Bankless - The Future of Bitcoin with Nic Carter, Eric Wall, & Udi Wertheimer

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Taproot was the trojan horse that opened the door to a new wave of Bitcoin innovation and culture. At the forefront of this culture are Udi, Eric, and Nic, the taproot wizards causing a shift in the world of Bitcoin. ------ 📣 CONSENSYS | DILIGENCE FUZZING https://bankless.cc/diligence-fuzzing-pod ------ 🚀 Airdrop Alpha is waiting for you on Bankless.com  https://bankless.cc/Alpha  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2   🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  👾STADER LABS | ETHX LIQUID STAKING https://bankless.cc/Stader  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku  🎮IMMUTABLE | GAMING ECOSYSTEM https://bankless.cc/Immutable  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  ----- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 6:19 Introducing the Taproot Wizards 12:00 Rejected From Bitcoin Conferences 17:17 Meme and Culture Layer of Bitcoin 23:55 Taproot Was a Trojan Horse 30:28 Are Ordinals Good For Bitcoin Bags? 35:11 How Ordinals Have Changed Public Perception 41:27 A Bitcoin Civil War 47:14 "We Broke Bitcoin" 53:42 Addressing Bitcoin Media  1:04:15 Are David and Ryan Bitcoiners? 1:05:27 Closing and Disclaimers ------ Resources: Nic Carter https://twitter.com/nic__carter  Eric Wall https://twitter.com/ercwl  Udi Wertheimer https://twitter.com/udiWertheimer  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Bankless Nation, it's time for state of the nation. We've got the topic that everyone is talking about right now. Who is in the Bitcoin driver's seat? Who's in charge of this thing right now? Who's running it, at least from a social layer perspective, of course. I know, David, Bitcoin runs itself, but there's been a disturbance in the force. This thing called Ordinals, it's consuming a lot of Bitcoin block space. And there seem to be some maybe social fracturing as a result. So what are we going to talk about today? we're going to talk about yeah who is in the cultural driver's seat over the bitcoin world uh bitcoin fundamentalist bitcoin maxi zealots i don't know what to call them but that camp we all know what they look like and sound like uh have been in control for a very long time until taproot comes in

until this ordinal's protocol and uh our three guests just got back from bitcoin 2023 uh and we want to ask them what they think about the current state of bitcoin uh there's a lot of questions to ask mainly my biggest question is why is the most viral thing out of Bitcoin 2023 a video of Eric Wall and Udi Wertheimer dressed up as wizards dancing on stage? I think that's the most important question of this podcast. But also, why are so many Bitcoiners upset by this? And so we're going to unpack all of these details about what's going on in Bitcoin Cultureland with three Taproot Wizards.

But first, before we get into that show, we have to talk about this thing called Diligence Fuzzing, which has nothing to do with Tap Roots Wizards, but is a similarly weird and funny name. What is diligence fuzzing for smart contracts, solidity devs, auditors, enterprises engaging in Web3 and need to ensure that their smart contracts are secure before going to main net. Diligence fuzzing is an auto-grade security tool that helps you and find all of your code vulnerabilities

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Go fuzz yourself. It's free fuzzing, as we said before as well. Free fuzzling tools here. All right, David, so who do we have on? And what side of the spectrum do our three guests take in this kind of, I guess, spectrum of full Bitcoin fundamentalism versus more open-minded bitcoiner? Do our guests all occupy the same side of the spectrum? How would you characterize them as we get into this?

Yeah, we have Eric Wall, Udi Werthheimer, and Nick Carter, who I'm going to ask them what they would call themselves other than Taproot Wizards, although Taproot Wizards is a great name, also call them Bitcoin builders, Bitcoin progressives, people that want to move Bitcoin forward instead of it being in the way that it is, at least with his culture. There's always nuances to pack apart with the people around Bitcoin versus the blockchain itself. But that is another topic of conversation that has floated to the top of crypto Twitter lately is the idea of a Bitcoin hard fork because the last time that there was a cultural division, there was a hard fork. And so people are thinking like, oh, cultural division, therefore hard fork. And so I want to ask that question as well. And so these are the, this is the context going into this. But mainly, I think the question is that you ask at the start, who's in the Bitcoin cultural driver's seat? I think this episode will be helpful for bankless listeners who are trying to predict where Bitcoin, goes next. I think it's been maybe one of the most interesting years for Bitcoin on record. And I feel more bullish on Bitcoin lately. And I'm not sure where that feeling's coming from.

But I hope we can find out through the course of this episode. Guys, we will be right back with our guests talking about who's in the driver's seat for Bitcoin. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our number one recommended exchange. They haven't failed us over 12 years and counting. It's Cracken. Go check them out. Cracken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry. The place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Cracken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real-time market data, and lightning fast trade execution. All inside their spiffy new modular interface.

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Wizards, Eric Wall, Nick Carter, and Udi Werthheimer. Eric Wall is a previously ostracized Bitcoiner and has recently entered the Bitcoin Citadel via the Taproot Trojan Horse committed to Bitcoin and sovereign technologies through the best and worst of times. Eric has recently begun seizing the current moment in Bitcoin's history to steer Bitcoin back into the best of times. He's also Taproot Wizard number two, a Bitcoin PFP project built on Ordinals Protocol. Eric, welcome back to Bankless. Thanks for having me on. Nick Carter is a partner at Castle Island Ventures and a longtime reoccurring bankless podcast guests.

And also writer on the bankless newsletter who like Eric Wall has also had his fair share of run-ins with the incumbent culture of Bitcoiners. Similarly, it has stayed steadfast in his support of the power and values that Bitcoin presents to the world, regardless of the massinations of the surrounding bees that buzz around in the Bitcoin space. And Nick is also taproot number three. Nick, welcome back to Bankless. Thank you. And thank you for making me your number one Bitcoin. guest on this show. Eric, you can't come back.

I heard your number two, so you actually have to leave. Thank you. And last but definitely not least, Udi Werthheimer is a perpetually beloved Bitcoin troll who was attempted to never say anything serious whatsoever on crypto Twitter, yet still manages to run circles around

the average Bitcoin fundamentalists, who are frequently left days and confused by the layers behind Udi's ship posting. Udi is also Taproot Wizard number one. Udi also welcome back to bankless. Pleasure to be here again. Great intro.

