[00:00:00] Speaker A: The whole point of libertarianism is that we should recognise that we don't know how to plan the world. We don't know what the solution is going to be. You can't have a central planner decide it.
If it was really just that libertarians understood how the world worked, then you could have a central planner. You would just need them to be libertarians. That's not how it works at all.
It's antithetical to the whole concept. That's why the Block Size War was such a huge success, because it did not hard fork. It did not decide, oh, if there is a schism in the community, one small group is going to be able to force it onto everybody else.
And that's exactly the thing that you actually need to have society's rules be sustainable, because otherwise, that's all you get. You get people who will violently disagree about the tiniest shit, and then they will put a gun to everybody else's head, and they will say, you just got to come along with me or you're screwed.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Guy Swan, host of Bitcoin Audible. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: What's up boss? Good to be here.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Cheers. Thank you for joining us.
As I was saying, I've been a big fan of you and your content and appreciative of all the work that you've done for the bitcoin community, spreading education for many years, over 1300 episodes of Bitcoin Audible, really, it's just a huge contribution that very few can say that they've done as much as you. And one of the things I love about your content is that you are able to, as I said, distill complex topics into easy to understand explanations. And so let's get right into it. The biggest topic right now that's the talk of the town this week, of course, is quantum. Google just put out a paper this last week saying that they are much closer than they originally thought to possibly breaking ecdsa, the algorithm that of course, that protects Bitcoin, the cryptography. And many people are on different sides of the fence of this issue.
So before we get your take, can you please just explain to the audience simply what is the quantum threat to bitcoin?
[00:02:25] Speaker A: So it's basically, can you reverse a public key back into a private key?
You know, like everything works in generally in cryptography, since public key cryptography in the late 70s is you, you issue like your Private key is your key and your public key is a lock. And you can give your lock to anybody and then they are able to send you information or encrypt a message with your lock and then you are the only person who can unlock it. And literally all of Bitcoin works based on that assumption. All of cryptography works based off that assumption. Is that the only reason you are the owner of your Bitcoin is because when you publicly share your lock and someone locks it with that lock, it says, oh, I'm going to use this to lock up these funds. You're the only person who can take the key and sign and prove that you can unlock it.
And so the idea of a quantum machine and the, the, you know, the ultimate threat to all cryptography and of course a money based on cryptography would be, does that assumption hold? Are you, can someone get your key without needing to get your key? You know, can somebody recreate your key?
And so a quantum computer is the theorized as a device. And the way I understand it, I hate this topic because it is.
There is nothing that has more jargon there. Nothing on planet Earth has more jargon than quantum.
And the. I swear to God they go out of their way to explain things badly. Like to, to not make it make any sense at all.
But if I wanted to give like a general idea is that like imagine you set up like a chip. You know, chip. Chips are always a 0 or 1, right?
Let's imagine you can set up a chip. You can set up these, these little gates and every single one of them is sitting right between a 0 and 1. Neither one of them actually exists in any place.
And you don't know what the input is, but you do know what the output is because you have a circuit that's actually designed to do one function. There's actually a single path of least resistance where an input actually enters the output or actually creates the output.
And so what if you could put all of these things in a perfectly like cannot be affected by like any tiny, tiny little effects effect of anything in any direction will get it to path of least resistance. Fall into this orientation of a private key to create the public key with an algorithm that says here this, this is where the path of least resistance would lead.
Can you then make a chip so that if you give it a public key you can, it will actually just know that this algorithm can be reversed? You don't. You're not actually trying everything, right? The idea of cryptography is that you have to try every single Possibility and guess.
And this would be a way to. How can you set up an environment that is so isolated and so sensitive that if you just said everything is perfectly between a 0 and a 1, all of the ones would fall right into place and all the zeros would fall right into place. Because electricity wants to follow that path to get from the public key back to the private key.
So that, in a very vague, hand, wavy sense, is kind of the idea of a quantum computer, as I understand it.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: I like that explanation. Like water running down a rock going down the path of these resistance going from that.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. Can you do that with a chip and an extremely complex algorithm with a billion of these gates? Yeah.
[00:06:24] Speaker B: And from the beginning, bitcoiners have known that this could be a theoretical threat in the future. Correct. Satoshi addressed this and said that if it was to appear, even if we had enough time, we would be able to address it. Right.
And so now it seems as if. Well, at least Google is saying that that timeline is shortening and that they highly advise that all cryptography be quantum resistant by 2029.
What do you make of this latest news? And do you think that there's an actual threat there?
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Papers are a dime a dozen. You know, there's a lot of theories and you know, another good example is Shor's algorithm, which is the. The main algorithm for suggesting you can reverse a private key or can reverse a public key back into a private key from a supposed or theorized quantum computer.
I think that was like late 80s or something that. That that algorithm came about.
So there's plenty of theory and there's plenty of like, oh, we can do it better this way. But the thing that gets me is talk is great, but talk doesn't. Talk ends at talking, you know, and every time, as. As I said, I hate this topic because it's so hard to find anything concrete.
And dude, the biggest. The biggest problem, like I. You got to go back to the source, right? You got to go find the. The actual research paper and you got to figure out, okay, how can I get details on the actual experiment they ran that this research paper is from? And a lot of these institutions or a lot of these companies actually try specifically not to share a lot of that information because that's the way they get to say their conclusion and get their extra funding for their next little experiment.
But I finally found someone who super did the hard work and found more information than I was ever able to pull together because I was having every article, no source. No source, just Somebody's statement. And that was always a red flag for me. Jargons and you. Every source goes back to just another journalist or article.
That always just makes me, man, I need, I need you to give me something concrete. And like I know quantum is an obnoxious topic and I'm actually working on a video right now for this just because it is such. God, this topic is such garbage.
It's pure noise. It's 90% noise.
