TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #28: Joe Looney

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Joe Looney, Co-Founder of the Rare Pepe Foundation, to discuss digital collectibles, the history of Rare Pepes, efficiencies provided to power plants via PoW mining, and much more. Follow Joe on Twitter: @wasthatawolf Follow Marty on Twitter: @MartyBent

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty ben here on a friday morning we got coffee in the studio it's uh it's early it's around 8 a.m may 11th 2018 year of our lord and we're going to talk about digital collectibles today i'm very excited um so how much time how much time do we have god i gotta train at 11 all right so we've got a couple hours here and uh you guys have heard them already i'd like to introduce you all to a co-founder of the rare prepay foundation joe looney joe welcome to the podcast thanks for having me thanks for coming on i'm excited to talk about this today because uh i've been corresponding in dms for a little bit in the last couple months talking about digital collectibles

It's something I can't wrap my head around fully yet, but you have been fully immersed in it, to some extent at least, being part of the Rare Pepes project. We'll get into Rare Pepes in a little bit first. We've got to hear your tale. How did you get into Bitcoin? I got into it, like I actually bought my first Bitcoin just prior to the big pump in early 2013, up to like 250 bucks. So I got interested probably like February, March when it was around $100, and then I thought I was a genius when it went up to $260. Then it crashed back down to $100, and I wasn't as smart anymore.

But I had heard about it probably like a year before. I remember following just a random Twitter handle that would tweet the price, but never really thought about it until I saw that tweeted price going up and up and up. So then I finally looked into it. what um what drew what drew you to it are you do you come from more of like an economics background a computer science background or um i'm i'm a big fan of just the internet in general um and uh it was kind of i was actually like starting to decide whether i wanted to get into trading like options and futures and stuff like that um and i remember i went to a like a seminar

on options trading because it was one of those things I really couldn't understand like buying a put or selling a put or buying a call like what that actually meant and so I kind of figured it out

and then by the end of the thing I was like man this is crazy because these things like just slowly rot away like it seems like the craziest thing to try to like make money in and then right after that I saw Bitcoin going up

I'm like wow this is this is probably just as crazy but it's something new so maybe the ceiling's higher so um and just just in general interest in uh just like the idea that you could have money on the internet so yeah it's pretty powerful and so what we're here to talk about is digital collectibles you so you helped with rare pepes when i was getting off the ground so the i did so let's explain rare pepes for the freaks out there that that don't understand what it is yeah so uh back up maybe a little bit and uh talk about counterparty okay um so i've been

involved in counterparty since like right after they had their their launch which was a burn which was kind of interesting for the time because it wasn't an ico people literally just burned bitcoin to get a certain amount of xcp which is the counterparty token um and uh so i've always just kind of been into that and and i i actually built a wallet a chrome extension wallet it's actually very similar to metamask like which is kind of funny because i did it in 2014 like prior to ethereum even launching so it's like i'm like watching that happen is like wow like like i guess it was a good idea two years ago or like when i had it so um but i kind of went through the whole progression of like oh these these tokens would be great for like

like tickets or they would be great for like using as like a way like like coupons or something like that and i i kind of like no that's stupid like no one would want to like pay transaction fees for that like like like having all these ideas and and eventually thinking like no like it kind of like when people first get into like crypto and see these like tokens and stuff and have all these wild imagination like all these things they can do and and uh so i kind of went through that early on like 2014 2015 and i feel like that's a cycle everybody has to go through right yeah well well it's anything with crypto right you come in you're gonna you're gonna fix everything you have this great idea that no one all the people here had never thought of before

um but yeah so uh actually there's a project called spells of genesis that came out on counter party um i think maybe late 2014 early 2015 so let's back up as a party access sort of like a second layer or like how does counter interact with bitcoin yeah so like counterparty is bitcoin um it's like a metal layer on top um master coin which is omni now is kind of like the first uh protocol to to build on top of bitcoin and all that really means is um using either op return which is what uh counterparty uses exclusively now because it's it's big enough when they went from 40 to 80 bytes um but you can actually encode data other ways too like um one of the methods i used early on was op check multisig and you basically just um you create

kind of dummy it's you create one of three uh it's bare multisig so it's not p2sh um and you create basically two dummy addresses and you create these one of three multisig outputs and the two dummy addresses are actually your data that you're encoding um isn't this what uh satoshi's coins are aren't they they're not using p2sh right yeah i'm not sure um object multi-sig is kind of like the precursor to uh p2sh yeah and it's i mean the reason why p2sh is way is is more efficient is it takes up a lot less space and um it's actually i think it's more like privacy centric because you don't actually see the addresses, the different addresses in the multi-sig. But it still works.

I mean, like, with Bitcoin, everything's, like, backwards compatible. So there were a few kind of, like, it stopped working after one update, and it was something to do with, like, the weight of, like, the inputs to outputs on either side. And I think that got fixed. I think it works again. But because Opera turns 80 bytes, you can squeeze most data into that. And what Counterparty does is a Counterparty transaction is just a regular Bitcoin transaction with a message in the op return. And then the Counterparty server basically runs Bitcoin D in the background.

And then it parses every block, looks for Counterparty transactions, and then builds a database from those messages. Okay. All right. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So it's cool because it kind of like leverages the security of Bitcoin. but it's still it's a weird beast it's unlike other coins it's had it's ups and downs

I've never been I never thought XCP which is the currency was a good investment and I still don't think it is even though I've developed on Counterparty for years and I use it all the time because

the value in Counterparty is because you're leveraging Bitcoin as far as like the ordering of transactions and stuff like that. But there's nothing to stop anyone from just launching another counterparty and just basically doing the same thing on Bitcoin also. So it actually, it like kind of gains its strength

from like people, the more people that build on it, the more it makes sense to not like roll your own version. So that was one of the reasons why I'm like, I would never really invest in the currency just because anybody could roll their own new counterparty. But it works, and it really was the first ... Well, MasterCoin was the first, but it's a place you can build tokens, and it's on Bitcoin. We didn't need Ethereum token smart contracts to have tokens in crypto. Are you telling me the ERC-721 isn't the most efficient way to do these tokens? It's a different way.

All right. So we got through Counterparty's history. And so how, so Rare Pepe, the Rare Pepe coin started, did it start as a joke with like June Seth and Krista Rose on the podcast or was it more? Well, no, they kind of like, they saw it develop kind of how I did. And then, so, back up a little bit, just to, like, some more perspective on it. It was never, it wasn't a planned thing. It was basically, I was talking about, I mentioned Spells of Genesis quickly before, and that

was a project that created these, like, trading cards, and they said these counterparty tokens they made equaled the trading cards. And they'd have just a picture of a trading card, and I was very skeptical at first. I was like, that's kind of weird. Like, no, they don't. like they're not they're not those things um and i actually like right before the the genesis of rare pepe maybe a month or two before i like i finally kind of accepted like i saw spells of genesis it kind of stuck around and i'm like you know what like i think this does work like

i think i think it's okay to say that the token is the trading card or the trading card is the token um and what happened was uh september 2016 um a guy named mike and i still only know him as mike um on telegram uh posted in the counterparty telegram chat the first rare pepe and it was the uh the dorian nakamoto uh rare pepe and um he posted that and he basically said like like this is like and he created the asset called rare pepe and he was this this is a Rare Pepe, I put him up on the Decentralized Exchange, which is another very powerful aspect of Counterparty that we can talk about. And he just put him up there, put him up for sale, and everybody in the chat was like,

oh, this is hilarious. These are great. But then everyone wanted to make their own, so everyone started registering different Pepe-themed assets and drawing their own cards and stuff. I want to get a hold of the David Seaman Pepe. Yeah, I can send you one of those. I'm also a big Pepe collector, so I practice what I preach. Yeah, I mean, and that was kind of, so I built the Rare Pepe wallet.

