TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #568: Building A Way Around Govt Digital ID with John Carvalho

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Marty sits down with John Carvalho to discuss his BIP on bitcoin units and an update on Pubky. Links: https://pubky.app/ https://pubky.org/ https://x.com/BitcoinErrorLog 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - John's BIP 10:16 - Millisats 14:30 - Unchained 15:30 - Optimizing against govt controlled btc 22:30 - OP_VAULT and fork consensus 36:53 - Zaprite & SOTE 38:26 - Pubky 45:21 - Government digital ID 54:10 - Nostr's vs X vs Bluesky 1:00:00 - Why Nostr needs an ID solution 1:03:13 - Atomic Economy 1:08:08 - Tether 1:12:15 - Bitfinex stolen coins 1:14:13 - MSTR 1:21:20 - Core dev incentives 1:25:39 - John's hot take history 1:29:29 - Bluesky culture 1:33:15 - Giving people what they don’t know they want 1:35:52 - Wrapup Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be bitcoin's dumping strategic bitcoin reserve on the docket pet's heads are falling off we're back with john cavallo it's been a while sir it's great to see

you yes sir how you been been well i'm tired whenever it's a bitcoin meet maina conference last week i'm still a little jet lagged i i didn't follow it too closely it's like once i have my last conference for the year i like unplug and that's it what was your last was your last one no plan b like i know yeah it was fun i forgot my memories flooding back yeah what's our what's our panel called that we always end up together unpopular opinions something like that yeah yeah and sometimes it's just mostly mostly popular opinions but yeah none of my opinions are popular you know you had a pretty unpopular one this week with your bips or should we start there or do you yeah i would say that's not really i didn't mean that

to be why i'm here but i guess that's what people will expect to hear and i haven't talked to it i haven't been on any other podcast to talk about it i'm pretty sure we talked about it last time or something very similar in the past yeah we definitely covered the millisats thing like millsets don't exist. It's all the same thing. About a year ago, after thinking about it, we like to rethink UX a lot

when we work on BitKit Wallet, which is our mobile app, Bitcoin only with lightning in there, with a self-custodial lightning there inside. And one of the things we realized is just that like Sats is actually kind of confusing

for people. And we were trying to make an app that would ideally be for anyone. And then when you get into the, the more I would talk about like my good morning tweets and these little like Bitcoin misconceptions and things, the more I realized that the way that we treat the 21 million and these quote unquote decimal places has actually served to miseducate like the vast majority of Bitcoiners on how Bitcoin even works.

Most people don't even know what a BIP is. Most people don't even know what my BIP is trying to do and are angry. So, yeah, I mean, if you want, I can overview some of these things or you can let me know any questions you have. Let's just overview it. Why'd you write the BIP? What did you say in the BIP for those who are unaware of it? And what is the ultimate goal?

Well, I guess maybe I'll even start with what is a BIP because I think a lot of people don't even know what it really is. It's just a specification, just basically text on a page that explain how to do something. It's not a rule. It's not a change to Bitcoin. It's not even a standard. In my opinion, the difference between a standard and a spec is simply popularity.

It's just how many people use it. A spec doesn't have to become standard. It just is a specification on how to accomplish those things. So when something gets put into the BIP repositories, You know, the area of GitHub that is currently managed by a few core developers who volunteer to manage it, it doesn't mean that, like, now it's official. It doesn't mean people have to do it. It doesn't mean anything, really. It just means now you can find that information in that place.

That's it. And so many BIPs are much more technical. They're more for code and things like this. But a lot of BIPs are superficial. for example using seeds that's a bit that's not you know a bitcoin rule it's not how the bitcoin protocol works actually has nothing to do with the bitcoin protocol it's just a way of storing data and so because it's a useful way of storing data for people that use bitcoin it's a bit and so now people can refer to a standard way to create seed words and you know choose which words to which

words to include and this kind of thing so there's like commonality across applications when they do implement it. But some BIPs are even less technical. They're just strictly about just explaining what to do and how to do it and how to think about certain aspects with Bitcoin user experience. MyBIP refers to an older, similar BIP from Jimmy Song, BIP-176, which is just simply promoting the concept of bits, which is the idea where some people think that we add, even though we currently have a decimal place at eight places we would add another one at two places um and that one would kind of emulate dollar precision right so you would have a whole thing at the third place and then two decimals kind of resembling how fiat works the problem with all of this is none of this

is how bitcoin works there are no decimals it is an integer based system and actually the only way it could even defend there being a limit on how many units there are, is to be an integer-based system. Because otherwise you would have infinite divisibility. You would have essentially the pizza problem that Francis Coppola imagined. But she didn't understand Bitcoin. She didn't understand that it's not actually divisible. There is no pizza problem. There's just roughly 2.1 quadrillion units. And at some point in the past, a kind of aesthetic decimal place was put into that position. Another piece of trivia is where there's eight quote unquote places now, there actually used to only be two and six more were added very early on in the Bitcoin days

because I believe it was how Finney didn't think there would be enough precision. And he was right, right? Like we're obviously having significant value below two decimal places of Bitcoin, right? Sorry, I'm jumping around a little bit, but there's a lot of nuance to all of this and how to kind of triangulate the idea, which comes down to a lot of people think that you could add more decimal places if you wanted. In other words, you could have a millisat. It's not actually possible. A lot of people think that adding more decimal places or removing it somehow affects the quantity of Bitcoin. It doesn't. Actually, adding decimal places would be what would affect the quantity of Bitcoin, because it's an integer system. So you

can only can actually multiply the units, you can't divide them. And so that's the biggest aspect of the motivation for the BIP, simply to correct how we portray Bitcoin, so people actually have a chance of understanding it properly. The rest of the stuff is just kind of bonuses. It's like, yeah, people are worried about unit bias. So let's mention that, you know, this would overcome some of that you know unit bias um and there are other some other little perks like that and nuances about it um in summary the reaction has been i would say the first day 50 50 where people some people were very interested and excited about it and some people were against it and giving reasonable feedback as to why the second day and since then it just got more and

more toxic people just not even reading the bip not understanding what a bip is thinking i'm trying to kill bitcoin or something thinking that if this passes they'll have to do it or that somehow this is like this should never pass they won't run this on their node just none of these things are accurate as to what's even happening it's just simply hey guys sometimes users get confused if if you if you say sats because they think they think they're dealing in bitcoin and when you say sats they don't know that's an abbreviation for satoshi and they don't even know what satoshi is sometimes and even worse you're treating it as if it's a different unit but it's actually the only unit um there are no other units in bitcoin everything else is a denomination

so btc is a denomination of bitcoin units some people call bitcoin units satoshis but they're not decimals you know what i mean they're not fractions of a bitcoin they're actually the only whole units in the system sorry for the rant but hopefully that covers most of it no it does in terms of the bit being a specification is it more geared towards end users or developers buildings they have better context when i would say since it's specs it's most like it's just as much for product builders as developers or in other words when you say developers it means more than protocol developers it means people building anything that relies on on Bitcoin. A lot of BIPs are just simply that. It's just how to implement Bitcoin in a way that

is successful or customary or recommended. Which, by the way, SeedWords Bitcoin Core does not recommend. So that's an example of a very popular BIP that is basically a standard at this point, but it's actually not recommended for use by the BIP reviewers because it's an incomplete solution. It doesn't address various problems, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, yeah, there's so much nuance to the BIPs. It's just best thinking of them as webpages with information on them. Yeah. Shout out to Amir Taki for creating the BIP process, the first ever BIP.

And it's, if I recall correctly, inspired by Python's proposal process as well. I don't recall. I do recall Amir Taki being the inspiration for it. I think Luke also carrying the torch for a while as well. um luke dasher but yeah i'm here or mir has only recently started commenting on bitcoin again i don't know if he's coming back or just drawing attention to his own projects but yeah he's he's around as it comes back to your bip oh no i like sats i'm pretty sure you guys popularized it they know what i mean like stacking sats yes there's nothing wrong with that i'm not saying

that like sats is evil saying satoshi's is evil i'm just saying as a software thing we tested it like we did it in the bitkit wallet we just have a bitcoin symbol and then just the full units literally no one is confused it's just a non-issue to confuse people because people know that there's such a huge gap between eight places you could never make a mistake like you would never think i was sending you a million bitcoin right but you might think i'm selling you a million you know base units um so there's just no confusion involved and as far as like sets like i think that stay humble stack stats is one of the few good bitcoin memes um it's you know i have no issue with these things and i can't kill it and it's not my goal to kill it it's just simply to

say if your goal is to make an application that is to be accessible to normal people or most people or any people that might be appropriate to the vip then here's how you could do it that's all yeah Yeah. That's fascinating, too, getting the user feedback or the observation that you've had with. Some of it was so backwards, man. Like people I have like literally one reply after another one say it's too early to do this. People will never approve it. It's too early. The next guy. It's too late. If you had if you had suggested this five years ago, then it would be OK. And in all of the arguments are like this, just like people are mostly arguing from their discomfort or their emotion or their tribe. And they're not even reading the BIP in many cases.