Is. There's a fantastic paper called Recreating Quantum factorization with 8 bit computer, an Abacus and a Dog.
And basically what he breaks down, it's a, it's not a super lengthy paper. I think it's like 25 pages or something like that. And.
But he goes to every experiment where a quantum computer or quantum chip has supposedly factored something or made some huge leap and breaks it down to like how many genuine bits of entropy were involved in this?
And to, you know, where's the signal? Because there's like one of them that like really, I mean it looks like a, it's like 4, 8, 7, 5. There's like 20 digits or whatever in the number. But then if you look at it in binary, it's 01,01,01,01,01, 01. And you find out that they actually just did a pre processing trick and there was only two bits of entropy which is basically like a single digit number.
And so there's a lot of that, there's a lot of that and there's this appearance of like a huge scale up and a huge, like doing much, much bigger tasks and factoring much larger numbers. When, if you look at the genuine concrete, and I just posted this day or two ago of when the, when the news of this hit was okay, has anybody successful at random with a quantum chip or a quantum computer factored a two digit number?
And as far as I can tell, the answer is still no.
And sure, it's not something to just like completely dismiss that somebody has a theory to like potentially make quantum computers and logical qubits, which are just kind of like using traditional computers to make fake qubits or things that behave like qubits. A qubit would be a quantum gate. So if I talked about a chip that had like billions of these gates and they all sit at halfway between 0 and 1, that would be a qubit, right?
And so you can basically mimic one by using traditional chips or traditional computer technology.
The way I understand it or the way it was poorly explained explained to me.
And so there's not even. And like, this is the problem, right, is that like a quantum machine. There's a reason, like, if you've ever seen one, they've like, they're like, dipped in like liquid nitrogen. And like, all of this stuff is because the idea is that if you're trying to get electricity to follow the path of least resistance between a public key back to what would be a private key through some super aggressive algorithm, and you're trying to get something that scales to like, billions of units, you know, because that's a private key. Like, you have to have something that's massive. You have to have a enormous amount of gates to actually pull this off. Well then you also have to make sure that the wind doesn't affect it, that the electricity doesn't affect it. There's no beta or gamma rays, that the temperature doesn't adjust. There's so much noise in the universe. And you're trying to create a chip that has no universe noise.
And so this is where the huge problem arises is how the hell do you do this without just a staggering amount of noise screwing up your calculation?
And this has been the problem of quantum compute is how do you, how do you deal with noise?
And as you scale up, the noise becomes worse, you know, like, it's more and more sensitive and it's, and it's funny, there was a. When Chip started becoming really, really small, there was a. I think this was in the late 90s, and I cannot remember his name. And I hate it because I love it when I find out something that was like a huge critical thing in computing and the Internet history that, like, nobody knows about it. And I'm like, this guy literally saved the Internet or like, figured out that thing that nobody could figure out. And I can never remember names because they're always obscure, but there was a. There was a dude who I think was like, IBM was like, making chips.
And as they got like smaller and smaller, the gates got smaller and smaller. Suddenly they just started throwing errors.
And he was. And if they. Nobody could make sense of it. And everybody was doing every bit of testing and everything that you could possibly do.
And they were like, there's. Everything's clean. Like, they were realizing they were. They were manufacturing it right? There weren't even errors in the construction. Like, it was like, what in the hell is going on? It was just throwing everybody for a loop until this one dude who happened to have enough background and just kind of like physics in general, you know, a little bit of a generalist knowledge, thought how small Are these things now and what are we putting them on?
And he did a test. They found out that the ceramic that they were putting the chips on, that they were, they were fusing these gates to that the natural, like, nuclear breakdown, like the, the half life of ceramic was throwing off these tiny, tiny amounts of, like, beta particles.
And the gates were now so small in the chips that every once in a while, one would just hit at the right time and in the right spot that it would. That it would flip the gate the wrong way.
So, like, this is the level of, like, tiny computing and, like, noise is causing problems that we were talking about in the late 90s, you know, and if you hadn't discovered that, they literally would never have been. Like, you had to. To scale down past that. You just had to realize that you have to, like, save it from radiation, because radiation will screw up your. Your calculation.
And like, so this is the quantum problem.
It's not really the theory.
You know, Shore's algorithm sure as hell made it a whole lot quicker, a whole lot sooner that a quantum computer was going to destroy cryptography, because somebody found an algorithm that a quantum computer could destroy cryptography.
But again, that was like late 80s.
And in the last 20 years, I think we first factored a single digit number in like 2007 or 8, like late 2000s.
And then the latest one that quote unquote succeeded was, I think 2019, and it was the number 21.
And they cheated kind of like.
So the actual physical, like, boots on the ground. I made a quantum chip progress.
I'm not even seeing it.
It's a lot of papers, lot of investment, a lot of quantum stocks.
But. And then, you know, then people give this excuse. It's like, well, if they're, if they can break cryptography, it's not like they're gonna announce it to the world. We're not even gonna hear about it until it's broken. It's like, well, yeah, but we should probably hear that, like, a chip exists somewhere that can do something. You know, we're not gonna go from 1 bit to 256 bits overnight.
Somewhere in there, there's gonna be like, we succeeded at three bits, and now we'll be quiet about it.
Do that. Do that first.
And the, the good thing, the good news is. And it's not, again, it's not even that I believe Steve. I have Steve on the show, and he used to work with NASA, and he's like kind of our resident physicist on the round table. He thinks that quantum computing is just a total. It can't scale at all. It just fundamentally, it's never even gonna produce anything.
He said, he. We talked about this in an episode and he said, dude, There were like 40 types of computing that we have tried and none of them scaled. None of them scaled except electronic computing.
And, and he believes quantum just falls in that same bucket. Lots of great theory, lots of fantastic physics and math, but it's never. You're never going to build a general quantum computer that can handle that many gates and have no noise.