Guys, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. And I really just want to get this one, this big question kicked off. Nick, Eric Udi, in the Bitcoin world. Is there a new party arising, a new party in power? Udi, I'll start with you. I mean, we've always been there, you know? I think it's just like, I think people are just sick of everything else at this point. It's like it's been so long, man, of all of the.

macro podcast and just talking about how there is no second best. You know, you go to the top Bitcoin figures at this point and similarly to the way I used to be on Twitter, like if you look at their Twitter feed, it's all about Ethereum,

it's all about proof of stake, it's all about how NFTs suck, it's all about it. It's like, wait, you're not talking about Bitcoin at all. You don't have anything to say about Bitcoin at all. So, so yeah, we're just trying to you know, break the mold and as Bitcoiners talk about Bitcoin a little bit,

and some people seem to be driven, driven crazy by that. Eric, same question to you. What do you think about this shifting cultural ties in Bitcoinland? Yeah, no, I think that we've always been here. We've just started to find a way to express ourselves and to sort of find ourselves for the first time. So we've always been here. It's just now that we're sort of congregating

and make an expression in a statement. that we are bitcoinsers we're not we're not like ostracized bitcoinsers or old coiners we're just bitquiners and we you know belong under the same umbrella as other bitcoins who choose to express their interest in bitcoin differently so we're just bitcoins nick i recently learned that you actually observed bitcoin twenty twenty three from afar uh so what's your take on all the recent events and how would you just describe and characterize them yeah i mean i live here so I didn't really have a choice. Here is Miami. Yeah. So, I mean, I was physically near the venue. I did not go in the venue. I did pull out. I didn't want fruit to be thrown at me. You know, Eric and Udy seemed like really interested in that happening.

Honestly, I think it'd be good for their brand if it happened. There was no upside in me having tomatoes thrown at me or whatever. It's just, you know, not fun. So I want to clarify this, Nick. So you felt completely unwelcome. to even attend. And how many previous Bitcoin Miami events had you attended up to this point? Both, yeah, I think I spoke at both of the previous ones. I was due to speak at this one. And I didn't want to do anything silly like get armed security or whatever. You know, I think that's just really unnecessary. But so the risk wasn't worth it. I mean, there were actual threats. So I think you have to take that seriously, even if you think that they're idle. So, despite that, I think I'm the least ostracized of the three here. But I would echo what they said. I think there have always been moderates. The majority of people are moderates. I mean,

the fundamentalists, they're disproportionate in the discourse, but they are not actually the most numerous sect within Bitcoin. And I think people are tired of their schick. I think they had their moment in the sun from the sort of the clubhouse era to present. But a lot of what they said didn't happen. You know, we didn't have hyper-bitquinization. We didn't have some kind of Bitcoin rapture. Fiat didn't go to zero. Stock-to-flow model was fake. You know, everything that they promised was ended up being false. And people are now interested in new ideas. And they're interested in actually using the Bitcoin protocol again, which is nice. So, you know, some people actually want to transact with Bitcoin as opposed to just sort of jealous,

guarding their coins and looking at them. So, you know, thankfully, yeah, I think there is a breadth of pressure and both from the sort of developer side and the user side. So it's great. Wait, I want to be clear about this kind of this division in Rift. I thought it mainly occupied the digital realm. I thought it was like mainly like people on Twitter who were just like pissy and like, you know, Anons and who knows who they actually are. But I would characterize the three of you as like basically Bitcoin heroes. At least that's what appears to me. I'm a Bitcoiner, but I'm not sort of immersed in Bitcoin culture. I've not ever gone to a Bitcoin conference.

But like, Udi, Nick and Eric, well, that's true, David. But like the three of you guys seemed like a year ago, you would have spoken at one of these events without worrying about having fruit thrown into your armed security. How is it that you feel like you are no longer welcome? I'm curious, like Udi, you went there. Eric, you guys were on the ground. Like, was it tense?

I mean, what's going on? I got to say the, so it's funny, up to the conference, we did receive like multiple, like a lot, honestly, of, like, actual death threats online for people who said, like, there are people who, like, started Twitter accounts to, like, go and reply on, on tweets about us and say that, you know, they want to pay people to hunt us down. You know, there's, there's some crazy shit. And there's also been a lot of like very brave keyboard warriors after the conference. But at the conference itself, I didn't feel any of it at all whatsoever. So at the conference, we actually, when, you know, there's been a lot of controversy in the last few days about the debate that me and Eric participated in. But actually at the debate, at the audience, almost everyone was cheering and gentic for us. Like literally, I'm not even exaggerating.

People enjoyed it. It was fun. people had a good time. Of course, some people didn't like it, so I assume they didn't attend or they just sat there quietly. But there was no, you know, I didn't see any type of like violent or even, you know, unwelcome sort of attention. It was, for me, it was a very good experience. Yeah, and I can just echo that, that actually, surprisingly, it was one of the warmest events that I've ever been to.

there were a lot of people who were just very friendly and I just had a great time at the conference and I didn't, there were a lot of people that came up to me and told me why, and asked me why Udi is such a douche, douch bag. But that's pretty normal though. That's pretty normal. Yeah. They did that last year and the year before too. It's like, it's usual.

Pretty much. Okay. So I have a bonus pick with you guys though because the last time I did this conference, I got in this show, I got in so much trouble because I did one, I think, some. summer 2022 when I had a falling out with Maximilus in a big way at the time. And I said a now infamous phrase. I said something like my star will continue to rise. Do you remember this? I remember this. Oh, I remember this. I remember the song. I remember. Someone wrote a song about it. Someone got so mad they wrote a song. I didn't actually listen to the song. I trust that it's good,

but they hate that. However, arguably. They hate that you said that was on this was it. That was on That was a bankless show. Leaving the Bitcoin religion with Nick Carter. They hated the show. They hated the show. They already hate bankless. They hate watched the show. So they made them.

See some of these comments. 26,000 views. That's a good show. That's a great show. They hate watched bankless. We introduced some of bankless. They hated that they had to watch this show. And some of them are in the comments right now.

And then they. Yeah, then they say that my star has since fallen, which is false. To be clear, I want to correct the record on that. My star has indeed risen. Okay, has indeed risen. So the verdict is in the star rose. Okay, the star rose. Thank you.

Now they're going to screen cap this. Then they're going to another hate cycle. Then we'll have to do a third show. What do you want to say to the haters right now who are tuning in and watching, Nick? Why don't you just address them right now? I don't know. I don't you know welcome to bankless nation check out the sponsors

um do some fuzzling I don't know smart contract fuzzing I don't know check out Tapper Wizards it's a really great collection so there you go

that was probably the worst thing you guys did to Nick like before his episode you just showed the most horrible reel of ads right in front before Nick gets to speak I'm sick of the episode before it even starts. I know. It's perfect.