But that doesn't mean I expect everybody to approve it or support it. All I want is for it to be fairly treated as a specification and included into the repository so other people like me in the future can refer to it. That's it. Yeah. It is the integer base clarification is important, like in the unit base, like there are these units in it. i think yeah people obviously people think millisat people think lightning millisats are real they and it all stems from this it all stems from this idea that there's 21 million in eight decimal places and that satoshis are pieces of bitcoins which is just not actually

how any of it works and so people think that that millisats are like an innovation of lightning but they're not they're just a credit system that some lightning devs arbitrarily decided would be interesting to include like they didn't figure out how to split satoshis they just included a credit system because they were speculating that people would want to trade on sub satoshi levels which is which by the way i think will never be necessary it doesn't is anybody doing that right now arbitrarily like because lightning implementations support it actually removing it from your flow is not that easy and so for example you could if you base your fees on a percentage you could end up

with half satoshi amounts right or sub satoshi amounts because it's percentages and thus your your channel and your your your relationship with your counterparty is going to support that naturally now the risk here is obviously super duper low because milisats are basically worthless but it's still wrong you know it's still a bad idea that people think that there will be milisats even the idea that they will need them is kind of faulty and not based in reality yeah i agree with that yeah the last time you came maybe it wasn't the last time or one of the times you came on before and explained the millisats have made a lot of sense as a credit system and trying to force it and the idea of millisats people need to send an amount of money

that low is sort of uh not materializing it's mostly just a pet peeve of mine man like i just I see Bitcoiners making memes and they make the memes wrong and then they teach the people wrong. And then I have to try to explain to them and they think I'm crazy. And I'm like, I don't want to live in a world where people think I'm crazy because I'm accurate. And so here's how you can be accurate if you want to join me. That's all. This rep was brought to you by our great friends at Unchained. As Bitcoin's role in the global financial landscape evolves, understanding its potential impact on your wealth becomes increasingly crucial. Whether we see measured adoption or accelerated hyper-Bitcoinization, being prepared for various scenarios can make

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Bitcoin is going up. Make sure you're protecting it the right way. Make sure you have a good partner that is Unchained. Go to unchained.com slash TFTC. What are your thoughts on this strategic reserve that's being floated right now? Are you bullish on America now? Are you bullish on America now? I am bullish on Trump and the Doge and all that stuff going on. I am hopeful. I am glad that it happened this way.

I'm glad to see it turn around. I'm glad to see peak clown world has ended. I hope that it's not replaced with some kind of other ridiculousness. But nonetheless, it's much more promising than we've seen anywhere in the world landscape for at least five years. so it's it's it's really nice to see that as far as a strategic reserve i just i literally just don't care like i just feel like chasing politicians is so lame watching bitcoin bitcoiners like care about this stuff and and share their opinions and their predictions it's just so much larping to me i just feel like okay like if some politician can get some voters to

make themselves more likable and whatever like i'm not surprised but bitcoin is not for the white market uh all white market alignment is going to be regrettable at some point um and i have no interest in trying to help the current government succeed at being you know having more resources and being more involved in bitcoin it's just it's just not my interest it's just not why i'm here i i make the things we make at synonym and the things that reason i care about bitcoin is so we can do things without the government um so yeah i just i you guys have fun i don't even know if you're if you're part of a group i'm just saying whoever is interested leave me out of it have fun i don't care how the outcome is honestly well let's dive into that like the the white

market versus black market or market outside the government's purview how do you see this playing out um or what tools are necessary to enable people for the audience and for nuance i guess i'll define white market and black market a little bit it just means sanctioned and not sanctioned It doesn't mean good or bad or evil or clean. It just means stuff the government allows and stuff the government isn't involved with. That's it. And so Bitcoin as a black market money, as a market-issued money, in other words, the people issued it and manage it, not the government, not a central organization, that makes it a black market money. And its core utility is being a money that is not part of the system.

If you go and take that money and you put it in the system, you're not accomplishing anything. You're just participating in the old system. You're not helping Bitcoin. You're not helping Bitcoiners. You're just creating something that might have to unwind at some point because ultimately the government is antithetical to Bitcoin, and they're not aligned with Bitcoin. And any amount of having Bitcoin in white markets, you're just going to lose some or all of the qualities of Bitcoin to have it in that white market. I'm trying to think because Bitcoin is money for enemies right

many people perceive the government as an enemy me to an extent I don't think the government works in my best interest who knows what will happen with Trump but that's we'll pull on that thread later in this discussion because that's part of the reason where we

initially decided to talk um some worries i saw around digital identity but we're gonna make like if bitcoin is this pristine asset running on this peer-to-peer distributed protocol like when it makes sense that governments would adopt it too at some point i don't know what pristine asset means that sounds like a podcaster term no offense um hey you were a podcaster at one point too let's not forget yeah and i will be again most likely but it's not it hopefully you understand what i'm saying like it's it's a it's a term that emerges from the culture not from some sort of scientific analysis or anything like this it's

it's just a meme um and so uh sorry what was the last thing you said it wouldn't make sense like the game theory when if bitcoin is a good money a better money this is another meme nobody's using any game theory in bitcoin like game theory is like a mathematical process for you know showing proofs for probabilities of situations when you have all the information like it's it's useless term in most most conversations the incentives the incentives a better way to put it you know i'm not so aren't the incentives such that so you're right pristine money incentives game theory uh look anybody can use bitcoin right not everybody can use bitcoin another topic but anybody could use it uh me saying i have no

interest in the government or that white market bitcoin is untenable is not to be conflated with thus we must disallow the government from using bitcoin and try to stop them from using it and be mad when they use it. No, it's just saying that in the grand scheme of things, in how Bitcoin works, where it sits in the world, if you actually are trying to optimize for anything to do with its existence, you wouldn't care so much about trying to optimize its place with governments. You would care more about protecting it from that situation. And so if a government having, you know, governments getting into this, yeah, I guess it's fun if you want to like, you know, fantasize about a future where China is trying to get more mining power than the U.S.

and trying to get more Bitcoin than the U.S. and Russia's trying to do the same thing and everybody's trying to out-gain each other. That's just not how the world works, in my opinion. You're creating this fantasy where only people care about the thing that only you care about, you, the audience, whoever, Bitcoiners. There's so much nuance to the economy and there's so many outlets for liquidity and for investment and for trade.

It's just never going to be only a Bitcoin situation. And so I don't – like one side wants to worry about Bitcoin might undermine the dollar or Bitcoin – the government might undermine Bitcoin. Look, that's the thing I care about. I don't care about undermining the dollar or whether we should stop that or prevent that or any of these things. It's all bullshit. Like these people are way above our pay grade. They don't care anything about what we're talking about. We have no influence on it.

We have no way to predict it or understand it. So, let's just try to focus on, you know, having a Bitcoin economy or a Bitcoin world that we can opt out of all these things. And that's what we do in Synonym with our atomic economy concept. It's just this idea that we can make a parallel society that people could opt into if they don't find a place in the legacy society. Yeah. Now, you said something there. You don't care. We should care more about the government undermining Bitcoin than Bitcoin undermining the dollar, which have you been following James O'Byrne's commentary at all? Yeah, it's embarrassing, honestly.

Why? Because all he wants is his toys and he's just going to keep, you know, making fun of people and crying at people and making excuses and spinning narratives until somebody gives him the toy that he wants. His incentives are not for Bitcoiners. So for context here, James, RotoBip, OpVault, which would provide the network if merged in a very narrow use case for a very popular topic in the Bitcoin developer world these days. I take issue with that framing. Popular with who? Yeah, some Bitcoin developers. I'm not in any rush to get covenants in.

