I talk with many people outside my

toxic maximalist bubble that find natural that just some guy will create 70% or 60%

of the money supply and sell it and and that's considered a fair attempt to to distribute the

new kind of free open source money so I think that tolerance actually shifted over more tolerance

for scams and at the beginning I think that we had a very strict resistance to bullshit when

litecoin came out Luke Dashjr he just wrote a complete straight to the point direct rebuttal

litecoin is a scam now it's very difficult to do the same with ethereum without having people

trying to to policy my words like you cannot call ethereum a scam I mean I technically can

there is a sentence which is unstoppable application which was false because this guy

stopped an application in order to bail out insiders that lost money so I think I can and

I think that the tolerance is increasing not decreasing and the reason for this is the eternal

september dynamic I was mentioning I think there will come a point where maximalists will be

redundant and useless and just a relic of the past especially in the in its toxic version I think we

are no way close and in a way we are actually even closer to the uh to the situation of the dot com

bubble where something is exploding and I think Goldstein called it the the scambrian explosion

and I think we are still in the in the scambrian explosion and people is even becoming more

tolerant for scams something that would be uh that would be uh really scandalous uh in in 2013

when I started something that was told to me uh was really really outrageous from an open source

point of view uh is now normalized among many people uh so I think that is still needed I think

that about the toxic part I have nothing against people who are nice for example uh Junker bio is

very direct not very nice not always and I'm not very nice especially online and I'm nicer

in person this may be hypocritical I don't know but probably it's also a different medium with

different trade-offs if I was nicer online I probably waste a lot of my time in person you have

one one-to-few communication online I have a one-to-many communication I get to manage my spam

filters in a stricter way even when I disagree I want to block because I'm saving my time from

eternal disagreement over the internet in person that doesn't make any sense so I'm okay with being

nice uh I say John can be toxic uh Saifedean can be considered toxic then again uh I think it's a

very example of somebody who was successful to attract people to Bitcoin and not the other way

around so I think it's very important to consider empirically that toxic maximalism in this self

ironic way of course not not just being assholes with people for no reason is uh is actually working

to attract people and not the other way around because it's giving a very strong distinction

between noise and signal so I think it's empirically working but people like I don't

know I can name probably Eric Lombroso Adam Beck there are some guys that are very very nice with

people online they keep being nice and I see nothing wrong with them there is a strategy choice

whether you want to be nice or blunt it depends on how much time do you have what is your mood

how much do you want to appeal to slogans for noobs or to nuance for experienced people so it

depends it's a strategical choice I have nothing against people who are nice the thing that really

triggers me as I said before are people who are being uh blunt but only or specifically or

especially against other people being blunt I when we get to that kind of meta toxicity I get mad

even with friends I don't know when when if I disagree with Andreas Antonopoulos and he will

say oh this is toxic I mean I'm just disagreeing you have to be nice to me if you want to defend

the idea that everybody must be nice so if you are a nicest you have to be nice with us toxic

maximalists we are the toxic ones so I hate meta toxicity but except for this stuff I think that

it's always good to be skeptical of everybody including yourself sometimes toxicity can help

you out really if you take it seriously and if you take it honestly I will give you another example

one I gave you from my personal experience was I was a shit corner then I met Lawrence then I wasn't

a shit corner anymore but the other one was when uh you know I used my my non-profit association to

funnel sponsorship to open source projects and other people was doing the same Adam Beck and

Alina Vranova and and other people and so we basically decided to go all together on a stage

to present a super centralized uh donation system a little bit like Blink is doing now but that was

before and the community reacted against that ferociously like this is centralization this is

bad uh this is dangerous and I was tempted to just say uh you know these mean bitcoiners that

they are just they are they are mocking me with memes and they are creating t-shirts and hats

against my foundation this is very I was just trying to help and they are being mean and instead

I I made an effort which was a difficult effort it was a a big effort to understand that the stake

are so high and the skepticism is so the adversarial thinking is so needed in this

noisy environment that I and I understand that I condone people thinking I'm a scanner I'm a

scammer I will just try to make my point clearer and to I mean sometimes uh social pressure is bad

but sometimes it's needed there there's always a trade-off but I think that in the context we are

right now we are still 99 noise about the so-called crypto or I mean just read a mainstream

publication about cryptocurrency or blockchain and the things that me and Paul agree about

will be completely out of the radar and it will be just 99.9 percent complete bullshit and and lies

and ridiculous things so I think we're really far away from the moment where we will not need any

more toxic maximalist but maximalism and we can keep that going for a while until it will just

become redundant great thank you Giacomo and Paul you have both been much more civil than I originally

envisioned which is a blessing and and a curse maybe but thank you both for joining the debate

today how can our listeners find both of you starting with Paul sure thanks for having me

first of all and I'm Truthcoin on twitter because my last name is very difficult to spell so that's

not a claim to make any kind of monopoly on truth or anything it's just related to a paper that I

wrote long ago about peer-to-peer oracles t-r-u-t-h-c-o-i-n and then I have a site at

Truthcoin.info which links to my other sites so that's where you can find me great Giacomo on

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

telegram channel which is the same that's my username while GiacomoZucco.channel I think is

the channel I don't even remember but anyway I have a website which is www.GiacomoZucco.com

I should fix the content the videos are not working and I'm a little bit lazy but I will

eventually fix the website so you can check stuff there okay and will you get on big cloud once

you're kicked out of twitter yeah let's hope that it can stay on telegram at least okay great thank

you both so listeners we'd love to hear from you and have you join the debate via twitter definitely

vote in the post debate poll feel free to join the conversation with your comments on twitter

we look forward to seeing you in future episodes of the blockchain debate podcast consensus option

of proof of thought required thanks again to Giacomo and Paul for coming on the show

for me one take away from the debate is that people are nicer in person than online which is

always comforting in a way social media is a place for people to express their outrage without

physically harming anyone it's analogous to how sports are a suitable replacement to wars

I think whether or not toxic maximalism will do good for bitcoin it is now part of the brand

it's a hallmark of the hardcore believers and it will continue to draw attention from bystanders

no coiners or pre-coiners apologies Srinivasan has a quote on how certain types of content

goes viral on twitter if it leads it bleeds if it enrages it engages I think that observation

certainly applies here to toxic bitcoin maximalism as well well what was your takeaway from the

debate don't forget to vote in our post debate twitter poll this will be live for a few days

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and be sure to check out our other episodes with a variety of debate topics bitcoin store value

status the legitimacy of smart contracts defi pow versus pos the case for government bailouts

central bank digital currency and so on thanks for joining us on the debate today i'm your host

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at our next debate