BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? John Carvalho, Skot of Bitaxe, Portland Hodl

Episode Date: November 16, 2024

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Very excited to get chatting with these gentlemen today. I hope you're all having a good week. It's been a hell of a week. Very interesting past few days to say the least. I think we can clearly say we're into our, this cycles bull run. So congratulations.

If you weathered that storm and it was your first epoch, you did it. Good for you. But we're going to be diving in. We'll bring in everybody momentarily. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

Toddled their Bitcoin. Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market. I'm pulling up, give me just a moment here. I am pulling up timechange stats.com. We are currently sitting at $91,430 per coin. A single US dollar will grab you 1,093 sats. Terms of fees. Next block, you're looking at eight sats per V-byte.

And in terms of Bitcoin mined, 19.78 million of them, that is 94.20% of the total supply. We are going to give a quick shout out to sponsors of the show. We'll be back in just a moment with your panel. Bitcoin Well is on a mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And the best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. they never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, plus they have KYC free sales and bill payments on their website. They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on the TSXV. Check them out

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All right, we are back in. And again, I did want to mention anybody that is in Canada or the U.S. actually and in EU countries and places in Central and South America as well. Bitcoin Well also now has an easy OTC service where you can get white glove if you're looking to do large buys over 50K. They can hook you up. You can get personalized calls, all that kind of stuff and be treated very, very well. have hand holding through the whole thing. So there's a QR code up on the screen there. You can scan that and then check out their OTC services. It's called Bitcoin Well Infinite. But with that, I think it's time that I bring in our guests here. So I want to welcome to the stage, Portland Hall,

and Scott 9,000 of Bitax. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. How are you guys doing? Fantastic. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I, Gentlemen, I'm so glad to have you. And we may, perhaps, we'll see. We may be joined by John Carvallo at some point. But nonetheless, we're going to have a killer conversation regardless. So before we dive into our bullishness, because there's plenty to go around, let's do some quick intros just so people are familiar with who you are and what you do. So Portland, I'll start with you. Can you let people know who we are, what you do? Yeah. So my name is Portland Hoddle on Twitter. And I'm a Bitcoin. educator basically. I do a lot of Bitcoin spaces about how to get your nodes set up and that cold storage, self-custy, those kind of things, Bitcoin Core contributor and a lead engineer at the marathon pool and creator of Slipstream, the non-standard transaction service, which might

be a part of today's discussion for good or for bad. So yeah, that's kind of a little bit in my backstory. Hell yeah. Well, I'm glad to have you back. Last time I think you were in a truck. I've since upgraded. I still have the same track, but I have a place to be inside of. That's perfect. Well, either way, regardless of where you're streaming from, happy to have you. And Scott, I'm glad to have you on here, too. We saw each other in Nashville very recently for that HRF event,

but for anybody in familiar, let people know what you're up to and who you are. Yeah, my name's Scott. Scott 9,000 on several of the internet. I'm the instigator of the bidax project, which is kind of amazingly blowing my mind. People know what that is now, but just in case you don't, it's a free and open source ASIC Bitcoin miner that you can build yourself or buy it from somewhere and dig in and see how it works and lottery mine. Awesome.

Well, that's fantastic. And I'm glad to have you. And I've got my bidax that we actually. got at that event it's i can see it from my desk right now uh that too soon will be a video uh nice and it's it's it's happening that i've just got a a number of things that uh now that i'm home for a little bit uh i'll get to uh i do see somebody backstage i don't know if he has his we'll try we'll see if he's there john can hear me uh yeah i can hear you can hear me i can hear me i can You loud and Claire. How are you doing, man?

Pretty good. I apologize for being late. I had a time zone discrepancy with the time I was given. So I thought it was actually 40 minutes from now, and I saw your messages on Twitter. Oh, that's all good. We're just diving in. So I'll let you do your actually perfect timing. But I'll let you do a little intro, let people know who you are and what you do. Oh, sure. I'll try to fix my lighting in a minute, too. Yeah, my name is John Carvalho. I'm CEO at San. synonym where we make various products for, I guess, freedom technology, including BitKit and our new protocol called PubKee. I've been a bit coiner for, I don't know, 12 years now, roughly.

So, yeah, I have some stuff to be bullish about, you could say. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you. I feel like I've seen you pretty much on every corner of the globe this year in various events. So we tend to bump in. to each other quite a bit as Bitcoiners do that are on the road. But yeah, this should be a good conversation. We're going to dive in. So anybody watching, of course, right now, thank you for being here first and foremost. But if you're unfamiliar, if you knew this show, this is why are we bullish?

Very simple premise. So the idea is each one of us comes with a reason for being bullish, something we're currently excited about in and around Bitcoin. And the flow of this show is pretty simple. One, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish, something that They're excited about a little chance to rant on it and let us all know. Two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, either comments, questions, whatever rabbit holes we decide to go down.

And then three, after we put a bow on that topic, we'll rotate to the next person and repeat it all over again. So reason, riff, rotate, super simple. So we're going to get started here. I'm going to start off with my reason for being bullish. and it centers in and around, I suppose, where we are in the cycle right now, but it's more just kind of a reflective reason for being bullish. So obviously, like right now, we're coming back around. We're seeing new all-time highs.

It's, you know, people are getting jubilant. People are getting excited. And so we're kind of on the cost for currently seeing the first inkling. of brand newbies kind of coming in. People are starting to be interested. I'm personally, I'm starting to get the messages and the texts and the emails and the DMs and all that. Oh, hey, I'm curious.

And I mean, there's a caveat to this whole reason is we've got, we're on the cusp of also having a lot of bullshit to deal with and navigate. There's always a lot of degenerative degeneracy that comes with the bull run and that's just kind of how it goes and it goes up and down. And we've got a lot of teaching to do also. There's a lot of education that needs to happen when there's a lot of new people coming in. But I guess I'm bullishly reflective on the fact that I myself and a lot of people are

currently enjoying the tools and services and communities even that people have built over the course of the bear market. And the interesting thing with all these new people is they're never going to know what it was like before a lot of the great things that we have right now existed, right? Like they'll come in and this is just kind of how it is. Great. We've got all these choices for all of these different apps and pieces of hardware and oh, I can easily find people locally that are bitcoins. There's lots of meetups. There's millions of hours worth of podcasts. Obviously, there's books and there's resources and websites and there's so, so much stuff that's available. And so they're coming in with a lot of resources at their fingertips, which is great.

But they're also coming in with fresh eyes to be able to maybe see some of the things that are missing that those that have been around the block quite a bit maybe aren't noticing. Having fresh eyes on anything can give some new perspective. And I'm sure there's going to be plenty of bad takes that come with that as well. But it's always good to have another set of eyeballs to come in and say, what about this? Like, I would really like to have this feature or this app or this device or I'd like it to do this. So, I mean, we're going to have lots of new ideas coming at us. And, you know, there's always bad ones, but the good ones will bubble to the top. So I think I'm bullish because over the coming cycle, all these newcomers will eventually be able to contribute in their own way towards the tools of the following.

epoch and we've seen it time and again. And in a way, I mean, we're all kind of standing on the shoulders of people that have come before and build the tools that led to the next tools. And, you know, just on a personal note here, obviously, I'm covering all of the wallets and the hardware and all the fun things that I get to deal with. And I've been traveling a lot. And now I'm back home and I'm home now. I'm staying put for the next three, four months here. And I'm looking just past my desk here and I've got so many things to cover. Like I'm looking. I've got like the portal, the 22 devices, NFC hardware device.

I've got Scott, I was just saying before we got started. I've got my Bitax sitting here from the HRF event we were at. I've got a future bit over on the table there that I got to cover. I've got one of the Crux DIY hardware devices here. I've got just like apps and crazy stuff. I've been doing a new video on the latest 2.0 and beyond release of BTZ pay server. You know, I've got a literal pile of stuff to cover. And I just want to contrast it to when I first started and first started having people ask me to do videos on things and offer up.

I remember the first time I got an email. saying, hey, can we send you a free device and maybe like you tinker around with it and make a video? And I was excited that anybody would offer to send me anything. And so I said, sure. And then I started getting more emails like that. And in my excitement, I blanket said just yes to everything. And then I ended up with a pile of absolute dog shit, like sitting on my desk where it's just like, there was a period where everybody and their grandmother thought that they could just like make a Bitcoin hardware wallet and it would be great and nobody would really question if it was good or not. And so I kind of hit that period of time and I just ended up with all

of these things that I was like kind of disillusioned. But the reason I bring that up is I'm contrasting it to now and I'm looking at all the stuff and every single thing that I look at, And I'm like, oh, I get to make a video on this. I'm excited to cover this because there's so many interesting things happening. So again, my general reason for being bullish is there's so many interesting projects and they've benefited from the work that people before them have done to be able to kind of excel us forward. And I think it's going to continue to accelerate as, uh,

newcomers benefit from the wealth of knowledge that the previous epochs have been able to create and distill in more digestible pieces. So that's kind of where I'm at. I'm curious to hear general thoughts or if there's anything that you want to pick at or you know mention there. So floor is open gentlemen. This is this is crazy right. This is a grand convergence of things like you just said, we have this ecosystem of tools and communities that's been building up. And now we have this influx of users coming from the excitement from the price and the network effects that go along with that combined. Dude, the things people are going to build is out of control.

Like, your desk is never going to clear again. There's going to be so many cool projects. I'm afraid to say it, but your desk is going to just disappear under all these cool projects that these people are going to make. Well, Scott, I've got a solution and I don't know that it scales. More desks. But, yeah, larger desks. No.

I do have another guy named Nathan that is going to be the first regular new face on the channel who's also going to make making tutorials. So I can at least, I guess I'm a big blocker when it comes to output or throughput on tutorial material. And so I've gone the simplest route and just double the blocks, I suppose. This exponential growth, right? It comes at you.

Couldn't soft-work it? Like some like little, anybody can spend way of doing this? No, I'm just kidding. I guess I'm just hard-headed. I kind of to go on that as well, like the tools built before us allowed us to get where we are today.

Some examples of that, I think, are the, first of all, like Bitcoin Core itself has made some pretty good improvements overall in just block template construction and usability, like Bitcoin Core.2.8, you finally got ephemeral anchors. That now means somebody can create this little output in the transaction that allows instead of you having to see PFP your own transaction or re-sign a transaction to bump the fee, you now can have anybody do that. And then also, like, in terms of your case, maybe Scott, at least in mine, EDA suites, which are, are used to design hardware like electronics, of printed circuit boards, et cetera.

Like KECAD is the open source version of that. So you don't got to pay for all TM pads, all these other ones. Monthly subscriptions are huge upfront fees. KICAD compared to where it was four years ago is substantially more usable. It'd be in terms of the interface, like part layout, the routing of all the wires.

Like you could do differential pairs now. Like I built the world's fastest lowest latency keyboard using it. It also minds Bitcoin, by the way. But yeah, just like all this tooling and these open source communities, like it just keeps compounding. And just the availability of these libraries that you can use today are incredibly powerful and they're not proprietary. Like combining that even further to amplify that, this may be a little bit of a controversial take,

but the access to be able to literally kind of build and understand and learn topics because of LLMs and generative AI don't trust anything it says, obviously, use your brain. But you can kind of work through really basic problems or like, you need to just quickly get like an overview of where should I go with this topic? Just ask it some dumb questions about like what you're looking for. Like what about trace length matching and wavelength differentials? Like how does this impact my signal integrity? Claude responded.

