Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - James D'Angelo: Satoshi’s Big Mistake and the Centralization of Bitcoin

Episode Date: December 21, 2015

With over 600,000 views, James D’Angelo’s educational videos at the World Bitcoin Network are among the most popular resources on Bitcoin. Besides his excellent technical explanation, he has also been vocal about the dangers of the increasing centralization of mining. James joined us to talk about his background as a rapper, the World Bitcoin Network, his proposal to use the Bitcoin blockchain to fight climate change and his argument that keeping Bitcoin decentralized would require sacrificing the anonymity of miners. Topics covered in this episode: How he first learned about Bitcoin and started the World Bitcoin Network His proposals on identity and climate change The crucial mistake Satoshi made in designing Bitcoin Why none of the current ideas can solve the underlying problem of the centralization of mining power Why decentralization should be the only design criterion for Bitcoin His Axiom: That anonymity and decentralization of miners are inversely correlated How Identity-based Mining could foster decentralization Episode links: World Bitcoin Network YouTube channel Article about his Sno-Caps proposal to use Bitcoin to fight climate change Sno-Caps Whitepaper Bitcoin Nodes and Noses A new mystery about Satoshi hidden in the Bitcoin block-chain 'Typical American' from James D'Angelo earlier rap band The Goats James D'Angelo's talk 'What is the Bitcoin Revolution?' Bitcoin in Uganda video with James This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/110

This is Epicenter Bitcoin, episode 110 with guest James DeAngelo. This episode of Epicenter Bitcoin is brought to you by Hyde.me. Protect yourself against hackers and safeguard your identity online with a first-class VPN. Go to hide.m.me slash epicenter and sign up for a free account today. And by Shapeshift, with no account or signup required, it's the easiest way to buy and sell gems, counterparty, Minero, Dash, and other leading cryptocurrencies. Go to Shapeshift.com. Iota instantly convert your old coins and to discover the future, of cryptocurrency exchanges.

Hi, welcome to Epicenter Bitcoin, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global cryptocurrency revolution. My name is Sebastian Guizu. And my name is Brian Fabian Crane. We're here today with James Neangelo. He's probably many of you have seen his video. He has started the World Bitcoin Network. And he has these great explainer videos where he goes from like Bitcoin One-on-One

to like how to make paper wallets to some other really interesting. interesting videos. And so we were super happy to have him on. We recently got into, like, he showed us a video on Twitter and we watched it. It was about sort of the future of Bitcoin centralization and, you know, felt like let's have him on and dive into this a little bit more in depth. So thanks so much for joining us today, James. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of you two guys, especially, very good interviews. It's nice to see the technical knowledge behind the interviewing. Yeah, thanks so much. Well, mutually are

our admiration for your work. I mean, we will certainly have links to some of your videos and your YouTube channel in the show notes for those who've never seen them. But, you know,

you are quite popular. I think I just saw before you have like 600,000 views in total on YouTube. So I think, well, you know, a fair percentage of listeners

definitely will be familiar. Yeah. And for me, in fact, I think when I first got into Bitcoin, it's quite possible that I think your videos was some of the first that I watched to learn about how things worked and everything. I'm an old man. I definitely played a role in my education about Bitcoin in the early days.

That's awesome. Well, thanks. So with that, how did you get started with both of Bitcoin and then with doing the video show? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think I answer that in kind of this random. I was asked to speak at the Texas Bitcoin conference, and I think it's, late 2013. And at the last minute, they come up to me, it's a speaker cancel. Can you talk? I'm like, I've never spoken live before about anything.

You know, go for it. We like your videos. And so I basically just told my story. I was fairly nervous, especially since there was this guy who hated me in the audience, ready to ask me questions. I won't name names, but we got into this. I heckled him during his talk, which you can probably find. But so I moved here in late 2012.

my wife from Uganda, I'd been living in Europe, and I'm not the biggest fan of living in Boston or the United States. I just get really bored. Most of my work that I do, I can do from anywhere. So I got very excited by this strange thing I was reading about, called Bitcoin, and I ended up buying some before I had any idea what I was buying. I was just so excited to just be able to buy some strange commodity asset. I have no idea what it was, but I was reading it and I was just buying it. talking to my friend in Austria, who's an economist and he hated Bitcoin, oh, you shouldn't buy it's the most stupid thing you could do. And I kept buying more.

My brother was the first one to actually read me the Wikipedia page. He's like, you want to know anything about what you've just bought? I'm like, yeah, this is cool, right? The price has been going up, right? And, you know, I bought it at like 69 and it had already gone up to 100. And I was like, whoa, this is great, right? And so he starts reading. to me about it and I just don't understand a thing and you know but it that I found that kind of

appealing and so I felt like when I began to understand it that it was part of a movement there was something going on here that was really cool that was providing excitement I actually really liked it most because it allowed me to be scared right I was able to invest in this really risky thing and just party with that right I didn't have to go to Vegas or whatever I could really just risk my money. And I have some big gripes with the SEC because the SEC in 1934 after the big stock market crash limited the ability for small timers to invest. And so now we always hear about the same big investors all the time. And I'm sick as hell of hearing about them, right? I wanted to invest in a lot of companies way back in the day, but I couldn't. Right. So they get to look like they're

geniuses. I get to look like I'm just an idiot. And here I was with this chance to buy Bitcoin. So I was buying like crazy. I just sold a song to Chevy and I was putting all my money into it. And it was terrifying. You know, there was one day when Coinbase went down, I think all the exchanges went down. I turned on my wife. I'm like, I think I just lost everything. You know, sorry. So I really enjoyed the fear aspect of it. But there was also, I got the sense as part of a movement. So I actually woke up one morning and it was like, you know, I want to piss on the wall here. I want to be part of this movement, let everybody know that I'm part of this movement. So I decided to just make videos. And so I made these really cheesy videos of me announcing the news.

I might still have a couple of them. You guys said I had 600,000 videos, but I've deleted almost all my initial videos. Because they're so cheesy. I'm wearing this suit. I set up the stage like I look like I'm in a news organization. And I'm basically saying, oh, Silk Road just got arrested, boys. And people were clicking on it for the news. I think there's a guy with a funny hat and glasses.

It still does that. Well, you know, he gets a little more philosophy in. We started around the same time and we have a close bond because of that. Thomas and I just hung in California. He's a great, great individual. And so, yeah, that's how I got started. And I really, the videos were me teaching myself. So as soon as I knew something, I would put it in a video.

