Shitcoin Insider #005 - Why Your Altcoin is Worthless - The Clubhouse Debate

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign bitcoin maximalists trying to make sense of the sea of shitcoins. This is Shitcoin Insider. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the shitcoin Insider show. I know it's been quite some time since we have published, but this is one that I've been sitting on for a while. It is a clubhouse meeting that we had trying to get a bunch of altcoiners and shitcoiners to come in and argue their point. And I think it went really well. It was a little bit of a first try experiment and I'm certain we will do this again. It's just been kind of slow on the Shitcoin Insider front, but there's lots of talks and ideas for new episodes. So we are alive, we are well, and we are still working on it. There is definitely more to come, so don't forget to subscribe and follow the tag on Twitter @ShitCoinInsider. I am Guy Swan, your host and our co host will be joining us in just a moment. But without further ado, I am just going to let it jump right into this clubhouse discussion. I didn't do a lot of editing. I did cut out some period where I was just trying to figure out how to make sure everything was working. Uh, but with that, let's get into a marathon of a clubhouse discussion on why your altcoin is worthless recording. And we're just gonna see how this goes. This is a first test run. Hopefully it works, but we'll find out. All right, Jimmy Song joined as a listener. What is up, guys? Let's see. Where is my co host? I think I need to invite them in here. Share. We need all coiners. Where's all the altcoiners? Who wants. Who wants to make a defensive? All coins up in here. Somebody raise their hands Here we got Nicholas. What is up? Welcome to the stage. You got. You got some thoughts? You got some thoughts on this? Before we get started, while we bring our co host up into this, I'd. [00:02:29] Speaker B: Love to feed you guys some altcoin fodder. I love altcoins, but I love to hear some roasting as well. [00:02:36] Speaker A: All right, there we go. [00:02:42] Speaker B: Hello. [00:02:43] Speaker A: Hello, Camilla. [00:02:45] Speaker B: How are you? [00:02:46] Speaker A: I am good. I haven't eaten yet, but I'm chill. I'm good. And I got my drink, so I'll probably get tipsy really fast on this one. [00:02:56] Speaker B: Oh, man. So this is being recorded. Where are you guys recording it? [00:03:01] Speaker A: I am actually recording this. I've got a little. Just a headset adapter for my iPhone and I've got kind of a janky. I got an old guitar cord and a few things running to actually set this, get it working into my microphone set up. And it seems to be working. We got a beautiful recording of all of our voices. It's a little bit hissy because I've got like five things plugged in series, but no, it worked. It's not too bad. [00:03:33] Speaker B: I'll. [00:03:33] Speaker A: I'll come up with a better one next time. [00:03:35] Speaker B: If you have. If you have an Apple computer, If you use QuickTime and you plug the iPhone into the computer, you can pull up the iPhone screen. [00:03:45] Speaker A: It actually pulls up the audio as well with QuickTime. Are you kidding? [00:03:50] Speaker B: No, I'm not. I've streamed that way. [00:03:53] Speaker A: I guess I just need like a. What? I need to lightning to USB or something for that. [00:04:02] Speaker B: Yes. [00:04:03] Speaker A: Okay. So. Shit, I had no idea you could do that. And it will actually record Clubhouse. [00:04:09] Speaker B: It would record what's going on in Clubhouse. [00:04:10] Speaker A: I think you would just need to. [00:04:11] Speaker B: Record your voice separately, which is kind of ideal, actually. [00:04:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's great. [00:04:17] Speaker B: It actually gives you this. This nice bright red warning about, like recording on it. And so it's like. It's actually really interesting because it can detect it. [00:04:27] Speaker A: Sweet. Well, that's fun. I didn't know. I learned something today. Thank you, Nicholas. [00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah, me too. That's super helpful. [00:04:38] Speaker A: Yeah. The integration between those two things has always been a bit of a pain to me because there's never been a clear way to go from my phone to my computer. And I've always. If I ever needed something, I always had to do some kind of, like, ghetto rig to actually get it to work. [00:04:55] Speaker B: I actually imagine a great idea is if you just have a second account. [00:04:59] Speaker A: That'S just strictly for recording, you can. [00:05:02] Speaker B: Just hook that thing up. [00:05:03] Speaker A: Mm. All right, let's make a moderator doom. Coming up on stage, our co host. What's up, man? How you doing? [00:05:14] Speaker B: Pretty good. [00:05:14] Speaker A: I think we got this thing working. I think it's actually up and running. [00:05:18] Speaker B: Awesome. [00:05:20] Speaker A: All right. Trying to get some altcoiners up in here. So basically the main idea here is altcoins are worthless. And there's a. You know, there's a lot of very fundamental elements about what makes a network value valuable in the first place. And I really want to hear somebody try to defend the utility token idea. To defend why? A governance protocol or whatever it is. Like, there's so many variations on this thing, and if you look at any of the history of this, all they do is fall in relation to Bitcoin. And I think Corey, I'm not sure if he's in here. Corey had a great thread about the survivor bias is that it looks like, oh, the market cap in relation to Bitcoin is, you know, bitcoin's only at like 70% or something like that. But if you actually look at, go back to any year and you're comparing it always to the newest like hyped up altcoin, if you just go back to 2013 or 14 and what were the biggest altcoins, then what were the top 10? Almost all of them have just massively plummeted against bitcoin and they've just been replaced with the newest hyped altcoin. And like fundamentally these are monetary networks and everybody, there's this huge misconception that everybody's just going to create this separate money with these, or excuse me, this separate network with these new special rules. And it's gonna have, you know, streaming or it's gonna have. It's just like, it's just like trying to create an alternate Internet that does one specific job and that everybody's just going to have their router log into that other Internet for that one job. And completely ignoring the fact that they're trying to do so by developing an entirely unique monetary standard which isn't going to be adopted and it's just going to destroy the ability or the ease of actually using any utility they build into their setup. So if they build a network that's actually useful for something, the monetary token is what kills it. The monetary token is why it's not going to be used. And at the exact same time, all of this is going to be buildable on top of Bitcoin. Anything that is actually useful, which I don't think sushi tokens or yams or whatever the hell else is. I mean, the pancakes. The pancakes. Thank you. I was, I was wondering, there was another one recently that was a food. Of course. If they actually develop something useful, which I just think it's kind of a, you know, if you have an exchange that allows you just to exchange a whole bunch of crap between each other, I don't consider that useful. Until you figure out how to create a decentralized exchange which allows you to transfer real world things to bitcoin and back, or actual equity tokens, like actual equity, like stocks or whatever it is between bitcoin and those, then I don't think you have any real value. If you can just trade one empty token for another empty Token that isn't connected to it doesn't have any value for its utility network that it's just going to be bouncing around on whatever platform will house it. Tether is a great example, right? Is that it first ran on Bitcoin, then it ran on Omni, now it runs on Ethereum and well, it was running on Ethereum and now it's more running on Tron. Like the value of being able to run that network and any value that Tether accrues doesn't accrue to the underlying token. It's got nothing to do it. They can just pick it up and stick it somewhere else. It's software, the monetary denomination, it's what's powerful, that is what has the network effect, that is what has the shelling point. And you're all coins are just shooting themselves in the foot chasing. Well, not the creators. The creators are making bookus of money off of hype and being able to print money. But everybody who tries to adopt those and use some utility token is shooting themselves in the foot and just giving their money to its creator. [00:09:33] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And you mentioned, you know, no value, just swapping worthless token for worthless token. Even that in the future. You know, I was just looking at like these Garbage Pail Kid cards and thinking about like buying some Garbage Pail Kid booster boxes and there are exchanges that sell these garbage and these are physical cards, you know. And like that could be said to be like a worthless thing to a lot of people and sure, but yet there are markets for it. So to the extent that there are markets for worthless things or things that are worthless to us, the more efficient way of doing those transactions will eventually win in the end. And it's pretty obvious the most efficient way of transferring one, you know, whatever worthless digital asset there is from, for one to another, the most efficient way to do that is not anything like what we see now like with Ethereum or Tron or any of these other smart contract platforms. So you know, even to the extent that they're not doing anything that, that we would appreciate, they'll still be done in another way eventually if they ever have real value. I mean, as long as it's like a niche thing that nobody really cares about, but like you know, 400 DeFi Bros. Then sure, they'll use whatever thing and pay 300 fees because it's not really real, you know, it's just them. But the moment it becomes real, if it becomes real and there it becomes like a real, let's say a mainstream or actual users Wanting to do it, it'll be done in an efficient way which, you know, probably won't use any blockchain at all. And if it needs, you know, a reliable or dependable network for some reason, then it will use Bitcoin, especially if that is for transferring value. So may I ask what have you. [00:11:16] Speaker A: Thought about the layer 0 options or. [00:11:18] Speaker B: Like those multi chain networks? Right. What if I could like bring Bitcoin onto another network and actually use that. [00:11:25] Speaker A: Value as Bitcoin as you know, and. [00:11:28] Speaker B: Put it into some sort of defi system? Can you give me an example of why that would be useful? Well, look at Wall street bets and how there's lots of concerns of how. [00:11:40] Speaker A: The markets were shut down. [00:11:41] Speaker B: If it was on a defi plat. [00:11:42] Speaker A: Then you, there's no off button. That, that's one specific example of why you might want to have a market. [00:11:50] Speaker B: Like that that just doesn't have an off switch or can't be manipulated. Well, sure, the Internet, the Internet doesn't have an off switch. So you know, and these things are essentially built on the Internet. They're just built on the Internet in a really dumb way. Like if you look at Ethereum for example, nobody pays for the server that's running it. Sure, miners mine and they have, but they're not paying for the servers that are running the network itself. That's the node. The software is being run by Infura, which is being paid at a giant loss by the Ethereum Foundation. It's like a sham basically where they don't even have a real network. They have something that they're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for to a centralized service and calling it centralized. They're basically using the Internet in a very inefficient way so we can get those same properties that people appreciate about those exchanges without the theater. [00:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I could see what you mean. [00:12:41] Speaker B: By they're just kind of like centralized and masquerading as decentralized. But there are other options out there that do have more of a decentralized, like maybe not just Ethereum like Cosmos or Polkadot or other multi chain options that might be more decentralized. I'm not so sure. I mean we have to get into each one in particular. But Cosmos, for example, I'm trying to remember one of the largest Ethereum thought leaders right now, I forget his name. He used to be Cosmos validator and he's come out publicly and said that it was basically politics as usual. It was, you know, people behind the scenes politicking and making friends and doing favors. And you know, that was how, that was the game of being a validator and you had to have millions of dollars to do it. And when you got there, I mean it was not. It's, it's more theater. It's theater all the way down. [00:13:31] Speaker A: Well, more importantly is that when you're so whatever multi chain network you have is, the whole purpose of all of this is oh, we're going to create a whole new token and it's going to be valuable. Then if you're putting bitcoin onto that network, what you end up doing is just sacrificing the high security and high reliability of bitcoin consensus and hand it over to this token network that isn't going to capture any of the value like the bitcoin. The reason you would want to use bitcoin is because bitcoin is the monetary standard, right? It's the one with the shelling point on denomination and it's the reserve asset of the space. [00:14:19] Speaker B: I think that's true and I think that's why bitcoin is always going to be bitcoin and still retains its value. [00:14:25] Speaker A: Because it's obviously the most secure, the most battle tested and that's never going. [00:14:31] Speaker B: To change about it. [00:14:32] Speaker A: Like what do I, what do I. [00:14:33] Speaker B: Want to leave my money in at the end of the day? Bitcoin, right. But there's always going to be people who, who want, who are willing to and knowingly will take a little bit more risk. [00:14:43] Speaker A: And, and everyone says, oh, you know. [00:14:45] Speaker B: We want to see the future of like you know, a self custody type, like a decentralized custody service. [00:14:51] Speaker A: And I think that that kind of is the direction that that's going. [00:14:55] Speaker B: And if you think about like maybe. [00:14:57] Speaker A: Putting your bitcoin into a completely decentralized. [00:15:01] Speaker B: Platform where you still own your own keys, kind of native. I think it's just like really interesting not to say that it's, you know. [00:15:08] Speaker A: It'S obviously not built out yet completely. [00:15:11] Speaker B: A lot of these things are kind. [00:15:12] Speaker A: Of like cutting edge software and that's. [00:15:13] Speaker B: That'S the trade off. [00:15:14] Speaker A: You know, why is it, you know what, why do any of these decentralized platforms or anything need a token? Like what is it about like multisig or lightning pool or like using DLCs that doesn't make these exact same things possible without having to invest in some like just obnoxious pointless token. [00:15:38] Speaker B: So I think there are a lot of altcoins out there that just kind of have pointless tokens for you know, for like, for like 100 tokens, I'm going to say like, you know, 90, 95 of them are not going to like have like a real use case or maybe like a copy of another token that or you know, have duplicates of like the same use case. But the. I just lost my train thought for a second. So the ones that, the ones that do have a use case though, I mean when you do have a completely lost my, my train of thought. Well, I can help you a little. Can you give me an example of one that you think has a real. That needs to exist, a token that has value? Oh yeah, yes. So, so like this is kind of probably the obvious one. A governance model. And why does a blockchain need a governance model? Well, it's more like if you compare it to the proof of work for, for. For a decentralized blockchain in