Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We have got a great episode of Shitcoin Insider. Today we bring the insider himself back to the show to discuss what bitcoin maximalism even is. Is it a dying breed? Is it just a bunch of meanies on Twitter? Or have we found ourselves fighting over a caricature equated to the lowest common denominator of the Twitterverse while ignoring the actual set of principles behind the bitcoin only philosophy and what it truly means?
We will get into all of that and more in just a moment. A quick thank you to coin kite the solution to all of your bitcoin hardware problems. To Swan Bitcoin, the best place to stack and the best onboarding experience out there. And to fold for letting me stack stats on everything in my fiat life. Fiat done the right way. They sponsor my work and they make this show possible. So a big thank you to those guys. Discounts, free SATs and a lot of other goodies in the show. Notes links included. So check them out with that. Let's get into it. You are going to love this episode, I promise. That is Guy Swan's 100% money back guarantee. This is ShitCoin Insider, episode eight, Maximum Maximalism.
Bitcoin maximalists trying to make sense of the sea of shitcoins.
This is Shitcoin Insider.
We're gonna. We're gonna start this off right now. We're gonna start this off right now. And I'm going to ask you, the shitcoin Insider, a fellow bitcoin maximalist of this show who enjoys exploring the world of shitcoins or at least finds a guilty pleasure in it.
What is. What the. I keep hearing all this ridiculous shit that, like, bitcoin maximalism is the idea that, like, I was literally just told this, that bitcoin maximalism, referring to myself as a bitcoin maximalist means I have to defend that bitcoin is going to save marriages.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: That should only eat meat.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Bitcoin is going to clean the water. Like. Like I'm supposed to just believe these ridiculous things that I don't believe and I have to somehow defend them. So what the hell is it?
What is. What is bitcoin maximalism?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: So, and I want to point out, first of all, my interest in inch coins mostly extends to wanting to know how they work, kind of breaking down the tokenomics of them so that I can in this case, point out why they're a bad idea. And the reason why I'm passionate about that is because a lot of people that you talk to in this space, you know, they might hear about bitcoin from somebody, why it's great and get into it. But when, as soon as they get on YouTube or anywhere else, you know, the marketing budgets start to be the predominant thing that they interact with. And of course that's what the marketing budgets are for. They'll start getting sucked into all kinds of ridiculous things. And I'm the kind of guy when like I'm trying to tell you not to do something you're not. I know that you're not going to respect what I have to say unless I understand that thing at least as much as you do. So I kind of feel an obligation as a person that gives a fuck about bitcoin to like dig into those things more than most people do so that I can pull people out of them that I care about. Because otherwise they are going to look at me like I'm just some ignorant guy that doesn't understand what they're talking about. And you know, for the sake of a good faith discussion, I have to make sure that's not true. And that, and that ties into what we're talking about here.
A bitcoin maximalist. To me and anybody. You know, none of these words are. There's no official, you know, bitcoin thesaurus or dictionary that the authority on what the words mean. But bitcoin Maximus to me is somebody who understands the principles of bitcoin, why bitcoin is valuable and as a consequence probably has a lot of bitcoin or at least whatever they can have. I don't think that person has to have bitcoin to be a bitcoiner. And really bitcoin maximalist is just a term that, you know, thrown around by metallic buterin originally as a, as an insult to defend, to defend Ethereum and like how people were kind of railing against it as a scammy and really they were really against not the idea of Ethereum. The principles of it. Pre mines suck. Unlimited supply sucks. How centralized it's going to be sucks. The gas system sucks, the account system sucks. Like these basic principles that kind of stray from what people would consider to be good principles or hard, hard money principles are the things that make Ethereum and other things so unattractive and so different and so much less valuable. When you understand the value that bitcoin has in those ways, that's what makes you a bitcoiner which has kind of warped or been called now by people a bitcoin maximalist.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah, there's, there's a big gap between what people think of as bitcoin maximalism and just being a bitcoiner. And I don't think, I don't, I think really truly understanding what makes bitcoin matter tends to create a bitcoin quote, unquote maximalist. But it's funny like, like one of the things that I think Udi made this argument I can't remember exactly and I don't want to straw man him, but I'll just in a general sense because I think this is kind of common from that side of the line in argumentation. Is that like in regarding to like the pre mines or the inflation or whatever, I essentially hear a lot that nobody gives a about that. Like it doesn't matter, nobody cares. I'm just like, I care.
I care a lot, you know, Like I don't, like I don't give a shit if nobody else cares. I still fucking care. That matters the fact that 70% of the coins were printed for free and handed out to their buddies and that now they are, they're literally billionaires because they can shield this to people. Like they have every incentive to be dishonest. They have every incentive to just fill their bags. The fairness of the money matters. It absolutely matters. You know, before, when like during the whole like cypherpunks period. It's funny that like, like there were all the always these cranks and morons who would jump in and you know, like just kind of as a regular thing. And there's this long post by one of the cypherpunks, I can't remember who it was who talked about this saying that like, you know, they would want to roll their own crypto and they would say that like, oh, we came up with our own, our own new cryptography scheme and we're the ones who have the answers. And this one's better and faster and more secure. And every single time, all the serious cryptographers, every single time they knew this was bullshit. Like it's just going to be a matter of time and it might take a year, you know, it doesn't matter how long it took. Like some massive fundamental flaw was found in the system and it was just kind of the rules. Like you just don't roll your own, you know, you just don't like these people coming in and claiming that they're the ones with the secret sauce that's gonna say that's gonna fix all the problems and there will be no tradeoffs. They're full of shit. They just are. And you know it. The moment they come in and they Say it. And they're not, they're not even looking for critical, they're just hyping up their thing and that like it was, it was known, it was part of the culture of the cypherpunk movement that we just knew these people weren't serious people. And the same applied to altcoins originally. The idea, the quickest way to have your altcoin absolutely dismissed, to have it smashed apart in the social sphere on Reddit or on bitcoin talk forums for like the fact that this is a scam, that you are full of shit, that you were just here to pump your own bags and print tokens, was a pre mine, was a pre mine. You would get blasted into the ends of the earth for doing that. It was so obviously a scam. The very, the very idea that you mined three blocks before you told anybody about this was an absolute, was a, was 100% proof that you're just here to scam people, that you're just trying to get tokens for free. And the whole idea of starting a new one, you know, like it was a, it was a uphill battle and then it just became normalized and it's because more new people who were ignorant came in and heard the explanation or heard the, the argument of the person shilling their ICO or pre mining 70% of their tokens before they actually were exposed or heard anything about the culture of bitcoiners, of the cypherpunks who were actually at the base of this, who knew the fairness of the money mattered. And I mean that's the whole problem. Well, and the whole problem we're trying to solve is fair money. And you can't have a 70% pre mine.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: The big, the just as big it already just as big of a problem is the fact that you can't stop it. Because that was to me anyway, when I was coming up as a little hacker kid in my little world and we started using headless, what we used to call then headless software, which meant it didn't have a central server.
And the biggest problem for us at that time was like, how do you make software that remains headless but can still operate like in more sophisticated ways and last for a long time? That was always the challenge. And that I think is, you know, Bitcoin did solve fairness by being, by having those rules. But those rules wouldn't have mattered if it couldn't run forever without being stopped or if it could have been controlled by somebody because you could make an ethereum with fairer Rules. But if it still has the same distribution and the way that they do their ICO and they start with all the coins themselves and you put it on proof of stake, like those rules are irrelevant when they can just change them every day.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of in the nature of fair, or at least, at least in my, in my, in my book, fair means it can't be controlled. As soon as it can be controlled, it's not fair. Okay.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: So encompassed in that term. I get it.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
I guess you have to define what the hell fair means because I was.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Thinking just the rules themselves, which of course.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you can have all the. You can have the fairest rules you could possibly think of on Ethereum, but if you've got a 99% pre mine, it all means jack shit.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Or if you can change it tomorrow. Like they just recently changed last year their emission rate, you know, and now they're going to change the entire consensus. They're firing their entire. The thing that's supposed to enforce the rules. You're fired.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Putting a new one in it, man. The proof of stake thing. The proof of stake thing is such. It is astonishing the number of people who buy that pile of garbage. Like, the fucking purpose, the whole purpose of all of this is to create a money that nobody can make for free.
And proof of stake is the act of creating the money for free by the virtue of being rich.
And when you. That's stupid. Like, it just is.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: When you talk to a lot of new people about Bitcoin and they don't understand yet what a digital currency means or what that is, Their, their first instinct is to think that, well, what I want, why would I want some digital money? They could, like, whoever made it could just keep making more and selling it to me or other people, and that's just going to be worthless. Or they could just change the rules or do whatever. Like that's what you would initially intuitively think about if you didn't know anything about how Bitcoin worked or any of these things work. And you just were told like, hey, you want to use this money on the Internet? Like, if you have any sense about you, you're gonna be like, no, because that would be stupid. Like, I can't trust that. Like, you know, it's somebody's scam out there making a scam. And the funny part is that like, once you kind of explain to them what Bitcoin is and how it works and how you can. How you don't have to trust it because you can verify everything about it and how those rules, you know, nobody can make coins out of thin air for themselves. Doesn't even matter who the creator is. Once you kind of build that foundation, they say, oh, that's awesome. But then they look and say, cool. And there's a bunch of other ones too. But it's like, wait a minute.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Copy and paste.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Wait a minute. Those things that you thought originally about why it would be stupid to have a digital currency, those things actually are all true about those things. Like, yeah, those other things were created by a guy who can change the rules, make more for himself and do those things, which intuitively are the reason why you'd never want to buy a digital currency.
