TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #117: Wiz & m52go

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Wiz and m52go from the Bisq project to discuss: - The origins of Bisq - How Bisq works - Mining - Why KYC/AML does more harm than good - Why privacy is important - The Bisq DAO - much more Check out and download Bisq: https://docs.bisq.network/getting-started.html Follow Wiz on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wiz Follow m52go on Twitter: https://twitter.com/m52go Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Casa. Use promo code “TFTC” to get up to $250 off your Casa membership … or hit their team up [e-mail] for a free demo, or to put them to the test with your hardest OpSec questions! Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. Matt O'Dell and I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Wiz and Steve Jane from the BISC team. A lot of BISC talk in this episode, which is great talk. The nature of non-custodial exchanges, why they're important, why people should care about their privacy, how the incumbent financial system that we currently are subjected to disregards our privacy and probably makes us worse off in the long run because of all the KYC AML compliance that they put us through.

On top of that, we talked about some more stories throughout the years. Wiz is a very fascinating person within Bitcoin in particular. You guys are going to hear some cool stories about the space back in the day, specifically around the DAO hack and the hard fork of Ethereum around that period.

So I hope you guys enjoy it. I know I did. I thoroughly did. I was very fortunate to have Wiz in person in the studio, very gracious for him traveling to come make this happen. It's very humbling, and it was great to meet these gentlemen in person and hear their story and hear more about BISC. I think you guys are going to like it as well.

I think it is going to be a project that becomes more and more popular in this space years to come. We forget how early on we are here. this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by the cash app as you know as you freaks already know you've been listening to this for a while cash app is the simplest way to send and save money you can stack sats on the app you can send sats off the app you can use their boost program to go to immersion and save money uh you can do it it's they're just trying to help you be better with your money now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money introducing cash app investing unlike investing tools that only let you buy entire shares of a stock cash app lets

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multi-sig setup go to keys.casa slash keymaster check them out use the code tftc secure those bitcoins i hope you guys enjoyed this episode i know matt and i certainly did what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here thursday it's thursday on a thursday afternoon with two very special guests two team members from the best project we got matt odell as well what's up freaks like to introduce you freaks to wiz and steve jane thank you so much for coming hey cypherpunks okay thanks for having us um yeah so this is going to be a big bisque episode we're going to get to bisque we just had a long conversation uh warming up before we hit record i think we should start uh what can

segue nicely into bisque is starting with you wiz back go all the way back to the dalhack mining ethereum classic after the the hard fork state transition bail out whatever you want to call it um that's one so for you freaks that don't know wiz is an og in the space who's done some incredibly cool stuff this being one of the coolest things i think uh mining ethereum classic to keep the chain alive why did you do it yeah so in case you don't know um ethereum had this smart contract called the DAO. It was the Slocket DAO. Slocket. Yeah.

Anyway, they got hacked because of some horrible security vulnerabilities in their smart contract and this attacker drew out just millions and millions of dollars worth of stolen Ethereum token. And of course, the

founders of the Slocket DAO, also being some of the same people who are founding Ethereum, they said, oh, no problem. We'll just do a hard fork roll back the transactions and do a charge back and it'll be totally fine and if you're a cypherpunk you know that rule number one of cryptocurrencies is that you have this immutable blockchain technology and you don't you don't roll back transactions you don't do a charge back because that would just be like a bank if your credit card gets hacked you call up american express hey i got hacked oh no problem we'll just take it off the bill right and this

is what ethereum is trying to do so me being the guy with a warehouse full of gpus at the time you know it was probably like only 0.2 percent of the ethereum mining hash power i knew that ethereum that the legacy blockchain um it was called like ethereum classic at the time i guess we were just coming up with this name would still be around like there's no way this is just going to die out because censorship as a feature is not going to be very popular and so there's this command line argument on the Ethereum node, you could do reject DAO fork. So I just kept mining on the old consensus rules. And my 0.2% on the Ethereum chain became something like 50% on the Ethereum classic chain. And if you actually look in the blockchain, there was a period where I was

mining like all the blocks, you can see where I mine like 30 something in a row, and I was actually 100% of the Ethereum classic hash power. So I don't know what the other guys dropped out or whatever but I knew this would be extremely profitable because there was this app at the time called bit square and they had this ethereum classic token listed do you remember this Steve when when ETC started to be traded on this square I think that was a little bit before my time I think I joined just just after the rename to bisque right so basically you know my experience at the time was you download this app and it syncs up to the network and it showed me that the price

discovery time was like a dollar and I was mining like half of all the ethereum classic at the time so you know with my electricity bill this was like a no-brainer for my profitability so I cranked up all my miners all my gpus to like 120 you know I'm telling all my guys go to the fries and buy all the gpus you can like we're going to just mine the hell out of this etc thing and we mined something like 26 000 ethereum classic in three days and then he got mine and then he got listed on planix uh at like two dollars and they went to like four or five bucks and we were like oh my god this is like the best call ever right like all the investors are like opening the champagne you know they're really happy then i think went up to like 40 bucks at the peak so if the investors kept it

and held it and traded properly that was probably like a million dollar decision to reject censorship so like the key there was when the fork happened all the exchanges were went in line with the ethereum foundation and vitalik and stuff so none of them were listing uh the original chain to begin with right and you had to use something like a bit square bisque which later became big running beef i have with coinbase is that they took like a year and a half to release yeah yeah i mean that's exactly it um over 99 of the mining hash power and literally all the exchanges went along with Vitalik and the only exchange was BitSquare that was trading the the ETC token and then and then plenty of started trading it and then it was it was like

Oh my god, all the users were demanding their exchanges to give them the ETC. That was now obviously very valuable Yeah, and I think you glossed over something there Slight detail you said they followed Vitalik Vitalik literally hopped in a chat room and told the exchanges to stop trading. Oh, yeah If that's not centralization, you know is is ethereum sufficiently decentralized now today oh yeah for sure garren's bond barons put all your money in ethereum in fact isn't ud like one of their best uh developer advocates now apparently yes he's a big ethereum shill these days no he's full-on tron now oh he's shifted over yeah all right all right guys it's tron now tron is ethereum 3.0 yeah according to ud

oh straight to 3.0 we're not even gonna get 2.0 you know who needs 2.0 yeah well it'll be It's funny because they just changed their difficulty bomb again. Oh yeah, when's Casper coming again? What was that, a proof of stake they've been working on for five, six years now? I have a long thread documenting the pushbacks of the Ethereum roadmap. It's the reverse Lindy. The longer you wait, the longer you will be expected to wait for proof of stake. Just keep that in mind, Ethereans.

So this event led you to BISC, right? Well, that was my first experience with BISC, yeah. I actually didn't use it after that until a few months, maybe like four or five months ago I started getting involved in BISC again. Steve, how did you get involved with BISC? I think it was a tweet. I think I remember seeing a tweet about documentation, and I guess I've been into writing

and was wanting that kind of a role or to do that kind of work, and when I saw, I had been introduced to BISC a couple of months before the tweet and so I had my eye on the project and I liked what they were doing and when this opportunity came up to write documentation for the project I just thought maybe I would give it a try and got to talk to some people on the project, got to see more about what they were trying to achieve, how the work was actually getting done, the community,

and just got more and more into it. And when was this exactly? I found out about the project at the end of 2017 and then I made my first contribution in early 2018. All right. So I think this is a good segue into 7.24, mark it down, we're going to edit it later. Sorry, there was some feedback in the air, I just started here. This is a good point to give the mark, not the marketing pitch, but obviously you use

BISC to create an Ethereum classic market back in the day, how has the experience changed since then, what is the ethos, and what is the current state today? So I guess the ethos is, at least the way I think of it as the game changer, in my opinion, is that BISC is taking what traditionally is a company that provides a service and has turned it into software, a network. You know, the common kind of phrase, the way we conceptualize it is, if Bitcoin gives you the ability to be your own bank, BISC gives you the ability to be your own exchange.

You're a node on an exchange network where you can trade Bitcoin for fiat currencies and other cryptocurrencies and so you know this is software it's open source free software that you can download build yourself audit it yourself from top to bottom run it and you know the the software itself is a hidden service so everything goes over Tor all data goes over Tor there are no accounts user accounts emails nothing required it's just you your node You can connect it to your full node, of course, and go to town, trade Bitcoin. I think the biggest thing for me is the incentives. When you have a company, they eventually all pretty much turn out to be evil, right?

Even Google started out as this tiny little startup when we're not going to be an evil, and they turn into this huge conglomerate where they're monetizing users' private data as much as they can. and it's simply because the incentives of the or the interests of the shareholders do not align with the interest of the users in fact they're like exact opposites in a lot of cases but in the case of bisque it's a community of individuals just like bitcoin and i'm very bullish on this community of individuals concept because everyone's aligns are perfectly in consent uh perfectly everyone's interests are perfectly aligned we're all incentivized to build and collaborate on this It's kind of like Wikipedia or any of these Creative Commons types of projects.

They're just, you know, pure success, right? And it's like the first model where you can just remove all the corporate compliance department. There's a lot of government regulations, you know, just we're not affected by any of this simply because we're individuals running software, whereas every other centralized exchange out there would have to comply because they're a company and they have to be evil not necessarily because they want to but because the government is going to force them to and i think a perfect example is like shapeshift they started out as this no kyc was like their whole value add and sure enough government puts

the gun to their head they now require mandatory full kyc and so the the way that bisque uh you know maintains its financial self-sovereignty is by not being a company by being a community of individuals that just collaborate to an open source project where there are no servers there's no central point of failure you know as much as as much as we can we're always trying to improve the software to make it more censorship resistant yeah there's almost i think uh you could say kind of like a reverse pressure like because it's an open source code base and not a company that has everything just kind of locked behind in a black box if the project were to make a misstep it would just get forked so it's like this pressure that okay this project is about privacy

security and freedom and if it doesn't stick to that it's it's going to be over it's going to be forked yeah so one thing we talk a lot about on this podcast we just alluded to with shapeshift is these shitcoin casinos get a lot of liquidity market themselves as the no kyc no aml uh place to trade binance is a perfect example most recently they blew up in 2017 and uh this year strapped kyc aml and everybody particularly americans um now and not even particularly everybody they had a big uh data dump with people's um passports and selfies yeah that's not good we don't want that and that's so i guess where do we want to go let's before we get into the uh the problems historically that viscous has with liquidity and ux and bootstrapping a

network effect like let's get into the idiocy of kyc aml and like why collecting all this data is stupid steve do you want to take this one i mean where do you even begin oh i guess why why do it i think the the case that's being made traditionally is that it's for your safety We don't want you to be trading with bad people. We don't want you to be scammed by other people. We want to keep people safe. Think about the children. What about the terrorists?

