TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #19: The Brothers O'Beirne Pt. II

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

Part II of Marty's conversation with the brothers O'Beirne gets more philosophical as the crew dives into many different topics.

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's marty ben here for part two of our conversation with will and james o'burn uh very excited for you guys to jump into the second half of this conversation we get a little drunker and get deeper and more philosophical uh into this stuff really a lot of the questions that i have about not just proof of work but a lot of like bitcoin things and there is always an answer and i would almost call it a canonical answer because i hear it from more people more than once but they don't always feel like realistic answers to me they feel like like coming up with an idea in a frictionless environment but interacting with a very frictionful environment which involves you know real people well that that's literally my

argument against proof of stake i think human systems are more complicated than thermodynamic systems and proof of stake is inherently a more social thing than having an asic chip that proves that you've done something but we can agree it goes beyond thermodynamics it goes on you know if if the president decides to put tariffs and taxes on on on foreign imports well now all of my hardware gets more expensive and now the decentralization fails because it's cheaper to run this hardware everywhere else in the world that's fleeting to an extent because it's only for i would argue that's like that that could be temporary well network security is not a temporary issue if you have if you open yourself up to a single 51 attack as james puts

it you might as well go home well a 51 attack um in terms of doing a reorg gets a lot harder as you go deeper in the chain and and yeah and then so i come from like a pure economics background like this shit is driven by economic incentives and if a government were to to instill tariffs on the hardware another government like you were saying to all business peter earlier was like would take advantage of that and say all right we're not gonna instill these tariffs all the mining come here and then the government that instilled the tariffs is gonna lose out is gonna get cut behind the competition and they're eventually gonna have to adjust their policy like oh i i agree but we still live in a world where like you can't get citizenship even if you're you know someone who

will provide a lot of value to a country like to move over all of that mining infrastructure takes time and money and it's money you might return a yield on later but maybe it's like you know zimbabwe who decides to open that up and like what else crazy stuff is the zimbabwe government going to do other than allow for for cheap mining you know maybe they'll impose some other restriction why would i as a business owner put that much risk you know into something i i like those ideas i like these you know economic games but i feel like a lot of the times when they move into the real world you introduce so much friction some of it's just emotion you know maybe i've made my money and when it gets difficult i'm like i'll sell my hardware i'm out of the game

so i really love being in a conversation where we can say where i can say confidently that government effects are short run that's like exactly that's i i love being able to say that with any degree of confidence but i i really think that government effects are short run you know let's say that they impose a tariff on mining hardware well then you know the chinese company contracts with an american company to transmit plans for building this hardware at some licensing rate i mean i i just think this stuff can be overcome where i really agree with you is that it's hard to anticipate reality and there are totally going to be snags that we don't foresee which is i guess why i believe in constraining the system to something that i

perceive as being very predictable and very straightforward which which is a proof of work whereas like i don't i don't want to rely on social dynamics or these strange emergent behaviors that could that could come about um across stakers because it's never been it's never been tried and it's a human system and human systems are like notoriously hard to reason about yeah but proof of work hadn't been tried either until it had been tried and it's had its fair share of surprising effects well proof of work had been had been discussed for a long time um i mean hash discussed hash cash goes a ways back proof of work systems had been built i mean obviously never as widely deployed as bitcoin um but shot 256 is a very well understood thing um

the dynamics of staking across multiple participants or not yeah this goes back to the heuristic fucking marcus what that's my fake name i've been saying here sorry for doxing you marcus sorry for doxing myself here i'm saying heuristics too much but this is another thing i fall back on so when i envision bitcoin in my mind it is a public utility and no matter what happens around it like it is a pillar of light that anybody who wants to interact with it can plug in and transmit data like go to the center of town and transmit data it doesn't like bitcoin doesn't give a fuck what wars are going on outside of it it doesn't give a fuck like who is doing what like who is fighting with who it's just there to embed data into and like you were saying like

proof of stake is inherently social where you're depending on people who are in my vision fighting outside of that sort of beam of light and making decisions in that aspect like i'm terribly describing my thoughts right now but like folks we we're in the midst of a competitive sport right now we're in barstool sports playing a sport and that sport is called consuming alcohol while discussing cryptocurrency systems yes and we've consumed a lot we're two bottles deep almost but again the the pillar of light that i see bitcoin as not changing is imperative in my mind like is slow dumb and something you just anchor data into and correct me if i'm wrong but i would guess that will is happy for that oh yeah like likes the fact that bitcoin is fairly conservative

and is is kind of a holdout um and is this is this system that isn't taking risks um i i i appreciate you for throwing me the um the escape hatch there because at some point i did want to make it clear that i am not an ethereum maximalist in by any means i'm not really a maximalist of anything we live in a world where we speak you know over 4 000 languages quickly diminishing quickly diminishing um rip so many cultures well we can yeah we can get into heuristics there like the anti-tower of babel like we're maybe like maybe consolidating from still we're coming back together after the tower battle and and nassim talib would probably argue that that uh consolidation imposes a lot of centralization risk which you know there's something to be said there i mean

there's that there's also the idea that you lose certain utilities you know certain languages are geared towards certain types of discussions one of my favorites is the anecdote about the language where um they don't have relative directions like left and right they only speak in cardinal directions and they have an uncanny sense of you know what direction they're facing anytime it's like a classic one it's like that scene in the wire where yeah yeah what what room are we in right now and it's north north corner of the fourth floor of you know whatever right like um having that understanding at any given time you know there's utility that and and and that's reflected in so many things reflected in our operating systems we we have three major ones

and dozens of minor ones we've got languages we've got currencies we've got you know systems of measurement people love to shit on the imperial system but you know what it has its uses sometimes for certain aspects of construction like there there are reasons that we choose certain things over other things and i'm a huge fan of bitcoin i hold bitcoin i like bitcoin it makes me happy when the price goes up um because to me it has a huge amount of use and one of those uses which you guys love is is the second layer staking thing i love the idea of these services building on top of it and committing their hashes to the blockchain like that's a huge thing for me i love that but i am not unwilling to deny and and i'm a huge fan of the other um use cases of

decentralized you know computing just in general and so um you know i'm just a features man like i said i i live on kind of the i mean i live on the second layer basically i don't think i'm ever going to touch any of these protocols and so what i love is being able to use these things and and bitcoin has kind of i think made a place for itself to be not the use case for many things and that's fine to say we're not going to solve that problem for you and and and i love having this like workhorse that doesn't try to do everything but it's not okay to say and your problem isn't important or your problem doesn't need to be solved today because you know somebody wants a prediction market and they want it today somebody wants a gambling application that pays

dividends to its you know its holders uh people have made it clear that there's a demand for these things and and i applaud anyone who can offer it even if it's not the optimal implementation but if it's an implementation that makes enough people happy that they're willing to throw money at it and i think there's a lot of wisdom there i think that you're oh go ahead martin i was gonna say i fucking love that explanation yeah no no he's he's dead on and he's touching on i i mean so my brother really sold himself short in his introduction um he is far and away one of the smartest people i know and i'm i'm privileged to have been his brother for 24 years um but he's touching on a really age-old piece of engineering wisdom which is don't fucking over engineer you

know people everybody knows the guy everybody has the co-worker who wants to rewrite this subsystem in haskell just because it's cool and it'll quote-unquote scale well um when it doesn't actually matter um and so i i think there's real value to to being agnostic about what really makes a difference and where where you should really put engineering effort effort in um i i just think i guess when it comes to money um and i mean i i don't know maybe maybe i'm fine with certain aspects of ethereum being a thing um what i worry is that money is really important and people's value is really important and in in systems with network like dynamics you have this slippery slope where people might start to build on top of a system because it's readily accessible and has

