Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Andreas Antonopoulos: Mastering Bitcoin

Episode Date: May 4, 2015

Few question that educating people about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is one of the most important and challenging tasks to achieve mass adoption. And perhaps even fewer disagree that there is no one more gifted at communicating the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin than Andreas M. Antonopoulos. A technologist, entrepreneur, LTB host and author, he has been speaking, writing and educating about Bitcoin for years and become one of the most popular people in the Bitcoin space. He joined us to talk about his new book, his journey in the Bitcoin space, educating lawmakers about Bitcoin and the exciting future awaiting us. Topics covered in this episode: Why he wrote ‘Mastering Bitcoin’ and how the reception has been so far What he currently spends him time on How he introduces new people to Bitcoin What NOT to do when telling someone new about Bitcoin His experiences speaking in front of the Canadian and Australian Senate Why he believes in the community’s ability to keep evolving Bitcoin Episode links: University of Nicosia Digital Currency MOOC Canada Senate Hearing Disrupt Athens Talk Personal Website Mastering Bitcoin on github Mastering Bitcoin on Amazon This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/077

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eB09 at checkout to get 10% off your first order. And by Voltoro, the gold to Bitcoin exchange. Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely, starting at just one milligram. Go tovoltaur.com to deposit some Bitcoin and start trading today. Hello, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show at Stalks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sebastian Couture. And my name is Brian Fabian Crane. We're here today with a man who needs no introduction in the Bitcoin space,

although we'll introduce him anyways, Andreas M. Antonopoulos. He is one of the hosts of Let's Talk Bitcoin, and he's also one of the most prolific speakers in the space. And I think he is for sure the most adept at just sort of selling Bitcoin to the world. And I think he's done a fantastic job there. So yeah, I was super excited to have him on. And of course, he's also the author of this book here, Mastering Bitcoin. I bought it and I like it.

I think it's, so I'm not a programmer, done a little bit of programming, but I think it's perfect to get a better understanding. So Andreas, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on the show, guys. I've been wanting to join you for quite a while now and it's really a pleasure. Oh, really? We weren't aware of that. That is so flattering.

Thank you very much. You have no idea. Yeah, we're really glad to have you on it. What Brian was saying about selling Bitcoin to people, that's definitely a major role that you played in my early education of Bitcoin when I first got into it, listening to LTB and watching your different talks. You definitely played a big role in selling me on the technology and the idea. I think probably the same for Brian.

Interestingly enough, I don't think I'm actively trying to sell anything to anybody. That's why it works. part of the appeal is that I don't have any interest in any of this I don't really own that much Bitcoin. I don't have a brand I'm pushing or anything like that. But what I'm doing is I'm not selling Bitcoin. I'm simply expressing my own enthusiasm, my own unique kind of geeky enthusiasm for this elegant technology. And I think that enthusiasm is infectious. And that's as far as the selling goes.

I just really, really enjoy talking about this technology because I find it exciting myself. And so when I'm expressing that enthusiasm, it's genuine. I really feel it. I'm not putting on a show. This is just me. And if you turn off the cameras, I'll then spend six more hours talking about Bitcoin to anybody who will listen.

And, you know, the event's over. I'll take a taxi back to my hotel and I'll get the taxi driver to learn about Bitcoin and give them some Bitcoin and then I get to the hotel and I'll tell the hotel reception is the vast Bitcoin. This is my life. It's basically me 24 hours a day talking to people about Bitcoin and just refusing to shut up when they tell me it's enough and then everyone turns a camera on and I just do it's under video recording.

So on average, how many people a day do you talk, especially new people, do you talk about Bitcoin? Well, it really depends, but I would say at least two or three people a day, unless I'm doing a big event, in which case, or meeting lots of people who are going somewhere public, in which case it might be hundreds of people a day. And then, you know, Twitter and YouTube multiply and magnify that reach. And so I can tell even more people about the things that I find enthusiastic and weird and interesting. That's pretty amazing.

So about like three people on average a day, like new people, you tell about Bitcoin, try to, you know, get some Bitcoin, try it out, start using it. Yeah, I tend to give people Bitcoin. I feel the best way to to deal with Bitcoin is not to try to explain it but to demonstrate it and to experience it as a new user so I help people set up a wallet and I give them to Bitcoin usually you know I'll get into a taxi I'll start a conversation they'll say why are you in this city I'll say I'm here for a conference of

Bitcoin have you heard of Bitcoin let me tell you about Bitcoin and 20 minutes later I'm you know they're passing me their Android phone back and saying okay just install a wallet for me in and install a wallet it's amazing that they they trust you with with their phone like that after after a 20-minute conversation yeah i guess um you know well he's just going to put bitcoin on in no so it's yeah yeah it's it's funny i mean there's there's other people who do this as well there's a lot of people who do this in fact um a funny story is i was i was always a bit i don't know worried about how how I might be treated at, say, a border crossing, right, if I'm going through customs.

And, you know, because their job is to not allow people to carry currency over borders, I generally avoid the word currency. So, you know, I'll say I went to a Bitcoin conference, or if they ask me why I'm going into a country or out of a country, I'll say I went to a Bitcoin conference or e-commerce conference. And on one of these, I had, I was behind. And Jeff Garzik, who's one of the core developers. And he was in the same flight as me returning back from a conference.

It's going through Customs and Border Protection. And I'm thinking, should I, I'll save Bitcoin, but you know, I don't want to, I don't really draw too much attention because I don't want people asking me a hundred questions. I don't have any money on me. I'm not transporting Bitcoin, but I don't want to, you know, cause an issue. And so I watch Jeff in the line in front of me. And he's literally four feet away. He steps up to the custom border guy.

the guy says, so what were you doing? And he says, oh, I was at a Bitcoin conference. Have you heard of Bitcoin? It's amazing. So you can take money and send it from one place in the world to another place. And he's waving his arms. And he does basically like a 30 minute, 30 second pitch to the border guy who's stamping his passport. And he says, and the border guy's like, yeah, that sounds really interesting.

Okay, well. Okay, Mr. Garzik, welcome to United States. It was so funny. I was thinking I don't want to get into it. He's like doing a full-on pitch. So I'm not the only person who just has a lot of difficulty containing their enthusiasm about this technology. I think a lot of the early adopters

and a lot of the people who are really, really into this amazing technology, you know, they're that guy at the party or that girl at the party who just won't shut up. about Bitcoin. Yeah, that's cool. So coming back to your book, tell us how, what's the reception been like? Oh, it's really going very well. I think it's already sold just over 2,500,000, almost 3,000 copies, which is really good for a technology book.

So it seems to be going very well. It's a number one bestseller on Amazon's e-commerce, online trading and digital currency section. It's selling both in print and in digital. And most importantly, it's available open source, available for anyone to read for free. You can download it, you can share it, you can forward the PDF, you can do whatever you want really with it. And recently we changed the license because it was going well. So now it's under Creative Commons share like attribution, which means that now you can also do derivatives and use it for commercial purposes and do translations.

