BTC Sessions - From ETH Pleb To Bitcoin Maximalist: Tony Cai

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

For this conversation I sat down with Tony Cai from Atomic Finance to discuss his transition from Ethereum to Bitcoin maximalist, the craziness and unsustainability of DeFi, whether or not NFTs make sense, and much more. Follow Tony and Atomic Finance on twitter: https://twitter.com/TonyCai_ https://twitter.com/AtomicFinance My article on Bitcoin maximalism: https://medium.com/bull-bitcoin/my-path-to-bitcoin-maximalism-c77c53466cb5 SUPPORT THE SHOW: LEDN offers Bitcoin backed loans – Sign up and get $50 free https://bit.ly/2S1Sk1L Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Buy a Cobo Vault to secure your Bitcoin! https://bit.ly/2GgMFlH Cobo Vault Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnRjvZKulrA Crypto Cloaks: Get the BEST Bitcoin swag out there https://www.cryptocloaks.com/shop/ If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up, everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions. Today I'm going to be sitting down with Tony Kai. He is the co-founder and CEO at Atomic Finance, and they're working on building Bitcoin Native non-custodial finance. So the reason for this conversation is we got into a little bit of a Twitter back and forth in a thread, and Tony mentioned that he, he kind of went through the paces of shit coinery before coming to rest on Bitcoin only.

And I've heard a lot of this from a lot of different people. And even myself, I dabbled early on and then came to settle on specifically just Bitcoin. So we get talking into what were some of the things that kind of pushed him over the cusp to realize that Bitcoin was so important and kind of question the narratives of Ethereum, namely. a lot of other alt coins out there. We touch on things like NFTs. We touch on defy and kind of like the degeneracy of the gambling that's going on there. And we just kind of flesh out his position and kind of how he's come to get there. It was a nice fun, casual conversation.

So I hope you enjoy this chat with Tony Kai as this is the first of hopefully many episodes of Sips with Sessions. Hottle their Bitcoin. Now before we dive in, I want to give a shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a whole bunch of different services. The first thing I ever used them for was their Bitcoin backed loans. This is where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a Canadian or US dollar loan. So if you're in a pinch, you need dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin because, one, that's a taxable event. And two, you're worried about buying back in at a higher price point.

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So if you want a Kobo Tablet Plus, which is a steel seed plate that can store the backup to any wallet you have, all you have to do is get on Twitter, retweet the show, tag myself and Kobo, and just let us know why you want one. I'm going to be picking a winner for every show from now until the end of November. So be sure to hit me up there. And with that, let's dive into the interview. Okay, I think I am recording. I think I'm all good. How's it going, man? Not too bad. Not too bad. What about yourself, Ben? Pretty good, pretty good. So anybody watching? This is Tony, Tony Kai.

Welcome. Maybe drop a little bit about who you are, what you do. Yeah, sounds good. I mean, I always say that my co-founder, he's a big part of my background. He's actually has the most more interesting backstory, but for myself, like, basically, got into the crypto space, specifically the Bitcoin space, I guess, in 2017. So basically, my co-founder and I, we were studying at University of Waterloo, and basically what happened was he kept on bugging me about Bitcoin, Bitcoin. And then, like, that was right around the time where it was, like, the Segment 2x stuff. So I think there was that extra like attention in the space and so like that.

And so like for me, I was like actually funny enough like the the I remember the reason I was like, okay, this might be interesting was because he sold me and this proves like how far I've come. He was like, oh, if you like if you buy Bitcoin now before this date, you'll actually end up with two bitcoins because there will be a fork. And then, you know, and I was like, oh wow, does that mean I get like double the amount of money? So funny enough, that's how I got in. And then basically, you know, once I started getting my first little bit of Bitcoin on Coinbase, I really started getting into it. And full disclosure, I was kind of like back then, I was more of a Eifflop. So basically, I got into the space really like, I would say through EF and the reason because of that. We should preface this.

The reason initially when we got started. talking like we haven't really chatted before um but there was a thread i can't remember where the thread was based but basically uh it was along the lines of like we've all had our our dives through like you know shit cornery to get to uh to get to kind of like being solely focused on on bitcoin and you kind of said said that that was that was your path and like you know everybody kind of goes through that. I can't recall, do you recall what the, what the thread was exactly? Not exactly, but I think you got most of it there. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, like, I guess the, I mean, the main reason when I first message you, I was like, hey, let's talk about the, the shit coin journey

to the one and only Bitcoin. So, so I guess, yeah, keep, keep going through your, your genesis from Eithleb to Stephen Bitcoin Maximilist. Yeah, sounds good. So basically, yeah, so basically was an EVE pleb. And I think the reason that EF at that point for me was particularly interesting was I guess it was mostly because, you know, I came out of Waterloo. That was where Ritalik went. And then like also they had like a bunch of like Eve communities there. And then also the other thing was, you know, being someone who, you know, was in computer science at the time. You know, Eif, I guess like was quite easy for the average like development.

developer type to, especially like JavaScript developers to get into right off the bat. And like, you know, that's, I would say now that I've gone through it is a good thing and a bad thing. There's definitely both sides of the coin in terms of like the quality of developers that you can attract. But then, yeah, so I guess like, you know, that combined with the dev tooling that was available, the hackathons, you know, they made it seem super fun, super cool, you know. So it was attractive for like, you know, 20 year old Tony back in the day. And then like, that was how I got into Eiff. And then so I started working at consensus, actually. And then, you know, was working on some,

I would say fairly interesting stuff. Like I was working on a team called Open Law, which was basically allowing you to do legal contracts on Ethereum, which, you know, I love the team, but you know, I have interesting takes on what they're trying to do now. But yeah, so basically like after that, basically during that time working census, my co-founder Matt, he was also working in consensus.