a nice interface and good marketing and whatever else um and then all of a sudden you start building on top of this system that has these these inherent problems at the foundation and ends up being repurposed for a use that it was never designed with the intent for which is another classic you know engineering circumstance that comes up but i really i do really respect this idea that like hey you know we just need to get something out there um but i i think that that changes a little bit for me when it comes to money i i yeah i think i understand that i think i understand i mean and and in a certain way that is why i respect a lot the the transition and branding from bitcoin to being a currency to a store of value is because it's it's it's a

shit currency when they go out there and say it it is it costs a lot of money to move around and it takes a lot of time and and so i think rather than try to stick to the mission statement which was you know um give this method of exchange to to the masses um they didn't pivot the mit they didn't pivot the code to match the mission statement they pivoted the the statement of what bitcoin is i mean i say they it's you know nobody owns this thing but but you know people as a whole and and i think that it is good to see that kind of level of principle not to oh what am i going to give my investors but what am i going to do to make the best thing i think that was the right move but the need for currency exists and someone's trying to fulfill a lot of someone's

are trying to fulfill that right now and that's really you know we started the show with tribalism that's what irks me the most about tribalism is when you're shooting down a use case that someone actually has i think that's where it doesn't belong no and i love that you said that and that's one of the things that i've been harping on a lot is that bitcoin is going to change us more than we change it like in the like i was fucking in 2013 2014 i was like yeah not i was fucking one of those idiots like anonymous cryptocurrency fee list it was like roger verspiel he was like you can do like a fee list fucking digital cash that's peer-to-peer and but again like time goes on more people join

the network and you realize like maybe this isn't what it is at this at this point in time and that is one thing i respect is that like we are sort of wielding to this thing and again going back to the pillar of light that we all just utilize like we're sort of adapting to this as it evolves itself and it's fucking heavy and it's fucking beautiful to be a part of it it's like it it really is exciting like i feel invigorated every day right i wake up and get to write about it and as much as i hate on ethereum like it's fucking exciting you guys are taking on like you guys we are we are we're all humans we're all taking on these problems like and it like right on the tip and trying to push the boundaries which i would argue has not happened

for a while in this country in particular and maybe around the world in particular as well i did it i i got marty to be positive i could leave this show and die happy especially about ethereum but just in general no but maybe we need less hate less hate no i actually do not believe that i believe we need to be i lost it i lost it i do not believe that we need to be as confrontational as possible so we get the best results no i i mean i i love pessimism i think one of the biggest problems that i run into um working on a platform that we one of the biggest mistakes we ever made was letting people enter their private key on a website it's like the worst thing ever never do it from the my crypto perspective yeah my crypto

perspective never never even if it's even if it's my website don't do it don't enter your private key anywhere never utter it aloud that never type it like yeah never type it don't put it in your your clipboard anyway make a picture of it don't do anything right right yeah even a picture you know uh text analysis if you're gonna do a picture make sure it's a polaroid from two decades ago it's actually not a bad idea as a backup mechanism anyway uh all i mean to say is that that pessimism is or skepticism i'm not gonna say pessimism i love optimism uh pro-optimism kind of self-fulfilling but um uh skepticism is is very healthy and i think it's something you know it's a challenge trying to work in this industry to convince people that you're not a terrible human being

but i love that that's people's first impression anytime that i propose something out there into the ether i always get um i always get people you know immediately saying well like what are you like what are you trying to do you know what's your your angle here um and and in in a way you know for better or for worse that's one of those effects you say bitcoin's going to change us more then we're going to change it it has made us skeptical but i think that's healthy no i do as well i do as well and that's the way you get the best results like you can't just be like oh my god yeah this is gonna work this is gonna work you gotta question everything at its core and really get to the bottom of it um and i am very skeptical i'm personally very skeptical and that's why i'm

here on the show i mean i i like that you are skeptical but you invited me on here because you said you know we need some like some somebody who's opposing me i can't wait to uh get a hold of or listen to the episode that you eventually record with uh who was it last week that you were saying just thinks bitcoin's like this huge scam that's uh oh adam singer from yeah yeah we don't have anything scheduled in the books yet but he has uh via dm said he will come on when he's in new york next so every single new york next yeah and he uh he's very skeptical like he he he believes that like our monetary system's fine it's going to go on as it has for for decades and and be fine like our economy is going to grow at a at a pace that that allows us to keep our monetary ambitions

on the trajectory that they are right now i don't agree with him but i would love to hear his his perspective in person yeah i want to hear that viewpoint too because i think you know above the skepticism is and you know this is i think probably more byproduct of the mediums of exchange that we have facebook and twitter but like we don't hear enough enough dissenting opinions on the things that we hold dear and i think that's a huge anti-tribalist move you can do is talk to your friend who doesn't like what you're doing and talk really deeply with them about it and like draw out of them why they don't believe in it um so looking forward to that episode are we talking about vitalik is it hey vitalik if you want to come on sorry come on guys we're

talking about a no-coiner no-coiner oh a no-coiner yeah yeah no-coiner i didn't realize that was that was a it's a branding that's a thing now that you could have until recently it happened recently i think in the last six months um but will we try to dig into it earlier you you deflected a little bit but i want to talk about you fascinate me because you dropped out of high school and when we first met up at skinny dennis we talked a lot about like you like you were fucking smart enough to drop out of high school and work with technology and you worked with gaming correct he was making these like incredible video games with with no instruction or prompting um it was like you know it was remarkable to watch i had to i had to go to

college to teach myself at a program but uh will just basically sat in his room and and via osmosis i guess accumulated the ability to just like make these magical programs um geez so how did you get how'd you get interested in this if i wasn't deflecting before i'm gonna be deflecting now Yeah, so I think like so many people of my generation, I don't mean to distance myself from you guys. I'm only like 16 months old. Yeah, I know, but it's a long – the Berlin Wall fell – or not – yeah, the Berlin Wall fell down, you know.

It has been down longer than it was up. That's what you're trying to say. And the pyramids and Cleopatra, whatever. Yeah, I got into programming via video games. Shout-outs to the Ludum Dare 48-Hour Game Challenge. That was a community that kind of raised me as a programmer. Those people are awesome. Like most game programmers, I read a couple of articles,

learned it's a shit industry that pays you nothing and squeezes you like a lemon until you're just dry of inspiration and life. And kind of pivoted into web development. Stuck around there for a while. But one of the things you were asking what attracted me to Ethereum, one of the things that attracts me to it is kind of its focus on the technology that we use today. So I'm a big fan of cryptocurrencies going to change us more than we change it. But I'm also a bigger fan of bridging today to what we're going to be doing tomorrow.