And there's a bunch of teams working on translations. So the book can be used as a basis for courses and videos and whatever else you want to use. It's fully open culture license. Is that common for O'Reilly or other publishers to do that to allow the books to be open source? It's pretty rare for a publisher to do that. O'Reilly is special and the reason I pitched it to O'Reilly was because of O'Reilly's very long history with open source and comfort with open source. And so, you know, once the book is doing well and showing that it can generate sales

and they're very comfortable with gradually opening up the license and now we've reached a point where it's a full free culture license and that's why, you know, O'Reilly is just an amazing publisher of technical books. but they're also an amazing kind of global citizen and supporter of free culture and free knowledge and bringing that knowledge to people. And honestly, it doesn't affect sales badly. It actually makes sales better. A lot of the people who will download the book, read it, and then buy a copy so they have it.

The people who can't afford to buy the book, buy it. And the people who can't afford to buy the book, read it and then give it to others who may be by it. So it's all good. Our show today is brought to by our friends at Shapeshift. Shapeshift is the fast and easy way to trade altcoins. They now support over 25 of the most popular altcoins, including Dogecoin, counterparty, Dash, Monaro, and so many others. When you want to trade altcoins, forget about using an exchange.

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You then simply send the Dochecoins to the address they provide you, ShapeShift converts it for you and puts a dash directly into your wallet. It's that smooth. Long gone are the days when you had to give an exchange your passport, tell them your shoe size, weight six confirmations just to buy some popcorn. With ShapeShift conversions are instantaneous and your privacy remains protected. So head over to Shapesh.io and start trading some altcoins today. We would like to thank Shapesh for their support of WebSenter Bitcoin. What made you when I write this book? In the grand scheme of things, I really wanted to get the knowledge out to people.

When I was trying to learn about Bitcoin, the sources that were available were extremely fragmented, the developer guide wasn't out there at the time the Bitcoin Wiki was incomplete and partial and you had to roam all across it to find any information. There was no single source that had, you know, a good collection of all of the basic information and how it works, soup to nuts, and described in a way that that has a consistent narrative and flow, not just bits of technical information all loosely dumped. And so I thought it would be useful to people. Honestly, I think the for Bitcoin to become mainstream.

The first thing that happens isn't millions of end users. The first thing that happens is tens of thousands of software developers who are going to build great applications and great user interfaces so that users can adopt this technology. It's going to take hundreds of thousands of software developers to make this what it can be. And we're already seeing this happen, but I thought

that would be an area to contribute. Now there's a second reason, which is a self-refertil reason, which is that you never really grasp a subject fully in depth until you try to teach it. I did not have the focus and the ability and the programming skills, quite honestly, to be a full-time core developer contributor or anything like that. I dabble in programming, I've dabbled in programming all my life, and I'm a decent program, but I'm not a professional. And I can't keep the focus on something like that.

So my best chance to really, really learn Bitcoin was to try to write a book about it. And, you know, in writing the book, it brought up a lot of questions. And gradually, by answering those questions and learning, I finished the book. And now I know a lot more about Bitcoin than I did when I started the book. So it seems crazy to me that you would feel

that you need to learn more about Bitcoin. Oh, and I can tell you, there's still so, so much I need to learn. Even the book, I mean, you know, this is a book for developers who are trying to enter the space of Bitcoin. Maybe they have a bit of background in cryptography. Maybe they have a bit of, you know, software development experience and they're trying to enter Bitcoin. But, you know, any one of the core developers can open this book and find 20 things that are, you know, from slightly wrong to quite wrong. and big gaps in bits that are missing. So don't for a moment there imagine that I'm certainly not even close to being the most knowledgeable person on Bitcoin.

I'm not, you know, in cryptography. You know, there are some real, hard, core genius geeks behind the core development team, you know behind many of the projects involved in in Bitcoin who who do nothing all day but that my skill is is really in explaining things in easy to understand terms and relating to an audience so I know enough Bitcoin to be dangerous and be able to explain it yeah I mean so for me as well right I've been working on this for now I guess almost two years that I've heard about Bitcoin and on the one hand I have a good understanding of it.

On the other hand, I'm just scratching the surface. And there's so much, I don't understand. And I think there are so much that frankly, nobody really understands. I think especially when we start thinking of the longer term, how it's all going to play out. It's so hard. Yeah, everybody's learning. I mean, this is unprecedented stuff. But there are some really, really, really smart people in this space with incredible depths of knowledge.

in cryptography and security and distributed systems in software engineering who we're just blessed to have in this space and it's really amazing to watch yeah absolutely and I have to say I think you you did strike a really nice balance between sort of the technical and you know the non-technical so for you know for me as someone like understands bitcoin but I've never like programmed Bitcoin it's I think it's nice because it is a deeper sort of a deeper dive into the topic, but it's not overwhelming. I think it's very, very digestible.

Thank you. A lot of work went into creating the correct analogies to be able to describe some of the more complex aspects of Bitcoin in ways that were easy to understand for someone who had a technical inclination, but not necessarily was a professional programmer. But, you know, the book is really designed for software engineers, developers, architecture engineers, security engineers, and technical professionals. It's not a beginner's guide to Bitcoin. It's not for people who do not have a technical background.

They're going to find it, honestly, too technical. And there are other books that address that audience. Now, would you say that perhaps for a developer, I'm talking about perhaps myself, you know, getting involved, and trying some things out technically. Like I like to dabble. I'm not a really strong developer, but I have some development experience.

I've been a web developer before, like getting into this book and trying some command line stuff. Is that also sort of the audience you're going for, or really just sort of the... Yes, absolutely. It would be ideal for that. There's certainly enough examples in the book, so you can try, you know,

with relatively easy to use. languages and common languages, C++ Python, etc. You could try and a lot of command line examples. So you could go beyond the surface of using a wallet or user interface and be able to you know roll your own key, convert a key from one format to another, build an HD wallet, etc. Now that doesn't mean you'd necessarily build a secure system and I certainly would hope you wouldn't take these experiments, learning experiments into production. You know, we know what happens when someone who dabbles in programming tries to write,

let's say, I don't know, an exchange and PHP and basically. Hmm. Yeah, bad things happen. I was thinking more like maybe some HTML or something. No, I'm kidding. No, but I think to get a better understanding of the protocol, you know, someone who wants to get a better understanding of the protocol could absolutely read this book and start getting their hands dirty with some Python

and maybe some command line stuff. Yeah, and the book is also, it's evolving. So the second print happened four days ago contains a lot of correction and a bit of new material and some clarifications in various places. And I'm getting contributions from the community, code examples, new sections of the book and so it's going to continue to expand it's continued to evolve

I expect by mid-year we're going to have a second edition in the works and probably by late summer we're going to have a second edition come out with significant additional content you know I look at I work this book and the publisher works this book as a software project so we're doing minor version releases all the time and we're going to do a major release in the summer with a nice change log full of features and not just bug fixes right and I suppose also as new versions of the Bitcoin Core come out you also have to update it yeah absolutely there's there's a lot of keeping up with the changes you know just recently about maybe a month ago for example the data storage capabilities

with offer return changed so some new command lines were added the size of the maximum size change from 40 bytes to 80 bytes you know that's important information so that required an update in the book and and those open source version keeps in perfect sync with a published version so if you download the open source one you can see all of that information so is this is I presume how you've been spending most of your time know I mean you give a lot of talks then at the book of course the writing and and now also promoting and reaching developers talking with them and trying to sort of I guess fuel that

that slow revolution or maybe fast revolution that's happening as more and more people start using this and cryptocurrencies. Well, yeah, speaking conferences, meetups, I do a lot of community events, meetups, interviews and things like that. That takes up a lot of my time. I'm preparing a second book that I'm going to start working on in the summer with another author. Can't give too much detail on that. And I'm launching a startup to do some work in a specific area of Bitcoin that I'm interested in. Can you share anything about that? Well, it's going to happen in the next three weeks, but it involves cold storage for keys.

