TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #45: Lightning Koala

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Lightning Koala, creator of satoshis.place and a man dedicated to building on top of the Lightning Network. The two discuss a bunch of different topics spanning from building games on Lightning to the coordination efforts it takes to make something like Bitcoin work at scale. Follow Lightning Koala: https://twitter.com/LightningK0ala Follow Marty: https://twitter.com/LightningK0ala Check out satoshis.place

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt we're here in uh in an off studio in my apartment building we're in we're in a shared space i'm not sharing with anybody other than my guest right now i'm very excited for tonight's guest it is lightning week here in new york city So there's a lot of very talented Lightning developers in town. So I got a slew of interviews set for this week. The first one is one I'm probably most excited for, is with Lightning Koala. I want to introduce you all to Lightning Koala. Welcome to the pod. Hello, everybody. I'm stoked to be here. Thanks for coming on, man.

I appreciate you coming on. So for you freaks that don't know, Lightning Koala is a Lightning developer who burst onto the scene earlier this year with his website satoshi's dot place where you could go uh and use the lightning work to pay per pixel to draw on this basically i'd like to reference it as like a public graffiti yeah it's like a public toilet graffiti yeah so before we jump into like satoshi's place like how did you get into bitcoin what's your tale uh i got into bitcoin around about 2000 end of 2013 2014 I can't remember exactly what, but the earliest memory I have was watching Andreas Antonopoulos speaking to the Canadian Senate.

What were you doing at this time? I was in Portugal. For the audience listening, I'm Portuguese, and at the time, I was just working remotely as a full-stack developer. Yeah. What type of systems were you building, like websites, CMSs, or? Yeah, web apps. It was a learning application. The software was actually serving Chinese customers, and it was kind of like a e-learning application. Okay. So what interested you in Bitcoin when you first got into it? Was it the tech, the money, the philosophy, sovereignty?

Yeah, so I started studying about finance and economics when I was at university. I studied engineering electronic engineering so there wasn't much about finance in there so I yeah I just started reading about it and probably the first thing I started the first experience trading was with forex and this was just before the financial crash of 2008 happened and it was pretty Iowa eye-opening experience at the time because I remember so one of the first lessons I learned was from my then manager I was working at a engineering company doing PCB design and we used to just like sit down and talk about the finance and stocks and and I remember

when uh the crisis was happening and like things were crashing down i kept asking him oh are you panicking are you selling are you selling and he said no no i'm buying so it was the first time i learned the lesson of by the dip right uh that's that's a good experience good time to learn that when i was dipping the hardest it has in in decades yeah so as the markets were crashing and And I saw sort of around 2013, 2014, the bear market, I saw sort of a similar pattern. And when I started researching Bitcoin, I felt like the fundamentals were really solid, but yet we had a downwards trend. And so I started buying Bitcoin and getting more and more into it.

And yeah, it's rabbit hole basically from then on. Getting more into it. You're at the point where you're in New York City because you're teaching at Lightning. Well, you're part of a Lightning Network bootcamp at Chaincode Labs this week. So you've obviously studied this a lot and got to a point where you know a lot. So how did you get into development on Bitcoin in particular? Did you ever mess around with like protocol level stuff or did you go like right to Lightning? Yeah, the first experience I had with developing on Bitcoin was actually with the 21 computer.

Oh, yeah. I have one upstairs. I'm keeping it. so maybe i'll go into a museum one day that's what i'm thinking too i got mine and uh yeah that's sort of like the the first time i i started playing around with programming with bitcoin and um i never really got into like protocol development but um yeah from then on it was it was basically running nodes and just figuring out how security works in Bitcoin and I went through a shit coin phase as well as we all do and yeah just

eventually when I saw lightning I thought wow this is this is amazing this is it for for payments at least yeah was there something about the machine payable web in 21 what they were doing like the concept of that yeah that drew you towards it yeah i just wanted to get my hands dirty i think yeah um i didn't really uh yeah i didn't think anything in particular about machine to machine payments yeah okay so what uh let's take like a step even further back like how'd you get into it seems like you're trading forex you're doing development Like, what was your upbringing? What did you study?

Did you go to university? Were you, like, a computer nerd growing up or more finance, economics-based? Yeah, I was a computer nerd growing up. Played a lot of games, actually. Yeah. So I grew up in Asia, and games were very accessible. There was, like, pirated games everywhere. So my childhood was pretty much, I remember like going out and just choosing any game I wanted for a dollar.

And like, yeah. And then I remember when I moved back to Portugal, one of the things that the school kids were like, oh, no way. There's this like disc that you can put on a Nintendo, like a disc reader. No, it's just cartridges. And I'm like, no, no, no. There's these discs that you can just rip games off of. i had a modded playstation at one point my life it's a true fact north northeast philadelphia christmas has come with modded uh modded playstations yeah um yeah uh so when you got

in the gaming and then um what uh like how does the development in the world that you were in before you got into bitcoin compare to like what you're doing on lightning right now um and just to let you know like lightning is still like a bit of a mystery to me it's something I haven't taken the deepest dive in. I've always just conceptually made sense to push things to a second layer. I plan on really experimenting with Lightning when I get my Kasa node in a couple weeks here. Oh, wow, you ordered one.

Yeah, I did. So I'm going to try and jump into the deep end with that thing. That's really awesome. I was talking about that to Pierre today, actually. Yeah. Just asking if he ordered one as well, because I didn't get a chance to order one, but also I have my own node at home

from a single-board computer. I saw you retweeted something about a Raspberry Pi Blitz, which they're trying to do like a Raspberry Pi node as well. Yeah, so it's an open-source project just showing how to set up your own Raspberry Pi node for Lightning, and it's really useful if you don't know much about command line stuff. It's like a step-by-step guide.

yeah right no that's what i'm looking forward uh with casa as well because it seems like they have a very very sleek onboarding process yeah so that's like one of the biggest problem is like setting up running and keeping these nodes running uh so i guess that's a good segue to go into like what are like the biggest obstacles that lightning has right now and as a developer what's like been the hardest part of building on lightning what's improved since you built satoshi's place yeah so So UX is sort of the angle where I'm coming from, because most of my experience as a software developer has been in front end and back end work, but mostly front end, I kind of specialize in React and React Native stuff, and I kind of like that intersection of users and interfaces.

And so with Lightning, there's a ton to do, I mean, I don't think we're a year into the first implementations that are out and despite the amount of development and interest that we've seen, I think there's still a lot to be done. With Satoshi's Place in specific, my aim was to basically be the answer to the question that most people will probably have the first time that they install a node or a wallet, which is how can I test this, and can I see it working, basically. So the reason a pixel costs one Satoshi, and it will always cost one Satoshi,

is simply so it's the cheapest thing that somebody can just go on and try it and see that, yeah, it works. Yeah, and are you making any money from this? Not that much, a little bit, but I lost most of it in a boating accident. that'll happen yeah it's unfortunate i'm sorry to hear about that boating accident you gotta be careful when you're boating uh never yeah never drink and boat people it's wavy and just drinking on a boat it's not good so um yeah so you said lightning it's still very early like how early

are we uh what needs to happen like what are the biggest obstacles the lightning has to overcome There's a lot of protocol development that still needs to happen. For instance, backups is a huge one. Today at the Lightning Residency, we were talking about a lot of these different things that need to happen. Backups is a really big one. Like clients are probably another one. Isn't that the big news this week or last week for that was Neutrina just launched, right?