I already knew the answer, but pretty darn well for that kind of stuff. And yeah, it allows, I would say, especially on the front end side of things, it allows people that have very kind of like artistic mindsets to kind of turn that into usable things. I'm really hoping that accelerates the UI or UX of Bitcoin. And my final shout out to like things I saw really improve, like just overall self custodial lightning combined with Zeus. That experience has been great in improving continuously over the last year. But yeah, just the tools and that acceleration ramp I fully expect just to be parabolic,

not just linear at this point. John, how are you feeling with where we're at right now versus say, four years ago or a cycle prior. Are you feeling decent about it? I know that you're, again, you're in the weeds and you're building things. I'm on the wrong show. This is the why I'm bullish show

and I always like to point out what's wrong with everything. So I guess that's, I can't avoid it. I'll say, as you were speaking, like I couldn't disagree with anything. You know what I mean? Obviously, things have progressed a lot and there's a lot of new products and a lot of new businesses and a lot of new protocols

and things like this. So there's nothing disagreeable with your intro and how you let off the topic. So I guess all I can really do is add nuance and say, kind of like how you're talking about the last four years. From my perspective, when you're building, you're always thinking, okay, let's try to see

what we can ship before the next bull market so you can get better exposure, more opportunity, et cetera. But of course, there's also more competition and all these other things. And so it's a lot of nuance. But I'm interested to see what actually separates, you know, and what actually rises to the top. Because I think that bitquiners always have this idea of like, we think we're the kingmakers and we're the tastemakers. And there's a lot of tribalism.

And like everybody kind of looks up to certain people and certain projects and things like this. But a lot of it is just very, very small within a tiny community of like maybe, I know it's not tiny in some perspectives. But we're talking like some of these communities are anywhere from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands at most. And that's not an accurate test for whether or not what we've made is actually useful, actually scales, actually what more, you know, a large quantity of people will use or want. And so I'm, while it doesn't sound so bullish, I'm bullish on seeing where things separate, you know, a year from now, where everything lands and what actually ended up being, what the market. market wanted and who ended up actually like pivoting in the right direction with their startup or,

you know, choosing the right angle on their wallet or whatever it may be. Yeah. It's at your point where you're saying, okay, well, how do we know what regular people want? Because let's be honest, like I'd say the people in this room right now, we might not fall under the category of regular people. Maybe, maybe not. But to that point, I'm seeing a nice kind of juxtaposition of people that aren't super technical meeting Bitcoin developers. And I'm referring specifically to, and the example I'm thinking of is these Human Rights Foundation events that I've been at in the past little bit.

So you're getting this juxtaposition of people that are from countries where, you know, they've been cut off completely from banks because they, you know, they oppose the government in some way should reform. They're being censored or whatever. And so they go to use, you know, people have said, hey, this could be a solution for you. And then they get using the apps and they're like, oh, God, like, this is not what I need. Like, I see how it's helpful, but I need it to do this, that, and the other thing. And now what HRF has started doing is smashing the devs and the people building the applications and the devices and everything into a room with the people that actually, you know, are really in dire straits that need these tools to do what they need to do.

And you're starting to see some things to come to fruition because of it. And so I think that it will mature, the space will mature as you get more of that. And it's going to be niche use cases at first. But again, it's just a function of how many people are actually using this stuff day to day. And I'm trying to get a bit of a read on that here in my city as well. we're doing just like local markets and stuff like that. And we are starting to get people that maybe are friends of friends of Bitcoiners that are kind of coming into the community realizing, oh, this is kind of cool actually.

And they maybe have the perspective of, yes, I understand why money outside of the state could be useful. And so they're coming in and then they're giving feedback as to like, okay, well, this was easy. This was hard. I wish it would do this. Why can't I do this thing and that and the other? And I'm trying to collect some of that feedback and they just go directly to the people that have made the applications and say, well, this is what I'm hearing from people that aren't me. And I think a lot of people day to day when they just use regular apps, they don't realize that if they encounter a bug or it doesn't act as expected, they'll just say, a piece of shit doesn't work and they'll just delete it.

And they don't realize, oh, I could. Maybe nobody's noticed this yet or the devs haven't noticed this yet. And all they need is somebody to just say, hey, this is broken. And people don't realize that you actually can get it fixed. And I think having communities where you get large numbers of, or at least decent numbers of people that are trying things out in just practical day-to-day use, getting feedback and even just having a single person kind of like relay back to the devs, hey, we've got a community and they found this, that,

and the other thing, I think that'd be incredibly helpful, in my opinion, anyways. I do have a thought on this specific topic about like the user kind of just giving up on the app. And I think developers, because of kind of the conflict of time, like developers build things,

but oftentimes I see in especially like corporate environments, they don't actually interface with the product that they've created very much. And so you can create like automated testing and say, oh, this all works or something like that, like play right, et cetera. But the best thing literally, if you do like a deployment or do something, like go use that feature a couple of times. Figure out some way to test on it. Like if you're on Maynet, build like a test net version of your application. Do a couple transactions.

See what kind of happens on the extremities of things, low fee rates, high periods, etc. Because yeah, a lot of these things are just like somebody just literally didn't click the button and didn't figure out there's a regression somewhere. Can I bring up like a kind of maybe a negative? point of all this building. I think deep down, I am a little bit concerned about the kind of building in the L2 space. I think a lot of these products might not have the best idea of like, hey, like, this is kind of the security tradeoffs we're making for our users or even if they're possible. And so we're doing a lot of building for L2s, which should ideally scale Bitcoin, but not every L2 is going to make it or do it right for that matter.

I think we could potentially create some pretty dangerous, not dangerous, but tools where people could lock their Bitcoin up and maybe regret that decision. I don't know of any blow up right now. But there are, like if you look at the list of layer two Bitcoin startups that are coming out, you see like there's probably like 50 to 80 of them all trying to compete for different types, like the multi-sig, the BitVM style, CTV, etc. So I think a lot of that is, it's in a very unusual. You see the VCs that will get damaged. Who cares? I don't. I mean, am I right in thinking like, okay, so you have like, let's say 30 of these

actually take off, right? And people lock up their money and then we find out later on like, oh, hey, this one doesn't quite work right or the incentives are incompatible for the peg out and somebody, you lost $115 million. Is that going to actually impact Bitcoin or is that the users know that going into these things when you peg in, this is your problem from then on out? Is that like, I don't know, your take. I mean, look at it this way.

We have examples to compare to. We can look at legitimate attempts to scale Bitcoin with a layer like lightning. And we can look at like illegitimate attempts and gambling-based attempts like in the all-coin world. And we can see how these things express even sometimes at a pretty large scale. And so I would say, you know, for the layer twos that are like extremely complex and speculative and design, they will probably never be anything more than like niche hackathon things from some protocol devs. And no matter what products they make, they'll just be so unusable that the user won't put up with them. And then maybe some of these layer two, as you mentioned, I probably wouldn't classify Mosin as even layer twos depending on what they are.

Because I don't know if 30 things like BitVM. But anyway, like, you know, if some of those focus on gambling-based things, like say how Ordinals did and these kinds of things, they could get a lot of traction and do, you know, cause a situation like you're talking about where a lot of people could get locked into a shitty situation or rug pulled in some way. But I think that as far as like just the pure investment side and the people are trying to build things speculatively as product and this kind of thing, what can we do? As long as people are making new mistakes, you have to kind of support them in a way, you know, as long as they're not repeating mistakes.

I mean, every cycle we see like people go through this same pain over and over again where they're getting like rugged by shay coins or whatever. But they're they are kind of learning lessons. And this is a pretty interesting space in that like anyone can kind of develop anything. We don't want to have that like safe playground like, you know, might exist on the US stock market or, you know, might exist just like in an app store. Right. A lot of this stuff, you know, there's no going back. There's no one doing it. you can actually lose all your money.

And that's like a paradigm shift for everyone who... It's just so difficult for users, though. Like, you get thrown in this space, and everybody's talking as if they're a genius. And yet the distribution of types of people in Bitcoin is probably not that much different, the distribution in the rest of the population. So probably half people are just not that special.

But you're here, and everybody's talking like they know everything, and you have to figure out, oh, what are layers? Oh, lightning is a layer. Liquid is a layer. oh, this company knows that. And here's I should listen to. I should be listening to Sale. I should be listening to Odell or whatever influencer

I came in through. And it's just so much. On one side, I guess it's probably gotta be pretty, falling into the rabbit hole in 2024 is gonna be some sort of much different experience than in 2012. But yeah, but there's probably the aspect of the, that's the same, right?

It's like, oh wow, there's so many corners of this rabbit hole that I could travel through and learn. And that's exciting. I think that there's an element of Bitcoiners typically are inquisitive in nature from what I've seen. Like you got to get into Bitcoin, you got to kind of ask a few questions. Or at least NGU's got to capture you and then your mindset kind of kicks in. But yeah, like everybody's got to kind of start their journey. They'll follow a few heroes. And ideally the critical thinking starts kicking in. You find your own path or whatnot from there. And I want to state that I'm not necessarily trying to like say that people shouldn't use L2s.

mainly what I'm saying is there's going to be a lot of L2 options potentially. Like a lot of these haven't come to fruition. But if there are just like if you peg into these things or give up your Bitcoin into one of these bridges or multi-sigs, understand the security tradeoffs for your coins. Like what where can they go? What can happen? Because every different layer of lightning is pretty good. Like it's basically you have a good as gold UTXO that's been signed. Some of these like, for example, liquid or in Marathon's case, who I work for, Enduro,

So it's a multi-sig. You're trusting that these Federation members will do things right. So yeah, with your Bitcoin that is literally a mathematical representation for a value attached to a signature that you can't get back if stuff goes wrong, just try to do a little bit of research into what you're doing with if you decide to use these. I think the average person is not going to do that. And I think what will end up happening is you're, you're, I mean, pain is is, is, uh, One of the best teachers and Bitcoiners are no strangers to pain.

And, you know, I'd say Bitcoin in general is a harsh but effective teacher given long enough timeframes. And so I think what ends up happening is inevitably you over a long enough time frame, the good scaling methods will, of course, win out. I think the period of, hey, we've got, how many did you say? How many different claimed layers of Bitcoin and companies that are buildings? Like, whatever the number is. I think that this is just this cycles hype, right? Like, it's, I think, to a degree, there's... Is it that?

I haven't been paying attention. Are we really, like, seeing, like, everybody hyped around the latest layer or layer token? Yeah, because I think what we're seeing is you go to an event and you see a booth from Tron that is saying Tron is Bitcoin. Yeah, I did see this. Like where one of like Hoskinson or somebody is doing this. Yeah, Cardano is now an allaire to a Bitcoin because it lost relevance for being a shit coin.

And so like I think we're going to see a lot of that like this kind of virtue signal kind of like, are you, like, are you really? Like, but I think that can only last so long, right? There's, there's a new kind of, you can get worse. They can all start calling themselves Bitcoin. I mean, to a degree, I think that's definitely going to happen. But, but I think that that can only hold up for so long, right? Like, you, I think that each, each cycle brings its own lessons. Like, you know, there's the ICO bubble where. I was like, okay, there's a lot of shit coins and everything. And through that, people, you know, was the first time that I saw like a definitively

well laid out case for why specifically Bitcoin. And then a bunch of people that made it through that and got to the next cycle and thought they were geniuses because they discovered Bitcoin only, then levered the shit out of their Bitcoin and got wrecked that way. And so, like, I think this cycle, one of this cycle's lessons will will be. learning the lessons of shitcoins, but on Bitcoin. Like it just because it was just because it's on top of Bitcoin, like if it was a bad idea, if it was not on Bitcoin, it's probably still a bad idea on Bitcoin.