And so there'll be some additional announcements about that. So helping companies do cold storage. And, you know, second book, more work. I also work as an advisor for a number of different Bitcoin startups. So helping them with strategic advice, with understanding the technology roadmap and where things are going and the trends, customers, market dynamics, you know, how to build the best product,

how to secure it, how to launch it, how to get it to market. And so working with executives at a number of different Bitcoin startups, Generally speaking, if I'm an advisor to a Bitcoin startup, you wouldn't know it because they're allowed to use my advice, but not my name. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I guess we had this with the Neo and B. It was a bit unfortunate how that turned out. Yeah, they ended up abusing my name.

And in that particular case, that changed the way I had to deal with companies. because when I first started that relationship, I really didn't have a reputation in the space to worry about. And so I didn't realize that someone could abuse my name, make it appears if I was doing a lot more for that company than I was, which was just a bit of consulting. And then, you know, draw customers in by the idea that I was a participant, which I was in.

So anyway, I had to change my practices to make sure that that couldn't happen again. So now if I work for a company, that's the last time you ever hear me mention it. And they don't mention me. Today's magic word is mastery, M-A-S-T-E-R-Y. Head over at let's-talk Bitcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word, and claim you're part of the listener award. Now, we're going to want to speak a little bit about sort of Bitcoin and where that is evolving, but I wanted to dive or come back very quickly to the aspect of sort of communicating Bitcoin

to like lay people non-Bitcoin as anyone really. What are there some things that people should avoid that they often do? Yeah, I think it's first of all and this is something I've been doing consistently since day one is I do not recommend Bitcoin as an investment. I recommend against investing in Bitcoin. You do not treat Bitcoin as an investment vehicle. If you know what you're doing, if you're a sophisticated investor, you know how to build a diversified portfolio,

and you know how to make something that is extremely volatile, a small part of that portfolio in a very structured way, sure, maybe you can invest in Bitcoin. But for the average person, this is not, this is absolutely not a sane, safe or wise investor. because of volatility, because of uncertainty, it's a technology that can move very, very fast. So just like you wouldn't invest in biotech penny stocks, even if they made the most incredible invention in biotechnology, you wouldn't invest in those, you don't invest in these kinds of things.

There are much, much safer investments to plan. So first of all, don't go telling people to go buy lots of Bitcoin. That's a terrible idea. What it will do is it will give people the wrong way. give people the wrong idea about what Bitcoin is. It will feed kind of the get rich, quick, greedy attitude and eventually we'll end up with people getting burned by making these investments and then they'll blame Bitcoin and that would be unfortunate.

I think it's also important not to try to oversell Bitcoin, although I'm certainly very enthusiastic about it. The idea here is to really help people experience it so rather than trying to project your own perspective of what Bitcoin can do try to think about what it can do for the person you're talking to how can it help them solve a problem in their life and then basically address the benefits talk about what been what benefits Bitcoin could bring to their life does it make it easier to do online commerce does it make it easier to send money abroad does it make it

it does it just simply give them an experience like listen this is a very futuristic form of money it'd be cool to try out to see how the future of money looks like so how about I give you a couple of dollars for free and you install a wallet and play with it and then we'll bounce some money back and forth and you'll see how easy it is and you know just get that experience so I think that's the best way to to to really deliver Bitcoin is to help people experiencing by demonstrating it by giving them a bit of free Bitcoin and helping them set up a wallet and then showing

them how it works in terms of a slogan as a whole I just go with a very very simple idea I say you know Bitcoin is the internet of money it's a network it's not a company it's you don't have to sign up you just download software that speaks Bitcoin and it will do to money what Skype did to phone calls and what email did to the post office and if you understand why Skype is really useful technology then if you could do that with money how would it change your life and let me show you some excellent yeah and then I think one one big advantage of actually giving people Bitcoin and having them do a Bitcoin transaction is that when you

explain it it seems so abstract right it's like this thing and then like oh maybe then I'm going to use this as well in a few years and then people maybe even understand conceptually that this is a power of thing stuff but they don't see themselves like using it like right now here and then it's like wow this actually right I mean just just the fact that you could install an app on their phone and send them money and then tell them the they could take that money in in exactly the same way send it to their cousin on another continent or someone they met on Twitter just today or any of that it blows their mind because they

start making comparisons their banking system now if they had that application running for a bit and they used it every now and then and tried it out. The good news is that eventually their bank will demonstrate to them exactly why banks suck. So as long as you have the Bitcoin experience to compare with, eventually your bank is going to freeze your money, delay a check for three days, charge you a ridiculous fee for something you never agreed to, or do some other thing like that. They're really good at doing it.

And then you will suddenly think, huh, hang on a second. So how come you're only open Monday to Friday? nine to five or nine to four. It takes three days to transmit money from my account to another account in the same bank. You always hold my money, but take the fees immediately, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Why is this still happening in the era of the internet? Isn't there a better way? And then you realize, oh, wait, that guy I met in the taxi showed me a better way.

Hang on, let me check this Bitcoin thing out again. I think I still have that wallet installed. You guys have pretty good in the States. Banks are open on Monday there? Wow. They'll get me started about how banks suck. No, I think these are all really good points. I think especially helping people experience it for themselves

and not projecting your own aspirations about Bitcoin, but sort of trying to help them find out how it could benefit them is a really good approach. Yeah, the reason you like Bitcoin is not necessarily. the reason to someone else will like Bitcoin. It's a technology that while it does have a liberal political bent to it and that it empowers individuals to control their money, beyond that really we all project our own aspirations and desires and worldview onto it.