It's engineered to trigger fundamentalists. Wait, can we switch back to the, can we switch back to Nick's Tapper Wizard? I want to make sure everyone notice the most important part about it. Yeah, as long as we're showing you, Nick. It's the worst honorary. So it's this one number three. Yeah, it's Wizard number three. You can see that looks like Nick, but also you can see the rising star behind it.

notice that that is amazing wow that's me that has I really do appreciate that the meme and cultural layer on Bitcoin has been able to get really really nuanced yeah it's including with the help of these uh I don't even know how you want to call them the fundamentalists I have a bone to pick with whatever artists that you guys contracted to do these because the early honoraries are terrible the arts really bad. And then the later honoraries are incredible. Like,

it just gets better. Hayes is one. I don't know. Like, they're great. So the early ones suck. And so you're punished. I'm yet again punished by virtue of my friendship with Udi and Eric.

That only brings me pain. Only brings me pain. How much are these things going for it? Is anyone selling them? No one is willing to sell. I literally am not aware of any single person who was willing to sell. There wasn't. So I don't know.

I mean, they don't trade, right? They don't trade. All of them have been given away for free so far. Yeah. We don't know what the price is. Sure. Okay, so Eric Coody, like they're incredible. At the Bitcoin 2020 conference just now, despite the dominance that the

dominance that the Bitcoin Cyber Hornet seemed to have perceived to be dominating the Bitcoin sphere, y'all did a thing. which was you went on stage when you guys had your talk. And I want to ask about what you guys actually talked about. But before, you guys dressed up as wizards did a fortnight floss dance and then proceeded to have your guys' talk. And so, Eric, I want to just ask you about the thought process behind this decision to put on some wizard costumes and to go on stage. And what was the strategy here? I mean, it wasn't like some grand plan.

It was, I mean, of course, if we're the Taproot Wizards creators, of course we're going to wear a wizard costume when we go to the biggest Bitcoin conference. And then sort of on the way there, I just asked, like, I asked Udi if he wanted to floss. He said that he didn't know how. You can see on his dance that he has no idea what flossing is or how you're supposed to do it. All right, I'm going to play this. Oh, wow. It's the breaking Bitcoin.

Hey, you get some cheers, Udi. That's a good floss. That's a good floss. It's a good floss. I mean, the idea is, the problem with Bitcoin culture is that they, you know, what has been the problem with this conference and the sort of general attitude around is that people just take themselves way too seriously. So this is a way to sort of prove that we don't take ourselves seriously.

We're here to explore and fuck around. and improve the protocol by stress testing it, not by trying to pretend that this is like some perfect thing ordained by God or Satoshi or something like that. So it's just like, we got to be a bit more humble with ourselves because, I mean, we try to like make a Bitcoin, a nation state currency in El Salvador with lightning. And from all things that I've heard about sort of the lightning progress in El Salvador,

or it's not a huge success. Like even the people are trying to use it in a decentralized way, we need to be more humble with the actual state of some of these tools. We definitely need to be more humble

with sort of the user experience and the privacy of these tools. So I think Bitcoiners, we have a lot of more fucking around to do before we can sort of go on these stages and be like, we're saving the planet, we're saving children in Africa. There's a lot more to do here.

And I think, you know, Bitcoin is, bit of a clown show. A lot of bitcoins are clowns. So I think that me and Udi, usually there are clowns at the conference that are dressed like maxis. This is the first time that you have clowns actually dressed like clowns. I think, I think, you know, David, you mentioned like the cyber hornets before. And I learned to call them laser eyes, you know, because previously we called them Bitcoin Maximilist, but it turns out we talked about this before. It turns out they don't talk about Bitcoin at all.

Like these guys, they talk about Ethereum. They talk about how they hate like NFTs and how they hate DFI and how they hate exchanges like Binance, but they don't talk about Bitcoin at all. So why call them Bitcoin Maximilus? So we started calling them Laser Eye maximalists because that's physically what they look like, right? And we, the important point is that's not the majority of Bitcoins at all. Like the vast, vast majority of bitcoins, I mean, first of all, I consider you guys bitcoins like David and Ryan.

I consider you bitcoins. I don't know if you identify as bitconers, but I think you are. I think Vitalik Return is a is a Bitcoin. I think that a ton of people in the larger like crypto ecosystem are Bitcoins in the sense that they hold Bitcoin and they want Bitcoin to succeed. They're bullish on it, right? But no one can identify as a Bitcoiner anymore because what happened was there's this small like cult that took over the Bitcoin brand, essentially. And when when new people are coming into, you know, Twitter or online or what have you, and they look at like, what is Bitcoin, that's what they see. So they think that they represent it. And in reality, it's very small. Like there's like a few thousand people, really. They're not big at all. We assume that there's around 100 million Bitcoiners in the world. I think that's like the number that people are talking about. Even if that's off by like, you know, you know, tenfold. It's still much, much bigger than the few thousands of lazy. their eyes on Twitter. So it's just, it's just been captured. Like the discussion has been captured online,

but it is not reflective of anything. That spirit of, you know, fucking around and finding out, just testing things out, breaking things and seeing, you know, how they react and building from there, that has always been Bitcoin culture for at least since, you know, 2010 to 2018. That definitely has been Bitcoin culture. And somewhere along the way, it kind of got lost. But I think, you know, we're not in a state where we can stop doing. doing that, not at all, like not even close. So I think we kind of need to go back. It's a bit like, you know that Kanye West thing where he did and he went up stage and said,

Taylor, I'm going to let you finish. That's basically like Max, they're taking the microphone in the like, Bitcoiners, we're going to let you finish. But, you know, we haven't finished yet. We haven't finished at all with what we want to do with Bitcoin. So Eric, this is why I described this as Tapper. And I know this from your memes, actually. so this is credit to you is that taproot was a Trojan horse.

And it's allowed Bitcoin to do things that previously, like Taproot, I heard about taproot just because like my friend, C.K. at Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin Media and just a number other like close to being laser-eyed Bitcoiners were like Taproot, taproot, taproot. And then now it turns out Taproot allows for these things called ordinals that allows for JPEGs on Bitcoin. That allows for Bitcoin to have chain fees. that allows a certain, previously censored, previously oppressed culture of Bitcoin to like have foundation, have like scaffolding to, and like market validation that there are these silent majority of Bitcoiners that are allowed to like kind of say, hey, get out of the

driver's seat. Like we're taking over now. And so I'm just asking for your reflections on that, Eric, but also like, where do you think this goes from here? Like, is this like how big of a tap route, how big of a moment is tap? in Bitcoin history. So taproot is a marginal, just a margin. It makes it marginally more easy to fuck around with the Bitcoin protocol, not by a lot,

but it has shown that it was just enough to sort of get us across the hurdle and make it just easy enough for people to actually start to fuck around with Bitcoin. I think it's, I think it's probably the beginning of something pretty big, like the genie is sort of out of the bottle. once you have proven that, yeah, you can take the Bitcoin block space and you can do more fun things with it. Even if you try to put the genie back in the bottle, Andrew Polstra, for example, who's one of the inventors of Taproot, says that it doesn't really make that much sense to try to block this at the technical level because they will just figure out even more inefficient ways to sort of embed data in public keys and stuff like that. So it's a game that you will sort of lose from the start. It is a little bit frightening.