And so I think there's going to be a bit of that going around this cycle, in my opinion. I think that the people that know what's up that have, you know, fucked around and found out that have gotten burned and now like know, you know how to go about things the right way. They're also increasing, you know, there's, there's more and more of those types of people, right? And they're going to help their friends and their contacts and people in their community figure it out. You know, clearly there's going to be some new people who just jump in and get totally wrecked. But I think, you know, as we go forward and this exponential growth happens and more and more people get into Bitcoin, that there's just more and more people to help, right?

There's more people like BTC sessions jumping out there and making videos, right? trying to teach people like how to do this right and there always be less of those people but that that's how we grow this yeah mistakes will yeah they'll they'll all be learning opportunities to suppose but with every cycle there's more and more people that have learned that less than the hard way and can tell others what to do yeah yeah i agree and it might take them a demo cycle to you know actually believe them but yeah that's fair it's we've got a lot of people to educate over the coming years and the tools are constantly evolving. So I've got my work cut out for me. So as does everybody else. But still, I think it's exciting. And so this is where we get to enjoy the fruits of the past

as new people come in. But with that, I'm going to put a bow on this topic because I want to get to you guys. Of course, everybody in the chat, thank you for being here. Keep the comments coming. I'll pull-up ones that I see that may pertain to what we're doing. Also, if you're watching this anywhere, smash that like button, give it a share, whatever you can do. We are going to give a quick 20-second shout-out to a show sponsor momentarily here, and then we will be right back. And Portland, I'm looking at you. You're coming up next. And I'm going to be asking you why you're bullish. So we'll see you guys in like 20 seconds here. When it comes to peer-to-peer trading and lending, instant self-custody and no K-YC,

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Why are you bullish? I am bullish for three reasons, but I'm going to stick it to just one. But yeah, that would be the Coin Desk article, Just Don't Break Bitcoin that is about Op Next, which was a conference that I just recently attended that really was around scaling Bitcoin. And what it did was you got a lot of pretty smart people, Jeremy Rubin, Peter Todd, Rusty Russell, etc, that are basically kind of trying to guide the direction of Bitcoin in terms of what kind of features we potentially want to add in. Softworks specifically, no hard forks, just what kind of things we want to do with anybody can spend transactions. And what I really liked about that was specifically that, first of all, nobody came to the conclusion of, oh, we found the magic bullet to consensus, right? And so what that to me, why I'm really bullish is because as long as you don't break Bitcoin, it's probably going to do number go up stuff and still showing that Bitcoin is extremely resilient to people or just a single entity grabbing a lot of influence and being able to activate a feature on Bitcoin. For right now, you have independents that literally have no funding who are like,

hey, I would like to do something like maybe the GSR to specific business or organizations that are pushing for an entire op code based on their soft work. And what it showed me, though, is as well is that a lot of these things can be used for scaling Bitcoin. Specifically, like my easy example would be like CTV. You can do the shared UTXO setup, kind of enables ARC and some other fun things for self-custy, but there are caveats again, like you're not technically like you got a UTXO, but there's some conditions. But yeah, overall, that's what I'm really bullish about is just watching all these developers converge and kind of say like, these are the things we can do with Bitcoin, understanding what it means to be in consensus and kind of

discovering like how do we form consensus potentially, though we didn't actually answer that question. I don't think anybody will be able to. And then also like I will say that it was really good to see in that conference. specifically, that there still is a giant set of, or a lot of people still understand that Bitcoin is not done. And what I mean by that is that Bitcoin still has a few issues with consensus, specifically legacy Bitcoin script, creating just blocks are hard to validate. And yeah, the great consensus cleanup, which is my favorite is what's talked about pretty

extensively there. So a great consensus cleanup, I think in my own opinion, we need to solve for some of these problems, whether it be through a software or just, client side, right? Like maybe we can fix some of these just with Bitcoin core. But yeah, before nation state adoption, you can't have like miners just producing blocks that cause problems for the Bitcoin network. And yeah, I got a reality check for that when I worked from Marathon and did slipstream for the nonstandard transactions. You get a few emails from people and they're like, hey, what the, you do know this exists, right? Like, don't let that happen. So

I hope that we could form consensus around some of these things that really push this so that everybody's ready to adopt Bitcoin and we don't have to think about these things about these different actors, potentially not following the incentive structure. And yeah, so overall, it just was really good to see the amount of energy focused on just building new features into Bitcoin to enable ideally scaling. But again, back to my previous point, some of these things I think could be used potentially for things more degenerate, like side chains or swaps for different things. There's one thing that I wanted to tag on that, that you kind of mentioned there, and that we were kind of discussing. And again, just, but in general terms that regardless of amount of funding, none of these things are like clear leaders in this area, right?

Like you can't, you're not, nobody's able to buy consensus was, was kind of the vibe that I was getting from you from coming out of this. At least for right now, yeah, that's kind of my, my general thing is, yeah, that one of the, I would say the less funded one, CTV is actually seems to have like unanimous, like this is probably going to be fine, right? And some of the more funded ones are standing in this ground of like, hey, like, they haven't quite found like exactly where they sit. But that's my own opinion. and very subjective at that. So like this is not objective.

This was just why am I bullish myself? And it's seeing all these builders build these great things. And hopefully we can, Bitcoin needs to scale. Like we have to have good tools for self-custody. And some of these I feel will enable that to happen. So. Now, do I toss it to John next? Or do I toss it?

Maybe, maybe how about I'll go to John next? and then I'll let Scott split the difference. Sure. So we're trying to keep in mind this is the why are we bullish show. You can go bear if you want. All you need to do is be bullish on your own topic, John. It's free of me. I actually can present this in a bullish way.

I am bullish on the same area of concern, but for entirely the opposite reason. I think that it's very, clear that the people at that conference and most people interested in softworking Bitcoin or entertained by the projects that purport to offer more scale to Bitcoin through new softworks. The reason why they can't figure it out is because they don't understand how it actually works and their motives aren't actually for the best for the benevolence of the user base. Their motives, they have other personal motives like seeing their own project become real

or having more things to experiment with this kind of thing. And so the reason why they couldn't figure it out, and I can put it really simply, like, consensus is not built, it is enforced. We already have consensus. That's why you can't find it. That's why you can't figure out how to make it. It's because we already have it. What Bitcoin is right now is consensus.

What they are is anti-consensus. They are centralized interests that are trying to influence the Bitcoin. network, the rules of the Bitcoin network, the behaviors of the capabilities of the users, etc. And so they are actually indistinguishable from attackers. And so the reason why everything is so, feels so wrong and toxic or impossible for them is because they don't understand, they're not appreciating how things actually work. And if they were actually trying to solve scaling problems, actually trying to like think and zoom out and assess the whole situation, they would not be approaching it anywhere near the way they are.

The idea of trying to create more and more complexities for sharing UTXOs when Lightning has barely demonstrated that they can have a major impact on scaling for Bitcoin. To add complexities that can be combined with other complexities that we have no hope of actually measuring the impact of or what the kind of composability may actually do in unforeseen ways. undesired ways. So if you are actually trying to solve these problems, you probably end up with something like a system for actually measuring symptoms, like actual research bringing out demographics of current Bitcoin users and potential Bitcoin users, and what is impacting their ability to use

Bitcoin, their ability to use Bitcoin frequently, cheaply, for whatever use cases, identifying how people are actually using it and how they are limited, and then identifying, you know, what are the current things that can address those problems. But first, you have to have symptoms of a problem. You have to have evidence. You have to substantiate the soft fork in some real way. Like consensus is overwhelming. It isn't something that you build. If you're building it, then it's a crusade. Then you're, you know what you mean? It's not actually something that the user base is demanding, that the market is demanding. It's you speculating on what you think the market needs. And that's very, very dangerous.

So can I, I want to go off this. Like that's why I was bullish is the fact that they can't find consensus. Like that is actually the point. But at the same time, I would say that are there things in consensus that we potentially might want to like solve in like not reactionarily? Like, hey, like something went wrong with a block during production that got stuck in the chain. But instead like ahead of time. Like the great consensus cleanup is my example of that. That was the only one in my talk.

I said that I think we actually need, right? But like when I create slipstream, like you, I do know of a transaction. You can create that creates a block that does take about an hour to validate. Do we want to have that end up in the chain before we go? It's not. I mean, it ends up in the, the reason why it ends up in the chain is because the rules, you know, allow for the flaw. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's not like, it's not the evil of slipstream. It's not the evil of somebody, you know, noticing that slipstream. didn't have some sort of disclaimer or automated way of making sure that somebody didn't submit a transaction this way. It's a known thing, but it's the way Bitcoin works. And so it's supposed to be a game theoretically sound and such. And so thus a minor would not do that unless they were literally trolling the network or

something. So that kind of is what it is. Granted, if it could be fixed and there are things that can be done to Bitcoin for clean up, optimization, refactoring. That's not the same thing as adding features, as adding rules as add complex. I also stated that there are like three types and like one is adding brand new features. It kind of like the second thing though is in terms of like scaling Bitcoin, like I understand some of these are really broadshot opcodes that do many,

many things like opcats specifically you can create a lot of stuff. But what about like more narrow banned things? Like I such as like CTV, how it seems like in general people are the problem like seriously like the problem is nobody is probably nobody in this in this stream most bitcoins, 99.9% of them are ever going to be qualified to verify anything you just said. You know what I mean? For you to say CTV is probably narrow and it's it's probably harmless. That's a claim. I have no way to verify that claim.

Even as like a 12-year bitcoiner, you know, I'm simply not an engineer. I'm not a cryptographer. I can't audit that code. I can't provide feedback on that code. I'm totally outsourcing trust to everything to do with it. I am happy with the way Bitcoin is. I don't need CTV. None of the, for the problems that I have as a bitcoiner, as a Bitcoin builder, et cetera,

there is absolutely nothing in CTV that I feel like I couldn't live without. There's almost nothing I care about. I don't care about taproot at all. I don't think taproot has had any notable major effect on Bitcoin, especially not to justify the way that it basically slipped in as activation just out of apathy. These things are super dangerous. Like we can't just keep behaving this way where we have like essentially a governance of Bitcoin core

that's leading the design of Bitcoin. That's that's super dangerous. I'm curious. for for you guys when you think we get to a point where um all of this stuff you know saw forks that are are not uh just like cleaning things up that aren't aren't general maintenance when do we reach a point where a proposal like this is just completely untenable like when when does ossification to the point of now we're just we're just doing cleanup come now now and I know that's a weird answer, but it's like we're always there because we're always in consensus, right?

But there's you can't predict the future and the environment is always changing. So we could all agree on a different, you know, reaction. So there's no there's no ossification like that it's just it's a red herring. It's not a real concept. It's just conservatism. That's all it really is. There's in Bitcoin, like I did a list of like all the soft works in Bitcoin. I think 11 out of like like the 17 are emergency activations. What that means is that they were, they were pushed into Bitcoin core specifically because they solve a bug that like coinflation

or some like a fork that happened with the level DB. These kind of things, like the biggest way to form consensus is have a need for a software, right? Like not just like a want, but an actual need. I think, yeah, that's my statement. Like if Bitcoin needs something, it will happen. And we have, we have people building, like,

I'm not saying, that I want any of this stuff. I'm just saying I'm glad we have the flexibility, the optionality to know that these things are in the back pocket to draw out. If we do like, wow, like Bitcoin, we have eight billion people at Bitcoin's door tomorrow. What can we do? Like right now, we got a bunch of UTIOs. I don't know. I thought that any, I don't mind like, I see it as like we're going to have a lot of these things in our tool belt, a lot of these things in our pocket. And we, if we can find ways to vet those things while they're in our pocket, like putting them on shit coins, putting them in liquid, finding ways to actually test them in the wild

and learn about them, then that would be even better. But even if we can't do that, by the time that we actually can, like I said earlier, demonstrate, substantiate with evidence that there's an actual problem and we have an actual solution, then I think we should just be curious and proud of these wizards, you know, doing their magical spells. I don't think we should put it in Bitcoin. I want to get Scott's if you got anything you want to drop in here as well having yeah yeah I mean I think that it is like like you're saying it's it's flashy to want to create you know new opcodes right that's like you're the boss if you get one of those sort of accepted in the in the consensus but like there's still like plenty of bug fixing to do which is the much

less glamorous work right like Portland was saying right with this block you can that is going to, you know, bring the nodes to a standstill. That kind of thing we need to make sure that we can clean up all that sort of stuff. I don't know what this like culture shift is, gets towards like tooling, right, test suites to try and test these new ideas. But to get people, to get developers, you know, interested in these, these more boring, but essential things, you know, I think that the funding, the grants and the companies that are funding developers to work on this stuff are absolutely essential.