And he basically began his slow transition into Bitcoin Maximilus, basically because he started working on atomic swaps. So basically he was working on this team called The Quality. They were doing cross-chain Bitcoin, Ethereum, Atomic Swaps. Really kind of started getting to the sound money aspect of things. And he started like trying to convince me to, well, read up more about sound money, reading stuff like Bitcoin standard and kind of educating myself more about Bitcoin.

Because, you know, to most, most eaths, and back then, and I think still today, most people see Bitcoin as just this very antiquated kind of thing that, like, allowed, ferved Ethereum. And now we have this much better kind of ecosystem on Ethereum. I think that's the take that I had back at that time, too. And so, yeah, we're going to. you came in from like a very, again, like I guess a very much like a developer technology based standpoint of what, you know, what can I build and make work not at all from a monetary

perspective, it seems like. And it wasn't until you started looking into money itself that you made this shift. Like do you think that's kind of like a, I mean, it's, it's tough to paint everybody with a single brush or with broad strokes. But like, do you think that's like a common thing with Ethereum developers where they're looking at it as, hey, technology, not money? Yes. I actually hit it right on the nail there. I think like that's, I think that's something that I've noticed, like,

kind of being in both camps, like what the pace, what the typical conversation topics go and where they go? basically like, you know, EF people, they tend to focus a lot more about what you can do with EVE and the tech itself and stuff like that. And, you know, Bitcoiners, it's the conversation is a lot more philosophical about like money, why Bitcoin is superior form of money. Of course, all that jazz. And so, yeah, I think that kind of difference dichotomy between like, you know, people focusing on the what in Ethereum and then the why in Bitcoin. I think that's something that's something, something I've definitely noticed kind of being in both camps.

Yeah. No, so were there certain things that kind of, were there like tipping points or things that you noticed that, that kind of tipped you further and further over the edge along the way? Like was there a certain, whether it be from like a, whether it be learning certain things or whether it be like limitations or or, you know, like what kind of started nudging you? You said your friend, obviously, but like technologically looking at it,

was there certain things that you were like, wait, what about this? Or what, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think there's, it was definitely not necessarily like a flip the switch kind of transition. I would say, you know, the thing that really did it for me was actually this latest craze of defy media and this, you know, speculation. You're not digging the food tokens or what? No, I'm not digging that. No, I mean, it's funny because like we could have it was probably, I mean, people have suggested to us as well.

Like that's something that we could have done, right? That like, like, Joe, doing a token on, on our product and stuff like that. But for us, like, it was, it's a number of things. I think, first of all, the, the way that the communities work themselves, I think there's a very big difference in the way they think about like how to develop products and things in general. For example, like high time preference versus low time preference, you know, development in ETH is very, tends to be very high time preference. And basically that kind of, that that's that really puts a number of things. There's tradeoffs with that kind of thinking. Like for example, you know, um, making decisions like launching a token, a yield

farming token that might incentivize like a bunch of growth. early on, but then like, you know, what the rampant patients are long term for the product or for the community, there's serious questions about that. And like, you know, for example, and another example might be that, you know, folks launching projects which eventually end up getting, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on it, but doing it without any sort of audits, which are, in my opinion, essential if you're wanting to build on Eath or stuff like that, right? And so, like, there's that and of course technologically like the security thing is always going to be a problem because you know even if you get like some of the best auditors to come out of your your product

and stuff like that you pay like hundreds of thousand dollars it's really tricky to catch all the possible errors out there because solidity and Ethereum it's just such there's just too many gotches out there and like Bitcoin like our first product where we kind of half built it we did a cross approach where we built half of it on Bitcoin and the other half on Ethereum, you know, we were like 99.9% sure that there was nothing wrong with the Bitcoin side of things, the Bitcoin script and stuff like that. It's just there's very limited set of possibilities that can even happen with the Bitcoin side. Ethereum, you know, we can never be so sure. It made it, it made us lose sleep, right? So yeah, I think that's what I would say about

the technological differences. But beyond that, I think like, you know, just, to touch on the defy mania i guess like you know overall i would say that um i would say that there has been like some value that has been created as a whole in terms of like you know some of the interesting innovations and you know the concept of oh like a decentralized uh back stable coin like in the form of die you know backed by the wrong asset but still kind of interesting right conceptually um and like you know there has been some interesting and useful innovation but then the issue is that you know the way that the the ecosystem has has developed you know doing these like you'll your farming stuff and it's really created a community of just

speculators and made it just for whales right it's it's it's a defy craze is really one that's dominated by whales that are shifting in and out of different pools and whatnot they're mostly zero-sum gains at the end of the day and you know I in my opinion they're just not really actually advancing the ecosystem as a whole forward so yeah that's kind of like some of the issues that we've been seeing on you. Yeah, so I was going to bring up, because you're talking about DFI being mainly speculators. There was a, this was today, I don't know if you saw this, I retweeted it because it was so stupid.

