TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #600: Immutable History Is Now Possible with Carlos Toriello

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Marty sits down with Carlos "Carliño" Toriello to discuss Simple Proof's first implementation in the US. Carliño on Twitter: https://x.com/carlostoriello Simple Proof: https://simpleproof.com/ Simple Proof on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqs26054qdgyq9mteppv3w4zcgdyp0qq2edxg077hkhwekyy6rujg7g72xr9w 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - How Carliño's year has been 6:40 - Explaining with Screven County example 16:21 - Fold & Bitkey 18:03 - The data from Screven county 26:56 - Expanding the use case 29:57 - Unchained 30:58 - Why bitcoin is the best solution 37:54 - A blockchain for enemies 46:48 - Changing history 52:59 - Retiring civil servants 57:41 - Preserving privacy 1:03:05 - Responsibility of preserving data 1:06:04 - Calls to action Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.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. This is a big episode.

Episode 600 of TFTC. Thank you, Logan. Crazy to think, 600 episodes. We're here, and I'm very excited that we're sitting down with Carlinio for this, because it's getting back to the roots of what this show is. we're in an era of bitcoin where everybody's focused on number go up nation state adoption state level adoption corporate treasury adoption there's other things going on in bitcoin important things world changing potential beyond number go up and you and your team at symbol proof are

are working on that and are an exemplary use case of bitcoin and what it can do to bring back transparency and level the playing field of fairness in our society so thank you for joining me for for episode 600 it's an honor and uh hello to everyone so yeah pleasure to be here and a lot has changed since the last time you were here what was that like is that exactly a year ago or is that two years ago at this point btc plus plus said austin that was last year right april maybe yeah so almost almost a year ago a little less than a year feels like four yeah at that point we were talking about the work that you did with simple proof digital witness stack work and it seems like a lot has changed since then so before we

jump into the broader discussion why don't you give us an update on how the last 10 months has been for you appreciate well it's been a whirlwind i've never been more bullish than i am at the moment right and uh for us it's been uh you know my background for folks that don't know is i was raised in guatemala and i have been an election auditor here and was privileged and honored to lead a community volunteer effort called Digital Witness that performed a real-time election audit of the 2023 elections in Guatemala using Bitcoin, both on-chain and through the Lightning Network, and submitted our auditing, our civilian-run audit of the elections, mostly in real-time, and our final report March of last year.

And after finalizing that, joined the Simple Proof team. And so I am now a member of Simple Proof. So the work that I did as an auditor relied on Simple Proof. We consumed Simple Proof service for the election audit work. And so it's just, we eat our own dog food, right? I am convinced that without it, I may have gone to jail. And so it's very nice to have cryptographic proofs that can demonstrate and allow anyone to see that what you're talking about isn't made up. right it's it's on um right it's uh like anyone can verify trustlessly right and so what simple

proof.com is is a startup that has built on top of the open timestamps protocol which has been around since 2015 16 i think we went over this last year we went over this last it's been around it's been around yes um and uh we're the first folks that have decided to you know try to build a business on top of this so you know for to kind of help folks understand it's like um for example strike is to the lightning network what simple proof is to open timestamps right we want to make open timestamps sexy again and just more commonplace and just a part of everyday life Not only for Bitcoiners, but also for other users. And what OpenTimestamps does is an extremely and perhaps the most data efficient way of using the Bitcoin time chain as a database of timestamps.

And so building Merkle trees, you can use blocks on the blockchain as a source of time to date digital information, thereby knowing when something was created in the digital universe. This is extremely important for arguably anything and everything that we do online. Like we can envision and imagine a future where your Nostra notes, your Twitter tweets, your emails, absolutely everything has a timestamp to Bitcoin because there's no reason not to. And, you know, currently where we got our start is in elections because elections are particularly time sensitive, right? If it is possible to circumscribe, limit anything that is produced from an election to election night and the moment when it happens, you dramatically increase the public's and election auditors, kind of like what I was doing, their ability to verify that. And so after having been a user and proven that it is incredibly valuable, I joined the Simple Proof team. And last year, the call to action was the elections were happening in November. And fortunately, we were able to find people to work with in the United States.

And so this has been used in the United States election system as of November 2024. Massive. A small step. but an incredible step and to refresh everybody's uh sort of understanding of how you're using open timestamps at simple proof to basically timestamp this voting data into bitcoin let's refresh everybody's memory or anybody who's new here walk them through how exactly this works and it's a great question because um immediately a lot of people will say that voting on blockchain like uh electronic voting like that's uh not a good thing and

i am sympathetic to that argument uh but i also think you know there is electronic voting but there is paper-based voting right so it's there's a spectrum of ways in which humanity votes What we have done and what we have built is an ability where anything digital in voting or in any public record or your tweets, whatever, anything digital can be anchored to Bitcoin as a source of truth. Right. And within voting and specifically in the case, for example, of Screven County, Georgia, where we worked in November, we did not work with the votes. So this was not a blockchain voting. This was the voting system in Screven County, Georgia, produced a result. And that document eventually became a digital file that was published on the internet. And so our client was very concerned that as election results, not directly votes, election results, once they're made public, they're sensitive.