Yeah, yeah. And also other things like the way the penalty system works right now. So what's the penalty system? So if a peer tries to broadcast a previous transaction or previous state of a channel in order to try and steal your funds, and you detect that, then you basically get to punish him and take all of the funds. But this plays into the backup problem where sometimes you don't do that by mistake.

Your node goes down for some reason, you come back up, or your data gets corrupted and you need to restore things, but you don't have the latest state. And as soon as you broadcast an old state, then the other person might take those funds. You sort of have to ask them for it back, where you might not even know who they are.

Yeah, well, the game theory is just not in your favor, basically. And so there's solutions proposed for that. One of them is called L2 by Christian Decker. And I can't remember his name now. I'm sorry. And yeah, it's just basically a different way to construct the way transactions work in Lightning so that yeah that basically doesn't happen yeah some other things like fees

for example so right now you need to commit to a certain fee for the closing transaction and you can't change that so you know if transaction fees on Bitcoin spike then that's a problem and so with l2 and sig hash input sig hash no input you can basically bind to bind it in a different way so that it doesn't you can basically change the fee and change the way the transactions are you couldn't do like by no means an expert on this you couldn't do like a replace by fee sort of like that yeah yeah interesting that's crazy how how intricate these systems are getting yeah it's amazing and then I know you're working on the

front end but just from a scaling perspective like I'm a big believer out you may know that like we need to scale this in layers and lightning as a second layer makes a lot of sense so like what type of things do you see it enabling as an app developer what type of apps are being built at the hackathons around the world it's crazy how many like lightning the uh colmo colmo fomo fomo um lightning hackathons there's one this weekend here in new york so yeah fomo is actually one of the first people to draw on satoshi's place yeah and i haven't met Hopefully this Saturday he's hosting one here, that one in New York.

But the applications that it will enable, so part of my talks this week will be about lightning-powered games. So I see some applications there, machine-to-machine API payments, basically what 21 was trying to do is I believe now possible with lightning. and um so i i think there's a kind of beautiful irony to um the way that uh adam back's hash

cash proof of work stuff came to be used um in bitcoin uh so satoshi decided to use proof of work um but you know the the origins of proof of work was to solve email spam because we didn't have a digital native currency well now we do and now we've found a way to realistically scale it and now we have the possibility to do microtransactions on on a digitally native currency and i think that's incredibly powerful satoshi's place in some ways is sort of like DDoS protected because of this fact that you have to pay like one Satoshi per pixel if you think about it like how else would you do it like if you didn't have micro payments in this game like people would

just end up spamming it and it would probably look worse than than what it we're seeing it now somebody put a shepherd fairy up there the obey posters I like that. No, it's crazy to see what this is enabling. And another huge theme of Tales from the Crypt and Rabbit Hole Recap the last month has been patience and the fact that a lot of these apps that are getting built out now

were once ideas that somebody launched a token to fulfill because Bitcoin had a perceived shortcoming. Nick Carter has the fun dice. I got them upstairs, yeah. You should play a game. But that's why we're going to make a drinking game with the FUD dice. This is a call to action for all the freaks and crypto Twitter people out there. We need to come up with a formal drinking game for the FUD dice.

The bounty is out there. Cards against humanity with FUD dice. There's an idea there. There's an idea. There's a starting point. The dice are a starting point. We just need to move from the dice to a drinking game. yeah and bitcoiners are really receptive to this kind of merchandise slash uh bitcoin culture

related stuff memeware memeware like where yeah it's uh some qual memeware nicks nicks producing with the dice he said there's a there's a supply cap but i have a feeling that he's got a neg on that supply cap he's known to do that inflationist with all those all of his products specifically his podcast appearance but we all know too well about that um but the point i was getting is like lightning is proving lightning and now uh what blockstream launched two weeks it was two weeks ago now or last week i can't even remember liquid uh sort of proving that bitcoin can enable all these use cases it's just going to be done on different layers in different ways so that's actually what's interesting to see right now is liquid and lightning running in parallel sort of

prove two different ways you can attempt to scale maybe one will be successful the other won't maybe they both will be maybe they'll both fail who knows but they're they're attempting to to drive the the issue forward yeah um it's yeah people need patience but also um perseverance in in the development work that's that's being done and um i think i think the way bitcoin is is headed is extremely promising. If you reason about why we need a stable base chain and from there you can scale on second layers and third layers and so forth, it makes sense. In engineering terms it makes sense. you said you dabbled in shit coins for a while what uh what drew your allure like what um

what interested you um did you have these like the the fud dice uh mentality yeah well i i this the full disclaimer i i participated in the dow should be a sticker for my car you should get a badge of honor for that yeah a merit badge i participated in the dow um yeah what interested me i i don't know just curiosity i i think um it's unfair to to um sort of look at people it's unfair to to look at people and assume that uh you know they haven't gone through the rabbit hole experience um it's just the the so many different ways people can reason about this this new technology it's just like somebody described it once as like a new metal that just landed from an asteroid asteroid and we just kind of pick it

up and we look at it and we we can't really understand what it is but it's got these amazing properties like you can yeah and um uh what was i talking about um yeah so shit coins shit coins yeah not not faulting people for not going through the cycle fast enough yeah or something like yeah and and smart contracts and all that stuff and um right and and so when you um i just think a lot of people go through this journey and um we might be at different stages and we might end up in different places but it's kind of i just like to give people the benefit of of doubt yeah i do as well and it's interesting uh especially during the depths of this bear market to see how uh feels like everybody's starving and backed into a corner and lashing out you

see bitcoin bitcoiners turning on each other bitcoiners turning on all corners all corners turning on each other yeah um the stakes and guns excellent yeah coat who was calling that out somebody was calling out somebody took a picture of uh a breakfast it was adorned with uh meats some bread i think there were some carbs on the table actually it was anti anti carnivore uh guns and like hardware wallets and uh people are trying to attribute that to like bitcoin the bitcoin mentality yeah which is not everybody's like that but it's a funny meme that's the other thing people don't realize yeah that was posted at jest to sort of trigger people and it did crypto creator twitter is is amazing but sometimes it um it just it's like a sliver of what what's out there

exactly it's easy to get lost in in um random rants and memes but then you start seeing people in in these meetups and and talks and you realize wow there's like a lot going on behind the scenes so let's talk about that do you travel a lot of meetups a lot of talks or not so much um i work remotely most of the time so um this year was probably the year where i i got a lot more exposure to to the bitcoin conferences and meetups i have been to to other meetups before in the past uh but probably the the best one i've been so far was um building on bitcoin in lisbon it was just incredible to see the amount of talent in the room and and everybody just um talking about uh how to improve this network how to build on it how to um

and and not not kind of like getting lost in pitching things to each other it was no it's had a similar experience in lafia uh in riga oh yeah you went to that at baltic honey bad That's what I wrote about in the newsletter, I said it had like a revolutionary feel where like outside the talks when it was like coffee breaks, everybody was outside and they're very genuinely having open conversations, feeling out like the attack vectors and how to protect Bitcoin. Go. It was, yeah, it had this very like, uh, like everybody felt responsibility for arbor during

the network into the future and it's it's a very mission driven movement it feels like people are very passionately uh like into bitcoin for for very ideological reasons yeah yeah 2018 is pretty good year for for meetups and conferences i feel like a vintage year perhaps yeah why do you say that uh just like it seems like you had a good experience at latvia and like um lisbon was really good um he got a residency in new york now but um a bunch of other people were were i i watched some some videos from tone vase and i see he's been like to a lot of different places as well except for the blockchain cruise that was a bit let's talk about the blockchain cruise we haven't talked about the blockchain cruise on this uh on this podcast i'm not an expert on