But anyways, Roger Verre tweeted out, having nearly 100x more Bitcoin wrapped for use on Ethereum than in the Lightning Network shows Lightning has been a total failure. for scaling Bitcoin. So I retweeted it and quoted and I said, today I learned that DGend gamblers using IOUs on a network with even higher transaction fees to yield farm food tokens

happened because people want a scaling solution other than lightning. Like it's, I don't know, like I find it, it's funny the whole wrap. Actually, you know what we could go? Let's go down the route

of like Bitcoin on name your shit coin, but I also want to go down the route of liquid. And the reason I want to touch on this, there's a bit, so like I have a little, like a small telegram group, and we just kind of,

it's just like we talk bullshit all the time. But so Blockstream dropped a wallet today for iOS called Aqua. And so it has Bitcoin. on it obviously. And then it has LBTC. So liquid Bitcoin. Those watching that don't know what the hell that is. It's like Bitcoin gets locked in more or less a multi-sig.

And the multi-sig is like, I think you need 11 of 15 to go rogue in order to screw you out of your Bitcoin. But those are like the federation members. And so that Bitcoin is locked in like a 15. part multi-sig between a bunch mostly exchanges and then there's a token issued one to one with bitcoin that has like confidential transactions and one-minute blocks and you know a couple other little features that some may use it was it was mainly uh at least initially kind of marketed as a inter-exchange settlement type deal where instead of exchanges having to go on-chain if they're already all part of like a liquid federation,

they could just back and forth that way, which sure, I don't mind that cutting down on blockchain congestion, especially like as it gets into a bull market. That's a nice thing to have. But this is, the new wallet is very much like a consumer-facing, like, hey, you can now load up your wallet with Bitcoin or LBT

or like these, like various, liquid-based stable coins or like token like there's some exchange tokens that are liquid-based on there like I like personally like the exchange tokens no like when I look at like a stable coin I'm like well obviously counterparty risk you can't really audit the dollars that are there in the bank account easily yourself but I mean dollars are already shit anyways so like I mean You know, there's counterparty risk with your bank account too, I suppose. So like, yeah, what's an extra layer of counterparty risk? I'm not going to dollars for safety anyways.

So it's just something I wouldn't use. Liquid Bitcoin to me, at least personally, with their model, it's kind of like an in-between. It's like not as bad as leaving your Bitcoin on a single exchange, but it is still custodial. it's still not Bitcoin. It's just you need 11 out of 15 entities to screw you to lose your Bitcoin instead of just one. So it's like it's like better than trusting a centralized third party, but it's a low bar. It's kind of my take.

Like so what's what's your take on I guess liquid Bitcoin and then maybe let's like wrap Bitcoin where it's basically just like, Bitgo custodying Bitcoin and you've got like tokens that are issued and then there's others maybe I don't know what your thoughts on that kind of yeah I mean liquid Bitcoin so I'll preface this was saying I haven't like done a ton of we haven't really done any development with liquid just yet and it's and I haven't missed I don't own I don't own any like liquid Bitcoin or anything like that so this is just kind of like an outsider's perspective I I think like yeah I I think, you know, it's better than, you know, just relying on one exchange.

Like, say, if you have, you know, some Bitcoin on Q-coin or whatever, you know, that could have been in trouble, right? So, so basically, you know, I think it's superior in that way. And I think what's interesting about liquid Bitcoin is that, you know, they add a few up codes that allow you to have more expressivity in terms of like Bitcoin scripting and, like, you know, kind of be able to, do more kind of interesting, I guess, smart contract type things with liquid.

So that's what's interesting on the surface for us. Like basically, and I think some of the issues that I see potentially with liquid is that I know that it does require, like I believe last I checked like 100 confirmations to actually onboard your Bitcoin onto liquid Bitcoin. I'm not sure if that's still the case. I know you can of course get liquid Bitcoin directly. Oh, sorry.

It's, it's, I think it's the opposite. Okay. I'm sure. I think it's the opposite way out to like, is it withdraw? No, maybe it's, maybe it is actually getting into it. I think any, the way it is is anybody can convert in, but to get out, like to actually unpeg Bitcoin from Liquid, you need to go out through a federation member. Gotcha.

You can also just swap Liquid for Bitcoin, but like, yeah, yeah, basically if you, if you want actual Bitcoin like swapped out of the protocol then then you need to federation member again I don't know the the confirmations they're shorter confirmations like it's one minute blocks but yeah yeah there there is a significant waiting time to allow for if something screws up that intervention of some sort yeah and I think like I was checking the um the block stream block explorer for liquids specifically and you know the number of transactions per block I think it's not not that great yeah it's like nothing at the moment but like I think you know that's that's something that definitely can can improve so I think I think we will see some kind of more interesting products

come out of that and I know of course like this is block streams baby and I know they're probably going to push it really hard moving forward in terms of like WVTC yeah it's interesting so WVDCs is a is a topic that comes up frequently in Ethereum circles and stuff like that. It's, uh, it's, let's start with is that Bitcoin on Ethereum, Tony? Yes, it is new. It is absolutely 100% not.

Um, it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, it's not like you're sending Bitcoin to Ethereum address, you know, it's not, the Bitcoin's not on Ethereum. The Bitcoin is custody by BitGo and you were just issued an IOU, um, kind of like paper gold, um, back in the day. where you're submitting your real goal to like, you know, a goldsmith or something like that. But like, yeah, so, so basically, you know, WBDC, I think is, is interesting for folks who are, you know, okay with that custodial risk, people who are already doing a lot of stuff on defy. I think for some of them, yeah, there is, there is a degree of interest there because it allows you,

it can, it allows you to kind of bring in some of that, you know, your Bitcoin that I'm that most of them I guess still want to maintain exposure to because you know if people most of them you know regardless of what you might see on Twitter they have Bitcoin and like some of them even have more Bitcoin than a good chunk of them you have more Bitcoin than Ethereum right so like so you know for for those folks it's it's I've heard quite a few of them who you know maybe will allocate a good chunk of their not all of it but a good chunk of their Bitcoin and converted Mint WDC with that and then bringing it over to Ethereum.