And so what we did was just protect and timestamp those ultimate documents, the final results with Bitcoin via transactions on the blockchain with Merkle trees that allow anyone to, using the cryptographic proofs, prove that those results happened. And if anyone tried to change them after the fact, it is very easy and simple to demonstrate and prove that alterations occurred. Is that helpful? Yes. So as people weren't using simple proof hashes to prove that they voted a certain way, people voted, those votes were tallied. were tallied then you'd have documents released showing the results at different points in time and you were taking those documents hashing it into bitcoin and then i mean it's similar what happened in guatemala to a sense like you guys actually helped prove that there was some meddling

there well yeah so the guatemala case was uh well let's uh especially not get into that uh quite yet But it was very similar in that once the elections produce a result, oftentimes there's a type of pyramid or just a system where these results bubble up into the final tally. So you can think of a voting system as the individual votes at the very bottom of the pyramid. Then the next level over is your polling machine or your polling location, wherever you give the vote, like there's a total there. Then within the polling place, right, a voting center, there's a bunch of locations that add up. Within a precinct, a voting precinct, there's also a bunch of polling. So it's all of these steps that ladder up into the final result, which can be a county, a state, a city, or eventually even a national level, right? So it's in our case in Screven, it was at the level of the Screven County Board of Elections when they produced their final results that they submitted to the Secretary of State.

The folks at the Screven County Registrar's Office had proof that they submitted that information to the Secretary of State. And therefore, if anyone hacked Secretary of State, Screven County was protected. And you could argue Scriven County, in that sense, became the first county in the entire United States where you could even have had nation-state level attacks breaking down the Secretary of State's office in Georgia. Scriven was protected, right? And so we have proven that it can occur at a scale that is as rural and as small. Scriven County is a beautiful place. The main city is Sylvania, Georgia. It's got 15,000 people living there.

And so this isn't something that is only affordable to the giant metropolis of the world that have gigantic IT departments, you know, multiple people. This is literally a three-person office where a single person was doing essentially all of this work. And so proving that it can – and it was an IT specialist. It was a wonderful woman and Bitcoiner called Stacey Scott. And she was able to integrate within our systems in the simplest way possible where within two weeks we were able to do this. Should we share screen and show the little preview of? My pleasure.

I think this would be good. It's only two minutes, right? Yeah. Oh, the actual, sure. You want me to show the? Yeah, I think this would be. Of course. I think most people watch this podcast these days.

so um taking you now to i mean so can you see my screen yep uh films.simpleproof.com we've made a few uh but our most recent one is this two-minute trailer called immutable history chapter one uh so without further ado the real focus has been on making sure that everything is fair and that everyone who is supposed to vote can vote and that was where they were talking about some of cybersecurity issues and especially of like ai and how it could be used against us on election night i would run the reports and bring that information into this office where we have the computer that's connected to the internet when that information touches the internet it should also get timestamped to the bitcoin blockchain so stacy came to our second official meetup from maybe her political

beliefs i think that's kind of what led her to it it is important that it's the bitcoin blockchain because it's not controlled by anyone even our rural small county office was easily able to afford this technology it was not expensive at all it's the first time an american institution decides to invest in protecting and preserve its history with the power of the bitcoin network verifying don't just trust you verify so it's taking that responsibility for yourself and not just counting on somebody else to do it for you i think as americans it's very important that we remember the people that created our nation that's what's going to help us remember to to keep those

freedoms we have to keep fighting and we have to keep remembering the importance and preserving no i think it was important to play the video too because it really humanizes and contextualizes just how granular something like simple proof can get and i don't think many americans despite the fact that we've grown up to try to understand that we live in this democratic society where you can vote and uh not until recent years particularly the last five years have we become acquainted with how the election process actually works and um the story out of georgia really really humanizes it this is how it actually works you have somebody like this running um an election process in their county and they literally run to their computer upload to the internet and there are many people

that are surmising that that's where things may get corrupted and so having the ability to time stamp this is very important for sure and you know also you know a lot of people have different feelings about democracy and voting but uh you know it's it's at the end of the day it's still people right like we don't have robots running all the show yet so it's uh the people are what make the system that you're in right and not all voting is created equal and it fundamentally comes down to who's there and and more often than not the folks that are uh decide to get involved in this because it's not a high-paying job it's it's it's it has political risks it's uh you know plenty of folks are not going to be happy with your work and so it's it's kind of thankless um

and we shouldn't just assume that all people that are involved in this are you know bad quite the opposite. It's how do we help folks that are there so that those that want to do a good job have it easy, and those that want to do a bad job have a harder time. What's up, freaks? Do you have a credit card? Are you getting cash back or airline points or points for some other service? Guess what? Those are shit coins. You want to be stacking Bitcoin. I have some groundbreaking news for you. The team at Fold has finally released the bitcoin rewards credit card they have a wait list i'm going to be distributing the cards later this year so you want to get on the wait list fold plus members are going to get unlimited two percent