blockchain cruises neither am i but i i saw some videos it just looks bad all around yeah um i just i i couldn't see why like jimmy song and and tone vase wanted to to go there i i just i don't know when i heard about blockchain cruise and i saw the the guest list i just thought wow that's an explosive mix of people yeah on a boat in the middle of the mediterranean cruises in general just do not appease me at all no i'd rather what would i rather do than go on a cruise that's a good question i think i'd rather do like homework for a week than go on a cruise as a 20 27 year old man i'd really would not like to go on a cruise number one number two to be subjected while on the cruise to debates about cryptocurrency specifically

bitcoin versus bitcoin cash did you see how much it cost no i did not it was probably expensive yeah it was up in the thousands just thought wow i could do so much with that money buy a good amount of bitcoin with that money yeah and that area of europe is so beautiful uh my my fiance's from italy and we like travel a lot around the area in sicily and sardinia and stuff like it's why why would you why would you just subject yourself to being stuck in a boat for two weeks or a week whatever it was but respect respect for for them to kind of like stand up on stage and confront the mob yeah yeah it's like that's one thing uh i've been going back and forth with lately is do we i think we're at a point where we don't even have to like respond to

the mob because it's been responded to so many times i think so as well it's like satoshi said if you if you don't understand uh i don't have time i don't have time to to fill you in um i agree i think don't feed the troll don't feed the troll and the markets are proving that this path has been right up to this point um yeah and there's so much other constructive stuff to focus on and build and the thing is i kind of understand the the because there's a lot of the deception uh and i can i can understand that for uh newcomers uh it's going to be really hard to navigate yeah very confusing especially yeah you google bitcoin right dot com is like the first right it's got the best seo yeah and you read it and it's like it's bitcoin and it's

bitcoin cash yeah and then well what is it then you know um so yeah i understand like why some people will take it upon themselves to try and clear the muddy waters uh i respect that as an engineer it's not something that i necessarily think i would enjoy being involved in i just rather focus on just leaving stuff leave it to our ship pastors we'll take care of that for you yeah marty you go you go back marty do it no that's actually one thing i wrote about today what um is uh is how how we should market and pitch bitcoin to the overwhelming public who's not really adept to what bitcoin is and isn't really interested and uh let me pull this up i I want to give correct attribution.

I read about in the newsletter today. This guy, Willem Vandenberg, he basically posted a thread saying if we were to believe that Bitcoin is going to follow the Nick Zabian path to becoming money, which is something moves from a collectible to a store value to media exchange to unit of account, it's going to take time and if we're being honest with ourselves bitcoin right now is still in the collectible phase and marketing as marketing it as a viable medium of exchange doesn't do us any favors uh because you're sort of uh over promising and under delivering because bitcoin at the protocol level is certainly not a good medium of exchange you got 10 minute block times fees uh

a float fluctuation of the price um so marketing it as a collectible that can potentially become a medium of exchange if it gets enough value to saturate uh to where it become viable and you have second layers that are fully functional and build out you know then yes it makes sense so maybe we should be under promising and over deliver over delivering in the future i feel like the the store of value stuff this is coming along pretty well um it depends where you are really where in the world you are i mean i i grew up in in in asia and i traveled a lot around southeast asia and i i can really see how like in a lot of situations for some people in particular you know putting savings into bitcoin even if it's volatile i mean savings are sort of like a

long-term thing right you shouldn't be thinking about storing value in bitcoin for the next year it should be like 5 10 20 30 40 even longer right and for that purpose it's good it's retained its purchasing value and it's even gone up uh but it's kind of i see those the yeah the collectible definitely like the bootstrapping stage uh the the bitcoin sorry the the store value uh these are all things to me that they're going to grow until eventually we hit unit of accounts but and this is where i see lightning actually playing a really big role in the medium of exchange part so some of the stuff that i've been exploring is thinking about how you can use lightning to build and implement use cases which aren't really possible with the existing

financial world that we have right and because you know using it for merchants like brick and mortar shops and and even e-commerce is fine it's good but it's not that 10x improvement right yeah and and for most people in in the west at least uh you know we have contactless payments at least i don't know about us actually but in in the uk you know you can travel by bus by train you can pay for for stuff for your shopping it's not ubiquitous but it exists here yeah and and and so and most people are comfortable with that that's a good experience uh and if you're challenging that with uh bitcoin or lightning you need to you need to see okay is this a 10x improvement because otherwise people aren't gonna move over right it's the same as saying like you

know I'm gonna give you a phone and unless it's 10x improvement which they usually are right because every two years for example they get way better or an internet somebody shows you a new internet and they say hey use this instead and like well is it that much better than what I'm using right now like mastodon for example this maybe I shouldn't talk about that cuz I haven't tried it but anyway so the way i try to frame it is like okay well um what can you come what can you build that is that 10x and um you can't do it with with the existing means and which will actually make people think wow that's cool i want to use that and so shit i need to use lightning

to, okay, I'm going to learn about it because I want to use that, right? And so this is why I'm exploring this idea of lightning games because I think, yeah, there's a lot of potential use cases there. Elsa, what type of use cases? Like what is the 10x improvement in gaming? Yeah, so this is actually the subject of my last talk this week and I should really pull up my slides. But essentially, I started by looking at how do games use money nowadays.

And if you think about it, you can purchase games, you can purchase in-app items, in-game currencies, you can gamble. And the first couple examples are usually unidirectional, right? so you you're paying to consume something but generally speaking you don't you don't have a game of like call of duty and then somewhere in the middle you you earn money right unless it's a tournament or something like that uh with gambling there's some more use cases where there's this bi-directional thing you know you put in money you play a game of poker and then you pull it out uh so um with lightning i think it's a bit of um uh regulatory arbitrage in the sense that it just creates this opportunity for anybody to just pop in and out of a game

and and so what does that mean well that means that we can actually perhaps think of games to wage bets on which are not necessarily casino style chance games it might be a game of like bomberman or battleships or chess or smash something like that yeah smash right and and if you think about that in in small quantities between groups of friends it's kind of interesting because you can imagine just sitting around with a group of like four friends and you just decide to whip up this game and you just wager a bet for like beer money right yeah and i remember doing that in college we used to do that but we would do it with like college football games we'd have like prop bets like exactly with like with singles yeah yeah so so the idea here is is the game

itself can uh can be like a computer game like a street fighter game or something hell yeah i like that so what uh what are like the first iterations that are that are coming out or are there any um uh there there are lightning network power games out there now um uh some of them some of like there's a roulette game right i know there's yeah there's a roulette game there's lightning spin uh made by hui gomes um from the open node team and actually lightning uh spin maybe roulette i don't know roulette but um lightning spin is one of the examples where you have the bi-directional thing but it's still a uh chance game okay right provably fair it's just an interesting application but I want to push that further

