Chat_150 - Why We Argue with Chris Guida

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Bitcoiners have a spirit. And I think the spirit is the same. It's an ancient spirit. It goes back to the American Revolution, it goes back to the Magna Carta, it goes back to ancient Greece, it goes back to Christianity in the early Middle East. The spirit of individual freedom, individual rights, that there's something inside of each of us that is divine, that kind of thing. And I think that is the cultural signal that resonates of humanity. And I think that's bitcoin's culture. And I think that if we use that, then we lose bitcoin. [00:00:53] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. We've got a fantastic show today. We've got Chris Guida on the show. The topic of conversation was sort of supposed to be about filters. Just because he's been a pretty prominent voice in the whole V30 versus knots versus whatever debate. @ least I think we both assumed it would go there. The entire conversation was essentially very relevant to that entire debate and that entire topic, but it ended up being about something completely different. It really kind of went in the direction of just taking a big step back and looking at the big picture and talking a lot about the context of why this debate is happening and how to think about certain areas of bitcoin and this dispute and the different layers of bitcoin and why this system actually works where it doesn't and what those important pieces are. You know, what is the social layer of bitcoin? What is this whole thing from the context of the many different layered and varied systems and elements or characteristics that make up a human system. And I think we just had a fantastic conversation. It was a really cool conversation. I wish we could have gone longer. I had to cut it a little bit short. But let's go ahead and get into it. Shout out to our amazing sponsors. 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But it's something I think you should have in your back pocket and consider synonym and pub key due to PubKey app is really just kind of a showcase for what they can do with their tools. But they've built a set of tools to re decentralize the web. If you're a builder you've got to check them out. That link is right down in the show notes and on the website that you will find very soon. I'm very excited to finally have that out for everybody. Then get yourself some nightshades. They are usually in here. I left them in the other room. But these are blue light blocking glasses that actually make it so that you're not just red washing everything. There's a band of purple that will not affect your circadian rhythm or your hormones. And they're just an amazing product. You gotta check em out. And there's a 10% discount code. Bitcoin audible. All those details are down in the show notes. And then lastly the Human Rights foundation subscribe to their Financial Freedom Report is a fantastic free newsletter to stay up to date on all of the freedom fighting and freedom fighting tools around the world. And of course they have the Oslo Freedom Forum that you should definitely check out. That is June 3rd 1/3rd next year tickets. You can find details, all of it right down in the description. And with that let's get into this episode with Chris guida. This is chat150 why we argue. Dude, Chris, welcome to the show. Dude. It's. It feels like it's kind of been overdue. [00:04:36] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know I've been following you for, for a while and I, I've, you know, I really like your content. I think you're one of the, one of the few voices in bitcoin that is just honestly pursuing the truth. You know, honest inquiry and curiosity. You know I like your appreciate. [00:04:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I like to think, I like to think highly of myself sometimes. But. [00:05:00] Speaker A: But, but that's, that's what we need in bitcoin, right? Like we need people who are curious about finding the truth and not necessarily just assuming that they're right and just like trying to punch the Other side. [00:05:12] Speaker B: I like a good. Hey, hey, hey. I like a good, just straight dunk with very low signal every once in a while. So, you know, don't like totally throw that out the window. But yes, generally speaking, I want an actual argument and it bugs me when people are just. Because, because arguments, Arguments are fun. Arguments are fun if you can actually get to the point, you know, that was something I spent. God. God. A really, really, really long time. And, and Twitter probably it's like a question as to whether or not this helps that if you focus on it or if it just sends you down the, the slop dunking rabbit hole, you know, whatever, whatever you want to label it. But trying to get to the heart of the argument because I feel, I swear to God, 98% of social communication is passed the argument. It's like around like what people are actually talking about to kind of like frame it in their own way. It's, it's like kind of like this weird social straw manning of every single thing that's ever talked about. And I bring that up specifically because I just had a conversation with somebody and they, they came in completely out of context and were arguing some point that Datham or somebody had made and I was just like, where, where, where, where what? I don't. This is, what is this? This is not in this conversation. How much baggage do I have to address every single time I say anything about. Anything about this issue? But anyway, sorry to tangent there. But yes, I generally agree. [00:06:47] Speaker A: I agree. Yeah, I think that Twitter is actually, as you said, arguing is fun. I, I enjoy arguing and the reason why I enjoy arguing is because I find it to be educational. Sometimes the other person, often the other person has a perspective that I hadn't considered. And so the only way to find that is to disagree with them and is to find people you disagree with and disagree with them publicly. And a lot of times there's, yeah, there's something I was missing or something there was something they're missing or both. And going back to what we were saying before about dunking on people, sometimes people are just being dishonest and you have to call that out. So yeah, and I think that that Twitter is, is pretty conducive to this. You know. Like, I think back before Elon bought Twitter, actually it was a lot more just. It was hard to just be like honest and just, you know, say your opinion about things and, and you know, because, you know, you were always worried like, is the band hammer going to come down? [00:07:45] Speaker B: I got banned. My, my shit My shit froze hard. I said one bad thing about the vaccine. I traced it by trace it back to that exact post, and everything froze for, like, eight months. Like, I was just. I was in just, like, some. Some sad corner where, like, nobody saw my stuff, and I was like, man, is this even worth it anymore? Like. And Noster kind of arose sort of that same era, and I was like, it's stupid not to at least have a foot over here, you know? [00:08:13] Speaker A: Yeah. So. But what I was saying is, basically, Twitter has gotten a lot better, and now I. I find it to be a fairly efficient, like, vehicle for clearing up miscommunications. As long as you use it correctly. As you were saying, it's very easy to take things that people say out of context. A lot of times, you know, I say something or somebody else says something or some authority says something, and. And people just don't really. They just don't really get the point. And then a lot of people, you know, they just, you know. Yeah, they have, like, authorities that they. They just listen to, and. And they just kind of hammer on those points, and they're. They're. They're, you know, they're worried about being, you know, ostracized or, you know, rocking the boat too much and getting kicked out of the, you know, the cool kids club. And so. [00:09:04] Speaker B: I don't think I was ever in the cool kids club, really. So. [00:09:08] Speaker A: Yeah, me neither. So a lot of times the signal gets lost, but I try to break through that. And like I said, I think Twitter is kind of the best place that I've. I've. I've found maybe ever. I mean, like, Reddit back in the day was really good, but then Reddit kind of got. It got really sensory and dumb. I don't know. It just feels really. Yeah. [00:09:30] Speaker B: So, yeah, I don't know. I haven't read it. I can't explain. You know, it's really hard. I feel like there's, like, there should be, like, a postmortem on what happened to Reddit, because there was an era where it was. It was big enough that I felt like we had gotten past the era of, oh, this is being overrun by spam and just low signal. But then it still shifted after that, and I can't quite make sense of what it was. It was. Was it just bad moderation? Was it, like, too much central control? [00:09:59] Speaker A: The same thing that happened to Twitter. Like, I'm sure you heard about the Twitter files, right? Where basically the FBI and CIA were going in there and being like, you have to. You have to censor this stuff, you know? And, you know, Silicon Valley companies that are just trying to. That are, like, unprofitable, that are struggling to, like, turn a profit so they can make a return on investment for their investors, you know, they're in a pretty important position, you know? Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, Elon was sort of the first one to just kind of be like, no, we're going to pursue the truth. And I really respect that. [00:10:31] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, it's so funny that, like, you think, like, you know, you're a wealthy corporation or something, or you're a big important CEO that like, oh, you can do whatever you want, you got all this money. And I. I really just kind of see it as the opposite. And Elon's the perfect exception that proves the rule is that everybody just has to align. Like, you have to do with what the board thinks and what the shareholders think. Like, I. I like, I think about how free Jack Dorsey probably felt after he just kind of like, got out of that shit and the weight that was off of him that he could just kind of like, talk about whatever the hell he wanted to talk about because now he had money and no attachment to the. The system, you know, and it just. Just really interesting, you know. Like, most people think of these. Like an analogy I used for my dad, because my dad very much has that, like, oh, Jack Dorsey was running Twitter. Jack Dorsey did all these things. And I'm like, dude, Twitter has like, had like a hundred thousand employees or some psychotic thing like that. The town that I grew up in has like 12,000 people in it. Like, the town think about how much is in that town that you have just no idea even goes on. You have no scope of understanding, you know? [00:11:54] Speaker A: Right. And even though Dorsey was the captain of the ship, you know, he was kind of. Maybe he wasn't steering it as much as he should have been. Um, but again, you know, I. I think he was just kind of un. Unwilling to kind of assert his. His way of doing things on that company. [00:12:13] Speaker B: He doesn't seem super confrontational. Elon seems very confrontational. [00:12:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And, yeah, and I. I respect that. You know, I mean, I. I respect both of them. But. But I think nowadays, you know, it's. It's nice for. For people to stand up what they really believe in. Stand up for what they really believe in. Yeah. [00:12:31] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's definitely the era to be less quiet. You know, quiet ends up causing more problems than not because of the trend and inertia of things headed in the wrong direction. [00:12:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:12:48] Speaker B: Speaking of, give me, give me a little bit of your background, man. Where did Chris Guida come from? [00:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so my name is Chris Weida. I've been a professional developer since 2010. I've been a developer in the bitcoin ecosystem since, since 2020 when I basically just jumped in and started working for Start nine. I was, my, my job there was packaging their, their services. If you don't know, they're, they're a company that makes Node in a Box. Well, a Node in a box operating system called startos. [00:13:25] Speaker B: You know, I love Start nine. [00:13:27] Speaker A: Start is great. And they, they have a, like an app store that is for servers instead of for cell phones. And so my job was basically packaging those. Basically taking applications that were already written and then kind of putting them in a nice package so that users can just kind of one click install, it hit start, and then it just works. And then I left start nine in 2023. [00:13:54] Speaker B: And 99% of the open source world needs people exactly like you. You just need to, we just need to hire you permanently to do that shit. For everything. Everything on GitHub. [00:14:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Thanks, man. Yeah, we need to support open source devs because a lot of times it's just kind of a lonely, thankless job. Yes, especially, especially that job, actually the packaging service on Start nine. Because like the, you're not really the guy developing the service, you know. You know, it's kind of upstream devs are doing that, you know, so it's almost kind of like you're invisible, you know, people don't really see your efforts. But yeah, we have to support those. [00:14:35] Speaker B: People because it's like the editor in a movie, right? Is