TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #20: Matt Odell

Episode Date: April 3, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Matt Odell to talk about Bitcoin's game theory, the mining landscape, and the need for people to avoid FOMO as hard as they can. Join in on the ramblings of two shitposters who have been observing the space for many years.

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent it's a thursday night here in manhattan and we have been relegated to the merch closet barstool sports we've got our zoom 6 hook up with a couple bikes um uh we're doing it raw and dirty today i sort of like it i like this vibe we got like a glass a glass wall here we're sort of in a fishbowl. People watching us with mics in our hands probably have no idea what we're talking about. I'm very excited for tonight. I've been following this man on Twitter for a while. Luckily, I caught him in town while he was in town from Austin, Texas. Some of you might know him. If you're on crypto Twitter, he puts out a lot of good shit. I'd like to introduce you all to Matt

Odell. Matt, welcome to the podcast. How's it going, freaks? Glad to be here. Gotta love the crypto Twitter. That's where I found Marty as well. It's a great place, you know. It's an interesting forum. I think Twitter is the best communication tool ever created. It's the perfect platform for Bitcoin. When did you get into Twitter? Well, I signed up in like 2009. But when did I get into crypto Twitter? Yeah, crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter i played around with in you know 2013 2014 but it really wasn't that big of a deal until maybe this year yeah back then it was all traders late 2016 maybe yeah i think i i was like a silent observer on crypto twitter for like four years right i sat in the background i look back i have

like a couple tweets from like 2013 2014 that no one interacted with i got like two likes on yeah if you go back i've got some 2014 tweets that were basically just like wired articles talking about bitcoin i was like hey everybody you should read this but i didn't really have anything pertinent to say back in the day the best the best crypto twitter tweet crypto twitter tweet of all time was how finney's uh running bitcoin just he uh the first tweet about bitcoin ever how fin at how fin rest in peace um it was like january i think that was right that was the day he got the first bitcoin transaction so january 10th 2009 was the first ever bitcoin tweet was by hal finney was it that early i think so i'm pretty sure yeah so we have you in the

merch closet on a very interesting day we got we got bitcoin tank and we got ethereum tanking below 400 for the first time in a while uh bitcoin fell below 7 000 for a little bit we're hovering around seven two right now um but yeah a lot of frothy markets right who even knows where the price is going to be when uh you finally release this when you're going to release like four days from now yeah next five days next tuesday so we could be anywhere we could be anywhere we're i mean i don't want to make you make a prediction but would you predict up or down are we gonna be able to well Right now we're at, like, 7,100, right? 7,18.

Let's go with down and then up. We'll be at, like, 7,300 when this airs, but we're going to go down first. Okay. You heard it here first. We need some capitulation. We need a nice, hard pain. One thing I really want to get into tonight, you said you had a druggie friend initially get you into it. What, like, convinced you?

like so he was going to college yeah and he had a buddy who was buying stuff on the silk road and i mean i remember that kid probably had like he had thousands of bitcoins and he spent it all on drugs or whatever before i before it even became anything but um then i had a nerd i had a nerd friend who told me to look at it again and that's that's and and i also i just From an economics point of view, from a social point of view, I see the value in that. I see the value in the sovereign money that's separate from any nation state that can't be seized, can't be blocked. I come from a real estate background, and, you know, we get checks bounced on us a lot. I have to deal with banks a lot.

I have to deal with regulations a lot. and I see the frictionlessness if that's a word. Frictionlessness, I think that's a word. We'll go with it. I'll go with it. Frictionless nature. And

it just hit all the boxes. It hit everything. And I was a tech geek at the same time. So it just hit every single box that I was interested in. Politics too, kind of. And then I was just in the rabbit hole. There was just no looking back. It's just taken over my life since then it's funny how it does that right like everybody who gets sucked in to a

certain extent like never like very rarely do you hear about people just like get into this and then there's very few mike hearns i feel like that just rage quit and stop thinking about it maybe mike hearn is still thinking about it mike hearn was the best rage quit of all time where's r3 today that's my question didn't they just make an announcement that they did they came out of like nowhere and made that random announcement but i was it even that big of a deal i don't i think they basically said that like we because like all the banks that initiated with them said this is not going to work because the banks can't get together and they can't coordinate because they can't trust each other that's the beauty of bitcoin it's like you don't trust anyone

you just compete against each other it's greed and it makes it work let's dive into that this technology is very confrontational with the traditional finance and the traditional world that we're used to so this is a good segue into the china fud that's been going around recently so like china recently china fud has happened like five times a year so the recent the most recent china fud is they're they're going to start banking or clamping down on exchanges again but i found it particularly interesting this week that they made an announcement or hinted at an announcement uh because this is the same week in which futures oil futures contracts priced in yuan the chinese yuan went live for the first time so uh this has been a theory for

for a while that china would like the yuan to be the reserve currency of the world they would like to usurp the u.s dollar as a reserve currency of the world and one huge step that a nation needs to take uh on that path is getting other countries to purchase oil in their native currency as opposed to the u.s dollar so china this week has opened up futures markets and other markets through which people can buy oil with the yuan which is a shot across the u.s dollars bow saying hey coming for that ass like we want to be the world's reserve currency and i think this has been a long con like i wrote about today in the newsletter i think this has been a long con like decades long con that china's been playing um and the black swan event that is bitcoin

and cryptocurrencies is sort of throwing a wrench into that long con that they've been playing. And they're starting to realize, like, holy shit, our long con's about to get messed up because of these cryptocurrencies, so we're going to need to clamp down. And so we're entering, potentially, I don't know, can't say for certain, but we may be entering

the then-they-fight-you phase with governments in particular. What will be most interesting to see going forward is who ends up on what side of the argument from a government perspective who's open to having blockchain innovation in their country and letting people letting the free market run and who's going to try and clamp down on it and uh it just adds these this technology adds another layer to the geopolitical game theory that's been going on for millennia thoughts is there a question okay no um so but yeah so i guess the question is