Exactly. You need to get all your private data for this. But I think the foundational reason and the reason that the approach that BISC takes is it's not really about that. It shouldn't really be about identity. It should be more about integrity. So verifying integrity as opposed to verifying identity. So on BISC, we just recently implemented account signing with the most major recent release. And the idea there is that there were some bank account scammers over the past few months ago

where people were using stolen bank accounts to buy Bitcoin on BISC because there were no checks. You pretty much put your bank account information in the software and take a trade or take an offer to buy Bitcoin, buy the Bitcoin and then turn around and just do a charge that the person who rightfully owned the account would see this charge and then do a charge back the other person would be scammed so the approach that we've taken to to fix that is to devise a way for a bank account owner to prove that they actually own the account so not submit a passport not submit whatever video proof or blood sample whatever this people are these people are doing these days just do a trade i don't and i

wouldn't be surprised if we see blood samples in the future i think edward snowden originally made that joke somewhere but um yeah just like do a trade prove that you actually own this account do a successful trade where there isn't a chargeback and you're probably good and we have other methods coming to verify but who do you do that first trade with you would do that first trade with a person who has already been signed so signed accounts have higher trade limits and then uh people who have unsigned accounts uh so you keep them below a threshold basically until yeah so you're limited to 0.01 like a reputation system kind of well i think i i i would i would kind of disagree with it it's more of a security vulnerability mitigation mechanism um the

reputation system uh we can talk about that in a bit but in this case the way it works technically is um you take your bank account information and you make like a cryptographic digest it's like a you know shaw 256 hash of it so nobody can see what your bank account number is but the hash of it is now locked in and this gets stored um in everybody's uh bisque nodes and after they see that this data has been on their node for more than one month and this same account is still around they know well if he was a scammer he probably would have got the account closed within the same bank account exactly that's what that's what i was going to say this could be the way i envision it could be game to somebody just there's a good actor in the beginning and then scams

people after they get verified yeah but but if you do some chargebacks they're going to figure it out and they're going to close the account within one month like that's fraud sure yeah and you have normal yeah so and and again this is only for very insecure payment methods right like i live in japan and well japanese bank transfers don't allow chargebacks because that's a stupid idea. Really? I mean like I really honestly don't understand how American or even European banks can just you can just call them and be like oh yeah my account got hacked and they'll like reverse all the charges again it's going back to the Ethereum thing but if you're like a merchant and you know you ship the goods thinking that you have the money and then the bank

takes it out of your account like PayPal and other insecure guys who do this right it's how can you even have like a business right they put the pressure on the merchant to almost vet the customers to make sure that they're not scammers or something, right? Which you can't do in a lot of cases. There's, you know, there's like these high-risk credit card payment processors, and it's like this whole other industry for that type of stuff. But yeah, I mean, the account signing is, it's more of a security for insecure payments. They're trying to make them like a little bit more secure by adding this time delay thing. I don't know if you want to talk about the bonded reputation. This is kind of a feature in BISC we haven't used widely still yet, but we're going to

at it very soon the way it works is um all right i want to i want to be a market maker i want to do uh trading on bisque as like my full-time thing and uh so to in order for people to see that i'm not just some random scammer i'm going to lock up a whole bunch of money in the bisque network itself and um what we're going to do is we're going to modify the app to have like a score so if the guy has no money bonded it's got like a like a bond right so if you do something bad If you scam people say I trade with Steve and I scam him, but I have a bond he can go to the bisque You know decentralized organization and say you should confiscate this guy's bond because he scanned me and then you have this very decentralized way of You know enforcing that why am I thinking that Adam Gibson was working on something similar to this?

Like a bond for like a coin join Network, too. I don't know But no, it seems very interesting, right? Well, I mean that's that's how things work in like a crypto anarchy system right if everybody has perfect privacy you have to assume that everyone are like scammers and so the only way you can kind of steer steer people into the right thing just like bitcoin you have to financially incentivize good behavior and financially disincentivize the bad behavior so scammers aren't going to put money out out of their own pocket and risk it risk losing it just to you know scam like little trades here and there they're going to go after some other lower hanging

fruit and that's what the bond system i think really should it just it just prevents all scams basically when you have to put the security deposit and the security deposit the hard part here is interacting with fiat right so like the security deposit that's in i'm assuming in bitcoin right yes and like a multi-sig or something like that yes there's there's security deposit on each trade which you can figure how many percent you want to do and then there's this bonded um reputation kind of a system where you can lock up a certain amount of money for like uh one month or three months or six months whatever time period you want to do and then that also like influence your uh quote-unquote reputation score which we're still implementing right now and you mean steve

you want to explain like how the whole trade process works because i think you're really good at explaining that i usually trip over myself and trying to do that but sure i um so essentially you're uh i guess it's important to first outline that there is no like order matching on this there is no real single order book what you see on in the software when you open it is a collection of offers from other people's nodes who are online at the moment, which is kind of the basis of the peer-to-peer network. Every node hosts its own offers

and has its own payment accounts. When you want to take an offer on BISC, you send a Bitcoin deposit. Usually it's about 10% or 20% of the full trade amount to a multi-sig. address and the other person the offer maker will do the same and Once that transaction hits one confirmation The buyer is told to send the money

Acknowledge that they've done so in BISC once they have and then once the seller receives the payment They'll acknowledge that they've received the payment in BISC and at that point deposits and the trade, the Bitcoin amount are routed to the buyer and the seller appropriately. Yeah, this is a really secure system because for the two party, the two trade counterparties to enter into a trade at all, to even begin, they would both have to have their funds in the multi-sig escrow with at least one blockchain confirmation. So if for some reason the multi-sig escrow doesn't get confirmed maybe there was a you know there was like an attacker trying to do some invalid thing then you could never risk losing any of your funds because

the funds would never leave your wallet right it's it either goes into the escrow or it stays in your wallet there's no it's either all or nothing that's the beauty of the multisig escrow on-chain transaction right yeah and then from there once they have the funds in the multisig you just got to deal with the fiat stuff and as long as you can mitigate the security on that you can this really uh smooth trade process just really quick i think it's important to mention for folks who are not familiar with bisque that all non-bitcoin transactions or transfers happen off of bisque so when you're doing when you're sending uh us dollars and euros or whatever

you're sending it through your bank or through another payment app or whatever and then just acknowledging that you've done so or received in this so what is uh from the user's perspective what does their bank think they're doing just sending money to somebody a friend they assume as a friend or something like that yeah depends on the payment method right like uh japanese bank transfer um actually respects the user's privacy so they don't ask what the bank transfer is for uh in some countries like real totalitarian societies um like when you do a bank wire in like usa or you know really like they ask like what are the what are the funds for i think japan is an anomaly here i mean most places you have like a reason for payment they like strip search

you dude i've had my bank text me shut down my card and text me like three times in the last month because I'm trying to use my card somewhere and they're like we think this is suspicious yeah I mean they pretty much if they suspect you for any reason I think usually what we what we require is whenever possible for users to put in

a trade like a string a random alphanumeric string that corresponds with the trade and I think some payment processors seem to have maybe caught on to that and kind of regard that as suspicious but for the most part they don't say anything

Yeah, I mean you got to be careful of mo right you can't even uh, well you can't even say like the word I ran without getting shut down How does the escrow arbitration work like who is who's controlling the other keys there in the multisig besides the two parties? So right now it's so with the the launch of the most recent version 1.2. It's just the traders It's a two of two multisig got it. It used to be two of three where an arbitrator had a third key But now it's just the traders and dispute resolution has changed quite a bit. Yeah, this had this It's kind of maybe do a little background on the Dow But basically before the bisque Dow was launched

There was a two of three multi-sig escrow where an arbitrator had a third key and he could resolve a dispute between the two parties but obviously, this is a trusted third party and a central point of failure and And, you know, we had to get rid of the arbitrators. So now that the BISC DAO is online and functioning healthy, what we did was we removed the arbitrators, and now we have mediators on there, which have no power. It's a two-to-two multisig between the two trade parties.

So all the mediator can really do is help the newbies when they make a mistake. And this is actually the majority of issues. Like, the actual rate of scamming is very, very low. it's just people who had a bug or they screwed up their wallet or they pressed the wrong button or something like this and mediator can resolve most of these disputes but if the mediator cannot resolve the speeds like the other person just disappears which does kind of happen rarely um because you know they have their money in the security deposit so why would they disappear right why would they disappear um who knows but uh yeah they're gonna risk losing their security

deposit if they disappear so there's this time lock transaction where i think it's uh 10 days for crypto and 20 days for fiat yeah where if the trade is not resolved in this much time after it enters the multi-sig escrow um it'll essentially go to this um how do you say like uh donation yeah donation address it's kind of like not the right word for it but basically no no but it works because um the money will get donated to the bisk dao donation address but what happens is you have this um kind of like the role formerly known as arbitrator maybe you can call them the underwriter now or something the refund agent where he'll just buy the um this uh the the trader's claim so if you're so 20 days after this um trade fails you're going to get your money back from the art

trader he's going to buy your claim it's a secondary market's already for me right but at 100 so you get fully cashed out and then this um underwriter guy is going to go to the bisque now and ask for a reimbursement for the money that got donated to that donation address and so he's not a party of your trade at all but if you do have a dispute with this trade party he will buy you out a hundred percent and then he'll settle it with the dow on his own time and so at least the deposit is unlocked forever right right that's basically what it's yeah because otherwise if um someone's computer just you know blew up or something they weren't able to complete the trade then this would be the the ultimate way of resolving it and but this way

we're also like bisque is even that bisque underwriter guard he's not never a party to a trade, right? It's just totally between those two people. Unless it fails, he can buy the claim and recover the funds. I think it's important to point out that the back end might sound a little complex and confusing for a new user, but for a user, it's largely the same as before. You're working with a mediator, and that mediator is going to give you a suggested payout. It's a button. Do I take it or not? If you take it, trade's over, and you get your funds. If not, then you request arbitration and the arbitrator will just pay you

that coin. That's it. You don't have to worry about the DAO or reimbursement. I think we need to change the terminology on that because it's not arbitration anymore. It was just to not confuse the users. We've got to change it to underwriter or fund agent or something. What type of users are becoming arbiters?