And that's what we need to get these people in there who are going to do the less glamorous projects in Bitcoin. Yeah. I wish I was qualified enough to comment on. It's interesting because I guess to kind of to John's point earlier on, you know, with Segwit and all that back in the day, I was bull. headed enough to to comment and feel like I understood what was happening, which I totally didn't. And so like, I was the same, man. Yeah.

I mean, and so, you know, I'm glad that we now have lightning and that, you know, I'm happy that Segwit helps that become easier to do. And but again, like even taproot, I, it's, I kind of have hit. the point in my Bitcoin journey where, you know, all of this stuff when I, when I hear like CTV or OpCad or all this, I'm like, I guess I'll just, if it becomes a thing and it's in something that I'm using, then I'll, I'll experience it then. But like, it's, I don't feel that also it's going to be my place to be a part of that conversation because I'm not in it. My role is more what is Bitcoin currently and how does it interoperate with all the various

tools that are available to me right now. And so, yeah, it's weird this time around, just kind of feeling in the dark about all this. Also, these talks in and around these proposals, they feel more niche this time. Like back with Segwit and like the big blocks versus not, it was it was enough of a base level conversation where I think even the average person could pretend like they knew what was up, myself included. And so that's why it felt like, okay, I'm going to weigh in on this, you know, big blocks versus not.

And now it's like, I wouldn't even know where to begin. And so I think, yeah, these technical proposals and changes are really kind of going off into realms where you've got a very specific set of people talking about them and debating them. And you've got a base layer of users that really are going to have no clue that a change has ever happened. happened to be honest. I think that's kind of if it happens. So I kind of feel like that's that's going to be the norm for most people is like, oh, Bitcoin change. I didn't, didn't know. Well, there's a flip side too. Like I agree with you on the protocol level. Like, you know, the way Bitcoin core is eventually you end up having to update to every change that they give you because it's not really a major implementation that any normal person is going to run other than Bitcoin

core. Sorry, I was going to say. Oh, and the flip side of that is that there's also a fatigue that happens when you keep adding new payment protocols and new layers and technologies on the product level and on the user level because they won't notice the changes you made on the protocol and whatever you manage to hide behind your new features, but all of the new features are going to be a new incompatible payment protocol and a new user experience. In other words, The difference between using Lightning, the difference between using Arc, the difference between using Lightning over Arc or Arc over Lightning, the difference between using Lightning

with liquid with BitVM, with multi-party channels with Tarrow and Taproot assets. Like none of these things are actually compatible inside of an application and they're all risky and complex to implement. And so for the builders and stuff, it's like after dealing with trying to do like self- Stodio, Lightning, and mobile, you come to me and say, oh, let's tack on eCash and Arc and CTV and multi-party to this. And I'm just like, fuck you. Like, I'm not touching that shit.

Here's where I'm going to both agree and push back on what you're saying. So the agreeance is, you know, when I started educating people about Bitcoin, I was like, here's your Bitcoin wallet, write down your words, this is a receive address, this is how you send. And then like we're kind of, we were coming in at the base layer of a potential new global monetary system saying like here's the base layer. This is how it works. Everybody's going to use this. And that was kind of the pre-supposition. You'll just be using this and this is how it's going to be.

And then it was like, oh, and now there's this thing, lightning. And so when you're using Bitcoin, you might use it in this instance. but then sometimes you're going to use lightning. And now there's other things that you alluded to there or mentioned other ways of using Bitcoin or we'll say get it. But do I say exposure to Bitcoin? Yeah, exposing yourself to Bitcoin. Other Bitcoin liability.

Yeah. But in a way, like so. But the way that one teaches now is I would say like, The education almost needs to inverse a little bit where the person coming in is going to want the easiest transactional experience and then work their way towards the most sovereignty. Because as you build more wealth that you're holding in Bitcoin, you should be more and more secure with how you're holding it. and somebody wanting to see how a wallet works and send a dollar back and forth is maybe not going to have the same considerations as somebody that's like, I'm going to begin actually saving in Bitcoin long term. And so my agreeance is that, yeah, as all these new things and changes happen and you have arc and you have lightning and you have all this other shit, it's like, oh, God, like, what? Where do I start teaching somebody?

However, I also see all these systems and whether you like the different, you know, ecosystems or not and like how different they are, right now I'm seeing a lot of lightning functioning as the glue that allows these things to talk to each other, or like the interpreter, rather, I suppose. So like, you know, having somebody that's on an e-cash wallet or a Feddy, whatever, or a liquid, technically a liquid wallet or actual self-custodial lightning. But like you have these systems in the back end where it doesn't necessarily matter that you and I are on completely different protocols in terms of what we're holding at the end of a transaction. but that there's systems in place where through lightning and other tools, I'm able to send to you even though you're not technically holding the same thing I am.

So like I can myself as perhaps a lightning user with full self-custodial lightning and my own channel and everything could send to the person that doesn't mind that they're on an e-cash wallet that is somebody else's Lightning Note and, you know, it's a, it's a IOU for the 500 Sats that I just sent. And so those, again, that kind of interpreter in between of lightning stringing these things together, I think is interesting and also makes it a little bit easier for like proof of concept initial. Let's try sending some stuff back and forth. So I don't know exactly where I stand.

there, but I think that it's both getting more difficult, but in a way I see that it will be easier later. I think that the concept of bridging these networks is interesting, just in general. In other words, I understand why you describe that last part that way, in that it is interesting when you think about, okay, well, maybe if we don't end up getting lightning to work on the end user level and it ends up working more on a B2B level, then these B2B kind of gateways would be able to assist in bridging all of the other experimental networks, especially when you consider that a lot of the things that are being developed lately

are kind of like these like liquidity islands, like ARC, the ARC is liquidity locked, the eCache mints, the assets are mint locked. And so you need to ultimately have some sort of conversion in order to transmit across into other networks or other nodes. And that's That's why all that is interesting. Unfortunately, there's a very important nuance there, which is that that complexity is actually delicate. And so our ability to have success rates across those systems is going to be less than our ability to have success

on Lightning alone, for example. And so you're going to, the user experience might be a little bit deceptive if you have, your good first attempt might be good, but then your next three attempts might be shit. or have very high fees or unpredictable fees and these kinds of things, because you're going to have slippage for the conversion. The base point being simply that in the economic concept

and the concept of circular economy and such, conversion is the enemy. And so conversion is an inefficiency in many cases because it's a service and thus it's a centralizing force. And so you have a very censorable layer network if you're basing it on this kind of design. Interesting. I'm if anybody has any final thoughts,

they'd like to tag into this, this topic before we put a bow on it, feel free. I'll just do like a quick draw, quick fire around here. First of all, that a lot of, like you mentioned earlier, that like you may not understand these things and how it works or can't validate. And that's the way most people are in that position. But you definitely can reap the benefits of some of these features. An example would be transaction malleability and Segwit that kind of enabled the lightning network to happen.

So though it's not understood to most people how that happened, but it did let lightning happen, which improved the UX on the basically transaction TPS side of things. And my second kind of point as well as like, you're right. Like I do want everybody to have a great experience, like especially with like the lightning network. And Wallace Satoshi was kind of my go-to. I would I tell everybody, hey, download Wall to Satoshi. I tell him like it's custodial. You can get rugs, like all this stuff. but just see the speed.

And then you can take it to your own lightning wallet when you get, sorry, it's custodial and when you get your own self-custodial solution, move it over. That's when kind of the some of the issues came in though, like they would try to move it over. Oh, there's no route, et cetera, found. And then they felt the real pain point of what happens when you remove the centralization and database post-rescue Lair from lightning.

So. Awesome. Well, Scott, I don't know if you have anything else you want to tag in or if you're all set there. I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, yeah, no. Oh, perfect.

We'll put a one for now. Where it's high time, we do another rotation here. So, gents, we're going to take, again, just 30 seconds. And we're going to do a quick shout out to show sponsor. And actually, when we get back, I'm going to give away some sats. So anybody that is in the chat, watching live, wherever you're watching. Make sure you get your LN URL enabled lightning wallets ready because whoever scans first will be able to snag those stats. So we will be back in 20, 25

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click the links in the show notes down below, and use code BTC Sessions 10 to get 5,000 SATs for free. All right, we are back in. We're going to give away some stats really quick here before we get rolling on the next topic. Everybody watching, I'm here on

Bitcoinwell.com. basically the way this works is anybody that does sign up or, and actually I'm just going to adjust the screen here, anybody that does sign up or buy Bitcoin or refer their friends, you basically, you earn points which can then be used to toss a coin in the Bitcoin wishing well. And when you do, you have the chance to win anywhere between 500 and a million SATs. So I'm going to do that right now. Make sure you have your lightning wallet ready. Again, first to scan, we'll snag the SATs. off the coin goes and boom 2100 sats whoever scans first congrats to whoever gets them uh of course

if you do snag those sats make sure you let us know in the uh comments in the live chat wherever you're watching of course and if you're not currently on bitcoin well uh there is a QR code there for you at the bottom of the screen feel free to sign up uh but of course with that Maybe I'll do this. Is that easier? No. I'm forgive me, I'm still learning how the hell this even works. So there we go.

That's a little bit easier. Okay, with that, we're going to do a rotation. Scott, I am looking at you. You are up next and I'll ask you this simple question. Everybody gets. Why are you bullish? Oh, man, I'm super bullish. I'm super bullish.

I'm super bullish on open source Bitcoin. which is kind of like you're like wait wait what like bitcoin is open source of course uh you talk to people who are who are working on things besides mining and it's just obvious that uh whatever they're working on will be released open source but as you may or not know a large portion of bitcoin mining has gone completely closed source and proprietary like actually top to bottom nearly all the bitcoin that's mine is done on on completely proprietary closed source uh equipment firmware and software. But that's changing. Like this year, it's been wild. We've got this group called the open source miners United that has like hit 4,500 members. Like people are streaming into

this. And I think now we're starting to see like the sort of like, you know, secondary projects that are coming on, like building on the original like open source projects that we're working on there. people looking at new ways to cool miners, developing open source ways to look at solar mining, doing some cool, I saw crypto ice was in here earlier, doing some satellite communications for miners to get to get totally off the grid, you know, paired with solar stuff. But this is really exciting. This is really exciting. The thing that kind of kept me up, before, before this, that they got me worried was that it was nearly impossible for, you know, the sort of mere mortal who wasn't working in a big company to get involved in Bitcoin in any

significant, in Bitcoin mining in any significant way. And I think slowly and surely, that's changing. Seeing all kinds of people jump in, you know, with the Bitax project and with follow-on projects. And it's making me really bullish. I get to have the luxury of working on this full time. And it is quite possibly the most exciting thing I've ever done, like getting to talk to these people and see what they're building and contribute to it on my own. So it is so fantastic to see.