is like what is the impact on bitcoin not even that but like are we answering the then they fight you phase like do you think we're gonna have like a strong backlash from certain countries the first key thing that people don't realize is that fiat the fiat system's 40 years old you know we were on the gold standard then we switched to fiat in the 70s u.s dollar became the dominant global currency this is all that's that's very very recent in terms of history yeah and you know of course i think i think the u.s this is just another example of the u.s dollar waning um i think it's going to be short-lived i think that um i mean i'm a huge bitcoin believer so i mean they should be pricing this stuff in bitcoin um i think china's biggest worry about

bitcoin is the capital flight is the capital controls they have really strong capital controls they're in a you know authoritative regime and they they want they want the easiest way to control your people is to control their money if they can't if they go against you and they lose their money they're not going to go against you right what's that um is that a rothschild's quote i care not who writes the laws just give me the ability to print the money no i'm not sure but That's a great quote, if it's real. It is. And he's right, if that's a real quote.

So that's what's so powerful about Bitcoin, is that it takes that control from them, and the first places you see that are the places that have outward capital controls, like China. China's a perfect example. Venezuela. Venezuela, it's really hard to get U.S. dollars in Venezuela,

And they also have super hyperinflation. Right. So it was really and they have cheap oil. So it was like really cheap gas, really easy to run generators, mine for a loss, loss everywhere else. But there you're mining for gain. And those are the places we see it first. But in America, we have very, very strong controls as well. It's just it's just not to the level of China. And people don't really realize it yet. you know my friends they love venmo they they don't realize that every transaction is being tracked that they don't really have control of their money they they just their eyes haven't been open to that you know but the chinese they realize that yeah i think our our first sort of

brush with that realization was when uh the u.s sanctioned wikileaks in particular and stopped allowing people to donate via paypal and the other one was not that i support this you know but but online gambling um all the fuck it people should be able to gamble all the you know i all all the online gaming all the online sports books all got the way they blocked it was visa and mastercard in the banks they said you can't transfer they didn't actually make it i'm pretty sure they never made it illegal they just said they just stopped the financial institutions from doing the withdrawals and the deposits like a perfect example um of that wikileaks is a is another is another example regardless of how you feel about it politically um but i i think i think

the clearer examples are more obvious in other parts of the world you know in the iran and the the chinas and the venezuelas and the russias and those governments actually have a lot of value in it too i mean i was talking about the other day like there's no doubt in my mind well i tweeted that there was no doubt in my mind that venezuela was i had a state-run mining op oh well there was an instagram video of it wasn't there did you see that i did he tweeted under me the instagram video and then i had multiple people send me other stuff that they didn't want me to post that was like it's really really mature there like they have they have great operations for miners at state-run mining they have great operations well they confiscated all the fucking hardware

i'm pretty sure the petro is just like a nice little cash grab that's separate from the real plan the real plan is you take the sanctioned oil and you turn into bitcoin you mine with it And you can have I said this back in 2013. I said, we're going to have the way mining is going is it's always going to trend to zero to a loss because there's going to be people around the world that would prefer to have the anonymity and the pureness that comes from the mining rewards because you can mine anonymously relatively easily and no one can stop you. Like as long as you have electricity and Internet and you cover yourself and you're following consensus, you're good. Yeah. And and then you get these nice, fresh, fresh, anonymous Bitcoin. Those people are going to be willing to mine at a loss. So it's going to trend towards, you know, towards zero, towards negative.

And that's fine. That's just how it is. That's a that's a good segue into another conversation. Does one Bitcoin truly equal one Bitcoin or some or. Fungibility. Yeah, fungibility. That's my biggest worry. Or other Bitcoins more valuable. than others it also bridges why i think altcoins aren't horrible i think i mean i'm a huge free

market believer so i think that if you believe in bitcoin you think it's the strongest chain which i i think it's the most secure chain the strongest chain the most likely to survive um has the greatest properties then and you're a free market believer then you shouldn't have any worries about altcoins except for the fact that there's scammers that are that are pushing certain altcoins that really have zero value prop something like verge that they pretend is anonymous and is actually not anonymous at all um that that presents an issue to the end user who's buying it but as the actual bitcoin holder yourself that's not a threat to us um fungibility in bitcoin is the biggest concern we have today it was the biggest concern before we

had the scaling debate it's the biggest concern after we had the scaling debate people do not realize how transparent the blockchain is how easy it is to track and this goes back to our other conversation about holding the forks if you sell bitcoin you are adding another element for the government or some malicious entity to be able to track the different transactions because they see it comes from the address so now they say okay marty marty sold bitcoin here came from this address now we know marty controlled that address and then they keep adding all these different info points and they're able to get a better idea and i think the future is probably will end especially if we don't have well key privacy improvements soon what about what about

plausible deniability so that example in particular you just said that like if where did it come from if you sold it well exactly plausible deniability so if i let's say somebody had bitcoin on a trezor hardware wallet just randomly got my coinbase address somehow and they sent me bitcoin randomly and i was like fuck i just woke up to some coin bit because some bitcoin in my coinbase account and sold it like i didn't ask anybody to send it to me like there's a can you make that argument like yes obviously like you like in the scenario that you outlaid like yes what if i actually did send that bitcoin from my treasure to coinbase but do i have a is there a case to be made that if the government were to come after me which i well like that it could

get to that point it could get to that point where it's like unless you physically find the private keys on me like some random person could have just sent me that bitcoin right but let's forget this is a global society right so let's forget about america for a second let's pretend you're in china right and you're trying to hide the fact that you own coins right um yeah it's a push system so i guess you have that a little bit of plausible deniability do i think we should rely on that like no i don't think we should rely on that i think ideally fungibility right ideally pristine we have like the most basic little bit of fungibility going on here because of plausible deniability but the thing is the thing that i worry about is the government says to you okay we want you you

When you report everything, we want you to give us all the addresses you have. And if they audit you, they're going to come in and they're going to say, give us everything. Give us all your documents. Give us every single transaction you've ever made, all the addresses you've ever made. And they're just going to assume you're guilty. Especially, there's certain governments around the world that are just going to assume you're guilty. This is America. You're innocent until proven guilty.