Are people seeing this as something that could be profitable in the future? I think one day it could be. We're coming from a time when arbitrators were highly trusted roles and so we and also i don't think we need we have a need for more arbitrators that are more refund agents at the moment right um but as volume grows and as the the the network grows in other countries and other regions and we have a need for more languages uh then we'll probably have marketplace developed for that yeah yeah that's fascinating and so let's jump into the the clunky

side of it like or not the clunky side but like it what bisque has been around for a while and it's competing with uh centralized exchanges that make it very easy to buy bitcoin what's it been like trying to bootstrap this network effect and and get it into more people's hands probably been a i'd call it a long slow process yeah it's uh yeah i mean it's it's still like you can if you if you open the software if you open the program at a you know a bad time in your in your region and you might not see too many offers. And I think a lot of people get scared away by this, but the one thing that folks should know, I think,

is that there are a lot of lurkers. And if you make an offer, I mean, you'll probably get it taken pretty quickly. That's the thing. Nobody really wants to be the maker, right? Everybody wants to be the taker. But yeah, there's a few issues, right? Anytime you have a decentralized system,

the UX always suffers as a result. It's going to be slower than a centralized system. Your credit card's always going to be faster than uh well meeting someone in starbucks and exchanging cash or something like this right and um and not only does ux offer we have like less liquidity right because you go on a centralized exchange there's a bazillion offers the market uh very deep in both ways whereas on a you know local trading pair like in japan we might only have a few offers on the on the offer book at any time so you know you just gotta everyone wants to be the taker you know they want like

the instant result like i want to sell bitcoin now let me go to the offers and they'll usually take an offer so this this creates a market maker uh opportunity right it kind of reminds me of bitcoin in that um there's really no reason to use bitcoin until you have no other option right and then all of a sudden you really realize the value of bitcoin right and it's with biscuits a similar idea like if if you have a way to get bitcoin without kyc uh quicker you know centralized like you'll do it but as we see kyc get implemented you know throughout the world we saw local bitcoins add kyc uh then people come to this because that is their only option right that's the only option for a lot of people uh for example in japan the centralized exchanges are only allowed

to trade a few coins that the government has has whitelisted and um they don't want to whitelist monero because it has privacy so for some uh things like if you want to trade monero in japan Your only option is bisque even in a free country like Japan So it's already the only option or like me with the Aetherium classic story earlier like before any centralized exchange Listed it its square was was the first. I mean it works even better with altcoins right because the whole The Fiat the Fiat ramp is a major pain point in general. I'm not a huge fan of the altcoins I'm always been you know more maximalist guy, but in terms of actual like cryptographic enforcement and whatnot Oh, yeah, I mean, that's the easiest to prove a trade dispute either sent the money or not

Here's the blockchain block Explorer link, right? It's the Fiat stuff That's always a pain in the butt, but you know, you can you can work around that there's There's different payment methods that we support, you know We try to do something more creative with gift cards or something like this That would be really cool if we figure this out. So is there any stable coin integration? Is there any like tether we tether tether, but nobody traded it. So I think got delisted They're like I think like two or three but they yeah, I don't think there's any volume on them Matt, you mentioned LocalBitcoins that in KYC, did you guys see like an influx of users

after that? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I joined the project, like, probably was like five months ago. So in Japan, in Tokyo, our LocalBitcoin community, we have a really cool meetup group of cypherpunk people. And we actually just use LocalBitcoins as like a Excel sheet. We didn't actually use the custodial escrow because nobody wanted to trust LocalBitcoins.

And there's no real crime in Tokyo. So you can just meet someone in a Starbucks, exchange thousands of dollars, never have any issue. Um, I mean, you know, it's just, um, sitting here in New York city, it's like, yeah, in New York city, quite the difference, but, um, local Bitcoin shut down the face to face cash, uh, offer book. And so we lost our Excel sheets, a spreadsheet. So I actually went to BISC and I was like, we actually just want like a decentralized

Excel sheet. If we could just have that offer book. And if you look at the JPY offer book, now there's some guys doing that where they put like a one yen buy offer and then they put a note that says just email me with uh because they don't want to use the uh security escrow features of bisque they don't want to pay the trading fees and that's fine too right it's like it's a censorship resistant uh you know like how is the government like going to censor this message right well that's a big assumption we've been making on this podcast that people will meet on local bitcoins or something like bisque once or

twice and just have that connect and use them directly is that something that you've seen in your so i have a lot of friends who are market makers on bisque actually and um they generally want to keep trading if they meet someone on bisque they generally want to keep trading on bisque even if they um kind of trust each other a little bit just because all the security uh mitigations are in place like um yeah maybe we do a lot of business together but why would i want to just stop using multi-sig escrow which guarantees my security in the case that you screw me over right it's like the the risk benefit analysis is like oh i guess we could save maybe a dollar on the trading fee but i would lose all my protections right don't trust verify

right exactly yeah um that's so how do we see this moving forward like are you guys bullish on right now you got the dow so let's talk about the dow you got the dow token and this is basically trying to incentivize people to build stuff out correct bounties and that's part of it I would say that, I would say it's a little bit bigger than that. And the DAO, I think, is a big reason that I've been so fascinated by the project. And let's preface this. Is this a DAO? Is this a shitcoin?

Let's talk about the token. Colored Bitcoin is how we've kind of preferred to refer to it lately. Yeah, there was no ICO or anything like this. And to use BISC, you don't need to use the BSQ. It's actually mostly for the contributors to use internally. But the way I like to explain it is that when you pay your trading fees, you can choose to pay them in Bitcoin or you can choose to pay them in BSQ. And if you pay with BSQ, then this BSQ just gets decolored back into normal Satoshis.

And so you're burning this BSQ from the supply. And the only way BSQ gets issued is by the contributors because there's no BISC company to do some BISC ICO scam. It's just the contributors, say if I implemented like dark mode into the app or something like this, maybe I get like a few thousand BSQ, and now I can go on the BISC exchange and sell my BSQ to the customers, the users, the traders, and get Bitcoin to pay my rent or my other living expenses, and they're going to use that to pay their trading fees. So it's this very cool like closed-loop economy where the users trading fees are directly going to pay the contributors living expenses But who issues that BSQ to the contributor who created dark mode or so? It's a it's a colored Bitcoin. So I'm taking my own Bitcoin my own Satoshi's and I'm creating a proposal in our Dow governance this system and if Steve approves my compensation request my Satoshi's will be

colored into BSQ and so they only exist on the Bitcoin blockchain and they're just sats but they're in a different wallet now and I can trade this BSQ to somebody else who has the same BSQ colored Bitcoin wallet and you know it's built into the business. Right so I guess my question is who approves that proposal? Everybody, it's a vote. So it's like there's a voting system? Right. You want to explain that to you? Yeah so it's a you can think of it like yeah Yeah, like a voting system where, for example, the proposal kind of thing that was just mentioned is a Bitcoin transaction. You would ask for, you know, I did this much work this month, and I think I deserve this much in BSQ compensation.

You would make a proposal transaction with that request along with the sats that you would need to produce that quantity of BSQ. And then in the voting, the next round, the next phase of the process is a voting cycle where each person in the community who wants to vote will go through the lists of proposals that were made in that cycle and yay or nay, accept or reject each one. And that's weighted based on how much BSQ they have? Yeah. Is that how that works? There's a little bit more to it, but yeah, pretty much how much you have and how much you've earned. Got it. earned bsq is worth a little bit more than bought bsq to prevent against whales from coming in and

just so contributors have more of a vote basically yeah skin in the game right skin in the game exactly yeah um that's so do you see this evolving like beyond cryptocurrencies yeah you could take the dial model and apply it to other open source projects right because um i guess i guess the critical component is that bisque is its own exchange so it can trade its own uh you know colored bitcoin token on its own on itself which is probably really um critical point but you know you could take uh your open source project and for everybody who contributes to your open source project you issued them a token and then you know you have to have this closed loop economy somehow so they have to have some way of like burning or redeeming the token for something else right

you know for example with btc pay server maybe they could um you know they have a foundation now so in theory they could make like a DAO that color some bitcoins to the contributors and then for the users if they want to donate they could just buy these tokens from the contributors and burn them and then that would be um you know directly sending the contributors money based on how much they contributed that's what i think is really cool about the about the mechanism like it goes back to what wiz was saying earlier about companies and how their incentive structures are They're often flawed, especially when you get to a really big scale. With the BISC DAO, the entire project is responsible to its users,

and the DAO constantly enforces that. It doesn't have a set of investors that it needs to please just for the sake of making another dollar. It has a set of principles that the users use the software for, and the whole DAO incentive structure just enforces that and requires the software just to become better in those particular respects. Yeah. I mean, it's a shame too, because the, uh, ICO boom, uh, the Dow in particular sort of, uh, the socket Dow. Yeah. Leaves a shit stain on the concept of a Dow. And it scares a lot

of people away from the first companies. Like I just think of a Dow as a, as a kind of a structure, like the first companies, there were a lot of really bad companies that started out. And if we looked at companies then as this evil thing that could never be done in a different way, could never be done better, then we wouldn't have the companies that we have today. and the progress that we have today. So I think, yeah, there were certainly missteps with DAOs. I think even the Ethereum Foundation pointed out a lot of, like, fundamental flaws

in the financial economics of the dislocked DAO. Like, they basically said, you know, there's no way, even if the DAO were to somehow invest in a project that made some profits or some returns, there was, like, no way to funnel those returns back to the investor. It was just, like, it was just a scam. I mean, at the end of the day,

everyone lost their money, right? How much did they raise, like $150 million for fucking automated locks? It didn't even work. And it was security vulnerabilities. Literally, the guy was like, oh, no, we're totally not. Steve in the tool tool. Yeah, we're not vulnerable to this. And then sure enough, next week, oh, actually, we lost all the money.