I wish I still had that same energy because I feel like now I'm way beyond where my videos are at and I haven't caught up. Maybe because now I have higher standards, people look at me more, critique me more, so it takes longer to make each video. You guys probably understand some of that, the real energy you put in to putting out good content. Yeah, definitely. I think people have a very limited understanding of the amount of, work that goes into producing content. And I mean, not only just the research and finding guests and

producing the content, but also the technical part of it. And like, sometimes Google Hangouts just screws up and we can't put it out or we can't put out the video or something like that. But yeah, so it is challenging. But, you know, what you were saying regarding educating yourself, we talk to other people that do content like Adam Beel-Vee and others. And same thing for us, like when we first started doing this podcast, especially for me, because I just really, like, I started doing this podcast because I had heard about Bitcoin

and I wanted to learn about it. And it was really just, yeah, to learn about it and to produce the content as you were learning. And I think a lot of people were in the same boat. Yeah. And there's something to be said. You know, I've got a four-year-old son, right? And here, my YouTube videos are dated. And it's like, if this does become a movement, I'll be able to, at least.

at least say I did something cool in my life to my son, you know, or he'll be able to look back. So it's weird. That strange human desire to piss on the wall and, you know, let the other dogs come and sniff was there. And then it really became, I really, really have fallen in love with Bitcoin and the philosophy and technology that sits underneath it and invested in anordinate amount of time thinking about it. So it is, as many people have said, it's a, it's a very fun rabbit hole to dive in. Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned people, we were wondering before like, oh, what is actually your main occupation? And so we, you mentioned that you sold some songs before.

Can you, can you share anything about that? Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, my background's technology. So I get into everything based on technology. So I built this some early audio hardware. You know, we're talking 1990, 1980s. I'm fiddling around with building audio hardware. And I was getting really sick of my job at NASA. And I just did this interview with Apple.

And I hated the job that they offered me at Apple. And I had this audio hardware. And I had some money in my pocket from the NASA. I wasn't spending anything. So I just picked up and moved to Philadelphia and started lying to my neighbors, the hot dog vendors, etc. That I'm a music producer. And at that time, man, you get rappers flying through the window if you produce music.

You know, now everybody has garage band on the computer. But back then, no one had beats. So I started producing beats. And next thing you know, rappers are coming in. Five months later, we're signed to Sony. Our very first calls from this, like, German guy is like, oh, we want you to tour in Germany. I was like, yeah, maybe next year he's like, no, we're going to get you here now, you know? And boom, some big contract came in.

And, you know, my first sold-out show is in Berlin. We look through the curtains. My rapping partner literally has like a heart attack or something. He's spazzing out on the floor. He's so nervous. And we start drinking beer before the show and the curtains open. And, you know, I'm a rapper, I guess. So, yeah.

Then the first show I played in the United States was Central Park. You know, it was like, wow, this is strange stuff. So it was, again, very similar to Bitcoin, right? It was this brand new thing. It was this brand new technology being applied to this old thing, which is music, right? So you're bringing the technology in and reinventing how music can be made. And I've always really enjoyed that when the technology comes in and disrupts, right? So it really disrupt the music industry.

Cool. And are you involved with any other Bitcoin? or blockchain startups or anything like that, any projects on the horizon and things that you like to work on? No, I mean, I don't know. I have, I do a bunch of sort of counseling and advising, so I do a lot of like high-powered free lunches. I've never charged.

People have offered me money. I do some consulting for companies that want Bitcoin explained to them, so banks, et cetera. It's not a very active part of my, life. So when the invite comes, and if it fits in my schedule, I jump at the chance, but I don't have a site. I don't publish it at all. But I also, I don't know if you know, I won this big contest at MIT. And it's a big contest in the United States for the, it's called the MIT Climate Co-Lab. And that was using the blockchain technology to solve what I consider a solution

for climate change. And then this year I was very proud of, I released a very simple global identity platform. And so these are things that I think about and sort of launch on my own. They're both open source. Anybody could use them. And in fact, I do get calls about both of them, whether people can use them.

And like, go ahead, do whatever you want. You know, the adoption factor, I think, is an issue right now because most people don't understand what the hell it is. but I think the ideas both stand up to scrutiny. And so I build my own just basically open source solutions. Can you tell a bit more about this, about this climate thing and this identity platform? Yeah. So I'm, I travel a lot.

When I travel the world, it's almost always climate. I wake up a night scared about climate change. I'm just one of those guys. There's people who are like going to immediately turn off the video right now because oh my God, climate change isn't real, whatever. I don't care if it's real or not. You can say what you want. I think it's an interesting problem.

And it deals with this problem of the commons, right? So if you're familiar, if you, like in the Mediterranean Sea, you have big fishing problems, right? You have 24 countries around the Mediterranean Sea. And how do you broker it's such that fish stay in the sea and fishermen still can make a paycheck. Well, if you've ever gone scuba diving in the Mediterranean Sea, you realize it hasn't been brokered very well. There isn't a single animal alive in the Mediterranean right now, at least when I was swimming there last. And that's because it's a commons, right? It isn't run by one government organization. And same with the atmosphere. So it's considered a commons.

And one of the traditional ways to solve the commons is to distribute ownership in such a way that people considers fair. So my idea was, what if we just assigned everybody on Earth an equal share of carbon emissions? And then companies would have to pay for it. And it relied heavily on smart contracts. So these smart contracts would broker fees paid between, say, a company that volunteers to come in, like a Whole Foods, a company that's looking to claim that they want to do something good for the environment. Well, that now they could prove it.

If you walk into Whole Foods right now and you see this poster, we support climate change initiatives, or this Kenyan farmer is working for you or whatever. Do you believe it when you see the poster? Probably not. But what if you could immediately click on there, see the blockchain transaction going to that Kenyan farmer, have people go to the farm in Kenya and see that that guy's received it? The blockchain transparency allows for some very bold statements that can be made and provable. And I was just basically applying that same concept to this commons problem of the climate.

And yeah, I just got a big call from folks in Vancouver trying to develop it last week. So I just went through the idea again with them. So this, and it all relies on Bitcoin. And you also mentioned an identity platform? He does with that. Yeah. So, again, I have a video on both of these. I'd say my snow caps, climate change one was me still figuring out the idea.

So it's kind of a long, confusing one. Whereas I think the identity one I do very well. And I actually give you the code there to build the identity. But again, even with Bitcoiners, one of the big problems with identity is that it exposes you to the networks. It exposes who you are. You don't have control of your identity. And it turns out that everything from voting, especially in developing countries, voting is very difficult because identity is very difficult. In the United States and Europe, we kind of have reliable identity run by a very strong government.

But the reason I'm speaking to you guys today, the reason you guys value my attention and I value your attention is we both have identity established. The reason we might hire Andreas Antonopoulos or Peter Todd or Gavin Andreessen is because we have their identities. If you're in the developing country and you have no identity, that you can sell, it's very hard for you to bootstrap yourself. So in a refugee situation or something, having zero identity is very expensive. In India, there's India that works very hard on identity because they can't hand out government handouts. So the government wants to install some welfare program, but the people at the end of the chain have no identity. So how do you know that the money ever reached them? And so the need for identity scheme is important.