And that was really, like, the reason I did it was because I was collecting Pepes, and I, like, needed a good way to, like, store them and trade them and stuff. So as much as it was something, because, I mean, as a developer, you like to see other people, like, use the thing that you made. But it was really, I was building it for myself. But yeah, the way it was able to take off, I think, was because of the decentralized exchange on Counterparty, which is just, it's built right into the protocol and you can put up orders to buy or sell something and then people can match those orders on the other side.

What's the GUI look like for that? Like, is it, or like, how's that? So, it's actually pretty bad in Counter Wallet, which is the main, like, the wallet of Counter Party, the original developers that built Counter Party, that was the wallet that they had built. And that was one of the reasons for Rare Pepe Wallet. So, I tried to make it as easy as possible. So, it's really as simple as you click a button, like, you go to the Pepe, you click a button

that says buy, sell, and it just looks like a regular order book. and you place your order you see sell orders you can match them and is there like does it like the jpeg image come up on the book too oh yeah yeah i got to dive into this i gotta dive in the rare prep yeah check it out check out the wallet it's so let's talk about like digital like how valuable do you think like the digital collectible space can be like i i can't wrap my mind around it yeah so i i i wrote like a little uh medium post i've only ever written one medium post and it was it was more just because i i felt like like everyone had their own idea of like what these things are like what are these and and i i kind of see them as it's

just a it's a different application of like like cryptocurrency but it's not like cryptocurrency it's like crypto things like crypto goods right so they're like low issue and it's it's just another application of digital scarcity. So I can say, yeah, I have money, right? Because that's the, I would say that's the, of course, that would be the first application of digital scarcity. But I really think these collectibles and stuff, they can have staying power. I don't know about the ones on Ethereum, but just the idea in general. Well, I'm not so sure on the staying power of ethereum really why is that i don't think it can scale um and i think i i i see how how where they're going just just in the latest like last couple weeks the

they have that big uh like the convention thing or something yeah where they did the badger dance yes yes um i remember seeing slides from a presentation and with for governance and it It almost looks like it's turning, like they want to be like where EOS is starting out. And I look at EOS as the most ridiculous project. I wrote about EOS yesterday in my newsletter. I think they're trying to like launder money, like the way their ICO is going. I honestly, I think that EOS is like one of the best ideas in the space Because it takes best ideas as in, like, it takes the ultimate conclusion of every, like, security, like, basically where you're like, oh, we don't need to be real secure in that, like, part of the chain.

We don't need to be that secure here. And it just does it right out of the gate. It takes all those assumptions. It takes all those assumptions. You know what? It doesn't matter. You know, we only need 21 people to validate this chain. And we can have governance to freeze the chain.

It's like, I see it as where Ethereum is going to end up. Okay. And it's just out of the gate where it's starting. And I don't think Ethereum can end up there without having more forks. Because it turned from a thing like smart contracts on a Bitcoin-like chain. And now it's just evolving into this weird kind of governance, not a real cryptocurrency, I'd say. I got beers with somebody last night. We were talking about how many full nodes that are archiving the full history of Ethereum are there?

It's hard to find that data. Yeah, I saw something the other day. It was like it's over a terabyte of data or something. And they don't call them full nodes. They call them archival nodes, which just suggests you don't need to run that. Which is the whole point of this goddamn thing. You're supposed to be able to confirm everything. EOS, they're trying to do everything out of the box.

You think it's great just because it's going to ... I think it's because we all think, we all being Bitcoin people, you think Bitcoin's going to win, or it's going to be like, it is the real decentralized currency. and i see eos as like the complete opposite of that so it's like it's like the perfect hedge like i have an eos bag just because it's like the perfect hedge like if if it turns out no we don't need any of it like the whole like sound money argument and all that just like okay like that's that's not a real thing or whatever it's like which i i'm like pretty sure it is but i see that is like that is the opposite it's the polar that is the polar opposite like yeah like eos in

particular i gotta write about it i'm pretty sure they're laundering money they had brock pierce as their as their like go-to guy for a while that guy freaks me out he's a weirdo yeah it was like crocodile dundee outfit yeah uh that's there's one thing we learned in this space i forget who tweeted it but somebody tweeted it uh it's don't trust child actors in this space you can't trust ret creighton you can't trust brock pierce bitcoin private he's on the prime now all right oh that's Right, I forgot about that. Be careful of the scammers out there, people. They're everywhere.

What's funny is Rhett was around early days of Rare Pepe, and he tried to basically take it and build it on Ethereum a month or two after we launched it, and we kind of just laughed him out of the room almost. But yeah, it's funny how it's a small space. You see the same names popping up. you see like dan larimer yeah yeah there uh there's some serial scammers out there and and uh as the cycles of new money come in there's new people getting scammed every day by the same

people um yeah but let's get back to our peppers so that was something that like it turned into like a phenomena on twitter yeah it was it was uh well uh chris and josh bitcoin uncensored picked it up, John Seth. This is what brought down Bitcoin Uncensored. It is. It is. Pepe Cash brought down Bitcoin Uncensored, which just makes the whole thing more hilarious. I think there was more going on. I think that was probably just the icing on the cake kind of culmination thing. But yeah, no, there's a funny kind of legend to rare pepe and i think that that all kind of like adds to the like the value of it and that was uh one of the things i wrote in that little medium post that i they wrote was the reason like when

you collect a rare pepe you're not you're not collecting a picture on a screen you're collecting a token yeah that's what it is and then my whole kind of thesis is that the picture is just that's what the token looks like right so the other thing that gives it value is like the legend of it so there's different Pepe's that are like more like like you don't know who the artist is just shit like someone showed up made a Pepe there's ones where people made them early days lost the keys so it's like it you see it like in the wallet but you can't buy it because it like doesn't exist like it's unbuyable um and uh yeah I think that and and I see it as like it's because it exists in like the digital space um it's gonna like transform like

as long as counterparty continues to run and um another nice thing about having that it lives on bitcoin you no counterparty nodes could be running and it's still there um because it exists in the chain you could just reparse it out um by spinning up a federated node um but yeah it's it's a it's kind of an it's a pretty interesting thing uh the rare pepe is because um you can create like all kinds of like you can create a game and then there was uh there's a developer in japan that created this like game where you can use different rare pepes to like create these like monsters and stuff and it's like so anybody can use this thing that just exists it's this like digital thing and incorporate it into their own application and stuff so it's like it has this can like jump

stories too like you can and that's why i see i see a lot of value in like the digital collectible space as far as like um like game like in games so yeah that's like the one application where like i i see it and it makes a lot of sense yeah and i mean if you think about like if you like you ever into like playing video games and stuff and there's like any kind of game where you collect things in it like um it would it would always like i remember as a kid it'd be like oh i wish i could like have this thing in this other game like and you really can do that with um so i i see that like these things are valuable um more in kind of like the indie game space because if If I'm, like, a Blizzard or I'm, like, a big game company, I probably don't want it open, right?