It's just not true about Bitcoin. And that's why when you understand what bitcoin is, when you have the, the actual understanding of the value of why bitcoin is valuable, that's what makes you a bitcoiner. And that's why as a bitcoiner, you would never buy some stupid thing with some guy that can just make more coins or change the rules because you already know that's worthless. You already have that understanding. It's not that this is a big misunderstanding that people have about the people who get called bitcoin maximals. Oh, you're so close minded because you'll only look at bitcoin and you won't look at anything else. And like you just think one coin is going to be everything for everybody. Like, that's so stupid. How could you think that? It's like, no, it's not about one coin or two coin or three coin. It's about here is this asset that is amazing and valuable for very real reasons. And here's this circus over here of like things that aren't even remotely close to the principles that make this thing exciting or valuable. Why? It's not, it's not close mindedness, it's just wisdom. It's like, you know, and this is one of the dangerous things that I think some of the influencers like Moody and Eric are starting to try to like unravel. Because for a lot of people, unfortunately, I hate to even say like this, but like, a lot of people aren't going to do the research for themselves. They're going to listen to whoever they think is the smartest guy on Twitter and that's what's going to inform their views. And so if they hear a couple of guys saying, oh, those Maximus people, yeah, they don't actually, like, nobody listens to them anymore. They don't exist. Like, the only ones left are, like, flat Earthers and people that don't believe the moon is real. And listen, guys, you're doing great. Buy all the coins you like. You guys are right. Just have fun. It's about having fun, guys. Like, be cool. Like, it's just this massive, like, gaslighting that's happening. And, And. And it's going to work on a lot of people because they don't do that research for themselves. If they did, it'd probably be a bitcoiner.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
You know, I.
It's funny, like, from the context of my view of bitcoin maximalism. Oh, and I think I mentioned this before the show. I don't think I've said it since we started recording, but I think Stephen Lubka, or Lubka, I'm not sure how to say his name, but had a great little tweet, because this is the thing that just drives me crazy and I feel like, is what we're constantly doing. It says, I found the tweet, though. It says bitcoiners have been tricked into defending a caricature of themselves. The bitcoin maxi, as described by critics barely exists outside of 0.1% of Twitter accounts. However, this deception causes people to be afraid to diverge from the caricature in public for fear of ostracism. In other words, a trick has been played on us by those who would not want us to want to see us succeed. We should dismantle it. Dismantle the strawman character. Not bitcoin maximalism or bitcoin only.
And that's what. That's so true. Every conversation I have, and this is the thing that just drives me up a wall, is I'm constantly told that because I'm a bitcoin maximalist, I believe A through D, and I don't believe any of that shit. And I'm told I have to defend it. Like, I'm told that, like, I. Because this is bitcoin maximalism.
What the. What the. Like, exactly. Like, they're. They're going to tell me what bitcoin maximalism is. And it's only ever negative things. It's only a list of stupid or somebody being an example of somebody being mean on Twitter or defending something that's shady or weird or, you know, in a gray area or something like that. And then that. That. That to them is just bitcoin maximalism, and there's no other discussion around it. Everybody who. All the bitcoin maximal. So like the example I brought up before is the stock to flow is. I went through this like kind of thing about the stock to flow model because any, anything that anybody who creates a model that says bitcoin's going to go up a lot.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: It's.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: You got to admit it's interesting. There's a reason Plan B, which is still vastly. The vast majority of his followers are retail people who are just like, ooh, I'm here to speculate. Which is what all of crypto is in my mind. But like it's what, 1 million, 2 million followers? I don't even know anymore.
Plan B. What is, what is he at 1.8 million followers.
But I read an article, his original article about stock to flow, defending the model. And then I read an article from somebody, it might have been Nick Carter, I don't know who it was, but somebody arguing against the stock to flow model.
And I thought both of them had decent points. I tended to kind of fall in the. I don't know. It's an interesting model and there's some, there's some interesting logic. And I like the idea of number go up. But then Corey kind of made himself made Corey Clipson from, from Swan.
Kind of had a little campaign against the stock to flow model and he was the one that made me go, oh yeah, no, that's a good argument. That's a much. That, that's a much cleaner and more logical way to think about it. And he is right. And, and plan B is just wrong. Like the idea of promoting this is ridiculous. Like that is shitcoining. You know, like that's.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: And I'm a traitor.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: Like I'm, I'm told. Now I'm told to this day I'm told that stock to flow is bitcoin equals bitcoin maximalism. But yet plan B I don't think of is nearly the bitcoin maximalist that Corey Clifton is. And Corey is the reason I solidly came down against bitcoin. Mac. I mean the stock to flow ratio. Like I just, I just decided that. No. Yeah, it's just kind of.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: I've noticed a trend there too with, especially with traders. There's a lot of. And this used to be big also in like 2017 and earlier with like, if anybody. If your interview listeners are familiar with like the. This is the Whale, the Whale Room. It was like a big trading room where anybody's names, but certain people there have been known for many years as OGs. But they're. And they're Known as bitcoiners because so many of those early communities. I'm not saying majority or anything like that, but maybe by number of people because it was. Everybody loves trading and gambling.
They were known as like these big OG bitcoin. But these guys were just, they were just good traders. They were just known traders who were the most popular guys in the trading world. And they kind of like co op some of the bitcoiner culture stuff because they do consider themselves bitcoin because they're predominantly trading bitcoin a lot of times.
And there's still. That still happens now with a lot of these trading accounts. Some of the guys that are on Twitter spaces a lot that have bigger followings than. Than you, for example, where you're putting out probably the best content in bitcoin, period.
Thank you.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Thank you. I think so as well.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Some guy that like, hey, I'll tell you when you should buy bitcoin because it's going to make you rich. You know, that guy will get three times more followers than you because, oh, I want to get rich. Like, yeah, tell me when to buy, tell me when to buy.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: And those are cheap. Those are cheap, shitty followers. I hate those followers. I don't want any of those followers, man. Those are the followers that like, when the bull market comes, you make 10 times as much money. And then when the. Or you get 10 times the following or the exposure in YouTube and whatever. But then when the bear market comes, you take a 90% discount on what you make. Like, because everybody just, everybody leaves. Nobody cares. Like, it was funny. I was talking to somebody asked me in one of the groups the other day and it was because I've been talking to Cold Card about like, you know, the show and stuff and like how things have been going through the quote unquote bear market.
And so I had like looked into like just trying to do like an analysis of the numbers and like I have had no change. And like tons of shows have seen, you know, the huge rise in listeners during the bull market and then this huge dip during the bear market. Like it follows the price. Now I do have growth usually during bull markets, but it just kind of flattens out and people seem to stick with the show. Which I like to think of is like, I've got followers who are the kind of followers that I hope to, I hope to have. You know, the people who listen to the show are people who actually give a shit about bit and learn something.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: I'll say the. And this is, I don't mean to show you maybe. Maybe a little bit. But like your telegram group that you have to subscribe to your Patreon to get into is my favorite bitcoin chat because it's full of. Because it's full of audio knots. It's full of Guy Swan's listeners. And those are not traders generally, those are bitcoiners. And generally people. Generally there are traders everywhere. But like, but in general, this is a very high ratio of, of bitcoin. Real bitcoiners that don't, you know, don't give two shits about the chart.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: Man, I can't wait to get rid of Patreon, though. I hate that that's still kind of like the, the doorway into it. Because I want something. God, I want something lightning powered. I wish there was an easy way to just be like, if you vote on one of my reads, like, you know, on the website or something, that it was just simple Patreon. I just have an automated thing. If they become a patron, they get a message with the link and so they could jump in and hang out. But God, God, I hate. I really wish we could get away from Patreon. I want a lightning solution to this so bad.
Whatever. The guys I'm gonna be talking with, the guys who are doing Keat actually this week, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give them. They're gonna have to like, be like, you gotta. You got to put in a. Subscribe to this thing for like a thousand sats a month or something. Like, if you're integrating lightning. I don't know. I don't know.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: I want to roll back a little bit to the, to bitcoin maximum's point and to do also with your, with your, with your content too. Our meetups. Our meetups that we go to. And you go to them as well. Or here. Well, I don't care if I say your city or not, but our city here has, I think, one of the best bitcoin meetups in the country where I think the oldest one. Somebody's gonna have to come out and prove us wrong. But I think we're the oldest weekly meetup in the nation because we have been meeting every week. There's old ones and we're from, I don't know, 2013 maybe.
I'd have to ask Steve for the exact. But every single week. And there are ones that might be older that met up, you know, older than we did, but they don't.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: But did they stay around? They still have die hard bitcoiners in that group.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: It May be like a monthly thing, like every month. Some of them might come together. Oh, we come together every week and now and in 2018, you know, when the bear market came, there'd be times when it would be me and a couple others sitting in a hotel lobby and just chill for two hours. And like, you know, it got kind of small. But like this time, this bear market, not even remote.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: Like we are funny, I didn't even thought about it, but the group is bigger. We had to like move over to the other room because it's like too big.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Yes, like it's huge. And like nobody there is like, is it going to moon tomorrow? Oh man, moon time. Like what's the price? Like it's just a bunch of people. A lot of them knew, a lot of them come figured out bitcoin in the last year or so and they know shitcoins exist and they don't care because they understand now they're bitcoiners. Those are bitcoiners. They don't care about stuff that you can make out of thin air. They don't care about stuff with pre mines because that's inherently not valuable. Like do you want pine cones or you want gold? You know, it's, it's. Once you understand what makes an asset valuable, you never choose the pine cone ever. It's not your closed minded just because, you know, like.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: And the what's funny too is that, well, this is not funny. It's just one of the fundamental reasons why I'm a bitcoin maximalist. I'm bitcoin only really.
It's more about conviction and about why bitcoin exists. But there is also just a fundamental economic principle of monetary convergence.
Networks without boundaries, without borders tend toward one, they just do.
And monetary networks tend toward one to an even stronger degree. Now if you want to argue that your network or your token or whatever is equity or it's like some share in some smart contract thing that's a little bit different. But I don't buy it. I don't think that open source code is going to be attached to a token. Like if like a good example is like USDT tether is. Or is that tusd? I don't know, whatever. Tether USDT has jumped from blockchain to blockchain. Like what was it? Omni or mastercoin back in the day? Mastercoin which was Omni, which became Omni later it started on Master Coin and everybody shield Master coin as the ultimate thing because it was designed in such a way like it could handle all the traffic and it could do all the smart contracts so that T. US or USDT so that tether could run on it. And they had billions of dollars worth of tether being moved and quote, unquote settled and they bragged about their numbers. They did all the same that Ethereum does today, arguing that they were going to be the ones because they had all of this money that settled on the network. And what happens.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I want to talk about these metrics. This is important because this is one.
[00:27:17] Speaker A: Of the biggest jump ships and they're gone. The whole, the whole thing is just dead in.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: In the shitcoin world. One of the things that they do every time, and I don't know, especially guys like, like Udi and I gotta say, as a disclaimer that I've known for a long time, he's worked on bitcoin things with.