I do think James' recent commentary has been interesting. I guess the way to frame this part of the discussion would be, do you think Bitcoin needs anything like a covenant or a substantial upgrade in the future? And if so, would the government getting in potentially muddy the ability to do that at some point? would you ever outsource your decision to me you know what i mean if i said yeah i think we do need it then would you say well if john thinks we need it then it's true would you ever do that no but i

would do you think i would ever do it do you think i would ever do it for you no but i respect you think i would ever do it for james i'm just i'm trying to get to a point so in other words people who make decisions for themselves don't use other people to make decisions right and so the only thing you need to ask yourself in regards to a fork is whether you need it, right? You don't have to speculate on whether you think we could solve UTXO sharing or whether you think this will solve scaling or any of these things. You just have to ask yourself, do I think this will solve problems for me? I don't think Covenants is going to solve any problems for me. I don't think it's going to solve any problems, like any notable problems for my users of our products. I think

that if we had covenants tomorrow, five to 10 years from now, there would be some stable use cases that you would see appear in some wallets. That would be it. You would not see some dramatic ability for people to all use Bitcoin and transact on chain as much as everybody would love to. You will not see true scale. Basically, the idea that UTXO sharing even solves scaling is unproven right now. I feel like we have been running a test, an experiment, basically, to see if Lightning can prove that we can scale with UTXO sharing. And I think mostly all we've proved with Lightning so far is that we can do high-frequency transactions between peers. I don't think we've proven UTXO scaling because when fees went really high, people were scared to close channels, scared to buy

channels. When fees are saturated, it becomes dangerous to use layers. There's all kinds of weird trade-offs that make it express much more, you know, diminish than we thought it would. And then there's also future problems that could come with lightning with scaling as far as sourcing liquidity, you know, things like this. So I think that just the concept of pretending that anybody knows what's best for Bitcoin is the folly here. Nobody knows what's best. James doesn't know what's best. Covenants lovers don't know what's best. And even if they did, they would, as evidenced by my attempt to get people to just really move a decimal place and get them to even read the bit or understand any aspect of what I was trying to do. I think that's very clear evidence that you

have no hope of getting users to consent to covenants or a soft fork, right? So all you're really doing is you're saying, I really strongly, like James is saying, I really strongly believe that there should be a clearer political process for me to do what's best for Bitcoin. That's what he's asking for and i don't think he's deserves that reputation i think very few people deserve that reputation basically the same people that would be trusted to be maintainers probably the only people that should be taken seriously in this regard um and even them they can be just as risky so sorry for all the rambling but it's just i just feel like the idea the way people look at this is just so off you know yeah no i mean the whole emergence of ordinals inscriptions that whole

thing has forced me over the last couple years to pause and think about particularly on rabbit hole recap how we talk about any soft fork proposal because i learned we were talking about taproot pretty adamant about it and uh quickly became apparent that i had no idea what the ramifications were or all the ramifications were i wasn't against taproot when it happened but i stayed out of it because i just couldn't think of anything that it did for me you know what i mean like i like like back then people kept saying oh people won't know that you're that you're making lightning channels that's the cool thing so yeah that sounds cool i don't mind that cool but i didn't like run a taproot activation or whatever and i didn't put it in my profile and do

all these things to make it happen because it just felt like taproot just slipped in out of apathy like nobody particularly needed it nobody particularly hated it and it just kind of snuck in there um that's risky you know that that things like that can happen and i'm glad that it's not happening but it did make me kind of perk up and be like hmm i should pay attention and that was around the time that jeremy started aggressively promoting ctv he was actually trying to get it into the taproot activation i remember he was pissing off core devs back then and that was like 2022 or something um i don't know what the year was but you get the idea um yeah i i think that you can't change bitcoin without oppressing people without politically overbearing them and so

changing bitcoin needs to be something that comes from the market if we want to make changes to bitcoin they should be presented with data with experiments probably need to put on a shit coin first like the standards just need to be so much higher than anybody's willing to admit are there any changes that you would like right now no um if so the the ordnance thing didn't bother me honestly um i think that it was i think it was nice to see the people are gonna think i'm crazy but like it was nice to see an example where somebody was using bitcoin in a way that people didn't like and people were trying to stop them and they couldn't right like that's i think that's awesome like i love seeing people act fix the filter retards acting like they could do

anything about it people trying to like oh like the sky is falling and all this bullshit and it's like guys they paid the fee that's what we do to stop spam there's no conversation here if you want if you don't like what they're doing and you then figure out how they're doing it and figure out a way to change bitcoin to stop it but you can't just like the mempool isn't going to stop them the mempool isn't even enforced and they're just going to make private mempools if you try you're Every time you try to control the mempool, you're going to make the mempool worse, which has been proven true a few times in the past few years. Yeah.

Sorry. I'm ranting. Yeah. No, I completely agree. Well, I'm not going to go out and buy any ordinals or inscribe anything to the chain because I just think the aesthetics are bad. I don't see the value in it. My concern is that what's going to happen?

And if the blocks get too full for too long, we're always going to identify the type of transaction we like the least and be mad at them. Is that what's going to happen? In other words, so let's say bankers start filling all the blocks because they're making ETF movements or whatever and most people can't afford it. We're all going to start hating the banks now, right? That's what I think that's what happened with Ordinals. It was just they're taking my block space and I don't like them. well get used to it because you're never gonna be like in full agreeance of how people are using bitcoin and you can't stop them from using it as an abstraction because that's all it is there's

no value in there it's just an anchor yeah yeah the whole kvetching over that and it's like funny looking who knows maybe there'll be a re-emergence of inscription activity in l2 season two whatever runes ordinals whatever probably at the top you know seems like there's always like a little shitcoin wave at the top after the after bitcoin tops people start cycling and so yeah i wouldn't be surprised if they're already actually strategically literally intentionally preparing to have like a second wave at the top you know yeah it was a lot of screaming and and kvetching over something that turned out not to be as big of a problem another issue with all this is it becomes very difficult for a person to separate what would be an attacker from somebody

naive or egomaniacal like you a victim can't tell the difference right about whether it's malice or whether it's a mistake so like when i see like james behaving this way i just i just started thinking like why is he so aggressive like why does he i mean i know he put time into it but like why why is he burning bridges with people why is he being aggressive about it like there's not an urgency the fees aren't astronomical um like it's just a feature it's a fun thing that people want to be able to use i'm guessing there's some aspect of these people's careers tied to this with like jeremy and you know maybe their grant flows i don't know what it is but it's like it's totally inappropriate to the situation and so i have to wonder like are these people

actually attackers like that they hired by jp morgan or the cia or how would i ever know the difference you know yeah i can see that i will say james is a good friend i'm sure we're all sure you guys are cordial as well don't don't don't try to show your own reputation be careful who you're lying with the uh how would you yeah like i guess what the for op vault particularly the way james presents it is you can create conditions that would make something like an exchange unhackable so i'd guess you'd need the exchanges to really demand it and then get broader bitcoin users to accept that it may be something that is well then maybe that that's probably where his

motivation is his his whoever's paying him probably would like to differentiate as a provider and say, when you use our service, we can't be hacked and we have a different grade of service. Maybe that's what it is. It's a product motivation. The sound of that, I have no issue with. But the process here is totally unacceptable. Do you think the process, I mean,

I talk to any core developer these days. They think the process is not as straightforward as maybe it should be. Do we need something like a benevolent dictator? Well, it's just always literally governance. It's like you're just literally saying you want more strict, clear governance and politics in Bitcoin. And the more you formalize politics and governance in Bitcoin, the more censorable it becomes. So do you want that tradeoff?