your, your director gets a lot of credit, your actors get a lot of credit because they're all on screen. But the whole purpose of editing is to be invisible. The better you are at editing, the more nobody notices editing. Editing actually occurred. That's what a good packager does, is they're invisible. [00:14:56] Speaker A: It's a great perspective. I love it. [00:15:01] Speaker B: So I've been working with a lot of developers and everybody has a. Oh, I can't believe anybody used this. This is so stupid. This is the worst thing to ever use. And then they're sold on some other thing. What's your, what's your thing that I can't believe anybody uses? And your, everybody should be using this. Like, what's your, what's your favorite environment for other devs out there? [00:15:23] Speaker A: Oh man, that's a, that's a tough question. I mean, I really like, it depends on. So I really think with Bitcoin because they're so, because everything is open and free and you know, voluntary. There's all of these, you know, there's this, what does it say? There's, there's many ways to skin a cat or something like that. There's, there's so many ways to do bitcoin and I think, you know, you really need to. So like after I left Star nine, I got really into like education and so I, I got really up and up close and personal with this. You really need to sort of tailor the, the bitcoin experience to the person. So if the person is so starless, for instance, is, is really good for people who are beginners. You know, it doesn't really interest them to, to learn the command line. Right. They just want to have a Bitcoin and Lightning server that works and they want to be able to set that up, be sovereign. You know, everything is, everything is, is open source and auditable. You know, you're, you're, you're trusting, you're trusting the company a little bit. But, but it's a great way to start your journey. And then if you're more technical then something like Rasplitz or there's a guide called the Mini Bolt Guide. If you really want to get your hands dirty with Linux, I recommend that just generally with bitcoin tools, I think that Phoenix Wallet is, is, is still really underappreciated. I think it's one of the best ways to use Lightning. [00:16:50] Speaker B: Phoenix Wallet is dope, man. Now I got contacts lists and stuff like I can just literally send, I have, I've saved like my, my mother in law, I, I literally, we send like Bitcoin every once in a while she'll sell a little bit or buy a little bit like just kind of when she needs it or I need it, you know, because I'm, you know, I do all my businesses on bitcoin so I'm going back and forth quite a bit and we just do it all over Phoenix and it just works. And she totally can use it. [00:17:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I love Phoenix. Like I said, it just works. You know, you're trusting the LSP a little bit, but it's basically sovereign. And the, the security model is not worse than my favorite bitcoin wallet from back in the day, which was Mycelium. I don't know if you, you rub it in the wallet, but that was the wallet that I kind of onboarded everybody with back in the day. And it was the same thing. It was like you hold your own keys, but you're trusting somebody else's note. And so that's what Phineas Wallet does. You're holding your own keys, you're self custodial, but you're relying on an intermediary to connect you with the bitcoin network. But not in a way where you're overly trusting. They can't take your funds and it can't really freeze your funds. And so I think that's a great place to onboard people. So I really like that. And another overlooked project is Phoenix D actually, which is the same software but implemented as a server instead of as a cell phone application. And I think this. Actually I'm involved in a project to put a front end on Phoenixd for. [00:18:22] Speaker B: Oh, wow, that's awesome. [00:18:24] Speaker A: Because I think after I left Star 9, you know, I got really into merchant adoption because I feel like merchant adoption is the number one most important issue facing bitcoin right now. Bitcoin has to become money. It has to be used for payments and stuff. And it was really great for that back before the box size Wars 1, because there was this kind of sense that, oh, you can just accept zero confidence, you know, basically, basically secure, you know, but, you know, but we were always kind of kidding ourselves a little bit because you always. Because it wasn't secure and you had to wait for a confirmation in order. [00:19:09] Speaker B: To really be secure. [00:19:09] Speaker A: That was a terrible experience. So I don't know, when did you get into bitcoin? Were you back, Were you there in like 2015, 2014, year round, man. [00:19:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm class of 2011, actually. [00:19:19] Speaker A: Oh, nice. Yeah, that's, yeah. [00:19:21] Speaker B: So I've been around a lot of the blocks. Yeah. [00:19:26] Speaker A: So, but, but then there was, you know, after the block size wars, there was this kind of shift in the, in the narrative where, oh, bitcoin is not a medium of exchange, it's a store of value. Because all the medium of exchange, people kind of left and went to ecash, which was, I think, important needed to happen because the store value is more important than medium exchange. But I think there's a limit to how much store of value can happen. If we never do medium of exchange, right? If, if, if, if bitcoin is just, you know, a store of value, right. If it's just this like dead pet rock, you know, pet digital pet rock, then it, it's really not better than a mean coin, you know, like, it needs to be going somewhere. It needs to, it needs to have a mission, you know, it needs to earn money. [00:20:11] Speaker B: So no, yeah, I've always seen it as like a path dependent evolution, but it requires an enormous, like the era of actually of creating development for the protocol. Like if you look at it like from the context of the history of Internet protocols is there's just a staggering amount of development towards where we need to be. While the actual store of value of the, the monetary base is the thing that pushes us to actually demanding it, you know, like, like it doesn't become a medium of exchange until it's broadly recognized as something that someone wants. Like that someone just wants to hold. [00:20:54] Speaker A: I think it's a feedback loop. [00:20:55] Speaker B: It's a bit of a chicken neck. One benefits the other. If it's easier to accept and work with, it's more obvious that it's desirable to have because you can also get rid of it very quickly if you're not sure whether or not you like it. Like it's. The cost to entry and exit matters a lot, which is another big reason why development, you're right, they feed back on each other. But I'm curious actually a question about Phoenix D, because I looked into it when they first released it and I thought it wasn't kind of like the full. Is this like the full backend that Phoenix is running to operate the Phoenix server or is this. Is. This is just. What is Phoenix D again? Give me the scope of what that was because I remember thinking it wasn't what I thought it was when I first looked into it. [00:21:49] Speaker A: So Phoenix D is very simple. It's the Phoenix Wallet. So the Phoenix Wallet is a really cool piece of software. It's a mini, it's a mini lightning node called lightningcam Peak that was written by the Asyntron team, which is the Phoenix team, and it's written in Kotlin because Kotlin, it can be ported to a bunch of different platforms like iOS and Android and Linux, Mac, Windows. You know, it can run practically anywhere. And so what the Phoenix team did is they. Well first they developed the Phoenix Wallet but then they were like, oh, we have this little Lightning node that's a mini Lightning node, right? It's, it's not a, it's not a full like Lightning implementation the same as, I mean does the full Lightning protocol, but it's limited in that it only has one channel with specifically the Async lsp. [00:22:33] Speaker B: Okay. So as opposed to downloading the Phoenix Wallet from the App Store is you can run your own implement like implementation on any server, any app, any merchant software, whatever it is and still connect it as if it's a Phoenix Wallet, basically. [00:22:50] Speaker A: Right, exactly. It's so, so the little Phoenix node, the little Lightning camp, you know, that runs inside every Phoenix Wallet on every cell phone, you can take that out and you can run it on a server. And that's really neat because you can, because you can connect a bunch of other software to it, first of all. So like, so like merchant software, point of sale software. And the other big benefit is that you can receive payments when you're offline. So you can give somebody your role 12, for instance. And your node, you know, your phone does not need to be open. I think Phoenix Wallet actually like wakes up your phone or something like that. But Android is weird about like running stuff in the background. A lot of times it just like turns off stuff that's in the background. And so a lot of times, you know, if you're trying to interact with the Lightning protocol while your phone is locked, for instance, you just can't. Right? You can't receive money. And so it's awkward to use for some applications. For a lot of applications it's much better to run it as a server. And the only difference between a server and a phone application is that the server is always on. It's 24 7, it's always online. And the other thing is that it has an API that you can call, that you can call into from other applications. So like I said, you can build like Windowsill Systems or other interesting Lightning applications on top of it. [00:24:10] Speaker B: Okay, so basically Phoenix D would be. So we're building an application called PEAR Drive which is essentially trying to make peer to peer file sharing not suck. And so, and one of the intents is to have Bitcoin and Lightning enabled. And we wanted to do this with the lowest amount of friction. And Phoenix D basically would be the way to do this. To basically have whatever's inside of PEAR Drive behave exactly like the Phoenix Wallet. Like it just works and you have your contacts list and bolt 12 that would, that would be a big deal. My big headache of implementing something like that would be and generally is like I want to be able to have this leverage, you know, kind of like a desktop node. Like part of the big issue that I want to solve with this for myself is my phone. I have all these photos and videos and stuff on my phone and my kid and all this family and we got on trips and all that stuff. I want it to immediately back up on my computer and I don't want to pay Apple 20amonth. To do it and to have a copy of it that gets hacked and leaked all over the place. And so the thing would be is, whatever device is online, if I have some sort of wallet built into this, can any wallet accept that payment? Like, that's one of the big problems with lightning is how do you sync so that two different wallets aren't trying to make, or two different instances are trying to receive the payment at the same time, but they can sync and know who's actually signing to receive if you've got the same keys in multiple devices. But that's the. That's the whole user. That's that UX problem. Right. Is how do you make this seamless and reliable at the same time? [00:25:56] Speaker A: Yeah, And I think the solution to that is pretty simple. I think it goes back to. I'm going to get a little philosophical here, but it goes back to what Giacomo Zuko talked about in one of his talks where he was like, you know, are we going to make Bitcoin happen or is Bitcoin just going to happen? You know, like, do we have agency? And like, is it like, can we affect, you know, whether, whether things happen in Bitcoin or are they just kind of inevitable and we just sit back and watch. And I think this goes back to what we were talking about earlier with store of value versus medium of exchange, where as you said, well, to some extent we can just sit back and wait for the store of value thing to happen, and then maybe medium of exchange will sort of magically happen as people realize that bitcoin is something to value. But I think at the same time, we have to press forward into. We have to intentionally press forward into the medium of exchange territory. And that's what really is going to improve all this technology. If we just kind of sit back and expect lightning and merchant adoption to happen by itself. I don't think it will, or it's possible that it won't. Somebody has to do it. If nobody does it, then it won't happen. So, I mean, yes, the vast majority of the plebs out there should probably, probably it is fine for them to just sit back and not do anything, but somebody has to push forward. And so, like what you were saying, all of these different ways of using lightning, all these different protocols and standards and stuff, those will get developed as users are attempting to use it. There needs to be a tight feedback loop between the people building the code and the people using the code. And a lot of times that doesn't happen. Right. Especially in open source Dev and Bitcoin debt in particular, there's people who receive fairly large salaries to work on Bitcoin or another software, but they don't get feedback from their users. Or when their users try to give them feedback, they don't listen. And I think that's something we need to fix. There needs to be, you know, development needs to be focused towards usage in the actual real world and then people need to actually try to use the software and, and give the developers feedback. So