And it's important to remember the audience you're talking to and express it in a way that makes sense to them. For many people, you know, some of the world views that are exhibited in the Bitcoin community may be a huge huge turn off. And so they may not think that's a good idea. Now one thing that's been a challenge for me when explaining Bitcoin to people is sort of explaining to them that this is not just about money, that every aspect of society will eventually be impacted by blockchain technologies. But most people seem to be at the sort of very low level of explanation of this is money, it's used for money laundering, etc. How do you go about explaining to people that yes this is revolutionary and it like in 20

years perhaps even less it will it'll be part of your life just as the internet is part of every aspect of your life? Well unless they're there to watch a conference or a video where they want to hear some kind of visionary statement about the future I don't I really don't I just I I give them something extremely practical and you know last last week I was talking to my driver I said you know where do you come from and they said to come from Haiti so do you have family back in Haiti yeah do you send the money yeah I send the money every every couple of weeks do you use Western Union yeah let me tell you about Bitcoin and I'm not going to talk about how it's going to change the

I'm going to talk about how it's going to change their money transfer to Haiti. Not now, but maybe in three years, from something that is a 8% transaction to something that is a 0.8% transaction, to something that can only happen by standing in line at an office, to something that can happen from your phone directly. And then their next question is, how do I get this Bitcoin? I say, well, you drive a taxi, you could drive a taxi and get paid in Bitcoin by people who have Bitcoin. I could pay you for this ride in Bitcoin. You don't have to go buy it.

You can earn it through your labor. And that changes the conversation. I'm not talking about a revolutionary technology that will unseat the governments of the world leading to a universal currency and decentralization wave that will sweep away nation states, blah blah blah blah no i'm like you know just maybe send a bit more money to your family in haiti simple stuff cool good advice thanks um so you've also been uh quite active i mean you've spoken at uh before the canadian and australian parliaments uh on the topic of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies what has that experience been like for you and what have you taken away from that well i'm when i when i speak

to those kinds of bodies and the two times that I have, I think a critical component of that is that the presentation I'm making is simultaneously broadcast live and uncensored on a national television

network which allows their constituents and the population of that country to watch if they're interested and then the video will be published immediately after for other people to watch which means that when I'm speaking to the Senate and they're speaking to me, both of us are very well aware that half of it we're speaking

to someone else. We're speaking to a giant audience out there, not just to each other. And that's really important because they give me a platform where I can speak without censorship to a broad population and answer their questions truthfully. But in a way that allows me to establish, I think, the important points about Bitcoin, which allows me to dispel certain myths and certain... you know, easy to to run to fallacies and statements about Bitcoin's use for drugs and terrorism and pornography, which is the same crap we heard about the internet in the 90s,

and allows me to very directly address those questions, diffuse them, and speak about the global potential, speak about jobs and opportunity and growth and speak about votes and a younger generation. Let me just say how great you have been diffusing those questions, by the way. I mean, they keep coming and you keep just deflecting them with such ease and grace. It's really amazing to watch you do that. Just before the show, I was watching a part of the Australian Senate hearings. And one of the senators brought up something relating to the drugs and money laundering and you just took it like a champ.

Thank you. I mean, part of that is practice, honestly, you know, before I did either of those two, I spent quite a lot of time practicing with people asking me very hostile questions and half of that is knowing how to answer the question and trust me I've had lots of practice because these questions come up again and again and again it's part of the framing of the media to immediately go for a very sensationalist angle and they don't just do it to Bitcoin it's not like a conspiracy against Bitcoin they did this to the internet they did this to the automobile they did this to electricity

They've done this to every new and disruptive technology. But part of it is practice. And the other one is simply presenting an emotional story, which is that I'm not going to freak out and start screaming. I'm not going to be offended. And I'm slightly amused by the fact that that question has come up again. And then I address it very, very calmly. and in a way that shows that there's nothing to hide,

nothing extreme going on here. This is really just a misunderstanding, and we have more important things to talk about. And so that's really a matter of practice, but I'm very glad I had the opportunity to do that a couple of times. And quite honestly, I'm really lucky, because both times it went very well.

So one of the concerns I had with the Australian Senate was I'm one zero ahead, in terms of Senate presentations. If it goes well, I'll be two zero, but if it doesn't, it will be a tie and I'll wipe out my score. You know, and keep in mind, part of the, you know, you think it went well because they were open to the ideas and they discussed them in a non-threatening manner. Even if I had done the exact same job to a different audience, they may have been extremely hostile, extremely negative and dismissive.

And then you would have assumed it went poorly when I did the exact same thing. So I don't have control over that. So far I've been lucky. Both the Canadian and Australian Senate were very welcoming, very open to discussion. They paid attention, they listened carefully, they had done their homework, they didn't come in with some kind of crazy, mad conspiracy theory and just bluster and things like that, which tells you why I haven't done a presentation for the US Senate. I'd expect more.

I mean, some of them are okay, but some of those committees are just like, whoa, crazy. We have people getting up at the Senate floor and throwing snowballs on the ground and saying, look, it proves no global warming exists. You can't completely crazy. You just can't. Yeah. So what do you think is the most threatening aspect of Bitcoin for, you can't? for regulators and lawmakers?

I think it's mistaking control for security. It's this assumption that because you have some control over something, that gives you the illusion of security. And then you, rather than seeing security as a secondary symptom of that control, you see it as inherently tied to that control. And then eventually you think the only way to achieve security, is through tight control of everything. And then when you see something that doesn't have tight control,

you automatically assume it has no security or that it represents a threat. So one of the main things about Bitcoin that confuses people is because we've never had a system that does decentralized security. The two terms, decentralized and security, seem to be until 2008, a contradiction in terms. centralized control was security and therefore if you don't have centralized control if there's no one who's accountable if there's no one holding the levers of power then how can it possibly be secure how can it possibly not be corruptible you know of course from my perspective the exact opposite is true you know if you have someone holding the leaves of power that's the one you corrupt and then the system

becomes corruptible from the top down and and it's very difficult to fix that And so the idea of diffuse power across a network is actually appealing because it's less corruptible, but that is not an accepted conventional wisdom. That is a pretty disruptive architecture and radical thought. It requires a change in thinking and perspective. It requires proof that this can be done. And increasingly we're delivering that proof with Bitcoin. But it still challenges the basic assumptions and worldviews of a lot of people who associate hierarchy, authority, and control with security. And they associate the lack of hierarchy, authority, and control with anarchy.

And not anarchy, as some of the people in the Bitcoin community mean it, but complete chaos, the breakdown of civil order, you know, people eating babies and rioting through the streets and burning all the buildings down and, you know, raping our daughters. So therefore any challenge to centralization, hierarchy, and authority immediately leads to ISIS, or whatever the latest Bhagabu is, a complete breakdown of civilization and chaos. That is obviously a very naive perspective in my opinion, and I think it misses a lot of the really big challenges we have with hierarchical institutions. and authority. But it's still a difficult cell and you have to do it carefully. And it's also a generational thing. For a generation of people who grew up in a certain world view in the past, this is an established fact. For a younger generation who see every social institution around them has failed them. The schools, the courts, the police, the government, the jobs, the corporations, the electoral system, all of these things, one after the other are failing them.