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so there were many things that ended up on the block and the blocks but this is kind of the easiest way to understand really what we're talking about at the end of the day so what you see on the screen is the certification of returns produced by the county of Scriven state of Georgia where the board of elections and the registrar superintendents supervisors etc below signed that this all of the information that they produced is official and this is still analog right so this is also to demonstrate it for people to see that this wasn't natively digital right you can see these the the signatures here are from the board of directors and the registrar and it was their own pens writing this down plus they have their seal and they created this

document that they signed together in this location. But now the requirements are this needs to get uploaded to the internet, right? And so how does a document like this get uploaded to the internet? Well, they scan it. And as soon as they scan it, they use some computer to connect to the internet and send it. And so our argument is that's when it's vulnerable, right? As soon as it was created, they could use our services. And that's what happened. Stacey Scott, which you can see here, she literally just sent an email to us through her email server that's run by the state. And so we received that document and immediately we hash using SHA-256 and it was confirmed on Bitcoin block 870032, which has a timestamp of November 12th at 1258 PM. And so yes, of course,

obviously the certification didn't happen on election night it was a few days later so that's kind of the point of like as the elections happen certain things are produced and so what we can do like i showed you earlier is provide people the ability to see the document download it for themselves to their desktop so they can extract the shot 256 and verify that it is indeed the same one that you're seeing here so once you do that you verify that the document that we're showing you on the screen, the same one you can download on your computer. And then on top of that, you have the OTS files, which stands for open timestamps. And that is what I'm now showing on your screen, which is all these cryptographic proofs. So mathematics proves all, these are all

the proofs, but this is kind of gnarly and difficult to follow. So what we've built is what we call the OTS navigator. So what we're showing here is the Merkle tree that was built and specifically the path that ties that specific document to a Bitcoin transaction. So at the bottom of the tree, we reveal the SHA, which starts with 21A935, which again is the same that was showing you are 21A935. And so then we just walk you through how this SHA gets combined with other SHAs and their proofs.

And it's kind of woven together mathematically all the way up to the final root hash of this tree. And the difference between the root hash and the rest of the tree is that it includes a transaction ID, which you can just copy and pop into your own Bitcoin node. But we also include a link to mempool.space

that I have already pulled up. So here's that transaction. You can see the timestamp there, which is November 12th, 1258 PM, which is confirmed here on time zone GMT minus six. And so the magic is really that the Merkle root, the hash exists in the details of that transaction. So we pull up the details and then we can,

and let me try to bring this up a bit. Basically, the detail section of that transaction includes that root hash. And so this transaction, which has in the op return function E9B3, contains this Merkle root of this Merkle tree. And so if we follow all the mathematical proofs, we get back to this document. thereby using block number 870032 to demonstrate mathematically to anyone that cares to believe in mathematics that that document is at least as old as that moment in time. This is not perfect, but it does mean that someone like Stacey and her board of elections can sleep soundly at night Like knowing that no one can attack them after the Bitcoin blockchain has three to six blocks past 870032.

The only chance that someone, an attacker would have is if they can sneak something around the time of that block and spam the chain with other confusing things. And that's where it's not perfect, but you've effectively eliminated the ability of any attacker in the future to change the data and hoodwink you with a sleight of hand, as it were. And that attack vector, too, they would have to know that you're submitting that hash at that particular point in time and know to man in the middle you then or try to double spend or not even double spend, reorg or whatever it may be. It's still a risk, and especially 10, 20 years from now, more things can be built to make that attack vector harder. But what everyone should recognize is, let's use something that's kind of in people's minds right now, is the JFK files. Recently, we have more information about them. but it is you know what was the date last week right so earlier this week yeah right so march 2025 and this all happened in the 60s a long time ago at this point so it means that folks if someone

had a desire to change those files and literally when you when you like redact them you're changing them right and so like if you've ever seen anything that has you know the black ink on it that's changed right but do we have a record of all of those changes so that we would know like are the files that were made public this week were they produced last week or were they produced 10 years ago 20 years ago 30 years ago so the further back in time that you can actually go and know when something was produced is just extremely valuable to know whether or not what you're looking at is credible and you know there's no such thing as 99 certainty or 100 certainty but the close the more you can reduce the variables that can affect whether or not you can trust

something the higher of a chance that you're talking about what actual history yeah and so So that's where in the video you saw, it's immutable history, chapter one, because it literally means that the document that I shared, Scriven County's election results and certification results are the first documents in US history that anyone from this moment on will be able to refer back to with full knowledge that they have not changed since they were produced by the people responsible for that record and so there's no reason for this characteristic to this immutable history to not be the standard operating procedure for all election systems everywhere in the world but more importantly for all public records produced by all governments

everywhere and this is obviously a hot topic here in the united states now with doge and elon sort of signaling we we're going to use blockchain technology to make sure these records are kept safe and transparent and i know that you're very interested in that particular focus and worry about potential ways in which the government could incorrectly implement this type of setup I think we have learned that there's a lot of things that could be done better. And what I've noticed is that in the blockchain Doge conversations, it seems that they have been able to speak with representatives of, I believe they use the phrase public blockchains, to discuss the way in which they could be used to combat waste, fraud, and abuse, and

for example, just protect records. And it would seem that the fact that Bitcoin lacks a CEO that could not be called to be present at these conversations has meant that in the analysis that is being done, in the evaluation that is currently happening about how to use blockchain technology to combat waste front abuse, Bitcoin does not have a seat at that table. And so I'm concerned that the greatest strength of Bitcoin, the fact that there is no CEO, is in this regard our shortcoming. And I just am imploring folk

that may be able to speak with folks at Doge and other federal agencies that as they're doing, and to be honest, state and local, right? Like in county, right? If there's anyone working in government right now that is evaluating blockchain technology, if your analysis does not include Bitcoin, It is certainly incomplete. And it would be important to have a complete analysis that considers how Bitcoin can be used as a tool and whether it can solve the problems that you have.