And I think, you know, one of the things that enthused me about Ethereum is its sort of JavaScript friendliness and the fact that there is kind of this proposal to bring the blockchain into your browser. And so if you use any Web3 provider, it's called Web3, the idea is that you basically have your account and the ability to sign and broadcast transactions exposed through your browser in a reasonably secure way. So don't worry, you're not just going to visit a website and they're going to broadcast your transactions for you. But I guess to play devil's advocate here, isn't making it quote-unquote easy to program Ethereum what gets us into situations like the DAO or its parity, right? Yeah. the multi-sig contract that froze i like you know some people kind of tongue-in-cheek joke that if um you know you can't contribute to bitcoin core because you don't care to or can't learn c plus plus then like good because that's a good filter on who should be writing code well james money

you're a self-proclaimed libertarian i think you of all people could respect that that that people are at responsibility for the way in which they use their money and you can promote best practices but at a certain point yeah if I go out and develop a smart contract and I claim that it can do something ludicrous

and I'm not saying that's what other people have done but if I say that and people send money to it like you don't even have to claim that it does something ludicrous look at the parity contract like this does multi-sig and because of a cultural element in that system people just reuse that contract

you know technically everybody can go out and audit the contract and figure out that oh you know there's this bug but but because the programming interface is so high level and friendly and abstract um it engenders this i don't know this lack of scrutiny maybe or this lack of understanding which which i have a real problem with i mean i i don't know how to argue with that i would agree with james all right we got marty on the record i would disagree with that because anytime i mean that's just classic elitism right oh that there are there are those who should be empowered to do and those who should be empowered to not the the reason i disagree with that is that anybody can go out and learn c++ if they really want to um you know anybody can go out

write bitcoin script i think what's a closer analog is like um functional programming what i love about bitcoin script is that it's a language that almost nobody wants to work in and it deals exclusively with value transfer and so because of that the things that happen in bitcoin script are very tightly scoped to value transfer so you know that anything happening in bitcoin script is important you should pay close attention it's nearly inscrutable so you have to sit there and like draw it out um whereas if you have a general purpose programming language like solidity then you can do all kinds of stuff and there's a lot of flowery stuff there's some filler in there um and maybe okay the value transfer happens on line 87 you know when you finally

get down there so i don't think it's latest at all i mean i think it's a very open system anyone can participate in we're at barstool sports here i'm gonna analogize it to like the nfl or like the nba is that yeah i mean yeah i think that's that's fine anybody can get into the really in in the nba or the nfl this is someone who not you know doesn't follow sports very much but i mean i imagine anybody can get in with a sufficient amount of talent like teams are probably like chomping at the bit to sign someone who's two times better than or you know performs some margin better than you know the the average player um but no i mean i i again i think this is another place where these systems defy conventional engineering wisdom in that like you you want this

code to be very tightly scoped and very unfriendly because well i mean not unnecessarily unfriendly but like you you don't want to you don't want a general purpose programming language no you want to be unfriendly because this again going back to like it's securing money and value money is one of the most important things in the world because it's one half of every transaction between humans or between commerce in commerce right right i'm so sorry guys i'm gonna fucking explode if i don't go to the yeah i really want to respond i had a similar episode so all right we're gonna shit on uh will no but like that is one thing i truly believe is like this is money it's not something you

fuck with it really is it's a special circumstance it's it's not your run-of-the-mill program you know i mean i've written a lot of programs where it's like okay this thing you know could shit the bed in various ways and i'd be in trouble you know we might we might be set back by a few days um and then there are programs that i've written where it's like this absolutely cannot screw up and this has to behave predictably um and and what i love about working on bitcoin is that the entire thing is that way so like every single change that i submit to bitcoin or every single pr that i review requires like the utmost of my scrutiny because you just can't screw it up um and this unlike a lot of systems out there these days yeah that's like where i fall back on the on the

argument that like this is fucking different than anything we've ever encountered like excuse me people trying to apply like guidelines and laws of your typical software like just doesn't it's just like doesn't it's not comparable it really isn't yeah it's i think um like elaine ow um shout out elaine yeah shout out elaine her her and very underrated very underrated fucking personality oh totally she's she is amazing and and so um i think maybe the talk that got me most hyped at scaling bitcoin in stanford this year was um her and sabo talking about this protocol that they are developing to transmit bitcoin blocks and transactions uh i guess the bitcoin protocol over shortwave radio

and like you talk about it's like ultra cypherpunk right yes yes and that is that that stuff just gets me so jacked up because that's exactly what you need to be completely fault tolerant um like that that kind of um you know really diversifying away from reliance on on the tcpi protocol tcpip protocol is is is exactly the kind of thing that we need so marty has um left the studio temporarily to go take care of some business i heard i overheard as i left you guys were going to shit talk me so i think now it's a time to shit talk marty yeah yeah we know somehow we actually we actually procrastinated shit talking you oh yes we can definitely shit talk marty right on yeah let's get down to it um man this is this office is intense so we're in bar

stool sports as i'm sure everyone knows at this point and it lives up to the name uh i'm impressed there is there is like an absurd amount of sports paraphernalia here there's a literal bar in the office did you notice well i mean that's not that's not totally on you know that's like bars I haven't seen the bar. Maybe it's a significant bar. Oh, it was behind where they were doing the streaming. They were live streaming pro football players playing Madden, which is like maybe a Black Mirror episode in waiting.

Yeah, it was behind them. I mean, it's cool. I was so busy running for the bathroom because I didn't want to miss a single minute of this riveting conversation. I was lucky I got to catch somebody to ask because there's like 40 doors. Oh, yeah, yeah. I definitely had a few false starts there.

Burning the midnight oil. Well, we got half a bottle of wine to finish, so let's keep going. I know. I have two beers, two and a half beers. I'm definitely going to cut this up into two episodes. Okay, that's great. Jeez, okay.

And I hope you cut out a lot more. Man. No. I don't know. I think it's big. I like it when it's raw, you know? Oh, it's raw. So the reason that I love podcasts over, like, audiobooks is that I feel like when people are reading the audiobook, it feels too polished.

And, like, when you're listening to a podcast, like a discussion, it feels like you're talking to somebody. Unless, have you ever heard Ice-T reading Dungeons & Dragons book? No, but that's all I want to hear now. He had a contract, and they made him read Dungeons & Dragons audiobooks. I'll have to scrape up which ones, but, oh, it's special. i can only imagine when i was like uh so where where we leave off we're still talking about uh elaine and we left off at the elitism of presuming that your code base should be difficult to get into because it's super important well it is super important like money is important like i don't

like i i would i would argue yes there's places for elitism like or not places for elitism but Like there are things where elitism can be applied and you can say, fuck you, you're being an elitist. But when it comes to money, above all, like the security and the integrity of that money is bar none. Like it is the most it's the pinnacle, the penultimate goal for everybody. I totally agree. And if you were to submit a poll request to geth or something, you know, of equal importance. and you weren't a serious person and you didn't write serious code you would be rejected just as you would

expect from Bitcoin Core I think you know probably the thing that has happened and I think it's healthy is people have grown this skepticism that I said that I like you know after a while and I'm affected by this too you hold a certain

amount of cryptocurrency and you've sent it around for a while you stop thinking of it as money it does kind of feel like video game bucks it starts feeling like a video game box so for reference it hasn't for me yet sweat every time i fucking oh yeah yeah yeah yeah as you should but you yeah so so uh for reference listeners will refers to any kind of cryptocurrency as space bucks to people who otherwise might not know what he's talking about oh yeah i mean i got i gotta start expectations low deliver high you know so i i i should talk this stuff to everybody until i really get into

it. But, you know, I think what what has happened is not some people wrote bad code and we should stop people from writing bad code, because let me tell you, people are going to write bad code forever. What has happened is that people were too willing to trust services with their information because they did not or not their information, but just anything because they had not yet learned to be skeptical. And this happened in the early Internet. You know, you had websites who were storing passwords in plain text in databases that were easily hacked. I think you

see it now a little bit. People are willing to give over KYC information to anybody who calls themself an exchange. And that's your social security number and your photo ID and all that stuff. That's not already all out there thanks to Equifax and everybody else.