It's a physics problem.
But we do have primitives. I think it's just a question of like, how much energy do I put into it. Right. Is how.
Show me something concrete before I'm going to spend a ton of energy thinking that this is the thing that will kill bitcoin. Because there's a lot of things that are trying to kill bitcoin. Bitcoin all the time. Yeah. And we have plenty of things to focus on and we can update bitcoin's signature. Like we've, we've done it. We have nor signatures now and those are new.
So sure. Come up with. Let's, let's beat against that. Let's put some investment into it. Let's like we should be prepared for all the edge cases. This is an existential crisis crisis if it is a concern. So why not spend a lot of time figuring out what that quantum resistant cryptography is and then do a path to potentially implementing that and figuring out how to safely add that to Bitcoin. But I think ECDSA is. I think just general math and general traditional computing is the bigger threat to ecdsa. Like cryptography just usually has a shelf life. So we're going to need a new signature scheme at some point. Probably.
I'm not so sure. Google's about to create a quantum computer that's going to break Bitcoin, though.
Just.
Yeah. So not on my bingo card.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: The, the paper that they put out. I mean it's, it's all theoretical. Right. And they said that the, essentially the, the theory that they were able to game out means that they need less qubits to theoretically break it. Right. So yeah, that means that there's, there'll be.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: They still need qubits, but they still keep it themselves.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: But one thing we have heard this last year that's really picked up a little bit of steam on like on Wall street, like Jefferies. Jeffries divested out of bitcoin from one of their funds because they thought quantum was A threat. We now have Ray Dalio on CNBC saying Quantum is a threat. So while some bitcoiners completely dismiss it, it does seem as if there are players out there on Wall street and whatnot who think that it's enough of a threat that, that I think maybe doing something, showing effort from the bitcoin community that there this is a something that's on the. On the table and that we are putting effort towards it. Adam, back last night he posted that 20 people at Blockstream are working towards quantum resistant algorithms for bitcoin.
Do you on your list?
[00:20:08] Speaker A: Oh, that's sweet. I didn't realize that. Yeah.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: On your list of things that devs should be spending time on, where would you put quantum? And if there's something above it, what is.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Wouldn't be.
It wouldn't be super high, but it would be top 10. Mostly because I, when it comes to like the protocol, I, I don't think we need.
Not a ton needs to happen. You know, we just need to be behaving defensively I think to, to make sure that something doesn't kill bitcoin.
So I think it's perfectly, I think it's great actually that attention is being spent on it whether or not it is a real threat. You know, you don't buy insurance because you want your house to burn down or you expect your house to burn down. You buy it in case it burns down.
So that's what quantum resistant cryptography is. To me, it's an insurance policy.
But I would put it like it wouldn't be my most. Let's just say it wouldn't be my most expensive insurance policy. Like I wouldn't invest that much in to it. I'm more concerned with mining decentralization. The fact that miners are basically hashers now that rent their hash to huge pools. I think getting them actually running their own nodes and building their own block templates and figuring out how to do that at scale and getting people to care about it because shockingly few people seem to think it's even that big of a concern, I think.
Or they kind of hand wave about it and be like, oh well, people can just log out of their mining pools. Like sure, you can react to something bad happening or you can prevent something from bad from being possible.
Let's actually not have a 51% attack that we have to fix.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: I wanted to briefly interrupt today's interview to give a big shout out to our lead sponsor, Rhino Bitcoin. Rhino is the all in one bitcoin super app. Built by Bitcoiners for bitcoiners. Buy or sell instantly send sats anywhere on the Lightning network. We withdraw straight to cold storage, even turn sats into gift cards or link to a CASA multisig all within one sleek interface. And Rhino is just warming up. Soon you'll pay bills, borrow against your Bitcoin and save for retirement, all without leaving the app. Download
[email protected] or tap the link in the description below. Use promo code Bitcoin News and Rhino will drop you $10 of free Bitcoin into your account today. Secure your stack with Rhino Bitcoin and enjoy the rest of the video.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: That would definitely be my top concern and probably some additional things with Lightning and state chains and Ark and that just that I think we have a really powerful scaling path and a really awesome network in the Lightning Network and kind of the standard language that it has become for payments inside of Bitcoin that I just love to see progress on that and I want to see more.
I think we have a path to scale to the world and I would, I would just like a lot of attention focused to like making that work in a very user friendly way.
But it's, but I also think it's just great that we're also dealing with. We also got an insurance policy on Quantum. That's great, that's fine. Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: Devs are working on it and we'll see what they come up with by the day. We don't know, we don't know what's going to happen theoretically or with actual physical qubits. But we'll keep an eye on it and there probably will be signs on the way there.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: So next topic I want to dive into is of course the idea of hijacking bitcoin. When the Jeffrey Epstein emails were released a couple of weeks ago, everything I'm bringing up is just making you go harumph.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: Everything around Bitcoin makes me do that lately.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: I feel you.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: It's nothing but FUD the overall sentiment.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: But yeah, we gotta, we gotta slay the FUD while we have the opportunity here. And I think that you're the, the perfect man to do it. As somebody who has detailed the history of the block size wars and now with this new layer of the Epstein emails showing that he did of course donate to the MIT Media Lab and he invested in Blockstream, it just gives more fuel to the haters to talk about Epstein and Bitcoin. So we want to dispel any ideas here that Epstein had anything to do really with the development of bitcoin, which I think you have done so well in your last couple pieces of content.
So let's talk about it. Let's zoom out a little bit. We don't have to go deep into the block size wars that's been been talked about a lot, of course, but just a brief history of the two different factions. And where does Jeffrey Epstein play into all this?