And all that we ask is a fighting chance, right? To just say, here's how we would do it. These are the security advantages, and this is how much it costs. And we believe that it is actually quite likely that in all cases, using Bitcoin to timestamp all data by the government will be the most secure and the cheapest solution possible. and all that we want is for the folks that are making that decision to evaluate it and you can call stacy scott in screvent county georgia and the elections um uh office the the registrar and ask her 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 the difference between merely participating and truly optimizing your position. This is important, freaks.

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partner that is Unchained. Go to unchained.com slash TFTC. So let's deal man this. Why do you it's the most secure and what proof do you have that it'll be cheapest so in terms of security the bitcoin blockchain is the longest running blockchain public blockchain right i believe there are other blockchains that precede bitcoin but they weren't public and so it is the longest running and has the highest availability right i'm not sure exactly the decimal point but it's It's definitely 99.99, and I don't know how many decimal points we've accumulated at this point in terms of Bitcoin's network uptime. And so just from that regard, immediately you should know that comparing Bitcoin's network uptime to any other blockchain, it's a longer network presence, right? So it's just older, and it has higher uptime in all regards.

then in terms of security it is at this point I believe the only one that has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is beyond any one person or institution's control right

and then in terms of cost which is what usually folks have used to claim that Bitcoin is not the right tool for this job because of the magic of Merkle trees

and specifically the open timestamps protocol, all that is required is one transaction per block. And you could have a Merkle tree or even a Merkle mountain range, which we need not go into and I am not equipped to answer adequately. You could have trillions of files in one single Merkle tree

pointing back to a single transaction. So this is not, and important for folks that know about Bitcoin, this is not spamming the Bitcoin time chain. I've sat down with Peter Todd, the main developer of

the Open Timestamps protocol. Shout out to him and the Open Timestamps Foundation and all the developers working on the open source protocol of Open Timestamps. Of course, all the open source developers everywhere. And according to his calculations, you could scale this to all data that is produced by all of humanity and require less than 1% of each block space. So there the important evaluation

that everyone needs to do, and particularly Bitcoiners, is if we sacrifice less than 1% of a block to make all of human history immutable and future-proof it against any attackers, AI, aliens, whatever you're afraid of 10 years from now, sacrificing 1% of the block space is worth it. And from a cost perspective, you always have to pay the minor fee, but if you scale to trillions of file, and that's literally why we want to provide government, because if If government leads with this, then the scale that that allows would then open up the ability to offer this also to the private sector, to social media companies, to everyone eventually. Because right now, it's too expensive for a social media company to include it in all its posts and stuff like that.

But eventually you can bring the cost down where this is, people would not give it a second thought. Just like when you put a staple on a few documents that, you know, a bureaucrat is pushing around from one desk to another and you staple them together. When was the last time any human being ever considered the marginal cost of a single staple on a few files? That's what we're talking about here in terms of when this scales, it is going to be just seen as second nature and a part of digital information and not having it is akin to walking around naked in a public street. Like looking at a public record, looking at a digital file that doesn't have an accompanying Bitcoin timestamp is like looking at a human being that's walking naked in the public square. so the steel you know to summarize the steel man it's it's it's the most secure and as it scales it's going to certainly be uh most the cost effective and affordable and what are what's the competition out there what are the the blockchains the alternatives what's their pitch

their, I guess, trade-off balance? You'd have to ask them. My impression is that the transaction output of other blockchains would allow to have every single file with an accompanying transaction. And so their argument is, if you have one transaction on Bitcoin per document, then it's completely unfeasible

and there's literally not even enough block space. But that's where Open Timestamps protocol is so powerful, where it's literally just one transaction per block that you would need. And you could provide that safety guarantee to everything. And so to steel man the other options, if you for some reason have a contracting specification that requires that each document have its own transaction, then yeah, then Bitcoin can't compete in a contract that has that kind of framework. But we would posit that that's an incorrect framework. What you want is the mathematical proof. You don't care about how many transactions went through the chain, right? If you have the mathematical proofs and standing behind those mathematical proofs, the strongest network, then it's really up to the evaluators to decide if this is up to the task. And it seems to me that the fact that the White House, through an executive order, has clearly established the difference between Bitcoin and other digital assets, that there seems to be a case that Bitcoin stands alone and that in the blockchain for government conversation, it must be a part of it. Completely agree. this is uh this is so incorrect because i've been i'm usually early to these trends hand up

a little early but as we know timing is everything in this market whether it's dlcs i've been pumping deals matt makes fun of me all the time for being a dlc bull it's coming dlcs are going to be a thing they already are they're going to be scalable people are going to be using them but open timestamps is what i remember when it launched i think in 2015 2016 whenever it launched was like holy crap this is amazing and for the better part of 10 years we've seen one-off implementations of a tweet stamp was one that was pretty cool that i was using for a while until that bot got shut down um but it seems like the the marriage of open time stamps and this critical historical data whether it's in regards to elections or government files and information