like I'm sorry, in bitcoin. So in Bitcoin, you know, the hashing power is kind of your governance model, right? You vote by, with, with your hashing power. The miners vote. [00:16:48] Speaker A: And in the same similar fashion like you know, to become a validator, you. [00:16:52] Speaker B: Might need X amount of dollars to become a validator, right? [00:16:54] Speaker A: My cost you a million dollars to. [00:16:56] Speaker B: Be a validator on one of these proof of stake networks. But then how, how much is it. [00:17:01] Speaker A: Going to cost you to become a successful bitcoin miner? [00:17:04] Speaker B: I mean it's it. It to do it profitably off the bat. [00:17:08] Speaker A: Now I'm not saying that in the. [00:17:09] Speaker B: Long run it's not going to be profitable because that's not. There's a lot of differences here that I want to get into. So first, you know, and I do a lot of consulting for altcoins and blockchain for the last four years, I'd say, and unfortunately, and I a little ashamed to say this, but you know, when somebody comes to me and says, well, we need a token because they want to fund with a token, right? And they think what do we, what should the token do? We can't think of anything for it to do. The first thing I say is, well, you can always just do governance because that's like the cliche, it doesn't actually do anything. But if we say it does governance, then you're good to go. Like governance is the filler. The filler nothing utility. Because you know, it's like, it's like if I have a store that says I will make you the president for 100 bucks. You know, anybody can come into my store. You pay me 100 bucks, I give you certificates, ask you what you want your country's name to be. You tell me. And there you go, you're now the president of Nicholasville or whatever. And you know, what does it mean? We can make unlimited governing bodies and unlimited presidents. And sure, in this case there are tokens, whatever networks that are there. For example, yearn is a good example. Yearn has a dao. And yearn advertised about, you know, how it was like bitcoin in the sense that it had a very strict supply, 30,000 tokens. And this brought the price up to over $50,000, even before Bitcoin was over $50,000. Obviously the market cap wasn't nearly as high as bitcoin's, but still it was impressive to see that number on a token that was so popular. And why? Because many people thought if I have 30 yearn like Bitcoin, I have 1 1000th of the year in supply forever, I'm great. But of course they have a dao. So is it actually centralized or is it business as usual? Well, the answer revealed itself last month where they had a vote and printed 22% more tokens because hey, the devs got to eat, man. Like you guys are getting rich and we're building this stuff and we just don't feel properly compensated. So let's print some money out of thin air, 22% more and give it to ourselves. And of course they did that. And the amount of tokens they gave themselves would now equal more than the amount of people the tokens that even voted in the vote to give themselves the money. So, you know, it follows that they would easily be able to vote for anything they want because they didn't just print money for themselves. But since they have a dao and since money is votes, they also now printed votes for themselves. And you mentioned mining. So if I'm a miner and I got a million dollars worth of infrastructure, sure it's expensive, but I have to go and I have to work and I have to compete. I don't get like an advantage over other miners. And to the extent that I get an advantage, I have to get that advantage myself through the free market and my own ability. Like if I can find cheaper power, if I can find cheaper land, or maybe I do schmooze with the government and I get some benefits there or something, but I have to work it. I can't just, you know, forget my mind exists and give it to my kids in 20 years. And then now they're still going to have, you know, a Profitable mind. But with proof of stake you absolutely can. Vitalik could have a daughter and you know, he could own 30% of the coins and you know, he could just forget Ethereum exists for the rest of his life. His daughter would now be the king or queen of Ethereum in 30 years and she'd never have to work or even think or care about it because it would just be given to her and it's not real. So when you're mining, you're having to compete, you're having to innovate or at the very least you're having to make good business connections and maintain those connections. JC to be fair, if you had a lot of bitcoin, you would pass. [00:20:39] Speaker A: That along to your kids too when you. [00:20:40] Speaker B: Yeah, but it doesn't give you power over the network with proof of stake. That gives you power over governance, especially if you're talking about a Dow. And it also gives you all the inflation. So simply having the money on a proof of stake system, the rich by design get richer and the rich by design have all the power. You can have all the Bitcoin and you don't get any more inherent power over the network or any ability to gain more of the inflation from that. If somebody out competes you as a miner, they now get more the money than you. But if I'm a staker and I've got 51% of the coins, just for example, nobody can ever out compete me. I will always make the most inflation no matter what, whether or not I even think about the network or not from that point forward. And, and you make a lot of valid points. I just wanted to point out that. [00:21:25] Speaker A: Like, you know, someone could pass along an entire mining opera mining operation and it still does take technical knowledge. [00:21:32] Speaker B: Like you can't just pass all along a, say a staking operation for the same reason you couldn't just pass along a mining operation. It takes a knowledgeable person to be able to, to efficiently run that operation and, and make it be profitable and make sure that there's no issues with it. So you still run into the same, same sort of scenario along that aspect. I don't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't compare the two. I mean it's basically running software. The software does it for you. There's no software you run and it just mines your whole mining business. But software can run your whole stake in business. I mean sure, you have to know am I running the right software? But that's it. [00:22:05] Speaker A: I would say that the, the main difference between proof of stake and Mining is that proof of stake as an authority system. And proof and mining or hashing is a market system. So like yeah, you could, you could pass down your, your, you know, huge hashing farm or mining farm or something, but that has nothing to do with you controlling anything about the decisions for the network or about, and it's, and it's by no means any consistent return for the network itself. Like you're running an operation to secure the bitcoin network and if your hardware is two years old, it's outdated. Like the market moves around you. Whereas if you have 51% of the network of stake, nobody can do anything to take that away from you. You always have 51% of the authority of the governance and of the inflation rate in that network. Whereas you actually have to provide a service. You actually have to continue hashing at an efficient and productive rate in order to be even remotely relevant in the hashing game. I mean, you look at any of Bitcoin's history and if you haven't updated your hardware, you haven't found a new energy source, if you haven't adapted, just like running a grocery store, if you don't adjust to the market conditions, you just go out of business. It's even more aggressive in the mining market and as we've seen also in Bitcoin's history is having a majority of the hash rate doesn't mean you get to dictate anything about the network either. Particularly not the consensus rules. You have to. You only make any money, you only produce Bitcoin as a reward. If you are following the consensus rules that the network says you have to follow. I think those are two like rather significant differences. Right? You have a dictate stake or actual proof of work. [00:24:00] Speaker B: I think an apt comparison is just simply that Bitcoin is a people powered system. So the people rule and something like proof of stake is a rich, the rich or an oligarchy. Oligarchy system where, you know, the rich get richer by design and the rich have all the power by design. [00:24:15] Speaker A: Well, I mean if you, if you're. [00:24:16] Speaker B: Assuming that 51% of the entire network has, you know, anything, I mean you could, if there's 51, if someone has 51% of the Bitcoin network, it's kind of over as well. So because we can buy more hardware, we can buy more hardware and, and take our network back through competition in the market. Now if you have 51% of the stake though, it's over, it's yours. And by the same strand or Depending. So some proof of stake requires the higher threshold than 51%. So let's just say, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot of gray there. But, but you could also, for example, with proof of stake, if this is shifting to a POS versus POW argument, there's a lot of other points I would have made. I was more and more talking about governance. But so if we're talking about proof of stake versus proof of work, like if you have a big convention and all the largest stakers are there, you arrest the largest stakers and now you own the network. Whereas if you rest the largest miners, you really didn't get anything unless you want to start running their businesses for them. And even then you don't get any power. And even then the rest of the market can decide to, you know, invest more and out compete you. But if you have nefarious purposes and you're, let's say, a government, and there's a big proof of stake, coins, convention, and you arrest whatever the threshold is, you know, to have a relevant governance stake or even cooperate with the exchanges which probably have all of those coins as well. Yeah. Now you hijack the, you know, and we've seen this before with, with Steam, which was proof of stake, where they actually had their network. [00:25:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:25:49] Speaker B: By Justin's son and Binance working together. I mean, so you could never, you know, you couldn't do that on Bitcoin. But it doesn't make it worthless. I mean, I mean if, yeah, if somebody steals your entire blockchain, then it's worthless like at that point. But up until that point, it's going to have some sort of value. [00:26:10] Speaker A: Well, the point here is that this is ultimately how to produce a secure, reliable monetary standard. And an economy can only build on, it will grow out of a single standard. It's like a language. You can't have efficient economic calculation for the same reason between standards for the same reason that you can't have an efficient argument speaking two different languages. It's just you're using an entirely separate denomination no matter what you do. The shelling point, the network effect of the dominant money will increase the trade off for holding any other potentially monetary asset in exchange as a trade off to holding it. And it's like, you know, holding. Imagine if you could only have one social media account. Like you couldn't, you couldn't just sign up for all of them. You could only sign up for one of them. You can only hold, just like that. You can only hold value in One money at a time, the same dollar or the same sat. Whatever of value that you are holding can only be in one place. So are you going to, are you going to sign up for the social media account that has 100 users and, you know, grew by 5 this month? Are you going to sign up on the one that's got 10 million and where all your friends and family are on? And it grew by another million this past month. And that gap gets bigger and bigger as time goes on. And it is through that new network, through that new standard, that you can then build all of those things. On top of it, Money's dominant utility is liquidity. It's the fact that it's the most exchangeable, most recognized asset on the market. And when you're seeing something like bitcoin monetized because it's vastly superior to all the other alternatives that we have, and it's an openness, permissionless network to boot, that it's, it's like the Internet when it comes to replacing analog communication, holding anything but bitcoin is just, it just seems crazy to me. And I think all of the forces at work consolidate us on one and I don't see anything, I don't see anything at all in the altcoin or crypto space that can't be built on top of bitcoin if it's really valuable. [00:28:40] Speaker B: I agree with you in that. But here's my whole thing with that, right? I would love to see all this stuff built on bitcoin, but like I have a little bit of a technical like computer background. So like I, I'm not a computer programmer, but like I know the kind of work that it takes to, to, to, to build these things and, and like the way bitcoin is, is like it like people want smart contracts like right this second, right now, they want to buy like cryptokitties have been out since like what, 2017. So, so like, yes, like bitcoin has things coming, but they are building the most secure form of money, like first and foremost, right? So do we really want bitcoin to do anything else except be that the store of value that it's best at doing or should we have something else that kind of fulfills that requirement that need? Actually the other way around, bitcoin had Pepe cash and all kinds of Pepe NFTs that were selling for quite a lot of money, probably more than some most cryptokitties well before cryptokitties came out. The thing is that that use case became usurped by a more valuable use case. And to be honest with you, no, I wouldn't want all this junk running on bitcoin. And the truth is nobody would actually want that stuff running on a network like that. The only reason why let's say Ethereum wants you to run your platforms on the Ethereum chain is because that's part of the marketing that propels a multi billion dollar market cap on a token that they gave themselves 70% of and that they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to maintain the illusion of decentralization for if it wasn't for that, they wouldn't want you running it on those servers either because it costs them a lot of money and they don't make that money back in the form in any way other than the fact that they gave themselves most of the token and people see that utility and think that utility equals value for a token holder and so speculate on that token which gets of course massively inflated and doesn't have rules that you can trust. So you know, we don't even know what the Ethereum network, for example, not to pick on Ethereum too much here because nobody really brought it up but we don't even know what that network's going to be in three years. We haven't even decided what is Ethereum 2.0 really going to, is it going to have sharding? Because nobody knows how to do communication on sharding yet. You know, so maybe we're just going to have roll ups and what kind of roll ups and how there's like, there's, there's no answer. So we don't even know what it's going to be in three years yet. So you know, to buy a software token that's not backed by equity or backed by anything really. It's just even if somebody could argue for the utility for Ethereum they wouldn't be able to connect the utility of Ethereum to the value, to the value of the token increasing that they would most time. Even if you ask an Ethereum guy they'll say yeah well I don't talk about price, I just, I'm just here for the, for the, for the tech man. I don't want to talk about price, I don't want speculate on price because they know even if they could build something cool, it has nothing to do with somebody buying Ethereum and hoping Ethereum is going to go up because somebody built something cool. [00:31:48] Speaker A: I would say two things too also. Thank you Nicholas for kind of holding down the fort up here. If anybody wants to jump up and defend or give an argument for an altcoin like this is, this is a free space. Will be, will be totally nice. I mean, we're not gonna, you know, sugarcoat our opinion on it, but that's, that's why we're here. So welcome. And