this is what a lot of people, people are sort of programmed with fiat mentality where, you know, there's just a centralized company that builds a piece of software. If the software sucks, you complain about it on Twitter and you say, hey, like your software sucks and then you expect somebody else to fix it. But in Bitcoin it doesn't work that way. In Bitcoin, when you find a problem, you know, say you're using Phoenix or you're using Zeus Wallet or you're using, you know, Ambrosia, which is the app I'm involved with, which is a point of sales app on Phoenix D. You know, if you, if you use it, you know, you should use it and if you find problems, you should report those back to the developer. I think that's your responsibility as a user. You should tell the developer the things that you liked and the things that you don't like because if you don't give that information to them, they can't improve it and it won't improve. So I think there needs to be a bit of a, I think we need to evolve a bit in our, in our sort of strategy and tactics around getting lightning adopted. [00:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think a lot of people misinterpret the, the idea of the path dependency as a, we can just sit back and do nothing and it will just occur. When I see it as the path dependency as something like, you know, it's, it's not inevitable that video streaming is going to occur on the Internet, that it's clearly possible. But obviously someone has to build the technology. But it's not going to happen in mass until you have the bandwidth and the infrastructure in place for somebody to just plug in a computer or a Apple TV or something into the Internet and then boom, you can stream high definition TV in a matter of a few seconds. So I would say when people do misinterpret that is like, oh well, store of value is just going to make medium of exchange happen. And that's not it at all. It's that I think store value has to reach a certain market saturation before, before medium of exchange can actually feed back on itself to just go, you know, like, like the mobile moment or something. You just hit the point where the technology reaches this apex and then it just explodes into kind of like a new layer or a new era of how the Internet actually works. And we'll likely see this very same thing. But somebody still has to build the fucking smartphone. You know, you can't just like wish it into existence. And if all you're actually doing is holding. The whole point is that the incentives align us to actually build those things. It's the fact that we talk about it and we say we wish it was like this. Well, okay, who's going to stand up and actually build the thing that we wish existed, you know? [00:30:55] Speaker A: Yeah, and again, I kind of agree with that. But also I'm worried that if we de. Emphasize medium of exchange too much and we just rely on the store of value thing, I think there's a danger that it gets captured. And the reason why I think this is because that's exactly what happened to gold. So if you look at gold, gold has a market cap of 20 trillion or, I don't know, maybe 30 or 40 trillion now, but it's captured, right? Gold led to, directly to the US dollar. Right. Like we had the gold standard and then we had Bretton woods and then we had in 1971, Fiat. And that's because gold was captured. And the reason why gold was captured is because everybody left their gold with a custodian and then the paper version of the gold became the medium of exchange. And so we have to fight against that tooth and nail as bitcoiners if we want Bitcoin to succeed at replacing the US dollar, which I, I hope is, is know where everybody sees that we're going. I think if Bitcoin is just a, you know, a mean coin like gold, gold is, you know, it's effectively just a mean coin now. You know, you can hold it if you want, but like, you know, are you, are you going to be able to pay it to a merchant? Are you going to be. Use it for anything? I mean, not really. So that's, that's what I'm really worried, that Bitcoin is heading down a path where everybody puts their, their Bitcoin into an exchange or a bank or an etf, you know, or one of these treasury companies and they think they're holding Bitcoin, but really they're just holding paper version of Bitcoin. And so, you know, if the paper version of Bitcoin grows to be significantly larger than the real version of Bitcoin, then bitcoin gets captured and there's no way to actually make it achieve its final mission, which is to replace the US dollar. [00:32:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I 100% agree. I almost don't want to, to counter the gold thing, because I think this is the more important perspective to have. I think we should be concerned, and I think everything, aside from whether or not even it even compares to the analog of gold, is that that's how we should think about it, is that the more Bitcoin that ends up in custodians, the greater the risk is that it does end up captured and we end up kind of back in that same thing. I would rather people actually believe that than, than be complacent. But I will say the reason that I think gold got captured is that it doesn't scale to large transactions, is that it's actually the opposite scaling problem. As to Bitcoin, Bitcoin scales poorly when it comes to billions of tiny transactions. Gold actually did that fine in physical space for a very long time. In fact, it did it longer after it was already captured. But you can't move a trillion dollars in gold. You can't move $10 billion in gold. You can do those things in Bitcoin far, far more easily. You can actually sovereignly hold large. The first actual paper notes in history in kind of like the 1600s, like the bills of exchange for merchants that, like the Templars were known for moving between churches and larger institutions were huge. They were 40,000 pounds of gold like it was. It was big transactions that got conquered first or got, you know, custodian before, way, way before small transactions. And this is what actually led institutions to get captured, which ultimately led to everything downstream getting captured as well, is that banks couldn't settle, governments couldn't settle. You couldn't have a small country actually be sovereign against a large country because everybody ended up keeping all their, their gold in the Federal Reserve or the uk, the London bank, and, and subsequently, if they made a decision, you, you know, France tried to bring a battleship to get their gold out of the New York, out of the New York Fed. And we said no in 1971. And that was the problem. If France was sovereignly holding their gold, which is the more difficult thing to do, you have to literally bring a battleship to try to get, you know, your tens of billions of dollars worth of gold. Because if you don't have a battleship, you can't even Carry the thing around. I think the scaling problem is actually the reverse. However, I also don't want anybody to think that means that bitcoin can't be captured. It would just be captured in a totally different way and at a different scale. [00:35:18] Speaker A: And that's an interesting perspective. Nobody has, has ever put it to me that way before. I don't know if I, I don't know if I agree with that. [00:35:29] Speaker B: I'll do a video and actually do a better job of laying out the argument and then, and then you can, you can tell me how I'm wrong in the thread. [00:35:35] Speaker A: We can dig into, into it right now if you want. I mean, so you know, I love it, right? Like. Like I said, I love respectful disagreements. So. [00:35:46] Speaker B: You'Re wrong and you suck though. I'm just, just letting you know. Just, just you. [00:35:50] Speaker A: What's that? [00:35:50] Speaker B: I mean, I'm clip. You're wrong and you suck and I'm going to clip this somehow and make you look like an idiot. [00:35:56] Speaker A: No, you. Yeah, yeah. No. So, so imagine a world where. So you're basically sort of drawing this picture of a future where sort of the plebs don't have access to real bitcoin, but large institutions and nation states have access to bitcoin and they are. [00:36:17] Speaker B: Able to. [00:36:20] Speaker A: Maybe decentralize not in like a distributed way where each individual is sovereign, but in a, a decentralized way where nations are more sovereign. And you know. Yeah, that's, that's definitely an interesting perspective that I hadn't considered. [00:36:38] Speaker B: What I like to think about it is in fiat is because. Because fiat is explicitly a who can enforce the, the ownership or the, the non counterfeiting. You always end up with one big dog. Like you always end up with alpha dog. And literally numbers 2 through 15 in the degree of power is literally how cozy they are to the big dog. There's not really a spectrum of power. There's like a power and how close you are to that power. And if you actually have an independent monetary standard where each individual country can like if five small countries right now said to the U.S. no, you're not going to be able to do this. The US would just. Or that we're not going to listen to what you say. They would just be sanctioned. They could be kicked out of the financial network. It just. They're totally meaningless. But if five sovereign nations holding sovereign Bitcoin, let's say in a multi sig or 20 small nations in a multi sig that actually create their alternative to the UN or something said we're not going to do whatever the US Says. That's actually a big deal. You can actually have local cultural changes. It would decentralize the context of governance around the world, which has been heavily centralized by the fact that there was no independent money anymore. That isn't a fix for all people around the world. And it isn't a fix for freedom. It's a, it's one, it's a very big layer of a governance problem that has downstream effects to everything else being where the dynamics are completely changed. But there's still a billion problems to solve, you know, at 10 layers, 10 layers below that. And, and we still, we want everybody all the way down to have that degree of sovereignty. And we're never actually going to have freedom unless we have that degree of sovereignty all the way down. We want people to have the same relationship to their state as small states would to big states. So, yeah, that's, that's kind of my thesis on that. Yeah. [00:38:34] Speaker A: And I appreciate your perspective and I think, like I said, I think it, it could happen that way, but I think that centralization pressures are everywhere and constantly need to be 100%. And I think that if we, if we just kind of surrender to that version of the bitcoin future, I think it eventually centralizes anyway. [00:38:57] Speaker B: This is exactly why I say I'd rather people believe, think about it from your perspective or from, with that, that level of concern, because I think complacency has a lot of other concepts, consequences. [00:39:10] Speaker A: And let me tell you why, Let me tell you why I think, I think it's because of paper bitcoin again. And this is, this is the same reason why gold centralized and eventually turned into fiat. If only nation states can use bitcoin on chain and, you know, and maybe they're a little bit more sovereign because they can do that. It still doesn't matter if 99% of the Bitcoin is actually paper bitcoin because the paper bitcoin is controlled by custodians and custodians are controlled by the big dogs. You know, there's no way to, to have, you know, so imagine there's, there's some country that's, maybe it's Russia, maybe it's China or something like that that's trying to challenge the hegemony of the US Empire. You know, the United States can just do exactly the same thing that it's doing now using paper bitcoin instead of, you know, paper gold, which is the dollar, basically. All it has to do is control the Custodians and then the custodians can do stuff like I'm sure you know about the money multiplier effect and you know about fractional reserve banking and you know about how that all, if you allow fractional reserve banking eventually that centralizes the banking industry, always consolidates as long as you allow fractional reserve banking. And so one of the main jobs of Bitcoin I think is to eliminate fractional reserve banking. That's why I like things like lightning and arc because they're provably full reserve. Whereas things like, things that are almost trustless, like this new ZK roll up called Citria, which you may have heard of, is a one of n trust model. And it's not trustless, it's paper bitcoin. It's almost not paper bitcoin, but it's paper bitcoin. And so what that does is a lot of people are just holding their Bitcoin on that. What that does is it creates this huge pressure, right? And that huge pressure creates a huge incentive to subvert that trust model. And, and then it ends up being being captured and then the big banks end up buying up all the small banks and then consolidates and consolidates and consolidates which is exactly what we saw with the, the global banking system right before the Federal Reserve was created. And then, and actually what can happen is the banking system can, and you can read about this. You know it happened in the early 1900s and late 1800s. The big banks were colluding to crash the economy. Actually there's a great story about Andrew Jackson in the early 1800s where the bank of the United States was fighting against the President. And, and, and I forget his name was like Nicholas Biddle or something like that. And he was like, I'm going to crash the economy. If you know, if you don't, I'm. [00:41:45] Speaker B: Going to crash the economy. And before the end of your administration, you'll be in a