I want to be able to control everything. But if I'm a smaller game developer, I can maybe leverage another developer's assets, and it kind of, like, kind of brings us both up. Because now it's like, oh, these things are more valuable. I can use them in, like, multiple games. Easier way to bootstrap. Yeah, absolutely. It's fucking interesting. I never knew that you could, like, apply the same assets to different games.

Yeah, I mean, they're just, it's just a token, right? So, yeah, you can build your game around it and just, and one of the other things I did in the wallet is, like, an access control kind of thing. So different creators of Rare Pepe's wanted to, like, have kind of, like, a secret access. Like, if you owned the Pepe, you could enter it. And I did that just using, like, message signing. So basically you check – the server checks basically that the address assigned the message owns the Pepe, and then they get access to the spot. But people have put, like, private SoundCloud links and stuff like that.

So it's kind of just this thing that exists digitally. So you can just kind of, sky's the limit from how you could apply it to different things. Damn. It's crazy. Like, again, trying to wrap my mind around this, like, it's insane. Because when I, like, CryptoKitties, like, really turned me off to this shit. Because I just see CryptoKitties as a continuation of our conspicuous consumption where people are just like, oh, my God. Yeah, I don't own any CryptoKitties.

I don't know what the draw is to that. I mean, I know a lot of people are into it. But, the thing I loved about Rare Pepes is everyone makes them. Everyone's making them themselves. It's not just one company making these things and saying, here, buy these. It's just individual people. We have people all over the world making Rare Pepes. There's the Japanese Rare Pepes, there's the Venezuelan Rare Pepes, there's a couple guys

from India that are in there that made Pepes. It really is. It was interesting looking at the analytics on the wallet, because the whole map lights up. Really? Yeah. It's crazy. That's awesome. Yeah. How many Rare Pepes are there right now? Do you know in total? Roughly?

I think it's 1,700 or something. Damn. Nice. Well, and there will be no more. The scientists left the lab, so there's no more new Rare Pepes. Why is this? Um, we kind of looked at it, so the way- Do you have to burn more? Well, so the way, the way Rare Pepe's worked is it's, because it was kind of an organic

thing and it's not, like, we don't make, we being, like, the few of us that were, the Rare Pepe Foundation. So there's, like, a group of, like, six or seven of us that were around in the beginning and we basically, as everyone started making these Pepe's, we're like, okay, like, we gotta, like, let's try to make some, like, loose guidelines. And I was building a wallet, and I'm like, I can't just put any, like, because some Pepe's can be pretty horrible. And it's like, I'm running this website. I'm not going to put that shit on my website.

So we just, like, developed these kind of loose rules around it, and we basically would curate them. So they would be submitted. You'd have to burn Pepe cash to submit your Pepe, and then it would get submitted to the foundation. And then the scientists in the foundation would make sure that it was rare and dank. Then we'd certify it and it would show up on the site. It got to be too much. We closed down submissions a few times. We reopened them again, I think, like, late January of this year.

And we got, like, 60 or 70, like, in a day. And it's, like, the way we have one of the other developers that works on it, he's in Venezuela. And he makes, like, Telegram bots, so he's pretty good at that. So he created kind of like a curation bot. So I could do it on my phone, and all the ones that had submitted show up, and basically we'd say yes or no. It was like a small portion of us say yes, then it goes in, and then if one person says no, then it jumps out. It was interesting how that developed. At first it was like everyone has to say yes, and it's like you've got one guy that doesn't turn on Telegram for two weeks.

We're going to have like 400 Pepes in the queue, and it just gets kind of backed up. But from that aspect, it's kind of funny, like, it's a, yeah, it's like a, it's built on the blockchain, but it's very centralized as far as the curation. And we're not, I mean, we're not like, we're not hiding that. We're like, no, we're going to look at them. And if we don't like them or they're like, like some people would, you'd submit, like you draw it in five seconds and submit. It's like, okay, like maybe that is okay if it's like so shitty that it's like funny. but sometimes it's just shitty so like so those wouldn't make it in um but yeah and we talked about like i think we talked about shutting it down at a thousand we talked about shutting it

down at 1500 and then when we opened it back up in january and we started getting like so many submissions a day we just kind of talked about it and we're like we should just let's just shut it down let's just let's everything's got to end at some point and that's not to say someone else couldn't spin up rare pepe generation two or whatever they want to do i mean anybody can do what they want right so but the original rare pepe's have no longer can be submitted the rare pepe's that brought down bitcoin on sensor yep exactly our cap now it's fascinating let's jump in one thing we talk a lot on this podcast is meme magic pepe is a very powerful meme oh yeah been in the news why why did you guys decide on pepe in particular well it was it was more uh

it was more that that guy that guy mike he just posted a pepe and and i i feel like one of the reasons it worked is because like pepe is like the perfect meme to make like a digital collectible out of right because the joke around pepe was it's rare like prior to this whole project and everything like it would be like i created this pepe but i can't show it to anybody so it stays rare like like that was always the joke and it's been around for years and how did do you know how like the origin story pepe i think it started on fortune um and i remember hearing um because like when it came out like when hillary clinton came out and said it was a hate symbol like everybody did a you're a nazi if you like pepe yeah exactly um so um just for the record i am

not a nazi um no but it's no but that's a battle we have to fight all the time i mean not you know not really so much now um that's really died down and yeah we had a we had a um actually it was the rare digital art festival um we did in january and and i actually i did a presentation i did like rare pepe wallet and stuff and i was i was waiting for that question like i was waiting for someone in the audience to go as like so so are you like an alt-right nazi or something like i was just like i was like i was like here it comes like when we asked like for questions and nobody asked so i was like all right good like maybe that whole like thought process has died down because pepe was around for years before that and the whole thing with pepe is it's it's a meme you

can make it anything you want so like if you want to make it a nazi you can make it a nazi if you want to make it like something uncle sam yeah exactly there are uncle sam pepe's in uh in the rare pepe directories really there are yeah there's a couple of them um but yeah no it's interesting how i mean the media cycle so quick like that happened i feel like that was like a week where people like this is all right like all right like and they try to co-opt like people having fun and turning against people it's like yeah yeah it's it's it's a shame because it's like what they could say is like like like we don't like these but but not the whole idea yeah don't paint a broad brush yeah i mean you could say like oh there's people posting stuff on twitter so like