We've worked on bitcoin things together. Like, he's done a lot of bitcoin education and he even had an anti Ethereum blog called Pro Ethereum to make fun of the pro bitcoin blog that had come out. And he was the one that popularized the saying have fun staying poor. That was his Twitter banner. He started have fun staying poor. That was his Twitter banner and his icon was a penguin with a gold chain bitcoin necklace. Like, he was like the silly bitcoin maximalist that was like popularized actually being so toxic and telling people to have fun staying poor. And then now he's the guy who's like all these bitcoin maximalists, you talk to them, they just want to tell you to be poor. They're going to tell you to be poor. Like, you fucking started that, dude. Like, you created this popular. Let's call everybody poor Me literally a professional troll. He is, he is.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: He literally is just there. Ooh, just knock everything. He's literally just there to start shit.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: But in the, so in the shitcoin world, though, and he did get sucked in, I only can speculate about this because I don't know like, exactly how it went down between him and other people. But from what I've. From where I sit, seems like he was pulled in by some of the smarter, more successful guys like Kobe, who legitimately make millions of dollars on their leveraging their, their status and the very potentially lucrative place. Especially if you have that kind of influence. Of course you're ripping that out of retail's ass. But nonetheless, these guys make a lot of money and they're very sharp and so I think uni was drawn in by some of these people, kind of like groomed very personally. And one of the big things in the shitcoin world that appeals to intellectuals are. Is all of the data. There's a lot of problems with this data, though. Data like how many transactions are being used on this protocol? How many new wallets were created on this protocol? What was the volume? Like you were saying? Well, it's the volume of. Of money that was transacted today on this protocol. And they look at these metrics and they are able to be convinced that, well, this is proof. We're just being objective. If you look at this thing, you can see that, like, 10 times more was transacted here than there. Therefore, this one is the winner or better, whatever. What they're not seeing, it's like they're. This is why I don't think that UDI lies, but I call him very disingenuous. Very disingenuous. Because you have to know that under these numbers there are these huge, obvious trends that, like, we can identify and you'll even agree with me on. But for the sake of the numbers, you just want to talk about the numbers.
Like if the compound token, which we talked about in our very first Shitcoin Insider episode, compound token, exploded because it was being given to you for free if you borrowed money.
And the reason why that was able to be driven, as we talked about the first episode, is because people buying more, trying to take out more loans, created more demand for the lender, which then, you know, just created this huge cycle of money pumping everybody until it was. Until there were more sellers than buyers, in which case, then of course, it collapsed and now it's basically dead and nobody would even think to try that again. But at the time, you could have showed a lot of metrics showing how compound is the most successful token ever and how, like, the growth is amazing. And like, look at all the people lending and borrowing. Look at the billions of dollars lending and borrowing. This is real, guys, look. Billions of dollars of lending and borrowers. But if you just know anything about that market and say, yeah, it's because they just launched a token and they give it to you for free when you lend them. Borrow.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what. That's the big thing, you know, and that's what Alan Farrington talks about. Yield, quote, unquote. Yield. Is that yield in the stock market. Like, the idea of yield means. It literally means productive value out of a. Out of an asset or a. A machine, a capital enterprise that Produces more than it consumes. That is yield. That is real yield. Whereas everything that you're seeing in the shitcoin ecosystem, like the fact that you're pointing at somebody staking $20 billion worth of value to get quote unquote 10% yield per month, what is that yield? The yield is just someone else printing a different token and you're getting the printed tokens. That's not yield. That's not yield. That's in your ridge. That's the Cantillon effect. What you're doing is you are, you are literally trying to be the first in the Ponzi. You're that. That is. There is an expiration date on that. There is zero way that inflation of a token supply can sustainable, sustainably produce a market that is. That is Fiat 101. That is exactly the. The concept of creating a fiat economy, of creating a debt based economy is that we can print ourselves into prosperity. It's a tax, it's a drain, it's a cancer. That is all it is. Inflation is a. Is is cooking the books. It's fake yield 100% top to bottom. If your project only survives because of token printing, then it's not a real project, it's not sustainable, it has an expiration date. Because as soon as the token is falling in price, if that's the only reason people are staking that $20 billion worth of capital into your system, if the, if the token price is falling faster than the quote unquote yield, they leave. They just leave. And what, what happens to your project? This is why I think the like, all the idea of like filecoin and storage coin and made safe and like all this of like making a unique token to the idea of having hard drive space is dumb. It's economically a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Yes you can. I can see why it's appealing because you have this architecture already in place to, to appear to subsidize this behavior while already having a way to create a peer to peer network out the gate. You can copy and paste that and it looks like you did something and you can just twist it around and be like now it's just storage space instead of proof of work or whatever. It's super appealing. It's appealing enough that I looked into Namecoin for years. When it first came out. I was really interested about how did Satoshi. That's exactly right for, for the very beginning, at the very beginning. It seems super interesting and it's an incredibly compelling argument, but I think it's wrong because at the end of the day, if the only reason people are running the hardware is to get this new token and there's no sustainable market between the payer and the payee, the host and the user, and you're just hoping that they don't care about the inflation, but that the only reason they have the token is because they think the price is going to go up, it's just going to expire. Is just going to expire. And what's happened, what's happened to all those projects? They've stagnated storage.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: There used to be a big trend around what was called masternodes and essentially it's proof of stake. It's essentially what. Actually I didn't think of this, but it's basically Ethereum 2.0. The whole masternode trend, it was a massive Trend before even 2017 bubble. I mean, it came back up and research after 2017 like most of the old trends did, because they all became even bigger versions of the old versions. But even NFTs were a redo in 2017. They'd already happened in 2014 on Bitcoin.
But the masternode trend was where you had to have a master node in order to generate the tokens.
And there was always a limit. Like you'd have to get at least 10,000 of these tokens. And if you had, if you bought 10,000, then on your software you would be the one, one of the ones, your 10,000 would make X tokens per day. And as long as you know you had enough to produce those X tokens per day, you could make them. And then people would sell them to more people who wanted to get to 10,000 because they wanted to have a master node because they wanted to be able to sell the inflation. And there was a. I don't know if the site still exists, was like masternodes online or something where it would list all of the most profitable. Like, well, if you use this master node, it's like 2000% APY and this one is 1500% APY. And I even had a guy tell me once that he wouldn't like invest in any shit coin if it didn't promise him at least like a thousand apy. Like that was his. Like, then it's worth it to me. Other than that it's not worth it to me. And I tell him, like, how long you been doing this? He's like, like two weeks. Like I can tell, dude, because none of that shit, you're not going to get an apy. You're going to, like, you might be looking to get apd, like. Like this shit is not gonna survive. Like, if it's 3,000 APY, you maybe have three or four days, like before this thing just dies completely.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: You've got days or weeks tops, tops, before that thing implodes.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Because it's just inflation. It's just conflation coming out of nothing. And I never thought about that. But that's, you know, it was a very successful model though, because essentially it's just pure Ponzi. It's like a Ponzi where you can see everything, which is nicer than the old school Ponzi, where you couldn't see everything and you're just trusting one guy. At least you get to be a little part of a masternode or whatever. But that's not a sustainable model. And that's exactly what Ethereum 2.0 is when you think about it. It's masternodes. You get 32 ETH and you get to have some of the ETH, the new ETH. It's the same shit. We already seen these collapse. They don't. Like there's no value being created there.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And what's funny, there's like, this is such a great example of everything that happened, like the appearance. It's amazing how much you can make the numbers look like something real is happening and it's all based on fluff. And this is that I saved this like a week ago or so and thought this was just interesting. This is so indicative of so much of what I find in quote unquote crypto. So Helium. This is, by the way, this is a tweet.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: I know about Helium.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: Tweet thread. You know. You know this?
[00:37:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know the tweet thread, but I know about Helium.
[00:37:59] Speaker A: Okay. There's a tweet thread by Lyron Shapira or Liren Shapira, not sure how to say.
You know him?
[00:38:08] Speaker B: No. Of his Twitter.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: Okay. Says Helium, often cited as one of the best examples of a Web3 use case, has received $365 million of investment led by A16Z. Regular folks have also been convinced to spend $250 million buying hotspot nodes in hopes of earning passive income. The result, helium's total revenue, $6,500 per month. Just for reference that I make more than that. Members of the R. Helium subreddit have been dedicated, have been increasingly vocal about seeing poor Helium returns. On average, they spent four to eight hundred dollars to buy a hotspot for to eight hundred dollars. They were expecting a hundred dollars a month, enough to recoup their costs and enjoy passive income. Then their earnings dropped to about $20 per month. $20 a month. These folks maintain false hope of positive positive roi. They still don't steal, still don't realize their share of data usage revenue isn't actually $20 a month. It's one penny a month. The other 19.99 is a temporary subsidy from investment in growing the network and speculation on the value of the HNT token. Meanwhile, according to Helium Network Network rules, $300 million 30 million HNT per year gets siphoned off by Nova Labs, the corporation behind Helium. This revenue on the books, which comes mainly from retail speculators, is presumably what justified such an aggressive investment by a 16 z.
C. Dixon's mental model thread on Helium claims that this kind of network can't be built in Web2 because it requires token incentives. But the facts indicate Web2 won't incentivize helium because demand is low. Even with a network of 500,000 hotspots, revenue is non existent. The complete lack of end user demand for Helium should not have come as a surprise because low rob wan market analysis, low ban. I'm not even sure what that stands for. Market analysis would have revealed that this was a speculative bubble around a fake overblown use case. The ongoing Axie Infinity debacle is a similar case of a 16 sees these documented thought process being shockingly disconnected from reality, wherein skeptics get vindicated within a matter of months at the expense of unsophisticated end users turned investors. More generally, I posit the two keys to understanding web three 1. Beware of easy money schemes. 2. Beware of hollow abstractions. When proponents like C. Dixon promise riches to come via abstract quote mental models, we can gently guide them to focus on money flows and use cases. I've posed the question to a 16Z partner involved with Axie Infinity how does money flow into the system? He blocked me. The tech community deserves better. Let's continue to press for answers to simple questions about Web3's money flows and use cases this is so prevalent. Like this. Like again, 19.99 of that cut down revenue is all subsidy, one penny of real value behind that.