we are the JC and I are the host of ShitCoin Insider. So we have a lot of fun with this. But back to something that Nicholas was talking about with the governance tokens. Is that the ultimate question here is governance of what? Like the, the idea of we're going to create a governance token for a network is kind of a circular point, a circular thing, right? What are we governing? It's like, oh, well, the network. It's like, okay, well what does it, what does the network do? And we're back to the utility problem. So if it's a governance token for an equity for somebody's productive enterprise that's doing something useful or providing a service in the, in, in the real world, then it doesn't make any sense to use that token as like how you make exchanges in the network. You still use money in whatever the service that's being used. And the governance token is just, that's just stock, right? Like this equity in a company. [00:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's how, I mean, that's how I see it as well. I'm sorry, but it's weaker. So I would say to that point it is similar to just a normal company with a normal board that has votes, voting power according to their shares and can make decisions for the company. The difference is with a normal company, if you buy those shares, you are getting real equity. And with pretty much everything that I see in the cryptocurrency space, there is nothing that resembles equity for token holders. They're getting nothing. So it's like typical company, but with less equitable shares, like a really crappy version of a stock. [00:33:52] Speaker A: Well, the thing is there's no real equity without a fiduciary duty, which means that it's still like property in the physical realm, remains a government monopoly. Right. So if you don't have a government license or a government like insured contract, you don't own anything in that context. Like there's no reason that they have to use the network to do this thing or that they have to produce whatever service that they're running on your network. And Jesus, if it's open source code, somebody can just copy and paste it from Tron to Binance chain or whatever. Like none of it is attached to anything. So you don't have equity. You have somebody's kind of loose promise that maybe you'll be a part of this, but it doesn't. Who knows if this is even going to be around? [00:34:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you'd have to give a specific example and we could address a specific example if you felt like you knew one that was, that was valuable with a dao. But I would say just forget blockchain exists for a minute and forget everything you know about blockchain and rewind like 30 years and imagine pitching 30 years ago a DAO to somebody as revolutionary idea. Take old watching out of it and just say we're going to create tokens, we're going to create, you know, tickets and we're going to sell them to people for this company. We're going to give ourselves most of them to start with and, and we're going to, you know, have control of the company based on the number of tickets we hold. And we're not going to give anybody any equity. We're not going to do, you know, any money we collect or anything, like any of our work product is not necessarily, you know, going to benefit these people, but we're going to market it a lot and talk about how this tickets, these tickets are the future. Like, what would they think of that? I mean, just think of it like without the blockchain stuff. It's really, it's very obviously a ridiculous scheme and it's not any better than what we already have with companies. They probably would say like, this just seems like a company without any protections and equity for the people. Like, seems like a really shitty public company. I mean, somebody has to like push the envelope though, right? Like, we can't just be like, oh well, you know, you know, regular stocks are better. Let's give up. Like, I don't think that's an option. I think something, somebody has to at least put like try technology out and see what comes out of it because maybe, maybe we do get something good out of it, maybe we don't get something good out of it. But I mean, you know, by all means, like let's, let's try it out. [00:36:19] Speaker A: And see what, see what happens. [00:36:21] Speaker B: Sure. I just would advise like anybody, I would just advise anybody like if. Because you can transparently see how ridiculous it is. So that's why I advise anybody I know or that I talk to don't buy it. Because like, sure, if you want to like gamble on like a way riskier, scammier version of penny stocks, you Might, you know, if you catch it in a good, a good trend. And I always say, you know, it comes to shitcoins, if you did want to go down that casino rabbit hole, you know, ignore the tech and just focus on the hype because that's all you're really buying is hype. There's not actually like, there's no actual utility being produced in any of these tokens. So you're just basically looking for where the hype is going to be and hoping you get in before the last guy. Cardano. [00:37:03] Speaker A: Dude, what do you mean? We got a couple of people on stage here that we haven't heard from. David, what's up, man? [00:37:11] Speaker B: Hey, what's up, guys? All right, so I missed the early part of the conversation, but I'm going to preface and say I think we all can agree, like defi to some extent is 100% necessary. And so in the same way that bitcoin created the permissionless asset, we need the permissionless financial services. So my first question is, you say we can build defi directly on bitcoin, but is that in the near future? I'm familiar with RGB and DLCs, but it's my understanding that those are far, far away. And so the second question is, if those aren't in the near future, would you rather have no defi or utilize maybe a side chain that requires a token? Right, because it's like, yeah, we all agree the ideal future is build on Bitcoin, but it's my understanding that the tech isn't quite there yet. Can you give an example of something today that is able to do in defi? Because, and also just to sidetrack a little bit, DLCs are really close and there actually are running oracles on deals these right now it's not for. I mean there's no platform built around it, but just to show the tech works. It's already running. It's a matter of whether anybody's going to implement it or not soon. They're going to make it a lot easier to implement, I think like two or three weeks. So we might see some stuff pop up. I don't know. It really just depends on how much real value is there when you take all the Ponzi machines away. Because in my brain most of the value is just Ponzi machines anyway. Sure, I can agree with you on. But like an oracle, like they have something like Atomic Finance, right? It's like Atomic Bets, like, like a basic, just kind of like, hey, does Trump win or Biden wins? Like that's you know, kind of like basic, like dumbed down, like defi. Like, like I don't really care about that. Like I don't think that's like the big. So what is a good defi too? Well, look at all the, like the centralized exchanges are going to be a huge potential choke point. Like if you have blockfi coinbase and the government goes up to them and says hey, thank you for your patriotic duty, like hand over all of your coins. That's a gargantuan issue. And so yeah, we can hold the asset. They can't ever take bitcoin away from us. But people are going to need these financial services. So 100% in the same vein that we love bitcoin, you got to love defi. So which one cannot? The government. Government can easily stop Ethereum right now by getting AWS and any other cloud provider not to work with them. Where are they going to host those terabyte nodes that require hundreds of thousands of dollars of the bandwidth every month? So that's not a solution. Binance chain is arguably probably more centralized than Ethereum. Maybe they're in a better regulatory area where they don't have to worry as much. I don't know. But somebody could take them down. [00:39:31] Speaker A: I would say the two biggest choke points there are actually tether and wrap btc, which are the dominant or N usdc, which are the dominant funding sources and you know, to actually control it. [00:39:49] Speaker B: So not only that, so yeah, so yeah, basically just there were actually more, there was more money lost on defi, quote unquote exchanges. I know they're not necessarily exchanges, but let's say platforms in 2020 than there were on centralized exchanges. So it wasn't any safer. It was actually more dangerous, more risk of getting your money lost through a rug pull. And I wasn't even counting rug pools in that. That's just hacks. So money lost through hack more dangerous in Defi last year and money lost through rug pulls if we want to count that. I'm sure there was much more money lost by the team ripping somebody off on a quote unquote decentralized platform than there were on large exchange exit scams in 2020. I haven't run those numbers myself, but I think intuitively can see that's the case. [00:40:35] Speaker A: My main answer, David, to your the fundamental question about Defi is that I think a lot of like everything that I've seen so far is kind of like decentralized theater, is that they're not thinking adversarially the the, the entire thing has so many like, like literally multiple like very, very serious central points of failure. You know, infura and the one other, I can't remember what it's called right now, but the one other infura thing, if both of those main institutions went down like 90, the whole thing would grind to a halt. Then the, the actual liquidity is provided by wrapped BTC which is just bitcoin sitting on an exchange somewhere and issued, issued a token and Bitgo. Yeah, thank you. That's the dominant one. And then so that's just, that's just somebody else holding bitcoin. And then there's USDC which is completely regulatory dependent and as soon as somebody writes a regulation or cracks down on blockchain coins, you know, on the stable coins or whatever, that's, that's going to completely change. You're not going to be able to just move that freely and tether. Exact same story is that yeah, there's the illusion that we have defi and that this could be really useful but 99% of it is being used to buy some worthless token to stake to get a loan out from somebody else and a new token to buy bitcoin or some token as it goes up. So it's just, it's, it's like a huge leveraging system that you can do without some central authority and you're doing it with a whole bunch of illiquid tokens that you're just betting are going to go up in price because of this circular economy that's you know, making people money off of the new people coming in. And then the, what was the first. There was, there was one other point. Oh, defi, is it on bitcoin? Yeah. Lightning Pool is actually a great example of an actually useful service like that. That's the thing is that how do you find a useful service, something that's actually productive in the real world and meaningful in an actual economy that you would build on top of this and do decentralized finance, do something where anybody could offer this service to you, that that service is permissionless and that that service is non custodial, that you do not have to trust the service provider in order to be provided with the service. That is Lightning Pool. DLCs are another great example. But Lightning pool is a, it's essentially like a lightning contract is that you always have the insurance clause to exit if anything ever goes wrong. You're running a copy of the software, you lock the multisig, you lift it up into what's referred to As a shadow chain, it's basically like a little temporary side chain for Bitcoin. It's an entire exchange where you match bidders, bids and asks, you match buyers and sellers, and it verifiably executes. And what happens is the buyer buys your liquidity on the Lightning Network and automatically opens up a channel and pays a. Pays a set fee that both of you agreed to and for an explicit amount of time. And everybody always has the ability to exit if something goes wrong. Everybody always verifies that it's that, you know, everybody's got the exact same conclusion at the end of running their software and therefore everything's good to go. Thumbs up. And you're providing liquidity on a payment network so that everybody can have fast, cheap payments that never get held up. And there's never any, you know, the payment network, the Lightning Network just always works, always has liquidity and opens, opens and closes channels as the, as the market demands it. And at the same time, they're providing a cheap service for everybody else because you can open, you can batch open Lightning Channels, which saves you a buttload on fees. So you just want to do it rather than opening up your channels by yourself anyway. But, like, that's default. [00:45:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think I agree with you guys on 99%, but I'm just going to push back on a few points just for the sake of the conversation on Lightning Pool. I'm obsessed with it. I dug into that quite a bit, but I'm not convinced that it has the depth to really kind of be a legitimate service in the marketplace. It perfectly fits what Lightning needs, which is like these gaps in liquidity. Lightning is like, shit, how are we going to fill these gaps? They go, oh, okay, cool. We're going to create an option, then we're going to fill all the gaps. But if one whale can come in there and plug in 100 or 1000 coins, then it's completely pointless. It solves Lightning issues, but it doesn't solve the issue that the entire market needs a gargantuan pool of liquidity in the same way. That's why U.S. treasuries are so huge. It's this infinite pool. So I am not convinced that Lightning Pool can handle that kind of quantity. And the other point is about wbtc. So I agree that's a huge violation of trust, massive risk. But what about something like tbtc, which is a trustless peg to Bitcoin? And so the idea that I'm kind of going off here is like, there's these Other providers, these side chains of Bitcoin, right? Like say, for example, like liquid or whatever, but that's a federated side chain. There's still some level of trust there. With tbtc, you can essentially create these side chains, right? And then you, you pledge your bitcoin over there. But then there has to be some sort of collateral that's securing that peg. And this is the use case, I think, for potentially like a governance token or something like that, where if there's a decentralized exchange or kind of like a blockfly type service that uses some sort of token, they use that token to secure the bitcoin peg. [00:46:40] Speaker A: So it creates this trustless peg where. [00:46:42] Speaker B: We can now port Bitcoin into the sidechain. It's still in the bitcoin environment and you actually have something backing it. So I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I think that's one potential actually use case where we can get as close to bitcoin ecosystem as possible with DeFi. But there has to be a token because it has to secure that bitcoin peg. There's no way to yet build defi on Bitcoin unless you have some sort of side chain. And in order to have a side chain, you have to have a peg. And in order to have a peg, you have to have a secondary form of collateral. And that's where the token comes into play. I would just take a lot of issue with when you say there's no way yet to build Defi on Bitcoin. Sure you could, but to the earlier point, there's no way to do defi on any of the other platforms that exist right now. None of them are decentralized enough to really call defi. And we spent, I don't know, 15 minutes kind of going into that. So to that extent, there is no defi going. But also it comes down to where's the use? I would agree with Pool to an extent where if you say, oh, the liquidity is not there for some whale to put like $100 million, sure it'll bring the rates down to basically free or the price of a fee, but that's not Lightning's fault or Bitcoin's fault. That's the fault of the utility not being. Nobody really thinks it's that useful right now. And mostly because Lightning is used for payments. So if you talk about, like, who wants to use cryptocurrency for payments, not really that many