I mean, there's all kinds of people that bring comments in there that say, you know that they're also bullish on the bid X like this is this is what I'm talking about where you know people can get their sort of hands dirty for the first time in Bitcoin mining and then you know maybe maybe that's where it stops maybe they're just playing the lottery but there's going to be a subset of people that want to do more like they like rabbit holes I think a lot of people tend tend to go for these rabbit holes and they're going to jump in right soon they're going to be talking with Portland you know at his level to like understand how this thing works and there's no telling what i mean what kind of amazing

advancements can come out of this right when when we provide the tools for for people to dig in just as an example like a couple years ago i was googling you know how do i run how do i mine to my own node like i've got a miner i want to mine to my own node and there was nothing there was absolutely nothing like there was tons of bitcoin talk responses they're like, don't do it. Forget about it. Don't do it. It's pointless. Software, basically, there was no, like, stratum server that you could run on your own node practically to mine to your own node. And this is changing. This is absolutely changing. We have single-click installs for node-in-the-box software where you can mine to your own node and, like, completely separate

yourself from any third-party in your mind, like top-to-bottom self-sovereign mining, which is you know you're not going to like take over the network you're not going to be providing a significant part of the network cash rate but you are understanding how this works and uh you know if enough people do that then uh this this is getting us back to that decentralized um component that is so essential to bitcoin itself i've got a question for you what kind of um so first off I'm going to do a show first because the whole bidax project, it's in terms of like an excellent educational tool, like in a way that is affordable. If you're a hobbyist and you just kind of want to dink around and be like, oh, I can get a little device and I can plug it in and it like doesn't take up a ton of power or anything, it's not loud. my wife is not going to divorce me because of the heat and the sound, then, you know, exactly.

Yeah, and I've got mine sitting over here. Again, video soon. But what a great opportunity for your average person to have something that you can just, like, plug in, have on a shelf, learn a little bit about Bitcoin mining, get your hands dirty, see like a nice dashboard and learn how to do it. You know, you're not going to be like bank and stats left, right and center. You know, you can, you can, depending on the mining pool, if you do a pool, then you can see like, oh, it's working. I'm getting paid out to a lightning wall, but you're not going to be profitable.

Alternatively, you can just solo mine and more or less have like a bit of a forever lottery ticket sitting there just for fun. But it becomes a conversation piece and it becomes an educational piece. I think it's, again, it's a cool thing where it may not have been. practical for somebody for various reasons. Like you're not going to likely, if you're living in a city, you're not plugging in like, you know, an S-21 or something to your, you're like outlets. And if you're getting an S-9 or something and you've got a jet engine in your house, you can retrofit them and make a little space heater.

And that's a fun, just like side projects for a weekend. but it's to me the bid X is just again a very accessible lightweight fun thing to try now my question is you're talking about moving the needle a little bit on on decentralized decentralizing mining and obviously like it's it's small but at what point, you know, would it be, and I'm not saying that this is going to happen for sure, but like at what point do, you know, the average people just like shoving a bit axe on their shelf for a couple of them and what numbers, would that actually be even decipherable in terms of versus large pools out there? Like, do you have any idea? Yeah. I mean, if we just

generalize the bitax as being one tarah hash, some or less, some or more. then we would need something like 7 million of those to equal 1% of the network cash rate. 7 million, that's a lot. And I don't think it's even practical to sell 7 million bit axes as they are now. But that's not exactly the point of the project. The project is sell as many bit axes as possible for one. But to inspire like a whole and enable the development of a whole new generation of miners, right? If we're going to have these decentralized mining, like I would argue that we absolutely need.

We need to have everyone who's even remotely interested in a little hobbyist lottery miner running a bitaxe. But also we need to have, you know, anyone who would consider to run their hot water heater as a Bitcoin mine, their space heater as a Bitcoin miner. And there's a bunch of cool like hot water heater, pool heater, hot tub heater, space heater projects right now. But it's kind of insane because it's an adversarial. relationship with the with bit main who makes the machines that these are based on right so to go into this market and you know think you're going to make a hot water heater you have to essentially reverse engineer bit main products or kind of use some previous generation you know bit fury chips something like that it's not good prospects right so this needs to change we need to have the tools such that people

can build those things right we need to hunt of different Bitcoin fired hot water heater vendors. Right now it's an incredibly daunting process. I think that can change. So it's kind of like trying to kickstart that industry so people can build those things. Yeah. You know, we've been, I've been talking a lot with Alex,

the guy who runs heap bit. And, you know, they're feeling the burn because of, you know, it's really tough to get competitive chips. bare chips to build into a system. And so we've been talking about like, hey, you know, we can expand this BitX project to make hashboards that can be suitable for space heaters, right? And the thing that comes along with that is open source firmware too, because like the firmware that we have basically right now, it's just not suitable.

It's just not suitable for any of these projects. Like you're always up against Bitmain who is not going after these and seems to want to prohibit these like alternative uses of their equipment. firmware locks as of March on us 19s and s 21s. Really? There's a new version that locks. Yeah, any ant miner as of March this year, the shipped of will have a firmware lock. You can do a hardware crack on it now, but the old software update, it's gone. So it's been more restricted than ever.

Continue. This is insane, right? Like lots, I think Marathon has their own control board, right, brains. Marathon, they're making their own control boards because Bitmain makes it so hard to load alternate firmware onto their control boards. Right? This is insane. Why are we doing this? Why do you have to make a new control board?

Like your own, like design your own control board and write your own firmware for it just to like get these machines to do what you want. The S9, they had source available for it. You could SSH into your machine. You can replace the CG minor. You can actually interface with it. Now none of that is available.

There's no SSH. You can't change the mining software. And I figure all this out because I basically, I was tasked with, hey, can we wrap stratum and TLS basically encrypt the data going back and forth? Yeah. I was like, oh, I remember I could SSH in my S9. Oh, none of that's available anymore. So it's messed up. It's messed up. I think people if, you know, I don't know why Bitman doesn't open it up, right? That would just sell more machines. You could have like some sort of DIY version that has no warranty or whatever, but like they don't want to do it. And I think that they're not going

to be so far ahead forever. Sooner or later, someone else, making this hardware, you know, maybe it's block, maybe it's someone else is going to open up and allow this to happen. And once these things get the A6, the chips themselves get commoditized, it's, I mean, the floodgates are going to open towards these ideas, right? You think about like Intel, AMD, ARM, right, except for ARM kind of sort of, but they make the CPUs, right? They don't make computers. They sell those CPUs to systems builders who build the computers, you know, whether they be big servers, desktops, laptops, phones, all those things, right? That's up to the systems integrators to build those things. And that's how it needs to work for mining A6.

Who are the people that are viable alternatives to Bitmain right now? Right now, nobody. Absolutely nobody. Bitmin is so far ahead. in terms of efficiency that, I mean, I don't actually, maybe Portland knows, I feel like, well, they gotta have like 80, 90% of the market. I believe it's somewhere in that realm right now. What's minor kind of has a little bit of a footing, but yeah, overall that,

I just wanna point out something about like physical real world things have always been very opaque. Manufacturing processes have all been opaque, right? So you compare that to open source software. It's very easy to put bits out. there text information compile it and things but if you ask anybody like hey like how's a piston in your car made how's a battery made how how's your silverware made nobody knows these kind of techniques and same thing with asic production is like the bitcoin network in of itself is literally basically

at this point backed by one producer of silicon that's tsmc uh or tmc so tmc yeah yeah yeah i mean it's a fucked up situation like there's lots of problems for for the world in tsmc but You know, that aside, you know, they can make those chips and sell them to people, just like, you know, if you want to rebuild your engine and understand how it works, you can like get the tools to do that, right? We don't need absolutely everyone to understand how Bitcoin miners work. We just need a legion of builders who are willing to do it. And like you said earlier, the tools to do this are becoming much more accessible, right? Like you can get KECAD, design your own circuit board, and you can get those PCBs shipped to your house. for like 30 bucks from China.

You can get like five PCBs shipped your house, build it up in a toaster oven. It's getting easier and easier. And, you know, that's how people get started doing it. As a side note, EDA for like actual chip design, lattice has Ice Storm. So basically like in my little keyboard I made that hashes at a mega hash. It's that's CPLD.

Like that's open source software. I basically wrote a chip. If I had enough money, I could ship this off to TMSC and have them build it. with that barrelog. Like people can actually, there's an open source chip movement as well. I don't know if there are open source ASICs,

but that's my question to you. When open source bit acts ASIC? I mean, there's open source FPGA designs, right? You can get it sort of the logic of how it works. I think you're gonna be very disappointed with the efficiency of that. Or even, you know, you can get on one of these, I figure what it's called that Google was doing it for a while,

like these shuttles where you can get your own ASIC made to like 130. nanometers opposed to like the most efficient A6 or three five meters yeah five so but going back you know when I started getting interested in electronics there's this whole scene of of makers like maker magazine hackaday and things like that of like people just jumping in and building their own electronics and there's tons of educational resources like you don't have to go and get a electrical engineering degree to start screwing around with this stuff. Not at all. In fact, a lot of people who work in it now don't have that. So it's becoming less opaque to jump in. You know, Bitcoin mining, however, has not been so welcoming in that regard. But, you know, my original reasons, it's changing.

It's very hopeful. But we, you know, people can work on hardware. People can totally do it. I've seen with the VidX project, like all sorts of people jump in. Shout out to, to Ben, you know, when he first contacted me, he was like, I want to build a bit axe. You know, is it hard? I know, he's like, I've never done anything like, never soldered anything together in my life. Like, yeah, yeah, it's, it's pretty hard. A little bit later, he gets back to me. He's like, I built two of them and they're working great. I was like, wow, dude, that's impressive. And then a little bit later, he's like, I bought a pick in place machine. And then now he has several pick and place machines and has made thousands of bid X. Like,

that's awesome. He's probably a special case because the dude's wicked smart. But, uh, But you know, what I'm saying is like people can jump into this. You can learn how to do it. It's, you know, like software. It's just it just takes some reading and some studying and and banging ahead on it. But you can figure it out. Yeah. There's a question in the comments there from Praveen.

He was asking how to get BitX in Canada. Decentral, I believe. Out of Vancouver, if I'm not mistaken, they ship them. So yeah, that's an easy way to get. your hands on one if you want to mess around. DeCentral is such a cool story, right? I mean, he's been, the guy who runs it's been repairing Bitcoin miners for a long time, has a lot of, you know, experience with how this works, but he had never made a minor. And he just started making him. He didn't have to ask me. In fact, he didn't. He just started making them and building them

and selling them. And he's the first person who started making bid axes, in bulk and selling them and uh i don't know it's just cool that there you go there's the essentials website it's just so cool to see people getting in and doing this um yeah it's hard but it's doable we've been we've been chatting with uh like the um uh got my company bitcoin mentor doing like the one-on-ones and stuff and uh so we got chatting with them and so we've got uh a relationship with them where the people are wanted to learn about it, they can like do one-on-one sessions, but also like go through the site to get like a deal on bid axes and everything. So it's the guys are great. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome.

He did a at the Canadian Bitcoin conference, not this year, but the last year, he did a, a workshop to like build your own bid axe from scratch in a workshop. It was like eight hours or something like that. But some people pulled it off. It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's awesome. John, I know that you've been enjoying watching the nerding out happening, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts that you wanted to drop in here. Well, I usually talk too much. I thought it was a good opportunity to shut up. I have some personal experience with mining in the early days when I was in Bitcoin. I remember I had, I don't know, maybe it was something like 9 or 12 GPUs back in 2014. 14 on open face like motherboards all on top of the table in my garage.