Right. We'll see about that. What I'm saying is we need privacy. We need privacy now. And the good thing is Segwit was kind of like a backdoor privacy. How so? Because it enables a lot of layer two privacy solutions like Tumblebit. And it makes JoinMarket better, I'm pretty sure.

And Nopara, I don't know what his actual name is. He just goes by Nopara. Yeah. He has a zero link that he's coming out with. But anyway, all these things are because we fixed transaction malleability. Yes. So it's really important. Yeah.

Yeah, and so what Matt's basically describing there is what has been called mixers. Well, no, in the past, mixers were centralized, though. Yes. They just closed BitMixer about eight months ago. I actually interviewed that guy back in 2013. He was a fucking badass. But let's explain what a mixer is for listeners that might not know what a mixer is. So a mixer is a service that you use to sort of make your coins anonymous by sending it to an address

that sort of jumbles it up with other UTXOs and you get random ones sent back to you. Yeah, basically you send it to a guy and that guy sends you someone else's coins. Yeah. Right? And then all of a sudden there's no link in the blockchain. Exactly.

And BitMixer was like kind of advanced. Like they had like, you could do delay times and stuff. And they had like a market maker function that if you sent them Bitcoin, they would pay you interest on it, like part of the fees and stuff. Yeah. But it was centralized.

And the key is to have, the key with Bitcoin is one of the value props is that it's completely transparent so it's nice that that transparency exists so the key is opt-in super privacy believers especially like the monero crowd want full privacy they want everyone to use privacy because you increase the anonymity set so it it gives you better privacy and and that does have its place and we will have privacy coins that you'll be able to probably switch into um that will give you like way bigger anonymity set but with bitcoin we just need good enough i think because you want to have

transparency you want to have opt-in you want to have transparency when you want to have transparency and you want to have privacy when you have privacy um but that is that is definitely like the best argument would you call our altcoins because they're experimenting with it for us yeah and we don't have to do any of that like we can just let z like z cash can't scale but like we're learning real world things about zk snarks right now that we wouldn't have learned otherwise if that didn't exist that's true but i'm not a big fan of z cash oh i'm huge you can't launch a privacy coin post snowden in america with corporate investors like exactly the zuku literally and i have so much respect for him he was he was so early he's like he's a cypherpunk i think

like i'm not even gonna say no i don't know i mean he definitely is a cipherpunk but like like he's og before people call people ogs you know like like they're calling people they're calling me an og i'm not an og you know i i got involved in 2013 is when i bought my first bitcoin you know i got involved in 2012 but i bought my first bitcoin in 2000 i'm not an og zuku's an og he was he was debating with satoshi you know about about how to do things but he's naive and and naivety is a liability in this industry and you can't launch a privacy coin in america they're going to say to you the wanna cry people are using this pedophiles are using this drug dealers are using this and they're going to either throw you in jail or you're going to cooperate

yeah those are going to be the two the two ways to handle what sketches me out the most during that trusted setup was that that journalist phone who got hacked during during the trusted setup and the whole thing was like very charadey right you know yeah so that's like that was one conversation that i saw going on on twitter today was that like a lot of people think these these um privacy coins and like things like open bazaar as well are sort of honeypots and these dark markets are like honeypots for for people to sort of expose themselves as buying shady shit like drugs and other illegal uh i think it's i think it's important that we keep the narrative that privacy is like super important yes it's very important then everyday

people need privacy like i don't want to pay someone and them to see all my payments and see what's going on exactly and i'm optimistic in america more optimistic i actually i sent out like a jinx tweet which i hope i didn't jinx us where i was like i'm pretty sure we've passed the point of no return of bitcoin getting banned because so many rich people in america are buying and the the way the attitude in america seems so positive that if you need a global response to ban bitcoin at this point you need governments to act and if you don't have america on board you have no global response right so i i think i don't know i don't know i think i think our political system is too entrenched in its ways right now i don't think they're so easily going

to give up uh no but they but the thing is they have to do a positive they have to do like in like uh an active action right they have to do a positive action they have to actually ban it they have to go out of their way to like coordinate with governments around the world to all at the same time go after this thing and that's never gonna they can't even pass a budget you know they can't they just have to sneak a couple of privacy and we have rich supporters We have the Peter Thiel's, right? You know, we have the Jack Dorsey's. So and then we have futures.

So you can't. I think I think at this point. So my two biggest concerns was government, government action. And the other thing was upgrading. And we have the upgrades through hard forks. If we need an upgrade, you hard fork it. The market will decide that's more valuable. Not worried about that.

And then and then government action. I don't think America is going to lead the charge here. And if you don't have America leading the charge, then you have a bunch of disparate governments all trying to fight it, but at the same time dealing with regulatory arbitrage and trying not to miss out on the next big thing and the next big tax money they can make. And I just don't – I don't see that happening. I think we've – I'm ready to give my jinx statement. Don't monkey foot us. Don't monkey foot us. Well, right now we're maybe under 7,000.

I'm not sure. We're getting close. We're at 7,050. We were under before. We were. But this brings us back to the point I was talking about earlier where this technology has thrown such a wrench into the geopolitical game theory that has been going on for centuries

that you literally have to recalibrate the prisoner's dilemma for this global game theory that's playing out. So this just adds another variable where it's like, all right, maybe ideally the U.S. government wouldn't want Bitcoin to succeed, but if China wants to bring it down and there's an opportunity for an industry to be created here because China shuts it down, then that opens up another opportunity for America in particular, and maybe they'll be more open to Bitcoin. but at the same time they'd have to be open to like hey we don't have control of the money supply is that something that these governments are willing to give up like is there one

is there one crutch between all these governments that hate each other that would make them like agree where it's like alright we should probably shut this down so we have control of our constituency to a certain extent you know what I'm waiting for

what I'm waiting for is the first government to announce that they've been accumulating Bitcoin for their reserves. And it's... Probably going to be North Korea. No, well, that wouldn't help us. Maybe Japan.