But the issue with that is that you know, you're just kind of taking sound money and you're wrapping unsound financial infrastructure all over it. So basically you're you're bringing it into the Jangat Tower of Pi. So that's the issue that I see there of course. And then like there's more kind of interesting issues if you really want to dig into it like for example, you know when there's another Black Thursday situation and then people are say people are kind of of scrambling to get more RAP Bitcoin to recaloralorize their DFI loan.

Then you can have really weird situations where like the actual Bitcoin and RAP Bitcoin, RAP Bitcoin would actually trade at a much higher price because they're not enough like rapid Bitcoin liquidity on the markets and you have all sorts of like weird situations like that that can come into play. But yeah, like for the DGens out there, you know, who are already dealing a lot with defy, it is a useful tool that once again, rap things. on sound financial infrastructure over sound money. So yeah.

Most stuff, like when I come across it, I'm, I'm, a lot of my issues with Ethereum tend to be in that they're building skyscrapers on top of shaky foundations. Yeah. Right? Like if the ground can shift between beneath your feet, aka there can be, you know, consensus changes at the drop of a hat and you're building complex infrastructure on top of it, that's scary as hell. You know, we've seen projects in the past. What was that at Aragon or whatever?

There was a couple of projects where certain hard forks where they basically like didn't. work anymore. And some of those projects were, they're pissed. So like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, scary to to have those consensus breaking changes, um, when so much money is riding on top of something. And I think that's kind of the difference in development around this stuff is, is, is, is so slow and calculated. And as you were alluding to the kind of high time for reference versus low time for reference, like on, on Ethereum, it's like, let's move fast and break. things, let's make this thing, and it should do exactly what we want it to right now, but you're not looking at like second and third order consequences down the road of what will happen,

whereas Bitcoin is like, if we do this tiny change, what possible impacts could that have decades out? And it's just a very different way of thinking. And I think part of it comes from the, you know, oh, this is tech versus this is money. And, And like if you, you don't want to be fucking with money, like it's just an app. You want to be very careful and calculated with it because we pretty much get one shot at this. There's not going to be like another leaderless protocol that comes out of the blue, catches the world off guard well enough to be decentralized as it is without regulators stepping in and realizing it the second time around. So we pretty much got this shot. And if we fuck it up, what do you do?

There's no, there's no take back seats at this point. Exactly. I think you hit it right on the head. And basically the other thing, speaking of building, you know, kind of skyscrapers on unsolic foundation, I mean, ETH itself is an unsolic foundation. Talk about this EVE 1 to EVE 2 transition, right? Like basically, you know, some folks in Eid kind of see it as the savior to a lot of their problems, but, you know, it's from what I've seen, you know, there's significant issues with

this whole transition because, you know, first of all, it's a separate, it's an entirely separate blockchain. So the EF1 blockchain is going to continue running as EF2 blockchain gets spun up. And then you're actually going to have two separate EF issuances. So your EF one, EF is still going to be EF1, and to my knowledge, it's still going to be issued on EF1, and then EF2, you have a separate token or ether that is. is minted there and then somehow they're anticipating that in a couple of years they're going to merge and the states on the two blockchain and like the balances and all that kind of stuff is going to merge and so when I first heard that I was like how is that

going to work like basically so you know there's and so yeah I mean talk about if you're talking about building on an unself foundation the entire blockchain itself you know seems to be in a great state of uncertainty in general and so So, I mean, you have that, and then of course you have the stuff built on top of it. That is also unsolic. So I've got questions for you then. Do you think there's a pretty good possibility that miners just keep mining and there ends up being two totally separate chains that continue? And if so, which will be more classic?

Ethereum classic or this classic? And which one gets to be the more classic classic of the two? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. that's funny. Miners will keep mining, right? They're going to keep mine. I think folks will. I mean, hard for me to say definitively,

but like many folks in EF seem to think that, you know, there is that possibility that folks will just keep mining on EF1. And yeah, then you have kind of like, interesting issues when it comes to fragmentation and liquidity and silos. and stuff like that. But yeah, in terms of like, like, Eif,

classic, I don't know, maybe they're going to have something like Eif, like Vitalik's vision or something like that. Like, I don't know. I don't know. It's funny. We need, like, we need a secondary Vitalik to come out and say that he was real Vitalik or something like that. What's Craig Wright doing?

He's out of a job, right? He doesn't have a job. He's not busy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, maybe Craig Wright will claim to be Vitalik next. Who knows? I think so. I think that's a possibility. Embroiled and controversy yet again. Okay, so I, okay, my Twitter feed right now,

I'm seeing everybody shitting a brick over NFTs today. Apparently that's the next thing that we're all angry about right now. I mean, I've got some, I've got some thoughts on NFTs. He's like, okay, so I don't know. What I'm thinking of NFTs, like there's certain instances where I'm like, okay, if I got like a ticket to a concert and I was buying it secondhand from somebody

and I knew that they couldn't like duplicate the ticket, perhaps that could be something useful. I'm not big on the digital art, an FT idea just mainly because the art originates in a digital form and thus can be literally duplicated pixel for pixel quite easily other than the fact that one has like an artist's seal of approval and one does not whereas it's tough because like you know you can go see the Mona Lisa or you can look at a postcard of the Mona Lisa and it's kind of of it's different, like people fly to Paris to see the original.