I don't want that tradeoff. I'd rather have James crying for 20 years than have that tradeoff. Do you think ossification is a possibility from here on out? No. I think that's another meme. um ossification is just for the moment right like nobody can ever say there's never going to be another change to bitcoin right like there's not some way to predict that future or ensure that future um yeah i think that ossification is just probably when nobody's using bitcoin anymore

otherwise it's just a temporary state we're always in consensus right like we already have consensus right now we we found it everybody agrees and what when when covenants people make proposals they're out of consensus they're saying they want to change bitcoin they want they want a different bitcoin um and you have to users have to assess whether they even care whether they need that risk and this is all speculation it's not like there's data it's not like there's examples um it's just totally totally speculative yeah yeah i don't think i need confidence right now personally well if you did you would be having problems right like it's just it's imaginary yes it would be cool if bitcoin could do things that more engineers could impress people with

but that's not why we're here yeah it doesn't make you wonder that like i imagine it's coming from a perceived or a look into the future and no it's totally personally incentive driven this is not coming from benevolence there's no way they are not signaling benevolence in any shape or form i don't see that do you see that i mean yeah i'll get the benefit of the doubt and see but there's so much aggression to a personal purpose like he's overstating like burning bridges with his peers overstating things like this is not a nobody has a vendetta for benevolence yeah i feel for a lot of the core devs have been at it for a while but like you mentioned

you gotta get like imagine if i was yelling at people for not accepting my pip like and i was like core devs are holding back my bip they they don't want people to understand how bitcoin works you know what i mean nobody nobody's gonna buy bitcoin because of unit bias and this is a huge problem the price has crashed to under 100k and it's all you know what i mean like i could just be dramatic too but i'm not i'm i'm gonna complain when people don't read it and don't understand it but i'm not gonna like force people or act like they're bad because they don't agree with me this rip was also brought to you by good friends at zap right if you're a bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor you should be accepting bitcoin as payment if not you then

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how things been at bitkits and that's why we're here to talk um really about because i so we are 21 people now um it's the first time we've had like kind of like feeling like the full team like all all roles filled um we basically about a year ago So we decided to re-architect SlashTags. For those of your audience who may have heard of that, this was our peer-to-peer web project before PubKey. And PubKey is our current one, spelled P-U-B-K-Y. The difference is basically that we were using the HyperCore stack,

the hole-punch stuff, and it was just way overkill for what our actual requirements were. Once we did some iterating on what we were doing and realized that what our actual requirements were to make this atomic economy thing, the whole lazy replication of append-only logs in a purely peer-to-peer sense was not actually compatible with what we were trying to do. We were trying to figure out a way for people to safely gather as many people as possible. Basically, we want to make using servers safe. We don't want to make using servers obsolete. Um, and that was a big change. And then also looking at the learning from, uh, the trends and, you know,

plateaus of Noster also learning from same likewise with blue sky and seeing that gives us a lot of advantage to kind of observe and adjust. And so I think that what we did was basically find what we thought was the ideal design from among our own research and among watching what our peers were doing, um, and basically spent a year making pub key. And so PubKey Core is all open source right now, and it's the kind of protocol aspect stuff for doing our schemes. And then PubKey App is an app that kind of acts as an interface for all of these features, which is currently testing privately in the team, and we'll release that in Q1.

I guess maybe that's a little bit of a summary of PubKey. Also with BitKit, we were in beta for a while, came out of beta in June. um and release the app into the app stores uh that was a long haul trying to get ldk working in the app um and not owning the whole stack like having to depend on other teams and things like this is a much different situation than people realize and it's a lot of work but we finally got the app pretty stable um and that's also powered by a lsp called block tank and that helps people buy channels and things like this you know route their payments effectively And the reason why we connected recently is because you had made that tweet where you said that something along the lines of Nostr and Web5 fixing identity,

and I needed to, like, nitpick your language because technically, as I said in my reply, Nostr doesn't really try to solve identity so much as use keys to sign data, which it's still identity, but it's not an identity solution, right? In other words, you can use it as an identity, but the result is that you have to almost have it be a disposable identity because that key gets put into every application, and you have no way to, like, you have no censorship-resistant way, trustless way to change your key if you lose your key or this kind of thing. You just end up having to use the web you are already using it in order to use those keys. And so with PubKey, what we do is we invented this thing called a public key domain. So basically you can use your public key as a domain name, literally. And so we made a DNS server that supports this, and we take your key, and instead of signing all your data every time you do something,

all you sign is your DNS record. So you take your key, you put a bunch of different endpoints, you say, oh, here's where you can find my web server, here's where you can find my tweets, here's where you can find my payment endpoints, whatever you want, just like regular DNS. And you sign that, and then you take that data and you put it in what's called mainline DHT. Mainline DHT is basically the largest, most essentialized network on the Internet right now. It's depending on how you measure and which protocols are supported by the nodes,

you've got somewhere between 2 and 20 million nodes in the network. The variance is because of, again, supporting different specs of which kind of data they actually share. The nodes that we rely on, the minimum of them is roughly 2 million of them. And so we take this data, we put it in there, and what that achieves is now instead of having ICANN owning your domain, being able to censor your domain, take it away from you, whatever, you have your key as your domain, and you have these millions of nodes that are storing just a small amount of data.

And you can go look up your key in those nodes, and they'll tell you where to find the data that you're looking for. So what this does is when you are using, say, a server, say you're using PubKey app, and we decide to censor you, what people have to understand is the host decides the rules. So when you use hosting, then you will be censored because legally hosts are required to censor you to some degree. Not all. Not to a subjective degree, but for illegal data, like things like underage porn and things like this. So since we know that censorship is an inevitability, and we know that people will always have a utility to gathering in one place, creating an exchange, a marketplace, a marketplace of ideas, social media, whatever it may be, then we know the situation we have to fix is what happens when somebody is censored

and what is the best that we can do for them for them to be able to basically hot-swap their service providers for ones that won't censor them or hot-swap for hosting it themselves. And that's what PubKey and this whole system does is it says, okay, even if somebody censors you, what happens is you just take your key, you update your records in the DHT, you update your DNS, and you say, okay, don't go there for my data anymore, go here. And that in here can be a different provider or self-hosting. And so we're just trying to make it totally safe to basically port yourself to any server or host yourself without losing anything and without even disruption from, you know, your followers when you think about this. Because immediately the application isn't going to look in that place for the data anymore.

It's going to route through DNS to the new location. Hopefully that all makes sense. Yeah. No, I was actually rocking that. And I think it's important, too, to add context to why I sent that tweet out. So I was at Bitcoin Mena, and then I hung around for a day in Abu Dhabi. They had the Abu Dhabi Finance Week event, and it was all TradFi, and it was their Blockchain Day. And I walked into the actual conference for two talks.

One was Binance's new CEO, Jeremy Lair, announcing the partnership of Circle and Binance, which was eh. And then the second panel was the CEO of Chain Analysis, I think the head dev at Avalanche, and a couple other people. And on that second – Sounds painful. Yeah, it was. Well, that's why I sent the tweet out. On the second panel, the Chain Analysis guy was really leaning into government-issued digital IDs that can run on these blockchains. it like set a shiver of uh yeah i agree with your sentiment i'm remembering now your sentiment was

basically we got to figure this out before they do right i've always had that sentiment i totally agree because there's a dystopian kind of way to look at all this where you think okay well what if john really does make the absolute best way to do public keys as identities and then the government just uses that. The problem here is that what we would encounter is an inevitability that the government will use digital identity. And so the only hope we have at this point is to basically show people that you can use digital identity in a way that doesn't involve the government whatsoever, and it works just fine. And then when the government starts to be overbearing, we have that to compare it to. We can say, well, but I already do it like this. Why are you making

me do it but also give up all my privacy you know like in this kind of thing so that's my hope is that on is that we can somehow stave off this inevitability of both the government requiring digital identity and requiring digital identity to use the internet which is what will come after that and so what we have to do is be able to show people that there are ways to connect to the internet without that that there are ways to represent yourself digitally that do not require government id and present this kind of alternative society because it's going to be the only way that we only hope we have yeah i don't i don't want to get too hippy dippy about it but i literally had like a existential philosophical crisis where like identity i i am me i know me

i have a conscience i talk to myself i think i have a soul it's mine like nobody can take this from me and like the whole once we get into the realm it already exists today like social security numbers and stuff like that but like it really for some reason maybe i'm overreacting but like it just felt very dystopian the way these people were talking about it on stage well it's dystopian because so much of our life is digital now when so much of your life is digital and you rely so much on your digital connections the idea that the government could not control your access to that is extremely dystopian it's extremely scary um i i think that you know unless we have some sort of major turnaround with the culture of government, like maybe Trump starts a romantic

revolution that the world, you know, speaks of for 100 years, probably not. And so, and there's going to be probably even within our lifetime a day where the government tells you that you need to be using a digital ID to connect to the internet. And that's really, really scary. That's, you know, I hope that by then, not only have we figured out digital identity without them, that we've figured out, like, totally user-accessible mesh networking and things like this because we have to always be these steps ahead of them. Yeah, and I think it's, like, the way they talk about it, too, they're going to, like, they were saying they're going to issue you

a digital identity, and that's when it comes down, again, going back to the hippie side of things. It means they have the keys. Yeah, it's like, no, the government shouldn't issue your identity. it is your identity you should create the private public key pair that represents your identity i don't know how interesting it is but there is nuance here like you have to be careful not to conflate identity with like access or permissioning um for things that do have rights in other words if i'm going to let you be on my server i can require any any level of identity i want right

Or I just say, you can't use my server. That's a scary part of how government can be involved. Reputation is a separate one. When we talk about identity, we're more talking about reputation than we are about government access to things in an official way. It's not an ID card. It's not an access thing. It's more of just how you anchor your real-world reputation

to your behaviors online. And so some people will use a sock puppet account, for example, because they don't want to attach the reputation of their behavior to their real identity. And that will thus devalue their value because there's not actual skin in the game, right? They're going to behave differently. They're going to be valued differently by people.

