TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Conversations from Riga: Matt Corallo + Hasufly

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

In this special edition of Tales from the Crypt, Marty sits down with Matt Corallo to discuss CVE-2018-17144, the bug found in Bitcoin last week, and his efforts with the Betterhash mining pool protocol. This is a quick 15-minute conversation that touches on a lot. During the last 2/3 of the episode, Marty sits down with Hasufly, a budding star in the world of Bitcoin content to discuss the practices he used to learn about Bitcoin as quickly as possible. Hasu has an incredible way of creating mental frameworks from which to learn. Tune in to learn about the people, data sources and tools Hasu used to bootstrap his knowledge of Bitcoin in only 10 months. Follow Matt: @TheBlueMatt Follow Hasu: @Hasufl Follow Marty: @MartyBent Links: https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/ https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/outline Thank you to our sponsor, Honeyminer. Check them out here: https://honeyminer.com/referred/59rtk

What's up, you freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty here with a little pre-podcast recording to let you know how this episode structure is going to work because it's not like anything we've done before. Some of you may know that I traveled to Riga, Switzerland over the weekend to attend the Baltic Honey Badger Conference hosted by Hodl Hodl. It was an incredible conference, had an amazing time. There were some very, very intense discussions about Bitcoin, especially revolving around the bug that was found last week. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Matt Corallo for the third time on this podcast to discuss that bug. So that's the first 15 minutes of this episode. And then the last half hour of

the episode, I sat down with somebody who fascinates me in this space, Hasu Fly, somebody that got into Bitcoin only 10 months ago, but has since bootstrapped a knowledge that is all encompassing of the space. Certainly not an expert, but the amount he has learned in a short amount of time is staggering, in my opinion. So I sat down with him to discuss how he got caught up to speed with everything going on in Bitcoin and the overarching cryptocurrency landscape. And he really gives us some good insights on how he learns and the processes he used to sort of come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is the most important project in this space and how he is able to sort of get to a level where he could create incredible content. He's co-written a couple of pieces with Nick Carter and Alexander Legle about how to value these cryptocurrencies and sort of the history of the narratives that have gone on in Bitcoin in particular. So I think you guys are really going to enjoy the insights that Hasu provides when it comes to how to learn about Bitcoin and the mental models one should try to develop when trying to learn anything new.

Really, this could be applied to two subjects beyond Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. so i hope you guys enjoy it this episode of tales from the crypt is bought brought to you by honeyminer.com if you're looking for an easy way to earn bitcoin and you have some extra computers or extra gpus laying around i highly recommend you go to honeyminer.com download their software and you can turn those vacant computers into revenue streams but what you do with honeyminer is you you download their software under your computer you start running it and basically your computer starts mining uh profitable altcoin chains and basically they have a mining pool that uses all this computing power of all their users to mine all coin chains and then immediately

dump them to bitcoin and you get a little bitcoin in your account for commensurate with the amount of energy you are you are providing to their pool so if you want to uh if you're sitting there at home with no bitcoin and you don't have enough to to buy any but you want to get in and sort of get some skin in the game a good way to do that could be taking an extra computer and turning that on downloading honeyminer at honeyminer.com and and and make put your computer to work basically So please check out our friends at Honeyminer. I will put a referral link in the description of this episode. Again, I want to thank Honeyminer for sponsoring us.

They are an incredible product and a great way to get introduced to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, in particular, in my mind. Beyond that, I hope you guys enjoy the interviews with Matt and Hasul. And I look forward to hearing the conversation around these episodes on Twitter. Peace and love. That's the difference between me being drunk and stupidly tired. Same thing, right? Well, that's a good intro.