But I don't know. I'm not super sold on the whole NFT digital art. But I'm also not angry about it. Like if you want to drop 10K on like a picture of a red square, I mean, good for the person that sold that, I guess. You know, if somebody was going to pay me one Bitcoin for like literally a red square, which I'm saying this because I just saw it happen. Somebody dropped like 8K on a red square NFT.

But anyway, it's like, I don't know. What are you thinking about these NFTs? By the way, those watching, it stands for non-fungible token, meaning that it's a unique token that represents a digital asset that is, different from any other. So it's, again, by I guess non-fungible, it's separated and differentiated

between every other version of it. Yeah. Like, for me, like, I mean, I think this is, this is probably enough, potentially the start in another, kind of rapid boom,

bus cycle thing that we saw with CryptoKitties, right? You know, it's a similar thing, right? It's, it's, it's,

I'm not, sure necessarily if it's it's not sure necessarily like how much value it actually provides like you know but you know I mean I'll preface it with saying I'm not an artist so maybe like there are kind of value interesting value propositions that can come from this especially like digital artists and artists and whatever and what they think but yeah I mean like you said we're already in a digital form which means that it's you know it's replicable pretty easily, you know, slapping a sign of approval, a signature of approval from the artist

that makes it so that people can verify that. I'm not sure that that's too much of a value ad. But yeah, so it's hard for me to see much of it. I mean, like, I haven't been digging into the NFT space that much, not as much as defy, definitely. And it's also kind of a nascent thing. So we'll see how it develops. you know, not too, definitely not too bullish on it.

Yeah, I think the best, maybe an argument against NFTs, because the idea of NFTs basically is banking on the fact that people will put value in the artist's seal of approval that you've officially bought it from them, right? but the existence of torrents is literally spits in the face of that idea so I don't know like will some people probably pay for this stuff sure do some people buy a 20 or $30

copy of a digital movie off of Apple they do does everybody I'd say a lot don't yeah it's interesting because like you know that when you mentioned that, I was thinking like, okay, well, for, you know, physical art, obviously, if you want to, if, if, if, you know, if you are buying a piece of art and, you know, most folks, and you, you probably want, like, the, the authentic piece of it, right? And you will get people to kind of inspect it and see,

and see if it actually is, you know, the real Mona Lisa or what have you, right? And so, like, you know, for physical art, you know, there is that desire to make sure that you have the authentic, the original. But like for digital, I don't know if that necessarily translates one-to-one because, you know, like you said, with other digital, with other digital kind of assets or works, you know, people seem to be pretty okay with grabbing like a, like the duplicate copy or what have you or torrenting and stuff like that. So yeah, I don't know if that translates one-to-one. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. There's like there's people. People are, yeah, I don't know.

I'm just seeing, I'm scrolling through because there's a few people that, lately there's been more NFTs. Were you around, I'm trying to remember when it was. It would have been in 2017 at some point, but there was, oh, it was so stupid. And it was probably one of the more DGEN things I've ever done. It was the tail end of kind of my dabble into shit coinery. And I think it was around the summer of 2017. So it would have been actually maybe just as you were getting your feet wet.

There was the stupidest idea, and I knew it was a stupid idea, but it was effectively like crypto Twitter personalities in like an NFT thing on like a centralized website. And the idea was if you go and buy like the card, like the trading. card of somebody for however much Ethereum. You owned it with your like Ethereum address, but at any point somebody could come along and pay double the amount to own it temporarily until somebody doubled it to buy it from now. So there's no way you could like keep it and not sell it if somebody was going to pay

double. So it was literally a giant Ponzi scheme. Yeah. and whoever like when it got to that a certain point whoever was left holding the bag of useless cards of crypto Twitter personalities was was going to be the one that just was just shit out of luck and it literally like it got up to the point where and this was when this is when Ethereum was like I'm trying to think it must have been like 500 a thousand like it was somewhere way up there and I remember being like, God, this is, and it was just as the website was kind of getting rolling,

and I was like, this is so stupid, but people are going to do this. It's like, I'm going to, I'm going to take like, I'm going to, this is so embarrassing, but whatever, we're talking about our shit coin here. Anyway, I took like one Ethereum and I like sat it on, I don't even know who's, it was some stupid car. It didn't matter. I bought a card and then some idiot bought it off me for two. And I was like, I'll do it again.

And like I did it a few times. I ended up making like three grand in a month off of. And but the worst part was it got to where it was like, you know, there was like $4,000 sitting there, a thousand of it mine. And it got to the point where like the car just sat there for like it had been like rolling every five or ten minutes or something. And then it just sat there for like hours. And I was like, I just lost a thousand more than. importantly, I just lost however many sats. I'm sitting there being like, I'm such an idiot.