Negative shoutouts to Equifax. Is there a thing like... Curses. We just put a curse on Equifax. I hope you guys I've actually got an interesting fight club theory about Equifax, but we'll get into that. Oh, man. I can't wait to find out who Tyler Durden really is. I mean, you guys would know more than I.

Would it be possible to quasi-DDOS the IRS with all the information that was attained from the Equifax Act? Oh, just file a bunch of false tax returns? Man, I don't know if you could. I haven't thought about that hard enough. but if you could i hope someone out there does right and just lets this motherfucker burn right like i want it i want it that's an awful libertarian statement on your part well well i mean i like to pick and choose but it's technically possible right do you think uh if they have the social security numbers the addresses and names like that's all you need yeah i mean i

think what it comes down to is there's not a lot of economic incentive for somebody to do that it's a lot of letters to send. You have to have a Tyler Durden. It's like, let's burn him. Right. Yeah, man. I'm into that. I don't hate it, but.

I'm not willing to be Tyler Durden. I'm willing to be. A passive observer. What's his name? Yes. He was the Hulk. Edward Norton. I'm willing to be an Edward Norton.

I'm not willing to be a Brad Pitt. Okay, so you want to be taken along for the ride, but you don't want to necessarily be directing directing the criminal activity. Oh, yeah, I'm a wuss. Are you kidding me? I mean, actually, to be fair, I came on here with my real name,

so I feel like I'm pretty badass right now. That's true, that's true. Yeah, so did I. Marty Bent's my real name. Oh, man. Yeah, you're going to be filing your tax return as Marty Bent a thousand times. I've actually signed a couple contracts as Marty Bent.

That's been weird. As you should. Plausible deniability. this is getting cut out yeah that's fair that's fair where were we with uh irs so oh your information be all right yeah so people so people were willing were willing to put out i mean you know it happened a couple times you threw 100 eth into an ico it turned into 200 eth when that thing came up people were doing that over and over and over and over again and they were sending it you know most most icos are smart contracts they're not some guy who writes down everybody

who sent in and writes down you know what they get sent later there's some amount of automation in there you know or or or multi-sig wallets because you start with your first and then you forget oh hey this isn't just a private key this is code running on the main net and you put money in there like people got um lazy you know and and again i'm gonna i'm gonna uh call to your libertarian responses like people you can't get lazy in a system where you're not someone doesn't cover your ass for you no it's yeah no i and i completely agree with that but there are certain cultural elements that encourage well everybody's using this parity contract so i can use this parity contract without auditing the code and that plays into things and i'm not

asking them to audit their code what like every individual because yeah that's that's absurd and that's also you know kind of my my anti-elitism angle you should be able to interact with this stuff but not know how to read smart contract code that's that should be a given um but yeah but who who's making the argument to the contrary i think all the a lot of the bitcoin community you know advocates running binaries that you've verified just as the ethereum people would yeah i i'm not saying that what i'm saying is that we as a society need to start adopting like efficient ways in which to trust things and i think um is that possible i mean there's so many variables well we already we already do that today right like um

credit score let's talk about credit score you know that fucking trust a credit score as far as i can throw it it's virtual i can't throw it anywhere okay well luckily i'm not trying to not trying to take out a loan with the the bank of bank of bent gotta go for that alliteration um you know i and i'm not saying we need a credit score i'm just saying that they're like after a time of people getting burned we develop systems by which to trust things and No one has that metric. I mean, one of the things that really drives me up the wall I hate is all these ICO rating websites.

Have you landed on any of these? Oh, my God. There's like an ICO influencer fucking website. Yeah. These things are garbage. Bitcoin. C-. Well, I'm not talking about-

Are you talking about like token curated registries and shit like that? I'm not talking about- Who's the organization that gave Bitcoin a C- as an investment? Weiss. Right. Right. I'm not talking about the traditional ones, which, you know, whatever. If a C- drives you away from Bitcoin, you probably shouldn't have invested in it in the first place. I'm talking about these these spun up websites that use fucking WordPress templates that rate ICOs and they just pump the ones they want you to like that time shall pass.

we shall get our snopes you know our our like our actual trustworthy um sources out there but it takes time to cultivate those things early internet was full of scams full of garbage and and we're gonna get there and i think smart contracts are gonna get there too we're probably gonna find ways in which people can trust them i mean ercs for what it's worth just to clarify erc all it means is uh ethereum request for comment it's basically a bip right it's even less than a bip it's just like yo what do you guys think about this thing it doesn't have to be does it have to be a contract no or it's just anything pretty much anything so so you know saying ercs are the way the future is kind of but there will be a you know gold stamp of approval

from various people about this smart contract is pretty legit the problem i think with the parody one as far as i know it was merged without um acceptance from anybody i think gav would took some uh took some uh uh what would you call them he took liberties liberties right and you know i i think gavin's a smart guy he's done a lot of good stuff but i think that you know on both ends he did not follow the kind of standards that i would hope that somebody would who has that level of influence but likewise nobody called him out or you know if they did call him out it wasn't listened to but but i think we're gonna hold a higher standard for ourself and where we put our money as you would today you would not go to you know a guy in an alley and be like yo here's ten

thousand dollars make it happen um we're gonna get there and it it takes time and you know it sucks that people got burned you should have had a camera on me in nashville last weekend i'm kidding okay scary thought oh man i don't want to see what was under that trench coat but um uh i i think it sucks that people got burned but i think to point to the central authority and say this is your fault for letting this happen is is almost like extremely anti-libertarian to say that there should have been a guiding hand that coddled you from the possibilities of getting burned you know i know you're you're completely right and and i'm certainly not saying that like the sec should step in and squash anything because i i don't think that's a long-term fix for

anything i i think you're totally right that these markets are extremely young and that we have to adopt wisdom kind of as participants and that only accumulates over time but again i just there there are these cultural elements that first principle like the first principles in my mind like of security first and securing the protocol level like and that's that's great that we have something to fall back on for that but what do you say to people that three dollars is a transaction fee is their take home for a week you know if you're trying to get well so that kind of adoption Well, right now, you can get a transaction confirmed within a day for five Satoshis on the byte. What's that translate to, to an average transaction?

To an average transaction? Sorry, man, I'm stuck in fiat. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't tell you. I can tell you that the average transaction cost, average right now, so obviously some people are probably setting ridiculous highs to get it done quick. mean is problematic you have to look at percentiles so if if i mean and the estimation is its own art um that that alex morcos uh knows a ton about because he's worked on that stuff um but it like you you have to incorporate as a parameter your willingness to wait for your transaction to confirm so i mean it depends okay fine all right let's move move the goalposts on what i

said what are you going to say to the guy who needs a cheap transaction now are you going to say we're going to figure it out with lightning in some amount of time and you'll have to pay this amount to use venmo and if you can't use venmo then realize that what you're doing comes at a premium because what you're doing is skirting censorship if you can't use venmo for what you're doing it might be a transaction that the government wants to avoid or it might be something cross borders or might be something high value and you should acknowledge that the transaction that you're doing has to live on a probably monotonically growing

network of computers for perpetuity and that that costs money and that that should have a premium. Right, and I agree with that. I agree that that is what Bitcoin stands for. But I think that there's a use case out there. Venmo, obviously, they need to connect to your bank. What if you don't have a bank that supports them?