And the one thing that isn't failing them is the internet. And so for a younger generation, in fact, it's very easy to sell this idea because they already get it. Like, you know, this is not the same structure as the one that has failed you. It's the same structure as the one you have hope in the internet. Yeah, I think it's a good way of phrasing it that it is a even when maybe lawmakers and regulators focus on issues like the consumer protection. It's not really those issues they're concerned about, but it's more just like vague fear of losing control and things descending into some, some world that, yeah, they can't control anymore. I think that's that that's really that's really it. Yeah, I mean, I'd love it if regulation delivered consumer protection.

where was my consumer protection in 2008? Because it didn't deliver. And that's the fundamental thing that we have to address, which is it's nice in theory of what you're saying. But the truth is that when it mattered, regulation and centralized institutions did not deliver consumer protection. They abandoned consumers, and they betrayed the social compact and trust,

and that is a fact. So we can either pretend it didn't happen or we can address why it happened, how it happened, and how we can solve it. And I think simply saying, well, let's do more regulation when regulation was at the root cause or at least the corruption of regulators was at the root cause of these failures. Until you show me actual consumer protection, I'm going to say, well, look, why should we trust in the same institutions that have failed us at the time when they were. most necessary. Let's take a short break and talk about Ledger, makers of the Ledger Nano hardware wallet. Now, you may have seen this little thing before. This is a USB smart card that contains a secure environment chip which host your private

keys and signs your transactions. You can plug this thing into any computer, even if it's infected with malware, your Bitcoin's will remain safe. Ledger provides a beautiful and easy-to-use Chrome app wallet, which is secured by second-factor authentication through their companion app for iOS and Android. If you lose your device, that's no problem. Your coins are protected by a pin and the second factor. And regenerating your wallet is really easy with the HD backup seed that you can store offline.

We all know about the importance of securing your bitcoins, but with a lot of solutions, it's just a hassle and people delay it. And that's how we've ended up with almost 1 million Bitcoin stolen. But with Ledger Nano, it's so easy that there's no excuse. So don't delay acting now and making sure you have a secure setup for your Bitcoins. To get started, we have a special offer for you. Go to ledger wallet.com and use the offer code EB09 to get 10% off your order. That offer is valid until September 30th of 2015.

They also just lowered their shipping rate and to the US, it now costs less than $5. Ledger Nano, SmartCard security for your Bitcoins. Give it a try. We would like to thank Ledger for their support of Epicenter Bitcoin. Let's talk a little bit about sort of the state of Bitcoin and where we're at. So as everybody knows, the Bitcoin price has been dropping a lot. And I'm curious, what's your view there? To what extent has that affected the startup activity and the ability to fund-dways for companies

in Silicon Valley and in the United States? I don't think it's affected it at all. I think it's important to realize that most of the companies that are fundraising in this space, first of all, in 2014 or at least in the last 12 months, just over 500 startups raised just more than $500 million, half a billion dollars, which is the fastest rate of investment since the internet in 1995 in the tech sector in a specific industry. It is an astonishing result, a very promising result. And all of that money that has just entered into this.

space has resulted and is resulting in hiring and training thousands of developers. And none of that investment has actually produced innovation yet. So it's beginning to now. And in fact, what we're going to see is the results of that wave of investment are going to hit about a year or two in the future, which is really interesting because we saw some incredible technology deployed in 2014. But that was really the result of technology written and tested first in 204. 2012 long before Silicon Valley started investing in this space.

Silicon Valley and the mostly US-centric venture capital space is investing in Bitcoin companies in US dollars, not in Bitcoin. They're not using the investment funds to buy Bitcoin. They might be buying a bit of Bitcoin in order to run some forms of or some parts of their operations. But for the most part, that money stayed in US dollars, which means that the start of the start of, that were funded with that money were not really affected very heavily by the drop in price. And the investment hasn't slowed down. And if anything, it's accelerated. We're getting news every day.

We just found out about a company that had raised a hundred plus million dollars two days ago. And we're still not sure of what they do, but yeah. We're still not sure what they do. And that's only the stuff you see on the surface. You know, these are the announced VC funds. You've got to consider all of the private investments. and angel investments and investments by Bitcoin angels and all of the other activity that's like bootstrap will startups running off credit cards, which in fact most of the interesting startups

in Bitcoin are. They're not like giant invested startups. They're collection of two or three founders with technical skills building really interesting little projects. Do you think that perhaps there's going to be a delayed effect since the price has gone down and investment rounds do take a long time to get in place that perhaps in 2015, at least in Silicon Valley, will see less investment? Or will that pick that up again now? Not at all. I think the investment is accelerating because more and more people, especially in Silicon Valley,

are seeing this for what it is. They're realizing this is not a joke. They see the enormous amount of talent that is being sucked into this industry. They understand the potential it has. You know, this is a force that can achieve disintermediation. It can replace intermediate layers with technology. And just like the Internet replaced several large intermediate layers with direct access to consumers. The difference is that the intermediaries in the financial industry are multi-billion dollar industries themselves. And so Silicon Valley understands that this is probably the first time that, that the software industry has been able to take on the banking industry and introduce

competition and change in disruption without having to ask for permission and that's why they can do it and that represents a very big prize at the end of the road because disrupting the financial industry means removing a lot of overhead a lot of fat and streamlining things which will mean great results for those who achieve it so So I think we're going to continue to see an acceleration in the investment in Bitcoin, in cryptocurrencies, in the startups in the space. Quite honestly, I think the real issue here is that the price of Bitcoin, the exchange rate of Bitcoin provides for a very poor price discovery mechanism for the industry.

It's not a price discovery mechanism for the industry. It's the equilibrium point at which the outflow of money from Bitcoin. Bitcoin in the form of mining revenue to pay for electricity matches or fall short or overcomes the number of new adoption. Like at the moment in order for the price to stay stable, we have to have 3,600 Bitcoin in new adoption come in every single day. That's a big flow of money. And we're going to see, I think, a significant change when the reward halves in 2016, as that's

going to naturally push the price a lot higher because the inflow of investment will will be greater than the outflow of mining revenue. But this is really not a price discovery mechanism. I think it's a mistake to look at and I certainly did make that mistake in the beginning. I thought the Bitcoin price represented kind of an index fund for the industry, you know, like an investment fund, but it isn't. And the reason it isn't is because it's affected by things that have a lot more to do with currency flows in and out of the economy than it does with the fundamental strengths of the

industry itself, of the technology or its development. And because it's a tiny liquidity pool, it gets very seriously moved around when anybody makes a big move in this industry. And so largely I think it's disconnected from the fundamentals. And that means that it's great for speculators. the movement you see is one guy saying, oh, the chart looks like, to quote to Dilbert cartoon, the chart looks like a rabbit sitting on a clown, now is the time to buy. And then the other guy says, oh, now it's looking like the clowns sitting on the rabbit,

so now we're going to sell. And that kind of technical analysis in a tiny liquidity pool is a circle jerk, if I can use that expression on radio. Essentially, it's a feedback loop where the activities of one trader are affecting the perspective and sentiment of the others. And there's a bit of fundamentals in there, but not enough to make a difference. So I don't really pay attention to that. I protect myself from volatility. If I have expenses denominated in dollars, I'll sell Bitcoin quickly to pay my bills.

And if I receive in Bitcoin or vice versa. And so I won't stay in one currency for too long and I won't be exposed to too much exchange rate volatility. And, you know, I use it primarily as a means of exchange and it works fine for me. Yeah. And so I'm able to ignore the price for the most part. Now, the problem is I'm human and all of our participants in this game are human. We have emotions and these emotions are very easily affected by the price of Bitcoin. So, you know, I'll be having a fantastic day and then I'll see the price of Bitcoin tank and all like, brownie face.