I'm thinking Japan, G20, right? You know? If you... It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You accumulate 5% of your reserves and then you announce it to the world, automatic price increase. Right.

The incentive. It's all about incentives, right? We go on about it all the time. It's all about the incentives. The incentives are set up right now for governments to embrace it. Well, we got our boy Chiefy, Chiefy Nundum. He's down in Africa trying to convince their central banks to allocate at least 1% of their reserves to Bitcoin. And he came out this week and said he's more confident than he was when he made his prediction, or not his prediction, his goal in the beginning of the year to get an African central bank to buy some Bitcoin as part of their reserve inventory. He came out I believe it was earlier this week That he's more confident than he was at the beginning of the year That he will be successful in that endeavor

And I would love to see that Fucking an African Central Bank I don't think that's a self-fulfilling prophecy Because no one really cares that much If like a random African country Starts doing it If Japan starts doing it It's like a whole different level

If South Korea starts doing it It's like a whole different level Definitely a different level definitely a different level but i don't think the african countries should be doing it right now and i think a lot of countries are doing it behind the scenes like venezuela is doing it right now iran is probably doing it right now russia is probably doing it right now and the thing is these countries have nothing to lose they literally they're getting batted with sanctions or in africa's case they're just not doing well they've been right serve the shit under the stick

Constantly So they have nothing to lose You might as well put some of it in And then if you announce it If Iran or Venezuela That doesn't help at all Which is good that they haven't formally announced it I don't know

But you create a chain reaction Where everyone's FOMO You have FOMO on a global scale With countries But I think that FOMO could be emerging from emerging markets Sure I don't think you need developed economies If I was like a small African country, I would just be slowly accumulating dollar cost average that shit.

Just keep accumulating. And, you know, worse comes to worse, you write it off. You know, if we're wrong, if we're wrong, you know, you lose some money. If we're right, game changer. Yeah. Complete game changer. This is something I'm going to add. What's the probability that we're wrong?

What would you put it at? So Matt Corallo, when I had him on the podcast... He's a really humble dude, though. Three months ago. I love Matt Corallo. He actually might be my first repeat guest. I was talking to him last week. But he put the success of Bitcoin at 5% when he was on. First of all, it's absolutely amazing

the quality of guests you got right in the beginning. That's why you hit crypto Twitter by storm. You started with Pierre. You just had great guests. You have a great lineup coming up. I mean, I'm not even trying. I think I'm one of the weaker guests, you know? That's how good your guest is.

Matt, don't undersell yourself. Follow me at Matt O'Dell. Anyway, what were we talking about besides that? I was saying, like, so Matt came in here. He's a core developer. Oh, right, 5%. No. 5% chance?

I think the two key things are the U.S. embrace. See, Matt is, you know, he's a scientist. Yeah, he's got to be pessimistic. He's got to think of every attack vector. you never say absolutes you know because you can't defend absolutes you can't the thing is with the hard forks i think we've shown that bitcoin can any kind of minute upgrade any kind of minute upgrade um can be done on bitcoin with a hard fork and the market will value it in and then and and and that will that that chain will win um i for that reason i don't

think i think like litecoin is way overvalued i think that's an overpriced test net i think bitcoin cash is way overvalued i think all these chains that are minute differences from bitcoin um i think etc is way overvalued compared to eth i think because because if you have an f fork now or if you have a bitcoin fork now it dilutes the previous fork it changes it it makes it so that fork doesn't matter as much because there's a new fork if you had if you had a bitcoin fork right so like let's say what is litecoin's hedge litecoin's hedge right now is sha-256 is bad right yeah but sha-256 the reason sha-256 might be bad as a pow algo that's why we're talking much out 256 is because bitmain controls the miners right not for long not for long i said

hey miles suitor from square cash shout out miles he just posted a tweet uh he just got his hell oh you got it he got it oh so now cobra or whoever that is behind that uh that name can't keep saying it he really can't anyway the point is is that um the reason ltc exists is because first of all they said it was ASIC resistant, which it isn't, right? So now they have ASICs. The failure mode is that Bitmain somehow, Bitmain decides to shoot themselves in the foot.

And they're probably about 50% right now, if not a little bit more, which has always been troubling, but it's less troubling now than it was six months ago. I've gone into this a few episodes in the past. Like, what do people fucking expect? Nobody else was taking that risk.

Right, exactly. And they're going to get out-competed. But the thing is, they haven't made a move, right? They're too scared to make a move. the bitcoin cash was like a really bold move by them and it was part of the way that they thought they could control the market and it's part of the reason they're we'll get into that later the ltc the whole main reason for litecoin is is that it uses a different uh pow algo than than bitcoin

i mean you have the you have the blocks are quicker or whatnot but that's all at the end that's all bullshit um if bitmain and and associates they control the script mining hash rate too so if you had a new bitcoin if we had an issue you would have good developers they would come they would switch the pow if they wanted they could switch the block time to two and a half minutes if for some reason they really even cared about that raise the block size they It made the exact same specs as Litecoin in a disaster situation and forked it. That fork would be worth more than Litecoin. Litecoin is not a hedge to Bitcoin for that reason.

Same with Bitcoin Cash. You can just create a fork right now that's eight megabytes. Pushing against that narrative, though. Different POW. But Bitcoin Private didn't attain. But the difference is that was a straight scam fork, and people realized. And the market was actually, you know, Nick, I was I was talking to Nick Carter about that before it happened. And we were talking about the efficiency of markets.