There we go. Fair enough. What's up, freaks? We're here in Riga. It's been a long weekend. A long week, especially for Matt, who I'm speaking with. um matt hey hey uh yeah it's uh been an interesting week stressful week and then uh came to riga and been hanging out here so i have to admit i have not had a whole lot of sleep in

the last week or so yeah yeah i got a i got an early morning dm from you i was surprised that you were even kicking yeah yeah i guess it is vaguely surprising i got like four hours of sleep last night maybe yeah well uh enough that i'm not completely dead that's it's good to see you're still still standing i'm gonna see bitcoin still standing let's jump into the bug uh cve bug yep uh initially disclosed that there was a denial of service uh bug uh and later disclosed that with that denial of service bug there was also an inflation uh overflow yeah yeah so it was originally reported to us as a denial of service and the original report said like well you know pretty sure there's no or i think the original report said flat out there's no way to do

inflation with this uh but there's a crash bug in terms of if you have a transaction that spends an input twice within the same transaction you could crash nodes that are 0.14 through 0.16 and then 0.15 and 0.16 some of their earlier 0.16 versions uh also sometimes would accept the trend depending on exactly how it was structured sometimes would accept the transaction and allow you to um create bitcoin for yourself not ideal for uh for a protocol that no it's trying to have a hard cap no not really you know being able to print your own supply is not ideal i mean there's some altcoins that have had supply printing issues and people were actively printing supply and the price didn't go down so yeah apparently the markets are kind of stupid yeah

sometimes yeah bitcoin actually rose after this bug was disclosed yeah well you know the markets are trying to tell us that we need more bugs gets us in the press let's talk about that so uh if anything this incident proved that uh obviously the software is not infallible there's always going to be bugs in software yeah and um so let's talk into that like there's there's never going to be bug-free software and this is something that there's not i mean you know this particular issue i would not have guessed that we would have had this issue like a lot of things went wrong for us to have this issue uh there's uh this issue caught a very specific hole in some of our test coverage like we had decent test coverage uh in a lot of other parts kind of

right around this. The review process failed because it was an optimization that would have otherwise been correct. And as of older versions of Bitcoin Core, the optimization would have been completely fine. And so different patches interacted with each other negatively. So, you know, it's humans and a lot of things went wrong for this particular bug. But, you know, There are also other classes of bugs that can have also very damaging impacts on individual users of Bitcoin Core. So, yeah, there's never going to be bug-free software. And ultimately, Bitcoin is still a human system. You know, if this had been exploited, I think at least the vibe here is the community would have been pretty vocal about saying, like, no, we're just going to undo that.

We're going to do a big reorg. It would have been very painful, incredibly painful, and potentially some people would have lost money if they were accepting payments. And then it got re-erged out. But, you know, we would have survived. That's happened before. It wouldn't be the first time. Now, you know, Bitcoin has grown up a lot since it happened. So, you know, hopefully that doesn't ever happen again.

But. No, that's, yeah, that's another thing. It was a 2010 bug, right? Or 2013 was the overflow? The overflow was 2010 or 2009 or 10. It was before my time. But there was also the BDB locks bug, so the 0.8 and 0.7 fork, where there was also a reorg. There was a chain split, so there was eventually a one-side-one-out.

But that was... I'm going to get the year wrong if I try to guess, but that was slightly more recent. I think it was March 2013. I did a history of Bitcoin episodes, so I know. Ah, there you go. on top of it no it was fascinating you got you were just on the panel with uh a couple other core devs and then eric foskell from lib bitcoin uh one thing brian bishop um made everybody aware of is that there was there was a breakdown of the communication channels too as well which is crazy yeah well i mean like look you know we uh we have you know the bitcoin core.org website we have

mailing lists we have a number of different communication channels and most of them have not been structured to and have never really needed necessarily to be instant updating or like you know updating on a very short time frame uh and so a few things went wrong in those areas and so you know we had a little website glitch where the website didn't update for half an hour until someone fixed it and then uh the mailing list for the the provider the linux foundation mailing lists that we use uh were just down when we were trying to disclose the uh version so we fell back to twitter and the website but yeah you know these these things these things fall over but it's all right yeah um no it's a good lesson it's definitely scary definitely heavy um but

it's a good reminder that that uh this is something it's not it's not it's not gonna be the last bug yeah i mean yeah you know i said on the panel and i've been saying kind of this weekend we you know we haven't had a chance to do full post-mortems like we haven't like i still need to go back and reread the irc logs from when that patch was merged because there was some discussion like not all of the review for that patch happened on github necessarily there was probably some discussion on irc of it and various other uh communication channels potentially so you know need to go go back reread all of those form a more full opinion of exactly what happened and then try to think about you know what what exactly went wrong and how can we prevent that