Like I've tried, the one point that I sort of want to make against this direction that we're going in is that I do have a deep appreciation for the fact that Bitcoin and Ethereum are very different systems. And that's good because if Ethereum fails in a particular way, then maybe Bitcoin survives. If Bitcoin fails in a particular way, then maybe Ethereum survives. If the two systems are very similar to each other, then that gives us more of a mutual attack surface. So, you know, we weren't, I mean, it wasn't me and Udi that made Taproot happen. It was the Bitcoin maximalists. Now we're just here trying to, you know, deal with the situation.

And I think the best way to deal with the situation is by fucking around with the protocol as much as possible so that we discover what actual situation are. we actually in. I don't think, you know, even though despite Udi being a Mossad agent, I don't think that we are doing something. I mean, Bitcoin should be resistant to Mossad agents like me. Like it should be fine, even if I am. Yeah. And I mean, the important thing to remember is there's nothing outside of the protocol rules that is happening here. Everyone is still constrained by the same four megabyte limit. It's just sort of a theoretical limit before and now it's a very practical limit as we figured out how to stuff more data into Bitcoin blocks. Nothing has fundamentally changed

with Bitcoin. People were inscribing data into Bitcoin arbitrary data from literally the first block. It's in the first block, right? So can I ask the question, Nick? Here's why I still don't understand. It's like, so why is everyone so, not everyone, why are the fundamentalists so upset about this? Right. It's like one thing I picked up actually from you. I give you a massive amount of credit for this. And so I was kind of understanding blockchain systems and the economics behind them of your emphasis on settlement assurances, right? And the value of a block space just in general. And it seems like ordinals and taproot and everything that it's unlocked has been a revenue generator, a value generator for Bitcoin block space, right? And it does seem like this is a

fair, efficient market. Like who gets Bitcoin block space, the highest bidder? It's the free market kind of, like this is libertarian ethos type stuff. I don't understand. Why are people so, why are some fundamentalists so pissed off about the use cases that are happening as a result of the free market right now? Well, first of all, because they don't believe in free markets. And they're not Austrians. They're not libertarians anymore, actually.

So any free market style bitconer would acknowledge that it's an open protocol anybody can bid for the box space and anyone can be included. And that means you have to accept all types of transactions is valid. Bitcoin fundamentalists have a different teleology. Tealology meaning sort of the purpose of the thing, right? So the telos of this chair is to be sat on. The telos of Bitcoin to them is to mediate monetary transactions exclusively with a preference for the global South, right, for the underserved globally that sort of need, you know, a hard monetary asset, right? To them, they see things through the lens of sacred and profane. So it's sacred for a Salvadorian to transact with Bitcoin to escape, you know, whatever authoritarianism or to

buy coffee or whatever it is. It's profane to use Bitcoin to settle a JPEG transaction. So, So it's not about Bitcoin having sustainability or accreting a vibrant fee market to them. It's about what's profane and it's about what's sacred. And what Udi and Eric are doing is profaning the Bitcoin system by forcing bullnodes to incorporate their JPEGs. Because NFTs under Bitcoin maximalist dogma, they are not an acceptable thing. as our tokens like BRC20s, you know, they're all unregistered securities, right? So that's the problem is that they don't care about the long-term longevity of the protocol. They just simply care that it's being used for the right things.

So they just have different teleology. But Nick, even if it's good for their bags, like even if ordnals and tapro is kind of good for its bags. So one thing I've learned about sort of the crypto community and certainly the Bitcoin community is number go up, right? Number go up good. can you make the case that like ordinals and all of the consumption it's going on to Bitcoin block space is actually good for the price of Bitcoin, certainly good for the economic security of Bitcoin. Do they not respond to that argument? They literally barely own any Bitcoin.

Well, that's true, especially the newer ones. They've only ever lost money with Bitcoin. They see Bitcoin as something that you donate to, like a tithe, basically. Like it's your religious duty to put a portion of your pay. check into Bitcoin. They've never made any money doing that because it's always sold off if you DCA into Bitcoin starting in 2021 to present day you'll actually lost money. So they see it more as an obligation to convert your savings into Bitcoin. They're not actually in pursuit of wealth, right? So as a religion, there's an ascitism to it, right? It's a religion that emphasizes is privation. It's not a religion that actually, you know, is like a pursuit of lucre.

There's no, it's not actually a financial motive. It's a spiritual motive. And also there, I mean, we have, there is also a very strong like just social and cultural element to this that sort of shape the arguments. Because when people were talking about Taproot in the beginning, when people were thinking about sort of the actual intended use case for Taproot was to use something that's called Merkleized Abstract Syntax Trees, which allows you to do a little bit more flexible smart contracts with Bitcoin. You can configure more spending paths for Bitcoin. And that was celebrated. You know, you had people saying what we're going to do with TapRood is going to blow your mind. Ethereum is going to get

blown out of the water because we're going to be able to do smart contracts on Bitcoin now. So when that was the narrative pushed by the right cohort of Bitcoins, that was the opposite opposite of profane, then that was sacred. Now, because it's sort of me and Udi and other sort of, you know, outcasts and degenerates, then it's a bad thing. So, you know, you can contrive any technical explanation for why something is good or why something is bad, but your starting point usually just comes from your gut feeling whether or not, whether you like it or not. Like if you take this is going to be like maybe a take that's sort of out there, but if you look like other sociopolitical issues, in society, like are you for or against immigration? Many times it sort of has to do what do I think about sort of the cultural impact of immigration, but then the debate always becomes about sort of financial, like what does this mean for the financial strength of our economy in our country? But if the immigration that we're coming is sort of where people that they like, then it's

good. So people will make up arguments for why something is good and bad on a sort of factual, objective, technical level, but where and how they contrive those arguments and where they ultimately end up sort of has to do with, do I want Bitcoin to be a place where Udi and Eric gets to fuck around? No, if your answer is no, then you don't like ordinals. And then you will listen to people who tell you why it's bad. So it's just like it's a power struggle between different cohorts of Bitcoiners. The reason that they don't like ordinals, many of them just has to do with it.