What if you live in a country that doesn't have... You know, whatever. All I'm saying is that that use case exists and to try to stand – I mean, I guess really I feel bad because I'm arguing against you guys, but I'm not arguing against you guys because you just agreed. You're like, yeah, other blockchains, that's fine. No, but to Marty's point, we don't have to focus on being friendly. We have to focus on getting this stuff right. Yeah, we're steelmanning it. Yeah, this is the important part.

But look, okay, so the closest analogy I can think of to the Bitcoin blockchain and all subsequent efforts that follow in its spirit is BitTorrent. And with BitTorrent, basically you have a file of fixed size, say a movie or a piece of music or a piece of text, that you're distributing across the network and then downloading from, right? So you have growth in one dimension. For a torrent to remain healthy, it has to be hosted among a number of peers, right? a blockchain on the other hand grows itself indefinitely the data keeps growing and then presumably as the network sees more use in order to participate with full security you have nodes being added to the network and coming online so you now have two dimensions of growth you have both the data growing and the nodes growing this is like unlike any other system that we've ever

seen and so as a result like you you can't have these you know even 10 000 character line programs that are executed and living on the blockchain that that get carried out on every single node because it's just not scalable yeah you're you're totally right bitcoin has locked its two dimensions in that it's going to optimize for, which is number of nodes and size of transactions or whatever you want to measure it as. But realize that number of nodes is an incredibly... The most important part.

It is. Oh, I agree. It's the most important part. And as I noted before, Ethereum right now does have the most number of nodes, or at least over Bitcoin. I don't know if there's some crazy currency out there. With a different security model.

Right. Right. And so that's all I'm saying is that there are multiple levers to pull here and to say that your thing is superior because you chose the right levers is disingenuous to people who have different use cases and have different needs out of your thing. I will always agree with you that Bitcoin right now, for quasi-anonymous transactions, is the most secure thing. But it doesn't fulfill certain use cases depending on what you're optimizing for, and that's always it. Well, I would push back and say that the use cases that you want right now take time. You can't get these use cases out of the box. Any money that has ever become money has had to go through this continuum. them and so collectible store value medium of exchange unit of account it's just going to take

time to get to the use cases that you're envisioning and it's going to i i agree or i would argue that we're going to be able to do everything that ethereum can do on second and third layers it's just going to take time and that's what perturbs me in particular is that like i see a lot of impatience in the space it's like we want this now it's like this shit takes time and i would argue that going uh sort of slow and steady is more advantageous than going move fast and break things in the long run and so we're going to hit like a time scale in the long run where the move fast and break things sort of mentality of ethereum sort of trips it up and the stick the move slow and steady mentality of bitcoin sort of proves its worth at some point in the next 10 to

20 years all right asap i dig that you know i'm i'm with you i'm just saying that big fan asap yeah underrated very underrated um i all all i am saying is that it's very convenient for us who are speculating in our lofty castle to say like yes this is this is fine to have years from now but you know for whatever reason whether you call it impatience or you call it need you know we've kind of opened pandora's box on this possibility and to say hold up hold up i know you got your use case but like it's gonna take some time is a little presumptive so one interesting point that um the director of the mit media lab made at scaling bitcoin um in 2017 was that um this guy his name is joey was working on the development of the internet and he was saying

basically that back when the internet was being actively engineered and worked on um in its formative years like very few people were using it and they had a lot of room to screw up and experiment um and bitcoin has gone from zero to 60 in you know 10 years and that's not a lot of time um so i don't know i i think we are in kind of different circumstances but um i i think we're doing pretty well honestly you know i i'll i'll be happy if bitcoin retains its current characteristics like because right now i can get on a plane to hong kong and move a lot of money that way and and sort of not worry about being censored or not worrying about having my my bank account frozen and as long as we keep that going i think it'll be a successful project

yeah i i think the value of bitcoin lies in what it has right now and in a lot of ways i think that is true of both ethereum and and many other currencies the value that it has right now it there is value a lot of people say like you know i i actually maybe if push to it i might say ethereum is overvalued on its potential future value because of how much people are building on top of it right now you have you have a lot of companies pledging themselves to be in the i can't remember the name like the ethereum corporate alliance or something like that enterprise ea ethereum enterprise alliance you have a lot of companies pledging themselves to that and that you know that i those announcements never shift the value but i think they change

the way people look at it and say oh you know what in three years five years this is gonna be the hot shit and so maybe it's overvalued in that regard but it does provide a value today in the same way that you said that bitcoin provides value today um that is unique to it and that i think um you know you can't undersell you can say that maybe it hasn't been done the way you would do it or the way a handful of people would do it but it's done enough the way that a lot of people are willing to stake what i would argue is almost more valuable than time or than money but is their time on you know you see an outrageously large number of products coming that are built on top of this and companies that are willing to kind of stake their name you know not wholeheartedly

you don't see city banks saying like all right we're moving the whole ledger over to ethereum but they're willing to invest the resources and say publicly hey you know we think this might be worth a fair shake yeah no I would agree with that like wholeheartedly and it's just it's like

I always fall back on that like this is money and we should be as conservative with it as possible to your point though I mean sometimes sometimes i i wonder about you know i mean decentralization is not the the end it's a it's sort of a means yeah um and i think that people that treat it as an end are kind of misguided and people who want everything massively decentralized and distributed like to the nth degree like i you know i don't care if pictures of my dog are are decentralized because i don't

really you know that's not controversial um i guess there's an argument to be made that you You shouldn't use privacy-preserving technology only when it's meaningful because you need sort of an amenity set there. But I think there's a priority list, right? I agree there's a priority list, but what makes you think that your priorities are more important than someone else's? Because the priority we're talking about is money, which is like a civilization-wide priority.

Well, let's be clear here. your priority isn't money it's some facet of money because money money has many qualities money has liquidity as a quality it has um you know backing value as a quality what backs this money well you're you're falling back onto my point that this shit's going to take time like it's going to take time to evolve into that holistic view of money that defines money which is it has to be a store value a medium of exchange something that's liquid that is exchangeable like my why why does it follow that order like where is that order derived from history i mean like it's like it's so it's a combination of mechanics and psychology like psychology is i

would say 75 of it like getting everybody to agree that a certain money is a money takes time How do you measure that agreement? That's a great question. I would argue, you know, in a certain way that CoinMarketCap.com might be that measure. Oh, fuck. I know. Fuck no. I know.

Hold on. Hold on. I'm playing devil's advocate here. This is my- Go to like OnChainFX or like CoinMetrics. Don't use CoinMarketCap. All right. Fine.

Fine. All I mean to say is that you're talking about metrics that don't have defined measurements. So you're saying something needs to be accepted first as a store of value. How do you measure whether people are using it as a store of value or using it as a utility or something like that? If we want to look at metrics, I guess you could look at coin days destroyed. Would that be a good metric of store of value? sorry coin days destroyed like basically the the number of time that you let your coins sit yeah why is that destroyed oh it's it's like i guess it's opportunity cost right like you could have

this many usd if you had sold but it's a deflationary asset i mean you could argue that the value is going up by letting it sit oh yeah certainly a lot of people would but but the fact that it's deflationary is inherent in the supposition that this thing is going to have value in the future so so basically that's that's kind of the most honest metric i guess is like how long have you held on to this because presumably if you've held on to it for a long time you think that in the future it's going to have a lot of value so you think a market with zero liquidity is a good metric. I'm going to say zero liquidity.