from going wrong in the future, and how can we pivot some contributors back towards better testing of some areas like this and more full test coverage and whatever. So, you know, we're going to turn this into something hopefully a little bit positive. Have, you know, we're going to figure out what we need to do to make sure

that this class of bug doesn't happen again. um but yeah there are some people saying that uh bitcoin can't use the meme that it is sound money and has a hard cap now uh what do you have to say to that yeah i mean like what was the the quote i just said right it was like bitcoin's a human system like ultimately it's consensus of humans we try very very hard to make sure that you can accept payments on a short non-human time scale right but if something falls over humans step in humans will resolve it in the direction of kind of the obvious direction i mean in a bug like this there's an obvious direction there's one fork where people are printing money and there's one fork where people can't print money

people aren't you know like i mean it's just kind of absurd yeah nobody's gonna go work on that inflation chain yeah no one's gonna be like oh yeah this this this chain with inflation that looks good i'm gonna use that for my money you know i'm gonna start uh trading that one um let's uh i'll only hold you for five more minutes let's shift to something more optimistic uh you want to talk about better hasher a little bit sure um yeah so uh we've talked well we've talked about this on this podcast before yeah we did i guess two one of the last episode that i was on yeah um talked a lot about that um but yeah so you know i've been trying to circle the wagons with various people who have interest in deploying it,

whether in the pool end, but also on the actual mining end. So it's kind of a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. You have to get both stood up and going at the same time, which is difficult. But there's a lot of interest, so there's a lot of people who have looked at it, have said, like, this is really cool, the ability to have actually decentralized mining,

but still have the advantages of pools like the consistent payout and the pooled payouts is really cool and would really like to deploy it but it's a question of finding the technical resources to implement and start using something like that in spite of the fact that it's not going to make you more money right it's profit neutral it's not going to cost you more there's maybe slight efficiencies here and there if you optimize it sufficiently but it's a big lift to deploy something like that um so it's slow moving but i'm i'm optimistic i'm as well but uh what i want to dive more into is that you think this is critical for bitcoin's future yeah i mean i think it is you know i don't know if better hash specifically is but certainly hash rate

decentralization is very critical um you know bitcoin i i still say bitcoin is an experiment um we i i think there was there was a a quote i had on my talk yesterday that people were uh excited about on twitter sharing a lot on twitter at least um that was something to the effect of like look you know we still don't know if we can construct a system that is actually censorship resistant yeah right like a lot of people i would say maybe a majority of people who use bitcoin who maybe with the exception of some traders uh with the exception of just kind of the investment angle most of the other use cases of bitcoin are kind of enabled by censorship resistance at some level and to some extent bitcoin is censorship resistant today but that's more of an artifact

of community norms and uh you know regulators haven't caught up yet and whatever but those things are temporary you know the next generation of bitcoiners next generation of regulators can take that away and so if we don't have hash rate decentralization i'm not very confident that this property holds in the long run and i you know bitcoin is still experimental in that sense you know some people are trying to do proof of stake i think that's even worse from that angle um capital is pretty freaking centralized uh but yeah so and i think hopefully better hash is one way that we can move the needle on that you know i'm i am still pretty confident in you know the future of hash rate decentralization because hash rate itself is actually not as

centralized you know people look at the pool graphs and yes those are what matter today but if we switch to something like better hash well all of a sudden those pool graphs what really matters is the actual miners that make up the pool and not the pool and that is actually reasonably decentralized today you know pools or individual farms there are some massive individual farms but they don't represent 25 of the network in one farm that's what you're saying the last time you're on is that there's economies of scale in the mining especially around energy like you can't if you want to get 300 megawatts you just might not be able to find it one place yeah and cheap energy often comes in medium scales not not going to show up somewhere and get 500 megawatts of

cheap energy unless you literally buy a dam yeah and that's fine but you're still not going to be 25 of the bitcoin network i believe we're almost 10 months to the date of the first time you came on this podcast and then you gave bitcoin a five percent chance of becoming uh successful in the long run you know i think is that higher or lower at this point it's a little bit higher um because of the failure of 2x yeah i think through 2x through all of that drama and all of that noise um was really positive for kind of setting a precedent of how bitcoin should be governed so i'm working on a opinion piece that i guess i'll go ahead and tease i'm working on opinion piece right now that's kind of um a retrospective on the last 10 years of bitcoin

