TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #767: The First Bitcoin Miner with Alex Waltz

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Marty sits down with Alex Waltz to discuss his forensic investigation into Bitcoin's first seventy-two hours, which uncovers that Satoshi Nakamoto likely ran both a clearnet and Tor node to bootstrap the network, reveals Hal Finney as the third node but second person to join, and exposes how the nascent blockchain ground to a halt eight separate times. Alex on X: https://x.com/raw_avocado Alex’s Website: https://alexwaltz.com/ Alex on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexWaltz21/ Alex’s Findings: https://1stbitcoinminer.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Lygos https://lygos.finance/ 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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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. The hottest man in Bitcoin this week, Alex Waltz.

Welcome to the show. Thank you, Marty. Thank you for having me. And when he says hot, just to be clear, he does mean physically hot, not in other ways. Yeah, it's a double entendre. You know, it's physically hot and main character vibes this week with the video that you launched after doing many months of research and production, getting back to the

roots of what started Bitcoin and trying to dissect who was the first person to launch, or excuse me, to get into the Bitcoin project after Satoshi. Many people flagged Hal Finney and his node after he tweeted running Bitcoin. But your piece argues that the real story is messier, more interesting. so i i think for the context of diving into uh your piece first bitcoin miner and the video associated with it which will link to the show notes what like what set you down this journey why was this a nagging problem in your mind to solve well i and for people who follow me on

twitter they know for the last years i i just kind of like really dove into this bitcoin archaeology stuff right and there were two instances one last year and one day before i did 30 days of 30 facts about Bitcoin, sorry, 30 days of Bitcoin facts, you know, and clearly the historical one kind of made a bit more sense. And I just happened to be more interested in them, you know? And I actually was, I realized that I want to find out more about this Hal Finney stuff, but I never really touched it because it always felt solved to me because, I mean, just how many times did you hear people mention the emails? And there's always this air of like, it's solved, we know exactly what happened. And it just feels like this has been around for such a long time.

clearly there's nothing to find there anymore right and i i decided to write a thread about the health feeding i'm i just could not believe there's nothing written about this right like zilch nothing i mean there's an article here and there but nothing like concrete right just people claiming certain things and i found it so strange and then i was like all right you know what let's try to dig into this and i started looking and looking and looking i was like oh my god i think i'm the first person who looks at this i just could not like the first part was i could not believe no one looked at this because it's so it's such a low-hanging fruit first of all right and um after this after after i realized i started digging a bit of things i was like oh my god

there's there's some interesting stuff here and um i've i firstly i figured out what what bitcoin client he was running when he made the the bitcoin tweet and then when i when i did i did and i found the debug.log file so when hal finney tried bitcoin for the first time he he it didn't work for him and there used to be this forum called search forge where people would post about bitcoin and the first time he wrote he tried bitcoin it didn't work and he posted on this forum with satoshi was literally the fourth or something day and then the bitcoin node at the time has a debug.log file which is a file that saves everything that happens right this is not new this was known other people wrote about this and i you could download it still today and when i

started looking at that file i've realized that actually no one actually really looked at what the files means and i went live by line line by line and um when i saw there's two other other people also sorry there you could also see satoshi's clear net ip and we'll probably get into this a bit more in depth and whatever but you can see the other two nodes and when i saw the two other nodes there which again this is undeniable posted by how this is there's nothing speculative about this part you can see it there and when i saw that i mean i couldn't believe it i was like oh my god i was like yes i started jumping around i was you know i was bombing to the ground and i was just so happy and i mean i'm kind of rambling right now but like there's just

so much to it and the that's kind of when i was like all right let's just see where this goes deeper and there was obviously more yeah i mean and so let's get into it i think timeline's important and maybe we can pull in why understanding this is important just for the the broader context of bitcoin and maybe some misconceptions about who launched it or whether or not it was an nsa project but i think we can get to that at the end but jumping in starting with block one um time stamping vmm pooled at space api you've caught that at uh january 9th 2009 and then i think that's where the big sort of mystery unravels is between that block and block 78 to block 309 which were produced between january 11th and january 13th so you have two days

of bitcoin operating essentially and that's another thing people have the times of london headline in the genesis block which was january 3rd but what many other people don't realize is that the the network was like up and running consistently on that date yeah i mean um i'm sorry i'm not sure if you wanted to address specifically something or i mean like what what what was the misconception people thought how was one and like what within the debug file i mean oh yeah well so the thing is like uh when i saw those things there so i opened the file and you could see so the way bitcoin worked back then when satoshi launched it So as we all know, a Bitcoin node is peer-to-peer, which means it needs to connect to other nodes.

But before you connect to other nodes, you need to find them somewhere, right? So the way Satoshi solved this, he was like, let's use an IRC channel to coordinate this thing. What does it mean? An IRC channel for your younger audience is more, it used to be like a Telegram group or a group chat that was just more bare bones. And you connect to the server directly and you can just chat there. And that's what Satoshi did. He created a group chat, literally, that was called hashtag Bitcoin. And it was hardcoded in the nodes there.

So when your node starts up and connects to the internet, you would connect to this RSC server. And then you would go in the lobby there and you would start being, you would start creating a username, which will probably go in the name that is created, which is very important also. But it's mostly random.

It looks like it's random and it looks like a Bitcoin address. It uses the same stuff that you generate Bitcoin addresses with, which is also very important, which is why we call Bitcoin addresses, addresses. So you can see, you can tell it's a username. and then there were two other usernames there and these usernames the way it constructs them it's

like uh i did say i claim it's a random a second ago but it's not completely random because the way it is actually structured is that they take the your bitcoin sorry you join the um the channel and now you are uh you have to construct your own uh username and register with this thing and your node will do this by default it will create it will take your ip address which is 1.9 point you will take your port which is 1.9.6 from whatever two dots colon 81084 um and well it takes these things actually that's kind of it actually it takes those things and it converts converts them in base 58 what is base 58 i mean if you look at a bitcoin address even though it was random you could tell it's a bitcoin address there's something specific about it looks a

certain way so um what it does it just eliminates local like characters uh mostly pretty much right and um well there's some other stuff also which maybe we'll go into so but you have this function which you take like a a public key which is a bit bigger and and and messier and whatever and then you well you do some other stuff you do the checksum and whatever and then you apply this pretty five function you make it a bit more prettier right so satoshi takes these ip addresses and so you take these ip addresses and whatever that's how you get the username so now the reason why this is important is because well the since we know the usernames are constructed in a certain way deterministically we can actually figure out what the username means because they're not quite

random and how their information i forgot to mention one thing so they do take the ip address and whatever but it's one more thing that it does if your node is connected the via tor for some reason, it will actually have an X in front of it, and then the other letters are going to be random. Why? Well, because there's no IP address. You could have an IP, but practically speaking, there's no IP address belonging to you. So it's like, well, just add some jumbled numbers. So now we can see there how Hal generated his username, which he did this thing that we mentioned he takes his ip and whatever and we know how's ip address because they were public um and uh and then you can see two other nodes one has this x in front of it which is you know