all of twitter is bad like you wouldn't say that right so it's it's yeah it's kind of a shame that It kind of took that turn a little bit in the early – because it started in September 2016, which is right before the election. And it was actually, like, a week after we started, like, making Pepe's, the whole, like, Pepe All Right thing came. And we're like, ah! Are you kidding me? But, yeah, no, Pepe is just, like – I think it is one of, like, the earliest, like, meme – like, internet memes that I can think of. um that people would just like the feels good man it feels good feels bad man the cringe the pepe cringe is one of my favorites um no it's uh interesting so how do you see this evolving

digital collectibles where do you see it going like you said indie games like yeah i think i think that's probably like a really big space for it like um i think that i think people really start to see the value in it when when people start doing like cross game things um people really haven't done that as much now actually and i like just kind of like crypto kitties is like much as i think they're kind of lame like people have made like like crypto kitty accessories and like like other projects have done it which i also think are like kind of silly but it kind it does show that like anybody you don't need the permission of that company to build something that interacts with it um but i think if if they start getting used more heavily for like um like things

like uh powerful items in games and then other games start to to say if you have this then from this other game then it has this function in this game it kind of like layer like kind of layers that and it really shows that like wow there there is value to this because these things exist outside of the game yeah you can have like a marvel dc like collab yeah anything and and but you don't and you don't need permission like i could come in as like an indie gamer and say like oh yeah this this other like pretty popular game has these items in it and it's like if you have those items in my game then they do like x y and z and then now people already have them so now they're more inclined to oh i'll try your game because now i'm already like like leveled up

because i have these things because i play this other game yeah it's crazy shit man how weird are games gonna get i think the whole like ecosystem of games i'm not a big gamer i'm not a big gamer myself so um a lot of this i'm kind of like just guessing i'd say because i'm not like in it but um i could i could really see how um that could evolve and just be like the new norm like like you create these maybe not every token or every item in your game is is rare tokenized um but a few are and then other developers would leverage off that because it makes sense right Because I can instantly kind of grab some market share, not even grabbing the market share, but grabbing users from another game and entice them to use mine because I've kind of given them a head start when they haven't even started playing yet. Yeah. But the other aspect of this, which is kind of more from like the art side of it, is digital artists now have like a way to like sell limited kind of prints of their digital art, which is it's like a very abstract idea.

It's very abstract. Yeah. Yeah. And I get it. I know what it is. Because the first time that I saw it, I was like, yeah. Like I was saying with the Spells of Genesis stuff, I was like, yeah, this is stupid. I don't get it. But you see it work. And once you really start thinking about it, it's like, say there's a painting, like the Mona Lisa, right? That gets reprinted all the time, but those reprints aren't the Mona Lisa. Right. right so I think the same idea can exist in the digital world like if the artist created this token and then sold 50 of them and you can guarantee that there's 50 and you know the artist isn't like creating more because like you can see it like yeah exactly this 50 of these were issued and then because there's a there's a way in counterpart you can lock issuance so if you were to use

counterparty and create 50 tokens and lock it which is how we do pepe um you know there's not going to be 50 more there could only ever be less right um which is another interesting thing because you can burn they provably destroy um your tokens yeah burn books on the blockchain yeah but but people and it's funny because people do that with with pepe is because we um probably i think it was like maybe 150 200 into it um submissions into the uh rare pepe directory we uh people would like at first people were like i'm gonna make like eight trillion of this one and then other people would be like well i want it to be worth more so i'm gonna make two or one and it was just it wasn't as fun because you can't collect if there's only one only one person can

have it so like the all the fun of it was like trading them you know like buying and selling different ones like trying to like guess like oh more people are going to want this one so i'll buy like like 10 of them and then i can resell five and like cover the other five that i bought um and so we changed the rules it had to be between another thing rare pepe foundations and we made the rules we could change the rules um it had to be between a hundred and a hundred thousand issuance so the lowest you could issue is a hundred of your rare pepe and then the most was a hundred thousand and what people did was they tried to get around that issuance by i'll issue 100 and burn 99 of them okay now it's one but like psychologically that's not worth as much

as a single issuance which is interesting like right yeah so like you could have an or even And the one's kind of like a tough example because when there's only one of something, it's kind of – people don't have it, so it's hard to see. Like price discovery is difficult. But we've had people do it with like 10. So some people would issue 10 early days. We changed the rules. They'd issue 100 and then burn 90 of them. And it kind of started to work out that like the 100 issuance with 90 burned wasn't really as valuable, like perceived as valuable as just the 10 issuance.

even though like it's the same thing at the end of the day there's only 10 right so it's it's kind of interesting there's a lot of like psychology and i kind of learned that like in doing the rare pepe stuff it's like this like blockchain and and like bitcoin and all different like cryptocurrencies it's like 99 psychology and like one percent tech like the tech enables it and you can trust it but the rest of it is just like how you perceive things no i've been talking a lot more about that like i think this is more of a psychological game than a technological game it really is and you see this in meat space too with like supreme drops like supreme just manufactures scarcity of the clothes they make and the collabs they do and it's crazy yeah like the day they drop

their new shit it sells out in less than 10 seconds yeah all of it and then you have kids waiting outside fighting each other to get in the store to buy it in person and it's all scarcity Yeah. There's only so many, and you want to be the one that has it. Right. And I think that's a lot of what kind of drove Rare Pepe is there are certain ones that there's a low issuance of, and people want to say they have it. They have it and no one else does. Are we stupid because we do this as an animal? I think there's a lot of things we do as animals that makes us stupid.

I don't know if this is real high up that list. I think it's just kind of like human nature. right um there's a lot of and i i i kind of looked into it as far as like why like why do people collect things like did like kind of little research on that just because i thought the whole like rare pepe phenomenon was just really interesting right so um there's a lot of reasons people like collect things like like there's like nostalgia reasons there's there's all there's all sorts of reasons why people would would want to collect something um but i and one of the main ones is is really like kind of like so you can boast and say like i've

got it and and no one else does yeah um it's like wearing your supreme hat with honor yeah exactly like yeah wow you got one of those like wow that's really cool yeah yeah it's it's uh that's something that's existed for for a long long time and i'm sure even like the like early early humans probably had their shiny rocks that they collected, right? Shiny and big rocks. That's why Nick Szabo is shelling out. We've talked about that before. He talks about rye stones back in, I forget what island it was.

Pom Pom, maybe? I remember that story. Yeah, and then there was one that like- Their currency was huge stones that never moved, and they just basically, when they did commerce with each other, They were like, all right, this stone's yours now. Yeah. This part of the stone's yours now.

The best part of that story was how there was, like, the stone that they were, like, because they would bring them down from, like, this mountain, and they would, like, take them by, like, canoe. Yeah, they would bring them down from another island, and it was so hard to transport from that other island that once they had gotten a fixed supply in, they were like, all right, this is our currency. It's sound. But do you remember the part of that story where there was one that, like, the boat sank?