We're going to need you to stop trading, please. but and so do you think we will i mean you we obviously are trying to flesh out a dow here with bisque like uh do you see bisque dow model as a uh something that can sort of save the image of dow's in particular well it's profitable right you like like the bisque is the bisque dow is profitable in the sense that if it issues you know 50 000 bsq each month and the traders are burning 50 000 bsq each month you know it's it's uh it has like it's like an actual profitable business you know this is sustainable it's not like one of these ico scams where they just sell millions of dollars worth of tokens and then deliver nothing and promise the world you know

well the key here is i feel like exchange tokens are one of the few things that have very straightforward utility right so like you actually pay feet you can pay fees with the BSQ token so it's like very easy to put it in a circular like create like a little circular economy there maybe you could I guess I don't know of any other other exchange tokens that have this kind of cycle so what do you guys think about BNB and Leo but no but that's a totally it's like apples and oranges right because they're doing ICO they're like they have a company that's just printing the tokens like by the billions or whatever you know they have

market maker trading bots you know this is like bisca is really peer-to-peer you're literally buying the tokens directly right from the contributor and also there's a loop like i think i mean from what i know about bnb it's like the token was issued and like yeah you can use it to pay fees and you can use it to do other things supposedly maybe i saw you could buy champagne in a club and do this something like that yeah yeah i guess clubs are accepting bnb but like ultimately What's the use case for it? You know there it's not really benefiting the Binance company CZ's pockets. Yeah, pretty much. Right. It's like faux equity Right, but with this there's actually an other side

Where you know, there's it's actually funding the project. There is no other source of capital. There's nothing else It's true the BSQ but the key there but the obviously is completely different than B&B or Leo But the key is that utility of the fees, right? That's what I'm trying to say. It's like one of these things is like everyone kept talking about utility tokens, utility tokens, utility tokens. And really, at the end of the day, no one has any incentive to hold these tokens, right? But with BSQ, there's like a real usage of it, right? Because you can pay the fees.

It's actually very, like the economics of BSQ are actually really complex. And so, for example, if you pay your trading fees in Bitcoin, they essentially go to this, what might as well just be a trading bot that takes the Bitcoin and buys BSQ off the market and just burns it in a cryptographically provable way. And this, in a way, this actually combines the utility token purpose of BSQ for the trading fees with the kind of like the shares or ownership is the wrong word, but the stakeholders of the BSQ. And these are the people who are essentially investing in the BISC project. Because if you want to invest in BISC, you could just buy BSQ and hold it. And because of this closed-loop system, as I mentioned before, if you're issuing 50,000 BSQ, but BISC gets really popular and the trading volume goes up by 10x, and now the traders are burning 500,000 BSQ just because there's 10x more trading volume. well now there's a huge demand for bsq and um that's going to make the users you know maybe

some of them are going to pay it in bitcoin now or we have the dow has to adjust the trading fees in bsq to go down to kind of balance it out but but at the end of the day these profits will be realized by the the price of bsq going up and for the the contributors who are holding bsq it's kind of like getting sweat equity in a way and if you want to invest in this you know you can do this So it has the utility token purpose. It has this stakeholder purpose. It has this voting governance purpose. Whereas BNB is just a shit coin.

Yeah. Yeah, BNB is just a shit coin. But it's crazy how, like, so I guess what we should hop in here to is, like, the cypherpunk values versus the make as much money as possible values, which a lot of these exchanges exude, right? like yeah and so we have a path like i've been saying this a lot on this podcast i believe we have a path and we have two paths to choose from like we either have the chinese surveillance state exported to the rest of the world like we were just talking about a rabbit hole recap here in

new york they're talking about facial recognition in the subway system like and stuff like that and then we can do that or go towards the best completely decentralized but it's going to be harder right like so how do we incentivize people to go to hard route well first of all we have to improve the ux because uh right now um you have to run it on a like a desktop computer or laptop and it has to be running like 24 hours basically like a bitcoin node or a lightning node maybe actually lightning is a really good um analogy for bis because they're both built on top of bitcoin and they both use bitcoin as like this layer one thing and lightning and the bis network both kind of like layer two and um you know instead of uh payment channels you have like trade channels

which are these multi-sig escrow and you also have time locks and all these things. So there's a lot of similarities. But I don't know, what do you think, Steve? Like how do we make it? Because I think the mobile app is probably the coolest way. So this is one thing that I'm really pushing for in the BISC project now is that

I figured out this architecture where we can make BISC run on an Android phone. It's kind of technical details, but long story short, I want to be able to have a Bitcoin meetup in a bar and say, okay, guys, install this app on your phone and just be up and running on BISC right away. And I feel that's a good way to probably increase the user base by 5x or 10x, hopefully.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. UX is a huge part of it, both in terms of availability and platforms. I'll let you finish, then I get a question. Sure. Oh, I was just going to add that also in terms of the UX and the software. Like I know a lot of people, surprisingly a lot of people have heard about BISC and they've downloaded BISC, who I've spoken to, but they've never actually used it.

They open it and they go, they're just immediately like, what the fuck? It's a little overwhelming. It's a little overwhelming. And I've seen some mock-ups from our designer for an overhaul of the UX that like, you know, guides people when they open the software for the first time, step by step. What do I do now? What's the first thing? How do you create a payment account? How do I make an offer?

And just guide them step-by-step Things like that. I think making making the key action is more obvious Well what I'm really trying to get out here is like so even if the UX doesn't prove will it ever get to the point Where it's on par with these centralized exchanges and if not, how do we convince people to take the harder route, right? I think a lot of that just gonna be automatic like you're gonna need to You're just and you're just not gonna want to put up with Whatever the central you don't even have an option. It's your only option yeah if you want to go to China right now and they have these really strict

capital controls and I heard that the reason why they're making their own cryptocurrency is so that they can basically censor Bitcoin and the others force these I mean the same thing they do with the Internet right they want to force people to use their government controlled cryptocurrency so that they can enforce their capital controls on this cryptocurrency as well and China just announced their uh what was it selective anonymity in their government double speak yeah it's they have like a honey and stick approach where they they ban something and then they give you like right a good enough alternative they have all the google like google competitors and

stuff we chat weibo um and so they give you some kind of tool that you can use and people just use it out of convenience well you get all the benefits of that uh centralized ux and all the uh totalitarianism of the the chinese government to uh you know social credit score and even in the usa like it's trending towards that here oh yeah try to rent a hotel room or a car without a credit card and uh try getting a credit card without a credit score you know it's not it's not a social credit score but you it's a slippery slope towards it's a slippery slope right it's like in in the bitcoin world this these concepts just don't exist right in the bisque world you know they're you your your identity is just this string of letters and onion address

right like if you have perfect privacy it's it's pretty easy to have perfect freedom because nobody knows who you are nobody knows what you're doing and they just can't regulate you right so we talked about some of the pain points of UX but I think one of the cool parts of bisque which I want to see go to more software in this space is that it's got Tor bundled in so you you boot it up It's an actual node in the network. It's connecting p2p through tor and then when you have an update That update not only gets delivered to you through tor but the previous software you installed then verifies The PGP signature for you since almost nobody is verifying these signatures

So at least you know if you have the previous software and the previous software wasn't malicious That the next update you get is a legitimate update. I think that's really fucking cool Yeah, BISC is written by Cypherpunks for Cypherpunks, but we try to make the UX nice enough so that even newbies can use it. How many people are contributing right now? Not enough. That's the easy answer.

I mean, I guess you could say consistent contributors, probably 15 to 20. There are a lot more people, but just consistently about that much. There's some people doing like translations or like kind of lesser roles, but then the core developer team is quite small. um what's the stack look like uh right now it's this uh java jvm thing we got um

the original founder of the project was like a java guy so um he's not really active these days he's just probably pretty much totally out of it actually but um you know we're still maintaining the java code base and uh you know it it took bisque like five years to get to this point right bisque is not new just to get to one round for a minute yeah i mean it it launched like so it was in development since five years ago it launched three years ago and then the dow launched about seven months ago yeah april yeah eight months ago so if you really if you figure that it took five years just to get to this v1.2 where we're just able now to do like trading in this decentralized way even with all the pain points like um you know like we we did a feasibility study to kind

of re-implement the code and at the end of the day we realized um you know we kind of you know it was a hard decision but we came back and said yeah let's let's keep working with the java app for now i think probably when we do like the v2 trade protocol which is a whole discussion in itself um you know basically we try to get rid of the on-chain transactions entirely at that point well because eventually the bitcoin blocks will get full and we'll have to uh you know lightning has a similar issue right where if you have to pay a hundred dollar fee to open a channel with someone then uh you know yeah so how are you guys preparing for this um everybody would be bonded basically and there would be no security deposits and no on-chain multi-sig escrow that's the short

summary but easier said than done yeah no so let's jump into the fee debate we actually just talked about that as well in the podcast we just recorded like are you worried do you think a fee market will develop oh it has to i mean satoshi intentionally like uh built this into the protocol this is how the miners get compensated after the block subsidies goes down but will people pay the fees of course they will it will it happen there's a there's a lot of fun out there yeah let him fudge yeah so what what gives you this confidence just because you've been around for a while the effect that you I mean when when bitmain and uh wujihan were intentionally spamming the bitcoin blockchain with their own uh high fee transactions because they were 50 of the hash

rate and they were getting half of those high fees back um users were still using bitcoin and they didn't fall for the bcash foot you know they didn't fall for bcash is the real bitcoin like propaganda despite the millions of dollars of marketing backing it right like users are not dumb especially when it comes to their own money you know maybe maybe you can fool like uh half of a country's population into voting for a corrupt politician but when it comes to like fooling cypherpunks with their hard-earned uh satoshis they're not so gullible you know they're gonna they're gonna verify they're not just gonna trust whatever you say yeah no i mean the um the debate around the fee market developing in the future is intellectually masturbatory in my

my opinion it's not a debate it's a science here it's like you know we hit this is like bitcoins like this peer-reviewed science debating is what politicians do you know this isn't this isn't like theory it's it's already developing yeah there's another element here too right because do am I mistaken or every bisque transaction has an on-chain footprint right there's a privacy element exactly so that's another big advantage of the v2 protocol which is still highly in discussion and not even conceptually solid at this point.