They don't like me and Udi and sort of the community of Bitcoiners we represent because we... Which is understandable, by the way. That is one thing I do understand. You guys are very disagreeable and frankly, very annoying. Yeah. But NFTs are perceived as an Ethereum thing. They're perceived as a shit-coiner thing, right? So it's the ordinals are created by the other and they're not being created by the income.

Lightning Labs just introduced taproot assets, right? it's also a protocol for creating NFTs and for creating BRC 20 tokens. It's still bringing tokens. It's still bringing tokens. If your concern is about speculation and and keep trading, that happens through Lightning's Lab Taproot Assets protocol. Now, the argument will be like, no, but that's actually okay because it's a slightly more, a slightly more efficient protocol. But that's also funny because if you're saying that you want a very efficient protocol for shitcoin trading, you're basically saying that I want the protocol to allow more tokens to be created, not less. At least, you know, the BRC20s, there's a limit to how many of them you can create.

So maybe that would be a good thing. Like, you can always twist and turn these arguments however you want. Nick, I'm wondering from your vantage at Castle Island Ventures and also just your, a, deep understanding of the nature of the Bitcoin blockchain and also your connections to the outside world that you get from just your relationships in the space. How has this changed people's perception of Bitcoin from the outside? Like, what's the deal flow like? What's the outside perception?

Is it changing? Is there any sort of perspective that you can offer there? Yeah, I mean, from the outside, I'm seeing for the first time, venture firms that would never have looked at Bitcoin or now looking at it as an investable, like domicile for startups, basically. Generalist venture firms, not even crypto firms that did a lot of crypto stuff, no Bitcoin stuff. And now they're looking at Bitcoin.

That's happening. generalist firms that have never done a Bitcoin deal ever. They realize that there's a whole new terrain here upon which meaningful value accretive companies can be built. And they see an influx of new developers. And developers are the lifeblood of startups, right? And I think that's a very meaningful phenomenon. I see developers that cut their teeth in Ethereum. So their whole career is there. Now looking at Bitcoin, hey, this is an interesting place to do things. It's a different properties that Ethereum has, or any other, you know, any other L1 blockchain. So it has created a flood of new enthusiasm. And I think you'll see many more financing happening in the Bitcoin

space than you saw in years prior. To a certain extent, Lightning did that. I mean, a lot of people thought Lightning would be this unlock for an application layer on Bitcoin. Arguably, that hasn't happened, right? It's still a very, very niche L2. But yes, from the allocated perspective, certainly caused even generalist firms to look at Bitcoin with a fresh set of eyes. And I think also a lot of people on the outside were fed up with the maximalist dominating the cultural terrain. And so they also think it's extremely good that this change is taking place. And also, Bitcoin, like Bitcoin's long-term security looks better, right? the possibility for actual fee revenue on Bitcoin in the long term, it looks far more tractable now.

So it's good on all fronts. There's basically no downsides. Who would have thought that Michael Saylor is sort of the one that's understanding all of this. So he's the out of all the Bitcoin Maximus, Michael Saylor has triumphed and is now above all the other Maxis in this sort of intellectual hierarchy because he actually understands that this is a, a net good or is at least willing to explore the idea. The other ones are sort of so ingrained in their hate towards me and Udi that they just, they will not entertain, you know, any, any reason for why this could be good. But Michael Saylor is like, perhaps he's a little bit above that. So he's like, hmm, okay, it increases revenue for miners. It makes Bitcoin more secure.

It makes it more investable. So that's pretty hilarious to say. So Saylor is saying these things now, and that's a departure from, like, Church of Maximilism canon. But, like, does he not just get decried and outcast and, like, the tomatoes hurled at him? How is it that he's saying something similar, but it's kind of above that? Can you explain that culturally? I think it's a super interesting thing. No, go ahead, Udi. I'm going to let you in. I think a lot of the laser eyes don't know what Bitcoin was like before Sailor acquired some, like they were not around. And everything they know about Bitcoin essentially came from Sailor's mouth, which is actually, I mean, I think that that's kind of impressive that he achieved that.

I think Sailor has been very good at kind of repackaging a lot of the discussion in the kind of Bitcoin Twitter sphere. and making it more accessible for a lot of people. So I think that a lot of people, when they hear him say those kind of things, they're like, okay, if he says so, then it must be true. And that's it. A lot of those new kind of laser eyes, I don't think they've ever had an original thought about Bitcoin in their entire lives, to be honest.

It's so funny. They're not there yet. And to be fair, though, look, they're really new. Like, I didn't dare to have any, like, you know, out of consensus. thought about Bitcoin in my first two years of Bitcoin. Literally, I felt like I know nothing and I need to learn more before I even open my mouth. And I think a lot of people are in that situation, which is kind of normal. The other reason is that people listen to him because he's sort of a designated truth teller.

So in the ecumenical analogy, right, he is the conduit from Satoshi's will to sort of like earthly people, right? He speaks the word of Bitcoin. And Catholicism, you know, the Pope is the ultimate conduit between God and Earth, right? Sailor is one of the sort of half dozen people that's allowed to convey new intent from our Lord and Savior Satoshi to the Plex. And so no one will listen to Udi and Eric. None of the, you know, avowed, you know, dogmatic maximalists. They won't listen to them because they're not the approved messengers of God's will, Satoshi's will, sorry.

but Sailor is. So he's an acceptable place to get that message from. So when he says that they actually have to listen. Nick has the great comparisons to religion. Like what's the word you usually use eschatologism? Yeah, eschatology. Yeah, it's the doomsday cult. I mean, there's no analogy to religion.

It just plainly is a secular religion. It literally is. It has all the trappings of religion. It actually is. When you remove God from your life, you have a God-shaped hole. you have to fill it with a new religion. For these people, that's what Bitcoin is. It is an incredibly interesting data point.

David, you ask me, like, where do I think this whole thing is going? And I think if we compare this, you know, I really don't want to call this a civil war. I don't, you know, we're not, like, I'm definitely not trying to, like, create a fork in Bitcoin and have these communities split off or anything. We're working sort of within the confines of the protocol. we want Bitcoin to be easy to sync on full nodes. And one of the sort of counterintuitive things is that the more we fill Bitcoin with JPEGs, the easier it is to validate the node because it's just raw data blobs.