war. [00:41:49] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah, yeah. And it happened exactly. It happened exactly. I mean, so Andrew Jackson, you know, beat the banks for like 80 years. They were gone. But they came back and they'll always come back as long as you allow fractional reserve banking to become the dominant way of saving your money of custody money. So that's the thing, right? That's the ring of power. Right. We have to destroy that. Right. We have to destroy the fraction of power. [00:42:12] Speaker B: I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:42:15] Speaker A: The ring of power is the ability to print money. [00:42:18] Speaker B: Yes. [00:42:18] Speaker A: And what Bitcoin does, as long as we stay on the path and actually go all the way to the volcano is that we destroy the ring of power and then everybody loses the ability to print money all at the same time. And this is actually why I disagree with people who say end the Fed. I'm like, well, no, if you end the Fed, it will just go somewhere else. Right. It just won't be the United States that has the ability to print money, but somebody else will do it. Right. Bitcoin is the. Is the first time the world has had a chance to completely get rid of fractional reserve banking and central banking entirely by just making hard money. The global standard. [00:42:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And importantly, the capacity to exit is the very thing that prevents fractional reserve banking getting systemically out of control. You know, like Mount Gox was fractional reserve banking, FTX was fractional reserve banking. But because we can actually exit, we can basically call their bluff on chain. That's the only reason they blew up. And we know exactly how long fractional reserve survives in bitcoin to date. But that requires us to scale the ability to prove reserves, to hold keys, to actually have a sense of. And what's funny is that Arkansas or Lightning is actually, without actually going on chain is essentially an exit. Like, because you have proof of reserves on chain, like you have a valid transaction that you can prove is valid on chain even without being able to enforce it. You know, the bitcoin is real. It's like a direct sovereign proof of reserves, you know, 100,000% that you have the reserves because it's from a UTXO that wouldn't even sign if you didn't, if it wasn't there. You know what I mean? [00:44:07] Speaker A: But it is actually important that you have the ability to enforce it. Right. That's what the exit is. [00:44:11] Speaker B: It is, it is, yeah, it is. The ability to enforce it is, is why you, is how to basically keep everybody in check. But. But also at the exact same time, the proof of reserves itself is a step in that direction, a massive step in that direction. Because when you're holding FTX coin, you have no idea if that's actual Bitcoin. If you're holding a signed utxo, even if you can't take it to chain, you know, the bitcoin is there, you know, it's not fractional reserve bitcoin. So there's a, there's an interesting dynamic. And I mean that in the sense that you can't take it to chain is not like you don't have the option to, but that you're Holding a thousand sats and it costs a thousand sats is, I mean in the sense of like a cost to, to that exit rather than the proof of the exit. [00:44:55] Speaker A: Right. But what I'm saying is that like, I think that's where we draw the line. Like you have to, you have to be able to not only prove that the funds are there, but you have to be able to unilaterally. [00:45:03] Speaker B: You have to be able to exit. Yeah. [00:45:05] Speaker A: You have to be able to take that money without anyone's permission. And Light and Lightning does this and ARC does this and nothing else does this. Right now if we activate Covenants, then you know, there, there might be a lot of other systems that allow us to do this, but for now it's just Lightning. [00:45:21] Speaker B: Are you pro Covenants? Because I get, I get so many. This is like one of my big arguments with other people and who are generally on like the knots side or whatever. Everybody hates any other improvements or whatever. I'm like, I don't know man, I kind of like ctv. Like it looks, it seems like a pretty good proposal. It doesn't change the cost of any data format or anything. It's not like opening a witness discount or anything. It seems like a standard way to hash a transaction you intend to do and lock it. You know, like pre signed transactions. That's all Lightning is, just pre signed transactions. Just formalizes it. But anyway, yeah, that's my thought. [00:45:56] Speaker A: I'm a fan of Covenants. You know, I've been, I've been, I've been rooting for Covenants since I first heard about them. You know, they, they. And the reason why is because they help us build these unilateral exit systems. They make them much, much more robust and much like so CTV and CSFS helps helps ARC become a lot more viable and a lot easier know, easier for developers to, to improve because it reduces interactivity requirements. This is like, you know, you know, like how much do users need to come online and actually talk to each other, you know, versus can they just kind of, can they just kind of chill out and everything just kind of works itself out? CCD massively improves that. There's, there's other systems like, like roll ups and things that like I said, either they're, they, they're not totally trustless like Citrio or they are trustless and they create a lot of what's called naval or mev, which is minor extracted value. And so it's kind of like, okay, well those systems could be helpful to Bitcoin one day once we are sure that they can be done safely. But it makes sense to just do CTV and csfs first because we haven't seen. I think that opens up a lot of like, that's a, it's a power up for Bitcoin. Like it really, really opens up a lot of really neat ways of doing these unilateral exit protocols. [00:47:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I agree. [00:47:22] Speaker A: Just, just to build on that. The, the thing that the covenants proponent proponents always talk about is what they're primarily worried about is they're worried about centralization of custody and centralization of payment processes. Which is exactly my concern as well. Right. Which is what we were just talking about. If you have to store your Bitcoin with a custodian because on chain fees are too high, for instance, then Bitcoin centralizes due to custodial centralization of custody. If you're a merchant and you have to accept Bitcoin through a third party payment processor, that third party payment processor is going to be controlled by whatever jurisdiction they're in. They're going to have to follow those laws. And so, you know, so, so centralization of custody, centralization of payment processing are death to Bitcoin. And you know, and, and covenants help with both. Actually, covenants help. [00:48:13] Speaker B: Help. [00:48:14] Speaker A: Help self custody be a lot easier. You can. Well again you can, you can much more easily onboard people to, to Bitcoin, for instance. So new people who've never heard of bitcoin, you can more easily onboard them. You know, my, my only problem with Phoenix Wallet is that, you know, when the fees go really high, it's very kind of difficult and embarrassing to onboard people. When fees go up to 30 or $50 a transaction. You're trying to onboard some major Bitcoin and they're like, what the hell is this? $50 to open a channel, especially like in developing countries where that's a significant portion of people's salary. [00:48:51] Speaker B: Monthly salaries for some damn people. [00:48:53] Speaker A: Yeah, so CTV helps a lot with that. It basically helps you onboard people off chain instead of having to create a channel which is really cool. And then like I said, it also helps just with payment processing because it's much easier to build things like Unix Wallet where you can have self custody of the funds. But the experience is also good. Right. We need the self custodial and self payment processing experience to be good for people who are not technical. And I think covenants help a lot with that. [00:49:23] Speaker B: You don't actually have to sell your Bitcoin to access its value. You can actually Borrow against it very easily without selling it. But when you do this, you need to be careful. You need to do this with a company that is trusted, one that has survived a bear market and one that will literally show you that they have the coins, that they have proof of reserves or some mechanism where you can look at your balance and know that it is safe. This is why I've been a huge fan and a customer of Ledn for a few years, years now. So one of the bitcoin backed loans that I got a few years ago to finish renovations and the basement and studio in my house, I would have paid three times as much bitcoin had I just sold it as it now takes me to just pay off the loan. And that's if I sell the bitcoin to pay it off, which I think I'm going to be able to get equity out of the house and pay off the loan and get all of my bitcoin back. This especially makes sense if you're making an investment. If you're doing something that is going to pay you income in the future, or if you're investing in bitcoin mining. It's a whole lot easier to beat the interest rate if you loan against the bitcoin and keep the bitcoin. Leden also makes this like crazy easy. Like if you went to do this right now, you could probably get the money by tomorrow. They do proof of reserves twice a year and I check. It's a very easy process. And you don't have to do monthly payments if you don't want to. You can just accrue the interest and pay off income chunks whenever it makes sense. And best of all, they just recently got rid of all the noise. They had some other features. They had Ethereum loans. They're like, nope, chop it. They had a yield product. Nope, chop it. They had loans where you could get a lower interest rate and they didn't have it on their books. They lent it out. Nope, chop that. Now it's just custodied, fully backed bitcoin loans. Doesn't work for every single situation or every person. But there are some times where this is an incredibly valuable tool to have. Don't overextend. Remember bitcoin is volatile and read the details. But if you need access to your bitcoin's value and you just don't want to sell, Leden is a brilliant and simple tool for doing exactly that. And I've been a happy customer for a couple of years now. You can check out the links Right down in the show notes, it's L E D N leden IO I'm curious then because my thinking about kind of this whole Core versus Knots debate that we're in the midst of is one of the potential. And I brought this up to Jimmy Song too, and I'm going to be talking with Cali on Monday actually, so. And I might bring it up to him as well. Is that like one of the big things is this shift towards Knots and this kind of like schism or just breakdown of trust to core. Core is probably our best bet to get CTV and CSFs in some sort of software, most likely. Like, I feel like that's probably where they are going from the context of development. Whereas Knots. I feel like I have more conversations with people in the KNOTS crew who just kind of like, are blanket. No ctv. Like, no, we shouldn't make this change. So I'm curious what the dynamic there is because I know you're you and I kind of feel the same way about like the fact that the road should simply be to limit spam. Like, and, and we should be thinking about how to do that in a low, low risk way. But I'm. I'm curious how, how that squares with your CTV thinking because I've had like a bit of a back and forth. [00:53:06] Speaker A: I'm not really sure why that, why that happened, actually. I, I was in both groups early on. I was in both the CTV proponents and the anti spam proponents or the, you know, the pro filter, I guess, people early on. And I noticed this kind of inexplicable hostility, mutual hostility between the camps where the CTE people were like, no, we must not filter spam. And the pro filter people were like, no, we must not have cte. And I was like, this feels very artificial to me. It almost seemed like a coordinated operation. You know, it was like they were. Somebody was trying to divide bitcoiners exactly along these lines. I don't think there's any reason for these sides to be opposed to each other. Both covenants and filtering spam objectively make bitcoin better money. And if you're a real bitcoiner, you should want bitcoin to be better money. So, yeah, I don't get it. But like I said, I think it was intentional on somebody's part in order to buy. Precisely in order to buy bitcoin and cost this conflict. So, but that's just. Maybe I'm just being a, you know, crazy conspiracy theorist. I don't know. [00:54:14] Speaker B: It's hard. It's hard because, I mean, it makes perfect sense to try to rope things into the tribal battle, you know, that. That aren't related, just that seem to maybe ideologically or kind of like philosophically aligned in some context of like, oh, well, the people who don't want to change bitcoin at all also might be more likely to go with the filtering spam argument. And then these things end up becoming tribal. And then people have an opinion about CTV and though. Even though they have nothing, they know nothing about it. And then, you know, vice versa, you know, they. They have an opinion on filter because they have ctv, but there's a reason to suspect that it could be coordinated as well, because there's. There's obviously benefits to actually engaging in that sort of stuff. [00:55:00] Speaker A: So anyway, so bitcoin is an interesting, very interesting