that that the public should be aware of and that information should be transparent this seems like the perfect marriage and you combine that with this administration and the way they're posturing towards the industry in a very uh a posture of embracing the technology and implementing it and um then you triple couple that with all the noise that's around the admin in terms of the other blockchain projects that are trying to get favor and position themselves to to get implemented in a way and uh you get a pretty cool landscape where it seems like the timing is perfect and that's why i'm happy you're doing what you're doing and that you are the guest for episode 600 because i think it is critical at this particular juncture as you mentioned there

have been a lot of public blockchain um public blockchain representatives in the room but bitcoin being the oldest public blockchain longest running highest uptime most secure network is truly a public blockchain in the sense it doesn't have representatives outside of individual users um that that don't have corporations or foundations excuse me set up to to basically represent bitcoin as a whole it's truly distributed decentralized and emergent for sure and you know something comes to mind is bitcoin is money for enemies right uh well it's also a blockchain for enemies right and definitely from our perspective i've never been in government so um i am very interested to follow what's going on right now in this battle

where it seems that doge is is is leading of saying we have to scale back there's there's legacy systems that have been built up at some point you gotta like tear some stuff down and reboot um but of course that means that there's an adversary on the other side of the folks that built those legacy systems that are very nervous about what's going on. And you are not wrong in being nervous because this is adversarial, right? And I don't want to take a side. And the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is it doesn't take a side, right? It does not censor. It's not your friend. It's Bitcoin. And so it benefits both sides, right? The people that are coming into want to review and figure out what has been going on, they would benefit from everything that

they're looking at, having the full knowledge and mathematics to prove that what they're looking at is actually what they're looking at and hasn't changed. And to protect them from 10 years from now, if there is a, you know, every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. So I would say that if there are folks going into these agencies you know ripping things out and you know it would i'd recommend that they look at the open timestamps protocol because there's a very simple way to before you take possession of something digitally to timestamp it right to say and this is why it was useful to me when i was in election authorities the election authorities were going to give me a bunch of digital data.

And so I needed proof to say, I got this and I worked off of what you gave me and I can prove that what you gave me is this. It's the same situation with folks that are going into agencies right now. If you get data, being protected and having proof that you never manipulated it, you just work off of what your adversary gave you,

protects you from any future attack from an adversary that is all of a sudden maybe now in the White House claiming that you changed something. But it also protects them as well, because if you are right now a federal employee, a state employee, a local employee, and you are concerned that someone is coming to take over your systems please look into the open timestamps protocol because it would behoove you to have that protection of saying this is while you had system access this is what's there and so you also like removing the ability to change the past benefits everyone who wants to find out what the past was the only folk that don't benefit are those that want and have become accustomed to

changing the past yeah it's very powerful extremely profound when you think about it too and i think that's a perfect framing it's like uh cya cover your ass like and particularly here not particularly here in the united states happening globally you know you've seen it up close and personal yourself but i think considering the hyper polarized nature of the political landscape in the united states and just an easy low-hanging fruit example of this is the executive order ping pong that we've seen across administrations over the last 15 years it's like you get an office you negate all the executive orders that were signed before you issue your own and then rinse and repeat on and into the future and we're seeing this we're seeing

right now joe biden's signatures on the auto pen stuff like imagine a situation in which a president signed an executive order signed a bill into law and was able to digitally all right i'm hashing it i signed it at this time and here's here's the proof oh and signatures signatures are great right So, fundamentally, what simple proof does is solve for when, right? When a digital thing happened. Now, signatures, and there are many ways to do this, solve for who, right? And there's a, I mean, we're working on and want to work with more folks to include this, right? So, there's, we can create who and when simultaneously.

And then the actual file is the what, right? Then there's where, which you can also include information on where. And so just populating and creating a complete picture of the story, who, what, when, where, eventually helps you get to why. Why is always subjective, right? But if who, what, where, and when cannot change and can be referenced back to, then it's just a lot easier to not trust, but rather through trust-minimized processes, establish your confidence interval or level in the data that you're looking at. And so it just happens that this was never possible before. and so it's counterintuitive that bitcoin can bring about this peaceful revolution right money for enemies brings about peace uh it's the same with with digital files and truth the fact that

adversary political adversaries that are having to change seats in office do not trust that their adversaries will play nice uh is what increases the conflict right so if if no one could change the history then i think we could actually increase the likelihood of there being more collaboration between adversaries and it's good to have competition and adversaries but uh you know let's just not kill each other yeah you have the the mexican standoff meme of like bitstein put it perfectly many years ago like this is bitcoin's consensus like like similarly with this digital data same thing it's like if you change it we're gonna see you and that bullet's gonna come your way and it's gonna lead to the downfall of all of us and and

and arguably the the mere fact that it exists the same with the money printer right if if money printing exists and is possible humanity cannot resist that so if changing history is possible humanity will not resist that and so bitcoin has potentially removed the money printer's ability from government it can also potentially remove our ability to change the past why not do both i'm all in i said we do it how uh i mean you mentioned we have the what you mentioned ideas on adding the who you had the what and the when uh adding the who and the where how are you thinking about doing that i've heard a lot of things from uh you know magnetic forces to gps you know it's uh unclear at the moment but open to suggestions and it's more a matter of

SimpleProof and our APIs and our SDKs and the building blocks that we are creating are to make it as easy as possible for those that want to work on that to just plug in. It's also similar to going back to what I said earlier about the Lightning Network and Strike. It's the more people are connected in the Lightning Network, the stronger the network becomes and it's the same for us. Those that want to create truth. We want to make it easy because if someone is solving for where and has the best way to solve for where, then, you know, just connect to our when solution and let's accelerate the ability for truth to win, right?