But right, if you do the totally V2 off-chain trading protocol, you could just use Lightning to trade. Right. And then you would trade through the Lightning network and you would do some other fiat transaction on the side. And because you're both bonded, if there's any dispute, you can go to the refund agents

or whatever we decide to call it in the future. In mediation, you would still have this. So it's evolving slowly to kind of grow with Bitcoin or to kind of scale with it. But yeah, right now, every BISC trade is like four on-chain transactions, which is very inefficient and unoptimized. So, you know, we have a lot of work to do. And you can tell. You can tell it's a BISC transaction, right? Like if you get Bitcoin, that Bitcoin on-chain, you can see that it's from BISC, right?

Is it like a vanity? I mean, I'm sure there are some very evil blockchain analysis companies out there that have already identified the BISC signature on the blockchain and they're already indexing it. And I wouldn't be surprised if they're trying to like blacklist Bitcoins that are traded through BISC because, you know, we're somehow evil for protecting users' privacy, right? It's, yeah, we got to improve the privacy. We got to improve the security. We got to improve the on-chain. How funny is that evil for protecting privacy? that's how ass backwards it is today right it really is it really is yeah

let's get a little cosmic here like why the fuck are people okay with not having privacy right it's like what if kyc is the illicit activity right yes yeah we talk about this a lot and it's just um they they make up all this propaganda about why they have to know what you're doing that why they have to invade your privacy for security but if we can implement security on top of bitcoin with privacy without sacrificing your privacy then you can keep your freedom and avoid that entire uh banking system the central banking system yeah and the kyc isn't even effective because you can either get leaked stolen kyc data or you can buy it there's like a whole market now where you could buy kyc data from like people in third world countries i kind of

noticed like two months ago that soul cycle leaked my data i've never like i've never even like your confession you were you doing soul cycle for a while i know god no i can't i tore my acl i never got a fix i can't like stand up on those bikes um pay cash yeah pay cash especially when you go to dinner with bitcoiners um yeah so moving away from this like for a little bit here like wiz in particular what are your thoughts on the current state of bitcoin like you've been around for a while you've seen a lot as bitcoin exceeded your expectations underperformed your expectations i think in our lifetimes uh bitcoin is probably the coolest thing that we could work on honestly like in the previous generation it was probably like the internet well or maybe even

the beginning of the web was the coolest thing you could work on but now uh the internet is basically like 100 of the world almost um literally everyone has like a smartphone in their pocket connected to a high-speed network even the third world countries are really uh advancing with their mobile networks and so we now can build the next layer and there's all these uh you know there's some apps on the internet already that were very successful like communications you know nobody writes letters through the postal system anymore to communicate we just text each other whatever and you know Wikipedia for some kind of information exchange or some kind of cat photos on Facebook or whatever people do but now we have money

as an app and in a very secure way and very decentralized way like the internet was designed to and so you know we can escape out of this fiat debt slavery and we can we really push the human race forward what made you this way what uh It's boring this way. So what were you into? I dropped out of school at 14 to be a network engineer at this ISP startup configuring Cisco routers. I grew up working at a data center consulting for random people in Hawaii,

where I'm from. I moved to Japan when I was 20, and I was always the rebel. I never wanted to conform to any system or society or take a real job. I always wanted to be the freelancer or the entrepreneur. and uh once you get a taste of freedom you can never go back to working for a nine to five job you know where you get your fiat paycheck and half the money is taken for taxes and all this other stuff yeah once you get a taste of freedom with bitcoin and bisque man once you start trading on bisque like you know you sign up for a centralized exchange you're like you want me to

do what id selfie you just delete the app because once you get a taste of this uh better system you know you look at the the existing stuff like this is rubbish who's going to use this you know yeah and so that explains why you you're able to build your own internet service provider you grew up working yeah i mean i've got i've i've got gear in that data center that's like uh probably like 15 20 years old i got like a whole museum of old servers in there and new stuff too um like bisque has a few um not not trusted but they have like data relay nodes where they're not they're not trusted by the network but they um they just relay encrypted and signed data without knowing what it is um there's like some seed nodes and stuff like this bitcoin has this too

uh bitcoin has seed nodes and so i run a few of those on my uh on my isp which is basically just for bisque night these days and uh yeah i mean you gotta if you want to be censorship resistant you can't host this kind of stuff on google right do you see uh breaking up of the isp world at all in the future uh like i don't know there's there's not a huge need for that because um if as long as you can run tor you can kind of run your own virtual isp right like you don't need to register a domain name you just create an onion address which is just a cryptographic key and um you know if your ISP is doing surveillance on you or censorship on you, well, yeah, just use a Tor or use some kind of VPN, you know,

which Tor is basically a decentralized VPN network. We don't have to trust people so much. I mean, there's not a huge need to build a new layer one when you can build this virtual layer one on top of a maybe slightly compromised layer one, right? It's like tails on top of the ISPs. Yeah, you can, you can, you can do all kinds of cool stuff these days right like you can um like put tails on the usb

stick and boot it up and do your secure stuff and then go back to your probably backdoor to nsa you know this thing yeah this macbook you got right here there's nothing wrong with it it's just i mean like personally i have like a pair of devices for everything i have like the iphone which is you know totally rooted by apple and uh you know i have some like twitter and what are talking about they're all about privacy man right just like the apple credit card right which is uh what a joke it's it's it's just on their credit card right i mean they it is actually crazy seeing all these big tech companies pivot towards becoming banking services as well just announced checking accounts yeah yeah well and in their defense like they should go further they're

able to out-compete the banks like from an iterative ux process and the banks are so beholden to regulations that they might as well go Ether launch right it's so weird I have a bunch of friends who work at Google in Tokyo and I was talking to them about Bitcoin stuff and they don't understand why anyone would use Bitcoin because it's so

slow and you have to wait 10 minutes for the confirmation and I'm like wow you live in this like corporate bubble like you really don't understand that users don't want to have to trust Google with their security privacy and freedom They want to, you know, be able to verify their own open source software and just run it on their own hardware and have their money secured by their own private keys.

Like, once mainstream users start adopting this, they're not going to want it. You know, the UX has to catch up, but once it gets there, it's going to be like a waterfall. Like, everyone's just going to be like, oh, you're still running that centralized thing? It's like going to the post office, right? Yeah, it feels like, I mean, another big topic on this podcast, like trying to put we, us, the people who are born in this day and age in the context of a bigger history, right? I was born in the 90s. The Internet was just coming up and feels like we're building out this digital infrastructure, which may take five to seven decades. We're already how many decades in?

And so do you see a point where we're basically just building infrastructure and a new system that will be somewhat on cruise control at some point in our lives? And how does that change the world? Well, how long did it take for the early days of the internet or the ARPANET to get to like this 100% where everyone has the internet in their pocket? Probably like a good 30 plus years for all this infrastructure to be built. And, you know, the Internet still has tons of technical debt, like IPv4 addresses are, you know, totally running out of the supply. And it'll probably take another 20, 30 years for everyone to make the switch to IPv6, right, for example. Right. And so there's all these kind of legacy things.

And it always takes a long time. Once something's, like, good enough and kind of working, you know, this is the problem with the banking system, right, is that people don't see it. The funny thing is you go to, like, Venezuela or Zimbabwe, they, it's, like, common knowledge. It's, like, obvious to them why you would never use the fiat currency, right? But if you go to, like, other countries, like, oh, no, we love our fiat currency. We think it's the coolest thing ever. And, like, Japan is an extremely challenging market to try and advocate for Bitcoin or BISC, right? Because in Japan, the banks are so efficient.

Like, literally, I can transfer money from my bank account to BitFlyer, like, less than five minutes, do a trade, and get the Bitcoin in my wallet. like another five minutes later it's like you know round trip trade time like less than 10 minutes how would visc ever fix this if it's doing like an on-chain transaction or it's doing this uh thing right so until we get the v2 trade protocol up and running which is totally on lightning and after you know we have to build all the stuff then we have to make the app really slick and make it on the same level i mean these guys are vc funded right this can't get vc funding to hire a whole team of developers because if we had to get vc funding we'd have to make a company and then we wouldn't be censorship resistant so we have to make all these sacrifices to

just you know be able to uh not have to comply with all these evil kyc government regulations and um it'll take us a while to do it but yeah we will we will build the infrastructure that will power the next generation of basically how the world runs the internet was this founding layer and next it's going to be bitcoin then lightning and maybe basically even be like layer three by them right um if bisque runs on top of lightning instead of layer one bitcoin you know it's just building up the stack yeah yeah i envision like a total future where are we where everyone's running like either raspberry pi or even a just an iphone or something or some android phone where they have a bitcoin full node a light lightning full node uh bisque full node and a btc pay server so they

can do merchant processing maybe like a few other apps like a block explorer mempool visualizer like these would all just be apps on a phone right and it would be so simple to just oh yeah install these 10 apps and yeah you have financial self-sovereignty you don't need any banks you don't need any government id you don't need to pay taxes you don't need to do any of this uh legacy stuff you know it's like going to the post office and putting a stamp on a letter just to communicate with someone you have to pay like 50 cents per message it's kind of it's kind of hilarious now but that is literally how the world ran for hundreds of years right thousands of years even i don't know yeah yeah it sounds like a dream do you think we'll we'll benefit

from uh this vision scene out to fruition or do you think uh that'll be a generation or two after us i don't know we always think engineers always think we can build it in like probably 1 30 the time it actually takes right you know um and i think that's why like a lot of bitcoin early adopters were like over bullish even me with my own like bitcoin mining business i was like way you know a way to over leverage on the miners or something like this and uh you know but eventually um we learn we make them we make the hard mistakes we learn the lessons the hard way and then we keep at it you know cypherpunks don't really give up they just kind of keep writing this code i mean how long did it take this like five years to get to this point it's gonna take another

five years to get to the next milestone of everyone has bisque in their pocket or something i don't know right yeah i mean how how long has bitcoin been around about 11 years now almost and uh still like what one maybe maybe there's some more common apps like cash app or something that has more bitcoin stuff but it's like very slowly getting into like this mainstream disclaimer cash is a sponsor of the podcast that's a joke we do here um yeah they are a sponsor of the podcast i try to use the app but uh i guess you need like a government id to use it so i couldn't use it And it's U.S. only. Wait, so you don't have a government ID?