um that includes a kind of a discussion of like look this whole you know segwit activation in spite of court of like most bitcoin core contributors being relatively strongly against the method of activation bit 148 bit 148 plus the seg signal initial 2x uh segwit part and it only happening when kind of everyone got to claim they won yes you have your uh miners and businesses claiming that it was only because of 2x that it activated and you've got a bunch of very vocal twitter users and bitcoin users who are claiming that it only activated because of bip 148 and like it finally activated when everyone kind of was in favor of it activating and got to claim they won and then also the failure of the second half of 2x the hard fork

that got called off in spectacular fashion off by one so close yeah you know so close it happens bugs happen right um but but just like the politics around 2x the hard fork part of 2x failing really cemented the kind of social consensus around how Bitcoin should be governed in a way that sets it apart from all of the other cryptocurrencies in exactly the way that I wanted to see happen for Bitcoin. You know, there are many other cryptocurrencies.

If you don't like that, you can go use BCH or you can go use any one of these other ones and that's fine. But Bitcoin is governed in a much more unique way And that really makes me happy to see as it generates confidence in the long term and in the next generation of Bitcoiners still being able to use Bitcoin in the way that we love and not just us. Yeah. No. Well, you've had a long week. I told you it would only be 15 minutes.

We're at 15 minutes. I'm going to go take a nap. Yeah, go take a nap. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. uh for your work on core as always um and yeah that's it that's it we're gonna go find another guest downstairs awesome deuces what's up you freaks still here in riga sitting in a room it looks like somebody might have been tortured in at some point back in the day a lot of wires a lot

of hanging wires uh somebody very interesting with me right now somebody i'm fascinated with because of the way he exploded onto the Twitter and Medium scene over the course of the last six months in particular. But this person also just got into Bitcoin about 10 months ago, less than a year ago, and the pace at which he has caught up to speed with sort of what's going on in Bitcoin and everything else in the whole landscape of cryptocurrencies fascinates me.

I want to introduce you all to Hasu. Hasu, welcome to the pod. Thanks, Monty. Thanks for coming on, man. So let's jump into this. Let's talk about your history for a little bit. So you're you were a poker player, correct? Yeah, that's right. How long we play in poker ten years ten years every day Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah Why were you playing poker for ten years? How'd you get into poker?

Well, it was a hobby at first right like everything I start to make money with it and Yeah Okay, eventually it got professional. Yeah. What's it like being a professional poker player? Is it a fun profession? Would you recommend it? no definitely not why not i mean it's it's fun for a few select people right you can make money with it but it's a grind for like 99 of the rest so you're considered one of the top enchilada poker players yeah it says so yeah wow i'm honored to be speaking with you nah dude come on so back to bitcoin um again i'm fascinated so what i want to get out of this podcast uh for

freaks out there especially if you're newer to cryptocurrency and bitcoin in general i wanted to talk to how sue is because again like i said in the intro um fascinated with the pace at which you got caught up to speed and uh or sort of like you've written co-written some prolific pieces most recently the last two months with nick carter um who else did you write the second one so i had two articles with nick yeah and two with alexander legal yeah this framework for Yeah, the mental framework. Yeah, for valuating cryptocurrency. Yeah.

Think about if they can become valuable. Yeah. And the fact that you wrote that one in particular 10 months in is fascinating. So what I want to get out of this podcast again is how did you learn so fast? What were the resources you used? And what sort of was your routine? And how were there any particular resources or people in particular that sort of push you in the right direction? um so yeah let's just elaborate on that okay sure so i mean the most important thing is there's no

substitute for hard work i think for putting in just a lot of time and i've always been like an obsessive person i think that's that's how you become a good poker player as well and you just for me it's all about immersion so you if you pick a topic that's interesting to you i mean not everyone has like this obsessive kind of personality who can enjoy looking at the same topic every day and still find it interesting but for me that's the case so after i was done with poker i i had bitcoin on my list for a while because and i had the feeling there was something interesting there but the same reason that that made me good at poker was the reason that i usually i don't look at other stuff that could be a distraction so i want to think that that's