And then it sold. And I was like, oh. And I converted that, the rest of that to Bitcoin. And then I didn't have any more bags from then on in. Really? So that was like literally your exit from. That was my exit. Other than I think, I can't, I'm trying to think of the timeline,

other than like air drops of like bee. cash and be gold, which I just dumped as soon as they happened for Bitcoin. But like that was kind of my last dabble. Like I think I had, there might have been like some random tips or something that came in on other stuff. But there wasn't really, that was kind of one of the last things I remember. Yeah. Were there any like as you were kind of again diving down and like careening wildly out

of the like shit coin highway. were there any like was there any material and stuff that you were kind of diving into being like oh or like resources when it came to um understanding sound money and and and money monetary standards and stuff like that what did you dive into yeah absolutely um things that i dived into um yeah so i've like i have like a nice little oh i have it right next to me you know you got you can't go without this Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Big one back here.

Yeah. By the way, I forgot to ask. What are you drinking? Oh, yeah. I am, so I didn't decide. I decided not to go alcoholic today because I had a little bit of drink yesterday. I appreciate it. Yeah, so I had a nice, it's a ginger lemon tea or something like that.

So, yeah. I'm making the bad decision and I'm having, I actually, so I bought this specifically because there was Bitcoin magazine did like a YouTuber takeover. And so there was like Max Kaiser and keep it simple and simply Bitcoin, those guys were all there.

Anyways, yeah, so I got this for that and obviously there's some left because I'm not an alcoholic, but I have a couple. So I'm drinking a, it's called Mount Logan. It's a 17-year-old Canadian rye whiskey. Okay. It's like, it's like 51% though. Oh, yeah, there we go.

Yeah. It's good, though. It's good. But I got it. I'm not in like a straight, dry whiskey mood. So I've got some like club soda that I'm mixing in with it. But only maybe one or two of these tonight. And then that's, that's plenty for me.

But I appreciate your tea. I'm sure I'll do a couple episodes of this with tea or something like that. taken for a painful Monday morning. But anyways, yeah. So Bitcoin standard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely, definitely part of that. What else? One of the things, oh, also, the other one was basically a little Bitcoin book by, like, Jimmy Song and his group there. And that was really cool as well. That was like a kind of quick, very kind of nice and tidy, quick reason. A CliffsNotes version of the Bitcoin standard kind of.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those two, but outside of like Bitcoin-specific books or materials, one book that was actually surprisingly was one of the factors in me switching out of chichornery was actually this book. called Start with Why by Simon Sinek, which is like a pretty popular book in.

Yes, yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't read it. Business circles, entrepreneurial circles and stuff like that. I wasn't reading it with the intention of like talking about Bitcoin or thinking about Bitcoin but like basically he was talking one of the things that I thought was really interesting was like basically you know the premise of the book is that you know you always need to as as a leader of the company as a business you should really be focusing on you should always have a a clear vision of why you're doing what you're doing and being very clear about communicating that to your audience. And basically one of the things that he mentioned was that businesses these days don't do enough of that. And instead what they do is they resort to things like

a bunch of different types of manipulations to kind of get people on board or to get customers and they, et cetera, et cetera. And that was like when I was reading that part and like, He actually named an example where it was... Was it a world computer? No, actually. So basically, they were saying how General Motors, so this is completely outside of crypto, this kind of example. But basically, they were saying that General Motors,

basically in the 2000s, they were losing a lot of market share to guys like Toyota and stuff like that in the US. So they were kind of losing their turf. And basically to kind of, you know, try to prevent that, they started offering a lot of cashback incentives for people to incentivize people to buy more GM cars, right? And like basically when the recession hit and stuff like that, what happened was they kind of like took a pause

on issuing these cashback incentives and like the man for GM cars fell like a rock. And like basically, that's kind of how I see a lot of this defy yield farm. stuff, right? And like basically, you know, right now, you know, we like we went from like $100 million or, sorry, $500 million in DFI million in the matter of months. Some people might say, oh, we found product market fit. But what I think is that it's just people are here for the yield. People are not here necessarily for, you know, advancing the space or growing the space over the long run.

And because of that, you know, when this music stops and stuff like that, you know, that's, we're not going to have like, you know, a sustained, I would say, like, value that was created for, for Ethereum or crypto in general. So you don't believe that people bought sushi because they believed in the future of that particular decentralized exchange? Yeah, well, I imagine like people must, I imagine people must, I imagine people must just. like really love sashimi or something like that. Yeah, I think so. Maybe they thought it was, they confuse it with an NFT because they were actually thinking that. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Non, non-fungeable sushi, I think. That's a solid cell. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that's coming in the pipeline. I'm sure in a couple months or maybe it's already in the works, non-fundable sushi. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so.

Yeah. So there's been, I recalled how we got talking. There was somebody on Twitter was talking about like how maximalism is somewhat closed-minded. And I think I dove into that thread and I said, actually, I found that after being around for a while, it's actually a well-reasoned set of criteria that I came to of what I'm actually looking for. for. And so I kind of have like from the outset, like, this is why I'm here. This is what I think is necessary to achieve said desired outcome. And anything that doesn't check these boxes,