And it's pretty easy to do. I could take Sebastian's picture right now with my little JPEG screen, and I could hash that photo, and I could put that on the blockchain. Okay. Now, what does that mean? It means now we have this photo of Sebastian that's timestamped. Now I can go to anyone who wants to be an identity provider, and they could send a tiny transaction to that photo. That photo doesn't have to be online.

He could email that to them or whatever, and he can now get authorized as an identity thing. So, you know, these get complex, and I don't want to lose too much time with that, but it's very simple, and it works, I'd say perfectly. Are you familiar with Identify? We had Tim Pestor on last week, and he's working on this platform called Identify that, well, allows you to put proofs of your identity in a blockchain, and you have this web of trust network where people vet what you put in this transaction, which is protected by your private key, which essentially allows you to create identities that are validated by different sources. Right.

And all identity schemes, I think he's absolutely correct when he says your identity has to be validated by someone. So identity is social. There is nothing about identity that will ever be perfectly digital because it's very hard to pass blood online and do a DNA. test. So it really has to be social, and I rely a lot on the face. The thing that I really hate about all identity schemes is you can, with a private key based or a password based, you can lose your identity. Someone could steal your identity. If I get your private key, well, what can I do now? Does

that have access to funds? Can I now spend it? Are we relying on a private key, which is knowledge, that's a knowledge-based identity or relying on recognition. So in my view, the photo would be the private key, because as you know, if I hash the photo, it becomes a private key. Now you would make that private key actually public. And the only person that can use that private key in a transaction would be someone whose face matched the photo. And you could put a million photos online. You could do every angle of yourself.

You could do location-based identity. The beauty of this is, even if you forget your name, even if you get mugged, beat up, and intimidated, you cannot lose your identity. It's impossible to steal it. So with the system, I mean, we don't have to go into detail of this, but with the system like identify what the premise is that if someone, if someone takes your private key or you lose it,

then you simply create, well, well, then you, you would ask your web of trust to basically unvalidate that that piece of identity so the people, so to say essentially that you're not in control of that piece of identity anymore so that people wouldn't trust it. And then like this is the new, you know, this is my new key over here. Right. It's a very interesting system. But, yeah.

But that sounds, that essentially is the problem, though, is when you have to ask your web of trust. Now, how do you prove that you're you? You can be civil attack like crazy, right? How do you now establish without a private key that's functioning that you're you? And when you really need your identity, you've now lost it. Okay, so you're going to a border crossing or you're about to be arrested in a refugee situation. The last thing you want is your identity compromised for even five seconds, okay?

And because those five seconds might be the crucial five seconds. Do you want to have to turn around and try and get your web across trust to authenticate you? And the beautiful thing about having your photo be the private key is you can go to a border crossing where no one has internet or electricity as long as you have working cell phones and you can prove your identity. Prove it. Okay. So you don't need that web of trust at all. So we're talking anytime there's an extreme situation, your identity is still yours. and that's why I think it's a fundamental change to ownership-based identity, right? I can establish private keys and passwords. I mean, what's more stupid? Do you guys have this in Europe where you forget your password on your bank and they ask you your mother's maiden name?

Like, what is that? That is not identity. That is bank-grade security, my friend. Well, but what it is is actually underlying that. is an enormous government protection, right? Because if you start lying about that stuff, you're going to get arrested. Okay, that's a, the ability to do shitty security is available in the first world, okay, in the developed world. The ability to do shitty security where you reclaim your password by saying your mother's made name is not available when you don't have strong police

protection, right? It's the police threat that you're stealing the identity that allows them to do shitty identity, really shitty, like five-letter passwords with one number at the end. I mean, give me a break. I could have programmed through that in 1982. So what if you can make an identity that can't be stolen? And that's what I was developing. And my experiences in Uganda definitely were behind that. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting problem. I mean, one of the things, one of the ideas coming out of cryptocurrencies that I am most excited about is the sort of universal basic income.

And there, of course, identity is a fundamental. Oh, yes. Yes. It's an awesome idea. Yeah. And what's the end row to that? You exactly know the end row to that, identity. Yeah.

If you don't have identity. Identity is the, you know. the one thing that is the key here. Yeah, Thomas Payne doesn't help you unless you have identity, right? You know, because I think he was the one who introduced the idea of universal basic income. So identity, and strangely, we'll talk about it later, but it's really key to think that identity is really the end road to thousands of problems.

So if my climate change solution works, it's the end road, even if other people's climate change, it's the end road. welfare, governance, voting, universal basic income, identity, right? It's essential to so many problems. Let's take a short break and talk about hi.comi. Hi, dot me is a VPN provider. And if you don't know yet why you should need a VPN provider, let us help you. I'm sure you were like me and when all the crazy revelations came out during the Snowden time

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your computer at work, your personal computer, and just be completely protected all the time. And of course, HyD.Me accepts Bitcoin. So we'd like to thank HyD.me for their support of Epicenter Bitcoin. So let's move on to Bitcoin. So you mentioned before when you heard about Bitcoin, you got so fascinated, and then you had this fascination also for the philosophy the ideas behind it. What was it about those ideas that you found? So fascinating. I would say,

really, I just loved, well, I mean, let's be honest, we're all still understanding this philosophy, right? We're learning it every day. So I love the fact that it's new, so it's new philosophy, right? It makes us question what money is. It makes us question what centralization is. It makes us question almost everything. We question how we can work together as humans. And so I guess I really love the fact that it's all exciting and new. It's 2009 since philosophy. Just by changing some simple things, like the ability to have a decentralized consensus timestamp database, right?

It sounds ridiculously simple, right? Oh, yeah, okay, I agree that that that transaction happened at that time. it's never been done before. It's never been unalterable before. And think of how terrible it is too, right? If I get a picture of my ex-girlfriend naked and posted on the blockchain, what's she going to do to take that down? Zero. It's the most terrifyingly, I mean, you could think for all the beauty that we think of Bitcoin, think of all the terrible things you could do with it, right?