people. Who wants to use cryptocurrency, like, because there's all Kinds of Ponzi's that you can run and play on. Sure, that's a huge market, like a multi billion dollar market. Bitconnect was like over $2 billion, really massive market for Ponzi's. So is Lightning going to be as big as Bitconnect? Maybe eventually, if the currency use case gets bigger. But lightning pool as a concept certainly would scale in a world where let's say lightning became a multi billion dollar, you know, where payments was more or not just payments. As people start building, some of the things I'm seeing built now where I see like I'm working for a company now that does esports in game in with lightning and, and some exchanges are starting to use lightning because they see that, you know, it's far more convenient and easier to use. So there's like the collider exchange is pretty new, but they do derivatives. So you can do, you can even do like you can trade Ethereum but depositing, you know, bitcoin through lightning just like you would on Bitmex but with lightning instead. So maybe as you see like more of the casino apps, quote unquote, like exchanges, those kinds of exchanges get into lightning, maybe, I hate to say it, maybe that would, you know, get that kind of liquidity there because obviously the market is eventually going to choose the one with least friction, the one that works the best. And Bitcoin works by far better than any of these other coins that you see out there that I've used. And I've used all of them, the easiest and the cheapest to use by far when you're using lightning. So it just makes sense the market is going to gravitate towards that eventually. But anyway, my point was just that if we say like, oh, there's no defi on Ethereum or on Bitcoin today. Well, there's no defi anywhere today. It's all like AWS stuff that we pretend like is decentralized. I can agree. [00:49:54] Speaker A: I just think in the interim until. [00:49:57] Speaker B: We can build a true defi like you're saying, I think that there is a one single use case where you can use a token as collateral to create a trustless peg and we can build like a quasi defi on something like a liquid side chain. That's just my one point. Otherwise I agree with you 99% that like it's scams and all that. [00:50:16] Speaker A: Well, I don't actually disagree with that point at all because what you're doing is, you're, all you're doing is creating a substitute Right. Like, it's just like, rather than having a gold token, like a gold coin, you have a gold certificate, but the money is still bitcoin. Like in something like tbtc, what you're just doing, like what we're doing there is just creating a side chain that gives more freedom to manipulate or write a different set of instructions directly onto the token. And if that is in fact, you know, actually used, I mean, you could, you know, you actually got a good point. Like that you could use that for equity, is that the company's treasury could be attached to those tokens. But again, at the end of the day, the token is only like that token is worthwhile because, or worth money, not because of its governance attributes, not because of, you know, it's got smart contract capability or it's a utility or it's a really great. It's the best version of Chuck E. Cheese tokens that you can make. It's got value because it's got money behind it, because it's got bitcoin that you can redeem it for. It just becomes a money substitute. It's layer two. [00:51:35] Speaker B: We would have to go deeper into TBTC because, I mean, there's always to say, like, yeah, oh, this smart contract is governed by somebody's private keys on the bitcoin network. Because if I still own my private keys, like, you know, we have to just get deeper into that because most of the stuff I've seen, like Ren and others that maybe, I don't know, I was going to say maybe some better assumptions than wbc, but probably not even, because even though they store it kind of like through a dao, the DAO is probably less trustworthy than an exchange like Bitco. Bitgo is pretty old and trustworthy. And you know, they custody PayPal's coins too, so. So, you know, like, whatever, trust Bitco or whatever trust, like the devs at Ren who swear they won't collude to steal my money, like probably bitcoin. I don't want to choose either one, but you know what I mean? So, you know, you have to look at that kind of, those kind of elements when it comes to TBTC too. I'm sure there's, you know, there's got to be some kind of, some kind of dower group of people that swear they can't collude or something. There's got to be something governing a smart contract somewhere. It's not just like completely just by itself running. Yeah, okay. I think this is awesome combo and super good food for thought so I'm sure we'll talk about it more offline or something like that. But I appreciate you guys. [00:52:48] Speaker A: Hell yeah. I always hit me up. Kobe, what we got. [00:52:53] Speaker B: I was listening to Peter McCormack. I think he was the only one who got Nick Szabo on one of these interviews. Rare interviews. Appearances. [00:53:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I hate him anyway. [00:53:07] Speaker B: What's that? [00:53:08] Speaker A: I said I hate him for it. Oh, got it. [00:53:12] Speaker B: Yeah, there was a part in there. Of course he asked him, you know, what's his interest and obviously it's wild speculation, but he did throw out a couple of projects that interested him and one of the projects that Nick Szavo. [00:53:26] Speaker A: Had said, and I've actually heard him. [00:53:28] Speaker B: Say to a couple times on Twitter is Monero. And I'm wondering what the bitcoin community thinks of. You know, I don't hold any other crypto outside of bitcoin. I had a couple buddies, I went through the whole phase. Got last Bull run was like 2017 eras when I was in it. I had a couple friends around me saying you should diversify your portfolio. And so I experienced all that and then ultimately led me to this. Only bitcoin and stacking. But then Monero's interested too. Did a little bit of a dive on there. I'm not, not on the technicals, but some would actually say that Satoshi created both projects. I don't know what you guys think. Well, this is why Monero is worthless. Because one, you can't audit the supply, which of course is a necessarily necessary prerequisite for that kind of privacy by default that you don't know how many coins actually exist. I mean you can kind of guess but you can't prove it because you can't see what's in people's wallets. So that's a double edged sword. Two, and probably a bigger complaint for me is that, and actually it really goes along with the first is that they hard fork every six months and any coin that can hard fork every six months first of all has to be very centralized because you have to have people that are agreeing on some new set of rules every six months. And those people are working together very, in a very organized way such that they can deploy new code every six months. But also because we can't verify the supply like those two, that's just a very dangerous combination. Now granted, Monero guy is going to tell me and maybe this is one of them that just has to come up. A Monero guy is going to tell me that they have a large community that looks over the code and blah, blah, blah. But I can't look over the code every six months. And one of the great things about Bitcoin is you've got 13 years of history, 13 years of days that are an accident, basically, or at least so you can trust that history with narrow. You've got about six months or less worth of history you can trust, can't be audited. And also it happens to have an unlimited supply. So, you know, it's just if you're talking about something that you would hold or invest in, like, sure. Like, does it have a use? Yeah. If you had some Monero and you wanted to buy something with Monero, then you could do that, you know, in an anonymous way for now. And that would be useful. But like, you wouldn't want to hold it. You wouldn't want to say, like, I'm going to put, you know, a bunch of Monero in a bank or somewhere to give to my son. Like, you wouldn't do that because you can't trust the rules and it has no max supply. [00:56:06] Speaker A: I would say before we get to Brian here is that like Monero has always been something that I was really interested in. I was always super, like, privacy is crazy important to me. And I think it's one of the most important philosophies and principles to be designing for. If we're talking about protecting people's freedom and protecting, like, you'll never hear me say anything bad about privacy. However, in that same context is the having its own token. I think the monetary effects, the monetary network effects will absolutely outweigh any potential utility that it has for its privacy. And like, even when, like, if I've ever used Monero in the past, it's like, like, you know, like the insider said over here is that like, I'm not going to hold it in the long term. I'm gonna, I'm gonna transfer to it and then transfer back for privacy. And it actually gives up a lot of security for that trade off. That's the, that's the one thing that, like zcash and Bitcoin private and all of these things that try to say, oh, we're private. And this is also why Satoshi explicitly made a trade off for like the sort of privacy that you would have in Bitcoin is that you, if you can't audit the supply, you don't have the slightest clue what you actually own. Because now you're sacrificing the money itself in order to get a feature of the money. You're Sacrificing your ability to communicate to get in a word, that just really hits one point. Great. And, and it's, it's kind of antithet, antithetical to the whole idea. And the six months, what really sold me on, like I gotta get away from Monero was the six, was the hard forks every six months, I think. And the reason they do it too is supposedly to not have it centralized by mining. They changed the mining algorithm and I was just like, oh, Jesus. Because I think, I genuinely think ASICS are the best thing to ever happen to bitcoin. You just, you just don't allow your security market to mature because you're changing it every six months and forever. Somebody can just rent space on a supercomputer with a bunch of GPUs and just, just ruin Monero's day. So that's kind of my thoughts on that. And it took a while for me to kind of push away from that because I am such an advocate for privacy and I love privacy technology. But I think Monero would be great if it was a bitcoin sidechain. And that's the only reason I feel like it's useful in actually doing something with it. [00:59:05] Speaker B: So, so two things I think. I'm not going to speak for Nick Zabo, we all listen to him. I think what he was saying too also is these, these privacy coins. Just how you guys put it, it's a good idea, but you don't know what's happening on the back end. Something he had said. And then. Yeah, I forget the other part. I was going to say, well, real quick, privacy coin out there, with the exception of mimble wimble coin, I think it's the only one that figured out a way to prove supply, just to say quickly and then we'll move on to, to, I think Brian, or was Brian just one. [00:59:42] Speaker A: Let's go over to Brian. Brian, you gotta, you gotta. [00:59:44] Speaker B: Well, before, before we do, there's one more thing on the end of the Monero which is that on top of all those other reasons, I think that bitcoin will end up being far more private than any of them because you don't want to use. Even Monero has a blockchain that everybody can see. Granted, you can't see the addresses, but you have clues there that you can use for the rest of time to track people. And that's the case with any of, any of the, any of them. So with bitcoin and the direction that bitcoin is probably going to go for privacy it's probably going to use second layer solutions for privacy which are completely off chain. So you're going to have transactions happening between individuals that are not publicly posted anywhere. And that is obviously a superior way of maintaining privacy. Granted. Like, are there possible ways somebody could try to sneak in and spy on those kinds of transactions? Sure. But you know, it's not about ensuring everything's 100% private all the time. It's really just about making sure it's very, very expensive to, to break somebody's privacy. [01:00:41] Speaker A: Well, as far as network analysis with something like Monero, Monero has, you know, freedom from like blockchain analysis or privacy from blockchain analysis. But that's not the only analysis that you can do. You can watch the. NET network for when the, where the transaction originates. You can do, you know, particularly with nodes, if you've got fewer, fewer nodes on the network or whatever, that's, that's explicitly much easier to do. You can, you know, spin up 100 of your own nodes and time how far it takes for each one of your nodes to receive the transaction. And you can pinpoint like there's a lot of other types of privacy that just having blockchain privacy does not actually solve. And then even not having quote unquote, like still having a blockchain trail, that if you protect all these other levels of privacy, you can still essentially have pseudonymity on the blockchain. So sure you see a transaction, but maybe you aggregate it with other people, maybe they have no idea where, what country it came from and they can't identify it to you because it's not going to an exchange. Privacy is not a light switch. Right. Privacy is an incredibly difficult multifaceted thing. So it's about what type of privacy we're getting and how long it lasts. And I don't think anything is a, anything has been or will be really a perfect solution. And that's honestly, that's one of my biggest things about lightning. Even though like, yeah, fast, cheap, instant payments, that's wonderful and I love that. I use it for that all the time. But I love it as a privacy network because it's attributes from like, like facilitating transactions and stuff in that regard is orders of magnitude better than Bitcoin. But let's, let's finally go to Brian. Unless you had some other thing to jump. J.C. we good? All right. All right, Brian, what you got, man? [01:02:43] Speaker B: I actually still wanted to riff on. [01:02:44] Speaker A: Monero and I, I could just go off what you guys were saying a little bit because I'm still not satisfied with the inaudible supply argument because while that seems very clear today, I'm not. [01:02:57] Speaker B: Sure how clear that would be, say 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And Monero's price didn't crater to the, to zero. Presumably that would happen if there was an inflation bug. Well, there's hard forks every six months though. So those two things, like you're not going to have 10 years worth of protection 10 years from now. Unless that changes, you're still going to have six months worth of protection. [01:03:21] Speaker A: Let's, let's go, go back to your point if you weren't finished or whatever. Brian, did you have something? [01:03:34] Speaker B: Sorry, is my connection bad? [01:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's, it's breaking up a little bit here. I could just, I could hear you fine just then though. Give another shot. [01:03:44] Speaker B: All right, sorry about that. [01:03:46] Speaker A: I, I understand the hard fork argument and I think it's a good one. I'm just, I'm just not sure why. [01:03:53] Speaker B: Or when you guys, I guess expecting. [01:03:55] Speaker A: The price to really go south because. [01:03:57] Speaker B: Ultimately I think price is the main. [01:03:59] Speaker A: Arbiter of, of it. All right. [01:04:02] Speaker B: It's not like what the auditable supply. [01:04:05] Speaker A: Or this issue or that issue. Ultimately that price is going to be the main judge of whether it's gonna. [01:04:10] Speaker B: Lose or gain against Bitcoin. It also has an unlimited supply. And I mean you can, it's just not, you know, you say it can. [01:04:20] Speaker A: Have an unlimited supply, but I'm saying. [01:04:22] Speaker B: Like, think about it like 10, 20. [01:04:24] Speaker A: Years from now, Monero stone around. [01:04:26] Speaker B: Let's just say if that was the case, if it is, then. [01:04:32] Speaker A: Man, you're right. Still