So you're like, you go in the garage and all you hear is, and it's like, you know, AMD, right? You know, if you were doing it around the same time, you'll remember that the GPUs came with like free gift codes for video games. And so you could almost recoup the cost of the GPUs just by selling the video game codes. And so I was doing this thing where I was, I was, I was, I was, So I bought, I didn't get that. I spent maybe, I don't know, $7,000 or so on GPUs and motherboard stuff, set it all up, sold all of the video, free video games that came into the GPUs.

Then I mined enough light coin because it was right when Bitcoin was not, you couldn't really mine it with GPUs anymore. It was when ASIC miners were starting to come out and things like this. And so I did try some mining on Bitcoin mining pools and obviously I didn't get any. thing notable at all. And so I mined like coin sold it for Bitcoin. And then I when I made enough to pay off for everything, I just sold everything. And I ended up just profiting and having some Bitcoin. So that's my mining story from the early 2010s or 20, I don't know, some of the time in 2012 and 2014. Also an interesting anecdote. I remember like being in the threads watching like fried cat selling the first ASIC miners, which were after the Avalon miners. But,

that was all a very interesting very fun time watching the hash rate go up um i remember it was like i think he i think they did on like valentine's day for some of it remember and just that was like when like a6 were hitting the scene and like the hash rate of bitcoin was just a totally different demon at that point um that's when they could just like you know delay shipping of your unit just to right they would mind them first run up the hash rate and then ship it to you and then so you were already buck basically that that was a scheme they noticed like that the machines were used from avalon sometimes things like this a lot of little weird stories like that could probably go on not about um but i will mention one thing you made me think of that maybe to

bring something interesting to the conversation about mining um ben you asked uh you know when like when would this have an impact of hash rate like and obviously you know i was smiling thinking it never will It's just such a small amount on hash rate that it's like you said like the lottery thing and a learning thing and this kind of thing But there is actually you know just to profound there is an interesting situation where it might matter Which is in the situation where all of the actual normal people using Bitcoin were running miners themselves And all of the people like holding most of the Bitcoin or you know the institutionalized Bitcoin We're not doing that if we ever had to do some sort of hard fork or something for the people, the people would have hash power.

You know what you mean? Now, granted, they wouldn't have enough hash power of the same type to stop themselves from being attacked by the larger network, but maybe there'd be something there where if you have these people that are capable of being responsible and organized for hashing their own network, then they're somebody that you can mobilize to respond when they're attacked. There's one point, though, I believe, is that having the hash rate isn't enough to do it. You actually have to be sovereign enough with the pool or pool selection to achieve your goal. Am I correct?

Like, if we have a bunch of home miners, for example, all connect to home mining tool.org. Well, migrating from a pool is pretty easy. As long as there's a credible exit, right? You need another pool that's safe to go to or the ability to self-organize a new one. Yeah, for sure. which I think there are a couple options now that seem like they're like CK Solo's been around forever and then Datum I think recently got released and that gives you template generation capabilities at your site you can still broadcast the block but I did like for my own research and like

I've been building on it a little bit they can always reject your shares that you submit so they can go even though you broadcast and built the block they can reject the the payout because they can go that block was it credible wrong paid address or whatnot but definitely SV2 as well kind of like making that pool experience better. Back to your original point, Scott, you mentioned like when you got into trying to mine Bitcoin, you couldn't even find a stratum pool solution to connect your Bitcoin node to figure out

how to get these things all connected together. That was my exact same experience when I got to Mara. I was like, hey, because I was responsible for doing an EBPF stratum observer, basically like watching the traffic over the wire, reconstructing shares. There weren't any good pool implementations. I tried Luke's. I tried CG miner. Like all these things wouldn't compile.

They're all from 2014. And then just CK Solo. His solution was there. It built, but the documentation, a little bit of a challenging codebair. Nonetheless, I got it working, but that was problematic. And now I think you do have some kind of out-the-box solutions that you literally can just download Umbrel, put on your Raspberry Pi, and start, attach your Bitax to it, and be a sovereign miner.

And hopefully people that do these kind of activities or the individuals learn to not just go, hey, let's sign up with Bitmain or whatnot. Yeah. And we need more of that, too. Right. This is a promising trend. There's more that is coming out. Because like you said, like a couple of years ago, we only had like these, these like almost nearly decade old software packages. And like just this year, we've seen the introduction of, you know, of ocean, of several solar mining pools, solar mining software, stratum servers. We're seeing sort of the increasing advancement of stratum v2. I think that I think this is this is absolutely headed in the right direction. Very bullish. Nice. That's awesome. Scott, before we do a rotation here, do you have any recommendations for people that perhaps are just getting started with this stuff?

They're curious. They don't know where to go, what to do. Where would they even begin? I've got a website, bidax.org. To be honest, we're pretty light on documentation. It's all community made at this point. There's a bunch of YouTube videos. One of the OSMU founders, Want Clue, has posted a bunch of tutorials on YouTube that you can watch.

In fact, he has a lot of videos on YouTube that you can watch. You can you can pester our friend BTC sessions to put together at amazing how-to video. The other cool thing that I've seen a lot of is people doing this at meetups. like in-person stuff at meetups. People are doing demonstrations, how-toes, they're hacking on it. That's really awesome to see is people doing it in person.

And then also providing the opportunity to buy one in person so you don't have to put your mailing address into a random website. Yeah, that's fair. Awesome. Sweet. All right, well, we'll put a bow on this topic.

We're going to do one final rotation. We're going to do a quick final sponsor shout-out. and also a way for you guys to earn more sats if you're looking to do so in the future and then we're going to jump to John as the final bullish member of our panel. So we will see you guys in about 30 seconds here. Keeper is a fully open source Bitcoin app

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So I highly recommend it's a nice way to stack sats. Well, new Bitcoiners stack skills. But with that, we are going to jump back out. I'll have that QR code at the end of the screen and of the show again for you if you need it. But John, I'm going to toss it to you. Why are you bullish? So this is hard for me. But I have a few answers that I could give.

I guess the first, I'll give the first. I'll give three, but the first two aren't really meant to be conversation, just meant to be interesting. I fancied myself a trader once, like many bitcoins. And I, because of my background being, before Bitcoin, part of my background being in graphic design, I was always particularly interested in charting. And so I still chart to this day, even though I don't trade. And I consider myself to have gotten pretty good at it over the, you know, It's been like 10 years now of charting.

And I'm pretty bullish just based off of my own charting. And so that's just simply saying, you know, I would say that maybe 150K would be a modest top for this bull market. And I'm interested to see what kind of craziness happens above there if we get there. Another funny one I'll mention is I'm bullish about EFBTC. Because I know that just sounds like shitting on shitcoin. But no, like actually like bullish on the fact that like it's failing. You know, it's failing to hang with Bitcoin.

It's failing to Ethereum's failing to make new highs. It's at least partially proving the Bitcoin thesis of their kind of being at least fewer coins to rule them all, if not one. And it's nice to see that like the narratives are not holding up for them. They can't keep coming up with new marketing pitches to be able to keep up with Bitcoin's price. So now we're seeing like reaching new lows while Bitcoin is like almost at 100K. It's, it's beautiful. I love to see it. I don't want it to see the pain of the people holding it, but you know, it's nice to know that we're not crazy. Like imagine how bad would you feel if Ethereum is like, you know, outpacing Bitcoin right now. Yeah. It's suck. And it's worth noting also that

like the all time, the peak of Ethereum versus Bitcoin was back in, in like June of 2017 and and it was like a you know point one nearly point one 5 bitcoin back then and we're at like they got to write a whole bull market without any actual progress and still school people like last bull market was a total sham like they didn't make a new btc high like it's it's funny now to see but i mean this is the trajectory for most alt coins right like you get an initial spike and some people do okay, maybe. And then it's just like a volatile path to owning less Bitcoin pretty much. And then they cycle because they end up having to compete with themselves. So it's like if you keep keep it compete on complexity, then there's a more complex coin that comes out. And if you

compete on token features or defy, like they just keep trumping up the centralization until they eat each other. Anyway, my actual bullish topic for discussion, I don't have a lot of thought put into it so we'll see how this goes. But I'm bullish on passively just on what's happening in American politics in general and not because of like things like Bitcoin Reserve, etc. Specifically because of the likelihood of Ross Elbrick being set free. And so and it isn't just like an appeal to, oh yes, John said the thing that we all agree with. No, what I mean is that Like, I think it's really interesting to start thinking about and bringing back the conversation of why we think he shouldn't have been in jail for all this time. And what caused him to get there in the first place and maybe like what he'll have to say about it.

What will change in Bitcoin and maybe in regulation and in culture and conversation based off of the fact that they did set free the guy that did the evil drug market? And I'm bullish on this because soft shill here, you know, it seems like that's okay. And so I'll say because we're trying to build this pub key thing and we need there to be more tolerance for people being able to host, you know, data themselves, people being able to not worry about being sent to prison if they host the wrong data the wrong way. You know what I mean? Or if they build the wrong marketplace. or do we need to care more about like that what Ross was actually doing was trying to provide a free market and he went to prison for that and you know what's what's going to happen with that conversation are we going to be more tolerant to free markets are we going to have more rights for web hosts and

cloud providers and things like this are we like noster people have to worry about this too it's not just like what we're doing with pub key it's anybody who's like trying to promote the idea of moving coasting away from big tech to smaller entities. You're still going to be prosecuted if you have bad data on your servers. So we need to kind of change the definition of what is bad data and what the government will come after you for to things that actually harm people, you know, actual evil things and not necessarily drugs or banned materials and whatever else is just more subjective and controlling.

So, yeah, that's my rant. I like it. I'll make sure, just so we're, ensure that everybody's on board, of course, everybody's smash, like if you agree with the thing. So make sure you do that. But, yeah, I mean, it is an interesting, very quick turn, right? Like, it was a little scary.

And it still is, of course, the environment. of, you know, throwing devs in jail and arresting people for, you know, basically sharing information. And so perhaps with, you know, the election there that may, I would consider it just buying some time, perhaps, because there's always, like, there's always the next election. There's always, who knows, like, who's what somebody in power will do. do or not do. But if we treat this time as a gift and, you know, get to work and build shit that is really hard, if not impossible to take down and that just kind of works and

that becomes the norm, it's a lot harder to point fingers at that point. I think we're kind of, we maybe saw a little bit of this in the privacy space in the past year too, where it's like, okay, well, Wasabi Sunsets as a coordinator, and then all of a sudden you've got anonymously run coordinators popping up that you can sub in. Samurai gets shut down and the servers get shut down, and then you see a fork of samurai anonymously forked that requires somebody to run a dojo, so there's no server to shut down. And so you're getting like whack-a-mole instead of pointing and saying shut it down.

I think, you know, Noster again, is, is to a degree an answer to, again, just a general online censorship. And what you guys are doing is trying to take that. And maybe, maybe if we could, could you maybe outline what Pubkey is and what you guys are looking to do with it? Sure. And it's kind of relevant when you bring up Noster that way, because, like, yes, there's the idea. of getting everybody to host everything themselves and getting people to be personally responsible. And there is a ideal in that direction that should be built and for the people that want to do that, and that should be inclusive with any protocol like Noster or like what we're doing with a PubT.