That alone is just terrifying. Right. She can't do anything to take that out. There's no one she could sue for all the very same reasons that it works as a currency. It works as something that can be very indelibly painful. And the world, just like, you know, the fact that we have cameras everywhere now is just going to have to get used to it because this won't be uninvented, this concept. When you kind of think back to or even today, you know, when you think of both the concept of Bitcoin as well, you know, cryptocurrency, blockchain, smart contests, all of those things that sort of are tied to it. You know, when you think ahead, I don't know, you're most optimistic or pessimistic, but this,

you know, sort of vision of the future of like, what role do you see that playing in the world at some point? And what role would you like it to play? Well, yeah, I, I'm a big, big fan of Vidalik Bouderen and especially, I, I, I, I, I, Ethereum I'm neither here nor there on. But he has been really, for me, a huge thought leader on these ideas of government and where things like this could really replace a lot of loopholes for corruption. And, you know, again, the identity and climate change and the ability for Ugandans to interact and transact as equal citizens of this global.

world as you what you just mentioned, you know, universal basic income. These are dreams, right? These are beautiful, beautiful dreams. And I think they far outweigh any of the negatives that I've seen. But every technology has

positives and negatives. So I see these dreams and I see them functioning and I understand the tech behind it. Really, we're waiting for the world to catch up. to agree that that dream is worthwhile. Yeah, I think that is true, right? At some point, people will start seeing some of these applications, you know, actually working.

And there would be a shift of thinking that will happen that will be incredibly radical. And it's still some ways off. I mean, in a way, we have this little bubble where, you know, we see this very different future. and then the rest of the world is just like, what is this weird Bitcoin thing? What is this weird stuff you guys are focusing on? But at some point, they,

you know, just it will all start unraveling, I think, and that will be. And I hate to harp on the name, but I think the name is a big stumbling block, right? When you hear a coin in it,

you just think currency, and it's been built around this idea of currency. And I think it's all fine and good that it provides a currency. And I think the currency is a killer app. But when I start, doing my series, million killer apps, I was trying to figure out myself how many beautiful, wonderful applications there were. And I just, inside of a week, I was like, there's too many

to count. So I did the first episode thinking I would do two. And then I did the second one. I'm like, oh, my God, I can do five more of these of these killer ridiculously beautiful applications for this technology. And the nice thing is, when I did the first, video, most people were saying, well, there is no killer app. And I would say maybe my videos changed that. I don't hear that as much anymore, right? Now it's like which killer app will come first or which of these applications might. But yeah, you're right. I think Bitcoin can be a bit of a stumbling balk and a barrier. I mean, when I meet people now, you know, who know, you know, something with that, it's almost always one of the first questions is, you know, you know,

is, you know, what's the price of Bitcoin? How is it? And it's just, I also think that actually Bitcoin as a currency is a killer app. It's awesome. But it's just one tiny, tiny part of all the things that are possible. And even with Bitcoin as a currency, you know, to reduce it to a price is just sort of misses the point. But even with, we can talk about this perhaps later, but the shift of attention from Bitcoin to blockchain in the media and startups and everything we've talked about this before.

Even with this shift, even when you're talking about blockchain, you still have to enter the conversation with Bitcoin. At just this, at lunch this afternoon, someone asked me, you know, what I was working on, and I'm talking about stratum and we're building blockchain solutions. And, well, what's the blockchain? Well, you have to explain Bitcoin to them before you can get into the blockchain. So personally, I find that challenging. And I'd like to be, you know, able to find a way, especially with regards to just blockchain technology, to explain it without having to talk about the currency. Yeah. And it's a bit like saying, well, you know, here's an engine and we're just going to ignore fuel. You know, you can't pull things apart so conveniently.

All engines that we ever make will require something that drives it. And it is the driving force behind all of it. I noticed that I was a big fan of counterparty. I loved that they were kind of competing with Ethereum. And they've basically been pulled off of all the Reddit, the Reddit moderators take counterparty off because it developed its own little currency inside of counterparty. But counterparty still essentially based on Bitcoin, right? It's built on top of it. It's built. You can't use counterparty without using Bitcoin. And it's not even clear if the moderators understand the real idiocy of that, right? If counterparty does well, Bitcoin does well. It's inseparable. And I think we're smoking their Ethereum crack there, being afraid that it was a competitive blockchain. And it's really not.

It's built. You have to have it. So it's an essential ingredient. Today's magic word is noses, N-O-S-E-S. Head over at Let's Talkbidcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word, and claim your part of the listener award. Well, with that, let's dive into one of the topics that you have thought a lot about, which is the aspect of centralization. or decentralization and the whole conversation around that. And of course, it's a conversation that I don't know how often we've talked about it. But it's just so central to all of this. And it's the decentralization is so essential.

So I get started with that. How do you think about decentralization and what do you think we should focus on? Like what's a good metric to even say, Bitcoin is? is, for example, decentralized or not decentralized? Well, yeah, I mean, I think we're jumping in almost at the deep end, but I'll try and roll with that. Bitcoin's number one proposal, the number one thing that it's offering that's different, is a decentralized consensus.

That is its selling point. If you don't have that, there is absolutely nothing. the fact that you get a currency out of that is really wonderful right so you have a decentralized consensus so all these different miners are we don't know where they are are coming to agreement that the transaction took place if it was centralized in any way someone could show up at that centralized area point a gun to their head and say reverse that transaction for that coffee i just bought the whole beauty of it is we don't know where that person is who just validated that transaction. Now, there's other beautiful things. We incentivize

that person to mine that transaction and all that. But really, if there's only one value proposal that Bitcoin's offered to the world that's changed the game, the novelty of Bitcoin is decentralized consensus. So if we prioritize at all away from that, we are prioritizing away from Bitcoin. We are prioritizing away from the ability to maintain a currency. The moment transactions are reversed by any centralized authority, the price, which everyone seems to care about, goes to zero. So Bitcoin as a framework dies.

Now, we could all think of really tragic places to have that centralization take place. So say, for example, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all the centralization. was taking place by some corrupt dictator in some corrupt country, and he owned all the mining. I would suspect that most people would stop calling Bitcoin a decentralized consensus, and they would all be bailing out pretty quickly. So centralization and decentralization are the main ingredients. If you talk Bitcoin, you have to talk those terms very clearly. The trouble is we have built mining in such a way that it's anonymous.

So if I wanted today to go out and buy some mining hardware and jump on the network without a name, I can. Well, if I wanted today to go out and buy half of all the mining hardware and jump on the network, I can. that is a choice that I make and I make alone. Whereas with Coinbase or a mining pool, you're socially tied into the people you're serving. So if I join a mining pool, I am only part of other people joining. And if the mining pool starts acting badly,

we all grab our hardware and we point it at another mining pool. Or if Coinbase starts acting badly, there are centralized institutions. We take our money out. we go to circle or we just run paper wallets. The mining hardware is our choice. Anybody who wants to can choose to jump in, and anybody who wants to own as much as they want can.

So that's the dangerous. Everyone talks about mining pools, ghash.io. I was bored to death with that whole ghash.io because I'm like, they're going to lose all their customers tomorrow if they go beyond. 51% and that's pretty much what happened. You know, the whole idea of Coinbase, people are worried about Coinbase. It just bores me. I'm not concerned about that.