whatever blah blah blah and then there's another username that has an at symbol the email sign in front of it the at symbol on irc means that you're the operator of the channel so already just by looking here we have you see those usernames and they they leak so much information that you can again provable information you know not not speculative and i also like in the article i i had to read the old sources of bitcoin i mean that was so fucking fun because you have to read the old sources of bitcoin core and understand how this thing is done it's kind of crazy and by the way there's this uh github repository that jeremy rubin shout out to jeremy rubin boy genius he actually looked at this like about i don't know a few years ago and he added comments

and stuff like that you know so um that was really helpful for me anyway so anyway so now you you have this debug file we have these free usernames they're only free one of them we know is hell um one of them it's a tor node which we don't know zilch about and then the other one there's this nor that's his operator who would be the operator of the channel if not satoshi i mean right let's be serious but also so we know how's ip so that means we know how he generated a username we can do the math and we can see generate a username so we can be certain we have this tor node we don't know nothing about anymore and now we have this operator node um but we don't know his ip well if you actually scroll up a bit more in the debug file you also see the ip so now you

can take the this ip of the operator node we convert it in this thing and they all match so even from this alone it's like again it was something that no one ever talked about and this is again there's no speculation because we trust that help i'd updated a real file there we can still download it today and we can inspect it for ourselves so this was again this was the the first thing in the first part and this was kind of like wow this is this is quite interesting um but also And I'll shut up and you can feel free to put us in the direction you want. I also forgot to mention that as I'm doing this stuff, I also gathered every single digital artifact that exists from that time, like emails, anything you can imagine. I convert them all to the same time zone, UTC, because just to make it the same, you know.

And I also like keep track of the time zones in each email and whatever what has. and then and also email sorry by emails i mean private emails hal had with satoshi which he made public later on but also public emails on the cryptography mailing list and also the p2p foundation and other even the cypherpunk mailing list but the last year i didn't really mention because there wasn't much activity so now that i know there's only two nodes and i know there's almost no activity there you know um i i was confident i'm onto something here and i also was and also like it confirmed what i find here that's also very important you find something and find something else that confirms you know yeah let's get on the block 49 why is block 49

so important it is fun just relearning how bitcoin worked in the early days it's nuts though it's nuts because you kind of like it's i just even said there that there it's like this is the way you can see how you can feel how that was you know and you can trace it with code and stuff like that black for then yes i forgot to mention this so that um the the before we had the stuff in the debug file that i just said with the nodes and whatever uh the so when there's a bug file you see the history of what the node did there but the first thing a node does there um no sorry it does connect to the irc it it finds one of these peers it tries to connect with and then it says to one of those nodes hey how far are you in the blockchain and give me the

block headers the block header is not the blocks yet what does this mean um it's kind of like just the import it's just the short version of the block just like the main fields and stuff like that you know so so the house node was like hey how far are you give me all the headers and the reason why this is important are not blocks and headers because we know they were easy to transmit right so it wasn't like an internet interruption or something like this right so now we see in house debug file he gets a list of all the blocks from zero or maybe to one i don't think they got zero right because he was hardcore yeah from one and it goes all the way down to the block fortnite and we have the first character of the hash right so when you see this thing you're like oh my god

this is as far as this i think the correct the absolute correct thing to claim would be this is as far as that's node went on the blockchain but practically speaking that's as far as the blockchain was going right so now i you you can also see like this is when hell entered so now the yes of course it makes sense now so now you're kind of thinking like oh block 49 well why isn't it block zero whatever and um that's when the emails came in handy because uh another very important thing and i know i feel like i'm jumping all over the place but i promise you it's in the correct chronology in the in the article um as things happen but um the thing is that In 2014, hell before he died, he shared his private correspondence with Satoshi.

And he did this once with the Wall Street reporter. And then after he died, some other reporter from CoinDesk got some few other emails. And his wife authenticated and said those emails are sure. So now we also have some private correspondents from Satoshi to Hal, which one of them were submitted by Hal. We're going to operate on the assumption he was not lying. And the other is by the wife, which, again, I think we should operate. Well, I'm going to operate at least. You do whatever you want.

I'm going to operate on the assumption that they are truthful. And now we have these private emails. And now if we look at his emails, we can actually see that initially Satoshi posts on the cryptography mailing list and people get, you know, whatever. Hallie's the only one that likes it. A bit more time passes. But then when Satoshi actually launches the Bitcoin, again, the white paper was launched in 2008, early 2008. And then the Bitcoin was like 8th January. I don't know.

by i think if the genesis block was the third and then depending on time it was like the eighth or ninth right depending on time zone was like the first block block one absolutely absolutely exactly yeah but but it's around the eight so there was a bit of time and and then when satoshi actually announced the the the client on the beat on the cryptography mailing list since literally hal was the only one who kind of liked this thing he obviously sent it to him and he said uh by the way i launched this thing here's here's if you want it then he goes like i'll take a look at it over the weekend which already this was by the way i'm sure a lot of people know about this take a look over at the weekend because i've seen the shirt around but when you again now we have another

source that confirms like oh so bitcoin started mining in block one when he makes the announcement and whatever and all these things and then he sends this email so he's already getting late so by the time he gets he he looks at it i think this was like a thursday in ps in in california pst time and by the time he gets to like look at it over the weekend it gets to block 49 and when he does do this it crashes because as we'll see they were like it was just it just didn't work and whatever so now we we have a confirmation because we see block 49 we can look at the time where he sent the email and whatever and now we have another thing so this was the first part which i was like oh my god this is insane this is nuts i cannot believe it i just could i couldn't

believe it i there were a few days when i just thought i'm there's something i'm missing because there's no way it's too easy that's why it was you know it was just too easy to figure it out yeah and how's node crashed when he originally tried to to connect to the network because of the tour node right there was some intricacies around how to interact with the tour node that it wasn't that it was just that the so satoshi and he says this in the email he did all the tests he can but you know how it is when you do testing then you have launch day he it was just some weird error and um no nodes work not just the tor ones none of them work um so so yeah okay so what what was the do not mind unless connected to a peer

rule didn't that shape part of your conclusion yes yes yes it did um so this this comes to the interaction between the satoshi node that you're assuming is the the ip because he's the operator of the irc channel and the tour node um which was the first two nodes that were in the irc channel before hal joined and so there's uh he couldn't have mined unless he had another peer on the network right yes so what marty is trying to say here um is that uh i mean this is also kind of this is fairly a known thing um and i mean i even wrote about this in the past at some point but but what marty's trying to say here is like uh so when satoshi made a bitcoin client had this condition where he said uh if you are on the internet don't start mining straight away you