But if you use your real identity, you can develop real reputation and real trust. And that's extremely valuable. So there's a lot of nuance here where building your reputation is valuable and it is worth something and it's normal and trusting people is normal. What we want to be focusing on is giving people the best tools possible to figure out who to trust, who to give permission to,

who to give access to, who to connect with, who to do business with, et cetera. We want all this self-regulating capability. We don't need the government getting in the way of the market, and that's all they're really going to be capable of doing. So this is the nuance here, giving people the tools to build a reputation and decide who they associate with in the digital world versus the government issuing it

and making those decisions for you in a top-down fashion. Yeah. Like a big aspect of what we're doing with PubKey app, not the protocol-level stuff, but the app-level stuff, is we're also handling how we do algorithms differently. And so instead of just trying to figure out, like, for example, not so many things where people will pick different algorithms and people can serve a different algorithm.

That's obvious stuff. Blue Sky has it. We could do stuff like this in our platform as well. But what's more interesting is what we're doing, we're establishing what we're calling a semantic social graph. So it's an actual graph database created by indexers that takes posts and profiles of basically keys and the things that those keys create, whether they be files, articles, blogs, podcasts, doesn't matter, all types of different files ultimately and allows people to attach semantic tags to them sort of like hashtags and this is partly a remnant from what

things we wanted to do with slash tags and why we call it slash tags back then we ended up not being able to secure that name because it's a generic term so we couldn't trademark it and so we had to change it that's another reason why we ended up with a different name with pub key but the idea there is like you are the algorithm you and the people that you actually follow or who's opinions you care about, have the ability to now curate data in any abstraction you want. And you can now, instead of searching, instead of getting a feed of like what we think you should see, you know, what my company thinks you should see, you get a feed of what you decide that you

want to see. And it's relative to basically your web of trust. Basically, you know, you have like your circle of friends that are closest to you, and then you have their friends and you have the friends' friends. So these are like distances away. And so you can now filter your streams through these web of trust distances across semantic abstractions as well. So this gives you like this whole graph database that is highly, highly relative to where now you can take a perspective on the data. So it's like saying, show me the graph from this perspective. Show me the graph from that perspective.

Weight things differently. It's like you control the algorithm and you decide which other people's algorithms to include on a granular level instead of a kind of whole feed level, if that makes sense. Yeah. It is, so I mentioned Nostr and Web5. It is a match, basically we're going to match data

and match people. It's a matching system in the abstract. So it's like people, you heard like Web5 wanted to make a DEX. Well, we're making a DEX too, but in the abstract. We're saying the atomic economy is just like the ability to connect anybody over any abstraction across any network so they can deal with each other however they want to

without requiring a middleman to give them permission. Yeah. So I also said that to include Nostra. Obviously, I'm on Nostra, following very closely, like it. Web 5, I had a conversation with Daniel from that project a few weeks ago. So they were top of mind. I guess I'm going to throw Urbit into this mix, too, to an extent, and now pub key um in your mind across all these projects like blue sky you can add now too

like what what is the path to like mass adoption or how do how do these things succeed in your in your mind do they can they play together um will they run in parallel is it good to have all of them competing? Are they competing? It's a lot of questions. Let me figure out a way to kind of circumnavigate this. So I think that we're all trying to solve problems for people. And, you know, sometimes some of us get distracted with thinking our interests are actual problems when they're not. Like, for example, like most people on Nostr aren't censored, right? And most of the people that are censored probably would get censored anywhere because they're behaving like douchebags or whatever. Then there's this like subset of people that

are actually censored and shouldn't be in this kind of thing. So like when you talk about censorship resistance for social media, you're really talking about maybe, you know, 100,000 people in the world that actually you're solving a problem for. And even then, you might not be because the people they're trying to reach might not be in your platform. And so you're kind of just theoretically solving problems for the, in the, in the interim. What, so like, if you think about like, what are the problems, like, why are people using these things today? I think people use Nasser because it's like public Bitcoin chat. I think people use Blue Sky because it's public leftist chat, public, you know, Democrat chat. It's, it seems to be where people are splitting

across cultural values much more than they're splitting across utilities. Truth social. This was kind of made in reaction, Rumble made in reaction to censorship, but they can censor just as much as Twitter can, right? Like it's just they censor differently. So what we've learned is there's a competition now for platforms that will censor only what's legally required, right? So that's kind of the nuance here is if you only censor what's legally required, now you're differentiating from Twitter or Facebook, these other things, and you have a utility. Now you see Blue Sky, they're specializing in extra censorship. They want to be a very curated, very safe place for the people that, you know, agree with what's safe there.

And so you can see, again, this is all very much related around, you know, cultures and censorship around things that are not that culture. So where do, to answer some of your questions, where do I think this will end up? I don't think all of these things will be talked about in 10 years. I think some of them will not be talked about anymore. I think some of them will still exist, and I think they will coexist. If you wanted to try to get mass adoption for any of these things, well, the solution is simple. You have to actually just basically do everything that Twitter is doing a little bit differently and a little bit better, but at their scale. You're never going to have a hope of getting people to move to Twitter unless you throw tens

of millions, maybe billions of dollars at trying to get gravity for your platform. And otherwise, now this is the most interesting part for all of us, what we're actually trying to do is figure out if by designing systems the way we're designing them, if we can provide users with new powers that they didn't have before, if they can do things they couldn't do on Twitter, even if Elon added the feature, if they can, you know what I mean? For example, the crowd making the algorithm like they could in PubKey app. That's not something you're going to find in Twitter. Matter of fact, Elon was just hating on hashtags yesterday and telling people to stop using them.

And so he has no intention of putting power into the user's hands for deciding what they see. He's trying to become perfect at showing them what he thinks they want to see. And so that's a different path. I know I'm rambling a bit, but the way I see it is as far as PubKey is the only one I can speak for directly. I am just trying to see if we can actually take this design and give people powers they didn't have before. For example, if you get kicked off of, you know, a platform, now you don't have to lose your followers or your feeds or anything as long as you're using PubKey compatible applications. If you want to, you know, experiment with being the algorithm instead of being a slave to one, now you can do that in PubKey app. and there are other ways that we're just going to try to show here are things you can't do in

other platforms that they would never let you do or give you the powers to do and hopefully some of those things are very interesting to people and we get some gravity ourselves and then maybe we compete with the majors that way someday but this is a very uphill battle right because mostly people just want convenience they want stuff for free they want stuff that's fast they want stuff that's convenient and they want network effect and so bootstrapping is a huge issue as well massive massive issue and in your mind we thought we all thought noxter won right like two years ago it was like wow jack's talking about it elon's banning it by mistake you know it was like and then all of a sudden there was like a million users or whatever it was and then blue sky came

and they got 20 million and we're like oh okay like there's this nuance here because now they both exist and now we want to exist and others are going to want to as well and so what's how are we going to differentiate we differentiate across cultures across features what yeah well i that was what i was going to get on the feature side because that's what having observed noster i've been on noster since july of 22 so over two years now and see the development there and how much better it is when it was back then when i first got on it is extremely impressive and i think it's pretty clear over in noster that like the social media use case is only the tip the iceberg if you talk to people like million from primal and others like what we're beginning

to see with things like nostril connect and these data vending machines that connect you with ai agents um social media a lot of this stuff is just web stuff though a lot of this stuff is not necessarily like using pki or public key identity and leveraging it it's just recreating the things that we already have in other places to some degree um i'm not i don't want to like talk but like this this is a tricky thing with people who aren't involved in peer-to-peer web stuff this it's it's like the coin world like i could impress you by lying to you by saying various things that we made that already exist in other places that aren't actually novel um but i just don't think that that's gonna help anyone you know um and so like when you talk about like

Let me put it this way. If Nostra wants to realize being more than a social media thing, they will not be able to ignore that they don't have an identity system. They will have to actually address that issue. And so far, they don't want to do anything that breaks the current protocol. And so even though you can probably get Nostra guys to admit that what we're doing with public key domains would be an improvement on Nostra. In other words, if they switch to that method for discovery,

they would solve a lot of their problems and be able to actually sincerely say the sentence you just said, where it's the tip of the iceberg and we can connect across many applications for many use cases. It's not as true when you have disposable private keys, I mean, disposable keys in general, and you have to always have a trusted place to kind of find somebody. It's a DNS's key to what you guys are doing.

Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think so. And the thing is, what we're doing with PubKey is like, yes, the PubKey core stuff is, as I explained, but the PubKey app stuff is separate. What I mean by that is, Monster could literally adopt only how we're doing the DNS stuff, and they could keep the rest of the stuff the same. It would be a breaking change, but they could do that. But because we don't have to do that, and somebody has to demonstrate the stack, when we're building our servers, which we call home servers, instead of relays, and when we're designing our stack, we throw away the parts of Nostr that we think aren't needed

now that we have this capability, whereas Nostr doesn't want to throw anything away. They're just looking for a way to keep things intact. So they have some kind of technical debt there, essentially, that's kind of got their hands tied, and they end up making these kind of justifying arguments for this instead of embracing the problem. So let's pull this into like the atomic economy concept, like how will PubKey digital identity plug into this and then blend into Bitcoin as well?

So the overview for atomic economy is simply, you know, the mission statement of Synonym is that we want to provide people an alternative to big tech, big banks and big states. And so that means, you know, Bitcoin and Lightning have a lot of the big bank stuff covered. But, you know, maybe further down the line, we would get more into credit related things like you've heard me talk about in the past with gift tokens or, you know, other forms of credit. We have some ideas about how to establish credit scheme, credit mechanisms or credit systems that do not use blockchains. We can talk about that later if you want, but we're going to build a proof of concept next year for that. But the idea being that, okay, so we have ideas about how to replace legacy finance, and I won't get into them because your whole audience knows most of them. Whether it be e-cash, Bitcoin, Lightning, any of the things that you're excited about and following, some combination of those, right? And then for big tech, that's the pub key stack, right?

So we're saying no longer do you need to trust these walled gardens. You have a credible exit with the way we're doing our PubKey keys. And we're going to be building, you know, applications and servers that people can exit from in a safe way and choose alternative providers. So now we're kind of challenging big tech. And then finally with big state, this is partially the PubKey stuff and then the semantic graph stuff, basically a little bit longer term. My goal is to get into ideas for basically having self-regulating systems. So now that you have these keys as anchors for both files, you know, posts and for keys for people, you can now start creating these substrates of mechanisms for people to be able to have, you know, if this person does the wrong thing, then this action automatically happens, like these deterministic outcomes. And you could have these, one term I've been using is spontaneous governance,

where people match across the things they agree on instead of the things they disagree on. And so where you have, you know, this tagging system, for example, in PubKey app, if you wanted to match and find all the people that, you know, are tagged by your friends as Bitcoiners, you could do that, and you could now create a network out of that system. And that when you do that, you can make things deterministically happen. basically digitizing and programming trust into digital systems so this way you have self-regulation you have reputational consequences that are all digital so it's just finding a way to do everything except violence in a digital system because that's the only physical thing that's

part of the economy is violence is always a part of the economy and you can't digitize it you could certainly have digital things that resulted in violent outcomes like drone assassinations and such, but this is getting to weirdo fantasy stuff. I'm just simply talking about Bitcoiners thought hyper-Bitcoinization would fix the world, but they never gave anybody a picture of what the world looks like once we delete those things. Like big banks, big tech, and big states do serve a purpose. There's some minimal reason they exist. And if we minimize them or delete them or mitigate them somehow. It's because we've replaced that elsewhere, right?

So I'm just trying to say, here is my vision for one way, at least one way that you have a total economic loop where you have like a Bitcoin wallet that supports multiple payment methods. You have applications that you can now buy things in that wallet peer-to-peer from people. And that's the longer term goal with PubKey app is that by the end of next year,

people will be able to digitally monetize anything they want to peer-to-peer without a third-party involvement. And so that's your only trusting servers just literally for resources to provide your data to others. So, yeah, that's the kind of economy idea is just to say, let's take these three concepts and make an alternative digital economy that people can opt into and that we can all develop together over time. Going back to Abu Dhabi Finance Week and the speed at which the governments

seem to be keen on bringing the digital identity i mean we've seen laws where in australia uk i don't think any laws particularly about digital identity but pretty strict censorship laws and obviously here in the u.s post-patriot act um digital surveillance has increased significantly and is pervasive at this point that's that's what i wonder like time what i'm trying to get here is like timeline of like how fast do these systems need to be built out and somewhat widely adopted before it's too late because the government seemed pretty well we can't control how fast we can build on we also can't even control how much resources people want to fund to be able to build them you know what i mean so it's like yeah we could talk about it and we could hype it and try

to get people interested in doing it but ultimately the market will drive how much you know investment goes into this space luckily you know our company is owned by tether and they're funding us to do this and you know we've been working on creating this atomic economy like this first version of the full loop that we might say um it'll be five years in a few months um and tether has been funding that and not only that but they approved a budget for me last week to hire eight more people so we'll be roughly 30 people by the end of next year all just doing research to build this totally speculative alternative economy um and that i think is you know a vote of confidence for me for my team for the for the idea um but it's only provided at the you know benefit or or the

success of tether um there's nobody else which is even web five ironic the website application stuff web five the tbd stuff they got most of their funding pulled um and then noster is mostly funded by like jack and open sats and smaller things like this like this could all disappear so quickly with just a change in in the tide you know like it's we're lucky to have you know these people investing in these things we're lucky that jack spawned off blue sky before he left even though i think that that project's going to be a disappointment because just the culture essentially yeah that's ironic that tether's funding you considering they're uh the middle of many theories that they're trying to usher in

the government-controlled cbdc future which digital yeah i don't think that's true i think that people are saying that just don't know paulo um granted paulo is not the only one making decisions uh there's other people that own tether but i i don't have special information for you i don't really talk too much to them about their own strategies and stuff but i'll say that like Paulo is actually a good person. He actually, like we talked about benevolence earlier. I do think his goal is benevolence. I do think that him funding, you know, approving funding for us, for Whole Punch, for RGB projects, for so many things is because they're throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.

But they're all things that they're just trying to like optimistically and idealistically help society. And I think that's amazing. yeah i do as well i've only had palo on the show once and i got the impression that he's extremely genuine and you look at what tether's doing with a lot of the proceeds mainly buying bitcoin and funding projects like yours and um i find the the whole and even more crazy stuff like they're they're investing in a they're like just on another planet now like they're investing in ai and in server farms and all kinds of things so like they're they're just on another level now yeah it is crazy to see how far they've come like to the point where like i remember hanging out

with phil potter in you know in live chat on bumble you know trading listen talking to traders on bitfinex and you know i remember uh phil potter being like when ethereum was giving him a headache he's like i should have never listed this fucking coin like that's like bitfinex went from like being hacked multiple times in its past and recovering to like just being hanging out with trader boys and chats to being like tether and the biggest company in i don't know the world man as far as like influence goes i think literally the most profitable company per employee that's ever oh definitely i i would not be surprised at all tether is not big it's not a lot of people although they're adding a lot lately so i don't know what their size is now this may um this may

ruffle some feathers with all the strategic bitcoin reserve people that are bullish on i'm bullish on i'll be frank with them like i think it's a good thing for america but uh i think bitfinex should get their bitcoin back like there's big talk about just like taking the the confiscated bitcoin and turning that into the strategic reserve like bitcoin was stolen from bitfinex wrongly it was discovered by the u.s government like is that whatever that i as far I haven't talked to Paul about that in a long time, but if I remember the last time it came up, it's an ongoing process. In other words, they're having to go through all kinds of hoops to try to get their Bitcoin. And I don't think there's anything you or I could say or do or influence in that regard.