Like we have no, we don't actually have like similar opinions as some of the previous big blockers that just wanted to throw away full node validation in favor of, you know, more data on the blockchain. We're not saying more data on the blockchain. We're saying free market for competing for that block space. And that sailor is sort of very much on the side of ordinals is an extremely interesting data point because it sort of shows you that you cannot draw clear battle lines in this divide. This is why there cannot be like a clean conflict between the laser eyes and the wizards because there are wizards inside the laser eye maxis and there are some laser eye maxis. since like we're a it's a much more diffuse and mixed battle area, which is why I think there's not

going to be like a civil war or a rift. We're not going to throw out them. They're not going to throw us. There is no us and them. It's just Bitcoin, being a bitconer is evolving to incorporate more ideas. And that is sort of the whole point of why we're doing this. Yeah. And I really want to double down on this point because there are murmurings out there in the, the

rumor mills like, oh, there's a civil war coming. The last time there's a civil war in Bitcoin. at hard forked by Bitcoin because then you can double your Bitcoins. And so I really just want to drive this point home that this is not like the Civil War of 2017 where there was a fundamental fight over how the Bitcoin, what the Bitcoin protocol ought to be. This is more of just a cultural war over the brand of Bitcoin, right? Can you just drive this point home for us, Eric?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, so there is no war in the same. sense that we want to fork off and have our different chains. But it is like a war of what is allowed, what are, what opinions are you allowed to have? What is actually like what is a bitcoiner really? And we think that a bitconer is someone who wants Bitcoin to be successful, but you don't have to have uniform ideas about what that path looks like. But what's very different from like previous conflicts is that we don't want to throw out decentralizations. We actually of all of us on the both me and nick and udi we started out as bitcoin maximalists we were bitcoin maximalist because we want the centralized hard money to become successful it's just that lately

the sort of small blocker camp and the religion that they created hasn't really been conductive to to that success so we're it's time to sort of experiment with different ways of achieving that goal we're not saying that one way is right and the other one is 100% incorrect. We're just saying, let's widen the dialogue. Let's have more open dialogues because we can't just go narrowly in one direction. Do you two, do you both agree with this? This will not cause a hard fork. This is kind of a social rift. What do you think, Nick? Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, the notion of fork-based governance is completely discredited. I mean, has there ever been a successful fork ever, you know, where it cleanly split a community in half? No, right? The big

blocks forks were irrelevant ultimately, right? I've never seen an example of a community actually being riven by a fork meaningfully. Nobody's trying to change the protocol. The protocol changed, and it just so happened to accommodate more interesting ways to transact on Bitcoin. Would you say, Nick, it's even hard to know. Like, so if you were a Bitcoin fundamentalist, like a Bitcoin maximus, how would you actually, what code changes would you make in your forked version of Bitcoin to, like, prohibit something like ordinals? It's unclear that you could even do that.

Yeah. As Eric said, you could try and bar the inscriptions transaction type. But again, I mean, people now have this bug in them where they want to take advantage of Bitcoin's permanence and high quality assurances as to the longevity of the data. the fact that the throughput is limited. It gives you very strong assurances about the future availability of that data, right? So it's not just settlement assurances. It's assurances of persistence.

So people want to take advantage of that. So they'll find a way to do it. And people have been embedding arbitrary data in Bitcoin forever, whether it's operaturn, whether it's malformed signatures, public keys. If you remember, the Aski Bernanke in 2011, you know, that was, I think I was done with public keys, if I'm not mistaken. You're talking about a large database. There's numerous ways to insert data into that.

And there's no way to prohibit it. So it's a totally a losing battle. And at this point, the notion of ordinals and inscriptions is so widespread. Even within the fundamentalist camp, a lot of people acknowledge the usefulness of it. And so there's just no way to strip it out, unfortunately. If it is an open protocol where anyone can transact, people will find a way to insert arbitrary non-economic data if they want to. What would you add to this, Udi? You know, it's a couple of weeks ago, we had the space, where it's tourist space that we titled, we broke Bitcoin.

Me and Eric went there and kind of blew up, went kind of viral. And we talked about, it was actually kind of funny. It was mostly parody. Like we just talked about the entire time about how we, because at the time, the fees on Bitcoin were going wild. And we were talking about how because of us, you know, Bitcoin is broken, doesn't work anymore. People in El Salvador can afford lunch because the fees are so high.

It was a joke. And people got really mad that we said we broke Bitcoin. How can, you know, there are two camps, One camp was like, how can they possibly say that they broke Bitcoin? That's, you know, they never broke Bitcoin. They cannot possibly broke Bitcoin. And then there was the other camp that was really pissed off because they said, why did they break Bitcoin? How can they do this to us?

Because of them, Bitcoin is never broken. So it was a very interesting two camps who were like, well, you can't break Bitcoin. Bitcoin is invincible. And then there's this other camp. It was like, how could you do this to Bitcoin? You hate it? Why did you do this to us? So that was very interesting.

I think that Bitcoin is really, and this is something that I've talked about years ago, I think Bitcoin is a social system. The nodes are there to automate or to coordinate between social participants, but it is, at the end of the day, a social phenomenon. And what human beings do matter. It's not just code that runs on computers and humans. don't interfere. It's actually the other way around. It's a system of humans and the code can help automate it just like any other type of software in the world. You know, like TikTok is not a software. It's people and the software helps facilitate the communication between them.

And that's why I think when we say we broke Bitcoin, I think we kind of did. I think we broke the culture in a way. And The Bitcoin community still functions just like he did before. I think most Bitcoiners are probably not even aware that there's an Ornals debate going on. They're probably going about their lives normally. They don't look at Twitter. They don't go to conferences. They don't listen to podcasts.

They have some Bitcoin cold storage and they don't care at all. But the small fraction of the community is online and is tracking those things, I do think it broke. That's honestly that happened. I think you cannot ignore it. And you look at how furious people are about this. They cannot stop talking about two people in wizard costumes on stage for like a week. They cannot stop talking about, you know, fees going high, even though they wanted the fees to go high, you know.

They just can't stop talking about. I think something did break. And I think that I think it's positive. I think that it needed to break. I think there was this kind of fake gatekeeping habit. that was, you know, stopping the block space for reaching its, you know, market, free market optimum and other types of innovation too. And I think that what a lot of people are realizing now, and I think that's why a lot of people are so mad is that I think they realize that the conversation

is about to change. It's not really about me and Eric. Like there's, there's so many builders that are getting into the space now. And people who have been just sitting around talking about how beautiful the Bitcoin logo is and how great steak is and how you shouldn't eat vegetables. These people are just going to find themselves sideline because their conversations are not going to be interesting anymore because there's going to be a lot of interesting things coming to Bitcoin very soon. So I think that's why they're so afraid and so upset because they know they're not going to be able to compete in that landscape anymore. And honestly, that's a frightening thought. It's not about Bitcoin. It's not about their will for the number to go up. It never has been. They honestly,

I truly believe that. I think most of them do not own a lot of Bitcoin. You know, when they say that they want Bitcoin to develop slowly, they mean it. They need time in order to accumulate. They don't own a lot of it. And I think they're truly upset. I think they're seeing that all this interest coming into Bitcoin. I think they're seeing a lot of OGs are coming back.