[00:41:50] Speaker B: There's so many things about Helium in particular, I mean talking to an insider. So like there was there's supposed to be. The whole idea is that the nodes are decentralized, supposed to be, you know, embrace whatever the hell web3culture is. But we know what web3culture is because when people decided to use the open source software, it's important for the open source, of course, that should be part of the culture. People decided to use the open source culture just, or software to just make Raspberry PIs to do the nodes themselves without having to buy them from Helium. They changed it to where they had. You had to have something that was signed by them in order to be considered a real node so that unless you purchased a license from them, I didn't even know. Unless you purchased a license from them to make a node. Like so they'll let you build your own, but now you got to pay them like 50 or 100 bucks, whatever it is, for that license so that it's a quote unquote real node. Like it was, it was horrible.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: Like, and Ethereum's about to introduce check checkpoints because that's the only way you can do. That's the only way you can do. Proof of stake is centralized checkpoints. And the worst, failing to realize that that means that you've lost everything about everything that matters.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: Like, hey, ask me.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: Saving Ethereum I think is proof of work. I think that's it.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: When somebody says checkpoint, what they're saying is just ask me what the next block is and I'll let you know. Like we're what, you know which ones. It's just, you want to know what the history of chain is? Just just ask me and I'll tell you. And if I say something different, that's what it is. Everybody like, it's so funny.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: God, the arguments, the gaslighting around this.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: Maybe bitcoin has checkpoints too.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: Dude, maybe it's, maybe it's not gaslighting. Maybe it's literally that they just don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about. Because the checkpoints, the quote unquote checkpoints in Bitcoin that are like what, 100,000 blocks every hundred thousand blocks, something like that. Like a year's worth of blocks. I don't even know.
The only reason those checkpoints exist is to make it so that you can easily download the entire blockchain not in order. That's the only reason those checkpoints are not validators. It is not, it is not over override your validation with these checkpoints. The checkpoints are just built into the core client so that you can Easily download block 500,000 without having to worry about whether or not you're building on the correct block 97,000.
If your, if your fucking client found out that there was a cheat. There was something wrong. Somebody made two bitcoin that didn't exist in block 100,000 with that checkpoint signature on it, it would reject it. It has nothing to do with validation. It is just a simple mechanism to. To rely on the slightest amount of trust so that you don't waste a day downloading blocks that aren't real. That is all it fucking does. Your checkpoints in Ethereum are validating. They are 100%. Someone is telling you what the truth is, regardless of what is in it, because you're not checking it.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: And at the end of the day.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: With the so infuriating.
[00:45:02] Speaker B: But it wouldn't even. Honestly, it wouldn't even matter if it didn't have it with a wake. Because the way Ethereum runs, just like the mining, you know, they say, well, we have the most distributed proof of work. All These kids with GPUs, everybody's buying Ethereum. It's far more distributed than any other proof of work network. It's irrelevant because it comes down again to the difference between the metric and the pragmatic reality of the situation. The metrics do not inherently tell you something is good or bad. The reality of the situation does. So if there are millions of people running GPUs all the way around the world, you think that's a great thing, fine.
[00:45:40] Speaker A: But.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: But. And if the nodes were completely decentralized and just waiting for one of the GPUs to tell them what the next block was, that would be true. But it's not the case. Because with Ethereum the nodes are completely controlled predominantly by Infera, and that is the Ethereum Foundation's pet. It's all part of the Ethereum infrastructure. So as we see with Theorem 2.0, the nodes which are very centralized are going to say hey guys, that mining, that's not what's important to us anymore. Now we look at this proof of stake over here and it's going to work because it's so centralized.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: If, if it were truly has to further centralize any. Every time something goes wrong, it has to further centralize. That's the only.
[00:46:22] Speaker B: If it were truly decentralized with all these GPUs and all these kids computers, they would never be able to do Ethereum 2.0 because obviously the. No, every GPU owner would have to say fuck you, I like to make money on this and I'm not gonna stop like. But they don't matter. They don't matter at all. They're all fired. Because the three guys that are in charge of the nodes. Say so actually, the Vitalik guy says.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: And I love, I love also the, the idea that because the, the light clients, they're not actually. They don't refer to them as light clients. I can't remember.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: They changed the names to make it.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: I know.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Because of arguments with Bitcoin maximalist. They do this on purpose because of arguments with Bitcoin maximalists. People used to complain about, oh, well, you can't run an Ethereum full node. Like, you can run a Bitcoin full node. It only takes.
[00:47:12] Speaker A: And they literally just started calling their not full node a full node, right?
[00:47:16] Speaker B: It's like, oh yeah, you can run a full node on a PI C.
[00:47:19] Speaker A: I'm dead, I'm dead.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: And then you say, but that doesn't verify the whole history. Oh, that's called an archival node. Like, yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: And what's funny too is that they'll, they'll argue that you can, you can do this insane amount of computation or whatever to rebuild like essentially everything that's in the node, but that they don't do it. And it's like saying that, like you could audit the whole thing. I just, it's just so much resource. This takes so many resources that I'm not going to do it. It's like, so you didn't check, so you're not verifying everything. The fact that you could go back and verify is totally irrelevant. If you haven't done it, there could be a hundred thousand blocks deep. Somebody just cheated. And because you're not verifying anything, you would know and you're just building on top of it. And you just bought new Ethereum and you don't even know. It's not even real Ethereum. It's not the same Ethereum that existed a hundred thousand blocks ago.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you actually can't. I mean, like.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: I don't know, I have never.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: What I mean is like, theoretically could. Even if you theoretically could, it's. If it's so resource intensive that like, nobody does, then I don't even.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: It doesn't matter. Yeah, like you can't.
[00:48:38] Speaker B: I would just say you cannot. Like you can't.
[00:48:40] Speaker A: If people aren't doing it, then it hasn't been done. That's the simple fact of the matter. It doesn't matter if, like they have the.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: Theoretically you could spend unlimited resources, but like, we don't have, like it will. Theoretically you could.
[00:48:51] Speaker A: Like just theoretically I could run a BSV node.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: I could find every bitcoin block on the, you know, in one second. And like, that's what I want to make, a new business that relies on that assertion. But actually we're not going to actually find the block. We're just going to pretend I could and we're just going to like assume that and let me have all the rewards in my new chain.
[00:49:11] Speaker A: And you know, like, like it's funny too because like I see, you know, there's this, there's this element or at least in I guess in my life, like as a, as a sort of life principle is that I think that if I don't struggle with whether or not I'm right or wrong in my position, if I don't kind of like argue or fight with myself over it, I feel like inherently I'm wrong like that almost universally. And I do struggle. I do constantly test my hypothesis on how I feel about crypto and shitcoins. And I constantly read, I do read it. I don't read them on the show because there's a ton of it and so much of it is noise. But I do read, like, I read Nick Carter's lambasting of bitcoin maximalists and like, how he was treated. I read Breed Loves. I read a bunch of crypto people stuff. I read Dixon stuff. I've read Sassel, whatever the frick his name is, Alex. Like, like I read it all.
I, I try to, I try to entertain the idea and wonder if I'm wrong because honest to God, I have one mission, I have one mission here is to separate money and state. And if the only way to do, if the way that actually succeeds is with 10,000 shit coins, I don't really care. I don't, I don't have some. Everybody tells me I'm a religious cultist lunatic and I'm not. I just, I don't see that at all. I don't, I constantly entertain the idea. And if, if, if your 20,000 shitcoin method really works, I will come to the fucking party and you can, you can lambast me about how I was just self righteous and I was indignant and I was stubborn and I was refusing to entertain this idea. I don't give a shit about how you think of me in regards to solving that problem. The problem I want solved is the separation of money and state. But fucking infura servers aren't going to do that, right? They're not going to do that. They're useless in the entire task. They are a distraction and I am not going to dilute myself. Because you think it's going to make more money. That's not why I'm here. You can tell me every day that the reason I'm here is for number go up and I will say you were full of shit because it's not fucking true. If I could make 10 times as much money on Ethereum, but everything relies on Infura. I'm still not going to give it a cent. Not a bit. Because bitcoin actually does something to me. Bitcoiners are the only ones that I see when Elon Musk dumps Doge. Doge. Dogecoiners come running in begging for him to still believe in their project, that there's still a future here and you should keep buying. What do bitcoiners do? They say, fuck off with your weak hands. Sell the rest of it. How? Why did you only sell 75%? Please sell the last 25% so I can get some. Bitcoiners don't run from red candles. That's crypto. Don't project on us like Jesus Christ.
[00:52:24] Speaker B: That's one of the biggest things that, that those influencers now, the biggest ones being Goody and Eric at the moment that I see, the ones that are speaking against Maxim and the idea of maximalism, they look at the entire thing through a corner frame. From the focus on metrics which everyone should know are incredibly inflated and not really meaningful to. As to what's going to be successful in the future to. Down to the, to those ideas that you just mentioned of.
It's. It's all like bitcoiners don't even think that way. And then they're saying, I guess maybe.
[00:52:59] Speaker A: It justifies bitcoin maximalist to them are the people who were mean to them on Twitter.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: Right?
[00:53:04] Speaker A: Like that. That's. That. That. That's what I see. And with all real maximalism, I love, I still love and you know, all the bitcoin maximalists, the, the jackasses who literally are just dickheads on Twitter can give me shit all fucking day and they can try to cancel me. I don't care. I love Nick Carter's articles. He's still got great arguments. Udi even has a half a point with the idea that there's like Metamask is a really easy to use software and that it's super popular and there's a ton of people that use it. But I think he's fundamentally misunderstood the problem. If you think that easy software is going to be what gets us through, what's going to be the ultimate victor here and that the fundamental infrastructure is not important then I think you, you have this idea that the future is going to be a lot softer than I think it's going to be. I think the state is going to come in and tell us how we're supposed to run this thing. And if your shit doesn't stand up, it doesn't survive the test. Who gives a fuck what your front end software looks like? Because the back end infrastructure is not going to survive and your front end is just going to switch over to bitcoin. We haven't had that test yet. We're going to have a block size war in the international political space. The equivalent of we're going to have a battle. You forgot who the final boss is here.
It's not getting shit. Tons of retail users who have no idea what the fuck is going on who are going to dump $100,000 of token X to buy token Y because one of them has more green candles. That is not. That's not how you solve this. You need a base. You need people who are Bitcoin only and who actually give a shit why we're here. And the ultimate cause to create unstoppable infrastructure in the face of the biggest adversaries in the world who have no problem being violent and attacking you outright and openly for. For challenging them.
Is Ethereum going to survive that? No. In my opinion, absolutely.
[00:55:07] Speaker B: If it survives, it survives as a tool of the state.
[00:55:10] Speaker A: If it survives. If it survives, it survives. Because bitcoin was its frontline defense.