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Okay, so I'll give a short rundown of the supposed argument or the narrative is in 2014, around mid 2014, he invested, and we have the exact documents and everything with this because he did it with Joy Ito invested $500,000 in, in Blockstream.
And shortly around that same time he started giving money to MIT Media Labs. And Joy Ito was explicitly having conversations with him because the Bitcoin foundation back then was blowing up at the time. And which is funny, the Bitcoin foundation was funding a lot of development. But it's amazing how much everybody hated everything. Like bitcoin has never been anything but like controversy and arguing.
I remember a whole bunch of people, and myself included being like, bitcoin foundation is stupid. Like, we're not going to have like a foundation that's just going to like decide what bitcoin does. And everybody's like, bitcoin foundation speaks for everyone. You're like, you sucker, you fuck. You don't speak for me. You know, like, you know how bitcoiners are.
And so, but that was falling apart at the time.
And so MIT Media Labs, he donated it. I think over the years it's been found that like the total amount is somewhere around 800,000, 850,000.
I couldn't find all the records of that, but other people were adding.
I'm just going to assume because I found enough of them, I'm going to assume that's probably the accurate number.
And they started funding the core developers, the maintainers, which were at the time, Corey Fields or Gavin Andreessen, Corey Fields and Vladimir Von De Lan. And these were specifically mentioned by name in the emails.
And Epstein had a lot of money in crypto and stuff in general. He had tons of conversations with Brock Pierce.
Brock Pierce was just kind of like his. I'm going to, I'm going to talk about this investment, I'm talking about this shitcoin. I'm going to talk about this thing. And he was with the Bitcoin foundation at the time as well as it was blowing up.
And his conversation with Brock Pierce went on for years and years.
And so he's like, involved, right? He's like talking to a bunch of people. He's throwing a bunch of money at different things.
And so the theory goes that he did this back in 2014 and met with Austin Hill and Adam Back, two of the founders of Blockstream, during the investment period, and that he captured blockstream to basically force them on the small block narrative. Because the idea was that they needed to prevent Bitcoin from being, from being the thing in, quote, unquote, digital cash.
And he wanted to keep it in the small blockers, wanted to keep it digital gold so that it couldn't scale in transactions.
And this would allow him to then create stablecoins and be the, basically the controllers of CBDCs and they would, they would neuter Bitcoin at the exact same time that they come up with this brilliant idea of stablecoins and they're going to, you know, own the world of electronic money.
So that's the general idea.
And there are a bunch of little pieces that kind of feel if you, if you really, if you accept some of the primitives of this argument, it kind of looks like it all sticks together.
But if you really start to peel it back and like, look at his conversations and his investments, it. It doesn't, it doesn't align in any sense.
And the, and maybe, actually I'll let you go to questions about, like, what your big thing is, but that's like the kind of general theory with the big caveat being this is the biggest primitive that I think is totally wrong about the narrative is that they do not tell the truth about what the block size debate was about.
Or I guess it's that they think that the block size debate was a lie and they cannot even accept that what the small blockers said we were arguing about was the truth of what we were arguing about, because it never, never had anything to do with digital gold versus digital cash ever. I don't know how many times I have heard Steve Patterson or Roger Big Blocker whatever say that. That has nothing to do with the block size war. The block size war was a question of two things. One, how do you scale Bitcoin without losing its decentralization?
It was not about whether or not we should. It was how, how do you do it?
And the other one was, if we are trying to do two different things that are at a impasse that you can't do at the same time, how. How does Bitcoin respond to aggressive disagreement? Those were the two issues in the block size war. How do you do A fork. How, how do you do we force the people who don't agree with us to just do it our way?
What happens when somebody wants one that's not backwards compatible and somebody wants one that is, what are the dynamics there?
And if we can't come to agreement, do we just not do anything or do we put a gun to somebody's head and say, you're going to do it this way?
And then the other one was just like, can you really just have 1 gigabyte blocks and have it actually be decentralized? And I think the obvious answer is no, but.
And for a lot of the reasons that were openly talked about for years and years and years, the small blockers won that debate.
But that's, that's a little bit beside the point because assuming, let's, let's absolve them of having to worry about the debate, because I think we can destroy the entire thing just by looking at what Epstein talked about and did.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean, the impetus of this conversation we're having today is because you refuted this and you've had this long back and forth with Steve Patterson.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Like he is the co author of Hijacking Bitcoin with Roger Ver. He's a former bitcoiner turned bitcoin casher. Right. And he's held a grudge, I guess, against bitcoin since this era. And so now we've got these Epstein emails and they show that, yes, Epstein actually did invest into, of course, the MIT Digital Media Lab as well as into Blockstream.
But one thing that you make very clear is that he invested in Blockstream just for a very short time. Correct. And then was forced to divest. Can you explain that saga, how he got in and got out of Blockstream? Because I think that clears up a lot of misinformation.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So the, the main pieces are literally those two, is that he invested in MIT Media Labs and they took over development, they took over core development and he invested in Blockstream and they had a huge hand in development. And so that decided what the core developers were going to do, what they were going to say, what arguments they were going to use in the direction of Bitcoin.
But he only invested $500,000 into Blockstream in June of 2014, and it was September of the exact same year that he divested.
So. And it was because they got wind that he had invested in Ripple and Stellar, which was funny. Ripple immediately, Garlinghouse immediately was like, epstein has never had anything to do with us. He's Never invested. We've never heard of such things.
But Austin Hill had. There's an email with him. It says that the other founders are telling me that you need to divest your shares because this is a conflict of interest. We're Bitcoin only.
And so AP divested his shares.
So, like, how is it that the three years later he's supposed to have total control over blockstream and what all of these people do when he wasn't even invested for. It was literally, like four months.
And in addition is he was a tiny investor in the original investment round. The first investment round was $21 million, and then the one that came just within a year, the second round was $55 million. So even if he had been invested $500,000 for that period, why would they listen to him over, you know, the 98% of the rest of the funds? Right?