phenomenon. The more, the more I look into it, the more I realize that the vast majority of the public has absolutely no idea what's going on. [00:55:12] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, no, yeah. [00:55:15] Speaker A: But, but, you know, but bitcoiners are, Are. Are wise and they have good instincts and they can see when somebody is bullshitting. And, But a lot of times, well, most people, since they don't actually understand the technical issues deeply, is they try to figure out, you know, what authority or what, you know, what person is somebody that they trust, you know, somebody who seems to be not bullshitting, who seems to be not lying, who resonates with. With their. Their belief system or their value system. And. And then they just kind of go with whatever that person says. And so you end up getting the, you know, there's. There's. There's a rift that has. Has been started since, you know, a year or two ago in the community. Again, I don't know where this rift came from. It doesn't make sense to me. But very early on, the CTD people were saying, oh, well, these, you know, these. These knots people or these filters, you know, they just want to censor us, you know, and, and the, and so we don't trust them. Right. And so, so the people who were kind of, you know, the AIQ clubs, you know, they, they. They were just. They were just, you know, what is it? Censorship resistance is the thing that most resonated with them about Bitcoin. And so they trusted the people that tended to be talking about censorship resistance. And then on the other side, the pro filter people were like, well, no, you know, we need to. We need to protect bitcoin as money. You know, we need to. We're, you know, we're. We're monetary maximalists. You know, we want to, you know, we want bitcoin to stay money. These are the more like, like Austrian economics fans, anarcho capitalist type people. And, and so, and they were looking at the other side going, well, this, this CTV crowd seems to be trying to like change bitcoin, you know, and why are we changing bitcoin? We don't need to change bitcoin, you know, and so, and so, you know, quickly there, there was a, there was a breakout of trust between the two, the two tribes. [00:57:04] Speaker B: So it's amazing how much comes back to like, especially for our, our failure to recognize. And this is something that I think actually John Carvalho talks about, even though he talked about him and just kind of like the pure contrarian sense, he does bring this up a lot. Is that like there's no way around trust. Like, you even in a trust list system, like, there are still so many other layers of trust that when, when you think everything's going to be trustless, you kind of like forget the actual purpose of building and thinking about things, because trust is still everywhere. And perfect example is like, who really. I mean, I've been in bitcoin longer than the overwhelming majority of people here. I've dug into everything technical that I felt like even had the time to dig into whenever I could. I've not audited the code. You know, I've not, I've not gone through the note and I've actually gone and looked at some of it, but I can't make sense out of the vast majority of it. You know, I'm not, I'm just not a developer in that sense. And now what do I do? I trust AI to break down. Like, what is this block doing? What are the details and the relationships of this? That shit's wrong most of the time. But I got no else. I got, you know, like, I don't have anything else to listen to. Go call or, you know, Antoine, like. [00:58:26] Speaker A: It just, yeah, AI is amazing at making help. [00:58:29] Speaker B: Yes. Oh, God, it's so good. [00:58:31] Speaker A: Yeah, you really need to, you really need to, to like poke and prod it and be like, are you sure? Can you please show me proof? [00:58:40] Speaker B: Exactly. I always get it to quote stuff, always ask it to quote what it's what it's what it's doing. I can give a direct link to that place, especially when you're looking at code, because the number of times I'll go back into like some cycle of some bullshit that we already sorted out, like, you know, 10 conversations ago. And, and we're back into it, making the same mistake about how it works when we're. When I'm vibe coding. No, I'm just like, oh my God, God, dude. And then it's like, you're absolutely right. After I tell it it's wrong five times, you know? [00:59:13] Speaker A: Yep. I really do think that, that fiat money, maybe this is a bit ideological, but I really do think that fiat money creates incentives towards more. More bullshit everywhere. More and more. [00:59:23] Speaker B: More. [00:59:24] Speaker A: More lies and more advocating responsibility. You know, more just. Just bad behavior. Right. Like it just. Yeah, it just, it just. Yeah. Amplifies the noise and it minimizes the signal. And this is another reason why I'm so. Well, I'm just bullish on bitcoin, but I'm also just concerned that bitcoiners, they're so complacent, they still think that, oh, it's inevitable, it's just going to happen. [00:59:52] Speaker B: It's dumb. [00:59:53] Speaker A: No, the fiat money printer. We should not underestimate the power of the fiat money printer. It can really mess up our sense making. And so we really need to, you know, you know, like, when we're talking to the AI, we really need to make sure that we understand it in our own words. [01:00:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And I would also say too, to the people who think that like, and this is somebody who's definitely, without a doubt, you can go probably find me 10 times in the show, say that we've won and it's inevitable. So I take this with a grain of salt because I'm full of shit a lot of times too. But is that this? This is a game of outbuilding and it never ends. In fact, Cali actually had a good post on this, which I'm going to bring up when I have him on the show because I'm a huge fan of the E Cash stuff I like. I actually. The rebirth of ECASH is fascinating aside, even. Even considering the fact that it's custodial and runs the risk of fractional reserve, I still think it is a vast net positive for this to become a norm. But it says, luckily or sadly, cypherpunks have enough work to do for the foreseeable future, given how the world around us develops. Not just bitcoin, Bitcoiners suffer from an isolationist mindset. We should be seeking collaboration across all branches of freedom fighters. We should be leading these efforts, crafting alliances, directing the vision. Instead, many are even proud to live in their own small little bubble in which weak ideas can flourish without ever being challenged or without Ever having any meaningful impact on the world, we should be at the center of the global fight for freedom, and we should be shaping the future of coming generations. I thought that was a pretty good. Because bitcoin is such a foundational thing, we think that, like, oh, as long as we do bitcoin, it'll be fine. But the reason bitcoin's so impactful as a foundational thing is because it gives us. It gives us a stone to stand on when doing all of the other things. It's just the first layer of an infinitely layered system and an infinite fight, which is all you ever do is just get to a new layer. Like the Internet. When was the Internet done? Like, did the Internet's decentralized revolution, Was it just done in 1999, or did it start to. The centralization pressures continue to push us back towards all the consequences of large, single, you know, corporate entities. And then Satoshi still had to invent Bitcoin. Yet, like, the next thing, we're still going to have to invent something as important or as. As consequential on a new layer as bitcoin is to the Internet on top of bitcoin or in parallel to bitcoin, like, it's never going to be done. [01:02:27] Speaker A: Right, right? Yep, yep, That's. That's exactly right. [01:02:30] Speaker B: You. [01:02:30] Speaker A: You hit the nail on the head, you know, that the. [01:02:33] Speaker B: The. [01:02:33] Speaker A: The forces of centralization are all around us all the time, and we always, always, always will need to fight them. The battle will never stop. But that's life, you know, you have a survival instinct for moving. Your survival instinct is what keeps you alive. You know, when something's grabbing you, you fight back, and then you survive and you reproduce and then life goes on. [01:02:52] Speaker B: Think about how boring life would be without a battle like that, though, you know, like, if we did ever just solve it, that, like, my kids get to grow up and they never get to fight for anything real, you know, like to. For progress. It's like some bullshit. No. [01:03:06] Speaker A: And I want to go back to Kalli's quote, you know, I completely agree with that. I love Khaled. You know, I love the work that he does with Cashew. I think he's taken some unfortunate and dishonest positions in this conflict, but I respect his work. But to his point, one thing that really influenced me a lot was, did you replace civilization, the game as a kid? [01:03:32] Speaker B: I did. [01:03:34] Speaker A: Do you remember how there were multiple ways to win the game? There was the technological victory where you would launch a. Launch a starship to the moon or something like that. And then there was a military victory where you would just, like, build a big army and take over the world. And then there was a third type of victory. Remember what the third type was? [01:03:49] Speaker B: I don't know. It's been a minute. And I hated it because the. When I played the computer, it just cheated more, and I got pissed with it. What was the third one? [01:03:58] Speaker A: So the third way is the cultural victory. And I think this is how bitcoin wins. And so what the cultural victory says is that so you could actually have this. So if you built a lot of cathedrals and museums and theaters and, you know, artistic things, then your. The borders of your cities would expand, and then your cities would start bumping up against sort of rival cities. And then eventually the rival city, it would get so overwhelmed by your culture that it would join you. It would just flip sides. [01:04:30] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [01:04:31] Speaker A: I think bitcoin can do this. Okay. I think we need to not lose our spirit, right? Bitcoiners have a spirit, and I think the spirit is the same. It's an ancient spirit. It goes back to the American Revolution. It goes back to the Magna Carta. You know, it goes back to ancient Greece. You know, it goes back to Christianity in the. In the. In the early Middle east, you know, this spirit of individual freedom, individual rights, you know, that there's something inside of each of us that is divine, that kind of thing. And I think that is the cultural signal that resonates with all of humanity. And I think that's bitcoin's culture. And I think that if we lose that, then we lose bitcoin. But I think that if we can strengthen that and we can make it so that it resonates globally, then I think bitcoin is kind of inevitable. Right? Bitcoin will win because it resonates with all humanity. And there's a danger with. As going back to Callie's quote, with being a little too open and trying to bridge divides with people who are outside of bitcoin. If you let people who are not bitcoiners impose their culture on bitcoin, then bitcoin's culture dies, and then we can't achieve the cultural victory. And so I would be very sad if that happened. And I think that a lot of people on the. Shall we call them, I don't know, anti filter side or the core side maybe, I think a lot of them don't understand this, and they think, well, we just need as many people as possible. And through the culture, bitcoin doesn't have a culture. What are you talking about? And I'm like, well, yes, it does. And I think bitcoin's culture is actually its most important feature that sets it apart from all of the other nonsense. You know, if you look at, if you look at BCH and bsv, those, the code bases are forks of bitcoin core. I mean, they, they're. Bitcoin does not have superior technology, you know, like, it has the exact same technology as all those shitcoins. What bitcoin has that shitcoins don't is a culture that values good things. That, that values, you know, creating value and storing that value inside of the bitcoin ecosystem. You know, individual freedom, you know, doing service to other people and then earning money, you know, through that service and then storing that wealth in bitcoin and giving it away. And maybe this is a little too ideological, but I think bitcoiners value, like, being good, you know, like a goodness. You know, there's, as I said, there's sort of a divine spark inside of bitcoin's culture that isn't there in other, in other cultures. And I think we need to, I think we need to safeguard that and make sure that it survives. I think it is, is actually the most important thing about bitcoin. [01:07:27] Speaker B: I think it's, it's very much in line. Like, like I very often think of the bitcoin Cultural Revolution as a kind of like a second American cultural revolution. [01:07:40] Speaker A: Let's not call cultural revolution that was like Mao's. [01:07:45] Speaker B: Is, is the, is the, the, the foundation of it, like what the cultural, what the essence of the culture is, is that absent a violent Maoist revolution, is that the, the culture itself is one, that it's funny. There, there's actually a comparison that I, I, I read between the American Office show talking about how it shows the difference in the cultures, is that the American office actually still led to good things happening. And there was this element of everybody