[00:55:15] Speaker B: Well no, because I think most point or the only way it survives is when I say it survives as a tool of the state then it just becomes another part of the AML kyc.
[00:55:24] Speaker A: Sure that that control of your money.
[00:55:27] Speaker B: Like if it survives it's useful to somebody. It's the same people that like same way Fiat. It's just another fiat.
[00:55:33] Speaker A: And as soon as the conversation becomes about ux it's just like you've lost the plot. You've lost.
They. They have an argument. They have an argument. If you stop. If you don't go any deeper than that. If you don't talk about monetary assurances, if you don't talk about economic consolidation like, like network effects. If you don't talk about.
Well they think, they think it's network effects because the easier to use will be is more likely to be quickly adopted. But centralized is always not easier than decentralized. Always.
[00:56:05] Speaker B: It's not a. It's not a bitcoin or ethereum thing with UX, it's a software thing. Which one gets 100 million dollar grant to a, to a wallet manufacturer.
[00:56:14] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:56:15] Speaker B: Fancy wallet. Like if you spend $100 million on Bitcoin wallet investment, you'll get a fancy bitcoin wallet too.
[00:56:22] Speaker A: And ultimately at the end of this.
[00:56:24] Speaker B: Can't do.
[00:56:24] Speaker A: Yeah. And ultimately at the end of this there is a, there's an ethical argument that, that again, like I said, UDI and I think some others have explicitly said that, oh, that doesn't matter because retail doesn't care. It's like, I don't fucking care. I don't care what they think.
[00:56:40] Speaker B: I wonder how much metamask is raised.
It's got to be a lot.
[00:56:44] Speaker A: I have no idea. But I still like one of my favorite BTC sessions, still has one of my favorite articles because I think it's the cleanest as far as like the points and the arguments. There's a lot of great articles about bitcoin maximalism and I'll say that there's not to. On any other authors who have done this because I've done probably, I don't know, 10 articles who have like explicitly talked about and you know, tried to define it. But I love the conclusion of his article.
It's. It's a long article with lots of great points, but just his main points.
This, I think this is just as cleanly as you can put it and every other thing that you want to say about like people being mean on Twitter or the culture of toxicity. I think the culture of toxicity has nothing to do with bitcoin and bitcoin maximalism. The culture of toxicity is A, it's a, it's an Internet thing. B, it's a lot of a Twitter thing too, but it's also a rejection. It's A, it's the flip side of the coin of the woke. Cancel culture. The establishment is horrifically toxic. Like, if you even budge outside of the establishment approved narrative, you're a bigot, a racist, a white supremacist terrorist. Like, those aren't calm. Those aren't like mild accusations. We're talking about you. You're the absolute scum of the earth Nazi. You want to murder and gas and burn alive millions of people. Like the, the. The unbelievable, mundane and simple things that you can do to be, to be classified that as. As a popular stance among millions of people. You, you ask the question, what is a woman? Be prepared to be called that. That is toxicity. The toxic environment online is a fucking protest to that. It's that it's that we have welcomed that insanity, that mental disorder into our society in the name of being nice, in the name of saying, I won't offend you, therefore let your personal delusions run wild, and I will accept them. That is where we are as a society. The toxicity online is a response to that. And I appreciate with all of the shitstorms and all of the dumbassery and all of the morons that come with that on in bitcoin maximalism, I think it is far better that we have the reverse toxicity of I don't give a shit whether you're offended, be offended. That is far more important than just walking around going, welcome all of this. Like, sure, let's be inclusive to all the people who are psychotic lunatics who will call anyone who disagrees with them a bigot or a Nazi. You know, somebody is not inclusive.
[00:59:39] Speaker B: Somebody they like on Twitter. It's a. It's a woman, and she is very liberal, and she had asked me, and I like her, and she's a bitcoiner. And I think we need more of people from different kind of groups that support bitcoin, because ultimately, bitcoin is. Money is for everybody. And the best way that everybody will use it is if nobody fights it as a political issue. But we may not be that lucky, but we can be great.
And so one of the complaints that she made on her tweets, not directly to me, but kind of at me or towards me, was, well, because I don't. I don't run around, like, being mean to people. I don't know. I mean, no, you know, I don't. I don't bully people. And there is a difference between bullying and toxicity. I don't feel like.
[01:00:23] Speaker A: I mean, I don't bully people.
[01:00:25] Speaker B: Well, it's a difference, because some people. I mean, like, there are a lot of guys in every culture, not just bitcoin, not just shitcoin, and be fucking Tesla, sock, whatever. There are people who are gonna, like, look at your avatar and say, fat ass. That's. Look how fat you are. That's why you like whatever other stock that I don't like. Like, that's. That's different.
[01:00:45] Speaker A: Of course you bought Apple. You're a fat.
[01:00:48] Speaker B: Yeah, like. Like, that's not. That's. That's a different. That's like. I don't. I think that's embarrassing people. When people bring up those kinds of means.
[01:00:56] Speaker A: You don't have an argument that means.
[01:00:58] Speaker B: So. So. So that stuff is one thing, but. And so if somebody is just like, you know, hate swimming or something and it's running around like, fuck all women. The only thing they're good for is like cooking for me and sucking my dick. Sorry to be so crude. Whatever people that say shit like that.
And if you're that way. But sure argument was, well, why don't more bitcoin maximalists then? If they're so not like that, then why aren't they speaking out against people who are? And it's like, listen, I'm here to talk and educate about bitcoin, not to go hunt down people that have offensive views about whatever other stuff. Like it's not. I mean, like, do I like it if somebody hates women and is super offensive towards them? Like, no, I don't like it. Do I want to spend my time on the Internet? Like I'm the guy who finds guys who say shit about women and then I tell them that they're wrong. Like, I don't care about that. Like, I mean I do, but I'm not going to devote my time to that. I devote my time to bitcoin and bitcoin education. Not like the bully chaser. Yeah, absolutely.
[01:01:55] Speaker A: And here's the thing. Here's the thing is that we have decided that feelings, somehow, somehow in this society, the dominant culture, the culture that runs things, has decided that feelings are more important than the truth. And I 100% disagree. Absolutely 100% disagree. It doesn't matter how much you want me to congratulate you and say that you're doing the right thing. When you make wings out of wax and paper mache and you're about to jump off a cliff, I'm going to tell you that what you did was stupid and that you shouldn't do it because you're going to die. Like the truth matters. Feeling the feeling. Believing that feelings matter more than the truth is exactly how we got here. As long as twist things to make it sound good, as long as you paper over the imbalance, as long as you cook the books and make the debt go away, as long as you redefine what, what recession means, then everything's hunky dory. Nope. People still starve, businesses still close, people are still struggling day in and day out to meet their ends. It doesn't matter what you think or feel about it. The truth matters. And somehow we have led. I don't this and maybe it's just a. A consequence of comfort, you know, but we have real problems in the world. I have. There are plenty of people who gives a give A shit about bullying on Twitter. Like, it's not my, it's not my job. Everything, everything on your hierarchy of feelings. Everything on it from being the most offended by the most racist, horrible, like just accusatory statement that you could possibly imagine from top to bottom. None of that matters more than the economy declining by 1%. Not even close. Not like, not even remotely. It's not even on the, in the scope of the ocean of issues around our money. I don't care about your feelings when we are interacting personally. I will be nice to you. I will respect you as a human until you do not return the favor. Then I will treat you like a piece of shit because you're just a piece of shit. But otherwise it's not a big societal problem. That people are mean. Sticks and stones may break my bones. Bitch, grow up like it's the Internet. Get over it. People are mean. If you don't have thick skin, you're not going to survive a major societal collapse. I actually think like, like 100% like not pretending and not just pontificating. And maybe I'm wrong, but I think we're in a fourth turning. Your feelings aren't going to matter, right? I think so too about it, you.
[01:04:45] Speaker B: Know, and it's, it's, it's going to happen because I mean, well, so in the west, women are concerned about things like microaggressions and then women who live in actually oppressed.
[01:04:56] Speaker A: I know, I know, I know. No, I'll let you finish your point. I'm sorry, but that word, women that.
[01:05:01] Speaker B: Live in actually oppressed nations where they're not even allowed to go to the group grocery store without like a male bank account. Like they, they, if they are beaten by a man, it only matters if it offends another man. If none of the men around them think it's wrong, then that's what makes it not wrong.
And, and they, and I know a woman who lives, who used to live in a society like that and she is very strong advocate for women's rights. And she hates Americanized like the way that the women, she says. Have you ever heard of her actual aggression?
[01:05:37] Speaker A: The hilarity. The hilarity of that word that like somebody giving you a dirty look or which is, which is the, the crux of like, I create my own world. That like I give somebody a dirty look or I look at somebody like, like a great example of like how people create their own world in this instance is that like if you go to a mechanic and you treat them like they're going to screw you. Like, like, don't you do it wrong. Don't you, don't you just like, not change my oil and then tell me you changed my oil. If I introduced myself and like had a first interaction with a mechanic like that, you know what they would do? Not change my oil and charge me for changing their oil. Like, I would get exactly the world that I had create that I had expected to find the idea of microaggressions as a problem at best.
At best, a microaggression is a micro problem. Like it is. You're saying that things that aren't important are mattering a lot to me. Like, I mean, you got lose.
[01:06:43] Speaker B: I wanna, I don't want to cheapen the way somebody feels because I mean, like, okay, I don't want to go somewhere where I'm uncomfortable. But you know what? That's my responsibility. That's my responsibility. Like, I can't just.
[01:06:53] Speaker A: Because they're just not.
[01:06:55] Speaker B: Yes. Or they're assholes to me. Their friends might love them and not think they're assholes, but whatever world I want, they're assholes to me. So I can't expect that wherever I go, everybody should conform to what makes me feel better.
[01:07:09] Speaker A: Right.
[01:07:09] Speaker B: You know, like, that's very selfish.
[01:07:11] Speaker A: Like I'm comfortable with or say the.
[01:07:14] Speaker B: Thing, it's my responsibility if I don't feel comfortable around a certain person. Now that's where the difference between like an actual, you know, violent crime, somebody that's imposing themselves on you a lot more than a microaggression, someone that's using violence to take or steal or whatever from you. That's. That's where there's, that's where it matters. But when it's just a way that you feel, just do something else. Go somewhere else. Don't try to force everybody to do whatever the hell makes you feel better. Because some people are never going to feel better.
[01:07:41] Speaker A: Have some respect for yourself.