So he even had a small investment at the time.
Then when it comes to MIT Media Labs, is that like, okay, he, you know, donated a lot of money. He literally gave it, like, it wasn't like an investment. He gave it to MIT Media Labs with Gavin Andreessen, Corey Fields, and Vladimir Von de Lan. So I thought I knew basically everybody's stance, but I wanted to, like, actually prove it. So I did a lot of digging into old opinions and conversations and, you know, the mailing list and all this stuff.
And, you know, so this is supposed to be the heart of, like, how he took over the development, development and forced it onto small blocks.
And yet none, none of these three developers are strong small blockers.
Like, none of these developers had any.
Vladimir Von De Lan was, as he put it, a reluctant small blocker.
And he had very few conversations about it. He was not like somebody who was going on Reddit and pushing this all the time. He was pretty much quiet about it. He didn't even like the idea that they were supposed to decide. Like, he hated that everybody was debating this issue.
And he was only a reluctant small blocker because he thought that raising the block size wasn't really a solution, and he thought a hard fork was just a bad way to do things. So, again, it was kind of the second part of what the debate was actually about. It was like, how do you deal with network conflict?
Whereas Corey Fields, I'm pretty sure he was a small blocker, but I could not find Corey giving any opinion on anything, really.
Corey was very quiet and Corey Fields was much mostly just tooling, right? It's like, okay, how do you build the infrastructure? How do you Build a client. How do you. How do you put wallet. Pieces of the wallet together so that you can actually use this thing? He wasn't really protocol direction Guy Gavin was like the biggest of big blockers.
Like, he could not have been more on the other side of this thing. In fact, he coded and released the Bitcoin Classic client and was a supporter of Bitcoin Unlimited. He specifically said that we should have an unlimited block size and that he thought a gradual increase that, you know, you kind of kept within Moore's Law would probably be the safe way to do it.
He was a huge proponent. Tons of people leveraged his authority on the issue to say, this is why we should do big blocks. Like, he was like one of the poster childs literally of big blocks.
But I'm supposed to believe that this donation to MIT Media Labs to control two not really consequential, don't really share their opinion about it, small blockers and one extremely aggressive poster child big blocker was to compromise it to make it small blocks.
And that he invested in blockstream only to divest from blockstream to force blockstream to make everybody do small blocks. It just.
Just those two pieces together, like, which are kind of like the key to the whole story, aren't even anything to me. Like, there's no connection to any of it. And, and if add to that, you know, one of the things about like a conspiracy theory like this, like this idea that, like, oh, this is actually the reason what you have to do to connect all these pieces together is you imagine private conversations that are being had, right? Is it like, oh, his intent was actually this. Oh, he was actually thinking of doing this. Like, a good example is I, I had a conversation with somebody. I was like, he didn't seem to have any, any. His investments didn't have anything to do with small block versus big block. They're all over the place. And it's like, oh, well, he was just trying to sow dissent, right? Like, that's a. That statement says, oh, he was actually having conversations in private where what he was actually trying to do was invest in big blocks and small blocks and start a battle and that he was making decisions and having conversations about how to properly do that.
Well, the thing is, is that you have to imagine conversations that you don't have access to, but when you actually have access to the conversations, you can't then just make it up and be like, well, there are other, other private conversations in which he actually did talk about these things. Because if you look at his Conversations. There is not one thing I have read, literally, I don't know, 500 of the 1200 emails or whatever that mentioned bitcoin.
There is nothing. There's not a mention. And I let AI run through the rest of it to try to say, is there anything, anything, anywhere? I have the whole DOJ Epstein dump on my computer. Is there anything at all that suggests he had an opinion about Bitcoin? There's nothing. There's nothing anywhere about protocol direction, about segwit. Segwit is not mentioned a single time. Block size. The word block size is nowhere. The word block is nowhere. Like, it just. He had no mention of anything anywhere. So, like, if you're making up a connection and saying that in private conversation, he actually believed this and he was actually talking about this, and this was actually his orchestration, then you get access to the private conversation. You should find it in private conversation. Yeah. Like, we have tens of thousands of emails from every. No, like, what is it? Millions of millions of emails or some crap. I don't know. Like, it's a huge, huge dump. There should be something somewhere that suggests he even thought about it. And there's just nothing. There's just nothing. You still have to make up that there are other private conversations outside of the private conversations we had, in which this is something that he cared about and planned about deeply.
[00:39:56] Speaker B: So, yeah, I think that that's a. Such an important point, is that he had no input or understanding of the protocol itself and had. Was not on either side. Right. He, like, he didn't offer any input as to how bitcoin should go.
But this was really brought up recently on this Brett Weinstein podcast with Steve Patterson, the author of Hijacking Bitcoin. And I wanted to talk to you regarding. Just, it seemed you're from the liberty movement, right? Like, and there seems to have been that schism between bitcoiners and bitcoin cashers within the liberty movement itself. And that grudge doesn't seem to have gone away. And you two have battled it out on podcasts and debates before.
Can you talk about that? Why? Why did the liberty movement divide in this way? And why is the grudge maintained?
[00:40:51] Speaker A: I'll start with the one that will piss off everybody.
So I think, and I'll say this as somebody who has had this perspective before. Like, I. I say this as someone who has been. Here is. I think there is a subset or a part of the mental perspective, a mental frame inside of the liberty movement, that the government is some sort of Deity that has control over everything.
And so that if anything went wrong, it's because the government did it.
And there is this perpetual, we lost like this, this, we have to be the underdog. And if there is any, if there is any point in which something is going well, we have to figure out why actually it all went bad and we lost.