Well, not from the U.S. Yeah, it's U.S. only. You need a driver's license? I don't have a driver's license either. But both Cash App and BISC play important roles in mainstream adoption in completely opposite ways. The idea that you could have the number one finance app on the App Store accepting Bitcoin

and allowing you to buy Bitcoin and allowing you to spend Bitcoin with their credit card, debit card processing. uh, is a game changer. And then being able to trade without any permission or without any, uh, KYC is an absolute game changer on the other end. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Tacking it from both angles. But as the conversation of this episode has been, uh, around like how, like obviously ideally the non-custodial non-KYC AML solutions are probably best for the individual. Um, it's how do we how do we make that more popular and there's trade-offs right i mean you can trade

some of your security privacy and freedom for convenience and currently the whole world does this when they use a credit card or when they use a bank account they're you know it's like a common uh thing that bitcoiners will tweet on twitter they'll say yeah when you put money in the bank it's not your money anymore you're just a creditor of the bank and it's true you're just trading all of your uh basically individual rights for this yeah a little bit of convenience but i'm confident well i like that convenience but i'm also confident in the ability to sort of hide your trail off the app right are you confident that ability or how would you recommend people using these centralized systems uh act after they move their bitcoin from them or does it even matter i mean

like i use this um i found one app where i can uh charge like a prepaid visa card uh anonymously without KYC but using Bitcoin and eventually it like hits some limit and then you have to delete it and then reinstall the app and make a new one but because it's anonymous you can just make infinite number of them right so that's kind of like a loophole I found like in Japan there's another loophole I found where you can actually do anonymous bank transfers in Japan up to a hundred thousand yen which is like a thousand dollars and you can do an infinite amount of those obviously so this is this is one thing I want to bake into BISC is where I actually we We added the Japan bank transfer payment method into BISC,

but I want to add this anonymous bank transfer. So you would know the bank info of the maker, but you wouldn't know who's buying it from you, right? Because you would just get this money deposited in your account, and they would put the BISC trade ID as their name, and then you would send Bitcoin to their address, and you would have no idea who you transacted with, right? So it would be a bunch of 999 yen transactions?

Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. um damn man what um what else do we got here it's been fascinating conversation thank you for all you've done for bitcoin over the i haven't said thank you yet in the space over the years so i guess let's talk about the the altcoins since like so do you think um any of them have merit like i'm going to talk about ethereum in particular there i'm going to eat two point like people seem very bullish on it i've been talking to people more recently who are looking at the uh the specs of what it's going to take to run a fully validating node on e2.0 and validating

the shards across each other if you're really like an exchange or something you're probably going to run five or six nodes to validate the chart shards across each other and some people are crunching the numbers saying uh the node cost may be upwards of like ten to twenty thousand a month um and like if that's the case it's just security theater right i mean at the end of the day you need if you want censorship resistance it has to be decentralized and to be decentralized you have to have very small blocks and very you can't charge ten thousand dollars a month to run a full node so i don't know i mean why are they doing this you know why what is the real goal here? Is it to help corporations do blockchain-y stuff? They don't really need a blockchain for a

lot of this stuff, right? It's just, they could use a centralized database like they've been using for years and years. It's just, a lot of it I feel is not really justified. It's like this Rube Goldberg machine, right? You make this highly complicated blockchain, but for what? You don't really gain any, like, look, you know, the DAO bailout was a good example, right? If it was really decentralized then you wouldn't have been able to bail out the dow yeah and but it persists today and that shocked me that's what like i was interested in ethereum a little bit up until now is i thought ethereum is is kind of dying now i mean what's the the price is pumping right well according to udi tron is is going to replace ethereum i mean apparently a tether on

ethereum is a big use case now i think there's there's a metaphor here uh or an analogy i don't know the difference between those two but uh between like bisque and all these so-called uh decentralized exchanges that literally just slap the word decentralized in front of it and they just say like oh we're a decentralized exchange but it's just a marketing term to them well it's like it's like an atomic swap right it's very it's like trivially easy to swap two tokens on the same blockchain you just have a smart contract that does this right so is that in exchange or is that more of a swap right but i'm just saying like they're not even they have centralized market makers they have centralized this or that they're not actually trying to

prioritize censorship resistance they're taking vc funding they have a you know a like a board that's like managing the token and all this stuff uh but they just slap it on for marketing there's no actual drive there to prioritize censorship resistance right and that's what we see with bitcoin is is the value prop is the censorship resistance it's the immutability right so if you don't prioritize that like you lose it and and it's yeah it's about long-term priorities yeah um steve haven't heard from you in a bit man what what drove you to this space dude um so i actually have a background that's probably the polar opposite of whiz in terms of the early days like through school and my first jobs i was uh

always on the traditional path of like do well in school and get a good job and I got out got my first job and like within the first month or two I was like this is it and like I started learning like I had so much free time at work just bored not doing anything that I started to look at some of the more fringe financial sites and discovered mises.org and zero hedge and all these places and it was just like a storm like what is going on nothing is the way I thought it was and so that what eventually led me to bitcoin and uh this whole space and questioning everything i had a very similar path i was sitting yeah i mean i love the people i work with and it was a great experience working for the fun that i did but i was sitting there i was like again bored most of

the day like reading about bitcoin and then having to dress up in khakis and a button up and sit there for eight hours straight it was like i physically like had an aversion to it i had to yeah actually quit on my birthday because nobody said happy birthday to me um no but it's crazy it's crazy that it always surprised me i've done 115 episodes of the show tales from the crypt we hear people's tales it's crazy how many people have very similar tales and it seems that this is almost common sense especially if you have a an understanding of how the system works and it's um it's something that makes me more confident in bitcoin moving to the future. And I wish we could just make more people realize this quicker. So that's why we do

this. That's actually like one of the biggest fears. And, uh, Greg Maxwell said this recently, like the biggest threat to Bitcoin is that nobody will understand why censorship resistance is valuable. And, uh, that pretty much sums it up. I like any of the Ethereum versus Ethereum classic debate really prove this to be true is that most people have no clue, um, why Bitcoin is valuable. in fact if i if i just tweet it out right now like why is bitcoin valuable you probably see some really wild answers um you know you really have to study like uh cypherding's doing this course right now like the principles of economics and he's talking about like the hardness of money and all these things and it's like once you start studying money you're like oh my god this is so

obviously like fucked up yeah like why would anyone do this fiat money system right it's just horrible and then you learn that gold gold was the hardest money for thousands of years for all these very logical reasons and once you understand that reasoning then you'll see why bitcoin is going to be even better and why everyone will eventually move back to it right and yeah you just you just got to study a tiny little bit and then you're you're red pilled you're woke right how do we get stop people from being apathetic that's my biggest fear too is apathy and again we've talked about this they'll be forced to not be apathetic um here in america in particular because again another driving theme is like i had a boss when i was working at that

fund was again i love the people i work with dimitri he was born and raised in ussr immigrated to the us in the 90s and he was the one really like spooked me he was like marty ever since like the patriot act this is slowly turning into what i ran away from like in the 90s and it's frogs boiling in water but people are just used to convenience and the you know the culture in america right now is like shrinking music about doing drugs and shit like that it doesn't seem like we have like long-term goals to build there's no space race right now that's why i'm into bitcoin because i think bitcoin is like analogous to like a space race something bigger than the individuals involved i think the doomsday scenarios are certainly there for like the big like uh

socialist, communist kinds of things that people have run away from in the past. But I think in this country, some of the motivators might be on a smaller scale. So I remember like a few months ago, I came across this guy who produced comic books. And for some dumb reason, he was kicked off PayPal. And he had nowhere else he could,

no other way to accept money for his comic books. And he was like, oh, I found Bitcoin. And it was like the perfect thing. Cause like nobody can kick me off of that. And I've seen a couple other cases like that. I think a few more of those happen at scale. I mean, these companies are known to be kind of unpredictable. It just happened at Pornhub.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that could certainly be a way, a motivator. Yeah. It's almost like the people in control, the incumbent system, are sowing its own demise, right? They're pushing people to the edge to a point. You know, like gun sales.

I think Bank of America or Citigroup, one of those people, announced that they were not going to allow those vendors to use their products yeah and legal weed has this issue yeah we see it all over the place exactly people get burned and then they learn and but it's very much a social movement and people have to be vigilant and active and contribute and yeah yeah you don't realize that you're a slave to the system until the system cuts you out and you have no other choice but bitcoin and imagine just 11 years ago you did not even have bitcoin as a choice you were just in this totalitarian banking system it's a real uh it's a real eye opener when you see it like that yeah yeah it's um again i'm excited to be on the front lines with

you gentlemen is there anything uh i don't want to force anything is there anything else you guys want to touch on in particular Matt I was actually kind of a little bit random but I had this in my back of my head uh how does like if there's a new market how does that get decided on BISC like if you if you want to add like a new fiat pair or something like that like how does that proposal work does that go to the DAO it doesn't get voted on or yeah that's a good question um we get a lot of um ico scams that want to add their token to bisque and bisque has like a no ico policy and a no b cash policy so basically no scams and um you know because it's actually like it would make bisque look really bad if some scammers were selling their tokens on bisque and

then they you know the regulators are saying oh bisque is enabling these people to lose money right um yeah so how does that work how does that process work who's deciding yeah i mean people make a pull request on github to add their um either asset or payment method assets or assets are a lot easier to add than uh payment methods payment methods you usually have to do quite a bit of work you have to make like the ui where you can uh you know but but assets i mean how many assets get added every month would you say probably like at least three or four yeah with each new release so that aspect is a little that approval process is still a little bit centralized No, I mean, yeah, the maintainers kind of, we have like a policy that the Dow, um, you

know, voted on some at some time in the past and then the maintainers just kind of enforced that policy. Got it. So yeah, so the adding an asset is pretty much up to the maintainers and then removing an asset would be where the Dow would come in. True. So if for some reason, some asset that was really controversial or became really controversial, uh, then you could, you could put up a request to remove an asset in the Dow as a proposal.