They're seeing a lot of new people are coming into Bitcoin instead of other chains. And they know they can compete. So I understand, but I cannot be their therapist. Unfortunately, I'm too busy. So I hope they'll find someone else to take care of those concerns for them. Yeah, if I can chime in there. I think that's an excellent point, Udi. Basically, for the last two to three years,

you could distinguish yourself within the Bitcoin community just by effectively preaching. So you could distinguish yourself as a non-technical person, non-builder, with no credentials or anything, just by preaching loudly on Clubhouse and Twitter spaces about how the world was heading for some sort of fiat apocalypse and how the Bitcoin was going to be the chosen people. So if you just talked about sort of the monetary virtues of Bitcoin, nonstop, you could become sort of a leading voice in Bitcoin. Now with new interest, new things, new structures being built on Bitcoin, new ways to use it, L2s, ordinals. To distinguish yourself, you actually need

to build something, right? All three of us are builders on this call, right? Entrepreneurs, investors. So to be relevant on a go-forward basis, you actually need to do something, right? You can't just talk. You can't just have a podcast and a newsletter. And so what we're seeing, the consternation we're seeing with the maximalist or fundamentalists is they're reckoning with their loss of clout. They know that they're not going to be relevant because merely preaching about how Bitcoin is a CDS on Fiat and Fiat's going to zero and Bitcoin's going to a zillion.

no one's going to care anymore. We know that's not true. And to be relevant in Bitcoin, you have to do something important. And they're not capable of doing that. They're only capable of talking. Yeah, I really like this conversation. Because Udi said the conversation is shifting and everyone knows it. And Nick, you're talking about in order to be a Bitcoin leader, you now have to be a Bitcoin builder.

There's another player in this story that we haven't brought up yet, which is Bitcoin Media, who are the organizers of Bitcoin 2023. and my beloved previous co-host, CK, over at the POV Cryptopod, is a leader there. And so I always think it's funny that CK went off to Bitcoin Media. I went off to bankless and now we are like the respective spokes, spokes orgs of our respective organizations. And understanding the business model of a media company, NFTs as a vertical has been great for content.

Surface area for content has been beautiful. Ethereum because of the smart contract layer of Ethereum that it provides. It provides conversational surface area. And so that in of itself is good for media. It is good for conversation. It's conversational scaffolding. And so now like when I see these ordinals protocols and these BRC20s, understanding that Bitcoin media as a media company needs to make content and needs to have that content be consumed, something like ordinals and something like token. Like token. and all the drama that it comes with is aligned in their business models of they need people to watch their stuff. And so I am bullish on Bitcoin media. And you can see this

division play out because a lot of the Bitcoin Cyber Hornets are very upset that Bitcoin media would even dare to allow the likes of Udi and Eric on stage in wizard costumes. Yet it is the thing that is actually going to be good for their business. And so I like to, if, anyone wants to reflect on this like the player that is Bitcoin media's role in this whole ecosystem. I think that is a very important part of the story. Eric, do you have any thoughts on this one? I just want to give a shout out to, you know, Bitcoin magazine, Pitrizzo. I think that it was it was brave what they did.

They knew that sort of this incumbent and loudest community that they had been catering to for years were violently against ordinances to the point where they were making violent threats. I personally don't care so much about the violent threats because of Mark Carpellus. Everyone said that Mark Carpellus was going to get killed, and then the only thing the Bitcoiners actually did was standing with a sign in front of him saying, you know, saying, where's our money, man? So I've never, you know, the only people who are actually violent in crypto that I've seen are sort of the outside criminal organizations who kidnap us and hit us,

but I've never seen like in internal crypto violence yet. So until I see that, you know, I'm not that word. But yeah, I want to do, I do think it was sort of brave of them because like this is the biggest Bitcoin conference. This is a super important organization for Bitcoin's culture. And Pete Rizzo is a Bitcoin maximum himself. That's sort of where he has all his own personal cloud. So to sort of go against the grain and create an ordinance track,

like at the conference they were actually, like they had a wall where they had all the most notable ordinal inscriptions one by one after each other with a Taproot Wizard, one being the number two, of course. I just think that it was pretty brave for them to do that. And you know, here goes to them. Yeah. When the history books are written, there's really two events that broke the spirit of the anti-ordinals, anti-inscriptions people. One is Sailor speaking intelligently about it, and the other is Bitcoin Magazine, releasing their ordinals collection and maintaining a more moderate stance in terms of the speakers at the conference. We actually saw a lot of the hardliner Bitcoin maximalists sort of pull out of the conference, disavow. I don't know exactly

what happened with your debate. I think people pulled out of the debate. on the fundamentalist side. So they were brave. And they went against the grain. They fired their most hardcore fans, basically, and deliberately picked a more moderate stance. So I echo that. I applaud them for what they did.

Yeah, same. Absolutely. It wasn't completely expected. And it is a big risk when they're in. And I think it's paying off now. So that's like really amazing. I do want to say that like, you know, David, you mentioned like,

this similarity between, you know, you on bankless and then there's Bitcoin magazine on the Bitcoin side. I think it's a little different, though. You know, in Ethereum, you have this very rich ecosystem of a lot of things going on and media is part of it. In the Bitcoin side, you only have Bitcoin media and you don't have anything else. There's nothing else. There's maybe mining companies. So those may be out of the, and they're very quiet, like intentionally. So there's just nothing else. So the Bitcoin media ecosystem, system is very, very different than what you would find in the rest of crypto, because it is literally the only thing the Bitcoin industry kind of has to say for itself. There's a lot of Bitcoin

companies that claim that there are startups, but they're just hiding in a startup. They're actually just media companies. They don't do anything else. They're not tech startups startups. And that's, you know, that's part of the unhealthy, unhealthy environment of Bitcoin is in. Like, it's very hard to be a media organization where there's literally nothing to report on except other media organizations. That's a very confusing situation to be in. And hopefully, you know, hopefully they'll find that it gets better for them too. Like I think that I don't mean Bitcoin magazine specifically.