working. [01:04:35] Speaker B: Sorry, go ahead. [01:04:35] Speaker A: I heard you there. I think we're losing him. [01:04:43] Speaker B: I think he's trolling. [01:04:47] Speaker A: I would say on the, on the point, like everything, everything seems to have temporary use here, right? Like, like use might not be the word. Like temporary value, particularly in the, the, the recognition stage. Like, like we're still 100 trying to mature and figure out what the hell this asset class is. Like, what is, what is this that's being created? Where are we going with this? This is the dot com bubble of, of money. And I, I honestly could not come up with a single industry or good or anything that is as greatly misunderstood as money. And the market will always reveal a lack of misinformation. It will always reveal a lack of knowledge about a thing in, in quote unquote inefficient prices. But it's, it's, it's representative of the knowledge of the, of the ecosystem of the economy. So I don't think like, I think altcoins will be around for a long time, but I don't think any individual altcoin or the very idea of competing monies will survive in the long term in the face of a dominant monetary standard. I think the very nature of having multiple monies, I think it was, hilariously enough, it was like Ben Bernanke who before becoming the Federal Reserve chair did a lot of, you know, great study about this. He was arguably an Austrian economist before becoming a politician essentially. And he talked about the fact that, you know, the problem that money solves is the problem of barter is that rather than having to have a market trading chickens to shoes and having some sort of price, the establishment that is going to be highly illiquid and crazy unreliable between who's selling shoes for chickens at what particular date is that you have a network for chicken with money and a liquidity for chicken. I mean with chicken, with money, with shoes. And it becomes the dominant medium that you can trade everything else for. The very value of money is that everyone is using the same money. And therefore you have the most liquid network, you have the most stable asset and you have the most pure economic calculation in doing so, in actually using that. As soon as you start talking about using different monies for different utilities that I'm going to use the money for, specifically coffee tokens to buy my coffee with or I'm going to buy loan tokens to get loans with. Now you're right back to the barter problem. You're right back to now we need huge liquid networks for every single token, for every single thing. And the very efficiency of having a money is just deleted. It's just like, okay, well we're just, we'll just tokenize everything and then we'll have this massive high cost, high friction, super volatile market for every asset to every asset. And I just think it's antithetical to the economics of the matter and very. [01:08:07] Speaker B: You know, more, I guess, pertinent to his point. You know, Monero has been around for five, six years. So we can look at the history and we can see we don't have to speculate. Bitcoin or Monero right now is priced at like.0 0.004 BTC 24,5. The last time it was that low was in 2016. So it's not like we can't argue that it's been holding its value to Bitcoin obviously hasn't. It's as low as it was in 2016, it had a run in 2017 when all alternative things kind of had a hype mania phase. Similar now. Well, Monero is not really benefiting from this current hype phase because every cycle the old ones die and the new ones pump and the next cycle these ones nobody will care about and the new ones on and on and on. But despite Monero's like long standing, I guess, reverence to some in the, in the ecosystem, the price is as low as it's been since 2016. Imagine being in the crypto space since 2016 and you have the same amount of bitcoin, you know, worth of stuff. So. [01:09:14] Speaker A: Thank you. I think if I were to boil. [01:09:21] Speaker B: Down like Guy's argument, it's basically that. [01:09:25] Speaker A: If anything were to replace or supplant. [01:09:27] Speaker B: Bitcoin in the future, it would need to be like 10 times better at the minimum. And a privacy improvement in the base layer is not quite going to be that magical enough of a leap that the social consensus is not going to adjust to the new thing. Is that kind of it? [01:09:43] Speaker A: No, that's, that's fair. Yeah. Okay, thank you, Guy. I was just listening today to your read of unpacking Bitcoin's social contract and what Brian just said made me think. [01:10:00] Speaker B: Back to it really doesn't matter what. [01:10:05] Speaker A: We call the next thing that has to replace bitcoin. If some shit really goes down. All that matters that everyone agrees, which, why wouldn't you agree with these four things? [01:10:17] Speaker B: But as long as everyone agrees that. [01:10:19] Speaker A: Like the money can't be confiscated, forged and is uncensorable and that you can verify all the former three, then it's fine. Like we can just like copy paste UTXO set and just work with that. And it's okay because we all come. [01:10:39] Speaker B: To consensus because those are all the. [01:10:41] Speaker A: Four things that make the most badass money ever. Yeah, there's something that I, I still think that's highly, highly misunderstood is that the, the best money is not the one with the most features. The best money is the one that's the most trusted. Money is inherently a tool of trust and that's why Fiat actually works until the government abuses the of it like I can. When Fiat is on just a trust us, we're going to have a reliable monetary standard and you know, you can use this money if they had a reliable monetary schedule and that they actually, you know, held to austerity, they didn't, you know, loan themselves just new money at will and for a hundred years, you know, the dollar was actually a reliable monetary standard and they never issued a single new dollar. It would be one of the most successful monies in history because it has the trust of gold, of being a reliable monetary schedule. And, and at the same time, it's also paper or digital. So it, you can do whatever you want with it. You can set up services and stuff like that. It would be a great money. The problem with money is that the trust is always abused. Fiat fails because you can't trust it. And that's why hard forks are so detrimental to the security of one of these monetary tokens of one of these monetary systems. Because you're destroying the Lindy effect. These things are tools of trust. You're resetting everything that they could rely on for how this thing's work, how this thing works, and how the consensus is actually formed. If you alter consensus, all of the trust is out of the window and the only people you have left over are the people who don't understand that that's the fundamental problem here. But let's, let's jump over. [01:12:44] Speaker B: The more successful it becomes, the more. [01:12:46] Speaker A: Incentive there is for the people running it to cheat. [01:12:49] Speaker B: Right? [01:12:50] Speaker A: Like so, yeah, it's, it's an exponentially growing problem. Like so the better they manage the money, the more like the more they're rewarded and the more they're incentivized to cheat it, screw it up in the future. And it's the same way if you hard fork all the time. If, even if they hard fork reliably like Monero on a regular basis and everything's always work, always works, if that's the way they change it and it becomes successful, well then at any time in the future one of those hard forks can be corrupted. Yeah. And the more successful that became a trillion dollar network. That's the avenue, right? Like immediately that hard fork is the most, is the scariest that you could possibly do to the network because now it's actually the, the incentive to cheat or get a bug in or to change the rules. Particularly when you've got a small group of people that you're like, yeah, well you could just, I could just poke this guy the right way. And who knows what we can get implemented into this system. Like, yeah, the more successful it is, the, the more potent the desire to abuse that trust becomes. [01:14:00] Speaker B: So just out of curiosity, how, how. [01:14:04] Speaker A: Much more inefficient are altcoins versus like companies? And then how do we feel like. [01:14:09] Speaker B: That landscape will be changing in a hyper bitcoinized world? [01:14:13] Speaker A: I would Say, like, altcoins aren't companies. I wouldn't compare them to companies because they're not equity. Not in any reliable sense. They. I mean, the best you could do is call them maybe, and, you know, most of them, like, really have, like, a completely incorrect engine. They have a. [01:14:41] Speaker B: First of all, there's Ponzi's in, in actual equities, right? [01:14:45] Speaker A: So let's, you know, let's not. I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that because I had this conversation with Ben Prentice on Friday. It was a really great. [01:14:55] Speaker B: Legally, of course, I mean, you know, walk on it. Well, I, I know, but the difference. [01:14:59] Speaker A: With equities is that you are actually, there's like, proof of work in equities because you're making an investment and you have, like, you have more. You have more stake in the game. [01:15:11] Speaker B: In that sense than a fucking proof of stake token. [01:15:14] Speaker A: Hold on. [01:15:16] Speaker B: It's very important that. Have somebody to sue, like, if a company goes down. And also, you know, if I run an ICO now and, and I raise $30 million tomorrow, and I, you know, I get that money in my account and I give you guys tokens. I've got $30 million now and probably half the tokens, too, on top of my $30 million, because I made tokens for myself. So I've got $30 million that I can do whatever the hell I want with, and you guys don't have a say in how I spend that money. I could go and throw a $30 million party with Guy if I want, and, like, you couldn't sue me for it. So. But with, with, with a. [01:15:49] Speaker A: That would be. [01:15:50] Speaker B: With startup. [01:15:51] Speaker A: I vote. I vote for that to happen. [01:15:54] Speaker B: If we did it with a startup, we would be accountable to our investors on that $30 million. We would have. We would have, you know, an actual structure and a legal structure, and those investors would be. Would have legal protections and expectations. So we couldn't just go and do something totally irrelevant with the money. You know what I mean? And if we did, they could sue us, they could liquidate us. They could take anything we bought with it. You know, we'd be personally liable in some ways and maybe even criminally liable if we did that. So. But with tokens. But you can sue. You can, like, take the computers out of the office and claim them if you want. You know what I mean? Like, you can't do that with the ico, at least not through traditional means. Maybe you could make an argument and try to do that through, like, just basic Fraud and say, these guys sold me a nothing token and, and I want to sue them. Maybe I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often, but I think they're way closer to like an in game currency than they are to equity. [01:16:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's, that's actually not a bad, that's not a bad comparison is that it's like having World of Warcraft gold and think that if they create World of Warcraft 2 and your gold transfers, well then maybe it's still good to hang on to my World of Warcraft gold. But it's still entirely dependent on whether or not they choose to have it. It's still completely centralized and it's not true equity. It's not redeemable for money or goods in the real world. For this institution. They're not liable to do this. They're just promising that they will in some form or fashion and they could easily renege on that. [01:17:25] Speaker B: Right. And also a lot of these projects can be thought of as like, economic gamification, like experimental economic gamifications of, you know, certain activities like, you know, storing files or, you know, providing anonymity sets for people, etc. The Quantstamp example is a good example. When I think of like, is, you know, what is the relationship between a company and an altcoin? Quantstamp is a company that does smart contract auditing services. They're known as one of the best, very good reputation. So when they had their ICO in I think 2018, everybody was very hyped about it because everybody knew like quantstamp is the best for smart contract audits. So they're going to be very successful. This is a very useful thing, right? Smart contract audits. If people are going to have lots of smart contracts in the future. So this is going to be huge. Buy, buy, buy. I don't know how much they raised. Tens of millions of dollars. Well, they are still a very successful company. Token is completely worthless. Why? Because the token didn't do anything and the company takes dollars or oh, bitcoin for their services. So they get paid, they get rich, they pay their staff, they have a successful company. But you know, you're out in the parking lot with a ticket that says that you helped them raise and you know, good luck, maybe you can trade it somebody. But why, like, ultimately nobody cares about that token. J.C. you are the shitcoin killer. I love it. [01:18:45] Speaker A: You're amazing. [01:18:46] Speaker B: So, okay, so explain to me, and you know, I'm a maxi, but explain to Me why some of these projects claim that they need the token. [01:18:55] Speaker A: Like take Polkadot for example. [01:18:56] Speaker B: They're like, well, you got to have the dots because you got to do this with the dots. I mean, obviously to me that just sounds like bullshit. But can you explain that angle polka dots a harder one? Because I haven't like done the same deep dive on Polkadot that I have on so many of the others as a little newer and I haven't had time in the last say six months. But what I know of it, but just anyone, anyone that claims that the utility token is needed, I might be able to better explain it because I actually am a shitcoiner. I think that the only way that a shitcoin can justify its need for its own token is if it actually. The game as I described it earlier that it's building requires the use of inflation pegged to some activity. So for example, Arweave, which is a game that incentivize that basically the way it's set up is in theory you pay once and you can store a file on their system forever. And in theory it incentivizes its miners to store that file forever. And one of the ways that it pays them is via the inflation, like the block rewards in the same way that bitcoin currently pays its miners in inflation. So I think all of these shitcoins where they like launch with like, like they have a cap and they launch with all their tokens like pre mines, so to speak. There's no reason why they should. They couldn't just be used as where you couldn't just be using some denomination of bitcoin for them. But I would say that it would be difficult to use some denomination of bitcoin for some of these projects that kind of require their own little walled off monetary system for it to work. Yeah, like some of the projects are just straight up honest. They'll just be like, hey, at the. [01:20:44] Speaker A: End of the day these developers need to get paid. [01:20:47] Speaker B: And I appreciate that. But I'm not saying it's good by any means. Yeah, like why would I? It's, it's like a really up form of charity. Because you tricked me. You tricked me into thinking this was like an equity or like some kind of share in this project, when really it was just, I'm buying your marketing so you guys can eat. Like there's not really an expectation of profit for me. You guys are going to inflate these things forever. Yo, can I get my question in? There's like four people. [01:21:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Michael. Yeah, we kind of skipped right over you. [01:21:17] Speaker B: Hey, thanks guy. I think you're like the top podcaster in bitcoin, so. [01:21:20] Speaker A: Oh my God, I love you. Michael's my favorite person up here. [01:21:24] Speaker B: No, for real. But okay, so it was like two weeks ago or something. Stefan Lavera had his like debut in Clubhouse and I