And, and I genuinely think that has something to do with it is because there are so many conspiracy theories or whatever that turned out to be true is we want everything to be a conspiracy theory. We want everything to be the government ran it and controlled it. And anything that didn't turn out in our favor, that we didn't get exactly what we want, it wasn't because the world, it's not because we were wrong, it's because the government did it.
And we use it as this crutch.
There's this weird, almost like religious belief that the government is this great evil God that can do whatever the hell it wants and that this is why we are permanently losing.
And it really appeals. You know, everybody has their, everybody has their crutch. Everybody has their thing that confirms their bias, that makes it easy to not deal with an uncomfortable truth. And so I think the libertarians who just honestly didn't.
I find it in a lot of non technical libertarians, you know, that want to say that bitcoin was supposed to be a certain way. And rather than, I think, having a little humility and learning, like, okay, what, what is bitcoin? You know, and I think that's where I came from because I was a big blocker too, right? I originally had, not during the block size war, but originally my perspective was that like, we can't, we can't take this away from the way it works right now. Like, I don't want to adjust to thinking about bitcoin. Totally different. Like my worldview of bitcoin was that it was a certain way. It was digital cash. And this is how I would interact with the protocol. I had gotten familiar with it. I'd been a Bitcoiner since 2011.
You know, like I. This was, this was how bitcoin worked. And it was a big kind of difficult, uncomfortable thing to realize that this thing wasn't perfect. There was a lot of problems still to work out. It was just a really cool, powerful opportunity to accomplish these things that we wanted to accomplish. But it was not going to be easy. And we hadn't actually solved the bigger problem. We had just gotten the building block that might get us there. And there were still a Ton of things to find, fight about.
And that was a realization was that like, oh, we really can't just, we'll lose it very quickly if we make stupid decisions.
And I don't know how much, I mean, you know, I say I'm the guy who's read more about Bitcoin than anybody else. You know, I don't know how many things I've read back then to try to make sense of like protocol history, like tcpip, some of the old wars, like the Linux wars, the. There were old TCPIP protocol wars like you would not believe. The, the, the history we already had with the Internet and development of these things that are completely obscure, nobody knows jack about because it just kind of sorted itself out. And it's just a bunch of crazy geeks who, you know, screamed at each other, thinking they were guiding the future of the world, which kind of they were.
And so they had aggressive opinions about these things and they fought about them. But then, now everybody just uses the Internet and their own TikTok and they don't, they don't care about any of that, right?
Same thing happened in Bitcoin. And, and so like I learned all these lessons and the nuances and all of these things and it started to make me see that, no, you can't just, you can't just make it bigger. You know, like the problem of all networking and electronic systems has been scaling, scaling. The problem of problems for all of it has been scaling. I guess why we're on LAN and wan, right? That's why, like, the whole world isn't on a route. A single router is. You have to segment these things off. You have to build a router on top of router on top of router on top of rally. You have to have network layers. Everything has layer upon layer upon layer upon layer upon layer.
How the hell would Bitcoin suddenly be the one thing that could just absolve itself of this natural reality that you have to build it in layers or you lose the nature of the base?
And that was a hard truth, that was a hard thing to actually learn. And I never would have done it if I hadn't spent a thousand hours reading about it, never would have understood it. I would have easily fallen in the bee cacher camp. And the people that I see over there are generally just libertarians, people who do understand very well Austrian economics, but couldn't tell you jack about TCPIP or how it works. You know, like, like which part of the handshake got interrupted if this Error occurs.
And, and they don't know anything about protocol development or, you know, general architecture of those sorts of things. I'm not saying that's all of them. There are some very smart people.
So, like, I'm not saying, like, oh, they're the dumb ones and we're the smart, smart ones. I just think it's a different general domain. Yeah. So to speak.
But yeah, I think those two issues had a lot, have a lot to do with it.
[00:46:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. And in watching that, that Weinstein Steve Patterson podcast, just first off, if you, if you didn't know anything about bitcoin, they lay out a kind of convincing case.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Like, it's a. There's enough crumbs together that you can string together that make you feel like, okay, these guys sound like they know what they're talking about. But from the very beginning, when I heard Brett Weinstein say that he sold all of his bitcoin just because it was mentioned in the Epstein emails, and that he had to spend over half a day to move his bitcoin to an exchange to sell it, and that he was scared every single step of the way that he was.
[00:47:18] Speaker A: It just.
[00:47:19] Speaker B: And from that moment, I was like, okay, so these guys fundamentally don't really know what's, what's going on here.
And then another giveaway at the end for me was when Steve Patterson said, I can't believe how naive I was to think that a software project could actually change the world. And I think that goes directly to what you were saying, is that these libertarians, they really put a lot of power into this outside force that is evil, controlling, and cannot be overcome. Right. So it was those two things together.
[00:47:47] Speaker A: And specifically that his idea of how it was going to evolve or change was the correct one. And so if it didn't do what he thought it was what it was going to do, it failed.
And, like, that's the big thing, is that, like.
And what's funny is that if, like, if you're actually a genuine libertarian, I think you have to actually recognize that the whole point of libertarianism is that we should recognize that we don't know how to plan the world. We don't know what the solution is going to be. That's exactly why we're fighting about it. That's exactly why you can't have a central planner decide it. If that, if it was really just that libertarians understood how the world worked, then you could have a central planner. You would just need them to be libertarians. That's not how it works at all. It's antithetical to the whole concept.
The idea is that, and this is exactly what a decentralized system is. This is, this is why the block sized wars were such a perfect example of how messy and painful and terrible decentralization is and why it's so critical that we actually have to have it. Because look how difficult it was to deal with one minor disagreement upon people who are among people who are ideologically aligned, who have the exact same goals in mind. And still we couldn't agree.