I haven't seen the the kind of you know Street Fighter or something that's actually how Satoshi's Place began like the idea of Satoshi's Place actually started with making

something like a Street Fighter game where like if you punch somebody it would be a micropayment to you well this is interesting because you're coming at this so So the counterparty Ethereum crew would come at gaming from a non-fungible sort of skin type angle

and you're coming from a purely spectator slash gambling angle, which is completely different than the other way that people are attacking gaming via crypto. Yeah, that's a really good observation because right now there's actually a trend in the blockchain world of like nfts non-fungible tokens and um uh you know it's revolving around the idea that oh you can own some crypto assets i guess crypto kitties was what kind of brought that into the mainstream i would say rare pepe's on counterparty was the original yeah yeah yeah

definitely shout out joe looney and crew yeah yeah exactly so the idea has been around for a while and um actually mandel duck uh that's his twitter handle he um he's out in japan and he he works or he has worked with counterparty uh based games he's actually like built stuff that use this concept um but you're right i'm not approaching this as uh oh there's some kind of digital thing that i own because uh i see some issues there and but i'm rather like looking at the you know this is an amazing payment rail yeah as the incentive like the humans will be driven to gamble because they're addicted to gambling at least a subsect of us yeah yeah well yeah i see it more as a casual like people having fun like just you know a couple of like i said like a couple of

friends just whip up a game and go hey guys like i bet i'll kick your ass in this game and by the way whoever wins pays a round of beer i can definitely see you do it around i can definitely see me and my friends doing something like that um i've got a few bitcoiner friends too so this might be possible if this ever gets uh spec'd out um going back to nfts though non-fungible tokens what are your knocks on them or your apprehensions okay so uh they're they're i've got two main gripes with it the first one is uh the idea of scarcity uh but we can talk a little bit more about that i guess but the other main problem i have is um so one of the things i try to break down in my talk is um you know when you play a game of uh like a board game like sellers of

katan or monopoly whatever you're between friends and you generally trust each other that you're gonna like cheat right and uh in a case of monopoly like even one of your friends might be the banker and you trust that he's not gonna cheat unless he's your brother or right but generally speaking that's that's sort of the setup but when you bring that game uh into an online setting um and even in the real world when we have like a boxing match or the recent like uh mma yeah right you need a referee there that uh controls the rules of the game make sure that people aren't cheating and uh it ultimately dictates the outcome of the match right so um and and multiplayer games online they they have the same architecture you have a centralized server

let's say to which all clients connect to and that server is basically is known as the authoritative server and that basically uh runs a simulation of the game so all the clients are just basically playing the game but they're they're um uh sorry they're syncing their state to the authoritative server and and so what does this mean this means that you you need to kind of trust that arbiter right and that referee and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that it's sort of in the referee's interest and in the tournament organizer whatever that that the rules are obeyed and you create a good competitive environment so so forth uh so my problem with these nft token stuff is that yeah you can create these things that are supposedly scarce

scarce we can talk about that more a bit later the problem is then what what do you do with them right you're going to play a game okay most of these are going to be like a trading card game and there's going to be rules about mana and strength and whatever. But who dictates those rules, right? And can you trust that person? And, well, if you have to trust that person, then what's the point in making the non-fungible token in the first place? Wasn't this something that Andrew DeSantis raves a lot about?

It was Star Wars Galaxy. Was that the... yeah star wars galaxy heroes they did something like this where um they were like a very open source community game like sort of run by the community at one point the the central authorities of the game sort of fucked up the whole incentives yeah and really screwed over the people that sunk a lot of time and effort into attaining certain levels of jedi mastery i believe uh and they changed the rules overnight and really made it so people who did not have to expend that amount the time we're able to catch up quicker so sort of destroy the whole incentive system of the game

yeah and and yeah that's that's basically my my concern and you could argue that yeah but you know i'm gonna keep it and i only uh surrender custody for that brief moment where the game rules are played right but then how do you guarantee the game rules are being uh played correctly and then And yeah, the scarcity thing is another issue. Well, Sir Koala, they're going to be decentralized, right? You're going to be able to decentralize these games and everything's going to be decentralized. And the fact that it's decentralized

means that it's provably scarce and it makes sense. Don't worry, it makes sense at the end of the day. Right. Yeah, that's, you know, have you run an Ethereum note? I have not tried. Yeah. Have you tried? Yeah.

How recently? uh like a year and a half ago and then recently when i was working at a company we had a lot of issues with running ethereum nodes eventually having to like fall back to inferria and stuff but what the what type of implementation were you trying to spin up i can't remember i wasn't responsible for the infrastructure uh of that stuff but that that's the to me that's sort of where the the line breaks with the scarcity stuff right because uh if you can't guarantee scarcity for the next couple years 5 10 15 then what are you doing this in the first place at what level at the level where you know the network becomes centralized to the point where

another dow bailout happens right or or something like that so you're not even saying like centralization of like non-fungible tokens you're saying centralization of ethereum yeah but that's that's the problem right because the tokens are built on top of the yeah of that network so it's not that i don't believe in the concept of digital scarcity uh obviously i do because of bitcoin but in the idea of building tokens that's also feasible uh it's just that you know again this has been done in bitcoin in counterparty it didn't necessarily work out it can be done liquid now yeah uh maybe uh i'm not sure you'd have probably probably have to create a federation of like gamers and stuff get gamer game developers or game publishers something like that i'm not

sure how that would look like uh even with lightning um uh jacomo zumo uh zuko zumo zuko and yeah he's uh made this proposal of rgb that's the idea of making tokens on on lightning but but it's not quite there yet. And basically, I think the issue here is pulling the cart before the horse to me. Exactly. And I'd rather focus my energy on the payment stuff than this pie-in-the-sky thing.

I could be wrong, but yeah, that's sort of... When I try to reason about it, I can't come up with a conclusion that tells me, yeah, this makes sense. right no and i think you just made a great point there like a lot of these projects have put the cart before the horse and that's what i think a lot of people have a knock on bitcoin i mean that's been in the head or it's been a big topic the last week in particular bitcoin maximalism has been getting dumped on pretty hard people think uh we're i don't know i don't speak for me um i

would consider myself a bitcoin maximalist um people think bitcoin maximalism in general is very dogmatic and and uh anti-competitive where it's not it's very descriptive it's like hey this works we want it to to work into the future we at least i do try to move from a first principle stance where like you want to make sure everything works correctly and start from its core and work out like yes you can make really cool tokens on top of ethereum that's pushed on top of so much obscurity and basically unknown future developments that I'm not willing to risk my money on that protocol like that's a non-starter for me yeah and that's what I think a lot of people don't realize is that there's these first principles where pick winners will just say all right if

you don't check these boxes it is not worth my time to pay attention to yeah it's just I think the the application of money is so crucial and like we talk about the the cantillion effect on on inflation but if you think about like the cantillion of effect of solving the the money problem what is the cantillion effect it's like um the description when the way to describe when um you inflate the money monetary supply and the first people who benefit from that are the closest to that and then the ones towards the ends but in that

sense you know it's kind of like maybe it's not a good way to describe it but it's kind of it's a small change it's a small fix to solve this thing about a non-sovereign

money which you can't change the supply of like if we if we fix that like the second third fourth order effects are going to be insane in in society i think uh and and so to kind of get distracted with all this other stuff is in i think in in in the broad um sense like it's just going to seem so stupid right yeah all right i think we're uh we're taking a cosmic turn here so like how how drastic do you think uh bitcoin can change society um and like i know you've played the thought experiments in your mind

like what's your like most optimistic view of bitcoin and how it changes society and what changes do you want to see um i don't know if i can answer that question um i think have you read the you've read the sovereign individual i think in fact i think i i read it because i listened to the podcast got it um yeah i talk about it often i talked about it like three times this week already yeah the thing i liked about it was sort of to me it it helped me uh answer like why why are things why did balance of power uh happen this way and and the way it describes like the balance of um uh violence the ability to to leverage a violence right yeah to me that was a really good way to see things right to understand like you know why