And then the next day, Bitcoin's like this week, Bitcoin's like shot up from, I don't know, 270 to almost 300. And I like, I don't care about the price of Bitcoin. But I have a big smile on my face. I don't know why. It's hard not to be emotionally affected by it. Um, well, it was it. It's, it's, I think it's interesting just how different, uh, situation is. Well, and the sentiment at the startup scene and the investment scene, uh, in the US

from like in Germany and Berlin or in France or in other European countries. I think it's, uh, I guess here that sort of wave of people becoming interest in Bitcoin saying, all this is the future. It never really started or maybe there was like the very beginnings of it and When you don't have like all your colleagues talking about it, you know like nobody is doing it I mean there's such a hurt instinct with people there and then the price I think does pose a problem Because for people who aren't so intuendo bit don't understand the technology yet It makes it so much harder to sell them that this is a lot of potential when you see like hey but then if that's really good

case why does the Bitcoin price keep going down? Like, so I think it from people, you know, I know here who have been trying to raise investment from from investors, they, they've been having very difficult time and the price definitely has exacerbated that a bit. So yeah, but yeah. Barry Silbert had the best answer. I think it was Barry who was asked, you know, why is the price of Bitcoin going down and when do you think it's going to start going up again?

And his answer was, it's going down. because there are more sellers than buyers. It will go up again when there are more buyers and sellers. That's it. It's as simple as that. And who are the sellers right now? Minors paying for electricity bills. Merchants converting from Bitcoin back into fiat as quickly as they can

because they're not using it as a store of value. And the buyers are people adopting Bitcoin not just to use it, but also to store value in it for the long term. And so is that the industry? Not really. it's not the industry it's just one aspect of economic activity so in your opinion what needs to happen for that trend to for for for the earth to be more buyers and sellers time it really is just a matter of time i think the overall adoption trends in terms of brand awareness in terms of more people

having heard of bitcoin trying bitcoin more people showing up at meetups the grassroots community the number of companies the number of developers the software being built better software slicker software, easier experience, more secure wallets, all of those trends are moving in the right direction. And so over time, it just builds momentum and builds momentum. And maybe at some point we're going to have a critical event, a spark event that's going to turn a hockey stick like and we're going to see very, very, very rapid exponential growth. But until then, it's just, you know, gradual hard slog. And I'm no worried about that. That doesn't frighten me.

I've seen this before. I first started dabbling with the internet really professionally around 1989, 1990. And then I watched for the next seven or eight years, and you know, in my mind, like, this was mind-blowing stuff that it was obvious and it was going to be huge. And then the market just took seven to eight years to start building up momentum. And then it crashed in 2000 and everybody said, oh, the internet's over, let's move on to something else. So I'm not scared.

I mean, this market sentiment happens. The real question is, is there something there? Is Bitcoin real? Is there a technological invention here that is disruptive, that is effective, that solves problems, that does something nothing else can do, that is truly remarkable? And the answer is yes. And I have no doubt in my mind that it is therefore just a matter of time. before this technology and it may end up not being called Bitcoin it may end up

using the different currents even in fact but I actually think it is going to be Bitcoin and I think it's gradually going to gain a bigger and bigger foothold and it will eventually become the de facto currency of the internet the de facto global transnational exchange currency for digital companies so We want to come back to this point, the point of the sort of long-term outlook for Bitcoin, because it's something that has been a topic again and again on our podcast. It's something we've been thinking a lot about the sort of long-term potential issues, challenges that are in the way.

But before we dive into that, for those who are interested in getting involved with Bitcoin, maybe they read your broker developers or maybe they have other skills of expertise, What are the big opportunities that you see in the space, especially those that are kind of neglected and that nobody is doing? Free startup ideas. Yeah. I don't think free, yeah. I think it's always wrong to start a startup by starting with what is the idea that's going to be successful.

I think the most important thing you can do in any startup is look hard, what drives you as an individual, your personality, what are your core principles, what are the things that excite you, and then try to find that one thing that drives you so hard you can't put it down, you can't sleep at night, you can't stop thinking about it, that drives your personality, it's important to you, it's important to the very core principles of who you are, and do Bitcoin in that, because nothing can make up for the enthusiasm and focus. and execution drive over the founder or founding team that really, really passionately drive behind an idea.

And, you know, if you just go, okay, was the thing I think will sell the most, you're going to fail. Now, in terms of Bitcoin and the future, honestly, I think there's a lot of really visionary stuff going on, and we've seen this whole Bitcoin 2.0 space, etc. But I think for the next two years, the vast majority of work we have to do, is in 304 core infrastructure systems, exchanges, wallets, ATMs, and the surrounding applications, making Bitcoin easier to get, easier to use, easier to secure, and spreading that reach to more people. And I would say, you know, that's very similar to, you're not, to the internet, you didn't get the web out of nothing. You got the web when the time was right because ISBs had been deployed on the back of email all across the world.

And so every country had begun to deploy ISB infrastructure and get out modems and personal computers and get people connected, at least basically with email. And that created the necessary adoption density to be able to deploy something like the web and lead the next range of killer applications. Bitcoin as a payment mechanism is already here. We've got the infrastructure. We need to deploy a lot of exchanges, a lot of ATMs, and a lot better wallets, which is already happening. But I assume there will be two or three exchanges in every country in the world. And we're going to also see decentralized exchanges and multi-currency exchanges and things like that. And we're also going to see more and better wallets.

And that basic infrastructure, as boring as it seems, is what's required. in order to get to the point where we can then pull out more killer apps on top of this platform. The space has sort of evolved over time from being a, I mean, Bitcoin being an invention of cyphur monks and crypto anarchists. And a lot of that ideology is still there. But as we move forward, you know, a lot more business coming into the space. We definitely see that at conferences. there's sort of a dichotomy of like the people that are there with sort of the ideological foothold

and others that are there just to make products and make money. Do you think that there's an evolution of the space towards more like Bitcoin equal, sorry, business-friendly products? How do you see that play out in the future? Yeah, of course there is. I mean, this is inevitable in the maturity of any technology. Most technologies start out with a very focused set of principles or engineering objectives or architectural goals.

And then as they hit mainstream, they gradually morph to adopt the principles of desires of mainstream, and they get diluted. This is normal. This is what happens in the maturity curve of any technology. Listen, if I have the suits playing on the blockchain architecture, we're winning. We just took a cypherpunk project. And I mean, not me personally, but you know, this community took a cypherpunct project inserted as a Trojan horse in the global financial services industry. And it got so good and so attractive that now it's peeling off suits from the financial services industry who want to start playing on our turf with our decentralized protocols.