one of the reasons why i didn't get interested earlier but when i did i eventually made a full transition to bitcoin and i just um started reading listening watching like bitcoin related stuff yeah all day pretty much so how did you find the best resources how what was your filter and your filtering process so well in bitcoin when i got into i wouldn't even say bitcoin because it wasn't about bitcoin in the beginning it was just the crypto space okay so um i had was under the impression that there was an incredibly poor signal to noise ratio that was my first impression yeah why is this i don't know i i had this feeling that a lot of information that i got was wrong or misleading and often willfully so i mean i knew there was a lot of

money at stake for different people different groups of people and they had different incentives so i was worried about that right from the start pretty much that people give you information because it makes them money and they have something to gain yeah they have bags they're holding yeah exactly that's what we would say nowadays yeah um so the beginning was very hard very painful i'd say just wading through so much bullshit um i mean you get into like i had no one to guide me in the beginning let's say um a quick like i think the the first thing that helped me was finding some people who you can trust like personalities in the space who you think they have very few like a very they're very high signal very strong signal okay

and and then workers uh like latch on to them pretty much like nick sable was was definitely that guy for me in the beginning and it gave me a good start to like read through his entire archive

like of Bitcoin related hit up on enumerated blog yeah totally man yeah my first exposure to him was in the thing in the podcast

with Naval with yeah with Patrick O'Shaughnessy and I was some other guy some of the

startup investor like a famous guy yeah Patrick O'Shaughnessy I think right no No, no, someone has, but it doesn't matter. Jason Kalkanek?

No. No? I thought it was... We will find out later. We'll find out. Yeah. We'll put the link in the bio. Yeah.

I mean, the podcast was really good. I mean, that's what Naval and Nick got together to explain cryptocurrency, mostly focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum to the host of the podcast, like talking to a complete beginner. And he had all the beginner questions that I would have had in his position. So it was very helpful. And from there, I found Nick's blog and then latched onto that. And yeah.

You need to like filter, start filtering, like radically removing noise, I think, from the space. So I followed like a thousand people in the beginning on Twitter, on Twitter especially. Twitter is like hands down the best resource to learn about crypto. Like everything happens on Twitter. That's what I realized pretty soon.

you just see, like, what people did Nick engage with, for example. Which people does he follow? Which people does he talk to, especially? That's another thing that I found extremely helpful. On Twitter, you have this feature that you can get a notification for everything someone writes. Not only their tweets, but also their responses responses that wouldn't show up in your feed normally unless you follow like both persons

who are in the conversation there i did that very excessively i still do that today so when i want to i want to learn how someone thinks i who's active on twitter a lot then you just you activate notifications for them okay and then you get notified i've never done this dude is so good seriously you should try then you get i mean you can't do this for too many people at the same time just one or two okay and then you just get notified for every single thing they write and you just like just stalk them yeah just stalk every single conversation that they have and like eventually you have a mental model of them in your head like what kind of what kind of person they are yeah um how they think how they would respond and then i mean you keep them in your head you

carry them with you okay so i have a mental model of nick sabo in my head just from following him for two months on twitter and reading every single word that he said every single response and the response to that and you know you're basically stalking the whole conversation and now i have a small nick sabo in my head you know who i can ask if i have a question he would answer okay for example it's a great way to frame a mental model yeah it's from from a book i'm terrible at remembering names, but Napoleon, do you know this? Napoleon someone?

Napoleon Bonavarte? No, some other guy. I linked to the book as well, but he had this idea originally. It was like the author of that book followed like the most important people, the most successful people in the world. I can interview them,

basically derived lessons how to become successful that's the idea of the book and one core idea for him that oh i think that's the only idea that i remember from the book but i think it's very valuable is to have like this consortium of people in your head that you can talk to basically who are your advisors in for everything and i have this uh that's i totally adopted that and it was very hard before i went on twitter i mean i had as there was one person particularly in poker who was a close friend of mine who i respected a lot and i had this mental model of him in my head yeah so because but it was only possible because i had spent a lot of time talking to him yeah learning how he would respond and think about various things you know so i could ask him even

if he's not present but it was it's hard for people who don't know very well and that's where twitter comes in so big that you can follow you get notified you know for everything everything basically just you you start following them around you become like that little helper you know yeah that was extremely helpful i did it for nick and i did it for like i don't know know 30 40 other guys over time yeah and when i felt like there was there wasn't much new information from one guy then i moved to the next okay yeah so you sort of get a complete understanding of how their mental frameworks work yeah and then you move move on to the next exactly yeah i mean some people you you start discarding discarding pretty quickly if you learn how they