Fair why no be cash in particular because it's a scam. Yeah, there were some legal Concerns too because I think sometime about a year ago. There were some exchanges being sued For I don't know the exact reasons but so there's some kind of concern that this would attract the wrong kind of attention Yeah, that was the origin of it. But of course, no, I mean they were anyway, they were marketing Bitcoin cash is the real Bitcoin, which is an obvious lie and it's a scam Yeah, what do you that's actually while we're on this topic. What do you think happens once? Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin SV, I guess to hit they're having Like five thousand like they're what five thousand blocks ahead of Bitcoin like a lappy the end of these chains you think of having I

Don't know. There's you know, there's some coins that have been around for a long time You know the well the nature shot 256 mining to write like wouldn't those miners still I I mean, yeah, they could get 51% attacked any day now. It's weird it hasn't happened yet, right? I've been surprised. I want more chain attacks. Well, you know, yeah, it's interesting, right? Because there was all this Bcash conspiracy theories

that Blockstream was trying to kill Bcash. And now they could literally do it whenever they wanted. But Blockstream has such a great reputation. Why would they even want to burn their own reputation just to destroy this scam coin that's just going to die out on its own natural course, right? It makes no sense. And, you know, they have a lot of,

they have like big pockets, right? They have a big budget supporting it. They have market maker bots to do this. They have like a huge marketing team, all kinds of sponsored content on, you know. They have a Bcash. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's just. And it's a liquid, so it's easy to try and prop up the price. They've got forced hard forks in, right? I have no idea. It's all. Too much Bcash conversation. yeah pretty much who cares i was just really surprised because i was i remember when it was

the game theory of bitcoin mining and running a node and stuff is like one of my favorite aspects of bitcoin um and i get really excited just thinking about it and running through scenarios and i just i was completely wrong about um i thought bitcoin cash and sv would have gotten attacked way long ago and i'm short it and then attack it and then make some huge profits and i'm sure there are some uh you know crypto anarchists out there that that will eventually do it one day yeah because the asics are getting more and more powerful every day you know people are building uh huge mining farms every day it's it's only a matter of time yeah do you monocoin in japan got a block withholding attack and a few other like minor like small chains um had these like block

withholding attacks um which is actually very easy to do you don't need 51 you only need like 10 and then you can try it in secret and you just try it like 10 times and your 10 of hash power will just by pure luck be um solve like 50 of the blocks in this short time and you can do a block withholding attack on an exchange and basically rip off the exchange so you know the only real defense against that is just increasing the number of confirmations but at some point they're gonna realize like there's no number of confirmations that would make these crypto currencies secure right you can can't really have one more than one with the same mining algorithm ASIC out there that's funny how many

times you have to learn this lesson right his name coin was probably the first to learn this lesson right and a feather coin yeah I wasn't like Aurora coin to got like forked into a building there's like five hard forks all at the same time something like that yeah yeah that's uh that's actually that was actually one of the first uh bitcoin events i went to was here in the city to hear ryan shea present on why name coin didn't work out in the end because they were sharing shot 256 um it's interesting like but that was a real shame because satoshi was like really behind name coin yeah because it was like i was trying to do dns or something no right just he didn't want to have all the uh the domain like

the name space it mixed in with the money right because it's the end of the day like you can only have like one hard money which is obviously Bitcoin right so all these other like litecoin or be cash or all these just basically copy cats that copy Bitcoin and tweak a few things and say we're better that's not really how hard money works right it's about the hardness of the money and the underlying economic things and then you have the security of it which we're talking about now it's like you're gonna put all your life savings in be cash or Or in risk of 51% attack, or are you going to put it in Bitcoin where you know it's very safe that it's going to hold its value over time?

And all these offshoots that pitch themselves based off of technical details really undervalue the social aspect of it all, the social layer of Bitcoiners running the network and stuff like that. Yeah, marketing works. You know, like uninformed masses will go to the shitcoin casinos and they'll FOMO and they'll gamble and they will, you know, they'll learn the hard way. Is this a lesson that's going to happen in perpetuity or do you see like shitcoinery fading out? I don't know. It became easier and easier every iteration of shitcoins. remember in the beginning there was like you had to actually uh copy bitcoin and um rename it and do mining you actually had to make like some proof of work algorithm and then you had like feather

coin that was like the first iteration of alt coins right right multi-script mining stuff like oh yeah there was like 10 different algorithms in one and all these things and then those all that i mean there's even stuff like hawaii coin and like stuff you never zeta coin yeah and then became like the ethereum erc20 tokens was i think like the next big wave right so it became like much easier you could literally just click a button and deploy a smart contract uh and and do it and now maybe the next wave will be like bitcoin side chains or something like this where you have some kind of uh virtual assets they're probably not going to go after the the hard money argument because by that time it'll probably be more obvious to the uninformed masses that

bitcoin is the hard money they'll probably try and do some other like what ethereum is trying to do now where they're trying to move away i don't know is it money or is it not they i don't know what they're going to market it as seem conflicted yeah i mean at some point they have to admit unstoppable applications world computer yeah touring complete it'll run on a raspberry pi right i think like that was one of the big things about the 2017 altcoin pump was that was the flippening narrative right so i feel like that flippening narrative will subside like people won't believe that that you could replace bitcoin but they'll still obviously be shit coins going around and people trading them and being greedy

and gambling on it it's like one of the the primary use cases of bitcoin whether you like it or not yeah everyone's a scammer beware freaks did you ever i mean bisque is a big trading platform do you guys like trade personally markets or yeah i don't know i don't know well i don't know i mean this is a privacy oriented platform that's true yeah ah that's true see nobody knows that's the whole point but uh if you ask uh cz at binance he could tell you your whole trading history yeah we'll give you a picture of yourself holding your passport right back to you too id selfie yeah i made a joke on our uh internal chat channel the other day um feedback here sorry freeze there we go uh yeah i made a joke on our internal chat the other day um i said

oh no someone in person made me on the chat and uh they told steve to send all the customer holdings to this scammer and they stole all the customer holdings off of bisque and one of the guys in the chat was like what really and i was like no dude like bisque doesn't hold any customer funds all the money is on your hardware on your private keys like that's the whole point it's off and they're like oh and then the whole you know everyone was like lol and stuff it's it's like once you realize that uh this is a better system you know there's no risk of this id selfie leak there's no risk of passports being leaked it's just you solve all those problems by avoiding it entirely by working around it do you think we get a lot of pushback from governments this is going to

be in long drawn out battle or are you thinking you know not so much because i live in japan and and i think the biggest concern of at least the japanese government is they don't want japanese people to lose money because they they want another mount gox situation right they had mount gox uh coin check zeif bitpoint all these japanese exchanges were hacked i mean there's only like 20 something licensed and four of them were hacked so it's it's not like you know the best record and yeah anyway the point is because BISC doesn't hold any funds there's no risk of this and more importantly even if you wanted to regulate BISC you couldn't because it's just this open source software that everyone runs right so you can't show up at the BISC corporate headquarters

with you know police or something and and demand it because we're not we don't have to abide by any jurisdiction because we're not a company we're just this community of individuals and that's so powerful right well i feel like the way you would do it is you would you would like insert undercover agents into one side of the trade right like that's kind of what they did with local bitcoins in america at least uh is is you would be trading with someone and that person was an undercover agent and then once you hit a certain amount uh they would like hit you with money laundering or something like that i think that was a big uh scare tactic by like some kind propaganda government propaganda they probably did it like once yeah and then you scare the

shit out of everyone that's the key and then you you scare them into compliance the u.s government is very good at this fear tactic that the system will get you if you do anything bad so you better conform you better pay your taxes citizen you know no thought but i like see that attack vector coming like that's like that's the move they make is is they like say you have to disclose your bitcoin like not even just in bisque like oh you have to disclose your bitcoin and then they pick like one or two people uh they throw the book at them and then scare 70 80 into compliance stuff like that right we can we can improve the privacy you know cypherpunks will adapt then at the end of the day the cypherpunks will always win over the status the governments of the world i know steve

what do you think i agree i mean i think the account signing is a great example of this i mean you you would think that if you can't solve the problem of fraud with the traditional kyc like that it's not a solved problem like exchanges and all kinds of financial financial institutions uh can't solve the problem with all of these overly uh sophisticated kyc measures how would a super highly private network do that well we found a way with account signing and it's just going to become better and better over time and so yeah i mean i'm pretty confident whatever obstacles we'll find a way right if your account is signed it shows it shows the account age like oh this account's six months old and he's posted a bond so he's putting his own money up to stake

it's like yeah this right this guy's not going to scam you can feel relatively confident right why would this why would this why would a scammer like work for six months and put his own money on the line just to to you know uh screw me over like a thousand dollars or something he could have like ten thousand or maybe some whale market makers would put a huge amount of stake on there just so that they would have the highest reputation score, you know? I mean, this is basically it, right? KYC, it doesn't actually solve the security problem. It just invades everyone's privacy so that it kind of maybe reduces it a little bit.

But if you actually make a secure system, then you don't need KYC. And this is so obvious to the cypherpunks, right? Yeah, well, and then as more and more of these dumps happen, like it just becomes like KYC, number one, it seems so stupid. But then you're like, obviously, this is so stupid. And then you start thinking, like, are there alternative motives for this? Like, is it evil, right? Like, intentionally evil.