had something really good with him. Michael Scott still ended up being a good person. And he has these moments, and this is what really made the show beautiful, was he has these moments of competence where you're like, oh no, he's totally a good guy. Whereas in the UK Office, it literally ended with him losing his job and kind of like begging to come back. And it was just like this kind of like sad, like, depressing end, but that it was also quirky and funny and that there is this element of hope and belief that, no, we can still do things like we can still actually accomplish things. And then the focus on the, on individual sovereignty as the way to create a strong collective is that, is that you, you empower the individual and you let people decide who they want to trust and how they want to organize and what group they want to be a part of. And ultimately the best wins and everyone is better for it. You know, like you, you trade ideas rather than stab each other in the back over them. And, and that, that kind of, that culture of American exceptionalism, like this is exactly how all of the people in history has. They, they attack culture first. They attack, they undermine the culture. They, whether it's through immigration or poisoning the church or whatever institution it is that they think has the most power, they, like, there's, there's a very explicit reason why government surveillance and like intelligence agencies always go after the media. They always go after the media. Like never in history has it not been the case. Whatever the media was, they went after it and they sought to control it and undermine the narratives and see to it that they manipulated what people thought were the foundations of their cultural beliefs to work in their favor. It has always been a crucial point of manipulation to undermine it because that cultural strength outside of their central point of dictation or, or control has always been the biggest barrier. Is it because you can't, you can't get through family ties and cultural ties by saying, oh, you should listen to the government, like, those are closer to you. Those care. You care more about those. You have to first undermine the belief. [01:10:41] Speaker A: Right? [01:10:42] Speaker B: And, and that's why I think of Bitcoin as, and instant. Such a concrete instantiation of so many core cultural. Or it's not even, it's not even moral. It's sort of moral, but like just principles like, like virtuous principles of, of autonomy and, you know, like holding your keys, you can, you can extrapolate all, almost everything about freedom and, and why from, from some. From the simple premise of why you should hold your own keys and what the consequences of not doing so are. And that's something where code can actually teach a cultural lesson. And that's a really, really powerful and I think underappreciated thing about how, how this system works. [01:11:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And, and, and going back to, to what we were talking about earlier with, with, you know, the cultural lictory, you know, we're never going to win again. We're never going to win if people are, are sort of invading Bitcoin and they're not assimilating to our culture. You know, if, if we have to teach these outsiders, these, these, these newbies, right, they don't, they don't know what they're doing. We have to teach them best practices. We have to teach them our values. We have to teach them why bitcoin is important. We have to teach them how to use bitcoin. We have to teach them the right ways and the wrong ways to use Bitcoin. Self custody, you know, privacy, the, you know. Yeah. Building things and, and serving your community and, and then getting paid for that. Right? Like, like money. I don't know if you can do. [01:12:16] Speaker B: Things that you're not. You don't have to wait for somebody else to do it. Like the capacity. Bitcoin was just built. We all just got here and we all just built stuff and we all just helped and we all just moved it forward, like. Right, yeah, don't wait for somebody else to do it. [01:12:29] Speaker A: And, yeah, and so there's. There's this tension, right, between all of the other cultures that are around bitcoin, trying to sort of smother it. And then there's bitcoin culture, which is, I think is, Is actually like human culture, right? It's, it's a, it's a shared global human culture. And, you know, it's the same thing that, that anarcho capitalists, why they believe that we can get rid of the seed, which is that humans are, are good, right? Like, or, or the food market is good, right? If you just let people do what they want to do because people want to be good, they're going to do good things on the whole, right? Like sometimes people are going to do bad things, but we should, we should push back against that, right? We shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't just let bad things happen and be like, oh, well, that's okay, you know, the more the merrier. You know, it's like when people do bad things, when they lie, when they cheat, when they steal, when they defraud, when they scam, we should call that out. This is, you know, bitcoin maximalist culture is under attack right now by people who want to scam, and precisely because bitcoin maximalists call them out. And when we do that, it makes scamming a lot more difficult for them. So, you know, so, so, so. And I think people, People love that about bitcoin maximalists. They, they see that and they resonate with it. They go, yeah, we should call out scammers. Like, we shouldn't steal from people. We shouldn't lie to People, we should build things of, of, of real lasting value. And you know, as, as. What's this Francisco d' Antonio says in, in, in. In Atlas Road? You know, you know, once we make, once we have sound money, then the money becomes that. Right. It becomes, you know, a representation of that, of that, that good, productive, generative human spirit. [01:14:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:08] Speaker A: Instead of something that subverts it, which is what the fiat money printer does. [01:14:12] Speaker B: Yeah. The idea too, though, it's really interesting from a game theory perspective is that like, the reason humans are naturally good is because cooperation just has a bigger return than conflict, and it basically always does. But that you can actually see how when we design systems, they start to break down because they mess with that game theory. And fiat could not be a more perfect example of taking the natural net benefit of cooperation and flipping it on its head so that cheating actually has an outsized benefit. And the cost is not directly felt by anyone. It's all indirectly. So you have a systemic, you're causing a systemic problem for a very direct and explicit benefit to yourself. And that like, so that literally the goodness of humanity cannot scale without sound money. Like the, the, the very thing that incentivizes cooperation against instead of conflict doesn't work when it's a million abstract people against a million abstract people unless there is a. The sound money. And that's like the wild thing about the game theory of it all and. [01:15:26] Speaker A: The, and the big trap that sort of the, the really, really ideological free market people fall into is, is that, is that the culture again? I think bitcoin's culture is unique. It, I think that everything else is fiat, partly because we're surrounded by fiat culture. And the reason why we're surrounded by fiat culture is because the money printer funds the spreading and encouragement of fiat culture. And so when people are too sort of warmly welcoming of anybody of any culture to join Bitcoin, that has a detrimental effect on Bitcoin's culture. Because what you're doing is you're basically saying, oh yeah, well, it's fine if bitcoin becomes overrun by people who don't understand bitcoin culture and come from fiat culture. Well, no, that's not okay. Because if, if bitcoin is, is 99% sort of fiat grain people who, who haven't assimilated into bitcoin culture and 1% actual bitcoiners, well, there's no way that bitcoin can survive. [01:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's a fantastic point. And it's really funny because I did Not. I don't think I ever won a game of civilizations with the cultural victory. I think it was all. It was like, 99% technological. That was. That was always. That was always my mission, right. Is like, let's get freaking moon or whatever. It was. [01:16:51] Speaker A: Culture was always my favorite because it was. It was just. It's such a power move. It was just like, yeah, everybody just wants to join me because look at all this art and music. [01:16:58] Speaker B: Listen. I'm just better, okay? I don't even have to listen. Like, you do it. You got your tanks. That's fine. Who's going to drive your tanks? [01:17:05] Speaker A: Who's going to try? [01:17:06] Speaker B: They all want to hang out with me. [01:17:08] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And I think that's how bitcoin wins, right? Like. Like, people are like, oh, these bitcoin maximus, they're so toxic and judgmental. And I'm like, well, yeah, but, like. [01:17:17] Speaker B: Like, they have standards. And people are so sick of not having standards when obviously the results of not having standards are dog. They're awful. Like, look. [01:17:26] Speaker A: Look at what happens when you just. [01:17:27] Speaker B: Let standards be whatever, you know? [01:17:29] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you. I love that you said that. Like, we should have standards. Like, we shouldn't just be like, yeah, do whatever you want. [01:17:36] Speaker B: It doesn't mean shoot everybody who disagrees with you, but it doesn't mean not have standards. You know, it's like, it always goes back to. The whole idea is like, oh, if you don't think that we should put people in cages for using heroin, then obviously you want to. You just want to shoot up heroin every morning. No, those are not totally different worlds. Like, you don't have to love heroin to think that you shouldn't shoot somebody over it. [01:17:58] Speaker A: Like, thank you. Thank you. [01:18:00] Speaker B: I love that. [01:18:01] Speaker A: Like. Like, it's. It's. And you're seeing this is fi culture, right? It's. It's so destructive. And like, I mean, yes, probably a lot of us sort of came up in bitcoin during, you know, drug prohibition, I guess, which is kind of still going on. And there were all of these kind of more or less harmless drugs that we were like, well, these are victimless crimes, so why are there laws against this? And why are we throwing people in jail for this? And I completely agree with that. Like, we should be throwing people in jail for using heroin. But at the same time, like, if 99% of your town is a bunch of junkies, like, that's not good either, you know? [01:18:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:18:36] Speaker A: You know, so. So, you know, so I. I think. I think we should be proud of our culture as bitcoiners, like I think we should. And when people say, oh, you're being toxic, toxic and unwelcoming, you know, just push back against that and be like, I'm sorry, but I'm proud of my culture. I like my culture. I like bitcoin how it is, and I want it to survive. And I think that, you know, I think if we continue to have standards and we continue to improve, I think that really nothing can stop us. But I think that there's a definitely concerted effort. I think if I wanted to kill bitcoin, right, if I had a money printer and I wanted to kill bitcoin, I think I would just fund a bunch of media outlets to try and convince everybody that bitcoin is just a store of value. You know, it's just. It's not money. Right? It's just a. It's just a pet rock. You know, it doesn't. It doesn't threaten the dollar. No, the dollar is king, you know, the bitcoin isn't, you know, it's not going to threaten the dollar. No, no, of course not. Not, you know. You know, and so if you can convince bitcoiners en masse that bitcoin isn't money and it's just data storage, for instance, then, you know, you won. You know, that's. That's how you do it. So I think we have to fight tooth and nail against people trying to convince us that bitcoin is not money. [01:19:41] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm curious and. Because I never actually got back to this in the technical side and I. I want to hit something on. Let's go all the way back. Let's go all the way back to the merchant problem and Lightning ARC and Citria, because I'll tell you, I don't quite. I still have not really dug into the gritty of Citria and the whole the VM like mechanism. And so what's the degree. Why is this trusted or far from too far from trustless and unilateral exit and that sort of thing? What's your. What's your take on how that works to the degree that you understand the specificity of it? [01:20:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, this is a great question that a lot of people don't really understand. So BITM is kind of an interesting phenomenon that came, that started like a couple years ago where SupertestNet and Robin Linus. Well, Robin Linus primarily, but SupertestNet sort of helped us in early implementation stuff, came up with this idea of, oh, you can describe any computational logic using a bunch of NAND gates or a bunch of NOR gates. And this is actually what your processor does, right? It's just a bunch of transistors that are made into NAND gates and NOR gates and you can make any Turing complete program using that. And then what they discovered is that you can, you can make NAND gates in Bitcoin scripts. And so what you can do is you can make this