Right, so it's a combination. Yeah, and again, it's psychological. How do you measure psychology? It's impossible. It's just a... They're heuristics. So let's shift gears here to another technical matter that's a recent personal favorite

of mine. Is it cosmic or terrestrial? It's fairly terrestrial. This is E.T. phoning home right here. so there is a distinction which listeners of the pod may or may not know about in ethereum you have an account based model in bitcoin you have a utxo based model the utxo based model is a little bit harder to reason about because basically the idea is that when you spend a coin you have an output and for that output there are certain inputs for which the sum total of the

inputs have to outweigh or equal the output usually outweigh because you want to pay the miners a fee in ethereum on the other hand which is account based basically you you have a sort of what we call stateful transaction which is moving a value into this account um and so the two it's sort of a subtle nuance but the two are different and the reason i bring this up is because a seemingly unrelated design choice has very concrete implications for attack so in ethereum you can wage this attack where basically you sybil someone which is to say that you surround them with nodes that are dishonest and feeding them bad bad information and you say okay i've paid you 10 ETH, right? So maybe you had some out-of-band agreement that I would pay you 10

ETH, give you this thing, and then you would give me back, say, 5 ETH, right? So they broadcast then the transaction that's paying you 5 ETH. Well, because this was a Sybil attack, you basically unengage and reveal to them that they have been off chain the whole time but you replay their five eath payment to you and you get five eath that works in ethereum this doesn't work in bitcoin yeah so i i agree with that possibility and hang on let me just is that printing eath basically no no no it's not printing eath it's just basically it's replaying a transaction that transfers value from one holder to another. Marty, have you ever seen The Sting, Robert Redford,

and what's the other guy? Paul Newman. Paul Newman, yeah, great movie. Strong recommend. If you don't have a movie list yet for the new website, throw The Sting on there. I'm going to watch it tonight. This is like playing somebody a different horse race

and getting them to bet on the real horse race and then making them lose money that way. Sorry, spoiler alert, this thing. Yeah, well, hopefully everybody who hasn't seen that will forget by the time they watch it. Right, it's a very small detail. But let me just spell out for the listeners that the reason that this isn't possible in Bitcoin is because it uses this kind of at-first-blush, more unfriendly mechanism of transacting, which is the UTXO mechanism.

And basically, if you tried to do that in Bitcoin, you wouldn't be able to replay that transaction that grants the thief five Bitcoin because it's based on a UTXO that doesn't exist in the main chain. And so, again, this is an example in my mind of a concept that seems more straightforward in Ethereum, this account-based model, that actually results in a wider attack vector than Bitcoin has. I would also like to point out, though, that in your proposed attack on this person, you agreed to an off-chain exchange. You said that they sent you 10 ETH for something off-chain. Well, no, I mean, this could be totally on-chain.

Somebody could say to you, hey, I need to get rid of this ETH. I'll send it to you for 10. You wait five days and send me back five. Right, and that could be orchestrated as a smart contract, which would not play well with a Sybil attack, because if I sent a transaction to a smart contract, it wouldn't exist on the mainnet, and it would not go through. Yes, it could be architected in a smart contract, but could also not be. Right. But that was an agreement that you made off chain. And so there, you know, again, it's that it's that discussion of deferring trust. Yeah. And that gets back to like the discussion of the attack surface. Like you're just increasing the attack surface in that at that point. I think that's what it is. Like, I think, Will, you're right that maybe, you know, maybe such an attack might be not as plausible as as something else.

But but the fact that it's available to an attacker, to me, is very meaningful. And like if you're if let's say that Chase Bank starts using Ethereum and they hire some hapless dude who claims to know solidity to architect their Ethereum system and then all of a sudden they rely on a pattern like this and and and nobody has really thought about it. You know, it's it's again a reuse of the parity multisig wallet over and over. It's it's just like there's this pattern that's available to somebody who's dishonest and then it gets misused. yeah and that's that's how you build your cheshireton's fence you know you you do these things you make a mistake and you you patch it can you define cheshireton's fence first cheshireton's fence is the idea all right so you're walking around you feel in in your field or someone else's field and you see a fence um what do you do with it do you destroy it

or do you think to yourself huh somebody probably built this fence for a good reason i'm just gonna like let it let it hang here or hop over it i guess is another um analog for that but the idea is that there are things that people don't have to know every single detail about you know you don't have to know necessarily why you look both ways before you cross the street as long as you know it you'll be fine and i think those things are built up over time as somebody mentioned earlier we have the ability to um you know transmit information across time and across people and we can share experiences that kind of stuff um that's that's going to build here in this ecosystem and that's why earlier when you asked is this going to happen in our lifetime i said no

because we're pretty ironed in our ways of like oh this website says that if i send my money here it's going to get there like that's fine i think people are going to learn you know is there a smart contract has has this agency validated it as you know a legitimate contract there's going to be a shorthand for that it's going to be so fast i i i don't know if i agree like i think marty remarked earlier at some point i don't know if this was on twitter or in an interview but he basically said like people know enough to not build secure applications in php and this like I think what you're arguing for is, like, building a secure application in PHP because you're like, well, look, yeah, it's PHP. You know, there are these attack vectors.

But, like, over time, we'll accumulate enough wisdom to avoid these attack vectors. And it's like you could just avoid all that by doing a much simpler thing. Yeah. And that argument came from, like, a CMS background where, like, most CMSs are built back in on PHP. where if it's like a blog or something that's putting out like written content it's not as big a deal as value transfer and you have to you have to de-alienate between these these different use cases and for me it's a non-starter with money it's got to be as secure as possible well i i mean i think that's why i'm kind of anti-maximalist is there are these use cases that require

different levers to be pulled and you know i'm sure there's somebody out there who says nope i want this in gold could be fake money could be money where the serial numbers are tracked by the government and going to be you know i'm going to be arrested for this or whatever like there are different mediums of exchange right now that exist for different reasons and maybe maybe bitcoin cements itself as hey if you want to make 100 sure that this one transaction lives alone and it's done you know maybe that's the avenue for bitcoin i would argue that we're in we're in a time where the multiple medium of exchanges is a luxury and what we're falling back on is when those luxuries aren't afforded to us what is the most sound medium of exchange and

most sound money and i would argue that's bitcoin like but even i i mean look would you like yeah i mean like we're afforded the luxury of medium of exchange now because fiat currencies are hot and they're readily available but that the fat lady's only going to sing or excuse me the music's only going to be playing for so long no i oh right is fat lady not in vogue phrase alternatively the fat lady is going to sing at some point exactly and the music's gonna stop exactly which is i think i'm mixing analogies here but dubious you're right the fat lady's gonna sing at some point and when that happens like what are you gonna fall back no i i think this is something that i i think a lot about and not a lot of people talk about because again it involves a lot of kind of

forecasting um but if you look at the balance sheet of the the united states government i mean this this money doesn't seem like it's going to last for very long if you sit down and and look at the numbers um so yeah i i do think like right now we're afforded a kind of luxury um that we can transact in these different mediums but um if you're asking me which system i would put my faith in long term it's it's absolutely bitcoin because i have the source code on my computer and i know how it works and i know what the monetary policy is and no other single human being can influence that so that i mean personally that makes me sleep a lot better at night and that's why i hold bitcoin i i mean it's still look if you really want to get down to what's what's the infallible currency