asked him, you know, why should I sell my Decred? Because like, I just haven't had like an in depth discussion with someone who really believes that I should. And I know he's a bitcoin maximalist and he started going into, you know, Mises regression theorem and it can only be one money. And so that's the only economically logical thing. And. But at that point people started, the other mods start saying, oh, decred is just like Ethereum and like get the fuck out of here. And just kind of got heckled off the stage before you could even have like a real conversation about it. Yeah, but, so that was kind of unfortunate. But yeah, I just feel like, you know, I've heard a bunch of stuff here like, oh, hard forking is bad, for example, because it's centralized. Well like, you know, in decred you vote on it. So you literally have to have 75% of the network like agreeing to do the hard fork. And there's an orderly process where there's a three month sort of period where things transition over. It's about as clean as you could do it. The decred devs, they wrote btcd, they wrote the cleanest bitcoin client there is. If you look, read the code base, it's undeniably much cleaner. It's disaggregated into modules. They're really good engineers and they thought about these things and like there's a lot of use cases for hard forking. Like if you look at Bitcoin's SPV mode, it's not as private as it could be because it would require a hard fork to embed certain information in the headers that would actually make it much more private. Decred did that. Like there's lots and lots of small things like that where you actually need a hard fork. L2, it's a much better way to do Lightning Network. It's not subject to these spam attacks. You need a hard fork to support that properly. These are just normal things. That is definitely going to put a lot of drag on bitcoin. And furthermore, just this simple question of scaling. I've said this a couple of times, Bitcoin is the global money and it's the Highlander, that can only be one. Then you get two transactions in your lifetime. If you just take the transaction throughput and divided by the human population you literally get I think D + you get one. One to open a channel, one to close the channel. I thought that was great. That's all we need. Well, but this is, I mean so I will say first of all like you can look at Decred on the price on the BTC chart of course and see like it's. It's more than like 10 times down from its high in 2017 and it's not even at dollar all time high now when like you know alter getting a reprieve in many cases. I mean obviously yeah is set the time series back so they both start their same genesis block. Right. And again the way I look at this is it's just a network that is like a decentralized piggy bank. So really, you know, if you're trying to store your wealth, the only way you can expect to. To get at least how much you put in out is if at that point when you're trying to withdraw, there's as many people putting in. That's really very, very simple. You know, and plus the inflation and they have the exact same inflation. That equation doesn't change. So it's just a question of. Yeah, Decred is a hundredth of bitcoin. No, I mean 10 years from now is it going to be from its own halt time high? Of course, yeah, it'll be a thousandth or even less. You can look at the chart. It looks like every other altcoin chart. I mean so I mean is decred just supposed to be like another bitcoin? I'm not really familiar with it. Yeah, everything you said about it, it's like it's like a spiritual success. It's like literally the Bitcoin devs wrote B2CD which is a bitcoin full suite written in golang. If you compare the two code bases and you know anything about software engineering, you will undeniable. If you didn't know who wrote which one, you just blindly looked at them. One, you could actually read it like a book. It's super clean. The other one is the ball spaghetti basically like from my perspective. So I. Marco is awesome. [01:25:46] Speaker A: I met him, I hung out with them. Great dude. The interesting thing about Decred is that. [01:25:52] Speaker B: He'S one of the basic. [01:25:54] Speaker A: Is basically. Yeah, he's like the founder of Decred. [01:25:58] Speaker B: Basically. He's a founder. [01:26:00] Speaker A: What? [01:26:01] Speaker B: He's not a founder, but yeah, he's just one of the engineers who worked at Company Zero. [01:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah, but he told me that he worked, he wrote the bitcoin decline. [01:26:11] Speaker B: He's been there since the beginning. [01:26:13] Speaker A: Anyway, Decred is betting on the failure of bitcoin. That's why they have this proof of work. [01:26:19] Speaker B: I don't see it like that at all. I don't see it like that at all. Can I finish, please? Sure. [01:26:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Can we, can we let Phil go first now? Just hold up, Phil, finish your thought. Yeah, like so this is just a substitute really, because the proof of work. [01:26:41] Speaker B: Protocol on bitcoin just doesn't seem like enough. [01:26:44] Speaker A: And the value and the sheer liquidity. [01:26:48] Speaker B: You can't reproduce that. [01:26:50] Speaker A: And this goes back to what I. [01:26:53] Speaker B: Was saying is that as long as. [01:26:55] Speaker A: You have those four values in your money, then whatever we need to do. [01:27:00] Speaker B: For bitcoin or whatever we're going to call it, whatever we need to do. [01:27:05] Speaker A: To make that scale or quantum resistant or whatever, we will just adapt it as needed. I don't think that you need another. [01:27:16] Speaker B: Fallback for, for bitcoin, which I really do based on what I've read. [01:27:24] Speaker A: Decred, actually, unlike litecoin, they really depend. [01:27:28] Speaker B: On and see themselves as like the. [01:27:31] Speaker A: Silver to bitcoin's gold. And it's just silly because you don't have the element of unforgeable costliness in anything else. [01:27:40] Speaker B: It is silly mostly because I've heard of flightcoin, but I never heard. I mean, I've heard of beaker, but I didn't even know what it was. Well, like it's not doing a great job, right? There's six different ASICs for Decred, so I don't see how the unforgeable is any difference. [01:27:52] Speaker A: Well, here, because nobody values it. Hold on a second, hold a second, hold on. [01:27:55] Speaker B: If it. No one values it. Why is the market cap a billion dollars? I don't get it. I value. [01:28:00] Speaker A: Hold on, hold on a second. So, so let's, let's compare. Let's just like talk about networks and like compatibility issues. So Betamax had higher quality than vhs hdv. HD DVD had advantages over Blu Ray. Bitcoin is ugly in a lot of respects, but at the end of the day, the utility of money is trust and liquidity. And to hold, to attempt to compete as a monetary asset. If you've not got something, it's like TCPIP isn't all that beautiful or smooth as a tool. IPv5 had streaming built in. IPv5 was much more interesting in the context of like oh yeah, we're going to replace media institutions and everything with Internet streaming. But somehow it still just happened over IPv4. IPv6 has a quadrillion times as much as larger address space and yet everybody's using IPv4 behind local area networks where you have a hundred devices in your house and then everybody just has one IP address. So even though we have maxed out, quote unquote, what the Internet could handle 20 years ago, like you, you know, you could only ever have like a, what was it, like a billion or 2 billion devices on the Internet and we've got like 100 billion in change is that there's no, the, the massive cost of a, of a compatibility shift, of a denomination shift in money, of a value shift in the trade off of one versus another. Like that is an astronomical cost that takes, I mean look at the shift from dollars to Bitcoin. Look at the shift from the Fiat system to the quote unquote crypto system. We're 13 years in and, and we're just getting started. This is a massive multi decade shift that's happening for century long assets. It's not going to change because one has slightly better code, or one's a little bit cleaner, or one has twice the block size. It's just if it's not a fundamental shift in what makes it trustworthy. Bitcoin works. At the end of the day, Bitcoin works and it has continued to work for 12, almost 13 years now. And it's been trustworthy and it gets more and more trustworthy as time and it continues to solve its problems even if it has to go around some weird little quirk or it has to add a zero at the end of the timestamp or whatever the hell it is because of some bug that's been in since the Genesis block. Yeah, we could hard fork and clean that one little thing up, but it, it's a whole lot easier to just work with it and be a part of the, the new foundation that's compatible and doesn't require a 100% infrastructure and denomination shift. So that's kind of why I think the, the main forces at play are economic, not just oh, clean code or some features or slightly more transactions. Real quick, I want to address the, the point about how everybody in the world can only make like two transactions in their lifetime. I think that, that like people seem to forget that you can buy bitcoin that's already on the Lightning network, you can buy Bitcoin that's already on liquid like I think most people will never make a base layer bitcoin transaction and that's okay. It'll be way more secure than the trust relationships they have now with legacy banking system. You know, you can have Bitcoin in a non custodial, you know, neutrino based lightning wallet and it will still be more secure than Bitcoin is in your. [01:32:04] Speaker B: I mean than dollars are in your bank right now. Just so I guess to tie the. Thanks Jeff. To tie the decrypt thing up, I think it didn't. If it's such a great store value or supposed to compete, I guess Bitcoin not only has it not passed its fiat all time high yet since last hype cycle, but it didn't even outperform Ethereum. Ethereum is pretty, it's the greatest example of a pretty crappy asset. So it's just not performing well to say, oh let's try to compare it to Bitcoin. When bitcoin was the same age like compared to the other things that were that are the same age as it's totally like that's kind of arbitrary. We're not in the same era that we were when nobody knew about cryptocurrencies and there was like not even a, the whole market wasn't even worth a billion dollars when bitcoin was, was younger. So you know, it's, it's a different game now. Now if you have something even, you know, you can even trick people into being good, you get a $20 billion valuation according to market cap and that's, and those networks are still essentially worthless. So you know. Yeah, I mean you go both ways. I think it's, I think, you know, Guy, your point is I think the strongest one just that there's just a switching cost but I don't know, there's atomic swaps. I see it as a complementary. That's basically my view on it. And it's like the same way that bitcoin keeps fiat honest decred, gives bitcoin honestly honest. [01:33:35] Speaker A: That's fair I guess. [01:33:36] Speaker B: One last, one last question I would ask. [01:33:38] Speaker A: I'll say, I'll say just as kind of like a broad thing about all coins is that I tell people not to buy them. I tell people I refer to them as coins. I do think 99 of them are scams. I think probably 1% are just honest projects that are misunderstanding the, the, the core problem or misunderstanding the, the major elements involved in, you know, using one versus another. But I don't have any, I don't have any issue with competition like my. My. Or experimentation or experimentation. My thesis is that at the end of that competition and experimentation, we end up with bitcoin. And there's a massive amount of evidence to suggest that this is the case. And it continues to prove itself in my use and experimenting with all of the new things that it is going to solve all the problems, even the things that we're still not 100% sure how we. We have new methods to do so and that this is a really long maturation process. Like the people who are chasing crazy features or defi right now are the people who are trying to build streaming in 1994. The liquidity isn't there, the network isn't there, the infrastructure isn't there. But it's great that people are trying. I don't really care. But I still tell people when they come in, you know, don't buy some random shitcoin just because it's cheaper. Like, if you're, if you're actually gonna touch one of those things, you better know why. And you better have already understood the full bitcoin thesis before you go there. [01:35:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm with you. And I always tell my friends, just buy bitcoin to the exact same reason, because I can't. Like it's very nuanced to disaggregate like decred, which I feel differently about versus everything else. I don't really hold anything else bitcoin decred. So I get that. [01:35:37] Speaker A: I'm personally really glad that litecoin existed to help. I mean, like it definitely busted helped bust a bunch of the fud around segwit, but you didn't have to buy and hold it for it to exist and bust the world. [01:35:51] Speaker B: There's that experimentation. [01:35:54] Speaker A: Yeah. How did you know I wanted to speak? Well, read my mind. [01:36:02] Speaker B: I've got a question, guys. Humbly, I've made quite a lot of money on altcoins, but my question is this and don't believe I'm going to stick around with them. My question is why is it that a lot of these channels, when we talk about O's, we look at them as an attempt to compete with bitcoin and dethrone it. Why don't we ever talk about the alt being a sort of voucher into an ecosystem? [01:36:32] Speaker A: My answer would be Sam just like clicked like crazy. I'm curious. I'm curious. What, are you agreeing with that or did you have a comment, Sam? [01:36:43] Speaker B: Oh, no, I just agree. I think, I think he. I think a lot of Macs you should Go look up Bernard Lieter and who is an economist that studied monetary systems his whole life and specifically he studied monetary systems in which there was a diversity of currencies and how beneficial that was. So I think that I agree with Stav that I think any alt that tries to compete with bitcoin is stupid. But by the same token, no pun intended, I think that there's, that they still like they're all comp. Complementary in some ways and they do something that I don't think any of them would exist if they didn't do something slightly different than what bitcoin's trying to do in such a way that, you know, people gave them value to do that. I would disagree with Sam, unfortunately, but also to Stav's point, as a, I guess a self proclaimed maximalist that tells people not to buy altcoins. I don't say, you know, oh, these guys are all trying to compete with bitcoin necessarily. What I say is you shouldn't buy them because you shouldn't buy them as an investment because ultimately you lose money. Now if you're talking about you made a lot of money in altcoins, you had to be trading them because of course we can look at any altcoin chart and they're all just a big red candle to bitcoin over time. Like sure, you might see like little hype cycles in three to six month periods. For the most part, with very few exceptions, it's just one giant red candle on the bitcoin chart. So if you're trading, you're essentially working. And you know, bitcoin could be worth $20 million a coin. If you want to work, put your work in, your knowledge, your skills, whatever, on trading anything, go outside and trade beans and cans. If there's a market for that, whatever you want to trade like you can make, you know, you can start out with five dollars and come home with 20 bucks. And you know, if you're denominating that In Bitcoin, a $20 million per Bitcoin Bitcoin, you technically made like a 5x gain on Bitcoin even though Bitcoin was worth 20,000, $20 million. But you, but you're not investing in those beans and cans, you're just working with them. And so you are one that's able to work with something that I would consider to be worthless and find a way to make money from that. But that's not what most people are able to do. Most people don't make money