And he said to me, he's like, he's like, if this market is actually efficient, they're pricing Bitcoin private at between 15 and 30 dollars. He's more number guy than me. I said Bitcoin private is going to be worth shit. You know, he told he said 15 to 30, boom, 30 dollars. It was like super efficient is exactly where it was supposed to be. It's a scam fork. But if we had a legitimate privacy fork by legitimate devs with no bullshit pre-mining. Because Bitcoin Private pretended they didn't have a pre-mine.

But what they did was they bought ZClassic. And then they said that all ZClassic owners would get a one-to-one Bitcoin Private airdrop as well as Bitcoin owners. So what's the ZClassic supply? It was like $3 million. All right. So they have like a $24 million. Basically, what they did was they said it would have been the same thing as them saying, we're changing the name of ZClassic to Bitcoin Private, and anyone who owns Bitcoin gets

one. Right? It's the same concept. So what's the supply? Is it 24 million? But instead, they said they're combining the two. Is it 24 million? Is it 21?

It's 19. 19? It's 16 plus 30. But what's their final? I don't even know. I didn't even look into that. It doesn't even matter because it's not going to be here in five years. So the thing is...

Do blockchains die, though? No, they never fully die. They never fully. They're going to be like cents. We still have black coin. You know, it's like Bryce Wiener's bullshit, you know, proof of stake coin. Zeta coin. The crazy thing is we've come full circle.

Now Bryce Wiener is calling out scammers, which is like pretty fucking cool. But I'm never going to give him any credit. So actually take that back. Yeah, Bryce is a very, very interesting, interesting character. He pumped a lot of the shit coins in there in the first. And now he's like running around saying, like, told you they're all scams. you know yeah whatever happened to zeta coin yeah exactly a black one black coin was the one that i always i don't know and razor and there's a bunch dirac yeah he was he was the original altcoin

spammer yeah um i think the market has a way of working itself out it just takes a little while especially in these kind of markets that's what i think people it's fucking people up actually is that this is this arena is the purest market that the world has never had in decades or centuries, potentially. We have a pure free market, pretty much. We have as close to a pure free market that we've ever had. There's no cut-offs. It's 24-7.

There's no breakers. They're not going to stop things. People don't get prosecuted. Is this the purest free market we've ever had? Is this civilization? There hasn't been anything else. Nothing close. You'd have to go way back.

That's why I have But, you know, Bitcoin Maximism, the term, was created by Vitalik. And the thing is, Vitalik, is that we... He listens to this podcast. Does he really? No. Fuck no. I was going to say.

I hope he's worrying about other things. No, I mean, I kind of hope he listens to it. He should, like, you know, expand his horizons a little bit. You can come on whenever, Vitalik. If you're listening. Vitalik, follow me. If you're in New York, swing by. Swing by the office.

believe in the value of altcoins and the fact that they help figure out what we want to... I think Bitcoin's a black hole. It will suck in anything that is more beneficial. It's not going to let... The network is not going to let something overtake it, I don't think.

I mean, just, again, going back to the incentives of the system, it's so perfect. The game theory of the system is so perfect that it'll get to a point where everybody's hand's forced. It's like, alright, if we don't do this, we're going to lose... No, the beauty is the simplicity. Well, exactly.

It just works. Yeah, you can, I mean, you can find perfection in simplicity in some extent. You can trust it without trusting it. Exactly, but. I will stand up for. It's not a hill worth dying on. The thing is. Is it?

The thing is. Okay, so like. So, Charlie. I will give Charlie. I give Charlie so much shit. Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin I just assume if I say Charlie you just know who I'm talking about

it's the guy with like a million followers he's done some questionable shit he pumped, you know, the most recent one he pumped LitePay which was like, honestly, it was like a non-story he just had to step back from that yeah, even if it existed, that's whatever he sold the top, you know

he worked for Coinbase and got it added to Coinbase and then pumped it and then left Coinbase you know, like that's all questionable shit then he sold the stop but um he recently said with nano do you know what nano is rival it used to be right he said with nano he's like it's really cool tech because the transactions are free and instant the only issue is centralization like that is the key freaking issue you know like are you kidding me charlie and he tweets that out to a million people like that is that is super super questionable like ricardo on the other hand he's telling people don't buy monero right yeah

he's like telling he's he answers trolls with like technical answers yeah you know like he's a good maintainer he's a good actor there's so many bad actors to attack he's not one and he's he's a bitcoin believer he loves bitcoin you know he owns a lot of bitcoin i would argue that he's i think i would argue that he's working on monero so hard to benefit bitcoin in the long run i think so yeah um and the only altcoin that i've ever given credence to and and legitimacy to is monero and the fact that it has an anonymous creator like i am under the volition that the shit has to be completely grassroots organically you can't have like a ripple corporation like launching oh my god don't get me started it's got to be it's got to be an anonymous creator it's got to be

sort of grassroots where people are just like naturally drawn to it you don't have to you don't have to need marketing i think there's a lot of rumors going around that some people not going to name names were paying people to go to bitcoin meetups on behalf of ethereum and like oh really before it was even launched like people i didn't hear about that one i've i've heard those rumors and i can't i can't validate them but there are rumors going around that that some people within ethereum we're paying people to go to meetups to pump it there's plenty of reasons to think that was a scam regardless in my mind that yes but in my mind that's just like just go back to heuristics that's not that's not organic that's not organic that's something that's forced and i feel like

anything in this space has to be truly emergent and it it has to it has to it has to draw people in like by pure fascination not by marketed and manufactured fascination at the end of the day the key value prop is censorship

resistance you know I said the other day you know square cash now gives us a layer two I smiled you guys can't see that it gives us a layer 2

network that has free instant transactions. Square cash? With no privacy. You send your Bitcoin to square cash just switch it into square dollars I don't think you can send to You can't send to cash. I think you can because I saw like a meme online

of people videoing it back. I don't do that I use Venmo if I'm going to send traditional payments. Yeah, I mean you could send I don't think you can send Bitcoin No, but you can send me dollars, right? I can send you dollars. Right, and then I can convert it into Bitcoin, right? So you can send me a no-fee instant transaction through Square Cash.