I think Bitcoin magazine is kind of pioneering that. But the rest of the Bitcoin media companies, I think they'll. find that this is, even though right now they're kind of kicking and screaming, I think they'll find out that this is actually good for them. They're going to have a lot more things to talk about. I would expect that some of them are going to issue ordinal's collections eventually, you know, they kind of don't want to talk about it right now, but eventually they'll find that it's probably a good revenue stream. And they'll just have more things to report on. And, you know, it's really hard for me when I try to think, like, who is this actually bad for? It's really hard to come up with

anyone except for those influencers were just not going to be relevant anymore. But other than them, it's really bad for everyone. Sorry, it's great for everyone. You know, if you're a software developer, you're a Bitcoin protocol developer, for example, and you don't care about owner-olds, you don't want to own NFTs, you don't want

to trade them, it is still good for you because now there's going to be lucrative employment opportunities for you with commercial companies that actually, you know, actually have revenue and doing, you know, have real business. And you're going to you're going to be able to employ your unique Bitcoin Protocol skills doing that.

You're probably going to have way above average salary for the first time in your life, just like Ethereum developers have for many years because it's finally going to be in demand. And then if you want to be, you know, an open source nonprofit developer in the future, that's great. So hone your skill in one of those commercial opportunities. And then you can go and be an open source developer for, you know, whatever open, source projects you want. So it's just good for everyone. It's really very hard to find someone who wouldn't like it, like it unless you're just a podcaster who really doesn't understand any

of this. That's something that might be kind of concerning. Well, this is what I. Sorry, it sounds like from what you're saying that it's a profit-motivated decision for Bitcoin magazine to support an ordernals track. And maybe that should be the lens that we observe any company's choices from. But is that the whole thing? Like they're just trying to make money because then I can easily see it from the Bitcoiner side that, I mean, it becomes sort of a sellout thing. Like yeah, they're supporting ordinals because it's a profit generator.

But in order to support it, like shouldn't it be also like a cultural thing, not only a financial thing that motivates the decision for it to be the right decision? I think the reason that it becomes a profitable decision to make is because there's a cultural movement, right? Because the culture supports this, because the culture clearly wants this, hey, look on chain right now. Most of the transactions for many of the blocks recently have been Ordinals related, you know? So like clearly Bitcoin users want this. Literally the majority of Bitcoin users, that's what they do. So, you know, the culture is there. And I think that's why people see that this is a profitable thing now. And still, like being the first

kind of domino to fall, I mean, you and I, Eric, we know how risky and just uncomfortable and inconvenient it is because you do it first, even if you know that the majority of the culture is on your side, even if you know that it should be a profitable decision, you're still going to have the hardliner extremist laser eyes going after you. And for a lot of people, that's an inconvenient situation to be in. And I assume that for many of the Bitcoin media companies, they also have a lot of internal pressure about this kind of stuff. So even, you know, if you were running a Bitcoin blog and you were the CEO and you have like five employees, like three of them hate this and you know that this is the right move.

What are you going to do? Are you going to fire them and get like it's it's a difficult situation, I think, for many of them? And I think it's very impressive. The Bitcoin magazine took a bet early and it's very cool to see that it's paying off. Yeah, there's definitely a few markets at play. One is the economic market, of course, but the other is sort of the truth market, right? And you guys have been talking about Bitcoin as a social system as well. And the truth is everyone who calls themselves a Bitcoiner gets to decide what operating system,

what version of the software they run in their own brains. Are they going to run Bitcoin fundamentalism? Or are they going to run a more moderate Bitcoin position? That's why I think that the influence of the three of you in pushing Bitcoin media and Sailor to a more moderate Bitcoin position, that's got to be, at least from where I'm staying, that's got to be the position that wins out over time, the economics of it, the builder of it, but just the straight kind of truth and logic of it, it just seems to make much more sense from a Bitcoin network perspective. And I will say this. I know, Udi, you asked whether

David and myself, whether we consider ourselves Bitcoiners. Well, I'll answer on behalf of David, too, because I think we've talked about this before, but we do. But it's been harder. in recent days, I'll say the past year and a half, 18 months, 24 months to actually say that publicly. It's like if I were to say there was a time 2018, no one cared if I called myself a Bitcoins. But, you know, if I called myself a Bitcoinser in like 2022, you're not a Bitcoiner. You're a shit coiner. The bankless podcast is like, no, I actually like Bitcoin was my first asset. I've never sold a Bitcoin that I have. Like, it's just Bitcoin is the reason I'm here. like I'm a Bitcoinser.

And so what I really appreciate in the work that you guys are doing on the social layer, it's kind of a reprogramming of the social layers, I feel much more at ease calling myself and labeling myself Bitcoiner. And so you'll lose some fundamentalists along the way, but I think you'll broaden the tent in a way that is actually good for this movement that we all call Bitcoin. So I appreciate the work you guys are doing. And thanks for explaining this undertaking to the bankless community,

Udi, Nick, and Eric's been a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much, guys. Yeah, thanks. This will great. Got to end with this. Risk and disclaimers, of course, none of this has been financial advice, never is on bankless. Bitcoin's risky, so is crypto. So are ordinals.

What the hell. So is attending a conference? God, I had no idea. You can definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

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and compensation platform for the crypto industry that makes this easy. Toku helps you hire employees or contractors and pay them in fiat or crypto legally, compliantly, and with all the taxes handled in over 100 different jurisdictions. So whether you're an early stage company with just a team of two or you're an enterprise with 200, Toku has a solution that meets your needs. Toku is already working with the leading companies in the space, Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So transform your employment and token payroll operations with Toku.

You can reach out to Toku at Toku.com slash banklists or click the link in the show notes. Introducing ETHX from Stater. ETHX is a liquid staking token designed to maximize rewards, all while securing Ethereum. With Stater, you can run an Ethereum node with just 4Eth, an 85% lower capital requirement versus the 32Eth required for

solo stake. With Staters for ETH nodes, you can get a 35% average higher yield, since you charge fees to those who use your node to stake their ETH. By running a node with Stater, the ETHX staking derivative token can get minted on your validators and can flow into the world of DFI, which Stater is actively building integrations and partnerships into to increase the utility of ETHX. Stater allows for both permissioned and permissionless nodes to join the network, maximizing its potential scalability for ETHX, while preserving the values of decentralization and openness by behind its liquid staking token. Go to staterlabs.com slash eith and sign up to get access to the stator staking protocol.

Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home. Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralized. of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM-compatible.

On Arbitrum, both builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitram Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit Arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. Thank you.