think you know definitely some of those uh in the space why would you discard them is it inconsistency just dumb ideas or yeah lots of like virtual signaling you know just think things that they don't mean just because it looks good and you want to cut through that which it's so hard yeah like you want to you want brutal honesty like if you learn that's that's like a very important idea i think yeah no it's a very important idea um laying the facts out just being pure uh getting the pure information and yeah what does actually happen oh and don't like you start out on crypto twitter there's so much wrong information you have to um i don't do this anymore but i think it was very helpful in the beginning to start blocking people very aggressively

so yeah whenever someone posted any like even people i respected before if they posted any reference to technical analysis i would block them instantly okay just because there was so much information i knew i wouldn't miss like anything from someone who believed in technical analysis like now i know some people who can do technical analysis yeah and who have like a mental model that works about that but those are not the people who give advice about technical analysis on twitter okay so that you have there you have to find some ways to reduce this universe of like 100 000 people on crypto twitter to 200 300 maybe 500 people who can you can follow and read everything off and consume everything off yeah and you have to find a way to do it and that was one

way for me like people who talk about price blocked okay people who talk about ta blocked like especially if it's like like irrational in either direction if it's like irrationally pessimistic or irrationally optimistic okay giving some mic instructions here um so how long did it take you to to build the confidence to sort of join the conversations on twitter oh i tried i tried that from the beginning yeah you don't you have you can't be afraid to be wrong like if you say something get corrected that's a very valuable learning experience yeah i'd say yeah i mean you expose yourself definitely and it's scary but where it helps is being synonymous right or anonymous so you have nothing to lose right you start as an

odd as a nobody and you can just start engaging with people's ideas you know and write your own ideas in response so that's where like pseudonymity i think helps tremendously yeah you don't bring the baggage of your past life you know you yeah that's so so important i think no it's uh no and again it is it is very important because that gives you the confidence to interact and then it's a meritocracy it's a meritocracy of ideas and you've quickly climbed the mountain of this meritocracy ah well yeah i definitely say it's a meritocracy yeah on twitter and especially in the bitcoin in the bitcoin universe yeah yeah so beyond like you being in the space uh and being interested in bitcoin right now like is is there are you driven ideologically like you're uh by

sound money or censorship resistance or sovereign money um well in the beginning i had no i had some ideas like why it could be valuable but i was i mean i was attracted by the same stuff that many people still believe in today you know like i know fed protocol thesis with a big was a big deal you know and like icos like democratizing finance this kind of stuff i mean you have no mental model to prove that wrong yeah if you start out okay so i participated in a couple ICOs and I bought a bunch of shit coins and then like only while learning like I was luckily I was able like to separate like the financial aspect and the learning aspect so I could I could draw a line between that and when I learned something then I made changes to my portfolio I only put a

small very small part of my total portfolio into crypto anyway yeah but I ended up reducing i wouldn't say i'm a bitcoin maximalist like by some kind of ideology or something but i just started removing everything that didn't make sense and bitcoin is the only thing like i'm totally convinced that bitcoin is the only thing that remains if you follow this process so yeah let's jump into your piece with alexander where you did the mental frameworks okay so how did you come to this conclusion sort of we both had no idea like that's how all my pieces the start out like except like one or two we had like a message that we wanted to convey there was that was the case and in just one or two articles and all the other ones it was

uh hey do you know about this topic like okay if you find someone who's also interested in working together with you and just learning together like social learning is like the way that i learn yeah okay yeah i can't sit down and like read i mean i can read for a few hours but i can't read alone every day no like it's not i don't think like maybe some people can but i can need to bounce ideas off people totally exactly yeah to constantly challenge each other bounce ideas and so when i want to learn about a new topic i find someone either who already knows about it who i respect and who can like mentor me even if it's only for a few days yeah but like this mentor and master um model mentor mentee yeah whatever that's called yeah it's super