need to have at least one peer connected to you either he connects to you because um you have to have one peer connected elizabeth s for now you have to have one peer connected to you and if you if you're just alone solo on the network and you don't have anyone connected to you do not mine and the reason why he may he added this i mean it's pretty obvious this is why he had is like let's just say we both connect right now on the internet download bitcoin but just because maybe there's a bit of lag or something we have some problems and we don't yet connect to to each other as fast so now you start mining on your own block i start mining on my own block and then we meet each other we have a fork so that's why this this this rule was out there and i know i think i may

have even claimed this in the past and people speculated it was to avoid pre-mining and stuff like that i don't think so i mean i don't think anyone cared about it really it was more coordination to make sure there weren't no forks absolutely i i think that it seems very obvious to me that's a reason well so let's dive into this tor node more what uh sorry one second before so so because you actually had a really good point bringing this up right so why is this important because now so so now getting back to the initial thing it's like so we have this debug file we have we know there how joins and there are two other nodes there and now the question is like but but why would there be another node there why would there be a tor node and this is like well if there wasn't

this tor node or there was just another node bitcoin should have been to block zero or or what could have happened maybe there were another nodes and maybe he maybe they left that also could have happened they there were two other nodes before they started chaining they live but that's not what happened we know for a fact at that point there were two nodes and it seems like maybe there were others maybe some came in and left but at least because there was that tor node this confirms that that's why at least that's why bitcoin was invented sorry i cut you off so what what are your thoughts behind the tor node well the thing is like now i'm kind of like i have this this thing and i figure it out and i'm like you know it's quite interesting and whatever and um i i kind

of like started going on a i couldn't find any more stuff from from back then you know um sorry i'm just scrolling through the article because i feel like we kind of went over the place should have a car but anyway um well the thing is like at this point i'm like i can't believe i made this stuff this is fucking nuts this is incredible this is whatever um and might i want to say i'm not going to give names but i will tell you this i sent it to some people and they shit on me so fucking hard man they shit on me they they said this is bullshit what you call this fucking piece of shit these are not discoveries whatever but you know again i won so you know i'll see in your history books you pieces of shit um so the thing but but but think about and i do want to

mention is because i find this thing out i don't want to share with someone i give it some people and again i know it's real at this point and they're just giving me shit and i will tell you this i know this is very pity but i'm a very fucking pity person and they gave me some shit and i and that's when i knew when it happened i said like okay all right fine my life becomes about this i'll make the video i'll make everything we'll see what happens but so now i'm filled with anger you know in my soul in my mind and i want to get vindicted and i said i need to fucking come up with something just to fucking shove in these people's face and um but i didn't have any more leads right because i looked at the emails i looked at all the things that everyone knows

and i just couldn't find anything else then i remember dustin tramell and i'm sure a lot of people that are somewhat um involved in bitcoin and whatever know who dustin tramell is he's a bitcoin vc and he's been around for like a lot of times and i remember around uh when actually was that 2000 uh 2000 oh in 2021 i think or maybe the first one was 2018 he makes a tweet and he says guys i think i was the the first uh bitcoin miner uh and i i think i was the sorry i think i was the second bitcoin node and i think i may have even beaten hell and the thing is like he he makes this this tweet and he claims this and then he he he posts all this again it's linked in the article everything we're talking about here go see it in the article it's explained every all

the assumption everything can find everything on it um so i remembered this tweet and then and then just like you know justin i have empty words or whatever uh he um he also posted a proof that he mined that block so the thing is like this in bitcoin i'm sure everyone knows that the blockchain is a chain of digital signatures what is a digital signature a digital signature so you have a private key you have a secret that belongs to you and then a digital signature does some mathematical operations which are more simpler than you think actually um and the and the output of that could prove to to someone from the exterior that you actually own this this public key and well you own the public key and the private key which you don't

share without actually revealing the private key right that's that's the main thing that's what a signature does and that's what bitcoin works on and i i'm maybe sounds over complicated i know everyone understand what a signature is but the uh the reason why i'm explaining this is because you can use this signature to prove any other things it's almost like you can you can sign anything so if you if any data is signed by this private key you can say oh it belongs to this private key so you can also do this with random text first of all right and the reason you might do this so you might make a bitcoin transaction where i don't know maybe you donate it to a cause you want to like brag about people are like well i don't believe that you anyone could claim you

prove the signature it's 100 there's no denying there's no nothing you can't really say anything about it at this point you know um so he was like well i claimed i mined a block i mine block i mine an early block i have to do the i have to prove this thing right he posted the proof there and you can use bitcoin core and you can verify the proof and it's true so dustin trammell from this proof that he pointed here we know for a fact that he might block um which what was it again 309 yes so so yeah sorry so he posted two proofs actually he posted a proof that he might in the block 78 am i right on 78 i really don't want to like people are going to be crazy in the comments yeah 78 78 and 309 all right so so he he when he makes the proofs he proved he makes he shows

to prove that he mined block 78 and block 309 now the interesting part is like the block 78 which he mined he said that those current those coins are unconfirmed maybe you could take that sus but that's that's what he said but the proof still verified but it's just that we can't see coins on chain but then block 309 it's still today we can still inspect it and whatever so i'm looking at this stuff here and now this kind of like another thing fell in my lap because i'm like oh my god now by just by incidentally i also solved the problem and the and the question was like what happened with dustin because we know we have block 49 from house debug file um we we know dustin may have uh mine block 78 but certainly has block 309 so we kind of know this for effect

and um okay this is interesting but it's not really like pushing me in in the right direction so what what else could i do right now you know um and i also should i also forgot to mention that there's also this other article where hal at some point shared a pretty almost close to him dying He shares this screenshot of his Bitcoin wallet with another reporter. So now, and there we can see the first block that Hal mined, which was... Block 170? No, that was the first transaction, I guess, he received. Okay, wait.