Now, are they going to change Bitcoin and make it more centralized? Sure they are. But they're never going to make it a centralized as Visa or MasterCard or Swift or. the current banking system, they're playing on our turf and that is a huge victory. And it will lead to massive decentralization and financial services. Just like on the internet, eventually the phone companies got into it and you had a whole bunch of phone company executives and eventually they end up centralizing things and threatening net neutrality. But they're still playing on the internet and that decimated the close monopoly control of the long-demeanour.

of the long distance phone companies and nationalized networks and all of that crap that came before and I remember that and it was a mess. And we got them playing on the internet and guess what? As centralized as the internet became as net neutrality, hostile as it became, as surveilled as it became, it gave birth to Bitcoin because we won that time and now we're going to do it again. So I'm not worried and in fact if we see the principles that looted to do it. too much, you know, already there are a whole bunch of cyphopunks moving on to do the next most disruptive protocol on the back of Bitcoin or as a Trojan horse within Bitcoin

again and again and again. So we continue reintroducing disruption. That is the nature of change and you can only co-op so much. It's the Greek approach to barbarian invasion. You know, you open the doors, you introduce them to the idea of 12 gods and orgies. And you wait to decades and they're Greeks. The barbarians invaded you and your culture invades them. What are your thoughts?

I'm curious about some of these new sort of semi-decentralized solutions that we see entering the space, like Hyperledge or like Aeros Industries and others, that are trying to take the technological idea of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general and bring it to some sort of a semi-decentralized model that doesn't really carry all the ideas of the creator. That's great. I think there's plenty of competition. What it will do is it will train more and more people in these,

semi-decentralized ideas is still semi-decentralized. And it trains people who are steeped in a lifetime of thinking in centralized fashion to see how semi-decentralized works. And what that does is it gives them a taste. You know, so that's a bit like asking, you know, did CompuServe help the Internet or not? Sure, it did. It introduced a lot of people to CompuServe email and they saw CompuServe email. They saw a computer email and said, this is kind of cool, but I'd like the real thing. Can I have internet email please?

And then CompuServe was over and the internet picked up all of the slack. You can simulate and create semi-decentralized things, but the point is the pace of innovation, the disruptive potential, the really interesting applications, they come from the decentralized architecture. And so if you semi-decentralized, you're only semi-competing and we will, we can beat that. I mean, it's not a problem at all. Yeah, I mean, I think that has also been my point of view and it's funny because we actually used Trojan horse before when we talked to the topic and discuss the topic because, you know, when you start having, giving easy access to people, right, to hold money and integrate in

a banking on et cetera, of course, the transition from there to a wallet that's for example you know elect you know a wallet that's hosted on your own computer where you control the private key that's a very easy step right the first part we're softening we're softening the edges we're basically creating easier on ramps into these concepts and and technologies but but the whole point about decentralization is that it has a cost decentralization is more expensive and more complex but it also has a benefits and the benefit is that it fuels much more rapid innovation because innovation can

happen at the edges without permission from a central stakeholder in a very diffuse and decentralized fashion. People can innovate on niche applications that nobody would approve on a centralized network. And that is how you win because it's an endless source of surprises, it's an endless source of new innovation and new applications, and the semi-decentralized things can never keep up with that. Let's take a short break to talk about Voltoro, the gold to Bitcoin Exchange. If you've ever tried to trade gold for Fiat, you know how difficult that can be, right? You have to do a bunch of KYC, wire some money over. That takes a week plus cost a bunch of bank fees. And then you can only

trade large amounts of gold. And when you want to get the money out, you've got to pay even more fees and wait for another week. Voltauro does things differently. It's so easy and so quick to start trading gold and Bitcoin and Voltura that you need to. give this a try even if you've never traded gold before. The Bitcoin network makes deposits lightning fast and you can start trading after just six confirmations. Deposits and withdrawals are totally free and the trading fees go as low as 0.2%. You can start trading gold as low as 1 milligram and because of the world-class security

transparency of Voltaur, you can rest assured that your funds are safe. And because you're trading commodities, you don't even have to provide them any K-Y-C documents for deposits up to $5,000 worth of Bitcoins per day. Valtoro combines the best aspects of the oldest form of money, gold, with that of the world's newest and most revolutionary currency, Bitcoin. So go to Valtoro.com and start trading gold today, and we'd like to thank Valtoro for the support of Epicenter Bitcoin. So in the long run, you know, it seems Bitcoin has a lot of advantages right now.

If you think of a sort of long run currency, right? I mean, all the old coins are basically irrelevant, you could say. And none of them have gotten any kind of adoption. That being said, we have been talking about, especially the issues with proof of work and whether it can stay secure in the long run. What are your thoughts on that issue? I think it's important to know, to realize that Bitcoin is a dynamic system and some parts of it can evolve and some parts of it can't evolve so easily. But I think there's a lot of smart people working on solving skillability issues and on making Bitcoin work better.

Now, 10 years from now, we'll probably have something called Bitcoin and it will probably result. what we have today in some of the fundamentals but not in the implementation. It will be quite radically different. One of the analogies that I use often is that when I started in computer science in 1990, we had Ethernet and every year someone would write an article about how Ethernet can't possibly get faster and how it's going to reach the limits of physics, etc., etc., and every year they were wrong and now 25 years later we still have Ethernet but how similar is the Ethernet of today with the Coax Cable protocol we had in 1990?

It shares some basic similarities. It has some fundamental collision detection and frame rates characteristics that are similar. But it's like a car where only the steering wheel is from the original and you've replaced every other part is still the same car. No, it's not. And yet it is and you still call it Ethernet. So we will have a Bitcoin that may have received many upgrades under the hood and the brand continues and the core principles continue and the decentralized architecture continues. Bitcoin is, I think, very difficult to unseat from that perspective.

But I think it's also important to realize that the idea that Bitcoin is competing against other currencies in a zero sum exclusion game is a context of thinking that comes from national currencies with national monopolies. The idea that they can only be 194 currencies, one per country, and those are monopolies, infects our thinking. In the cryptocurrency space, Bitcoin can coexist with tens of thousands of currencies, and many of them can become equally valuable and find niche applications. This is now a fully open ecosystem without barriers to evolution, and we will see these currencies evolve and occupy the niche that they are most fit to occupy and coexist in layers and synergistic relationships and parasitic relationships and entire ecosystems of related currencies. We are now living in a poly currency pluralistic society after 2008 and the idea of monopoly currencies is dead.

So it's not Bitcoin against the world. Bitcoin will find its niche. It will probably be a very powerful niche, but it's going to coexist with thousands of other currencies. Yeah, I mean, this is somewhat where my own thinking on this issue is also evolved. I think to what extent, you know, Bitcoin's success will dramatically depend on the ability of the community to evolve the protocol and to question also some of the sort of fundamental. fundamental design choices, Satoshi made. So I was in Spain two weeks just shortly,

and I was reading the book of Satoshi, and it was actually the first time that I was reading some of Satoshi's writing except for the white paper. And I think one of the things that just sort of struck me, and it's kind of obvious, but we tend to forget about it, it's just how difficult this job was, like what a monumental task that was. And how much he had to just make choices, right?