because they're not Able to, you know it's a zero sum game in trading. Every time you're selling the top of some shitcoin some guy is buying it from you and that guy is getting wrecked. And so most people are, you know, if you made a 20x return it came from somebody you know it wasn't. There wasn't new money that was created. I agree with you. You're right, I have, I didn't get, I didn't get into the game quick enough with bitcoin and I wanted to amass more and stack more sats and so I am a trader actually. Yes, you're right and it's not for the faint hearted and I would never, I can recommend it to anybody but I'm lucky in the fact that I've. [01:39:31] Speaker A: Been able to 5 or 10x against. [01:39:32] Speaker B: Bitcoin which has allowed me to earn more bitcoin. Ultimately I've traded alts to get more bitcoin so that's where I stand. So I don't know what you would call me. A D gen. A maximalish. You know I'd like, I'd like a title as well. Maybe if you're trading and catching out into bitcoin and using bitcoin as your actual like money then I'd still call you a maximalist that plays the shit coins. But you still could be because I mean I, I'm a maximalist but I, I've used all the shitcoins, you know. So basically I can call myself a shitcoin maximalist then. Yeah, no, I wouldn't say that because then that like implies that you don't hold any bitcoin but you are using bitcoin for its purpose. You know some people will do all kinds of whatever they do with their money. It's not like any of my business. And you just happen to do that? [01:40:21] Speaker A: Yeah, a shit going adjacent bitcoin maximalist. It's too many, too much. [01:40:27] Speaker B: Well stop. There's a way in which we're bigger maxis than them because we don't actually give a shit about what the US dollar price is of our stuff. We just care about what it's worth in, in SATs we don't like. Dude, I'm making a price chart. [01:40:38] Speaker A: SATs are truly your standard. [01:40:40] Speaker B: Like all these Mac is freaking out. Oh it's like this and USD it's like, like we all agree with you that USD is going to zero and that bitcoin is the new standard. But you know we're actually trying to get more sets but when I, when I open my altcoins I get like hammered like that. I'm not a maximalist and I didn't realize I was. I probably. I am a maximalist, but I'm a shitcoin maximalist definitely. Unless you're also holding like a side of Ethereum and say, well, it's just a hedge in case bitcoin doesn't ignore Bitcoin cash. Then you're not a Maximus at all. [01:41:09] Speaker A: No, no, I hold a lot of issues and I learned about Bitcoin through. [01:41:14] Speaker B: Ethereum, so that was weird as well. Experience, I suppose. Is EOS the top coin of all time? I never touched it, never touched bsv, I think is the top chicken. Maybe ripple. It's got to be something between gotta be ripple and maybe cardio actually is. [01:41:33] Speaker A: The biggest shitcoin of all right now. Truth, I would say, I would say to sav on your point about competition is that they're not competing with bitcoin or why do they say they're competing with Bitcoin? Is that if, if, if they create their own native free floating token and it is not explicit equity in some productive enterprise or it's not explicitly attached to something in the real world, then it is attempting to hold a monetary premium. It's just a digital point that they want to have monetary value and they're trying to create some sort of free friction, whether it be a quote unquote utility that requires that token, or we're going to store so many terabytes of data for this token, which at the end of the day every time they're going to say, oh, we're going to inflate it and we're going to reward with the new supply and all these servers you break down their incredibly complex Rube Goldberg machines and what you have is somebody paying a fee for a service. And like when you look at all of this stuff and you're trying to create a free floating token that has nothing real behind it, you're trying to create a money and whether they want it to compete with Bitcoin is irrelevant. It will compete with Bitcoin because they're trying to create a competing money. The only, the only exception to that rule is if it's a share in a company is if it's, you know, like, like my quote unquote, unquote, like, like my quote unquote Starbucks points don't free float. Like they're worth dollars, right? Like I gave them dollars or whatever, but they're denominated in money and ultimately the Language that we will all speak will be the money. And, and at the end of the day I think that will be Bitcoin. Anybody who creates a useful utility or a useful network or useful defi will, the one that will be successful and will replace all the others are the ones that will create some sort of side chain system that pegs it to Bitcoin like tbtc. I can't remember who mentioned that earlier. And allows you to use money Bitcoin, the one with the strongest monetary trust and network effect, to run some other feature. And then at the end of the day you're just creating a network to do something more with Bitcoin. And the one that has the free floating token will fall away, die and be replaced by that. [01:44:15] Speaker B: So was Satoshi wrong when he worked on Oxpow and Namecoin? [01:44:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think he fundamentally, if we're talking about namecoin as having its own token, like I was always interested in the namecoin project, it's a really cool idea. I really wish we could have decentralized DNS, but I wouldn't call him wrong per se. But no, I don't think Namecoin will stick around long run when we come up with a better DNS. Decentralized DNS. [01:44:49] Speaker B: I mean namecoin speaks for itself. It's dimensionally wrong. I mean we've had like what, 10 years to prove that. Yeah, Namecoin was a failure as an investment. Can I ask a question regarding the. [01:45:00] Speaker A: Store of value narrative we were speaking on earlier? Yeah. And then just afterward, let's go to Sam. I want to make sure we don't stop going down the list here. But yeah. Yeah, Dan. [01:45:09] Speaker B: Yeah. And thanks for your answers, guys. That was pretty awesome. [01:45:12] Speaker A: Yeah, man. So, so would it, would it be far fetched to say that if I. [01:45:17] Speaker B: Was storing information on a network, that the integrity of that information is based. [01:45:22] Speaker A: On the integrity of the attack surface. [01:45:25] Speaker B: That exists on the network? [01:45:26] Speaker A: And do we think that there's a. [01:45:28] Speaker B: Possibility to mathematically theorize or write a. [01:45:32] Speaker A: Proof showing just how integrity, just how. [01:45:36] Speaker B: Much integrity lies in say, one network versus another? [01:45:40] Speaker A: Possibly. That's a tough one because like the way bitcoin's consensus is held is not really quantifiable. It's very qualitative in the fact that. And there's a lot of people who have tried to quantify like proof of work, what's security or consensus, but at the end of the day it's a trade off, like it's a human judgment to the cost and the Reward, it's an economic problem. And all economic calculations, even with a totem as reliable as like a secure sound money, the trade off, the decision is still a spec, not speculative, it's still a subjective one. Right? Like all value is subjective. So I don't think there is anything that is quite so provable about that. Economics is inherently a study of human behavior and valuation which, which is a subjective thing. But sure, I think there's a lot of great models that could lend to making sense of that. And kind of the beauty of Satoshi's design is that he found a way to make it increasingly economically more costly and detrimental to attempt to cheat the system or attack the system, while very rewarding and beneficial to work within the system and participate within the rules and build within the rules and all of those things. All right, let's go to, let's jump over to Sam. Sam, you still around man? Yeah, I just have a follow up. [01:47:28] Speaker B: Kind of like on the store of. [01:47:29] Speaker A: Values for Bitcoin, the btc. [01:47:33] Speaker B: So I heard earlier about, you know, layer two solutions and so forth. If there's no utility, you know, Bitcoin like actually transacting for day to day transactions. [01:47:45] Speaker A: Is it, is it, is this? [01:47:46] Speaker B: Is bitcoin really going to, you know, be sustainable for a long term just. [01:47:51] Speaker A: As a store of value or you know, are we going to have, you. [01:47:54] Speaker B: Know, better use cases for btc? [01:47:58] Speaker A: I think the store of value is what comes from first. Like and, and this kind of makes sense too, which it's, it's actually funny like if you study like Rothbard and Manger and some of these Austrian economists that have kind of like roped all of the value or all the uses of money into like one thing and extrapolated the fact that its final use as a medium of exchange or excuse me, unit of account as being its dominant source or it's its dominant feature is that if you actually go back to the history of money, like you watch it actually being birthed and I think bitcoin is actually kind of a phenomenal historical event that we actually get to see this literally come from zero and emerge into the economic environment, particularly in our current macro environment, it's just absolutely crazy. Like this is one of the most epic things to ever happen ever. And the fact that like I am kind of at the stage in my life where I can actually observe it and study it is like this is a once a millennia opportunity. It's unbelievable where we are sitting right now. But you look at this. Throughout history, something became a Store of value first. And then when it's. It's a particular set of its attributes made it usable as a medium of exchange. And then after becoming a widespread spread medium of exchange, you can then use it as a unit of account. But before those other maturation phases, you can't possibly use something as a medium of account until it's the most liquid asset in the world. I mean, just no hope. It's just a complete and utter like pipe dream to think that that's even possible. And you see this with everything. You see it with cattle, you see it with salt, you see it with wampum. Like, you know, like the reason salt became a currency was because it had a huge liquid market. Everybody knew somebody else needed or wanted salt. And you could easily misinterpret that as being like, salt has some quote unquote intrinsic value and therefore it becomes a medium of exchange later on. But the, the quote unquote intrinsic value is simply what developed the market. It's simply what made it liquid enough for us to then use it as a medium of exchange. And what we have is an information protocol that establishes a unit of value. We're going to be able to build everything on top of this, whether it be with DLCs, whether it be with lightning and establishing liquid payment networks. And all of our technology builds in layers. Anyway, like, this is not new. The, the entire monetary system since forever has been. I mean, oh God, the audiobook will be out soon, but Nick Bhatia's book Layered Money and we're finishing it up right now. But his book is already out if you want to read it. Audiobook will be soon, but he just lays out the entire history of building monetary systems and talks about all the different layers. But that's how you get all of the features of money. It's money substitutes. And the fact that we actually have a programmable money to create higher layers to create provable money substitutes. Like Lightning Network is not an iou, right? Like Lightning Network is a provable contract that you can always go to the court of Bitcoin and essentially get a verifiable outcome. And it's, it allows you to introduce liquidity into a global, decentralized private payment network. And I just don't think everything that I have seen, yes, it will take longer. Yes, building it out truly decentralized and against every adversary will be a pain in the ass in the process, as it has been and will continue to be. The Internet, I mean, really, Netflix took 25 or 30 years to truly become Possible even though people at the very beginning of the Internet were going streaming. Oh shit, streaming. We're going to destroy cable tv. Took a really long time to get there. I think we're looking at the same thing in the context of money and the fact that we have a global information standard of value, that we have turned value into a piece of information. And it's programmatic. Altcoins will be great experimentation ground for trying to figure out how to build these things or create some smart contracts. But ultimately I think they're just froth on the fact that we have this new, highly immature money that is growing in the global sphere. And in 20 or 30 years, I think they'll mostly be irrelevant. Well, and it's worth pointing out that all these things happen like kind of at the same time and in like a messy way. Right? Like drug, the drug markets were using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange before a lot of people were even using it, using it as a store value. Right. And like some of our, our shitcoin traders here have pointed out, they're using. And, and this is very common among the successful altcoin traders that I know is they're using Bitcoin as a unit, as their unit of account when they trade, you know, and, and trading shitcoins is, is not just a matter of, you know, throwing all your money here and all your money there. It's all. Trading in general is a risk management strategy. So you need to have a unitive account and most of your money safely stored away in something where you can save. [01:53:41] Speaker B: And, and you need to measure your gains in, with the portion you're. [01:53:45] Speaker A: You're putting at risk in, in that thing that you're saving. So they're already using, they're, they're leaping ahead sort of and using, you know, using it as a unit of account. [01:53:55] Speaker B: Before most other people are. [01:53:56] Speaker A: Yeah, just, just. And then everybody knows. Sorry, just so everybody knows. I'm at 7% battery and my setup is such that I cannot charge this. I'm at 6% battery. So let's see if we can actually go down and get a couple of questions answered really quick. Let's jump to SEO real quick because we're going to be, we're going to be closing this out pretty soon. [01:54:19] Speaker B: Hi, thank you for letting me ask you a question. It's a general question. Can you, I, I mean, I have this thought in my mind in this question. How come Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and he bought like, and the company, not he bought with the company 1 billion. We all know. Did you ever think why and do you have an explanation why he's tweeting all these memes about the other coin? What explanation do you have and why he's doing that? I would like to know. To answer my question, I have this question since like one month, one month and a half ago. Yeah, I watch him clip as. Yeah, yeah. [01:55:00] Speaker A: I literally think it's a joke being sarcastic. [01:55:05] Speaker B: I don't think that he, I don't think he even cares about bitcoin. I don't think he's really done the done. I think if you asked him to, you wanted to have a conversation about proof of work with Elon. I'm not sure how good of a conversation would be. Not saying he's not that smart. I'm just saying he's a guy that's, you know, his day is, you know, if you look at his Google calendar, it's probably going to be completely packed, every 30 minute block, completely packed with meetings. And not only with meetings, but the meetings that were so important that they said, okay, only Elon can do this because this is like an emergency. So like his entire day are only the most important meetings that he could do all day. And so it's not like he gets into chill for three hours and Google and listen to bitcoin audible. You know, like it's not his fault probably that he doesn't understand it, but I just don't think he has the time to really. It's taken most of us here, you've got to really dedicate time to understand complex things, even if you are really smart. So I just think that's what I think. Just likes to troll. And I don't think he took it seriously