I'm so sorry. So a correction. So Dustin Tramiel mined block 76 is the one that wasn't confirmed. and 309 is the one that is confirmed and now how in this article block mine block 78 which we can still see here and whatever and we can see in this wallet so we can be fairly certain so now there's also quite interesting because so maybe maybe dustin was beforehand by two blocks but we can't prove it you know so um uh where are we going at this uh started with the tour note do we get back to the tour note oh yeah so yeah so so so i looked at um at a we were at we left off

so i look at dusting stuff and this is all great another discovery you know i'm going crazy i'm doing this on the ground you know and um but this didn't really help the investigation and i just couldn't come up with any idea of where to look for data anymore and i just needed more data and i also like i had the feeling that there's there isn't going to be any data to find because they're just you could tell from the emails on the on the cryptography mainly there wasn't anything left then i'm just sitting there you know and also as it's dramatizing the movie maybe not as dramatic with the lighting and whatnot but it was pretty much that i'm just sitting there and i'm like dude why don't you fuck when i just look at a blockchain maybe i'll find something there

you know so i took the the first blocks and i started looking around and i'm seeing when i look let me just pull this up here so so i took i started looking at it i took all the blocks from like up to block 49 and i started looking around there and i looked at the times and i'm like dude there's one instance from block 14 to 15 where there's like 24 hours and 12 minutes between blocks there's another one which is 30 minutes statistically probable uh and there's but still worth looking at and there's another one that's eight hours and 34 minutes so now i'm like oh i think i want to something here there has to be something there's so much stuff that doesn't fall into place another one so why don't we look here so then i started looking around even more

and i i i i took this all the way to block one seven sure we should have said uh this is actually well known and well established that um which is actually exactly what you hinted at earlier that there is the famous uh transaction that hal sent that satoshi sent to hal and this was at block 170 and it's the first bitcoin transaction so i was like ah let me just let me just try to see what's happening up until there so now i look at all the blocks and i'm like whoa i there's like eight instances where there are big time blocks between time gap between blocks bitcoin is not working which we know from here there's all this weird fuzziness going on here and i'm like oh man um this there's no way this is not connected there's no way this is a coincidence but like

how the fuck can i figure out i i so now now i found um i found the um sounds suspicious but now i need another one so like what how i just i just spent so much time because like there's no way i could get more from the blockchain how could i possibly get more from the blockchain i'm looking at a blockchain and then again after i spent a bit more time and pray to god and whatever and you know um when full retard i realized like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute uh there's that guy sergio damian learner that uh estimated how much money bitcoin satoshi has and you may think well what does this have to do with everything well i the way he does it he actually looks at some other parts of the data which i was making um in the

blockchain and that's how he was managed to to figure out how satoshi mindbox now here's the He didn't really figure out how much Bitcoin and Satoshi mined. What he did, the conclusion that comes from this, from what he looks at is like, you have a group of blocks and this seems to be mined by a single entity. Well, that's exactly what I'm looking for here. I'm looking to find a way to group blocks to draw the conclusion that there is an entity or another entity, you know? So, yeah.

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sovereign health care this is famously known as the patoshi pattern and so this is what led you to have an understanding that correct me if i'm wrong the tour node address the irc channel probably belonged to satoshi too correct well that is where it gets right but but but i didn't knew that i i didn't even dare to suspect that at this point right uh so now i'm looking at this stuff i have this data i was like shit let's do the patoshi pattern so we need to bring a bring a bit of context here how bitcoin mining works um so i know i'm more than certain any one of the listeners is familiar and knows that the bitcoin mining is just a big lottery and you have to try a lot of numbers until you get lucky right and the thing is like

the thing is like when you hash something and this may sound very counterintuitive every output has the exact mathematical probability of being valid like if you sit down and you do a block by hand right now you have the exact same chance as another miner that's why you know people are talking about the bid axis and all these things the only reason the miners are um make more money they just try more times than you that's really what is it's just pure dumb luck there's nothing you can do or to game or whatever that's how mining works but the thing is like okay great but now we need to look specifically what that actually happens so what happens is that you're a miner you get some transactions you make the block header which you say this is block number

whatever it was mined here some other things i'm hand waving a lot and then you have to put the transactions in orders and you hash them and um and is this block valid or not i'm sorry i should have also clarified the the way the mechanism works what draws the well i'm sorry i'm sorry Let me backtrack again. So you take this transaction, you have the header, you put a transaction in it, and you hash them all, and you get a number. And then you can submit this to the Bitcoin network, and the Bitcoin network needs to tell if this is a valid block or not. What makes this block valid or not? Well, anything you have on a computer pretty much can be translated to a number.

right and the thing is that uh we want uh so so the thing is like you have this process that is random that you could have like that could be any number and whatever and then you have this number you can set a number here and you can say well if this is below this threshold this is valid or this is if this is um you have this number you want sorry you have the number that draws the validity and then you have the hash and then you can say if the hash is bigger than the number is valid and if the hash is more than number is valid now if you if you have the now the valid number very small look at all this gap here there's so much valid numbers right but if you actually make the number smaller smaller smaller like if you make the number 10 well there's only 10 possible outcomes

out of the literally all the numbers well it's not all the numbers but it's 2 to the 32 minus 1 but but pretty much you know and i'm sure at this point everyone goes like well well that's what makes it difficult it's like the smaller you make this number the the less number they are and the reason we have this mechanism and satoshi came up with this which is truly probably the only thing that actually he did invent in this bitcoin stuff everything was used is he figured out a way the more people come in we have to make it harder how you just you just make this number smaller you know but that's how mining works and uh so so i so you you take the block you put the transactions there you start hashing them and probably the first time you're going to hash them this is not

going to be um it's not going to be in the target there unless you're extremely lucky um and uh and satoshi realizes and says like well let's just add a counter here which just literally increment you go and you can try these things right and this this counter in the block it's called the nonce i'm sure a lot of people uh heard of this nonce means number used once right and this this the single purpose of this number is just so you can have lotto tickets pretty much right so you can keep iterating iterating now this number here is due to the power of 32 which even though may seem a very big number it's not and because of statistical variations and other things and the distribution of well distribution of luck pretty much uh you could you could absolutely because

this is a strictly purely uh the random process you could you could you could go for the full range of these numbers and you just you're just not going to get lucky it's not enough so you have to try one more time you know and uh satoshi knew this also and he said like well you can go for all these numbers from one to the power of two to the 32. And if you don't have another one, we just have a second number here, which you increment. And because another very important thing with a hash, like if you change one small minute thing anywhere, it changes the whole output completely. So now you already went for all the options. You can go from one to the power of 32. So you have a second number. You tweak this and you just get a fresh new set of

numbers quite simple quite brutal but but quite elegant now the first number that i'm talking about you can see it in the block header if you go on memple.space or ever you will see there is well actually it's called bits but that's the nonce and equivalent is kind of same thing but the extra nonce is kind of a hack the extra nonce because you're the miner and when you're at a miner you create all this transaction you create a coinbase and in the coinbase you pay yourself and except she was like well just tweak a random fucking number here just tweak this part of the coinbase here so you can get a fresh new set of numbers this is again from first day right so uh sergio de malerna which i mean the guy to come up with this fucking idea in 2000 i don't know