The community's too active and too passionate to let that happen. The trouble is in 2013, I don't know, did you guys mine ever? Were you ever mining? No. In 2013, at the meetups. I think I mined for about five minutes on my CPU. Yeah. At the meetups, everybody mine.

My nephew who was 11 mine. You wouldn't mind. Why wouldn't you mind? It was just too fun, right? You buy the little USB thing in, you slap it in, and you've got big... Okay, I did have one of those, actually. Oh, you did have one of those? Did you actually make anything?

Yeah. But it was like $20 as a joke. It wasn't like to actually, you know... Right, right. And even the price of those was varying dramatically, right? People didn't even know how to speculate on those because of the new ASICs coming out. And I remember selling them for way more than I bought them.

So I made more money selling the hardware than actually mining. But nobody mines now. I don't know anyone who mines. Sure, people mine. But the percent of people has gone terribly low. And we now have people claiming that greater than 50 percent, I've heard as high, 70 percent of the miners are in China. And the Chinese are probably hate hearing this. Why, you guys always pick on the Chinese, you know, we're okay, right?

But the Chinese have a very different government. They have a very powerful leader. They have single individuals, centralized people who can make very quick and powerful decisions, as we saw during the Olympics in Beijing, where you can move entire communities of people to put up a racetrack. So we have at this point today put most of our mining under a very strong government. Can we measure decentralization? No. Do we have a pretty good idea that it's being centralized dramatically?

Yes. The fact that we can't measure it, I would say, is a big problem for people who like to think that we're following science and math. The fact that we know that it's centralizing and centralized. underneath someone who's made, even in the last few weeks, some very powerful, Xi Jinping has made some very powerful censorship maneuvers in his country just in the past few weeks. The economist just did an article on it. Here's a guy who doesn't care about Bitcoin right now.

He doesn't, might not even know what it is. But what happens if Taiwan tomorrow decides to adopt Bitcoin as a national currency? Well, Xi Jinping will be very curious about what's going on. What happens if Bitcoin is suddenly being used for gambling in Macau or other areas? What happens if it's used for any sort of remittances in and out that really matter to China? I'm sure some of it happens now, but it's not at any reasonable percentage. Then you have someone who, A, can control all the mining. I'm sure you can find all the big miners.

They're public. They're fairly well known at this point. But he could follow him probably just by some simple sleuthing of a little bit. electricity, and he can control them. So today, we face a very strong centralization risk that we can't change. We can't point our miners away from them because those are, the very hardware is actually there. And they are, as you mentioned before, Brian, they also do a lot of the chip processing.

I'd be surprised if any ASIC was manufactured in the U.S., maybe a couple. But I'd suspect that all the ASICs are being manufactured in China as well. Yeah, I agree. It's one of the things that's also the scary aspect of that too, is you can do all sorts of maneuvers with saying, okay, we're going to do this change to the Bitcoin Protocol or that changed the Bitcoin Protocol. Are we going to make a bigger block size or a smaller block size? It really doesn't touch that aspect at all. I mean, one can try, right?

But it's really hard because this is very deeply ingrained in the economics of Bitcoin. So if you want to change that, you really have to fundamentally change something about the sort of economics of how Bitcoin works. And that's just extremely hard. So it's almost a problem that's, yeah, how can it be solved? It's not so clear to me. Right. you have this, what is it, segregated witness, you have lots of proposals to, to lower the requirements for mining by a factor of two, a factor of 10, et cetera. Does that mean suddenly 10 times as many

individuals are going to be jumping in and starting to mine? Maybe, though I doubt it, what it really means is you're basically providing a 10 times incentive for current miners to maintain what they're doing or invest more. So we've we've actually made it 10 times less expensive for them to do what they're doing. And so they will make a, who knows what, a much bigger return on investment. So I certainly know I've segregated witness and all these things. I'm not going to pull out my USB ASIC and start mining again, right? That's just ridiculous. We're a gazillion pedahashes right now. I would have to reinvest and buy new hardware. So I don't see that day.

The dream day that everyone's talking about from Gavin, Peter Todd on down, is that we're going to somehow write the technology such that it's going to be 2013 again when you go to the meetup and everyone's talking about mining. And I don't think anything based on history of economies of scale suggests that that's going to happen. So that's it's a dream. It's a pipe dream. It's a false dream. Yeah.

I mean, one could imagine some things, right? So let's say, because the issue is you have some centralization pressures, right? So first of all, the latency thing with mining makes it a lot more attractive to be a big miner, right? You have a clear advantage in terms of, you know, your block doesn't get orphaned. So that's a problem. But if we, for example, talked about Bitcoin NG, that would solve that, right? So you could do that and that would at least solve the latency problem. And then, of course, you still have the thing with the hardware and, you know,

the cost of hardware and the economies of sale there. But, you know, if you did do a proof of work algorithm where, you know, you can't really build an ASIC for it, or it's really inefficient to build an ASIC. for it, but everybody has sort of a spare resource to use, like, you know, spare computational cycles. Then, you know, those economics could actually change to make it just economically unattractive to build basics and build big mining farms. So it's possible. It's, of course, but one, require huge changes to Bitcoin, which isn't going to happen.

I mean, if you can't even agree on barely anything, there's just absolutely zero possibility of that happening. And, you know, then you also start having other vulnerabilities, maybe with botnets and stuff. I don't know if that's so much of concern. Probably not. I'd say it's a very real concern. So that's the big fear. Right. Keep in mind that when Bitcoin grew, it grew without predatory.

right it was growing in this very beautiful space because no one saw any value in it and so it was able to grow up without all this attention and and and massive hackers and so bots bot nets are are the argument right now for coming up with an asic resistant algorithm the there's everything that we're talking about is is some lead-sic-resistant algorithm to some problem. So if you'd come up with a brand new ASIC, of course, economies of scale, even if you're just mining on your chips, there's economies of scale there. There's huge economies of scale. Mining all together as opposed to having to broadcast your networks, etc. So we'd love to think that, you know, those halcyon days of 2011 can be created by

some hardware or software thing that we're going to go and kind of recreate that environment. but that environment will never be recreated, right? Because the innocence that existed there was essential to the growth of Bitcoin. Certainly, if you went back in time and it was 2009 or 2010, you'd be mining like a maniac and looking to centralize as much as possible. No one at that point was thinking that, right? So Gavin's throwing out his Bitcoins, he's giving him out on his – Bitcoin Fawcett, people are paying $10,000, $10,000 for a pizza.