why we human uh human civilizations have evolved to this point and so um uh yeah i think bitcoin changes that balance of power uh dramatically like the same way that the internet changes the balance of power of communication and um dissemination of information i think bitcoin is sort of also like massive um yeah like revolution and in the way that value is is uh stored and transferred and um the effects of that i don't know i don't know what the effects are but it's almost like does it matter what my opinion is it's like a moving train like I the way the conclusion I have is just like it's the gears are moving and you're not gonna be able to stop it and it's gonna be big is it gonna be good I

don't know I hope so but yeah I got a couple of things to piggyback on with this like one so the sovereign at most we're gonna riff on the sovereign individual here for a little bit so the sovereign individual talks about 500 years super cycles in particular that are based on inflection points that are precipitated with technological advancement and the fact that we have and again like i've been thinking about this more recently the inflection point that we're born in in particular like we have two technologies not just like one so we have the internet and i mean yeah we probably wouldn't have bitcoin without the internet but we have the internet which is distributing

decentralizing and making information widely available then we have bitcoin which is distributed money and decentralizing money and making money very sovereign and the fact that you have those two and cryptography as well yeah cryptography ties in with it as well the fact that you have all these crazy innovations having at once like the amount of change that we're experiencing in our life is going to be so profound yeah we can't even comprehend it like at a chemical level like we don't we have never experienced the rate of change that we are going through right now it's crazy it's heady man it's a simulation is it like we're getting closer and closer it seems like this tweet deck looks like the uh the matrix thing we're just like falling

down it's like the event horizon um but the the empowerment of being able to uh transact directly with other people without asking for permission it's like i was talking about this to somebody at the lightning residency today it's like we're talking about like creating custodial like third-party custody solutions for lightning stuff you know because you know aids adoption and it's easier to reason about and stuff and i'm like no no no open source it make it like available to everybody like i want a kid in in bangladesh to run his own nodes and be not only his own bank but his own payment processor for his village or or school and Once you like break the hydra into into these like million heads

It's like it's like impossible to stop. Yeah, so that's why I like what like BTC pay servers doing. Yeah Those guys know it's doing amazing amazing work But sticking on the sovereign individual another thing like you said which I really appreciate you said it's like this stuff is inevitable it's it was predicted it if you if you take the time to sit down and think about like the trajectory of this technology it's inevitable like they and literally on page 25 of the sovereign individual they predicted bitcoin almost word for word like almost word for word yeah decentralized uh non-sovereign money run on the internet that no one controls that is run by algorithms and is secured with cryptography pretty much word for word had no idea it was coming

and it's here now and like you said it it is a better technology it is inevitable it is going to keep proliferating and hopefully be ubiquitous one day most likely be ubiquitous because it's just a natural progression of the uh technology that is money um so it's it's for me at this point it's i've recognized that reality in that future and it's just adapting and making your life is as friendly and uh and and bitcoin friendly as possible yeah it's almost like when when society realized that you can get more productivity out of people if they're happy and you know private property rights and and so forth and you can build a society that can innovate rather than you know whip them into work right yeah we were seeing we've seen

that and and so bitcoin is i think the next level of that where it just makes it even more possible to um to be part of this network uh that can just go peer-to-peer right without somebody being able to dictate what to do um and and so i see it like as perhaps uh it will trigger another order of magnitude of efficiency in human societies. Yeah, one thing that's interesting, I think you can actually bring some clarity to what's interesting about Bitcoin in particular, since it's a global distributed phenomena.

You're seeing, especially when it comes to the interaction of miners, developers, users, there's, I don't wanna say culture clash, but there's definitely some friction between like, especially with the mining and the scaling debates with like East and West. And this is like, this might be the first truly global project

where it's truly individual plebs coordinating together to build. And there are some like cultural differences. So like growing up in Asia and Portugal, so you've experienced Western and Eastern world. Do you notice that at all? And do you think do you see Bitcoin sort of building bridges between these societies, which haven't haven't been very, I mean, cooperative, very cooperative up to this point, but could be more cooperative going forward? Yeah, yeah, I do. Same way, like, like, flight airplanes, like cheap, cheap flight, like in Europe, we have the Erasmus project, where students from a country will like, spend a semester or a year abroad. And there was some statistic, I can't remember the numbers off my head, but not off my head, but it was like the number of children born from couples that came from this.

that met that yeah erasmus couples and uh yeah like it it you know europe is in a weird situation now with brexit and some like nationalist movements and stuff but i feel like the younger generation they're so much more aware of our neighbors and um and that's good that's that's a positive thing i think bitcoin enables that in a in a similar way um i don't know if i can say that much about China because the place I lived in was kind of it in its own niche yeah but yeah I think the the what's the mining facilities that are being or leveraging or arbitraging malinvestment in like power plants to you know have this surplus energy well i call it malinvestment technically it might not be

because bitcoin serves as a good way to kind of store that value and um absorb um that that surplus energy which is a good thing we want that we want good cheap renewable sources of energy right but um yeah it's it's interesting the way that plays out i don't think it answers your question though but for example that story about uh university students uh mining because electricity is part of the the rent they don't have to pay they don't have to pay for it yeah so so i think that's where it like starts chipping away um but yeah it's a peer-to-peer protocol um sort of peer-to-peer network and and yeah no i think the uh the crux what i was trying to get get at with that question in particular is like this might be like the first like global

project where people are coordinating i mean what it's actually i don't think the internet was yeah in general like playing games when i was growing up one of i'm gonna give a shout out to this game now one of the games that i played a lot when i was a kid was called subspace and uh it was made by virgin media and it was this uh almost like space invaders sort of thing uh Space ships and you basically like just it was multiplayer online one of the first like massive multiplayer game So you'd be like in an arena with like a hundred people like battling these ships and stuff and it was in the late 90s so Back then

It I was living in this in this really small like enclave in in China and most of the people I played with with were Americans and Canadians and people from Europe and it was the first time I had this kind of exposure to to people you know from abroad and shit-talking you online yeah noob yeah and yeah the the slogan of the game was meet people from all over the world then kill them it's incredible yeah no that was incredibly ignorant of me to be like bitcoin's the first time there's ever been anything on a global scale but i think as time goes on and decentralized and open source technologies become more ubiquitous and more

popular and more palatable and they're actually like the go-to preference they're preferred to closed source solutions that it is bringing the world together slowly but surely maybe bitcoin the uh open source attempt to build possibly the biggest app ever which is money can bring the world together in a way that hasn't happened before yeah that's pretty uh crazy because look you can travel somewhere in the world and if you happen to meet a bitcoiner and i don't know you share a cab and then or an uber or uh and and then you go hey uh let me pay you back oh send me bitcoin i was like oh i do bitcoin as well so it's like this common language of value that globally is understood you're right it's and man those currency exchanges airports are ripoffs

right oh my god when i went to when i went to rega when i went to latvia i got bent over oh no you used them i used i used the airport i just had to i forgot i forgot to set it up with my bank before i got the airport traps it's like it wasn't it was obscene yeah um luckily work expenses shout out by salads thank you um they expensed it but uh no um i was gonna segue to something else what was it this uh we're imbibing bullet bourbon right now by the way uh lightning koala specifically asked for american whiskey i gave you the run-of-the-mill bourbon it's a good bourbon i'm not a very um good whiskey connoisseur i like that single malt yamazaki okay one from japan yeah i used to work at an izakaya in college so i know a little bit about japanese liquors

oh i should have asked for that but this is really good actually oh thank you uh i can't i shouldn't say thank you i should uh i'll send the people from bullet bourbon your regards um what was i about to say though it's uh it's the thing when you were i just recorded that the rabbit hole recap with matt odell too we had a little bit of mccallan just now yeah the before yeah i just posted it right before you came here i want to meet matt seems like a cool dude oh we'll set that up this week he's in town i'll be um i like the the rabbit hole recap as well and also you should do the montage

oh the montage coming next week we're recording it next week got the script ready yeah I'm running it down should include Satoshi's place oh it'll be on there it'll be on there it's gonna be a good one

I'm trying to figure out what the perfect background is for the montage right now and think of what I was gonna ask you so we're talking about east west oh here's what it is you said

here's what it is so you said that bitcoin when you're traveling it is this global language where you're like taking a cab with somebody and it's like, oh, you pay me in Bitcoin. It's like, yes. You're a big proponent of Satoshi's over bits.