13 wherever it was because everyone looked at this but to look at at the second number that you tweak and be like you know what i think we can extract something from here so what ended up happening this second number that you so not the the nonce the nonce is one from two to the power four two and it's it's just really random but the second tweak number here this has a bug satoshi fucked up when he implemented this thing all right so you would be thinking to yourself well this is this is mixed this makes pretty pretty much sense you're like you're a miner you start mining one from four to two two to the power four two you go for it you you start from one you make it two and i go again maybe you go three times five times but then let's just say it takes you five

times these numbers are just uh they don't reflect reality by the way just to be clear so you can do it five times you found the block it makes sense to reset this thing and you know start from zero like a respectable gentleman right um and the the thing is satoshi when he implemented his bitcoin mining he made some small mistakes and this number doesn't reset right even though this number should reset it only resets when you turn off your node on and off um let me just pull this bit of code here right so so so you would expect this number to to reset but it doesn't reset so now if you turn on your node and you start mining um and this number doesn't reset this number just became an uptime counter right it's just like so how long has this

guy been mining from well as long as his extra announce was on and the extra announce is on the blockchain the coinbase so then i have this as a as a as a counter now the thing is that there's like a few things to understand here i'm not sure if like um it makes sense to really like uh explain it but the thing is like it it not only doesn't reset after this thing but it also increments when it checks for a block what does this mean um so you are a miner and you're mining you're doing your own business but as you are trying to as you're mining and you're constructing this new block with his new nonce you have to check is this valid is this below the hash so because again it was just like where he placed the function to well it's a while it's not a function to to check this

thing um he just he just made such a small error it it just triggers it more times so the extra announced counter doesn't reset when you find a block and it also increments when you when you look for blocks so not only that that it doesn't reset and tells you how long this node has been online it also like does it at some kind of a random thing so it makes it like a fingerprint makes it even more identifiable and whatever you know now i should be very clear here that and this was pretty much the criticism that a lot of people threw at the patoshi pattern which i don't 100 agree with but it is somewhat valid is like right but like if you have tens of thousands of miners which the patoshi pattern focuses on a bit later period other things could happen

there's statistical anomalies and whatever so maybe you shouldn't be too sure of this well who cares who gives a fuck because for me i know at block 49 there's only three fucking people one of them couldn't get it up can't get the node up uh halfini is what i'm talking about and um and and there's two other nodes like the chance of having more nodes let's just say maybe there's five more that came up and whatever get out of here forget about it there's no way there's no way that happened you know so for me this analysis in this logic it's like sin from heaven because guess what i have almost no noise here so i could start drawing i could start looking at and draw my conclusions and um so i did uh let me just take a sip because i just ranted for such a long

time no it's uh it's a good refresher on the difficulty target nonces extra nonces and the fact that satoshi was fallible in the beginning launching with this this bug this hard code bug i mean he was so fucking fallible so fallible and he said the word retarded which counts for something um uh is there any way by the way we can we can add this um this picture on the screen because i think you should be able to share if you hit share oh my god share my browser i think it's just send me the link i'll pull it up easier to convince me to have unprotected sex what you think bitcoinminer.com so i send it here in the in the in the thing

and then this other one also oops boom all right so where we're looking at we have the we have a chart here which is i'm telling it's way more simpler than you actually think it is so on the on the horizontal x-axis we take blocks so the number there means that if you go at 50 that's block 50 it goes to 0 to 200 we're focusing on the spirit because we know block 170 is when we know how many the transactions so we'll just focus on the spirit and then on the all y-axis on the on the other thing there uh we're just charting this value this value of the of the counter the the extra nonce the second counter that i was talking about right and the thing is like um remember remember this what happens here is

that this number goes up all the time right and it tells us how much how much it goes up and the thing is like when it resets we know for a fact it only resets in this particular version of bitcoin code it only resets when you turn off your node like if you turn it off and you turn it on that doesn't get saved anymore in the memory and gets resetted so every time we see uh we see um sorry so we have all these like so so a blue dot here on the chart if you look there and it's like around 50 and 50 because you can see it there that means at block 50 there was an extra amount of the value 50 right that's what this means so now we can kind of see that they formed this kind of like squiggly things that go like this and then they're kind of like grouped a bit more you can

see there's some kind of a grouping or something like this and the thing is like this is the way we interpret this so the number starts from zero at the bottom and it goes up it goes up it goes up it goes up and then nothing happens and then we see it starts another line so that means then the no reset sorry you were gonna say no no so i was gonna pull up the other chart which i think highlights let's leave this one for a bit more because i think there's a bit more to clarify here i don't mind right so the thing is like the we can see the reason these grouping groupings for them is because again at some point the chart goes up but then it starts from zero so if we know the number starts the the the extra the second count or the extra announced number

uh goes to zero only when this um when you know when node resets and now here's another thing to understand like well if you have two consecutive if you have uh the groupings and it goes from one to two that could be really lucky because all nodes starts from zero all nodes go to one right but the thing is as each number you add it's less likely to be a random occurrence right it just makes sense it's like if you have one random event and you're like one okay it's like if the more coin flips you do the harder is to guess you know what i'm trying to say so not only that this means that the so the the bigger this this this thing goes the more certain we are because it's like really what is the chance someone is going to go up to 200 come on let's be honest and it's not

one yeah you know you can't be sure so this is so just by looking here we can see that oh wait a minute this is quite interesting because we see we kind of see these groupings here so that we don't know if they're all the same node but we can say maybe maybe one third like that with the red thing i think that's i think that's a node you know yeah yeah again going back to the probabilistic chance of different nodes having consecutive higher externance numbers is very low, particularly at this

point in time in Bitcoin's history. Absolutely. So we're assuming, if you're looking at the screen, if you're not looking, we're looking at the Potoshi pattern and you basically just assume that Potoshi mined all these blocks that we're highlighting here, or one entity did.

Not yet, not yet. We're saying one entity mined at least one turd that's for now for now but yes of course we're going to get there but uh that's where we are right now in the story that's all we can claim for what we have from what we have all right freaks you know me you know i don't take sponsor money from products i wouldn't use myself so listen up the aven bitcoin visa card is one of the most interesting things i've seen in the bitcoin lending space in a long time here's the deal you can get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your bitcoin without selling a single sat no games no annual fees no minimum