You deposit the Bitcoin into it. You send it to me, and then you send it back, right? And then I switch it back into Bitcoin. Yes. That's a no-fee instant Bitcoin transaction, kind of. I would argue yes. Yes. If you don't care about privacy and censorship resistance.

The fee is either positive or negative depending on the price change while you're doing it. But it should counteract both sides. But the point is you don't care about censorship, resistance, and privacy. And that's what you're paying for. That's the whole value prop. The whole value prop is that people can't seize, block, or ideally track you. I mean, the biggest the biggest issue I have with Bitcoin fungibility is that if we don't fix it, like they don't have to track you now, they can track you in 10 years. Yeah, because the ledger is all there.

Right. So we need to fix it soon. I think it should be like a big priority, but we need we need to fix it soon. But anyway, any chain that prioritizes low-fee transactions is at the detriment of the health of their own network. So eventually, they're going to end up in a situation where they have an unsustainable network with very small node count, with very centralized validators. Why does low-fee mean low node count? Because if you have no fee, then you can't stop spam. and if you can't stop so basically the fee is what stops someone from just sending

infinite bitcoin transactions so on a nano for instance let's talk about nano because nano is no fee and charlie pumped it so on nano i can just send to marty all like if i bought nano i could just buy some nano i buy a thousand nano and then just every second i send marty a nano for no fee and then every second marty sends me back a nano for no fee right that costs us nothing we have the same amount of nano we could just do that forever just sending it back and forth having a fun time going let's go bitcoin you know and just it comes back and forth and every node has to record all those transactions right and what happens is it gets super expensive it gets expensive to run a node and then next thing you know there's less and less nodes and then all of a sudden if

you only have four or five people or 10 people or 20 people validating these things because they're the only ones running nodes because it gets so expensive then that's all it takes is 20 police raids and you take down the whole network right exactly so low fees encourage blockchain bloat to an extent and then which encourages centralization yes which leads to a non-censorship resistant environment exactly so this is like second order situations that people really don't think through when they're investing in altcoins but the thing that nano in particular what's the thing with them that you run your own blockchain and they just like i don't know that's all bullshit the point is the point is is that they have like these delegates that are doing delegate

proof of stake and over 51 of them are controlled by the nano team right now really um and they live in america they're america i mean they bought nano.org which i asked them how much it cost they didn't tell me it cost a lot of money you know that gave me a little bit of attitude and then i just gave them props for buying it because that is actually pretty impressive like that must have cost i can't even imagine i don't even know what number it is that's why i was curious that's why i asked them i was like how much did this cost you and they just started giving me shit you know um and then the price plummeted but that's besides the point they control the majority of the nodes there's no incentive to run nodes they make no money

running it and they just I already think there's a little bit of an issue with Bitcoin nodes for the fact that you don't make any money running a Bitcoin node. Why do you say that? There's no way to solve that because of because of Sybil attacks.

Why would you want to make money running a node? Running a node, the purpose of running a node is proving that. Right, right. And you have that value prop. But the thing is if you have no fees it gets even worse is my point, right? So my point is that if you have no fees and you're running a nanonode, it's just going to get more and more and more expensive, and you're just not going to run one. And they already control the majority of the network, so the chances – it's really difficult to take a centralized network and then make it more decentralized. That's a very – especially if you're based in America.

Don't tell Kyle Simani that. That was one of his main tweet threads a couple weeks ago These systems should start out as centralized And then decentralized from there I mean, him and Vinny also told me to sell at $2,000 And then took credit when they fucking dropped from $20,000 So we're still 3x from there at least Depending on what the price is there right now

We're below $7,000 at $6,889 I just want to say that I don't get stressed out by this anymore my wife does the numbers are way bigger for me now i mean yes they are for everybody my dad stresses me out a bit you know we're still pretty young you know does your dad know how much you have no nobody knows how much i have my dad is the one person who knows how much i have because i've should not have told don't tell your dad how much bitcoin you don't tell anyone how much control your own keys don't tell them don't tell anyone how much bitcoin you have don't tell any

your friends how much try not to tell anyone that you own any bitcoin i already screwed this up marty already screwed this up i actually don't own any bitcoin yeah neither do i and the thing is is like now that we did it we have to we might as well sacrifice or opsec for your benefit but because there's so much unsubstant see the key is people say like don't say fud there's a lot of unsubstantiated fud you know and that is what we try and dispel we should call it U-FUD. No one calls it U-FUD. U-FUD. I like that. Regular FUD is fine. You should be scared

a lot of the time. This is experimental. Be scared. Especially if you're invested in altcoins and some of these ICOs and tokens. So I get a lot of shit in this office. People are like, Matt Brown. Lou's little protege. My partner in crime

on Teen Light Switch. He came out and was like, dude, I'm about to fucking ball tap you. Looking at the Bitcoin price today. I'm like, I told you. I have to go all in. But of course, nobody listens, but they blame you anyway. I'm like, I told, I literally, at first, that piece of advice I've given to everybody in this office was dollar cost average in.

Yeah. 200 bucks every two weeks, depending on how much you get paid. Like, less than... A pack of cigarettes. Just do a pack of cigarettes. Yeah. Like that, and of course...

That's why I did the $10, because we're in New York, so that's, you know, 15 bucks. Yeah, 15, 16 bucks. Don't smoke cigs. It's not worth it. Buy Bitcoin. Buy Bitcoin. Not financial advice.