Yeah. This is a big debate going on or starting right now. Yeah. And this is an important debate in the long run. Yeah. I think with Samurai, so Satoshi's versus bits, there's a long going debate that's starting to heat up now that Bitcoin's at a level where people are like,

oh, buy one Bitcoin. It's like $6,000, $6,500. Like that's way too much. and to help with the UX of the overwhelming public. Yes, there's a bunch of unibias. A lot of people think that we should start treating Bitcoin as a unit of account in the digital world. One team that has started this is Samurai Wallet.

They are officially not allowing... They're not doing fiat? Yeah, they're not denominating anything in fiat. It's all going to be denominated in Satoshi. So there's a debate right now. Should we even put fiat in the wallets? And then if we don't, what is the nomenclature? Is it Satoshi's?

Is it bits? Like, how do we talk about the denominations of Bitcoin? Okay, no, fuck fiat. So props to Samurai Wallet. Those guys are legends. I like Satoshi's. Although one of the things about bits that I also like is the fact that it's got those two decimal places.

To me, it makes sense. It fits into the mental model that people are used to. Because if you go down to Satoshi's, you can do millibits in Lightning, but it's probabilistic. It's not really, it's not in the Bitcoin protocol yet. But at the same time, I really like Satoshi's because it's almost an homage to Satoshi himself. Yeah. And I would say, like, I have an opinion on this. I don't like bits because it just gets too confusing

with the typical, like, computer engineering world. Right. Computer software world. Yeah, maybe. Sort of like Satoshi, Finney. Oh, God, I don't know. Yeah, so there'll be, like, so that's another interesting. Millibits, right?

Millibits, yeah. There will need to be a whole new nomenclature for denominating Bitcoin in smaller and smaller terms. and that's a that's an interesting and important uh development on its road to becoming a reserve currency of the world well enlightening uh i don't think i've seen bits mentioned anywhere no yeah it's all satoshis right yeah it's like the biggest which is which is kind of hard to wrap your head around because sometimes you see a hundred thousand satoshis uh but i i think we just need one more bull run and then it's like okay yeah what is it it's a million satoshis is

a bitcoin it's 100 million 100 million is bitcoin yeah it's off by two orders of magnitude eight zeros yeah um that shows how much uh marty knows about that the denomination of bitcoin don't worry i only learned it this year so shameful this game 100 million satoshis is a bitcoin I was uh I was wrong there um but yeah that's developing as well yeah um what else do we got here how how far are we in now we're at three in oh I was going to mention um the what was it education stuff I don't know why I was going to mention that oh because of unit bias like uh you know what grinds my gears sort of thing what is that what grinds your gears like in quality unit bias um lack of educate yeah lack of education i have i have a good anecdote about that

i i heard i was listening to um your alan silbert uh interview this morning on the path the very new yorker thing um are you staying in hoboken uh no i'm staying in jersey city best bagels by the way wonder bagels shout out to wonder bagels you're gonna find very good bagels in jersey city yeah it's the water it's the water up here i hope you know that yeah and to work so is it jersey shore is actually jersey city no no jersey shore is a different thing yeah jersey shore's got you got a very wide range it's the whole coast uh so my family i grew up in the south jersey shore which is not at all like what you what you see on mtv and what that show was Yeah, but yeah closer to the city Seaside Heights where that show was from we're not too far from it probably 45 minutes away

Yeah, okay This is another thing actually like a lot of people always joke about Americans Oh, they don't know where like Portugal is or something like that. But You guys I know a portrait Yeah, it's just like you guys have this amazing knowledge of like the American States and like the other when I was arriving the other So there was this woman sat next to me on the plane and she was going to Winnipeg because we stopped over in Toronto.

She was going to Winnipeg to see polar bears. Pretty cool. But I was like, where the hell is Winnipeg? So that's one thing. But yeah, going back to the Alan Silver. You don't know your Canadian provinces and cities? I don't know. Yeah.

Anyway, so the Alan Silver thing was education about money and finance, which I also concur it's fucking shocking but I have another example when I was growing up in in China where we spoke Portuguese it's not easy to find out where it is the Portuguese educational system at the time and I'm not that old but it was mandatory to learn English and French because it was prior to english it was sort of like the lingua franca of the world the romance languages yeah yeah and like why the fuck do you need to learn french in china right i'm wait wait i'm very

confused now because you said you're you were in a portuguese speaking sector in china yeah basically yeah the gambling mecca of the world right now um and you don't know I understand French. Yes, a little. A little. But not very good. I don't speak Spanish. I don't speak Spanish.

Yes. Me too. But yes, French was like ridiculous. I can't speak Portuguese. I can say bonjour. That's about it. Bonjour. Bonjour.

That's like a Brazilian accent. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. It's good night now. It's evening. Okay. but i have a friend from uh i have a friend from paraguay who speaks fluent portuguese and he's got

a he's got a big uh bomb gia he's a big bomb gia fan he does like inspirational instagram posts where he just wakes up in the morning it's like bomb gia so i'm learning from a friend yeah it's a cool language um and yeah but french what the fuck and and so uh the education side of finance i think it stretches beyond that to like other stuff like like this example of learning french when you're in china when it's probably more useful to learn mandarin or cantonese um so yeah yeah and that's one thing i've been trying to wrap my head around more recently especially when it comes to education around finance and economics and accounting and personal finance in particular is is it intentional to not teach people these things as they grow up

so they're useful idiots. Is it intentional? I don't know. Yeah, exactly, because you think, like, as soon as you know these core concepts, you can make more educated decisions, I feel. Like, if you do not know these core concepts of what money is, how finance works,

how loans work, the decisions you make based off that lack of knowledge really sets you back. What's that razor thing, Hanlon razor, is it? Hanlon's razor. Is it like benefit of the doubt sort of thing? Yeah, nothing's ever malicious. Nothing's ever done with malicious intent.

It's more ignorance. So is that the case? Because do they understand it themselves? Right? Like CFDs and stuff, like all those weird financial instruments that they made up running up to 2008. Mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps.

Right, just fancy names for stuff. I just feel like maybe they lose themselves in the definitions and they just don't understand it anymore, and then nobody can actually teach it. Maybe. I don't know. Benefit of the doubt. I'm not going to give that benefit of the doubt. I will say that it got to the point where mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, which were basically insurance policies

on the mortgage-backed securities, were enabled because Wall Street discovered that the creation of financial products led to fees like that's that's what people have to realize intermediary exactly the intermediary uh incentive to intermediate got so strong that wall street basically created products to take a take a vague off of every little transaction that happened and that led to some crazy uh imbalances in our our economy our global economy that led to the led to the crash and I don't think they've gotten any better since a decade ago. This year has been pretty intense

regarding to institutional investors coming into the space. So what's your take on that? It's been the big meme. I actually said this last week when Fidelity announced that they've solved custody for institutional clients and Novogratz from Galaxy.