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right so every time we see we we go from from um so now we have these groupings and i was like you know what's so interesting because remember i found the big time time gaps right so now i'm just looking at this thing and i was like oh man wouldn't be so strange if somehow there would be some alignment between when then when this thing when this event of node reset happens and the times and i look at it and i'm like jesus fucking christ this is nuts it actually happens almost every single time with two exceptions and those are actually help our case we'll see later every single time the node resets so like it goes from from top to down there's a big time gap between blocks right so we know that's an event that that means the node resets and then we see

big time gap between gaps between blocks oh this means whoever is mining this stuff is is turning off their node that's why there's no more blocks to be produced and now you're being you're going to be like yeah sure i mean you know maybe there was internet or whatever right but the reason why i'm so certain is turning off because so you can look at all the other time gaps and be like maybe i don't know whatever but it's like when it's 24 hours clearly that person turned off their node there was no enough to get online and the you know no one mined any blocks and so the 24 and the eight hours one i mean i don't think anyone could argue with me right now there's another two hour and 45 minutes one also the same and there's a three hour one and there's a few like 30 and 44

minutes and you're right that would be statistically sound but it's statistically sound to have some of them but not to have so many right so um when i looked at it sound like oh my god this is kind of interesting because this kind of means there is just no one here and the network halted eight times um and this i mean it's again it just feels so together to not make any sense you know so yeah and so this is where it ties into the tour note right right the tour note exactly i forgot about um so now because that's why we started on this fucking thing so now i'm i'm looking at this thing and i'm just kind of thinking to myself well we know for a fact there weren't that many people around here on the network as the first thing and then we know that there were there we know we have

this condition we need two people to mine two nodes two nodes at least to mine on the network that being said you could have like opened the code and changed that however i doubt it and and here's the thing why i doubt it because uh even satoshi had trouble compiling the the code and make it run so whoever was running this was most probably like using satoshi's code and whatever anyway so we know there's like no no we know there's a very low activity we know we have we need two nodes and we know from how's the back at least at block 49 and there's a yellow line there so we know at least this this um round we can be very certain uh we we we know um what i'm trying to get at sorry i'm over explaining and i was like the fucking network is halting we know

two nodes there jesus fucking christ clearly they must be the same entity because they're two in sync right they're two in sync like when they go out both of them probably look like they go all right and here's the interesting part there's an exception it is an exception to where there's no big time gaps between blocks you know where the exception is at block 49 when we know both the nodes were there right you can see there it's a 12 minute the all the other have big time blocks only these ones have 12 minutes which is like normal and whatever and i also do the very crude statistical analysis here and i looked and this is from block 29 to block 77 and it looks like again and the average here is about 10.7 minutes which is what we're going for it's not a proof

per se but it's absolutely like looks like he was a healthy thing which again we know this was happening in the in the node so you know when i looked at this stuff and whatever i was like oh my god i just think it's so hard to not really be like it must have been satoshi because satoshi started off see there she saw not even how was like yeah sure let's let's jump in and whatever it's like dear god if i if i don't have anything here um on this network it's not gonna go further people need to jump in and also like maybe they start their own bitcoins or whatever let me just spin up a torno you know and then uh to tie it in a bow and whatever there's this another email that satoshi had uh so after this whole hullabaloo happens and whatever and whatnot

satoshi writes an email to hal and says like dude you were keeping the network alive and sorry i can't try things out right now because i'm in a place where i can't accept incoming connections and that is what a tor node could do at least in the context of this node and whatever it cannot accept incoming connection so i was like oh yeah this is fucking that yeah he couldn't get to his clear net node to accept incoming connections i don't know why tor wouldn't have done it anyway is that what you're saying uh not quite i could have been more clear one second so the thing is like in the bitcoin core version 0.1 the one we're working with it could you could not accept incoming connections so uh satoshi says here um

Unfortunately, I can't receive incoming connections from where I am, which has made things more difficult. Your node receiving incoming connection was the main thing keeping the network going for the first two days. So Satoshi, what I'm reading here is like where I am. So Satoshi is somewhere else where he's not home, but he's on setup. So he's probably just connecting via Tor to be private. And with Tor, you can't accept incoming connections. So it's a hint towards the fact that, again, I mean, again, what is the coincidence? He mentions this when we have the tornado and whatever. It's fascinating.

What fascinates me about how much work he put into this, some research, is that just like the first few days of the network on life, there's so much in this short period of time, the 72 to 96 hour period. that i mean you articulated in the video and in the article so much rested on this this early interaction with the bitcoin network yes yes and the thing is like in most of those by the way so we didn't really touch this but but most of the emails with satoshi and how how says this doesn't work and they try to fix it and it's just hair pulling and nothing works and this doesn't work and there's one node and whatever so so dude this thing almost barely take off i mean it was the most dinkiest it almost is like god why is like was pushing it from behind because it's like everything that could have gone wrong went in the absolute worst way that could have gone wrong you

know it was it was a fucking shit show and and and and think about it like this oh and all this shit showing whatever this how this this uh it's uh how phoenix and dustin trameo i don't even know what i mean they're probably fucking retarded or crazy or something because you have to be so retarded to look at this and to be like you know what man i i think this is i think this deserves a chance i think um i think we need to look at this um well again we can't ask how we should at some point because it just almost makes no sense you know it just wow wow that's all i can say yeah now i feel like i need to get dustin on if he would come on to talk about this stuff because it's fascinating and you you highlighted too you have the emails um sort of lining up with

satoshi sending version 0.1.1 to hal and then him tweeting out a few hours later running bitcoin so you can tell that like the tweet sort of lines up with the back and forth email he had to try to fix the bugs and get a new version yes absolutely absolutely i think we can turn off the screen sure um i don't think we need anymore or um yeah and also like another question that you may think but what if dustin was the tor node sorry i forgot to mention dustin also had some private conversations with satoshi which he also released so i also looked at those emails in some other for some other stuff and he he actually shows his ip address with satoshi there so that's why i think it's not him and i think he even said this so so

the thesis is essentially that to bootstrap the network in the early days satoshi had a clear net node and a node running through tor that were connected and mining blocks so that when other individuals join the network like hal and dustin it looked like there was activity already and they could have peers and begin mining immediately to improve the user experience um so why why is this important why is it important to know all this i don't because it's cool dude what do you mean why it's important it's like why do you fall in love with a woman why do you go there why do you sometimes feels like you're like there that's i have to go there that's where it is that's the prize i fucking see it i know it that's why you do it i mean how could i

have ever first seen this you know um there was no way it just i just couldn't leave it alone i just could not fucking leave it alone and i was right i mean i'm always right not everyone when they feel it i see you're always right it doesn't matter what when you just like you know it's it's like this tiny string that kind of like you have to listen to it you know that's why you can't you can't have bullshit around your head because you have to listen to that that tiny whisper you know or maybe this is how i'm gonna i'm telling the world that i'm crazy and retarded it's the whisper that told me we all are but like no i think you made a good point in the video and in the article it's like i think if um the thesis that you put out there is believable which i think

it certainly is what does it debunk like was bitcoin created by the nsa what was the type of person like what type of person was satoshi i i think that's a very good point and i even forgot about it that kind of came to me later but it was like dude when you see how fucked up this whole thing was and again how many like things were just happening wrong i just feel like the chances of thinking this was created by the nsa i mean i do you have to be really really really i can't prove it right because you could say well the nsa may have done this and whatever but that i think that that's a bit retarded because i mean i just feel like if you would give me a million dollars and would say construct the chaos like this i don't think you i don't think you could do it i really