But I do think that confiscating things from people that weren't taken from illegal crimes, in other words, how could you ever confiscate Bitfinex's Bitcoin? That doesn't make any sense. Right. So it's just I think it's just bureaucracy and maybe not even having a proper way to give them their Bitcoin back. Yeah. Yeah. And just like the government, be clear in government's defense, they haven't articulated that they're going to do is do anything one way or the other. But I've been a long champion of that for the last couple of years since I don't even think it was Rosalcon, but since they recovered the Bitcoin, I find it. I find it hard to believe that it was Razul Khan. I just think it's impressive that they actually did it, you know, that they actually recovered. They actually, for people that,

granted there are people who kind of panicked and sold and things like this on the day where the Bifnix happened and they were damaged permanently. But for anyone that actually held out and participated in their share program and their Leo program and all that stuff, like everybody made out just fine if they trusted them. So they did their best to recover

and I think that's commendable. Yeah. it is uh it's such a fascinating industry like you're saying from a mumble chat to where it is now what's going to happen this time man who's going to be our sacrifice this cycle the only well the only the only focal point is master you know that's the i don't know if anything else going on i don't follow a coin world i don't know if they have some kind of big ponzi brewing or what um it doesn't seem like we're gonna get any type of huge blowout with ordinals or any of that area so where's the sac maybe we'll get a sacrifice but you know if

there were going to be one i would think probably the master shareholders would be the people yeah they're the biggest target at the moment i think i mean there are it is insane how much bitcoin they're buying um well it could just be like you know uh the premium gets zapped in one day or something you know what i mean when we finally top maybe the maybe the market actually knows and they zap the premium in one day and people get wiped out and crying and losing all their savings or something like this you know but i don't follow closely enough to be predict i don't know closely enough the design of the loans and things to know when things could go bad like for example his average has got to be going up a lot his cost basis and i imagine if we hit

is cost basis is tension there um something has to give from what i like i've paid like i'm not um some master i'm like not in the uh irresponsibly long master um x group and i'm not like a master shareholder but like following the dynamics i think there is a lot of fun around it and it seems definitely is risky to an extent but i don't think it's as risky i think the way he's structuring the credit and particularly the duration gives him a lot of breathing room to it's just hard to predict like for example like trump just came out of nowhere saying oh i'm gonna do this whole tariff thing and that's how he's gonna handle some of his strategies um he's come he came out in favor of the longshoremen and being anti-automation for the ports.

Like, Trump could take a stance that to the public may seem logical, but to master shareholders or, you know, a sailor, it might not. And because they're a publicly held company and because, you know, the government is going to be able to filter any of that money any way they want to, any way they can justify. And so if for some reason Trump decides to take a stance of something like, We cannot have corporations trying to exploit and undermine the value of the dollar. And the master strategy is something that if more corporations did, could become tragic and harm many people.

So anybody that's doing this kind of scheme is going to automatically have a 50% tax on unrealized gains. And this is the way they roll out the first test on unrealized gains is just for somebody that they can target like this doing a weird thing. and that something like that could happen you know like it could just be all of a sudden now every oh you thought you you you played the system well yeah you played the system but we're going to take half you know like it's you never know just turn off the buy button my uh to be clear i think micro strategies i do think there's a possibility that they've tapped into a hack of credit markets and i think that's most likely the case but uh my outlandish well if they obviously have the question is whether that hack could be plugged that's all yeah i

think it could my more outlandish micro strategy theory is that they are building the strategic reserve um that is uh well i think i made a meme actually with the butterfly guy and he's holding up the master logo he says is this a strategic reserve because yeah that's that's the fear right is that maybe they won't do what i just described and tax it maybe they'll just literally take it and say no you can't do this michael this is you think you're just gonna like game the system no give me that bitcoin here's your money back go back to actually running a business you know like you never know what they're gonna do that that could be painted in all kinds of horrible oppressive government thing ways so it's unlikely but i can't imagine every permutation

of what the government or or the market could design to relieve the pressure of sailors hack yeah yeah maybe maybe they just let him go maybe it keeps going up forever who knows it's going up forever maybe you know you know what he wants what he needs i'm guessing is to achieve like escape velocity he needs it to be like where he bought so much bitcoin before the the big players did that like we just had a whole new price level and he just has nothing to worry about ever anymore about any of this you know what i mean where it's like oh now the floor is 250k his average is at 75k and all the corporations are buying and now it's like a million dollar bitcoin and he's just that guy who did that move that everybody talks about for 100 years

I hope that's what happens for him. I don't have any ill will to people trying to, you know, figure out the angles on the system, at least as long as they're not harming anybody. But, yeah, I mean, I have no issue with Michael Saylor making me bloody rich if that's what he can figure out doing. It's just I'm not going to, like, become part of the movement or start compromising my own, you know, interests and perspectives on things just to support that. Yeah. No, it's just fun to watch play out. And again, like I said earlier, it's crazy to see where we are today from you getting Roger Ver or you flipping him off.

Him avoiding being extradited now. Yeah, it's crazy. I think that's another thing to reflect. I remember watching your live streams back on Exotica, and that was not too long ago in the grand scheme of things, like eight years ago. um whatever 20s 2017 i mean yeah i'm pretty sure that roger bears was streamed live on exotica too look what's happened in seven years and just project that forward and that's why it's important

that we have people like you working on these sovereign tools that give people the ability to opt out of the state oppression and use bitcoin correctly understand it correctly i hope it's important i don't know i haven't proven it's important yet but uh i i feel like it's important to at least make new mistakes and build things that other people haven't done um and i and i very much think that our team has been focused on doing that on making sure that the designs that we've chosen in the past that we've chosen for our roadmap are things that other people aren't doing and we need to figure out if they're worth doing yeah what's your biggest worry for bitcoin right now or what about mining pool centralization what about fpps no i'm my only concern is core

devs honestly um i don't think that the i don't think bitcoin core is evil i don't want to fire bitcoin core i just think that i don't know i work with engineers i work with designers i know what people it means for people to like have babies like when a project is their baby and when their biases, they figure out ways to convey their biases as if they're not, and they just end up in this kind of trap where they think that they're doing something that is benevolent or for everybody else's sake, but underneath, it's really just for their own sake. And core devs are not any different than other humans in that regard. If anything, they're a little bit worse because they're engineers, and they have this, they're compelled

to demonstrate their prowess. They must demonstrate their ability. Everybody wants a new challenge, right? When you're good at things, and this is saying, if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room, right? You always want to be improving, learning,

demonstrating what you've learned, and proving to other people that you've achieved these things. And you can't do that if you don't ship code, if you're an engineer. That code has to go into the app. It has to go into the user's hands. They have to do the thing.

or everything you did is just a LARP. It's just worthless. And that's very frustrating for a core developer making things that they have no guarantee of getting into the user's hands, particularly speculative things like soft forks and such, and BIPs. It's totally unhealthy to go into a BIP situation

with an expectation of success. Your only expectation is, I think that I have a unique experience in the world where if I gather my ideas and I put them in one place, They could be valuable to others someday, so they don't have to waste the same time that I did learning these things, and they can skip ahead. That has to be your attitude. If that's not your attitude, then you're just going to live in disappointment. And unfortunately, many of the core devs, they have incentives, too.

They have grants. They have reputation among their peers. It's kind of an academic situation. So they have a lot of incentives. They have a lot of things they're juggling with and struggling with to want Bitcoin to be the way they want it to be and put their mark on it somehow. And it's not even things that have to be evil or spooky or, you know, government influence. Just simply human incentive to take pride in your work is really all it is. Demonstrate your work, demonstrate your ability.

yeah and so that that's my fear is that the whole like we started the conversation with this whole idea that like covenants is like a lot of people like it and this whole idea that like it's needed at all this whole idea that utxos actually scale bitcoin like there's so much of this that we've kind of elevated to a level of just hot air that just really should be much more you know down to earth and just talked about in a much more pragmatic way and a much less certain way yeah yeah and it is uh besides you're saying that's like the i'm just thinking about what i said about like it's big conversation right now there's a lot of people out there screaming so it like seems it really isn't though it's like it's like 10 people

It's like, it's like 10 people that even care. And then 10 more people that they're harassing about it. And then, you know, a few hundred people watching closely. And then a few thousand people that are even aware it's happening. That's it. It's, it's super, super tiny. It is not real. It's not a real movement. It's not a real anything. The only thing that makes it seem real is that the BIP for people that know, understand it, the code that for people that can audit it seems to make sense and seems to work that's the only legitimacy here is that they actually made a thing they to some degree can demonstrate it and it can be it's reviewable but all the other stuff is just wild claims yeah

yeah this has been fascinating i always love catching up with you we got to do it more often um anything else we should touch on before we wrap up here i don't know i'm sure there's other stuff going on but yeah i guess i'll just summarize and see if something comes out but you know we've been working hard on synonym stuff and we are a bitcoin only company we are i'm certainly not trying to kill bitcoin i think that the idea is absurd you know people are triggered by my bit how dare you say yeah uh bitcoin magazine called me uh what Was it short-sighted that my BIP was short-sighted? It's like, man, like, I don't know.