Oh, yeah, yeah. So, like, this big rock that was going to be part of their currency, like, on the way back to their island, it, like, sank. But everyone knew it sank, so they still used that, like, in their currency. It's like, and now I'll trade the one at the bottom of the ocean to you. Like, that one's yours now. Like, that's how crazy it is. And it's crazy how that came crashing down. There was an Irishman who came to the island and, like, noticed that they were using these rye stones as their currency.

He was like, holy shit, it's just limestone. Like, I'm going to go get a bunch of limestone. and bring it back and use it as money on this island, and he completely destroyed their currency. Yeah, yeah. That was like helicopter money, right? Yeah. And that's like,

and if we want to go into like scarce money, like that's the beauty of Bitcoin is like nobody, I mean, people create altcoins and stuff like that, but you're not going to have an Irishman coming in creating more Bitcoin out of thin air. Yeah, but I think that's a lot of the reason why like altcoins work, like is because like people believe in them yeah because that like like do people believe in them

or they like to speculate i think it's both right um i think they're really i mean if you're a developer and you're you're building on an altcoin you altcoin you have to have some sort of belief in it right because you're spending your time you got to get in the game yeah exactly um and i really think like if you have the core of the people building around this thing that believe in it And then people kind of believe in them. That's the psychology. So to get back to when we were talking about EOS, it takes all the security considerations and throws them out the window for Bitcoin. But if people believe in it, then it could work.

So it's like, I don't know. And I kind of like, I did the altcoin thing early on, 2013, 2014. Then there was the altcoin Armageddon, right, where everything crashed. The nuclear winner. Yeah. And I was like, that's it, I'm done. I'm done with shit coins. I'm not touching these things anymore.

But then you see it in 2017, Bitcoin pumps, and all these shit coins pump again, too. And it's like, I think most of it's because they all trade against Bitcoin. So, Bitcoin pumps, and obviously, their prices. Rising tide raises all ships. Yeah. But at the same time, really, if enough people believe it, it could work. And as long as the software works. and it's this thing with Rare Pepe

it's like early on when I was like building out the wallet I was I need to make these things look like trading cards so like they look like trading cards and I even like put a little like CSS animation where you can like click on them and they flip around so it's like you even get a better idea

like oh yeah they're trading cards I can flip them around I can do it and it really helps you to people to believe in like these are yeah they're real things I can see them on the site it's real like so that's where like the psychology comes in and and um i mean from a security point of view i think most altcoins are probably like doomed in the end yeah um but if they if if i mean you see

hard forks and stuff and people just just okay we'll do the new one now yeah like yeah i don't know i always have this conversation i always ask this question people like how long does it go on before people are finally just like all right enough is enough there's always going to be a new shinier altcoin like that's what people don't realize like coming in today like oh my god this is so much better than bitcoin i'm like there's been five iterations of this shit coin oh yeah in the past like there's always going to be a shinier coin that can do better and like you said i think it's going to come down to security at the end of the day and it's really going to be like how much energy is expended on these chains and obviously bitcoin far and away is the most

hash power and yeah but that's where you see like proof of stake coins like working and proof of stake is crazy like because you have to trust the existing nodes that they're giving you the real chain yeah and that's like i think a lot of people don't realize like that's the difference between proof of work and proof of stake like proof of work i could come in not knowing anything and i just find the chain with the most work the longest chain with the most work and that's the right one but with proof of stake you have to ask the current nodes on the network like what's the longest chain and then hope that they give it to you right right um and so theoretically like that shouldn't work but it does i mean it is or it has it has worked up

till now so it doesn't and it's like exactly it's a non-starter though for me because it's like satoshi specifically used proof of work because proof of stake was a non-starter for him as well like what we're seeing a lot today is like people are like oh my god no we need to go back to proof of stake but it's like this problem's been worked out well it's energy efficient oh we're saving the world that's right we're saving the world um and that's i fucking hate that argument like people people don't realize like especially like the ethereum crowd it's like we're gonna say it's more environmentally friendly like the energy that bitcoin expends like would be wasted anyway yeah it's and it has a lot of value and i know i listened to a couple i think one or two of your

podcasts ago we were talking about um like using basically like having like mobile like crypto miners right like and i actually um i'm a mechanical engineer like by trade and uh the first job i had i worked in um power plants so i actually like my job was basically when the power plants were down for an outage i would go and inspect different equipment make sure they could turn it back on and be safe um but power plants do have a problem where there's times where like they have excess energy and there's a lot of of work that's gone into like storage solutions um but if if they just like we're like oh we can just anytime we have extra energy we just mine bitcoin like that really is a solution like like now they can make money when they have

extra energy and they don't need to like try to store it where like you're only going to get like 80 75 efficiency in storage um and a lot of the storage solutions don't work i mean there's crazy storage solutions for energy like there's there's a solution i saw where um and a lot of it is renewables right because um people like you get the peak times like five six o'clock right everyone's getting home everyone's turning their lights on everyone's doing that that's where you get the peaks but like for solar and stuff you're getting the most energy like earlier in the day you're not there's not as much of a demand for it so um there's techniques where they like pump water up a hill with their excess energy and then when they're producing less energy

and they need but they need more there's more demand they let the water back down the hill to like spin a turbine like holy shit yeah crazy stuff like that and i saw another one where it's it's like a little train car that they like pull up a hill and then as it comes back down like it basically just use gravity right like because now you have more potential energy because it's higher up. But yeah, there's crazy mechanical solutions that have horrible efficiencies, right? You get maybe 30% of the energy that was expended, you get back. But that could be the thing that really moons Bitcoin in another cycle. If these power companies, because that's a lot of money. I would go into plants. If they're shut down, they're losing millions of dollars

a day when they're not running so like if they're running and they're producing extra energy that it could be like huge amounts of extra energy that they just need to like burn but they can burn it and like turn it into money at the same time yeah it's crazy and i like so that kind of stuff like i think proof of work has a lot of advantages that are kind of like unrealized yet yeah how do we how do we get people away from this meme that like proof of work is going to kill trying to destroy the world. Do you know Bitcoin expends more energy than Ireland? Or was it Denmark, I think? Denmark. I think it might be Ireland, too.

Or maybe both. But the argument, people make that argument. It's like, do you realize how much energy is wasted on our traditional banking system? The buildings created, people commuting to and from work, the paper wasted within the buildings. The amount of energy that that consumes is probably comparable or arguably even more. Well, drive into any city. What are the biggest buildings in the city, right? Yeah.

The banks. Yeah. They create huge phallic structures because they have huge egos. And they want to have dicks in the sky that prove that they're the strongest people on earth, you know? And that takes a lot of energy. But Bitcoin, individuals can provide some energy and contribute to the system and create a financial system that's separate from the government and central banks.

If you don't like that, then I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. Yeah, I think Bitcoin's just spawned all these other things, and as long as they work and they can get people to believe in them, they'll continue to work until they don't. What are you working on now? I'm working on parenting my two-and-a-half-month-old. Two-and-a-half-month? Yeah.