I can just disregard. So it's easier for me to sift through everything and look at it because very quickly on basically, well, up to now, on everything except Bitcoin, some of these boxes don't get ticked and a lot of times most of them. And so like I, so I wrote this article, and this is the one I actually linked to in that thread when we were talking. So I linked to it and it's an article I read or that I wrote called My Path to Bitcoin Maximilism. And it talks about kind of like things that I found necessary because I'm here for sound money and replacement of effectively central banks because I don't think people can be trusted to to run the money. I think we need like a preset set of rules that can't be fucked with so that people can't

screw with it so that we actually just have like a baseline for value that we can all use. And so in my article, I outlined, okay, number one, I want sound money. So like already, ETH, you know, initially it was like, oh, 100 million cap. Well, it's like 110 now and like no like specified. There's no real like monetary policy that can be pointed to that will be maintained long term. So for me, that was out. Our, you know, borderless and censorship resistant. So like censorship resistance has been basically thrown out the window with a lot of like,

for sure with D-Fi, like you saw the Ku-coin hack of basically $130 million of that was frozen by centralized protocols that had God mode. Then is it sufficiently decentralized and secure? And so, like, I look at that. Again, we're shitting on Ethereum a lot here, but that's just because you were working on Ethereum before. But like, this is pretty broad across everything, I'd say. decentralization like I look at that as there's a lot of different aspects to that but like can I run it can I run it myself

um you know if I don't run it or is there anybody running it like either aspects of that and yeah security as well like you were talking about well is it really secure if it's constantly changing you have to gauge it on each each iteration I suppose I said that being leaderless is actually an excellent thing. You know, centralized figureheads are just like a pain point where things can go wrong. And then I said, how easy is it to make non-backwards compatible changes or hard forks to the protocol? Again, a lot of it is pointed to the same reasoning, but yeah, you know, our hard forks easy. If they're easy, it denotes a lack of decentralization.

And then one of the most important ones to me was can users self-validate and follow the consensus rules with minimal cost. And that's a big one because the other day, I don't know if you're watching, you're probably watching this on Twitter, but on Friday, was the, as far as I know, the largest coordinated audit of the supply of Bitcoin that has ever been rolled out. And at Block 650,000, anybody running a node was able to type a simple command and get an answer of how many Bitcoin exist. And simultaneously, like this, I still can't get past, even though we knew it would work, I still can't. get past the fact that it was only a four-minute block. So it was a quick block, but in a four-minute window, hundreds of people from around the globe were able to type in a simple command on infrastructure that was more or less free, like electricity and like a cheap laptop or like a

Raspberry Pi would do the trick and audit the supply of a global currency instantaneously and come out with the same number. It blows my mind, and I don't think people really understand the value of this. So I don't know if I'm really segueing to a question here. Actually, I guess my question is, when you were big into Ethereum, did you run a node? No.

What? So, like, yeah, I mean, it's impossible. It takes so long. And it's everyone just kind of relies on inferior for that, to be honest. So, I thought. Yeah. Yeah,

it was wild. Not even Vitalik runs like a full, I think they call it archival node, right? Yeah. Yeah. Not even he does, right? So that tells you. Yeah, yeah,

that's scary to me. That the founder of a protocol that is the second largest cryptocurrency in the ecosystem himself does not run a full archival node. Yeah. Of the, that's, for those that are unsure,

I think the measure of full archival node is like having every transaction that has ever happened, which I do. So I have, behind me, I have a, there's a little Raspberry Pi just out of frame running a software stack called My Node. So it runs a copy of Bitcoin Core and then it has a bunch of other like software to interact with Bitcoin Protocol. I have a pruned node on my laptop, which is just Bitcoin Core. running. And then I'm going to build another one. By the way, I'm just, the reason I have soon to be three nodes is because experimentation, but my one, the my node, actually all of my wallets point to that node so that I'm self-verifying everything. So, but yeah, I'm about to build a third one

with a Raspberry Pi because there's a project called Umbro. So get Umbro on Twitter. They have like a, it looks very, very user friendly. And the UI looks really clean and nice. And everything's going to be like an app. If you want to run something, you download it and it attaches onto your humble node. So yeah, like it's, it's very accessible for those that want to run a node to be able to do it with Bitcoin. There's a learning curve, of course. But the infrastructure necessary to do it is next to nil.

You maybe need a couple days time to sink if you've got like a slower laptop. But outside of that, it's not bad. I'm going to make a video on Bitcoin Core because people that maybe don't have the money to get like a Raspberry Pi, I just want to show like, hey, you can hit download, open a program and leave it running for a couple of days and you'll have a full note. So I don't know. Like is that kind of makes sense to you? Like, was that something that, was that at all something in your mind as you kind of shifted this direction that that kind of caught your attention? Don't trust, verify, right?

Like, that's, that's a, that people don't have that mentality in Ethereum. And like, basically that's a large reason why what makes Bitcoin as powerful as it is, right? Basically, it's very hard to, uh, the ecosystem, the, the, the, the, the network is very hard to break, right? it's very easy to verify if someone did break it, right? So, like, that's what's useful about, about Bitcoin. And, like, you know, the EF mindset, it's, it's not like that. It's basically like, you know, you're kind of making a lot of assumptions about, you know, the security of not only EF itself, but, of course, like the service providers that you're relying on to actually

access the blockchain. And you're making assumptions about the safety of the smart contracts, you're interacting with. And it's just a lot of assumptions and trust. They just don't have that. Don't trust, verify it. Yeah, that's fair. I think that's a pretty good roundup of everything there. I guess at this point, because I do have to run shortly here, but before we wrap up, it's funny, like the whole time you've been talking, oh, co-founder, this and that. I didn't, I'm such an idiot. I didn't give you and I think I cut you off at the beginning, so you couldn't even fully say, like,