You ever use, what was it, I think, WeChat Pay in China? I've never used it. This is the worst thing I've ever seen. And if you ask any person in China, they'll say you cannot live without WeChat. In Japan, or in Korea, they use, like, Kakao or Naver. And in Japan, they use Line. In USA, they use, like, Facebook and WhatsApp. Like, you tell the average American, like, yeah, delete your Facebook, delete your WhatsApp.

They're like, oh, no, I use that to talk to everyone. But it's obviously backdoored by the government, and, you know, they're doing this mass surveillance. If the government has this much of a, you know, a stronghold in all of your personal connections, all of your financial transactions, they can just seize your account any time. I mean, I don't know. We have to educate the masses. we have to really free the slaves you know it's it just that's what we're trying to do here like is there any like god damn it this fucking feedback i don't know what it is i think it's

one of the new that's you know what it is it's this um but um fuck what was i gonna say i just lost track because of the feedback um what was your last comment there china wechat facebook oh china wechat and you so uh that's something i actually wrote about earlier this week is that uh prototype that was proven on the lightning network what's that um so you can build you can basically build a wechat on top of bitcoin right like they built like a messaging system i don't think that's the correct usage of like bitcoin is kind of like this uh payment network if you want to build like a censorship resistant chat app uh probably tor is the correct network to build on top build that on not bitcoin bitcoin is like a totally different use case it's going

to be extremely expensive i'm not sure why you would build a chat network on top of a payment network that's uh well it was an interesting like you could send messages via lightning well this guy was doing it without uh spending any money but uh he yeah tor is free yeah well one of the things i think is cool is that you can use like a lightning public key as a uh like an identity system or like a reputation system but you don't have to actually run the actual messages through the network to do that yeah tor has an identity system the onion addresses the public key hash yeah um i don't understand that i thought what was interesting i would just wanted to go back a little bit is that uh you mentioned earlier and then it kind of went off in a tangent and i've

You mentioned it on Twitter too, and it's a strategy that I prescribe to as well. In this intermediate gap where you might need to use WhatsApp or you might need to use WeChat or something, it's important, a good strategy to use is to basically have two different devices. You have your KYC device, and then you have your private, more, you know. Yeah, there's some loopholes you can do. um you might want to have like an iphone that's totally kyc'd and a graphene os which is a privacy oriented fork of android um device for your lockdown apps and just kind of separate the two because it's it's basically free to make a new online identity right yeah i don't know there's a

lot of loopholes you can exploit um i i'm obviously like you know against using any uh backdoored app But a lot of people will use them for some purposes. I mean, we use Twitter, right? Yeah, on my iPhone, but not on my Android, yeah. That's the key is that separation, the isolation. Yeah, it's just, it depends on your, you know, any security depends on your threat model, and you've got to have like a multi-layered solution.

I guess that's a whole conversation in itself. I mean, are you worried about the government seeing who you talk to online? Are you worried about the government seeing your financial transactions? You know, you have to take that specific threat model and either mix your coins or, you know, use Keybase or some other privacy-oriented chat app. I mean, there's different things you can do. Depends on the exact problem. There's a lot of nuance. Sure.

I mean, it's not like use Signal, use Tor, and then that solves all your problems, right? Privacy will never be. Do you think privacy will never be the most convenient option just because of the trade-offs? No, it can be. It's just that it's always easier to implement an un-private system. It's always easier to just say, all right, everyone put all their money in this box,

and if someone steals the box, oh well, versus if you actually make a secure system, then you would never do something silly. So yeah, it's like a lot of work, and people like to take shortcuts, and they like to sacrifice security and privacy and freedom because they don't value it, or they don't appreciate it as much, or they trust people they shouldn't trust, right? It's like the more business deals you do, the more conflicts you have, the more you realize that a trustless system is probably a better way for the world to interact with each other. like imagine how much money is is scammed every day off credit cards and if you pay with cash you're kind of subsidizing this fraud because uh you don't get like a three percent discount if you pay cash right so you you know there's a lot of uh trade-off systems that no it was speaking of

the credit card fraud like that was like a vice documentary that they actually took down because i think it was so powerful and showing how to easily pull off credit card fraud they were using bitcoin on the dark web to buy basically credit cards oh yeah cards and millions of credit card companies don't want you to know about about this i think it was um mythbusters also did a an episode about how easy it was to hack credit cards and like they said like the general council of like visa mastercard american express like just called them up and was like yo you are not going to do this episode we're going to sue you and you know of course they're like a tv network they're like okay you know back down immediately so yeah i mean those those scare tactic works

they have a lot to lose um it's like multi-billion dollar industry right like if you're taking it's like a tax right so you take like three percent of every credit card transaction in the whole world every day and uh yeah they don't want that machine to stop no no and it's i mean again bitcoin being a push system solve this and that's something actually the company i work for is an online uh ad platform and they uh deal with a lot of publishers and had a huge credit card chargeback problem and started accepting bitcoin in like 2014 because of that specifically so and it does work you ever uh try to use your credit card for something and then the bank blocks it because they suspect you're like a fraudulent transaction and then you just pay with bitcoin

instead and of course it works perfectly fine i wish i could do that nobody accepts bitcoin in the city again this happened to me three times in the last month and i'm sitting there trying to pay a bill at a bar or something looking like an asshole and like waiting for that text from my bank so i can reply yes i'm using my card like um if they if they had provided a qr code i would have gladly played you know the other payment method that uh cannot get declined is cash yes i'm a big cash guy always got a lot of cash on me that's what actually i uh i was introduced to money uh via cash i worked at a hot dog stand in south jersey every summer starting at age 13 to 21 and i got paid out in cash every day so i have a very big uh emotional affinity to cash there

it's good it feels good to have like a wad of cash and just be able to pull it out and when did you get your first paycheck and notice that they took half and when i when i when i i started working at a bar uh during the school year my senior year of high school and that's when that I heard that in USA like bartenders make most of their money off of the tips Yeah and like they usually just paid on the books like minimum wage or something to like less than minimum wage like you get paid three Bucks an hour and you depend on tips. How could I do less than minimum wage? There's a carve-out for the service industry as long as your tips past the minimum wage like broken

Yeah, might as well not even get the the minimum wage then and just exactly. Yeah, but now it's actually a problem because because most people are paying with credit cards. Right, right, right. Like, I've seen in this city the move to cashlessness, and it hasn't even been pushed by the government. It's a better UX. It's pushed by the coffee shops. Yeah, it's pushed by the...

You bought this coffee. You can't use cash there. Yeah, I couldn't use cash at it. Yeah. It's legal tender for all debts, public and private. It's crazy. It says on the bank now. That's why I'm actually pumped to be from Philadelphia,

where a historically very liberal city made it illegal for companies or businesses not to accept cash. So if they try to go credit cardless, they can't. But even the places that accept cash, like people have a desire to pay with their Apple Pay or their credit card or whatever. Think about it.

It's like you have to count out all these bills and coins. And change. It's like dirty money. And oh yeah, I just tap my phone and it's so easy and so cool. And I get some points. you know and they give you all these uh you should have seen how fast this motherfucker fell into the face id like they picked up a an eye well i'm fucking the touch the fact that

the fact that there's no fingerprint is ridiculous is that there's no fingerprint reader on the fucking iphone but yeah i just bought my first iphone uh through my work they provided it uh and now i'm experimenting with uh graphene on an android basically like fully lock it down it has the fingerprint sensor on the back really cool well i'm what oh i have a 3a which is a pixel yeah it has a yeah exactly um yeah i like i like to you know i i think i think you turn off the biometric when you're like going through uh like border crossing stuff like that and you also just try and like keep it you know you keep it separate you try and keep everything uh isolated but there's no there's no perfect solution here you don't want to enter your you know your 20 digit

passphrase like in front of people yeah um so like android has that really cool like pattern which is actually like um if you make well depends on if you make it stupid or make it hard to guess right but yeah if you make a cool android pattern that could actually be um like mathematically much harder to crack than a number i think even right you can make the grid like eight by eight right there's something crazy yeah but uh you can make it mathematically hard it makes sense right random connection because if you think about like how many possible chess moves are there it's like uh you you know you need like some kind of a quantum computer to calculate this but how many numbers can you put in on like eight digits well yeah that's only like

what 100 million so yeah fascinating this has been incredible almost two hours fuck man um i can't believe you flew to new york to come speak to us we don't we don't deserve that type of uh that type of love man oh yeah well you guys are cool so yeah missed uh american hodl also uh flew to meet you guys too right yeah yeah short flight though short flight oh don't dox him now i'm not going to but it was sure most places are shorter than where you came from so yeah um it's fun it's crazy being able to meet uh people i've been following online for and admiring from afar for a while now. Again, thank you for what you're doing, Steve,

working on BISC. BISC is an incredibly... Let's end it on BISC. It's an incredibly important project in the space. How can people help? Oh, just follow the project on GitHub, join our key base, and just get a pulse for what's going on

and where you can possibly help. I think it's a common misconception that we only need developers. Developers are certainly very important and we could use more, but we can use help across a whole number of functions. So no matter what you do, there's probably a way you can fit in.

We don't need developers. We need cypherpunks. We need Bitcoiners. We need the real crypto anarchists who want to be part of this really cool thing. Because you look at Bitcoin, they have all the VC funding. They have hundreds of developers

working on Bitcoin and Lightning. There's like three different implementations. all vc backed but bisque is like totally bootstrapped from the community directly and uh you know if you're used to like a like a steady paycheck every month this is um this is like a big change right because now you're basically making your setting your own salary uh submitting to the dow for compensation and you know trading on this purely uh private and free exchange like if you're a real cypherpunk you will just fall in love with bisque and even if you're just a bitcoiner you'll love trading on bisque and uh yeah it's just i think it's the

coolest project to work on right now agreed anything tended on here matthew fuck yes bisque is awesome again thank you for your time guys it's been a pleasure peace and love freaks