But it plays into the psychological realm of the space. It's like people just can't avoid the FOMO. It's like, oh, my God, it's going to take off. Well, I believe in the FOMO. That's one of the reasons I'm invested in this space. The FOMO is real. I mean, it's undeniable. I mean, it's funny because in 2013, the whole way up to $1,200, I shilled the shit out of it.

And then I had this one girl who was a close friend of mine. She bought the top. She literally, the day of, she bought it. She tanked the price. i told her you have to sell otherwise they're not going to go up you know moral of the story she never sold she's doing pretty well right now um but the thing is when we went up this year and when we went up in 2000 like the end of 2016 early 2017 i didn't i wasn't shilling it to any of my friends because they all like freaked out on me i can't say the same thing

they freaked out of me well i i was when i was getting drunk i mean i i was i was i tried to reduce my shill factor and then i actually got people that gave me shit when we were at 15k why didn't you tell me to buy it i was like dude i've been talking about it for five years now every time i get drunk i tell you to buy it you know um so you just can't win you can't win you just try and educate people as much as possible you try and stop the ufud um i'm a big believer that spreading FUD is almost as it's almost as bad when you just tweet out things that are just like PR releases that say the word blockchain in them that's not news like there's so many bullish things to talk about like I can't even believe that we still have futures that we have

futures all of a sudden you know regulated future products and then we have square you know allowing you to easily buy bitcoin and then we have robin hood even though it's not a barrier instrument making it very easy for no fee purchases to get some exposure um there's so much bullish news and then people talk about bullshit on twitter and then they get like 200 likes i'm like dude that's just bullshit like that doesn't even matter you know separating the wheat from the chaff you It forces people to learn. You've got to think for yourself in this space. That's the most important thing I've learned over the last five years.

I've accumulated a list of people in crypto that I follow, and any given day, there is 17 conflicting views on the list. That's what you come to find. That's what I like crypto Twitter about, because you build up your reputation, but you can just destroy it in a second. Yes. This game is a long-term reputation game.

It's the free market of reputation. It's easier to hide amongst other media platforms than it is for Twitter. If you make some questionable calls, you decide to pump an ICO, you decide, like Richard Hart, you decide to freak out and then try and pump your own altcoin,

like no one's ever going to forgive you for that and that's important like i feel like that's important um and that's like that's another skin in the game aspect of this is like your reputation is in the game in this space and that's why i'm extremely skeptical and conservative of anything outside of bitcoin because bitcoin is the only blockchain that's proven to do what it markets that it will do and that's enabled peer-to-peer censorship resistant transactions and nobody else has come close to meeting their marketing spiel, other than Monero, I would say. And that's one thing I'm extremely careful of,

is not pumping other shit, because yes, it might be the popular thing to do at the time, but this is a long-term game, and you can get your shit pushed in pretty easily if you have a market downturn like we are now. Fucking everybody, every crypto hedge fund manager pumping ICOs last summer, Like, sorry.

Like, your reputation is ruined. Did you see Ian yesterday? Ian today, actually. Who? Ian Bellina. Diary of a Maid Man. The guy who tweets his Blockfolio thing of all the ICOs. I don't follow that guy.

Oh, so I like to follow, like, the bad actors as well because... I don't even know who he is. I think it's important to keep track of them and to call them out. Mr. Chach. Do you know Mr. Chach? No. So, Mr. Chach is a Twitter account. I've never met him in person.

Dope guy. I like him a lot. he has a deleted twitter deleted tweets account called uh crypto delete bot oh really and he like tracks like mostly traders um that are likely to delete their tweets and then he has some like kind of outside bitcoin people too like uh malware tech or the guy who got framed for the wanna cry um but but but he's got all these different accounts and when they delete a tweet he posts like his bot automatically posts the screenshot and ian bellina like made a big name on icos um shilling icos the thing is if you have 100k followers and you take a low market cap ico and

you just tweet it out you automatically make money it's just free money like you can post some bullshit chart it doesn't matter like that that price is going to go up you just it doesn't take much volume to sell on that and he tweet he deleted like 30 tweets today really you know and the internet doesn't forget like that doesn't archive.com.org never forgets and you can actually get that removed but no i mean maybe it's because he got fucking subpoenaed like that that's a good i don't think he's american so maybe not the sec can go after people outside of america but he pissed off a lot of people and and and he was taking like easy you You know, he was getting, like, easy buy-ins, like, early with, like, really big discounts and just shilling the shit out of it.

And, you know, it comes back to bite you in the ass. Well, I don't know if what I said is just true. Can the SEC go after people outside the U.S.? Is it if they harm U.S. investors? The U.S. can just do whatever they want. Yeah, if they're American investors. I mean, Tezos right now, right? So Tezos is the big one.

They're getting sued by American investors for misleading them. and they forbade americans from investing right so like that's i mean honestly like come on people like you're giving them shit for selling you they what she's do you remember that she said she called it uh tote bags tote bags brightman yeah you you know you were buying tote bags but that's what ethereum's idea was like that's what you have to do you're going around regulations everyone knows you're going around regulations like don't be a little bitch if like the thing you were going around regulations with doesn't work out and you're an American

and you weren't even allowed to participate and you're going to fucking sue them. It's kind of a bitch move. Yeah, you sort of set yourself up for that loss to begin with. Exactly. You should know what you're getting into. It's your money. You fucking sent

it to them. It's a push system. They didn't take it from you. It's a sunk cost at that point. Yeah. I'm not supporting ICOs. I've told every single person who's asked me not to invest and ICOs and most of 2017 they were calling me a fucking idiot you know everybody yeah and I think now you just can't you can't just go back and be like oh well that's ridiculous you took advantage of me you know yeah and that goes into like and that's the tip I'm on like I'm trying to educate