It's a bit like playing with monopoly money. The only reason no one turns around and starts printing really beautiful copies of your monopoly money is because there's no value in it. But as soon as those things take off, well, you've incentivized people to be corrupt. And so that transition happened in 2012. So it's a very, very different environment. And, you know, I hate to say it. but Satoshi made a massive, massive mistake by assuming that decentralization can happen via hardware.

And again, if we look at centralization as the key ingredient of what Bitcoin is, he's made a massive and fundamental mistake in his development of Bitcoin. And it's just something that's happening slowly, as the miners are pooling and moving together. and I saw the scaling Bitcoin, I think even one of them said, you know, 85% of all Bitcoin mining is sitting here at this panel right now. I was like, that's freaking terrifying, right? That's the last thing I want to hear. And they're all sitting there, and what if they make one little deal between themselves, right?

And all of a sudden, 85% is walking out in one guy's pocket. So, again, the only thing we're offering is decentralization. And the only thing we're not talking about is decentralization. The only thing we're not concerned about. Everyone's concerned about anonymity. You know, fuck anonymity. It's the second ingredient, right? You know, we really have to be careful about that.

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I mean, there's this famous quote in the white paper, right? One CPU, one vote. I know. How beautiful. That's the dream, right? That's the dream. Right. And right now we're sitting here and massive vote buying scandal of all time, right? Yeah, it didn't quite work out that way.

I've got three CPUs in my house. I have zero votes. Then let's get right to that question. What should Satoshi have done differently? Well, again, how do you define decentralization, right? decentralization just between the three of us exists. We all have very different dreams for what we want for Bitcoin. But if our three computers were mining Bitcoin, there's no decentralization between our computers. They're all mining it the exact same way.

So if I buy your two computers and leave them connected to your IP addresses and I'm able to control them remotely, I've centralized the mining even though it looks decentralized. But if I'm arguing with Brian and Sebastian about how we should mine transactions, we'll never centralized. We'll always disagree. So the difference here is decentralization can only be measured by humans, the number of humans. If the number of humans drops, decentralization drops, period. Who cares how many CPUs or ASICs or nodes exist? that means nothing.

What I care about is how many people own those nodes, right? So counting nodes is like, you're just sitting there wanking off, right? You're telling yourself that it's decentralized. It's just not, okay? That's no evidence of decentralization at all. I could go on AWS right now, Amazon Cloud, and build a billion nodes for an hour, right, and do some massive mining, right? It'll cost me a ton.

And I'll look as decentralized as you want to be. Trouble is, I'm just me. And I really do want to reverse the price I paid for that coffee, you know, an hour ago. And so what, in that case, how, so you mentioned people, it's important to know how many people are behind these miners, these mining rigs. And you did an interesting video called nodes versus noses where you argue that, you know, there should be one nose behind every node, or a physical person, how can we achieve that then? It seems difficult to, without, if we compromise anonymity, unless we want to compromise on anonymity, it seems unlikely that we'll be able to achieve a situation where we have many nodes and

as many people behind those nodes as possible. Yeah, I think difficult is a very good word. And I think idealistic is another very good word, right? We've gone through 2009 to 2014 sort of thinking we could have our cake and eat it too, right? And we've never really looked at the problem square in its face. It's really easy when you're beginning a system to think you can have all the design constraints. But, you know, Tesla right now is going to be faced with competition from Porsche. And I think they're going to see their profit margins shrink and they're going to have to change

some of their dreams of how they build cars as competition comes in. We're seeing the same thing in Bitcoin, where we're going to have to sacrifice some of our design constraints to maintain the things that are essential to us. And certainly, if we see centralization of hardware, which has already happened today, we have to take that very, very seriously. We have to stop, you know, Gavin and Tristan saying eight megabyte blocks

at the risk of centralization or 20 megabyte blocks at the risk of centralization. That's the most dangerous thing you can say on earth, right? Because we're already very centralized. Today, whatever day it is, December 18th, 2015, right? We're centralized now. Anything that moves up, I'm like, when Peter Todd started saying, I might be in for smaller blocks. I was like, yeah, let's kick this can down the road for a little bit. Let's keep it as decentralized as possible.

I don't care about how much people are paying per transaction because it keeps the dream alive. People are like, oh, transactions should be cheap. Yeah, that's a great design constraint. Yeah, a miner should be anonymous. Yeah, that's great too. Yeah, it should be decentralized. Yeah, that's essential. That's not great.

That's essential. You don't have that. You have nothing. Yeah, I mean, my thinking on that is I agree with you. it is very centralized already. Bitcoin is way too centralized, right? It should be much, much more decentralized. It's just that, like, we are here with one megabyte, right?

So if you say we're going to stay here with one megabyte, I don't think that decentralization is going to increase, right? It's going to continue going towards more centralization. If you're going to go 8 megabyte, is it going to be, you know, substantially different, I'm not so sure. All right, but let's just check your first assumption there. You said if we stay at one megabyte, decentralization or centralization might not change. The truth is we can't measure it, right?

That's because we aren't counting individuals. And we know, we really do in our gut, know that it's being centralized even if we stick at one megabyte, right? So it's currently centralizing. It might be at a logarithmic or x. exponential pace, which is my guess that it's going that fast. So we don't know, even if we just said, let's do everything we can to avoid increasing any form of centralization and stick at one megabyte. I would say that's still dangerous. I would still say that's, we're playing,

we're rolling dice here. And we're rolling the dice very aggressively against our only design criteria that really matters. So yeah, I think we're safe today. I don't think Xi Jinping is really to make a move yet, but please don't call the network trustless anymore, because now I'm trusting the fact that he doesn't want to make a move. I mean, forget this idea that we're protected by math. Bitcoin's a social institution, right? When you tell me you're protected by rubber gloves or condoms, I go, it all depends on how you use it and how much people want to attack. your girlfriend can snip off your condom in two seconds, right? Your condom doesn't protect you. If you put your condom on your head, it doesn't protect you either. Same with rubber gloves.

Same with math. If you're not careful of how you're being attacked, math doesn't protect you at all. There's no honey badger here. There's no, this will work if we don't organize. We have to organize, period. And if we don't organize and start measuring and counting decentralization, we're just letting it centralize because it is currently happening. It's like the tide.

It's coming in. So, yeah, I'm strong on that because I feel strong on that. But go ahead where you were going with the eight megabytes or whatever. Well, actually, let's not talk about that because I think we've talked about that a lot. I think it's more interesting to talk a little bit about the more the bigger picture here. So, you know, we talked about, you called Satoshi having made a mistake. What should we have done differently? It's one thing to see a problem.