Like the amount of dependency that is being glorified. That like, I can't be okay with my gender unless every single person on earth like justifies it or like backs it up. That's not being me being okay with my gender. That's the exact opposite.
[01:08:02] Speaker B: It's me wanting other people to unbelievable force.
[01:08:05] Speaker A: You had a feel on someone else's opinion of me that I would commit suicide. Like you help that person.
[01:08:12] Speaker B: That would be like me saying, am offended by other people thinking that they are a woman. Why shouldn't they all conform to how I feel? Because that's stupid.
[01:08:21] Speaker A: Flip that coin over. It's the exact same thing.
[01:08:24] Speaker B: I wouldn't. I wouldn't expect. I don't. And the people who, by the way, are totally against anybody identifying as being a woman, like, they can be against it with their own likes, with their own family, whatever people that they are around. But I feel the same way about, like, okay, if this person wants to turn their women, like, and if I don't like that, it makes me uncomfortable. I just won't go where they go. Like, we won't talk to each other if it's something I like. Enjoy your own little life over there.
[01:08:46] Speaker A: And I'll have freedom of association.
[01:08:48] Speaker B: Like.
[01:08:49] Speaker A: Like accept and. And know who you are as a person and quit thinking that you have to have everybody else tell you what it is and that it doesn't exist unless, like, if you're actually confident in who you are, you don't give a shit about somebody else's opinion. When somebody calls me a dumbass on Twitter.
Okay, Okay. I don't know. I don't know who this person is. Like, I don't like. I'm sure some. I'm sure there are millions. There's not even millions of BSV'ers there. I'm sure there are dozens of BSV'ers out there who think I'm a total moron and that everything I say is utter bullshit. Doesn't bother me. Doesn't bother me at all. You don't know why. Because I know I'm not. I'm not stupid. And I make sure I read a lot to make sure that that's not the case.
[01:09:40] Speaker B: Like, always be checking yourself. That's the. That's, I think, what separates. And that's a big part of Bitcoin culture that, like, when I'm talking to new people and they want to ask me, like, very critical questions, like, I'm sorry to ask this, but it's like, please don't be sorry. That's the point. Like, that's the point. Ask me those questions. Ask me those questions that you think might offend me. Those are, like, the important questions.
[01:10:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:10:01] Speaker B: You know, that's what I want you to ask me the most.
[01:10:03] Speaker A: The most important truths are always the hard ones because they're the ones that we're ignoring necessarily. It's like, you know, telling someone they're alcoholic is. When they're an alcoholic is not nice. They're going to feel like they're being bullied. They're going to be horribly offended. They're going to Feel attacked, let us make it not true. And in fact, if they don't admit that they're an alcoholic, it's necessarily the most important thing that they should address. The most important truth is always the hardest truth is never the. The truth will set you free, but it's going to piss you off first. Like, if you're saying that I can't say anything to piss people off, you're saying that we're just going to drive ourselves into the side of the Pl, like we're going to drive our plane at the side of the mountain. Because I'm not allowed to tell people that we're FL with they're falling, that, you know, we're all going to die and we're going to crash and everything's going to go up in flames and nobody's going to have our funeral because we're all on the same plane. Like, that is what you're saying, is that, is that we should never have uncomfortable truths, which means that we are all just going to keep doing. We're going to cycle, cycle through the. How do I twist this to make it feel good until we all die? Literally. And what happens eventually in society as a whole is that things get so bad and so messy, which is where I think we are now, is that we've come to a point of no return where the degree of uncomfort in reality trumps the degree of uncomfort about telling people that you're full of. About rocking the boat. It's easy when things are easy to just let things go by to make sure that you're not rock. You're not the one rocking the boat, that you're not the one standing out in the crowd and making everybody uncomfortable. That's not fun. I know that's not. It's not fun. And even from BSVRs, it's not fun to be called stupid. It's not fun to be called a dumb ass. But you get over it. You get over it because you actually know who you are and you. You actually care about being intelligent or learning and making sure that you aren't just spouting off nonsense, which I do. I do all the time. It's not like I'm invulnerable to something like that. I just actually care and have a little bit of conviction about what I believe in and what I study day in and day out. So I come to the conclusion. Wrap this all back. We kind of went on a really cultural tangent here. Wrap this all around. All this back around Bitcoin Maximalism, the toxicity has nothing to do with it. It has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's about ethical, sound fair money. That's it. That's it. And the fact that it must survive the state as a challenger, and I actually brought up the BTC sessions thing is this, these are the points, these are the points that lead me to Bitcoin maximalism. It embodies the principles of sound money. It is borderless and censorship resistant. It exhibits sufficient decentralization. It has no discernible figurehead or leader. It is incredibly difficult to change in a non backwards compatible way. And it preserves the ability of any individual to validate and follow the entire system set of consensus rules.
That is Bitcoin maximalism. That's it.
[01:13:23] Speaker B: Awesome.
[01:13:24] Speaker A: And if you apply all of that, that set of principles to the entire crypto landscape, ignore the Bitcoin is going to solve marriages, ignore the stock to flow the, the Twitter social bullshit and the fact that somebody was mean to you on the Internet. I'm so sorry for you. If you apply that to all of crypto and, and just eliminate, eliminate, eliminate, you end up with Bitcoin, in my opinion. You end up with Bitcoin and that's it.
[01:13:52] Speaker B: You know when somebody tells me like, oh, you just don't, you just only care about bitcoin, that's why you won't like, like my coin or whatever. What I tell him is, listen, you.
[01:14:02] Speaker A: Won'T like my coin.
[01:14:04] Speaker B: Listen man, if Bitcoin didn't even exist, I would probably still be talking about all these scams because they are like just ridiculously bad. They, they're scamming people for billions of dollars. Like I think Ethereum is the biggest scam that we've ever seen. Well, especially in my lifetime. It's the fact that we have all these VCs putting money into these things that are so clearly unsustainable. Yeah, I don't get it. But so, I mean it's not so Bitcoin absolutely, because it does exist and because it, thank God we have it. But if we didn't, that doesn't mean I'd be like, well let me look at this other thing. Maybe this will be good. Like no, those things are the fundamental properties of an Ethereum or whatever other thing is a helium token. Horrible. That would never interest me ever as an old cipher punk or, or any other kind of freedom maximalist that doesn't want to be under the government's boot.
None of those things are interesting to me. In fact, not only they're not. Are they not interesting? Many of them are transparently scams, you.
[01:15:20] Speaker A: Know, and, and somebody, I don't remember, I don't remember who said it might have been Giacomo or.
Ah, I don't know, I don't know. But I'm sorry, whoever I should credit, I should credit whoever this was because it stuck with me and it was a good, it was a good tweet, but basically that no one who listened to the bitcoin maximalists got rug pulled by the thousands of scams, by the thousands of like fundamental flaws and broken systems and the Lunas and the Celsius. Like the, like, they just didn't. They just didn't. In fact, just the opposite. People who did listen to them, who listened to Corey, who listened to everybody who retweeted, who challenged these ideas everybody talks about, like bitcoin maximalists. Like we all agree on stuff. And all I see is bitcoin maximalists bitching and arguing at each other day in and day out. Like some of the most contrarian people that I follow who are constantly arguing with bitcoiners are bitcoin maximalists. The Shinobis, the John Carvalhos, the Corey's. Like those people, like, I highly value them. And Udi was one of those. For a long time I held him in high regard because he loved pushing people's buttons, which I think matters because you have to challenge them on the way they think about things. I'll admit there. There's even like a hint of value in the fact that Udi's gone kind of web3shitcoinery saying that like, oh, the wallet is great, even though I'm not shilling the token.
Okay, but at least it's caused a conversation about it. It's caused people to kind of like isolate their arguments about it.
[01:17:06] Speaker B: I mean, in a way you could. I mean, that's like a life silver lining, I don't think.
[01:17:10] Speaker A: I think that's a silver lining. It's a silver lining.
[01:17:12] Speaker B: I think it feels negative. But, but, but at least I think it's still not negative. But at least he may accidentally create this culture of yeah, Ethereum is going to go to zero.
[01:17:23] Speaker A: Clean up the edges. Clean up the edges of bitcoin maximalism.
Make the argument and the stance more cohesive because there are plenty of dumbasses on Twitter who call themselves Bitcoin Maximus.
[01:17:36] Speaker B: But he's not at all making that argument. I mean, right now he's saying that bitcoin maximalism is at least, I think that is what I See you saying is that Bixon bitcoin maximum is essentially dead. It's only proponents. The only people who are bitcoin only now, the only people who are bitcoin only now are like these losers with no followers that are just like a bunch of religious retards. Like that's the, that's the right thing.
[01:18:03] Speaker A: Everybody, everybody who's a bitcoin maximalist is Dieter Bob.
[01:18:06] Speaker B: Yes, yes actually. Or, or he thinks like, yeah, like he thinks that like all the cool people are obviously shitcoiners. The Kobe's with the millions of followers, like everybody's a shitcoin. Anybody, anybody takes seriously. Look at Nick Carter's like I don't need any of you maxis for my fund. That's right, you don't like there's plenty of people for you to scam. You're not going to get to scam the bitcoiners.
So you know, and that was such a telling thing. Like there's this group of people that are focused on principled, on principles and who aren't here just to get rich quick orders and rip off retail.
And these many of these same people are the reasons why a lot of these, everybody always used to know. And that's one of the things that I think maybe is the most damaging about what they're doing to the extent that other intelligent people really care. And it's debatable maybe how much of an impact it makes on that. But, but it very well could they along with all the other things they're saying. It's like the real experts understand that it's not about bitcoin. And it used to be well known that all of the real experts are the guys who are responsible for doing some of the key things in bitcoin. Bitcoin's always had the most rigorous cryptographers, the most, the most uncompromising in the way that the real cypherpunks that are building things, they may be incredibly simple because they are incredibly strong.
And that's always been something that everybody knew. And if you, if you knew enough to know, you knew that the real bitcoiners, some of the oldest developers, people that have been doing this for a long time, these are the smartest guys in the room. They're kind of shifting that perception and saying no, no, don't ask a bit. Nobody asks a bitcoiner if they want to know something.
Like that's what they're, that's, that may be the most damaging part of what they're doing to the common Perception.
[01:20:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:20:04] Speaker B: Is trying to unseat those who have been most rigorous, who haven't focused on trying to make money, who haven't taken VC funding, who've just been passionately obsessed with, in many cases, doing for free, this great work, critical work, and taking that and saying, you know, who's actually the one. You should talk to this guy over here that's getting paid $600,000 a year to tell the Ethereum foundation what they need here because he works for them.