don't think so so yeah when you look at it and the the biggest the fact that it went so bad and so poorly and nothing worked and whatever i think this is the biggest proof that it was organic really you know so yeah and also like this whole bullshit about it was a woman nothing against women by the way i'm not trying to say anything it was oh maybe it's a woman maybe it's a group of people dude come on look at this this is some fucking guy with a laptop like you and me for some other fucking reason he figured this out he put her on the internet he was talking with with some random guy on the internet and with two random guys on the internet that was it he made a fucking pet project come on let's be honest this is what happened you know well that's the

other point too like could bitcoin have easily died in the cradle of dust and and how didn't care to actually try to get it working my opinion is that i mean the thing is like you never know right but i i just feel like do you guys know that the video it's a very old video there's this guy this rave on a on a hill he's dancing like this and whatever you know and then there's one the first person that comes and the other one and whatever and whatnot then he goes and then oh my god it's it's so passe to not be a part of it and do that i just feel like that's really what it is it's like well and see the guy the narrator says there is a second guy doesn't come and i think i'm afterwards you know so i you really feel like it's hard to even put into words

how important it was not only how but also dusting equally equally absolutely equally um just being willing to do this you know i'm to participate there i mean i know you're focused on the first 170 blocks but like how did you research how long it took for more note like when a marty mommy join um like when did it get beyond three people and the tour node that we're suspecting is satoshi well i haven't re-looked because fucking took a year to look at this so maybe the next research we'll see but um well mommy came way later actually when mommy came he was i i think it came before they have they had bitcoin talk which wasn't even called bitcoin talk it was hosted on bitcoin that work but it's the same interface um i really don't know i have it

in my nose but i don't know but by but it was it was way more popular at this point there were people talking it was it had a community at that point we can claim at least that yeah well that brings up another good point like what other forensic excursions do you plan on going on or what are there oh i i have a few other things that i'm gonna all right i mean i already filmed one video it's not as big as this one it's not as as grandiose or a bit more small i also figured out some very interesting i just don't want to like share them because they're not super important but people have questions about like why satoshi made certain weird decisions in the code and whatnot and there's all many questions on stack exchange and the answer is always like you have

to ask satoshi you know and i think i i figured out one of this but it's not it doesn't change anything it's just i just kind of have enough context from the chaos and i'm like oh that's why it was it was actually nothing burger i just i just could trace it this part of the code you know but what other thing that i want to do and whatever i mean i don't have any more first investigations but uh i'm making movies man i'm movie director that's what i do so um uh are we wrapping up by the way no we don't have to keep going i want to actually wanted to touch on that like the the art side of this because i mean the production value was incredible and i think telling thank you these bitcoin stories in this way and this engaging way is is very important

and i know you've been sort of iterating on this art form within bitcoin for for years and uh i think the output is incredible so it's just like you're you're world real and bringing this artistic touch to the bitcoin world yeah well you know i mean um i never i never really think about it that it's gonna sound so insane but uh like everything i said here uh but uh but uh i i just i just want to see that video i know no one is going to make this video never ever in a thousand years and i have to see i just need to see that i need to see it on the screen i don't get this bullshit about i don't watch my stuff shut the fuck up i watched it i watched it yesterday i watched it today i love it i fucking love it how good it is you know and i just want to see that

video i like it so much i love this stuff i can't get enough of it i everyone that knows me or life knows this is how this is what i breathe every time if i'm somewhere i talk about bitcoin weird things i just want to see this thing so i just wanted to do it like this that's what i was thinking about but i do kind of feel like uh i don't know where it goes but i feel like what else i can my own dick fucking set a new standard i think i think that's how i think this is a new standard if i don't say so well good we need to raise the standards it's a pretty high standard i mean the the behind the scenes sort of a b-roll cut that you include in there we have the camera on the

on the track and you're like pushing it toward your laptop like i took a lot of time and effort to set it up yeah but the thing is like dude what is dirt house to do in life when you think about it man you're gonna die dude you're gonna die everything you know is gonna die everyone know is gonna die and and the craziest part is that you can't even be sure that when you're awake this is real i mean just think about think about how many times i'm sure everyone can relate this you have a dream you think it's so sure and it goes away it happened this morning i don't really yeah are you serious yeah i mean i i have pretty vivid dreams yeah well anyway the point is like that's what life could be so the only thing you could do philosophically if you want to be

philosophically rational is you have to pick something and go get the high score in that that's the only thing and it doesn't have to be this is just my own retardation which is fine but it could be other things you know so the reason why it's like you have to put everything in something when you do something it has to be the best of all time you owe it you owe it to to yourself you owe it to whatever that you can't it's kind of like like uh it's like you you life is like a bag of goodies you keep taking back things only you can put something back because it's so vast and so big and such a crazy hard thing to contribute is you have to really really really give it everything and even if you don't contribute something back at least you you spent

your time well you know so that's how i think about it anyway it's never like uh the stuff but yes i like the brag i'm very braggadocious absolutely and i do like this i like to be like oh look how good my stuff is yeah i put in the work though i appreciate the confidence we need more confident people in this world what uh what movies are you working on right now if you're allowed to elaborate absolutely uh i have two movies coming out the um um then one that's going to come out the next month i don't know if it's going to be 30 or 40 days depends it's filmed it's a short movie about bitcoin core and it follows this fictionalized story of myself where i start i use bitcoin core and i need to verify the pgp keys and i'm so retarded that i

decide that i need to find so when you verify the pgp keys there are certain people that sign it and i'm like you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna go across the world take planes and find the people to who verify the pgp key to verify the pgp key around them and you have in this video mz uh short provost uh you also have some few a few other cameos there uh and it's it's again it's still very jokey and whatever but it's way more narrative and and and by the way if you like this stuff you want a place in history you know what i'm looking for sponsors in this uh in this movie um because uh i mean um well i just in this specific video with a thing i really didn't want to add any sponsors because i wanted to be pure and i didn't want to paint it anyway but i'm a

business man i'm a fucking priest and cost a lot of money out of my own pocket to make these things so um i would i would be very happy to have sponsors and your logo will be included there and it's not going to be just the fucking logo there put it's going to be an object as you can see at the end of the video and whatever so if you want to do that please hit me up and i also i have this other movie that i've been working on which is called satoshi's don't exist i started in 2023 um and well again it was just one of those things that annoyed me it was like when you think about it the satoshi units don't exist and they're not present in the code and i was trying to have conversations with people like this and they were so like you're wrong you're

stupid i was like can we please just look at the code and he said no i was like girl i'll make a movie about it you see and um and the thing is that when i started that movie i wasn't so versed cinematography but i kind of got to that point and then i was like oh you know what and i got some money people were very helpful it was it was absolutely cool but i just felt like i know at this point with my own two hands a light bulb and a camera i can rival any colleague production of course not in scale or like this but i know i mean i know i could do that i've done it now um so anyway so i wanted i feel like the situation don't exist because that's a proper feature film and i also went to azores i filmed there and there's a lot of stuff i wanted to to really