How long do you have to be here to not be short-sighted? It's like, how long do you have to wait to make a real BIP before people can take you seriously? It's just such nonsense. 2.1 quadrillion Bitcoin out there, freaks. Yep, 2.1 quadrillion units. Call them what you want. Call them Bitcoin.

Call them Satoshis. I don't actually care that much. i just think that people that make applications might do a little bit better for their users if they try this approach how dare you how dare you i'm gonna have to now that we have ai i'm like thinking oh i could probably go and compile all of my old good morning tweets and turn it into like a long form like book or something or some series of articles and actually have like a cohesive view on all of my takes on bitcoin that actually i can share with other people so they can understand where i'm coming from because while people think i do this for engagement i

don't um i'm not controversial for engagement as a matter of fact the engagement mostly leads to me muting and blocking more people um i'm not trying to get some sort of engagement i'm trying to actually be useful um and trying to share these share my experiences and observations with the world because I do think I have a very unique perspective on things from my experience here between the time that I've been here, the projects I've worked on, the battles I've been through, the people I've met, the products I've built. This is just all real experience and it's not just like a core dev. It's not just an engineer trying to speculate on code. It's like real world working with users, learning from them.

I don't think the BIP is crazy. I don't think that what we're doing with Synonym is crazy either as far as our atomic economy vision. It's just big. It's just very speculative. I'm just rambling now, sorry. No, I was going to co-sign it. As somebody, as an individual who learned a lot from you in the early years

and continues to learn, I appreciate your perspective and you putting it out there because I do think it's important. Well, I appreciate your patience in taking me seriously. The conversation does get lame out there. Bitcoin Twitter, I think Alex, who I'm actually recording with tomorrow morning, has said this a couple of times in the last few weeks, but Bitcoin Twitter is dead. It's not what it was back in 2014, the 2019 era. Blame Noster.

I don't think you can do, you can't really do Bitcoin Twitter without also doing Noster now, right? You have to kind of be in both places. And Nostr isn't the same for some Bitcoiners. Like, I don't feel comfortable on Nostr. Like, I tried to, you know, I only just started using it maybe a month or two ago, just as research, mostly, to compare it to PubKey app. Or to compare the other, like, Primo and all these different apps to see what the state of things was. But, like, when I'm there, like, none of the content is for me. None of the topics are for me.

It's all like a lot of Nostr circle jerking, like we're so great, Nostr is the future, kind of just like with Bitcoin. And so it's like Bitcoin Nostr, and I just don't find that to be a signal. Maybe for new people it's great, I don't know. But for me, it feels like I'm in the wrong place when I'm hanging out there. And it's even worse on Blue Sky. When I go on Blue Sky, I'm like, whoa, I am definitely in the wrong place. These are not my people. I've never been on Blue Sky.

Oh man, you have to try it. It's amazing. You're not going to believe it. It's like walking into Kamalaville and like walking into Wokeville. It's like you wouldn't believe it. It's like literally like the first things you'll see in the feed are going to be like ridiculously hateful things about Trump. And it's just – I don't know. It's just a whole alternate reality really.

Yeah, that's the sense I've been picking up on it having heard other people talk about it. I don't know if I – worth like actually being aware too of like seeing the culture in action like you'll see like there's a lot of like posts from the people that are enthusiasts about the tech as well at least maybe for me because i followed some or whatever i don't know if it's that way in general but you'll see even like the nature of their conversations is another reality like they're talking about ways to like censor properly and you know create safe spaces and these kinds of things and you know being they want to be really really hateful to people that disagree with them and it's just it's

it's unhealthy it feels very unhealthy to me very toxic situation but they probably think that i'm toxic for saying that they maybe even feel very safe there and very happy but it's not for me yeah i wonder if we're observing the world just fracturing into these digital subculture not that these digital subcultures didn't already exist obviously we've had things like 4chan and on the other end of the spectrum for many years, but I don't know. This is probably why I portray PubKey as trying to match people because, say, for example, what if Nostr is just the Nostr tag, right? And that's all there really is.

It's just a category of people and a topic. You could really, in a very significant way, you could almost say that's what Nostr is. It's the Bitcoin Nostr topic chat room, right? in a large way, at least functionally. And you can do similar with Blue Sky for leftists, things like this. Like, what if now in PubKey app, all I do is I have leftist, LGBTQ, woke, Trump. We have all these things as semantics, and we are tagging people with these semantics

and tagging their posts with these semantics. Now Noster is just looking at the Noster tag. You know what I mean? And now Blue Sky is just looking at the Blue Sky tag or the set of tags that represents the behaviors that you like in Blue Sky. And so that's one of the differences with PubGap is I'm trying to say, I don't know what's best for people. I don't know what the best algorithm is for you. I don't know who you should be friends with. But I do know how social graphs work.

I do know how, like, webs of trust work and how semantics work. And I do, I'm pretty sure that if we create the system for you, you can connect with anybody on any level you need to, and you don't need multiple platforms to do that. So that's maybe one way we're differentiating is saying, well, let people figure out how to connect with each other themselves, because that way we can figure out how they actually want to connect instead of telling them, like, oh, use Nostr, it's the future, it's, you know, it's uncensorable, which it's totally censorable. Every relay should be censoring, and if they're not careful, they can get in a lot of trouble if they don't. Anyway, rant over. Yeah. Well, is this from a UX perspective, I guess?

It made me think of Steve Jobs and his quote, or maybe it was Henry Ford. They would have had at the end the gist of the ideas that both were getting at. if you ask people what they're the band-aid event like yeah people don't know what they want like do you have to present them with to some degree yeah those are both two different quotes but they're related uh i think if i remember correctly yeah i i feel pretty strongly that way um sometimes on the team you know i'll get someone on the team saying you know i just i i think you're totally wrong about tags for example about semantic tag about social graphing i just think that's it's

it's a non-feature. I had somebody on the team tell me, and it's just like, I, you don't understand the future. You know what I mean? I have total faith in the future, and I can explain it, and I've explained to others, and they understand it, and you're just going to have to trust me. You know what I mean? Like, this is something where I don't think that users are going to fully understand what it is until we put it in their hands. If I ask the user, hey, would you prefer if Twitter work this way they'll say maybe no i don't know yes but that's not how you you have to actually take the time to create the whole user experience and surrounding user experience to give that idea an honest chance because people you can't just show people one feature you have to show them

i learned this from working at exotica like and then working on that platform i thought oh yeah of course you know uh of course chat you know girls want to be able to be private and have Bitcoin and not be censored. It's a huge problem for them. They use all these shady payment processors, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I learned was, yeah, that's true. But as soon as you start offering people a video platform, they have very high expectations about the feature set because they've been using video platforms that have been built for 20 years, adding features every month, adding features for 20 years. And now they come to your platform and you don't have this one feature they use every day. And if you don't add that feature in the next week or two,

they're gone and so you have to create a certain stature of a project to actually bootstrap you can't just go out there and this like that a lot of engineers and a lot of silicon valley types will say you just gotta ship ship ship ship iterate iterate ship ship ship but there's another strategy i believe in which is actually completing a whole thought and then shipping it because sometimes the whole thought is much more intricate and complicated and requires a support system to even understand it correctly yeah hell yeah i love it john this has been great where um we'll link to everything we'll link to you synonym synonym.to right um yeah bitcoin error log handle wherever you want to look for me on social medias and then pubkey.app if you

want to see a little sneak preview of the app pubkey.org if you want to look at the code and you know build something with it and we also have been doing we just had one today uh public monthly dev call so if anybody wants we demo what we've you know worked on in the past month and newest features and things like this and help people like learn what they can build with it as well so if you want to run your own public key domain and try that out any of this stuff it's all open source it's pub key without the correct correct p-u-b-k-y yeah go check it out john thank you for for doing this. Thank you. A response to a tweet about digital identity turned into a conversation about core development, soft forks, covenants, identity, UX. It was great. We've got Brett.

Happy to. Happy to say, happy to comment on anything I actually have any experience with. And otherwise, I will make a disclaimer that I don't. But yeah, I don't have experience with The strategic reserve stuff, I just haven't been following it closely, even the master stuff. So I just claim to your audience, if they don't like something I said about any of that, I am speaking ignorantly. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert. Thank you for the disclaimer. We'll do it again at some point in the future. Peace and love, freaks.

All right. Thank you, sir.