Because the fact that someone can change history right now leads to people changing history, and it creates a dynamic where those that are willing to do those things, to alter the past, unfortunately benefit from getting away with it. Whereas those that want to do good and don't want to change records that shouldn't be changed, they, if, like I'm imagining there must be people and potentially listening to this episode right now that may have spent an entire career trying to be public servants, good public servants, maybe they're Bitcoiners, and, you know, spent 30 years and maybe thought they had 20 more years working within government that are now very concerned, even though they didn't do anything wrong, that there's nothing protecting what they did, really, at the end of the day.

It's all a database and everyone, like a database is under someone's control. So unfortunately, changing history benefits those that creates the wrong incentives so that folks that just want to do a good job are more nervous than those that don't. And if we remove our ability to change history, I believe we can put a dent into increasing the incentives of if you did your job right,

if every time you logged into your government-issued laptop or terminals or whatever you want to call those machines that obviously, as my understanding, are full of spyware that track every little keystroke you ever did, and there's got to be a log in there of absolutely everything you do, there's no reason why every keystroke isn't some kind of information, digital information. That keystroke can also be converted into hash, can be incorporated into a Merkle tree, and just absolutely everything that is being done while you are a public servant is tracked forever, right? But in an immutable way, so that if your worst enemy ends up holding office and having a position of power over you after you return power, you should be able to, as George Washington put it, retire under a fig tree, right? You should be able, if you did a good job, you should be able to chill, right? And if public servants that are doing a good job were, you know, retiring without the monkey on the back of their mind saying, you know, something could happen, that's just wrong, right? So I would hope that there's so much benefit to this that even those that would benefit from things not changing, actually, at the end of the day, when they do their calculation, their game theory, they'll realize we have to do this, especially if you're concerned about artificial general intelligence or any other kind of non-human intelligence suddenly competing and potentially becoming

the apex intelligence on this planet, because if they have access to that power of changing our history, then I'm going to bet that they're going to use it. And so I don't know where I stand, really. I think there are much smarter people that know whether or not artificial general intelligence is already here or is going to happen, or if UAPs are actually from some other dimension or whatever it's just having this on the board as a potential play means that someone will use it so it we all benefit from just removing this and bitcoin is the first time so over the last 16 years it's the first time that humanity has even had the option of doing this so let's do it you

think i mean going to the incentives too you're walking through the use case if you're a public servant you want to be able to retire under the fig tree you want these assurances of the digital data being hashed so you can prove like here's what i uploaded at this point in time um it's hashed in a block that was produced 100 000 blocks ago and there's no way to basically change that hash at this point conversely it's like as an american citizen as um an administrator of a government agency or whatever if somebody under you or you yourself does something bad and the government has adopted this technology and all this stuff is being uploaded you can easily go back and verify that they did something nefarious in the past so it's easier to surface the

corruption as well if it does occur and the likelihood is since this exists the incentives are such that you arguably should not be corrupt because you will easily get found not only will easily be found you also risk that it could happen if it doesn't happen tomorrow we have the rest of history and so maybe you get lucky and you got away with it but you know maybe your grandchild decides to oh i'm gonna go into granddaddy's records and your grandchild stumbles upon holy crap like granddaddy did some stuff that and so it's it's also your own the idea of legacy It's like, do you want, are you comfortable with at some point in the future, your descendants learning about what you did, right? And so we all, I think, have a conscience, right?

And a big part of that is if you know that that's going to be forever scrutinized, then I do think it pulls on your conscience more powerfully than how it already should. But, you know, people respond to incentives and there's a lot of calculations that can affect the person's decision making. And as this becomes standard, there's also like, sure, we can easily think of why this would be, you know, as citizens, we should demand it from government because it's a matter of like, as we realize that this is possible, right? Let's meme it into existence because we're discovering that this kind of behavior from public servants is possible. we could make this standard. Well, we could also make it standard for you, right? Like your own files. Like I've recently looked at stuff

that I wrote 10 years ago. I'm like, I don't, like, did I react that? Like, do I trust my own personal files? Like I try to be a good BitWinner and like have my own server and all that. But if someone managed to hack into my stuff and change things to change me And what I thought was happening, how do I even trust myself, right?