really show that i'm good at cinematography give me a lot of money because i know this could be a great thing that's going to go all over the world so i took all the money that i raised for that one and i made this um mvp version of the vita short movie the how to install bitcoin core and then i i swear to god i was ready to launch it that this whole thing started when i was ready to launch it last year i was absolutely ready and then this thing fell in my lap and i was like okay here we go another side quest let's go i promise i listen i promise i'm not taking a side quest and for the people like the movie is film by the way it's not gonna take it's film it's ready i could release it tomorrow if we want to i just i just need to find some sponsorships and whatever you

know and i mean again just think about it if you want to see more content like this uh similar or something because again it it you cannot imagine how hard it is and i mean the minimum amount of takes is 50 takes so you know there's there's moments in this movie like the beginning of the dusting thing that took two weeks that's a four second shot took two weeks just doing it doing it so you know damn yeah but alex i was told ai is going to take all the uh all the filmmaking jobs is this true i i think there is through this because you know i first of all i never used the eye in my stuff because i had a as as of this recording there's no ai in the planet that could do things better than i could do with a camera on a light bulb but it's

going to change you know what's going to happen here's what i predicted i'm probably i hope i'm going to be one of these people i think we're going to have the first feature film that by a single person and there's going to be one guy in his in his living room and he's going to act up all the all the parts and whatever because that's the hardest part is directing really what ai and being persistent and then there's going to be one guy in his living room acting out all the parts and yeah i will get so good at augmenting this stuff and then you're going to see a lot of stuff like this uh you know there's francis ford coble and there's the film the famous movie um uh apocalypse now and he went through hell and and again he's just i fucking love these stories

i like it when someone just tells the world you're wrong and everyone just tries to fucking bash them and then he wins but the thing is like and that being said collaboration is really good and it's not like i'm trying to say like that's always better but sometimes you can just eliminate the people you don't really need there and they're just trying to bring the vision down and they don't believe in it and uh you just eliminate overhead and we're gonna get better better everything for them you know yeah i love to hear it i love to see you making this art because uh i'm putting these short films and feature films out um very much looking forward to to what you release next month what are they called what are they about what are they called what are they

about i'm talking about you i said i love that you're making them oh sorry because uh like i said we need to elevate the the aesthetics and the attention to detail when it comes to storytelling within bitcoin i think um your first bitcoin miner uh short film is what i'd call it or expose i don't know what you're calling it but that's that's what i view it as is it was beautifully done engaging and highly educational so thank you for doing it brother no thank you for watching man and i mean i just couldn't be more happy you know because i will tell like there was some time because here's the thing i knew this was good i knew i had lighting in a bottle and i if there's something in my control there's not an ounce of doubt i will fucking find a way and i'll find it

it never happens that i know i can make that there's nothing that i'll get in my way to get the vision that i have it never did of course i kick and cry along the way but they scream but but i get her eventually no but the thing that you can't control is how people react to it and i was there was this moment where i was like oh man i mean what if people don't like it then also it's just like even if if if they would have shut me in the head i still could not change a single pixel of it right so what it was it was never like an option to be like oh well if you want people to like it changes like that's not an option i make the art that's all i make the art you consume it the end of story there's no changing or anything like that my vision is pure and goes

out in the world you know yeah how uh was the reaction what you expected or i mean i feel like there's a million fucking views i'm not gonna look 220k is respectable and thank you to everyone don't hurry to it. I really appreciate it. And there are so many people that I know from a long time and they really kind of championed this a lot. And I, without a doubt, if they would have not done this, you wouldn't have got all the, you know, the push and whatever. So I'm very happy and very thankful for that, you know. But I feel it deserves some, I mean, it's the most important and the most discussed moment in Bitcoin history, you know. But in all fairness and all jokes and all arrogance aside, like, the thing is, like, if you would give me this video or this article,

a year ago i'm going to be honest it would have took me more than probably two weeks to really understand what the fuck is going on here and i think i have the best context so as this is going to become more mature and whatever i think people are going to look at it people are going to find things i hope they find things that are wrong i hope they build on it you know and uh i think you i i'm pretty confident we'll get to a million views and at that some point you know yeah it's evergreen content and we'll get out there um this will be something that professors reference uh in the future when they're saying you want to understand the early days of bitcoin go check out alex waltz's uh his first bitcoin miner uh expose i don't i mean of course you can see how

vain i am as a human being of course i wanted to have my name there but you know in all in all fairness you know i think the the thing i'm super happy is that i just got to contribute to this thing man i got to contribute this this thing i've i've it's like 30 years now of my existence it was important this thing and and i've only got benefits from it really and i actually made a contribution right now a perfect country and and again now i'm switching arrogance back on you know all the clients and all these things that you have here they're going to become obsolete the story will never become obsolete you know so a hundred years from now or whatever they will if even it doesn't matter if they don't say what's going but but but in this in this darkness of what

the bitcoin moment was i said it just a tiny bit of a spotlight you know and that that's everything you know yeah no if anything it shifted a conversation towards a more productive uh more productive uh topic i would argue um because that's the discourse has been pretty last year yeah well you know i also feel like the problem with the bitcoin stuff you were saying like do you see coinbase man they have the best marketing on the planet they are up to up with with apple right now you know and i really don't i mean i know i'm asking for money i'm probably gonna piss off a lot of people but like guys come on you really think you're gonna be better than coinbase and take over the world and being the beacon to mess when you share fucking memes

that are low resolution coming step up your game if i can hire me to make a commercial for you if you're listening and i know many of you are working at bitcoin companies seriously take them up we need we need to elevate the game when it comes to competing with coinbase commercials and telling the story yeah i mean you know at the end of the day it's like your responsibility to tell the story you know because you're going to spend the people to get it and whatever and i think everyone has a really interesting story the problem is you really need to be able to articulate it you know uh and i think i don't think we're too about that yeah well we're gonna link to it in the show notes if you haven't watched it yet make sure you watch your freaks

and then if you're out there i'm gonna support alex at his work reach out got more great art coming coming to market but uh thank you for telling the story it was fascinating and i think um it's a it's like you said it's a incredible contribution that will give people better context of the early the literal early days of bitcoin the first few days of bitcoin which uh again i think that that was my favorite part it was like the attention to detail to a thank you 96 hour period thank you well again thank you very much for having me on and uh alexwaltz.com won't spell like the dance if you want to find other shit that i did find me on twitter ron or square avocado tweet at me send me dick pics i'm kidding only tits only tits i don't like tits um and uh i don't

know if you if you if you if you feel like you want to do something great that could change the world and whatever fucking hit me up let's let's fucking do it let's turn the world fucking upside down that's a do it peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app

You can go to Fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free, helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time. Okay.