helpful so yeah definitely like mentor other people who want to learn and become mentored you know yeah it's constantly look for people who can teach you so but in most articles was the the case that i i looked for someone who was on my level and who was also struggling to learn about a certain concept and in the example of this valuation framework we both were intellectually or like on a subconscious level we were completely convinced that it doesn't like tokens cannot accrue value unless they are being used as money but we couldn't explain it in a way that was satisfying to us and that started i don't know three weeks process where we try to argue from first principles why it's impossible yeah and let's talk about sort of walk us through this

thought experiment in particular because you start out with like a very very wide view of a token economy and basically narrow it down to the only way this works yeah i mean i don't have all the premises in my head right now because it's yeah we don't have to we don't have to touch on all them but yeah i mean the first idea was like make a draw a comparison to between a decentralized protocol and like a company you know something where value is uh i mean yeah that pretty much we dove into that in the second article because we thought it wasn't sufficiently worked out in the first one there was some holes in the logic there that's why we made the second article that showed like exactly the difference

between a decentralized protocol and a company and that the company has to create value but also capture it. Okay. Exactly. And I think in the first one, we worked through like what needs to happen for the price to go up, for example.

and we showed that lack of tokens are only used as working capital to basically help for a short time then there's no there can never be like sufficient pressure on the price to upward pressure go up yeah and that in terms like the protocol itself insecure and like the you can never have this virtual virtual cycle that you have in Bitcoin you know where the price goes up it's more secure and so on yeah so yeah protocols need to be removed uh protocols tokens need to be removed permanently from circulation they need to be held i think vj called it like engine reserve or whatever but um they need to be held by people like their use case needs to be holding and not

using yeah okay um and then you can have the sufficient uh upwards price pressure to make these tokens investable i'm gonna turn them into money so that's that's another thing i like to expound upon oh yeah that was the second part right yeah it's uh why only one money token is gonna yeah through any significant value yeah and another thing that gets lost on people is i just want to take time for this to become money like yeah and we are in the price discovery phase so even though bitcoin is very volatile right now people are holding holding is okay yeah dive into why holding is okay because this has been a terrible meme

that's been propagating I think I want to take a step back because at this point I realized like how valuable it was that I learned at least a little bit about Austrian economics okay like I had zero exposure to it in the beginning when I started

out in crypto but I realized that like people in the space were attracted so I had to at least check it out and I I started learning about it and at the same time, a little bit later, I took also an online course, a MOOC on microeconomics and they both worked very well together because if you're arguing about tokens, about money, about networks, you have to have a model how actors are going to behave. you know what's rational for them how they're going to be how they're going to behave on their own or in groups and you know just what kind of behavior can you expect from them and in the example of money i think that was very very helpful because you can i mean in the case

of money you can that's exactly what austral economics is about like looking at what the individual is doing yeah um and not some kind of aggregates you know yeah arguing from some from statistics but you you isolate one economic actor and you can do that for like everyone in the economy but everyone has their own incentives and it's their own agent and um in in the example of money i don't know like i know which money i would accept as payment like which and which money i would want to hold and which one i wouldn't hold and it's it's of course the the biggest most liquid most saleable one and that's i mean i i know that it's rational because i went through the process i bought a ton of shit coins who are like all inferior forms of money and i started

discarding them one by one by one until one money remains and i mean maybe i went through the process faster than other people but i'm convinced that they will eventually go through the same process and that's why i believe that all monies will collapse into one yeah and uh that's sort of the ethos of the newsletter of the bent and this podcast is to try to help uh speed up that process and i think this conversation in particular is very very enlightening will be very enlightening for some people oh if you don't follow marty marty's band you said i have to give a huge shout out to him because uh it was the first newsletter that i followed and for the first i don't know three to four months it was the only one that i followed thank you um i i tried

following many of them but i just unfollowed them relatively quickly and this was the only one that i was i was subbed to the entire duration and when i yeah when i started out i i ran one episode but then i i thought okay i can't wait like i can't wait until tomorrow so i went on your home page and read the last 50 ones in a row. Thank you. Humbled that it helped you out. I had an effect on your learning experience.