Because like you don't know how things are going to turn out. And you don't have the time or capacity or skills or knowledge to try to model where things will be in that there will be A6 and mining pools and all those other things 10 years out of line. But then I think those choices will actually be very crucial to the extent that the network is stable and survive. So I think in my own view, this is, I think, their ability and the willingness to kind of think about these things and take action

proactively, not just when something goes wrong will be key and hopefully, hopefully Bitcoin will make that. And you're certainly right, there is a huge advantage today in terms of network effects, right? It will be very, very difficult for anyone to displace Bitcoin unless Bitcoin runs into some really big obstacles. Which even that, they have to not only be big, they have to be in. surmountable and unfixable or persistent over long periods of time, which again is a rare situation. The other thing is to realize there's a significant element of observer bias here.

You know, it's not as if, you know, Satoshi made all of the right choices and, you know, we can see that now. The thing is the reason we can see that is because Bitcoin succeeded and therefore validated all of the choices that Satoshi made. and we don't talk about the hundreds of other attempts at creating forms of digital currency from the early beginnings in the mid-70s through the 80s and 90s and all of the other centralized, unmind, minds using different protocols, different decentralized approaches, all of the ones that failed we don't talk about.

So it appears as if one person came along, made all the right choices, and done. No, the reason we talk about Bitcoin today, is because the choices that were made ended up proven good by its ability to support a $10 billion market cap, which is supported at some point, and attracting the investments that we've seen in the interest of people. Now, the great thing is that now it can evolve based on production use to best fit the needs of the people who use it. And so now it's a live system. It wasn't necessarily the best thing, but it was the protocol that was good enough and

caught on early enough. Just like TCPIP is not the best set of protocols, but it was good enough and it evolved fast enough. And after that, if it needs little tweaks here and there in order to expand its use, they make them. And this is the funny thing is that just as we see obituaries for Bitcoin, people are writing obituaries for the internet and its basic protocols. throughout the 90s, right? And eventually they stopped only because it became obvious that it was refusing to die and in fact thriving. Now we write different kinds of obituaries.

Now the internet is here to stay, but the free internet is dead and it will forever be more and more centralized. And again, I think that's also short-sighted. The same thing with Bitcoin now we're beginning to see people say, oh yeah, but mining is getting so centralized that eventually it will collapse in on. itself i don't think that's true either uh this is a dynamic system it will ebb and flow it will get more centralized it will get more decentralized people will push against that um you know it's it's a dynamic system with with influences and there are a lot of people now invested both literally

and metaphorically in the success of bitcoin so coming back on these issues like you know scalability etc i i have really have my doubts about whether or not the ecosystem has the ability ability to take a step back and look at the problems as they are and fix them because people seem to get so emotionally charged. And I don't know. I mean, I was definitely there at that time. I was too young to know what was going on. But with the internet, I don't think people were getting so emotionally riled up about choices that were made in the design of TCPIP, for instance. Oh, yeah, they were. They were. Oh, yeah, they were.

I mean, did they have, I don't think they had such an emotional. And they were T-shirts to make fun of the asynchronous transfer mode ATM protocol and its 53 byte payload. They went to conferences and screened at each other about centralization and selling out to the suits and all of that. Very, very much the same. And there were a few important organizations within that fray that managed to just strike the right balance and make good engineering decisions and steer the main. protocols in the way they needed to be to get here. You know, a lot of this happened because of organizations like the IATF and ICANN and various other standards bodies in W3C that managed to strike what are in retrospect some good balances. We're seeing that in Bitcoin too.

You know, I see a very, very healthy conversation on the core developer mailing lists and among the community of engineers and architects who are involved in Bitcoin about what needs to be fixed. and how it can be fixed. There are a lot of competing proposals, and they all receive healthy doses of skepticism, and nothing is a sacred cow. I think there are some things obviously in Bitcoin that will not change. You know, the 21 million coin cap will not change. No one will ever agree to that. But, you know, pretty much everything else is up for a redesign as necessary.

If it becomes a problem, it will get replaced. And the things that are becoming bottlenecks, scalability issues, etc., are vigorously discussed. a very healthy debate. So I'm very optimistic that these things will continue to evolve in a positive way. That's really good to hear then. Yeah, I mean, I think the challenge, the particular challenge in the Bitcoin example, no, is that you have money involved. There are different people who have large financial stakes,

and you somehow need to get them aligned, which can be a challenge. Depending on the issue, of course, in some cases, it's not, right? like yeah but the money is not an externality it's internal to the system which is really interesting because what it means is that if you make the wrong choice your money is worth less right um de facto so that also creates a very protective um environment where uh because people are invested more than just ideologically um then that that kicks in market incentive structures um for good decision making and and you know in fact what we saw in the past for example the internet it was a pure it was a pure

battle between engineers and suits if you like some who had just principled positions on engineering and some who just wanted to make more money on it with Bitcoin is kind of a mixed mixed game because you know the engineers are into money and and the money people have to do a bit of engineering too so it's it's engineered money it's a new thing we'll see how it plays out but it's going to be interesting again That's part of the really exciting thing about this, is that we have front row seats in the development of a historic technology that is doing things that have never been done before. And every day that goes by, I just feel amazed at having this opportunity to be a frontline observer and sometimes influencer in what is turning.

out to be perhaps a historic generational worldwide impactful disruptive change in technology, one that will create history and that is an amazing feeling. I definitely agree with that. I think Brian probably even more so than I because he works out of the Ethereum office. I mean I was in Berlin last week and I walked in on Vitella Gutera and Gavin Wood working there in the office and I just somehow felt like I don't know being in the Apple offices in the early 80s or something like that. I mean, like, it just seemed like in 10, 15 years from now, I would look back on these times and really look back on them as sort of being at the, like you said, you know, being at the

beginning of something just really huge. I think we all feel that. I know what you think, Brian. I couldn't agree more. And I also think this is that the perfect note on which to end our episode. I think we are very privileged to be part of this revolution. and you know and none of us doubt that this is going to be have such a big impact on on things and how how things are done and how we live our lives and I think it's going to have a tremendously positive impact and it's just super exciting to be part of that absolutely

and part of the fun is not knowing where any of this is going absolutely right we're not in control we're not we're just going to see well Andreas thanks so much for coming on it was a you know great pleasure talking Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it. And maybe one last time for those who want to do get more into debt for Bitcoin, spend some time trying some thing out, maybe sending some transactions from the command line. I certainly will do that. Yeah, check out this bookmaster in Bitcoin.

And it's on GitHub as well, no? Or where is that? Yeah, if you search Bitcoin book on GitHub, you'll find it. It's free. It's also, honestly, as being seated on Torrent sites as a PDF. PDF. People are exchanging the Kindle version and the mobile version

which of course is perfectly fine. And yeah, so you can find it. If you're not a developer, don't buy it. Go read it for free. And I hope you get something useful for it. But do buy it or a tip Andreas for his awesome work.

Oh, that's okay. Okay, well thanks. Thanks so much for coming on. And yeah, to listen, thanks very much for listening to show, we appreciate it very much. If you want, you can follow us on Twitter. We're at Epicenter BTC. And you can also tip us, and you can do that. Well, it depends.

If you listen to it on lots of Bitcoin, it's just in there, or you can do it at EpicenterBitCon.com slash tips. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.