But you also have to consider that there are use cases for the internet that will always benefit from centralization. Like the internet is not Bitcoin. Like the internet is, you know, we're trying to get people to gather in as larger way as possible sometimes. Like when you have a marketplace of ideas, you want as many ideas as possible. When you have a marketplace of products, you want as much competition as possible. And so this is part of the reason why something like Twitter or X becomes such a focal point and, you know, has such a shelling point, is that people just want the maximum exposure when they're using X. And you'll see people differentiate, you know, like blue sky is like becoming more left

and Nosser is more Bitcoiny and whatever. But the problem ultimately is that, and why I brought up this kind of topic that is being bullish, is that we will always need hosts. And we will always need this to respect this relationship of where, no matter what situation you have from a physics standpoint, the host is going to be the one who makes the rules. And so we need to make it so hosts can host safely. And whether that be you hosting something yourself, X posting it, or Google Cloud hosting it,

or anywhere in between in that spectrum, we're always going to need that. And so that's my intro into comparing Pub Key or describing Pub Key and contrasting it a little bit with Master in that. What is majorly different with PubKee is simply that it is using your public key as your domain name. And we accomplish this through putting the equivalent of a DNS record inside of what's called Mainline Dht. Mainline Dht is the network that basically powers the BitTorrent network. We don't use BitTorrents and file replication for anything. We only use the DHD and we only use it to store a key signed DNS record. What that means is you can literally have your public key, or as many public keys as you want, act like a domain name and resolve

through the Dht. So you don't need to resolve through ICANN. You don't need to worry about whether or not you're censored, even if you use trusted endpoints. So what I mean by that is if you take this key, your Pub key, and you make put these records in the Dht, you could point them to a server that you are self-hosting, right? And now you're living the dream, right? But you could also point them to a server that is trusted,

where you have an account. and still use it the same way and have the same experience, where if that entity now censors you, all you need to do to hot swap your location is copy your data somewhere else and update your DNS record. And so you can't really be censored anymore in the practical sense, as long as you are either willing to host it yourself, or you can find an alternative host from the one that banned you or whatever.

So this is why I'm interested in, you know, lean more leniency around hosting and things is because we figured out a way to make servers safe to use for the users, you know what I mean, where they won't be trapped in a walled garden, where they have a credible exit, where they can be more control and have interoperable applications and such on the identity level. But we still need servers. And so the whole idea with PubKee is just to basically show that you can have a key-based web and that you can have it be something where you can use servers safely. You don't have to be anti-server anymore. And you can have both a peer-to-peer aspect of the network and a server-based part of the network. So, yeah, that's like the main aspects of PubKee core, and you can see from here on the screen.

And then, of course, we're building PubKee app right now. I'll enter a private beta for that very soon, and we plan to make a public beta for that in Q1 next year. But this is basically an app that's meant to demonstrate how you could implement all of this stuff and what's possible with it. And another part of the vision, which is the concept of social tagging. So this is our solution for establishing what we're calling a semantic social graph. So we're somewhat addressing the old problems of the semantic web in the past, and we're also addressing the current problems of what you might call poisoned algorithms or toxic algorithms, you know, just central as algorithms being the main source.

The way that users use Pubkey app is they can basically tag. They can basically tag anything. They can tag posts. They can tag any type of posts. It's not just micro blogs or tweets or notes like Master and X. It could be an article. It could be a video. It could be a podcast.

And there are actual intentional post types for each of these different types of posts. So it's more like if you turned like Google.com into social media. And instead of Google.com providing the algorithm, you and the people that you follow provide it. And so you can now create a context. through basically filtering down the graph. So all of the data is now aggregated into indexers, graphs, and you tell the indexer how to prepare that data for you, so you create your own views of the graph.

So it's not just like creating a feed of people you follow, it's creating a feed of actual perspectives on the entire data that you have access to. And so it's like reversing the algorithm to be something that you create and you provide the waiting for and you provide the context for. And this is all based off of web of trust concepts, except what we've done is built basically a contextual level trust.

So yeah, enough shilling, enough ranting. I hope that explains some things. So can I, I just want to chat through some, I'm just, again, practically thinking out loud on like some of the basic stuff that may be useful for, say, myself, you know, making content. Like right now, let's say, I'm on YouTube. I'm making whatever content. And I'm pretty much be holding to them. They say, nope, you're not allowed to have this anymore and they delete it and it's gone and that's it. Noster, I can post, like, I can post something. It's difficult to, in terms of like the text itself, because it may be on multiple relays, that's kind of difficult to censor. and it may refer to larger data like videos that is hosted somewhere on a server.

But again, that server could remove that content. So then my note, which is difficult to censor, may be pointing to something that no longer exists. Whereas Pubkey, it sounds like that piece of content, you know, should it be censored on that one server, it could still exist in the context of where people thought it was, even though... Even at the same URL. Yes, exactly. Because that's your key, right? That's the idea.

That's amazing. Yeah. So I think, again, it almost sounds like it might be, like, would you consider this complimentary to, like, can these things, like, Noster and Pubkey, do they in a way complement each other? Or is it redundant in a way? Or, like, how would you think of it? I can provide some nuance and you decide. So in Nost, so starting from the key level in Noster,

you put your private key into everything. There's no routing from the key. There's no key rotation, there's no key delegation. There's just you are a key and you put it in the app and you sign everything that you do. That's not necessary in PubKee because the signing is derived from the domain, from the routing, right? And so you don't have to sign every piece of data

And why that's also interesting is that when you change your key, when you lose your key, when you get your key hacked in Noster because you pasted it in the wrong app, you have this continuity problem, this data fragility problem, in addition to all the data availability problems of the relay system. Because now you have these, your people don't know when the messages were, became fake or real,

which person to believe to say, whether which messages are real, which key is the new key, you have to rely on another network or another trusted source to be able to derive all this stuff. And so in Noster, you have kind of these broken moments to actually, they end up, you don't have a true credible exit. You know, it's not actually credible in many cases. And so with Pubkey, basically, you know, you're able to now say, oh, there actually is a home server. We call them home servers. You have a primary server.

So there's not like miscellaneous relays where you, you might get some of the data and you're trying to find everything. No, there's like, you tell people, here is where my data is, and that's where you can get it. And you only tell them to get it from somewhere else if you change where that data is located. So you still have very similar relays. It's like similar to relays, except the organization is, you know, coming from a primary first.

There's no reason that you couldn't have alternative mirrors. You could have syncing servers for keeping, backups and stuff like this and having redundancy, but you still have this idea of where there is a primary place to look. And unlike Noster, because you have the Dht and the DNS records in there, you know you have a verifiable place to look. You know what I mean? So like if I change information, you know that my key signed it. This gives us at least the capability of key delegation. So while there's still no key rotation, and we can talk about that really if you want to, but I think it's kind of almost like a

dead end kind of idea. But you can have the key delegation because you have your key, cold, and pub key, and what you do is you create sessions with the different app home servers. And so this way, your PICAR records, the DNS records, they're called PICAR in our system, PQAR, public key addressable resource records. These contain all of the endpoints.

And so, yeah, you have basically total control. Very interesting. I'm gonna have to dive in, but I'm curious to, to hear thoughts from either Scott or Portland. Did you guys have comments, questions, anything? My only kind of question about this is like self hosting, I do a lot for my own infrastructure, email, web, et cetera.

How do you provide a consistent user experience with these disparate hosts? They're kind of all around, right? Like for example, you point and you say like, okay, my record says go here to find data there or like my data. My server's down. My ISP is broken. my powers out, wife pulled the plug on it, you know? Does that, how do you, how do you interface or like,

how do you set up mirrors or have more resilient hosting in a way that, because at some point, like my solution would be like, oh, like put, uh, for example, an AWS engine X router so that it probably will work, right? And some connections will go here, but if this one breaks, it'll then go there. Does that make any sense? Yeah, I mean, okay. I guess on one hand, I'd say, don't overthink it. It's just the web, the way the web already works now.

It's somebody else's server. So whatever you would do to mitigate. a problem right now, you would do most likely a very similar thing in Pub Key. So yeah, I'm not sure that there's a better way to answer that question, but yeah, that's perfect. What I'll say is this, so there are, there's more than one paradigm for a home server. There's a home server that you run yourself that is just so people can pull data from you. There's a home server that maybe is acting as an account-based home server, right?

And so in other words, people are making accounts in it, and so it's trusted. There's a home, you could have a cloud that was something that was a home- hosting home server instances if you wanted to. And this is a different trust model. But in the end, what creates the consistency is that there's an indexer model. And so even if you are offline, your data may still be indexed to some degree. And so you might have some availability. And the indexer is still a centralized source that you can go to as a resource.

And you can have more than one next to change your indexer. You can run your own indexer, et cetera, will eventually. probably be indexing other networks like the normal web instead of just the Pubkey web. And so there's a lot of flexibility there to be able to create some consistency to prepare the data in a graph for people. And a lot of data ends up being replicated there. Now, of course, you trust the indexer, so you have to be careful, but you can always go check the home server at any time to verify the data directly if you need to once it comes back online, etc. So you're right that, like for example, in our Pubkey flagship app that we're

making that because we're going to be the first home server and it's an account-based home server, there should be very little data consistency problems and availability and performance problems because it's mostly happening all in one place. But we do intend on supporting in that client the ability to render data from a home server. And if there are a lot of people that are following people in various ways on shitty home servers, they're going to have inconsistent data. But I'll tell you what, it'll still be more consistent than it would be a Noster. Because in Nostr, you'll have disparate relays, you may have inconsistent data across the

relays, things like this. What incentivizes someone to run this indexer or to run a mirror of any, you know, anyone else's data? Again, the same thing as the web, right? So we could charge, like, we could treat it as that we're commoditizing cloud services. We're just saying the only the core service we're providing is just availability of your data. On top of that now, if you want to provide a platform and an application, you have other ways that you can monetize, you know, charging for

the platform and certain ads, et cetera. So you can keep thinking about it just in the same ways that you would monetize the current web. So I apologize. This is my first exposure to this, but what about the DNS providers or like basically I can, right? Like how do they have the ability? to basically if they want to target a specific record or set of lookups to censor that or does your system avoid that somehow? Because like right now,

for example, mine's dream host, right? Dreamhost takes away my name server. I don't have names. So not in the sense, in other words, nothing to do with ICANN, but if I can were to try to say, in other words, there are, there are tradeoffs and there are criticisms of Dhty

and its ability to serve things in a censorship-resistant way or in a consistent way, et cetera, as with any network, right? Yeah. But the interesting thing about it is most of these things are actually pretty mitigated, and they're all more resilient than any other decentralized network that you could compare them to. So there are things like, for example, eclipse attacks you could talk about, but they have things like where, I forget what, this is beyond my technical reach, but they're doing something like hashing the IP into it,

and so that mitigates the eclipse attack. I forget what, but in other words, there used to be the criticism of DHT that they're eclips attacked and civil attacks, and since then they have been heavily mitigated and they're entirely detectable, so thus you can respond to them similar as you might respond to a denial of service or such.

Nice, thank you. When- Oh, and by the way, sorry, I mentioned, we're actually, we've started already publishing a little bit of research and researching like the size of mainline DHT and its resilience. And so we are actually already have some of that stuff publish and tests that you can recreate it yourself. And we're going to have more as well.

Because I think there's a big misconception, especially in Bitcoiners, where they've always ignored DHT as a possible solution to some things because of these kind of trope, you know, fears. But the fears never played out. I mean, you know, the mainline DHT network has been running for like, I don't know, 20 years or something. And it's got, it's, it's, It's got two million, at least two million nodes that will confidently serve these, this specific, it's like a NIP or BIP, it's called a BEP, this specific, you know, standard to be able to put the DNS records that we do in there. There's two million, and there's overall like 20 million notes in the network. There's just no network, decentralized network on the internet that's a better target for this kind of solution, in our opinion.

At what point do you figure that I will have my hands on something and I'll be able to start tinkering? Depends on what degree of tinkering you want to do. You could this weekend be right, have your own key domain resolving. We have a, we made our own DNS server called PKDNS. You could install that DNS server and you could be changing your your browser to be pointing to your own DNS server instead of I can. and you could see you could put in and you can resolve a PubKee domain yourself. You could do that right now. You could run a home server right now and you could have data there.