Totally did, man. And you also, this is like a huge example about how learning works, I think. You're like a perfect example of that. A great example for the community because you have to

incentivize yourself to learn. If you're learning, you have to learning is not always fun you know i mean being rewarded is fun but learning doesn't always reside in rewards so you have to create your own incentive loop you know your own your own kind of process that rewards you for learning and twitter is it's just twitter is one fantastic way because if you learn about something then you can you know tweet it out you know and people like it you know retweet it it's it's like it's totally it's addicting and even like when you get to a certain point then you can also write an article about it like even if it's very short one just

write about a topic that you learned about and then put it out and then other people will say wow i learned something say thanks for that's one outcome and it's it feel i can only say it feels incredibly rewarding and the other outcome is like hey um good effort but you missed like this and this and this and this and that's and then it's also rewarding because you just you know a bit you just learn more yeah exactly you have to you have to love learning but you can definitely stimulate the process by getting into a feedback loop yeah yeah no again thank you for the kind words uh no but that has the the newsletter is a feedback loop for me it is not fun getting up early and writing that every day but it is uh worth it i think i mean yeah you

always tweet about it as well and then you get a lot of likes retweets and comments every day yeah and that gotta be rewarding and i'm not always right the newsletter to me is like really raw i just write it i don't even read it before i hit submit i just write it's a free flow consciousness and then hit submit and uh see what people think but that's the best way yeah like you you can't polish until you're totally satisfied yeah ain't nobody got time for that no ain't nobody got time for that yeah yeah you have to expose yourself get your ideas out there like let your ideas speak for you yeah and be evaluated by others you know and if they suck then yeah you're gonna

gonna get criticized but you're gonna do better next time you know like being criticized is of course very important. I don't want to say you have to have thick skin but you just have to be open to constructive criticism which is something you should be open to in all forms of life not only Bitcoin. All areas of life, all forms

of life. You shouldn't be constructively criticizing other animals or anything like that. Yeah, so probably got like five minutes left here beyond all the resources you just described is there anything else that helped massively? or so what i struggled the most with was because i'm not i'm not technical okay so

what i struggled the most with was understanding how bitcoin works on a protocol level like the ins and outs that was definitely like i have a i have a better intuitive feeling for economic concepts logic than anything technical so i think my process could be helpful for some people because what i do when i learn about something that i don't really understand is i don't force myself to learn from a certain source so i've ordered two different books to try to learn about bitcoin and i'm not too i'm not ashamed to admit that they went totally over my head and i found it incredibly dry and boring and i didn't didn't give a shit yeah okay so i put them down and yeah that's what happened to the first book and i bought the second book and i tried again and

again it didn't feel like it didn't feel interesting or rewarding to learn about bitcoin yeah so i kept i knew i had this like urgent feeling that it's important you know so i looked for different sources and i listened to like an audio book about like some some kind of recording and then i eventually read through some more articles and then eventually found a um youtube video that explained it like in an animated way but really slowly methodically yeah and um and that's when it started like i didn't grasp it right away but that's when it started like working and then i like for each i don't know minute of the video i I wrote it down.

What I thought was how it worked, you know, and like the video was 40 minutes, but I don't spend like eight hours going through the video again and again. Just, yeah. Damn. And now it feels more intuitive to me. Yeah. Well, your dedication to learning is inspiring.

Yeah, but I mean, it took forever to find one source that was even acceptable. So don't be afraid to discard sources. don't force yourself to read boring stuff read boring stuff i mean there's so much stuff out there that you're eventually going to find something that speaks to you it was the same in poker like many concepts didn't click for me the first 10 times that i read it and then i found like then someone said the very same thing explained the very same concept but in a slightly different way and suddenly it clicked yeah and it's not about forcing yourself to understand it the first 10 times but just keep going eventually you find a one explanation that really works for

you and it really clicks for you because everyone is different yeah everybody comes to these understandings from different paths yeah everyone has like different prior knowledge you know and everyone's brain is working differently yeah yeah like i'm more of an audio and visual learner yeah i hate reading yeah me too man yeah i listen to like that's that's something else that i did like listen to three podcasts a day just while doing random stuff you know that's my podcasts are so awesome that's yeah that's what it's i'm lucky to work on the homework and just yeah doing workout in bed yeah just by doing the dishes and stuff you know all right well it's been enlightening we're exactly a half hour in now awesome thanks for coming on dude

thanks for having me uh it was my pleasure i think uh the freaks are gonna like this one peace and love