It's another to offer like a solution that works. I think he's a genius. I think the dream he's offered us is the most beautiful dream I bumped into in my life. But he did make a mistake. the one, I think you said it best, the one GPU, one vote has been compromised dramatically. And he's nowhere close to that being correct. Right. But if you say he's made a mistake, I mean, he definitely made a mistaken statement there.

Like the statement turned out to be very wrong. No question about that. And that is a super significant thing that happened there. No question about that. But if you say, you know, he made a mistake sort of implies that, well, he could have done something better, right? So he could have made some different design choice at that stage that, you know, maybe wouldn't have led to the situation we currently are in. I hear you. I hear what you're saying. I'm not always so sure that I can be that confident, right? It's one thing to say someone made a mistake

when they're designing a spacecraft to go to light speed. And it's another to come up with the solution to make sure you go to light speed. It's not clear that a decentralized consensus is anything still but a dream today. So we have it. It's working so far, but the turkey on Thanksgiving morning said everything's working so far. And then the farmer comes in after treating it so nicely all its life and hacks off its head. Everything's working so far as a terrible measure of a system.

And it was what was yelled at me when I first presented this idea in the green room of a conference. by someone who's working heavily on scaling Bitcoin, right? It's working so far. Don't mess with it. And I'm like, that's a strange measure of a system. And you can see people who are very invested in scaling, being very invested in making sure that Bitcoin is scaled through hardware or software because they're building these projects. Now, if my axioms correct, and as I say, an axiom can be torn asunder by just,

one tiny little fact. So all I need is one little fact to prove it's not. If my axioms correct, which is that decentralization and anonymity are incompatible, so you can't have, you can't prove one, you can't prove both. You can only establish one or the other. So if you are looking for decentralization, then you really do need to sacrifice the anonymity of minors. And I would say a lot of the miners are sacrificed currently, we know who they are. But that's not what I'm talking about is the ability to choose their identity in some way as well. Right. So say Xi Jinping was mining everything and we knew who he was. So identity doesn't help us there. It just terrifies us. We would have to come up with some way to choose them, to vote or elect them. Now, this is where every Bitcoin is probably going to

want to shoot me and I might have to watch my head is we really have to understand that it's now a social network that we're building and the only way to build it would be maybe to look at some systems that have kind of sucked which have been you know Congress of the United States or or something like that where we're actually vote for a percentage of minors now I I could see leaving 49% of the network has proved of work. But anything over that, I think, is you're asking for a disaster. You know. Wait, can you explain that? What do you mean with 49% of the network is proof of work?

Well, I don't look at the technologies, as I said, as much as I should. Like, is there a way to alternate between an identity-based miner and proof of work in such a way that we're convinced that it's working correctly? I'm not so sure. Those aren't easy problems at all. And even the whole idea of, so let me just go backwards for what I propose in my video is, say, for example, today, we just added one person that we knew had no real mining gear into the network. So we just chose Andreas Antonopoulos to mine one tenth of all trends, all, all blocks. So every 10th block he comes along and mines it. There's some real powerful beauty there, right? He can take all the free transactions and mine him. He's not doing proof of work.

He doesn't need an ASIC. He does it on his phone, right? Does all the transactions, a billion transactions, he mines them. And then the very next block, you'd hand back to proof of work. Of course, it would take them a little bit longer to go through and validate those transactions than they'd mine forward. The beauty is he's not invested in mining hardware. So we've suddenly decentralized the incentive of structure of mining just by adding one individual who we kind of know and trust. I would sleep so much better at night if you, Brian, and you Sebastian and five other random Bitcoin people from Reddit were involved in this process. Because I know you guys don't have a ton of mine.

Well, I don't know, but I would assume you don't have mining hardware, which is better than knowing that all the mining hardware is controlled by people who own it. But of course, the problem is that is that you don't really know. I mean, I could have a ton of mining hardware. I could have financial interest in mining company shares, for example. Correct. Absolutely 100% correct. With the U.S. Congress, with any group of representatives, you run into all kinds of corruption and bastards and assholes.

And it all sucks. But is it the best thing we've done? got. And I'm just saying if we want to maintain a decentralized consensus, we have to figure out some way to be decentralized. And that's humanly decentralized. If I had one representative from each district on earth mining randomly, I would sleep a billion times better than those guys all sitting on the panel in China, waiting for Xi Jinping to decide whether he wants to go to war with Bitcoin. And transact, by the way, there's two other huge advantages.

Say we do this, right? And no one's ever going to want to do this because I probably sound like I'm on crack right now. But say we do this. Scaling goes to near infinity right away because you don't need proof of work because it's broken. And you have a Bitcoin governance thing now where all these people, these delegated miners, can actually vote in a way that we would trust a little bit better than just have. having the miners vote or the core devs vote or the exchanges vote. I mean, really what you are talking about is a proof of stake system, right?

No, no, no, not at all. None of these people need to have stake. I don't think proof of stake, proof of stake like proof of work suffers from some issues that may or may not be solvable. I'm talking about proof of knows, proof of identity, proof of reputation. Right, right. But you have to, I mean, who is going to choose those people? Exactly.

Exactly. These are all the choices that why would I offer a solution, right? How are we going to vote for these people? Well, you can say, you can vote with your private key, right? Right. And then you have a proof of stakes sort of thing where, you know, all of a sudden, Roger Vair gets all the votes or Satoshi gets half the votes. there's certainly a lot of things wrong with that system of course it maybe even better would be if you had the identity system you could say just every human can vote right like just vote and who gets to that will be preferable to roger having whatever 500,000 votes and and i agree with the latter as opposed to the also because um uh proof of stake everything i've seen about it leads to some intrinsic problems as well um it it

Until we accept that there's a social construct problem here, you know, we're playing games. I mean, there's a bit of a high school mentality of Bitcoin, as you probably see. You know, it's like, yeah, Honey Badger, yeah, Honey Badger, right? And it's like, is anyone really measuring decentralization? When someone says decentralized consensus, has anyone ever provided data? There's been no data on that period, right? We have no data on that. So we're all playing games because we've taken over some world economy and it's worth, you know, $5 billion or wherever it's worth.

But I think there's something much more beautiful here. I'm very passionate about Bitcoin. And, you know, talking about this is obviously no fun for me either. I didn't like thinking of it. You know, I told my wife when I spoke at the conference, I go, this might be my last Bitcoin conference because I'll be shot. It didn't make me happy. But it's a reality that it needs to be considered and measured. So I'm not going to say the solution is vote for a thousand people,

though I think that's probably the way that might, that's the way in my mind right now that makes the most sense. I would say the solution needs to be thought about by some people who are a lot smarter than me. but we are now aware of the problem. But if the solution is 1,000 people, we've solved a lot of Bitcoin problems right there. We can scale to visa levels tomorrow. So there's some nice silver lining. There's no way to scale using any of the scaling solutions

unless maybe Lightning Network. But then I don't know. I look at Lightning Network a little bit like counterparty. you're building something above and beyond. I mean, I agree with you in some points, but I guess there's sort of two sides. I think on the one hand, this is sort of an actual idea. It's like sort of a half-baked idea that has in terms of a lot of details that you sort of, you know, gloss over. Oh, yeah.