hold a physical thing in your hands and then that's not even infallible because what if we're all living in a simulation you know and you simulate me giving you giving you me the thing that i traded my gold for i would argue that that bitcoin's more infallible than gold this is gonna i'm gonna get yelled at for this but no you're not i mean in the sense that like i can fucking hold it in my brain and nobody can like literally grab it like nobody could take my ring like somebody you could take my ring off my hand right now and run away at the gold like you can't take my thoughts on my brain some you know certain people time lock bitcoin so that basically it can't be taken from them and that's that's a wonderful property that you can say and by the

way a lot of people don't know that there are native operations to bitcoin that um aren't exploited in the same way that they are ethereum like multi-sig contracts like time lock contracts like check sequence verify um but let's be clear those aren't those aren't abused in ethereum those are abused in particular smart contracts that do not implement them correctly okay i would argue that the the possibility that they can be implemented incorrectly is a bad non-starter i yeah i agree but but anyway like the i mean yeah like that's that's a pretty cool feature of your money um and so yeah i i put more faith in bitcoin as a monetary system than almost anything else um and that stands alone from adoption i think i think basically people are catching up

to bitcoin kind of as marty says like bitcoin is going to change people faster than people change bitcoin and i do think that's true i mean i i think that some people were primed for bitcoin because they were thinking about this kind of weird, I don't know, people have been noodling on monetary policy for a while and people were ready for it. Huyck was ready for it in the fucking 80s. He fucking predicted it. So if you don't mind me proposing a slight topic.

I mind. Yikes. Don't come on the podcast. Marty's a Nazi. um who do you think the next generation of cryptocurrency maintainers are going to be who do you think is going to get interested in this stuff because one of the things that i hear a lot of people talk about is one um like the ethereum crew very young you know a lot of inexperience if you that's air quotes on that uh it's direct quotes to me a lot of brashness

Whereas the Bitcoin is like a bunch of old cypherpunks who are like cool and – Disagree. Let me tell you why. Well, for one, you. Well, yeah. Well, I'm somewhere between. I'm 28 years old. Yeah, but you said it yourself.

You were doing PRs when you were 25. I guess so. I guess so with reduced frequency. All right. Feel free to dispute the – So shout out Andrew Chow. Andrew Chow is one of the most prolific Bitcoin core contributors. And this kid is still in school.

Sorry for doxing, H.L. Grade school? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He's an undergraduate in America somewhere. More doxing. I won't say more than that. He goes to North Dakota State University. You can really find out about H.L.

How bad would you feel if you were right about that? Terrible. Terrible. I sure hope I'm giving A. Chow an ego boost that's commensurate with the amount of information I'm revealing about him. But I don't even think this guy can drink. And he is an incredible contributor to Bitcoin Core. All right. That's all I'll say.

I wasn't going, I mean, I was not going for exceptions to the rule. I think it's fair to say that the Bitcoin crowd skews, developer crowd skews older. I think the blue map might be your guys' age. I don't know. Nobody knows. He's ageless. He's younger than me. I know for a fact.

Okay. What I will say, what I think is more important is that we need to fucking ... We don't need ... Our schooling system needs to get better. We need to ... Oh, it's busted. It's busted, but we need to realize, oh my God, instead of ... I took five years of Latin. like i fucking i should have been learning like javascript or like css html are you uh are you a catholic school upbringing yeah i went to a jesuit high school like i fucking learned

took five years i took five years of dead language our father in heaven hell be the name i can i can do it in latin for you right now oh man all right one out there was one time there was a time yeah i can do it i could do it right now like but i should have been learning fucking like c plus plus or i equal zero yeah but that's something like we have to just do like that's what i'm like to your point will like we're not going to see the benefits of this for generations and And I think that's because we are terribly equipped to learn at the pace that we should be learning as a society. Yeah. So, all right.

Circle way back. This is why I want to go back to you. Like, you dropped out of high school noticing this. Okay. Tell your damn biography. All right. Just give the people what they want. I hardcore deflected up front because, honestly, I'm a huge poser.

And I'm always worried about getting credential checked at parties. So, yeah. So, I dropped out of high school. As James mentioned earlier, it was for my wanting to develop video games like every other 16-year-old out there. I think I disillusioned myself fast enough to not get into $120,000 of debt in some state school. And it was your absolute willingness to defy truant officers and hide in your closet. That was a pretty key part of it. Boss!

You were hiding from officers? Is this true? Oh, yeah. Tijuana Brown. Tijuana Brown. Shout-outs to Tijuana Brown. Shout-out to Tijuana Brown. She threw me in the back of a police car.

I thought I was pretty cool at the time. I didn't know there was a police car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cuffs and all. Holy shit. No, I mean, I guess in Northern Virginia, they take truancy seriously. I'm sure in, like, downtown Baltimore,

they don't give a fuck. Shout-outs to The Wire season four. One of my fondest memories is watching The Wire with Will, by the way. Oh, yeah, Wire and Wings Night. That was a strong two-person family tradition for a solid year in Midtown East. That sounds like an incredible night. Incredible multiple nights.

So let's get back to you dropping out of high school. I think we need more yous. That's what I'm trying to get to. All right, all right. Because we need more people like you. Okay. Well, you know, in a lot of ways I disagree with that. Because, for one, I'm working with a lot of very smart people who went to school and who know things that I don't.

I'm not saying that I could not learn those things, but there is something to be said for being classically educated in computer science. I think you take certain things into consideration. For instance, my brother is one of those. I think if I interviewed at Chaincode Labs, they would laugh me out of there because I just don't have a basis for a certain classification of computing problems. But I do think that the path that I took well equipped me to build a certain type of thing that, if you ask me, I think Bitcoin is lacking a little bit, which is sort of the bridge between reality and cryptocurrency, which is it's not this thing that sits in space and you can hold in your brain

and no matter what anyone does to you, can't take it away. It's this thing that actually provides utility and ease of use and you can think about in realistic terms. And I think that's something I see a lot of in the Ethereum community and I think is promoted by the ease of access that i you know previously mentioned is a way to build things people can use today probably tomorrow you know maybe they build some piece of garbage that gets hacked i don't know but um the point is people have room to experiment in in a in a pretty friendly way i have no idea you know how

i would get started on like some layer 2 bitcoin stuff how did you learn to program so how did i learned to program swearing oh yeah what was the first thing to program very first program man i think my dad asked me to program the fibonacci sequence without hard coding it i think that yeah yeah remember i used python but i holy shit my dad never asked anything from me shout out dad he had he has doing discrete math problems in pizza hut oh yeah i mean that's where that's where the like strong libertarian core economic background comes from james picked up more of the math than i will ever pretend to know but damn wait so how do you write a fibonacci you got a for loop that adds an item from the array that you're iterating on it takes the last

item and it just adds to it yeah the classic pitfall is to do a tree recursion which blows up exponentially in terms of run time, but you can do it iteratively more easily. One of the few times where the naive solution wins out. Exactly. Gentlemen, we've been in here

for fucking three hours already. Really? Yeah, it's 9 o'clock. Time to free Marty up to go home to his wife. Do I want to do that? Just kidding, Rachel. I love you. What's the note to end on?

I don't know. Do we? I mean, we got 10 minutes to end. What did we solve tonight? Did we solve anything? I don't think so. Here's what I think we solved. I think we hashed a lot of things out, though.

I think one thing that we solved is that you- Pun intended. You, the listeners, know that Marty has a heart of gold. Despite all his pessimism, I was able to just polish a nugget of positivity for a hot second, which was instantly taken away, but I know it's there. I would agree. I see Marty's heart of gold every morning when I get his email. There's no doubt in my mind.