I thought you said years earlier. Oh, man. So I have a two-and-a-half-year-old and a two-and-a-half-month-year-old. Okay. Or two-and-a-half-month-old. Yeah, so trying to find ... Well, congrats on being a dad. Thank you.

Yeah, so that's why I have a train back at 11, so I've got to head back home. But, yeah, like when you have kids, one of the things they say is, like, you don't realize how much free time you had, right, until you have kids. Well, I didn't realize how much free time I had with one kid until I had the second. So once I find my free time, I've got some ideas and stuff that I want to work on. And a lot of it kind of delves into kind of the cross-functionality of these kind of like digital collectible assets. And hopefully I'll find some time to work on that in the next few months. You'll be working on Bitcoin?

Yeah, Counterparty is kind of my labor of love. So, are you – Dan Anderson, he's in this city, right? He's a big Counterparty. Yeah, yeah. I hung out with him yesterday. Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's always at the Bitcoin meetup.

i go to in the city i've yet to introduce myself i need to introduce yeah you should i follow him on twitter i'm uh he's a he's one of like the few contrarian voices in the space that i really respect you know he's got a contrarian view would you say i think that just the bitcoin space there's a lot of contrarians it's when you go into these other projects that it's like a lot of hand waving and just everyone just kind of believing everything which is crazy like And I think it's, because I started in Bitcoin, and I actually, I got into BitShares early on. Because I think everyone goes through the process, right? You discover Bitcoin, like, oh, here's this other thing that's going to, like, beat Bitcoin, right?

It's going to be the next big thing, and I'm going to get in on that, like, at the beginning. And I kind of got, like, disenchanted with BitShares pretty early on. And it was because of that. Was that a Dan Larimer project? Yeah, that was the original Dan Larimer. Yeah. Proto shares to BitShares. Yeah. Which is funny to come full circle back around to EOS and then I'm saying it's like the perfect hedge to Bitcoin. But I know. I know. It's crazy. I find it odd that I'm even saying that. But, yeah, the echo chambers are pretty powerful once you leave Bitcoin. I think when you – I'm pretty active on Telegram and different Bitcoin groups on Telegram.

And in the Bitcoin groups, everyone's just arguing all the time. I think it's great, right, because someone will present an idea. Even someone that's, like, kind of respected. Like, there was one of the rooms I'm in, there was a debate between George Timon, who works for Blockstream, and Paul Sports. Paul Sports. For drive chains. And it was basically Timon says, like, drive chains are like a broken side chain, and Paul saying that they aren't. But here's the thing that, like, if Paul came into Ethereum with that project, everyone would be like, oh, that's the best thing.

let's do it yeah yeah and and maybe it is good i i don't know enough about it i'm skeptical um i need to get i need to get paul in here we need to talk about this because a lot of people will say the the you're basically just trusting miners not to steal your money in the drive chain uh model yeah and he'll say well you're trusting miners any way to make sure bitcoin works yeah but it's like yeah i'm i'm skeptical of side chains in general why um i think that anything you want to do on a side chain just do it on an on an alt because the the like value with the the reason people spin up alt coins is because like they think their idea is better right so why would they want to why would they want that to be like bitcoin so like there's there's nobody i

don't see anybody rushing to like create a side chain um yeah it's a it's an arduous endeavor like if you're gonna if you're gonna try to do it yeah and why and and one of the things and now that we like lightning is starting to develop and we have the ability to basically do atomic swaps between like chains yeah what's the point what's the point of side chains i don't know i'm skeptical of the whole thing i mean the point would be play devil's advocate here um i'd like to see side chain experiment experiments at some point i don't think they're completely necessary i'm in it for the sound money as long as no more bitcoin gets printed and you're able to send it in a censorship resistant matter it's fine but side chains i guess the value proposition would be if you add

more functionality to Bitcoin in some way, in the end, brings more value to the underlying token, which makes it more valuable, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I get the idea. I just don't see why anyone would ... But it's also a risk. If you fuck up the side chain, you fuck up the main chain.

Who's going to put their money in the side chain? I'm not going to. Well, you're seeing it with Lightning now. What is there? I think there's only like 20 Bitcoin on Lightning right now. Yeah, but Lightning's not a side chain, right? That's just like a multi-sig. It's a payment channel, right?

It's still an experiment. Yeah, but I think there's a big difference there in the fact that lighting, you're just locking your money up. And if you do it, have you experimented? Have you tried lighting yet? I've got to spin up a lightning node. I'm too nervous. Just download the Clare wallet if you have an Android phone. Apple guy.

Yeah. Well, I have an Apple phone, but I have an Android phone I use for work. So it's kind of nice because I can use both. But they kind of structured Lightning in a really interesting way that I hadn't considered before where you use Lightning to send only and you receive on an on-chain address. So that's how their wallet's structured. And the beauty of that is that you don't need to watch that. You don't have to worry about the watchtowers or anything because the previous states of your channel would only be more money for you. so you're not worried about someone publishing an old state because why would someone just give

you more money yeah exactly so um but what it does is like for example like one of the ways i use bitcoin is um i'll use it to buy like gift cards and stuff um and i have a separate wallet for that well i have to send bitcoin to that wallet and now that's my wallet i use to buy gift cards well What if instead of doing that, I just used that transaction fee, opened a channel, now that's the money I used to buy. Literally, it's like I'm spending the same amount of money, but now every time I buy a gift card, I'm not paying a fee. That's awesome. Yeah. So it's like when I downloaded that wallet and I started using it, and there were some bugs.

I remember I actually had to tweet. I tweeted Christian Deckers working at Blockstream on Lightning to help me through it. So, we're definitely earlier days, early days, but I, like, you can see that, like, I really would recommend, like, if you can get your hands on an Android phone to, like, try it out. Yeah, because there was that, somebody just posted a video from Australia, like, using it at a coffee shop, the Eclair wallet. Yeah, yeah, buying coffee at a coffee shop, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Paying, I think he said he paid, like, a two Satoshi fee or something like that, which is less than a penny. Yeah, and that's all just set by, like, whatever, whoever you're connected to, right? because that could be there could be no fee there doesn't have to be a fee it's just message passing at that point yeah um so you're bullish on lightning i'm i'm very bullish on lightning i i and i kind of have it like a a different kind of take on it because i see lightning enabling

like the masses to use bitcoin in the same way they currently use dollars so like so imagine imagine you and this is kind of just like how i see it progressing and like how people could really buy into it because people like like non-bitcoin people non-crypto people like they don't even want to talk about money right right like don't question like their money right it's which is a really weird thing like you talk about bitcoin people get mad like why are you getting so mad like we're just we're just talking about like this different money right um but i see it as as the your your spend only channels that you don't need to monitor that's like your checking account right that's the money you're going to spend anyway and then your kind of incoming

channels the one you would would want to monitor and if like the whole watchtower stuff gets realized and and there's like trustless ways to monitor i almost think if you trust the other side of that channel so like you work at barstool you get your paycheck from barstool yeah i assume you'd probably get ACH into a bank account. Yep. So, Barstool also has the ability to ACH withdrawal from your bank account. What? Yeah.