It could not be more important than ever that a protocol actually stays, not changing in the face of that. That's why the block size war was such a huge success because it did not hard fork, it did not decide, oh, if there is a schism in the community, one small group is going to be able to force it onto everybody else. It prevented that. And that's exactly the thing that you actually need to have societies rule, be sustainable. Because otherwise that's all you get. You get people who will violently disagree about the tiniest and then they will put a gun to everybody else's head and they will say, you just got to come along with me or you're, or you're screwed. You know, even libertarians will fall into that trap. I know how it's going to work, I know how it's going to run. And if you disagree, then everything just failed. Right? Like you just broke bitcoin or hijacked it. It hijacked it. Right, exactly. Yeah.
[00:50:02] Speaker B: And so if you had to look back on the last 10, 15 years of Bitcoin and the liberty movement because you've been here for a lot of it, are we further along? Have we reached more people with these fundamental beliefs? Do you think liberty is on the rise or on the decrease in the world in 2026?
[00:50:23] Speaker A: I think it's on the rise.
I think it's on the rise in a very messy, disagreeable, uncoordinated sense. I think is on the rise.
I don't know. I mean, I mean look at the, the quote unquote alt right.
I hate calling it the alt right because it's not, it's, it's a mess of trying to figure out how to label like different groups. But there is a non establishment media and think about it like somebody like Dave Smith is actually very prominent. Thomas Massie is important now in the political sphere.
Like the, the concepts of that you would say align with libertarianism are far more prominent and I think far more powerful than they were.
And it may just Be because. Because essentially the two alternatives that we have always had have led to so much distrust and failure in our political system that people are just disenchanted with it.
So that might be the reason for a lot of it. It might not just be that, you know, libertarians have done a really good job of converting everybody. It's that everybody's so sick of the other crap that they're starting to listen. Okay, so there was somebody else saying something else. And what were they saying? Oh, that these guys are all jackasses and they're gonna screw us.
[00:51:48] Speaker B: Oh, well.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: Oh my God. That worked. That happened. So maybe, maybe I'll listen to them a little bit.
So I do think it's a bit on the rise as well as like the cypherpunk movement. Like before, when we first found bitcoin, it was practically non existent. Like you couldn't talk.
There were no.
There was no real move movement online. Like it was a freaking mailing list with like 400 people or something.
And I would definitely say it's bigger than ever to the point that, you know, bitcoiners at large crap on the fact that there are suits here. You know, like, so we're thinking, I would say there's millions of people now who might actually be interested or geared toward the. These ideas and, and thinking that we need to create a money that's free of the state, that we need to create protocols and networks that are free of the state control and all of that stuff.
So. Absolutely, absolutely. I think it's on the rise. It's just messy. And I don't think. I think most of them still don't agree with each other.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: Be cashers and bitcoiners, so to speak. Right. There's a lot of that still.
[00:52:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, personally getting into bitcoin, the. The goal, the end goal is separating money from state. Right. And we saw the liberty movement and the right sort of get into bed with Donald Trump for the last election. And now that we are a year plus into his second term here, it feels as if, I mean, we got a couple things right, like Ross is free, but there is a new war. You know that. So we didn't go along with that.
Do you think that there is a future with bitcoin in a political party or does it need to be just outside of that arena?
[00:53:31] Speaker A: In total, I think there is a future in which bitcoin will be in a political party, but I don't think it will matter. And it will probably just be a disaster.
Like Just generally speaking, like, when you attach something to politics, it's going to. I think, I think bitcoin and a political party may very well just do more damage to its image. You know, it'll be the crypto thing all over again.
But, I mean, I could be wrong. There might be something good to come out of it.
Just like, you know, Trump walked back every promise, but he did. Ross is out.
You know, okay, yeah, that's a win. You know, I think Robert Kennedy Jr.
Has done a hell of a gut for, like, we turned the food pyramid upside down.
The holy shit, we needed to do that so bad.
I think he's made much more aware and also just given permission, social permission to talk about what a fucking disaster
[00:54:39] Speaker B: our
[00:54:41] Speaker A: general pharmaceutical and, like, healthcare system is and to recognize that, like, you should not just do what you're told, like, or you will literally get the normal. You will get. You'll have cancer, you'll have heart disease, you'll have, like.
If you do what they say is healthy, the things that we believe are correct and are normal will produce normal results. And we are the least healthy, we are the most sick and diseased generation in the history of this country. If those are the results you want, then do what the health care system tells you to do.
And I think a lot of people are waking up to that. Like, don't get me started on food and God. Jesus Christ. Pharmaceuticals is a mess.
So I think that's good, generally speaking, but I don't know about anything else, really. All the other.
The war with Iran. Jesus Christ, another one.
[00:55:39] Speaker B: Well, I mean, this last hour, I've made you dispel a lot of fud and talk about a lot of things that I'm sure make you angsty and annoy you to talk about, but what are you.
[00:55:49] Speaker A: Nah, it gives me energy. It gives me energy, though.
I do like, as much as I.
I love having to go and then destroy something.
So it's not. It's not that big a deal. But what am I excited about? That's a good question.
[00:56:03] Speaker B: What are you most excited about in bitcoin in Liberty? Just. Just looking forward.
What gets you pumped up for the future?
[00:56:13] Speaker A: Vibe coding? Yeah, vibe coding.
And.
And also just like lightning and ark and like, you know, I live on a bitcoin. I've been on a bitcoin standard for like a number of years now.
I get paid in bitcoin with sponsors. I pay everybody that I work with in bitcoin.
And I often do have to go back and move some money to a bank account or send a wire or this, that or the other.
It sucks.
Like you real, like when you're, when you just expect. When you, you can just go send a transaction and it just goes to have to physically go into a bank to like fill out two forms and talk to somebody and like prove who you are and to have to wait three days like every single time. It is awful. If you're doing anything over $1,000 in fiat, it is like nails on a chalkboard and.