Like there's mental health issues where, you know, just Alzheimer's. I mean, there's so many things that if you eventually build the tools where it's just running on your machine and the proofs are there, and then you can like make proofs of proofs so that finally at the end of your life, at the end of your service as a public servant, you can take one final proof that you take with you. And it's a simple file, maybe a few kilobytes. And if anything ever changes, you can contrast that, right? And here's the other incredible moment when you realize, and you actually could do this respecting privacy, respecting top secret classified information. I don't want to know this. SimpleProof has no desire to handle sensitive, top-secret classified information. If we're required to, we'll end up doing all that and hopefully getting those accesses. But I'd actually

rather you not do that. And the beautiful thing about the OpenTimeStamps protocol is you can run the client and all you need to do is put in the hash. So we could just do the hashes and I have no idea what's on the other side. No one on our team, no one at Open Timestamps, no one knows. It's zero knowledge, essentially. And so you just take your proofs. And so as a citizen, as a human being, your own personal files, you could, at the end of every day, at the end of every session, just have the one final proof of everything you've ever done so that if the AI or the aliens ever come in and try to attack us, that you can quickly check the checksum to see is has have things changed without my authorization you're you're completely negating the whole um

the whole plot line to minority report right now well that's a future thing right so what what's well yeah yeah i mean it was in the future the precogs were like you're gonna kill somebody on this day but let's pretend like it was tom tom cruise you killed this person and it was really the guy running the pre-cog program. And what's the name of that in reality, right? Like Whitney Webb has talked about. Pre-crime. Yeah, so pre-crime.

Yes, we should want to make it much, much harder that if those systems ever do exist for someone in that position to be able to get away with murder, right? Just like it happened in Minority Report. It's not impossible, but let's just make it harder. There's no reason why we should continue making it easy for people that lie. Bitcoin is a trust machine.

Bitcoin is truth. Let's use it to its fullest potential instead of just leaving stuff on the table because I don't know why we're not demanding this, to be honest. Yeah. And I sort of rushed past, which is a very important point that many people may not pick up on intuitively, which is the ability to preserve privacy while utilizing this. And so the example you use me personally, I want to hash things into the blockchain to prove I did something at a certain point in time. Let's run through the scenario at some point in the future. God forbid the government comes after me and they try to say I did something digitally in the past and they're trying to trying to pin me for a crime. they don't know that i've been hashing my personal data my digital life into the bitcoin blockchain over time and i have the ability well actually you think i did this on this day here's proof that

i was doing this on that day not that so um that's very powerful yeah i mean i i don't know the full details of it but for example another thing that's you know in people's minds right now is ross ulbricht right then my understanding is if ross had had a little demon uh on his laptop just running all these proofs and as soon as the fbi sequestered his laptop if he had taken like all he needs to say is can i just take like one file with me it's just like your proof and he just takes that and so if n and i'm not saying that they did change i don't even know what happened really but like in his case if they did change anything they would be immutable and you know trust minimized proof that someone indeed uh changed something after a certain moment in time

and so was that someone like ross or was that someone else well if the laptop is in custody of an agency and no longer in the custody of the person that is in prison, then what are the odds that a person in prison can access his laptop, right? And so there are clear things that this

would benefit us, and maybe let me show one last thing in terms of on the screen for folks. If you go to opentimestamps.org, and you should, because don't trust Verify, this is all you know uh open source you literally this has been up here for ages uh the open timestamps

foundation covers the cost it's literally for you just drag and drop a file here it downloads an ots file to your your desktop um and then a day later you can come in and drive and drop drop it again but this is where you know that's this public uh version of this does require that you offer your file right but uh if you like so so this easy like on on the web service does require you you you lose that privacy so if you have sensitive files just you know go to the the the code repository that like figure out how to run this yourself and then just do it's just the hash. It's not the file. It's just the hash. So you can take ownership of this and figure out how to run it yourself so that you're not relying on any cool foundation run by open source

developers. You're literally just doing it on yourself. And I think recently, I don't know if you discussed this, but at the end of 2024, there was this kind of scare that the IRS was requiring certain information and attestations from folks, and a bunch of people flocked to open timestamps to use it, right? And you should not be uploading sensitive tax information to this random website, right? You should hash it and then just upload the hash, and you're not revealing anything to anyone. you do keep that on your files and as long as you take this is again going to the discipline

of running your own known if you protect your files and they're there unchanged then that timestamp will always allow you to prove it which is another awesome thing for example the National Archives

in the United States it's the final repository where all the digital data produced by all the government agencies end up And incredibly, since July 1st of 2024, all government agencies and anyone that is responsible for public records that end up at the National Archives can only submit digital data. No analog is allowed anymore. They have such a giant, like, people have seen the infamous, like, coal mine that turned into an underground, you know, warehouse, like, it's real, right? And they're full, basically, like, we filled up all the analog space that there was left and no one wants, like, we shouldn't keep building, you know, mines under a mountain to guard analog data. So we have to go into digital.

And so 100% of government records as of July 1st, 2024 are digital. And so it is important that NARA maintain that archiving culture and history and we should help them do a good job. And this is not about eliminating them, right? Bitcoin is not coming for NARA's job, right? Like, no, Bitcoin does not want to replace NARA. It's Bitcoin can be used by the National Archives to assure to everyone that the job of the archivist is being done well. And no one will ever be able to say that they didn't do it well because they'll have the most powerful computer network in the planet to demonstrate it. And so it highlights how important it is that we take care of our files, right?

Bitcoin can't handle all of our files, right? Our collective memory, our collective human culture is up to us. It's up to these institutions that represent us. It's up to you to run your own node, to have your own files, to keep your own. And, you know, if there are movies, songs or things that you're afraid might disappear, like definitely download them. Keep a log, right? Because like Bitcoin can serve as just an independent arbiter, notary of sorts to confirm that your log is true and hasn't changed since a particular moment in time. But the responsibility is ours, right?