Ask that guy.
Those are the important people.
[01:20:41] Speaker A: Honestly, I've always found good engineers build shit. User experience, like user interface almost.
[01:20:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Josh, I love you.
[01:20:50] Speaker A: Yeah, great example. Guy is absolutely brilliant, but everything at the user level has too many steps. It's like, it's like he needs a, he needs a, an equally genius front end developer who just cleans it up and removes three out of four steps and everything he build is just, it.
[01:21:09] Speaker B: Just, he builds things like nobody else. He builds things that would take an entire VC funded team of like, Jack.
[01:21:15] Speaker A: Was gonna listen to this, you'd be so pissed.
[01:21:16] Speaker B: It's a two year, you know, he builds things that takes an entire.
[01:21:19] Speaker A: Pump them up a little bit at the same time.
[01:21:22] Speaker B: And like, and yeah, it won't be like, it's not, you can't expect it to be like, also it looks like a whole team of seven people made the interface like because of just one guy that made the entire fucking thing in many cases.
[01:21:36] Speaker A: But yeah, really the thing is that like, is it secure? Is it secure? Like again, like, okay, get advice from MetaMask about how to build your browser extension. Browser extensions aren't the crux of the problem.
[01:21:52] Speaker B: We had a great one in Bitcoin, just like Madamask already. It doesn't. The reason why it doesn't have more users isn't because of the ux. The reason why it doesn't get more users because you can't. Like there's not all this gambling casino. Like nobody owns MetaMask unless they want to play in the gambling casino.
[01:22:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:22:06] Speaker B: And there's a ton of people that want to gamble.
So yeah, you're gonna have more users for like the hey, click here for free money than you are for the like hey, click here for long term awesome saving asset or whatever. Like, you know, like it's just.
[01:22:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it was a UDI that said, I think he was talking about like, you know, NFTs are like a multi billion dollar, like a billion dollar or more industry or something like that. Just call it a trend and Bitcoiners don't have it. And that's like this huge net negative. And I'm like, nah, the reason bitcoiners don't have it is because bitcoiners don't care.
Like, yeah, they had it and they let it go again. Again. Are you building infrastructure that can survive the state?
Are you building like if NFTs are the old. I just don't think NFTs are the deciding factor in anything. Anything. And I'm not going to dilute my support of bitcoin to buy a JPEG that I can right click to have to have the same bored ape profile image of a million other people, but it just has a different hat and some sunglasses. Like, I'm sorry, but what the. Like you're investing in this. Your investment matters. Where you direct your productive output supports a type of an economy, a set of principles and a, a type of monetary instrument. You are going to say that it's more important to get your, your bored ape token than it is to put a floor on Bitcoin and actually build out an infrastructure, run a node, do a little bit of home mining, make this thing slightly more resilient so that it has a better chance at the mission of separating money and state. I don't think so. I just don't think so. I don't give a shit about your NFTs. I just don't. And if it's a multi billion dollar market, I think it's probably a short lived multi billion dollar market. I don't think anybody's going to be paying. Just like the guy who paid $25 million for the NFT of Jack's Jack's first tweet. He lost about $25 million in that trade.
And I think that's what most people who hold NFTs will end up with. Now maybe there's a, maybe there's a market for baseball cards and collector's items and you know, signed posters as opposed to an unsigned poster. I don't really care. I don't really care. And there's nothing special about ethereum that makes NFTs possible. NFT started on bitcoin, everybody. Like paypays were the first like. And just, it's just that nobody cares because I think we actually have a goal. We actually have something at the end of this that we matter about solving. At least that's my position. That's, that's why I'm doing it. I guess I can't speak for everybody else, but okay. I mean, you're going to dump everybody else's opinion on me anyway. You're going to say that I believe bitcoin slump solves marriages. Like, and. And that I'm supposed to defend this? Like, God bless. I just read this like, it was. Was it ragnarly? Ragnarly, like, posted, like, this whole list of just. Just. Just nonsense. And then it's like, if you don't. If you don't explain why this is it. And you. You don't even know anything about bitcoin maximalism. It's like, would you just, like, find the dumbest. The list of the dumbest tweets that you could possibly find that had bitcoin tagged in them? There's a million of them. There's millions and millions of them. Like, Jesus Christ. Like, oh, man. It's a group of people, dude. It's a group of people. Wake up. Wake up.
Things matter. Things matter. And we're doing something that's going to be really, really hard. And if you don't have die hard infrastructure, if you don't have infrastructure where half of it can get cut off for six months and it still works seamlessly, it works as if it doesn't know that that shift has changed, your shit's not gonna survive anything.
Maybe, maybe we get your soft future, you know, maybe. Maybe we get your easy route through all of this and it just gets adopted by Wall street and VCs and everything's hunky dory. Great. Great. That would be wonderful. That'd be wonderful. I'm not even gonna. You can throw it in my face. Ootie sassle, whatever. Like, rub it in my face so hard I will get drunk with you and you can rub it in my face and I will be ecstatic that we separated money from state. I don't think that's the way it's going to happen. I don't think that's the way it's going to happen. And I don't think your shit's going to survive. That's why I don't invest in it. I don't think it's going to help.
You're not going to convince me by calling me dumb on Twitter or saying that I believe all of this stuff or pointing out that somebody else who said there's a bitcoin maximalist was mean to you. That's not going to change my mind. And it's not. I've tested it a lot and I still come to the same conclusion. Bitcoin maximalism is going anywhere, in my opinion.
[01:26:59] Speaker B: So Absolutely. And it's just growing. Like that's, that's the, that's the craziest part. Only it's not going anywhere. I think one of the most important things that we might have brought about the trajectory is the meetup started out bear markets. You'd be lucky to have three or four.
[01:27:17] Speaker A: They're like 10 years strong.
[01:27:19] Speaker B: And now there's 30 people sometimes in that room and many of them are new and all of them are bitcoin only. And they're not there for the price.
These. And this is, I can't imagine that we live in some like that. We just have some anomaly here in this one city. It's everywhere. And I see it on Telegram and I see it even on Twitter. You're not gonna see it with the, with the, you know, it's not everywhere on Twitter. There's all kinds on Twitter, but I, I'm seeing it in everything. This, this trend of being, of realizing what bitcoin is and valuing that and as a consequence not really caring about anything else. As far as investment goes, as far as money goes, that's growing and it's going to continue to grow. I mean Fiat was already the biggest coin dollar, US dollar was already the biggest coin.
[01:28:07] Speaker A: Centralization is always, is always better, always got the better user experience. The question is, does it do anything that matters?
[01:28:15] Speaker B: Right? The reason why bitcoin is growing is because it's better. Not because it's the most popular, not because, not even the network effect. I mean that is amazing. And it's. The network effect is going to grow, but the dollar has a bigger network effect and the dollar is losing ground to bitcoin because bitcoin, am I not.
[01:28:30] Speaker A: Supposed to call it a shitcoin because it's bigger and does way more volume and is super duper liquid? Nah, it's still a coin.
[01:28:38] Speaker B: Even if somehow because of these money prints in this money printing world, anything can happen.
Even if somehow money printing brought Ethereum to bigger quote unquote market cap. The bitcoin, the whole metric thing is stupid anyway. It wouldn't make Ethereum better in any way. It would be.
[01:29:00] Speaker A: Ethereum would have all the same problems that I still have that I still have with it.
[01:29:04] Speaker B: You wouldn't say, oh well, there's a new biggest, therefore that's the one I should use. It's not about that. It's about the actual what it is. What is this thing? I don't want to use dollars. They're the biggest. They're the most accepted there's the most apps for dollars. They're the easiest to use. So why don't I just use dollars? Because I have control of that.
[01:29:24] Speaker A: I'll tell you, I actually hope Ethereum like fully, fully centralizes flips. No, no, I mean it would be fun. That would be funny.
That would be good for a little bit.
You'd make more humble. You'd make more humble in Bitcoin. And the only argument that I think stands any sort of has a ground to stand on is that there is humble lost in bitcoin and we need to do more stay humble in stack sats. But I actually hope Ethereum, I mean I think that's kind of the only way it survives. But I hope it like fully, fully centralizes because that's the only way that it doesn't just turn into at least in my opinion.
I mean there's the argument, there's the argument there. But I think it's the only way that people don't lose hundreds of billions of dollars.
[01:30:21] Speaker B: Even Vitalik. I mean they're still going to lose the money because centralized systems suck. They're not going to lose it from a, maybe from a network hack because it's centralized, but they'll lose it from JP Morgan and the other VCs like continuing to milk them.
[01:30:32] Speaker A: It could, it could take a long, stagnant, slow death. And I think that would be maybe, maybe it wouldn't be the least painful. But you know, there's always like, I think a centralized network that has quote unquote smart contracts.
Maybe there's a business opportunity. Like maybe, maybe there is like I think a non custodial one would work better. Like when you're looking at like shadow chains, like that's exactly what Lightning Pool does. They create a market that's non custodial. I think Helium is completely agnostic to the code. But, but I worry like I just don't want to see as much as I disagree with them and like I'm annoyed. I don't want to see everybody lose all that money. But I think proof of stake is kind of going to be the death of Ethereum. Proof of stake won't be able to survive Jack.
And I think there will be a very quick and very simple hostile takeover. Anytime there's even the slightest contesting of what Ethereum is supposed to do and which one is going to get which, you know, upgrade is going to be installed and everybody, because they've already made it so that what, you have to have like $50,000 or something, something Everybody's going to centralize the same thing. It's gonna be like three nodes.
[01:32:01] Speaker B: I mean, there's a lot of evidence to back up what you're saying. The staking pools.
[01:32:06] Speaker A: That's what I mean. The pools. That's, that's, that's what I was referring to. Yeah.