We have other tools. If you go to PubKee. Tech, it's kind of like the awesome PubKee website that somebody made. And there's a bunch of links to all the different things that you might want to click on and investigate. But yeah, the PubKee core, the protocol and stuff, that's all open source already and you can play with it now. PubKee app is the part that's not open source yet, but it will be as soon as the public beta is ready. Nice. OK, so I've got some playing today.

Oh, and I forgot to mention all the demos. So we did like an internal hack week using our own tools. And we ended up coming up with seven demos and we spent a week releasing a new demo. You showed it briefly on the screen on PubKi Core, but there are demos as like a, and these are just very basic apps, but they use this whole model,

but the key, the key based model and the home server model for like a note taking app, a password manager, a chat app, app, a file explorer of the home server, the DNS server I mentioned. So take a look at it. That's super cool. That's awesome. Well, so if people do want to check this out, best website to visit and start poking

around would be? If you're just looking to dive into code, either go to pubkey.tech or GitHub.org slash pubkey. If you just want to kind of read about the code, go to pubkey.org. If you want to read about the vision, I would go to the Pubkey blog and Medium. I did a really long post about the whole vision and how everything works together called Pubkey the next web. And that's on Medium if you want to check that home.

Awesome. Okay. Cool. All right. Well, gents, the time has come that we start rounding out here. And the way that I like to finish each episode is just kind of go down the line really quick. And I try to get a recommendation from each guest of something cool to check out that you think would be useful or interesting for the people that have been watching. And so this can take any form really.

It might be a book you read or an app that you've been playing with or even just as simple as like a piece of life advice. but you know something that you can offer up for people to learn about play around with or consider but i will start by saying really enjoy the conversation i enjoyed i enjoyed i enjoyed being able to mildly participate in the nerdiness that was present in front of me i thoroughly enjoyed it and i feel like i need to level up a little bit but i i love it so thank you all for being here. In terms of recommendations, I think just because I'm kind of on this kick and I'm starting to

sort through it right now, if you haven't played around with BTC Pay server, super useful, cool piece of technology that allows you, again, to be your own payment processor. I'm currently doing some testing and tinkering, running it on Luna node because they have I've done it before on voltage. You're a little bit more limited on the plugins that you can add,

but on Lundanode, you've pretty much got free reign to add whatever the hell you want. And they do have a new update for BTC pay. It just hit version 2.0 and then some additional versions beyond that with some basic bug fixes. So be sure to check that out if that's up your alley. And yeah, that's it for me. So Portland, I'll go to you. If you do have any final thought, feel free to throw it out, but any recommendation as well.

My recommendation, self-custody or Bitcoin and verify your backups. That would be my ultimate in terms of things to play around with. I think Zeus combined with your own self-hosted Lightning Node is probably one of the best kind of fun ways to get started in a high level. Middle, start playing around with like maybe Electris and kind of like getting your UTXOs for addresses. And if you really want to play with something fun and you're pretty technical, go learn some rust and use the Bitcoin lib. It's a very, very powerful tool to craft PSBTs and all sorts of very fun things and potentially maybe even build the next killer app.

Nice. I love it. Scott, I'm tossing it to you. Any final thoughts, recommendations? I think Portland inspired me on this one. But check out K-K-K-K-K-K-K-A-D. It's pronounced either K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K. But it's a free and open source, you know, free to use a tool for designing your own printed circuit boards. There's tons of tutorials on YouTube for, you know, for doing this. It's incredibly cheap to get started. This software is, it's different than other software used. It has a little bit of a learning curve. But once you pick it up, it's actually a superpower.

So try it out. Make a little like, you know, blink an LED kind of circuit. get it printed at a PCB shop like JLCPCB.com and like check it out. This is this is actually an incredible superpower like you know, think about like the first time maybe you compiled some software or something, right? Like doing this is the equivalent of doing that in hardware and it's it's incredibly approachable. That's awesome.

Love it. Yeah, there we go. Right. Like you might end up making a badass keyboard. Mine's big. Yeah. No, it does. Yeah, but I built all this in KCAD.

And one note, I do believe KCAD actually, if you start fresh and you haven't been exposed to all TM pads, etc. It's incredibly easy to use. Like the routing and the design rule checker, it's fantastic. And a fun thing you could do with KCAD is because all the file representations are JSON, if you get like, let's say you need to like make an array of like LEDs, right? Instead of placing them by hand, you can actually use like Claude and say, hey, I have like this JSON.

Can you please write a script to move this position by this much? It'll actually create a script you can pass through and generate, like literally generative design for your printed circuit boards if you want to get really fancy. Awesome. I love that. It's right. Build the open source ASIC, please. Save Bitcoin.

John, up to you last final thoughts, recommendations. Go ahead. First, I'll just echo the sentiment that, you know, I definitely. recommend AI in general whether you're making content images text code there is some way you could be using it to leverage your ability and so if you're not you should stop procrastinating and start using it but as far as an actual specific bitcoin thing i'm going to recommend this um if you if you want to be paranoid about something like don't be paranoid about mixing your coin joins and pretending anybody cares about what you're doing with your bitcoin or stupid things uh you're

care about that probably every popular chip in the world is backdoor already and none of your seeds or private keys have actually been generated in a safe way and you shouldn't be generating them digitally if you're using a lot of money and so you can buy these if you like the 39 and using seeds and not private keys as files and such you can like they have all these 3D printed little every single word the first four letters which by the way another That's cool. Some people don't know. You only need the first four letters of your seed. You don't need the whole word. But yeah, the first four letters of every single seed have been 3D printed and popped out and put in this jar and they're for sale. It's called Entropia. I don't know.

I'm not affiliated with them. I don't know anything. I just think it's cool. Yeah. That's my recommendation. So there's an interesting question I have about that. It's like, I asked people like, hey, if I handed you a piece of paper with a seed phrase on it, would you accept it? Like, no.

That's a terrible idea, right? But would you take one that your cold card just gave you? Yeah, sure. That sounds great, you know, definitely for any large amount of money. Things like that, dice, you just need true real-world entropy that hasn't been sleuthed. Yeah. Dice would be, I think dice, the reason, problem I see with dice is that it sounds stupid, but there's like a barrier there.

People don't know how to use the dice, and then they have to go look up what to do with the dice, and they're going to feel less confident than they're going to feel them just randomly pulling names out of a hat. I 100% agree with that. My solution to dice, six-sided, you can't create an even number of bits of entropy. You treat the numbers 1 through 4 as two digits of entropy is 0-1-0-0-et-et-et-et-et, and then if you get a 5, you treat it as a single bit of entropy, a 6 is a single. So 5 is a 0, 6-as-a-1. And you can use a 6-sided dice that way to very, very slowly generate your 256 bits

to protest your Bitcoin. I mean, the idea here is that you grab like 12, you shuffle it up and grab 12 of those, right? You have to calculate the 12th word. So you would then use maybe something like a seed signer or even, I think you can do it in Sparrow now, perhaps you might be able to. I can't recall, but there's a few different, and Crux allows you to do it as well, but like all open source stuff. So at least like the 11 words that you've generated, that you've randomly drawn, you then, there's only so many possible final. words that you could have there. But yeah, yeah, more or less.

Isn't that a little bit of a problem, though, because the 12th, the number of options for 12 words on a 24 word seed phrase, there's only eight possible check sum values. So your cold storage wallet or whatever software can tell you, like, these are your options. You can, like, roll a dice to figure out, like, okay, what's my last one going to be? But with 12 word seed phrases, I think you have like almost 256 different potential candidates for that 12th word. So I know for example

The Jaden Cold Card do not provide you a 12th word If you enter in for the recovery of your first 11 If you randomly generate Yeah, I can't remember the specifics of generating your eyes So I did I just pulled it here on on YouTube But I did a video a while back on on literally like doing the whole You know get

Oh that's cool And like this is how you how you math it up Up into a certain point and then it goes all the way into like exactly what you're doing and then and then going into terminal for the final little piece of it as you generate your like actual seed phrase. So anyways, it was it's been, I mean, this was a year and a half ago. I think I did and like I'd probably have to watch my own tutorial to recall exactly what I did and how I did it.

Armand the Parman, he put together a guide and he's, I mean, that guy's awesome. And so I just did the video representation of it. And he even did, you can just like pen and paper math out, the final word. It's just it's a process. You got to do Shaw, 256. You actually have to hash to get the last one. Exactly. Yeah.

And so he did show how to do that in a subsequent guide. I haven't made. Yeah. I know. No. Just. Yeah. This is not how you get world adoption.

with this. But it's, you know, I think I made that video in and around when, you know, Elizabeth Warren had said something bad shit crazy about, like, you know, requiring permission to self-custody or something like that. And I was like, okay, well, you better ban dice and paper and pens than, I suppose. So. They'll post your bullets.

Yeah, exactly. So, but either way, fun, again, to, To John's point, I absolutely, I have the Entropria thing sitting up on my shelf here. It's great. It's a fun thing to play with, and I've definitely used it before. And if you would like to affix a tinfoil hat atop your head, then you can go check out the DICE video too. I have one more trivia everybody might be interested in that. The BIP, BIP 39, if you go and read the BIP, the actual kind of summary and recommendations,

recommendation is unanimously discouraged for implementation. Basically, BIP 39 is not recommended. Despite being the most popular method of backing up your Bitcoin, it's never actually been intended to be a popular spec. And it's right now you can go look at it and it says, don't people shouldn't use this. So yeah, that's funny. Now they have a bunch of nuanced reasons for it.

And the idea being that something better should be made. but it's kind of stuck at this point. Tell me a better way to encode 256 bits of information, human readable form. I'm not saying there can't be something better, but right now for we as humans. Well, you know how these guys are. It's like,

we can make something much more complex that would address every issue. I know. Nobody will use it. There's actually been a little bit of controversy as well with that bit. There's been specific segments that have kind of been scrubbed away recently. And then also, I think, yeah, And then if you look at kind of like the sponsors, I think Trezor was deeply involved with this because I wrote a BIP 39 like Walt implementation and like all the test vectors have the passphrase as treasor.

Like go go run the test vectors. It's all treasered up. So with that said, I know what I didn't have a problem with them spearheading that because they did not at all the SLP thing and they try to track derivation paths and things like this. Like somebody had to do it. But yeah, it is it is interesting that, you know, the core devs would not. tell you to do this. There's also my final note about like doing any of that's like physical entropy and seed phrases.

When you go to recover or convert the bits over to their actual word representation, make sure you print off that sheet of like that basically the cheat sheet to figure out like where it goes because you don't want to be like sitting on your screen and like looking like, oh, my mouse is now hovering over like these different sections or like I'm using somebody else's website. Just print the sheet off, be by yourself. like don't have a bunch of cameras and stuff in the room. But yeah, that's kind of my only recommendation.

Just like print the cheat sheet off. There is, by the way, somewhere online, I got mine. It literally is a single page. You got to use like a loop to read all the words, but you definitely one sheet and you can do it. No, it worked great. I'm dropping the, I have a video on Entropia as well. So I dropped the dice and the Entropia video in the live chat for anybody interested.

You can use coins too, just one bit of the time. Flip, yep. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, I want to say a huge thank you for hanging out with me even longer than anticipated. We did a good rip for about two hours and 15 minutes, and we had north of 6,000 people join us at some point or another over the course of the conversation. So, again, I really appreciate it. And hopefully people glean some fun little tidbits from it. But thank you guys so much. Have yourselves a wonderful weekend. And of course, you are all welcome back anytime.

See you next time. Thanks for having me. I'm just kidding. Thanks, guys. See you later. All right. And everybody in the chat, thank you guys for being here as well. If you can, please do like, subscribe, share, and also hit the show notes down below.

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