I actually really liked what he said where he said it's going to be a trickle, not a flood into the space, basically. These products are going to be created and the institutional money has a lot of money at stake, so they're going to be very cautious and approach this sector in particular with an amount of caution where it's not going to be a flood of money at once.

it'll be all right let's test this out it works it's doing what we're doing and okay we'll add a little more we'll add a little more eventually become a flood but not at the onset you know like uh i think the engineering challenge of building good custody solutions like what kazza is doing but uh also generally this this idea that um you can work on custody solutions for institutional investors and stuff. It's interesting. I just don't know how it will affect Bitcoin, basically. Like, is it, yeah.

No, that'll be interesting to see. And that's another interesting debate that's starting right now. It's like, a lot of people are like, oh, you guys are Bitcoiners, but you're letting all these institutions come in and they're going to take over. But it's like, it's inevitable if Bitcoin is successful

it's not like you can just like hold your arms out and stop Wall Street from participating like if it is like that actually might be a good sign that they are trying to participate that it is worth participating in and you can

I would argue that you can maintain the decentralized independent self-sovereign ethos of Bitcoin while allowing Wall Street to come in they can do what they want I'm not going to hold my Bitcoins or my money and their products

that are related to Bitcoin. But if people want to do that and that's how they're comfortable with it, good for them. Well, because the argument then is like the whole gold thing, right? Like how central banks did like capture

like most of the world's gold and then, you know, like if a situation like that happens with Bitcoin, obviously it's different. But yeah, just in the interest of studying that possibility.

if it's an issue no that's definitely something to to think about in the long term but i don't think it'll be like the options so the scenario which i see it getting as bad as gold is there if there's ever conditions where um where you can't pull your bitcoin off an exchange so like i would only recommend buying bitcoin at a place where you can like take it out of that custody solution and put it into your own wallet on demand yes yeah so i think the market will just in the game theory work itself out where it's like if you're not offering the ability to withdraw your bitcoin into a personal wallet then i'm not going to use a product like that yeah um and on a small scale that's kind of some of the conclusion that i was i was coming to with the lightning game sort

of thing it's like yeah you can go into their custody for the time that you need to but the key key here is that you can come in and out like instantly and on demand yeah whenever you want yeah and it's uh it's a growing and learning experience for people to become comfortable with this because it is a new model of people have never been able to do this like you know people have had the ability and uh to have their bank accounts frozen at any time but with bitcoin if you have the ability to withdraw it and have it in your full custody at any time That's sort of it. Yeah. Well, this is actually one of the in one of my slides I'm like, okay

why lightning games and one of the reasons I state is because it's a younger audience usually that games are targeted to and I think we need to think of this in terms of generations and That younger audience is the one that's like most likely to adopt this new technology because you know They can pick up things quicker but also it's going to be the whole like andreas talks about this a lot like the whole um you know uh kid who like goes and like he can't open a bank account but then like when he when he finally reaches the age where he can open a bank account it's like oh you need uh i need a branch yeah and it's because of branch we're only open five days a week and you have to pay all these fees and by

that time he's like well i've already been using bitcoin and lightning and i've been playing these games with my friends and we're exchanging value and this is why do i need this that'll be unconscionable yeah so that's what remember wasn't minecraft experimenting with bitcoin at some point where uh so there was there's a guy called constantine um who wrote this uh unity plugin Unity is an engine for making games, and it's actually what Fortnite is built with. Really? Yeah, and it's free,

and you can make 3D games on it and stuff. And he made a plugin so that you can render lightning invoices and stuff in-game. And I'm not sure, actually, if this is related to Unity, but um it's he made a demo where uh he had a minecraft game and you could like render a qr code and then i don't know like for instance you can buy like a teleport to another location in the map or you know things like that he actually uh in lisbon he showed me another really cool

example which was unity has this um sort of template demo for when you first start developing it it's like a tank battle game um it's just so you can start getting your hands dirty with a with the engine and he created this way for you to basically so so he handed me this nintendo switch controller and we both started playing this tank game and at some point he like renders this qr code on screen and he he goes i'll check this out he scans it pays it and it triggers a power up on my tank so i got this shield and i can just yeah so this is really cool because um it again applications of lightning game lightning in the context of games that's really cool yeah and and there's this whole phenomenon of like uh twitch streamers who um yeah yeah they get donations as

well and and apparently there's like some gambling and stuff as well but you can imagine a situation where you as a spectator are watching this game and you can participate in it and interact and support your team or interfere in some way. Yeah, I guess it's worth mentioning. We're getting to such weird places as a society where watching people game online

and sending money to help them out while they're playing that game. did you know like in august uh there's this dota 2 competition it's a it's a game like league of legends uh you know like star starcrafts yeah a real-time uh strategy game i was a big starcraft guy back yeah me too for number one yeah yeah yeah um and in august they held uh the annual tournament called the international and uh the grand prize was 11 million dollars what for a team of five kids essentially taking home two yeah 2.2 mil a piece yeah i was watching like i was looking at the instagram of this kid who's like visiting this museum for red bull uh formula one guys it's

like should i sort of like nonchalantly yeah should i like suggesting like should i spend it on it and but actually they seem really cool and and um yeah but this is how big esports has gotten to and um e-gaming has gotten to yeah oh it's getting to it's getting to a weird place like twitch in particular uh i've been following that via barstool company i used to work for like they're a sports comedy brand and like a satire brand but a couple of their personalities have built out like a twitch channel and it's gotten like crazy traction like people will sit there and watch other people play video games for for quite a while yeah and they'll interact with them it's so cool like um this this kind of transition from like real world sports to

to digital gaming like that's what i need to get back into gaming uh i haven't had a system in five years i got rid of them yeah i'm sorry i got rid of my gaming systems i haven't had one in five years but like pc uh like xbox i was an xbox guy yeah i'm mostly like a casual gamer and you're like there's this phenomenon of like io games i don't know if you've heard of them yeah the this 19 year old brazilian kid made a game called agar.io there's agar.io and it's a browser-based game and it's characterized by simple graphics simple mechanics and very addicting sort of accessible gameplay so you just like you know pretty much anybody with a computer a browser can access it hop into a game

start playing and it was eventually featured on House of Cards yeah I don't i didn't actually watch the scene but i think it was like kevin spacey alluding to like u.s politics politics and showing how this game sort of represented the mechanics of like dog eat dog stuff and actually the the probably before that the game got famous because uh there was like an election turkey and people were like voicing their opinions on the game but it's by all means considered like a casual kind of game and and I think this is also again a target for like lightning network games it's like aim for these experience like obviously there's there's games that aim for realism but that's not necessarily the recipe for success

yeah there are a lot of like indie games out there that are massively successful and don't necessarily have the most amazing graphics ever but they have this amazing gameplay and yeah something like crazy birds whatever uh hungry what was it crazy angry birds that's what it was yeah yeah yeah and then like something like craigslist which is like html css is like one of the most successful apps in the world it's got the shittiest design in the world it's just pure html css but hacker news is uh yeah yeah that's what uh if the content you're providing is good uh people will flock to it yeah exactly one one really good example i like is a game called hotline miami um yeah it's again it's an indie game uh just became massively uh successful and

it's just like the idea of these like two guys and um they polished the game and eventually like made this this really cool thing um it's almost funny because i almost think like we're gonna reach the point eventually where we're gonna be like in a VR situation like in a virtual world playing some kind of game like this with its simplified graphics right so similar to like how Netflix has that thing where you're in a fake theater watching a movie right mm-hmm I I would wager a bet that we'll we'll end up in a situation where we're in virtually a fake state like snake on On a Nokia.