[01:32:09] Speaker B: And there's a lot of reasons why those pools will centralize even more. I don't get into it because it's like a whole other thing. But like, long story short though, the, the I'm not worried about like the technical implosion, although that could happen. The thing that people need to be worried about with those centralized systems is that the people who control them are there to make money and you are how they make money. And the moment that whatever they were doing before, because, you know, making a bunch of coins and ripping off people that way doesn't work forever, but people are like, I'm going to stop doing that. I'm going to stop paying for these things that sound so good and then always fuck me. Like, people will just stop eventually. Like once you have saturated. That's how every Ponzi is. Once you saturate the people who would have otherwise been interested in your thing enough that they all learn that like they lose money when they do this thing, then eventually they all know and even the ones that don't try it like get to know through them that like, hey, like penny socks. Like, you know, penny stocks used to be a lot bigger, but now they're not because the knowledge is kind of saturated throughout society and people are like, yeah, no, it doesn't matter like how fancy a penny stock you tell me is not interesting because I know what's going to happen. If it even pumps at all, it'll dump and it probably won't even pump at all. So like, so eventually they're going to run. They're going to. That way is not going to work for making money anymore. What are they going to do? They're going to have to start eating themselves. That's, that's every centralized thing. They're going to do anything they can to take more money from you somehow. How do they extract more dollars from you? Well, proof of stakes will let them dump all those coins for free now. So there's going to be massive flowing, zero cost basis coins. They have a zero cost basis on all these coins now. They can just dump for as long.
[01:33:49] Speaker A: As they pay for coins. They get them for free as long as really familiar. It sounds like we've been here and.
[01:33:57] Speaker B: So what actually happens? Economics 101. A bunch of guys are getting a bunch of these things for free and they want to sell them to you as much as possible. Well, what's that thing worth?
Pretty close to zero is what it's worth.
[01:34:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, again, if I had to sum up as easy, like as simple as possible why I'm a bitcoin maximalist, is because the only thing that I think matters right now, everything else is noise until we get over the hill, is that are we separating money from state?
And is what I am investing in going to help or hurt that or be completely irrelevant to it? I think the vast majority of crypto is completely irrelevant to it and, or will hurt it, and particularly Ethereum. I don't think Ethereum is going to, I don't, it's not even like slightly designed in that way. I think like what I see is something that's run by Amazon that if the right person comes knocking on that door and says that you're going to install this and this is how you're going to run it and this is, you know, what you're going to censor and it's just going to do it.
[01:35:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I think within the next three years we're going to see, especially on proof of stake, within the next three years we're going to see an order come down from a government somewhere that causes the Ethereum network to censor an app on a network level. Probably within three years we have, this is going on to the Bitcoin audible page as a, as a, as a proof of this, of this prediction. Within three years there will be a censored act by the government.
[01:35:34] Speaker A: Are we right, Are we wrong? Who knows? But if it did happen, I mean, I kind of agree too. I think we're just saying it'll be so easy.
[01:35:42] Speaker B: It'll be a phone call. They're going to just let somebody create some massively popular money laundering tool or something. No, they're going to call up the node guys that have all the stake and they're gonna say, hey, if you run another one of those transactions, that Smart contract, we're gonna come and get a judge to give us your private key and we'll be the number one staker on theory.
[01:36:03] Speaker A: Yeah, but that's why, that's, that's the whole reason, like say come up with every other tweet or example in some telegram chat or something that you think I'm supposed to defend as a bitcoin maximalist. I didn't say it had Nothing to do with me.
But the only reason I'm a bitcoin maximalist is because I care about the separation of money and state. I think monetary assurances are all that matter.
No, gold is not a number, grow up scheme. It's about monetary assurances that nobody can contest.
And bitcoin is the same. It's the digital equivalent of that. Is that how do you create a money that nobody can make for free and that nobody can change the rules of. And I think bitcoin is the only one that even stands a chance. That's why I'm a bitcoin maximalist. You want to prove me wrong? Fight that, argue with that. Don't show me some dumbass on Twitter that said something mean to you and tell me that I've done something bad or I believe something stupid. Got nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing to do with it. I am still a bitcoin maximalist and I have. There's nothing you're going to do in that realm. It's going to change my mind.
[01:37:14] Speaker B: Absolutely. This is a great talk. I'm glad you had me here.
[01:37:19] Speaker A: Actually. I need to. I need to go. We need to take rad. Go out, get some. Get something to drink, take a ride around.
[01:37:25] Speaker B: That's a good spot to stop.
[01:37:27] Speaker A: That's good. That's a good spot to stop it. We'll.
[01:37:29] Speaker B: We'll.
[01:37:30] Speaker A: This will come back. There's no way. There's no way that he's done. We're going to have another couple of heroes getting killed in four or five months.
[01:37:37] Speaker B: We need to do something big on Web5.
I need to get some Web5 people to come and because they're.
[01:37:43] Speaker A: We need to get the. We need to get the TBD people and synonym to come in and argue with each other.
[01:37:48] Speaker B: That would be cool. I mean like, because Web five is really.
They are. Web five is going to kill Web three. I mean Web three is going to kill itself. Web five is going to be the nail in the coffin. Because all those people that doesn't have.
[01:38:02] Speaker A: A token hole punch ain't got no token.
[01:38:04] Speaker B: Yeah. The ones who like a charm. The ones who are like not trying to just chase scams because some. Some of the shit corners know. Yeah, well, this is shit. But I'm gonna make money. Like those aren't the guys that I. Those guys kill themselves. Whatever. The guys that I more concerned about are the guys who maybe they're in their 40s and they looking at these technologies, they're like, well, this looks like a new revolutionary way of building web applications. And this could be really great. And I need to, you know, better buy some of this token, invest in this new startup. It's like you are being. You're the one being scammed. Like, the guy scambling. Like, I know it's a scam, but fuck it, some dumbass is going to buy it. Like, yeah, he's waiting for you to buy it.
And like, and like, so that guy, he.
[01:38:49] Speaker A: At the end of the day, you're being tricked by the appearance of low cost and simplicity through the subsidy of token printing, through the subsidy of money printing. It's the exact same reason it looks like it's easy and cheap and very, very good to go into massive amounts of debt in our current fiat economy is because it's being subsidized by money printing. It's the illusion of cheapness. It's the illusion of efficiency that doesn't actually exist.
[01:39:18] Speaker B: What's Rad doing now?
[01:39:20] Speaker A: Rad is hanging out with mom in the other room.
[01:39:25] Speaker B: I want to see him.
[01:39:26] Speaker A: Oh, come on. It's like, I got. I can't. I can't go get him. I. I'll show it to you later.
[01:39:33] Speaker B: Hello? Hello?
[01:39:34] Speaker A: I'll send it. I'll. Oh, wait, no, my camera is right here. My phone is right there. I'll. I'll shoot you some. I. I literally, like, I record a video and take like, 20 pictures like, every single day. And I'm actually thinking about doing a little, like, make a little, like, fake newspaper like, in Photoshop and put like, a couple pictures of Rad on it and then make the Radford Daily and then, like, open up a telegram or like a. A messenger chat or something with, like, our families or whatever. Because I just. I'm just blasting. I am the like, like, ever. I just like, it's like, look at my kid. He's the cutest chick that's ever lived.
[01:40:11] Speaker B: Has he made an appearance on your show yet? I think, like, while he's.
[01:40:14] Speaker A: A couple of times. A couple times he's. He's cried a couple times. I had a commercial hold him up.
[01:40:20] Speaker B: Like a Lion King baby. And like, this is little guy.
[01:40:26] Speaker A: No, I haven't done that one. I haven't done that on video.
[01:40:28] Speaker B: I think that'd be cool if I. If he. If he. You know, when he grows up one day, it'll be cool to see his baby self on your show.
[01:40:34] Speaker A: That would be cool.
You might be like, you might be right. I need to do that.
[01:40:40] Speaker B: Even if it's just, like, while you're in an interview with somebody, like, he's in your arms. You just put him on the camera. Like, little baby, like, while you're here.
[01:40:45] Speaker A: Here'S my cute baby.
[01:40:48] Speaker B: I would love that. When I'm like 20 or even when I'm 15, like, yeah, my dad's in this cool bitcoin show since, like forever. Bitcoin was only worth like 20 grand. And like, there's me on that show.
[01:40:59] Speaker A: That will be the day. You're looking back. It's only worth 20 grand.
All right, man, go take care.
I'll talk to you. I'll talk to you later. I'll hit you up on telegram a couple hours.
I'll let you know when this is getting published.
[01:41:18] Speaker B: Awesome, man.
[01:41:19] Speaker A: And we'll make. We'll piss everybody off and get a bunch of different people talking about dumbasses and we don't know what we're talking about.
[01:41:25] Speaker B: I already know.
[01:41:25] Speaker A: I welcome you sticks and stones.
[01:41:29] Speaker B: The Ody tweet is going to be like, oh, they're supposed to talk about Maxim. All they talk about is how much they hate women.
[01:41:36] Speaker A: That's what it is. We're bigoted. We're bigoted Nazis. That's what. That's what it was. I, I predict, I predict that that is in our, in our near future.
[01:41:45] Speaker B: If this was big enough for like CNN attention, that's the only thing they take out of this show.
[01:41:49] Speaker A: That would 100. There'd be some comment that if you took out the middle of the sentence, I sound like an absolute racist lunatic or something.
[01:41:57] Speaker B: I don't care about that. And they're like, he doesn't care about women being beat up.
[01:42:03] Speaker A: I didn't care about people being bullied. It's the leading cause of suicide.
[01:42:09] Speaker B: That's bitcoin maximums. He doesn't care about people.
[01:42:11] Speaker A: There you go. There you go. I predict I'll cut. We'll cut out this section and then just have that as like a Twitter video response every time. Every time they do that.
[01:42:20] Speaker B: Yes. That's so cool. Oh, God. Okay.
[01:42:24] Speaker A: All right, I will catch you later. Thank you, ShitCoin Insider, for joining me for this wonderful episode.
And that'll do it. A huge thank you to the Insider for joining me on this episode. I had a lot of fun and we're actually on bitcoin audible. We're gonna have a couple of reads about bitcoin maximalism. We'll be diving into this topic a little bit more. I think this is a great kind of fun, fun, light hearted primer. On the topic before we dig a little deeper and get more concrete with the idea of Bitcoin maximalism.
And we will be we will have another episode of shitcoin Insider, hopefully relatively soon. No guarantees we get to this one when we get to this one. But we've got some fun stuff, some fun ideas to cover.
So don't forget to subscribe and you won't miss the next episode of ShitCoin Insider. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Coinkite, to Swan Bitcoin, and to the Fold app for their amazing services and for sponsoring my work. I am Guy Swan, joined by my co host, the Insider himself. Until next time, everybody buy Bitcoin and stay clean.
[01:43:47] Speaker B: This podcast is part of the C Suite Radio Network, turning the volume up on business.