But every single year living on a bitcoin standard has become easier and easier. And I also, as I said earlier, I think we finally have a lot of the tools in place to do non custodial scaling bitcoin to a huge, a huge amount of people, like maybe a billion people.
And I think that's with ARK and state chains, like things like the Breeze, SDK is that like that's not non custodial for people. And now they just released a thing where you can actually generate a key from your passkey. So it's like integrated into things that people are familiar with with iOS and I think we've constantly had this.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Is it? Like imagine how powerful it is. Even if it is just generated from a passkey and it's stored in their icloud keychain that you actually have. You could have 200 million people self custody.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:16] Speaker A: Like that's such an unbelievably powerful thing. Even if it's just like not the best self custody. Right. You know, it's like 80% self custody like you. They could still lose their icloud account or Apple could lock them out and that would be a problem or whatever. It's like, yeah, well, at least they actually have the keys to their freaking money.
You know, at least somebody can't literally cannot inflate them away. They cannot defraud them about whether or not they even have the money in the first place. Like that's a sound money standard where people are holding their keys. And the fact that we actually have a path to that, and that's just one of the things that gets me about like B cashers and libertarians or whatever is that they think that because bitcoin existed for like a minute, they're like, oh, we're done.
It's like, dude, you still. We still have everything. Like we have a billion problems to solve and now we actually have a path to like, it's not easy. None of this is easy. There's so many freaking problems to Fix. There's so much user friendly. You have to deal with people who are ignorant about this. How the hell do you give somebody who's ignorant about how to deal with keys? How do you give them keys and not have them shoot themselves? You know, like we have everything to build and it's just like, oh, we lost the block size war. That's it, that's it, we're done. And it's like you never even got started. You never even let us begin before you gave up.
And I know they probably think they're not giving up, but I think they just like being the underdog and they like feeling like, okay, well we're going to do it our way. And. And I just, that's not how decentralization works. Right. Like if you didn't get your way, it's not because it's not because the market broke. It's because maybe, maybe have a hum, a little bit humility and you weren't right. Maybe the market isn't just always going to decide what you think it's going to decide and it's not always an evil God that, you know, took it from you.
Any B catcher who's listening, it's not going to give a. But you know, whatever. They're just going to hate me.
[01:00:27] Speaker B: They've been hating you, dude.
[01:00:28] Speaker A: Yeah, no love lost. Yeah, this is long.
That ship is sailed.
[01:00:35] Speaker B: No, but I thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed that conversation. And of course people who want to follow more about you. Bitcoin Audible. Where should they go to get more guy?
[01:00:47] Speaker A: Just check out Bitcoin Audible, the show. Like I said, I'm going to have a video on the quantum stuff. Just kind of like breaking down mostly that paper, but essentially anything that I can find concrete and try to keep it, keep it simple.
And I got Bitcoin Audible, the website, which is now up and keep an eye out for. I mentioned vibe coding as like one of the things that I'm excited about is I kind of think of it as like the 3D printing of creating things.
And I have been.
If anybody has checked out the Pear stack and anybody's interested in like peer to peer stuff, I really think we're overdue for kind of a return to like a peer to peer renaissance and the pressure is greater than it has ever been and I hope that some of the things that we're building will be a part of that.
But keep an eye out and check out Pair Drive Pear drive dot com.
We've got like very basic working tools but we should be pushing actually within the next couple of days because we're, we'll be pushing a bunch. Before I go to Bit blog, boom. We should be pushing some new things out to start playing around with.
Like for one, I have Jarvis, I have my bot on my Mac Mini back at home and I'm working on my MacBook here. And we built a tool with. So we kind of have like an engine, an underlying engine, and with it we can build basically anything and everything that we build with it will be compatible so they can all talk to each other.
But I have a folder that syncs directly from my computer back at home. So anything that any tiny change immediately syncs to this computer. So while Jarvis is making a change to our app and adding or fixing a bug, I literally just close my app locally on my computer and open it back up and it's got the fix and, and I've also built. And we're cleaning it up to make it not AI slop, but built pair drop, which will probably be the one that we release with BitBlock. Boom. But it's a simple drag and drop. Get a key, send somebody a key and they can download a file. And it's like that. And it will be all cross platform and everything. Like I want to be able to get photos, files, anything from and to any of my devices that like I can just bring up. This is the stuff on my computer that's being shared with me. This is the stuff that my brother's sharing with me. These are the movies that I have that Brandon wants to watch. This is like it just. This is the Internet. It's freaking 2026. How is this not easy? How is this not easy? Why do I have to go through Apple to get my phone photos from my phone to my computer? They are two feet away.
You know, like, it's just so stupid. And so I've decided that I'm not a developer. I mean I've always been comfortable with the command line and stuff, but Vibe coding has opened this up to me and I'm also, thanks to Bitcoin, able to pay us and developers to make it not slop.
But we have been building a lot and a lot should be coming this year without a doubt within, within a few months. So I'll have some really fun stuff to share. So definitely, definitely check that out. And good to, good to hang out, man. Thanks for having me on the show.
[01:04:02] Speaker B: Absolutely. What a time to be alive. Lots to be optimistic about so the Doomers can go on by themselves. We're gonna. We're gonna carry it on forward.
Cheers guy. Thanks for coming on.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: Yeah man. Later dude.
[01:04:16] Speaker B: Thanks for making it to the end of the video. If you could drop a like and a share, it would help in our mission to accelerate adoption. If you're looking for more Bitcoin Signal, join over 10,000 readers of our newsletter Bitcoin News Weekly. Every Monday morning we send out the biggest headlines of Bitcoin to keep you in the know in under five minutes. Links below in the description. Then come hang with us live every Monday at 11am Eastern. We break it all down live on stream with a new guest and you can add your two sats in the chat. See you next week.