Oh, my God, dude. Are we going to have a Ready Player One world at some point, do you think? Probably, yeah. So I was talking about this with Matt Adele last week where, so there was a cryptocurrency, again, talking about patience, and we're not going to get everything out of the box, but it will come eventually. There was a cryptocurrency back in the day, like 2013, 2014,

GEO, where they would, like, geographically drop, drop they would airdrop uh some of the supply of their coin in areas and you go on treasure hunt and go to like physical areas on a map and yeah and uh use a qr code in vr to to acquire the coins are going to be virtual reality world like this could be enabled with bitcoin correct like where you can like in a vr world you can hypothetically enable like lightning transactions via QR codes? Maybe. Yeah, again, the sort of authoritative server architecture

needs to come into play here. Because basically, if you imagine, like, yeah, you put some QR code in a location in a map, right? You can't reveal that location beforehand, right? So you can't necessarily serve the game to the user where he can maybe, like, reverse engineer it or something like that and figure out where it is. it would have to be more of a interactive experience where he uh he's getting a concept

feed back yeah yeah like you take in their trigger for motion things are getting revealed in real time exactly yeah yeah um actually you reminded me of pokemon go like i thought people didn't play that anymore but in new york city like yesterday there was loads of people out in random squares like playing this game still yeah it's still happening around here it's annoying at some points but yeah i gotta i yell at the pokemon goers now i'm like hey you're what you're way pat no i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm not i'm not gonna yell at any pokemon maximum it's not worth it um we're almost we're almost an hour and a half in here um what uh i guess i don't know what else i want to pick your brain about uh what are you most

excited about for lightning for bitcoin in general for life in general outside of bitcoin uh oh i'm getting married next year that's the most exciting thing congratulations i did a lot of proof of work with the church recently she had to do one of those days where he sat there for eight hours yeah kind of italian like catholic church system works in in interesting ways uh we had to basically go in this like church in the mountains and like spend the day there with family it was really wonderful but i was really worried because i had to uh we had to like uh i don't know how to describe it like get certified i don't know like there was a priest in front of us and he had to like i know what it's like yeah i'm an irish catholic uh i decided to forego all the traditional

catholic you didn't you didn't have a church wedding no they're not uh i eloped but uh yeah it's uh but i know i know the process you went there it's really interesting because uh sorry going off on a tangent now uh you know like when when we talk about proof of work uh and somebody i think it was andreas once made an analogy of like the pyramids and how you know when you look at them it's like shit those guys were badass and they did that and you know that they did that because that stuff is so far so fucking hard to even pull apart never mind make it right um i see that a lot with with the church uh and especially in italy right and even like uh we went to a bunch of weddings this year we were in venice and the whole city

is like made to last it's like fucking amazing and you watch these these buildings with these frescoes that have been around for centuries and it's like wow like shit isn't made like that anymore nowadays you know right the oldest thing you find in america is like 300 years old if that yeah well you got some really cool there's a really cool cathedral here in uh or church in new york i can't remember the name now but in front of rockefeller we went in it's amazing actually it was really an experience but yeah when i'm when i'm looking at stuff like that like i will i always think of it in that sense you know it's like all this effort uh and the amount of work that was put into creating these monuments and and the culture around it

that still prevails today I feel like proof of work is in a sense gonna be similar in the far distant future in the sense that wow those guys like mind those blocks yeah we're just imparting that view of the world into the digital world yeah and that's like the one thing another thing that's become more and more prominent in my mind is that proof of work is the connection between the physical and digital oh yeah which is beautiful yeah if you think about it definitely it's like the yeah through the through energy the most fundamental units of the universe right yeah and that's where it gets weird like are we

a simulation are we discovering ourselves right now like are we is bitcoin like going to lead us to something very that we may not want to know i don't know yeah i i i'm an optimist in that sense i'm very i'm very optimistic as well because um i'm i don't want to say that we we have a bad like in portugal for instance like things are good um there's nothing necessarily bad about I mean, in fact, Portugal is amazing. You should go visit in Portugal for sure but it's a very socialist system and You see things that disrupt society like Airbnb like uber and stuff and then you see like all this hot and I don't know we must regulate it and stuff and then

Yeah, I I see like Bitcoin might It's gonna be like very disruptive for those for those kind of places and enabling maybe but yeah sorry I was saying about the church so I had to memorize this stuff to say and I didn't have that much time and ended up memorizing like this one thing and somehow it was the exact one that they like asked the sort of like we had this to say and yeah it was a cool experience but Italy is another country that's suffering a lot from sort of the state control it's really hard to be an entrepreneur in Italy especially in the

south and you really see that and and so when I think about Bitcoin I think about like what it's gonna fix and solve it's those kind of things it's like helping the lives of those people that are like having to move away from their their hometowns because there's no work because everything's so corrupt and doesn't function yeah my optimism is that Bitcoin actually will fix that yeah I think and I think it's one thing I've been trying to like cost a bit like Bitcoin will give people a tool to fix that, I think. Bitcoin is just, it's not going to be the panacea,

but it is a very effective and very powerful tool where the amount of leverage that you get because of it is such that the power that it gives you is orders of magnitude better than anything you've ever experienced up to this point. But Bitcoin will just help us realize that if we have a stable base of a monetary system from which to to operate we can do some pretty creative and pretty crazy things and an open global economy yeah and we have like a stable

sort of store of value i guess um it's like one of the ways i described it to a friend of mine was like uh bitcoin is a thing that makes you not have to get up from your couch not in a way that like it makes you lazy but in the sense that with fiat you have to go and look for sources to beat depreciation right yeah and so you were forced to to go find yield to go find yield to to find risk and and so forth and bitcoin is the inverse of that bitcoin is the thing that lets you park your money because you can focus on the longer term project or the longer term target uh yeah i mean i think safedine puts it like really well in his book and i really agree with that stuff yeah and that's why i i think we should keep bitcoin as slow dumb and uh simple at the

the protocol level because all you need is that certainty that you know that bitcoin is going to produce a block every 10 minutes with a certain block reward uh with a certain set of consensus rules and all you need to do is have that happen and then you can base a lot of decisions off of that yeah um we've ripped it here hour and a half you got anything any parting notes for the freaks um get involved uh run your own node and uh hodl look for cool ways to to spend bitcoin actually bitcoiners are like awesome in terms of uh you know buying stuff actually like you know you see this with like stickers and and things like that so uh if you are looking for ways to um uh make some money i guess it's like come up with something that touches on bitcoin culture

uh bitcoin memes whatever yeah and make something and and sell it to people uh it doesn't even have to be uh something like that it can even be like selling wine or or maybe you make hummus or or whatever just like offer your product uh for sale uh for bitcoin ship it internationally whatever and you will find people that want to uh spend their bitcoin on that yeah yeah with that being said uh hey advertisers out there we accept bitcoin payments so if you're uh you're looking to advertise and you're willing to pay in bitcoin we folks here at tales from the crypt are totally open to your investment as long as you will be vetted you will be vetted uh to a certain extent um like mcqualla it's been a pleasure this is the first time we ever met it's a great conversation

cheers marty it was amazing being here thanks for coming man uh two freaks out there peace and love bye freaks