people like to help people make wiser decisions and that's an internal debate I go through a lot is is it possible to to stop people from harming themselves like no do they have to learn these lessons the hard way in an unregulated market we're gonna have scams free the free market has no mercy you know people are gonna lose money they're gonna get they're gonna get creamed they're gonna lose their life's life savings like this is it comes with the territory you know that's just it's unfortunate you know like i wish it wasn't the case and the best we can do is try and educate i mean the only reason i'm on twitter is because i'm trying to educate people if i didn't think i the best thing is i'm afraid of saying this because i don't be afraid i don't

want to get a bunch of dms the best thing on twitter is the dms i get saying thank you really yeah i get so many dms saying like thank you dude you tell it how it is like this is what i needed to hear and and it's the important thing is the good actors will rise above though they'll educate and hopefully we can we can stop a lot of the harm from happening but the thing is free markets have no mercy you know and a lot of people are going to get fucked and and and it's not over it's it's just beginning like we're gonna have so many scam alt coins and so many scam icos like it's not even funny we've we've just we've tip it's the tip of the iceberg we're just playing the tip game right now just the tip we're just reaching the tip and yeah that that like scares the shit out of me

because so many people have been scammed so hard already like how much harder is the world ready to get scammed but i mean to go back i mean i the first scam i tried to really warn people about was ethereum yeah and the reason i got so many hits on that site i mean i said this earlier that that was the most hits i ever got wasn't because they were thanking me it was everyone coming back to say have you seen ethereum it's trading at two dollars have you seen ethereum it's trading at four dollars have you seen ethereum it's trading at ten dollars you know and i was just taking the facts that i had at the time and i was like you're getting a raw deal you have no idea what the supply cap is going to be you have no idea what the inflation rate is going to be we have no idea

if the network's going to exist you know and now we we know it exists and now we know it's worth 400 so like obviously in hindsight like i wish i bought it at 30 cents you know no one's saying that i didn't yeah and it's yeah it's uh that's the other that's the other fascinating thing is like you were alluding to people bringing up class action lawsuits like in Tezos, it's interesting to see sort of the learning curve of everybody like, yeah, we're for free markets, like sovereign currencies, all that. And then when shit hits the fan, they want to fall back to Uncle Sam.

Yeah, you can't be for both. Exactly. So let's get into that. You can't be for both. Like what does that mean? It's your money. That's the beauty of it. we finally have money that's our money you know and if you lose it there's so many people it goes

back to what i said earlier like the hard part isn't buying bitcoin the hard part is holding on to your bitcoin yes you know like there's so many people trying to separate you from your bitcoin let's shout out michael bitstein right now or michael goldstein excuse me aka at bitstein on twitter one of my favorite articles from the satoshi nakamoto institute is his everyone's a scammer and the way he lays it out is incredible uh you gotta listen to some old western theme song while you're reading this article he lays it out for you but it's literally like so i have described all coins and uh fud as like ulysses sirens like the sirens that are trying to call you over and they're eventually exactly they're eventually going to to destroy you so you

have to put a blindfold on get the crew to tie you to the post so you don't get so you don't get drawn to the sirens it it is a battle it's a mental battle it's very mental and i would i would argue that i'm much more mentally tough than i was in 2013 because of this industry industry whatever you want to call it because of being in in bitcoin um because you you have a lot of internal battles you go through like am i wrong like how wrong am i if i am wrong like am i right like what are the the repercussions of being wrong and now like you were saying earlier we've completely destroyed our opsec and put ourselves out there in the public and i feel the stress building more and more like every day i write a newsletter every podcast i put out like shit

i'm giving out some information that like if i'm wrong a lot of people are gonna be pissed at me And that's a risk I'm willing to take right now because I truly, I believe I have a fundamental understanding of this stuff that most people don't, and I'm willing to step on that branch and say, I think I'm right. So how do we wrap this conversation up? Where do we end it?

Do we have a piece of advice for everybody? I think you should just dollar-cost average Bitcoin. This is not financial advice. We are not your financial advisors. I think Bitcoin goes up in price. As adoption increases. Yes. As the halvings happened, they also decreased supply and lead to more extreme increases.

Yes. And every time Bitcoin falls in price, the Bitcoin transfers from so-called weak hands to stronger hands. And those strong hands have no intention of selling anytime soon. Nope. and we end up in a supply shock situation where we're going to hit the bottom, and when this sentiment turns, you're not going to expect it.

It's just going to hit you out of nowhere, and we're going to go up, and you're going to deny it, and all the bears are going to lose a shit ton of money. They're going to lose a shit ton of money trying to short it, and there's a bunch of bears that just gave up in the most recent run.

Yeah, well... Because they just got hit. They were like, I'm shorting this out of $1,200, hundred dollars and they just got fucked well the bear whale is a perfect example the dude markets 300 but he did all right he made like 30 mil or something like that that's true he probably was able to buy back but not as many bitcoin i mean i i hope he didn't buy back like i hope he just like was like i'm done with like if you're gonna do that just like be done with it like don't like i hope he didn't fomo buy back in at like 17k you know like i'll excuse him if he

just like took his 30 mil and was just like i'm satisfied with that i'm just gonna live my life Never talk about Bitcoin again. No, I agree with that as well. But I wouldn't do that. My advice would be learn. Learn as much as you can. Yeah, argue with people. Argue with people.

I have to pee more than I've ever had to pee in my life. He's literally shaking back and forth. Matt, where can we find out more about you? Just go to my Twitter, twitter.com slash Matt under dash Odell. It's not great. he's got incredible tweets Marty retweets me all the time if you follow Marty you probably already follow me

to be honest and this is a great podcast I fucking love this podcast I hope to be on again soon you definitely will be hopefully then they won't put us in the merch closet because it'll be like 25k a coin 30k a coin we'll be in the new studios Barstool's looking for new offices because we're expanding

too fast you can find me at Marty Bent on Twitter subscribe to my newsletter Marty's Bent if you like this podcast please rate it leave a review reviews help so if you like it please give us five stars um and that's all we have for this week freaks peace and love love you guys bye bitcoin