You're absolutely right about that. It's not even a tenth baked. Right. Right. I think when you think about, you know, a truly decentralized, you know, resilient currency because or distributed system, you know, whatever it is used for, whether currency or smart contracts or whatnot, it's pretty clear to me right now, you know, Bitcoin, you know, and sort of works as advertised, more or less. I mean, at least it's not being, even though it's not particularly decentralized, it's not being abused because, you know, we would sort of see that. But it's not resilient. I think you totally pointed that out correctly, right? You could have the Chinese government go in there and take over. I think there's just a variety of points.

You could have those 85% that were there sitting on the same table and having dinner together in some private room afterwards, come up with all kinds of schemes. And of course, if, you know, let's say the U.S. government or some government said, like, okay, well, we have a problem with this Bitcoin thing. well, you know, they know those guys, right? That were like announced, they're 85%. And, I mean, US government doesn't have a very hard time taking people out, right?

So that would be, you know, there's no way they could protect themselves. So it's not resilient. It's clearly not resilient. And if there is a strong interest to sort of go after Bitcoin, you know, organizations could, governments could, right. So you obviously would need to decentralize it. And then I think you do need to deal with the economic problems, right? These economic incentives that are there for centralization, and I think those are just...

They will always be there. Why do we have antitrust laws? I mean, people who make bread in their houses all the time. People used to make beer in their houses all the time. Everything on earth has been centralized. The big article came out recently. Oh, YouTube videos, all the most watched ones are now corporations, right? we thought we had this big decentralized thing, but, you know, half the views now are big companies.

Centralization happens in everything. In Europe, you have antitrust laws. Why do we set up laws to prevent monopolies? Because they always happen for everything. So you have them in Korea, you have them in Japan, you have them in the United States. There's some of our most serious laws. And the rule number two is to prevent complete control. by one entity. In 1860 in the United States, Jay Gould is his name, tried to corner gold.

Gold. He tried to corner gold, right? And he got very close. If he wasn't like kind of wrecked by how the president reacted, he was going to corner gold. I'll repeat, gold. People were using gold back then. All right. We have laws to prevent that, right, for very, very important. reasons because economies of scale dictate no matter what you do someone doing a lot of it is going to do it better and so you're going to be asked out imagine in 2013 if we had a panel of all the miners like what coliseum are you going to put them in what 10 coliseums right and and you can see that picture very very differently so is it is it inevitable then i mean just look at the internet look at the you know internet hosting it's controlled by a w s

Amazon and a handful of other companies that everybody goes there. They have the infrastructure. That's how it works. Exactly. And everybody seems to be somewhat comfortable with that. I mean, look at DNS and all these other systems. Right, because the number one design criterion of AWS isn't decentralization. The number one design criteria is to provide internet hosting.

Correct. All right. Remember that Bitcoin is doing something no one's ever done, where the number one design constraint is decentralization. and the only parallels that we have of that are democratic governments. There's nothing else in history that you're going to find that requires decentralization of some form. The very reason that we establish ID in Europe is so that you can vote so we can decentralize the decision-making process on those transactions. Because don't get me wrong, what is Europe?

It's basically a big company that's distributing billions and billions of dollars. and that's being decided upon by a decentralized group of people. Now, someone might come up with some other model, but I just can't even see it. If I am correct, that noses matter, then we need to put noses into the system. And right now, Bitcoin has loved claiming that math is protecting us. So all I'm saying is people love to go, oh, it's like the Internet in the early days. Bullshit. It's like Linux.

Bullshit, right? Linux, you could break off your own chain. you can develop comfortably on it. You could run Linux beautifully on your company. If you do that with Bitcoin, it's not Bitcoin, right? It's another currency. And you can never reintegrate them later. You can't just, you can't spoon them together.

So that one last sentence. So that one design criterion decentralized makes it something that's never existed before. It's the implication of what you're saying now that this will only be ever, achievable when we have figured out identity. So we can say, you know, you, James, you have one vote, not more than one vote. And, you know, you can vote on, you know, for example, who are those representatives? Well, I hear you. Yes, if we want it. So what is the definition of maximally decentralized? That's very easy to define. It's 7.3 billion individual people voting. Right, that is maximum.

That's, you can't get more decentralized until we discover people on Mars or Jupiter, right? So every individual would have a vote. We don't need maximally decentralized. I would be very comfortable with knowing all times that we've got around a thousand differently incentivized people. Okay. And there, the identity then relies on identifying a thousand people in some form or fashion. I'd be very happy identifying people from Skype conversations. I'd be very happy identifying them from their public personas and public presence, even though I've never met them.

And indeed, that works pretty well in a number of places. So right now, we're moving towards minimally decentralized. And, yeah, AWS is a great comparison, right? Google and Microsoft are competing, but that's works for them. It doesn't work at all for currency. James, thanks so much for coming on. It's been interesting. I think we are, we are sort of an anniversary show, although I'm sure we could keep going

for a very long time with this discussion. And I'm sure, I'm sure in some way we are continuing this discussion. Hopefully you will do so in your videos. We will do so here. And perhaps we will do so again once in the same context here. Yeah, so thanks so much for taking the time. And thanks so much for the work you're doing. Yeah.

Great, great work you guys are doing. well really big fan hope to continue whatever whichever conversations yeah so of course for a listener we will have links to to his videos to his YouTube channel and to his appearances as a 1990s rapper as well in the show notes and so yeah thanks so much for listening so episode and bitcoin is part of the ltb network so of course you can find our show and you can also find lots of other great shows on Let's Talk Bitcoin.com. And we put out episodes every Monday so you can, of course, subscribe to it on your podcast app, or you can also watch the videos on YouTube.

That's on YouTube.com slash every sender BTC. And yeah, if you're loyal listener, we're still doing the t-shirt, the t-shirt contest, basically leave us to review, send us an email and, you know, let's a little a t-shirt. And that's not really a contest anymore. It's just like, send us a review and, you know. it's a misnomer it's not a contest those are nice t-shirts you guys have mediums yeah yeah yeah we'll get you on oh i'm i'm gonna

absolutely but you gotta leave us a review though on iTunes I will oh I have but I will okay then we'll leave them on a teacher okay well thanks so much and yeah we'll be back next week bye guys great meeting y'all I'm not

the M. M. M. M. I'm not. I'm not. Thank you.