giant tree of scripts and process any conceivable logic. And so what Citria did is they took this and they made what's called a bit DM bridge where there's a thing called a roll up, which is basically Ethereum speed for sidechain. And, and actually the funny thing about Citria is that they're an EDM sidechain and so effectively they're Ethereum, but they're running as a bitcoin sidechain instead of as its own blockchain. And the crazy thing about this is that somehow we're supposed to be excited about this, even though the exact same thing was invented in 2016. It's called Rootstock or RSK. And the only difference between the two is that there's a different pegging mechanic mechanism. So Rootstock uses what's called a federated multisig or a federated sidechain. [01:22:13] Speaker B: Kind of like liquid. [01:22:14] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly like Liquid. It's the same model. Liquid's blockchain just, just looks, looks a lot like Bitcoin with some extra features. Now whereas RSK looks a lot like Ethereum. And Citri has the same thing as RSK with this slightly different pegging mechanism that uses that bit VM bridge that I talked there that I told you about. And so it's a slightly different trust model. And I don't, I don't think there's any practical difference to the end user, especially Ethereum users, which are going to be the majority users of this, this new Ethereum roll up. So instead of a federated multisig where you have like, I don't know, it's like, like 7 of 15 or 8 of 15 or something like that, or 6 of 11 or something like that, you have some kind of multisig and you trust a bunch of functionaries to, to run thing and if, you know, if that many of them collude, then they can steal your money. With Citria, the trust model is improved, right? It's a lot better. It's one of n. So there's these things Called Watchtowers that are sort of, there's like coordinators, right? There's people who are running the protocol and everybody's more or less trusting these coordinators to run, to run the raw, to execute the raw. And this is so that everybody doesn't have to run their own node. They can just more or less trust these coordinators. And the coordinator can be called out if it does the execution incorrectly, if it breaks the protocol somehow and at least one of these watchtowers is paying attention enough to submit a proof, then it can submit a fraud proof that takes the money from the coordinator. So the coordinator, you know, has, you know, something at stake. And then if, if the coordinator screws up or tries to screw everybody out of their money, then as long as at least one watchtower is honest, then they can, then everybody gets their money back. Right? [01:24:05] Speaker B: And, and the, can anybody be a watchtower in this setup? Like could I, could I join and then just like spin up. [01:24:11] Speaker A: My understanding is that the Watchtowers are, are, are trusted and known. I, I'm, I might have that. So don't quote me on that. But the point is, you know, if all of them collude, then everybody still loses their money. So, so it, so this is, this is unlike ARC and better than a. [01:24:27] Speaker B: Multi sig, but still similar in to some degree. Yeah. [01:24:35] Speaker A: Right. And so, and so what happens whenever you create something like that is you, you basically recreated fractional reserve banking. Okay. But just, you know, it's a little bit harder to do. But you know, imagine that, imagine that a trillion dollars gets invested in the Citria ecosystem. Now there's a huge incentive to try and get all those watchtowers to collude. And if they do and everybody loses their money and we've got this paper bitcoin fraction reserve and then consolidation thing that happened with gold and then we have, and then we have fiat again. So like we really need to. Yes, it's fine if people build those things, but I don't think they're very exciting or interesting. And I think what Bitcoin is really, really interesting. What's really interesting about Bitcoin is that we can create these unilateral exit off chain systems that nobody has to trust and cannot do fractional reserve banking. And that's where Bitcoin's power lies. [01:25:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I wanted to ask about Ark because I have a much better understanding of ark, but Justin, Justin, a guy who did Shocknet and did the, the Lightning Lightning page or something like that, can't remember the name of it. Exactly. But he was going off on Noster of just like ARK was a scam. And it's just, it's a, it's a pretend mimic is trying to say it's got all the benefits of lightning. But you know, the arc, the, the ARC operator or whatever can collude with themselves and there's no benefit over just like having a zero comp channel and all of this stuff without, without me giving like a really hard argument on behalf of that post. What do you say kind of like naturally to just a challenge like that in how ARC operates? [01:26:32] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean I, I don't deeply understand how ARC works, but I understand it, I think enough to sort of conceptually understand what it's doing. It again, it has unilateral exit. So it basically it's, it's similar to a lightning channel in that a lightning channel is two people who share a UTXO and they, and they have an off chain protocol that they operate between themselves. And there are, there are ways to cheat the protocol, but then there are ways to punish if they're, if cheating happens. So that's called like a justice transaction in lightning, for instance. And then lightning, you know, you have a bunch of these little, little shared utxos network together and that's the lightning network. And then when you want to pay somebody, you just route through, through a bunch of them. With arc you have, you have a much larger UTXO that's shared among a lot more people. And so you have effectively a tree of off chain transactions instead of just one off chain transaction. So in lightning you have an off chain transaction which is the force closed transaction. So that's the unilateral exit guarantee. So you hold it and don't post it on chain unless you really, the trust has been broken between you and the other side. And then you go, okay, I'm out. And you post the foreclosed transaction. Ideally you don't need to do that if you want to close a channel, ideally it's cooperative and you just collaborate with the other person to close the channel. That's a lot more cheap, a lot cheaper and a lot less risky. With arc, when you want to do the same thing, there isn't just one transaction that you have to post, you have to post. So because there's a bunch of people sharing a utxo, there's the way that, the way that this ends up looking off chain is it's a big tree of transactions. So, so there's a root which is, you know, Like a merkle root. And then you have a big tree of outputs on top of this. And then the people inside of the, this big construction can pay each other inside of it off chain. And you know, nothing. So that's why it's very cheap and convenient, because it doesn't need to go on chain as long as you're. As long as everything is operating properly. Where, where the unilateral exit comes into play is where. And where the difficulties with ARC come into play are when, when you have to, you basically call, call the bluff of the coordinator. The coordinator starts doing something, you know, starts abusing the protocol in some way, tries to steal people's money, whatever, and, and you, and you go, okay, something weird is happening. I got, got to get out. So instead of posting one transaction, you have to post a bunch of transactions because you have to post, you have to post the actual, you have to spend the actual UTXO on chain. And then you also have to spend. So you're up here in some leaf, right? So sure, you know, your, your money is like out here on the tree. And so you, in order to be able to spend this on chain, you have to. All of the UTXOs, they're called VTXOs. All VTXOs that you have that lead back to that original UTXO, you have to spend all those two. [01:29:32] Speaker B: You have to post the trunk and then the first branch and then the next one just to prove that you're in, you're in the tree and that you actually have your key. Yeah, exactly. [01:29:43] Speaker A: And so what Justin from Shotgun is probably complaining about is that basically it's more expensive to exit from ARC than it is to exit from lightning in probably most cases. But anyway, so if you have high on chain fees, for instance, during spam attack, it might be more so like you have a thousand sats. As you were saying, if you have just 1,000 sats in an arc, then going on chain could end up losing you all for money that you have just in fees. And so that is a difficulty in ark. However, as we were saying before, it still doesn't allow fractional reserve banking because at least there is no way for the coordinator to pretend they have that money. You might have to burn all of it in order to spend it. But, but that, but that should be enough to keep the coordinator honest and not actually run a fraction reserve. [01:30:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll tell you just in general, because one of the things, I feel like there's a huge perspective loss in Bitcoin, like there's an argument with Paul Sort and Callie actually I think recently about E cash and all this stuff and how like he was like, E cash is like an attack and it's like terrible. And I was like, seriously? Because we have this perspective somehow that oh, somehow we've already achieved sovereignty and full self custody and infinite transactions and stuff. With bitcoin for like the whole world is it like somehow this is like a thing that's already been solved and now so anything that is built that does that isn't perfect towards that goal is not even worth building. And it's like, no, dude, the whole world lives in fiat banking land. Like anything that is better than that is a huge leap in the right direction. We still have everything to fix. Nothing is fixed. We really have a whole handful of bitcoiners who live in this bubble that they think sovereignty is completely possible, but it doesn't scale. We're not there yet. The point that I was making was that with Ark is that the difference is in the context of going back to the perspective of like comparing this to a bank. Like if I had a thousand dollars in a bank and the bank tried to steal it from me and I had the option, I couldn't get it, I couldn't get it myself, but I had the option to set it on fire. I would fucking set it on fire. I would set it on fire immediately. I would be like you, I don't give a if I don't get my money back. But you will not get it. You will not get it from me. You know, like, I will bust, I will blow up the building before I let you take my money. You know? And like that's kind of the situation is like think about the power dynamic that has changed there to just be able to spite them for being pieces of shit. And, and like that's that itself is such a huge thing. And. But anyway, that was just like the perspective shift of like you think no advancement has happened, that you could literally burn the bank's money that they tried to steal from you. [01:32:50] Speaker A: That's amazing. [01:32:51] Speaker B: That's fucking great. [01:32:52] Speaker A: You know, bitcoiner spirit, man. That's that bitcoiner spirit I was talking about. Like, you can't tell me what to do. You can't take my money. I will burn this before I will let you have it. Like that is, that is the essence of being a bitcoiner. Like, like, like, like freedom, like, like strong property rights, you know, this is. [01:33:11] Speaker B: Mine and it's my choice. And you can suck a dick. [01:33:16] Speaker A: Yeah. But so but going back to people saying it doesn't scale, who were you saying? You said call. And who were having that. That argument? [01:33:23] Speaker B: Paul Storks. [01:33:26] Speaker A: Saying it doesn't scale. Yeah, so. So, so there's. I think there's a. There's a good explanation for this, this dispute or conflict that often arises in. When talking to declarist, I think that people are expecting bitcoin to scale faster than it can. So kind of, as I was alluding to earlier. [01:33:43] Speaker B: Oh, God, keep going. But yes. Jesus Christ, yes. So much. [01:33:49] Speaker A: Bitcoin absolutely scales. And actually, Andreas has a great video about gracefully failing to scale. This is what the Internet did. This is what the Internet is still doing, and this is what bitcoin does. And so a lot of people look at bitcoin and they go, oh, it's so slow. It's slow and clunky. It has high fees and this and that. And lightning is so hard to use. And it's like, yeah, but, like, the Internet was like that in the 80s, you know, but it still happened because people. People pushed forward because they could see there was something. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. There was something there that, that, that was worth working towards. And so, and so it does scale, but it just takes a lot longer than everybody is expecting. And the reason why everybody's expecting it to go a lot faster than it is is because of fiat money. Fiat money allows the fiat money printer to print a bunch of money and fun stuff, and then it happens immediately. And this is. This is how like, all of Silicon Valley basically happened. You know, like people are expecting, oh, it's just going to instantly happen. And it's like, no, this is decentralized tech. This is much closer to the Internet than it is to, like, Twitter or Facebook or something like that. Like, it's not just going to immediately have a billion users overnight. And again, the reason is because we have to scale the culture. Okay? This is. This is. This is the slow part of bitcoin. The slow part of bitcoin is scaling the culture. If we scale adoption before scaling the culture, then the same. We have the same outcome as what I was worrying about before, which is that now you have 99% of Bitcoin holders and users are just not bitcoiners. Right? They're just fiat people who are pretending to use bitcoin, but they're not, right? They're just trusting some third party. And if you do that, then bitcoin dies, in my opinion. Or at least it becomes much less likely to work, but you can grow organically. This is what I keep trying to, trying to tell people, like you have to grow organically, you have to teach people best practices, you have to teach people to self custody. And it's a lot of work. Right. It's not going to be easy. But nothing worth building was ever easy. So it's, it's like that, that's what we, you know, that's what we're here for. [01:35:43] Speaker B: You know, like that's easy to build. It's by necessity, like it is cheap, you know, like it's, it is of, it is of less consequence if it's easy. [01:35:53] Speaker A: And so there's this fiat sort of Silicon Valley mentality. Oh well, if you could just raise a billion dollars, then you can immediately build the thing and have a billion users. And it's like, well no, that's not how bitcoin works. Bitcoin works. If you're a bitcoin company and you raise a bunch of money from Fiat vcs, you are not going to be a bitcoin company for long. You're just going to be a fiat company that pretends to do stuff with bitcoin. And we've seen this with so many bitcoin companies. It's, it's, it's frustrating but again, you know, we're at war with the money printer. Liz. This was always going to happen. So I mean it's, it's, it's frustrating but at the same time it's, it's not, you know, it wasn't unexpected. [01:36:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The BC pull is, is remarkable but like there's no getting around it. It's kind of like going back to the whole Jack Dorsey thing is that like once, once you have your shareholders and you have your investors, it's, it's what they want and it's about getting them their return and their, their payout that changes. The incentives and their payouts are all in the fiat mindset. So they're all going to make the fiat decisions and you have to cater to that. You have to work what you actually want around it. And there will never not be a conflict between what is the long term structured perspective for bitcoin and the one that appeases all of the fiat financial games. [01:37:13] Speaker A: Yeah, and this is the, yeah. I'm sure you've heard the term malinvestment, right? [01:37:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:37:18] Speaker A: From blockchain economic. Yeah, like this is the malinvestment endgame. I mean it's gotten so bad that you don't, not only do you not need to worry about your users. You don't even need a product. Like all you should do to succeed in fiat world is pretend to have a product and do a bunch of marketing and dupe a bunch of investors into giving you enough money so that you can do more marketing Crypto. So I mean, you know, and again, like that's the money printer. [01:37:46] Speaker B: We have to fight that culturally. [01:37:48] Speaker A: Like the battle happens on every level, you know, and especially in the cultural arena. So when people are, people like Paul Storch are like, I raised $300 billion to build drive chains. You know, you have to look at that a little with a little skepticism and be like, you know, is this really actually going to do something? It doesn't seem like this is an organic development. It seems like you're just trying to bolt some bitcoin that doesn't belong there. [01:38:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. My issue with drive chains, I'll be perfectly fair, I always found them interesting, but it seemed like just a way to kind of pretend like we weren't actually using multisig security, but relying it on like whoever has the most hash power as the degree of how much you control the multisig. You know, like somebody could just come in and add a dump an enormous amount of hash power. Now you're like 90% of the multisig and it's like y. [01:38:41] Speaker A: Okay, and this is, this is exactly the problem of met, right? This is exactly the problem of minor extracted value. Or mel. As Matt Carollo wrote an article about where basically, you know, you have actually. [01:38:52] Speaker B: Read that one on the show. [01:38:53] Speaker A: Yeah, you give so much power to the miners and the, like, you not only give miners the power over the bitcoin protocol, but you give them power over a bunch of related protocols and then they end up doing things which have absolutely already happened on Ethereum, where basically validating, validating blocks becomes this very, very, almost like a closed source process where there's one company that writes the software that does the validation and then everybody has to just like subs like pay a subscription fee so that they can do validating. And what validation does is it maximizes your profit by ordering the transactions in a way that usually screws a lot of people out of their money. Right. Like people lose a lot of money on Ethereum because they're, they're using these dexes and stuff. And, and, and you can do. There's these things called sandwich attacks and stuff where you can just like, like, like remove all the liquidity from a market. You can, you can. Somebody's doing A trade, right? You can catch the trade and then as the miner, you can front run the trade, remove all the money from the market. The trade ends up executing. It's a market buy. It ends up executing at like a crazy price, right, where the person just basically just loses all that. Like, like, you know, somebody puts in an order for you know, a million USDT or something like that, you know, and then, and then you say, you know, ha, the price of USDT is now, instead of, instead of a million, now it's a billion. And then you front run that and they think they're doing a market buy on a market that they were just looking at with a bunch of liquidity, but now it doesn't have any liquidity in it. And then they just lose all their money. [01:40:24] Speaker B: And then, and then basically gamifies the manipulation. It literally just gamifies the manipulation of the, of the border book itself. [01:40:31] Speaker A: Yeah, the miner colludes with the attacker and takes a big cut. And so that's how Ethereum is. Ethereum is just a den of thieves. Right. And this is why I said, you know, we should avoid activating things like opcat and you know, zero knowledge proof. Like OP ZKP has been proposed to use your house proofs. Like again, they might be safe, right? Those sorts of things might be safe, but they definitely create a lot of very bad perverse incentives for miners. And I think we should grow again, we should try to organically grow Bitcoin's culture and adoption a bit more before trying those things. [01:41:08] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, I always feel like I run out of time way before we're done with the conversation. But I do have a bit of a stop here in just a minute or so. I want to give any final thoughts. There were like two or three things that we literally didn't even get to, but any final thoughts or your take, what's your piece of advice to people in the current environment around Bitcoin and what should they focus on and what's the best way to frame how they look and read and explore and debate with people like, like, like moving forward. [01:41:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, I think just recognize which things are, are, are fiat values and which things are bitcoin values and recognize when you're doing, when you're getting into that fiat brain which is like fomo, right? Like impatience, like short, you know, as we say, high time preference. Right. Like trying to do things in the short term. Just catch yourself when you, when, when you see that happening and you're, you're, you're trying to like follow some, some wave and like not miss the wave. I, I would, I would just, just push back against that and work on what really resonates with you. Work on what you really think is important. And if you put in the work and you put in the time and you really care, it will bear fruit in the long term. It will bear way more fruit than just chasing around this thing and that thing and getting distracted and trying to find where the party at. Start bitcoin meetups. Teach new bitcoiners onboard them. Especially get merchants to start accepting bitcoin. The fees are rock bottom right now. You know, like it was very difficult to onboard merchants in 2023 and 20, 2024 because of the spam attacks that happened then, but now the blocks are practically empty and now is the perfect time to onboard your favorite merchants to lightning. Just go, do it. [01:43:00] Speaker B: Go. [01:43:01] Speaker A: Like it's up to us, you know, we have to make it happen or it won't happen. [01:43:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. That's a great way to end. We have to make it happen or it won't happen. Can you direct people to your project? I'm actually really interested. What's the state of it in the context of having. I may literally end up using it. It's very relevant to something I'm working on. So I'm curious because I don't know much about it. [01:43:28] Speaker A: I'm hoping to present it in December in Taiwan. It's not really ready yet, but it's. Yeah, it's. It. We have a couple of users right now, but we, we're, we're pretty much in alpha so we gotcha. We're not, we're not in production yet, but we're hoping to get there in the next, in the next month or two. Like I said, hopefully, hopefully by December, but if not, we're just going to keep building and just keep trying to get, get an auction. Oh, by the way, it's called Ambrosia. Pos Ambrosia. [01:43:56] Speaker B: Pos okay, Ambrosia. [01:43:57] Speaker A: Pos and it's a, like I said, it's a, it's a point of sale system that's designed to quickly onboard non technical merchants entirely onto a bitcoin standard. [01:44:09] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, when, when you do have the, the beta or the public release or the video or the, the, the conference announcement or whatever, shoot it to me, the tweet, the note, you know, whatever it is. And I'll, I'll boost it. I'm. I'm definitely Very interested. When. When we actually get to see that and I get to play with it. [01:44:27] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks guy. And it's been a pleasure talking to you here. [01:44:31] Speaker B: Of course. Always, man. Always, man. Like I said, overdue. Overdue. We'll have to do it again because like I said, actually I'll be doing a couple of different episodes on the filters. I'm gonna have Merchadamus on sometime soon. Just talk about V30 in general, all the. A lot of the non opera turn things about it. So I may have a bunch of good content to either argue against or statements and. And it might be, might be a perfect opportunity to have you back on to just kind of continue the conversation. [01:44:59] Speaker A: You mean with Merch? [01:45:02] Speaker B: No, I was, I was meaning after Merch. Like after I did an episode with Cali and Merch and like a whole number of other people kind of like if this debate is still going on, which I imagine it will, is that it? Always good to have back and forth. So yeah, for sure. [01:45:17] Speaker A: I'd love to be back on this. This is a really, really great conversation. [01:45:21] Speaker B: Hell yeah, dude. Hell yeah. [01:45:22] Speaker A: Every day a cool, deep conversation like this. [01:45:25] Speaker B: Well man, thank you so much for joining me and yeah, thanks for coming on the carnival, man. [01:45:30] Speaker A: All right, thanks dad. Thanks for having me. [01:45:35] Speaker B: All right guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Thank you guys so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe, press the like button, share it out, all those good things, they make a massive difference with the show. I thought this was a fantastic episode. I really, I really hope you guys liked it too. Shout out to Chris for both an amazing episode but also for joining me. It's good to actually hang out and get to know the guy a little bit. And don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors as well. Oh, you can follow Chris by the way. I'll have links and details and ambrosia point of sale. Any links that he sends me I will have down in the show. Notes the description of this show. Whether they are here immediately or if they show back up, just stay tuned. Keep watching down there as well as on the website. Don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors at Leden IO for bitcoin backed loans Synonym and pub key for a new protocol stack to decentralize the web to Chroma for fixing light for human health and lastly the HRF and the Oslo Freedom Forum and their financial freedom report. Great guys. All great bitcoiners and really cool products and services. So check those out. Highly recommended. I have a bunch of other recommendations that I'll be putting on the website soon, so stay tuned there at bitcoinaudible. Com and run knots. He sent me that message, like, just a few minutes after we close this episode out. He's like, damn it, I should have told people to run knots. So I have to add this back in here, and that should do us. Thank you guys for checking us out for watching, and I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. Until then, everybody, that is my two sets. Sam.