I don't know why you're reading or listening to me. I don't know. I don't know. I just happen to be here. I don't know how I ended up at Barstool Sports. I don't know what the fuck is going on right now, but I know that I'm here, and I know that I very much enjoyed the last three hours.

I think I'm smarter. I think I'm a little smarter because of it. I don't know if you two are. I mean, you two might be dumber from talking to me. but no i think any opportunity in which i have to remain civil with my brother is an opportunity to learn because he's a very smart guy who who calls me on my shit and he has done so a couple of times here and i feel like i'm uh i'm a more well-rounded person as a part of it i do as well no i really enjoyed this conversation like i think we learned a lot like and i think the main thing that we

learned is that we have no fucking idea what we're doing is we we have no fucking idea what we're doing at a macro economic level i think each of us carries out the contribution to the ecosystem marty i feel like especially those first two episodes you did are great entry point for people into understanding both the community and the history behind this stuff i think james barely needs to speak for himself in terms of contribution. I mean, the man's landed many a pull request that I'm sure will pay dividends 10, 20

years from now. Minor at best. And I make it easier to buy ICOs. I'm sorry. I don't know how I feel about that, but Hey man, if I didn't do it, somebody would. Yeah, somebody would.

ah you had to bring up icos right we touched on it we did i told you your investing advice look for why they made a token they probably don't have a reason what i say what i would say is it's it's um it's a real privilege to be close with someone who has a different perspective than you do and to be able to not only not only get that perspective but um have a basis of respect for them um which i obviously do for my pretty pretty intelligent brother um and just to be able to test your own ideas i think that's really awesome um yeah i would say try try to surround yourself with people who while they may not hold the same viewpoint as you a hundred percent but but you have to respect yeah there have to be certain principles that you share and that you

can kind of establish a bedrock from because i don't think there's value in just going out and seeking dissonance for the sake of dissonance oh you shouldn't feed the trolls nor should you be fed by the trolls you need you need to seek out you know true wisdom um from respectable people and i think that's really hard to find you know honestly if i could introduce a product in the world it would be you enter your viewpoint and i return to you people who hold an opposing viewpoint who are respectable yeah i wish that existed i hope you guys thought this was respectable tonight that's that's that's the only hope i have tonight like i had a fucking blast with you too like it and it has enlightened me it is and i will be the first to admit like i am

very uh very quick to to be negative you know well you're willing to spend three hours to suss out the validity of that negativity so i'd say marty you've got you've got a lot on a lot of people and a quick plug for chain code um i just want to say that the residency was an incredible opportunity and um if and when we do it again um i encourage anybody to apply and just you know come and spend a few weeks at chain code because the people there are truly exceptional um and um uh the people who have a hand in running the program namely um john and alex and suhas and marco and russ and matt um are extraordinary and uh they're just wonderful people so so if if the opportunity arises please apply and come hang out at chain code shit are we doing plugs now

plug oh yes all right plug to my crypto solid team you've heard me shill ethereum all night but you know honestly as i tried to mention before and i'll try to mention now i'm just pro blockchain development everywhere so are my fellow devs on it if you're interested in getting your feet wet you know whether or not you want to stick for the long term or you just want to like soak up the ecosystem learn you know certain things uh we're totally open source we you know i get contributors every day shoot me messages and stuff so if you're interested in working on that kind of stuff jump in we're also focused on a little bit more than just ethereum i'm just hint that way no major statements but um yeah if you're uh if you're listening you're like

hell yeah these guys are cool and i want to work on blockchain stuff too um definitely a good starting point my name is marty bent i'm your token idiot and we are gonna wrap the the podcast there uh peace and love everybody we love you marty that was fun three hours jesus we're gonna have to cut that in the tip i gotta say i'm sad that I didn't make it to the end, but... We'll see how much you edit out. We'll see if we've got 45 minutes. I don't edit a lot out.

We took multiple pee breaks. I mean, we each took one. We each took one. Yeah. In aggregate, it was multiple. That was well coordinated, by the way. Not at all. I literally said,

I gotta pee. I didn't hear that. We gotta get one last penis in there. Penis. That was fun. That was cool. That really opened my eyes. no there's there are a lot of really good arguments for you know why ethereum should

be a thing why it should be worked on well you guys were you were uh exceptionally open-minded guests for this i mean to the will show to the will show yeah i mean you said you're having an ethereum core guy on later at some point right lane reddick yeah i don't know lane's contributions but I swear to God he showed up like last year like this time last year whatever he can speak to is going to be way more than me

so I appreciate I find that hard to believe that you're seeking that out I feel bad for your listeners that I'm their first exposure to the enemy I don't I feel like you're a great first

a good representative thank you realistic and idealistic at the same time but you guys did a great job of not teaming up on me and whooping my ass I literally had

try your hardest not to shit on my 30s. That's like the do not congratulate for Marty. Like, start. Oh, Jesus. No, like,

that's one thing I'll admit. Like, I'm fucking, I'm dumb. Like, I don't know the technical aspects of it. You gotta stop saying that, man, because you're gonna lose credibility to people.

You understand so much more than... It's disgusting that you can school me on eclipse attacks when this is like i don't know what that is please pull up an article and tell me what it is but you have experienced trading in like real markets that are not cryptocurrency you know i mean that alone puts you head and shoulders above people like us for a long run when you meet traders

traders are fucking mouth readers like fucking just like like just react to like instincts like what i think is smart is like and this is coming from like now probably four years ago i started working like heavily in the code like i was writing code in matlab but like the cio that i worked like the chief investment officer who wrote the coding base that i manipulated to pull the data from bloomberg like all my he was like literally in line to be a russian cosmonaut immigrated to the u.s to get away from the city yeah thank god for him i hold dimitri up to like this pedestal like oh yeah he's smartest like he wrote the edge of the algorithm for the hfri hedge fund like i would never be able to do that like the fact that like you can write lines of

code and manipulate data and make things happen like i cannot do that and i feel powerless compared to that but you can i mean you just admitted to having manipulated that lab and like you you've done the php job i can't build that code base from scratch yeah like nobody builds it nobody builds it from scratch the first time i mean yeah yeah yeah i don't know the only The only way that I made it work was I worked at an agency where other people did that part for me, and then I got to watch and learn. It's the only way it worked. If you really wanted to, you could put yourself in that environment where you're like, okay, I want to do this. I probably should.

I mean, you know what? You have the number. No, I don't think you should because there are plenty of dudes in our seat. And there are not a lot of these in your seat who are actually, as Will says, serving as an adapter between, like, the technical community and the people who use it. So that's what I'm trying to do. Like, when you were saying tonight, like, that's what I'm trying to do with the newsletter is be, like, the olive branch to the uber-technical side and the masses that want to know more. Yeah, that's what people are fucking up on right now. I mean, the number of projects that I look at that just have no respect for, like...

Like, that's why I'm writing Barstool's voice and the curse in the newsletter. I can't write proper for you if you're ready to. People are going to listen to that. No, and people love it. That's why I love referring you to my friends, because I'm like, oh, there's this dude from Philly. You're from Philly. You're going to understand this communication.

Yeah, exactly. You speak your language. Yo, this shit's fucking crazy. Or like, yeah, I mean, that's why I love this show, is because you get these stupid digressions, regressions and like it's not all just like crypto jibber jabber yeah yeah james james has another guy that he well i don't know if you still listen to him but the bitcoin markets update guy oh