Really? Yes. So, when you fill out that form ... No? What? I never knew that. Maybe it's different here, but I had ... So, the company I work for ... We're not accusing Barstool of taking anybody's money.

No, no, no, no. This is just practical. This is just possible. Yeah, this is just how ACH works. So, one of the things you do when you fill out that form, when you start a job, if you work at a company and you get your deposit ACH is you kind of like give them the ability to I mean I'm sure you could can they only withdraw money they put in or can they can they take I'm not sure but I know that it's fine at least the company I work for I don't

think it's unique because I work for a big company it's like they do everything by the book and everything so but I had an issue where I went on paternity leave when my oldest was born and um they had changed policies and and you get um i was getting money through the state because they had a paternity kind of leave you get an x amount of dollars and uh um the company started a program where they would pay you your paycheck um which i just missed out on by a couple months got it with my second but um so they deposited the money and they shouldn't have And so I checked my account, and I go, guys, like, this is, like, thank you, but you're going to realize you gave it to me eventually. I'd rather we clear this up now, right?

And they went back in, and they took back double. Oh, shit. Accidentally, because it was, but that, they took, they ACH withdrew, and I didn't have to, like, authorize anything or sign off on anything. And it just came back out of my account. So, like, when you sign that over, at least for companies, like, for payroll and stuff, there is a two-way street there. But in my mind, that's fine. It's because I know who they are. Like, they're not going to show up to work one day and be like, hey, you guys drained my bank account.

You know, like, I'll go talk to, like, the payroll department and say, hey, can you send that money back to me? So if you look at Lightning in, like, that regard and you get your paycheck that way, it's kind of the same as what we have already in the banking system. But the difference is you can close and reopen a new channel whenever you want. So, you can, like, basically, you can be, like, getting your money into a channel, your paycheck, and then settle it every month or two. Yeah. Right? And then you move money into your other, like, channel, your checking account. Mm-hmm.

So, I kind of see, like, and it would almost benefit, like, if Bitcoin starts to get bigger and more companies start using it. Like, it would kind of make sense for, like, existing payment processors to be, like, lightning. Lightning compatible? lightning compatible, right? And it's like heresy, right? It's like, oh, we want to get rid of those things. And it's like, most people don't. I mean, most people like taking out their credit card. One of the things that I realized early on with a lot of the kind of crazy ideas in crypto and decentralized stuff is there's no decentralized customer service, right? There's no like, oh, I lost my money. Who do I call? Nobody. You lost

your money right hop on reddit and yeah beg for money yeah exactly and i think the general public wants customer service i would agree yeah and they need they need they want a phone number they want a person they can talk to and they want to be able to get their money back yeah um so i i i see lightning as a means to bringing bitcoin into like the current like financial system like i don't i don't see it from like kind of like the the like libertarian reset kind of like this is going to destroy everything that exists i think it will change what exists but i think the banks are still going to be around like the the whole idea of like loaning money like that's gonna in my opinion i i think that's good um like i was able to buy a house i didn't have

enough money to buy a house but i could put 20 down and now i live in the house right yeah i do too i think i agree with you but what i will say is like i would like to get back to a point where the base of the reserves is sound so like you can cryptograph cryptographically prove that the bank is reserved to a certain extent you know they have a certain amount of bitcoin that they they distribute loans against so that's that's like my my biggest one here because right now the way the way the loans work like they just print money there's no accountability like on the back end yeah well they take in a hundred dollars and they can loan out a thousand dollars right yeah you could lever up 10x and you know nobody asks questions about it yeah and i mean

that's why you get the the issue the too big to fail stuff exactly and like the toxic assets and stuff um yeah i i i definitely see a benefit there i mean i i think that scarcity is like one of the most important if not the most like important kind of properties of bitcoin um but i think that that it would benefit kind of the whole ecosystem to like try to integrate with the current system instead of the idea of we're gonna like destroy the current which is fine I mean, everyone's got their own idea, but I don't see that as a bad thing. I don't think it's a bad thing to want to integrate with what we have. Well, it could even be like a slow transition where they integrate it, and then at some point we realize that they're obsolete.

We don't need the banks in their current form to do it. We can do it ourselves, but the fact that they created that ability to use these technologies sort of helps in the transition towards a more sovereign individual. Yeah, well, I think it helps to keep them honest. And they actually have to, like, provide, like, valuable services, right? If you can do it yourself, then they're going to have to provide a reason for you to want to do it through them as opposed to doing it yourself. So, there has to be a value add there. Exactly. So, it keeps everybody in check.

Yeah. That's, I would say, that's the overarching benefit of Bitcoin is that it keeps everybody in check, keeps everything fair to an extent. So, Lightning. Can you do collectibles on Lightning, I think? So, you can do, like, Counterparty, not currently, there's a few updates that need to happen to integrate Segwit, and we needed to get, so one of the things Counterparty's kind of stuck on, I think it's 0.13, because BTC Drac used to patch Bitcoin Core every time a new release would come out. There's an address index flag, so he'd patch it. And basically with that, it gives you the ability to pull raw transactions. I think it's like search raw transaction functionality.

So that's what Counterparty uses to parse each block. And BTC Drac, basically, I think he's probably because he's the halon, I think, doing that. So I think he's just, I'm too busy. I can't do this anymore. He was doing it for free, so okay, can't really complain. But he basically said, came into the Counterparty Slack and was like, okay, guys. I'm done. I'm done.

like this is the last version which is okay because bitcoin is backwards compatible so it's it's okay it still works but we need to um and there's a method there's a i think it's a trans tx index flag that um we can use instead of the patched version so you can use bitcoin proper without having to be patched um so we need to do that we need to get segwit um integrated but you can do lightning with um counterparty assets the problem is is for like digital collectibles especially like ones that are like really rare like there's not liquidity right so like the whole idea of lightning is is kind of like we're shifting we're shifting balances right well if there's only like five of something and and you're the only one that wants to use it on lightning

yeah yeah what are you gonna do it's not really an applicable use yeah yeah like why wouldn't you just send it at that point yeah so um but some of the more like liquid ones like like pepe cash which is like the which is kind of a funny thing like that was the thing that brought down bitcoin uncensored right yeah let's jump into that story because yeah june seth was pumping it and krista rose did not like it right yeah well i think they both thought it was funny um john seth thought it was funny and he bought some rare pepes because at the time they weren't that expensive they're they're on the rare pepe is being like the original the rare pepe asset um and mike the mysterious mysterious mike that that started um uh the the whole rare pepe thing he uh