what the hell you're talking about? So I guess if people, if you enjoyed my chat with Tony as we shat on Ethereum for like a solid hour, then be sure to find them. So maybe just let people know where they can find you. Also let them know, and I apologize for cutting you off, but let them know what you're doing where you're at. Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah, basically one of the co-founders of Atomic Finance. Basically, we were previously during our more EF days, basically working on kind of a cross-chain approach where you would putting Bitcoin as collateral and then you got to E-E Ethereum Staplecoin as a loan. For us, our vision has always been to build sound financial infrastructure for sound money to basically add value to Bitcoin over the long run by giving folks who hold Bitcoin a way to kind of engage in different meaningful financial activities

like lending and, you know, margin trading down the road. And while maintaining, while being able to maintain as many of the assurances that you mentioned, of Bitcoin as possible. So whether that's the censorship resistance, seizure resistance, open, borderless, all that kind of stuff, verifiable security. And basically, that's what we're all about atomic finance. So like right now we're just kind of in a bit in the middle of a bit of a pivot out from our kind of half-eaf-eaf-bif-Bit-Poin approach to a Bitcoin-centric approach at the moment.

And then basically right now, kind of what we're focused on right now is actually we're building a mini product for your average bitcoiner to be able to bet on any outcome. So basically, getting on Bitcoin price, sushi price, Ethereum price, etc. or even American election, that kind of stuff, basically allowing you to put your Bitcoin where your mouth is. It's funny, we actually got this idea when we were talking to Jimmy Song, and he was like, oh, I wanted to be able to shut those shit coin shills up. And like the only way to do that is putting your money where your mouth is, right? And so basically we're planning to launch in a week or two

with folks like Jimmy Song and a couple other bitcoiners who are looking to also see. as a way to engage their audience and like make bets with their audience and stuff like that. What you should have had, I wonder if we can shift it over there, but what you should have had was the bet between, I think, American Hoddle and keep it simple Bitcoin because they're betting on the outcome of Bitcoin price. Actually, you should have also had the bet with Peter McCormick and also American Hoddle, obviously, about the outcome of the American election. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Hoddle is going in on Trump, and it seems that Peter McCormick is leaning Biden, but has less conviction as of lately. He's worried about his choice now. If you had to take a wild guess as to what's going to happen in November, what do you think is going to happen? Wild guess, probably something,

Like, I mean, there's all this talk about peaceful transition of power and how Trump's not going to agree to that. And so, like, I feel like, I'm going to go with the polls on this one. I'm going to say, like, Biden probably. But, like, Trump's going to challenge it, for sure. Like, if that happens. So that's what I would say. I think Trump's going to take it. You think it's not that it's not that I, like, I don't like Trump.

I obviously don't like Biden. I basically, what I'm saying is I don't like the choices. But I think there's a lot more not only open but closet support for Trump as far as, but also I think there's just Biden is just kind of like barely there. and so the the campaign or lack of campaign from what I've seen is literally like they're banking on enough people hating Trump to get them to the polls to vote for Biden even though he hasn't really like what have you seen of him not not a whole lot so like you know like my sister lives in L.A and I was like so what uh how are things we're talking and she's like she doesn't like Trump But, and I'm like, okay, so like, obviously you, you know, like, a lot of, like, very kind of left-leaning people, are they, like, excited for Biden? And her words were like, oh, God, no. It's like, I was like, are you worried they're not going to vote then? Or like, and she's like, I don't know. I don't know what's happening. Like, I mean, but whatever, she's, she can come home to Canada. So it's, yeah. Yeah, it does. I, like, I'm, I'm kind of a little bit indifferent. to the, I'm just like watching with my popcorn. I don't know. Yeah.

I kind of, most Canadians are. But like, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. I found actually, to tell you the truth,

I've like shifted out of being political. Like I don't, I used to be like, I need this candidate to do that. Now I'm like, I've just have like such a lack of faith in government to actually perform. That I'm like, I'm just kind of opting out of everything.

And I'm like, I'll just, I don't know, Bitcoin is my vote. That's my vote. I'm like, I, yeah, what else? I totally agree. Like, basically, like, you know, the way I look at it, you know, left or right, what have you, you know, like, money is going to be printed no matter what. And like, we're going to have a lot of probably a lot of money printing that's going on, especially in the next couple of years.

Because, you know, the right probably wants to prop up the economy. and then the left wants to, you know, support the, you know, the people who are out of a job. And so, like, you probably will get a lot of money printing, by the way. So, yeah, I would say politically, politically on a social spectrum, I'm live and let live. And on a monetary spectrum, I'm incredibly conservative because I want sound money. What do you, what do you vote for for that? Nobody is fiscally conservative. And nobody is live and let live on the left and the right.

right. So what do you like? There's nothing. It's like that you pick up a ballot and it may as well just be a middle finger in your face because there's nothing for me. So I vote Bitcoin. Yeah, exactly. We need a Bitcoin candidate at some point. Hopefully. Yeah, exactly. We have one. It's in my, it's in my cold card and my cobo. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Also. Well, Tony, honestly, I had a really good time chatting with you. I will cheers you through the camera. This is, by the way, this is my buddy got me this. This is my shield glass. I'm like a big marble nerd.

But thank you for the chat. I hope everybody enjoyed this. And yeah, man, good time. Check out Tony. You do it again sometimes. Yeah. For sure. Thank you guys so much for watching and or listening.

Now, if you're here on YouTube, please do hit like, subscribe, and share all of those things. Really, really do help. And you can hit up Tony. there's links to both his Twitter and the Twitter for Atomic Finance down below. As always, if you want to help out the show in another way, you can always hit up the sponsors that was lead and you can get 50 free bucks if you do opt to use that link and sign up for a loan that's in the show notes.

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