for a long time. I think he's starting to take it a little more serious now. Obviously he put 10% of his company's cash into it, which was very significant. So he gets it, I think, to an extent. But you know, I just think he likes a troll and he's not actually. He doesn't realize that bitcoin is the thing that's going to make him truly sovereign in a way that he isn't today. JC I actually slightly disagree with that. I think Elon well understands it, but I don't know if it's worth the conversation. I wanted to understand what, what is his goal? What is why he's doing that? I mean, I was curious going down his deepness, his consciousness, his spirit, why he's doing all this game. Because he can, I Think. [01:56:43] Speaker A: I think he literally wants people to not take him so seriously. He even said on the clubhouse that he jumped into about bitcoin, was that, like, everybody loves dogecoin. Doge is like a fun joke and it's just hilarious or whatever to suggest that it's going to become the world reserve currency because it's a meme, but maybe it does become the world reserve currency. Like, I think, like, everybody just hangs on to every word and every tweet that he says, and I think that probably just hates that to some extent. He's probably just like, like, quit listening to me. Like, I'm just gonna tweet about dogecoin right now. Like, I get, I'm just. I just want a Twitter account, for crying out loud. Quit building it up. He wants to shade. [01:57:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I know, but, yeah, with the money, with everybody, and maybe one day they will tell him, oh, was a shitcoin. Everybody disappear. He's playing with the money of the people. [01:57:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:57:41] Speaker B: Hey, I think an upgrade to the network lately. Is that right? [01:57:45] Speaker A: Just on the subject, there was. [01:57:48] Speaker B: Sorry, I didn't hear you. They got an upgrade to the network. They've made the Doge network faster. [01:57:52] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Have they really? [01:57:54] Speaker B: I don't know. Yeah, I read it today, but I. [01:57:57] Speaker A: Think twice as Doge. I think Elon loves memes and the. [01:58:02] Speaker B: Power of memes, and I think he's playing with the world with memes. Memes are very, very powerful. Yeah. [01:58:07] Speaker A: Let's move on, Jay. Let's see. Yeah. What's your comment, man? I'm at five. Just. Heads up. [01:58:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's why I wanted to hurry up. Thanks, guy, for, for bringing me up. Hey, no, you know, I, I was reading something. Well, more of a question and statement. I, I recently read something about how the amount of bitcoin that is wrapped up in some of these coin blockchains. And, and the article was talking about there's more wrapped bitcoin coin than there is on the Lightning Network. And so I, I, I, I, I. [01:58:43] Speaker A: First, I could not believe it. [01:58:44] Speaker B: I was flabbergasted by that. But then, you know, it started to make me think, you know, what does that say about bitcoin development overall? I mean, I, I've been in, in bitcoin since inception, and so, you know, I've been hearing of the promises of. [01:59:00] Speaker A: All of these layers. [01:59:02] Speaker B: You know, we always, we always equate, you know, the osi, the seven layers of the OSI model. And so, you know, how bitcoin is the eighth layer and possibly lightning. Lightning is the ninth layer. Well, you know, it just seems like some of these other blockchains are so that. Sorry, I know, I know what you're getting at and since we're so short on time, I know the question, I can answer the question. So when you talk about like lightning capacity versus WBTC amount, me, I'm a user of Lightning and I only keep, I try to keep my lightning balance less than $5,000. It's hard to do because bitcoin keeps mooning. So like it's been like $20,000 and I have to like take some money off. But I try to keep my lightning balance low because one, it's a hot wallet too. I don't need much more than $5,000. I just need enough that I can spend. The lightning capacity does not represent how much it's being used, it represents that. So it's not the amount of water that can run through the pipe, it's the width of the pipe. So you can like my node with let's say $5,000 on it, can route $50,000 worth of Bitcoin every day when the network is busy. So that's part one. But part two is if I wanted to use WBTC to play like on AV or one of these defi Ponzi schemes, I wouldn't just put $5,000, I would put, you know, whatever's a lot of money to me or whatever's not a lot of money to me. Whatever the value of this thing is to me, like whatever I want to gamble with, I put that and be very easy. And I would just put, you know, let's just say $100,000, $200,000. And I wouldn't think twice about it if I was trying to gamble, but I would never put $200,000 on a lightning node because it wouldn't be useful there. So it's not a measure of oh man wrapped. Bitcoin is more like, is getting more use than lightning. Lightning gets a whole like over 100,000 transactions a day, probably on a good day. Whereas for years there have been one guy could put the capacity entire Lightning network on WBTC and just leave it sitting there. Because that's what you do with it, you just leave it in pools and you let it sit there. So you don't actually use your wbtc. But also WBTC isn't real bitcoin, it's in an exchange, basically. You can say the same thing about Coinbase. [02:01:14] Speaker A: That's what I was about to add is that there's also more Bitcoin Coinbase than there is on the Lightning Network because it's just in an exchange and people are buying and selling. That will always be the case. And that's what Rap BTC is right. It's just people trying to use an exchange to buy a bunch of shitcoins or tokens and it's being held with a custodian that's Bitgo or this other subset of approved merchants in this little consortium who issue a WBTC token. So I see it absolutely no fundamentally different than saying there's more Bitcoin on Coinbase than there is on Lightning. But then at the exact same time is that we don't really have a full view at the Lightning Network. Increasingly more and more even Strike Jack Maller says we don't. Our, our channels aren't public. Private channels are becoming the norm very, very quickly. There's a suggestion I think I saw, I think Andrew Palestra had the last data that I saw on it. Something like there's 40% of the network is hidden and you can only see it through blockchain analysis because you can't ping it on the network. And that's actually rather old. So that might increasingly be less and less true. We actually could very well get to a point, particularly with Taproot coming, where we can't see what the hell's going on Lightning at all. Like we just have no idea how big it is. So my, like my recommendation would just be to, you know, if you have a use for it and you can, you know, buy stuff on fold or you like just use works. It works great. I use it all the time. In fact, I have an invoice that my website guy sent me and I haven't paid it yet but like, you know, I do it every day. [02:03:08] Speaker B: You know, I think what really, what really caught me was that there's over a hundred thousand bitcoins wrapped up and, and that just seemed so obscene. [02:03:19] Speaker A: Gambling is a big game, is a huge market that honestly that doesn't surprise me. I just, I'm not like that doesn't. I'm like that. Yeah, that makes perfect sense to be, to be. [02:03:30] Speaker B: What I would say too, sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. Is that it just kind of proves even more like those who want to say, like Ethereum's money. If Ethereum's great money, then why are they large? Why are they using WBTC on Ethereum? Like it's one of the largest assets on Ethereum. If not number one, number two, and number. And the only things that beat it are the stablecoins which are also used more than 80% to buy Bitcoin with. So like, you know, if so it's almost in a sense like it just proves more that Ethereum is worthless because even if you did build a money network, it's going to be full of bitcoin, it's going to be full of bitcoin derivatives and bitcoin stuff to buy bitcoin with. [02:04:10] Speaker A: Yeah, it becomes like in that context, Bitcoin is still the absolute monetary standard and Ethereum just becomes a side chain to do something else with bitcoin that you just don't, you're not natively doing on the bitcoin network. Let's, let's see if we can get Teddy in before my, my shit dies at 1%. I'm gonna try to close this out. All right, cool, cool. Yeah, I just had a question about FD7 Ventures out of Dubai. They had like a position that they. [02:04:43] Speaker B: Were hodling for quite some time that. [02:04:45] Speaker A: You know, got up to I think. [02:04:47] Speaker B: Just over 5 billion. [02:04:48] Speaker A: And they've just decided to liquidate a portion of that, like $750 million and put it into Polka Dot and Cardano. And I think that, yeah, I just think that that's a really bad move. Wow. So I was just curious as to if you had thoughts on that. I feel very, very sorry for them. [02:05:09] Speaker B: What I heard about this and I haven't verified this myself, so sorry if this is wrong, but what I've essentially heard is that it was basically a PR puff piece and that this fund has a negative existed for very long and it's mostly just, you know, like contrived story to pump basically the coins. [02:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. That's, that's kind of what I was thinking. Like I see those prices moving like much quicker in comparison to bitcoin right now. But I'm not suggesting that's a long term plan or even a good short term one. I think maybe the pumping might have already took course. So I just think that it's a little dangerous for these huge players to be making moves, moves like that out of bitcoin into these coins and having. [02:05:52] Speaker B: You know, people follow billionaires, they, it. [02:05:55] Speaker A: Seems like people are taking this as advice. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's unfortunate but you know, like take every article you see with a grain of salt. I wrote a piece and spoke at length with a guy I don't know a year or two ago on the show now who had worked in crypto for a long time. And actually one of the very first, first pieces I ever read on bitcoin Audible was about how easy it was to just buy ratings to write your own article and issue it to some huge, some crypto quote unquote news group and, and just have them publish it under one of their authors. And that goes on a lot. Not, I don't really know anything about this particular case, but I'm always highly, highly skeptical. And if that's a legit thing that has just happened and there's no shady or nobody buying an editor or something like that in the midst of it, then it's just. It's just very, very unfortunate in my opinion. [02:06:57] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, there were big funds, huge funds. All my buddies in New York were running crypto funds. It became the thing to do in 2017. And we're talking maybe, you know, not that big, but let's say 50 million to 100 million dollar funds. And I knew at least 20 of these guys, like it was the thing to do if you had money in New York. It almost became like a meme. You start a crypto fund and you start like building these diverse portfolios. And now, like, you know, they're embarrassed to come around because, yes, in hindsight, it was a horrible decision. Many of them, you know, some of them pivoted to bitcoin, Other ones are very jaded against the entire market now because they thought they could diversify against bitcoin. But yeah, I mean, you know, this, they learn eventually and poorly for a lot of people. [02:07:39] Speaker A: So let's see if we can get one from Eugene. Just a quick thing. I don't even think I've said anything about this the entire show here, but we host Shitcoin Insider and we have a show where we just kind of have a lot of fun. And it's, as we refer to it, it's. It's our guilty pleasure where we just get to kind of rip some shitcoins a new one. And that is what this is for. So if you missed any of this or want to go back and listen to the beginning of it, this will be posted on the ShitCoin Insider RSS feed. And my main podcast is Bitcoin Audible, where we talk, I talk about, read, I mean, every damn thing about bitcoin that you could possibly think of. We're about to be, I don't know, our 500th read and 640 some odd episodes now. Yeah, yeah, so check both of those Outcoin Insider, Bitcoin audible. But real quick, let's see if we can get Eugene's question in. [02:08:40] Speaker B: Hey, thanks. So question is that I have is basically are the protocols that like all coins such as Ethereum or Chain Link or AV or whatever it is, are the protocols themselves valuable in terms of developing new blockchain technologies and defi. And if and is the issue that the coins themselves that they're offering and they'd be good if they were offered on top of like Bitcoin or the protocols themselves not even really worth anything else? I would say like Ethereum goes to zero. [02:09:14] Speaker A: I would literally say yes is that they're very well co could be value in the code that they're writing. They could have some great clients. I don't know. I mean granted I think there's a huge engineering mindset disconnect with Ethereum in particular. But yeah, they could be writing great code. They could be building a really interesting ecosystem. I think the fundamental problem that they all have is the attempt to create a free floating independent monetary token Token and competing with Bitcoin as money. And they, even the ones who attempt not to do that don't realize that they cannot escape the fact that they are. [02:09:58] Speaker B: And I would be more clear, none of the specific protocols are, are doing anything like Chainlink for example. Chainlink is doing Oracles. Of course they need the token. That's the biggest flaw. It's gonna be very, very easy to outcompete a company like Chain Link. If we were in a free market where any and Oracles were, let's say a thing that had extremely high demand. Like sure. Like you can find like list of things like people that use training but it's, if they're not making, you know, it's not a very big business for them, they're not making a bunch of profit on people that are using Chain Link. If it were an actual, you know, if there were actually money there to start an Oracle company, for example, it would be extremely easy to out compete Chainlink because well, not only is all their concepts open source, but most of their concepts are also borrowed. Of course everybody's borrowing from it. Nothing wrong with that. But the problem is that somebody will do it in a way that benefits the Oracles themselves better without a token. And it'll be very easy to do because of all the friction that the token adds. [02:10:55] Speaker A: And we already have this. Eugene, if you ask specifically about Oracle stuff or look up sure debits, that's S U R E D B I T s and check out what they're doing with DLCs. They're discrete law contracts. But you can make any financial contract and you can have the Oracle just take care of it for you. Really do that. At this point, I had muted my local recording and forgot to turn it back on, but I was at the absolute limit of my battery. And so I basically just. This was essentially the end of the recording. There's like a couple of little comments and things. But that was, that was the show. That was the clubhouse. And I do want to. We do want to actually do this again sometime. And we'd love to get anybody's feedback. Always feel free to hit us up at the shitcoin Insider Twitter handle. Hope this helped answer a lot of questions and any other criticisms or ridiculous insults or attacks you have, feel free to throw it our way and maybe we'll address them on the next episode of the shitcoin Insider. And hopefully it won't be so long a gap this round. Don't forget to subscribe, don't forget to follow us on Twitter. And with that, thank you guys so much for listening to the shitcoin Insider. [02:15:16] Speaker B: This podcast is part of the C Suite Radio Network, turning the volume up on business.