It's the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, right? We can't shake this off. There is no magic unicorn that's coming to save us, right? Yeah. Makes me so bullish. How's the response from people that have seen what you guys did in Georgia in November been? Is word spreading? Yes, fortunately.

But we need the help of the community. So please, if you're excited about this, reach out. However, a beautiful anecdote is a few Bitcoiners from Tennessee reached out. And earlier this month, literally like two and a half weeks ago, we were in Tennessee contracted by bona fide Republicans who were participating in an election, a convention of the Republican Party where there was paper ballots and there was very contentious. There were two sides that were really wanting to win and they voted and the vote produced a certification of results and a few other things. And so we were contracted and they used our system, one of the sides, right? So both sides could have, but only one side had Bitcoiners. So this is just, it's still something that's very much in the Bitcoiner mind space, but we're going mainstream now, right?

So we can't imagine a situation where any school board election, your local high school, your local town hall, neighborhood, garden community, whatever, wherever you are, where there's adversarial context, and you don't trust that the other side is going to play nice with digital data, you can use this, and it already has, right? So what started in Screven County, Georgia has spread to Tennessee, and we are receiving inbound from an increasing number of folks. And our call to action this year is, as you saw in the video, there's also a nine-minute version. So go to films.simpleproof.com to watch the full thing. Our mission this year is to have as many of these as possible and to chronicle them, right? So if it's you in that agency, in your local town hall, it's a different use case, not necessarily elections, maybe it's just your records, right? Your property deeds, whatever is sensitive to you, that you're concerned that at some point someone with AI could manipulate or worse, just reach out, use us. And if it's a good enough story, let's write chapter two, let's write chapter three, let's show the world that there are no public records, there are no digital files that cannot become immutable. And immutable history is now possible.

Let's make it so. Another call to action for anybody listening to this. Let's tag Elon. Let's tag David Sachs. Make sure that they're aware of this. they're having the conversation right now they're obviously thinking about this and this is what i said on tv earlier this week there's a lot of people donate a lot of money to packs and particular campaigns and that has provided them a proximity to the ears of the

people making decisions and they may not be putting the best ideas in those ears and i having been around for a while uh and have known carlino for for quite a bit now i think what you have built is incredible and as an american citizen i would like to see this technology leverage because again anchored into the largest computer network on the world the most reliable and powerful blockchain that has ever existed the only one worth thinking about in my opinion uh and number two there's always a lot of corruption and a lot of waste and a lot of fraud and we can do this cheaply scalably quickly like you guys have built the product You can implement this right now.

Oh, and that's another piece of good news to share is we are working closely with the Open Time Samus Foundation. We believe that it's important that companies that build, you know, are using open source protocols, you know, contribute and support the open source community

that helped develop the product and the underlying tools. And our promise and commitment is we will continue to do everything we can for the protocol to be improved, to benefit everyone, right? and like obviously we benefit but anyone else can benefit and the good news is it has been improved upon uh uh recently and so if we got a call tomorrow to

timestamp absolutely every single file that essentially all of humanity is creating in the next 10 minutes uh which at this point is i think in the order of billions there is absolutely no limit. We can scale this to all files that are created everywhere within maybe two weeks. If push comes

to shove, maybe even faster, depending on the requirement, this can scale. There's no reason not to. That's great news. All that we want is a chance. I'm not saying we're

the best. This is all open source, so technically the best could potentially be the in-house IT department of the government or yourself as a Bitcoiner running this yourself, like do it, run your own node, run your own open timestamp server, learn how it works. We just make it easy, right? So that we just plug in here, like boom, boom, it just happens and it scales to trillions quickly. And so we just want to make sure that in the analysis of blockchain for government, if Bitcoin doesn't have a seat at the table, and hopefully many seats, like there's no reason other companies can't figure out how to do this, the more the merrier, right? Let's all start converging on Bitcoin because there's no

reason not to. And those companies that are doing other things, we can also work with you, right? Just plug into our APIs and start doing this tomorrow, right? Then let's just make sure that this unique opportunity where it is buzzing right now and there are folks talking about how to use this blockchain tool to help create a better world, that the most powerful, longest running public blockchain is a part of that conversation. Let's make it happen. Is this event you're going to be at next week live streamed? I do not know. So I will be at DC Blockchain Week in Washington, D.C. next Wednesday discussing blockchain and voting systems. I'm told that there are many other people that are going to be there. And so please reach out if you're in Washington,

D.C., going to the D.C. Blockchain Week. And yeah, just go to the digital chamber. I believe they have a YouTube channel. So if it is live streamed, it'll be there. I have not received confirmation though check it out Carlino thank you for for indulging me and coming on

for episode 600 it's an honor and you'll reach out we're on Twitter we're on Oster we're on LinkedIn so

we're everywhere and let's let's make it happen right let's do it tag Elon tag David Sachs

tag the Don too what's up Don get big don get this on his radar you know he likes signatures he likes he likes doing signatures digital signatures he likes truth uh and his truths uh check me out every truth that the donald trump publishes the president trump publishes has a timestamp why is that right well you know why why not have a bitcoin timestamp to every single truth like there's no reason not to and it's just a better timestamp than a little text

right why not big Don let's make it happen let's make your truths immutable sir immutable truth peace and love freaks okay