we we had kind of chatted about it and we're like we want we kind of want like a pepe that's like very liquid so that it can be like the main trading pair because then we kind of we're not stuck to the value of xcp because that's that's kind of like the liquidity token in counterparty and that's that's on i'm talking about on the decentralized exchange the decks that's within counterparty um so we're like well let's just create a pepe that has like a billion issuance and it's divisible at this point it's like well what are you creating i mean you're creating like an altcoin right at that point um but it is a pepe like there's a card pepe cash and just like all the other ones. You flip it around, you trade it. And what Mike did is he just

airdropped all the Pepe cash to the holders of the first three Pepes. So, it was the rare Pepe one, Gox card, which is Mark Carpellus Pepe, and there's one called Shitcoin card, which actually I have a gift for you before I leave. It's a physical rare Pepe. Oh, thank you. um and it's a shit coin card um but uh so he just airdropped him he didn't tell anybody he was gonna do it he's just like i'm gonna create this thing and we kind of talked about it and we're like we can't like like we don't want to we don't want to be scammers we're doing this to have fun like how are we gonna like get this out and then mike just did it he was like i just airdropped it

to all the i didn't get that many i had like one rare pepe because i'm like i i need i can't be spending all my i wouldn't need to collect all these things i can't spend all my money on the first one right so um i think john seth had bought like 30 of them and there is 300 and so i think i think it was probably like 30 million pepe cash or something and within a couple weeks like pepe cash because counterparty has a decentralized exchange we didn't need like my whole thing is like i'm not paying an exchange to put pepe cash on because it's not a i didn't there's no ico it's like we we wanted it to we wanted to create it so it was an easy way to trade Pepe's it's the liquid Pepe right so people started trading it for

counterparty XCP which is traded on exchange like it's trade on bitrex it's at the time it was on like shapeshift so you could quickly get through get Bitcoin for it so the value of it within a couple weeks just like skyrocketed and And I remember John said he didn't even know he had Pepe Cash because he didn't buy any. And he didn't realize it got airdropped because he bought the Pepes at first as like he thought it was funny. And then he just never looked back. And then like I think someone in the chat probably like, you should probably check like how much you have. And he checked and it was a lot.

It was like thousands of dollars. And he's like, well, I don't want Pepe Cash. I want Bitcoin, right? um and i think yeah he which yeah you you it's found money right like bitcoin cash or bitcoin gold it's found money it's like oh shit i got a bunch of money i didn't know about but i want bitcoin right so i think he just he just sold it all he wanted bitcoin yeah um and he told everyone he was gonna do it because he didn't want to like he's like guys i don't want this like don't i think he even did like a live stream of him like dumping it on the market like i don't want this like um

and i think the reason that i think chris got mad because he felt like like john seth just like he was just he was scamming people at that point because they were pumping it on their pot like but they weren't really pumping it they just thought it was a joke and it was funny so then you got then it kind of just became a thing like i said before i think it was i think there were other issues culminated to that but that that's kind of the story where it's a straw that broke Yeah, yeah, and I think there was maybe a little bit of, like, jealousy in that, like, Chris was pumping it, but he never thought to, like, buy any. And, like, maybe he's like, I think that could have been in there maybe a little bit. But, yeah, that was the story of how Bitcoin Uncensored came down.

But it was actually funny because if you were to – so the Rare Pepe, like, trading group is kind of, like, exists around a Telegram group. There's a Telegram group for it. Chris and Josh were talking about it on Bitcoin Uncensored, but I don't think a lot of people were getting into it from that. They heard them talking about it and thought it was funny, because if you asked anybody in the room at that time, they're like, Chris and John, who's that? That's why we thought it was so funny, because Chris thought, oh, the price went up because of us.

Probably not. No, probably not, yeah. Probably not yet. I would love to get those two in the same room in this studio, hash it out. Talk to Chris. I've emailed Chris. I'd like to get him on here just because I like his interview style. But John Seth, too.

I'd like to get him on as well. Yeah. If you can help out at all, let me know. Yeah, well, I can send Josh a message. Yeah. Is there anything else that interests you in this space? What are you most excited for right now? i'm kind of just excited to see where lightning is kind of like is very exciting to me um

i'd like to see how that kind of develops and how those those wallets develop do you think there's do you think there will come a time where like people don't even interact with like main chain bitcoin and just like open up channel like do you need bitcoin to open up a channel or can somebody open up a channel for you yeah i've read a couple things um there was a post i saw on like channel factories where like one person could create multiple channels and as long as you trust trust like that person then like you can use your channel um it kind of changes the dynamic of bitcoin a little bit right because on chain stuff it's like completely there's no trust at all right so with lightning there can be situations where there is no trust like if it's if it's

you're opening a channel but it's send only there's no trust involved right because there's that the previous all the previous states are better or more in your favor yeah um but i i see like when we were talking about kind of like bitcoin interacting with um like the current financial system the the one that really excites me is cash app i i see that as like they could i could see them integrate lightning in a way where like you don't really see it and you don't really know what you're using, and you could almost subsidize users to open channels. I don't know if you remember when Coinbase first came out, and it was like, sign up for an account and you get $10.

Yeah. I think it was $100 if you bought $100. I thought it used to be, if you referred somebody and that person bought at least $100, Coinbase was giving you $100, I'm pretty sure, worth of Bitcoin. Yeah, so just think about that. What if they were using that to send to you to open a channel? I feel like that could be subsidized to an extent to try to onboard people. It's funny you bring up Cash App. We're going to have Miles Suter, who's the PM on the Bitcoin team at Cash App, on the podcast next week.

Nice, nice. Yeah, I'll be interested to listen to that one. Because I'm sure he's a huge Bitcoin guy, and I've teased him before. I'm pretty sure they're experimenting with Lightning to some extent. I think it's a natural progression for that app. And Jack seems pretty open to it. He's calling Bitcoin the reserve currency of the world in 10 years. Yeah, he's the biggest advocate for Bitcoin maximalism.

Yeah, no, I'm excited about that. I think they're in a position where they can really help to bring it to the masses. and it would be interesting to see like using Cash App in a way where you don't need a bank account yeah actually Cash App sponsors some Barstool podcast too

use the promo code TAKE that's T-A-K-E part of my TAKE promo code to get five bucks when you sign up for Cash App that was a free ad very nice it's been a fascinating conversation Thank you for educating me on digital collectibles.

Yeah, no problem. I feel like I know a lot more than I did two hours ago. I hope so. I hope so. I hope I was able to bring some knowledge. This was a great conversation. You need to let me know when you come back down to New York. Yeah, for sure.

Joe, where can we find out more about you? I would say just go to rarepepewallet.com. That's my kind of labor of love lately. Go there. There's a link to the Telegram group at the bottom of the main page. So I hang out in there a lot. Yeah, that'd probably be the best place. Awesome.

Can we find you on Twitter? Yep. Do you want people to find you on Twitter? Sure. My handle is at was that a wolf. Was that a wolf. I like that one. I'm Marty Bent.

You can find me at Marty Bent on Twitter. If you like this podcast, rate, subscribe, share. Tell people about it. We need more listeners. We need more advertisers. Just kidding. Eh, maybe. That's all we got for this week, freaks.

Peace and love. that was an awkward ending